First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s

'The mask one wears when entering a profession becomes one's authentic face' Friedrich Nietzsche 'What is a beginning?' Edward Said Archigram, Archizoom, Rossi, Siza, Price, Venturi, Foster & Rogers, Virilio & Parent, Moneo, Piano, Eisenman, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Ito, Koolhaas, Libeskind, Mayne & Rotondi, Morphosis, Tschumi, Herzog & de Meuron and Zaha Hadid. During a tumultuous period in the 1960s and 1970s, ne w generations of architects began careers amidst a period of profound social change, ne w conditions to architecture and the city, and lasting changes to popular and critical forms of culture and its production. FIRST WORKS tells the story of this period and re-assesses the conditions of architecture and the beginnings of architectural careers today through a selection of projects world- wide undertaken during the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition presents a single key early project or other kind of architectural realisation by Archigram, Archizoom, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster + Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Rafael Moneo, Morphosis, Renzo Piano, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Paul Virilio + Claude Parent. It seems clear today that in any discipline related to the production of culture the question of ho w one starts a career is absolutely central. Not by chance, successive generations of architects have found in their first works the basis for long-term interests, agendas and even obsessions. More interestingly, these beginnings often represent a kind of compressed architectural portfolio of an architects' career, marking key discoveries, breaks or shifts in how they think, work and learn architecture. FIRST WORKS provides a timely opportunity to resituate the crucial role of these projects, and their various forms of realisation built, and other wise through which critical forms of architectural practice can be seen to emerge and later influence architecture. During these tumultuous decades, generations of architects began careers amid a period of profound social change, new conditions to architecture and the city, and lasting changes to popular and critical forms of culture and its production.

A "beginning," especially as embodied in much modern thought, is its own method, Edward Said argues in this classic treatise on the role of the intellectual and the goal of criticism.

Distinguishing between "origin," which is divine, mythical, and privileged, and "beginning," which is secular and humanly produced, Said traces the ramifications and diverse understandings of the concept of beginning through history. A beginning is a first step in the intentional production of meaning and the production of difference from preexisting traditions. It authorizes subsequent texts -- it both enables them and limits what is acceptable. Drawing on the insights of Vico, Valery, Nietzsche, Saussure, L viStrauss, Husserl, and Foucault, Said recognizes the novel as the major attempt in Western literary culture to give beginnings an authorizing function in experience, art, and knowledge.

Socrates' Ancestor
An Essay on Architectural Beginnings Indra Kagis McEwen Architecture precedes philosophy, McEwen argues, and it was here, in the archaic Greek polis, that Western architecture became the cradle of Western thought. Who was Socrates' ancestor? Socrates claims it was Daedalus, the mythical first architect. Socrates' ancestors were also the first Western philosophers: the preSocratic thinkers of archaic Greece where the Greek city-state with its monumental temples first came to light. McEwen brilliantly draws out the connections between Daedalus and the earliest Greek thinkers, between architecture and the advent of speculative thought. She argues that Greek thought and Greek architecture share a common ground in the amazing fabrications of the legendary Daedalus: statues so animated with divine life that they had to be bound in chains, the Labyrinth where Theseus slew the Minotaur, Ariadne's dancing floor in Knossos. Drawing as much on the power of myth and metaphor as on philosophical, philological, and historical considerations, McEwen first reaches backward: from Socrates to the earliest written record of Western philosophy in the Anaximander B1 fragment, and its physical expression in Anaximander's built work - a "cosmic model" that consisted of a celestial sphere, a map of the world, and the first Greek sun clock. From daedalean artifacts she draws out the centrality of early Greek craftsmanship and its role in the making of the Greek city-state. The investigation then moves James forward to a discussion of the polis and the first great peripteral temples that anchored for the meaning of "city."