Discourse on the Skeleton
between Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman
Bilkent University Fall 2017-2018 Arch 565 Contemporary Architecture and Theory Vis. Asst. Prof. Giorgio Gasco Münevver Duygu Gökoğlu 21704231 November 2017
Discourse on the Skeleton between Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman
“... the relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, Editor’s Introduction which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized, somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some: catastrophe of nature or art...” 1 Jacques Derrida Writing and Difference
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Figure1. Horizontal section of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, built 135139 A.D., later transformed into the Castel Sant’Angelo
Notes 1. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, , trans. Alan Boss, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, p.5 2. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.5 3. Ibid. p.5
The task of this paper is introducing the polemical critique of the Modem Movement position on the city and the architecture by creating a dialogue between Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman. The dialogue is created by sources which are ‘Urban Artifacts and a Theory of the City’ introduction of Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City and ‘Typological Questions’ the third heading from the first chapter of ‘The Architecture of the City’; Peter Eisenman’s ‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’ which is introduction for Aldo Rossi’s book The Architecture of the city and ‘PostFunctualism’ which was published on the 6th issue of Oppositions in 1976. PE:
To begin with the image on the cover of the fourth Italian edition of your book L’Architettura della citta, a horizontal section of the Mausoleum of Hadrian in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome [Figure 1], reads as a spiral. Use of the image on the cover of your book can interpret in two ways: first, in terms of the spiral as a mausoleum, as representing a symbolic place of death, in this case that of humanism; and at the same time, in terms of the spiral as labyrinth, as representing a place of transformation.2
AR:
I would like to add on that the spiral has a further, more personal meaning for me. It symbolizes my very own rite of passage, my role as part of a generation progressively more distanced from the positivism of modern architecture by the collapse of historical time and left drifting into an uncertain present.3 2
PE:
The various theories of architecture which properly can be called “humanist” are characterized by a dialectical opposition: an oscillation between a concern for internal accommodation—the program and the way it is materialized—and a concern for articulation of ideal themes in form—for example, as manifested in the configurational significance of the plan. These concerns were understood as two poles of a single, continuous experience. Within pre-industrial, humanist practice, a balance between them could be maintained because both type and function were invested with idealist views of man’s relationship to his object world.4 Modernism proposed a new interpretation of the subject which was never fulfilled by modern architecture; in this respect modem architecture can be seen as simply an extension of nineteenthcentury functionalism. 5
AR:
Well, that’s why I strongly recommend that such a study should, once again, begin with the Greek city, which offers many significant insights concerning the meaning ofthe urban structure, and which at its origins had an inseparable relationship with the mode of being and behavior of human beings.6 The Architecture of the City is an attempt to build a different kind of castle from that of the modems. Proposing an other architecture, an other architect, and most importantly, an other process for their understanding, it can be seen as an attempt to break not only from the traditional humanist definition of the relationship of object and subject, but also from the more recent modernist one. Modernism proposed a new interpretation of the subject which was never fulfilled.7
PE:
Whereas the humanist conception attempted an integration of subject and object, the modernist conception polemically attempted their separation.8 For functionalism, no matter what its pretense, continued the idealist ambition of creating architecture as a kind of ethically constituted form-giving. But because it clothed this idealist ambition in the radically stripped forms of technological production, it has seemed to represent a break with the pre-industrial past.9 In brief, the modernist sensibility has to do with a changed mental attitude toward the artifacts of the physical world. This change has not only been manifested aesthetically, but also socially, philosophically, and technologically—in sum, it has been manifested in a new cultural attitude. This shift away from the dominant attitudes of humanism. 10 3
Notes 4. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.236 5. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.4 6. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.24 7. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.4 8. Ibid. p.5 9. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.237 10. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.238
Notes 11. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.41 12. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.238 13. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.21 14. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.5
AR:
They have always avoided or displaced it, suddenly pursuing something else—namely function. Since this problem of function is of absolutely primary importance in the domain of our inquiry, I will try to see how it emerges in studies of the city and urban artifacts in general and how it has evolved. Let us say immediately that the problem can be addressed only when we have first considered the related problems of description and classification. For the most part, existing classifications have failed to go beyond the problem of function. 11
PE:
Modernism, as a sensibility based on the fundamental displacement of man, represents what Michel Foucault would specify as a new episteme. Deriving from a non-humanistic attitude toward the relationship of an individual to his physical environment, it breaks with the historical past, both with the ways of viewing man as subject and, as we have said, with the ethical positivism of form and function. Thus, it cannot be related to functionalism. It is probably for this reason that modernism has not up to now been elaborated in architecture. 12
AR:
Well actually, architecture carne into being along with the first traces of the city; it is deeply rooted in the formation of civilization and is a permanent, universal, and necessary artifact. Aesthetic intention and the creation of better surroundings for life are the two permanent characteristics of architecture. These aspects emerge from any significant attempt to explain the city as a human creation. But because architecture gives concrete form to society and is intimately connected with it and with nature, it differs fundamentally from every other art and science. This is the basis for an empirical study of the city as it has evolved from the earliest settlements. With time, the city grows upon itself; it acquires a consciousness and memory. 13
PE:
Accordingly, you are creating a new formulation focuses on a mediating element: the process of the work. Into this new idea of process, You reintroduce the elements of history and typology, but not as a nostalgia for narrative or a reductive scientism. Rather, history becomes analogous to a “skeleton” whose condition serves as a measure of time and, in turn, is measured by time. Isn’t it this skeleton which bears the imprint of the actions that have taken place and will take place in the city? 14 4
AR:
The skeleton and its measuring apparatus become the process and ultimately the object of the autonomous researcher. History and type, as components parts of research, allow for transformations of themselves which are “prearranged but still unforeseeable.” For the skeleton links the city to history. The skeleton thus provides an analogue for my understanding of history, for it is at once a structure and a ruin, a record of events and a record of time, and in this sense a statement of facts and not causes. 15
PE:
In this case, the city’s most singular elements and those which give it its specificity. Thus, the skeleton, which may on one level be compared to the urban plan, while a general structure of parts, is also a material artifact in itself: a collective artifact. The skeleton’s nature as a collective artifact allows us to understand your metaphor of the city as a giant man-made house, a macrocosm of the individual house of man. 16
AR:
The collective and the private, society and the individuaI, balance and confront one another in the city. The city is composed of many people seeking a generaI order that is consistent with their own particular environment. 17
PE:
The dialectic can best be described as the potential co-existence within any form of two non-corroborating and non-sequential tendencies. One tendency is to presume architectural form to be a recognizable transformation from some pre-existent geometric or platonic solid. In this case, form is usually understood through a series of registrations designed to recall a more simple geometric condition. This tendency is certainly a relic of humanist theory. However, to this is added a second tendency that sees architectural form in an atemporal, decompositional mode, as something simplified from some pre-existent set of non-specific spatial entities. 18
AR:
In my personal vision of time, the same dialectic applies as in the city: history provides the material for biography but memory provides the material for autobiography; as in the city, memory begins when history ends. It encompasses both future time and past time: a project that has to be done and one that is already completed. The images of ruin activate this unconscious memory, linking the discarded and the fragmentary with new beginnings. Here again, the apparently coherent orderliness of logic is biographical, but fragments 5
Notes 15. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.5 16. Ibid. p.5 17. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.22 18. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.239
are autobiographical. Abandonment and death— the attributes of the skeleton—are through this dialectic now seen as parts of a process of transformation; death is a new beginning associated with some unknown hope. 19
Notes 19. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.11 20. Ibid. p.11 21. Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture theory since 1968. mit Press, 2000, p.238 22. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.8 23. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.22
PE:
On the contrary, your analogous drawings, like your analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analgous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: the one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric— where drawn shadows indicate the stopping of the clock, are a frozen and constant reminder of this new equation of life and death. No longer in the analogous drawing is time represented by a precisely measured aspect of light, the length of a shadow, or the aging of a thing. Rather, time is expressed as an infinite past which takes things back to the timelessness of childhood, of illusions, of fragments of possessions and autobiographical images of the your own alienated childhood— of which history’s narrative can no longer give an effective account. 20 It is this condition of displacement which gives rise to design in which authorship can no longer either account for a linear development which has a “beginning” and an “end”—hence the rise of the atemporal—or account for the invention of form—hence the abstract as a mediation between pre-existent sign systems. 21
AR:
I don’t agree with that. Analogy is my own most important apparatus. It is equally useful to me in writing and in drawing. The time of analogy, a bifocal lens of history and memory, takes in and collapses chronological time—the time of events—and atmospheric time—the time of place: place and event, locus solus plus time-place. 22 We must carefully elaborate a city’s enduring elements or permanences so as toavoid seeing the history of the city solely as a function of them. I believe that permanentelements can even be considered pathological at times. The significance of permanent elements in the study of the city can be compared to that which fixed structures have in linguistics; this is especially evident as the study of the city presents analogies with that of linguistics, above all in terms ofthe complexity of its processes of transformation and permanence.23 For I am convinced that progress concerning knowledge of the city can be real and efficacious only if we do not try to reduce the city to any one 6
of its partial aspects, thereby losing sight of its broader significance. 24 PE:
It is in this context that this book can be seen as an analogous artifact itself—a written analogue to built and drawn artifacts. The written analogue, like the drawn one, is bound up with both place and memory. Yet unlike the city, the urban skeleton, the analogue is detached from specific place and specific time, and becomes instead an abstract locus existing in what is a purely typological or architectural time-place. In this way, by displacing type from history to make a connection between place and memory, and Sir your attempts through the erasure of history and transcendence of real places to reconcile the contradictions of modernist utopia—literally “no place”—and humanist reality— built “some place.” 25
Notes 24. Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1982, p.27 25. Eisenman, Peter. ‘‘The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogue’’ in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.8
Ultimately, Rossi and Eisenman argued why the axiom “form follows function” was taken an oversimplified concern of form - type relationship in architecture by modernists. While Rossi was looking at the unrealized program of modernism through urban layer in terms of process instead of consequences, Eisenman focused the consequence of this problem which is the absence of the preindustrialization balance between aesthetics, function and also the human figure when the displacement of man resulted in obsession with his object by modernists.
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