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At the review, one critic said, "You have started from a position of irony, a good position for cultural criticism, but you have squandered that initial advantage and ended in poetry."1 Ever since the publication of Learning from Las Vegas irony has held a special role in avant-garde architecture. "Irony is a tool," its authors wrote then, and proposed "moral subversion through irony and the use of a joke to get to seriousness" as "the weapons of artists of nonauthoritarian temperament in social situations that do not agree with them." Their key example is the Guild House, a group home for the elderly in Philadelphia, noting that the gold-anodized aluminum TV antenna at its top is "somewhat ironical."2 Irony here means that an educated consumer should understand that a project’s architects "couldn’t really mean that" (that the lives of elderly people spent watching TV are heroic and deserve a monument), and furthermore that what they did mean was the opposite (that those lives are tragic, not heroic). A gold TV antenna as a symbol for the elderly is transparently disingenuous; it is sincerely insincere. It thus implies a stable and knowable opposition between appearance and reality: if you can see that something is ironic, it is because you, unlike Oedipus, for example, who does not realize the irony of what he says — you know that what seems true is the opposite of what really is.3 Irony is well-defined here. Whether or not the gold TV antenna is offensive, whether or not the joke is a good one, it is an easy riddle to solve. It is to this recent tradition of irony in architecture that Bergren’s critic referred. It helps a little to think of it in terms of the ironic man, in terms of the traditional opposition between eiron and alazon, as they appear in Greek or Hellenic comedy, the smart guy and the dumb guy…You must keep in mind that the smart guy, who is by necessity the speaker, always turns out to be the dumb guy, and that he’s always being set up by the person he thinks of as being the dumb guy, the alazon.4 Who is smart and who is dumb at the Guild House? The smart guy, the speaker, could be the antenna itself, saying, "I am a monument to old people watching TV!" We would have to be pretty dumb to believe this, but we are straw alazons, never really because only provisionally dumb. Instead, identifying the true speaker as an architect behind the antenna and identifying with him, we make the antenna the dumb guy, because we know better. It, like Oedipus, cannot realize the irony of what it’s saying. This is the useful role the architectural object contributes to the scenario. We presume that it is necessarily dumb, and it relies on us to ventriloquize it. When we are being smart guys, speaking for architecture, we would do well to ask ourselves, are we being set up? It would certainly feel terrible if we were missing a joke. In any case the project at stake here, Ann Bergren’s Theater for Architecture and Dance, is not ironic in this way, as her critic rightly pointed out. The project is a building for two teachers: Diane Davisson, a tap dance teacher, choreographer, and director of a twenty-five person dance company, and Michael Rotondi, of ROTO Architects, formerly of Morphosis, and co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. It is a hybrid building program, combining a tap dance company and an architectural firm onto a single site.
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