John Hejduk’s late work on memory, in certain places emblematic of the violent historical dynamics that run through the twentieth century, has been widely received by architecture historians as a kind of theoretical meditation on architecture¹—a reading of the work that reinforces the sense of opacity one may have when encountering for the first time the thousands of drawings present in the CCA’s John Hejduk fonds. The prolific architectural poetics that he developed throughout his life as well as the disciplinary context in which he worked have contributed to this reception.² Yet, fragments of interviews and texts from that late period reveal Hejduk to have been a practitioner grappling with reality, not finding sufficient opportunity to build, and seeking to propose “programs for his time.”³ He was, in fact, exploring the capacity of his discipline to participate in a multi-layered reparative effort within a society facing deep trauma related to wars and recessions.⁴

Today, there is an urgent need for Western-trained architects to confront the (absence of) traces and consequences of colonial domination and to engage more actively with the memory and traumatic dynamics of place. In the face of obvious yet fragile entanglements between memories, histories, bodies, and places, it is not only a dominant narrative but an entire Western epistemic construction that is unsettled and confronted with its own inability to engage with the multidimensional relationalities of the planetary field. To reckon with the depth of the cracks in history, historians must reformulate the Western conception of time and duration in space, such that it ceases to separate past, present, and future, virtual and real, fact and fiction.⁵ Is the opposition between, on one hand, Hejduk’s declared commitment to the present and, on the other, the profusion of images, poems, and fictional elements, not itself partly a product of a linear conception of time? Wouldn’t it be more productive to consider his entire practice as an active architectural weaving of temporalities?

“The past is not past.” These words traced in the sketchbook for Soundings, one of Hejduk’s last projects, invite us to receive his late works as attempts to breach linear time by refusing to relegate the past as dead. In previous projects, architectural elements already occupy the breach between the real and the virtual.⁶ Never really image, never really architecture, elements are superimposed on the overdetermination of places of distress. But in his later projects, Hejduk seems to insist on another aspect of the interweaving of time, previously more latent. In the long description of Pewter Wings Golden Horns Stone Veils, he makes figures go through these layered landscapes with, as a culminating motif, the experience of an increased bodily attention to absence: “They both feel the silence.”⁷ Hejduk points here to the architectural understanding of a specific material dimension of the present, that of a silent past that continues to act in the present by finding access to materiality in bodies and gestures.⁸

At this point, architecture acts at the spatio-temporal scale of gesture. By touching on the intertwining of temporalities that play out in bodies, the gesture extends its action across time—towards the past, but also towards the future. When the past finds a way to reappear in an affective landscape of gestures, places, and relationships, it is not the isolated fact of the past that is recovered, but all the virtualities that surround it, tied to what has not been completely swept away from history. Gestures perform relationships and construct spatialities both as sites of repetition of a specific violence, and as potential means of subversion.⁹ Hejduk’s last projects can be seen as an architectural attempt to grasp the scale of this space of affective friction—and potential reparation.

The increased use of computers for design brought about two crises of scale in architecture. The first crisis was hailed as such when, in the 1990s, scaleless, floating three-dimensional models and digitally optimized forms challenged the traditional understanding of tectonic and formal hierarchies. The second, less conspicuous, crisis was that of the scaleless discourse: a long-established practice wherein Western architecture is rendered without a scale—assumed universal—while other architectures and their discourses are necessarily bound to their geographical and cultural scales—partial and regional. While this critique of Eurocentric architecture discourse of the twentieth century is well-known, the crisis of the scaleless discourse is far from being resolved. At the turn of the twenty-first century, as the discipline was just beginning to confront these biases, a new digital discourse was being built on the same fallacy of the scaleless West.

The early international exhibitions on digital technology and architecture, including, for example, Non standard Architectures at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003–2004), almost exclusively showcased works by Western European and North American architects. In fact, browsing through the early histories of the digital in architecture, one gets the impression that computers did not exist outside the West. The limited geographic scale is not the issue here; the issue is that this focus went unacknowledged, allowing the West to stand in for the world. Hence, when in 2013 the CCA launched Archaeology of the Digital, for which it had acquired and documented twenty-five architecture projects produced between the late 1980s and early 2000s, the selection mirrored the already existing bias in the discourse and as such comprised projects designed predominantly by Western European and North American architects.¹ However, as Mirko Zardini explained when Archaeology of the Digital was launched, “there was a sense of urgency in trying to capture this period, particularly because digital materials produced as part of the twenty-five projects were growing increasingly difficult to access as older forms of software became incompatible with new machines.”² The CCA’s response to this urgency and its now rich born-digital collection, although initially Eurocentric, have been key for advancing the scholarship on the history of the digital in architecture. In recent years, many scholars, such as Daniel Cardoso Llach, and institutions, including the CCA, have since been working to expand the boundaries of the discourse and multiply the histories it includes. Although a lot of work still needs to be done, a broader understanding of the history of the digital in architecture has been slowly emerging.

That said, as important as these urgent responses are for the preservation of the histories of architecture, they are also most telling of the larger conditions and biases underlying how we—the designers, builders, historians, critics, and curators that are the architecture discipline—assign value to certain architecture. Unless we revisit these biases, rendering visible the institutional infrastructure guiding the selections and conditioning the narratives of our work, we will continue to perpetuate scaleless discourse and to produce biased histories, belatedly attempt to expand them, and then reproduce them once again.

Discussions on humour, as a quality of either architects or buildings, are rarely brought to the forefront of architectural criticism. James Stirling, however, is an exceptional case. Through anecdotes, photographs, and graphic and sculptural representations in publications and archives, Stirling is painted as an individual with a strong sense of humour. In one of the many monographs on the architect and his partners, author Geoffrey Baker even dedicates a small section to Stirling’s humour—in fact, it is among the rare books on architecture that features the word humour in its index. For instance, Baker refers to the architect’s use of nicknames for critics, his interventions on models, and his impressions and funny faces in official contexts.¹ In these depictions of Stirling’s words and actions, Baker constructs the architect’s identity as an exception—humour was a tool to attack the elitist image of the architecture profession.

The frequent connection between Stirling and humour in architectural criticism does not stop at his personality but has been translated to his work as well. Clore Gallery, an extension to the Tate Britain by Stirling, Wilford and Associates, is an interesting example. Not long after its completion in 1987, the building sparked a discussion on humour in the British architecture press.¹ In the way the gridded cladding on the façade is disrupted, the seemingly unsupported elements, and the references to the pre-existing Tate, critics saw a series of intentional—humorous—assaults on the presumed order of an autonomous building.

Stirling’s humour, as viewed so far in criticism, disrupts the way architects are conventionally represented and twists established rules of composition. However, the critical focus on the scale of the individual still reinforces the conception of the architect as a single, superior author, an author in control of even seemingly accidental, humorous moments. A look at the James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds held at the CCA provides the opportunity to expand this scale. Although the archive is dominated by images of Stirling, depicting him as the lead figure of his office, further images also reveal what is absent from the usual representation of him as a humorous individual: his colleagues. Photographs and collages from life at the office, and events, parties, and trips are an indication that Stirling’s humour did not exist in a vacuum. It was allowed to thrive, and perhaps encouraged, within a collective.

This idea is mirrored in some of the development drawings of the Clore Gallery. We cannot always be certain of these drawings’ authors, and whether they constitute serious proposals, creative exercises, or even jokes between colleagues. What such drawings do reveal are moments of uncertainty, of unexpected connections and juxtapositions, that produce humour, which allows the possibility of error.

The finished building displays another side of architectural humour not considered by critics. The Clore Gallery was originally part of a larger project, a museum campus, eventually abandoned due to financial issues.¹ The extension’s unfinished nature results in an occasionally humorous coexistence of intended and unintended incongruities, which blur the boundaries between the Clore Gallery as an authored object and its chaotic urban context.

Expanding the scale of the critical interpretation of humour can present it as the unpredictable collision of various agencies and accidental urban encounters, disrupting the image of the architect-author and, more profoundly, architectural authority.