Vers une Architecture – Complexity and Contradiction – S, M, L, XL: Three Bibles of Architecture?

The article analyzes and compares Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, and Rem Koolhaas’s S, M, L, XL, considering the nature of their manifestness and biblicality reflected in past and present writings in both canonical and de-canonical, sacralizing and desacralizing ways. The three architectural writings under discussion are interpreted as approaches to the categories of utopian manifesto, gentle manifesto, and finally retroactive manifesto, or implicit-explicit (multi)manifesto. None of the three books interpreted is a “pure manifesto”. Like the Bible, they are multi-genre volumes; similarly, in all three texts, not only do diverse genres and modes of writing – ranging from journalistic to scientific, theoretical, and literary – intersect and interrelate, but they also bring into dialogue varied ways of thinking and practicing architecture, all while maintaining a past-present-future orientation.