Lateness [1 ed.] 9780691147222

Table of contents :
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- Lateness: Toward a Definition
- Lateness in the Twentieth Century
- Adolf Loos
- Aldo Rossi
- John Hejduk
- Consclusion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes

Citation preview

:··· ..... • • • ••••• • • •• •• ••• :••••.:•• ••• =··· •• ••••••• ••• •• SERIES EDITOR

••• •••

Sarah Whiting

Lateness, Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe After Art, David Joselit Kissing Architecture, Nicholas Carnes

Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All images are courtesy of Eisenman Architects All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-14722-2 Library of Congress Control Number 2019955614 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Helvetica Neue and Scala Printed on acid-free paper. = Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Editor's Preface Sarah Whiting Introduction

1

Lateness: Toward a Definition

11

Lateness in the Twentieth Century Adolf Loos

25

Aldo Rossi

47

John Hejduk Conclusion

63 93

Acknowledgments Notes

105

vii

103

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Series Editor's Preface POINT offers a new cadence to architecture's contemporary conversation. Deliberately situated between the pithy polemic and the heavily footnoted tome, POINT plumbs the world of the extended essay. Each essay in this series hones a single point while situating it within a broader discursive landscape, thereby simultaneously focusing and fueling architectural criticism. These short books, written by leading theorists, historians, and practitioners, engage the major issues concerning architecture and design today. The agility of POINT's format permits the series to take the pulse of the field, address and further develop current issues, and turn these issues outward to an informed, interested public. With Lateness, architect Peter Eisenman, writing with Elisa Iturbe, offers up the ideal model of POINT, even if to speak of idealization is to counter Eisenman's own argument. This essay is at once deeply personal and yet highly relevant to practitioners and students alike. Contemporary architecture, Eisenman argues, is so focused on making an immediate splash that it has

no impact-architecture has become a world of complexity for the sake of complexity, representation for the sake of representation, exuberance for the sake of exuberance. Laying out a remarkably clear argument that relies on a close analysis of three projects by Adolf Loos, John Hedjuk, and Aldo Rossi, Eisenman offers us the model of lateness-work that is contingent, nondialectical, nonzeitgeist, and non-avant-garde. This short volume does not offer up a how-to of lateness; instead, it provokes an entirely new way of thinking of architecture's time, as well as its impact. -Sarah Whiting

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Lateness

Introduction In November of 1989, my major building, the Wexner Center, opened. Participating in that occasion, among others, was Laurie Anderson, who that same year had issued an LP called Strange Angels. On it was a song, "The Dream Before," which resonated with me. It was a ballad about Hansel and Gretel alive and well, living in Berlin, the site of another of my projects. In the lyrics, Gretel asks Hansel, "What is history?" Hansel's reply alludes to Walter Benjamin's interpretation of Paul Klee's drawing Angelus Novus, describing history as an angel being pushed backward into the future by a storm from paradise. In Benjamin's account, the winds are so strong that the angel can no longer close his wings, and even if he would like to, he cannot pause "to awaken the dead and to make whole what has been smashed." The storm-which is identified as "progress"-forces the angel past the ruins of war against his will, and although there is no depiction of rubble in the foreground of the drawing, Benjamin writes, "where a chain of events appears before us, he [the angel] sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet." 1 Benjamin was trying to come to terms with the twentieth century as a time when astonishing technological advancements were paired with unprecedented atrocities of war. His analysis of the Klee drawing reveals his disillusion in

the ideals of the twentieth century and his skepticism of the notion of progress. For Benjamin, progress represented the concept of implacable linear time derived from Hegel' s concept of the forward march of history, and could only be ideological, as evidenced by the way the storm interferes with the angel's process of perception: as he is carried swiftly away, he cannot hold his gaze upon the events of the present in order to perceive them critically, for the storm pushes him ever forward. In architecture, belief in progressive time manifested itself in the twentieth century's concept of zeitgeist, an Hegelian incarnation that saw the spirit of the age as a propulsive force different from any previous defining era such as the baroque or the neoclassical. In contrast, the zeitgeist was seen as the evolution of a collective consciousness about the present and, tinged with a utopian energy, saw the present as both a means to break away from the inherited values of the nineteenth century and as a vehicle to look forward into the future. This produced an almost universal idea in the early twentieth century, called the "modern," and its fervor for novelty in form and construction was embedded in a belief in progressive time. Evidence of this new temporality can be found in Mies van der Rohe' s notion of the "will of the epoch," and his interest in using new materials and building technologies to express the essence of the present. Similarly, Le Corbusier's five points proposed a new architectural language that 2

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maximized the potential of new materials and reconceived the nature of urban relationships to reflect a society structured by industry and technology. With the zeitgeist as a framework, the question of how to be present became the means by which the modems projected into the future, and so, despite modernity's transformational aspirations and its critical capacity to challenge the status quo, there emerged a characteristic faith in the possibility of a new progressive paradigm that gave the modern an idealizing and propelling tendency, similar to historicism. Art historian Rosalind Krauss identified this inclination toward idealization as a problem for architecture's modernity, arguing that the infatuation with industrial forms was fundamentally different from the paradigmatic conceptual shift seen in painting due to the rise of abstraction. As long as modern architecture continued to imitate the forms of technical progress, it remained a representational practice, and as such would not transition into what had defined the modern in the other arts. In fact, the attempt to rid architecture of its representational idealizations was at the heart of the modernist abstractionist project. 2 In 1941 Sigfried Giedion published Space, Time and Architecture, a seminal work that gave rise to an attitude toward space-time that framed the modern as a discourse of temporal integrity. The notion of literal transparency celebrated the openness and clarity of INTRODUCTION

3

architectural space made possible by steel and glass. Before beginning my dissertation in 1960, these views espoused by Giedion and the inherited discourse of the modern had shaped my understanding of architecture. But in the summer of 1961, on a trip to Italy with my then mentor and colleague, Colin Rowe, I had two realizations: first, in the formal contradictions of the Casa del Fascio, I saw the potential of a different modernity in the work of Giuseppe Terragni, making it possible to question any universalizing tendency that previously had been thought to pertain to Le Corbusier. Secondly, I was asked by Rowe to stand in front of a Palladian fo;:ade and rather than describe it as I saw it, I was to tell him what I could not see. This changed my understanding of architectural perception and analysis. Then in the fall of 1961, back at Cambridge, I read Rowe and Slutzky's text "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal."3 It was at this point that I realized that neither seeing nor representation was the basis of architecture, but rather, abstraction and the critical, which refers to the possible or necessary commentary on a work. To be critical meant learning to see not only what was present, but also what was absent. This realization, along with my linguistic concerns, began to shape the foundation of my dissertation research. The Formal Basis of Modem Architecture was my first attempt to move away from the idealizing tendencies of the modern by using an analytic frame devoid of 4

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function, technology, or social purpose. But an unacknowledged idealism and a universalizing tendency remained in my belief that an underlying modern language could connect four very different works of architecture: those by Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Giuseppe Terragni, and Le Corbusier. And in fact, at the time of writing, Colin Rowe, in a 1963 letter providing commentary on an early draft of the text, asked, "Why is modern being singled out while your principles are thought of as universal?" In Rowe's opinion, the dissertation was arguing for the modern as a universalizing force, and as such could only ever uphold the idealizing tendency of the zeitgeist. In other words, the conception of the modern as universal projected the modern into the indefinite future, replicating its future-oriented temporality. It is clear in retrospect that Rowe was, in part, correct: first because it is possible today to see that The Formal Basis had assumed the modern was critical in its essence, and as such, idealized its potential to be universal, and secondly because the critical framework of the modern clearly has not held past the middle of the twentieth century, proving that a universal modern framework was not possible. Despite these lessons learned in hindsight, in the context of today's digital turn it becomes difficult to avoid similar idealizing notions, as the desire to keep pace with the ever-evolving digital realm echoes the fascination with present and future technologies that INTRODUCTION

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characterized the modem. In his book The Second Digital Turn, architectural historian Mario Carpo recounts the shift from spline-based modeling to voxel-based design, outlining how technologies that have the capacity to work with an abundance of data have made formal complexity increasingly possible, a trend that had already begun when scripts and algorithms became widespread tools in architectural design. Since the publication of Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in 1966, complexity had become an important critical tool after the modern, introducing a framework for reading form that saw complexity as a means to slow down perception and induce a process of close reading. Unlike Klee's angel caught in the compulsion toward progress, Venturi practiced a sustained attention to form and space, looking both forward and backward in time-in clear opposition to modern habits, which by that time had transformed into a platform for corporate interests. Complexity, then, became a critical tool and a mode of resistance to institutional power, due to its ability to resist the ideological trends of the time. In today's context, however, the digital facilitates the production of complexity without heightening its capacity as a critical tool; instead the ease of production normalizes formal difficulty because complexity can be generated automatically by software. As scripts easily generate endless iterations of varied forms, the difference between one form and another is no longer a critical integer but 6

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i

I :1

instead the output of a totalizing mathematical process. Any formal complexity in this context becomes normative and thereby ineffective as a mode of resistance to power. Moreover, form can be generated today without concern for constructability, because advances in digital software are paired with ever-more-sophisticated building technologies. With constructability becoming less of a concern, contemporary architecture produces increasingly more exuberant forms, each one just as anomalous as the last, creating a conceptual milieu that is ultimately homogeneous, despite any specific differences between individual forms. What capacity does architecture have to be critical in this context? While it is tempting to identify the problem as an infatuation with software, perhaps the problem lies in the inherent attitude around time that the digital presents. The techno-zeitgeist of today has returned to a present-based avant-garde, one in which the limits of form are defined by the technical possibilities of the present and in which time might be the integer of possible resistance. If this is so, what might a different attitude toward time look like? For this, it is possible perhaps to turn to Theodor Adorno's study of Beethoven's late works. Adorno finds in Beethoven's late works a return to classical conventions after a long period of rejecting them almost entirely, and yet this classical recapitulation does not follow formulaic classical structures. Instead, Beethoven introduces caesuras INTRODUCTION

7

and ruptures between classical conventions, and as such, he identifies the fragment as a formal idea, which informs the path that music and other disciplines take in the nineteenth and twentieth century. But Adorno's analysis is of interest not simply because he succeeds in identifying a formal change that marked the beginning of a new period in musical history, but rather because Beethoven's unusual treatment of classical conventions problematizes the existing relationship between form and time. The classical conventions that appear in the work inevitably embody a temporal dimension, due to their emergence within a specific historical context and their corresponding associations with particular styles. Yet because of gaps and breaks between these conventions, the classical elements no longer follow the formulaic sequence of classical form, and are thereby transformed from stylistic determinants to autonomous fragments within a work. Untethered from style, they become possibly unbound from time. So, in a way, Beethoven's late works were neither imitative nor innovative. Instead they rewrote the relationship between the parts of classical form through an approach that did not rely purely on formal anomaly to break from the past, but that disrupted temporal continuity by breaking up the narrative sequence of a piece, and in so doing, questioning the historical context within which the work unfolds. Beethoven's work looks neither forward nor backward in time, but rather sits outside a temporal 8

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progression. Anachronisms no longer operate as historical reference; as fragments they acquire a different capacity to identify with other moments and other eras-including those that had not yet occurred. Adorno called this phenomenon lateness, and it is dif. ferent from the modern relationship to history, which focused on a break with precedent, and different from the postmodern relationship to history, which focused on citation and a return to past historical styles. Instead, lateness exhibits temporal ambiguity. The result is something nondialectical, not of the zeitgeist, and not of the avant-garde. Late works are neither of the present nor of the past. They are, as literary critic Edward Said wrote, in and apart from the present. 4 This essay proposes lateness as a possible different attitude toward form and time in architecture, one that attempts to circumvent stylistic constraints and expand the critical capacity of architecture through the notion of untimeliness. Examples of lateness can be found throughout history, arising when a work is "out of joint" with its time. 5 As such, lateness is a contingent phenomenon. It has no predetermined formal qualities and must be read relative to its historical context. As a result, the outward appearance oflateness changes depending on how a work invokes the conventions of its time or those from previous eras. This text will not attempt to prescribe what the appearance of lateness might be in the contemporary moment. The focus will be instead INTRODUCTION

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on the works of three twentieth-century architects who exhibited qualities oflateness in their work: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. The goal, however, is not a reevaluation of the twentieth century but a reexamination of the relation between a work and its time, which generates a different mode of close reading that is, in itself, untimely.

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lateness: Toward a Definition In music and art scholarship, there seem to be three different meanings of the term late. The most common refers to the closing years of a coherent style, as in late Renaissance, late baroque, late modern. This use of the term serves the purpose of historical categorization, fully available only in retrospect and as an exercise in classification. Here, late is relative to the rise and fall of movements, marking a linear trajectory of history and reflecting on the preceding era while drawing its style to a close. Another common meaning of late is part of the term late style, an expression that identifies changes that take place in an artist's work when the artist is faced with the proximity of death. It is what Edward Said calls "the new idiom" that emerges in an individual artist's work and thought as their life draws to a close. 1 In this context, late style can only appear at the terminus of a chronological and biographical arc. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote, "There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death.'' 2 Late style, in this sense, is a phenomenon of personal intransigence, a moment when the artist ceases to heed the norms of the discipline; subjective expression, in the face of death, drives away any formal predeterminations.

A third context for the term late can be found in Theodor Adorno's seminal study of Beethoven's final works. Although Adorno uses the same phrasing-late style, or Spatstil-and although the works he analyzes are written near the end of Beethoven's life, he insists on rejecting the "usual view" of the term late that attributes the intransigent qualities of late works to the "uninhibited subjectivity" that arises from a confrontation with death. In his view, such an attribution gives death power over art, "as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its right and abdicate in favor of reality." 3 In other words, if late style is defined by, or induced by, proximity to death, then art is reduced to a subset of biography, and the autonomy of art is subsequently denied. For art, then, to assume its "right," rather than divest itself of it, the subjective and biographical aspects of an artist's life must be separated from the artwork itself. In addition to critiquing late style, Adorno proposes a redefinition of the term late. He identifies a "formal law of late works," which, he argues, "is, at the least, incapable of being subsumed under the concept of expression." 4 By describing the idea of spatstil as a "formal law," Adorno rejects an individualized framework based in personal caprice in favor of exploring formal characteristics that can apply across different works and different artists. In other words, while in the usual understanding of late style, the virtuosity of the artist 12

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freely digests, breaks down, and ultimately discards precedents in order for subjectivity to "break through the envelope of form," 5 in Beethoven's late works, the opposite occurs. Phrases and formulas of the classical era remain intact: classical trill sequences, cadences, and melodic embellishments appear unaltered, unlike in earlier Beethoven. The "envelope of form"-through a renewed attention to classical convention-appears to defy subjective whim. Adorno writes: "the power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. . .. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form ... hence the conventions that are no longer penetrated and mastered by subjectivity, but simply left to stand."6 One could propose, then, a modification of terminology in order to distinguish late style from this idea, which would be referred to simply as lateness. Lateness frees form from the deformations wrought by a hand in search of expression, and as such, formal conventions appear in the work unprocessed, "bald, undisguised, untransformed.'' 7 In contrast to late style, where the artist resists dominant conventions, lateness is the resistance to personal expression, in favor of working with specific formal relationships. While this may at first seem to imply, through opposition to subjective invention, a resurrection of past styles, or a plea to adhere to its rules, the use of recognizable tropes in lateness does LATENESS: TOWARD A DEFINITION

i3

not serve to reinstate the classical order, for it is clear from Adorno's writing that the conventions still appear somehow altered, since their "baldness" or "nakedness" seem to achieve a startling effect. The implication is that conventions do not necessarily represent a style, nor do they always embody or follow stylistic determinations. In order to better understand this phenomenon, a more precise definition of convention is needed. In music, the word convention is used differently from its normal use in architecture, where the term implies standards by which architects can more easily communicate with each other-for example, the drawing conventions expressed through graphic standards and the structural conventions standardized through building codes. In music, conventions refer to form. Musical form governs the overall structure of a piece of music as well as its internal relationships. The basic constitutive elements are a single note, a sound, or the absence of sound, and these elements are repeated and aggregated, generating form as notes are organized into phrases and rhythms. In turn, these phrases are organized into themes, variations, and rhythmic sections. As defined by musicologist Percy Scholes, musical form mediates between "unrelieved repetition" and "unrelieved alternation" 8 by making an organization of sound in time. Conventions emerge when particular organizations of musical sections become recognizable and prevalent during a defined era. For example, the 14

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sonata form, which dominated the classical period, is like the sonnet form in poetry, or the palazzo type in architecture. These conventions were widely used to determine overall form in their time. Convention can also operate at a finer grain, dictating internal relationships within the whole. For example, because of its ABA structure, sonata form is characterized by the differentiation of the central section. A typical convention of the classical period was to achieve this differentiation via contrasting thematic material and tempo. In poetry this would be more like a literary device such as repetition or alliteration. In architecture, it would be like the play between the central bay and the flanking bays in the palazzo type. These formal conventions structure the relationships between parts. Conventions, then, consist of formulas and replicable configurations that define the nature of form. Thus the definition of convention can be easily translated into architecture. The basic unit equivalent to notes or sounds in music would be the elements of architecture such as walls, columns, floors, apertures, et cetera. How these are arranged respective to each other varies according to the scale of the building and necessary functions, but as in music, it is possible to make a catalogue of these possible arrangements, such as in the typological drawings ofJ. N. L. Durand, John Hejduk, or Stanley Tigerman. These forms become a formal vocabulary for architecture, generating conventions LATENESS: TOWARD A DEFINITION

15

stylistically specific. For example, the courtyard type is a formal structure that has appeared across cultures and throughout history, and the nine-square plan was prevalent both in the Italian High Renaissance and the modern period. However, due to a convention's repeatability, it does have the capacity to hold the integrity of a style, defining its character and its limits and giving formal consistency to an era. For example, the centrally planned church was very prevalent during the Italian Renaissance, and when the elongated oval plan became common during the baroque, the change in form cued the ensuing change in style. So while a circular plan has appeared and reappeared throughout architectural history, often without reference to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, read against the oval plan of the baroque, its particular condition as a centrally planned church lent coherence to the architectural style of the Renaissance. In music's classical period, specific conventions were repeated and propagated until they stabilized and merged with social and cultural forces into the rigid standards of an era, i.e., until they became a style. In this context, Mozart and Haydn were able to work without experimenting with form, and instead generated work prolifically within the boundaries of the LATENESS

predetermined forms of the classical style. Beethoven scholar Michael Spitzer calls this the "extreme conventionalization of eighteenth-century musical material,"9 a phenomenon that made it possible for Mozart to compose around six hundred works before he died at age thirty-six. While conventions can feed into style, it is important to note that they are not synonymous with style. A style arises when a specific combination of conventions is adopted and repeated. In other words, styles dictate how conventions relate to each other and generate a series of predetermined forms that become indicative of a specific era, bounded by time. If this is so, then conventions can become disassociated from style if the specific combinations dictated by that style are challenged, as they are in Beethoven's late works. This is the reason the classical and baroque elements legible within those works appear "undigested" and broken apart "Abrogating the classical art of logical transition, the late Beethoven loves to juxtapose contrasting ideas or sections directly.... Keystones, ligaments, pivots are all knocked away, and yet the structure levitates, defying musical gravity." 10 With typical transitions and connections gone, the conventions become fragmentary and figural, and introduce an unprecedented formal relationship rather than reinforcing the style previously associated with those same conventions. For example, in the Missa Solemnis, Beethoven moves away from the evolution of motifs within a given structure (the LATENESS: TOWARD A DEFINITION

17

standard in the classical period) and instead generates imitative sections accumulating throughout the piece with breaks and difficult transitions between them. A formal structure emerges that is aggregative and disjointed rather than conforming to an idea of the unity of the whole. In the face of the fragment, the whole dissolves, opening gaps where they previously did not exist. Adorno is interested in this analysis of Beethoven because the fragment as a formal idea was unprecedented in early music and became one of the predominant innovations of modern music. While that may be true, to frame lateness as a concept of transition, or as a hinge between two styles or paradigms, belies the temporal complexity of the idea. If Beethoven brought change to the classical-a moment that was otherwise hung in a suspended state due to the rigidity of its style-it was due to the notion that the relationship between form and time could be rethought. His late works show that a convention, rather than being understood as an historical citation, can operate instead as part of a vocabulary of elements that can be infinitely recombined. For example, fugues appear in the late works, not as a reference to the baroque but as particular rhythmic and harmonic structures, 11 i.e., as a syntactic element rather than as a reference to a style or an era. Beethoven is "playing with the empty shells or cliches of the language .... At a micro level, [he] seems to interrogate the very building blocks of the language." 12 This emphasis 18

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on the syntactic-rather than citational-potential of an historical convention has the effect of producing temporal ambiguity. By decontextualizing a convention and stripping it of its historical weight while preserving its formal integrity, a late work can break historical narratives and cause time to become discontinuous. As such, lateness need not be a hinge that leads into the development of a new style-it can be an aporia, or caesura, in itself. This conception of time differs from the dialectical framework in twentieth-century architecture that relied on a rejection of what came before-an attitude that was prevalent both in the modern era's pronouncements of a break with the past as well as the subsequent postmodern rejection of that break. By the end of the century, it seemed that the digital would introduce a different temporality, as its emergent forms seemed to have no history at all. However, it has since become evident that the digital is a recapitulation of a techno-zeitgeist in which the limits of form are determined by the boundaries of the technology itself For example, in parametric design, form is determined by numerical inputs. At the same time, the idealization of technological progress occludes the perception of the imposed formal limits. The digital did not transcend the dialectic frame of the twentieth century, but rather, reverted to the idealization of the present that characterized the modern.

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Against this backdrop, lateness presents an alternative view of form in time because the integrity of form is preserved at the scale of specific conventions, while at the same time, inherited notions of how one convention might relate to another are challenged or reinvented. Operating outside a strict dichotomy between transgression and regression, and remaining instead in the realm of the untimely, lateness is neither an explicit break with history nor an overt return to the past. Lateness has no ties to any particular style, nor does lateness operate as a style in itself It manifests itself as an interruption to linear time, and as such its form must be contingent, its outward appearance dependent on the historical context in which certain conventions are dominant and others are suppressed. The works by Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk analyzed in the text that follows were chosen because they exhibited qualities of both modernity and a subconscious lateness, and each represents a different moment in the twentieth century. Through a contrast between their modern and late aspects, the modern-as the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century-can serve as a backdrop against which different temporal and formal attitudes emerge and begin to suggest a definition oflateness in architecture, as well as a catalog of its attributes. Drawing from the modern in this way is not meant to portray modernism as a monolithic style or ideology, nor will lateness emerge as an 20

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undiscovered style or a new historical category of equal weight and importance with the modern or postmodern. Rather, this study of lateness offers the possibility of uncovering a critical mode in which the invention of new form is no longer the stated goal of a critical architecture. Instead, a different critical mode might emerge in questions about the relationship between form and time, proposed in the term lateness.

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Lateness in the Twentieth Century It can be readily agreed that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were two of the major figures who defined what was considered modern architecture. Le Corbusier with his five points and Mies with his "will of the epoch" defined a complex, critical matrix that sustained the twenty-five years between the two world wars-1914 to 1939, essentially-in a fragile detente between their two positions. Through their work, themes such as edge stress, sparse space, flat space, free plan versus open plan, centripetal versus centrifugal energy, and others, came to define the critical nature of the modern project as a commentary on architecture's autonomy. While many of those conditions can be said to animate any given moment of architecture, their invocation as a totally new lexicon of conventions served both as an antithesis to preceding historical eras as well as a new logic for how an architectural plan could be composed, while making the dialectic a central aspect of modern discourse. Against these conventions of modernity, lateness can perhaps be read. While the modern put forth new conventions in opposition to history, lateness can be found where the relationship between known conventions is reinvented-a phenomenon present in the work of three anomalous architects: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Their architecture openly deploys the vocabulary of the modernist project while introducing new relationships between elements that

allow the work to look both forward and backward in time, neither openly rejecting nor fully accepting the language or conventions of the modern, which produces untimeliness. It should also be noted that there is no single definitive or paradigmatic late architect or architecture. Each architect chosen for these analyses exhibits different · qualities oflateness, and together, in the aggregate, they might begin to suggest the possibility of lateness. Furthermore, changes in convention and style over time do not repudiate the possibility of lateness-the di:fference between Loos's and Hejduk's historical contexts, for example, is great-yet evidence oflateness can still be found in their works as both architects interrogate the potential of their inherited architectural language. Unlike Adorno's reading of Beethoven, their interventions, as studied here, do not necessarily establish the ground for a new style--Loos's Raumplan and the vertical surfaces of Hejduk's Wall Houses do not generate a new lexicon of conventions as did the work of Mies and Le Corbusier. Yet these works are significant precisely because the formal relationships within them resist becoming stylistically normalized; as such, these works are characterized by a quality of undecidability. By examining this aspect of architectural form, the following analyses propose lateness not only as a possibility of form itself, but also as a method of interrogation, one that places criticality at the center of architectural discourse. 24

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Adolf Loos This study oflateness in architecture begins with Adolf Loos, who in most historical accounts is categorized as protomodem due to the taut white volumes of his villas and his critique of ornament. However, despite this tendency toward the modem, these works also deploy the familiar language of the nineteenth century. The conflict between past and present prevents each project from being stylistically categorized, creating formal contradictions that might be read as instances of lateness. Villa Karma

Evidence of lateness in Loos can be found in his early work, such as his Villa Karma, supporting the theory that lateness is not a biographical phenomenon, but rather one that emerges when a work is read relative to its broader historical context. The Villa Karma (figure 1) is a unique project in Loos's work because it was a renovation and addition to an existing nineteenthcentury home. Initially the house appears to be a square, corner-tower parti. This reading is deceptive, however, because another parti description is also possible, since the project takes the form of a wrapper. This wrapper allows Loos to leave the original architectural object intact while creating four new fai;ades. These fai;ades are spare in their ornamentation, suggesting a stark

Figure 1

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contrast between the original house and the new addition. At first this might be read as analogous to Alberti's project for San Francesco in Rimini-also a wrapperwhere the metered exactness of Alberti's Renaissance addition stands starkly against the irregularities of the original Gothic structure, creating tension between an early example of modern rationality and premodern form. However, a close reading of Loos's project for Villa Karma reveals that the wrapper generates four very different fas:ades, each setting off a play of symmetry and asymmetry throughout the project. Rather than engaging in the rational language of the modern and drawing a clear distinction between old and new, the addition introduces irregularity, ultimately destabilizing the architectural object, which could be considered a characteristic oflateness. The original house has a geometrically symmetrical plap., divided roughly into a nine-square organization with a narrower center bay that runs uninterrupted in the plan from east to west (figure 2). In the design of the addition, there are only two moments where the poche takes up the thickness of the original walls. These added walls extend the north and south walls of the original house toward the west, emphasizing the orientation of the center bay (figure 3). Loos's design for the new east fas:ade, which contains the entrance to the house, at first seems like it will emphasize the internal organization of the house by setting up an axis ADOLF LOOS

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Figure 5

Figure 6

8

of symmetry along the same orientation as the center bay. The fac;:ade is flat and taut, with hardly any articulation. The towers on the corners are forced behind the flat vertical surface and their presence is reduced to two symmetrical trellises that rise above the parapet in perfect symmetry. Furthermore, this fac;:ade is the only one that is three stories, because the ground plane drops in line with the front of the house, allowing the back three fac;:ades to be four levels. These characteristics of the front entry fac;:ade strongly differentiate it from the rest and, in combination with the original front and back fac;:ades of the existing house, seem to set up a spatial layering in the house in an east-west direction (figure 4). The volume of the wrapper, however, contradicts this reading because it does not fully surround the house on all four sides, leaving the north fac;:ade partially open. As a result, the wrapper has a C-shape that creates symmetry along a north-south axis, in contrast to the east-west layering set up by the front fac;:ade (figure 5). This organization is further emphasized by the four-corner tower parti, an echo of Palladio's sixteenthcentury villas. The two northern towers frame the opening that exposes the fac;:ade of the original house. This opening creates a secondary north-south layering, while the southern towers frame an ABA fac;:ade on the south side of the house. Unlike the entry fac;:ade, however, the south fac;:ade expresses neither flatness nor frontality. The towers ADOLF LOOS

33

create an asymmetrical condition due to both their fenestration and their form: one is round and repeats the scale of the openings in the central bay while the other is rectangular and has an anomalous rectangular window subdivided into square openings. This not only destabilizes the symmetry of the south fa