Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

F o r e w o r d
because my writing “isn’t about architecture, of course.” The last
two words carried the burden of Johnson’s meaning. The subject
was closed to discussion. Architecture was the moving and shaping
of geometric forms in two and three dimensions. All else was
sociology, a waste of time. Nice work if you can get it.
And there had been a time when formalism was a radical
position, and to take it was to embrace a broad set of progressive
causes. And it is still available both as an analytic tool and as an
episode in the history of taste. I take to heart Roland Barthes’s
warning that the enemies of formalism are “our enemies,” they are
the people who claim the authority to enforce a strict correspondence
between signs and meanings. Unfortunately, by the 1960s,
the enemies had become very shrewd in manipulating forms to
cleanse the images of toxic enterprises. The Life of Forms in Art
had become the Death of Art in Logos.
We are workers, producing our own factory just by walking
down the street: that’s one way to summarize what I took away
from Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. And I say this as a
former window dresser, who once had the good fortune to work
inside one of those precious glass-enclosed storefront stages. Store
display was the only form of design I ever worked in, and I loved
it: the commercialism as well as the aesthetics (the store, which no
longer exists, specialized in Good Design objects) and the effect
that the fusion of commerce and appearances can have on the life
of the street. It was like being a sidewalk painter, and if people
believed that buying the objects on display enabled them to acquire
the image I had set up for their viewing pleasure—if the window
got enough of them to cross the threshold into the shop—that was
good enough reason to ask for a raise.
But a sidewalk painter isn’t only or even mainly working for
paying customers, and neither was I. I was working for passers-by,
for the wonderful ladies who get all dressed up to go out window-shopping,
almost as if they were going to the opera, and for
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