S. H. IRADJ MOEINI

Seyed Hossein (Iradj) Moeini received his PhD in architectural theory and criticism from the Bartlett, UCL. His thesis was on the effects of new sciences and technologies on architectural design value systems. He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and has published a number of papers on issues of contemporary architecture and architectural education, and music. He is also an amateur musician and photographer.


Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” may have marked a boost to a line of inquiry into the question of authorship in literary criticism, but the artistic exploration of the non-authorial arguably precedes that seminal text. It is a recurring theme in periods and disciplines as far apart—as shown through the examples here—as the mid-20th century music and the late-20th century architecture. The present text is thus based on a comparison between examples of the work of the American composer John Cage, and that of early 90s work of Dutch architects UN Studio to trace the parallels found in their non-authorial creative methods, and to investigate the origins of these methods and their relevance to their respective contexts ...