126 What is Architectural History?
architectural theory and critical architectural history as
written in a theoretical genre. It published essays by the
aforementioned directors and fellows, as well as work by a
vast number of international guests including a series of
books, Oppositions Books, published by MIT Press.^19 It
tracked the shift from interest in semiotics and post-structur-
alism to the fi rst salvos in the 1980s of architectural decon-
structionism and deconstructivism – as a historiographical
strategy and stance and as a programmatic architectural
theory of formal invention and deformation.
Teresa Stoppani^20 has recently observed the importance of
the IAUS to what we could call the second generation of
American architectural theorists for bridging Tafuri’s mode
of critical architectural history – celebrated in the term
‘Venice School’ – and the architectural-theory discourse that
opened the fi eld of architecture itself well beyond the realm
of building, valorizing as the material of architectural history
an exponentially expanding fi eld: from literary sources, fi lm
and music, to popular media and ephemera, to philosophical
concepts with an architectural resonance, to architectural
concepts with philosophical implications, and so on. If it
could be brought to bear on or be made to express architec-
tural problems or themes, it could readily be legitimated as
the material of this new theorized critical history. Bloomer’s
Architecture and the Text (1993) and the essays of Joel Sand-
ers’s Stud (1996) are good examples of an open approach to
the methods, evidence and political project of criticism and
historiography in architectural culture.^21
Under K. Michael Hays and Catherine Ingraham, the
journal Assemblage staged the work of many of this second
generation of architectural theory’s protagonists. The jour-
nal’s fi nal issue, number 41 (2000), presents a series of one-
page, state-of-the-question contributions from each of the
writers who had published in the journal since its fi rst issue
(1987), and who could now look back on this period with a
measure of hindsight. It is interesting, from a historical point
of view, how Assemblage 41 documents an uncertainty in the
ongoing relevance of architecture’s theory-project as it had
been conceived and implemented in the last years of the
twentieth century.^22 The conclusion of this journal hardly
marked an end to architectural theory, or to theorized history,