Nature is the unconscious of the periphery: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas in conversation with Cameron McEwan and Andreas Lechner

The conversation with Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas is part of our Peripheries-Peripherocene special issue of The Journal of Architecture. In this conversation, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas discuss their Fabric Object exhibition at Princeton and the conceptual pairings running through their decades of theory, drawing, teaching, writing, and building. They explain the fabric as object / object as fabric conjunction that subverts a conventional opposition, tracing it to a critique of Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin and the "death of the street". The discussion moves through their critical relation to Rossi's urban thought, the differences between European and American urbanism, and Agrest's reworking of nature, from nature/culture to nature/architecture as a continuum. Representation is articulated as a form of knowledge central to a critical architectural practice engaged with the urban periphery and we discuss the critique of architectural ideology.