ADV 9601 - MArchII Proseminar Giorgos Chatzopoulos Final Paper
Is There Anything Outside the Cave?
My essay is a response to Professor Bonner’s presentation. It will be a reflection on contemporary
architectural attitudes towards representation, which Jennifer Bonner’s work makes explicit, rather than a critique. While hearing Professor Bonner I could not help but recall Plato’s allegory of the cave. According to this myth, non-philosophical human beings resemble chained captives who have lived and grown up inside a cave, experiencing only a world of representations. For their whole lives they have been witnesses to a shadow play, believing this to be reality. Behind them there is a fire, and guards who hold and move puppets resembling objects and persons. The prisoner’s reality is the projection of those objects. At some point, a prisoner may free himself and thus see the puppets, now believing those to be the reality, or he may even exit the cave and encounter the real objects, whose mere shadows he had been observing while imprisoned. For Plato the everyday world of experience, which we perceive through senses, is a representation of ideas and beings that exist both beyond and before the sensorial world. Art can either duplicate the representations, rendering the distance between this world and the Ideal one bigger, or bring them closer by revealing glimpses of what is “real”. Plato’s philosophical journey is a linear one, from the everyday world of representations and persuasion to the higher pursuit of truth. In today’s online world, where information is being digitized exponentially, and with the world forever being replicated in representations, is there a way out of the cave? Or indeed, is there anything outside the cave? Is there some origin or do we inhabit a hauntological world—to use Derrida’s term—where the presence of being is replaced by the non-origin: an endless reference between words and images. Clarifying my position, I would say that I am not invoking Plato’s allegory as the ultimate authority, against which every truth should be measured and compared. On the contrary, recognizing that the Platonic cave is a cultural and ideological construction, I am willing to let Plato’s construction be deconstructed through Professor Bonner’s representational approach.
But let the question resonate again. Is there anything outside the cave? One could readily answer
that, as far as architecture is concerned, the built work is that real thing to which all the representations refer. But this answer, as self-evident as it may seem, falls short of addressing the architectural reality, and Bonner’s work takes to extremes something which constitutes a deeper reality for architecture: that representation always comes first and then follows the architecture1. Since the Renaissance, architecture has been represented firstly in orthographic drawings, in models and words and only then does it, though exceedingly rarely, come into being. Most of architectural production starts and ends in representations that can, however, be just as influential on the architectural discourse as the built work. And even after realization, the projects are mostly circulated as images via books, magazines and websites, and they 1
This statement is a reference to Professor’s Bonner class Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture
Figure 1. Another Axon
Figure 2. Another Axon
are rarely experienced bodily. But still, as the word representation implies, the realized project is set at the center of this pursuit. As we shall see, Bonner’s work systematically contaminates reality with representation, creating an endless self-referential loop by preventing reality from being fully present even in the built projects. In Another Axon (Figure 1&2), the work itself is realized as a representation of an axonometric drawing. In other words, the reality becomes a representation of the representation, looping endlessly back to itself. Furthermore, the textures are directly derived from Autocad hatches and the space is populated with objects found in Google Sketchup’s Warehouse.2 What were once 2D and 3D representational tools, such as hatches and blocks, which abstractly represented physical objects or material qualities, now become reality themselves. They bring representation into presence. It is as if some box of dolls were opened up and these puppets took over the reality, or as if the characters of a videogame came out of the screen with flesh and bones. Another Axon can only be perceived as an axonometric drawing from a singular privileged point of view, from the top corner of a garage building (Figure 1). From the street level, the fakeness of the design and the doll-like aspect of the objects are strikingly present (Figure 2). The banal urban scenery becomes a weird juxtaposition of digital and physical reality, lending to the whole scene an uncanny feeling. Returning to Plato’s allegory, Another Axon proposes a world where one would exit the cave only to realize that the real objects are a scaled-up version of the puppets used in the shadow play. In Best Sandwiches (Figure 3&4) Professor Bonner is exploring the possibilities of a vertical high-rise building as a stacking of different layers. Although layered buildings have been explored in the past, Bonner uses the metaphor of the sandwich to describe certain design qualities that her stacking proposal has (like the indexical coloration of the different layers). Here we must notice that the stacking is already a metaphor, since buildings cannot truly be piled up, but only represented as such. Based on this observation, one could argue that the sandwich metaphor implies a certain redundancy of meaning, 2
J. Bonner, All work is in the Drawing, p.27-28
Figure 3. Best Sandwiches
Figure 4. Best Sandwiches
which is made even more obvious if one takes into account design qualities that go beyond the sandwich metaphor, like the application of different architectural styles in different layers, or the way that mass is abstracted from the edge of each block (a design approach that resembles more a Chillida sculpture than food) (Figure 3). Bonner’s metaphor of the sandwich would be a redundant rhetorical trick, had she not gone one step further, by placing the models on plates and patterned blankets, like real sandwiches in a picnic scene (Figure 4). Some buildings end up in toothpick-like antennas, thereby realizing the metaphor of the sandwich even more explicitly. Once more, the metaphor, as a representational tool, has taken over reality and folded back to itself. Almost every metaphor implies a theatricality, a certain staging,3 and here the theatre literally takes place before our eyes, with the buildings assuming the role of sandwiches in a picnic scenery—or is it rather that they are sandwiches pretending to be buildings?
The Haus Gables further blends the boundaries between reality and representation in two ways.
Firstly, the use of faux materials makes the work external to itself since the house continually refers to something more “real”. It disavows being fully realized and present. Even the construction details emphasize the falseness of the materiality. Unlike Venturi’s system of signs, where architecture should be read and interpreted as something that has deeper hidden meanings, Bonner’s use of faux materials only signifies the endless loop of representation, pointing to a reality that fails to be fully present. It is a signification of the representational aspect of reality. Secondly, the Haus Gables is part of a formal exploration of the gable, with the Domestic Hats exhibition being an outcome of this. The Domestic Hats were huge mass models that, “[reject] the constraint of smallness. For these purposes, the massing models are scaled up to an awkward size, they are not easily transportable, and they don’t quite fit in the frame of our foam wire cutter.[…] Intentionally inflated, these massing models merely represent themselves.”4 Again we find the loop beginning when the real thing, the Haus Gables, is constructed as an exact copy of a massing model which was designed with purely formal criteria, setting aside functional, spatial or experiential considerations. The oversized mass model is uncannily similar to the 3 4
See J. Derrida, Plato’s Pharmakeia, chapter The Heritage of the Pharmakon: Family Scene https://jenniferbonner.com/Domestic-Hats
constructed house, which in turn seems like an oversized dollhouse.
Her devotion to deconstructing
reality as representation can also be traced in a representational tool that she has used twice. Both in Still Life (Figure 5) and in Haus Gables’ dollhouse mockup, she illuminates the models with red and cyan light, imitating and reversing the stereoscopic effect Figure 5. Still Life
that 3D movie films employ. In anaglyph 3D, the images are
analyzed into two overlapping images of different coloration, one for each eye. “When viewed through the “color-coded” “anaglyph glasses”, each of the two images reaches the eye it’s intended for, revealing an integrated stereoscopic image”.5 By casting red and cyan light from different angles, the shadows of the models are projected as the anaglyph image of the model itself. The visitors encounter the works as a kind of non-three-dimensional reality, where the absence of the anaglyph glasses permits them to experience reality as a representation or a projection. The reality is deconstructed into a supposedly underlying representation. Once again, we are trapped in the representational realm, with no way out.
Professor Bonner’s stance marks a departure from a post-modernist approach to representation,
where drawing and plans by architects like Enric Miralles and Zaha Hadid were extremely elaborated, to the point that one could say that they had a life of their own. It was this difference that “forms the poetry of the map [representation] and the charm of the territory [reality], the magic of the concept and the charm of the real”.6 In this case, representation did not take over reality, but was an independent reality. In Bonner’s case, representation as such is not that important, but it is rather the reality as representation that interests her. Baudrillard’s article on Simulacra and Simulations seems surprisingly apposite here. “[Simulation] is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory. […] Present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.”7
So let’s return to the Platonic allegory and dare to construct Jennifer Bonner’s version of the
cave. The first part of the story would be the same. Humans are imprisoned and experiencing the shadow play as reality, while the guards as puppeteers are performing a play behind them, but when they free 5 6
7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Simulacra and Simulations, p.167 J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Simulacra and Simulations, p.166
themselves and exit the cave, they will find themselves, not in the outside world but merely inside another chamber of the cave where the puppets have become bigger. As the puppets are enlarged to the point that their size is comparable with the size of the real objects, the resolution of the joints and textures decreases uncannily. In this version the cave is a dead end with no exit! Τhe cave is a gigantic dollhouse. Professor Bonner’s approach can be summarized into two strategies. Firstly, scaling up the representation, so the project itself becomes a large drawing or model and, secondly, revealing the fakeness or the doll-like qualities of the details, materials and textures, or other representational aspects of reality. In both cases, the work becomes an empty sign, pointing to itself and marking the neverending self-referentiality of presence as representation.
I acknowledge Professor Bonner’s dedication to looping and deconstructing reality, to unleashing
the media and permitting them to come into being, and her dedication to constructing her own version of the Platonic cave, but where is all of this leading? And most of all, what are the ethical implications of such a pursuit? From this point on, everything is beyond good and bad, beyond truth and false, but rather a question of philosophical and ethical stance. So, let us assume that the cave’s exit branches into endless different versions, like a multiverse, and every guard can free a prisoner and present an individualized version of what constitutes reality. What reality do we want to present? Do we want to construct architecture as an exit, or as an enclosure in the cave? No matter what the cave allegory implies for reality, for me architecture (and every entry in a building) should be this glowing exit, this experiential kick which may leave an internal psychic mark, this visionary dazzling sun, this negation of reality for something more real, a critique rather than an augmentation of what constitutes the real.
All images are from Professor Bonner’s website https://jenniferbonner.com/