Deltiology as history: informal communications as praxis

The collecting and exchange of postcards by architects - known as deltiology - in London around the Architectural Association and in the East Coast of America during the 1960s and 1970s marked an intense moment of innovation and exchange. Postcards became a mean for gossip, for irony, for disseminating shared preoccupations, for advancing architectural positions, and, above all, for affirmation that ephemera and, using Walker Evans words, “hack photography” (Evans 1964: 109) could challenge the narrow constraints and limited ambitions of mainstream architecture and urbanism. Precisely two years after the “decisive moment of 1968”, the first in a series of influential architectural publications emerged, seeking in various ways to undermine the hegemony of the modernist project and in particular to challenge the paradigm of the modern city. These publications- Alvin Boyarsky’s “Chicago a la Carte. The City as Energy System” of 1970; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour’s “Learning from Las Vegas” of 1972; Bernard Tschumi’s postcard series “Advertisements for Architecture” of 1978; and Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto” of 1978- represent an insurgent movement that circumvented conventional methodologies of urban design to reconnect to popular myths and narratives of the American city and the individual, anonymous citizen. The weapon of choice within an arsenal of critical references was ephemera, specifically the postcard, both vintage and contemporary, that enabled the perpetrators to build upon the inherent nostalgia of the postcard and its potential for surrealist interpretations alongside its documentary potential for social criticism, to fashion multiple narratives and bring to bear unexpected references and content into the discourse on the city that would break with tradition.