The Staging of (French) Theory in ANY – The Anyone Corporation’s magazine from 1993 to 2000

Frederike Lausch

Abstract

The ANY magazine, published by the Anyone Corporation (founded in 1990), was published for the first time in May 1993. It began with an issue number zero to mark a beginning without value, which was entitled “Writing in Architecture.” The publisher Cynthia C. Davidson emphasized in the editorial that writing necessarily entails ambivalence and indecision, for example puns and ambiguities like the magazine name itself (ANY being an acronym for “Architecture New York” as well as meaning “some” or “whichever”). ANY was supposed to close the gap between popular magazines, academic writings and the less theoretical professional architectural journals. It was deliberately delimited from comparable architectural theory journals: „In the U.S. we had Oppositions, which dealt directly with interpretations of history, and then Assemblage, which fused theory and history. ANY viewed history more as a resource or a backdrop against which to test new thinking.“ (Davidson 2004) This new way of thinking, embodied by the so-called “French Theory,” becomes clear both in terms of content and graphics: an academic tone gives way to a playful, affirmative approach to intellectual fashions, and the overlapping of texts and illustrations leads to a visual spectacle.

Short CV

Frederike Lausch studied architecture at Bauhaus-University Weimar and METU in Ankara. Her Master Thesis “Architektenausbildung in Weimar: 29 Lebensläufe zwischen DDR und BRD“ (Architecture Education in Weimar: 29 biographies between the GDR and FRG) was published in 2015. She worked as a researcher and lecturer at Goethe-University Frankfurt (2014–2018) and at TU Darmstadt (2018–2019); and she was coordinator of the CCSA (2017–2018). In 2019 she held a fellowship from the Wüstenrot Foundation to conduct the research project “Fascism and Architecture. Max Bächer’s interest in Albert Speer” (CCSA Topics 2). She wrote her Ph.D. on translation processes between Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and the US-American architectural discourse of the Anyone Corporation in the 1990s. Since 2020 she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Teaching and Research Area Theory of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University.

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