Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices. Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Foreword
1 Introduction
2 Different Ways of Relating Fiction to Reality and Architectural Drawings: Object-Oriented and Subject-Oriented Modes of Representation
3 Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the Modernist Ethos: Around the Spirit of truth and Clarity
4 Individual-Community Assemblages in Post-War Era Architecture: The Dissolution of Universality
5 Decodification of Design Process as Syntactic Analogy: The Primacy of the Observer in the 1970s and 1980s
6 Identification of the Architect with the Architectural Artefact: Autobiography vis-à-vis the Design Process
7 Bernard Tschumi and the Intensification of Urban Conditions: Uncovering the Potentialities Hidden in the Programme
8 Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture as the Discourse of Events: Disjunction and a new Definition of Metropolis
9 Rem Koolhaas and the Congestion of Metropolis: How the Artificial would Replace the Reality?
10 Conversing with Bernard Tschumi on his Conception of Architecture’s Modes of Representation: Instead of Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

“Boldly, Charitonidou’s new book Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices attempts to theorize the creative process itself by investigating the way luminary architects such as Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas produce their designs in conversation with the times. She argues that architectural drawings should be understood as dispositifs that function as virtual meetings points of the ideas of the designers, the needs of the eventual users of the buildings, and the desires of the developers funding the projects. In this way, she shows that the virtual is already material and a necessary part of and not just a preliminary to the actual. It is a rich and powerful book that will stimulate debate and thinking in the field of architecture for years to come”. Ian Buchanan, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia “This book contributes to the contemporary transient and dynamic ­relationship between the work of architecture, the spectator, and the user. While the architect seemingly remains extraneous to the longevity and crisis of the triangle, Marianna Charitonidou’s retrospective agenda charts four generations of architects’ contributions to the core idea of drawing, be it representational or abstract and diagrammatical. In each chapter, ­Architectural Drawings as an Investigating Devices provides a valuable discussion of the impact of socio-cultural and technological as it concerns the representation and reception of architecture. A timely reading as architecture departs from its past invisible ties with the city for a self-referential commodity form deserted in the megalopolis”. Gevork Hartoonian, Em. Professor of the History of Architecture, University of Canberra, Australia “This book is an important contribution to our understanding of architectural design. Exploring the complex interplay of visual representation and architectural discourse, Marianna Charitonidou offers excellent and inspiring insight of how, over the last hundred years, leading Western architects used sketches and drawings as research and design tools, but also for shaping the roles of users and observers, and for architecture pedagogy”. Christian Gänshirt, Visiting Professor, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. This book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. Dr. Ing. Marianna Charitonidou is architect engineer, urbanist, historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism, expert in sustainable environmental design, and curator. She is leading the project Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus at Athens School of Fine Arts, and is teaching architectural design studio, and history and theory of architecture at Leeds Beckett University. She is Founder & Principal of Think Through Design Architectural, Urban and Landscape Design Studio. Apart from her PhD thesis The Relationship between Interpretation and Elaboration of Architectural Form: Investigating

the Mutations of Architecture’s Scope (National Technical University of Athens, 2018), she completed the following two postdoctoral projects: The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, where she was ­L ecturer ­(2019–2021), and The Fictional Addressee of Architecture as a Device for Exploring Post-colonial Culture: The Transformations of the Helleno-­ centric Approaches at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (2018–2022). In 2022, in the framework of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022, she was selected by ETH Zurich among the women role models conducting research in Science. She curated the exhibition The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime (ETH Zurich, 2021), has authored more than 90 peerreviewed scientific publications, and has presented her research at more than 100 international conferences. She has taught architecture, urban studies, landscape design, and history and theory of architecture at ETH Zurich, the National Technical University of Athens, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Malaquais, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris La Villette, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, and the University of Ioannina. She holds a PhD in Architectural Engineering (National Technical University of Athens), an MPhil Degree in Architecture and Urbanism (National Technical University of Athens), an MSc Degree in Sustainable Environmental Design (Architectural Association, London), and a Master Degree in Architectural Engineering (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).

Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. Transgressive Design Strategies for Utopian Cities Theories, Methodologies and Cases in Architecture and Urbanism Bertug Ozarisoy, Hasim Altan Architecture and Affect Precarious Spaces Lilian Chee Modernism in Late-Mao China Architecture for Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Guangzhou and Overseas, 1969–1976 Ke Song The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy Guy Trangoš The Ambiguous Legacy of Socialist Modernist Architecture in Central and Eastern Europe Mariusz E. Sokołowicz, Aleksandra Nowakowska, Błażej Ciarkowski Architecture, Ritual and Cosmology in China The Buildings of the Order of the Dong Xuemei Li For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century Marianna Charitonidou

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Marianna Charitonidou The right of Marianna Charitonidou to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Front cover image credit: Bernard Tschumi, drawing for the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1982. Dimensions: 74 × 60 cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images. The author and publisher apologise for any errors and omissions. The research project was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “3rd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers” (Project Number: 7833) Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-43110-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-44418-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37208-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations List of figures Foreword by Gevork Hartoonian 1 Introduction

xi xvii xix xxv 1

2 Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings: object-oriented and subject-oriented modes of representation

39

3 Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos: around the spirit of truth and clarity

50

4 Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture: the dissolution of universality

71

5 Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy: the primacy of the observer in the 1970s and 1980s

106

6 Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact: autobiography vis-à-vis the design process

136

7 Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions: uncovering the potentialities hidden in the programme

169

8 Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events: disjunction and a new definition of metropolis

207

x Contents

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jean-Louis Cohen, Bernard Tschumi, George Parmenidis, Pippo Ciorra, Constantinos Moraitis, Kostas Tsiambaos and Panayotis Tournikiotis for their insightful comments. Several of the reflections that are developed in this book emerged in the framework of the research I conducted for my Ph.D. thesis entitled The Relationship between Interpretation and Elaboration of Architectural Form: Investigating the Mutations of Architecture’s Scope for which I was awarded unanimously a Ph.D. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens in September 2018 (jury: Jean-Louis Cohen, Bernard Tschumi, George Parmenidis, Pippo Ciorra, Constantinos Moraitis, Kostas Tsiambaos, Panayotis Tournikiotis). I am particularly thankful to the supervisor of my Ph.D. Dissertation George Parmenidis and to the advisors of my Ph.D. Dissertation Jean-Louis Cohen and Panayotis Tournikiotis. Moreover, I would like to thank Andreas Giacumacatos for mentoring me while working on my postdoctoral project Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus conducted at the Faculty of Art Theory and History of Athens School of Fine arts, Tom Avermaete for mentoring me during my postdoctoral project entitled The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen for our great collaboration during the preparation of the exhibition The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime that I curated at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich in 2021 and George Parmenidis for mentoring me during my postdoctoral project entitled The Fictional Addressee of Architecture as a Device for Exploring Post-colonial Culture: The Transformations of the Helleno-centric Approaches. I am also particularly grateful to Soraya Smithson and Simon Smithson for offering me the opportunity to discuss with them about the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Georgios Parmenidis. He has been always very supportive, trusted me and encouraged me throughout all the process. His intelligent comments enriched my work and synthesised the questions that are at the core of the present study. Our frequent

xii Acknowledgements conversations throughout the trajectory of the research on which this book is based played a defining role for the methodological strategy I have followed. His observations motivated me and always invited me to shed light on the interrelations between design and theory. Our discussions concerning the epistemological questions that this book examines kept alive the sense that praxis and theory interactions are essential for understanding what is at stake in the notational strategies employed by the architects I examine in this book. I am very indebted to my advisor Jean-Louis Cohen. Since our first discussion on my Ph.D. Dissertation in 2014, I had the great opportunity to exchange with him on my research on a very regular basis. His insightful remarks during the archival research and the writing process were pivotal for this book. I am really grateful to him for sharing so generously with me his passion about architecture and its history. His seminars at the Collège de France were a great inspiration for me. I had the chance to follow his seminars the last five years on “Architecture and Politics in 20th-Century France” (2013–2014), “Russia’s Americanism: Architecture, Industrial Design, Urban Planning” (2014–2015), “Architecture in Vichy France, 1940– 1944” (2015–2016), “Frank Gehry’s itineraries: Architecture Between Art and the City” (2016–2017) and “Architecture as a Vehicle for Politics” (2017–2018). He also encouraged me to travel and arrange meetings with many scholars and professors on the opposite side of the Atlantic, an experience of great significance for my research, given its concern about the transatlantic exchanges, and was very supportive during my three stays in New York. He invited me to his seminars at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York University (“Frank Gehry’s Architecture, from Los Angeles to the World, and Back”) and at Princeton University School of Architecture. In parallel, I am grateful to him for having trusted me to write an essay entitled “L’AUA entre le Team 10 et le postmodernisme” as part of the catalogue of the exhibition “Une architecture de l’engagement: l’AUA 1960–1985” that Jean-Louis Cohen co-curated with Vanessa Grossman at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (Editions La Découverte et Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine, 2015). I am very indebted to Bernard Tschumi for the several stimulating conversations we had during my work on this book and on my Ph.D. Dissertation. I am also very grateful to him for having invited me to conduct archival research as Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning. During my stay in New York, he invited me to his New York office and showed me how he works. His support during my stay in New York was defining for this Ph.D. Dissertation and gave me the opportunity to conduct research, essential for the present study, Avery Drawings and Archives Collection, part of Columbia University’s Library. His guidance to conduct researches related in the archival material concerning the Centennial of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was fundamental for my work.

Acknowledgements  xiii I am also grateful to Mary McLeod for having sponsored me in 2014 providing me access to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. I would also like to thank Arnaud Dercelles, who was very helpful and supportive during my researches at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. I am also extremely grateful to Pippo Ciorra for having accepted to be a reader and examiner of my Ph.D. thesis when I contacted him in early spring 2018. During my research as fellow at the École française de Rome, he invited me to the School of Architecture of Ascoli Piceno, University of Camerino, where he is Professor, to present my doctoral research project and he introduced me to a group of his students and collaborators that work on projects that have many affinities with mine. This opportunity was great and contributed to my enthusiasm to work hardly to complete the present study. In parallel, I had the chance to have various stimulating exchanges on my Ph.D. thesis with Pippo Ciorra during my stay and he invited me to an ensemble of events, conferences and exhibition openings, which are very close to my research interests. I could mention, for instance, the conference “L’architettura come confluenza di diverse discipline” by Umberto Napolitano (LAN), the event “Architettura. Sostanza di cose sperate. Scritti in onore di Franco Purini” and the opening of the exhibition “Gli Architetti di Zevi. Storia e controstoria dell’architettura italiana 1944–2000” (“Bruno Zevi’s architects. History and counterhistory of Italian architecture 1944– 2000”), which he co curated with Jean-Louis Cohen, all of them held at the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), where Pippo Ciorra is Senior Curator. I would like to thank him for being so positive and helpful. I am very indebted to Philippe Roger, who, during his seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, which I attended with great interest and enthusiasm during two years, transmitted me his passion for teaching and research. The various discussions we had during these years were very important for my trajectory and would love to thank him for sharing his very intelligent thoughts with me. I would also like to thank him for inviting me to several scientific events – many of them on the work of Roland Barthes and Émile Benveniste – and for discussing with me many interesting aspects treated in the journal Critique, which he directs. I admire his enthusiasm and intelligence. I would also like to thank Maristella Casciato for welcoming me at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where I conducted archival research in the Special Collections (Aldo Rossi papers, Reyner Banham papers, Philip Johnson papers, Ada Louise Huxtable, among others). I am extremely indebted to my great friend Danielle Rago for making Los Angeles even more of a home to me. I am thankful to Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas for devoting me time to discuss about their experience at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. I am very grateful to Ariela Katz and Soline Nivet for inviting me to contribute to their seminar “Les conditions contemporaines du projet: représentations, narrations... fictions” at the École Nationale de Paris-Malaquais and for exchanging with on the methodology of my doctoral research.

xiv Acknowledgements I would also like to thank the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.), Columbia University, the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Académie Française, the Cité Universitaire Internationale de Paris, the École française de Rome, the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY), Leventis Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation and ETH Zürich Foundation for having supported my research projects. Parts of the research on which this book is based were presented at international conferences. Among them I could refer to the following papers: “The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness between the 1950s and 1970s: The Exchanges between the British, Italian, and Australian Milieus” (38th Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) “Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis”, 10–13 November 2021), “Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette as Reinvention of the Concept of Territory: ‘Follies’ as a Dispersed and Differentiated Reality” (13th Deleuze & Guattari Studies International Conference “Territorialities, Exterritorialities, Non-Territorialities”, Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague, 7 July 2021), “From the Athens Charter to the Ηuman Αssociation: Challenging the Assumptions of the Charter of Habitat” (International Conference “Mapping the Spaces of Modernist Cities within the Context of CIAM’s Athens Charter”, ZRC SAZU, France Stele Institute of Art History, Nova Gorica, 26–28 August 2020), “Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts as an exploration of unlikely confrontations: spatial praxis as a dispositif agencing spaces and events” (International Conference “DARE 2019: Machinic Assemblages of Desire. Third International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research”, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, 9–11 December 2019), “Bauhäusler in Chicago: László Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe and the ‘Re-invention’ of Teaching Models” (International Conference “Initiations: Practices of Teaching First Year Design in Architecture”, Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, Cyprus, 23–25 October 2019), “Mies’s Representations as ­Zeitwille: Großstadt between Impersonality and Autonomous Individual” (International ­Conference “Mies van der Rohe. The Architecture of the City”, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, 18–19 October 2019), “OMA’s Parc de La Villette and Perpetual Transcoding: The Diagram as Osmosis between Program and Territory” (12th Annual Deleuze & Guattari Studies conference “From Sense to Machinic Becoming”, Royal Holloway, University of London, 10 July 2019), “An Action towards Humanization: Doorn Manifesto in a Transnational Perspective” (International Conference “Revisiting the Post-CIAM ­G eneration: Debates, Proposals and Intellectual Framework”, Escola Superior Artística do Porto (ESAP), Porto, 11-13 April 2019), “Suburbanization and Ugliness: The Aesthetic Appropriation of the Postwar Urban Reality in the Work of Aldo Rossi, Bruno Zevi and Ludovico Quaroni” (4th edition of the Lessons of Rome, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 22 March 2019), “Aldo van Eyck’s Critiques Against

Acknowledgements  xv Postmodernism as a Humanist Device: between the Notion of ‘Configurative Discipline’ and ‘the Irritant Principle of Renewal’”, annual conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre “The Irritant Principle of Renewal: 100 Years of Aldo & Hannie van Eyck”, TU Delft, 28 November 2018), “Paperless Studios and the Articulation between the Analogue and the Digital: Geometry as ­Transformation of Architecture’s Ontology”, International Symposium “Scaffolds: Open Encounters with Society, Art and Architecture” organised by EPFL, 22–23 November 2018), “Aldo Rossi’s transatlantic cross-fertilization: American ‘urban facts’ and reinvention of design methods” (International Conference “Aldo Rossu. Perspectives from the World”, Politecnico di Milano, AUIC School, Milan, 11-13 June 2018), “A Microhistorical Genealogy of Aldo Rossi’s Transatlantic Connections: transplantation and architectural pedagogues and historians” (international conference “Theory’s History, 196X-199X Challenges in the historiography of architectural knowledge”, KU Leuven, Brussels, 9 February 2017). Special thanks go to the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, the Architectural Association Archives, the Smithson Family Collection, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Archivio progetti of the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice, the Avery Drawings and Archives Collection of Columbia University’s Library in New York City, the Manuscripts division of the Library of Congress in Washington DC., the Department of Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA) in Cologne, the Collezioni MAXXI Architettura at the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome, the Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation in Athens and the Drawing Matter Collections at Shatwell Farm in Somerset for offering me the opportunity to conduct extensive archival research in their archival resources and for authorising me to use the images included in this book. I am also very grateful to the Design History Society and two the two Trustees who reviewed anonymously my application for awarding me a Research Publication Grant. Special thanks go to the reviewers that reviewed anonymously my book manuscript for providing me with inspiring reflections regarding the theme of the book, and to Caroline Church and the Editorial Board of Routledge Research in Architecture book Series who supported me throughout the process of preparation of this book. I would also like to thank Gevork Hartoonian, Ian Buchanan and Christian Gänshirt for writing the short statements that appear in the back cover of the book. I am also particularly grateful to my family and loved ones for their support and their faith in my reflections and work.

Abbreviations

AA APAO CCA CIAM ETH Zurich FLC GSAPP IAUS ICA INA INU ISES IUAV MAXXI MIT MoMA OMA RCA UAA UNRRA

Architectural Association Associazione per l’architettura organica Canadian Centre for Architecture Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich Fondation Le Corbusier Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Institute for Contemporary Art Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica Istituto per lo Sviluppo dell’Edilizia Sociale Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum of Modern Art Office for Metropolitan Architecture Royal College of Art Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

Figures

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, note including the following reflection: “THERE IS A TRUTH RELATION. But what is truth? […] THOMAS: ADEQUATO REIS ET INTELLECTUS […] Augustine: Beauty is the radiance of truth”. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings. Credits: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61. Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, note including the following reflections: “ARCHITECTURE MUST BELONG TO ITS OWN TIME […] But what is our time? […] What is its structure; its essence? […] What re the sustaining and driving forces?” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings. Credits: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61. Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Sketches of Le Corbusier for his project for the Villa Savoye showing how much importance he gave to circulation. Credits: FLC 33491, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris Mock-up of double page spread for Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Delft: Delft University Press, 1983). Artwork by Alison Smithson, 1982. Credits: Smithson Family Collection Passenger’s View in Citroen CX: departing from Upper Lawn: approaching the outer gate (Inigo Jones?) of Splenders, Beckford’s father’s house. Photograph by Alison Smithson taken in March 1982. Credits: Smithson Family Collection (a and b) Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Reidentification Grid, which was presented at the ninth CIAM in Aix-en-Provence in 1953. Credits: Smithson Family Collection

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Alison and Peter Smithson. Presentation Panel CIAM 1956. Fold Houses. Credits: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut Collection, Rotterdam 4.5 Alison and Peter Smithson, “Fold Houses”, panels for CIAM 10, 1956. Credits: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive BAKE, inv. nr. 0175 4.6 Valley Section Diagram as included in Doorn Manifesto for CIAM meeting in Doorn, January 1954. Credits: Het Nieuwe Instituut Collections and Archive, Rotterdam, CIAM Congresses and Team 10 Meetings 4.7 Pattern of association – Each district with a different function. Diagram by Alison Smithson, 1953. This diagram was included in Urban Re-identification Grid, which was presented at the ninth CIAM in Aixen-Provence in 1953. Credits: Smithson Family Collection 5.1 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kolhoff, Arthur Ovaska, “The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago”, 1977. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne. Image Courtesy of Arthur Ovaska and the Cornell AAP Archives 5.2 Oswald Mathias Ungers, competition for the Roosevelt Island Redevelopment, 1975. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne 5.3 Peter Eisenman, Sketches for House II, 1968. Medium: Black ink on paper. Dimensions: 290 × 102 mm. Description: ink sketch with multiple views and sections. Annotations: signed by Peter Eisenman. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1802r. Provenance: Max Protetch 5.4 Peter Eisenman, Axonometric Drawing for House VI, 1972. Medium: black ink, coloured ink, and adhesive vinyl on mylar. Dimensions: 609 × 609 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1280. Provenance: Peter Eisenman; Max Protetch; Private Collection; Edward Cella 5.5 Oswald Mathias Ungers, axonometric representation of six houses included in the Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne 5.6 Oswald Mathias Ungers, axonometric representation of one of the houses included in the Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne 5.7 Oswald Mathias Ungers, collages and axonometric representations, Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne

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Oswald Mathias Ungers, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany, 1984. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne 6.1 John Hejduk, B11 from Project B in Album containing 35 pages illustrating the three projects, projects A, B and C Project, 1969. Medium: offset litho. Dimensions: 458 × 458 mm. Description: Third level colour plate, axonometric. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2303.b11. Provenance: Max Protetch 6.2 John Hejduk, Project from Album of photographs of the models for Project A, 1969. Medium: silver gelatin print photographs. Dimensions: 900 × 1400 × 150 mm. Description: Album of photographs of the models for Project A. Small ring-bound album with red cover of black and white photographs of models, elevation and floor plans for disposition of furnishings. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2304. Provenance: Max Protetch 6.3 John Hejduk, Drawing for Wall House, 1972. Medium: black and coloured ink on paper – felt tip pens. Dimensions: 85 × 273 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1808. Provenance: Max Protetch 6.4 John Hejduk, A8 from Project A in Album containing 35 pages illustrating the 3 projects, projects A, B and C showing details for ‘the Diamond House’, 1969. Medium: offset litho prints in styrene box. Dimensions: 458 × 458 mm. Description: Fourth Level projection, axonometric. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2303.a8. Provenance: Max Protetch 6.5 John Hejduk, Design for Bye House, c 1973. Medium: Black, green, blue and red ink on letter headed paper with printed title ‘John Hejduk’. Dimensions: 210 × 270 mm. Description: Studies for Bye House, Annotations: inscription HOUSE #21. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1801. Provenance: Max Protetch 7.1 Bernard Tschumi, Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center, University of Cincinnati OH (2001–2006). Comparative studies of alternative configurations of the envelope regarding the atrium’s permutation. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi 7.2 Bernard Tschumi, studies on different variations from the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2014. Photograph by Marianna Charitonidou © Marianna Charitonidou 7.3 Bernard Tschumi, “The Masque of the Red Death”, project brief for Princeton University School of Architecture, 1976. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi

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xxii Figures 7.4

Publication of the brief “The Masque of the Red Death” that Bernard Tschumi gave to his students at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Princeton University during the Fall Term of the academic year 1976–1977 in Nassau Literary Review, (1976), 38. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi 7.5 Joao Basto, “The Library of Babel”, student project for the Literary Briefs studio at the Architectural Association (1974–1975). Source: Bernard Tschumi, Nigel Coates, The Discourse of Events (London: Architectural Association, 1983), 33. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects and Architectural Association Archives 7.6 Bernard Tschumi. Joyce’s Garden. 1976. Photographic print, ink, graphite and letraset on cardboard. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi 7.7 The different student projects for Joyce’s Garden (1977) brought together. Projects superimposed on Ordnance Survey. Source: Peter Cook, “Strange Pavilions of the Mind. The Work of Diploma Unit 10 1973– 1983”, AA Files, 4 (1983), 104. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects and Architectural Association Archives 7.8 The fourth manifesto from the exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes”, held at Artists Space Gallery in New York in 1978 was Joyce’s Garden (1977). The image above comes from the catalogue of the exhibition. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi 8.1 Bernard Tschumi, entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1982. Dimensions: 134 × 92 cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects 8.2 Bernard Tschumi, entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1983. Dimensions: 77 × 48 cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects 8.3 Bernard Tschumi, drawing for the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1982. Dimensions: 74 × 60 cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects 8.4 Bernard Tschumi, Five Levels of Interpretation (Vicious Logic), Late Entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, 1980. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi 8.5 Bernard Tschumi Architects, Parc de La Villette, Paris, 1985. Sketches of different city organisations that could be implemented at La Villette (from Baroque axes to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin), the park is no longer an escape from the city, but is understood as an urban construct. Tschumi, through the sketches shown above, compared the

182

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184

185 224 225 227

228

Figures  xxiii

9.1 9.2

9.3

9.4

organisation of the Parc de La Villette with Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and Algiers among other. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Rem Koolhaas, first page of the manuscript of The Surface, 1969. Credits: Architectural Association Archives and Rem Koolhaas Kamiar Ahari, 2.5 m long drawings of hotel and a residential building in Bijlmermeer, Netherlands made in Diploma Unit 9 at the AA taught by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zaha Hadid and Demitri Porphyrios during the academic year 1978–1979. It comprises of a plan and an axonometric drawing, mixing exterior and interior, a favoured projection technique in the unit. Credits: Architectural Association Archives and Kamiar Ahari. Available at: https://collectionsblog.aaschool.ac.uk/wpcontent/ uploads/2017/02/Kami1low7.jpg Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zaha Hadid, Axonometric Drawing for the entry to the competition concerning Roosevelt Island Redevelopment, 1975. Medium: Pencil and gouache on board. Dimensions: 840 × 1030 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 3070 Rem Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Photo-collage for Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972. Final project, AA School of Architecture, London, 1972. Medium: Pen, ink photocollage in colour and black and white, on silver backing. Dimensions: 295 × 418 mm. Exodus started as an answer to a competition by Casabella in 1972, on the theme of “the city as meaningful environment”, for which the Berlin Wall is taken as model. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 3151.5. Provenance: Zoe Zenghelis

230 238

239

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241

Foreword Gevork Hartoonian

Several photographs from the last century closely show Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, among other architects, inspecting a project’s model or staring at their drawings. What are architects looking for when checking the final scaled model of a project? That the proportions are correct; the composition matches the image or the diagram they had in mind at the start of the project. Or are they trying to understand what the observers, the absentee, would see and get away from after the completion of the building? Surprisingly, it has been a routine practice for detective officers, at least in Hollywood movies, to pin up photographic images of suspects on the wall, searching for clues to make the proper connection between an image and the crime narrative. Since the inception of film and photography and the importance given to images, not only the user’s (client?) perception or, for that matter, misperception of their needs is presumably resolved in the planimetric organisation of the project, which, interestingly enough, remains invisible as long as the building operates appropriately. These queries, and many others, are at the heart of Marianna Charitonidou’s ambitious project discussed in each chapter of this book. It highlights the gaps in reconciling spectators, “users”, and architecture across four generations of architects, delineating the presumed divide between early modern and postwar architecture. This book is a timely read since Walter Benjamin’s critical reflections on architecture’s “touristic” appropriation of most buildings conceived and erected today in metropolitan cities worldwide. Without calling it out, the author seemingly had considered the historiographic importance Kenneth Frampton has given to the work of the late Mies and Le Corbusier to bridge the generational gap under the auspices of monumentalisation. Charitonidou indexes the same gap as post-war architects tried to formulate different design strategies to accommodate the conflict of interest between the spectator and the work, which in the present full-fledge dissemination of the spectacle of commodity fetishism, is almost reduced to zero-degree importance. The reader, however, is reminded of the short passage when the advocates of the “participatory design” on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to charge architecture with meaning as the intellectual spectrum shifted from phenomenology to structuralism and

xxvi  Gevork Hartoonian post-structuralism. Peter Eisenman’s diagramatisation of the representational drawings of his early design work is the best barometer for checking the architectonic implications of these theoretical transformations. The complexity involved in understanding the diagram’s evolution – what, for Charitonidou, delineates the passage from autonomy to post-autonomy– and its further complications in the work of Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi shattered the short-lived postmodernist simulation of historical quotations, let alone the advocacy for learning from the commercial strips of Las Vegas, not to mention Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. The implied negativity is not an individual choice but belies “the crisis of the object” starting when capitalism usurped the historicity of the project of modernity circa the late 1930s. Dialectically, the continuity of crisis has been contingent on the internal contradiction of capitalism and the separation of architecture from its context, the city itself, a reason for the emergence of subsequent tendencies for autonomy. Recalling Robin Evan’s suggestion that episodic investigation is not fruitful unless it “intimate[s] something other than their unique occurrence”, the book assemblages the complex rapport between representational drawings, the spectator, and the users or, for better or worse, the occupier of architectural space. One of the author’s contributions is to highlight the heterogeneity informing each of these agencies by which one might be able to contextualise the work of architects mentioned earlier. Contrary to the early historiographies of architecture, the author underlines the delay involved in the architect’s theorisation of their work and the structural changes solidifying the three agencies’– the work, the user and the observer– rapport with the work. Central to this proposition is the role representational drawings play in Mies’s and Le Corbusier’s persuasion of what Charitonidou discusses in terms of the tension between “universality and individuality”. Under the presumed temporal homogeneity of the early modernist take on the Zeitgeist, the architect was positioned in the vanishing point of the humanist perspectival view to sustain a balance between the heavenly and the earthly, if not between the “assumed existence of a ‘universal user’ and what Reyner Banham called ‘a normal man’”, seemingly in analogy to Le Corbusier’s modular. Even if this one-dimensionality offers a plausible criticism of his early work, it is reductive to dismiss Mies’s photomontages that had roots in the work of Berlin Dadaist artists, such as Hannah Hoch, even though both these architects attempted to present architecture worthy of the project of modernity as a totality. The destructive consequences of the war did shatter any vision of “normality” except the drive for mass consumption and the legitimisation of American popular consumer culture. The reader is reminded of the encounter between “consumerism and citizenship” that expanded the scope of identity issues to include several architectural tendencies, including British Brutalism, Italian Neorealism and New Humanism. The 1960s also witnessed the end of the utopic urban projects and the emergence of capitalistic

Foreword  xxvii investment and planning of the city that, in return, offered an opportunity for architects to reiterate their authority through diverse theorisation of the concept of autonomy as the author turns her attention to the work and drawings of Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman and Oswald Mathias. Benefitting from the theoretical turn from structuralism to post-structuralism, these architects’ drawings, particularly Eisenman’s axonometric drawings, conjugated the observer’s digestion of his early houses with the philosophical concept at the expense of dismissing the everyday needs of the users. We are then guided to a “post-autonomy” take on diagram drawings focusing on Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi’s competition entries for the Parc de La Villette. In addition to these two architects’ affiliation with the work of Russian Constructivism and an interest in the filmic technique of montage (Tschumi) and script (Koolhaas), the competition offered a remedy for the architect’s lost opportunity to engage with the city through a limited extent. Charitonidou underlines the potentialities of the “interconnection of territorial and programmatic indeterminacy” as a design strategy to engage with the city. We are reminded of Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts, furnished with filmic montage as an analytical notation to juxtapose fragments from the “world of movement, the world of objects and the world of events”. Tschumi’s choice of filmic montage against the traditional notational system informed by the perspectival regime, including the early and late avantgarde axonometric drawings, expanded the drawing purpose to include the centrality of the event to comprehend the very fragmentary experience of contemporary everyday life. Le Corbusier and Mies also appropriated this strategy, each differently, however. The author introduces Le Corbusier’s concept of “patient search”, by which the architect attempted to narrow the gap between a dusky mental image and the to-be architecture. Nothing short of this transformative process, from in-itself to for-itself, is suggested in Le Corbusier’s page-long letter to Madam Meyer (1925) that combines a freehand axonometric view of the proposed house with explanatory filmiclooking visual cuts along with annotations. The idea to inform a third person, be it the client or the spectator, is also provoked in Mie’s photomontages to the point that “the observer had become an element of the spatial construction of the building itself”. In the light of post-war capitalistic intervention in the city and the failure of the historical project of the avant-garde, the use and abuse of drawing attained a new momentum. The issue of turning architecture into a single object of phenomenological contemplation or otherwise, along with the colourful postmodernist images of simulated classical elements, gave way to the notion of history with an eye on the city as history. Aldo Rossi, for one, not only radicalised the idea of autonomy but also, writes Charitonidou, offered a design strategy that “was based on an understanding of the act of drawing as a means of transforming architectural and urban artifacts into objects of affection”. The Italian Marxian sympathy for “collective

xxviii  Gevork Hartoonian memory” that informed the early work of Rossi was more promising than the populist inclusiveness underpinning the work of Giancarlo De Carlo and Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, especially the latter’s aspiration for learning from American mainstream architectural culture. What should we make out of Charitonidou’s exhaustive journey into the discursive formations of diverse architects listed in the contents of this book? The author has equally done comprehensive work to probe the suggested contingencies around the core idea of drawings, be it representational or conceptual. Along this path, the author guides us in the architect’s mental life, at times with constructive philosophical observations and at other times with broad contextualisation of an architect’s praxis. This book is an essential read toward a comprehensive exploration of the role of drawings as both a means of communication between the architect and the client and a poetic state of collectivity, a much-needed subject of attention at the present predicament of architecture under the auspices of digital reproducibility. Apropos, not only has the drawing position changed,1 but in the technification of the design process and contrary to the filmic and photographic closeup, the image recedes from the viewer furthering the distance between the spectator – be it the architect or the user – once needed to comprehend and critique the work. In doing so, the spectacular image of the object jots towards the spectator as another emblem of the world of the commodity form that has saturated today’s everyday life. 2 Among many other issues, one consequence of the surface-oriented digital spectacle is the dismissal of detail. Even in late modern architecture, detail was treated as a closeup image, an enlargement of miniature drawings with a particular focus on the interconnectivity between different materials, labour and technique in anticipation of the expected tactile and aesthetics of the finished work. Not only Mies suggested that “God is in detail”, but it is also part of Walter Benjamin’s reflective judgement that “Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text”. 3 Accordingly, a detail, either in drawing or model form, has the potential to close the gap between the architect’s mental image of the work and the spectator’s expectation. The dilemma this book leaves the reader in is how to welcome the technically motivated dismissal of the ideals of the architect’s autonomy and yet hold on to the architecture’s conspicuous rapport with fragmented tactile and tectonics deposited in the historicity of the culture of building.

Notes 1 Gevork Hartoonian, “The Drawing Position,” Architectural Review, 14(3) (2009): 248–259. 2 See Esther Lesley’s reflections on Henri Bergson in “Telescoping the Microscopic Object: Benjamin the Collector,” in Alex Cole, ed., The Optic of Walter Benjamin (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1999), 58–94. 3 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as a Producer,” in Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978), 229.

1

Introduction

The point of departure in this book is the hypothesis that modes of representation can serve as tools in order to diagnose how the concept of observer and the concept of user in architecture have been transformed throughout time. The research methodology of the book is based on a parallel interpretation of architects’ writings, drawings and pedagogical strategies and their connections. These three terrains of study are considered as the main areas of research of the book. Special attention is paid to showing how different architects responded to similar tensions. This strategy, instead of homogenising different architects’ approaches, interpreting their design approaches as expressions of Zeitgeist-inspired generational tendencies, aims to show how architectural history research could overcome polarisations between internalist and externalist methods1. The term internalist methods refers to the approaches that tend to interpret architectural artefacts, either drawings or buildings, relying exclusively on formal evidence, while externalist methods refer to the perspectives that understand architectural artefacts as outcomes or reflections of forces that dominate architecture, excluding from architectural expression every force related to its own means of production and dissemination. To the present, there are no comprehensive studies that manage to relate the transformations of the modes of representation to the mutations of the dominant, at different historical times, conceptions of the user and the observer. Despite the fact that there are some studies that aim to examine the implications of the use of certain modes of representation, focusing on various case studies, such as Alberto Pérez Gómez and Louise Pelletier’s Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge published in 1997, 2 the volume Perspective, Projections and Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation that Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle edited in 2007, 3 Robin Evans’s book entitled The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, published in 1995,4 and Stan Allen’s Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation,5 there are no exhaustive studies that relate the metamorphosis of the modes of representation to the dominant ways of understanding the concept of the user and the concept of the observer corresponding to different generations. Despite their concern about specific

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-1

2 Introduction questions regarding architectural representation, the existing studies on this topic do not manage to relate the evolution of the modes of representation to the epistemological mutations. In parallel, they do not inscribe, in a systematic way, the prioritisation of certain modes of representations in a general network of debates and tensions that characterise different generations. Robin Evans notes in his introduction to The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries: “[a]n episodic treatment […] has no advantage unless the episodes intimate something other than the fact of their own unique occurrence”.6 This remark might be considered as a realisation of the significance of situating the episodes analysed in larger contexts. Reading Evans’s observation, it becomes evident that he intended to overcome the incidental nature of the case studies that he examines in The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries and to inscribe them in a narration of historical mutations. His study, despite its remarkable depth and subtlety, did not organise in a systematic way the connection of the episodes to a larger context of evolution of the epistemological debates of architecture. In his introduction of his book, Evans also notes that “[t]he history of architectural projection is just beginning to be investigated”.7 Five years later, Stan Allen’s Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation was published. The latter was organised in three parts that focused on drawings, buildings and media respectively. Despite its intellectual interest, this book did not aspire to establish a diachronic sequence of the transformation of the privileged modes of representation at each historical era. Two books that has certain affinities with my book is Tom Porter’s book entitled The Architect’s Eye 8 and Why Architects Draw.9 The lacuna that this book wishes to cover is the lack of systematic studies in the domain of architecture concerning the transformation of the modes of representation that are privileged at each historical era and the examination of the connections of this transformation with the dominant epistemological questions corresponding to different historical periods. Despite the fact that I focus on specific architects, my aspiration is to treat them in a way that renders comprehensible how their work and the strategies they elaborate in order to fabricate their drawings and teach are inscribed in the epistemological questions that dominated the generations on which the research on which this book is based is focused. The book also aspires to go beyond an interpretation of diachronic transformations as expressions of Zeitgeist-inspired generational tendencies. One could, thus, claim that the innovativeness of the book and the significance of its contribution to the existing scholarship lies in the effort to show how an analysis of the reorientations concerning the modes of representation can permit us to overcome the split between internalist and externalist methods. Moreover, it can offer us the opportunity to establish a strategy of interpretation that does not take for granted conventional taxonomies. To avoid an a posteriori analysis of the creative processes of architectural projects, and to enlighten the very processes through which the projects are

Introduction  3 carried out, the book aims to unfold the tensions and contradictions between the theorisation of these processes by their architects-conceivers and what I discern as intentions behind the projects. In some cases, as in the case of The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi, the theorisation of his projects by himself does not come a posteriori, but it takes place during the creative process and is a constitutive part of his design strategies. In other words, in the case of The Manhattan Transcripts, the experimentation with the notational devices is part of Tschumi’s theoretical project.10 At the core of the book is the idea that the process of creation and the process of interpretation do not constitute separate steps. The book examines how these two processes interact during the architect’s compositional practice. What the book proposes is that, in the field of architecture, the act of creation and ideology interact. It is for this very reason that it is interesting to demonstrate how the design of an architectural project, its inhabitation, and the interpretation of architectural composition constitute three cases that should not be understood in isolation given that they interact in ways that should not be reduced to a cause-and-effect relationship. The book argues that through the process of contextualising the drawings within a corpus of projects of the same architect or other architects can help us understand how the architects give sense to their act of architectural composition. The specificity of architectural drawings in comparison with any other kind of drawings is also taken into account. In each architectural representation, because of the fact that the conception of form in architecture addresses to a use, the construction of a conception of user takes necessarily place. In parallel, when the observers of architectural drawings interpret them, they construct in their mind a translation of architectural drawings into space. The architectural drawings’ main purpose is to activate the way the observers relate, in their mind, the drawings to effects of real spaces. The point of departure of this study is the observation that the conception of this translation changes throughout time. Architects, through the construction of their drawings, address to the observers of their drawings and to the users of the architectural artefacts that their practice aims to produce. The main objective of the book is to show how the dominance of the first or the second actor, that is to say the observer or the user, changes when we pass from one generation to the following. In other words, this book aims to show which parameter of the observer/user relationship becomes more central in architectural epistemology in each generation and to explain the reasons of the prioritisation of the one parameter over the other. The term “architecture’s addressee” is used in the book because it embraces the different status of subjects that interpret architectural drawings and artefacts.11 In parallel, different terms were chosen to describe the addressee of architecture concerning the successive generations that are examined, because I intended to insist on the transitions regarding the status of the subjectivity of the addressee of architecture from generation to generation. For the generation of the modernists, what counts most is

4 Introduction the individual and bourgeois character of architecture’s addressee. For this reason, I chose to use the term “individual” when I refer to the addressee of architecture that concerns the generation corresponding to the modernist era. Despite the dominance of the bourgeois subject in modernist architecture, there are certain cases that are related to the construction of an antibourgeois subjectivity, such as the case of Hannes Meyer’s Co-Op Zimmer (1926).12 The idea of functionality was not so central in the modernist era, despite the existence of certain episodes that are related to “Taylorist analyses of bodily movement”,13 such as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen (1926). In this case, the kitchen functioned as the engine for the re-interpretation of the status of the housewife. The debate on existenzminimum, which took place in the framework of the 1929 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which was devoted to housing, is also important for understanding the status of the modernist user par excellence. The 1929 CIAM was focused on Frankfurt’s ambitious housing programme and on international attempts to define the minimum habitable dwelling.14 Michael K. Hays, in Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, aimed to overcome “Giedion’s notion that modern architectural objects provide visual symbols for the integral psychological self” and to point to certain modern architectural that put into crisis the cognitive status of autonomous vision and the centered self for which that vision is a metaphor, and redirect our attention to those extrinsic processes that lie beyond individual aesthetic mastery.15 During the post-war era, the interest in the concepts of the user and standardisation of architecture was intensified. This was accompanied by a concern about the mass subject. The emergence of models as Ernst Neufert’s Architects’ Data (Bauentwurfslehre) (1936) played an important role for the reinforcement of the concerns about the concept of the user.16 The shift from an understanding of architecture’s addressee as individual towards its understanding as user occurred progressively. We could refer to the emergence of Neufert as a first sign of such a reorientation, but the most significant mutations occur after WWII and were related to the ambiguity between citizenship and consumerism, which is connoted when we use the term “user”. For the aforementioned reasons, I employ the term “user” to refer to the addressee of architecture that concerns the generation of the post-war era. The term user is situated between the individual and the subject. Regarding the 1970s and the era during which autonomy in architecture was at the core of the epistemological interest, what was at stake was a shift from an understanding of architecture’s addressee as user towards a conception of architecture’s addressee as subject17. Comprehending architecture’s addressee as subject instead and not as user implies that the meaning or signification of architecture cannot but be co-constructed by the architect

Introduction  5 and the addressee. In other words, the term subject goes hand in hand with the complementarity between object and subject, as well as the complementarity between the architect and the addressee within the framework of the process of establishing meaning in architecture. In the case of the work of Peter Eisenman, for instance, the interpretation of architecture depends on the de-codification of architecture by its addressee. Finally, at the core of the work of Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is the “multiple subject”.18

Definitions and terminology A dilemma to which I tried to respond is that of employing either the term “user” or the term “inhabitant”. The Petit Robert dictionary defines the user – “usager” – as a “person who uses (a public service, the public ­domain)”19 and situates its emergence in the 1930s. According to Daniel Pinson, the term “use” appeared in the late 1960s in conjunction with the critique of the notion of “function” and of the reduction of architectural function to its technical performance. 20 Alvar Aalto, in his essay entitled “The Humanizing of Architecture”, written in 1940, argues that “[t]echnical functionalism is correct only if enlarged to cover even the psychological field. That is the only way to humanise architecture”. 21 Adrian Forty notes regarding the concept of “user”: the category of the “user” was a particular device by which modern societies, having deprived their members of the lived experience of space (by turning it into a mental abstraction) achieved the further irony of making the inhabitants of that space unable even to recognize themselves within it, by turning them into abstractions too. 22 Insightful researches regarding the concept of the user are: Kenny Cupers’s Concerning the User: The Experiment of Modern Urbanism in Postwar France 1955–1975, 23 the volume edited by the same author under the title Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, 24 Jonathan Hill’s Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users, and especially its first section entitled “The Role of the User”, 25 and Stephen Grabow’s and Kent Spreckelmeyer’s The Architecture of Use: Aesthetics and Function in Architectural Design. 26 For Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache, “[u]nlike the user with the absence of character, an inhabitant builds an edifying habitus that is the cultural dressing of life’s events”. 27 Kenny Cupers underscores that “[t]he figure of the user had remained implicit in interwar modernism”. 28 He also reminds us that the user became a central point of reference “during the “golden age” of the Welfare State in post-war Europe, when governments became involved with their citizens’ well-being in novel ways”. 29 What is worth-noting is that “[w]hile the notion of the user initially emerged in the context of industrialised production, mass production,

6 Introduction and large-scale government intervention, it evolved to contest exactly those basic qualities of mass, scale, and uniformity”. 30 The term “user” is related to technocracy and consumerism. Jonathan Hill underlines the fact that the term “user” suggests “that using architecture is primarily a question of practicality”, 31 while Henri Lefebvre maintains that “[t]he user’s space is lived—not represented (or conceived)”. Lefebvre juxtaposes the abstract space corresponding to the architects, urbanists and planners with “the space of the everyday activities of users”. 32 For him the specificity of the users’ space lies in the fact that it is concrete and subjective. The distinction between the notions of function, use and programme is also significant for this study. Stanford Anderson argues, in “The Fiction of Function”, that “if it was a fiction to treat functionalism as a crucial feature of even part of modernism, it is a grosser fiction to treat the whole of modernism as function”.33 Anthony Vidler, in “Toward a Theory of the Architectural Program”, sheds light on the replacement of the logic “form follows function” with that of “form as, in a real sense, program and vice versa”.34 The term “observe” derives from the Latin “observare”, which is composed by “ob” and “servare”. According to its Latin root “observare” means “to conform one’s action to comply with”. 35 Jonathan Crary, in his seminal book entitled Techniques of the Observer, sheds light on the interaction between the human visual response and the prepared mind. He places particular emphasis on the concept of “observer”36. The term “spectator” derives from the Latin “spectare”, which means “to look at”. Therefore, it becomes evident that the choice to employ the term “observer” instead of the term “spectator” is related to the intention to highlight the activity of adjustment from the side of the perceiver of the architectural drawing. As Crary reminds us “one who sees, as observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities. One who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations”. 37 The choice of the term “observer” implies an intention to highlight the importance of the impact of each parameter of the “heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations”. In other words, the decision to use the term “observer” is compatible with the conviction “[t]here is no observing subject prior to this continually shifting field”. 38 To put it differently, the “term” “observer” is in accordance with an understanding of architectural drawings as dispositifs. Useful for analysing the relationship between the architectural representations and their observers, is the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Didi-Huberman and James Elkins in their Le visible et l’invisible, 39 Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde,40 The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing41 respectively.

Architectural drawings as dispositifs What interests me mostly regarding the concept of dispositif, which also explains why I decided to use it in order to analyse architectural drawings,

Introduction  7 is that it does not treat all these heterogeneous systems – that is to say the object, subject, language, and so on – as homogeneous. In parallel, not only the different systems are characterised by heterogeneity, but the inside of each system is also understood as heterogeneous. In other words, the systems as composed by interacting forces that are at a continuous state of becoming, “always off balance”,42 to borrow Gilles Deleuze’s words. Such an understanding of the articulation of systems and of the relationships within each system implies that what is at the centre of the interest when an object of research is comprehended as dispositif are the relationships between all the parameters and the relationships between the interacting forces composing each parameter. The comprehension of architectural drawings as dispositifs implies that they are understood as the meeting points of the exchanges and the interaction between different parameters: the architect-conceiver, the observer, the user and so on. The conception of each of the aforementioned parameters changes within time as we move from the one social, institutional, cultural, historical context to the other. What interests me is the transformation of the relationships between all the aforementioned parameters. My attraction to the notion of dispositif could be explained by the fact that my intention is to take into account the transformation of the conception of each parameter – the architect-conceiver, the observer and the user – and the transformation of their relationships. A starting point of this research is the assumption that new conceptions of space and new modes of inhabitation are addressed through architectural design process before being theorised. These reinvented modes of assembling the real and the fictive dimension of architecture are addressed through written discourse much later than their concretisation though the establishment of specific dispositifs related to architectural non-discursive signs. In other words, there is a time lag between the elaboration of new conceptions of fabrication of space assemblages and modes of inhabiting the constructed assemblages and their theorisation through written discourse. This time lag is one of the parameters that my study intends to scrutinise. My main intention is to demonstrate how the modes of representation elaborated by the architects under study vehicle different ways of constructing assemblages between the following agents: firstly, the conceiver of architectural representations; secondly, their observers; thirdly, the users of the spatial assemblages after the construction of the architectural artefacts. During the architectural design process, they take place encounters at three different levels: that of the design, that of the reception of architectural drawing by the viewer, and that of the inhabitation of constructed space. To better capture these three layers, we should think of them as two successive transitions: the first transition concerns the transference from the conceiver to the viewer, while, the second one, concerns the transition between the viewer and the inhabitant. The first transition corresponds to an exchange between two different subjects, while the second one corresponds

8 Introduction to a transition between two different modes of reception of the architectural dispositif by the same subject: its reception through the view of architectural drawings and its experience through the inhabitation of the constructed space. Architects are obliged to pass through the visualisation of their ideas in order to convince the client and to communicate with them. Therefore, their task is characterised by a necessary translation through visual means. The visual means are their instruments for communicating their spatial dispositifs. The architectural representations are founded on the construction of fictions. Any choice of the architect to privilege certain modes of representation shows the level to which they intend to control the perception of the viewer and the way the user inhabits built space. For instance, the use of perspective is tied to the establishment of a specific way to view space and to imagine your movement through space. A characteristic of this way that is essential for this study in that it is pre-defined by the conceiver-architect. An aspect that interests me is the fact that architects tend to use different modes or representation in order to produce the drawings that serve to capture their ideas and the drawings that serve to transmit their design concepts and proposals. To make this point explicit, I could refer to the fact that their way of drawing during the process of concretising their ideas through design and the modes of representation elaborated in order to produce the images that are destined to communicate their projects differ from each other. The architectural design process is not only a way of communicating a project to a viewer, it is also a way of capturing, concretising and giving form to their own ideas. The extent to which these two stages of architectural process are based on the use of the same modes of representation is a parameter that is also scrutinised in this book. Two notions that are important for understanding how this book is organised are the notion of problem and the notion of dispositif. A characteristic of the concept of dispositif, which is significant for this research, is the fact that, apart from discursive forms of expression, it also refers to non-discursive forms of expressions, such as the drawings. Whereas the notion of episteme is primarily discursive in nature, a dispositif is more heterogeneous, designed to capture the links between the discursive and the non-discursive aspects.43 We could, thus, claim that the architectural drawings under study are understood as dispositifs. A pivotal question that is addressed here is how the drawings of the architects under study invoke special modes of visual attention. A second issue that is also at the heart of this research is the activity of translation from drawings to buildings. The aforementioned two activities are understood as dispositifs. A problem, for Gilles Deleuze, is a means by which thought constructs itself. In Difference and Repetition, he notes: “The virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved: it is the problem which orientates, conditions and engenders solutions, but these do not resemble the conditions of the problem”.44 In What is Philosophy?,

Introduction  9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari underscore that “concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges”.45 Problems, for Deleuze, constitute the higher capacity of thought. Ernst Gombrich maintained that there are no disciplines, only problems46. As Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann reminds us, Gombrich “did not believe in the existence of disciplines, […] [but emphasized] the role of problems”.47 Regarding the concept of dispositif, the book draws mainly on the interpretation of the concept of dispositif of Michel Foucault. Gilles Deleuze writes in Foucault: “Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a ‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities”.48 The translation of “dispositif” as “mechanism” is misleading. Gilles Deleuze defines Foucault’s concept of dispositif as follows: But what is a dispositif? In the first instance it is a tangle, a multilinear ensemble. It is composed of lines, each having a different nature. And the lines in the apparatus [dispositif] do not outline or surround systems which are each homogeneous in their own right, object, subject, language, and so on, but follow directions, trace balances which are always of balance, now drawing together and then distancing themselves from one another. Each line is broken and subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked, and subject to ‘drifting’. Visible objects, affirmations which can be formulated, forces exercised and subjects in position are like vectors and tensors. Thus the three major aspects which Foucault successively distinguishes, Knowledge, Power and Subjectivity are by no means contours given once and for all, but series of variables which supplant one another.49 The best in order to understand the connotations of the term “dispositif” is to look at the definition given by Foucault: What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus [dispositif] is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality.

10 Introduction In short, between these elements, whether discursive or nondiscursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely. Thirdly, I understand by the term “apparatus” a sort of–shall we say–formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. 50 The structure of the book is based on a generational organisation and it unfolds around four generations. For each generation, the research focuses on emblematic architects that affected significantly the epistemology of architecture of the corresponding generation. The narrative unfolds around two axes: one diachronic and one synchronic. The synchronic axis serves to shed light upon the different interpretations of similar concepts by the architects belonging to the same generational cluster, while the diachronic axis permits to grasp the ruptures regarding the transformation of the way they built the relationship of their design artefacts with the observer and the user. The means to diagnose these ruptures are the modes of representation employed by the architects under study, on the one hand, and the way the relationship between the discourse on architecture, the representation of architecture and the realisation of architecture changes, on the other hand. Two aspects that are at the heart of the book are: how each of the architects under study conceive the “observers”, who view and interpret their architectural representations and how through the design of buildings they shape a model of the “users”, who are to inhabit the spaces they conceive. The way that the relationship between the observer and the user changes as we move from one generation to the next is one of the parameters examined in this book. I could summarise the evolution of the way the observer and user are treated through architectural representation as follows. In the first generation, the observer was privileged in favour of the user, despite the dominant rhetoric claiming that function was the main purpose of the modernist architects. The observer was treated in a homogenised way. The relationship between the architect and the observer in the modernist era was not interactive. It was characterised by a mono-directional transmission from the architect towards the observer. This hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that perspective, which is a mode of representation based on a pre-defined way of how to view and interpret drawings, was the privileged mode of representation. In the modernist era, architects tended to conceive their selves capable of orchestrating every detail of how drawings should be interpreted. The problems of such a hegemonic conception of their role were already apparent in the way the relationship between buildings and the city was treated. Two main tendencies of treating the building-city assemblage were apparent: the claustrophobic and the hegemonic. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s interior perspectives’ agoraphobic attitude is representative of the former, while Le

Introduction  11 Corbusier’s Plan Voisin is representative of the latter. Both extremes made apparent that the role of the architect as capable of orchestrating how the observers conceive their drawings and how users inhabit their spaces was problematic. The simplifications and generalisations on which their attitude was based pushed the next generation to recognise that the role of the architect in society is the most ambivalent issue to which architectural practice should try to respond. In the modernist generation, in contrast with the modernist doctrine “form follows function”, architectural drawings are characterised by an elitist vision and architects gave great importance to the observer. Despite the general conviction that architects’ main addressee during the modernist era was the inhabitant and their main ambition the final built outcome, the design practices of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe invites us to problematise this assumption. Their rhetoric very often assumes that the user was the main addressee of their architectural design practice, but the revolutionising of the design practices and the way both architects disseminated their architectural approaches through photography, on the one hand, and through their involvement in the preparation of exhibitions on their own work, on the other hand, shows that the observer, in many cases, was much more defining for their architecture than the user. Michel Foucault employed the term dispositif in order to refer to the interaction between heterogeneous vectors, such as “visible objects, affirmations […] formulated, forces exercised and subjects in position”. 51 The study on which this book is based covers a period extending from the 1920s to the present. For each generation, the book focuses on certain emblematic architects that contributed significantly to the epistemological shifts of architecture. All the architects chosen were also educators, with the exception of Le Corbusier, who, while he never held a position of professor at any school of architecture, had exceptional skills in orchestrating the dissemination of his work that are characteristic of rather strong pedagogical ambitions. For instance, the way he gave his lectures by drawing and speaking simultaneously while improvising and the inventiveness with which he prepared every of his several books, combining visual and textual means, demonstrate the didactic determination of his attitude. Le Corbusier, in his Talks with Students, emphasises that he conceived his Œuvre Complète as his teaching manifesto.52 The pedagogy of architecture is an important aspect of the research on which this book is based. One of the intentions in this book is to relate the transformation of the modes of transmission concerning the methods of treating an architectural project in the design studios of the schools of architecture under study to the mutation of the ways of producing architectural drawings. In order to be able to do this legitimately, I chose to focus the research on which this book is based on architects who used to teach or still teach design studios in architecture schools. The narrative of the book is organised around the identification of the dominant modes of representation in each generation. A narration thread

12 Introduction around a diachronic axis serves to diagnose the generation-specific norms that characterise epistemology of architecture, on the one hand, and how the conceptions of the observer and the user are transformed, on the other hand. One can distinguish three aspects of the concept of “generation”: the generation in the sense of succession, the generation in the sense of specific shared socialisation and the generation in the political sense53. All the aforementioned aspects of the concept of “generation” are taken into account. What interests me is to examine under what conditions the architects that I analyse in this book share the same “fields of experience” and/or the same “horizon of expectation” and to examine how their way of fabricating architectural drawings reveal their “field of experience” and “horizon of expectation”. My intention is to identify which aspects of their “fields of experience” and “horizon of expectation” are common and which are different. In parallel, I associate these similarities and differences with the national and institutional contexts of their teaching practice. At the core of the book is the intention to examine how architects’ conception of need, communication and control change in time and how the way they conceive the aforementioned notions affects their architectural design strategies. My hypothesis is that the transformation of the scope of architecture is not based on continuities, but rather on ruptures that provoke the emergence of new ways to give sense to the process of architectural composition. Even if the concepts that are employed are similar their signification necessarily changes as the conjuncture that triggers their elaboration differs as we move from generation to generation. For this reason, despite my intention to organise the book according to a diachronic narrative, I also aim to shed light on the fact that the epistemological debates concerning each generation should be conceived as autonomous units. Instead of providing an exhaustive analysis of the evolution of the scope of architecture, I provide a detailed analysis of the questions that are prevalent in the architectural stances of the architects examined. This analysis is based on an understanding of the episodes examined as part of the multiplicity that characterises each generation. I try to make clear that the choice to focus on certain episodes or certain architects does not imply that I assume that I evaluate them as more important than other episodes or architects that are not examined in the framework of this book. Such a focus was guided by my intention to reveal the subtleties of the episodes and the architects’ stance in order to provide an overview of how each act of architectural composition can be analysed in a way that takes into account the multiplicity of the reality in which it is inscribed. Alain Badiou, in his Manifeste pour la philosophie, notes that “[t]he procedures of truth, or generic procedures, are distinguished from the accumulation of knowledge by their eventual origin”. 54 Taking as starting point the aforementioned distinction, one could claim that this book seeks to identify and analyse the generic procedures and the procedures of invention of the epistemology of architecture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In other

Introduction  13 words, my goal is to reveal the truths that architecture generates from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. In order to do so, I take as fields of study the architectural drawings produced by the architects of the corpus of the research on which this book is based. I understand the architectural dispositifs that I examine as “assemblages of significations within a network of signs”. As Badiou notes in his article entitled “L’autonomie du processus esthétique”, “by the author, we must not hear a creative subjectivity, a projective interiority”. In a similar way, in the framework of this book, I do not understand the architects examined as neither creative subjectivities nor projective interiorities. In parallel, as Badiou argues regarding the concept of author, the concept of architect “is not a psychological concept, but exclusively a topical concept”. In the same text, Badiou notes that “by real, we must understand the scientifically determined historical structure”. The starting point of my research is Badiou’s position that “an aesthetic mode of production is an invisible invariant structure that distributes binding functions between real elements so that these elements can function as ideological”.55 The book aims to decipher the aesthetic, conceptual and epistemological mutations in the architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries through the analysis of the conditions on which are based: the fabrication of architectural drawings and the instrumentalisation of certain modes of representation (perspective, axonometric representation, hybrid modes of representation, collage, etc.), by the architects examined. Alain Badiou, in his Theory of the Subject, highlights the difference between the classical conception of subject, according to which the subject is understood as “an operator endowed with a double function”. For Badiou, this double function of the “classical subject” consisted in the act of assigning “an irreducible being of the existent” and in the act of limiting “that which, from the ‘remainder’ of being, is accessible to knowledge”. To borrow his own words, according to Badiou, the classical subject “partitions that which is immediately given and that which is mediately refused to experience”. Badiou underscores that both Jean-Paul Sartre and Hegel inverted these two functions of the subject, each of them in their own way. The former claiming that “[t]he being of the subjective existent proves to be a being of nonbeing” and the latter maintaining that “[t]he limit of knowledge proves to be an unlimitation”. In the same book, Badiou underscores that “Sartre holds on to a simple conception of the subject, […] [according to which he] enumerates its strands, without being able to think their interlacing”.56 One could assume that the concept of inhabitant that corresponds to the modernist era was based on the idea that the architect can function as an omniscient subject that is able to fabricate a concept of user. In this case, we could employ the terms “thing” and “user” in order to designate the architectural artefact and the inhabitant of architecture. In the modernist context, the relationship between the architect and the architectural

14 Introduction artefact and the way the architect conceived the experience of the inhabitant was based on the assumption that the signification of the architectural artefact is not co-shaped through the experience of the inhabitant. In other words, in this case the scope of architecture did not take into account the role of co-creation by the inhabitant and their participation to the formulation of the sense of the act of architectural composition. The German term “Sachlichkeit” is more relevant than its English translation “objectivity”. The shift from a mono-directional understanding of the architect’s creative process towards a conception of the significance of architectural composition as the effect of a reinvention of the articulation between subject and object could be related to the shift from Sachlichkeit towards Neue Sachlichkeit.57 This shift implies an understanding of the significance of images as dependent upon the relations between the components used by the creator and as dependent upon the reinvention of the relationship between the architect-conceiver and the inhabitant. Such a reorientation is pivotal for understanding the rupture that characterises the transformation of the scope of architecture as we pass from the first generation, whose conception of the user is universal and homogenising, to the second generation, whose conception of the inhabitant is culturally determined and was based on the assumption that the inhabitant can function as an important agent of change and played an important role in the way the architectural artefact used to take its meaning. If I tried to relate this study to the state of art on the question of representation in architecture, I would refer to Stan Allen’s Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation and Robin Evans’s The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. What my research shares with the former is the intention to understand the drawing as notation and the conviction that drawings even if they try to simulate the effects of the real experience they “always fall short, freezing, diminishing, and trivializing [its] […] complexity”, while its meeting point with the latter is the interest in the potentialities and limits of architectural representation and in the ambiguity of the relationship between the fabrication and the interpretation of architectural drawings. As Allen notes, the preference of the term notation over the term drawing implies an intention to capture the “intangible properties of the real”. 58 Evans also sheds light on the metaphoric function of geometry and on the complementarity between the geometric and atmospheric state of drawing. 59 Regarding more recent researches focused on the question of architectural drawings, I could mention Jordan Scott Kauffman’s PhD thesis entitled Drawing on architecture: the socioaesthetics of architectural drawings, 1970–1990.60 Kauffman analyses the shift, which took place during the 1970s and 1980s, mainly in the New York scene, from understanding drawings as related to architectural design process towards a comprehension of drawings as autonomous from the architectural process and as aesthetic artefacts in and of themselves. In my own research, in contrast with

Introduction  15 Kauffman’s research, architectural drawings are understood here as dispositifs or devices of examination of my object of research and not as the object of research per se. In contrast with this study, the book concerns a longer period, examining a period of ten instead of two decades. In parallel, in my own study I treat architectural drawings as the investigating device that can serve to diagnose how the conception of the user and the observer changes. The object of research concerns mostly relationships than artefacts: the relationship between the drawing and the observer, the relationship between the architect-conceiver and the observer-perceiver, the relationship between the architect-conceiver and the user and the relationship between the observer and the user.

Around the generational structure of the book The choice to organise my research according to a generational structure is based on the hypothesis that the way architectural drawings are created, viewed, and understood is transformed when we move from one generation to the next. Instead of interpreting this transformation simply chronologically, my aim is to distinguish the tensions that characterised each generation and to comprehend them in a socially oriented manner. A methodological reference, which comes from the domain of art history, is Michael Baxandall, and especially his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, where he introduced the notion of the “period eye”.61 As Margarita Dikovitskaya remarks, this notion permitted Baxandall to relate the production in art to social history.62 Baxandall employed the concept of the “period eye” in order to describe the cultural conditions under which art in the Renaissance was created, viewed, and understood. His analysis was based on the assumption that viewing habits are culturally determined and on the hypothesis that individuals who belong to the same culture share experiences and ways of thinking that have an impact on the way they perceive images. I share this conviction and, for this reason, I embarked on this research project with the intention to examine how the modes of fabricating, viewing and interpreting drawings in architecture have changed over the last ten decades. The term “generation” derives from the Latin verb “generare” (to produce, materially or intellectually) and from the substantive “generatio” (reproduction, the generation of men), themselves derived from the Greek “γίγνομαι” (to be born, to become), “γιγνώσκω” (to know), “γένος” (family, race) and “γένεσις” (the cause, the principle, the source of life). In order to clarify my methodological point of view, it would be useful to be precise that in the epistemological debates around the adoption of a generational approach there is a distinction between the sociological and the historical understanding of the notion of generation. The term generation is employed here in a historical sense. Historians focus mainly on how each generation is formed. The use of the concept of generation is part of a trend that gives ideas and culture the defining role in understanding history. Three questions that are

16 Introduction at the heart of the generational approach to history are: How do individuals become aware of belonging to a generation? What relationships do the different generations have with each other? To what extent is a generation constructed retrospectively? All these three questions are present in the way I investigate how the architects under study position themselves in relation to the generation to which they belong and to the previous generations. Reinhart Koselleck’s The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts helped me understand why historians tend to seek concrete similarities to temporally frame the generation-specific units of experience, while Claudine Attias-Donfut’s Sociologie des générations : l’empreinte du temps63 was useful in order to comprehend the differences between the concept of generation and the concept of consciousness of generation. The choice to focus on a generational understanding of the epistemological transformations in architecture is based on the adoption as main criterion of identification the common historical experiences that shaped the vision of the architects under study. It is essential to underline that generations here are not understood as homogeneous ensembles. Instead, they are conceived as composed of various conflicting forces. These conflicting forces composing each generation are characterised by their social, ideological and political determinations. It is also important to note that the feeling of belonging to a generation is formed not only horizontally, that is to say in relation to a given historical period, but also vertically, that is to in relation to the ties of filiation in a lineage linking successive generations. The narrative of the book is organised around four generation-spanning sequences: a sequence corresponding to the modernist architects, such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe; as sequence corresponding to emblematic post-war architects which developed critical stances towards modernism and reinforced the cultural determinations of architecture, such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Team 10; a sequence corresponding to protagonist figures for the transatlantic exchanges during the 1970s and contributed to a great extent to the way architectural drawings are viewed, such as Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers; and a sequence referring to architects that reinvented the role of programme rendering into compositional device, such as the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Bernard Tschumi. The recourse to “concrete commonalties that temporally frame generation-specific units of experience”, as Reinhart Koselleck underscores, is an indispensable means of every modern social history that aims “to go beyond chronicling”. The objective of the four generation-spanning sequences is to overcome chronicling and to enrich the hypotheses of this research. In other words, this generational organisation far from homogenising serves to privilege interpretation in favour of description. Koselleck underlines that “from the inception of history, it remains methodologically necessary to rely on primary sources not only to track down unique but also generation-specific, collected experiences”. He also maintains that “[t]here are generation-specific conditions and outcomes, which overlap

Introduction  17 with personal history but still refer to greater spans which create a common space of experience”.64 Following his approach, my aim here is to combine the analysis of unique and generation-specific experiences. Moreover, the narrative of the book follows a synchronic and a diachronic axis. The synchronic axis serves to discern the variations of the aforementioned relationships in the same generation, while the diachronic one permits to diagnose the mutation of these relationships in the successive generations. The combination of both axis helps me avoid two risks: firstly, the risk of reducing what is at stake during the architectural design process to a mirroring of what happens to the larger sphere at a specific historic moment, interpreting architectural artefacts as effects of political, cultural, social, or other causes not belonging to the sphere of architecture; secondly, the risk of analysing architectural drawings in an isolated way that takes into account only the singular characteristics of forms and, because of the fear to relate them to the shared experience or the social becoming of a generation, fails to formulate any hypothesis that take into consideration the historical evolution of the problems analysed, on the one hand, and their connection to the political, cultural, social, or any other sphere that does not concern directly the architectural discipline. The first generation, which includes Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is characterised by the tendency to define in a holistic and homogenised way the “fictive user” and the “other”. My analysis shows how during this period the construction of the “fictive user” is focused on the assumption of the existence of a “universal user”. Representative of such a homogenised and generalisable approach is the Modulor, which is described by Le Corbusier as “harmonious measure to the human scale universally applicable to architecture and mechanics”. As starting point for this research, I take the following claim of Reyner Banham regarding the stance of the generation of modernists: To save himself from the sloughs of subjectivity, every modern architect has had to find his own objective standards, to select from his experience of building those elements which seem undeniably integral – structural technique, for instance, sociology, or – as in the case of Le Corbusier – measure. Banham also maintained that [t]he objectivity of these standards resides, in the first case, in a belief in a normal man, an attractive though shadowy figure whose dimensions Le Corbusier is prepared to vary from time to time and place to place, thus wrecking his claims to universality.65 For Le Corbusier, the architect was the authority on living, as it becomes evident from what he declares in the Athens Charter (Charte d’Athènes).66

18 Introduction He maintained there that the role of the architect is to know what is best for humans, posing the following question: Who can take the measures necessary to the accomplishment of this task if not the architect who possesses a complete awareness of man, who has abandoned illusory designs, and who, judiciously adapting the means to the desired ends, will create an order that bears within it a poetry of its own?67 A paradox that is explored in the book is the fact that Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier privileged the use of perspective as mode of representation, despite their predilection for the avant-garde anti-subjectivist tendencies, which disapproved the use of perspective and grant the use of axonometric representation or other modes of representation opposed to the assumptions of perspective. The analysis of the way in which both architects use perspective helps me investigate the tension between fiction and reality, on the one hand, and the relationship between the universal and the individual, on the other hand. In order to investigate how the architects under study treat the tension between individuality and universality, I examine to what extent they believe that the means of their architectural composition process should be generalisable and universally understandable and transmissible. Special attention is paid to show how Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier reinvented certain conventions of perspective representation and to shed light on the specific contribution of each of them to the revolutionising of certain norms of perspective. During the post-war era, the users become very important because they are conceived as actors of change in society. My analysis for the second generation, which was characterised by a cultural turn, is focused on the work of Ludovico Quaroni (1911–1987), Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909–1969) and Team 10.68 The members of Team 10 on whom my analysis focuses are Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999), Giancarlo De Carlo (1919–2005), the couple Alison M. Smithson (1928–1993) and Peter D. Smithson (1923–2003), and the trio Candilis-Josic-Woods.69 My hypothesis is that in this generation the concepts of the “fictive user” and the “other” are defined according to national contexts. In this period, we can discern the development of ethnocentric models not only in architecture, but also in cinema. New Brutalism, Neorealism and New Humanism are labels that appeared in the post-war context. All these labels and the concepts that accompany them are related to a specific ethnocentric character: New Brutalism is associated with Great Britain, while Neorealism and New Humanism are linked to the Italian context. They are interpreted as responses to the identity crisis in the postwar era. Each of these labels is related to a specific ethnocentric character. During the post-war era, the identity crisis of the post-war era; secondly, they paid attention to the everyday; thirdly, they were related to the intention to build for the masses. The architects aimed to respond to the

Introduction  19 urgent need for mass housing. The concept of user corresponding to this generation was culturally determined and the architectural and urban assemblages were conceived as unfinished and in a state of becoming. The architects analysed here tended to employ modes of representation that put forward the status of architectural and urban artefacts as unfinished. In parallel, ethnographic concerns became central preoccupations for the architects of this generation, as in the case of Aldo van Eyck, who was interested in the architecture of the Dogon culture.70 A concept that is useful for analysing the epistemological debates during the post-war era is that of “individual-community assemblage”. In order to grasp the significance of the individual-community assemblages for the post-war architects, we should bear in mind that the fascination with the everyday in the post-war era was linked to the idea that inhabitants can function as agents of transformation of society. A feature that is examined is the rejection of any understanding of the individual-community assemblage as complete. Symptomatic of the conception of habitat as an expression the individual-community articulation, on the one hand, and of the rejection of any understanding of the individual-community assemblage as complete, on the other hand, is Aldo van Eyck’s thesis, claiming that “[t]he habitat […] becomes the counter form of the complete individual- community, with individual and community being more than part and whole”.71 The idea of additive composition and dynamic aggregation of successive elements constituted a common preoccupation of the architects under study in the “Chapter 4 entitled “Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture: The dissolution of universality””. A common characteristic of the design processes and modes of representation of the architects examined in this part is the fascination with the constantly unsettled urbanistic assemblages and the projects in continuous becoming. Such examples are Alison and Peter Smithson’s Cluster City diagrams, Shadrach Woods’s “stem” and “web”, but also Neorealist architecture’s shift from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to one obtained by means of superposition and expressed through the aggregation of successive elements and the obsessive fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of Tiburtino district. Concepts as “city-territory” (città territorio), “network”, “open project” and “new dimension” (nuova dimensione) acquired a central role in architectural discourse during this period.72 What I examine is the impact that the dominance of the open project as compositional device had on the transformation of the concept of the user. In this book, I also analyse how ugliness was instrumentalised as a productive category in post-war Italian architecture. More specifically, I examine how Rogers and Quaroni views towards ugliness incorporated post-war urban reality. During the same period, in a different national context, in Great Britain, the New Brutalists developed an anti-art and anti-beauty aesthetics, which was presented in Banham’s emblematic article “The New Brutalism”.73 The incorporation of ugliness in the architectural discourse

20 Introduction is linked to the change of the conception of architecture’s user. The “way of life” and the “sensibility of place” were important parameters of the discourse of Alison and Peter Smithson. Banham in his aforementioned article referred to Alison and Peter Smithson’ stance and treated them as main protagonists of The New Brutalism. Despite the divergences between the Smithsons’ and Banham’s interpretation of the transformation of the way of life, which have been highlighted by Dirk van den Heuvel,74 the reinvention of the experience of inhabitation and the ethical implications of the ways of life was central for both. The Smithsons’ Changing the Art of Inhabitation: Mies’ Pieces, Eames’ Dreams, The Smithsons shows how important was the reshaping of the way spaces are inhabited for them.75 What is at the centre of my analysis is the examination of the moral aspects of the way in which the concept of the user was reinvented. The moral implications of the role of the user and its responsibility for the transformation of society are related to the reinvention of the aesthetic criteria. City’s ugliness acquired a positive role and functioned as a reminder for the responsibility of the user and the architect in the process of transformation of society. This explains why architecture and urban design were treated as terrains of encounter between the individual and the community. I employ the expression individual-community assemblage in order to refer to this tendency of the post-war architects to conceive their practice as devices that served to invite users to understand how responsible they are for the transformation of society. A strategy of fabrication of drawings that is analysed is Alison and Peter Smithson’s use of photographs of existing celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, the French actor Gérard Philipe and the first prime minister of independent India Jawaharlal Nehru. The Alison and Peter Smithson’s tactic of introducing figures that were protagonists in the news in their drawings of projects concerning social housing buildings, such as the collages for the Golden Lane Estate project (1953), show that they tended to reinvent through their architecture the established reality. Golden Lane Estate, which occupies an area flattened by wartime bombing, was one of the most defining public housing projects of the post WWII reconstruction in Great Britain. It was rather provocative to introduce in council housing blocks of flats famous figures. The contrast between their anti-aesthetic stance and the use of figures that were part of the present culture could be interpreted as an invitation to change existing reality and its conventions. The incorporation of existing figures in the image functions as a gesture of integration in the architectural representation of fragments of existing context and reality. The tension between New Brutalist anti-art and anti-beauty aesthetics and Νeorealism’s anti-aesthetic and anti-elitist stance is insightful for recognising what was at stake in post-war debates. In parallel, this tension is useful for understanding how the notion of ugliness was related to the question of morality in post-war architecture scene. Moreover, I also unfold Tendenza

Introduction  21 and Neorealist architecture’s debates around the notion of ugliness, taking as main actors Rogers, for the former, and Quaroni, for the latter. I analyse their respective positions regarding post-war city and explain how they perceived the relation of post-war suburbanisation to the city’s uglification. My aim is to demonstrate how ugliness was instrumentalised as a productive category in post-war Italian architecture and how Rogers, Quaroni’s aesthetic views towards ugliness incorporated post-war urban reality. The Tendenza and the Neorealist architecture shared their interest in the intensification of architects’ responsibility, the reestablishment of the relationship between reality and utopia and the critique of modernist homogenised and impersonal functionalism.76 The Neorealist approach constitutes an endeavour to conceive ugliness as a path to the real putting forward the reality of post-war Italian city. Neorealism’s intention to recuperate the immediacy of reality instrumentalised and aestheticised urban ugliness. The endeavour of transforming ugly features of the urban landscape into architectural instruments of social and moral engagement was at the heart of Neorealist approach. In the context of post-war Italy, architects often aimed to transform ugly elements into devices of reflection about how one’s aesthetic criteria interferes with the meaning they give to reality. The Tiburtino district, designed by Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi, is often interpreted as a Neorealist expression in architecture. In this case, Quaroni and Ridolfi conceived the construction of social housing in a suburban neighbourhood of post-war Rome as a way to contribute to citizens’ moral engagement towards life. This transformation of the norms according to which a city is judged as beautiful or ugly was paralleled with a shift from aesthetic criteria to politic, ethic, moral, social and civic criteria. As Stephanie Zeier Pilat notes, [t]he designers of the Tiburtino deliberately appropriated popular traditions in such an exaggerated way in part because it offered a way to reject Fascism and reach back to a less tainted past that could form the cultural and spiritual basis for the new Italian nation.77 Ludovico Quaroni and Ernesto Nathan Rogers intended to reinvent the relationship between utopia and reality. Quaroni’s approach is characterised by the belief in the potential of imaginary reality to revitalise urban design. In La torre di Babele, he expressed his belief “in the creative value of utopia – of an imaginary reality […] that […] holds the seeds for revitalizing a process like urban planning that has lost its capacity for energetic response”.78 His conception of utopia’s creative force as imaginary reality, capable of revitalising urban planning processes, brings to mind Rogers’ understanding of “utopia of reality” as “teleological charge that projects the present into the possible future”. Rogers underscored utopia’s capacity “to transform reality in its deepest essence, in the moral and political, as well as in the didactic and pedagogical fields”.79

22 Introduction For the third generation, I focus on the analysis of the modes of representation of John Hejduk (1929–2000), Peter Eisenman (1932-), Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) and Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007). My main objective is to show how their approaches are related to the tension between the individual and the collective. A common characteristic of their respective approaches is their endeavour to redefine architectural design process towards the schism between the individual and the collective. This tension, in many cases, as in the case of Rossi, took the form of opposition between individual and collective memory. Useful for interpreting the design strategies of John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers is the analysis of the tension between individual expression and civic responsibility. During the 1970s and the 1980s, a transformation of the status of architectural drawings was also held. Architectural drawings entered the art galleries of New York and the observer became the protagonist of the dissemination of architectural knowledge. The supremacy of the observer over the user provoked important epistemological mutations and transformed significantly the role of the architect and architectural drawings and their relationship with society. At the core of the book is the intention to discern which mode of representation was privileged. With the exception of Rossi, all the other architects privileged axonometric representation. A relationship that is investigated is that between the concept of “intertextuality”80 and “intericonicity”. The first concept has been broadly theorised, while the second still remains a concept that has not been analysed meticulously. My research aims to show the potentials of the concept of “intericonicity” for understanding how methods of representations are transposed and transformed not only when they are used by different architects, but also within the work of the same architect in different periods of his life. The elaboration of the concept of “intertextuality” in the analysis of architectural drawings is tricky. In order to respond to these risks, certain scholars, as Thomas Hensel, propose the concept of “intericonicity” as the visual analogous of the concept of “intertextuality”.81 This concept intends to respond to the gap that exists because of the fact that the concept of “intertextuality” is not sufficient to designate certain modii of visual references. The importance of the concept of “intericonicity” is apparent in the following words of Jean-Luc Godard: “There is no picture, there are only images. And there is a certain form of assembling images: as soon as there are two, there are three. […] There is no image, there are only relations of images”.82 Another distinction that has been also taken into account in this research is that between the concept of “hypertextuality” and the concept of “hypericonicity”. Regarding Hejduk’s prioritisation of axonometric representation, what is scrutinised is the way he related axonometric to the erasure of illusion of depth. His strategies in the case of the design of the Diamond House B (1962–1967), the Bernstein House (1968) and the Wall House 2 or A. E.

Introduction  23 Bye House (1973) are the climax of his intention to erase any sense of depth through specific tricks that are examined in the book. Special attention is paid to the explanation of how Hejduk rendered isometric representations two-dimensional. In parallel, the intentions that lie behind this strategy of privileging two-dimensional sense are scrutinised. The book also examines why Eisenman and Hejduk’s conception of architectural composition is time-oriented, shedding light on the ways in which different architects treat time-oriented interpretation of architectural drawings and incorporate representability of time in architectural representation. Regarding Rossi’s understanding of the act of drawing, what is of interest for this study is the way he understood repetition, and his disapproval of the notion of invention. He conceived every architectural drawing he produced as a “repetition of an occurrence, almost a ritual”, arguing that “it is the ritual and not the event that has a precise form”.83 His preference for the ritual over the event can explain his rejection of the notion of invention. Rossi’s scepticism vis-à-vis the notion of invention could also be interpreted as part of his endeavour to reject whatever is not part of existent reality. He associated the rejection of inventiveness with the “abandoning [of] the task of searching for the threshold, which divides, or which simply represents the borderline between personal experience and artistic experience”.84 Two other aspects of Rossi’s approach that are analysed are: firstly, his understanding of the act of drawing as a means of transforming architectural and urban artefacts into objects of affection; secondly, the way that the encounter with the “living history” of different cities enable architects “not only to understand architecture better, but also, above all as architects to design it”.85 This position is related to the importance he gives to the “geography of experience” and to the interaction between individual and collective memory drawing mainly on Maurice Halbwachs’s conception of “collective memory”.86 An aspect of Rossi’s approach to design that is extremely relevant for this study is the fact that each of his drawings is treated as a reiteration of recollections, impressions and obsessions that always re-emerge.87 He is against any gesture of limiting his method of drawing according to specific objective syntactic rules, as Eisenman does in his House series. In Rossi’s case, every drawing is an effort to capture an imprint of reality and it is exactly the reiteration and the network of all the drawings as expression of the same ritual that is at the very centre of the way he understands the transition that takes place when he draws an impression of the city’s fragments on the paper. The addressee par excellence of Rossi’s drawings is the subject that is ready to suspend his perception in order to wait for the next drawing. The significance and the semantic value of each drawing lie on its relationship with the network of drawings which are constantly reiterated in a tireless game to grasp the “living history” of cities. The fragmentary character of each of his drawings is like an invitation to the next drawing. We could, thus, assume that what is at stake in Rossi’s case is a dispositif of a network of drawings that aims to

24 Introduction capture this always-escaping, but at the same time, always-present sense of the city. The cities that are the contexts of the mise-en-scène of his fragments change and shape new amalgams of cities, as new imaginary cities, but the sense of what he labels “living history” of cities is what he always tried to grasp and reiterate. Another aspect of the creative processes of Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman and Oswald Mathias Ungers that is explored in this book is the desire to free architecture from functionalism. Such an intention is defining for the theoretical and design strategies of Rossi, Eisenman and Ungers. Rossi, as he stated in the interview he gave to Diana Agrest for Skyline in 1979, conceived as a point of departure of his theoretical and design approach the need to free architecture from functionalism.88 In Architecture of the City, Rossi referred to a “critique of naïve functionalism”, maintaining that “any explanation of urban artefacts in terms of function must be rejected”.89 He also sustained that when one reduces architecture to a way to respond to the question “for what purpose?”, they risk developing an approach that does not manage to incorporate “an analysis of what is real”.90 It becomes, thus, evident, that in Rossi’s eyes the critique of functionalism is as a way to enlarge architecture in such a way that would permit to take as a starting point of the design process the close understanding of reality. Of great interest for this study are the differences of the strategies of Rossi and Eisenman regarding how they introduced the critique of functionalism in their design process. Despite the fact that both share the conviction that functionalism is reductive and should be left behind, they elaborate very different theoretical and design strategies in order to establish an architectural approach against functionalism. More specifically, what I argue here is that the path of Rossi to avoid functionalism is the understanding of the real, while the means of Eisenman to reject functionalism is to ignore the real. To put it differently, Eisenman’s rejection of functionalism takes the form of contempt or ignorance of the user of architecture. The critique of functionalism was also present in the preoccupations of Ungers, who notes, in Architecture as Theme, regarding his disapproval of blind pure functionalism: The need for a thematization of architecture means nothing if not moving away from the blind alley of pure functionalism or — at the other end of the spectrum — from stylistic aberrations and a return to the essential content of architectural language.91 In the aforementioned declaration, it becomes evident that Ungers was set against pure functionalism and autonomy of architecture, seeing both tendencies as reductive. He diagnoses two dangers: that of pure functionalism and that of the rigid autonomy of architecture, that is to say of an understanding of architecture based on its reduction to language and stylistic expression. This position of Ungers makes clear that he was conscious that

Introduction  25 an obsessive critique of functionalism engenders the risks of leaving behind the concern that architecture necessarily addresses to a use. He seems to be aware that such an omission of architecture’s concern with the user can enclose architecture into the trap of syntactic games, excluding architects’ responsibility for the way their artefacts will be experienced by users. I also analyse Eisenman, Hejduk, Rossi and Ungers’s receptive conceptions of the relationship between fragments and totality, either regarding the city and its units or regarding the elliptic character of architectural conception and its progressive concretisation through repetition, as in the case of Rossi, and the impact of the evolution of time on the design procedure, as in the case of Hejduk. The latter maintained that the initial fragmentary images, which is the starting point of architectural design process, becomes progressively more concrete through the formation of “a series of images one after the other over a period of time”.92 An emerging tendency characterising this generation was the rejection of any unitary image of the city. Instead, the dominant trend was to invent strategies of conceiving urban reality as “a living collage, a union of fragments”.93 The notion of fragment became central for Rossi, Ungers and Hejduk. The approaches of both Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) are characterised by a rejection of the preconceived idea of the user. They both reject the idea that the architect can function as omniscient subject that is able to fabricate a concept of user. I examine to what extent their approaches have contributed to the establishment of conditions that permit to the users to have a new kind of no normative understanding of their perception of space and their movement in it. In order to unfold the epistemological shift from the generation examined in the third and fourth chapter, I compare Rossi’s concept of “urban facts” (fatti urbani) and Tschumi’s concept of “event-cities”, and Rossi’s understanding of type with Tschumi’s understanding of “concept-form”. Tschumi notes, in: “A concept-form differs from a type in that it is not bound by history or historical context”.94 Tschumi’s concept-form, in contrast with type, takes distance from any kind of symbolic identification or a priori meaning.95 Tschumi differentiates himself from Rossi’s typological analysis, underlying that “analogies between typological forms and concept-forms are not necessarily relevant”.96 He also takes distance from the linguistic analogies and the structuralist references that dominated Peter Eisenman’s approach, highlighting that “[o]ne cannot construct a theory of concept-forms based on linguistic analogies in the way structuralism looked at types, because concept-forms do not originate in history”.97 In the first three volumes of the Event Cities series,98 for instance, Tschumi avoided the elaboration of the notion of form. In Event Cities 4, he explains this avoidance as follows: “Form did not need to be discussed because it was always seen as the result of an architectural strategy, never as a starting point”.99 This brings to mind Mies’s conception of the starting point of the creative process as superior in relation to the result, which is evident in his following declaration: “We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process”.100

26 Introduction Regarding Tschumi and Koolhaas’s approach, my intention is to discern the differences and affinities of their understanding of urban reality in The Manhattan Transcripts and Delirious New York respectively. Koolhaas commenting on “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972) referred to the notions of archipelago and “Cities within Cities”, echoing Ungers’s theory. He also referred to a tripartite organisation of grid, lobotomy and schism. A question that is examined is how the aforementioned tripartite organisation to which Koolhaas referred could be related to Tschumi’s formulation of three worlds The Manhattan Transcripts, that is to say the world of movements, the world of objects and the world of events. Koolhaas also argued that “[t]he more each island celebrates different values, the more the unity of the archipelago as system is reinforced”.101 In the introduction of The Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi refers to the disjunction between use, form and social value and juxtaposes the world of movements, the world of objects and the world of events102 . In order to better grasp what is at stake in Tschumi and Koolhaas’s approaches, I examine to what extent Koolhaas’s understanding of archipelago could be related to Tschumi’s notion of disjunction. Taking as point of departure the idea that the tension between form and programme is very central in the work of both Tschumi and Koolhaas, I aim to discern the differences of their conceptions of programme.

Between the “fictive” and the “real” inhabitant In the framework of this book, architectural representations are understood as pragmatic systems aiming at a use. Architecture encompasses everyday reality, and in so doing, inevitably, provides a framework of social life. Thanks to the fact that the designed space is destined to be inhabited, during the design process, the genesis of a conception of inhabitant takes, necessarily, place. The architects during their endeavour to represent an eventual space formation, they fabricate a relationship between a conception of “fictive” and a conception of “real” inhabitant. The book aims to trace a history of the mutation of the status of this relationship, responding to the following question: how could we trace a genealogy of the epistemology of architecture as a genealogy of the construction of this relationship? The aim is to discern how the relationship between the “fictive” and the “real” inhabitant is conceived in the modes of representing the different aspects of the project: sketches, plans, models, photomontage, perspectives, axonometric representations, etc. In order to do so, the book examines the relationship of these artefacts with the real. A starting point of this research is the adoption of Sergueï Eisenstein’s following point of view: “When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are cut off from the historical forces that shaped them”.103 Certain of the questions to which I wish to respond are the following: do the artefacts that each of the architects under study produces correspond to a certain kind of “fictive” inhabitant? What is the status of the relationship

Introduction  27 between the “fictive” inhabitant and the “real” inhabitant that each of the architects under study “construct” during the process of concretisation of a conception of space via the modes of notation they use? In order to better grasp how each of the architects treats the construction of the relationship between the “fictive” and the “real” inhabitant, I situate each of them within a genealogy of a specific mode of production of spatial representations. This act of situating each of these architects within a genealogy of a specific mode of representation aims to unfold hidden aspects of their conceptual edifice.

On how to diagnose the historical determinations that condition the production of architectural artefacts Gilles Deleuze notes regarding Foucault’s conception of history: Foucault is a philosopher who invents with history a different relation to that of the philosophies of history. History according to Foucault identifies us and delimits us, it does not say what we are, but what we are in process of changing, it does not establish our identity, but dissipates it for the benefit of the other that we are.104 We could say that Foucauldian archival research is a diagnostic that aims to interpret the actual signs, decrypting the historical determinations that condition their actual expression. What would be the implications of such an approach for research on architectural artefacts? My study could be understood as an effort to diagnose the historical determinations that condition the production of architectural artefacts. My analysis focuses on the understanding of the forces of composition and not on the interpretation of architectural forms as already composed or finished. The architects under study invented visual concepts that corresponded to problems. At certain instances, the architects, who belong to the same generation tried to respond to the same problems. These problems could be understood as connected to certain dispositifs in the sense that they correspond to a concrete historic moment and to a concrete context, social, institutional, political, geographic, etc. This research is based on the thesis that there is a time lapse between the emergence of a new type of sign in architecture and its theorisation. Its objective is to discern the epistemological breaks. How does the concept of the archive contribute to the deprival of preconceived continuities? According to Gilles Deleuze “Foucault presents a theatre of statements, or a sculpture made from articulable elements, ‘monuments’ and not ‘documents’”.105 What would this shift from a conception of articulable elements as ‘documents’ to their conception as ‘monuments’ mean for architectural history research? Aloïs Riegl’s conception of the monument could help us to address the distinction between the notion of ‘document’ and that of ‘monument’. The description of the

28 Introduction archive as deprival of preconceived continuities, as described by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is central for understanding the trajectory of this research: The description of the archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our own language (langage); its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices. In this sense, it is valid for our diagnosis. Not because it would enable us to draw up a table of our distinctive features, and to sketch out in advance the face that we will have in the future. But it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man’s being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside. In this sense, the diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks.106 In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze uses “a formula of Nietzsche” in order to remind us that “it is never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its essence; what it was from the outset it can reveal only after a detour in its evolution”.107 Following such a conception, this research is based on the thesis that there is a time lapse between the emergence of a new type of sign and its legitimisation within architectural discourse. Through the analysis of design procedures, we can discern formal expression strategies by different architects that seem disjunctive and disconnected. Only after a period of experimentation and normalisation of the new tools that have been invented we can understand retrospectively the relationships between formal expressions that, at first glance, seemed dissociated. The concepts of Zeitgeist, episteme, dispositif and Kunstwollen have certain common characteristics, but they also differ. The aforementioned four concepts emerged because of the interest to show that there are certain problems that correspond to a specific historic time. A common intention behind the aforementioned concepts is the focus on the understanding of the activity of creation, in our case of the activity of creation of architectural artefacts, not as the result of the genius or the talent of a creator but as an expression of an epoch. For this reason, the comprehension of these concepts is important in order to define in a concrete way the conceptual tools that I use in this book in order to analyse the epistemological mutations that I study.

Introduction  29 The book aims to render visible, using as case studies the work of specific architects, how the differences between concepts as Zeitgeist, episteme, dispositif and Kunstwollen correspond to different methods of interpreting the visual and written work of the architects studied. My method of analysis is based on the notion of dispositif, but in order to show how a historical method that is based on this notion differs from methods that are based on the notions of Zeitgeist, Episteme and Kunstwollen, I try, throughout the book, to show the differences of the ways of interpreting architectural drawings, texts and buildings that correspond to the adoption of the aforementioned different concepts. The concept of Kunstwollen comes from Aloïs Riegl’s “The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen” (“Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie”),108 originally published in 1901. According to Christopher Wood, “Kunstwollen was Riegl’s loose way of designating the aesthetic impulse within culture, the aesthetic principles of an individual artist, or the aesthetic dimension of a given artefact”.109 Following Margaret Iversen’s study on Riegl’s history and theory, we could claim that Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen or artistic volition, emerged as a counter-concept to narrowly empiricist and determinist histories of art that were dominant in his time.110 Georges Didi-Huberman, in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, notes that “the Kunstwollen – sometimes translated as ‘artistic volition,’ sometimes as ‘will-to-form’”.111 The generational structure of the book aims to reveal these reinventions of ways to relate the real and the fictive dimension of architecture and to diagnose the epistemological problems that characterise each of the generations. The organisation of the book according to generations permits me to show the chronological succession of dogmatic images. It also helps me to identify the types of registers between repetition and representation.

Between the conceivers of architectural representations and their addressees The link between all the chapters of the book is the intention to demonstrate how the modes of representation elaborated by the architects under study vehicle different ways to construct assemblages between the following agents: firstly, the conceiver of architectural representations, secondly, their viewers and, thirdly, the inhabitants of the spatial assemblages after the construction of the architectural artefacts. During architectural design process, they take place encounters at three different levels: that of the design, that of the reception of architectural drawing by the viewer, and that of the inhabitation of constructed space. To better capture these three layers, we should think of them as two successive transitions: the first transition concerns the transference from the architect-conceiver to the observer-interpreter of architectural drawings, while, the second one, concerns the transition between the viewer and the

30 Introduction inhabitant. The first transition corresponds to an exchange between two different subjects, while the second one corresponds to a transition between two different modes of reception of the dispositif architectural by the same subject: its reception through the view of architectural drawings and its experience through the inhabitation of the constructed space. Architects are obliged to pass through the visualisation of their ideas in order to convince the clients. Therefore, their task is characterised by a necessary translation through visual means. The visual means are their instruments for communicating their spatial dispositifs. The architectural representations are founded on the construction of fictions. Any choice of the architect to privilege certain modes of representation shows the level to which they intend to control the perception of the viewer. For example, the use of perspective is tied to the determination of a specific, which is preestablished by the conceiver-architect, way to view space and to imagine your movement through space. An aspect that interests me is the fact that architects tend to use different modes of representation to capture their ideas and to communicate them. To make this point explicit, I could refer to the fact that their way of drawing during the process of concretising their ideas through design and the modes of representation elaborated in order to produce the images that are destined to communicate their projects differ from each other. The architectural design process is not only a way of communicating a project to the spectator, but is also a way of capturing and concretising, of giving form to their ideas. The extent to which these two stages of architectural process are based on the use of the same modes of representation is a parameter that is scrutinised in this book. Robin Evans, in his article entitled “Eyes It Took Time to See”, published in 1993 in Assemblage, notes: What is at once so fascinating and so hard to understand is the way that contemporary architecture, in theory and in practice, consistently refuses to acknowledge this manifest inconsistency in its own products. The real and the imaginary parts of architecture do not give the same evidence. They are not about the same things in the same way. It is not a question of bringing them into coordination, or of making appearance and reality coincide.112 Karsten Harries, in Infinity and Perspective, notes that the “artful pictorial illusion invites us to mistake it for reality and to forget its merely artificial being”.113 Both Evans and Harries shed light on the distinction between the real and imaginary or artificial dimension of visual production. The relationship between the real and the fictive aspect of the design process is at the centre of this book. I am interested in analysing the way in which a specific corpus of representations produced by each of the architects examined contributed to the shift and the reinvention of each mode of visualisation under study.

Introduction  31 In architectural practice, there are certain drawings that are destined to be seen by an audience, such as the clients, that will judge them, but there is also a big part of drawings that are produced by the architects during the design process useful for concretising and visualising their own ideas. These drawings are not destined to be seen or judged by anyone. My study focuses on both categories of drawings. As we move forward in time, the request for revelation of the processional aspect of architectural design is intensified. For example, as we move from one generation to the next, the criteria for evaluating an architectural project tend to be more related to the process than to the final drawings. In the case of the first generation, which corresponds to modern architects, such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, the drawings realised during the process of concretisation of projects were not revealed to the individuals or the authorities that would judge the architectural proposal and would decide if a building would be constructed. In the more recent years, as in the case of Frank Gehry, for instance, the revelation of the first gestural drawings and all the working models of the projects intend to capture the successive transformation and progressive concretisation of architectural concepts. The communication of this successive and progressive aspect of architecture is considered today as a way to add value to architectural proposals. A question that is examined in the book is how this shift affects the relationship between the observers of the architectural drawings and their conceivers-architects. We could assume that as we move forward in time, the observer acquires a more participative role. The possibility to reconstruct the trajectory followed by the conceiver-architect in order to assemble the architectural object becomes an important parameter of architectural design.

Notes 1 Marianna Charitonidou, “Challenging Eurocentrism in Architectural Historiographies”, in Gevork Hartoonian, ed., The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate (London; New York: Routledge, 2023), https://doi. org/10.4324/9781003257776; Charitonidou, “Towards Non-Eurocentric Historiographies: Challenging Europe’s Position in the Formation of Architectural Histories”, paper presented at the 7th Biannual Conference of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN 2022), Madrid, 15–18 June 2022, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000524602; Charitonidou, “Rethinking Europe’s Position in the Formation of Architectural Histories: Is a Non-Eurocentric Narrative Possible?”, in Salvador Guerrero, Joaquin Medina Warmburg, eds., Lo Construido y lo Pensado: Correspondencias Europeas y Transatlánticas en la Historiografía de la Arquitectura/European and Transatlantic Correspondence in the Historiography of Architecture: Built and Thought (Madrid: AHAU, 2022), 606–619, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000480884; Charitonidou, “Architectural History and Re-inventing Temporal Structures: Beyond Eurocentric Narratives”, paper presented at the international conference “History of Architectural History”, Accademia di San Luca, Rome, 8–9 November 2022, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7324388

32 Introduction

Introduction  33

34 Introduction

Introduction  35

36 Introduction

Introduction  37











38 Introduction

108 109 110

111

112 113

Charitonidou, “Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films as Dispositifs of Alterity: How Borgatari and Popolane Challenge the Stereotypes of Nationhood and Womanhood”, Studies in European Cinema (2022) https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17411548.2021.1968165; Charitonidou, “Gender and Migrants Roles in Neorealist and New Migrant Films in Italy: Cinema as an Apparatus for Placemaking”, Humanities, 10(2) (2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/ h10020071; Charitonidou, “Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema: On Challenging the Stereotypes of National and Gender Identities”, in Wiltrud Simbürger, Sarah Riviere, eds., The Dream Play Challenge Project. Facing up to the Crisis in Residential Living (Hamburg; Berlin: Simbürger Riviere, 2023), 60–67, https://doi.org/10.17613/vna4-c077 Alois Riegl, “The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen (1901)”, in Christopher S. Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader. Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 87–104. Wood, “Introduction”, in idem., ed., The Vienna School Reader. Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, 10. Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993); Jas’ Elsner, “From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen”, Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006): 741–766. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 96; Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1990). Evans, “Eyes It Took Time to See”, Assemblage, 20 (1993): 36–37. Karsten Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti”, in Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 110; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

2

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings Object-oriented and subject-oriented modes of representation

Hubert Damisch, in The Origin of the Perspective,1 refers to the distinction between the “desiring subject” and the “Cartesian subject”. 2 Damisch’s analysis, which is based on Jacques Lacan’s approach, focuses on the concept of “desiring subject”. This distinction between the “desiring” and the “Cartesian” subject could serve as a starting point in order to examine how the relation between the “fictive” and the “real” aspect of the user is constructed through architectural representation. Damisch also argues that perspective, as mode of representation, does not correspond to the standards of humanism and sheds light on the consideration of perspective as cultural formation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, according to Wood, believed that “perspective is a cultural fact that we could overcome”. 3 He wrote in 1959 regarding perspective: I say that the perspective of the Renaissance is a fact of culture, that the perception itself is polymorphous and that, if it becomes Euclidean, it is because it allows itself to be guided by the system. Hence, how can we return from this perception shaped by culture to ‘raw’ or ‘wild’ perception?4 In contrast with the hope of a re-conquest of an authentic perception based on the concept of the “lived” (“vécue”), as it is expressed in the aforementioned words of Merleau-Ponty, Damisch did not believe in the existence of such an authentic perception. As Christopher S. Wood underscores, perspective for Damisch is neither a mere simulation of our optical impressions of the world, nor a mere cultural imposition, but a model or machine that reveals the structure of the mind to itself, independent of the particular historical circumstances of its discovery or use. 5 Wood also notes: “For Damisch, linear perspective is the fundamental scene of Western painting’s philosophical ambitions, namely, to participate, alongside other sign systems, in the constitution of subjectivity.”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-2

40  Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings The participation of the perspective to the constitution of subjectivity is at the heart of my study. What interests me most regarding Damisch’s understanding of “[p]erspectival painting [is his belief that] it reproduces the basic conditions of intersubjectivity.”6 Damisch argues that perspective stages the originary “capture” of the subject in the gaze. Thus, perspective for Damisch is neither a mere simulation of our optical impressions of the world, nor a mere cultural imposition, but a model or machine that reveals the structure of the mind to itself, independent of the particular historical circumstances of its discovery or use. Giulio Carlo Argan, in his article entitled “The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory”, published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in 1946, understands perspective “as a constructive and operative design tool for the construction of the new Renaissance urban space, rather than a painterly, representational device”.7 This remark of Argan invites us to reflect on the impact of perspective on the shift of the relationship between architecture and the city. In order to understand what are the implications of the preference of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier for the use of perspective, we should bear in mind the importance of proportions for perspective. Rudolf Wittkower’s analysis of the relationship between proportions and perspective in the case of Brunelleschi, who invented Renaissance perspective around 1425, could help comprehend the role of proportions for perspective representation.8 Marvin Trachtenberg, in “To Build Proportions in Time, or Tie Knots in Space? A Reassessment of the Renaissance Turn in Architectural Proportions”, sheds light on the question of temporality in the understanding of proportions.9 He opposes his own approach to Wittkower’s conception of proportions. He elaborates the concept of “durational proportions” and invites us “to shift discussion to an altogether different narrative of proportional practice”. He claims “Alberti’s atemporal new program of building-outside-time […] rigidly separated planning and building conceptually and temporally”. The question of disconnection between planning and building is at the centre of the questions that this book treats. It is essential to clarify what is the relationship of perspective and axonometric representation to proportion. Perspective and axonometric representation are related to the notion of proportion in a different way. The significance of the proportions for perspective becomes evident if we think that “Alberti wanted to base architecture on the ‘laws of nature’, by which he meant the universal principles of correct proportions.”10 As Anthony J. Cascardi states, “perspective and the cogito assure a uniformity and regularity of proportion, and provide a vision that could in principle be held by anyone, but both define the subject’s relation to the world in purely formal terms.”11 According to Leonardo da Vinci, “[t]he young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of all things.”12 Richard Padovan, in Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl, maintains that

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings  41 Le Corbusier made proportion the pivot of his work.13 Both Mies and Le Corbusier paid much attention to the concept of proportions. Mies in a radio address in 1931 declared: “The artistic expresses itself in the proportions of things, often even in the proportions between things”.14 Le Corbusier proclaimed, in “L’Esprit Nouveau en Architecture”, in 1925: “This is the architectural invention: relationships, rhythms, proportions, conditions of emotion, machine to move. Talent alone acts here”.15 The establishment of the distance between the eye and the picture was primordial for Alberti, as it becomes evident in his following declaration: “I establish, as I wish, the distance from the eye to the picture”.16 In order to understand the implications of the use of perspective, it is essential to bear in mind that “Alberti reduced the position of the viewer to an unextended eye point that is reflected by the vanishing point in the painting”,17 on the one hand, and “exposed the contradiction within humanism between appearances and reality”,18 on the other hand. The limitations of perspective have been highlighted by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who, in A Thousand Plateaus, underscore that “[t]here is no falser problem in painting than depth and, in particular, perspective”. They also maintain that “perspective lines, far from being made to represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation, which occupies them only for an instant, at a given moment”.19 They shed, thus, light on the accidental character of the use of perspective representation. According to El Lissitzky, the main disadvantage of the use of perspective representation is the fact that it “limits space; it has made it finite, closed.”20 Because of this limitation, Lissitzky prioritised axonometric representation over perspective. His choice to distance himself from the use of perspective is linked to his intention to acquire a more universal point of view than that of the perspective. Auguste Choisy writes regarding the advantages of axonometric representation, in his Histoire de l’architecture: In this system, a single image, animated and dynamic like the building itself, takes the place of an abstract figuration through plan, section, and elevation. The reader has before his eyes, at the same time, the plan, the exterior of the building, its section, and its interior disposition. 21 For Choisy, thus, the main advantage of the use of axonometric representation is that it permits the observers to have a holistic view of the designed object. In other words, for him, axonometric representation provided the observer with a simultaneous reading all the aspects of the object. Two important characteristics of axonometric representation are, on the one hand, the fact that it represents all the aspects of the architectural project “as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once”, and, on the other hand, the fact that it “truly renders the mental image”. 22 Yve-Alain Bois introduces his “Metamorphosis of

42  Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings Axonometry”23 with the following excerpt of Claude Fayette Bragdon’s The Frozen Fountain. Isometric perspective, less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things more nearly as they are known to the mind: Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortions of ordinary perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image – the thing seen by the mind’s eye. 24 Yve-Alain Bois reminds us that axonometric and isometric representation were taught widely in engineering schools from the end of the 19th century. He remarks that the “re-invention” of axonometric representation in the avant-garde circles around 1920 should be seen as a re-interpretation of an established tool for specific epistemic purposes. He also underlines the fact that in the case of axonometric representation “the vanishing point is taken to represent infinity”. 25 In other words, unlike perspective, in axonometric representation there is no vanishing point. The fact that the use of axonometric representation was prioritised in the Bauhaus over the use of perspective representation should also be taken into account. Walter Gropius, who was the first director of the Bauhaus, declared, in “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses”, that the Bauhaus avoided old academic perspective and developed a new spatial representation known as axonometry.26 Hannes Meyer, who was the second director of the Bauhaus, after Gropius and before Mies van der Rohe, also preferred axonometric representation. His remarks regarding the implications of the use of axonometric representation are important for understanding the ideology of the preference for axonometric representation at the Bauhaus. He wrote, in his text entitled “How I work”: As a rule I use an axonometric aerial view to render a design for a building as a general plan. All parts are drawn to scale and the view shows how all the elements of the building are spatially arranged in measurable dimensions. Errors of judgment in the arrangement of the buildings are shown up mercilessly. It seems important to me that designs for buildings should be represented as realistically as possible so that they will be immediately understandable to any member of the public. 27 For Meyer, what seems to be an important criterion is the measurability provided by the use of axonometric representation. For him, it was essential

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings  43 to represent buildings as realistically as possible. In parallel, Meyer claims that axonometric is more accessible to all the members of the public than other modes of representation, such as axonometric representation. In this sense, Meyer understands axonometric representation as less elitist than perspective representation. Stan Allen comments on the measurability of axonometric representation and its objectivity and refers to both Gropius and Meyer, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation: In most early modern architectural practice, axonometric maintains the linearity and objectivity — the measurability — of the architect’s plans, and it is therefore attractive to architects such as Hannes Meyer or Walter Gropius not for its irrational or metaphysical qualities but for its objectivity. Transparency here implies not privileged contact with origins (Husserl), but a guarantee of technical performance. Axonometry as a useful means of explaining complex architectural objects needs to be distinguished from axonometry conceived as a privileged point of contact with universal geometric truths. 28 This connection of the use of axonometric representation to the belief in universal geometric truths, mentioned by Allen in the previous excerpt, is an aspect that helps us better grasp the implications of its use by the architects under study. Allen drew a distinction between two different uses of axonometric representation: from the one hand, a use of axonometric representation that aims to explain complex architectural objects, and, from the other hand, a use of it that is based on the acceptance and affirmation of certain universal truths. Michael Sorkin asserts that “[a]xonometric projection confers a kind of instant rigor and discipline”. 29 Sorkin also states that “[a]xonometric projection is privileged for its “objectivity,” for the fact that, unlike perspective, its every dimension is true to scale, yielding a favoured flat, anti-illusionist space.”30According to Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, axonometric representation is related to the “homogeneous and transparent space of modernity”31 and is considered as the semantic tool par excellence of modernity and is associated with objectified space.

Between object-oriented and subject-oriented modes of representation My objective is to show how different modes of representation imply different modes of understanding the concepts of the observer and the user. A remark that could help us understand how the modes of representation are based on the assumption of ways according to which the observer reads and interprets architectural drawings is the fact that the modes of representation can be distinguished into object-oriented and subject-oriented. For instance, axonometric representation is object-oriented in the sense that it pushes the observer to focus his interpretation of the architectural drawings

44  Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings on the actual relations between the various parts of a building. In parallel, axonometric representation does not follow the laws of visual perception. As Bernhard Schneider remarks, perspective refers to the viewer, while axonometric representation refers to the object. 32 This remark is useful for understanding the implications of the use of axonometric representation or perspective by the architects under study. The fact that both Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier privileged the use of perspective shows that they were interested in referring mostly to the viewer. My objective is to present how each of them establishes a specific kind of relationship with the addressee of architecture, that is to say the observer and the user. In order to do so, I examine the extent to which they use axonometric representation and perspective and I analyse the specific strategies of fabrication of their drawings. Both Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had close connections with avant-garde anti-subjectivist circles. Despite the incorporation of several anti-subjectivist concepts in their thought and work, both architects – each one for their own specific reasons – privileged perspective as a mode or representation. In parallel, they granted a protagonist place to the construction of interior perspective views. My objective here is to explain their preference for the use of perspective. For each of them, there was a turning point after which the use of interior perspective views was even more intensified and acquired certain distinctive characteristics. Even before this turning point they used interior perspective views in a more dispersed way, but without having established their personal visual language. One can observe that, at a certain point, their visual language as far as the use of interior perspective is concerned acquired a particular character. This particular character made their drawings easily recognisable and contributed to the establishment of their fame as the modernist architects par excellence. Mies van der Rohe used perspective as his main visualising tool against the declared preference of De Stijl, El Lissitzky and Bauhaus’s for axonometric representation. Many of his perspective drawings were based on the distortion of certain conventions of perspective. In order to grasp how his drawing techniques shaped the way the interpreters of his drawings viewed them, it is important to discern and analyse what are the exact effects produced by the overcoming of the conventions of perspective by Mies van der Rohe. The use of axonometric representation establishes the conditions of a more active way of observing architectural drawings than that set up through the fabrication of perspective representations. In other words, the confrontation of the observer with axonometric representations provokes a more intense optical awareness than that produced through the use of perspective representation. In the case of axonometric representation, the view of the observer and that of the real inhabitant of space do not coincide in the sense that the inhabitants would never view the space in the same way that the observers of the drawing view it. This makes clear why the use of axonometric representation prioritises the observer of architectural

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings  45 drawings and not the inhabitant of architecture. On the contrary, the use of perspective is based on the assumption that the image viewed by the observer of architectural drawings and the inhabitant of architectural artefacts coincide. The identification between the image viewed by the observer and that viewed by the inhabitant is compatible with the desire of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier to achieve a generalisable way of viewing space. Perspective representation pre-establishes the position of the viewer within space and does not leave any space for a random way of seeing space. These remarks could be valuable for any interior perspective. In order to understand which is the exact contribution of Mies van der Rohe to the reinvention of the use of perspective, we should discern what are the special characteristics of his use of perspective. Mies van der Rohe, despite the fact that he prefers objectivity, he did not privilege axonometric projection. He gave much importance to proportions. As Rudolf Wittkower underscores, in “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective’”, the Renaissance architects through their use of perspective and the way they identified the measures of their buildings with the way they were seen in perspective resolved the “contradiction between objective proportions and subjective impressions of a building”.33

Constructions versus constructions-spectacles: Space for living or space for the eyes? In the first issue of G, which was also published that same year, El Lissizky states: Space: That which cannot be seen through a keyhole or through an open door. Space is there not only for the eyes. It is not an image. It is for living.34 Lissitzky’s thesis that “[s]pace is there not only for the eyes”, could be juxtaposed to Le Corbusier’s expression “Eyes that do not see”.35 This tension between space for living and space for the eyes, highlighted by Lissitzky in the aforementioned excerpt, could be better understood if we analyse the arguments presented by Lissitzky in his article entitled “Idols and Idolaters” (“Idoli I idolopoklonniki”), published in 1929, in Stroitel’naja PromySlennost’. In this article, Lissitzky criticised Le Corbusier and blamed him for having blinded the “idolaters of Constructivism”. Lissitzky argued that Le Corbusier’s projects were not constructions to live but constructions-spectacles. This distinction between “construction to live” and “construction-spectacle” could be compared to the distinction he had drawn six years earlier between “space for the eyes” and “space for living”. It is almost the same distinction. Lissitzky, despite his disapproval of the prioritisation of vision by Le Corbusier, admitted that the latter “proposes

46  Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings new living conditions”. 36 However, he accused Le Corbusier for not having taken into consideration the needs of “broad masses”, underlying that his “system of composition was the construction of a frame”. 37 In the case of Le Corbusier, the drawings that are analysed can be classified in the following categories according to the nature of the act of drawing: the drawings of his sketchbooks during his trips that are used to capture ideas for later use in his architectural projects, the sketches he produced during his conferences, trying to transmit to his audience his design ideas in an immediate and efficient way, the drawings that correspond to the process of concretising his architectural ideas, and the drawings that were used to document a project in books, exhibitions or to be shown to clients. Each of these categories of drawings corresponds to a different kind of construction of the relationship between the fictive and the real dimension that characterises architectural design process. The kind of relationship that is established between mental image and representation on the paper is different for the drawings that are part of Le Corbusier’s sketchbooks and the sketches or the drawings for specific projects which were destined to be judged by the clients. The drawings of the sketchbooks were produced in a much more immediate way. Such sketches, which were produced for personal purpose, can be found in three kinds of sources: his “Cahiers de croquis”, the “Albums Nivola” and his “Cahiers de dessins”. The analysis of the sketches that Le Corbusier used to draw during the conferences he gave is of great interest for my study. Their significance for my research lies on the fact that they function as sketches that were used to simultaneously capture ideas and to communicate them. The immediacy of their production and the presence of the observers during their productions are two aspects that explain why these sketches are useful for my research. The special character of the sketches that Le Corbusier used to produce during his conferences is scrutinised here. What interests me most regarding these sketches is the fact that their production was based on the immediacy of the transmission of architectural ideas through representation. Le Corbusier described the activity of producing sketches during his conferences as follows: “The public follows the development and the thought; they enter into the anatomy of the subject”.38 In parallel, Le Corbusier had stated: “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing allows less room for lies”.39 For instance, Le Corbusier underscored during an interview, in 1951: “when we draw around words, we draw with useful words, we create something.”40 He believed that “[d]rawing makes it possible to fully transmit the thought without any written or verbal explanations”.41 For him, drawing was “a language, a science, a means of expression, a means of transmitting thought”.42 August Schmarsow aimed to establish a “scientific” approach to art (Kunstwissenschaft) based on the concept of space. His main intention was to discern “the universal laws governing artistic formation and stylistic evolution”.43 What is of interest for this study is that Schmarsow conceived

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings  47 architecture the “creatress of space”.44 He employed the term “raumgestalterin” in order to describe that in architecture there is an inherent potential of creating space. A distinction that he drew and is very useful for this study is that between the sense of space, which he called “raumgefühl”, and the spatial imagination, which he called “raumphantasie”. The terms “raumgestalterin”, “raumgefühl” and “raumphantasie” can elucidate further the relationship between the conceiver-architect and the observer of architectural drawings and the relationship between the interpretation of an architectural representation and the experience of inhabiting an architectural artefact, which are the main objects of research in this book.

Notes 1 Henry Millon was the director the Center for Advanced Study un the Visual Arts of the National Gallery in Washington during the period that Hubert Damisch was a resident scholar between 1982 and 1983. 2 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1995); Damisch, L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty cited in Christopher S. Wood, “Une perspective oblique. Hubert Damisch, “La grammaire du tableau et la strukturanalyse Viennoise”, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 58 (1996), 121. 4 Merleau-Ponty, “Perception sauvage – Immédiat – Perception culturelle – ­learning”, in Le Visible et l’Invisible suivi de Notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). Originally published in 1964; Merleau-Ponty cited in Christopher S. Wood, “Une perspective oblique. Hubert Damisch, La grammaire du tableau et la strukturanalyse Viennoise”, 121; the specific terms that Merleau-Ponty employs in this phrase in its French version are “brute” and “sauvage”. 5 Christopher S. Wood, “Une perspective oblique. Hubert Damisch, “La grammaire du tableau et la strukturanalyse Viennoise”, 107–129. 6 Ibid. 7 Giulio Carlo Argan, “The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 9 (1946): 96–121; Amir Djalali, “Which ‘Humanism’? On the Italian Theory of Architecture, 1951–1969”, in Giorgio Ponzo, Teresa Stoppani, George Themistokleous, eds., This Thing Called Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 59. 8 Rudolph Wittkower, “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 6 (1953): 275–791. 9 Marvin Trachtenberg, “To Build Proportions in Time, or Tie Knots in Space? A Reassessment of the Renaissance Turn in Architectural Proportions”, Architectural Histories, 2(1) (2014): 1–8, http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ah.bp. 10 Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 224. 11 Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34. 12 Leonardo Da Vinci, “Training of the Painter”, in Leonardo on Art and the Artist ed., André Chastel, (New York: Dover Publications, 2012). 13 Richard Padovan, Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 23. 14 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Radio Address Manuscript of 17 August 1931, Collection of Dirk Lohan, Chicago; Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies

48  Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings

15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

van der Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 311. Le Corbusier, “L’Esprit Nouveau en Architecture”, in Almanach d’architecture moderne (Paris: G. Crès, 1925), 37. Alberti cited in Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 74. Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 110. Timothy Kircher, Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Publications, 2012); Barry M. Katz, Leon Battista Alberti and the Humanist Theory of the Arts (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 1977); Charles H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and ­Schizophrenia, 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 298; Deleuze, Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, Collection Critique, 1980). El Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry”, in Carl Einstein, Paul Wcsthcim, eds., Europa-Almanach, (Potsdam: 1925); 103–113; El Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry”, in Einstein, Wcsthcim, eds., Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970), 146–149. Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture. Tome 1 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899). Claude Fayette Bragdon, The Frozen Fountain: Being Essays on Architecture and the Art of Design in Space (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932). Yve-Alain Bois, “Metamorphosis of Axonometry”, Daidalos, 1 (1981): 40–58. Bragdon, The Frozen Fountain: Being Essays on Architecture and the Art of Design in Space. Bois, “Metamorphosis of Axonometry”, 46. Walter Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar”, in Karl Nierendorf, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, eds., Staatliches ­Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923 (Weimar; Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923), 7–18. Hannes Meyer, “Kak ia rabotaiu”, Arkhitektura CCCP, 6 (1933): 34–35; Meyer cited in Claude Schnaidt, Hannes Meyer: Building, Projects and Writings (Teufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1965), 27. Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 23. Michael Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings (New York: Verso, 1991), 36. Ibid., 180–181. Alberto Pérez Gómez, Louise Pelletier, “Axonometry as Collage: Le Corbusier’s Poème de l’angle droit”, in idem., Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA; London, England: The MIT Press, 1997), 341–360. Bernhard Schneider, “Perspective Refers to the Viewer, Axonometry Refers to the Object”, Daidalos, 1 (1981): 81–95. Rudolph Wittkower, “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective’”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 6 (1953): 275–291; see also Richard Padovan, Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999). El Lissitzky cited in Detlef Mertins, Michael William Jennings, eds., G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 100; Lissitzky cited in Tom Porter, The Architect’s Eye (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 5.

Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings  49







3

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos Around the spirit of truth and clarity

Manfredo Tafuri, in Progetto e utopia, underscores that the inherent opposition within all modern art [is that between] those who search into the very bowels of reality in order to know and assimilate its values and wretchedness; and those who desire to go beyond reality, who want to construct ex novo new realities, new values, and new public symbols.1 This chapter is based on the assumption that both Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier intended to conciliate the distinction that Tafuri draws in the aforementioned passage. Their stance is characterised by the desire to dive into reality in order to convert the potential of reality in the very force of constructing new realities, values and symbols through their practice. I have chosen to draw attention to the links of Le Corbusier’s approach with the point of view of philosophers belonging to the same historical period, such as Georges Bataille (1897–1962)2 and Albert Camus (1913– 1960).3 This choice was driven by the fact that, there was a real exchange between the aforementioned philosophers and Le Corbusier. Despite the fact that their communication wasn’t frequent, the fact that they have exchanged correspondences or/and books was helpful for my research. Apart from the analysis of the connection of the thought of the architects under study with certain philosophers who belong to the same historical era, I investigate the relationship of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier’s thought with certain Nietzschean concepts. In addition to the analysis of the drawings, writings and correspondences of the architects under study I had the chance to investigate their own library, mainly that of Le Corbusier. I paid much attention to the notes of Le Corbusier in the books of his personal library. A parameter that is examined here is how each of the architects under study conceives the relationship between the discourse, written or spoken and the drawings. The concept of “ineffable space” of Le Corbusier and its ambiguity is useful for posing the problem of the encounter between words and drawings. The fact that Mies van der Rohe always chose to be laconic

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-3

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  51 is also examined. The fact that Mies van der Rohe was laconic at every instance he was invited to use the written or spoken discourse to transmit his ideas is related to the incorporation of the thesis of Gœthe regarding the attitude of the figure of the artist. This becomes evident when he says: “That is what Goethe meant when he said: Create, artist, do not talk”.4 Mies van der Rohe wrote in a letter he addressed to the Manuscripts division on 3 May 1963: “My main work has been the planning of buildings. I have never written nor spoken much”. 5 Mies van der Rohe, in a provocative way, noted regarded his scepticism regarding writing and books, in his drafts for speeches, conserved in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress in Washington: “Tell about 3000 books. Send me 300 to Chicago. I could return 270”.6

The spirit of truth in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s thought Mies van der Rohe understood truth as congruence of thought and thing. As Peter Murphy and David Roberts remind us, in Dialectic of Romanticism, such a conception of truth is related to Aquinas.7 The connection of Mies’s thought to certain aspects of Wilhelm Dilthey’s approach, especially regarding the place of truth in their thought, should also be explored. Peter Murphy and David Roberts, in the chapter they devote to “‘Truth in building’ in Mies van der Rohe”, note: “According to Dilthey, the relationship of purposes to patterns is not subject to the judgement true or false, but to the judgement truthful of untruthful”.8 Murphy and Roberts underscore the fact that “lies […] can break the relation between expression and mental content that is expressed”. This tension between expression and mental content is very present in the way Mies van der Rohe conceived the building process. According to Richard Padovan, both Aristotle and Aquinas identify “forms with their individual material manifestations”.9 For Aquinas, “things are the source from which the intellect acquires ideas”.10 This becomes evident when he claims that the “intellect draws knowledge from natural things, and is measured by them”.11 Umberto Eco in his book entitled The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas claims that in the case of Thomas Aquinas “Aesthetic pleasure has to do with the intellect, even if it does so through the mediation of the sensible”.12 Mies van der Rohe was convinced that truth is linked to the significance of acts and believes in the need for equation between the things and the intellect, following the thesis of Aquinas, according to which “truth is the equation [or adequation] of things and intellect” (“Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus”) “Truth is the correspondence of thing and intellect” (Figure 3.1). He associates such an understanding of truth with his belief that architecture should be the expression of the innermost structure of its time. Aquinas also restated his theory as: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality”.13 Paraphrasing Aquinas,

52  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos we could say that for Mies, architecture is true when it conforms to the external reality. Reading his words, we realise that, instead of believing the above, he considers that architecture is true when it conforms to its time. This becomes evident when he claims: “Only a relationship which touches the essence of the time can be real”. He confirms this when he says that he defines as “truth relation” any “relationship which touches the essence of the time”. Mies van der Rohe was convinced that “[a]rchitecture must belong to its own time” (Figure 3.2). Four questions that were really at the centre of his thought concerning the relationship of architecture with its time are the following: “But what is our time? What is its structure? Its essence? What are the sustaining and driving force?”14 Le Corbusier writes, in When the cathedrals were white: a journey to the country of timid people, first published in French in 1937: “Architecture

Figure 3.1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, note including the following reflection: “THERE IS A TRUTH RELATION. But what is truth? […] THOMAS: ADEQUATO REIS ET INTELLECTUS […] Augustine: Beauty is the radiance of truth”. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings. Credits: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61. Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  53

Figure 3.2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, note including the following reflections: “ARCHITECTURE MUST BELONG TO ITS OWN TIME […] But what is our time? […] What is its structure; its essence? […] What re the sustaining and driving forces?” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings. Credits: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61. Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

54  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos joins its destiny, which is the setting in order of the present time”.15 Mies van der Rohe understood architecture as expression of the innermost structure of its time. He notes in a text of an address given in 1950: “Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form”.16 In an interview, he gave to Peter Blake for the event “Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright”, in 1961, Mies declared: “I didn’t want to change the time. I wanted to express the time. That was my whole object”.17 Oswald Spengler declares, in The Decline of the West, that “[e]very philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time”. In parallel, Spengler rejected the distinction “between perishable and imperishable doctrines” and replaced it with the distinction “between doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all”. He believed in the capacity of “philosophy [to] […] absorb the entire content of an epoch”. For him, the main criterion for evaluating the potential and the eminence of a doctrine was “its necessity to life”.18 In 1959, during his presentation of The Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mies van der Rohe underscored his conviction that “architecture belongs to an Epoch”. He claimed that he believed it would “take fifty more years to clarify the relationship of architecture to the epoch” and that “[t]his will be the business of a new generation”. He closed this address with the following quotation of Ulrich von Hutten: “It is the dam of a new day it is a joy to love”.19 Mies van der Rohe believed that truth is linked to “the significance of acts” and that “architecture must stem from sustaining and driving forces of civilisation”.20 He declared: “[t]echnology is far more than a method, it is a world in itself”.21 The ontological status that Mies gives to technology shows that he differentiates himself from a reductive functionalist understanding of modernism. The semantics of architecture is the field of his praxis and he understands architectural composition as the expression of spiritual values. More specifically, Mies remarks in his notes for an address he gave on 17 April 1950 at Blackstone Hotel in Chicago: “It is true that architecture depends on facts, but its real field is the realm of the significance”. 22 In the same notes, he writes: “Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit”. 23 Mies van der Rohe believed that the real field of activity of architecture is in the realm of significance. What does it mean by the fact that Mies van der Rohe situated architectural practice in the realm of significance? Why does he care so much about significance? Georg Simmel places particular emphasis on the relationship between mental life and metropolis, while Mies van der Rohe was particularly interested in the link between mental life and architecture24. He was convinced that “[a]rchitecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form”. 25 Fritz Neumeyer underlines, in “A World on Itself: Architecture and Technology” that “[f]or Mies, the discovery of the steel frame was linked not only to the technological progress of the age, but also to

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  55 developing its metaphysical potential and refining the idealistic construction of modern architecture”. 26

Is Mies van der Rohe’s perspective objective or subjective? A contradiction that is very present in Mies van der Rohe’s attitude is the fact that despite his affirmed preference for objective, impersonal and generalisable means, his stance is characterised by a predilection for the use of perspective drawing. How could this contradiction be explained? One could assume that Mies shared the viewpoint that El Lissitzky describes in “A. and Pangeometry”, published in 1925, claiming that “[i]t is commonly assumed that perspective representation of space is objective, unequivocal and obvious”. 27 James Elkins, in The Poetics of Perspective, notes that [w]hen Panofsky writes about Greek perspective as if it were the expression of a subjective world and Renaissance perspective as if it were the record of an objective world, he is recalling the inherent paradox of philosophic perspectivism (that it cannot choose between the world as an objective whole and views as subjective fragments) and reapplying it to its original source, artistic perspective. 28 We could, thus, claim that an inherent characteristic of perspective is the tension between that it cannot choose between the understanding of the world as an objective whole and its conception as an assemblage of views as subjective fragments. A possible answer to the fact that Mies van der Rohe despite his interest in generalisable means and objectivity uses mainly perspective and avoids axonometric representations could be that the attitude of Mies van der Rohe is an expression of the above paradox and of the inability to reconcile the understanding of objective means of building art and the visualisation of fragments, which are snapshots or crystallisation of the building art process, which, as “Zeitwille”, is always in a state of becoming. Perspective depicts just one among all the possible views of space and, for this reason, does not privilege a holistic perception of the building art process. It would be interesting to examine the hypothesis that Mies van der Rohe, in contrast with Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, who, in “Le purisme”, published in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1921, rejected the accidental character of perspective, used interior perspective views because he intended to exploit the accidental and fragmentary character of perspective representation. 29 A clue in order to conform to this hypothesis is the fact that he understood architecture as “Zeitwille”. Given that the notion of “Zeitwille” implies a non-stop process of becoming inherent in life, a comprehension of architecture as “Zeitwille” implies a perception of architectural representation as a snapshot of this continuous process of transformation. In other words,

56  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos the use of perspective is compatible with the fragmentary character of an understanding or architectural experience and a perception of architecture as “Zeitwille”. If we assume that Mies van der Rohe intended to communicate that the strategies he elaborated during the architectural design process are generalisable, is the use of perspective an efficient mode of representation? To respond to this question, one could take as starting point the following declaration of Robin Evans: “Mies was not interested in the truth of construction, but in expressing the truth of construction”.30 Drawing on the aforementioned assertion of Evans, we could claim that Mies van der Rohe was not interested in the use of objective means, but in expressing the use of objective means. Such an interpretation makes us think that the use of perspective serves to pushes the subject that is in front of his perspectives to read space in the way that Mies van der Rohe did. The use of perspective serves Mies van der Rohe in order to impose to the observers of his drawings a specific prioritisation during their interpretation of the represented space assemblages. The viewer is transformed mentally into inhabitant. He imagines himself being in the same position as Mies van der Rohe imagined himself when he conceived the representation. In this case, the conceiver, the viewer and the inhabitant coincide. What does this overlapping of these subjects imply?

Between freedom and objectiveness: Clarity as truth or as objectiveness? The act of liberation and the notion of freedom are very significant for Mies van der Rohe. Another aspect of Georg Simmel’s approach that is useful for understanding the double concern of Mies van der Rohe about freedom and objectivity is the remark of the former regarding the relationship between objectivity and freedom.31 Simmel, in “The Stranger”, observes that “objectivity may also be defined as freedom”, in the sense that “the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given”. 32 The fact that Mies van der Rohe differentiated his stance from any kind of individualistic approach, as such corresponding to the figure of great artists, like Michelangelo, pushes to think that he might also think that objectivity permits liberation of perception from commitments, such as those described by Simmel in the aforementioned passage. Mies van der Rohe insisted on the fact that his way differed from any kind of individualistic approach, saying: “I go a different way. I am trying to go an objective way”. 33 Clarity has an important place in Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s thought. The fact that Le Corbusier chose to name “Les heures claires” his project for the Villa Savoye signals the importance of clarity for his generative process. He notes, in 1960: “Here then is the villa, born in 1929. It was happy in its limpid clarity”.34 In 1927, in “Où en est l’architecture?”,

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  57 he declares: “I want a poem made of solid words with defined meanings and a clear syntax”.35 In 1918, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and Amédée Ozenfant published Après le cubisme.36 Its first chapter was entitled “Où en est la peinture?”. We can read in the eighth volume of Le Corbusier’s Œuvre complète: The trained man, too, inflexible like the horizon of the sea, ought to be an instrument for measuring things, capable of serving as a level, as a datum line in the midst of flux and mobility. That’s his social role. This role means that he must see clearly.37 We could, thus, claim that, for Le Corbusier, a basic criterion for being a capable architect, who serves efficiently their social role, is their ability to “see clearly”. For Mies van der Rohe, clarity was important not only for the design process, but for pedagogy as well. This becomes evident from what he declared in his inaugural address as Director of Architecture at Armour Institute of Technology, in 1938, where he underscored the significance of “rational clarity” for education: “Education must lead us from irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order”. 38 Mies also claimed: “If our schools could get to the root of the problem and develop within the student a clear method of working, we could have given him a worthwhile five years”. 39 For him, the lack of effectiveness of a pedagogical method is related to the lack of direction. He states: “Most architectural schools today are suffering from this lack of direction—not from a lack of enthusiasm, nor from the lack of talent”.40 A year before his death, Mies van der Rohe declares, in January 1968: Teaching forced me to clarify my architectural Ideas. The work made it possible to test their validity. Teaching and working have convinced me, above all, of the need for clarity in thought and action. Without clarity, there can be no understanding. And without understanding, there can be no direction — only confusion. Sometimes it is even a confusion of great men, like the time around 1900 when Wright, Berlage, Behrens, Olbrich, Loos and Van de Velde were all at work, each taking a different direction.41 Théo van Doesburg declares in the first issue of G. Zeitschrift für elementare: What we demand of art is CLARITY, and this demand can never be satisfied if artists use individualistic means. Clarity can only follow from discipline of means, and this discipline leads to the generalization of means. Generalization of means leads to elemental, monumental form-creation.42

58  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos The clarity in the sense described in the journal G is associated with the invention of generalisable means. The possibility to generalise means and the rejection of individualistic means can be related to objectivity. Here, I understand objectivity in the sense described by Georg Simmel in “The Stranger”.43 In the aforementioned passage from journal G, we can discern a tension between clarity and individualistic means. In this sense, the notion of clarity in Mies van der Rohe’s thought is associated with the conquest of generalisation of means. Mies van der Rohe believed that one of the most important criteria for judging the practice of an architect is the clarity of their working method and the knowledge of the tools of the discipline. Mies’s belief in the necessity of an extreme discipline of the design process could be associated with St Thomas Aquinas’s conviction that “[r]eason is the first principle of all human work”.44 Nicolas Rubio Tuduri notes referring to Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, in Cahiers d’Art, in 1929: “Everyone would understand therefore that one wishes to speak of proportions, of limpidity and of the cruelty of architectural reasoning”.45 Tuduri, in the same text, notes that “[i]t may be surprising to find the sentimental in a very modern and very technical work of architecture, but we must recognize that architecture can with difficulty avoid the social influence that gives it birth”.46 This declaration of Tuduri brings to mind Georges Bataille’s assertion regarding architecture in a text entitled “Architecture”,47 published in the second issue of Documents that same year, in 1929. In this article, Bataille claims that “Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, in the same way that human physiognomy is the expression of the being of individuals”.48 The text of Sigfried Giedion, who at the time was the direction of the architectural section of Cahiers d’Art, referring to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, which as we mention above was named by Le Corbusier “Les heures claires”, was published in 1930.49 St Thomas Aquinas agrees with Aristotle’s point of view in Nicomachean Ethics (Ηθικά Νικομάχεια) according to which the ethical is what is in accordance with right reason. In this sense, we could claim that in Mies’s case, good architecture is assimilated to an architecture that is conceived according to right reason. Mies has told: “I don’t want to be interesting – I want to be good!”50 This declaration, apart from an echo of St Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, can also be interpreted in relation to Nietzsche’s Will to Power, where the latter claims that it is important to avoid any confusion between the good and the beautiful. More precisely, he states: “For a philosopher to say, ‘the good and the beautiful are one,’ is infamy”. 51 Mies as Nietzsche refused to assimilate good and beautiful. The belief in the extreme discipline of the design process, which characterises Mies’s point of view, could be interpreted as a transposition into architecture of the idea of St Thomas Aquinas that “Reason is the first principle of all human work”.52 Aquinas and Aristotle share the conviction that the ethical is what is in accordance with right reason. In other words, for both Aquinas and Aristotle behaving according to reason is the first

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  59 principle of ethics. Aristotle’s “kata ton orthon logon” (“κατὰ τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον”) and St Thomas Aquinas’s “according to right reason” (“secundum rectam rationem”) are close to each other. Aristotle writes, in Nicomachean Ethics (Ηθικά Νικομάχεια), sixth book, chapter 13: Σημεῖον δὲ· καὶ γὰρ νῦν πάντες, ὅταν ὁρίζωνται τὴν ἀρετήν, προστιθέασι τὴν ἔξιν, εἰπόντες καὶ πρὸς ἄ ἐστι, τὴν κατὰ τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον· ὀρθὸς δ’ ὁ κατὰ τὴν φρόνησιν. And there is a sign of this. For even now when all define virtue, after speaking of the given characteristic and the things to which it is related, they set down in addition, “the characteristic in accord with correct reason,” and the reason that accords with prudence is correct. 53 Francesco Dal Co relates Mies van der Rohe’s culture to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse).54 Dal Co associates the conflict between the arete (αρετή) of operari and its historical determination, described by Nietzsche in the aforementioned book with the tension between architecture and “Baukunst” in Mies van der Rohe’s thought. For Mies, “Baukunst” is an expression of spirit. The elaboration of the term “Baukunst” permitted Mies van der Rohe to capture the practice of building as a spiritualised art. It also helps him to grasp the idea of spiritual pertinence, which to him, is the means to freedom and clarity. An aspect that is interesting to examine in the case of Mies van der Rohe is the relationship between the mental image and the art of building. According to Descartes and Kant our rational minds impose meanings to the world. St Thomas Aquinas understands this process in the reverse. Mies van der Rohe believed that “the art of building [arises] out of spiritual things”. 55 How his predilection for the notion of clarity and the way of representing architecture are related in Mies van der Rohe’s work? Mies van der Rohe privileged perspective views instead of axonometric views. Is this choice compatible with his preference for clarity? In order to respond to this question, we should examine how he understands clarity. Leibniz claimed that “[m]onads differ enormously in terms of the clarity and distinctness of their perceptions”.56 Could we associate Mies van der Rohe’s understanding of clarity with the distinctness produced in the perception of the spectators of his images? Could the experience of looking at his images be related to the emergence of distinct perceptions? The encounter of the viewers with his images provokes an instantaneous confusion, which could be related to the concept of deterritorialisation. As we tried to explain, this phenomenon of confusion or deterritorialisation pushes the viewer to reconstruct the image in their mind and to be transformed into an active participant. The transformation of the viewer into an active participant takes place in many ways. Many dispositifs used by Mies van der Rohe contributed to this.

60  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos The combination of different modes of representation, that is to say collage and linear perspective, the extension of the image through several mechanisms that we described above, the combination of haptic and optical reception of the image, the combination of close and distant reception of the image etc., contribute to this process of deterritorialisation which is followed by the reconstruction of the image in the mind of the spectator and a process of reterritorialisation. The process of reterritorialisation could be related to a moment of distinct perception, in the sense that Leibniz describes distinct perception. If the above are valid, then the conception of clarity by Leibniz could be related to the conception of clarity by Mies van der Rohe. Descartes maintained that all our clear and distinct perceptions are true. The predilection of Mies for both clarity and truth pushes us to this that his conception of clarity is closer to that of Descartes than that of Leibniz. In this sense, we could claim that Mies van der Rohe’s conception of clarity and Descartes’s have certain affinities. Without any doubt Mies van der Rohe would share Descartes’s conviction that clear and distinct perceptions are true. Given that we have borrowed the concepts of “deterritorialisation” and “reterritorialisation” to which we refer above from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it would be interesting to examine to compare Mies van der Rohe’s conception of clarity and distinctness with the way Gilles Deleuze understands these two notions and their relationship in Difference and Repetition. In contrast with Descartes and Leibniz’s intention to understand clarity and distinctness as articulated, Deleuze relates distinctness with obscurity. Deleuze argues that the act of linking the notion of clarity to the notion of distinctness “is inseparable from the model of recognition which serves as the instrument of every orthodoxy, even when it is rational”. For him, the act of linking these two notions coincides with the act of pushing “the Idea over into representation”. Deleuze, in opposition with a reductive understanding of Idea as representation, maintains, that “all the more obscure the more it is distinct”. Deleuze writes, in Difference and Repetition: The restitution of the Idea in the doctrine of the faculties requires the explosion of the clear and distinct, and the discovery of a Dionysian value according to which the Idea is necessarily obscure in so far as it is distinct, all the more obscure the more it is distinct. Distinctionobscurity becomes here the true tone of philosophy, the symphony of the discordant Idea. 57

Mies van der Rohe’s modernist ethos vis-à-vis Nietzsche In order to understand the aforementioned passage, we should examine what is perspectivism in philosophy. Perspectivism (Perspektivismus) is the philosophical view (touched upon as far back as Plato’s rendition of Protagoras) that all ideations take place from particular perspectives, and that there are

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  61 many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgement of truth or value can be made. This is often taken to imply that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively “true”, but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid. The term was coined by Nietzsche. The term “perspectivism” appears in in The Gay Science §3 54. What’s the connection of the use of perspective as mode of representation with the concept of perspectivism in philosophy?58 If we understand as ontology the enlightenment of the unity of being, it becomes evident that the notion of perspectivism (Perspektivismus) is more related to anti-ontology. The elaboration of the concept of perspectivism by Nietzsche is related to the endeavour to express the inexpressible. This aspect of perspectivism could be related to the concept of “the ineffable space” (“l’espace indicible”) in the case of Le Corbusier and the visual techniques that reinvent the use of perspective in the case of Mies van der Rohe. Blaise Benoit, in “La réalité selon Nietzsche”, interrogates if it is possible to conceive reality as unitary, when we assume a multiplication of the points of view, as the concept of Nietzschean perspectivism (Perspektivismus) suggests. He associates Nietzsche to the request of a non-unifiable multiplicity.59 What is of interest for our study is his remark that the perspectivism is a way of trying to say the unspeakable, ineffable, inexpressible (“indicible”). This brings to mind the concept of “espace indicible” (“l’espace indicible”) of Le Corbusier and could be also associated that Mies intended to express his intellect through action, that is to say through “Baukunst” as “Zeitwille”, and not though words.

Between Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s spirit of unity and chaos Aristotle makes the distinction “between ontology, which studies everything in the respect in which all things constitute a unity, and dialectic, which does not as an intellectual activity have such a structure as to reflect any unity on the subjects which it treats”.60 He frees dialectic from ontology61 and “maintains that dialectic does not involve the search for definitions”.62 A distinction that is important for understanding the vision of Mies van der Rohe is that between the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Dialectic of Romanticism, which is analysed by Peter Murphy and David Roberts in Dialectic of Romanticism. Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “unmask enlightenment ideas as dangerous myths” and reproduce “the divided unity of modernism”.63 This divided unity of modernism, for Murphy and Roberts, consists of the double attraction of certain modern personalities to romantic critique of modern society and progressive techniques. Murphy and Roberts reject both interpretations of modernity as related to enlightenment and romanticism. A question that emerges is whether “Esprit Nouveau” can be understood as Zeitgeist. As David Watkin reminds us, in Morality and Architecture

62  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos Revisited, that Nikolaus Pevsner “interpreted the styles of the past as the inevitable outcome of what he conceived as their social and political zeitgeist”.64 The “Esprit Nouveau” can be interpreted as a form of zeitgeist. Le Corbusier associated the concept of “Esprit Nouveau” with his belief in certain forces that overcome the geographic context. He insisted on the existence of a unitary character of its forces. He also believed that the “Esprit Nouveau” is “stronger than that of the races and stronger than the influences of the geographical environment”. Le Corbusier described the way in which “Esprit Nouveau” contributes to the unitary spirit, in a conference given more than once in 1924, a year before the publication of L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui: “An Esprit Nouveau stronger than the races and the influences of the geographical environment passes over all habits and traditions and spreads over the whole world with precise and unitary characters”65 In 1955, Le Corbusier still believed in the significance of the “spirit of unity”, as it becomes evident from what he writes in his forward to the book of Paul Damaz on the synthesis of arts: “The task of the architect […] is the most synthetic, the most “indecent” when practiced by people with the spirit of unity”.66 Le Corbusier’s interrogation in the sixth volume of his Œuvre complète regarding the understanding of poetic phenomena, manifested by volume, colour and rhythm, as an act of unity or an act of chaos shows that in the late 1950s, he was more sceptical vis-à-vis the concept of unity and more favourable to the concept of chaos. It only remains to decide whether occupying one’s self with poetic phenomena, manifested by volume, color and rhythm, is an act of unity or one of chaos – whether architecture, sculpture, painting, that is to say volume, form and color are incommensurable or synchronous – synchronous and symphonic.67 In an address he gave in 1950, on the occasion of the celebration of the addition of the Institute of Design to the Institute of Technology, Mies posed the following questions: “Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wood buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form?”68 It becomes thus apparent that an issue that is at the centre of Mies van der Rohe’s approach is the unity of materials, construction and form. Mies van der Rohe in a lecture entitled “The Preconditions of Architectural Work”, given in three different instances during 1926 underscored that, for him, “[c]haos is always a sign of anarchy [and that] anarchy is always a movement without order” He associated chaos and anarchy with “[m]ovement without central direction”.69 In a different text, originally written the same year, Mies van der Rohe related the difficulty of overcoming “the chaos of confusing forces”70 to the struggle of understanding the principles of “Baukunst”. In 1950, in a text entitled “Architecture and Technology”,

Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos  63 Mies van der Rohe argued that “[t]he chaos […] [should] give way to order and the world would again become meaningful and beautiful”.71

Vis-à-vis photography and cinema: Découvrir la vie, dans ce qu’elle a de vrai Le Corbusier prioritised sketches over photography. This becomes evident when he writes, in L’atelier de la recherche patiente, that “[t]he camera is a tool for idlers, who use a machine to do their seeing for them”.72 It would be interesting to compare this thesis of Le Corbusier with his reflections regarding the relationship of cinema to the expression of truth, in a text entitled “Esprit de vérité”, published in the journal Mouvement, in June 1933.73 In this text, Le Corbusier associated the capacity of cinema to document reality in a way that does not interfere with other faculties of humans apart from vision with its potential to discover life in its truth. He compared human vision with the vision of cinematographic camera and argued that the capacity of cinema to isolate vision makes cinema a tool of discovering “life, in what is true”.74 Le Corbusier had also published a text with the title “L’esprit de vérité”, in the journal L’architecture vivante, six years earlier, in 1927.75 In parallel, a text that is included in L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, published in 1925 had the same title.76 Le Corbusier, in “Esprit de vérité” published in the journal Mouvement in June 1933, argued that cinema offers the possibility to return to the essential things. He related this return to essential things to a process of recovery of consciousness. For him, it was essential to discover life in its truth. He believed that “the simultaneous presence of other perceptions” apart from vision do not permit us to “enter into the truth of human consciousness”.77 He maintained that cinema, because of its capacity to register the reality without the interference of other sensations, is able to grasp the life in its truth. Cinema, for him, is addressed to “eyes that see” and to people who are sensible vis-à-vis truth. Le Corbusier understood cinema as a non-fatigable machine, which is able to reveal “the intensity of the human consciousness through the visual phenomena”, which humans are not able “to discover and record”.78 In 1925, in “L’Esprit Nouveau en Architecture”, Le Corbusier defined as “emotional factors of architecture” what eyes see in order to classify objects into surfaces, forms and lines.79 Five years later, in Précisions, he declares: “I exist in life only on condition that I see”.80 For Le Corbusier, vision and the process of design were inseparably linked. Despite the fact that, normally, the act of seeing precedes that of designing, in some of his writings, Le Corbusier inverted this sequence. Such an instance is his following declaration: “you have to conceive and then […] you have to see”.81 Le Corbusier, in the aforementioned phrase, implied that the process of design permits the architect to acquire the notion of vision. For him, drawing is the means to take possession of the notion of vision. In a

64  Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos conference entitled “Les tendances de l’architecture rationaliste en rapport avec la collaboration de la peinture et de la sculpture” he gave in Rome in 1936 insisted on the importance of the laws of vision for architectural practice and defined architecture as “an activity extending to any construction depending on the laws of vision”.82 Vincent Scully tries to describe the specific way of seeing of Le Corbusier.83 He reminds us that Le Corbusier, since 1918, had a monocular view, given that he lost the view of one of his eyes the same year he wrote Après le cubisme with Amédée Ozenfant.84 This parameter could also be used in order to explain the way he conceived space. I don’t suggest that his way of seeing should be interpreted in a simplistic physiological way, but I claim that it would be interesting to incorporate this parameter in our interpretation of the way Le Corbusier conceived the movement through space and the way he used to produce his interior perspective views. The emergence of the notion of the “promenade architecturale”, which is explicitly used verbally in order to describe the space of the Villa La Roche-Jeanneret, but was latent in earlier projects as well, contributes to the transformation of the interior perspective views into the tool par excellence of Le Corbusier’s drawings. Scully juxtaposes Le Corbusier’s space, which is based on “a clearly conceptual frame of reference close by on all sides”, to Mies van der Rohe’s space, which is “flowing out on the horizontal”.85 Another observation of Scully, which is useful for this study, is a remark regarding the way in which Le Corbusier’s perspectives are constructed. He notes: “Even the smallest spaces are torn apart by shamelessly exaggerated perspectives and the dramatized interaction of unusual shapes”.86 Scully describes the Villa Savoye as “the most optically complex” of all of Le Corbusier’s houses. Le Corbusier attributed much importance to movement and visual perception in relation to it. A remark that is significant for analysing how this house is traversed is the observation that “movement through spaces […] are partly enclosed and partly open, penetrated by the diagonal of the ramp but always enframed”87 (Figure 3.3). The notion of frame is, thus, extremely important for the perception of space for Le Corbusier. Scully also notes that Le Corbusier’s “ultimate concern was with the essence of illusion, with fantasy, myth, and disguise”.88

Notes 1 Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e utopia: Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Bari: Laterza, 1973); Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976). 2 Georges Bataille, La Part Maudite, essai d’économie général, la consumation (Paris: Les Éditions Minuit, 1949); Bataille, The Αccursed Share: an Εssay on General Economy (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 3 Part of Le Corbusier’s personal library were the following books of Albert Camus: Albert Camus, L’exil et le royaume (Paris: Gallimard, Collection

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Figure 3.3 Sketches of Le Corbusier for his project for the Villa Savoye showing how much importance he gave to circulation. Credits: FLC 33491, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22

Folio, 1972); Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Camus, La Chute (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Among them L’exil et le royaume and La Chute have dedications by the author. Le Corbusier highlighted many passages of L’Homme revolté and took notes in the book. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe cited in Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 193. Mies van der Rohe, Letter of May 3, 1963, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts Divisions, Library of Congress, Washington DC. Mies van der Rohe’s notes for his speeches, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts division, BOX 61, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Peter Murphy, David Roberts, Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2004), 108. Ibid. Richard Padovan, “Machine à Méditer”, in Rolf Achilles, Kevin Harrington, Charlotte Myhrum, eds., Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator (Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1986), 18. Ibid. St. Thomas Aquinas, Ouaestlones aisputatae ae verltate. 1256–1259. part I qu. 86. Art. 2. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 57. De veritate q. 1 a. 3. Mies van der Rohe’s drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 35. Text of an address by Mies van der Rohe at a dinner on 17 April 1950, Chicago, Illinois. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Transcript of the interview that Mies van der Rohe gave to Peter Blake for the event “Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright”, held at Columbia University in 196. Peter Blake papers, Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York; Columbia University School of Architecture, Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright: The Verbatim Record of a Symposium Held at the School of Architecture, Columbia University, March–May, 1961 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1963). Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31–32. Reply of Mies van der Rohe to Baron von Lupin’s speech on 2 April 1959 at the Arts Club of Chicago on the occasion of his presentation of The Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Mies drafts for speeches, Speeches, Articles and other Writings, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, BOX 61, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Revised version January 1968, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Mies van der Rohe, “Architecture and Technology”, Art and Architecture, 67(10) (1950), 30. Text of an address that Mies van der Rohe delivered during a dinner on 17 April 1950 at Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Practices of Teaching 1st Year Design in Architecture (Cyprus: University of Cyprus, 2021), 310 – 322, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000375725; Charitonidou, “Mies’s representations as Zeitwille: Grosstadt between impersonality and autonomous individual”, in Michele Caja, Massimo Ferrari, Martina Landsberger, Angelo Lorenzi, Tomaso Monestiroli, Raffaella Neri, eds., Mies van der Rohe. The Architecture of the city. Theory and Architecture (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2023), 229-239, https://doi.org/10.17613/02mh-7c08; Charitonidou, “Mies’s representations as Zeitwille: Grosstadt between impersonality and autonomous individual”, paper presented at the International Conference “Mies van der Rohe. The Architecture of the City”, Politecnico di Milano, 18-19 October 2019, Milan, Italy https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000371187 Ibid. Second and third pages of Revised Version, January 1968, Speeches, Articles and other writings, Box 61, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers, Manuscripts Divisions, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Detlef Mertins, Michael William Jennings, eds., G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 102. Simmel, “The Stranger”, in Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I II, q. 58, a. 2. Nicolas Rubio Tuduri, “Le pavillon d’Allemagne à l’exposition de Barcelone”, Cahiers d’Art, 8–9 (1929): 409–410. Ibid. Georges Bataille, “Architecture”, Documents, 2 (1929), 117. Ibid. Siegfried Giedion, “La maison Savoye à Poissy 1928–1930”, Cahiers d’Art, 4 (1930): 212–215. Mies van der Rohe in Moisés Puente, ed., Conversations with Mies Van Der Rohe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 56. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 435. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I II, q. 58, a. 2. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press), 133. Francesco Dal Co, “La culture de Mies considérée à travers ses notes et ses lectures”, in Claude Eveno, Alain Guiheux, eds., Mies van der Rohe: sa carrière, son heritage, et ses disciples: Centre de creation industrielle, du 1er avril au 15 juin 1987 au Centre Georges Pompidou à Paris (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), 78; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1886). Mies van der Rohe, unpublished lecture, 17 March 1926, reprinted in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 252–256. Nicholas Jolley, “Leibniz: Truth, Knowledge and Metaphysics”, in George Henry, Radcliffe Parkinson, eds., The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 397. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London; New York: Continuum, 2001), 146. Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). Blaise Benoit, “La réalité selon Nietzsche”, Revue Philosophique, 4 (2006), 411.

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4

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture The dissolution of universality

The post-war period is related to an intense re-evaluation of modernist abstraction.1 During the post-war years, the concept of the user was defined in relation to national contexts. One can discern the development of ethnocentric models not only in architecture, but also in cinema. New Brutalism, Neorealism and New Humanism, which are tendencies that emerged during the post-war years, could be interpreted as responses to the identity crisis of the post-war era. Each of these labels is related to a specific ethnocentric character: New Brutalism is associated with Great Britain, while Neorealism and New Humanism are related to the Italian culture. The common characteristics of the different architectural approaches analysed in this chapter are the following: firstly, all of them aimed to respond to the identity crisis of the post-war era; secondly, they paid attention to the everyday and thirdly, they were related to the intention to build for the masses. A tension that is very apparent during the post-war years is that between utopia and reality. The architects under study in this chapter aimed to respond to the urgent need for mass-housing. 2 This is valid for Alison and Peter Smithson in Great Britain and for Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods in France. The latter were “the most influential spokespersons of Team 10 in France”, and their “iconic project for their experimentation with French mass-housing was that of Toulouse-le-Mirail”.3 The adoption of the New Towns programme in 1946, which Martin Pawley analyses, in Architecture Versus Housing, played an important role for the reorientation of architectural epistemology towards mass-housing projects.4 Pawley remarks, in his article entitled “The Need for a Revolutionary Myth”, regarding this shift towards housing during the post-war years: The consumer ethos, presently under mild attack by amateur ecologists in the West, has meanwhile penetrated to the four corner of the globe. The world has become a consumer society unconscious in a deep consumer sleep, thrilled by erotic consumer dreams. Housing itself, in its meaning and purpose, has become a consumer envelope. 5 Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods maintained: “The important question is not “how?” but “why?” or “what for?” Town planning, DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-4

72  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture like architecture, has to help society to achieve its ends, to make life in a community as rich as possible, to aspire to a present utopia”.6 This interest in the reorientation towards the question of “why” is a common characteristic between Candilis-Jossic-Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo. A group of significant episodes that contributed to the intensification of the concept of the user during the post-war years were: for the Italian context, the large-scale transformations that characterised the post-war period, the effects of the European Recovery Program and especially the UNRRACASAS programme,7 the two INA-Casa programmes (1949–1956 and 1956–1963),8 and for the French context, the sociologically-informed methods of the planning and design of the “villes nouvelles” or French New Towns, an ambitious programme officially launched in 1965. To understand how important was the impact of the UNRRA-CASAS housing office, which operated from 1947 to 1963 (when it became ISES, Istituto per lo Sviluppo dell’Edilizia Sociale), one could recall that it was responsible for the construction of more than a thousand villages all over Italy. The mythologies that accompanied the conception of all these villages are significant for unfolding the transformations of architecture’s scope within the Italian context from 1947 to 1963. In parallel, essential for understanding the transformation of architecture’s scope in the post-war years is the effect of the politics of the Welfare State, the so-called “golden age” or “Les Trente Glorieuses”, according to Jean Fourastié, who was the first to coin the term, covering roughly a period spanning from 1945 to the 1970s.9 The concept of dweller corresponding to this generation is culturally determined and the architectural and urban assemblages are unfinished and in a state of becoming. The architects analysed here tended to employ modes of representation that put forward this status of architectural and urban artefact as unfinished. In parallel, ethnographic concerns became central preoccupations for the generation of the architects examined in this chapter, as in the case of Aldo van Eyck, who was interested in the architecture of the Dogon culture.10 In order to understand the significance of the individual-community assemblages for the architects examined in this chapter, we should bear in mind that the fascination with the everyday in the post-war era is related to the idea that inhabitants can function as agents of change. Avermaete employed the expression “epistemologists of the everyday”11 to describe Candilis-Jossic-Woods. Neorealist architects, such as Ludovico Quaroni and Giuseppe Samonà, in a different sense, despite their differences with the Team 10’s philosophy, searched for principles that would permit the fabrication of architectural spaces for the everyday. Rogers and Samonà, who insisted on the necessity of an ethical consciousness of the architect, are often described as neo-humanists. A constitutive characteristic of the post-war movement known as the “New Humanism” is the insistence on the moral and ethical implications of architecture and architects’ responsibility for society’s evolution. As Luca Molinari reminds us, “[w]hen Rogers took over Domus in January 1946, he had two major

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  73 issues to contend with: the urgent need to reconstruct Italy and the cultural and ethical redefinition of Italian society”.12 Shadrach Woods’s notions of the “stem” and “web”, put into question the notions of boundary and formal definition. The rejection of any understanding of the individual-community assemblage as a complete and finished whole was at the heart of Team 10’s stance. Symptomatic of the conception of habitat as an expression of the individual-community articulation and of the rejection of any understanding of the individual-community assemblage as complete is Aldo van Eyck’s thesis, claiming that “[t]he habitat [...] becomes the counter form of the complete individual-community, with individual and community being more than part and whole”.13 The idea of additive composition and dynamic aggregation of successive elements constituted a common preoccupation of the architects under study in this chapter. A common characteristic of their design processes and modes of representation is their fascination with the constantly unsettled urbanistic assemblages and the projects of continuous becoming. Such examples are Alison and Peter Simthon’s Cluster City diagrams, Shadrach Woods’s “stem” and “web”, but also Neorealist architecture’s shift from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to one obtained by means of superposition and expressed through the aggregation of successive elements and the obsessive fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of Tiburtino district. Concepts as “city-territory”, “network”, “open project” and “new dimension” acquired a central role in architectural discourse during this period. What I examine is the impact that the dominance of the open project as compositional device had on the transformation of the concept of the user. Alison and Peter Smithson, in their text entitled “Cluster City: A New Shape for the Community”, gave a new definition of functionalism, explaining how their own conception of functionalism differs from that of the modernists and the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne): we are still functionalists and we still accept the responsibility for the community a whole, but today the word functional does not merely mean mechanical, as it did thirty years ago. Our functionalism means accepting the realities of the situation, with all their contradictions and confusions, and trying to do something with them. In consequence we have to create an architecture and a town planning which — through built form — can make meaningful the change, the growth, the flow, the vitality of the community.14 This redefinition of functionalism by Alison and Peter Smithson is of great significance for grasping the shift that took place when we passed from the generation of modernists, such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to the post-war generation. The most significant mutation was of social nature and concerned the incorporation of the responsibility

74  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture of the architects for society, the communal life and the collectivity. The vitality of the community was what counted most. The emphasis that Peter Smithson placed on the building praxis is apparent in his following declaration: “What we’ve written has arisen from the experience of building the projects. The thoughts don’t arise from intellectual speculation, but from the consequences of building”.15 Peter Smithson said to Mohsen Mostafavi during an interview held in 1998: During the 1940s and the 1950s the cultures which European students expressed in their work – whether Dutch, French or Greek – were still intact, and it was fascinating to see the way in which those cultures impacted on the work. Every generation, has its secrets, and those confidences can’t be shared by people standing outside.16 The diagram of Alison and Peter Smithson that aims to illustrate the “Small Pleasures of Life”17 shows how their conception of the inhabitants differs from that of the modernist functionalism. For them, the quality of how the users experience their houses depended on pleasures related to quotidian activities as working or writing next to the window, the sense of how the sunlight spreads across the floor, the view of the outdoor vegetation from the windows etc. Important for understanding how these “Small Pleasures of Life” were put into play in the quotidian life of Alison and Peter Smithson is their Upper Lawn Pavilion, often referred to as the Solar pavilion, which was their own weekend home in Wiltshire in the countryside in South-West England. The same year that the Alison and Peter Smithson completed their Upper Lawn Pavilion, the “Conference on design methods” was held in London.18 This conference legitimised design as method of investigation. Alison Smithson’s AS in DS: An Eye on the Road is a diary documenting the experiences of the Smithsons travelling from London to her vacation home in Fonthill and elsewhere in their Citroën DS19 (Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2). At the core of AS in DS: An Eye on the Road was the intention to record what she referred to as the “changing sensibilities of a passenger in the car to the Post-Industrial landscape”. A lison and Peter Smithson instrumentalised the concept of “New Brutalism” in order to redefine function. In 1955, three years after the competition for the Golden Lane project, Alison Smithson defined as follows “New Brutalism”: The New Brutalism is the extension of the original functionalism (Constructivism and the Esprit Nouveau) in that it is the poetry of the natural order – a seizing on the essence of the programme, an attitude which is fundamentally anti-academic even in a period when antiacademic has become academic. 20 As it becomes evident from the aforementioned passage, but also in the ensemble of the writings and the drawings of Alison and Peter Smithson, the architects prioritised the anti-elitist aspect of the reinvention

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  75

Figure 4.1 Mock-up of double page spread for Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Delft: Delft University Press, 1983). Artwork by Alison Smithson, 1982. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.

of the architectural programme. For Ludovico Quaroni, what was the most important parameter for the way he intended to challenge the modernist conception of functionalism was the responsibility of the architect for society through the reformulation of his practice in order to

76  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture

Figure 4.2 Passenger’s View in Citroen CX: departing from Upper Lawn: approaching the outer gate (Inigo Jones?) of Splenders, Beckford’s father’s house. Photograph by Alison Smithson taken in March 1982. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.

embrace urban design. Ludovico Quaroni was one of the professors of Manfredo Tafuri. The latter collaborated with him as teaching assistant and would write a monograph on Quaroni, published in 1964, under the title Ludovico Quaroni e lo svillupo dell’architettura moderna in Italia. 21 For Giancarlo De Carlo, the main disadvantage of the modernist approach was the hierarchy of the design process and the ignorance of the role of the user during the phase of decisions. Through his participatory design approach, he proposed a different design procedure that treated the user as protagonist in the decision-making at every stage of the process. All the aforementioned architects established their approaches in reference to the generation of modernists. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier are very present in their discourse. De Carlo, for instance, published a book on Le Corbusier in 1945, 22 while Alison and Peter Smithson published their text entitled “The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture 1917–1937”, in 1965, in a special issue of Architectural Design. 23 The modernist dogma was not demystified. The architectural scope revisited the principles of modernism and tried to adapt to the post-war reality. Defining for understanding how the connection between form and function was challenged is Giancarlo De Carlo’s approach. In a lecture, he gave at Harvard University in December 1967, the latter stated:

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  77 The so-called modern architecture – namely the rationalism of the twenties – stated that dual and self-acting interrelation binds form and function: a function expresses itself through a peculiar form; a form must peculiarly express a function. For a long period that kind of a dogma was very useful to clarify the field of reality and to dispel the clouds of architectural academicism. 24 De Carlo, in the aforementioned passage, interprets the concern of modernist architects about function with their endeavour to reject academicism. He claims that the reductive comprehension of the connection between form and function transformed the functionalist intentions of modernist architecture into “dogma”. 25 The failure of the way functionalism was understood during the modernist era, according to De Carlo, lies in the fact that it remained “too simple and unsophisticated compared with the complexity of reality”. 26 The relation to reality was of great significance for the post-war generation. A meeting point of all the different personas that are examined in this chapter was their intention to incorporate in the scope of architecture the contradictions of post-war reality and post-war societies. De Carlo, sharing such a view, declares, in the aforementioned lecture he gave at Harvard University in 1967, commenting on the problems of the reductive conception of function by the modernists, that “very soon many serious contradictions became evident”. 27 In the same lecture, he identified two opposed approaches that characterised the debates of late sixties, which could be summarised in the schism between modernist authoritarian patterns and non-authoritarian patterns. He believed that the latter, which corresponded to “a new world trying to grow”, 28 could enhance the transformation of society and incorporate the notions of peace, tolerance and intelligence. According to De Carlo the task of contemporary architecture was to prepare “a new environment for the new world”, through the comprehension of “the world in its whole complexity” and the opening of its scope to the “problems of the greater numbers, the larger scale, the widespread communication and participation”. De Carlo blamed Eisenman’s design process for being “abstract manipulation”. 29 He also sustained that meaning should not be defined in advance, since it depends on the impact that users have on it. He was interested on the way users “alter the process in order to give it life as they see it”.30 The modes of representation that characterise the generation of architects analysed here are the diagrams and a specific kind of collage. One of my objectives here is to explain what are the specific characteristics of these diagrams and collages. The collage acquired a different status than that of the previous generation. The fact that Alison and Peter Smithson used images of existing celebrities for their collages show that they tended to reinvent through their architecture the established reality. The contrast between their anti-aesthetic stance and the use of figures that are part of the

78  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture present culture functioned as an invitation to change existing reality and its presuppositions. The diagrams also acquitted an important role during this period. My objective is to show why diagrams express better a conception of the inhabitant as an agent of change. Tom Avermaete employed the term “socius”, which means fellow, sharer, partner, comrade, companion, associate,31 in order to describe this conception of the dweller as agent of change. During the post-war era, Alison and Peter Smithson used the technique of collage to render visible the contrast between the old and the new society. The collage was instrumentalised in order to intensify this contradiction between the old and the new. The interventions they proposed were presented in a way that gave the impression of the unfinished. This strategy implies the opening of architecture to its future progress. The notions of transformation and flexibility were very present in the dominant discourse on architecture during those years. The metaphor of the order of nature was employed by several of the architects I examine, such as Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck. The aforementioned architects used the metaphor of the order of nature to describe how architecture is transformed, on the one hand, and to demonstrate in which sense the connection between architecture and the city should be reconceptualised and adapted to the exigencies of post-war reality, on the other hand. This parallelism between nature and architecture as well as that between life and architecture were also present in the topics of emblematic exhibitions that took place during this period, such as Growth and Form (1951) and A Parallel of Life and Art (1953). As Sarah Deyong underlines, the exhibition Growth and Form, curated by Richard Hamilton, “presented visual evidence of a new aesthetic perception in modern biological imagery”.32 Representative of the endeavour to establish an analogue between nature and architecture is Aldo van Eyck’s “Leaf-Tree, House-City” diagram (1962). In this case, Van Eyck, stating that “tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house”, established an analogy between the leaf-tree assemblage and the building-city assemblage and communicated how essential it was to comprehend building as a component of the organism of the city. Giancarlo De Carlo’s sketches “The ragioni de l’architettura” establish a similar analogy. The nature-architecture assemblage was very present in this period. Jaap Bakema illustrated his article entitled “Architecture as an instrument of man’s self realisation” with “Friendship Diagram” (1961), stating that “[t]he way in which high, low, big and small buildings are spatially related, can help man feel at home in total space”. 33 Bakema’s analogy between the way human beings and buildings are related is also representative of this endeavour, during the post-war period, to establish analogies between human life and architecture. The analogies between nature and architecture and the analogies between human beings and architectural artefacts are significant for understanding what was at stake regarding the dominant conception of architecture’s

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  79 addressee during the post-war period. Concepts as “human association”, “core”, “heart”, “urban life” became central for the epistemological debates and replaced the four functions doctrine that classified the city functions in the following categories: dwelling, working, recreation and transportation. This reorientation of the way architects conceived the relationship between architecture’s addressees and the city signified a shift from a universal logic of functionalism to an understanding of architecture’s experience that was based on the desire to grasp the quotidian aspect of urban life. The fact that the fourth CIAM, held on the ship “Patris II” and in Athens in 1933, was entitled “The Functional City”, shows how important the notion of functionalism had become at the time for architectural epistemology. Other titles that had been also considered for this congress were “The Constructive City” and “The Organic City”. The debates that were held during this congress were based on the assumption that it is possible, through efficient architectural and urban design to there has, to achieve “a balance between the functions of the particular parts”34 of the city. In order to grasp what was the climate in early fifties and how intense was the interest in the connection between architecture and the city at the time, we can recall that the theme of the eighth CIAM, held in 1951 in Hoddesdon in the UK, was the “Core”. This topic reflects the preoccupations that characterised architectural discourse in the early fifties regarding the future of the city. The suburbanisation of the post-war cities led architects to challenge their models regarding the way they conceived the relationship between the urban centre and its peripheries. The architectural debates of the post-war years reflected the ambition of the architects to adapt the scope of architecture in a way that would be capable to maintain the role of architecture in the control of city’s expansion. This reorientation and transformation of the scope of architecture during the post-war years was related to the mutation of the way inhabitation of architectural artefacts and the cities were conceived. The discourse of the first years of the fifties was characterised by intense reflection regarding the humanisation of urban conditions, as it becomes evident from Ernesto Nathan Rogers’s text entitled “The Heart: Human Problem of Cities”, which was published in The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life, which was published in 1952. 35 The aforementioned book was the publication of the eighth CIAM. 36 Van Eyck presented his playgrounds at the eighth CIAM, held in Hoddesdon in 1951, the same year that the “First International Conference on Proportion in the Arts” was organised in the framework of the ninth Triennale di Milano. Albert Camus’s L’homme revolté was published that same year.37 The rejection of the homogeneous functionalist model was replaced by culturally determined models of understanding the way users inhabited buildings and cities. The attraction to the reinvention of the way architectural and urban artefacts are inhabited is reflected in the topic of the ninth CIAM, held in 1953 in Aix-en-Provence, which was the “Grid of

80  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture ­

­

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  81

Figure 4.3 (a and b) Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Re-identification Grid, which was presented at the ninth CIAM in Aix-en-Provence in 1953. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.

Summer School of 1956.42 Quaroni wasn’t among the Italian supporters of the CIAM. The most important effect of the CIAM Summer Schools, held in Venice, was on the pedagogical methods of the IUAV. The theme of the tenth CIAM, which was held in Dubrovnik in 1956, was “towards a chart of Habitat” and its goal was to challenge the assumptions of the Charter of Habitat. During this CIAM meeting, the younger generation of the group, Aldo van Eyck, Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Alison and Peter Smithson, who would form the

82  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture

Figure 4.4 A lison and Peter Smithson. Presentation Panel CIAM 1956. Fold Houses. Credits: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut Collection, Rotterdam.

Figure 4.5 Alison and Peter Smithson, “Fold Houses”, panels for CIAM 10, 1956. Credits: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive BAKE, inv. nr. 0175.

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  83 Team 10, established a new agenda for mass-housing, “Habitat for the Greater Number”. It was during this CIAM meeting that Alison and Peter Smithson presented their “Fold House” (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). Le Corbusier’s diagram regarding the reorientations of the philosophy shows how he conceived the relationship between the vision of the first CIAM meetings and that of the late CIAM meetings. The reaction of the latter against the former could be summarised in the intention to reshape architectural scope in a way that would permit architecture to contribute to what Le Corbusier describes in this diagram as an act towards humanisation. Among the episodes that are defining for understanding what was at stake in the post-war Italian context are the foundation of the Associazione per l’architettura organica (APAO) by Pier Luigi Nervi and Bruno Zevi founded in 1945 and the approach that Rogers developed in Casabella ­Continuità during the post-war years. In 1957, the latter wrote, in “Continuità o Crisi?”: “Considering history as a process, it might be said that history is always continuity or always crisis accordingly as one wishes to emphasize either permanence or emergency”.43

Neorealism between cinema and architecture: Looking for new signs The term Neorealism is associated, on the one hand, with the project of reformulating the nation’s identity in the period immediately after World War II and, on the other hand, with the notion of a privileged instrument for the recuperation of reality either in its immediacy. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze sees World War II as a historical event underpinning divergent taxonomies; the post-war period greatly increases the situations in which we are faced with spaces “we no longer know how to describe, to which we no longer know how to react”.44 Deleuze sees reality as unpresentable and refers to a crisis of the action-image in cinema, which corresponds to the war’s historical caesura. Using the example of Italian Neorealist cinema, he discerns a delinkage between the affection-image, the perception-image and the relation-image, and identifies certain formal inventions that reduce the distance between fiction and reality. The result is the production of a formal or material “additional reality”,45 a kind of formalism in the service of content. This leads Deleuze to ask whether the problem of the real arises in relation to form or to content. I, however, examine the possibility of applying Deleuze’s same question regarding Neorealism to the domain of architecture. It would be interesting to compare Jacques Rancière’s et Gilles Deleuze’s conception of Neorealism. According to James Harvey-Davitt, “[t]he difference between Deleuze’s crystal and André Bazin’s is crucial to understanding the difference between their takes on Roberto Rossellini in general”.46 For Deleuze, Neorealism is linked to time’s subordination to movement. James Harvey-Davitt suggests that Bazin interprets Rossellini’s films as an

84  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture interrogation regarding “the current state of reality”. He claims that Bazin asks “what is the current state of reality?”, while Deleuze asks “what does it mean to perceive the current state of reality? What changes when we perceive it?”. In cinema, Neorealism is associated with the subordination of the image to the demands of new signs. For example, in Neorealism, the montage of representations is replaced by the sequence shot. This leads to the invention of a new type of image, the “fact-image”,47 which address a new form of reality. As Bazin notes regarding Rossellini’s films, the Neorealist reversal of the image’s subordination to montage serves as a critique of how preestablished meanings (in images) are imposed on the spectator. In relation to architecture, this leads us to critique pre-established meanings of spaces in post-war architecture: what new types of signs emerge in architecture as a result of World War II? How can we see a process of virtual becoming taking place in architecture? Neorealist architecture sees constructions in relation to rhythms of aggregation evident in their successive elements. It’s often characterised by the fabrication of a new architectural language that aims to overcome rationalist types of composition. Parallelly, Neorealist architecture is related to a shift from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to one obtained by means of superposition and expressed through the obsessive fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of Tiburtino district. Furthermore, two of its main characteristics are the elaboration of formal discontinuities and the rediscovery of the value of the street. It is also based on the surgical examination of the singularities of the visible world and everyday life. We could claim that its logic unfolds according to impersonal individuation, rather than personal. In the case of Neorealist architecture, special attention is paid to a preindividual notion that through the sheer materiality of living, the powers of a life can be attained. The virtual doesn’t lack reality, but is rather engaged in a process of actualisation that lends it its singularities. The fabrication of architectural assemblages doesn’t imply a translation from the virtual to the actual. Instead, we could claim that every stage of the genetic process is characterised by a coalescence of actuality and virtuality. The resulting indiscernibility is not produced in the mind, but it is inherent in the construction’s material expression. Cesare Zavattini and Guido Aristarco may be regarded as the two chief Italian expositors of Neorealism. Zavattini worked as the screenwriter for Vittorio De Sica and authored several of the masterpieces of Neorealist cinema including Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948). His conception of Neorealism is based on the recognition of the indexicality of the cinematic medium, and is directed towards reducing the mediation that mainstream cinema interposes between reality and its capture of film. As Deleuze reminds us, “Zavattini defines neo-realism as an art of encounter”.48

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  85 Gilles Deleuze also suggests that what “defines neorealism is the build-up of purely optical situations … which are fundamentally distinct form the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism”.49 He also associates Neorealism in cinema with the “passage from the crisis of image-action to the pure optical-sound image”. 50 What interests him is the endeavour of “making visible these relationships of time which can only appear in a creation of the image”. 51 One could claim that Neorealism’s aesthetic is characterised by the following four basic principles: firstly, it should project a moment of everyday life rather than construct a fictional tale; secondly, it should focus on social reality; thirdly, it should use non-professional actors and improvised script so as to preserve the natural speech rhythms of the people it represents; and finally, it should film on location using hand-held cameras, rather than in a studio. Vittorio De ­Sica’s Ladri fi bicicletti (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948) adhered to all the aforementioned principles. Two traits of Neorealism that interests me here are, on the one hand, its intention to examine surgically matters of society, paying an almost documentary attention to the everyday life and, on the other hand, its disposition to the ontological truth of the physical and visible world. Neorealism’s attraction to ordinary and everyday situations are apparent in Deleuze’s interpretation: in an ordinary or everyday situation, in the course of a series of gestures, which are insignificant but all the more obedient to simple sensorymotor schemata, what has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no response or reaction. 52 Hence Rossellini’s great trilogy, Europe 51, Stromboli, Germany Year O: a child in the destroyed city, a foreign woman on the island, a bourgeoise woman who starts to ‘see’ what is around her. Situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once: what tends to collapse, or at least to lose its position, is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action-image of the old cinema.53 André Bazin discerns in Rossellini’s work an effort to never impose a preestablished meaning of images on his spectators. This implies an inversion of the shot’s subordination to montage. My objective is to examine to what extent a similar critique of the imposition of pre-established meaning of spaces on their user took place in post-war architecture. In order to do so, I analyse the strategies that certain architects established in order to reject the imposition of pre-established meaning of spaces on their users. In other words, my aim is to extend the study of the links between war’s irruption and Neorealism’s innovativeness from cinema to architecture. Which would be the specificity of the equivalent virtual becoming of the Neorealist description in cinema if we move from the domain of

86  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture cinema to that of architecture? My starting point when addressing these questions is Bazin’s formal aesthetic criteria vis-à-vis the Neorealism. Bazin identifies Neorealism to the research of a “common denominator between the cinematographic image and the world we live in”. 54 At the same time, he conceives Neorealism as an attempt to refer to “a universe that is not metaphorical and figurative but spatially real”. 55 The term Neorealism extended from the domain of literature and film to that of architecture. Bruno Reichlin, in “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture”, reminds us that “Italian architectural criticism derived the term Neorealism from literature and film”56 and examines how the connection of the stylistic rupture with the existential rupture that characterises Neorealist cinema could be extended to the domain of architecture. Neorealism is related to the situation of Italy in the immediate post-war period, which was characterised by destroyed cities, poverty and a derelict social fabric.57 Neorealist architecture, following the example of Neorealist cinema and literature, intended to find modes of expression that aimed to serve reality. Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) is generally credited as being the first Neorealist film. Deleuze, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, notes that Visconti’s Obsession rightly stands as the forerunner of Neorealism, while Mark Shiel, in Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City, remarks that “although Ossessione is often admired for its images of rural Italy, it actually spends a considerable amount of time in urban settings”. 58 In Neorealist cinema, the inversion of the shot’s subordination to montage is associated to a critique of an imposition of a pre-established meaning of images on the spectator. For instance, Bazin sees in Rossellini’s work an effort to never impose a pre-established meaning of images on his spectators. Neorealism discovers in Rossellini the style and the resources of abstraction. To have a regard for reality does not mean that what one does in fact is to pile up appearances. On the contrary, it means that one strips the appearances of all that is not essential, in order to get at the totality in its simplicity. 59 In Neorealism in architecture, we can discern a passage from a preestablished conception of compositional unity to a conception of unity which can be obtained, a unity by means of the superposition of always different perspectives formed by a succession of diverse spaces brought together by a renewed value of the street. We can detect the elaboration of formal discontinuities through the rediscovery of value of the street. Neorealist architecture seems to recognise that constructions should be thought in relation to the rhythm of the addition of their successive elements. Formally, this recognition is expressed through the obsessive fragmenting of the walls and fences, as in the case of Tiburtino district.

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  87 In Neorealism in cinema, we can discern the mise en œuvre of tactics of formal invention intending to reduce the distance between fiction and reality. Gilles Deleuze refers to a production of a formal or material ‘additional reality’. As far as Neorealist poetics are concerned we are confronted with a kind of formalism in the service of content. A question that is posed in Cinema 2: The Time-Image is if the problem at the level of the real, in the case of Italian Neorealism, arises in relation to form or content60. What would be the answer if we posed the same question in the case of Neorealism in architecture? In the case of cinema, the gesture of Neorealism is associated to the subordination of the image to the demands of new signs, which would take it beyond movement. The epistemological turn that accompanies the emergence of the Neorealist approach in architecture is related to the subordination of the form to a new system of signs. In cinema, following Gilles Deleuze, we can refer to a replacement of the montage of representations by the sequence shot. How is the posing of the problem at the level of reality expressed in cinema and in architecture? In the case of Neorealism in cinema we can talk about an invention of a new type of image, the ‘fact-image’, which aims to address a new form of reality. In Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, for example, objects and settings (milieux) take on an autonomous, material reality, which gives them an importance in them. In the case of cinema, we can refer to the transformation of the characters of the films into a kind of viewers. At the same time, Neorealism in cinema is characterised by the intention to communicate to the spectator that the film he or she is viewing is related to reality. In the case of architecture, the concern of the architect for the experience of the user is a central issue in the discourse developed around Neorealism. Gilles Deleuze, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, underscores that the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual is not produced in the mind but it is an objective characteristic of certain existing images that are characterised by an ambiguous nature.61 The way the role of the architect as intellectual was intensified during the immediate post-war year is important for understanding the epistemological mutations that took place during this period. Jean-Louis Cohen relates “the architect’s self-acknowledged role as intellectual, capable of functioning consistently within a given ideological context”.62 In Rome, Bruno Zevi edited Metron from 1945 to 1954, during the years that are considered as the years of the most intense expression of Neorealism in cinema. He also contributed to the weekly column in Espresso from 1955 to 2000. The project most closely identified with Neorealism was the Tiburtino Housing, (1949–1954) built by Ludovico Quaroni, Mario Ridolfi, and many young Roman architects. However, as Paola Bonifazio reminds us, “[n]one of the sponsored films publishing INA-Casa […] portrayed the Tiburtino”.63 The Quartiere Tiburtino (1949–1954) was designed by a team led by Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi. It was the most apparent

88  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture example of this pseudo-vernacular. The architects of Tiburtino pursued an engagement based on the understanding of architecture as vocative image. Aldo Rossi wrote in 1960 in Casabella Continuità: Tiburtino quarter… after five years we find… perhaps only nostalgic, the sign of a particular moment in our history — a notable and generous moment without a doubt, but incapable of leading to any wider developments, and above all, incapable of following the events of a reality which in all fields is continually breaking down the barriers raised between them64 Jacques Lucan, in Composition, Non-Composition: Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, claims that the concept of composition erodes during the 20th century, with the adoption of neutral architectural devices, the use of aggregative processes, and the adoption of “objective” operations.65 John Rajchman, in “Deleuze’s time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art”, notes that a conception of space defined by simultaneity presupposes an understanding of space based on distinct elements in closed or framed space.66 If we make the assumption that there is a coalescence of the actual and the virtual during the compositional process in which way does the concept of architectural composition change? Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, refers to an activity of interpretation of real activities and real relations between forces, which is expressed in three forms: through symptomatology, typology and genealogy.67 He relates symptomatology to the activity of interpreting phenomena as symptoms whose sense must be sought in the forces that produce them, while typology is related to an understanding of forces according to their evaluation active or reactive. Genealogy, on the other hand, focuses on the evaluation of the origins of forces, relating them to the quality of the will to power as noble or base. How could these three forms of interpretative activity help us to understand the specificity of Neorealism in cinema and architecture? Deleuze makes the crisis of the movement-image dependent on conditions provoked by great transformations in history.68 It is a societal trauma that provokes the modernisation of classic film-form. In fact, the emergence of cinematic modernity is connected to the impossibility for human beings, in a specific geo-historical context, to come to terms with their life situation: “the modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world”69. Instead of perceiving reality as a stage where action is possible, we experience it as a realm in which it is impossible to intervene. Reality appears too powerful, too painful, too exceptional.

The Italo-American exchanges The transatlantic relations played a significant role during this period too. An aspect that is not sufficiently studied by the historians of architecture is

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  89 the impact of Quaroni’s posture on the American pedagogy. Both Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Ludovico Quaroni spent some time in the United States during the fifties, where they taught as Visiting Professors at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University the former and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the latter. Giancarlo De Carlo was appointed Visiting Professor in several schools of Architecture in the United States. Rogers, during his stay in Switzerland, starting in 1943, came closer to Sigfried Giedion. Josep Lluís Sert, in a letter he addressed to Giedion on 8 February 1954, informed him Rogers was Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University for six months.70 An aspect that is not sufficiently studied by the historians of architecture is the impact of Quaroni’s posture on the American pedagogy. The latter spent some time in Boston between 1957 and 1958, teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The research projects that were realised in the framework of Joint Center for Urban Studies are also significant for grasping the importance of the exchanges between European and American pedagogy during the sixties. The Joint Center for Urban Studies, which was supported by the Ford Foundation, was a combined research centre between Harvard and MIT and was established in Boston in 1959. It was founded in conjunction with an inaugural conference entitled “The Historian and the City”71 and played an important role for the Italo-American exchanges during this period. It took up the challenge of addressing intellectual and policy issues confronting a nation experiencing widespread demographic, economic and social changes, with dramatic and far-reaching effects on cities in particular. Jean-Louis Cohen underscores that the “[t]he immediate postwar years were also marked by a significant American presence in Italy”.72 A topic that is at the centre of this study is America’s special relationship with Italy from 1945 to 1948 and the impact that the European Recovery Program, so-called Marshall Plan, had on the cultural transfers between the USA and Italy. A case in which the presence of United Nations becomes evident is that of the UNRRA-CASAS programme, which was developed under the aegis of the United Nations. To understand how important was the impact of the UNRRA-CASAS housing office, which operated from 1947 to 1963 (when it became ISES, Istituto per lo Sviluppo dell’Edilizia Sociale), one can think that it was responsible for the construction of more than a thousand villages all over Italy. Adriano Olivetti played an important role in the Italo-American exchanges, since he was a member of the housing committee from 1951 and vice-president of the agency from 1959. Olivetti’s ideas, thus, had a significant impact on the urbanistic approaches within the post-war Italian context. For him, urban planning was part of a broader political project. In 1947, he founded “Movimento Comunità”, while in 1950 he became president of the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (INU). Giovanni Astengo, a graduate architect of the Politecnico di Torino, who was associated with the “Movement di Comunità”, helped Olivetti reorganise Urbanistica and

90  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture became vice-president of the INU in 1950.73 In early 1952, Olivetti formed the Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento Urbanistico del Canavese, which included the architects Ludovico Quaroni, Nello Renacco, and Annibale Fiocchi and the engineer Enrico Ranieri. Since 1933, he was general manager of the typewriter factory, founded by his father outside of the Italian town of Ivrea. Due to the projects at Olivetti’s initiative Ivrea’s population roughly doubled between the 1930s and 1960s. Olivetti was elected mayor of Ivrea in 1956 and became a member of parliament in the national government in 1958. The epistemological mutations in Europe had an impact on the architectural and urban debates in the North American context too. A symptom of the epistemological transformations is a symposium that was called “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”,74 organised in February 1948 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An episode that is useful to analyse in order to understand the tensions between the European and the American methods vis-à-vis urban design during this period is the 93rd Convention of the American Institute of Architects in Philadelphia. This convention, which was held in April 1961, focused on the topic “Re-designing Urban America”. In its framework, Bruno Zevi gave a talk entitled “The Culture of the Cities”. In this address, Zevi analysed the “interaction of different architectural tendencies in […] city-making, the architects’ role in the process of shifting from city planning to city-making and the philosophy of urban renewal”.75 The processes of city-making and urban renewal were at the heart of the architectural discourse at the time. The central question of this speech was “what a city is or should be today”. Zevi questioned if “the satellite communities on the periphery of the metropolis [is] […] the right way to cope with city expansion” and wonders if a better way is possible. He insisted on the necessity of “urban renewal” and underlined that the mechanisms to address this renewal should be in accordance with the specificity of the context. More specifically, he claimed: “As for urban renewal, it is needed in Los Angeles and Detroit just as much as in Rome, and Venice, but its meaning is totally different here and there”. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, in his article entitled “The Phenomenology of European Architecture”, published in the special issue of Dædalus “A New Europe?”, claimed that “in countries with much more solid traditions in social questions and in town planning where a slow but continuous reform has been going on for years” the phenomenon of architects that challenge the conventions of architecture is less frequent that in countries “with profound contradictions in their economic structures and a slow and difficult evolution in their political institutions”.76 As representative of the second tendency, he referred to the Japanese, American and Italian context. The aforementioned distinction of Rogers shows how ethnocentric was his view. The crisis of the concept of “polis” as a paradigm of the crisis of modernity is very related to the Italian post-war context. It is interesting to examine to what extent the ways in which post-war Italian architects

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  91 reinvent the concept of the city is linked to the hybridisation of imported American models to Italy. As Paolo Scrivano underscores, “[i]n the 15 years following the end of the war, Italy underwent dramatic social and economic change”.77 Scrivano, in Building Transatlantic Italy: Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America, situates the Italo-American exchanges in the larger realm of studies on Americanisation.78 Antonio Gramsci’s Americanism and Fordism79 is useful in order to understand the mechanisms involved in the “economic boom” (“miracolo economico”) of the 1960s in Italy and the way in which the process of Americanisation is linked to the process of modernisation during post-war reconstruction in the Italian context. The southern city of Matera, in the Basilicata region is related to the concept of “meridionalismo”, which is used to designate the social study, economic and cultural problems of the south.80 A large part of its population still lived in the “sassi”, which are a type of primitive house.

Typo-morphology between Neorationalism and Neorealism An important issue for understanding the exchanges between France and Italy regarding the pedagogy of Architecture is the Italophilia in the pedagogical vision of Bernard Huet, and more precisely on Italian borrowings in his use of the notion of “typo-morphology”. Huet understood the process of architectural composition as a system of components that cannot be reduced to syntax or a language and which is welcoming with regard to the reconciliation between form and typology. The conception of “typomorphology” as a mechanism of correspondences between social relations and spatial relations is very present within the context of Neorealism, as it is expressed in the case of the Tiburtino district, where one is confronted to a rejection of a predetermined syntax of urban genetics. Huet considered the architecture of the “Tendenza” to be “realist” and not “formalist”. He conceived its “realistic” approach as a means of overcoming the subjectivity of discourse and of having access to the aspects that characterise typical situations, while defining as “formalist” any conception that attaches itself to purely formal games of language. Huet, in his seminal article entitled “Formalisme – Réalisme”81 opposes these two terms, despite the fact that the notion of “typo-morphology” seems to be an effort to reconcile them. For Huet, the “Tendenza” was based on a conception of architecture as instrument of knowledge. He claimed that this characteristic of the “Tendenza” was in contrast with modern architecture’s functionalism, on the one hand, and an “enlightened” (“eclairé”) rationalism, which treats architecture as an instrument of knowledge. For him, the specificity of architecture resides in its capacity to produce “typical”, general and popular forms. What I argue here is that the boundaries between “Neorealist” and “Neorationalist” approaches are not concrete in the reflection and pedagogical philosophy of Bernard Huet. Taking as a starting point the remark that both Neorealism

92  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture and Neorationalism seek modes of expression in conformity with collective aspirations, my objective is to respond to the following two questions: firstly, what is the difference between the Neorealist and the Neorationalist approach in architecture? Secondly, how could we situate Bernard Huet’s pedagogical and design approach vis-à-vis both approaches? The fact that Ludovico Quaroni interpreted the Tiburtino district project as an endeavour to take distance “from the recent past by rejecting the sterility and inhumanity of Rationalist architecture”82 could serve as a point of departure in order to respond to the aforementioned questions. Silvia Malcovati, in “Realism and Rationalism: An Italian-German Architectural Discourse”, notes that “[t]he understanding of realism in architecture is, from its outset during the late nineteenth century, indissolubly interwoven with the outcomes of rationalism”.83

World War II technologies and architecture: Standardisation as epistemological shift In the exhibition “Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War”84 curated by Jean-Louis Cohen, the materials were chosen and assembled according to the hypothesis that the Second World War was a key moment in the modernisation of architectural theory and practice. In order to convey about the importance of the experience of these years for the transformation of architectural discipline the exhibition documented a series of episodes using artefacts of multiple scales (city to construction details) and forms (industrial objects to architectural plans). Its materials extended from products or posters of mass culture to specialised technical objects. The construction of its narrative was based on a sequence that is thematic rather than chronological. The classification of documentation materials into distinct phases was elaborated in order to shed light on the connections of episodes and on the direct and indirect impact of the war on architectural thinking. The main argument was that the architectural knowledge and discipline between the bombings of Guernica in 1937 and Hiroshima in 1945, a time full of research and transformation, was called upon to mobilise its field of experiences in such a way that war functioned as a creative force giving an unprecedented boost to research on prefabrication, and the use of new materials. The exhibition accomplished in an effective way the purpose of communicating that the contribution of architects to the post-war reconstruction proved to be as strategically indispensable as did the scientists and engineers. Every component of the show, from the interior perspective of Le Corbusier’s and Jean Prouvé’s 1940 “Flying Schools” project to the original model of Buckminster Fuller’s 1945 Dymaxion Dwelling House, as well as from Jean Prouvé’s 1941 bicycle frame to war-time guide books for the home, contributed to convincing the spectator about how methods developed under the pressures of war emergency were applied to peaceful purposes

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  93 extending the field of architectural expertise and knowledge. All the different media, used in the exhibition, functioned as systems of coordinates, making operative the mapping of the historical territory under question. Through a comprehensive documentation of the events, design, and construction that took place during the war this exhibition revealed certain episodes of post-WWII architecture and city planning that had been overlooked because of the invisibility and secrecy during the war. The communication of the main incidents, turning points, and inventions that contributed to the emergence of new types of buildings could not become possible without the detailed documentation and the narrative tricks of the exhibition.85 How did the architects around the globe respond to the changing conditions because of the war? The selection of the components, which serve as sequences of its narrative, was guided by the intention to reveal the main episodes that contributed to the emergence of new visual languages. Its pan-geographic and chronotopic approach makes it explicit that architecture is a major historical actor. The influence of the war-time technological experience on post-war architectural epistemology reminds us that inventions are the amplification of knowledge that give rise to new formalisations and normalisations through the constitution of symbols. An important figure for architecture’s standardisation is Albert Kahn.86 Kahn’s role for the bureaucratisation and typification of architecture should be taken into account if one wishes to understand how the architecture of bureaucracy and the concept of architectural corporation were intensified during the post-war period due to the incorporation of the war technologies in the common architectural practice.87 This shift that was caused because of the typification of the different phases of the architects’ task is linked to the emergence of a new understanding of the concept of user, as it becomes evident in the pages of the journal Plus and especially in its first issue published in December 1938. The emblematic graphic design by Herbert Matter for this issue is telling regarding the mutation of the conception of the user that was taking place already before the beginning of the WWII. The editors of the journal Plus were Wallace K. Harrison, William Lescaze, Willima Muschenheim, Stamo Papadaki and James Johnson Sweeney and among the journal’s collaborators was Albert Kahn. Two years earlier the publication of the first issue of Plus, Ernst Neufert had used “man as Normed Measure” in Bauentwurfslehre.88 The conception of man as normed measure goes hand in hand with the standardisation of the building procedures. This standardisation is associated with the emergence of the organisational diagrams, which could not have been so intensified without the incorporation of the war technologies in the milieus of industries. The concepts of standardisation and typification were so present in Neufert’s thought that he even used an index for his diary. The way organisational diagrams were linked to the mutation of the process of conceptualising architectural practice becomes evident in “The Kahn Organization” diagram, which accompanied an article published in

94  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture The Architectural Record in June 1942, the organisational diagram shown by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, published in Bauen + Wohnen in April 195789, but also in the way Albert Kahn used the concepts of method, management and decentralisation in the case of the General Motors Building.90 Charles K. Hyde, in his article entitled “Assembly-Line Architecture: Albert Kahn and the Evolution of the U.S. Auto Factory, 1905–1940” explains how Albert Kahn incorporated new building materials in factory design. He also analyses the impact of Albert Kahn’s approach on Henry Ford’s factories and other factories of automobile industry in the United States.91 An expression of the impact of standardisation on architectural design strategies is a diagram that the Eames published in Arts & Architecture in 1944.

The city’s ugliness as social engagement: The anti-aesthetics of New Brutalism, Neorationalism and Neorealism Ugliness was instrumentalised as a productive category in post-war Italian architecture. More specifically, I examine how Rogers and Quaroni’s views towards ugliness incorporated the post-war urban reality92 . During the same period, in a different national context, in Great Britain, the New Brutalists developed an anti-art and anti-beauty aesthetics, which was presented in Banham’s emblematic article “The New Brutalism”.93 The incorporation of ugliness in the architectural discourse is linked to the change of the conception of architecture’s user. The “way of life” and the “sensibility of place” were important parameters of the discourse of Alison and Peter Smithson. Banham in his aforementioned article referred to Alison and Peter Smithson’ stance and treated them as main protagonists of The New Brutalism. Despite the divergences between the Smithsons’ and Banham’s interpretation of the transformation of the way of life, which have been highlighted by Dirk van den Heuvel,94 the reinvention of the experience of inhabitation and the ethical implications of the ways of life was central for both. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Changing the Art of Inhabitation: Mies’ Pieces, Eames’ Dreams, The Smithsons shows how important was the reshaping of the way spaces are inhabited for them.95 In 1954, Philip Johnson, in an article that he published in Architectural Review regarding Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hunstanton Secondary School (1949–1954), analysed the relationships between influences of Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons’ stance.96 The Smithsons were attracted to Mies and Eames’ architecture as it becomes evident when one reads their book entitled Changing the Art of Inhabitation: Mies’ Pieces, Eames’ Dreams, The Smithsons97 and from their poster for the lecture “Three Generations” that Peter Smithson gave at Gund Hall at Harvard University, for which they assembled representations of Mies van der Rohe’s House on a Hillside (1934), Eames’ legs of wire chairs (1951) and their own Lucas Headquarters (1973). The perspective view that Alison and Peter Smithson drew for Hunstanton Secondary School is not symmetrical. The most distinctive characteristic of this representation is the use of very

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  95 dense horizontal parallel lines, which could be interpreted as a strategy used to communicate the materiality of the building. The use of very dense horizontal parallel lines is also a trait that we can find in Mies’s drawing. In contrast with the Smithsons, Mies van der Rohe used this strategy in his interior perspective views and its goal was not related to any intension to communicate the materiality of the building. In the case of Mies, the purpose of the use of very dense horizontal parallel lines was to provoke a sense of extension and to erase the effect of the non-frontal surfaces to eliminate the sense of extension. Some years after Alison and Peter Smithson drew the exterior perspective view for Hunstanton Secondary School, they drew an interior perspective view of the spatial formation of the exhibition “A Parallel of Life and Art”, held at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in 1953. This perspective view as the one for Hunstanton Secondary School is characterised by an aesthetic of the unfinished.

Human association as first principle In 1954, the Team 10 presented, in the Doorn Manifesto, their “Scale of Association”, which was a kind of re-interpretation of Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section. This is of great significance for my study because it demonstrates the intention of the Team 10 to replace the four functions – dwelling, work, recreation and transport – of the Charter of Athens by the concept of the “human association”, on the one hand, and to incorporate in the scope of architecture the reflection regarding the impact of scale on the design process, on the other. One can read in the draft statement for the tenth CIAM: “This method is intended to induce a study of human association as a first principle, and of the four functions as aspects of each total problem”.98 Le Corbusier proposed the Charter of Athens in the framework of the fourth CIAM, which has as theme “The Functional City” and was held in 1933 on board of a ship in the Mediterranean during a trip towards Athens. The fourth CIAM was led by the architect Le Corbusier, the urban planner Cornelis van Eesteren and the art historian Sigfried Giedion. The post-war context was characterised by the intention to “re-humanise” architecture. The Doorn Manifesto was pivotal for this project of architecture’s re-humanisation. The rediscovery of the “human” and the intensification of the interest in the proportions are two aspects that should be taken into account if we wish to grasp how the scope of architecture was transformed during the post-war period. Two figures that played the role of protagonists in this process of “re-humanisation” of architecture were Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Giancarlo De Carlo. The latter was interested in Le Corbusier’s work and he played an important role in the dissemination for the theories of the later Italy given that he curated a publication of Le Corbusier’s writings in Italian in the post-war period. The post-war period and, especially, the historical moment that the Team 10 prepared the Doorn Manifesto was not only characterised by the opening of the architectural scope to the urban scale, but it was also closely

96  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture connected to the belief that the design process, its different phases and its hierarchies should be adapted to the scale of the project. This appreciation of the importance of the adjustment of the architectural and urban design strategies to the scale was related to the project of humanisation of architecture. The significance of the “Scale of Association” lies in the fact that it sets up, as Volker M. Welter mentions, a “comparable and synchronic scale that establishes a conceptual relation that binds the smaller communities into a hierarchically structured, larger whole”.99 In other words,

Figure 4.6 Valley Section Diagram as included in Doorn Manifesto for CIAM meeting in Doorn, January 1954. Credits: Het Nieuwe Instituut Collections and Archive, Rotterdam, CIAM Congresses and Team 10 Meetings.

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  97 through the visualisation provided by the diagram in the Doorn Manifesto, which was inspired by Geddes, the Team 10 aimed to articulate a renewed individual-community assemblage (Figure 4.6). Through the adjustment of architectural design processes to the needs related to scale that this diagram suggests, a mutation of the way different scales of architectural and urban interventions are related to each other takes place. This re-articulation of the connections between different scales was part of the Team 10s project to humanise architecture and to infuse into architectural practice the capacity to contribute to the transformation of society. The addressee of the architectural scope is not any more the individual user, and, for this reason, it seems inadequate to reduce the architectural design process to the user’s activities – dwelling, work, recreation and transport. In contrast, what becomes the scope of architecture is the establishment of individual-community assemblages. The question of scale, thus, is what counts most, instead of the categorisation of the satisfaction of the needs related to the user’s activities. The term “function”, and its universal and abstract connotations, is replaced by the culturally defined experience of the citizen and by his interaction with the community to which the citizen belongs. Architecture is, therefore, comprehended as a means that can and should enhance the encounter with the community to which the citizen belongs, transforming the individual into a citizen, and treating the citizens as responsible for the future of their communities. As one can see in the “Pattern of Association” diagram (Figure 4.7), which was published in Team 10 Primer, the attention was focused on the relations between the components of the urban fabric and not on its components per se. Team 10s “version of architecture, while modern, was nevertheless capable of integrating the existing social order of a specific place and society”.100 Alison and Peter Smithson’s drawing for Patio and Pavilion for the exhibition “This is Tomorrow”, which was held at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956, is interesting for this study mainly for two reasons: firstly, its perspective is captivating because it reveals the tensions between axonometric and perspective representation; secondly, its interest lies on the fact that the way the observer sees the drawing, from above and more or less placed centrally in relation to the space formation, is based on principles that are more present in axonometric representation than in perspective representation. Its perspective is fabricated in such a way that the observer has an overall view of the space. Parallelly, the way the observer perceives the spatial formation is not based on the assumption of a hierarchy. These two characteristics are more associated with axonometric representation than with perspective representation. This same technique was employed by Alison and Peter Smithson for one of their drawings for Lucas Headquarters (1973–1974). Alison and Peter Smithson employed, in general, both modes of representation – axonometric and perspective representation. Two examples of axonometric representations are their drawings for the “House of the Future” (1956), designed the same year as the exhibition

98  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture

Figure 4.7 Pattern of association – Each district with a different function. Diagram by Alison Smithson, 1953. This diagram was included in Urban Re-identification Grid, which was presented at the ninth CIAM in Aixen-Provence in 1953. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.

“This is Tomorrow” took place. The drawings for the Alison and Peter Smithson’s Upper Lawn Pavilion, were displayed at this exhibition. That same year, Alison and Peter Smithson designed a prototype for an ideal house for a foreseeable future, then dated in 1981. For this project, which was named as the House of the Future (1956), they drew an axonometric representation. The prototype of the House of the Future was displayed at an exhibition organised by the British newspaper The Daily Mail. What is at the centre of my analysis in this chapter is the examination of the moral aspects of the way in which the concept of the user was reinvented. The moral implications of the role of the user and its responsibility for the transformation of society are related to the reinvention of the aesthetic criteria. City’s ugliness acquired a positive role and functioned as a reminder for the responsibility of the user and the architect in the process of transformation of society. This explains why architecture and urban design were treated as terrains of encounter between the individual and the community. I employ the expression individual-community assemblage in order to refer to this tendency of the post-war architects to conceive their practice as devices that served to invite users to understand how responsible they are for the transformation of society. Reyner Banham, in “The New Brutalism”, paid special attention to the exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art”, held at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in 1953 and curated by Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Banham described New Brutalist aesthetics

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  99 “as being anti-art, or at any rate anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word”.101 A seminal text regarding the Alison and Peter Smithson’s conception of the “New Brutalism” is their short essay in Architectural Design in 1955.102 In order to grasp the subtleties of the notion of the “New Brutalism” and the differences between the way Alison and Peter Smithson and Banham conceived it, we should bear in mind Dirk van den Heuvel’s claim, in “Between Brutalists: The Banham Hypothesis and the Smithson Way of Life”, that “the Smithsons and Banham held very different opinions about the direction of the New Brutalist project”.103 The same year the Smithsons produced their collages for the competition for the Golden Lane Housing project, they also designed a perspective drawing for the exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art” held at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) from September to October in 1953 and organised by Alison and Peter Smithson, and the photographer Nigel Henderson and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, all members of The Independent Group. Reyner Banham stood down as chair of The Independent Group, as he was busy with his Ph.D. thesis at the Courtauld Institute. The Independent Group was closely associated with the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). The Group was interested in the effects of technology and mass media on the arts. Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Colquhoun, Reyner Banham, John McHale and Lawrence Alloway were all members of the aforementioned group. The latter commented on the group’s philosophy and vision as follows: We discovered that we had in common a vernacular culture that persisted beyond any special interest or skills in art, architecture, design or art criticism that any of us might possess. The area of contact was mass-produced urban culture: movies, advertisements, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals.104 The tension between New Brutalist anti-art and anti-beauty aesthetics and Νeorealism and Tendenza’s anti-aesthetic and anti-elitist stance is insightful for recognising what was at stake in post-war debates around the notion of ugliness in relation to the question of morality in architecture.105

Notes 1 Peter Eisenman, Ariane Lourie, eds., Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000 (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 22. 2 Georges Candilis, “L’esprit du plan de masse de l’habitat”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 57 (1954): 1–6. 3 Kenny Cupers, “Designing Social Life: The Urbanism of the Grands Ensembles”, Positions, 1 (2010), 94; see also Marianna Charitonidou, “E-Road Network and Urbanization: A Reinterpretation of the Trans-European Petroleumscape”, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 9(1) (2021): 408–425, https://doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2021.1950045

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Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  101 ethz-b-000423442; Charitonidou, “La vision de l’automobiliste et le regard mobilisé des architectes: Réinventer la perception et la représentation”, Revue Tracés, 3508 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7330681; Charitonidou, “Autopia as New Perceptual Regime: Mobilized Gaze and Architectural Design”, City, Territory and Architecture, 8(5) (2021), https://doi.org/10.1186/ s40410-021-00134-1; Charitonidou, “Denise Scott Brown’s Active Socioplastics and Urban Sociology: From Learning from West End to Learning from Levittown”, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 10(1) (2022): 131–158, https://doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2022.2063939; Charitonidou, “Denise Scott Brown’s Nonjudgmental Perspective: Cross-Fertilization between Urban Sociology and Architecture”, in Frida Grahn, ed., Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2022), 98-106, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035626254-008; Charitonidou, “Ugliness in Architecture in the Australian, American, British and Italian Milieus: Subtopia between the 1950s and the 1970s”, City, Territory and Architecture, 9(20) (2022), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-022-00152-7; Charitonidou, “The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and Automobile Vision”, in Marco Pretelli, Ines Tolic, Rosa Tamborrino, eds., La città globale. La condizione urbana come fenomeno pervasivo/The Global City. The urban condition as a pervasive phenomenon (Turin: AISU, 2020), 684–694, https:// doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000373063 21 Manfredo Tafuri, “Ludovico Quaroni e la cultura architettonica italiana”, Zodiac, 11 (1963): 130–145; Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia (Milan: Comunità, 1964). 23 Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, “The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture 1917–1937”, Architectural Design, 35(12) (1965): 590–643.

26 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

30 Ibid. ­ 32 Sarah Deyong, “An Architectural Theory of Relations: Sigfried Giedion and Team X”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 73(2) (2014), 228. 34 Martin Steinmann, ed., CIAM. Dokumente 1928–1939 (Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1979), 160, 63.

102  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture

36

37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

text is based on a speech that Ernesto Nathan Rogers gave in Hoddesdon during the eighth CIAM Congress in July 1951. Charitonidou, “An Action towards Humanization: Doorn Manifesto in a Transnational Perspective”, in Nuno Correia, Maria Helena Maia, Rute Figueiredo, eds., Revisiting the Post-CIAM Generation: Debates, Proposals and Intellectual Framework (Porto: IHA/FCSH-UNL, CEAA/ESAP-CESAP, 2019), 68–86, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000451108. Albert Camus, L’homme revolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: Grossman, 1973); Le Corbusier, Charte d’Athènes (Paris: Plon, 1943). Charitonidou, “From the Athens Charter to the ‘Human Association’: Challenging the Assumptions of the Charter of Habitat”, in Katarina Mohar, Barbara Vodopivec, eds., Proceedings of the International Conference of the Project Mapping the Urban Spaces of Slovenian Cities from the Historical Perspective (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2020), 28–43, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000426865 De Carlo, “Summary”, Architectural Design, 5 (1960): 204–205; this text was based on the the paper Giancarlo De Carlo prepared for the last CIAM in Otterlo in 1959. Giancarlo Guarda, “Attualità di una scuola”, Casabella Continuità, 199 (1953), 41; Gabriele Scimemi, “La quarta scuola estiva del CIAM a Venezia”, Casabella Continuità, 213 (1956): 69–73; Franco Berlanda, “La scuola del CIAM a Venezia”, Urbanistica, 13 (1953): 83–86. Herman van Bergeijk, “CIAM Summer School 1956”, OverHolland, 9 (2010): 113–124. Rogers, “Continuità o Crisi?”, Casabella Continuità, 215 (1957): 3–4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 171; Deleuze, Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985). Ibid., 1. See also Charitonidou, “Neorealism between Cinema and Architecture: Looking for New Signs”, paper presented at the 9th International Deleuze Studies Conference “Virtuality, Becoming and Life” hosted by the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts, University of Roma Tre, 11 – 13 July 2016, https://doi.org/10.17613/9zh0-3j73; Charitonidou, “Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films as Dispositifs of Alterity: How Borgatari and Popolane Challenge the Stereotypes of Nationhood and Womanhood?”, Studies in European Cinema (2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2021.19 68165; Charitonidou, “Gender and Migrants Roles in Neorealist and New Migrant Films in Italy: Cinema as an Apparatus for Placemaking”, Humanities, 10(2) (2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020071; Charitonidou, “Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema: On Challenging the Stereotypes of National and Gender Identities”, in Wiltrud Simbürger, Sarah Riviere, eds., The Dream Play Challenge Project. Facing up to the Crisis in Residential Living (Hamburg; Berlin: Simbürger Riviere, 2023), 60-67, https://doi.org/10.17613/ vna4-c077; Charitonidou, “Placemaking and alterity in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema: borgatari and extracomunitari vis-à-vis the reterritorialisation of borderland”, paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) 2022 “The Architecture OF Borderlans” co-hosted by Queen’s University Belfast and Manchester School of Architecture, 16, 17 and 20 May 2022, http://dx.doi. org/10.17613/14ey-sb91 James Harvey-Davitt, “Disputing Rossellini: Three French Perspectives”, NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 3(2) (2014), 70. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Ibid., 1.

Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  103

104  Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture

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Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture  105

93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104

105

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 22 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000494637; Charitonidou, “The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of Ugliness”, in Thomas Mical, Wouter van Acker, eds., Architecture and Ugliness. Anti-Aesthetics in Postmodern Architecture (London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350068261.ch-013 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, The Architectural Review, 118(708) (1955), 359. Dirk van den Heuvel, “Between Brutalists. The Banham Hypothesis and the Smithson Way of Life”, The Journal of Architecture, 20(2) (2015): 293–308. Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, Changing the Art of Inhabitation: Mies’ Pieces, Eames’ Dreams, The Smithsons. Philip Johnson, “School at Hunstanton: Comment by Philip Johnson as an American Follower of Mies van der Rohe”, Architectural Review, 116 (1954): 148–152. Alison Smitshon, Peter Smithson, Changing the Art of Inhabitation: Mies’ Pieces, Eames’ Dreams, The Smithson. Draft statement for the tenth CIAM with Patrick Geddes’ Valley Section, CIAM Congresses and Team 10 Meetings, Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Volker M. Welter, “In-between Space and Society. On Some British Roots of Team 10’s Urban thought in the 1950s”, in Van der Heuvel, Max Risselada, eds., Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953–1981 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), 260. Ibid., 262. Banham, “The New Brutalism”, 359. Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, “New Brutalism”, Architectural Design, 25(1) (1955), 1. Van den Heuvel, “Between Brutalists: The Banham Hypothesis and the Smithson Way of Life”, The Journal of Architecture, 20(2) (2015): 293–308. Lawrence Alloway cited in Charles Jencks, “‘Pop-Non Pop’: Contemporary British Architecture”, Architectural Association Quarterly, 1(1) (1969), 57; also cited in Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture (Oxford: Penguin Books, 1973). Charitonidou, “The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of Ugliness”; Charitonidou, “Ugliness in architecture in the Australian, American, British and Italian milieus: Subtopia between the 1950s and the 1970s”.

5

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy The primacy of the observer in the 1970s and 1980s

This chapter focuses on the work of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers. A common characteristic of their approaches is their interest in redefining the concept of the user in architecture in relation to the tension between the individual and the collective.1 This tension, in many cases, takes the form of opposition between individual and collective memory, such as in the case of Aldo Rossi. The starting point of the reflections developed here is the hypothesis that the design strategies of the aforementioned architects aimed to respond to the dichotomy between individual expression and civic responsibility. The analysis of how each of these architects treated the relationship between individual expression and civic responsibility through architectural design is pivotal for understanding their approaches. Central for this chapter is the idea that two concepts that are at the core of the thought of these architects are those of memory and rationality. At the core of the chapter is the evolution of the exchanges between Europe and the United States of America and the role that these exchanges played for architectural debates. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of certain exhibitions and events that had an important impact on the cross-fertilisation between European and American architectural scenes. The impact of the 1968 events, and especially the effect of the student revolts on architecture’s epistemology and pedagogy should also be taken into account. 2 The reorientation of architectural discourse’s dominant questions in relation to the 1968 effects is related to “the rise of the ‘user’ as an object of social scientific knowledge”, 3 which characterised the late 1960s, as Felicity D. Scott has mentioned. In parallel, another significant aspect examined in this chapter is the impact of suburbanisation on the transformation of architectural epistemology. All these parameters are related to the way in which the architects under study treated the relationship between the fictive and the real user. The conflict between architecture’s individual and collective dimension is related to the tension between autonomy and contextualism,4 which was central for the architects treated in this chapter. The antagonism between autonomy and contextualism should be interpreted in relation to the work

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-5

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  107 of Colin Rowe, who was one of the most significant mentors of Peter Eisenman and belongs to the generation preceding that on which this chapter is centred. Therefore, the opposition between contextualism and autonomy could be interpreted as a conflict between Eisenman and his mental “father”. Rowe’s approach was “humanistic”, while Eisenman aimed to reject any kind of humanism in architecture. For this reason, the latter often criticised Rossi for having adopted a humanistic point of view. Another common parameter of the approaches of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers is their desire to free architecture from functionalism. The intention to free architecture from functionalism is defining for their theoretical and design strategies. Rossi, as he stated in an interview given to Diana Agrest for Skyline in 1979, conceived as a starting point of his theoretical and design approach the need to free architecture from functionalism. 5 In Architecture of the City, Rossi refers to a “critique of naïve functionalism”, arguing that “any explanation of urban artefacts in terms of function must be rejected”.6 He also remarks that when one reduces architecture to a way to respond to the question “for what purpose?”, they develop approaches that do not manage to incorporate “an analysis of what is real”.7 It becomes, thus, evident, that, in Rossi’s view, the critique of functionalism was as a way of redefining architecture in such a way that would permit to consider as a key issue of the design process the close understanding of reality. Of great interest for comprehending the design strategies of Rossi and Eisenman, and how they introduced the critique of functionalism in their design process is their conviction that functionalism is reductive. Their theoretical and design processes aimed to shape mechanisms aiming to challenge functionalism. On the one hand, for Rossi, the strategy for avoiding the risks of functionalism was the close understanding of the real. On the other hand, Eisenman’s means for rejecting functionalism were based on a decision to ignore the real. To put it differently, Eisenman’s rejection of functionalism took the form of contempt or ignorance of the role of inhabitants in architecture. The reasons for which Eisenman chose to ignore function are revealed in his following words: Only when the thought-to-be essential relationship of architecture to function is undermined, that is, when the traditional dialectical, hierarchical, and supplemental relationship of form to function is displaced, can the condition of presence, which problematizes any possible displacement of architecture, be addressed.8

Oswald Mathias Ungers and architecture as collective memory Oswald Mathias Ungers was set against pure functionalism and autonomy in architecture, and considered both tendencies reductive. He notes, in Architecture as Theme, regarding his disapproval of blind pure functionalism:

108  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy The need for a thematization of architecture means nothing if not moving away from the blind alley of pure functionalism or – at the other end of the spectrum – from stylistic aberrations and a return to the essential content of architectural language.9 At the core of architectural debates, in the late 1970s, was the interest in the dialectic nature of reality. Ungers underscored reality’s dialectic nature and maintained that the metaphor works by analogy, producing a “Gestalt”, “which directs design activity and defines a global organizational principle”.10 His interest in “Gestalt” brings to mind Rossi’s conception of “architecture as totality, as a comprehensive project, as an overall framework”.11 In parallel, Rossi and Ungers shared their interest in the notion of “fragment”. Rossi, despite his attraction to architectural projects’ totality and comprehensiveness, in A Scientific Autobiography, acknowledges that historical and psychological reasons obstruct any reconstruction of totality, asserting the following: “there can be no true compensation, and […] the only thing possible is the addition that is somewhere between logic and biography”.12 Rossi chose the title “Fragments” (“Frammenti”) for a drawing he made in New York for an American journal and wrote a small text on fragments.13 Ungers shared with Rossi the intention to interpret architectural artefacts as fragments and recognised that “[t]he projects are better characterized as fragments and partial solutions of a very specific area than ideal realisations of a platonic idea” and understood projects as attempts “to get away from the myth of the perfect plan”.14 What Ungers was trying to transmit to his students was the significance of conceiving architectural projects as urban fragments. The 1977 Sommer Akademie in Berlin, organised by Cornell University was devoted to the theme “The Urban Villa”. In its framework, Ungers in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska, wrote the manifesto “The City in the City:  Berlin, A Green Archipelago” (“Die Stadt in der Stadt Berlin: Ein Grünes Archipel”)15 and produced a thought-provoking collage (Figure 5.1). The manifesto that accompanied this collage was based on the hypothesis that the constitutive characteristic of a metropolitan city as Berlin is the coexistence of juxtaposed or antithetic urban units. Its point of departure was the intention to overcome any sense of “unifying vision for the city”. It consisted of ten theses and was based on the idea that architecture should not be treated as “object”, but as “urban element”. The conclusion of the fifth thesis, which concerned the idea of the city in the city, was that “[t] he pluralistic project for a city within the city [was] […] in antithesis to the current planning theory which stems from a definition of the city as a single whole”.16 The manifesto also underpinned the “individualization of the city and therefore a moving away from typization and standardization”. It rejected any kind of unitary image of the city, conceiving urban reality as “a living collage, a union of fragments”. Such a conception of

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  109

Figure 5.1 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kolhoff, Arthur Ovaska, “The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago”, 1977. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne. Image Courtesy of Arthur Ovaska and the Cornell AAP Archives.

the city as the amalgam of antithetical and fragmentary units was based on the conviction that the vividness of the city is the result of the contrast between its components. In parallel, the idea behind such a point of view is that the evolution of cities is related to a dialectic process that always characterised urban reality. The manifesto claimed that “[t]he contemporary vicinity of contrasting elements is from an historic point of view the expression of the dialectic process in which the city has always found itself and still does”.17 Ungers, in “Architecture of Collective Memory: The Infinite Catalogue of Urban Forms”, published in Lotus International in 1979, maintained

110  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy that “[t]he city is a history of formation and transformation, from one type into another, a morphological continuum”. He described city as “a textbook of events representing ideas and thoughts, decisions and accidents, realities and disasters” and underscored that “[i]t is not a uniform picture but a vivid ensemble of pieces and fragments, of types and counter-types, a juxtaposition of contradictions, a dialectical rather than a linear process”. This rejection of any uniform image of the city is at the heart of Ungers’s dialectical thought. Ungers was convinced that “[t]he law of the thesis and antithesis is the content of the city, be it Rome – acting as a global model over the longest time in history, or Berlin – entering the historical scene in the age of humanism”.18 He also claimed that “Berlin and Rome both might act as a model for the concept of the ‘city within the city’”.19 Ungers appropriated the concept of “coincidentia oppositorum,” or unity of opposites, from the medieval philosopher and theologian Nikolaus von Kues, who believed contradictions to be enfolded in God, and unfolded in the world. In Ungers’s analysis of the morphological transformation of simple formal elements, it becomes evident his interest in the notion of fragment.

John Hejduk’s Flatness of Depth and Oswald Mathias Ungers’s city in the city John Hejduk, in “The Flatness of Depth”, assumes “that an architect has an architectural image inside his mind’s eye”. He also claims that this “initial image is like a single still-frame” in architects’ “mind’s eye” is not a “total image”. Hejduk, thus, believed that the starting point of architectural design process is the capture of a fragmentary image. He also maintained that this initial fragmentary image, which he described as “single still-frame”, evolves in time, becoming progressively more concrete through the formation of “a series of images one after the other over a period of time”. He gave much importance to the significance of time for this process of transition from one fragmentary initial image towards a more total one, asserting that this “period of time, no matter how small, is a necessary ingredient for the evolution toward totality”. For him, “total architecture is ultimately made up of parts and fragments and fabrication”. 20 Hejduk’s conception of the relationship between fragments and totality and the progressive metamorphosis of an architectural project from a fragment into a more comprehensive image could be related to the way Ungers and Rossi conceived the relationship between fragments and totality. A comparison between the collage “The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago”, which Ungers produced in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska in the framework of the 1977 Sommer Akademie in Berlin 21 and Hejduk’s “Victims” could help us understand how the aforementioned architects treated the question of fragments. The Fact that both are related to Berlin renders the comparison more interesting. Mark Lee, in “Two Deserted Islands”, remarks that

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  111 “John Hejduk began his theatre masque series two years after Ungers’s ‘Berlin as Green Archipelago’”. 22 The “urban islands” of “Berlin as Green Archipelago” and the units composing Hejduk’s “Victims” function both as islands. However, they are characterised by certain differences. The most significant is the fact that Hejduk’s “Victims” as instable in contrast with the “urban islands” of “Berlin as Green Archipelago”. Mark Lee draws on Deleuze’s distinction between “continental” and “oceanic” islands, which is presented in his short text “Desert Islands”, 23 in order to highlight the contrast between the stability of Ungers’s “urban islands” and the instability of Hejduk’s moving urban components. Hejduk was convinced that “[t]he arguments and points of view are within the work, within the drawings”. He declared: “it is hoped that the conflicts of form will lead to clarity which can be useful and perhaps transferable”. 24 The notion of dialectic was very present in the discourse of the architects under study in this chapter. For instance, the part of issue 359–360 of Casabella of 1971, which included the articles of the American contributors, such as Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Denise Scott Brown and Emilio Ambasz was entitled “A Dialectical Aspect: The City as an Artifact”. There, one can find the following seminal articles: Eisenman’s “Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition”, Kenneth Frampton’s “America 1960–1970. Notes on Urban Images and Theory”, Denise Scott Brown’s “Reply to Frampton” and Emilio Ambasz’s “Institutions and Artifacts for a Post-technological Society”. 25 In parallel, Oswald Mathias Ungers, in “Criteri di progettazione”, published in Lotus International in 1976 and in the catalogue of the exhibition “Europa-America: Architettura urbana, alternative suburbane” in 1978, insisted on the importance of the dialectic process of existent reality. Another notion that was very present in architectural epistemology during the 1970s is that of “Gestalt”. Architectural debates during the 1970s were characterised by a tension between people that tried to still defend a Gestalt approach to architecture and urban design and those who intended to overcome Gestalt theory. Ungers was among the first, while Pierluigi Nicolin, who was head of the editorial staff of Lotus International at the time, belonged to the second. Ungers wrote, in 1976, in “Criteri di progettazione”, which is a text from a lecture he gave that same year at Harvard University: “A metaphor or an image describes the whole idea of design. It works by analogy to create a “Gestalt”, which directs design activity and defines a global organizational principle”. 26 Pierluigi Nicolin remarked, in 1978, that the main characteristic of the shift of pedagogy in the Schools of Architecture within the European context since 1968 was the dissolution of “the myths of creativity and the technology of the creativity […] along with the very “design methods” of which it was to be the Gestaltic complement”. 27 The verb “gestalten” has multiple connotations. On the one hand, “gestalten” refers to the vital and creative forces of becoming, which are

112  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy not known or predetermined at the outset of the process. These forces are retained in the concreteness of the resultant form. On the other hand, “gestalten” is also used to imply a figure or configuration that is a clear and individuated totality. Gestalt psychology is based on the idea that an organised perceptual or behavioural whole has certain properties which cannot be reduced to those of its constituent parts. Georg Simmel writes, in “Bridge and Door”: “The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements”.28 Some questions that raise when one tries to understand Ungers’s conception of the city and the fragment are the following: What distinguishes this approach from the gestalt approach? How we could relate Simmel’s understanding of the formation of “one cosmos out of all the individual elements”29 to Ungers’s dialectical vision of the city? Ungers noted, in “Architecture of Collective Memory: The infinite Catalogue of urban Forms”, published in 1979 in Lotus International: Reality is seen in a morphological sense, the physical phenomena perceived like “Gestalten” in their metamorphosis. This process of thinking is fundamentally an imaginative process of conceptualizing an unrelated, diverse reality through an employment of images, analogies, symbols and metaphors.30

Around the primacy of the observers over the users Michael Sorkin, in “Drawings for Sale”, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator, that is to say “the drawing as artifact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture”. He argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator depends on the interaction of these two different levels. He also underscores that “[a]rchitectural drawing almost inevitably contains a rhetorical element, the essay to produce conviction about the building’s rightness”.31 The architects through the design process address to the “observers”, who are going to interpret their architectural representations, and, to the “users”, who are going to inhabit the spaces they conceive. In the case of Eisenman, Hejduk, Rossi and Ungers’s approaches, due to a congruence of factors that I tried to analyse here, the “observers” became more central than the “users”. The critique of functionalism, the intensification of the interest in the reinvention of the modes of representation and the raise of architectural drawings to art-objects, which are common characteristics of the stances of the aforementioned architects, led to an architecture that prioritised the “observers” of architectural drawings and neglected to a certain extent the inhabitants of space. What is contradictory, however, is that all the aforementioned architects, in their writings, insisted on the importance of human spatial experience.

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  113 Despite Rossi’s insistence on “human living”, “living history” and the experience of architectural artefacts as “objects of affection” – preoccupations that became even more important for him during his stays in the United States of America – the introduction of his theory and the exposure of his drawings to the American scene coincided with a prioritisation of the observers’ role over the inhabitants’ role. In parallel, his interest in collective memory, despite his intention to take into account architecture’s civic effectiveness, contributed to the transformation of inhabitants’ experience into an abstract category. This seems paradoxical if we recall Rossi’s concern, in “The Analogous City”, about the dialectics of the concrete and the “capacity of the imagination born from the concrete”.32 In a similar manner, the conception of the city as a “living collage” and the rejection of any unitary vision of urban reality, as expressed in “Cities within the city”,33 privileged the observers of architectural drawings over the inhabitants of architectural space. The starting point of Rossi’s pedagogy in the United States of America was the intention to capture the reality and the “living history” of American cities and culture. This intention was trapped between two opposing forces: a trend of raising of architectural drawings’ artefactual value that was paralleled by an appraisal of the individual poetic of architects’ task, on the one hand, and a trend of establishing methods capable of rendering what is collective in the city architecture’s primordial instrument and apparatus, on the other hand. The dialectic between the two aforementioned opposing forces could be grasped through the act “of seeing autobiography […] as the nexus of collective history and creation”34 and as their superimposition. As Rafael Moneo has remarked, Rossi’s stance reminds us that “the architect does not act in a vacuum in radical solitude, but, on the contrary, knowing what is collective in the city he, as an individual, could penetrate the ground where architecture belongs, and make architecture”.35 In the case of Hejduk’s approach “[t]he representation of architecture […] is “already” architecture, reality…”.36 Rossi’s encounter with the American milieus and especially the impact that the American exhibitions had on the interpretation of his work impelled an understanding of his œuvre that could be compared with Hejduk’s conception of the representation of architecture as reality of architecture in itself. Rossi’s insistence on the fact that “[a] knowledge of the city […] enables us not only to understand architecture better, but also, above all as architects to design it”37 and his belief that the act of drawing objects can transform them into objects of affection show that he did not wish to reduce his drawing practice to the objective per se of his architecture. His fascination with the “living history” of American cities reveals that he conceived architecture’s individual and collective dimension as always intermixed and superimposed in a never-ending game. In contrast with Hejduk, he would never be satisfied with an understanding of architecture’s reality as architecture’s representation, despite the fact that the way his work was interpreted in the United States of America contributed to the prioritisation of the “observers” of architectural representations over the inhabitants of real space.

114  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy Rossi’s design method was based on an understanding of the act of drawing as a means of transforming architectural and urban artefacts into objects of affection. For this reason, he always conceived compositional process as a mechanism of accumulation of meanings. His disapproval of any tabula rasa conception of architectural forms and of the notion of invention, on the one hand, and his attraction to typology, repetition and living history, on the other hand, reflect his conviction that, firstly, the architect should never act in the vacuum and, secondly, architectural projects cannot refer to a totality, since they are always in a state of becoming and their character is always fragmentary. In his eyes, the individual autobiographical aspect of architects’ creative process and the collective nature of urban reality are in a state of constant interchange. Any fixation to one of them would not satisfy Rossi’s desire to capture architecture and city’s vivid and evolving reality and their ceaseless interaction. His conception of architecture as inseparable from reality becomes evident when he underscored that he had “never regarded architecture as a playing with forms, as being unrelated to reality, deprived of engagement […] but on the contrary as being inseparable from reality”.38 The elaboration of the concept of analogy helped him distance himself from a dialectical understanding of repetition, as it becomes evident in the following statement: I could believe that this is a sort of hopeless circle and it could be thought without a dialectic […] in reality it is not the emotions that prevail but the logical development of the facts, which inside themselves are completed or renewed without duplicating themselves perfectly. 39

The strategies of representation of John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers Aldo Rossi’s stance is characterised by the use of different modes of representation in the same drawing, as, for example, in his drawing for the Cimitero di San Cataldo in Modena entitled “Il Gioco dell’Oca”, drew in 1972, the presentation drawing for the exhibition “Roma interrotta”, drew in 1977, but also the famous collage “La Città analoga” that Rossi produced in collaboration with Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart for the 1976 Biennale di Venezia. In these cases, we are confronted with the use of plans, elevations, axonometric representation and perspective representation in the same drawing. Rossi’s simultaneous use of elevations, bird’s-eye axonometric views and distorted perspectives within the same drawing could be interpreted as an endeavour to enforce multiple viewpoints. Paolo Portoghesi has employed the term “torsione”, or twisting to describe Rossi’s design strategy.40 Rossi also privileged the use of aerial perspective. In aerial perspective or bird’s eye view perspective, the horizon is above the objects. Another characteristic of Rossi’s drawing, which is worth analysing, is the juxtaposition of objects and buildings coming from

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  115 different urban contexts and belonging to different scales in the same drawing, as in the drawing “Teatro del Mondo” produced in 1981. Aldo Rossi’s drawing entitled “Teatro del Mondo”, produced in 1981, was displayed at the exhibition “Aldo Rossi: Theatres”. In this work, he combined objects from daily life – such as a pencil, a packet of cigarettes and a can – with the representation of buildings. This juxtaposition can help us better grasp the role of the notions of “urban facts” (“fatti urbani”) and typology for his design strategy. One of the most thought-provoking features of this drawing is the distortion of the quotidian objects or buildings’ scale. Rossi’s gesture of magnifying objects from daily life to the point that they acquire dimensions close to those of urban artefacts, such as the towerish buildings represented in this drawing, could be interpreted as an active enhancement of the dialogue between them, but also as a manoeuvre for transforming them into constitutive components of the same world. This world, for Rossi, is the world of so-called “collective memory”, which he conceptualised in his seminal book L’architettura della città, drawing upon Maurice Halbwachs’s theory.41 Fusing quotidian objects into buildings and vice-versa is, for Rossi, an apparatus for expressing his conviction that both are “objects of affection”,42 to borrow his own words. In Rossi’s thought, viewing urban artefacts and quotidian objects as objects of affection was part of the process of transforming them into constitutive components of collective memory. Fusing them into each other, he provokes an ambiguity in the perception of the observers of the drawing that could be understood as a strategy intending to infuse the familiar and the recognisable with unreal realities. This ambiguity is further reinforced by his choice to draw the surface on which both urban artefacts and quotidian objects are placed in a way that makes it appear to be either a table or a beach. For Rossi, the act of observing with a formidable sensitivity, not only the landscapes and typologies that constitute cities, but also the quotidian objects that grant our daily life its idiosyncrasy, functioned as a device for inventing new design methods. For this reason, during his travels throughout the United States during his visiting professorships in the 1970s and 1980s, he paid particular attention not only to the variations of the skyscraper, but also to typologies that he encountered for the first time and were quite unprecedented for the eye of a European architect, such as the huge complexes of one-family houses in California, the mobile-homes in Texas and Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Characteristic of this approach are Rossi’s words to Diana Agrest in 1979, during an interview for Skyline: I have seen huge complexes of one-family houses in California and mobile-homes in Texas, as well as the new buildings in New York City, and, personally, I don’t have any moralistic feelings toward these works; I even found them stimulating.43

116  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy Significant – regarding his openness towards the typologies he encountered within the American context – is the fact that for the design studio he taught at the Cooper Union, he chose the theme of the “American Academical Village”,44 inviting his students to work on a new version of Jefferson’s renowned work, on a site of their choice. Aldo Rossi conceived of both quotidian objects and buildings as forms capable of expressing “human living […] in a concrete way”.45 This led directly to his definition of typology: “in fact by the concept of typology I mean the concept of a form in which human living expresses itself in a concrete way”.46 The gesture of distorting the scale of quotidian objects and representing them as large as buildings could be understood as a declaration that both artefacts express human living. For Rossi, they both play a central role in the practice of assembling a mental map of collective memories. This gesture also brings to mind Giorgio de Chirico’s tendency to create “unfamiliar, inconsistent relations by putting different objects together”.47 In parallel, the fact that the urban artefacts are grouped together and represented too close to each other could be comprehended as a declaration that their interaction gives to the city its idiosyncrasy and makes them capable of leaving their traces or even of shaping our mental maps. It is worth noting that the drawing studied in this text was produced in the same year – 1981 – that Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography was published. In this book, he explained his treatment of quotidian objects and buildings as components of the same world: “I subsequently understood that it pleased me because here the limits that distinguish the domains of architecture, the machine, and instruments were dissolved in marvellous invention”.48 Vincent Scully, in his postscript to Rossi’s Scientific ­Autobiography, underscores the fact that in Rossi’s thought there is “no predetermined connection between things, no hierarchy”.49 A second characteristic of this drawing by Rossi, that is present in many of his drawings and deserves to be highlighted, is his particular use of perspective representation, or, to be more precise, his use of a mode of representation that is between perspective and axonometric representation. In this specific drawing, the way the contours of the buildings and the quotidian objects are constructed provokes a confusion related to the nondecidability as far as the use of perspective or axonometric representation is concerned. If we make the hypothesis that this confusion was provoked on purpose, it would make sense to bring to mind the implications of each of these modes of representation for the way the drawings are perceived by their observers, on the one hand, and which might be the effects of the fusion of these implications, on the other hand. Axonometric representation is an object-oriented mode of representation and pushes the observer of the drawing to focus their interpretation of the architectural drawing on the actual relation of the various parts of the represented building, while perspective is a subject-oriented mode of representation. In parallel, axonometric representation does not follow the laws of visual perception. Bernhard

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  117 Schneider’s remark that perspective refers to the viewer, while axonometric representation refers to the object is very useful for understanding the implications of the use of the two aforementioned modes of representation.50 The fact that Rossi often chose to represent buildings using a visual mode that lies between axonometric and perspective representation could be interpreted as a non-decidability regarding the addressee of his drawings. This undecidability to a certain extent questions the generalised view that Rossi was interested in the autonomy of architectural artefacts. His conviction that “there can be no true compensation, and […] the only thing possible is the addition that is somewhere between logic and biography”51 could be related to this undecidability between perspective and axonometric represented that characterises several of his drawing, in the sense that logic could be connected to axonometric representation and biography could be associated with perspective representation. Many scholars have shed light on the fact that one can discern several characteristics of the so-called pittura metafisica in Rossi’s drawings. Apart from the qualities mentioned above, Aldo Rossi’s drawings share with Giorgio de Chirico’s works the tendency to represent the shadows of the represented objects in an extremely intense way. Despite the fact that Rossi’s modes of representation, and especially the deep black shadows in his drawings, are often associated with those of de Chirico, Rossi himself felt closer to the visualisation techniques of Mario Sironi and Giorgio Morandi, as becomes evident in his following words: I think that there is an equivocal relationship that most critics find between my work and de Chirico. Certainly there is a de Chirico-like element in my drawings, but I always find it strange that critics fixated on an immediate association with de Chirico. Because the truth is that my great influence and love is with Sironi and with Morandi. In fact, what Morandi does with his precise bottles and still lifes is part of what I aim to do in my architecture. 52 Rossi’s choice to include shadows in his drawings brings to mind Jules de la Gournerie’s predilection for using shadows in his axonometric representations. In contrast with Gournerie, Auguste Choisy preferred not to use shadows in his axonometric representations. The main aim of the use of shadows is to create an illusion of depth, which is contradictory with axonometric representation’s object-orientedness, but compatible with the undecidability of Rossi’s mode of representation. Worthy of note is also Rossi’s use of two different modes of fabrication of shadows in the drawing under study, as well as in various other works. One is the nervous use of intense black lines, which is applied in the case of less abstract forms, and the other is greyish homogeneous colouring, which is employed in more abstract forms, such as the skyscraper, the can and the packet of cigarettes. We could emit the hypothesis that the first mode is used in the case of

118  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy representations of artefacts that play a more central role in the fabrication of collective memories and when the artefacts represented are conceived as more “loaded with living history”. Rossi remarks, in “The Meaning of Analogy in my Last Projects”, that “the most exciting experience [he] [...] had visiting cities […] is that they [were] […] loaded with living history”. 53 He also states: “we have to reflect in architecture the vitality of experience”.54 The vitality of experience to which Rossi refers is related to the impact of the typologies he encountered on his design strategies, and his representation of shadows in his drawings should be interpreted as a visual device aiming to express the intensity of this vitality. The different modes of fabrication of axonometric views are related to the distinct agendas of the architects under study. In order to understand how the different architects analysed in this chapter use axonometric representations, I discern what are the differences of the way they construct their axonometric views. In 1974–1975, a competition for the Roosevelt Island Redevelopment was sponsored by the State’s Urban Development Corporation. It would be interesting to compare the axonometric views that Ungers produced for this competition and the representations of the different typologies to which they referred (Figure 5.2) with Hejduk’s drawings for the series of Texas Houses, and with Eisenman’s axonometric views for the series of the Houses (Houses I-House X) between 1967 and 1975. Both Hejduk and Ungers presented their plans and axonometric views organised in columns the one mode of representation below the other and at the same scale. Hejduk, for this series of houses, drew the plans and axonometric views of five different typologies on the same sheet of paper and organised in five columns. On the top of each column, he drew the plan corresponding to each house type and below them the axonometric views that corresponded to each plan. For the Texas Houses, Hejduk produced some perspective sketches, interior and exterior, and he also drew human figures. Ungers, in 1975, for his proposal for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island competition, drew on the same sheet of paper seven variations of three different types: the loft type, the standard type and the palazzo type. For each variation of these three types, he drew an axonometric view on the tope and the plan corresponding to each of them below. All axonometric views and plans are illustrated at the same scale, as in the case of Hejduk’s Texas Houses. Ungers, drew this table of the building typologies for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island competition in two versions: a coloured one and one with only the contour of the axonometric views and the plans. In the coloured version, the axonometric views are not inscribed in the context of building blocks, while in the non-coloured version the axonometric views are shown as contextualised within the grid of building blocks. Ungers’s chart of typologies reflects the tension between individual buildings and a unified plan. Despite the affinities between the modes of representation of Hejduk’s Texas Houses and Ungers’s tables of types for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island competition, one can also observe certain differences: firstly,

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Figure 5.2 Oswald Mathias Ungers, competition for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island, 1975. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne.

Hejduk’s axonometric views for Texas Houses are not presented contextualised to any building block, expressing an indifference for their connection with the urban fabric, and secondly, Hejduk, in contrast with Ungers, chose to present two successive axonometric views of each type, each one corresponding to a state of design procedure, that is to say one that correspond to an intermediate version of the generative procedure and shows the interior structure and one that presents the form as complete and closed. This last characteristic of Hejduk’s axonometric views for Texas Houses constitutes a common feature with Eisenman’s successive axonometric views. The Texas Houses are also called Nine-square series. In the case of Texas Houses, which precede Diamond Projects and for the Wall House II, the axonometric views he produced are conventional 30- and 60-degrees axonometric representations, which do not play with the suspension of any sensation of depth. Ungers’s axonometric views for his proposal for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island competition were 45 degrees. Eisenman described House VI, which was designed in 1972, as a turning point in his career. The successive sketches of this house reveal the generative process of the project. During the design process, Eisenman felt that he “achieved a synthesis between the isolation of the architectural sign and the

120  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy generation of the autonomous object”.55 Peter Eisenman, in the catalogue of the exhibition “Architecture II: Houses for Sale”, held at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, noted: “The House El Even Odd is an axonometric object”.56 He has also written regarding this project: So that two opposing axonometric projections of an axonometric model produce what in reality are a normal model and a plan… Thus, the model of this house appears to be simultaneously a three-dimensional object, an axonometric projection, and a plan. 57 Eisenman designed House X in 1975. The book on Eisenman’s House X was published the same year as the American edition of Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City, and Ungers’s Architecture as Theme, that is to say in 1982.58 A year after, in 1983, Klaus Herdeg’s The Decorated Diagram: Harvard architecture and the failure of the Bauhaus legacy was also published by MIT Press.59 Manfredo Tafuri noted, in “Peter Eisenman: The Meditations of Icarus”, which was published in House X: “Eisenman demonstrates a desire to reduce as much as possible the system of ambiguities that he himself had prearranged through the distilled networks of relations”.60 What is of great interest for my research is Tafuri’s remark that Eisenman seeks to ensure “a controlled and one way decodification of […] signs”. This comment is significant for understanding what kind of relationship Eisenman intends to establish between the spectators, observers of his architectural drawings, which is one of the main parameters studied in this PhD thesis. Manfredo Tafuri also underscored that what is at the centre of Eisenman’s approach are the “‘guided’ reconstructions of the compositional process”.61 He claimed that in Eisenman’s axonometric representations for the House series “the semantic system is frozen in order to bring the syntactic system into the foreground”.62 This prioritisation of the syntactic over the semantic aspect of architectural design process is pivotal for grasping Eisenman’s conceptual strategies. Demetrios Porphyrios defines syntactic intents as follows: [t]he exclusive preoccupation with the relational aspects of the elements of an architecture, as opposed to the significatory power of the elements themselves. In that sense, syntax has to do more with composition (topological, relational, etc., arrangement), whereas sensuous imagery focuses exclusively on the significatory dimension (I am aware, of course, that even syntax, in its power to trigger associations, has a significatory dimension as well.63 Mario Gandelsonas notes regarding Eisenman’s syntactical strategy of architectural composition: “In his work, the firm is supposed to establish a linear communicational relation with the ‘interpreter-user’”. Gandelsonas

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  121 remarks that in the case of Eisenman’s axonometric representations “a homology is established between the visual spatial linearity and the linearity of the theoretical explanatory discourse”. He claims that this homology “makes a parallel between the visual development and the verbal discourse”. Very relevant for grasping the addressee of architectural drawings in Eisenman’s case is the fact that “there is a strong illusion that one can reconstruct the process”. As Gandelsonas maintains, “[t]he visual linearity can be seen as the making of another linearity – the theoretical discourse, an attempt to produce an exhaustive and reversible explanation of the complete design process”.64 Tafuri analysed how Eisenman’s architectural representations function and shed light on the frustration of the visual approach caused by his axonometric drawings. More specifically, he claimed that Eisenman’s axonometric drawings force “[t]he eye […] to measure its own lack”. He also noted that in the case of House X, even if the drawing remains on paper, “the system of representation […] coincides […] with the evocation of nonrepresentable processes”. This act of evoking nonrepresentable processes is enlightening for grasping what is the specificity of the relationship between the spectator and the drawings that Eisenman seeks to establish through his axonometric representations. Peter Eisenman underscores that the “making of form can […] be considered as a problem of logical consistency, as a consequence of the logical structure inherent in any formal relationship”.65 This understanding of form-making procedures as an accumulative evolution of logical structure could be interpreted as a reduction of architectural enunciation to signifying enunciation. Eisenman’s axonometric drawings for the House series are indexical diagrams. Eisenman, in Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000, drawing upon Jeffrey Kipnis, proposes a distinction between performative and conceptual reading strategy in order to highlight that OMA’s diagrams for the Jussieu libraries invoke a tactic of performative reading.66 The introduction of this categorisation of textual tools in architecture and the search for their visual analogues is emblematic of the strategies through which Eisenman aimed to redefine architecture’s scope. Eisenman published “Transformations, Decompositions and Critiques”,67 which is an “article” consisting exclusively of four pages of images and more specifically depicting the successive steps of transformations of House I (1967–1968), House II (1969–1970) (Figure 5.3), House III (1969–1971), House IV (1971), House VI (1972– 1976) (Figure 5.4), House X (1975–1977), House 11a (1978) and House El even odd (1980). Eisenman chose to note that the first three houses and House VI were built. In this “article”, he also depicted House V (1972) and House VIII (1973) but without illustrating neither successive steps of transformations of the design strategy nor the photo of the model, in contrast with the other Houses. He also noted: “There is no House IX”. A meeting point of Rossi and Hejduk’s modes of representation is their use of different modes of representation in the same drawing, while a

122  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy

Figure 5.3 Peter Eisenman, Sketches for House II, 1968. Medium: Black ink on paper. Dimensions: 290 × 102 mm. Description: ink sketch with multiple views and sections. Annotations: signed by Peter Eisenman. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1802r. Provenance: Max Protetch.

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Figure 5.4 Peter Eisenman, Axonometric Drawing for House VI, 1972. Medium: black ink, coloured ink, and adhesive vinyl on mylar. Dimensions: 609 × 609 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1280. Provenance: Peter Eisenman; Max Protetch; Private Collection; Edward Cella.

common characteristic of Hejduk’s and Ungers’s drawings is the juxtaposition of axonometric views and plans. Rossi produced some axonometric views, such as the axonometric projections for the Business District (Locomotiva 2) in Turin in 1962 for which he collaborated with Luca Meda and Gianugo Polesello, the Florence Directional Centre in 1977, for which he collaborated with Carlo Aymonino and Gianni Braghieri, the project for the Halles in Paris, published in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1980, the apartments’ building in Südliche Friedrichstadt in Berlin (1981–1988) and the residential and hotel complex in Città Di Castello (1990–1993). Rossi’s axonometric representations have certain affinities with Ungers’s

124  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy axonometric representations. For instance, the axonometric projection for the Business District (Locomotiva 2) in Turin and Ungers and Ovaska’s axonometric projection for the hotel in Berlin (1976) present many similarities. Rossi’s axonometric view for an entry to a competition for a Landmark for Melbourne (1979) and Ungers’s axonometric view for Block 1 IBA on Köthener Strasse in Berlin (1981) are also very similar. Ungers’s axonometric views for the Group of Houses in Marburg in Germany (1976) bring to mind Rossi’s axonometric representation for the Südliche Friedrichstadt Housing Complex. Despite their affinities, they are also characterised by the following differences: in the case of Ungers’s representations the represented buildings are presented as totally isolated, there is no connection to the city, while in the case of Rossi’s representation there are some traces and some buildings that remind us that the housing complex is addressed to an urban context. This aspect of the relation to an urban context is much more present in Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino and Gianni Braghieri’s axonometric view for their proposal for the Halles in Paris. Another note-worthy difference between Ungers and Rossi’s axonometric views is the fact that the latter always use very intense shadows. The use of shadow intensifies the impression that the architectural artefact to which the representation corresponds has a presence in the city, in contrast with Ungers’s axonometric views, which, in many cases, seem to refer to isolated objects. For instance, Ungers, in his axonometric representations for the group of houses in Marburg in 1976, did not use any shadow (Figures 5.5–5.7). In contrast with Ungers, Rossi’s choice to highlight the use of shadow is very present in the axonometric representation for the Florence Directional Centre in 1977 and for Südliche Friedrichstadt Housing Complex. However, a case of axonometric view, where Rossi did not use any shadow is in axonometric projection for the Business District (Locomotiva 2) in Turin in 1962. Ungers, in contrast with Rossi, privileged axonometric representation instead of perspective representation. Nevertheless, Ungers also produced certain perspective representations. Among them, I could refer to the three linear perspective representations for the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, in 1975, and the large exhibition hall for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the perspective collage for the New Berlin project published in Architectural Design in 1991. In this collage, Ungers used existing buildings coming from different historic periods. Among them he also used Louis Kahn’s City Tower project (1952–1953). This strategy of using existing buildings is the composition of urban design representations, either ironic or literal, is significant for understanding how the relationship between the spectator of architectural drawings and their designer changes in the generation treated in this chapter. Ungers in an axonometric drawing for the New Berlin project (1990), published in the same issue of Architectural Design, he used a reproduction of a collage of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project of 1921. In a similar way, Rem Koolhaas used many

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Figure 5.5 Oswald Mathias Ungers, axonometric representation of six houses included in the Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne.

unbuilt projects for the collage “The City of the Captive Globe”, which he produced in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp in 1972. The strategy of using emblematic buildings that are part of the epistemology of architecture accentuates the symbolic aspect of architecture. As I have already mentioned, in the generation examined in this chapter the architectural artefacts and especially the architectural drawings function as language. At the core of Charles Sanders Peirce is the triad “icon”, “index” and “symbol”, while Charles W. Morris draws a distinction between “syntactics”, “semantics” and “pragmatics”. The use of architectural forms that

126  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy

Figure 5.6 Oswald Mathias Ungers, axonometric representation of one of the houses included in the Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne.

formally are easily recognisable since they belong to the epistemology of architecture and constitute typical points of reference of any architectural school’s curriculum reinforces the conception of architectural drawing as “icon”, in Peirce’s sense. According to Peirce, [a] [s]ymbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. […] As such it acts through a Replica.68

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Figure 5.7 Oswald Mathias Ungers, collages and axonometric representations, Project for a Group of Houses, Marburg, Germany, 1976. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne.

128  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy According to Peirce, icons refer by resemblance, indices refer by a natural correlation and symbols refer by convention.69 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, distinguish indices from diagrams. They claim that “[t]he diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality”.70 In the case of diagrams, form of expression and form of content are not distinct. Deleuze and Guattari also maintain that the object of Pragmatics should be understood according to four components: the generative the transformational, the diagrammatic and the machinic component.71 The way Ungers introduced Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project and Louis Kahn’s City Tower project in his own drawings reinforces a reading of architectural artefacts as replicas and accentuates their symbolic dimension. What is of interest for this study is the fact that “the icon and index […] represent something by virtue of factors that are not fully subject to the control of the interpreter”.72 We could claim that despite their common attraction to the use of axonometric representation, Eisenman and Ungers’s approaches are different in the sense that the former focuses on the “syntactics”, while the latter cares more about the “semantics”. “Syntactics” refers to “the study of the syntactical relations of signs to one another in abstraction from the relations of signs to objects or to interpreters”,73 while “semantics” “deals with the relation of signs to their designate and so to the objects which they may or do denote”.74 The distinction between semiology and semiotics is of much importance for this research. Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image underscores the “ambiguity which runs through semiotics and semiology”.75 He denounces the linguistic inspiration of semiology, while he praises semiotics’ consideration of language as related to the materiality of signs and images. The ignorance of Eisenman for the user is an abstraction par excellence from the relations of architectural drawings to the way the buildings would be inhabited. The interpreter has a role, but the control of the way the image would be de-coded rejects any non-relevant association from the activity of the observer’s interpretation. Ungers in the representation to which he introduced Kahn’s City Tower project, he also used collage. Drawing and collage are combined and buildings that belong to different eras come together. In this representation, Ungers chose to represent the urban as a neutral canvas on which the buildings, charged with their symbolic denotations, spring up. There are many commonalities with the collage “Cities with the city. Berlin: A Green Archipelago”. It seems that for Ungers the use of axonometric representation was the best means in order to show from which components his architectural artefacts were composed. For this reason, in contrast with Eisenman, he chose to introduce many details in his axonometric drawings, as in the case of his axonometric views for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Figure 5.8). The hypothesis that Ungers

Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy  129

Figure 5.8 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany, 1984. Credits: Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA), Cologne.

privileged axonometric representation because he intended to promote the capacity of architectural drawing to communicate the way the building would be composed seems to be confirmed when we view an axonometric section for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. There is a tectonic value in his axonometric drawings that is not at present in the drawings of Eisenman. The competition entry was never submitted. Unable to resist his rational instinct, Oswald Mathias Ungers sent only the original entry. The other proposal was soon forgotten, bequeathed to Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he donated it as upon his visit in 1978. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis entered the competition concerning the Roosevelt Island Redevelopment in 1975. Their proposal had many affinities with that of Ungers. Koolhaas and Zenghelis’s entry extended the city grid between Seventy-first and Seventy-fifth streets to Roosevelt Island Redevelopment. Their scheme re-appropriated, in

130  Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy a sense, Manhattan typologies, while Unger’s scheme arranged different housing types (appropriated from Manhattan) around a miniature “Central Park” and sized-to-fit street grid. The emblematic axonometric view that Gouache Koolhaas and Zenghelis drew in gouache and graphite present many similarities with Ungers’s axonometric view for the same competition. In Lotus International, these two proposals were literally juxtaposed. Hejduk avoided the use of perspective representation. In his architectural drawings for the Diamond Series and the Wall House, which are conserved at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), we can find only one perspective drawing.76 He was aware of the impact that different modes of representations have on their observers and of the varying depth of connotations related to each of them. This becomes evident from what he wrote in “The Flatness of Depth”, where he claimed that “[t] he architect […] is able to make isometrics, axonometrics and perspectives into the surface, each one giving a different depth connotation ranging from the shallowness of an isometric to the extended deepness of a perspective”.77 What is note-worthy regarding Hejduk’s drawings for this thesis is that “were not only documents of what had been designed but also, more importantly, records of how the designs were formulated”.78 This is a common characteristic with Peter Eisenman. According to Lorens Eyan Holm, “Rossi is rarely concerned with space per se he is far more concerned with objects”.79 Eisenman and Hejduk focus mainly on the process of formation of objects. Hejduk associated flatness with post-Cubist aspirations and perspective with the Renaissance space. This becomes apparent when he claimed that “[t]he Renaissance space of perspective is a fact; the flatshallow contained flux space of the post-Cubist canvas is a fact”.80 Perspective drawing would have been non-compatible with the philosophy of these projects.

Notes 1 Marianna Charitonidou, “Aldo Rossi’s Transatlantic Cross-fertilization: American ‘Urban Facts’ and Reinvention of Design Methods”, in Marco Bovati, Michele Caja, Martina Landsberger, Angelo Lorenzi, eds., Aldo Rossi, Perspectives from the World. Theory, Teaching, Design & Legacy (Padova: Il Poligrafo, Biblioteca di Architettura series, 2020), 166–173, https://doi. org/10.3929/ethz-b-000438706; Charitonidou, “Le récit autobiographique d’Aldo Rossi: introspection ou rétrospection?”, L’Homme & la société, 208 (2018): 295–318, https://doi.org/10.3917/lhs.208.0295 2 Charitonidou, “The 1968 Effects and Civic Responsibility in Architecture and Urban Planning in the USA and Italy: Challenging ‘nuova dimensione’ and ‘Urban Renewal’”, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 9(1) (2021): 549–578, https://doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2021.2001365; Charitonidou,

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3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

“Between Urban Renewal and Nuova Dimensione: The 68 Effects vis-à-vis the Real”, Histories of Postwar Architecture, 2 (2018): 1–25, https://doi. org/10.6092/issn.2611-0075/7734. Felicity D. Scott, “Vanguards”, e-flux, 64 (2015), https://www.e-flux. com/journal/64/60873/vanguards/ (accessed on 24 May 2017); see also Charitonidou, “Between Urban Renewal and Nuova Dimensione: The 68 Effects vis-à-vis the Real” ; Charitonidou, “Non-hegemonic or ‘other’ voices in the urban design process: Advocacy Planning and Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the late 1960s”, paper presented at the 19th National Conference on Planning History organised by the Society for American City & Regional Planning History, 20 October 2022, https:// doi.org/10.17613/8a29-yh50; Charitonidou, “The Advocacy Planning and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: The Architects’ Renewal Committee and the Democratization of Urban Planning”, paper presented at the 15th International Conference on Urban History, Antwerp, 31 August–3 September 2022, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000402030; Charitonidou, “From Harlem to New H aven: The Emergence of the Advocacy Planning Movement in the late 1960s”, in Dirk van den Heuvel, Soscha Monteiro de Jesus, Sun Ah Hwang, eds. Architecture and Democracy 1965– 1989: Urban Renewal, Populism and the Welfare State (Delft, Rotterdam: TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2019), 41–47, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000402979; Charitonidou, “Revisiting Civic Architecture and Advocacy Planning in the US & Italy: Urban Planning as Commoning and New Theoretical Frameworks”, paper presented at the 110th ACSA Annual Meeting: Empower (ACSA 2022), Los Angeles, 19 May 2022, https://doi. org/10.3929/ethz-b-000528991 Charitonidou, “Revisiting the Debate Around Autonomy in Architecture A Genealogy”, in Soriano Federico, ed., Critic|All II International Conference on Architectural Design & Criticism. Actas Digitales, Digital Proceedings (Madrid: critic|all PRESS, 2016), 99–127, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000442670. Aldo Rossi, Diana Agrest, “‘The Architecture of the City’ (interview with Aldo Rossi)”, Skyline, 2(4) (1979), 4. Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 46. Ibid. Eisenman, “Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida”, Assemblage, 12 (1990): 14–17; Eisenman, “Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida”, in Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 4. Oswald Mathias Ungers, Architettura come tema/Architecture as theme (Milan; New York: Electa Rizzoli, 1982), 10. Ungers, “Criteri di progettazione/Planning Criteria”, Lotus International, 11 (1976), 13. Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans. Lawrence Venuti, Oppositions books (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1981), 8. Ibid. Rossi, “Frammenti”, in Alberto Ferlenga, ed., Aldo Rossi: architetture 1959– 1987 (Milano: Electa, 1987), 7; see also Charitonidou, “Aldo Rossi’s Transatlantic Cross-fertilization: American ‘Urban Facts’ and Reinvention of Design Methods”; Charitonidou, “Le récit autobiographique d’Aldo Rossi: introspection ou rétrospection?”.

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6

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact Autobiography vis-à-vis the design process

The starting point of this chapter is the idea that the architectural artefacts conceived by Aldo Rossi and John Hejduk have an autobiographic character. Their architectural artefacts are characterised by their own personality and their own idiosyncratic characteristics. Hejduk argued that “the idea of the isolated object […] is a twentieth century architectural manifestation”.1 He related the manifestation of object’s isolation to what he called “flatness of depth”. The concern of Rossi and Hejduk about the autobiographic character of the architectural artefacts they conceived pushed them to give an anthropomorphic character to the objects they designed. This hypothesis could be further reinforced by Rossi’s following metaphor: Hundreds and thousands of people can see the same thing, yet each perceives it in his own unique way. It is a little bit like love: One meets many people and nothing happens, and then falls in love with one destined person. 2 Manfredo Tafuri, in “The Theater of Memory”, published in Skyline in 1979, claimed that the “continuous frustration”, which is present in Rossi’s work “becomes the opportunity for a restless renewal of the transformational games of materials reduced to a zero degree”.3 This tendency of Rossi and Hejduk to identify their selves with the architectural objects they designed could explain their fixation with autobiography. Such a stance of identifying oneself with the object they conceive is reflected in the following words of Hejduk, in his text entitled “Flatness of Depth”: “Instead of just being an outside observer or an outside spectator, we can become part of its very interior organism”. Hejduk maintained that “[a]rchitecture is the only art form that affords us the opportunity of being voyeurs who watch the outside from the outside and also of being interior watchers”.4 This remark is important for understanding this process of identification between the architects’ subjectivity and the process of formation of the forms that they conceive. Hejduk also notes, in “Evening in Llano”: “There is a possibility of a vision of architecture that might be interpreted as a fabrication”.5

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-6

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  137 Two issues that are important for understanding Rossi’s thought are: firstly, the difference between the notion of “history” and the notion of “memory”, and, secondly, the operative nature of memory. The concept of recollection-images, which we can find in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, is useful for analysing Aldo Rossi’s conception of the relationship between memory and repetition. Deleuze draws on Henri Bergson’s conception of “recollection-images”. What is at the centre of Deleuze’s analysis of “recollection-images” is that with them “a whole new sense of subjectivity appears”.6 Following Nicolas de Warren, we could claim that “[r]ecollection-images are images of the past actualised in the present with a material support in the perceptual present”.7 Rossi writes in his Quaderni azzuri: “every work or part is the repetition of an occurrence, almost a ritual since it is the ritual and not the event that has a precise form”.8 He also wrote in the introduction of the catalogue of his first solo exhibition in the United States: “with each return there is a change, little modifications and alterations that are developed in the direction of a different discourse”.9 Peter Eisenman, in his preface to the American edition of Rossi’s L’Architettura della città, entitled “The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue”, refers to Jacques Derrida’s Writing and difference.10 He highlights the difference between “memory” and “history” in Rossi’s work: “in the city, memory begins where history ends”11. In order to understand Rossi’s conception of “memory” and especially the distinction between individual and collective memory, we should take into account how Maurice Halbwachs examined the notion of “collective memory” in his book entitled On Collective Memory,12 which was published posthumously. This book played a significant role for the theory that Rossi developed in The Architecture of the City. One of the subtitles of the chapters of Rossi’s book is “The Thesis of Maurice Halbwachs”.13 Rossi draws upon Halbwachs’s theory in order to explain how the individual personality contributes to urban changes.14 Rossi cites the following passage from Halbwachs’ book entitled On Collective Memory: When a group is introduced into a part of space, it transforms it to its image, but at the same time, it yields and adapts itself to certain material things which resist it. It encloses itself in the framework that it has constructed. The image of the exterior environment and the stable relationships that it maintains with it pass into the realm of idea that it has of itself.15 Paolo Jedlowski underscores that “Halbwachs showed how the images of the past conserved by individual and by societies are, more than a substantive reliving of the past”. She also underlines that these images are also “products of active reconstructions”.16 Two questions that are important for understanding the role of memory for architecture are the following: in what sense does memory constitute part of the aesthetic of architecture?

138  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact What is the role that memory plays during the design process? Adrian Forty notes that the “the modern interest in ‘memory’ and architecture has been less concerned with intentional monuments than with the part played by memory in the perception of all works of architecture, whether intentional or not”.17 John Ruskin noted in “The Lamp of Memory”: “We may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her”.18 The attitude of Rossi and his colleagues regarding the importance of well-defined form could be juxtaposed to the point of view described by Alison and Peter Smithson: In an open aesthetic, one senses that an architect is involved in a changing situation; in a closed aesthetic, an architect provides the solution to a problem which has been arbitrarily limited just for the sake of reaching formal definition.19 Alison and Peter Smithson, through this distinction they draw between open and closed aesthetic, privileged open aesthetic and blamed certain architects for having overlooked the dynamic character of architecture because of their intention to maintain the specificity related to well-defined architectural forms. An example of ethnocentric approach in the case of Rossi, which shows the impact that the models of the previous generation had on him is the lecture “Architettura moderna e tradizione nazionale” given in 1954 in the “Conferenza internazionale studenti di architettura” held in Rome. Aldo Rossi was interested in identifying “the specific forces acting upon the city”. 20 He was against quantitative methods of analysis of the effects of urbanisation, and positive vis-à-vis processes of investigation founded on the forces that act within architecture. In 1965, in the framework of the nineteenth congress of the Istituto Nazionale Urbanistica (INU), held in Venice, Rossi along with his colleagues Gianugo Polesello, Emile Mattioni and Luciano Semerani claimed: It is difficult, if not impossible to define the formal and spatial terms of urban transformation within the presumed global vision of planning, because planning often presumes a demiurgic design of the entire territory… From the point of view of the design of the city it is difficult to understand the exact meaning of expressions such as “open project”. These expressions are similar to such very fashionable aesthetic categories as “open form”, and they are mystifications in view of the fact that any design intervention addresses a problem by means of a form. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to emerge.21 Rossi along with certain of his colleagues were doubtful vis-à-vis the focus of the debates on concepts such as “city-territory”, “network”, “open project” etc. They were convinced that the potential of the creative forces of architectural and urban design were embedded in the form making of

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  139 architectural objects. Therefore, they maintained that the starting point should be the design of well-defined and determined architectural forms and not the abstract, quantitatively oriented procedures of urban analysis. Rossi, in “La città e la periferia”, referred to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni and equated contemporary city to urban periphery. He asserted that “[t]he face of the contemporary city is represented for the most part by the periphery, a great part of humanity is born, grows and lives in the urban peripheries”. He perceives the suburbs as “vast zones of the modern city that depart from the old centres and in form show both the lacerations of extremely quick growth and a vitality that is intense and new”. 22 Despite his rejection of concepts such as “city-territory” (città territorio), “network”, “open project” and “new dimension” (nuova dimensione), he understands the vitality embodied in the dynamic of the expansion of the city. The notion of ethos had particular importance for Rossi, as we can see in his manuscripts, in 1966, he had noted down next to the word “typology”, Heracletus’s following statement: “ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων”. This statement could be translated as “‘Daimon’ is a force shaping ‘ethos’”. It could also be interpreted as “the character of man determines his life”. The fact that he noted down the aforementioned statement of Heracletus next to the word “typology” shows that he gave typology a moral value. This makes sense if we reflect on how Heracletus understood the “polis”, that is to say the city, as the place of truth (“aletheia”, «αλήθεια»), the place in which all essential relations are decided. For Rossi, thus, as for Heracletus, the connection to the city was the relation to truth. As we can read in in his preparatory notes for his seminars at the Politecnico di Milano for the academic year 1966–1967, he related the notion of type to the search for a solution that would take into consideration the cooperation between the distributive, stylistic, economic and constructive characteristics of an architectural or urban form. Rossi was also interested in the distinction between “Zivilisation” and “Kultur”.

John Hejduk and two-dimensionality as antidote to depth’s illusion Hejduk’s isometric drawings intended to put forward two-dimensionality. His text entitled “Flatness of Space” begins with the declaration that “[t]he problems of conception, image, representation and realization are haunting obsessions to [his] […] mind’s eye”. 23 His obsession with the expression “mind’s eye” brings to mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s text entitled “Eye and mind” (“L’œil et esprit”), which was originally published in Art de France just before his death in 1961. 24 In this text, Merleau-Ponty understood painting as a “brute fabric of meaning” and paid attention to the way the synergy between vision and movement affects painting’s perception. This distinction between the perception of an object by a fixed and the perception of an object by a moving observer could be related to Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the synergy of vision and movement in the aforementioned text.

140  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact Hejduk notes, in “Flatness of Space”: “I can also contemplate the object moving in relationship to a fixed observer as well as the object fixed to a moving observer”. 25 Hejduk argued that movement affects the way spectators perceive objects and related tactile sensation to a moving spectator and mental perception to a fixed spectator. This dichotomy between tactile sensation and mental perception explains his intention to render three-dimensional spaces twodimensional and to erase as much as possible the sense of depth. His intention to prioritise fixed spectator’s mental perception over moving spectator’s tactile sensation is expressed through his techniques of erasing depth from isometric drawings and is exemplified in his Diamond Houses series and Wall House series. He wrote regarding his strategies of rendering the isometric representation of Diamond Houses two-dimensional: “When the diamond is drawn in isometric and has a plan of more than one floor, a very special phenomenon occurs. The forms appear two-dimensional […] they are three-dimensional, yet a stronger reading of two-dimensionality predominates”26 (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The effect of flatness is very present in an isometric projection for the Wall House 2 he produced in 1973, which is also named A. E. Bye House. This intention of Hejduk to erase as much as possible the sense of depth explains why he avoided perspective. The use of zero degree angle for the fabrication of his axonometric representations for the Wall House 2 in 1973 and the Bernstein House in 1968 intensifies the effect of flatness. An ensemble of factors that one should take into account in order to understand Hejduk’s mechanisms of eliminating the sense of depth are the following: firstly, the interception between different forms in a representation provoke the illusion that forms are closer to the observer of the architectural drawing; secondly, the representation of depth also depends on the revealed number of orientations; thirdly, oblique projection denies single viewpoint and assumes that the observer’s visual angle is unlimited. In the case of perspective representation, the viewpoint determines how much depth is revealed. Despite his avoidance of perspective in the Texas Houses, the Diamond Houses and the Wall Houses (Figure 6.3), a shift of his approach is observed in his sketches for the 1978 Watchtowers of Cannaregio and the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought, in the case of which Hejduk privileged perspective. Hejduk did three projects for Venice: “Cemetery of the Ashes of Thought” (1975), “Silent Witnesses” (1976) and “The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio” (1978–1979). Hejduk notes, in Mask of Medusa: Works 1947–1983: Since 1974, Venice has absorbed the nature of my work. She is the deepest center of my deepest thoughts. The thoughts have to do with Europe and America, abstraction and historicism, the individual and the collective, freedom and totalitarianism, the colors black, white, grey, silence and the word, the literal and the ambiguous, narrative and poetry, the observer and the observed. 27

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  141

Figure 6.1 John Hejduk, B11 from Project B in Album containing 35 pages illustrating the three projects, projects A, B and C Project, 1969. Medium: offset litho. Dimensions: 458 × 458 mm. Description: Third level colour plate, axonometric. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2303.b11. Provenance: Max Protetch.

A paradox that should be highlighted is the fact that Hejduk in the debate that accompanied the exhibition “Europa-America. Architettura urbana, alternative suburbane” argued that “any architect today using perspective as ‘antique’”. More precisely, during the conference that was held on August 1 in 1976 at the Venice Biennale, in the framework of the aforementioned exhibition, he stated: It would appear to me that when perspective was in fact so called “intended” it was a very sophisticated system of seeing. And consequently the so called “reality of seeing” was in fact changed. I also consider any architect today using perspective as ‘antique’. 28

142  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact

Figure 6.2 John Hejduk, Project from Album of photographs of the models for Project A, 1969. Medium: silver gelatin print photographs. Dimensions: 900 × 1400 × 150 mm. Description: Album of photographs of the models for Project A. Small ring-bound album with red cover of black and white photographs of models, elevation and floor plans for disposition of furnishings. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2304. Provenance: Max Protetch.

Figure 6.3 John Hejduk, Drawing for Wall House, 1972. Medium: black and coloured ink on paper – felt tip pens. Dimensions: 85 × 273 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1808. Provenance: Max Protetch.

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  143 This is contradictory with his use of perspective in the “Cemetery of the Ashes of Thought” and “The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio”, especially, if we consider that he worked on these projects during that same period. His aspiration to relate the evolution of the modes of representation to a diachronic axis of epistemological transformations was explicit, as one can see in the diagrams that accompanied John Hejduk, and Donald Wall’s article entitled “John Hejduk Perspectives”, published in Skyline in 1979, where three key periods of “the history of space in architecture29” were associated with certain attitudes towards the observer, but also in the diagram that accompanied his statement for the Graham Award, where he related the past to the use of perspective and the present to flatness of space through the use of axonometric representation, raising at the same time the question regarding the modes of representation corresponding to the future without, however, giving a clue regarding this question. In his statement, he described this diagram as an endeavour to present the history of space in architecture until that time. Hejduk designed Diamond House A, Diamond House B, and Diamond Museum C between 1962 and 1969 (Figure 6.4). Three characteristics of these projects should be highlighted: the compression of the centre, the use of curvilinear surfaces and the voided centre. In the preparatory sketches I had the chance to see at the Canadian Centre for Architecture it becomes evident how important the achievement of centre compression was for him. He employed compositional strategies that could put forward the condensation of space and mass towards the centre. Seeing Hejduk’s sketches, it becomes apparent that he intended to escape from the biases of frontality. In his preparatory sketches for the Diamond Houses series, he notes: “Density towards centre of structure [….] center compression [...] conclusion permits maximum extension from the maximum compression”. He also takes notes that confirm his reference to Mondrian’s unfinished Victory Boogie-Woogie. He remarks in the ‘Diamond Thesis’ regarding his use of curvilinear surfaces: “a curvilinear surface would have the effect of softening the experience and impact as compared to the impact of confronting the diagonal with right-angled conditions”. 30 My research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture on the preliminary sketches of Hejduk for the Diamond Houses series and the Diamond Museum gave me the opportunity to trace certain aspects of the trajectory of their design process. The notes that accompany these sketches were revelatory regarding his design strategies. For instance, in a sheet of paper with some sketches for the Diamond Houses, Hejduk noted: “Absolute compression […] Density towards center of structure […] Architecture criticism where?????? […] Organica e ragione”. It is intriguing how these sketches communicate his experimentation and reflection. On another sheet of paper with sketches for the Diamond Houses, Hejduk notes: “Homage to Boogie, July 5, 1963”. This is an explicit reference to Piet Mondrian’s

144  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact Victory Boogie-Woogie (1942–44), which was Mondrian’s final work. 31 In his statement for Graham Award, one can read regarding the relationship that Hejduk intended to establish between his architectural drawings and the Cubists’ paintings: “As the Cubists in their paintings tipped objects forward towards the picture plane, the isometric projections of the diamonds accomplished the same point of view for architectural drawings”. 32 The issue of centre compression is also central for the Diamond Houses and Diamond Museum. Hejduk insisted on taking notes on his preparatory sketches for this series regarding this aspect. For instance, he often referred in his notes on his sketches to “center compression”. Moreover, he wrote, in his statement for Statement for Graham Award, which is conserved at the Canadian Centre for Architecture: the quality of space is transferred to the observer in the diamond isometrics without using the antique and outmoded form of perspective projection. For the first time the two-dimensionality of a plan can be projected into the three-dimensional isometric, yet appears twodimensional, closer to the two-dimensional abstraction of the plan and perhaps closer to the actual two-dimensionality of the architectural space.33 Hejduk was convinced that fixed observer’s mental perception is preferable than moving observer’s tactile sensation. This becomes evident when he declares that he “believe[s] that full comprehension of an object involves the least physical movement of the observer”. 34 The following phrases are symptomatic of this stance: “I have often thought that when we actually move physically in space our mind takes a secondary position to our body’s tactile sensations. When we physically stop moving and become fixed, our mind takes over the primary position”. 35 What is the point of departure of Hejduk’s text entitled “The Flatness of Depth” is the intention to unfold how the architect treats the tension between the hidden and apparent reality that necessarily accompanies any endeavour of architectural design. Hejduk underlines that “[t[he many masks of apparent reality have made [him] […] wonder, speculate and ponder about the revealed and the unrevealed”.36 Hejduk was interested in responding to the interrogation regarding the extent to which architectural representations are related to illusion or reality. He argued that architectural representations are more related to illusion than reality given that they presuppose a fabrication in the imagination of the designer. He avoided the use of perspective because he believed that it provoked “the most heightened illusion”. 37 In parallel, he maintained that “the representation of a plan may be considered the closest to reality”.38 In “The Flatness of Depth”, he intended to respond to the following three questions: “What is the reality of architecture? What are architectural representations of reality? Is its (architecture’s) realization absolutely necessary?”. 39

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  145

Figure 6.4 John Hejduk, A8 from Project A in Album containing 35 pages illustrating the 3 projects, projects A, B and C showing details for ‘the Diamond House’, 1969. Medium: offset litho prints in styrene box. Dimensions: 458 × 458 mm. Description: Fourth Level projection, axonometric. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 2303.a8. Provenance: Max Protetch.

Michael Jasper, in “Working It Out: On John Hejduk’s Diamond Configurations”, underscores that “Hejduk was never concerned […] with multidirectional spatiality, convinced as he was at the time that the already dense two-dimensionality of architectural space was the only one he should pursue”.40 He also sustains that Hejduk’s representations for Diamond Projects aimed to “place the observer in an oblique state”.41 The fact that Hejduk privileged two-dimensionality, as Eleni Constantin maintained, in “John Hejduk: Constructing in Two Dimensions”, should be understood in relation to Hejduk’s intention to separate the modes of representation from

146  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact the sensation of depth they provoke.42 The representations he produced for the Diamond Projects and the Wall House II or the Bye House constitute outcomes of his exploration of mechanisms that aimed to contribute to the dissolution of any illusion of depth (Figure 6.5). This intention of Hejduk to overcome any illusion of depth can be apprehended if we read what he wrote in “The Flatness of Depth”.43 Hejduk, in this text, analysed the relationship between conception, image, representation and realisation, on the one hand, and tension between the revealed and the unrevealed, on the other hand. These preoccupations are evident in his following phrases: “The problems of conception, image, representation and realization are haunting obsessions to my mind’s eye. The many masks of apparent reality have made me wonder, speculate and ponder about the revealed and unrevealed”.44

John Hejduk’s time-oriented devices of composition John Hejduk’s starting point, in “The Flatness of Depth”, was that the architects during the design process, and the observers of their architectural drawings “are always faced with the illusion of depth-realities”.45 His main

Figure 6.5 John Hejduk, Design for Bye House, c 1973. Medium: Black, green, blue and red ink on letter headed paper with printed title ‘John Hejduk’. Dimensions: 210 × 270 mm. Description: Studies for Bye House, Annotations: inscription HOUSE #21. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 1801. Provenance: Max Protetch.

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  147 objective was to reflect on how the evolution of the form during the process of architectural composition is related to the evolution of what he calls “depth-realities of images”. Given that his main concern is the transformation through time of the images through the process of architectural composition, the notion of time is at the heart of his preoccupations. In other words, the way in which he conceives architectural composition is timeoriented. His interest in time-oriented modes of architectural composition and in the suspension provoked to the observer’s perception when confronted with his drawings is apparent in his following words: “The mind of the observer is heightened to an extreme, exorcising out from a single fixed photographic image all its possible sensations and meanings — a fragment of time suspended, a recapturing of the very image that has been photographed”.46 Gilles Deleuze, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, underlines that [w]hat is specific to the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.47 Deleuze also maintains that the “relationships of time […] can only appear in a creation of the image”.48 A problem that is important for this research is the representability of time in the architectural representation. The aforementioned issue, which is related to memory, is treated by Michael Jasper, in his article entitled “Working It Out: On John Hejduk’s Diamond Configurations”,49 where Jasper analyses the concept of time in Hejduk’s work and sustains that in the case of his Diamond Projects a reversal of the relationship between movement and time took place, comparable to the reversal of the connection between movement and time in cinema during the port-war years, which is described by Deleuze, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze, in this book, referred to a shift from a movement-oriented conception cinema towards a time- oriented conception of cinema. The claim that Hejduk’s compositional strategies were time-centred seems contradictory to the fact that Hejduk chose to give the title “Hors du temps dans l’espace” to one of his articles published in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 196550 and to his article “Out of Time and Into Space”, published in A+U in 1975. 51 What’s the difference of Eisenman’s conception of representation of architecture from Hejduk’s? How do John Hedjuk’s Texas Houses series and Peter Eisenman’s Ten Houses series treat differently the role of memory for the transmission of the narrative of the production of space? Both series of projects paid special attention to the possibility of the spectator to read the process of composition. How does each of the aforementioned architects treat the spectator while reading the project? In order to respond to the aforementioned questions, it would be useful to consult Eisenman’s comment on Hejduk’s work, in the article of the former entitled “In My Father’s

148  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact House Are Many Mansions”, which is the preface of the catalogue of the exhibition “John Hejduk, 7 Houses” held at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York from 22 January through 16 February 1980.52 Peter Eisenman’s design strategy in the case of the Cannaregio Ovest was organised according to the following five successive steps, as he notes down in the diagrams he did: (1) Take a diagonal through the site, (2) Choose a square from the curb grid, (3) from the 4 points of the square draw parallels to the diagonal, (4) Extend the lines of the square out in vectors and (5) Locate new 4 points at points of intersection of parallels and vectors. 53 Eisenman’s House 11a was based on a series of L’s. Eisenman inserted the previously worked out House 11a in the site of Cannaregio, repeating it across the site. The new space generated by the rotation and extension of the Corbusian grid became an appropriate context to locate House 11a in a series of different scales. The House 11a represents the fragmentation of the cube. The design for House 11a was produced by the collision and the deformation of the topological L’s. Eisenman, through the strategy of the collision of three-dimensional L-shaped volumes in the House 11, aimed to challenge the idea of enclosure in the sense that the exterior and interior surfaces are revealed simultaneously. The house is treated as an object that has neither an outside nor an inside. The Bakhtinian theory of chronotope54 provides us with a concept of spatio-temporal frames of narrative, understanding space as a trace of time and time as a marker of space. My research on Hejduk’s production of artefacts the spatial-temporal frame of a narrative plays a key role in the production of meaning. What interests me most about the application of the concept of chronotope to architectural history research is the fact that the chronotope of the narrative relates its interpretation by a reader, a spectator or a researcher with the broader historic, social and cultural setting in which it is interpreted. Chronotope is the coordination of a system of time and space, a form-giving ideology. Mikhaïl Bakhtine deploys this term to name the set of distinctive temporal and spatial features within a work, the phenomenal “feel” of the world produced by the work, which is different from the world in which the work is produced.

Around the conflicts between successive generations Following what Karl Mannheim notes, in “Das Problem der Generation”, we could claim that “a generation is situated in a similar way first of all by the fact that it participates in parallel with the same period of collective becoming”.55 In parallel, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s approach in his book entitled Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction), the way in which each of the two architects conceives the

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  149 role of architecture in social change reflects their respective positions in the social field. 56 The analysis of the impact of the approaches of the previous generations, treated in the previous chapters of this book on the generation studied in this chapter is important for grasping the epistemological shifts. For this reason, I have chosen to examine some cases that are useful for understanding the following three aspects: firstly, the re-conceptualisation of the legacy of the International style by certain protagonists of architectural discourse in the early 1980s; secondly, the re-conceptualisation of the legacy of the Team 10 and the conflicts of the architects examined in this chapter with certain ideas of the Team 10; thirdly, the relationship of the agenda of the Tendenza, which is mostly related to the generation treated in this chapter, despite the fact that the term was originally used by Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who belongs to the generation examined in the previous chapter of the book, with the agenda of Neorealism, which refers to an approach elaborated in the previous generation. The analysis of the differences and affinities between Neorealism and Neorationalism are useful for understanding the architectural approaches analysed in this chapter. A useful remark regarding the impact of the approach of Team 10 on the curriculum of the North-American Schools of Architecture during the late sixties, is the description of Team 10’s agenda in the catalogue of the exhibition “The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal”, an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 1967. One can read there: Prominent in the dialogue are members of Team X, a loose group (outgrowth of CIAM) formed in the mid-fifties to explore elusive values of human associations and aspirations that they felt were disregarded in the stratified, over-generalized solutions of modern city planning. 57 Pivotal for understanding the conflicts between the approaches of the generation examined in this chapter and the approach of Team 10, insightful are the disagreements between Aldo Rossi and Alison and Peter Smithson regarding the opposition between an aesthetic of well-defined form, corresponding to the former, and the open aesthetic of the latter. The tension between the Tendenza and Neorealism concerning their understanding of suburbanisation and urban reality’s ugliness, 58 and the shift from an ethnocentric model, corresponding to Neorealism, to a more international and cosmopolitan model, corresponding to the Tendenza are useful for understanding the epistemological reorientations that took place between the post – war era and the 1970s. In the debates that took place during the XV Triennale di Milano in 1973, one can see the tension between the aforementioned two generations. Important for comprehending how the “International style” was seen in the early 1980s are the issues that were raised in the framework of a conference entitled “The International Style in Perspective”, which was held

150  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University in 1982, that is to say fifty years after the exhibition “The international style: Architecture since 1922”, organised by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). 59 During the conference “The International Style in Perspective”, Anthony Vidler, Bruno Zevi and Kurt Forster gave talks. Their talks were entitled “Modernism in the Museum: Abstraction and History 1925–1940”, “Architecture since 1932: From Avant Garde to Official Style”, “Architecture becomes ‘style’: The Moment of Modernity” respectively. A common characteristic of these lectures was the intention to reveal the reasons for which the label “International Style” contributed to the institutionalisation of the agenda of Modern architecture. Zevi analysed the impact that the exhibition “The international style: Architecture since 1922” had on his own intellectual path, underlying that he was “a remote offspring of this Exhibition [and] […] a testimony of its cultural relevance”. Zevi also underlined that he used the catalogue of the aforementioned exhibition “in the school, especially in relation to Lewis Mumford’s essay on Housing, as a weapon to fight dictatorship”. He, thus, emphasised how he instrumentalised, during his teaching in Rome, the aforementioned exhibition in order to serve his own political agendas against dictatorship. He maintained that the catalogue of the aforementioned exhibition “helped a group of 18-year-old Roman students in their struggle for democratic freedoms”. He also claimed that the modern language of architecture could not be transmitted because it had not been codified. For this reason, it could be accessible but to an elite. He underscored that “dissonant, anti-establishment language of modern architecture, unlike that of modern music and art was not codified”.60 Kurt Forster analysed the phenomenon of making “appear homogeneous ‘the fragmented state of European Architecture’”.61 Klaus Herdeg’s Decorated Diagram: Harvard architecture and the failure of the Bauhaus legacy, 62 which was also published by MIT Press a year after the conference “The International Style in Perspective” is useful for understanding the evolution of the legacy of modernism and its institutionalisation from its import until that time. Ungers drew a distinction between the concept of the city of “collective unconscious” and the concept of the city of “collective memory”. According to him, the criterion for judging if a city could be characterised as a city of “collective memory” is its capacity to provoke an effect of “recollection of places”. He maintained that “[t]he city of the ‘collective unconscious’ […] could be any city, [while] The city of the ‘collective memory’, however, has yet to be realized”.63 The defining characteristic of cities that are based on the idea of collective memory, according to Ungers, is their capacity to convert the recollection of places to the creative idea. Just before Koolhaas’s arrival at Cornell University, Ungers organised a Team 10 studio at Cornell in 1971–72 and invited Jaap Bakema, Charles Polonyi, Reima Pietilä, Giancarlo De Carlo, George Candilis, Peter Smithson

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  151 and Shadrach Woods, which were members of Team 10, to lecture and supervise studio work. Before this studio, Ungers attended the Team 10 meeting in Berlin in 1965. Ungers first attended a CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) meeting in 1953 at Aix-en-Provence. The ideas he presented in “Grossformen im Wohnungsbau”64 could be seen as a turning point of his point of view. In this text, Ungers developed his theory of how “architecture can have a morphological impact on the city”.65 In the late 1970s, Ungers’s approach took a distance from Team 10’s approach.

Aldo van Eyck’s critiques against postmodernism as a humanist device: Between the notion of “configurative discipline” and “the irritant principle of renewal” Of pivotal importance for better grasping Aldo van Eyck’s opposition to the rise of Postmodernism in architecture are the following: firstly, Aldo van Eyck’s position in the debate that took place on 1 August 1976, in conjunction with the exhibition “Europa-America. Architettura urbana, alternative suburbane” held at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido di Venezia in the framework of the Venice Biennale66; secondly, van Eyck’s message to Oswald Mathias Ungers published in 1979 in Spazio e Società under the title “A Message to Ungers from a Different World”67; and, thirdly, van Eyck’s Annual Discourse to the Royal Institute of British Architects entitled “What is and isn’t Architecture, A of Propos Rats, Posts and other Pests (RPP)” in 1981, which was also published in the Italian journal Lotus International that same year.68 The debate accompanying the exhibition “Europa-America: Architettura urbane alternative suburbane”, which was focused on the thematic “Which Modern Movement?”, is symptomatic of “the growing discontent with the idea of modernism”, which had been apparent since the 50s. Among the participants to the exhibition and present in the debate were Giancarlo De Carlo, Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck and Manfredo Tafuri. The interest of this instance lies on the fact that it exemplifies the conflicts between the two generations. In parallel, it is a case where one can discern the tensions between the European and the American stance. Van Eyck, during this debate, expressed his disapproval of Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects: An Introduction to NonPedigreed Architecture, originally published in 196469 and his opposition to Tafuri’s approach. After having declared that he was for “absolute ‘unmitigated functionalism’”, he concluded his contribution to the debate with the following phrases: Humanism has hardly started yet. And an architect is a humanist or he is hardly an architect. According to Peter Eisenman, the Van EyckTafuri confrontation represented an ideological debate that still exists today between the phenomenologists and the socalled conceptualists.70

152  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact The message to Ungers that Van Eyck published in 1979 in Spazio e Società – the journal that was directed by Giancarlo de Carlo, who was member of the Team 10 – is useful text for understanding the differences between Ungers and Aldo van Eyck’s approach. More specifically, in his message to Ungers, van Eyck was set against Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Léon and Rob Krier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Jencks, James Stirling and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). He blamed Ungers for having changed his orientation and for being attracted to the stances of the aforementioned architects. More specifically, van Eyck wrote to Ungers: Architecture does not mean, nor has it ever meant, nor will it ever come to pass that it may some day mean, what people – to sweep them together – like Rossi that other Aldo has tried to make it mean; or Tafuri, the italic Rasputin, or Kriers, considerably multiplied, creeping over Europe; or Denise contradicting Robert and – recently – Robert himself; or Eisenman-Tigerman-Superman-Simpleman; or the Cooper Union circuit; or the Cornell hedgehogs; or Charles semio-something of London who’ll soon be post-post; or you yourself, for that matter, with your – or whoever’s – OMA ma mix. Ideas about ideas about…. Yes about what? Not about anything as substantial as a useful building. […] I got you a reserved prize in 1964 for your Enschede student housing project and, later, saw the one for the Berlin Museum. But neither Hadrian nor these projects can account for your Lutzowplatz Hotel design. Are you doing Sterling a bad turn or is it vice versa? Anyway, turning coordinates by a few degrees, an effective device you used to handle well, is not going to redeem that circular shaft from being like hell.71 Van Eyck in a diagram published in September 1959 in the seventh issue of Forum, which was dedicated to the history of CIAM, shows how he understood the emergence of Team 10 out of CIAM.72 Van Eyck was critical towards the CIAM, claiming that CIAM and the true avant-garde of architecture did not coincide. He believed that the only members of the CIAM that were to a certain extent avant-garde were Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion. Van Eyck also argued that “Team X […] certainly behaved far less traumatically towards the past and history that either CIAM of RPP today”.73 A point of convergence between Van Eyck and the architects he described as “Rats, Posts and other Pests” is the way they treated history and the past. Van Eyck associated the problematic nature of both CIAM and postmodernism with their understanding of time as “mechanical”, to adopt Van Eyck’s own expression. In other words, crucial for understanding van Eyck’s disapproval of postmodernist architecture is the way he conceptualised the past. He remarked regarding his attitude towards the past: Architects today are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either hinders, runs after, or at best keeps up with,

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  153 This, I suggest, is why they tend to sever the past from the future with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike sentimental antiquarian attitude towards the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time.74 Aldo van Eyck, in the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage, experimented with the interrelations between elementary forms, as can be seen in his sketches. His design for the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague, built between 1964 and 1969, could be interpreted as an exercise in the transformation of a box. As Francis Strauven underscores, “a dynamic junction of a nave- and a crypt-like space characterizes the design of this project”.75 As becomes evident upon seeing his diagram for a Congress Building in Jerusalem, Aldo van Eyck was interested in producing built forms that are capable to transform “what is essentially similar” into “different through repetition”.76 The sculpture pavilion in Arnhem, which was designed around the same period, through the distortion of the parallel wall aimed to establish a pattern of movement through the pavilion. The impressive variety of the different sketches he drew for this project are revelatory concerning his appeal to the notion of configurative discipline. Aldo van Eyck’s notion of “configurative discipline”, which was at the centre of his educational and architectural vision, is not compatible with certain postmodernist views. Van Eyck, despite his interest in the polyphony of reality, believed that the coherence of a whole can only be achieved through “configurative discipline”. In “Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline”, published in 1962 in Forum, he expressed his belief in “a single complex system”, maintaining that “[a]ll systems should be familiarized one with the other in such a way that their combined impact and interaction can be appreciated as a single complex system — polyphonal, multirhythmic, kaleidoscopic and yet perpetually and everywhere comprehensible”. He claimed that the intensification of urbanity enforces the connections of urban functions, and human associations. His reflection on “city-forming potential” and “urban transmutability” lead him to maintain that “decentralization of important city-scale elements […] lead to a greater appreciated overall homogeneity”.77 Despite his openness towards polyphonal and multirhythmic systems, he always tended to inscribe this plurality to a gestaltist whole. His attraction to coherence is the key to understand his opposition to postmodernist architecture. Van Eyck always intended to enhance the way architecture is inhabited and enriches human relationships. He believed that the postmodernist architects’ visual and narrative “tricks” threatened architecture’s humanist aspirations. In the CIAM of 1956, Peter Smithson, referring to van Eyck’s Amsterdam playgrounds, maintained that “[a] possible discipline for the mutation of the community structure is the irritant principle of renewal”.78 Van Eyck said regarding the notion of configurative discipline:

154  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact What we are after is a new as yet unknown configurative discipline. It’s hard to tell anybody about it because nobody in the twentieth century has made it his. The discipline is still not ours – the art of humanizing vast numbers hasn’t advanced beyond the first vague preliminaries. Van Eyck related the notion of configurative discipline to what he called “hidden laws of numerical aesthetics”. Characteristically he remarked, in “Steps towards a configurative discipline”: “The necessity to uncover the still hidden laws of numerical aesthetics – what I call harmony in motion – was already brought forward in our first Forum issue”. As it becomes evident in “Steps towards a configurative discipline”, originally published in the third issue of Forum in 1962, Van Eyck was for the achievement of “a far greater comprehensibility at all stages of multiplication but also a radical enlargement of scale in the sense of far greater configurative compactness”. He also insisted on the fact that “[n]o configurative stages of multiplication […] can acquire real significance until they coincide to some extent at least with the illusive configuration of the individual and the collective”.79 Symptomatic of the conception of habitat as an expression of the individual-community articulation, on the one hand, and of the rejection of any understanding of the individual-community assemblage as complete, on the other hand, is Aldo van Eyck’s thesis, claiming that “[t]he habitat […] becomes the counter form of the complete individual-community, with individual and community being more than part and whole”.80 In “Steps towards a configurative discipline”, van Eyck also referred to “the city-like nature of a house and the house-like nature of a city”.81 “The irritant principle of renewal” and van Eyck’s vision regarding the “new as yet unknown configurative discipline” refer to similar epistemological questions.

Between the American and the European context: Pedagogy and transatlantic exchanges During the 1970s, the exchanges between Europe and the United States in the domain of pedagogy of architecture played a significant role. Both Oswald Mathias Ungers and Aldo Rossi taught in the United States of America during this period and they played a significant role in the transatlantic cross-fertilisation of architecture and urban design debates. The former held his position of Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Cornell University from 1969 through 1975, while the latter was invited to teach at Cooper Union, Cornell, Yale University, Princeton University and Harvard University. For both Ungers and Rossi, the transatlantic exchanges were defining for the evolution of their design processes. In parallel, their impact of the pedagogy on both sides of the Atlantic is worth-analysing. Klaus Herdeg, who authored The Decorated Diagram, taught at Cornell University and Columbia University. He joined the Design Staff of the College of Architecture of Cornell University in the fall of 1967, when Chairman

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  155 of Design Department was F. M. Wells and Dean of College of Architecture was Turnham Kelly. The arrival of Herdeg was preceded by one year by Ungers’s appointment as Chairman of the Department of Architecture of Cornell University. During his teaching at Cornell University taught with Alex Kira, who was attracted to the Miesian discipline of design, a first year design studio. The agenda of his course of descriptive drawing entitled “Translation of Three-Dimensional Information to a Two-Dimensional Surface”, which he taught during the spring term of 1969 at Cornell University is close to the questions examined in this book. He also taught a class entitled “Theory and Concept Not Mechanics of Architecture”, which treated the question of how a “complete representation of architectural space” is possible. At the centre of this class was his conviction that “[t]o grasp space, to know how to see it, is the key to the understanding of building”.82 Herdeg wrote, in his preparatory notes for this class: “The teacher must transfer information but also must cultivate dedication towards the architect’s special responsibility in perceiving, depriving and creating order.” Despite his interest in the subtleties of architectural representation, his approach did not challenge the conventions and dogmas of the previous generation. This becomes apparent from the fact that he remained fascinated with notions as order and he believed that a complete representation was possible. Herdeg played an important role for the transatlantic exchanges during that period, because the references he used in his classes were mainly European. Among them I could refer to Bruno Zevi’s Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture. During his classes, Herdeg distributed to his students “The Representation of Space”, “Space: Protagonist of Architecture” and “Architecture: The Unknown”83 – chapters of the aforementioned book of Zevi. As we can see in his preparatory notes for this class, which are conserved in the Avery Drawings & Archives Collection, he paid special attention to the following arguments of Bruno Zevi in Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture: As we have seen, the methods of representing buildings most frequently employed in histories of art and architecture consist of (1) plans (2) façades and elevations and (3) photographs. We have already stated that neither singly nor together can these means ever provide a complete representation of architectural space. Plans. We have said that a plan is an abstraction entirely removed from any real experience of a building. Nevertheless, a plan is still the sole way we have of evaluating the architectural organism as a whole. And every architect knows that the plan, however insufficient in itself, has a distinct primacy in determining the artistic worth of a building.84 Cornell University, during the 1970s showed a particular interest in inviting figures coming from Europe whose work was focused on the connection of architecture to urban design. During this period, both Oswald Matthias

156  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact Ungers and Colin Rowe showed a particular interest in grasping the processes that shape metropolitan city. Ungers first visited Cornell as visiting critic in 1965 and 1967 before being appointed Chairman of the Department of Architecture of Cornell University in 1969, invited by Colin Rowe after they had spent some time together in Berlin. Mario L. Schack took Ungers’s Chairman’s position in 1975, but the latter continued teaching studios at Cornell University until 1977. Ungers’s pedagogy was characterised by an understanding of the building as a true engine of metropolitan life. Ungers paid special attention to the morphological principles of design. Ungers’s entry for the Roosevelt Redevelopment Island competition dates one year before his collaboration with Rossi at Cornell University. Among the European Visiting Professors at Cornell University, next to Aldo Rossi, figure Léon Krier and Rem Koolhaas. Ungers invited Krier to Cornell University in 1975 and had been Koolhaas’s mentor and colleague during his Harkness Fellowship sojourn at Cornell University in the autumn of 1972. Around the same period, Ungers contributed to the conference “Architectural Education USA: Issues, Ideas and People” held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 12 and 13 November 1971. The aforementioned conference coincided with the opening of the exhibition “Education of an Architect: A Point of View”, also held at the MoMA, which presented the pedagogical vision Cooper Union’s School of Architecture.85 Aldo Rossi’s interest in the work of Ungers dated back to 1960, when he wrote the article “Un giovane architetto tedesco: Oswald Mathias Ungers” for Casabella after a trip he made with Vittorio Gregotti and Giorgio Grassi to Cologne, where he learnt about Ungers’s work.86 In 1977, Ungers’s taught at Cornell University a seminar on Urban and Regional Design and a studio “Urban Housing Developments”. The former dealt “with a broad range of issues and problems of urban and regional development”, paying special attention to “the context in which the designer functions”, while the latter was concentrated on “large-scale housing developments, particularly in relation to size, density, and problems of infrastructure”.87 The Urban block and Gotham city: Metaphors and Metamorphosis, 88 a publication on Ungers’s pedagogical strategies during his last period of teaching at Cornell University. Ungers contributed to many exhibitions in the United States during the late 1970s. John Hejduk’s teaching was based on four studios: The Nine Square Problem, the Cube Problem, the Juan Gris Problem and the Analysis Problem. The first was intended for first year students. A very important article for understanding the pedagogical vision of John Hejduk is Rafael Moneo’s “The work of John Hejduk or the passion to teach: Architectural education at Cooper Union”, published in Lotus International in 1980. In this essay, Moneo notes that in the case of Hejduk’s approach “[t]he representation of architecture, as had happened in the cubist pictures, is “already” architecture, reality…”89 and analyses Hejduk’s relation to Le Corbusier and

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  157 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In “The Flatness of Depth”, Hejduk confirms Moneo’s remark when he maintains that his “isometric projections of the diamond are Cubist projections in architecture”.90 As Peter Eisenman said to Thomas Weaver, in an interview he gave him for AA Files in 2017,91 the connections of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies with the Italian scene were intensified after 1968. Eisenman situates as a turning point for the development of the dialogue between the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Italian context his meeting with Rafael Moneo. Eisenman met for the first time with Moneo at the Aspen Design Conference (IDCA), which was founded in 1951 and emulated the Bauhaus philosophy by promoting a close collaboration between modern art, design, and commerce. Reyner Banham and Hans Hollein were also present at this conference. In the advertisement of Oppositions by MIT Press, one can read: “No other architectural journal makes such an intensive effort to discuss and develop specific notions about the nature of architecture and design in relation to man-made world”. Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton and Mario Gandelsonas, in the editorial statement from Oppositions 1, in September 1973, declared: Oppositions is an attempt to establish a new arena for architectural discourse in which a consistent effort will be made to discuss and develop specific notions about the nature of architecture and design in relation to the man-made world. It is our joint belief that truly creative work depends upon such an extension of consciousness […] In all this, no attempt will be made to establish a single editorial line. The Institute will maintain its independence while we, as editors, will simply attempt to maintain the discourse at a high level and to concentrate on issues which in one way or another must necessarily affect the future status of architecture and design. Naturally our respective concerns as individuals for formal, socio-cultural and political discourse will make themselves felt in our joint editing of Oppositions. The Oppositions alluded to in the title will first and foremost begin at home.92 The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies organised the Special Public Lecture Series, which was a programme made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts. The Evening Program in Architecture included ten lectures that focused on different European cities, such as Berlin, London, Milan and Amsterdam. Most of the cities analysed in the framework of this series of lectures, which was entitled “A New Wave of European Architecture”, concerned metropolitan European cities. While Milan, Berlin and London were analysed twice, Paris despite its importance as European metropolis missed from this series. It would be interesting to try to interpret why this happens. In parallel, in this series, we have Venice and Milan, while Rome misses. Cologne was also analysed in this series.

158  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact In these lectures the relationship between theory and projects was very central, as it becomes evident from Massimo Scolari’s talk on Milan, which was entitled “The Relationship between Theory and Projects”. I refer to the titles of the lectures given by different European architects to give an idea of the topics treated in the framework of these public lectures: Oswald Mathias Ungers’s talk on Berlin was entitled “Architecture as Found and the Technique of Displacement”, Rem Koolhaas’s “American Inspiration for European Architecture” focusing on Amsterdam, Elia Zenghelis’ “Ideological Content in Architecture: Hotel Sphinx”, analysing London, Massimo Scolari’s “The Relationship between Theory and Projects” on Milan, Carlo Aymonino’s “Wohnungsbau and Planning” on Venice. Léon Krier gave two talks: one for Vienna entitled “The Loss of Urban Space in Twentieth Century Architecture”, and one for London entitled “Projects on the City: Urban Space and Sense of Place”. Ungers also gave a second talk, entitled “New Tendencies in European Architecture” and focusing on Cologne.93 The Lecture Series at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies of spring 1977 included as contributors Mario Gandelsonas, Rem Koolhaas, Robert Krier, Léon Krier, Elia Zenghelis and Massimo Scolari. The “Open Plan 77” was structured according to three categories: architecture, the city, the arts and design. The subjects addressed were “Style and Meaning in American Architecture”, “Cities within Cities”, “The Modernist Vision” and “The Languages of Design” respectively. Robert Stern, Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vidler and Andrew MacNair moderated the aforementioned thematics respectively. The fifth and tenth week of the term were “Open Plan” weeks. During these weeks the four courses were opened and all participants were invited to attend a series of interrelated discussions and debates. The contributors to the 1977 “Open Plan” on architecture were Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Charles Jencks and the topic they addressed was “Eclecticism, Revivalism, and the Issues of Modernism”. The contributors to the 1977 “Open Plan” on the city were Léon Krier and Oswald Mathias Ungers and the topic they addressed was “Revising the Modern Movement: London, Berlin, and New York”. The contributor to the 1977 “Open Plan” on the arts was the historian and music critic John Rockwell and the topic he addressed was “The Artist in Revolution”. The contributor to the 1977 “Open Plan” on design were Massimo Vignelli and Ivan Chermayeff and the topic they addressed was “Forms of Order: The Grid and the Columns”. The “Open Plan 79” had a quite different structure and was organised around the followings five topics, instead of the categories of architecture, the city, the arts and design: “The Uses and Abuses of Precedent”, which was moderated by Robert Stern, “The Visual Arts: Critical Encounters”, which was moderated by critic Graig Owens, “Interiors/Exteriors: House and Home”, which was moderated by Andrew MacNair, “Architecture/Film/Ideology”, which was moderated by Kenneth Frampton, and “Advanced Seminar: Reading Contemporary Architecture”, which was

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  159 moderated by Mario Gandelsonas, Diana Agrest, Kenneth Frampton, Werner Oechslin and Anthony Vidler. What is note-worthy regarding the point of view developed in the framework of the “Advanced Seminar: Reading Contemporary Architecture” is that the work of Peter Eisenman was interpreted as a case of approaching architectural composition in relation to the opposition between syntactics and thematics and the dichotomy between structure and subject. The work of Aldo Rossi was mobilised in order to address the subject of “comparative architecture” and participation the way the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is associated with the polarity between codes and texts. The contributor to the 1979 “Open Plan” on “The Uses and Abuses of Precedent” were Philip Johnson and Robert Stern and they debated on the topic of historicism. The contributor to the 1979 “Open Plan” on “The Visual Arts: Critical Encounters” was artist Jack Goldstein. Goldstein delivered a lecture entitled “Film: The Rhetoric of the Image”. The contributor to the 1979 “Open Plan” on “Interiors/Exteriors: House and Home” was Michael Graves and he lectured on “Drawing from History: The Princeton Warehouse”. The contributor to the 1979 “Open Plan” on “Architecture/Film/Ideology” was Kenneth Frampton and he lectured on “The Social Realist City. Film: Rome, Open City, Rossellini”. The “Open Plan 80” was organised around eight topics: “The Family: Sources of the Architectural Status Quo”, “Louis I. Kahn: Modernism as Tradition”, “America vs. Europe: Symbolic Exchanges and Transformations”, “Architecture and the Social Order: Style, Politics, and Regeneration”, “Vienna Today: A New Wave of Austrian Architecture”, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Tradition as Modernism”, “Shadowboxing: Modern and Post-Modern in the 1980s” and “Architecture and the Ideology of Nature: Gardens as Ideal Form”. On the poster of the “Open Plan 80”, one can read regarding the relationship between the United States and Europe: The idea that America and Europe display characteristically different approaches to architecture is a myth obscuring the true complexities of origin and exchange. This series will both criticise the geographic myth and attempt to see how locale does inform architectural ideas.94 In the framework of the series “America vs. Europe: Symbolic Exchanges and Transformations”, Rem Koolhaas gave a lecture entitled “American Dream versus European Images” on 12 March. The poster of the “Advanced Design Workshop: ’80/’81” was illustrated with photos of Diana Agrest, Charles Gwathmey, Aldo Rossi, Robert Stern and Oswald Mathias Ungers. This programme was conceived as “an experimental laboratory exploring specific problems of architecture in an urban context, with a critical/analytical framework”.95 The programme incorporated “a two semester curriculum” and focused “on actual problems within the context

160  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact of New York City”96 through a design workshop and a history/theory component. In the same issue of Skyline in which an interview of Aldo Rossi given to Diana Agrest was published, one can see an advertisement of the Open Plan programme of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on architecture in American Culture. As Lucia Allais notes, [i]n 1978, with the launch of the newspaper Skyline and of the Oppositions Books series, the intensification of exhibitions and the overhaul of public programs under the title “Open Plan,” the IAUS became a veritable cultural centre, renowned internationally as a gate for foreign visitors and frequented locally by a successful class of East Coast architects.97 The course moderated by Mario Gandelsonas and Anthony Vidler was entitled “Piranesi and Le Corbusier”. Its description, as one can read in Skyline of 1979, was the following: Modernism typically is presented as a history of progress from the Enlightenment to the present. The course opposes that view. It will make instead a reading of Le Corbusier and Piranesi, which places their theories, procedures and forms in a new context the encounter of Architecture with the City. In parallel, the description moderated by Kenneth Frampton was described in Skyline as follows: Given that cities can no longer be projected as finite objects, housing assumes importance for its ability to create as sense of place and limit. The course will examine the ways housing has been both for and against the traditional city and in so doing will survey patterns for future urban development.98 As we can see, both classes were focused on the connection of architecture to the city. This reorientation is related to the import of Rossi’s theory about the city in the United States of America. The cities, and especially the lessons from the European cities played an important role in the architectural debates of this period in the United States. The Casabella issue dedicated to the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies was advertised in Utopia fotoromanzo by strum group. In the text that accompanied the advertisement, one can read: “the magazine for people with responsibility in the organising and shape of the human environment”. The issues of Utopia fotoromanzo were devoted to the following topics: “Utopia”, “The Mediatory City”, “The Struggle for Housing”. The reflection that was developed in these issues is related to the argument of

Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact  161 the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” held at the MoMA from 26 May through 11 September 1972.99 The issues of Utopia fotoromanzo that I present here are conserved in the archival documents of this exhibition in the exhibition Records at the MoMA. Ada Louise Huxtable, in “Italian Design Show Appraised: Ambiguous but Beautiful”, published in The New York Times on 26 May 1972, which is a comment of the aforementioned exhibition, noted that “[c]ounterdesign is the protest of the counterculture, which believes, not without some cause that everything is generally rotten, in the worst of all possible worlds, and that the design of beautiful things is a pointless act”.100 Klaus Herdeg and Michael Schwaring taught at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning of Columbia University a class on “Urban precedents”, which aimed to elucidate the relationship between building and urban structure or the “interpretability” of a building’s meaning in an urban context. It also intended to help students to develop consciousness of context and scale as well as the multiple roles that urban form can assume. It was organised around the analysis of cases from various cultures and time periods in order to discuss the relation of cultural meaning to design principles that transcend time and culture. Ηerdeg and Schwaring also taught a theory course entitled “Principles of architectural design”, which was focused on the investigation and analysis of building within and without their cultural context. This course aimed to shed light on the design principles that are true for differing cultures and building purposes. The hypothesis of this class was that certain principles are valuable for different cultures and building purposes because they derive their meaning from basic biological and psychological traits as well as from inherent, and thus stable, formal characteristics. The method to demonstrate the aforementioned hypothesis was to analyse examples of architecture from nonindustrial, pre-industrial and industrial societies in Europe and America. Kenneth Frampton played a catalytic role in bringing Klaus Herdeg to Columbia University. Klaus Herdeg, in the fall of 1974 taught at Columbia University a class entitled “Form Transformation and Interpretation: some pedagogical experiences”. He introduced the text of the syllabus noting: “We all know about the natural psychological tendency of OBJECT FIXATION – reinforced historically by the Modern Movement (oblique view, De Stijl, Bauhaus etc.)”.101 What did Herdeg mean by the term “object fixation”? Aldo Rossi also uses the notion of “fixation”, but in a positive sense. Herdeg, in the text of the syllabus, also remarked: There are TWO CRUCIAL CONCEPTS which have to be introduced in order to be able to formulate design problems or exercises which […] demonstrate that the design process can be a rational discourse between percept and concept. The two concepts are TRANSFORMATION and INTERPRETATION.102

162  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact This understanding of the design process as a rational exchange between percept and concept could be challenged if we mobilise the way in which Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms “affect”, “percept” and “concept” and their relationship, in What is Philosophy?103 The intention of Klaus Herdeg’s pedagogy at Columbia University was to make comprehensible what makes form interpretation possible. His pedagogical vision was based on the idea that forms have inherent formal characteristics that correspond to specific functional and symbolic possibilities. This becomes apparent from what he remarked in his preparatory notes for his 1974 class at Columbia University, he remarked: “We know that what makes form interpretation possible is the fact that forms have inherent formal characteristics which charge that form with corresponding functional and symbolic possibilities”.104 The conferences on “Urbanism in Crisis”, which were organised in 1975 under the patronage of the Le Corbusier Foundation and the Ledoux Foundation in collaboration with the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Zurich show that the interrogation about the limits of modernist urbanism was at the core of the dominant epistemological debates during the late 1970s. These conferences were focused on the critical study of The Athens Charter (Charte d’Athènes) (1942).105 The provisional committee of the aforementioned conferences included Louis Miguel and Christian Gimonet from the Fondation Le Corbusier, Daniel Drocourt from the Fondation Ledoux, and Alfred Roth and Walter Custer from ETH Zurich. The Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands organised a two-days-seminar, titled “Housing and Monument”, in September 1978. In the framework of this event, Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, Carol Weber, Rem Koolhaas and Herman Hertzberger were invited to discuss on “Modern architecture and its relationship with nowadays production culture”.106 In July 1979, Robin Middleton sent a letter to Rossi in order to invite him to a symposium entitled “Architecture and the symbols of power” that would be held in May 1980 at the Architectural Association. Middleton, in this letter, noted that among the invited contributors were Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Ciucci, Jean-Louis Cohen, Robin Evans, Eric Hobsbaum, Joseph Rykwert, Richard Sennett and Manfredo Tafuri. In the letter he sent to Rossi, Middleton underscored that “[t]he dependence and autonomy of architecture will clearly be one of the themes requiring discussion”.107 Dore Ashton, who was Professor of Art History at Cooper Union at the time, wrote to Rossi on 5 January 1983 to invite him to participate to the conference “From Art to Politics: The Presence of Myth in Contemporary Life”108 that would be held at The New School for Social Research of the Cooper Union on 11 and 13 October 1984. According to Ashton, among the contributors that had agreed to participate were Italo Calvino, Francesco Pellizzu, Vassilis Vasillikos, Bruno Zevi and Gianni Vattimo.

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Notes 1 Georges Teyssot, John Hejduk, “Conversazioni con John Hejduk/Conversation with John Hejduk”, Lotus International, 44 (1984), 64. 2 Aldo Rossi, “A Conversation: Aldo Rossi and Bernard Huet”, Perspecta, 28 (1997): 105–113. 3 Manfredo Tafuri, “The Theater of Memory”, Skyline, (1979): 7. This article was reprinted form the newspaper Paesa Sera and was translated for Skyline by Alessandra Latour and Maria Lina. 4 John Hejduk, “The Flatness of Depth”, in Mask of Medusa: Works 1947– 1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 69; Hejduk, “The Flatness of Depth”, in ­Judith Turner, Judith Turner. Photographs Five Architects (New York: R izzoli, 1980), 9–11. 5 Hejduk, “Evening in Llano”, in Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis, Kim Shkapich, eds., Education of an Architect: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union (New York: Rizzoli International, 1988), 340. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 47. 7 Nicolas de Warren, “Memory in Continental Philosophy: Metaphor, Concept, Thinking”, in Dmitri Nikulin, ed., Memory: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 248. 8 Aldo Rossi cited in Diane Ghirardo, “The Blue of Aldo Rossi’s Sky”, AA Files, 70 (2015), 165; Rossi, Quaderni Azzurri, no 4, 26 January 1970–30 December 1970, 14–15; Rossi, Aldo Rossi: I quaderni azzurri, edited by Francesco Dal Co (Los Angeles; Milan: Getty Publications/Electa, 2000). 9 Rossi, Introduction to Kenneth Frampton, ed., Aldo Rossi in America, 1976 to 1979: March 25 to April 14, 1976, September 19 to October 30, 1979, Catalogue (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1979), 3. 10 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 11 Peter Eisenman, “The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue”, in Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 11; Rossi, L’Architettura della città (Padova: Marsilio, 1966). 12 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1950). 13 It is a subtitle of the Chapter 4: The Evolution of Urban Artifacts. 14 Marianna Charitonidou, “Le récit autobiographique d’Aldo Rossi: introspection ou rétrospection?”, L’Homme & la société, 208 (2018): 295–318, https:// doi.org/10.3917/lhs.208.0295; Charitonidou, “Aldo Rossi’s Transatlantic Cross-fertilization: American ‘Urban Facts’ and Reinvention of Design Methods”, in Marco Bovati, Michele Caja, Martina Landsberger, Angelo Lorenzi, eds., Aldo Rossi, Perspectives from the World. Theory, Teaching, Design & Legacy (Padova: Il Poligrafo, Biblioteca di Architettura series, 2020), 166–173, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000438706 15 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 143. 16 Paolo Jedlowski, “Simmel on Memory. Some Observations about Memory and Modern Experience”, in Michael Kaern, Bernard S. Phillips, Robert S. Cohen, ­ eds., Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology (Dordrecht: Springer, 1990), 131. 17 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 206.

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62 Klaus Herdeg, Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983). 63 Oswald Mathias Ungers, “L’architettura della memoria collettiva. L’infinito catalogo delle forme Urbane/Architecture of Collective Memory. The infinite Catalogue of urban Forms”, Lotus International, 24 (1979): 5–11. 64 Ungers, “Grossform”, Aujourd’hui: Art et Architectures, 57–58 (1967): 108– 113; Ungers, “Großformen im Wohnungsbau”, Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur, 5 (1966): 130–133. 65 Lara Schrijver, “The Archipelago City: Piecing together Collectivities”, OASE, 71 (2006), 18. 66 Franco Raggi, ed., Europa-America: Architetture Urbane, Alternative Suburbane (Venice: Edizioni la Biennale di Venezia, 1978); see also Charitonidou, “Aldo van Eyck’s Critiques Against Postmodernism as a Humanist Device: between the Notion of ‘Configurative Discipline’ and ‘the Irritant Principle of Renewal’”, paper presented at the 2018 annual conference, Jaap Bakema Study Centre, The Irritant Principle of Renewal: 100 Years of Aldo & Hannie van Eyck on 28 November 2018 at TU Delft, Delft, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7331740. 67 Aldo van Eyck, “Un messagio a Mathias Ungers da un altro mondo/A Message to Ungers from a Different World”, Spazio e Società, 8 (1979), 64. 68 Van Eyck, “What is and isn’t Architecture, A of Propos Rats, Posts and other Pests (RPP)”, Lotus International, 28 (1981): 15–19; see also Van Eyck, “Rats Posts and Pests”, RIBA Journal, 88(4) (1981): 47–50. 69 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: An Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964). 70 Transcript of a conference held on 1 August 1976 at Venice Biennale, Italy about American and European architectural traditions; rejected for publication by editorial board of Oppositions magazine. Participants include: Peter Eisenman, James Stirling, Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi, Denise Scott Brown, Manfredo Tafuri, Giancarlo De Carlo, Raimund Abraham, John Hejduk, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Peter Smithson, 17; in Italian and English. Reference number: ARCH153618. Part of: AP057.S3.SS1.D1.SD2, Proposed Material for Publication, 1970–1981. Folder Number: C1–16. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; see also Charitonidou, “Exhibitions in France as Symbolic Domination: Images of Postmodernism and Cultural Field in the 1980s”. 71 Van Eyck, “Un messagio a Mathias Ungers da un altro mondo/A Message to Ungers from a Different World”, Spazio e Società, 8 (1979): 64. 72 Van Eyck, “The Story of Another Idea”, Forum, 7 (1959): 197–248. 73 Van Eyck, “Rats Posts and Pests”. 74 Van Eyck cited in Kenneth Frampton, “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic”, in Vincent B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2022), 375. 75 Francis Strauven, “Aldo van Eyck: Shaping the New Reality From the Inbetween to the Aesthetics of Number”, Study Centre Mellon lectures, 24 May 2007, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Available at: https://www. taak.me/wp-content/uploads/15/in-betweenness_Aldo-van-Eyck.pdf. 76 Ibid. 77 Van Eyck, “Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline”, Forum, 16(3) (1962): 81–94.

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168  Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact 02 Ibid. 1 103 Deleuze, Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 104 Klaus Herdeg papers, Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. 105 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: Grossman, 1973); Le Corbusier, Charte d’Athènes (Paris: Plon, 1943). 106 Umberto Barbieri, Henk Engel, Jan de Heer, letter to Aldo Rossi, 24 May 1978, Aldo Rossi papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 107 Robin Middleton, letter to Aldo Rossi, 31 July 1979, Aldo Rossi papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 108 Dore Ashton, letter to Aldo Rossi, 5 January 1983, Aldo Rossi papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.

7

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions Uncovering the potentialities hidden in the programme

Bernard Tschumi is interested in the dialectic between social praxis and spatial forms. He understands real space as the product of the social praxis and ideal space as the product of mental processes. Moreover, he questions whether it is the language that precedes socio-economic context or the inverse. He argues that any interpretation of architecture that prioritises historical processes over mental processes of formation of space reduces space into one parameter trapped in a specific political status quo. In Event-Cities: Praxis, Tschumi poses the following question: “How can architecture, whose historical role was to generate the appearance of stable images (monuments, order, etc.) deal with today’s culture of the disappearance of unstable images (twenty-four-image-per-second cinema, video and computer-generated images)?”1 The questions of instability and indeterminacy, and in general the dynamic aspect of architecture, are the core of his thought. Tschumi notes, in “Disjunctions”: Architectural and philosophical concepts do not disappear overnight. The once fashionable ‘epistemological break’ notwithstanding, ruptures always occur within an old fabric which is being constantly dismantled and in such a way that its ruptures lead to new concepts or structures. 2 He uses the expression “Architecture against itself”, 3 in order to describe this process of emergence of new concepts through the ruptures. He is interested in “the idea of a meaning immanent in architectural structures”.4 He argues, in Event-Cities: Praxis, that “all architecture is inextricably linked to our urban condition and that each of the projects featured [in the aforementioned volume] is first and foremost a constituent element of our global system of cities”.5 Tschumi also maintains that “[w]hat distinguishes these projects […] is the manner in which their programmatic dimension becomes as much a part of their architecture as of their use”.6 He highlights the necessity to replace “the static notions of form and function […] by attention to the actions that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-7

170  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions occur inside and around buildings – to the movement of bodies, to activities to aspirations”.7 He suggests the abandoning of the cause-and-effect relationship sanctified by modernism, by which form follows function (or vice versa) […] in favour of promiscuous collisions of programs and spaces, in which the terms intermingle, combine and implicate one another in the production of a new architectural reality.8 The central point of reference for Tschumi’s projects is the complex and interactive web of events of the metropolitan network. It becomes the relevant point of reference. The starting point of his approach is the desire to convert the experiences of the city into instruments capable to redefine the urban actual conditions. In Event-Cities 2, he underscores: The projects always begin from an urban condition and a program. They then try to uncover potentialities hidden in the program, site, or circumstances, whether economic, social, or cultural. Dynamic forces and/or intensely public spaces are encouraged; a concept is identified; and, eventually, a form arrived at, so as to reinforce or qualify the concept.9 The starting point of Tschumi’s approach, in Event-Cities 4: Concept-Form, is that the programme or/and the context are insufficient as tools serving to establish conceptual generative strategies.10 He introduces the notion of “concept-form” in order to describe a concept generating a form or a form generating a concept, in such a way that the one reinforces the other. The notion of “concept-form”, which implies the dissolution of the distinction between the phase of construction of the mental idea and the phase of its transmission via its representation, offers the possibility to think together percept, concept and affect. For Tschumi, “concept-forms are diagrams without history”, are “autonomous from history” only and “never symbolical”. They lose their “autonomy as soon as it is populated by reality”.11 Tschumi also notes: “a concept-form begins as an abstraction, but immediately assumes a social, political or, alternatively, sensuous experiential character as soon as it is built”.12 In the projects presented in Event- Cities 4: Concept-Form, Tschumi aimed to transform abstract devices into generators of architectural schemes, turning programmatic strategies into concepts. Through the elaboration of the notion of concept-form, he treated both concepts and forms as “a function of one or several program characteristics”.13 In the same issue of Studio International where Tschumi published “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”, RoseLee Goldberg published her article entitled “Space as Praxis”.14 In “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  171 Paradox)”, Tschumi juxtaposed the information included in the numerated frames, which included extracts from other authors or images, to his own text, also numerated. The twenty-four frames, that accompanied Tschumi’s article contained questions, references to other projects, such as Archizoom’s No Stop City and Aldo Rossi’ s Gallaratese, quotations as the following one coming from Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’architecture dans le Boudoir”, published in the third issue of Oppositions in 1974: The return to language is a proof of failure. It is necessary to examine to what degree such a failure is due to the intrinsic character of the architectural discipline and to what degree it is due to a still unresolved ambiguity.15 Tschumi shares with Tafuri his conviction that any reduction of architectural design according to linguistic analogies is but a negligence of architecture’s very logic. Tschumi also refers to the 1973 XV Triennale di Milano “Architettura Razionale”, curated by Aldo Rossi in frame 10, relating to the endeavour to transform architecture into a “cosa mentale”. For Tschumi the conception of architecture as a “cosa mentale” is related to “the domination of the idea over matter”.16 A compelling question that Tschumi poses in the same text, in frame 11, is the following: If as pace is a representation of an idea or a thought which is signified, does a space achieve its meaning through its relation to all the other spaces in a context, or through all the spaces for which this space has become metaphorical?. This question brings to mind the relationship between the concept of “intertextuality” and “intericonicity”. It seems that Tschumi, in order to overcome the risks of establishing analogies between the mechanisms of interpretation of texts and the mechanisms of interpretation of spaces, suggests the replacement of the notion of “intertextuality” by the notion of “interspatiality”. Tschumi’s intention to bring back architecture to the experience of real space becomes evident, when he notes: “As long as social practice does not absorb but rejects the paradox of ideal and real space, imagination – interior experience – may be the only means to transcend it”. He sheds light on the tension between ideal and real space and was convinced that the challenge of “prevalent attitudes towards space and its subject” was the only possible means capable to “provide the conditions for renewed social attitudes”.17 Among the questions that Tschumi situated within the frames that accompanied his text were the following questions: Does the concept of space note and denote all possible spaces, both real and virtual? The tension between the concept of materialisation

172  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions of space and the concept of space is at the very core of his thought. Is the experience of space the experience of materialisation of the concept of space? Are spatial archetypes inevitably of a universal, elementary nature or can they include personal idiosyncrasies?.18 Tschumi published the questions that were in the frames that accompanied “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)” separately under the title “Questions of Space” in 1990 in Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture.19 The way he enumerated them demonstrates which groups of questions are interrelated. Some of the questions that are worth mentioning are the following: If, etymologically, ‘defining’ space is both making space distinct and stating the precise nature of space, is this an essential paradox of space? […] Isa architecture the concept of space, the space and the definition of space? […] Are spatial archetypes inevitably of a universal elementary nature, or can they include personal idiosyncrasies? […] In any case, does the concept of space note and denote all possible spaces, both real and virtual?. 20 Bernard Huet’s “Formalisme – Réalisme”, Rem Koolhaas’s “‘Life in the Metropolis’ or ‘Culture of Congestion’” and Bernard Tschumi’s “The Pleasure of Architecture” were all published the same year, in 1977. 21 In “The Pleasure of Architecture”, Tschumi explores how architecture can function “as an instrument of socio-cultural change”. 22 The subtitle of the article “The Pleasure of Architecture” is “Its Function as an Instrument of Socio-culture Change”. This text can be interpreted as a “polemical position” against “the realpolitik of resource planning” and its “quantifiable benefits”. What Tschumi maintained, in the aforementioned article, that “representations inevitably separate the sensual experience of a real space from the appreciation of rational concepts”. 23 The conviction on which this text is based is the intention to dislocate and distort the conventions of their environment should be the very force of the architects’ task. What lies behind this position is not an intention of destructiveness, but, on the contrary, at the core of this point of view is the attraction of Tschumi to notions as excess and difference. Tschumi was set against “exceeding functionalist dogmas, semiotic systems, historical precedents or formalised products of past social or economic constructs”. 24 His intention was, on the one hand, to dismantle the elements of architecture and, on the other hand, to transgress the rules of architecture. The intensification for the interest in the programme is related to the attempt of the architects to transform the instability of the “lived-in world” and the present into the very force of their task. Elia Zenghelis, in “The Aesthetics of the Present”, published in Architectural Design in 1988, invited architects to embrace “the existing, lived-in world; a world which

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  173 is simultaneously mediocre and sublime, frustrating and exciting”. He underscored that the “state of perpetual instability” and the coexistence of a plethora of “programmes […] in the same spot”. What is relevant for my study is his remark that “[t]he programme is the generator of architecture”. The role that visualisation plays for the generative capacity of the programme generates becomes evident in his following statement: “The iconography of the programme provides architecture with its visual aesthetic […] Its hedonism lies in the power of its suggestiveness”. He defined the iconography of the programme as “the setting where a sequence of displacements activate the imagination […] and animate the inanimate”. He believed that it is “the economy and simplicity of its means” that makes it an instrument that permits the passage from “the implicit to the explicit”. 25 Koolhaas refers to a shift from form to iconography. 26 Zenghelis, notes in “Text and Architecture: Architecture as Text”: Has it not been accepted – ever since Kant – that there is an unbridgeable gulf between reality in itself and reality as it appears to us? That our possibilities of knowing have more to do with our own apparatus than with the nature of reality?27 The way Rem Koolhaas defines programme lies in his interest in the tension between compliance and independence. According to Tschumi, programme, in contrast with function, is defined by activities and actions and not by conventions. In other words, programme permit to challenge the conventional correlations between function and form. The point of departure of Tschumi’s approach is the conviction that there is no obligatory relationship between architectural signifier and programmatic signified. A parameter of Tschumi’s perspective that is scrutinised here is the exploration of many different formal variations that can be produced if certain parameters that are central for the design strategy for a project are fixed but all the other parameters are altered. In order to explore these different variations, Tschumi passes through their visualisation through diagrams of comparative studies of possible configurations (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). 28 This visualisation technique addresses neither to the observer nor to the user of architecture but to the architect-conceiver who uses them in order to choose and concretise his own design strategies. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) used the term “social condenser”, while Tschumi used the term “urban generator”. The former described as “social condenser” the strategy employed for the proposal for the Parc de La Villette, while the latter claimed that the entry to the competition for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France “intended to act as an urban generator” and treated the library building “as an ‘event’ rather than as a frozen monument”. 29 The connection of the scope of Tschumi’s Diploma Unit 2, taught at the Architectural Association in London, with Henri Lefebvre’s theory is evident. Tschumi’s pedagogical vision was focused on the critical analysis of

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Figure 7.1 B ernard Tschumi, Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center, University of Cincinnati OH (2001–2006). Comparative studies of alternative configurations of the envelope regarding the atrium’s permutation. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

the urban condition. The main intention of his teaching was to invite the students to reflect on the points of convergence and divergence of different approaches of understanding the dynamic of the urban condition. As main references for reflecting on the city, he proposed, apart from Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Theodor Adorno, György Lukács and Walter Benjamin among others. In parallel, he incorporated in the reflection developed in this Unit

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Figure 7.2 Bernard Tschumi, studies on different variations from the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2014. Photograph by Marianna Charitonidou © Marianna Charitonidou.

tools coming from various disciplines related to the arts, such as photography, conceptual art, and performance. Tschumi, in the early 1970s, was captivated by Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between perceived, conceived and lived space, in The Production of Space, 30 as it becomes evident in the themes he treated when he taught at the AA. As Łukasz Stanek reminds us, Lefebvre’s theory was based on the distinction between the physical field of nature and materiality, the mental field of logics and formal abstractions and the social field, “the field of projects and projections, of symbols and utopias, of the imaginaire and . . . the désir”. 31 The involvement of Bernard Tschumi to the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London organised a French Programme in March 1973 further confirms the hypothesis that Tschumi’s agenda during his first years of teaching at the AA was in close relationship with Henri Lefebvre’s 32 ­ approach . Tschumi was the coordinator of the Architecture and Urbanism lecture series, which was titled “The Politics of Space”, and his main

176  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions intention was to examine the effect of space and architecture on society, which had preoccupied Henri Lefebvre and Anatole Kopp, who was director of the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris at the time. For this reason, Tschumi invited both Lefebvre and Kopp to contribute to the lecture series. Other alternative suggestions were Herbert Tonka of the Utopie group, Manuel Castells and Françoise Choay.33 Choay would be, some years later, member of the jury that would evaluate the proposals for the competition for the Parc de La Villette in Paris that Tschumi would win with his famous project. It was in the framework of this event that Tschumi met for the first time Jacques Derrida, with whom he would exchange some years later on his project for the Parc de La Villette. The list of invited participants included Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Raymond Aron, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre. Finally, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault and Lefebvre did not manage to participate. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as the poster of the event informs us, did not participate at the ICA but in a parallel programme at the French Institute at Queensbury Place. Lefebvre and Tschumi did not meet at this instance, but, as we can see from a letter of Lefebvre, 34 they would meet later, in December 1972 or early January 1973. Tschumi translated for the series Lefebvre text entitled “L’espace”, which was included in Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et politique.35 In “L’espace”, according to Tschumi’s translation, Lefebvre examines “space as it relates to social practice”, and “the relationship between mental space (as perceived, represented) and social space (as built and produced, mainly urban space)”.36 What interested Tschumi most regarding Lefebvre’s approach, as he has confirmed me in an interview on 15 February 2017, was his triad of perceived, conceived, and lived space. In his lecture handout, Tschumi underscores that for Lefebvre “[s]pace is essentially linked with the reproduction of the (social) relations of production”. 37 Tschumi wrote in the press release of “The Politics of Space” series: Lefebvre’s approach, which is developed in the yet untranslated “Droit a la Ville” or “La Revolution Urbaine” can be articulated around two main themes. On one hand, space is political. Space is a product of the socio-economic structure. Space is “produced” by specific groups that take over space in order to exploit it, to transform it with profit, to manage it. Such an exploitation has led to contradictions between the interests of a power structure and the everyday life of the city inhabitants. But on the other hand, and despite these contradictions, an urban specificity emerges. This specificity proceeds from the use of the city rather than from its exchange value. Such a use, or an urban praxis, could be understood as an agent of spontaneous transformation of everyday life, within a new type of civilization – the Urban Society – and within a space that has become the “reborn place of finally expressed desires.38

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  177 Tschumi published, in the issue of September 1972 of Architectural Design, a review of Henri Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et politique that was published in French in 1968. Tschumi remarked in his review: Lefebvre sees urban space as the place ‘where there is something always happening’. Although the city became a product that can be bought and sold, an urban specificity emerges. This specificity proceeds from the use of the city rather than from the exchange and its property value. Such a use, or urban praxis, can be understood as an agent of transformation of everyday life within an urban space which is ‘a projection of Society on the ground’.39 As the change of the titles of the publications corresponding to the successive academic years shows, there was a shift of his interest from urban politics to space. Tschumi remained, however, concerned with grasping the potential of urban insurgencies. There was a shift between the topic of the first year of teaching of Tschumi at the AA, which was focused on urban politics, to the second year, which was characterised by the conviction that the unit instead of “analyzing the variables of architectural activities” should “deliberately concentrate on one constant, space”.40 According to Jamieson, this reorientation is linked to his collaboration with Nigel Coates. The latter became a Diploma student of Tschumi in 1973–74, the first year of Alvin Boyarsky’s unit system, and started supporting Tschumi as tutor in 1979. Coates notes: “year-by-year I learned to use drawing as a tool to capture experience, giving prominence to the effect rather than objectifying the idea”.41 Coates remarks, in Architectural Research Quarterly, in 2015: “Bernard didn’t really approve of the fashion paradigm I was pursuing back in London, which made me realise I needed to develop my own distinct approach”.42 The analysis of Tschumi’s pedagogy during his teaching at the Architectural Association in London is important for grasping the epistemological shifts related to how the modes of representation can grasp the dynamic aspects of how space is reinvented through its inhabitation. Their relation to the Italian radical architecture scene, as Archizoom and Superstudio is also examined. When they taught at the Architectural Association, Tschumi invited Archizoom, while Koolhaas invited Superstudio. Adolfo Natalini gave a lecture at the AA in 1971. Koolhaas introduced Superstudio to the AA, inviting Natalini. Superstudio, at the time, was working on the “Continuous Monument”. Tschumi claims that Koolhaas was interested in the semantics, while he himself wasn’t. In “Environmental Trigger” (1975), Tschumi referred to the nihilist stance of Superstudio. Special attention is paid to their appropriation of certain principles of surrealism and to the way both Koolhaas and Tschumi challenged the frontiers between theoretical and non-theoretical work with their early projects. A question that Tschumi posed, in “The Environmental Trigger”, published in 1975 was the interrogation regarding the possibility of space to

178  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions function as an “instrument of social transformation” and “a means to change the relationship between the individual and the society by generating a new life-style”. This text was published in the period between Diploma Unit 2 and Diploma Unit 10, when Tschumi had stopped teaching at the AA for two years. In “The Environmental Trigger”, Tschumi defined architecture as “the adaptation of space to the existing social structures”.43 Reading the aforementioned text, it becomes evident that at the time – in 1975 – he was convinced that “[n]o spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure”.44 His disbelief in the potential of architecture to contribute to the transformation of a given socio-economic structure pushed him to maintain that “[t]he only possible architectural action of a revolutionary nature is rhetorical”.45 Tschumi described counter design as nihilist and desperate. For him, its weakness lies in the fact that it uses as means plan, which, according to what he believed in 1975, was not effective given that “no built object could ever have an effect on the socio-economic structure of a reactionary society”.46 Therefore, for Tschumi, any gesture of translating institutional trends by translating them in architectural terms was not capable of transforming given reality. It becomes, thus, evident that in the beginning of his career, and especially before he started the series of The Manhattan Transcripts,47 Tschumi believed less in the capacity of architectural notation as it can be seen in the positions mentioned above. Tschumi, in the introduction of Architecture and Disjunction, defines counter design as follows: “Being a devil’s advocate, counterdesign is aimed at creating an understanding in the people concerned by the implications of such developments on their everyday life, and at leading to their active rejection of such planning processes”.48 The approach that Tschumi developed in The Chronicle of Urban Politics and The Chronicle of Space differs to a certain extent from his point of view in The Manhattan Transcripts. Their common parameter is the interest in city and space, but they correspond to two distinct phases of his career, as he has confirmed in a discussion we had on February 2017. A reorientation of his view took place because of his encounter with New York art scene. The Manhattan Transcripts are the outcome of this encounter. The Manhattan Transcripts are closer to the agenda of Diploma Unit 10 that to the approach developed in the framework of Diploma Unit 2. Nigel Coates graduated from Tschumi’s Unit 2 in 1974 and joined the latter as co-tutor of the Unit 2 for the academic year 1974–1975. Coates’s project for Unit 2 was entitled “Prison Park”. Tschumi described this project in order to render explicit how “new attitude[s] to architecture […] question its mode of representation”. Nigel Coates and Doug Branson’s student project for the academic year 1974–75 was entitled “Real Mint Housing”. One can read in The Discourse of Events regarding Nigel Coates and Doug Branson’s student project for the academic year 1974–1975: “Real Mint Housing turns an architectural competition into a critique of conventional architectural problem-solving and questions notions of representation and figuration”.49

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The literary briefs and the notational experimentation For the academic years 1975–1976 and 1976–1977, Tschumi did not teach at the AA. In 1977, he initiated in collaboration with Nigel Coates Diploma Unit 10 at the AA, which they taught for three academic years until 1980 when Tschumi left for the United States in order to teach at Cooper Union and Princeton University. 50 He taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture between 1980 and 1983. Tschumi gave as programmes to students at the Architectural Association and Princeton University excerpts of literary texts, such as Frank Kafka’s Burrow, Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. 51 For the studio he taught at the School of Architecture of Princeton University for the fall semester 1976–1977, Tschumi gave the topic “the Masque of the Red Death” (Figures 7.3 and 7.4). He gave as project brief Edgar Allan Poe’s book entitled The Masque of the Red Death. In the project brief for this studio, he wrote: “Signs and space, words and figurations are related”. He also noted that “[s]patial concepts are made as much by writings and drawings as by their built translations”. 52 The importance he gave to users is apparent in his following claim: “But if architectural spaces contain their theoretical discourse, users’ requirements also extend towards cultural artifacts in such a way as to become an important part of any architectural projects”. 53 Joao Basto did the project “The Library of Babel” at the Architectural Association during the academic year 1974–75. In 1977, Coates and Tschumi gave as project brief “Joyce’s Garden” (Figure 7.5). They gave as project brief an excerpt from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and invited the students to do projects in the Covent Garden in London, using the aforementioned excerpts as starting point (Figure 7.6). In the “Ordnance Survey”, produced in the framework of Diploma Unit 10, one can see the various student projects superimposed (Figure 7.7). Among the student projects for the Joyce’s Garden brief, I could mention Hans Hiegel’s. Batsheva Ronen ’s project for the same brief is also worth mentioning, since it shows how the experimentation on the modes of notation was already an important component of Tschumi’s agenda as educator. Here is an excerpt of the text that accompanied Hiegel’s project: “An ideal geometrical construct is placed/ materialised/distorted in Leicester Square/Covent Garden. Any reference to the other points in the area is carried through ‘objects’ (groups of columns, memory map)”.54 Tschumi himself also worked on this brief and produced a project, which constituted the fourth manifesto that he displayed at his first solo exhibition, which was entitled “Architectural Manifestoes” and was held at Artists Space Gallery in New York in 1978 (Figure 7.8). The same show was also displayed at the Architectural Association in 1979. Each of the aforementioned exhibitions was accompanied by a different catalogue.

180  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions In the text that accompanied the illustration of Joyce’s Garden in the catalogue of the exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes” held at Artists Space Gallery, Tschumi noted: Kafka’s Burrow, Borge’s Library of Babel, or Poe’s Masque of the Red Death could just as equally be the basis for an architectural project, as a list of instructions regarding square footage and the needs of a client. Sometimes the analogy with language can be taken further, and architectural exploration of linguistic perversion can be attempted. Such was Joyce’s Garden, a large-scale city project, loosely based on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Although the project contains numerous references to writing techniques, to the characters of Annalivia Plurabelle or the twin brothers Shem and Shaun – see the double crescents and their dissolution – it would be circumstantial to attempt to make direct relationships between the novel and the piece of architecture. One merely triggers the other. The project embraces an archetypal part of urban London, Covent Garden. Emphasis has been placed on its “Garden” nature, and its “virtual” route to the River Thames. 55 Among the illustrations regarding Tschumi’s proposal for Joyce’s Garden brief was the so-called Homage to Eisenstein (1977). The affinities between Tschumi’s “Homage to Eisenstein, Joyce’s Garden” (1976–77) and the notation of Sergueï Eisenstein for the film Alexander Nevsky (1938) are explicit. Tschumi refers at many instances to Eisenstein’s notation for the film Alexander Nevsky and its impact on his thought. 56 Tschumi’s reference to Eisenstein is not explicit only in “Homage to Eisenstein, Joyce’s Garden”, but also in Tschumi’s project for the Acropolis Museum. He notes, in “Conceptualizing Context”, for instance: “The famous cavalcade scene in Eisenstein’s film shows a striking resemblance to the equestrian segments in the Parthenon Frieze”. 57

Bernard Tschumi and the first collective exhibitions In 1976, Tschumi participated in the exhibition “40 London Architects” held at Art Net Gallery in London and curated by Peter Cook. 58 Other collective exhibitions in which Tschumi participated in the 1970s and 1980s are “Mapped” at Nobe Gallery in New York in 1977, “Imaginary Worlds” at Rosa Esman Gallery in New York in 1978, “Art, Architecture, Space. Structure” at Max Protetch-MacIntosh Gallery in Washington in 1979, “Urban Places” at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 1979 and “Artists and Models Ball” at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1980. Tschumi, apart from “A Space: A Thousand Words”, which he co-curated with RoseLee Goldberg in 1975, also curated another exhibition six years later. This time the title of the exhibition was “Architecture: Sequences”, and Tschumi brought together drawings, etchings, photographs, models and little books

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Figure 7.3 B ernard Tschumi, “The Masque of the Red Death”, project brief for Princeton University School of Architecture, 1976. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

by Philippe Guerrier, Jenny Lowe, Lorna McNeur, Deborah Oliver and Peter Wilson. The Exhibition was held at Artists Space Gallery in New York, held from 17 January to 28 February 1981. Tschumi wrote, in January 1981 for the preface of the catalogue of the exhibition:

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Figure 7.4 Publication of the brief “The Masque of the Red Death” that Bernard Tschumi gave to his students at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Princeton University during the Fall Term of the academic year 1976–1977 in Nassau Literary Review, (1976), 38. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

Instead of trying to herald some new movement and because of the respective concerns often differ, I have emphasized a further common ground in this work, namely the idea of ‘sequence’. Always present in architecture, regardless of generation or ideological allegiance, the architectural sequence is of considerable interest insofar as it allies notions of route as well as ritual, movement as well as method, program as well as narrative. 59 In the catalogue, he also published his text entitled “Sequences”, where he distinguished three kinds of sequences, present in every architectural

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 Figure 7.5 Joao Basto, “The Library of Babel”, student project for the Literary Briefs studio at the Architectural Association (1974–1975). Source: Bernard Tschumi, Nigel Coates, The Discourse of Events (London: Architectural Association, 1983), 33. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects and Architectural Association Archives.

Figure 7.6 Bernard Tschumi. Joyce’s Garden. 1976. Photographic print, ink, graphite and letraset on cardboard. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

work: transformational, spatial and programmatic sequence. He underscores that in the first case “the sequential transformation […] becomes its own theoretical object, insofar as the process becomes the result, while

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Figure 7.7 The different student projects for Joyce’s garden (1977) brought together. Projects superimposed on Ordnance Survey. Source: Peter Cook, “Strange Pavilions of the Mind. The Work of Diploma Unit 10 1973– 1983”, AA Files, 4 (1983), 104. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects and Architectural Association Archives.

the sum of transformations is all that counts, rather than the outcome of the final transformation”.60 Tschumi, in “Sequences”, underscored that “[t]here are closed sequences of transformation as well as open ones”. He claimed that “[c]losed sequences have a predictable end because the chosen rule ultimately implies the exhaustion of a process, its circularity or its repetition”.61 One could claim that Eisenman’s House series are based on closed transformational sequences. Tschumi maintained that in the case of open transformational sequences “new elements of transformation can be added at will according to other criteria, such as concurrent or juxtaposed sequences of another order — say, a narrative or programmatic structure, juxtaposed to the formal transformational structure”.62

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Figure 7.8 T he fourth manifesto from the exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes”, held at Artists Space Gallery in New York in 1978 was Joyce’s Garden (1977). The image above comes from the catalogue of the exhibition. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

Tschumi exhibited “Broadway Follies” in the show “Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape”, held at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles in 1983. In the catalogue of the exhibition, we can find exclusively axonometric representations. He shed light on the relationships between the “follies” and not the “follies” per se, distinguishing five strategies of relating the “follies”: single object, pair of objects, linear sequence of objects, randomly scattered objects and objects on a point grid, identifying the last strategy with his entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette in Paris. “The Broadway Follies” is based on the strategy of linear sequence of objects. In his text in the catalogue, Tschumi notes that his objective in this project was to couple transformational and spatial sequence. In an interview he took from Tschumi, Marco De Michelis highlights that Tschumi’s definition of space, since his very first articles, was complex in the sense that “it isn’t space as a geometrical element but rather as it is connected with use, movement, and dynamics”.63 In the same interview, Tschumi underscores that his way of defining space was based on his very intention to define architecture independently from its historical

186  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions determination and to invent devices that take distance from notions as form or typology, that dominated the generation that came before Tschumi. He also claims that the notions of space, movement and use permitted him to go beyond an understanding of architectural praxis, limited within the boundaries of cultural and historical determination. His attraction to Cedric Price’s incorporation of movements and events in the architectural design process, as in the case of Fun Palace, is related to his conviction that architecture should aim to design “the conditions for architecture: instead of ‘conditioning designs’”.64 Another significant point of reference of the early years of his practice as educator and writer is Archizoom’s No Stop City. The point of convergence of his own thought and of Archizoom’s approach was the intention to “‘verify where the system was going’ by taking specific conceptual themes to an extreme”.65 His attraction to Archizoom becomes also evident in a sketch he drew for his entry to the Parc de La Villette, in which he related his use of the grid with Archizoom’s use of the grid in No Stop City. Tschumi is interested in the social and programmatic dimensions of what happens within space, but, at the same time, is intrigued by the concept of envelope. He identifies as the first project that activated his concern about the notion of envelope Le Fresnoy, where he tried to put forward the conflicts between the continuity of the envelope and the discontinuity of events. The objective of the sharpening of this opposition is “to re-establish dynamic oppositions or conflicts”.66 Tschumi is for the notion of materiality and against the notion of tectonics. He is convinced that architecture, as mathematics, physics, art, or literature constantly produce knowledge. He sustains that “[w]hile the making of architecture is a productive action, the building is a productive action not in itself but rather as something that [creates] […] conditions of use”.67 Tschumi notes: It is only through the conditions of use that something can be produced, hence the question of autonomy cannot exist without the question of what might be called architecture’s “intertextuality”. For me, the object of architecture does not exist as “architecture”. The object of architecture is always corrupted by its use.68 During the 1970s, Tschumi employed certain tools coming from conceptual and performance art in order to activate physical spaces. He is sceptical vis-à-vis a comprehension of architecture as narrative, since he believes that “architectural narrative should never be addressed in a linear way”.69 He prefers the use of the notion of “aleatory narrative” in order to describe architecture because he considers, drawing on Roland Barthes’s structural analysis of narrative’s components, “that the components of a narration are interchangeable” and “not pre-determined” and that “[a]rchitecture never conveys a singular story”.70 Even if he maintains that architectural design process can be conceived of as a

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  187 series of transformations, transmutations and manipulations, he insists on the fact that “architecture is much simpler than verbal language”, in the sense that “architecture carries a critical mass”.71 Its critical mass is based on the fact that its translation into materiality obliges to leave behind certain permutations in contrast with verbal expression where the permutations can be unrestrained. The concept of notation has always been at the core of Tschumi’s pedagogy. The reorientation of his pedagogy is related to the impact that The Manhattan Transcripts had on it. Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates gave the project brief ‘Soho Stadium’ at Unit 10 during the academic year 1978–79. What was at the centre of the pedagogy of Coates and Tschumi’s Unit 10 was the thesis that “[t]he insertion of programmatic elements, movements or events implied breaking down some of the traditional components of architecture”.72 Nigel Coates notes, in “Narrative Break-up”, commenting on the pedagogical approach they adopted – he and Tschumi, in Unit 10, they co-taught at the AA between 1977 and 1979: Tschumi asked ‘if space is neither an external object nor an internal experience (made of impressions, sensations and feelings) are man and space inseparable?’ We decided to single out the contents of the brackets; it was the effect that needed to be worked on.73 Ron Arad’s “Soho Stadium” project was realised during the academic year 1978–79 in response to the brief “Soho Institutions”. Jeremy Barnes’s project, entitled “Soho Synthetics”, envisaged a stadium, an asylum and a prison in Soho, between Old Compton Street, Wardour Street and Dean Street. Anthony Summers’s did the project “Carlisle Clinic” for the Soho Institutions studio (1978–79). Nigel Coates, Jeanne Sillett, Peter Wilson and Jenny Lowe collaborated for the Westway Project.

Bernard Tschumi as Dean at GSAPP Columbia University A Symposium entitled “The Culture of Fragments” was organised by Precis 6, which was the Journal of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, at the Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 1985. The panellists were Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Jeffrey Kipnis, Raimund Abraham, John Hejduk and David Shapiro and their moderator was Kenneth Frampton. The speakers “were chosen on the basis of their apparent similarity in ideological positions”.74 Tschumi focused on the mutations that accompanied the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, claiming that “[s]tructuralism referred to a totality” and underlining the role that post-structuralism played for introduction of the notion of “decentered subject” and to the “refusal to consider things as a total identifiable system”. For him, the most significant mutation was the “rupture with the totalities”.75 He also claimed: “today there cannot be

188  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions any opposition between drawings, words and architecture. They are simply different modes of interpretation”.76 The notion of a process is critical here. Things can be apprehended at every moment of the process. The built work of architecture is integral with the drawing of it, and also the death of it, the end of it. I was interested in Palladio, who would redraw his completed buildings, and alter them. I sympathize with this. The act of building is only one aspect of architecture. Concepts are turned into buildings and buildings into further concepts. If the built work is understood as only a moment in time then it represents neither a beginning, nor an end, but rather a fragment is some discontinuous process, a fragment of time.77 Tschumi also underlined the fact that “certain things [had] […] broken down [and that] [a]ny type of attempt to glue it back together, or to consider that it is possible to once again have those full objects, is probably something that cannot be possible anymore”.78 The same year as the symposium “The Culture of fragments” was organised, the exhibition “Bernard Tschumi: drawings, Parc de la Villette” was held at Max Protetch Gallery in New York in September. Parallelly, an exhibition on his entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette was organised at the Architectural Association. Hence, his first prize for the competition had triggered various international events at well esteemed institutions both in the art and architecture scenes, as Max Protetch Gallery, mostly for the art scene, and the Architectural Association, for the architecture scene. Tschumi was invited to give a talk entitled “Paris-Strasbourg-Tokyo” at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation on December 3, 1986.79 The same year the exhibition “Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’” was held at Columbia University. Columbia University’s School of Architecture and Planning was renamed School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation the fall semester of 1986. Bernard Tschumi wrote to Kenneth Frampton on 31 December 1987, as one can read in Frampton’s personal correspondence: Dear Kenneth, Confidentially — Michael Sovern offered me the position yesterday*. I want to thank you for your remarkable support and am looking forward to work very closely with you in developing further that very sharp institution. Talk to you soon — and all my greetings to you and Silvia: a very Happy New Year. Bernard. * still to be confirmed by the Trustees early February.80

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  189 Tschumi assumed the position of Dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University on 1 March 1988. Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) Professor Richard Schaffer and University of Southern California Professor Panos Koulermos were also considered for the post during a yearlong search. As Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning of Columbia University, Tschumi inaugurated significant series of publications. An attentive analysis of the agendas behind these publications is useful in order to analyse how his contribution as dean of the GSAPP triggered significant epistemological transformations. Some publications that should be mentioned are the Précis,81 the Journal of the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning of Columbia University in the City of New York, an informal student publication named Imprécis, which made its first appearance during the Spring semester in 1989, Abstract, which was first published in 1989 and collected a selection of on-going work corresponding to each academic year, Newsline, which was first published in February 1989. Newsline was published five times per year and contained information and essays regarding the School’s programmes, faculty and alumni. The miniseries publications are also important in order to grasp the reorientations of the agenda of the GSAPP of Columbia University, since they were publications collecting works coming from exhibitions that were held at the School. Such case, for instance, is Stan Allen’s Between Drawing and Building, which was published on the occasion of an exhibition of Stan Allen’s work held from 11 March to 20 April 1991 in the South Gallery of Buell Hall at Columbia University.82 The Archives of student work, containing documentation of projects selected by the studio critics at the conclusion of each semester was utilised in the making of Abstract. Another publication that is also worth mentioning in order to grasp the role of Tschumi as dean of the GSAPP and the epistemological mutations that his decisions triggered is D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory. It was first published in 1993 and its editorial board included Bernard Tschumi, Stan Allen, Rosalyn Deutsche, Arata Isozaki, Kunio Kudo, Catherine Ingraham, Joan Ockman, Stephen Perrella and John Rajchman. The name of this publication cannot but bring to mind G: Materials for Elemental Form-Creation (G: Materialen zur Elementaren Gestaltung). A large part of the essays that were published in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory originated from lectures that were given at Columbia University’s GSAPP. D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, as Precis, was distributed by Rizzoli Press. Its General Editor was Bernard Tschumi and its Managing Editor/Designer Stephen Perella. On 4 October 1989, Tschumi gave a lecture entitled “Transprogramming, Disprogramming”, while on 1 November 1989, Dennis Hollier gave a talk entitled “Against Architecture”.83 As The Daily Princetonian announced on 9 November 1989 Tschumi also gave a lecture under the titled “Disprogramming” at Princeton University. On 18 October 1989, Barbara

190  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions Kruger gave a lecture entitled “Pictures and Words” at Columbia University’s GSAPP. That same year, Tschumi published his text entitled “De-, Dis-, Ex-” in the volume Remaking History, which was edited by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani.84 Kruger produced the work “Your body is a battleground”, made for the march on Washington on 9 April 1989. Among the contributors to Remaking History were Edward W. Said, with the essay entitled “Yeats and Decolonization”, Paula A. Treichler, with AIDS and HIV Infection in the Third World: a First World chronicle, Cornel West, with “Black Culture and Postmodernism”, Michelle Wallace, with “West Reading 1968 and the Great American Whitewash”, Janet Abu-Lughod, with “On the remaking of history: how to reinvent the past”, Homi K. Bhabha, with “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, with “Theweleit and Speigelman: of Men and Mice”, J. Hoberman, with “Vietnam, the Remake”, Carol Squiers, with “At their Mercy: a Reading of Pictures from 1988”, Victoria de Grazia, with “The Arts of Purchase: How American Publicity Subverted the European Poster, 1920–1940”, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with “Who Claims Alterity”. The city was at the centre of the interest in the early 1990s as can be seen to a large extent in the topics of the lectures that were given at the GSAPP. For instance, I could refer to Rem Koolhaas’s lecture “Architecture for Urbanism”, on 20 November 1989, or Nigel Coates’s lecture “The City in Motion”,85 on 4 April 1990. Jean-Louis Cohen, who was Visiting Professor at Columbia University during the spring semester in 1991, gave a lecture entitled “The Wall and the Gates: Designing the Paris Ceinture 1900–1990” on 6 February 1991. Peter Eisenman was often invited to give lectures at the school. The 1991 spring semester, he gave the Special Lecture Series “Weak Form: Architecture in A Mediated Environment” at Columbia University from 25 March to 4 April 1991. The subjects of his four talks were the following: “From Interpretation to Mediations: Icon and Index”, “The Conditions of Presence: Immanence, Arbitrariness and Excess”, “The Event of Architecture: The Trace of Presentness” and “Weak Form as Urban Architecture”. The exhibitions that were organised at the Buell Hall can also function as indicators of the reorientations of the epistemological dominant models in the school throughout the years. What can be easily discerned is an interest in the Soviet scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Symptomatic of such an interest is an exhibition which displayed student work from the Moscow Institute for Architecture and was held from 16 October to 22 November 1989, as well as a symposium was organised in conjunction with it on 18 October. Parallelly, a year later, the exhibition “The Drawing of Iakov Chernikhov” was on view in the Arthur Ross Gallery at Buell Hall from 7 December 1990 to 9 March 199186 (Figure 4.102). Andrei Chernikhov, the

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  191 architect’s grandson, gave a lecture entitled “Iakov Chernikhov. A Personal View” the day of the opening of the exhibition, while a related colloquium “Chernikhov and His Work” was organised on 9 February 1991. An exhibition of Stan Allen’s work was held in the South Gallery of Buell Hall at Columbia University from 11 March to 20 April 1991.87 The exhibition entitled “The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art” was held between 9 March and 9 May 1992 at Arthur Ross Architecture Ballet at the Buell Hall at Columbia University.88

The GSAPP and the French philosophy scene In the early 1990s the agenda of the GSAPP was characterised by an intense interest in the French philosophy scene. This is mirrored in the variety of conferences and lectures that were organised on philosophy-oriented topics. In parallel, many philosophers were invited to give lectures at the School’s Wood Auditorium. I will refer to certain of these episodes in order to render tangible this claim. For instance, on 1 and 2 November 1991 a major conference entitled “Afterwords” was organised by the GSAPP in collaboration with the Collège International de Philosophie. In the debate that was held at Wood auditorium and was published in Newsline, Tschumi posed the question of why a conference on architecture and philosophy and architecture and theory was timely. Tschumi underscored, in his article on the “Afterwords” conference, published in Newsline before the conference that the objective of the meeting would be to examine where the “dynamic dialogue” between architecture and philosophy and literary criticism, which had developed over the last decade was going. He insisted on the fact that both spheres of knowledge – philosophy and architecture – borrowed and imported tools from one another: “Philosophy once imported its metaphors (foundations, structure, etc.) from architecture. In turn, architecture imported concepts from philosophy (from positivism to post-structuralism) and also exported polemics (postmodernism)”. He summarised the agenda of the “Afterwords” conference in three pivotal questions: “What is the situation today? Does architecture need theory? Does theory need architecture”.89 Among the speakers at the conference were Bernard Tschumi, Yve-Alain Bois, Rem Koolhaas, Andrew Benjamin, Sylviane Agacinski and Geoffrey Bennington. Joan Ockman and Greg Lynn wrote reviews of the “Afterwords” Architecture and Theory conference entitled “Afterthoughts on Afterwords” and “Afterwords and Just In-time” respectively, published both in the same issue of Newsline.90 Essays on various French philosophers appear in the pages of Newsline throughout the years of its publication. I could refer as an indication to the publication of an “In Memoriam” for Gilles Deleuze, written by Melissa McMahon in 1995,91 to the publication of Jean Baudrillard’s “The Télécratie and the Revolution: or, The Timisoara Syndrome”,92 on the cover

192  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions of the 1992 issue of Newsline of March/April in conjunction with a lecture that he presented in Wood Auditorium on April 6, and the discussion with Jacques Derrida at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation on 27 September 1992, moderated by Mark Wigley. It is worth mentioning that the first piece that appears in the first volume of D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory is a discussion with Jacques Derrida, moderated by Mark Wigley, on 27 September 1992.93 This volume of D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory closed with a two pages article with John Rajchman, Catherine Ingraham and Bernard Tschumi’s comments of the conference “Afterwords: Architecture and Theory Conference”.94 The presence of philosopher in this first volume of D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory is striking. Four of all the articles included in his volume were excepts from talks at the “Afterwords” conference: “Sylvia Agacinski: Shares of Invention”, Giovanna Borradori’s “The Italian Heidegger: Philosophy, Architecture and Weak Thought”, “Geoffrey Bennington: After the Event” and “John Rajchman: Weakness, Technologies, Events (An Introduction)”.95 On 18 November 1992, Tschumi gave a lecture on Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts, entitled “The Electronic Roof; the Inhabited Bridge; on the dissecting table”.96 Kipnis claimed in his review on Tschumi’s Le Fresnoy, published in 1992 regarding the opposition between “DeFormation” and “InFormation”: While they both evolve from the same problem and both explore the heterogeneity that obtains from interstitial and residual spaces, DeFormation and InFormation architecture are by no means collaborative. Indeed, the tensions between them are explicit and pronounced. While DeFormation architecture emphasizes the role of new aesthetic form in the production of space, InFormation de-emphasized the role of aesthetic form in favor of new institutional form, and therefore of program and events.97 Gevork Hartoonian maintains, in The Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, that “Bernard Tschumi thinks of architecture as being in line with conceptual art”.98 Hartoonian discerns two strategies in Tschumi’s attitude: on the one hand that, the “[d]isjunction between architecture and its institutional hegemony” and the distancing of “the object from its conventional connotative context”, and, on the other hand, the tendency to reinterpret “a given programme free of its formal contingencies”.99 Tschumi deconstructs the dualities theory/practice, form/content and subject/object. Tschumi writes in the introduction of Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between: To achieve architecture without resorting to design is an ambition often in the minds of those who go through the incredible effort of putting

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  193 together buildings. Behind this objective is the desire to achieve the obvious clarity of the inevitable, a structure in which the concept becomes architecture itself. In this approach, there is no need to design “new” abstract shapes or historically grounded forms, whether modern, vernacular, or Victorian, according to one’s ideological allegiance; here the idea or concept would result in all the architectural, spatial, or urbanistic effects one could dream of without reliance on proportions, style, or aesthetics. Instead of designing seductive shapes or forms, one would posit an axiom or principle from which everything would derive.100 On 22 September 1993, Joan Ockman, Jean-Louis Cohen, Alan Colquhoun, Jacques Gubler gave a series of lectures and Fritz Neumeyer were given at Columbia University under the title “Architecture Culture”. In a review of the conference by Grahame Shane, published in Newsline, we can read: Cohen identified three themes in this shift to globalization. First was the modernists’ ambiguous preoccupation with transcendent monumentality — ambiguous because of Stalin’s similar obsession with monumental classicism (not to mention Hitler’s Germany or New Deal America). Second were reactions to Americanization after World War II, with the image of the United States shifting form New York skyscrapers to the decentered city-region of suburban Los Angeles, a haven of tertiary service industries and consumption. Third was the critical reappraisal of modernism from Hitchcock to Rogers in the ‘40s, to Tafuri and Rowe in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Cohen read this as part of a cycle of repression from generation to generation, as the taboos of one generation were broken and replaced by new prohibitions.101 A major exhibition of Tschumi’s work entitled “Thresholds/Bernard Tschumi: Architecture and Event” was held at the Museum of Art in New York from 21 April to 5 July 1994. It was organised by Terence Riley, who was MoMA’s chief curator at the time, and Anne Dixon, who was the supervisor of the study centre of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design at the time. The main works exhibited were Le Fresnoy Center of Contemporary Art in Tourcoing in France (1991–1997), which was still under construction at the time, the Bridge City Lausanne (1988), Kansai International Airport in Japan (1988), Chartres Business Park Masterplan (1991), the Parc de La Villette (1982–1998), which was also still under construction and The Manhattan Transcripts (1976–1981). The exhibition was accompanied by the re-publication of The Manhattan Transcripts and the publication of Architecture and Disjunction,102 which collected various essays of Tschumi written between 1975 and 1990 and the first volume of the Event-Cities series, that is to say Event-Cities: Praxis.103 The same year the exhibition “Thresholds/O.M.A.at MoMA: Rem Koolhaas and the Place of

194  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions Public Architecture” was also held at the MoMA from 3 November 1994 through 31 January 1995.104 Stan Allen, who was at the time Assistant Professor at the GSAPP of Columbia University, wrote in his review in Newsline regarding Tschumi’s exhibition at the MoMA: “The neutrality of the container is never given, always constructed; not so much inFormation as disinformation”.105 This distinction between architecture as information and architecture as disinformation brings to mind Jeffrey Kipnis’s distinction between “DeFormation” and “InFormation”. Another note-worthy symposium, which was held at Columbia University in 1994 is “Cyber Space, Public Space, Hyper Ghetto: New Conceptions of Urban Space”. In the 1995 issue of Newsline of November/December a new course taught by Saskia Sassen was announced: “Saskia Sassen, professor of urban planning, will teach a new school-wide course this spring titled “Space: Electronic, Economic, Political and Urban Dimensions” […] The course will examine the impact of electronics and globalization on the constitution of space in the economy, the polity and the city”.106 The Colloquium “The Origins of the Avant-Garde in America” was organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art of New York and the Columbia University GSAPP from 1 to 3 February 1996. Its contributors were Phyllis Lambert, Philip Johnson, Jeffrey Kipnis, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Somol, Francesco Dal Co, Joan Ockman, Mark Linder, Michael Hays, Paulette Singley, Mitchell Schwarzer, Sanford Kwinter, Colin Rowe, Terence Riley, Silvia Lavin, Beatriz Colomina, Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman. Koolhaas and Eisenman’s talks were entitled “Le Corbusier, Harrison and the United States” and “The Necessity of an American Avant-garde respectively”. In his introductory text to the volume that collected the contributions of the speakers of the conference, Tschumi highlights the shift from a situation in which the conditions of the architectural profession contributed to the reorientations of architectural pedagogy to a situation in which the roles have been inverted, that is to say a situation which is characterised mainly by the impact that the schools have on the “development in the profession”.107 Tschumi sheds light to a similar mutation of the role of the schools of architecture in his introduction to Index Architecture: A Columbia Book of Architecture.108 On 26 February 1997, Tschumi gave a lecture entitled “Deviance, the normative and the in-between: bodies in space”.109 Tschumi presented a lecture on 23 February 2000. In the 2000 spring issue of Newsline, “Anything” the tenth and final event of the series was announced. It would take place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on 1, 2 and 3 June. The participants would include Elisabeth Diller, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Hubert Damisch and Germano Celant, among others. After having served as Dean of Columbia University’s GSAPP of Columbia University for fifteen years, Tschumi stepped down at the conclusion

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  195 of the 2003 spring semester. In his last year as dean, he organised the conference “The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century”, which was held on 28 and 29 March 2003.110 In the introduction to the volume that gathered the contributions of the sixty of the world’s leading architectural designers, historians, theorists and critics who gathered for the conference, Bernard Tschumi and Irene Cheng distinguished two ways of existing texts commenting on the condition of architectural discipline – descriptive and prescriptive statements – and interrogated if the modes of self-analysis and self-expression had changed. The volume, as the conference, was structured around eight pairs of notions that conventionally are not thought together: aesthetics and urbanism, politics and material, detail and identity, form and influence, envelope and public/private, globalisation and criticism, organisation and bodies and electronics and perception.

The emergence of the paperless studios at GSAPP Columbia University Bernard Tschumi, in “The School’s New Computing Facilities”, published in the fall issue of Newsline in 1994 discerned three major “breaks” or “dissociations” that occurred in architecture education and architecture at large “in the last two or three thousand years”. He situated the first dissociation in 1670, when sphere of architecture and the sphere of construction were separated, and architects stopped learning on the construction site and started going to school. He positioned the second dissociation within the context of the dominance of the Beaux-Arts model and of the concept of “composition”, which turned architecture into a practice that aimed at producing drawings and left behind the idea of their translation through construction. Finally, he claims that the third major dissociation was association with the 1968 effects and the students’ protests at Columbia University and elsewhere. The emergence of “a new social conscience” pushed architectural schools to adapt their curriculum in a way that would render them capable to respond to the needs of advocacy planning. The necessity to respond to the issues concerning the conflicts between different communities became a major issue. A claim that was at the very heart of Tschumi’s agenda as dean is the following: “it is not the architectural schools that follow the trends established by the professional firms; but now it is the professional firms that follow the trends set by the architectural schools”. He expresses the same point of view regarding the inversion of the relationship between architectural schools and firms in his introduction to Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, in 1997, and to Index Architecture: A Columbia Book of Architecture in 2003.111 In “The School’s New Computing Facilities”, he also highlights the mutations of architecture’s score regarding its interaction with various disciplines and the impact that these exchanges have on the intensification of the role of theory: “Multiple

196  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions crossovers among art, architecture, film and linguistic studies encourage complex proposals in which “theory” becomes a key word”. He considered that the notion of “theoretical practice” had acquired a different and more important role, triggering “an extraordinary development in the culture of architecture over the last ten years”. Tschumi also shed light on the separation between the architects focused mostly on publishing their work and the actual fabrication of buildings. He expressed his view that architectural schools should find strategies to respond to these mutations of architecture’s scope. He poses the following questions regarding the necessity to invent new tactics in order to respond to the transformations of architecture’s score: “What is our attitude toward this ever-increasing distancing of architects from the actual fabrication of buildings and cities? How can we turn such distancing against itself?”. His view was that architects should try to have a defining role in the invention of new tools and in “the construction of technology”. Instead of being involved with “the technology of construction”, they should play a protagonist’s role in “the construction of technology”. He argued, for instance, “that the changing role of architects means that they may be less involved with the technology of construction but that they must instead be involved with the construction of technology”. Tschumi’s agenda as dean was characterised by the conviction that architecture schools should orient their efforts in contributing to the transition of knowledge and skills that would render architects “instrumental in the construction of the new computerized technologies that are already transforming building and design processes”. The very force of his vision was the way he associated the third dissociation, that is to say the emergence of “a new social conscience” after the 1968 protests, with the necessity to take distance from “a laissez-faire acceptance of today’s design conditions”. Instead, he was convinced that architects should “design new conditions” and go “[b]eyond the construction of technology”. He related the design of new conditions for architecture with the emergence of “new attitudes toward the activities that take place in architectural spaces”. Reading this article of Tschumi in Newsline, it becomes apparent that his vision regarding the paperless studio went far beyond a technophile vision, but intended to embrace “a new attitude toward programs and the production of events, so as to reconfigure and to provide a rich texture of experience start will redefine architecture and urban life”.112 Despite the fact that at the beginning the paperless studios were only two out of twelve or thirteen studios, their impact on the epistemology of architecture was significant. Stan Allen and Greg Lynn taught the first two paperless studios. The aforementioned text of Tschumi was translated into the decision to locate computer studios on a loft like mezzanine in McKim, Mead and White’s 1912 Avery Hall. This space took the name “Avery 700-Level Computer Studios”. The architects of this space were Stan Allen, who was Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP at the time, in collaboration

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  197 with Lyn Rice, Kathy Kim and Anna Mueller. The GSAPP, thanks to a $1.4 million combined grant and loan from Columbia University was able to take the initiative to realise three physically separate but electronically linked environments for learning and research: the Paperless Design Studio, the Multimedia/CAD Lab and the Digital Design Lab (DDL). Of these only the Paperless Design Studio was completely new; the other two expanded existing facilities. The Paperless Design Studio denoted a significant “reversal of the standard notion of the student’s homebase”113. Stan Allen remarked in his article entitled “Avery 700-Level Computer Studios”, which was published in Newsline in 1994, that “Columbia [was] […] the first architecture school to provide students their own SGI machines with stateof-the art visualization software such as Softimage” 114. He also mentioned that, apart from him, other faculty members that contributed to the teaching of the Paperless Studios were “Keller Easterling, Hani Rashid, Scott Marble, […] Richard Plunz, Laurie Hawkinson, Greg Lynn and Bernard Tschumi”.115 Eden Muir and Rory O’Neill note in “The Paperless Studio: A Digital Design Environment”, published in Newsline in 1994: Last spring, Dean Tschumi asked us to propose an integration of digital technologies into the School. We proposed a seamless electronic infrastructure with a complete suite of state-of-the-art digital design and presentation tools. We faced two different but intertwined design problems”. They highlight the need to find a way to combine the virtual design environment (software, interfaces, networking, archives, etc) and the physical studio. They also mention that “[t]he electronic configuration of the Paperless Studio was derived from experiments conducted by the Digital Design Lab (DDL), a GSAP research group concerned with electronic environments, both real and virtual. During the spring semester of 1994, in 206 Fayerweather, the DDL assembled an early prototype of the Paperless Studio, an electronic design environment that resembled a special-effects film studio more than a traditional architectural studio. Advanced equipment was granted from Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI. Columbia’s Center for Telecommunications Research provided additional SGI hardware and video capability. Software was granted from a variety of leading vendors, included Alias and Softimage (best known for modelling and animating the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park). Each student in the Paperless Studio had access to a machine dedicated to his or her sole use and files could be transferred over the network to the machines as required for special shared or computation-intensive tasks. As Muir and Rory O’Neill underscored in the aforementioned article, “learning the protocols of telecommunications and multi-user situations is a valuable part of the experience of the Paperless Studio, where electronic library resources, online databases and global internet access will be delivered digitally to each student’s desk”.116

198  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions Anthony Webster, in his article “Building Technologies Research Program Initiated at the School”, also published in the October 1994 issue of Newsline, differentiated the agenda of Columbia University’s GSAPP regarding the import of digital culture on education from the agenda at MIT’s and Renneslaer Polytechnic Institute’s architecture schools: “Unlike the technically-oriented research programs at MIT’s and Renneslaer Polytechnic Institute’s architecture schools, the GSAP’s efforts will build on the School’s strength in setting technological considerations in the context of design and history/theory”117. Reading these words, one can easily understand that the GSAPP embracement of technological facilities in the education did not mean a distancing from the previous philosophically oriented agenda during the first years of deanship of Bernard Tschumi, but instead aimed to enrich through the incorporation of new tools the agenda on which the latter worked since the first days of his deanship. Tschumi was convinced that new design tools go hand in hand with new modes of thought. For this reason, his philosophically oriented agenda was not opposed to the paperless studio, but, instead, both were major components of the same agenda and the one further enriched the other. Anthony Webster, in the aforementioned article, noted that “[t]hrough an invitation for preliminary proposals, the GSAP research program aims to encourage the participation of various departments, consistent with the goal of receiving funding from organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF)”118. He also highlights that interdisciplinary efforts were encouraged. He referred to projects that were currently under development, such as the Architectural Anatomy Online, run by professors Webster and Kenneth Frampton, and underscored that the incorporation of new computational facilities aim at accelerating learning and increasing “the amount of technological information to which the GSAP students are exposed”.119 In the issue of Columbia Daily Spectator of 11 October 1995, we can read: “Dean of the School of Architecture Bernard Tschumi said the project was undertaken in response to changes in the way architects work since the introduction of computers. ‘The tools that they have today mean that people don’t think in the same way,’ Tschumi said. ‘Architects can now think threedimensionally in both time and space’”120 Another article related to the paperless studios that one can find in Newsline’s pages is “The Paperless Studios in Context”, published in the 1995 January/February issue, where we can see students’ projects coming from Hani Rashid, Scott Marble, Greg Lynn’s studios.121 Stan Allen further analyses the reorientations of architectural pedagogy that occurred in conjunction with the emergence of paperless studios in his recently published essay entitled “The Paperless Studios in Context”.122

Bernard Tschumi’s recent pedagogical strategies It would be interesting to reflect on the relationship between the project briefs that Bernard Tschumi gave to his students in his early career as

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  199 educator during the 1970s and those that he gives nowadays to his students at Columbia University. In the 2012 fall semester, the topic addressed in the Advance studio taught by Tschumi at GSAPP was “Public and Private: The House of the Three Little Scripts”. This studio, as one can read in its syllabus, aimed “at developing new architectural concepts potentially as radical as Kahn’s serving-served spaces or Le Corbusier’s Plan Libre were in their time”.123 The studio was centred on the elaboration of trilogies that served as instruments of analysis as concept, percept and affect, concept, context and content, and space, event and movement. The programs, which were determined by lottery, were six: a Concept Library, a Concept Hotel, a Concept Clinic, A Concept Museum, A Concept Brothel and a Concept Cemetery. What is remarkable is that all concept submissions were in black and white. In exceptional cases and if it was strategic for the argument of the project a single additional strategic colour was allowed. In the 2013 fall semester, the studio “Armory Generator Notation” explored “Concept and Notation”, aiming at inventing a new type of urban generator for the 21st century. In the studio brief, Tschumi defined as “urban generator” “a place that can foster and encourage new modes of living unknown until today”. The students were invited to investigate “three modes of notation for a new type of urban facility for the 21st century”: The invention of new modes of notation, that describe space, time, activity, processes, body, light, private, public, etc., in a novel way was an important component of the studio. In the first short exercise, students were asked to select one mode of notation from another discipline (dance, sport, music, battlefield, biology, chemistry, cinema etc.). The architectural precedents mentioned in the syllabus included Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery, Rem Koolhaas’s Kunsthal, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Palladio Basilica Palladiana and Terragni’s Casa del Fascio among other. The building programmes given to the students in this case were: art, media, sport, work, sleep, education, love, death. The mediation and interaction between different communities was central for this studio. During the 2014 fall semester, he gave the brief “Elements and Concepts” in response to the Venice Biennale. The syllabus was introduced with the following questions: What is architecture? Is it an idea, a sequence of spaces, a montage of attractions, a material whirl, a supplement? Is it made of a finite number of elements (twelve, fifteen, or less, or more, as described in an important exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale)? Reading the syllabus, one is also confronted with the following interrogation: “So what is the difference between architecture and just a building?” Tschumi invited his students to explore ways of designing architecture without using the “elements” that were celebrated in the 2014 Venice Biennale,

200  Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions curated by Rem Koolhaas. He notes in the syllabus: “In this year’s studio we will make it our agenda to investigate the design of an architecture without windows, walls, roofs or corridors etc.” In parallel, in the first exercise he gave during this studio, he asked the students “to identify existing projects that are not using any of the fundamentals defined in the Biennale”. Additionally, students were asked to design a project by using only one Biennale fundamental element of architecture (given by lottery). Using any of the other fourteen fundamentals was not allowed for this exercise. The programmes given for the main project of this studio were: An Elemental Library, an Elemental Hotel, an Elemental Clinic, an Elemental Museum, an Elemental Brothel and an Elemental Cemetery. In the 2015 fall semester, the project brief was “Concept and Interaction”. The first phrase of the brief was “Architecture is the materialization of concepts”. The hypothesis was: “What is most important in architecture is not what it looks like but what it does”.124 The six programmes that were given this time were library, science museum, research labs, lecture hall, amusement arcade and love hotel and the site was a typical Manhattan block. The reading list he gave to his students included Rafael Moneo’s “On Typology”, Team 10 Primer and Roland Barthes “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966). In the 2016 fall semester, Tschumi gave as project brief for his Advanced Studio “CONCEPT + SITE (Revisiting “The Gym”)”. The tension between Columbia University’s control of the surrounding community and the activists’ reached its peak, some weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., because of the intention of the university to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park.125 Tschumi’s studio at the GSAPP of Columbia University takes as precedent the 1968 student protests at Columbia University, the occupation of university buildings and the arrests that followed them. What was the point of departure of the reflection that was developed in this studio was the realisation that the arrests “began with an architectural incident”. More specifically, the studio invited the students to reflect on the incidents regarding the gym on Morningside Park126. One can read in the syllabus: The university had started to build a gym on Morningside Park, on the slope leading to Harlem (but accessible only from the summit above) for the exclusive use of Columbia College students. Considered insensitive and racially charged, the gym was eventually abandoned. But it was an architectural incident that set fire to the already confrontational climate of a time that included the Vietnam War, the assassination of MLK, and May ’68 in Paris.127 Tschumi invited the students to investigate through their projects “how the gym (and other programs) could have been designed otherwise on the same complex and challenging site”. The objective was to problematise the notions of programme and site intelligence and to propose a project

Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions  201 that enhances social and political intelligence, in contrast with the gym on Morningside Park. The studio was developed around the connections between programme, site and concept. In that particular semester, special attention was paid to the link between the concept and the site. The main question that was addressed was that of how “a concept affects a site, or a site affects a concept”. The students were invited to reflect on “how topography and social context can become an opportunity rather than a constraint”.128 Despite the fact that the studio took as its precedent the gym on Morningside Park, it was not focused only on the programme of gym, but, instead, it opened the reflection on other five programmes too: a museum with A.I.R, a clinic, a school, a performance centre and a library. Tschumi apart from the Advanced Studio he also teaches “Architecture: The Contemporary (Ideas and Concepts from 1968 to the Present)”, which is a history and theory seminar. As we can read in the 2006 syllabus of this seminar, it covers the period from 1968 to the present, beginning “with Italian Radical Architecture of the late sixties and early seventies, together with its counterpoint in Rational Architecture”. The syllabus started with the following three questions: “Should architecture be judged based on its history? Does contemporary practice grow out of a genealogy of forms? Or, on the contrary, do architects develop ideas and concepts embedded in their culture and time?”

Notes 1 Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities: Praxis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 367. 2 Tschumi, “Disjunctions”, Perspecta, 23 (1987): 108–119. 3 Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), vii. 4 Tschumi cited in Dennis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, 1993), xi; Dennis Hollier, La prise de la Concorde: Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). 5 Tschumi, Event-Cities: Praxis, 11. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Tschumi, Event-Cities 2 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000). 10 Tschumi, Event-Cities 4: Concept-Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 11 Ibid, 15. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 RoseLee Goldberg, “Space as Praxis”, Studio International, 190 (1975): 130–135. 15 Manfredo Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language”, Oppositions, 3 (1974): 112–129. 16 Tschumi, “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”, Studio International, 190 (1975), 139.

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8

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events Disjunction and a new definition of metropolis

Bernard Tschumi argues that his Manhattan Transcripts’ “starting point” was the “inevitable disjunction between use, form and social values”, which implied “a dynamic conception posed against a static definition of architecture”. 2 The reinvention of architecture’s modes of notation that he attempted through this series of “theoretical” projects that he started in 1976 and ended in 1981 and which are linked to his first encounter with the art scene of Manhattan, “aimed at grasping domains, which, though normally excluded from most architectural theory, are indispensable to work at the margins, or limits, or architecture”. 3 Tschumi first went to New York in 1975. During the first year of his stay, he was in close connection with the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), who had invited him to New York. He started working on The Manhattan Transcripts after his collaboration with the Institute, but was doing research on Central Park, which in a sense prepared the Manhattan Transcripts, during his stay at the Institute. The Manhattan Transcripts are theoretical propositions executed through drawing. Made between 1976 and 1981 for consecutive exhibitions, the four episodes transcribe imagined events in real New York locales: The Park uncovers a murder in Central Park; The Street (Border Crossing) chronicles the movement of a person drifting through violent and sexual events on 42 Street; The Tower (The Fall) depicts a vertiginous fall from a Manhattan skyscraper; and The Block illustrates five unlikely events occurring in separate courtyards within a city block.4 In order to understand the relationship between The Manhattan Transcripts and reality, we should bear in mind that despite the fact that their strategies are based on the elaboration of “fragments of a given reality”, the overcoming of conventional architectural signs becomes possible thanks to the use of “abstract concepts”. 5 Tschumi’s Advertisements for Architecture (1976–1978) is a series of postcard-sized juxtapositions of words and images that intended to explore how “one can trigger desire for architecture through the media”.6 These advertisements were employed by Tschumi to illustrate in a reinvented way articles treating issues that could not be illustrated in a conventional way. Their main argument was that conventional illustrations can never replace the way real space is experienced. Hence,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-8

208  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events this series of advertisements aimed “to trigger desire for something beyond illustration”, in other words “desire for architecture”.7 One of the advertisements accompanied a text of Tschumi regarding his exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes”, published in Skyline in May 1979.8 Advertisements for Architecture were the third manifesto displayed at the exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes”, held at Artists Space Gallery in New York from 8 to 29 April in 1978. Tschumi argued in 1975, in “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”: “it is the unreal (or unrealistic) position of the artist or architect that may be its very reality”.9 In “The Pleasure of Architecture”, Tschumi sustained that “[t]he architecture of pleasure lies where conceptual and spatial paradoxes merge in delight, where architectural language breaks into a thousand pieces, where the elements of architecture are dismantled and its rules transgressed”.10 The starting point of The Screenplays and The Manhattan Transcripts was the realisation that “architecture’s sophisticated means of notation – elevations, axonometric, perspective views, and so on – […] don’t tell you anything about sound, touch, or the movement of bodies through spaces”.11 A very essential remark for the purposes of this research is Tschumi’s observation that “[a]bstracted from a use or a context, a building has no meaning”. At the heart of his stance is the realisation that “as soon as it is used or contextualized – as soon as something happens in it – it acquires meaning”.12 Tschumi argues that “space is transformed by events”13 and that “architecture is the discourse of events, as much as the discourse of spaces”.14 In architecture, according to Tschumi, the materialisation of concepts coincides with visual and social expression. In other words, the concepts in order to be materialised must necessarily be expressed through visual and social means. Tschumi claims that “architecture’s unique quality is that the means through which it materializes its concepts are also the means through which it expresses itself visually and socially”.15 For him, the very force of architecture is that these three modes of expression coincide. In other words, for him, architecture is “in constant intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought”.16 Tschumi is interested in the function of drawings as “devices”. The term “device” is a term that he often employs. He notes, in The Manhattan Transcripts, for instance: “Even if the Transcripts become a selfcontained set of drawings, with its own internal coherence, they are first a device”.17 In a conversation, in his office in New York in September 2016, Tschumi insisted on the fact that he uses several devices. He told me: “The devices that I use they are several, they are many”.18 At the core of this book is the endeavour to understand architectural drawings as dispositifs. An aspect of the notion of “dispositif”, as understood by Gilles Deleuze, in “What is a dispositif?”, is the conception of lines of subjectification as processes.19 The insistence on the participation of lines of subjectification to the production of subjectivity is important for understanding how the shift

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  209 from a conception of a passive spectator that just sees the image towards a conception of an active spectator that is invited to rebuild in his mind and experience “the dynamic process of the emergence and formation of the image”20 is related to the production of a new kind of subjectivity. Tschumi underscores that Manhattan Transcripts’ “implicit purpose has to do with the twentieth-century city”. 21 But what is more important for my research is that “[t]heir explicit purpose is to transcribe things normally removed from conventional architectural representation, namely the complex relationship between spaces and their use; between the set and the script; between ‘type’ and ‘program’; between objects and events”. 22 Tschumi was interested in grasping “the character of a city at the very point where it contradicts itself”. 23 He also aimed to explore to what extent architectural narrative could exist and under what circumstances. The point of departure of The Manhattan Transcripts was that “architecture [is] […] simultaneously space and event”24 and that “[t]here is no architecture without action, no architecture without event, no architecture without program”. 25 In Event-Cities: Praxis, Tschumi underscores that “there is no architecture without action or without program, and that architecture’s importance resides in its ability to accelerate society’s transformation through a careful agencing of spaces and events”. 26 Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts are of great importance for this study, given that their objective was to go “beyond the conventional definition of use […] [and] to explore unlikely confrontations”. 27 They are also characterised by the intention to reorganise the connections between space, event and movement. Through his Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi addresses the juncture between real spaces and mere fantasies. In “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”, originally published in Studio International in 1975, Tschumi underscores that “just as the surrealists could not find the right compromise between scandal and social acceptance architecture seems to have little choice between autonomy and commitment”28 and addresses the problem of the impossibility of questioning the nature of space and at the same time experiencing the spatial praxis. A question that Tschumi posed, in “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”, originally published in Studio International in 1975, was the interrogation regarding the possibility of existence of “architectural essence, a being that would transcend all social, political, and economic systems”. A starting point of his approach is the consideration that the historical moment at which he started his projects was characterised by a total “split between social reality and utopian dreams”. At the centre of his stance is the desire to draw parallels “between the philosophies of a period and the spatial concepts of architecture”. The approach of Tschumi could be interpreted as a reaction against the tendency of the architects of the previous generation to focus on the autonomy of architecture. His rejection of the internalist that characterised the dominant models of the epistemology of architecture of the previous generation

210  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events becomes apparent in Tschumi’s following statement: “By focusing on itself, architecture has entered an unavoidable paradox that is more present in space than anywhere else – the impossibility of both questioning the nature of space and at the same time experiencing a spatial praxis”. At the centre of his thought is the exploration of the conditions under which “dialectic between social praxis and spatial forms” could be possible. What interests me most in Tschumi’s approach is his remark regarding “the impossibility of questioning the nature of space and at the same time experiencing a real space”. 29 Jacques Rancière’s distinction between dialectical and symbolic montage is mobilised here in order to examine to what extent Manhattan Transcripts constitute a form of expression of symbolic montage. According to Rancière, “dialectical montage” reveals a reality of desires and dreams, hidden behind the apparent reality, while “symbolic montage” creates analogies by drawing together unrelated elements, proceeding by allusion. 30 The instrumentalisation of the term “late avant-garde” by Michael K. Hays draws attention to architecture’s endeavour to critique consumerism and to challenge the relationship between architecture and the real. Hays’s understanding of the discursive and visual strategies of the “late avant-garde” as signs of recognition that “the real is not there before some material symbolic practice makes it manifest”, 31 is opposed to Theodor Adorno’s conception of “the dialectical images of surrealism” as components of a “dialectic of subjective freedom”. 32 At the core of this chapter is the relation of the transition from the outward-directed negativity of the historical avant-garde to the second-order negation of a self-reflective late avant-garde architecture to the passage from dialectical to symbolic montage. In the Manhattan Transcripts series, Tschumi used three autonomous systems, as he did for the Parc de La Villette. The Manhattan Transcripts series consist of four episodes: Episode 1: the Park, Episode 2: the Street, Episode 3: the Tower and Episode 4: the Block. The conflicts between the events, spaces and movements are the focus of these projects. Tschumi says to Enrique Walker: I had always had the idea of doing a book that would travel around the margins of the twentieth century in a kind of counterhistory of modern architecture, using all the neglected or dismissed views of architecture suggested by nonarchitects, from the futurists to the surrealists to John Cage. And I might have done if La Villette hadn’t happened. I even had a title, The Architecture of Dissidence.33 He raised the issues that would be treated in this book in a lecture at the Architectural Association in London in 1979 and in nine seminars at the Cooper Union in New York a year later. A text bringing together some of the aspects addressed in these cases was published under the title “The Architecture of Dissidence: A Hypothetical Book” in Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture in 1990. Tschumi’s intention in this “hypothetical

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  211 book” was to “document the most dynamic episodes in the history of twentieth-century spaces, emphasizing those moments when architects, artists and writers attempted to achieve radical breaks with the constricting rules of their time by devising impossible, shocking and often fabulous projects”.34 In other words, the objective of the book would be to expose key moments “in the development of a new sense of space in the twentieth century”. 35 The episodes to be explored would include: “Spaces of Destruction; Spaces of Sensation; Spaces of Limits; Spaces of Lust; Spaces of Notation; Spaces of Coercion; Spaces of Empathy; Spaces of Fiction; Hypnotic Spaces; Subjective Spaces”. It would be developed around the following nine chapters: Futurism; Russian Constructivism; Expressionism; Dada; Surrealism; De Stijl and the Bauhaus; 1952–1960; 1968–1972; The 1970s. It is interesting that he identified 1972 as a turning point. Regarding the last chapter, to which also his own work could be inscribed, he remarked that the focus on the notion of body pushes the architects and artists to preconceive the notion of space and to adapt it to the need to embrace the idea of “space as praxis”. He interpreted the intensification of the importance of drawings and painting as “a secret wish to see the modern city die”. In parallel, he underlined the intention of certain works to capture the capacity of the modern metropolis to “generate its own spaces”. Important for analysing the notion of montage is Sergueï Eisenstein’s seminal text “Montage and architecture”.36 The notion of montage is defining for understanding the intentions behind the visual strategies of The Manhattan Transcripts. Montage is the technique of selecting, editing and piecing together separate sections of fragments. The way Tschumi conceives montage is based on his appropriation of Eisenstein’s theory. The latter, in The Film Sense, drew a distinction between emotionally exciting and moving story and logical exposition of facts. This distinction is pivotal for grasping Tschumi’s endeavour in Manhattan Transcripts. In parallel, Eisenstein distinguishes the montage principle from the principle of representation. 37 What is at the centre of my analysis here is Eisenstein’s intention to provoke the shift of spectator’s perception from a passive stance to an active one. This shift also characterises Tschumi’s stance. Through his Manhattan Transcripts, the latter intended to reinvent the relationship between the observers of architectural drawings and to provoke the reader of the drawings to adopt a point of view that is based on the idea “there is no architecture without […] movement”.38 Tschumi declared in the introduction to Architecture and Disjunction: there is no social or political change without the movements and programs that transgress supposedly stable institutionality, architectural or otherwise; that there is no architecture without everyday life, movement, and action’ and that it is the most dynamic aspects of their disjunctions that suggest a new definition of architecture. 39

212  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events He aimed, thus, to invent modes of architectural notation that could activate a sensation of movement and action in the mind of the observer. The “signifying incompletion” that characterises the perception of design strategies through the technique of montage invites the spectator “to attempt to complete the montage”.40 Eisenstein notes regarding the strength of montage, in “Montage 1938”: The strength of montage lies in the fact that it involves the spectator’s emotions and reason. The spectator is forced to follow the same creative path that the author followed when creating the image. The spectator does not only see the depicted elements of the work; he also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and formation of the image in the same way that the author experienced it. This is obviously as close as it is possible to get to conveying visually the fullness of the author’s thought and intention, to conveying them ‘with the same force of physical perception’ with which they faced the author in the moments of creative vision.41 Eisenstein also sustained that montage’s strength “lies in the fact that it involves the spectator’s emotions and reason”. His main intention was to the force the spectator “to follow the same creative path that the authors followed when creating the image”.42 The point of departure of his approach was his intention to shift the way the spectator is treated. More specifically, he rejected any understanding of the spectator that was reducing the conception of the spectator’s practice into a simple practice of seeing depicted elements of the work. On the contrary, his objective was to shape tools that could take into consideration the conviction that the spectator when confronted with images should experience “the dynamic process of the emergence and formation of the image”.43 The interest of Tschumi in provoking the spectator “to attempt to complete the montage”44 is evident in his remark that “looking at the Transcripts also means constructing them”.45 Significant for grasping the way Tschumi understands the concept of the user is the relationship of his theory with the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who believed that the viewers’ perception of a face depends on the impact of sentiments on their perception.46 Kuleshov claimed that context influences one’s perception of emotional faces. In a similar way, Tschumi believes that “depending on what happens in the same building, one’s perception of the building will differ”.47 The replacement of the notion of function by the notion of event implies a reorientation of how the concept of spatialisation is conceived. For instance, Tschumi notes, in his manuscript for “Six Concepts”: “Just as important is the spatialisation that goes with the event”. He draws on Foucault in order to describe the transformations regarding the way one perceive and inhabit space when we move from a conception of architectural experience focused on the concept of

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  213 function towards a conception of architectural experience focused on the concept of event. More specifically, as we can read in the manuscript for “Six Concepts”, Tschumi draws on Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia as interpreted by John Rajchman: “Here are events in the space we construct ourselves to inhabit: heterotopia”.48 The point of departure of Tschumi’s approach is the intention to replace “the project of the Modern Movement, which was after the affirmation of certainties in a unified utopia” with the “questioning of multiple, fragmented, dislocated terrains”. The concept of heterotopia permits, according to him, such a questioning. He notes: “Such a concept is quite different from the project of the Modern Movement, which was after the affirmation of certainties in a unified utopia as opposed to our current questioning of multiple, fragmented, dislocated terrains”. In “Six Concepts”, Tschumi refers to the following concepts: “Technologies of Defamiliarization”, “The Mediated “Metropolitan” Shock”, “De-structuring”, “Superimposition”, “Crossprogramming” and “Events: The Turning Point”. The concept of “crossprogramming” is critical for this study. Tschumi highlights the importance of the interaction between “Crossprogramming”, “transprogramming” and “disprogramming”.49 In his typescript for the preface for Questions of Space, Tschumi writes: “these essays were part of a conscious strategy to open unexplored grounds and develop conceptual tools aimed at the making of a new architecture”. Tschumi notes in a manuscript of 1986: “Every interpretation can be the object of interpretation, and that new interpretation can in turn be interpreted, deconstructed until every interpretation erases the previous one”. He understands the “dominant history of architecture” as “a history of the signified” and wishes to revise it and to overcome its normative rules. In parallel, he rejects “cause and effect relation between a function and a form, between a signifier and its signified” and is for “deregulation of meaning”.50 Claire Jamieson, in NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London, notes that Tschumi’s “strips of photographs and drawings, each from a different perspective”, in Manhattan Transcripts, “the viewer change their point of view upon reading each image”. 51 The observer of the drawings when confronted with the “changing perspectives and angles” is forced to trace in his mind “the effect of moving through space”. 52 Sam Spurr juxtaposes Tschumi’s use of “sudden perspective” in The Manhattan Transcripts to the “distanced, bird’s eye view of the map reader” in order to argue that Tschumi’s notational strategies invite observers to reconstruct in their mind an “embodied interaction”. 53 Tschumi combined not only photographs and drawings, but also different perspectives. Both strategies force the observer to constantly change his point of view. A third strategy employed by Tschumi is the mixing of different scales – the city, the building and the details are simultaneously present and invite the observer to adjust his reading in order to conceive all the different scales as part of the same semiotic

214  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events assemblage. Jamieson draws attention to the way Tschumi mixed “the scale of the city, the building, and the small detail – creating a much greater sense of motion, an almost swooping effect”. 54 This last tactic also contributes to the activation of a sense of motion while reading the images. The transformation of the status of the citizen examined in each of the generations under study goes hand in hand with the mutations of the dominant modes of notation. The tension between fragmentation and “Gestalt” is important for understanding Tschumi’s design process. The latter is against Gestalt theory. His attraction to montage functions as an antidote against Gestalt. As Dan Mellamphy underscores, “fragment (broken off, broken away/from), escapes the logic qua dialectic of part and whole” and is thought “as wholly distinct from the whole”.55 This explains why the incorporation of montage by Tschumi serves to deconstruct any logic of understanding architectural design through dichotomies between parts and whole. As he underscores, The Manhattan Transcripts did “not attempt to transcend the contradictions between object, man, and event in order to bring them in a new synthesis”56. Their objective was, instead, “to maintain these contradictions in a dynamic manner, in a new relationship of indifference, reciprocity, or conflict”. 57 The concept of fragment, and especially the concept of fragmented inhabitant could be associated with the concept of becoming, as understood by Gilles Deleuze. Following Keith Ansell Pearson, we could claim that “[f]or Bergson it is the part that is virtual and the whole that is the real”.58 The notion of montage could be related to the virtual. The Manhattan Transcripts were exhibited in four solo exhibitions at Artists Space Gallery in New York in 1978, at the AA in 1979, at P.S.1 in 1980 and at Max Protech Gallery in 1981. In 1979, the exhibition “Aldo Rossi: Architectural Projects” and two exhibitions devoted to the work John Hejduk and Massimo Scolari respectively were also held at Max Protetch Gallery.59 Moreover, the exhibition “O.M.A. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis: Projects 1972–1982” was held at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York between 11 March and 3 April 1982. The first solo exhibition of Tschumi was “Architectural Manifestoes”, held at Artists Space Gallery in New York from 8 April through 29 April 1978, where the first series of Manhattan Transcripts were displayed. In March 1978, he wrote for the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition: “Each of the following works plays on the tension between ideas and real spaces, between abstract concepts and the sensuality of an implied spatial experience”.60 In the catalogue of the exhibition “Architectural Manifestoes”, Tschumi wrote: “Architecture will be the tension between the concept and experience of space”.61 The works that were displayed at the exhibition were the following: Manifesto 1: Fireworks (1974), Manifesto 2: Questions of Space or the Box (1975), Manifesto 3: Advertisements for Architecture (1976), Manifesto 4: Joyce’s Garden (1977), Manifesto 5: Birth of an Angel (1977), Manifesto 6: the Park (1977), Manifesto 7: Border Crossing (1978),

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  215 and Manifesto 8: the Room (1978), which, according to Tschumi, was not a manifesto in the proper sense. Tschumi writes in the catalogue regarding the contrast of this last piece with the other “manifestoes”: “While the others are plots or fantasies that desire a space to exist, here is a space that desires a plot”.62 The notational strategies he employed aimed to “trigger desire for architecture” and to replace function with fiction. He employed the moto “Form follows fiction” in order to highlight his intention to challenge conventional “functional and moral standards”.63 He preferred the term “action” over the term “function” and intended to transform action and programme into integral parts of architecture. For this reason, he replaced conventional plans with new types of architectural notation. The exhibition “Manhattan Transcripts” was also displayed at the Architectural Association in London in 1979. A year earlier, Tschumi produced “Screenplay no. 2”. In Bernard Tschumi: Architecture in/of motion, Tschumi notes regarding the Screenplay series: The Screenplays are investigations of concepts as well as techniques, proposing simple hypotheses and then testing them out. They explore the relation between events (“the program”) and architectural spaces, on one hand, and transformational devices of a sequential nature, on the other.64 The “Domino Distortion” is part of the Screenplays series, and expresses his opposition to the emblematic Domino diagram of Le Corbusier. Like most of the illustrations of the Screenplays series the visual representation is constituted by three parallel distorted strips. An interesting coincidence is the fact that the same year Peter Eisenman published his text entitled “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Signs” in Oppositions.65 The show “Architecture: Sequences” was displayed at Artists Space Gallery in 1981. Some of the collective exhibitions to which Tschumi participated during the late 1970s and the 1980s are the following: “Art and Architecture: Space and Structure” at Protetch-Mcintosh Gallery in January 1979; “Architecture III: Architectural ‘Follies’” held at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York from 22 October through 19 November 1983, where Tschumi exhibited Broadway Follies.66 Other participants to “Art and Architecture: Space and Structure” were Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock, Mel Charney, Peter Eisenman, Jackie Ferrara, Richard Fleischner, Michael Graves, Nancy Holt, Will Insley, Roelof Louw, Mary Miss, Martin Puryear, Massimo Scolari and George Trakas, and Bernard Tschumi. Interestingly, out of the fifteen participants in this exhibition, only five were trained architects: Charney, Eisenman, Graves, Scolari and Tschumi. Four exhibitions on the work of Tschumi were organised at Max Protetch Gallery during the 1980s, in 1980, in 1981,67 in 1985 with the show “Drawings for the Parc de la Villette” and in 1988. The exhibition “Bernard

216  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events Tschumi: drawings, Parc de la Villette” was held at Max Protetch Gallery in New York from 6 September to 28 September 1985. The Block, which is the fourth and last episode of The Manhattan Transcripts series, was first exhibited at Max Protetch Gallery in 1981, and it was accompanied by the first publication of The Manhattan Transcripts68. The drawings from The Manhattan Transcripts were exhibited also in the exhibition “Perfect Acts of Architecture” organised at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 15 August to 19 October 2002 and curated by Jeffrey Kipnis.69 Tschumi highlights that, in The Manhattan Transcripts, “[t]he relationship of one frame to the next is indispensable insofar as no analysis of any one frame can accurately reveal how the space was handled altogether”.70 What is worth mentioning is his conviction that the meaning of The Manhattan Transcripts is produced in a cumulative way and that it “does not depend merely on a single frame (such as a façade), but on a succession of frames or spaces”.71 Tschumi distinguishes five kinds of sequences: a repetitive, a disjunctive, a distorted, a fade-in and an insertive sequence. The fourth episode of the Manhattan Transcripts was organised in five horizontal and three vertical sequences. The vertical ones correspond to object, movement and event. Dan Graham has been a key figure in American art since the mid-1960s and a leader in the intellectual shift which took place in artistic thinking in the 1970s. Dan Graham was invited by Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg to contribute to the exhibition “A Space: A Thousand Words”. The same year that the aforementioned exhibition was held at the RCA, Dan Graham had presented his Video/Performance Works at John Gibson galley in West Broadway in New York. His video performance works for this show consisted of two parts: the first was titled Present Continuous Past, while the second part was titled Yesterday. Dan Graham had also a solo show at Max Protetch Gallery in 1972, the same year as he had done a performance at Lisson Gallery in London. Graham was interested in architecture during the period that Tschumi was working in his Manhattan Transcripts series, as it becomes evident in his article “Art in Relation to Architecture/Architecture in Relation to Art”, published in Artforum in 1979.72 In the same journal, Tschumi would publish a year later his first article concerning architecture and its limits, which would be followed by other two articles about the same concern, but also his seminal text “Violence of Architecture”.73 It is interesting to note that Tschumi’s article “Architecture and Its Limits II” was first published in Artforum74 in 1981 without any image. A thought-provoking contrast is the fact that in the same issue of Artforum Eisenman published “Transformations, Decompositions and Critiques”,75 which is an “article” consisting exclusively of four pages of images and more specifically depicting the successive steps of transformations of his House series. Bernard Tschumi during the late 1970s and early eighties was close to the circles of the so-called “Pictures Generation”. As one can read in Douglas

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  217 Eklund’s The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, the meeting point of the artists related to this group was the question of “how pictures of all kinds not only depict but also shape reality”.76 Tschumi was close to Cindy Sherman, who in 1977 began the Untitled Film Stills, conceiving the first six pictures as a group in which she impersonated a single blond actress in various roles. Tschumi also had close contacts with John Baldessari. The exhibition “Architecture II: Follies: Architecture for the LateTwentieth-Century Landscape” was held at the Castelli Gallery in New York from 22 October to 15 November 1983.77 At this show, Tschumi exhibited Broadway Follies, while Eisenman displayed Fin d’Ou T Hou S. Tschumi worked on The 20 th Century Follies series and The Manhattan Transcripts series during the same period. Tschumi’s 20th Century Follies series, which initiated in 1979, consisted of works for New York, London, Middleburg in Holland, Kassel in Germany and Toronto in Canada. The Broadway Follies, which were exhibited in the show “Architecture II: Follies: Architecture for the Late-Twentieth-Century Landscape” were the fifth in the series. Tschumi situated along Broadway in New York beginning at the Custom House and ending in the Bronx. The elaboration of filmic metaphors, such as repetition, distortion, superimposition and fading, are very central for this project, which consisted of elevations of the follies, mounted on black mats and in black frames. The analogy between the way they were mounted, and the sequence of a filmstrip is striking. The final image was a square axonometric on a black ground, in a black frame, evoking one frame of a negative. Apart from the drawings, in this case, Tschumi also exhibited six models of the follies.

Bernard Tschumi’s strategies of representation In certain cases, Tschumi used axonometric representations, as for his works Five Levels of Interpretation (Vicious Logic) (1980), Broadway Follies, his project the Strasbourg County Hall (1986), his project for the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe (1989), for which he also produced an interesting perspective view that we can see in the special issue of the journal A+U of March 1994 and the National Library of France Competition (1989). The zero-degree axonometric views for the Follies of the Parc de La Villette are characteristic and bring to mind John Hejduk’s zero-degree axonometric views for the Wall House 2 (or A. E. Bye House) (1973). The use of black background is characteristic of Tshumi’s drawings. The use of exploded axonometric view reached its peak during late 1980s, with typical examples the exploded isometric representations for the “Folies” of the Parc de La Villette (1985), the Strasbourg County Hall (1986), the Bridge City in Lausanne (1988), the National Library of France Competition (1989) and the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe (1989). Another strategy that is worth-analysing is the zero-degree isometric views as those he drew for the “Folies” for the Parc

218  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events de la Villette. The latter have certain affinities with John Hejduk’s isometric views for the Wall House 2. Some notation strategies that one can discern in Tschumi’s work during the eighties are: the use of exploded axonometric views, the use of black background, the juxtaposition of identical axonometric views with inverted colours and the use of red, blue and white colour for the surfaces of the building envelopes. In parallel, during the late 1980s the use of shadow is reduced and the way he fabricated the drawings became much more abstract. This becomes apparent if we compare his axonometric drawings for his entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, for which he produced the work entitled Five Levels of Interpretation (Vicious Logic) (1980) with the axonometric drawing for the New County Hall in Strasbourg he drew in 1986. A reorientation of his interest towards more abstract modes of constructing axonometric views becomes apparent in La Case Vide, a drawing on a paper of 94.5 × 94.8 cm produced in 1984 with pen, ink, gouache and air-brush and where Tschumi drew the axonometric views of the “Folies” in zero-degree, as John Hejduk had done for the Bernstein House (1968) and the Wall House 2 or A. E. Bye House (1973). Bernard Tschumi used various strategies in order to represent the exploded axonometric views of the three systems of lines, points and surfaces for the Parc de La Villette. In the 1980s, Tschumi privileged as mode of representation the exploded axonometric views. In parallel, in many cases, he used a black background for his drawings and drew the contours of the building assemblages with white. What are the effects of the use of black background in axonometric and perspective views on the perception of the observers of architectural drawings? He also drew some of the surfaces of the building envelopes, privileging colours as red, blue and white, as in the exploded axonometric view for the New County Hall in Strasbourg (1986). The preference for the exploded axonometric views is in accordance with his intention to reject through the modes of notation he employs any kind of self-sufficient totality and unity. In parallel, it puts forward the sense of the prevalence of a condition which is characterised by the impression that the parts of the building assemblage are off-balance. Additionally, exploded axonometric drawings are often used to show how a building can be deconstructed and reassembled. The purpose, however, of Tschumi is not to provide an explanation of how the building components can be reassembled but mostly to transmit visually his position that the different parts of the building assemble “lead[s] to another, and every construction is off-balance, constituted by the traces of another construction […] [or] by the traces of an event, a program”.78 What is remarkable is the fact that Tschumi, instead of favouring isometric representation over perspective employed both simultaneously. For the project for the New County Hall in Strasbourg he drew the exploded axonometric drawing that I mention above, but he also drew two drawings that combined within the same image different modes of notation:

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  219 perspective drawings with plans, for instance. This strategy invites the observer of the drawing to be conscious that all the modes of representation are fictitious. The combination of plans and perspective views in the same drawing is an aspect that is very present in his drawings during the late 1980s. Such examples are: certain of his drawings for the “Follies” of the project for the Parc de La Villette, drew in 1986, as well as two drawings for the New Strasbourg County Hall, produced that same year. Another characteristic of Tschumi’s drawings that should be highlighted is the black background. In his drawings for the New Strasbourg County Hall and for the Parc de La Villette, where Tschumi drew within the same drawing perceptive views and plans, as in the exploded axonometric view for the New County Hall in Strasbourg, he used a black background. In parallel, he used white for the contours of perspective views and the plans and either blue, as in the case of the New County Hall in Strasbourg, or red, as in the case of the Follies of Parc de La Villette for the surfaces of the building envelopes. The use of black background triggers an active perceptual process. Here, I should mention that the colour scheme of white, black and red was the typical combination of Russian Constructivism. The juxtaposition of black and grey background and the use of blue, red, black, grey and white are very present in El Lissitzky’s sketch for the Kabinett der Abstrakten (1927–1928), for instance. Yve-Alain Bois craims, in “El Lissizky: Radical Reversibility”, that “[f]or Lissitzky, axonometry eliminated all reference to the spectator’s point of view”. He maintains that this elimination aimed at “[l]iberating the viewer from gravity” and at “leading to the foundering of the whole system of perception”.79 The combination of two-dimensional representation and three-dimensional axonometric views is also another trait very present in Russian Constructivism. Another aspect that is very present in Tschumi’s representations is the parallel fabrication of exploded axonometric views with very clear and minimalist, I would say, exploded axonometric views. This juxtaposition of two almost identical exploded axonometric views, but with inverted colours has an effect on the perception of the observer. The alterations of the observers’ perception because of the juxtaposition of the inverted colour drawings also contributes to the intensification of their active perception. This strategy is employed, not only for the New County Hall in Strasbourg in 1986, but also for National Library of France Competition, three years later, in 1989, for which he drew two exploded axonometric views: one with black background and white frame and the other the inverse. In the A+U Special Issue devoted to Bernard Tschumi this technique of juxtaposition of inverted colour axonometric views is present in the illustration of all the projects. What are the implications of this technique? What is his objective? Through their juxtaposition, Tschumi possibly invites the observers of his drawings to reflect on the different effect that each of them has on his perception. Another distinctive characteristic of the modes of representation of Tschumi is the production of axonometric views for the same projects, but

220  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events from different angles, playing with the fact that the observer’s perception of the represented artefact is transformed when the angle used for the fabrication of the axonometric shifts. Another strategy that is very present in Tschumi’s notation strategies is the shift of the way he crops the same drawing. He seems to be conscious of the impact that this mutation of how he crops the same drawings has on the observers’ perception. If we tried to discern some of the central characteristics of the exploded axonometric views that Tschumi produced for the New Strasbourg County Hall, we would realise that he often chose not to show in the drawing dashed or any other kind of lines that have served as guides in order to construct the exploded axonometric views, in contrast with the case of the Bridge City and the National Library of France, where he used lines as guides of the exploded axonometric view. The components of the building assemblage that are exploded float in a destabilised way, like they are the outcome of an explosion. The explosion is, in any case, very present in Tschumi’s drawings. The most characteristic example is the Exploded Folie (1984). The exploded axonometric views have a particular importance for Tschumi. In an exploded axonometric view for the New Strasbourg County Hall, it becomes apparent that the building assemblage consists of four independent components, in a similar way as the Parc de La Villette consists of the three independent systems of points, surfaces and lines. In some cases, Bernard Tschumi chooses to not show the guiding lines in the exploded axonometric views, while in other cases he chose to show the guiding lines as in the exploded axonometric views shown for the Bridge City, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Bridge City respectively. An axonometric representation for the Bridge City presents great interest, since it illustrates how Tschumi challenges the very conventions of axonometric representation. Despite the fact that the guiding lines appear in this representation, the way it is fabricated breaks the rules of fabrication of axonometric representation. The exploded components are literally exploded in a similar way as in the Exploded Folie of 1984 and are literally suspended, inviting, in this way, their observers to grasp the disapproval of their conceiver – Bernard Tschumi – for any kind of wholeness, totality, unity or synthesis.

The effect of photogram or “cameraless” technique and its implications A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow image that shows variations in tone that depends upon the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey. A seminal text concerning photogram or “cameraless” technique is László

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  221 Moholy-Nagy’s “Making Photographs Without a Camera”,80 first published in 1939. Three years earlier, in 1936, Moholy-Nagy, in “A New Instrument of Vision”, published in Telehor, had characterised photogram as “the most completely dematerialized expression the new vision commands”.81 Photogram was also a significant pedagogical tool in New Bauhaus in Chicago, where Moholy-Nagy was Director. The exhibition “How to Make a Photogram”, organised in 1942 at the MoMA is also worth mentioning. Some other aspects of Bernard Tschumi’s modes of representation that should be highlighted is the mixed technique of photography and drawing, and the incorporation of photographed physical models in his representation as in the case of his project for the competition for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The images come from a photocopy of the photos, which were air-brushed with blue and red colour. Tschumi photographed his physical models using a small Polaroid, and then he was photocopying the photograph in order to accentuate the contrasts. After this phase, he used to give the photocopied photographs to a professional laboratory to enlarge them and, finally, he used to draw them using an air-brush. As he notes in an interview on 21 August 2018, the professional laboratory to which he gave the photos of the physical models for enlargement was called Metro Giant and was located at Union Square in New York City. The contrast of the photograph was edited in such a way that the image acquires a status between photograph and drawing. Hence, the confrontation of the observers with the image pushes them to wonder if it is an image or a drawing. In parallel, the way the image is fabricated contributes to rendering explicit that the image cannot grasp more than a screenshot of the events that happen within space in an unexpected and unpredictable manner. Therefore, this strategy of representation is compatible with Tschumi’s conviction that there is no architecture without event and that the very constitutive trait of architecture is how it is experienced by the users. It also reinforces the cinematic narration. In fact, this strategy is not different than this employed in the strip regarding “Action Phases” of Homage to Eisenstein (1977), the first of the three square frames of the Episode 1 – The Park – of The Manhattan Transcripts (1976–1977) or the four square frames that Tschumi produced of each of the four episodes of The Manhattan Transcripts series, consisting of a gelatine silver photograph.82 Despite the fact that in the latter he did not use colour in contrast with the photograph of the model for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the introduction of colour in the black-and-white gelatine silver photographs was not a new strategy for Tschumi when he was working for his entry to the competition for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In fact, he had used coloured synthetic laminate for his red-and-black photographic reproductions for the introductory panel for the fourth episode of The Manhattan Transcripts series, in 1980. The same year that he Tschumi designed the New County Hall in Strasbourg, he also designed the New National Theater and Opera House in

222  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events Tokyo, in which he employed a very experimental device of notation. The film strips that Tschumi used as notation device for the National Theater and Opera House in Tokyo (1986) are worth mentioning. This project won the second prize in an international competition. The hypothesis that lies behind this project could be summarised in the following question: “How to deconstruct opera and architecture so as to ‘think’ their concepts in the most precise manner possible, and simultaneously to observe them from an external and detached point of view?”83 Tschumi’s notation strategy in this case was based on the use of seven strips. In Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color, where he has related each of his projects to the specific design strategy on which they are based, he has identified as the dispositif of the National Theater and Opera House in Tokyo “Programmatic Dissociations”. Tschumi’s main objective in the aforementioned project was to treat the different components of this building independently from each other and to overcome the concept of homogeneous block. He also intended to treat the different areas from which the building assemblage consisted in a way that would permit their adjustability to the needs not only of the site, but also of the programme and the context. The purpose of the parallel strips is the accommodation of a variety of activities. Any transformation that would correspond to the need to respond to one of the different activities would not affect the strips concerning the other activities. In parallel, “each strip or band could have its own material or construction system”.84 The notation system that Tschumi invented for this project brings to mind musical notation systems. I could refer, for instance, to John Cage’s notation system for Atlas Eclipitcales (1961).85 The way that Tschumi drew the interior perspective view for the National Theater and Opera House in Tokyo accentuates the effect of movement. This is caused because of the different strategies he employed to draw this view. Among these strategies, I could mention the way it is framed and the intensification of the sense of depth. The image, on purpose, is out of balance. The use of vectors on the floor intensifies the sense of movement. The perspectives of Tschumi, in most cases, are dramatic, and never symmetrical. The use of colour, and especially of red plays an important role. Characteristic perspective views are these he produced for the competition for the Center for Art and Media (ZKM). The central question for Le Fresnoy was: Can architecture be achieved with our “composition”, by inventing an “envelope” rather than “composing a facade”? As Tschumi reminds us, during the competition the client said: “Your competitor has no concept, but he has architecture, you have no architecture, but you have a concept”. The roof on the top of an abandoned leisure complex from the 1920s was conceived as a device giving birth to “an “in-between” or new interstitial space […] created between the old and the new roof”.86 Tschumi relates this project with the intensification of the importance of the concept of envelope in his work. In an interview on 14 September 2016, Bernard Tschumi told me: “In my case is less specific than in Mies because Mies

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  223 during the period of 50s there is a constant exploration of the “space-time” which I don’t always do”. Therefore, Tschumi related the 50s to the exploration of “space-time”.87

Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette: Interconnection of territorial and programmatic intentions Bernard Tschumi, in December 1982, when he won the first prize in the international competition for a “21st-century Park” at the Parc de La Villette, was teaching at the Cooper Union. The entries to the completion were 472 entries, coming from 37 different countries. The brief of the competition was referring to an “Urban Park of the Twenty-first Century” and to an “Open Air Beaubourg”. Tschumi produced nearly 4000 drawings and 70 models for the Parc de La Villette. For the first stage of the competition, the participants were asked to send three posters. The second stage had nine finalists and they were asked to submit one more poster. Among the members of the jury were Françoise Choay, Vittorio Gregotti, Renzo Piano, Joseph Rykwert and François Barré. As we can read in the issue of February 1983 of Skyline the seven other finalists apart from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Bernard Tschumi were: Alexander Chemetov, Andreu Arriola, Jacques Gourvennec, Gilles Vexlard, Sven Anderson, Bernard Lassus and Van Gessel.88 The strategy of Tschumi’s entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette was to “distribute programmatic requirements across the entire site in a regular arrangement of variable intensity points, referred to as “Follies””. The deconstruction of the programme into a series of activities and its dispersion within the site aimed to maximise movement across the site, on the one hand, and to encourage the encounter of the visitors-users with a variety of programmes and events, on the other hand. The central gesture of Tschumi’s design for the Parc de La Villette was the method of superimposition of lines, points and surfaces (Figures. 8.1 and 8.2). The system of points, lines and surfaces in La Villette and the “combinatoire” that is used for the “Follies” aimed to shape a non-hierarchical transformative language, on the one hand, and at relativising the pre-eminence of form rendering it (the form) the result of the “combinatoire”.89 Tschumi, in contrast with Eisenman’s strategy in the House series, which is a formal strategy, chose a programmatic strategy. Tschumi wrote, regarding his approach in the entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, in International Architect, in 1983: We aim neither to change styles while retaining a traditional content, nor to fit the proposed program into a conventional mould, whether neo-classical, neo-romantic or neo-modernist. Rather, our project is motivated by the most constructive principle within the legitimate “history” of architecture, by which new programmatic developments and inspirations result in new typologies. Our ambition is to create a new model in which program form, and ideology all play integral roles.90

224  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events

Figure 8.1 Bernard Tschumi, entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1982. Dimensions: 134  ×  92  cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects.

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  225

Figure 8.2 B ernard Tschumi, entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1983. Dimensions: 77 × 48 cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects.

226  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events In 1988, Tschumi, in Architectural Design, described the project for the Parc de la Villetter as “the first built work specifically exploring these concepts of superimposition and dissociation”.91 What is of great interest for my study is the fact that this “project directed an attack against cause and effect relationships, whether between form and function, structure and economics, or (of course) form and program”,92 as Tschumi underlines in “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”. At the core of Tschumi’s strategies is the idea that an architecture that rejects a cause and effect relationship between form and function redefines the role of users and observers. For Tschumi, the means to ostracise cause and effect relationships between form and function was the elaboration of concepts as “contiguity and superimposition”. His objective was to show “that the program can challenge the very ideology it implied”. He shed light on the tension between intertextuality and modernist autonomy. The superimposition of the “autonomous and completely logical structures”, as Tschumi characterises them, of lines, points and surfaces aimed to question “their conceptual status as ordering machines”93 (Figure 8.3). According to Bernard Tschumi, the issue about Le Parc de La Villette is really an issue of non-hierarchical transformative language of whatever is in the park. In other words, Tschumi insists on the fact that he didn’t give any value judgement to architectural expression. He considers it a “combinatoire”. Tschumi borrows the notion of “combinatoire” from Roland Barthes. During an interview, Tschumi informed me that in English instead of the notion of “combinatoire”, he uses the notion of “commutation”. What interests him is the idea of combination and permutation. He claims: “the idea of combination and permutation is central to architecture”. For him, the concepts of combination and permutation contribute to relativise the pre-eminence of form. Tschumi rejects the pre-eminence of form and insists on the fact that form is just the result of the “combinatoire”. He differentiates his approach vis-à-vis the process of architectural design from Peter Eisenman and underscores the fact that he, in contrast with Eisenman, does not have a formal strategy. More specifically, he asserts: “That’s why I am very different from Eisenman. Eisenman has a formal strategy. I don’t have a formal strategy, I have a programmatic strategy”.94 Thus, a tension that emerges if we compare the design strategy of Tschumi and that of Eisenman is that between programmatic strategy and formal strategy. For Tschumi, it is very important to relativise the pre-eminence of form. In the Parc de La Villette, the detail is not used as an important part of the semantics. Tschumi also underlines that his choice to use the expression “The Parc de la Villette is the largest discontinuous building ever built” is related to this conviction that in the case of the “Folies” of his project for the Parc de la Villette one is confronted with the fact that “it is always the same building but in a different configuration”.95 He has described as “Combinatoire of the ‘Folies’” his transformation of the cubes of 10.8 m × 10.8 m according to the following five processes: intersection, repetition, qualification, distortion and fragmentation.

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  227

Figure 8.3 Bernard Tschumi, drawing for the competition for the Parc de La Villette, 1982. Dimensions: 74  ×  60  cm. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi Architects.

The notion of sequence and the filmic analogy The notion of sequence and the filmic analogy are very central for Tschumi. Worth mentioning is a drawing that Tschumi produced for the competition for the Parc de La Villette, in which he juxtaposes the frames of the possible successive images that someone who would traverse the park would see with a bird’s eye view of the sequence between the successive flies. It would be interesting to compare this drawing with his axonometric drawing Five Levels of Interpretation (Vicious Logic) (Figure 8.4), which was an entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition (1980) and to the third episode of The Manhattan Transcripts series, the Tower or the Fall (1979). In the sketches he drew while he was working on the Parc de La Villette, we can see how much importance he gave to the sequence.

228  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events

Figure 8.4 Bernard Tschumi, Five Levels of Interpretation (Vicious Logic), Late Entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, 1980. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

Tschumi through the superimposition of the three systems of points/ lines/surfaces in the case of his project for the Parc de La Villette aimed to bring together “spaces that define” with “objects that activate”.96 He often identifies the Joyce Garden’s project as a precedent for the Parc de La Villette. The use of grid in Le Corbusier’s Cannaregio hospital (1964) and Peter Eisenman’s Cannaregio project (1978) share with Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette the use of the grid as common denominator that serves to

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  229 activate the objects that are superimposed to the grid. What was the main argument of the project for the Parc de La Villette was that “the superimposition of three coherent structures can never result in a supercoherent megastructure, but is something undecidable, something that is the opposite of a totality”.97 Tschumi, preserving the independence and autonomy of each system – that of the points, that of the lines and that of surfaces – managed to avoid the homogenisation of “the park into a totality”98 and “eliminated the presumption of a re-established causality between program, architecture, and signification”. What is relevant for my study us the fact that Tschumi, in “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”, described the project for the Parc de La Villette as “anticontextual”. Tschumi sheds light on the fact that Colin Rowe attacked functionalism. Opposing himself to Rowe’s understanding of context, poses the following question: “Can one form a concept out of a context?”.99 The whole project is a gesture of privileging “conflict over synthesis, fragmentation over unity”. At the same time, it constitutes an attack against the prevalence of meaning and a rejection of the use of a well-defined signified in order to legitimise the work of art.100 In other words, this project challenged architecture’s “tendency […] to be “in service, and at service”, obeying an economy of meaning premised on functional use”. What is of great interest for my research is the fact that “La Villette promotes programmatic instability, functional Folie”.101 Tschumi argued, in an article devoted to the Parc de La Villette and published in Architectural Design in 1988, the necessity to replace Post-Modern architecture with post-humanist architecture. He defined as post-humanist architecture the architecture that stresses “the dispersion of the subject and the force of social regulation, but also the effect of such decentring on the entire notion of unified, coherent, architectural form”.102 Through the Manhattan Transcripts and the project for the Parc de La Villette, Tschumi aimed to challenge the notions of unity and order. The main purpose of the project for the Parc de La Villette was to take into account the “new social and historical circumstances” that were characterised by “a dispersed and differentiated reality that marks an end to the utopia of unity”.103 As Tschumi proclaims, in the case of this project, “[e]ach observer will project his own interpretation”. In parallel, the guiding idea behind the project was to establish design strategies that are set against any conception of “unified, centred and self-generative subject”.104 In “Notes towards a Theory of Architectural Disjunction”, Tschumi relates his attraction to disjunction to his conviction that architectural components should never be understood under the prim of self-sufficient totality. On the contrary “each part leads to another, and every construction is off-balance, constituted by the traces of another construction […] [or] by the traces of an event, a program”.105 Tschumi’s intention was to activate multiple interpretations. Tschumi is convinced that “no mode of notation […] can transcribe the full complexity of the architectural phenomenon”.106 Therefore, despite his interest in

230  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events notation and the employment of notational tactics in order “to deconstruct the components of architecture”, he is aware that the dynamics of reality transcend any representation of it, even if the representation is unconventional. He believes that the reinvention and progress of notational strategies is able to contribute to “the renewal of both architecture and its accompanying concepts of culture”. The connection, thus, between culture and notation is important for him. The notation is the articulation between culture and architecture and boosts the architecture’s advancement. Instead of being a-historical, the project acknowledges the importance of history. The main intention the design strategies employed in the Parc de La Villette was to show architectural signs’ “contingency” and “cultural fragility”.107 Tschumi was interested in conceiving an urban park for the 20th century. This becomes evident in an ensemble of sketches that he drew for the Parc de La Villette, he aimed to discern the specific characteristics corresponding to urban tissues of the 18th, the 19th, the 20th and the 21st century. Bernard Tschumi for his entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette drew sketches illustrating different city organisations from Baroque axes to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (Figure 8.5). His main objective was to design a park that would no longer be an escape from the city, but would be understood as an urban construct. In another diagram of the programmatic deconstruction of Tschumi’s competition entry for the Parc de La Villette that one can see below, the first square of the diagram consists of the following squares: the smallest square refers to the built surface, the medium square refers to the covered surface and the large square refers to the open

Figure 8.5 B ernard Tschumi Architects, Parc de La Villette, Paris, 1985. Sketches of different city organisations that could be implemented at La Villette (from Baroque axes to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin), the park is no longer an escape from the city, but is understood as an urban construct. Tschumi, through the sketches shown above, compared the organisation of the Parc de La Villette with Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and Algiers among other. Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects © Bernard Tschumi.

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  231 air surface. Tschumi used the strategy of programmatic deconstruction, treating “la folie” as common denominator. Bernard Tschumi when he moved to London wished to collaborate with Cedric Price. Tschumi’s attraction to the work of Price could be explained by their common interest in the unpredictability of the programme. For instance, in the case of the Cedric Price’s Fun Palace for Joan Littlewood (1959–1961) the core of the project is the upgrading of programmatic unpredictability and indeterminacy to the very force of the design strategy through the elaboration of a flexible framework into which programmable spaces can be plugged. Tschumi was still studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Zürich under Bernhard Hoesli when Cedric Price designed the famous Potteries Thinkbelt Project (1964–1966). A less known project of Cedric Price is the Generator Project (1977–1978). For this project Price collaborated with John Fraser. The diagram regarding the “Activity Compatibility” we can see below could be interpreted as presenting certain affinities with Tschumi’s distinction between programmatic reciprocity and programmatic conflict. In terms of graphics also there are certain affinities between the aforementioned diagram for the Generation Project and one of the diagrams that Tschumi drew for the Parc de La Villette. Bernard Tschumi’s drawings for the “promenade cinématique” for the project for the Parc de La Villette present certain affinities with Guy Debord’s “Guide Pychogéographique de Paris (Discours sur les passions de l’amour)” (1956), which was made out of fragments of the map of Paris Blondel la Rougery, Plan de Paris à vol d’oiseau of 1956 with the aim to transmit the desire behind the Situationist act of “détournement”.108 Tschumi was interested in the notion of “détournement” since the early seventies. For instance, in the framework of the Urban Insurgency seminar during the 1972 Summer Session of the International Institute of Design, he intended to produce “a catalogue of ‘détournement’ within the formal properties of the city”.109

Notes 1 Marianna Charitonidou, “Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette as Reinvention of the Concept of Territory: ‘Follies’ as a Dispersed and Differentiated Reality”, paper presented at the 13th Deleuze & Guattari Studies International Conference “Territorialities, Exterritorialities, Non-Territorialities”, Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague, 7 July 2021, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000402368 2 Bernard Tschumi, “Illustrated Index. Themes from the Manhattan ­Transcripts”, AA Files, 4 (1983), 67. 3 Tschumi, “Parc de la Villette, Paris”, Architectural Design, 58(7/8) (1988), 34. 4 Gallery label from 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, 12 September 2012–25 March 2013. 5 Tschumi, “Themes from the Manhattan Transcripts”, in Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color (New York: Rizzoli/Random House, 2012), 109;

232  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events

6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

see also Charitonidou, “Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts as an Εxploration of Unlikely Confrontations: Spatial Praxis as a Dispositif Agencing Spaces and Events”, paper presented at the 3rd international conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research: Machinic Assemblages of Desire (DARE 2019), Ghent, Belgium, December 9–11, 2019, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000401519; Charitonidou, “Simultaneously Space and Event: Bernard Tschumi’s Conception of Architecture”, ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, ­ 5(1) (2020), http://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.250 Tschumi, “Advertisements for Architecture”, in Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color (New York: Rizzoli/Random House, 2012), 43. Ibid., 42. Tschumi, “Architectural Manifestoes”, Skyline (1979), 8. Tschumi, “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)”, Studio International, 190 (1975): 136–142; Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox”, in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 46; Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox”, in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1998), 225. Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color (New York: Rizzoli/ Random House, 2012), 111; Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture. Its Function as an Instrument of Socio-Culture Change”, Architectural Design, 47(3) (1977): 214–218. Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color, 19. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 30. Tschumi, “Spaces and Events”, in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 149. Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color, 36. Tschumi, “Violence and Architecture”, Artforum, 20(1) (1981): 44–47; Tschumi, “Violence and Architecture”, in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 123. Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London; New York, NY: Academy Editions/St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 7; see also Tschumi, The Manhattan ­Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1981). Interview of the author with Bernard Tschumi, 14 September 2016. Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”, in Timothy J. Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault, Philosopher (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–186. Sergei Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1959); Eisenstein cited in Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 157. Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, 7. Tschumi, Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color, 80. Tschumi, “Three Competition Entries”, AA Files, 18 (1989): 30. Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 22. Ibid., 121. Tschumi, Event-Cities: Praxis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 11. Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, 7. Tschumi, “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the A rchitectural Paradox)”; Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox”, 46. Tschumi, “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the A rchitectural Paradox)”, 137.

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  233

­

234  Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events

Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events  235

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109

paper presented at the13th Deleuze & Guattari Studies International Conference “Territorialities, Exterritorialities, Non-Territorialities”, Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, 5–7 July 2021, https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-b-000402368. Tschumi, “The Park: An Urban Park for the 21st Century”, Progressive Architecture, 66(1) (1985): 90–93. Originally Published in International Architect, 1 (1983): 27–31. Tschumi, “Le Parc des Folies, Projet Bernard Tschumi, Lauréat”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 227 (1983), 92. Tschumi, “Parc de la Villette, Paris”, Architectural Design, 58(7/8) (1988), 33. Tschumi, “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”, in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 198–199. Interview of the author with Bernard Tschumi, 14 September 2016. Ibid. Tschumi, “Montage: Deconstructing Collage”, in Emmanuel Petit, ed., Reckoning with Colin Rowe. Ten Architects Take Position (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 139. Tschumi, “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”, 198–199. Ibid, 199. Tschumi, “Montage: Deconstructing Collage”, 139. Tschumi, “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”, 200. Ibid., 203. Tschumi, “Parc de la Villette, Paris”, 33. Ibid. Ibid., 39. Tschumi, “Notes towards a Theory of Architectural Disjunction”, A + U, 216 (1988), 15. Tschumi, “Parc de la Villette, Paris”, 33. Ibid., 34. Andrew Hussey, “Paris underground: Juan Goytisolo and the ‘Situationist’ city”, in Christoph Lindner, ed., Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 82. Tschumi, Synopsis of Urban Insurgency Seminars in the framework of the 1972 IID, 27 June 1972; see also Irene Sunwoo, ed., In progress: The IID Summer Sessions (London; Chicago: Architectural Association/Graham Foundation, 2016), 226.

9

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis How the artificial would replace the reality?

The exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture” was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) between 23 June and 30 August 1988 and was curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. Its exhibits included Rem Koolhaas’s Apartment Building and Observation Tower in Rotterdam (1982), Peter Eisenman’s Biocenter for the University of Frankfurt (1987) and Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette (1982–1985). Philip Johnson, in his preface to the exhibition catalogue, highlighted the contrast “[b]etween the ‘warped’ images of deconstructionist architecture and the ‘pure’ images of the old International Style”.1 Mark Wigley remarked in his essay in the exhibition catalogue that “[a] reconstructive architect is […] not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings” and that “deconstructivist architecture seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesce to it”. 2 In the text that accompanies Tschumi’s drawings for the Parc de La Villette one can read: The park is an elaborate essay in the deviation of ideal forms. It gains its force by turning each distortion of an ideal form into a new ideal. Which is then itself distorted. With each new generation of distortion, the trace of the previous ideal remains, producing a convoluted archeology, a history of successive idealizations and distortions. In this way, the park destabilizes pure architectural form. 3 Philip Johhnson’s remark, in the exhibition catalogue, regarding the contrast between the so-called deconstructionist posture and the “‘pure’ images of the old International Style” could help us better understand the performance “A Slice of Modernity/Casa Palestra, the domestic project” by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the framework of the 17th Triennale di Milano in 1986, that is to say two years before the exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture”. This work by OMA consisted of a ‘bent’ reproduction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The starting point of this project as the conviction “that modern architecture is in itself a hedonistic movement” and “that its severity, abstraction and rigor are

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-9

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  237 in fact plots to create the most provocative settings for the experiment that is modern life”. This performance by OMA could be interpreted as a critique against the dominant tendency in the 1980s to present modernist emblematic buildings, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye “as lifeless, puritanical, empty and uninhabited”. In their description of this work, they underscored that the “presentation [would] […] try to illustrate this point by binding the Barcelona Pavilion and Systematically develop a project of its all human occupancy related to physical culture in the widest possible sense of the word”.4 OMA’s “A Slice of Modernity/Casa Palestra, the domestic project”, displayed in the framework of the 17th Triennale di Milano in 1986 and Tschumi’s advertisement series aimed to criticise modernist doctrines. The choice of Tschumi to show in one of his advertisements to Villa Savoye in a devastated situation, and to juxtapose it with the provocative declaration that “[t]he most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is”, invites the observer to reflect upon the very definition of architecture, the fictional aspect of modernism and the devices of aestheticisation of modernist architecture, which were exemplified in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. In a similar way, OMA used Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The Barcelona Pavilion in its emblematic photos is almost always shown empty. The only figure that inhabits it, in most of the cases, is the statue. OMA’s intention to disturb this emptiness was expressed through the choice to represent in a drawing they fabricated of the Barcelona Pavilion a woman figure doing gymnastics. They even incorporated devices of instrumental gymnastics in the drawing. This gesture could be understood as a reaction against the obsolete and elitist way the inhabitation of modernist buildings was treated. Bernard Tschumi and OMA used a medium that addresses to the observer of visual artefacts in order to disturb the sterile way modernist architecture was fetishised. Their visual comments refer to the way the inhabitation of these emblematic buildings was idealised and, finally, deprived from life and the events that give architecture its sense.

Rem Koolhaas’ surface, exodus and delirious New York: The congestion of metropolis Rem Koolhaas started his architectural studies in 1968 when he was twenty-four years old, but his appeal to architecture dates back to 1966, when, as a representative of the group 1, 2, 3 enz., 5 participated in a seminar on cinema and architecture that was organised by the historian of Constructivism Gerrit Oorthuys at TU Delft. Koolhaas spent May 1968 in Paris, where he experienced the 1968 events, and August 1968 in Prague – it was the time Russians were arriving in Prague. In 1982, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) published a book devoted to Leonidov that Koolhaas co-authored with Oorthuys.6

238  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis Almost a year after his 1968 stay in Paris, during the summer 1969, while he was studying at the Architectural Association (AA), Koolhaas worked ­ 9.1). on a thirty pages story-manifesto entitled “The Surface”7 (Figure  This project was the product of his first collaboration with Elia Zenghelis, who was at the time his tutor at the AA. Many of the ideas that would take a more elaborated form in Delirious New York,8 some years later, were already present in this student project of Koolhaas. In this 1969 story-manifesto, Koolhaas conceived the metropolitan city as “a plane of tarmac with some red hot spots of urban intensity” that radiates “city-sense”. The conviction behind this project was the idea that if these “spots of urban intensity” were treated “[w]ith ingenuity it [would be] […] possible to stitch the area of urban radiation, to canalize city-sense into a larger network”.9 Already from this very early project, it becomes evident that Koolhaas understood city primarily as condition and not as place. Koolhaas notes regarding Delirious New York: “Its written structure is analogous to the urbanism it describes”.10 Elia Zenghelis, in “The Aesthetics of the Present”, defined the iconography of the programme as “the setting where a sequence of displacements activate the imagination […] and animate the inanimate”.11 Zenghelis and Koolhaas’s exploration around the iconography of the programme was paralleled by a quest for new modes of representation as can be seen in certain projects produced by their students in Diploma Unit 9 at the AA.12 This becomes evident in the outcomes of Diploma Unit 9 taught by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zaha Hadid and Demitri Porphyrios during the academic year 1978–1979. Among the student projects that placed particular emphasis on the exploration of the

Figure 9.1 Rem Koolhaas, first page of the manuscript of The Surface, 1969. Credits: Architectural Association Archives and Rem Koolhaas.

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  239 modes of representation in architecture is that of Kamiar Ahari, which included a 2.5 metres long drawing combining a plan and an axonometric drawing, mixing exterior and interior, which was a core mode of representation in Diploma Unit 9 at the time (Figure 9.2). It was in 1972 that Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp moved to the United States firstly to Cornell University to study with Oswald Mathias and a year later to New York after the invitation from Peter Eisenman to join the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies with which he collaborated until 1979. In his 1971 fellowship application to the Harkness foundation, Koolhaas referred to the pedagogy of Ungers at the TU Berlin and expressed his sympathy for certain aspects of Ungers’s work on architecture and the city prior to 1971.13 In a letter he addressed to Kenneth Frampton on 20 February 1972, he informed him that his stay in the U.S. would coincide with Gerrit Oorthuys’s own stay, who would travel to the U.S. to be at Princeton University for Mart Stam exhibition.14 During his stay in the United States of America, Koolhaas taught at Columbia University and the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Zaha Hadid collaborated for their entry to the competition concerning Roosevelt Island Redevelopment in 1975 (Figure 9.3). In 1976, Koolhaas started teaching at the AA and TU Delft. In 1972, Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis collaborated for “Exodus of the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” (Figure 9.4), which was Koolhaas’s graduation project. The starting point of the Exodus project was Koolhaas’s reflections regarding architecture during the time he had spent in Berlin, in the framework of a field while studying at the AA. His encounter with Berlin Wall made him abandon once and for all any belief “in form as the primary vessel of meaning”.15

Figure 9.2 Kamiar Ahari, 2.5 m long drawings of hotel and a residential building in Bijlmermeer, Netherlands made in Diploma Unit 9 at the AA taught by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zaha Hadid and Demitri Porphyrios during the academic year 1978–1979. It comprises of a plan and an axonometric drawing, mixing exterior and interior, a favoured projection technique in the unit. Credits: Architectural Association Archives and Kamiar Ahari. Available at: https://collectionsblog.aaschool.ac.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Kami1low7.jpg.

240  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis

Figure 9.3 Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zaha Hadid, Axonometric Drawing for the entry to the competition concerning Roosevelt Island Redevelopment, 1975. Medium: Pencil and gouache on board. Dimensions: 840 × 1030 mm. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 3070.

He interpreted Berlin Wall as “a total mockery of any of the emerging attempts to link from to meaning in a regressive chain-and-ball relationship”.16 Exodus project was a response to the competition that the journal Casabella in collaboration with the Italian Association for Industrial Design (ADI) organised in 1972 on the topic “The city as signifying environment”. The main objective of this project was to “reappropriate the physical and ideological decay of our urban societies and to rehabilitate their premises with the metropolitan ideal and life style”.17 Koolhaas’s attraction to Constructivism invites as to relate the “Exodus of the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” project to Ivan Leonidov’s linear city Magnitogorsk proposal (1930), as well as Leonidov’s birds’ eye axonometric drawing for the film studio competition in Moscow (1927). Christoph Lueder highlights that Rem Koolhaas treats proximity and contradiction as “strategic and productive devices analogous to cinematic montage”.18 In 1993, Koolhaas said to Cynthia Davidson during an interview he gave to her: “a crucial element of the work — whether writing or architecture — is montage”.19 In 1973, the Exodus project was published in an issue of Casabella. In 1977, an entire issue of Architectural Design was devoted to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  241 The “City of the Captive Globe”, which was designed in 1972, was the first project that Koolhaas conceived in reference to Manhattan. In the 1977 issue of Architectural Design, one can read regarding this project: “The most persistent formula used by Manhattan’s architects to describe the resulting ensemble was that of a ‘very modernized Venice’”. 20 The key idea of the “City of the Captive Globe” was the conviction that “many of New York’s skyscrapers had […] ideological ambitions” and materialised certain ideals “of European avant-garde movements”. 21 The point of departure of “The City of the Captive Globe” was the realisation that the “metropolitan culture” is in a state of continuous change and “of perpetual animation”. For this reason, city cannot but be conceived as a “sequence of various permanences”. The conception of the “City of the Captive Globe” is based on a tripartite system of grid, lobotomy and schisms. The grid subdivided “metropolitan territory into maximum increments of control” and is the tool that puts into play the idea of “an archipelago of ‘Cities within Cities’”. The concept of “Cities within Cities” is founded on the conviction that the heterogeneity of the different

Figure 9.4 Rem Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Photo-collage for Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972. Final project, AA School of Architecture, London, 1972. Medium: Pen, ink photo-collage in colour and black and white, on silver backing. Dimensions: 295 × 418 mm. Exodus started as an answer to a competition by Casabella in 1972, on the theme of “the city as meaningful environment”, for which the Berlin Wall is taken as model. Image courtesy of Drawing Matter. Collection No: 3151.5. Provenance: Zoe Zenghelis.

242  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis components of the urban fabric, which function as “islands” that celebrates different values, reinforces “the unity of the archipelago as system”. In this way, each Skyscraper of Manhattan’s “archipelago – in the absence of real history – develops its own instantaneous “folklore”. 22 The concepts of lobotomy and schism refer to the separation between exterior and interior architecture. This disconnection between the interior and exterior architecture and the capacity of each one to be conceived and treated independently permits to the former to be devoted to functionalism and the latter to be attached to formalism. This dissociation between interiors’ functionalism and exteriors’ formalism provides a renewed framework of thought within which it is possible to overcome once and for all “the conflict between form and function”, embracing, at the same time, “metropolitan instability”. According to Koolhaas, the aforementioned principles were materialised in Manhattan, even unconsciously, allowing its “buildings to be both architecture and hyper efficient machines, both modern and eternal”.23 The central gesture of “The City of the Captive Globe” is the fact that it celebrates culture of congestion. According to Koolhaas, the only of his projects until 1985 that managed to incarnate a new definition of the culture of congestion were their proposals for the Parc de La Villette and the masterplan for EXPO ’89. It would be interesting to compare the collage that Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) produced for the masterplan for EXPO ’89 after an invitation by the French government shown in figure 4.188, with the drawing that Aldo Rossi had used in 1961 to illustrate his article entitled “L’uomo della metropoli”, published in Casabella.24 OMA used axonometric representation for several of the drawings they produced for their entry to the competition for the Dutch Parliament Extension in The Hague in Netherlands in 1978. OMA’s proposal for the competition for the Dutch Parliament Extension in The Hague in Netherlands (1978), which was the first project of the OMA, was based on a tripartite interpretation of the principles of Rationalism, Dutch Structuralism and tradition, as the team explains in an article published in International Architect in 1980. In this article, they refer to Mies van der Rohe’s 1921 glass tower projects, claiming: “In 1921, Mies van der Rohe invested the same irregularity with explicit intention in his projects for two glass towers; the two images contain the essential difference between the built subconscious of America and the unbuilt consciousness of America”.25 The way they related the dialectics of American realised implicit or fictitious ideology and European non-realised explicit or real ideology and Mies’s stance is of great interest. This bipolar relationship between American unconscious and European unconsciousness was very present in the early projects of OMA. The same idea was analysed by Koolhaas in an interview he gave to L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1985, where he claimed: “New York’s main interest lay in the fact that this city had been a kind of exploration ground of how the artificial would replace the reality”.26 The point of departure of Koolhaas’s reflection on Manhattan was the realisation that in the 1930s the same kind of problems preoccupied both

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  243 European and American architectural scene, but there was the paradox that in the United States there was reality but not the manifests that supported the ideology behind it, while in Europe there was the manifests that supported the ideology but not the reality, that to say the materialisation of the ideas. Koolhaas tested the aforementioned hypothesis, which would be the basis of Delirious New York, through a series of lectures he gave at Columbia University. The role that representation played for the arguments of Delirious New York is undeniable. As Koolhaas underlined in 1985, “the presentation of projects plays a capital role on the theoretical level”. 27 He also underscored that during the period he produced in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp the painting that would become part of Delirious New York – between 1972 and 1975 – painting was not popular in the architectural circles. Koolhaas returned to Europe because he thought the debates of Rationalists was an interesting terrain for him, as he said in an interview he gave to L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1985. This becomes also evident from the explicit reference to Rationalism in the publication regarding the project for the Dutch Parliament extension in Architectural Design in 1977. He wrote Delirious New York after his return to Europe. Koolhaas describes the “Cities within Cities” project for which he collaborated with Ungers in 1976 as follows: “Our idea rested on the fact that it seemed stupid to want to rebuild all this city whereas since the 50s, it was only depopulating”. 28 In the issue of Skyline of March 1979, a review of Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, written by Patrick L. Pinnell, was published. Pinnell proclaimed there: “There are two difficulties here: one specific to Delirious New York, the other more general. Koolhaas’s problem is that either Manhattanism is the resident spirit of New York or it is a manifesto-model for a general “Culture of Congestion”. It cannot be both. In other words, his virtuoso visual and verbal exegesis the Island’s essence not only obscures his intended manifesto, it contradicts it. The more general objection is that nobody has ever popped either a Zeitgeist or a genius locus into a jar of formaldehyde for permanent exhibition; both are convenient fictions, and no more”. 29 A year later, Tschumi published a review of Koolhaas’s Delirious New York in International Architect. Tschumi drew attention on the plural meaning of Delirious New York and maintained that the main argument of Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto, originally published in French in 1978, 30 “was […] characteristic of a contemporary Zeitgeist than of all-pervasive Genius Loci”. He also claimed that “New York […] [was] nothing but a pretext” that Koolhaas had used in order to explore “notions more farreaching than the mere documentation of a remarkable city”. According to Tschumi, the most important contribution of Delirious New York was “the argument over ‘programme’ and ‘unconscious’”. Manhattan served as the scene for putting into play the reinvention of the notions of the programme and the unconscious, since it provided “striking examples”. In his review,

244  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis Tschumi sustained that the way Koolhaas treated Manhattan, in his book, is not based on a “predefined ‘meaning’” of Manhattan. On the contrary, Koolhaas treated Manhattan as “a repository of forms and activities that await a possible meaning”.31 The journal Architecture d’aujourd’hui devoted an issue of 1985 to OMA. This issue was organised in the following four sections, which are emblematic of OMA’s stance in the 1980s: context, urbanism, arcadia and architecture. Koolhaas wrote an article with the provocative title “Architecture: Pour qui? Pourquoi?” for the last section, in which he sustained that “[i]n the countries where “participation” is institutionalised and sacralised by the law, the position of the architect is even worst”. He claimed that in these cases, the architects were trapped between the high power and the basics “in a situation where the dilution of responsibilities means that no one is blamed or congratulated”. He concluded this text with the following declaration: “The unconscious of our culture must be fuelled by marks of heroism […] that certain essential things exist, that only an architect is able to accomplish”.32 What interests me in this assertion of Koolhaas is his belief that the vey force of architecture resides in its capacity to redistribute the power relations of the society. In contrast with the autonomy of the previous generation, which, in many cases, was trapped in a kind of intellectual game that took place in the interior of architectural discipline and was self-consumed in a narcissist manner by architects that shared similar ideas and knowledge and were capable of understanding the hermetic and implicit gestures of the architects-conceivers, Koolhaas’s ambition was to have an impact on reality and to rearticulate through architecture the balance of forces in society. In the same issue, Koolhaas published his essay entitled “To imagine nothingness”.33 The first solo exhibition of OMA in the United States of America was “The Sparkling Metropolis”, which was advertised in the issue of Skyline of December 1978 as follows: “The Office for Metropolitan Architecture – Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis – exhibit their exquisite drawings and visionary ideas for a refurbished Manhattan”. In the issue of Skyline of January 1979, Willy van Bel wrote a review of OMA’s exhibition at the Guggenheim. In this review which is entitled “The Sparkling Metropolis: OMA at the Guggenheim” we can see a black and white version of the “City of the Captive Globe”. 34 An exhibition of OMA’s work entitled “Toward a modern (re)construction of the European city: Four Housing Projects” was held at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies from 12 March to 28 May 1982. The project that figured in the invitation to the exhibition is Lützowstrasse Housing in Berlin, which was a competition that remained unbuilt. The same year an exhibition on OMA’s work was held at Max Protetch Gallery in New York from 11 March to 3 April. These two exhibitions almost coincided. In the poster of the second exhibition a drawing by Rem Koolhaas and Stefano de Martino, made with charcoal for a project of Renovation of a Panopticon

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  245 (1980) was illustrated. The cover of the issue of Skyline of May 1982 illustrated the viewing tower on the bridgehead for a project for two Structures for Rotterdam (1980–1981) by Rem Koolhaas, Stephano de Martino and Kees Christiaanse. In the same issue of Skyline, Anthony Vidler published a four pages article commenting on OMA’s work.35

OMA’s Parc de La Villette and Seattle Library The way Tschumi and OMA treated the notion of programme in their proposals for the competition for the Parc de La Villette is intrinsically linked to the way they represented diagrams in their design processes. My objective here is to show what was the impact of the transformation of programme into composition device for the relationship of design proposals with the observers of their drawings and the users of their spaces. The paradox that I intend to examine is the fact that the comeback of the user as central parameter of architectural composition became possible only through the invention of new notational techniques. The programmatic diagrams of OMA and Tschumi for the Parc de La Villette (1982), for instance, aimed to visualise the intensities of urban sites in order to incorporate them in the design strategies and convert them into protagonist design tools. Their diagrams, on the one hand, visualise the relationships between dynamic parameters and, on the other hand, function as tools that serve to render treatable information that in the previous generations would not have been understood as part of architects’ agency or task. OMA and Tschumi treated the notion of programme in their proposals for the competition for the Parc de La Villette is intrinsically linked to the way they represented they used diagrams in their design processes. My objective is to show what was the impact of the transformation of programme into composition device for the relationship of design proposals with the observers of their drawings and the users of their spaces. In the entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, the OMA treated the park as a programmatic entity36. Koolhaas has described the project as a “social condenser based on horizontal congestion”. 37 Their approach intended to show “that the park can sustain program with superior ease”. The point of departure of the design strategy elaborated in the proposal for the Parc de La Villette was the critique of stances based on understanding the concept of “‘park’ as the opposite of the city – a programmatic non-entity”. The aim of the “programmatic layering” was “to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented events”.38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia shed light on the disjunction between code and territory. They sustain that “[t]he territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently”.39 They draw a distinction between milieu and territory. They explain how “perpetual transcoding between milieus”,40

246  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis which each one is characterised by its one code, takes place. They highlight that the territory emerges through a process of decoding. The use of the strips for the programmatic layering functioned as a tool that served to combine territorial and programmatic regularities. Territorial regularities refer to contours, primary grids, infrastructure, while programmatic regularities refer to repetitive spaces, services, and poles of intensity. The former, that is to say territorial regularities were part of the conventional task of architecture and urban design. The latter, that is to say programmatic regularities were the main contribution of the OMA to the reinvention of the way park design is conceived. More specifically, what constitutes the innovation of the OMA’s proposal for the Parc de La Villette is the interconnection of territorial and programmatic regularities through a common visualisation tool, which is the diagram of strips. In the case of OMA’s proposal for the competition of the Parc de La Villette, the central parameters for the design process were the frequency of the various activities, on the one hand, and their relationships, on the other hand.41 Despite the prioritisation of programme and its conversion into compositional device, it is essential to note that the elaboration of programmatic aspects in this project is based on the very explosion of the conventions of the modernist functionalist classification systems, as JeanLouis Cohen has underscored.42 OMA’s approach is characterised by the intention to reveal the internal contradictions of programmatic intentions and the incompatibilities or functional oppositions. The strips of the diagram for the Parc de La Villette serve as a mechanism serving to avoid the “concentration or clustering of any particular programmatic component”. The “tactic of layering creates the maximum length of “borders” between the maximum number of programmatic components” permitted “the maximum permeatability of each programmatic band”. The intensification of interferences between the different programmatic bands intended to maximise “programmatic mutations”.43 This diagram was seen “not simply as a design but mostly as a tactical proposal to derive maximum benefit from the implantation on the site of a number of activities”. It also permitted the combination between architectural specificity and “programmatic indeterminacy”. Programmatic indeterminacy was not treated as something negative, but, instead, as the very potential of architectural design strategy. The diagram, instead of representing formal configurations, visualised the relationships between different parameters that were incorporated in the design strategy, turning programmatic indeterminacy into the very centre of the design strategy. The notion of indeterminacy and uncertainty are critical for Koolhaas’s approach. In “What Ever Happened to Urbanism”, he declares: “If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty”.44 A central characteristic of OMA’s entry to the competition for the National Library of France is the definition of the major public spaces as

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  247 absences of building. In other words, voices were “carved out from the information solid”. The building would contain five separate and autonomous libraries. The conception of the building as an assemblage of voids is a strategy that gives the opportunity to conceive the individual libraries of the building assemblages independently from each other, that is to say as “multiple embryos each with their own technological placenta”. Such a possibility to conceive each of the five libraries contained in the building according to their own logic and independently from the external envelope pushes architecture to free itself from its conventional obstacles. It is worth noting that “[t]he only connection between the major interiors of the library is a battery of 9 elevators that penetrates the storage block at regular intervals”.45 In S,M,L,XL the strategy employed in this case is described as “Strategy of the Void”.46 In order to put into play the design strategy, the construction of several physical models was essential. In parallel, the production of various diagrammatic plans that showed as slices the configuration of the building assemblage in various level was fundamental for the design strategy. As one can read in S,M,L,XL, [t]the ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggressively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architecture’s last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectivity.47 The cover of the 1992 Newsline issue of September/October was illustrated with two photos of the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe by OMA (1989). In parallel the background is illustrated with various plans of OMA’s competition entry for the Bibliothèque de France in Paris (1989). In the same issue, Terence Riley, who was at the time curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the MoMA, published an article announcing the participation of Rem Koolhaas in an open forum entitled “Lille: Architecture for the New Urban Frontier” in Wood Auditorium at Columbia University ’s GSAPP on 19 October 1992. This article focused mostly on the analysis of the KunstHAL in Rotterdam. He noted regarding the KunstHAL: The project, as approached from the city center, is first glimpsed from an “entertainment” district — a strip of seedy but docile X-rated dance bars. Diagonally opposite the bars is a large urban park and in the distance the KunstHAL at its edge. The edge is defined by a roadway that seems too wide, too high and too fast-moving for its environs. Clambering up and down the embankments, crossing the multiple lanes of traffic and finding that distances are farther than anticipated evoke images of Los Angeles rather than European cities.

248  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis This type of urban space is familiar to OMA: most of Koolhaas’s urban investigations have exploited the potential of discontinuous environments.48 Rem Koolhaas, in “The Regime of ¥€$”, published in Anything in 2001, chose to describe the Seattle Library “not in detail but in terms of the steps we had to take in accommodating certain drastic shifts in current culture”. He sees this library building as a mechanism that would render OMA’s wish to trigger mutations in “current culture” real. Their intention was to transform the way library function and with it the users’ and the librarians’ role in a way that would respond to the shifts concerning the “public realm”, the role of iconography. More specifically, Koolhaas notes: It is clear that the library is one of the last remaining bastions of social good, a status that has made librarians on the whole overly self-satisfied and moralistic; they are confident that they are one of the rare professions that is doing good… But the librarian now has to compete with a public realm that is now utterly transformed and radicalized, with packs of consumers that need iconography and entertainment rather than enlightenment. So a critical part of our approach to the library became not to make the mistake of accommodating this kind of moralism.49 Koolhaas underscores, in the same text: “it is more that we are trying to multiply readings of the building, rather than destabilize or make them ‘about’ instability”. 50 The activation of the multiplicity of readings is central in his work and it is related to OMA’s intention to take into account the transformations regarding the significance of architectural image. This becomes evident, in the following words of Koolhaas during a conversation he had with Sarah Whiting in 1999: “We are aware of the changing significance of image in that we now find it more interesting to have parallel readings”.51 Informative regarding the way the library’s design strategy aimed to bring together the virtual and the actual dimension or architecture in the following phrase, also published in “The Regime of ¥€$”: “We’re looking for a gestalt that is effective in actual and virtual space”. Rem Koolhaas said in an interview he gave to Sarah Whiting: What I (still) find baffling is their hostility to the semantic. Semiotics is more triumphant than ever – as evidenced, for example, in the corporate world or in branding – and the semantic critique may be more useful than ever: the more artificialities, the more constructs; the more constructs, the more signs; the more signs, the more semiotic. 52 Koolhaas also maintains that “[t]o be operational today, you have to abstain from large claims, including being operational”. 53 At the core of OMA’s design strategies is programmatic indeterminacy. More specifically, OMA treat programmatic indeterminacy as the very potential of architectural

Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis  249 and urban design strategies. In other words, in the case of OMA’s work, the diagrams, instead of representing formal configurations, visualise the relationships between different parameters that are at the centre of the design ideas.

Notes 1 Philip Johnson, Preface to Philip Johnson, Mark Wigley, eds., Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 7. 2 Mark Wigley, “Deconstructivist Architecture”, in Johnson, Wigley, eds., Deconstructivist Architecture, 11, 17. 3 Bernard Tschumi cited in Johnson, Wigley, eds., Deconstructivist Architecture, 92. 4 Luis Castillo Villegas, “Modernism on Steroids. Casa Palestra, The Domestic Project”, OASE, 94 (2015): 79–81. 5 1–3 Group was a youthful band of five who shared different roles in front of and behind the camera in a kind of anti-auteur cinema; see also Bart Lootsma, Reality Bytes: Selected Essays 1995–2015 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), 78. 6 Rem Koolhaas, Gerrit Oorthuys, Ivan Leonidov (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1982). 7 Gabriele Mastrigli, “Modernity and myth: Rem Koolhaas in New York”, San Rocco, 8 (2013), 84. 8 Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994); Koolhaas, New York Délire (Paris: Le Chêne, 1978); Koolhaas, “Delirious New York”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 186 (1976): 36–39; Koolhaas, “‘Life in the Metropolis’ or ‘Culture of Congestion’”, Architectural Design, 47(5) (1977): 319–325. Reprinted in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1998), 320–331. 9 Koolhaas, “The Surface”, unpublished manuscript, unpaginated. 10 Koolhaas, Cynthia Davidson, “Rem Koolhaas: Why I Wrote Delirious New York and other Textual Strategies”, Any, 1(0) (1993), 43. 11 Elia Zenghelis, “The Aesthetics of the Present”, Architectural Design, 58(7/8) (1988), 67. 12 Marianna Charitonidou, “Architecture’s Addressees: Drawing as Investigating Device”, villardjournal, 2 (2020): 91–111, https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv160btcm.10. 13 Commonwealth Fund Archives, Harkness Fellowship Files, Series 20.2, Box 115, Folder 941. 14 Koolhaas, letter to Kenneth Frampton, 20 February 1971. Kenneth Frampton Fonds, Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 15 Koolhaas, “Field Trip. A(A) Memoir (First and Last...)”, in Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, eds., S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), 227. 16 Ibid. 17 Koolhaas, Zenghelis, “Exodus o i prigionieri volontari dell’architetture/Exodus of the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture”, Casabella, 378 (1973): 42–45. 18 Christoph Lueder, “Proximity: The Unfolding of a Koolhaasian Hypothesis in Book Space and Architectural Space”, Journal of Architectural Education, 69(2) (2015): 187–196. 19 Koolhaas, Davidson, “Rem Koolhaas: Why I Wrote Delirious New York and other Textual Strategies”, 43. 20 OMA, “The City of the Captive Globe”, Architectural Design, 47(5) (1977), 331. 21 Ibid., 332.

250  Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 296. Ibid. Aldo Rossi, “L’uomo della metropoli”, Casabella, 258 (1961), 25. OMA, “Urban Intervention: Dutch Parliament Extension, The Hague”, International Architect, 1(3) (1980), 50. Koolhaas, “La Deuxième Chance de l’Architecture Moderne... Entretien avec Rem Koolhaas”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 238 (1985), 3. Ibid. Ibid. Patrick L. Pinnell, “Remifications: Delirious New York”, Skyline (1979), 8. Koolhaas, New York Délire (Paris: Le Chêne, 1978). Bernard Tschumi, “On Delirious New York: A Critique of Critique”, International Architect, 1(3) (1980): 68–69. Koolhaas, “Architecture : Pour qui ? Pourquoi ? ”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 238 (1985), 71. Koolhaas, “To Imagine Nothingness”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 238 (1985), 67. Willy van Bel, “The Sparkling Metroplis: OMA at the Guggenheim”, Skyline (1979). Anthony Vidler, “The Office for Metropolitan Architecture: The Ironies of Metropolis: Notes of the Work of OMA”, Skyline (1982): 18–21. Charitonidou, “OMA’s Parc de La Villette and Perpetual Transcoding: The Diagram as Osmosis between Program and Territory”, paper presented at the 12th Annual Deleuze & Guattari Studies Camp and Conference “From Sense to Machinic Becoming”, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK, 10 July 2019, https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/442861. Koolhaas, “Congestion without Matter”, in Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, eds., S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), 921. Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Rem Koolhaas, eds., Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 73. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 322. Ibid. Charitonidou, “OMA’s Parc de La Villette and Perpetual Transcoding: The Diagram as Osmosis between Program and Territory”. Jean-Louis Cohen, “The Rational Rebel, or The Urban Agenda of OMA”, in Jacques Lucan, ed., OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 9–19. Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, eds., S,M,L,XL, 923. Koolhaas, “What Ever Happened to Urbanism”, in Koolhaas, Mau, Sigler, eds., S,M,L,XL, 969. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas 1987–1998. El Croquis, no. 53+ 79 (Madrid: El Croquis, 1999), 66. Koolhaas, Mau, Sigler, eds., S,M,L,XL, 603. Ibid., 694. Terence Riley, “Rem Koolhaas/OMA: Urban Construction”, Newsline (1992), 2. Koolhaas, “The Regime of ¥€$”, in Sylvia Davidson, ed., Anything (Cambridge, MA; New York: The MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 2001), 186. Koolhaas, Sarah Whiting, “A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting”, Assemblage, 40 (1999), 49. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47.

10 Conversing with Bernard Tschumi on his conception of architecture’s modes of representation Instead of epilogue Introduction Bernard tschumi, in the framework of the French Programme that was held at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in March 1973, arranged a meeting with Henri Lefebvre in order to discuss with him about the event. Lefebvre wrote, in a letter he sent to Jonathan Benthall, on 15 January 1973: “I was very happy to meet Bernard Tschumi and I will be pleased to continue the interview in London.”1 A year earlier, Tschumi wrote a review of Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville 2 for the issue of September 1972 of Architectural Design3. That same year, Manfredo Tafuri, in his essay “Design and Technological Utopia”, written for the catalogue for the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, which took place in 1972 at the MoMA, expressed his disbelief towards the efforts of “Architettura Radicale” to modify the systems of production through the formulation of anti-consumer utopias, claiming that these efforts show an inability to escape the capitalist dimension which is hidden within technology4. In “The Environmental Trigger”, Bernard Tschumi notes: “Architecture is the adaptation of space to the existing social structures. No spatial organisation ever changes the socio- economic structure of a reactionary society. The only possible architectural action of a revolutionary nature is rhetorical”5. He also refers to the existence of three points of view: a first group, who “conserve[s] their historical role of translators of the formal structures of society”; a second group, who acts as a commentator and critic of society, and third group, who goes even further than the second and “use[s] their environmental knowledge to be part of the forces trying to accelerate the process of collapse and to turn urban conflicts into new urban structures to polarise and play the dialectic of conflict”6. Manfredo Tafuri and Henri Lefebvre’s approaches could be classified in the second group. A question that arises is whether Tschumi’s position, in “The Environmental Trigger”, is related or opposed to Tafuri’s position. It would be interesting to reflect upon the relationship between Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York7 and Bernard Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts8 . When Koolhaas comments on The City of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003372080-10

252  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation Captive Globe, refers to the notion of archipelago in “The City in the City  – Berlin: A Green Archipelago”9, echoing Oswald Mathias Ungers’s theory. Koolhaas refers to a tripartite organisation of grid, lobotomy and schism. This organisation could be related to your formulation of three worlds in The Manhattan Transcripts: the world of movements, the world of objects and the world of events. Koolhaas argues that “[t]he more each island celebrates different values, the more the unity of the archipelago as system is reinforced”10. In the introduction of The Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi refers to the disjunctions between use, form and social value and you juxtapose the world of movements, the world of objects and the world of events. Koolhaas’s understanding of the reinforcement of the unity of the archipelago because of the fact that each unit celebrates different values could be related to Tschumi’s notion of disjunction. The tension between form and programme is very central in the work of both Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. Roland Barthes in “Semiology and Architecture” (“Sémiologie et Urbanisme”), which was published in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1971, refers to the concept of urban semiology. He argues that the practice of urban semiology is associated with semiology, geography, history, urbanism, architecture and psychoanalysis. Barthes, in the aforementioned article, examines to what extent an urban semiology is possible and tries to understand under what conditions such a kind of semiology could exist. He underscores that “the human space […] has always been signifying”. What seems really interesting is his observation that “Lynch’s conception of the city (« cité ») is more gestaltist than structural”11. For Lynch, the modern metropolis as opposed to the historical city no longer has a Gestalt. Tschumi’s notion of disjunction could be interpreted as an opposition to the gestaltist theory. The German word “Gestalt” means whole. The Gestalt theory is based on the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Two issues before the issue in which Barthes published this text, Tschumi had published with Fernando Montès “Do-It-Yourself-City” in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui. The ‘activities’ outlined in “Do-It-Yourself-City” could be understood as an attempt to infuse the city-through architecture – the social and cultural ‘content’ that the barren, rigid, and repetitive modernist city did not offer, including the temporal and ephemeral. In this sense, “Do-It-Yourself-City” could be understood as an opposition to a gestaltist understanding of the city, that is to say to a Lynchean understanding of the city.

Conversation held on 14 September 2016 in New York I am giving a lecture in London on 28th of September and I am trying to do a slightly different lecture from what I am doing the last two years. The lecture is in two parts and the first part is really about the way architects draw or represent in relation to their thinking

BERNARD TSCHUMI:

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  253 process and my argument is that through out the 21st century, I think, the architects developed modes of representation or modes of notation, which were closely related to the conceptual, political, cultural sphere. I am starting from the times when the modern movement used axonometric representation. What is important is that the modes of representation were a mode of thinking. Then, today we all use the same hyperrealistic software. So, what is now the difference of the way the architects think when the language is the same? That’s the first part and then the second part I go through my own work from The Manhattan Transcripts today. These three questions you prepared somehow touch the point either directly or indirectly. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: When you talk about the notion of the “combinatoire”, in the book titled Bernard Tschumi. Des transcripts à la Villette, you underscore that “the relationship between form and meaning is never a signifier-signified relation” and that “relations are never semantic, but formal (in the sense of formal logic, and not of formalism”12. What is central to your project for the Parc de La Villette is the way the process contributes to the genetics of the form. If we try to juxtapose the sequences of the successive stages of the “Follies”’ transformations to the axonometric representations of the Eisenman House Series, some formal affinities can be discerned between your drawings for the “Follies” and Eisenman’s axonometric drawings. Your approach is, however, characterised by the intention to distance yourself from any semantic intention that precedes these transformations. You note: “The result of the application of a process or a formula, their result takes on an obviously unforeseen meaning”. How would you differentiate your own approach from Eisenman’s design strategy in the case of his House Series? BERNARD TSCHUMI: The issue about La Villette is really an issue of nonhierarchical transformative language in terms of whatever is in the park. In other words, I don’t give any value judgement to any architectural expression. I consider it a “combinatoire”, which is a mathematical term. In English, I generally use the word commutation. The idea of combination and permutation is central to the architecture of the “Follies” of La Villette. It’s a way to relativise the pre-eminence of form. In other words, form is all-relative. It is simply the result of the “combinatoire”. That’s why I am very different from Eisenman. Eisenman has a formal strategy. I don’t have a formal strategy; I have a programmatic strategy. In the case of the “Follies” the central element that I use in the “combinatoire”, in the combination are the movement and the vectors, in other words the staircases and the ramps, the elevators, and then there is the grid. But the transformation of these objects is made through these identifiable devices, like the grid, the cube, the 27, etc. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: You have in mind the subject that will appropriate the space?

254  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation No, it is the programme itself. In other words, how it will be used. But then, it’s also relative because the use in certain cases changed. In the beginning, it was all about locating programmatic. The architecture expression is identical for all, which is very different from an architect that would use the detail as an important part of the semantics. That’s why I used the expression “The Parc de la Villette is the largest discontinuous building ever built”, because it is always the same building but in a different configuration. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: I read, in Une architecture en projet. Le Fresnoy, that you think of Le Fresnoy (the National Studio for Contemporary Arts) (1991–1997) as a dialogue, or rather an antithesis, with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Concert Hall. Taking this as a starting point, I would like to ask you what do you think of the collage technique that Mies is developing for this project? In this collage, as in the other collages of Mies after 1937, we can discern the existence of a cinematographic conception of space. You, several times, when you talk about your use of montage you refer to the concept of space-time. How, in your opinion, is your conception of space-time different from Mies’s conception of space-time? How do your modes of notation for The Manhattan Transcripts and even for Le Fresnoy project could be related to the aforementioned collage of Mies? BERNARD TSCHUMI: In the case of this incredible collage by Mies he takes a military warehouse. It is a military warehouse where they put bombs to bomb Germany. That’s very abstract and then he wants to make it cultural. So, what does he do? He takes a statue from Maillol and then he puts a title: “Concert hall”. So, it is fascinating to see that there are three devices. Just with three devices which have nothing to do with one another he conveys an argument. He is really defending a theory: that space has an independent autonomous existence, that can then be articulated through the vertical separation, the partition and can be connoted and here he puts the statue, that’s a connotation of culture, but then it is not a museum but a concert hall – it is twisted one more time and calls it “a concert hall”. That’s why I like our conversation, because now in my lecture I am going to give that example. Off course, the ability – now we get back to the first question – the potential permutations is fascinating because it means that architecture is endless. Much of my work is about definition of architecture. In my case, it is certainly less specific than in Mies because Mies, during that period in the 1950s is constantly exploring the “espace-temps”, which I don’t always do. Let me show you something. We are currently working on a tower in Monaco and there are different programmes. As I looked at precedents, I came across a plan of Mies apartment, which is absolutely fascinating because everything was open, there is no division. You arrive at the standard apartment – look at the bedroom, you have a wall and a door. In a sense, it’s fascinating reading the plan to see that he BERNARD TSCHUMI:

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  255 non-stop is using the same devices as he did with the Barcelona Pavilion and the fantastic elegance – it is a thick partition and a thin partition. You can’t do a plan, which is more minimal and more intelligent than this. That’s about the “espace-temps”, so, Mies explores it up to extreme. In my projects, the devices that I use they are several, they are many. Mies tends to push one device. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: Thanks to the fact that the constructed space will be inhabited during the design process the genesis of a conception of user takes necessarily place. The architects during their endeavour to represent an eventual space formation, they fabricate a relationship between a fictive and a real user. My thesis aims to trace a history of the mutation of the status of the relationship between the fictive user and the real user. In order to do so I have chosen to study the way in which some architects (Mies van der Rohe – linear perspective, Frank Gehry – gestural drawing, Aldo Rossi – form as fatti urbani, Peter Eisenman – axonometry, you – Sequence/Montage) have contributed to the reinvention of a specific typology of visual representation. Situating each of the aforementioned figures within a system of strata of transformations, aims at showing how each of them contributed to the transformation of what we could call spatio-temporal assemblages implicated by architectural representations. What do you think about it? BERNARD TSCHUMI: For me, in your question there are two questions. When you brought the discussion about the fictive user when we were talking in Paris that was touching upon we talked about representation. We also talked about the fictive user in terms of social housing when in France the law gives you exactly the size how the toilet is supposed to be, how a bathroom, how a kitchen. This kind of typical user is a fictitious user. For example, in France the kitchen has to be separated room, which off course is not Mies – that’s not the American open kitchen. Hence, the people who wrote the law were addressing a fictitious human being, which is interesting because then we can go back to Derrida on the law. You use a very nice expression here: “a specific typology of visual representation”. The examples that you give Mies, Gehry, Rossi etc. are interesting. Each have a different typology of visual representation not only that their typology is highly related to what they are trying to say. If I go back to the 21st century when we are all using hyperrealist 3d renderings, this situation changes. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: But the preliminary sketches still exist or not really? BERNARD TSCHUMI: Less, for me they do of course, because that’s how it works. For other people it does not. They work directly with the software. There is no concept. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: These are like models. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, exactly, because we think in elements.

256  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation In the physical models there is still the concept, more than in the hyperrealistic 3d renders, because they are abstract. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, that’s true. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: What I am trying to do in my PhD thesis is to discern what is the contribution of each architect to a certain typology of visual representation and how they reinvented or redefine in a way this typology. BERNARD TSCHUMI: The way I start working is really exploring something. Quite quickly I differentiate the parts. One deals with movement. If the concept is here then the sensibility, the materials come through this. I am interested in exploring potential concepts. The hand diagram comes when you have to think about the next thing. It gives you a sense of the fact that there is a thinking process where the mode of representation is fundamental. Here you see correctly when you say Mies’s linear perspective, Frank Gehry’s gestural drawing, Rossi’s “fatti urbani”, Eisenman’s the axonometric. That clear correlation is unbelievably interesting. The word diagram is dangerous. Fifteen years ago, everybody talked about diagram it was clearly a computer diagram. The diagram is mediation. The drawings are important because they are the mediation. The montage and the notion of superimposition are important for me. I had a dilemma between the word superposition and superimposition in the early days. Superimposition is the overlap of two films. The superimposition of two images, which is giving you a third image. In the case of “la superposition”, we can say that there are two or three or whatever independent artefacts that you bring them together. It is a vertical juxtaposition superimposition where they are merging to one another. The transcripts are more superimposition than superposition. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU:

Conversation held on 12 December 2016 in Paris In Event-Cities 4: Concept-Form, you mention that a “concept-form differs from a type in that it is not bound by history or historical context”13. You also note that the typologies are related to the symbolic dimension. In which way a concept-form, in your opinion, can take distance from this symbolic aspect of forms? In which sense your understanding of the concept-form is differentiated from the conception of forms by Aldo Rossi as non-separable from their symbolic history? Aldo Rossi, in a sense, conceives typologies as a way of identifying the human experience and its autobiographical/autoanalytical dimension to the historical evolution of forms. From what I understand, you are also interested in the relationship between individual perception and collective unconscious. Your intention to redefine what architecture is in contemporary era is linked to an endeavour

MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU:

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  257 of understanding the assemblage of space and its representation as a strategy of incorporating the collective unconscious in the individual perception that accompanies the modes of visualisation. Is the understanding of this passage from the collective to the individual and vice versa central in your work? BERNARD TSCHUMI: I find interesting to try to relate the notion of concept-form and the notion of type. Type is derived from history, type begins with a function and is formalised in a configuration, which can be applied to another function. The concept-form does not come from history, it does not even come from use. It is a geometric, an abstract configuration that then can be applied to shelter a programme, to house a programme. So, it is in a sense the reverse of the type, but because of the fact that can be both interaction between a space and a programme inevitably they will meet someway. Hence, you can invent new programme that are the result of concept-form. To give you an example: the tower of Babel starts as a concept-form. It is an abstraction and then it is turned into a narrative, a fiction and a story, and a programme. It is a complete fabrication of the mind. This is what I call “concept-form”. When architects look at sciences and try to translate scientific formulas into forms. History of typology comes from physical sciences and not from architecture, it is the form of classification. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: The “Encyclopédies”… BERNARD TSCHUMI: Exactly. Durand takes as an example the classifications of the “Encyclopédies”. So, the concept-form is the starting point and not the arrival-point. With the concept-form, turning upside down the cumulative understanding of type in Rossi’s sense, I invent new correlations. Disjunction presupposes a use, a programme. Concept-form is an abstraction. For me, there is no correlation or cause-and-effect relationship between a form and a use. Rossi, in a way, could also say that, but in a totally different sense. He could say that certain characteristic forms that come from history are part of the constitutive elements of the city and brings the idea of memory that is something that I never use. So, in many ways, the way the type and the concept-form approaches intersect is related to the fact that all work with space and in materials. Anybody that works with space and materials will hit with these similar issues. I don’t consider myself a Russian architect, but inevitably I will hit a problem that Rossi may have encountered. Similarly, Mies. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: But you prefer Mies over Rossi? BERNARD TSCHUMI: Probably yes because every now and then Mies raised questions more often than Rossi. Rossi was after certainties, while Mies against himself does a few things – not the Mies of the Seagram building but the Mies of the Brick house and the Barcelona – raised fundamental questions. Rossi works in the 1970s at a time that the 68 period has completely dissolved every possible certainty to the extent that nothing can work and Rossi and his friends of the Tendenza try

258  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation to find reassurance and permanence. When he talks about memory, he feels the necessity to have certainties. Mies is living in completely different era – the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century is the end of certainties – a lot of things are being put into question – representation, reality and so on – so, Mies is part of that questioning and when he is questioned if he was influenced by Theo van Doesburg he denied, but off course he was. They were all testing new tools. I think at that time when Mies was exploring interesting territories and then at a moment he stops. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: In your work, the intention to shape an argument through architectural practice is very central. We could claim the same for Mies’s work. What interests/captivates me is the fact that despite your common interest for the forming of an argument though visualisation and space assemblage, you connect the intensity of the essence of the argument to the notion of disjunction, while Mies relates it to the notion of clarity. Mies refers repetitively to the importance of clarity not only for architectural practice but for the architectural education as well. For example, in a letter where he tries to develop his ideas regarding the pedagogy at IIT. Mies’s quest for ultimate clarity is related to his avoidance of any formal speculation. Mies writes: “I realized that their eyes simply could not see proportion”. When he conceived the curriculum for IIT he gave much importance to the visual training classes that were “especially designed for training the eyes and forming and maturing a sensitivity for proportion”. He also notes: “to try to express individuality in architecture is a complete misunderstanding of the problem”. Both you and Mies try to avoid formal speculation as a starting point. For Mies the aesthetic experience seems rather to serve as an intermediate term within the sequence of an argument. We could claim the same for you. What intrigues me is the fact that you relate this process of concretising the argument through architectural production to disjunction, while Mies relates it to clarity. I would also like to examine how this is reflected in your different understanding of teaching architectural design. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Back to your point, which I find fascinating about the ultimate clarity. I really believe in the ultimate clarity, but ultimate clarity can be dynamic – it does not have to be static. Mies is about ultimate clarity that is dynamic. Again, I take the same examples; the Concrete house, the Brick house, the Barcelona Pavilion. They are constantly challenging expectations to the extent that very few historians have really tried to explore what it was. I think clarity can be found in equations that cannot necessarily be resolved. So, the question can be incredibly clear and yet not provide an immediate answer. This happens in mathematics. Somebody says that there is an equation that can be resolved and it takes two-three generations for finally a mathematician to find the solution. I think you say something extremely beautiful:

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  259 “you related the process of concretising the argument through architectural production to disjunction, while Mies relates it to clarity”. Yes, I will look for tension, while Mies looks for resolution. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: So, you relate clarity to disjunction, while Mies relates clarity to unity or synthesis. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, absolutely. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: Because you don’t like the idea of unity… BERNARD TSCHUMI: No, I don’t like the idea of wholeness, unifying – I don’t even believe it exists. I don’t believe in totalities. When I was student, Bernhard Hoesli made a distinction between organic and dialectic in architecture. Dialectic implied the shock of oppositions. For example, the plan libre of Le Corbusier is about dialectic. However, the architects who believed in organic believed in wholeness. I can bring the example of Frank Lloyd Wright. That distinction I find very interesting because it is a conceptual one and I will be always on the side of the dialectic and not on the side of the organic and it was quite amusing when I started at Columbia, you know the computers and the so-called paperless studio the majority was looking for the organic. Perhaps the young Mies is about dialectic – up to a point there are certain tensions and oppositions. BERNARD TSCHUMI: We just finished the reviews on Friday and the issue in my case was the clarity of the question.

Conversation held on 24 February 2017 in Paris To what extent A Chronicle in Urban Politics14 and Chronicles of Space 1974-1975. Diploma Unit 215 are related to The Manhattan Transcripts16? The Chronicle of Urban Politics includes the material produced in the Unit 2 at the AA during the academic year 1973–1974, while Chronicles of Space 1974-1975. Diploma Unit collected the material produced in the Unit 2 at the AA during the academic year 1974–1975. To what extent the exhibition “A Space: A Thousand Words”17, held at the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in 1975 contributed to the shift from urban politics to conceptual art concerns? The emphasis on process is a point in common with conceptual art. The understanding of space as praxis is the meeting point between your concerns about urban politics and your interest in conceptual art practices? BERNARD TSCHUMI: The immediate answer is that A Chronicle in Urban Politics and Chronicles of Space 1974-1975. Diploma Unit 2 have nothing to do with The Manhattan Transcripts. Then, they share an interest in the city and in space, but it’s really two different phases. The two chronicles are part of the teaching strategy, The Manhattan Transcripts have nothing to do with it, but more importantly the chronicles are 74, 75. It’s not yet the moment when New York becomes MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU:

260  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation central in terms of conceiving work, testing things. I could say that the two chronicles are documentation and not creative work per se. They are very important in terms of asking questions, trying to establish a field, an area of interest, an area of questions. “A Space: A Thousand Words” is in between, chronologically, but also conceptually. Why it’s in between conceptually? I invite people, not unlike what I am doing with my students, but in the same time I start to develop a very strong interest for certain things that will make phenomena that happen in the art scene. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: So, before that time you were more interested in urban politics than in the art scene? BERNARD TSCHUMI: I was interested, but I wasn’t interested in doing it myself. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: When I read your first texts, I understand that there is a moment, a turning point that you stop believing in Henri Lefebvre’s theory and because of that you try to shape an approach that is more related to architectural practice and in a sense more optimistic. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, I would say that I always find Lefebvre fantastic for a lot of things he develops, which are still remarkable. In order to go to the next step, it was required to change gear and to start asking questions that in order to answer them I needed to draw. So, that moment is completely related to New York. I kept writing and people requested me to write articles, but the fact of changing media had radical implications on what I was thinking. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU But in the beginning, you were still teaching at the AA and you were back and forth. BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, I was back and forth. But the interesting thing about your question is that it articulates quite well. “The emphasis on the process is a point in common with conceptual art”. Yes, absolutely. Conceptual art was a great bridge between architecture, which for me had to do with thinking and not with just doing drawings. I don’t use the word “concept” in the way they use it. At the AA there was a lot of discussion about what artists were doing, at the Saint Martin’s School of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts. It’s amusing when I use now the word documentation. Documentation is a form of art. Yes, absolutely. Space is a word that could be used by architects, by planners, by artists, by musicians, it is a fantastic word. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: In the review of Lefebvre’s Le Droit à La Ville; Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et politique; “The Right to the City” you published in 1972 in Architectural Design you note: “Lefebvre’s comment on the new civilization – the Urban Society – erupts on the notion of the finally expressed desire…on ‘La Fete’ [sic] that will not only subvert (like in May ’68) but also change radically social and production relationships (between the private owners of the means of production and the workers). This jump from a new social behaviour to a new social structure is interestingly architectural and thus

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  261 appealed to architects: the art of the revolutionary twenties wanted space to become ‘the instrument of social change’. But no group behaviour can alter the production relationships, and one doesn’t see how the organisation of space can be the new motor of history, nor could it be the urban everyday life”18. In many instances, you refer to the fact that Lefebvre conceives the city as a projection of society on the ground. In other words, we could say that he conceives space praxis as a representation of society and vice versa. You, on the other hand, in The Manhattan Transcripts you ‘take’ elements from the city but the role of The Manhattan Transcripts is never to represent; they are not mimetic. I could claim that what does not satisfy you in Lefebvre’s theory are the following issues: a. The fact that he neglects subjective experience. In other words, the fact that city from a personal and experiential perspective was missing from Lefebvre’s approach. Lefebvre does not underscore the importance of experienced space. b. The fact that he is not specific or inventive about the space praxis’s processes that could contribute to the transformation of everyday life. What do you think about it? Is the “Environmental Trigger”19 conceived as a response to the gaps you had discerned in Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville? To what extent your review of Lefebvre’s Le Droit à La Ville; Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et politique; “The Right to the City” is related to the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” that was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 23 May to 11 September 1972? I agree, but it’s amusing. Importance of the experience of everyday life. He articulated what he called the vecu and I tend to use these three categories that were previously used by philosophers: the conceptual, the perceived and the experienced. I invited Archizoom at the AA and Rem Koolhaas invited Superstudio. He was interested in the semantic, while I wasn’t. During the seventies in New York City, the Whites as Eisenman tried to have a syntactic view of architecture and the Greys like Robert Stern who were interested in meaning and the semantic view of architecture. Hejduk was an interesting person because he was really interested in the semantic but coming from a modernist abstract point of view and he was changing the codes. His codes came from a variety of influences, which came from religion, very strange person. He was interested in the programme as well through literature. He was interested in literature and painting Juan Gris representation and abstraction. Memory was a big word. 68 literally killed. The trauma of 68 was such that most people abandoned architecture and those who tried to re-capture architecture did not want to go back to the modern movement. Roland Castro was doing psychoanalysis with Lacan.

BERNARD TSCHUMI:

262  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation “The imagination takes power” and you say that this is contradictory because imagination and power cannot go together. So, the scene in London is more related to imagination, while the scene in France is more related to power? BERNARD TSCHUMI: Yes, absolutely, here in France people got very politicised without finding a way to go beyond it. That’s why what was happening in Italy was interesting, because the “Architettura Radicale” and the “Architettura Razionale” both emerged there. It’s amusing to see in retrospect that some of the conversations were taking place, some of the oppositions, some of the polemics were in a way more interesting than today when everything is so pragmatic. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: How exactly did you decide to go the US? BERNARD TSCHUMI: I went to London because that was the place where things happened, right, and it is not an accident that you had Elia Zeghelis, Rem Koollhaas or Léon Krier. All went to London because nothing was happening anywhere. My plan was to go to London for a certain time before coming back to Paris. Paris was always going to be my base. Culturally, my first language is French, I love the city of Paris, I was obsessed with it. It was purely because for the art scene. There was a conference organised in London “The Conceptual Architecture Conference” by Peter Cook. Vidler told me to come to Princeton. All my friends and life were from the art scene. From January 1976 to 1982 I do something that is neither art nor architecture and then in 82 I do the competition for La Villette. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU: I would also like to discuss with you regarding the concept of transparency. Robert Slutzky and Colin Rowe draw the distinction between literal and phenomenal transparency. They related the phenomenal transparency with Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches and the literal transparency with Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building. In the case of Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches the stratification of space invites the viewer to imagine the movement through space. I would like to ask what you think about this distinction, especially in relation to the Acropolis Museum. BERNARD TSCHUMI: You should ask me to send you a text of 1975, which I wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition “Space: A Thousand Words”20. In my text in this exhibition catalogue, I am referring to Robert Slutzky and Colin Rowe’s distinction between phenomenal and literal transparency21. It was on this occasion that Peter Eisenman invited me to New York. The phenomenal transparency is more related to painting. The successive and parallel layers are in space and not in time. A critique that I could make is that it is a collage of successive layers and that it is too formal. In the case of the Acropolis Museum, firstly, the museum is simultaneously in space and in time. My points of reference are the cinema and the choreography. The relationship with Eisenstein’s text was very important. MARIANNA CHARITONIDOU:

Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation  263

Notes 1 Henri Lefebvre, letter sent to Jonathan Benthall, 15 January 1973, Institute for Contemporary Arts Archives, Tate Britain Library, TGA955/12/2/5. 2 Lefebvre, Le Droit à La Ville (Paris: Anthropos, Collection Société et Urbanisme, 1968); Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman, Elizabeth Lebas (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 63–185; Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et politique (Paris: Anthropos, 1972); in 1972, Lefebvre gave many lectures on “L’espace”, which is cited as stemming from Lefebvre’s “Séminaires sur l’espace, Nanterre, Oxford, etc., 1972.” 3 Bernard Tschumi, “Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Le droit à la ville’”, Architectural Design, 42(9) (1972): 581–582; Tschumi, Press release, “The Politics of Space, Henri Lefebvre and Anatole Kopp at the ICA,” Institute for Contemporary Arts Archives, Tate Britain Library, TGA 955/12/2//5; Tschumi, Lecture handout of “Lefebvre: The Politics of Space,” 17–19 March 1973, Institute for Contemporary Arts Archives, Tate Britain Library, TGA955. 4 Manfredo Tafuri, “Design and Technological Utopia”, in Emilio Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Centro di Florence, 1972), 88–404. 5 Tschumi, “The Environmental Trigger”, in James Gowan, ed., A Continuing Experiment: Learning and Teaching at the Architectural Association (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 89–99. 6 Ibid. 7 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994); Koolhaas, New York Délire (Paris: Le Chêne, 1978). 8 Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1981); Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London; New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 9 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kolhoff, Arthur Ovaska, “The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago: A Manifesto”, 1977, UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research; Florian Hertweck, Sébastien Marot, eds., Die Stadt in Der Stadt Berlin: Ein Grünes Archipel (Verlag: Lars Müller, 2013); Ungers, Koolhaas, Riemann, Kolhoff, Ovaska, “Cities within the City: Berlin as Green Archipelago”, Lotus International, 19 (1978): 82–97. 10 Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts. 11 Roland Barthes, “Sémiologie et Urbanisme”, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui. 153 (1971): 11–13. 12 Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi. Des transcripts à la Villette, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Institut français d’architecture, 1986); this exhibition catalogue was for the show presented at the Institut français d’architecture from 2 April to 18 May 1985. 13 Tschumi, Event-Cities 4: Concept-Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 15. 14 Tschumi, ed., A Chronicle in Urban Politics (London: Architectural Association, 1973). 15 Tschumi, ed., Chronicles of Space 1974-1975. Diploma Unit 2 (London: Architectural Association, 1975). 16 Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1981); Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London; New York: Academy Editions/ St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 17 Roselee Goldberg, Tschumi, eds., A Space: A Thousand Words (London: Dieci Libri, Royal Academy of Arts, 1975); the exhibition “A Space: A Thousand

264  Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture’s modes of representation

18 19 20 21

Words” was held at the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in London from 7 February to 6 March 1975 and co-curated by Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg. Tschumi, “Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Le droit à la ville’”, Architectural Design, 42(9) (1972): 581–582. Tschumi, “Environmental Trigger”. Goldberg, Tschumi, eds., A Space: A Thousand Words. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”, Perspecta, 8 (1963): 45–54; Rowe, Slutzky, Bernhard Hoesli, Transparency (Basel; Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997).

Index

Aalto, Alvar 5, 33 Abraham, Raimund 104, 164, 166, 187 Agrest, Diana 24, 37, 107, 115, 131, 133, 158, 159 Ahari, Kamiar 239 Architectural Association (AA) 67, 105, 162, 173, 177, 179, 183, 184, 188, 202, 203, 210, 215, 233–235, 238, 239, 263 Aristotle 51, 58, 59, 61, 68, 69 artefact 1, 3, 7, 10, 13–15, 17, 19, 23–29, 45, 47, 72, 78, 79, 92, 107, 108, 113–118, 124, 125, 128, 136, 148, 220, 237, 256 Artists Space Gallery 179, 180, 181, 185, 203, 208, 214 Athens 17, 32, 35, 79, 80, 95, 102, 104, 162, 168, 202 autobiography 108, 113, 116, 131, 133, 136 axonometric 13, 18, 22, 26, 40–45, 55, 59, 97, 98, 114, 116–130, 140, 141, 143, 145, 185, 208, 217–220, 227, 239, 240, 242, 253, 256 Aymonino, Carlo 123, 124, 158, 162, 164, 166 Bakema, Jaap 78, 80, 81, 101, 150, 166 Baldessari, John 217 Banham, Reyner 17, 19, 20, 35, 36, 94, 98, 99, 105, 157 Bataille, Georges 50, 58, 64, 68, 201 Bauhaus 42, 44, 48, 120, 134, 150, 157, 161, 166, 211, 221, 262 Bergson, Henri 137, 214, 233 Berlin 32, 36–38, 69, 101, 102, 104, 108–111, 123, 124, 128, 132–134, 151, 152, 156–158, 206, 239, 240, 241, 244, 252, 263

Bernstein House 22, 140, 218 Blake, Peter 54, 66 Bourdieu, Pierre 162, 165 Braghieri, Gianni 123 California 115, 189, 239 Camus, Albert 50, 64, 66, 102 Candilis, Georges 18, 35, 71, 72, 81, 99, 100, 150 Charter of Athens 95 Charter of Habitat 35, 81, 102, 104 chaos 61–63 Chermayeff, Ivan 158 Chermayeff, Serge 67 cinema 18, 28, 36–38, 63, 71, 83–88, 102, 103, 128, 134, 137, 147, 151, 163, 164, 169, 199, 221, 231–233, 237, 240, 249, 262 citizens 5, 21, 97 civilization 176, 260 clarity 50–60, 62, 111, 193, 258, 259 Coates, Nigel 177–179, 183, 187, 190, 203, 204 Cohen, Jean-Louis 34, 49, 87, 89, 92, 103, 104, 162, 165, 190, 193, 246, 250 collage 13, 20, 25, 48, 60, 77, 78, 80, 99, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 124, 125, 127, 128, 235, 241, 242, 254, 262 collective memory 22, 23, 36, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 115, 132, 133, 137, 150, 163, 166 Colquhoun, Alan 99, 193 Columbia University 66, 154, 161, 162, 167, 168, 187–191, 193–197, 199, 200, 206, 239, 247 competition 74, 80, 99, 100, 118, 119, 124, 129, 130, 156, 173, 176, 178,

266 Index 185, 188, 217–219, 221–225, 227, 228, 230, 232, 239–242, 244–246, 262 computation 197 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 4, 35, 73, 79, 80–83, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 149, 151–153 consumerism 4, 6, 104, 210 Cook, Peter 180, 184, 203, 262 Cooper Union 116, 133, 152, 154, 156, 162, 163, 167, 179, 210, 223 Cornell University 108, 150, 154–156, 167, 239 culture 15, 19, 20, 29, 35, 36, 39, 48, 59, 67, 68, 71, 72, 78, 90, 92, 99, 100, 103, 113, 132, 160–162, 169, 172, 187, 188, 190, 193, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 230, 232, 235, 237, 241, 243, 244, 248, 249, 254 De Carlo, Giancarlo 18, 72, 76, 77, 80, 89, 95, 100–102, 150–152, 164, 166 De Stijl 40, 44, 47, 161, 211 Debord, Guy 231 decodification 106, 120 Deleuze, Gilles 7–9, 27, 28, 33, 34, 37, 41, 48, 60, 68, 83–88, 102, 103, 111, 128, 132, 134, 137, 147, 161, 163, 164, 167, 176, 191, 205, 208, 214, 231–233, 235, 245, 250 depth 2, 22, 23, 37, 41, 110, 117, 119, 130, 132, 134, 136, 140, 144, 146, 147, 156, 163, 164, 167, 222 Derrida, Jacques 131, 163, 176, 192, 205, 255 diagram(s) 37, 73, 74, 77, 78, 83, 93, 94, 96–98, 120, 121, 128, 134, 143, 148, 150, 152–154, 166, 170, 173, 215, 230, 231, 245, 246, 249, 250, 256 Diamond House(s) 22, 140, 143–145 digital 197, 198, 206 dispositif 6–9, 11, 23, 28–30, 33, 34, 208, 222, 232 Doorn Manifesto 35, 95–97, 102 drawings 1–3, 6, 8, 10–17, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 35, 39, 43–47, 50, 56, 64, 66, 74, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 134, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 155, 167, 168, 179, 180, 188, 195, 202, 205, 208, 211, 213, 215–220, 223,

231, 236, 239, 242, 244, 245, 253, 256, 260 Dutch Structuralism 242 Eisenman, Peter 5, 16, 22–25, 77, 99, 106, 107, 111, 112, 114, 118–123, 128–132, 134, 137, 147, 148, 151, 152, 157, 159, 163–167, 184, 187, 190, 194, 215–217, 223, 226, 228, 234, 236, 239, 253, 255, 256, 261, 262 Eisenstein, Sergueï M. (Sergei) 26, 37, 180, 211, 212, 221, 232, 233, 262 Evans, Robin 1, 2, 14, 30, 32, 35, 38, 56, 67, 69, 162 fiction(s) 6, 8, 18, 30, 33, 39, 83, 87, 99, 211, 215, 237, 243, 257 flatness 37, 110, 130, 132, 134–136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146, 156, 163, 164, 167 Florence 80, 123, 124, 167, 263 Foucault, Michel 9, 11, 27, 28, 33, 34, 37, 176, 212, 232 Frampton, Kenneth 111, 132, 157–161, 163, 165–167, 187, 188, 198, 204, 239, 249 freedom 56, 59, 140, 210, 247 friendship 78 functionalism 5, 6, 21, 24, 25, 73–75, 77, 79, 91, 107, 108, 112, 151, 229, 242 Gandelsonas, Mario 120, 121, 134, 157, 158, 160, 167 Geddes, Patrick 95, 97, 105 Giedion, Sigfried (Siegfried) 58, 68, 89, 95, 101, 103, 104, 152 Goldberg, Roselee 170, 180, 201, 216, 263, 264 Graham, Dan 216, 234 Greece 35, 100 Gropius, Walter 42, 43, 48, 54, 66, 67, 262 Guattari, Félix 9, 34, 41, 48, 60, 128, 134, 161, 167, 176, 231, 235, 245, 250 Hadid, Zaha 238–240 Hejduk, John 22–25, 37, 106, 107, 110–114, 118, 119, 121, 123, 130, 132–136, 139–148, 156, 162–167, 187, 214, 217, 218, 261

Index  267 Herdeg, Klaus 134, 154, 155, 161, 166–168, 204 Hertzberger, Herman 162 Hoesli, Bernhard 231, 259, 264 housing 4, 19–21, 33, 71, 72, 80, 83, 87, 89, 99, 100, 124, 130, 150, 152, 156, 160, 162, 178, 244, 255 human association 35, 79, 95, 102, 104 humanisation (humanization) 35, 79, 83, 96, 101, 102 icon 125, 126, 128, 134, 190 imagination 47, 113, 144, 171, 173, 238, 262 index(es) 93, 125, 128, 134, 190, 194, 195, 202, 205, 206, 231 individuality 18, 67, 258 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) 148, 157, 158, 160, 163–167, 207, 237, 239, 244, 249 Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) 95, 98, 99, 175, 202, 203, 251, 263 James Corcoran Gallery 185 Jencks, Charles 105, 152, 158 Johnson, Philip 94, 105, 150, 158, 159, 165, 194, 236, 249 Kahn, Albert 93, 94, 104 Kahn, Louis I. 159 Kant, Immanuel 59, 173 Koolhaas, Rem 26, 37, 108–110, 124, 129, 130, 132, 133, 150, 156, 158, 159, 162, 172, 173, 177, 190, 191, 193, 194, 199, 200, 202, 205, 214, 236–252, 261, 263 Krier, Léon 156, 158, 262 Krier, Robert (Rob) 152, 158 Le Corbusier 11, 16–18, 31, 34–36, 40, 41, 44–50, 52, 54–58, 61–67, 69, 70, 73, 76, 80, 83, 92, 95, 101, 102, 103, 152, 156, 160, 162, 168, 188, 194, 199, 215, 228, 230, 237, 259, 262 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 33, 173–177, 202, 203, 251, 260, 261, 263, 264 Leo Castelli Gallery 120, 180, 215 Lissitzky, El 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 55, 67, 219 London 74, 80, 95, 98, 152, 157, 158, 173, 175, 177, 179, 180, 203, 210, 213, 215–217, 231, 233, 241, 251, 252, 262

Los Angeles 90, 131, 133, 134, 167, 168, 185, 193, 239, 247 Manhattan 3, 26, 32, 37, 130, 178, 187, 193, 200, 203, 208–211, 213–217, 221, 227, 229, 231–234, 241–244, 249–254, 259, 261, 263 Max Protetch Gallery 188, 214, 215, 216, 233, 244 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 33, 39, 47, 139, 164 Metropolis 54, 90, 157, 172, 202, 207, 211, 236, 237, 244, 249, 250, 252 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 10, 11, 16–18, 31, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50–70, 73, 76, 94, 95, 105, 124, 128, 155–157, 177, 199, 222, 236, 237, 242, 254–259 Milan 157, 158 Modern Movement(s) 105, 151, 158, 161, 213, 253, 261 montage 84–87, 199, 210, 211, 212, 214, 233, 235, 240, 254–256 Moore, Charles 134, 158 Morris, Charles W. 125, 134 nation 21, 83, 89 nature 2, 6, 8, 9, 33, 40, 46, 73, 78, 87, 108, 114, 137, 140, 152, 154, 157, 159, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180, 209, 210, 215, 251 Neorationalism 91, 92, 94, 149 Neorealism 18, 37, 71, 83–88, 91, 94, 102, 103, 105, 149 New Brutalism 18–20, 36, 71, 74, 94, 98, 99, 101, 105 New Towns 71, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich 28, 58–61, 68, 88, 103 Oechslin, Werner 158 Olivetti, Adriano 89, 90 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 5, 16, 25, 152, 173, 202, 223, 236, 237, 240, 242, 244–250 Oorthuys, Gerrit 237, 239, 249 paperless 195–198, 206, 259 Parc de La Villette 173, 176, 185, 186, 188, 193, 201, 210, 215–231, 236, 242, 245, 246, 250, 253, 254 Paris 33, 67–70, 100, 103, 123, 124, 157, 175, 176, 185, 188, 190, 200,

268 Index 230, 231, 234, 235, 237, 238, 247, 255, 256, 259, 262 pedagogy 11, 57, 89, 91, 106, 111, 113, 154, 156, 162, 177, 187, 194, 198, 239, 258 Peirce, Charles Sanders 125, 126, 128, 134 periphery 90, 139, 164 politics 38, 72, 103, 159, 162, 175–178, 195, 202, 203, 260, 263 popular 21, 36, 91, 234, 243 Portoghesi, Paolo 114, 133 pragmatics 125, 128, 159 Price, Cedric 134, 231 private 195, 199, 206, 260 P.S.1 214 public 5, 20, 32, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 170, 194, 195, 199, 202, 204–206, 246, 248 Quaroni, Ludovico 18, 19, 21, 36, 72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 101, 104 Rancière, Jacques 210, 233 rationalism 68, 77, 91, 92, 104, 242, 243 revolution 48, 67, 100, 158, 176, 191, 205 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 16, 18, 19, 21, 36, 72, 80, 83, 89, 90, 94, 95, 100–102, 149, 193 Rome 21, 31, 36, 64, 70, 87, 90, 104, 110, 138, 150, 157, 159, 165 Roosevelt Island Redevelopment 118, 119, 156, 129, 239, 240 Rossi, Aldo 16, 22, 24, 25, 36, 37, 88, 103, 104, 106–108, 110, 112, 114–118, 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133–139, 149, 152, 154, 156, 159, 161–164, 166–168, 171, 214, 233, 242, 250, 255–257 Rowe, Colin 107, 132, 155, 156, 191, 193, 194, 229, 235, 262, 264 rural 86 Russian Constructivism 211, 219 Schmarsow, August 46, 49 Scolari, Massimo 157, 158, 214, 215, 233 Scott Brown, Denise 101, 111, 132, 152, 164, 166, 202

semantics 54, 125, 128, 159, 177, 226, 254 semiology 128, 252 semiotics 128, 248 Sert, Josep Lluís 89, 101, 103 Simmel, Georg 54, 56, 58, 67, 68, 112, 132 Slutzky, Robert 262, 264 Smithson, Alison and Peter 18–20, 35, 36, 71, 73–78, 79, 80–83, 94, 95, 97–101, 105, 138, 149–151, 153, 163, 164, 166 Society 11, 18–20, 22, 61, 71–75, 77, 78, 85, 97, 98, 111, 132, 176–178, 206, 244, 251, 260, 261 spirit 50, 51, 54, 59, 61, 62, 69, 243 Stam, Mart 239 Stirling, James 152, 164, 166 street 80, 84, 86, 130, 187, 204, 207, 210 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) 162, 231 symbol(s) 50, 93, 112, 125, 126, 128, 162 syntactics 125, 128, 159 synthesis 62, 119, 214, 220, 229, 259 Tafuri, Manfredo 50, 64, 76, 101, 120, 121, 134, 136, 151, 152, 162–164, 166, 171, 193, 201, 251, 263 Team 10 (Team X) 16, 18, 34, 35, 71–73, 80, 83, 95–97, 101, 105, 149–152, 163, 165, 200 Tendenza 20, 21, 91, 149, 257 Texas Houses 118, 119, 140, 147 Time-Image 28, 37, 83, 86, 87, 102, 103, 128, 134, 137, 147, 163, 164 tradition(s) 21, 49, 62, 90, 159, 164, 166, 204, 242 Triennale di Milano 79, 149, 171, 236, 237 Tschumi, Bernard 3, 5, 16, 25, 26, 32, 37, 169–237, 243, 245, 249–264 TU Berlin 239 TU Delft 237, 239 Turin 123, 124 typology 88, 91, 114–116, 139, 186, 200, 255, 256, 257 ugliness 19–21, 36, 94, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 149, 165 Ungers, Oswald Mathias 16, 22, 24–26, 37, 106–112, 114, 118–120,

Index  269 123–134, 150, 151, 152, 154–156, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167, 239, 243, 252, 263 United States (U.S.) 89, 94, 104, 106, 113, 115, 131, 137, 154, 156, 159, 160, 179, 193, 194, 239, 243, 244 universality 17–19, 40, 47, 67, 71 University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) 239 urban fact(s) 25, 37, 115, 130, 131, 163 Valley Section 95, 96, 105 Van Eyck, Aldo 18, 19, 35, 72, 73, 78, 79, 81, 100, 151–154, 166, 167 Venice Biennale 141, 164, 166, 199 Venturi, Robert 152, 202 Vidler, Anthony 6, 33, 150, 158, 160, 245, 250, 262

Vignelli, Massimo 158, 204 village 115, 116 virtuality 37, 84, 102 Vriesendorp, Madelon 125, 239, 241, 243, 244 Wall House 2 22, 140, 217, 218 Welfare 5, 72, 131 Woods, Shadrach 18, 19, 35, 71–73, 81, 100, 151 Wright, Frank Lloyd 54, 57, 66, 159, 259 Zenghelis, Elia 129, 130, 158, 172, 173, 202, 214, 238–241, 244, 249 Zenghelis, Zoe 239, 241, 244 Zevi, Bruno 83, 87, 90, 103, 104, 150, 155, 162, 165, 167