Dan Graham

Though architecture is clearly not the sole focus of Dan Graham's work, it is one of his themes of predilection, as much in his photography as in his photography as in his installations and writings. How does Dan Graham use architectural ideas and functions, and in return, how can architectural thinking react to his accusations and justifications? This volume attempts to understand and evaluate his work from the perspective of modern and contemporary architecture, the necessary meeting-point for the basic questions he develops: urbanism, public/private space, socio-political life, ideological critique, the role of language in the visual-kinetic perception of the building (with ideas from the Russian formalists, Bakhtin, Mevdev, Shlovsky), or the effects on the constitution and transformation of the ego since the appearance of glass as a construction material. This approach promises to shed a clearer light on questions that belong not only to the separate fields of art and architecture.