Reconsidering agency in architecture: A late review of Richard Serra's Railroad Turnbridge

This essay proposes that works which are often only tangentially architectural might help us formulate a contemporary idea of intrinsic effect, or "agency", in architecture. A reconsideration of Richard Serra's early film, Railroad Turnbridge, suggests that we should begin by attending to the often forgotten gulf between human times, rhythms, natures and agendas, on the one hand, and those proper to sites, objects, artifacts and representations, on the other. Serra's film suggests a redeployment of some of the insights of the often disparaged "turn to theory" of the late twentieth century, as well as a renovation of the classically modern project of thinking about contexts and things "for themselves".