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John McMorrough

The Architectural Coverage

of Supergraphics
Supergraphics is a minor thing, but it is a widening of the range of what
architecture is. Paint used to be something outside the pale. And this is a breaking
from that that colors in themselves can become architecture. It is one more tool.
It is not the answer to everything but in many [cases] it is the best answer. 1
CESAR PELLI

1 Supergraphics: Special Report,

Approach (Spring 1971).

Gene Davis, Franklins Footpath, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1972.

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Supergraphics are those big arrows, numbers, or words painted on

walls and seen throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though clearly
a minor occurrence within the annals of architectural history during
its time as a fad, it received some amount of critical attention. It was,
for a time, presented as an answer (or at least a tool) to elevate to the
aesthetic, social problems facing the man-made environment. The
supergraphics technique, in its momentary ubiquity, articulates a key
juncture in the debates on representation (or anti-representation), and
its history is revealing. To facilitate this condensed history, it is worth
expanding on what is meant by the architectural coverage of the title,
not to revel in the pun but to pose the problem at hand: namely, how
to find an adequate historic frame for a minor thing that escapes
easy categorization. That is, to utilize the complementary valences of
coverage, as having both material and discursive implications.
In the literal sense, the coverage implied here is the ability of a
pigmented color to conceal the architectural surface. Already it is
necessary to distinguish generic wall painting and, for lack of a better
term, motivated wall painting distinguished by its connection to a
set of articulated aspirations for the paint scheme. Paint has been of
little interest to modernist and contemporary architectural writing,
conceptually invisible despite the entirety of its visual manifestation.
Paint is usually seen as a passive ground, in contrast to the active media
of architecture: form, space, and technology.2 It lacks the justifying
teleology of the monochrome in arts context (in which significance
is an attribute of historic context), or the plentitude associated with
material considerations in architectural contexts (where significance is
a function of more technical performance or sensual reaction). However,
it is possible to propose that the capacities of paint can be read from the
beginning of the 20th century, with examples including de Stijl exteriors
and Le Corbusiers interiors, in modernist deployments that saw paint as
a type of erasure, a shortcut to transformation, with the ability to remove
solidity, gravity, and even history. At the end of the 20th century the logic
of erasure was inverted into one of inscription, with various high-tech
and postmodern elaborations each seeking to over-code functional or
semantic relations over the architectural surface.3 Seen in this historical
context one could posit that the distribution of paint, in its coverage
of the architectural surface and therein its dominance of the interface
between buildings and vision, is a particularly fertile ground for the
elaboration of architectures aspiration, if not of content per se.4

65
2 Fredric Jameson, From Metaphor
to Allegory in Anything (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2001). For example,
Fredric Jameson, in speculating on
what a non-metaphorical art might
be, proposes house painting,
stating that, the colors of a house
or wall generally respond to some
conventional color scheme that is
culturally meaningful even if it does
not exactly mean something. In
this, Jameson allows for a social
significance to be read by the
pervasive agreement on the suitability
of a particular wall hue but not for
meaning.
3 The history of wall painting
originated long before the modernist
usage articulated here. From the
Roman mural to Goethes moodspecific colored rooms in his house
in Weimar, the interplay of thinly
covered surfaces and perceptual
response occurs throughout the
history of architecture. In limiting
the examples to the 20th century, the
author wishes to suggest there is
usage beginning in the 20th century
that marks a particular configuration
in which the techniques of painted
surfaces are both ubiquitous and
ignored (or at least maligned as
somehow artificial).
4 Mark Wigley, White Walls,
Designer Dresses: The Fashioning
of Modern Architecture (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1995). This is a
history that focuses on the early 20th
century use of color in architecture
(particularly white). Wigley also
develops this interest in the means of
surfaces and proposes that it could
be an alternative logic for the tectonic
in The Architecture of Atmosphere,
Daidalos, 68 (1998).

apply hunch

Blowing the Lid off Paint

The second form of coverage is that of reportage, the rhetoric

surrounding practice that is discursive as opposed to formal. In the

Bathhouse GraphicsMake it
happy kid, Progressive Architecture
(March 1967).

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John McMorrough

midst of the general enthusiasm of the time, it is the journalism of C. Ray

Smith, author of the Supergraphics term that purposefully takes on the
definition and implications of the practice.5 Smiths articles on interior
design for Progressive Architecture in the late 1960s provide a fertile
interpretive ground on which to read both the form and the rhetoric of
the implied Supergraphic program. Within his examples are illustrated
how, in a specific context, developments in practice precipitate a high
volume of promotional discourse (seemingly inversely proportional to
the means of the given project, this is, after all, paint we are talking
about), which serves to articulate new possibilities.
In the March 1967 Progressive Architecture Smith wrote Bathhouse
Graphics Make it Happy, Kid, which featured coverage of Charles
Moores Bathhouse at Sea Ranch. Though the project had been
published a number of times before, what made this entry unique was
that it concentrated not on the design of the building proper, but on
the projects interiors.6 The startling walls with their bright colors,
stripes, and enlarged letters and numbers had been added as the result
of budget cuts precluding the intended levels of expensive detail and
finish. Much of the design was done on site with the designer Barbara
Stauffacher and a few sign painters. The title of the article refers to
Stauffacher asking the Sea Ranch contractor if the work was becoming
too much, to which he responded, No, make it happy, kid.7 The anecdote
already sets into play those key components of Supergraphic aspiration:
the facile alteration of an already established context to some emotional
effect.

5 Smiths enthusiasm for blowing

the lid off of something as banal as
paint offers a particularly egregious
case of what Manfredo Tafuri
refers to as operative criticism
and provides an opportunity to
rethink the implications of such a
dismissal of instrumentality in the
processes of practice formation. In
Architecture and Utopia: Design and
Capitalist Development (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1976), Tafuri wrote that
today, indeed, the principle task of
ideological criticism is to do away
with impotent and ineffectual myths,
which serve as illusions that permit
the survival of anachronistic hopes
in design. Today, the ramifications
of Supergraphics coverage represent
a case in which to rethink the
implications of explicit instrumentality
in the process of practice formation.
6 The original design of the Sea
Ranch bathhouse (without the
interior graphics) can be found in
the Thirteenth Annual P/A Design
Awards in the January 1966 issue of
Progressive Architecture.
7 C. Ray Smith, Bathhouse
Graphics Make it happy, kid,
Progressive Architecture (March
1967): 156-161.

Smiths other articles from the period continued to lay the framework
of emerging conceptions of the architectural surface, as embodied in
the interiors of the period. After the Bathhouse piece, he appeared

Sea Ranch Bath House Supergraphic, Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker (Bath House), Barbara Stauffacher (Graphics), The Sea Ranch, California, 1966.

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Blowing the Lid off Paint

The second set of articles, both from the October 1967 Progressive
Architecture, focused on ready-made as a design strategy. In The
Freeway Comes Indoors, Smith presented a selection of interior
projects that made use of the object and techniques of automobile
culture, ranging from signage to artifacts such as car seats and chrome
bumpers.10 The projects included the work of Hugh Hardy, David Sellers
(of Prickly Mountain, Vermont, a hotspot of architectural work by recent
Yale graduates) and Doug Michaels (a Yale student associated with the
office of Charles Moore), as well as Paul Rudolphs New Haven kitchen
wallpapered in an enveloping collage made from a Gulf Oil billboard.11
In The Permissiveness of Supermannerism, Smith articulated the
unity of these previous identifications in a wider scope of the new
possibilities implied by the designs of the generation just emerging
from schools (again, the examples come mostly from Yale), with
an implication that these new phenomena were in fact looser and
more permissive than the accommodation of Robert Venturi or the
inclusion of Charles Moore.12 Positioned as a kind of architectural
happening (with all the associations that terminology carried with
it from the art of the time), the Supermannerist idea allowed a messy
vitality to emerge from the building process. As Smith describes it, by
permitting situations and the conditions of design to generate solutions,
and by permitting those solutions to stand adjacent to other unresolved
and seemingly incompatible solutions, Supermannerism grants
acceptance to the accidentals of design.13 Alternately referred to by
Smith as Campopop, it is the compression of what he considered to be
the main components of the movement, evoking au currant art practices:
namely Camp, Pop, and Op, setting up a conceptual framework for
Supergraphics as the condensed version of the Supermannerist ideal.14
In the November 1967 Progressive Architecture Smith published
Supergraphics.15 The article represents the formal declaration of this
sensibility, drawing again on work of Yale design students and faculty.
Supergraphics made sense as an installation constituting only a depth
of a few millimeters of paint and, because the technical requirements of
application were so minimal and the necessary capital expenditure so

L_Hunch11.04.compleet.indd 67

8 Smith, Minimal Interiors,

Progressive Architecture (March
1967): 149-155.

9 Smith, Instant Interiors,

Progressive Architecture (June 1967):
177-181.
10 Smith, The Freeway Comes
Indoors, Progressive Architecture
(Oct 1967): 164.
11 Doug Michels subsequently
received a P/A Award for his
work with a new suburban house
prototype, which though not strictly
Supergraphic, nonetheless exhibited
many graphic manipulations. He
and Chip Lord (the work of both was
featured in the 1967 Supergraphics
article) went on to form the
architectural collective Ant Farm,
which continued to explore the
relationship between architecture
and other practices (art and media
especially).
12 So ingrained was the coverage of
the architecture school at Yale in the
pages of Progressive Architecture
at the time that the magazine was
often referred to as the Yale alumni
newsletter, featuring the work
emerging under the deanship of
Charles Moore. For more information
regarding the Moore deanship at
Yale, see Eve Blaus Architecture or
Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale
in the Late 1960s in Architecture
or Revolution (Yale School of
Architecture Exhibition Publication
Number 6, 2001).

apply hunch

to rehearse the concepts implied by its example. The first rehearsal

began with Minimal Interiors (Progressive Architecture, March 1967),8
characterized by the idea of alteration. In this piece, Smith advocated
a re-adoption of the modernist interiors of the Bauhaus. The clearest
manifestation of the trend was the use of venetian blinds to entirely
cover windows without the use of curtains. Again, this is a specific
technique, a quick fix, but it is not the lack of curtains that is important
but the simultaneous identification of the realm of the interior as a
zone of developing sensibility, and that the development of that interior
sensibility did not require (or rather minimally required) the traditional
trappings of interior design, such as curtains, furniture, or ornate rugs.
Smiths writing rendered the interior as a blank canvas, laying the
conceptual groundwork for his next article.

With Instant Interiors in June 1967, Smith explained the possibility
of electronically induced environmental change through the use of
images projected onto walls, the primary and most successful example
being his own apartment.9 Foreshadowing the implications of an instant
architecture that is defined by application rather than essence, he states
in the article: architects, beware: there is talk of projection of building
exteriors. In addition to his extensive contributions to PA, Smith was
also at the time a contributing editor for Theater Design and Technology,
a journal that featured numerous articles on the similar use of projected
images for theatrical productions.

13 Smith, The Permissiveness of

Supermannerism, Progressive
Architecture (Oct 1967): 69-173.
14 The connection between Op Art
and Supergraphics extends beyond
their visual similarity; each was
published in similar ways. It can
be argued that Op Art, and its main
practitioner Bridget Riley, are both
the cause for the initial interest in
Stauffacher by the architectural
press, as well as the frameworks for
her initial interpretation. A hint of
this parallelism can be seen in the
treatment of Stauffacher in Signs of
Life (Progressive Architecture, June
1966), written after she designed the
signage at Sea Ranch (but before
the Bathhouse graphics were made).
In the article, Stauffacher is shown
in relative repose, engulfed on all
sides by her work. This image is
almost identical to that of an image of
Bridget Riley posing with her painting,
Continuum (1965) that was widely
published in the press during the run
of The Responsive Eye show at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1965.
15 Smith, Supergraphics,
Progressive Architecture (Nov 1967):
132-137.

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John McMorrough

Paul Rudolph, Kitchen wrapped in Roadside Billboard, New Haven, Connecticut, 1967.

Smith defined Supergraphics specifical

applied to architectural surfaces, wi

no design is to be held within a

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Blowing the Lid off Paint

low, it was possible to have a student operate as instigator, designer, and

actual maker of the projects. With an example from the bedroom of Hugh
Hardy, the focus was on a context both of increasing awareness of and a
will to preserve existing structures, as Supergraphics allowed a discrete
deployment within an existing given structure.

Smith defined Supergraphics specifically as giant two-dimensional

forms applied to architectural surfaces, with the forms being so large
that no design is to be held within a given architectural plane.16 It is
necessary to establish that Smiths specific definition of Supergraphics
was quite different from the generic meaning of the term that would
later predominate. The Smith version makes Supergraphics a proper
title, which we could distinguish from supergraphics, as merely large
graphics, or graphics that are out of scale to their application. To Smith,
with the application of Supergraphics, the definition of the interior
is negated it is in fact un-defined. This dislocation of the relative
stability of the architectural frame should be understood in terms of the
effect on the subject this work was intended to elicit. The Supergraphic
environments were, similar to other experiments of the time as in the
bubble architectures and mirror environments intended to have reality
altering effects.
In the expanded definition the idea was to define and designate
space. The primary point of this distinction was over the inclusion of
alphanumeric material, where Supergraphics proper, according to
Smith, contain no such identifiable elements. Smith refers to both,
but it is important to keep a distinction between the abstraction called
for by Smith and generic out-of-scale graphics. The startling absence
in Smiths definition of Supergraphics is any mention of the work of
Barbara Stauffacher, who he only references to explain that her work is

16 Analogous observations regarding

the relationship of shape to painting
were being made at the same time
by art critic Michael Fried, especially
in regard to the shaped canvas work
of the artist Frank Stella. See Frieds
Art and Objecthood, Artforum
(June 1967). The essay is reprinted
in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
edited by Gregory Battcock (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1968).

apply hunch

Supergraphics, Progressive
Architecture (November 1967).

William Grover, Hallway with reverse

perspective stripe, New Haven,
Connecticut, 1967.

ifically as giant two-dimensional forms

s, with the forms being so large that

hin a given architectural plane.

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John McMorrough

not Supergraphics because of her use of letters and numbers in her wall
designs.17 Though Smith cites Robert Venturis use of oversized stencil
letters on the walls of Grands Restaurant in Philadelphia in 1962 as a
precursor to Supergraphics, just like with Stauffacher, the inclusion of
alphanumeric material ultimately disqualified it for him.

17 One such trajectory to consider

is the series of work by Barbara
Stauffacher and her partner and thenhusband architect Daniel Solomon,
which shows one way of translating
paint to form. In the Hear Hear
record store in Ghirardelli Square, in
San Francisco, published in Kinetic
Boutiques and Campopop Store
(Progressive Architecture, April 1969)
the graphic stripes of the walls are
extended onto freestanding partitions
that create a diagonal orientation to
the store that counters the rectilinear
box of the enclosing space. At
the Thrift Federal Savings & Loan
Association in Concord, California
(Progressive Architecture, May 1970),
the painted effects move from the
wall to an enveloping sign structure.
Finally, with the design of an Orange
Julius juice stand in the Sun Valley
Shopping Center (Progressive
Architecture, September 1971), the
inhabitation of the sign is complete,
as the stand itself is in the form of an
extruded form of the letter C.

Robert Venturi, Grands Restaurant, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1961-1962.

Smith and Venturi each represent an interpretation of an architecture

based on signs, but one that finds its origins not in the abstraction of the
structuralist sign (of signifiers and signifieds), but in literal forms and
technologies of the sign as a proper noun. Smiths abstract pervasive
mode focuses on the capacities of sign paint to cover regardless of
geometry, while also privileging the practice and making of the signthing. Venturi represents the second version of Supergraphics, the more
generic in terms of large-scale elements aimed toward signification,
and focuses on the format of the sign-thing, especially in the
billboard as a point of departure that makes concrete the separation
between sign and scaffold, signifier and signified.18 It is between these
opposing approaches of abstraction and legibility that the project
of Supergraphics is to be found, alternately writing and erasing the
environmental code.
While Smith struggles to maintain the validity of his specific
designation of the term, he acknowledges the emergence of this
environmental fad occurring in other forms, from numerous genealogies,
and often labeled Supergraphic after the fact. At the height of its
ubiquity Supergraphics were applied to situations as diverse as
automobiles19 and prison cells.20 The articles on Supergraphics after
1967 followed these two threads, with Smiths own usage tracking the
development extending beyond his own definition to new terrain in
interior and exterior applications. In this proliferation, the qualities
attributed to the Supergraphics concept also expand, and with these
new capacities came a prioritization of the social over the formal, while
retaining the logic of efficiency and specification. The expanded field
of Supergraphics includes an expanded sociability, a humane vocation
attributed to the work, and also an expanded significance both in terms
of over-signification by the use of words and signs incorporated into the
work but also by the environmental legibility the graphics generate.

18 Robert Venturi, A Bill-Ding-Board

Involves Movies, Relics and Space,
Architectural Forum (April 1968):
74-76.

19 Smith. Mobilegraphics,
Progressive Architecture (January
1969): 172.
20 Smith. Rehabilitation by Design,
Progressive Architecture (January
1968): 38.

Addressing the expanded signifying capacities of Supergraphics, in the

March 1972 Progressive Architecture article Survey Studies Employees
Reaction to Graphics, Smith discussed circulation graphics, the
insertion of large-scale signage into the office landscape of the Sunkist

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Blowing the Lid off Paint

The social use to which Supergraphics is applied is exemplified in

the article Urban Renewal with Paint, from November 1970, which
covered a number of uses of Supergraphics as a fast and cheap means
of energizing our ghettos.22 Among examples featured included New
Yorks City Walls project, founded by artist Allan DArchangelo to
create new forms of public art on blank building sides in Manhattan, the
Bronx, and Brooklyn, and which began as a series of ten professional
noncommercial exterior wall paintings in a program to convert vacant
lots into vest pocket parks. Regarding this program and others like it, in
1978 Klaus Herdegs essay, Supergraphics, Animated Walls, set out
this particularly urban reading, stressing the translation from an interior
idea to an urban one, expressing again that decorative aspirations not
only bring a drab wall to life, but, by the gigantic scale and uncommon
colorfulness, provide a psychological and perceptual unity to an
otherwise disturbed urban fabric. Hence the huge mural, by quasiarchitectural means, renders an eminently social service.23

21 Smith, Survey Studies Employees

Reaction to Graphics, Progressive
Architecture (March 1972): 46. The
results of the survey were that: The
signs worked well, according to 78
percent of the employees, and 87
percent feel they are helpful; the
departmental identification signs
were particularly liked. About half
the employees surveyed felt that the
murals added to the vitality of the
buildings; most didnt feel they were
useful as directional aids. Over half
prefer them to solid colored walls,
and 30 percent would like to see more
of them.
22 Smith, Urban Renewal with
Paint, Progressive Architecture
(November 1970): 95-107

23 Klaus Herdeg, Supergraphics,

Animated Walls, in Archigraphia:
Architectural and Environmental
Graphics. edited by Walter Herdeg
(Zurich: The Graphic Press, 1978): 162.

apply hunch

Corporations offices, which provided a corporate logo in the form of a

large orange slice in the lobby and an exaggerated mailbox to mark the
mail room door. Almost all of the surveyed employees felt that attractive
facilities are an important part of company business and plays a part
in internal morale; close to the same number noted that they preferred
colorful surroundings. Virtually all employees noticed the graphics,
which included directional signs and decorative murals.21

Tania, City Walls mural, Brooklyn,

New York, 1970.

To Smith, Supergraphics meant that the definition of the room was

negated; it was in fact un-defined by the application. The expanded
Supergraphic, however, rests on the idea of defining and designating
spaces; in either version Supergraphics was a critique of the existing
condition. Norma Skurka and Oberto Gili make this attitude explicit in
their relatively late treatment of Supergraphics in the book Underground
Interiors:
In modern buildings there is none of the inherent charm of earlier times
given by wide, well-spaced windows, high ceilings, gracious staircases
and doorways, rich moldings, and ceiling decoration. The cost of
decorating these boxes to give them some of the atmosphere that they
lack can be outrageous, but paint is cheap and colorful. It allows great
scope for creative expression at the right price. If one doesnt like
the results, they can be buried under more coats of solid white, easy,
instant, inexpensive architecture and therein lies its appeal.24

L_Hunch11.04.compleet.indd 71

24 Gili, Oberto and Norma Skurka,

Underground Interiors: Decorating
for Alternate Life Styles (New York:
Quadrangle Books, 1972): 76.

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John McMorrough

On whatever scale it is deployed, whether at the level of building,

where Supergraphics bring relief to the unnavigable spaces of large
building complexes, or in an urban setting, this technology of paint
actually generates a condition where one could understand the whole
of the environment as re-codable, and not in terms of destruction and
rebuilding directly over the existing condition.

Cover, Supermannerism: New

Attitudes in Post-Modern
Architecture, by C. Ray Smith. (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1977).

Jean-Philippe Lenclos, Preliminary

Model of Color Studies for Apartment
Building, (Architects: Jean-Claude
Bernard and Wladimir Mitrofanoff)
Crenel, France.

In 1977, Smith collected his architectural journalism of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, presenting the reframed material as Supermannerism: New
Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture.25 The subtitle of the book places it
in interesting proximity to Charles Jencks The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, also published in 1977, which itself illustrates the primacy
of the Supergraphic concept to the development of Postmodernism with
the depiction of the highly graphic Ni-Ban-Kah by Minoru Takeyama on
its cover.26 The simultaneous publication of these two books shows more
than an overlapping of terms. While the argument in each case as to
what constitutes the Postmodern differs, there are notable alignments,
a prioritization or participation, ease-of-use, ready-made-ness, and
alteration as the defining characteristics of the style that are all quite
different than later more historicist versions.27
It is the quasi-architectural nature of Supergraphics that specifies
how the sign has been interpreted within these practices; not the
abstract sign, though clearly under its influence, rather a more literal
interpretation of signage, its forms and technologies. In the Jencks
version, following on the Venturi lead, the interpretation foregrounds
the separation of signifier and signified, rendering the informational
surface univalent and notational. The concept of sign is consolidated

25 Smith, Supermannerism:
New Attitudes in Post-Modern
Architecture (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1977).

26 Charles Jencks, The Language of

Post-Modern Architecture (New York:
Rizzoli, 1977).

27 The connection between the

projects of Smith and Jencks extends
beyond the schematic correlation
of the title postmodern and the
Supergraphic image. For example, the
position of the essay Permissiveness
of Supermannerism in the October
1967 Progressive Architecture is
very similar to the work discussed
in Adhochism (New York: Doubleday
& Company, 1972) by Jencks and
Nathan Silver.

The matrix of Supergraphics capaci tie

made conditions, and the expansion of

when placed together coalesce d in

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Blowing the Lid off Paint

into an inescapably scenographic model. Within the mere thickness

of paint that follows the line of the existing, Supergraphics obscures
these clear demarcations, and rethinking its thin efficiencies allows
a questioning of the status of Supergraphics as a minor thing. The
matrix of Supergraphics capacities facile alteration, use of readymade conditions, and the expansion of social and signifying missions
when placed together coalesced into an implied technology of the
Supergraphic, a technology that had only a momentary legibility before it
became so pervasive as to be literally and figuratively invisible, its forms
rendered banal and its apparitions forgotten.
Cover, The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, by Charles Jencks (New
York: Rizzoli,1977).
28 In a different context,
contemporary video artist Stan
Douglas articulates the question
of such forgotten answers.
Douglas states: Obsolete forms
(of communication) have become
an index of an understanding of the
world lost to us. To recover these
forms is to address moments when
history could have gone one way or
another. We live in the residue of such
moments, and for better or worse
their potential is not yet spent. As
quoted in Hal Fosters essay, This
Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,
in Design and Crime (and other
Diatribes), (London: Verso, 2002).

apply hunch

The ubiquity of Supergraphics application marks a shift in thinking,

not only about surface, but also about architecture and the city, and
marks a specific moment in the development of the sign in architectural
discourse and an insufficiently explored virtuality within that
development. 28 Despite of appearances and because of the specifics of
its material practice, the phenomenon of its widespread use represents
a constitutive moment in the conceptualization of surface, with an
influence that exceeds the residual manifestation of peeling murals
in remote urban locales. Supergraphics is one case in which the
aspirations and techniques of representation are used, but in a manner
both constitutive of and resistant to the aporia prescribed within the
applied postmodern reading of its significance (ne representation).
The history of such techniques show how representation in architecture
can be understood, not in terms of its signification, but of its application.

Student project for an exhibition,

University of Texas, Austin, 1968.
Photograph by Richard Oliver.

ci ties facile alteration, use of ready

on of social and signifying missions

d into an implied technology ...
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