I’m no Susan Sontag expert. I’ve read little of her writing. Still, I think that David Sucher is prematurely dismissive in saying that she has no relevance for architecture.
With all due respect to the dead, to Sontag… did Sontag ever say much of anything about the built (or natural, for that matter) environment? Just curious. My impression is no. I’ve browsed through her works over the years. I could never connect with anything she wrote. My superficial impression was that she was remote from the concrete, oblivious to the physical world, concerned only with abstractions.
It’s true: Sontag favored the representational arts: literature, photography, film. As such she seems to have less to say about architecture. And by nature, the representational arts seem to be more about abstraction and less about the concrete. But Sontag - while an unabashed aesthete willing to cite philosophers and abstractions at a drop of the hat - resolutely resisted an academic consumption of art. In the Guardian’s words, "Her astringent attack against interpretation (’the project of interpretation is largely reactionary’) carried an aesthete’s preference for readers, or consumers, to leave works of art alone, not to seek to replace them with something else."
This attitude - intellectual, but not academic - permeates her work. In addition, she represented a tide shift in our appreciation and understanding of art. She took as axiomatic that serious aesthetic contemplation could and should be applied to cultural artifacts across the high/low culture divide. She took seriously the artistic forms of the 20th century. I’ll still remember seeing her last year, introducing a Japanese Cinema series at the MFA. Her obvious love of cinema seemed both outdated and thoroughly vital. Finally, Sontag took seriously popular forms of aesthetic understanding (such as kitsch and camp) and tried to find the abstractions of artistic appreciation buried within.
You might disagree with these impulses, but they have changed the way we approach the arts, including in architecture. A Venturi or Jane Jacobs may well have been possible without Sontag, but those writers nonetheless breathed the intellectual atmosphere that she did so much to establish.
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