Anthony Vidler, visionary architectural historian; at 82
NEW YORK — Anthony Vidler, an architectural historian who, beginning in the 1960s, reshaped his field by setting aside dry chronologies of styles and movements for an interdisciplinary approach borrowing from psychoanalysis, French literary theory, and cultural studies, died Oct. 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.
His wife, literary critic Emily Apter, said the cause was B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Dr. Vidler, who was born in Britain during World War II, was part of a generation of European and Latin American architectural historians who arrived in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, bringing with them new, theory-driven viewpoints about architecture as a realm of ideas and not just design.
Sometimes cast as architecture’s version of the British Invasion, scholars such as Dr. Vidler, Kenneth Frampton, and Alan Colquhoun settled in New York City and in architectural programs at a small number of institutions, above all Princeton University, where Dr. Vidler taught for almost 20 years and remained affiliated for decades.
He also served as dean of the architecture schools at Cornell, from 1997 to 1998, and Cooper Union, from 2001 to 2013.
In scores of essays, monographs, books, and exhibitions, Dr. Vidler wielded both his deep knowledge of 18th-century architecture and his sharp insights into the contemporary field to argue for a type of history that operated not at the superficial level of function or style but at a deeper, formal level of metaphor, juxtaposition, and ideology.
“Architecture is usually presented as big glossy photographs of the final product, and I like to present architecture as a process of design and thinking about space and the way people use space,” he said in an interview for Brown University, where he taught in the mid-2010s. “I like to find all the little sketches, the bits of sketches on little table napkins, that were made during the process of design.”
He also reached beyond the standard confines of architectural criticism to bring thinkers including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin into the discussion. He wrote extensively about how Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the reemergence of childhood fears in adult lives — manifests itself in modern urban spaces.
He was a leading expert on 18th-century French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who, he argued, brilliantly incorporated the social and political thought swirling around him into his bold, even utopian designs. He said much the same about James Stirling, whose work in postwar Britain moved architecture beyond modernist convention.
Another way Dr. Vidler and his cohort broke with their field was with their interest in shaping architecture as it was being practiced around them. Soon after he arrived in the United States in the mid-1960s, he joined the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, an organization, led by American architect Peter Eisenman, that sought among other things to bring new social and cultural ideas into architecture.
Their efforts were successful: Around the same time that writers and scholars including Dr. Vidler were trying to bring theory into architecture, a generation of architects, among them Rem Koolhaas, Wolf Prix, and Bernard Tschumi, was eager to receive it.
“His ability to look at the very big picture with an incredible informed eye both philosophically and visually was fascinating,” said Tschumi, who designed major buildings in New York, including Alfred J. Lerner Hall at Columbia. “It certainly had an influence on me.”
Anthony Vidler was born on July 4, 1941, in Mere, about 100 miles southwest of London, and raised in and around the town of Shenfield. His father, Stafford, was a surveyor, and his mother, Enid (Yardley) Vidler, was a homemaker.
As a very young child, Anthony witnessed a German air raid on a nearby city. That experience, he said, helped spark his interest in the impact of social and political change on architecture.
So did his perambulations, by bicycle, across the Essex countryside. An adept sketch artist, he would park himself beside a ruined church or an old farmhouse for hours, taking in, with his drawing pad, the way the structure fit within its surroundings.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He married Apter in 1984. Along with her, he leaves two daughters, Anna and Sarah Vidler; a son, Nicolas Apter-Vidler; his brother, Richard; and three granddaughters. His son Ben died before him.