Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism [Hardcover]

"Linder refreshes the debate over a well-documented historical period with a compelling argument of inspiring and insightful scholarship. In light of the wide range of media used by architects today, readers will also find Linder's book a surprisingly timely entry on the contemporary significance of the physical, literal property of architecture."--Jeffrey Inaba, Program Director of Post-Graduate Studies, Southern California Institute of Architecture

"adventurous... essays open up a greater range of debate and questioning that has recently disappeared in discussions about 'nothing more than architecture.'" Constructs

"Centered around events of 1967, Mark Linder's Nothing Less than Literal provides a major reconceptualization of the history of American formalism and its discontents by exposing architecture's 'undisciplined' appearance within art discourse and practice. In a provocative twist on traditional scholarship, Linder convincingly asserts that architecture appears before art in the conceptual development of modernist formalism. Rather than engage in the stale and seemingly endless squabbles over whether, or to what degree, architecture is an art, Linder cleverly and economically demonstrates how modernist art emerged through architecture. He delivers this argument with great erudition and specificity, offering nothing less than a literally reconfigured map of two disciplines and their relations at a crucial moment in recent history." Robert Somol , Department of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Los Angeles

"Centered around events of 1967, Mark Linder¹s *Nothing Less Than Literal* provides a major reconceptualization of the history of American formalism and its discontents by exposing architecture¹s 'undisciplined' appearance within art discourse and practice. In a provocative twist on traditional scholarship, Linder convincingly asserts that architecture appears *before* art in the conceptual development of modernist formalism. Rather than engage in the stale and seemingly endless squabbles over whether, or to what degree, architecture is an art, Linder cleverly and economically demonstrates how modernist art emerged *through* architecture. He delivers this argument with great erudition and specificity, offering nothing less than a literally reconfigured map of two disciplines and their relations at a crucial moment in recent history."--Robert Somol, Department of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Los Angeles

In Nothing Less than Literal, Mark Linder shows how minimalist art of the 1960s was infiltrated by architecture, resulting in a reconfiguration of the disciplines of both art and architecture. Linder traces the exchange of concepts and techniques between architecture and art through a reading of the work of critics Clement Greenberg, Colin Rowe, Michael Fried, and the artist-writer Robert Smithson, and then locates a recuperation of "the architecture of minimalism" in the contemporary work of John Hejduk and Frank Gehry."Literal" was not only a term used by Fried to attack minimalism; it was a key term for Greenberg as well, and in both cases their use of that term coincides with discussions of the architectural qualities of art. Linder gives us the first thorough examination of the role that architectural concepts, techniques of representation, and practices played in the emergence of minimalism. Beginning with a comparison of the "postcubist" writings of Clement Greenberg and Colin Rowe, he reveals surprising affinities in their critical formulations of pictorialism -- including the use by both of an analogy between cubist collage and architectural space. This is followed by an account of the sharp differences between Michael Fried and Robert Smithson; Linder contrasts the sublimation of space and refusal of architecture in Fried's concept of the "radically abstract" with Smithson's explicit embrace of architectural thinking and his complex concepts of space. Finally, Linder looks at particular instances in the work of two architects who, through collaboration with artists, engaged the legacy of literalism -- John Hejduk's Wall House and Frank Gehry's decade-long fascination with the figure of the fish. Linder shows how the "productive impropriety" of transdisciplinary borrowing in the discourses surrounding minimalism serves as a counterexample to the prevalent perception of "disciplines" as conservative and institutionalizing.