HARRISON RATCLIFF works
CONFES
SION
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OP ROT
4 IA #
A M N E S IA B A NK
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W R IT IN G
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INTERIOR post-scripts
GSAPP - housing studio prof. Mario Gooden fa 2014
a project done in collaboration with Harrison Nesbitt.
The Velvet and Silk Cafe exhibit Mies van der Rohe 1927
The Snail Henri Matisse 1952
n o c o m m e rc ia l a c tiv ity o c c u r in g
fa r re m a in s fa i c o n s ta n t. h ig h e r a t h o u s i p ro je c t.
far
4 6
1 5 2 3
re s i d e n t i a l
s i t e of h ousing proj e c t
exempt total value
t ax bre a k zone
assessed total value
s i t e s of NY CHA proj e c t s
irly
ing
unit multi-family building community
Microunit 2
partment a
System
Joseph Albers’ ‘Homage to the Square’ was used a conceptual device to break up the program at different levels of interiority. Every element in the apartment that could possibly be removed and shared was distributed amongst a multi-family unit, an apartment building as a unit, and the community itself. With every step from the personal unit, the programs get more luxurious. Neoliberalism is used merely as a mask.
living & dining space 320 ft2
Dining
Shared Programs
Shared Programs
Living
Shower
Microunit 1
ct
kitchen spac 75
essential spa
ce
laundry space
ft2
5 ft2
Roof Garden
Kitchen
Exercise
340
sleeping
Given our initial interests in social density and overlapping layers, what would eventually become more aptly programmatic flaking, we chose to explore the tower and floor plate as types to play with.
chrome plated mullions
glazing
curtains
bed
collection case
closet
toilet closet platform
kitchenette unit
polished bronze door
UP
DW
UP
DW
UP DW
UP DW
UP
DW
UP DW
UP
UP DW
DW
29
30
Subject
System
AMNESIA BANK 8 dialectical objects
GSAPP - banking ReForm prof. Christoph Kumpusch sp 2014
AMNESIA BANK commodity & memory
GSAPP - banking ReForm prof. Christoph Kumpusch sp 2014
Sigmund Freud’s office Vienna, Austria circa. 1938
Tom Ford Store NYC 2012
‘Capricious Forms” Guggenheim, NYC 1937
plan sketch by myself
A memory bank for those who do not, or cannot, have memories.
furniture
Amnesia questions the value of memory its loss of a past or an inability to record a future. Not all capacities of memory are left in ruin. Languages and speech are usually retained in patients ingrained familiarity that extends to multiple visual and audible forms. In the Netherlands, there is a large compound for alzheimer patients. It includes different programs and facilities to fabricate a normal life in a small city (salons, grocer, etc.). However, every space is designed as a living room. Potted plants litter the streets. Side boards grace the meat counter. A secondary population of armchairs, floor lamps, and persian area rugs form a familiar spatial language. This is nothing new. Before its implementation for commercial psychology, Sigmund Freud’s library and office were designed as rooms in a home. Retail stores like Tom Ford go even further to tap the potential of this language of familiarity, replicating the grammar of living rooms through scale and spatial definition. area rugs
symbols
curtains
wood
thresholds
Architecturally, the building implements dialectical questions of memory and value. The living rooms are constructed around 8 void columns. There are a series of parts, a language, which is manipulated as the parts are joined and imposed on one another. The interior space is a matrix of fragment rooms and continuous, incomplete perspectives.
Every room is designed to imitate a living room. There is one program, reproduced in every room as a matrix of spaces. They are psychoanalytic offices. They are glass cases for storing a vast collection of objects. They are shop rooms.
W. C .
You can purchase the memories necessary to function in our society. Object contain memories can be stores with our psychoanalysts while you receive object therapy. Every room has the potential to do all depending on what is required by each customer. We invite the public to come in, for after all, it is a shop. Let them buy the disregarded memories. Let them buy the objects kept to act as new memories.
All autobiographical objects are treated as commodities. The contradicting logics of each value system are left unresolved except in the destruction of one over the other. The question is left unanswered. It merely provides a sentimental education.
41
42
bathhouse
GSAPP - bathroom prof. Pep Aviles fa 2013
‘Campo Marzio’ by Giovanni Battista Piranesi Avery Library 1762
Josephine Baker House Paris, France 1928
by Adolf Loos
May we present the massive contraption to satisfy any and all desires of capital, absorbing them like a black hole. It sustains itself as a congested concentration of an infinite number of desires. By far, it is the happiest place on earth. The primary structure of the complex is a mysterious, desirous, black monolith. In reality, the monolith is merely a screen, a dark veil draped over an enormous simulation machine. But is ‘monolith,’ monolith?
This fantastic machine performs through a series of cyclical, sequential pauses, dislocating the subject’s reality. Each room is separated out as an event or marking, building upon each other (or consuming another). The parts are made into a whole by the individual, producing a new utopian real from the matrices, memories, and models of pleasure densely packed in an endless network of unreal circulation — of fantastic proportions without space or dimension. A theme park to perpetuate and satisfy these desires. The black monolith is composed of two separated program/objects: the auditorium and the bath, with the first below ground and the second at the top. They are separated out by a dense field of walls that grow out of pyramid (auditorium), supporting the endless circulation above (bath).
escalator up
up
up up up podium up up up
up
The pyramid contains the void of a sphere, which is additionally violated by an upside down cone. Inside, the space is ecstatically claustrophobic.
11. auditorium
up
dn
up
1. inclined moving walkways
up
2.
green room
up
up
In the bath, each individual is given a scannable temporary tattoo. It serves as their key to all of the rooms.
3. lobby 4. ziggurat 5. blue room
up
6.
changing rooms
up
up
7. locker room
8. showers
9. lower bath
10. upper bath
A U D I T O R I U M
The auditorium is below. It serves as the supporting foundations of the negotiating structural field holding up the rest of the complex. Geometrically, it’s a voided sphere within a pyramid. Circulation inside moves upwards and downwards clockwise, like an eye, to different balconies overlooking the center stage. Surrounding the pedestal, all are ecstatically claustrophobic.
Welcome. You are brought through the black veil by a conveyor belt. The moving walkway is brightly lit by a florescent band running the full length of the ramp. Ascending, you are surrounded by panels of reflective, black glass that multiplies the metal structure into an infinite grid as if the space continues forever. A first taste. A rush. A euphoria that will be sustained for now.
1. inclined moving walkway
G R E E N
R O O M
“Vertigo� is induced. A bright green pendant hands low from the domed ceiling. The walls themselves are a bright desirous green. Footsteps echo as the guests walk across the black glass floor. The golden gates of the elevator close behind you and the individual ascends.
2. green room
L O B B Y
The golden gates are pulled apart and behold, the Bathhouse. Black stucco walls. A white marble tile floor. Bright lights beam atop stands in the right, four alcoves. The left ones are empty with only three dark glass walls. An enfilade of flashing light like that of a camera frame.
3. lobby
Z I G G U R A T
Ziggurat is entered on the corner. Light comes from a central hold in the ceiling. It streaks through the columns, casting shadows like blinds around a lantern. Absolutely every surface (apart from the 7 sliding, mirrored doors) is coated in a smooth wax the color of Vaseline. Guest sit, agitated, on the steps, moving in and out of the Tattoo Parlors in anticipation. Upon receiving access, they continue on.
4. ziggurat/tattoo parlor
B L U E
R O O M
Three doors and an opening onto a hallways. The doors will only open after the hall is visited. They all come back to the Blue Room occupying a new position. Their arm is scanned, and they move upwards.
5. blue room
C H A N G I N G R O O M
Like the “Billie Jean� video, the floor is lit. The changing room is a matrix of open rooms, each red with a marble cube. You enter and occupy an empty space, sitting on the cube to undress. Naked, picking up your pile of clothes, you move out of the changing room onto another inclined moving walkway.
6. changing rooms
L O C K E R S
Locker Room is a serpentine hallway. Clothes are deposited into the lockers. You may rest on the benches in front of the mirrors at the end of each space. Vanity though usually serves as a stronger magnet. Leaving the Locker Room, you are confronted with 2 automated doors, one an elevator. The other is entered first which behind holds two small amphitheaters placed behind the mirrors of the Locker Room. The glass is one directional.
7. locker room
S H O W E R S
Pleasure is derived from a loss of sight and subject. The elevator spills out onto a field of tall, columnar lights that support the grid of pipes and showerheads. To one side are private showers. To the other are the ‘Saunas.’ The thick perfumed steam obscures all vision. There are over-stimulations and their voyeuristic counterparts. Again, this too is indulged abstracted as memories past.
8. showers
L O W E R
B A T H
The stimulation of all five scents and the people make the Lower Bath the happiest and most pleasurable room of the complex. Every surface is lacquered glossy white. Violet light shines from below the surface of the water, radiating through the entire room. Guests rest in the bath or spread around the water’s edge in clusters. Time passes. When finished, individuals return to the elevator which takes them up.
There are baths or immense sensory pleasures. Hidden behind screens, different rooms look over the bath as another wave of Others indulge in the waters. Their view is framed just so. Off of these rooms are a series of smaller, private rooms. Upon scanning your tattoo, a television screen plays a recording of yourself in the bath. The bath is relived again through memory.
9. lower bath
U P P E R
B A T H
Above the Lower Bath is a pure abstraction of the BathHouse. There is matrix of rooms and doors, each with a marble cube and a screen. A few spaces overlook the bath below. After your first visit to one of the overlooking spaces, the window becomes opaque. The bath is perpetuated through memory, before entering a self-reflective continuum of abstractions that play a fun cycle of desire and satisfaction.
Scanning your tattoo again, you are let into an adjacent room slightly different from the previous one. A television screen plays a video of yourself, watching others in the bath. The next room plays a video of you from the first private room, watching yourself take a bath through the screen. The next is a video of you watching a video of yourself watching others take a bath, and so on. And so on. In a way, each individual becomes their own dream commodity, fetishized not as an object but an ever abstracting memory or addictive thought. As the machine becomes an unnecessary relic, an amazingly new, ‘asexual’ species remains. Now and again, the happiest place on earth.
10. upper bath
HETEROTOPIA #4 public bathroom
GSAPP - bathroom prof. Pep Aviles fa 2013
‘Bear’ by Steve McQueen Tate Modern 1993
Heterotopia, as a term in architecture, has been made a cliche.
The bathroom is designed as a heterotopic space, as a real space that deviates from culture logic through exercises in excess or deviation. The public bathroom, by its typology, is a private space directly placed within public space. Therefore, and within Foucault’s contradiction, the bathroom is inherently a very real space within public space that contains a strange reflexive relationship with cultural logic.
The bathroom plays upon the typology’s notions of vanity, of privacy, of separation, of confession, of eroticism, of transgression.
Foucault uses the mirror to animate his theory of heterotopic and utopia space. Looking in the mirror, the space beyond the glass is not real. However, it puts the person in front of the mirror in a position to reflect on a very real space from a vantage point beyond themselves. The mirror is used of course a mere device. My proposal takes the mirror, in its literal sense, and exaggerates it in its symbolic characteristics, specifically through these aspects of private, public, gaze, division, and function. Thus, through ‘the monstrousness of the contaminated program, the cracks guiltily repressed by deviant rigor are revealed.’ The symbolic, the profane, (the sacred), the structural, and functional aspects of the bathroom are designed into a single, continuous, reflective, and malleable surface.
RN
5’
TU
The bathroom is maintained as a sanctuary. The public and the individual are put into a position though such that they become conscious of that position and its surrounding contradictions.
private gaze
public subject
public gaze
private subject
CONFESSION library
UofU - library prof. Lisa Benham fa 2013
WRITINGS small thoughts & published works
GSAPP - banking ReForm prof. Christoph Kumusch sp 2014
KOOLHAAS THERAPY The following is to be a brief analyses of relationship between realism, ideals, and utopianism in architecture through the theory-cum-manifesto Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas. The three terms pose a question to architecture: to what ends should architecture represent the present, as a realist and accurate state, and to what extent should it aim for the future, embodying idealistic and optimistic sentiment in hopes for a change in the current state of things? In one way or another, the three are paradoxes in the same body. However, by closely looking at these three terms in conflict, we can begin to sift through the complexity of Koolhaas’ dialectical images. In the guise of operative history, the focus to my study shall itself be reserved to forms pertinent to the present and future of architecture and society. The three categories I will analyze for realism, idealism, and utopia are issues of sexism, class structure, and turn of the century capitalism. Typologies To begin my argument, the three terms of realism, ideals, and utopianism require clarification and definition to understand the breadth of Koolhaas’ synthesis. The term Realism is to be defined by its understanding in literature, put simply, as depictions of reality. Everyday actions, common activities—these images are the banal fragments that contribute to the function of public and private life such as labor, social structures, and physical needs. The term implies a present tense by its very logic. The past and the future are not real. But moreover, the intention behind the genre mediates upon the current state of things and representing them with a degree accuracy. Furthermore, realism prizes materialism and physicality over thoughts and ideals.1 Ideals and idealism are the belief in transcendental thoughts and humanist perfection, often by means of simplification and reduction – truth is found in abstract thought. It implies a social advancement or ‘forward vector.’ Utopian is idealistic, an imagined perfection, but it desires a physical manifestation. However, its satisfaction is always kept at bay. By definition it is infinitely remote.2 Introduction Delirious New York opens with a winking god’s-eye of the whole exercise. Two quotes and six passages make up an ideological outline, showing both the methods with which he will build his argument and the intended conclusions. Like a starters pistol, the first quote from Giambattista Vico jars the reader’s understanding of the empirical project from a scientific search for truth external to oneself to an artistic and cultural exploration—and an experiment—within the minds of men. Facts and history are to be understood as synthetic and be treated as such. The resulting form, which we will explore later, is an impossible tangle of phantasmagoria and actuality. The condition of architecture is produced in literary form. “This book is an interpretation of that Manhattan which gives its seemingly discontinuous episodes a degree of consistency and coherence.”3 The book is declared equal parts fact and fiction. Which is which is not called out, for the book really contains no citations. Nor are the facts and fictions left pure and blurred into one another. The truth is stretched into a synthesized set of superficially smooth evidences—the empiricism of a comprehensive history blended with the rhetoric of a manifesto. It is therefore very real for the degree of facts present but ultimately subjective for the intent of its interpretation: the possibility of a utopian future. Delirious New York is an interpretation of Manhattan’s history. Understanding history to be itself an interpretation, Koolhaas interprets it further. However, in its second-order, the abstractions, their causes, and their effects are produced in complete awareness. The book is itself a highly controlled exercise in Dali’s critical-paranoiac method. Knowledge is produced consciously. Images are made facts through a concentration, dilution, and abstraction.4 But unlike Foucault, the production of knowledge is not merely made conscious, but fully exploited by Koolhaas. It is in the fourth of his six parts, the segment titled “Blueprint,” that we fully understand the entire operation to be a fusing of these three categories of realism, ideals, and utopia. For, he writes, “[o]nly through a speculative reconstruction of a perfect Manhattan can its monumental successes and failures be read.” The idea of a blueprint for something already existing—Manhattan—and then retroactively applying a logic to it—an idea—organizes ideology to be implemented in future cities. A blueprint is a base plan or conceptual scaffolding for something to come.
Celebrations of banality and seemingly negative occurrence of the real capitalist city serve to reinforce this strange statement. The blueprint is as much something that already exists as it is an ideal plan: a utopian city to come, overwhelmed by density, speculation, pleasure, and anxiety. But in his clear extended allegory of architecture, is his reasoning for blurring the boundaries between representations of dirty reality and utopian ideals a willing gesture or a belief that architecture is not capable of separating them out? City of the Captive Globe The final block of Koolhaas’ manifesto is an end to a physical Manhattan. Moved into pure theory—and death—through a supreme consciousness, the appendix contains five fictive projects, each Manhattan perfectly and consciously manifested into an ideology. The City of the Captive Globe is a painting of New York’s infrastructure and conceptual structure purified to an essence. Here the city is made a museum. Urban blocks are replaced by marble plinths, elevating, limiting, and incubating a sea of individual ideologies, theories, and products of their inflictions and affliction. The grid structure is the ego of Manhattan, where each individual ideology is granted satisfaction to exist in a degree of isolation and be destroyed upon the very plinth it was built. Their isolation is no grace to exist unperturbed forever. These ‘towers’ are forced by New York to perpetually undergo partial or complete change. However, the urban grid remains over time. The pragmatic structure is the only continuity through the city’s history. Manhattan’s grid is its only true monument, hidden beneath thousands of sublimations. Ironically, physical manifestations of non-physical entities contain the possibility of being both monumental and un-monumental. Ideologies are strangely both monumental and un-monumental. Under constant threat of destruction, our perspective of the marble in the City of the Captive Globe changes from empty pedestals to slates. Ideologies, regardless of what they were in the past, are not monuments by this exact pragmatic nature. Koolhaas describes this ideological patricide as an ‘ethical joy,’ a ‘moral fever,’ or ‘intellectual masturbation.’ We note in all three labels that this change is perceived as positive and ideal. But each is additionally characterized, or transformed with, a base-psychological feeling of anxiety or pleasure. We have our most common abstract ideals, of ethics, morals, and intelligence, fused to directly to a psychological materialism, which appears as a strange blend of Marxist notions on Materialism and Freudian psychology. The City of the Captive Globe is merely ideologies in a structured operation. But anxiety and excess are results of the operation itself. The pleasures are not contained with the pockets of the city grid, but a result of accelerating and perpetual change. What Koolhaas notes in the anxious pragmatic structure of Capitalism is that there is hedonism. There is Post-Modern anxiety and there is Post-Modern pleasure. The psychoanalytical terms, regardless of factual groundings, provide complexity to the ideas in Delirious New York. In Freudian terminology, the ego is the part of the psyche which seeks to realistically please the id, the part of the psyche which responds to impulses and desires like sex and anger. Thus, by defining The City of the Captive Globe as Manhattan’s ego, Koolhaas is implying that the fictional structures purpose is to satisfy real emotions with a degree of reason rather than abstract and cultural thoughts. In the painting we find, not an orgy or bout of postmodern terror, but merely a structure that provides isolation and congestion such that base impulses and desires can be indulged. Realism manifests itself further in the painting of The City of the Captive Globe. We are presented with 20 physical representations of 20 very different ideologies. Capitalism, if capitalism is an ideology, is placed in the same field as Suprematist sculpture and Fascist architecture. The injustice that is the Berlin Wall is shown too. It is possible that the presented system gains a irony and neutrality through the painting. Koolhaas used the Berlin Wall to make an argument that walls produce desire through inclusion and exclusion. But perhaps we could interpret the presence of our perceived ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ ideologies as Koolhaas’ realism. All opposing typologies are combined together to reveal the extent of their larger context. This is simply architecture. Given that it is as much a physical construct as a cultural one, architecture simultaneously produces physical experiences as well abstract thoughts. Koolhaas’ ideology advocates the simultaneous presence of both. Architecture shall be an abstract thought, reserved for those with a luxury of time, and a production of base conditions that class hierarchy does not exclude.
Waldorf “The Waldorf is the first full realization of the conscious of Manhattan.”5 Koolhaas’ perspective on class is most present in his chapter on the Waldorf. The interior of the Waldorf is a colossal three-tiered bourgeois salon. Although the spaces are accessible, they are only accessible to customers. It is not a public space, merely a space for those engaging in the exploitation of commodities and production of culture. The sea of tables is related directly to little individual islands with their occupants engaging in their own discourse working in the same manner as the marble pedestals in The City of the Captive Globe. Manhattan is compared to “a metropolitan archipelago of 2,028 islands” or isolated entities with which to build and destroy different ideologies.6 That this is occurring through a massive expense of labor and capital, or immaterially in the Waldorf, the production of ideology is certainly an activity reserved for the bourgeois class. However, Koolhaas’ theory contains something of an equalizing gesture. He isn’t removing class, but allowing all classes access to architecture, in one form or another, through a presence of ideologies and materialism. Delirious New York is itself accessible on multiple fronts by the fact it is one of the most readable written works of architecture. Though it is comprehensively developed through dozens of theorists, very few of those sources are cited. It merely exists like a built work of architecture, embodying the ideologies alongside physical stimulation. The possibility of architecture’s relation to class struggle is tempered. However, there is optimism in his final statement of the section. Here we find the above quote in reference to the destruction of the Waldorf for the construction of the Empire State Building. American and capitalist pragmatism were allowed to destroy the salon. This consciousness that capitalist production is as equally capable of consuming its own evils is key to understanding Koolhaas’ strange blend of realism and utopianism. Incubator/Womb In its representation, Capitalism presents itself positively. Advertisements uncover a demographic and provide images of it amplified in a positive light. The advertisement of the Club reads as the “ideal home for men who are free of family cares and in a position to enjoy the last word in luxury living.”7 On that note, Koolhaas describes the Downtown Athletic Club as a laboratory aiming at perfection – a “flight upwards.”8 In all of these passages, Koolhaas’ heavily charges the subjects of his study with sexual language; often using it with intellectual and top-shelf metaphoric references. Performing in the exact opposite literary manner as Nabokov’s Lolita, the pornographic reveals and excites the mundane subjects and actions. The realist aspects of each recorded or invented event are made dirty. The language romanticizes mundane life and discriminates women with the same vigor of a Swiffer advertisement. Therefore, women are ‘recounted’ as excluded from engaging in the creation modernity’s perfection. They had not been allowed in the aims of physical perfection at the Downtown Athletic Club just as they had not been allow in the perfection of abstract thought in the architectural profession. In his portrayal society, Koolhaas realistically uses both past tenses and present tenses when discussing women in the Club, and additionally at the Ball. But to what extent does his cynical realism blur into idealism and utopian optimism? “In their frenzied self-regeneration, the men are on a collective “flight upwards” from the specter of the Basin Girl.”9 Deconstructing this sentence into its base terms, we have self-regeneration, collective, and specter being directly related to “flight upwards”/abstract thought, men, and Basin Girl/reality. Self-regeneration implies that ideology or perfection only can be reproduced within its own logic but never outside of it. In some state of imagined autonomy it becomes “sterile.” In this extensive metaphor, he is careful to state that all abstract thought exists within itself, that all ideologies have some dependency on a larger system. However, these individual attempts occur in a collective. Men are given the privilege of producing perfection with can be understood to be arguably understood as knowledge. Women are plumbing. Symbolically, women are personified and assigned the grounding and necessary functions of architecture. Here the familiar language of the Communist Manifesto becomes important (and certainly gives materialism arguments a greater validity). The Marx quote famously reads “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.”10 Women are assigned the task of haunting and threatening the production of knowledge. Though they are
missing from this passage, his advocacy for materialism elevates this haunting to an equal position. Just as in the City of the Captive Globe, architecture is assigned the equal task of physicality and abstraction. Cleverly, he combines the realism of social equality into an ironic joke to give them equal importance. Retroactive Introduction Fredric Jameson has described Koolhaas’ writing and architecture as “dirty realism.”11 He reveals the darker aspects of the mundane, in their present tense but the possibility of their future outlook. Koolhaas is optimistic though. But his optimism is quelled to a compromise. Capitalism may never end, but there are positives in pragmatism. The search for truth may be pointless, but we can easily look at our presence in the Cave as a voluntary positive. In his allegory, Plato himself frames humanities inability to achieve perfection or understanding an absolute truth as a desirable condition. The same could be said of Koolhaas’ portrayal of late-Capitalism and class structure. Marx’s prophesized revolution never came. Economic inequality didn’t desist. It is possible that Koolhaas merely seeks a positive in a system that may never be escaped and might as well be altered slightly from within by looking at its positive qualities. Delirious New York is very much for, and about, Koolhaas. He is writing it as his own ideological manifesto, avoiding the clichés that would keep it from being polemical. The introduction, where Koolhaas pulls back the covers to his own operation, is something of a super-ego. The super-ego is a consciousness of others and the others’ consciousness of you. It is a consciousness of cultural logic. The super-ego is what we understand as ‘ethics,’ ‘morals,’ and ‘intellect,’ which frankly is just knowledge in Foucauldian sense. Koolhaas architectural manifesto is that architecture should consist of realism, idealism, and utopian optimism.
1. Materialism, defined as a quasi-Marxist term, is a physical property and interaction, including history and psychological phenomenon like pleasure and emotions. 2. Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner. The Oxford English dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press ;, 1989. 3. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, 2nd ed. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994) 10. 4.
Ibid., 238.
5.
Ibid., 138.
6.
Ibid., 123.
7.
Ibid., 158.
8.
Ibid., 158.
9.
Ibid., 158.
10. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Martin Puchner, The Communist Manifesto and other writings (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005) 5. 11. Fredric Jameson and Ian Buchanan, “Interview with Michael Speaks,” In Jameson on Jameson: conversations on cultural Marxism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) 130.
Isolated in the mountains, Prescott’s Alta house lodged in the canyon resembles a work of self-aware, mass-culture music. The building is made code. Western architectural and theory is treated as an accepted but internally contested language undergone a series of abuses.
A LT A RESIDENCY
Upon pressing play, the architecture is broadcast to the visitor-cum-listener/ reader. Like a Gyorges Ligeti composition, the first moments are precise replicas of an original idea. The home is approached by a winding canyon road, gradually moving up along the mountain’s contours. Turning down a private drive, the terrain and side road level off onto a flat courtyard situated between two buildings: a garage/guest house and the Alta main house. The 1st structure reflects the logic of the approaching road, the form broken up and turned southwest to follow the topography. In contrast, the main house resembles a cubic monolith situated parallel to the river. An industrial iron arbor extending from the garage collides formally with the house, plastically deforming its original rigidity at the foyer (fig. 1). The building can be read through the sequential experiences of a visitor. Through time, the historical and architectural referents are manipulated, moving further and further away from their origin. The main house jaggedly protrudes like an autonomous, rigid monolith of rough concrete and frigid glass. In plan and elevation, the building reveals itself as a three-tiered, Palladian nine-square grid extended through the interior as a concrete scaffolding. Platonic objects are slid into the grid with an initial appearance of regularity. But each quote is accompanied with a slight discrepancy and contradiction. As each object is placed within the structure, the scaffolding is deformed and shifted. Take the cylindrical Kahnesque stairwell in plan view (fig. 2). Adjacent to it, we see the column has been pushed forward from the grid and away from the stair drum wall. A similar move is repeated in the top corner of the south elevation (fig. 3). Reacting to a placed rectangular volume, part of the above concrete beam is stretched down to become a short hanging wall, wittily giving the appearance of a winking eye in the façade. References and nods to numerous architects are repeated throughout the building. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s lineage, fireplaces are brought away from the exterior wall to divide and shape the interior. The fireplaces are additionally incorporated with other functional pieces like cabinets and bookshelves. From Frank Lloyd Wright, the building moves to quote aspects of Louis Kahn’s work by its strict separation and enclosure of service functions into one side of the home, with the foyer and mud room being the contradiction to the rule. The stairwell is a more ambiguous signifier. From the exterior, its form closely resembles at worst a prison tower and at best an industrial silo, a repeated motif in Muir’s work and Le Corbusier’s writing. But it has strong similarities to Kahn’s cylindrical stair drum at Yale’s British Art Museum by the way the rectilinear stair is placed within the cylinder and how that cylinder is resolved as it hits the bottom floor. A series of architects from different eras appear as different speech acts within the established, somewhat aesthetically Eisenman, structural language. Architecture and history are brought forth as myths. Each is valid simply for its past existence but it is made conscious and contested through play and folly.
The project represented in Prescott Muir’s monograph is isolated. Given its removed location, it lacks a city to react to, nor any critical regional culture to act within. In its vacuous isolation, we therefore find the architecture adapting its aesthetics to the surrounding landscape in addition to addressing the context of Western architecture itself in its entirety. Like music, its context allowed it some autonomy to be self-referential. Take an image from Muir’s monograph. Taken from a lower and inaccessible vantage point along the river, the rough gray concrete is gently placed in front of rough gray mountains – the icy blue of a frigid stream in front of the cold blue glass. The landscape is acknowledged over the immediate costume party of Swizz chalet and log cabin guests. In reality, the home is not alone. Dozens of homes, condos, and resorts surround the project unlike its published representation. Each photo presented is precisely cropped to exclude the existing neighbors. The contour lines of the site plan simply end before reaching the adjacent homes. The surrounding houses are ignored in their entirety as an architectural context and a represented visual presence in the monograph. Different quotes have a greater presence in the monograph through initial models. The published photograph of the plaster model reveals further Palladian motifs. Here we see the architects original intentions to place two sweeping staircases at the base of the south and west elevations. Both are axially symmetrical creating grand portals from the house into the landscape, as if it were merely two sides of the Villa Rotunda looming over the Po or the Piave. With every referent, the Alta residence refutes an absolute, singular correctness in architecture with a Mannerist abuse. The work reflects the internalization of a larger historical, cultural, and architectural logic. Numerous contexts and referents are compressed into multifaceted and partially fragmented compositions. Each systemic reproduction of an original idea is left unfinished or perverted. It is unfolded in time through expectancies and surprise, of parts that alter the entirety of the composition. The familiar tune is changed. The building can be read as essay on architecture as a language, with the architecture designed as a series of speech act (parole) taking place within – and accepting – the lines, folds, and language of historical Western architecture and theory.
Works Cited Prescott Muir, It by bit (Novato, CA: Oro Editions, 2011) George Baird, “’La Dimesion Amoureuse’ in Architecture” in Architecture Theory since 1968 ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1998)(orig. 1969) 41-55.
SUBTLE SURGERY the tabernacle and the temple
In 2010, an electric fire gutted the interior and collapsed the roof of the 90-yearold Provo Tabernacle, located at the center of downtown Provo, Utah. After the blaze, all that remained was a charred brick skeleton, the gutted body of a century old public space. The walls remained empty until, less than a year after the fire, the LDS Church, owners of the Provo Tabernacle, moved to preserve the remains, not as a tabernacle, but by making it a Mormon temple (fig. 1).
through juxtaposition between an initial sign (tabernacle) and the new function (temple) own symbolic decoration. The power dynamics of its use have been completely altered in the process. The public space is flattened to an exterior image. The cultivated focus on interior and exterior, inclusion and exclusion, has established the tabernacle-cum-temple as an appropriated sign, abstracting and confusing its meaning as a modern monument.
Though currently under construction, the transformation from a tabernacle to a temple will collapse the existing public space, and establish its primary status as a totem—a monument with ambiguous meaning—by excluding part of the population. The temple’s location and general visibility to the city will retain the building as a literal and conceptual center for the city of Provo. However, it will provide only a trompe l’oeil of public space: a flattened image. Temples are hybrids of semi-public spheres (not truly public spaces) of concentric and permeable, but exclusionary, membranes that wrap the sacred building in varying levels of access and omission. As Habermas will tell us, this collapse of public space is a developed paradigm in late-Capitalist societies but its reproduction in Provo exposes a shift in the mechanical relations between the institutions of the LDS church, Provo City (as both government and urban space), and the people.
All activities within the temple are restricted to full observant LDS members, though it remains in a way, a permeable membrane. Desire for access and inclusion into the Provo temple will be created, bolstered by its central location and ideological dominance within current Provo society. But given the areas primary demographic, this desire has little intention for those outside of the Mormon Church. 98% of the city population is LDS but 40% of the Church’s members cannot enter. The desire produced is strongest on the people closest, but just out of reach. Conceptually, a series of ‘rings’ or boundaries set up multiple ‘distances’ between the object of desire—the temple—and the public. This desire to occupy the center will act primarily on those already participating in the LDS faith.
The original Provo Tabernacle, or Old Meeting House as it was called, was built in 1861. Shortly after, as the growing needs and size of the community rendered the space inadequate, the original was torn down. Immediately south of the old Tabernacle/Meeting House, in 1882, a new tabernacle was constructed in a reserved Victorian style brick by the architect W.H. Folsom (fig. 2). Four towers intersected the brick volume at each corner with, originally, a tall central tower that was removed in 1918 for structural reasons. Three separate entrance bays were arranged bilaterally on each side to accommodate large numbers to the single grand space, used for meetings, events, and later, concerts. As a work of city architecture, the Provo Tabernacle has a rich religious and secular history. On two occasions it held General Conferences for the LDS church. President William Howard Taft spoke in the hall in 1900. The Utah Symphony and other performance groups held countless public concerts and events here over the past century. It was a space for the production of culture and public thought, mixing sacred and profane functions (fig. 3). There is no clean division between public and private in contemporary space. Public and private spheres contain a multiplicity of types, gradients, overlaps, and permutations. However, we see the physical size of spaces and spheres increase as their functions as public spaces become insignificant. The tabernacle has become just like another palace, church, or mall. On July 21, 2013, the Daily Herald, an LDS owned media subsidiary, published the initial drawings for the renovation. From the drawings we see the Provo City Center Temple is a poché-infill of the tabernacle’s skeleton (fig. 4 & 5). The interior is to be a standard, LDS temple typology consisting, not of a large gathering space, but parceled into a gradient of small, intimately scaled rooms. Expanding two floors underground, the building’s size will swell from 35,000 to 85,000 square feet unnoticed. Beyond simply preserving the brick shell, exterior details like the roof and windows will be rebuilt to match their first state. Even the original central tower is being surgically grafted back onto the exterior. Cosmetically, the Temple’s face is undergoing reconstruction, vicariously parading in a youth state it never had (fig. 6). By preserving the structure, the exterior aesthetic and image of the Tabernacle has remained as the implant of a new interior temple is added, superimposing the image each building to overcome their visible contradictions in a hybrid image of the tabernacle and the temple. Rather than Denise Scott Brown’s theory of the duck, the buildings function is constructed around the image to a very different effect than a duck or a decorated shed. New meanings are produced by the old sign being severed from the building’s function, and grafted to an foreign space
Like 99% to a COMME des GARÇONS, the temple is to be a totem—an object composed of multiple manipulating exterior images to be circle around, drawing people towards it. By placing a temple in the body of the Provo Tabernacle, it appropriates an image and position in the city. It is appreciated wearing the clothes of a structure’s past and time itself. As discussed, the temple presumes a “common heritage,” cunningly drawing portraits of community, history, memory, and the ideals of the city. The owners of this “heritage” are the beneficiaries. For in its present transformation, the value of this preservation and restoration is as a public sign, not a public function. Public space has collapsed. Pope Sixtus V transformed Rome in the 1600s by establishing and connecting a series of new churches within the city, drawing pilgrims to the city and enforcing the everyday life of its inhabitants, reconstructing and growing the influence and image of the Catholic Church. In a 2012 parallel, the LDS Church opened City Creek Center across from the main temple of the Church of Latter Day Saints to much the same affect, transform downtown Salt Lake City, Utah and revitalizing the Mormon church’s presence through increased visibility and connection to the new mall. The Provo temple is a case study for the relations between religion, city, the people, and capitalist modes of cultural production.
Works Cited 1. Jürgen Habermas, “I, II, III, IV,” The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 1-88. 2.
Daily Herald (Provo), “Tabernacle to Temple,” July 21, 2013.
3. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour, “Learning from Las Vegas,” Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 13-17. 4. Georges Bataille and Allan Stoekl, “”The Obelisk,” In Visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 213. 5. Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, “The Idea of the Common Heritage of Humankind and its Political Uses,” Constellations 9, no. 3 (2002): 375-389.
#OBELISK 10 proposals for the modern monument
May we present to you our proposal for the ideal modern monument. For our monument, we have ten points to make, ten proposals to explore. Let’s begin. One 1 Where did the modern monument originate? In our attempt to transcend time and meaning, there is it even possible we were conscious of our bastard virgin birth. “[It is] so profoundly unoriginal that it can only be imported?”2 We will inseminate our monument of the modern city; import it from the greatest and most fashionable distant places. It shall be reassembled piece by piece. Acting in a similar manner to Mr. Rockefeller’s Cloisters, this monument is something of a billboard, extruded to form a three-dimensional, decorated shed. Conceptually, it is 2nd order of Denise’s idea. It achieves both duck and decorated shed simultaneously as if the two were collaged. Our fresh new monument has no origin. Rather, it conveys the notion of origins in general. The monument has been designed exteriorly like a façade for the city, not for those who inhabit the city, but for those in transit and viewing it through pictures. The inhabitants, in reality, occupy the Modern city as transients. However, though it is designed with the distraction of ‘historical charm and monumental appearance,’ the modern monument has never truly been able to shake an internal ‘truth’ or the triggers that grow seeds of thought. It contains no truth. It is a placeholder to remind us the space is still vacant. Vacuum. Every modern city has a monument. We need one as well. St. Louis boasts the Gateway Arch to the same tune that Chicago advertises the Cloud Gate (the Bean) (fig. 1). Other cities need one. Luckily the Bean, having reflected upon Chicago so effectively, is slated to be formally reproduced and imported to the base of Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street luxury condo development in New York. Like the Bean, mirrors are embraced in our monument with all clichés. The literal reflection of city and subjects has proven itself abstract enough that its transplantation to the gentry of New York could not have been more frictionless. Ours shall be equally slick. Two2 Do we have frontiers left? Our earth has been measured with such absolute precision, almost down to the pixel, that we are never lost. Our past has used monuments as fillers to questions they lacked the capacity to answer, or, that in fact, had no answers. The pyramids were a placeholder to the anxieties of death; the temples as placeholders to our anxieties of life. Have we any need for these psychologically stabilizing limits? Are the memorializations of catastrophe done for grounding of a mass or creating of one? The dual function to these psychological confines on our share consciousness was the singularity of their direction and that they aimed at an ideal. The aims of our society no longer project genuinely forward towards a single truth or frontier, but cleverly, it incessantly moves towards an Other. It is inherently and perpetually another subject. It is a forever changing ideal. It no longer represents ideals but ideal. You see, our monuments shall be pure symbol – or very nearly reduced to a vanishing essence – like an open vessel. Meaning no longer occupies the monument. Rather, it inconspicuously outsources this task to every individual, every group, every epoch.
Monuments of the past have always contained a future sentiment. They reflect an image of a person or event simultaneously as they had been, as they are (dead), and what they could be. But the modern monument aims towards no frontiers. More and more, our monumental gestures are not placed in statues of men and war, but images of time and knowledge themselves. We do not construct another Mount Rushmore to perpetuate our leaders, but libraries. We propose that, rather than hierarchically piling symbols and subjects to compose a monument, it becomes a field of forms. Every last one of our ideal and ideals would be laid out alongside our uncharacteristic and immoral. Our ideal state and our represented state sit side by side. Everything is imported, divided, and separated out equally on a continuous plinth. They become something of a collection. Its needed house would need to be enormous, like some fantastic library of Babel. The arrangement of signs into a horizon or flattened, horizontal condition creates a uniform tension between all symbols, in all directions: forward, backward, sideward. God had only existed in symbols. Our Modern power structure no longer lends itself to the same symbolic acts. Monarchical legitimacy was the same. Our own fun of separating meaning from forms has revealed the frightening prospect of simplicity, real or fake. The monument was a mere witness to the methodical scientific process of Enlightenment. No matter. We shall deny the existence of such a void, the very void we occupy.4 The monument will be the sole of discretion. Three 5 Our monument is universal. It is abstracted to such a degree that each individual subject can project their desires into the monument and receive back their own reading each and every time. It only remains collective in its ability to address an increasingly docile people. Our monument is a mound or, more accurately, a pile. The minute, granular pieces are placed and centered on a large mirror plane occupying the entire ground of the square to form an initial conic pyramid. The pieces are at once representational and literal in how the installation acts within the city. By its very nature, the pile won’t last long. The modern monument clears away the distractions towards a deeper reality or consciousness. People will visit. Many will pass blindly. With any luck, the modern monument will grow the very spores of thought already present in its form. This monument, as much as it negates questions, contain the seeds to the questions all the same. Others will visit this place exterior from themselves and be provoked to turn their reasoning into themselves which is arguably our only remaining frontier. Four 6 The functional monument of urbanity itself destroys our questions with the same vigor the modern monument did to god. New York is a monument to men. The field of infinite ‘horizontal’ distractions often keeps pedestrians from looking up. But it’s plagued with a major flaw in that it ‘functions’. Therefore, we additionally propose that a large portion of the city fabric be completely leveled to build a true urban monument of ideal forms in ideal relation to each other.
Five 7
Works Cited
This monument will be mass produced, distributed, and sold. It is no exception to commodification. It shall be imported from a place where labor is cheap and fast. It practically “[wants] to halt the flow of time.”8 Our truly modern monuments will transcend time. Multiplication of the monuments should be sufficient in creating this ideological vessel. Conscious of not, the object will provide an absent and much needed phallus; our coping mechanism to an absence of meaning gained in production.
1. Georges Bataille and Allan Stoekl, “The Obelisk,” In Visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 213.
Six 9 Since the clock tower has been moved from the church towers to the factory, we’ve lost concern; time dominated through a retroactive appropriation of the future. We cannot stress enough that our monuments have always existed. They have lasted forever and it will continue to do so. Modernity will be young forever. Our monument will be young forever. Seven 10 Of course, a further monument is necessary for the revolutions to come; a monument to the 4th, 5th, 6, and so on, internationals. They will be most likely placed on the very squares of future conflict and violence. The most modern characteristic of Tatlin’s tower was that it wasn’t built.
2. Rem Koolhaas, “Generic City” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 1250. 3.
Bataille, “The Obelisk,” 213-214.
4.
Ibid., 220.
5.
Ibid., 214-215.
6.
Ibid., 215.
7.
Ibid., 215-216.
8.
Ibid., 215.
9.
Ibid., 216-217.
10. Ibid., 217-218.
Eight 11
11. Ibid., 218-219.
Gathering mere signs of ‘death’ and delirious ‘victory’ won’t give us a greater understanding of them as concepts so why bother. How does one represent nothingness? Surely with something. Therefore, we propose our monument be a limitless field of signs and monumental fragments. These very substitutes for enlightenment, logic, and reason will be multiplied. Thousands of obelisks. Thousands of arches. Thousands of empty urns.
12. Ibid., 220-221.
Nine 12 Representation is heavily limited in generating action. We fear that monuments have nature towards confusing the edges between representing of ideals and representing actuality. But these remain mysteries in what has exceeded representation. This mystery has been defined in the past as ‘exhilarating.’ 13 Ten 14 Lastly, the monument shall be placed on a broken, isolated chunk of an elevated old highway turn off. We’ll paint this La Madame Pedestal gold to be safe. It shall be a profoundly spatial billboard. Those with a luxury of time and position (i.e. those with a chauffeur) will be capable of overcoming displaced thoughts. The view up is framed best through a sunroof. We cannot stress enough the lengths we’ve gone to remove origins from this monument. No god is present. No nation is present. No George Washington is present. No power is concentrated by its existence. It is a pure monument. It shall be a guide for future monuments.
13. Ibid., 220. 14. Ibid., 221-222.
A N I D E A L PA N O P T I C O N
During the course of his position as the administrator and architect for the Inspecteur des Salines for Lorraine, the 18th century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux would morph the typology of the salt factory from its traditional form to a revised, radical one reflecting the changes in political and social discourse of his time. He would draw both. The Saline de Chaux, as a compressed form, records the development in the ideal new forms of power structure, social relations, and industrial production for an entire society. The revision focused on separating out, ordering, hierarchizing, and controlling social and technical functions, using what Fortier termed as “a ‘politic of symbols’ to an ‘administration of spaces’.” Ledoux established an architecture, consciously, as a machine of control and reform, with what the architectural historian Antony Vidler states as a “political economy (that) is paternalist but reformist.” Ledoux’s second rendition for the Saline de Chaux takes on a radically different form and intent by means of the architectural and institutional devices it creates. There are no new programs per say, but rather the same programs are recomposed, ordered, and adapted in a new way. We see the ideal of a single all-encompassing structure has been completely abandoned. Instead, the different functions have been separated out and methodically ordered around a semi-circular site. The plan has a centrality that is only expanded by a single axis that extends visually and physically outside the complex to the entering road as well as the landscape beyond the stables in the opposite direction. There are four building types in total: the Director’s house, the two factories, the numerous residences, and the Gatehouse. The Directors house is placed at the center of the whole arrangement, on axis with the Gatehouse. Perpendicular to this axis, two factories flank either sides of the Director’s house. The housing for the workers is hierarchically spread in a half circle, extending out from either side of the Gate House. Small plots of land lay behind the individual housing. Ledoux is driven along two lines. The first is a genuine desire to want to reform industrial production techniques through new methods. The second is towards the popular political and sociological philosophy of the previous century, from authors like Rousseau, Locke, and arguably Hobbes. Vidler makes an important point that Ledoux’s experiment is “the first attempt to form the factory community of modern capitalism.” The advancements in technical production are innovative. By separating out functions, the factories operated better. The threat of fires to production and safety was all but removed. The workers environments were improved, both in the factory and in their living quarters. There is an importance placed on the workers having families and engaging in a community within the compound but separated from production to some degree while a upper class men keeps them in check with the stature of a Prince. The layout of the Saline de Chaux physically and symbolically unifies all powers and sects of life in what 19th and 20th century Marxist thought will recognize as bourgeois patronage and one of the key defining aspects of capitalist society. It becomes important, and Vidler states this, to understand Ledoux’s training in Jacques-Francois Blondel’s school of architecture which educated architects for what was a burgeoning state and bourgeois benefaction. Ledoux sets up (or reinforces) a modern day bourgeois class system in the Saline de Chaux. The workers at the complex are separated by their occupation and the economic value/skill of their occupation, in addition to the ‘nature of their necessary surveillance.’ The least skilled workers are placed closest to the factories, with high skill workers like craftsmen placed furthest away near the gate house, like post-war suburbia.6 Additionally, with the development of industrial production and capitalism by the end of the 19th century, the luxury of time was becoming more and more wide-spread. It is seen as much of a blessing as a curse. What should a proletariat do with their new found time? The fear was that it would fall into the dissolution of morals, though drinking and corruption.
Like Rousseau, Ledoux did not see the solution to this luxury of time being intellectual thought and betterment. Rather, the workers were given plots of land and communal space conduct menial tasks for entertainment. Here they could engage in the same simple pleasures of farming` as the Queen on her Hamlet. The small plot was not really for the purpose of food but to occupy the workers free time, the goal being to keep them within the confines of the Saline de Chaux. In fact, the opposite of production was desired. One of the few ways that wages were able to remain so pitiful was through this dog to owner relationship of feeding the workers. Architecturally, all of the buildings consist of the same generic form that is added to give the building a commodity of function. The general forms become clothed with language to give each building its ‘appropriateness.’ Ledoux states that the underlying formal logic was “the choice of the orders and the permutations; and the sculptural and figural motifs, or attributes that were added to reinforce the message.” How an ideal society is represented and symbolized becomes crucial. Ledoux establishes a new language in the Saline de Chaux for the moral story he is creating. Like a fable, “architecture for them will take the place of the books they cannot read, and the orators they cannot understand” and become the new language of the emerging discourse on institutions To enable this ideal factory, Ledoux’s second plan sets up numerous devices of control. There is as many symbolic and psychological instruments of surveillance as actual ones. The primary, legitimate surveillance of the compound is the ‘hundreds of eyes’ that Ledoux brings up in his description. What is actively created in the drawings and description is a self-regulating community. It would function the same way as say a small town would; the combination of close proximity and interaction are filtered, more often than not, through a religious screen that not only self-regulates individuals but allows for others in the community to regulate each other. Therefore, the director is required to only maintain a symbolic eye and to provide a check on the general community actions and source of morals. The workers families act as a 2nd order, self-regulating module within the community. Ledoux writes that “(t)he accommodation of the worker’s family will enable the morality of the entire society to be regulated, but also increase the stability of the workforce.” Even the terms he uses reinforce this strange blending of powers and methods of surveillance into a complex network, refined to a system of “reinforced secular surveillance with religious power.” Vidler makes a critical observation that the houses are often obscured by the leafy tree lined avenues radiating in plan. He states that the arrangement arguably speaks more to a community united in a line of production. Though often criticized as a similar form, direct symbolic comparisons of Ledoux’s creation to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon are insufficient. Ledoux’s intent was not to control droves of ‘degenerate’ populations, but to control a labor force through methods that still vary from Bentham’s prison. The placement of the Director’s house serves as more of a symbolic power. Several devices employed by Ledoux from the lanterns to the tree planting destabilize the Director’s house as an absolute power. It can be understood as the central point of power and surveillance, similar to the watchtower in a panopticon. In Bentham’s project, the intermediate space between the houses/cells and the watchtower contains the prison yard, a factory of sorts where the prisoners work and occasionally spent time. Just like a panopticon, the houses of Ledoux’s complex are placed around the half-circle form such that all can be viewed from the single point occupied by the Director’s house. The Saline de Chaux is not however a panopticon due to the positions it creates for each subject. Looking at Ledoux etching, what dominates the vertical lines of the entire composition, that escaped actual completion, is the four un-built light towers. They are the tallest objects on the entire site. But the fundamental difference between Bentham’s creation and Ledoux’s is where they place the light. In the panopticon, the light is placed around the exterior, so that the central position is given absolute surveillance, a position so powerful and obscure that
the psychological condition of self-regulation becomes the primary means of control. However, in the Saline de Chaux, the lights are spaced evenly between the Director’s house and the workers residences. Light is cast on both the workers and the director. The Director’s house, which Ledoux called a Temple de surveillance, though given the central position, is equally visible from all points as well. Though every individual is placed into a class-like hierarchy based off occupation, they were all given this strange power of surveillance. Unlike the watchtower, the Director’s house is itself under surveillance by the workers. This power extended to the workers is one of the defining positive attributes to this social model (and one of its primary redeeming factors), is the traces of what we perceive as democracy: the visibility of power and a proletariat given a reflexive position. The theorist Michele Foucault, in his analysis The History of Sexuality, defines the primary strength of power is its obscurity. Visible, a power is forced to reliquish a part of its self to those who ‘see’ it. Visibility is power’s greatest weakness. The missing towers from the built complex alter the entire dynamic, falling into a more unidirectional system of surveillance of an absolute power like a monarchy. Gaze was not the primary concern, but merely a component of the ideal society that is still present today in our Late Capitalist society.
Works Cited Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, 1986. Machiavelli, Niccolò, and Dominic Smith.The prince. New York: Knopf, 1992. Vidler, Anthony. “Architecture, Management, and Morals: The Design of a Factory Community at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” In The Scenes of the Street and other essays. New York: Monacelli Press, 2011. 149-169. Vidler, Anthony. “The Theatre of Production.” AA Files Winter (1981): 55-63.
PIRANESI & TAFURI a critical analysis in 16 subjects
Introduction In 1749-1750, the Italian etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi published fourteen plates that were to be his first set of architectural dystopias. As a part of a larger compilation depicting fantastic reconstructions of Roman ruins, they were titled Invenzione Capric di Carceri, meaning Capricious Inventions of Prisons. As the title describes, the images of the “prisons” are light and airy. The Soviet film director Eisenstein would label this first stage of his drawings as “unexpectedly harmless, with little feeling,” almost whimsical in mood. Though the prints themselves magnificently replicate and multiply the awe and power of ancient Rome, they remain somewhat neutral. With a single exception, the plates have no relation to prisons. The fact that they are titled Carceri appears to serve as a theatrical interest rather than an actual allegory or representation of prisons. Early stages of Piranesi’s work show him greatly influenced by the architectural theorist and his contemporary Carlo Lodoli; stressing an architecture of objective laws, reason, necessity, truth, and simplicity. Also visible are the theories of the philosopher Giambattista Vico, a contemporary of Piranesi’s who looked into the reconstruction of the philosophies of past society through contesting and reconstruction of myths. The Carceri drawings display a pivotal shift in Piranesi thought from purely archeological reconstructions to his producing his own theories based on self-conducted architectural experiments. A decade later, during a time of personal and professional crisis, Piranesi republished the Carceri, heavily edited and reworked, adding two new plates at II and V. Though at the height of his influence he was criticized not only for his ideas of architecture and ornament, but that his previous ideas contradicted the architecture portrayed in his past etchings. Though the subject – and the physical plates – remained the same, what is conveyed in the plates appears violently corrected. In these corrections, his architectural theories are pushed to their furthest. All supposed contradictions are manipulated and reworked. The 2nd Carceri is a clear and decisive break. Law, reason, and simplicity are now ridiculed. In this essay, we will analyze the second stages of the Carceri d’Invenzione against the first, in conjuncture with the in-depth reading of Piranesi’s work by the architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri. In his book The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Tafuri engages in a complex and inventive analysis of Piranesi’s work as a pivotal break with the past and as a beginning for the Modern avantgarde. Several questions will be asked through the course of this essay. Firstly, how is Tafuri choosing to define the term avant-garde? Additionally, to what extent did Piranesi view himself as avant-garde through this lens constructed and reconstructed by Tafuri? How does Tafuri’s definition and analysis relate to the second set of the Carceri? Moreover, how do other architectural historians interpret Piranesi in relation to Tafuri? Each section of the follow argument is titled after a plate of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione.
Subject 1: I – Title Plate
Subject 2: V – The Lion Bas-Reliefs
In creating a definition of avant-garde and beginning his analysis relating it to his own time, Tafuri produces a series of assumptions to uncover hidden structures and institutions based on coinciding evidences. Initially he establishes a negative dialectic relationship between the word avant-garde and what he terms the negative avant-garde. Tafuri views Piranesi as the origins of the Modern avant-garde for three reasons: the moment of crisis Piranesi was producing in, the conceptual devices used by Piranesi resemble those of the late-Avant-Garde of the 1970s, and the overall effect those devices had. Tafuri sees Piranesi as etching during a critical moment when bourgeois ideology and “intellectual anticipation” aligned, beginning what Tafuri understands as the start of a new cycle of bourgeois culture. Additionally, he finds it to be no coincidence that the beginning of this new cycle fell in line with the birth of a lineage of experiments critically analyzing the concept of space.
The fifth plate was added in the second series, along with plate II, published in 1761. Though all the plates are unnamed, the common name associated with it is The Lion Bas-Reliefs. It depicts a sunken level with two lions. On a ledge above them, the only two people in the image whose faces are visible precariously sit. The historian Andrew Robison notes that the captive figures appear to be classical statues. In the scene, the ancients are captives while the moderns wander around free observing and possibly enjoying.
Tafuri assigns a number of characteristics to the figure of the negative avantgarde. They are an ideologist and a public figure. They have, to some degree, a self-awareness concerning their position; their work contains negations of the subject; they hold banality in high regard; they produce cultural devastation; and they produce a cultural reaffirmation. For example, looking at the Title Plate, we find a negation of the subject by the added figures as shadowy, faceless spectators. According to Tafuri, an avant-garde work assumes a dialectic component and produces a utopia, negative or otherwise. Summing up the 2nd set of the Carceri as a whole, Tafuri proclaims “Piranesi’s ‘negative utopia’ […] as the first true expression of the ‘dialectic of the avant-garde.’” Utopia, as a theoretical place, is a critical component in establishing Tafuri’s definition of the avant-garde, viewing it as the only outlet, from Piranesi to Tafuri’s present, for producing intellectual work and imagination. Here, invention enters the tradition of architecture. The next defining aspect of the avant-garde is the use of architectural and theoretical fragmentation of the past. Tafuri believes Piranesi’s fragmentation to be the consequence of two discoveries. The first discovery is a new science of historical criticism, or a critique of the past. It is quite possible that Piranesi did have an ideological understanding of historical criticism as it appears as a reoccurring theme in Vico’s Scienza Nuova. The second is the discovery of a criticism of criticism, reflexively acting on those criticisms which dominate and dictate architectural ideas, producing an interesting effect. A condition is created where logical reason and criticism, rationality and irrationality, could coexist simultaneously as unresolvable contradictions, in much the same way as the George Orwell word doublethink. The way Piranesi deals with his accused and present contradictions is addressed by numerous historians in the Carceri plates and will be dealt with further in the essay.
Other historians portray him in their own simpler definitions of avant-garde. Middleton reveals that Piranesi was not as liked or appreciated during his time as he is now. He writes that “[m]any disliked the forcefulness of his representations.” Looking back at the fifth plate, the “forcefulness of his representations” is clear. Beyond just the presence of lions, the image itself is jarring. The classical figure teetering on the point of falling to the lions creates an immense tension. Piranesi viewed himself in an avant-garde position, though nowhere near the extent attributed to him by Tafuri. A critical quote from an inscription in a plate from Della Magnificenza (1761) reads “it is reasonable to know yourself, and not to search into what the ancients have made if the moderns can make it.” Beyond merely insisting on self-reliance and the ‘genius’ of the artist, he is declaring a decisive break from the reproduction of historical architecture. In his inventive dialogue “Thoughts on Architecture,” he stages this debate, cast himself in role as Didascalo and the traditionalist as Protopiro, consciously fabricating a critique of criticism. Subject 3: III - The Round Tower The Carceri d’Invenzione is an argument at its very core. As a sarcastic and unified whole, Piranesi uses the 16 plates and, for that matter, architecture, to attack and refute his critics. The dynamic medium of paper, as a series of visuals and language, presents architecture in a different way. By not having to deal with the physical complexities of space, Piranesi is able to draw forward and exaggerate certain aspects while diminishing others that may distract from an overall purpose. One of the primary changes, noticed by Robison, is that the technical craft and content experimentation on top of the first stages creates a heaviness and solidity. Smoke is literally removed in several plates. Referencing back to the Title Plate, we will notice that in the inscription the word capricious, meaning spontaneous, has been removed. The air of possibility that the spaces depicted could continue infinitely is replaced by absolutely certainty. The forms are darkened. Disconcerting perspectives and winding stairs set up a never ending enigma.
Subject 3: III - The Round Tower
Subject 4: XVI – The Pier with Chains
The Carceri d’Invenzione is an argument at its very core. As a sarcastic and unified whole, Piranesi uses the 16 plates and, for that matter, architecture, to attack and refute his critics. The dynamic medium of paper, as a series of visuals and language, presents architecture in a different way. By not having to deal with the physical complexities of space, Piranesi is able to draw forward and exaggerate certain aspects while diminishing others that may distract from an overall purpose. One of the primary changes, noticed by Robison, is that the technical craft and content experimentation on top of the first stages creates a heaviness and solidity. Smoke is literally removed in several plates. Referencing back to the Title Plate, we will notice that in the inscription the word capricious, meaning spontaneous, has been removed. The air of possibility that the spaces depicted could continue infinitely is replaced by absolutely certainty. The forms are darkened. Disconcerting perspectives and winding stairs set up a never ending enigma.
The final and last plate of the set, The Pier with Chains, was the most visibly altered. The dark image, and added cemetery of historical fragments, bears little resemblance to its past state. Looking at the first rendition, we see a large, loosely defined pier, bleeding into the right edge of the frame. On it is a wooden bridge from which chains and a single lantern hang. A second lantern hangs in the background. What we are looking at is unclear, even in relation to the other plates. Robison believes this final plate indicate Piranesi’s later concerns though he makes no substantial attempt to assume what those concerns are. Middleton insists, in addition to Tafuri, that the 2nd set of the Carceri does address numerous issues that concerned Piranesi at the time.
John Wilton-Ely interprets the second stages as visual studies in spatial advancement because of the inventive nature with which Piranesi reconstructed monumentality and his free manipulation of perspective. The architectural historian Myra Rosenfeld, however, views Piranesi’s intentions as merely technical experimentation for the effect of sublime emotions and the advancement of his craft. If we follow the primarily believed theory that the Carceri d’Invenzione was produced in direct relation to Piranesi’s position of crisis and that he produced a formal argument, then it becomes important to look at methods that he used to address the contradictions of his past. Overall, the prisons are not composed of classical or common artifacts. Rather, they are a strange bricolage of historical forms devoid of rules. In comparing it to other plates in the Prima Parte, Robison relates the primary form in The Round Tower to a classical temple surrounded by a prison interior. Tafuri’s analysis goes further, proposing that the classic forms themselves are imprisoned. This holds two meanings: that the architectural elements and classical Roman ideals are held captive, splitting it into two possible lines of thought addressing Piranesi’s fascination with the freedom of artistic ‘genius’ and his interests in Roman justice.
In the Carceri d’Invenzione, “[…] the contradiction is absorbed and recomposed, and rendered inoffensive.” The overstimulation of symbols wipes them blank, confusing and distorting any meaning in white noise. However, the memories of these symbols remain. His later constructed dialogue between Didascalo and Protopiro reveals Piranesi’s intentions. Here he states that the purpose of ornamentation is effect not meaning, directly breaking from Lodoli. Further in the dialogue, Piranesi reworks the definition of ornament, attacking the concept of natural in architecture by condemning the predictable simpleton Protopiro, “(he) would like us to go live in those huts.” It becomes interesting to note that Piranesi directly altered the original plates. This appropriation of his own created past was less of a practical gesture and is generally understood as a symbolic, theoretical, or psychological one to absolve his own contradictions. In self-referentially etching over his past, Piranesi would appear to self-legitimize his new position on the ruins of his old ideas in an avantgarde way. Piranesi in turn unmasked the contradiction of his opponents. However, it remains unclear whether this silence described by Tafuri was merely a consequence of Piranesi’s opinion or an intentional attempt to divorce dominating signifiers from their respective signs. Tafuri’s idea that Piranesi discovered the linguistic power of negatives in order to allow his contradictions to coexist and reveal the contradictions of language is a stretch. Moreover, does Piranesi’s work accomplish that? Piranesi’s character Didascalo does prove the arbitrary nature of architectural criticism but the question remains: did Piranesi realize “the arbitrary nature of human institutions” as Tafuri assumes? Scholars have no doubts as to the intellectual capacity of Piranesi. Middleton in his review notes that Piranesi’s library consisted of over 1200 books from across Europe, including all past and present architectural treatises. Wilton-Ely and Middleton only see Piranesi loosening his hand rather than setting up any formal autonomy. However neither historian contradicts Tafuri’s statement that the Carceri drawings are removed from a value system of forms to some degree.
Subject 5: XIII - The Well
Subject 6: IX – The Giant Wheel
Robin Middleton, in his 1982 review of historical works on Piranesi, looked at the accuracy and ideas of several historians against one another. What was made clear was there are few actual recollections or first-hand accounts of Piranesi. Any historical research conducted has required, and still does, a level of reconstruction. He regards Tafuri’s ideas as overtly “idiosyncratic” and “personal,” though it is “greatly admired by architects of intellectual pretention.” Middleton’s opinion of history differs from Tafuri’s in that history is understood as archeology of fragmented facts that are heavily interpreted within the context of their creation, rather than through modern appropriation.
The plate that changed the least was the ninth plate, later titled The Giant Wheel. Robison argues that this drawing is the most successful out of the set, not only because it was changed the least, but that its irrationality was the reason for it being changed the least. What numerous historians assume is that the plate, for being changed the least, contained what Piranesi was trying to accomplish in the second set. We find the same irrational complexity multiplied in every newly edited plate. There are multiple perspectives, not just within the construction lines of the drawing itself, but additionally contained almost in frames, like central doorway and openings in the background. However, Robison feels, as does Rosefeld, that the reasoning behind Piranesi darkening the plates is that he liked the aesthetic effect it created.
It becomes necessary in analyzing Tafuri’s writings to understand his methods and views of historical research as well as to see how he differs from others. The introductions to two of his books give an insight into his mode of historical analysis: Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth. In conducting his research into the work of Piranesi, he interprets his present time by reconstructing the context of the past, using 19th and 20th century Marxist devices to gain a greater understanding of his own “crisis.” In doing so, the two are somewhat blurred together as he looks for patterns and establishes links between them. He describes architectural history research first and foremost as a cultural production its own right. It is a jigsaw puzzle to be carefully reconstructed in the mind of the historian. His reasoning for his heavily speculative research is stated plainly as a question. He writes, “is not architectural writing […] a multiplicity of projects of domination?” Therefore, history is dealt with as a source of domination both “determined and determining,” and especially as an intensely political endeavor. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s idea of history as genealogy, history is analyzed, not as a linear sequence with an origin, but as a complex network of small truths. Knowledge, he states, “is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” His idea of history is similar to Piranesi’s of architecture. The language of the past is fragmented to serve a specific, contextual purpose.
In his analysis, Tafuri discovers that the network of beams, stairs, and walkways project beyond the foreground of the circular opening and actually pass through a second oval structure. The effect alludes to a space immediately behind the imaginary vantage point of the spectator. Tafuri sees in the image “lawless intertwining” structure manipulating perspectives “to make nonexistent sequences of structures seem real.” Moreover, the shadow falling across isolated doorway further complicates the composition as to whether or not the space is inside or outside, which is a common theme in almost all the plates of the Carceri Cast shadow gives the impression of being an exterior view, but on numerous occasions the architectural language is interior. Looking at the spatial arrangement of the bays, the back lit windows, and the back wall – which resembles the interior of the Roman baths at Caracalla – does little to resolve the ambivalence established.
Subject 7: XI – The Arch with a Shell Ornament
Subject 8: VIII – The Staircase with Trophies
This plate, as well as the previous plate The Pier with Chains, is heavily altered. Again we find that the physical logic of the composition doesn’t make sense. For example, where the rope swag falls isn’t physically possible. Space is manipulated by producing something that can only make sense in a flattened, paper state. Wilton-Ely sums the first set to spatial play, stating that Piranesi was merely “escaping from the spatial limitations of conventional perspective.
The historian William MacDonald sees Piranesi’s changes to his Carceri drawings as pragmatic. In his short book, Piranesi’s Carceri: sources of invention, he writes that “(t)he near failure of that series (1st), and the addition of some vivid prison imagery in the second series published years later, suggest that perhaps Piranesi thought the prints would sell better if he added images that lived up to the literal meaning of his title.” Along the way, he sees Piranesi drawing on everything from Roman ruins to Borromini. Additionally, he sees the overall concept of the collection as merely evoking Roman art and ideals. For example, he sees the enormous structures of stone and wood brackets as representing Roman engineering prowess. Roman justice, referenced in Livy, is called upon to explain the depictions of human suffering. Though it answers many of the questions provoked by the enigmatic set of drawings, it fails to explain why Piranesi denied faces to any figures other than those suffering, and moreover why the faceless beings appear more as demonic creatures rather than actual, or ideal, humans.
However, the second set, is agreed by Wilton-Ely to being a pivotal argument for Piranesi during a time of “creative tensions” as well as a source of formal experimentation. Here Middleton criticizes Wilton-Ely for refusing to speculate further as to what Piranesi was attempting to accomplish through the Carceri d’Invenzione. The historian further accuses Wilton-Ely, based off his analysis, of believing that artists don’t think, noting Wilton-Ely’s belief that Piranesi served more as a mouth piece to others. Along with Tafuri, Middleton emphasizes that Piranesi had his own very strong beliefs coming from archaeological exploration and ideological endeavors.
Subject 9: VII - The Drawbridge
Subject 10: IV – The Grand Piazza
The drawing of The Drawbridge is easily the most architecturally complex. Perhaps one of the most prevalent attributes of the image, and all the images of the Carceri, is the overwhelming use of symbols. One of the key, Modern concepts that fascinate Tafuri is Piranesi’s use of architecture consciously as a language, as a cultural and historical product, and a myth to be refuted. It is from this fascination that Tafuri analyzes the work of Piranesi.
Though Tafuri chooses to heavily engage the works of the avant-garde in their semantic capacity, can architecture be considered as language? What are the limits of architecture ability to act as a language? Piranesi himself is in a position where the architecture he produces isn’t experience under the same logic of built works. By producing paper architecture, a different structured logic between the spectator and the work is also produced.
Piranesi’s divorcing of the signifier from signified is viewed as a mindful act, freeing himself from the dominating language of the past. Tafuri boldly states that “[t]he manipulation of forms always has an objective that transcends the forms themselves.” Fragmentation of architectural forms serves to set them up autonomous from the system that assigns them meaning. Piranesi overwhelms his composition with fragments. The explosion of meanings creates an overhauling distortion of sematic meanings.
MacDonald draws attention to the importance of the medium Piranesi was producing as a composition of signs and effects. In a flattened state, Piranesi was able to exaggerate scale and monumentality. The image can be manipulated to emphasize certain things and reduce others. Moreover, an image is read not experienced or occupied. Architecture itself though is incredibly semantic in that it draws from a system of signs to produce forms. However, it’s limited in physical construction where it becomes required to serve larger functional needs and where the complexities of space complicate any power of language.
The “crisis of the object” is a theory of Tafuri’s used to describe the condition of an object heavily abstracted and made hermetic. When the object is put into crisis and language is attacked, intentional or not, it performs what Tafuri calls a “typological negation.” What occurs is that the parts or the objects relation to a larger system of objects undermines the language as a whole in addition to reconstructing it separate it away from its previous context. By the very definition of language though, there is actually very little language present in Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione: just hollow forms left by brutal experimentation. Scientific research is executed on ruins before they are finally and arbitrarily reconstructed into fantasies. What is interesting is the possible degree that Piranesi may have performed this. In his dialogue between Didascalo and Protopiro, he unmasks the language contradictions present in the architecture of his time. It makes no sense to utilize both walls and pilasters in architecture. Towards the end of his diatribe he rhetorically asks which architectural language Protopiro would prefer to destroy to absolve this contradiction. Finally, he emphatically pronounces, “[w]ell then, I will destroy everything!”
Subject 11: XIV – The Gothic Arch
Subject 12: XII – The Sawhorse
The Gothic Arch is where MacDonald feels to be the defining plate of the first set. It too is changed very little, Piranesi only adding in only wood members in a few places in addition to a walkway under the arch and in the top left corner. He writes that “it is also the first in this exhibition where a spatial ambiguity is so pointed it raises the question whether Piranesi intentionally designed architecture which is visually convincing but cleverly irrational.”
In analyzing the possible intention of Piranesi, historians point to two primary Italian ideological figures: the philosopher and historian Giabattista Vico, as well as the Italian architectural theorist Carlo Lodoli. Both figures were contemporaries to Piranesi and his work at different times reflect similarities to their ideologies. The historian Maurizio Calvesi, in his 1967 introduction to the Italian edition of Focillon’s work, saw them drawing heavily on a “consciousness of history” from Vico and others. Vico’s theories actively reflect back upon history to manipulate and reinvent, revealing their malleability. Specifically, what seems the most prevalent in Piranesi’s work, and is noted by not only Tafuri but the historian Gian Paolo Consoli, is the “reappraisal of a mythical Italian past.” Also, Vico’s idea of history as not being singular or homogeneous, meaning that “humanity nor architecture has a single origin,” is echoed in Tafuri’s argument. Tafuri writes:
The Gothic arch too appears as the perfect example of Tafuri’s concept of negative utopia. Tafuri claims that in the plates of the Carceri d’Invenzione, the same concept of Nature create by Enlightenment in an act of bourgeoisie self-legitimacy, is portrayed corrosive, diabolical, and inhuman by Piranesi. The plate could perhaps be viewed as drawing on the Gothic for its ideals, though the Gothic is carried through the same as it was in the first set. Vegetation spills from the cracks between stones as well as hangs from the ropes and arches. The Gothic appears in a fragmented state, awkwardly joined to piers. Through this perspective, the heavy addition of wood members gains a new meaning; the violent joint between wood and stone being a signifier to a clash. What is clear is that all of the plates of the 2nd stage display aspects of domination. But of what specifically is being dominated is unclear. The sublime nature of the image sparks ideas that the spectator himself is being dominated. The chains draped over fragment, somehow isolated in a historically ambiguous space, could portray that it is architecture itself that is imprisoned. As mentioned earlier in the essay, the classical figures portrayed in plate II and X complicated and multiply the possible readings. The multiplicity of the image could be his intention for in his “Thoughts on Architecture” claims architecture should be “an enigma for the eyes, as a confused poem is an enigma for the mind.” However, Tafuri pushes that Piranesi was conscious of essentially what Jameson defines as post-Modern anxiety in its early form. He sees the images as creating cold spaces of absolute power and alienation as if Piranesi intentionally made the Portman Hotel in Los Angeles. He takes his Marxist analysis further into analyzing the nature of commodification in Piranesi’s work as a representation of conflict in the face of Italian cities being reduced to images for his own economic livelihood. Moreover, Tafuri sees a fear or crisis simultaneous with his own time; that the profession of architecture is irrelevant if it falls into any forms of reproduction. Here Tafuri clearly draws on a quote made by Didascalo which states that “those seeking to build would be foolish to ask an architect to do what a brick could do for them at much less expense.” As to whether or not Piranesi was addressing a larger human condition, it appears as a stretch.
Since Roman antiquity is not only a recollection imbued with nostalgic ideologies and revolutionary expectations, but also a myth to be contested, all forms of classical derivation are treated as mere fragments, as deformed symbols… Thoughts from Vico appear continuously in Tafuri’s and Piranesi’s own ideas. Firstly, Vico transformed the fantastical to a science by declaring it a tool for reconstructing knowledge. He believed that the philosophies of the Latin’s could be reconstructed out of the etymology of their language. Therefore, Piranesi’s use of forms, evoking Roman memory, could be interpreted as at least a partial awareness of architecture as a language if he was in fact influence by Vico. The second idea perhaps gained from Vico is understand truth as an entity created by man, as is history. Could the sawhorse, lost in a sea of cut up fragments of the past, imply a control over history, or could even the spikes allude to something more violent.
Subject 13: XV – The Pier with a Lamp
Subject 14: X - Prisoners on a Projecting Platform
Wittkower, in his essay, states that Piranesi had three main arguments that overlap in the Della Magnificenza Ed Architettvra De’ Romani. Firstly, that Etruscans were an older race than the Greeks and therefore had their own origin separate from Greece. Also, the Etruscan civilization reached I higher level of perfection. Secondly, that the Etruscans were more talented. Here Piranesi points to an incredible engineering prowess and civil mindedness in the utilization of it for public works. Lastly, and the point he wished to be incredibly specific about given the criticisms he received, the Etruscans didn’t adorn their buildings but instead produced effect. This is not to say that they didn’t use ornament, but that, in opposition to Lodoli, ornament served to produce an effect in the spectator as is mentioned in Piranesi’s “Thoughts on Architecture.” We no longer find Lodoli’s principles of objective laws, reason, necessity, truth, and simplicity followed. For Wittkower, the Carceri argues additionally the supremacy of Roman art, which is additionally mentioned by Consoli in his essay.
Prisoners on a Projecting Platform, in the previous state, was the only drawing to contain any relation to an actual prison. But as to why Piranesi chose the concept for the set in the first place is debated. Wilton-Ely points to the fact that prison scenes were common in stage design. Further, he uses a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to expand the possible intention, who described the prison symbolism as expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome.”
Additional speculative interpretations of Piranesi’s argument by Wittkower address a quote from Piranesi’s “Thoughts on Architecture” where he claims that the Greeks in fact corrupted Roman architecture. Tafuri viewed this to the extent that it was Roman values too that were corrupted, not only by Greece, but by a clash between antique values and bourgeois one rapidly developing in the 18th century
Tafuri assumes social connotations in Piranesi’s choice of subject. To him, the infinite spaces illogically folding over one and other represents a collapse of space entirely, which, simultaneously pointing at the tortured classical figures, he believes represents a collapse of ancient values and order. Middleton finds Maurizio Calvesi’s analysis of the Carceri to the most convincing. He views it, again, not as hallucinations or fantasies, but merely a reflection of contemporary notions on the origins of Roman justice and law. At least two inscriptions published alongside the 2nd set of the Carceri relate to episodes of justice recorded by Livy. Tafuri also brings up 18th century Rome, inferring Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione “accuses the Roman aristocracy and the authorities of ignoring the need for an urban reorganization founded on great public works.”
Subject 15: VI – The Smoking Fire
Subject 16: II – The Man on the Rack
There are numerous theories regarding his Carceri d’Invenzione as a pedagogical work. His possible didactic aims are brought up by Wittkower to not only convince his critics of the power of Rome, as well as prove that use creates the rules, but to convince of the necessity of coming to Rome to study architecture. Consoli alludes to the pragmatic necessity of this. Piranesi required the patronage of foreign visitors for his livelihood. Regardless, Piranesi clearly saw his work in a pedagogical sense, both to teach his ideas through the drawings and to convince architects to study Roman works.
In the other added plate of the second set, the language of a prison is amplified. Torture and death is the clear focus of the image. The man we find on the rack is not only the proponents of Greek architecture, but all architectural criticism from Vitruvius to Palladio. The prisons show a dramatic shift from the writings of Lodoli. The ornaments and fragments of Piranesi’s etching show Piranesi forcibly and consciously removing meaning from them, leaving them simply as formal, aesthetic memories. Strangely, Consoli argues that Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione is in line with Lodoli because the two materials used, wood and stone, are made autonomous regarding their structural logic. His argument comes off as bizarre given the nature of the structure of the whole is that it contains very little logic. Given the multiplicity of symbols and meanings, his argument is reductive of even Piranesi’s own experimental ideologies plainly stated in “Thoughts on Architecture” as well as overall. It certainly doesn’t explain the fact that the wood was added. If Piranesi’s intention had been to portray a structural logic, the stone construction itself should have sufficed. Moreover, Robison notes that the stone and wood don’t elegantly connect in the celebration of the joint, but violently collide. Robison additionally disagrees with Tafuri. He stats that the images of the Carceri d’Invenzione don’t portray a timelessness, nor modern condition, nor psychological internment, but are simplified to being not time, but ancient prisons being representatively being rediscovered by Piranesi’s marveling contemporaries.
Conclusion
Works Cited
“For the moment,” Tafuri writes, “Piranesi merely exalts the capacity of the imagination to create models, valid in the future as new values, and in the present as immediate contestations of the ‘abuse of those who possess wealth, and who make us believe that they themselves are able to control the operations of Architecture.’” It is for this that he is researching Piranesi. Piranesi fits into his definition of avant-garde in an almost self-legitimizing way of addressing his own political crisis. Even if overtly speculative and idiosyncratic like Middleton says, what is clear in numerous historical analyses is that Piranesi attempted to detach himself from the “prisons” of the past in a way that has sparked an enormity of interest over the last century. What we understand from researching Piranesi is that, beyond the absolute functions required of architecture in its service to the public, it is an arbitrary construction.
Consoli, Gian Paolo. “Architecture and History: Vico, Lodoli, Piranesi.” In The Serpent and the Stylus: essays on G.B. Piranesi, edited by Mario Bevilacqua, Heather Hyde Minor, and Fabio Barry, 195-210. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Published for the American Academy in Rome by the University of Michigan Press, 2006. Eisenstein, Sergei. “Piranesi, Or The Fluidity of Forms.” Trans. by Roberta Reeder. Oppositions 11 (Winter 1977): 84-109. MacDonald, William Lloyd. Piranesi’s Carceri: sources of invention. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1979. Middleton, Robin. “Giovanni Battista Piranesi: review of recent literature.” Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 4 (1982): 333-344. http://www.jstor. org/stable/989805 (accessed November 6, 2013). Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. “Thoughts on Architecture.” Trans. by Michaela Nonis and Mark Epstein. Oppositions 26 (Spring 1984)(orig. ed. 1765): 4-25. Robison, Andrew. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Early Architectural Fantasies. Washington. National Gallery of Art (1978): 49-76. Rosenfeld, Myra Nan. “Picturesque to Sublime: Piranesi’s stylistic and technical development from 1740-1761.” In The Serpent and the Stylus: essays on G.B. Piranesi, edited by Mario Bevilacqua, Heather Hyde Minor, and Fabio Barry, 195-210. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Published for the American Academy in Rome by the University of Michigan Press, 2006. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans. by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press: 1976 (orig. ed 1973). Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: avant-gardes and architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Trans. by Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987 (orig. ed. 1980). Wilton-Ely, John. Piranesi as Architect and Designer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Wittkower, Rudolf. “Piranesi’s ‘Parere su l’Architecttura’.” Warburg Institute Journal 2 (1939): 147-158.