The Resistant Object of Architecture: A Lacanian Perspective 9780367624408, 9781003109495

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Chapter 1 The four positions in architecture
Architecture of the logic of the market: outside determination + acceptance
Architecture of the imperative of invention: inside determination + acceptance
Architecture of resistance: inside determination + criticality
Architecture of social reformism: outside determination + criticality
Notes
Chapter 2 Towards the fifth position
Architecture in crisis
Response to crisis: destruction and recomposition
Architecture’s provisional moral code
Architecture of piercing affirmation
Notes
Chapter 3 The structural logic of architecture
The architectural triad I
The Lacanian triad
The subject of psychoanalysis
Anamorphosis
A headless subject of architecture
Notes
Chapter 4 The four structural elements of architecture
4.1 The architectural condition
The condition of the possibility of architecture
Notes
4.2 The architectural act and architecture as subject
The opening up of a place
Enacting the “cause of architecture” in the world
The subjectification of architecture
Notes
4.3 The architectural object
The architectural triad II
The structural joint: an elementary particle of architecture
The gigantic joint: constructing a place
Notes
Chapter 5 In lieu of a conclusion
Buildings-machines and the posthumanist subject
Extended rationalism and the human factor
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview



This thesis predicated on radical French thought posits a theoretical basis for the cultivation of an autonomous architecture capable of transcending the total commodification of the environment under the aegis of Neoliberal capitalism. Kenneth Frampton, the Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP

* This book is an excellent example of a systematic and inventive elaboration of those fundamental concepts that are the internal conditions of architectural theory and practice. The work draws on the theoretical framework of the Ljubljana Lacanian school, which certainly well serves to support its elaboration of the architectural concepts developed herein. Rado Riha, philosopher Head of the Institute of Philosophy, the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

* The author develops a penetrating analysis of today’s architectural reality and points out architecture’s dramatic loss of autonomy and the blind surrender to the logic of market economy. She also exposes the often naively idealised self-understanding of the architectural world. Analysing the understanding of reality in the discipline, Čeferin makes it evident that today’s trivialisation of architecture as a critical and transformative practice, calls for a rigorous understanding of its societal and cultural reality. Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor emeritus, writer Member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury 2008–2014

* This book addresses the pressing concern of architecture’s role in globalised capitalism by providing a courageous alternative to yet another gloomy

ii  account of architecture’s impossibility to act. It points to a way out of the cul-de-sac of post-criticality by formulating a theory of architecture’s inherent transformative potential and its capacity to “punch a hole” in the world of consumer capitalism. Rixt Hoekstra, historian and lecturer creative technology, University of Twente

The Resistant Object of Architecture

Architecture’s role is becoming increasingly limited to serving the all-pervasive system of globalised capitalism and becoming a constituent, complicit part of its mechanism. The Resistant Object of Architecture addresses this problem, and does so in a way that represents a marked departure from predominant responses which, as the book shows, do not address the core issue. The book addresses this problem by focusing on the question “what is architecture?,” and responds to this question by developing the immanent structural logic of architecture that enables it to work not only as an instrumental thinking practice, but as a practice of creative thinking. This means that it alone determines its issues, problems, and priorities, and precisely because of that it has the capacity and cogency to destabilise, indeed pierce holes in the system in which it operates. The Resistant Object of Architecture draws on various theoretical sources, from the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Alain Badiou, to contemporary architectural theory. In contrast to the predominant view of today, it demonstrates that architecture has an affirmative, transformative capacity. This book is an ideal read for those interested in architectural theory and history, analysis of contemporary architecture, and philosophy of architecture. Petra Čeferin is an architect practising architectural theory and philosophy of architecture and is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches architectural theory and history.

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. The Complexities of John Hejduk’s Work Exorcising Outlines, Apparitions and Angels J. Kevin Story Writing Architecture in Modern Italy Narratives, Historiography and Myths Daria Ricchi The Resistant Object of Architecture A Lacanian Perspective Petra Čeferin Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament David Boswell Reid and Disruptive Environmentalism Henrik Schoenefeldt Le Corbusier in the Antipodes Art, Architecture and Urbanism Antony Moulis Kenosis, Creativity, and Architecture Appearance through Emptying Randall S. Lindstrom For more information about this series, please visit: https​://ww​w.rou​tledg​ e.com​/Rout​ledge​-Rese​arch-​in-Ar​chite​cture​/book​-seri​es/RR​ARCH

The Resistant Object of Architecture A Lacanian Perspective

Petra Čeferin

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Petra Čeferin The right of Petra Čeferin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her 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. 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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367624408 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003109495 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figures

ix

Introduction 1 1 The four positions in architecture Architecture of the logic of the market: outside determination + acceptance  16 Architecture of the imperative of invention: inside determination + acceptance  17 Architecture of resistance: inside determination + criticality 20 Architecture of social reformism: outside determination + criticality   24

15

2 Towards the fifth position Architecture in crisis  32 Response to crisis: destruction and recomposition  35 Architecture’s provisional moral code  38 Architecture of piercing affirmation   41

31

3 The structural logic of architecture The architectural triad I  53 The Lacanian triad  56 The subject of psychoanalysis  60 Anamorphosis 63 A headless subject of architecture  71

51

4 The four structural elements of architecture 4.1 The architectural condition  83 The condition of the possibility of architecture  86

82

viii Contents 4.2 The architectural act and architecture as subject  92 The opening up of a place   92 Enacting the “cause of architecture” in the world  94 The subjectification of architecture  98 4.3 The architectural object  104 The architectural triad II  106 The structural joint: an elementary particle of architecture   110 The gigantic joint: constructing a place   113 5 In lieu of a conclusion Buildings-machines and the posthumanist subject  121 Extended rationalism and the human factor  129 Bibliography Index

120

143 147

Figures

1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4 2.1

3.1

3.2

4.3.1, 4.3.2 and 4.3.3

4.3.4 and 4.3.5

4.3.6

Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia, China, 2008. Presentation of the architectural proposals. Photo: Territorial Agency. 20 Hollmen Reuter Sandman Architects, Shelter Home in Moshi Tanzania, 2015. Photo: Juha Ilonen. 23 Hollmen Reuter Sandman Architects, Shelter Home in Moshi Tanzania, 2015. Photo: Juha Ilonen. 24 The four positions in architecture. 26 Aldo Rossi, Archittetura Assassinata, 1974. Ink, felt pen, and pastel on paper, cm H 38.5 × B 47.4. Private collection. © Eredi Aldo Rossi, courtesy Fondazione Aldo Rossi. 35 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. © The National Gallery, London. 64 Jacques Lacan, Diagram of the Gaze, from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 67 The wooden joints securing the large (floating) roof of Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert. 109 One of the key joints of the roof structure of the Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert. 111 Gigantic joint: the place of the Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert. 115

x  Figures 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer, Petersschule in Basel, competition project, 1926. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. 123 Alvar and Aino Aalto, Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, 1938–1939. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen. 130 Modular coordination scheme of the Villa Mairea, drawing by Juhani Pallasmaa. (Initially published in: Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea 1938–1939.) © Juhani Pallasmaa. 133 Articulation of columns in Villa Mairea (elevations and plans), drawing by Darren Stewart Capel. (Initially published in: Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea 1938–1939.) © Darren Stewart Capel. 134 View of the main staircase. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen. 135 View towards the living room. © MFA/ Jussi Tiainen. 136 The entrance canopy with the view of the forest. © MFA/Heikki Havas. 137 The corner of the fireplace—an object that is always also something other than what it is. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen. 138

Introduction

The theme of this book, as is clear from the title, is the resistant object of architecture, which is something that architecture constructs in the world. I begin, however, with an issue that, at least at first sight, isn’t directly related to this theme. As the starting point for drawing the central hypothesis that this book advances in regard to architecture, I take a certain position in relation to the world in which we live—a relation that is particularly predominant today, both at the level of our thinking and of our action. This relation is commonly understood as a critical interpretation of the world. For us, it is important that this relation also determines the place and role of architecture in the world. As regards architecture, it finds its expression in various media, in the lectures and teachings of and public appearances by architects, and in the books and various professional and scientific publications and articles that deal with architecture. All have one thing in common, which is that they persistently call attention to the fact that today—in today’s world—architecture is faced with a serious problem. The problem lies in the fact that architectural construction has been taken over by investors, surveyors, real estate consultants, technical specialists and other so-called experts, and that it is no longer in the hands of architects. For architects appear to have lost all sense of authority; they have turned into mere servants of the interests of capital, for which there is no such thing as the power of architecture, for whom there is only the power of numbers and profit. In fact, architects themselves have contributed to this problem, not only by consciously allowing the power structures to usurp their central role, but also by perceiving themselves as the agents of critical action, without noticing that their “emancipatory” strategies in fact only served— and continue to serve—the system. There was a moment not so long ago, according to the critical interpretations, when architects could have reacted to this development and could perhaps have turned things around—but they didn’t, and now it is too late. The process of commodification that encompasses practically all human activity and manifestations today, including our feelings, enjoyments, affects, has been taken so far in the domain of architecture that one can indeed speak of architecture approaching its end. More precisely, we can speak about the end of architecture as an activity

2 Introduction which via its structural logic embodies the possibility of acting differently, and not merely at the direction of the given circumstances and the marketinstrumental logic behind them. One work that points to this problem particularly effectively is the famous graph of the ¥€$ regime.1 It shows us our contemporary world as the world that is regulated, in its entirety, by the ¥€$ regime—the regime that has to be understood as the subservient YES to the Yen, the Euro, the Dollar. This is the world in which everything is incorporated into, fully immersed in, a single, market-instrumental logic of functioning. It is a world that is being reduced, or has indeed already been reduced, to a world as world market.2 The power of this critical interpretation lies definitively in its persistent and persuasive description and demonstration of the extent to which architecture is losing itself in and to the world of market instrumentalisation. This interpretation points to the problem that, in my view, has to be taken seriously—that is if we really care about architecture. But at the same time this interpretation also tells us something more than what it is intended to tell. This “more,” however, this additional dimension of the problem to which it points, remains, in this interpretation, unthematised. And it is precisely in this unthematised component that the problem and the deficiency of this interpretation lie. So, where, to be precise, does this unthematised surplus of the interpretation lie? In the first step, this interpretation calls on us to open our eyes, so that we will see the problematic state of architecture today and, based on such, do something about it, change something. But it also shows us, in the second step, that which has to be seen, which should be done: the simple fact that there is nothing to be done. And this is because the ¥€$ regime has already absorbed, incorporated, everything, including the possibility of resistance itself, including the critique itself. Such an image of the world and of ourselves in it is one of the fundamental characteristics of our time: on the one hand this image shows us the infinite power of the capitalist machine that reigns supreme over everything, and on the other hand it shows us who we are—those who are but part of this machine and in the face of which we are utterly powerless. It is precisely in this way that we are accustomed to seeing the world today: all that we (can) see is that we are entirely integrated into the (political, economic, financial) structures that regulate the world today, and that there is no other choice left us but to succumb to their power. It is indeed hard to take issue with this image of the world today. Yet, at the level of theoretical argumentation such an account and perception of the world, which is characteristic also for the aforementioned critical orientation in architecture, has a crucial deficiency. The purpose of this introduction is to probe into this deficiency; for when we see and understand it, we might also see the possibility of a different response to the trivialisation of architecture to which we are witness today. In this respect, the book is an

Introduction 

3

attempt to develop another, different response to the current state of the impotence and impossibility of architecture. It is an attempt at a response that affirms the possibility of rupturing the condition of the so-called globalised closure. Let us first expand a little on this presentation of the present critique of the given reality and of architecture within it. With its radically critical account of the given conditions, an account that is organised such that it also demonstrates our radical impotence to change anything, these critical works come rather close—although this may be contrary to their intention—to the type of critique for which the term “post-critique” or “critique of critique” was introduced.3 For it is characteristic of post-critical works in general, from philosophy to sociology and art and culture, that they reveal the power of today’s system of capitalism, and underline the fact that this system is able to succeed, or indeed already has succeeded, in co-opting everything; which also includes anything that looks to challenge or oppose it. Their central point is, in short, a critique of critique, the argument that every critique of the existing reality inevitably runs its course or shatters against the wall of globalised capitalism. The ¥€$ regime reigns over everything, including the possibility of its critique. No matter how radical the critique, it is, in the final instance, impotent, for the regime has already accepted and absorbed it as an integral part. Where then does the deficiency of the position of the critique of critique lie: the deficiency at the level of its theoretical argumentation; the deficiency that invalidates also that which at first sight seems the critique’s factual indisputability, and in so doing also points to the possibility of a different response; the kind that is capable of drilling a “hole” in the seeming totality of the ¥€$ regime? An excellent analysis of post-critical thinking, which also embodies an answer to our question, can be found in the text of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, entitled “The Misadventures of Critical Thought.”4 The fundamental position of post-critique, as Rancière points out, contends that traditional critique, that is, critique that was based on revealing and denouncing the “real” or the “true” reality concealed behind the brilliance of its superficial manifestations, of its appearance, is obsolete. For today it appears clear, post-critique maintains, that there is no solid “true” reality that could stand counterpoised to the way in which reality, in each specific case, appears. We live under the reign of manifestations of reality that cannot be transcended. Rancière sees the problem of this post-critical position in the fact that the argumentation of post-critique, which holds that the time of traditional critique has passed, uses exactly the same procedures and concepts traditional critique itself employed. The only difference is in how it uses them: traditional critique used them for a critique of reality, while post-critique uses them to demonstrate that a critique of reality is not possible; or more precisely, that it has no power, that it is impotent. And in using the traditional procedures and concepts, maintains Rancière,

4 Introduction post-critique in fact only repeats the mistakes traditional critique itself made and which rendered it ineffective. Let us explore Rancière’s argumentation in more detail. As an example of traditional critique, Rancière takes a work by the artist Martha Rosler from the late 1960s entitled “Balloons,” which is an expression of opposition to the Vietnam War. The work is a photomontage of two images: against the background of an idyllic American scene, in this case the interior of a spacious villa, she places an image of a Vietnamese man carrying a dead child killed by American forces. Rancière writes that the montage of the two heterogeneous images was intended to have a dual effect. It was supposed to elicit better awareness of the true American reality, that is, awareness of the fact that domestic happiness was inseparably connected with the violence of imperialist war, and to evoke a sense of guilt over America’s complicity in this twisted reality. On the one hand, the message of the image was as follows: this is the real reality hidden behind the beautiful image, the reality that you do not know how to see or do not want to see, but you must acknowledge it and act in accordance with this acknowledgment. Knowledge of a certain condition, however, doesn’t automatically bring with it a desire to change the condition. Thus, the image was also conveying something else: this is the obvious reality that you do not want to see, because you know that you are responsible for it. The work tried to create a dual effect, writes Rancière: “an awareness of the hidden reality and a feeling of guilt about the denied reality.”5 And it was hoped this feeling of guilt would lend strength to, incite, the activist energies hostile to the war. The same procedure is at work in the works that question the effectiveness of traditional critique. Rancière introduces the work of contemporary artist Josephine Meckseper as an example of just such a critique of critique. One of her photographs depicts an anti-war demonstration in America. In the background are demonstrators seen protesting against the war in Iraq, while in the foreground we see a garbage can overflowing with garbage, garbage that most probably came from the demonstrators. This photograph too deals with the theme of a remote war and domestic consumption, writes Rancière, and this artist too is opposed to the war. But there is an essential difference between the two works. The work of Martha Rosler emphasises the heterogeneity of the elements: “the image of the dead child could not be integrated into the beautiful interior without exploding it.”6 The photograph of the protesters with the garbage in front of them, however, emphasises precisely their homogeneity. Here, everything is reduced to one and the same reality: those who protest against the war of the empire of consumption are themselves consumers; the war is a response to the destruction of the Twin Towers, which was itself orchestrated as a spectacle symbolising the collapse of the empire of commodities and its spectacle; and the demonstrators are there because they have consumed images of the destruction of the towers and the bombing in Iraq, and now they are offering us yet

Introduction 

5

another spectacle in the streets.7 In short: everything is incorporated into one and the same system. The ¥€$ graph employs a similar structure. YES is in itself an affirmative statement. It can be understood as a call to action, an appeal to do something, to change something for the better. The graph, however, shows us an affirmative YES that is put in the service of the machinery of finance. It shows us YES as the world of the triple structure of the Yen, the Euro, and the Dollar, and thus radically changes its affirmative meaning. YES as the sign and the means of an active intervention in the world is altered such that it is nothing but a redoubling of the world as it is. The ¥€$ world doesn’t show us some other reality behind the world of appearance, it doesn’t show us some other, truer world behind, but shows us the same world again—the ¥€$ world. In other words, there isn’t some other, true world beneath the surface of the ¥€$ world, some other true reality full of inequality, contradiction, and discord that is masked or concealed by its superficial appearance. Rather, the superficial appearance figures as reality itself; the appearance has become all. It is the appearance that is already also the reality, the thing itself; which also means there is nothing in which one could find support in one’s critique of this appearance. In short, Rancière demonstrates that post-critical critique is structured the same way as what we traditionally call left-wing critique. For its part, post-critique also says: this is the hidden reality that you do not know how to see; you must become acquainted with it and act according to this knowledge. And it also says: this is the real reality that you do not want to see, because you know that you too are responsible for it. Post-critique also aims to achieve a double effect: an awareness of the hidden reality and a feeling of guilt about the denied reality. The essential difference between the two, however, is in the way this mechanism is used: post-critique no longer tries to bolster activist energies; on the contrary, it demonstrates that activism is in fact no longer possible, that resistance doesn’t work, that nothing can be done. For it also indicates—as is shown by Meckseper in the aforementioned photographic work or as OMA shows in the ¥€$ graph—that everything is integrated into one and the same system, including the critique looking to criticise the system, including the Yes that tries to change the system. Everything is an integral part of the same network: the revolutionary slogans and the commercial slogans, both; our proactive “Yes, something can be done!” and the “Yes” of the capitalist system that determines (for us) what will be done. So, where lies the deficiency in this way of understanding and explaining the world and is characteristic for post-critique? Or, to formulate the question another way, why can’t we say that the paradigm of post-critique is also the final answer to the possibility of critical action in the world? The answer is that post-critique repeats this mistake, which was also the chief reason traditional critique ultimately proved ineffective. The mistake is that traditional critique, together with post-critique, understands and

6 Introduction practises critique as the uncovering of that “real” truth about our reality—a reality that is pathological, and that owing precisely to its specific, pathological mechanisms one cannot or even does not want to see it the way, “in truth,” it really is. It could be said that the type of critique at work in both cases is characteristic for traditional Marxism, according to which the primary task of the critique of reality was to unveil the ideological cover that concealed the real relational scheme. It reasoned as follows: one has to reveal the reality that the veil of ideology conceals; through the critique of ideology one has to show the truth of reality or the “real,” “true” reality hidden behind its ideological veil. When one becomes acquainted with the “true,” non-ideological reality as it were; when one becomes acquainted with the mechanisms with which it works, then one will know also how to change it. To this, post-critique adds only that it is also this “true reality,” which critique is supposed to unveil, that always already figures in some ideological cover, that all reality is, in fact, that there is no non-ideological reality. And this of course, at least in view of the critique of critique, invalidates every critique in advance, takes away its “truthfulness” or its criticotransformative point.8 All there is, is an ideologically mediated reality into which we too are fully integrated, and some distance from reality, which is the condition for critique, is not possible: so argues post-critique. We can agree with this view on the following point: ideology functions precisely on the level of what we see, perceive, and understand as reality itself—of what we see as that “objective” reality, against which we can then measure various false, mistaken images of reality. Ideology in fact exerts a true hold on us precisely when we see something as objective reality, which is supposedly independent from how we see it and interpret it, from what we say about it. This is also the point where we need to be most alert to the workings of ideology, the point where ideology appears as something nonideological.9 And what else is the victorious ideology of our time, that is, the ideology of the ¥€$ regime, but a paradigmatic case of ideology that figures and functions as objective reality itself? Today it seems self-evident that all human activities have to prove and justify themselves in terms of their utility and usefulness for the given world—which can also be translated into numbers, into some financial equivalent. This is also the case for those activities that are not primarily meant or expected to generate financial profit—the creative thinking activities, such as various forms of artistic creation, scientific research, and architecture. To return to the works that we mentioned at the outset, works that call attention to the process of commodification and the trivialisation of architecture: ideology is hidden in the fact that people in general, and many architects in particular, don’t actually see a problem in that which these works persistently point up. The question that arises at this point, of course, is: if we see a problem, how can we move beyond this point of closure, the point where everything we see consists only in the fact that we can’t actually move on? How is it possible to rupture ideology as the mechanism that structures the very

Introduction 

7

normality, the very “objectivity” of our world? How is it possible to take a critical stance in a situation whereby it seems there is nothing in it from which we could draw support for some critical action? The answer is, at least on the first level, simple: in the situation where it seems there is no point of support, we have to act in such a way that we alone construct that point of support for our critical action. This simply means that we take a stand, assume a position that we have recognised and can defend as correct, as the right one, despite the fact that the given situation shows us that this is unrealistic, that it is illusory to expect that it can ever be implemented; and that we also proceed to act in tune with this decision, persistently, methodically, step by step. This way of acting, which is elaborated in detail further into the book, closely corresponds to that which Alain Badiou conceptualises with the maxim “to hold on to a real point.” In the context of this book this maxim can be explained as follows. We might come closest to the meaning of that which Badiou calls a “real point” if we compare this point with the initial positing of a scientific hypothesis; that is to say, with the positing of some yet unproven statement whose truth value depends on its further demonstrations and elaborations, on the consequences that can be drawn from this hypothesis and either confirm or refute it. Badiou formulates this maxim as a response to the specific social and political situation in which we find ourselves today. This is the situation that excludes every true innovative action; that is to say, any action that aims to develop in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs.10 The way of acting that might break this condition is what Badiou calls “the wager on a real point.” He understands this wager, then, as the hypothesis about some possibility which, within the framework of that which is “objectively” given— the framework of the given conditions or the given socio-political situation—appears as something impossible. But with the persistent drawing of various kinds of consequences from our initial decision we can, according to Badiou, demonstrate that it is precisely this point that is, for the situation, essential and that has to be gradually implemented in the situation as its new real possibility. In outlining this maxim Badiou draws on the definition of the analytical cure proposed by Jacques Lacan, which claims that the object of the cure is “to raise impotence to impossibility.” It is precisely this that is our current situation, our current condition, the condition of radical impotence, which Badiou describes also as a situation of historical nostalgia and acknowledged impotence, and argues that in such a situation a cure is required. The cure consists in finding or constructing a point that exceeds this situation from within. He writes: If we are suffering from a syndrome whose worst symptom is acknowledged impotence, then we can raise this impotence to impossibility. But what does that actually mean? A number of things. It means finding a real point to hold on to, whatever the cost. It means no longer being

8 Introduction in the vague net of impotence, historical nostalgia and the depressive component, but rather finding, constructing and holding on to a real point, which we know we are going to hold on to, precisely because it is a point uninscribable in the law of the situation, unanimously declared by the prevailing opinion to be both (and contradictorily) absolutely deplorable and completely impracticable, but which you yourselves declare that you are going to hold on to, whatever the cost; you are then in a position to raise impotence to impossibility. If you hold on to a point such as this, then you become a subject bound to the consequences of what is unanimously held to be a crazy disaster and happily quite impossible, but to which you grant reality and thereby make yourselves an exception to the depressive syndrome.11 One has to find or construct one’s own point of thinking and action that is “uninscribable in the law of the situation,” an “illegal” point that the situation excludes as something impossible, and which fulfils yet another condition—it has to have a universal dimension, it has to be potentially available and transmittable to all.12 If we hold on to such a point of impossible-real, then we are in a position to raise our own impotence to impossibility. And holding on means that we consistently draw all practical and theoretical consequences of that which this point implies. It is in this way that we can, step by step, pull ourselves out of our state of impotence. Badiou explains that we become the subjects of the consequences of this point, that we incorporate ourselves “into the construction of these consequences, into the subjective body that they gradually constitute in our world.”13 In this way we tear ourselves out of our immersion in and determination by the mechanisms that regulate each given world of ours. I propose that the answer to the situation in which it seems there is nothing that could support our critical action is, therefore, that we raise our impotence in view of our determination with reality, to the level of the impossible. This means that we take as the starting point of our action something that the given reality excludes as impossible, and that with all reflective rigour we draw all of the consequences of our declaration—that it is precisely this point of the impossible that opens not only some new possibilities, but also the possibility of a radically different reality. In short, the point of the impossible at stake here points to the contingency of the given reality, to the fact that it need not necessarily be the way it is—that it could also be different, and in fact radically different than the way it is. This is a form of critique that differs from both traditional critique and post-critique. It doesn’t position itself as contingent on the uncovering of some objective reality that would be hidden behind a veil of appearance or ideology; and which would have to be uncovered and changed in some practical way with some adequate, analytical tools. It doesn’t, then, try to point to false images of reality in order, on the one hand, to denounce them as false, and to find, on the other hand, those points in reality that could serve

Introduction 

9

as support for its critical action. Nor does it try to demonstrate that beneath every image of reality there is only yet another image of reality hidden, that we actually have to do only with images, that we never touch upon reality itself—and thus we do not have any firm point of support for our action, either. In short, to stress that which is essential, what differentiates this way of acting from traditional critique and post-critique simply is that it does not seek support for its action in reality. Its starting and its reference point is not the given reality, but, rather, something that is for the given reality impossible. But this impossibility is not just some impossibility in general, some abstract impossibility. It is something that is impossible for the given reality. This means that it is something which is part of reality but does not have a proper place within it; it is part of the situation but cannot be accounted for in its specific terms. The starting-reference point of this way of acting is therefore something in the given situation that, so to speak, exceeds the situation from within. It is the point of interior exception or the point of interior exteriority. And when an action affirms such a point, such possibility of the impossible in the world, in the given reality, it opens this reality. It opens the given reality in the sense that it shows that what reality offers up to us as the set of “objective possibilities” is not everything; that in the given reality there is also some other and different possible way of acting. It is precisely in this opening, rupturing, piercing of each given reality that the criticality of this mode of action lies. It is precisely this mode of action, this way of acting, that we follow also in this book. For here we don’t stand to demonstrate that architecture has found itself at its end-point, that it is already entirely incorporated, irretrievably plugged into the machine that regulates and drives today’s world; nor does it dwell on the fact that architecture has turned into a mere instrument of control and compliance. Rather, this book proposes as its central hypothesis precisely that which today’s situation, the world of the ¥€$ regime, excludes as impossible. This is the possibility of architecture as an activity that operates in the world such that it is not entirely determined by the mechanisms that regulate today’s world but is, instead, determined by itself. That it isn’t entirely subordinated to the market’s instrumental logic but rather follows its own logic, the logic of independent thinking and action or the logic of creativity. The starting point and central hypothesis developed herein, therefore, contends that architecture is the type of activity that is self-supported and self-determined. This is architecture as a creative thinking practice or, as we also define it herein, architecture as subject. An oversimplified understanding of self-determination, however, has to be avoided here. First, the fact that architecture is determined by itself certainly does not mean that it isolates itself or is isolated from its historical, social, political, or cultural context or the conditions in which it emerges and operates. On the contrary, these conditions are the material with which architecture works and from which it constructs its body. From this point of view architecture is the set of conditions in which it comes into existence.

10 Introduction The following, however, is essential here—and this is the second specification that has to be stressed—architecture is in its conditions and is the set of its conditions in the sense that it is not determined by them, but that within these conditions it alone determines itself. What does this actually mean? This means that architecture determines itself precisely via that point that is radically external to the situation in which architecture operates today, which in regard to the given conditions of architecture is something radically other—via the point that is, for architecture’s given situation, something impossible-real. The self-determination of architecture can therefore only be defined, as philosopher Rado Riha explains, on the basis of the dialectics of autonomy and heteronomy: One can’t speak about the autonomy of architecture without simultaneously taking into account its opposite concept, the notion of heteronomy. ‘Hetero’, to recall, means ‘other’; the heteronomy of architecture signifies the determination of architecture that comes from elsewhere, not from architecture itself. If we talk about the autonomy of architecture, we can’t avoid the dialectics of autonomy and heteronomy. This is the dialectics that is at the very core of architecture’s autonomy. It so much belongs to its core that one has to say, to the very core of architecture, to its autonomy, belongs also some moment of irreducible heteronomy.14 That architecture is determined by itself therefore means that it comes into being and works in the middle of the world, while its central point of support and orientation is precisely the point of an irreducible otherness of the given world, the point that each given world excludes as impossible. And architecture affirms this point in the world in the form of its material products. Here we arrive at both the overriding theme and the title of the book. These products are, in this sense, objects of a special kind: they are transtemporal and trans-situational objects, objects that are in their time and situation such that at the same time they pierce their temporal and situational determination. They are resistant objects: they resist being reduced to the concrete space and time in which they appear. In different spatiotemporal situations they insist as a kind of disturbance—a disturbance of the established architectural codes, the entrenched ways of constructing, the habitual modes of living. They disturb us in our routine existence: they make us open our eyes to see, they invite us to listen, they address us in our capacity to think—and they can work in this way again and again, sometimes for centuries, even millenia. Anyone who is interested in architecture knows a number of such objects: they can be buildings, bridges, squares, drawings, texts, models and more. By constructing such objects architecture introduces another kind of temporality into the world. It opens the possibility for us to take a distance from the world in which we live and to see that that there is nothing self-evident in its order and predominant logic, that we can also live

Introduction 

11

and act according to some other logic. In other words, when architecture succeeds in constructing such objects, which is the way architecture appears in the world, it works such that it infringes on the seeming consistency and factuality of each given world in which it appears. This book argues that this is how all creative thinking practices work: it is precisely in their capacity to determine themselves—in the capacity that in the form of the objects, which they produce, they keep reinventing what they themselves are—that their critical capacity, their creative piercing power, lies. This book, then, responds to the radical impotence and impossibility of architecture by taking as its starting point—that is to say, its real point— the following hypothesis: that the practice of architecture as determined by itself is possible today, and that precisely because architecture is just such a self-determining activity it acts in the world in a critical, indeed, transformative way. And the body of this book is nothing but the drawing of the theoretical consequences of the decision to advance this hypothesis. It can, in short, be described as an outline of the fundamental structural logic of the creative thinking practice of architecture. This logic is fundamental in two senses: it is a logic which the activity of architecture itself is built on, it is the “internal” logic of architecture; and at the same time, it is the logic in which architecture appears and operates “outside itself” in the world. Both meanings are inseparably connected: architecture, which is built in a special way—such that it is in itself organised around the point of internal exteriority—simultaneously works outside itself, in the world, in just such a special way—such that it opens the world from within. So, it is the book itself that follows the logic of acting summarised by the maxim “to hold on to a real point.” It doesn’t merely try to serve as a theoretical definition of the creative thinking practice of architecture, but also understands itself at the same time as a practical act. More concretely, it understands itself as a constitutive part of the practical struggle to implement such a practice of architecture in the given reality. Because what holds true for architecture holds true for all creative thinking practices: it is constructed of two levels of action—the level of practical making and the level of theoretical reflection; or, we could also say, of design practice and theoretical practice. Both levels are necessary for its existence. They are necessary because a place for architecture isn’t already given, by default, in the world; architecture alone has to create, to open such a place for itself. And one of the key ways by which it opens such a place requires that architecture alone tells (us) what it itself is—what it does and makes, what its objects are and why they matter, what its task and the purpose of its action is—and that it also sufficiently theoretically supports and grounds such claims. If architecture will not tell us this then “objective” reality will. And, as was outlined at the outset, today objective reality is already telling us, most insistently, that architecture has to be useful and usable—of course, usable and useful for reality as it is, the reality of globalised capitalism. This results in reducing architecture to an instrumental thinking practice:

12 Introduction one that thinks, but thinks in service of the given, thinks that which the ¥€$ regime gives it to think. In order to define why and in what way architecture is a creative and not instrumental thinking practice, and to theoretically support and ground this definition, however, we need—as is clear by now—to proceed from another theoretical structure other than that on which both traditional critique and post-critique draw. We have to proceed from the structure that includes as its internal moment also that which doesn’t belong to this structure, its moment of irreducible otherness, its exteriority. More precisely, we have to accept the “revolution in the way of thinking” that appeared with the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and which forms the basis of the so-called new ontologies with which contemporary philosophy, notably Alain Badiou and the Ljubljana Lacanian school, operates (if here we point only to the segment of philosophy explicitly referred to herein). This revolution can be expressed in short as the shift from Two to Three. Thinking within the framework of the logic of Two is the way our everyday understanding of the world works, as does the theoretical thinking of the day; and it is within this framework that traditional critique and postcritique also situate themselves. This understanding always operates with two, such as the two of image and reality, or ideology and reality, as well as the two of words and things, form and content, outside and inside, etc; or, in the case of post-critique, the image behind which there is just another image. What is essential for this reality of Two is, that regardless of the fact that it consists of two components, it forms a single unified whole—in short, One. The shift to the logic of Three, however, is based on the hypothesis that there is Two which connects into One or is always already in various ways connected into One, on the condition of the exclusion of the Third, some real point. This Third then has a special status. It isn’t simply inside reality. But it isn’t simply outside either, because for the constitution of reality, for its emergence as One, it is crucial. It can be defined as something which is in reality present in a specific way, as that which is excluded, which is lacking in it. It is the point of internal exception of reality or, as I defined it earlier, the point of its internal exteriority. If according to the logic of Two, two instances form an enclosed One, the logic of Three constructs a different One: One with a lack or a breach in itself—One that is split into Two. The Third is this immanent split itself. Thus, the shift from Two to Three is the shift from a consistent, unified totality of One or All, to an “open” totality of not-All. Not-All because, according to the theorem of Three, to repeat, a constituent part of a reality—a world—is a point that doesn’t have its place in this world, its internal exception that interrupts, splits the closed totality of the world. On the basis of the logic of Three we can therefore proceed from the presuppositions that are radically different than those advocated by post-critique. Here we can once more return to Rancière. In the conclusion of his analysis he too argues that the position of post-critique—which in the name of

Introduction 

13

critical action persistently demonstrates that critique is in fact no longer possible and that therefore the world as it is also represents the final horizon of the possible—can only be surpassed on the condition that we leave behind the very presuppositions on which it is based and propose new, different ones; ones, says Rancière, “that are certainly unreasonable from the perspective of our oligarchic societies and the so-called critical logic that is its double.”15 The work herein is based on just such unreasonable presuppositions. It presupposes that the world is not an enclosed whole without a fissure that would exist outside us as some objective given. In the world, in what the world is, we too are involved. It also presupposes that there is no overarching machinery that reigns sovereign over our world and us with it; every situation, every world can be opened up, made to reveal itself in its constitutive openness, in its structure of not-All. The world is, then, something that can be changed, and it is creative thinking practices that can affect such change. They operate such that they hold on to just such a structural impossibility of the given world and thus affirm the world as an open structure. One such practice is architecture. It is a practice that has no less than a transformative capacity, or, as we could also say, it has a world-building capacity. Architecture builds the world in which it appears and operates, it builds the world as a structure that is open in itself, that is to say, as a subjectified world. This is the world in which we, its inhabitants, can be in the way that we find support in ourselves and in our own capacity to think and judge. And architecture works in this way precisely when it serves no one and nothing but itself. It serves itself in the sense that it is guided by something that exceeds it from within, something that we will define herein as its “cause,” the “cause of architecture.” To claim that architecture embodies such a power is, of course, only a hypothesis. It is an unreasonable hypothesis. And yet, to paraphrase Rancière’s fine concluding formulation, there is more to be sought and more to be found in investigating and advancing the hypothesis of such power of architecture than there is in endlessly demonstrating that nothing can be done, that architecture is dead, and that it is also our fault that the machine has in fact succeeded in conquering all. This book is, then, both a record and the result of just such an investigation—an investigation of the power of architecture.

Notes 1 OMA*AMO, The regime of the ¥€$, 1999. Published in: Veronique Patteeuw, ed., What is OMA? Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2003), 23. For more on the origin of this graph see: Leslie Sklair, The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 140–141. 2 This graph clearly shows one particular aspect of today’s world—despite the fact that different variations of capitalism are practised in different parts of the world, and in different countries specifically, and that we certainly can’t speak of a single, unified capitalist system that spans Sweden to China and Russia to

14 Introduction New Zealand—where we can nonetheless speak about capitalism as a specific socio-economic framework characterised by certain determining features (which hold for all variations). One of these features is the logic of financial rentability and financial profit that organises this system, indeed this regime. 3 In discussing the notion of post-critique or critique of critique I follow Jacques Rancière and leave aside other understandings of this notion, including those that are commonly used in architectural theory. Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009). 4 Cf. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 25–51. 5 Ibid., 27. 6 Ibid., 28. 7 Ibid., 28–29. 8 Rancière writes that this line of reasoning would logically have to lead to the abolition of the critical procedure—yet it doesn’t: “if everything is nothing but spectacular exhibition, the contrast between appearance and reality that grounded the effectiveness of the critical discourse disappears, and with it, any guilt about the beings situated on the side of the dark or denied reality. In that case the critical system would simply reveal its own extinction. Yet that is not how it is.” Cf. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 29. Post-critique reproduces the same mechanism that is characteristic for traditional critique. Only that, unlike traditional critique, it reproduces it in order to show that critique is in fact no longer possible. 9 This is what the philosopher Alenka Zupančič argues—that the highest form of ideology is constituted as the reality principle itself, that is, as the very framework that determines what is in a given reality socially acceptable and valued. She explains: “The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact or (biological, economic …) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as nonideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.” Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003), 76–77. 10 Alain Badiou defines politics in these terms. He understands it as an innovative practice, a practice that opens new possibilities. In The Meaning of Sarkozy he writes: “Let us assume that politics is what I think it is, which can be summed up in the following definition: organized collective action, following certain principles, and aiming to develop in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs.” Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans. David Fernbach (London/New York: Verso, 2008), 11. 11 Ibid., 35. 12 Badiou stresses that a real point has to have a universal and generic validity. Cf. ibid., 40, 46, 47, etc. 13 Ibid., 35. 14 Rado Riha, “Avtonomija arhitekture in odločena želja” (“The Autonomy of Architecture and the Decided Desire”), in Objekt v arhitekturi (Object in Architecture), ed. Petra Čeferin (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC SAZU, forthcoming). 15 Cf. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 48.

1

The four positions in architecture

Let us begin by examining, more systematically, the possibilities that today’s world affords architecture as a creative thinking practice. We will first observe in what ways the activity of architecture is understood and explained within the architectural profession today. Everyone who designs, draws, or writes about architecture also explicitly or implicitly maintains a certain understanding of what she does, what she practices—what architecture is. The notion that architecture is, or ought to be, a creative thinking practice is just one of the current views. These different views and explanations constitute different ways this activity is imagined and appears in the world. In this chapter we will look at these understandings or images of architecture as they can be traced through professional discussion, in articles, books, exhibitions, lectures, blogs, etc. Our starting point in this analysis will be two criteria, based on which architecture can be defined in terms of its basic characteristics. The first criterion concerns the activity of architecture itself. It concerns the question of what type of activity architecture is. This criterion entails two options: either architecture is an activity that alone determines the body of its issues and the production of its objects; or it is an activity that responds to the issues assigned it by others (society, culture, the market, etc.), and subordinates the production of its objects accordingly. In the first case architecture is the type of activity determined by itself, or it is determined from the inside. In the second case, architecture is the type of activity that is determined from the outside. The second criterion concerns the relation of the activity of architecture to that which is exterior to it, the society or the world in which it works. This criterion can be specified as follows: either architecture is an activity that accepts the given order of things, the given conditions in society; or it is an activity that operates—or should operate—by way of critically intervening in the given social reality. In the first case we speak about architecture as a practice of acceptance, and in the second case of architecture as a critical practice. Based on these two criteria the multiplicity of different views and positions on architecture can be systematised into four basic categories, which

16  The four positions in architecture  correspond to the four possible combinations of the two criteria: the activity of architecture can either be determined from the inside or from the outside, and it can either accept the world as it is or maintain a critical position in relation to it. In what follows, we look closely at each of these four categories or positions.1 The question that leads us is this: what does this analysis tell us about the possibility, the prospect of the existence of architecture as a self-determining or creative thinking practice in the world today—that is, as a practice that not only has its own domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, a history of its own, but which alone determines or chooses its problems, objectives, and purposes?

Architecture of the logic of the market: outside determination + acceptance In keeping with this position, the activity of architecture is simply a form of industry comparable to the automotive or entertainment industries. Accordingly, the task of architects is to design such products-buildings that can successfully compete on the market. It is the market that ultimately decides whether an activity is necessary or not, and only if architecture can prove itself as a successful competitor on the market will it also confirm itself as an activity—or an industry—that is somehow necessary and thus worth investing in. That the world is led by the logic of the market is, for the advocates of this position, not something that architecture should concern itself with. The task of architecture is certainly not to try to affect the order of the world. Its task simply is to make good, or even superior, products. They have to be functional, technologically advanced, environmentally friendly, as well as economically viable, and they have to be appealing.2 This is what the advocates of this position like to emphasise: that architecture has to fulfil people’s expectations, needs, and wishes and conform to their various tastes. For architecture is meant for people, argue the advocates of this position, and thus it is only logical that architects design buildings that people like and want.3 This argument, however, is based on a very specific understanding of people. These are people with formed tastes, expectations, preferences, and sensibilities, as well as capacities—as opposed to people as human beings who can advance their own sensibilities and capacities, who can in fact redefine themselves, recreate, in a way, who they are. The latter understanding was characteristic for many architects of the modern movement, and they saw architecture as a force that can engender and support this process of redefinition or recreation. In fact, in their view it was precisely this that was the task of architecture—to broaden people’s intellectual horizons, change their expectations, activate their potentials, indeed, to re-create its people.4 This could not be further from the position and

The four positions in architecture   17 attendant sensibilities of the proponents of architecture of the market. What the modernists understood as the activation of human capacities, they consider a restraint, one that forces people to accept things that simply aren’t close to them. In their view, one of the fundamental problems with modernism—and for many advocates of this position modernism decidedly has many problems—lies precisely in the fact that it strove to change both individuals and the larger society. People are the way they are and the world is the way it is: this is the firm starting point of the advocates of the architecture of market logic. That the world is as it is and people are as they are is, for the advocates of this position, neither a good nor a bad thing; it’s just a fact. The problem for them is that architects are still not willing to face this fact, and to accept it. Instead, they insist on architecture having some logic and some body of principles of its own, and argue that the primary principle around which this architectural logic turns is creativity, which requires that architects be creative. For the advocates of market architecture this is one of the worst ideas architects ever embraced. Creativity was both the raison d’être of modern architecture and its promise to humanity, they argue, and today we all know that modern architecture has failed in this promise entirely.5 And not only did modernist architects fail in their supreme goal to change society for the better, but in their idealistic endeavours to realise this change they in fact actively and significantly contributed to the deterioration of our living environment.6 The advocates of market architecture are convinced that it is high time architects stopped insisting on their far-fetched ideals and principles, which are indeed nothing but the principles of a self-centred utopian world of architecture, in which architects retreat from the real world and the real needs of people. Instead, they should confront reality and join the real world, which in the twenty-first century is a world governed by marketinstrumental logic. If they refuse, architecture will prove unnecessary and be replaced by some other industry. To sum up, according to this position, architecture is determined from the outside—it is determined by the market. As an activity with purpose and meaning it confirms itself when it performs well on the market. That human endeavours are obliged to prove themselves on the market is a given and unproblematic fact, and architecture has to adjust to this in order to operate as it should. For the advocates of this position architecture has to be usable and useful for the world as it is.

Architecture of the imperative of invention: inside determination + acceptance According to this position, architecture is an activity that is determined by itself. It alone defines its own principles and assigns itself its issues and tasks. The task this position posits at the centre of architecture’s activity

18  The four positions in architecture  is the invention of the new (in the field of architecture). For this position, invention is the driving force of architecture. Architects have to be daring and imaginative, they have to experiment with new materials, technologies, formal solutions. They have to discover and explore new architectural possibilities beyond architecture itself. They have to perform a leap into the unknown, over and over again. And this can probably be done today better than at any time before, the advocates of the imperative of invention proceed, because we live in an excellent time, because the current time enables, indeed encourages, such an inventive way of thinking and action. In terms of technology, it offers incredible possibilities, the kinds of materials and technologies that were only a decade ago almost unthinkable. What’s more, the entire planet is available today for these new planning and architectural interventions. Architects can work simultaneously in different parts of the world, fly from one construction site to another, from one invention to the next. And perhaps most importantly, today’s world favours and rewards creativity, the invention of the new, and thus by extension it also favours architecture. So instead of trying to “change the world” architects should take advantage of the potentials the world offers and respond to the exciting challenges it presents. The advocates of this position use the metaphor of the surfer riding the waves of globalisation to describe the way the architect of the twentyfirst century functions: she has to seek balance in the demanding conditions of global capitalism, and in so doing perform her acrobatic designer feats in the most daring and elegant of ways. One case that can in many respects be considered a paradigmatic example of this position is Ordos 100, the monumental project planned for Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.7 Ordos 100 is a project for a complex of 100 villas planned for construction in the Mongolian desert on the outskirts of Ordos, a city of a million inhabitants. One of the objectives of the project was to demonstrate that a different kind of residential architecture could be built in the region. The residential structures that are commonly built, including the structures designed for Ordos City, correspond to what the architecture of market logic would find correct and agreeable. The Ordos 100 complex, however, was an attempt to design a different kind of architecture: daring, experimental, and contemporary—that is, architecture with the potential to break with the established views of what constitutes prestigious residential architecture today. The project curators invited architectural offices from around the world to design a villa for the complex, with each team assigned one villa. Ai Weiwei explained in the film that he made in connection to this project that he wanted “to introduce young foreign architects to China. They can’t just have good concepts, they need practice, they need opportunities.”8 Even a superficial view of the project, however, reveals that this project offers a rather limited range of opportunities. When it came to shaping the program and the urban plan there was actually no room left for conceptual

The four positions in architecture   19 experimentation: for Ordos 100 was from the very outset defined as a set of luxury villas for rent, and each villa was generally positioned in the middle of its assigned lot, with all of the lots arranged on a conventional grid. The opportunity for architects was in fact limited only to the design of individual buildings, or more precisely, to their conceptual drawings and models. All later design phases, during which significant design decisions are usually made, were no longer part of the architect’s domain, but were instead left to the investor to determine. The architects were indeed expected to focus on a specific set of questions, on the how questions: how to do what they were asked to do. They were invited to think, but only to think that which the leading project team gave them to think. And these are the questions predominantly related to form and spatial configuration of an individual object-villa, the questions that can be responded to in the form of models which were indeed the final products of the architects invited to take part in this project. It is these questions that were considered to belong to the domain of architecture, the so-called inner-architectural questions; which is why Ordos 100 is an illustrative example of the position of the imperative of invention. This position aims at the invention of the new in architecture, whereby it perceives said invention as invention within a clearly defined set of coordinates, within the inner-architectural field. Within this field architects are expected to be fully creative, fully inventive. They can do whatever they want—as long as they stay within the set limits. To return to the Ordos 100 project: it was in just this way that architecture was treated by the media in their coverage of the project. Whatever the architects tried or succeeded to develop in their designs, whatever they did in the pursuit of their architectural experiments, the media simply reduced to experimentation with the forms and spatial compositions of the buildings. Similarly, architectural accomplishment was sought and celebrated in the unusual character of individual solutions and in the diversity of the proposals. Artforum enthusiastically catalogued what the architects proposed: “a villa without distinction between inside and outside, a monolith, a villa of different boxes colliding together into one unstable form, a green mountain rising out of the desert …”9 And based on the simple observation that the architects had designed buildings of unusual shapes and treatments, the media declared them contemporary avant-garde, and hailed their projects as revolutionary housing solutions (Figure 1.1).10 This is the understanding of the revolutionary, of invention and the new, that is characteristic for the imperative of invention in general. It claims that it aims at inventing the new, but it understands the new simply as that which is the most fascinating (of everything that is fascinating), the most daring (of everything that is daring), and different (from everything that is being designed and built). The new in this project is measured in terms of the existing, using the categories and criteria of the given. It is not understood as something that couldn’t even be categorised within the framework

20  The four positions in architecture 

Figure 1.1 Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia, China, 2008. Presentation of the architectural proposals. Photo: Territorial Agency.

of the given and therefore requires new categories and criteria in order to be defined. In other words, the new isn’t understood as something that intervenes in the very framework of the existing, that disrupts and breaks the existing from within. The invention at which this position aims, which it hopes to attain, is actually a neutralised invention and the new is a neutralised new, devoid of any subversive power. In summary, this position understands architecture as an activity that is determined from the inside. It alone sets its own rules and assigns itself its own tasks, whereby its principal task is the pursuit of an architectural invention. Today’s world is supportive of such action, the advocates of this position contend. Besides, the condition of the world order isn’t something that should concern architecture; being critical isn’t the task of architects—they should simply take best advantage of the possibilities the world has to offer.

Architecture of resistance: inside determination + criticality According to this orientation, architecture is the type of activity that isn’t simply a constitutive part of the mechanism that regulates today’s world, it isn’t simply in service of this system. It is a specific and unique practice

The four positions in architecture   21 that alone determines both the choice of its core questions and issues and the specific way of producing its objects. At the same time, the advocates of this position argue that architecture has to operate critically in society. It is precisely this engagement in working to change society for the better that, in the view of this position, justifies architecture, renders it a meaningful practice. But in the reality of the twenty-first century this position is obliged to deal with the fact that this time of globalised capitalism affords fewer and fewer opportunities to realise such a practice of architecture. The possibilities of practising architecture as a specific and unique activity are becoming increasingly rare. Architectural design, which is supposed to respond to a wide range of issues, from those related to infrastructure and settlement patterns to the articulation of an individual building, is today limited to merely the questions of forms and facades. Residential structures are no longer conceived with a view to their inhabitants, but rather with a view to their investors—and they have a very simple agenda, one that is easily summed up and expressed in numbers. This results in “real-estate disguised as architecture.”11 The design of public buildings, such as museums, cultural centres, municipal halls and the like follows much the same logic, wherein so-called spectacular architecture is much favoured—visually impressive buildings that remain impressive for but a moment, until they are outshone by yet more impressive specimens. Yet another challenge today, argue the advocates of this position, is the fact that even when buildings of real architectural quality are built they become trivialised in the media, reduced to beautiful images and successfully pressed into the service-role of contemporary spectacle.12 The media plays a decisive role in yet another way architecture is trivialised today—in redirecting the public attention away from the products of architecture to their authors, from what was made to who made it. The signature of a famous architect serves to significantly increase the financial value of a building as well as its attraction factor for the general public, which extends to increased attention for the city or region in which the building stands. Thus, it is hardly surprising that today almost every city, region, corporation, or institution wants to have its own Gehry or Koolhaas, its Nouvel, Foster, Herzog & de Meuron, or any one of those architects who will soon—or have already—replaced these celebrated names. Further, the names of the starchitects are also joined today by the names of those architects who design precisely what the position of resistance is fighting for: socially engaged architecture or architecture for the so-called disadvantaged, be they individuals, groups, or entire social strata. These architects, too, are hardly safe from becoming the next celebrities, the next fashionable trend. In fact, in the past decade or so, it is precisely the social projects that have attracted particular attention from the media, both in professional and in lifestyle publications. As a result, it appears the architecture of resistance itself is turning into what it most despises: fashionable architecture, the archi-trend of the moment.

22  The four positions in architecture  This brings us to another highly problematic issue of today: not only are the possibilities for practising architecture as a self-determining practice disappearing, closing, but also the possibilities for realising that primary role architecture sets for itself and which, in the final instance, justifies it as a self-determining practice, as a creative pursuit. And this is its critical function, its socially critical role. Architects that subscribe to this orientation see the main territory for realising this critical role in creating better living conditions for the wider population, by designing quality residential structures not only for the privileged few but for society at large, by constructing truly public spaces and similar. But there are fewer and fewer commissions and thus fewer opportunities to develop such projects. Governments no longer invest in quality housing “for all” as they once did back in the early and mid-twentieth century, lament the advocates of architecture of resistance, and governmental interest in investing in public architectural projects such as schools, kindergartens, libraries, health and cultural institutions is fast diminishing, too. Furthermore, truly public spaces are today increasingly being replaced by commercially driven and closely controlled quasi-public spaces. In short, architecture is losing its opportunity (and thus capacity) to serve the public, society, to be available “for all”. Well-conceived and elaborately crafted buildings are increasingly reserved for corporate HQs, private villas, and museums, all of which are separated from the general public by walls and elaborate surveillance systems. Architecture still exists there, argue the advocates of the architecture of resistance, but it is reserved only for those who can afford it. As it becomes transformed into but another privilege for the select, for the elite, architecture is indeed losing its purpose, becoming meaningless. But the advocates of the architecture of resistance don’t really have an answer to such a development. They increasingly tend to see the only true possibility for architecture—the possibility to play both roles, to be practised as creative practice and to work towards the greater well-being of society—in some exceptional circumstances, such as remote locations where everyday reality is not entirely driven by and subordinated to market forces, and where, they argue, the real problems that architecture can solve still exist.13 A fine example of an architectural practice that corresponds to the orientation of the architecture of resistance is the all-women office of Holmen Reuter Sandman. Their work strives to and succeeds in fulfilling the two central requirements of this position—to design high-quality architecture and to contribute with it to improving the social good. This is particularly visible in their projects for the Women’s Centre in Senegal or the KWIECO Shelter House and the Hostels for Girls, both in Tanzania. This is precisely how these projects are discussed in the media. In the published reviews it is emphasised that they are simple structures that boast distinctive architectural qualities, which are expressed in their sensitive relation to the local

The four positions in architecture   23 context, the employment of traditional techniques, the introduction of vernacular details, and the fact that they were conceived in collaboration with the local population. And it is equally stressed that these structures incited a positive social change, that they empowered the community, in particular the community of women, an otherwise discriminated group in local society, that they improved both their everyday well-being and their symbolic standing in society (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).14 However, the exceptional attention that these and other similar projects receive—the awards, media coverage, invitations to lecture, exhibitions, etc.—indicate that these are exceptional cases, that the practice of architecture that this position supports today is possible only in extraordinary circumstances. And this is what the representatives of this position argue: the practice of architecture to which they aspire was possible in the past, in the time of modernism; and it is still possible in some remote and exceptional locations; but in the developed world, in the here and now, architecture as a self-supported critical practice has found itself at a dead-end. In summary: in tune with this view, architecture is an activity that is determined from the inside; it alone sets its own rules and defines its own tasks. At the same time, this position sees the primary task architecture has to fulfil as being outside of architecture, in society, and argues that only if

Figure 1.2 Hollmen Reuter Sandman Architects, Shelter Home in Moshi Tanzania, 2015. Photo: Juha Ilonen.

24  The four positions in architecture 

Figure 1.3 Hollmen Reuter Sandman Architects, Shelter Home in Moshi Tanzania, 2015. Photo: Juha Ilonen.

architecture successfully realises this task, if it acts in a socially critical way and brings or incites positive effects in and for society, does it confirm itself as a meaningful practice.

Architecture of social reformism: outside determination + criticality According to this position we live in a highly problematic world. This is a world of enormous social disparities and injustices, a world of oceans of poverty on the one hand and tiny islands of extreme wealth on the other. Today, one-sixth of the world’s population lives in circumstances that satisfy the classic definition of slums. In such a world it is absurd to think, thus maintain the supporters of this position, that anything significant could be done with architectural means, in an architectural way—with what they mockingly refer to as architecture with a capital A. It is high time, they argue, that architecture stop focusing on itself, on the so-called “architectural” problems, and instead addresses the real problems. And, in the view of this position, these are the social problems that plague us today.

The four positions in architecture   25 Architecture’s knowledge and practice should be put in the service of the project of social reform. For the advocates of this position, it is clear that the task of architecture lies outside itself, in society—and not in anything “architectural.” For them the following view is particularly problematic—that an insistence on practising architecture as a specific and unique discipline is already a form of critique. They brand this formal critique and declare it entirely ineffective.15 The understanding of this position, what it actually means to focus on architecture, however, is surprisingly close to that of the advocates of the imperative of invention. They share the view that to focus on architecture means to focus on questions related to “assembling interesting spaces,” “composing rich elevations,” “creating arresting facades,” and that this can be dealt with independently of the issues and questions related to architecture’s socio-political context. The difference between these two views lies only in the fact that the latter consider this the true task of architecture, while for the former, seeking inventive architectural solutions represents but an elitist distancing of architects from the real problems. This actually brings them close to the advocates of market architecture: they both insist that architects focusing on the questions “inherent to architecture” poses a serious problem for architecture’s relevance today. They both agree that this is a retreat from the real world and real problems, except that they have a different understanding of what the real problems are: while the advocates of market architecture see them in architecture not competing successfully on the market, the social reformists point to social problems such as homelessness, the growing crisis in affordable and appropriate housing, the degradation of the environment, the proliferation of slums and similar.16 And this brings them close to the architects of resistance—but just like them, the advocates of social reformism also have to confess that in their attempts to put architecture in the service of social reforms, they are not succeeding overly well. Their overall effectiveness is conditioned by the effectiveness of the political and economic programs and projects in which architecture plays a part, and such programs and projects are today only carried out within a very limited scope. In most cases they are conceived as small-scale interventions that are intended to engender, as a kind of urban acupuncture, various positive effects for the poorest inhabitants of contemporary cities and urbanised landscapes. An additional problem lies in the fact that such small interventions can indeed produce precisely the opposite effect than the one envisaged, can serve to further consolidate the given order of things. Neoliberal politics indeed systematically supports various small improvements, selfhelp initiatives, and market-oriented solutions in order to obscure the fact that it has no interest in large-scale longer-term solutions—solutions that could positively affect the very factors that gave rise to the impossible living conditions in the first place. This too is what the advocates of this position

26  The four positions in architecture  call attention to: in order to realise serious social reforms, programs on the national and international levels are needed. Such programs would include upgrading infrastructure, establishing transportation networks, and, of course, securing jobs and education for the socially endangered inhabitants of our fast-growing contemporary cities. However, interest in establishing such programs—as the advocates of this position are obliged to admit—is, today, very limited.17 To sum up, according to the position of social reformism the task of architecture is located outside architecture, out there in society. Architecture has to contribute to the project of social reform, and only insofar as it functions in this way does it prove itself a meaningful practice. The advocates of this position are convinced that architects should put their “creative ambitions” aside and instead put their technical knowledge and professional expertise in the service of solving social issues connected to life in the contemporary world. So, what does this analysis tell us about the prospects for practising architecture as an activity that is determined by itself, for architecture as a creative thinking practice in today’s world of globalised capitalism? (Figure 1.4). Both the proponents of the architecture of market logic and the proponents of the architecture of social reformism—the first and the fourth

Figure 1.4 The four positions in architecture.

The four positions in architecture   27 positions—understand architecture as an activity that by definition responds to and resolves the problems and demands assigned to architecture from outside. The first position maintains that it is the market that lends architecture its orientation, dictates what it should be doing; while the fourth position insists architecture has to respond to the tasks and issues with which the current problematic social situation presents it. It should serve the cause of social reform. Thus, only the second and third positions, the imperative of invention and the architecture of resistance, remain relevant for us and our specific concerns. Both understand architecture as an activity that is determined by itself. But they both have a problem: upon closer examination it becomes clear that neither is able to determine just how such a practice of architecture can be realised in the here and now. The advocates of the imperative of invention believe that architects can limit themselves to their own, architectural territory and focus only on the so-called inner-architectural issues and questions. They don’t see, however, that by isolating themselves from the socio-political issues, questions, and circumstances that constitute the situation in which architecture is made they are actually becoming merely a tool of these very circumstances. A good case in point is, again, Ordos 100. The architects involved in this project accepted, from the very outset, the fact that they would practise their architectural inventions within the limits which were drawn by others, by the investors and curators. The architects consented to the idea that they would focus only on a specific set of questions, on the how rather than the why and the what questions. And once they designed their objects, the PR machinery took over and explained what it was that the architects had designed. They explained that they designed and produced a rich collection of different kinds of products, indeed revolutionary products, from which one could choose—just as one might choose from among any other products available on the market. So this position claims that architecture follows its own logic, the logic of invention or the logic of creativity. However, owing to the fact that it consents to practise this logic within a framework determined by others (clients, investors, curators, etc.), its own way of working, its own logic is reduced to a logic determined by others. In short, by limiting itself to the so-called innerarchitectural territory, this position renders invalid its own requirement that architecture be self-determined. Only the third position doesn’t actually give up on the insistence that architecture be determined by itself. It insists that architecture has its own knowledge and practice, which means that it is primarily architecture itself that knows or has to find out which problems are the ones to address, as well as how they should be addressed in a given task. But to this self-determination it adds a condition; this insistence on approaching various tasks and problems in an architectural way, from an architectural point of view, makes sense only if this ultimately serves society, if it serves the social good.

28  The four positions in architecture  By defining architecture in this way, however, this position in fact no longer posits self-determination as the principle guide of its actions; rather the opposite in fact—it takes reality as the norm. For it is only reality—architecture’s social effects in reality—that can authenticate, validate, architecture as a meaningful practice. And because the reality of globalised capitalism keeps reminding architecture that it can’t operate in a socially critical way, the architecture of resistance has to reconcile itself with the fact that it can’t fulfil the role and task it sets itself. And as it is unable to fulfil the task it sets itself, as an activity that sets its own tasks, it is itself no longer possible.18 Something has to be added to this, to which we will return in the next chapter. What this position can be reproached for, however, isn’t so much that it doesn’t see or doesn’t understand that which it obviously doesn’t see or understand—that capitalism is a system that is able to thwart or neutralise various manifestations of this position’s critical stance and attendant resistance. What it can and should be reproached for is the fact that it doesn’t see or doesn’t understand that which it does see and, at least at first sight, also understands—that architecture is a creative thinking activity that determines itself. It doesn’t see and isn’t able to develop the true range of its understanding of architecture as a self-determining practice which alone assigns itself its own specific problems, aims, and purposes, that has its own history, its own specific way of working, and its own specific objects. In other words, the architecture of resistance isn’t able to develop the full creative power that is contained in its own understanding of architecture, and thus allows capitalism to turn its point of potency into the point of its impotence. On the basis of this analysis one should indeed confirm the diagnosis offered by the (post-)critical works referenced in the introduction and conclude that the possibilities for practising architecture as a self-determined practice that is supported in itself are indeed closing—if they haven’t already closed. This analysis points to a radical crisis of architecture: radical because none of the four positions, which in respect to the four possible combinations of the two criteria set out at the beginning of this chapter, cover all possible orientations in architecture; none of them show how a creative thinking practice of architecture could be realised in the here and now. It seems we really have no alternative today but to consent to the idea that under global capitalism architecture is fully incorporated in its mechanism and determined by it, that architecture is a constitutive part of it. It is precisely at this point, which presents itself as the point of final closure, that— as our hypothesis goes—the next step must be taken.

Notes 1 Each of the four positions is illustrated with one or two examples. The selection could of course also be different, but those selected are nonetheless representative of each of the positions.

The four positions in architecture   29 2 For this line of reasoning see for instance Michael Benedikt, “Less for Less Yet. On Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace,” in Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, ed. William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 9–10. 3 For a discussion on the question of what people want (in connection to architecture and design), see Shamiyeh, Michael and DOM Research Laboratory, eds. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005). 4 Two examples of such modernist projects of constructing architecture, which includes also the constructing of its people, are examined at the end of the book: the work of Hannes Meyer and the work of Alvar Aalto. 5 This view is presented, for instance, by Michael Benedikt in the article “Less for less yet.” He writes that “creativity is probably the single worst idea with which architects could associate themselves” and that it is an essentially modernist idea. Cf. Benedikt, “Less for Less Yet. On Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace,” 9–10. 6 See Benedikt, “Less for Less Yet. On Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace,” 12. 7 See http:​//mov​ingci​ties.​org/e​mbedd​ed/or​dos10​0/ (accessed February 5, 2019). The project’s client/investor was Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd., the master plan was developed and the project curated by FAKE Design, Ai Weiwei, and Herzog & de Meuron. They selected the 100 architects to participate. In fact, the project had already come to a halt in 2008, even before construction really began, but in the way its initial phase was conceived and realised, and especially in the way it was discussed in the media, it remains, in my view, a paradigmatic case of the position of the imperative of invention. But it is just one case, of course. 8 Cf. http:​//mov​ingci​ties.​org/e​mbedd​ed/or​dos10​0/pha​se1/ (accessed July 27, 2020). 9 Cf. http://artforum.com.cn/words/596 (accessed May 10, 2019). 10 Cf. http:​//www​.home​-desi​gning​.com/​2009/​11/40​-revo​lutio​nary-​housi​ng-co​ ncept​s-fro​m-ord​os-10​0 (accessed July 27, 2020). 11 Cf. Zvi Hecker, “Architecture Stripped of its Ornate Garment,” http:​//leb​beusw​ oods.​wordp​ress.​com/2​009/0​3/19/​zvi-h​ecker​-arch​itect​ure-s​tripp​ed/ (accessed August 10, 2018). 12 Cf. Luis Fernandez-Galiano, “Spectacle and Its Discontents; or, the Elusive Joys of Architainment,” in Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture, ed. William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1–7. 13 Such a view was, for instance, expressed in the outline of the Alvar Aalto Symposium in 2010. The Symposium’s chairman Sami Rintala argued in his official statement that the true possibility for architecture today resided only in those locations “where the real problems are,” which in his view meant in places outside the European and North American economic centers. There, architecture can still do something, it can still solve something. Cf. Sami Rintala, “Edge— Paracentric Architecture,” http:​//www​.alva​raalt​o.fi/​sympo​sium/​2009/​index​.htm (accessed May 12, 2019). 14 “The building itself steers away from making any grand artistic statements; instead, it focuses on empowering the community while respecting the local culture and spatial hierarchy.” Frederika Fraser, The Architectural Review, March 15, 2016). Cf. https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/contextand-collaboration-kwieco-shelter-house-by-hollmn-reuter-sandman-architects/10003875.article; https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2015/05/25/ kwieco_shelter_house.html; etc. (accessed May 12, 2019).

30  The four positions in architecture  15 For this view see, for instance, the book Out of Side: A Social Criticism of Architecture. In the Introduction the editor contends: “To return to the issue of architecture’s critical capacity and its relation to wider society, it seems obvious to me that formal critique, directed as it invariably is to those already in the know, has as much to do with criticism or critique as a placebo does with curing cancer. To continue the parallel, it is worth observing that a placebo is not harmless: the patient operates under the illusion that a medicinal agent is at work battling the disease, whereas no such thing is going on at all.” Diane Ghirardo, ed., Out of Side: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 13. 16 Cf. Margaret Crawford, “Can Architecture Be Socially Responsible?” in Out of Side: A Social Criticism of Architecture, ed. D. Ghirardo, 27. 17 For this view see for instance: J. Beardsley and C. Werthmann, “Improving Informal Settlements. Ideas from Latin America,” Harvard Design Magazine, Spring–Summer 2008. 18 As such, the architecture of resistance actually maintains a position that is in contradiction with itself. On the one hand it insists that architecture is determined by itself, that is, from the inside, yet at the same time it understands architecture as an activity that can find its meaning and purpose only outside itself, in its positive social effects. The architecture of resistance doesn’t know how to find its way out of this split position, and thus condemns itself to passivity and inertia.

2

Towards the fifth position

Our starting point for rethinking the possibility of continuing with the practice of architecture as a creative thinking practice is the architecture of resistance; for this is the only one of the four positions which insists that architecture is the type of activity that alone determines its own tasks, aims, purposes, and ways of working. This position sees the primary task that architecture should set itself as recognising and addressing social issues, as changing society for the better. In its endeavour to preserve the independence of architecture, and at the same time to work for the benefit of the social good, this position understands itself as a successor to the modern movement, whose objective was to transform the inherited physical and social order.1 As discussed in the previous chapter, however, this position meets with serious difficulties in its attempts to realise its vision of architecture. It aspires to be an architecture of resistance, an architecture that resists the logic and workings of globalised capitalism, but is in fact only an architecture of impotent resistance. And this position doesn’t know how to respond to this. It doesn’t see a way forward. Manfredo Tafuri pointed to this problem of architecture decades ago in his highly influential book Architecture and Utopia.2 He showed that the modern architecture of the first half of the twentieth century had already become stuck in its effort to realise its core principles related to its social role, and indicated how and why this happened as it did.3 In so doing, however, Tafuri not only questioned the effectiveness of certain attempts by modern architecture to play a critical, transformative role and serve as an agency of social change, but questioned the very presupposition of modern architecture that architecture can play such a role. With this he hit a sensitive spot. For many influential architects of the time held that it was precisely architecture’s capacity to work towards social improvement that made both the work of architecture in general and their own work specifically, meaningful, made it worth fighting for. It is hardly surprising, then, that Tafuri’s book initially elicited rather unfavourable responses. For his part, Aldo van Eyck addressed Tafuri at the

32  Towards the fifth position Venice Biennale in 1976, the year Architecture and Utopia was published, in English, as follows: Therefore, if Tafuri is present, I would like to tell him that I detest him, and even more I detest that which he writes; that he is profoundly cynical, up to the degree of horror, of nausea … Humanism has only just begun. And an architect is a humanist or not an architect at all.4 This book, however, takes a different position: in order to move forward from the point at which the architects-humanists became mired in their struggle to realise the socio-critical capacity of architecture, one has to give Tafuri’s analysis serious consideration. Further, I would argue that we must accept his analysis precisely in order to develop the productive potential of the architecture of resistance which holds that architecture is determined by itself, and that it alone assigns itself its tasks and orientations. Our starting point, therefore, posits that the architecture of resistance has to be read together with Tafuri. Only by considering the connection between the two views are we able to determine the possibilities for continuing that paradigm of architecture or that theoretical and practical image of architecture at which we are aiming.

Architecture in crisis Tafuri’s analysis of the workings of modern architecture, in which he included the architecture of his own time, can briefly be summarised as follows: modern architecture assigned itself the task of taking part in building a better, socially more just world, and in the early twentieth century it was indeed actively engaged in the process of changing society. It failed to see, however, that in these attempts it was changing society in precisely the ways that suited capitalism. It failed to notice that with its transformative action it was in fact merely fulfilling the tasks assigned to it by the capitalist city. It took an active part in capitalism’s gradual reorganisation of the world, although in such a way as to try and liberate capitalist society from its contradictions. Tafuri argued that one should see the entire cycle of modern architecture—from its beginnings to its fall into radical crisis—as an attempt to resolve the imbalances, contradictions, and retardations characteristic of the capitalist reorganisation of the world.5 In this process architecture merely performed the functions of the ideological justification and rationalisation of the process. And even in this capacity it gradually began to lose ground, since society itself began to perform this function better.6 Tafuri illustrated the process of architecture losing its active role in society with the practice of spatial planning, which was for modern architecture, as he explained, one of the ways of realising the utopian world it envisioned. Initially directed and guided by modern architecture, spatial planning at a certain point turned into merely a mechanism of capitalist social reality

Towards the fifth position  33 itself, a mechanism that worked by itself and no longer needed architecture as the planner.7 At a certain moment, which Tafuri located in time around 1930, it became clear that architecture was in fact no longer needed, at least not as an activity that takes an active part in changing society. This was the moment architecture no longer knew how to proceed, when it found itself at a dead end. It lost itself as an activity that assigns itself its own tasks, and it was left without an active role in society. It slid into the condition, to summarise Tafuri, that ultimately saw the closing down of the direction architecture set for itself. It would be wrong to say, however, that modern architecture failed in its attempts to change society. On the basis of Tafuri’s analysis, it would actually be more appropriate to say that it succeeded only too well. Modern architecture proved so successful, it so effectively contributed to the transformation of society, that it reached the point where society no longer needed its transformative capacities. The only problem was that society, which architecture helped create, wasn’t a more just society—which modern architecture envisioned as its ultimate objective. Instead, it had become the society of advanced capitalism. It is here that, in my view, one of the key points of Tafuri’s analysis lies: it reveals that the social reality—which the advocates of the view that the project of modern architecture has to continue today want to change—is actually the reality that modern architecture itself helped create. The question to ask, therefore, isn’t how to continue the project of social change in accord with the presuppositions and principles of modern architecture. Rather, the question that has to be asked is how, if at all, architecture can change society. And to really change it, which means to change it in a way that is fundamentally different from the way that is dictated by the capitalist system itself. Tafuri’s answer to this question, however, is far less interesting than his analysis: in his view architecture simply doesn’t have the power to truly change society. His response is an expression of his specific understanding of architecture, which is that architecture is an ideological social practice. In his view, it is an ideological social practice in the sense that it is grounded in something that is, strictly speaking, outside it: it is grounded in the network of various social, political, and economic interests. The fundamental function of architecture is to represent these interests. So architecture isn’t what in the modern age it thought it was, it isn’t an agency of social change. Rather, it is through its operations that various social, political, and economic factors simply express themselves, and often in a largely unreflective way. It is these factors that actually change society. And in Tafuri’s view, as I would argue, there are two ways architecture can perform its task of representing the interests of these factors that enter architecture from outside. It can uncritically consent to the given conditions in society and take an active part in realising society’s developmental requirements. This is how most (modern) architecture works. It can, however, also work another way,

34  Towards the fifth position such that it represents a critical social interest.8 But in the time of capitalism, and in particular advanced capitalism, it cannot uphold this position. Therefore, there is in fact only one option left to architecture—to participate in consolidating the given. And this it can do either by uncritically consenting to capitalism, or by criticising it and protesting that architecture ought to change society for the better, that the project of modern architecture has to be continued.9 Tafuri was particularly critical of the second option. In his view it was foolish to believe that the role capitalism ascribed to architecture could be countered with a different type of designing or with an “antidesign”;10 that one could act critically in the way of, and with the means of, architecture. By maintaining such empty faith in the so-called transformative capacity of architecture the proponents of this position indeed actively participate in preserving the status quo, and consequently contribute to and further exacerbate the crisis of architecture. The only possibility to act productively in the field of architecture in the age of advanced capitalism lay for Tafuri in the critique of architecture as ideology; that is to say, in architecture acting as critique of its own ideological character and role. This is also where Tafuri recognised his own task. In Architecture and Utopia he tried to show the kind of role modern architecture actually played in society. He considered this a step towards breaking the given order of things, a step with which architecture “might open a ray of hope.” He insisted, however, that the self-critique of architecture as ideology can only go so far, can only arrive at a certain point, and then it has to stop. At that point, that other agency sets in, which is the only one actually capable of working towards true change. For Tafuri, this was politics. In the final instance it is political engagement that interested Tafuri as critic of architecture as ideology: the transformation of existing social relations through political struggle.11 Let us now sum up this argumentation in two points. First, in diagnosing the state of architecture, and not only its state in the mid-twentieth century but also the state of architecture today, we have to take Tafuri’s analysis seriously. We have to accept the view that the building of architecture—its system of starting points, principles, goals, and objectives—no longer stands on firm foundations, and that there is no other option but to demolish it. In other words, we have to take seriously the fact that architecture, as an activity that alone determines its tasks and takes as its primary task changing society for the better, is (still) in radical crisis. However, and this is the second point, Tafuri’s analysis turns out to be inadequate with respect to the possibility of a constructive response to this condition of architecture. In the book Architecture and Utopia he doesn’t even concern himself with the possibility of getting out of the crisis. Rather, he moves to another field, to the field of politics, and from the position of the political activist, that is, from the outside, he identifies the crisis of architecture as something final and complete, and perceives the entire building of architecture as a set of

Towards the fifth position  35

Figure 2.1 Aldo Rossi, Archittetura Assassinata, 1974. Ink, felt pen, and pastel on paper, cm H 38.5 × B 47.4. Private collection. © Eredi Aldo Rossi, courtesy Fondazione Aldo Rossi.

ruins in and from which there is nothing left to be salvaged. It is this particular approach to crisis, the approach from the outside position that is, in my view, the key deficiency in Tafuri’s analysis. In order to find a way out of crisis and continue where he left off—or simply stopped—we have to assume a different position. We will look for this different position in the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of crisis itself, one which is more elaborated than Tafuri’s (Figure 2.1).

Response to crisis: destruction and recomposition Such an elaborate and productive analysis of the phenomenon of crisis can be found in Alain Badiou’s text Can Politics Be Thought?12 This analysis is interesting already by virtue of the fact that it begins precisely where Tafuri stops. The crisis taken up for discussion by Badiou is the crisis of politics; that is, the crisis of precisely that agency which in Tafuri’s view may be the only one capable of transforming society. And for Badiou the crisis of politics is closely connected with the crisis of Marxism. This includes various conceptual orientations and political practices related to Marx’s thought and the idea of socialism, as well as the actual, existent state configurations that have identified themselves as socialist or communist. Together with

36  Towards the fifth position the collapse of these states at the end of the twentieth century, Marxist conceptual and practical-political orientation went into decline. What was preserved and established as the only possible politics was “capitalo-parliamentarism,” maintains Badiou, which is the politics of capitalism as the fundamental relation and mode of production. In his view this is a politics reduced to mere technique of management. The crisis of politics is indeed an expression of the fact that with the decline of Marxism, every politics of emancipation receded from view.13 But here we will not be interested in Badiou’s analysis of the crisis of Marxism. We will focus only on his conceptualisation of the formal elements that are, in his view, characteristic of crisis as a phenomenon, not only of the crisis of Marxism but of crisis in general. There are three such elements, all of which are closely connected. First, a crisis—of an individual, collective, conceptual orientation, political or state regime—means the destruction of those points of support and orientation that serve to secure the identity of the subject of crisis, her thinking and action.14 Second, we cannot have a crisis without a subject of crisis, without someone who is existentially affected by the crisis. A crisis is essentially always a crisis of the subject, of the one who must deal with the fact of the weakening of the points that support her identity. In other words, a crisis is basically a subjective or subjectively experienced phenomenon. Third, a crisis isn’t simply a sign of the end of something, but it also announces the possibility of a new beginning, of a recomposing of that which found itself in crisis. Based on these three elements two fundamental modes of relation to crisis can be defined. First, one can have an outside relation to crisis. Characteristic of this relation is that one doesn’t even see the crisis as a crisis but rather considers it a kind of disturbance—natural, social, or personal—that can be expected to abate sooner or later. Second, one can have an inside relation to crisis. This is the relation of someone who is affected by the crisis in her very being, as it were. This relation can be expressed in three different ways: the first is the relation of someone who suffers because of the crisis and doesn’t see a way out of it; the second is the relation of someone who is in the middle of a crisis but doesn’t recognise this fact, refuses to see it. In both cases the one in crisis is an object of crisis. She doesn’t play an active role in it. The most interesting relation—which also applies to architecture—is the third one, and can be summarised with the following formulation by Badiou: to take a subjective and immanent position in relation to crisis. The essence of this mode is to try and construct, from inside the crisis, a distanced, outside relation to it. This is the relation of someone who is in crisis as the subject of the crisis, and thus lives the crisis or her response to it as a process of subjectification; or, as could also be said, as the process of her possible re-birth as the subject. For its part, the process of subjectification also requires a specific recomposition of the disposition of referents of this subject in reality. How can we apply these formal definitions of crisis to the field of architecture? How can we, based on what Badiou tells us about the crisis of

Towards the fifth position  37 Marxism, respond to the crisis of architecture that Tafuri paints as a kind of destiny of modern architecture, in the face of which it wields no power? Again, when we speak about the crisis of architecture, we understand architecture as a creative thinking practice that draws from its own realm of theoretical and practical knowledge, its own history, and which alone determines and assigns itself the problems, goals, and purposes of its practice. First, we can say that in the case of the crisis of architecture, also, there are two fundamental relations to crisis—the outside and the inside. The first, outside response is to reject (or renounce) the very idea that architecture is a self-determining practice that can—precisely as a self-determining activity—also take an active role in effecting social change. One instance of such a response is the position of the architecture of market logic. For this position, it is precisely the insistence on architecture as an activity that follows its own orientation and certain principles of its own, and which it alone determines, that handicaps architecture and indeed might even serve to endanger it. For this insistence simply repeats the mistakes of modernism, which sets as its central point of orientation a transformation of social reality. And today it is clear—thus this position—that this is a failed project that has to be left behind, for good. The outside response to the crisis of architecture is characteristic also for the architecture of social reformism. For its proponents too, it is the very idea of architecture as a practice that is supported in itself and determined by itself that is erroneous. In the insistence on self-determination they see nothing but architecture’s unnecessary preoccupation with itself, rather than focusing on what it really should be preoccupied with—and these are the social issues connected with living conditions in the contemporary world. What is common to both views within the first type of response is the fact that they look at the crisis of architecture as outside observers examining the failure of something, something that has already failed and which indeed was destined to fail. This is how Tafuri sees the crisis: he too takes an outside position to the crisis of architecture as a distinct, self-determining practice that can, as such, also act in a socially critical manner. He doesn’t try to rethink the possibility of such practice, but steps outside architecture and withdraws to the field of politics instead. For Tafuri considers politics the only territory left where one can still effect true social change. The second, inside relation to the crisis of architecture represents the view that architecture has to continue to act as an independent, self-supporting practice that alone determines its own tasks. The architecture of the imperative of invention and the position of the architecture of resistance both fit within the framework of this type of response. They indeed both function as objects of crisis. The only difference between the two is this: the imperative of invention doesn’t even see the crisis or simply doesn’t acknowledge it. In its view architecture’s task is the invention of the new, invention within the field of architecture, and in this, claim those who subscribe to this position, it largely succeeds. The position of the architecture of resistance, however,

38  Towards the fifth position knows that architecture is in serious crisis and it suffers as a result of this, but doesn’t see any way out and forward. It remains inert and powerless. So far, we have seen two possible responses to the crisis of architecture. Badiou, however, suggests a third possibility, which is neither a response from the outside position nor a response from the inside position of the object of crisis. It is a relation whereby one responds to the crisis from its inside, as the subject of crisis, but in the outside, distanced mode. In other words, one lives a response to the crisis as the process of subjectification, as the process of her possible rebirth as subject. What does this mean in the case of architecture? What does it mean to respond to the crisis of architecture as the subject of crisis? Essentially, this means that one responds to the crisis as the architect—as the one who in her work enacts architecture as a creative thinking practice; and who is therefore, if architecture is in crisis, also in crisis. She is aware of the crisis as something on whose outcome her own existence as architect depends. The following is essential, however: although she responds to the crisis from the inside of the crisis, she establishes an outside, distanced relation to it. That is to say, the relation that enables her to pull herself, step by step, out of the crisis of architecture. In this case, then, the crisis isn’t simply the end point, the conclusion of a certain process; for at the same time it is also an opportunity for a new beginning, for the recomposition of that which is in crisis—but a recomposition built on new foundations. In order to outline such a radical recomposition of the foundations of the crisis situation Badiou draws on the approach designated by Descartes as the provisional moral code.15 And the way out of crisis that Badiou outlines in reference to Descartes is in my view also the way architecture—which is teetering on the edge of impossibility—can overcome its crisis and step out of it in a new appearance.

Architecture’s provisional moral code Descartes’s concept of the provisional moral code can be understood as the way of acting in those situations where one has no firm points of support or orientation to help one act—and just such a situation is the condition of trying to break out of the crisis of architecture. Descartes based his concept on a few maxims; for us, the second maxim and a summary of his concluding remarks are particularly important. The second maxim holds that once one adopts a certain position or opinion, it is important that one stand behind this opinion as firmly and resolutely as one can—no less than one would if the position had, with utmost certainty, seemed the best or most correct one. Descartes illustrates this maxim with a parable: some travellers find themselves lost in the forest. If they wander first one way and then another, they most certainly will not find their way out. Only if they “walk as straight as possible in one direction, and not alter their course for any weak reasons” they might

Towards the fifth position  39 stand a chance of finding their way back again.16 In his concluding remarks, Descartes demands that when we do something, we rely on our own capacities and trust in them, trust that in doing what we did, we truly did it to the best of our abilities. Doing the best one can is the right way to work, and in so doing one cannot fail to be happy.17 Descartes’s maxim and concluding remark can, for our case of the radical crisis of architecture, be reshaped as follows: we are in the position where we know that the building of architecture is unstable and that it has to be pulled down—as Tafuri’s analysis shows us and in fact already assumes this task and itself pulls down the old building of architecture. Now the next step has to be taken: we know that as architects we can’t do anything but construct a new building, even though we don’t know yet how to do this. In this phase of uncertainty, we can look for support in, let’s say, the architectural provisional moral code. This means that we first choose a direction, a path that we will follow; which in our case means that we must formulate our own hypothesis as to how the new building of architecture is to be constructed. Once formulated, we must follow this hypothesis firmly and resolutely, which means that gradually, step by step, we explore all its many implications and thus verify and ground it. The direction we go on to develop herein once we have accepted Tafuri’s diagnosis of the state of crisis of architecture—that is, our hypothesis—goes as follows: architecture is the capacity to act in the world irrespective of the world. Or, put differently, it is the capacity to act in a way that is inappropriate for the world. We will call this capacity the architectural capacity.18 The architectural capacity requires only one thing from the architect: to do everything in her power to perform her task well. This capacity incorporates that minimum, which secures architecture its identity—architecture as a creative thinking practice that alone assigns itself its tasks and sets the rules that guide its workings. Holding on to the hypothesis of the architectural capacity is how we as architects can step out of the crisis of architecture and construct, step by step, the new building of architecture. This hypothesis works as both the point of support and the point of orientation in the process of breaking out of the crisis and finding a way forward. There is one more thing that needs to be stressed here: a constitutive part of the hypothesis on architectural capacity is also that which serves as its material support. This is the body of objects that demonstrate, in the here and now, that architecture as the capacity to act in the world, irrespective of the world, is indeed possible. These objects—which in this work we call architectural objects and which are sketched out as such early in the Introduction—are concrete instances of the architectural capacity.19 On the one hand they are ordinary objects—one could simply call them objective objects of the world. They can be buildings, texts, drawings, models. But on the other hand, they are not simply ordinary objects of the world. They are objects, which are at the same time also something other than merely the objects of their world; in other words, they are something other than

40  Towards the fifth position what they are. They have a special status. They are the objects that in their material presence testify to the fact that in each specific given world it is also possible to act in a way inappropriate to that world. They are the objects that pierce their own situational and temporal determinations dictated by the given world.20 Holding on to the hypothesis of the architectural capacity corresponds, as it isn’t difficult to see, to what Badiou formulates as “holding on to a real point.” If we recall, this maxim requires two things. First, we must find or build in a given situation, that which is, for this situation, its structural impossibility, that is to say, its real point. This is less demanding than it may seem at first sight, for every architectural object, which is the product of a creative act, is a potential real point once it occurs in reality.21 To find a real point therefore simply means: to see an object as an architectural object. But to see such an object requires additional effort. For as an architectural object, such an object is not something objectively determinable and provable. It only has a hypothetical status. The decision that something is or isn’t an architectural object therefore requires another step. It requires that we support and ground this decision or judgement. A building (or a drawing, model, etc.) is an architectural object as long as we succeed in demonstrating it as such, as long as we succeed in supporting our hypothesis that this building is an architectural object or an instance of architecture. This has brought us to the second requirement of the maxim. This requirement says that we also have to hold on to this real point—Badiou even adds at whatever the cost. This means that we have to realise, firmly and resolutely, step by step, all possible consequences implied in and by the object or position that we are introducing into a given situation, because we recognised it as the point of the impossible-real of this situation. So, we don’t stop at the point of seeing an architectural object and being fascinated with it: we have, as I said earlier, to support our fascination with arguments; we have to explain, write, theoretically (re)construct, what is it that makes this object an architectural object, and what this object tells us both about itself and about architecture in general, and what consequences for architecture and its workings in the world we can draw based on this object. Or, this time, on the level of practical construction, we try to repeat in our own design work the architectural object that engendered our thinking—not of course the constructed object itself, but that something in this object that constitutes it as an architectural object. And, once we succeed in doing so, we continue, we try to construct another architectural object. Or—in our case, in the case of this book—we develop, step by step, our hypothesis that there is architectural capacity, the capacity that is materialised in the form of the products of architecture which are instances of this capacity. In this way we gradually build, in the situation, in the reality, a new disposition of referents—in the form of constructed buildings, unrealised projects, conceptual drawings, critical essays, theoretical theses—which function as points of support for our real point. In other words, by implementing the

Towards the fifth position  41 possibility of the impossible in the given reality we gradually change this reality: we transform it into the reality in which architecture—as an activity that is in the world such that it follows its own logic of action—is possible, and thus into the reality in which another kind of logic is possible, in which it is possible to act differently. In architecture’s present situation—a situation whereby architecture is increasingly incorporated into the mechanisms that regulate the world today—a real point consists precisely in persevering with the hypothesis that there is architectural capacity—the capacity which is of course always specified with the tasks, working tools, and products that are (in each specific case) intrinsic to architecture. To sum up: the hypothesis of architectural capacity enables us, as I proposed at the outset of this chapter, to take Tafuri’s diagnosis of the radical crisis of architecture seriously, and at the same time to nonetheless continue with the practice of architecture; to continue precisely from that point at which the architecture of resistance fails; to develop (both in theory and in practice) architecture as a creative thinking activity that it determines itself, and which is, precisely because it is a self-determining activity, capable of breaking the frameworks of its specific given social and cultural situation. In this, however, the following is essential: pursuing the hypothesis of architectural capacity isn’t simply a way of bringing architecture back to life, it isn’t simply a way of working our way out of the crisis. It is already the way of asserting and implementing architecture as a self-determining activity in the world. It is the way of practising architecture that we are aiming at in this book. At this point we can describe it as the potentially endless process of reformulating the hypothesis that there is architectural capacity. The architectural “provisional moral code” therefore isn’t only a way of acting in exceptional situations, it isn’t only a provisional solution that can help us work our way out of the crisis. Rather, it is the very principle of practising architecture, and practising it in a way that differs from all of the four ways presented in the previous chapter. It is the practising of architecture in the way of a fifth position. As a conclusion to this chapter we will outline this position in its difference compared with the other four positions. In this, particular attention will be paid to the difference between this fifth position and the architecture of resistance, which served as our starting point here. By developing the implications of this position which it, itself, isn’t able to develop, we are also separating from it.

Architecture of piercing affirmation Let us first return to the two criteria, based on which the four fundamental positions on which architecture stands and from which it operates, were delineated. Within the framework of the first criterion, which concerns the question of how architecture itself is determined, all four positions understand architecture as an activity that is determined in two possible ways:

42  Towards the fifth position either from the outside or from the inside. The fifth position, however, is determined differently. More precisely, with this position, the criterion of determination itself changes. Instead of the either/or schema, the fifth position is determined with the schema neither/nor: architecture is neither determined from the inside, from within architecture as an autonomous formal system, nor is it determined from the outside, from the broader social and cultural situation. If we borrow a term from Lacan’s psychoanalysis, we can say that it is determined in an extimate way,22 by a moment of internal exteriority. The fifth position’s determining moment is something internal in the sense (in which we argue here) that architecture is a creative thinking practice which alone sets the rules that guide the way it works, alone assigns itself its own tasks, and alone determines the specific ways it produces its objects; in short, in the sense that it is an activity that produces its objects within its own formal system of self-determination. And this moment is something exterior in the sense that what architecture produces within its formal system can’t be reduced to this system, that is, to the field of architectural knowledge and practice and to the determination of this field by the given (in each case, specific) social and cultural or historical contexts. The successful architectural products, the instances of architectural capacity, are produced within the formal system of architecture, but they can never be situated within this system entirely. They always interrupt it, punch a “hole” in it, they always remain also exterior to it. They belong to the body of objects of a special kind, the kind that pierce their (specific) spatial, cultural, and temporal determination. (We referred to this earlier by saying that they have a hypothetical status.) The exteriority in question here is therefore a radical exteriority—it is an exteriority with respect to each given situation, to each given world. But this exteriority originates from within architecture itself; it is the exterior consequence of the strictly inner-architectural production of an object. The objects that architecture produces within its formal system are therefore potentially the points of the radical exteriority with respect to the given world—they are the points of the internal exteriority of that world. This brings us to the second criterion of the analysis, which concerns architecture’s relation to the society and culture within which it operates. The four positions decide between the two options: architecture is an activity that either (uncritically) assents to the social reality as it is, or it operates—or should operate—by critically intervening in the given social reality; whereby, as we saw, also the two positions that aspire to the critical practice of architecture—the architecture of resistance and the architecture of social reformism—are unable to actually realise this aspiration. The limits of their critical action are set by the very system they aim to criticise. The fifth position defines itself differently also with respect to this criterion. Neither does it accept the given state of affairs, nor does it ground its action in resisting or opposing the given state of affairs. It doesn’t determine itself within the

Towards the fifth position  43 framework of the for/against scheme. Instead, it decides for something that the given choice doesn’t presuppose. It decides for architecture, for the affirmation of architecture in the world. And the decision to affirm architecture is to decide for the production of a special kind of objects, the kind that by virtue of their internal structure interrupt the given world and its predominant logic, that break it from within. This too is a form of critique, but a critique of a different kind than that to which the architecture of resistance unsuccessfully aspires. In order to further explain this, we return to the question of the difference between the two positions. Both the architecture of resistance and the architecture of the fifth position understand architecture as an activity that alone determines the selection of its issues and the production of its objects. But the architecture of resistance seeks “permission” for such a practice in the given conditions, in the situation. For this position, it is only when architecture acts in a socially critical way, only when it works towards greater social well-being, that it can justify itself as a self-determining activity, confirm itself as a meaningful practice. Its logic of reasoning goes as follows: it is only when the critique of reality is possible that architecture is possible. The fifth position, however, takes as its foundation and the starting point for its fight for architecture the simple requirement that architecture be a self-determining practice. The first and primary task architecture assigns itself is that it appears and affirms itself in the world as architecture. Which means that it affirms itself as a specific creative thinking practice, that is, as a practice that is capable of acting in the world in a way inappropriate to the world. In other words, architecture affirms itself in the world in the form of its instances, and these instances are those objects that work in their time and situation such that they pierce their situational and temporal determination. The fifth position therefore follows a logic that is precisely contrary to that followed by the architecture of resistance. It can be summarised using the following reasoning: it is only when architecture is possible that the critique of reality is possible. The architecture of resistance is grounded in the gesture of resistance, while the fifth position grounds itself, in contrast, in the affirmative gesture. It is grounded in the affirmation of architecture or the affirmation of the architectural capacity. This is not an affirmation of the autonomy of architecture in the sense of a withdrawal into the ivory tower of architecture; it is an affirmation of the specific way of working of architecture, which according to its structural logic is working within the conditions of the given world irrespective of these conditions. It works by piercing them from within. The fifth position can therefore be called the architecture of piercing affirmation. It is precisely in its dedication to affirming architecture in the world that its transformative capacity, its piercing power, also consists. This is potential of architecture as a self-determining creative thinking practice that the architecture of resistance doesn’t recognise. It doesn’t see and thus isn’t able to develop the piercing or the creative power contained

44  Towards the fifth position in its own understanding of architecture. Instead, it distances itself from its radical requirement that architecture alone determine its concerns and the production of its objects, and hastily assures us that such self-determination is not of course enough, that architecture should not be, to resort to a popular phrase, “an end in itself,” but that it has to be useful and serve society. This is yet another important difference between the architecture of resistance and the architecture of resistance which is at the same time also affirmative; because for the latter we can say that it insists precisely on architecture being a useless creative thinking practice.23 And it is precisely this uselessness that poses a great challenge for the world of global capitalism. Of course, also architecture of the fifth position always designs and constructs various useful and usable structures. But for this position it is decisive that these structures are constructed as architecture, that they are architectural objects—and architecture in its architecturalness, in that which constitutes its products as architectural objects, is of no use to the capitalist world.24 At this point we can return to Tafuri’s analysis of the crisis of architecture. For it is in the uselessness of architecture that Tafuri too recognised a certain minimal possibility for architecture.25 In the preface to the American edition of Architecture and Utopia he designated such architecture, which he described as sublimely useless, pure architecture. This was architecture that capitalism stripped of its ideological function; as Tafuri put it in his oft-quoted assertion: What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture. That is to say, what it has taken away in general from ideological prefiguration. With this, one is led almost automatically to the discovery of what may well be the ‘drama’ of architecture today: that is, to see architecture obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness. To the deceptive attempts to give architecture an ideological dress, I shall always prefer the sincerity of those who have the courage to speak of that silent and outdated ‘purity’; even if this, too, still harbours an ideological inspiration pathetic in its anachronism.26 “Pure architecture” is, for Tafuri, architecture that no longer aspires to the utopian “architecture for a liberated society” and no longer tries to change the world. It consents instead to being useless—in the best case, sublimely useless—which is why Tafuri favoured this position. He supported it because this position realised that its ideological function was powerless and thus he renounced it and returned to architecture purified of all utopian intentions. Although, as he added, neither was pure architecture entirely purified of the supplement of ideology. Tafuri’s view was, then, that one could arrive at architecture that didn’t serve as an ideological instrument of society through its “purification”.

Towards the fifth position  45 In this way one can, in his view, reach, or at least come very close to, the “null point” of architecture, that is to say, its point of purity. In contrast to this I would argue, with this book, that architecture doesn’t reach its “null point” through its purification. Rather the opposite: it is architecture itself that introduces such point into the world, and out of this point it then constructs its products. This point is that in which architecture finds support when it posits its hypotheses. It is the logical presupposition of each individual hypothesis based on which every architect works, and which declares what architecture is and how it is to be implemented in the world. This isn’t a null point in the sense of being non-ideological. It is null in the sense that, from the perspective of the given situation, it doesn’t exist at all, that it is impossible. Following Badiou, we referred to this point earlier as a real point. It manifests itself in the form of a declaration that the practice of architecture, which is for the given situation impossible, is indeed possible. For the work of architects, which Tafuri described as the return to (sublime) uselessness, I will therefore say that it was in fact an instance of practising architecture in the way of affirming the null point, which is consistent with the fifth position.27 Their work could be summarised as follows: they were practicing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the work of architecture was already highly instrumentalised. They were faced with the fact that architecture was losing everything that could render it meaningful, that it was turning into merely a constitutive part of the capitalist machine. But they nonetheless continued with their practice. They continued by starting from the null point. For there, where it seemed there was no way to go and where no clear larger plan existed, where according to the laws of the given situation there was nothing to be seen, they nonetheless found something: they took a decision that one has to proceed with architecture and they worked at developing ways to realise this. From project to project, in different modes and different media, they drew all possible consequences of the hypothesis that architecture that wasn’t part of the machine was possible, that there is architectural capacity. Their only support in this process came in the form of their own decision, that they had chosen the right direction, because they chose it to the best of their abilities. They raised, as Lacan and Badiou would have it, the impotence of architecture in the given situation to the level of the impossible—that is to say, they turned it into the possibility of the impossible; more precisely, into the possibility of that which in the given situation appeared as something impossible—the possibility that architecture, which is supported in nothing else but its own capacity, still continues nonetheless to realise itself in the world. Their sole source of support came from the null point of this nothing else, of this real point of theirs. They ventured ahead then, based on nothing other than their own willingness and capacity to proceed with architecture. Their practice organised itself around this null point, and from this point on they worked to realise their architectural projects. Thus, they kept affirming that this null point

46  Towards the fifth position nonetheless was something, that successful architectural projects, instances of architecture, stood in its place.28 In what follows we proceed in the direction outlined in this chapter. We make the hypothesis, that there is architectural capacity, more concrete by identifying and describing the consequences of such, those that are relevant for our specific concern. The first one we draw is this: what architecture has to insist on today, the real point onto which it must hold, no matter what, is that it constructs objects with an internal difference. It is with the construction of such objects that architecture acts in the world in a way that is inappropriate for this world. As our starting point for advancing this argument we will take some concepts of the theory of tectonics developed by Kenneth Frampton. His theory is relevant for our elaboration of the theoretical structure of architecture as a creative practice for at least three reasons. The first one is connected to the content of Frampton’s theory: according to Frampton, architecture produces objects of a special kind, which in reference to Heidegger he designates things. The second reason is formal: in order to explain architecture, Frampton uses the conceptual triad of structure, construction, and tectonics. This second reason is closely connected with the third: in order to be properly understood, Frampton’s use of this triad requires the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan as interlocutor; this is at least our view. Regardless of the fact that Frampton does not refer to nor make use of Lacanian conceptualisations, it is only against the background of the connection of the three categories of Lacan’s psychoanalysis—the intertwinement of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real—that the productive charge of Frampton’s conceptual triad becomes fully apparent. And reading Frampton’s thoughts in the context of Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory also enables us to answer some of the questions that Frampton’s theory of tectonics fails to answer. Furthermore, with the help of Lacan’s concept of the subject we can show that in constructing objects of a special kind, architecture also constructs itself as a specific—subjectified—action. Architectural production of objects with an internal difference is at the same time the act of the composition of architecture as the subject. In order to explain how it is possible that objects of a special kind appear in the world, ones that work in a trans-worldly way, we must therefore introduce also the notion of the Lacanian subject. It is this that constitutes the focus of the next chapter, an outline of the theoretical tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis that play a productive role also in the field of architecture—the concepts of the subject and the specific object, the objet petit a.

Notes 1 That this was the central objective of the modern movement is well (and unapologetically) put by Barry Bergdoll: “In short, the credo of the modern movement, despite what historians now recognize as its great variety of positions and practices, was that a new architecture could ultimately serve for the large-scale transformation of the inherited order—whether the physical order of

Towards the fifth position  47 cities and suburbs or, for the most committed, the transformation of inherited social, political, and even economic structures.” B. Bergdoll, “Introduction,” in Small Scale Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, ed. Andres Lepik (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 7. 2 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigi La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 3 For an in-depth analysis of Tafuri’s understanding of the crisis of architecture, which in contrast to this book puts in the foreground the crisis as the product of the work of an architectural historian who reveals history in its irreducible inner tensions and interminability, see Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture, trans. Alta Price (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 4 Cited in Rixt Hoekstra, Building versus Bildung: Manfredo Tafuri and the Construction of a Historical Discipline (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2005), 29. 5 See for instance Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 176, 178, 179, etc. 6 Tafuri noted that for architects, the recognition of their decline as active ideologists created an atmosphere of anxiety, and he further explained that there was, “ominously present on the horizon,” “the worst of the evils,” which was “the decline of the architect’s ‘professional’ status and his introduction into programs where the ideological role of architecture is minimal.” Cf. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 176, 178. 7 See Tafuri’s explanations: ibid., 134–135, etc. 8 As an example of the latter approach, Tafuri presented the work of Piranesi, in particular his Campo Marzio project. He saw the critical capacity of this project in the fact that it revealed the inner contradiction of society and the age of reason, that is, the irrationality at the core of the rational structure, and he described Piranesi’s revelation as “an act that in itself might offer a ray of hope.” He added, however, that the architecture and city planning of the Enlightenment were quick to ensure that the truth revealed by Piranesi was immediately and effectively concealed. Cf. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 14–16. The following question arises here: wouldn’t it be more appropriate to understand that which Tafuri sees as a critical intervention in society, as Piranesi’s capacity or sensibility for the irrational dimensions of every rational order, for that which within the given order exceeds or ruptures this order; as the capacity, then, which is the fundamental characteristic of every creative action? 9 Tafuri asserted in a number of places in this book that architects were incapable of seeing their complicity in the process of firmly establishing the system of advanced capitalism, and thus kept repeating the same mistakes that brought architecture to its state of impotence. He explained, for instance: “Architects, after having ideologically anticipated the iron-clad law of the plan, are now incapable of understanding historically the road travelled; and thus they rebel at the extreme consequences of the processes they helped set in motion. What is worse, they attempt pathetic ‘ethical’ relaunchings of modern architecture, assigning to it political tasks adapted solely to temporarily placating preoccupations as abstract as they are unjustifiable.” Architecture and Utopia, 178. 10 Cf. ibid., 179. 11 As Tafuri explained in the preface to the American edition of his book: “Of course, once the work of ideological criticism has been completed, there remains the problem of deciding what instruments of knowledge might be immediately useful to the political struggle. It is precisely here that my discourse must end, but certainly not by choice.” Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, x. For Tafuri’s political orientation see Hoekstra, Building versus Bildung, 157–173, etc. Hoekstra writes that Tafuri and his colleagues, gathered around Contropiano magazine,

48  Towards the fifth position “proposed a revolution-in-negativo: a revolution without content,” a gradual undermining of the “secure” foundations of bourgeois capitalism: “Not the construction of a brave new world, but the destruction of the existing one: this was the fundamental choice made by Tafuri and his comrades.” She proceeds that they rejected the idea of a revolution as a leap from one system to another, but this doesn’t mean that they were calling for evolution or reform. Rather, they saw a possibility for true change in a long-lasting process of undermining and fragmenting the existing order, “so that its parts could be reassembled in accordance with a new order. It was thought that this was the only true way to effect substantial change: it was a long-term process in which the analytical and theoretical work of the historian took primary place.” See Hoekstra, Building versus Bildung, 166. 12 Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018). 13 Cf. ibid., 39. 14 The crisis of Marxism is in Badiou’s view tied to the destruction of the framework of the historical referents that secured Marxism the identity of the “historically active” revolutionary political doctrine. Badiou lists three such fundamental referents: the formation of the socialist states that presented themselves as the allies of the Marxist doctrine, the wars of national liberation that found support in Marxist thought, and the workers’ movements that referred to Marxism. For more on this see Alain Badiou, Can Politics be Thought?, 40–44. 15 For Descartes’s understanding of the provisional moral code see René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21–26. For Badiou’s use of Descartes’s provisional moral code see http:​//www​.entr​etemp​s.ass​o.fr/​Badio​u/06-​07.ht​m (accessed August 28, 2018). 16 “My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could, and to follow no less constantly the most doubtful opinions, once I had opted for them, than I would have if they had been the most certain ones. In this I imitated those travellers who, finding themselves lost in a forest, must not wander in circles first to one side then to the other, and still less stop in one place, but have to walk as straight as possible in one direction, and not alter course for weak reasons, even if it might only have been chance which had led them to settle on the direction they had chosen; for by this means, even if they do not end up precisely where they want to be, they will eventually reach somewhere where they will most likely be better off than the middle of a forest.” Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, 22. 17 “… and seeing that our will tends to pursue or shun only what our intellect represents to it as good or bad, it is sufficient to make a sound judgment in order to act well, and to judge as well as we can in order to do our best; that is to say, to acquire all the virtues and with them all the other goods we are capable of acquiring. And when we are certain that this state of affairs exists, we cannot fail to be happy.” Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, 25. 18 We use the term architectural capacity analogously with Kant’s classification of human thinking into three, as he calls them, cognitive capacities or faculties of cognition (Erkenntnisvermögen): understanding, the power of judgement, and reason. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 267. Here we follow Rado Riha, who shows that this triad is relevant also for architecture. He explains: “If we risk certain simplification we can say that the understanding corresponds to the technically structural aspect of the architectural practice; to the faculty of reason belongs, both on the practical and

Towards the fifth position  49 theoretical level, the fundamental idea that guides and orients a given architectural project; and the power of judgement is the ability of the architect to connect all the factors that a proposed project requires in a singular and independent way, such that the result of this connection allows the following judgement: ‘This is an instance of architecture.’” Cf. Rado Riha, “Arhitektura in razsodna moč” (“Architecture and the Power of Judgement”), in Objekt v arhitekturi, ed. Petra Čeferin (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC SAZU, forthcoming). (My translation.) 19 The architectural capacity actually doesn’t exist in and of itself but exists only in its materialisations in the form of various concrete instances of the architectural capacity—architectural objects. 20 It has to be added here that architectural objects exist with various degrees of intensity, as it were, or with various degrees of the architectural capacity realised in them—from the weakest to the strongest degree, which is characteristic of the so-called breakthrough architectural works that have radically intervened in the established architectural knowledge and changed it forever, so to speak. There is, however, the threshold—one could also say the null degree of realised architectural capacity—below which there is no architecture left, but only ordinary objects. Whether a building is or is not an architectural object, however, of course cannot be definitively decided and claimed once and for all, but has to be re-examined and reassessed each time anew. This claim is further developed in the continuation of this book. 21 For a more detailed account of the special status of the architectural object see the chapter “The architectural object” in this book. 22 Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Seminar VII, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 139. For an explanation of this concept see the next chapter, the section “The Lacanian triad.” 23 In this respect the fifth position indeed differs from all the other four positions, for they all follow the principle that architecture has to be useful for the given world. They define usefulness in various ways, but in the final instance they link it to two principles that only appear to be in opposition: to be useful in preserving the market logic, or to be useful for society. But the society that architecture wants to be useful for is the given society, the society of global capitalism, and this is a society which is itself subordinated to and regulated by the market logic. In short, usefulness is understood and measured in the terms of the given world: useful is that which is useful for the world as it is, that which preserves the given order of the world. 24 Admittedly, today’s world tries to monetarily evaluate this key dimension of architecture that can never be fully determined, to put a price on it. An example of this is the phenomenon of star-architecture, which is basically an attempt to determine, more precisely, quantify, this dimension of architecture, and to do this by measuring it in terms of or according to the architect’s fame factor: the more famous the name, the more valuable the architecture, and the higher its price. 25 In this position Tafuri saw a certain possibility for architecture. Not in the sense of some kind of a solution or salvation for architecture, but in the sense of an option that remained open to architecture in the contemporary situation. This position is no less part of the capitalist machine, but at least it doesn’t pretend to act in a socially critical way, nor that it would have acted in such a way had the circumstances been more favourable. 26 Cf. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, ix. 27 In Architecture and Utopia Tafuri didn’t specify which architects he had in mind as the representatives of the practice of (sublime) uselessness. However, K. Michael Hays writes in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA:

50  Towards the fifth position MIT Press, 2000, 146) that Tafuri further elaborated his position on contemporary architecture in his essay “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” in particular in an engagement with the architecture of the American neo-avantgarde, Aldo Rossi, and some others. Hays maintains that this was necessary because Tafuri’s forming of his own theoretical position owed a lot to a confrontation with these specific architectural practices. In “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir” Tafuri discussed the work of these architects as an example of a return of architecture to form without utopia or a retreat into an isolated disciplinary field of architecture. Hays returns to the work of some of the architects that Tafuri discusses—notably A. Rossi, P. Eisenman, and J. Hejduk—in his (later) book Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, and presents it in a very different light. He shows in this book that their practice can in fact be seen as an example of the approach we define here as the fifth position: their work isn’t a retreat into the “inner field of architecture” but rather the advancement of a kind of critical capacity of architecture, the kind that corresponded to the specificity of the historical situation of the 1960s and 1970s, when resistance no longer seemed to bring change. Cf. Hays, Architecture’s Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) 13. And Hays—which is of particular interest for us—links this capacity of architecture to its production of a specific type of object, the kind he describes as the “objectdifferent-from-itself,” and in order to explain this capacity Hays too draws on the Lacanian triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. 28 Tafuri described the work of these architects as a retreat into a disciplinary autonomy of architecture. But in so doing he concealed that which was for their work essential, and that is the null point as the central point of their action. Their work is indeed an exemplary case of the autonomy of architecture that is based on the dialectics of autonomy and heteronomy: the autonomy that is organised around the point of irreducible heteronomy or the null point of architecture.

3

The structural logic of architecture

Frampton’s thesis that architecture is a thing is his response to a problem that interests us as well: the problem of the closing down of possibilities to practise architecture as an activity that isn’t a constitutive part of the mechanism of the market-instrumental logic that rules the world today. In the introduction to his essay “Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic” he presents this problem as, on the one hand, the reduction of architecture to a “shelter packaged like a giant commodity,” and, on the other, architecture’s reduction to scenography.1 Both popular ways of understanding and practising architecture are for Frampton two instances of missing the point of architecture and what it truly is; because for him architecture is precisely not scenography, regardless of whether it appears in the framework of a modern or an historicist outlook. Nor is architecture a commodity. In order to prevent the process of reducing architectural products to one or the other, in Frampton’s view one has to return to that which is intrinsic to architecture and is specific to it. The question Clement Greenberg already posed back in the 1960s in reference to the domain of art has to be asked for architecture as well: what is it that determines architecture and that should not be lost in order for architecture not to be reduced to yet another form of entertainment or yet another form of therapy? Frampton responds by insisting that one has to return to a material base of architecture, which is “that architecture must of necessity be embodied in structural and constructional form.”2 In other words, architecture is a process and a product of articulating the construction and structure of an object; in short, architecture is construction. It is, however, a special kind of construction—tectonic construction. Frampton defines tectonics as a craft in the original Greek sense of poiesis—the craft of making, that is, the making of material products. He points out that the term tekton originally signified carpenter or builder, but that later it also came to assume a poetic dimension. Thus, tectonics is on the one hand the craft of making, of handling materials that both the architect and the carpenter/craftsman have in common. On the other hand, however, tectonics in architecture shouldn’t be understood simply as making in the technical-instrumental sense of the word. There is also something else that is at stake in tectonic construction, something other than the construction

52  The structural logic of architecture of a suitable utilitarian object. The making of things is at stake here. And according to Frampton, things are objects of a special kind. He describes them in a way similar to the way in which we talk about what we have here designated architectural objects. When he talks about the tectonic joint, which is for Frampton an architectural object par excellence, he describes it in terms of an object that is always “time-bound” or situated in its time, yet is on the other hand also simultaneously “excised from the continuity of time.”3 And later he says that architecture is the activity that “defies time,” that “is anachronistic by definition,” and whose “duration and durability are its ultimate values.”4 Therefore, for Frampton, architecture is an activity that produces, with its own procedures, its own special kind of objects. In the essay “Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic” he defines the special status of these procedures and objects, of tectonic building and built form, as follows: However, building remains essentially tectonic rather than scenographic in character and it may be argued that it is first and foremost an act of construction rather than a discourse predicated on the surface, volume and plan, to cite Le Corbusier’s ‘Three Reminders to Architects’. Thus one may assert that building is ontological rather than representational in character, and that built form is a presence rather than something standing for an absence. In Martin Heidegger’s terminology we may think of it as a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘sign’.5 Frampton defines the meaning of built form as a “thing” in reference to Heidegger. What is crucial in this definition, however, is that he determines a “thing” in opposition to the built form as a “sign.” Based on this opposition a thing appears as something that is directly given in what it is: a thing is that which presents itself in its ontological status, that is to say, in its being. Crucial for a thing, if we use Badiou’s formulation, is its being-there.6 As such, it is supported in itself and in this sense, it is self-supporting: a thing is something that is present, something that has, to use another of Frampton’s formulations with which he defines tectonic construction, amplified presence.7 It counts as an object in its immediate corporeal, material presence. In contrast, built form as a sign, is something that is not self-supporting, that does not present itself in what it is. Its fundamental function is in this case merely representational; as a sign, built form represents or shows something that isn’t already itself, something else. It shows (us) something that isn’t directly present but rather remains absent, concealed, or hidden. This is what Frampton distances himself from. Architecture for him isn’t a kind of façade that would express various social, political, or cultural interests or tendencies. Or, to simplify somewhat: architecture isn’t the “decorative garb” of the shed, nor is it a decorated shed. Just as architecture is for Frampton not the making of bare utilitarian objects, it is not the constructing of its objects as signs. Architecture is that which is neither one nor the

The structural logic of architecture  53 other, and that “neither one nor the other” he designates a thing. And there is something else that he stresses: a thing is the product of the craft of making, constructing, and it counts or matters precisely as a material object, in its corporeal material presence. A thing is something material. The assessment that a thing is something material, however, requires also a response to the following question: what kind of materiality is actually at stake here, what is the materiality of an architectural thing? Since Frampton defines architecture as a thing in reference to Heidegger’s concept of the thing as a product of creative act, we will certainly not miss the point if we say that the materiality of an architectural thing doesn’t and can’t simply consist in the materiality of the building materials involved. In his famous essay “The Thing,”8 Heidegger focuses on the question of what the materiality of the thing is; more precisely, what is the thingness of the potter’s jug that is an instance of the thing par excellence, the thing as the mark of the human presence in the world. And just as for Heidegger the thingness of the jug as a thing isn’t clay, the thingness of architecture as a thing, if we anticipate, isn’t simply concrete, glass, or steel. It is materiality that determines products of architecture objects of a special kind—and we designate them resistant objects. We call them this because they are the products of creative, that is, human action which have the capacity to persevere in time. They are resistant to time and, in this sense, they are durable or potentially eternal. They are anachronistic in their character—and they are this way because they were created. Frampton, however, doesn’t concern himself with the question of what precisely this materiality is, what the materiality of architecture as a thing is. It would seem that also, generally speaking, he isn’t really interested in the question what an architectural thing is—that is to say, what it is in its ontological status. He is clearer in his definitions per negationem, in outlining what architecture is not: for Frampton, architecture is neither scenography nor an ordinary utilitarian object or commodity. However, in “Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic” we do nonetheless find two instances of a positively formulated explanation of what architecture as a thing actually is. In both cases, the explanation is grounded in the introduction of three notions, in what we could also call three objects or conditions. In one case, this is the triad of the technological, the scenographic, and the tectonic object; in the other case, it is the triad of structure, construction, and tectonics. It is with these triads that, in Frampton’s view, one can explain architecture, which is a thing.

The architectural triad I The use of three categories as a formal tool to determine architecture in architectural theory certainly isn’t new.9 Nonetheless, we can say that Frampton’s use of the three categories does bring something new. For what matters in his understanding of the architectural object as a thing isn’t the three categories in and of themselves; what is crucial is the way he links

54  The structural logic of architecture them together. It is precisely the logic of connecting the three categories that is, in my view, where the key to Frampton’s concept of the architectural thing as the object with an internal difference lies. The thing as the object with an inner difference is developed in more detail later in the book; for now, we must focus on connecting the logic of the three categories, the product of which is the architectural thing. This logic can be explained with the help of the first triad, the triad of the technological, the scenographic, and the tectonic object, whereby we presuppose that the same formal logic organises also the triad of structure, construction, and tectonics. This is how Frampton outlines the first triad: The term ‘tectonic’ cannot be divorced from the technological, and it is this that gives it a certain ambivalence. In this regard it is possible to identify three distinct conditions: 1) the technological object, which arises directly out of meeting an instrumental need; 2) the scenographic object, which may be used equally to allude to an absent or hidden element; and 3) the tectonic object, which appears in two modes. We may refer to these modes as ontological and representational tectonic. The first involves a constructional element that is shaped so as to emphasize its static role and cultural status. This is the tectonic as it appears in Botticher’s interpretation of the Doric column. The second mode involves the representation of a constructional element which is present, but hidden. These two modes can be seen as paralleling the distinction that Semper made between the structural-technical and the structural symbolic.10 Frampton defines the technological object as a direct response to some instrumental need. But it would not be amiss to define this object also as a pure utilitarian object. If we explain it from the constructional point of view, we can also say that the technological object is simply a technically adequate (solid, enduring, economical, etc.) articulation of the construction and structure of a building. The scenographic object is the object that doesn’t present itself in what it is, but rather represents something else, something absent or hidden. Both such objects are already familiar to us: they are the objects with which Frampton explains what architecture is not. But there is also the third object, the tectonic object. The function of this object is, as we summarise Frampton’s argument, to make out of the scenographic and the technological object the architectural object or the thing of architecture. For Frampton, the tectonic object appears in two modes, and he describes both in terms of construction, as the two modes of articulating a constructional element. In the case of the ontological tectonic a constructional element is fashioned such that its static, load-bearing role is also expressed as such, as load-bearing, while in the second case the emphasis is on its representational dimension: a constructional element or the load-bearing system is hidden and yet, it is present. Based on this we can, to begin with, establish two points: first, the tectonic object is neither the sum of the other two objects nor is it their

The structural logic of architecture  55 fusion; it is their specific connection. Or, to be more precise: tectonic construction can be understood as the procedure of connecting the other two objects in a specific way, and the tectonic object as the result of this connection that gives the final architectural product the character of a thing. In the case of the ontological tectonic, it is the load-bearing function that is emphasised in this connection, and in the case of the representational tectonic, it is the representational aspect that is primary. Second, the notion of the tectonic object actually entails that which is characteristic for every architectural construction: it is the connection of two objects. It is some sort of utilitarian object that also, simultaneously, performs the representational function. In this way it states that it is architecture—and says this either in terms of its envelope (representational tectonics) or through the concept and form of the load-bearing systems and elements (ontological tectonics). But these two points don’t yet provide an adequate response to the following two questions that the triad of objects presents us. First, how in the connection of the other two objects does the tectonic object actually present itself, and what is this object in and of itself? Second, if we imagine the tectonic object as the result of the connection of the other two objects, then we cannot explain the core of Frampton’s hypothesis—which is that the architectural or tectonic proposal, materialised as a building, is neither representational or scenographic, nor is it simply a utilitarian object or a technological articulation of its construction. What is the tectonic object if it is neither one nor the other, neither scenographic or representational nor something utilitarian or technological? Stated another way: what is this third object, if all its substance, if all its content lies only in the negation of the other two objects? First it has to be said that we don’t actually begin with three objects. For it is only in the connection of both other objects that the tectonic object actually produces itself. At the same time, it is only in this connection that the other two objects become architectural objects, the components of the product of architecture as an architectural thing. And second, I would argue that we can present the neither/nor character of the tectonic object in positive terms if we understand the tectonic construction as that kind of connection between the utilitarian and the scenographic object, which is oriented towards that which separates both objects. In other words, the tectonic construction is oriented towards the gap between them, towards that distance between them expressed in the formulation neither one nor the other. It is the articulation of this gap that the connection of the two objects creates as something new. And it presents this gap as that which connects both objects into an architectural thing. The name for this created connection, articulated as the minimal, so to speak, null distance11 between the utilitarian and the scenographic object, is the tectonic object. In other words, the tectonic object is the name for the link that connects the technological and the scenographic object such that it is present between them as their null distance.

56  The structural logic of architecture So, the tectonic object assumes the paradoxical role of that which separates and connects at the same time. This paradox can also be formulated another way: the tectonic object supplements the other two; it is the supplement of the connecting element. But at the same time, as a positively given third element, the tectonic object is precisely lacking in this connection—from the standpoint of fundamental arithmetic there are only two components in this connection: the technological and the scenographic object. Put another way, in the connection of the other two objects the tectonic object is, in itself, absent, but at the same time it is nonetheless present. It is present—and this is essential—in its material effect, in the fact that both objects together, as one, so to speak, now appear as an architectural thing. In its ontological status, in its being, then, the tectonic object is something very special: it is some paradoxical present absence. The question that appears at this point is of course: how can we explain this in more detail? How can we explain the tectonic object, that is, the object that is in its being a present absence? To this question we respond with the help of another conceptual triad—the Lacanian triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. It is my contention that the logic in which the three fundamental categories of Lacan’s psychoanalysis are connected can also help us understand and better explain the connection between the three objects of Frampton’s theory. Obviously, the Lacanian triad can’t be directly translated into the language of architectural theory, neither are we looking to impose such a direct psychoanalytic reading of architecture. What I want to point out is that there is a structural affinity between the logic in which the categories of the architectural triad are joined and the logic in which the categories of Lacan’s triad are connected—whereby the Lacanian Symbolic is homologous with the technological or the utilitarian object, the Imaginary with the scenographic object, and the Real homologous with the tectonic object. And in introducing the Lacanian triad, we definitively leave behind the conceptualisation of reality according to which reality is built of Two that connects in various ways into One. We enter the thinking according to which every reality or every system is split in itself or decompleted by the otherness or heterogeneity it contains within itself.

The Lacanian triad Let us have a look at the three fundamental categories with which Lacanian psychoanalysis operates. The Symbolic can be described as the structure that constitutes and regulates our world, our reality. Exemplary cases of such a structure are language12 and law, and in the most general sense it could be understood simply as a network of signifiers, and the signifiers understood as the building blocks of meaning; that is, as the elements that don’t have meaning in and by themselves; in their ordered connection, however, they produce meaning. By saying that the symbolic structure constitutes

The structural logic of architecture  57 reality we are in effect saying the following: for a human being, as a being of speech, only that which is named, which acquires meaning through being named, exists. Only when something is assigned a name, when it is articulated in language, does it become part of reality. It is language that brings things into their existence.13 Once we speak about meaning, however, we have already come to the second category, the Imaginary. Generally speaking, the Imaginary can be defined as the spatio-temporally determined appearance of the symbolic structure in reality. That is to say, it can be defined as the way or manner in which we imagine and understand our symbolically constituted reality, the way we live this reality. In short, the connection between the Symbolic and the Imaginary constitutes our reality, the world in which we live. Reality is a montage of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. But this isn’t all. In order for reality to constitute itself, something has to be excluded from it. As psychoanalyst Bruce Fink puts it: “something must, structurally speaking, be pushed outside for there to even be an inside,” and so we can say that “what, of necessity, remains outside … causes what is inside.”14 And that which is of necessity excluded belongs to the third category—the category of the Real. This description conveys two things about the Real and reality. The first is that the Real is something outside reality, that is radically other to reality. It can be defined as something that is outside law (a pure contingency), outside the realm of meaning, and beyond the horizon of signification. But this description also tells us something else. It tells us that the Real isn’t simply outside or external to reality—that we don’t have the Real on one side and reality on the other, but that one is by necessity connected to the other. This connection can be described as follows: that which is outside (the Real) is that which is not inside (in reality). In other words, outside is that which lacks inside. Reality therefore isn’t whole, it isn’t One, because something is lacking in it. The Real can therefore be defined, for now, as that which is lacking in reality, but which is, for the constitution of reality, absolutely crucial. That it is lacking, therefore, doesn’t mean that there is no such thing, that the Real is something null. The Real is something that never appears directly, it cannot be subsumed to the symbolic structure and the imaginary representation, but it nonetheless is, or, to be more precise, it works, it takes effects. Psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller describes its effects in relation to the Imaginary and the Symbolic as follows: “Whereas the Imaginary is ultimately subordinated to the Symbolic, the Real resists, it bounces back: ‘The Real—this is impossible’.”15 This is one of Lacan’s definitions of the Real: the Real is impossible. Here it has to be pointed out that the notion that something is impossible is very different from the notion that something isn’t possible. The statement that the Real isn’t possible should, according to Lacan, be understood as follows: the Real—and herein lies the crucial shift—is impossible.16 This means that it isn’t simply unattainable, exterior to reality, but that it is articulated

58  The structural logic of architecture inside reality as that which is unattainable, outside reality. So the Real, which has the status of the impossible, isn’t simply outside symbolically structured reality nor is it simply inside this reality. In order to determine its location Lacan coins a new term: extimacy. Extimacy is to be understood as a radical otherness, exteriority (thus the prefix ex-) which, however, figures as something most interior, most intimate. Miller defines this notion well when he says that “Extimité is not the contrary of intimité. Extimité says that the intime is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”17 So the Real is something that can’t be reduced to the symbolic structure. It is that which insists as its enduring, resistant, ever-so-real otherness. It works in the way that it interrupts, ruptures, the symbolic structure; it prevents this structure from becoming whole. And here the role of the Imaginary comes into play. For the Imaginary patches up this rupture in different ways, and at the same time, makes it manifest. For us, however, another explanation of the Imaginary is relevant, one that can be found in Rado Riha’s article on the possibility of a creative act. He explains: The Imaginary is not only the way in which we live, experience the symbolically ordered reality, as I mentioned before. The Imaginary is also the specific manner in which the dropping out of the Real from the Symbolic is staged, literally, as a mis-en-scene. For the dropping out of the Real could be either negated or repressed. Yet this paradoxical internal externality or extimacy of the Real can also appear as that which is crucial.”18 With the last formulation we have returned to the architectural thing and to Frampton’s triad. As it isn’t difficult to see, our explanation of the triad of the technological, the scenographic, and the tectonic object is but an elaboration of the thesis that there is a structural affinity between the way in which the objects of the architectural triad are connected and the way in which the categories of the Lacanian triad—the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real—are connected. The tectonic object connects the technological and scenographic object in the way that we see them both as a single object that is differentiated in itself, an object with a gap in itself. We see it as the architectural thing. The tectonic object, as a countable, positively given object, is absent in the connection of both other objects; however, its absence is the condition for their connection to appear as the architectural thing. In its absence, then, the tectonic object is very much present. The mode of present absence in which the tectonic object operates in the architectural triad is homologous with the function of the Real in the Lacanian triad. Just as the exclusion of the Real is the condition for the constitution of reality—reality as a montage of the Symbolic and the Imaginary—the tectonic object is that “internal exception” of the montage of the technological and scenographic object, which is for this montage crucial, and on account of which the two together appear as the architectural thing. Just as in their

The structural logic of architecture  59 connection the Symbolic and the Imaginary stand as one, so to speak, vis-àvis the Real, the utilitarian object and the scenographic object stand as one, so to speak, vis-à-vis the internal exception of the tectonic object. Let us now return briefly to the function of the Imaginary as concealing the Real. For it is this that is the prevalent tendency of our time. Philosopher Alenka Zupančič maintains that we live in a time and a world that denies the very idea of the Real. This notion itself is dismissed as the last great illusion, the last grand narrative. And this, Zupančič proceeds, is nothing but “the last grand narrative from the era of the end of grand narratives.” It goes like this: “there is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities, that at least in principle are all of equal value.”19 The effect of such a view is, as she notes, highly problematic. Why? Because with this view, reality, the given reality, appears as matter-of-fact, as something self-evident. What happens is “not exactly the disappearance of the Real, but, rather, its full coincidence with reality. In other words, the reality principle is now conceived of as the only and ultimate Real.”20 What is concealed, then, is that immanent gap or fissure of symbolically structured reality, which indicates that one can create some distance to the reality principle, to that which reality presents as the objectively given and self-evident fact, and that some other way of understanding reality and acting in it is possible. It is precisely within this framework of the reality principle as the exclusive criterion of architectural practice that the four architectural positions discussed in the previous chapters are also situated. All four take as their guide those principles that are entirely anchored in the given reality, like the principles of utility and usefulness. While the architecture of the imperative of invention and the architecture of resistance take as their starting point the principle of self-determination and thus open up the prospect of breaching the framework of the given reality, they too realise this principle in a way that remains entirely bound to the demands of the given reality. The orientation of the imperative of invention serves as a particularly illustrative case of consenting to the principle of (the given) reality and denying the notion of the Real. It declares that its task is the invention of the new, but it understands the new as something that can be determined and defined by the criteria and in terms of the categories of the given reality. For this position, the new is that which is more technologically advanced, formally more daring, bigger, taller, out of everything that has already been designed and built. This position understands the new as the differentiation between different products. And with such an understanding, it subordinates itself and its own action to the principle of the market, which requires precisely that—the continuous production of something new, new as different from what there (already) is, new as something the world has never seen before. For architecture, however, some other difference is central: the difference as that which precisely eludes the given criteria—as that which the world will never see directly. This is not the difference between individual products; it

60  The structural logic of architecture is the difference that is internal to the very product of architecture—it is that which makes this product different from itself. It is precisely the articulation of this difference that is, in a successful tectonic construction, created as something new. On account of this internal difference, which is a result of the creative act, a successful product of architecture can’t be entirely situated in the spatio-temporal coordinates in which it was made. This is a constitutive difference—the difference from which the product itself is made and which constitutes it as the architectural thing or the architectural object. It is owing to its immanent constitutive difference that this object is always something more and other than itself. That is to say, it is something more and other than utility and representation, and something more and other than the specific given conditions in and from which it was made. To put it simply: ontologically, in its being, the architectural object is that, that it isn’t (only) what it is. Its “more and other” is not situated in some unattainable beyond nor is it the architectural object’s hidden essence. The architectural object is not an object that expresses something “more or other.” It is the object itself, the way it is, that it simply is this “more and other.” Where there is such an object, however, there is always also the subject. We agree with Frampton that architecture isn’t a sign, that it isn’t a representation of something that is absent, but that it is, rather, the materially based craft of making, which means a presentation of specific material objects—things. However, the supporting elements of Frampton’s theoretical construction—the triad of the technological, the scenographic, and the tectonic object—have to be supplemented with a fourth element. Just as in the knot of the Lacanian triad, consisting of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, the instance of the subject is also tied; the triad of Frampton’s objects has to be supplemented with the category of the subject. In order to substantiate this claim, we turn again to Lacan’s psychoanalysis.

The subject of psychoanalysis Let us begin with the elementary definitions of the Lacanian notion of the subject. The subject of psychoanalysis is the human being as the being of speech, that is, as the being of the symbolic, signifying structure that determines human reality and the human being part of it. Lacan’s short introductory definition is as follows: the subject is the subject of the signifier.21 In developing his theory further, Lacan supplements the definition: because the subject is the subject of the signifier, she is also the subject of enjoyment. Let me clarify somewhat these two definitions. We can begin by recalling a few elementary definitions of the signifier. In order to know what a signifier is, that is, what it means, let’s write it as S1; another signifier is needed, S2, which tells us what the first signifier means. A single signifier isn’t possible; the minimum number of signifiers is two. This unusual characteristic, that a signifier is always already two

The structural logic of architecture  61 signifiers, is expressed by one of the fundamental principles of the signifying logic, the principle of differentiality. This principle argues that a signifier is determined, that is, it acquires its meaning, only in its difference in relation to another signifier; S1 acquires its meaning only in retrospect, in relation to, S2. In the signifying logic there is no original meaning, no original identity; relation takes precedence over identity. The differentiality principle, however, entails yet another crucial implication and this leads us to Lacan’s understanding of the subject. Even before it differs from another, a signifier already differs from itself. Why? Because the condition of the possibility of a signifier is the place of its inscription, the place where the signifier can be situated. So, there is always already two—the place and the signifier. But it is a special kind of two, because the two appearing together, the place and the signifier, isn’t possible: either the signifier appears and the place of its inscription disappears, or the signifier disappears and the place of its inscription appears.22 The signifier is that kind of One that is divided into Two. Or, it is One that differs from itself—One with an internal difference. From this the following ensues: signifiers connect in a chain that is, in principle, endless. For every signifier requires yet another. And every additional signifier is already one signifier less (as each one requires another in order to acquire its own meaning). In this succession of signifiers, however, something persistently repeats itself, or, as could also be said, something remains the same, irrespective of the variety of combinations and successions of signifiers. What repeats itself incessantly as a kind of sameness is precisely that—that something is lacking. In other words, it is the lack that is repeated, the lack of the signifier that is also the lack of its meaning. This lack is that which is most persistent in meaning; persistent in the sense that it keeps re-emerging as something that cannot be reduced to the signifying system, as something that incessantly does not appear; or, to use Lacan’s formulation, as that which in the signifying chain “doesn’t stop not being written.”23 This is Lacan’s definition of the impossible, which corresponds to the Real. The lack is the trace of the impossible-real that is articulated within the symbolic structure, and it is articulated precisely as something that is always excluded, that is always without, other of this structure. To the unfolding of signifiers, however, Lacan adds, and this is specific to his use of the signifying logic, also the category of the subject. His fundamental definition of the signifier is: “a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier.”24 The signifying chain is in principle endless, and the subject can never arrive at herself in it, she can never attain her being. Her being keeps eluding her, because a signifier only represents it, and only temporarily, just as long as the representation is not subsumed by another signifier to which the representation is addressed.25 Based on this, we can say for the subject only, that in the signifying chain is she present as its indeterminant = X; more precisely, as its empty place, the place of one-less that keeps sliding along the signifying chain. The subject that slides incessantly along the signifying chain without ever being able to attain her

62  The structural logic of architecture being is the subject of desire. For Lacan’s psychoanalysis, a human being as the speaking being is the subject of desire. Let us now focus briefly on Lacan’s concept of desire as that which determines the subject.26 In the most general sense desire can be understood as the specific causality that determines a human being as the being of the symbolic or as the speaking being. It is defined by two objects so closely connected that one can simply speak about the object of desire, which is redoubled in itself. Yet, despite their close connection, the two objects have to be differentiated. The object or the objects of desire are the objects that are in front of desire, the ones to which desire aspires. Desire strives to attain them, but for each one of them, if and when it is attained, it turns out that it isn’t actually that which desire desired. Either it is not yet that which was desired, or it is no longer that which was desired. One way or another, the attained object inescapably bears the stamp of “this is not it.” Inevitably, it turns out that the desired object was but an empty shell of desire.27 The object of desire, however, also has the role of that unique object that is behind desire and elicits it as its cause. The designation “object” should not mislead us here: the object-cause of desire is precisely not an object like all the other objects of desire. It would be better to designate it as an objectal moment. In and of itself it is nothing specific and nothing that can be specified. It is nothing positively given. It might be easiest to explain it if we say that it is the “this is not it” that accompanies every desired object and to which every desired object turns—and which in fact functions as the only proper “this is it,” because it is this “object” that animates desire, that keeps desire going. The object-cause is therefore, on the one hand, the presupposition of the functioning of desire, the presupposition that directs desire to its object. On the other hand, it is the product of the functioning of desire, it is the “this is not it” which desire produces—and which keeps desire going. Thus, it is the product that desire positions in the place of its own cause. More precisely, the object-cause is produced as the surplus product of the striving of desire to attain its object, as that which always remains in the process of abolishing each specific object of desire. This remainder is something that is always the same, which doesn’t change and which keeps being repeated. We can thus say that this is that which is the most resistant, in desire. It is the resistant objectal moment that the signifier cannot subsume. It has the status of the Real as that which, in Lacan’s words, “doesn’t stop not being written.” It keeps returning to the place of the cause that animates the mechanism of desire. With the outline of the Real status of the object-cause of desire we returned to Lacan’s double definition of the subject. Precisely because the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of the signifier and the subject of desire she is, according to Lacan, also something else. She is also the subject of enjoyment and the subject of the drive. The transition from one definition to the other is based on the premise that the subject of the signifier—the

The structural logic of architecture  63 subject that stands in the place of the lack of the signifier and as such doesn’t have her own signifier—isn’t simply nothing. She is something more than just an empty place of the signifying chain. She is something more in so far as her emptiness takes the form of some object that doesn’t belong to the universe of all other symbolic and imaginary objects. It takes the form of some Real object that in the signifying system embodies precisely that which exists in it by way of elusion. Lacan’s name for this non-signifying moment that is part of the signifying structure is objet petit a or object a. In the object a the subject comes closest to that which is inseparable from her and which she herself is; in short, she comes closest to her being. Which also means that in the object a the subject attains a certain satisfaction that could correspond to desire and its constitutive impossibility to be satisfied; Lacan designates this satisfaction enjoyment. In a somewhat simplified way, we can understand enjoyment as the satisfaction in which the subject, in a specific way, takes upon herself her eternal impossibility to be satisfied as the subject of desire. Thus, it is only in relation to the object a that the status of the subject is really decided. For in this relation is decided the rebirth of the subject: her rebirth as the subject of enjoyment. The decision regarding the status of the subject is contained in a specific attitude; more precisely, in the specific act of the subject as the subject of desire. This act can be specified as the subject’s turn from the object which is before desire towards the object which is behind desire, the object-cause of desire. It is in this turn that the subject of psychoanalysis is constituted as the subject of enjoyment and the subject of the drive. It could also be said that it is in this turn that the subject is only really constituted as the subject—the kind of subject that procures herself a certain modicum of being. This is the subject that interests us, because architecture as a creative practice functions as just such a subject: the subject that in some specific way finds support in itself and thus separates from the Other. This turn can be designated as the turn of subjectification—it is in this sense that we also understand Badiou’s statement that “the subject is subjectification.”28 In the next step we will observe the act of connecting the subject with the object a—the composition of the subject of the signifier and the object a in which the subject only constitutes herself as subject—with the help of Lacan’s conceptualisation of the phenomenon of anamorphosis, the technique of optical deception once employed in painting.

Anamorphosis One of the best-known cases of anamorphosis in painting, to which Lacan refers in his seminars, is Holbein’s The Ambassadors (Figure 3.1). The painting depicts two figures, English ambassadors, surrounded with various objects that symbolise the arts and sciences, and in the bottom of the painting there is also a strange object, a stain of some kind. Lacan describes it as the magical floating object. As the observer moves away from the painting

64  The structural logic of architecture

Figure 3.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. © The National Gallery, London.

and, at some point, turns around and looks back at it, this stain reveals itself to her gaze as a recognisable image. The observer can recognise the contours of a skull in it. And at that moment the painting acquires a new meaning. This is how Lacan describes this revelation: For the secret of this picture, whose implications I have pointed out to you, the kinships with the vanitas, the way this fascinating picture presents, between the two splendidly dressed and immobile figures, everything that recalls, in the perspective of the period, the vanity of the arts and sciences—the secret of this picture is given at the moment when, moving slightly away, little by little, to the left, then turning around, we see what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head.29 In what sense can the transformation of a stain into a recognisable image, one that shows what the stain-floating object “really” is, as it were, help us understand the turn away from the object of desire and towards the

The structural logic of architecture  65 object-cause of desire; the turn that can also be described as the turn from looking towards the “desire to see,”30 which means to see that which is essential for desire, which triggers and animates desire, that is to say, to see its object-cause? The following analogy can help us here. The episode in which the observer sees the unrecognisable floating object first only as a stain and then, from a particular vantage point, recognises a skull in it, can be explained as follows: if we look at the painting in an unengaged way, which means, if we look at it without the desire to see, we recognise in the foreground only a stain of some kind. But if we look at the painting in order to see, if our looking is invested with the desire to see, we are on the way to transforming that which shows itself as a meaningless stain into something that we can recognise as the bearer of (new) meaning in the painting. We begin to truly look and truly think; it could also be said that we open our eyes so that we would also see.31 In other words, just as with the anamorphic change of the vantage point, a meaningless stain begins to reveal itself in its meaning as the death’s head, which renders suspicious the established meaning of the depicted objects, opens up the abyss of the search for a meaning; in the case of looking that is guided by the desire to see, a meaningless stain transforms into an open question or a riddle that requires resolution. It transforms into something that functions as the cause that triggers the observer’s desire, her desire to see and understand what the real cause of her desire is. The change of the observer’s vantage point, as a result of which the stain reveals itself as the death’s head, is, from the viewpoint of the problematics that concern us here—and this is the problematics of the subject of desire—comparable to the turning of the subject away from the object of desire and towards the object-cause that sets desire in motion. Lacan says that in The Ambassadors, Holbein makes the subject visible for us in a specific way.32 But where in the painting is the subject? If we follow Lacan, the subject is, strictly speaking, the stain in the foreground of the painting. More precisely, the stain is that place where the subject is inscribed in the painting, it is the place where we are inscribed in the painting—we, the observers, as the subjects. The stain is the subject, which is part of the painting. Which also means: the stain is the subject, which is the object. Let us unpack this statement with the help of Lacan’s explanation of the logic of looking and seeing. We as the subjects of the signifier are the subjects of desire, and it is the signifier that brings the world in which we live, the things and us in it as its constituent parts, into its existence and into its meaning. The subject is a constitutive part of the signifying process, and the definition that a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier can also be read as follows: the subject is inscribed in all things. This is why, if we remain at the scopic level, when we look at things, at occurrences, and ourselves in the world, we don’t look and see these things, these occurrences, and ourselves as they or we supposedly are “in and of themselves” or “in and of

66  The structural logic of architecture ourselves.” Instead, we always see things in the way that they address us, in the way they show themselves to our gaze—the gaze of us as subjects. In the world, that is, in the picture of the world that we see, we as subjects are inscribed with our gaze—with the point from which we see, but which we can never see as such, at least not in any act of direct looking and seeing. Being inscribed in the world with the point of our gaze means that this point is not in us but is instead outside us. Because we are the subjects of the signifier and thus the subjects of desire, we can also call the point of the gaze the point of the desire to see. This is the point from which we desire, the point where that which drives our desire is. To appear as subjects, however, means that we are ready to take upon us the fact that we are with our desire—desire to see and to understand—engaged in what things mean in the world, in what the world is. We act as subjects when we are capable and ready to “see” in our picture of the world also our own desire to see, our own gaze. Precisely in this capacity or readiness of ours is the turn of subjectification; which doesn’t proceed by itself—an additional effort is required, but if we are successful, our seeing of the world is in this case subjectified. In Lacan’s view, painting works in the way that it triggers such a subjectified relation to the world. It functions such that it captures our gaze. It is in this sense that it takes us into the picture, places us in the “inside” position. Lacan argues that Holbein shows us “that, as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught.”33 He shows this in the form of the stain in the foreground of the painting. We are caught in that stain, in the enigmatic object on the canvas, “the singular object floating in the foreground, which is there to be looked at, in order to catch, I would almost say, to catch in its trap, the observer, that is to say, us.”34 How does this stain catch us in the picture? It does so simply by virtue of raising the question: what does the stain mean, what does it want to tell us? By asking this question we are already caught in the picture, and we are caught in it as the ones who desire to see, as the subjects of desire. The stain: this is us, who look because we want to see; it is us with our desire to see, with our gaze in the form of an object—with the gaze that is part of the picture. Lacan defines this gaze, which is part of the picture, as the object a: “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze.”35 The gaze therefore doesn’t coincide with the eyes of the observer. Between the gaze and the eyes there is a split, a fissure. The gaze is outside; again, it is in the picture that we are looking at: “The correlative of the picture, to be situated in the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of gaze.”36 This is the point with which we are inscribed in the world, in all things of the world, and which in direct looking and seeing we can never see. The subject therefore isn’t only the one who is looking at things in the world, but also the one who is looked at. We are always subjected to the gaze which is outside: “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.”37 The gaze is there, where things are: “On

The structural logic of architecture  67 the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them.”38 Things are the ones who look at me, me as the observer/subject. Vision therefore isn’t simply what perspective teaches us and what is usually schematised in the form of a triangle, whose apex lies in the focal point—Lacan designates this point as the geometral point39—while the other two vertices of the triangle form the line that represents what we are looking at, some object. For the subject/observer is not located only in this point. As Lacan puts it: I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But it is me, me alone who is in the picture.40 The subject isn’t simply in the position of the mastering eye of perspective, she isn’t simply the subject-master in whose eye the image of all things in the world is born and who defines their meaning. Instead, it is she who is also looked at, who is in the picture. This means that the perspectival triangle has to be supplemented with another triangle. In the apex of this second triangle lies the point of the gaze, which Lacan identifies with the point of light,41 as that point from which things look back at us, and the line across from this point represents the picture drawn in the subject’s/observer’s eye. This brings us to Lacan’s diagram of the gaze42 (Figure 3.2). It is composed of two triangles. The apex of the first triangle—the geometral point or the subject of the representation—is situated on the line that represents the picture (that is painted in the eye): the subject of the representation is in the picture. The apex of the second triangle—the point of light or the gaze as the object a—is situated on the line that represents what the subject of the representation looks at and wants to see, an object: the gaze is outside, in the field of the visible. These two triangles intersect at two points, and the line that connects these two points is the place where vision takes place. Lacan marks this place with the indication screen/image. Let us now take a look at this place. On the one side of it is the geometral point/the subject of the representation, and on the other side it is the point

Figure 3.2 Jacques Lacan, Diagram of the Gaze, from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

68  The structural logic of architecture of light/the gaze as the object a. This is that point towards which the eye of the subject is directed, but which is precisely the point that the subject cannot see: the very source of light is something that we cannot see. We can see only on the condition that the source of light is obscured. Lacan explains that we can only see if between the eye and the source of light, that is, in the field of the visible, a small screen is introduced “which cuts into that which is illuminated without being seen” and this “makes the milky light retreat, as it were, into the shadow, and allows the object it concealed to emerge.”43 This is how vision materialises; only in this way can we see. But what do we see? We see some picture or some thing, in the foreground of which there is always some kind of a “stain,” although not the stain in the literal sense that is illustrated by the floating object in Holbein’s painting. This is a stain in the meaning of the screen; already by virtue of showing us something, by offering something to our gaze, the picture/thing raises the question: what is actually shown with it, what, in the broadest sense, is the meaning of its image? The image the picture/thing shows also functions (at the same time) as the screen that conceals that which it shows; what it gives us to see it also hides at the same time. The picture/thing offers its image as the screen and the screen as its image. We try to decipher the meaning of this image, find out what is “behind” the image-screen that the picture or the thing shows. But “behind” we see, strictly speaking, nothing at all: what we see, when we “look behind the screen,” that which “behind” or “beyond” the image-screen is, is indeed nothing but a new image, which means a new screen that hides that which it shows. We are caught in an infinite sliding away: image—screen—image … We never get to that which is essential: that is, to see that which we have wanted to see the entire time—and this means to see that which we precisely do not see when we see a picture. What we don’t see is the point that we, so to speak, structurally can’t see. We can’t see it because, first, it is the point that gives to our vision everything that we see, because it is the point from which we see. And second, because it is always already concealed by the image-screen. This point: this is our gaze, the gaze of we who look and see as subjects; it is the gaze as the object a. If we return to Holbein’s painting: this is not the gaze of the observer who is looking at the painting, so to speak, from outside, neutrally or in an unengaged way; it is the gaze of the observer-subject who has already entered the picture and who observes the stain of the floating object as the screen, that conceals something, as the open question or the riddle that has to be solved. At the moment the subject observes the picture in this way, she has, in Lacan’s world, laid down her gaze in the picture.44 The stain is now the mark of the subject’s entering the picture, it is the mark of the presence of her gaze, of her desire to see. That the gaze is laid down in the picture means precisely that the subject cannot see the gaze, that she no longer has an approach to it. The gaze appears merely as something that calls for an intervention of the observer’s looking, the intervention of the fact that she desires to see. As such it always appears in the shape

The structural logic of architecture  69 of some image. The specificity of Holbein’s painting is that it gives us sight of the gaze as a stain, which means as something where there is nothing to see. Of course, in the very next moment, as soon as we try to answer the question of what we actually see, the stain disappears as a stain and turns into a bearer of meaning—we see the image of a skull, which speaks about the nothingness of the world. Lacan’s explanation of Holbein’s painting clearly shows, with the help of the diagram of the split between the eye and the gaze, between the subject/ observer and the object a, that the subject can never attain her desire-to-see or her gaze—that which is the cause of her seeing, of how she sees what she sees. The subject/observer always has to make do only with what is given to her vision, with the image of a thing; every attempt to see “beyond” the image, the point of her gaze, wherefrom she “images” a thing, only brings her to a new image, which again functions as a screen against the gaze, the object a. And this schema also shows us something else: that “beyond” an image there is actually nothing hidden, that in vision we don’t have to do with an image or an appearance of a thing beyond which the “thing in itself” was hidden. As Lacan put it “beyond appearance there is nothing in itself, there is the gaze.”45 That there is a something “beyond” is already an interpretation of the subject/observer, an interpretation that misses the essential point—that the subject is not in front of the picture but that she is in it. She is in it in the stain, in the absence, the marked territory. The stain is therefore both the place of the object a and the place of the subject. Therein they come closest to each other. On the basis of what has been said thus far we can set out two points that are crucial for our line of argumentation. First, if we take seriously the thesis that the subject is inscribed in the world, in all things of the world, this leads us to the conclusion that no thing is whole. There is always something inscribed in it that doesn’t belong to it—the subject’s gaze. A thing is always a thing with a breach, with a hole of the gaze in it. In short: every thing is a thing with a hole.46 The same can be argued for the subject. She is inscribed in the world with her gaze, whereby this gaze is precisely that which she cannot see, which is foreign to her and in which she, as subject, disappears. This is our second point: the subject too is not whole. Something that is not herself belongs to the subject, some objectal moment or the surplus of the object a. Recall Lacan's description of the process of vision: “No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But it is me, me alone who is in the picture.” The picture is in the observer's eye, and in the picture is the subject with her gaze. The gaze is that in the picture which the subject doesn’t see, although the gaze as object enables her vision. How then does the subject connect with the surplus of the object that belongs to her as something that she can’t appropriate, can’t lay claim to? The subject who desires to see and the object a as the cause of her desire, strictly speaking, only appear at the moment the observer/subject enters the

70  The structural logic of architecture picture. From this point on, vision is shaped as the process in which the subject seeks access to her gaze, to the object a as the point in which she in fact is. To be more precise, vision depends on the way in which the observer/ subject, as it were, “composes” herself with the point of her gaze, with something that already is the subject, yet has the form of something that is irreducible to the subject, outside and foreign to her, in short, if has the form of an objectal moment—the form of the object a. In the context of the problematics addressed herein we will, in something of a simplification, make a distinction between the two modes in which the subject composes herself with her gaze as the object a, the cause of her desire to see. We will refer to the first as the interpretative mode, and to the second as the subjectified mode. In the first mode the subject constitutes herself as the subject of desire, and in the second mode as the subject of the drive. The second mode in my view corresponds also to Badiou’s maxim “to hold on to the real point.” In the interpretative mode the subject remains tied to the position in which she sees the image of a thing primarily as an open question, as something that requires an explanation, as something that holds a hidden meaning. She remains tied to the image as the screen, to the image that shows and hides, reveals and conceals at the same time, and thus to the sliding away from one image/screen to another image/screen without ever actually encountering the gaze as the object-cause of her vision. This is the mode of vision that enables the subject to maintain a certain relation to that object that for her is essential: the gaze as the object a. But at the same time, it allows the subject to keep a safe distance from the object-gaze, as it conceals this object with the image painted in the subject’s eye. Maintaining this distance is essential, for if it were ever to attain its object, desire would cease to exist, and with it the subject of desire too would cease.47 It is this mechanism that is at work in The Ambassadors: in the stain/death’s head the gaze as the object-cause is activated, put into play, but in the very same gesture it is also already concealed. The death’s head shows or promises us, on the one hand, that the ultimate meaning of the picture is hidden in it, the meaning that Lacan describes as a reflection of the nothingness of all things, including our own nothingness. On the other hand, however, it is precisely this meaning, precisely this image of the death’s head that is our defence that prevents us from truly confronting, really encountering, this nothingness, from coming face to face with it. In the second, subjectified mode of looking, the subject also preserves a certain distance to her object-cause of desire. In this case, too, the subject doesn’t see the gaze itself. But in spite of this the subject succeeds in establishing a certain relation to the object a, in which neither the object a is activated in the way that it is at the same time concealed, nor does the subject cease as the subject; rather the opposite—it is only now that the subject truly subjectifies herself. This doesn’t mean that she constitutes herself as the subject who attained full satisfaction and her being, that which she really is.

The structural logic of architecture  71 She does, however, acquire that bit of being that she as the being of speech can attain. What is at stake here is actually a paradoxical subjectification or, to use Lacan’s words, a subjectification without subject. The subject truly subjectifies herself only as that which Lacan designates a headless subject.48 In other words, the subject truly subjectifies herself only as the subject of the drive, and she does so by composing herself with the point of her gaze as that which is constitutive for her, even though it is outside her; the impossible point of the gaze, precisely as the point of the impossible, she presents and affirms in the world as that “cause”49 which is for her, insofar as she is part of this world, crucial. This is the way in which the subject can tear herself out from the full determination of the world in which she acts.

A headless subject of architecture Let us observe now on what this way of acting, designated as the subjectified access of the subject to the object a, is based. The subject is a product of the signifier, she is bound to the signifying chain and destined to ceaseless sliding in it. She seeks to find the meaning, she searches for her being, yet in this sliding away of the signifiers she neither attains the final meaning nor does she find the answer to the question of who she is. She exists, but only as the lack of being—the lack of being who wants to be. Which is why within the framework of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory the subject is defined also as an alienated subject. The subject is alienated in language; she is bound to the signifying chain and determined by it, without ever being able to step out of its sliding away and arrive at who she herself is. A human being as the being of speech can’t avoid alienation; alienation is, so to speak, our destiny.50 But if the subject of the signifier can’t avoid alienation in the first step, it is nonetheless possible in the second step that she rids herself of her submission to the Other of the signifying system, that she manages to separate herself from it. That which causes the subject’s alienation is indeed also that which enables the subject to get out of it, to separate from the Other. In Lacan’s words, “the subject experiences in this interval [of speech] something that motivates him Other [Autre chose] than the effects of meaning.”51 And what is this “Autre chose”? The condition for the subject’s separation from the Other is her encounter with something that is precisely not a ceaseless slippage of signification and meaning, a ceaseless production of the lack of being. This is the encounter with the fact that the absence of meaning is never absent, that the lack of being never lacks, but that it is always also, so to speak, “personally” (i.e. as a lack of being) present. It is present in the internal surplus product of the signifying production of meaning, in the object a—the moment of enjoyment. This moment is produced by the signifier itself as something that is irreducible to it, but in which the subject can achieve a certain modicum of being. An encounter with the object a is the mark of a different functioning of desire—the one in which the subject constitutes herself as the subject of enjoyment and the subject of the drive.

72  The structural logic of architecture Lacan’s explanation of The Ambassadors presents Holbein’s painting as a possibility that the subject is motivated by something Other than the effects of meaning. The moment the observer turns back to look at the painting and there, where the meaningless stain was, suddenly recognises the death’s head, is the moment the painting returns the gaze. The observer now encounters her own gaze in the painting. She looks at the painting, and in the stain she sees herself as the gaze that she laid down in the painting. She sees herself as the enigmatic part of the painting, she sees herself as an object. A true encounter of the subject with the object that belongs to her, although she can’t recognise herself in it, is built as the moment of encounter with the meaningless stain (which, however, in the very same instance already turns out to be the bearer of signification and meaning). This is the moment when the observer/subject sees the stain as the structural element of the image, of the death’s head; she sees non-meaning as a constitutive element of meaning; in other words, she sees the gaze, that blind-spot of vision, as that which enables vision. To be sure, the observer/subject immediately attaches a signifier to this meaningless stain, she tries to give it a meaning, to make sense of it. And in this interpretative gesture she inscribes herself and the objectal moment in the order of the Other, in the signifying system. Apart from this interpretative pursuit of the effects of meaning, however, the encounter of the observer/subject with the meaningless stain opens up yet another possibility—the possibility of subjectified action. This is the possibility that the observer/subject subjectifies herself as a headless subject, the subject who has separated from the order of the Other. This isn’t the subject who acts headlessly, it is the subject who acts in the way of the drive. In other words, this is the subject who is guided by her “cause.” This brings us back to architecture. Because the architect who is guided by her “cause of architecture” is precisely this kind of subject. The “cause of architecture” can, in its first approximation, be described as some more or less clear notion an architect has as regards what architecture is or should be, and which she tries to realise in her work. This isn’t, however, some ideal notion of architecture that the architect would try to come as close as possible to in her work. It would be better to say that in her work the architect always already realises in a specific way also her “cause.” The architect doesn’t know in advance what exactly this “cause” is. Rather, she discovers it, finds it when she succeeds in constructing her objects well. She finds it in the well-constructed object, and the “cause” that she finds in the constructed object gives her support and works at the same time as incitement to continue, to try again to find out what this “cause” is. So the architect realises the “cause of architecture” in the way that in the construction of her object she also constructs the “cause,” whereby it is the “cause” that guides her in this process, that gives her support and orientation. She isn’t guided by the order of the Other but rather by her “cause.” This way of acting roughly corresponds to acting in the way of the drive, in which the subject constitutes herself as a headless subject. It can

The structural logic of architecture  73 be described as follows: the subject is after an object which is the aim of her desire. But the desired object always turns out to be “this is not it;” the subject misses the object by definition. In this process, however, the subject can nonetheless experience that in the action itself she gains something that lends her support in her action; that she nonetheless, we could say, attains her object. But this object is not that forever unattainable object of desire at which she is aiming. It is some other and different object, the object that emerged as the side effect of the aiming process itself. Miller says that this object is “satisfaction as object.”52 Thus, in the case of the drive, just as in the case of desire, we have to do with two objects. Lacan uses the English terms aim and goal to designate them. According to his schema of the drive the goal is the level of the specific satisfaction that the drive attains, satisfaction that isn’t generated by the object-aim; rather, it is satisfaction itself that now figures as object.53 Also, the creative thinking practice of architecture has to do with both types of objects. Its manifest object, its aim, is some utilitarian object determined in the requirements and conditions set at the beginning of a given design task. However, if in realising this task the architect does everything within her power, if she performs her task as architect well, then together with the utilitarian object54 she realises also something else, some other object. This other object is the satisfaction of the requirement that the architect perform her task well. It is the satisfaction of the indeterminant of the architectural capacity. Or, to apply Miller’s formulation: that other object is satisfaction of architecturalness as object. The architectural activity produces a single object—the utilitarian one; but if the architect performs her task well this object is redoubled in itself. It is redoubled into the utilitarian object and the “cause of architecture,” which is that specific form of architecturalness that the architect strives to realise with and in her action. The final product of the architect, the architectural object, is, in this sense, the connection of the utilitarian object and the realised “cause of architecture.” To put it another way: if together with the construction of the utilitarian object the satisfaction of architecturalness as object is also realised in it, that is to say, if the architect’s “cause” is also realised in it, then the utilitarian object, apart from being the utilitarian object, also becomes the architectural object. The architectural object is an object of a special kind. On the one hand, this is the object that is materially, “objectively” present in the world, just like any other object. But on the other hand, this object has a special status and meaning—for it’s also an instance of architecture, an appearance of architecture in the world. And as an instance of architecture it is precisely not present in the world simply “objectively,” empirically. Simply “objectively,” empirically it is not present in the following sense: as an instance of architecture this object can’t be determined by the predicative determinants of the situation itself. It is this characteristic of the architectural object that I pointed out in the previous chapter, when I said that it has only a

74  The structural logic of architecture hypothetical status. As the connection of utility and architecturalness, the architectural object is the presence of a specific materiality. It is the presence of a body that resists every spatio-temporal determination. It is the presence of the body of architecture. The architectural object which is an instance of architecture is an object of a special kind: it belongs to its situation such that it works as its immanent exception. It has all of the characteristics that Frampton outlines in his theory of tectonics. There is something else that we have to pay attention to here: just as “satisfaction as object” isn’t the subject’s aim in the case of the drive, it isn’t satisfaction of architecturalness that is the direct aim of the architect’s activity which would be exterior to it.55 Satisfaction of architecturalness is nothing but a realisation of the architectural capacity. It is the way of acting of the architect in which she does everything in her power to perform her architectural task well. How then should the architectural capacity be understood? Is it something that belongs to the personality of the architect, something hidden within her as her “creative power,” her “talent”? The architectural capacity certainly can’t be separated from the acting of the architect but nonetheless, it isn’t something that would exist within the architect as her inner creative power. Rather, it exists outside her. The architectural capacity has to be understood materialistically: it is materialised in that “cause of architecture,” that notion of architecture that guides the architect in her action and that the architect attains only insofar as she creates it, enacts it, constructs it in the form of material objects, successful products of architecture. It could also be said that the architectural capacity exists and works in the form of an idea that guides the architect—on the condition, of course, that we understand the notion of idea in a precisely defined way. The idea is not a thought that exists somewhere “beyond,” in the “heaven of ideas,” and that has to be lowered to the level of reality. The true idea is something of this world, it exists and has effects in reality itself and is the point of the inseparability of thought and action. The “cause of architecture”, however, isn’t only that which guides the architect. Strictly speaking, it is the “cause of architecture” that only creates its architect. Or: it creates her over and over again. It creates her in the never-ending process of design, in which the architect with her projects encircles the “cause” that guides her in her action. And just as the architect strives to realise some of that “cause” in her projects, render it visible in reality, it is the “cause of architecture” that gradually shapes her as the architect. It is in this sense that the subject of architecture is a headless subject. It is the subject created and guided by the “cause of architecture,” that ever-unattainable “cause” with which she shares her independence. The architect subjectifies herself such that with her constructional act she enters into the composition of such a headless subject. This is indeed, to apply Lacan’s definition of the drive, a “subjectification without subject,”56 which means without a subject as the self-conscious agency which following her clearly defined vision constructs and organises the world around her.

The structural logic of architecture  75 This way of working is a potentially endless process. The architect’s constructional act isn’t concluded with the construction of a planned architectural object. Rather, once this task is concluded it returns to its starting point, to the architect and her commitment to the “cause of architecture.” It returns to its starting point, whereby the conclusion of a design task is also already the beginning of a new construction—either the beginning of a new design task or the beginning of a critical reception of the constructed object or the further elaboration and development of some individual solution or fragment articulated in this object. Constructing an instance of architecture is indeed a repetitive encircling of the “cause of architecture.” The only “aim” of the architectural activity is, in the final instance, the circular conclusion of the act in a new beginning.57 As such, this activity is the scene of two indeterminates: the beginning indeterminate of the architectural capacity and the end indeterminate of a created instance of the “cause of architecture,” which is at the same time a return to a new beginning. Let us add something to the conclusion of this chapter. In the previous chapter we discussed the architectural activity as an activity that organises itself around a real point. An activity that is organised in this way has the structure of the turn away from the object of desire and towards the object cause of desire, which is characteristic for the structure of the drive. As psychoanalytic theory points out, however, the subject’s passage from acting at the level of desire to acting in the way of the drive doesn’t happen spontaneously. While submission to the Other or alienation is the destiny of every speaking being, separation from the Other isn’t destiny and doesn’t happen by itself. The condition that makes separation possible is a certain want. As Colette Soler explains: “Separation supposes a want to get out, a want to know what one is beyond what the Other can say, beyond what is inscribed in the Other.”58 If we draw on Lacan’s formulation that the subject “is called to be reborn—as desire’s object a—in order to know if he wants what he desires,”59 we can say that separation from the Other requires that the subject find out whether she really wants what she desires. But this doesn’t only hold true for the architect. If we understand architecture as a self-determining activity, as an activity that has the structure of the subject, we could say for architecture too that it is an activity structured in the way of “wanting its desire,” In short, for architecture as a creative thinking practice it isn’t enough that it organises itself around a real point; it also has to want its orientation towards a real point. And what does this mean? It means that it isn’t enough that the practice of architecture organises itself around the construction of the architectural objects, that in its design projects it strives to realise the “cause of architecture” over and over again. Apart from, and in addition to this, it also has to reflect on and explain what it is constructing, and what the significance and the meaning of its activity are. Acting in the way of wanting one’s desire isn’t a blind action—it is a reflective action. This holds true also for the activity of architecture. The constructional capacity has to be supplemented with yet another form of architectural capacity: the capacity to explain and

76  The structural logic of architecture present itself through architectural theory or philosophy of architecture,60 to itself and others, as that which it is—as a creative thinking practice that alone sets its orientation, determines its questions and its specific way of constructing its objects. Only when this theoretical form of architectural capacity too is developed can we say that architecture is advanced to the degree that it really wants what it desires. Only when both forms of architectural capacity are developed, that is, the design practice and the theoretical practice, can we speak about the true existence of architecture as a creative thinking practice. The aim of this book is to develop the theoretical capacity of architecture, which can shortly be described as an explanation and a conceptualization of architecture as a creative thinking practice. The argumentation developed thus far was based on the conceptual apparatuses of Badiou’s philosophy and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. We followed the outline of the mode of action, which Lacan conceptualises as operating in the way of the drive, and which Badiou understands as acting in line with the maxim “to hold on to a real point.” Each of the two modes reveals an important aspect of architecture as a creative thinking practice. What they both have in common, however, is that they successfully demonstrate how it is possible to be and to act in the world without being fully immersed into the mechanisms that regulate today’s world. This mode of action, which is characteristic for all creative practices, is what we defined as acting in the world irrespectively of the world. In the process of our explanation we have, up to this point, proceeded largely on the conceptual level; now we will shift to a more concrete material analysis of the architectural activity. In what follows we will define four concepts whereby the fundamental structural logic of architecture can be drawn: the architectural condition as that “null point” or the gap in the Other, which is the necessary formal condition for architecture to constitute itself and to act; the architectural act as the beginning of architecture’s acting in the world; architecture as subject, which is the mode of architecture’s existence in the world, and which we have described thus far as a potentially never-ending process in which the architect realises, in the world around her, that “cause of architecture” that guides her in her practice; and finally, the architectural object or the object with an immanent difference as the appearance or materialisation of architecture in the world.

Notes 1 Cf. K. Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” in Labour, Work and Architecture: Collected Essays in Architecture and Design (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 91. 2 See Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 92. 3 Ibid., 103. 4 Cf. Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1996), 27.

The structural logic of architecture  77 5 Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 93. 6 For the notion of “being-there” see Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). 7 Cf. ibid., 93. 8 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1971). 9 For the explanation of tectonics with the triad of structure, construction, and tectonics see, for instance Eduard Sekler, “Structure, Construction, Tectonics,” in Structure in Art and Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Brazilier, 1965). 10 Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 94. 11 For this distance we can say that it is null because it isn’t visible as such—there is a single object in front of us, such as a building or a column. And yet, this distance isn’t simply null, because for architecture, for the appearance of an architectural thing, it is precisely crucial. For more on this see the chapter “The architectural object.” 12 If we are precise, however, language can’t simply be equated with the Symbolic; in the case of language, we can in fact see particularly well that the three categories of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real are always present together, that there isn’t one category without the other two. As Lorenzo Chiesa points out and explains: “In a sense, the triad Imaginary, Symbolic, Real is reflected within language in the triad signified, signifier, letter.” Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), 57. 13 As Bruce Fink explains this: “The ‘social construction of reality’ implies a world that can be designated and discussed with the words provided by a social group’s (or subgroup’s) language. What cannot be said in its language is not part of its reality; it does not exist, strictly speaking. In Lacan’s terminology, existence is a product of language; language brings things into existence (makes them part of human reality), things which had no existence prior to being ciphered, symbolised, or put into words.” Cf. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 25. 14 Cf. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 27. 15 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Pet predavanj o Lacanu v Caracasu” (“Five lectures on Lacan in Caracas”), in Gospostvo, vzgoja, analiza, ed. S. Žižek, trans. E. Bahovec et al. (Ljubljana: Analecta, 1983), 28: “The Real is the dimension of that which in the game of the signifier doesn’t slide away nor does it transform like an image but, rather, ‘always returns to the same place’—as do stars and traumas. Whereas the Imaginary is ultimately subordinated to the Symbolic, the Real resists, it bounces back: ‘The Real—this is impossible.’ The Real isn’t whole: there are only ‘fragments of the Real’.” (My translation.) 16 To put this in a condensed form: for Lacan the Real doesn't exist; instead, it ex-sists. 17 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. M. Bracher (New York: University Press, 1994), 26. 18 Rado Riha, “The Semblant and the Act,” in Política común, Volume 9, 2016, https ​ : //qu ​ o d.li ​ b .umi ​ c h.ed ​ u /p/p ​ c /123 ​ 2 2227 ​ . 0009​ . 006?​ v iew=​ t ext;​ r gn=m​ a in (accessed July 13, 2020). 19 Cf. Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), 79–81. 20 Ibid., 80. Alenka Zupančič describes this condition as the arrival of a specific kind of dictatorship, “the inexorable dictatorship of the reality principle itself as something that ‘self-evidently’ functions as the ultimate limit of the possible.”

78  The structural logic of architecture She proceeds: “It seems as if we are dealing with some perverse delight concerning the fact that we have finally reached the point where nothing (other) is possible, and can thus peacefully enjoy our lives … We all know, however, that this ‘peaceful state’ is far from being actually peaceful, but instead generates ‘postmodern discontent in civilization’ itself.” Cf. ibid., 81. 21 Lacan in all stages of his work insists on the notion of the subject—in opposition to the structuralists who tried to develop structure without the subject (structure in relation to which the subject is simply the effect of the structure, for which, however, she is blinded). But he defines the subject in an entirely new way. 22 For an explanation of this logic see J.-A. Miller, “Matrix” (“Matrice,” Ornicar? 4, Paris, 1975), trans. Daniel G. Collins, https​://ww​w.lac​an.co​m/sym​ptom1​3/ mat​rix.h​tml (accessed June 6, 2020). 23 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Encore 1972-1973. On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. with notes Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998) 59, 94, 108, etc. I quote here the definition of the impossible which corresponds to the Real, which Lacan presents within the context of the triad of the necessity, the contingency, and the impossibility. Ibid., 94. 24 Lacan: “What must be stressed at the outset is that a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 207. 25 No signifier can determine, fixate, the subject, represent it fully; the subject is an agency that doesn’t have his or her own signifier. Therefore, Lacan represents it with the symbol $: “S for Subject, / for barred: the subject as barred by language, as alienated within the Other …” Cf. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 41. 26 Desire can, on the one hand, be defined as a structural moment of the signifying system or as that which drives the machinery of meaning that incessantly searches for meaning. This evasion of the final meaning—whereby it is the signifying structure that produces meaning yet at the same time the meaning can never be mapped by this structure—is an indication of desire. Lacan describes desire as something that crawls, slips, escapes in speech: “In this interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metonymy. It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret.” Cf. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 214. And on the other hand, desire can be defined as that which determines the subject. This means that it has some privileged connection with the subject or that it is correlative with the subject. 27 The characteristic of desire—that it never attains its object, the one that would satisfy it—is of course taken full advantage of by the mechanism of consumerism for the continuous production of ever-new goods and all attendant profit. The market always offers new variations of “this is it” products, which are supposed to satisfy our desire. If I return to the four positions: this same logic is followed not only by the architecture of the market logic, but also, as I pointed out earlier, by the architecture of the imperative of invention. 28 See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 171. 29 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 92. 30 I refer here to the concept of “the desire to see” as developed by Rado Riha. In the following passage he defines it succinctly: “… the seer who desires to see, on the contrary, has eyes that might see. He/She is not content to simply stare and

The structural logic of architecture  79 see what the situation is giving to see. Rather, he/she desires to see that which the situation structurally ‘conceals.’ He/She desires that which represents the impossibility for the situation itself and which points in this way to its radical contingency. The operator that reveals behind the apparent necessity the contingency is nothing other than desire. The desire to see, in its elementary form, manifests itself as a desire to see something there where, at first sight, there is nothing to be seen.” Cf. Rado Riha, “Seeing the Revolution, Seeing the Subject,” Parallax 27, April–June 2003 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 35. 31 One of the most famous appeals in architecture, to open our eyes to see, is certainly Le Corbusier’s famous appeal from his book Vers une Architecture, first published in 1923. He turned to his colleague architects as the ones who have eyes that do not see. But they should open their eyes to see, thus I would sum up Le Corbusier, to see not only that which the world directly gives them to see, but to also see that which is irreducible to the objective givens of the world, which the world, so to speak, structurally hides from them; and which means, to see or to be able to see architecture, the fragments of architecture in the world. 32 Lacan: “All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated …” Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 88. 33 Ibid., 92. 34 Lacan stresses, later on in the text, that the picture doesn’t catch the observer in the sense that it would set a trap for her gaze. Rather, it offers the observer the opportunity to see something, which is an invitation to her to lay down her gaze in the picture. Desire to see, therefore, also requires a certain decision, a certain want. To the invitation we also have to respond. A decision to respond, to activate our desire to see, is therefore on our side. Lacan: “The function of the picture—in relation to the person to whom the painter, literally, offers his picture to be seen—has a relation with the gaze. This relation is not, as it might at first seem, that of being a trap for the gaze. It might be thought that, like the actor, the painter wishes to be looked at. I do not think so. I think there is a relation with the gaze of the spectator, but that it is more complex. The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus—You want to see? Well, take a look at this!” Ibid., 101. 35 Ibid., 105. 36 Ibid., 96. 37 Ibid., 106. Referring to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lacan stresses that “we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world,” that we are under the gaze, “that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this;” ibid., 75. 38 Ibid., 109. 39 The geometral point is simply the “point of view,” the point from which the viewing subject observes an object and apprehends it through an image. What we commonly understand as perspective is what Lacan calls the geometral optics. 40 Ibid., 96. The English translation of the last sentence of the quotation is inadequate here and it is corrected. See the French original: “Sans doute, au fond de mon oeil, se peint le tableau. Le tableau, certes, est dans mon oeil. Mais moi, je suis dans le tableau.” Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse, Le séminaire, livre XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 89. 41 Lacan explains the point of gaze also by equating it with the point of light: just as the gaze, the point of light, too, is the point which enables our vision—“That

80  The structural logic of architecture which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted …”—but which we can nonetheless never see as such. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 96. 42 The significance of Lacan’s diagram of the gaze for the understanding and explanation of the logic of architecture has been pointed out by some other works of architectural theory and philosophy of architecture, such as Michael K. Hays’s Architecture’s Desire (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010) or Lorens Holm’s Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2010). 43 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 107–108. 44 Lacan: “He [the painter] gives something to the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze.” Cf. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 101. 45 Ibid., 103. 46 Alenka Zupančič explains well what it means to take seriously the claim that the subjective gaze is inscribed in the object. Generally speaking, the “subjective gaze” is understood as something that distorts the image of the object from the outside, while the object is in fact whole; she talks about this as the fantasy of wholeness. In her words: “This fantasy of wholeness clearly indicates that the ‘subjective gaze’ is regarded as something that distorts the image of the object from the outside, being in no way inherently related to this object. In other words, if we take the thesis that the subjective gaze is inscribed in the object seriously, then it follows from this that the object is necessarily not-whole. This does not mean that it always lacks the one thing that would make it complete; it means that it is constitutively not-whole.” Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 106. 47 This relation between the object a and the subject corresponds to what Lacan defines as the phantasy. For the elaboration of this concept see also the work of Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), etc. 48 See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 181, 184. 49 The notion of the “cause of architecture” that we develop herein is based on Rado Riha’s notion of the “thing of thought.” Riha develops this notion based on the thesis that the “thing of thought” can be understood in way similar to the way Lacan’s object cause of desire operates. Riha develops this argument further in his book Kant in drugi kopernikanski obrat v filozofiji (Kant and the Second Copernican Turn in Philosophy) (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC SAZU, 2012); abridged German edition Kant in Lacan’scher Absicht. Die kopernikanische Wende und das Reale (Wien and Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2018). 50 For a broader discussion of the problematics of the subject’s alienation in language see Colette Soler, “The Subject and the Other,” I, II, in Reading Seminar XI. Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 39–44 and 45–53. 51 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 843. Cited in Soler, “The Subject and the Other,” 49. 52 J.-A. Miller defines this object as follows: “What is the libido object? It isn’t material. The Freudian drive, which is a satisfaction-seeking Trieb, doesn’t seek any object in particular. It seeks satisfaction. The object that corresponds to the drive is satisfaction as object. That is what I would like to propose today, as a definition of Lacan’s object a: object a is satisfaction as an object.” Jacques-Alain

The structural logic of architecture  81 Miller, “On Perversion,” trans. Josephina Ayerza, ed. Bruce Fink, in Reading Seminars I and II. Lacan’s Return to Freud, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 313. 53 Cf. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 178, 179. 54 The utilitarian object is understood in this book as a building or some other built structure that fulfils various requirements and conditions defined as the starting points of its design, and that performs various functions including the function of representation. In reference to Frampton’s triad, presented at the beginning of this chapter, it can also be described as a combination of the technological and the scenographic object. 55 What is essential for the mechanism of the drive is that both objects operate at the same time. More precisely, the drive rests on the gap or interval between the two objects—the object that is supposed to satisfy the drive (at which the drive aims) and the satisfaction as object. This also means that in the case that satisfaction becomes the direct aim of our action—that is, when we act as if the object that is supposed to satisfy the drive doesn’t really count, that it is only satisfaction itself that counts—then we miss it, we miss the satisfaction as object. Something similar holds true for architecture: we can approach the “cause of architecture” only via the “loop” of dealing with the entirely pragmatic questions of constructing a utilitarian object of architecture. 56 Cf. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 184. 57 Like the drive, it is also the architect’s action, her constructing of architecture, that is characterised by repetition; for the architectural action, too, we could say that “its aim is simply [this] return into circuit.” See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 179. 58 Soler, “The Subject and the Other,” 49. 59 Jacques Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure,” in Lacan, Écrits, 571-572. Cited in Rado Riha, “The Semblant and the Act.” Riha explains the passage from following desire to wanting desire, which is the passage from the subject’s submersion to the Other to the subject’s separation from the Other, as the process of subjectification. 60 Speaking about a theoretical form of the architectural capacity I mean both the architectural theory and the philosophy of architecture. I leave aside the difference between them here.

4

The four structural elements of architecture

4.1 The architectural condition

By way of introducing the first structural element of architecture, the architectural condition, we turn to Lacan’s seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, to two chapters in particular. In “On Creation ex nihilo” Lacan explains the notion of creation using the example of pottery as “what is the most primitive of artistic activities;”1 and in “Marginal Comments” he connects his interest in the constructions of anamorphosis with the history of architecture, and defines architecture, which he understands as one of the creative practices, as follows: “To put it briefly, primitive architecture can be defined as something organized around emptiness. That is also the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark’s give us, and it is a true meaning of all architecture.”2 The emptiness or the void discussed here by Lacan shouldn’t be understood in the way that the void, which matters for architecture, is commonly understood among architects. This isn’t the space-volume of a building delimited by walls, floors, and ceilings that can be inhabited or utilised in some other way. The void in the Lacanian sense is nothing “objectively” given, it never appears directly. It exists, strictly speaking, only in its material effects: it works as the condition for products of architecture to qualify as architectural products. To put it in more general terms: the void Lacan refers to is the element that gives the products of human action the character of something created. This void is created and introduced into the world by all creative practices, including architecture, when they produce their products. Lacan’s central reference in thematising the void is Heidegger’s essay “The Thing.” As I mentioned earlier, Frampton too refers to this essay when he defines the products of architecture as architectural things. Let us begin by summing up briefly what Heidegger tells us about a thing as a product of creative action. Heidegger focuses on the question: what is it that differentiates a thing from an ordinary object, what defines the thing as a thing? As an example of the thing, he singles out the potter’s jug. He describes it as a vessel, as something that holds something within it; as the holding. And as a vessel the jug is, according to Heidegger, also something that stands on its own. It is therefore something self-supporting, independent, and it is this that differentiates

84  The architectural condition it from an ordinary object: the jug is a thing, and not an object by virtue of being “the self-supporting independence of something independent.”3 But what is it that makes the jug something self-supporting, that makes the jug a thing? What is the thingness of the jug as a thing? In Heidegger’s view, the thingness of the thing can’t be defined in terms of the objectness of the object, nor does it consist in its being a represented object, nor in its being something produced. What makes the jug a thing, the thingly character of the jug as a thing, resides in its being qua vessel, in its holding nature. But what performs the task of the holding? It may seem that the task of holding is performed by the sides and base of the jug, Heidegger contends, but actually this is not what does the holding. It is the void that does the holding. He explains: The sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holding. But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No— he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form.4 What makes the jug a thing is in the void: “The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.”5 This is why the potter, when he shapes the jug, in fact shapes the void: for it, in it, and out of it he creates the jug, the jug as a thing, as something created. Lacan, too, presents the jug or vase as an exemplary case of creation, and of that which is created. The vase is a good example because it has always been there, Lacan notes; it is perhaps the most primordial feature of human industry. It is an object that allows us to affirm, unambiguously, a human presence wherever we find it. The vase is, he proceeds, a signifier, perhaps the first signifier fashioned by the human hand. And that which defines the vase in its signifying function and which signifies a human presence in the world is the void that the vase creates; in Lacan’s words: This nothing in particular that characterizes it in its signifying function is that which in its incarnated form characterizes the vase as such. It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the same sense.6 In view of Lacan’s designation of the vase as a signifier it could be argued that the void that characterises the vase is that void that belongs to the vase in the same way the empty place of the signifier belongs to the signifier. As

The architectural condition  85 was emphasised in the previous chapter, there is no signifier without a place of its inscription, a place in which a signifier can appear. But just as there isn’t one without the other, it is also impossible for the two of them to be present at the same time. The relation between them is the relation of an absolute either/or: either the signifier or the place of its inscription. In other words, the place of the signifier is internal to the signifier; the signifier is, so to speak, divided into itself and its place.7 The void of the vase is therefore not simply a hole between the sides and bottom of the vase; rather, it is that without which there is no vase as a thing, that is, as an object created by human action. The void belongs to the vase as the product of human work, and the making of the vase is one of the ways of creating the void and at the same time introducing it into the world. The void is, for certain, always already filled, just as the place of the signifier is always already filled with a signifier. But the world with the void is a different one than the naturally given world: it is no longer the world as a self-enclosed entity without fissure, but rather the world of emptiness and fullness. It is, metaphorically speaking, a punctured world. The void, therefore, is also for Lacan that which is essential for the vase as a created object, as a thing. In the framework of his conceptual apparatus, which operates with the triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, Lacan designates the vase “an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing.”8 The Thing, the name Lacan uses here for the Real, is in itself empty, and the vase is created as that which represents the emptiness of the Thing. And the emptiness of the Thing is in its appearance manifested as a nihil, Lacan notes, as nothing. Which is why we can say of the potter’s making of the vase that he makes it starting with nothing, ex nihilo. In Lacan’s words: “And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around the emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.”9 Based on Lacan’s comparison of the potter’s work with the work of the audience that listens to his seminar and tries to capture the meaning of what he says, one can argue that the potter makes the vase out of nothing the same way the meaning in the signifying process of the seminar is created out of nothing, out of the point of non-meaning or lack of meaning. And just as this lack, this hole of meaning, is repeatedly introduced into speech—which creates meaning out of the point of lack of meaning—so does the potter, when he shapes the vase, keep introducing the void into the world. As Lacan concludes his explanation of the potter’s work: “the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical.”10 What holds for the making of the vase holds for creative action in general: it starts with a hole, the void, and it is the void, which is constitutive for the products of creative practices, that is, along with them, introduced into the world. The circle is thus complete; the action that started with the

86  The architectural condition void is also completed with the void; a conclusion is at the same time the starting point for a continuation, for further creation. The void is in this sense the central internal moment of the process of creation. And the void is also that which is internal to the products of creative action. The void belongs to the vase, it is a constitutive part of the vase as a thing. It does appear as nothing, yet it isn’t something null. It is owing to the void that the vase as a thing is neither something utilitarian nor something produced, nor something that can be defined in exact scientific terms, etc. One could go on describing what the vase is not, because every positive determination misses what the vase as a thing, as a product of creative action, is. This reasoning, however, can also be inverted to say that this is precisely what the vase as a thing is: it is precisely that which every positive determination misses, which is neither one nor another nor a third. It is that which resists every final predicative determination, which persists in the production of meaning as the lack, the absence, the void of meaning—but the void of meaning that is here, that has some resistant, material existence. This is what determines the vase as a thing: the emptiness that isn’t something empty but is, rather, something materially present. And since the void, which determines the vase as a thing, is also that which the vase itself creates, the vase is something self-supporting, supported in and by itself. It is this self-supporting that differentiates the vase-thing from an ordinary object. On the basis of this account of Lacan’s examination of the vase as a product of creative action we can say that his definition of architecture, as something that is organised around a void, entails two meanings. Both are related to the problematics of our first structural element—the architectural condition. The first meaning concerns the determination of the activity of architecture, which is, just like pottery, a creative activity. In this case the void functions as the fundamental condition of the architectural activity, as the instance around which the activity of architecture as such is organised. In the second meaning the void is the organisational centre of the products of architecture, just as the void is the organisational centre of the vase. It is the instance around which architecture constructs its products, the instance that lends them the mark of a thing. As such it works in the beginning and at the end of each specific act of construction. Let us now take a closer look at both meanings of the void.

The condition of the possibility of architecture Let us begin at the beginning, with the question of how the activity of architecture began. In responding to this question we will turn to the hypothesis of the origin of architecture posited by Vittorio Gregotti. With this hypothesis, Gregotti supports his view—and we will return to this—that the act of siting is of fundamental importance for architecture, and at the same time

The architectural condition  87 rejects some of the established explanations of the origins of architecture and argues, in opposition to them, that architecture began with the elementary gesture of placing a stone on the ground in the midst of the unknown world. He explains: The worst enemy of modern architecture is the idea of space considered solely in terms of its economic and technical exigencies indifferent to the idea of the site … Geography is the description of how the signs of history have become forms, therefore the architectural project is charged with the task of revealing the essence of the geo-environmental context through the transformation of form. The environment is therefore not a system in which to dissolve architecture. On the contrary, it is the most important material from which to develop the project. Indeed, through the concept of the site and the principle of settlement, the environment becomes the essence of architectural production. From this vantage point, new principles and methods can be seen for design. Principles and methods that give precedence to the siting in a specific area. This is an act of knowledge of the context that comes out of its architectural modification. The origin of architecture is not the primitive hut, the cave or the mythical ‘Adam’s House in Paradise.’ Before transforming a support into a column, a roof into a tympanum, before placing stone on stone, man placed a stone on the ground to recognize a site in the midst of an unknown universe, in order to take account of it and modify it.11 According to Gregotti, it is the geo-environmental context of an architectural task that is of crucial importance for architecture; not in the sense that architecture would have to be subordinated to it, such that it would dissolve in it, but, rather, in the sense that the environment is the material from which architecture is to be constructed. What is of primary importance for architecture, then, is siting, the placing of architecture in its context, and this is a modification of the context which is at the same time also an act of recognising it. This is also how architecture began: with the act of siting, which is the placing of the first stone on the ground, and it is this that is also an act of recognising the site and modifying it. But in what sense exactly is the placing of the (first) stone on the ground the primordial act of architecture, the point of the very beginning of architecture? An answer to this question can be found in Rado Riha’s essay on architectural creation, in which he presents Gregotti’s stone as the architectural equivalent of the potter’s vase. He writes: And in my view it could be said that the architectural equivalent of a potter’s vase is the stone that, as Vittorio Gregotti puts it, a man placed on the ground to recognise a specific site in the midst of an unknown

88  The architectural condition universe. In my view, placing this stone is not an appropriation of space, but the stone literally creates the space where architecture will take place, architecture as the mark or sign of human dwelling.12 The central point of his argument could be summarised as follows: If we take Gregotti’s question about the origin of architecture seriously we need to understand it as a question about the condition that has to be met in order that architecture can occur in the first place. Riha sees this condition as follows: out there in the world, in the unknown world of nature, a space for architecture isn’t already given—it has to be created. The stone is a metaphor for the primordial act of the architect, for that which is necessary so that architecture, which doesn’t yet exist, could come into existence—and this is the creation of space or the opening up of an empty place in the world in which the product of architecture as a human or creative action could be placed.13 The opening up of an empty place is the fundamental condition of the possibility for architecture. This is why we designate it simply as the architectural condition. Based on this interpretation of Gregotti’s hypothesis we can say that architecture begins just like every other creative activity does: it begins from an empty place, from the “null point” as the point that is without spatial reality, but nonetheless is, it exists. And we could argue here that this holds not only for the ancient origin of the activity of architecture but—and I will develop this thesis in the next chapter—that architecture always begins, with each project or task, in this way. Thus, one can in fact say also for architecture that it is an activity that creates out of nothing, ex nihilo. This does not of course mean that it doesn't take into account the broad scope of conditions in which it is made. It simply means that in the given set of conditions, architecture first has to open an empty place for itself, a place in which it can appear as itself. Out of this empty place architecture then constructs its products. And if it is successful, this empty place has effect also in the final products of the process of architectural construction, in that they are built as objects of a special kind—as architectural things. Let’s also look at this concluding phase of design. In reflecting on this phase, we turn to an explanation of the design process developed by Glenn Murcutt. Like Gregotti, Murcutt too advocates the view that the physical and cultural context, or the set of conditions and factors that constitute the specifics of a given architectural task, is of fundamental importance for architectural design. In one of his lectures he began his explanation of the process of constructing architecture simply with the claim that “architecture is nothing but the conditions of architecture.”14 In this lecture Murcutt, characteristically, paid particular attention to the significance of local conditions for architectural design, such as the geological and geomorphological characteristics of the site, the related climatic

The architectural condition  89 particularities, etc. He even showed some measuring instruments that are in his view necessary in order to arrive at a good building concept. One could conclude from this presentation that for Murcutt, architecture comes into existence when an architect takes into account and properly responds to all of the relevant conditions and factors that figure in a given project and connects them into a synthetic whole. But Murcutt ended his lecture with a surprising twist: he concluded his meticulous explanation of architecture’s imbrication in its (in each case specific) local conditions with the following: “What architecture is, is frightening in its openness.” This spontaneous concluding remark, in my view, reveals the essence of Murcutt’s statement that architecture is nothing but its conditions: for him, architecture is really nothing other than an appropriate response to the conditions and factors that the architect recognises as crucial in a given task, but at the same time this is not, nonetheless, everything. If this were everything, the architect would, as the result of taking into account and fulfilling all the necessary conditions and factors, automatically, inevitably, arrive at architecture. But Murcutt doesn’t say that. When one takes into account all the necessary conditions and factors and as a result arrives at architecture, one encounters here the “frightening openness” of that which architecture is. What then does this statement of Murcutt’s tell us? It tells us that a successful response, the result of all input parameters of an architectural task, leads to the point at which, with the final product of architectural construction, the openness of its meaning also appears. In the constructed object, where architecture is supposed to be, one encounters the void—the void of its meaning. That one encounters the void here has to be taken literally: in a successful solution the void, although it never appears directly, is nonetheless rendered present in a specific way. It is rendered present in the successful material product of architecture, in the architectural object.15 But how is it rendered present? In a way similar to the way the void is rendered present in the potter’s vase. It is rendered present in the way that the building as an architectural object is neither something utilitarian nor something scenographic, nor something that responds well to the climatic requirements, geomorphological conditions of a region, etc.—and we could go on. As is the case with the vase, every positive determination of the building misses what the building as an architectural object is—and it is precisely this that a building as an architectural object is. That which constitutes a building as an architectural object is precisely its difference from itself. This is how the void is manifested in the architectural object. It is manifested in the way that this object is not identical to itself, that it differs from itself. This is the key structural characteristic of an architectural object—that it is an object with an internal difference. When we think about architecture, we are therefore justified in saying, as Lacan said, that it is something organised around emptiness. This holds true in the sense that its successful products are organised around emptiness—the

90  The architectural condition emptiness that manifests itself as a minimal, null difference in which an architectural object differs from itself. And it holds true also in the sense that the activity of architecture is organised around emptiness. The operations of architecture are structured such that in the given conditions, which are specific in each case, they always first open up an empty place, and out of this place architecture then constructs its objects. Murcutt’s claim that architecture is nothing but the conditions of architecture therefore holds if we take into account that the complex system of conditions and factors that constitute an individual architectural task is itself dependent on an additional condition. The conditions and factors of architecture are activated only when an architect intervenes in them, when she opens an empty place for herself within them, for her architectural task. And starting from this empty place the architect then utilises these conditions in a specific way, she reconstructs and connects them in the way she finds appropriate for the task she is working to solve. The opening up of an empty place in the set of the given conditions is in this sense the fundamental presupposition of architectural activity. Or, more precisely, it is the fundamental condition of architecture as a creative activity: it is the condition for architecture to happen at all. And if it does happen, if it succeeds in modifying and connecting the given conditions into a sound architectural proposal, a successful architectural solution, then in the “frightening openness” of its meaning that Murcutt speaks about it opens up a new empty place; that is, a new opportunity to make further attempts at constructing architectural objects, to proceed with that potentially endless process of construction that is the existential mode of architecture.

Notes 1 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Seminar VII, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 119. 2 Ibid., 135–136. 3 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 164. 4 Ibid., 166. 5 Ibid. 6 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 120. 7 See the chapter “The subject of psychoanalysis” in this book. 8 Lacan: “Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.” Cf. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 121. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

The architectural condition  91 11 Vittorio Gregotti, The Territory of Architecture, “Lecture at the New York Architectural League,” Section A, no. 1, February–March 1983. Cited in Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 98–99. 12 Rado Riha, “Architecture and New Ontologies,” in Project Architecture: Creative Practice in the Time of Global Capitalism, ed. Jeff Bickert (Ljubljana: Architecture Museum of Ljubljana, 2010), 86. 13 See also this explanation of Gregotti’s stone by Riha: “The world of nature is ruled by the laws of necessity, whereby everything is connected with everything else; placing a stone on the ground, however, is the sign and the mode of a symbolic interruption of this causal chain, it is the opening up of a place for something that isn’t already part of this causal chain, for something yet unknown, new. In Gregotti’s sense, it is the opening of a place for architecture that is to take place.” Riha, “Arhitektura: redefiniranje človeškega prebovanja. Pogovor z Radom Riho (“Architecture: A Redefinition of Human Habitation. A conversation with Rado Riha),” Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology, XLVI, 2018, no. 274, 195. (My translation.) 14 I am referring here to an unpublished lecture given by Glenn Murcutt, April 3, 2006, Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 15 We have to recall here what was developed in the previous chapter, that the lack of meaning is a constitutive element of the very production of meaning: good architectural products, well-constructed objects, succeed in rendering this constitutive lack present, they succeed in articulating it as a kind of “stain in the picture,” or, as Murcutt has it, the “frightening openness” of their meaning. They are constructed in such a way that they keep inviting us to lay our gaze down on them in order to discover their meaning.

4.2 The architectural act and architecture as subject

We turn now to that other side in the process of constructing architecture which, in discussing the architectural condition, remained in the background—let’s call it the “subjective” dimension of constructing architecture. This dimension can be understood in a number of mutually connected meanings, and all of them are linked to the act of the architect; not the act of the architect as a personality, with all the psychophysical attributes of her personality, but the architect’s act, which is and operates as one of the structural elements of the complex process of the creation of an architectural object and—which is inseparably connected—architecture as subject. To start with we can introduce it as follows: while the architectural condition is the logical condition of the possibility for architecture, the architect’s act is the concrete structural element of architecture, which on the one hand realises this logical condition; that is, transforms it into the beginning of a concrete architectural construction, and on the other hand it retroactively appoints and confirms it as the logical condition.1 As a beginning, the act then proceeds step by step to the point at which an architectural object, which is the object with an internal difference, appears in reality. The appearance of an architectural object, however, always constitutes also the appearance of a specific image of architecture as subject. In this section of the book we look at the three key dimensions of the architectural act. First, we will again focus on the point of the beginning.

The opening up of a place Every architectural task or commission at its start encounters a set of conditions and factors that constitute the material with which the architect operates in responding to this task. These conditions include those that are “external”2 to architecture, both the local conditions such as the specificities of the climate, the configuration of the terrain, and the cultural particularities, and those of a more global character related to economics, technology, etc.; as well as those that are “internal” to architecture, such as the complex body of architectural knowledge and history, current trends in architecture, etc. But the following is essential here: this set of conditions and factors is

Architecture as act and as subject  93 usable only on the condition that is explicitly not included in this set. It is usable only on an additional condition, which is that the architect is able to use this set, or that he succeeds in using it, succeeds to make something out of it. The addition of this condition, which is, so to speak, the spontaneous beginning of each architectural task, is in professional jargon called an intervention in the conditions. This intervention is the act of the architect with which he opens up an empty place in the set of given conditions, an empty place for himself. It is in this place that the architect situates himself with his concrete decision as to how to take into account and respond to these conditions and connect them with each other such that this will produce an architectural solution of his task. It is here, in this place, that architecture begins.3 Why is it appropriate to say that this place is empty? Simply because there is no recipe, no rule or regulation that could tell the architect how to put this “material” together, how to respond to the given conditions and connect them such that this process results in some utilitarian object that will be clearly recognisable also as an architectural object. The right way to construct architecture in and with the given conditions is always yet to be found, it has to be invented. The act of the architect is the beginning of this process of invention. In this process, the architect, too, naturally, is influenced by the given set of conditions: his reasoning is based on his knowledge of architecture and related fields, he proceeds from the skills he has learned and his professional experience, and it is against this background that he analyses the given conditions in which he operates. However, to stress once more, his constructional decision can’t be logically deduced from the conclusions that he reaches based on his knowledge, training, and concrete analysis. His decision exists only in the form of the act itself—in this case we can call it the constructional act—with which he connects the given conditions and factors in the way that could or might lead to a good architectural proposal. The only support of the constructional act is the act itself. Which also means: the initial architectural act, just like the act of every creative activity, is essentially groundless. It is entirely dependent on its consequences—as a successful act it confirms itself only in retrospect, that is to say, only in and from the future consequences to which it gives rise. Architecture can therefore, to simplify somewhat, be divided analytically into two components. On the one hand, it is composed of various domains of knowledge, from architectural theory and history, other social sciences and humanities, to technical and technological knowledge. In short, the first component of architecture is the system of knowledge. On the other hand, however, both the theory and practice of architecture are, irrespective of the rich content of knowledge that constitutes architecture, founded on the architect’s act. The act is the second component of architecture. It is the instance of the concrete application of accumulated knowledge in a way that is appropriate for the specific architectural task at hand. The

94  Architecture as act and as subject specificity of this application lies in the fact that the system of knowledge does not already include any instructions related to how this knowledge is to be applied in each concrete case. It doesn’t say how this knowledge is to be used such that the project’s irreducibly architectural dimension will also be realised; that the utilitarian object will, at the same time, also be realised as the architectural object. In short, between the massive body of architectural knowledge and its successful application is a breach, an ineliminable gap. This gap requires—and from this gap originates—the architect’s act. The act transforms this gap into the empty place where the architect’s decision can be placed—the decision dictating how the relevant (both the “inner-architectural” and the “outer-architectural”) conditions and factors are to be included in the process of thinking and connected such that an architectural object will be produced. The place of decision is therefore the gap of the distance between the system of knowledge on the one hand and the application of this knowledge on the other. Any decision regarding how the given knowledge is to be applied, is therefore groundless—it is grounded only in itself. But this doesn’t mean that it is something subjective. The decision isn’t guided by the architect’s personality, his tastes or personal preferences. It is guided by an idea. More precisely, it is guided by that “cause of architecture” that the architect tries to realise in his practice, whereby at the start he doesn’t know and cannot know what exactly this “cause” is, nor can he know whether his decision is the correct one. The correctness of a decision is always confirmed only fragmentarily and only in retrospect. The only rule that can serve to support the architect in this process of trying to make visible in his projects that “cause” at which he is aiming is the formal rule that holds true for all creative practices: he has to do everything within his power to realise his architectural task well, which means that he has to do what he does as an architect, well. Architecture always exists only in the form of potential architectural capacity; more precisely, in the form of each individual actualisation of this capacity.

Enacting the “cause of architecture” in the world So far, we have examined the act as the formal beginning of architecture; now we will observe it in its durational dimension, as the process of constructing an architectural object step by step, point by point. We can begin by recalling how the architect works, how his task of solving an individual phase of design proceeds, for instance sketching a concept of a planned building. It would be an oversimplification to say that the architect draws without thinking, that he simply follows his feelings and intuition, that it is his hand, as it were, that thinks. It is also clear, however, that the concept he sketches isn’t a straightforward realisation of a thought that would be fully formed in the architect’s head and would only have to be put down on paper.

Architecture as act and as subject  95 More likely the process goes as follows: initially, the architect doesn’t know exactly what he is looking for, what the right solution to his task is, and the only way he can find out, come closer to the solution, is to try and articulate it—draw a sketch or construct a model, write a text. Drawing (or writing, constructing, etc.) is a way of resolving some initial problem that is actually only concretised as a problem through drawing: the architect draws, and that which he makes in this process—a sketch, diagram, scheme—tells him about what it is he is looking for. And based on what the sketch shows him he can proceed, pursue and elaborate his thought further. This is what I meant when I said earlier that the correctness of an idea is confirmed only in fragments and only in retrospect. Such a way of acting can also be described as paving the path while walking. In the process of architectural design—or the practising of architecture in general—neither “intuitive practical action” nor “rational theoretical thought” can be positioned first in some hierarchical scheme. It is more appropriate to say that both moments, action and thinking, are closely connected, so closely as to be inseparable. These two moments, however, are always joined also by a third. And this is that “cause,” or that irreducibly architectural solution of a given design task at which the inseparability of thought and act is actually aiming. In the case of the activity of architecture, this is the “cause of architecture.” Here we have arrived at the second dimension of the act: the architectural act is a process of enacting the “cause of architecture” in the world. And this process is at the same time also an operation in which the subject of architecture is constituted. As an illustration of this dimension of the act we will take the act of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto—his theoretical and practical decision that the right direction for modern architecture was extended rationalism. He presented this hypothesis in a lecture in Stockholm in 1935 as a response to the condition that he recognised as the condition of crisis in which architecture of that time found itself.4 We will come back to the content of this hypothesis in the final chapter; here we will focus only on the act itself, the act of proposing extended rationalism as the right orientation for architecture. Aalto began his lecture with the discussion that was going on in architecture at the time. On one side of this discussion were the advocates of the so-called modernist approach to design. They argued in favour of architecture conceived in terms of economic viability, technological efficiency and innovation, of utility and use; in short, they were in favour of a functionalist architecture and its rationalist approach as was then established in the Nordic countries and beyond. On the other side were the traditionalists, as Aalto called them, who contended that such rationalist thinking led to the impoverishment of architecture and which created inhumane living environments. They sought to replace the rational methods of design with more personal, even irrational approaches, and called for a return to tradition. Aalto responded by agreeing that the rationalist approach to architecture had many positive sides, and contended that it worked well with modern

96  Architecture as act and as subject modes of production, made sense in terms of building construction, and fulfilled social considerations and functional requirements. And he also pointed out some negative aspects of this approach, saying it neglected some facets of designed objects related to human neurophysiology and psychology.5 However—and this is essential—Aalto did not dwell on weighing the positive and negative aspects of the so-called rationalist approach, he didn’t simply join the pro/contra discussion. Instead, he did something else: as a foundation on which a definition of architecture could be built he proposed something that was neither an acceptance of the rationalist approach to design nor the rejection of such. He called this extended rationalism. So, in a situation where it seemed that only two options (and their various combinations) were available, Aalto recognised a third option, one that the available choice didn’t presuppose.6 That this was the correct choice, the one that had to be pursued in architectural design, was just a hypothesis. This option couldn’t be logically deduced from the situation, it wasn’t already inscribed in the situation as one of the possibilities from which to choose. With his declaration—that this was the correct orientation—Aalto actually only articulated it as a possibility. In other words, up until that time everything seemed to be in its proper place; yet as a result of Aalto’s hypothesis it turned out there was yet another, empty place—a place where solutions that were as yet unknown could reside, a place of solutions still to be seen. Aalto’s act was an act in the true sense of the word. For he responded to the dilemma of the architecture of his time in such a way as to interrupt the dilemma itself. By refusing to consider architecture in the framework of the given choices he intervened in the situation such that he cracked it opened from within, punctured it as a seemingly enclosed and unified whole. At the same time his intervention in the situation also constituted the invention of a new possibility—a possibility that up until then had been considered impossible. In his hypothesis, Aalto connected the various conditions and factors he considered relevant for architecture in the modern age, from the industrial production of building elements to various established methods of design and local building traditions, together with the neurophysiology and psychology of a human being, such that he also radically transformed them. He offered a reconstruction of these conditions that pointed to something that up until then hadn’t been part of the design equation—and he called this extended rationalism. The following, however, is for us essential here: Aalto didn’t stop at the declaration that extended rationalism was the right direction for architecture. He continued, he advanced his decision step by step in his practice. At every stage of each individual task and with every subsequent task he tried to realise the various implications that this hypothesis brought to the situation. He tried to realise his pivotal “this is it,” this is the right orientation for architecture, over and over again, which means that he was giving it a form of “how it is,” some concrete form, in writings, lectures, drawings, models,

Architecture as act and as subject  97 buildings. For every “this is it” exists only in the form of a certain “how it is,” in some concrete, material form, and this form has yet to be found, discovered through the very process of constructing architecture; it has to be invented, stage to stage in any given task, and from task to task. The initial decision is never fully decided, the original hypothesis is never entirely and conclusively proven. “This is it” exists only in the ongoing and unceasing demonstration of how it is, how such is possible in each concrete situation. This is precisely the way of acting that we outlined in the previous chapters as acting in tune with the maxim “to hold on to a real point.”7 The only firm point of support in such action is, on the one hand, the hypothesis itself, and on the other, the drawing of the consequences the hypothesis, which is both the concluding and the starting point of the act, implies. The architect has to keep asking himself how to remain faithful to his hypothesis—in the case of Aalto, the hypothesis expressed in and as extended rationalism: how to conceive a building, how to position it on site, how to solve this or that detail, if extended rationalism is indeed the right answer for architecture and not just a passing fancy. This he does not and cannot know in advance—the only way to arrive at an answer is through his own practice, his own thinking and acting, step by step: by drawing a sketch, writing a text, constructing a detail, designing a building. And whether or not he is moving in the right direction he can see based on what he draws, writes, constructs; that which he constructs helps him better know what he is looking for and, based on that, he can continue. This is the way of acting that architecture as a creative thinking practice requires—and as Aalto’s case shows, this way of working can have far-reaching effects. With his hypothesis, Aalto broke with the established modes of design, modes based on the body of accepted architectural knowledge—and out of this break he was, step by step, creating new knowledge. Those aspects to which he paid particular attention in the process of articulating architecture of extended rationalism—expressing the materiality of the materials used, structuring spatial sequences, articulating light, in short, an emphasis on affirming architecture’s capacity to engage the senses (as well as the particular techniques and procedures he developed to realise this)—gradually acquired their place in the body of architectural knowledge, became an integral part of it. And it is this new or transformed knowledge that verified, in retrospect, and justified Aalto’s initial hypothesis. In short, it was Aalto’s act and his perseverance in developing the consequences of this act that gradually created a reality that retroactively verified the very causes of the act. The notion of cause, however, has to be understood in two ways here: not only in the sense of something that justifies something else, but also in the sense of something that engenders, that activates, something else. In drawing the consequences of his hypothesis, Aalto created architectural p ­ roposals—drawings, details, buildings, instances of architecture of extended rationalism—that continue to invite and motivate us to think and rethink what architecture is, or should be, in the here and now. One such

98  Architecture as act and as subject building, an instantiation of architecture of extended rationalism, to which we will return at the end of the book, is Villa Mairea. In short, Aalto’s case shows that the successful drawing of consequences of an act is realised in the form of constructing objects, that maintain a certain fidelity to the act in the way that they themselves generate a continuance of the initial act. Therefore, the change triggered by the act is indeed twofold. It is a modification of the situation, a change of the regimes of knowledge. At the same time this change pierces the situation, breaks it, opens it up. Not only is a different situation produced, but another situation as well—one that is structured differently. I said earlier that Aalto’s hypothesis was an articulation of an impossible possibility for the situation. To this we can now add that the hypothesis functions as an impossible possibility in two different senses: first, in the sense that the possibility articulated by the hypothesis is something that no one has seen in the given situation before, that the given situation didn’t offer up as a possibility; second, in the sense that it has the status of the interior exteriority of the given situation. In the case of architecture, we call this interior exteriority the “cause of architecture.” This second meaning of the impossible possibility is manifested in the fact that Aalto continued to develop his hypothesis; that the hypothesis continued to serve as both the starting point and the driving force for his further thinking and rethinking what architecture was or should be. As such, it worked not only for Aalto, but for many other architects as well—architects who found and continue to find in his work that which is crucial for architecture, that “cause” of theirs that they as architects pursue.

The subjectification of architecture The way of acting described above closely corresponds, as is quite plain to see, to what was defined earlier as the wanting of desire. This is the specific way of dealing with desire when one not only has desire (which is generally the case for human beings as beings of speech), but also desires it. To desire one’s desire means to desire to see that which initiates and animates desire: its object-cause. In the case of architecture this is the “cause of architecture.” And one can see this “cause” only in the way that one makes it visible, which means that in reality, in the set of conditions that determine each architectural task at hand, one constructs the “cause” at which one, as architect, directs one’s efforts. This is precisely what Aalto did: over and over again he tried to enact or construct the “cause of architecture,” which he designated in his Stockholm lecture as the architecture of extended rationalism. He found already in this syntagm some of that “cause,” which he then tried to present, expand on, and elaborate in his lecture. Similarly, in the other successful products of this elaboration, of his thinking and action, his “cause” acted as that which he kept actualising in these products, in

Architecture as act and as subject  99 which he kept finding, and which continued to help him understand, what he was looking for. This way of working is very demanding, for the architect’s only source of support is himself or his constructional act—but himself in a precisely defined sense: his point of support is, strictly speaking, the “cause of architecture,” that is, something that belongs to the architect, something in relation to which he only becomes what he is as architect, but which is at the same time something the architect can’t fully appropriate, something of which he is not entirely in charge.8 This is another characteristic feature of the act as the key element of any creative action. Philosopher Jelica ŠumičRiha describes it succinctly: in all genuine acts there is a dimension of ‘auto’: it is by ‘authorizing’ oneself that one can accomplish an act, which is to say that one has to take upon oneself the fact that one finds no support, no guarantee in the Other, in the symbolic order. In this regard the act is a causa sui, a cause of itself, which, of course, is not to be confused with the subject. For the cause at work in the act cannot be attributed to the subject; rather it must be located in the object, and more specifically in the cause of desire as that which is withheld from the subject’s knowledge. Which is why Lacan evokes a paradoxical structure of the act, since, in the act ‘the object is active, while the subject is subverted’.9 The object and not the subject is behind the origin of an act; the object is its cause. This holds true also for architecture. For in architecture, too, the act is, as we can put it, an operation with the object—the object-cause of desire. And the subject is a result of this operation, it is caused by the object-cause—just as in the case of architecture, the architect is caused by the “cause of architecture.” Although he designs with his head, as it were, the architect is in fact a headless subject. For the “cause of architecture” isn’t only that which guides him in his action, it is what causes him as an architect. Only when he makes visible, constructs his “cause of architecture” in the world, does he constitute and confirm himself as an architect. And he is an architect as long as he perseveres in this way of acting, as long as he continues to construct the “cause of architecture” in the world. This way of acting is characterised by an inner necessity, it is almost an enforced or imposed action. This notion is well expressed by architect Zvi Hecker when he says that he “draws because he has to think.”10 According to Hecker, an architect has to think, there is something that literally forces him to think. To elaborate Hecker’s thought in the spirit of the argument of this book: what compels him to think is that “cause” which guides him as an architect and which he, as an architect, tries to objectify, make visible in the world. He tries to do this in order to be—to be an architect. And this is why he draws. Drawing is one of the ways of constructing “the cause of architecture” in the world. Only in his constructions, in architectural

100  Architecture as act and as subject drawings, can he find it. Hecker continues: “Not once was I surprised at how drawing by hand can evoke certain possibilities that I most probably would not have been able to imagine consciously.”11 Drawing affects him by way of surprising him. I would say that the drawing surprises, because in it he finds, encounters, that “cause” at which he as architect is aiming, and which is for him crucial, constitutive. Drawing helps him find direction, helps him know what he is looking for. And it is owing precisely to what he finds in the drawing that he is able to continue, to make another drawing, another construction, in order to find again, to repeat this encounter, through which he can become, be, who he is—is as an architect. One can therefore not simply say that after concluding a project an architect goes on to begin designing the next one, simply because he is an architect, because this is what architects do, they design. It is too simple to say that he proceeds because he is an architect. We approach the essence of practising architecture as a creative thinking practice only if we switch the cause and effect and say that he is an architect because he proceeds. It is only by proceeding, through successful attempts at constructing the “cause of architecture” in the world, that he constitutes and affirms himself as an architect. This holds true also for Aalto: after he proposed his hypothesis he continued, he tried to elaborate it further, tried to construct the instances of architecture of extended rationalism in the world over and over again, in the form of various material products. For this was the only way he could be—could be as an architect. An architect who practises architecture as a creative thinking practice does not therefore necessarily correspond with the iconic image of the hero of the film of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, the individual of independent mind and personal integrity who leads his project of architecture with full self-assurance and determination, without ever straying from his clearly delineated path. For the architect isn’t someone who sovereignly leads the process of realising his design decisions in the world. It is better to say that it is the “cause” that leads him in his decision, guides the way he will construct an object he is working on. The construction of a concrete object can in this sense be understood as an attempt by the architect to make visible that “cause” that guides him in his work—visible in the image of the constructed object. The architect is not a self-conscious subject-agent. Rather, he is someone who in the process of constructing architecture subjectifies himself such that he enters into the composition of the subject. And the subject in this case is architecture as a specific activity which alone determines its issues and the production of its objects. For both the hero of the famous film and the subjectified architect, the hypothesis they proposed and recognised as the right one is something absolute. But in the case of the subjectified architect this absolute is something that also exceeds, goes beyond the architect, that has the status of something not-known. This is why the subjectified architect may not possess that same sense of certainty that leads Roark in his clearly delineated perseverance to realise his envisioned project.

Architecture as act and as subject  101 It is just as likely that he is in constant doubt, exposed, in Badiou’s words, “to the permanent temptation of giving up, of returning to the mere belonging to the ‘ordinary’ situation, of erasing the effects of the not-known.”12 The way of his perseverance isn’t necessarily a militant, clearly defined orientation towards a chosen goal. The right way always remains to be found, it has to be invented in relation to the concrete given circumstances. As Badiou maintains elsewhere, “war can have as much value as peace, negotiation as much as struggle, violence as much as gentleness.”13 There is a thing to add here. The architect’s act isn’t simply a decision as to how he will produce his specific objects. In this decision some other “decision” is present. This is the “decision” (in quotation marks because it may only be implicit) as to what architecture is. Which means, within the framework of our argumentation, the decision whether the architect will affirm in and through his action architecture as a creative practice, that is, as the capacity to act in the world as a self-determining practice or as an autonomous subject. Or will he, as we might suggest, “betray” architecture and subordinate the production of his objects to some other requirement or activity—the market, fashion, humanitarian concerns, calls for social reform. It is precisely here, in this decision, that the “subjective” dimension of the architectural act lies. The act belongs to the order of the subjective, because with this act architecture itself is (in a way that is always specific) subjectified; in addition to the material, visible object of architecture the act always also constructs architecture as subject. As I stressed earlier, architecture is a complex set of a vast array of conditions and factors. As the subject, however, it operates when this set also includes a reflection of architecture itself. This reflection tells us what architecture is or is supposed to be. In most cases it tells us this implicitly, simply in the form of material objects; but it can also tell us this explicitly, in the form of statements, explanations, and theoretical arguments. It is this reflection that is, in the architectural set, performed by the architect’s act: the act belongs to the complex set of conditions and factors that constitute architecture, but in this set it has a very special role. It is the reflexive factor that gives architecture, as it appears in some concrete situation, its profile and its orientation. The act is the factor that decides in what specific way architecture (in each individual case) understands itself and in this understanding also shapes itself. The act is therefore a constitutive moment of the architectural practice. It is that element of architecture due to which the practice of architecture, as we develop and demonstrate it here, can never be reduced to a (mere) instrumentally technical operation. It provides the practice of architecture with the indelible mark of a subjectified activity; indelible because architecture remains subjectified, even if the architect tries to present architecture merely as an objective, techno-instrumental mechanism for the production of specific objects, wherein a reflection on what it is that architecture actually produces is irrelevant. Architecture is a subjectified activity even when

102  Architecture as act and as subject it denies or represses its subjectification. In this case it is structured as a subjectified activity that actually works on its desubjectification. Here we can return to the four positions introduced in the first chapter. For they also represent four different ways of denying architecture as subject, that is, denying or rejecting the notion that architecture is an activity that is determined by itself and which alone assigns itself its tasks. The first group insists that architecture is an activity that is, just like all other human activities, regulated by market logic and it is therefore the market which in the final instance determines what a successful architectural object is. The second group argues that architecture is all about the invention of the new, whereby it understands invention simply as forever generating new variations on those existing, which are all equally subordinated to the demands of the market. The third group retreats from the radicalness of its own requirement that architecture be a self-determining practice and instead hurries to convince us that it is the social good that architecture ought to serve. And the fourth group is, again, convinced that in essence architecture should serve to reform existing society, that is to say, work towards correcting existing social contradictions and discord. Those architects who understand and explain their practice in the framework of one of these four ways can nonetheless produce works that surpass their explanatory frameworks. Irrespective of this fact, however, what we stressed at the end of the previous chapter holds true: if we want to enact architecture as a creative thinking practice in the world—or, put differently, if we want to enact architecture as the subject of its own action and not as an object of some other instance or practice, such as politics or the market— then producing architectural objects isn’t enough. What is also necessary is that architecture be presented and explained as a special, creative, or subjectified activity through theory. In other words, only when architecture is capable of and ready for the act, with which it also theoretically demonstrates all dimensions of itself as the construction of architectural objects, can it then exist and act in the world as that which it is—a creative thinking practice with its specific object and its own characteristic procedures of construction.

Notes 1 The conceptualisation of the architectural act developed in this section is based on the concept of the act as developed by Rado Riha in the article “The Semblant and the Act” and the book Kant in drugi kopernikanski obrat v filozofiji (Kant and the Second Copernican Turn in Philosophy) (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC SAZU, 2012), 379-400; abridged German edition: Kant in Lacan’scher Absicht. Die kopernikanische Wende und das Reale, 138–214. 2 Quotation marks are used here, since before encountering its conditions—before opening a place for itself—architecture, strictly speaking, doesn’t even exist, and thus can’t even have an inside or outside.

Architecture as act and as subject  103 3 Every architect then begins as the ur-architect of a kind: he starts “out of nothing” metaphorically speaking, out of an empty place, because he starts with an intervention in the given conditions (specific in each given case). 4 Alvar Aalto, “Rationalism and Man,” in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Goran Schildt (Helsinki: Otava Publishing, 1997), 89–93. 5 Cf. ibid, 92. 6 In reference to Lacan’s explanation of The Ambassadors, one could say that Aalto saw the “stain in the picture,” in the set of conditions that were pertinent for the production of architecture in the mid-1930s. 7 Aalto’s way of acting is indeed an example of the immanent and subjective response to the crisis of architecture. (See “Deconstruction and re-composition” in Chapter 2.) His hypothesis of extended rationalism was an affirmation of the “null point” of the situation of the mid-1930s, which he recognised as the crisis of modern architecture; the “null point” as the point of a break with this situation, and as the starting point from which it is possible to start again—to start the process of recomposing architecture, on new foundations, the foundations of the concept of extended rationalism. 8 This specific relation between the architect and his work is well expressed by Zvi Hecker when he says that “A true artist is never fully aware of what he does, but nevertheless has to do it very precisely.” See Zvi Hecker and Andres Lepik (eds.), Sketches (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 139. 9 Cf. Jelica Šumič-Riha, “Infinitization of the Subject,” Filozofski vestnik 2, 2009, 276. She quotes Lacan’s “La méprise du sujet supposé savoir,” Autres écrits, 332. 10 Hecker, Sketches, 21. 11 Ibid. 12 This is how Badiou describes the process of perseverance, which he conceptualises as consistency: “The ‘technique of consistency’ is singular in each case, depending on the ‘animal’ traits of the some-one. To the consistency of the subject that he is in part become, convoked [requis] and seized by a truth-process, this particular ‘some-one’ will contribute his anguish and agitation, the other his tall stature and cool composure, this other his voracious taste for domination, and these others their melancholy, or timidity … All the material of human multiplicity can be fashioned, linked, by a ‘consistency’—while at the same time, of course, it opposes to this fashioning the worst kind of inertia, and exposes this ‘some-one’ to the permanent temptation of giving up, of returning to the mere belonging to the ‘ordinary’ situation, of erasing the effects of the notknown.” Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 48. 13 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 86.

4.3 The architectural object

We turn now to the fourth structural element of architecture, the architectural object. A certain amount has already been said about this element. In order to define it more precisely, however, we will take a few steps back and begin with the simple assertion that not every building constitutes architecture, just as not every piece of writing is a literary work. Admittedly, we don’t say much with this: the generally accepted view maintains that there is a difference between a mere building and a building that is an instance of architecture, or an architectural object. But to this we add that it is crucial how one understands this difference. In regard to this, two distinct views predominate. In tune with the first view, an architectural object is a built structure that may be used in a variety of ways—for shopping, for habitation, etc. Primarily, it is a response to various technical and utilitarian requirements: it has to be functional, weather-resistant, financially viable, sustainable, etc. In addition, however, it also has to have an aesthetically compelling dimension, it has to be beautiful. Thus, according to this view an architectural object is first and foremost a utilitarian object, but one which is also distinguished by an aesthetic supplement or a surplus. It is owing to this supplement that architecture, which is essentially a technical discipline that also includes scientific methods and approaches, can also be classified as one of the arts. And it is this aesthetic or artistic supplement that differentiates a building that is an architectural object from a building as a “pure” utilitarian object. The second established understanding of an architectural object is that it is an object whose primary function is to arouse or engage our sensual perception and also express an idea about architecture and thus address our intellectual capacities. In tune with this view an architectural object is an aesthetic object that is essentially no different from an art object, such as a sculpture. The advocates of this view are convinced that architecture is one of the arts, and the specificity of its products lies only in the fact that they can also be used. Thus, they also need to fulfil a number of technical and utilitarian requirements specific to architecture. In tune with this view, an architectural object is therefore an aesthetic object supplemented by some

The architectural object   105 utilitarian value. It is this utilitarian supplement that differentiates an architectural object from an object produced by the “pure” arts. Our view differs from both established views. For us, too, an architectural object is the combination of a utilitarian and an aesthetic object. And it is also our starting point that for an architectural object a difference is constitutive. But this is not a difference of supplement, neither in the form of the aesthetic nor in the form of the utilitarian. It is a difference that is inherent and internal to the object itself.1 That this difference is internal to the object means that it determines the meaning of both its components, the utilitarian and the aesthetic; which means the following: an architectural object is an ordinary utilitarian object that fulfils the requirements of functionality, economy, sustainability, etc. The essential thing, however, is that the internal difference functions in an architectural object such that a utilitarian object never succeeds in being “itself,” it is never merely an ordinary utilitarian object. As a utilitarian object it exists only as the flash of an aesthetic surplus, or, also, as the flash of some “cause of architecture” in it. Something similar can be said for the other, aesthetic component of an architectural object: an architectural object is an aesthetic object that engages our sensual perception and expresses an idea of architecture. But this aesthetic object of architecture never succeeds in being “itself,” it never appears before us in its purely aesthetic form. As soon as it appears as such, as soon as we see it as such, it has already descended to the level of an ordinary object. An architectural object is therefore two at the same time. It can be described as follows: an aesthetic object of architecture exists only in a deaestheticised form, in the form of an ordinary object, that is to say, in the form of some useful and usable building on its site. And an ordinary object, a building that fulfils various utility criteria, exists as a useful and usable building only in the form of an aesthetic object of architecture. In other words, this simultaneity of two is seen in the fact that in a successful architectural object its two dimensions can in fact not be separated. For a successful architectural object, it is the inseparability of the utilitarian and the aesthetic that is characteristic. Their separation would not only isolate one or the other component of the architectural object but would indeed destroy the architectural object as such and thus both its components in the process. For an architectural object we can therefore say that it is an object that is something less than what it no doubt is—and it is undoubtedly an aesthetic object bordering on art. At the same time an architectural object is also an object that is something more than what it no doubt is—and it is undoubtedly an ordinary, utilitarian object. If we connect these two observations into a single formulation, we can say that an architectural object is that object which is also something other or something else than what it is. An architectural object is therefore two at the same time, but this two is neither the sum of the two objects—a utilitarian object and an aesthetic object—nor is it their amalgamation into one. Instead, it is the kind of two

106  The architectural object that also articulates something else, something that is neither one nor the other of both objects that constitute the two. But this “something else,” this “third,” which is neither one nor the other, is not really some third object. Moreover, it is not an object in the ordinary sense of the word. It is an object of a special kind—an object as the materialisation of the difference between a utilitarian and an aesthetic object. On this difference, from this difference, an architectural object is built. This difference is constitutive for what this object is as object. In the chapter on the architectural condition we saw that all creative thinking activities function thus: at the same time as they shape their products, they also produce the void and introduce it into the world. This can now be said in yet another way: all creative thinking practices produce objects of a special kind, objects with an internal difference. To the question whether architecture is art, science, or technique we therefore respond as follows: architecture is a creative thinking practice just as various arts and sciences are. An important difference between creative thinking practices, however, lies in the specific ways in which they produce their objects. This brings us back to Frampton’s thesis that the specific way in which architecture produces its objects is tectonic construction. He designates these objects things and thus emphasises the fact that they are something material. Now we will focus on the question of what this materiality is. As mentioned earlier, Frampton doesn’t really concern himself with this question, but as we will see, it is precisely his theory of tectonics that can help us respond to it. We will show that architecture as a thing, in the sense according to which Frampton defines it, has a special materiality that is produced precisely in the process of tectonic construction. This hypothesis is elaborated on the basis of the second triad that Frampton introduces in order to explain architecture: the triad of structure, construction, and tectonics. With the first triad—the triad of the scenographic, the technological, and the tectonic object—we outlined an architectural object on the level of a logical structure; with the second triad we shift to the level of architecture’s appearance in the world.

The architectural triad II One of the established understandings of structure and construction, to which Frampton too relates, is that the notion of structure refers to a basic system or principle meant as a response to forces at work in a building, such as post-and-lintel, arch, vault, etc., while the notion of construction refers to the concrete realisation of a chosen structural system, which can be expressed in a number of materials, such as stone, wood, or steel, and by applying a number of different techniques.2 In this case too, however, a question arises similar to the case of the triad of the scenographic, the technological, and the tectonic object: where precisely in this relation between the two of structure and construction is the third category of tectonics?

The architectural object   107 In order to respond to this question, we first need to recall that Frampton keeps stressing that construction and structure in architecture should not be understood in purely technical terms. When he points to the importance of the construction he notes that he is not only referring to the structural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence;3 when he writes about constructional and structural modes for the articulation of space, he maintains that he is not merely referring to constructional technique; when he refers to the structural unit as the essence of architectural form, he stresses that he is not merely referring to mechanical construction.4 Therefore Frampton does not, strictly speaking, treat structure and construction as categories or entities that would be fully formed and given from the start. If structure in architecture is not merely a system of elements meant as a response to the forces at work in a building, then it is obviously also something else. The same goes for construction: if construction in architecture is not merely the concrete realisation of a structural system, then it must also be something else. Based on Frampton’s argumentation I would thus argue that we actually operate with three elements: structure, construction, and something else as well. It is precisely in the place of this something else that, in my view, tectonics should be placed. In this, tectonics isn’t a kind of aesthetic supplement that would be added to a specific structure realised in a concrete construction; rather, it is that which enables both structure and construction to arrive at what they are as themselves, that is, as structure and construction in architecture. Only in connection with tectonics are they in fact articulated as architectural elements, whereby tectonics too is constituted only in connection with them. All three of these categories appear as themselves only together, that is, only when they are mutually connected, joined together. No single category exists without the other two. This can also be confirmed if we recall how the process of conceiving, constructing, architecture in design practice goes. When designing a building, one doesn’t first define a structural system, and in the next step consider how this structure is to be realised, in what materials and techniques, and finally, in the third step, check whether a sound architectural solution appeared as the result. This process doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion, from structure via construction to architecture/tectonics. Rather, the three categories are always considered simultaneously; again, a single category does not exist without the other two. A load-bearing construction is always already considered a certain implemented concept of structure, and a structural system is always already considered as implemented in a certain construction, whereby both the starting point and the aim of this thinking is a more or less clearly envisioned architectural or tectonic solution, that in the process of constructing—of thinking and making—still changes and only gradually gains its form. If the process of constructing, or the process of articulating construction and structure, succeeds, then an object is made

108  The architectural object that isn’t simply a specific structure, realised as a specific construction, but is also something else or other (of tectonics). In professional jargon one refers to this relationship by saying that in the process of architectural construction a certain surplus is produced. This is what architects are always working to achieve—they have to create a certain surplus, such that their response to a given design task would amount to something more than a mere meeting of the technical and utilitarian requirements set at the outset. What then is this surplus? If we begin with the premise that architecture is a thing, which is to say something material, then this surplus cannot be articulated anywhere else but in the product itself, in its material giveness.5 And since this product is nothing else but a connection of the two, of construction and structure, the surplus of tectonics can only consist in the connection itself, in the very link or joint between the two. It does, however, articulate itself in a special way: the connection of tectonics is nothing directly visible; the produced object is “objectively” speaking only a specific structure realised in a specific construction. Tectonics doesn’t actually exist for structural engineering calculations and similar— yet it works. More precisely, it produces a specific material effect: it is that, as the result of which the resolution of a constructional and structural task appears as an architectural resolution. It works such that architecture in all its corporeal material presence appears before us.6 In the tectonic joint it is architecture itself that is materially present (Figures 4.3.1 to 4.3.3). We can look at this more closely using an example of a detail of a structural joint. In architectural theory the structural joint is referred to as an elementary particle of architecture. This is how Gottfried Semper talked about it, and it is Semper to whom Frampton refers when he argues that the structural joint is the primordial tectonic element: “This brings us back to Semper’s privileging of the joint as the primordial tectonic element, as the fundamental nexus around which building comes into being, that is to say, comes to be articulated as a presence in itself.”7 Thus, the structural joint for Frampton doesn’t merely serve to connect. Rather, it is the point of the presence of architecture itself. He says so even more explicitly when he contends that the joint is “a point of ontological condensation.”8 What does this mean? It means that the structural joint is that key architectural element around which architecture itself is articulated—architecture as a thing. In the joint, architecture itself is (or is not, depending whether a joint is well articulated) present; it is materially, corporeally present. To these observations of Frampton’s we add two things: first, the material presence of architecture is the presence of a special kind of materiality, the kind that is produced anew precisely in the process of tectonic construction. It is produced by way of constructing tectonic joints. The second point that we bring to Frampton’s theory is that this materiality is produced and appears in the form of joints of various scales. Not only does it appear in the small scale of the details of structural joints, but also at larger scales, all

The architectural object   109

Figures 4.3.1, 4.3.2 and 4.3.3 The wooden joints securing the large (floating) roof of Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert.

110  The architectural object the way up to the largest scale of what we can call a gigantic joint. By this we mean the connection between a building or some other built structure and its site.

The structural joint: an elementary particle of architecture Let’s begin with the small joint. As an illustrative example of such a joint we will use a structural detail from a protective shelter for a small medieval archaeological site designed by Slovenian architect Oton Jugovec in the early 1970s—and which is one of the finer examples of modernist architecture in the country. This detail, however, is not of interest to us here in its specificity, as a particular instantiation of architecture, but only as an example, based on which we can see how this special materiality is produced and how it appears with or through the joint—the materiality of architecture as a thing. This detail interests us, then, simply as an instance that allows us to see the logic according to which the materiality of an architectural thing is produced. Let us now focus on the detail that carries the massive roof of the building presented in the photograph (Figure 4.3.5). What do we see when we look at this detail (Figure 4.3.4)? We see four wooden structural elements: one vertical, one horizontal, and two diagonal, all of which are connected. But at the same time, we don’t simply see these four connected elements. We also see something else: we see before us—as most of us would probably agree—a successful architectural solution. Where, in what, is this successful architectural solution contained? As there is nothing else before us but four connected elements there is only one possible answer to this question: a successful architectural solution is contained precisely in the way these elements are presented together. In short, it is contained in their connection. So how does their connection work? What is produced with it? Here we have just four connected elements. Their joint, the specific scheme by which these elements are connected, is not some additional fifth element. Strictly speaking, we can’t see the connection as such. We can’t see the joint itself. The joint is present only in its material effect—that we can see the connection of the four elements as a successful architectural solution. We see them as a materialisation of architecture. The joint disappears, so to speak, in the solution and comes to life as the solution itself. It has a paradoxical status: it is present as absent. We can’t see the joint, and in that sense it is absent. And it is present in the sense that it produces material effects: it is owing to the joint that we see the four wooden elements before us as a body of architecture, even though “objectively” speaking we have nothing else before us but four connected wooden elements. This is what happens if the connection of elements is successfully articulated, if they are effectively combined, well joined. If the connection isn’t successful, if the joint is poorly articulated, we see only the elements and a

The architectural object   111

Figures 4.3.4 and 4.3.5 One of the key joints of the roof structure of the Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert.

112  The architectural object failed attempt to connect them. In this case there is no architecture present, only a (decorated) structural detail. If the joint is successful, however, things become more complex. Let’s observe this in the case of the same detail, which is a fine example of a successful tectonic joint. The detail depicted in the photograph is a structural element, part of the load-bearing structure, that is to say, an ordinary utilitarian object; and yet it isn’t only that. A utilitarian object is such that it is also something else—it is also a successful architectural solution, a materialisation of architecture. One should, however, follow that with: without positively or “objectively” being that “something else.” The same goes for the other dimension of this detail, for the detail as an architectural or aesthetic object. This detail is an object that engages our sensual perception and expresses an idea of architecture; in short, it is an aesthetic object of architecture. But it isn’t only that. An aesthetic object of architecture is such that it is, at the same time, also something else—it is also a load-bearing structural element, that is, an ordinary utilitarian object. And here too one should add: without “objectively” being that “something else.” What does it mean that each of the two forms of the structural joint is also something else or other than itself, without positively or “objectively” being that “something else”? This simply means that this “something else” isn’t some supplementary component that could be subtracted from either of the two objects, be separated from them; because it’s not possible to subtract this “something else” from the utilitarian object and arrive at a pure utilitarian object, to “pure utility.” Nor is it possible to subtract this “something else,” the utilitarian value, from the aesthetic object and arrive at “pure aesthetics” or “pure architecture.” Both components, the utilitarian and the architectural, are connected in this structural detail, which is an example of an architectural thing, in the way that they are inseparable. But they are not fused into One. There is a single object in front of us; it is One, but it is a special One—the kind that is Two at the same time. It is an object that is in itself split in Two (into the utilitarian and the aesthetic objects of architecture).9 This simultaneity of Two in One is the result of the architectural or tectonic joint. This is the joint, then, that works two ways at the same time: it simultaneously connects and separates the Two. The components of utility and architecturalness are in the architectural thing connected in the way that the result of this connection is a single object, and yet in this single object a difference is articulated—a difference that is at the same time also a joint between both dimensions. This difference/joint is internal to the object. It is from this joint/difference that the architectural object or the architectural thing is made. To put it briefly: the architectural thing is an object with an internal difference. Because of this difference it is an object of a special kind—one that is always also something else, something other than what it is. It is an object that is not identical to itself.

The architectural object   113 In this simple example of a structural detail we can see the logic that is characteristic for the constructing of architecture in general. We can call it the logic of tectonic construction. It is the logic that is in a way illogical. For the operation of constructing architecture—and this is clearly seen in the case of this detail—is not merely the process of adding parts and elements in accordance with a simple formula, like 1+1=2. In order to define architectural joints, we must abandon the elementary logic of mathematical addition. We can describe the operation of architectural construction only with an inequation: 1+1≠2; or in our case: 1+1+1+1≠4. An architect is one who succeeds in creating such objects with an internal difference. Of this difference one can say that it is minimal, so to speak, null.10 Why null? Because it isn’t directly visible—there is but a single object before us, like this structural detail of the protective roof. At the same time, however, this difference isn’t really null. In fact, just the opposite holds true: for architecture it is crucial. This minimal difference works in the way that we see, so to speak, in a perceptibly sensorial way some material object, such as this structural detail as a materialisation of architecture, as its body. And this is why we can say, for successful architectural constructions, that they indeed have a double materiality: the ordinary materiality of building materials—of wood, concrete, bricks, steel—and the materiality of architecture itself. Both materialities are inseparably connected; there is only a single object in front of us, like the structural detail of Jugovec’s protective roof over the archaeological site. The materiality of architecture itself isn’t directly visible. Yet it is more durable and enduring than the materiality of wood, concrete, stone, or steel. It is this materiality that gives successful architectural products—the architectural things—their particular resilience and resistance in the face of time and situation. It is this materiality that is, in the architectural object, trans-situational and trans-temporal. This special materiality is that which is in the architectural object created anew, and it is created precisely as the result of a successful construction, a successful articulation of the architectural or tectonic joint. This is the materiality of architecture as a thing.

The gigantic joint: constructing a place What holds for the small joint also holds for the gigantic joint, the connection between a built structure and its site. This joint, too, is the way architecture in its specific materiality is produced and it is the way architecture appears in the world. By way of explaining this joint we will once again refer to Frampton’s theory of tectonics. For what we call the gigantic joint is closely connected to yet another aspect of architecture that he explicitly singles out as one of its fundamental aspects, and this is the siting, the situating of a building on its site. It is the topological aspect of architecture that is at stake here.11

114  The architectural object Frampton shares Vittorio Gregotti’s view12 that the geo-environmental context—we understand it here as the set of specific material conditions in which architecture comes into existence—is that essential material that architecture has to work with in a concrete case. When he reflects on the importance of context for architecture Frampton again refers to Semper and in particular to Semper’s concept of stereotomics.13 He explains that this is for Semper one of the two dialogically opposed modes of construction: while the tectonic concerns the light structures of the frame, the stereotomic concerns the massive, solid building. But the etymology of the word— stereos is the Greek term for solid, and tomia for cutting—gives rise to that meaning of this notion which is related to architecture’s siting. For siting, placing on the site is always also an act of creating or opening up a place on which an object can be placed, and this holds true also in the most literal sense—that in order to begin construction, to lay foundations, one first has to break ground, dig a hole for them. So, the act of siting is always an intervention in the surrounding pre-existing; and also, in the most literal sense of an incision, a cut into the ground, the solid body of earth that will become topos, a place, or as we will refer to this place here, the place of architecture. Given the fact, however, that Frampton’s starting point contends that architecture is the art of construction, the following question logically occurs: how are the two aspects of architecture, the tectonic and the topological, connected with each other, or, how can one arrive through the constructional or tectonic aspect at the topological? Our answer to this question goes as follows: a built structure that is well positioned on its site actually works like a gigantic variation of the tectonic joint. The following happens in this case: the site where architecture is to occur is transformed into a topos, a place, and the built structure appears as an instance of architecture. In what follows we will elaborate on this explanation in more detail. As an illustrative example of such a successful connection, a well-articulated gigantic joint, we take the same example— Jugovec’s protective shelter for the archaeological site—only now we focus on the entire building, the building in its context (Figure 4.3.6). If we look again at the building depicted in the photograph, we are moved to ask: what’s happening here? What is happening here is the same as is going on in the case of the small joint. The connection between the building and the landscape isn’t simply the sum of the two. What we have before us isn’t simply a building in the context of the surrounding landscape. Rather, we can say that in their connection the connection itself, their joint, is indirectly present. For this indirect presence of the joint between the building and its site we will henceforth use the notion of place. The joint is indirectly present in the way that we now see the building and its specific context, its site as a place—the place where architecture occurred or placed itself. A place is a successful joint—in our case the joining of the building and its site, into One. More precisely, into an architectural One, which is One that is in itself already Two: in our case this One of the Two is the place of the

The architectural object   115

Figure 4.3.6 Gigantic joint: the place of the Jugovec building. Photo: © Jeff Bickert.

Jugovec building. Which means the following: the One of the Two of the Jugovec building is the building that is a successful architectural creation to the extent that it does not simply function as a bare, free-standing object but is, rather, situated on its site in the way that this site, in all its specific geo-environmental givenness, also appears as an architectural place, or as a successful local realisation of architecture. Just as in the case of a small joint, the joint itself is not directly visible; also in the case of a gigantic joint, the place itself is not directly visible. It isn’t an additional element that would appear on-site directly; we have before us only the building and its site; more precisely, the positioning of the building on the site. And yet this positioning, if it is successfully articulated (as it is in our examined case), works, it has effects. It works such that architecture materialises before us. And it materialises in the form of an inseparable connection of the building and its site, the site that is both specific and intrinsic to the building—its place. The construction of the architectural object is at the same time therefore, if it is architecturally successful, just as in the case of the Jugovec building, also the siting of the architectural object. Which is to say, it is a transformation of its site into a place, the place of architecture; into the place that remains something locally specific or unrepeatably geo-environmental, not only also in its architectural formation, but precisely because of its architectural formation. Both the building and its site are products, they are the

116  The architectural object products of their simultaneous successful architectural articulation, and this successful articulation can be designated a place. We can also say that in their successful connection, in their gigantic joint, both the building and its site are produced anew. Naturally the site, as the set of various factors and conditions, existed already before the building was constructed there. But as a result of the successful architectural construction it appeared, and thus we see it in a new way: as an architectural site. The same goes for the building itself: as a result of the successful connection with its site, its successful siting, the building arrived at its full architectural appearance. If we are more theoretically precise we can say that it appeared with the maximum level of architectural existence; or, co-opting Badiou, with the maximum intensity of appearance.14 As the result of successful architectural construction both components of the gigantic joint, the building and the site, appear as the object of a special kind, as the architectural object in its architecturally marked site, which means, in its place. And as such, both are always also something else or other than the objectively determinable givens that constitute them. They both appear as objects with an internal difference. Thus, we have arrived at a more precise answer to the question how the two procedures of making architecture, constructing and siting, tectonics and topology, are connected, how one arrives at topology from tectonics. They are connected in the way of a gigantic joint, which is nothing but the wellconceived, that is to say, successful, architectural positioning of a planned architectural object on its site. If the gigantic joint is successfully articulated, both a concrete architectural object and its site are created anew with it and in it—or, in short, both with it and in it, the place of an architectural object is created, topos. Positioning on site is therefore essentially the constructional act of the architect (the construction of an architectural object), which is at the same time the topological act (the creation of a place). If this act is successful we get an architectural object that is Two in One: we get the place of a building, which is the inseparable connection of a building, and the site that is intrinsic to it. And this is an architectural object which appears with a high or maximum intensity of architectural existence. If the act is not successful, if the joint is badly articulated, then this Two in One breaks down into two ones: instead of the inseparable connection of a building and its site in which also something other is articulated—the place of a building—we get only a building on a site. We get only a freestanding object. This object may in itself be an architectural object; it can for instance be distinguished by its masterful articulation of structure and fine detailing, but a topological dimension is missing here. Thus, such an architectural object appears with a diminished intensity of existence, and the consequences it triggers are correspondingly diminished, perhaps even null.15 What has been said about constructing gigantic joints we can now illustrate by referring to the dilemma that concerns the question of architecture’s

The architectural object   117 siting, and which continues to be a pointed subject of discussion among architects. This is the dilemma commonly expressed as local vs. global and can be summarised in the form of the following question: must architects simply accept that we live in a time of fast-disappearing local features and characteristics, and that one has no choice in architecture but to adopt a single, globalised language (of architecture); or is the task of architects to rescue the remaining local particularities, where they still exist, and work to bring them back to life? Based on what we have developed, it is clear that architecture, when it really works as a creative thinking practice, always already overcomes this dilemma. It neither strives to preserve the local particularities nor accepts that we live today in a single globalised reality, in which local differences no longer particularly matter. Nor does it choose the possibility of some “soft compromise” between the two in the form of fusing some of one and a bit of the other into a so-called glocal architecture. Rather, architecture as a creative practice works such that, together with its object, it also creates the object’s context. More precisely, it creates the context that is both specific and intrinsic to it—it creates a place. This is important here: when we speak about creative thinking practice of architecture the place isn’t the unveiling of something that is already there, it isn’t the unveiling of a kind of essence of the locality, it is isn’t some sort of the “most local of the locality”.16 The place is a transsituational and trans-temporal creation of architecture. Because of its trans-situational and trans-temporal character it may actually be more appropriate to call it a non-place, a-topos. The creation of a place is an affirmation of something that is incommensurate with either the local or the global conditions, something that is incommensurate with the particularities of the given world and the laws and mechanisms of the world of “objectivity”—this, even though it always operates in the local/global situation, even though it always figures in the form of some particularity, some particular given by the existing global world. The creation of a place is a transformation of a particular geo-environmental context— which is, as we agree with Gregotti, the most important material from which to develop the project—into a context that is qualitatively different from the one before, a context with a different, architectural materiality. Or, as we said before, into a context with a difference in itself. To create a place means to open up the given context, the given world—to affirm the world in its constitutive openness. Architecture constructs the world as an open structure. This is the world that not simply looks different from the one before architecture intervened in it; it is the world in which we are differently—we are in the way that we activated our desire to see. When architecture constructs its tectonic joints it therefore not only changes reality, the world in which we live, but together with the world it also changes us. It is here that the transformative capacity of the creative thinking practice of architecture lies, the capacity that

118  The architectural object architecture fully realises by way of a successful gigantic joining—via the joint—of the tectonic and the topological aspect of its construction.

Notes 1 In the conceptualisation of the architectural object I am indebted to the concept of the double minimal difference formulated by Rado Riha. In what follows, I use some of his formulations. See Riha, Kant in drugi kopernikanski obrat v filozofiji, 306–327; Kant in Lacan’scher Absicht. Die kopernikanische Wende und das Reale, 139–159. For the concept of the immanent difference see also Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 39–40. Riha too refers to Copjec’s conceptualisation of the difference. 2 This is how structure and construction are defined by Eduard Sekler in his essay, which is one of the key references for Frampton’s theory of tectonics. See Eduard Sekler, “Structure, Construction, Tectonics,” in Structure in Art and Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Brazilier, 1965). See also Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 392. 3 This is how Frampton explains it in the essay “Rappel à l’Ordre”: “The dictionary definition of the term ‘tectonic’ to mean ‘pertaining to building and construction in general; constructional, constructive used especially in reference to architecture and the kindred arts,’ is a little reductive to the extent that we intend not only the structural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence in relation to the assembly of which it is part. From its conscious emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century with the writings of Karl Bötticher and Gottfried Semper, the term not only indicates a structural and material probity but also a poetics of construction, as this may be practiced in architecture and the related arts.” Cf. Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 93. 4 Cf. Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 92. See also Studies in Tectonic Culture, 2. 5 To return to Sekler: he too understands tectonics as a certain surplus, as “something more,” but he explains this surplus as something we sense in ourselves. Frampton’s definition of architecture as a thing, however, leads to the conclusion that this “something more” is embodied outside ourselves, in the body of an (in each case specific) architectural object. Of course, on the condition that we want to look as architects, that is, if we not only look but also desire to see. 6 Here we can see that the triad of construction, structure, and tectonics follows the same formal connecting logic as the triad of the scenographic, technological, and tectonic object. Tectonics is the category that never appears as a perceptibly present third element. As itself it is always absent. Precisely as such, however, it is crucial for the constitution of architecture. In its absence it is therefore very present. It is present in its effects: it works in the way that a specific structure enacted in a specific construction appears as architecture, as the body of architecture. 7 Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 95. Frampton also writes that for Semper the knot was a primordial tectonic unit and indicates that it is from the knot that the structural joint developed, the joint as the primordial tectonic element. See Kenneth Frampton, “Bötticher, Semper and the Tectonic” in What is Architecture, ed. Andrew Ballantyne (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 144–146. For Semper’s understanding of tectonics and the crucial influence of Karl Bötticher on Semper’s theory of tectonics see Wolfgang Herrmann: Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 121–123, 139–152, et al. 8 Frampton: “There is a spiritual value residing in the ‘thingness’ of the constructed object, so much so that the generic joint becomes a point of ontological

The architectural object   119 condensation rather than a mere connection.” “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 95. In this statement it actually seems that Frampton withdraws from the radicality of his own thesis that architecture is a material thing, as he replaces the thingness of the thing with a spiritual value. In so doing he reduces the product of architecture, in opposition to his own theory, to a sign. 9 The two of the utilitarian and the aesthetic component are distinguished-yetindistinguishable—the architectural object is one articulated as two. 10 The minimal difference is well defined by Alenka Zupančič when she explains the special status of a double—she defines it as the “difference between me and me”: “The question that throughout inhabits the configuration of a double, of course is: What actually constitutes me as me? And in this configuration it receives a paradoxical answer: The difference between me and me. Not the difference between me and the other, but the difference between me and my double. And if there is no such difference (or nobody sees it), then, strictly speaking, there isn't me either.” A. Zupančič, Seksualno in ontologija (Sex and Ontology) (Ljubljana: Analecta, 2011), 147. (My translation.); the abridged English version: A. Zupančič: What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 11 Frampton in fact singles out three aspects that are crucial for/in architecture: “Thus we may claim that the built invariably comes into existence out of the constantly evolving interplay of three converging vectors, the topos, the typos, and the tectonic.” See Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 2. 12 See Gregotti’s statement cited on p. 87 of this book. 13 For Frampton’s explanation of the notion of stereotomics see: “Rappel à l’Ordre,” 95, 102. For an insightful discussion of Semper’s concepts of tectonics and stereotomy see also Akos Moravanszky’s Metamorphism, in particular pp. 93–131. In this book Moravanszky discusses what we too are interested in: architectural materiality, which is a result of architectural construction, and to which he refers as the “alchemical transformation of materials in architecture.” But his focus is different: he is particularly interested in the construction of the meaning of building materials and in a building as a cultural object. A. Moravanszky, Metamorphism: Material Change in Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2018). 14 In Logics of Worlds Badiou focuses on the question how instances of being—and in his philosophy being is being-multiple—appear as situated objects of a world. According to him being-qua-being isn’t that which appears: what appears of a pure being is a particular quality of being, and this is existence. That existence as a quality of being means not only that it appears but that it appears in various degrees of intensity, from minimum to maximum. Cf. A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book II Greater Logic, I. The Transcendental, etc. Similarly, I would argue that architectural objects appear with various degrees of intensity or existence, from the weakest to the strongest degree. And there is also the lowest threshold, below which there is no architecture, only ordinary objects. 15 This difference between articulating a successful gigantic joint and failing in this articulation, can be compared to Frampton’s distinction between an approach that he calls “building the site” and the construction of free-standing objects. Frampton: “Hence the notion of ‘building the site’, in Mario Botta’s memorable phrase, is of greater import than the creation of free-standing objects, and in this regard building is as much about the topos as it is about technique.” Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 27. 16 It seems that Gregotti too shares this view, when he writes that the task of an architectural project is to reveal the essence of the geo-environmental context. (See his statement in the chapter “The architectural condition” in this book.)

5

In lieu of a conclusion

We have outlined the structural logic of architecture, which presents this activity in its transformative capacity. But architecture includes as one of its elements also something that we haven’t yet explicitly addressed. This is the element that necessarily belongs to the creative thinking practice of architecture, yet at the same time is strictly speaking exterior to it. This is why we conclude with this element—which is the user of architecture. In the case of architecture this is always a specific user, specific in the sense that architecture does not address nor acknowledge him as a user in general. Rather, for architecture the user is interesting and relevant only as a specific, that is to say, an architectural user. I would describe the user as one of the conditions the architect has to take into account in his design, and it is in this sense that the user is something exterior to architecture. It is a constitutive part of the material, that most important material with which architecture works and from which it constructs its body. And just as architecture addresses and deals with all other conditions, it also does so with this one: architecture transforms the user into a component of the architecture and thus in a way creates him anew. This is how all creative thinking practices work. Gilles Deleuze in his text “What is the Creative Act?” puts this particularly succinctly when he says: “There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist.”1 Something similar can be said for architecture: there is no work of architecture that does not call on a user who does not yet exist. And if that someone who is called on, addressed by architecture, by a select architectural work, responds to this—if he activates his desire to see, if he not only looks but also wants to see, as we formulate it herein—then he becomes an architectural user. This is no longer someone who uses architecture as something to which he has, strictly speaking, an outside relation (who uses it as a bare means, as something he needs either to live in or as a promising investment, a status symbol, etc.). He has already entered the work; entered it in the sense that he incorporated himself into its body, that he entered into the composition of architecture as subject. To our thesis that architecture constructs its object in the way and in the form of tectonic joints, we can therefore add here that the user too is always tied in this joint.2 It is in

In lieu of a conclusion  121 this sense that this element necessarily belongs to the thinking practice of architecture. This is, however, a user that has only been created by architecture, the architectural or subjectified user; the user who is the product of architecture. Let us, as we conclude, observe in closer detail the image of the user that the transformative capacity of architecture, architecture as a creative thinking practice, requires. We can observe this by way of looking at the work of two modernist architects, Hannes Meyer and Alvar Aalto. Both built on the notion that architecture, with its material objects, constructs a new, architectural reality, and that this reality presupposes or entails also its newly constructed user. We can put this another way. Both architects believed that architecture is meant for people—but for people who do not yet exist. These are not some ideal people that might or could exist in some ideal world. They are people that architecture calls into existence. And architecture can do this if it is well constructed, if it is good architecture. Each of the two architects of course examined, developed, and demonstrated in his own specific way what concretely well-constructed architecture was. In what follows we come to see, albeit only in the form of a rough sketch, how each one of them approached this task of constructing good architecture, the architectural objects, and in this sense, also the way they constructed their architectural users. In the case of Meyer, we focus on his work from the late 1920s. In the case of Aalto, we focus exclusively on the Villa Mairea project, which he designed together with architect Aino Aalto in the late 1930s.

Buildings-machines and the posthumanist subject Hannes Meyer was one of those architects who was guided in his work by the idea that society, the given capitalist society, can and must be radically changed, and that architecture too can contribute to triggering and realising this change. He was an architect who wagered on the possibility that architecture embodies a socially transformative capacity and is able to contribute no less than to the constructing of a classless, collective society.3 In this it is, in our view, essential, however, that for Meyer architecture succeeds in doing so precisely when it is well conceived and constructed. Meyer’s specific approach to such well-conceived architecture can in short be described as follows: he tried to construct buildings that were mere things4 among the other things of the modern age. For him, this meant that they were actually nothing but well-functioning machines. In his study of Meyer’s work, K. Michael Hays examines and elaborates on how, using what approaches and methods, Meyer worked to approach this task of constructing buildingsmachines.5 In what follows we draw on this work, which is interesting for us also because Hays maintains that Meyer’s constructing of architectural objects presupposed also the constructing of the subject, which is a new type of subject that Hays designates the posthumanist subject. But let us begin with Meyer’s architectural object.

122  In lieu of a conclusion Hays writes that Meyer understood and practised the architectural design of a building as mere technical organisation of the building. For Meyer, modern production techniques weren’t simply means to take into account various functional, technological, etc. requirements that the building was supposed to fulfil, and in so doing subordinate them to the architect’s design intentions and incorporate them into some preconceived form of the building. In Meyer’s view, it was the technical organisation of the building that already constituted the architecture of the building. An example of this approach, which Hays examines in detail, is the Petersschule project that Meyer designed together with Hans Wittwer. The architects took the technological and functional conditions and requirements as the basis of their project, such as maximising the amount of light entering the building, hygienic requirements, the functional organisation of the building and its surrounding area and similar. Their design proposal was indeed the diagramming of these requirements in the form of the plan and the spatial concept of the building, and a direct translation of this diagram into the building’s form. The building wasn’t an attempt to realise some architectural principles of composition, it wasn’t an expression of the touch of an individual maker. Rather, it was a direct response to the functional and technological requirements and conditions of the project—so direct that one could argue, and Hays notes, that this holds true for Meyer’s architecture in general, that the building was only the conditions and requirements to which it responded.6 The materials too were approached in just such a matter-of-fact way in Meyer’s architecture. Hays writes that they were purged “of all mythical, auratic, transcendental meaning”; each material was “experienced as such and as infiltrating our everyday lives with the new concrete effects of the industrial image landscape and social field; no distinction can be made between the content and its expression.”7 Also the detailing and the individual elements of the building were approached this way, as a direct response “to what was demanded technically of the building as a servomechanism.”8 In the Petersschule, for example, the staircase—the element that ordinarily carries a special meaning in architecture and expresses the author’s creative intentions—was simply designed using only standard prefabricated elements. Hays maintains in his study that in this specific approach to design Meyer differed significantly from many other modernists, who also strove to articulate the modernity of the modern age in their work. As two examples of this latter, different approach Hays points to the Bauhaus building in Dessau and the tubular steel furniture of Marcel Breuer, and explains that both represent attempts at translating newfound technical possibilities into expressions of technological aesthetics, and that they are both examples of subordinating technology to the subjective design intentions of the architects. In short, the two examples are objects that refer to modern technology. In contrast to this mere reference to modern technology, to machines, Meyer’s buildings are conceived as machines; more precisely, they are machines. In reference to the Petersschule project (Figure 5.1), Hays explains that Meyer’s presentation of the project as published indicates that

In lieu of a conclusion  123 one should understand the building “as an instrument, a concrete instance of the diagram, a part of a larger machine for the production of the desired effects of light, occupation, and sensuous experience”.9 This is what Hays keeps stressing: that Meyer was making buildings that were not objects raised to the level of the sublime objects of architecture, but had the same status as the context in which they were produced. In

Figure 5.1 Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer, Petersschule in Basel, competition project, 1926. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

124  In lieu of a conclusion this way, Meyer showed that the so-called socio-historical context of the architectural production must be understood as existing on the same level as the object, which is the result of this production, and that therefore the two can’t be treated as separate entities. It is precisely in this revelation of Meyer that Hays finds what he refers to as the architect’s crucial “materialist contribution.”10 This is where, for Hays, also lies the radical quality of Meyer’s modernism: “in the difficult truth that things are just what they are, utterly shorn of any metaphysical illusions of artistic authenticity, unity, or depth.”11 Meyer rejected the idea of an autonomous artistic work, “complete and suspended, as it were, against the world,” and instead tried to create the work that “falls into the world, becoming one worldly thing (Sache) among others. The boundaries between the facts of modern society and aesthetic production are thereby dismantled, and that production returned to its unprivileged place within the totality of social practices.”12 To this, Hays adds something else, and this is crucial: that the building falls into the world, that it is but one worldly thing among others, doesn’t mean that it fuses with the world. On the contrary: precisely because it is but one worldly thing among others, because it is a thing and nothing but a thing it interrupts and opens the given world and shows that it could also be different. In just such a way Hays describes the workings of Meyer’s architecture, and he ties its piercing or transformative capacity to its material presence, to architecture as a concrete material object. For the Petersschule project he thus argues that the building “organizes its elements in such a way as to reveal the present order as unsatisfactory, physically and socially”; that it reorganises the components and materials of the world such that it produces a certain absence in them, “a significant absence”; that it is an architecture of non-consent, the effect of which is estrangement, and absences of different sorts.” These various absences reveal “that what had seemed … essentially natural and given is in fact historically and socially produced, and therefore open to radical transformation.13 The building, then, is conceived such that it reveals the present order as unsatisfactory; it reorganises the components and materials of the world in the way that it produces a certain absence in them. It is precisely as a material object that Meyer’s building has the capacity to function this way. And the materiality of the building is the result of the specific constructing of architecture, the core of which, says Hays, is that it shows things just the way they are, shorn of all metaphysical illusions. This specific constructing produces the building as a thing and nothing but a thing. And here arises a question that is truly interesting, and this is: how can something, which is a bare thing of the given world, change this world? Or, how can its bare material presence grant the building-machine the power to reorganise, interrupt, pierce the world?

In lieu of a conclusion  125 In formulating an answer to this question, we can draw on Hays’s explanation of the materiality of Meyer’s planned buildings. But we will supplement it with something that is essential. For Hays, the materiality of a building encompasses various aspects of the building, from the articulation of its parts and detailing and the use of materials to its formal scheme and its positioning on site. His descriptions also show that he understands it as a special kind of materiality. He writes, for instance, that in the Petersschule project, Meyer “intensifies the raw materiality of the thing—the glaring brightness, the hardness, the smell, the taste—and thrusts the experience of that thing, previously indifferent and unimaginably external, toward the subject with unpadded harshness.” Hays proceeds, maintaining that Meyer’s materialism induces a play of sensuous energies in the viewer, a compulsive pleasure taken in the quiddity of the building parts, but also in the contradictions, the disruptions, the gaps and silences, all of which explodes the received social meanings of those things.14 The materiality at stake here is one that affects the subject in a special way, and in this sense it is a special materiality. However, here Hays forgets something crucial, and it is this that has to be added to his interpretation. For we must certainly agree that the special materiality of a building is produced by constructing a building as a thing among other things and nothing but a thing. But to this we must add that this materiality belongs to the building, or becomes visible in it in a specific way only because the building is constructed as an architectural object and because we also see it as such. Hays’ claim that Meyer’s key achievement lies in his demonstrating that things are just what they are therefore has to be rectified as follows: it is precisely when Meyer shows that things are just what they are, that is, things, that he also shows that they are always also something other or else than what they are—without positively being something else. “The most important materialist contribution of Meyer’s work” is therefore in my view the following: when Meyer constructs a building as one worldly thing among others, as a building that is precisely what it is— that is to say, a building and nothing else—he in fact produces at the same time also a building as an architectural object. Let us elucidate. Meyer constructs a thing—in our case a building— as what it is, as nothing but a building. A building is a building, nothing but a building: this is Meyer’s specific understanding of the building he constructs. With such an understanding of a thing-building, however, he already adds something to it, namely, precisely this “nothing but a thingbuilding.” He supplements a thing-building with a nothing, a void, the void of this “nothing but.” This void, however, isn’t null. As soon as Meyer succeeds in constructing the building with the supplement of the void of this “nothing but the building,” he also succeeds in constructing the building as architectural object. For the void is materially present, it is in its place that

126  In lieu of a conclusion the building as architectural object stands, it is where the architecturalness and the architectural materiality of the building reside. In the place of the void that “significant absence” is present, which is, following Hays, the mark of the architecturalness of Meyer’s objects. And it is precisely in this present absence that Meyer’s specific materialism and the materiality of his buildings lies, that because of which, as mere buildings, they are also already architectural objects. Meyer succeeds in realising a building as architectural object by showing two things at once. First, that thing-buildings are just what they are—buildings; and second, that, in exception to this, they are always also something else, without them really being something else for the given world of “objectivity.” The building that Meyer constructs has at the point of its being “nothing but a building” disposed of every marker of the “sign” and become only the “architectural thing”; whereby, as must be added, this architectural thing in the building breaks the identity of the building itself, drills a hole of (its) meaning in it. Meyer’s buildings are constructed as objects that work within the framework of the given world as interruptions of that world, as foreign elements that with their specific materiality throw any firm identitary logic of the given world of objectivity into question. The most important materialist contribution of Hannes Meyer is therefore, in my view, that in his particular historical situation he succeeded in constructing architectural objects as objects with a special materiality, which gives them a piercing capacity; the capacity owing to which they reveal the present order as unsatisfactory, reorganise the materials and components of the world in the way that they disrupt it, introduce an absence in it. He created objects that were located in space and time, yet were not subordinated to the given space and time; they are objects that demonstrate, with their material presence, that the given reality can always also be something else than what it is. Thus, they reveal that which every system tries to conceal— that the reality, which the system regulates, is in itself open to the possibility of radical transformation. In such objects, however, it is always also the subject that is tied. Let us observe now also this element of architectural construction. We turn first to Hays’s interpretation of Meyer’s work, whose central point maintains that Meyer’s architecture isn’t simply the production of objects, but that it also produces its subject, which is the posthumanist subject. Thus, Hays writes in the introduction that the architectural objects have a subject-productive force, and that “the subject is variously ‘constituted’, ‘constructed’ or ‘inscribed’ by the different architectures.”15 He introduces the subject also in reference to Giedion and his outline of the subject as an instance that is constituted in relation to the work of art or architecture and is therefore inscribed in it. Hays explains: The subject having been split from its object by the logic of social and technical development, the object must now be reconstructed by Giedion

In lieu of a conclusion  127 in such a way as to bear the place of the subject within itself: ‘lo spettatore nel centro del quadro’ was how Giedion put it. … The viewing, interpreting subject must be placed within the frame of the object …16 In short, the subject that emerges in relation to the object isn’t outside the object; the subject is always already situated within the object, inscribed in it. To this we add that which is in my view essential, and this is that this logic has also to be turned around: the object—which is that special object that in the case of architecture we defined as the “cause of architecture”—is in a specific way within the subject. It is part of the subject. It is in line with just such an understanding of the subject that Hays, too, explains the posthumanist subject. He outlines it first in opposition to the humanist subject, which he presents as the conscious originator of meanings and actions and as the intending manipulator of his material products. This is what the posthumanist subject is not. What this subject is, Hays develops particularly clearly in the case of the producer of architecture, that is, the architect. And as a concrete and exemplary case of such a posthumanist subject Hays takes Meyer himself. For in Hays’ view, Meyer is an example of the architect who doesn’t construct his material products according to his taste and his personal preferences, he isn’t the grand author of his architectural creations. Hays repeatedly stresses this in his book: Meyer’s architecture does not bear the mark of the architect’s personality, his production breaks with the authorial gesture and the individuality of an architectural work, his buildings are conceived as “a building system that resists the appearance of having been manipulated or mediated by a particular artistic personality.”17 Hays also notes that Meyer insisted that design functions as a collaborative action conceived in the form of so-called designing brigades. Despite emphasising these points, however, Hays doesn’t reject the idea of an active role for the architect in the production of architecture. For him, the architect is certainly not a simple constitutive part of the mechanism of producing architecture determined by each specific socio-historical context. In defining the posthumanist subject, Hays actually distances himself from two understandings of the subject: on the one hand, from the position he calls a simple positivism, which explicitly does not recognise an active, constitutive agency of subjectivity in creating the world; and on the other hand, from the position of idealism, for which the subject is an autonomous, trans-individual agency that actively constitutes the world. The posthumanist subject corresponds neither to one nor the other definition of the subject. Hays describes its special status particularly lucidly when he discusses the process of designing the proposal for the League of Nations competition. He writes that from Meyer’s statements and the concept of his proposal it follows that “the architect himself is only a switching mechanism who sets in motion the process of assembling an object.”18 But after Hays has described the concept of the building in detail, he nonetheless adds: “to be sure, substantial formal decisions have been made by the architect.”19

128  In lieu of a conclusion Therefore, the architect is on the one hand merely a switching mechanism, a passive link in the design process in which he only performs the switch on–off function. On the other hand, however, he is an active force, the one who takes substantial decisions. It would seem, then, that Hays ascribes an impossible role to the architect, because on the one hand he is fully integrated in the mechanism that controls him; on the other hand, he nonetheless acts and takes decisions independently. However, the two modes of his working—this is our essential supplement to Hays’s argument—can also be thought about together if we turn to the understanding of the subject developed herein based on Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Hays’ architect-subject in this case reveals himself as the subject that is split with his objectal moment, the moment we designated the “cause of architecture.” The action of such an architect-subject—a headless subject insofar as that which guides him, to simplify somewhat, is not his head, but rather the “cause of architecture”—can be outlined as follows: the architect is only a switching mechanism because he isn’t the master of the process of constructing architecture. He isn’t the one who guides this process. Rather, it is he who is “guided” in this process in a specific way. He is guided in the sense that it is the “cause of architecture” that guides him and which he tries to realise in his thinking and action, and which he finds in the successful products and phases of his design work. And it is precisely because he finds some of his “cause” that he is able to continue, develop the project further. The “cause of architecture” that he as the architect is working to achieve and that he actually finds in an individual solution is that point of support, based on which he can make the next step, take a decision as to how to proceed with the project. The taking of the decision has the structure of the act, and it is only with this act that he who decides confirms himself as the architect. The architect is therefore only a switching mechanism in the sense that he isn’t the sovereign master of the design process, but that he too serves the “cause of architecture.” As an architect, he does constitute and confirm himself through his independent act of taking substantial decisions. But the driving force and only firm point of support of this act is, again, that “cause” that guides him. And this is the “cause” that comes into existence only in the act of creation, which is, paradoxically, itself guided by the “cause.” The concept of Hays’ posthumanist subject who composes himself with his objectal moment, with the “cause of architecture,” shows us an architect who is neither a self-sufficient creator of his architectural objects, removed from the world, nor simply some constitutive part of the network of conditions in which he works. He is, and acts, in the world in a special way: his point of support is his “cause,” as that point of the impossible-real of the given world that he tries to (re)construct in the world in the form of material objects; whereby the “cause” itself exists only in the process of this (re)constructing. And in this process, he too only constitutes himself as the architect-subject. More precisely, he enters into the composition of architecture as subject. Since the firm point, both the foundation and the driving force of

In lieu of a conclusion  129 his thinking and action, is the “cause of architecture,” something which for the given world doesn’t exist, the architect-subject already separates himself in his action from the given world. He separates himself in the sense that he is not determined only by the logic that governs the given world of “objectivity.” He acts in the world in a kind of torn-out way; he is in the world such that within this world and its predominant logic he acts regardless of this logic. He follows his “own” logic—more precisely, he follows the logic of the “cause of architecture,” the logic of creativity. Here we can see where the emancipatory potential of Meyer’s architecture, of his constructing of buildings-machines, lies—the potential Hays focuses on in his book. This is actually, as I would emphasise, the emancipatory potential of architecture as a creative thinking practice in general. By producing architectural objects that are articulations of the “cause of architecture” in the world, in a specific sense architecture opens up the same possibility of living to all. It opens up the possibility for all to be in the given world such that we are “torn-out” of this world, such that we find support in ourselves and our creative thinking activity. Architecture opens this possibility not only for architects, that is, for those who literally construct architecture, not only for the producers of architecture. It opens it up also for the spectators and the users of architecture; for the users, who are, if we are precise, the architectural users, that is, the users who are ready to “enter” or have already “entered” architecture. These are the users who not only look, but who look because they desire to see. What do they desire to see? They desire to see a constructed object, as something other than a mere utilitarian object—they want to see it as architecture.20 Herein lies the universal dimension of architecture: by introducing its “causes of architecture” into the world, architecture addresses us all in our capacity to activate our desire to see—the desire to see, which is a generic human capacity, a capacity everyone has.21 Architecture is a creative thinking activity, that is, one of those activities that invites us to activate this capacity of ours, which also means that we bind our existence to some “cause,” which we recognised as that which is essential for us and potentially also for others or for the world, part of which we are. Our gaze is in this case subjectified—and it is the subjectified gaze that is the condition for seeing, recognising that there is nothing self-evident in the given order of things, in the given social and political order; that this order could be, or as Meyer insisted, that it should be, radically different; such that would enable the existence worthy of a human being, not only for a few, but for all.

Extended rationalism and the human factor The work of Alvar Aalto represents another, markedly different approach to constructing the architectural object. In presenting this approach, let’s focus on the Villa Mairea designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto in the late 1930s (Figure 5.2). This villa is one of the early, particularly explicit, attempts to

130  In lieu of a conclusion develop or to realise the hypothesis that extended rationalism is the right orientation in architecture, to be able to realise it in built form.22 As such an attempt, this villa was also an opportunity for the architects to better determine what exactly it was they were looking for, what the architecture of extended rationalism was, such that based on what they found in the construction of this villa they would be able to continue, articulate this architecture further. And Aalto’s concept of extended rationalism also presupposed its specific user.23 Let us first observe what Aalto said about this user in the lecture in which he initially presented his hypothesis. As we recall, Aalto argued in this lecture that the rationalist approach to the design of the built environment isn’t problematic in itself. It has many positive sides, it works well with modern production and construction processes, it fulfils social considerations and functional requirements and thus makes perfect sense for the (modern) time and way of life. The problem appears only in the case that in the design process one doesn’t take into account the fact that such designed objects and buildings are made for people. So, what kind of people are these objects made for? In other words, who are the users of architecture of extended rationalism? Aalto maintained that design should “provide people with better and more humane objects to build the world they live in,”24 and in order to do this, it should take into account that people’s needs and requirements can’t possibly be definitively categorised in and as various rational systems, nor can they be

Figure 5.2 Alvar and Aino Aalto, Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, 1938–1939. © MFA/ Jussi Tiainen.

In lieu of a conclusion  131 adequately addressed on the basis of related calculations, rules, and regulations. Because a human being is always determined by “something else” that evades the rational grasp, that is never fully attained, fully reached. The “human factor” that determines a human being remains, in the final instance, indeterminate. The user of the architecture of extended rationalism is therefore a rational human being who is determined precisely by something that cannot ultimately be rationally determined, one that remains external to the system of rationality. And the issues and problems appear when one doesn’t take into account the human being in this crucial dimension of his—that is to say, when one doesn’t take into account that which Aalto called the “human factor.” Aalto illustrated this argument using the electromagnetic (light) spectrum. He explained that the complex set of requirements an object has to fulfil can be well described using this spectrum. Rationalism does an excellent job of covering most of it, such as its red band, which deals with social considerations; or the orange band, which deals with questions related to construction and structure, and so on, all the way up to the ultraviolet band. This segment of the spectrum is invisible to the naked eye, but according to Aalto it is this band that is related to “the demands that are closest to the human individual” and “contains the purely human questions” such that in it “we will find most of what is new.”25 And it is precisely this segment that rationalism fails to take into account. Another example Aalto presents to illustrate the inadequacy of the rationalist approach to design is the metal tube chair by Marcel Breuer (mentioned in the context of Meyer’s work). He describes the chair as light, structurally hygienic, as a product that makes complete sense from the point of view of production; it is a technically ingenious solution. But, Aalto argues, it has one crucial deficiency. What it doesn’t take into consideration is the simple fact that the chair is meant for a human being, who experiences the world around him through his body. What the chair failed to meet is the range of demands, Aalto concludes, “that together make up the mysterious concept of comfort.”26 To these demands it isn’t possible to respond with the solutions that are the result of technological discoveries, rational calculations, and logical reasoning. Yet one has to and can respond to them, maintained Aalto. To this particular problem or this deficiency of rationalism Aalto responded with his hypothesis. His central point maintained that rationalism isn’t problematic in itself—the problem in fact is that it hasn’t been taken far enough. For one should apply the rational approach also to that which eludes or defies definition, which can’t be measured or calculated, and which goes beyond any scientific determinations. This has to be included in the rational system of design, and it should be included, for herein lies the essence of Aalto’s hypothesis, as precisely that which remains foreign to this system. So, rationalism has to be extended—such that it takes into account also that which is invisible to the eye, unmeasurable, outside the realm of physics yet deeply affects us as human beings. It has to be extended

132  In lieu of a conclusion to include the “human factor.” Only if it were extended with this factor, which is, strictly speaking, external to the rational system, would it become a real rationalism.27 In his hypothesis, therefore, Aalto strove to make architecture a rational system whose crucial moment is something that has a paradoxical status. For on the one hand this “something” belongs to the rational system, but on the other hand it can’t, strictly speaking, be situated within this system. It is an internal, constitutive part of the system, yet in relation to the system it is always in a position of its externality, its surplus. It is therefore in a paradoxical position of something, and it is this that is crucial for Aalto’s concept of extended rationality, that is external from within. So, it is in a paradoxical position of internal externality. And this internal externality of the system works such that it keeps opening, cleaving the system in its systematic arrangement. As a result, one can in fact no longer speak about the system as a consistent whole. For the system is whole only as not-whole, All is only as Not-All. And it is only such a “system,” if we follow Aalto, that is truly rational; only this would constitute real rationalism. What we have to deal with, therefore, is an open system that includes as its constitutive part something that is heterogenous to it, which doesn’t belong to it—the moment of the a-rational.28 And it is precisely such a system that is for Aalto characteristic for human rationality—for a human as rational being is determined by a “human factor.” And this is something that can’t be rationally defined, that remains external, other to the system of human rationality and which, as such, opens this system, extends it from within. If a living environment is to prove suitable for a human being and his characteristic, that is, extended rationality, one always has to take into account the approach of extended rationalism. And I would argue that this is precisely what Aalto tried to develop, to realise in the Villa Mairea project. He tried to realise this villa as an open system. Several critics have described the villa as a unique work of art, or as an entirely personal expression devoid of any particular unifying rational principles, even as “entirely illogical”.29 This seeming lack of any underlying design schemes or rational devices is widely seen as characteristic of Aalto’s post-functionalist phase in general. But other interpretations have shown that Aalto consistently used rational organising principles in his work, such as modular co-ordination, structural grids, or simple compositional and geometric principles.30 This is what Juhani Pallasmaa points out in his analysis of the villa. He writes that a number of studies indicate that Aalto could in fact be considered one of the more rational and rationally consistent architects of the modern movement, and points out that the design of this villa too is based on rational design principles. Its floor plan has a regular L-shape; it follows a modular grid based on subdivisions of a square; the load-bearing structure of the living area is planned atop a regular grid; the entrance wing is entirely symmetrical; and the program of the house is arranged as a series of functional zones (Figure 5.3).31 To this, however, Pallasmaa adds that the rules and guiding principles of rationalism are also consistently violated in

In lieu of a conclusion  133 the villa, and it seems as if the architects “aimed at confusing any reading of regularity and repetition.”32 Kari Jormakka maintains a similar position when he discusses Aalto’s approach to design; he too notes that in this house the architects insisted on subverting rationalist principles.33 Based on Aalto’s hypothesis of extended rationalism we could summarise these findings as follows: not only did the architects apply a rationalist system of design—which they also violated and subverted—but it was precisely the two together, that is, their use of the rational system together with their simultaneous breach of it, that constituted their architectural system. They used various techniques of confusing, subverting, and transgressing the rationalist principles, precisely as a constitutive part of these principles—in order to make out of the rational system the real, that is, extended rationalism. What guided them in their design wasn’t a violating of the rationalist logic; rather, they used rationalist principles such that, in the name of this

Figure 5.3 Modular coordination scheme of the Villa Mairea, drawing by Juhani Pallasmaa. (Initially published in: Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea 1938–1939.) © Juhani Pallasmaa.

134  In lieu of a conclusion same rationality, they also violated them. Their process of deciding how and where such violations were necessary was consistently guided by the question of how to create rational architecture that takes into account the “human factor”—the factor of human being as rational being, as one who is always determined also by the moment of the incalculable, the contingent. For it is only this specific moment that makes rationality truly human, that creates real rationality. The ways one can effect this, however, always have to be invented anew, on various levels of the project, from case to case, from detail to detail. Pallasmaa shows in his study how the architects approached this difficult task, what moves they developed in order—as our argument goes—to construct the villa as an instance of architecture of extended rationalism. He also explores the consequences and effects of just such an approach. Let us look at some aspects of this project by drawing on Pallasmaa’s analysis of the architecture of this villa. We can begin with the bearing structure. The load-bearing columns are, in this villa, arranged in accordance with a basic rationalist design principle: on a structural grid. But every column is treated differently, either covered with a layer of paint, wrapped in rattan bindings, or dressed in wood. In some places, a single column is replaced by two or three columns bound together to form a new, fourth element; and two of the otherwise steel columns are simply replaced by concrete ones (Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4 Articulation of columns in Villa Mairea (elevations and plans), drawing by Darren Stewart Capel. (Initially published in: Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea 1938–1939.) © Darren Stewart Capel.

In lieu of a conclusion  135 That these are “violations” of the elementary structural logic, of the requirement for an economical structural system, etc.—but that these “violations” are decisive for the architecture of this villa, Pallasmaa effectively demonstrates in his analysis. As a result of such diverse treatment of the structural bearing elements, he explains, the sense that they all belong to a single structural system, as well as their central purpose as load-bearing elements, is all successfully blurred.34 They appear as curious objects that in their enhanced materiality affect our sensuous perception. In so doing, they also trigger a number of other effects, such as the feeling of continuity between the interior and exterior: the columns “emptied” of their loadbearing function, the vertical poles of the main staircase and the tree trunks in the forest outside all appear as elements of the same order, seamlessly flowing from the interior outward to the exterior of the house (Figures 5.5 to 5.7).35 The border between inside and outside is thus obscured and the impression of the building’s spatial complexity is enhanced. Here we arrive at another aspect of this villa as defined by extended rationalism: its spatial arrangement. The complexity of space is further underlined by the careful arrangement of the door openings and the

Figure 5.5 View of the main staircase. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen.

136  In lieu of a conclusion

Figure 5.6 View towards the living room. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen.

slanting partition walls that are positioned in such a way as to conceal the axiality of the entrance wing of the villa. As a rule, the rooms in the villa are configured such that one never enters them directly, on the axis of one’s movement, but always diagonally or perpendicular to this axis. Pallasmaa explains that this helps “create a relaxed, informal atmosphere and a feeling of improvisation, as well as subtle ergonomic and emotional articulation.”36 Similarly, the space of the villa can’t be perceived from a single point of view, but only in sequences, by moving through it.37 One experiences the space of the villa as a complex conglomerate of spatial sequences designed in fragments that were only subsequently assembled into a whole, rather than conceived following a single design scheme atop an orthogonal grid. Pallasmaa notes that this enhances our bodily experience of movement through space and argues that “The house immediately evokes an experience of sensuous pleasure.”38 This is further enhanced by an exceptional richness of detailing, materials, motifs, and textures employed and applied in this villa.39 One could indeed argue that here everything is excessively designed, that there is too much of everything. Not only the columns, but also several other parts of the building, such as walls, staircases, openings, or door handles, aren’t simply treated as elements that serve a particular purpose, such as dividing, protecting, connecting, opening. On the contrary, they appear also as

In lieu of a conclusion  137

Figure 5.7 The entrance canopy with the view of the forest. © MFA/Heikki Havas.

peculiar, unique objects that leave one wondering why they are where they are and the way they are. Still, precisely in their puzzling non-functionality, even more, unintelligibility—by the simple virtue of being materially present—they work as architectural objects and they set the seal of architecture to the entire building. An illustrative example of such architectural detail in the villa is the sculptural indentation in the corner of the living room fireplace (Figure 5.8). Pallasmaa devotes particular attention to this detail. He describes it as “a brilliantly sensuous detail, an erotic conversation piece,” which is at the same time also a functional solution, as it tries to resolve the clumsy detail of the brick wall projecting out in front of the glass. He continues that the shape of this corner also has female connotations, that it appears as a negative mould for a sculpture by Hans Arp. At the same time, it can be read as an interpretation of the corner cavity characteristic for Finnish vernacular fireplaces.40 To these interpretations others could probably be added. For this detail is constructed in such a way that it keeps triggering new interpretations, new attempts to explain why it is the way it is and what it means. It is constructed as an object of a special kind, one that is always also something else and other than what it is; as the object that carries in itself some internal exteriority, the moment of something that is always in a state of something that is still to come, that will have been. It is constructed, in

138  In lieu of a conclusion

Figure 5.8 The corner of the fireplace—an object that is always also something other than what it is. © MFA/Jussi Tiainen.

short, as an architectural object. Just as other details, individual elements, or segments of space in this villa are architectural objects, and just as the villa itself is such an object. Aino and Alvar Aalto (together with their team) developed specific approaches and strategies in order to construct such objects, in order to construct architecture. These gestures and moves, such as the dressing of columns, their redoubling and repositioning and particular attention to “unnecessary” detailing are, according to the logic of functionality and (established) rationalism, excessive or gratuitous. And yet it is precisely such moves that are crucial for the architecture of the villa. One couldn’t possibly eliminate those details, those elements and objects that could, according to the criteria of simple rationalist logic, be seen as redundant decoration—without losing not only an “additional” aesthetic quality but also all other “functions” that these elements and objects perform. In the case of the load-bearing columns, for instance, this would mean that the sense of continuity between the exterior and interior, the spatial complexity, the engagement of our senses, would be severely interrupted or reduced, and that the mute material presence of these curious elements would be lost—the material presence that addresses us in our

In lieu of a conclusion  139 desire to see, or, in our desiring our desire. In short, we would lose architecture itself. Earlier we contended that there seems to be too much of everything in Villa Mairea. Now we can add to this the following: that there is too much of everything in the way that this “too much” is becoming “just right.” Just right in the sense that this villa functions as architecture that is rationally organised to just the right extent, as an example of just-right rationalism. With this villa the architects succeeded in showing that within the rationally organised modern world there also exists a form of rationality that is founded on something “excessive,” on what the traditional understanding of rationality considers a violation or aberration of rationality. They opened the way for a different logic of rationality, a logic perhaps best summed up with the equation too much = just right. Their invention of the specific way in which they articulated this logic in the materiality of the Villa Mairea can be encapsulated as follows: the excessive, redundant, and unnecessary can be precisely that which is essential for architecture, that which is for architecture just right. However, the following has to be emphasised here: the logic of too much is just right is in fact nothing else but the logic of human rationality. The rationality of a human being, for whom some surplus moment of the a-rational is crucial, the moment that is always the moment of some too much, but it is precisely this moment that determines a human being as a human being. And which is in this sense, therefore, just right. The architecture of extended rationalism—and this is the case for creative thinking practice in general—addresses a human being precisely in this dimension of what Aalto calls the “human factor,” the result of which is he is never entirely determined by the circumstances in which he acts, but always maintains a moment of autonomy, that is, his capacity for self-determination. Architecture invites a human being to activate this capacity of self-determination, to find support in himself, in his independent thinking and action, and as a result tears himself out of the determination with the world in which he acts. This specific approach to design developed by the Aaltos is markedly different from Meyer’s. Also, the material products of the two teams of architects are very different, both in the ways the materials and detailing are articulated and the ways in which the spaces, structural systems, and elements are conceived and constructed. However, in a certain essential sense Aalto’s project of extending rationalism with architecture doesn’t differ from Meyer’s project of constructing buildings-machines. Insofar as both can be considered architectural projects, they can also both be defined as projects of extending the rational—the rational as that which is objectively determinable, measurable, provable—with the moment of the a-rational. The moment that tells us that human rationality is built on an element that exceeds this rationality, makes it constitutively not-whole; and precisely in this openness truly rational. Aalto explained this moment, which he

140  In lieu of a conclusion designated the “human factor,” as something that belongs to the domain of psychology or neurophysiology. But I would maintain that there is no need to look together with Aalto for an explanation of the “human factor” outside architecture itself. Why not? Because he had already found it in architecture, in the extended rationalism of its way of working. He found it as something contingent, indeterminate, yet something that is precisely as such a contingent and indeterminate factor necessary for rationalism to become and function as real or, as Aalto would have it, as extended rationalism. In its contingency and indeterminacy, the human factor is therefore accessible to architecture, while at the same time it is something neither psychology nor neurophysiology can explain. Both Aalto and Meyer kept affirming this human factor in the world, in their respective historical situations, as that which is essential for the world, and in so doing kept introducing architecture into the world—architecture as subject. Such architecture works in the way that it cracks the world open from within, so to speak, and thus transforms it into the world of extended rationality, into an open or subjectified world. Insisting on the creative thinking practice of architecture represents a continuation of this project of modern architecture, which is in turn a project intrinsic to architecture itself—a project which by its very definition remains unfinished.

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?” in Two regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 324. 2 For an insightful discussion of the inseparable connection between the physical environment that architecture creates (object) and its user or spectator (subject) see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 13–30, etc. 3 For the discussion on the relation between politics an architecture in Meyer’s work see also Thomas Flierl and Philipp Oswalt, ed. Hannes Meyer: Im Streit der Deutungen (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019). 4 The word thing is in this case a translation from the German die Sache, which Meyer used. In his theory of tectonics Frampton uses the same English word, but takes the notion of the thing from Heidegger, which means that it is translated from the German das Ding. This is also the reference for our concept of the architectural thing. 5 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992). 6 Ibid., 105–106. 7 Ibid., 110. 8 Ibid., 136. 9 Ibid., 111. 10 Ibid., 146. 11 Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 171: “This realization—that the various so-called contexts of an object are not mere surrounds but are embedded in the very form and medium of architecture—is perhaps the most important materialist contribution of Meyer’s work that connoisseurs of interiority have

In lieu of a conclusion  141 continued to suppress: the imperative induced in viewers to critically produce or (re)invent relationships among the architectural fact and the social, historical, and ideological subtexts from which it was never really separate to begin with.” 12 Ibid., 172. 13 Ibid., 107. 14 Ibid., 111, 113. 15 Ibid., 6, 7. 16 Ibid., 18. 17 Ibid., 154. 18 Ibid., 160. 19 Ibid., 164. 20 We could say that the architect modernists, with their projects of educating the public and introducing the artistic production in architecture, tried to achieve precisely this—that the users of architecture become such users that have eyes in order to truly see built projects as architecture. In short, they tried to activate their desire to see. Compare this way of addressing the user of architecture with its radically different way of addressing the user in the case of market architecture, as outlined in the chapter “The four positions.” 21 In this, two additional conditions have to be fulfilled. The first is that one also has to know something about architecture, that one has to at least basically understand the specific logic of its working. But this is a knowledge and understanding that everyone can acquire. The second and essential condition, however, is that one is ready to accept and respond to this address or call by an architectural object, that one is ready to activate one’s creative thinking capacity; which is nothing but that which the well-known motto of the enlightenment aimed to express: “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!” Cf. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, general introduction by Allen Wood (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. 22 Aalto himself referred to this project as an “experimental laboratory” for testing and developing various ideas. Cf. Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Goran Schildt (Helsinki: Otava Publishing, 1997), 225. Also, a remarkable amount of work was invested in it. The concept of this villa was developed through a number of phases and in this process no less than nine different design proposals were conceived. The Alvar Aalto Foundation archive alone contains 874 drawings of this villa by the Aalto office. 23 While Villa Mairea was designed for an affluent client, Aalto maintained that just like every other project, he tried here to develop ideas that would, in his words, have “social value and general usefulness for all human beings,” and to make something that “can be made use for both the advancement of architecture and the betterment of social conditions.” He illustrated this argument with a number of examples and justified this position as follows: “This means that you are not only poor architect with a single temporary client, but you are working as a responsible designer who is responsible for an entire nation and for the social life of the entire world. If you accomplish this, your work will then be what today we call true architecture.” Aalto’s lecture, delivered at Yale University in 1939, published in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, 227. 24 Cf. Aalto, “Rationalism and Man,” in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words. 25 Ibid., 91. 26 See Aalto, ibid., 90. 27 See, for instance, this explanation by Aalto: “Thus we might say that one way to produce a more humane environment is to extend our definition of rationalism.

142  In lieu of a conclusion … My aim is to show that real rationalism means dealing with all questions related to the object concerned, and to take a rational attitude also to demands that are often dismissed as vague issues of individual taste, but which are shown by more detailed analysis to be derived partly from neurophysiology and partly from psychology. Salvation can be achieved only or primarily via an extended concept of rationalism.” Cf. “Rationalism and Man,” 92. 28 I refer to this moment as the a-rational rather than the irrational in order to emphasise that this “supplementary” moment, which Aalto identifies as crucial for a human being, isn’t the opposite of the rational, it isn’t its other, opposite pole. Rather, it is the otherness that is internal to the rational. It belongs to the rational as its heterogeneous, external moment. It is something that comes from the inside as something external, and thus extends the rational, opens it, so to speak, from within. In other words, it is the moment of the radical otherness, an exteriority which, however, insists on being something interior, intimate. 29 See K. Jormakka, J. Gargus, and D. Graf (eds.), The Use and Abuse of Paper: Essays on Alvar Aalto (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 1999). 30 Andres Duany shows that Aalto used three major organisational principles in his design, and that he used them consistently from project to project. See Andres Duany, “Principles in the Architecture of Alvar Aalto,” Harvard Architectural Review 5 (New York: Rizzoli, 1986). 31 Similarly, Pallasmaa points to a number of organisational schemes that the Aaltos used in their design of the villa. See Juhani Pallasmaa, “Image and Meaning,” in Villa Mairea 1938–39, ed. Juhani Pallasmaa (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Foundation and Mairea Foundation, 1998), 80. 32 Ibid. 33 The Use and Abuse of Paper, 34. 34 Cf. Pallasmaa, “Image and Meaning,” 82, 85. 35 Ibid., 82. 36 Ibid., 80. 37 Ibid., 90. 38 Ibid., 85, 86. 39 As Pallasmaa explains: “The wealth of motifs, rhythms, textures and materials in the Mairea is overwhelming. Aalto seems to keep adding motifs and textures as a painter adds colour accents and areas of light and shadow to his painting. The whole is not held together by a single dominant architectural idea.” Cf. “Image and Meaning,” 90. 40 Cf. ibid., 97.

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Index

Aalto, Aino 121, 138, 139 Aalto, Alvar 95–98, 100, 121, 129–140, 141n22, 142n28 act 47n8, 63, 75, 87, 88, 92–99, 101, 114, 116, 128; architectural 76, 92, 93, 95, 101, 102n1; of construction 52, 86; constructional 74, 75, 93, 99, 116; of creation 128; creative 40, 53, 58, 60, 120; practical 11; primordial 87, 88; of siting 86, 87, 114; topological 116 action: architect’s 81n57; critical 1, 5, 7, 8, 13, 42; human 53, 83, 85; innovative 7; organised collective 14n10; reflective 75; subjectified 46, 72; transformative 32 activism 5 activity: architectural 73, 75, 76, 86, 90; of architecture 11, 15–16, 75, 86–88, 90, 95; creative 86, 88, 90, 93; creative thinking 28, 41, 129; human 1, 6, 102; self-determining 11, 37, 41, 43, 75; subjectified 101, 102 agency: self-conscious 74; of social change 31, 33; of subjectivity 127; trans-individual 127 alienation 71, 75 analysis 3, 13, 15, 26, 28, 32–36, 39, 42, 44, 76, 93, 132, 134–135 anamorphosis 63–71, 83 appearance 3, 5, 8, 14n8, 38, 57, 69, 73, 76, 85, 92, 106, 116, 127 architect 18, 21, 32, 38, 39, 45, 49n18, 51, 73–76, 88–90, 92–95, 97–100, 101, 103n3, 102n8, 110, 113, 120, 121, 127–128, 141n20, 141n23; architect-subject 128, 129; subjectified 100 architecturalness 44, 73–74, 112, 126 architecture: contemporary 18, 21, 25, 50n27; as creative thinking practice

9, 11–12, 15–16, 26, 28, 31, 37–39, 42–44, 73, 75, 76, 97, 100, 102, 106, 117, 120, 121, 129, 140; fashionable 21; as ideology 34; of the imperative of invention 17–20, 25, 27, 29n7, 37, 59, 78n27; of impotent resistance 31; for a liberated society 44; of the logic of the market 16–17; modern 17, 31, 32–34, 37, 47n9, 87, 95, 103n7, 140; of piercing affirmation 41–46; pure 44, 112; of resistance 20–24, 25–28, 30n18, 31–32, 37, 41–44, 59; as scenography 51, 53; socially engaged 21; of social reformism 24–28, 37, 42; spectacular 21; star-architecture 49n24; as subject 9, 76, 92, 101, 102, 120, 129, 140 Arp, Hans 137 art 51, 104–106, 114, 118n3, 120, 124, 127, 132, 141n20 autonomy 10, 43, 50n28, 139 avant-garde 19 Badiou, Alain 7–8, 12, 14n10, 35–36, 38, 40, 45, 48n14, 52, 63, 70, 76, 101, 103n12, 116, 119n14 Bauhaus building 122 being 52, 56–57, 60–63, 71, 84, 108, 119n14 body: of architecture 74, 110, 118n6; subjective 8 Bötticher, Karl 54 Breuer, Marcel 122, 131 building-machine 124 Campo, Marzio 47n8 capacity: architectural 39–41, 42, 43, 45–46, 48n18, 49n19–20, 73–76, 94; constructional 75; critical 11, 30n15, 32, 47n8, 50n27; human 17, 129; piercing 11, 43, 124, 126;

148 Index of self-determination 139; socially transformative 121; theoretical 76; to think 10, 13; transformative 13, 34, 43, 117, 120, 121, 124; world-building 13 capitalism: advanced 33, 34, 47n9; global 18, 28, 44, 49n23; globalised 3, 11, 21, 26, 28, 31 “cause” 71–74, 94, 98–100, 128, 129 “cause of architecture” 13, 72–76, 80n49, 81n55, 94–100, 105, 127–129 change 17, 18, 21, 33, 34, 44, 48n11, 50n27, 65, 98, 117, 121, 125 China 18 commodification 1, 6 condition: additional 90, 93, 141n; architectural 76, 83–90, 92, 106; external 42, 92, 131, 132; formal 76; fundamental 86, 88, 90; global 117; local 88, 89, 92; logical 92; of the possibility 61, 86–90, 92 consequences: future 93; theoretical 8, 11 construction: architectural 1, 55, 88, 89, 92, 108, 113, 116, 126; tectonic 51, 52, 55, 60, 106, 108, 118 context: architectural 87, 114, 117, 124, 140n11; cultural 9, 42, 88; geoenvironmental 87, 114, 117, 119n16; historical 9, 42; local 22–23; physical 88; social 42; socio-historical 124, 127; socio-political 9, 25 contingency 8, 57, 79, 140 contradiction 5, 32, 47n8, 102, 125 creation 83, 84, 86–88, 92, 115, 117, 119n15; artistic 6, 83, 124; ex nihilo 83; of a place 116, 117 creativity 17, 18, 27, 29n5, 129 crisis 25, 34–38, 41, 47n3, 95; of architecture 28, 34, 37–39, 41, 44, 47n3, 103n7; of Marxism 35–36, 48n14; of politics 35, 36; radical 28, 32, 34, 39, 41 criticality 9, 20–28 critique: formal 25, 30n15; of critique 3, 4, 6, 14n3; traditional 3–5, 8, 9, 12, 14n8 culture 3, 15, 42 Descartes, René 38–39, 48n16–17 desire 62–66, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78n26, 78n27, 79n30, 81n59, 98; architecture’s 50n27; to see 65–66, 68–70, 78n30, 98, 117, 118n5, 120, 129, 139, 141n20

destruction 4, 35–38, 48n11, 48n14 desubjectification 102 determination: inside 17–24; from the inside 15, 16, 20, 23, 30n18, 42; from the outside 15, 16, 17, 42; outside 16–17, 24–28; with reality 8; situational 10; temporal 10 diagram of the gaze 67, 80n42 difference: constitutive 60, 105, 106; immanent 36, 60, 76; inner 54; internal 46, 54, 60, 61, 89, 92, 105, 106, 112, 113, 116; minimal 90, 113, 118n1, 119n10; null 90, 113 drive 62, 63, 70–76, 80n25, 81n55 effect: far-reaching 97; material 56, 83, 108, 110 element: structural 72, 83–90, 92, 104, 110, 112 emancipation 36 emptiness 63, 83–86, 89–90 enjoyment 1, 60, 62, 63, 71 equasion 96, 139 exception: immanent 74; interior 9; internal 12, 58–59 ex nihilo 83, 85, 88, 90n8 existence 9, 65, 76, 77n13, 85, 88, 89, 114, 116, 119n14, 121, 128, 129 experimentation 19 exteriority: interior 9, 98; internal 11, 12, 42, 137; radical 42 externality: internal 58, 132 extimacy 58 Fink, Bruce 57, 77n13 form: constructional 51; structural 51 Foster, Norman 21 Frampton, Kenneth 46, 51–56, 58, 60, 74, 83, 106–108, 113, 114, 118n3, 118n5, 118n7, 118n8, 119n15, 140n4 gaze 64, 66–70, 71, 72, 79n34, 79n37, 79n41, 79n42, 79n44, 79n46, 91n15, 129; subjectified 129 Gehry, Frank 21 Greenberg, Clement 51 Gregotti, Vittorio 86–88, 91n13, 114, 117, 119n16 Hays, K. Michael 49n27, 121–129 Hecker, Zvi 99, 100, 103n8 Heidegger, Martin 46, 52–53, 83–84, 140n4 Herzog & de Meuron 21, 29n7

Index  heteronomy 10, 50n28 history: architectural 28, 37, 47n3, 83, 92, 93 Hoekstra, Rixt 47n4 Holbein, Hans 63–66, 68–69, 72, 79n32 Holmen Reuter Sandman 22 hypothesis 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 28, 39–41, 45, 46, 55, 86, 88, 95–98, 100, 103n7, 106, 130–133; scientific 7; unreasonable 13 idea 27, 29n5, 37, 49n18, 59, 74, 87, 94, 95, 104, 105, 112, 121, 124, 127, 141n22, 142n39 ideology 6, 8, 12, 14n9, 34, 44 image 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 21, 64, 67, 68–70, 79n39, 80n46, 100, 121; of architecture 15, 32, 92; false 8; of reality 9; of the world 2 imaginary 46, 50n27, 56–60, 77n12, 85 impossibility 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 38, 63, 78n23, 79n30; of architecture 3, 11; structural 13, 40 impossible-real 8, 10, 40, 61, 129 impotence 3, 7–8, 11, 28, 45, 47n9 indeterminant 61, 73 inequality 5 Inner Mongolia 18, 20 inseparability of thought and action; of thought and act 74, 95 instance of architecture 40, 49n18, 73–75, 104, 114, 134 interpretation 1, 2, 54, 69, 88, 125, 126, 132, 137; interpretative mode 70 intervention: architectural 18, 93, 96, 103n3 invention: architectural 20, 27; imperative of 17–20, 25, 27, 29n7, 37, 59, 78n27; neutralised 20 joint: architectural 112–113, 117; gigantic 110, 113–118, 119n15; structural 108, 110–113, 118n7; tectonic 52, 108, 112–114, 117, 120 Jormakka, Kari 133 Jugovec, Oton 109–111, 113–115 Kant, Immanuel 48n18 knowledge: architectural 25, 27, 42, 49n20, 87, 92, 93, 94, 97; techn(olog)ical 26, 93 Koolhaas, Rem 21 KWIECO Shelter House and the Hostels for Girls 22

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Lacan, Jacques 7, 12, 42, 45, 46, 56–76, 78–79, 83–86, 89, 90n8, 99, 128 lack 12, 56, 57, 61, 63, 71, 85, 86, 91n15, 132 language 56, 57, 59, 71, 77n12, 77n13, 117 League of Nations 127 Le Corbusier 52, 79n31 Ljubljana Lacanian school 12 logic: architectural 11, 17, 51, 76, 80n42, 120; connecting 118n6; of creativity 9, 27, 129; of independent thinking and action 9; instrumental 2, 9, 17, 51; of invention 27; market 17, 18, 27, 37, 49n23, 78n27, 102; signifying 61; structural 2, 11, 43, 51–76, 120, 135; of tectonic construction 113 making: craft of 51, 53, 60; practical 11 Marxism 6, 35–37, 48n14 materialism 125, 126 materiality/object: double 113; of a special kind 10, 42, 46, 52, 53, 73, 74, 88, 106, 108, 116, 137; transsituational 10, 113, 117; transtemporal 10, 113, 117 maxim 7, 11, 38–40, 48n16, 70, 76, 97 meaning 5, 17, 30n18, 52, 56–57, 61, 64, 65, 67–73, 75, 78n26, 83, 85–86, 89–90, 91n15, 92, 105, 114, 119n13, 122, 125–127 Meckseper, Josephine 4, 5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 79n37 Meyer, Hannes 121–129, 131, 139, 140 Miller, Jacques-Alain 57, 58, 73, 80n52 modern architecture, modernism, modern movement 16, 17, 23, 29n5, 31–34, 37, 46n1, 87, 95, 96, 103n7, 110, 121, 122, 124, 132, 140, 141n20 moment: objectal 62, 69, 70, 72, 128; resistant objectal 62 Moravanszky, Akos 119n13 Murcutt, Glenn 88–90, 91n15 new 18–20, 37, 59, 60, 102, 131; neutralised 20 Nordic countries 95 nothingness 64, 69, 70 Nouvel, Jacques 21 null point 45, 50n28, 76, 88, 103n7

150 Index object: aesthetic 104–106, 112; architectural 39, 40, 44, 49n20, 52–55, 60, 73–76, 89–90, 92–94, 102, 104–108, 119n14, 121, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 137, 138, 141n21; art 104; created 85; of crisis 36, 38; of desire 62, 64, 65, 73, 75; desired 62, 73; floating 63–65, 68; with an internal/inner/immanent difference 46, 54, 60, 61, 76, 89, 92, 105, 106, 112, 113, 116, 118n1; material 53, 60, 74, 101, 113, 121, 124, 129; object a 63, 66–69, 71, 75, 80n47; object-cause 62, 63, 65, 70, 98, 99; objective 39; objet petit a 46, 63; resistant 1, 10, 53, 62; satisfaction as o. 73, 74, 80n52, 81n55; scenographic 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 81n54; technological 54; tectonic 53–56, 58–60, 106, 118n6; trans-situational 10, 113, 117; transtemporal 10, 113, 117; utilitarian 52–56, 59, 73, 81n54, 81n55, 93, 94, 104, 105, 112, 129 objectivity 7, 117, 126, 129 OMA * AMO 5, 13n1 Ordos 101 18–20, 27 Ordos City 18 Other 58, 63, 71–72, 75, 76, 78n25, 81n59, 99 otherness 12, 56, 58, 142n28 Pallasmaa, Juhani 132–137, 142n39 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 140n2 perspective 67, 79n39 Petersschule 122–125 philosophy 3, 12, 76, 119n14; of architecture 76, 80n42, 81n60 Piranesi, Gianbattista 47n8 place: architectural/of architecture 114, 115; of a building 116; creation of 88, 116, 117; empty 61, 63, 84, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 103n3 poiesis 51 politicsof capitalism 36; of emancipation 36; neoliberal 25 post-critique 3–6, 8, 9, 12, 14n3, 14n8 potential: emancipatory 129 power: of architecture 1, 13; creative 28, 43, 74; creative piercing 11; subversive 20 practice: of acceptance 15; architectural 22, 48n18, 59, 101; creative 22, 46, 63, 76, 83, 85, 94, 101, 117;

creative thinking 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 26, 28, 31, 37–39, 42–44, 73, 75, 76, 97, 100, 102, 106, 117, 120, 121, 129, 139, 140; critical 15, 23, 42; design 11, 76, 107; ideological social 33; instrumental thinking 11, 12; meaningful 21, 24, 26, 28, 43; self-determined 9, 28; selfdetermining 22, 28, 37, 43, 101, 102; self-supported 9, 23; social 124; theoretical 11, 76 presentation 60, 89, 123 principle: of differentiality 61; reality 14n9, 59, 77n20 production, product: architectural 42, 46, 51, 55, 83, 87, 113, 124 profit: financial 6, 14n2 project: of architecture 100; failed 37; of modern architecture 33, 34, 140; of social change 33; of social reform 25, 26 provisional moral code 38–41, 48 psychoanalysis 12, 42, 46, 56, 60–63, 67, 76, 83, 128 Rancière, Jacques 3–5, 12–13, 14n8 rationalism: extended 95–98, 100, 103n7, 129–140; real 132, 142n27 rationality: extended 132, 140; human 132, 139 Real 46, 50n27, 56–63, 77n12, 77n15, 78n23, 85 real point 7–8, 11, 12, 14n12, 40–41, 45–46, 70, 75, 76, 97 reality: capitalist social 32; given 3, 8, 9, 11, 14n9, 41, 59; objective 6, 8, 11; social 15, 32, 33, 37, 42; symbolically constituted 57 recomposition 35–36, 38 reflection: theoretical 11 reform, reformism 24–27, 37, 42, 48n11, 101, 102 regime: capitalist, ¥ € $ 2, 3, 5, 6 rentability: financial 14n2 representation: imaginary 57 resistance 32, 37, 41–44, 50n27, 59, 113 revolution 12, 48n11 Riha, Rado 10, 48n18, 58, 78n30, 80n49, 81n59, 87, 88, 91n13, 99, 102n1, 118n1 Roark, Howard 100 Rosler, Martha 4 Rossi, Aldo 35, 50n27

Index  satisfaction 63, 70, 73, 74, 80n52; see also object, satisfaction as o. scenography 51, 53 Sekler, Eduard 77n9, 118n2 self-critique 34 self-determination 9, 10, 27–28, 37, 42, 44, 59, 139 Semper, Gottfried 54, 108, 114, 118n3, 118n7, 119n13 Senegal 22 separation 71, 75, 81n59, 105 shift from Two to Three 12 sign 5, 52, 60, 88, 91n13, 119n8, 126 signifier 56, 60–63, 65–66, 71, 72, 77n12, 77n15, 78n24, 78n25, 84–85 siting, site 86, 87, 113–117 situation: cultural 41, 42; social 27; socio-political 7; spatiotemporal 10 Slovenia 12 (Ljubljana) 110 society: of advanced capitalism 33, 47n9; capitalist 32, 121; classless, collective 121; modern 124 Soler, Colette 75, 80n50 spectacle: contemporary 21 speech 57, 60, 71, 85, 98 split: immanent 12; into Two 12 stereotomics 114, 119n13 structure: symbolic 56–58, 61; theoretical 12, 46 subject: alienated 71; of architecture 74, 95; autonomous 101; of crisis 36, 38; of desire 62, 63, 65, 70; of the drive 62, 63, 70, 71; of enjoyment 60, 62, 63, 71; headless 71–76, 99, 128; humanist 127; Lacanian 46; posthumanist 121–129; of psychoanalysis 60–63; of the representation 67; of the signifier 60, 62, 63, 71 subjectification: subjectified mode 70; turn of s. 63, 66; without subject 71, 74 surplus 2, 62, 69, 71, 104, 105, 108, 118n5, 132, 139 Symbolic 50n27, 56–60, 77n12, 77n15, 85 Šumič Riha, Jelica 99 Tafuri, Manfredo 31–35, 39, 41, 44–45, 47n3, 47n8, 47n9, 47n11 Tanzania 22–24 technique: of management 36

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tectonic: ontological 54, 55; representational 54, 55 tectonics 46, 51, 53–55, 74, 77n9, 106–108, 113, 116, 118n5, 118n6, 118n7, 119n13, 140n4 tekton 51 theory: architectural 53, 56, 76, 80n42, 81n60, 93, 108; psychoanalytical 46; of tectonics 46, 74, 106, 113 thing 5, 12, 46, 51, 52–55, 60, 65–69, 77n13, 83–86, 90n8, 106, 108, 110, 113, 118n5, 119n8, 121, 124–126, 140n4; architectural 53–56, 58, 60, 77n11, 83, 88, 110, 112, 113, 126, 140n4; of architecture 54; of thought 80n49 thingness 53, 64, 69, 70, 84, 118n8 thinking 8, 9, 12, 18, 36, 40, 56, 94, 95, 97, 98, 107, 121, 128, 129, 139 thought 74, 80n49, 94, 95 topos, topology 114, 116, 119n11; a-topos 117 transformation: radical 124, 126; of society 33 triad: architectural 53–56, 106–110; conceptual 46, 56; Lacanian 50n27, 56–60 trivialisation of architecture 2, 6 usefulness 6, 49n23, 59, 141n23 uselessness 44, 45, 49n27 user 120–121, 130, 131, 140n2, 141n20; architectural 120, 121, 129; subjectified 121 utility 6, 59, 60, 74, 95, 105, 112 utopia 17, 32, 44, 50n27 Van Eyck, Aldo 31 Villa Mairea 98, 121, 129, 132–134, 139, 141n23 Void 83–86, 89, 106, 126 Weiwei, Ai 18, 29n7 Wittwer, Hans 122 Women’s Centre 22 world: contemporary 2, 26, 37; of globalised capitalism 26; of market instrumentalisation 2; punctured 85; subjectified 13, 140; ¥ € $ 5; utopian 17, 32 Zupančič, Alenka 14n9, 59, 77n20, 80n46, 119n10 Žižek, Slavoj 80n47