Marcel Broodthaers: The Architect Is Absent (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)

On Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers and his witty, ingenious critique of postwar modern society.

The seminal Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976) is best known for his mussel assemblages, enigmatic poetry, and the fictional museum project Musée d’art moderne (1968–72). Yet in the late 1950s and the 1960s, he made manifold allusions to architecture, design, and urban planning relative to his native Brussels as well as Amsterdam and Paris, through diverse forms including photographs, brick objects, and tectonic structures. 

For the first time, this book points to architecture as a key theme of Broodthaers’s oeuvre via a formal, critical, and historical study of works and documents, many of which are published here for the first time. While his interest in buildings and the postwar city is often overlooked or otherwise considered marginal, here Stefaan Vervoort resolutely situates architecture, design, and urban planning as central to his thinking and practice.

Focusing on the years 1957–1967, the book revisits the artist’s roots as a poet living and working in postwar Brussels, his journalism and photography informed by French sociology, his debut as a visual artist, his little-known collaborations with local architect Constantin Brodzki and designer Corneille Hannoset, and his dialogue with international artists and art critics. All are brought into relation with the artist’s sustained interest in architecture, design, and urban planning as motors of modernizing postwar society. 

Broodthaers was reflecting on architecture at a time when functionalist principles and social-utopian qualities were under attack—a scepticism underscored by his frequently quoted bon mot from 1967: “L’architecte est absent.” If the sentence is evocative of a flawed society, this book argues, it is the very absence of architectural organization and control which for Broodthaers opens up the possibility of another life.