This Thing Called Theory 1138222992, 9781138222991

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
1 This thing called theory
Part I: Theories and histories
2 Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture
3 Theories and history of architecture (museums)
4 Architecture in/out of the boudoir? The autonomy of architecture and the architecture of autonomy
5 Repositioning. Before theory
Part II: Between history and philosophy
6 Which ‘humanism’? On the Italian theory of architecture, 1951–1969
7 Philosophical thinking as political praxis: Giorgio Agamben and inoperative architecture
8 Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture?
9 Repositioning. The after(s) and the end(s) of theory
Part III: Beyond the image
10 Drawing Jerusalem: notes on Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (1575)
11 Architectural drawing: architecture’s speculative visual history
12 God’s eye view
Part IV: Critical displays
13 Aktion 507: politics become theory become praxis
14 Architecture and the neo avant-garde: some theories of history in architectural criticism
15 Exhibits that matter: material gestures with theoretical stakes
16 Repositioning. This think called crit …
Part V: Theories of things
17 Pragmatics: towards a theory of things
18 Ready, steady, cook with Bergson, Plato and Gordon Matta-Clark
19 Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory
Part VI: The transactions of architecture
20 Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism
21 Domestic, production, debt: for a theory of the informal
22 White, wide and scattered: picturing her housing career
23 Toward a theory of Interior
24 Repositioning. Theory now. Don’t excavate, change reality!
Part VII: Forms of engagement
25 (Un)political
26 Prince complex: narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror
27 Less than enough: a critique of Aureli’s project
28 Repositioning. Having ideas
29 Post-scriptum. ‘But that is not enough’
Index

Citation preview

This Thing Called Theory

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which together propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and theory as a ‘risk’ of architecture. Teresa Stoppani is Professor of Architecture at Leeds Beckett University, where she directs the PhD in Architecture programme. She is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge, 2010) and of X Unorthodox Ways to Rethink Architecture and the City (Routledge, 2017). Giorgio Ponzo is Teaching Fellow in Architectural Design and Pedagogy at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh, and PhD candidate at Leeds Beckett University. His research pursues a definition of (architectural) knowledge as a combination and recombination of fragments of discourse, where the work of the architect becomes a combinatory practice. George Themistokleous is a Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory and Architectural Design at Leeds Beckett University. His doctoral research considers the limitations of current architectural representational methods in relation to a re-thinking of bodily and machinic vision, through custom-made optical devices and multimedia installations.

CRITIQUES: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities A project of the Architectural Humanities Research Association Series Editor: Jonathan Hale (University of Nottingham) Editorial Board: Sarah Chaplin Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh) Murray Fraser (University College London) Hilde Heynen (Catholic University of Leuven) Andrew Leach (University of Sydney) Thomas Mical (Auckland University of Technology) Jane Rendell (University College London) Adam Sharr (Newcastle University) Igea Troiani (Oxford Brookes University) This original series of edited books contains selected papers from the AHRA Annual International Conferences. Each year the event has its own thematic focus while sharing an interest in new and emerging critical research in the areas of architectural history, theory, culture, design and urbanism. Volume 5: Agency: Working With Uncertain Architectures Edited by: Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk, Stephen Walker Volume 6: Architecture and Field/Work Edited by: Suzanne Ewing, Jérémie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Clare Bernie Volume 7: Scale Edited by: Gerald Adler, Timothy Brittain-Catlin and Gordana Fontana-Giusti Volume 8: Peripheries Edited by: Ruth Morrow and Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem Volume 9: Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence Edited by: Ines Weizman Volume 10: Transgression: Towards an Expanded Field of Architecture Edited by: Louis Rice and David Littlefield Volume 11: Industries of Architecture Edited by: Katie Lloyd-Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech Volume 12: This Thing Called Theory Edited by: Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous AHRA provides an inclusive and comprehensive support network for humanities researchers in architecture across the UK and beyond. It promotes, supports, develops and disseminates high-quality research in all areas of architectural humanities. www.ahra-architecture.org

This Thing Called Theory

Edited by Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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 Names: Stoppani, Teresa, editor. Title: This thing called theory : / edited by Teresa Stoppani, George Themistokleous and Giorgio Ponzo. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027257| ISBN 9781138222991 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138223004 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315406268 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--Philosophy. Classification: LCC NA2500 .T513 2017 | DDC 720.1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027257 ISBN: 978-1-138-22299-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-22300-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-40626-8 (ebk) Typeset in Univers by Saxon Grahpics Ltd, Derby

Contents

List of illustrations

ix

List of contributors

xi

Acknowledgments

xvii

1 This thing called theory

1

Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous Part I: Theories and histories

7

2

9

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture Marco De Michelis

3

Theories and history of architecture (museums)

21

Sergio M. Figueiredo 4

Architecture in/out of the boudoir? The autonomy of architecture and the architecture of autonomy

33

Ole W. Fischer 5

Repositioning. Before theory

45

Kyle Miller Part II: Between history and philosophy

55

6

57

Which ‘humanism’? On the Italian theory of architecture, 1951–1969 Amir Djalali

7

Philosophical thinking as political praxis: Giorgio Agamben and inoperative architecture

67

Camillo Boano

v

Contents

8

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture?

79

Hélène Frichot 9

Repositioning. The after(s) and the end(s) of theory

89

Deborah Hauptmann Part III: Beyond the image 10

97

Drawing Jerusalem: notes on Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (1575)

99

Andrew Benjamin 11

Architectural drawing: architecture’s speculative visual history

115

Desley Luscombe 12

God’s eye view

126

Adam Jasper Part IV: Critical displays

135

13

137

Aktion 507: politics become theory become praxis Florian Kossak

14

Architecture and the neo avant-garde: some theories of history in architectural criticism

147

Michael Chapman 15

Exhibits that matter: material gestures with theoretical stakes

158

Maarten Liefooghe 16

Repositioning. This think called crit …

168

Brian Hatton Part V: Theories of things

177

17

179

Pragmatics: towards a theory of things Gerald Adler

18

Ready, steady, cook with Bergson, Plato and Gordon Matta-Clark

191

Stephen Walker 19

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory Ivana Wingham

vi

200

Contents

Part VI: The transactions of architecture

211

20

213

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism Anthony Burke

21

Domestic, production, debt: for a theory of the informal

222

Platon Issaias 22

White, wide and scattered: picturing her housing career

231

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot 23

Toward a theory of Interior

242

Ross Exo Adams 24

Repositioning. Theory now. Don’t excavate, change reality!

252

Roemer van Toorn Part VII: Forms of engagement

259

25

261

(Un)political Pippo Ciorra

26

Prince complex: narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror

273

Camilo Amaral 27

Less than enough: a critique of Aureli’s project

283

Douglas Spencer 28

Repositioning. Having ideas

292

Mario Carpo 29

Post-scriptum. ‘But that is not enough’

298

Teresa Stoppani Index

305

vii

This page intentionally left bank

Illustrations

Jimenez Lai, Skyline of Misfits, 2013; Andrew Holder and Benjamin Freyinger, Houses, 2015; Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer, Treatise Model, 2014; Andrew Kovacs, Medusa, 2015; Andrew Kovacs, Architectural Cliff, 2013; Adam Fure, Rocks, 2015

46

Erin Besler, The Entire Situation, 2015; First Office, Paranormal Panorama, 2014; David Eskanazi, Training Wheels, 2015; Bryony Roberts, Inverting Neutra, 2013; Alex Maymind, 100 Drawings, 2013

47

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out, installation at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 19 November 2008 – 2 February 2009. Digitalimage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence ©Photo SCALA, Florence

78

Hans Bol, Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (recto) Image courtesy The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London

98

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Perspective, Barcelona Pavilion Image courtesy Viscopy Ltd

114

Gerrit Rietveld, Isometric, Schröder House Image courtesy Viscopy Ltd

125

Aktion 507, front cover of the catalogue or ‘Materials for Discussion’ of the ‘Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin’ exhibition featuring the manifesto of the organising group, Aktion 507, Berlin 1968

136

Rotor, Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Oslo 2013 Photograph and image courtesy Marte Garmann

157

Andreas Angelidakis, The Empire Room, in 1:1 Period Rooms exhibition, Rotterdam, 2015 Photograph: Johannes Schwartz. Image courtesy Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam

167

ix

This page intentionally left bank

Contributors

Ross Exo Adams is assistant professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. His work as an architect and urbanist looks at the historical and political intersection between circulation and urbanization. He has published widely on urbanization, circulation, urban political ecology and architectural practice. Gerald Adler runs the MA in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, where he is Deputy Head of School. He is the author of a monograph on the mid-20th century British architectural practice Robert Maguire and Keith Murray (2012). He has published on Heinrich Tessenow’s Festival Theatre at Dresden-Hellerau (2015), on the ‘Bauhaus bioconstructivist’ Siegfried Ebeling (2013), and co-edited the AHRA book Scale: Imagination, Perception and Practice in Architecture (2012). Camilo Amaral is an architect and urbanist, and holds a MRes from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. He is professor at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, where he has supervised a series of awarded projects. He is a PhD candidate at the University of East London, with support from a CAPES fellowship, where he is conducting research on the relation between architecture and the (re)production of social relations. Andrew Benjamin is professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and professor of Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has taught architecture and architectural theory at the University of Technology Sydney, where he also holds a Professorship, for the last 12 years. His publications that touch on architecture, art history and philosophy include: Architectural Philosophy (2001), Style and Time (2006), Writing Art and Architecture (2010), Architectural Projections (2012), Art’s Philosophical Work (2015). Camillo Boano is an architect, urbanist and educator. He is senior lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College of London (UCL), where he directs the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development and co-directs the UCL Urban Laboratory. His research interests revolve around the encounters

xi

Contributors

of critical theory and radical philosophy with urban and architectural design processes, especially in relation to collective agency and urban politics. Anthony Burke is professor of Architecture and Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. He is a regular commentator on architecture, specializing in contemporary design and theory in relation to architectural education, future practice, technology and their implications for the built environment. Burke has spoken at TEDx Sydney, and was creative director of the Australian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Mario Carpo is Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His research and publications focus on the relationship between architectural theory, cultural history and the history of media and information technology. He is the author of The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011), of Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001), and of other books on the classical tradition and on contemporary architecture, translated into several languages. Michael Chapman is currently the Head of Discipline (architecture) at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, where he teaches architectural design, history, theory and research methods. His research is concerned broadly with the relationship between architecture and the avant-garde, Marxism and architectural theory. Pippo Ciorra is an architect, critic and professor at the School of Architecture of Ascoli Piceno and the IUAV University Venice, Italy, where he is Director of the Villard d’Honnecourt International PhD programme. A contributor to magazines and national press, he is the author of books and essays, and curated exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He’s the author of Senza Architettura. Le ragioni di una crisi (Laterza 2011). Since May 2009 he is senior curator at MAXXI Architettura in Rome. Marco De Michelis is professor of History of Architecture at IUAV University in Venice, where he founded and directed the Faculty of Arts and Design until 2008. His research focuses on the history and theory of modern architecture, on the work of contemporary international architects, and on the relationship between art and architecture. He was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Arts, Walter Gropius Professor at the Bauhaus University and Senior Mellon Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Amir Djalali writes about the politics of the production of architectural knowledge. He taught studios and theory seminars at the Berlage Institute, TU Delft, and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. In 2013 he co-founded Behemoth Press, a think tank exploring the relations between history, architecture and political power.

xii

Contributors

Sergio M. Figueiredo is assistant professor of Architecture History and Theory at TU Eindhoven, where he coordinates the research seminar for the unit of Architecture, Urban Design and Engineering (AUDE). Previously, as a Fulbright scholar, he completed a doctoral dissertation at UCLA analysing the history and development of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) which has been recently published by nai010 publishers under the title NAi Effect: Creating Architecture Culture. Ole W. Fischer is an architect, theoretician and curator. He taught at ETH Zurich, Harvard GSD, RISD and MIT, before being appointed at the University of Utah and at TU Wien, Austria (visiting). He contributed to The Handbook of Architectural Theory (2012), he co-edited Precisions (2008), Sehnsucht (2010) and Dialectic II (2014), and he is the author of Nietzsches Schatten (2012). Hélène Frichot is associate professor and Docent in Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, where she is also the Director of Research Studies in the School of Architecture. While her first discipline is architecture, Frichot graduated with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney in 2004. She has been working on practice-based or creative research projects with her doctoral students since 2005. Brian Hatton has taught since the 1980s at the Architectural Association and Liverpool John Moores University. A recipient of a Graham Foundation grant for research on the origins of the ‘open plan’, he is Senior Mellon Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He has published extensively as a critic on art and architecture, and guest-edited a special Liverpool issue of Architectural Review. He is currently developing the book Wandering in the Open Plan. Deborah Hauptmann is professor and chair of the Department of Architecture, College of Design, Iowa State University, and was the Director of the Delft School of Design (DSD) at TU Delft, the Netherlands. Hauptmann’s research draws on a trans-disciplinary approach to architecture, which includes disciplines such as philosophy, cultural and media studies, the social and neurosciences, as exemplified in her 2010 co-edited volume Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Platon Issaias is an architect, researcher and teacher. He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTh) and holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft. His research focuses on the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. He teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association (MPhil Projective Cities), and the Syracuse University London Program in London. Adam Jasper is a post-doctoral researcher with eikones in Basel. He has edited the Architectural Theory Review, and acted as a contributing editor to Cabinet. He has recently co-edited an issue of Future Anterior with Jorge Otero-Pailos.

xiii

Contributors

Florian Kossak is senior lecturer in Urban History, Theory and Design at the Sheffield School of Architecture where he is a founding member of AGENCY. He studied architecture in Berlin and Glasgow and received his PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. He was co-founder of the co-operative GLAS Ltd. He has curated exhibitions in Germany, France, Italy and the UK and is author of numerous articles, architectural monographs and catalogues. Maarten Liefooghe is an assistant professor of Architectural History at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at Ghent University. He studied architecture in Ghent and Berlin. His doctoral research at Ghent University, ‘The Monographic Factor’, studied the ideology underlying single-artist museums and their institutional and architectural hybridity. His current research concerns shifting practices in preserving and curating architecture. Desley Luscombe is professor and dean of the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. From 1977, as founding partner of Campbell Luscombe Architects (Sydney), she has also collaborated in the design and presentation of architectural projects. Luscombe’s current research focuses on twentieth-century architectural drawings as systems that bring together technical conventions and representations more associated with artistic practices. Kyle Miller is architecture program director at Syracuse University in Florence, assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, co-founder of Possible Mediums, and a graduate of the University of California Los Angeles. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and published in Project, Offramp, and the Journal of Architectural Education. Helen Runting is an Australian urban planner and urban designer, currently undertaking doctoral research in Critical Studies in Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. She is a co-editor of the journal LO-RES and a member of the office Svensk Standard. Douglas Spencer is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016). A regular contributor to Radical Philosophy, he has also written chapters for collections on architecture, politics and critical theory, and published essays in journals such as The Journal of Architecture, AD and New Geographies. He teaches history and theory at the Architectural Association and at the University of Westminster, London. Roemer van Toorn is professor of Architectural Theory and director of PhD studies at the UMA School of Architecture at Umeå University, Sweden. Currently he is investigating how different contemporary practices can make architecture politically under the title Making Architecture Politically. From Fresh Conservatism to Aesthetics as a Form of Politics. He has a forthcoming text-image publication, Society of the And, with the support of the Swedish Research Council Formas.

xiv

Contributors

Stephen Walker is a reader in Architecture at the Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA), The University of Sheffield, where he is Director of the Graduate School. His research interests are broadly informed by art, architectural and critical theory and examine the questions that such theoretical projects can raise about particular moments of architectural and artistic practice. He has published widely on the artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Helen Chadwick. Ivana Wingham is an architect and design researcher. The concern with tacit knowledge informs her interdisciplinary projects: Air Room: Drawing for Spatial and Temporal Performance, MaHKU, Utrecht (2015); Iridescent Air Architecture, Venice Biennale (2014); The Scene of Architecture, Brighton (2014). Her research challenges the boundaries of architecture and includes ‘Touching Air: An Architectural Scenographic Encounter’, in Perspectives on Architectural Design Research, AADR, (2015) and the book Mobility of the Line: Art, Architecture, Design (2013).

xv

This page intentionally left bank

Acknowledgments

The essays collected in this volume stem from ‘This Thing Called Theory’, the twelfth annual conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association,1 which was held at Leeds Beckett University in November 2015 and explored the current state of architectural theory. In recent years the representations and discourses of architecture have transformed and diversified as much as its practices, designs and makings. This book proposes a collective critical reconsideration on the resonances, intersections and conversations across different positions that emerged from the This Thing Called Theory conference. The title This Thing Called Theory, was devised by the genial mind of our colleague, Doreen Bernath, and emerged from conversations around possible shared research projects in the area of architectural theory. Then this ‘thing’ became a conference. However, we are obviously not the first to refer to theory as ‘this thing’. In 2011 Michael Hardt edited an issue of Duke University’s South Atlantic Quarterly entitled ‘Theory Now’ (January 2011), and in its introduction Kenneth Surin refers to ‘this thing called theory’. We wish to thank Liz Martin Malikian, one of the conference speakers, for referring us to it. More to the point of our project, in the presentation of the Edinburgh University Press book series ‘Frontiers of Theory’ (2010), Martin McQuillan writes that ‘Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, end and after-life’. He continues by observing that, in its process of auto-critique, Theory needs to consider: ‘What is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines that inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory?’.2 We would like to thank the Architectural Humanities Research Association for the opportunity to host its twelfth annual conference, This Thing Called Theory, at Leeds Beckett University, and the AHRA Steering Group for their support of the event and of the preparation of this book. In particular, we wish to thank Jonathan Hale, editor of the AHRA book series ‘Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities’ for his comments and advice.

xvii

Acknowledgments

We would also like to thank the Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology of Leeds Beckett University for hosting and supporting this project, and in particular Professor Mohammad Dastbaz, the Faculty Dean and Pro Vice Chancellor, for believing in the project and trusting our work. Our colleagues Doreen Bernath and Braden Engel, as members of the organizing committee of the conference, played a crucial role in the development of the event and in the discussions that inform this book. We would like to thank the conference keynote speakers: Andrew Benjamin, Mark Cousins, Marco De Michelis, Hélène Frichot, and, in particular Deborah Hauptmann, whose comprehensive and critical opening keynote (partly documented here) offered a cultural and critical framework to open conversations between theory and architecture at the conference. Mario Carpo, Maristella Casciato, Pippo Ciorra, Cynthia Davidson, Hilde Heynen, Sylvia Lavin and Bart Verschaffel joined the conference keynote speakers on the advisory board and scientific committee of the project. We would like to thank the reviewers of the abstracts and papers we received, and the session chairs at the conference, who helped us to define and focus the contents of this book: Tilo Amhoff, Jen Archer, Katharina Borsi, Hugh Campbell, Pippo Ciorra, Mark Cousins, Wouter Davidts, Marco De Michelis, Maarten Delbeke, Davide Deriu, Suzanne Ewing, Jon Goodbun, Valeria Guzman, Jonathan Hale, Andrew Higgott, Sandra Kaji O’Grady, Rebekka Kill, Sarah Lappin, Andrew Leach, Katie Lloyd-Thomas, John Macarthur, Tim Martin, Catalina Mejía Moreno, Sarah Mills, Branko Mitrovic, Simon Morris, Jacquie Naismith, Diana Periton, Julieanna Preston, Charles Rice, Manolis Stavrakakis, Igea Troiani, Stephen Walker, and Francesco Zuddas. Finally, we would like to thank many other colleagues and friends who helped us directly or indirectly, by taking on one or more of our routine responsibilities, or simply by tolerating moments of madness. Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo, George Themistokleous Leeds, June 2016

Notes 1

The Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) ‘promotes, supports, develops and disseminates high-quality research in the areas of architectural history, theory, culture, design and urbanism’. The AHRA was established in 2003, and while the practices of architecture have transformed and diversified since then, so has the relationship between the designs, representations and makings of architecture and their surrounding discourses. www.ahra-architecture.org/. The AHRA annual conferences were inaugurated in 2003 with the ‘Critical Architecture’ conference, held at the Bartlett School of Architecture and organized by Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Mark Dorrian and Murray Fraser. Subsequent conferences were subject specific, hosting a wide range of discussions on topics including ‘Models to Drawing’, ‘Scale’, ‘Agency’, Dissidence’ and, more recently, ‘Industries of Architecture’ in 2015. This book includes a selection of papers presented at the twelfth international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA), held at Leeds Beckett University, Leeds (UK) on 19–21 November 2015, and organized by Teresa Stoppani, Doreen Bernath, Braden Engel, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous of the Leeds School of Architecture. www.thisthingcalledtheory. org/.

xviii

Acknowledgments

2

‘The Frontiers of Theory’ book series, published by the Edinburgh University Press, series editor Martin McQuillan. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-the-frontiers-of-theory.html. For McQuillan’s text see, for instance, Martin McQuillan, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, in Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), xi-xii.

xix

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 1

This thing called theory Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous

In the early 2000s, after semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction’s flirt with Derridean philosophy and Deleuzian redefinitions of folds and diagrams, the impact of the digital in architecture seemed to have vanquished the ‘need’ for architecture to refer to discourses from the humanities. Issues and questions of architecture seemed to look elsewhere, while the concerns of the humanities began to converge with the sciences. Today, in an age of extreme specialization and thus far inconceivable intersections of strands of knowledge, architecture needs to reinvent itself. As architecture reconsiders its status as a discipline in relation to digital technologies, material sciences, biology and environmental transformations, it continues to introject thoughts and practices developed ‘outside’ architecture. It is indeed the very openness and connectedness of architecture that can offer a line of continuity in the process of self-definition and reinvention that has always characterised it as a practice of the multiple and of the critical. As a discipline that never simply makes physical environments, architecture acts in and through all its intersections with its ‘other’ as a critical and cultural agent. At the turn of the millennium, architectural discourse seemed to have been muted with the shift from the alphabet to the algorithm.1 It has more recently emerged that, even for the digital, it is already not only possible but indeed necessary to construct an archaeology,2 and this has to be both historical and critical. In 2013 Log’s ‘Stocktaking’ issue3 borrowed Reyner Banham’s 1960 instrumental opposition of tradition and technology4 to resume (or restart) a critical discourse on contemporary architectural practices, attempting to relate them to recent and not so recent disciplinary pasts. In the same year the ‘Ways to Be Critical’ proposed by Volume5 seemed to reduce the issue

1

Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous

of criticality to a series of positions of militant criticism. A void seemed to have been exposed, and with it the need to address this gap with a critical discourse of architecture from within. This book proposes that theory, beyond its mediatory function6 and its problematic tag of authorship and authority,7 and far from dead, extinct or rejected, remains crucial to the discipline. In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores the critical and productive role of architecture theory as a form of architectural practice, a critical voice from within that finds different articulations in the thinking and making of architecture, and opposes the instrumentalization of its use. It is only through a choral project that the multifaceted nature of architecture theory, its differences and complexities can be grasped and articulated. This book is not an anthology of previously published materials or a systematic survey of current or recent positions,8 but documents the development of a fluid conversation, not without differences and contradictions, that emerged from a critical consultation (and provocation) on architecture theory in the making. The different voices gathered here propose not a thinking for architecture or about architecture, but, more essentially, by architecture.9 The book addresses interdisciplinarity, but it does it from within architecture not from the outside in: how architecture can generate thinking rather than absorb thinking from the outside; how, having introjected and having been transformed by and with its outside it continues to instigate its change and redefine its role, moving with(in) its outside. The notion of the outside of architecture and of theory’s position in this relation then has to be addressed. The claim here is that architecture theory operates in architecture from within. Yet it is also the hinge that both opens and mediates architecture’s relation to its outside as ‘the place one can never occupy fully or completely for it is always other, different, at a distance from where one is’.10 This is the task and the risk of architecture theory. As it positions itself outside, as ‘other’ to architecture, theory opens the limits of the discipline and produces a distance from it. This paradoxical shifting of positions enables theory to introject ideas within its discourse, thus continuously redefining architecture’s disciplinary boundaries. Able to detach itself, theory accesses multiple outsides and attains a critical distance from and for architecture.11 While architectural praxis is already defined within its constitutive edges, theory as mediator plays a critical role in addressing architecture’s relation to the outside and by doing so re-configures the discipline of architecture. Theory is an open issue in architecture. It relates to and borrows from other disciplines and practices, thus opening up architecture and showing how it is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. A contingent selection, the essays in this book bear testimony to the richness of issues at stake in a discipline – Architecture – in constant transformation. Organized in sections, the book moves gradually from the specifics of architectural thought, its history, theory and criticism and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to forms of theory that are produced by architecture and for architecture, to its social and economical contexts and the critical positions formulated

2

This thing called theory

through architecture’s forms of expression, to more recent forms of architecture’s engagement. The thematic sections are accompanied by short critical texts – ‘repositionings’, which conclude each of the sections and provide a critical lens to re-read its chapters together as a conversation, by questioning and relaunching their issues. Read together, these short texts propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a positive, both critical and productive, role for theory in architecture: theory as a proposition, theory as a task and a risk, and as an intrinsically inescapable condition of architecture. There are indeed relations, cross-references and echoes between papers and across the sections of the book, which the linear sequence of the format cannot possibly mirror in their complexity. While we propose here a sequence as a possible itinerary across different contemporary ideas, the reader will discover other resonances and indirect conversations between authors and arguments. All together, the sections of the book provide a view of the many facets of ‘this thing called theory’, without imposing one perspective on it. The purpose of the book is not to systematically document how many disciplines impact on architecture theory, but to show how architecture theory engages with the different practices of architecture. The intricate relationship between architecture and its ‘Theories and histories’ (Part I) is revealed in the recent re-emergence of a project of architectural history as problematized by Manfredo Tafuri half a century ago. Rather than producing a historiography of architectural history, the contributions to this section look at how historical work addresses the crisis of the discipline, and at its role in relation to current practice. The understanding of peculiar conditions of crisis performed in the work of the historian is crucial to address the context of operations for architecture (De Michelis), and informs not only architectural practice, but also architectural agency in cultural programming. Tafuri’s project is even more effective when it is (re)activated in devising cultural programmes (Figueiredo) or in identifying agendas for the architectural project (Fischer), but also in proposing new forms of theoretical practice (Miller). Here the notion of an operative history compromised with the agendas of practice is reversed into an approach that sees practice itself as generative of self-critical questions and research agendas (Miller). Far from instrumental (operative), the production of history as theory can pinpoint moments in the past that help in understanding aspects of present crises. The relation ‘Between history and philosophy’ (Part II) that often informs theory also shows that there is not one past but a multiplicity of interpretations of it, and each moment of history-making is the taking of a position (Djalali). These concerns are mirrored in different ways of addressing the history of the present, from the appropriation to architecture of Agamben’s redefinition on ‘use’ and ‘inoperativity’ (Boano), to the reactivation of feminist discourses in architecture for its renewed political practice (Frichot). The problematic and transformative nature of theoretical discourse in architecture is mapped in the evolution from critical theory to beyond any intellectualism, suggesting that a way forward can be found in architecture (Hauptmann).

3

Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous

Representation, far from neutral, critically engages with the production of theory, across the history of drawing long before and long after the digital, and ‘Beyond the image’ (Part III). Drawings of architecture differ from drawings of art in their relation with actuality and potentiality, between the determinacy and indeterminacy of the impermanent (Benjamin). Architectural drawing moves beyond its representational scope to produce alternative understandings of its cognitive and intellectual spaces (Luscombe), and established drawing techniques can be questioned as knowledge is converted into data and architectural representation implicates a non-human agency (Jasper). ‘Critical displays’ (Part IV) of architecture, through both architectural exhibitions and the architecture of exhibitions, explores and critiques underlying political and production processes (Kossak) where architecture, no longer only a place of representation or inhabitation, becomes a mediated site of the political. The expansion of architectural work beyond its physicality and in relation to a multidisciplinary field of production is considered in the relationship between architecture and audience (Chapman). Criticality and materiality converge in contemporary architectural exhibitions where the curatorial project exposes and frames the materiality of architecture as a form of made theory (Liefooghe; Figueiredo). Criticism is both a formative moment of architecture (Fischer) and an essential element of its making in its interdependence with theory, history and creation (Hatton). The thought embedded in the relationship between the designer, the materialization of a project and its use can be a territory of theoretical exploration (Adler). ‘Theories of things’ (Part V) suggests an approach to architecture’s formed material that moves beyond Platonic conceptions of form, towards an ongoing process of materialization that engages the capacity of the mind to operate without the intellect (Walker). It is particularly the expendability of material technologies that reveal the ‘thing’ as a multifaceted chimera, where the thingness and the thinking of the thing converge (Wingham). In these permutations of ideas and things, economical value is at stake. The ‘Transactions of architecture’ (Part VI) questions the capacity of the discipline to claim a role in the development of the city (Burke), increasingly dematerialised within economic paradigms that relate to subjectivity only as an economic entity. The quasi informal growth of the city (Issaias) as well as its gentrification (Runting and Frichot) seem to materialize the global neoliberal strategies that address spatial and environmental issues only when they are reduced to exchange value. It may seem that there is no way out from these global financial projects. To change reality would require to reactivate emancipatory strategies (van Toorn) and to open up the total interior that has become the dominant figure of capital development (Adams). It is here that architecture has to find new ‘Forms of engagement’ (Part VII) with the political. A project that, at the moment, cannot be positively defined. But we can attempt to say how it should not be, what it should not do: it should not be a nostalgic and often rhetorical attitude that looks towards past political ideologies that cannot be reactivated (Ciorra); it should not indulge in a narcissistic practice that only

4

This thing called theory

aims at reproducing itself (Amaral), and finally it should not pretend to step back from dominant economic strategies while actually embracing their latent effects (Spencer). There is probably one thing we can say about this future project: we will see it emerging from architecture itself, as it happened with the ‘digital turn’, when architecture anticipated the trends now largely implemented across other fields of innovation (Carpo). Is this enough to define what ‘this thing called theory’ is? No, this is not enough. If practising theory within architecture means to continuously activate a project, relentlessly performing a (re)positioning (Stoppani), attempting a definition is not what matters. What is at stake instead is the delineation of a few facets of (this thing called) theory and the mapping of its changing.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11

Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Greg Lynn, ed., Archaeology of the Digital (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2013). Log 28, ‘Stocktaking’, summer 2013 (New York: Anyone Corporation, 2013). Reyner Banham, ‘Stocktaking 1: Tradition and Technology’, Architectural Review vol. 127 no. 756 (February 1960). Volume 36: Ways to Be Critical, Stichting Archis, July 2013, exultantly proclaims ‘The critic is dead. Long live the network!’ and then sets ‘two fundamental tasks’ for the rebirth of architectural criticism: ‘reviving the productive value of criticism, and finding new profitable ways to broadcast it to the world’. This position is very distant from the critical role of theory, ‘inoperative’ or otherwise, proposed and discussed here. K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Book, 2007); Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Book, 2009). See Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, eds, The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (UK: SAGE Publications, 2012). In April 2014 the conference ‘2000+: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory’ at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, brought together ‘a range of the most compelling architectural historians and theorists’ to ‘chart new directions and points of critical importance for theory in architecture’, and was then documented in James Graham, ed., 2000+: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory (New York: GSAPP books/Columbia University Press, 2015). While This Thing Called Theory does not aim to be a response to the conversations of 2000+, it shares and supports its position against considering architectural theory as a ‘historical phenomenon to be anthologized and studied as another passing phase in the history of the discipline’, and contributes to the current debate with voices that are geographically and culturally ‘other’, coming largely from the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, offering alternative and differently situated points of view. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Introduction’, Architecture from the Outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), xv. As Grosz states, ‘outside architecture is already inside bodies, sexualities, history, culture, nature – all those others it seeks to exclude but which are the constitutive edges, the boundaries of its operations’. Grosz, ‘Introduction’, xvii.

5

This page intentionally left bank

Part I Theories and histories

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 2

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture Marco De Michelis

Manfredo Tafuri passed away on 23 February 1994. He was 59. The Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari gave an unforgettable funeral oration describing Tafuri as the master of ‘signs and conjectures’ and not of ‘foundations and certitudes’.1 A few months later, in January 1995, Casabella published a monumental monographic issue on Tafuri, with articles by distinguished architects and scholars such as Vittorio Gregotti, Rafael Moneo, Giorgio Ciucci, Howard Burns, Jean-Louis Cohen, Joan Ockman and many others. Cohen emphasized the ‘epistemological break’ in contemporary history effected by Tafuri’s reflections on twentieth century architecture: ‘a break whose consequences have yet to be fully assessed’.2 And Joan Ockman produced a brilliant portrait of American architecture during the 1970s, divided between the neo avant-garde of Peter Eisenman and the more pragmatic and nostalgic approach to history by the postmodern architects. Tafuri had broken into this context with a ‘culture shock’ of unprecedented theoretical complexity, whose consequences seem to have been seminal for the wide theoretical production in the USA during the last decades of the twentieth century.3 His was indeed a proposal for a true disruption of the historical canon: new subjects, new actors, new contexts, new analytical tools, new aims. A fundamentally different point of view was put forward at the time of his death by someone who did not belong to Tafuri’s generation, and could not cultivate a personal friendship with him like all the contributors of the Casabella issue. The obituary published by Mark Wigley in Archis in 1994 discloses the deep distance between the years in which Tafuri had produced his most crucial works and the 1990s. For Wigley, Tafuri already belonged to the past.

9

Marco De Michelis

It is true that his extraordinary work was always flawed, riddled with gaps, leaps and contradictions. The texts had to be rejected, even called for their own rejection. But some kind of bond, an unrepayable debt, was established in the very moment of rejection. … It was the limits of the texts, the multiple points where Tafuri stretched his line of argument to breaking point, if not beyond it, that transformed the way we think about architectural discourse.4 For Wigley, ‘There have been so many Tafuri’s … Each successive wake launched a particular trajectory of inquiry, making a new form of research possible’, but now his texts started to become interrogated in his own name. Followers became critics. During the last twenty years not much has happened about Tafuri. In Italy itself, it has become almost impossible to get his books reprinted. There have been very few new translations. Here and there some younger scholars are addressing his work in new books and PhD dissertations,5 but no critical edition of his immense oeuvre is forthcoming. It is not easy to start re-reading Tafuri’s books. First of all we need to ask ourselves what we are looking for in his texts. Are we addressing the question of learning more about the history of the European avant-garde? About Sansovino and Palladio? About the New York ‘Fives’ and late modernist architecture? Why do we need today to re-read Tafuri? The answer will not be so easy to find. The books by Tafuri are usually written in very enigmatic language. They have a labyrinthine structure. They are not the most suitable source for learning facts. They do normally put into play an enormous number of sources, but not in a way that we could define as systematic. There is one reason for continuing to read Tafuri: he did transform the subject itself of the story. Let’s consider the why and the how. We should start by looking back at one of his most celebrated works, Architecture and Utopia, published in Italy in 1973 and translated into English three years later. The small book was an extended revision of a long article that had been published in 1969 with the title ‘Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology’.6 The illustration on the cover of the American translation is a drawing by Aldo Rossi entitled The murder of architecture that Rossi originally dedicated to Manfredo Tafuri. The book indeed had been widely interpreted as the origin of the infamous ‘death of architecture’ announced by Tafuri. The late sixties and early seventies had been a decade characterized by several crucial publications and events on architecture. 1966 was the year of Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi in Italy and of Complexity and Contradiction by Robert Venturi in the USA. One year later, Peter Eisenman started the activities in the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in whose journal, Oppositions, Tafuri, alongside Moneo, Rossi, Rem Koolhaas and many others, would publish some of his most important critical statements. All these publications and events raised crucial questions about the essential meaning of architecture and its praxis, and its relations to other manifestations of technical and scientific knowledge. And they put forward the idea that architecture could represent itself as an autonomous cognitive tool and an independent discipline. These had also been years characterized, both in America and in Europe, by extraordinary political events, from the students’ rebellion, the protest against the Vietnam war, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, to the explosion of

10

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture

terroristic activities in Europe. Aldo Rossi’s assertion of the existence of an autonomous body of architectural knowledge addressed the crucial question of a critical practice of architecture, and of the re-conquest of analytical tools specific to the city and to the forms of its production. Architecture, once again, laid claim to its capacity of not just interpreting the urban structure, but also giving it a new form, of re-forming it in accordance with the distinctive tradition of modernity. The effects are clearly recognizable in Europe, for instance in the successful experiments for the critical reconstruction of European cities such as Berlin or Barcelona. At the same time, in the USA the activities of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies were revealing that the issue of autonomy in architecture – and the connected critical revision of the modernist tradition – had become topical also outside Europe. At this point Manfredo Tafuri’s theoretical work appeared on the scene with a dramatic destabilizing effect. Tafuri’s approach to modern architecture seems to have been characterized by the recognition of a condition of doubt and anxiety, which marked architecture’s destiny. These questions seemed to have already been raised by the end of the seventeenth century, in the debate between the ‘ancients and the moderns’ at the time of Perrault in France. The discussion around ‘classical orders’ challenged the narrative of architecture’s foundations. The naturalistic analogy between the architectural column and the human body, between its proportions and a recognizable system of rules in the natural universe – not to mention the mathematical rules of perspectival representation of bodies in space – represented, during the ‘long Renaissance’, that rational base which guaranteed architecture (non-mimetic art par excellence) a status consistent with that of painting and sculpture. Architecture cannot become a perfect imitation of nature itself, but it was possible to transfer ‘rules’ which shape nature and allow for its three-dimensional representation, such as proportions. The crisis of this system dramatically raised the issue regarding the survival of the notion of architecture itself, as it had taken form, through the interpretation of the Vitruvian text, starting with the treatises by Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, up until those proposed by Andrea Palladio, Sebastiano Serlio or Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. The history of Western architecture from the eighteenth century onwards can also be seen as the history of the struggle for the survival of architecture. How else can we interpret, for example, one of the most influential books of the eighteenth century, the Essai sur l’architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier? Decades prior to the writing of that book, French architects had already attempted to substitute the ‘objective’ rules of classical orders with the ‘subjective’ notions of ‘character’, which involved the observer’s experience. Germain Boffrand had introduced the idea of ‘speaking architecture’, which tried to re-establish an analogical connection with painting and poetry. Laugier’s ‘primitive hut’ constituted in its turn a ‘natural archetype’, a ‘genetic beginning or principle’7 – from which the idea of ‘order’ itself originated as a structural basis – aesthetic and constructional, but not decorative – for all buildings. In this way, Laugier strove to re-establish a coherent sequence that started from the rule and moved towards perfection, whose task it was to eliminate the risk of freedom becoming arbitrariness. ‘The taste which Laugier propagated was one that aimed at simplicity, formal purity and structural sincerity’,8 but it also required ‘a guide that would lead it, and brakes that

11

Marco De Michelis

would prevent it from overstepping limits’.9 Beyond these limits, architecture itself was doomed to vanish. We know that Tafuri paid little attention to Laugier’s treatise, dwelling on it only in order to emphasize the new role of the city with respect to architectural practice. However, the fact that his reflection on modern architecture addressed as a main feature the ‘negative utopia’10 of Giovanni Battista Piranesi demonstrates how Tafuri had defined a chronology of the ‘crisis’ of architecture, starting already in the eighteenth century. It is not by chance that at the beginning of Architecture and Utopia Tafuri recalls Quatremère de Quincy’s definition of architecture in his Encyclopédie méthodique: ‘[It] sees to the salubrity of cities, guards the health of men, protects their properties, and works only for safety, repose and orderliness of civic life’.11 The only catch was that the very establishment of science and technology as independent bodies of knowledge separated and isolated architecture from the real process of conformation to modern society and condemned it to a laboured and irresolvable course. This, for Tafuri, is the origin of the ideological nature of any modern architectural work: the fact that architecture no longer is a protagonist of the real transformations produced by capitalistic development, and that it is unable not only to produce them but also to interpret them a posteriori. It could be said that architecture was no longer permitted to give form to reality, but, at most, to re-form it. Reform is a crucial keyword of modernity and it addresses the desire to re-establish order and rationality which capitalistic development does not essentially possess. However, the problem concerned not only the unrelenting separation between architecture, technological progress, new scientific knowledge and the revolution of forms of industrial production, of consumption and of politics; but it also concerned the, by then worn out, separation between the disciplines of engineering and architecture. The very appearance of the notion of tectonics – a neologism coined by archaeological sciences, but soon taken on by architects – clearly assumes a meaning of crisis. Tectonics, the art of connecting the different parts of a building, of configuring into a unit that which originally is discontinuous or intermittent, seems an expression of the consciousness of the lost unity of architecture. It signals a dilemma. It claims the possibility of re-establishing a system of relationships among parts that has been inevitably lost.12 When faced with the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton, in London in 1851, Gottfried Semper, possibly the nineteenth century’s most lucid thinker on architecture, immediately recognized an extraordinarily threatening contradiction. Paxton’s building, a greenhouse-structure of iron and glass transformed into an enormous exhibition complex, seemed to Semper an event that was inconsistent with the notion of tectonics itself. Its ideal was to be as light as possible, to the limits of immateriality. The joints between the glass panes and the metal structure were repeated with such an unaccented regularity that they no longer corresponded to any compositional syntax of elements. In order to save the notion of ‘architecture’, Semper was forced to organize it into two welldefined categories: only to the ‘monumental’ architecture did he assign the task of keeping alive the idea of a well-proportioned composition of elements; the other category, the ‘useful’ one, was left to the fate entrusted to it by technological progress.

12

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture

Tafuri did not dwell directly on these themes, but he grasped with precision the parallel, and likewise threatening, transformation of the city into metropolis; one ‘which swallowed up in its formless body every architectural object’,13 which was absorbed in a continuous space and endowed with an invisible rationality essentially different from that which had characterized the historical city. At the turn of the twentieth century, Otto Wagner had written about a shocking new development, that is, the vastness of the suburbs, the unusual and regular size of the streets and the squares and the unstoppable process of growth, for which metropolitan architecture was called upon to elaborate an equally new character, distinguished by an anonymous regularity, to the point that it would change its own name: no longer the name of architecture with all of its historical conditionings, but that of Baukunst, or the ‘art of building’. This is the struggle in which Tafuri engaged his historical ‘project’ – not for the historicist reconstruction of the facts exactly as they occur, but for the construction of an ideological constitution for contemporary architecture, the only constitution that could justify, even if contradictorily, the resistance against the mise en abîme itself. It is, therefore, true that Tafuri spoke to us of the ‘death of architecture’ and of the anxious search to save it, or at least the fragments of it, through ideology, as the disenchantment of the avant-garde and its attempts to mirror that crisis of values were threatening it. Tafuri’s historical project was neither an announcement nor a condemnation, but it aimed ‘to reveal this disenchantment for what it was’.14 He did not wish to tell the history of the relationship between architecture and reality, but to study the contradictory event concerning the attempts of architecture to ‘exist’ in the reality of the contemporary world; to recognize the whole reality as ‘ready made’ and, precisely for this, to be able to transform it.15 Tafuri’s ‘heroes’, therefore, are those architects who fight this battle, who ‘dispel anxiety by understanding and internalizing its causes’.16 His heroes are those who move between the ruins and try to interpret the meanings lying therein. They are certainly not the protagonists of a commercial ‘generic architecture’, who believe they can astutely turn their gaze elsewhere and go beyond ideology. And neither is his hero the ingenious optimism of the neo avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s – and perhaps that of many architects at the beginning of this new century as well – who believed, or still believe, in the possibility of a purifying immersion in the pulsating plurality of the manifestations of contemporary society, of being able to go beyond ‘architecture’ by simply accepting reality and its materials ‘as found’.17 The ‘archaeology of the present’ practiced by James Stirling, and in a different way by Carlo Scarpa, was much more fascinating. Stirling, in Tafuri’s opinion, reduced architectural language – not the reality itself – to fragments ‘as found’. He manipulated, rewrote, mounted, re-mounted and ‘sentenced it to meditate and reflect on itself’.18 ‘Stirling’s architecture does not open new paths, does not indicate targets to aim at, does not entrust others, but only itself, with its own destiny’.19 Of course there have been numerous victims of the Tafurian historical project; not just the neo avant-gardes of the 1960s and so-called radical architecture. Louis Kahn was also a victim, whose extraordinary complexity was reduced by Tafuri to a symbol of a mystic opposition, unaware of the true nature of the problem. A reckless chimera, and

13

Marco De Michelis

thus anti-historical, for his claim to re-establish a fullness of the meaning of architectural form, which was incompatible with reality. Paradoxically, Robert Venturi was similarly a victim; he too was responsible for an attempt at ‘refounding architecture’, which was only apparently dissimilar to that of Kahn, and also based on reintroducing a ‘significant form’, a found anew ‘density of the architectural image’20 which appeared to Tafuri as even more destructive than the modest quality of his projects and buildings. We know well who Tafuri’s ‘new knights of purity’21 are. They are those architects – the ‘Five’ Americans in New York, and Aldo Rossi in Italy – who at the end of the 1960s had introduced a critical revision of the modern tradition and of its peculiar instruments, even at the risk of becoming aware that the final outcome of this process would be none other than the retreat into the solitary subjectivity of architectural practice. Aldo Rossi would also recognize this a few years later in his Scientific Autobiography when he stated that, in writing The Architecture of the City, he had ‘perhaps simply wanted to get rid of the city and, in reality, had discovered [his] architecture’.22 There is a subtle, profound and even ambiguous affinity between the idea that architecture could represent itself as an autonomous cognitive tool and as an independent discipline, between Aldo Rossi’s assertion of the existence of an autonomous body of architectural knowledge, and the Tafurian claim of autonomy of historical research versus design practice. This affinity was explicitly claimed in a text by Massimo Scolari published in the exhibition catalogue Architettura Razionale, curated by Aldo Rossi in 1973. For Scolari the progressive character of the rediscovery of architecture’s disciplinary autonomy lay in recognizing the historical basis of its very tools of analysis and intervention, as opposed to the utopian season of the avant-garde. Scolari tried to define a ‘critical’ condition for the strategy of architecture’s ‘autonomisation’: Architecture is a cognitive process that in and of itself, in the acknowledgment of its own autonomy, now necessitates a re-founding of the discipline: one that refuses interdisciplinary solutions to its own crisis; that does not pursue and immerse itself in political, economic, social, and technological events only to mask its own creative and formal sterility, but rather desires to understand them so as to be able to intervene in them with lucidity.23 Having reached beyond the apocalyptic dilemma on the ‘death of architecture’, Rossi and Scolari seemed to be ready to make Tafuri’s interpretation of the drama that characterized architecture in those years their own: that of ‘seeing itself forced to turn back to “pure architecture”; an instance of form devoid of utopia; a sublime uselessness in the best of cases’. ‘Yet,’ Tafuri had continued, ‘to the mystified attempts to dress architecture in ideological clothing, we shall always prefer the sincerity of those who have the courage to speak that silent, unreliable purity’.24 For Tafuri, the utopia of form had by now taken on the physiognomy of the ‘mask’. The ‘sullen indifference’25 of Aldo Rossi’s architecture evidenced the awareness of the disillusionment of the Italian architects during the reform of the 1970s. The project for Modena’s new cemetery turned its back on the ‘noise of the world’. ‘The thread of Ariadne with which Rossi

14

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture

weaves his typological research does not lead to the reestablishment of the discipline, but rather to its dissolution’.26 When Aldo Rossi presented the image of The Analogous City at the Venice Biennale in 1976, enouncing the theory that it could be understood as a compositional procedure ‘centered on some primary facts of urban reality around which other facts are constituted within the frame of an analogical system’,27 Tafuri entitled his review ‘Ceci n’est pas une ville’, playing on the famous title of René Magritte’s ‘calligramme’ Ceci n’est pas une pipe. For Tafuri, Rossi’s ‘collage’ was completely within the negative tradition of modernity: his message ‘is at once the manifestation of a negation and an interweaving of subjective impulsions and reality’. It confesses the definitive impossibility of giving a new order, of attributing a new meaning to the city and, therein, it unmasks the purely ideological character of Rossi’s pretence of constructing a ‘theory of the city’ capable of governing its transformations. In Tafuri’s ‘L’architecture dans le boudoir’, published in Oppositions in 1974, we can read: he who wishes to make architecture speak is thus forced to resort to materials devoid of all meaning; he is forced to reduce to degree zero every ideology; every dream of social function, every utopian residue. In his hands, the elements of the modern architectural tradition are all at once reduced to enigmatic fragments – to mute signals of a language whose code has been lost.28 ‘The Historical “Project”’ was published by Tafuri first in Casabella (1977) and then in Oppositions (1979), before it became the introduction and the theoretical manifesto of La sfera e il labirinto.29 It can be used today as a very crucial key for interpreting the nature of the Tafurian historical strategy: its tortuous, even labyrinth-like paths and meanings. Tafuri starts by addressing the question about the nature of the architectural message and its translatability into linguistic terms. Does there exist an architectural language, or is architecture finally divided and multiplied into techniques incommunicable to one another? Tafuri refers here to the ‘micro’ – historical work that had been implemented and described by the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg: research in which ‘only some pieces are available, and theoretically more than one figure can be made from them … For this reason, the fact that everything falls into place is an ambiguous sign; either one is completely right or completely wrong’.30 This metaphor of history as a jigsaw puzzle is the metaphor that describes historical enquiry in terms of a detective investigation. At the starting point of the historian’s research only very little presumptive evidence is revealed – or only a few pieces of our jigsaw puzzle. Through archives, primary and secondary sources, crosschecked information, comparisons and even some subjective intuitions, the historian will be able to gather more and more indications – or more and more pieces. But the puzzle will never become complete and ‘more than one figure can be made’.31 At the same time, we are compelled to use all the collected elements; which means that we may not use only the pieces that correspond in the easiest way to our critical intention. No. We really have to use everything we know in order to produce an honest ‘historical representation’. The multiplicity and diversity of the materials available to historians address one more

15

Marco De Michelis

dilemma. While we can speak about architecture itself, or about language, techniques, institutions and historical context – each with their own intrinsic characteristics – are we really able to bring them back to ‘an underlying or hidden structure’? In which of these areas can we find a common meaning on which to rest? Can we translate these different words into one coherent narration? For Tafuri, the peculiar aim of history is not a mere ‘hermeneutic’ production of interpretation, but rather much more a production of meanings through ‘the constant struggle between the analysis and its objects’, ‘beginning with the “signifying traces” of events; an analytical construction that is never definitive and always provisional; an instrument of deconstruction of ascertainable realities’.32 It was Mark Wigley who pointed out this peculiar ‘monstrous legacy of Tafuri’, which is not ‘his specific analyses of particular events, but the scandalous introduction of contradiction into the heart of historical analysis’.33 Tafuri describes his historical ‘project’ as a ‘project of a crisis’. What does this formula mean? It asks to go beyond the traditional relation – completely rooted in nineteenth-century positivism – between an origin and the ‘final point of arrival: a destination point that explains everything [and] that causes a given “truth”’.34 The notion of genealogy proposed by Michel Foucault aids Tafuri here. Genealogy does not know any linear path of history; it ‘is made up of little, not obvious, truths, arrived at by a rigorous method’.35 Genealogy does not know any unity of history; there is nothing to be recognized in history, nothing that we already know. For Foucault, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’.36 The encounter between Tafuri and the French philosopher addresses one of the most controversial problems for the interpretation of Tafuri’s philosophy of history. It is evident that the crucial sources for Tafuri have to be found in the German postidealistic and Marxist tradition (Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger), and not in the French poststructuralist philosophers such as Foucault, Guattari, Deleuze, or Derrida. The very peculiar – and crucial – difference between Tafuri and the theorists of a deconstructivist critical approach lies in Tafuri’s interpretation of deconstruction as a provisional tool that inevitably presupposes a form of ‘reconstruction’. For him the danger – or the mortal risk – that threatens ‘the genealogies of Foucault, […] as well as the disseminations of Derrida, lies in the re-consecration of the microscopically analyzed fragments as new units, autonomous and significant in themselves’.37 For Tafuri, the point is to conceive the theoretical language as something comprising a plurality within itself: ‘the plurality of the subject, of knowledge, of institutions’.38 History has to consider the multiplicity of languages and subjects, and all the thresholds that continuously displace its single protagonists and elements. Here Tafuri quotes the German philosopher and sociologist, Georg Simmel: The secret of form lies in the fact that it is a boundary; it is the thing itself and at the same time the cessation of the thing, the circumscribed territory in which the Being and the No-longer-being of the thing are one in the same.39 The historical work finds its place inside of this tenuous and unstable interval. Tafuri did, of course, work inside a Marxist tradition of thought. But his originality and autonomy

16

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture

lie in his refusal to recover a ‘centre’, a final dialectical synthesis: the historian’s path does not lead towards the certainty of ‘truth’, but to ‘the divorce between the signifier and the signified’, to the ‘multiple meanings’ of reality. In this sense, again, the recognition by Tafuri of the mise en abîme, of the dissolution, of the classical unitary notion of architecture at the end of eighteenth century, split into the divided fragments of form and construction, of technique and architecture, of science and art, has been crucial for recognizing the ideological character of modern architecture in his already evoked Architecture and Utopia. That was the very true occasion for implementing the famous metaphor, proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche, that knowledge ‘has to stumble over words that are petrified and hard as stones’.40 At this point one more vital dilemma needs to be addressed: How to construct a history which, after having upset and shattered the apparent compactness of the real, after having shifted the ideological barriers that hide the complexity of the strategies of domination, arrives at the heart of those strategies; that is, arrives at their mode of production?41 For Tafuri, architecture is an ideal territory for the historian, exactly because of its complexity and because of the multiplicity of its languages and techniques. And modern architecture is even more fragmented. In it we can truly recognize the very different voices of politics, economy, philosophy, technical innovation and scientific discoveries; the peculiar voices of the new sciences of social health, psychology, sociology and so forth; the echoes that resound from the different universes and media of artistic creation. It is such multiform panorama that can explain why, according to Tafuri, a philological approach seemed to be even superfluous in his investigations on modern architecture. Re-reading Tafuri’s texts on modern architecture today indeed reveals a very precarious – even rough – approach to the primary sources. But the sometimes phenomenal outcomes of his approach seem to be the result of his extraordinary capacity to expand his enquiries to unknown territories, to fill the historical set with unexpected actors and to establish a critical network between the different voices. The frame of the jigsaw puzzle of modern architecture has become a totally new one through his seminal investigations. And it has become the duty and the task of the future generations to give form to it. At this point, the paths of contemporary architecture broke off, irreparably, from Tafuri’s historical ‘project’. His ‘total disenchantment’ was testimony of his awareness that there was nothing more to be found in the ‘hypnotic solitude’42 of that architecture which he loved calling ‘hypermodern’. In his essay in Contropiano in 1969, he had already written: There is no more salvation to be found within modern architecture: neither by wandering restlessly through labyrinths of images so polyvalent that they remain mute, nor by shutting oneself up in the sullen silence of geometries content with their own perfection.43

17

Marco De Michelis

Thus, the dilemma was revealed that still today seems to impassion whoever takes the time to interpret Tafuri’s path: the reasons for abandoning the passionate confrontation with contemporaneity and the apparent retreat into the more conventional territories of philology and the Renaissance. For Tafuri, the autonomy of the historiographic project had its foundation in a condition of conflict between analysis and its objects. The historical project was always a ‘project of crisis’, nourished, as we have already seen, by ‘notions as hard as stone’: one of these was the long unitary and progressive myth of modernity. What remained, in his eyes, were now only fragments. By now Tafuri had moved on and was busily engaged in studying an epoch of history, the Italian Renaissance, where wisdom and power still truly blended and where the forms of architecture did not seem to be separable from those of thought. Just one year before his death, Tafuri did try to explain that modern historiography was missing ‘large narrative’44 – the ‘grand récits’ of Lyotard. Renaissance architecture did offer him precisely these broad – even heroic – narrative structures, for which the analytical tools had to extend themselves to the most sophisticated philology. The masterpieces of the Italian Cinquecento did look, in Tafuri’s eyes, like those ‘notions hard as stone’ of which Nietzsche had spoken. They seemed to ask of the historian much more critical vigour, and much more historical skill and courage for dismounting the apparently solid unity of that time. In front of the articulated urban strategies of Antonio da Sangallo for the powerful Medici family and for Pope Leone X, Tafuri was ready to attempt the graphic reconstruction of the design process. And even to try to interpret as a draftsman (or a designer?) the architectural effects announced by a Rafaelesque study for a new façade of San Lorenzo in Florence.45

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11

12

18

Massimo Cacciari, Quid Tum (Venice, Istituto Universitario di Architettura, 1994). Now in Casabella 619–620 (1995): 168–169. Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘Ceci n’est pas une histoire’, Casabella 619–620 (1995): 48–53. Joan Ockman, ‘Venice and New York’, Casabella 619–620 (1995): 56–71. Mark Wigley, ‘Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994)’, Archis 4 (1994): 6–7. Marco Biraghi, Progetto di crisi (Milan: Christian Mariotti, 2005). English translation Project of Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Gent: A&S Books, 2007). Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Per una critica della ideologia architettonica’, Contropiano 1 (1969): 31–79. English translation ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 6–35. Vittorio Ugo, ‘Presentazione’, in Saggio sull’architettura, ed. Marc-Antoine Laugier, (Palermo: Aesthetica edizioni, 1987), 15. Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture was originally published in Paris in 1753. Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory (London: Zwemmer, 1962), 200–201. Laugier, Saggio sull’architettura, 39. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Giovan Battista Piranesi: l’architettura come “utopia negativa”’, Angelus Novus 20 (1971): 89–127. Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Architecture’, in the Encyclopedie methodique, I no. 109. Quoted by Tafuri in ‘Per una critica della ideologia architetconica’ (‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’) in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 10. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Marko Pogacnik, ‘La dissolution de la grande forme’, Faces 47 (1999/2000): 14–23.

Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 112. English translation: Theories and History of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980). Anthony Vidler, ‘Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930–1975’ (PhD diss., Technische Universiteit Delft, 2005), 174. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Architettura Contemporanea (Milano: Electa, 1976), 105. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, 6. Marco De Michelis, ‘Fin de Siècle’, Thesis. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar XLVI, 4/5 (2000): 160–167. Tafuri and Dal Co, Architettura Contemporanea, 368. Tafuri and Dal Co, Architettura Contemporanea, 368. Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, 252–253. Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 323. English translation: The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1987). Aldo Rossi, Autobiografia scientifica (Parma: Pratiche editrice, 1990), 22. Massimo Scolari, ‘The New Architecture and the Avant-Garde [1973]’, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed., K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 131–132. First published in Aldo Rossi, Architettura razionale (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1973). Scolari, ‘The New Architecture and the Avant-Garde’, 131–132. Manfredo Tafuri, Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944–1985 (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 166. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir [1974]’, in , ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 155. Pierluigi Nicolin, ‘Tafuri and the Analogous City’, ANY 25–26 (2000): 17. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3 (1974): 37–62. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, Casabella 429 (1977): 11–18. English translation: Oppositions 17 (1979): 55–75. Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul ‘Beneficio di Cristo’ (Turin, Einaudi, 1975), 84. Ginzburg and Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza, 84. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical “Project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1987), 3 and 2–3. Mark Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, ANY 25–26 (2000): 47. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical “Project”’, 3. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, in La sfera e il labirinto (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 6. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 76–100 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 88. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical “Project”’, 4–5. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical “Project”’, 5. Georg Simmel, ‘Zur Metaphysik des Todes [1910]’, in Das Individuum und die Freiheit (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1984), 29–35. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Aurora’, in Opere, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari vol. V, I (Milan: Adelphi, 1965), 40. Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, 14–15. K. Michael Hays, ‘Tafuri’s Ghost’, ANY 25–26 (2000): 36. Hays, ‘Tafuri’s Ghost’, 37. Pietro Corsi, ‘For a Historical History. Pietro Corsi Interviews Manfredo Tafuri’, La rivista dei libri 4 (1994): 10–12. Also in Casabella 619–620: 144–151. Anna Bedon, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, eds, Questo. Disegni e studi di Manfredo Tafuri (Vicenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 1995).

Bibliography Bedon, Anna, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, eds. Questo. Disegni e Studi di Manfredo Tafuri. Vicenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 1995. Biraghi, Marco. Project of Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Originally published in Italian: Progetto di crisi. Milan: Christian Mariotti, 2005. Casabella, 619–620 (January 1995). Corsi, Pietro. ‘For a Historical History. Pietro Corsi Interviews Manfredo Tafuri’, La rivista dei libri 4 (1994): 10–12. Foucault, Michel. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76–100. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. Frampton, Kenneth. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

19

Marco De Michelis

Ginzburg, Carlo and Adriano Prosperi. Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul ‘Beneficio di Cristo’. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Hays, K. Michael. ‘Tafuri’s Ghost’. ANY 25–26 (2000): 36–42. Herrmann, Wolfgang. Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory. London: Zwemmer, 1962. Laugier, Marc-Antoine. An Essay on Architecture. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977. Originally published as: Essai sur l’architecture. Paris, 1753 [first published in English in 1755]. Leach, Andrew. Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. Gent: A&S Books, 2007. Nicolin, Pierluigi. ‘Tafuri and the Analogous City’. ANY 25–26 (2000): 16–20. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘Aurora’, In Opere V, no. I, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Milan: Adelphi, 1965). Pogacnik, Marko. ‘La dissolution de la grande forme’. Faces: Journal d’architectures 47 (1999/2000): 14–23. Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysothôme. ‘Architecture’. In The True, the Fictive and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère De Quincy. Translated by Samir Younés, 74–86. London: Andreas Papadakis Publishers, 2000. Originally published in Quatremère de Quincy and Antoine Chrysostôme. Encyclopédie Méthodique. Architecture. Paris: 1788–1825. Rossi, Aldo. ‘Introduzione’. In Architettura Razionale. Edited by Ezio Bonfanti, Rosaldo Bonicalzi, Aldo Rossi, Massimo Scolari and Daniele Vitale. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1973. Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Italian edition: Autobiografia scientifica. Parma: Pratiche editrice, 1990. Scolari, Massimo. ‘The New Architecture and the Avant-Garde’. In Architecture Theory Since 1968. Edited by K. Michael Hays, 131–2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Simmel, Georg. ‘Zur Metaphysik des Todes [1910]’. In Das Individuum und die Freiheit, 29–35. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1984. Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and History of Architecture. London: Granada, 1980. Originally published in Italian: Teorie e storia dell’architettura. Bari: Laterza, 1968. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’. In Architecture Theory Since 1968. Edited by K. Michael Hays, 6–35. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Originally published in Italian: ‘Per una critica della ideologia architettonica’. Contropiano 1 (1969): 31–79. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Giovan Battista Piranesi: l’architettura come “utopia negativa”’. Angelus Novus 20 (1971): 89–127. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Originally published in Italian: Progetto e Utopia. Bari: Laterza, 1973. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Il “progetto” storico’. Casabella 429 (1977): 11–18. English translation in Oppositions 17 (1979): 55–75. Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1987. Originally published in Italian: La sfera e il labirinto. Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Tafuri, Manfredo. History of Italian Architecture, 1944–1985. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Originally published in Italian: Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944–1985. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Ugo, Vittorio. ‘Presentazione’. In Saggio sull’architettura, Edited by Marc-Antoine Laugier. Palermo: Aesthetica edizioni, 1987. Vidler, Anthony. ‘Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930–1975’. PhD diss.,Technische Universiteit Delft, 2005. Wigley, Mark. ‘Post-Operative History’, ANY 25–26 (2000): 47–53.

20

Chapter 3

Theories and history of architecture (museums) Sergio M. Figueiredo

While travelling in a train to Utrecht to attend yet another preparatory meeting for the establishment of what would become the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut (NAi, Netherlands Architecture Institute) in 1984, Mariet Willinge, the deputy director of the NDB (Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de Bouwkunst, Dutch Documentation Center for Architecture), and Ruud Brouwers, the Policy Director of the Stichting Wonen (Living/Housing Foundation), reached an agreement: the two organizations would come together for the new institute, but they ‘would be separated by a glass wall in the middle’.1 As Willinge and Brouwers reassured other passengers overhearing their conversation that this agreement did not pertain to an estranged marriage but to a new architecture institute, they were effectively defining the NAi’s intellectual foundation. Specifically, their informal agreement defined the intellectual framework of the Dutch institute as a dialectical opposition between historians (NDB) and architects (Stichting Wonen), between the past and the future of Dutch architecture. Even if inadvertently, their agreement – and the very foundation of the new Dutch architecture institute – reflected the changing role of history within architecture culture. Such agreement effectively echoed the theoretical framework with which Italian historian and critic Manfredo Tafuri had disrupted the normative institutions of both historical and design practice with the publication of Teorie e Storia dell’Architettura (Theories and History of Architecture) in 1968. Using a structuralist-Marxist framework, Tafuri poignantly challenged the predominant model of historical practice by revealing its shortcomings and denouncing its instrumentalization as a means to legitimize architectural practice. Instead, he aimed ‘to effect a complete change, away from history

21

Sergio M. Figueiredo

of instrumental architecture’ and replace it with a historical practice of critical independence and sound methods.2 Most notably, Tafuri attacked the simplification of history as a unified reading, calling instead for a revelation of its plurality and the polemical multiplication of its historiographies. To that end, the Italian historian prescribed several conditions that were to be met, from which some soared above all others as structural components to his theoretical apparatus: the continued and constant dialectical opposition between architecture and history, the construction of a territory shared by historians and architects in the present moment, and the engagement of architecture theory and history with society. While distinct, the three conditions were interdependent. Only an unrestricted, common territory of architecture’s past shared by architects and historians could ensure the emergence of a properly productive dialectical opposition between both factions; only a structured interaction between architecture and history could produce the needed criticality to challenge ‘the false historical consciousness at the core of architectural theory’, thus becoming a first step towards the ‘dissolution of architecture’s selfreferentiality’ and a greater engagement with society.3 While Tafuri identified these elements (and discussed their interdependence) in abstract terms, they were most clearly materialized and institutionalized in the establishment of new architecture museums. Specifically, the founding of not only the NAi in Rotterdam (1988) but also the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal (1979), intended to reveal the plurality of history through the constitution of encyclopaedic archives and fulfil all three of Tafuri’s theoretical precepts in their attempts to create institutions dedicated to the advancement of an engaged architectural discipline.4

Criticality in the architecture museum At the end of the 1970s there was a noticeable surge in the ranks of architecture museums worldwide. Although institutions like the Sir John Soane Museum (1813) in London or the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Department of Architecture and Design (1932) in New York were already well established, the number of architecture museums had previously been limited at best.5 But as more architecture museums were opened, a new type of museum also emerged. These new institutions moved away from previously established operative models and pursued instead a new form of criticality for architecture, clearly paralleling Tafuri’s theoretical claims. Tafuri had identified in the historical analysis of his predecessors (such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, and Leonardo Benevolo) an inherent order utilized to construct a singular narrative that served little more than to validate contemporary design positions of (modern) architects. Such singular construction presented history as a trajectory not merely leading up to the present condition, but indicating the inevitability of the positions sustained by architects ‘with historical material carefully selected in order to match this purpose’.6 The suppression of ‘conflicting layers of detail involved in any architectural project’ resulted in an ‘illusion of a seamless, unified past’, used to ‘promote

22

Theories and history of architecture

an equally monolithic future’.7 Such practice, which did not simply attempt to explain but also to affect the evolution of architecture, and presented the historian’s desired development as the next logical step, was defined by Tafuri as an ‘operative criticism’.8 Beyond a mere use, this practice constituted an abuse of history. While Tafuri established this model to describe the agency of his predecessors, operative criticism could just as easily have been used to describe the work of established architecture museums, particularly those which based their archival policies on antiquarian practices. Museums such as the Sir John Soane’s and the MoMA, for example, assembled their collections through a careful selection of content, favouring singular pieces over complete series. While such practices allowed the Soane’s Museum to elevate public taste and the MoMA to assert ‘a resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity’, it also inevitably implied that the reading of history was limited to the narrative established by the juxtaposition in their collection.9 Much like the operative criticism identified by Tafuri in the work of historians, the collections of these museums were assembled to articulate particular conceptions of architecture, effectively resisting the emergence of competing readings and meanings. If in the early nineteenth century Sir John Soane explicitly promoted a return to classicism, in the early twentieth century the MoMA championed a modern architectural expression, both clearly aiming at specific re-orientations for the discipline.10 In contrast to the prevailing operative criticism, Tafuri had proposed an alternative historical practice where the simplification of history was displaced by a revelation and acceptance of history’s ‘internal contradictions and its plurality, stressing its dialectical sides, and exalting it for what it really [was]’.11 Tafuri’s critical historiography called for a ‘polemical multiplication of historiographies, each of which undermin[ing] the idea of singular, unified, self-consistent structure’ by recognizing the ambiguity inherent to any project.12 Accordingly, the historian was to observe the subject and dispassionately identify the ‘twists and turns that point[ed] to deeper complication’ without ‘imposing [any] conceptual schemes on the evidence’.13 By accentuating the contradictions of history, the historian was, according to Tafuri, to offer the ‘architect an endless vista of new and unsolved problems, available for conscious choice and freed from the weight of myth’.14 In short, for Tafuri, historical practice was intended to ‘raise questions instead of provide answers, multiply problems rather than offer singular solutions’.15 While never directly mentioning Tafuri, both the CCA and the NAi adopted an approach to architecture and historical practices that clearly resonated with the Italian historian’s conception of criticality. Specifically, both institutions aimed to establish a new type of ambitious and engaged cultural institution that would operate both as an architecture museum and a study centre. In their galleries, libraries and archives, history and architecture, theory and practice were meant to productively collide, revealing – rather than smoothing – the breaks, the difficulties, the tensions and the discontinuities within and between them. What the Montreal centre and the Rotterdam institute proposed was ‘virtually a new institutional type’ where architectural scholarship and inclusive debate were to further public engagement and understanding of the discipline.16 The CCA and the NAi ambitions and intellectual positioning were clearly articulated in their common approach to architecture’s disciplinary archive. Specifically,

23

Sergio M. Figueiredo

the archival policy adopted by both institutions directly responded to Tafuri’s stipulations since it aimed to foster architectural scholarship and discussion unconditioned by – and untethered from – any singular narrative or reading of architecture and its history. By assembling comprehensive, encyclopaedic and complete collections formed by a diverse array of artefacts that related to the processes of architectural production, the CCA and the NAi aimed to document and present the complexity of architecture.17 Specifically, since the complete and detailed nature of these collections meant that for every architect, for every project, there was a sizeable amount of archived material, not only were the intricacy or nuances of the archived ideas conveyed, but also the ‘collections’ status as open-ended resources for inquiry’ was emphasized.18 As such, the CCA and the NAi became paradigmatic examples of a contemporary encyclopaedic approach to the architectural archive. Beyond merely collecting representations of architecture such as presentation drawings, the scope of these institutions’ archives came to include ‘sketches, preliminary designs, working drawings, business and personal correspondence, photographs, models, collections of press clippings, and published articles’, that is, full collections composed of both final and preparatory work which ‘contribute[d] to the understanding of professional practices, projects and personalities’.19 In Montreal, the CCA holds over 190 fonds, most notably the entire archives of James Stirling and of Peter Eisenman (until 2008), while in Rotterdam the NAi housed almost 800 separate collections of the most prominent Dutch architects of the past two centuries. The complete and detailed nature of these collections means that for any object, idea, project or architect, there is a sizeable amount of archived material. The tremendous breadth of these collections is rather extraordinary. The Peter Eisenman Archive (CCA fonds AP143) at the CCA, for example, spans almost 60 years of architectural production (1951–2008).20 This fonds is composed by not only a staggering amount of drawings (which the CCA catalogue lists as ‘circa 39,294’), models (‘circa 1,250’), and textual records (‘circa 85.57 linear meters’), but is also complemented by a vast assortment of material.21 From videocassettes to panels, from collages to posters, the professional and academic development of Peter Eisenman is documented in an assortment of artefacts related to over 200 projects. While this particular fonds is remarkably eclectic and vast, most other collections within both these institutions are composed by a similar wealth of material that represents a rich cross section of the influences, interests and activities of prominent architects and inherently offers substantial insights into the shaping of the discipline. As a result, the NAi’s archive was composed of approximately 18,000 linear metres of archival material, while the CCA’s collections occupied a 62,000 square feet underground vault.22 The sheer size of these archives indicated the open-ended character attributed to them, as well as a clear break with existing practice and an affinity to Tafuri’s ideas. Only with a comprehensive archive could the historian ‘let the subject do the talking – by exposing all the multilayered detail to be found in the archives – and patiently watch for the complications, the twists and turns that point to deeper complications’.23 In agreement with Tafuri, the CCA and the NAi understood that the basis for any discussion in present architecture rested in the shared territory of architecture’s past, and if that

24

Theories and history of architecture

basis was compromised by predetermined readings or conditioned by particular agendas and selections, then so would the ensuing discussion. Effectively, the comprehensive nature of these archives aimed to encourage multiple readings, thus preventing both knowledge and meaning from being solidified, but rather remain in constant flux. Given the breadth of material in these collections, any object, idea, project or architect was constantly subject to possible re-interpretation, where the construction of alternative readings and juxtapositions was nearly limitless. In the encyclopaedic archives of these museums, the multiplicity and complications of history effectively resisted simplification.

Dialectical opposition In order to ensure that the problematization of history resisted any impulses for simplification, Tafuri considered that ‘the critical effect of history could only be guaranteed if it was radically divorced from architectural practice’.24 Thus, while recognizing that they occupied a place within architecture culture, historians had nevertheless to assume a detached position. Instead of complacency and collusion, the architect and the historian were to face each other in a dialectical confrontation, ‘almost to the point of constant opposition’.25 In this confrontation the historian was to become ‘the architect’s conscience’, the voice ‘that unsettle[d] the project and its reliance on tidy lessons drawn from history or upon clean abstractions of the surrounding worlds’ by holding the architect accountable for his or her use of history.26 In establishing the distinction between history and architecture, between ‘critical’ and ‘operative’, Tafuri defined the temporal territories for both practices. While ‘critical’ history was to look back and engage with the past, ‘operative’ architecture was to look forward and engage with the future.27 Such separation ensured that there was a preemptive gap between history and architecture – a gap that provided the necessary critical distance between both practices. But while their research territories remained clearly separate, ‘both “operative” and “critical” figures start[ed] from a “present moment” and [were] activated by operating in the present’.28 Given that the present not only informed the understanding of past history and the shaping of future architecture, but was also where the dialectical confrontation between architecture and history took place, the present became a pivotal construction in Tafuri’s conception of a renewed approach to architecture, that is, in regulating the relation between architecture and history. Merely by hosting the discipline’s archive, architecture museums had an important role in Tafuri’s scheme of dialectical opposition between architecture and history. Specifically, the archives within these museums constituted the common language between architects and historians and thus were a crucial prerequisite for the organization of any fruitful interaction between them. While some museums were satisfied with their role as custodians of this shared language, the newly established CCA and NAi were intent on actively becoming facilitators of the type of productive discussion described by Tafuri. The organization of a dialectical

25

Sergio M. Figueiredo

confrontation between architecture and history became the primary objective for these institutions. If for the NAi that was clearly expressed in the institute’s early motto defined as ‘history as the source of inspiration for the contemporary design task’, the CCA intended to become ‘a study center and museum devoted to the art of architecture past and present’.29 Whether in Rotterdam or Montreal, the ambition was the same: to allow the confrontation between historical and architectural practice in order to broaden the future possibilities for the discipline and foster greater public engagement. The result from such a confrontation was best expressed in the NAi through the productive tension between its Archives and Collections Department (into which the NDB had been transformed) and its Presentation Department (into which Stichting Wonen had been transformed). While the Archives and Collections Department was responsible for Dutch architecture’s past, the Presentation Department was responsible for engaging with its future; that is, while the Archives and Collections Department was tasked with managing the archives and documenting the knowledge within them, the Presentation Department was responsible for disseminating to a broad audience the knowledge collected (and produced) at the institute through exhibitions, publications and discussions. The intersection between the two departments was conceptually defined by research and physically occupied by the institute study room and library. From the very start, these spaces were devised as the privileged interface between the Collections and Presentation departments; that is, as the confrontation between historical and architectural practices. Research developed in the study room was often initiated by exhibitions and publications, but was only made possible by the archives and collections. It was through research for the institute’s multiple activities that the Presentation Department directed new acquisitions for the archives, and it was through archival research by the Collections Department that new knowledge and new readings of the archives were produced that stimulated exhibitions and publications.30 Likewise, for the CCA, research also represented the field in which not only collections and presentation intersected, or where historical and architectural practices engaged, but was also ‘vital in opening ideas in architecture to a wider public’.31 This dialectical confrontation was also critical in the development of other institutional policies, further revealing the implicit influence of Tafuri’s theoretical framework. Specifically, beyond initiating its own research, the NAi also actively cultivated ‘connections with researchers from universities, skilled designers, and authors’ in order to develop an inclusive type of discussion.32 This was claimed to be ‘contrary to one-sidedness and [instead] based on open-minded, curiosity, unbound by time or place’.33 Additionally, the NAi strived to engage and present architecture ‘as a continuous development’ rather than divided by arbitrary periodization, as Willinge and Brouwers (by then respectively Head of Collections and Head of Presentation) jointly stated in an internal policy document.34 As such, the study and presentation of the broad field of architecture (which included ‘architecture, interior and landscape, urban development, housing, urban renewal, preservation and spatial planning’) was to be equally approached and understood as a unified development, in which the field was ‘not to be compartmentalized but connected together by a shared history of ideas’.35 At the NAi, research and the study room represented this shared history of ideas; that is,

26

Theories and history of architecture

the shared territory of historians and architects where a door was found in the glass wall between the former NDB and Stichting Wonen. Beyond merely hosting archives or constructing readings of architecture’s past, these new progressive architecture museums were determined to engage with the discipline and project its future. Such methodical engagement of both architectural and historical practice effectively staged Tafuri’s conception of the present moment where architects and historians were to interact. Even if unwittingly, the rhetoric employed by the CCA and the NAi revealed the spectre of Tafuri’s dialectical opposition in their organization. If the CCA presented itself as the first institution to ‘function both as an architectural study centre and as a museum’, intent on ‘instituting a mechanism for interchange between the academic and architectural communities’, the NAi was defined as an institute ‘from which the built environment could be studied’ and ‘from which incentives could be given to better build environments’.36 The combination of these two objectives was dubbed as ‘platform-function’ and was intended to ‘stimulate discussion and opinion regarding developments in architecture and urban planning and act as a “center” for those involved in this field’.37 Despite their slight differences, these pronouncements were still evident applications of Tafuri’s theoretical framework.

Confronting architecture’s insularity Tafuri also claimed that, by engaging in operative criticism, both historians and architects were not only deliberately constructing a singular, forward trajectory of history, but they were also inherently moving architecture towards a greater insularity from society and contributing to its growing irrelevance. According to Tafuri, since ‘operative criticism obfuscate[d] the disciplinary clarity potentially claimed by both architecture and history’, it reinforced the ‘isolating shield of architectural theory’.38 Therefore, the ‘task of history [was] the recovery, as far as possible, of the original functions and ideologies that, in the course of time, define and delimit the role and meaning of architecture’.39 Rather than isolate architecture from society, history and theory were to ensure that architectural practice remained socially and culturally engaged with society at large. This was yet another aim of the newly established museums that neatly corresponded to Tafuri’s theoretical construction, as they strived to use architectural debate for establishing a direct connection between the interior and the exterior of the discipline.40 In the autumn of 1993, for example, the NAi pursued an ambitious mass media programming intent on broadening architectural debate by engaging a wide audience. For that, the institute produced a series of eight television shows entitled Architectuur in Nederland to be aired on Dutch national television along with accompanying radio broadcasts and a general publication book.41 Similarly, in 1990, the CCA also tried to shorten the distance between the interior and exterior of the discipline by organizing an exhibition of broad appeal. Titled ‘Buildings in Boxes: Architectural Toys from the CCA’, this exhibition was the first in a series allowing a general audience (‘both adults and youngsters’) to become engaged with architecture through the more approachable medium of ‘architectural toys

27

Sergio M. Figueiredo

and games’.42 Either through mass media or with architectural toys, both institutions intended to oppose the perceived ‘elitist superiority’ of architecture and instead position the discipline as a public concern by targeting its activities to a much wider constituency.43 By encouraging the public to become active participants rather than passive observers in the continuing architectural debate, these institutions inherently hindered architecture’s growing insularity identified by Tafuri. Specifically, by requiring architecture to engage with a lay public, the CCA and the NAi forced a grounding of any discussions. Therefore, while these debates were crucial for the advancement of architecture, they were only as important as their ability to be demystified and explained to a wide audience. Beyond arcane and abstract constructions, research and discussions within the Rotterdam institute and the Montreal centre were also intended to be applied to the improvement of urban fabrics and architectural objects in the world at large.44 In short, the obscurity cast upon architectural ideas, issues and processes that had caused the discipline’s insularity was continuously frustrated by the inclusiveness of the discussion promoted by these institutions. The commitment to a continuous societal engagement was a central element of both these museums and Tafuri’s conception of architecture’s culture. In fact, the Italian historian’s claims were echoed once again in the rhetoric employed by the CCA and the NAi. While CCA founder Phyllis Lambert asserted that ‘architectural research has a profound cultural influence, and that scholars have a social responsibility of the highest order’, the NAi professed its ambition to initiate an inclusive conversation of how architecture both shapes and is shaped by society, not ‘merely from the angle of the discipline itself but also open to the relationships with other disciplines and current thought in general’.45 By forcefully establishing a public setting, with a public audience, and where the present condition was the shared language and territory of not only architects and historians but also the general public, these new museums became also the most direct manner through which the issues, processes and concerns of the architectural discipline could engage with society.

Mind the gap Even though Tafuri had insisted that ‘architecture demand[ed] engagement with political, social, and economic systems and institutions, [while] criticism require[d] distance’, it was in the confrontation of architecture and criticism that the CCA and the NAi began to address ‘the real problem [of] how to project a criticism capable of constantly putting itself into crisis by putting into crisis the real’.46 Effectively, the institute and the centre not merely responded to and institutionalized Tafuri’s ‘prophylactic gap between history/ criticism and design’, but they went even further to establish a sort of ‘post-operative criticality’ described by Mark Wigley as ‘new forms of research that take the risk of actively working on both sides of the gap’.47 By engaging with both the past and future of the discipline, the CCA and the NAi were moving from a reflective to a projective model, but by minding the gap between architecture and history, these institutions

28

Theories and history of architecture

offered also the materialization and institutionalization of Tafuri’s theoretical prescription for a productive architecture culture. Ultimately, the progressive quality of Tafuri’s theoretical construction was particularly compelling to these institutions, which recognized in this critical model an opportunity to become pivotal instruments for the advancement of architecture. Unencumbered by established methods and intent on staking a claim at the forefront of architecture culture, the CCA and the NAi were eager to become forums for inclusive discussion. In doing so, these fledgling institutions signalled a paradigm shift in the nascent field of architecture museums, where the presence of Tafuri’s theoretical framework was all but evident in their intellectual positioning. Without ever explicitly referring to Tafuri, the founding of the CCA and the NAi effectively institutionalized his conceptual constructions of criticality. This much was revealed as both of these institutions assembled comprehensive archives, encouraged constant reassessments of history, established platforms for discussion, revealed new paths for architecture practice, but most importantly institutionalized a productive dialectical confrontation between architects and historians. Accordingly, through the CCA and the NAi activities and in their galleries, theory became praxis.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

Mariet Willinge, ‘Interview by Sergio Miguel Figueiredo’, audio, 11 January 2011; Ruud Brouwers, ‘Interview by Sergio Miguel Figueiredo’, audio, 5 January 2011. Ignasi de Solà-Morales, ‘History and History of Architecture’, ANY: Being Manfredo Tafuri 25–26 (2000): 8. Andrew Leach, ‘Choosing History: Tafuri, Criticality and the Limits of Architecture’, The Journal of Architecture 10 no. 3 (2005): 237. While the CCA is still fully operational in Montreal, in January 2013 the NAi was merged with other cultural institutions to create Het Nieuwe Instituut (The New Institute) dedicated to the ‘creative industries’. In discussing the growing numbers of architecture museums since the mid-1970s, Barry Bergdoll emphasizes the doubling of the number of institutions affiliated with the International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM) between 1975 and 1995, singling out the foundation of the ‘Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (1979), the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt (1979), the Architekturmuseum in Basel (1984), the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam (1988), and the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh (1990)’, as well as specialized departments in other museums, such as ‘the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris’. Barry Bergdoll, ‘Curating History’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57 no. 3 (September 1998): 257. Titia Rixt Hoekstra, ‘Building versus Bildung: Manfredo Tafuri and the Construction of a Historical Discipline’ (diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2005), 21. Mark Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, ANY: Becoming Manfredo Tafuri 25–26 (2000), 48. Mary McLeod, ‘On Criticism [Criticism of Place: A Symposium]’, Places 4 no. 1 (1987): 4–5. In Tafuri’s own words, ‘what is meant by operative criticism is an analysis of architecture (or of the arts in general) that, instead of an abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precise poetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historical analyses programmatically distorted and finalised’. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 141. Alfred H. Barr, quoted in Built in USA: Post-War Architecture, ed. Henry Russell Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 8. For a comprehensive discussion of the MoMA’s promotion of a particular conception of architecture, see: Henry Matthews, ‘The Promotion of Modern Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s’, Journal of Design History 7 no. 1 (1994): 43–59. Regarding Sir John Soane’s instrumentalization of his collection towards a particular reading of architecture’s history (and of his own work), see: John Elsner, ‘A Collector’s Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 155–176.

29

Sergio M. Figueiredo

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38

30

Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 233. Tafuri devotes a chapter of Theories and History of Architecture to define each position, see ‘Operative Criticism’, 141–170, and ‘The Tasks of Criticism’, 227–237. Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, 48. Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, 52. Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 229. Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, 48. Canadian Centre for Architecture, ‘The First Five Years’, in Centre Canadien d’Architecture: Les Débuts, 1979–1984 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1984), 110. As the objective of these collections was ‘to document the design process and not to collect individual drawings as pieces of art’, these collections were ‘composed of all the elements that [gave] evidence of the personality and practice of an architect, from the whole range of drawings, specifications, models, working tools, travel sketches, account books, as well as the library and works of art collected by the individual architect or firm’. Monika Platzer, ‘Interview with Mariet Willinge’, ICAM Print 3 (December 2009): 52; Phyllis Lambert, ‘The Collections of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’, Architectural Design 59 no. 3–4 (1989): 9. Phyllis Lambert, ‘The Architectural Museum: A Founder’s Perspective’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58 no. 3 (September 1999): 309. Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, ‘Archives and Collections’, NAi, accessed 27 August 2012, http:// en.nai.nl/collection/about_the_collection/item/_rp_kolom2-1_elementId/1_95698. Canadian Centre for Architecture, CCA: The Canadian Centre for Architecture Today (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1986), 10. Derived from the French expression respect des fonds, expressing one of the major concepts of archival science and theory, that records of different provenance should not be intermingled, a fonds is a grouping of documents that originate from the same source. Specifically, the organic structure of the fonds sets it apart from a collection, since it comprises documents and artefacts that have been accumulated (either produced or collected) by an individual, institution or organization during its everyday activities. The entire catalogue and summary description of this fonds is available online. See Canadian Centre for Architecture, ‘AP143: Peter Eisenman Fonds’, CCA Finding Aids, accessed 26 October 2012, http://svrdam.cca.qc.ca/search/bs.aspx?langID=1#a=arch&s=380476&d=AP143&p=1&nr=1&nq=1. Ole Bouman, ‘Why the New NAi?’, ICAM Print 4, ed. Monika Platzer (February 2012): 22.; Helen Malkin, ‘Building and Gardens: Participants, Chronology, and Specifications’, in Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture: Building and Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 156. The breadth of the CCA and the NAi encyclopaedic collections was such that the institute had to move its growing models collection offsite due to lack of space, while the CCA had to develop ‘standards for basic access to very large archives’. Gerald Beasley, ‘Interview with Phylis Lambert’, ICAM Print 3, ed. Monika Platzer (December 2009): 39; Platzer, ‘Interview with Mariet Willinge’, 50. Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, 58. Hoekstra, ‘Building Versus Bildung’, 110. Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 64. Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent: A&S Books, Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University, 2007), 130. Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History, 125. Leach, ‘Choosing History’, 235–236. Ruud Brouwers, ‘The NAi: The History of a Design Task’, in The Netherlands Architecture Institute, trans. Robyn de Jong-Dalziel (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1993), 72; Lambert, ‘The Architectural Museum: A Founder’s Perspective’, 309. Werkgroep NAi, ‘Schets Beleidsplan Architectuur-Instituut’, September 1986. NDBK 420, 10–11. Phyllis Lambert, ‘Archeology of Collecting’, in En Chantier: The Collections of the CCA, 1989–1999 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1999), 31. Ruud Brouwers and Mariet Willinge, ‘Activiteiten Architectuurinstituut: 1989–1992’, 13 October 1988. NDBK 422, 2. Ruud Brouwers, ‘Nadere Uitwerking van Het Doel En de Uitgangspunten van Het Architectuurinstituut Voor de Afdeling Presentatie (Tentoonstellingen, Publikaties, Toegepast Onderzoek, Manifestaties, Educatie, Dienstverlening)’, 14 November 1988. BSTU 1989, 1. Brouwers and Willinge, ‘Activiteiten Architectuurinstituut: 1989–1992’, 4. Brouwers and Willinge, ‘Activiteiten Architectuurinstituut: 1989–1992’, 4. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Centre Canadien d’Architecture: Les Débuts, 1979–1984 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1984), 109, 110; Dick van Woerkom, ‘Nota Het Nederlands Instituut Voor Architectuur En Stedenbouw (NIAS)’, 18 April 1982. NDBK 35, 4. Werkgroep WVC-VROM, ‘Ontwerp Voor Een Nederlands Instituut Voor Architectuur En Stedenbouw’, 1 December 1984. NDBK 399, 9. Andrew Leach, ‘Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research’ (diss., Universiteit Gent, 2006), 88.

Theories and history of architecture

39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46

47

Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 228. Tafuri addresses the problematic nature of the communication between architecture’s interior and exterior in a full chapter of Teorie e Storia, in which he further decries not merely the insularity of the discipline, but also the lack of consideration that has been given to the enunciation of the discipline. See Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Architecture as Metalanguage: The Critical Value of the Image’, in Theories and History of Architecture, 103–39. The televised series had an average viewership of 223,750 people per episode. NAi, ‘NAi Jaarverslag 1993’ (1994), 74–5. Canadian Centre for Architecture, ‘Press Release: A Unique Collection Is Unveiled at the CCA!’, 28 November 1990. Brouwers, ‘Nadere Uitwerking van Het Doel En de Uitgangspunten van Het Architectuurinstituut Voor de Afdeling Presentatie’, 2. The same sort of connection between architecture and the real world (eschewing the trappings of architectural theory) was emphasized in the construction of post-critical positions within the discipline, most notably by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, and Michael Speaks. See Robert E. Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, in The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, ed. William S. Saunders, Harvard Design Magazine Readers 5 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 22–33; Michael Speaks, ‘Design Intelligence: Or Thinking After the End of Metaphysics’, Architectural Design 72 no. 5 (October 2002): 4–9. Lambert, ‘The Architectural Museum: A Founder’s Perspective’, 309; Hans van Dijk and Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, NAi Beleidsplan 1993–1996, 2nd edition (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1993), 21. Diane Y. Ghirardo, ‘Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the US, 1970–2000’, Perspecta 33 (January 2002): 46. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical Project’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Robert Connolly and Pellegrino d’Acierno (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 9. In describing the new types of research that both maintained Tafuri’s gap between history and architecture while operating on both sides of the gap, Wigley dubbed this type of research as ‘postoperative criticism’; Wigley, ‘Post-Operative History’, 53.

Bibliography Beasley, Gerald. ‘Interview with Phylis Lambert’. ICAM Print 3. Edited by Monika Platzer (December 2009): 34–39. Bergdoll, Barry. ‘Curating History’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57 no. 3 (September 1998): 257, 366. Bouman, Ole. ‘Why the New NAi?’. ICAM Print 4. Edited by Monika Platzer (February 2012): 20–29. Brouwers, Ruud. ‘Nadere Uitwerking van Het Doel En de Uitgangspunten van Het Architectuurinstituut Voor de Afdeling Presentatie (Tentoonstellingen, Publikaties, Toegepast Onderzoek, Manifestaties, Educatie, Dienstverlening)’, 14 November 1988. BSTU 1989. Brouwers, Ruud. ‘The NAi: The History of a Design Task’. In The Netherlands Architecture Institute. Translated by Robyn de Jong-Dalziel, 68–85. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1993. Brouwers, Ruud. ‘Interview by Sergio Miguel Figueiredo’, Audio, 5 January 2011. Brouwers, Ruud and Mariet Willinge. ‘Activiteiten Architectuurinstituut: 1989–1992’, 13 October 1988. NDBK 422. Accessed 22 June 2016. Canadian Centre for Architecture. Centre Canadien d’Architecture: Les Débuts, 1979–1984. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1984. Canadian Centre for Architecture. ‘The First Five Years’. In Centre Canadien d’Architecture: Les Débuts, 1979–1984, 109–13. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1984. Canadian Centre for Architecture, CCA: The Canadian Centre for Architecture Today. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1986. Canadian Centre for Architecture. ‘Press Release: A Unique Collection Is Unveiled at the CCA!’, 28 November 1990. Canadian Centre for Architecture, ‘AP143: Peter Eisenman Fonds’. In CCA Finding Aids. Accessed 26 October 2012. Accessed 22 June 2016. http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search?query=AP143&lb_ url=%2Fen%2Flightbox%2Fsearch%2Fsummary%2Fcollection_41%2Fobject%2F380476. Dijk, Hans van and Nederlands Architectuurinstituut. NAi Beleidsplan 1993–1996, 2nd Edition. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1993. Elsner, John. ‘A Collector’s Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane’. In The Cultures of Collecting. Edited by Roger Cardinal, 155–176. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Ghirardo, Diane Y. ‘Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the US, 1970–2000’. Perspecta 33 (January 2002): 38–47.

31

Sergio M. Figueiredo

Hitchcock, Henry Russell and Arthur Drexler, eds. Built in USA: Post-War Architecture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952. Hoekstra, Titia Rixt. ‘Building versus Bildung: Manfredo Tafuri and the Construction of a Historical Discipline’. PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2005. Lambert, Phyllis. ‘The Collections of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’. Architectural Design 59 no. 3–4 (1989): 8–11. Lambert, Phyllis. ‘Archeology of Collecting’. In En Chantier: The Collections of the CCA, 1989–1999, 17–33. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1999. Lambert, Phyllis. ‘The Architectural Museum: A Founder’s Perspective’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58 no. 3 (September 1999): 308–315. Leach, Andrew. ‘Choosing History: Tafuri, Criticality and the Limits of Architecture’. The Journal of Architecture 10 no. 3 (2005): 235–244. Leach, Andrew. ‘Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research’. PhD diss., Universiteit Gent, 2006. Leach, Andrew. Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. Ghent: A&S Books, Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University, 2007. Malkin, Helen. ‘Building and Gardens: Participants, Chronology, and Specifications’. In Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture: Building and Gardens. Edited by Larry Richards, 153– 160. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Matthews, Henry. ‘The Promotion of Modern Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s’. Journal of Design History 7 no. 1 (1994): 43–59. McLeod, Mary. ‘On Criticism [Criticism of Place: A Symposium]’. Places 4 no. 1 (1987): 4–6. NAi. ‘NAi Jaarverslag 1993’ (1994). Accessed 21 June 2016. http://www.nai.nl/over_het_nai/jaarverslagen. NAi. ‘Archives and Collections’, Accessed 27 August 2012). http://en.nai.nl/collection/about_the_collection/ item/_rp_kolom2-1_elementId/1_95698. Platzer, Monika. ‘Interview with Mariet Willinge’. ICAM Print 3 (December 2009): 48–55. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. ‘History and History of Architecture’. ANY: Being Manfredo Tafuri 25–26 (2000): 8. Somol, Robert E. and Sarah Whiting. ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’. In The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Edited by William S. Saunders, 22–33. Harvard Design Magazine Readers 5. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Speaks, Michael. ‘Design Intelligence: Or Thinking After the End of Metaphysics’. Architectural Design 72 no. 5 (October 2002): 4–9. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Architecture as Metalanguage: The Critical Value of the Image’. In Theories and History of Architecture, 103–39. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Operative Criticism’. In Theories and History of Architecture, 141–70. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘The Tasks of Criticism’. In Theories and History of Architecture, 227–37. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and History of Architecture, 1st US edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘Introduction: The Historical Project’. In The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Translated by Robert Connolly and Pellegrino d’Acierno, 1–21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Werkgroep NAi. ‘Schets Beleidsplan Architectuur-Instituut’, September 1986. NDBK 420. Werkgroep WVC-VROM. ‘Ontwerp Voor Een Nederlands Instituut Voor Architectuur En Stedenbouw’, December 1984. NDBK 399. Wigley, Mark. ‘Post-Operative History’. ANY: Becoming Manfredo Tafuri, 25–26 (2000): 47–59. Willinge, Mariet. ‘Interview by Sergio Miguel Figueiredo’, Audio, 11 January 2011. Woerkom, Dick van. ‘Nota Het Nederlands Instituut Voor Architectuur En Stedenbouw (NIAS)’, April 1982. NDBK 35.

32

Chapter 4

Architecture in/out of the boudoir? The autonomy of architecture and the architecture of autonomy Ole W. Fischer

Three levels of architectural criticism Architecture is a deeply self-critical cultural practice: architecture students are introduced to the discipline with weekly reviews by their instructors, concluded by the ritual of the ‘final crit’, where a group of academic jurors picks at students’ work in public. The design process itself is characterised by an iterative feedback loop between developing alternatives and judgmental decision-making, selecting and rationalizing. Architectural acquisition follows similar processes of (anonymous) competitions or charrettes, where design teams compete with each other and are judged by experts (often peers and clients). Once a design has been commissioned, is fully developed and gets finally built, the architectural critics (often again peers and scholars) inspect the work and exercise value judgments directed to specific audiences. This latter public discourse on edifices is what we normally regard as architectural criticism proper, similar to the ones in other cultural areas such as art, opera, music, dance, theatre, literature, cinema, fashion, design or cuisine. While reviews of past and current buildings proliferate through media outlets from online blogs and newsletters to trade magazines, journals, daily press, fashion and lifestyle formats and sometimes TV features, this form of criticism remains on the level of journalism, advertising and public outreach, and in its best examples turns into a piece of literature. At times of dramatic changes in the media landscape, the importance of mediators between architecture and the larger public cannot be

33

Ole W. Fischer

acknowledged enough, though on the other hand, reviews do not exhaust the possibilities and roles of criticism in architecture. In a different vein, an architectural work itself might carry a critical component. If ‘modern’ in the arts can be defined with Greenberg as self-critical in the sense that the artists render their medium opaque, and thereby interrogate the medium-specificity of their practice as well as the institution of art, then this must be applicable for architecture as well. At least Peter Eisenman thought so,1 and with him others such as Bernard Tschumi, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, O. M. Ungers, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, etc. All these architects share the common notion of ‘criticality’ as intellectual questioning of the discipline, of architecture as an institution or as a linguistic system. According to this approach, the ‘critical’ architect would be able to scrutinize conventional understandings of what architecture is, what it represents and how it creates meaning with project design, often accompanied by theoretical texts by the same author. In order to allow for these self-reflections on the discipline via design, one has to render architecture autonomous. But not before architecture is ‘liberated’ from other requirements and conditions; is it able to advance to a medium of its introspection? Yet also the ‘critical practice’ of architecture does not come without contradictions: first, the concept of artistic practice as a valid form of criticism actually stems from Romantic literature, where Schlegel asked criticism to be an artistic work in its own right that would develop its criteria immanently from the work being discussed;2 second, this form of criticism hardly relates to questions of judgment of a specific work, as it does instead to the (pre-)conditions of architecture, which are addressed through conceptual design and theoretical writing; and third, the author-architect assumes an all-powerful role of determining the correct interpretation of their work, taken for granted that they are not only the first interpreter but also the best one. Ironically, ‘criticality’ transferred originally terms, concepts and methods from advanced literary criticism (such as deconstruction), which questioned the metaphysical underpinnings of architecture or problematized its servant role to power, capital and the elite. Yet, from today’s vantage point, it seems to have fostered the dominant figure of the author-architect to indulge in abstract formalisms, rather than designing a critical architecture of social, political and economic change. Beyond architectural reviews and critical practice there is a third level of architectural criticism, which takes architectural design, edifices or the built environment as a starting point for a fundamental problematization of the discipline, that is, an interrogation of the practice of architecture, its tools and ideologies, its boundaries and neighbouring territories, its doxa and discourses, its networks and actors, its centres and peripheries. This form of critical architectural theory explicates the mentality of modernity: self-reflexivity and genealogy. It has a rather recent history connected with the crisis of modern architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, which opened up architectural discourse to various critical cultural theories – from philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, ecology, feminism, etc. – in addition to the more modernist references to technological sciences and the arts. Manfredo Tafuri holds a key position in the formation of this architectural critique, since he interrogates theoretical production and the possibility to write history from a specific architectural perspective. In post-war Italy Tafuri was faced with historians who regarded history as part of an architectural project – that of modernism – and with architects who conducted historical research from the grounds of an architectural practice. Tafuri calls for reclaiming the autonomy

34

Architecture in/out of the boudoir?

of history from instrumental thinking. With references to neo-Marxist Frankfurt School philosophy, he distinguishes between the involved ‘operative criticism’ of historians engaged in the modern project such as Sigfried Giedion or Giulio Carlo Argan, or theorizing architects such as Bruno Zevi or Paolo Portoghesi, and the specific task of theory distanced from architectural production, which he calls ‘the critique of ideology’. Tafuri provided an example with Progetto e Utopia:3 instead of writing architectural history as a narration of individual architects, of canonical masterpieces or of building types, he maps the development of the discipline at large, and re-contextualizes architecture within the economic, political and philosophical unfolding of capitalist society. In parallel to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment4 he strips bare the deep rooting of modern architecture in the ideology of rationalism, progress and capitalist development, which compromised its utopian hopes for a new society, and led to a crisis of depoliticized formalism and institutional as well as social marginalization.

Autonomy vs autonomia The notion of autonomy seems to be key for both critical practice and critical architectural theory evolving in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While they employ the same term, they relate it to different concepts. The critical architects, such as Eisenman, Rossi, et al., think of it as a special status of architecture, as a discipline disconnected from the contingencies of society and its production. Thereby they differentiate themselves from their modernist predecessors, who viewed architecture as technological progress, rational problem solving or social engineering. Through the detour of Greenberg and Adorno, architectural autonomy refers to medium-specificity, to the realm that belongs to the architect only, which is formal design unhindered by considerations of function, material, technology, context, etc., and a far cry from Kant’s notion of pure beauty as disinterested pleasure in the free play of perception with the formal qualities of the object. The material of architectural creation is architecture itself, its typological history, its formal elements, its syntactic structure, purified or abstracted from the actual historical circumstances of a particular object. Although Tafuri is well aware of this side of the argument, and sympathizes with structural readings of architecture and the city, he underlines the other side of Adorno’s dialectic, where the abstract, dissonant work is able to express unresolved social conflicts, repression and alienation, while always remaining a social product despite this partial autonomy.5 To unearth this dialectic, Tafuri claims the autonomy of architectural history from both formalist interpretations of traditional art history and from instrumentalized design practice. He argued for a detached form of architectural writing critical of its sources, which would return architectural history to a general history of society; this meant for Tafuri the materialist history of class struggles.6 In addition, Tafuri’s use of the term autonomy connotes the autonomia slogan of the operaismo movement, a grass-roots self-organization of Italian workers of various radical anarchist left-wing groups during the 1960s and early 1970s that was opposed to institutionalized politics of unions or parties including the Italian Communist

35

Ole W. Fischer

Party (PCI).7 Their distrust of orthodox Marxism met with Tafuri’s ‘return to Marx’ (Althusser) in the form of critique, negation and actualization. Operaismo as featured by intellectuals such as Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti focused on neo-capitalist post-war Italy, on the factory system (of, for instance, FIAT), and on the worker as subject of historic action, while their critique of ideology targeted the established political and intellectual left.8 Tafuri in turn took up a similar stance to critique modern architecture as an ideological project in close alignment with capitalist development, despite its own reformist aims.9 Panzieri’s notion of ‘starting over’ was translated by Tafuri as an enormous work of destruction: of bourgeois culture, of the avant-gardes and of scientific Marxism.10 Early on, Tafuri found a model in Walter Benjamin, who had criticised Marxism from within, and attacked both (collaborative) leftist politics and intellectuals of social-democratic as well as communist tint.11 Especially influential seemed Benjamin’s theological, messianic writings, read in the mirror of his contemporary political opponent, Martin Heidegger – or better, through Heidegger’s reception of Nietzsche,12 and his critique of modern technology and the modern project.

The role of criticism: Tafuri’s assessment of the neo avant-garde These questions of criticism and autonomy were also at the core of Tafuri’s opening salvo in US academia. Based on a lecture given at Princeton in April 1974, the English translation of ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’ appeared in the journal Oppositions of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) headed by Peter Eisenman in New York. This was followed by the English translation of Progetto e Utopia in 1976.13 Despite obvious differences, Tafuri’s project has been appropriated and instrumentalized by US academic discourse, especially by protagonists of critical architectural practice, but also by misconceived followers amongst historians. This has had wide ranging effects on the theory, practice and education of architecture up until now, even if Tafuri’s first mark in this context with ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’ was nothing short of a direct confrontation with the so-called neo avant-garde contemporary architects at the brink of post-modernism. As the subtitle demonstrates with perfect clarity – ‘The language of criticism and the criticism of language’ – the article deals with the linguistic metaphor in architecture, where criticism is reduced to an unfolding, re-narrating and mere comment on the linguistically informed design of author-architects. Aware of the danger of tautology, Tafuri uses several examples of advanced contemporary design to discuss the role of criticism towards architects who think of themselves as ‘critical’ with regard to modernism, language, discipline, media, etc. To overcome that vicious circle of self-referentiality, Tafuri calls for cruelty against the object of architectural criticism to ‘free what is beyond language’.14 And this ‘beyond’ is nothing other than the political role of the intellectual in general, and the role of architecture in society in particular, since Tafuri regards it as part of both base structure of production and ideological superstructure of culture, which characterizes it under capitalism as inevitably bourgeois.15 Tafuri develops his argument with four alternative takes on the relationship between architectural criticism and language.

36

Architecture in/out of the boudoir?

In his first approach he analyses James Stirling and his use of architectural language as technical neutrality or technological aesthetic. Since this text was written before Stirling’s turn towards more eclectic historicism, the examples discussed by Tafuri show the indebtedness of the work of the British architect to historical avant-gardes, such as Russian constructivism, Dutch De Stijl and Le Corbusier, and to modern utopias, such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City or the ship-phalanstère metaphor of early socialist literature. Yet, Tafuri is quick to point out that, unlike post-war bureaucratized functionalism, Stirling treats ‘function’ purely as a sign, disconnected from its referent of human use or social engagement. This results in autonomous form, so here for Tafuri ‘architecture does indeed speak its own language, one that is perversely closed into itself’.16 Yet, this self-reflexive discourse excludes human presence and contingency, and reduces commentary to ‘repetition in the desperate search for the genesis of the signs’.17 The role of architectural criticism, understood as distinguishing, separating and disintegrating the function of the linguistic elements employed by the architect, must not only abandon the question of meaning, since the signs have been emptied and redeployed, but also break through the circle of (architectural) language to overcome the closure of a linguistically informed practice. In his second take, Tafuri explores the dissolution of language and the retreat into silence: ‘the absolute presence of form makes “scandalous” the existence of the casual, even in that casual behavior par excellence, human presence’.18 If this is the case for Louis Kahn, it is even more so for Aldo Rossi and his typological restraint in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which Tafuri reads as a detachment from reality and a search for absolute autonomy of form, directed against both the semiotic realism of Robert Venturi and the servile officiousness of late-modern functionalism. Rossi’s designs exclude external justification, from both meaning and use, and present the internal process of linguistic differentiation resulting in a mute alphabet of architectural types. Tafuri takes up Rossi’s interest in the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and compares the abstract typology of the first with the discovery of the arbitrary laws of language of the latter, yet not in Rossi’s favour: his architectural language exhibits ‘a syntax of empty signs, programmed exclusions, rigorous limitations’,19 and therefore exemplifies a closed system of communication. This impasse represents an endpoint of alienation between daily experience (as source of communication) and absolute form, since the price for autonomy is the separation from life, as Tafuri recalls with Georg Simmel.20 Tafuri recedes far beyond Simmel’s birth of the modern capitalist metropolis, blasé attitude, commodity fetishism and abstract art, in search of the sources of this phenomenon, which he locates in late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the fragmentation of the ‘order of the discourse’ (Foucault)21 and the dissolution of Vitruvian architecture, where both the method of classification and the depletion of language originate.22 For Tafuri this historic loss is irreversible, and therefore Rossi’s nostalgic (or melancholic?) longing, a kind of obsessive memory work, in spite of Rossi’s aim, does not reconstruct the discipline, but rather dissolves it. Another genealogy traces Rossi’s silence back to Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus, as a way to withdraw from ‘facts’: in the case of Kraus, war and propaganda,23 in the case of Loos, the separation of culture from art to secure its holy precinct from contamination with daily life. For Loos, architecture belongs to the realm of culture/life, with the only exception of the monument and the tomb, which are building-art (Baukunst): they speak of collective functions beyond life.24 Tafuri alludes to Loos in his analysis of Rossi’s

37

Ole W. Fischer

most famous project, the Modena cemetery extension, where the mourning about the loss of the European city and the dissolved order of the discipline meet with the fragmentary, ahistorical design of emblematic emptied forms for the necropolis of a post-religious society. Architecture, we might conclude, is similar to Latin: a dead language, to be studied, but disconnected from life. The third position discussed by Tafuri emerges out of this paradox: architects experimenting with semiotics lost their belief in the innovative powers of communication (Venturi, Stirling) while the ones exploring architectural syntactics experienced the arbitrariness of the reference code (Kahn, Rossi).25 Irony, if not nihilism, seems all that is left after this breakdown, a position that was embraced by the post-modernists of the late 1970s and 1980s. But let us return to Tafuri and the early 1970s: in the projects of the ‘New York Five’ (Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier)26 he discovers research into the discipline, into what constitutes architecture,27 into architectural linguistics as a set of limitations, exclusions and syntactic operations, but always within the predetermined confinement of highly selected forms of 1920s heroic modernism. Despite the resemblance to their historical referent, the neo avant-garde acts a-historically: isolated, analytically studied and reduced to linguistic structures redeployed as East Coast weekend houses, the forms of the historical avant-gardes are separated from their modernist social and technological reasoning. As syntactic compositions conceptualized in the analytic laboratory of the autonomous researcher, these formal manipulations reach their peak condition of ‘pure design’ in paper architecture.28 The linguistically informed architecture of the neo avant-garde confronts the critic with a double bind: first it limits any specific reading to re-narrate what has already been said by the author-architect and, second, to repeat the self-destruction of the historical avant-gardes. The critic therefore has to break the ‘vicious circle of language’.29 Tafuri calls this retreat into the interiority of the discipline, where the architect manipulates the unique character of the object withdrawn from the economic, social and functional context, an ‘architecture dans le boudoir’, an ‘architecture of cruelty’ that shares affinity with the structural rigour of the Marquis de Sade and his La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, to which the title of the essay refers.30 De Sade had been discussed by Horkheimer and Adorno as the dark side of Enlightenment rationalism and bourgeois culture, which undermines conventions and morals as it exposes a completely liberated thinking, unable to find reasons against pain, cruelty and murder as long as they increase the freedom and pleasure of others. Also Foucault refers repeatedly to de Sade, though through a different lens: less concerned about the objectification of other human beings, he points out how de Sade’s writings challenged the discourse of its time, transgressing the borders of what can be said about sexuality, breaking the exclusion of mad versus normal and mixing literary genres such as political pamphlet, pornographic novel and theatre. Tafuri emphasizes the ‘structural rigor’ and ‘geometric structure’ of de Sade’s ‘educational novel’: one narrative divided into seven dialogues, all taking place within a single time frame and principal location: the boudoir of Mme de Saint-Ange. This architectural type, a small, furnished and ornate feminine aristocratic space dedicated to bathing and dressing, located en suite with bedroom and salon or dining room, and used by the lady of the house to withdraw or to receive private guests for intimate conversation (or more), is the setting for both exclusion and excess, chosen by de Sade to regain the ‘order of discourse’ of subjective liberties in post-revolutionary France, detached from outside realities. Tafuri parallels it with

38

Architecture in/out of the boudoir?

the autonomous architecture of the neo avant-garde formalists, seen as a retreat that allows for subjective liberties, both completely independent from and absolutely ineffective in society. The neo avant-garde is seen as unable to overcome the failure of the historic avantgardes, which is the disappearance of the artwork in the assembly line. Its subjective liberties of formalism make silence speak, or claim to re-establish the discipline (‘order of the discourse’) while in fact remaining locked in hermetic language games. ‘The questions criticism must now ask are: What makes such studies and research possible? What are the contexts and structures within which they operate? What is their role within the present day production system?’31 Tafuri, at the threshold of the IT revolution, subsumes another strand of media architects under the same category: in their search for a language fitting the new technology of information and data, both Venturi and Hans Hollein understand ‘space only as network of superstructures’,32 that is, not as communication, but as flux of information in which architecture dissolves. Their projects treat architecture not as a language, but as a mass medium, and in order to be effective, they sport a disenchanted, cynical acceptance of reality. Although their pop approach seems opposed to the elitist rigorists (Eisenman), it achieves a similar result: the neo avant-gardist aims to extract the architectural object from the flux of existence (formalist autonomy), while the media-architect immerses into the sea of floating signifiers, where the non-utilization of language leads to a self-closure on advertising, pop and everyday clichés (affirmative realism).33 With his fourth and final position, Tafuri analyses a practice that is less involved in a reformulation of the architectural language (neo avant-garde) or in the convergence of art and life (avant-garde), but with the organization of living conditions on larger scale than the individual object. Significantly, Tafuri has to reach back into the history of the modern movement, of the garden city, of planners and administrators of public housing to find examples: ‘the current to which we are referring interprets architecture as an altogether negligible phenomenon’.34 If one understands housing and the built environment as a social product, then architectural intervention has to be political, economic, technical and typological, to deliver ‘a radical modification of social division of labor’35 on the scale of the urban plan. Following the slogan ‘from form to reform’,36 Tafuri demands a shift in focus of architectural criticism, from language (form, single object) to production and performance, from representation of alternative lifestyles to their organization in reality. Tafuri frames the architect as producer, drawing from Benjamin’s argument about the function of art, where the critic should be less concerned about ‘the position of the work of art with respect to the relations of production’ (meaning, representation), but rather about ‘the function of the work relative to the relation of production of an era’,37 that is, its performance within capitalist development and class struggle. Benjamin questions the leftist art and literature of the interwar period (socialist realism and new objectivity), which seemed to him caught in the bourgeois intellectualism of the educated, and delivering artistic commodities (critical works to be consumed by the hegemonic class) instead of scrutinizing the production of art itself, transforming its institutions, producing works addressed to the urban masses and enabling the reader/observer to actively participate and become a producer. Benjamin argues for an intrinsic relationship between the political function of an artwork (its position in the production cycle) and its aesthetic judgment (what he calls its technical aspect), that is, he claims that the ‘correct’ political tendency of a work would guarantee its artistic formal quality. Translated into the field of architecture, this change in perspective evaluates both masterpieces of the modern

39

Ole W. Fischer

movement as well as linguistic-formalist exercises of the neo avant-garde as ‘marginal’. Criticism needs to focus on the often overlooked architecture integrated into capitalist production, which addresses problems of production, distribution and consumption within the existing structure of society. A new form of criticism, according to Tafuri, would rather discuss the role of protagonists such as Friedrich Naumann (German Werkbund), Walter Rathenau (AEG, planned economy during WWI) and Henry Ford as instigators of new forms of architectural organization within industrial production, as well as the architect-planners and administrators of German Siedlungen, Red Vienna superblocks or Central Park New York, who all contributed intellectual work in order to overcome capitalist contradictions in the building sector by means of the plan (redistribution of resources such as housing or parks).38 Tafuri concludes that the claim for both autonomy of the artwork (architecture about architecture) and autonomy of the intellectual (technician, producer, planner), despite the utopian character of their reformist projects to ‘solve’ social problems, are ideological fallacies. These claims for autonomy do not recognize the inherent crisis of capitalist development, which can only be addressed politically.39 But that is not enough, since Tafuri extends Benjamin’s perspective on the intellectual work of the critic, who has to ask herself: ‘in which way does criticism enter into the production process?’40 How can criticism reflect and change its own subject, institutions, outlets and audiences? Tafuri provides a clear answer: through a criticism of ideology, an ‘analysis of concrete techniques which will favor capitalist development’ – in order to use this critique in class struggle.

Architecture in/out of the boudoir? Remarks about the current situation Despite Tafuri’s open exhortation for neo avant-garde author-architects to leave their selfconfined ivory tower boudoirs and to confront the social role of architecture, US academia instrumentalized Tafuri to legitimize their practice of ‘critical architecture’ and architectural theory aloof from social reality. Autonomy stayed en vogue during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, especially amongst the so-called deconstructivist architects, who proliferated advanced post-structuralist reading strategies as literal methods for architectural design.41 Also, the operative use of history as stock for design – literal, semiotic or syntactic – continued and thrives up to this day. The reception of Tafuri in academia is overwhelming, and at the same time ineffective: he gets labelled as ‘Marxist’ (despite his differentiated position unfolded here) and reduced to the theory/practice divide, supposedly claiming autonomy for history. The validity of Tafuri’s assessment of advanced architectural trends in the 1970s might easily be extended to this very day: what else should one call the designs of Herzog & de Meuron, of SANAA, or of Foster, Rogers and Piano, if not neo modern and (neo)high-tech, that is, using signs, fragments and stylistic references to the modernist avant-gardes, to functionalism, machine age and technological civilization? Or, we could use Tafuri’s second category for the silent architecture of the minimalism of Riegler Riewe, Klaus en Kaan, Max Dudler, Aires Mateus, John Pawson, David Chipperfield or the restraint of OFFICE Kersten

40

Architecture in/out of the boudoir?

Geers David Van Severen? Even though some architects of the neo avant-garde are still active – such as Eisenman, Meier and Tschumi – they have found a large echo amongst the next generations, such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Preston Scott Cohen, Pier Vittorio Aureli (Dogma), Hernan Diaz Alonso, etc. Not only syntactic formalism but also semiotic postmodernism and irony have returned into the current discourse, after a premature exhaustion in the early 1990s. The work of the recently dissolved FAT, of MVRDV, NL Architects, BIG and even OMA/AMO speaks of a renewed interest in pop, super signs, logos and advertising. Probably the biggest change occurred in the area labelled by Tafuri as information and data architecture: a more contemporary term would be Parametricism, comprising the practice of Greg Lynn, Karl Chu, NOX, UNstudio, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or former FOA. The difficult part remains, as it had for Tafuri, to name the architects of the fourth category, who deliver change and operate beyond the language game and the individual object. Although marginal, there is a large body of work in cooperative housing (especially in Vienna, Zurich and Berlin), in participatory design (Diébédo Francis Kéré, Assemble, Baupiloten, but also Álvaro Siza or Elemental), in design for the unprivileged (Rural Studio, Michael Maltzan, Urban Think Tank), in critical political work (such as Forensic Architecture, but also Teddy Cruz) and in design criticism (such as the Spatial Agency, Planning for Protest), to name but a few.42 Despite attracting attention and recognition since the financial crisis of 2008–09, Tafuri’s call for a different architectural practice and different architectural criticism informed by its position within the capitalist system of production remains at the fringes. Yet, it would also be time now to rethink Tafuri with his own methods, that is, to recognize his radical critique but reveal its shortcomings: his conflation of architectural quality with political and social performance inherited from Benjamin’s The Author as Producer essay seems highly problematic, similarly to the contemporary trend to reduce architecture to environmental performance. The question of architectural quality has to be judged both on the level of base structure (how architecture addresses problems of production, distribution and consumption within existing society) and on the level of superstructure (culture, ideology). Therefore, a more dialectical approach to criticism is needed: besides cultivating a language and discourse about works, the twofold criteria for evaluation should be the wished-for evolution of society (a utopian perspective, and how the work positions itself in real existing capitalism) in a dialectic confrontation with a wished-for development of the discipline (how the work relates to institutions, discourses, genre, technique, audiences, etc.).43 The direction is clear: after Tafuri.

Notes 1 2

3

Peter Eisenman, ‘Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign’, Oppositions 15–16 (Winter/Spring 1979): 118–128. Friedrich Schlegel, Lessings Geist aus seinen Schriften: oder dessen Gedanken und Meinungen / zusammengestellt und erläutert von Friedrich Schlegel, parts 1 and 2 (Leipzig: Junius, 1804). Quoting from the second edition (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1810), Peter Bürger interprets Schlegel’s differentiation between canonical critique and productive (or poetic) criticism as birth of modern art criticism; see Peter Bürger, ‘Begriff und Grenzen der Kritik’, MERKUR (2009): 1024. Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia (Bari: Laterza, 1973) translated into English as Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).

41

Ole W. Fischer

4

5 6

7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26

27

42

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (New York: Social Studies Association, 1944; Amsterdam: Querido, 1947); new edition (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1969). Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 16. Luisa Passerini, Manfredo Tafuri and Denise L. Bratton, ‘History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri’, ANY: Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment 25–26 (2000): 42–44. ‘The history of architecture, until 1967, 1968, was made up of architects who combined history with participation in operations that involved either restoration or the design of architecture; this was the history of a discipline seen as plaster, bricks, reinforced concrete, without men, without society and without real history. This was the polemic of my Teorie e storia, which took an oppositional stance. […] I realized that the profession of the architectural historian could be completely autonomous in relation to architecture because its objective was to start from the discipline and embrace history itself. I wanted to elevate the history of architecture to the same level as all the other histories.’ Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds, Autonomia, Post-Political Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1980; 2nd edn, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) in the series: Semiotext(e) intervention series; 1. Passerini, Tafuri and Bratton, ‘History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri’, 32. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Per una critica dell’ideologica architettonica’, Contropiano 1 (January 1969): 31–79; expanded in Progetto e utopia (1973). Passerini, Tafuri and Bratton, ‘History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri’, 37. Tafuri refers to his book Teorie e Storia dell’Architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968) translated into English as Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (London and New York: Granada, 1980). See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 85–10; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [1940], in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 253–264. Georges Teyssot and Paul Henninger, ‘One Portrait of Tafuri,’ ANY: Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment 25–26 (2000): 12. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir. The language of criticism and the criticism of language’, Oppositions 3 (May 1974): 38–62. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 38. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 38. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 41. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 41. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 42. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 42. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 45. Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, trans. Ian McLeod (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 48–78 (inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, given on 2 December 1970: L’Ordre du Discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Foucault analyses the principles of discourses in societies, especially with regard to their controlling function. He distinguishes three sets of principles: 1) principles or rules of exclusion (including prohibition, the division between reason and unreason or madness and the opposition between truth and falsity); 2) internal rules of control, or principles for classification, ordering and distribution (including commentary, the author and disciplines); 3) rules for the conditions of employment or application of discourse (including ritual, fellowships of discourse, doctrine and social appropriations of discourse, for example education). Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 45. Tafuri cites an entire paragraph from Karl Kraus, ‘In dieser großen Zeit’, Die Fackel XVI no. 404 (December 1914): 1–20, a lecture delivered on 19 November 1914, in which Kraus tries to come to terms with the outbreak of WWI: ‘When newspapers have entirely turned into propaganda, and journalism produces hollow phrases, then the silence of the critic (with extensive reasoning for this silence) is the only possible act left.’ Adolf Loos, ‘Architektur’, Der Sturm (15 December 1910), reprinted in Trotzdem. Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1931; reprint: Wien: Prachner, 1997): 90–104; English edn: ‘Architecture‘, in Adolf Loos. On Architecture (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2002), 73–85. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, 48. Tafuri adds that Kahn supported the mystic aura of pure form by a ‘simple faith’ in institutions, a position that cannot be sustained any longer in the 1970s. Peter Eisenman, Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier, preface by Arthur Drexler, introduction by Colin Rowe, criticism by Kenneth Frampton, postscript by Philip Johnson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Wittenborn, 1972). Peter Eisenman, ‘Aspects of Modernism’, 118–128.

Architecture in/out of the boudoir?

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38 39

40 41

42

43

Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 281. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 53. ‘To dissect and rebuild the geometric metaphors of the “compositional rigorists” may prove to be an endless game which may eventually become useless when, as in Eisenman’s work, the process of assemblage is altogether explicit and presented in a highly didactical manner. In the face of such products, the task of criticism is to begin from within the work only to escape from it as soon as possible so as not to get caught in the vicious circle of language that speaks only of itself.’ Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 53. See Donatien Alphonse François [Marquis] de Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir ou Les instituteurs immoraux (London: 1795). Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 53. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 54. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 55; ‘The return to language is a proof of failure.’ Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 56. Tafuri’s protagonists are: for the garden city movement and Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), Raymond Unwin, Barry Parker, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright; for public housing, Charles Harries Whitaker; and for modernist urban planners and civic administrators, Fritz Schumacher, Ernst May and Hannes Meyer, all historic figures by the early 1970s. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 56. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 57. Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ [1934], in Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds, Gesammelte Schriften Zweiter Band Zweiter Teil (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 683–701; quoted in Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 57, where he comments that ‘at least one new tendency is discernible among all these various attempts – a role for the “new technician” immersed within those organizations which determine the capitalistic management of building and regional planning, not as a specialist in language, but rather as a producer’. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 58. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 58: ‘[T]here does indeed exist a history of attempts towards a comprehensive organization of intellectual work within the relations of production. The task of criticism is then to recognize those attempts, to favor them in the field of historical analysis and to cruelly reveal their deficiencies and ambiguities, thereby making it readily known that those unanswered problems are the only ones worthy of “political” action.’ Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, Oppositions 3: 58. See Andrew Anker, Mark Kessler and W. Scott Clark, eds. ‘Autonomous Architecture’, The Harvard Architecture Review 3 (Winter 1984), an entire issue dedicated to autonomy; Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, eds, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988); Michael Speaks, ed., The Critical Landscape (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1996); Robert E. Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-garde in America (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997) and the countless publications on and by Peter Eisenman. For a counter position, see Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). See Andres Lepik, ed., Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010); Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, eds, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011); Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa, ed., Planning for Protest (New York: Project Projects, 2013); Pedro Gadanho, ed., Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014). See K. Michael Hays, ‘Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form’, Perspecta, 21 (1984): 15–29; Peter Bürger, ‘Begriff und Grenzen der Kritik’. MERKUR (2009): 1023–1034. See also my earlier takes on the role of criticism: Ole W. Fischer, ‘Kritik der Architekturkritik: Architektur zwischen Gesellschaft und Form’. Archplus 200: Kritik (October 2010): 120–125; Ole W. Fischer, ‘Architektur, Theorie, Kritik?’. Werk, Bauen, Wohnen 101 no. 4 (April 2015): 47–48.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. New York: Social Studies Association, 1944; Amsterdam: Querido, 1947. English edition: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Anker, Andrew, Mark Kessler and W. Scott Clark, eds. ‘Autonomous Architecture’. The Harvard Architecture Review 3 (Winter 1984). Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, eds. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011.

43

Ole W. Fischer

Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [1940]. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–264. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Author as Producer’ [1934]. In Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock, 85–100. London, New York: Verso, 1998. Originally published in German: ‘Der Autor als Produzent’. In Gesammelte Schriften Zweiter Band. Zweiter Teil, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 683–701. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Bürger, Peter. ‘Begriff und Grenzen der Kritik’. MERKUR (2009): 1023–1034. Eisenman, Peter. Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier. Preface by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Colin Rowe. Critique by Kenneth Frampton. Postscript by Philip Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Eisenman, Peter. ‘Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign’. Oppositions 15–16 (Winter/Spring 1979): 118–128. Fischer, Ole W. ‘Kritik der Architekturkritik: Architektur zwischen Gesellschaft und Form’. Archplus 200: Kritik (October 2010): 120–125. Fischer, Ole W. ‘Architektur, Theorie, Kritik?’. Werk, Bauen, Wohnen 101 no. 4 (April 2015): 47–48. Foucault, Michel. ‘The Order of Discourse’. In Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. Translated by Ian McLeod. Edited by Robert. Young, 48–78. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Gadanho, Pedro, ed. Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Hays, K. Michael. ‘Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form’. Perspecta 21 (1984): 15–29. Johnson, Philip and Mark Wigley, eds. Deconstructivist Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988. Lepik, Andres, ed. Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Loos, Adolf. ‘Architektur’. In Der Sturm (15 December 1910). Reprinted in Trotzdem. Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930, 90–104. Innsbruck: Brenner, 1931; reprint Wien: Prachner, 1997; English edn: ‘Architecture’. In Adolf Loos. On Architecture, 73–85. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2002. Lotringer, Sylvère and Christian Marazzi, eds. Autonomia, Post-Political Politics. New York: Columbia University, 1980. Passerini, Luisa, Manfredo Tafuri and Denise L. Bratton. ‘History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri’. ANY: Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment 25–26 (2000): 10–70. Schlegel, Friedrich. Lessings Geist aus seinen Schriften: oder dessen Gedanken und Meinungen / zusammengestellt und erläutert von Friedrich Schlegel, parts 1 and 2. Leipzig: Junius, 1804. Somol, Robert E., ed. Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-garde in America. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Speaks, Michael, ed. The Critical Landscape. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1996. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir. The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’. Oppositions 3 (May 1974): 38–62. Tafuri, Manfredo. Progetto e Utopia. Bari: Laterza, 1973. English edn: Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Tafuri, Manfredo. Teorie e Storia dell’Architettura. Bari: Laterza, 1968. English edn: Theories and History of Architecture. Translated by Giorgio Verrecchia. London and New York: Granada, 1980. Tafuri, Manfredo. ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir. The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’. In The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, 267–90. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Teyssot, Georges and Paul Henninger. ‘One Portrait of Tafuri’. ANY Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment 25–26 (2000): 10–16. Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa, ed. Planning for Protest. New York: Project Projects, 2013.

44

Chapter 5

Repositioning. Before theory Kyle Miller

In the final section of his well-known essay ‘Practice vs. Project’, Stan Allen writes about errant trajectories in contemporary architecture. He draws a parallel to De Certeau’s walker in the city to describe the ways in which there will always be free movement and tactical improvisations against the structure imposed by the city.1 His point is that control exercised by any regime can never be total. Resistance will always find other ways around or through constraints imposed from the outside. There will always exist fissures and cracks in existing frameworks that enable tactical reworkings – in the context of this paper, new trajectories for contemporary architecture that do not abide by dominant paradigms from the discipline of architecture and broader cultural contexts. With the concept of the errant trajectory in mind, and with a desire to define an alternative construction of architectural theory, this paper calls attention to four legible, perhaps errant, trajectories in experimental architecture being developed in the United States. With the ambition to foreground the theoretical implications of this work, I begin by revisiting a passage from an essay written by Michael Speaks in June 2005. More perhaps than anything else, the certainty of theory vanguardism has retarded the development of a culture of innovation in schools of architecture, which requires a more fluid, interactive relationship between thinking and doing, as well as an expanded definition of what counts for architectural knowledge.2

45

Jimenez Lai, Skyline of Misfits, 2013; Andrew Holder and Benjamin Freynger, Houses, 2015; Stewart Hicks and Alison Newmeyer, Treatise Model, 2014; Andrew Kovacs, Medusa, 2015; Andrew Kovacs, Architectural Cliff, 2013; Adam Fure, Rocks, 2015.

Erin Besler, The Entire Situation, 2015; First Office, Paranormal Panorama, 2014; David Eskanazi, Training Wheels, 2015; Bryony Roberts, Inverting Neutra, 2013; Alex Maymind, 100 Drawings, 2013.

Kyle Miller

In this provocatively titled piece, ‘After Theory’, published in Architectural Record, Speaks provides a commentary on the role of architectural theory in both the academy and practice. He concludes that theory is not just irrelevant, but continues to be an impediment to design innovation. Ten years later, the role of theory and the legibility of a discipline of architecture continue to be called into question. These enquiries often result in binary oppositions – either, or over both, and. Rather than making distinctions and fuelling debates between ideology and intelligence and between theory and design, an emerging group of academic architects in the United States, myself included, are avoiding the construction of oppositional agendas and devising new ways of producing architectural knowledge through the parallel development of conceptual projects and educational events that seemingly respond to Speaks’ call for a more fluid relationship between thinking and doing. These projects and events have primarily been born on the fringe of architectural experimentation and have slowly started to solidify as legible departures from the preceding 20-year period that privileged technique and process over theoretical explication and aesthetic assessment, and sought technical virtuosity and formal novelty over the extension and evolution of disciplinary knowledge. In the wake of this so-called ‘digital project’, new trajectories for architectural design experimentation have emerged, each partnered with a burgeoning theoretical discourse surrounding contemporary architecture. Here I make a case for the legibility of these new paradigms, chart their emergence, define their existence and differentiate their design agendas and theoretical enquiries. Before doing so, I present a brief overview of the attitudes and ambitions shared by the collection of designers whose work constitutes the formation of these ‘post-digital’ projects. The first priority of these theoretically charged projects, and a shared motivation among this group of architects, is to foreground the production of architectural knowledge through the synthesis of, to quote Speaks, ‘thinking and doing’. The trends emerging in the United States are not purely theoretical, philosophical, ecological, historical or technological – they are design trends and rely on and encourage promiscuous encounters between multiple references, sources of inspiration, mediums for production and motivations. In his 2005 essay, Speaks applauds the modes of operations adopted by young practices such as SHoP and William Massie. These offices use speculation to produce innovations that enable architectural design to more directly and aggressively acknowledge and engage the marketplace. Where the work of those young offices aspired to make advances in constructability, cost-effectiveness and performance, the conceptual work and educational events developed by the emerging group of designers today demonstrate an ability to synthesize thinking and doing without an abandonment of architectural theory. This group shares an ambition to problematize and develop convictions about the most salient issues in contemporary discourse – formal composition, spatial relationships, aesthetic qualities and the continuity and evolution of architectural discourse across generations. The design work is speculative in nature – often ‘critical’ and almost always ‘projective’. The educational events conceived of by these architects take the form of short-term intensive design exercises and often precede theory. Over

48

Before theory

time, the accumulation of convictions developed in the work and through the workshop has yielded design principles and new architectural knowledge that begin to formalize four diverse, emerging trajectories of contemporary architecture: Almost Figures, Formless, Post-Post-Critical and Preservation. What follows is an attempt at establishing the categories of these new architectural projects.

Almost figures In defining the concept of the almost figure, it is useful to make a distinction between shape and figure. For the purpose of this classification, shape is defined as the silhouette of a solid primitive.3 Circles, squares, rectangles and triangles are shapes. Figure is defined as an articulated shape with associations to something other than itself. The outlines of objects such as ducks, baskets, crowns and hearts produce figures. Shapes have names and figures have associations. In his essay ‘Twelve Reasons to Get Back into Shape’, R. E. Somol makes a case for a return to shape as a primary visual and formal device for architecture because shape dodges the rhetorical excess of expressive mass and exhibits the immediacy of the graphic. Somol writes that shape ‘performs precisely because of its “defective” condition: crude, explicit, fast, material’.4 Many of the projects associated with this paradigm of the almost figure subscribe to Somol’s notion of shape’s lack of obligation to the discipline of architecture or any signature oeuvre, but also transcend the idea that shape is ‘crude, explicit, fast and material’ through the production of figures, which are refined, implied, slow and perceptual. In doing so, these projects demonstrate commitment to architectural form that is nuanced and fine-spun over obvious and careless. Three recent projects demonstrate the emergence of the almost figure. The first, Skyline of Misfits, completed by Jimenez Lai5 in 2013 is a collection of articulated cubic masses. Each cubic mass has been fitted with elevational profiles that are the result of partial shapes subtracted from a rectangular boundary. Each face of the mass is then altered by the removal of material, producing a composite figural form with no singular elevational profile gaining hierarchical significance. In total, eight figural forms comprise the Skyline of Misfits [page 46]. Tapering, armatures, posture and three-tiered vertical stacking characterize not only the Skyline of Misfits, but also the primary protagonist in a recent project completed by co-founders of The Los Angeles Design Group, Andrew Holder6 and Benjamin Freyinger, titled Houses [page 46]. The central figure of Houses exhibits anthropomorphic features – stubby arms and legs, a long neck, and a dominant brow – and stands confidently atop a plinth. From between the lower limbs slips a staircase, guiding visitors upward to a series of spaces stacked within the figural form. Regarding elevational and formal legibility, Houses nestles comfortably in between ambiguity and exactness. The third project, a model prepared by Design With Company – Stewart Hicks and Alison Newmeyer – for a 2015 Graham Foundation exhibition curated by Jimenez Lai titled Treatise [page 46], demonstrates an interest in the conflation of character and

49

Kyle Miller

figure. Exaggerating the features of the Midwestern dwelling unit, Hicks and Newmeyer present a mannerist portrayal of the most beloved features of the single-family dwelling. An assemblage of aggrandized pitched roofs, archways, shingles and portal windows play on the charming nature of these architectural elements and comprise a composite figural form with variable depth in all four facades. These projects fall between collections of articulated shapes and sets of ambiguous, or almost figures. Neither shape nor figure, they enter and contribute to the discourse on composition and constitution of architectural form.7 The open-endedness of these almost figures, enabled by multiple signifiers and compounded by their proliferation in three-dimensions, defines the loose-fit-ness of the forms. This loose-fit relationship between the figures and their significations is not floating or empty; rather encourages the recognition of multiple figures by the individual viewer. The looseness between object and reference, whether figural or architectural, is a device that delays reception and places the almost figure on the verge of the poetic.8 Through their idiosyncratic development of form and layering of associations, the almost figure is created ‘artistically’, prolongs reception and elicits cognitive engagement. This is achieved by developing new forms that operate in between shape and figure and by diversifying the ways that both architects and the general public can connect to the form. In doing so, this trajectory provides contemporary architecture with strategies to simultaneously evolve the ongoing discourse on architectural form and expand architecture’s audience through visual association.

Formless The formless trajectory can be defined by projects that resist the certainties and confidence of previously dominant paradigms surrounding architectural form. Design work associated with this trajectory intentionally avoids formal order, lacks bravado and disrupts visual and spatial coherence.9 Formlessness is most legible in recent work by Andrew Kovacs.10 Two projects, Medusa and Architectural Cliff [page 46], exhibit the qualities that define this trajectory – a preference for parts over wholes, expression of incongruence over fluidity and a composition that falls somewhere between a messy pile and a neat stack. In pursuit of disorder, these projects resist repetition and systematic growth, and they exist without an underlying organizational structure. In both Medusa and Architectural Cliff, Kovacs collects and reassembles dollar-store treasures to create idiosyncratic and unexpected architectural fantasies. These projects are representative of a larger generational shift away from topological clarity and uniform geometric resolution towards indefinite patterning and episodic, localized order. Kovacs’ blog, Archive of Affinities, a venue for the collection and curation of his most beloved architectural artefacts, serves as an endless supply of source material for his recent acts of appropriation. Another version of the formless trajectory, one with a significantly different aesthetic sensibility, manifests itself in recent projects by Adam Fure,11 whose work infuses architecture with raw materiality and intensive atmospheres that challenge the

50

Before theory

experiential norms of contemporary culture.12 The project titled Rocks [page 46] demonstrates how this notion of the formless arrives through a clever combination of an alternative constitution of the natural, the concept of free formation and an obsession with masking the process of making: one that runs counter to the previously dominant disposition to celebrate and make visible in the final artefact the process of digital manufacturing. Ultimately, the formless provides a counter-narrative to, and in some cases an evolution of, process driven digital work, and places emphasis on the visual experience over fidelity to technique.

Post-post-critical In ‘Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form’ K. Michael Hays proposes an alternative to the ubiquitous chasm between architecture as an instrument of culture and architecture as an autonomous form.13 Hays identifies resistance as the most potent weapon of critical architecture. Resistance enables the architect to develop new architectural knowledge and generate new cultural activity without the burden of limitations imposed by an existing structure – be it disciplinary or cultural. Years later, in ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’,14 R. E. Somol and Sarah Whiting claim that Hays’s ‘critical’ position has become quotidian and propose an evolution towards the ‘projective’, or ‘post-critical’ – developing a theory of architecture that exchanges its indexical, dialectical approach for one that is diagrammatic and atmospheric. To put it simply, the critical refuses to accept the dominant paradigms of architecture and culture, and the post-critical aggressively engages and seeks to evolve both – acknowledging and drawing from our discipline’s authority figures and broader cultural habits. Where the critical is ideological, the post-critical is intelligent. The critical delivers, the post-critical encourages participation. The critical is hot, the post-critical cool. We now find ourselves in another pivotal moment, looking for ways out of the established divide between the critical and projective, one that has led many emerging designers to choose between either/or: either retreat into the interstice of dialectical opposition, or to eschew the critical project in favour of pure cultural, social or political correspondence. The post-post-critical trajectory actively engages both of these recent paradigms regarding criticality and proposes another trajectory for contemporary architecture. Post-post-critical architecture acknowledges authoritative disciplinary figures and architectural paradigms, and tends to cultural habits and nostalgic memory; it employs the close read and produces absurd constructions that, through misuse and exaggeration of the ordinary, are as banal as they are provocative and extraordinary. In doing so, the post-post-critical trajectory produces architectural objects with internal coherence in relation to disciplinary concerns and instrumentality within a broader cultural context. Three recent projects best demonstrate the simultaneous efficacy of the postpost-critical in academia and venues of mass consumerism alike. These projects, The Entire Situation [page 46] by Erin Besler,15 Paranormal Panorama [page 46] by First

51

Kyle Miller

Office – Andrew Atwood and Anna Neimark16 – and Training Wheels [page 47] by David Eskenazi,17 mine, among other things, the potential of corners, paint specifications and scale, respectively. Topics deemed vapid and unimaginative by the previous generation of avant-garde architects are featured as departure points for this group of post-postcritical architects who are conceptualizing the practice of architecture and practising how to be architects by engaging conventional modes of construction, utilizing off-the shelf products and participating in the procedural aspects of document production within the architectural design process, ultimately realising a theoretical partner for the quotidian life of the practitioner.

‘Preservation’ As evidenced by a number of special events and recent publications,18 there is a renewed interest in historical artefacts as source material for experimental architecture. Following this interest, and in a manner more akin to Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc than John Ruskin, a group of young architects are developing architectural designs that propose new forms of preservation, seeking to uncover and extend disciplinary accounts through appropriation and successive authorship. The desire for the work produced by this group is not simply to resurrect in an act of nostalgia, but to both preserve and enliven concepts that are native to the discipline of architecture – concepts about building form and spatial organization, to name a few. Embracing the impermanence of architecture, these ‘preservation’ projects seek to add to, subtract from, agitate, edit, double, invert, repurpose, modify and transform existing architectural artefacts. The projects associated with this movement also problematize the fundamental elements of architecture – not doors, windows, balconies and toilets, but form, space and order. Ultimately, the preservation trajectory demonstrates how the discipline of architecture is constantly revitalized by the recurrent collusion between history and design, and how every generation has the opportunity to alter one with the other. Two projects exemplify the emergence of the preservation trajectory. The first, Inverting Neutra [page 47] by Bryony Roberts,19 presents a spatial inversion of the solid– void relationship found in Richard Neutra’s VDL Studio and Residences, constructed in Los Angeles in 1932. Roberts’ installation subverts the existing architectural strategy, which presents a meandering vertical spatial void. Where Roberts works on a historical artefact, Alex Maymind,20 in 100 Drawings [page 47], works from historical artefacts to document, appropriate and reproduce architectural acts in search of new rules and systems for architectural formal and spatial order: ‘the drawings oscillate between the scale of the city and the individual building, between autonomous figures and blatant agglomerations, and between legible archipelagos and interconnected wholes, allowing divergent contiguities and spatial relationships to emerge from within the set’.21 Through alterations, corrections and inventions, Maymind’s drawings are conceptualized as intentional misreadings of historical works and seek to reimagine architecture’s encyclopaedia as a collection of found objects not fully exploited and explored.

52

Before theory

The work used to define the scope of this emerging paradigm demonstrates the impact of successive authorship through reengaging the most potent disciplinary adventures from the twentieth century through the lens of contemporary culture and modes of production and is guided by a desire to repurpose a variety of architectural acts from the history of our discipline. The dialogues between history and design evident in the work produced by the ‘preservationists’ produce rich narratives that simultaneously substantiate the relevance of contemporary work in relation to historical reference and facilitate continued interrogation of architecture’s canon. This text introduces, defines and creates a provisional classification system for a range of projects and sensibilities being developed by emerging architectural designers, but, admittedly, merely scratches the surface of what will likely solidify itself as a pivotal moment in the development of experimental work in the United States and elsewhere. The diverse trajectories called attention to in this paper and the equally diverse modes of operation that characterize this emerging group of academic architects, make a case for an alternative construction of architectural theory through the speculative design project that blurs the boundaries, not only between ‘thinking and doing, design and fabrication, and prototype and final design’,22 but also between history, representation, technology and design. Ultimately, this group of architects are demonstrating and developing new partnerships between theory and design, evolving the manner in which architectural knowledge is constructed and reasserting the value of theory as a critical tool for architectural design in both the academy and professional practice.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10

Stan Allen, ‘Introduction: Practice vs Project’, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2000), XXII. Michael Speaks, ‘After Theory’, Architectural Record 193 no. 6 (2005): 74. Spheres, cubes, boxes, cones and pyramids are solid primitives. Robert Somol, ‘Twelve Reasons to Get Back into Shape’, in Content, ed. Rem Koolhaas (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 86–87. Jimenez Lai is a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and leader of Bureau Spectacular, accessed 24 June 2016, http://bureau-spectacular.net. Andrew Holder is an assistant professor of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Here ‘form’, as opposed to ‘shape’ and ‘figure’, is defined as the result of systematic development of volume that cannot be summarily understood in a single picture plane or elevational view. Victor Shklovsky makes a distinction between poetic and prose in his 1917 essay, ‘Art as Device’, when he states that poetic language is fundamentally different from the language that we use every day because it is more difficult to comprehend. Poetic speech is framed speech created to deny automatic, immediate and singular perceptions. The ambition is to create material ‘artistically’ so that its perception is impeded and its comprehension is arrived at through focused attention. Shklovsky also claims that the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be delayed. Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique (Device)’ [1917], in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose, eds. Formlessfinder, ‘Besides Form’, in Formless: Storefront for Art and Architecture Manifesto Series 01, ed. Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose (Zürich: Lars Müeller, 2015), 115. Andrew Kovacs is a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and curator of Archive of Affinities, accessed 24 June 2016, http://archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com.

53

Kyle Miller

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

Adam Fure is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and leader of Sift Studio, accessed 24 June 2016, http://siftstudio.com. Sift Studio. ‘About’, accessed 3 April 201, http://siftstudio.com/about. K. Michael Hays, ‘Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form’, in Perspecta 21 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 14–29. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, Perspecta 33 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002): 72–77. Erin Besler is a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and partner in Besler & Sons, accessed 24 June 2016, www.erinbesler.com. Andrew Atwood and Anna Neimark are partners in First Office, accessed 24 June 2016, http://firstoff. net, and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and full-time faculty at SCI-Arc, respectively. David Eskenazi is the 2015–2016 Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan, accessed 24 June 2016, www.davideskenazi.com. In 2011, the University of Michigan hosted a conference, The Future of History, and in 2013 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a symposium on the role of precedents in architectural design, Under the Influence. Log 31: New Ancients, edited by Bryony Roberts and Dora Epstein Jones, which scrutinized the role of history in contemporary architecture. A 2012 issue of Harvard Design Magazine calls into question the core of the discipline of architecture. Bryony Roberts is the 2015–2016 Historic Preservation Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, accessed 24 June 2016, http://bryonyroberts.com. Alex Maymind is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 2012–2013, accessed 24 June 2016, http://cargocollective.com/maymind. Socks Studio: ‘We cannot not know history’, accessed 3 April 2016, http://socks-studio. com/2014/05/19/we-cannot-not-know-history-and-other-works-by-alex-maymind/. Speaks, ‘After Theory’, 74.

Bibliography Allen, Stan. Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2000. Koolhaas, Rem. Preservation is Overtaking Us. New York: GSAPP Books, 2014. Meredith, Michael and Hilary Sample. Everything All At Once: The Software, Videos, and Architecture of MOS. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013. Ricciardi, Garrett and Julian Rose, eds. Formless: Storefront for Art and Architecture Manifesto Series 01. Zürich: Lars Müller, 2015. Shklovsky, Victor. ‘Art as Technique (Device)’ [1917]. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee Lemon and Marion Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Somol,  Robert. ‘Twelve Reasons to Get Back into Shape’. In Content, edited by Rem Koolhaas, 86–87. Cologne: Taschen, 2004. Somol, Robert and Sarah Whiting. ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’. Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–7. Speaks, Michael. ‘After Theory’. Architectural Record 193 no. 6 (2005): 72–75.

54

Part II Between history and philosophy

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 6

Which ‘humanism’? On the Italian theory of architecture, 1951–1969 Amir Djalali

In 2010 philosopher Roberto Esposito employed the term ‘Italian Theory’, in English in the original Italian text, to address the recent international academic success of the works of Italian philosophers including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben.1 Esposito pointed out Italy’s peculiar situation in post-war Europe: the industrial development was recent, political institutions were unstable and the bureaucratic apparatus was substantially Fascist, preserved intact despite the war of liberation. In this situation, a small but consistent part of the population was frustrated by the broken promise of an unfinished communist revolution. According to Esposito, this climate of a latent threat of civil war constituted the favourable breeding ground for an original way of thinking, developed outside the safe spaces of academia and institutional knowledge and directed against capitalists and the state. Esposito traced the singularity of Italian thought back to Renaissance philosophy: the political instability that marked the beginning of Italian modernity was mirrored in the work of Renaissance philosophers who denied the construction of overarching stable metaphysical systems, and practised a form of ‘living thought’, a mode of thinking deeply connected to life and political engagement. The importance of the so-called Italian Theory upon architectural theory in the 1960s has been demonstrated both by the work of architects such as Superstudio and Archizoom Associati,and by the direct involvement within operaist circles of figures such as Manfredo Tafuri, who was a regular contributor of Contropiano, a journal directed by Massimo Cacciari and, for its first issue only, by Antonio Negri.2 However, it was only with the global circulation of the translations of the texts of Italian architects and historians that an Italian architectural theory emerged as such. Jean-Louis Cohen noted

57

Amir Djalali

that the post-1968 French architectural discourse in France was shaped after the circulation of Italian architecture and critique – in particular by Aldo Rossi, Aldo Aymonino and Manfredo Tafuri – in the French press. Moreover, it was through Italian (architectural) literature that French architects discovered French authors such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Halbwachs and Marcel Poëte.3 In the same years, the American translation of Rossi and Tafuri was not as easy as it had been in France, yet their role was central in shaping the debate around the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) and its journal, Oppositions.4 The phenomenon described by Cohen was not the first moment in which an intense effort of translation, exchange and reciprocal influence occurred between Italy and the rest of Europe. In the post-war debate on Italian Renaissance, Italian scholars were in fact exposed to the theories developed by German authors exiled in Britain and the US. Then, Italian architects and architectural historians both assimilated and, at the same time, resisted the interpretations of the concepts of proportions and Mannerism that were at the centre of an intense debate. Mapping such a debate allows us not only to determine whether an Italian theory of Renaissance architecture can be defined (especially in opposition to German and British theories), but also – more interestingly – to testify the significance of the ‘Italian difference’ within the framework of post-war reconstruction. The Renaissance, seen as the contradictory beginning of European modernity, offered a conceptual toolbox for the redefinition of European institutions after the tragedy of the Second World War.

Divina proportione In September 1951, the Primo Convegno Internazionale sulla Proporzione nelle Arti (First International Conference on Proportions in the Arts) was held at the Milan Triennale. The conference, curated by the antiquarian and publisher Carla Marzoli with the advice of Rudolf Wittkower, featured an all-star line-up of scholars, artists and practising architects, including, among others, Sigfried Giedion, James Ackerman, Bruno Zevi, Max Bill, Lucio Fontana, Le Corbusier, Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Pier Luigi Nervi.5 The conference is the apex of the development of post-war studies on Renaissance proportions, and testifies to the great influence of the work of art historians upon architects willing to overcome sterile professionalism and to find a stable foundation for architectural practice in the years of reconstruction. At the same time, the gathering showed the impossibility to reconcile a wide variety of often incompatible positions and languages.6 The issue of proportions did not find a fertile ground in Italian soil. The enthusiasm of the organisers and the mystical overtones of some of the contributions were met with a certain coldness by the historians, architects and artists invited to the conference.7 The Milan congress marked, at the same time, the high point and the crisis of the discourse on proportions in modern architecture; its final demise is usually considered to have happened on 18 June 1957, when the RIBA8 rejected the motion, proposed by Nikolaus

58

Which ‘humanism’?

Pevsner, ‘that systems of proportions make good design easier and bad design more difficult’.9 Nevertheless, still in 1960, Rudolf Wittkower believed that the contemporary lack of a shared system of proportions was only a temporary historical passage, since every epoch based its aesthetic habits upon collective systems of proportions.

Warburg encounters Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), the text which mostly inspired the Milan conference topic, bore no traces of mystic naturalism or natural positivism. Titled after Geoffrey Scott’s 1914 The Architecture of Humanism, Wittkower’s book is polemical against Scott’s idea of proportion as guaranty of concordance between the human subject and the architectural object, and against the theory of Einfühlung elaborated in those years within the Deutsches Werkbund. Nor does Wittkower indulge in iconological analyses of the symbolical meaning of architecture and its proportions. On the contrary, Wittkower derives his analysis on the neo-Kantian idea of space as a symbolic form from the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and the studies of Erwin Panofsky: for Wittkower, the humanistic symbolic structures and conceptions of the universe are expressed in a tangible form in the architecture of the Renaissance space.10 In this sense, Renaissance architecture is an instrument through which we can read the abstract mental structures and the modes through which thinking took place at that time.11 The pre-war relation between Cassirer and Italy had been a difficult one. Cassirer had criticised the provincialism of Italian Renaissance scholars, and centred the birth of Renaissance philosophy on Nicholas of Cusa as an attempt to give a European – and, specifically, German – breadth to the phenomenon of the Renaissance in Italy.12 Yet, during the 1940s, Cassirer was a central figure for those young Italian scholars wishing to overcome the narrow perspective of Italian Idealism and its anti-scientific bias. In 1946 Giulio Carlo Argan published an essay on Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective in the Journal of the Warburg Institute. The essay, indebted to Panofsky’s idea of perspective as a symbolic form, recognized perspective as an operative design tool for the construction of the new Renaissance urban space, rather than as a painterly representational device.13 In general, the studies of the Warburg Institute were an example for an art critique that pursued subconscious collective structures as the conditions of existence of perception and artistic experience, and overcame an idealistic art historical practice still centred on the genius of the individual artist and on the refusal of structural categories. Such a collective basis for artistic experience was not only sought in abstract categories of thought by art historians, but also in the political life of the city: scholars, as well as practising architects, felt the necessity to verify Wittkower’s claims in light of the actual political situation of the Renaissance. In 1955 Giulio Carlo Argan extended the analysis of his Warburg article by locating Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective into the political and economic crisis of the early 1400s in Florence. Then, for Argan, perspective became not only a mathematical device shaped after the mentality of the time, but also

59

Amir Djalali

a practical tool for the organisation of the building site and a tool to safeguard the construction of civic public works in an environment where the republican freedoms were starting to be undermined by the authoritarian tendencies of the Medici family.14 With a clear political significance, Wittkower himself traced a portrait of Palladio as a systematiser of architectural knowledge. Palladio was seen as the champion of a rationalistic antidote against the anxieties of the post-1527 invasion of Italy by the armies of Charles V. The canonisation of architectural principles into an academic discipline, rather than their formal dissolution in the Mannerism of Rome, Florence and Milan, was seen as an integral part of Venice’s resistance to counter-reformation. For this reason, the architecture of Palladio could become a reference for the construction of the national architecture in the reformed North, in particular in Britain under the influence of Inigo Jones.15 Yet, Wittkower studied Palladio almost exclusively on the Four Books, with a careful selection of the examples to be included to produce his argument.16 On the occasion of the publication of the first issue of the bulletin of the International Centre for Palladian Studies in Vicenza in 1959, Ernesto Nathan Rogers called against the schematic interpretation of a normative and theoretical Palladio, and suggested a reading of Palladio as a professional urged to solve concrete design problems. For Rogers, the value of Palladio lay not in his construction of a universal theory of architecture, but in the systematic variations and licences to that very theory, vis-à-vis the practical necessities of the design experience. Contrary to Wittkower’s conceptual Palladio, Rogers sought to discover an anti-formalist understanding of the Vicentine master.17

The San Francesco controversy Rogers’s collaborator, Manfredo Tafuri, was less clear in rejecting Wittkower’s thesis. Throughout his career, Tafuri kept an open dialogue with Wittkower on the Memorandum by Francesco Giorgi on Sansovino’s design of the Venetian church of San Francesco della Vigna.18 In 1525 Giorgi, a Franciscan friar, had published his book Harmonia Mundi, an account on the harmony of the world expressed in the harmonic proportions discovered and formalised by Pythagoras, and then developed by the Hermetic tradition as it had been disseminated by Marsilio Ficino and the Renaissance Neoplatonism. Giorgi’s Memorandum, (which Wittkower published in his Architectural Principles), had been commissioned by the doge Andrea Gritti to evaluate and correct Jacopo Sansovino’s design for the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. In the Memorandum, Giorgi corrects the measurements of Sansovino’s design to make the church resonate with the music of the spheres, infusing the design with numerological references to Noah’s Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple.19 The fact that the Memorandum was approved by Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) and Sebastiano Serlio, allowed Wittkower to conclude that the ideas of Neoplatonism were common knowledge among artists at that time, and that even Palladio might have been familiar with them.20

60

Which ‘humanism’?

In his 1969 monograph on the architecture of Jacopo Sansovino, Tafuri directly confronted Wittkower’s argument. Tafuri read Giorgi’s philosophy as a form of negative or ascetic hermetism, which disregarded any possibility for spiritual redemption within matter and images. The visible world – and architecture as part of it – conceals the musical harmony of the universe rather than showing it. In this vision, redemption can only come by transcending worldly matters.21 Such an indifference towards the material world was for Tafuri testified by the fact that Giorgi did not have any problems with Sansovino’s design, as he limited himself to accept it and to slightly correct its measurements. Correspondingly, the actual consistency of the built church shows only a superficial reception of Giorgi’s prescriptions – namely, the general austerity and simplicity of the spatial configuration. Moreover, the later and more important public works commissioned by the doge Gritti to Sansovino no longer employed the harmonic ideal, and were based on an empirical approach to urban problems devoid of any a priori ideal. So why did Gritti ask for Giorgi’s consultancy? And why did Titian and Serlio, who generally privileged an empirical approach in their art, approve Giorgi’s Memorandum?22 Tafuri sought an answer to these questions in the specific political conditions of Venice, looking for the significance of the construction of San Francesco della Vigna withing the doge’s programme for the reform of the republican institutions.23 According to Tafuri, Gritti would have read Giorgi’s Harmonia Mundi not so much for its mysticism, but because of its potential for a syncretic resolution of the various attempts of religious reformation. In harmonic proportion, the doge would have sought the possibility of a discordia concors, a political unity among conflicting interests. Rather than the Neoplatonist legacy, Gritti would have seen a programme for a concordia philosophorum derived by Pico della Mirandola’s idea that all philosophies and theologies are joined by the same inherent problems and purposes. Venice was religiously tolerant, and wanted to establish itself as the European champion of a religious synthesis. This programme failed after the enforcement of the counter-reformation orthodoxy: Harmonia Mundi was declared heretic and was listed in the Inquisition’s Index. Tafuri saw in the construction of San Francesco della Vigna – and in its marginal position in the city and in Gritti’s programme – a testing ground for the construction of a syncretic language of architecture to be later applied in more contested sites in the city.24

Which humanism? Tafuri’s appeal to a Pichian concordia, in opposition to Wittkower’s preference for the systematic Platonism of Ficino, can be paralleled to Eugenio Garin’s rediscovery of the work of Pico della Mirandola. Garin, together with a group of young philosophers including Ernesto Grassi and Delio Cantomori, was responsible, in the immediate postwar period, for de-provincialising the study of Renaissance philosophy from the deadlocks of Italian nationalism and idealism.25 According to Garin, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism was a syncretic appropriation of various philosophies in the construction

61

Amir Djalali

of an all-encompassing system of thought that ended up in an instrumental appropriation of various philosophies, levelling their differences and intrinsic characteristics in a rigid metaphysical system. Instead, Pico’s syncretism was based on a genuine political and oecumenical project of peace at a European scale, that was capable of encompassing both philosophy – combining modern Platonism and Aristotelianism – and theology – bridging Christian, Islamic and Jewish mysticism. Famously, in 1487, at the age of 23, Pico presented his 900 theses to Pope Innocent VIII, as a discussion platform for an oecumenical debate with Europe’s most erudite scholars and prominent religious authorities. The text accompanying the theses, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, with its negation of any specific human essence and the subordination of being to existence, was seen by Garin as an anticipation of European existentialism.26 For Garin, the Renaissance is indeed, as Husserl theorised, the beginning of the European crisis. Contrary to the interpretations of this crisis in the circle of Rogers, who sought to bridge the crisis through a project of historical continuity, for Garin ‘humanism and Galilean science are a twofold alienation that prevents reconciliation between man and reality and between man and himself’.27 Such a split is, for Garin, the condition for the possibility of the humanistic project and for its civic and pedagogical attitude. It is in this context that we can locate the presence of two humanisms. For Wittkower, humanism represented the last historical instance of a conception of man as an integral part of nature and its stable, immutable structures. In this view, harmonic proportions were, at the same time, the index for the position of man within the universe and the tool for its knowledge. According to Wittkower, such a conception ended with the Baroque, when an idea of subjective and customary beauty emerged in the writings and the designs of Claude Perrault, Christopher Wren and Guarino Guarini.28 Despite their different approaches, Argan, Rogers and Tafuri delineated a different kind of humanism, a ‘civic’ humanism, where the project of architecture is not that of aligning the earthly city to the celestial city. Rather, civic humanism calls for the construction of the city of men starting from the consciousness that human life has no other meaning than the one given to it by human action itself. Hence, the construction of architecture is not based on the imitation of natural laws, but on the construction of a completely artificial order, a linguistic code, either based on the examples of the past (as in the case of Alberti), or on the elaboration of a logical, syntactic system (as in the case of Brunelleschi).29 Such a conception of humanism was haunted by a tragic awareness of the human condition of unfoundedness, and of its lack of origins. The post-war optimism of the will and the faith in human action somehow managed to tame such nihilistic premises. At the end of the 1960s, the project of existential humanism was already coming to an end. In the two books on Renaissance architecture published by Manfredo Tafuri in this period – L’architettura del manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo (1966) and L’architettura dell’umanesimo (1969) – humanism appears more like an ideological programme of a group of intellectuals, which had to be measured against the actual state of the political institutions of that time.30 The concept of Mannerism, first circumscribed to certain artistic manifestations of the post-1527 sack of Rome and to their cynical and intellectualistic connotations, started also to be applied by Tafuri to the

62

Which ‘humanism’?

work of early Renaissance architects such as Giuliano da Sangallo. Progressively, Mannerism became the norm, rather than the exception within the artistic manifestations of the Renaissance, to the point that the concept became no longer useful, and it would be later jettisoned by Tafuri.31 In 1968, Eugenio Garin was still writing in defence of a positive existentialist interpretation of the Renaissance, with a passionate yet belated defence of Sartre from Heidegger’s famous accusations in his 1947 ‘Letter on humanism’.32 However, at the beginning of the 1970s, Garin already seemed to have abandoned his post-war certainties upon the redemptive capacities of human organisation. Ironically, such a turn was triggered by the work of an architect, Leon Battista Alberti, who, until that time, had provided the model for the olympic and harmonic figure of the Renaissance universal man. The discovery of some of his dinner pieces, which were considered lost, presented Alberti as a contradictory and ambiguous intellectual, at times praising moderation and civic virtues, and other times cynically dismissing them, assuming a disenchanted pessimism over the uncontrollable powers of fortune, and the incapacity of human will to conquer them. ‘Strangely,’ Garin wrote in 1975, ‘no one has noted that a few decades before Giovanni Pico della Mirandola composed his famous hermetic ouverture praising men, Alberti had already written its parody’.33 What is left of the attempt to construct an Italian Theory of the Renaissance is the image of a fragmented, contradictory episode in European history which escapes any attempt to describe it with general categories and totalising narratives. Perhaps, the major contribution of the Italian theory from those years was the return to the intuitions of Jacob Burckhardt. In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the description of Italy was far from presenting a pacified, united image of the Italian territory. Burckhardt outlined the Italian Renaissance as a period of turmoil, violence and political uncertainty. The Renaissance Italian state is the parody of the well-ordered apparatus of the modern nation state. The power of the Renaissance princes, be they magnanimous governors or bloody tyrants, is always illegitimate, and their sovereignty is constantly ridiculed by adverse fortunes and political contingencies. In this sense, the Italian Renaissance is at the same time the beginning and the limit of the European political order, and it needs to be either warded off or embraced as an alternative path for modernity and its institutions.

Notes 1

2

Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), originally published in 2010. The specificity of Italian political thought, and, in particular, its close connection with political struggles since the 1960s, had already been pointed out in many English-language publications, such as: Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Semiotext(e), 1980); Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, eds, The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009); and in a series of conferences, such as The Italian Effect in Sydney (2004), Post-Autonomia in Amsterdam (2011). Superstudio and Archizoom Associati were deeply influenced by operaist readings, in particular by Mario Tronti’s Operai e capitale (1966; Workers and capital). See Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of

63

Amir Djalali

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17

18

19 20

64

Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘The Italophiles at Work’, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 508–520. See: Joan Ockman, ‘Venice and New York’. Casabella (January/February 1995): 619–620. Anna Chiara Cimoli and Fulvio Irace, eds, La Divina Proporzione: Atti del convegno (Milano: Electa, 2007). For an English account of the conference, see Christopher Hight, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (New York: Routledge, 2007). An assessment of the results of the conference by Wittkower are contained in Rudolf Wittkower, ‘The Changing Concept of Proportion’. Daedalus 89 no. 1 (1960): 199–215. Anna Chiara Cimoli, ‘Il Primo convegno internazionale sulle proporzioni nelle arti: una storia interrotta’, in La Divina Proporzione. Atti del convegno, ed. Anna Chiara Cimoli and Fulvio Irace (Milan: Electa, 2007), 200. Giulio Carlo Argan and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli declined the invitation. Art historians Giusta Nicco Fasola, Piero Sampaolesi and Gillo Dorfles’s contributions pointed towards a historicisation of the problem of proportions, denying the possibility that they be used to guide the production of contemporary art and architecture. Similarly, Bruno Zevi and Carlo Mollino saw traditional ideas of proportions – either based on integer or irrational ratios – as incompatible with the contemporary conceptions of space–time continuum and non-Euclidean geometries. Finally, artist Lucio Fontana hijacked the event for the launch of his manifesto on spatial art, establishing the need to abandon ‘any form of known art’. Cimoli, ‘Il Primo convegno internazionale sulle proporzioni nelle arti: una storia interrotta’, 216. For a comment on the RIBA vote, see Bruno Zevi, ‘I sistemi proporzionali sconfitti a Londra’, L’architettura 26 (1957): 508. Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’. Architectural Review 118 (1955): 354–361. Alina A. Payne, ‘Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 no. 3 (1994): 322–342. See also: Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Payne summarised the characters of Wittkower’s Renaissance architecture, as an echo of the ‘principles’ of the architecture of the Modern movement: ‘reduction of form to syntactic relationships, the geometric grids, the emphasis on structure, on “white” and “cubic” forms, on the causal relationship between art and science (mathematics) and away from an understanding of architectural form as representational, the rejection of ornament from the core of “principles”, the presentation of an architect actively shaping theoretical directions’; Payne, ‘Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism’, 330. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2000), 47. See Argan’s 1946 seminal essay on Filippo Brunelleschi and the invention of perspective: Giulio Carlo Argan and Nesca A. Robb, ‘The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory in the Fifteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 96–121. Giulio Carlo Argan, Brunelleschi (Milan: Mondadori, 1955). See also Colin Rowe’s unpublished master’s thesis, written while he was a student of Wittkower at the Warburg Institute: Colin Rowe, ‘The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: Their Source and Scope’, unpublished manuscript (London: 1947). Wittkower acknowledged that, in his built work, even Palladio was not immune from the contamination of the Mannerist language, especially in his late realisations. See Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Sviluppo stilistico dell’architettura palladiana’, Bollettino C.I.S.A 1 (1959): 61–65. Francesco Benelli, ‘Rudolf Wittkower versus Le Corbusier: A Matter of Proportion’, Architectural Histories 3 no. 1 (2015). ‘Palladio was useful for the Americans as a great model of life, more than a model for forms: the most beautiful – and, as far as I am concerned, most touching – examples, are those houses and churches where Palladio is copied with wood: it seems that that wood that had become stone – as Choisy had taught us – had turned into wood once again’; Ernesto Nathan Rogers, ‘Palladio e noi’. Bollettino C.I.S.A 1 (1959): 57–60. Tafuri’s insistence on this theme can be traced back to his first book, L’architettura del Manierismo italiano of 1966, and lasted until his last book of 1992, Ricerca del Rinascimento. Tafuri also dedicated a monographic, microhistorical account to the specific issue of the construction of the Venetian Franciscan church in his 1984 book, significantly entitled L’armonia e i conflitti (Harmony and conflicts), written with Antonio Foscari. For the relation between Wittkower and Tafuri, see the paper by Daniel Sherer, ‘Tafuri vs Wittkower: The Harmonic Thesis and the Crisis of Modernity’, delivered at The Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri, a conference at Columbia GSAPP and Cooper Union, 21–22 April 2006. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 10th edition (London: Academy Editions, 1977), 155–157. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 102–107.

Which ‘humanism’?

21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33

Manfredo Tafuri, Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia (Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1969), 18–20. Tafuri, Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia, 25. Tafuri, Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia, 5–8. Tafuri, Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia, 23–25. Rocco Rubini, ‘(Re-)Experiencing the Renaissance’, in The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays, 1860–1968, ed. Rocco Rubini (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2014). See: Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: vita e dottrine (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011), originally published in 1937; and Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Eugenio Garin, ‘Which “Humanism”? (Historical digressions) (1968)’, in Rubini, The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective, 230. The essay was originally published in French as ‘Quel “humanism”? (Variations historiques)’ in Revue internationale de philosophie 22, 1968: 76–89. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 154. See: Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 24–28. Manfredo Tafuri, L’architettura dell’umanesimo (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 317–321. While Tafuri already had difficulties in giving a univocal definition of Mannerism in his 1966 L’architettura del manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo, in Teorie e storia the term is employed not so much as an artistic movement in a specific period of time, but as an attitude towards history which could be traced not only in the Renaissance, but also in the contemporary experiments of post-war architecture. In Ricerca del Rinascimento, the concept had already disappeared. See also: Luisa Passerini, ‘History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri’, Any, 25–26 (February 2000): 10–69. Garin, ‘Which “Humanism”?’, 225–234. Eugenio Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari: Laterza, [1975] 2007), 362.

Bibliography Argan, Giulio Carlo. Brunelleschi. Milan: Mondadori, 1955. Argan, Giulio Carlo and Nesca A. Robb. ‘The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory in the Fifteenth Century’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 96–121. Banham, Reyner. ‘The New Brutalism’. Architectural Review 118 (1955): 354–361. Benelli, Francesco. ‘Rudolf Wittkower versus Le Corbusier: A Matter of Proportion’. Architectural Histories 3 no. 1, Art. 8 (May 2015). Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]. London: Penguin Classics, 1990. Chiesa, Lorenzo and Alberto Toscano, eds. The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. Ciliberto, Michele. Eugenio Garin: Un intellettuale del Novecento. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2011. Cimoli, Anna Chiara. ‘Il Primo convegno internazionale sulle proporzioni nelle arti: una storia interrotta’. In La Divina Proporzione. Atti del convegno. Edited by Cimoli, Anna Chiara and Fulvio Irace, 200–235. Milan: Electa, 2007. Cohen, Jean-Louis. ‘The Italiophiles at Work’. In Architecture Theory Since 1968, Edited by K. Michael Hays, 508–520. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Esposito, Roberto. Living Thought: Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Garin, Eugenio. Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo. Bari: Laterza, [1975] 2007. Garin, Eugenio. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: vita e dottrine. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011. Lotringer, Sylvere and Christian Marazzi, eds. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Cambridge, MA, and London: Semiotext(e), 1980. Payne, Alina A. ‘Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 no. 3 (1994): 322–342. Rogers, Ernesto Nathan. ‘Palladio e noi’. Bollettino C.I.S.A 1 (1959): 57–60. Rubini, Rocco. The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Rubini, Rocco, ed. The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays, 1860–1968. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2014. Sherer, Daniel. ‘Tafuri vs Wittkower: The Harmonic Thesis and the Crisis of Modernity’. In The Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri: A Conference at Columbia GSAPP and Cooper Union, 21–22 April 2006. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Tafuri, Manfredo. L’architettura del Manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo. Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1966.

65

Amir Djalali

Tafuri, Manfredo. L’architettura dell’umanesimo. Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1966. Tafuri, Manfredo. Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia. Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1969. Tafuri, Manfredo. Ricerca del Rinascimento. Principi, città, architetti. Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Vidler, Anthony. Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Wittkower, Rudolf. ‘Sviluppo stilistico dell’architettura palladiana’. Bollettino C.I.S.A 1 (1959): 61–65. Wittkower, Rudolf. ‘The Changing Concept of Proportion’. Daedalus 89 no. 1 (1960): 199–215. Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism 10th edition. London: Academy Editions, 1977. Zevi, Bruno. ‘I sistemi proporzionali sconfitti a Londra’. L’architettura 26 (1957): 508–509.

66

Chapter 7

Philosophical thinking as political praxis Giorgio Agamben and inoperative architecture Camillo Boano

Giorgio Agamben’s reflections are political, provocative and language oriented. His production has been highly influential, mainly through his popular Homo Sacer project,1 where the notion of ‘exception’ and ‘the camp’ suggest the basis for the constitution of extreme spatial organization in the modern metropolis. Never speaking directly about architecture and urbanism, Agamben alludes to the contemporary landscape by saying that advanced capitalism produces a great accumulation of dispositifs, of heterogeneous sets of elements (discourses, regulations, institutions, architectures), and that today ‘there are only oikonomie – pure governance, which has the sole purpose of reproducing itself’.2 This paper is part of a research project on the possible encounters between architecture and Agamben’s politics.3 It focuses on ‘inoperativity’, a key feature of Agamben affirmative politics, centred on the deactivation of those dispositifs of power which are in the interest of a ‘coming community’ (present and yet unrealized), and potentially useful to rescue a political emancipatory project of architecture. In this critical project, architecture becomes a sort of inoperative operation that consists of deactivating its communicative and informative function, in order to open itself to a new possible use. Yet, Agamben’s theory goes beyond the conventional concept of appropriation and the functionalist/utilitarian understanding of use. It opens to the possibility of a new ‘free use’4 by making it inoperative, or by replacing its old use with a new use (non-use): a pure use without finality. In navigating the complex encounters between architecture and Agamben, this paper concentrates on two concepts – inoperativity and use – which can offer a reinvigorated political possibility for architecture. In doing so it reflects on Agamben’s philosophical thinking as a function of political praxis, and highlights the task

67

Camillo Boano

of philosophy to ‘deliver us from the sphere of law and duty, from the faculties of will and intention’, and to allow us to ‘see the darkness’ as critical ingredients of a new theory. Agamben suggests that the act of creation is an ‘act of resistance’ to some external forces or threats. However, he openly admits that, while investigating the genealogy of the term I discovered that part of the responsibility falls on the architects […] when the medieval theologians were to explain the creation of the world they were using the example of the house: ‘as the image of the house pre-exists in the mind of the architect, so God created the world, looking at a model in his mind’.5 This recalls Thomas Aquinas’s differentiation between creation ex nihilo, which defines divine creation from nothing, and facere de materia, which defines human production. The activity of the architect and God’s act of creation contains the paradigm of the artist’s creation, due to a transposition of a theological paradigm to the act of the artist […] So I prefer to speak of a poetic act of creation and thus the act of creation should simply be understood with the Greek term poiein […] I’m convinced that, as the potentiality, which the act of creation freezes, must be internal to the act, in the same way also the resistance must be internal to the act of creation.6 For Luca Taddio7 there is no distinction between the architect who ‘does/makes/acts’ and the philosopher who ‘thinks’, but rather there is the need to accept and acknowledge more explicitly that there is an immanent plane of doing-designing proper to the architect. The same intrinsic knowledge is inscribed and produced in the work (opera) of the architect: As the painter thinks through images also the architect thinks through the forms of his making. The opera, is the synthesis of knowledge that results in determination. The activity of the architect is a continuous trespassing in other areas of disciplines and knowledge that (s)he has not fully mastered because they do not fit perfectly with her profession but, at the same time, it is precisely this knowledge (in which (s)he is not fully competent) that defines the perimeter of the profession of the architect. It is these ‘incompetences’ that determine the specific competences of the architect.8 The act of creation is to be understood as a field of potency stretched between potentiality and impotentiality, acting and non-acting, acting and resisting.9 Taddio suggests that architecture is to be understood as affirmation, as ‘taking place’, and not as a simple deception of the reality of an object, nor is it the simple focusing on the theoretical point of view expressed by an architect. Rather, it is important to capture the design-production of the architectural work as a non-conceptual form of thought, and so be able to capture the immanent affirmation of thinking architecture.10

68

Philosophical thinking as political praxis

Agamben’s inoperativity The concept of inoperativity is at the centre of Agamben’s affirmative politics. Its origin has to be traced back to the Aristotelian tradition of political theology of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, as well as to Alexandre Kojeve’s concept of désoeuvrement. The reflections are also influenced by Agamben’s Pauline studies,11 and by St Augustine’s and Luther’s different reflections on faith and grace as means to achieve salvation. However, Agamben’s notion of inoperativity was certainly influenced by the Autonomous Marxist movement in Italy in the late 1970s around the idea of ‘refusing to work’, which did not refer to the mere valorization of idleness but rather sought to overcome the set of relations and identities formed around labour in capitalist societies. The term sounds untimely and somehow obsolete in a present where all actions, discourses and knowledge are focusing on the ‘sanctification’ of an action oriented to an end (telos), and on the obsession with the quantitative aspect of action and work. Agamben applies the concept to a specific kind of action that does not minimize but, rather, augments the possibility of use: ‘to affirm inoperativity is not to affirm inertia, inactivity or apraxia, let alone disfunctionality or destruction, rather a form of praxis that is devoid of any telos or task’.12 Luca Serafini13 suggests that inoperativity has three ranges of meanings that should be considered mutually reinforcing: a requalification of any action in a nonpurposeful sense; an ontology of potentiality that is never inexhaustible; and an overcoming of the metaphysical concept of subject. As such, inoperativity has nothing to share with quietism, a theory of non-action either in the form of passivity or as mere contemplation. Inoperativity is always a matter of action, but an action that loses any links with purpose, signifying gratuitousness and potentiality. It is in Homo Sacer that Agamben articulates this theme more openly: ‘the only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted’.14 The constitutive inoperativity of the human being is inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and fundamentally linked with the notion of potentiality. The central question that Agamben takes from Aristotle relates to the task of humans being qua humans, and therefore not having any specific functions due to any activities they engage in. Agamben proposes a redefinition of désoeuvrement that cannot be read merely as absence of work/activity, nor as a form of negativity as ‘no use’. Rather, it should be conceived as inexhaustible potentiality15 that is not becoming an act: ‘a generic mode of potentiality, which is not exhausted in a transitus de potentia ad actum [transition from potentiality to act]’.16 For this reason Agamben finds that ‘politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperativeness of mankind’, and that there is politics because human beings are argos – beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation – that is, ‘beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust’.17 To be inoperative, then, is not to be inactive, but rather it is the activity that restores potentiality of beings and things, making them usable in new ways. In Hunger of an Ox: Considerations on the Sabbath, the Feast, and Inoperativity,18 Agamben analyses the Jewish Sabbath and he finds ‘its theological paradigm in the fact that it is not the work of creation, but rather the cessation of all work

69

Camillo Boano

that is declared sacred’.19 Agamben quotes a verse of Genesis that reads: ‘On the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and on the seventh day he ceased from all his work. God blessed the seventh day and consecrated it, because on this day he ceased from all the work of his creation (Gen. 2:2–3)’.20 This double action of God, namely the positive one of completing the work begun and, on the same day, the negative one of refraining from operating once the creation itself is completed, refers to the active character of inoperativity. Not all actions are forbidden during the Sabbath, only the ones that have some immediate productive purposes: ‘The decisive question is whether the activity aims toward production’.21 This way of acting is nothing more than a non-purposeful, a-teleological mode of working in its total gratuity: the feast is then a requalification gesture that, rather than prescribing new, or simply different unusual actions, is finalized to dis-activating the instrumental apparatus of what is done on a daily basis: ‘The feast day is not defined by what is not done in it but instead by the fact that what is done – which in itself is not unlike what is accomplished every day – becomes undone, rendered inoperative, liberated and suspended from its “economy”’.22 In The Time that Remains, Agamben reflects that the messianic vocation (klesis) consists precisely in the re-vocation of any vocation; however, as Carlo Salzani23 reminds us, klesis refers to an inoperativity that is neither related to the action and mode of operation suggested by the protestant ethic and the capitalist spirit, nor refers to the quietism of inaction signified in the eschatological indifference. Inoperativity is always a shift towards a requalification of any action in a non-purposeful sense, in an a-teleological action that does not nullify the action but makes it free, thus producing ‘almost an internal shifting of each and every single worldly condition by virtue of being “called”’.24 The essential connection between potentiality and inoperativity means that the sabbatical suspension, which, by rendering inoperative the specific functions of the living being transforms them into possibilities, is the proper human praxis. The term Paul constantly uses is katargeo, ‘a true key word in the Pauline messianic vocabulary’. Katargeo is a compound of argeo, which in turn derives from the adjective argos, meaning ‘inoperative, not-at work (a-ergos), inactive’. According to Salzani, this comes to mean ‘I make inoperative, I deactivate, I suspend the efficacy’.25 Katargesis restores the works – the identities – to their potentiality by rendering them inoperative. What is rendered inoperative is an activity directed towards a goal, in order to open it to a new use. This does not abolish the old activity, but rather exposes and exhibits it. This inversion, operated by the messianic, is not a negative form or a destruction, but an action. The messianic deactivates the law, makes it inoperative and as such restores the work in its passive form, potential, rendering it inoperative, no-longer-at-work. The messianic ‘is not the destruction but the deactivation of the law, rendering the law unenforceable (l’ineseguibilità della legge)’.26 To be inoperative, then, is not being inactive, but is rather a sui generis praxis that restores the potentiality of being and things, making them usable in new ways. Inoperativity does not advocate the destruction of things, but rather their canonical functions, and enables free use.

70

Philosophical thinking as political praxis

The use of Agamben The second concept is use. Agamben’s earliest engagement with the issue of use occurs in Stanzas27 where Agamben posits that ‘the transfiguration of the commodity into an enchanted object is the sign that the exchange value is already beginning to eclipse the use value’,28 challenging its underlying utilitarian presuppositions and examining the possibility29 of a new relation to things that consists neither in a utilitarian conception of use nor in the logic of exchange.30 In The Coming Community, use is a ‘manner neither generic nor individual […] a manner in which it passes from the common to the proper and from the proper to the common is called usage’;31 it is associated with ethos and defined by the ‘free use of the proper’.32 In Means Without Ends, Agamben displaces such reflections beyond the concepts of appropriation and expropriation, in order to think ‘the possibility and the modalities of a free use’33 in a critique of the dialectic between proper34 and improper that characterizes the present we live in. This true use is neither the Marxian use value nor the utilitarian concept of Antonio Negri, rather it is a deactivation of the use much closer to the Franciscans’ who refused all forms of property and right in favour of a usus pauper. In The Time That Remains, inspired by Pauline early Christian political theology, Agamben puts the word chresai (make use) in relation with the definition of the messianic life: ‘to live messianically means to use the klesis, and the messianic klesis is something to use, not to possess’.35 As Salzani notes, ‘the fulfilment in the use is thus désoeuvrement, and messianic potentiality is precisely that which is not exhausted in its ergon but remains potential in a “weak” form. Katargesis restores the works – the identities – to their potentiality by rendering them inoperative’.36 In such a use without legal authorization, Agamben sees the possibility of a form of subtraction from law, rather than an open conflict with it. In The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life,37 Agamben offers a superb interpretation of the message of Francis and of the Franciscan theory of poverty and use, again suggesting clearly the very political task of the present to think a form-oflife, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law, and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation. What is so outrageous and deeply political in the highest poverty practised by the Franciscans? What leads and what makes life according to Franciscan brothers? Those questions were guiding Agamben in discovering that the Franciscan rule is a life that coincides with its own form, a life that is a form-of-life.38 From a legal point of view, the form-of-life can be achieved only through the abdicatio omnis iuris, or waiver of any form of law: the very survival of the individual is the use of things. Use here is contrasted with a radicalism – an unprecedented radicalism – with property as not simply representing a ‘different way of owning’, but a theory of a relationship with the world that is independent from the paradigm of appropriation.39 In L’uso dei corpi 40 (The use of bodies) Agamben outlines a double significance of the role of the body (corpo), declining modes of use and theorizing ‘a dual form of doing’. In the first part of the book Agamben puts forth Aristotle’s theory of slavery as

71

Camillo Boano

the privileged locus for the development of the theory of ‘use’ – indeed revealed in ‘the use of bodies’. Agamben refers to the opening sentences of Aristotle’s Politics: ‘one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a person is a human being belonging to another if being a man he is an article of property, and an article of property is an instrument for action separable from its owner’.41 Agamben observes that the body of the slave in ancient Greece was intended as a tool, as an instrument, as ‘those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better’; here Agamben sees energeia and chresis, being-in-use and use, being juxtaposed as psyche and soma, body and soul. Aristotle refers to slaves as ‘living tools’. For this reason, Agamben writes that ‘the use of the body and the absence of practical use (opera) are something more, or rather different from a productive activity, and they resemble and keep the paradigm of a human activity that is not reducible to labour, to production or to praxis’,42 but is a form-of-life. The result is thus a radical transformation of the ontology of the concept of subject. Not a subject that uses an object, but a subject that constitutes itself only through the using, the being in relation with another. For Agamben, use is a ‘fundamental political category’, liberated from its intentional nature by ascribing it to its original mode of ‘inoperative enjoyment’. This anticipates and connects to the very core of his research, the rendering inoperative of the different exclusionary dispositif.

Radical and just a little bit different What seems to emerge from Agamben’s reflection is that use ‘constitutes an inoperative practice that can happen only when the Aristotelian dispositive potentiality/actuality – which assigns the supremacy to energeia, to the being-at-work, is deactivated’43 and profaned. What does this mean for architecture? How can this political project help reading, theorizing and practising architecture? What in Agamben’s political thought does seem powerful and central here is that it performs a gesture of inversion. Agamben does not offer any solution from a higher, alien, distant reality, but the solution he offers is ‘a subtle inversion’.44 Architecture in this new critical project becomes an ‘inoperative operation’ that consists of rendering inoperative, of deactivating its communicative and informative function, in order to open it to new possible uses, new possibilities. What does it mean today to imagine a redeemed world in which everything will be as it is now, but just a little bit different? What would that difference consist of? And how do the grand promises of architecture and its change fit? At first this position denounces the apparent opposite and contradictory nature of architecture and design as operative, practical, concrete, tangible and problem-solving oriented when confronted with inoperativity. Inoperativity/inoperosity – which Agamben situates at the crux between theology and philosophy – is not to be treated as a simple contemplative quietism detached from reality; rather, it is a paradox of practice, so situated in the praxis that, contrary to poiesis, it does not produce something other than

72

Philosophical thinking as political praxis

itself. It is an action, but it is interrupted, deducted, inward-oriented – not because it is dysfunctional or destructed, but rather because it is devoid of any telos or task; it instead implies its opposite, namely, its own productivity restates the centrality of possibility and virtuality, along with a specific method of deactivation. Searching for an inoperative architecture could have led to the simplistic claim of a contra-hegemonic project, another historical project, or a renewed humanistic discourse in a new manifesto for action rather than reclaiming the more powerful motto by Bartleby: ‘I would prefer not to’.45 It does suggest being theoretical. Agamben’s reflections allow us to frame a counter practice, and to see again practice in a renewed orientation and perspective. As Andrew Benjamin has observed, ‘that philosophy uses architectural metaphors is clearly the case. That architecture deploys a language that is in part philosophical is also now commonplace’.46 If we look beyond the specific cases in history, what emerges from the reflection here is the position of thinking through an ‘architectural philosophy’, a term coined by Andrew Benjamin in 1995. It describes a philosophy that belongs to architects and is connected with architecture (as it represents an intimate and intrinsic material of architecture), but not a philosophy of architecture or a philosophy for architects. The encounters that hopefully take place in this paper aim to help awaken the latent philosopher inside the architect and, as such, open the possibility of the architectphilosopher to thematise and to tackle questions related to our ways of ‘doing’ architecture individually and collectively, producing a repertoire of concepts that in the future could become eminently architectural. Architects have sometimes been interested in philosophical texts that have some sort of relevance for architectural and urban discourses, and sometimes architectural metaphors have been employed by philosophers to explain the construction and articulation of philosophical thoughts. For the sake of our argument, it is more important to think of philosophy as intrinsic to architecture in order to tackle the questions related to their ways of doing architecture, and, ultimately, their very idea of architecture. Andrew Benjamin suggests treating architecture and philosophy not as thought only, but as ‘texts in which there was either an overlap or similarity of language such that an analysis of the language was an analysis of the relation’.47 This approach fits well with Agamben’s dual focus on language as the medium by which humans give themselves a world of meanings, projects and trajectories, and a focus on life, on ‘what resists the inclusion in the systems that order, name and denote our world’.48 As such, architecture and philosophy interpenetrate and question each other, not only illustrating one field in relation to another, but also in dynamic, uneasy, messy and somehow contingent relations. Architecture and philosophy are challenged to think and re-invent how logos, topos, aisthesis, are mixed in time. Agamben’s work is located in the political praxis of the Italian tradition of ‘performative thought’ to highlight ‘a thought on praxis and a praxis of thoughts […] a thought in action that is also a philosophy of action and which is relevant to its time’.49 As David Kishik has suggested, Agamben’s work ‘is not writing but a form of life’.50 Agamben is not simply satisfied with the relativist term of the existence of a multiplicity of forms of life, he also calls for a renewed politics. The redemption possible with a generalized inoperativity is the audacious message of Agamben. Challenging our

73

Camillo Boano

conventional notion of politics framed in the activist term of the positive transformations of social reality, a politics of disengagement, deactivation, subtraction, inversion, suspension can be seen simply, at most, as a temporary and partial solution always to be followed by a second phase, a next and more productive one, of constitutive and affirmative steps. Agamben’s political thought of an inoperative form-of-life is not something to be attained in a reformist or revolutionary praxis, but merely requests the subtraction of the subject from the existing apparatuses, whereby they appropriate their own potentiality of whatever being. Agamben’s politics is not about mobilization, organization, civil society and aggregations particularly interested in a contra-hegemonic discussion. Politics consists of a subtraction from the apparatuses of power that govern the identities and prescribe roles and positions, rendering them inoperative and then reclaiming its own inoperativity. Agamben’s use and inoperativity show the intent of profanation and the reason Agamben wishes to praise it. Its goal is to free things from the ‘sacred names’ that set them apart as the province of the few; it is to return the things of the world to their natural context: common usage. In this respect, re-discovering and liberating, Agamben’s ‘architecture’ represents an indispensable tool for architects in search of a theoretical and critical framework for a renewed political practice and a common use in imagining alternatives to the complicit and silent predicament of architecture and city production in late capitalism: a new use of architecture.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

74

The project includes: Volume I: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998 [1995]), Volume II, 1: State of Exception (2005 [2003]), Volume II, 2: Stasis La guerra civile come paradigma politico. Homo Sacer II, 2 (2015) translated into English by Nicholas Heron in 2015, Volume II, 3: The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (2013 [2008]), Volume II,4: The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011 [2007]) Volume II, 5: Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty (2013 [2012]), Volume III: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002 [1998]), Volume IV.1: The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2013 [2011], Volume IV, 2. L’uso dei Corpi (2014) just translated in English by Adam Kotsko with the title The Use of Bodies (2016). Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 16. Earlier reflections on Agamben and architecture and urban design were developed in Camillo Boano and Ricardo Martén, ‘Agamben’s Urbanism of Exception: Jerusalem’s Border Mechanics and Biopolitical Strongholds’. Cities 34 (2013): 6–17; Camillo Boano and Benjamin Leclair-Paquet, ‘Potential, Freedom and Space: Reflections on Agamben’s Potentialities in the West Bank’, Space and Polity 18 no. 1 (2014): 1–22. An early version of the section around the ‘use’ in Agamben’s work has been published in Camillo Boano and Giovanna Astolfo, ‘A New Use of Architecture. The Political Potential of Agamben’s Common Use’. ARQ 91 (2015): 15–25. Giorgio Agamben. Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 116–117. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Che cos’e l’atto di creazione?’, in Il Fuoco e il Racconto (Verona: Nottetempo, 2014). The quoted text, in English, is from YouTube, accessed 14 May 2016, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=one7mE-8y9c. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Che cos’e l’atto di creazione?’, in Il Fuoco e il Racconto, (Verona: Nottetempo, 41). Author’s translation. Luca Taddio, ‘L’affermazione metastabile dell’architettura’. Aut Aut 368 (2015): 131–145. Taddio, ‘L’affermazione metastabile dell’architettura’, 140. Author’s translation. Agamben, ‘What is a Destituent Power?’, 46. Taddio, ‘L’affermazione metastabile dell’architettura’, 145.

Philosophical thinking as political praxis

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39

40 41

Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letters to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Sergei Pozorov, Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 33. Luca Serafini, Inoperosità: Heiddeger nel dibattito Francese Contemporaneo (Macerata: Mimesis, 2013). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 62 [71]. In Means Without End, such central argument is further developed around the tenets that human beings as potential beings have no proper ergon (work) but they are argos, without opera, inoperative. Therefore, politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperativity of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 62. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 62. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 104. Agamben, Nudities, 104. Agamben, Nudities, 104. Agamben, Nudities, 105. Agamben, Nudities, 111. This operation takes the name, in more recent texts, of profanation; it implies the neutralization of what is profaned, which loses its aura of sacrality and is restored to use, and the creation of a new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, by rendering it inoperative. Carlo Salzani, Introduzione a Giorgio Agamben (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 2013). Agamben, The Time that Remains, 25. Carlo Salzani, ‘Inoperative/deactivation’, in The Agamben Dictionary, ed. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 107. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 98. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasms in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasms in Western Culture, 38. Certainly influenced by his personal and intellectual engagement with Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Agamben suggests that in the ‘spectacle […] in which we are now living, in which everything is exhibited in its separation from itself, then spectacle and consumption are the two sides of a single impossibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given over to consumption or to spectacular exhibition and […] the irrevocable loss of all use.’ As such this empties out what Marx termed the use value of commodities, leaving in place empty forms, freed from the need to be useful and thus available for a new, non-utilitarian, use. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 83–84. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte, The Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 199. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 55–56. Agamben, The Coming Community, 24–25. Agamben, Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics, 116–117. Aristotle, in Politics, argues that ‘with every article of property there is a double way of using it; both uses are related to the article itself, but not related to it in the same manner – one is peculiar to the thing and the other is not peculiar to it. Take for example a shoe – there is its wear as a shoe and there is its use as an article of exchange; for both are ways of using a shoe, inasmuch as even he that barters a shoe for money or food with the customer that wants a shoe uses it as a shoe, though not for the use peculiar to a shoe, since shoes have not come into existence for the purpose of barter.’ Aristotle, Politics [1257a] [1]. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 21, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1944). The proper use and the free use represent the political message of resistance suggested by Agamben. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 26. Salzani, Introduzione a Giorgio Agamben, 152–153. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). In The Idea of Prose Agamben explains: ‘by the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life’ (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 28. The form-of-life of the Franciscans is an existence outside the law, or an existence for which the body of the individual can never be captured by the legal arrangement, a non-available body. For the Franciscans a form of economic life or a form of legal life does not exist; rather, there is simply a formof-life that makes appropriation impossible and enables use only. Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi (Verona: Neri Pozza, 2014). Aristotle, Politics, [1254a] [1].

75

Camillo Boano

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50

Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 35. Author’s translation. Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 130. Author’s translation. Anke Snoek, Agamben’s Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom Beyond Subordination (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 30. Agamben, Stanzas, 36–37. Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 2000), vii. Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy, viii. Clare Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, Agamben (London: Polity Press, 2016), 35. Roberto Esposito, ‘German Philosophy, French Theory and Italian Thoughts’, in Differenze Italiane. Politica e Filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti, ed. Dario Gentile and Elettra Stimilli (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2015), 12. David Kishik, The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas. Word and Phantasms in Western Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Agamben, Giorgio. The Idea of Prose. New York: SUNY Press, 1995. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letters to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Agamben, Giorgio. Nudities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Agamben, Giorgio. L’uso dei corpi. Verona: Neri Pozza, 2014. Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What is a destituent power?’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 no. 1 (2014): 65–74. Agamben, Giorgio. Il fuoco e il racconto. Roma: Nottetempo, 2014. Aristotle. Politics. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1944. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0058. Attell, Kevin. Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Boano, Camillo and Benjamin Leclair-Paquet. ‘Potential, Freedom and Space: Reflections on Agamben’s Potentialities in the West Bank’. Space and Polity 18 no. 1 (2014): 1–22. Boano, Camillo and Ricardo Martén. ‘Agamben’s Urbanism of Exception: Jerusalem’s Border Mechanics and Biopolitial Strongholds’. Cities 34 (2013): 6–17. Boano, Camillo and Giorgio Talocci. ‘Agamben’s Gesture of Profanation and the Politics of Play in Urban Design’. Design Philosophy Papers 12 no. 1 (2014): 59–90. Ciccarelli, Roberto. ‘Abitare l’immanenza. Logica, storia e politica di un concetto nel pensiero italiano’. In Differenze Italiane. Politica e Filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti, edited by Dario Gentile and Elettra Stimilli, 150–169. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2015. Colebrook, Clare and Jason Maxwell. Agamben. London: Polity Press, 2016. Esposito, Roberto. ‘German Philosophy, French Theory and Italian Thoughts’. In Differenze Italiane. Politica e Filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti, edited by Dario Gentile and Elettra Stimilli, 9–15. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2015. Kishik, David. The Power of Life. Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Murray, Alex and Jessica Whyte. The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pozorov, Sergei. Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Reed, Patricia. ‘The Politics of I Can …’. In Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, edited by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, 78–89. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

76

Philosophical thinking as political praxis

Salzani, Carlo. ‘Inoperative/deactivation’. In The Agamben Dictionary, edited by Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte, 106–108. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Salzani, Carlo. Introduzione a Giorgio Agamben. Genoa: Il Melangolo, 2013. Serafini, Luca. Inoperosità: Heiddeger nel dibattito Francese Contemporaneo. Macerata: Mimesis, 2013. Snoek, Anke. Agamben’s Joyful Kafka. Finding Freedom Beyond Subordination. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Taddio, Luca. ‘L’affermazione metastabile dell’architettura’. Aut Aut 368 (2015): 131–145.

77

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out, installation at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 19 November 2008 – 2 February 2009. Digitalimage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence ©Photo SCALA, Florence.

Chapter 8

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures in architecture?1 Hélène Frichot

Slow languorous limbs floating near gravity free in viscous wonder as lazy globules of saturated colour in warm tones spill across surfaces. Patches of colour and light pulsate amorphously. Soft objects in liquid suspension brush by bare arms. A glowing luminescence, a womb-like throbbing soundtrack sends a signifying reverberation through the viscera. A gentle hum, a self-satisfied oneness with the world. Haecceity – a hereness, a nowness – a suchness, surfeit of immanence. Burbling univocity, substantial self-sameness. Dream-like and colour drenched, auto-affective bliss. Swooning jouissance. Here I am in perpetual sensorial suspension, lying on my back in communion with an all-engulfing world bearing witness to Pipilotti Rist’s Gravity Be My Friend (2007) at the contemporary museum of art Magasin III, Stockholm.2 What I offer in opening is an insufficient post-affective description captured from an engagement with the immersive worlds of Pipilotti Rist; post-affective because I now tell my story after the affective fact of these pre-conscious arousals. Arising from my supine position upon the soft shagpile that is part of the exhibition installation, having taken in Rist’s blissful soft visions, I want to relate a story of the temporal collapse of critical theory amidst the rise of affect and sensation, and how ‘this thing called theory’ gets caught in a non-critical quagmire. Specifically, I want to address these concerns from the perplexing perspective of what Elizabeth Grosz in an essay from 15 years ago has called a ‘feminist future’, in order to reflect on the contemporary present that her future has subsequently become. For Grosz, the feminist future directs itself less toward memory and history than toward a reorientation of thinking around problems.3 It is about remaining open to the force and pull of the future, which is projected as radically open,

79

Hélène Frichot

a projection that specifically does not rely on the past or the present as a blueprint for what is to come. Grosz develops this argument by reading Gilles Deleuze reading Henri Bergson, whose concepts of duration and élan vital play a vital role, alongside Deleuze’s discussions of the virtual and the actual, the possible and the real. With these conceptual aids Grosz challenges the assumption that the new, the radically open future, should be based on what we already know. Yet what quietly emerges in her account is a behindthe-scenes tension between everyday political struggles and this radical orientation toward the future, with the risk that a politics of the present and its vicissitudes is overlooked, not to mention the obligations and requirements that secure us to our immanent locations. What is happening in this opening toward a future, what things are gathering, waiting for their voices to be heard? Grosz installs a caesura, an atemporal gap to secure a future that is different in kind from the past and the present, and what I want to ask here is how far this gap creates opportunities for the lure of affective visions that waylay a capacity for criticality, instead over-determining the ways in which we think and thereby act in worlds. Immersive environments play a central role in Sylvia Lavin’s 2011 book Kissing Architecture, where she celebrates the wonder of a new medium that is specifically ‘postfeminist’ and suffused with ‘intense affect’.4 This is a wondrous hybrid medium that she names ‘superarchitecture’, not for its super human, or even more than human capacities, which might be interesting in terms of offering some insight into the so-called ‘nonhuman turn’,5 but rather as a play on how moving images are ‘superimposed’ onto unremarkable architectural surfaces. I opened with an account of immersive affectivity so as to highlight connections Lavin makes between affect and post-feminism when she herself encounters the work of Pipilotti Rist. This too can be seen as a variety of feminist, or rather a post-feminist future, wherein a political project is deemed to be completed, giving way to the pleasures aroused through affect. Kissing Architecture is a slight book, lightweight, hot pink, transportable and immediately affective, which makes it extremely dangerous because it is designed to seduce. The kiss between architecture and other media, we are told, produces spaces of sociability that can make us feel good about politics and political engagement, and even, finally, about the possibility of ethical action. Affect plays a central role, and Lavin cites the usual suspects Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi in passing. But what I want to stress is the emergence of affective atmospheres in architecture, and how these inaugurate a post-feminist moment, ‘certainly postfeminist’ Lavin assures us.6 It is important to note Lavin’s role in earlier debates concerning the uses and abuses of architectural theory, which anticipated by a good 12 years the, by now surely exhausted, critical versus projective discussion signed by the likes of Sarah Whiting, Robert Somol and the questionable Michael Speaks (Kissing Architecture is published in a series edited by Whiting). Twenty years before Kissing Architecture, in 1990, Lavin expresses her distaste for the veritable ‘theory frenzy’ she discovers herself in the midst of, and seeks to draw a firm line between such theoretical paradigms as feminism, structuralism and deconstruction, on the one side, and design histories and processes, and design proper, going so far as to suggest that ‘critical architectural theory is oxymoronic’.7 Feminisms in this earlier essay are firmly rooted on the side of extraneous

80

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures

concerns, for Lavin. Instead, she forwards a disciplinary call to order, which has been heard loud and clear in the subsequent turn to design research. This position is further forwarded with the insistence that theory should only ever be deployed as an attendant to making practices, and here Lavin lauds intuition and inspiration, and even recommends ‘personal inconsistency’.8 With the publication of Kissing Architecture, it would seem that Lavin has faultlessly followed her own earlier prescription: the theory content is carefully moderated and always applied as secondary support to descriptions of affective architectural relays, and there is a light touch with respect to such problematic if not exhausted proper names as Deleuze, although she has contravened her own prohibition in mentioning such French signature thinkers. A good decade before Lavin’s Kissing Architecture, but a decade after her earlier laments about the ‘theory-go-round’ in architecture (1990), a collection of essays entitled Deleuze and Feminist Theory was published and this is where Elizabeth Grosz’s reflections on feminist futures can be found. The collection, part of the ongoing Deleuze Connections series, also included the names of thinkers who have subsequently been taken up in architectural discourse, even if only peripherally, most notably Grosz, but also Rosi Braidotti and Verena Andermatt Conley. In the biographical statements at the back of the volume, Grosz explicitly states that she has shifted her own research agenda toward architectural theory, no doubt she was close to completing her book Architecture from the Outside (with a foreword by Peter Eisenman).9 I want to make a point of this publication date, 2000, because it was another era; an entirely other mood prevailed at the anxiously anticipated threshold of a new millennium. The gathered scholars were emerging out of the mood of the 1990s, writing from the vastly different perspective of a pre-9/11 world, a location within which ‘theory’ was not yet suffering so many of the troubles it was to be subsequently assailed by, especially in architecture. The 1990s is also the heyday of the ANY (Architecture New York) series of conferences and publications where Grosz frequently appears as an invited guest, the prehistory to the now popular and essayistic Log journal edited by Cynthia Davidson. What is remarkable, and telling with respect to architecture’s traffic in ideas, is that within just 10 years, by 2010/2011, Grosz confesses that she has exhausted all there is to say about architecture and Deleuze.10 If we sustain this millennial mood a little longer – and ‘mood’ is the operative term here, so fittingly deployed for instance in such influential essays as Whiting and Somol’s Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism;11 mood also because it is by the circulation of affect that mood is procured – what Grosz wants to hold open amidst this millennial mood is an atemporal gap of potentiality between perception and memory, between action and recollection, a caesura that unhinges the future from the past, and from our tendency to project by way of prediction and probability. In her essay ‘Histories of a Feminist Future’, also published in 2000, Grosz speaks of this as clearing a conceptual space for an ‘indeterminable future’, one that does not divulge itself to futurology. She claims that this ‘future yet to be made, is the very lifeblood of political struggle, the goal of a feminist struggle’,12 and yet, according to Grosz’s formulation of temporality, this goal cannot be set up as some predetermined telos. It cannot, by definition, be specified in advance.

81

Hélène Frichot

Grosz’s atemporal ‘zone of indetermination’, which is interpellated between sensation (composed of blocks of affect and percept) and action,13 requires a radical openness to a future into which no goal can be securely projected. Somehow, in the lag between sensation and action, with action conceived as a form of political praxis, theory might just lead us into more liberatory political and spatial relations, if we are so lucky. Within this atemporal interstice Grosz urges an ‘openness to what befalls us’, which is also an ethical attitude, and the next Deleuzian step in this formula would be to make oneself worthy of the unprecedented events that do so befall us.14 Yet, we must pause to ask about the diagrams of power that create these unexpected opportunities, as Doreen Massey writes, the real socio-political question concerns less, perhaps, the degree of openness/closure … than the terms on which that openness/closure is established. Against what are boundaries erected? What are the relations within which the attempt to deny (and to admit) entry is carried out? What are the power-geometries here; and do they demand a political response?15 From the midst of affect-driven events, how does one grapple with the elusiveness of mood and the rise of ‘experience economies’ that become increasingly capable of managing the affect that arouses us? How does one not fall instead into an acritical vortex of luxurious sensation that precariously holds together ‘whatever subjectivities’?16 How can the feminist futures Grosz promises be sought after? Now these experience economies I mention, enthusiastically coined by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, chime in remarkable unison with Lavin’s rhetoric in Kissing Architecture. Beyond extracting commodities, making goods, delivering services, there is, they argue, a fourth economic offering, and that is the temporal unfolding of the staging of experiences, for a premium price. To stage an experience requires the development of design principles, and Pine and Gilmore explain that ‘experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level’.17 What they do not explain, but what can be inferred, is the economic implication of scaling up experiences to procure ephemeral events of being together, achieved through the design of ‘richer experiences’, and here Lavin’s ‘superarchitectures’ would appear to fit the bill. Let’s return to Lavin: it turns out that temporality is also at work in Kissing Architecture, where Lavin affirms that ‘Superarchitecture … is architecture in contact with incommensurable forms of time, movement, and immateriality that coalesce to produce socially enveloping and therefore political effects’.18 This abrupt shift in the last quarter of Kissing Architecture, which introduces the reader to a possible politics, is an unexpected move. In fact, it presents itself as a rather sensitive point in the text. The pressing together, the kissing of moving image and mute architecture, which looks like a convincing formula for the procurement of experience economies, is suddenly supposed to open up a space where visitors gather around to apprehend another kind of projection, or rather a project, a political one. Here too an atemporal caesura of sorts

82

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures

offers a moment of opportunity. The presumption is that through the mixing of media of moving image and architecture, disaffected museumgoers and jaded urbanites will be shaken from their disenfranchised slumbers.19 The problem, which Lavin seems to have overlooked, is that a mere gathering neither amounts to a social occasion, nor a politics, rather the risk of an appeasement, and even disavowal by way of the distractions of intense affect. When it comes to the noopolitical (noo, for nous or mind) management of captured attention, collective memory and social relations at the scale of populations, there is always the risk, as Maurizio Lazzarato argues, that the ‘being together’ of emergent publics lends itself promptly to exploitation, as Pine and Gilmore have eagerly discovered.20 Lavin’s ambitious and hopeful political projection of felicitous social gatherings would be all very well if her book did not conclude with its ‘urgent call’ for where the post-feminist future of kissing architectures might take us. Her project concludes with a call for the reinvention of experience through the exercise of architecture’s potential power, the diagramming of a politics toward urgent ethical action: but for what, and for whom?21 Awakening from my supine position, I wonder how quickly I will be ready for such action. I should explain that in viewing Pipilotti Rist’s Gravity Be My Friend I must consume this experience lying flat on my back. So now I need to prop myself up in order to ask what kind of collective experience is being managed and toward what ends? How will this process of subjectivation that composes my precarious position for the meantime, and alongside the other museumgoers, not instead be captured by the ubiquitous insistence of experience economies? As Claire Colebrook argues in her essays on extinction, while we need to remain open to the fleeting pleasures of sensation, we also need to be able to link sensation into broader networks of selfhood and significance, including, I would add, political significance.22 The risk that Colebrook identifies is that fleeting sensation, an over-consumption of multi-media stimuli, is ‘taking over twenty-first century neural architecture’.23 This leads me finally to the issue of critical feminist theories and practices in architecture and whatever happened to Deleuzian feminist futures (in architecture). It is in relation to affect theory specifically that the questions I raise are to be considered, including the many connections between affect theory and so-called new materialism. As I promise in my title, I want to track whatever it is that has happened to Deleuzian feminist futures, in order to consider the current status of feminist theories and practices specific to our discipline, architecture. There persists a necessarily cautious ambivalence with respect to how to think with Deleuze and Guattari, across the unwieldy, multifaceted domain of feminist theories, as demonstrated in the various cautions and promises uttered fifteen years ago in the collected essays of Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Feminist theorists, it should be stressed, were early to pick up on Deleuze’s ethics of difference. In 1994, in the anthology Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Dorothea Olkowski suggests that Deleuze’s project can be fruitful to feminists in that it provides the means of challenging hegemonic images of thought (read, the normative status quo), and over-determined performances of subjectivity.24 Even earlier than this, in the mid 1980s, the architect Jennifer Bloomer can be located

83

Hélène Frichot

as a notable precursor working across architectural theory and practice, not only providing an early reception of Deleuze, but seeing no need to be faithful to him alone, as Karen Burns has argued recently in her contribution to Deleuze and Architecture.25 What of the projected future and its projects, which have led me to the brief status report I sketch above? After Deleuze, feminist theorists from neo or new materialism, for instance, frequently call on the production of ‘transversal’ movements that can cut across the issues of ‘social constructivism’ and a feminist sociological overemphasis on material, toward something like the conjunctive capacity of a ‘material semiotics’, resounding with Donna Haraway’s insistence on ‘situated knowledges’.26 The enduring challenge is how to avoid the either/or, the double bind of either biological essentialism or social constructivism.27 All of which is to say that an important feminist project has re-emerged in the domain of ‘new materialism’,28 which also implicates affect theory (with necessary cautions issued), including an emphasis on ontological performativity, the processual comportment of sexual differing and, importantly, the issue of how these are made manifest in practices. Still, despite these important developments, I remain uneasy. Because … Feminist practices are still too often accused of being anachronistic, out of time. They are either too early to be recognised (because they are unprecedented - we can think of Bloomer’s early work here – and also because they take as their task the disruption of consensual ways of thinking the present), or else they are discounted for being too late, assumed to have run their course. The problem is the misconception that a feminist project necessarily discovers teleological satisfaction. It is notable that both Grosz and Lavin, coming from distinct temporal moments and disciplines, yet overlapping positions, raise the notion of a post-feminism, exactly as though a feminist project can be overcome, or that we can ‘get over it’. In the opening pages of Kissing Architecture, Lavin is quick to dispel any misguided feminist thinking, she quite simply dispenses with this unhelpful theoretical tendency. Instead, she seeks her resolution not in the oppositional modes of a neo avant-garde, but in a softening, a touching of surfaces, an affective dissolve. Grosz, more cautious, raises the spectre of the ‘post-feminist’ as something of a promise, her resolution desires transgression and radical change. She calls out for a hesitation, followed by a radical leap across a ‘zone of indetermination’, to take us outside of ourselves and away from a memorialised past and the weight of debt toward a pragmatic politics of change, not utopian, not atopian, but specific, located.29 And yet, how exactly do we dispense with our debts, and remove ourselves from the ubiquitous ‘power geometries’ that Massey has warned of? Certainly a shift from the empty enunciation ‘I am a feminist, but …’ into a reconsideration of ethical, political and aesthetic practices is worth considering, but all that is packed into a post-feminist position might need to be unpacked again; because this is not a project with an anticipated expiry date. I need to shift direction now so as to find some means of opening onto a more promising or hopeful conclusion, and so I will turn finally for assistance to the philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers. I have found, over the last several years, Stengers’ discussion of the cosmopolitical relations between diverse even conflictual practices useful, as well as challenging. Stengers’ ecology of practices demands: a respect for the

84

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures

differences between practices, and that no practice should be defined as just like any other, nor should we behave in a condescending or ‘tolerant’ way toward practices we deem less ‘scientific’; seeing practice as a non-neutral tool for thinking through what is happening, which means acknowledging that our concrete practices are apt to make us analyse and construct our worlds in certain ways; that the tools we deploy are less ones that we own, than ones that can be passed from hand to hand, thereby transforming both the situation and the one who handles the tool; the framing of what is happening in a minor key, and in direct response to our local habitat, or ‘environment-world’, from the midst of those issues which immediately confront us; and, finally, never believing we have arrived at an answer once and for all, but maintaining nevertheless an affirmative and not a negative, nor even a deconstructive demeanour.30 Although Stengers’ work is addressed to the sciences, and discussed in the greatest detail across the seven parts of the two volumes of Cosmopolitics, in which she builds on seven problematic landscapes in the sciences, the question of practice and its relation to thinking is one that is shared with architectural theory and practice alike. Practice focuses on local and particular problems, which immanently define a practice’s relations amidst its environment-world or milieu. What is required is an attention to the problems that are confronting us, or, to use Grosz again, to maintain an ‘openness to what befalls us’, including of course the affections that befall a body, with the Spinozist proviso that we acknowledge not a binary construct of body/mind, but a complex one such that ‘mind is an idea of the body and body an object for the mind’31 as a starting point for a new materialist thinking. Now affect here is all very well, and the rise of affect theory needs to be acknowledged especially where it manages to critically assess affective politics and affective economies (which also fall under the moniker of experience economies). Likewise, the considerable work dedicated to new or neo-materialism, especially its explicit feminist strands, and this requires a nod in the direction of those inimitable precursors Deleuze and Guattari, to whom these theoretical tendencies have restored something radical. Finally, I am compelled to ask, how, once the effects of the reciprocating circuit of affecting–affected wears off, and once we have worn thin the non-renewable materials and concepts of our environment-worlds, how do we regain a critical stance that makes no claims on the transcendental, but operates immanently? Stengers, when she seeks to address Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘last enigmatic message’ in her reading of What is Philosophy? argues that we must tirelessly grapple with the ‘habits, settled interests, and the balance of power’, and importantly, acknowledge our obligations and requirements in relation to what I will call feminist practices.32 This suggests a distinct direction from Grosz, who wants to break away from the historical, and too often patriarchal debt of obligations and requirements. As Stengers argues, the challenge is an enduring struggle with the common-sense consensus we inherit before we even begin to think. Furthermore, a ‘public’ or a ‘body politic’, Stengers insists, does not pre-exist but emerges around a problem, not only around an affect, unless the interchange of affecting– affected can be situated in terms of its negative or positive political ramifications. A well-framed question, which assists in the identification and localisation of problems, both requires, and at the same time creates, a localised environment-world of concerns. This returns us once more to concrete (feminist) practices.

85

Hélène Frichot

With Vinciane Despret, well known for her work on animal studies, Stengers has recently published a small volume, entitled Women Who Make a Fuss, the subtitle of which is, The unfaithful daughters of Virginia Woolf. They write, ‘there are stories that need to be ceaselessly reactivated in order to be relayed with new givens and new unknowns’, suggesting a practical leap forward that looks backwards at the same time. This is a superimposition in action that allows contemporary problems to acknowledge their difficult histories. The cry that Stengers and Despret utter, after Woolf, is ‘Think we must’, in order to create and fabulate, and in order to slowly achieve these feminist futures Grosz has promised, which risk being overwhelmed in affective circuits that have lost all their capacity for immanent critique.33 This is a cry, as of Bartleby, or the idiot, or the one who speaks out of time, a cry to slow down emerging from amidst the soothing atmospheres of affect, toward at least a minimum of critical labours directed at contemporary struggles.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

86

I acknowledge Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, where I have the pleasure of thinking and practising alongside: Helen Runting, Bettina Schwalm, Brady Burroughs, Meike Schalk, Maria Ärlemo, Katja Grillner, also Ramia Mazé and Thérèse Kristiansson. It is thanks to them that much of what unfolds below has been rendered possible. I do not make these acknowledgements out of mere collegial politeness, but because they also stand here as an expression of the collective, collaborative ethos of feminist theories and practices that I discuss in this chapter. This work is part of the permanent collection at the contemporary art museum Magasin III, Stockholm. It was reinstalled for the exhibition I’m Still Here, 15 February–14 December 2014, Magasin III, Stockholm. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 216. Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 4. See: Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 4. Sylvia Lavin, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Theory’, Progressive Architecture 71 no. 8 (1990): 114. Lavin, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Theory’, 114. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). A comment made to the author in email correspondence between mid 2010 and 2011. Sarah Whiting and Robert E. Somol, ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Histories of a Feminist Future’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25 no. 4 (2000): 1,017. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 214–234. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 149. Here I specifically thank Helen Runting for alerting me to this quote. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 179. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control’, in Deleuze and the Social, ed. Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 171–190, 179. See: B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press). Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 57. Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 49. Lazzarato, ‘The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control’, 179. Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 113.

Affective encounters amidst feminist futures

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 12. Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 12. Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), 11. Karen Burns, ‘Becomings: Architecture, Feminism, Deleuze – Before and After the Fold’, in Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 15–39. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 104. Dolphijn and Tuin, New Materialism, 138–139. See also Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds, Material Feminisms (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). Grosz, ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future’, 229. See Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, in Cultural Studies Review 11 no. 1 (2005): 183–196; Isabelle Stengers, ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Isabelle Stengers, ‘Wondering About Materialism’, in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011). Dolphijn and Tuin, New Materialism, 152. Isabelle Stengers, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message’, in Angelaki 10 no. 2 (2011): 151–167, 161. Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, trans. April Knutson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Boundas, Constantin and Dorothea Olkowski. ‘Editors’ Introduction’. In Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, edited by Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, 1–22. Abingdon: Routledge, 1994. Burns, Karen. ‘Becomings: Architecture, Feminism, Deleuze – Before and After the Fold’. In Deleuze and Architecture, edited by Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, 15–39. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin, eds. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future’. In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by Claire Colebrook, 214–234. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Histories of a Feminist Future’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25 no. 4 (2000): 1,017–1,021. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Lavin, Sylvia. ‘The Uses and Abuses of Theory’. Progressive Architecture 71 no. 8 (1990): 113–114. Lavin, Sylvia. Kissing Architecture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Lazzarato, Maurizio. ‘The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control’. In Deleuze and the Social, edited Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorenson, 171–190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Pine, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’. In Cultural Studies Review 11 no. 1 (2005): 183–196. Stengers, Isabelle. ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994–1,003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

87

Hélène Frichot

Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics II. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message’. In Angelaki 10 no. 2 (2011): 151–167. Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Wondering About Materialism’. In The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, 368–380. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. Stengers Isabelle and Vinciane Despret. Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf. Translated by April Knutson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Whiting, Sarah and Robert E. Somol. ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’. Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77.

88

Chapter 9

Repositioning. The after(s) and the end(s) of theory Deborah Hauptmann

Theory, perhaps most particularly ‘this thing called architecture theory’, does seem to remain ever problematic to itself. Yet, at the This Thing Called Theory conference held in Leeds in 2015, amongst the many international contributors there were no apologists amongst them and little need to legitimise theory’s necessity. In offering an opening keynote, I prepared a series of reflections on moments in history where the discipline of theory was challenged and also where it spontaneously emerged. This repositioning offers a partial view on those reflections. Many will recall that, in approaching the turn of the millennia, terms such as ‘after’ and ‘end’ began to illuminate the horizons of book titles, papers, conferences, symposia and the like. Just to name a few: as early as 1990 there came Thomas Docherty’s After Theory: Postmoderninsm/Postmarxism; Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art emerged in 1998; and John Law and John Hassard’s Actor Network Theory and After of 1999. Then, for a moment there seemed to be a pause, perhaps even a reprieve. Yet, just a few years later – a few short years after the turn of the millennium failed to produce a failure – similar cries once again rang out; for instance: Terry Eagleton’s much commented on After Theory, and Jacques Derrida’s Life After Theory, both of 2004. Closer to architecture, Michael Speaks had launched a sustained indictment of traditional theory – meaning, of course, what many once referred to as critical theory – with numerous articles on what he referred to as ‘design intelligence’ in a + u, AD, and Architectural Record between 2001 and 2005. Conferences and symposia were organised to address this seemingly most pressing of issues as well, of which two notable events were sponsored by the journal Critical Inquiry: the first held in Chicago in

89

Deborah Hauptmann

the Spring of 2003, entitled ‘The Future of Theory’, followed by a symposium the following year in Beijing entitled ‘The Ends of Theory’. In October 2006, the Department of English at the University of York held a conference paradoxically entitled ‘Theory After Theory’. This perhaps to indicate that theory was, in fact, not yet dead at all, but merely transforming and thus questioning the manner in which it might persist or continue, that is, to be relevant. Of course, the turning point of this era – the end of philosophy and beginning of theory – long preceded the millennium turn, and it came to be known simply by the spatio-temporal designator 1968. I find that when we inquire into this history of theory, of architecture discourse, we cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure, qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of making, were invented – ones that profoundly modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time, ones that were combined with a reflexivity within certain texts and certain buildings that rendered them somehow indefinitely open in and of themselves, and in which there appeared something radically other and, more importantly, something that would be linked to an increasingly urgent meditation on writing, exemplified perhaps most succinctly in what Derrida called grammatology. Not the word, as such, but the affirmation of the word in a new form of writing; not the object, as such, but a radical astonishment when faced with the presence of very small, very modest and intimate things. Nineteensixties literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’ de-sanctioning of the biographically centric author, or the removal of authority form the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ of 1967, or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality in ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ of 1969. These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomenon and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and, further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories transformed thinking in architecture. For instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in 1973 in the first issue of Oppositions. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. This spatio-temporal moment designated both a past and a future; or rather a point in time where the past–future distinction dissolves, where the past seems accessible from every direction and the future appears to flow back towards us from that turning point; that which once represented itself as the end of philosophy, the moment of theory, that once beginning of the turn whose unforeseeable effects we have not yet fully deciphered. It is as if a limit had been crossed and we were, perhaps we even remain, confronted with a great interval: a duration of consistency now running 50 years, and then, yet another century further. I am recalling an unfolding that took place against the philosophical and aesthetic background of Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud, of Manet and Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy, Ruskin and Wölfflin, of Wright and Corbusier; a background in itself referring to an unprecedented scientific, economic and technical mutation. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now tacitly, impalpably takes

90

The after(s) and the end(s) of theory

place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, JeanFrancois Lyotard, Georges Bataille and, of course, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The importance of the radically original works of the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus; and Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange of Death. The philosophies to which they were responding – or believed they were eulogising – were primarily those which had dominated through German discourse of the generation they had inherited, being Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other. In other words, a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics; and these as they extend directly to Nietzsche and Freud and even, at the extremes, to Kant, Hegel and Husserl, amongst others. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another underpinning can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing, as Michael Hays has expressed it, which culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ of 1977 argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as selfconstituting, as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Over the following decades the dismissal of architecture theory became more and more prevalent in discourses that posited foundational philosophies – whether leaning on Kant, Marx and Hegel, or Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Challenges came, as well, to theories that relied on binaries such as nature versus culture, theory versus praxis, essentialism versus social constructionism, as they appeared no longer adequate to analyse, much less to think, the complexity of our current state of affairs. Challenges to the notion of will as previously tied to either the centred subject, or, with Marx, to the masses, have resulted in a so-called loss of agency, which, on one side, annihilates the agency of the individual in relation to politics or actor theories, and, on the other, the universality of the collective whether through class-consciousness or the invisible hand of the market. And yet, over the past several decades we have seen two areas of thinking remain highly resilient: on the one hand, a political turn in culture which subsumes ethics as tied to politics and theories of action; and, on the other, aesthetics as tied to new forms of knowledge and media in what became commonly referred to as the aestheticisation of politics. On this point, W. J. T. Mitchell has noted that new challenges to criticism and theory are precisely due to new forms of knowledge production and aesthetic experimentation. Of these, while the first clearly sits in the sixties movement against philosophy, the second – already announced in 1979 by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge – has emerged as particularly

91

Deborah Hauptmann

significant in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ theoretical agendas. While the sub-title to Lyotard’s seminal work often seems to be neglected, it was nevertheless with this work that Lyotard was asked to produce a report on the then current state of knowledge and information as it related to the sciences. It was here that the question of legitimation was raised with regard to technology, or, as Jameson saw it, ‘technocracy and the control of knowledge and information’.1 Both the computer (Lyotard’s cognitive regime of phrases) and the Panopticon (Foucault’s regime of truth) exemplify mechanisms that both function, or act, as devices created by man, for the use of man, as well as machines for inscribing emergent forms of social reality. Lyotard observed that both producers and users of knowledge (knowledge systems) would, in the new technological age, have to possess or acquire means of translating whatever they wished to learn or create into these new computational languages or forms of communication. He referred to this as the hegemony of computers, which come with a specific logic of production and thus specific sets of prescriptions determining which statements can be accepted as knowledge statements. In 2003 the New York Times published a review of the 2003 Chicago held Critical Inquiry symposium mentioned above entitled, ‘The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn’t Matter’. Mitchell responds by writing that the word missing from this Times title is ‘immediately’; theory, he suggests, may not seem to matter ‘immediately’, but, in fact, over the long haul it certainly does. He cites numerous examples: Henry Luis Gates, Jr, whose work profoundly transformed the discussion of race in the US; Stanley Fish, whose work affected both literary and legal interpretations; and Sander Gilman, who greatly influenced the relation of thinking between the humanities and medicine. With Mitchell’s insistence on the word immediately, he opens up the question of how theory might be said to articulate the present which is later articulated in what he would a year later refer to as ‘medium theory’. Of course, a meditation on the immediate, immediacy, also brings us to thinking the non-immediate, the long durée of Bergson and the meditations on the continuous and the discrete. The end(s) of theory in this sense, realised a thinking-between: thinking between, for instance, science and society, between ‘matters of fact and matters of concern’. I am, of course, now referring to Bruno Latour and his assertion that the examination of details, no matter how numerous or complex, will never plausibly lead to social explanations, and belief that if the critical mind is to renew itself, it may well require the cultivation of, with William James, a ‘stubbornly realist attitude’.2 Neo-pragmatism … almost. Whether one thinks in terms of linguistic tropes or in terms of social constructivism, architecture discourse has recognised that the privileged position of theory as established in the final decades of the twentieth century had substantially shifted. Many protagonists, by way of a revisiting of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries American Pragmatism, launched one such after-theory pronouncement. And this, rightly or wrongly, was often delivered in conjunction with a most unfortunate term, which came to be known simply as post-critical-thinking. Both in the US and in Europe we simultaneously witnessed a rise of anti-intellectualism from out of the architectural court. The anti-intellectual stances that were propagated were highly seductive for many architects, students and design departments. But the designer as savant, entrusted in

92

The after(s) and the end(s) of theory

the hands of the architectural-elite, led directly to the potential for these practitioners to become tools of an economic-elite and servants to technocratic positivism. A position, a practice that depended primarily on two strategies: data-based legislation and experiencebased nominalism, predicted, as indicated above, by Lyotard and emphasised by Jameson in his critique of high capitalism. With this current we saw within the theoretical discourse a leaning on the early work of the pragmatist philosopher William James and, later, that of the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty over and against the French PostStructuralism of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, for instance. At first glance the reasons appeared obvious: on the one side, continental philosophy’s (Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism) apparent inability to come to terms with the specificity of the contemporary predicament, i.e. the loss of traditional value and the absence of a cohesive direction; on the other, pragmatism – rooted in democracy and provocation or entrepreneurial capitalism and the rights of the individual, the individual body over the social collective and, of course, power – political and economic – and its apparent ability to address this very predicament. Such thinking indirectly resulted in a techno-managerial disposition towards the production of architectural ideas and things. Such thinking advocated the potential of the architect as entrepreneurial, free and quick, ideas-oriented, market-oriented thinker. Such techno-managerial optimism argues that theory’s utopian aspirations can never be realised by the slow, moral theory of the past, but only by the new entrepreneurs and managers in the fast-globalised marketplace. The post-critical position notes that even criticality has become commoditised and standardised, and promotes practice itself as the new site for development of ideas. For instance, as indicated by a few examples of early pragmatist tenets: an obsession with mobility, contingency and financial liquidity combined with a deep moralistic impulse, impatience with static theories and analytical philosophies, alongside ingenious technological innovation; and this again combined with political strategies of compromise, and personal requirements for comfort and convenience. This is what Henry James called the hotel civilisation – with its fusion of the uncertainty of the capitalist market and its quest for the security of the home. Cornel West, in his 1989 The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, describes this as yielding an ingenious mode of thought that ‘subordinates knowledge to power, tradition to invention, instruction to provocation, community to personality, and immediate problems to utopian possibilities’.3 The neo-pragmatist position privileges concrete effects over abstract ideals; which, problematically, opens a tendency towards instrumental reason. Pragmatism, primarily a middle-class discourse, was difficult to convincingly revive in contemporary neo-liberal societies that in many ways have been effectively doing away with the middle class. It was precisely at this intersection of late capitalism’s privileged individual and its deported collective that the question of value within pragmatism might have been re-envisioned and taken into a more inclusive theory of action. The question, however, remains as to whether a new form of pragmatism can extend beyond the seeming freedom of individual rights to political responsibility? In other words, even with the few examples of pragmatist tenets as mentioned above, might we recognise what seems to be two sides of pragmatism: one, progressive and aesthetic, which we embrace as

93

Deborah Hauptmann

exemplar for the condition of post-critical thinking as well as one, moral and ethical, which the anti-theorist of the nineties and early two-thousands remained hard pressed to address. West, in the introduction to The American Evasion of Philosophy, offers an observation that reads as if it could easily be delivered today: In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.4 It should be clear to any academic that changes in research paradigms that seemed not long ago to loom on a distant horizon have now become imminent. The questions still being asked are how have the notions of criticism, critique and theory changed in this epoch of prevention and accountability and in this current state of what many continue to refer to as crisis? And what, then, must be the role of architecture theory with regard to the complexities of the global environment, geo-economics, politics and public life? It appears to me that the After(s) and the End(s) of theory – the End of (German) Philosophy, the Beginning of (French) Theory, and the millennium’s End of (Continental and AngloAmerican) Theory – did not successfully eulogise the passing of previous eras, but, on the contrary, when combined, formed a sustained and substantial critique. It also seems to me that the past decades’ advances have had little to do with forgetting and much to do with remembering, but this, perhaps leaning on Heidegger, we might recall is what calls for thinking. So, perhaps it was not an end to theory, but an end to thinking without action. That is, if thinking can still be grasped as a bursting and an overflow that speaks, a grasping that does not fix thought within a singular mode of thinking. Perhaps it is this that we have witnessed in this moment in Leeds; an encounter with a renewed call to thinking clearly evinced in the diversity of research, concepts and ideas that were presented in the autumn of 2015 at This Thing Called Theory.

Notes 1 2

3 4

94

Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard, vii–xxi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), viii. Latour argues that social critiques, to regain focus and credibility, must embrace empiricism, and insist on the ‘cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude – to speak like William James’. Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–248, 231. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 5. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 4.

The after(s) and the end(s) of theory

Bibliography Agrest, Diana and Mario Gandelsonas. ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’. Oppositions 1 (1973): 93–100. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. In Image, Music, Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, [1968] 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE Publications, [1976] 1993. Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. I. New York: Viking Penguin, [1972] 1977. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1980] 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Docherty, Thomas. After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism. New York: Routledge, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Eakin, Emily. ‘The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn’t Matter’. New York Times, April 19, 2003. Accessed 27 June 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/19/books/the-latest-theory-is-that-theorydoesn-t-matter.html. Elliott, Jane and Derek Attridge, eds. Theory After ‘Theory’. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Foucault, Michel. ‘Truth and Power’. In Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–133. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Foreword’. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard, vii–xxi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Word, Dialog and Novel’. In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 34–61. New York: Columbia University Press, [1969] 1986. Latour, Bruno. ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Critical Inquiry 30 no. 2 (2004): 225–248. Law, John and John Hassard, eds. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Lyotard, Jean-Françoise. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, [1979] 1984. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. ‘The Future of Criticism: A Critical Inquiry Symposium’. Critical Inquiry 30 no. 2 (2004). Mitchell, W. J. T. ‘Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium’. Critical Inquiry 30 no. 2 (2004): 324–335. Mitchell, W. J. T. and Wang Ning. ‘The Ends of Theory: The Beijing Symposium on Critical Inquiry’. Critical Inquiry 31 no. 2 (2005): 265–270. Payne, Michael and John Schad, eds. Life After Theory: Jacques Derrida, Toril Moi, Frank Kermode and Christopher Norris. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Speaks, Michael. ‘Architectural Theory and Education at the Millennium: Part 3. Theory Practice and Pragmatism’. A+U: Architecture and Urbanism 372 no. 9 (2001): 19–24. Speaks, Michael. ‘Design Intelligence: Or Thinking after the Ends of Metaphysics’. AD Architectural Design 72 no. 5 (2002): 4–6. Speaks, Michael. ‘After Theory: Debate in Architectural Schools Rages about the Value of Theory and Its Effect on Innovation in Design’. Architectural Record 193 no.6 (2005): 72–75. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

95

This page intentionally left bank

Part III Beyond the image

Hans Bol, Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (recto).

Chapter 10

Drawing Jerusalem Notes on Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd (1575) Andrew Benjamin

Presentation Drawing becomes drawings. If there is a line through drawing it divides, yielding differing though related concerns. The task here is to allow two of those concerns a productive intersection. The first concern, while having a form of generality insofar as what it brings up for consideration is the inscription of futural possibilities into the present, arises from the description of architecture and building that can be located in Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews 11:10 and which pertains to descriptions of what can designated as the cityto-come. In the Letter Paul describes how the nomadic Abraham envisaged a better future. Paul writes that Abraham ‘was awaiting [ἐξεδέχετο] the city [πόλιν] that has foundations, whose architect and builder [τεχνίτης καὶ δημιουργὸς] was God’. The importance of this formulation, at least at the outset, resides in what it does not do. It does not address, at least directly, any actually existing city. Its point of orientation is the city-to-come (this ‘to come’ quality is clear from the use of the formulation τὴν μέλλουσαν at a later stage in the Letter, specifically at 13:14).1 The cityto-come will house the community to come. What is significant, however, is that this coming city will also be both named and drawn. (This ‘also’ is not an arbitrary addition.) In being named, it sets the problem of how the relation between Jerusalem and a heavenly Jerusalem is to be understood.2 To the extent that the distinction is textual, then, firstly, the actual Jerusalem becomes the locus of possible transformations, while, secondly, the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ became the exemplary instance.3 It is in relation to

99

Andrew Benjamin

that other city that Augustine in both the De Civitate Dei and the Enarrationes in Psalmos, for example, sets up a distinction between other cities (e.g. Rome) and differing conceptions of human earthly life and their heavenly correlate such that the latter provides the criteria for the former’s judgment.4 Indeed, it is possible to go further and begin to show in what way the structure of monastic life is predicated upon a form of negotiation with the distinction between the actual and the heavenly.5 At work within these differing textual possibilities, which when taken together establish a limit, is what might be more aptly formulated in terms of a complex interrelation in which there is a conception of an architectural future, the city-to-come, that is coterminous with an absent image.6 It is essential to note that it is an absent image and not a prohibited one. It is the image to come and thus the future as that which is always yet to be given an image. While an image may be invited, in the precise sense that the city-to-come elicits both images and forms of representation, to the extent that they are not already present means that what endures is the way that texts envisage a future, where that future has yet to attain the status of an image. This changes, of course, in the move from text to drawing. Hence the absent image brings the second concern into play. And here caution is necessary if only to allow for the complexities that are brought with the move to the image to be expressed with some clarity. If the first concern is with the city-to-come, a concern that brings the relation between the actual and the potential with it, then the next stage in the progression of this possibility is a link between that which is to come and its having an image. Were this to occur, then the elicited image, the image of a futural possibility, would have attained actuality. There are at least three elements involved here. In the first instance there is the move from textual possibility to image. The city-to-come becomes an image; in the analysis to follow it has become a drawing. Secondly, there is the related question of the demands that any image brings with it in terms of its interpretation. Again precision is necessary: what is meant by interpretation in this context pertains to the complex set of relations that hold between acts of interpretation and the differing ways the object’s interpretability is envisaged. Both occur within the interpretive act. They define it. And yet problems endure. Difficulties with the relation between image and interpretation can be located at a number of different levels. From the beginning they occur due to the problems that arise from the ease of generalizing across all images. (Indeed, even the word image brings its own set of attendant difficulties with it.7) Generalization leads to a situation in which all images are, as a result of that process, the same. If, as a methodological move, what is resisted is the generalizing tendency that results in forms of conflation in which genre, materiality and content – the latter is a term that needs to be recast in terms of the in-forming of form – are not even subject to questioning but simply effaced, then what emerges as a consequence is the need to take up particularity as a question. Repositioning particularity in this way, namely as a question rather than as the merely given, becomes necessary precisely because particularity, the conjecture is, names the locus in which genre, materiality and content attain forms of precision. Here, then, is the link to drawing since within such a setting what arises is the need to allow for drawing itself to emerge as a question with its own particularity.

100

Drawing Jerusalem

The third element is the retention of the effective presence of the potential/ actual relation. It should be noted that its presence as a relation is fundamental to how a project centred on a repositioning of drawing comes to be formulated. It occurs in two interconnected ways. In the first instance it can be argued that the very notion of the city-to-come has to be understood as a potentiality. The image it attains is, of course, on one level, the actualization of a potentiality, to which it should be added that the relation between potentiality and actuality is a relation of indetermination insofar as the resultant actualized image is not the only determined outcome. There is always the possibility of other determinations. The presence of a relation in which there is an actualization and yet where any one actualization neither exhausts nor fulfils a potentiality is part of what is meant here by the term indeterminate. This conceptual pairing, a pairing that is essentially dynamic insofar as the pairing potential/actual involves the relational, has, however, another life. If, as has already been suggested, central to this project is understanding what is entailed by the particularity of drawing, then, and this becomes the further argument, a drawing, thus drawing, is always linked to forms of possible actualization. This is what is drawn. The consequence is clear. The drawing (and now what is at stake is drawing qua drawing) is a potentiality if it is maintained as generative. And it can only be understood as generative to the extent that it is held apart from its complete identification with the representational and thus takes on the quality of the indeterminate. The holding apart allows for indetermination both in the sense that the drawing is itself indeterminate and that it in-determines what proceeds from it. An indeterminate relation has therefore a twofold quality. It means firstly that ensuing works are not then re-presentations of an original drawing and secondly that the original drawing need not be interpreted representationally. The language of origins becomes redundant (and misleading) once relations of indetermination have explanatory ascendency. Finally, indetermination brings a constitutive spacing into consideration. Not a pure space, rather it is a pause which sustains indetermination. This spacing, bound up as it is with a specific sense of the immaterial, is integral to drawing. Within this framework, in which both indetermination prevails and spacing is maintained, drawing becomes an opening towards. Conceived as an opening, drawing now repositioned as the opening towards, means that what endures as awaiting are the other determinations to which the drawing opens.8 And yet, this opening is never absolute. There are three important consequences of this repositioning. Firstly, that the conceptual framework within which the relation between the city-to-come and its attaining the status of an image is to be understood, namely the framework sustained by the potential/actual relation, is itself reiterated within the structure whose own understanding would yield the setting where the question of the particularity of drawing is best posed. Secondly, and relatedly, both of these elements are integral to the suspension of the representational as defining, as circumscribing any one drawing’s interpretability. It is this suspension that is equally central to allowing drawing the status of the opening towards. Hence it is presenting rather than re-presenting; presentation rather than representation. The presenting as an opening has to be maintained even if every drawing is always, and at the same time, a form of closure since every presentation inscribes representational qualities within it. In other words, the third consequence is

101

Andrew Benjamin

that while the representational is suspended as that which determines judgment because representation is no longer taken as structuring interpretability in advance, as has already been suggested, this does not mean that drawings do not have representational qualities. The opening towards therefore is marked in advance. The to come always has a form of determination. There are loci of analysis. Evolving here is the set up that allows for the particularity of drawing to be addressed, albeit as a theoretical or philosophical question. However, while such a mode of questioning may seem to sideline the historical, the contrary is the case. What it opens up is the possibility for a reinscription of the historical. Instead of simply positing another conception of history, what is at stake is that specific rethinking of the temporality of historical time that would emerge once centrality is attributed to the interplay between particularity, in the first instance, and then, in the second, the continuity of discontinuity within chronological time. What occurs as a result is that reworking of the temporality of historical time which is engendered by an insistence on both potentiality and actuality and thus on particularity and relationality. From within such a purview, history is other than the interplay of recovery and progression. In the place of the simplicity of chronology there is complexity of the disjunctive and the anachronic.9 Drawing may have a contextual history. Equally, it evinces its own sense of history. A drawing of the city-to-come stages, ab initio, its own sense of the historical. Art’s self-staging inscribes time within it.10

Opening towards And drawing? To begin with drawing’s presence as a question, is to allow for a sense of beginning that precedes all drawings. (To which it might be added that emphasising this quality is to highlight what drawing could actually be, namely, the drawing always precedes. Drawings therefore would be always prior insofar as this is the condition of any drawing being an opening towards.) The corollary is, of course, that were drawing to allow for the productive, it could only do so to the extent that drawing would name that which preceded any further actualization arising from its having a productive quality. A drawing is therefore always preliminary and as result would never be present if presence were taken as defining what might be called a self-completing finality.11 The contrary must pertain. As has already been suggested, the end of drawing is its presence as open ended. From within this framework, drawing will continue to be reconfigured here as the opening towards. Hence all drawings are open ended. While the presence of the drawing as the opening towards has to be maintained, such a conception of drawing needs to be positioned in relation to another twofold quality that drawing stages; they are qualities that are fundamental to any understanding of drawing as a locus of interpretation. Any drawing is present, in the first instance, as a drawing and then, in the second, as a drawing it negotiates a relation to the architectural or to the domain of art, or indeed to both. This particular doubling inscribes drawing within an already present configuration staged by art, architecture or their mutual imbrication. Moreover, this doubling is simultaneous. There is not one then the other. Occurring at the same time

102

Drawing Jerusalem

the doubling constructs the drawing as a complex site. The line therefore, the drawn line, can never be pure mediality. As intimated earlier, any line is marked in advance. Form is always informed. Impurity is original.12 However, this is neither to suggest that the distinction between art and architecture is clear nor that a particular drawing may not be the locus of a specific and productive ambivalence. Instances of that ambivalence can be found in, for example, Parmigianino’s Two Figures and a Cupid (1532–35) as well as Andrea Mantegna’s Studies for Christ at the Column (recto) (early- to mid-1460s). In both, architectural motifs and figures are present. Hence what matters is the nature of their relation. In the case of these two drawings, each figure – be it a cupid or the tormented Christ – is already positioned within a network of relations that sustain those figures and as such allow for the attribution of meaning(s). And yet, within both these specific drawings there are not just figures. Figures and the architectural are already together. One is present with the other; a co-presence that is already there within the drawing. This referential complexity is not a secondary consideration. To present the architectural, and this will be the case whether the architectural is evidenced by components of buildings or plans, is already to present places of inhabitation. To which it should be added that to present figures is to present both that which will always inhabit – as an abstract principle, bodies are always placed – such that any one of these drawings is an already present enactment of that abstraction. What has to be brought to bear on these concerns, however, is their status as drawing. In other words, the questions that have to be noted are the following (and it should be noted that each one seeks drawing’s definition): What is added to this description of the relation between the inhabited and the one who inhabits – two formulations that overlap once what is at stake is the inhabitable – when what is present is a drawing? In other words, does the object’s presence as a drawing bring about a change in how it is understood? Finally, therefore, is drawing’s interpretability delimited by its presence as drawing? (The latter is present continually as the opening towards.) In order to take these questions further, and they need to be progressed as the project is to develop an understanding of the specificity of drawing and in so doing to allow problems posed by the relation of drawings to other media and thus other generic determinations to emerge, one particular drawing will be taken as central, i.e. Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd [page 98], a drawing that dates from 1575. The drawing itself is not unique within Bol’s overall oeuvre. Moreover, it has a stylistic affinity with drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder with which Bol is assumed to have been familiar. In addition, the presence of the high walls and the twelve gates allows a link to be established between the drawing and a number of Christian Biblical texts, e.g. Revelations 21:12 in which Jerusalem is described as having had ‘twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels’.13 The Biblical texts provide an elaborate description of buildings, materials and even the dimensions of what is described in Revelations as ‘the city (τὴν πόλιν), the holy Jerusalem (τὴν ἁγίαν Ἰερουσαλὴμ)’. In this specific instance the drawing gave rise to an engraving. Further, it formed the basis of other drawings (Marten de Vos) and additional engravings (Julius Goltzius).14 It should be added here, though the point awaits development, that Bol’s drawing is of architecture. It is delimited as such. What has to remain a question is how

103

Andrew Benjamin

the designation of architecture and its insistent delimitation is itself to be understood. Finally, this projection of Jerusalem becomes an image of the city-to-come. A distinction can be drawn between Bol’s image, again an image of which there is a network of similar images, and other drawings of Jerusalem, e.g. Jacques Callot’s 1619 Aerial View of the City of Jerusalem.15 In regard to Bol’s drawing, it is possible to continue to provide explanatory details, amongst which would be the inscription of differing temporal determinations. The latter take the form of a temporal disjunction between the presence of an initial drawing (perhaps set of drawings) that preceded what is taken now as the actual completed drawing (recognizing from the start the difficulties that inhere in the word ‘completed’.) The result is clear. The now present drawing is itself a complex palimpsest. The palimpsest has temporal, as well as spatial elements, since present within it are different lines. To which it should be added that these different lines constitute the drawing even if the drawing cannot be equated with its literal presence. The lines are present both in their difference and in their coherence. Lines are always at work. With these lines there is a separation between modes of drawing which can be accounted for in terms of dissimilar forms of production. Finally, there is the addition or presence of colour. While the supply of further detail is on one level always essential, it remains the case that despite the continual reference both to detail and the object’s context, the conjecture has to be that even when all these elements are taken together, they do not diminish the force of the question of drawing. Indeed, the further elaboration of detail only gives that question greater acuity. With this ‘example’, therefore, what continues is the question of drawing.

Informing form There are, at the very least, two interrelated ways into this drawing. The first involves the set of relations that hold between it and other drawings and subsequent engravings. The second is to the texts that position Bol’s drawing as an after-effect of differing forms of relationality. The texts in question would no longer just be the Christian Biblical texts to which direct reference is already being made. Any drawing is always more than a mere illustration. Included in the textual detail would be the texts within the history of philosophy’s own concern with the city, the way that concern is staged, and then the way those concerns overlapped and were overlapped by Biblical and related religious writings. However, an additional point needs to be made. The conception of the city at work here, and it is a conception that receives a far more precise presentation in, for example, both Plato’s protracted discussion of the city in the Republic and the Laws, Scipio’s dream in Cicero’s De Republica, as well as the structuring effect of earlier formulations, on St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, is underscored by reference to both the model (as an ideational entity be it a philosophical formulation, the object of a vision or the result of a dream) and then that model’s own relation to the history of the image.16 There is a weave, therefore, between this drawing, the history of the image and then the image as it continues as a preoccupation in both the history of philosophy and the history of religion.

104

Drawing Jerusalem

In the Republic, Plato, as part of a discussion of that with which the ‘wise man’ engages, and then after having postulated the presence of ‘a city’ that exists only ‘in words’ and thus is of necessity yet to attain actuality, goes on to note more precisely the distinction between an ideal and actual city. He writes of the former that ‘there is a paradigm (παράδειγμα) of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to see it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen’.17 The presence of a ‘paradigm’ (παράδειγμα) cannot be separated from the possibility of its presentation, even if that presentation is only to sight. For Plato, the ‘paradigm’ can be seen. The text is explicit on this point, even if the possibility of actual presence is left to one side. Nonetheless, the attendant question concerns the possibility of an image of the ‘paradigm’. (Here, what is intended by ‘possibility’ pertains to the nature of the presentation of the ‘paradigm’.) The link to presentation pushes on the question of drawing and thus on drawing’s place within the history of the image. While it may be the case that drawing resides – at this stage at least – at a point marking a form of passage, and that drawing is, as a result, inherently preliminary, the passage in question is not between the ‘paradigm’ and drawing. The contrary is the case. The passage identifies a different locale of movement. Within it what is being worked out is the possibility of an image and thus what would be at stake in the ideal’s presentation. It is essential to note that, as it is the ideal’s presentation, it is the ‘paradigm’ that provides the point of departure. The presence of the ‘paradigm’ would have created the threshold condition. The question that has to arise, therefore, cannot just concern the status of drawing. It should be remembered that, while all drawings are preliminary and thus open ended, they are still implicated, as has already been suggested, in forms of closure since what is always recalled is the re-presentational. The latter continues within the presentation and as a result there can be no pure opening. While it may seem to be a diversionary tactic, what has to be addressed are the conditions in terms of which it becomes possible to address the question of this drawing as a drawing. In other words, how, then, is its status as open ended, and thus as a drawing, to be understood? What this demands is not the restriction of relations, but the continuity of their addition in order that the particular as after-effect then emerge. The legacy of the passage from the Republic that was cited above is that it leaves open the possibility of presenting the ideal. In the Sophist, an important distinction on the level of presentation is introduced. In the first instance there is the creation of ‘a house’ that results from a correct application of a skill (techné) and then there is that which, in Plato’s terms, is created ‘by the art of drawing (γραφικῇ)’. The latter, in Plato’s formulation, ‘makes another house, a sort of man-made dream produced for those who are awake’.18 This distinction recalls the two domains of the image that are at work in the Sophist at 236C. The first is the making of images that are defined by ‘likeness’. These are ‘eidola’, and the second of these the ‘fantastic’. The second is linked to a form of presentation in which there is a ‘false order’ (ἀπατητικήν) while the first holds open the possibility of the correct order, as given by the ‘paradigm’, to have a subsequent ordering effect on what is presented. Within the structure of Platonism, for one type of artist the relation between the ‘paradigm’ and the image is regulated by techné. Other forms of production, if this

105

Andrew Benjamin

position were accepted as the point of departure, are not directed by techné and become therefore phantasmatic insofar as they present that which can only be explained in terms of semblance. The regulative operates in a twofold way. Firstly, there is regulation by a pre-existing image and, secondly, it is the relation between images that creates and sets the measure. While there may be tensions within the history of Platonism, and it might be conjectured that these tensions are also present in the corpus of Plato’s own writings in regard to this precise point, nonetheless what endures is a relation of ‘sight’ between two images, one produced the other, not in which the ‘paradigm’ has a determining effect on the produced image and where the production itself has to be understood as regulated. The regulation occurs as a result of the relation between the ‘paradigm’ and any related techné. What this means, of course, is that the locus of judgment then pertains uniquely to this relation. Judgment assumes that that the drawn is judgeable because of a relation orientated by techné between the paradigm and the material object. The object’s material presence, therefore, is always secondary in relation to that which allows it to be judgeable. There is an important consequence of the secondary nature of the material. Namely, that if there is to be a suspension of Platonism in which the drawing can emerge as the open ended (noting of course that such a designation is impossible if the relation that allows the object to be judgeable, and thus an object of interpretation, is always given in terms of a relation between a ‘paradigm’ and materiality), then there needs to be a reconfiguration of materiality itself. In other words, it is not a simple reversal or suspension. The constituent elements within the relation are themselves transformed in the process. This point is key to what follows. Plato’s approach to the architectural is reworked within a Neoplatonic framework. Indeed, the relation between the actual house and the ‘form of the house’ is given great concision when, in his discussion of beauty in the Enneads, Plotinus deploys the example of the architectural.19 How does the architect compare the external house with the form of the house within himself and pronounce that it is beautiful? Perhaps because the outward building, with its stones taken away, is no other than the interior form divided externally throughout the bulk of the matter, and, though subsisting indivisibly, reflected in multitude.20 The affective quality of beauty can be given an account that allows for the ‘object’ – here the ‘external house’ – to be judged precisely because of the presence of that which is external to object. This externality has an immaterial quality. As will be noted, there is a fundamental divide in how the immaterial is to be understood. There are two positions. In regard to the first, the immaterial is an external regulative force; as opposed to the second, in which the immaterial is a quality of the material itself. It is the latter that, as will be argued, is fundamental to the presence of drawing as the open ended. Presentation, therefore, is divided between two possibilities. It is this set up that accompanies any drawing, namely that the Platonic formulation might have, in fact, provided the frame of reference within which drawing is to be understood. Part of the argument that has to be developed – and its development is integral to addressing the question of drawing in its particularity – refers to an opening within which Platonism would no longer have exerted a dominant hold. (Repeated here is the point that has

106

Drawing Jerusalem

already been made in relation to representation.) Such a configuration would be a set up in which the drawing, while alluding to the history of Platonism, and it could be an allusion in which Platonism was not named as such but the differing modalities of the image at work within it were still retained, that history did not exercise an exclusive hold. Hence the reference made above to the presence of a form of Platonism. Platonism would be maintained, but at a distance. Allowing for this as a possibility means that an opening will have been created. An opening in which closure is neither axiomatic nor defined in relation to immateriality as an external quality and that, as a consequence, materiality’s resultant reconfiguration allows for a distancing of any one drawing’s inscription of an already determined sense of closure. Specifically, it is the retained distancing of the ideational that allows the particularity of the material to be present. This is not to suggest that form is not informed. Rather, and more importantly, it is to suggest both that the informing of form occurs in ways other than those dictated in advance by the history of Platonism and that any image is still able to refer to that history. Another conception of the image therefore comes into play. Within it, as suggested, form is still informed. However, it is not formed by a preceding image (or ‘paradigm’). Here there is an opening, since this is the conception of the image in which it becomes possible to locate the particularity of drawing and thus begin to address the particularity of Hans Bol’s Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd.

Attaining actuality As stated at the outset, Bol’s drawing of Jerusalem is a drawing of architecture. Moreover, as a drawing of architecture it retains its status as drawing and thus as the open ended. This is a position that cannot just be stated. It has to be located with the work’s work. It is the object, the drawing, that is workful. The work works as a drawing. This is the point of orientation. If the drawing is itself a threshold insofar as it is preliminary, then it becomes possible to begin with its own inscription of threshold conditions. Rather than attempt to provide an exhaustive account of the work, a number of the drawing’s own elements will be positioned to create an interpretive setting. Gates are thresholds. An opening point is provided, therefore, by the relationship between the twelve gates and the twelve angels. The three gates that can be located at the front and centre of the drawing contain angels. Importantly, the angels cast shadows. Heavenly angels do not cast shadows. To the extent, however, that angels appear in the world, they have become corporeal; and then, as a result, they cast shadows. Consistent with a tradition in both drawing and paintings, and this pertains as much in a Northern as well as a Southern context, angels do indeed cast shadows.21 This is of course necessary to mark the process of Jerusalem, to adopt the formulation of Revelations, ‘descending out of heaven’ (καταβαίνουσαν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ).22 In the drawing each angel is in a gateway casting a shadow. As already noted, each gateway is itself a threshold. The city-to-come contains specific thresholds that inscribe the process of becoming earthly within them. This happens with the shadows cast by the

107

Andrew Benjamin

angels. While in a threshold, namely the gates, the cast shadows announce that an engagement with another threshold, namely the one that obtains between heaven and earth, is being staged. As the shadows are cast, the city-to-come is being secured. A process is at work. A process whose finality, and thus its fixity and moreover its determinate final form, are all still to occur. The angels remain. They hover. Thus, they continue to figure as loci of investigation.23 Christ as the shepherd is leading the flock towards the gate. The flock, which is ‘the flock of God’ (ποίμνιον τοῦ Θεοῦ), is of course the image of the community.24 Again, it is the threshold condition that allows for the incorporation of the community within the walls. The community is yet to be established. The ‘sheep’ are yet to be shepherded across the threshold. They are outside. Crossing the threshold would constitute them as citizens and thus secure the presence of the city-to-come. The presence of walls not only constructs an opposition between the inside and the outside, that opposition is also articulated in relation to the opposition between the city and the countryside. It is as though the city wall is the condition in relation to which the earthly presence of the heavenly becomes possible. Equally, it is important to note that the internal organization of the city-to-come – to which it should be added that the drawing is the actuality of the to-come quality presented as a bird’s eye view – is in terms of blocks.25 The presence of the block and the grid inscribes the inside/outside relation within the city. The city itself consists of thresholds. The presence of an array of threshold conditions, and other specific instances that could be identified, raises a number of important questions. One of the most insistent concerns regulation. If the retained presence of the block creates edges and thresholds, then there needs to be forms of regulations, be they architectural or legal, that control and constrain circulation through and across threshold conditions. Before turning to that problem it is essential to stay with the presence of thresholds. The drawing is both of the city-to-come and of the city that has attained, or is attaining, actuality. Neither one completes the other. This occurs by the drawing already recalling, recalling as drawing and thus as its work, the presence of the city as a set of pre-existing conditions. What emerges here is therefore an opening. Between the to come and the pre-existing there is a space. There is a spacing which, it can be argued, houses an immaterial force that would be the possibility of its own projection. This conception of the immaterial is inherent to the drawing as a drawing. What this means is that, as the city-to-come has an indeterminate relation to any one actualization, then this drawing, while one possible determination is also an indetermination, the drawing leaves an opening. This is the constitutive spacing that has already been noted as intrinsic to drawing once freed from the purview of representation and linked to processes of indetermination. The immaterial force is a quality of the work. As should already be clear, it stands opposed to the conception of the immaterial that is linked to the ‘paradigm’ in Plato. The continuity of the opening towards finds its force in the overdetermined thresholds. (In the end, however, there will be a play of forces.) While the drawing positions God at the centre, and thus as the regulative force, and moreover the earthly architecture can be reconfigured such that God appears as its architect, since lines of force can be drawn from God to essential elements of the

108

Drawing Jerusalem

city, it is also the case that God’s force, while attaining a sense of actuality with the figure of Christ, this is after all the Trinitarian impulse, is also immaterial. God’s presence as a specific immaterial force appears in the drawing. There is the material presence of that which is inherently immaterial.26 In this drawing of architecture, God is drawn, and thus allowed material presence, as the presented immaterial force sustaining it. There is, therefore, another sense of the immaterial that appears within the work. It is these two senses of the immaterial that need to be taken up. Pursuing them, however, has to work with the recognition that Bol’s drawing is a drawing of architecture. Architecture, therefore, is not pro-jected. This is not a project drawing. The two senses of the immaterial are the following. The first noted directly above concerns the inscribed presence of God. If God complicates presence, that presence is complicated in the precise way that the problem of presentation occurs as a result of the formulation of the ‘paradigm’ in Plato. Moreover, the question of regulation is located both in the figure of God as an inscribed presence within the drawing and equally to what God actually stages, namely, that the regulative is always external to that which has materiality, hence the drawing brings the tradition of the material as regulated by an external immaterial presence into the frame. It frames that tradition. In the context of this particular drawing it is the image of God as regulative. An equal part of this network of relations is the presence of the Platonic ‘paradigm’ or ‘idea’ that, in its externality, provides the criteria in relation to which judgment becomes possible. The presence of the ‘paradigm’ grounds, in that instance, the object’s interpretability. As this position unfolds, it is externality that occasions the object becoming an object of judgment. The overriding point is that the immaterial is always given as an external element in relation to the object’s materiality. That is even the case when the external immateriality has material presence within the frame. In the case of the drawing it is the presence of God in a cloud that positions his immaterial presence. The clouds underscore materially immaterial presence. Though it should always be noted that this immaterial presence is made possible by the use of drawing techniques which, in the context of this drawing, are reinforced by the use of colour. Immateriality could not be more material. And this is the case despite the clouds signalling its absence from the framed. The clouds allow absence to be present. What this makes clear is that immateriality, or at least this version of immateriality, is not invisibility. The contrary is the case. The interplay of Divine presence and clouds entails that the immaterial is defined by the visible. In sum, therefore, while the material presentation of the immaterial occurs, what it maintains is the immaterial as an externality. The second sense of the immaterial confounds the first insofar as that immaterial is now a quality of the work; thus internal rather than external. (To which it should be added that the presentation internally of the external already confounds the idea of the purely immaterial by having allowed, literally, for its material presentation.) The immaterial returns now as directly related to the drawing’s presence as a drawing. Immateriality pertains to the space that opened by the relation of non-relation, the constitutive spacing, there between what is present and the city-to-come. If a start can be made with the presence of this Jerusalem as a drawing of architecture, then what

109

Andrew Benjamin

has to figure is the way in which the threshold as the locus of the immaterial reinforces the presence of the drawing as the opening towards. This other sense of the immaterial as a quality of the work occurs once threshold conditions are made neither literal nor complete. Each threshold holds open a possibility. The threshold becomes an invitation. The drawing invites another drawing, thus other drawings. The latter, this futural drawing, the other drawings – though where the future and the other possibility are themselves conditions of the present, the present as a site that cannot be resolved or reduced to a unified and already determined state – will always be other in the precise sense that there is an inevitable relation to drawings to come. The further consequence is that what continues will always have had an indeterminate relation to that which preceded it. The further implication is that continuity occurs within the necessity of discontinuity. The latter is a description of time. It need not be a description of stylistic appearance. The shadows cast by angels stage the complex connection between indeterminacy and determinacy. They underscore permanence insofar as they are drawn. They are in place. And yet in the drawing they underscore the impermanent. They will vanish the moment there is movement. Both the shadows and the angels are in the thresholds – the gates – and yet they are thresholds. As a minimal condition, there is a divided presence. The division is the interplay of the material and the material itself a reconfiguration of the relation between actuality and potentiality. The angels and the shadows expose possibilities that their actual exposure circumvents. A similar explanation can be given of the shepherd and the sheep. They present openings that their presence, as present, forecloses. To allow for the threshold is to allow for the drawing to work as a drawing, staging, therefore, the ineliminability of the opening towards.

Notes 1

2

3

110

While the role attributed to them differ, both of these passages from the Letter to the Hebrews are discussed in Claudia Rapp, ‘City and Citizenship as Christian Concepts of Community in Late Antiquity’, in The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World. Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, ed. Claudia Rapp et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 153–166. Furthermore, it is passages such as these that would form the basis of questioning interpretations of Paul that insist on a type of presentism that prelude references to the future. In regard to the latter see, for example, L. L. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to the Messianic Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). While the focus here is on images of Jerusalem within the Christian tradition, it should not be thought that Jerusalem does not figure within the history of Jewish manuscripts and drawings. For an illustrated discussion of this Jerusalem, see Shalom Sabar, ‘Zion and Jerusalem: “The Sum of All Beauty, The Joy of All Earth”’, in Skies of Parchment. Seas of Ink. Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Marc Michael Epstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). There is a wealth of literature on this counter positioning of cities. Far more is involved within these histories than a mere opposition. For a range of interpretations, see: Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities (Leiden: Brill, 1991), Lois K. Fuller Dow, Images of Zion: Biblical Antecedents for the New Jerusalem (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), Leslie J. Hoppe, The Holy City: Jerusalem in the Theology of the Old Testament (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 2010). In addition to the Jerusalem to-come there were always paintings that purported to be of the actual Jerusalem, even though the latter often involved, to use Hayden B. J. Maginnis’ formulation, the ‘coining of Jerusalem from the architectural currency of Tuscany without making references to actual sites’. See his ‘Places Beyond the Sea: Trecento Images of Jerusalem’, Notes in the History of Art 13 no. 2 (Winter 1994): 1.

Drawing Jerusalem

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15

16

On Augustine’s complex relation to utopianism see Françoise Choay, La règle et le modele (Paris: Éditions de seuil, 1980), 53–54. See also Stephen Frith, ‘The Heavenly Jerusalem as the Virtual City: Revisiting the De Civitate Dei, City of Virtue’, Architectural Theory Review 2 no. 1 (1996). The literature on this topic is great. Studies, however, are usually specific. See, for example, Sophie Cartwright, ‘Athanasius’ “Vita Antonii” as Political Theology: The Call of Heavenly Citizenship’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67 (2016). The interesting challenge would be to trace Agamben’s interpretation of monastic life onto the architecture of both the monastery and then Jerusalem as the setting of the holy. See his The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). For an analysis of the status of drawing within the Renaissance and the actual relation of drawing to building in this period and the difficulties therein see, Mario Carpo, ‘How Do You Imitate a Building That You Have Never Seen? Printed Images, Ancient Models, and Handmade Drawings in Renaissance Architectural Theory’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64. Bd. H.2 (2001). The status of the image remains a question that continues to attract considerable attention. For a survey of recent investigations, see the papers collected in the volume Penser l’image, ed. Emmanuel Alloa (France: Les presses du reel, 2010). Reiterated here is the argument that became central to architectural theory concerning the diagram. While there needs to be far more argumentation adduced, the straightforward claim is that what a concern with the diagram allowed for is a rewriting of the history of architectural drawing. The diagram freed the line from having to be thought within the structure of representation. As a result, the history of drawing can be reconfigured in these terms. For a general treatment of the diagram see my ‘Lines of Work. On Diagrams and Drawings’, in Architectural Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 143–156, and ‘Notes on the Line’, The Line: A Design Element across Architecture, Interiors, Art and Graphic Design, ed. Ivana Wingham (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2012). For the argumentation concerning the history of drawing, see ‘Introduction’, written with Desley Luscombe, in a jointly edited issue of The Journal of Architecture on architectural drawing, vol. 19 no. 4 (2014): 467–469. Luscombe’s work on The Schröder House and on Eisenman’s House VI form a fundamental part of this overall project. See her, ‘Illustrating Architecture: The Spatio-Temporal Dimension of Gerrit Rietveld’s Representations of the Schröder House’, The Journal of Architecture 18 no. 1 (2013), and ‘Architectural Concepts in Peter Eisenman’s Axonometric Drawings of House VI’, The Journal of Architecture 19 no. 4 (2014). For a contemporary discussion of the relation between the diagram and the computer as a design tool, see Hélène Frichot, ‘Drawing, Thinking, Doing: From Diagram Work to the Superfold’, ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies 30 no. 1 (2011). The term ‘anachronic’ is deployed by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood. They define it in the following terms: ‘The work of art when it is late, when it repeats, when it hesitates, when it remembers, but also when it projects a future or an ideal is “anachronic”.’ See their, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Their work is a central element of a more general prompt to reconsider the temporality of the history of art history. For another contribution to this project, albeit from a different philosophical direction, see Kamini Vellodi, ‘Tintoretto’s Time’, Art History 38 no. 3 (June 2015). For a discussion of the formulation ‘art’s self staging’ see my Art’s Philosophical Work (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). On drawing as preliminary see my ‘The Preliminary: Notes on the Force of Drawing’, The Journal of Architecture 19 no. 4 (2014). The argument for the impossibility of pure mediality is intended as the beginning, though no more, of a response to Giorgio Agamben’s important paper ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means without Ends, trans. Vincenzo Binetti et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49–63. Part of that response will involve taking up the way in which the ‘trait’ and the ‘retrait’ figure in the writing of Jacques Derrida. These terms appear in Derrida’s writing on literature and philosophy rather than in his work on drawing. While it cannot be pursed here, it is via terms of the ‘trait and the ‘retrait’ that drawing should have been approached by Derrida. There is another project that needs to be taken up here. For an important discussion of the ‘trait’/‘retrait’ motif, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Derrida’s writings on drawing have recently appeared in Jacques Derrida, Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les art visible 1979–2004 (Paris: Éditions de la difference, 2013). For an overview of Derrida’s early contribution to a discussion of drawing, see Michael Newman, ‘Derrida and the Scene of Drawing’, Research in Phenomenology 24 no. 1 (1994). Revelations, 21:12. For further information, see the description in William Bradford and Helen Braham, Master Drawings from the Courtauld Collections (London: Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1991), 30. Jacques Callot’s 1619 Aerial View of the City of Jerusalem is an etching and engraving on laid paper and is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The view does not purport to be a presentation of the city-to-come, except, to the extent that it can always be understood as laying bare the world prior to its transformation. Callot’s is an image of a component of a world to be transformed. Herein lies the difference, as Bol’s is an image of the city-to-come. The ‘model’ also plays a fundamental role in the way Hannah Arendt distinguishes between the animal laborans and the homo faber. The move away from a determination by a model is integral to the move

111

Andrew Benjamin

17

18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25

26

from ‘work’ to ‘action’. There is an accord between her argument concerning the break with utility that marks the move from ‘work’ to ‘action’ and the possibility of the to come not having an already determined image. On the model itself, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 140–143. Plato, Republic, trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 2001), Book IX, 592A-B. For a discussion of how Plato engages the detail of the city-to-come, and to deploy the terminology used here regarding what the city’s actualization envisages, see Patricia Fagan, Plato and Tradition: The Poetic and Cultural Context of Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 58–72. Plato, Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 2013), 266 C8-9. While it is clear that on the level of aesthetics – the treatment of beauty – there is an important sense of overlap between Plato and Plotinus, there are also important differences. What is of interest here is what can be gained from noting the repetition of the architectural in both instances. For a discussion of the differences in relation to beauty, see Daniele Iozzia, Aesthetic Themes in Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism: From Plotinus to Gregory of Nyssa (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 39–44. Plotinus, Ennead, Volume I, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 1969), Ennead 1.6. For a sustained engagement with the shadow in the context of the paintings of Caravaggio, see Steven F. Ostrow, ‘Caravaggio’s Angels’, in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, ed. L. Pericolo et al. (London: Ashgate, 2014), 123–148. Revelations, 21:10 The problematic of the angel, and the angel as a figure of complexity, precisely because of their indeterminate status, has been explored in detail by Massimo Cacciari; see his The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Peter, 5:2–4. While it cannot be pursued here, there would be an important point of connection between this image of Jerusalem – especially the internally organized block system and its presentation within a bird’s eye view – and images created by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux for the planned project at Chaux. Indeed, Ledoux’s knowledge of Renaissance drawings may make the connection even stronger. In regard to his knowledge of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, see Paul V. Turner, ‘Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, in Word and Image 14 no. 1/2 (1998). It should also be added that the affinity between the block within these images of Jerusalem and the role of the block in Chaux might question that originality of the autonomous block that Emil Kaufamn attributes to Ledoux. See the latter’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen (Vienna: Passer, 1933). It is interesting to note in this regard that Goltzius’ engraving does not reproduce the figure of God. On the contrary, God is named. The Tetragrammaton YHWH is used. God is written into the image in Hebrew. While this evokes the complex problems of naming God that occurs within Judaism, it also reiterates the aniconism that can be identified with the Reformation. There is therefore a complex concession to the Bilderverbot in Goltzius’s engraving. There is no such concession in Bol’s drawing. However, what endures is the material/immaterial relation.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. ‘Notes on Gesture’. In Means without Ends, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–63. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Alloa, Emmanuel, ed. Penser l’image. France: Les presses du reel, 2010. Arendt. Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Benjamin, Andrew. ‘Notes on the Line’. In Mobility of the Line: Art Architecture Design, edited by Ivana Wingham, 205–210. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2013. Benjamin, Andrew and Desley Luscombe, eds. The Journal of Architecture 19 no. 4 (2014): 467–469. Benjamin, Andrew. ‘The Preliminary: Notes on the Force of Drawing’. The Journal of Architecture 19 no. 4 (2014): 470–482. Benjamin, Andrew. Art’s Philosophical Work. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Bradford, William and Helen Braham. Master Drawings from the Courtauld Collections. London: Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1991. Cacciari, Massimo. The Necessary Angel. Translated by Miguel E. Vatter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

112

Drawing Jerusalem

Carpo, Mario. ‘How Do You Imitate a Building That You Have Never Seen? Printed Images, Ancient Models, and Handmade Drawings in Renaissance Architectural Theory’. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64 Bd. H.2 (2001): 223–233. Cartwright, Sophie. ‘Athanasius’ “Vita Antonii” as Political Theology: The Call of Heavenly Citizenship’. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67 (2016): 241–264. Choay, Françoise. La règle et le modele. Paris: Editions de seuil, 1980. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’. In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les art visible 1979–2004. Paris: Éditions de la difference, 2013. Fagan, Patricia. Plato and Tradition: The Poetic and Cultural Context of Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Frichot, Hélène. ‘Drawing, Thinking, Doing: From Diagram Work to the Superfold’. ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies 30 no. 1 (2011): 1–10. Frith, Stephen. ‘The Heavenly Jerusalem as the Virtual City: Revisiting the De Civitate Dei, City of Virtue’. Architectural Theory Review 2 no. 1 (1996): 122–141. Fuller Dow, Lois K. Images of Zion: Biblical Antecedents for the New Jerusalem. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press., 2010. Hoppe, Leslie J. The Holy City: Jerusalem in the Theology of the Old Testament. Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 2010. Iozzia, Daniele. Aesthetic Themes in Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism. From Plotinus to Gregory of Nyssa. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Ledoux, Claude Nicolas. Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen. Vienna: Passer, 1933. Luscombe, Desley. ‘Illustrating Architecture: The Spatio-Temporal Dimension of Gerrit Rietveld’s Representations of the Schröder House’. The Journal of Architecture 18 no. 1, (2013): 25–58. Luscombe, Desley. ‘Architectural Concepts in Peter Eisenman’s Axonometric Drawings of House VI’. The Journal of Architecture 19 no. 4 (2014): 560–611. Maginnis, Hayden B. J. ‘Places Beyond the Sea: Trecento Images of Jerusalem’. Notes in the History of Art 13 no. 2 (Winter 1994): 1–8. Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Newman, Michael. ‘Derrida and the Scene of Drawing’. Research in Phenomenology 24 no. 1 (1994): 218–234. Ostrow, Steven F. ‘Caravaggio’s Angels’. In Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, edited by L. Pericolo and D. Stone, 123–148. London: Ashgate, 2014. Plato. Republic. Translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 2001. Plato. Sophist. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 2013. Plotinus. Ennead, Volume I. Translated by A. H. Armstrong. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press, 1969. Rapp, Claudia. ‘City and Citizenship as Christian Concepts of Community in Late Antiquity’. In The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World. Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, edited by Claudia Rapp et al, 153–166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Sabar, Shalom. ‘Zion and Jerusalem: “The Sum of All Beauty, The Joy of All Earth”’. In Skies of Parchment. Seas of Ink. Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, edited by Marc Michael Epstein, 205–214. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Turner, Paul V. ‘Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’. In Word and Image 14 no. 1/2 (1998): 203–214. van Oort, Johannes. Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities. Leiden: Brill, 1991. Vellodi, Kamini. ‘Tintoretto’s Time’. Art History 38 no. 3 (June 2015): 414–433. Welborn, L. L. Paul’s Summons to the Messianic Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

113

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Perspective, Barcelona Pavilion.

Chapter 11

Architectural drawing Architecture’s speculative visual history Desley Luscombe

This paper explores the apprehension of meaning in architectural drawing afforded through each drawing’s structuring ‘diagram’. Rather than being confined to technique alone, the ‘diagram’ of an architectural drawing helps to inform its delivery of visual meaning. Through their diagram, architectural drawings, and more specifically presentation drawings, anticipate a response to the theoretical proposition of the architecture portrayed. In this manner, and in order to deliver meaning beyond technical representation, architectural drawings can anticipate a role for a viewing subject that frames the bodily interaction between viewer and viewed image. Based on a comparison of two architectural drawings, the aim here is to highlight how representational techniques and conventions including those of the perspective and axonometric, have traditionally defined the conceptual ‘scope’ of the architecture they portray. However, during specific historical periods architects have subverted these techniques to incorporate visual references more often related to painting. To engage with the importance of these acts of subversion it becomes necessary to question, as Gilles Deleuze has done for the paintings of Francis Bacon, the delivery of meaning afforded through the diagram.1 For Bacon, the diagram takes the form of a virtual and complex network of nodes and intersections that result in the emphasis of particular adjacencies of importance for a viewer’s grasp of meaning.2 Extending Deleuze’s understanding of the diagram, Andrew Benjamin recognises that the diagram specific to architectural drawing works beyond painting’s representational force as its conceptual ‘ground’.3 For architecture, the structuring diagram of its drawings provides an additional unique

115

Desley Luscombe

setting for recognising architectural experimentation. For Benjamin, the diagram of an architectural drawing must therefore be considered differently from the diagram of painting. In these terms, the structuring diagram of individual architectural drawings, especially those known as presentation drawings, conceptually moves these drawings from being a supporting precursor of realised building to one that is an independent operation recognised for its piloting of architectural ideas and consequent recognition of those ideas.4 Selected for comparison here are an axonometric drawing by Gerrit Rietveld of the 1924 house designed for, and in collaboration with, Truus Schröder-Schräder [page 125],5 and a perspectival drawing by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of the interior of the 1929 German State Pavilion for the International Exposition at Barcelona [page 114].6 Traditionally, within the structures of architectural delineation the axonometric and the perspective embody different types of conventions. Axonometric techniques, in maintaining dimensional accuracy in their derivation from the plan and accuracy of scaled measure across three spatial axes, can provide an understanding of architectural design that privileges a rational spatial logic. Unlike perspective or photography, the axonometric technique avoids placing the viewing subject within the internal logic of the image.7 When considering the perspective technique, it is its tie to optics, and perspective’s implicit understanding of the mathematical and geometric unification of the space-object relationships, that implicates a role for the viewing subject within the spatiality of the view. Based on the structuring of Brunelleschi’s fifteenth-century experiment regarding linear perspective, in these drawings what remains is the implication of a single ocular sensibility within the technique’s geometric construct. The two drawings selected for this comparison provide a basis from which to question the implications of breaking usual conventions in drawing techniques. Both drawings act as ‘presentation’ drawings and have the added expectation of communicating ideas to a client or broader public through a display, publication or exhibition. In these drawings, what is of importance is their interruption of technical accuracy. What is claimed in this paper is that this is an interruption with purpose. Gerrit Rietveld’s use of a wire-framed axonometric in his depiction of the Schröder House partly responds to the implications of a fourth spatial dimension evident in De Stijl art of the period.8 As a result of the drawing’s wire-frame technique, the viewer is able to see ‘through’ interior surfaces and register relationships between elements that are neither temporally nor spatially collocated in the realised building. This attribute signifies the importance of a spatiality that is beyond the optical confines of the technique’s representation of interior surface. However, further analysis shows that the structuring diagram of the drawing, seen partly in the rigorous mathematical logic of the axonometric, is layered also through the spiralling and dynamic spatial effects of the central stair, and the application of primary colours as well as black, white and grey. It is thus more than simply an application of axonometric conventions or ideas of the fourth dimension that invites the viewer’s response. The coloured version of this drawing uses the centrality of the stair and coloured shapes to present the image’s abstract and spiralling effect. Rietveld’s inclusion of an

116

Architectural drawing

open-ended planar approach to the exterior walls of the house embeds this spiralling centrifugal force in the external form of the architecture. This small detail in the architectural geometry of external corners shows one panel sliding past the corner’s vertex. Portraying a consistency with the spiralling effect this overlapping vertical edge introduces a resolution of the exterior wall as abstract plane rather than container. This hierarchy of effects in the drawing works to create a complex layering of meaning that relies on the drawing’s underlying diagram for interpretation. The complexity of the drawing’s conceptual diagram leads the viewer to recognise specific important nodes, adjacencies and intersections not always consistent with the conventions of the axonometric. An example is the relationship seen pictorially between three circular stove hot plates on the ground floor and the three rectangular chimney flues aligned vertically above them. These relationships structure visual responses and the abstraction framing the drawing as image. Within the abstraction of the image there is a residue of recognisable fitments that help define the content of the drawing as architecture and focus its interpretation.9 In the rhythms of the composition, distances and sizes are accepted as architectonic in scale because of the recognition of simplified linear depictions of a piano, beds, seats, toilet bowls, tubs, taps and a stove. As a consequence, even though abstracted and painted with blocks of colour or hue, these abstract planes accept that for architecture this abstraction plays an essential role as an environment for bodily habitation. While the drawing registers this habitation, it also registers the habitation’s subservience to the primary abstraction of the formal composition. It is as though the body accepts its condition within architecture’s pervasive although not total abstraction. However, Rietveld’s drawing introduces an element that is uncharacteristic and induces the viewer to question the thinking behind its inclusion. In the lower midfield is a carefully rendered depiction of one of Rietveld’s designs, the Berlin Chair of 1923. This is the only recognisably authored piece of Rietveld furniture included in the scene. Because of viewer recognition this chair attracts attention. Its soft pencil rendering was most likely applied late in the drawing’s production as its shading works over a yellow square that elsewhere in the drawing represents the flat surface of a stool. The inclusion of the Berlin Chair opens an inquiry into its purpose in the signification of the architecture surrounding it. Historians, including Paul Overy and Mark Wieczorek, have suggested this chair embodies the conceptual origins for the house. Overy claims that the furniture designs of the period just prior to the design of the Schröder House can be seen as ‘studies for the spatial ideas and formal devices used in the house’.10 More specifically, he draws attention to the Rietveld ‘joint’ or corner detail of the Berlin Chair in this development.11 Building on this, Wieczorek suggests the importance of locating the chair in this drawing with its orientation toward the corner ‘joint’ of the house. He goes on to recount that under Rietveld’s early chairs he had often glued a poem, ‘The Aesthete’, by poet Christian Morgenstern. It follows: ‘When I sit, I do not care/just to sit to suit my hindside:/I prefer the way my mind-side/would, to sit in, weave or build itself a chair’.12 However, while Wieczorek beguilingly suggests the potential visceral invitation ‘to become that open corner, to inhabit it, by sitting down in Rietveld’s 1923 Berlin

117

Desley Luscombe

Chair’, one would have to question what this act brings to an understanding of the image or its architecture.13 Has the inclusion of the Berlin Chair been used as a metaphor that could potentially point to a phenomenological reading of the architecture? This may be a little perplexing in the context of the abstraction that dominates. Or, is the chair simply working as a sign directing the viewer to look in a certain direction in their investigation of the image? Making such a reading more complex, the window corner that Wieczorek alludes to, while commonly known from the realised building, is not represented in the drawing, and it is difficult to follow through his suggestion of purpose for the representation of the chair. However, recognisable in Wieczorek’s analysis of the drawing is an implied theorisation of architectural intent that is rarely raised with regard to Rietveld’s architecture. Extending this theorisation becomes important to a further interpretation of the drawing and its placement of the Berlin Chair. Central to this inquiry is Rietveld’s interest in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer’s understanding of aesthetic cognition and its formation of a distinctive notion of ‘objectivity’. Aspects of Schopenhauer’s writing can be used to support an interpretation of the drawing that explains the purpose of the rendering of the Berlin Chair within such an abstract visual context.14 Interest in Schopenhauer emerged in Rietveld’s historical context through lectures given by G. P. J. P. Bolland in the early twentieth century.15 Rietveld continued to be fascinated with Schopenhauer’s work, directly and indirectly commenting on his ideas and quoting him until the 1960s in reference to his early architectural design and its use of colour.16 For Rietveld, Schopenhauer held the key to a tie between perception and ‘objectivity’ whereby the objectivity of external forms and the viewer’s objective relation to those forms could be realised.17 In Schopenhauer’s approach to perception, what is of importance in the representation of architecture is its reduction through drawing to an apprehension of meaning limited to the sense of sight. To respond to architectural drawing the dominance of the viewer’s visual perception is only marginally tempered by the temporality of movements in the body. For Schopenhauer, seeing was able to be distinguished from other senses because it resulted in a form of ‘pure knowing’ unfettered by the will.18 He used the example of colours suggesting that there is a ‘wholly immediate, unreflective, yet also inexpressible, pleasure that is excited in us by the impression of colours’.19 For Schopenhauer, this ‘pure knowing’ directs an instantaneous connection between the aesthetics of an external object as cause and the response to that object in an apprehension of ‘beauty’. In Rietveld’s drawing there is a purposeful reduction of the material complexities of architecture to basic geometric elements in order to reinforce a response to architecture’s abstract spatiality. The reception of this abstraction is immediate. Consistent with Schopenhauer, reception of the image is generally guided, not by an intellectualised response based on the physical sensations of comfort or pleasure, but simply on the immediacy of a recognition of abstract logic. From Schopenhauer, it can be understood that representations in the mind of the viewer, derived through sensations of sight, transform the viewer’s capacity to become objectlike or ‘objective’. Schopenhauer explains this claim stating, ‘that is to say, in contemplating [the aesthetically pleasing object] we are no longer conscious of ourselves

118

Architectural drawing

as individuals, but as pure, will-less subjects of knowing’.20 This epiphany-like effect was understood as intuitive and instantaneous. It was a cognition that was independent of personal needs, affects and interests, and was in Schopenhauer’s terms thus considered pure perception that results from a higher ‘objective’ consciousness.21 Transferring these ideas to Rietveld’s drawing, the relationship with the viewing subject is one where he/she is introduced to and absorbed by the abstract logic of the image and its architecture. In this transformation, the Berlin Chair works as an instantaneously recognisable aesthetic element. The viewer’s unreflective knowing of this chair transforms them, through this experience, to a point of his/her own objective conformity with the scene. The transformed viewing subject becomes integrated within the abstraction of the scene portrayed. Through Schopenhauer, Rietveld’s drawing conceptualises the viewer of architectural space as both object-like and objective. In this construct there is a perceived experimentation that brings together the instantaneity of knowing through sight perception and an understanding of the world as representation. This references the body’s objective complicity with the abstract spatiality of the house and its furnishings. The Mortgenstern poem extends this reference. The notion of the mind ‘build[ing] itself a chair’ becomes a process of intellectual transformation in the mind of those seated rather than the phenomenology of the creative act of designing a chair from the basis of sensations. The viewer is mentally transformed by the spatiality of the chair. The effect of the realistic representation of the Berlin Chair is an instantaneous complicity with the architecture’s abstract spatiality. The viewer, external to the drawing is changed in this process. The complicity required between viewer and viewed implies a link between inside and outside in the drawing’s conceptual framework, one that takes advantage of the initial recognition of the Berlin Chair. By first becoming aware of the chair for its resonance with memory, the viewer of the image accepts the instantaneity of sight’s perception and absorbs the abstract logic of architecture’s interior and its spatial and geometric concerns. This internal logic, developed between architecture’s fitments and its abstraction, is thus replicated within the viewer’s own being. In Rietveld’s drawing, the viewer’s gaze moves from one surveying the drawing as artefact to one focused on questioning the role of this logic in the corporeal world. It transforms the abstract rigorous logic of the axonometric technique, to introduce a transformation for the viewer in understanding their new role as an objective and ‘object-like’ inhabitant of architectural space. The second example, Mies van der Rohe’s drawing of the Barcelona Pavilion, uses perspective conventions to present a very different message.22 Generally, in architectural drawing the application of the perspective technique embodies a claim for a spatial rationality tied to optics. Martin Jay and others have suggested that this tie to the photographic gaze was the ‘scopic regime’ of the Modern.23 The geometry of the perspectival technique implicitly unified the viewer’s single optical relationship within the scene’s spatial diminution. However, in Mies’s drawing, while the perspective’s vanishing point is clearly referenced through a well-worn remnant pinhole that would have been used as a ruler-guide in setting up the drawing, it also registers a critique of

119

Desley Luscombe

perspective’s static single reference to a mono-ocular geometry. In comparison with Rietveld’s reconceptualisation of the axonometric, this critique of perspective’s techniques equally questions the hegemony of effects that registered in the techniques of representation commonly used in architectural practice. Robin Evans and others have recognised that the scene depicted in Mies’s drawing of the Barcelona Pavilion is distorted.24 The left side of the view is compressed and the cruciform column’s centrality is incorrectly emphasised. This corruption of perspectival clarity suggests that the final image emerges as much from the twodimensional characteristics of its composition as it does from the geometries of perspectival representation. However, rather than being considered as corrupt, this step away from the singular logic of perspectival conventions is important to the development of architectural meaning in the drawing. As two-dimensional composition, various rhythms and proportions can be revealed in an analysis of the image that defines aspects of its compositional structure and shows the importance of its diagrammatic and representational concerns. Through the highlighting of specific nodes and adjacencies, the diagram of the drawing can be seen to move the image beyond projective perspective to expose attributes in the architecture that otherwise might remain inconsequential. To investigate this further, and because of the single vanishing point, the distortion of the image can be examined from the basis of its implied perspectival projection from the plan.25 However, as shown through the analysis of the correlation between plan and scene, the resultant drawing moves beyond these simple geometries. In order for the scene to retain the logic of the drawing’s perspectival technique, the viewing subject internal to the perspectival structure must relocate to change their point of view. Introduced through this gesture is a split in the understanding of the viewing subject. The viewer internal to the perspectival construction relocates to respond to specific elements, and acts to posit these for the reference of a viewer external to the drawing. The viewer internal to the scene structures the image and plays a didactic role as instructor, whereas the viewer external to the artwork negotiates these collaged attributes in a process of questioning the importance of its architectural meaning. In Mies’s drawing, the didactic role of the viewer internal to the drawing’s construction retains a necessary sensory engagement with architecture’s material form. There is a haptic response to architecture’s corporeality. What this viewer brings to the external viewer’s understanding includes recognition of the impact of natural light on the multiplicity of architecture’s materials and their representation as a result of being located in a natural setting. However, equally included are the abstract qualities of architectural space that enable figure/ground reversals and the privileging of single elements over others. This capacity to spatially reverse what is seen suggests a complexity in architectural reception that is not evident in Rietveld’s drawing of the Schröder House. These two characteristics of material response to nature and possible spatial reversals create a dialogue whose parts are co-dependent. For example, in the scene, it is the introduction of tonal opposites that provides an implied depth through the collaging of elements. The lack of rendering of the freestanding wall enables it to be considered either as a void/absence, and thus in one sense as a ‘ground’ of little consequence, or as the ‘figure’ of the scene. In a representational sense, the strongest recognition of ‘figure’

120

Architectural drawing

is of the sculptured scene in the courtyard beyond the interior. This shift to representational form brings with it a scale that is unambiguously architectural. The literal representation of ‘figure’ is a device used to further the architectural investigation, and to orientate the viewer’s attention to spaces hidden from view.26 The alternation between figure and ground reinforces the didactic role determined for the viewing subject internal to the structure of the image. However, it also highlights that the viewer external to the image plays an active role in responding to the image. Seeking a resolution of figure/ground through tone and detail, Mies’s drawing reinforces a dynamic asymmetrical balance to the image that is abstract and begins to configure a range of responses anticipated from the viewer external to the image. This viewer comprehends the drawing differently as they move closer to or further away from its detail. From a distance there is a focus on the abstract chevron of the darker tonal mass on the right of the image, counterbalanced by the strong vertical lines of the centre and left. This suggests a response that focuses on the abstraction of twodimensional characteristics of the artwork and counters the singularity of its architectural scenography. In close up, however, the viewer is positioned within this scenography. The detailed rendering of materiality and atmospheric situation reinforces architecture’s corporeality and the complexity of this view’s meaning as ‘scene’. However, this scene has an inbuilt ambiguity. The most privileged position opposite the vanishing point, for the viewer external to the image, is at the wrong distance for the view to be apprehended in a single observation or resolved in a single geometric logic. This ambiguity demands an intellectual engagement that avoids the implication for the viewer of the image to be caught up in the inertia implied by the perspective. Rather than the objectivity of Rietveld’s drawing of the Schröder House, this effect proposes a necessary combination of objective as well as subjective responses to architecture’s spatiality. In Mies’s drawing, there is an attempt to relocate into the technique of perspective the temporality that is necessary for the natural apprehension of architectural space. The relationship developed between viewers internal and external to the scene takes on a kaleidoscopic negotiation of temporally defined spatial collages. In the context of Mies’s work of the period, this can be seen in the light of how artists in his immediate milieu were responding to philosophers such as Eduard Spranger and his text Psychologie des Jugendalters (Psychology of Adolescence), published in 1924.27 Spranger’s aim for the improvement and retraining of the adolescent was fundamentally based on bringing together specific intellectual and physical functions. Through the retraining of body and mind, the adolescent would learn to conform to societal norms. This was carried out through the unification of body with cognitive retraining. It was believed that this retraining would remove any undesirable or confusing characteristics of individuals. These propositions influenced the way avant-garde artists developed new pseudo-scientific roles for their artistic production.28 It is this contextualisation that can be seen as important in understanding the visual structure of Mies’s drawing. Artists such as Hans Richter and others became interested in the power of art being used in the processes of retraining the spiritual will of the individual. For Richter, art, and specifically his experimental film, could support a re-alignment of a viewer’s ‘soul’ through an amalgamation of their physical

121

Desley Luscombe

actions with their sensory perceptions and cognitive responses. The cognitive and physical functions of the body thereby came together in a single uniform action. Fundamental to this concept of retraining was the distrust of the visual that in the past had led to sentimentality (a failing he observed in representational art or feature films of the time). Mies’s response in this context was to rethink the way viewers might respond to architecture’s material forms and, by implication, the way they might respond to its representation through graphic media. The viewer external to the image is destabilised in their quest for an understanding of the image, and is directed to move, unifying their bodily and cognitive inquiry. By liberating drawing from the confines of its conventions, dominated in this case by perspectival techniques, Mies reinserted a unification of the viewer’s physical and cognitive responses to architectural space, directed precisely by the construct of the internal viewer. For Mies, this unification of the physical with the intellectual cognitive response to architecture supported his call for an ‘intensification of life’.29 For this new future to emerge there was to be no room for sentimentality. What was unique for architecture in this new conceptualisation was the necessary relationality between material affect, abstraction and a viewer’s understanding of implied hierarchies of ideas in architecture through the lens of the everyday nature of experience. What is present in both drawings, a perspective by Mies van der Rohe and an axonometric by Rietveld, is a theorising of very specific attitudes to architectural experimentation. Rietveld directs attention to architecture’s potential for continuously expansive and dynamic abstraction and the complicity of man as objective within that understanding of modernity. Mies instead returns the viewer to the link between abstraction and a sensory apprehension of layered architectural spatiality. Exposing these layers as distinctive sensory responses is to elicit an intensification of the soul. His drawing’s link between abstraction and materiality reminds us that the mind requires direction for clear apprehension and interpretation of sensations in order to intellectually montage only the important attributes of a temporally engaged bodily inquiry. For architecture, the structuring diagram informing its drawings, specifically presentation drawings, is thus doubly informed and can open a new appreciation of its theoretical possibility. The diagram can be understood as structuring representation, whereby a complex network of nodes and intersections emphasise adjacencies of importance for the viewer’s apprehension of meaning. As well, and because architectural drawing works beyond representation as its conceptual ‘ground’, the structuring diagram of architectural drawings provides a unique setting for recognition of architectural experimentation. In these terms, the diagram of individual architectural drawings moves beyond being the simple precursor of its realisation as building to become an independent operation that is recognised for its piloting of architectural ideas. The idea of representation in architecture is therefore repositioned. It becomes renegotiated as an after-effect of a continuously experimental discipline.

122

Architectural drawing

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). See specifically Chapter 12, ‘The Diagram’, for a discussion on the importance of the diagram for apprehending meaning in paintings. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Andrew Benjamin, ‘Lines of Work: On Diagrams and Drawings’, Architectural Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 143–55. Benjamin discusses diagrams in architecture as the site of experimentation for architectural innovation. These two examples are taken from an ongoing project analysing presentation drawings for their delivery of meaning related to experimentation in architecture. Centraal Museum Utrecht (Rietveld Archive, Inv. Nr. 004 A 104). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MOMA, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, Cat. No. MR14.1). The impact of photography on modernity and its basis in notions of the gaze is discussed by: Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Seattle Bay Press, 1988), 3–28; Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, Daidalos 1 (1981), 41–59. Bois had recounted the impact of axonometry within the De Stijl movement and suggested its influence on modern architecture being dated to the 1923 exhibition of Theo van Doesburg’s illustrations in Paris and subsequently in Weimar. See Desley Luscombe, ‘Illustrating Architecture: The Spatio-temporal Dimension of Gerrit Rietveld’s Representations of the Schröder House’, The Journal of Architecture 18 no. 1 (2013): 25–58. Richard Difford, ‘Developed Space: Theo van Doesburg and the Chambre de Fleurs’, The Journal of Architecture 12 no. 1 (2007): 79–98. Richard Difford, ‘Proun: An Exercise in the Illusion of Four-Dimensional Space’, The Journal of Architecture 2 (1997): 113–44. This can be seen as distinct from the paintings of Theo van Doesburg, where the abstraction of the image leaves the viewer questioning what they see, whether painting or a representation of an architecture-like spatiality. Paul Overy, De Stijl (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 82. Overy, De Stijl, 85. ‘Wenn ich sitze, ich nicht sitzen, wie mein Sitz-Fleisch möchte sondern will wei mein Sitz-Geist sich, säße er, den Stuhl sich flöchte.’ Christian Morgenstern, ‘Der Aesthet’ (The Aesthete). See Marek Wieczorek, ‘Le Paradigme De Stijl’, translated by the author in Alfred Pacquement, De Stijl 1917–1931 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2010), 68. Wieczorek, ‘Le Paradigme De Stijl’, 66. While Richard Padovan questions the interest that Rietveld showed in Arthur Schopenhauer drawing attention to the differences in attitude, others, such as Rob Dettingmeijer and Georg Stahl, see this association as important. See Richard Padovan, Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl (London: Routledge, 2002), 49, and Georg Stahl, trans. and ed., On Vision and Colors by Arthur Schopenhauer and Color Sphere by Philipp Otto Runge (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 30–31. Dolf Broekhuizen, ‘An Awakening Consciousness, The Early Development of Rietveld’s Theoretical Approach’, in Rob Dettingmeijer, Marie Therese van Thoor and Ida van Zijl, eds, Rietveld’s Universe (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2010), 38. For translations of Rietveld’s written work, see Theodore M. Brown, The Work of G. Rietveld Architect (Utrecht, A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1958). See exploration of similarities in Rietveld’s theories with those of Schopenhauer in Georg Stahl, On Vision and Colors, 30–33. While Madeleine Kuipers has written a critique of Rietveld’s article on New Objectivity, there is no questioning of the term ‘objective’ outside an artistic context. See Madeleine Kuipers, ‘Rietveld and Nieuwe Zakelijkheid in Architecture’, in R. Güttemeier, K. Beekman and B. Rebel, Neue Sachlichkeit and Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 81–112. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, E. F. G. Payne, trans. (New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. II, 375. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, 375. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, 209. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, 185–6. For a fuller version of this analysis, see Desley Luscombe, ‘Drawing the Barcelona Pavilion: Mies van der Rohe and the Implications of Perspectival Space’, The Journal of Architecture 21 no. 2 (2016): 210–43. Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Seattle Bay Press, 1988), 20. See also Jonathan Crary, ‘Modernising Vision’, in the same volume. Evans on Mies: Robin Evans, The Projective Cast, Architecture and its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 360; Robin Evans, ‘Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries’, in

123

Desley Luscombe

25 26

27

28

29

Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architecture Association, 1997), 242. See drawings showing this analysis in Luscombe, ‘Drawing the Barcelona Pavilion’. As first mentioned in Luscombe, ‘Drawing the Barcelona Pavilion’, this is a device continuously used in Mies’s designs. See Penelope Curtis, Figuring Space: Sculpture/Furniture from Mies to Moore, Catalogue (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), esp. 6–8. See also Thomas Pavel, ‘Result: Best Completion’, in Barcelona Pavilion: Architecture and Sculpture, eds, Ursel Berger and Thomas Pavel (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2006), 26. See the response to Spranger implicitly made by Hans Richter: Hans Richter, ‘Die schlecht trainierte Selle’ (The Badly Trained Soul), G, III (June 1924). Also in Detlef Mertens and Michael W. Jennings, G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, trans. Steven Lindberg with Margareta Ingrid Christian (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 146–49. See also Gabriel Trop’s analysis of Richter’s work: Gabriel Trop, ‘The Vitality of Form: Hans Richter and the Training of the Soul’, in Mies van der Rohe, Richter, Gräff & Co.: Alltag und Design in der Avantgardezeitschrift G, Karin Fest et al. (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2013), 34–42. Detlef Mertins suggests that Walter Benjamin was also to see this link explaining that images could be capable of installing new knowledge, new behaviours and the solution to new problems of mass society. See Detlef Mertens and Michael W. Jennings, G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, 95 [70]. This is a term Mies was to use to explain the times. See, Mies van der Rohe, ‘On the Theme: Exhibitions’, Die Form 3 no. 4 (1928), 121; see translation in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 304.

Bibliography Benjamin, Andrew. ‘Lines of Work: On Diagrams and Drawings’. In Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy, 143–155. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Berger, Ursel and Thomas Pavel, eds. Barcelona Pavilion: Architecture and Sculpture. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2006. Bois, Yve-Alain. ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’. Daidalos 1 (1981): 41–59. Brown, Theodore M. The Work of G. Rietveld Architect. Utrecht: A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1958. Curtis, Penelope. Figuring Space: Sculpture/Furniture from Mies to Moore, Catalogue. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1981] 2002. Dettingmeijer, Rob, Marie Therese van Thoor and Ida van Zijl, eds. Rietveld’s Universe. Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2010. Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast, Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Evans, Robin. ‘Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries’. In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, 233–277. London: Architectural Association, 1997. Fest, Karin, Sabrina Rahman and Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah. Mies van der Rohe, Richter, Gräff & Co: Alltag und Design in der Avantgardezeitschrift G. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2013. Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Seattle Bay Press, 1988. Güttemeier, Ralf, Klaus Beekman and Ben Rebel. Neue Sachlichkeit and Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Luscombe, Desley. ‘Illustrating Architecture: The Spatio-temporal Dimension of Gerrit Rietveld’s Representations of the Schröder House’. The Journal of Architecture 18 no. 1 (2013): 25–58. Luscombe, Desley. ‘Drawing the Barcelona Pavilion: Mies van der Rohe and the Implications of Perspectival Space’. The Journal of Architecture 21 no. 2 (2016): 210–43. Mertens, Detlef and Michael W. Jennings. G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926. Translated by Steven Lindberg with Margareta Ingrid Christian. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010. Neumeyer, Fritz. The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art. Translated by Mark Jarzombek. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Overy, Paul. De Stijl. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Pacquement, Alfred. De Stijl 1917–1931. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2010. Padovan, Richard. Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl. London: Routledge, 2002. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. G. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Stahl Georg. On Vision and Colors by Arthur Schopenhauer and Color Sphere by Philipp Otto Runge. Edited and translated by Georg Stahl. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.

124

Gerrit Rietveld, Isometric, Schröder House.

Chapter 12

God’s eye view Adam Jasper

Perspective Perspective, according to the account famously provided by Erwin Panofsky in Perspective as Symbolic Form, is not only a transparent medium for conveying information about objects, but also shapes the way we see. The pictorial space of linear perspective produces a homogenous space centred on the viewer, and this in turn informs our picture of the world. Moreover, when we construct an image in perspective, we place the viewer in the position of observation that was enjoyed by the artist. The very act of constructing an image in perspective is therefore an attempt to communicate something a priori incommunicable: the subjective experience of one viewer to another. Panofsky’s observations regarding the modern dominance of one particular version of perspective – Albertian pictorial perspective – sits in tension with a number of drawing techniques, and in particular with what might be taken to be its antithesis, axonometric projection. If pictorial perspective is an attempt to communicate the world view of the sovereign individual, whose view is shared – or rather, shaped – by the axonometric?1 The word ‘perspective’ has contradictory aspects: on the one hand, it implies a personal and subjective vantage point (‘my perspective’), on the other, its etymology indicates a long and quite impersonal technical history (the science of perspective). Five hundred years of writing explicitly concerned with perspective have left their traces. Back-translating the word per-spective is simple enough: ‘through the eye’. However, the very fact that the word has a Latin root is enough to indicate that it is not an innocent

126

God’s eye view

word, but one equipped with a manufactured tradition; indeed, it is not a word found in the ancient world, but dates back to late church Latin, to the perspectiva ars, the science of optics. The terminology around ‘perspective’ is, for its part, something of a forest. The closer the subject is studied, the more bewildering the technical language becomes: orthogonal, Albertian, central, one-point, two-point, scena per angolo, atmospheric, skiagraphic, axonometric, isometric, military, cavalier, and so on. Each word corresponds to an invention, a re-invention, a claim to authorship, a dogma or a pedagogic technique. A dozen or more systems for civil, bellicose or celestial use could be listed. What all systems of perspective and projection share, and what explains their proliferation, is that none are satisfactory.2 Three dimensions cannot be losslessly translated into two dimensions. A flat plane can show the appearance, or dimensions, or relative position, of bodies in space, but never all three at once. Sacrifices are always made, whether to angular or spatial relationships. What is produced by perspectival drawing is not a map of perception, but information. In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky’s definition, drawn from Albrecht Dürer, is economical but considered. Perspective involves the presentation of a material surface, on which individual objects are painted or drawn, as a picture plane. ‘Upon this picture plane is projected the spatial continuum which is seen through it and which is understood to contain all the various individual objects’.3 Or, put differently, pictorial perspective is described as a way of looking at an illustrated surface as if we were looking through a window. The ‘spatial continuum’ that is ‘seen’ is invisible. The Cartesian grid is not itself drawn upon the picture plane, but consists in a standardisation of the interpretation of changes in size, shading and vertical displacement. This is more than simply a rule dictating that objects appear smaller the further away they are. Rather, it is meant to be a homogenisation of the way that objects are depicted in space. That this homogenisation presented a radical break with the lived phenomena of vision was famously described by Merleau-Ponty in Cezanne’s Doubt. He was not alone in recognising this.4 If this was the only difference between pictorial perspective and biological vision, we could count ourselves fortunate. However, as Panofsky notes, unlike the picture plane, the retina is not flat, but a section of a sphere. All the basic units of information are inherently compromised, because all straight lines projected into a sphere should appear as curves. No lines can be straight, both in nature and to the eye. And if even today only very few of us have perceived these curvatures, that is surely part of our habituation – further reinforced by looking at a photograph – to linear perspectival construction: a construction that is itself comprehensible only for a quite specific, indeed specifically modern, sense of space, or, if you will, sense of the world.5 Parallel lines should not only converge as they recede, but also bend and cramp together the further they are from the centre of the field of vision (as in curvilinear perspective). Vision is, so to speak, mostly blind. The individual eye compensates by moving the sensitive part of the fovea around so rapidly that our impressions are rarely in focus. Mechanical blur is, in the literal sense, more true to vision than a focused image, for it shows an average of multiple small perspectival shifts gathered together in a single image. And all this without mentioning that vision is binocular, which is essential for determining the real distance of objects, and thereby their actual size. Curved, blurry,

127

Adam Jasper

dynamic and binocular vision: not much is left to reconcile the claims pictorial perspective used to make upon perception. Panofsky presented perspective not as a technique for capturing nature (‘nature’ understood as the excess of the here-and-now of perception), but as a latent technology for escaping it. Panofsky’s interests were theoretical in the full sense of the word. He wanted to know what positive historical content, what ‘spiritual meaning’ (geistige Bedeutung), perspective has. What he might have been looking for is suggested by the longest quote on symbolic form that he drew from Cassirer: In connection with perceptual space we can no more speak of homogeneity than of infinity. The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that all its elements, the ‘points’ which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation, this position which they occupy in relation to each other. Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation: it is a purely functional and not a substantial reality. Because fundamentally these points are devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no question of a diversity in content.6 ‘Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation.’7 Cassirer and Panofsky understood the spatial continuum as a mathematical ether within which objects appear as points, a network of paired spatial relations, of above, below, left and right, before and behind. These relations are symmetrical, homogenous, measurable and, if we are sympathetic with the phenomenologists, utterly impoverished.8 In lived experience space is neither homogenous nor symmetrical. In early Christian art, to take representations of the city of Jerusalem as an example, space is not shown as it is meant to look, but as it is known, with parallel lines remaining parallel for each building, and the relative size of each building depending on its subjective importance. The existence of a metric, however, transforms relationships of presence to relations of proximity. The primordial meaning of a word like ‘closeness’ is displaced by a data set. Theoˉ ria, understood as a mode of seeing, is sometimes rightly accused of being sterile. We can temporarily abandon ideological considerations to ask, as Robin Evans did in his last, posthumously published, book, The Projective Cast, what practical effect the techniques of drawing had on the production of architecture. Evans bluntly argued that full frontal, symmetrical representations are virtually dictated by the tools of drafting.9 Alberti’s insistence upon the primacy of the drawing, a fifteenth century claim endorsed by almost every prominent theorist in the 1980s – by Peter Eisenman, by Daniel Libeskind, by Bruno Reichlin, by Yve-Alain Bois, and by Evans himself10 – was condemned in Evan’s last work as a false refuge. If drawing is afforded primacy over building, the limits and tendencies in the construction of technical drawing reveal themselves all the more forcefully, like the chequerboard floor that dictated the composition of Albertian paintings. The implication was that insisting on the primacy of drawing is by no means the same thing as establishing the creative autonomy of the architect.

128

God’s eye view

That Evans understood perspective as a generative technique, rather than a question of perception or even semiotics, is indicated by his analysis of various sacrae conversationes by Piero della Francesca in the same book. Using della Francesca’s paintings as examples, Evans shows the cohabitation of pictorial perspective for depicting architectural spaces, and a kind of quasi-axonometry that he calls ‘the Other Method’, for the depiction of human bodies. Evans attributes the other-worldliness, the curious detachment, of the figures in the paintings of Piero della Francesca to this variation in perspectival technique. Likewise, one could add the separate technique of skiagraphy that is used for drawing shadows thrown by the sun. Thus, the depiction of space in Renaissance painting emerges as the collective effect of a cluster of distinct techniques with varying poetic effects. If perspective therefore consists of many techniques, rather than a single process, we should think of it as a means of distributing information, not capturing reality. However, with the arrival of photography, technique was subjected to the amnesia of the mechanism, and the absolute consistency of onepoint perspective, with all its concomitant distortions, fell like an iron cage onto our expectations of realism. Perspective, embedded in a technology rather than understood as a technique, was lost to painting.

Axonometry The first rigorous explanations of how to consistently construct drawings of objects in axonometric space appeared during the nineteenth century. English histories, in particular, inevitably begin with William Farish’s succinct rules for the construction of isometric mechanical drawings in his Cambridge pamphlet from 1822.11 Although axonometric construction was known before then, and was particularly common in military treatises from the seventeenth century on, it was not systematised until the popularity of isometry in technical drawing normalised the conventions around it. The tremendous advantage of the axonometric, as is well known to every student of architecture, is that it conserves measurements, and that it is fast to construct. The removal of the vanishing point means that spatial relationships are conserved regardless of their depth within the picture – and that parallel lines never meet, a criterion that can only be met if the viewer is an infinite distance away, and sees the image with infinite clarity, hence the name ‘God’s eye view’. The God’s eye view is apt to show the world as x-rayed, as a projection that is good for thinking with because it encourages mental rotation, but it also appears autonomous and floating because it sits in no particular relationship to the eye. It is perhaps no coincidence that Baldassarre Peruzzi’s famous 1530 cut-aways were of St Peter’s in Rome, a building designed not least with the intent that God might gaze upon it. Axonometric projection became a reflexive source of architectural knowledge with the popularity of Auguste Choisy.12 Choisy’s chthonic or ‘frog’s eye’ projections, which placed the viewer within but beneath a structure, were ideal devices for depicting the distribution of loads in gothic vaulting. They stripped the gothic of its idiosyncrasies,

129

Adam Jasper

revealing the vault as an abstract, economic, modular form. As a result, they look strangely contemporary, and Choisy’s insights can be rediscovered a century later in the worm’s eye axonometrics of James Stirling. The two advantages of the axonometric, speed and measurability, mean that even now it remains a common notational tool for internal communication between designers, architects and engineers; unlike the perspectival drawing or the photorealistic rendering, it is not conventionally used to present a project to clients or the public. The first essays to argue that the axonometric might have an importance for architecture theory akin to that of pictorial perspective to painting were published by Bruno Reichlin in 197813 and Yve-Alain Bois in 1981.14 As Bois openly attests, it was Reichlin who first accorded the axonometric the status of a ‘symbolic form’, in his essay on Alberto Sartoris. Although many of the ambiguities of pictorial perspective discussed above are avoided in axonometric projection, even in this seemingly objective form radical new ambiguities are introduced. As many nineteenth century commentators, such as the engineer Jules de la Gournerie, observed, it is impossible to know with parallel projection which spaces are convex to the viewer, and which are concave. The image can pop back and forth between conformations, and an element can be simultaneously either behind or in front of the picture plane. Furthermore, if the viewer does not know where the ground plane is intended to be, it is impossible to absolutely determine the relative position of anything in the image. Gournerie’s way to resolve this ambivalence was by including shadows in axonometric illustrations: ‘When a view includes shadows, there can be no doubts’.15 Bois called this solution ‘absurd in its redundancy’.16 Why exactly? Certainly this instruction grants shadows the role in the axonometric image that Leonardo da Vinci had always wanted to attribute to them in his Neoplatonic world view – darkness as one of the four constitutive elements of the universe. It is noteworthy that, regardless of the system of perspective employed, all shadows thrown by daylight are automatically in parallel projection, because the sun is taken to be far enough away that its view of the world is axonometric. All the same, the presence of shadows in a ‘God’s eye view’ seems somewhat inappropriate, not least because of the old identification of the Eye of God with the sun itself. An irony that, because everything that God looks upon is illuminated, that which occurs in shadow is concealed from his omniscience. God’s eye is not all seeing. The absurd redundancy is that for an axonometric projection to both remain measurable, and avoid ambiguity about what is moving towards and what away from the viewer in the image, not one but two omniscient God’s eye views are required: one to provide the vantage point, the other to throw the shadows from. These heretical characteristics were exploited by El Lissitzky for his Proun constructions, or rather, as El Lissitzky argued in his well-known essay, ‘A and Pangeometry’, Malevich’s black square can be interpreted as not merely iconoclastic, but as blinding the window of the picture plane. ‘Suprematism has extended the apex of the finite visual cone of perspective into infinity.’17 God’s eye can be put out. ‘If one assigns the value 0 to the picture surface, then one may call the depth direction – (negative), and the frontal direction + (positive), or vice versa. Thus, suprematism has swept away the illusion of three-dimensional space on a plane.’18 As Bois wrote, ‘all treatises preceding this event, regardless of their concern with architecture, military art,

130

God’s eye view

technical drawing or geometry, emphasise the convenience and accuracy of axonometry, whereas the modern artists celebrated its perceptive polyvalence’.19 The ideological force of the axonometric for El Lissitzky was absolutely not that it offered final objectivity, a God’s eye view, nor even the logic of objects as they were known to the hands (as in medieval art), but that the ambivalence inherent in any system of representation proved that no such comforting final objectivity was possible. The world could not be represented with a crystalline map, for its image popped between alternate configurations. Just as the significance of the ‘Here, Now, I’ origo flips in dialogue with each alternating speaker (a law known to grammar as deixis), the meaning of the images changes depending on the origo, the imagined vantage point of the viewer. Images, therefore, could present alternating points-of-view just as well as any dialectic. Roman Jakobson, who in pre-revolutionary years was deeply involved in the Futurist circles in Moscow, neatly echoed El Lissitzky’s praise of the arbitrary polarity of the axonometric image when he wrote of the bipolar nature of the linguistic sign, of its ability to toggle between positive and negative determinations. Jakobson referred to the words that express deixis – I, you, here, there, and so on – as ‘shifters’, their movement across speakers as a formal expression of struggle. ‘Without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out.’20 Jakobson was writing about poetry, but his description applies just as well to images. It was in this intellectual context that Cornelius van Eesteren’s and Theo van Doesburg’s Counter-Construction, exhibited at the 1923 De Stijl exhibition at L’Effort Moderne in Paris under the explicit title of ‘analysis of architecture’, must be understood, a parallel that would be made explicit in Josef Albers’ later Kippbilder.21 That Bois’s essay was intended as something of a manifesto for the significance of the axonometric to architectural representation is attested to by its context. ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’ appeared in 1981 in the first issue of the architecture theory journal Daidalos. It was not alone – the entire inaugural issue of Daidalos was dedicated to the axonometric projection, with further contributions by Bruno Reichlin and Werner Oechslin, on Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and van Doesburg, amongst others. For the new theory journal, the axonometric was asserted as the way of seeing – or theoˉ ria – that had become architecture’s own. Robin Evans, however, with more skepsis, pointed out that what architecture thereby saw was its own grid, taking ‘its own rectangular measuring system as its characteristic content’, such that ‘the metric framework is the form’.22 Rather than opening architecture to speculative experimentation, Evans argued, the exploration of axonometric space produced a fascination with its own crystalline geometry. ‘What we see here,’ he concluded, ‘are concretions of the measuring grids reticulated structure.’23 What Bois did not celebrate, perhaps because of its associations with op-art and kitsch, is that it was in the decade after the De Stijl exhibition that the craze for the drawing of ‘impossible objects’ appears. Oscar Reutersvärd is credited with the invention of the Penrose triangle in 1934, and M. C. Escher’s visual illusions appeared not long after. Individual objects had been sketched out in parallel projection since the invention of drawing, but such relatively simple visual paradoxes were not created until the

131

Adam Jasper

twentieth century. Why? Because in order to generate the logical space in which such a paradox can be presented, it is not merely the figure that needs to be understood as axonometric, but also the ground. If the viewer does not understand all space as axonometrically structured, the drawing is not understood as a paradox, but merely as patterned. As a symbolic form, axonometric space is in fact a kind of meta-perspective, fulfilling the goal of a complete spatial continuum that so alarmed Cassirer. It is for this reason that Reichlin argued that parallel projection achieved the isotropic and enveloping representation of space that pictorial perspective had failed to deliver,24 or, as Bois wrote, ‘axonometry abolishes perspective’.25 Can they all be right? From what perspective is it possible to reconcile El Lissitzky’s claim of the objectivity of the axonometric with Evans’s accusation of empty formalism: what is both objective and has no object? The answer is not to be found in humanism or theology, but in data. Roman Jakobson’s early career was dedicated to futurism, with its clash of dialectical opposites and its meaningful dichotomies. His later career was devoted in no small part to championing cybernetics.26 His biography paralleled the fate of the axonometric, tracing a trajectory from ideological avant-garde to technocratic computation. As Bernard Geoghegan writes, Jakobson introduced both Levi-Strauss and Lacan to Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, and championed an interdisciplinary ‘center for communication sciences’ at MIT. Jakobson’s centre failed, but cybernetics thrived in the research into human and computer interactions that shaped the development of graphical user interfaces and the evolution of computer-aided design. By the time axonometric projection was claimed as the fulfilment of the reflexive history of architectural drawing by Reichlin and Bois, it was already being implemented in a much more straightforward way as a data storage and display heuristic in computer graphics. Indeed, the axonometric could be described as the native condition for computer graphics. All image data is stored, addressed and transformed in matrices. Moving from an axonometric projection – which can be stored in a matrix – to pictorial perspective requires an entire additional rendering step. In pictorial perspective, the relative appearance of every object in the image must be recalculated with respect to a hypothetical observer. This is an expensive sop to the biological quirks of the human user, one that needs to be re-performed every time this user moves. In the case of axonometry, the geometry of display does not need to be recalculated when the user moves, only redrawn, for there is no parallax shift of foreground and background – this redrawing costing no more computational power than scrolling through a text document. Your graphics card is indifferent to the history of Russian formalism, but not to computational parsimony. The history of representation remains with us in encrypted form, embedded within technologies. Once the axonometric is encoded deep within the graphical machine, is it as lost to architecture as photographic perspective is lost to painting? This brings us to questions that cannot be answered within the bounds of architectural theory, questions of how technique becomes sublimated as technology, and knowledge ossifies into the structure of data – non-negotiable, because it is implemented automatically. Let us repeat Jakobson’s quote on the polarity of the sign, but this time

132

God’s eye view

from a very different deictical position, that of the here-and-now: ‘Without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out.’27

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Thanks to Agnes Hoffmann, Stefan Neuner, Johanna Függer-Vagts and my colleagues at eikones in Basel for their profound insights and suggestions. As was done in Alberto Perez-Gomez’s Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, [1924] 1991), 27. See also Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1968; revised 1976). Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 34. Ernst Cassirer, Das mythische Denken, cited in Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 30. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 118–19. In Cassirer’s Das mythische Denken, continuous space overrides the fundamental human need to set and respect limits, most especially that between the sacred and the profane. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, [1925] 2010) 109–10. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The sudden arrival of deconstruction can be seen in Libeskind’s drawings, from Micromegas (1979) to Chamber Works (1983), and in Eisenman’s House El Even Odd. For textual evidence, see the first published issue of Daidalos (1981). Then there is Robin Evans’s 1984 essay ‘In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind’, AA Files no. 6 (May 1984). William Farish, ‘On Isometrical Perspective’, Cambridge Philosophical Transactions 1 (1822). French histories credit the invention to the mathematician Gaspard Monge (1799), and emphasise continuity with the military illustrations of the seventeenth century (see: Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle, Perspective, Projections & Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 2) and isolated earlier examples can be found in archives, but Monge’s interest was in pure geometry, not architecture, and in the case of the illustrations of military fortifications, the axonometric was employed as a ‘method without a theory’, a form of practical illustration that required little to no training. Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’Architecture (Paris: Gauthier - Villars, 1899). Bruno Reichlin, ‘The Axonometric as a Project: A Study on Alberto Sartoris’, Lotus International 22 (1979). Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, Daidalos 1 (1981): 40–58. Bois’s essay on the axonometric has continued to be included in university readers in spite of the awful English translation. Jules de la Gournerie, cited in Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, 56. Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, 56. El Lissitzky, ‘A and Pangeometry’ [1925], in Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, trans. Eric Dluhosch (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 142–149. Lissitzky. ‘A and Pangeometry’, 145. Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, 56. Roman Jakobson, ‘What is Poetry’ [1934], in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 175. Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, 42. Evans, The Projective Cast, 339. Evans, The Projective Cast, 339. Reichlin, ‘The Axonometric as a Project: A Study on Alberto Sartoris’, 85. Bois, ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’, 46. Bernard Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus’, Critical Inquiry 38 no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 96–126. Jakobson, ‘What is Poetry’, 175.

133

Adam Jasper

Bibliography Belting, Hans. Florenz und Bagdad : Eine Westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008. Bois, Yve-Alain. ‘Metamorphosis of Axonometry’. Daidalos 1 (1981): 41–58. Bragdon, Claude Fayette. The Frozen Fountain: Being Essays on Architecture and the Art of Design in Space. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932. Carpo, Mario and Frédérique Lemerle. Perspective, Projections & Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, [1925] 2010. Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Farish, William. ‘On Isometrical Perspective’. Cambridge Philosophical Transactions 1 (1822). Geoghegan, Bernard. ‘From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus’. Critical Inquiry 38 no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 96–126. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1968; revised 1976. Jakobson, Roman. ‘What is Poetry’. In Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1934] 1987. Jakobson, Roman. My Futurist Years. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1992. Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. [1925] London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Lissitzky, El. ‘A and Pangeometry’. [1925] In Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution. Translated by Eric Dluhosch. London: Lund Humphries, 1970. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, [1948] 1964. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, [1924] 1991. Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Reichlin, Bruno. ‘L’assonometria come progetto nell’opera di Alberto Sartoris/The Axonometric as a Project: A Study on Alberto Sartoris’. Lotus International 22 (1979): 82–93. Scolari, Massimo. Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Wood, Christopher. ‘Review: The Origin of Perspective by Hubert Damisch’. Art Bulletin 77 no. 4 (1995): 677–82.

134

Part IV Critical displays

Aktion 507, front cover of the catalogue or ‘Materials for Discussion’ of the Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin exhibition featuring the manifesto of the organising group, Aktion 507, Berlin 1968.

Chapter 13

Aktion 507 Politics become theory become praxis Florian Kossak

In the past two decades, a string of large exhibitions (e.g. Urban Drift; MakeCity; Wohnungsfrage/Housing Question), publications (e.g. AnArchitektur),1 innovations of building typologies (e.g. Baugruppen) or experimental initiatives (e.g. temporary urbanism, urban gardening and agriculture)2 have made Berlin one of the ‘hotbeds’ of contemporary explorative work on the city. This development, arguably, ought to be seen as a reaction to top-down, large scale, predominantly speculatively driven and often controversial building projects that the city of Berlin had become known for after the fall of the Berlin Wall and and which have ignited a renewed critical discourse among a new generation of architects, planners and citizens. They are not only upholding the city’s social planning traditions from the early 1920s, but also the dramatic changes in the way architecture and urban planning were publicly negotiated and finally produced from the mid 1960s until the early 1980s. While the period from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s is typically acknowledged in contemporary discourses for the spatial change it produced in West Berlin, the mechanisms through which this dramatic change was made possible – how and why architects, planners and politicians began to rethink the nature of planning – are rarely considered. An understanding of this period – upheld as a model for bottom-up (yet entirely supported by policy and politics) urban regeneration in relation to its socio-political and planning context – is crucial not only for a fresh and critical understanding of the most recent developments in Berlin, but also for the devising of contemporary strategies and tools that make drastic social and inclusive change possible. An analysis of the mechanisms that led to a revised understanding of the city of Berlin during the late

137

Florian Kossak

1960s and throughout the 1970s, and more specifically of the public and contextually situated architectural exhibitions that played a substantial role in this process, can produce an understanding of the role of exhibitions as methodologies of mediation and negotiation, and offer valuable lessons for future urban regeneration processes in other cultural and national contexts. All urban regeneration and transformation processes are immensely complex and involve a whole range of professions, political and public stakeholders, as well as the affected communities. To focus only on one or on several interconnected groups and their forms of engagement within this process inevitably reduces its complexity. However, research has shown that the process of mediation, or translation, between these groups is an immensely crucial factor for the success of regeneration projects.3 This paper argues that architectural exhibitions, understood in their broadest form, play an important, yet underexplored and ill-understood role in this process, as they are a prime medium and locale in which the process of translation between different cultures or disciplinarily defined languages can occur – for instance, between the architectural and planning disciplines on the one hand, and engaged public or political bodies on the other.4 This particular type of architectural exhibition, distinct from the omnipresent shows of works of architecture in the context of individual or group exhibitions, biennales or triennales,5 occupies the role of ‘mediator’ or ‘translator’ of the complexities of the production processes of architecture, politics, socioeconomics and culture into a public setting. Architectural exhibitions can transgress beyond being localities of mediation, to become spatial settings that make possible conversations and negotiations between users and policy makers, top and bottom, finance and ambitions, the ‘real’ and the ‘desired’. In the context of Berlin, one could regard three exhibitions and events as the pivotal starting, catalysing and culminating moments within the aforementioned way through which, from the mid 1960s until the early 1980s, architecture and urban planning were first publicly negotiated and finally produced.6 These key events are the Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin (Diagnosis on the state of building in West Berlin) in 1968, the Strategien für Kreuzberg (Strategies for Kreuzberg) in 1977 and the Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin (IBA, International Building Exhibition) from 1984 to 1987. Until the mid-1960s, architectural exhibitions had commonly focused on the display of buildings and infrastructural projects. The Diagnose was the first exhibition to fundamentally move away from this format, to present instead a theoretical exploration and radical critique of architecture’s underlying politics and production processes in West Berlin, and of its housing provision in particular. It was an exhibition that ventured also into another previously uncharted terrain, by questioning the traditional roles of the architect and the other stakeholders involved in the production of the built environment, including the wider public and the users of architecture. Ten years after Diagnose, Strategien für Kreuzberg moved beyond the theories and criticism voiced by Diagnose and, with an open competition,7 brought into action the central demands that were then being made regarding the participation in planning processes of all people concerned with the development of their immediate built environment.8 The initiators of Strategies for Kreuzberg, local politician and architect

138

Aktion 507

Gerd Wartenberg, and Klaus Duntze, the pastor of the St Thomas parish in Kreuzberg, developed a programme of public exhibitions which included discussion forums and lay juries, where tenants and community groups presented and negotiated over 100 proposals to improve housing and its supporting infrastructure in this area of Berlin. This experimentation with democratic planning processes led to the notion of a ‘careful urban regeneration’ (‘Behutsame Stadterneuerung’), which was first developed in Berlin and deployed as an exemplar on a vast scale for the International Building Exhibition (IBA-Alt/ IBA-Old). The IBA remains, to this day, one of the most successful examples of a bottom-up, user-led and fundamentally sustainable inner-city regeneration on the social, cultural and economic level.9 These series of public architectural exhibitions and events are therefore significant in that they mark the gradual development from a type of exhibition that visualized and spatialized notions of critical theory (Diagnose), to a type of exhibition that can be described as ‘transformative praxis’ (IBA-Alt): exhibitions began to develop into locations and spaces that produced new arenas and new translations of existing knowledge. Indeed, it could be argued that the dramatic turn in West Berlin’s planning culture was possible only because of these exhibitions, which fostered a move away from a bulldozer mentality and towards a position that respected the existing building fabric and its residents’ desires to play a role in its transformation processes. Public architectural exhibitions, in other words, came to play a major role in urban change. The most prominent, and by far the largest of the three exhibitions, the IBA 1984/87, had with no doubt the most significant impact on the actual building fabric of Berlin, and there already exists a significant body of literature that documents this.10 It can also be argued that the Strategien für Kreuzberg have been instrumental in ‘relocating’ the architectural exhibition from a confined venue into a whole urban neighbourhood, to include a wider affected audience in the actual participation in the exhibition itself. And while it is arguably the aforementioned succession of exhibitions that led to the shift in West Berlin’s urban regeneration from the late 1960s until the 1980s, and the exhibitions should be considered together when one aims to understand this whole development, the Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin was the triggering moment for the production of a fundamental critique of the existing praxis and its politics. It ultimately galvanized a new generation of architects and planners in West Berlin, who would embark on a new form of praxis.

Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin In March 1968, the West Berlin branches of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA) and Architekten und Ingenieur Verein (AIV), supported by the Berlin Senate, launched a call for young architects born after 1932 to contribute to a special exhibition within the framework of the bi-annual ‘Berliner Bauwochen’ (Building weeks) to be held in September that same year. The Berlin Senate provided the money for this exhibition, 18,000 Deutsche Marks. The young architects answered the call for urban design

139

Florian Kossak

projects for West Berlin, but did not aim for the presentation of new design talent to a selection jury. In contrast, this group of around 100 architects, university teachers and students, intended to produce the exhibition on their own terms, to deliver a ‘critical reflection on the current building activity and production processes in Berlin’.11 In the development phase of the exhibition, the group organized weekly plenary meetings held in room 507 of the Architecture Faculty, which would give the group its name – Aktion 507. The result was the exhibition Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin held in the half-completed Scharoun extension for the Architecture Faculty of the Technical University. A form of ‘Anti-Bauwochen’, as it was coined in the newsweekly Der Spiegel,12 the Diagnose marked a fundamental shift away from the mere presentation of individual architectural and urban design projects or buildings, as was the case in the traditional Bauwochen, and instead produced a scathing critique of the political, professional and construction establishment. The Materialien zur Diskussion13 (materials for discussion) that act as a quasi catalogue for the Diagnose exhibition, encompass altogether 17 sections that could be broadly grouped into six topics – although these were not made explicit at the time. These topics are: ‘economy and politics’, including an analysis of Berlin’s land ownership and related building practice, as well as the fierce critique of the so-called Berlin-Support;14 ‘socio-psychology’, with a specific focus on the Märkisches Viertel as case study; ‘administration’; ‘architectural practice and discipline’; ‘urban regeneration and planning examples’; ‘urban planning and participation’, which includes also a first version of the so-called Planer-Flugschrift (planning pamphlet),15 a call for a radical readjustment of publicly negotiated planning processes and for an extension of the architectural curriculum in order to produce practitioners fit for these new planning processes. The Materialien offer not only a diagnosis and a critique of the existing conditions, but also a call for a different building praxis and its defining conditions. This is already apparent in the Manifest by Aktion 507 [page 136], which was put on the front page of the Materialien zur Diskussion and outlined the key demands of the group. (These demands were: ‘Establishment of an informed and critical public’; ‘Involvement of all affected people at every level of planning and architectural decision-making processes’; ‘Economic, societal and architectural models (1:1)’; ‘Scientifically and socially oriented development of needs and programmes’; ‘Reduction of building administration tasks to coordination, supervision and accounting’; ‘Publicizing of all criteria regarding public commissions of building projects’; ‘Dismantling of design departments in housing associations’; ‘Planning alternatives through independent and interdisciplinary working teams’; ‘Abolition of the professional officialdom’; ‘Societal allocation of (land) property’; and ‘Adjustment of the so-called Berlin-Support to the real needs and opportunities [of the city]’.)16 And yet, Aktion 507 and the Diagnose exhibition cannot be seen independently from the historical context of 1968 and the socio-political situation of Berlin as a divided city. In fact, it is more than likely that the exhibition would not have happened, at least not in its format and fundamental critique, without the context of 1968 and the radicalization of large parts of the student body and the substantial support they had amongst a (younger) general public at the time. The exhibition was also specifically

140

Aktion 507

focused on the exceptional position of West Berlin and its highly subsidized building economy. It is therefore pertinent to understand the context in which the Aktion 507 manifesto and the Diagnose exhibition were produced.

Political context After World War II the West German seat of government moved from Berlin to Bonn, while West Berlin remained under Allied control (USA, UK, France), an ‘island’ in the otherwise Soviet-controlled zone. After the foundation of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG) in May 1949, West Berlin became de facto a federal state of the FRG, maintaining special rights and rules. In the same year, the Eastern part of the city became the capital of the newly founded Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR). Despite temporary blockades (1948/49) the two parts of the city remained open for some controlled form of exchange, for instance for the 50,000 so-called Grenzgänger, East Berliners who worked and studied in West Berlin and crossed the border on a daily basis. However, this situation came abruptly to an end with the erection of the Berlin Wall that commenced on 3 August 1961. The formerly anticipated re-unification – constitutionally enshrined in West Germany – became (for the time being) obsolete. The isolated position of West Berlin left the economy of the city heavily dependent on West German and US subsidies. Through the so-called BerlinHilfe-Gesetz (Berlin-Support-Bill) of 1964, the FRG gave West Berlin a lifeline in order to keep it the Schaufenster des Westens (shop-window of the West) in the ideological battle of the two economic and political systems which opposed each other in this city.17 It is those continued subsidies and investment incentives to the construction industry which (favouring comprehensive redevelopment and new-builds over renovation of the existing built fabric, large developers and practices with close political ties over smaller independent firms, projects that demonstrate prestige and ideological and economic superiority over projects with an actual use-value to the populace of West Berlin) contributed significantly to the state of building production that was later criticized in the Diagnose exhibition. On an urban regeneration level, the city was subjected to the so-called Stadterneuerungsprogramm, or City Renewal Programme, ratified by the SPD-led Berlin Senate in 1963. It legally framed the large-scale comprehensive redevelopment already in progress, which included the total demolition of 10,000 units in run-down inner-city housing areas18 and the relocation of the population to newly built housing estates in the outer suburbs of West Berlin, including the ominous Märkisches Viertel in BerlinReinickendorf from 1963–74 (with 16,000 units),19 which became the pinnacle and ultimately the much-criticized turning point of this development.20 The realization of these large housing estates followed a gradually shifting modern planning ideology, from a CIAM-influenced approach of functional divisions and building within a green landscape, to principles of the so-called Urbanität durch Dichte or ‘urbanity through density’.21 However, in the case of the Märkisches Viertel, this supposed urbanity is

141

Florian Kossak

portrayed by the Diagnose exhibition as a mere rhetoric and ‘loss of reality’ by architects, housing associations and politicians alike.22 Regarding the actual 1968 protest movement, one has to take into account the overall political landscape in West Germany. The country was governed from 1966 by the so-called Grosse Koalition, or ‘big coalition’, under Chancellor Kiesinger of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), with the Social Democrats (SPD) as junior partners.23 This led to little political opposition within the parliament, a decisive factor for the establishment of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, extra parliamentary opposition) by an increasingly politicized and revolting student body, headed by the SDS (Socialist German Student union) with Rudi Dutschke acting as a key proponent. While the 1968 student protest had been part of a wider international movement with cross-pollination and overarching themes (e.g. the Vietnam War), the German and Berlin protests have their own specificity. Initially a protest of a post-World War II generation against the lack of critical reflection on Germany’s recent fascist past, and in favour of a fundamental change towards a more emancipatory university education (inspired by the work of the Frankfurt School and the writings of Marcuse, Horkheimer or Habermas), the German and Berlin protest movement was galvanized by the death of the student Benno Ohnesorg, who was shot dead by a policeman during the demonstrations against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin on 2 June 1967, and, in the following year, the assassination attempt on SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968. The West German government, increasingly under pressure from the right-wing press, finally reacted to these growing protests and disruptions of public life with the ratification of the so-called Notstandsgesetze (emergency laws) on 30 May 1968 – a measure which was fiercely opposed by the student body and by substantial parts of the West German population, leading to occupations of university buildings around the country. Although there were also significant protests in all other major West German cities and their universities, it is in West Berlin, with its more direct relation to the Nazi past and the ongoing symbolic battles of ideologies, that those student protests found their most radicalized expressions. The intellectual centre of these protests in West Berlin was the Free University Berlin, located in Berlin-Dahlem, a bourgeois suburb to the southwest of the centre. The stage of the student demonstrations, however, was mainly around the Kurfürsten Damm, which was used for rallies, impromptu happenings and street battles. These are in close proximity to the Technical University Berlin and the Architecture Faculty, which was also occupied in the wake of the coming into force of the emergency laws.

Come! Look! Discuss! What this illustrates is that the whole preparation of the Diagnose exhibition, from the first official call in March 1968 by the Berlin Senate, BDA and AIV to participate in the Berlin Building Weeks, to the opening of the exhibition on 8 September 1968, took place in a highly charged environment that influenced the weekly discussions of members of

142

Aktion 507

Aktion 507. A short report by Thomas Schröder, entitled ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’24 and published in the German architecture journal Arch+, offers a rare insight into the planning and development process of the forthcoming exhibition. The journal issue was published three months after the official call, and at the time of the initial forming phase of the group of architects, university teachers and students. Schröder, who later also signed the Diagnose manifesto, reports that the initial intention of a show by Berlin’s young architectural talent had already been rejected. Through specific working groups, Aktion 507 had also already established a whole range of overarching themes as well as singular issues. What had not been decided at that point was how this large and diverse group would manage to produce a joint exhibition, and how this range of partly dispersed topics could be structured for the exhibition. Schröder lists seven different concepts for the exhibition as they were then still discussed by the exhibition coordinating committee: 1.

Pluralist approach (all groups work independently until shortly before the start of the exhibition).

2.

Permanent coordination of all groups (similar approaches for all group analysis).

3.

Reduction and modification of the groups to three or four main directions.

4.

Models of planning processes (following a general analytical prep work, individual group works would serve as illustrating examples).

5.

Series of topics (Senate, Clinical Centre Steglitz – not featured in the final exhibition, Märkisches Viertel investigated through the same critical considerations).

6.

Reduction to one topic (all points of critique applied to one topic, i.e. Märkisches Viertel).

7.

No exhibition, but a programme of agitations, hearings, seminars, discussions.25

Schröder further writes that the exhibition venue had still not been fixed at that stage (June/July) but that ‘it is planned to have a space close to the city centre but outside the University area’.26 The group originally planned to avoid the institutional affiliation, and were looking for a ‘neutral’ space that would be accessible to as large as possible a public, hence the city centre. It cannot quite be established whether they ran out of options for alternative spaces, or whether they simply opted for the easily available, halffinished extension of the Architecture Faculty on Ernst-Reuter-Platz. However, on the Manifest catalogue, only Ernst-Reuter-Platz was given as the location for the exhibition, rather than the institutional TU Berlin or Architecture Faculty – as if the unfinished and yet institutionally ‘unclaimed’ shell could grant the required independence. One can further note that the planned exhibition still had the working title Diagnosen zur Architektur. The final title signifies the shift away from an inward looking analysis of the discipline of ‘architecture’ towards the broader examination of the Bauen, or ‘building’, which encompassed the inherent politics and economics of building activity. There is also a subtle shift from the plural Diagnosen to the singular Diagnose, suggesting a move towards an ‘unquestionable’ single diagnosis, rather than a range of differing diagnoses. One could however argue that this is a somewhat rhetorical measure as it masked the diversity that was still apparent from the Manifest catalogue, and presumably in the exhibition itself.

143

Florian Kossak

According to Schröder, ‘weekly plenary meetings’ brought together the ‘fifteen working groups and one coordinating committee’.27 All groups had to report on this weekly basis to the plenary, presenting their additional plans and state of discussions. An elected secretariat represented the whole group to the outside public. The discussions regarding the format and content of the exhibition were not without struggles. A statement of the group in their manifesto indicates: ‘Due to its heterogeneous composition for both status and motivation, the group encountered within itself the same behavioural patterns that it had aimed to uncover and overcome in the ruling institutions’.28 What Aktion 507 ended up with was an exhibition that amalgamated several of the concepts listed by Schröder in Arch+. The exhibition catalogue is evidence that Aktion 507 maintained a pluralist approach, but tried to reduce or group the diverse projects to a manageable size, yet ended up with more than the suggested three to four. Aktion 507 also incorporated into the Diagnose a programme of agitations, hearings, seminars and discussions (suggested as concepts for a non-exhibition). This is particularly commented upon in a report in Bauwelt,29 a prominent weekly architecture journal, which mentions the eleven nights of discussions, also discussions with representatives of the building and administration establishment and with contributions that the journal deemed ‘not always printable’.30 It is this diversity of topics, and consequently of formats and media, that distinguishes the Diagnose exhibition, a fact that was also commented upon by the nonprofessional national papers and journals such as Die Zeit or Der Spiegel. Marion Schreiber in Die Zeit speaks of ‘colourful banners hanging over the visitors’ heads’ but also of ‘carefully produced drawings, models’.31 Der Spiegel mentions ‘timber scaffolding for graphical displays’, ‘large photographs mounted on Novopan-chipboards’, ‘flickering slide projections onto the bare concrete walls’ and a series of ‘installed loud speakers to create a soundscape with voices from interviewed residents of the Märkisches Viertel’.32 Aktion 507 thus produced a multi-media exhibition, mixing architectural representational techniques, such as orthogonal drawings or models, with art practice media (installation, sound pieces), documentary and graphical agitation, as well as formats that were used by the protesting and striking students around them.33 The different formats that translated the group’s diagnosis, critique and propositions were combined in the Diagnose exhibition to engage its diverse intended audience. According to Schröder, Diagnose aimed to address students, university teachers, professors, the general press, the professional press, the Berlin Senate, the parliament, political parties, banks, estate agents, housing associations, construction companies, planning departments, tenants, pupils, parents, pedagogical faculties and school teachers. Surprisingly, Schröder omits ‘architects’ from his list of intended audiences.34 It remains doubtful whether the Diagnose exhibition indeed managed to engage with such a broad audience. Marion Schreiber, for instance, asserts that the Diagnose was ‘an exhibition of the informed, for the informed’.35 And Bauwelt reports that the BDA and AIV, who had both originally initiated the exhibition, were now distancing themselves from it and the discussion, especially because ‘they are not compatible with the tasks and aims of both organizations’.36 As an exhibition that claimed

144

Aktion 507

to address the real needs of a hitherto neglected and disenfranchized public, the Diagnose alienated those very people that it was supposed to inform and speak for. The language that these young architects and planners used for their critique did not resonate with the experience and knowledge of the wider exhibition audience. But even if this exhibition was to a certain extent self-referential, managed only to address those who were already ‘informed’ and engaged in the critical dialogue about new democratic planning processes, the exhibition and the process of its production inadvertently galvanized a new generation of architects and planners in Berlin. This group not only came to prominence as practising architects and planners, as leading critics, or university teachers in Berlin and beyond, but they also led the city of West Berlin towards new forms of negotiating architecture and urban regeneration through increasingly participatory exhibition and urban transformation processes, culminating, via the Strategien für Kreuzberg, in the ‘careful urban regeneration’ section of the International Building Exhibition Berlin 1984/87.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer and Philipp Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013). Klaus Overmeyer, ed., Urban Pioneers: Temporary Use and Urban Development in Berlin (Berlin: Jovis, 2007). Francesca Ferguson, ed., Make Shift City (Berlin: Jovis, 2014). Florian Haydn and Robert Temel, eds, Temporary Urban Spaces (Berlin/Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006). See Robert Freestone and Marco Amati, eds, Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture (London: Ashgate, 2014). Florian Kossak, ‘The Real Beside the Real: The Laboratory Exhibition and the Experimental Production of Architecture’ (PhD diss., Edinburgh College of Art, 2008). Kristin Feireiss, ed., The Art of Architecture Exhibitions (Rotterdam: NAi publisher, 2001). Rolf J. Rave and Hans-Joachim Knöfel, Bauen in Berlin der 70er Jahre (Berlin: Kiepert, 1981). The ideas competition Strategien für Kreuzberg was completely open, not only for local, national and international teams of architects or built environment professionals, but also to lay people interested in the improvement of this, at that time extremely run-down and vulnerable, area of Berlin. Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Strategien für Kreuzberg (Berlin, 1979). Harald Bodenschatz and Cordelia Polinna, Learning from IBA – die IBA 1987 in Berlin (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2010). Josef Paul Kleihues, ed., 750 Jahre Architektur und Städtebau in Berlin (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1987). Günter Schlusche, Die Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin – Eine Bilanz (Berlin: Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung TU Berlin, 1997). Bodenschatz and Polinna, Learning from IBA – die IBA 1987 in Berlin. Kleihues, 750 Jahre Architektur und Städtebau in Berlin. Schlusche, Die Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin – Eine Bilanz. Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Strategien für Kreuzberg. Thomas Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur – Kritische Ausstellung zu den Berliner Bauwochen’, Arch+ 3 (July, 1968): 63. Anon., ‘Slums verschoben’, Der Spiegel no. 37 (9 September 1968), 1231. Aktion 507, Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin – Manifest – Materialien zur Diskussion (Berlin, 1968). Through the Berlin-Hilfe-Gesetz (Berlin-Support-Bill) of 1964, the West German state actively provided tax incentives for investment, employment and consumption in West Berlin. Autorenkollektiv der Fachschaft Archiktektur, ‘“Planer-Flugschrift” – Ein Beitrag zur Planerausbildung’, Stadtbauwelt no. 20 (1968). Aktion 507, Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin – Manifest – Materialien zur Diskussion, 1. Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics & Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). In the Berlin-Wedding Brunnenstrassen regeneration area alone, 17,000 units were destroyed. Preceding large scale developments are, for instance, the Falkenhagener Feld in Berlin-Spandau from 1960 onwards (8,000 units), or the Gropiusstadt in Berlin-Rudow from 1960–75 (17,000 units).

145

Florian Kossak

20

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

34 35 36

See Harald Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das neue Berlin! : Geschichte der Stadterneuerung in der ‘grössten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt’ seit 1871 (Berlin: Transit, 1987). Florian Urban, Tower and Slab – Histories of Global Mass Housing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). See Karen Beckmann, Urbanität durch Dichte – Geschichte und Gegenwart der Großwohnkomplexe der 1970er Jahre (Berlin: Transcript, 2015). Aktion 507, Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin – Manifest – Materialien zur Diskussion. In contrast, West Berlin was governed from 1949 by a succession of SPD-led senates under mayors including Willy Brandt (1957–1966), Heinrich Albertz (1966–1967) and Klaus Schütz (1967–1977). Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’, 63–4. Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’, 64. Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’, 63. Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’, 63. Aktion 507, Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin – Manifest – Materialien zur Diskussion, 1. Anon., ‘Berlin Diagnose’, Bauwelt no. 39/40 (1968): 1231. Anon., ‘Berlin Diagnose’, 1231. Marion Schreiber, ‘Aktion 507 – Jungarchitekten kritisieren die Berliner Republik’, Die Zeit 38 (1968): 12. Anon., ‘Slums verschoben’, 134. Although without concrete evidence, one could also argue that the group drew on several seminal realized or projected precedents of (architectural) exhibitions, including Gustav Klutsis’ 1922 scaffoldlike Kiosks, Herbert Bayer’s 1930 Werkbund Exhibition in Paris or Paolozzi, Henderson and A+P Smithson’s 1953 exhibition Parallels of Life and Art, to name only a few. Schröder, ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur’, 63. Schreiber, ‘Aktion 507’, 12. Anon., ‘Berlin Diagnose’, 1231.

Bibliography Aktion 507. Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin – Manifest – Materialien zur Diskussion. Berlin, 1968. AnArchitektur – Produktion und Gebrauch gebauter Umwelt, 1–23. Berlin: AnArchitektur e.V, 2002–2010. Anon. ‘Berlin Diagnose’, Bauwelt no. 39/40 (1968), 1231. Anon. ‘Slums verschoben’, Der Spiegel no. 37 (9 September 1968), 138. Autorenkollektiv der Fachschaft Archiktektur. ‘Planer-Flugschrift – Ein Beitrag zur Planerausbildung’, Stadtbauwelt no. 20 (1968). Bodenschatz, Harald. Platz frei für das neue Berlin! Geschichte der Stadterneuerung in der “grössten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt“ seit 1871. Berlin: Transit, 1987. Bodenschatz, Harald and Cordelia Polinna. Learning from IBA – die IBA 1987 in Berlin. Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2010. Feireiss, Kristin, ed., The Art of Architecture Exhibitions. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001. Ferguson, Francesca, ed., Make Shift City. Berlin: Jovis, 2014. Freestone, Robert and Marco Amati, eds, Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture. London: Ashgate, 2014. Haydn, Florian and Robert Temel, eds, Temporary Urban Spaces. Berlin/Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006. Kleihues, Josef Paul, ed., 750 Jahre Architektur und Städtebau in Berlin. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1987. Kossak, Florian. ‘The Real beside the Real – The Laboratory Exhibition and the Experimental Production of Architecture’. PhD diss., Edinburgh College of Art, 2008. Oswalt, Philipp, Klaus Overmeyer and Philipp Misselwitz. Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013. Overmeyer, Klaus, ed., Urban Pioneers: Temporary Use and Urban Development in Berlin. Berlin: Jovis, 2007. Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics & Identity in Divided Berlin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Rave, Rolf J. and Hans-Joachim Knöfel. Bauen in Berlin der 70er Jahre. Berlin: Kiepert, 1981. Schlusche, Günter. Die Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin – Eine Bilanz. Berlin: Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung TU Berlin, 1997. Schreiber, Marion. ‘Aktion 507 – Jungarchitekten kritisieren die Berliner Republik’, Die Zeit 38 (20 September 1968). http://www.zeit.de/1968/38/aktion-507, accessed 25 September 2016. Schröder, Thomas. ‘Diagnosen zur Architektur – Kritische Ausstellung zu den Berliner Bauwochen’, Arch+ 3 (1968). Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Strategien für Kreuzberg. Berlin, 1979. Urban, Florian. Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.

146

Chapter 14

Architecture and the neo avant-garde Some theories of history in architectural criticism Michael Chapman

Peter Bürger’s 1974 book Theory of the Avant-Garde (first translated in 1984), made the argument that certain strategies of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s were repeated (in a depoliticised form) in the creative production of the 1960s in art, and specifically the paintings of Pop Art.1 The 1970s were replete with theoretical projects that sought to critically connect contemporary practices with historical precedents, and, most specifically, those of the historical avant-garde. The historical positioning of a neo-avantgarde gained a degree of traction in architectural criticism in the same period, having been theorised by Manfredo Tafuri in the seminal Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (1973; English, 1976), which then percolated through the theoretical New York wanderings of Oppositions and October, and then culminated in the high-profile Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley.2 Featuring the work of seven architects, the exhibition showcased an array of critical and conceptually rigorous projects from a wave of (mostly) young and ambitious international practitioners who would, in the coming decade, emerge as one of the dominant paradigms in architectural production at the turn of the millennium. Each of the seven are now frequently positioned as agents of a resurgent neo-avant-garde in architectural design which has, in tandem with a number of other emerging international practices, reshaped the relationship between architecture and its expanded popular audience. As with the neo-avant-garde counterpart in art in the 1960s, the overwhelming commercial success of these practices, as their young radicalism was increasingly appropriated by the mechanics of capitalism in the decades that followed, raises

147

Michael Chapman

important questions in regard to architectural theory. As theoretical approaches are inevitably translated into the economic landscape of the city, a friction emerges revealing the extent to which architecture reinforces the predominant forms of production native to the societies (however global) within which it operates. Whatever theoretical resistance exists towards conventional architectural production, it is pressured by the distortions of a global capitalist system that revels in the production and dissemination of objects, whether buildings or products. However, what distinguishes the work of this collective of theoretical design practices from the 1980s is a radical and expansive approach to architectural reception that brazenly brought intellectual theoretical ideas, however contested, to the forefront of architectural progress and innovation. For this reason alone, this historical paradigm is worthy of further analysis. Bürger’s theory has been highly influential in art criticism, most notably in the circle of New York writers linked to the journal October; in architecture a detailed exploration of the historical impact of this conjecture is yet to be undertaken, although Colomina, McLeod, Ockman and Hays3 have all made contributions to this scholarship. This is despite the English publication and popularisation of Bürger’s work in the mid1980s, coinciding with a period of great experimentation in architecture, as well as a rejuvenated interest in the practices of the historical avant-garde.4 What is foreshadowed in Bürger’s work is the emerging field of reception theory, which sets out to shift criticism away from the creative ‘product’ and towards the audience within which it is received.5 Reception theory is an approach to studying creative works that focuses on the interpretation and response to a work, rather than the intention of the work itself. It is a theoretical approach developed in the 1970s, primarily in literature – in the work of Hohendahl and Silberman, Iser and Holub6 – although its influence has since expanded to a number of creative fields7 including art, landscape, theatre, television, film theory and, most recently, architecture in the work of Tim Gough and of Naomi Stead and Cristina Garduño Freeman.8 Central to reception theory is an understanding of the relationship between aesthetic production and aesthetic reception. The value of reception theory is that it offers a method for analysing the audience, rather than author of a work and so it dramatically expands the sphere of investigation, particularly in architecture where the audience of a work is often ill defined, or in a state of continual evolution. Given that Bürger was writing from a disciplinary perspective within literary studies, and from the geographic context of West Germany where many of the initial forays into reception emerged, it is not surprising that its sentiments would echo in his theoretical (if not speculative) history of art. Central to Bürger’s argument, was an understanding of a shifting audience and motive within which art began to operate after the Second World War, and particularly connected with the accelerating forces of market capitalism that had become increasingly intertwined with the emerging marketplace of contemporary art. Frustrated with the failures of the May 1968 riots in Paris and committed to extending the Marxist dialectic of the Frankfurt School, Bürger’s treatise is written partly out of disgust with the rampant commoditisation of the art market, and partly out of a personal need to document the unprecedented historical transformations that were occurring in front of him. Put simply, Bürger maintained that the art practices of the 1960s merely replicated the strategies of the earlier (and authentic) historical

148

Architecture and the neo avant-garde

avant-garde, and his positioning of a ‘neo-avant-garde’ category was a way of distinguishing (as well as patronising) the current art production of his contemporaries. A clear example, offered by Benjamin Buchloh, is the reprisal of the monochrome, initiated in Alexander Rodchenko’s work from the 1930s, and then again in Yves Klein’s work from the 1950s. While Buchloh9 illustrates the oversimplification at work, the implication for Bürger was clear: while the aesthetic principles had not evolved significantly in the three decades between, it was clear that the audience for it had. Bürger was certainly not the first to use the term ‘neo-avant-garde’.10 By the mid-1970s it was already being used to identify contemporary practices across a range of creative media. What was more unique in the work of Bürger was the emphasis on a historical avant-garde, embodying a moment or origin in artistic production from which the majority of strategies in the 1960s could be derived. It set up a clearly defined, and contentious,11 historical structure, which anchored a definitive origin (even a primal scene) from which creativity in the twentieth century was inevitably entwined. Three decades later, when Bürger responded to critics of his original theory,12 he still remained steadfastly committed to the importance of this historical structure.13 Bürger conceptualised the avant-garde as a distinct historical phenomenon, peculiar to the first decades of the twentieth century and in opposition to the bourgeois aesthetic practices that were, in his view, rampant in the historical periods either side of it. Amongst the numerous criticisms of Bürger’s position is his tendency to over-romanticise the work of the historical avantgarde.14 Bürger retains a special affiliation with the work of Dada generally, and Duchamp specifically. He was drawn to the use of everyday objects which, he argued, presented an affront to the autonomous bourgeois art of the gallery by reconnecting art directly with the practice of life. This was exactly the critique he offered of the neo-avant-garde: it no longer presented a critique of the institutional status of art and had, by the 1960s, become totally immersed in it. Contrastingly, for Bürger, it was in the Dada act of collage that the art of the historical avant-garde was at its most radical, as it required the ‘audience’ to be complicit in the completion of the work, visually assembling the discarded fragments into some kind of intelligible form, and in the process, fundamentally destabilising the autonomous status of either the artist or the work of art. It was in his writing on collage that Bürger engages most directly with ‘reception’ and the theories of reception that would become more pronounced in the years after the publication of Theory of the Avant-Garde. Collage provided a clear transition, away from the laboured production of the art object, and towards an understanding of its reception by the individual within a broader cultural and political field. The shift from production to reception that collage necessitates is incorporated, in Bürger’s theory, through the dialectical pairing of the categories of the organic and nonorganic work, adopted from the writings of Walter Benjamin. In a critical passage from ‘The Author as Producer’ Benjamin described the process as: Still lifes put together from tickets, spools of cotton, cigarette butts that were linked with painted elements. The whole thing was put in a frame. And thereby the public was shown: look, your picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than painting.15

149

Michael Chapman

Benjamin’s thinking clearly had a significant impact on Bürger’s attitude to collage. One of the primary criticisms that Buchloh16 makes in regard to Bürger’s thesis is his selective appropriation of Benjamin’s work and the lack of specificity in respect of the concept of the organic/non-organic work of art that he applies, or for that matter, the fluidity of Benjamin’s own theory as he became increasingly immersed in Marxism. What reverberates throughout ‘The Author as Producer’ though, is the need for the avant-garde to develop a radical language through which to communicate with a broader public and through which the agency of artistic production could be mobilised. This is clearly a theme in Bürger too, who sees the failure of the neo-avant-garde generally as a failure to transcend the accepted institutional structures of art. It is this aspect of Bürger’s historical premise that most reverberates with reception theory, as well as its application in the field of architectural theory. It is easy to see how aspects of Bürger’s theory could be applied to the situation in architecture, and specifically in the mid-1980s, when his work was first translated into English. Not only was this a period when an ambitious and emerging avant-garde was just coming to prominence, but also when comparisons with historical avant-gardes in architectural theory were being conspicuously made. By the time of the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition, each of the seven featured architects, with the possible exception of Frank Gehry, had been critically connected to movements of the historical avant-garde: Peter Eisenman with the rationalism of Giuseppe Terragni, Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind with constructivism, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas with suprematism, Coop Himmelblau with surrealism, expressionism and Merz.17 In fact, Johnson and Wigley’s naming of the exhibition, as a hybrid of Derrida’s deconstruction and Russian constructivism, signalled clearly this historical tendency to not only deliberately engage with theory, but also establish direct comparisons with earlier movements based largely on stylistic similarities between the modes of aesthetic production.18 Equally importantly, the architectural production that characterised the work of Libeskind, Tschumi, Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, Eisenman and Gehry engaged very deliberately with the abstract communicative strategies of collage, drawing and montage, distilled, to some measure, through a critical awareness of the tactics of the historical avant-garde. This phenomenon alone invited architecture to be understood beyond the realm of built works and as intellectual and theoretical triggers for discussion and engagement, inviting a broad, popular and cross-disciplinary audience to be confronted with architectural propositions in a similar way to which they might interact with a work of art. The heavily-laden emphasis on the work of Jacques Derrida in both the catalogue and reception of the exhibition,19 as well as the rhetoric of Eisenman and Tschumi in particular, also encouraged a linguistic, if not poststructuralist, reading of the work which tended towards an emphasis on process rather than product, and interpretation rather than fixed meaning. That the work displayed was, for the most part, representational in nature, featuring highly codified models and drawings, rather than concrete buildings as such, also influenced the reception of both the work and the architects, by positioning the projects at their creative inception and unintentionally initiating a speculative language for architectural expression in the period, that combined savvy design communication techniques with abstraction, codification and obfuscation.

150

Architecture and the neo avant-garde

Given this, it is not surprising that the reception of the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition was both broad ranging and diverse, and was met with a wave of both critical and popular interest and engagement. If the intention of the exhibition was to establish a new paradigm of creative expression and position it within a larger cycle of architectural history, then the multivalent range of responses to the work, and the impending interest in and burgeoning success of the individual protagonists, served to both confirm and complicate this historical framework. The ruminations that radiated outwards from the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition went well beyond the formal or stylistic dimensions of the work, and began to question the political, spatial and social values of architecture (and architects) in a celebrated period of capitalist rationalisation and expansion. That the representation of architecture, as well as its production, became central to such theoretical debates in this period is of significant historical and theoretical importance. Even in the opening paragraphs of the introduction to the catalogue, Johnson and Wigley frame the projects as an extension of a much larger historical project: in their words ‘exploiting the hidden potential of modernism’.20 Similarly, many of the critiques that followed the exhibition, tended to focus on the ‘formal’ aspects of the work and its perceived ‘autonomy’ from social or contextual realities, both key features of Bürger’s critique of the neo-avant-garde in art. Frampton for instance, argued that the work was ‘elitist and detached’21 and James Wines22 found a fixation on form rather than process that characterised the architects involved, arguing that the work of Gordon Matta-Clark or others excluded from the original MoMA show may have been more in line with the theoretical principles that some proponents aspired to. So Bürger’s positioning of the neo-avant-garde as a depoliticised but aesthetically similar reprisal of the historical avant-garde has certain resonances, especially in a period when the political efficacy of architecture was already being questioned.23 Manfredo Tafuri, who employed the term neo-avant-garde on a number of occasions in Architecture and Utopia, was constantly frustrated by the futility of architecture to engage with any meaningful political resistance, torn between its utopian idealism or its consumer-driven rationalism. For Tafuri, as the practice of architecture ‘deliberately flees confrontation’24 through cooperation or escapism, architectural criticism assumes an elevated role in evaluating and opposing the effects of ideology. For Tafuri, architectural practice was so heavily immersed in the forces of production that there were no avenues through which it would be able to effect or disrupt the means of production. It was, in its nature, an outcome of production rather than the means to oppose it. In the end, it was only criticism that remained to reveal the failures deeply embedded in the system. While there are similarities between the positions of Bürger and Tafuri, particularly in regard to the Marxist allegiances, a more productive avenue of enquiry exists in the realm of reception, and particularly if we measure Bürger’s contribution less in setting up a stylistic conversation between diverse historical periods, and more in regard to establishing an audience within which creative works operate. Understanding the avant-garde as a radical framework for reception, rather than production, recasts somewhat the critical argument in regard to Deconstructivism,

151

Michael Chapman

moving away from the resonances with earlier movements and towards a greater appreciation of shifting currents in the way architecture was communicated. This is certainly the aspect of Bürger’s theory that has resonated with the circle of Octoberist critics in New York, whose united critique of Bürger’s work has also become the platform for their own rejuvenation of the (historical) avant-garde. They used the pages of October to present their own view of modernism, which effectively interwove the methodologies of psychoanalysis, social art history, structuralism (linguistics) and post-structuralism. It was in response to this combined theoretical project that Amelie Jones coined the term ‘Octoberism’,25 arguing that the collaborative efforts of these authors had assumed the force of a hegemony and provided a platform from which a selective reading of art history (and modernism) was being projected.26 Having effectively dismantled the hegemonic modernism of Clement Greenberg, the Octoberist critics have been central to the establishment of an equally intellectualised and highly conditional reading of modernism generally, and the avant-garde specifically. Of particular importance here is the work of Benjamin Buchloh,27 one of the most formidable critics of Bürger, but also those of T. J. Demos, Hal Foster and George Baker,28 who have each used the platform of October to argue for a new understanding of the importance of the avant-garde. A thread running through each is the 1928 Pressa exhibition by El Lissitzky, which experimented with a hybridised form of communication, merging architecture, collage and print media,29 specifically intended to both challenge and advance the audience within which a work was received. In Baker’s words: [Pressa] was a project – for it was no longer a ‘work’ – that would occupy, in every way the space of the between […]. It was a form called into being by the claims of new audiences, offering new modes of reading, new forms of cultural distribution. Lissitzky’s Pressa design was a form that had reached its telos, achieved its brief destiny.30 A similar argument can be found in regard to the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition, where a new innovative medium of expression emerged, narrated by a unified and discursive theoretical position and intersecting with an expanded and educated popular audience. That this exchange was given the global institutional media platform of MoMA in order to disseminate its message also, no doubt, contributed to its impact and success. Like Pressa, there is no doubt that, despite its deeply theoretical aspirations and highly curated perspectives, the exhibition fulfilled a role in advancing a similarly hybridised model of communication in architecture, transplanting a relatively marginalised and elite architectural sub-culture into the orbital centre of architectural debate and popular interest. Interestingly, even the most recent reappraisals of the work of this era31 have tended to prioritise the emphasis on abstraction, codification and theory – in short, the autonomy – that characterised some, if not all, of the work presented, rather than the extensive and prolific built work that each of the individual representatives has since gone on to produce. So while the exhibition failed to challenge any of the existing ‘institutional’ conventions for architectural exhibition or curatorship, it did cultivate a new audience for

152

Architecture and the neo avant-garde

architectural experimentation and an original language for communicating this, as well as an academic audience which revelled in the autonomous space of architectural theorisation. The abundance of theoretical forums, documentaries, films and publications that emerged in the wake of the exhibition is relatively unprecedented in architecture. While some of the work was, and should be, questioned for exactly its relative autonomy – comprising unbuilt projects, highly crafted models, exceptionally well-executed drawings and abstract, sometimes indecipherable, texts – the originality of these modes of communication and the precision with which they were disseminated, comprise, like Pressa, ‘a new form of cultural distribution’ which, for the large part, has remained underappreciated. It also constitutes an important phase of career progression for seven of the most progressive architects of that generation. This theoretical language of architectural production completely transcends the stylistic and historical affiliations that it is built upon, and begins to establish the framework for a new mode of architectural communication that is no longer specifically tied to the executed built project, but embodies speculation, experimentation, and also elements of shock and unpredictability: all characteristics that Bürger reveres. All of these aspects would become increasingly central to architectural innovation throughout the 1990s, as the gallery became an incubator for new ideas, rather than a protector of old ones. Jeremy Till32 has recently argued that architectural exhibitions have an obligation to always retain an awareness of the bigger social and public sphere within which architecture operates, rather than retreating to the autonomy of the gallery space and its inherent structures and limits. One aspect of Bürger’s work that remains relatively underexplored is this very principle: how it is possible to not only challenge the institutionalised structures of aesthetic production, but also expand these beyond the confines of predictable and often gentrified social engagement and into a much broader sphere of agency and activism. It is within this that Theory can advance new understandings of architecture, but also a deeper appreciation of the audiences that it resides within and the extent to which it both embodies and advances the expectations they are beholden to.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art/Little Brown and Company, 1988). Beatriz Colomina, ‘L’Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicité,’ in Architectureproduction, eds, Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 56–99. Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstruction’, Assemblage 8 (February 1989): 22–59. Joan Ockman, ‘Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of Oppositions’, in Architectureproduction, eds, Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 180–192. K. Michael Hays, ‘Reproduction and Negation: The Cognitive Project of the Avant-Garde’, in Architectureproduction, eds, Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 152–180; K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Catherine Cooke, ‘Russian Precursors’, in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, eds, Andreas Papadakis et al. (London: Academy Editions, 1989), 10–19. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 10–11 and 48.

153

Michael Chapman

6

7

8

9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

154

Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Marc Silberman, ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics’, New German Critique 10 (1977): 29–63. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). On the theory of reception in art, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). In landscape, see John Dixon Hunt, The Afterlife of Gardens (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). In theatre, see Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997). In television, see John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987); John Fiske, ‘Audiencing: A Cultural Studies Approach to Watching Television’, Poetics 21 no. 4 (August 1992): 345–359. In film theory, see Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies (New York: NYU Press, 2005); Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On the theory of reception in architecture, see Tim Gough, ‘Cura’, in Curating Architecture and the City, eds, Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara (London: Routledge, 2009), 93–102; Tim Gough, ‘Reception Theory of Architecture: Prehistory and Afterlife’, Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 279–292; Naomi Stead and Cristina Garduño Freeman, ‘Architecture and “The Act of Receiving, or the Fact of Being Received”’, Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 267–271; Tom O’Regan, ‘Reception and Exposure in Architecture, Film and Television’, Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 272–278. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the NeoAvant-Garde’, October 37 (Summer 1986): 41–52. While rarely acknowledged, Bürger did not invent the term ‘neo-avant-garde’. It was in use at least three years prior to the publication of Theory of the Avant-Garde in: Miklós Szabolcsi, ‘Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions’, New Literary History 3 no. 1 (Autumn, 1971), 49–70. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Theorizing the Avant-Garde’, Art in America 72 no. 10 (November, 1984): 19–21. Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, trans. Bettina Brandt and Daniel Purdy, New Literary History 4 no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 695–715. Interestingly, the historical structure of the neo-avant-garde and the historical avant-garde is one aspect of Bürger’s theory that his critics have accepted and, at times, reinforced. Buchloh, for instance, adopts the same historical structure and terminology in his Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). It is also central to the volumes: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004); David Hopkins and Anna Katharina Schaffner, eds, Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2005); Branden Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October 70 (Autumn 1994): 5–32; Buchloh, ‘Theorizing the Avant-Garde’, 19–21; Buchloh, ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time, 41–52. Walter Benjamin, ‘Author as Producer’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 220–238. Buchloh, ‘Theorizing the Avant-Garde’, 21. Mary McLeod and Beatriz Colomina, ‘Some Comments on Reproduction with Reference to Colomina and Hays’, in Architectureproduction, eds, Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 223–231. Mark Wigley, ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’, in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, eds, Andreas Papadakis et al. (London: Academy Editions, 1989), 132–134. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture, 19. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition, 1992), 313. James Wines, ‘The Slippery Floor’, in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, 135–139. See, for instance, the historiography in: Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstruction’, 22–59. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 170. Jones writes: ‘For lack of a better term, this hegemony marked in such definitive – one might even say final – form by the publication of this book might be called Octoberism’. Amelie Jones, ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 377. This was a particular theme in the reviews of Foster, Krauss, Bois and Benjamin, Art Since 1900. Amongst the reviews that took issue with the selectivity of the work see: Robert Storr, ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006), 382–385; Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Review of Art Since 1900’,

Architecture and the neo avant-garde

27 28

29

30 31 32

Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006), 375–376; Nancy J. Troy, ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006), 373–375; Pamela Lee, ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006), 379–381; David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 8. See Buchloh, ‘Theorizing the Avant-Garde’, 19–21. See T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October 70 (Autumn 1994): 5–32. George Baker, Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Ulrich Pohlmann, ‘El Lissitzky’s Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His Work in Germany, Italy and the United States, 1923–1943’, in El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 52–65. George Baker, Artwork Caught by the Tail, 162; see also: George Baker, ‘Entr’acte,’ October 105 (Summer 2003): 159-165. K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde. Jeremy Till, ‘Afterword: Please Touch’, in Curating Architecture and the City, eds, Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 246–248.

Bibliography Baker, George. ‘Entr’acte’, October 105 (Summer 2003): 159–165. Baker, George. Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Review of Art Since 1900’. Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 375–376. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Author as Producer’. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 220–238. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. ‘Theorizing the Avant-Garde’. Art in America 72 no. 10 (November, 1984): 19–21. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-AvantGarde’. October 37 (Summer 1986): 41–52. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bürger, Peter. ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’. Translated by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Purdy. New Literary History 41 no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 695–715. Colomina, Beatriz. L’Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicité. In Architectureproduction, edited by Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman, 56–99. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. Colomina, Beatriz and Joan Ockman, eds. Architectureproduction. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. Cooke, Catherine. ‘Russian Precursors’. In Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, edited by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke and Andrew Benjamin, 10–19. London: Academy Editions, 1989. Demos, T. J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Dixon Hunt, John. The Afterlife of Gardens. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Fiske, John. ‘Audiencing: A Cultural Studies Approach to Watching Television’. Poetics 21 no. 4 (August 1992): 345–359. Foster, Hal. ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’. October 70 (Autumn 1994): 5–32. Gough, Tim. ‘Cura’. In Curating Architecture and the City, edited by Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara, 93–102. London: Routledge, 2009. Gough, Tim. ‘Reception Theory of Architecture: Prehistory and Afterlife’. Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 279–292. Hays, K. Michael. ‘Reproduction and Negation: The Cognitive Project of the Avant-Garde’. In Architectureproduction, edited by Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman, 152–180. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. Hays, K. Michael. Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe and Marc Silberman. ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics’. New German Critique 10 (Winter, 1977): 29–63. Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen, 1984. Hopkins, David. Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Hopkins David and Anna Katharina Schaffner, eds. Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2005.

155

Michael Chapman

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992. Johnson, Phillip and Mark Wigley. Deconstructivist Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art/ Little Brown and Company, 1988. Jones, Amelie. ‘Review of Art Since 1900’. Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 377. Joseph, Branden. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Lee, Pamela. ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 379–381. McLeod, Mary. ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstruction’. Assemblage 8 (February 1989): 22–59. McLeod, Mary and Beatriz Colomina. ‘Some Comments on Reproduction with Reference to Colomina and Hays’. In Architectureproduction, edited by Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman, 223–231. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. Ockman, Joan. ‘Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of Oppositions’. In Architectureproduction, edited by Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman, 180–192. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. O’Regan, Tom. ‘Reception and Exposure in Architecture, Film and Television’. Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 272–278. Pohlmann, Ulrich. ‘El Lissitzky’s Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His Work in Germany, Italy and the United States, 1923–1943’. In El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, edited by Margarita Tupitsyn, 52–65. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Stead, Naomi and Cristina Garduño Freeman. ‘Architecture and “The Act of Receiving, or the Fact of Being Received”’. Architectural Theory Review 18 no. 3 (2013): 267–271. Storr, Robert. ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 382–385. Szabolcsi, Miklós. ‘Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions’. New Literary History 3 no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 49–70. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Till, Jeremy. ‘Afterword: Please Touch’. In Curating Architecture and the City, edited by Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara, 246–248. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Troy, Nancy J. ‘Review of Art Since 1900’, Art Bulletin 88 no. 2 (June 2006): 373–375. Wigley, Mark. ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’. In Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, edited by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke and Andrew Benjamin, 132–134. London: Academy Editions, 1989. Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

156

Rotor, Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Oslo 2013.

Chapter 15

Exhibits that matter Material gestures with theoretical stakes Maarten Liefooghe

An increased engagement with materiality and the growing importance of practices that combine designing with research, critical reflection or exhibition making are two developments that impact the position of theory in architectural culture and practice. This paper looks at exhibitions realized by two practitioners, operating in this expanded field of architecture, that engage with issues of materiality.1 The first one, 1:1 Period Rooms [page 167], an exhibition by the GreekNorwegian architect-artist-curator Andreas Angelidakis shown in 2015 at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam,2 is illustrative of Angelidakis’s interest in intersections of reality and virtuality, cyberspace and ruins.3 The second one, Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability [page 157], was the main exhibition of the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2013,4 and was realized by the Brussels based research and design collective Rotor, who engage in gathering knowledge about how our culture deals with materials and material resources.5 My aim is not to study how these exhibitions relate, respectively, to theories about the experience of historical substance or about the ecology of building materials in our digital era. Instead, my approach starts from the finding that, unlike most architecture exhibitions, the two cases bring the ‘bricks and mortar’ of architecture on stage, and more importantly, that their discourse is itself largely material: their handling of exhibits is meaningful and informed by theory.6 This paper unpacks the theoretical stakes in these material gestures.

158

Exhibits that matter

Permutations of white cube and period room 1:1 Period Rooms featured six unconventional period rooms that referred to a collection of stijlkamers (period rooms) that once belonged to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The rooms were not revisited in Rotterdam to present a history of interiors, but to reflect on changing museological formats. Het Nieuwe Instituut asked Angelidakis to contribute to its ongoing investigation of 1:1 display formats, by taking up the case of the period rooms that had fallen from grace at the Stedelijk Museum under Willem Sandberg’s curatorship and later directorship. The Stedelijk’s period rooms had first been opened as permanent displays in 1900, but had then gradually been dismantled from the late 1930s, as the museum refashioned itself into a spearhead of modernist culture and remodelled its galleries after the white cube ideal. The last period rooms were finally stored away in the 1970s.7 In the 2015 exhibition only two rooms integrated the original historical material. The other four rooms evoked the Stedelijk’s former period rooms without employing original artefacts. The entire exhibition thus testified to the increase of material doubles in exhibition culture that Mari Lending has observed recently. Lending notes a ‘re-glossary’ in architectural discourse, apparent in an ‘interest in replicas, reconstructions, reproductions,

restorations,

remakes,

recreations,

repetitions,

reenactments,

reinventions, remediations’ and in verbs such as ‘recycle, reuse, recompose, reimagine, restage’, arguing that this return to a very physically perceived past is part of the posttheoretical, material turn in the humanities.8 She also points out that ‘the current reassessment of things and spaces’ is enabled by ‘a very specific theoretical backdrop’, namely the destabilization of the original/copy dichotomy inherited from philosophical deconstruction.9 In short, the apparent ascension of material doubles was prepared over decades of theory. I believe we can take Lending’s reasoning beyond the particular phenomenon of the Ausstellungskopie,10 and investigate other continuities and dependencies between ways of handling material objects in exhibitions and legacies of theory from the near past. In 1:1 Period Rooms, Angelidakis takes up a legacy of institutional critical practices developed in conceptual art from the 1960s onward, attempting, in the words of Benjamin Buchloh, to ‘integrate within the conception of a work, the final forms of distribution and the conditions of reception and acculturation, the modes of reading that ensue from them and that are contained within the practices of institutionalisation’.11 In the paradigmatic example of Michael Asher’s installation at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974, a partition wall between a front exhibition space and an office area in the back had been dismantled. In the resulting unified space, the administrative activities of the gallery were disclosed to the viewers. Asher’s intervention had laid bare ‘the contradictions inherent within the gallery structure and its constituent elements’.12 The artist called this work didactic in the way it ‘represent[s] materially the visible aspects’ of aestheticizing abstraction and subsequent commodification.13 1:1 Period Rooms employs similar conceptual material gestures to question the display format of the period room. While Angelidakis’s project engages with ‘the museum’ through the

159

Maarten Liefooghe

Stedelijk as pars pro toto, it never addresses the particular institutional framework of Het Nieuwe Instituut in which it operates. Rather, critical gestures are directed against the display formats of the period room, and the white cube in general, through their avatars in the Rotterdam exhibition. In room after room, Angelidakis performs conceptual material gestures to expose a scenographic apparatus that is usually hidden from view, and to reveal the contradictory aspects he discerns in this apparatus. A first gesture shapes the global aspect of the exhibition to a critical effect, in line with Peter Osborne’s understanding of the meaningful character of the ‘exhibitionform’ in contemporary art exhibitions. Osborne argues that the exhibition rather than the individual artwork has become ‘the unit of artistic significance, and the object of constructive intent’.14 The six period rooms presented in the exhibition are detached from each other and distributed over the floor as freestanding constructions. This way Angelidakis breaks with the convention of either arranging period rooms as an enfilade that museum visitors pass through, or of juxtaposing their interiors as theatre stages that visitors look onto. Usually, the typical wooden framework holding the historical wall panelling remains invisible, but now, in a second gesture, it is exposed and visually dominates the exhibition. Seeing the incongruent exteriors of the rooms precludes the illusionistic bubble effect that these interiors normally uphold. This exposure is taken furthest in the centrally located Empire Room (see page 167), presented as a construction in process, partly turning the exhibition into a construction site or a research studio. During the months of the exhibition, the Empire Room’s wooden support structure was gradually clad on the inside, as restoration students pieced back together the bits and pieces of the interior. From the outside, identifying marks on the back of each fragment were left visible. In contrast to the gestures discussed so far, which show a conceptual rigour that corresponds to the cerebral conceptualism of much institutional critical art practices, the material gestures in the so-called Period Cube are less analytical and more allegorical. Here Angelidakis mashes-up a period room and a white cube to underscore the period character of the generic white cube exhibition gallery, and to question the criteria that normally single out interiors to be displayed in the museum as period rooms. How could the plain white cube, this gallery interior that wants to be an interior without particular qualities and does not want to distinguish itself – except from the historicism of styles – ever live up to the norms to be celebrated by museums as their latest acquisition? Through speakers, the cube wonders out loud: ‘When are you considered good enough to be preserved? Why them and not me?’15 Reinforcing its words, the cube crossdresses as a rococo salon, as if making a theatrical genuflexion. On the outside, the wooden framework of the Period Cube clumsily bends its beams along the contours of the rococo panelling on the Xeroxed photograph behind it. Inside, unpainted gypsum boards are cut in shapes and applied in layers to evoke a classical composition. ‘Run your fingertips along the saw cuts. […] I might not be more, but I’m certainly no less than plasterboards on a wooden frame.’ This Period Cube stakes its material construction in its performance to achieve an ambiguous, reflexive truthfulness rather than the illusionistic realism of the period room or the idealistic dematerialization of the white cube.

160

Exhibits that matter

Eloquent objects: making the stones speak Such theatricality is absent from Behind the Green Door at the 2013 Oslo Architecture Triennale. The exhibition is for the most part a rather understated accumulation of objects, programmatically enclosed however by two iconic elements. The luminous sign that spells ‘BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR’ at the start of the show can be read as an evocation of the celebratory and commercial resonance that sustainability has today. In counterpoint, the wall-sized print of the 1968 Earthrise photograph is a powerful backdrop to the whole exhibition, recalling a now remote counter-cultural environmentalism. In between both ends, the visitor is led through a collection that documents the ambiguous Desire for Sustainability. For at the basis of Behind the Green Door (BTGD) is Rotor’s observation of a sociological paradox: they find that on the one hand ‘sustainability has become an incredibly strong force in our societies’, but on the other hand in an increasing number of circles sustainability also seems to provoke ‘unease’, not least in architectural culture.16 Rotor therefore approach sustainability as an ‘essentially contested concept’,17 a philosophical category described by William Bryce Gallie in the 1950s to denote those ‘concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users’, such as art or democracy.18 For Rotor, any assumption ‘that the concept of sustainability constitutes a singular and practical idea’ comes down to a crucial misunderstanding.19 To disentangle the multiple discursive and material realities of sustainability and sustainable architecture, Rotor perform what they casually describe as ‘an archaeology of the present’.20 Starting from a first set of projects that claim in some way to be sustainable – architectural and urban projects such as Masdar City designed by Foster + Partners near Abu Dhabi, but also industrial products such as patented green roof-covering systems, policies or activist manifestations – Rotor assemble a study collection of related physical or digital objects, ranging from building fragments and façade study models to software packages. The collection brought together in this way is then reduced to 600 of the most telling items in the exhibition. These items document and confront products and practices that other actors call sustainable, and only indirectly support Rotor’s anti-positivist understanding of sustainability as an ultimately impossible illusion. Rotor have described their method as ‘reverse archaeology’ because of the way their exhibits bear testimony to historical environmental aspirations to realize a (more sustainable) future.21 The material assembled in Oslo speaks of the past but also of alternative futures that were envisioned throughout the history of environmentalism, and later of sustainability – futures that did, or did not, come true. In the past 15 years, numerous archaeological studies of contemporary, post-industrial society have established Archaeology of the Contemporary Past as a self-reflective and often politically engaged subfield. Positioning Rotor’s research and exhibition project against the background of this and related disciplinary approaches to the study of contemporary material culture brings better evidence to Rotor’s critical engagement with materials and discourses. BTGD considers not only architectural projects by architect-authors but also lawns in suburbia, or instruction campaigns by Brussels local authorities on how to

161

Maarten Liefooghe

retrofit average row houses. Such scope corresponds with the interest of many archaeological studies of the contemporary past in everyday sites and artefacts. Similar to archaeologists making a familiar recent past unfamiliar by exploring its hidden, forgotten and abject qualities,22 Rotor, too, operate a de-familiarisation of the omnipresent ‘sustainability’ through their quasi-archaeological operations of de-constructive investigation and curatorial re-contextualisation. However, Rotor’s approach cannot be labelled unequivocally an Archaeology of the Contemporary Past, if the latter is understood as distinct from other forms of modern material culture studies by its distinct use of archaeological methodologies such as excavation or the principles of stratigraphy.23 In the wider field of study of contemporary material culture, Rotor’s analytic approach could therefore just as effectively be associated with material culture studies within anthropology, even if disciplinary borders tend to become blurred here.24 Finally, BTGD should also be connected to contemporary artistic and curatorial practices working in some archaeological mode of artistic research, as Archaeology of the Contemporary Past has a close relationship with those practices that are part of a wider historiographic turn in contemporary art.25 Yet, BTGD shows little trace of the quasi-romantic desire of ‘plunging into the abysmal darkness of history’s most remote corners’ that marks much of this artistic research.26 Objects are not displayed by Rotor to affect us as relics or shards of the past, but as evidence to historical and contemporary pursuits of sustainability. Similarly, the exhibition does not aspire to the status of an art installation, but presents reference material that can critically inform a public discussion on sustainability and architecture. It is further organized in two large, parallel sections, whose very similar treatment keeps the exhibition’s overall effect of one display of evidence intact. The first section is an inverse chronological timeline along one wall of the exhibition space. With exhibits such as a lightweight folding bike (1971) or renderings of MVRDV’s Pig City (2001), it documents shifting approaches to sustainability, complementing the two historical anchor points that BTGD proposes and discusses in more depth: the Whole Earth Catalogue of 1968 and the United Nations Brundtland Report of 1983 where the notion of ‘sustainable development’ was coined.27 The other section consists of 12 tables and two vertical panels on which exhibits are clustered in often surprising combinations. Their thematic headings are as diverse as Waste, Performativity, LEED and Beauty. The display design in BTGD testifies to Rotor’s pragmatic design approach that re-values recycled building elements as well as everyday industrial building materials by reinterpreting their functionality in simple design solutions. Display tables, occasional protective Plexiglas hoods and pedestals are all custom-tailored from standard industrial elements such as chromed steel legs. With their surface finish of greyish carpet tiles, the tables form a scenographic support structure with little claim to design, while enabling easy adjustments when installing the exhibition. More importantly, together with the dense juxtaposition of objects on the carpet, this materialization avoids the aestheticizing effect of isolated objects, as played out by Rotor in the exhibition Usus/ Usures in the Belgian pavilion’s white cubes at the 2010 Venice Biennale. In BTGD exhibits appear not installed as art would be, but as evidence brought to the table to be observed and discussed. This does not mean, however, that the overall aspect of the

162

Exhibits that matter

installation is devoid of the rhetorical eloquence that characterises Angelidakis’s show. Modelled into an archaeological display of found objects, Rotor’s exhibition breaks down the sacrosanct concept of sustainability into a landscape of often surprisingly simple things, and into a critical juxtaposition of diverging claims as to why something would be considered sustainable. In her review, Léa-Catherine Szacka has pertinently called Rotor’s curatorial approach one of objectification, more precisely of ‘objectifying stories rather than buildings’.28 Indeed, the units that make up the exhibition are not simply the distinct objects in themselves, but always an object together with a corresponding description – in black and white, fixed to the tables – that identifies the object’s provenance from a specific architectural project or a general practice, and informs about the associated claims to sustainability. Sometimes Rotor’s object descriptions introduce a critical perspective in an additional revelatory micro-analysis of the exhibit’s material setup, or provide information on its production process or on the larger context in which it is used. However, the exposure of tensions and anomalies with regard to sustainable architecture mainly takes place at the level of the thematic clusters. There, a voice-over text, printed in a large font on detachable sheets of paper along icons representing each exhibit, draws the clustered exhibits together in a laconic quick-tour. The text accompanying the Pockets cluster, for instance, opens with the following statement: Modern civilization is a unified, all-encompassing system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts and keep only the ‘good’ parts. Consequently, all ‘sustainable’ projects are also to some degree agents of ‘unsustainability’. Humans deal with this realisation by clearly defining a limited area of which they can take full responsibility.29 The voice-over text applies this perspective to each of the eight exhibits in this cluster. A sustainable plaster board that recycles waste from unsustainable coal combustion becomes a convenient partner in crime to the latter. A 1975 masterplan to make the island of Gomera self-sufficient ‘with technological add-ons’ such as solar panels and methane fermentation is put in perspective most concisely: ‘Although “isolated”, the planned economy of Gomera would still have been dependent on tourism, seaplanes, imported technology …’.30 Rotor carefully differentiate their own curatorial discourse at cluster level from the more factual individual object descriptions. This allows them to maintain the openended truth of the assembled archive, and avoids reducing it to a rounded, unfractured representation of sustainability in architecture. In Rotor’s overt montage,31 exhibits are interpreted only through a partial integration into one of several, sometimes conflicting, layers of narrative. The open-ended character of the exhibition is further underscored by Rotor’s invitation to guest guides – who included Eva Franch and Mirko Zardini, among others – to discuss their personal selection of items. Their comments were subsequently made available as supplementary tour notes to visitors at the beginning of the exhibition. In this half-open constellation, Rotor make the assembled objects act as exhibits: this exhibition of objects is not about advocating a particular agency of sustainable building

163

Maarten Liefooghe

materials, devices or designs, but it mobilizes objects as exhibits that can demonstrate ‘how the concept of sustainability operates as a powerful agent of change in today’s world’.32 BTGD has little to do, then, with Actor-Network-Theory, but much with Bruno Latour’s Dingpolitik: Latour’s conceptualization of the critical role that evidentiary objects can and have to play in public conversations about matters-of-concern such as sustainability and architecture.33

Expanded field of architectural theory The two exhibitions discussed here defy any simple opposition between pragmatically engaging with materiality on the one hand – as an object of study and a resource for shaping an exhibition – and sustaining a critical discourse on the other. The exhibitions make critical arguments based on alternative readings of material structures and objects to challenge established architecture-related discourses and conventions. They employ material exhibits to expound these arguments and to provoke these readings. The exhibitions differ, however, in the nature of the material-discursive gestures they use to combine the presentation of exhibits with the curatorial argument. 1:1 Stijlkamers uses a series of permutations of the formats of ‘white cube’ and ‘period room’ in which close readings and critical propositions coincide. In this regard each of the rooms become similar to institutional critical gallery installations, demanding a similar deciphering. In BTGD there are no material interventions on the exhibited objects themselves, as their integrity is required to secure their value as evidence. The proposed reading is mainly advanced in the layered exhibition texts, with supporting material gestures – of grouping, encasing or accumulating exhibits – that remain within the traditional realm of the museological. The two exhibition discourses are informed by different strands of theory: institutional critique and critical museology in the first case, and material culture studies and Latourian Dingpolitik in the second. Taken together they suggest that the expansion of architectural practice to public research and exhibition making is not so much a threat to architectural theory; rather, it involves a tacit expansion both of architecture’s references – to include non-architectural exhibition practices – and of architecture’s theory.

Notes 1

2 3 4

164

I understand this expansion of the field not in Anthony Vidler’s sense but rather in the sense implied in Felicity Scott’s call to recognize both the multifaceted character of architectural careers – ‘extending beyond traditional modes of professional practice and academic scholarship, while at the same time intersecting with, as well as reflecting and building upon, them’ – and the inseparability of architecture from a diverse array of ‘operating platforms’ amongst which are exhibitions. See Anthony Vidler, ‘Architecture’s Expanded Field’, in Architecture between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown, MA, and New Haven, CT: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press, 2008), 143–154, and Felicity D. Scott, ‘Operating Platforms’, Log 20 (2010): 65. 1 February–6 April 2015. Monika Szewczyk, ‘Andreas Angelidakis Is:’, Mousse (15 April 2015). The exhibition ran from 19 September to 1 December 2013 in DogA, Oslo. It was subsequently re-exhibited at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen, 6 February–8 June 2014. With the

Exhibits that matter

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

exhibition, a first book was published by OAT, with various contributors including Rotor. See Helle Benedicte Berg, ed., Behind the Green Door, Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability (Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2013). The exhibition is, however, best documented in its book adaptation: Lionel Devlieger, ed., Behind the Green Door: A Critical Look at Sustainable Architecture through 600 Objects by Rotor (Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2014). Rotor identify as a collective, but for individual projects they often acknowledge the constellation of individual (authorial) contributions. In this exhibition project, Lionel Devlieger and Maarten Gielen took the lead in the research and curating, while Tristan Boniver and Benjamin Lasserre were in charge of realizing the exhibition scenography. Taking up Jean-Louis Cohen’s distinction between the art exhibition in which a work is shown as ouvrage and the architecture exhibition in which, rather, the oeuvre would be exhibited through a range of representative media, Thordis Arrhenius states that the idea of architecture as ‘bricks and mortar’ is hard to maintain in the exhibition space, as is any medium-specificity of architecture more generally. See Thordis Arrhenius, ‘Discourse’, in Exhibiting Architecture: Place and Displacement, ed. Arrhenius Thordis et al. (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 15. Most material ended up in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum. One room is currently installed as ‘Amsterdam Canal House Room 1748’ in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Mari Lending, ‘Circulation’, in Exhibiting Architecture: Place and Displacement, ed. Arrhenius Thordis et al. (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 167. Mari Lending, ‘Circulation‘, 168. Annette Tietenberg, ed., Die Ausstellungskopie (Köln: Böhlau, 2015). Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers’, in Museums by Artists, eds, Peggy Gale and A. A. Bronson (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 45. Michael Asher, ‘September 21–October 12, 1974, Claire Copley Gallery, Inc., Los Angeles, California (1974)’, in Institutional Critique. An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 151–152. Asher, ‘September 21–October 12, 1974, Claire Copley Gallery, Inc., Los Angeles, California (1974)’, 152. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 167. Angelidakis commissioned the Dutch poet Bianco Boer to write a series of testimonials for each of the rooms: Waar muren spreken was offered to visitors in the exhibition brochures in the original Dutch version and in English translation. A sound installation played a computer voice reciting each room’s testimonial in English. Devlieger, Behind the Green Door, 3. Maarten Gielen, ‘The Seven Lives of Sustainability’, in Behind the Green Door: A Critical Look at Sustainable Architecture through 600 Objects by Rotor, ed. Lionel Devlieger (Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2014), 14. William Bryce Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 169. Gielen, ‘The Seven Lives of Sustainability’, 12. Lionel Devlieger, Behind the Green Door, 3. Helle Benedicte Berg, Behind the Green Door, Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, 21. Rodney Harrison and A. J. Schofield, After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1. Harrison and Schofield, After Modernity, 95. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, eds, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (Digital printing edn. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. Reprint, 2006). Harrison and Schofield, After Modernity, 107. Dieter Roelstraete, ‘The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art’, e-flux journal 4 (March 2012): 3. Devlieger, Behind the Green Door, 29. Léa-Catherine Szacka, ‘Objectifying the Exhibition’, Domusweb (7 October 2013), http://www. domusweb.it/en/architecture/2013/10/07/oslo_architecturetriennalerotor.html, accessed 17 September 2014. Devlieger, Behind the Green Door, 69. Devlieger, Behind the Green Door, 76. Jacques Le Goff, ‘Documento/Monumento’, in Enciclopedia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alfredo Salsano (Torino: Einaudi, 1977), 46. Helle Benedicte Berg, Behind the Green Door, Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, 29. Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA, and Karlsruhe: MIT Press and ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, 2005), 19.

165

Maarten Liefooghe

Bibliography Arrhenius, Thordis. ‘Discourse’. In Exhibiting Architecture: Place and Displacement, edited by Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie Michael McGowan, 15–20. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. Asher, Michael. ‘September 21–October 12, 1974, Claire Copley Gallery, Inc., Los Angeles, California (1974)’. In Institutional Critique. An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 150–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Berg, Helle Benedicte, ed. Behind the Green Door, Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability. Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2013. Boer, Bianca. ‘Where Walls Talk’. Translated by Michele Hutchison. In 1:1 Stijlkamers by Andreas Angelidakis 1 February– 6 April 2015 [Exhibition Brochure]. Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2015. Buchli, Victor and Lucas Gavin, eds. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Digital printing edn. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. Reprint, 2006. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. ‘The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers’. In Museums by Artists, edited by Peggy Gale and A. A. Bronson, 45–56. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983. Devlieger, Lionel, ed. Behind the Green Door: A Critical Look at Sustainable Architecture through 600 Objects by Rotor. Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2014. Gallie, William Bryce. ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–198. Gielen, Maarten. ‘The Seven Lives of Sustainability’. In Behind the Green Door: A Critical Look at Sustainable Architecture through 600 Objects by Rotor, edited by Lionel Devlieger, 12–20. Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2014. Harrison, Rodney and A. J. Schofield. After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Latour, Bruno. ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14–43. Cambridge, MA, and Karlsruhe: MIT Press and ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, 2005. Le Goff, Jacques. ‘Documento/Monumento’. In Enciclopedia, edited by Ruggiero Romano and Alfredo Salsano, 38–48. Torino: Einaudi, 1977. Lending, Mari. ‘Circulation’. In Exhibiting Architecture: Place and Displacement, edited by Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie Michael McGowan, 167–170. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, 2013. Roelstraete, Dieter. ‘The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art’. e-flux journal 4 (2012): 1–7. Scott, Felicity D. ‘Operating Platforms’. Log 20 (2010): 65–69. Szacka, Léa-Catherine. ‘Objectifying the Exhibition’. Domusweb (7 October 2013). http://www.domusweb. it/en/architecture/2013/10/07/oslo_architecturetriennalerotor.html, accessed 17 September 2014. Szewczyk, Monika. ‘Andreas Angelidakis Is:’. Mousse (15 April 2015) 174–181. Tietenberg, Annette, ed. Die Ausstellungskopie. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. Vidler, Anthony. ‘Architecture’s Expanded Field’. In Architecture between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler, 143–154. Williamstown and New Haven: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2008.

166

Andreas Angelidakis, The Empire Room, in 1:1 Period Rooms exhibition, Rotterdam, 2015.

Chapter 16

Repositioning. This think called crit … Brian Hatton

‘An unexamined life is not worth living,’ Socrates is said to have declared.1 We may likewise doubt the value of life in an unexamined building, and never think to build an unexamined design. But what does such scrutiny require? What is it to examine architectural design? Is it just to direct upon it a critical eye, or does it entail some kind of theory wherein for judgment to found its criteria? And yet, just as an artwork has to be done with courage, regardless of criticism, so criticism must act boldly, according praise or damning not from theory or axiom but from experience. Yet, does not experience include models and examples, recorded and represented in what we call history? Are then act, critique, history and theory but points of vantage on an integral figure whose angles revolve about each other in a circulation that we call ‘culture’? [1]. For architecture since Alberti’s time, that circulation was directed: from theory to idea to drawing, and thence to building. Yet while theory was developed in De Statua, Della pittura, and De Re Aedificatoria, there was no Della Teoria. As a writer, Alberti had to act existentially, ab initio, without a guide. To notice this, may subvert not just theory’s priority, but that of any privileged mode in exposition or in examination. It may, too, shift emphasis from Platonic speculation on general and abstract principles to something more like Socratic enquiring: particular, critical and oriented to performance and practice. My initial remarks are spurred by Kant’s observations in a preface to his Critique of Pure Reason: Our age is, in special degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity and lawgiving through its majesty

168

This think called crit …

may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.2 A stern summons, no doubt, towards an ideal of universal rigour in all our judgments and a disposition whereon to predicate all our projects. It was such that, writing of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ as allegorizing a ‘myth of criticism’, Octavio Paz would reflect: From the time of Kant, thought has been critical, not metaphysical. Today we have criticism instead of ideas, methods instead of systems. Our only idea, in the proper sense of the term, is Criticism. The ‘Large Glass’ is a painting of ideas because [...] it is a critical myth [...] It is also and above all the Myth of Criticism [...] a painting of criticism and criticism of painting … a work that turns in on itself, that persists in destroying the very thing it creates.3 Paz’s reflections were admiring, yet intimated a caveat that Criticism (which may be just what we call Theory as applied to particular actualities rather than abstract generality) is ambiguous; indeed, perhaps a kind of what Jacques Derrida named as a ‘pharmakon’, which may kill as well as cure. Not least among its doubleness is that criticism criticizes theory as much as practice, even though in its first architectural enactments, criticism enters as but a discrete remarker on the scene. What, or where is that scene? It is the scene of a ‘crit’.

A crit In architecture studios, a ‘crit’ is an hour to invite thought and judgment [2] into projects, when design is qualified by comment. Architecture can scarcely be realized without someone somewhere commenting. Hence Adrian Forty’s study of architecture’s verbal supplement, Words and Buildings [3].4 ‘Artworks’ observed Robert Morris, ‘float in a sea of words’ [4].5 But whose words? Not always the artist’s. ‘I don’t talk about my work’ [5], answered the painter Kenneth Noland to Charles Harrison’s request for an interview; ‘I have Michael Fried do that for me.’ Fried is an art critic, and, too, an art historian. And art theorist? Yes. But what of Noland? Also yes, yes and yes. A contention here will be that art/architecture, criticism, history and theory cannot be done without each other [6], though often by different people. No architectural act can be made without an idea of past, present and future, i.e. of history (for a myth, too, is a history). But architectural history cannot be represented without selections. Selection entails judgments, judgments entail criticism, criticism implies criteria that imply principles and entail theory. But all that also runs in reverse: theory, history and criticism all depend from and on practice. Yet what is practice but the enacting of critical judgment? Accordingly, Critical Architecture, the title of a 2004 AHRA conference, was a pleonasm; for what of any aesthetic value was ever built that was not in somewise critical? [7].

169

Brian Hatton

A second observation to be made is that, even though criticism is indispensable, its specific role and characteristics have been neglected in recent concern with theory. This is notable in that, while several anthologies of ‘theory’ have appeared (Ockman, Nesbitt, Hays, et al.)6 no comparable anthologies of criticism (aside from monographs) have been published. Nor has Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism7 ever been matched in the field of architectural criticism. This is perverse, for whereas theory of architecture is often recondite and remote from practical life, criticism of architecture is a continuous activity in design judgment as well as a recurrent topic of public and political discourse. Moreover, if articulacy is a goal in architects’ training, it is more likely groundable on literacy in criticism than in history and theory [8]. We do not expect architects to be historians or theorists, but to be percipient and articulate critics – even though their judgments may be made more in acts than in words. However, those acts prompt two reflections whose opposite lines we ought to note. The first directs criticism upon itself, requiring it to be criticized according to more fundamental or, in Kant’s term ‘transcendental’, criteria. Named since Kant critique, such self-reflexive criticism was, for formalist critics like Greenberg, the distinction of modernist art [9]. An opposing line, whereas, which may be called existential, hails in a creative act [10], an unprecedented event, deducible from and reducible to no theory [11], but sprung from something necessary yet rarely referred to, namely courage [12].

Twelve remarks [1] whose angles revolve about each other in a circulation that we call ‘culture’ Theory, practice, history and criticism are rarely in equipoise. At times, diads or triads prevail over the discounted others. Practice in league with theory may dismiss history as contingency. Theory may enlist history to make of design but a teleologic project. Or design and criticism may spur each other on unburdened by theory and oblivious of history. Whatever their results – Alexandrian, academic, progressive, revolutionary or naive – their exclusions eventually subvert such local or temporary alliances. [2] thought and judgment Although a crit often makes practical/technical remarks on a design, it would not, if that were all it did, be a crit. Measured indices may inform a performance appraisal, but do not in themselves make a critique, for they cast no light on motives. Criticism attends not to objective matters but to subjective motifs – expressive, representational and symbolic of motives. It enacts not a deduction but a judgment. [3] Words and Buildings Forty did not mean terms in which plain statements are made, but loaded connotations in architectural jargon. Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age8 conflated

170

This think called crit …

design with machine design and theory with technical theory. Technology is scientific technique; but no architectural theory, however used, works like a scientific theory. An electric motor is designed according to electrical theory, i.e. deduced and calculated from fixed laws, principles and measures, but that is true only for the motor’s internal objective relations. It says nothing about the motor’s relations in use and meaning to human subjects. Engineering gives no idea as to why Peter Behrens, following his AEG employer Paul Jordans, should declare that ‘an electric motor should be like a birthday present’.9 It is not to how but to why that architectural theory is directed. Why should it be like a birthday gift? Or indeed, anything at all? The subject of our ‘theory’, then, is wish, and Banham’s title should have been Desire and Design. [4] a sea of words Like seas, words are all around; some before, some after. Fore-words we can call theories, for they set principles and axioms before building. After-words we can call criticism, for they remark on what has been done or made. This distinction indicates a difference in method and outlook, for whereas one seeks a universal rationale by means of generalization and abstraction, wherefrom to deduce particular examples, the other prefers to work from actual experience of existent instances. We here sense again a familiar contrast between continental and British tendencies. Alberti, Le Duc, Semper versus Ruskin, Banham, Rowe. [5] ‘I don’t talk about my work’ Mies said something similar; but Noland and Mies no longer needed manifestos to proclaim their motifs, because critics such as Clement Greenberg had homogenized the ‘isms’ into a single mid-twentieth century ‘modernism’. By 1964, Ulrich Conrads’ Programmes and Manifestos on Modern Architecture10 was a log of bygone documents; for if the modern movement was a fading idea, the manifesto was an obsolescent practice. In Charles Jencks’ 1997 Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture,11 ‘theories’ replace ‘programmes’; most of his examples are excerpts from discursive essays. The only manifestos are from ecological campaigners or from conservatives such as Roger Scruton. They alone talk of ‘principles’; which was why Scruton was invited as keynote speaker to a 2002 symposium titled ‘Are There Any Enduring Principles of Architecture?’. Manifestos had become embarrassingly uncool. Asking ‘How to write a manifesto … in an age disgusted with them?’, Rem Koolhaas had declared in Delirious New York that ‘their fatal weakness is their inherent lack of evidence. Manhattan’s problem is the opposite: a mountain of evidence without manifesto’.12 Hence he called his Delirious New York ‘a retroactive manifesto’ – which put it in the category of ‘after-words’ – so that it could also be called ‘pro-active criticism’. [6] art/architecture, criticism, history and theory cannot be done without each other These four disciplines may be imagined as points of a tetrahedron, wherein each may be the apex when practised; for none can be done without conscience of and attitude towards the other three. If I am to be a critic of architecture, then I must have some knowledge of its practice, some idea or theory of it, and some sense of history. And as

171

Brian Hatton

their engagement exceeds Euclidian simplicity, theory must give account of their complex relations. Each shares in a reciprocal nexus of legitimation from which, once Eden’s innocence is lost (first of all lost objects), we can never escape. A primitive architect, we may suppose, is one who builds not without an idea but without selfreflection. Our modernity sets us against mindless enthusiasm. To a naif who would have his design so simply because he likes it so, we question: ‘Why do you like it so?’ Doubtless that is a start upon critique. Yet, were critique merely to achieve reflection without building, that could scarcely be counted as improvement. If theory has a role, surely it is to bring the three practices of design, criticism and history together in order for them to be distinguished and vice versa: to make clear their distinctions in order for them to be engaged in a way that renders possible an idea of a further space, not in the indicative but in the subjunctive mode of ‘could, would, may, might be’. That ‘mightlihood’ is where, as W. H. Auden wrote in ‘The Birth of Architecture’, all proceeds from the question ‘If’. … to take umbrage at death, to construct a second nature of tomb and temple, lives must know the meaning of If.13 [7] for what of any aesthetic value was ever built that was not in somewise critical? The suffix, wise, indicates direction across a certain latitude, namely that of critical negotiation. Think of the space of criticism as a leeway, a latitude between limits. Like Hermes’ impish hermeneutic guiding among ideas and icons to which he never quite commits, criticism is always between. Alan Tate in The Forlorn Demon14 spoke of its middle position between imagination and philosophy. Bound always to mediate, what is the space of criticism but the recurrently provisional re-constitution of space? Space to enact freedom by creating meaning among terms placed in new relations to one another. Critical leeway is a latitude within determined/disputed limits. Criticism thus has a double role: it lies in that slash / – like cubism’s ambiguous facets, or like Duchamp’s Rue Larrey door, which opened one entrance as it closed another. On one hand to criticize is to evaluate within a determined range; on the other it is to put into question the limits themselves. Scylla and Charybdis are to be probed, interrogated, pushed to the brink – brink of what? To the inevitability of appearing of somewhere else. Once, in Greece, that space was but a leeway of entasis, a modulation of line, proportion or figure. Today, though, the whole configuration is open to interrogation, including purpose. The ideals of scientific freedom and democratic will converge on a limitless critique of ultimate purpose. But where along the scale of this exponential de-teleology should any definite act of design or of criticism pitch itself? Answers to that enquiry are everywhere obstructed by powers and ideologies at odds with all efforts to base architecture on rational priorities. Purpose is supposedly subject to continuous scrutiny while the supposed but fictitious sovereignty of the consumer liquidates any real basis for scrutiny. Teleologies are everywhere implied but nowhere hunted to their ulterior motives.

172

This think called crit …

[8] if articulacy is a goal in architects’ training, it is more likely groundable on literacy in criticism than in history and theory How might this neglect of criticism be corrected? We should ask: How, where and when does criticism get done? How, where and when can it have any value or effect? Doubtless, publications are important. More germane, but difficult, is the problem of student-architects’ curriculum. Can we devise ways to direct study to, as Husserl’s phenomenological maxim had it, ‘the things themselves’? Or is that just a theoretical nostrum of how to dispense with history and theory? Paul Feyerabend wrote a book titled Against Method.15 It proposed, of course, a method: a method to end method. [9] self-reflexive criticism was, for formalist critics like Greenberg, the distinction of modernist art Critique of the criteria of criticism led in art to a phantom of autonomy, hypostasized for a moment around 1970 in Conceptual Art. Despite the efforts of Peter Eisenman, no parallel hypostasis was located for architectural autonomy, where seeking for Kant’s ‘purposeless purposiveness’ (‘zwecklose Zweckmässigkeit’) falls into infinite regress – a mirror to capitalism’s mindless, because illimitable, fantasy of functional ‘progress’. Must it be then, that just as one does not stare at the sun, the architect should not stare too long at the light of reason, i.e. theory? And yet, criticism’s imperative to overlook nothing, including its own premises, remains. What when criticism, partner of theory, discountenances theory? Reflection seems here to reach a turn that inclines it towards a conjunction of Kierkegaard with Beckett: Critique, you’ll regret it. Forget critique, you’ll regret it. Regret or regress: Critique again, regress again; regress better. [10] a creative act Marcel Duchamp’s lecture ‘The Creative Act’, posited a reciprocity between artist and critic : ‘ … the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’16 Oscar Wilde had advanced a similar idea in ‘The Critic as Artist’.17 But if, as Duchamp claimed, an artist’s decisions ‘cannot be translated into self-analysis, spoken, written or even thought-out’, the same holds for the critic, whose acts, as much as the artist’s, face the same demands and the same risks. To risk is to lay open to doubt, but doubt in an undertaking where, as Henry James wrote, ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art’.18 [11] deducible from and reducible to no theory The hang of theory, its affinity with architecture, is towards the integrity of structure: an ordering, against entropic time, of some uncontingent space where change is only ever oscillation, and freedom is always framed within a palindrome of wall and law. Structuralists might locate such oscillations in a ‘Klein group’, where design, theory, history and criticism occupy corners in a square of axes that may imply expansion to include their excluded ‘others’. But creative and critical acts are not just oscillations, they

173

Brian Hatton

are enacted by subjects in time. Time and space – existential time and space – are what they actually make and remake; each time reiterating, each time casting designs to risk, uncertain as to whether they be seeds, or spells or merely dice. [12] but sprung from something necessary yet rarely referred to, namely courage Courage knows no operative theory; it cannot be studied and then put into practice. Hegel’s Owl of Minerva flew only at dusk; but for the artist it is always dawn. At a certain point, analysis, examination and dialectic reach a limit. To act, whether it is to design, narrate, criticize or theorize, one must forgo any further reflection and affirm from somewhere beyond reasonable account, where no reference or criterion can underwrite; and where, Kierkegaard (who despised Hegel’s cautious clever-owls) warned, ‘To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself’.19 For architecture, to adapt Kierkegaard once more, ‘can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

174

Plato, ‘The Apology’, in The Apology, Phaedo and Crito of Plato, trans. by Benjamin Jowett (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–1914), 37e–38a. Immanuel Kant, ‘Preface to First Edition’, in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929), 9. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp. Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1978), 75–76. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Robert. Morris, ‘Some Splashes on the Ebb Tide’, Art Forum 11 no. 6 (February 1973): 43–49. Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Columbia Book of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993). Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory for 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). More recently, see: Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed., Architectural Theory: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Harry Francis Mallgrave and Christina Contandriopoulos, eds, Architectural Theory: An Anthology from 1871 to 2005 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); A. Krista Sykes, ed., Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, eds, The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (Washington, DC, London: SAGE Publications, 2012). Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936). Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). Behrens cited Jordans in ‘Zur Ästhetik des Fabrikbaus’, in Gewerbefleiss 108 no. 7/9 (July/September 1929). Cited in Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens, Architect and Designer (London: The Architectural Press, 1981), 82. Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). Charles Jencks, Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 1997). Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6. W. H. Auden, ‘Prologue: The Birth of Architecture’, in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, first published in About The House (New York: Random House, 1965). Alan Tate, The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1953). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975). Marcel Duchamp’s lecture ‘The Creative Act’ was given in April 1957 to a convention at Houston, Texas, of the American Federation of Arts. It was reprinted in Art News 56 no. 4 (June 1957), 28–29, and in Robert Lebel, ed., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959). Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist: Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything’, in Intentions (London: Methuen, 1891), 127–147.

This think called crit …

18 19

Henry James; quoted here are the closing lines of James’ story, ‘The Middle Years’, first published as ‘Terminations’ in 1893 in Scribner’s Magazine 13 no. 4 (1893): 620. ‘It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.’ Søren Kierkegaard, Journals IV A 164 (1843), in The Sickness onto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by AntiClimacus (1849) (London: Penguin, 2004).

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. Della pittura, [1434]. De Pictura, [1435]. In English, On Painting. London: Penguin Classics, 1972. Alberti, Leon Battista. De Re Aedificatoria, [1452]. In English, On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Alberti, Leon Battista. De Statua, 1462. See: Grayson, Cecil, ed. L. B. Alberti: On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua. London: Phaidon, 1972; and more recently Arkles, Jason, ed. On Sculpture by Leon Battista Alberti. Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2013. Auden, W. H. ‘Prologue: The Birth of Architecture’, in ‘Thanksgiving For A Habitat’. First published in About the House. New York: Random House, 1965. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Conrads, Ulrich. Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Ullstein, 1964. English edition: Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture. London: Lund Humphries and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970. Crysler, C. Greig, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory. Washington, DC, London: SAGE Publications, 2012. Duchamp, Marcel. ‘The Creative Act’. Art News 56 no. 4 (June 1957): 28–29. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. London: New Left Books, 1975. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture Theory since 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. James, Henry. ‘The Middle Years’. Scribner’s Magazine 13 no. 4 (April, 1893): 609–621. http://ebooks. library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=scri&cc=scri&idno=scri0013-4&node=scri00134%3A1&view =image&seq=621&size=100. Accessed 15 May 2016. Jencks, Charles. Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture. Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. ‘Preface to First Edition’. In Critique of Pure Reason Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, 7–15. London: Macmillan, 1929. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus [1849]. London: Penguin, 2004. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Lebel, Robert, ed. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959. Mallgrave, Harry Francis, ed. Architectural Theory: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Mallgrave, Harry Francis and Christina  Contandriopoulos, eds. Architectural Theory: An Anthology from 1871 to 2005. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Morris, Robert. ‘Some Splashes on the Ebb Tide’, Art Forum 11 no. 6 (February 1973): 43–49. Nesbitt, Kate, ed. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory for 1965–1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. Ockman, Joan, ed. Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Columbia Book of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993. Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. Translated by Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1978. Plato, ‘The Apology’. In The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, 37e–38a. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–1914. Sykes, A. Krista, ed. Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. Tate, Alan. The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays. Chicago: Regnery, 1953. Venturi, Lionello. History of Art Criticism. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936. Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Critic as Artist: Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything’. In Intentions. London, Methuen 1891, 127–147. Windsor, Alan. Peter Behrens, Architect and Designer. London: The Architectural Press, 1981.

175

This page intentionally left bank

Part V Theories of things

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 17

Pragmatics Towards a theory of things Gerald Adler

Recent turns in architectural theory all share a reaction against totalizing analyses. Hilde Heynen and Gwendolyn Wright1 ‘Things’ in architecture have included buildings, obviously, but depending upon the scale at which we observe and experience the world they also comprise topographies, cities, streets, houses, schools of architecture and technical colleges, rooms, lintels, lavatories, windows, lamps, escutcheons and nail heads. With the rise of the digital, however, these solid, finite and material things are rapidly melting into air. The fluidity of the modern world, à la Zygmunt Bauman,2 means that the traditional division between theory and practice, between what architects one hundred years ago would have understood as the dichotomy of ‘architecture’ and ‘building’, no longer obtains for the world outside the narrow confines of most contemporary architectural offices and academies. And yet we urgently need a ‘reality check’, literally understood, in order to ground architecture, once again, in our material existence. ‘Historians, sociologists and philosophers compile knowledge without testing it against reality’; so wrote the French architect Patrick Bouchain,3 hero of this story, in his reclaiming of the art and craft of building from the reaches of dry, disengaged theory. Two things are examined in this paper: the narratives told by and about pragmatist architects together with their power to evoke and stimulate the design of buildings, and the theories of social anthropology, sociology and philosophical pragmatism that have practical effects upon architectural production. Such

179

Gerald Adler

plain-speaking narratives take their cue from novels, poems, short stories and other texts accessible to the broadly educated reader, especially those writings not already filtered through an excess of theory, while the ‘applied’ social sciences of sociology and anthropology, in particular the work of Bruno Latour and his followers, contribute to structuring the ‘theory’ side of the argument.4 Narratives of every description are crucial means by which architects of all stripes conceptualise for themselves and communicate to others. Most recently, architect and educator Jeremy Till has argued that the professional discourse of ‘logic and completeness’ should be replaced by the techniques of ‘conversation’ and ‘story telling’.5 The power of these stories to influence the design of buildings, and to engage both professional designers and lay public, lies in their very resistance to critical theory, couched as it often is in language opaque to meaning.6 This faction of theory tends to pay scant regard to traditions of philosophy outwith the Continental variety, such as those associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy or the more practical ‘applied’ thinking of sociology and anthropology. These engage the concrete and tangible and deal in pragmatics, such that their theory elides and coincides with its practical expression in buildings and environments. In this paper it is maintained that architecture is not aloof from other disciplines, artistic practices and social praxes in this regard. As far as literature is concerned, the plain speaking of the writers cited here is championed over Californian architect and poet Jill Stoner’s preferences for so-called ‘minor’ literature7 and over those of her mentor Jennifer Bloomer,8 which are seen as being too abstruse and unconducive to the production of useful buildings and environments. The overall tenor of this paper supports the contingency of architecture,9 after Manfredo Tafuri’s assertion that ‘architecture realises the impossibility of finding its own reasons exclusively in itself’.10 This statement of Tafuri’s chimes in with the post-1968 sentiments of his compatriot Giancarlo de Carlo, for whom ‘architecture has become too important to be left to architects’.11 The contention in this paper is that ‘things matter’, and they matter in ways that can be theorised and be of practical benefit to architectural production.12 The recent Log special issue ‘Stocktaking’, which echoed and updated Reyner Banham’s eponymous series in the Architectural Review in 1960, posed provocative questions about the place of theory in architectural discourse. This paper takes Banham’s initial essay on tradition versus technology as its starting point and inverts the Banham dichotomy. If, according to the architect Elizabeth Diller, ‘architecture is a technology that has not yet discovered its agency’,13 then it is surely the case that today it is technology in its globalised and commodified form that has become the new architectural tradition, or orthodoxy, in contrast to the freedoms of action suggested by an architectural practice and theory of political, social, material, environmental and artistic bricolage, the children of Ivan Illich and Lucien Kroll. Compare the certainties of the brands that are Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid with the serendipities of the French architect Patrick Bouchain, and pit the certitudes of so-called ‘starchitecture’ against more volatile, less predictable forms of building.14 It cannot be denied that there are such named architectural brands.15 We recognise and are able to identify such an architect’s buildings to a far greater extent than we would those of architects whose primary aim is

180

Pragmatics

to serve clients. For the media-savvy architect it is rather a case of clients serving such an architect’s own self-image. This is a theme espoused by the critic Hal Foster in his book The Art-Architecture Complex,16 whose very title has echoes of the militaryindustrial, and so (to a liberal-minded audience, at least) a pejorative ring, or a cynical one, at the very least.

Plain writing Alfred Polgar (1873–1955), one of the legion of Viennese emigré writers of the 1930s and master of the witty and ironic short story, wrote a particularly pithy one called ‘I Can’t Read Novels’ (1948).17 For the protagonist, the world is so full of incident and detail that novel reading seems completely superfluous. The only thing he reads avidly are grammar books: he is a kind of twentieth-century Mr Gradgrind for whom only facts will do. In contrast, and more recently, Jill Stoner has argued for ‘minor’ architecture in which narratives of various stripes inform design decisions, something akin to the ‘everyday constellations’ invoked by Georges Teyssot.18 The decisions they inform are ones involving spatial questions, and the ‘minor’ narratives Stoner has selected are ones originally outside the literary canon. The ‘spaces’ they delineate have to do with four myths: of the interior, of the object, of the subject and of nature. Naturally, her ‘objects’ are of greatest interest in connection with this paper. However, even the thinginess of objects dissolves under Stoner’s critical gaze: they ‘respond to lines of force, but not necessarily through lines of flight. They atomize; forms transform to fields’.19 What does this mean? Certainly, the ubiquitous word ‘field’ does little to aid comprehension, and contributes to the denigration of ‘things’ in architectural discourse.20 ‘Fings’, though, ‘ain’t wot they used to be’,21 as the architectural theorist Antoine Picon made clear when he questioned the classic, mid-twentieth-century understanding of the ‘individualistic’ thing, as expressed by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon;22 today they appear, rather, as ‘quasi-objects’, whose ‘existence appears as a mere efflorescence of networks and fields life’.23 This paper argues for the value of networked things, the atoms of architecture: bricks, coat-pegs, escutcheons – indeed the inventory with which this paper began. The reason someone like Polgar is useful (useful in the sense advocated by the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who ‘hope[d] to replace the reality-appearance distinction between the more useful and the less useful24) for an alternative praxis of architecture is the fact that he was no ‘pure’ litterateur like the ascetic Kafka. Polgar was involved in the burlesque, collaborating with the feuilletonist Egon Friedell in writing for the cabaret in Vienna in the years before the First World War. Like the painters Edward Burra and Georg Grosz, he depicted ‘real’, gritty life as opposed to airy abstractions. Theory is alive and kicking, even if cryptic and couched in everyday narratives to a greater or lesser extent literary. And not so everyday: verse, perhaps the literary form most removed from everyday life, is suffused with metaphor that relies upon the naming and relational aspects of things for its poetic force. Amongst contemporary English-language poets one might mention Seamus Heaney, one of the most trenchant advocates of the

181

Gerald Adler

power of everyday things, presented in their starkest Anglo-Saxon raiment in his volume Seeing Things25 and in the works of the Australian poet Les Murray.26 Most famously in our era it is the French poet Francis Ponge (1899–1988) who accepts, indeed revels, in the quotidian nature of ‘things’ and transports them to the prose-poem.27 Indeed, most poetry is like this, where named things are placed in (linear) juxtaposition with other named things (unless we are talking about ‘concrete poetry’, where the shape of the text allows us to see the poem all at once, as if it were a picture). Each word refers to a thing in the world; it is also, by dint of its sound and rhythm, able to resonate with other words and evoke feelings of various psychological hues.

Building things And so to return to that species most resistant to theory: things, whose recent poetic emanation, à la Heaney, might be R. F. Langley’s ‘[n]ot things, but seeing things’.28 The list of things recounted in the first paragraph will remind the reader of the architect Heinrich Tessenow’s writings on the provenance of the things that make our houses: Our home is connected with the world by countless threads, and has an immediate relationship with the greatest variety of worlds, both close at hand and far away. For instance, the wood of our floorboards or of our furniture: where did the trees grow which provided the timber, and by what means did it get transported to us? Who were the people who felled the trees and sawed the timber? Who laid the foundations of our home, who made the roof and covered it and who made the tiles? Our home is connected with the world by countless threads, and has an immediate relationship with the greatest variety of worlds, both close at hand and far away. Where does the lime for our walls come from, the glass for our windows? Who wove the curtains, who grew the flax from which they are made? Who made the key for our door, how did it get to us, where is the mine in which its iron lay for many thousands of years; where will it all end?29 The sentiments in Tessenow’s prose-poem, together with their phrasing of the inventory, evoke Bertold Brecht’s poem, ‘Questions of a Reading Worker’,30 bringing us back neatly to ‘this thing called theory’. Tessenow’s quest to trace a building’s components back to their source material suggests a pragmatist, quasi-Marxist understanding of the centrality of material conditions, not to mention a contemporary feel for the ecology of materials, and certainly echoes Brecht’s poem. Citing Tessenow and Polgar today for their pragmatic qualities of the everyday and of the ordinary opens up the question of what these terms might mean for contemporary architecture. Pragmatism has certainly had a bad press recently, architecturally speaking. Is it, indeed, as Bertrand Russell claimed, ‘little more than an apology for crass American commercialism’,31 which is what any number of those on today’s ‘critical theory’ wing of

182

Pragmatics

architectural academia might claim? It is time to invoke voices other than those from the rather narrow confines of contemporary critical theory, and cite those that assume a pragmatic, if not downright empirical, take on the world.32 The world of the social sciences is the most hopeful sign yet of a network of disciplines including sociology and anthropology that is able to offer an antidote to the abstractions of philosophy. ‘How can we stop drawing boundaries between architectural technologies and architectural humanities, between materiality and meaning?’,33 asks Albena Yaneva in a question reminiscent of Banham’s enquiries in 1960. Yaneva, a disciple of French sociologist Bruno Latour’s anthropological approach to social critique, argues against a modernist opposition between subject and object [that] seems to have paralyzed architectural theory. It leads to an impasse in which the theory of representation is trapped in the metaphysics of essence that causes buildings to be defined by rigid classifications, applied after the architectural event.34 Yaneva uses recent work in the field of science and technology studies (STS) in which ‘the method of Actor-Network-Theory’ [‘ANT’] is used ‘to successfully get out of the artificial dichotomies of nature/culture, subject/object and technologies/humanities’.35 The danger she sees in the reductive and frankly nihilistic tone of much critical theory, as it applies to architecture, is that it tends to ignore its material, thing-bound reality so that, in extremis, there are no buildings! Have we ever seen buildings without builders, constructors and building technologies? Have we ever seen ways of bending the roof structures and materials without procurements [sic] systems and value engineers? Constructors without different ways of calculating construction budgets? Architects without perspective drawings and scaling instruments? Users and clients without changing demands? […] Defined on the basis of numerous situations of coexistence of these entities, it is made of spatial pluralities as they enfold in time.36 Not to mention material pluralities, as this paper contends. Materialist designers and critics (amongst whom are counted Patrick Bouchain and this author) share Yaneva’s ‘modest ambition […] that there is a different way of doing social sciences-inspired research in architecture: one that is pragmatist, realist and irreductivist’.37 And like the American architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer, they believe that ‘we should heighten our sensitivity to ordinary building’.38 To great critical disagreement, both pro and contra, the architects Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting have recast pragmatist architecture as what they term ‘projective’, such that [w]ithin architecture, a project of delivering performance, or soliciting a surprising plausibility, suggests moving away from a critical architectural practice – one that is reflective, representational, and narrative – to a

183

Gerald Adler

projective one. Setting out this projective program does not necessarily entail a capitulation to market forces but actually respects or reorganizes multiple economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups.39 Bouchain’s work is clearly projective, in Somol and Whiting’s terms, but also narrative, while hardly representing ‘a capitulation to market forces’. One of the more sustained attacks on Somol and Whiting’s notion of the projective, in its weakening of social engagement in advanced architecture, were the voices of the editors of the first volume in this series.40 Yaneva qualifies Jane Rendell’s contention that ‘design is a mode of enquiry that is capable of generating new ways of knowing and understanding the world’41 by stating that before we engage with critique we need to fully understand what the world is made of and how architecture contributes to its making; that is, a pragmatist way of grasping the world of architecture is needed to apprehend all of the undertones of the social and the cultural that architectural production is entangled with.42 Working along Latourian lines, the anthropologist Michael Guggenheim has usefully attempted to redescribe buildings as collections of technologies.43 His thinking is useful for our purposes in considering the kind of pragmatic, projective work of Bouchain for whom, as for Guggenheim, buildings are composed of many parts, some of them technologies and some not. As building types, they are themselves black boxes, containing other black boxes. They are manifold on their ‘inside’. With their inside, I would like to describe everything that is not normally accessible by the user, the black-boxed part. Just like CD players, and unlike for example stones, buildings have an inside that is manifold in the sense that it contains too many black boxes, independent of each other, to make it predictable.44 So buildings (yes, buildings, and not ‘architecture’) appear as ‘actors’ in ‘networks’ (sociologically speaking) at the same time as they are clearly hard, material objects: the inscrutable ‘black box’ of today’s Latourian social scientists,45 an uncanny relative of Reyner Banham’s ‘black box’ that was the subject of his last published essay dealing with the inscrutability of great architecture.46 At its most basic, this is akin to saying that buildings have interiors that do something for and with their users, while at the same time ‘appearing’ in the world, having facades that face us in our public lives, structuring and shaping external space. While the buildings designed by Bouchain and his team exemplify pragmatic and imaginative design, we nonetheless find the need to spin words, mere signs of objects, in order to produce ‘a thing called theory’.

184

Pragmatics

Projective, pragmatic and critical ‘Sauvons les objets!’ (‘Save our objects!’) cried the French materialist philosopher François Dagognet,47 who took an anti-Platonist stance in his arguing against preconceived forms. He investigates tables and chairs, and together with his charming drawings48 argues that we declare ourselves to be anti-Platonic. We reject the idea of a ‘chair which precedes the chair’ and locks it into some essence, whereas in the course of history it has not failed to restructure itself and to question its own fundamentals (feet, seat, robustness, form).49 Dagognet’s exhortation that we reconsider ‘the real’ has echoes of Somol and Whiting’s criticism of ‘critical’ 1980s and 1990s architecture as being too reliant on (poststructuralist) philosophy; a relationship they sum up as that of [the actor Robert] De Niro to his character [whom he plays]. In other words, it fostered a kind of Method acting, or Method designing, where the architect expressed a text or where architecture represented its procedure of formation. As with the ‘critical project’, Method acting was connected to psychoanalysis, to calling up and re-enacting memories and past events.50 Pursuing the acting analogy, they go on to refer to the art critic Dave Hickey’s contention that De Niro is the arch Method actor, while Robert Mitchum is the more relaxed, ‘professional’ actor.51 Is there not something equally ‘arch’ about architecture, akin to the archness of Banham’s black box? While Jane Rendell, in her introduction to Critical Architecture, the first book in this Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities series, roundly rejected Somol and Whiting’s ‘postcritical’ position (not their term), the editors nonetheless published the architect Philippe Rahm who began his chapter with the statement that ‘[a]rchitecture is not the instrument of expression of something beyond architecture. It is not the reflection or representation of something else. The cause of its form is architecture itself, in space and time’.52 Hardly a critical position, in the usual understanding of the term. For the American theorist Michael Hays, the ‘very autonomy’ of architecture is constitutive of its criticality, as pointed out by Hilde Heynen in her chapter in the same volume,53 two contradictory views that are hard to square. However, by a roundabout route, Heynen comes to the conclusion that projective architecture has the potential for ‘contain[ing] a critical and even utopian dimension’.54 Bruno Latour, on the other hand, frames his view of science and technology in decidedly pragmatist, Rortyan terms, most clearly expressed in these rules (and elaborated in the respective chapters of his book Science in Action): Rule 1 We study science in action and not ready made science or technology; to do so, we either arrive before the facts and machines are blackboxed or we follow the controversies that reopen them. (Introduction)

185

Gerald Adler

Rule 2 To determine the objectivity or subjectivity of a claim, the efficiency or perfection of a mechanism, we do not look for their intrinsic qualities but at all the transformations they undergo later in the hands of others. (Chapter 1)55 For Stoner, as for Tessenow and Bouchain, it is theory represented by imaginative narratives that structure design, whether it is the discovery of the self-seeded roof of the wool and cotton auction house56 that Bouchain transformed into Roubaix’s La Condition Publique arts centre (2002–2003), or the creative agency accorded by his practice to construction workers and building users. For Bouchain, ‘[t]he building worker is nowadays reduced to a kind of modern slavery by the global building site. Transforming our building sites into “vernacular” sites and restoring the workers to the heart of the abode may deliver a renascence of the construction worker’.57 At Roubaix, Bouchain found the original 1900 municipal textiles auction house in severe disrepair. He carefully tended its fabric, conserving the concrete construction – an early example of François Hennebique’s patented system – and delighted in discovering and nurturing its naturally seeded roof, comprising exotica brought over in the bales of raw wool and cotton from the West Indies, India, Africa and Australia. The natural and cultural histories of the building provided rich stories, and the Roubaisians proved keen to work collaboratively on their new civic and cultural forum. The stories related by Bouchain evoke the exuberant hedonism of the dance, or of the theatre and circus, worlds familiar to the architect. They are expressed by his friend and supporter, the philosopher Michel Onfray, who sees in Bouchain’s work a rejection of the dualism that lies at the heart of Western civilisation: The Platonist is the child of the Apollonian, and the nominalist, of the Dionysian. Formal structure and the worship of the copy stand against organic life-force and the rematerialisation of the real; life boxed into proportions stands against life at ease in a network of flux, circulation, movement and transits.58 This paper has provoked and implicitly challenged certain nostrums of critical theorists as they apply to architecture. It has argued for the primacy of things, and, taking its cue from Jill Stoner, has wielded it not, as she does, on ‘space’ but on the ‘atoms’ – the things – that comprise our understanding of the world at human scale. The ‘minor’ literature deployed are poems, short stories and architectural texts that use everyday language, and are invariably thing-related, and the architectural work is that of Patrick Bouchain and his team, who are held up as exemplars of critical but pragmatic engagement, deploying recognisable components and materials in dialectical ways that question existing community and building structures. It is redolent of ‘a “do-it-yourself” kind of modernism [whose] detailing […] is a rough version of the industrial aesthetic, using inexpensive materials and hand methods to join them’.59 For Bouchain, a pragmatic architecture need not equate to a dull acceptance of the conventional; he ‘believe[s] in the temporary, in the fluidity of things, in exchanges, and work[s] to create in architecture

186

Pragmatics

a situation in which construction can take place in another way and can produce something unexpected, and therefore enchanting’.60 It is this which distinguishes his ad hoc appropriation of populist technology from the High Tech or Late Modernist slick, facile but most significantly overtly professional fetishisation of things. The conclusion is that the effect of such praxis is amplified when designers additionally work, as Bouchain does in his baguette-strewn and red wine-stained French ‘house’ at the 2006 Venice Biennale, and at the Circus School at St Denis, L’Académie Fratellini (2002–2003),61 in fields outwith architecture, mutually enriching both: in this case, bread and circuses.

Notes All translations are by the author, unless otherwise stated. 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20

Hilde Heynen and Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Introduction: Shifting Paradigms and Concerns’, in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), 55. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Patrick Bouchain, Construire autrement: que faire? (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006), 13. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010, 2009). Albena Yaneva, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). Albena Yaneva, ‘The “Architectural” as a Type of Connector: A Realist Approach to Architecture’, Perspecta, the Yale Architectural Journal 42 (2010): 141–145. Jeremy Till quoted in: David Salomon, ‘Plural Profession, Discrepant Practices’, in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), 435. This is ‘theory’ that broadly has its lineage in West European transcendental philosophy, so-called Continental Philosophy, and has a trajectory emanating from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818– 1883), and onwards to their twentieth-century interpreters, particularly the ‘Frankfurt School’ ending up with the post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and others. For a broad outline, at least until the 1960s, see Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure, trans. Jeffrey Herf (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 1981). Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012). Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2009). Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text, 40. Benedict Zucchi, Giancarlo de Carlo (Oxford: Butterworth, 1992), 40. An echo of this epigram, itself borrowed from US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks concerning American involvement in Iraq in 2003, can be detected in the title of the popular work of materials scientist Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters (New York: Viking, 2013). Elizabeth Diller, ‘Architecture is a Technology that has not yet Discovered its Agency’, Log 28 (2013), 22. Bouchain’s practice has no website as such. Instead, he has produced a joint CV with Loïc Julienne, with whom he is in partnership. See www.locus-foundation.org/GlobalAward/monographs/2009/ Patrick_Bouchain/content.htm. Accessed 5 July 2016. See David Ponzini and Michele Nastasi, Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities (Turin: Allemandi, 2011) for an upbeat analysis of the term. It is one usually treated with circumspection by most critics, to say the least, and has an unmistakably pejorative air to it. Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York: Verso, 2011). Alfred Polgar, ‘Ich kann keine Romane lesen‘, in Anderseits (Amsterdam: Querido, 1948), 61–64. Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2013). Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 48. But not all fieldwork. The sixth volume in this series, Architecture and Fieldwork, gives a useful conspectus of what the field might mean for architectural theory, but above all, practice. As Suzanne Ewing, one of the editors of that book, explains, ‘[f]ieldwork is a practice, not a discipline’; see Suzanne Ewing, Jérémie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Claire Bernie, eds, Architecture and Field/Work (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 5. I would argue the same for pragmatism, as Richard Rorty might have done.

187

Gerald Adler

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

188

Music and lyrics by Lionel Bart for the song of the eponymous musical comedy, from the play written by Frank Norman. It was first produced and directed by Joan Littlewood in her Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, in 1959 before transferring to the West End in 1960. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958). Antoine Picon, ‘Technology, Virtuality, Materiality’, in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), 502. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), xxii. Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991). Les Murray, Waiting for the Past (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015). Francis Ponge, The Nature of Things (Le parti pris des choses), trans. Lee Fahnestock (New York: Red Dust, 1995). R. F. Langley, Complete Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015), xvii. Heinrich Tessenow, Geschriebenes: Gedanken eines Baumeisters, ed. Otto Kindt (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1982), 14. Berthold Brecht, Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 656–657. John Dewey; Larry A. Hickman, and Thomas M. Alexander, The Essential Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), x. Kathryn Moore, Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). Albena Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1. Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture, 2. Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture, 3. Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture, 107. Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture, 42. William S. Saunders, ed., Sprawl and Suburbia: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 89. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, in The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, ed. William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 32. Jane Rendell, et al., eds, Critical Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). Jane Rendell,  ‘Introduction: Critical Architecture: Between Criticism and Design’, in Critical Architecture, 7. Albena Yaneva, Mapping Controversies in Architecture, 106. Michael Guggenheim, ‘Mutual Immobiles: Building Conversion as a Problem of Quasi-Technologies’, in Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, ed. Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (Abingdon: Routledge. 2010), 163. Guggenheim, ‘Mutual Immobiles: Building Conversion as a Problem of Quasi-Technologies’, 165. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1–17. Reyner Banham, ‘A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture’, New Statesman and Society (12 October 1990): 22–25. François Dagognet, Eloge de l’objet, pour une philosophie de la marchandise (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 67. Dagognet, Eloge de l’objet, pour une philosophie de la marchandise, 154–155. Dagognet, Eloge de l’objet, pour une philosophie de la marchandise, 156. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, 31. Somol and Whiting refer to Dave Hickey, ‘Mitchum Gets Out of Jail’, Art Issues (September/October 1997): 10–13. One is reminded of the apocryphal put-down of Laurence Olivier’s to his younger colleague, Dustin Hoffman, on Hoffman’s travails with Method Acting during the filming of Marathon Man (1976). Olivier is purported to have advised him to ‘Try acting, dear boy’. www.britishtheatreguide. info/articles/290701.htm. Accessed 14 February 2016. For De Niro, as for Hoffman, read an architect such as Daniel Libeskind practising ‘critical architecture’, as opposed to, say, Rem Koolhaas and his team, OMA, producing what Somol and Whiting term ‘projective’ architecture. Philippe Rahm, ‘Immediate Architecture’, in Critical Architecture, ed. Jane Rendell et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 182. Hilde Heynen, ‘A Critical Position for Architecture?’, in Critical Architecture, ed. Jane Rendell et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 49–50. Hilde Heynen, ‘A Critical Position for Architecture?’, 55. Latour, Science in Action, 258. Designed by Alfred Bouvy, 1899–1902. See ‘La Condition Publique. Histoire du conditionnement public de la ville de Roubaix’. www.laconditionpublique.com/pdf/historique_cp.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2016. Pierre Frey, Learning from Vernacular, trans. Chris Miller (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), 14. Bouchain, Construire autrement, 134–135.

Pragmatics

59 60 61

David Salomon, ‘Plural Profession, Discrepant Practices’, in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), 439. Bouchain, Construire autrement, 7. Loïc Julienne and Alice Tajchman, Patrick Bouchain: Histoire de construire (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012).

Bibliography Banham, Reyner. ‘Stocktaking 1: Tradition and Technology’. Architectural Review 127 no. 756 (February 1960): 93–100. Banham, Reyner. ‘Stocktaking 2: The Science Side’. Architectural Review 127 no. 757 (March 1960): 188. Banham, Reyner. series ed. ‘Stocktaking 3: The Future of Universal Man. Symposium with Anthony Cox, Gordon Graham, John Page and Lawrence Alloway’. Architectural Review 127 no. 758 (April 1960): 253–260. Banham, Reyner. series ed. ‘Stocktaking 4: History under Revision’. Architectural Review 127 no. 759 (May 1960): 325–332. Banham, Reyner. series ed. ‘Stocktaking 5: Propositions. Banham responds to the AR editors J. M. Richards, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Casson and H. de C. Hastings’. Architectural Review 127 no. 760 (June 1960) 381–388. Banham, Reyner. ‘A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture’. New Statesman and Society (12 October 1990): 22–25. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Bouchain, Patrick. Construire autrement: que faire?. Arles: Actes Sud, 2006. Brecht, Berthold. Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Dagognet, François. Éloge de l’objet: pour une philosophie de la marchandise. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Hickman, Larry A. and Thomas M. Alexander, eds. The Essential Dewey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Diller, Elizabeth. ‘Architecture Is a Technology That Has Not Yet Discovered Its Agency’. Log 28 (2013): 21–26. Ewing, Suzanne, Jérémie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Claire Bernie, eds. Architecture and Field/Work. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Frey, Pierre. Learning from Vernacular. Translated by Chris Miller. Arles: Actes Sud, 2010. Guggenheim, Michael. ‘Mutual Immobiles. Building Conversion as a Problem of Quasi-Technologies’. In Urban Assemblages: how Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, 161–178. Abingdon: Routledge. 2010. Heaney, Seamus. Seeing Things. London: Faber & Faber, 1991. Heynen, Hilde and Gwendolyn Wright. ‘Introduction: Shifting Paradigms and Concerns’. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, 41–55. London: SAGE Publications, 2012. Hickey, Dave. ‘Mitchum Gets Out of Jail’, Art Issues (September/October 1997): 10–13. Julienne, Loïc and Alice Tajchman. Patrick Bouchain: Histoire de construire. Arles: Actes Sud, 2012. Langley, R. F. Complete Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Miodownik, Mark. Stuff Matters. New York: Viking, 2013. Moore, Kathryn. Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Murray, Les. Waiting for the Past. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. Paterson, Don. Selected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Picon, Antoine. ‘Technology, Virtuality, Materiality’. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, 501–512. London: SAGE Publications, 2012. Polgar, Alfred. Ich kann keine Romane lesen. In Anderseits, 61–64. Amsterdam: Querido, 1948. Ponge, Francis. The Nature of Things (Le parti pris des choses). Translated by Lee Fahnestock. New York: Red Dust, 1995. Ponzini, Davide and Michele Nastasi. Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities. Turin: Allemandi, 2011. Rendell, Jane, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, eds. Critical Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

189

Gerald Adler

Salomon, David. ‘Plural Profession, Discrepant Practices’. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, 430–443. London: SAGE Publications, 2012. Schmidt, Alfred. History and Structure. Translated by Jeffrey Herf. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1981. Schwarzer, Mitchell. ‘The Spectacle of Ordinary Building’. In Sprawl and Suburbia: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, edited by William S. Saunders, 74–90. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1958. Somol, Robert and Sarah Whiting. ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’. In The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, edited by William S. Saunders, 22–33. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. 2007. Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012. Tessenow, Heinrich. Geschriebenes: Gedanken eines Baumeisters. Edited by Otto Kindt. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1982. Teyssot, Georges. A Topology of Everyday Constellations. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2013. Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2009. Yaneva, Albena. Mapping Controversies in Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Zucchi, Benedict. Giancarlo de Carlo. Oxford: Butterworth, 1992.

190

Chapter 18

Ready, steady, cook with Bergson, Plato and Gordon Matta-Clark Stephen Walker

This paper is situated within architecture’s awkward relationship with ‘this thing called theory’, particularly theory closely read from philosophy. More precisely, it is situated within a discussion concerning the precession, conjunction or lag that this thing called theory enjoys with the matter, and the formed material, of architecture. It brings together three protagonists: the philosophers Plato and Henri Bergson, and the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Admittedly, they are unusual bedfellows; what brings them together here is their shared interest in cooking, which each uses (metaphorically or literally) when discussing method, be it philosophical, artistic or architectural. The age-old, awkward relationship between form and matter – between theory, thinking, matter and action – has troubled both architecture and philosophy, separately and together. I will begin by introducing Bergson’s criticisms of Plato’s cook, and then discuss the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, himself a lapsed architect and a dab hand in the kitchen. I will suggest that much of Matta-Clark’s œuvre was informed by culinary analogies sympathetic to Bergson’s thinking, and that his work can thus offer food for thought to architects still struggling to exceed a Platonic conception of architectural form, encouraging them to involve other capacities of the mind that operate without the intellect.

191

Stephen Walker

Bergson and Plato on division I will begin with a sentence from Creative Evolution, where Bergson jibes at Plato: ‘Plato compares the good dialectician to the skillful cook who carves the animal without breaking its bones, by following the articulations marked out by nature’.1 The particular passage Bergson refers to is from Phaedrus, where Plato argues that ‘we are enabled to divide into forms, following the objective articulation’ and then immediately warns ‘we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher’.2 There is another division in Plato which bears indirectly on the later discussion, namely the split between the raw materials of the world and the structure of organized beings. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield discuss how, [i]n Plato’s system … the science of matter remained divided. About the raw materials of the world he was prepared to offer a geometrical theory, specifying the fundamental shapes of their atoms and the mechanisms by which they combined and separated. But he could give no such mechanical account of the organisation of the world: that was something decreed by the original Creation.3 Bergson’s objection to Plato’s ‘skilful cook’ was that this figure represents thought without action. In contrast, Bergson argued that an active thought that intends to fabricate should be able to cut through matter irrespective of its actual form. For Bergson and Plato, the dispute between skilful cook and clumsy butcher is clearly at one remove from their main intentions: their comments occur in the middle of their respective attempts to introduce or renovate philosophical method. In Plato’s case, these passages from Phaedrus come from the section on ‘The Method of Dialectic’, where he formally expounds his method for the first time. The method itself involved ‘a pair of procedures’, collection and division, and he sets out to ‘seize their significance in a scientific fashion’. The intention here is not to rehearse Plato’s dialectic: there are two points which are more significant for the present discussion. Firstly, Plato based the procedure he recommended for ‘skilful practitioners’ of art on this method of philosophy – indeed, after a couple of sections discussing the dialectic he is able to state with some gusto, ‘now I think we have pretty well cleared up the question of art’.4 Reiterating what makes speech-writing (and by extension other activities) an art, Plato returns to the central role of division: the conditions to be fulfilled are these: first, you must know the truth about the subject that you speak or write about: that is to say, you must be able to isolate it in definition, and having so defined it you must next understand how to divide it into kinds, until you reach the limit of division.5 It should be noted that for Plato, the adoption of his dialectical method was no guarantee of good art: the artist needed a ‘corresponding discernment’ regarding what was most

192

Ready, steady, cook

appropriate for the audience concerned, and the success or otherwise of the art would be judged according to the effect it had on that audience. According to Lodge: The important question is, does the artist reproduce (as so many of them do) something hardly worth reproducing – such as the image of an un-ideal house – or does he (like the inspired artist of Laws … or like the dialectician or philosopher-artist of Republic) … depict the ideal life in such a way as to stimulate us to enter upon it?6 Bergson goes halfway with the theory of ideas, but restricts its appropriateness to thought directed at action, not to speculative philosophy. He is explicitly critical of classical philosophy on this count: it moves the wrong way, from an incorrect starting point in the immobile. ‘[A]t the base of ancient philosophy lies necessarily this postulate: that there is more in the motionless than in the moving, and that we pass from immutability to becoming by way of diminution or attenuation.’7 Secondly, it is Plato’s method of division that Bergson objects to, or more precisely, the assumptions Plato makes regarding ‘proper’ division, which defers to the ‘objective articulations’ of nature, and ultimately to the unreachable moment of divine creation or truth. Bergson argues against this approach to philosophy, suggesting that Plato’s ambition to ‘uncover’ such unchanging truth involves only the intellect,8 which is predisposed to work on inert discontinuous matter, particularly on solids.9 Although matter ‘allows us to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in it’,10 once that choice is made these divisions appear ‘real’ and thenceforth rule our action thanks to the intellect’s predisposition towards solids. These observations have two consequences for Bergson (and implicitly for architecture): firstly, philosophy’s fault is to have accepted a mode of thought based on action as its model for speculation. Secondly, this can have restrictive implications for modes of thought that subsequently turn towards action. Bergson’s stated interest is in the possibility of a creative evolution, and he champions invention instead of uncovering. Although his main concern is to renovate philosophy accordingly, he suggests in the process that thought directed at action considers things as provisional and capable of being carved up against the grain, arguing: an intelligence which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never stops at the actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvable at will … In short, it makes us regard its matter as indifferent to its form.11

Matta-Clark as the clumsy butcher? While Bergson’s attention turns elsewhere, the work of Gordon Matta-Clark can help explore the architectural consequences of his suggestions a little further. Although he

193

Stephen Walker

worked as an artist, Matta-Clark had trained as an architect at Cornell University in the 1960s, and much of his work can be read as a response to that experience of being educated at what was arguably the high altar of modernism. (Colin Rowe, Matta-Clark’s tutor and the object of his ire, started his studio at Cornell in 1963, the same year MattaClark enrolled.) In contrast to the pure, discrete, whole-object buildings sanctioned by architectural high-modernism and forming the staple diet of his architectural education, Matta-Clark’s interest included matter and ongoing process.12 He produced an extensive œuvre in a wide range of media, although he is best known for his so-called ‘building dissections’, where he arguably looked upon all matter as if it were carvable at will. We should, at least for the time being, resist reading him (just) as the clumsy butcher. Coincidentally perhaps, Matta-Clark had an enduring interest in cooking, both as an analogy for the creative process and as a creative act in its own right. In an early sketchbook, he described ‘a complete set of … operations: selection (the ingredients in their natural forms are separated from the landscape), preparation (each substance … in short undergoes a variety of imaginative alterations), cooking (where the flame, time and the elements are one’s palette)’.13 Following these instructions, in his series of Agar Pieces, (1969–1971), he cooked up strange and unpredictable concoctions with no regard for the stable ‘good form’ expected of artworks. A more palatable development perhaps was his involvement in the collaborative ‘restaurant’ project, Food (Prince Street, New York, 1971–1973), where the object of art (or cooking) enjoyed a similar ambiguity, expanding its remit beyond proper definitions or clear end product.14 The shop premises for Food was the site of Matta-Clark’s first building cut: subsequent building dissections involved a cutting that seemed to enact Bergson’s advice, never stopping at the actual form of things nor regarding it as final, demonstrably indifferent to the ‘pure’ form of the building. However, this cutting was far from clumsy or ill considered. As they developed in scale and complexity, the cuts themselves inscribed Platonic geometry or forms: planes (Datum Cut, 1973, and Splitting, 1974), squares (Bingo, 1974), circles (Office Baroque, 1977), cones (Conical Intersect, 1975), and spheres (Circus or The Caribbean Orange, 1978). Moreover, the positioning of these cuts was very specifically generated by issues such as audience, position and involvement, narrative, progression, sun path, and so on. So, rather than being simply a knee-jerk reaction, or unskilled clumsy butchery, the suggestion here is that the building dissections (and Matta-Clark’s œuvre as a whole) extended beyond buildings themselves in a thoroughgoing conversation with architectural method (including this thing called theory), a conversation that reached architecture’s liaison with philosophical approaches to both the production and judgement of architecture.15 To make a crude generalisation, the role of the architect has been closely, sometimes exclusively, associated with the design of form, and architectural theory has served to provide ‘philosophical’ justification for this approach. Writing his treatise On Technique in the High Renaissance (but in ways that set him up as a mouthpiece for this situation more broadly), Giorgio Vasari was happy to conflate idea, form, design and drawing into the term disegno, which he believed was the foundation or ‘animating principle’ of all the fine arts.

194

Ready, steady, cook

Seeing that Design [disegno], the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the intellect, draws out from many single things a general judgement, it is like a form or ‘idea’ of all the objects in nature, most marvelous in what it compasses. […] Seeing too that from this knowledge there arises a certain conception and judgement, so that there is formed in the mind that something which afterwards, when expressed by the hands, is called design [disegno], we may conclude that design [disegno] is not other than a visible expression and declaration of our inner conception and of that which others have imagined and given form to in their idea.16 More specifically, Vasari stated that the chief use [of design or drawing] indeed is in Architecture, because its designs [disegno] are composed only of lines, which so far as the architect is concerned, are nothing else than the beginning and the end of his art, … all the rest … is merely the work of carvers and masons.17 This division of labour clearly reflected contemporary building practice, as the emerging architectural profession attempted to leave the building site and enter polite society. This feat of social climbing was underwritten by a philosophical distinction leased by architectural theory, where the valorization of disegno echoed the privileging of form/eidos. Indeed, on first inspection, Vasari’s position seems to correlate with Plato’s 18

method. However, the two positions do diverge: the division of forms was, for Plato, a risky business, where matter remained as a question. Division involved a foray into the realm of madness (mania), with the task of isolating the ‘right’ madness of divine love.19 Following Vasari’s risk assessment, this complex relationship was replaced by the simpler Renaissance division of labour. His work anticipates a further hardening of the key terms involved, and a laundering of the role of madness and matter, which in its post-Cartesian definition was reduced to that which can be quantifiably described by physics. Plato and Vasari also differ regarding the role of the artist, their status in society, and the location of (artistic) authority. Although Vasari agreed that the creative act involves the reproduction of an idea, a perfect form-disegno that exists in the artist’s mind, and that a corollary of disegno was nature (natura), again linked to Platonic conceptions of art imitating nature (or more precisely the correct version of nature that was available to the intellect rather than the senses), where the authority for this process was established is ambiguous in Vasari: God, nature or genius. ‘Design … is the foundation of both these arts [sculpture and painting], or rather the animating principle of all creative processes; and surely design existed in absolute perfection before the Creation.’20 Recalling that Bergson’s criticism of Plato targeted the role of division around which Plato’s philosophical – and by his own extension, artistic – method developed, and the particular speculative mode of thought on which this method was implicitly based, it can be suggested that his criticisms could be extended to any architecture that follows Platonic method, and would therefore apply a fortiori to Vasari and modernism. Without

195

Stephen Walker

suggesting that Matta-Clark set out to enact Bergson’s criticism, his building dissections operate to expose the same problematic method of division: by running Vasari’s disegno across the stuff of carvers and masons, they raise questions for architecture regarding its methodological genealogy and sanctioned sphere of activity, particularly with respect to the roles played by speculative thought and thought which is aimed at fabricating.

The good butcher: discrete violations Now Bergson does not criticize the intellect per se, only the inappropriate use of it by Plato or architecture. His project aims elsewhere, but one consequence of his analysis is to articulate other ways in which the intelligence can work, without the intellect. Creative thought, an intelligence aimed at fabricating, does not stop at the ‘final’ forms of things. If Bergson’s assertion is taken as a serious alternative model for creative method, it has consequences both for the role of the designer, and for the discipline of architecture, as it demands an expansion of the traditional understanding of when and where architecture happens, and where it must go to seek judgement. Similarly, Matta-Clark was attempting to broaden the possibilities for architecture beyond those sanctioned by the purist advocates of the discipline. He described his method as ‘discrete violation’; a clearly limited alteration of expectations, undertaken in order to reveal what is taken for granted, to expose the mechanics of the system predicating architectural production and experience. In an interview with Judith Russi Kirshner shortly before his death, Matta-Clark argued: ‘what [visitors to Circus or The Caribbean Orange] could identify with in terms of art activity is this kind of discrete violation of their sense of value, sense of orientation’.21 In an earlier interview with Donald Wall, he discussed the building dissections more broadly, and emphasized the importance he attached to maintaining sufficient elements of the original situation to permit a clear reading: the situation must be common enough so that everyone can still understand it even after I undo it. Especially after I undo it, the original situation must remain undiminished in clarity. This imposes restrictions of another kind which the professional architect doesn’t have … [T]he cut also must reveal a portion of the existing building system, simply as that which exists.22 Bergson too was interested in clarity. ‘The fact is,’ he writes, ‘there are two kinds of clarity […]. [One is] easy and can be prolonged at will.’ He associates this with the mere uncovering of pre-existent truths, such as that championed by Plato. In contrast, any excursion beyond the domain of the intellect undertaken by a creative or inventive questioning ‘is arduous and cannot last’,23 but can result in another kind of clarity. Such creative questions ‘can’, he says, ‘begin by being inwardly obscure; but the light they project about them comes back in reflection, with deeper and deeper penetration; and

196

Ready, steady, cook

they can have the double power of illuminating what they play upon and of being illuminated themselves’.24 Each in their own way, Bergson and Matta-Clark argue that these two kinds of clarity are not mutually exclusive, and both aimed to invigorate the relationships between them. One consequence of this would be to renovate the possible approaches to form available to both philosophy and architecture. Indeed, later on in Creative Evolution, Bergson takes this up, and provides a new translation of ɛίδoς (eidos, form): After the explanations we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate ɛίδoς by ‘view’ or rather by ‘moment.’ For ɛίδoς, is the stable view taken of the instability of things: the quality, which is a moment of becoming; the form, which is a moment of evolution; the essence, which is the mean form above and below which the other forms are arranged as alterations of the mean … finally, the intention of mental design which presides over the action being accomplished, and which is nothing else, we said, than the material design, traced out and contemplated beforehand, of the action accomplished.25 Matta-Clark’s projects provide a reminder of what is involved in any ongoing challenge to the stability of ‘form’ as a category. Form cannot be reduced unproblematically to object-form but must also involve and maintain both the material and immaterial aspects of architecture. Consequently, this pushes the production and consumption of architecture beyond the intellectual manipulation of form, to involve other capacities of the mind that operate without the intellect. However, in the light of recent architectural production which addresses cross-programming, enacts the radical break-up of form, develops animate form26 and so on, there emerges an increasingly nagging question regarding the relevance of Matta-Clark’s projects today. Clearly he did not set out a method for architecture, yet architects appear compelled by his œuvre. Beyond any particular approach, Matta-Clark’s most enduring and interesting contribution to architecture lies in the economy of his question, which seems to enact Catherine Ingraham’s demand that ‘the question of architecture needs to be constantly reposed in the midst of philosophy or it slips quickly away into its support function’.27 Matta-Clark’s particular approach to methodical division happily follows Plato into the realm of madness, but unlike Plato, he is keen to gamble: his foray does not aim for divine clarity, but reinvigorates the creative role of matter, and consequently draws out the obscure clarities that surround architectural good form and provide a barrier to full, once-and-for-all intelligibility. As Bergson’s re-translation of eidos suggests, this situation does not prevent architecture from being understood, but it does replace the traditional authority of static form with a contingent and composite version. This composite constantly reposes architecture as a question, but it also demonstrates the importance of ‘other’ aspects of architecture (such as building) that have traditionally overspilt the domain sanctioned by philosophy, suggesting in turn that philosophy’s role as a support for architectural method be reposed.

197

Stephen Walker

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20 21

198

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), 164. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato: Complete Works, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, ed. John M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 265E. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 81–82. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, 277B. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, 277B–C. Elsewhere, Plato expands on the motivations behind the process of division as these should affect artistic production: ‘we must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming and never is. The one apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that has come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.’ Plato, ‘Timaeus’, in Plato: Complete Works, trans. D. J. Zeyl, ed. John M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 28 (§3: Prelude). Rupert C. Lodge, Plato’s Theory of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 73–74. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 334. See in particular Bergson’s ‘Introduction (Part II). Stating the Problems’, in Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, F. Hobner & Co., 1946), 32–105. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 162. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 162. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 146. And compare: ‘the whole of matter is made to appear to our thought as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we will and sew it together again as we please. … A medium of this kind is never perceived, only conceived’, Bergson, Creative Evolution, 164–165. Matta-Clark’s œuvre is covered comprehensively in María Casanova, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1992) and Corinne Diserens, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2003). Gordon Matta-Clark. ‘RECIPES’, in Sketchbook (cat. No. 828). (Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, unpublished, on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Montreal, c. 1969–1971), 7. For a bigger helping, see: Klauss Bussmann and Markus Müller, eds, Food exhibition catalogue (New York: White Columns Gallery, 2000). This also goes some way to explaining the enduring interest in Matta-Clark’s work, particularly amongst architects and within schools of architecture. Giorgio Vasari, On Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, [second edition 1568, when sections 74–75 were added], trans. Louisa S. Maclehose [1907] (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), §74. Vasari’s disegno was anticipated in the previous century by Leon Battista Alberti’s lineaments: ‘It is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material. […] Since that is the case, let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.’ See: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7. Vasari, On Technique, §75. Although Vasari referred to this Introduction as the parte teorica or the capitoli delle teoriche, there is actually very little theory in it, constituting as it does much more of a technical or instruction manual. This may explain why Vasari’s Introduction has so frequently been overlooked, a point that is forcefully made by his introductory essay. See in particular Gerald Baldwin Brown, ‘Neglect of Vasari’s Introduction’, in Vasari, On Technique, 3. See: Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, 265D–E, 266A, where Plato writes: ‘the single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next, on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings: wherefore the first speech divided off a part of the left, and continued to make divisions, never desisting until it discovered one particular part bearing the name of “sinister” love, on which it very properly poured its abuse. The other speech conducted us to the forms of madness which lay on the right-hand side, and upon discovering a type of love that shared its name with the other but was divine, displayed it to our view and extolled it as the source of the greatest good that can befall us.’ Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists [1568], trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 25. Judith Russi Kirshner, ‘Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark’ [Chicago, 13 February 1978], in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. María Casanova (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1992), 392.

Ready, steady, cook

22

23 24 25

26

27

Donald Wall, ‘Transcript: Interview Between Wall and Matta-Clark: Rough Draft’, in Articles & Documents 1942–1976 (Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, unpublished, on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Montreal, c. late 1975–early 1976), #1, #15. Selections from this interview, which were subsequently heavily edited by Matta-Clark, form the basis for an article that first appeared in Donald Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections’, Arts Magazine 50 no. 9 (May 1976): 74–79. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, F. Hobner & Co., 1946), 38–39. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 40–41. Interestingly, Bergson’s rehearsal of the traditional translations of ɛίδoς includes one definition that coincides with Vasari’s disegno: ‘It denotes (1) the quality, (2) the form or essence, (3) the end or design (in the sense of intention) of the act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act supposed accomplished.’ Bergson, Creative Evolution, 332. See: Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999 and 2011), and Greg Lynn, ed., Archaeology of the Digital (Montreal and Berlin: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Sternberg Press, 2013). Catherine Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 30.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan and Co., 1911. Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, F. Hobner & Co., 1946. Bussmann, Klauss and Markus Müller, eds. Food. Exibition Catalogue. New York: White Columns Gallery, 2000. Casanova, María, ed. Gordon Matta-Clark. Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1992. Diserens, Corinne, ed. Gordon Matta-Clark. London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2003. Ingraham, Catherine. Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Lodge, Rupert C. Plato’s Theory of Art. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. Matta-Clark, Gordon. ‘RECIPES’. In Sketchbook (cat. no. 828). Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Unpublished, on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Montreal, c. 1969–1971. Lynn, Greg. Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999 and 2011. Lynn, Greg, ed. Archaeology of the Digital. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Berlin and Sternberg Press, 2013. Plato. ‘Phaedrus’. In Plato: Complete Works. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Edited by John M. Cooper. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Plato. ‘Timaeus’. In Plato: Complete Works. Translated by D. J. Zeyl. Edited by John M. Cooper. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Russi Kirshner, Judith. ‘Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark’ [Chicago, 13 February 1978]. In Gordon MattaClark. Edited by María Casanova. Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1992. Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield. The Architecture of Matter. London: Hutchinson, 1962. Vasari, Giorgio. On Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects [second edition 1568, when sections 74–75 were added]. Translated by Louisa S. Maclehose [1907]. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists [1568]. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1965. Wall Donald. ‘Transcript: Interview Between Wall and Matta-Clark: Rough Draft. In Articles & Documents 1942–1976. Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Unpublished, on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Montreal, c. late 1975–early 1976. Wall, Donald. ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections’. Arts Magazine 50 no. 9 (May 1976): 74–79.

199

Chapter 19

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory Ivana Wingham

The question ‘what is this thing called theory?’ is a provocation, a risk and a kind of invitation to step outside of the semantic arguments about theoretical speculations. It could be said that the thing and the theory are worlds apart: we encounter the former in everyday life, while we speculate about our projective ideas in the latter. Yet, such a division does not aid the contingent answers and the audacious ambiguities embedded in asking the question that this paper wants to address obliquely: what is the relationship between ‘architecture’s thing’ and the ‘thingness of theory’?

Thinking through things: the thingness of theory Unlike objects, which are known, classified, have a place they belong to – as in a museum or at home – things seem to be less known. And although it may be true that, as Bill Brown suggests, there may be ‘something perverse, [and] archly insistent, about complicating things with theory’,1 at the same time we can see the occurrence of things when the objects’ practical functions become mysteriously interrupted and we experience a stoppage in their performance. At this particular moment of interruption we start to glimpse the thingness of the thing. A telescope is an object with an assigned practical function. Defined as ‘an optical instrument for making distant objects appear nearer and larger’,2 this object led to numerous discoveries that, in the past and at present times, continue to affect the way

200

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory

people think about the universe and their own place within it. Aided by inventions in technology and advancements in engineering, the telescope manages to sustain its magical status of simultaneously being object and thing. As an object it fulfils its function, until it becomes obsolete due to the expendability of technology. As a thing it straddles the boundaries of science, technology and human imagination, embodying the innovation, speculation and experimentation that reveal the thingness of the thing. Bound by the affiliation with the astronomer, the telescope is less an object than a subject–object relationship: a relationship that is indeterminate, both speculative and open to speculation. For example, the observations carried out by different Astronomers Royal in Greenwich led to numerous calculations in longitudinal measurements (which lasted for almost a century) that affected the accuracy of the position of the meridian. Each astronomer’s telescope was positioned in a particular place and was pointing to the sky; from this place, the astronomer-observer could measure the exact time when the sun (and other celestial bodies) would transit and cross the meridian, an imaginary line connecting the observers’ position with the North and South Poles. Different telescope-astronomer positions, along the same meridian, would result in the same time measurement. Thenceforth, different rooms at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich bear astronomers’ names: Edmond Halley’s Transit Room, James Bradley’s Transit Room, George Airy’s Transit Room. Yet, the meridian is a strange thing that fits Steve Connor’s definition of a thing that ‘names less an object than a particular subject-object relationship’.3 The relevant meridian and its imaginary position – bound by the astronomer, his chair and his telescope – was the site of convergence between the subject and the object, as well as the thing based on which we can orient ourselves toward the stars and draw a map of the earth. The changing nature of the exact place of this imaginary line provides a wealth of theoretical speculation. Depending on the astronomer (a subject and his practice), the telescope (an object of the latest invention in technology) and the universe (the earth and the sky), the thing itself (the meridian) starts to open up an understanding of what may emerge from the search for the thingness of theory. The search for the thingness of theory could be seen as one of those activities that constitute a practice, and that, following Gilbert Ryle, ‘directly display qualities of mind, yet are neither themselves intellectual operations nor yet effects of intellectual operations’.4 For Ryle, what distinguishes one operational practice from another is an ‘intelligent procedure’, that is not necessarily ‘intellectual’ or ‘knowing how’ in terms of ‘knowing that’, but rather occurs while ‘I am thinking what I am doing’, and represents a performance that has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.5 In other words, the search for the thingness of theory cannot be learned from an example, but depends on a form of individually discovered and carefully tailored operational procedure as much as on a subject–object relationship. Procedures, practices and relationships belong to human experience and, according to Michael Polanyi, are ‘the outcome of an active shaping of experience performed in the pursuit of knowledge’, where ‘this shaping or integrating’ is a ‘great and indispensable tacit power by which all knowledge is discovered’.6 I would like to add that indispensable in the shaping of an experience that embodies the pursuit for knowledge is the search for the thingness of theory, since ‘the intangible meaning of

201

Ivana Wingham

tacit integration is more real than the tangible particulars of which it is composed’.7 For Polanyi the logic of ‘tacit thought’ is present across a number of ‘performance skills’ belonging to art, science, athletics or technology.8 These skills encompass both Gilbert Ryle’s ‘knowing what’ and ‘knowing how’ since they have a similar structure and neither is present without the other.9 In order to accommodate a very long telescope (engineered to overcome the technological limitations of the lenses’ optical power), John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, used a 30-metre well; by conducting his observations from the bottom of the well he could achieve a long steady focus for, at the time, very accurate measurements. Flamsteed was one in a long line of astronomers who had to ‘know what’ and ‘know how’, in order to construct and shape, at the same time, his own personal intangible meaning for the tangible particulars measured by the telescope.

Things: travelling and talking companions According to Steve Connor, becoming a subject involves a form of thinking that can only happen through ‘things that draw, drain or detain our thinking’10 and make thinking accessible as a thing. And to complicate things a bit further, for Connor ‘thinking about things is a kind of thinking about the kind of thing that thinking is’,11 since the ‘thinking thing’ is like an atmosphere whose presence is sometimes felt and some other times ‘is not there’, similar to a moving body that is always beside or beyond itself. For Connor, ‘thinking things’ are like ‘travelling companions’ made of thoughts and bodies in motion.12 The telescope seems to be one such ‘travelling companion’ constituted of thoughts and bodies in motion and in time, even if extremely slow, like the rotation of the earth or the movement of planets and stars. Yet, bound by the accurate measurement of time, the telescopes are perfect examples of expendable technologies, quickly made obsolete by new inventions, witnessing the changing nature of the travelling companionship with the subject. These travel(ling) companions, made of thoughts and bodies moving together, require communication, a kind of a voice. Lorraine Daston brings such a voice to what she calls ‘things that talk’, things that are simultaneously material and meaningful since, for her, matter contains meaning.13 For Daston ‘things that talk’ possess ‘utterances [that] are never disembodied’ and they ‘communicate by what they are as well as by how they mean’.14 In architecture or art ‘materiality stakes its claim at at least two levels: in the stuff of and gestures by which the work is made, and in the material objects depicted or invented therein’.15 However, in this particular relationship between how the things have been made and what the embodied invention in them is, there is a separation between the things that talk and the things that do not. Only some things talk: Daston calls these talking things ‘chimeras’ as they ‘straddle boundaries between kinds’ and, as such, they persist as a paradox, until they become prosaic and then disappear into speechlessness.16 Telescopes and architecture are both ‘chimeras’ in Daston’s terms, as they ‘utter’ words and images that ‘are never disembodied’ and ‘communicate by what they

202

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory

are as well as by how they mean’; both are ‘composites of different species’ and they travel across boundaries between different kinds of things through which ‘art and nature, persons and things, objective and subjective’17 are somehow brought together. An architectural chimera, a thing that utters its voice materially, technologically and subjectively is also a thing that lures, tempts and teases out the precarious thingness of theory. Architecture is a thing hoped for, an act of discovery and an activity not entirely possible to control. As a thing, architecture becomes, through ‘tacit dimension’ and ‘personal knowledge’,18 created in the relationship between the architect and the utilizing of technology, be it a pencil, clay, a CNC machine or a digital spline. Architecture’s relationship to technology is particularly precarious as it is here that a peculiar relationship between the subject and the object gets uttered. Drawing and making have a voice in a way that the thing that is to be made may appear to know more than one can tell, and yet less than one can predict. Working through the material objects depicted and invented, the architect has similarities with the astronomer and his tool, the telescope, by bringing the distant visibility into a closer proximity to the eye and, in the case of architecture, also to touch. As a consequence of talking with his/her thing, the architect is also dependent on understanding the instruments that predict some of the numerous unpredictable possibilities by which the transits in time of the human body, life and function happen spatially, and on the understanding of how such transits could be aligned with motion – of the sun, among other considerations – and with changes in the natural environment.

Architecture’s thing: a chimera of life and technology Étienne-Jules Marey’s and Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotography was able to bring to visibility rapid habitual movements of both humans and animals; Harold Edgerton’s strobe-flash photography could see a bullet passing through a candle flame or an apple. This new kind of visibility, used in Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s time and motion studies (bringing human labour to higher levels of efficiency), revealed the previously invisible outcomes of scientific experiments, and was intrinsic to new artistic movements of that time. The visibility of the thingness of thing – the high speed as inseparable from the bullet – was made possible only with the ascent of technology and through the invention of particular technological apparatuses. However, as always, every new visibility is fuelled even further by humanity’s insatiable desire for more knowledge and more visibility of the things unseen. Such desire produced an acceleration in technological inventions across disciplinary boundaries, continuously replacing the older models with improved functions and new additional features. Acceleration for more to be seen and experienced resulted in more to be discarded and replaced, and the invention of new technologies was paralleled by an acceleration in technological expendability. In architecture, modernism brought to visibility, through the utilization of new technologies, things that had been previously unseen. Early twentieth-century rotating devices made a connection between buildings and technologies of movement. There is

203

Ivana Wingham

a history of rotating buildings, ranging from long before modernism (according to Chad Randl, the first observatory with a rotating dome and telescope was constructed in Kassel, Germany, in the sixteenth century), to rotating space stations designed in the twentieth century (in order to simulate the rotation of the Earth). According to Randl, since the Middle Ages we can find examples of turning structures that were meant to be habitable for a short time: detached dining halls in the gardens of the European nobility provided changing views of the landscape. Rotating and revolving technologies were used as a form of entertainment: revolving theatres or rotating stages were designed, for example, to depict a race at the London Coliseum, turning at the same speed as the runners (actors on the stage). Also, revolving technologies were used for industrial efficiency, as in Walker-Gordon’s Rotolactor, invented for milking 50 cows in 12 minutes using a rotating platform.19 The first ideas about rotating residences date back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it was the dawn of the twentieth century that reached what Randl calls an ‘atmosphere of can-do-ingenuity’,20 which often came from both amateurs and architects who started experimenting with rotating buildings. For the modernist avant-garde, rotating technology offered the opportunity to experiment and overturn the traditional notion of architecture. Such experiments aligned with the modernist credo in a progress to be achieved through technology and motion, and made explicit the allegiance between architecture and technology. Among many experiments and designs with rotating houses – such as Max Taut’s design for a rotating house or Carl Kreyl’s drawings for a swinging and hanging architecture – Angelo Invernizzi’s Villa Girasole (1931–1935) is probably one of the most challenging built examples, resisting easy classification. Villa Girasole is a rotating house built by the civil engineer Angelo Invernizzi and his design team (the architect Ettore Fagiuoli, the mechanical engineer Romolo Carapacchi and the interior decorator Fausto Saccaroti – none of whom was particularly avant-garde) in the landscape near Verona. The house was a ‘laboratory for trying out modern materials, from reinforced concrete to fibre-cement wall boards’, and the experimental nature of the project meant that Invernizzi and his design team had to make a number of adjustments in the process of construction. Exterior walls were substituted with aluminium sheets to prevent cracks, and interior walls were covered with canvas when the rotating mechanism was being tested.21 Villa Girasole (translated as Sunflower Villa) was one of those things that Daston calls ‘chimera’, a thing that talks provoking curiosity on how architecture’s things could be seen. Mostly used to shield from the sunshine rather than to let it in, in the hot summers of the Italian climate the house employed construction technologies that came from outside the regular architectural building trade: the mobile cladding, made of an aluminium alloy, was manufactured by a Milanese company that specialized in aircraft, railway and nautical vehicles; fifteen sets of wheels beneath the moving wings were adapted from railcar bogies; the rest of the rotational machinery used the same technology as railway turntables. Villa Girasole was a ‘travelling companion’ to the authors who made it, a kind of thinking thing through which tacit knowledge was discovered, with ‘knowing that’, which was the making of the house, and with ‘knowing how’ by utilizing technologies beyond architecture. An experiment and an idea, it

204

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory

became an unusual and unique house to live in, but it also demonstrated the thingness of theory in its shaping process. However, as an architecture’s thing, Villa Girasole could be seen obliquely and tangentially to the thingness of theory. A slightly different, yet intelligent, procedure may have been applied during its creation. According to David J. Lewis, Marc Tsuramaki and Paul Lewis, Villa Girasole could be seen as an example of the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse, in which a drawing (or a series of drawing marks) is realized on different folds of a sheet of paper by different authors, each without knowing what the other drew until the end of the process, when a necessarily unexpected figure is revealed, demonstrating that ‘the end result is more than the cumulative product of individual contributions’.22 In the exquisite corpse of Villa Girasole, the movement in the landscape is predetermined by the rotational mechanism. The garden cannot grow sunflowers in between the circular paths, etched by the massive wheels and dictated by the exits that are cantilevered from the building. Garden doors, on the yard side, always lead to sidewalks that terminate back into the villa, so it is almost impossible to leave the house from the back door. If seen as a surrealist game, Villa Girasole ‘is a writing apparatus, continually transcribing the movements of the sun, through a skin of a landscape, onto the shoulders of architecture’.23 This rotating house is both brought to life by its movement and, at the same time, heading toward self-destruction as its mechanism wears out with each rotation, it is ‘a time machine in the process of destroying itself’.24 Quite unlike the initial avant-garde’s desire to embrace revolving technology in order to challenge the static nature of traditional architecture and re-invent a way of living, Villa Girasole produces only a one-dimensional change, rotating itself in one direction. The house moves only when it is occupied, and is made to move by pressing the right buttons, which activate the rotating machinery. The house resembles an elaborate compass, it is a strange and unusual machine, as well as a slightly irrational thing, set in time and strangely fixed to either anticipate or allow change. And, I would suggest that, due to this fixity, its innovative technological apparatus became expendable as soon as the house was completed.

Expendability of technology and the advent of technical mentality For Walter Benjamin, the Surrealists ‘were less on the trail of psyche rather than things’25 that included also house experiments in which technology had an expendable and transitory place. According to Benjamin: Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. […] It catches hold of objects at their most threadbare and timeworn point.26

205

Ivana Wingham

As it revolves and rotates around its own axis, Villa Girasole disturbs the relationship between the building and the ground, the architecture and the landscape. As an architecture thing, Villa Girasole becomes a catalyst that shifts the inquiry about the thingness of theory further, toward ideas about the expendability of technology and the advent of what Gilbert Simondon called ‘technical mentality’.27 According to Simondon who, like Walter Benjamin, recognized the obsolescence of technology, there may be slightly different approaches to understanding technological limitless expendability, an understanding based on the insatiable human desire for choice. Simondon suggests that, in the post-industrial age, the digital has added ‘distance between the act of production and the act of usage’, extending the inessential involved in the choice, which creates the obsolescence of the produced technical object,28 be it a car, a bathroom or a building. For Simondon, the development of the ‘technical mentality’ is manifested through the ‘individuation of thought’ and the ‘individuation of matter’, in which a ‘technical object’ is not a finished product but ‘an open object that can be completed, improved, maintained’.29 The openness of unfinished architecture, and indeed of an architecture that moves in line with ever changing life demands, allows the subject of life to re-define itself through architecture’s thing, through and over time, instigating a mobile companionship with the thingness of theory. While Villa Girasole moved only in one direction, it was a complete object in all other respects, carefully prescribed in terms of how it could be inhabited and unchangeable in terms of changing life demands. An unfinished and truly mobile architecture instead allows the subject of life to instigate change, improvement and adaptation of the ‘technical object’. The object and the subject create an incomplete and temporal relationship that reveals and discovers, every now and then, a different face of what may be called an architecture’s thing, and its mobile companionship with the thingness of theory. To be constantly engaged in the re-creation of what Reyner Banham called ‘environments fit for human activities’,30 the subject, in a sense, moves its own ‘meridian line’, thus creating a novel relationship with the object, like the astronomers of the first telescopes did. While telescopes became obsolete with any new invention, the relationship between the astronomer and the telescope did not change for a long time, or at least until the advent of digitized operational procedures. Digitally operated bespoke fabrication opened the field for design to what Banham called in the past ‘intellectual freebooters’,31 who utilize the availability and the speed of technological advances to embody deterministic, economically viable and utilitarian approaches to architectural design. To avoid the transformation of architectural design into ‘an instrument of an exclusively

technological 32

‘prefabrication’

character’,

Banham’s

idea

of

‘expendability’

and

– embodied in scientific and technological innovation – could be

re-thought through Simondon’s idea of ‘reticular structures’.33 Prefabrication, even if fully bespoke, tinkers with the whole of the structure. Simondon, on the other hand, proposes a slightly different idea. In his opinion, there are some structures, including architectural ones, that work and could remain to be a core, and could be extended in a reticular manner rather than reconstructing their core from scratch, which is what previous modernist attempts of prefabrication aimed at. From this way of thinking stems the development of Simondon’s concept of ‘technical mentality’.

206

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory

In discussing Simondon’s idea of ‘technical mentality’, Brian Massumi observes that the changing relationship between human life and technology involves the expendability of animate and inanimate matter and the extension of structures.34 These changes require a different form of mentality, Simondon’s evolution of the ‘technical mentality’. I would like to suggest that while the developing of a ‘technical mentality’ may include a residual nostalgia for recent technology, it also embodies a future of expendability. In terms of an architecture fit for human activities, the ‘technical mentality’ manifests itself through forms of ‘individuation’ of things in which technology, according to Massumi, is a ‘constitutive factor in human life – and with biotechnology, life itself’.35 The expendability of the house evokes life expendability, since according to Jean Claude Ameisen, ‘as long as we live, all our cells continuously produce the weapons that allow them to self-destruct within a few hours’, ‘allowing us to continuously reconstruct ourselves and adapt to new environments’.36 For Massumi, as life evolves, it becomes ‘entangled with modes of knowledge and their associated practices’ in which technology is key ‘in matter becoming, in ways imbricated with life transformations’.37 The relationship between life and technology is one of becoming for Massumi, who suggests that this becoming is manifested through Simondon’s conceptualization of ‘individuation of thought’ and ‘individuation of matter’ and the development of ‘technical mentality’ that considers the ‘technical object’ similar to life, ‘an open object that can be completed, improved, maintained’.38 With the view of seeing architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory as a multifaceted complex relationship of movement and dance with each other – a relationship that is in process and that evolves through travelling companionships, conversations, extensions and additions from which both disentangle and entangle from time to time – we can speculate on the evolution and development of a technical mentality as something different from the modernist tradition of the unique technical object. Perhaps, using the norms of a ‘technical mentality’ that conceives a building as a ‘being to be enlarged, continued, amplified without disfiguration or erasure’,39 and considering in a similar way that life transforms by thinking through and with things, it may be possible to open transduction paths for new forms of ‘cellular’ (or what Simondon calls ‘reticular’) architecture. Architectural design research, focused on the development of a technical mentality, would then see the technical object operate at the numerous levels that the thingness of theory operates at: at the levels of voice and talk, in a travelling companionship, in an entanglement with novel forms of procedures that combine knowing that and knowing how, all for the sake of moving the ‘meridian line’ just a bit closer to architecture’s thing. And yet, the development of a technical mentality, as corollary of architecture’s thing, involves clarity of intelligent procedures in the digital technologies, lack of nostalgia for the expendability of technology, manifestation of individuation of thought and matter, and closeness to the voice of theory: all in line with seeing the previous technical object – long dead – being replaced by creative cells and new bespoke cells, also eventually expendable, that could be configured and re-configured as time goes by, bringing architecture slightly closer to human life while endlessly dancing with theory.

207

Ivana Wingham

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36

208

Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28 no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Main Edition. Richard Dunn, The Telescope: A Short History (London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2009). Steven Connor, ‘Thinking Things’ (an extended version of a plenary lecture given at the 9th annual conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark, 25 August 2008 and as the Textual Practice lecture, University of Sussex, 14 October 2009). Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009): 14–47. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 14–47. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009): 3–25. Mark T. Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006): 59–103. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 3–25. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 3–25. Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, 2009. Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, 2009. Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, 2009. Lorraine Daston, ‘Introduction’, in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 9–24. Daston, ‘Introduction’, 9–24. Daston, ‘Introduction’, 17. Daston, ‘Introduction’, 9–24. Daston, ‘Introduction’, 9–24. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974); Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension; Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing. Chad Randl, Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel and Pivot (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Randl, Revolving Architecture, 2008. David J. Lewis, Marc Tsuramaki and Paul Lewis, ‘Invernizzi’s Exquisite Corpse: The Villa Girasole: An Architecture of surrationalism’, in Architecture and Surrealism, ed. Thomas Mical (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 156–167. Lewis, Tsuramaki and Lewis, ‘Invernizzi’s Exquisite Corpse’, 160. Lewis, Tsuramaki and Lewis, ‘Invernizzi’s Exquisite Corpse’, 161. Lewis, Tsuramaki and Lewis, ‘Invernizzi’s Exquisite Corpse’, 164. Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism’, in Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 236–239. According to Jane Alison, the house is a special kind of object within surrealism, one that contains the playful, the erotic, the uncanny, all of which are manifested through the marvelous being at work while disturbing the way by which we look at things. Instead of creating a ‘machine to live in’, the house was a container of things that are surreal and real, a kind of beginning of a house, a cage-like structure, a series of chambers or a box (as manifested in the work of Alberto Giacometti, Frederik Kiesler and Joseph Cornell). See Jane Alison, ‘The Surreal House’, in The Surreal House: Architecture of Desire (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism’, 236. Gilbert Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, trans. Arne De Boever, ed. Arne De Boever et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 1–18. Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, 1–18. Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, 1–18. Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002); Mary Banham et al., eds, A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1996). Whiteley, Reyner Banham; Banham et al., A Critic Writes. Whiteley, Reyner Banham; Banham et al., A Critic Writes. Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, 1–18. Brian Massumi, et al., ‘“Technical Mentality” Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon’, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Arne De Boever et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 19–36. Massumi et al., ‘“Technical Mentality” Revisited’, 20. Jean Claude Amiesen, The Sculpture of Life: Cell Suicide or Death as a Creator. http:// lasculptureduvivant.free.fr/Ameisen-presse-textes.htm, accessed 28 March 2016.

Architecture’s thing and the thingness of theory

37 38 39

Massumi et al., ‘“Technical Mentality” Revisited’, 19–36. Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, 12: and Massumi et al., ‘“Technical Mentality” Revisited’, 19–36. Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, 14.

Bibliography Alison, Jane, ed. Surreal House. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Amiesen, Jean Claude. The Sculpture of Life: Cell Suicide or Death as a Creator. http://lasculptureduvivant. free.fr/Ameisen-presse-textes.htm, Accessed 28 March 2016. Banham, Mary, Paul Barker, Sutherland Lyall and Cedric Price, eds. A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham. Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism’. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 236–239. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Brown, Bill. ‘Thing Theory’. Critical Inquiry 28 no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Daston, Lorraine. ‘Introduction’. In Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, edited by Lorraine Daston, 9–24. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Dunn, Richard. The Telescope: A Short History. London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2009. Lewis, David J., Marc Tsuramaki and Paul Lewis. ‘Invernizzi’s Exquisite Corpse: The Villa Girasole: An Architecture of Surrationalism’. In Architecture and Surrealism, edited by Thomas Mical, 156–167. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Massumi, Brian, Arne De Boever, Alex Murray and Jon Roffe. ‘“Technical Mentality” Revisited: Brian Masumi on Gilbert Simondon’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 19–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Mitchell, Mark T. Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Randl, Chad. Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel and Pivot. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Simondon, Gilbert. ‘Technical Mentality’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Translated by Arne De Boever. Edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 1–18. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Whiteley, Nigel. Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002.

209

This page intentionally left bank

Part VI The transactions of architecture

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 20

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism Anthony Burke

In parallel to histories of technology and type, architecture’s relation to capital has evolved its own dramatic yet until relatively recently1 under-theorized history across the twentieth century. Various approaches have emerged in the last decade to interrogate this relationship more fully, as the role of economics within general social and political discourse has become dominant. As an alternative approach to reading the role of architecture and economics, this paper interrogates architecture’s positioning as it is written from within economic theory, using two key economic texts that serve to bookend the twentieth century and illustrate the prospect of a theory of the built environment from the perspective of money and capital. Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900) and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014) define a spectrum for architectural theory through the discipline of economics as it has evolved from the economies of industry into the modern neoliberal context. These two key economic texts outline architecture’s evolving relation to forms of value and exchange, and trace a broader movement from the capital value that architecture has represented throughout history to a moment where material capital has evolved to a ‘zero margin’ paradigm, a literally de-materialized framework of value for process as product, underpinned by the Internet of Things at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The recent interest in scholarship addressing architecture and its relationship to labour and capital more broadly understood, has been explored through three main themes: globalization and its implications for architecture (Keller Easterling, Reinhold Martin, Manuel Castells, etc.); architecture’s relationship to power and authority (Manfredo Tafuri, Pier Vittorio Aureli, etc.); and the crisis of architectural practice

213

Anthony Burke

(business) and its implications for the future of architectural work (Tony Fry, Jeremy Till, Peggy Deamer, Maurizio Lazzarato, etc.). Clearly, as architecture’s more sophisticated technologies are now being explored for their political implications, the status of architectural labour within a professional economy is also under scrutiny, either as part of the creative classes, or in terms of the co-opting of creativity into neoliberal mechanisms.

Modern capital and the creation of a new subject To begin to contextualize architecture’s relation to the neoliberal economy, it is instructive to return to Georg Simmel’s A Philosophy of Money from 1900. As a sociologist writing 30 years after Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of the Political Economy (1867), Simmel was not interested in money per se, but in the impact that new systems of capital exchange were having on individuals within the newly emerged ‘money economy’, intertwined with the phenomenon of an altogether new form of metropolitan condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Simmel, the industrial momentum of the early twentieth century produced an alienating experience, caused principally by the separation of labour and the production of goods from their use, made possible through the abstraction of value embodied in money. Simmel noted with concern the consequential sociological and psychological impact of this distance and, as he saw it, of the freefloating assignation of value to goods. Three years after he published The Philosophy of Money, Simmel extended his focus on money and the individual to a more elaborated theory of the metropolis, in his well-known The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), both reinforcing the centrality of the metropolis to his economic philosophy and characterizing the metropolis itself and its subjective effects as constituent elements of a philosophy of money. Through the more generalized notion of the built environment and the newly formed urban which ‘had been forced upon us’, Simmel saw the negative characterization of the metropolis as crowded and alienating and of money as having become abstract and distancing as one and the same. Simmel recognizes the paradoxical situation in the urban condition, where the closer people are forced together, the more internal and individual they become. Since contemporary urban culture, with its commercial, professional and social intercourse, forces us to be physically close to an enormous number of people, sensitive and nervous modern people would sink completely into despair if the objectification of social relationships did not bring with it an inner boundary and reserve.2 Urban life and the new metropolitan condition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century embody and symbolize this cycle of coldness, alienation and reserve, and perpetuate it through the cultivation of the individualization of work and the celebration of individual talents. The money economy then ultimately ‘brings about a situation in

214

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism

which the means of livelihood can be based on completely individual talents’.3 Thus the relationship of an individual to the environment and to other persons is one of increasing detachment and individuality – or one of increasing abstraction – also signalling the beginnings of the detachment of immediate value from property or material capital to the abstraction of exchange. Drawing a comparison between nature, the urban, individualization and abstraction, Simmel sees urban life as ‘dependent upon’ the money economy, and leaves no doubt regarding his reading of the negative effects of both the money economy and its newly formed urban subject. Simmel is nostalgic for the community and country life of the pre-industrial ‘commons’ that the metropolis leaves behind: Our whole life also becomes affected by its remoteness from nature, a situation that is reinforced by the money economy and the urban life that is dependent upon it. […] Landscape painting, which as an art depends upon distance from the object and upon a break in our natural unity with it, has only developed in modern times, as has the romantic idea of nature. They are the result of that increasing distance from nature and that particularly abstract existence that urban life, based on the money economy, has forced upon us.4 In this schema, the newly flourishing built urban environment is dependent on, complicit with and symbolic of a system of increasing complexity and subjective detachment (de-humanization) and abstract value production. This theme is well documented in the cultural production of the time, through the visual and plastic arts, dance and music. The architecture of the twentieth-century metropolis was also undergoing significant change to accommodate and symbolize the new metropolitan modernity, yet it offers no critique, respite or resistance to its developing economic role, accepting the role of embodying surplus value arrested (slowed down) within the materiality of the city itself. Values attached to subjectivity are, according to Simmel, firmly repressed, and progress, technology and individualism (a form of new intellectualism) are celebrated. As Simmel writes: ‘Intellectual energy is the psychic energy which the specific phenomena of the money economy produces in contrast to those energies generally denoted as emotions or sentiments’.5 Through this understanding of the intellectualized nature of the money economy, Simmel raises the issue of relationality and the continuously related but deferred connectivity of value within a context of growing spatial and subjective abstraction. In his words, ‘the extension of the series [network] is brought about by money because money creates a common, central interest’. In exploring the teleological impact of ends and means (motivation and will) Simmel concludes: ‘Since money itself is an omnipresent means, the various elements of our existence are thus placed in an all-embracing teleological nexus in which no element is either the first or the last’.6 While this recognition establishes the groundwork for a modern debt economy, it also introduces the concept of deferred (intellectualized) value and the recognition of a networked or relational schema of values, which becomes effective at the opposite end of the century principally through technological terms.

215

Anthony Burke

Post-capitalism and the end of subjectivity If Simmel explicitly linked the money economy to the emergent metropolis, a century later economist Jeremy Rifkin published The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), extending the notion of the abstraction of value, while signalling the development of an oppositional relationship to the built environment as it was understood by Simmel. The built environment in 2014 has evolved to be framed within a totalized (ecological, energy, information) environmental medium or continuum. This implies the creation of a very different subjectivity, one that is not acted upon but rather is created as an environmental constituent to the production of value, moving the creation of the 1900 subject from a labour to work dichotomy, to the dissolution of this distinction where work is external to the individual. In other words, the economic role of the metropolis of 1900 has been replaced by individuals themselves. Rifkin’s focus on the development of post-capitalist economies is built from the ‘paradigmatic shift’ in the economic environment from centralized

industrial

markets

and

commodities

to

the

new

dematerialized

‘communications and energy matrix’ that absorbs the subject into the DNA of value creation and production.7 The economy is no longer relegated to financial transactions or externalized, but comprises all forms of exchange within an expansive environmental or biosphere framework, far superseding the metropolitan condition but equally distancing itself from material expression in the built environment which has been exchanged for global infrastructures. Rifkin outlines three essential systems (abstractions): communications, energy and logistics that, he claims, have all fundamentally changed in order to provoke the new zero-margin economic paradigm. Zero margin here denotes the end of the capitalist economy at the moment of its success. For Rifkin it is the moment where the abundance of goods and costs of production have produced a zero (profit) margin (difference) created between the sale price and production costs. It marks the natural dynamic of capitalism through ‘the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down’.8 This is the schizophrenia at the heart of capitalist production that economics professor Oskar Lange and John Maynard Keynes foresaw in the 1930s, producing the asymptotic moment, where ‘a near zero-marginal cost society is the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare and represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism. Its moment of triumph, however, also marks its inescapable passage from the world stage’.9 Rifkin identifies classic economics as under siege by ‘a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship that has brought together previously distinct fields – including ecological sciences, chemistry, biology, engineering, architecture, urban planning and information technology’.10 Encouraging this form of enquiry, Rifkin notes that conventional economists fail to recognize that the ‘laws of thermodynamics govern all economic activity’.11 ‘In classical or neo-classical economic theory, the dynamics that govern Earth’s biosphere are mere externalities to economic activity’.12

216

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism

Within this planetary context of connectivity, the urban becomes conspicuous through its replacement by the environment in the zero marginal cost society. The metropolis has become a biosphere of exchange, activated by the Internet of Things, in turn challenging issues of subjectivity by incorporating human and non-human exchanges. Consequentially, the built environment has become part of a continuum for the exchanges of all forms of data in a wired and sensored world, and like everything else, has little or no symbolic value, with (capital) surplus being captured in other more liquid forms, while the city at most operates as a supporting environment of infinite small information (value) exchanges. The relationship of the city to the zero-margin economy has been reformulated from the accumulation of capital (buildings), to the harvesting of value created by the processes that flow through, around and beyond it. The value of the built environment is its supporting role as a processor or accelerator of exchanges, rather than as a capital project in and of itself. As the market place is reduced to a series of data exchanges, unlike Simmel’s nostalgia for nature versus the urban life, or even Manuel Castell’s infrastructural turn in the networked society,13 the categorical distinction between the city and nature in the Internet of Things becomes negligible. Reflective of Simmel’s concerns about money as the great levelling abstraction of all relationships, in economic terms both the city and nature, for Rifkin, are reduced to a common information exchange (value production) paradigm. Rifkin further sees the data landscape as extending through the human body (biological processes), eradicating the scales/categorizations of the globe, the city, architecture and the body as meaningless in an apparently seamless continuum of data. The object (building/city) as capital product ceases to encapsulate the issue of value and production. Architecture in this context has been stripped of its capacity to carry value, whether symbolic or economic. Rather, its symbolic or cultural estate has been transformed to a paradigm of performance over permanence.14 Rifkin seemingly offers a remedy for the alienation identified by Simmel, as individuals move from their role of consuming individuals in the twentieth-century metropolis to reconnect to roles of local production and exchange in the zero-margin society, enabled by new forms of information exchange. In Rifkin’s account, the capacity of the individuals to reclaim their relation to forms of production (reconstruct their own subjectivity in relation to labour) is a defining aspect of the post-capitalist economy, and overcomes the experience produced by the abstraction of value embodied by Simmel’s metropolis. This phenomenon expresses itself in contemporary shared communities, maker movements and so on, remaining conspicuously placeless or distributed. Every place (home, office, nature, etc.) has become a site of production. This positivist position is not without critics, who identify even the role of creativity as a fundamental metric within neoliberal human capital. Among these metrics, the popular notion of ‘creativity’ is particularly interesting because it has become a generalized imperative of neoliberal societies: creativity (and its proxies, ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’) are seen today as an essential component of any ‘competitive’ worker. Creativity is a fundamental metric within what neoliberals call ‘human capital’.15

217

Anthony Burke

Within this context, Manuel Schvartzberg goes on to note that ‘contemporary architectural workers are a very easily managed and docile group’.16 Comparing architects to artists, Andrea Fraser refers to artists as ‘the very model of labour in the new economy’.17 As the market environment increases to the scale of a totalizing biosphere, it is difficult to see the abstraction produced at the beginning of the century between production and value, and the alienation of the metropolitan subject as being anything other than exacerbated, despite Rifkin’s claims, as the products of trade themselves have become increasingly immaterial or abstract packets of information. In the ‘Internet of Things’,18 the production of values occurs within technologically enabled social networks, and hence the place where value and exchange are created and take place is not physically embodied. Interestingly, this paradigm relies on the central role of the ‘event’ rather than the ‘location’, as a moment of information production generated by a change of some sort. It is this difference that is classically understood to be ‘information’ in cybernetic terms (difference that makes a difference).19 Like Simmel, Rifkin does employ the spatial metaphor of the pre-industrial commons to conjure the image of the collaborative, social forum; however, Rifkin’s contemporary commons do not exist anywhere but everywhere, where the commons are understood not as a locale as much a virtual space of communication and co-managed resources. By contrast, the twentieth-century metropolis was the place where these exchanges occurred, and where capital exchanges and surplus became embodied, consequently producing Simmel’s new form of metropolitan denizen and, in turn, locating the burden of the market within the fabric of the city (business versus domestic). In Rifkin’s post-capitalist framework, this has been reversed and the burden of the market falls on the activities of the subject, not as property but as a form of perpetual engine of data creation and exchange through all the processes, habits and actions of life, what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as habitus in the individual and Foucault refers to as the biopolitical environment.20 However, this productive act is no longer limited to the subject but to forms of automated or monitored exchanges of all human and non-human types. As Bruce Sterling notes, ‘politically speaking, the relationship of the reader to the Internet of Things is not democratic. It is not even capitalistic. It is a new thing. It is digital feudalism’.21 The subject is now producer, consumer and marketplace in one, and architecture has devolved its responsibilities for holding or representing capital to the (physical and non-physical) infrastructures of exchange. The exchange of the physical with the immaterial and Rifkin’s positive prognosis for a reclamation of subjectivity is summed up in his forecast: […] markets are beginning to give way to networks, ownership is becoming less important than access, the pursuit of self-interest is being tempered by the pull of collaborative interests, and the traditional dream of rags to riches is being supplanted by a new dream of a sustainable quality of life.22

218

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism

In more ominous terms, Sterling re-phrases this sentiment: ‘digital commerce and governance is moving, as fast and as hard as it possibly can, into a full-spectrum dominance over whatever used to be analogue’.23 In this context, architecture and the city, as an environment of production, are not privileged beyond their productive capacity. When considered as an environment of exchange and surplus capital, the industrial version of the metropolis has become fully distributed as a means of growing its economic value proposition. This in turn suggests, in contrast to Rifkin’s positivism, that the alienation attached to the twentieth-century metropolis (money economy) might also be fully distributed within a total biosphere of exchange and production.24 As the economic fabric of post-capitalist economies move from products to processes, it follows that the role of the built environment within this economic equation also moves from its theorization as a product (i.e. property, capital investment, infrastructure) to its understanding as a bandwidth within an information continuum that spans from the intimate biological systems within our bodies to the environmental deficit of the planet. As information flows (the contemporary equivalent of Simmel’s abstract money) equalize any number of modern categorical boundaries and specifically dematerialize the boundaries and categories familiar to architecture (issues of scale, the public, shelter, experience) built from a material / human / experiential foundation, economic theories, such as Rifkin’s, seem to demand a corresponding critical re-theorization of architecture within these paradigmatic economic changes, to privilege a theory of architecture based not on materiality or even humanism but on information and relationality. As an example of this dilemma, should sitting on a public bench, a small public action, be framed as an offering of public engagement and activation of common space, or does the economic layer forecast a micro leasing arrangement in the same way we already pay for street parking to a local council? Are theories of urbanization or consumer behaviour or both or neither an appropriate theoretical apparatus of enquiry? In contemplating the impact on a corresponding theory of architecture, the post-capitalist economy territorializes the fundamental relationality of architecture rather than its matter, and the social and traditional habits that the built environment embodies become the new economy. From a positivist economic perspective such as the one Rifkin promotes, this is the wonder of the post-capitalist moment and a demonstration of an evolved human ‘empathetic drive’ of a now super-connected human species, a planetary fraternity of understanding. Or, as his critics suggest, is this only the survival tactics of a resilient neoliberal capitalist system that is no longer physically constrained, and is bounded only by the capacity to imagine moments of information exchange through processes, whether human or otherwise, as the new locale of the old economy? In either scenario, the days of architecture and the city as market place or expression of capital or culture are seemingly limited. In marking the apparent trend to dematerialization across these two economic texts separated by 114 years, the shift from urban environment as by-product and capital surplus (1900) to urban environment as productive globalized infrastructure (1990), to the devaluing of capital and the re-valuing of processes or exchanges (2014) is stark. These texts also sketch out the changing nature of the subject produced within these

219

Anthony Burke

environments of exchange, from alienated urbanite, or Robert Musil’s ‘man without qualities’, to a consumer within a network of commodity flows, to subjugated producer within a dematerialized network of information. It might seem that as the cities’ centrality in economic terms dematerializes, so too does the relationship of economic production, and a newly formed subjectivity becomes more totalizing. Interestingly, this might be considered a new form of economic suburbanization (as work is fully distributed and detached from conspicuous centres of production)25 at the very moment when interest in cities, primarily as economic engines, is high on the agenda. It is almost impossible to speak of cities today through a formal or aesthetic analysis. City analysis has become essentially an economic analysis of assets and deficits, systems optimization, business attraction and tourist hotel stays. In theoretical terms, economic theory requires us to take a position within the cold calculus of exchange as the animator and ultimate evaluator of the built environment as part of an energy, information and access spectrum. Within this post-capital economic lens, the symbolic, aesthetic, experiential or historic values are challenged, apparently holding no intrinsic worth, and are all subsumed by their capacity to value-add rather than enrich on their own cultural terms. If we accept that we are historically able to draw the city as a function of the economy, then is it also true that, as the spaces of commerce and exchange have expanded to encompass any process or interaction, detaching these exchanges from a physical manifestation dismantles the possibility of a theory of the modern categories of architecture and the city correspondingly?

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

220

Scholarly works on globalization and labour within architecture have recently been produced. Compendiums such as The Architect as Worker edited by Peggy Deamer (2015), and Industries of Architecture edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech (2015) have recently focused the conversation from a general polemic on globalization and its effects to a more specific architectural relationship to industry. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2004), 483. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 482. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 484. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 433. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 435. Rifkin notes the three paradigms that have changed as Logistics, Communication and Energy. Within this three-part set, the communication and energy matrix is the most visibly changed landscape to signal the impact of new technologies and the beginning of a new post-capital landscape. See Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 15. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 19. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 21. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 23. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 23. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 23. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Manuel Shvartzberg, ‘Foucault’s “Environmental” Power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization’, in The Architect as Worker. Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 181–207. Shvartzberg, ‘Foucault’s “Environmental” Power’, 181. Shvartzberg, ‘Foucault’s “Environmental” Power’, 192. Andrea Fraser writes: ‘[artists] are the very model for labor in the new economy, a fact that is not an odd irony or quirk, but deeply rooted in our “habitus”. […] We are highly educated, highly motivated

Architecture and the promise of post-capitalism

18

19

20

21

22 23 24 25

“self starters” who believe that learning is a continuous process. We are always ready for change and adapt to it quickly. We prefer freedom and flexibility to security […] we don’t know the meaning of “overtime”. […] We tend to value non-material rewards, which we are willing to defer, even to posterity. […] We tend to come from backgrounds that discourage us from seeing ourselves as labor. Finally, we’re fiercely individualistic, which makes us difficult to organize and easy to exploit’. See: Shvartzberg, ‘Foucault’s “Environmental” Power’, 203. The term ‘Internet of Things’ is credited to the British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton, who in 1999 while working on radio frequency identity tags (RFIDs) used the term to refer to objects able to be electronically networked. Bruce Sterling extends this safe definition, noting, ‘In practice, the Internet of Things means an epic transformation: all purpose electronic automation through digital surveillance by wireless broadband’. See Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014), 8. In cybernetic and information theory, information (that which is at the core of the zero marginal cost society) is the product of ‘difference that makes a difference’ in any state or condition. The term was coined by Gregory Bateson. See Gregory Bateson, ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972), 457–461. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972). Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, 13. Sterling continues: ‘People in the Internet of Things are like the woolly livestock of a feudal demesne, grazing under the watchful eye of barons in their hilltop Cloud Castles. The peasants never vote for the lords of the Cloud Castles. But they do find them attractive and glamorous. They respect them. They feel a genuine fealty to them. They can’t get along in life without them’. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 34. Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, 8. Maurizio Lazzarato develops this critique at length in terms of modern subjectivity created by neoliberal economies. See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012). See Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) for a full exploration of cybernetics and the architectural response within corporate architecture from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Bibliography Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Deamer, Peggy, ed. The Architect as Worker: Immaterial labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. London and New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014. Fry, Tony. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Keynes, John Maynard. ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ [1930], in Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften). Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1930–1943. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Sanchez, Jose. ‘Post Capitalist Design; Design in the Age of Access’. In Paradigms in Computing; Making Machines and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, edited by David Jason Gerber and Mariana Ibanez, 113–122. New York: eVolo, 2014. Shvartzberg, Manuel. ‘Foucault’s “Environmental” Power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization’. In The Architect as Worker; Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, edited by Peggy Deamer, 181–207. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Edited by David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 2004. Sterling, Bruce. The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

221

Chapter 21

Domestic, production, debt For a theory of the informal Platon Issaias

In recent decades, the unprecedented concentration of people in cities around the world, coinciding with the collapse of any safety net that welfare state policies used to provide, has provoked a series of staggering effects, a ‘housing crisis’ possibly similar to the one experienced in nineteenth-century industrial centres. Decency and basic rights are ignored, and social responsibility or even a philanthropic agenda are replaced by the rhetoric of ‘bottom-up’ and DIY. Unapologetic entrepreneurialism is often disguised and sold as emancipation. Spaces and neighbourhoods of extreme poverty in Cairo, Rio, Tunis, Athens or Shenzhen are celebrated as cases of improvised urbanization and selfbuilding ingenuity. Yet, there is no cause and effect relationship between space, architecture, the economy or the political. There is no architecture as a ‘representation’ or a ‘diagram’ of a power relation external to its own production. The domestic is not a scale of design, a response to a given, predetermined framework, but the construction of the problem itself. The most emblematic object from the discipline of architecture that is used to unpack the above is Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino. Yet, it remains rather ambiguous. Seen often as a pure diagram of power relations, or just as an object that is often reduced ‘stylistically’ to its abstract, formal qualities, it is probably as enigmatic as in 1914. As part of a broader research project on Athens, this paper discusses the relation between urban management and architectural form, using the Dom-ino and the Greek apartment building as examples. What is the link between the domestic, production and debt? How could forms of domestic ethos, habits and practices of domestic life be related to administrative and managerial projects and processes?

222

Domestic, production, debt

How could this be used to develop a theoretical framework to confront the distinctions between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, architectural representation and administrative machines?

Athens and the Dom-ino effect In Athens, or any other Greek town and city, instead of well-planned, commissioned housing projects, or what we conventionally classify as ‘well-thought’ and ‘welldeveloped’ planning proposals, regulatory masterplans and the like, we observe something rather different. What defines the city’s urban horizon is a system of space management based on the deployment of a singular building unit, organized in irregular fragments of discontinuous grids, made of in-situ, labour-intensive concrete frames, filled with bricks and plastered – something that ultimately looks like a stack of slabs with continuous balconies. There is of course nothing unique in this: many similarities could be drawn, especially with cities and townships of the Mediterranean or the Global South. However, it is possible that the Greek case is somehow emblematic of an entire history of capitalist town planning and governance of the last 60–70 years, with its sequential crises, periods of prosperity and eventual catastrophes so clearly visible in the organization of dwellings, the city’s infrastructure, law and land property regime. During this period, social transformation in Greece has been primarily achieved by – and occurred within – the development of specific architectural and urban types and planning protocols. This body of tools and design procedures was used to administer social relationships; it put space at the epicentre of political and social antagonism. As a sophisticated institutional framework that employs a process of subjectification, it framed forms of life, corresponding practices and conditions of occupation. From my point of view, it deserves to be discussed as a paradigmatic operation within which space, administration and architectural form exhibit a certain level of brutality, precisely by becoming more and more bound to a rhetoric of self-building and to a method of spatial control that celebrates informality and pushes – i.e. exploits – popular practices and building improvisations. In the Greek city, the domestic monad acquired its highest and most complex resolution as a managerial, biopolitical device in the form of a particular type of architecture: the ‘polykatoikia’. This term stands for the small-scale, multi-story apartment building, and ultimately refers to a method for constructing and arranging multiple housing units and apartments within a single plot of land. Historically, especially in the local urban and architectural history, a clear distinction was made between the above model and other various methods of selfbuilding, more or less ‘formal’ in regard to available capital and construction conditions. The term itself is a neologism, a new constructed word, most probably introduced into Modern Greek by the architect Kyprianos Biris in 1932. In his article entitled ‘I Astiki Polykatoikia’ (‘The Urban Polykatoikia’),1 he discussed the method of construction, the organization of the units in this new type of housing and the potential benefits and new

223

Platon Issaias

developments this typology could bring to Greek architecture in general and the city of Athens in particular. Biris wrote this piece after he completed possibly the first building of that kind, the Logothetopoulos Polykatoikia at 20–22 Bouboulinas Street, in the middle class neighbourhood of Exarhia. For him, the middle class subject was the client, the producer, the financer and ultimately the targeted user of this new form of urban dwelling. As he underlined in his text, the polykatoikia ‘should aim to serve the needs of the bourgeois class’, not the ‘wealthiest and higher class of tenants and landlords’.2 For him, the premises of this type of architecture were not based on any commercial success and its possible profitable diffusion in the city, but on its capability to ‘solve the acute housing shortage in Athens’, especially for ‘public servants, military officers and wealthy bourgeois refugees’.3 The history of the polykatoikia proved Biris simultaneously accurate and mistaken in his approach to the type’s instrumental architectural and urban performance. In the decades that followed, the polykatoikia would serve not only the housing needs of the middle class, but also those of the poorest segments of the population, providing decent living conditions in a kind of homogeneous way throughout the city and across the social field. Nevertheless, an overwhelming commercialization of the urban and peripheral land would be the aftermath of the type’s diffusion, eventually turning it into something more than a mere residential type. Moreover, there are two points that we have to stress in regard to the appearance and the early existence of this housing typology. First, the polykatoikia is an object that belongs exclusively to the activities and the realm of the private sector. As Manolis Marmaras4 has underlined, this exclusivity is registered not only in its method of production, but also in the way the polykatoikia and its apartments were, and still are, integral components of the housing market. Hence, when we are referring to a polykatoikia, we are discussing a residential building that is produced by and within a speculative economic mechanism, where its main characteristic is the commercialization of the urban land. The initiative of construction belongs entirely to private capital. It is a form of investment exclusively by private actors, and the use of space requires a monetary transaction, either in the form of rent deposits or as purchase deeds of the final, buildable product. As Marmaras has shown, this definition differentiates this building type, or at least can be used to distinguish this method of production of residential spaces from other cases of ‘high rise, apartment buildings’, which existed in Greece and were built simultaneously or in later periods. Interestingly, in the common language and popular perception, the term itself is used in a much more inclusive way, to indicate any building of more than two floors, with balconies on the façade, and an interior organization of independent apartments serviced by one staircase, with or without an elevator. Most importantly, it seems that the use of the word by Greek society does not necessarily follow Marmaras’s scientific definition, in regard to its economic and structural mode of production. If in the early appearance of the polykatoikia model, the commodification of the land and the presence of many individuals as owners and tenants was a unique characteristic of the type, the subsequent mutations of this residential unit transformed it into a rather different architectural object. In the last four decades, a small, family-owned plot, in a rather unregulated, unplanned part of the city or in any periurban land in Greece, could be built

224

Domestic, production, debt

with almost self-made, low cost techniques of intense manual labour, often without formal building permission, following the polykatoikia formula. Members of the same family, or a small number of associated households, who share the open space, the small garden or the pilotis on the ground floor, owned the two, three, four or more apartments of these small residential buildings. This method of self-building did not necessarily imply a commercial, economic activity or additional income from rentals for the group of property owners, but defined instead a social condition, where low income, petit bourgeois subjects were able to construct their own house, outside of and independent from a public subsidized programme or the banking system, the first being overwhelmingly absent while the second became active only from the late 1990s. It is precisely with this method of production of residential space, where the formal and structural simplicity of the polykatoikia met with the ‘self-building’ practices of the poor, that the critique on the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ urbanism could be possibly raised. This is what brings the diagram of the polykatoikia model next to its decisive predecessor, Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino.5 Le Corbusier envisioned and developed the Dom-ino at an extremely critical political moment, anticipating the post-World War I reconstruction, to tackle especially the housing needs that the conflict would create, especially for the working class. For Le Corbusier, the archetypical housing unit would have to perform simultaneously two complementary tasks. First, the structure is capable of absorbing and re-appropriating the labour force, promoting adaptability as the most essential element of the model. Secondly, it promotes a system where the rigid reality of the organization of industrial work, as this is expressed within the construction industry too, is to be masked by the Dom-ino’s informal properties. This ultimately promotes a diagram of domination and exploitation from within, establishing a particular domestic ethos and the potential for its limitless territorial expansion.6 Both the Dom-ino and the polykatoikia constitute complex machines that embody the power relations that materialize in space, and express those forms of exploitation that put at work – and thus control – the most basic skills of the actual producer of these spatial devices. The abstract ability to produce ‘in general’ collapses and simultaneously is glorified within a peculiar diagram, where an architectural abstraction, a space reduced to its bare minimum – ‘columns, beams, slabs and a staircase’ – becomes the diagram through which production and private property are proposed and promoted as the one and only possibility. The seeming ‘informality’ of the Dom-ino model – applied in the most successful way to Greece and the polykatoikia system – is the paradigmatic scheme through which the organization of work of the assembly line merged with the organization of production of space and the particularities of the modern construction industry. The polykatoikia, defined by an apparently loose regulatory framework – yet quite complex and full of details and exceptions – formalized different subjectivities and framed modes of living and corresponding spatial and social diagrams, and habitual patterns of everyday life. Simultaneously, the method of production of its architecture composed a characteristic economic, techno-material and architectural entity: a local yet generic science of dwelling.

225

Platon Issaias

In the absence of property tax or VAT on construction materials,7 the acquisition of small-scale properties, the reliance on rentals as a source of income and the construction of small family-scale polykatoikias, where different generations lived under the same roof, became the modus operandi of the Greek society, a cheap method to live, but also a competitive method of investment and tax evasion. This entity became a device that captured the productive potential of the Greek labour power and determined the core social imaginary of a south European society: access to property and small-scale entrepreneurialism through an equally smallscale real estate speculation.8 Conceived in the late 1920s and endorsed in the aftermath of the Greek Civil War of 1944–1949 as a project to address human displacement and increasing densities in urban centres, it actually consists of a platform of social consensus: peace and (spatial) development as an antidote to struggle. A system of accessing private property and housing in an environment defined by the overwhelming absence of public funds and subsidies, it has also become a mechanism of capital accumulation, a calculus of inequality, and of course a scheme to achieve extreme monopolies in construction materials, building patents and technical solutions. Interestingly, it was precisely this last point that was best attained by the overfragmentation of structures, property and the labour force in the construction industry. A form of technical and intellectual knowledge captured and governed by being constantly separated and diffused. This concerns not only the proletariat of builders and contractors, but also the vast middle class of architects, engineers and technicians, and even property lawyers and conveyancing solicitors involved in everyday real estate praxes and agreements. Recently, through an extreme devaluation and land depreciation brought in as part of the International Monetary Fund/European Union memorandums, another phase of exploitation has commenced, where contemporary financial devices and products have been put in place to manage and govern space as part of the debt economy.

Debt: what now?9 We could argue that capital’s main aim, and therefore urbanization as one of its central operations, is to organize and manage the life and welfare of producers, not only in the present but also as a potential for future development. This implies a political and philosophical paradox. The true essence of this rationale and its practice of spatial control is the management of something that does not exist – the control of the potential of production and the modes of living inscribed in these diagrams of power. This relation between the urban, economic management and the administration of production therefore becomes central. This is the moment when city management established its critical bond with economy, with production and with the processes of formalization of different subjectivities, especially relevant today, in the epoch of extreme deterritorialization, financialization and the complex apparatuses that deal with private and public debt. The critical point is to understand how this new ontology

226

Domestic, production, debt

becomes not only the paradigm of the praxis of administration, but also the process through which it produces its own subject. As Maurizio Lazzarato pointed out in The Making of the Indebted Man,10 the issue of future development and the management of its uncertainties become even more critical today, especially within the mechanisms of exploitation and domination produced in contemporary financial capitalism in the debtor–creditor relation. As Lazzarato argues, this dialectic scheme lies at the very core of the neoliberal project and, far from being a pathogenesis or a malfunction of monetary capitalism, constitutes the very process that destroys the past distinctions of the welfare state between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers. As Lazzarato further explains, capital initiates an ontological guilt, and debt becomes a political construction that cannot be reduced to an economic mechanism but constitutes a device of governance and control. By a technique where the honour of a private or public debt and the minimization of uncertainty are placed in the centre of contemporary economic policies and political debates, the exchange of time and money in the future pushes for the reconfiguration of the entire material and existential horizon of the debtor.11 In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber expanded this position further, arguing for a much longer historic instrumentality of debt in the organization of human societies.12 Graeber explains how, from the virtual transactions of early agrarian societies to primitive accumulation based on gold and silver, to contemporary financial capitalism, the process of constructing the debtor is crucially linked with the construction of the oppressed. The ‘slaves of debt’ have nothing more to valorize but their future, i.e. their own existence as producers who owe each time anew their own productive capability. Here is where the philosophical and political paradox of capitalism is further intensified, since time itself enters the realm of calculability and risk assessment. The sovereign debt crisis in Greece coincides with a colossal restructuring of the model of its economic development, a crisis of the economy of the city and a violent transformation of the productive basis in Greece – i.e. a crisis of the Greek subjectivity. Elements and traces of this violence preceded the IMF/EU agreements from 2010 and onwards, and could be detected since the late 1990s. Neoliberal economic reforms of the real estate market at the time when Greece was entering the Eurozone in 2001, a project that continued after the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, severely altered the previously existing housing model. Today, due to the systemic modification of land and taxation policies, what originally seemed to be a form of investment and wealth has become a device of extreme exploitation through the institution of debt. In July 2015, when the Greek government, led by SYRIZA, signed the third memorandum with the Troika,13 one of the most important preconditions to start negotiations for a new rescue package was to vote a new law that would lift the protection of primary residence and allow foreclosures. Although the consequences of this are still to be seen in Greek cities, it definitely initiates a new property regime, possibly with the interference of large real estate companies and banks. If we understand this new phase as the end of the previous model, its collapse must therefore be discussed in light of Lazzarato’s theses. In a process of further

227

Platon Issaias

‘rationalization’ of economic transactions related to real estate, urban space in Greece – which actually consists of a homogeneous domestic environment – is de-valorized such that large corporations and banks may acquire and accumulate it from the hands of the indebted, the class paradoxically made up of the original producers and owners of this very space. Hence, the architectural and social diagram of the polykatoikia model, originally the device that formalized the Greek subjectivity, turns against itself.

Conflict is never informal How to conclude then with a thesis to confront not only the distinction between formal/ informal in regard to city management and planning, but also these two as attributes of kinds of architectures and their representations? What makes a diagram of space and social relations a successful territorial, biopolitical machine? Conflict is never informal. It always has a certain degree of directionality, defined by power relations and by the struggle between subjects and forms of life at play. In the Greek case, it was the undeclared intention to achieve social peace that formulated an architectural and urban/territorial project that normalized a spatial and social diagram to an unprecedented degree. What we witness is a project that formalized the economy of construction to become the epicentre of production in general, a process where architecture and its technical characteristics expand to the realm of law, politics and the organization of the entire production process. This shows how social conflict could be choreographed and ultimately avoided – in exchange for a flat, or a small number of apartments, a summer house, the gradual legalization of irregular buildings, investment in land and extensive tax evasion. This has been achieved by the mechanisms of the model’s own development and reproduction, fuelling capital accumulation and concentrating most of the monetary activities of the different social classes in the building industry. It is within this history that the various political and economic relations, the struggles and the social desires of the Greek society could be read. Contractual agreements between individuals, property owners and contractors, forms of labour and employment, family structure, gender and class domination, and, ultimately, the patterns of estrangement in the metropolitan space are registered in the polykatoikia’s organizational diagram. It is the device through which the city has been transformed to a continuous, un-interrupted productive landscape. Any informal attributes, or the very idea of the infill and its endless possibilities, not only exist due to the rigidity of the model’s own architecture and structural/technical/ material properties, but are politically essential. It is this that allows the diagram to be presented as a self-help, welfare project for cheap and decent housing, a device that celebrated the access to private property and the individualistic treatment of land and the domestic environment, in the tradition originally defined by Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino.

228

Domestic, production, debt

Therefore, informal is never a true and real condition, but what disguises the brutality and the rigid reality of social conflict. In Greece, and we could argue in any other case, it is this that made the model acceptable and incredibly successful. It is this that produced a vast Greek middle class, the constituents of which were simultaneously owners, producers and consumers of space, in a paradoxical manner. Nevertheless, as has been recently witnessed, it has overwhelmingly contributed to the construction of a class and a society defined and captured by debt.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

Kyprianos Biris, ‘I Astiki Polykatoikia’ [‘The Urban Polykatoikia’], Technika Chronika 11 (1932): 563–571. Biris, ‘I Astiki Polykatoikia’, 564. Biris, ‘I Astiki Polykatoikia’, 564 and after. Marmaras, a prestigious Greek planner and historian, produced a remarkable piece of research on the birth and early appearance of the polykatoikia type in the interwar period. He explored the birth of the ‘multi-storey apartment building’ in Greece, primarily focusing on the analysis of the various factors that defined the early stages of the type’s development. Marmaras explains how, since its initial appearance, the type was captured by the private sector, the agents of which exploited the potentiality of this architectural and urban machine. For more, see Manolis Marmaras, I Astiki Polykatoikia tis Mesopolemikis Athinas: I Arhi tis Entatikis Ekmetalleusis tou Astikou Edafous [The Bourgeois Polykatoikia of Interwar Athens: The Beginning of the Intense Exploitation of the Urban Land] (Athens: ETBA Cultural Foundation, 1991). Quotes above from pages 9–12. For more on this see Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici and Platon Issaias, ‘From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia’, DOMUS 962 (2012): 74–87, and Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici and Platon Issaias, ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Athens as a Case Study’, in Made In Athens, catalogue of the Greek Pavilion at the 13th International Architectural Exhibition, Venice Biennale, ed. Panos Dragonas and Anna Skiada (Athens: YPEKA, 2012), 313–319. Pier Vittorio Aureli has written and lectured extensively about this issue. See mainly: Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘The Dom-ino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space’, Log 30 (2014): 153–168. Property tax was first introduced as part of the first and second memoranda with the three institutions (ECB/EU/IMF). The Uniform Tax on Real Estate Property (or ENFIA in Greek) had become one of the central issues in Greek politics, with its long-term effects still unclear. In the short term, and in relation to the decrease of household income and bank loans during the recent economic crisis, the number of property transactions had been decreased by 84 per cent (2007–2013) and prices of available flats by 36 per cent (2008–2014), the largest in the EU. For a detailed analysis, among others, see Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE), ‘Research on the Importance of Development, Obstacles and the Future of Construction Sector, March 2015’, http://iobe.gr/docs/research/RES_05_F_31032015_ REP_GR.PDF, accessed 6 July 2016. For a complete analysis of the polykatoikia model and its prehistory, see Platon Issaias, ‘The Absence of Plan as a Project: On the Planning Development of Modern Athens, 1830–2010’, in The City as a Project, ed. Pier Vittorio Aureli (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2013), 292–333; Platon Issaias, ‘Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common’, PhD diss., TU Delft, 2014. A fascinating account on the relation between debt, space and urbanization can be found in Ross Exo Adams, ‘The Politicisation of Debt’, in Real Estates: Life without Debt, ed. Fulcrum (Jack Self and Shumi Bose), London: Bedford Press, 2014, 105–111. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012). These theses were further developed by Lazzarato in his more recent book Governing by Debt, which is quite crucial for the argument and the points made in this paper. See: Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015). David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville Publishing House, 2011). It is worth noting that in Governing by Debt, Lazzarato himself is very critical of Graeber, specifically on his point about the existence of debtor–creditor relations in pre- or early capitalist societies. Lazzarato confronts this point insisting on the significantly different situation that money and financial capital create politically, territorially and ontologically from industrial capital, and of course forms of primitive accumulation. His focus is precisely on the formalization of a certain subjectivity that the debt

229

Platon Issaias

13

economy, through a vast set of machines, forces an entire new web of power relations on patterns of exploitation. By Troika, I refer to the tripartite committee that was formed to control and supervise economic programmes and organic loans in Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland and Portugal. It consists of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Bibliography Aureli, Pier Vittorio. ‘The Dom-ino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space’. Log 30 (2014): 153–168. Aureli, Pier Vittorio, Maria Giudici and Platon Issaias. ‘From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia’. DOMUS 962 (2012): 74–87. Aureli, Pier Vittorio, Maria Giudici and Platon Issaias. ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Athens as a Case Study’. In Made In Athens, catalogue of the Greek Pavilion at the 13th International Architectural Exhibition, Venice Biennale, edited by Panos Dragonas and Anna Skiada, 313–319. Athens: YPEKA, 2012. Biris, Kyprianos. ‘I Astiki Polykatoikia’ [‘The Urban Polykatoikia’]. Technika Chronika 11 (1932): 563–571. Fulcrum (Shumi Bose and Jack Self), eds. Real Estates: Life without Debt. London: Bedford Press, 2014. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville Publishing House, 2011. Issaias, Platon. ‘The Absence of Plan as a Project: On the Planning Development of Modern Athens, 1830– 2010’. In The City as a Project, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, 292–333. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2013. Issaias, Platon. ‘Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common’. PhD diss., TU Delft, 2014. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Governing by Debt. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015. Marmaras, Manolis. I Astiki Polykatoikia tis Mesopolemikis Athinas: I Arhi tis Entatikis Ekmetalleusis tou Astikou Edafous [The Bourgeois Polykatoikia of Interwar Athens: The Beginning of the Intense Exploitation of the Urban Land]. Athens: ETBA Cultural Foundation, 1991.

230

Chapter 22

White, wide and scattered Picturing her housing career Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

It is in the seductive space of real estate that finance and architecture can flirt, collaborating on the shaping of brains, minds and bodies through biopolitical and noological processes of subject formation, of assujettissement.1 In turn, our real estate ‘choices’ – it is as choices that they are presented to us as affect-addled consumers – are conditioned by exposure to image worlds that over-determine how interior environmental niches are carved out, and how subjects and environments are co-produced. Contemporary architectural theory is at present lost in a love affair with the opportunistic use that we make of our exterior environments, in the process overlooking the regimes through which we dress our interior environments (which in turn dress us). This paper considers the arrangements that make the interior and its imagery a mechanism of capture and subjectification of ‘the indebted woman’ (and her property), within the neoliberal bourgeois civil society. We show how what we term ‘diagrams of capture’ work within the real estate advertising imagery that she peruses on a daily basis – diagrams we address through the categories of the white, the wide and the scattered. Rather than looking to the contemporary real estate landscape as a field of opportunity for the exercise of architectural agency – a move which is all too often predicated on the reproduction of property rights and the individualized and indebted subjects they belong to – we advocate viewing real estate as an object available to feminist critique. At stake in such a critique is a possible reformulation of the architectural subject in a manner that constitutes a firm and decisive shift away from the now-failing model of the ‘entrepreneurial self’.

231

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

The indebted woman and her architect The story of contemporary real estate is mirrored in the tale of the entrepreneurial subject that we, with an irreverent nod to Maurizio Lazzarato’s formulation, call the ‘indebted woman’. The indebted woman is an aesthetic figure inhabited and performed by many bodies and minds in relation to the real estate/debt infrastructures of the AngloAmerican city, and by an ever-swelling horde in the Welfare State of Sweden, a country which is plunging head first into private home ownership ahead of a decade in which housing production – according to the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket) – must double in volume.2 The indebted woman comes to us, in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a ghost; she is the impossible remainder of a number of promises from the ‘long nineties’ that to this day have never been made good.3 As an entrepreneur of the self and a citizen of the Big Society, she has taken it upon herself to bankroll her lack of a rent-negotiated rental flat (a hyresrätt),4 a form of housing which is increasingly out of reach for the vast majority of Sweden’s middle class due to excessive waiting periods and limited supply.5 While the indebted woman is definitely an occupant of Stockholm’s real estate infrastructure, she is also its co-producer. She is part of a network of players that work to compose what the Swedish Government has recently termed a ‘designed living environment’,6 bankrolling the country’s massive housing production effort through her personal mortgage and through the compulsive performance of urbanity in her daily life.7 In producing her environment through purchase and performance, the indebted woman joins the architects, albeit on an unwaged and largely involuntary basis. She is an ‘involuntary architect’, a notion that is opposed to the position taken by Awan, Schneider and Till, who maintain that ‘the standard histories of architecture focus almost exclusively on the guiding hand of the individual architect, and in this exclude the multiple voices and actions of others’.8 While we agree that ‘spatial production belongs to a much wider group of actors – from artists to users, from politicians to builders – with a diverse range of skills and intentions’,9 we argue that participation in spatial production can also constitute a form of exploitative labour and certainly cannot be taken by architectural theorists as being inherently emancipatory. Given the degree of crossover between the architect and the indebted woman, it is perhaps not a surprise that our protagonist ends up mirroring some of the most valorized qualities of the figure of the architect herself – namely, her entrepreneurial capacities. In the 2015 Europan architecture competition (to which 1,305 submissions were made by young architects and urban practitioners across Europe), the brief nominated a specific category of sites as being prime for the practice of ‘architect as entrepreneur’. As Kristiaan Borret writes in the briefing document, ‘we need a new kind of urban planning, a new kind of architecture, that is active and performative, that is taking action in the real city life, driven by civic commitment, and where the architect acts as an entrepreneur’.10 This position is more carefully and critically theorized in the widely read Extrastatecraft, where Keller Easterling extols the virtues of the strategic multiplier, suggesting an entrepreneurial mode of practice that might serve architecture

232

White, wide and scattered

in actioning dissidence in relation to ‘authoritarian powers’, in a space which exists outside of the state. As Easterling puts it: The hacker/entrepreneur does not value purity but rather relies on multiple cycles of innovation, updating platforms, and tracking changeable desires that supersede, refresh, or reverse the products and plans they introduce into the world. Entrepreneurs cannot survive unless they are on the way to becoming obsolete … They vigorously engage the world looking for multipliers that will amplify their influence.11 The biopolitical tone evoked by the deployment of terms such as ‘purity’, ‘vigour’ and ‘survival’ is telling here. The ‘entrepreneur of the self’, after all, is the privileged subject of emergent neoliberal biopower – not one dependent on the production of a ‘polity’, but rather on the self-production of a new class of self-managed individuals.12 After all, the individualized neoliberal entrepreneur is a figure of self-regulation rather than (political) government per se, and as such might be conceived of, en masse, as a ‘multiplicity on the move’ 13 rather than a body politic, that is, the political citizens of a particular nationstate or city. This warrants a consideration of the field across which such actors move, which seems to be viewed by contemporary architectural theory in a manner that distinctly recalls the ‘field of operations’ described within the landscape urbanism paradigm. James Corner, a leading figure in this movement, explicitly views the metropolis as ‘a living arena of processes and exchanges over time, allowing new forces to prepare the ground for new activities and patterns of occupancy’,14 also advocating (like Easterling and Borret) ‘operative strategy’ over ‘utopian projection’. The latter move demonstrates a deep scepticism of ‘the modernist notion that new physical structures would yield new patterns of socialization’15 – a scepticism of, in other words, the biopolitical and disciplinary power of architecture to engage in processes of subjectification. Rather than viewing the architect as an entrepreneur, Corner addresses the territory upon which the architect works, deploying a Koolhaasian trope to describe this complex surface as one that is ripe with potential and just waiting to be irrigated. Given the well-publicized spikes in property prices that followed in the wake of the construction of the High Line in New York, which Corner’s own Field Operations were involved in designing, the parallel to Easterling’s notion of ‘spatial multipliers’ seems clear – in both cases the city is viewed through the lens of an entrepreneurial enthusiasm, which leaves behind the biopolitical aspirations of an abandoned modernist project in order to embrace urbanization via a regime of private property ownership and development. While these positions are diverse and certainly aim for very different forms of entrepreneurialism in relation to very different fields, the opposition between an extrastate entrepreneurialism and authoritarian powers (the Europan brief openly speaks of ‘the Welfare State vs. self-organization’) needs to be historically situated and even critically rebuffed. Why? We offer three reasons: 1) as hinted at earlier, the conduct of the entrepreneur is self-governed via an internalized regime founded on individuation. The entrepreneur is not a collective subject: there cannot exist solidarity between entrepreneurs (as opposed to, for instance, workers), and this is a loss; 2) because the

233

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

entrepreneur operates on the basis of a regime of internalized control via ‘normalization’, she has no recourse to political power – the constitutional power that finds legitimacy in law rather than in norms, and this is a further loss;16 3) the lack of solidarity and the lack of recourse to politics, when taken together, point to an inability (or disinterest) when it comes to initiating structural change. As Wendy Brown explains: The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public.17 The domain we call ‘feminist real estate theory’ thus targets the entrepreneurial spirit which runs through the reticular networks of real estate infrastructure, seeking – as critical theory does – to expose the conditions of subjectification, and in particular those which produce subjects as indebted. One field of operation, which we argue should be viewed by architecture less as an opportunity than as a ‘capture device’, is that of the image. We therefore turn to the visual culture of the real estate image, a key site in the production chain of real estate infrastructure.

Perusing the imagery Rather than a consideration of plans and drawings (the beloved objects of planners and architects), we here choose to address the visual culture of real estate as it is received by the indebted woman herself. We thus look to our morning newspaper, and our tablet and phone, the key channels through which the diagrammatic capture devices of real estate reach the population. Supplementing idle perusal of relevant media with a concentrated analysis, we turn to hemnet.se, a site that purports to have 2.6 million unique viewers per week18 in a country of just under 10 million inhabitants. White. The Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea in the centre of Stockholm, the setting of this essay, at a latitude of 59º 9’ N. The winters are both long and dark in Sweden’s capital; the arrival of snow is duly welcomed for the reflected light it provides in the perpetual dusk of midwinter. With or without snow, Stockholm remains a city of a thousand shades of white, inside out, centre to periphery. ‘Stockholm White’ is designated by the colour code S0502Y in the NCS colour system (meaning that it is, aside from white, also 5 per cent black and 2 per cent yellow). On a lazy afternoon, flicking – albeit in a serious and systematic manner – through the section of hemnet.se dedicated to Södermalm, the inner-city bastion of the new privileged indebted women (bearded and tattooed, if correct to popular stereotypes of what Vogue designates ‘the third hippest neighbourhood on the planet’),19 one starts to get the sensation that all of the apartments in Stockholm are really painted white. In fact, of the 132 advertised apartments up for sale that day, 49 per cent show an all-white room in their first image.

234

White, wide and scattered

Even more astonishingly, if one clicks on the ad to get further information, 52 per cent of all the ads show all-white rooms in all of the subsequent 3–5 images. Of the images that do not show totally white walls, in 26 per cent of cases this is the result of a wall or section of wall covered with patterned wallpaper, and in a further 22 per cent photographs deviate from ‘all white’ because of a grey wall (or walls). Exposed brick and then marble (mainly in bathrooms) made up the majority of remaining deviations.20 The white walls do a number of things. They frame the interior spaces of the apartments, light-boxing the objects inside. They also make apartments interchangeable, feeding the sense of a seamless flow of commodities – infinitely upgradeable, based on pure floor area metrics. They also carry out other, more insidious, operations upon the indebted woman who perceives them through her glowing screen in her lazy-yet-serious afternoon perusal. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, ‘the objects that we direct attention toward reveal the direction we have taken in life. If we face this way or that, then other things, and indeed spaces, are relegated to the background’.21 Some of the things that we relegate in this manner, she goes on to warn us, using the example of the philosopher addressing his writing desk, include the work that is done to maintain a foreground. In this sense, we might turn to the 68 advertisements featuring all-white interiors and consider what kind of work has been erased in this production of a background which foregrounds such exchangeable neutrality? Beyond their prized casement windows (or absence thereof), these interiors are suspended in a-historical space: any previous era’s preferences for colour have been erased, the edges that might demarcate a specific kind of room blurred, spatial and temporal boundaries are softened in a deliberate focus pull. But this is not all. Ahmed also reminds us that one’s own background also affects what it is that comes into view. We have to wonder how the maintenance of these white walls begins to grate on the background (the lived and historically situated subjectivity) of the occupying subject too; we have to ask what kind of erasure is required to keep those walls so white in preparation for their exchange for a new abode? Scattered. Against a backdrop of Stockholm White, shared across a plethora of real estate images, we survey a scene of carefully orchestrated disarray. Beds are always slept in, mussed up, suggestive of recent bodily warmth and intimacy. A bag lies packed, ready for the always absent occupant’s impending departure. The real estate interior, while arousing affects in the direction of a hunkering down, thus paradoxically also places the indebted woman on notice. Will she or will she not be able to make her next interest payment on her mortgage (let alone the mortgage itself)? When will the encouragement to ‘cash in’ on a hike in property prices, or rational reaction to a shift in the stakes of her debt again displace her? Compulsive itinerancy is rewarded in relation to some bodies and some figures, and not others – the indebted woman finds herself in a position of privilege in this respect, but a privilege that is far from emancipatory.22 This recalls Fredric Jameson’s prescient identification of a postmodern subject whose ‘structural distraction’ in fact acts as ‘the very motor and existential logic of capitalism itself’.23 The indebted woman finds herself both surrounded by scattered objects and in a scattered state. These objects do not withdraw into phenomenological muteness beyond relationality: instead, they draw the indebted woman out, and once they have drawn her out and into the enterprise of the real estate transaction, they then release

235

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

her again, as her cycle of subjectification is accordingly adjusted. We would do well to bear in mind the debt that further destabilizes this image. What neither she nor the next indebted woman wants to be reminded of is their debts, which in today’s housing market may never be amortized, leaving owner-occupants vulnerable to forced departures and encouraging a fantasy of upgrade and exchange. It is this foreclosure of a future without debt that the real estate image thus packages as perpetual promise. Enclosed. The distortion of space, its immanent exchangeability, and its temporary nature are all reinforced by the use of wide-angle photography. A wide-angle lens has a shorter focal length than a normal lens, the result being that it can evenly depict the breadth of a scene, for instance, the scene that is the real estate interior. The use of this visual technology of capture produces an encompassing sensation, though a viewer also has to come to terms with the uncanny effects produced when the technique is exaggerated, resulting in the perceptible stretching of an image. Such overzealous visual distortion aims to produce the illusion of a greater feeling of spaciousness, where space is not in fact in abundance. The giveaway signs appear in doorways that are too wide, furniture that is out of proportion. It is a conceit necessitated by the spatial constraints of photographing an interior; a photographer can only stand so far back from the scene of the interior to capture it. Paradoxically, the wide-angle shot – the one the indebted woman pretends not to notice when she goes window-shopping for an apartment – while aiming to create the illusion of spaciousness, curves back around her to enclose her in its menacing embrace. The image arouses the illusion of infinite space, a future promise, only to conclude in enclosing the viewer. It is as though the anamorphic grid that diagrams wide-angle distortion snaps back around like a netted trap to close in upon the indebted woman and her vicissitudes. All of which assumes a logic whereby the subject does not arrive pre-formed at the constructed point of view, but is rather a subject who is formed in relation to a point of view.24 That is to say, the indebted woman is produced as an effect of subjectification exactly in relation to the distorted, wide-angle point of view that is framed by way of the curated real estate image.

The ‘organisartorial’ regime Writing in 1968, Jean Baudrillard noted the way in which the use-value of the functional object (a value which had been liberated by the modernists in the process of liberating themselves) was at that time itself being supplanted by a new (postmodern) combinatorial logic, based on the value of the relations between objects rather than objects in themselves.25 This shift foregrounds relations of difference, for it was difference that allowed each piece to be used to make ‘moves in a game’,26 the stakes of which were no longer emancipation but communication.27 The System of Objects today, we argue, stands witness to the emergence of an ‘organisartorial’ (organizational-sartorial) regime of control through dressing that is achieved through the provisional categorization we have undertaken above, registering the images we have perused according to the three designated categories: white, wide and scattered.

236

White, wide and scattered

Baudrillard’s early emphasis on the communicative capacity of relations between objects is both prescient and instructive, and we would do well to revisit it in the light of the imperative nature of contemporary cognitive capitalism’s compulsive and compulsory relation to communication. As Maurizio Lazzarato explains, in a world of immaterial labour ‘[o]ne has to express oneself, one has to speak, to communicate, cooperate’.28 Through this communicative exchange, within which the non-discursive circulation of affect plays a crucial role, a subject position takes shape as the by-product of a milieu, and conversely that subject is enlisted in the production of that environment (as we state earlier: the indebted woman is both a voluntary prisoner of architecture and an involuntary architect). The mad oscillation between positions in this recursive feedback loop is not without consequences for our protagonist: the pressure to produce herself and her environment through consumption (itself in turn consummated through occupation) leaves the indebted woman in a state of informational-advertising-productive stimulating flux, in the face of which the only possibility is withdrawal. As Bifo Berardi puts it, ‘[t]he constant mobilization of nervous energies can lead to a depressive reaction: the frustration of our attempts to act and compete leads the subject to withdraw his or her libidinal energy from the social arena. Our frustrated narcissism retreats and the energy just shuts off’.29 Such withdrawal symptoms reside at the heart of the organisartorial, and they move in two directions simultaneously: on the one hand, we witness a retreat into ‘place’, into the building of worlds via the dressing of interiors (a nesting impulse); on the other hand, we see a withdrawal into flow, an aestheticization of privileged itinerancy and a valorization of the possibility of remaining in motion. Both forms of retreat beat a path away from that which is radically shared, into the comforts of a heavily curated interior. Slowly we begin to see how a milieu is constructed that is suffused with affect sufficient to distract her from what could instead be her political concerns.30 It is politics, then, that is at stake in all of this.

The architect herself We have set the scene of an over-curated real estate interior and how its organisartorial logic operates in the remarkable context of Stockholm, as it shakes off its Welfare State past and proudly puts its elegant neoliberal heel forward: a preponderance of Stockholm white on white, which lends itself to the illusion of infinite interior landscapes; the scattered appeal of affectively charged objects, forwarding an existence ever prepared for over-privileged nomadic departures and returns; the astutely composed wide-angle frame that takes the entrepreneurial subject-in-formation into its comfortable, or rather menacing, embrace. But where does the critical support of our proposed feminist real estate theory enter? We have framed the indebted woman as an aesthetic persona, but it is not enough to emphasize the underrepresented gender here, nor to suggest that any reflection on the well-tempered interior is women’s business. We acknowledge the

237

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

ever-present risk that we inadvertently put her back in her place, a place not of her own choosing,31 returning her to the ancient status she held as chattel, or so much un-landed property. At the same time, her supposed emancipation and capacity to pay for a room of her own, requiring the quickening of her entrepreneurial spirit, would appear to place her in yet another relation of debt to a future that is already exhausted within the insistent demand that she cover her repayments. What becomes clear in this brief story of the entrepreneurial occupant as they are constructed in/by/through both images and interiors, is that seeing a lack as an opportunity can be equated with a renunciation of politics (architectural politics, planning politics, or otherwise), which in turn must be read as renouncing the project of prescribing ‘a life in common’.32 It is also clear that this lesson applies as much to the architect as to our protagonist. Rather than highlighting fields of opportunity awaiting architectural irrigation, the task we might ask of architectural theory at this juncture is in fact to sketch other diagrams of subjectification to capture our exhausted architect, dressing her to dress others by enfolding them in supportive, rather than competitively predatory, vestments. This is far from an easy task. If she is to desist in producing entrepreneurial environments, the architect cannot start with her indebted and deregulated self in such a politics of provision. Her agency is not what needs to be valorized here; just as her wage or professional status does not need to be sacrificed (yet another withdrawal is no response at all). Further, we – the privileged class with access to the status of becoming indebted woman – cannot retreat into the role of being ‘builders of worlds’ for ourselves, nesting into the enclosures we artfully curate, the containers that only appear to be of our own making and our own choosing.33 The first lines in a sketch of a tenable position for the architect as viewed through the lens of feminist architectural theory would produce an environmentality that fosters solidarity rather than competition between architects on this matter. Architects are workers before they are entrepreneurs: as such, they have recourse to collective organization, and thus to a politics. In this sense, the ongoing political discourse within the international architectural community might do well to broaden the scope of its concerns from matters of housing delivery and supply (urban development) to the critique (‘not like that, not by them, not on those terms’)34 of the predatory capacity of the infrastructures within which we are subsumed, by refusing to see them as opportunities. It is upon this task of immanent critique that we must – even in the privileged, post-political white noise of our white, wide, scattered present – try to concentrate.

Notes 1

2

238

See our earlier essay on this theme: Hélène Frichot and Helen Runting, ‘The Promise of a Lack: Responding to (Her) Real Estate Career’, The Avery Review no. 8 (May 2015), accessed 16 May 2016, http://averyreview.com/issues/2/the-promise-of-a- lack. According to the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket), approximately 29,000 new dwellings were completed in Sweden in 2014, closer to 70,000 new dwellings are

White, wide and scattered

3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21 22

required per year between 2015 and 2020, after which at least 50,000 dwellings must be built per year for the next five years to 2025. See Boverket, Rapport 2015: 8 Behov av bostadsbyggande: Teori och metod samt en analys av behovet av bostäder till 2025 (Karlskrona: Boverket, 2015); and the updated figures in Government of Sweden, Fler nya hem (Stockholm: Regeringskansliet, 2015). As Maurizio Lazzarato writes, ‘Since the last financial crisis following the dot-com bust, capitalism has abandoned the epic narratives it had constructed around the “conceptual types” of the entrepreneur, the creative visionary, and the independent worker, “proud of being his own boss”’. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 9. A form of tenure that is subject to corporatist centralized rent negotiations, which is not means tested (and thus not ‘social housing’), and rather relies on a queue system which is open to all Swedish citizens. To give an idea of the shifts at work, we note that whilst in 1990, the percentage of flats that were rental tenure was 71.62 per cent, compared with 28.38 per cent that were tenant-owned; by 2012, the figures were 62.64 per cent and 37.34 per cent, respectively. See Statistics Sweden, Antal lägenheter 1990–2012 efter hustyp och upplåtelseform samt antal fritidshus, accessed 18 February 2016, www. scb.se/Statistik/BO/BO0104/2012A01/Bostadsbestand_efter_hustyp_och_upplatelseform_ (omraknad)_1990-2012.xls. This situation is exacerbated in Stockholm, where, as Bo Bengtsson notes, ‘In the decade following 2000, municipal sales of municipal housing companies and [their] estates, as well as conversions from private and public rentals to cooperative tenant ownership expanded strongly, in particular in Stockholm. In combination with the declining production of rental dwellings in the capital, today individuals and households with modest economic resources have huge difficulties in finding housing in Stockholm’. Bo Bengtsson, ‘Housing and Housing Policy in Sweden’, in Planning and Sustainable Urban Development in Sweden ed., Mats Johan Lundström et al. (Stockholm: Swedish Society for Town and Country Planning, 2013), 175. See the Government of Sweden’s public investigation: Statens offentliga utredningar, Gestaltad livsmiljö – en ny politik för arkitektur, form och design (Stockholm: Statens offentliga utredningar, 2015). See: Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot, ‘Welcome to the Promenade City: Gentri-fictional Images of Thought in the Post-Industrial Age’, Architecture and Culture 3 no. 1 (2015): 397–411. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 28. Awan, Schneider and Till, Spatial Agency, 28. Kristiaan Borret, ‘Introduction: The Entrepreneurial Architect’, Europan 13 Theme: The Adaptable City 2, accessed 18 February 2016, http://europan-europe.eu/media/default/0001/10/e13_topicbrochure_ en_ld_pdf.pdf. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), 232. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2008). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007), 126. James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 30. Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’, 28. See Miguel Vatter’s discussion of the Foucauldian opposition between the ‘pastoral’ establishment of norms of conduct and the ‘political’ establishment of laws as the basis for social order: Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 43. ‘Om hemnet’, Hemnet, accessed 17 February 2016, www.hemnet.se/om. Nick Remsen, ‘Global Street Style Report: Mapping Out the 15 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World’, Vogue 5 (September 2014), accessed 8 January 2015, www.vogue.com/slideshow/1080625/fifteencoolest-street-style-neighborhoods/. See also Runting and Frichot, ‘Welcome to the Promenade City’, 2015. This analysis was undertaken using data from hemnet.se gathered on 17 February 2016, by searching ‘apartments for sale’ in ‘Södermalm’. Each advertisement was logged as to the colour of walls in the cover image and the colour of walls in all the images. Ten advertisements were excluded from the initial sample of 142 due to either being visualizations, construction photographs or because the ads had been removed at the time of being logged, leaving a sample of 132 advertisements. Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology’, GLQ 12 no. 4 (2006), 547. Writing of the figure of the ‘cultural worker on the go’ at the turn of this century, Miwon Kwon dryly observes that ‘[o]ur very sense of self-worth seems predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traveling through elsewheres. Whether we enjoy it or not, we

239

Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

are culturally and economically rewarded for enduring the “wrong” place’. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 157. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 117. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 19. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996). Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 17. As he puts it: ‘[t]oday, value resides neither in appropriation nor in intimacy but in information, in inventiveness, in control, in a continual openness to objective messages – in short, in the syntagmatic calculation which is, strictly speaking, the foundation of the discourse of the modern home-dweller’; Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 23. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 137. Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, 134. Franco Berardi, ‘The Century that Trusted in the Future’, in After the Future, ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), 61. Nancy Fraser calls for a re-engagement, for instance in socialist-feminism. See Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, New Left Review 56 (2009): 97–117. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Vatter, The Republic of the Living. Here, we refer to the work of Luce Irigaray on the debt associated with ‘chora’; Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007 [1978]), 45.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. ‘Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 no. 4 (2006): 543–574. Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. Bengtsson, Bo. ‘Housing and Housing Policy in Sweden’. In Planning and Sustainable Urban Development in Sweden, edited by Mats Johan Lundström, Charlotta Fredriksson and Jacob Witzell, 167–178. Stockholm: Swedish Society for Town and Country Planning, 2013. Berardi, Franco. ‘The Century that Trusted in the Future’. In After the Future, edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn, 15–68. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011. Borret, Kristiaan. ‘Introduction: The Entrepreneurial Architect’. Europan 13 Theme: The Adaptable City 2. Accessed 18 February 2016. http://europan-europe.eu/media/default/0001/10/e13_topicbrochure_en_ld_ pdf.pdf. Boverket, Rapport 2015:8 Behov av bostadsbyggande: Teori och metod samt en analys av behovet av bostäder till 2025. Karlskrona: Boverket, 2015. Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Corner, James. ‘Terra Fluxus’. In The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim, 23–33. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press, 1993. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014. Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is Critique?’. In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 41–82. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007 [1978]. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Picador, 2007. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Picador, 2008. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56 (2009): 97–117. Frichot, Hélène and Helen Runting. ‘The Promise of a Lack: Responding to (Her) Real Estate Career’. The Avery Review no. 8 (May 2015). Accessed 16 May 2016. http://averyreview.com/issues/2/ the-promise-of-a-lack. Government of Sweden. Fler nya hem. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet, 2015. Hemnet. ‘Om hemnet’. Accessed 17 February 2016.www.hemnet.se/om. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

240

White, wide and scattered

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Lazzarato, Maurizio. ‘Immaterial Labour’. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–150. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012. Remsen, Nick. ‘Global Street Style Report: Mapping Out the 15 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World’. Vogue (5 September 2014). Accessed 8 January 2015. www.vogue.com/slideshow/1080625/ fifteen-coolest-street-style-neighborhoods/. Runting, Helen and Hélène Frichot. ‘Welcome to the Promenade City: Gentri-fictional Images of Thought in the Post-Industrial Age’. Architecture and Culture 3 no. 1 (2015): 397–411. Statens offentliga utredningar. Gestaltad livsmiljö – en ny politik för arkitektur, form och design. Stockholm: Statens offentliga utredningar, 2015. Statistics Sweden. Antal lägenheter 1990–2012 efter hustyp och upplåtelseform samt antal fritidshus. Accessed 18 February 2016. www.scb.se/Statistik/BO/BO0104/2012A01/Bostadsbestand_efter_ hustyp_och_upplatelseform_(omraknad)_1990-2012.xls. Vatter, Miguel. The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

241

Chapter 23

Toward a theory of Interior Ross Exo Adams

Without going so far as to claim another ‘death’ of architecture, we may begin to detect a certain architectural nihilism present today, by looking at the way in which one of architecture’s fundamental categories – interior – has become a kind diagram for all others. Populating peri-urban spaces of global cities, there is a distinct kind of architecture that constructs itself around what we could call a strategy of interior: architecture reduced to a single act of enclosure. It produces vast spaces that, from within, appear at every turn to conceal limits, to obscure frontiers, to draw a spectacle around its ability to appear as a horizon. It is an architecture whose design agenda seems consciously concerned with denying its status as a finite object. The inconvenience of its objectstatus, captured only by roaming satellites and banking airplanes, turns out to be an advantage for an architecture whose exteriors are otherwise impossible to capture as a whole. From its exterior, it appears at once totalising and partial, ubiquitous and fragmented. This is architecture that approaches a background condition. From within, however, this architecture expresses something wholly different: it offers itself only in the singular, a unitary space perceived solely through its impossible attempt of sublimation into a state of pure interiority. While it may be useful to interrogate this architecture through its historical developments or map it onto contemporary sociological and political tendencies in order to explain it, I would like to approach this problem inversely. Throughout modern history, the organisation of the material world has been understood as the result of rational human thought translated into material interventions into the world. Architecture, form, space, technology all appear as products explainable in accordance with some form of human

242

Toward a theory of Interior

agency, whether legitimate, just, reasonable or not. This is why, like any other cultural artefacts, architecture presents itself to be eminently representative of values, ideas, economies and policies. Although not wishing to reject this outright, I would like to consider what it might mean to treat architecture (and the entire material ordering of the world, for that matter) with more agency – as also a co-conspirator caught up in social and political transformations. In this sense, it is not so much interior as a category of architecture that I would like to examine, but Interior as a condition that precedes and supersedes its spatial appearance altogether; one that works both parallel to and across architecture, traversing many other scales, networks and materialities at once. In other words, instead of tracing architectural innovations as responses to a certain set of social, economic and political demands, what if the opposite may be true as well? What could it mean if modern political form takes its cue as much from the way in which space, infrastructure and architecture are conceived as it does as a response to rational human discourse? Such a provocation suggests that Interior may be better understood as a political phenomenology – a name for the evermore convoluted relation between space and the immaterial, nonrepresentational and environmental political ontologies of late neoliberalism. The thesis that I would like to elaborate is that, in most cases, architecture serves only as an armature for Interior – a scaffolding on which Interior quietly restructures the world. Though, in very particular cases, architecture captures and produces a kind of caricature of Interior, rendering it momentarily legible as a coherent, perceivable space – as an interior. Despite its relevance in the present, with the concept of Interior, I do not aim to mark a radically new condition, much in the vein that others may theorise the spatial politics of the immediate present – Easterling’s ‘Zone’1 or Bratton’s ‘Stack’,2 for example. Rather I see Interior as a key ontological register of a profound historical transformation that came into view in the early nineteenth century and whose roots extend far back into early modern history with the discovery of the infinite; a transformation whose cybernetic and planetary appearance today may tempt us into claims of radical novelty if not straight up prophecy. The notion of Interior I want to look at will instead allow us to trace both discursive and non-discursive slippages that were definitive in the anonymous project of reconstructing the space of the liberal nation state – a project that emerged not only in the architecture of the nineteenth century, but increasingly across all scales and spaces at once, producing a kind of spatio-political ontology proper to the experience of the modern, capitalist world. Retroactively, we may say that Interior describes the anonymous meta-strategy that underpins the general production of modern space. And while architecture may have lent Interior an initial paradigm from which to reorganise relations between space and power, it has since been at the receiving end of Interior. In other words, the status of architecture has since been undergoing a kind of rudimentary inversion in which one of its fundamental components, having escaped its epistemological confines, only now has begun to double back on itself as a force of a completely different nature, one that shapes architecture through a nearly total set of mandates. Architecture today, I would like to suggest, is always-already interiorised. More an experiment than a paper, I would like to explore Interior through a set of hypotheses. Through these, I will consider Interior simultaneously as a spatio-political

243

Ross Exo Adams

ontology and a way to describe a concrete tendency present in certain contemporary architectural production. Instead of treating architecture as a cultural product through which to read some social or political shifts, changing values, etc., I would like to show how architecture has a kind of schizophrenic capacity, acting as both the product of this larger spatio-political ontology I call Interior, and its accidental allegory. In other words, I want to show how, in a certain lineage of architecture appearing today, Interior manifests itself as both diagram and demonstration, machine and metaphor, fragment and totality. Captured in projects such as Foster and Partner’s Mexico City Airport or Moshe Safdie’s Changi Airport, architecture becomes a kind of pivot around which Interior revolves, oscillating between its more diagrammatic, machinic instrumentality,3 and its instantiation as a kind of unintended allegory for the very condition that produced it. It provides the somewhat awkward situation in which an otherwise invisible configuration of power produces an architecture which also happens to look a lot like it – the unwitting moment where, captured in a precise architectural container, the ontology of power coincides with its full, phenomenological self-portrait. For that reason, such architecture is less useful as a case study to be interrogated in a more traditional sense, than it is as a kind of architectural diagram to illustrate the following set of theses.

Architectonics of Interior Interior is an absolute condition – it both precedes its own construction and defines itself in contrast to nothing. Interior has no exterior. Interior is meta-architecture: it is the technological attempt of architecture to transcend itself through the act of pure enclosure – an architecture so vast as to contain the world. It is architecture separating itself from itself. This is why the objects that occupy the space of Interior are a kind of inchoate architecture – an architecture which, separated from itself, becomes increasingly senseless. Interior admits no limits. Instead, it trades on membranes, thresholds, pressures and vacuums. Interior is sea-like architecture. It is fluid space without dimensions, whose orientation is permanently relative. Just as Interior has no limits, it is decentralised, perceivable only as a horizon. Interior is topological. Neither perceived as a legible space nor understandable as discrete architecture, the meta-architecture of Interior appears by rendering concrete what is virtual in origin. It is spaceless.

Interior’s history Interior is historically produced. Benjamin’s famous interrogation of the nineteenthcentury interior found it to consist of multiple forms: the bourgeois, domestic interior; the interior of the world’s fairs and exhibitions; and the interiors of the Parisian arcades – multiple interiors existing in tension with one another and thus standing in contrast to a general exteriority of the modernising world beyond.4 The domestic interior achieves a level of withdrawal from the ‘reality’ of capitalist labour precisely in its opposition to the

244

Toward a theory of Interior

space of work, the space of the commodity (arcades) and the space of relentless exposure (world’s fairs). Here, interior persists in the classical sense of a space known and perceived in its negation of exteriority. It is a space in which illusion dictates, protecting the individual bourgeois from the trials of labour that reside in its blinding exterior. It becomes the cocoon of natural eternity, immune to the modernising city outside, the experience of the arcade, the micro-politics of capital and the exposure of the world to itself. This is interior in gestation. If interior was, for Benjamin, the space of withdrawal from the world, today interior has replaced the world. Withdrawal is no longer possible. The history of Interior may have roots that extend far back into early modern history, with the discovery and subsequent fascination with the infinite. While this discovery was cause for a series of crises that helped shake apart the premodern world in Europe,5 it soon became an integral part of the European experience that developed through the controlled engineering of territory and proceeded unchecked in the administrative spaces of its colonial exterior.6 The Atlantic gulf that separated a space conceived entirely by exploiting the infinite from one in which the infinite remained a seventeenth-century experiment in gardening7 would collapse by the nineteenth century with the discovery of network (réseau) as a spatial concept.8 What ensued is what we could call the maritimisation of the land – the limitlessness of the sea invested in transnational infrastructures on land.9 This is Interior before it was ever illuminated in architectural form. However, the emergence of Interior as a legible, socially coherent spatial category, whose sentient qualities could be reproducible, was perhaps, as Benjamin suggests, in the nineteenth century. Its appearance in domestic real estate and in the glassy palaces of industrialism across Europe is both exceptional and stands as the scaffolding for technologies of an increasingly persistent experience of the everyday. The two extremes of this architecture of Interior attempt, on the one hand, to register in monumental architectural interiors the expansive energies of industrial capitalism as Europe’s new imperial project of infinite transcendence while, on the other, to invest desperately in furniture and upholstery to tether the evermore immaterial and circulating status of domestic enclosures to a long-lost kingdom of the sensible. Yet Interior-asarchitecture is only a momentary habitat for a category rapidly discovering its own ontological territory – a category that needs less and less representation: in this set of experiments, architecture becomes a category of Interior, rather than the opposite. Over the course of the nineteenth century, architecture experienced a certain erosion which appeared to go hand in hand with the increasing scales it achieved. In some cases (Palais de l’industrie, 1855; Grand Palais, 1897), it is the roof and ceiling that disappear, giving way to a sky measured in mullions. In other cases, the façades and vertical partitions follow suit, giving way to glass and iron enclosures not seen before (Crystal Palace, 1852). From its exterior, such structures retain a certain lexicon of architectural proportions – architectonic shells whose symmetry, scale and great axes reference royal palaces of centuries past. In these odd new objects populating European capitals, the celebration of transparency coincides with the enjoyment of scale, forcing their interiors to remain decidedly sparse. This was a moment in which architecture

245

Ross Exo Adams

sought to master a centuries-old design technique previously achieved only in the landscape and garden design of Le Nôtre and his followers: the convincing construction of the infinite. It was therefore a matter of architecture to display such vastness through a play of slender lines. The atmospheric haze that, in turn, filled these interiors was an unexpected bonus of a new aesthetic of the immense. With the exploitation of scale that these buildings achieved, architecture, as stone, brick, mortar and wood only obstructed the experience of interiority they produced and would thus have to be discarded: to fully exploit the experience of Interior, architecture as such would have to disappear. Indeed, what is happening at the same time as the bourgeois interior, the world’s fairs and exhibition architectures, the arcades and every other architectural expression of Interior erupting across European capitals in the nineteenth century, is another, far less visible condensation of Interior as a spatio-political paradigm operating at and beyond the scale of Europe. Peter Sloterdijk captures the multiplicity of Interior in his concept of ‘world interior’, drawing from Paxton’s Crystal Palace as a crucial metaphor of the capitalist world.10 And perhaps this is precisely because this architecture is only a metaphor for this structure of power, a momentary demonstration of a trans-scalar condition. Since the nineteenth century, Interior has become the dominant ontological condition of modern life. Interior cuts across accounts of globalisation, neoliberalism, Empire and biopower by silently constructing life as a problem whose universal solution is always-already (and evermore exclusively) spatial. This is why, as much as Interior may be legible through a history of architectural production, Interior also annihilates history. It squeezes time with the pure gravity of its total illumination of the present. Time in Interior collapses in on itself into a single point. Surrogate histories abound within a space-time in which risk presents itself in the permanence of its absence. Interior is the unfolding of the future in real time.

Machine Interior is a relation of transparency. Interior has no cracks, no nooks, no obscurity. Shadows exist only to project the otherwise invisible presence of interior. It is a space of total illumination. It is the infrastructure that enables a total visibility of human behaviour. Interior is where life is coerced by exposing it to itself. It is conduct made spatial. Interior is a space comprehensible only by its constant interpellation. Its power is passive and increasingly relies on the spatial effects it produces by exposing life to the sublime terror of sharing a single, crystalline space. It is the container for voluntary yet total participation. Its architectonics mould social relations into quasi-occult gestures, signalled codes – communication as pure form without content – a totalising transparency that presses all opacity into a paranoid non-relation to the self. Interior is the electrification of the socius with an anxious potentiality – a totalising charge that reduces life to its generalised conduct.

246

Toward a theory of Interior

Interior is an architecture of silence. Yet in its monopoly over silence, it forbids silence from those who inhabit it. It is a space of coerced chatter. The space of interior speaks endlessly one phrase: ‘everything is ok’. Interior displaces. It demands perpetual motion. It achieves stability as an equilibrium of non-aligned bodies set in constant motion. This is why the only orientation interior permits is that relativised to each body. If all motion stops, if motions begin to cohere into motion, its stasis is compromised and interior becomes dangerous, volatile. The glassy shells that exhibition architecture of the nineteenth century gave way to were not so much skins of buildings, as they were screens that mediated multiple interiors and exteriors: from inside the great palaces of transparency, the glass walls and ceilings filtered through the outside world as a kind of immunised projection of exteriority; an alter-exteriority that envelopes the interior. Likewise, because of the effect of boundless light from all sides, the interior achieves a space far too large to be conceived of in architectural terms as ‘interior’; rather, it appears as a continuation of the city, a reproduction of the exterior world replete with interiors, buildings, trees, nature, clouds and breezes. Architecture becomes a device that produces interior, but interior here is no longer to be understood in the traditional, architectural sense. Rather, Interior now signals an ontological condition given by security, control and the need to contain and make visible everything in a single space. Through this type of architecture, Interior is a kind of stage on which a parallel world is produced. This is the point of the world expositions for which such architecture is initially constructed: one enters these structures as a means to consciously bear witness to a staged world – an interior of props enclosed in a vessel whose aim is to reproduce the exuberance unleashed in the enlightened imperial project of world industry. The vision of connecting a world with technologies of travel, machines of circulation, all contained in a vast glass structure, indeed reproduced a precise image and idealism of the world yet to come. The enclosure and its illusory mediation of liminal conditions is necessary as both separation from the imperfect, violently modernising world outside and container for the frenzied dreams of one to come: architecture as a device of separation and projection. From the nineteenth century’s fascination in exhibition architecture, through the techno-positivism of Reyner Banham, Buckminster-Fuller, Archigram and the lot of what has been called ‘hippie modernism’,11 for quite some time experiments in architectural interiority have ridden upon the great urge to expand translucent skins across whatever seems most alien to containment – a bizarre jouissance discovered in enclosing the world. While this architecture relies almost entirely on its existence as façade, it is perhaps no longer accurate to speak of such a technology as a ‘façade’. For this architecture conceives of itself as a kind of container whose boundary condition separates not interior from exterior, but rather divides the world into two. One world is curated, organised, systematised; it is a conditioned world conscious of its status as also a demonstration of the world. The other is a remainder – a space of unknown domesticity. Thus, it may be more precise to understand the façade of such architecture as an ontological technology – a single structure meant to choreograph an existence of the world as interior.

247

Ross Exo Adams

Political phenomenology Interior is a technology of subjectivity. Yet far from producing subjectivity, the glassy horizon of Interior destroys it since the operative consistency of subjectivity would presuppose the singularity and visibility of power. In its place, Interior manages the perpetual coordination of life not as a mass of bodies (as in Hobbes), but as a homeostasis of dividuals, each enacting its own machinic trajectory in space. If modern subjectivity draws a certain origin from Hobbes’ relation between the Subject and the Sovereign, this relation always inscribed subjectivity in its own absolute interiority of the body itself – a private interior within the exterior of public law.12 The slow and indirect struggle to release subjectivity from its absolute interiorisation begins with Locke’s promotion of the law of private censure, a law which exteriorises private opinion in public space, but only by subsequently interiorising this from the political exterior of the state in a cocoon of universal moral judgement. The web of secret societies, lodges and occult practices that spread itself across Europe and culminated in a power based on communication stood as a kind of interiorised exterior to the state, or an exterior from the state in which the interior of subjectivity could find proto-public purchase.13 This is the blueprint of Interior as a convoluted technology of subjectivity. Interior admits no negativity. This is not because it precludes negativity, but because it translates it through a lexicon of positivities; it conceals it through gestures, encapsulates it in casual swaggers, it moulds it into a confident stride. It interiorises negativity as a thousand mobile interiors circulating across its smoothness. Negativity as such is never constructive since it remains always partial, forgotten, embryonic. Negativity in Interior, in turn, becomes pathological, precluding its conscious mobilisation as a directed rupture. Interior is the ‘inferno of the Same’.14 Interior thrives on a currency of terror produced by constructing itself as an arena of potentially limitless Otherness. It is this terror which gives consistency to the experience of interior whose neutralisation is guaranteed by the universally voluntary abandonment of human countenance. Interior disables the Other amidst a mass of circulating bodies. This is why architectural images that depict Interior always privilege the body from the back. Interior is an architectonics of crisis. It is Empire’s insides. It reconstructs the world as a world of interiors. Yet because Interior is not so much an architecture, we could say that it is instead the phenomenology of Empire. Lacking a spatial exteriority, what stands at the threshold of Interior, permanently pressing in on its delicate transparency, is crisis. Interior is implosive. It is law made immediate, spatial, affective, total.15 Security is experienced as the act of Interior collapsing in on a point of irregularity. It is perhaps the only time when Interior momentarily leaps forth from its atmospheric invisibility, only to evaporate again into the void of its perpetual peace. Violence, in Interior, is the sudden shift of background to foreground. Interior preserves life by ‘futureproofing’ it. It is a crystalline Leviathan, the silent sky under which life voluntarily reproduces its most innocent, automatic gestures.

248

Toward a theory of Interior

While realised in nineteenth-century architecture, it was the second half of the twentieth century’s fascination with cybernetics that confirmed that Interior not only requires no physical enclosure, but that it is scaleless as well. Neither space nor architecture, Interior is principally a system for exhaustively accounting for what happens across time and space. Romanticised visions of responsive, open architecture of the 1960s, like Cedric Price’s Fun Palace or Ian McHarg’s interest in chance and entropy,16 all reflect a moment in which Interior opened itself to the world as a system of planetary scale. The jumps J. W. Forrester was able to make in his systems dynamics, from Industrial Dynamics (1961) to Urban Dynamics (1969) to World Dynamics (1971),17 are indicative of this double discovery. Interior is a single logic that works at and across all scales at once.18

Metaphor It may be that it has become impossible to look to architecture – as a discretely scaled, epistemologically bound field of objects – as a way to understand the nature of contemporary problems or the forces to which it responds. This is not to say that architecture cannot tell us anything about our world; rather, it is to say that such readings may only produce partial conclusions: architecture as beholden to capitalist forms of urbanisation, architecture as the practice and object of spectacle, the vehicle for colonial violence, the site of uneven development, architecture as a form of subjection. It may also be that, in order to grasp a more complete image of power and the way it persists as an entanglement of spatial and technological systems, one has to learn to read architecture as metaphor – the almost accidental points of contact between space and power, categories whose relation today has become at once total and invisible; a relation bent on destroying any evidence of its existence. At its best, architecture today offers itself as the site of an increasingly blurry interaction between manifestations of a set of socio-political and economic forces and the representation of a broader ontology of power they constitute; architecture, as such, appears today as at once paradigm and fragment; machine and metaphor. This strange ‘return’ of metaphor and representation into the language of architecture may strike one as deluded, but that is because its ‘return’, I would like to suggest, is completely accidental: the metaphorical role that certain architecture plays is the result of an unintentional ‘genius’ that appears in projects which manage to construct a perfect architectural-scale allegory for the otherwise unrepresentable spatial ontology of contemporary power. Interior is the phenomenology of Empire, the architectonics of security, the pedagogical technologies of environmentality,19 the human colonial machine of neoliberalism. Strikingly, it is in a project such as Foster and Partners’ Mexico City Airport that this entire topology of power comes together in what is clearly both a machine and an unintentional model of it – the embarrassing moment in which architecture makes visible what seems otherwise impossible – by design – to render. It is perhaps time to take the ‘message’ of such an unintended metaphor very seriously.

249

Ross Exo Adams

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2015). Benjamin Bratton, ‘The Stack’, Log 35 (2015): 129–159. Here I draw on Maurizio Lazzarato’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on ‘machinic enslavement’ in contrast to social subjection to identify two primary means through which capitalist power operates: ‘If subjection calls on consciousness and representations of the subject, machinic enslavement […] activates pre-personal, pre-cognitive, and pre-verbal forces (perception, sense, affects, desire) as well as supra-personal forces (machinic, linguistic, social, media, economic systems, etc.).’ Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 26–27. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2006). Ross E. Adams, Circulation and Urbanization (London: SAGE Publications, forthcoming). Leonardo Benevolo, La cattura dell’infinito (Rome: Laterza, 1991). Michel Chevalier, Le Système de la Méditerranée (Paris: Bureau du Globe, 1832). Ross E. Adams, ‘Urbanization of Land and Sea’, in Territory beyond Terra, ed. Phil Steinberg et al. (London: Roman and Littlefield International, forthcoming). Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). A recent exhibition (October 2015–February 2016) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, entitled ‘Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia’, examines the design, architecture and artwork of counterculture figures from the 1960s and 1970s, including that of Archigram, Haus-Rucker-Co and others. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin, 1986). Reinhold Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 62–97. Byung-Chul Han, Society of Transparency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Margot Lystra, ‘McHarg’s Entropy, Halprin’s Chance: Representations of Cybernetic Change in 1960s Landscape Architecture’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly 34 (2014): 71–84. Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, 1961); Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); Jay W. Forrester, World Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, 1971). For more on the way cybernetic technologies ontologically alter notions of ‘scale’ with regard to design, law and politics, see Ross E. Adams, ‘An Ecology of Bodies’, in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. The Avery Review (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016). ‘Environmentality’ is a term that Michel Foucault began to explore in a set of notes that followed his final lecture (21 March 1979) at the Collège de France of the series The Birth of Biopolitics. In his explorations of neoliberalism, especially pertaining to certain contemporaneous developments in American neoliberalism, Foucault began imagining a mode of governance that worked through a milieu, rather than through the direct application of laws, coercion and other forms of normalisation. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 239–265.

Bibliography Adams, Ross E. ‘An Ecology of Bodies’. In Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, edited by The Avery Review. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016, 181–191. Adams, Ross E. Circulation and Urbanization. London: SAGE Publications, forthcoming. Adams, Ross E. ‘Urbanization of Land and Sea’. In Territory Beyond Terra, edited by Phil Steinberg, Kimberly Anne Peters and Elaine Stratford. London: Stratford Roman and Littlefield International, forthcoming. Benevolo, Leonardo, La cattura dell’infinito. Rome: Laterza, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015: 129–159. Chevalier, Michel. Le Système de la Méditerranée. Paris: Bureau du Globe, 1832. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2015. Forrester, Jay W. Industrial Dynamics. Waltham: Pegasus Communications, 1961. Forrester, Jay W. Urban Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. Forrester, Jay W. World Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, 1971.

250

Toward a theory of Interior

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Han, Byung-Chul. Society of Transparency. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1986. Koselleck, Reinhold. Critique and Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014. Lystra, Margot. ‘McHarg’s Entropy, Halprin’s Chance: Representations of Cybernetic Change in 1960s Landscape Architecture’. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly 34 (2014): 71–84. Massumi, Brian. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press, 2006. Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

251

Chapter 24

Repositioning. Theory now. Don’t excavate, change reality! Roemer van Toorn

Theory is no longer theoretical, when it loses sight of its conditional nature, takes no risk in speculation, and circulates as a form of administrative inquisition over the world paralyzing all of us practitioners.1 (Trinth T. Minh-ha) I have always maintained that architects, more than any other educated group in society, ought to serve as our society’s real intellectual commandos. After all, who else may, and indeed must, deal with both economics and biology, human collectivities and geometry, history and matter?2 (Sanford Kwinter) Critique has become the primary mode of practising theory. A growing dissatisfaction with the political capacities of critique is emerging facing the many crises of our bewildering modernity and the many unintended consequences it produces. The persistence of melancholy as a primary effect of much contemporary theory derives from the recognition of this inability of critique to fulfil its transformative promises. And yet such expressions of dissatisfaction with critique – from an often disenchanted elite – are generally not accompanied by propositions of a different practice of theory as political intervention. With my plea for the architect as public intellectual I look for an optimistic critique – a new theory – that projects alternatives with a passion for the real. This means that we need a new model for theory and the role of theorist that aims at a social project which is both after independence (autonomy) and a new idea of emancipation. As

252

Theory now

philosopher Alain Badiou remarked, we cannot just continue the experiences of the last century. It is important to understand that our global condition is in need of a new conceptual framework after the failure of late-capitalism, the destruction of nature and the arrival of the digital. Opportunities arise to develop alternatives from within, now that a critical position negating the real from the outside is no longer an option. It is not hard to imagine affluent communities protected by walls, watchtowers, searchlights and machine guns (as Donald Trump and the European Community have advocated recently), while the poor scavenge for food in the wastelands beyond. More encouraging are the social movements seeking to sketch out new relations between globality and locality, diversity and solidarity. Confronted with an implacable political enemy, and a fundamentalist one at that, the West will no doubt be forced more and more to reflect on the foundations of its own civilisation, and on what other civic imaginations could be enacted. We have to imagine the possibility of something else based on a new idea of the collective and the individual, its hybrid formations, confront the many forms of struggle in concrete situations today, and what happiness entails. Our idea of the city, the countryside, the community, infrastructure, housing, migration, transport, nature, work, leisure, the natural and the virtual, the poor and the rich, and many other co-existences are at stake. The old, linear maps which helped and taught us to navigate in the past, all no longer work. New forms of civil belonging, which in our contemporary world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic, need to be developed. Some of those forms will likely have something of the intimacy of tribal or community relations, while others will be highly abstract, virtual, mediated and indirect. In simple terms it boils down to the research question: what could it mean to be modern today within the very domain of praxis? With this question we could contribute and develop a framework of architectural theory for the future that calls for a skill in ethical and formal judgement that stems from a study of humanistic and social thought, avoiding an architectural knowledge of practice or design intelligence based on pragmatic needs only. Architectural theory can come from many directions informing the praxis of architecture. These different directions generate points of view that can be, and indeed are, all-relevant; but how they could drive a social and ethical relevant practice is a question that, I believe, architectural theory needs to address today. More than ever – following Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said3 – the intellectual needs to develop and have a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going about her/his business. The central fact, says Said, is that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, the public sphere. […] And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the carpet.4

253

Roemer van Toorn

Theory: to reflect The primary mode of practising theory today is still concerned with critique. The work of philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, linguists and alike has been brought into architectural theory courses, introducing students to the study of social science and humanities; demonstrating how architecture is perceived and utilized. Theorists such as Charles Jencks, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes demonstrate that the meaning of buildings as interpreted by society, might not match up with the intentions of the architect. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are of importance to understand that architecture is not autonomous but plays an integral part in the legal, institutional, political, economic and social order. Gilles Deleuze, like Maurizio Lazzarato, and Donna Haraway teach us, among other issues, that machines have invaded everyday life, producing a new kind of complexity of both machines and subjects. Sociologists from George Simmel, Sharon Zukin to Ulrich Beck provide insights into the urban condition and its endless modes of modernization. Geographers from David Harvey, Mike Davis, Saskia Sassen, Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski study the devastating and mutating social effects of global capitalism. And the studies of post-colonialism by Edward Said and Ariella Azoulay, for instance, show the importance of being sensitive to cultural and social differences and equality; and that a new civil imagination is essential given our increasingly global practice. A lot can be learned by placing systems into question from theoretical perspectives, critically analysing architecture production from the outside. Knowledge gained from the humanities and social studies challenge the disciplinary boundaries of architecture and need to be an essential part of the education of the architect allowing the re-examination of the common places of an often too complacent and tradition-bound practice; but here architecture theory should not stop, the question is as much how theory can drive practice – become operational.

Theory: a practice of action Although of essential importance – as explained above – I see theory not only as a system of ideas intended to reflect, but – as in the Greek meaning of theoria – to see, to look, to speculate; to have the possibility of a vision. In other words, the role of theory is also about constructing vantage points towards our contemporary and future condition making it possible to operate from within architecture. Theory is as much about establishing concepts through which a community (a team of researchers, an institution, students and society) can develop a shared understanding of an issue. Operating in such a manner, theory needs to develop a common view and establish a practice of action that, if possible, reaches outside the limits and boundaries of accepted fields and methods, hybridizing them, inventing new categories and new modes of experimentation that include the rewriting/mobilizing of history from novel and actual perspectives, and put forth concepts under a common framework that allows us to grasp the multiplicity of things and events without reducing them to one-liners.

254

Theory now

Theory: and urgency Instead of ‘only’ looking critically at the architectural consequences of the state of things, feeling lost and paralyzed while ‘celebrating’ the many crises of late-capitalism, we need to develop ways of looking forward, and see how theory can be framing a discourse – developing ideas and models of practice – around possible futures. The post-structuralist discourse reached a definite limit in both architectural practice and the imagination. What is at stake for theory – instead of theory theorizing itself, architecture architecting itself and history historizing itself, as Catherine Ingraham5 recently remarked – is how theory, without the risk of engaging the contemporary all too thankfully, which could be a trap for it, can contribute to new or updated tools to help transform the dominant apparatus from within, to reverse its hierarchies and to help redirect architecture’s possible relation to it. At stake here is taking time to do so, guaranteeing independence, developing theories in dialogue (and in debate) through research institutes (such as universities), media platforms (books, conferences, conversations, exhibitions), alliances with practice engaging the real – as an act of framing a discourse – around much-needed possible futures. A new sense of urgency, looking further than the present moment, needs to be thought, researched, outlined and experimented with.

Theory: its fields of knowledge Many different kinds of fields of knowledge encompass the idea of architectural theory. I already mentioned above those outside the domain of architecture that help frame the nature of practice and its role in society, but the many ‘manifests’6 the discipline is rich with from antiquity to the present, its approaches ((op)positions) and debates, constitute the ideological theory and pragmatic knowledge of the profession; its aesthetic, ethical and methodological, developed over the ages too. It is this history of concepts, media and construction by which the past was created and the future could be built. And, last but not least, the hard data and experiential results (performance) that are the substances of structural, material, technical, computational, environmental, infrastructural and planning decisions do mobilize new ideas (theories) too, and make them visible.

Theory now Through the humanities and the social sciences heavily steering architectural theory, architecture is becoming a kind of ‘sociology’, so to speak; and with the race to technical, computational and data mapping expertise, much of the formal and aesthetic theory that was part of architecture practice (its architectural and historical knowledge) has disappeared from the field of theoretical investigation. What is needed – also in the light of theory becoming a practice of action confronting urgencies – is a rethinking and in-depth study of the performative and relational qualities of space and form (the

255

Roemer van Toorn

sensorium of time and space and its aesthetic complex): how can form, light, (infra) structure, proportion – elements of architecture among others – be further developed addressing the social and political issues the twenty-first century is confronted with? With respect to the new forms engineered by advanced computational technologies of digital media, iteration and fabrication architecture, including new financial systems of property and debt in place, the societal role and meaning of our built environment – and that of the profession – is changing and will further radically change. Not only the opportunity and digital effect of technology upon the practice and how it could enlighten new societal agendas, but also other insights – such as the performative concept of ‘action form’ (in opposition to ‘object-form’ as outlined by Keller Easterling), or how the operating system through the software for global infrastructural space is scripted by financial systems, or how yes-men in the language of ecometrics, informatics and management could be hacked – as part of a co-opting strategy of change as explained by Benjamin Bratton.7 And other relevant insights as they occur within society need to be investigated and discussed from a much-needed agenda of emancipation; how they can inform and have an impact upon the practice and meaning of architecture for a better future to come. With the question ‘what it could mean to be modern?’ – investigating what I have called our ‘Society of the And’8 – I am investigating a modernity that takes the bewildering interdependence, its unintended consequences and alterity to be its core. On the one hand, I believe that it becomes crucial to safeguard whatever movement of difference can keep the system from locking down on itself. We should be on the lookout for the open-ended productive struggle between sameness and difference, between a system and its other. But, on the other hand, generating open systems (allowing otherness and running room) is not enough, as Slavoj Žižek9 has remarked critically, late-capitalism has become Deleuzian. What we need is a civil imagination, or in other words a missing third: a third political project, which you can call emancipation. Explaining this would take too long, but what we can say – following Nancy Fraser10 – is that the conflict between marketization and social protection cannot be understood in isolation from a much-needed project of emancipation, a political project against oppression. Another topic that challenges architecture and deserves to be researched is the changing perception and understanding of what an object, as assemblage, actually allows, and what its agency is. It is perhaps mentally easier to divide humans and objects, but when we use objects, and buildings among them, and their space, we emphasize the continuing interplay between objects and people. Once we understand the interplay between form and content, building a Vertical Forest in Milan (Stefano Boeri) may perhaps look strange, but in fact it hints at a much-needed ‘other’ reality combining cosmopolitan life with a new sense of the natural. The taxonomical division between dead objects and people as alive has blinded us to the ways and means by which objects do change us, and it obscures the areas of intervention where design can and could reshape our social life. Instead of only listening to the architect as author we should study the performance of buildings in their discourse of use, both on the level of perception (being both representational and experiential), and the space of appearance,

256

Theory now

the affects (sensations) and the usefulness. For that reason, I prefer to talk about the quasi-object11 instead of the classical object, those quasi-objects that are both social and technical. I believe that we need to ask ourselves what it means to make architecture politically. The problem is not to make political architecture, but to make architecture politically. With my research ‘Aesthetics as a form of politics’12 – very much inspired by Jacques Rancière – I am investigating how architecture frames certain kinds of spacetime sensoriums, as these sensoriums define modalities of being together or apart, organizing inside or outside, in the lead or towards the middle. The aesthetics as a form of politics I am after is based on dissensus (agonism), equality and the need to create objects and subjects anew. Architecture can do that up to a point, through specific modes of dissensus and agonism. What I am researching is how such an agonistic struggle in spatial settings, frameworks and representations allows us to envisage a struggle between different interpretations of shared principles, enacting a conflictual consensus – ‘consensus on the principles, [and] disagreement about their interpretation’,13 as Chantal Mouffe puts it. It entails a move from negation to a negotiation with the status quo, operating from within, co-opting the system while projecting alternatives. It is a move from a melancholic ‘No’ of critical resistance (and of most theory) to a ‘Yes’ of what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe14 call radical democracy, a practice that develops work from both within and against the status quo while striving for an And/ Other: the beginning of emancipating projects.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11

Trinth T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Sanford Kwinter, Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2010). See also Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures (London: Vintage Books, 1994). Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 1113. Catherine Ingraham, ‘Hospitality’, in 2000+ The Urgencies of Architectural Theory, ed. James Graham (New York: GSAPP Books/Columbia University Press, 2015), 54–64. See for instance: Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture: 1943–1968. A Documentary Anthology (New York: Columbia Book of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993); K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995); A. Krista Sykes, ed., Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); Hilde Heynen, André Loeckx, Lieven de Cauter, Karina van Herck, eds, Dat is architectuur. Sleautelteksten uit de twinstigste eeuw (Rotterdam: NAi 010 publishers, 2001). Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Roemer van Toorn, The Society of the And. The Bewildering Interdependence of our Times (forthcoming). See also Roemer van Toorn, accessed 7 July 2016, www.roemervantoorn.nl/ societyoftheandp.html. Slavoj Žižek, Organ without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004). Nancy Fraser, ‘A triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi’, New Left Review 81 (May/June 2013): 119–132. Roemer van Toorn, ‘The Quasi Object. Purity and Provocation in the Library of Utrecht by Wiel Arets’, in Living Library: Wiel Arets: University Library Utrecht, ed. Marijke Beek (Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2005), 204–207.

257

Roemer van Toorn

12 13 14

Roemer van Toorn, ‘Aesthetics as a Form of Politics’, in Open! Key Texts, 2004–2012, ed. Jorinde Seijdel and Liesbeth Melis (Rotterdam: NAi 010 publishers, 2013). Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 109. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democractic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

Bibliography Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Conrads, Ulrich. Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Frankfurt am Mein, Berlin: Ullstein, 1964). English edition: Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture. London: Lund Humphries/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970. Fraser, Nancy. ‘A triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi’. New Left Review 81 (May/ June 2013): 119–132. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Heynen, Hilde, André Loeckx, Lieven de Cauter and Karina van Herck, eds. Dat is architectuur. Sleautelteksten uit de twinstigste eeuw. Rotterdam: NAi 010 publishers, 2001. Ingraham, Catherine. ‘Hospitality’. In 2000+ The Urgencies of Architectural Theory, edited by James Graham, 54–64. New York: GSAPP Books/Columbia University Press, 2015. Kwinter, Sanford. Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium. Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2010. Minh-ha, Trinth T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013. Mouffe, Chantal and Ernesto Laclau. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Nesbitt, Kate, ed. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory for 1965–1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. Ockman, Joan, ed. Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Columbia Book of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. London: Vintage Books, 1994. Sykes, A. Krista, ed. Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. van Toorn, Roemer. ‘The Quasi Object. Purity and Provocation in the Library of Utrecht by Wiel Arets’. In Living Library: Wiel Arets: University Library Utrecht, edited by Marijke Beek, 204–207. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2005. van Toorn, Roemer. ‘Aesthetics as a Form of Politics’. In Open! Key Texts, 2004–2012, edited by Jorinde Seijdel and Liesbeth Melis. Rotterdam: NAi 010 publishers, 2013. Van Toorn, Roemer. The Society of the And. The Bewildering Interdependence of our Times (forthcoming). Žižek, Slavoj. Organ Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004.

258

Part VII Forms of engagement

This page intentionally left bank

Chapter 25

(Un)political Pippo Ciorra

Dark side This text is born out of a vague sense of malaise, the feeling of moving about on a dangerous dark side, unexpectedly aroused in its author by an overwhelming return of the ‘political’ theme at the heart of the interests of contemporary architects, artists, scholars and curators. This pivotal role of ‘commitment’ does not just characterize the work of groups and individuals whose approach has an explicitly activist nature, but actually dominates the scene at 360 degrees, from ‘under 30’ groups that operate ‘in the social area’ all the way to the Pritzker Prize,1 from the remotest and most underground initiatives, to exhibitions in the most important and institutional museums. Theoretically, this phenomenon, which has by now been acknowledged also by the mass media,2 should gratify the weary soul of a survivor of the 1970s that this author is. Instead, along with a certain endearment, it provokes a feeling of distrust, and arouses many difficult questions. Some of these questions can be used as starting points for this short essay, although what follows will not really provide answers. We can therefore consider this exercise as the opportunity for a very modest first approach to the new scenarios in the relationships between architecture and politics, which indeed should deserve a rather different space and commitment. The three questions that we can use to start this discussion are as follows. The first concerns the reasons for the malaise and distrust that so much ‘passion’ stirs up in me. The second question asks why, unlike other phases in our recent history, the

261

Pippo Ciorra

presence of political commitment in the work of contemporary authors does not appear to be upheld by a more general consensus and by a proportionate citizens’ inclination toward engagement in (traditionally understood) political life.3 With the third and last question, the most pertinent of all, we wonder whether engagement, as it was called in other phases of European and world history, actually represents a credible and promising way out from the crisis of the disciplines interested in social space, especially architecture, urban studies and public art. To be prepared to deal with such a dark theme, I could not help but seek support in equally dark references, or at least equally extreme ones in the way they relate, from distant positions, to the issue of politics. So, to delimit my field of action I traced two opinions that are the opposite of one another: on the one hand, the highly appreciated essay by Pier Vittorio Aureli on the Project of Autonomy,4 which emphasizes operative criticism and the analogy between political project and architectural project (or rather, to paraphrase Tronti, between the autonomy of the political5 and the autonomy of architecture). On the other hand, the opinion expressed in an accursed book such as Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man,6 which the author of the Magic Mountain used as an outlet to voice his doubts on the call to (political) arms launched to artists and literati by many of his contemporary intellectuals, his brother Heinrich first of all, in the Germany that had just emerged from the Great War and had not as yet entered the Weimar period (the book came out in 1918, almost a century ago). These are obviously two difficult texts, the former because it is hard to separate it from its author’s design and teaching activity, and the latter because it consists of a long-winded outburst that always wavers between public and private, which will become even more difficult to approach in light of the history that followed and Mann’s ambivalence during the Nazi period. Despite this, these two texts can be of use for the construction of this short argumentation. The former because it is among those that have breathed life into a sort of variegated return to the hegemony of the political in design; the latter owing to its tendency to exasperate doubts and uncertainties on the role of art and on the way artists participate in a country’s political life. And also owing to its painfully introspective nature, which cannot be denied when one chooses to write a text that ventures into the Dark Side. ‘The soul [of art] is not political: for a German,’ wrote Thomas Mann not without angst, ‘there is no need to belong to the evil nineteenth century to turn this ‘is not’ into a matter of life or death. The difference between the soul and politics implies that between culture and civilization, between soul and society, between freedom and the right to vote, between art and culture.’ 7

Politics and architecture There is yet another distinction that must be made before delving into this slippery subject. The difference between the art/politics and the architecture/politics relationship needs to be clarified. In the field of the visual and performing arts, the presence of a political theme is generally a ‘normal’ (and consolidated) aspect of the artist’s work. The

262

(Un)political

author consciously chooses to attach a political value (or content) to his work, or less heroically to give a shape to his client’s need for political communication, as is the case for many forms of celebratory and ‘state’ art.8 Conversely, there are works and artists who do not aspire to an explicit political content, and limit themselves to the work’s technical and expressive (narrative, descriptive, decorative, linguistic and so on) potential. In architecture (and even less so in urban studies) this choice does not exist. Each work – whether public or private – contributes to shaping the social space, and therefore has a political value, whether or not the architect realizes this, whether or not he or she wants it to be so. Actually, in our culture we tend to attribute this prerogative to the specific identity of the work of the architect/urbanist, while other similar professional figures – engineer, surveyor, different types of experts – who also have the authority to modify the inhabited space, take an approach that is strongly oriented toward taking into account only, and above all, the client’s functional needs and desires. This makes it almost impossible to speak of a relationship between architecture and politics: it would simply mean dealing in one glance with the entire history of architecture through its buildings, authors, projects. Allow me to clarify, therefore, that the phenomenon that I am trying to frame in this writing has temporal and programmatic limits. I am in fact interested in cases and situations that have especially occurred in the recent past, starting from the financial meltdown of 2008, and that implicate authors who explicitly uphold the central role of politics in their work. This does not mean that I will not be forced to sometimes refer to and make comparisons with previous eras and situations – the same ones that many of the contemporary authors that come to mind draw upon – or to the intrinsically utopian nature of modernism.

Commitment vs. engagement At first sight, I would say there are two large families of ‘militants’ in the renewed passion for architecture as political action, especially if we exclude the strictly environmental question. The first family is the one that leans toward commitment, and is made up of an endless list of authors, curators, scholars, who devote most of their time to producing or theorizing activities and projects based on alternative modalities of interaction between the architect/artist and the community. The clearest and most immediate example of these ‘participatory’ architects (collaborative, bottom-up, sociallysensitive, among other terms) are groups such as Raumlaborberlin, the French group Exyzt,9 the British team assemble, the Italian Orizzontale, to name a few. Their utopia seems to be that of moving – at least conceptually – the indicator of authorship to the users’ side, and of setting forth an idea of work that is defined, above all, by its use and by its being built collaboratively and ‘inhabited’ by a community.10 Ultimately, this is the postmodern evolution of the well-known concept of ‘participation’, and it is generally aimed at offering to the community in question some form of requalification (physical, environmental, even psychological) of the context . This improvement is often of a pragmatic nature, and it is not necessarily related to a broader ‘political project’ for the

263

Pippo Ciorra

transformation of society. It is a form of commitment that is, rather, coherent with the current social fabric, a fragmented and volatile one, and it implicitly tends to seek a new location (social role) for the architect and the artist, both orphans of the historical dialogue with the middle and the intellectual classes. The architect, whose work has been expelled by the sphere of welfare, seeks new means of interchange with society, farremoved from the old client–architect hierarchies. The artist seeks to drag the solitude of ‘talent’ into the mechanisms of production and dialogue that will endow with meaning the market’s profit-making drive. Whereas the dissemination of such a mentality appears to be substantially coherent with what takes place in society and with the contradictory mixture of individualism and sharing solidarity that characterizes our day and age, the second family of the ‘politicized’, which are perhaps more interesting with respect to our approach, seems to be oriented more toward engagement than toward commitment. By engagement we mean something similar to what had occurred in post-war Italy,11 that is, the adherence to some ‘partisan’ ideological ‘position’ and to the potential political projects that represent it, with the aim to draw artistic/architectural strength precisely from the friction between reality and design, and from the antagonistic nature of the work. Aureli explicitly speaks of the option ‘against from within’,12 which was certainly in the everyday practice of many Italian intellectuals in the 1970s, but that with equal evidence reminds us, at least by assonance, of the Christian component of the political antagonism of those years and of John’s ‘we live in the world but are not of the world’. Referring to this ‘trend’, no doubt, are the allusions to the propulsive force of ideology in architecture contained in the above-mentioned Project of Autonomy, but also the myriad and often more confused calls by other authors to the need for resurrecting Utopia, to a reloaded return to radical tradition, to a liquid version of the architecture and/or revolution debate.

Ostalgie Needless to say, there is no shortage of good reasons for this particular form of architectural Ostalgie. For the world, things are definitely getting worse, at least in terms of geographical inequality and income; the turbo-Capitalism of the late twentieth century appears to have been transformed into a Moloch that is out of control even with respect to its own leaders; peace (military, environmental, social) seems to be more than ever threatened (or violated), even within the borders of the Western democratic oasis, and ‘European values’ escape from under Merkel’s skirt in all directions. It is still complicated, however, to understand and classify, according to twentieth-century ideological categories, the modalities with which the social body – from the impoverished members of the middle class to the truly downtrodden – reacts to the new conditions of ‘exploitation’. It is hard to channel the dissent, and also hard to understand the role of the artist (I consider the figure of the intellectual to be obsolete) within this scenario: becoming committed to collaborative and alternative projects (bottom-up ethics),

264

(Un)political

enrolling in precise ideological groups (recuperating traces of the grands récits undermined by the postmodern), or counting solely on the internal strength of the imagination and the discipline as the implicitly necessary building blocks of democracy. Or even going back to being the demiurge à la Koolhaas, who managed the metamorphosis from starchitect to a new and romantic figure at once, seamlessly oscillating between nihilism and the new European ruling class, between Toni Negri and Romano Prodi, to then move on to Putin and to a vast range of leaders who are not exactly what you would call ‘democratic’. It is an exalting and gloriously Nietzschian choice, unfortunately accessible only to few. However, it is impossible for us to move all at the same level as Koolhaas, where centrality is still something that belongs to the architect and not to the architecture. So, for many contemporary designers who yearn to be ‘committed’, all that is left is often to go back to gazing insistently at a period when the collaboration between architecture and ideology was apparently very fertile. So back to the 1960s and 1970s, the utopists, the radicals, the ‘organic’ or ‘alternative’ intellectuals of various forms and backgrounds. In a nutshell, we could say that Italophilie,13 not exactly unpredictably, is back in style. Now that we have come to this point, we can find a new formulation, one that is clearer and more synthetic, for the questions posed at the start of this essay. As we witness this much-acclaimed revival of a specific Italo-centric phase when art and even more so architecture seemed to enjoy a relationship of mutual and intense collaboration with politics, the basic question we must ask ourselves is: what can this revival produce?14 To suggest an answer to such a complex question we will need to analyse the issue from several points of view, first of all from that of artistic and architectural production, then from that of theoretical production, lastly from that of cultural production. It is in fact in this field of activity and makeup of cultural institutions (i.e. museums, biennials, festivals) that the impact of these phenomena has had the most intense effects.

Works At first sight, it does not seem hard to notice a series of evident effects of the return to politics in the field of architectural output. The first effect was a return to the limelight of the legacy of a series of Italian architects – Aldo Rossi and the Florentine radicals at the forefront – who from history books returned to the desks of the students and of their coolest teachers as more or less operative references. For a long time the object of a contest between utopians and ‘vernaculars’, Aldo Rossi is now becoming the symbol of a strange armistice, which allows the sophisticated architect of the twenty-first century to be at the same time a radical idealist and a disenchanted postmodernist.15 The second effect was that of a sort of sudden revival of drawing, based on a very Italian tradition that sees the natural link between the utopian-ideological nature of the project and the centrality – if not the autonomy – of drawing. The third effect, a consequence of the second, was a sort of more or less fictitious revival of the analogical as opposed to the

265

Pippo Ciorra

digital. Or rather, of a digital version of the analogical (no one actually draws by hand) which has an impact on the expressive nature of the project and tends to identify the neo-Rationalist revival (not to mention the already spoken-of neo-Postmodernist revival) as the only credible alternative to the hedonistic and technocratic spread of Parametricism. Among other things, an architecture based on traditional drawing thrives regardless of its construction, and it is fuelled by ideological meanings, while digital architecture aims at increasingly bridging the gap between design and construction in a system in which the drawing has the purely functional value of conveying information. In other words, this is another typical 1960s derby match, for or against techno-utopia, to be able to divide friends from ‘enemies’. The last effect, this too related to the others and perhaps the most interesting of them all, is the reconstruction of the idea of a ‘didactic architecture’, the obsession of the Italian masters of the 1960s and 1970s, easy to transmit and reproduce, albeit allowing the ‘followers’ a varying degree of awareness. It is hard to take sides vis-à-vis these inclinations. Although we put forward here some personal reactions, it is obvious that we are moving in a field of complexity and contradiction. We all love Aldo Rossi, but the impression at the bottom of this is that we might end up replicating post mortem a typical exaggeration of the 1960s, the blind trust in the political identity of a style, fully endorsed in order to obtain power from a condition of dialectical opposition – radical vs digital – which oversimplifies reality and does not leave room for the thousands of stances that cannot be reduced to the two extremes. Except that in the years in question, the ideological battle in the artistic field – suffice it to recall Gruppo 6316 – had strong reflections in the cultural and social fabric, while today the taking sides of the architects does not seem to reflect the socio-political geography, which is much more fragmented, individual and mobile. It is harder to trace everything back to such a synthetic vision when we move to the art world, which is much more familiar with the ‘non-productive’ and at the same time subversive nature of the project. We can safely say that here too – after all, the distance between art and architecture today is very small – we find different mentalities. There are groups of artists busy working on, with, for, together with the communities, aimed at connecting the results of their work to the ability to involve and converse with the endusers of the work itself. There are others, generally stars, who cannot resist the striking and constructive force of consensus brought by the political connotation, and thereby entirely shift their ability to communicate to the field of performance activism. This happens, and it obviously raises controversial reactions, like Ai Weiwei playing the role of a migrant’s body on a beach and receiving the accolades of the press and the insults of at least half of the art community. And then there are those who make the political theme disappear within their own process, and reappear in the ‘autonomous’ form of their work, as, for instance, in Disarm by Pedro Reyes (weapons turned into musical instruments), and in Istanbul City Hills by Margherita Moscardini, capable of merging in a single language all the different conflicts that are ravaging the Turkish capital, Ankara. There remains, however, a strong and very influential difference between a discipline like architecture, where one can still cultivate the illusion of a two-way correspondence between the form and the political contents of the project, and art, where this illusion has disappeared for decades now, leaving to the authors individuality

266

(Un)political

and freedom to face the theme.17 It is likely that in the world of architecture there are many subjects who aim at profiting precisely from the anachronistic nature of a renewed architecture engagé. It has yet to be checked whether this profit is limited to the battlefield of cultural power (which in itself is rather closely interwoven with the market), or whether it can be extended also to those who really experience and inhabit both architecture and the city, that is the so often evoked body politic. The impression is that the former scenario is prevailing, also because the world of art is, by its very nature, better accustomed to it.

Theory One of the experiences that weighed upon the decision to write this text was my participation in the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) annual conference held in Leeds in November 2015.18 The title of the conference was This Thing Called Theory and in many of the panels, especially in the interventions selected by way of a call for papers, regardless of the title, the speakers insisted strongly on the political side of architecture and its theoretical potential. This in turn makes us go back to the Project of Autonomy and to its self-proclamation as the exemplary and detonating case of an architecture theory based on its political contents. Or rather, if Aureli cautiously insists on the analogy between political and architectural project in relation to the calling into play of a weapon of highly ambiguous potential such as autonomy, what seems to prevail in the mass of neo-committed architects is a far more simplified vision. If we try to sum things up, we can try to frame their approach in the following syllogism: the (Italian?) architects of the 1960s and 70s incorporated a very strong political content (a posteriori utopian and techno-phobic) to add value to their projects; we aim to follow those architects’ figurative tracks (where the word ‘those’ often brings together subjects who simply cannot be together19); so our architecture is by self-definition utopian, antagonistic and anti-system. The argument is even more radical in the field of theory, also because the evoked ‘masters’ (whether good or bad) were much better at producing theory than buildings. The result of this is that the argumentation is even more borderline: my thoughts on architecture are political, hence theoretical, and therefore capable of generating architecture that is ‘formally’ more politically correct, something that cannot be disputed, than the others. The peculiar aspect of this attitude is that none of these activists seem to be interested in participating in an actual project of subversion (or of radical change, or reform) of the political status quo of society,20 as instead was the case, at least formally, for the ‘politicized’ architects of the post-war decades. On the one hand, there seems to be an eagerness to ‘occupy a position’, finding a place for oneself in a slice of the market of ideas unexpectedly left vacant. On the other, one has the impression that the political reference is assumed as the generator of form and meaning in itself, deliberately overlooking the fact that the meaning of the theories evoked (indeed very different ones, if we think, for example, of the liaison dangereuse between Branzi and Tafuri) was strongly embedded in the historical and conceptual

267

Pippo Ciorra

contexts that generated them. In other words, the paradox, no doubt an interesting one, is that the architecture that most upholds commitment (within the social context) could ultimately find itself enclosed within the worst type of autonomy, of the self-referential kind, and practise the utmost indifference to the context. Let us go back full circle to the beginning, where the battle between formal positions ends up only being an analogy of the battle between the political positions. It is a closed circuit and can, no doubt, generate interesting conflicts, except that, contrary to its premises, it seems to create a great distance between architecture and the social body which it claims to address and must legitimize. An unsolved problem, and one that cannot be overlooked.

Curatorial Aureli opportunely plays it safe concerning another aspect of the political commitment of contemporary architects (and artists): the hegemony of museums and academia. Far from the squares where the political city is historically supposed to stage its conflicts, today there is a chosen place where theory, authors, criticism, city (in the sense of civitas) meet in privileged conditions: the ‘curatorial’ space. In the attempt to transform a practice into a discipline, curators in recent years has assigned to the political theme a decisive value as a criterion for the evaluation, classification, collection and exhibition of the works of artists and architects. Politics, in fact, have the advantage of not requiring consolidated knowledge and technical testing, of being very communicable, of being immaterial and interdisciplinary, and therefore being able to be associated to any exhibition’s material and curatorial programme. Moreover, politics is intrinsically topical, tied down to the present. Except that, as such, politics risks being assimilated with any other ‘content’ of museum projects – beauty, intelligence, usefulness, innovation, historical value, technical wonder – potentially offered to the visitor within the protected space of the museum, thus subtracted from the actual political space. My aim here is not to produce a eulogy to disengagement – extraneous even to Thomas Mann’s ideas about the ‘unpolitical’ – but to send a message to the navigators of a generation that is easily seduced by the aesthetic of commitment (not that my generation was any less easy to seduce) so as to warn them of the thin line they tread. On the one hand, there is the passive compliance to the ‘market rationale’ and to the ‘no matter what’ global competition that the neo-Radicals identify in the technocratic, costly and bright forms of the monuments of digital architecture and in the rotating skyscrapers of Dubai and Phnom Penh. On the other hand, there is the quest for architectural salvation achieved through Forma, where by form we mean a device capable of replicating a system of mutual power relations and rapports between society, project and ideology. The strange historical telescope that we are told to look through in these risk-filled times, however, is not allowing us to see how the space that separates these two extreme attitudes is actually much broader (and perhaps even much more populated) than might seem to us. Inside there are a myriad of other ways to relate reality and project, to ‘make use’ of one’s own vision of architecture, to deal with the matters of the present, which it is

268

(Un)political

perhaps a shame to keep completely hidden from the view of the young architects and scholars in favour of a forced return to a strange form of dialectic materialism. Those myriad other ways perhaps represent an alternative to the chance that architecture will be reduced to a ‘museum’ specialty,21 restricted to the few and usual ‘aesthetic-cumpolitical’ cases that draw the curatorial interest of the directors of museums, biennials and triennials (and the odd doctoral programmes) traveling around the world. Hence, a very ‘political’ architecture, but enclosed within the museum precinct, while the definition of real space, where actual political relationships are determined, is left to the much less thoughtful actors of the project: finance, armies, migrant masses, speculators, catastrophes, and so on.

(In)conclusion The first calls for this paper came about on the exact same days that the terrible events of November 2015 were unfolding in Paris. To go back to Thomas Mann and to the minimum need for introspection, I wondered what the correct response was, for someone who does this type of work, to such a serious situation. One possible answer is to reset everything and focus only on the themes directly linked to the civic emergency and to the attack to which we are being submitted: let us have the students only work on migration and integration, let us noisily resist the security vs freedom debate, let us organize projects that only have to do with this emergency, let us only exhibit Syrian and Libyan artists, let us do research to show that it is all capitalism’s fault (something that is rather obvious, with the odd historiographic addendum), and so on. Or, obviously doing everything we can to be part of a civic body that fights back, let us continue to produce culture, to broaden the borders of our disciplines to make them accessible and relevant for more and more people, to understand why it is anachronistic and dangerous to build bi-univocal links between architecture and ideology, and, lastly, to build and broaden a language, making it as open and inclusive as possible. This is obviously a false alternative, with myriad possible answers, but it can still help us think things through. Again introspectively, I wondered what there is in this rappel à l’ordre idéologique that sounds so strange and alarming to me. So I thought that this text on the relationship between architecture and politics should have a much broader scope, a more substantial one than this short essay. And that to start a work of this kind I should try to find other borders, beyond the space delimited by Thomas Mann and Pier Vittorio Aureli. More precisely temporal borders, to understand if we can find a conclusion to a long period of encounters between culture and politics that began in Italy (and not just there) in the post-war period. Understanding the conclusion to that period would allow us to understand our own times better, to define ‘by difference’ the nature of the ‘committed intellectual’ (the definition is deliberately anachronistic) of the twenty-first century. Umberto Eco’s passing, which happened as this essay was being penned, offers us an immediate foothold to try to make evident what we mean. That is to say that Eco’s death reminds us of the sunset of a whole generation. A generation born

269

Pippo Ciorra

generally in the 1930s and that became visible as such precisely on the occasion of the birth of Gruppo 63, which I referred to above and which achieved enormous relevance. Divided into the ‘apocalyptic’ and the ‘committed’ (namely ‘integrated’) Italian intellectuals had managed to interpret and occupy the country’s entire political-cultural space at the end of the Second World War and drag it toward a long hegemony (not just national), which was made easier by the effects of an ever-lasting and hyper-resilient Cold War ideological geography. The coincidence between the demise of that generation with the country’s new political climate – with the related redrafting of the maps of parties and formations – allows us to review the years considered in this essay as the conclusion of a phase in which art, technology, politics and society liaise according to specific modalities, codified by ideologies mostly born between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, at the dawn of mass society and of the issues linked to industrialization. Anyone who intends to resort to ideology to find meaning in his or her work as an architect, theoretician, academic must take into account the specific nature of our historical time and use well-focused lenses to interpret the past. As we are also reminded by Aureli, Giulio Carlo Argan, Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, Vittorio Gregotti, Manfredo Tafuri, Gianugo Polesello, Luciano Semerani, the whole Venetian-Milanese Casabella-Continuità area (except for Ernesto Nathan Rogers) and many others were members of the Italian Communist Party. Giuseppe Samonà, Leonardo Benevolo and other Sicilians and Bolognesi instead gravitated toward a political area of so-called ‘left-wing Catholics’ (Cattolici democratici). Bruno Zevi, Ludovico Quaroni and other ‘terzaforzisti’ who were intolerant to the ‘two blocks’ (and greatly scorned by Tafuri and by the Communists) mingled with the Socialists, Actionists and Olivettians. Paolo Portoghesi flirted with the extra-parliamentarians and counted on the Socialists. The Florentine groups despised the parties and drifted between Bohème anarchism, operaismo and again Azionismo. Giancarlo De Carlo was spitefully anarchic, while Massimo Cacciari, Francesco Dal Co and other Venetians orbited around Potere Operaio. Argan, Aymonino, Nicolini, Eduardo Vittoria, Pierluigi Cervellati and many others later took on administrative or government roles and were elected mayors, assessors, undersecretaries. Figures who were far-removed from politics, such as Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Gino Valle, Maurizio Sacripanti, had a hard time in trying to gain attention by the architecture cultural elite. Not to mention post-Fascists such as Adalberto Libera and Luigi Moretti. In other words, when we speak of political commitment for the generations that crossed the 1960s and 1970s we know perfectly well what we are talking about, and how the world of architecture reproduced in scale a very precise political geography that was strongly influenced by continental geopolitics (suffice it to think how many times Zevi was more or less seriously accused of being an American agent). Today, anyone who wants to consciously face the theme of the relationships between the arts (especially architecture) and politics will have to acknowledge first of all the fact that the political scenario has changed and that the dialectic simplification of the two main positions (i.e. progressive vs reactionary) does not work that well anymore. Not even in its indoor version, within the Left. The very attempt to erode the differences between the radical ‘subversive’ season and the postmodernist ‘hedonist’ one proves that this is the case. Suffice it to think, to go back to real politics, and reach the end of

270

(Un)political

this brief excursus, of the ease with which the Turkish oppositions – from the Kurds to the fans of Fenerbahçe – gather around a bunch of bushes to protest against Erdogan even if it means losing their lives, and the same ease with which they break up into myriad rivulets and groups, the ones against the others when it comes to formulating a political alternative. In this ‘liquid’ plasticity, and in the new bio-political composition of the relationships between individual and group, we should probably seek the new key to the rapport between creative action and commitment if we do not want to end up being mired in dangerously nostalgic rhetoric.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14

15

The choice of curator for the fifteenth Architecture Biennale, Chilean architect and winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize Alejandro Aravena, as well as of the title of his exhibition – Reporting from the Front – seem to resolve in an allusive key the question of the adherence to the contemporary aesthetic of conflict. ‘Denouncing the horrors of war does not end with Goya and with Guernica. Ai Weiwei has created a photograph in remembrance of Aylan Kurdi, using his body and his famous name to commemorate dead people whom we know nothing about and soon forget.’ Maurizio Ferraris, ‘Da Ai Weiwei a Banksy solo l’arte resta politica’, La Repubblica, 2 February 2016, 24. In a text on the seminal experience of Campo Urbano, a collective project by a group of Italian artists developed in the streets of Como in 1969, Romy Golan spots the dual potential of the Italian expression ‘movimenti di piazza’, meaning both the riots dominating the urban scenes in late 1960s and the agency of the artists in the open Urban Space (Campo Urbano). See: Romy Golan, ‘Campo Urbano, Como, 1969’, in Exhibiting Architecture. A Paradox, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen et al. (New Haven and Barcelona: Yale School of Architecture and Actar D, 2015), 47–58. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Mario Tronti, L’autonomia del politico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977). Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1918). Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 41. The twentieth century was obviously the age of the productive and dangerous cohabitation of politics and the avant-garde, not just in terms of episodes linked to the great dictatorships – USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy – but also for the parallel and subsequent search for an unmistakable style for democracy, which was crucial in the postwar period. Commissioned to curate the exhibition in the French pavilion for the tenth Architecture Biennale in 2006, the group called EXYZT used the project Metavilla to transform the whole pavilion into a habitable space lived in by the members of the group and their guests throughout the event. See: www.exyzt.org/about/, accessed 10 May 2016. From Bernard Rudofsky to Giancarlo De Carlo to Yona Friedman and many others, there is no shortage of twentieth-century references for those interested in committing themselves to an architecture ‘for the people’; however, what changes in this case as well is the ideological status of the intervention. Between the beginning and the end of the 1960s, two monographic essays were written in Italy, of questionable historiographic value yet rather accurate in providing a map of the relationships between the country’s architectural and socio-political scenarios. One of the essays was written by Tafuri on Quaroni, see: Manfredo Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1964); the other was written by Bonfanti and Porta on BBPR, see: Ezio Bonfanti and Marco Porta, Città Museo Architettura Il gruppo BBPR nella cultura architettonica italiana 1932–1970 (Florence: Vallecchi, 1973/Milano; Hoepli, 2009). Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 19. In a very timely fashion the publisher Mardaga has recently republished the perspicacious essay by Jean-Louis Cohen written in the late 1970s on the liaison vertueuse entre architectes et intellectuels in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century; see Jean-Louis Cohen, Les enseignements de l’italophilie. La coupure entre architects et intellectuels (Brussels: Mardaga, 2015). The collaboration between architecture and politics spans two crucial decades, the 1960s and 1970s, bracketed by the first center-left government in 1963 and the 1980 Architecture Biennale directed by Paolo Portoghesi (La presenza del passato). A theory that is hard to get Italians to accept, but that has some strong supporters. For example, Frederic Migayrou, La Tendenza: Architectures Italiennes 1965–1985 / Italian Architectures 1965– 1985, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2012); Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost:

271

Pippo Ciorra

16

17

18 19 20

21

Architecture and Postmodernism Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010); Charles Jencks, Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, eds, Architectural Design: Radical Post-Modernism no. 213 (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2011). The ideological foundations for the neo avant-garde and Radical season of left-wing literary and artistic literature were laid in Italy by the first official group of neo avant-garde authors, founded in Palermo in October 1963 and including Umberto Eco, Alberto Arbasino, Renato Barilli, Achille Bonito Oliva and many others – Gruppo 63. The architect closest to Gruppo 63 was no doubt Vittorio Gregotti. Once again we need to refer to the introductory essay by Germano Celant in the collection of his writings on Arte Povera, where he offers possibly the clearest picture of the political condition of the artist today as compared with the period of Arte Povera; see the interview by Francesca Cattoi and Antonella Soldaini to Germano Celant in Germano Celant, Arte Povera Storia e storie (Milano, Electa, 2011), 12–29. www.thisthingcalledtheory.org, accessed 10 May 2016. An example that deserves to be discussed is indeed that of Tafuri–Branzi, on which Aureli bases much of his reading. Of course, the debate that we identify here within the subject of the theory of architecture is none other than a reflection of the start of a broader discussion between those who were once referred to as ‘left-wing intellectuals’: suffice it to refer here to the controversy between the reference to agency in Paolo Virno’s departure from the system – Paolo Virno, L’idea di mondo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015) – and Agamben’s Pulcinella, which ‘calls for another type of politics, that no longer takes place in action’, Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi, (Rome: Nottetempo, 2015), author’s translation. It is impossible not to think of the myriad of ephemeral installations that involve architects today in museums and festivals around the world, but also further back to the well-known early essay by Aldo Rossi, Architettura per i musei, recently republished in Aldo Rossi, Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi. Rome: Nottetempo, 2015. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Project of Autonomy. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Bonfanti, Ezio and Marco Porta. Città Museo Architettura. Il gruppo BBPR nella cultura architettonica italiana 1932–1970. Florence: Vallecchi, 1973/Milano; Hoepli, 2009. Celant, Germano. Arte Povera Storia e storie. Milano, Electa, 2011. Cohen, Jean-Louis. Les enseignements de l’italophilie. La coupure entre architects et intellectuels. Brussels: Mardaga, 2015. Guglielmi, Angelo and Renato Barilli. Gruppo 63. Critica e teoria. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976. Golan, Romy. ‘Campo Urbano, Como, 1969’, in Exhibiting Architecture. A Paradox, edited by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Carson Chan and David Andrew Tasman, 47–58. New Haven and Barcelona: Yale School of Architecture and Actar D, 2015. Jencks, Charles, Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, eds. Architectural Design: Radical PostModernism. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2011. Mann, Thomas. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1918. Martin, Reinhold. Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010. Migayrou, Frederic. La Tendenza: Architectures Italiennes 1965–1985 / Italian Architectures 1965–1985, exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2012. Rossi, Aldo. Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012. Tafuri, Manfredo. Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia. Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1964. Tronti, Mario. L’autonomia del politico. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. Virno, Paolo. L’idea di mondo. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015.

272

Chapter 26

Prince complex Narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror Camilo Amaral

Critical contradictions In general, common sense would accept the idea that ‘architecture has always shaped society’.1 Monuments, squares, streets, patterns, houses, nature, rituals and so on are understood as elements moulding cultures and ways of life in every city. Nevertheless, we increasingly accept the idea that architecture cannot change society. This paradox exposes a fundamental contradiction in the epistemology of architecture. The paradox is important, not only to delineate how an impulse of subjugating the other (a ‘prince complex’) is implicit in the way architecture transforms abstract machines into concrete forms, but also to reveal how a narcissistic discipline reifies subjectivities to reproduce the field of architecture. Furthermore, it is fundamental to understand how society reproduces itself by producing space.2 This effort aims to avoid the most common deadlocks of the discipline: ingenuity, resignation or even protest. On the one hand, star architecture as a discipline took a very straightforward path. A series of critiques3 defended architecture as an autonomous practice which should concern itself only with ‘technical’ or internal matters and forget society. In this sense, star architects like Zaha Hadid4 felt very comfortable designing for dictators whose construction sites exploited ‘slave labour’, because they believed architecture to be only ‘design’. In a similar way, Rem Koolhaas displayed a certain cynicism in playing with the elements of architecture, treating history as an imaginary identity, addressing social contexts as fictional allegories, and law as a game. The depoliticisation of Oswald

273

Camilo Amaral

Mathias Ungers’s dialectic5 allows Koolhaas to read context and irreverently accept the status quo as inevitable. This enables him to develop dystopias into silent utopias, as he does in his project Volunteer Prisoners of Architecture, in the text Junkspace, or in the transformation of architecture into ‘branding’ for Prada.6 On the other hand, although some authors produced important critical knowledge about the field, architecture could never be understood beyond a form of protest. For instance, Manfredo Tafuri7 understood architecture as a reflection of the mode of production, following a well-known Marxist interpretation of the base (the mode of production, the material conditions, and so on) as determinant in the constitution of a superstructure (the culture, conscience, and so on).8 Therefore, architectural theory or aesthetics were just speculations or representations of more fundamental trends. In these terms, architecture was condemned to produce ‘ideologies’ which merely reflected social tendencies. In a less negative form, Aldo Rossi9 developed a political anthropology to understand urban spaces as artefacts of labour, and therefore concrete forms filled with abstract and collective desires. In this sense, he could understand architects as Gramscian organic intellectuals.10 Nevertheless, architects would engage with context and design with a political intention, taking a position in the urban social struggles, and using architecture as a representation of their position. Architecture would become a form of protest rather than a practice of social change. Again, why is architecture at the same time so powerful and yet so resigned? These contradictions will be explored through some examples in order to understand how the architectural field is trapped in a specific disciplinary form of narcissism that structures the agency of the architect around a ‘Prince Complex’. In this way, a disciplinary way of producing reality will reproduce the subjugation of the ‘other’ and the objectification of the self. The understanding of this combination in the architectural field could help to delineate an effective critical practice within architecture.

Fundamental contradictions In the process of architectural design, on the one hand, we should expect a series of ideologies framing possible design solutions; on the other hand, architectural theory also functions as an apparatus to justify and valorise transformations in the social space. Yet these processes hide deep contradictions, which we could investigate through some examples. A known example of that is Antoine Laugier’s (1755) primitive hut.11 His theory explained the Doric order as a reflection of the essential primitive forms of habitation. A series of simple and round tree columns would end in primitive capitals supporting a triangular pediment: the most ‘essential’ of shapes. In this sense, architecture could be found in simple, rational and pure elements. Laugier’s conception of the true origins of architecture would justify the neoclassical (and later the modern) architectural aesthetic. In spite of that, Viollet-le-Duc designed his own version of the primitive hut.12 Drawing

274

Prince complex

upon a different logic, he was fascinated with the ‘rationalisme structurel’ of Gothic architecture. In his hut, there was no place for ‘elementarization’; the structure was a continuous and sinuous whole in which each part had a role in the overall effect. His essential architecture was based on a different logic, the systematic structural logic of medieval scholasticism.13 How can something be universal, fundamental and essential if it is not necessary or if it can simply be different? Using two contemporary examples, I would like to illustrate how architecture proceeds in the naturalisation of different ethics within the discourses of truth. The first is from Axel Paredes, a Guatemalan architect who developed his own version of the primitive hut. In his thesis project at MIT14 he replaced the columns with computer-generated structures, and surrounded them with (what are now vintage) Apple Macintosh computers: his argument being that new technologies were reinventing the foundations of the discipline. Therefore, when he was commissioned to build an Internet facility for a community in Tecpan, Chimaltenango, Paredes, was not interested in the ancient Mayan ruins that populated the landscape with horizontal monuments. Paradoxically, as a good contemporary architect, he was very keen to open a ‘dialogue’ with the local context, and in order to do that he understood the context as ‘strawberry fields’.15 His eye magically captured the beauty of red strawberries in green fields and therefore he proposed a red steel building. The prefabricated object appears in photos on his website populated by indigenous people in traditional clothes. The object has no connection to local tradition or local ways of building. Modernisation is something to be given, not developed. Therefore, locals are invited to enjoy ‘modernity’ in a few square metres rather than controlling it. Locals become visitors (or clients) in this piece of their own territory. The other example is the proposal of a cultural house for the Xakriabá, an indigenous community in central Brazil that faces a devastating historical pressure to acculturate to Western society. This process has detached the community members from old forms of architecture. Nevertheless, many forms of resistance emerged, leading to a partnership with the Federal University of Minas Gerais, including interdisciplinary research programmes and specific courses and diplomas for mestizo knowledge.16 Among these programmes, an investigation of local building knowledge and economic production began. Traditional materials and skills were redeveloped together with local artisans, which led to a project brief for a new community house. In this format, architecture was neither image nor object, but rather the means that would allow a community to reinvent itself. Architecture was a research topic through which alternative forms of economy – ways of tying wood, ceramic making, mestizo techniques and artisanal brick machines – could employ local workers. In this sense, the choice of materials was also a choice for an ‘economy of local solidarity’.17 Here style had little significance, as architecture had no ‘integrity’ to be preserved.18 Thus, as the community appropriated the house, it became open to development and transformation. The role of architects became one of partnership, co-creation and ‘ethno-development’.19 Thus, social practice informed by architectural theory demonstrates different forms of politics inside theory itself. It is not simply different aims informing different briefs; instead,

275

Camilo Amaral

architecture itself becomes two different things. For this reason, one should distinguish the principles at play if one aims for alternatives.

Discipline narcissism Firstly, we should investigate why architectural epistemology manages to produce facts leading to a discipline subjectivity of the architect. To do so, we will start with Jean Baudrillard’s first metaphor of knowledge.20 For Baudrillard, classical epistemology would understand knowledge as a mirror. In this metaphor, ideas would be the perfect images of reality. For instance, one could say that the context is a strawberry field, therefore the contextualised building is a red building. The problem of this form of knowledge is that it conceals an original violence. For Schopenhauer21 objects are the representation of the ‘will’. This means that the subject frames reality in order to make the subject’s desire possible. To identify an object in the real world is to build the means of achieving a goal (i.e. the world is formed by imposed desires). Therefore, this ‘mirror’ of reality is actually projecting the subject onto what is outside of her/him (the Other). Therefore, this mirror is not a naïve take on reality but a violent one, as it implies what could be defined as a narcissistic principle. According to some versions of the myth, when Narcissus looked into the pool of water, he saw in that ‘otherness’ (the water) nothing but his own beauty.22 Fascinated by his own image (re-presentation) made apparent in that external object, he jumped into the pond, trying to re-encounter the beauty of himself, and died without noticing the ‘other’ engulfing him. For Althusser23 the narcissistic view of the world is a ‘doubled mirror’ that projects a specific subjectivity as reality. The architectural field actively produces glances of this sort, disciplining subjectivities to see the outside as a mirror of a fable developed by internal desires. This kind of architecture is trapped in this narcissistic principle. A self-evident example of this is Le Corbusier’s Modulor. By trying to find the ‘hidden’ principle of beauty, he ultimately denied the other. The feminine body is out of his formula. Furthermore, the architectural game does not only subjugate the other by way of exclusion. It is not just the ignoring of Echo (the nymph ignored by Narcissus) or the hiding of her reverberating truth. It is actually a transformation of the self and of the world (not only the starting point but also the ending point). This reifies reality. To reify is the process of making social conceptions appear as if they were ‘natural’ relations between things. It is in this sense that the architectural discipline functions as an ideological apparatus, reifying subjectivities to behave in narcissistic ways. Beyond the idea that Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century Panopticon, or Baron Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards, where architectural objects intended to shape the mind (changing the ‘soul’) by introjecting forms of control24, here architectural practice itself is a process of disciplining and punishing (of both architects and users). Michel Foucault argued for a microphysics of power inserted in everyday life, in which forms of power should be traced everywhere, in mechanisms of governmentality of the other, as well as in technologies intended to shape specific forms of subjects and

276

Prince complex

subjectivities.25 In this sense, the architectural discipline is a power structure imposing measures of truth and reproducing the status quo. Louis Althusser argues that ‘[t]he ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production’.26 With that, he means that two apparatuses ensure the ‘submission to the rules of established order’: a repressive state apparatus and an ideological apparatus. There are many ways in which architecture can be a slow form of social ‘violence’,27 but here the focus is on the subtle way architectural theory becomes ideology. For Althusser, ideology is the image an individual has of his own existence, but it has a paradoxical ‘material existence’,28 precisely because it shapes the possibilities of what exists for a subject in everyday life. This happens especially through ‘interpellation’ (an identity mirror). Interpellations create the subject because they set the individual in a relation to and in a position from which he can act in the world. This happens when ‘embodied’ ideological instruments (an advertisement, a building or even the setting of chairs in a room) address the individual, making her/him the object of expected social interactions with institutions and discourses. Thus, embodied ideologies mould internal subjectivities. For Althusser, ‘ideology never says, “I am ideological”. It is necessary to be outside ideology … to say: I am in ideology’.29 In architecture, interpellations are being imposed at three different levels: firstly, through the disciplining process (institutions, boards, academia, publications, clients, the market, and so on); secondly, by the architectonic objects produced, which create a ritual, constantly reinforcing how architecture should be understood;30 and finally by the instruments that architects use, such as perspective or computational techniques, which both frame and produce facts. Architecture does not simply present ideologies as facts, as if it were lying; it actually transforms ideologies into social facts.

The Prince complex (or, the architectural unconscious) For Jacques Rancière31 the theory of history has only recently tried to overcome the chronicle of the princes by means of a history of the masses, the everyday life and the concrete conditions (not just what lies on the wave crest, but the enormous forces of movement in the depth of the sea). Nevertheless, architectural imagination is still trapped in narcissistic histories of ‘Princes’. According to Althusser,32 Machiavelli’s book The Prince creates an intellectual device for political practice to counter ‘fortuna’ (the conjecture) in order to rule, thus demanding ‘negativity’ and ‘objectivity’ (virtú) to control the randomness of the future. By doing so, Machiavelli was not inventing the prince per se. What he revealed was the representational character of this practice. In this sense, his prince is the public image of a political narrative. It is an image of power or truth rather than power or truth itself. The theory of architecture has long been based on figures of ‘princes’. Styles are nothing more than narcissistic epistemologies. Furthermore, the majority of architects do not play the role of Narcissus himself, but rather of captive echoes, repeating incessantly the chronicles of their princes. For instance, Tafuri33 noticed that

277

Camilo Amaral

Frank Lloyd Wright made the decisive shift toward what would become his famous style by using all of his wife’s fortune in order to create a ‘Taliesin Fellowship’ (a messianic school in the middle of the desert). This allowed him to appropriate the work of a series of collaborators and apprentices as his own.34 The Broadacre City project brought him close to bankruptcy and yet it made him a ‘prince’ of US architecture. This aim – of being the icon for the style of US civilisation – is very clear in Wright’s (1957) lectures.35 By contrast, a satellite image is enough to reveal the localism of his universal truths. In our own society of spectacle and immaterial toil,36 the ‘princes’ imploded upon themselves. If the architectural office was once the elite’s stronghold, dividing intellectual and manual work,37 it is now becoming the new sweatshop. In this sense, Bjarke Ingels gives a first-hand account38 of what it was like to work in Rem Koolhaas’s office. The only way to rise in rank at OMA was by acquiring ‘more and more sorrows’, by creating ‘space for designers beneath me in responsibility to crank out cool stuff’. Ingels recalls episodes of yelling and ‘hurling of office supplies’, and that designers were under constant tension and stress due to negative reinforcement. At some point, he felt he ‘had paid [his] dues’, and decided to open his own office. What was his alternative? To create his own sweatshop, employing dozens of architects, using up-to-date behaviourist techniques: rather than the ‘negative’, he uses ‘positive’ reinforcement (a more tender dressage). This transforms intellectual work into subjectification. The role of Craig Webb in Frank Gehry’s office, captured in the movie Sketches of Frank Gehry,39 demonstrates how an architect who does not know how to switch on a computer can be the ‘prince’ of computer-generated forms by transforming another architect (Webb) into a puppet. For Marx40 the fetish of the commodity is the process of hiding the actual process of production by an ideology or image – in this case, the myth of a great architect. In this condition, the narcissistic representation of single architects as geniuses justifies the expropriation of collective work.

Conclusion (in the form of one last example) A housing block and a local square in Wood Street, London, were facing a process of ‘regeneration’. In the contemporary context, this expression means the demolition of social housing estates and the privatisation of public spaces. Yet, a partnership between the University of East London, E17 Architects (a non-profit organisation), Wood Street First community group, WF Council and the RIBA mobilised a series of activities to allow community participation in the debate. One of the instruments used for these mobilisations was the production of an ephemeral ‘architectonic’ device built in the square. This object was less important than the event it produced. In Alain Badiou’s terms, the ‘event’ is the process of reframing the reality and possibilities of a given moment.41 One could argue that after the event, the square remained physically the same. Could an architectural procedure have changed this space by not actually changing it? The answer might need to subvert the narcissistic mirror. Lefebvre42 and 43

Rancière appropriated Aristotle’s concept of poiesis, in contrast to mimesis and praxis.

278

Prince complex

For them, ideas and reality are not separate. When Lefebvre says that ‘(Social) Space is a (social) product’,44 he means that space itself is not an empty entity filled with artificial or natural ‘stuff’; it is actively produced. Aristotle45 had already stated that the possible is part of the real. What constitutes a ‘seed’ is not simply material elements but also a possible future tree (its potential). If architecture can create counter potentialities, then it changes reality by opening new horizons: a virtual, yet real, existence. In this case, architecture is neither codes of beauty (narcissistic mirrors), nor a style (representation of truths), nor a ritual affiliation (prince complexes); it is a political tool. In this sense, the lost manuscript of Lefebvre on architecture – Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, published in English in 2014 – might enlighten counter practices such as this. There Lefebvre asks: ‘an architectural revolution? Why not?’ Although he argues that architecture has the potential for ‘radical subversion’, for setting aside relations of production and for ‘turning the world upside down’, he also cuts back, ‘this project alone is incapable of changing the world’. As he argued elsewhere, revolution would need both ‘contempt’ and ‘corruption’, i.e. consciousness that ‘impl[ies] a rehabilitation of everyday life’.46 For that reason, his inquiry into architecture went beyond ‘the architect’ and its ‘discipline’: ‘[i]t is a question of “mankind” and its future’.47 Thus, his curtailment of the discipline is, in a matter of fact, the means of narrowing down a form of provocation: ‘Can change occur without expectation, without exploration of the possible and the impossible?’48

Notes 1 2 3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11

May Abdalla, ‘Rebel Architecture’, Al Jazeera (blog video), accessed 23 September 2014, http://www. aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (London: Allison and Busby, 1976). Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, ‘Collage City’, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, [1978] 2000), 88–111. Peter Eisenman, ‘O Fim do Clássico: o Fim do Começo, o Fim do Fim’, In Uma Nova Agenda para a Arquitetura: Antologia Teórica 1965– 1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, [1984] 2006), 233–252. Charlotte Skene Catling, ‘Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t: What is the Moral Duty of the Architect?’, in The Architectural Review (22 September 2014), accessed 11 May 2016, www. architectural-review.com/archive/viewpoints/damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont-what-isthe-moral-duty-of-the-architect/8669956. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003). Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, History of World Architecture: Modern Architecture 1 (New York: Electa, 1976). An alternative to this interpretation would be the ‘school of regulation’ in which a regime of accumulation would be supported by a regime of work, a pattern of consumption and a mode of regulation including values, laws and habits. David Harvey and Fredric Jameson provide an interpretation of architecture as part of a cultural logic that is dialectically intertwined with a mode of production. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1982). Antonio Gramsci, ‘Prison Notebooks: The Intellectuals’, In An Anthology of Western Marxism, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 113–119. For the English edition with a title where some of these paradoxes are revealed, see Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (London: Gray’s Inn, 1755), accessed 22 April 2015, https://ia902706.

279

Camilo Amaral

12

13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22

23 For

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

280

us.archive.org/35/items/essayonarchitect00laugrich/essayonarchitect00laugrich.pdf, in which its true principles are explained, and invariable rules proposed, for directing the judgement and forming the taste of the gentleman and the architect, with regard to the different kinds of buildings, the embellishment of cities and the planning of gardens. For the image discussed here, see Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture. Nouvelle edition, revue, corrigée, & augmentée (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755), accessed 22 April 2015, www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/31371. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire de l’habitation humaine depuis les temps préhistoriques jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1875), 6, accessed 10 August 2015, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k6258576d/f14.image.r=Viollet-le-Duc,+Eug%C3%A8ne-Emmanuel.langFR. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957). Axel Gabriel Paredes, ‘Generative Opponents: A New Architecture for Native Soil’, MA diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, 12. Accessed 10 August 2015, https://dspace.mit.edu/ handle/1721.1/39264. Photos of the projects are available at the architects’ Facebook page, accessed 10 August 2015, www.facebook.com/paredesaleman/photos_stream?tab=photos_stream. Serge Gruzinski, Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002). Roberto Luís de Melo Monte-Mór, Sibelle Cornélio Diniz and Felipe Nunes Coelho Magalhães, ‘Economia e Etnodesenvolvimento no Território Indígena Xakriabá, MG’, in Anais do XII Semiário Sobre Economia Mineira (Brazil: Diamantina, 2006). Silke Kapp, ‘Contra a Integridade. MDC’, Revista de Arquitetura e Urbanismo 1 no. 2 (2006): 8–11. Monte-Mór et al., ‘Economia e Etnodesenvolvimento no Território Indígena Xakriabá, MG’. Jean Baudrillard uses three metaphors to explain how epistemology evolved. For him, classical epistemology understood knowledge as a mirror in which ideas would be the perfect image of the real itself. The second epistemological stage was the one of the ‘Mask’, in which thinkers would recognise that knowledge itself creates a deformed image of the real, so the thinker should engage in trying to see the ‘real’ behind the mask. For Baudrillard this is the mood of Sigmund Freud, who wants to understand human drives behind the surface of the conscious, developing an understanding of the unconscious as the real cause of drives. Baudrillard also connects this metaphor with Karl Marx, who wanted to see the truth of economic relations behind the mask of ideology, finding a positive, scientific and historical truth. His last metaphor is the simulacra: where the unveiling of a mask would only lead to the realisation that we are trapped in a new mask, which, when unveiled, would lead to a continuous spiral where the concepts would never reach the depth of their reference. For Baudrillard this is the birth of a hyper-real in which all reality is nothing more than simulation. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Trübner & Co., 1909), 227–228, 234–235, accessed 28 February 2015, www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf. This is not Freud’s narcissism, which recognises the other by representing itself, nor is it Lacan’s mirror stage in which the subject needs the other to represent itself. See Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XIV (1914–1916) (London: Vintage Classics, [1957] 2001), 67–102; Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’, paper presented at the XVI International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on 17 July 1949 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us (London: Verso, 2000). the relation of architectural devices as a means of changing the soul, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200–202, 237, 295, 305. For the overcoming of sovereignty and surveillance by the government of populations and subjectivities, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 55–86; Rux Martin, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’. In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (London: Tavistock, 1988), 9–15. Foucault, ‘Truth, Power, Self’, 9–15; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1970] 1971). May Abdalla, ‘Rebel Architecture’, Al Jazeera blog video (23 September 2014), accessed 11 May 2016, www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 165. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 175. For Althusser, ideology imposes itself because it becomes a form of ‘ritual’, constantly reinforcing existing institutions and social practices (as in the case of consumption and consumerism). See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 172–173, 178. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, [1992] 1994). Althusser, Machiavelli and Us.

Prince complex

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Tafuri and Dal Co, History of World Architecture: Modern Architecture 1, 140. Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). Frank Lloyd Wright. Student Lecture # 1, lecture at College of Architecture from University of California, 1957, accessed 10 August 2015, https://archive.org/details/cabeueda_000010. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, [1968] 1994). Sergio Ferro, Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006). Ian Parker, ‘High Rise: A bold Danish Architect Charms his Way to the Top’, The New Yorker (10 September 2012), accessed 11 May 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/10/high-rise. Craig Webb and Frank Gehry, Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sydney Pollack (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006), DVD. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Penguin, [1867] 1990). Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2006). Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy (London: Verso, [1965] 2016). Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, [2000] 2004). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, [1974] 1991). Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 127, 142. Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, ed. Lukasz Stanek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1973] 2014), 29. Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, 27.

Bibliography Abdalla, May. ‘Rebel Architecture’. Al Jazeera (blog video). Accessed 11 May 2016. www.aljazeera.com/ programmes/rebelarchitecture/. Althusser, Louis ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press, [1970] 1971. Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. London: Verso, [1995] 2000. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, [1981] 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press, [1992] 1996. Catling, Charlotte Skene. ‘Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: What is the Moral Duty of the Architect?’. Architecture Review (22 September 2014). Accessed September 24, 2016. https://www. architectural-review.com/archive/viewpoints/damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont-what-is-the-moralduty-of-the-architect/8669956.article Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, [1967] 1994. Dezeen. ‘Designs of the Year prize “about architecture rather than politics” says Design Museum director’. Accessed 11 May 2011. www.dezeen.com/2014/07/02/design-museum-designs-of-the-year-prize-zahahadid-heydar-aliyev-centre-azerbaijan/. Eisenman, Peter. ‘The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End’. Perspecta 21 (1984): 154–173. Ferro, Sergio. Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–1978. Edited by Michel Senellart. New York: Picador/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV (1914–1916), 72–102. London: Vintage Classics, [1957] 2001. Friedland, Roger and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. Gramsci, Antonio. ‘Prison Notebooks: The Intellectuals’. In An Anthology of Western Marxism, edited by Roger Gottlieb, 113–119. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

281

Camilo Amaral

Gruzinski, Serge. Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Jameson, Frederic. ‘Future City’. New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003). Accessed 7 July 2016. http:// newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Kapp, Silke. ‘Contra a Integridade. MDC’. Revista de Arquitetura e Urbanismo 1 no. 2 (2006): 8–11. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’. Paper presented at the XVI International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on 17 July 1949. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949. Laugier, Marc-Antoine. An Essay on Architecture. London: Gray’s Inn, 1755. Accessed 22 April 2015. https://ia902706.us.archive.org/35/items/essayonarchitect00laugrich/essayonarchitect00laugrich.pdf. Laugier, Marc-Antoine. Essai sur l’architecture. Nouvelle edition, revue, corrigée, & augmentée. Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755. Accessed 22 April 2015. www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/31371. Lefebvre, Henri. The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. London: Allison and Busby, 1976. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I. Translated by John Moore. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, [1974] 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1973] 2014. Lefebvre, Henri. Metaphilosophy. London: Verso, [1965] 2016. Martin, Rux. ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’. In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al., 9–15. London: Tavistock, 1988. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin, [1867] 1990. Monte-Mór, Roberto LuÍs de Melo, Sibelle Cornélio Diniz and, Felipe Nunes Coelho Magalhães. ‘Economia e Etnodesenvolvimento no Território Indígena Xakriabá, MG’. In Anais do XII Semiário Sobre Economia Mineira. Brazil: Diamantina, 2006. Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. London: Thames & Hudson, [1951] 1957. Paredes, Axel Gabriel. ‘Generative Opponents: A New Architecture for Native Soil’. MA diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. Parker, Ian. ‘High Rise: A bold Danish Architect Charms his Way to the Top’. The New Yorker (10 September 2012). Accessed 11 May 2016. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/10/high-rise. Rancière, Jacques. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, [1992] 1994. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, [2000] 2004. Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter. ‘Collage City’ [1978]. In Architecture Theory Since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays, 88–111. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2000. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, [1966] 1982. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. London: Trübner & Co., 1909. Accessed 28 February 2015. www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf. Tafuri, Manfredo and Francesco Dal Co. History of World Architecture: Modern Architecture 1. New York: Electa, 1976. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel. Histoire de l’habitation humaine. Paris: J. Hetzel, 1875. Accessed 10 August 2015. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6258576d/f14.image.r=Viollet-le-Duc,+Eug%C3 %A8ne-Emmanuel.langFR. Webb, Craig and Frank Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry. Directed by Sydney Pollack. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Wright, Frank Lloyd. Student Lecture # 1. Lecture at College of Architecture from University of California, 1957. Accessed 10 August 2015. https://archive.org/details/cabeueda_000010.

282

Chapter 27

Less than enough A critique of Aureli’s project Douglas Spencer

Differentiating ‘the project’ from mere design has been crucial to the architectural theory of Pier Vittorio Aureli, not least since his own oeuvre consists of something like a project for the affirmation of the project.1 In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture he states, ‘Design reflects the mere managerial praxis of building something, whereas the project indicates the strategy on whose basis something must be produced, must be brought into presence’.2 Aureli’s discourse is nothing if not decisive. Decision – originally from the Latin decaedere, ‘to cut’, as he reminds his readers – in fact constitutes the form and the content of his project.3 The separation of the project from design is just one in a series of cuts from which the project itself is fashioned. The political is separated from the economic, the architectural from the urban, the limited from the totality, the object from the field, the fixed from the circulating. The positive terms of each opposition – the political, architecture, limit, object, fixity – are stacked up to one side, forming the basis of the project. The procedure seeks out fundamentals and establishes identities, the fixed points of origin for words, meanings and practices; the essential loci around which architecture and its political potential should be understood and refounded as a formal project. Its case is argued through exemplars – Boullée, Hilberseimer, Red Vienna, Ungers. It understands architecture as the possibility of establishing the limits that protectively frame the life of the subject and its small-scale communal relations, securing its integrity from the economic currents circulating in the realm of the urban. Its object is autonomy – individual, political, architectural. In some sense, Aureli’s project stands in direct confrontation with the projective, post-critical and Deleuzian turns undertaken by architecture since the

283

Douglas Spencer

mid-1990s. It contests their fetishisation of circulation and their affirmation of continuous connectivity. Patrik Schumacher, for instance – certainly the most vocal contributor to this tendency – has come to openly endorse the market order of neoliberalism as the condition to be served, unquestioningly, by an architectural culture renouncing any political agency of its own.4 Diametrically opposed to Aureli’s political project for architecture, Schumacher has recently written that ‘[t]he concept of a “critical” or “political” architecture is either due to the delusion that the revolution has arrived or an atavism that dreams about small “brotherhood” style societies’.5 Those motivated to contest Schumacher’s embrace of the market, and the broader de-politicisation of architecture his position represents, might be inclined to endorse Aureli’s position in response. Nevertheless Schumacher touches a sensitive nerve. His charge of atavism is not so easily dismissed. It exposes a real weakness in the way that the argument against architecture’s embrace of neoliberal urbanisation has typically been articulated. This weakness lies in a strategy that simply reverses the polarity of its enemy’s affirmations, by negating what it valorises, and vice versa. The strategy of decisive contradiction confines what aspires to be a critique of capitalist urbanisation to a project of redemption. It adopts a position whose roots, going back to the earliest appearance of monetisation in fifth century BC Athens, and characterised by the historian Richard Seaford as the ‘ideology of self-sufficiency’, are essentially aristocratic: forms of unfettered circulation are contested through an appeal to spatial limits in order to restore an earlier established social order.6 As Alain Badiou notes in his Logic of Worlds, ‘[e]ndorsing an aristocratic idealism has tempted many a good mind’. The aim of this endorsement – as is to be found, for instance, in Heidegger – is ‘practically to safeguard ... the possibility of a Return’. The nostalgia of this position, he notes, is however ‘always already lost ... it cannot partake in the creation of a concept for the coming times’.7 In the case of the project of autonomy, this is because the formal absolutes and identities from which it is forged are transhistorical. History, for Aureli, appears as a repository from which moments confirming the possibility of an absolute architecture can be recovered; an archipelago of exemplars in which architecture, somehow, realised its proper essence in isolating the subject from the economic imperatives of urban circulation. Where architecture has maintained its formal limits, refusing the dissolution of these within the field of urbanisation, it has secured the separation of the subject from the deformities to which it would otherwise be vulnerable within capitalism. The self is protectively framed so as to ensure its enjoyment of the already extant fullness of its being. There is no real treatment of the production of subjectivity, as such, in this project. Unlike Foucault, for whom subjectivity is a process of production in which discursive and non-discursive practices are always implicated – from Ancient Greece and Rome to twentieth century neoliberalism – Aureli posits an essential form of life whose conditions of possibility are not themselves critically examined, but taken as read, given, transcendent to history. For Badiou, subjectivisation is an achievement, a temporal event that enables escape from the normative bounds of convention by which the mere individual is constrained.8 For Aureli, subjectivisation is to be warded off, through an architecture of

284

Less than enough

limits, as a threat to the already identified idea of being to which the self must be adequate. The formal essence and the essentialising formalism of the project are, then, pre-critical. If this project appears unable to produce concepts critically adequate to contemporary conditions, however, this is above all because of its insistence on the separation of the political from the economic. This renders it especially compromised in relation to the current conditions of neoliberalism in which the political and the economic are strategically rendered indistinguishable from one another. Aureli’s resort to an appeal to escape from these conditions that focuses on the self apart from the economic, articulated in his extended essay Less is Enough, is especially revealing of the problematics always inherent to his project.9 Here, the compromised nature of the project of autonomy, and the limitations of its transhistorical and pre-critical approaches, becomes particularly apparent. Its affirmations – its identification of architecture with form, and forms of life, the idea of the self as project, and the privilege of isolation from the urban – begin to converge with those promoted by neoliberalism and its architecture. ‘Asceticism,’ writes Aureli in Less is Enough, ‘allows subjects to focus on their life as the core of their own practice, by structuring it according to a self-chosen form made of specific habits and rules’.10 Asceticism also enables the self to achieve ‘autonomy from systems of power’11 in a process that ‘often involves architecture and design as a device for self-enactment’.12 Monasticism and its architecture, particularly that of the early Franciscans, exemplify this possibility. ‘From the outset monasticism manifested itself as an inevitable and radical critique of power, not by fighting it, but by leaving it’.13 The monastic single cell is the ‘quintessential representation of interiority: it is here that the single body finds its proper space, the space in which it can take care of itself’.14 The Franciscans best exemplify a critique of power since they eschew the concern of other orders with entrepreneurialism and production. Above all, their rule of voluntary poverty enables them to escape corruption from the economic order emerging in the towns and cities of thirteenth-century Europe. The Franciscan ‘refusal to own things’ is a refusal of their ‘economic value and thus the possibility of the exploiting of others’.15 The architecture of the monastery, its individual cells and cloistered common spaces, holds the monks in protective isolation from the economic powers circulating beyond its walls. Aureli, following the arguments of Agamben’s The Highest Poverty, maintains that the form of the monastery sustained a ‘form of life’ in which one’s life and the habits through which it was lived were in perfect agreement, the one becoming indistinguishable from the other through the sharing of a common rule.16 The architecture of the monastery is in perfect consonance with this form of life, it is ‘simply an extrusion of the ritual activities that take place within’.17 The argument of Less is Enough builds upon that of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Architecture is only ‘resolutely itself’ when separated from the managerial paradigm of urbanisation associated with the rise of capitalism.18 An absolute architecture achieving formal autonomy from the economic forces that surround it is, in its very essence, a political architecture: ‘[t]he very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated’.19 An architecture of formal autonomy is political because politics is, in its very essence, ‘agonism through separation and confrontation’.20 The architectural and the political are defined through formal categories in which the one

285

Douglas Spencer

serves to realise the essence of the other. In combination they constitute a project that escapes urbanisation with its ‘economic logic of social management’.21 In Less is Enough Aureli introduces an essential form of life as a third term within this schema. ‘Human nature’ is identified with ‘its most generic substratum’, that of ‘life itself’ – bios – and human subjects are argued to be properly themselves only when allowed to ‘focus on their self as the core of their activity’.22 What are claimed as the essential properties of the architectural, the political and the human, are held to be perfectly aligned in Franciscan monasticism.23 This is proposed as a paradigm of resistance-through-escape from the economic and the managerial. And this, in turn, is how Aureli arrives at his concluding argument concerning what is proper to the conduct of the contemporary architect. Whereas architects and designers today often concern themselves with a social agenda, ‘they rarely,’ Aureli laments, ‘look at their own existence, which is what really constitutes the main source of their production’.24 They would do better, and be more effectively political, were they to focus on their own lives, as formal projects, rather than concerning themselves with an architecture of good intentions. This is Aureli’s Franciscanism. Through asceticism the self might realise its properly autonomous essence, a project, in Aureli’s words, of ‘fundamental liberation from [the] social structure’.25 Aureli’s Franciscanism, however, constitutes an effectively pre-critical turn in its insistence on fundamental essence and normative identity. No less so than the now near-hegemonic and post-critical architectural discourse of emergence, self-organisation and complexity, it identifies life and architecture with form, and the redemption of their essence in restoring the absolute consonance of the one with the other. What Aureli sets out to oppose is only inverted. The extroverted and the open, the flexible, the intensively networked and the hyper-connective, are challenged by an opposing set of morphological principles – the introverted and the closed, the separate and the fixed, the cloistered and the bounded. Each party – the post-critical and the pre-critical – stakes a claim to what is proper to life and to architecture, and each articulates this claim in formal terms. But neither party concerns itself with the conditions under which the proper, in terms of life, architecture and the political, is itself produced, historically, politically, economically. Their respective positions, that is, are not critical but dogmatic. Neither party, though for quite different reasons, seems willing to acknowledge the ways in which architecture and life, and what is supposed to be proper to them, are mediated by the economic. Indeed for Aureli the redemption and realisation of the essential forms of architecture and life are held to be the very means by which both, together, escape the economic. Here the terms of the concept of a ‘political economy’ are decisively prised apart so that the political is seen as the means through which autonomy from the economic can be achieved. As David Cunningham has recently remarked of this project, ‘there is something profoundly formalist about this definition of “the sphere of the political” itself, which in rendering “separation and confrontation” solely internal to politics, merely brackets off the central “context” of actual, historical capitalist social relations themselves’.26 It might be added that this bracketing off of the economic also serves to obscure the ways in which the seemingly redemptive project of the autonomous self is also mediated by the economic and managerial imperatives of neoliberalism.

286

Less than enough

Franciscanism does not elude the economic and its managerial operations, it elides them. In fact it even obscures the relationship between capitalism, architecture and religion at work in the case of the early Franciscans. Looked at from a historical perspective, as opposed to a transhistorical one, the relationship between the Franciscans and their architecture reveals precisely the ways in which this was mediated by, and indeed contributed to, the emergence of an urban managerialism driven by the rise of capitalism. Giacomo Todeschini writes, in his Franciscan Wealth: From Voluntary Poverty to Market Society, that ‘the Franciscans’ approach to the market reveals that it was the most rigorous Christian religiosity that formed a large part of the vocabulary in western economics … the Christian world was never extraneous from the market … nor was there a clear separation between morality and business’.27 Todeschini is not alone in arguing that the Franciscans were implicated in the development of the market society emerging in thirteenth-century Europe. In Money and the Middle Ages, Jacques Le Goff remarks that the early Franciscans ‘were better integrated into the new money economy than into the old rural economy’.28 Caroline Bruzelius reports, in her recent Preaching, Burying, and Building: Friars in the Medieval City, that ‘[e]conomic historians have noted that in time the orders that adopted the idea of evangelical poverty came to have an intimate acquaintance with wealth’.29 ‘Indeed,’ she continues, ‘Franciscans were among the first economic theorists of the Middle Ages’.30 The implication of the Franciscan order in the economy of the emerging market society derives in significant part from the fact that it tended, in contrast to the rural locations of earlier monastic orders, to situate its monasteries within the existing urban territory, often at its core. In the early decades of the thirteenth century the order began to insinuate itself into the gaps it found within this environment. It occupied abandoned buildings within towns and cities experiencing rising population growth and the rapid development of mercantile trade. From these footholds it grew its monasteries piecemeal, taking further ground building by building. As Bruzelius suggests, ‘[w]e can think of mendicant architecture, like cities, as in a constant state of “becoming”’.31 The architecture of the Franciscan friary was not derived from a logic of isolation internal to the order, or the expression of a plan generated, straightforwardly, from the rituals it was supposed to accommodate. It resulted from the order’s ongoing tactical manoeuvres in the urban environment in which it was embedding itself. The Franciscans fought for urban space from which to save the souls of citizens. Their activities were oriented outward, not inward, towards engaging with the public, the emergent bourgeoisie in particular. Rather than preaching to the choir they evangelised amongst the urban laity. As C. H. Lawrence notes in his Medieval Monasticism, ‘[t]he Mendicant Orders broke free from one of the most basic principles of traditional monasticism by abandoning the seclusion and enclosure of the cloister in order to engage in an active pastoral mission to the society of their time’.32 Bruzelius writes that ‘[o]ne of the radical aspects of the mendicant movement was the externalisation of religion into the open spaces of cities as well as into the private spaces of homes’.33 Not only did the Franciscans build large conventual structures in the towns and cities, but they projected their message out into the surrounding urban environment. Pulpits were placed on the exterior walls of their

287

Douglas Spencer

buildings so that they could preach to those in the street below.34 They built piazzas from which to proselytise. They ventured out from their monasteries to visit the laity in their homes – ‘usurping the traditional role of the secular clergy’, as Bruzelius notes – in a practice derided by their contemporary, Saint-Amour, as a penetrans domus.35 The extroverted and expansionary practices of the Franciscans were driven by their rule of poverty, meaning that they had to evangelise in order to receive donations to sustain themselves, as well as to expand their built presence in the city. In return for donations the laity were offered salvation, the assurance that their passage through purgatory in the afterlife would be hastened. What they left in their wills bought intercessionary prayer on their behalf, and space for their burial within the order’s convents.36 Bruzelius observes that the architecture of the Franciscans ‘came to resemble … “warehouses” or “hangars” for tombs and other kinds of interventions of the faithful: paintings, banners, coats of arms, and other paraphernalia’.37 Death, as Le Goff argues, was ‘monetarized’.38 In burying the bourgeoisie within its convents, death was also, as Bruzelius argues, newly ‘democratized’. The monastic architecture of the Franciscans, then, is not ‘simply an extrusion of the ritual activities that take place within’, but one shaped through financial exchange. The area it occupies registers the extent of their economy, it forms a direct index of the success of their entrepreneurial habits. Trading between donations and services, between life and the afterlife, the Franciscans become, Todeschini argues, socially esteemed for their abilities in calculating value and the management of exchange and wealth.39 In turn, the Franciscans themselves positively evaluate the emergence of the market society, seeing trade as a kind of evangelical social glue. The dynamics of evangelical poverty, experienced again in the climate of economic ferment of the thirteenth century, led Franciscans to discover the logic of the market as a keystone of Christian relationships. From the center to the suburbs of the system of cities and territories concretely forming this market society, trading professionals appeared to friars as possible mediators of a life in common that was recognizable both as a common good and as belonging to the Christian world.40 Rather than offering a critique of power by leaving it, the Franciscans, and their architecture, are implicated in exactly the kind of economic and managerial operations that Aureli seeks autonomy from, and precisely at the historical locus of the emergence of these. This case, in particular, points to a broader issue for any theory premised on the belief that salvation lies in secession from the economic in order to realise a notion of the political transcendent to history. Positing life and architecture as essential, and essentially formal, categories, it then seeks to locate what will stand as exemplary of these across the history of architecture. The archipelago of exemplars is sustained by identifying those instances, ranging across the centuries, where architecture momentarily realises its potential to provide protective enclaves in which the economic is held at bay, and where the sacralised individual is thus able to focus on its being, on a life lived in common amongst small and isolated communities – Schumacher’s atavistic

288

Less than enough

brotherhoods. The possibility of an absolute architecture appears as a transhistorical canon of ideal instances, a constellation in which each point illuminates precisely the same promise to be redeemed. There appears no need to be concerned with the ways in which these instances, and thus the forms of life and the forms of architecture with which they are concerned, might be mediated by a history of the economic, the managerial or the governmental. These historical, if not absolute, determinants, are unconsidered because it is supposed that they can be eluded through the redemption of an absolute architectural essence. These determinants are, ultimately, not matters of concern other than in their role in constituting the eternal antagonist of a project of autonomy. But this project of autonomy is itself inescapably mediated by economics, by managerialism, by governmentality. This is what is most troubling about Aureli’s insistence that architects might be more genuinely political in focusing their attention on themselves as the source of their own production. It resonates all too well with the doxa of neoliberalism, with the imperative to make of one’s own life an ongoing project, with the apparent dissolution of the political in the absolute economisation of the self. As Nick Dyer-Witherford has recently written, the insistence that the world be understood only as a set of individual projects, is one of the most powerful and destructive weapons for the current economic system in a “class war” waged from above by capital.41 And what is most prized within this class war is to earn, through working on oneself as an entrepreneurial project, the means to isolate oneself from the dangers and precarities circulating in an urban condition figured as hostile, as a threatening externality. The successfully managed self achieves the privilege of securing its integrity within the private courtyards and securitised common spaces of the gated community. Understood within a historical context it is unable to countenance – the neoliberal mobilisation of the economic as the political – the formal project of autonomy comes to share the values of what it supposes itself to oppose.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Camilo Vladimir de Lima Amaral, Nadir Lahiji, Will Orr and Ricardo Ruivo Pereira for taking the time to discuss the contents of this essay with me, and for providing invaluable feedback on its earlier drafts. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume – Giorgio Ponzo, Georgios Themistokleous and, especially, Teresa Stoppani – for their input in further refining this essay.

Notes 1

In his insistence on this differentiation between ‘the project’ and design, Aureli invokes a longstanding concern within Italian architectural culture, especially as this developed in the 1950s and 1960s within

289

Douglas Spencer

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

290

the IUAV (Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice). In this context, the term ‘project’ (in Italian, progetto) is possessed of multiple and variously nuanced meanings. As Marco Biraghi notes, progetto ‘can mean project, plan, and even architecture. It can also imply a projection or an intention’, see Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2013), xi. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2011), xiii. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, 165. Patrik Schumacher, ‘The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Order’, in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015), 19–44. Schumacher, ‘The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Order’, 21. Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 247–248. Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 2, 3. As Peter Hallward writes of Badiou’s account of subjectivity, ‘[o]rdinary individuals are constrained and justified by relations of hierarchy, obligation, and deference; their existence is literally bound to their social places. True subjects, by contrast, are first and foremost free of relation as such, and are justified by nothing other than the integrity of their own affirmations’. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxxi. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Less is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2013), 4. Aureli, Less is Enough, 4. Aureli, Less is Enough, 12. Aureli, Less is Enough, 4. Aureli, Less is Enough, 5. Aureli, Less is Enough, 7. Aureli, Less is Enough, 9–10. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Aureli, Less is Enough, 8. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, ix–x. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, ix. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, ix. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, x. Emphasis in italics mine. Aureli, Less is Enough, 4. Other examples are also considered, however, such as the work of the Israeli artist Absalon, the architecture of Le Corbusier and Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer project. Aureli, Less is Enough, 22. Aureli, Less is Enough, 7. David Cunningham, ‘Architecture, Capitalism and the “Autonomy”of the Political’, in Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left, ed. Nadir Z. Lahiji (London: Zero Books, 2016). Giacomo Todeschini, Franciscan Wealth: From Voluntary Poverty to Market Society, trans. Donatella Melucci, ed. Michael F. Cusato, Jean François Godet-Calogeras and Daria Mitchell (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute Saint Bonaventure University, 2009), 7–8. Jacques Le Goff, Money and the Middle Ages: An Essay in Historical Anthropology, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 76. Caroline Bruzelius, Preaching, Burying, and Building: Friars in the Medieval City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 183. Bruzelius, Preaching, Burying, and Building, 183. Caroline Bruzelius, ‘The Architecture of the Mendicant Orders in the Middle Ages: An Overview of Recent Literature’, in Perspective 2 (2012): 369. C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 238. Bruzelius, Preaching, Burying, and Building, 181. Bruzelius, Preaching, Burying, and Building, 181–182. Bruzelius, ‘The Architecture of the Mendicant Orders in the Middle Ages’, 378. Bruzelius, ‘The Architecture of the Mendicant Orders in the Middle Ages’, 380. Bruzelius, Preaching, Burying, and Building, 151. Le Goff, Money and the Middle Ages, 131. Todeschini, Franciscan Wealth, 103, 110. Todeschini, Franciscan Wealth, 134. Nick Dyer-Witherford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 8.

Less than enough

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2011. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. Less is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2013. Badiou, Alain. Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, 2. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2009. Biraghi, Marco. Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2013. Bruzelius, Caroline. ‘The Architecture of the Mendicant Orders in the Middle Ages: An Overview of Recent Literature’. Perspective 2 (2012): 365–386. Bruzelius, Caroline. Preaching, Burying, and Building: Friars in the Medieval City. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Cunningham, David. ‘Architecture, Capitalism and the “Autonomy” of the Political’. In Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left, edited by Nadir Z. Lahiji. London: Zero Books, 2016. Dyer-Witherford, Nick. Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press, 2015. Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Lawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Longman, 1984. Le Goff, Jacques. Money and the Middle Ages: An Essay in Historical Anthropology. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012. Schumacher, Patrik. ‘The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Order’. In The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, edited by Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015. Seaford, Richard. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Todeschini, Giacomo. Franciscan Wealth: From Voluntary Poverty to Market Society. Translated by Donatella Melucci. Edited by Michael F. Cusato, Jean François Godet-Calogeras and Daria Mitchell. Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute Saint Bonaventure University, 2009.

291

Chapter 28

Repositioning. Having ideas Mario Carpo

Mario Carpo had prepared these notes to read at the concluding session of the This Thing Called Theory conference. Due to an incident, he could not attend. We include them in this volume, with the author’s permission, only slightly edited from the original draft, and with the addition of a basic bibliography of works cited. Do not expect me to offer any conclusion on the topic of This Thing Called Theory. I have no clue as to what ‘this thing called theory’ is; although it was certainly a good idea to convene a conference so we could ask that question. When I was a student in the faraway country where I was born and bred, I thought I knew what architectural theory is: evidently, a body of ideas related to building, as first set forth in the writings of Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Vignola and other Southern classicists, and then, in more recent times, of some more Nordic blokes too – Semper, Ruskin, Corbu, etc. Now that I am older and wiser, I know better. I have learned that, alongside this stuffy repertoire of philistine writers who had ideas on the art of building, there is another, wider domain of intellectual speculation pertaining to, and bearing on, the design professions. I became aware of this divide between old architectural theory, the one I knew and studied at school, and a rising new field of theory for architects, when, more than 20 years ago, I was invited for the first time to teach in America, as a visiting professor in a well-known Ivy League university. On one of my first days on campus I visited the local bookstore, and headed for the aisle titled ‘Architecture’. There, I started to check the names of the authors on display: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, etc. Perplexed, I called the

292

Having ideas

sales person, and asked: ‘There must be a mistake, where is the architecture section?’ And he said, of course, ‘That’s it; you are looking at it.’ ‘Is it? This looks to me like the philosophy aisle.’ The sales person then realised that I was a newcomer and an alien, someone just arrived from who knows where, and he explained, briefly, opening his arms and looking at the sky, ‘that … that is theory’. Period. Theory. Meaning, I presume, theory for architects: a digest or selection of philosophy specifically meant for the design professions; the kind of philosophy architects should know. A few months ago an American scholar I know was invited to teach a research seminar, in a school of architecture I shall not mention, here in Europe. His topic, a topic on which he has published many books and articles, was the invention of architectural formalism, from Colin Rowe to Peter Eisenman. Yes, I know, a typical Ivy League topic, but, after all, one that has had a certain relevance in the history of contemporary architecture. Soon, however, the speaker realised that most students in the class looked a bit lost, so, during the coffee break, he started to test the waters, discreetly, and asked some of the students whether they were familiar with any of that stuff; had they ever heard any of those names? No, most students in that class had not. One said that he had heard about Eisenman – in a seminar on Derrida. At that point the speaker himself was confused, and asked: ‘Well, tell me then – give me an example: what are you working on these days?’ ‘We are organising a seminar on penguins,’ was the reply. Penguins. I swear I am not making this up. That was meant to be part of a seminar on post-human and animal studies. So, that much at least we know: old architectural theory is, or was, made of ideas about building; today’s theory, or philosophy for architects, is not. So far so good. I have no opinions on that, and I shall not take sides. After all, there is no way to prove that, in the general scheme of things, penguins are more important, or less important, than deconstructivism. And yet, to remain at a purely anecdotal level, I can think of at least one counter-example, just one – but one case when architects had ideas about building that started something which went well beyond building, and transcended the confines of our discipline: ideas about building that changed building, but also sparked a global wave of change, and have already changed the world in which we live. It may be just one isolated case, but it is a remarkable success story. Let me recap this story in brief. Architecture is, and almost always was, a low-tech business; hence, with a certain logic, architects tend to be late in embracing technological change. Sometimes architects simply ignore technological change; sometimes they oppose it. This chronic belatedness started at the very beginnings of the Western architectural tradition: Vitruvius’s De Architectura, one of the most influential books of all time, was composed in the early years of the Roman Empire (c. 30 BC) but it described a building technology that, by the time Vitruvius put it into writing, was already a few centuries old. Vitruvius refers for the most part to trabeated, post-and-lintel structures, and he does not ever even mention either arches or vaults, which were already a major achievement of Roman engineering. When Vitruvius mentions bricks, he seems to have in mind the primitive sun-dried brick of the early Mediterranean and Mesopotamian traditions; yet, when he was writing his treatise – as a retired military engineer living on a pension from the Roman army and on a grant from the Emperor’s sister – he was probably sitting in a

293

Mario Carpo

modern Roman house, made of solid bricks baked in a furnace. Why did Vitruvius choose to celebrate an obsolete way of building, and concoct the fiendish plan to bequeath to posterity the description of a building technology that nobody, at the time of his writing, was using any more? We do not know. But perhaps it should come as no surprise that his treatise soon fell into oblivion, only to be revived 15 centuries later by the Humanists of the Italian Renaissance, who, of course, could not make head or tail of most of what Vitruvius was talking about. Some – the most alert among Vitruvius’s Renaissance readers – did remark, meekly, that Vitruvius’s book, and the extant Roman ruins they could still peruse all over Italy, did not seem to match. But again, the technological ambitions of most Renaissance architects were simple at best, and early modern classicists did not need much technology to build in the classical styles they cherished. When the Renaissance came, European architecture had just gone through an age of astounding technical renewal: the high rises of Gothic spires and pinnacles were so daring and original that, to this day, we do not really know how they were built (and we could not rebuild them using the tools and materials of their time). But when Renaissance classicists and their Italianate style took over, the technical skills of the medieval master builders were abandoned, and early modern architecture fell back on the good old post-and-lintel structures of classical antiquity (this time with arches, vaults and domes added on when needed). For centuries, and with few exceptions, modern classicism kept stifling technological innovation in building. In the nineteenth century, while the industrial revolution was changing the world, society and the way we build, architects for the most part used the new industrial materials to imitate the shapes and forms of classical antiquity (and, at times, of other historical periods too). Even the golden age of twentieth-century Modernism, when architects in the end decided to come to terms with the industrial world, and invented a new style meant to exploit and represent the new technologies of massproduction, was – when all the hype is taken away – a sadly retardataire phenomenon. Look at the makers of cars, planes or steamships, claimed Le Corbusier in his famous writings of the early 1920s: unlike us, engineers know how to deal with today’s technologies of mass-production, and how to exploit the assembly line. We should take our lead from them, concluded Le Corbusier, and imitate their example. As their names suggest, Taylorism and Fordism were not invented by architects; they were invented by Frederick Taylor and by Henry Ford. Architects just followed suit – or tried to: a controversial, painful, and often not very successful travail. For houses, unlike automobiles or washing machines, can hardly be identically mass-produced: as late twentieth-century Post-Modernists will not fail to reiterate, every human dwelling should be a one-off, a unique work of art, made to measure and made to order, like a bespoke suit. Bespoke suits are expensive, but most Post-Modernists did not object to that. This is why, when the digital turn came in the 1990s, and digital design and fabrication started to change the way we make almost everything, architects – not all of them, but the best – found at long last a technology to their taste; one they could empathise with. For this was a technology meant to produce variations, not identical copies, and to produce customised, not standardised products. Digital tools use industrial

294

Having ideas

machines to mass-produce individual objects, thus delivering – in theory – unique, custom-made products at affordable, industrial costs. This was truly a post-modern architect’s dream come true, which is one reason why the architectural avant-garde adopted digital tools, and embraced digital change, sooner than any other trade, industry or creative profession. During the early years of the digital turn in architecture it also soon became evident that most scripts for computer-based design and manufacturing would be written in a parametric format – using a core mathematical syntax and some numeric variables called parameters. Parametricism has been a staple of modern mathematics for centuries, but when the same parametric approach was first applied to digital technologies for design and fabrication (then also known as file-to-factory technologies), major and disruptive consequences started to occur. A general parametric script, where parameters are left indeterminate, is in fact the design of an entire family (or class) of objects – but of no object in particular. When, further on, each parameter is replaced by a number, each script becomes the notation of an individual product; each product generated this way will be different, but similar to all others in the same family, or series (as all items share a core code, almost like a genetic code). Last, as digital fabrication in most cases does not need to amortise the cost of mechanical matrixes, casts or moulds, all end-products in the same parametric family can often be produced at the same unit cost: making more copies of the same item will not make any of them any cheaper, or, the other way around, each item can be different, when needed, at no additional cost. In short, the mass-production of different items becomes the general mode – the default mode, so to speak – of a digital design and fabrication environment. Throughout the 1990s, these new ideas and technologies rose together with the notion that parametric mathematical functions would be mostly continuous functions – the kind of functions derived from Bézier’s mathematics and embedded in the splinemodelling software of the late 1980s and 1990s, like Form Z, Maya or Rhino. These mathematical functions are best used to describe continuous lines and surfaces, and indeed in the 1990s parametricism was universally seen as a style of streamlined, smooth and polished curves. These spliny curves were then also known as ‘folds’, or plis, following the terminology introduced by Gilles Deleuze and by the designer, philosopher and polymath Bernard Cache – Deleuze’s gifted student. In the mid 1990s Greg Lynn famously introduced the term ‘blob’, which immediately caught on, and to this day best defines the spirit (as well as the technology, culture and architectural style) of the first digital age. As of the mid 1990s, digital tools allowed the fabrication of freeform or complex geometries cladded by curving surfaces of unprecedented smoothness, and when Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao was inaugurated, in 1997, it was immediately recognised as the icon of a new way of building. The same could be said of many equally iconic works by Zaha Hadid: to this day, such buildings give shape and form to the notion, reiterated of recent by Patrik Schumacher, of parametricism as the ‘global style’ of the first digital age. They prove that, using digital tools, we can realise objects that, until a few years ago, few architects could have conceived – and no engineer could have built. And if new ideas and new technologies can revolutionise building to such extent, one may be led to think that the same may be true of any other

295

Mario Carpo

field of art and industry, and of human society in general. Such is the power of persuasion that architectural forms can wield, in some particularly felicitous moments of architectural history – and the digital turn was one such moment. For the technical logic of digital tools is indeed changing the world in which we live. Seamless digital mass-customisation, increasingly applied to physical objects and media objects alike, means a consumer culture where the end-user is also a co-designer or content provider, and where new breeds of variable, generic objects are out of sync with many humanistic values that have moulded industrial modernity – such as copyrights and intellectual property, for example. It means a new marketplace where economies of scale do not apply any more, and standard and non-standard products, industrial massproduction and digital one-offs, can compete on price. But it also means a marketplace where prices are algorithmically determined and change at all times, and where the aggregation of supply and demand does not provide any economies of scale either. As the cost of algorithmic transactions is almost nothing, we can now process the transaction of almost nothing at almost no cost and in almost no time: the “invisible hand” of the new global marketplace is simply indifferent to scale – just like computeraided design. Meanwhile, Big Data simulation is opening the door to a new, post-modern scientific method where information retrieval is more important than mathematical formalisation (and this has already upended the modern science of structural design – and much more is coming). But the granularity of Big Data analysis also means, for example, the end of all actuarial practices on which the insurance industry has been based since the end of the Middle Ages: when the group for which the risk is being calculated is a group of one, the very same notion of insurance is gone. And in a new global marketplace, where standards, statistical means, averages, economies of scales and aggregation of supply and demand are equally irrelevant, many of the regulatory functions historically taken over and delivered by the modern nation state become equally obsolete – together, some would argue, with the need for a nation state itself. Does all this seem vaticinatory, utopian or apocalyptic? For better for worse, this is already happening, all around us. And all this started in a few schools of architecture little more than twenty years ago. At that time, these were the ideas of a handful of digital designers, trained in the tradition of Western architectural theory, inspired by some philosophy books and trying to put to task some brand new software for drawing lines on a screen. These ideas are now being discussed by politicians, technologists, economists and decisionmakers around the world. US President Barack Obama included a chapter on 3D printing in his State of the Union address of 2013. Major banks and think tanks of multinational companies are organising brainstorming sessions on digital theory; digital gurus are regularly invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Yet these were originally our ideas: these ideas have been nurtured, tested, crashed and rebooted in architectural schools around the world for the last 20 years. Yes, now the genie is out of the bottle – for better for worse. But if past performance is an indication of future returns, the best vantage point to take a glimpse of our techno-cultural future today is neither in the palaces of our political leaders, nor in the executive suites of our corporate masters. All these people are late – as it seems they do not have a clue as to what is

296

Having ideas

going on and they are just trying to catch up. They should ask us. If you want to see our future in the making, the best observation deck these days is still in a school of architecture.

Bibliography Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Cache, Bernard. Projectiles. Translated by Clare Barrett  and Pamela Johnston. London: Architectural Association Publications, 2011. Carpo, Mario. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Carpo, Mario, ed. The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Lynn, Greg. Folds, Bodies and Blobs: Collected Essays. Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 1998. Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume I: A New Framework for Architecture. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume II: A New Agenda for Architecture. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio). The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

297

Chapter 29

Post-scriptum. ‘But that is not enough’ Teresa Stoppani

Claim The question behind ‘this thing called theory’, asked in architecture but without mentioning architecture, has a purposeful if not arrogant implication: that architecture has a theory of its own, or, rather, that architectural theory is intrinsic to architecture, and an indispensable part of it – ‘architecture’ theory, then, rather than ‘architectural’ theory. The question is the same as affirming that theory does exist (exists, existed, will exist) in architecture as something different from other forms and areas of theory, although it remains deeply interconnected with them, and is all too often reliant on them. ‘This thing’ then calls for specificity, and for a return to the discipline of architecture as well as to the thinking that occurs within it. The arrogance of architecture theory, its calling for its own (ad-rogare), that forceful claim that appropriates, is an assertion of and for the right to be. It requires, as in the Latin adrogatio,1 a statement of commitment made in front of the public (the Roman populus, and later its representatives) that legitimizes a consensual and mutual appropriation (and affiliation): in this case, in relation to architecture, it is the claim to an area of discourse, as well as the claim to a role within architecture itself. The ‘arrogance’ of this thing called theory is ultimately a claim of responsibility, a serious act of incorporation, as well as a commitment to a form of care. It is also a commitment to a relation to an other.

298

‘But that is not enough’

In arrogating architecture (to itself), architecture theory claims a stake on it, cares about architecture and helps define it. Architecture theory attributes to itself the right to exist within architecture; it also claims a necessary role with(in) it. As in the Roman adrogatio, the relation of convenience and limitation is mutual, as architecture claims theory to itself. Architecture thinks. The two – architecture theory and architecture – do not coincide, but each cannot exist without the other. They co-(l)laborate, that is, they are at work together. Architecture without its theory is not architecture. The mutual and public claim of care is important, as it is not a claim of autonomy. Far from it: architecture can only exist in relation to what it is not, to what makes it possible, to what inhabits it, and architecture theory plays an important role in articulating such relations. Relations change (are changing), and with them the adaptable, fleeting, sometimes volatile voice of theory, while architecture itself remains relatively slow, caught by its very nature between the space of experimentation and that of realization (although these too are amazingly brought to converge today). A practice that changes constantly, that has no axioms or definitions, that is not prescriptive but relational both within architecture and with building, a malleable practice that thinks with society and both reflects it and transforms it, cannot be a discipline. ‘This thing called architecture theory’ does not exist, the historian tells me; and he is right: as a discipline, this ‘thing’ does not exist. It ceased to exist as a discipline (an ancillary one) when it stopped being descriptive and prescriptive, that is, when it stopped being a tool for, rather than a voice with. Yet, even that form of architecture theory – a ‘discipline disciplining’ theory – was indeed struggling to keep at bay contrasting voices, unorthodox practices, material evidence, endeavouring as it did, throughout its history (yes, the history of theory), to find (but read, fabricate) the origin of architecture – that one, single, dignified and pure origin that never existed. Even then the role of this ‘non-discipline’ that is theory was indeed that of interrogation: asking questions of itself rather than formalizing appeasing solutions. Similarly, the recent post-theory2 movement in architecture attempted again to fix-frame architecture theory as a discipline, this time with a sentenced and staged death rather than with a search of origins. What it produced instead, rather than a forever aftertheory, was indeed a reenergizing restart moment, as it magnified questions of architecture at the beginning of the new millennium. The opposite of an after-theory has happened instead. Opening up the divergence between the critical and the projective, the debate has indeed set free and re-launched the thinking in architecture that is caught in between. And questions remain (some of which are addressed in this book). Dislodging architecture theory from an established and generational association with critical theory, with psychoanalysis, or with semiology or post-structuralism, the after-theory moment in fact re-started conversations, not only with current developments in philosophy, but also with material sciences, politics and economy, and indeed with the convergence of them that we are now witnessing. Not only that: the bastardized origin-less material nature of architecture makes it the ideal ground to develop original thinking in making.

299

Teresa Stoppani

In architecture Architecture theory needs to return to itself, that is to architecture, in order to find how it has changed, not why. Why it has changed is obvious and becomes a redundant statement if we imply architecture’s relationality as a sine qua non condition of its being.3 To look at ‘how’ architecture theory is changing means to engage in exploring the relationship between architecture and theory, and also to redefine theory as a plurality of different and discordant contributions to how (the ‘how of hows’) theory is produced in architecture, which means: for architecture, about architecture and, more essentially, by architecture. The idea of ‘in architecture’ was introduced by Andrew Benjamin in his 2000 book Architectural Philosophy to think ‘the particularity of the architectural’ and ‘to engage with architecture understood as a site of repetition’, where ‘the critical is defined as a repetition that takes place again for the first time’.4 That the thinking that defines architecture must happen (literally, take place) in architecture as a site of repetition has always been the case, whether this was being recognized at the time of its happening or not. This becomes apparent and almost inescapable with the demise of classical (and modernist) prescriptive theory, and with the emergence of an architectural history that is distinct from both art history and architectural practice, and triggers the formulation of specific questions of architecture. From the mid-1960s the discipline of architectural theory started to be redefined and opened up to and by the non-specifically architectural – borrowing from political ideologies, psychoanalysis, linguistics and semiology, literature criticism and cultural studies. As early as 1966 Aldo Rossi clearly articulated the intrinsically manifold nature of architecture, claiming for the ‘project’ a unique and specific form of embedded criticality. In his text ‘Architettura per i musei’5 Rossi identifies the most important ‘moment’ of architecture theory in the ‘relationship between the theoretical view of architecture and the making of architecture’.6 It is in its making, through the combination of its multiform expressions – the text, the drawing, the building – that, for Rossi, architecture both produces and expresses its ‘thinking’. Rossi sees the ‘thinking’ (pensare) in architecture as one with the ‘design’ (progettare) of architecture. Subjective, rational but also evocative, and far from the modernist prescriptive ‘method’, architecture theory for Rossi remains internal to the discipline of design. A stubborn obsession, architecture theory operates in architecture by choosing and selecting, focusing and persevering on the same problem, which is then repeatedly tackled by the different occasions of the ‘project’. Architecture produces an autonomous discourse that, while it is informed by external disciplines – in Rossi’s case, economy, sociology and linguistics – it is also expressed by the specifics of the project, its representation and its construction. Reflective and iterative, critical and specific, architecture ‘presents itself as a meditation on things, on facts; its principles are few and immutable, but the concrete answers to changing topical problems that the architect and society can offer are manifold’.7

300

‘But that is not enough’

Relation Architecture theory is not a discipline, and yet it is a practice, difficult to accept, to grasp even, because it is not regulated. It may be quiet, embedded in architecture’s buildings; it may subtle, silenced at times, but it is not going away, despite oppositions, dismissals and ridicule. Ridicule in fact it welcomes, as a sign that theory is very much alive, provoking and provocative of thinking, eliciting whatever reactions, making indifference impossible. The laughter that theory laughs is the Bataillean laughter that mirrors the being laughed at with laughing it back out, louder and sharper.8 It is the laughter of that least definable and frameable of theorists, through which the unfashionable shakes the established mainstream. Theory laughs, and it laughs back. Theory laughs also at itself. In prefacing the book series Frontiers of Theory,9 literary theorist  and  cultural critic Martin McQuillan writes that: ‘Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, end, and after-life.’ McQuillan observes that, in its process of auto-critique, Theory needs to ask: what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines that inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought’s own limits?10 And architecture theory? How does it construct itself? How does it reinvent itself and think its own limits (in the iterations of architecture’s project) while architecture continues to reinvent itself? As it reconsiders its status as a discipline in relation to digital technologies, material sciences, biology and environmental transformations, architecture continues to introject thoughts and practices developed ‘outside’ architecture. It is indeed its very openness and connectedness that offer a line of continuity in the ongoing process of self-definition and reinvention that has always characterized architecture as a practice of the multiple and of the critical, that, far from only making physical environments, continues to act in and through all its intersections with its ‘other’ as a critical and cultural agent. Architecture has always borrowed narratives, tools, concepts and images from other disciplines, always defining itself in relation with an ‘other’. It is by definition relational: internally, in how it organizes itself through rules or paradigms of form and space making; externally, in how it relates to forms of inhabitation, use, and cultural and physical conditions. The relational nature of architecture is intrinsic to its making since the very beginnings – which are themselves multiple, uncertain, open and negotiated. Designed for human inhabitation and interaction, architecture needs to respond to requirements that are both practical and more extensively intangible: social, political, psychological, etc., depending on its spatial and temporal conditions of production. Architecture establishes, that is, a series of external relations, rules, narratives and situations.11

301

Teresa Stoppani

Yet, in each instance of its repetition, in its every ‘act’ – design, construction, practice, writing – architecture calls into question also its own languages, its materials, its history as a discipline, thus producing a self-redefinition at its every re-enactment. Is architecture too, then, ‘A thought that thinks its own limits’ (to paraphrase McQuillan)? Architecture changes itself in each of its ‘instalments’, in its repetitions; each time it is enmeshed in a web of relations, both external and internal, which affect it and which it produces. These relations occupy also a space that is only apparently void of architecture’s direct intervention. It is in these apparent voids that the relational nature of architecture emerges more forcefully, where possible alternative practices of architecture are exposed. It is in these ‘voids’ that the discourse and the critical space of the words of architecture take place, as well as other alternative practices. It is in this space that the relational nature of architecture becomes more evident.12

‘But that is not enough …’ Architecture theory is how architecture thinks itself and in itself, and therefore, ultimately, thinks what architecture is – not in the sense of grasping an impossible essence or fixed origin, but in order to confirm its multiple and changeable position in response to the basic issues of inhabitation and environment, and in relation to space and time. If there is an essence to what we do in architecture, and in thinking with it and writing in it, it is in this constant questioning. Because buildings can be architecture and architecture can be buildings, but the two do not necessarily coincide. It is the space of these differences and non-coincidences that architecture theory inhabits, explores and constantly redefines. ‘But that is not enough.’ Architecture theory is the ‘not enough’ of architecture, its ‘not-enough-ing’, with the oppositional ‘but’ that accompanies it. ‘Aber das genügt nicht’, Walter Benjamin writes in a fragment of his First Sketches for the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project),13 one of the many in which he approaches the dialectical image as a constellation, a critical construct that escapes fixed definitions: It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice, at each moment, to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. [Aber das genügt nicht.] For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. […] the object is felt to be concretized in this situation itself and upraised from its former being into the higher concretion of now-being [Jetzsein]. For Walter Benjamin, placing the historical object in its context is not enough; it is necessary to place it in relation with the current situation of the observation point. The historical object is always and again re-concretized in the present, and it is the dubitative ‘but’ that triggers the performance of the ‘not-enough-ing’. In architecture, the nowbeing of the object is in the ‘not-enough-ing’ that each time and again questions the stability and the finished-ness of the object. The architectural object therefore becomes

302

‘But that is not enough’

a site of discourse. It is such kind of object that architecture needs to be: dialectical, tensioned, questioned and ultimately unstable. But that too is not enough. In his fragment, Benjamin continues proposing the now-being as a concretion that ‘has overcome the ideology of progress’, to pursue instead a philosophy of history that is ‘an increasing concentration (integration) of reality’. In architecture, this would mean to dismiss linear histories of pacifying progress, and seek an architecture that remains actively capable to engage both its past and present in trans-historical, discipline-specific process of self-interrogation. For Benjamin, the ‘dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of all present action to the test’. ‘But that is not enough’ then proposes a criticality that is intrinsic to the object under consideration, and that the object itself performs. The architectural object must perform, incessantly and relentlessly, a critique not only of its own time, but of the now-time of its activity. Architecture is such a self-critical object, but, within it, it is the work of architecture theory that triggers its laughter.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13

‘Adrogatio was the process of Adoption by which a man Sui Iuris (that is, a Paterfamilias who was not under another man’s potestas) could give up his independence and come under the potestas of an adoptive father (a different process called adoption was used to adopt individuals in potestate parentum).’ See Fred. K. Drogula, ‘Adrogatio’, in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). See: Robert E. Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, in The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, ed. William S. Saunders, Harvard Design Magazine Readers 5 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 22–33. See also Michael Speaks, ‘Design Intelligence: Or Thinking After the End of Metaphysics’, Architectural Design 72 no. 5 (October 2002): 4–9. I have discussed this in Teresa Stoppani, ‘Relational Architecture: Dense Voids and Violent Laughters’, in Field: 6 no. 1, Urban Blind Spots, ed. F. Kossak, T. Schneider and S. Walker (Sheffield: The University of Sheffield, 2015), 97–111. Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000), 3. Aldo Rossi, ‘Architettura per i musei’ (1966; 1968) now in Aldo Rossi, Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972 (Milan: CittàStudi, 1975), 323–339. Rossi, Scritti scelti, 323. My translation. Rossi, Scritti scelti, 328. My translation. See Georges Bataille, ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935–1936) now in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. A. Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Writer, critic, philosopher, independent intellectual who operated outside academia and across disciplines, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) performs in his work a counter-reading of reality. The subversive character of his texts does not consist in a demolition from the outside of established sets of values, but in a systematic and pungent exposé of their contradictions and intrinsic ambiguities. The laughter that he discusses in ‘The Labyrinth’ is a key instrument in Bataille’s critique of society. Martin McQuillan, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, in Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals [Frontiers of Theory] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), xi–xii. McQuillan, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, xi. On the idea of exteriority and interiority in architecture, see Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). See also Peter Eisenman, Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978–1988 (New York and Montreal: Rizzoli and CCA, 1994), and Peter Eisenman, ‘Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing’, in Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 87–94. See Stoppani, ‘Relational Architecture: Dense Voids and Violent Laughters’. Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk [O°, 5] in ‘First Sketches’, in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 857.

303

Teresa Stoppani

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935–1936). In Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl, 171–177. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy. London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Drogula, Fred. K. ‘Adrogatio’. In The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah13007, accessed 25 September 2016. Eisenman, Peter. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978–1988. New York and Montreal: Rizzoli and CCA, 1994. Eisenman, Peter. Diagram Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Eisenman, Peter. ‘Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing’. In Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004, 87–94. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. McQuillan, Martin. ‘Series Editor’s Preface’ [Frontiers of Theory]. In Of Jews and Animals, by Andrew Benjamin, xi–xii. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Rossi, Aldo. Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972. Milan: CittàStudi, 1975. Somol, Robert E. and Sarah Whiting. ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’. In The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, Harvard Design Magazine Readers 5, edited by William S. Saunders, 22–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Speaks, Michael. ‘Design Intelligence: Or Thinking After the End of Metaphysics’. Architectural Design 72 no. 5, (October 2002): 4–9. Stoppani, Teresa. ‘Relational Architecture: Dense Voids and Violent Laughters’. Field: 6 no. 1, Urban Blind Spots, edited by Florian Kossak, Tatjana Schneider and Stephen Walker (Sheffield: The University of Sheffield, 2015): 97–111.

304

Index

Page numbers in italics denote figures, end of chapter notes are denoted by a letter n between page and note number. 1:1 Period Rooms exhibition (2015) 158, 159–60, 164, 165n15, 167 100 Drawings (Maymind) 47, 52

anarchism 270 Angelidakis, Andreas 158, 159–60, 164, 165n15, 167 anti-intellectualism 92–3

L’Académie Fratellini, St Denis 187

anti-Platonism 184

Ackerman, James 58

apartment buildings, Greek 223–6, 228

Actionists 270

Aquinas, Thomas 68

Actor-Network-Theory 164, 183, 184

Arbasino, Alberto 272n16

Adorno, Theodor W. 16, 35, 38

Arch+ 143, 144

adrogatio 298, 299, 303n1

Archaeology of the Contemporary Past 161–2

aesthetic cognition 118–19

Archigram 247

affect 79–86

Architectural Cliff (Kovacs) 46, 50

affect theory 83, 84, 85

architectural drawing see drawing

Agamben, Giorgio 57, 67–74, 285

architectural exhibitions 147; 1:1 Period Rooms

Agrest, Diana 90

(2015) 158, 159–60, 164, 165n15, 167;

Ahmed, Sara 235

Behind the Green Door: Architecture and

AIV see Architekten und Ingenieur Verein (AIV)

the Desire for Sustainability (2013) 157,

Ai Weiwei 266, 271n2

158, 161–4, 164n4; Berliner Bauwochen

Aktion 507 136, 140–1, 142–5

139–40, 142; Deconstructivist Architecture

Albers, Josef 131

(1988) 147, 150–1, 152–3; Diagnose zum

Alberti, Leon Battista 11, 63, 128, 168, 171,

Bauen in West-Berlin (1968) 136, 138,

198n16

139–41, 142–5; exhibition architecture 246,

Albini, Franco 270

247; Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin

Alison, Jane 208n25

(IBA, 1984/87) 138, 139, 145; Pressa (1928)

Allen, Stan 45

152, 153; Strategien für Kreuzberg (1977)

almost figure trajectory 49–50

138–9, 145; Usus/Usures (2010) 162

Althusser, Louis 91, 276, 277

architectural language 13, 15, 36–40

Ameisen, Jean Claude 207

architectural philosophy 73

analogical 265–6

Architectural Review 180

305

Index

architectural reviews 33–4

Bauman, Zygmunt 179

architectural toys 27–8

Bauwelt 144

architecture museums 21–9

BDA see Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA)

Architekten und Ingenieur Verein (AIV) 139,

Beck, Ulrich 254

142, 144 Archizoom Associati 57, 63n2 Arendt, Hannah 111n16

Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability exhibition (2013) 157, 158, 161–4, 164n4

Argan, Giulio Carlo 35, 59–60, 62, 64n7, 270

Behrens, Peter 171

Aristotle 69, 71–2, 75n34, 278–9

Benevolo, Leonardo 270

Arrhenius, Thordis 165n6

Bengtsson, Bo 239n5

Arte Povera 272n17

Benjamin, Andrew 73, 115–16, 300

asceticism 285, 286

Benjamin, Walter 16, 36, 39–40, 41, 124n28,

Asher, Michael 159

149–50, 205, 206, 244–5, 302–3

assembly lines 294

Bentham, Jeremy 276

astronomers 200–1, 202, 204, 206

Berardi, Bifo 237

Athens 222–9

Bergdoll, Barry 29n5

Atwood, Andrew 52

Bergson, Henri 80, 92, 191, 192, 193, 195–7,

Auden, W. H. 172

199n25

Augustine 69, 100

Berlin 136, 137–45

Aureli, Pier Vittorio 213, 262, 264, 267–8, 269,

Berlin Chair 117–18, 119

270, 283–9

Berliner Bauwochen exhibitions 139–40, 142

Autonomous Marxist movement 69

Berlin Wall 141

autonomy 11, 14, 18, 33–41, 173, 283–9

Besler, Erin 47, 51–2

avant-garde: historical 37, 38, 147, 148–9, 150,

Big Data 296

152, 154n13; neo 9, 36–40, 41, 147–53,

Big Society 232

154n13, 272n16

Bill, Max 58

Awan, Nishat 232

biological essentialism 84

axonometric techniques 115, 116–19, 125,

biopolitical environment 218

129–33

Biris, Kyprianos 223–4

Aymonino, Aldo 58

black box 184

Aymonino, Carlo 270

Bloomer, Jennifer 83–4, 180

Azionismo 270

Boer, Bianco 165n15

Azoulay, Ariella 254

Boeri, Stefano 256 Boffrand, Germain 11

Bacon, Francis 115

Bois, Yve-Alain 128, 130–1, 132

Badiou, Alain 253, 278, 284, 290n8

Bol, Hans 98, 103–10

Baker, George 152

Bolland, G. P. J. P. 118

Bandinelli, Ranuccio Bianchi 64n7

Boltanski, Luc 254

Banham, Reyner 1, 170–1, 180, 184, 206, 247

Boniver, Tristan 165n5

Barcelona Pavilion 114, 116, 119–22

Bonito Oliva, Achille 272n16

Barilli, Renato 272n16

Borret, Kristiaan 232

Baroque 62

Bouchain, Patrick 179, 180, 183, 184, 186–7

Barthes, Roland 58, 90, 254

Bourdieu, Pierre 91, 218

Bataille, Georges 91, 303n8

Bouvy, Alfred 188n56

Baudrillard, Jean 91, 93, 236–7, 240n27, 276,

Braidotti, Rosi 81

280n20 Baukunst 13, 37

306

Bratton, Benjamin 243, 256 Brazil 275

Index

Brecht, Bertolt 182

cognitive retraining 121–2

Broadacre City project 278

Cohen, Jean-Louis 9, 57–8, 165n6, 271n13

Brouwers, Ruud 21, 26

Colebrook, Claire 83

Brown, Bill 200

collage 149–50

Brown, Wendy 234

Colomina, Beatriz 148

Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 103

commitment vs engagement 263–4

Brundtland Report (1983) 162

computer graphics 132

Brunelleschi, Filippo 59, 116

Conceptual Art 173

Bruzelius, Caroline 287, 288

concordia philosophorum 61

Buchloh, Benjamin 149, 152, 154n13, 159

Conley, Verena Andermatt 81

Buckminster-Fuller, Richard 247

Connor, Steve 201, 202

building dissections 194, 196

Conrads, Ulrich 171

Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA) 139, 142, 144

constructivism 37, 84, 92, 150

Burckhardt, Jacob 63

Continental philosophy 180, 187n6

Bürger, Peter 147, 148–50, 151–2, 153,

Contropiano 17, 57

154n13

cooking 191, 194

Burns, Howard 9

Coop Himmelblau 150

Burns, Karen 84

Corner, James 233

Burra, Edward 181

courage 174 creation 68, 69–70

Cacciari, Massimo 9, 57, 270

‘The Creative Act’ lecture 173, 174n16

Cache, Bernard 295

critical architectural theory 33–41, 147–53; see

Callot, Jacques 104, 111n15 Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal 22, 23–9

also Tafuri, Manfredo Critical Inquiry 89–90, 92 critical practice 11, 34, 35

Cantomori, Delio 61

criticism 168–74

Carapacchi, Romolo 204

critique of ideology 35, 36, 40

Casabella 9, 15

Crystal Palace 12, 246

Cassirer, Ernst 59, 128, 132

Cunningham, David 286

Castells, Manuel 213, 217

cybernetics 132, 218, 221n19, 249

Celant, Germano 272n17 Cervellati, Pierluigi 270

Dada 149

challenges to theory 89–94

Dagognet, François 184

Changi Airport 244

Daidalos 131

Chaux 112n25

Dal Co, Francesco 270

Chiapello, Eve 254

Danto, Arthur 89

chimeras 202–5

Daston, Lorraine 202

Choisy, Auguste 129–30

Davidson, Cynthia 81

chronophotography 203

Davis, Mike 254

Cicero 104

Deamer, Peggy 214

Circus School, St Denis 187

debt, real estate 231–8

city analysis 220

debt crisis, Greece 227–8

city-to-come 99–101, 104, 107–8

debt economy 215, 226–8, 229n12

Ciucci, Giorgio 9

De Carlo, Giancarlo 180, 270

civic humanism 62

De Certeau, Michel 45

Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles 159

Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition (1988)

classicism, modern 294

147, 150–1, 152–3

307

Index

Deleuze, Gilles 16, 80, 81, 83–4, 85, 91, 115, 187n6, 250n3, 254, 295 della Francesca, Piero 129

Einfühlung 59 Eisenman, Peter 9, 10, 24, 34, 36, 38, 41, 128, 131, 150, 173

Demos, T. J. 152

El Lissitzky 130–1, 132, 152

De Niro, Robert 185

emancipatory project 67, 252–7

Derrida, Jacques 16, 89, 90, 91, 93, 150, 169,

engagement vs commitment 263–4

187n6

Enlightenment 37, 38

de Saussure, Ferdinand 37

Entire Situation, The (Besler) 47, 51–2

Design With Company 49

entrepreneurialism 222, 226, 231–8

désoeuvrement 69, 71

environmentalism 161–4

Despret, Vinciane 86

environmentality 249, 250n19

De Stijl 37, 116, 131

Escher, M. C. 131

Deutsches Werkbund 59

Eskanazi, David 47, 52

Devlieger, Lionel 165n5

Esposito, Roberto 57

de Vos, Marten 103

Evans, Robin 120, 128–9, 131, 132

Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin exhibition

exhibition architecture 246, 247

(1968) 136, 138, 139–41, 142–5

exhibitions see architectural exhibitions

diagrams 111n8, 114, 115–22, 125

exquisite corpse game 205

dialectical opposition 21, 22, 25–7

Exyzt 263, 271n9

di Giorgio Martini, Francesco 11 digital turn 294–7

fabrication 206, 294–5

Diller, Elizabeth 180

Fagiuoli, Ettore 204

Dingpolitik 164

Farish, William 129

disegno 194–5, 196, 198n16, 199n25

Fasola, Giusta Nicco 64n7

division 192–3, 195–6, 197, 198n5

Federal University of Minas Gerais 275

Docherty, Thomas 89

feminist discourses in architecture 79–86

Dom-ino 222, 225, 228

feminist real estate theory 231–8

Dorfles, Gillo 64n7

Feyerabend, Paul 173

drawing 99–110, 265; axonometric techniques

Ficino, Marsilio 60, 61–2

115, 116–19, 125, 129–33; perspective

Field Operations 233

59–60, 114, 115, 116, 119–22, 126–9, 130,

figure and shape 49–50

132; pictorial perspective 126, 127–9, 130,

figure/ground reversals 120–1

132; structuring diagrams 111n8, 114,

First Office 47, 51–2

115–22, 125

Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard 11

Duchamp, Marcel 149, 169, 172, 173, 174n16

Fish, Stanley 92

Duntze, Klaus 139

Flamsteed, John 202

Dürer, Albrecht 127

Florentine radicals 265, 270

Dutschke, Rudi 142

folds 295

Dyer-Witherford, Nick 288

fonds 24, 30n20 Fontana, Lucio 58, 64n7

E17 Architects 278

Ford, Henry 40, 294

Eagleton, Terry 89

Fordism 294

Easterling, Keller 213, 232–3, 243

form (eidos) 195, 197, 199n25

Eco, Umberto 254, 269, 272n16

form and matter 191–7

economic theory 213–20

formless trajectory 50–1

Edgerton, Harold 203

form-of-life 71, 72, 74, 75n39, 284, 285, 286

eidos (form) 195, 197, 199n25

Forrester, J. W. 249

308

Index

Forty, Adrian 169, 170

gothic vaulting 129–30

Foster, Hal 152, 181

Gough, Tim 148

Foster, Norman 180

Gournerie, Jules de la 130

Foster + Partners 161, 244, 249

Graeber, David 227, 229n12

Foucault, Michel 16, 37, 38, 42n21, 91, 187n6,

grammatology 90

218, 250n19, 254, 276, 284

Gramsci, Antonio 253

Frampton, Kenneth 151

Grassi, Ernesto 61

Franch, Eva 163

Graves, Michael 38

Francis 71

Gravity Be My Friend (Rist) 79, 83

Franciscans 71, 75n39, 285, 286, 287–8

Greece 222–9

Frankfurt School 35, 142, 148, 187n6

Greenberg, Clement 34, 35, 152, 170, 171, 173

Fraser, Andrea 218, 220n17

Gregotti, Vittorio 9, 270, 272n16

Fraser, Nancy 256

Gritti, Andrea 60, 61

Freeman, Cristina Garduño 148

Grosz, Elizabeth 5n11, 79–80, 81–2, 84, 85

Freud, Sigmund 91, 280n20

Grosz, Georg 181

Freyinger, Benjamin 46, 49

Gruppo 63 266, 270, 272n16

Fried, Michael 169

Guarini, Guarino 62

Friedell, Egon 181

Guattari, Felix 16, 83, 85, 91, 250n3

Fry, Tony 214

Guggenheim, Michael 184

functionalism 37

Guggenheim Bilbao 295

Fure, Adam 46, 50–1

Gwathmey, Charles 38

Gandelsonas, Mario 90

Habermas, Jürgen 142

Garin, Eugenio 61–2, 63

habitus 218

Gates, Henry Luis, Jr. 92

Hadid, Zaha 150, 180, 273, 295

Gehry, Frank 150, 278, 295

Halbwachs, Maurice 58

genealogy 16, 34

Hallward, Peter 290n8

Genesis 70

Haraway, Donna 84, 254

Geoghegan, Bernard 132

Harmonia Mundi (Giorgi) 60, 61

German State Pavilion, International Exposition

harmonic proportions 60, 61, 62

at Barcelona 114, 116, 119–22

Harrison, Charles 169

Germany 136, 137–45

Harvey, David 254, 279n8

Giedion, Sigfried 35, 58

Hassard, John 89

Gielen, Maarten 165n5

Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 276

Gilbreth, Frank 203

Hays, K. Michael 51, 91, 148, 185

Gilbreth, Lillian 203

Heaney, Seamus 181–2

Gilman, Sander 92

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 91, 174, 187n6

Gilmore, James H. 82, 83

Heidegger, Martin 16, 36, 63, 69, 91, 284

Ginzburg, Carlo 15

Hejduk, John 34, 38, 131

Giorgi, Francesco 60, 61

Hennebique, François 186

globalization 213, 220n1

Het Nieuwe Instituut 159, 167

God’s eye view 129–33

Heynen, Hilde 179, 185

Golan, Romy 271n3

Hickey, Dave 185, 188n51

Goltzius, Julius 103, 112n26

Hicks, Stewart 46, 49–50

Gomera 163

High Line, New York 233

Goodfield, June 192

historical avant-garde 37, 38, 147, 148–9, 150,

Gothic architecture 129, 275, 294

152, 154n13

309

Index

Hobbes, Thomas 248

isometry 129

Hoffman, Dustin 188n51

Italian Communist Party (PCI) 35–6, 270

Hohendahl, Peter Uwe 148

Italian intellectuals and politics 270

Holder, Andrew 46, 49

Italian theory of architecture 57–63

Hollein, Hans 39

IUAV see Institute of Architecture of the

Holub, Robert C. 148

University of Venice

Homo Sacer (Agamben) 67, 69, 74n1 Horkheimer, Max 35, 38, 142

Jakobson, Roman 131, 132–3

Houses (Holder and Freynger) 46, 49

James, Henry 93, 173

Howard, Ebenezer 37

James, William 92, 93

human capital 217

Jameson, Fredric 92, 93, 235, 279n8

humanism 61–3

Jay, Martin 119

Husserl, Edmund 62, 91, 173

Jencks, Charles 171, 254

hyresrätt (rent-negotiated rental flats), Sweden

Jerusalem 98, 99, 103–10, 110n2, 111n15,

232, 239n4

112n25, 128 Jerusalem, with Christ and the Good Shepherd

IAUS see Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) IBA see Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin exhibition (IBA, 1984/87) ideology 277; critique of 35, 36, 40; see also politics/architecture relationships Illich, Ivan 180

(Bol) 98, 103–10 Jewish Sabbath 69–70 Johnson, Philip 147, 150, 151 Jones, Amelie 152, 154n25 Jones, Inigo 60 Jordans, Paul 171 Journal of the Warburg Institute 59

indebted woman 231–8 indigenous peoples 275

Kahn, Louis 13–14, 37

information theory 221n19

Kant, Immanuel 35, 91, 168–9, 170, 173,

Ingels, Bjarke 278

187n6

Ingraham, Catherine 197, 255

katargeo 70

Innocent VIII 62

Keynes, John Maynard 216

inoperativity 67, 69–70, 72–4

Kierkegaard, Søren 174, 175n19

Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies

Kirshner, Judith Russi 196

(IAUS) 36, 58 Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice (IUAV) 289–90n1

Kishik, David 73 Klein, Yves 149 klesis (messianic vocation) 70, 71

interior 242–9

knowing, pure 118–19

International Centre for Palladian Studies 60

knowing that/knowing how 201, 202, 204,

International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM) 29n5 Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin exhibition (IBA, 1984/87) 138, 139, 145 Internet of Things 213, 217, 218, 221n18, 221n21

207 Kojeve, Alexandre 69 Koolhaas, Rem 10, 150, 171, 180, 188n51, 265, 273–4, 278 Kovacs, Andrew 46, 50 Kraus, Karl 37

Invernizzi, Angelo 204–5

Kreyl, Carl 204

Inverting Neutra (Roberts) 47, 52

Kristeva, Julia 90

Iser, Wolfgang 148

Kroll, Lucien 180

Isometric, Schröder House (Rietveld) 116–19,

Kwinter, Sanford 252

122, 125

310

Kwon, Miwon 239n22

Index

Lacan, Jacques 91, 132

Mann, Thomas 262, 268, 269

Laclau, Ernesto 257

Mannerism 58, 60, 62–3, 65n31

La Condition Publique arts centre, Roubaix 186

Mantegna, Andrea 103

Lai, Jimenez 46, 49

Marcuse, Herbert 142

Lambert, Phyllis 28

Marey, Étienne-Jules 203

Lange, Oskar 216

Märkisches Viertel, Berlin 140, 141–2, 144

Langley, R. F. 182

Marmaras, Manolis 224, 229n4

Lasserre, Benjamin 165n5

Martin, Reinhold 213

Latour, Bruno 92, 94n2, 164, 180, 183, 185–6

Marx, Karl 16, 91, 187n6, 214, 278, 280n20

Laugier, Marc-Antoine 11–12, 274

Marxism 16, 36, 150, 151, 274

Lavin, Sylvia 80–1, 82–3, 84

Marzoli, Carla 58

Law, John 89

Masdar City 161

Lawrence, C. H. 287

mass-customisation 296

Lazzarato, Maurizio 83, 214, 221n24, 227,

Massey, Doreen 82, 84

229n12, 232, 237, 239n3, 250n3, 254

mass media, use by museums 27–8

Le Corbusier 37, 58, 222, 225, 228, 276, 294

mass-production 294–5

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 112n25

Massumi, Brian 80, 207

Lefebvre, Henri 278–9

Materialien zur Diskussion catalogue 136, 140,

left-wing Catholics (Cattolici democratici) 270

143, 144

Le Goff, Jacques 287, 288

Matta-Clark, Gordon 151, 191, 193–4, 196, 197

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 187n6

Mayan ruins 275

Lending, Mari 159

Maymind, Alex 47, 52

Leonardo da Vinci 130

Medusa (Kovacs) 46, 50

Levi-Strauss, Claude 132

Meier, Richard 38, 41

Lewis, David J. 205

Memorandum (Giorgi) 60

Lewis, Paul 205

meridian 201, 206

Libera, Adalberto 270

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 58, 91, 127

Libeskind, Daniel 128, 150, 188n51

Mertins, Detlef 124n28

literary theory 90

messianic vocation (klesis) 70, 71

Locke, John 248

metaphor 73, 246, 249

Lodge, Rupert C. 193

Method acting 185, 188n51

Log 1, 81, 180

metropolitan condition 214–15

Logothetopoulos Polykatoikia, Athens 224

Mexico City Airport 244, 249

London Coliseum 204

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 114, 116, 119–22,

Loos, Adolf 37–8

171

Los Angeles Design Group 49

Milan Triennale (1951) 58

Luther, Martin 69

Minh-ha, Trinth T. 252

Lynn, Greg 295

‘minor’ literature 180, 181–2, 186

Lyotard, Jean-François 18, 91–2, 93

Mitchell, W. J. T. 91, 92 Mitchum, Robert 185

McHarg, Ian 249

Modena cemetery extension 14, 38

Machiavelli, Niccolò 277

modern classicism 294

McLeod, Mary 148

modernism 34, 35, 38, 151, 152, 171, 173,

McQuillan, Martin 301

194, 203–4, 294

Magritte, René 15

Mollino, Carlo 64n7

Maison Dom-ino 222, 225, 228

MoMA see Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),

manifestos 171

New York

311

Index

monasticism 285, 286, 287–8

Octoberism 152, 154n25

Moneo, Rafael 9, 10

Oechslin, Werner 131

money economy 214–15, 219, 287, 288

Ohnesorg, Benno 142

Monge, Gaspard 133n11

Olivettians 270

Moretti, Luigi 270

Olivier, Laurence 188n51

Morgenstern, Christian 117, 119

Olkowski, Dorothea 83

Morris, Robert 169

Onfray, Michel 186

Moscardini, Margherita 266

opening towards, drawings as 101–4, 110

Mouffe, Chantal 257

operaismo movement 35–6, 270

Murray, Les 182

operative criticism 23, 24, 27, 29n8, 35

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 22,

Oppositions 10, 15, 36, 58, 90, 147

23; Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition

Orizzontale 263

(1988) 147, 150–1, 152–3

Osborne, Peter 160

museums 21–9 Musil, Robert 220

Oslo Architecture Triennale (2013) 157, 158, 161–4

Muybridge, Eadweard 203

Overy, Paul 117

narcissism 273–9

Palladio, Andrea 11, 60, 64n17

Naumann, Friedrich 40

Panofsky, Erwin 59, 126, 127, 128

Nederlands Architectuurinstituut (NAi),

Panzieri, Raniero 36

Rotterdam 21, 22, 23–9

parallel projection see axonometric techniques

Negri, Antonio 57, 70

parametricism 41, 266, 295

Neimark, Anna 52

Paranormal Panorama (First Office) 47, 51–2

neo avant-garde 9, 36–40, 41, 147–53, 154n13,

Paredes, Axel 275

272n16 neoliberalism 213–20, 227, 231–8, 249, 250n19, 284, 285, 286, 289

Parmigianino 103 participatory architects 263–4 Paul 69, 70, 71, 99

Neoplatonism 60, 61–2, 106

Paxton, Joseph 12, 246

neo-pragmatism 93

Payne, Alina A. 64n11

neo-Rationalist revival 266

Paz, Octavio 169

Nervi, Pier Luigi 58

Penrose triangle 131

Neutra, Richard 52

period rooms (stijlkamers) 159–60, 164,

new materialism 83, 84, 85

165n15, 167

Newmeyer, Allison 46, 49–50

Perrault, Claude 62

‘New York Five’ 14, 38

perspective 59–60, 114, 115, 116, 119–22,

New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 10 New York Times 92 Nicholas of Cusa 59

126–9, 130, 132; pictorial 126, 127–9, 130, 132 Perspective, Barcelona Pavilion (Mies van der Rohe) 114, 116, 119–22

Nietzsche, Friedrich 16, 17, 18, 36, 91

Peruzzi, Baldassarre 129

Noland, Kenneth 169, 171

Peter Eisenman Archive 24 Pevsner, Nikolaus 58–9

Obama, Barack 296

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 61, 62, 63

objectivity 118–19, 131, 132

Picon, Antoine 181

observatories 201, 202, 204, 206

pictorial perspective 126, 127–9, 130, 132

Ockman, Joan 9, 148

Pine, B. Joseph, II 82, 83

October 147, 148, 152

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 12

312

Index

plain writing 180, 181–2, 186

Quaroni, Ludovico 270

Plato 104, 105–7, 109, 191, 192–3, 195, 196,

quasi-objects 181, 257

197, 198n5, 198n19 plis 295

Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome 12

Plotinus 106 Poëte, Marcel 58

Rahm, Philippe 185

poiesis 278–9

Rancière, Jacques 257, 277, 278–9

Polanyi, Michael 201–2

Randl, Chad 204

Polesello, Gianugo 270

Rathenau, Walter 40

Polgar, Alfred 181, 182

rationalism 35, 150, 151

political phenomenology 243, 248–9

Raumlaborberlin 263

politics/architecture relationships 261–71

real estate imagery 231–8

polykatoikia 223–6, 228

reception theory 148, 149–52

Ponge, Francis 182

Reichlin, Bruno 128, 130, 131, 132

Portoghesi, Paolo 35

relational nature of architecture 301–2

post-capitalism 213–20

Renaissance 18, 57–63, 294

post-colonialism 254

Rendell, Jane 184, 185

post-critical architecture 31n44, 51, 92–4; see

rent-negotiated rental flats (hyresrätt), Sweden

also projective architecture

232, 239n4

post-feminism 80, 83, 84

resistance 51, 68, 180, 275

post-modernism 9, 294

resistance-through-escape 286

post-post-critical trajectory 51–2

reticular structures 206, 207

post-structuralism 93, 255

Reutersvärd, Oscar 131

post-theory movement 299

Revelations 107

Potere Operaio 270

revolving buildings 203–5, 206

Pour Your Body Out (Rist) 78

Reyes, Pedro 266

poverty, Franciscan theory of 71, 75n39, 285,

RIBA see Royal Institute of British Architects

287, 288

Richter, Hans 121–2

pragmatism 92–4, 179–87

Rietveld, Gerrit 116–19, 122, 125

prefabrication 206

Rifkin, Jeremy 213, 216–19

presentation drawings 114, 115–22, 125

Rist, Pipilotti 78, 79, 80, 83

preservation trajectory 52–3

Roberts, Bryony 47, 52

Pressa exhibition (1928) 152, 153

Rocks (Fure) 46, 51

Price, Cedric 249

Rodchenko, Alexander 149

primitive hut 11, 274–5

Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 58, 60, 62, 64n17, 270

Primo Convegno Internazionale sulla Proporzione

Roman engineering 293–4

nelle Arti (First International Conference on

Rorty, Richard 93, 181

Proportions in the Arts) 58, 64n7

Rossi, Aldo 10, 11, 14–15, 34, 37, 58, 265, 266,

Prince complex 277–8 projective architecture 51, 80, 183–4, 185–7, 188n51; see also post-critical architecture

270, 274, 300 rotating buildings 203–5, 206 Rotolactor 204

project of autonomy 283–9

Rotor 157, 158, 161–4, 165n5

property tax, Greece 226, 229n7

Roubaix 186, 188n56

proportions, systems of 58–9, 64n7

Rowe, Colin 171, 194

protest movement, Germany 142

Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)

pure knowing 118–19 Pythagoras 60

58–9, 278 Royal Observatory, Greenwich 201, 202

313

Index

Ruskin, John 52, 171

shadows, in axonometric drawings 130

Russell, Bertrand 182

Shannon, Claude 132

Russian constructivism 37, 150

shape and figure 49–50

Ryle, Gilbert 201, 202

Shklovsky, Victor 53n8 Shvartzberg, Manuel 217–18

Saccaroti, Fausto 204

Silberman, Marc 148

Sacripanti, Maurizio 270

Simmel, Georg 16, 37, 213, 214–15, 217, 218,

Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de 38

254 Simondon, Gilbert 181, 206–7

Safdie, Moshe 244

Sir John Soane Museum, London 22, 23

Said, Edward 253, 254

situated knowledges 84

St Peter, Rome 129

Skyline of Misfits (Lai) 46, 49

Salzani, Carlo 70, 71

slavery, Aristotle’s theory of 71–2

Samonà, Giuseppe 270

Sloterdijk, Peter 246

Sampaolesi, Piero 64n7

Soane, Sir John 23

Sandberg, Willem 159

social conflict 228–9

San Francesco della Vigna 60–1

social constructivism 84, 92

Sangallo, Antonio da 18

Socialist German Student union (SDS) 142

Sangallo, Giuliano da 63

Socialists 270

Sansovino, Jacopo 60, 61

Socrates 168

Sartoris, Alberto 130

Somol, R. E. 31n44, 49, 51, 80, 81, 183–4, 185,

Sartre, Jean-Paul 58, 63

188n51

Sassen, Saskia 254

sovereign debt crisis, Greece 227–8

Scarpa, Carlo 13, 270

Speaks, Michael 31n44, 45, 48, 80, 89

Schlegel, Friedrich 34

Spiegel, Der 140, 144

Schmitt, Carl 69

spline-modelling software 295

Schneider, Tatjana 232

Spranger, Eduard 121

Schopenhauer, Arthur 118–19, 276

Stead, Naomi 148

Schreiber, Marion 144

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 159–60, 164,

Schröder, Thomas 143, 144

165n15, 167

Schröder House 116–19, 122, 125

Stengers, Isabelle 84–6

Schröder-Schräder, Truus 116

Sterling, Bruce 218, 219, 221n21

Schumacher, Patrik 284, 295

stijlkamers (period rooms) 159–60, 164,

Schwarzer, Mitchell 183

165n15, 167

Scipio 104

Stirling, James 13, 24, 37, 130

Scolari, Massimo 14

Stockholm White 234–5

Scott, Felicity 164n1

Stoner, Jill 180, 181, 186

Scott, Geoffrey 59

Strategien für Kreuzberg exhibition (1977)

Scruton, Roger 171

138–9, 145

SDS (Socialist German Student union) 142

strobe-flash photography 203

Seaford, Richard 284

structuralism 37, 173

self-building 223, 224–5

structuring diagrams 111n8, 114, 115–22,

self-reflexive criticism 173

125

Semerani, Luciano 270

student protest, Germany 142

Semper, Gottfried 12, 171

subjectification of indebted woman 231–8

Serafini, Luca 69

subjectivity 216–20, 248, 276, 284–5, 290n8

Serlio, Sebastiano 11, 60, 61

superarchitecture concept 80, 82–3

314

Index

Superstudio 57, 63n2

University of York 90

suprematism 130, 150

urban condition 214–15

surrealism 150, 205, 208n25

urban regeneration 137–8, 139, 141–2

sustainability 161–4

use, Agamben’s concept of 67, 71–2, 74

Sweden 232, 234–6, 238n2, 239n4, 239n5

Usus/Usures exhibition (2010) 162

Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket) 232, 238n2

Valle, Gino 270

systems dynamics 249

van Doesburg, Theo 131

Szacka, Léa-Catherine 163

van Eesteren, Cornelius 131 Vasari, Giorgio 194–5, 196, 198n16, 198n18,

tacit knowledge 201–2, 204

199n25

Taddio, Luca 68

VDL Studio and Residences (Neutra) 52

Tafuri, Manfredo 9–18, 21–3, 25–9, 29n8,

Vecellio, Tiziano 60, 61

31n40, 34–41, 42n6, 43n29, 57, 58, 60, 61,

Venice 60–1

62–3, 65n31, 147, 151, 180, 213, 270, 274,

Venice Biennale (1976) 15

277–8

Venice Biennale (2006) 187

Taliesin Fellowship 278

Venice Biennale (2010) 162

Tate, Alan 172

Venturi, Lionello 170

Taut, Max 204

Venturi, Robert 10, 14, 37, 39

Taylor, Frederick 294

Vertical Forest, Milan 256

Taylorism 294

Vidler, Anthony 164n1

technical mentality 206–7

Villa Girasole 204–5, 206

technology 1, 180, 183, 185–6, 201, 203–7,

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel 52, 171, 274–5

256; Internet of Things 213, 217, 218,

vision 127–8

221n18, 221n21

visual paradoxes 131–2

Tecpan, Chimaltenango 275

Vitruvius 293–4

telescopes 200–1, 202, 204, 206

Vittoria, Eduardo 270

Terragni, Giuseppe 150

Volume 1–2, 5n5

Tessenow, Heinrich 182, 186 Teyssot, Georges 181

Wagner, Otto 13

Thomas Aquinas 68

Walker-Gordon Laboratories 204

Till, Jeremy 153, 180, 214, 232

Wall, Donald 196, 199n22

time and motion studies 203

Waltham Forest (WF) Council, London Borough

Titian 60, 61

of 278

Todeschini, Giacomo 287, 288

Warburg Institute 59–60

Toulmin, Stephen 192

Wartenberg, Gerd 139

Training Wheels (Eskanazi) 47, 52

Webb, Craig 278

transcendental philosophy 187n6

West, Cornel 93, 94

Treatise Model (Hicks and Newmeyer) 46,

West Berlin 136, 137–45

49–50 Tronti, Mario 36, 57, 262

WF Council see Waltham Forest Council, London Borough of

Tschumi, Bernard 34, 41, 150

white, in real estate imagery 234–5

Tsuramaki, Marc 205

Whiting, Sarah 31n44, 51, 80, 81, 183–4, 185,

Turkey 271

188n51 Whole Earth Catalogue (1968) 162

Ungers, Oswald Mathias 34, 273–4 University of East London 278

wide-angle photography, in real estate imagery 236

315

Index

Wieczorek, Mark 117–18

World Economic Forum, Davos 296

Wigley, Mark 9–10, 16, 28, 31n47, 147, 150,

Wren, Christopher 62

151 Wilde, Oscar 173

Wright, Frank Lloyd 278 Wright, Gwendolyn 179

Willinge, Mariet 21, 26 Wines, James 151

Xakriabá community, Brazil 275

wire-frame technique 116 withdrawal 237

Yaneva, Albena 183, 184

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 180 Wittkower, Rudolf 58, 59, 60, 62

Zardini, Mirko 163

Wood Street, London 278

Zeit, Die 144

Wood Street First community group 278

zero-margin economic paradigm 213, 216–17

wool and cotton auction house, Roubaix 186,

Zevi, Bruno 35, 58, 64n7, 270

188n56 Woolf, Virginia 86

316

Žižek, Slavoj 256 Zukin, Sharon 254