Some Essays

SOME ESSAYS In general, this portfolio is about two pairs of four things: history and representation, objects and space. Many of the following essays are tests without hypotheses. As referential, derivative, and appropriating, these essays are more hypotextual than textual - revised versions of things I read. These texts and hypotexts are, at times, historicizing, factual, and observational. At other times they are projective, fictional, and indifferent. They conjure images in your mind. Some of these images are tectonically soft: sloping, slooping, and drooping; slippery, sickly, and sexy. Others are tectonically hard: constructive, complete, and precise; cold, calm, and ugly. The following 10 essays are often about objects, both mental and tangible, and the spaces that they either occupy or enclose. These spaces contain narratives and fictions. We percieve these spaces in multiple ways - as homogenous, discrete, flat, and deep.

Theodore Adorno and Leon Battista Alberti are the two most recurring names. They occur the same number of times: 65. I’d like to say that these essays ask more questions than they attempt to answer, but that would be a lie.

Perhaps the answers are lies, too.

Paul Mosley

This is a portfolio of writings by Paul Mosley from his irst semester in the Master of Arts in Design Criticism (M.A. Design Criticism) program at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture (UIC).

In general, this portfolio is about two pairs of four things: history and representation, objects and space.

Many of the following essays are tests without hypotheses. As referential, derivative, and appropriating, these essays are often more hypotextual than textual - revised versions of things I read.

These texts and hypotexts are, at times, historicizing, factual, and observational. At other times they are projective, ictional, and indifferent.

They conjure images in your mind. Some of these images are tectonically soft: sloping, slooping, and drooping; slippery, sickly, and sexy. Others are tectonically hard: constructive, complete, and precise; cold, calm, and ugly.

The following 10 essays are often about objects, both mental and tangible, and the spaces that they either occupy or enclose. These spaces contain narratives and ictions. We percieve these spaces in multiple ways - as homogenous, discrete, lat, and deep.

Theodore Adorno and Leon Battista Alberti are the two most recurring names.

They occur the same number of times: 65.

I’d like to say that these essays ask more questions than they attempt to answer, but that would be a lie.

Perhaps the answers are lies, too.

None of the images are mine. I found them on the internet.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Next Page: The Virgin In Prayer, Giovanni Battista Salvi Da Sassoferrato, 1640 – 1650.

CONTENTS

Numbness & Fragmentation in the Metropolitan Individual Golden Lane City Ridiculousness & Mimesis Object Oriented Reyner Banham Loves Ice Cream Alberti from Vitruvius & the Emergence of an Architectural Intellect for the City Giant Metallic Pinecones, Travel Agency Mirages, & Magic Taxidermy Constructivist and Rationalist Montage The Chicago Architecture Biennial & the possibility of an aesthetic environmentalism Suprafunctionalism

Pound Flesh 195 Architecture, 188 art, 125 city, 112 form, 65 Theodore Adorno, 65 Leon Battista Alberti, 53 functionalism, 41 montage, 39 Aldo Rossi, 37 autonomy, 37 aesthetics, 37 image, 34 humanism, 29 history, 29 modern, 27 theory, 25 Adolf Loos, 22 appearance, 21 painting, 21 Filippo Brunelleschi, 21 Peter Eisenman, 19 design, 17 project, 16 Hans Hollein, 15 philosophy, 14 Claude Perrault, 14 Palladio, 14 representation, 21 reality, 14 de re aediicatoria, 13 ridiculous, 13 nature, 12 Francios Blondel, 12 clown, 12 rationalism,

11 taxidermy, 11 Alison and Peter Smithson, 10 object oriented ontology, 10 sustainability, 10 mimesis, 10 Manfredo Tafuri, 9 idealist, 9 metropolis, 9 transformation, 10 dialectical, 8 political, 8 intellectual, 8 narrative, 7 Canaletto, 7 collage, 7 utopia, 7 Donatello Bramante, 6 tendency, 6 science, 6 Victor Hugo, 6 practice, 4 realist, 4 Mies, 2 aura, 1 Rem Koolhaas, 1 Michel Foucault, 0 criticism

Numbness & Fragmentation in the Metropolitan Individual

This was the irst essay I wrote from the course “Architectural Visions of the City� taught by Alexander Eisenschmidt. This paper uses the space of the street as the site for important changes within the modern, metropolitan individual. My interest for this paper is to analyze the relationship between the metropolitan individual and the modern metropolis. An analysis of two paintings - one by Manet, the other by Boccioni help to visualize the effects of metropolitan life on the individual.

The industrial metropolis is an invention of the 19th Century.

In Paris, its emergence was catalyzed by fundamental material changes in population, land ownership, and industrial production.

Inlations of population, rural displacements, and the relationship of labor and leisure in the city became catalysts for radical interventions.

Architects began envisioning architecture as integral conigurations of city form, rather than as public monuments or vernacularisms. Metropolitan identities are synonymous with fundamental changes in the identities of public life; the idea of the street foregrounded these changes. The work of Baron Haussmann in mid-19th Century Paris, and the early 20th Century work of the Futurists—Sant’Elia’s sketches in particular—illustrate these changes in the space of the street, and the social morphology of the individual. Within these contexts, the street and the individual as mutually dialectical.

In the metropolis, the street is the physical site of metaphysical changes in the individual. The following posits numbness and fragmentation as two efects of these metaphysical changes.

Two paintings evince these psychological changes—the efects of numbness in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), and the efects of fragmentation in Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (1911).

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isolation of the individual. (Ibid.

135) Paradoxically, as more and more people came into contact with one another, the number of strangers in the metropolis increased, and, conversely, discouraged community.

Haussmann’s boulevards were intended to unify the various neighborhoods of Paris, but instead further isolated the individual.

Industrial capitalism wrought two primary alterations in the public individual—a change in the terms of public belief, and a change in the terms of public behavior. Sennett writes that these two forces together form one explanation for the effects of “material change on public life, of personality in public, of why a new image of public man was born, and of how the 19th Century traumas of public life prepared for the 20th Century denial of the public itself.” (Ibid. 127) Material change on public life are the effects of population and economy.

The effects and manipulations of intimacy on the individual are fourfold. Sennett identiies them as “the fear of involuntary disclosure, the superimposition of inappropriate private imagery on public situations, the desire to repress one’s feels in order to be shielded in public, and the attempt to use the passivity inherent in silence as a principle of public order.” (Ibid. 128) These four effects come together as fear, inapt imagery, affective repression, and passivity in the private psyche of the individual, and the changes of industrial capitalism produced these fears and repressions.

Haussmann began restructuring the material fabric of preindustrial Paris by, in part, demolishing whole sections of Paris to make grand boulevards. With this radical envisioning of construction through deconstruction—through establishing void space—new effects on the beliefs and behaviors of the individual arose. In his essay The Turmoil of Public Life in the 19th Century, Richard Sennett writes that “Paris was the place in which all the fears and fantasies of the 19th Century bourgeoisie were concentrated… thus the city was, like modern New York, a place of both fascination and horror to others.” The Parisian industrial metropolis was like a disease creeping into their lives, Sennett writes, and yet they cannot “avert their gaze from the sick patient.”1 The dynamics of population and density was an important material factor that catalyzed these (1) Sennett, Richard, “The Turmoil of Public Life in the psycho-social effects 19 Century,” in The Fall of Puublic Man (New York: W.W. Noron & Company, 1977), p. 129. on the individual. In Chapter 7 of The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett writes that Paris was not a city of sprawl, so that as the population increased, its urban form was always strained to the limit. (Ibid. 134) Up until 1840, the wall was the legal delineation of this limit until the plans of Haussmann by commission of Napoleon III. th

Haussmann physically reordered Paris by cutting through preindustrial fabric to form grand boulevards.

This initiated new social divisions in the city. As the population grew, it began segmenting into quarters and forming “social molecules.” Sennett writes that this segmentation and fracturing of the city intensiied the

Manet’s 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (igure 1) depicts the effects of numbness on the 19th Century city dweller. The central igure of the painting, a barmaid at the Folies Bergere nightclub in Paris, stands behind a bar counter, and before a mirror. The mirror relects the spatial depth of the dining area, creating a complex scene of actual and relected depth.

The barmaid confronts us, as

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Previous page: Top of the Rue Champlain, View to the Right (Twentieth Arrondissement, 1877-78. Photo by Charles Marville.

Below: Edouard Manet. A Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1882. 38� x 51�. Courtauld Institute of Art.

Above: Impasse Briare (de la Cité Coquenard) Photo by Charles Marville Below: Paris, rue Soufflot, the Pantheon.

Phooto by Charles Marville.

viewers, while at the same time stands withdrawn and remote. To borrow Sennett’s words, her demeanor shows a fear in being found out. She seems to repress herself in order to shield herself from the public web that surrounds her. The mirror occupies a critical position in this reading. It creates a complex string of viewpoints that envelopes and surrounds the barmaid. To her right, she is relected in the mirror, and a shadowy man stands before her along the painting’s right edge. In relation to us, as viewers, the barmaid appears to gaze in our eyes, but the mirror shows she is gazing at the man—and we gaze at the relected image of the man. In this painting, the autonomy of the individual remains, and stands upright, but the surrounding public begins to uproot the ground of this autonomy.

For Haussmann, space is more important that form.

His proposal embodies the city as seen through a lens of economy and administration by placing emphasis on the street and circulation. His work is not an invention of the city, but a restructuring of public space in the city through delineating voids. Haussmann’s boulevards are anti-utopian by insisting that the reality of the city will prevail, and reduces everything to a diagram of administration and managerial organization.

Haussmann’s work on Paris is parallel to the invention of the idea of the metropolis, and the alienation of the individual. A counter yet parallel project to Haussmann’s Paris can be seen in Futurism. As Sennett wrote, “the 19th Century traumas of public life prepared for the 20th Century denial of the public itself.” (Ibid.

127) The work of the Futurist is the irst image of this denial.

Sennett writes that a sharp rural dislocation occurred in Europe in the 19th century. Peasants and villagers were displaced from their rural setting caused partially by rural property ownership and the capitalization of farming. He says that “for these people who were themselves becoming nomadic and landless, the life of the city, appearing as a condition of permanent uprooting, no longer seemed wholly alien, wholly foreign.” (Ibid. 129) The effect of metropolitan forces were not only psychological—the ground of individual place became groundless and placeless. The site of familiar domesticity changed—it became unfamiliar.

Rather than being surrounded by the usual and ordinary, the city was altogether alien, and full of strangers.

Where the effects of material changes on public life in the 19th century are largely rooted in population increase and new economic orders, the Futurist project embraced a utopian vision of the city rooted in new material tendencies. For the futurists, the invention of telephones, electricity, and cars provided an opportunity to rethink the city. The city of the futurist is made for speed. It expressed architecture as a new kind of society, and a new 12

engagement with the individual. This where the focus of futurism’s utopian tendency lies—in the vision of a new society. Where the effects of concrete material change in a new industrial society produced a numbness and alienation of the individual, the Futurist took these material changes to the extreme by creating an image of the city that fractured the individual. The relationship of the individual to the work of the futurists is that of fracturing, speed, and noise, not that of fear, repression, and passivity as with 19th Century Paris.

Where the life of the city was foregrounded by the street in the work of Haussmann, and is primarily planimetric, for the futurists, the street becomes fully fractured and stratiied. In his essay La Citta Nuova, Sanford Kwinter writes that the depicted forms in Sant’Elia’s sketches makes them “appear as molecular fragments belonging to greater but indeterminate wholes.”2 The “social molecules” created by Haussmann’s segmented Paris are in Sant’Elia’s (2) Kwinter, Sanford. “La Citta Nuova,” in Architecture of sketches not delineated Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 75. by void circulations, but by positive molecular fragments on a ground that has become fully stratiied in section. Sant’Elia’s sketches often depict what seem to be singular buildings on a ground inhabited by mobility and sound, and can be viewed as fundamentally additive, rather than subtractive as with Haussmann.

Where Haussmann’s work was a set of administrative and managerial strategies for deconstruction, La Citta Nuova, as Kwinter writes, “may be understood less as a literal, realizable program than as a set of instructions, governing not only the assembly of isolated molecules of (bachelor) machinery, but the composition of a universal machinic consistency (plane of immanence).” (Ibid.

99-100) For Haussmann, maps were the fundamental dimension through which the city was governed, and, in this sense, is in the same genealogy descending from the Nolli Plan. None of the work of the futurist resembles a map in the traditional sense. Rather, Kwinter deines Sant’Elia’s work as a procedural map, “made up of protocols or formulas for negotiating local situations and their luctuating conditions.” (Ibid. 98) The street foregrounds these luctuations.

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In the Futurist city, the individual itself is fractured and fragmented. Where the effects of industrialization left the individual numb and abandoned to the public void of the street, the Futurist individual is fully fractured and fragmented by the noise and speed of the street.

Umberto Boccioni’s 1911 painting The Street Enters the House depicts these effects. Occupying the central foreground of this painting is a woman in a cool blue and white. Surrounding her are warm colors yellow and reds that create a fragmented ground of intersecting lines and planes. Beyond this ground, along the left, right, and top edges of the painting, are more vertical, fragmented surfaces of buildings. These buildings seem to fold and facet into themselves and into the space of the street. A green railing in the bottom left corner of the painting indicates that the woman is standing on a balcony looking down into a plaza full of people. The fractured nature of this ground intersects with the silhouette of the woman, and lattens the distance between the foreground of the balcony and the middle ground of the plaza. This painting, with its cubist sense of fracturing and intersecting lines, planes, and igures, creates a whole that one can imagine would sound as fractured as it looks. The noise and lows of the street enters the space of interior domesticity—the fragmentation of the metropolis invades the private sphere of the interior, producing a fragmented and sound saturated individual.

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Umberto Boccioni. The Street Enters the House, 1911. Oil on canvas. 39.4 in. x 39.6 in.

Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany.

Golden Lane City

This essay, written in “History and Theory I” taught

by Alexander Eisenschmidt, situates Alison and Peter Smithson’s Golden Lane City (1952) within a history beginning with Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation. In doing so, the idea of the street in modernist city planning is seen as gradually escaping from the ground as a foundation for spaces of circulation, and inds resolution in the sky. Within the Smithson’s oevre, Golden Lane is often viewed as an important precursor for Robin Hood Gardens. Rather than rehearsing that narrative, this essay views Golden Lane as a seminal project in the development of the very idea of the street in the modernist city.

Golden Lane City, Alison and Peter Smithson (1952) Plan sketch in a hypothetical city context.

Alison and Peter Smithson’s Golden Lane City (1952) is an elaboration of a losing competition entry for the Golden Lane Housing estate in London, which took place the same year. The Smithson’s entry, although unbuilt, remains a signiicant model for urbanism even today, and carries the ideological momentum of the development of the modernist street while at the same time surpassing this development.

viewed Golden Lane as an urban strategy, capable of implementation within any context.

Golden Lane City is a collection of interconnected “street-twigs” that link together as housing. Clusters build toward new district identities in the city, and frees the ground for implementing vehicular trafic and recreation. The Smithson’s write that the links between the clusters and twigs are “comprehensible images of a new ordering—indicative of and based on pedestrian movement—were the irst offering of places where the pedestrian could walk in safety and feel calm surroundings.” Golden Lane was an attempt to reenergize the “art of urbanism.” Rather than enclosing volume around a “charged void,” Golden Lane ignites urban nerves, transmiting community, movement, and new forms of dwelling.

The idea of the street is one of the most important developments in the ideological lineage of modernist urbanism. The Smithson’s Golden Lane proposal is situated within the historical development of Le Corbusier’s 1925 Ville Contemporaine, which was a critique of the 19th century rue corridor, and plans the street as a geometric pattern on the ground plane, dotted with cruciform “towers in the park.” This notion was later resolved into a linear form with his Rio de Janeiro Project (1929) and Algiers Project (1930).

The Smithson’s both worked on the Unite d’Habitation (1946-1952), which marks a further development of the idea of “building as street.”

Vertical circulation are positioned at the joints where the “twigs” kink, negotiating the movement from ground districts to elevated streets. Far more than a receptacle for the facilitation of movement, Golden Lane is a radical vision for housing. Housing units alternate between “sky deck” levels. A central spine of stairways connect these two different level types. For the Smithson’s, urbanism is the thoughtful relations between building, street, and room. In Golden Lane, these three elements combine into a cohesive, active, and interdependent whole.

Following their work on the Unite d’Habitation, the Smithson’s translated ideas about circulation present in the Unite into what they termed “streets in the sky.”

This creates a narrative between the years 1925 and 1952 where the idea of the modernist street gradually escaped the ground as a foundation for spaces of circulation. With Golden Lane City, the street found resolution in the sky. The idea of elevated street systems is not unique to Le Corbusier or the Smithsons; precursors can be seen in the dynamic aerial sketches of Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova and El Lissizky’s constructivist horizontal skyscrapers. But the lineage of Golden Lane exists within the speciic context of Le Corbusier’s work, and shows an ascension of the street from the ground to the sky, where terra irma gives way to supra caelum.

The gridded paving in the leftmost space of the cutaway axonometric in igure 1 shows an entrance foyer to a housing unit. The rightmost space, adjacent to the railing seen on the rightmost edge of the drawing, is the horizontal exterior “street in the air.” A stairway runs vertically in the center of the axonometric, horizontally dividing the exterior pedestrian street from the interior domestic units. This stairway also connects the levels vertically, acting both as a volume of division and connection. This axonometric is highly precise; it represents the interconnectedness of three different kinds of spaces: interior units, exterior walkways, and stairways.

However, Golden Lane is not merely a variation of Le Corbusier’s Unite, which fully interiorized the street within a modular composition of housing units. Golden Lane externalized the street in section, so that the street becomes a transition not only from room to room, but from room to city. Thus, the scale of the street mediates the transition of the scale of the interior room and the scale of the urban block. In Golden Lane, the street is synonymous with the building. The street is a proper network, both connecting and creating new city districts within a preexisting context. The Smithsons

A section sketch on trace (igure 2) shows another operative logic of Golden Lane between site, circulation, and inhabitation. The section shows the various deinitions of public and private between these three spheres. The drawing is simultaneously section and elevation, where the section is shown in darker line weights on the left, and the projected elevation on the 17

right. This drawing evinces an important departure from Le Corbusier’s work, where the section is often an index of plan and elevation; with Golden Lane, the plan is an index of section and elevation, that is, the plan is the residual resolution of speciic spatial conigurations in section and elevation. The Smithson’s viewed streets in the air as places—not merely corridors or balconies.

In this drawing, several spaces are highlighted by a white pastel ill indicating public space, and its relation to unique conditions within both the building and site.

The ground level shows the collective inhabitation of people, cars, and trees. The vertical midpoint of the section shows the elevated pedestrian street using the label “shops,” indicating hybrid programs within public spaces of circulation. The topmost highlighted space is the roof terrace, notably Le Corbusier’s ifth point, where the Smithsons depict congregations of people and vegetation. Together, these exterior public spaces occupy the ground loor, pedestrian streets, and roof terrace. This hybrid section/elevation drawing represents the unique spatial conigurations of section and elevation, and is the operative logic Golden Lane City.

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Photograph of Le Corbusier driving a car on top of the Fiat Factory.

Ridiculousness & Mimesis

“There is nothing as expressive as the eyes of animals— especially apes—which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human.” -Theodore Adorno

Adorno theorizes the idea of mimesis in parallel to the idea of ridiculousness. He says that, “the divergence of the constructive and the mimetic…has its correlative in that element of the ridiculous and clownish.” Spirit has become the principle of construction, Adorno says, and mimesis in art is the prespiritual. This creates an inverse relationship of constructive/mimetic and spirit/ridiculous. Spirit may be viewed as the innermost identity of objects. Unlike the more spectral idea of apparition, “spirit” is constructive in an artwork—it offers primacy to a cohesive unity, and is positive and pervasive yet also nameless and evasive.

Consider a bird’s song: “Something frightening lurks in the song of birds because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed.” There is a fear in these songs—a shudder produced by the discernment that birds are shackled to their own barbarism. Inescapably, birds compulsively sing in obedience to its animality. Birds, however, are not merely barbaric animals. Their songs signal that something of the past survives in them.

Theodore Adorno’s book Aesthetic Theory, originally published in 1970, is a nonsystematic, nonlinear, constellation of paratactical (rather than syntatical) thoughts on aesthetics. Sentences don’t often form a coherent thought in the reader’s mind. It often requires the reader to enter a meditative attitude towards the labryinthine text in order to digest it.. However, the book does, seemingly miraculously, form more cogent and coagulated ideas as the book progresses. One of these ideas is that of mimesis.

Much of the following is what I think of as the “mechanics” of ideas (mimesis in particular). It’s not very useful, but it’s something I ind great joy in doing - in working-through, as Frued would have it.

The following essay, written as a presentation that I read aloud in class, uses this idea of mimesis as Adorno discusses it in a section of Aesthetic Theory titled “Ridiculousness.” My aim was to view taxidermy (Carl Akeley’s Gorilla Group Diorama in particular) as a kind of mimesis - a dead gorilla with a hollow glass eyes gaze, the cask of a formerly sentient being made object by a bullet. The tragedy of Akeley’s gun ire is here redeemed by an aesthetics of objects.

And diorama’s are fascinating.

“The deeper the chorismos (lit. “separation”) between particular things and the paling essence,” Adorno writes, “the more hollowly artworks gaze.” The greater the issure between the bird’s spell and the bird’s song, between its shudder and the source of that shudder, the emptier it is of constructive spirit, and becomes hollower. Adorno identities this hollowness in the expression of apes. He writes, “There is nothing as expressive as the eyes of animals—especially apes—which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human.” If the barbarism of birds produces a shudder through singing, the expression of apes produces a mourning of barbarism.

The mimetic in art has a mutual relationship with the ridiculous and clownish. Mimesis yields the residue of ridiculousness in art. Contrary to spirit as the constructive element of art’s innermost being, mimesis is the deconstructive afterimage of this spirit. If art’s spirit inds truth in images, the mimesis of art inds clownishness in afterimages. Adorno observes the resemblance of clown routines with apes in the zoo. The expression in the eyes of apes evinces the mourning and melancholy of their unhuman barbarism. Ridiculous art is regressive, Adorno says, in that it is the residue of this world.

Adorno’s brief account of the ridiculous seems equally ridiculous, and becomes an artifact of the idea. He says that children and clowns form collusions against art, as though children and clowns form barbaric birthday party conspiracies against the world of adults, art, and humanness. They would drag art into the mimetic, into a

world before history and human. Mimesis is the vague but deinite discernment of these ridiculous conspiracies against the autonomy of artwork. Clowns strike fear into the hearts of adults, and a cold shudder runs down their spines. Clown routines, Adorno says, resembles apes in the zoo.

Adorno writes that “Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being both determinate and indeterminate.”

Taxidermy is enigmatic through the condition of being both an artifact of a living being, and the hollow object of that being’s spirit. Enigmaticalness constantly threatens the experience of the Gorilla Group. Dioramas perform a lobotomy between enigmaticalness and experience; chorizmos recapitulates the separation of “particular things” and “paling essences.” Dioramas spatially recapitulate the concept of mimesis. The Gorilla Group diorama encloses mimetic space, rather than occupying space as a mimetic object. The diorama is a mimetic space through its construction of a painted background, foliaged foreground, and taxidermy specimens. Dioramas are intended to appear separate in time and space. They are like the cemetery version of a zoo, and the zoological version of a museum—not completely one or the other.

He writes, “In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes lashes up.” This is the difference between behavior and appearance—clowns behave like animals, and humans look like apes. The similarities of animals, clowns, and art is lattened in the “Gorilla Group” diorama at the American Museum of Natural History’s Akeley African Hall. The Gorilla Group is the centerpiece of the African Hall—a display of ive gorillas hunted by Carl Akeley in 1921. The tableau represents a Congolese scene with a painted background of steaming volcanoes, and Lake Kivu below. In the center stands a silverback male known as the Giant of Karisimbi. He stands tall above the others in a chest-beating gesture, and looks deiantly into the viewers beyond the glass. He is enigmatic. Bound up in history, the Giant of Karisimbi is a mimetic artifact of barbarism. The taxidermist transforms beings into objects, yet an image of spirit remains.

Adorno writes that spirit devises enigmas, and that it produces enigmas mimetically (127). We discern far more than we can articulate. Similarly, art says much more than what exists. The Giant of Karisimbi communicates nothing—its physiognomy is frozen. Carl Akeley robbed the creature of its capacity for communication. The taxidermist is a subject of deconstruction—a subject that fractures spirit into semblance. We now only partially perceive ourselves in its expression. We look at the glass eyes, but nothing peers back. Its physiognomy concretizes the indeterminacy of spirit—this is what constitutes the enigma of taxidermy. In one artifact, we see simultaneously in glass eyes the mimesis of spirit—its frozen physiognomy—but not the evidence of it. It is now an object, not an animal.

The taxidermist is the self-preservationist par excellence. In separating spirit from essence, becoming lesh from diminishing image, taxidermy produces a work with a hollow gaze.

The work of taxidermy is the preservation of the afterimage of the work of art, which is precisely what Adorno wants to destroy. The ridiculous, Adorno writes, is the barbaric residuum of something alien to form.

The Giant of Karisimbi is the most essential condition of ridiculousness. In her essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, Donna Haraway also notes the similarities of humans to apes. She questions Akeley’s motives for hunting the gorillas, “What qualities did it take to make this gorilla ‘game’? One answer is similarity to man, the ultimate quarry, a worthy opponent.”

(31) The Giant of Karisimbi can be used to both shift and clarify Adorno’s concept of mimesis.

Dioramas spatially recapitulate the concept of mimesis.

The Gorilla Group diorama encloses mimetic space, rather than occupying space as a mimetic object.

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Above: Mountain Gorilla Diorama (1934). Photograph Š American Museum of Natural History. Courtesy of Salvatore Dellaria and Athanasiou Geolas; Latest Realistic Touches for Akeley Hall (1935). Photograph Š The New York Times.

Endnotes Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), ed.

Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, tran. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Orig. published as Asthetische Theorie, 1970 Suhrkamp Verlag

Object Oriented

“When it comes to grasping reality, illusion and innuendo are the best that we can do.”

- Graham Harmon, Weird Realism

This paper was a presentation that I read aloud v “Aesthetic Theory” with Lisa Lee and Blake Stimson. The purpose of this paper was to understand more about Object Oriented Ontology, and what Adorno might have to add to the conversation. This paper acts as a kind of meditation on the relations between three things: Aesthetics, Architecture, and Speculative Realism (of which OOO is a branch). This paper aims for clarity and thoughfulness without making a claim or staking a position.

The recent interests of architects in Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) comes from a frustration that architecture is increasingly justiied by its relation to disciplines exterior to it, and not from its own peculiar and autonomous qualities. OOO and the project of autonomy in architecture are separate but parallel discourses. OOO privileges the being of objects in themselves, and does not rely on things beyond or among them to deine them. A similar turn away from relational ontologies to objects themselves has occurred in architecture, and remains today, despite various posts and reactions against it.

equipment’ and ‘visible objects.’ Functional objects like a hammer are inconspicuous while in use. While hammering a nail, the hammer is processed as background equipment and ceases to exist as the object we perceive in the mind as ‘hammer.’ If objects cease to function (when the hammer is laid aside) they become visible to our attention as an object, and are no longer processed as background equipment. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno reverses our relationship as subjects to the hammer as object.

“If the tool has been called the extension of an arm,” Adorno writes, “then the artist could be called the extension of a tool, a tool for the transition from potentiality to actuality.” With this quote, Adorno posits the status of subjects in relation to tools. Where Harman divides equipment from objects by means of their use, Adorno divides tools (objects) from those using it (subjects), thereby reversing the distinction between subjects and objects. Even while in use, tools are extricable from their function.

Autonomy does not only signal a turn from something, autonomous from something, but can also produce an eclipse of something. In architecture, modernism eclipsed history. Industrialization, and perhaps most importantly, the appearance of the modern metropolis, nulliied the metrics, materials, and forms that had governed historical architectural theories since Alberti. One of the more public and published exchanges between architects and object oriented ontology is in a recent issue of the architecture journal Log, which contains a conversation titled “The Object Turn” between Todd Gannon, Graham Harman, David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe.

In Bells and Whistles, Graham Harman differentiates between two theories of presence: Immanentist and Reductionist. With Immanence, everything lies at the surface of the world, whether in consciousness or concrete events. Things in themselves and the knowledge of them, their reality and their image, are readily apparent to our perception, both visually and mentally. In opposition to this, reductionist presence asserts that things lie hidden beyond objects, and that deeper meanings within objects require work to uncover. For Harman, an object is any uniied entity, whether it has a reality in the world or only in the mind.

In “The Object Turn,” David Ruy says, “most architects probably haven’t noticed an aspect of Graham’s work that is likely disturbing to most contemporary philosophers: aesthetics becomes primary and replaces epistemology.”

I understand this to mean that OOO is a form of aesthetics, a science of perception, rather than a form of epistemology, which would attempt to explain the extent to which we can know objects.

Springing from Ruy’s observation, that aesthetics is primary in OOO, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory becomes a more direct point of reference. As a negation of relational hierarchies, OOO may at irst appear tenuous regarding Adorno’s paratactic and dialectical methods, but through these methods objects become primary. The ontological status of objects in Aesthetic Theory exists in a dialectic with subjects. Adorno writes that “For the artwork and thus for its theory, subject and object are its own proper elements and they are dialectical in such a fashion that whatever the work is composed of—material, expression, and form—is always both.”

In Harmon’s discourse, objects exist adjacently to these two theories of presence. No entity is fully capable of perceiving the depths of other objects. Contacting object through relationality creates translations and caricatures of them, what Adorno may call ‘apparitions.’ Mereology, the relations of parts to a whole, is thereby a process of undermining objects by reducing them to a coherent collection of parts. Harman also holds that philosophy cannot be concerned with immanence, but only with counter-immanence: that wisdom about things lies outside of knowing them. Relationality underpins both reduction and immanence, meaning that objects can only be understood in relation to what they are not.

Harman’s OOO is built on the foundations of phenomenology—in particular, Heidegger’s tool-analysis in Being and Time, which, in short, posits the autonomy of tools from their functions. Beginning with and departing from this position, Harman differentiates between ‘invisible

Architecture has a tendency to borrow the language of philosophy to communicate theory belonging exclusively to its disciplinary bounds. This tendency began as early as the renaissance with Alberti, who was writing as an 25

Aristotelian. His 1452 treatise, De re aediicatoria, asks questions that are speciic to the Aristotelian rhetoric of his time. Alberti’s answers, however, are not properly Aristotelian. By structuring principles of architecture— perhaps exempliied in his concept of concinnitas—the formulations of Alberti’s principles of architecture, and not the principles themselves, are Aristotelian.

necessity. Perhaps the current conlation of images with reality is no longer a confusion.

Harman states that “if we all agree that the image of a frog does not live, breathe, eat, and reproduce like a real frog, then philosophy needs to account for the difference between them.” The same charge can be made to architecture: if the representation of architecture through drawings does not stand, shelter, and function like a building, then architecture needs to account for the difference between them.

This is a useful approach for conceptualizing architecture, to view philosophy as a structural device, rather than as a language to adopt, because it avoids a complex that philosophy is infallible. In “The Object Turn,” Todd Gannon says that many ields tend to look at philosophy as a master discipline. Many architects use philosophy as an alibi for their own ideas. Philosophy, along with science, art, context, and budget, are often the bottom-line rationale for the implementation of an idea. Perhaps it’s better to view philosophy as Alberti did—as a constellation of thoughts and words to shift the terms one uses to communicate architectural theory.

Images of architecture are no less real than buildings.

What’s interesting about the recent conversations concerning the relationship of architecture and object oriented ontology is that the topics of discussion often question the presumed connection between philosophy and architecture. It appears that if one is to draw a consensus concerning architecture’s relation to philosophy, it’s this: when architecture engages philosophy, it can only do so at the level of metaphor.

In Harman’s book Weird Realism, he writes “When it comes to grasping reality, illusion and innuendo are the best that we can do.” Forgiving that I’m decontextualizing this quote, it’s an interesting statement coming from a philosopher who believes that objects are the monadic substances of reality. Today, passivity is the dominant state of today’s subject, and not distraction as Adorno would hold, in the vein of Benjamin. Where the “culture industry” conditioned subjects to consume entertainment, distracting them from reality, today an oversaturation of information conditions us to consume images, which we confuse with reality.

In architecture, as with ilm, the material relation between images and reality is especially pronounced: Buildings have developed into increasingly more spectacular forms. In his essay “Michael Haneke and the New Subjectivity,” Peter Eisenman writes that “As buildings become increasingly more abrasive visually, they become less confrontational conceptually and critically.” Architecture is an image-driven media. The production of images in order to communicate ideas in architecture is a 26

Perhaps the current conlation of images with reality is no longer a confusion.

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Reyner Banham Loves Ice Cream

This is a review of the Ah!LLaska chocolate syrup bottle that I wrote in “Design Criticism” taught by Sam Jacob.

Yes, Banham loves more than just LA, he loves ice cream, too. Especially when it’s with Ed Ruscha and Mike Salisbury in the back of a convertible at an LA drivethrough.

The Ah!Laska company makes use of a bad pun to sell their products. That, and a circa 1995 Ofice Assistanty looking polar. The use of Banhan’s taste for ice cream, and Ah!Laska, as subjects, is about taking a seemingly banal object, maybe even one that’s a bit strange, and teasing out its intricacies and hidden meanings. This text attempts to do this through two things - bad puns, and tone.

This text is four different (but akin) sensibilities of tone.

At times, it borders on meditation, but a kind of disrupted meditation, full of noise and exclamation.

The word “academic” is sometimes used as a pegorative adjective for useless work.

This text is useless.

But it’s not academic.

I think of it as a frivolous experiment in abrupt shifts of tone using muddy clarity. Good luck.

The Ah!Laska chocolate syrup bottle embodies the devolution of the American pastoral will. Mid-century objects of domestic mechanization—GE transistor radios, mobile homes, shift outboards, and Polaroid cameras are now synthesized in one device: the iPhone. Even retail catalogues are made bunk by iPhones. Just order an iPhone on an iPhone. Reyner Banham was fascinated by these gadgets. For him, their portability, affordability, and ability to mechanize daily life, stemmed from their embodiment of utopian ideals. Gizmos preserve the American landscape by staying compact and mobile, “low impact” as one might say today. Banham’s version of functionalism did not exactly come to pass, and even he admits that a nation pursuing rural happiness down the highway is an oversimpliication. His revisionist ideals of gizmos and paradise gardens remain, but in a devolved and twisted state. The progeny of all this may be viewed in a chocolate syrup bottle.

Imagine browsing the grocery store aisles for chocolate syrup. Strolling through the freezer aisles you approach the Ah!Laska chocolate syrup bottle, and confront the Ah!laska company’s advertising character—the Ah!Bear.

The bottle lies on the only shelf in the four full aisles of freezers, and is opposite a freezer containing Ben & Jerry’s “Baked Alaska” ice cream. This ice cream carton carries a cartoon bear uttering the phrase, “If it’s melted, it’s ruined.” Ah!Bear is forced to lie on a shelf opposite this mockery every day. In its melty tectonic bottle, Ah!Bear bears the brunt of this ridicule unrefrigerated and lukewarm. Ah!Bear’s bottle appears to melt, but is stamped with the small print, “refrigerate after opening.” This phrase chains Ah!Bear to the shelf opposite its vanilla marshmallow swirly white chocolatey nemesis.

Ah!Bear displays a placard grin of contentment, yet something frightening lurks in its expression precisely because it is not a grin, but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed.

Unlike the iPhone, the Ah!Laska bottle is not a Banhamesque gizmo itself—it’s a chocolate syrup bottle, but not just a chocolate syrup bottle. The way a gizmo performs is more important than the way it looks.

The tectonics of a gizmo, as Banham would have it, is about portability, eficiency, and compactness. The way Ah!Laska looks is more important than the way it performs. All chocolate syrup bottles perform the same way: unhinge the cap, lip upside down, and pour. The Ah!Laska bottle’s function is invariable (in intent), but its tectonics remain signiicant. The bottle’s form Ah!ppears to be melting itself, like the substance it contains. The gooey drooping dripping chocolate colored bottle mimics the way the sauce might slowly descend a decadent pineapple sundae. This may be viewed as a kind of Ah!ffective tectonics, in which the object’s form looks like what it contains. The bottle Ah!ppears to slump and sAh!g. It recalls the base of Otto WAh!gner’s Postal Savings Bank where the stone veneer droops down limply, as though it could drip onto the street.

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Consider the Ah!Bear as Ah!bject.

Neither object nor subject, the Ah!Bear’s identity tensions the manner of its blithely demeanor against the bottle’s orgAh!nic broadcAh!sting. Ah!Bear lies on the bottle holding an ice cream sundae and chocolate milk. The Ah!Bear is Ah!bject, not an object which one can imagine, and not sub-ject which one can name. The Ah!Laska bottle is not a proper object with a singly congealed meaning. A weight of loathsome and spAh!stic propagandAh! crushes Ah!Bear’s slAh!ck contentedness. The spots and stripes of fAh!t free! Non-GMO! OrgAh!nic! Ah!dvertisements traps Ah!Bear inside a hAh!llucination of ilthy imAh!ges.

The brute bear, Ah!Laska’s igurehead, brings together opposite emotions in one’s mind. Constellations of sales promotion haunts and condemns Ah!Bear’s innocence.

The bottle wishes to Ah!ppear healthy, but this is only a distrAh!ction. The healthy imAh!ge collAh!pses in the sugar serving size. Ah!Bear’s precarity is shrouded by this deception, chained to the Ah!dverse label, but frozen in a glAh!dness of drooping susurrus chocolate syrup

rivers in a Windows 95 clipboard art cartoon Ah!laska.

In this twisted braid of Ah!ffects, pictorial representation triumphs over what is represented, and the Ah!Bear’s contented grin dissolves into horriic Ah!bjection.

The Ah!Laska organic chocolate syrup bottle is pretty stupid. The graphic design looks like a clipboard art Ofice Assistant from 1997, just add a cartoon polar bear to the Einstein and Shakespeare caricatures. At the grocery store, the bottle is cheaper than the other chocolate syrups, and it looks cheaper, too, despite its desperation to advertise as “organic.” The company’s motto, “for the people and the planet” also announces its good will to the local and global. The iPhone is also for the people and the planet. The individual, intimate “i” phonetic object immixed with “worldwide” information and internet. For your health, it’s oxymoronic to buy this USDA organic non-dairy fat free gluten free non-GMO veriied low sodium cholesterol free product in a BPAfree bottle that one just pours over frozen salty scoops of sugary fat.

iPhones and Ah!Laska share similar titles by containing two unrelated afixes. Where “iPhone” is additive, combining i and phone, “Ah!Laska” misspells Alaska (then throw in an exclamation mark separating ah from laska). The difference between i and ah! is inward and outward. “I” is internal, in reference to the nominative singular pronoun I; ah is external, in reference to an outward response. Both of these objects refer to particular and the universal, the local and global. The Ah!laska company originated in Alaska, but the morphology

A weight of loathsome and spAh!stic propagandAh! crushes Ah!Bear’s slAh!ck contentedness.

The spots and stripes of fAh!t free! Non-GMO! OrgAh!nic! Ah!dvertisements traps Ah!Bear inside a hAh!llucination of ilthy imAh!ges.

The name “ah!” occurs inwardly as a spontaneous response to an outward occurrence. Spatially, the Ah!Laska bottle moves inwardly, from inside the ground as a cocoa seed, to outwardly as a cocoa bean ready for processing, distribution, retail, and consumption. The Ah!Laska company is a member of the Non-GMO Project involving a collaboration between manufactures, retailers, processors, distributors, farmers, seed companies, and consumers. Ah!Laska products use cocoa that is grown in Central America and parts of South America, it is nationally distributed by Blue Marble Brands in Providence, Rhode Island. The life of the Ah!Laska chocolate syrup bottle begins with a cocoa bean in South America to be distributed on the east coast, and certiied organic by Quality Assurance International on the west coast in San Diego, and, in this author’s case, bought in a Mexican grocery in Chicago. That this movement from a seed to a bottle is multinational is tell-tale of the movement from particular to universal.

produces a word with a speciic meaning that departs entirely from its origin. Permitting reduction, the irst person singular nominative pronoun preix i in iPhone signiies me. As in, my phone. The personal pronoun my indicates possession of the object phone. The i in iPhone is an initial for various words like innovation, internet, and individual. The signiication Ah! Initials the word Alaska, and carries with it multiple Ah!ffective meanings.

The exclamation ah! communicates many things—pain, surprise, fear, joy—even at the level of onomatopoeiAh! The Ah!Laska bottle survives its kitsch by unknowingly carrying with it the Ah!ffects of fear, pain, and joy.

The Ah!Laska chocolate bottle is a product of an expansion of images and information. The movement from a seed to a bottle is a movement from the particular to the universal, from the material to the abstract. The manufacturing and processing of an Ah!Laska product exceeds total administration from a particular location.

Digital information and communication enables the cocoa bean to reach the status of food in my refrigerator.

The labor, organization, and administration it requires to farm, manufacture, process, and distribute an Ah!Laska product can be dificult to comprehend. Further, the web of information and images that Ah!nimates this process in its totality is incomprehensible.

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Fourty-two minutes into the ilm, “Reyer Banham Loves Los Angeles,” Banham pulls up to a Tiny Nala’s drive-in restaurant on Sunset Boulevard with Ed Ruscha and Mike Salisbury. The waitress approaches the convertible:

a custom utility belt designed to carry the bottle with him everywhere. After opening the bottle, he contentedly pours the sauce over his pineapple sundae before getting back to a discussion with his shaggy west coast Ah!merican artist entourage about public monuments worth visiting in Los Ah!ngeles.

“Hi! Can I help you?” Banham (obviously aware of the camera pointing at his face) replies in a sing-song tone, “Yes please!” The trio take their menus. Banham orders, “Can I just have a pineapple sundie?” Yes, a ring singy informal ie, not a hum drum formal ay. Salisbury, in a low, mildly bored tone orders, “and I’ll have a BLT.” The camera cuts to the waitress placing their food on the door of the convertible. Impatiently, and still in a giddy ringing tone, Banham implores, “Alright, someone pass me my sundie. Right. And a spoon...and with luck, we’re away!” He begins to gobble up the pineapple treat by the spoonful before suddenly realizing, “Ah! Almost forgot my Ah!Laska organic chocolate syrup!” He removes the bottle from

Okay, that last sentence didn’t happen, but one might imagine Ah!Laska as a culinary gizmo—a portable chocolate sauce always ready to transform your boring Salisbury pineapple sundae into a Bah!hamesque pineAh!pple “sundie.”

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Above: screenshot of Reyner Banham eating ice cream in his documentary “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles”

Alberti from Vitruvius & the Emergence of an Architectural Intellect for the City

This paper was written in “History of Literature in Architecture” taught by Martha Pollack. It was the term paper.

Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aediicatoria (1452) was the irst book on architecture since antiquity, and marks the transition from architecture as an atomized product of construction to encompassing an intellectual dimension.

This transition may be viewed in three ways—from the general to the particular.

Firstly, the work of Brunelleschi shows an emergence of architecture as a discipline no longer conined to trades of construction. This essay examines the Santo Spirito and the dome of Florence cathedral as works of architecture becoming intelligible of their own discrete igurality.

Secondly, Alberti’s treatise departs from Vitruvius’s in that he constructs a uniquely Italian view of architecture concerning the future, whereas Vitruvius wrote De architectura from a Greek view concerning architecture’s past. The paper will view Alberti’s critique of the Vitruvian triad by observing the differences between them using the Palazzo Ruccellai as evidence.

Lastly, the paper views the concept of concinnitas—the notion of beauty—as the mereological basis for Alberti’s famous dictum that “a city is a large house, the house is a small city.”

The purpose of this essay is to examine the transition of architecture from a construction trade to an intellectual discipline using both the texts that underpin this transition, and select buildings.

Facing page: San Spirito by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1436.

This Will Kill That

Practice – Discrete igurality in the work of Brunelleschi

Victor Hugo's oft-cited dictum, “this will kill that,” occurs within a dialogue in his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame between the primary antagonist, Claude Frollo and two visitors seeking council. One of the visitors asks Frollo about his books, and what they are.

Frollo opens the window of his cell and points to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, "Here is one," he replies. In Notre Dame's looming presence, Frollo assumes a silent and pensive composure, examining the black silhouette of the two bell towers, the stone sides, and the huge roof sharply outlined against a starry sky. Hugo writes that the cathedral is "like a two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city." (Hugo, 179) Shaking off contemplation, Frollo turns, sighs deeply, looks mournfully from the church to a book lying on his table and utters the terrifying words, "The book will kill the building." (Hugo, 178) The story takes place during the reign of Louis XI (1461-1483), the same time in which the printing press was being spread throughout Europe. The idea that one art can destroy another art, that the printing press can destroy architecture, questions the ontological status of architecture, and its agency in the world. The appearance of printed text, especially with renaissance architectural treatises, established in writing the endeavor of architecture as fundamentally intellectual. The irst treatise to provide a theoretical view of architecture is De re aediicatoria, written by Leon Battista Alberti in 1452. Hugo’s narrative exchange between Frollo and his vistors intuits two important paradigmatic shifts within architecture in the 15th century. The irst shift occurring within the built work of Brunelleschi, and secondly within the writings of Alberti.The following uses Brunelleschi’s design for San Spirito (igure 1), begun in 1436, and Alberti’s treatise De re aediicatoria, completed in 1452, to view the emancipation of the role of the architect from building trades, to encompassing an intellectual dimension that deines the role of the architecture in society, and in the production of both buildings and books as architecture inextricably tied to the political realm of the city.

Brunelleschi and Alberti viewed architecture as absolute objects against the dispersed spaces of the medieval city.

For Brunelleschi, the urban context he worked within was a collection of Romanesque-Gothic relics. In Theories and History of Architecture, Manfredo Tafuri writes, “One of the best lessons to be learned from Brunelleschi’s Humanism is its new conception of the pre-existing town as an available and passing structure, ready to change its global meaning as soon as the introduction of compact architectural objects altered the balance of the RomanesqueGothic ‘continuous narrative’.” (Tafuri, 15) Brunelleschi’s San Spirito (igure 1) illustrates this conception of the discreteness of architecture in relationship to the continuity of the medieval city.

Along the entire perimeter of the chapel are bulging niches intended to be seen as semicircular convexities along the exterior. Contrary to Brunelleschi’s intentions, the façade was built as lat and blank, producing a subtractive reading of the niches as hollowed from the thickness of the wall, much like the Temple of Minerva Medica. San Spritio is designed in a grid, such that the ends of the transept and nave maintain equal proportions, centralizing the space within the transeptnave intersection. The plan’s stability, combined with a strong cruciform igure, nests within the ‘continuous narrative’ of the city.

Hans Memling’s Scenes from the Passion (igure 2) from 1470 is useful to show this conception of the medieval city as a ‘passing’ structure. This painting shows 23 vignettes from the life of Christ within one representational space. The scenes include Palm Sunday, the judgement of Pontius Pilate, and the Stations of the Cross, among other narratives, that combine into an untimely whole, meaning that in this painting, time is nonlinear, and becomes contiguous with the three dimensionality of space. Although completed after the dome of Florence, in representation, this is Brunelleschi’s context. It’s the problem of an unstable environment that warrants the response of a stable architecture.

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Theory – De re aediicatoria and the “the art of building” as an intellectual endeavor

Brunelleschi’s “symbolic and constructive selfsuficiency,” Tafuri writes, “of a new three-dimensional spatiality radiates into the urban space a rational order that was the absolute emblem of a strict ethical will.” (Tafuri, 15) San Spirito is an aggressive ‘manifesto’ of a new igurative language that was conscious of its connection to urban space. This is an important transition in the relationship of architecture to the city. Tafuri writes, “The autonomous and absolute architectural objects of Brunelleschi were bound to penetrate the structures of the medieval city, upsetting and changing its signiicance.”

(Tafuri, 16) San Spirito as an ‘autonomous and absolute’ object of architecture is a proto ‘urban artifact’ to borrow Aldo Rossi’s phrase. As such, San Spirito is an integer of urban iguration, meaning that the uncoordinated, continuous environment of the medieval context does not participate in its form, but acts adjacently.

With San Spirito, architecture is for the irst time intelligible of its own discrete spatiality. Like Hugo’s ‘two-headed sphinx crouching in the midst of the city’, San Spirito, not despite its blankness but because of it, lurks in silence, aware of its context. With San Spirito, and equally with the Florence Cathedral dome, a new concept of architecture emerged as integral to the city. Parallel to this development is Alberti, who newly theorized two important ideas, that of homogenous space, and the discipline of architecture itself as intellectually autonomous from other trades of construction.

No explicit mention is made of parallel projection in any Renaissance text before the second half of the sixteenth century. In De pictura, Alberti began writing in response to the rise of Humanist pictorial art in Florence after his return to Rome from exile in 1428. Conceivably, Alberti would have seen in Florence the frescoes of Masaccio in S. Maria Novella, the sculptures of Donatello, and Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome. In this, the irst ever treatise on painting, Alberti, among other things, set out to construct three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane by the use of the construzione legittima of monocular perspective. (Figure 3, 4, and 5) Alberti clearly assumes a homology between plan and perspective by the way he inscribes shapes within a grid to show their distortion between receding, perspectival lines.

The idea of consistent homogenous space has been a widely debated issue in twentieth century scholarship. It is important to recognize that Alberti understood space as homogenous, and that before him, this awareness of space was unavailable. By geometrically constructing the totality of spatial relationships between shapes, Alberti enables architectural thinkers after him, like Vignola and Palladio, to coordinate plans, sections, and elevations to show the measurable consistency of space between them.

We maintain this fundamental idea of space today. The theme ‘this will kill that’ repeats: homology kills latness. De pictura occupies a critical position in killing latness, which would become systematic for the next century. The Italian translation of De pictura was dedicated to Brunelleschi, “whose great structure rose into the sky, so ample that it can cover all the people of Tuscany with its shadow.” (Alberti, xii) Whether or not Brunelleschi understood space as homogenous (which is dificult to imagine for someone who conceived of and designed the geometry of the dome of Florence) his architecture made a signiicant impact on the young Alberti.

Alberti’s dedication to Brunelleschi, praising the dome ‘rising into the sky covering all of Tuscany in its shadow’ recalls Claude Frollo’s tenebrous contemplation of Notre Dame, as a “sphinx crouching in the midst of the city.” Alberti would have seen the Florence Cathedral sometime between 1428 and 1432. One can imagine Alberti, in his mid-twenties, standing in the shadow of Brunelleschi’s dome, devising the death of architecture as a construction trade. This death came to fruition with Alberti’s De re aediicatoria.

FIGURE 2 Hans Memling, Scenes from the Passion, 1470.

FIGURE 3, 4, & 5.

Leon Battista Alberti, diagrams in della pitura showing the interrelationships of volume, grids, and diminishing perspectival lines.

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fig. 3

fig. 4

fig. 5

Alberti’s departure from Vitruvius

Lineamenta

De re aediicatoria was the irst book on architecture since antiquity, and draws largely from Vitruvius’ own treatise, De architectura, which was rediscovered around the mid ifteenth century. Although Alberti draws heavily from Vitruvius, he is not merely copying De architectura. Alberti’s treatise maintains a similar structure to Vitruvius in both form and content, but he departs from Vitruvius in paradigmatic ways.

Vitruvius’ treatise may be viewed as the irst grammar of architecture in that it divides the practice of architecture into categories and rules. Alberti strove to systematically assimilate Vitruvius’s text, but he was still critical of it.

Where Vitruvius typically stopped at the description of phenomena, Alberti explained the principles that underlie them.

Vitruvius was writing about Greek architecture, that is, where architecture was coming from at that time. Alberti’s treatise is iltered through an Italian view of architecture, and thereby forms a critique of Greek architecture. De re aediicatoria is concerned with where architecture is going. It is unconcerned with continuing a historical narrative. Or to put it positively, Alberti is a theoretician--his text departs from Vitruvius’s in that he surpasses the importance of spoken instruction, as intended with Vitruvius, beyond the rote execution of material construction. De re aediicatoria gains an intellectual quality that distinguishes itself from Vitruvius and other igures of antiquity.

The following outlines two key theoretical ideas in De re aediicatoria, lineamenta and concinnitas. Both of these concepts have accumulated a deep history of debate, interpretation, and scholarship. My intent is to view the aesthetics of lineaments and concinnitas in order to understand their meaning in relationship to the city.

De re aediicatoria is subdivided into ten books: book one is on lineamenta (guidelines for design), book two and three are on irmitas (materials and construction), books four and ive on utilitas (building types and their uses), books six through nine on venustas (ornament; sacred, public and private buildings; and theories of proportion), and book ten contains general conclusions.

In the irst book, The Lineaments, Alberti divides the elements of buildings into six parts: locality, area, compartition, wall, roof, and opening.

Alberti’s notion of lineaments concerns guidelines for design. Lineaments are made up of angles and straight lines, and order the form of construction. He writes that they are “conceived in the mind,” and are “perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.” This introduces “the art of building,” architecture, as a mental construct.

Lineamenta has been translated from Italian in several different ways, such as Max Theuer’s German translation as Risse, the German word for drawings or sketches, or Vassiliy Pavlovich Zubov’s Russian translation as nachertanie, the Russian word for drawing.

The idea to interpret lineamenta as ‘drawing’ is rooted in Cosimo Bartoli’s Italian translation of 1550. (Mitrovic, 44) Bartoli used the word disegno, the Italian version of the Latin designo, meaning “to mark out, point out, outline, deine, trace.” (Mitrovic, 44) Throughout De re aediicatoria, Alberti uses lineamenta to refer exclusively to the ‘shape’ of objects, and their parts. (Mitrovic, 49) Regardless of how lineamenta is rendered, whether as shape, design, drawing, or sketching, it is clear that the idea of lineamenta is not only drawing, but concerns a mutual relationship between built objects, and the content of drawings, and that these two things maintain an equivalence as architecture.

Risse, nachertanie, and disegno share a common view of the architectural object, and helps to elucidate the meaning of lineamenta. In his book, Serene Greed of the Eye, Branko Mitrovic writes that lineamenta “pertains to those properties which are imagined by the architect… deined by determining the position of lines and angles and which, together with matter, constitute a building as a material object.” The meaning of lineamenta is more than simply “drawing” and should be understood in a wider sense. Alberti’s message is that the content of the thoughts of the architect and the architect’s drawings, together with the accumulation of materials that form a building are one and the same—are lineaments. (Mitrovic, 43)

Facing page: Image of pages 10 and 11 of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re Aedificatoria (1452).

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Concinnitas

For the functioning of concinnitas and its parts, Alberti relied on the musical theory of his time.

Harmonia in music and initio in architecture are subject to the same rules. Proportion for architecture is what harmony is for music in that the numerical relationships between musical intervals and building ratios maintain a mutual relationship. Concinnitas is central for understanding these various ideas. “The formalist interpretation of Alberti’s aesthetics,” Mitrovic writes, “is further conirmed by the fact that concinnitas is a relationship between formal, shape-deining, properties.” (Mitrovic, 45) Concinnitas is the central term of Alberti’s aesthetic formalism. Although the standard Latin dictionary translates the term as “elegance or reinement,” the translators of Alberti’s De re aediicatoria commonly leave the word untranslated, viewing it as a technical term.

The concept of concinnitas is a relationship between formal, shape-deining, properties. In his book On Alberti and the Art of Building, Tavernor has summarized the histories of the the different ways that this term has been rendered, ranging from Wittkower, Westfall, Leoni, and Bartoli. In all cases, the term pertains to shape-deining properties.

(Mitrovic, 114)

Another important idea in Albert’s text is that of concinnitas—the notion of beauty, that is, the relation of parts to a whole. This forms the foundation of Alberti’s famous dictum that ‘a city is a large house, the house is a small city.’ Alberti’s conception of architecture is organic. He writes, “Let your Building therefore be such, that it may not want any Members which it has not, and that those which it has, may not in any Respect deserve to be condemned.” (Mitrovic, 44) A certain ethics of elegance pervades this statement, almost like a Miesian ascetics of ‘less is more.’

Alberti used the term concinnitas to refer to the relationships between parts which results in beauty.

He outlines three criteria of beauty (pulchritudo): number (numerus), proportion (initio), and placement (collocatio). The sum of these concepts is harmony

Tavernor writes, “Alberti coined the Latin term concinnitas speciically to explain the means by which a beautiful building can be achieved. It stems from the Latin adjective concinnus, which is understood to mean skillfully put together or joined and beautiful; and pleasing, on account of harmony and proportion.” (Tavernor, 46) Architecture has a tendency to borrow the language of philosophy to communicate theory belonging exclusively to its disciplinary bounds. This tendency began as early as with Alberti, who was writing as an Aristotelian. In De re aediicatoria, Alberti asks questions that are speciic to the Aristotelian rhetoric of his time. His answers, however,

(concinnitas) which is the key aesthetic concept of his architectural theory. For Alberti, concinnitas synthesizes numerous, initio, collocatio. Alberti writes, “Beauty is a certain harmony (consensus) and agreement (conspiratio) of parts of that to which they belong, according to a deinite number, initio and placement, that concinnitas, i.e. the absolute and primary reason (proportion, ratio) of nature, requires.” (Mitrovic, 44) 39

are not properly Aristotelian. By structuring principles of architecture—perhaps exempliied in his concept of concinnitas—the formulations of Alberti’s principles of architecture, and not the principles themselves, are Aristotelian.

Tavernor writes that it was Socrates who “had compared the structure of speech to that of a living being ‘with a body of its own as it were, and neither headless nor feet-less, with a middle and with members adapted to each other and to the whole’.” (Tavernor, 46) Although Vitruvius did not use the term concinnitas in his treatise, he refers to these bodily relationships as that disposition and symmetria of a building. Unlike our contemporary understanding of symmetry, Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s is based on the ‘harmonic’ balance of various members of a building that come together in a uniied whole. Tavernor posits that Alberti, in response to Vitruvius, brought the notions of dispositio and symmetria together, and reined them as concinnitas. (Tavernor, 46) The three criteria of concinnitas as numerus, initio, and collocatio has been interpreted in many different ways. Numerus is often understood as ‘number.’

Tavernor notes that Vitruvius explained quadrature as “a means by which a plan area can be ‘squared’ geometrically: the diagronal of any square is equal to the side of a new square double its area, and from this beginning a progression of related squares can grow or diminish.” He also points out that studies of Florentine architecture conirm that Brunelleschi conlated geometry with arithmetical modulation in his buildings, and that there is no proportion without number and no form without geometry. (Tavernor, 46) Brunelleschi’s wood and painted sculpture Christ Cruciied in Santa Maria Novella makes obvious his connection between human perfection and the sacred body of Christ, and by extension linking the perfect body and the body of architecture. Alberti explored this notion further, evident in the Prologue of De re aediicatoria: “irst we observed that the building is a form of body, which like any other consists of lineaments and matter, the one the product of thought, the other of nature; the one requiring the mind and the power of reason, the other dependent on preparation and selection; but we realized that neither on its own would sufice without the hand of the skilled workman to fashion the material according to lineaments. Since buildings are set to different uses, it proved necessary to inquire whether the same type of lineaments could be used for several; we therefor distinguished the various types of buildings and noted the

importance of the connection of their lines and their relationship to each other, as the principal sources of beauty; we began therefor to inquire further into the nature of beauty.” (Alberti, 45) This approach makes clear the relations of lineaments and concinnitas. Lineaments concern the construction and structure the discrete parts of a building, while concinnitas governs the aesthetic and form relations between parts to form a coherent whole. Concinnitas is an act of reinement through the means of numerus, initio and collocatio.

Palazzo Rucellai and a Project for the City In the early ifteenth century, buildings, especially churches or palazzos, were always built by guilds or collectives that were resistant to any one igure of builder 40

or architect. With the work of Brunelleschi, and the theories of Alberti, the idea of the architect emerges as a more autonomous igure. For Brunelleschi, he became the central igure to administrate the design of the dome of the Florence cathedral. And Alberti became the irst known writer-architect. The spatiality of Brunelleschi’s dome, and the discrete igurality of Santa Spirito are signals of an architecture becoming intelligible of its own spatial and formal conditions. The emergence of the autonomy of the architect also introduces a political dimension to architecture design. The classical Orders of architecture were often the site of change and transformation in architectural theory from Filarete to Serlio to Vignola. But with Alberti, the order’s gained a political dimension which they did not previously contain.

For Alberti, the Orders are not merely structural elements of architecture, as with Vitruvius, but an applied ornament; it is political. Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (1446-51) introduces the idea of the architectural Orders as a surface based political signiier. It is a project of the façade. The purpose of the Palazzo Rucellai is to reclaim the fabric of the palazzo to make clear the difference between public and private space. In this building, private interests maintain a clear and acceptable public face towards the city. By irmitas, Alberti did not mean that architecture should stand up, as Vitruvius did, but that it should look like it stands up.

For Alberti, the building is also the sign of the building.

This lobotomizes architecture from the rustication and gravity of the ground, and views the building as a signiier of political power. The public dimension of this idea is clearly apparent in the way that Alberti delineates a bench along the perimeter of the façade in the Palazzo Rucellai. This is the irst know architectural gesture to the public life of the city, such that architecture becomes an absolute background for the administration of public life in the city.

Alberti’s San Sebastiano (1460) in the province of Mantua (igure 5) maintains a similar relationship to the city. Possibly uninished or altered, San Sebastiano nonetheless consists of what Wittkower calls a “wallarchitecture,” meaning that architecture consists solely of a frontal wall. Unlike Rucellai, San Sebastiano shows a complete absence of column Orders on the façade.

The entire outlien of the façade conforms to a square proportion, indicating the Alberti was paradoxically referring to geometrical ratios for determining the proportions of the façade, much like what Le Corbusier would eventually call “regulating lines.”

The idea of a “wall-architecture” implies an aspect of architecture that confronts the space of the

city. If Palazzo Rucellai is a project of the façade through signifying a public presence to the city, and if San Spirito is conscious of its own igurality, then San Sebastiano surrenders architectural control to the width of a wall. San Spirito is conscious of its own igurality; Palazzo Rucellai is conscious of its own civic presence; San Sebastiano is conscious of itself.

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Facing page: Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai, c 1453. commissioned by Giovanni Rucellai, Via della Vigna Nuova, Florence.

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Above: Leon Battista Alberti, San Sebastiano, Mantua (1460) http://turistipercaso.it/italia/image/23981/ Endnotes: Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (originally published Laterza & Figli Spa, Rome and Bari, 1976).

Tavernor, Robert. “The Beauty in Art and Building” in On Alberti and the Art of Building, (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999).

Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1988).

Mitrovic, Branko. “Leon Battista Alberti and the Homogeneity of Space” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Dec., 2004).

Giant Metallic Pinecones, Travel Agency Mirages, & Magic Taxidermy

This was the inal paper I wrote for “Design Criticism” taught by Sam Jacob. It consists of three sections, as indicated by the above title: metal, mirage, and magic. This piece began with a fascination with the bronze palm trees at Hollien’s Travel Agency interiors.

My fascination centers on the appearance of these crepuscular objects. They are the image of a tree without the material of a tree. Form without bios. Represenation without latness.

Their material qualities, combined with a range of elusive appearances produces what is, perhaps, a mirage.

Despite the content, my interest was to test the thought of the oxymoronic relations between artiiciality and nature. The irst section “Metal” embeds this idea within the history of a giant mettalurgical pinecone. The second section “Mirage” views Hollien’s palm trees as linguistic devices that lobotomize sign from signiied, and “Magic” spatializes the relation of natural/artiicial within the absolute form of islands.

Facing Page: Old St. Peter’s, Reconstruction drawing c. 400 by K.J. Conant, Italy, Rome,

Metal The eleven foot high pineapple was originally located near the Pantheon next to the Temple of Isis. From there, the gilded bronze pineapple, or “Pigna,” was moved to the courtyard of Old St. Peter’s basilica sometime in the Middle Ages before it was moved again to a large niche in the wall of the Fontana della Pigna at the Vatican Museum in Rome.

In an etching dated around 1489 by an anonymous draftsman, the Pigna is drawn enclosed by a roof structure held by eight columns enclosing it within a sheltered space. Four semi-circular tympanums delineate each edge of the roof, with two gilded bronze peacocks within them. The Pignas current location at the Vatican Museum is part of the Cortile del Belvedere, originally designed by Donato Bramante in order to connect the palace of Pope Innocent VIII to the Sistine Chapel. After Bramante died in 1514, architect Pirro Ligorio completed the Belvedere and added the wall and niche to terminate the courtyard’s primary axis, within which the Pigna now stands.

For its time, the Pigna was an archaeo-metallurgical wonder. Both the pigna and the peacocks date back to around 100 BC. They were made using the cire perdue (lostwax) method of casting of copper in addition to alloying minerals resulting in metal alloy castings. The two are hieroglyphic signiiers of both their form and material: the pigna’s hieroglyph is kande meaning ‘pine cone’ and khanda meaning 'metalwork.' The peacock’s hieroglyph is mora meaning ‘peacock' and morakkhaka loha signifying ‘a kind of copper.’

These words, against our expectations that two unlike things have divergent etymologies, contain similar hieroglyphic origins.

The distinction between nature and artiice, pineapple and metal, peacocks and copper, lattens into a surface level difference between form and material.

Like the hieroglyphic synthesis of form and material in the Pigna, Renaissance builders assimilated the form of wood in the construction of stone. Renaissance architects were consistently preoccupied with origins. Alberti, Serlio, Vignola, Filarete, and Palladio, among others, all theorized Vitruvius’s primitive hut, and presented their own theories for the origin of architecture. For these architects, as both reactions to and assimilations of Vitruvius's De Architectura, an account of the Classical Orders is central to their theories of architecture.

Providing descriptions and illustrations of the ive orders is the cornerstone of Renaissance architectural treatises. Philibert Delorme, a contemporary of Palladio, posited the origin of the column in his Premier Tome de l’architecture. This was the irst important French book on architecture, countering the dominance of Italian discourses and theories on classical architecture. Delorme's l’architecture deines various methods of wood construction, along with its material qualities and detailing.

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The decorative features of stone column capitals are evolutions of indigenous wood construction methods. Delorme’s “tree column” evinces this evolution from wood to stone construction, and illustrates the origin of the column orders as a primitive descendent of a material logic. Even within attempts to identify a deep structure for the Orders, Delorme’s tree column shows that architecture’s origin is always a myth, and that the apparent depth of origin stories are fabrications of an essentially lat history.

Although the intent of Delorme’s tree column is to illustrate the column prior to the ive order hierarchy, the image is less clear than it may irst appear. It depicts a wooden shaft and capital, but with what appears to be a stone base and entablature. If to prove that the column derives from a material logic based on wood, why not also draw the base and entablature as wood?

The tree column itself is not of Delorme’s invention—it was built as early as 1495 by Bramante in his Corinthian loggia at the Canonica of San Ambrogio. In the Canonica, columns with tree-trunk shafts are only located at the corners of the space, making intelligible the design of the other columns. It is unclear whether Delorme was familiar with Bramante’s Canonica, but they were likely both inferring the Vitruvian theory of the wooden origin of the column.

Philibert Delorme, Tree trunk column.

Bramante’s column seems to operate as an acknowledgement of Vitruvius, rather than as an evolutionary understanding of the Orders as with Delorme. The Canonica treetrunk columns are located at the corners of the Sant’ Ambrogio basilica cloisters, and emphasizes the corner by simply marking two adjoining planes. But the columns do not impose an interruption between the planes—they act less as a pivot feature between the two walls than as structural devices alluding to Vitruvian ideals.

The Vitruvian analogy between the building and human body—taken up by nearly all Renaissance architects starting with Alberti—do not apply with Bramante’s tree-trunk column at Canonica. The analogy is not even entirely a natural one—between an artiicial column and a natural tree-trunk. The distinction is subtler. Bramante’s column is neither solely a constructed or natural artifact. While the human analogy reconciles the ideal proportions of the human body to the architectural body, the tree-trunk column does not reconcile designed artifacts with natural artifacts, but preserves the tension between them.

The stone tree and bronze pineapple both resists and reinforces architecture’s understood artiiciality. The Pigna and tree-trunk column are oxymoronic foils for making intelligible the inherent artiiciality of architecture.

Mirage Everything is, in fact, not architecture. And if Hollein’s widely known apothegm “all is architecture” were true, the world would be a pretty boring place.

Artiiciality largely often characterizes Hollein’s early work, which shows a strangeness in familiarity: aircraft carrier buildings run aground, spark plug high-rises, golden cavernous jewelry stores, and Golden Bat loating cigarettes. These examples subvert the factual nature of things. It’s easy to look at something, anything—a bottle of coke, 46

A print from 1575 showing the large decorated canopy covering the bronze pine-cone inside which spurted water from various apertures. The canopy was decorated with bronze peacocks and resed on eight porphyry columns.

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a computer mouse, a piece of string—and scale it up to the size of a building. This was Claes Oldenburg’s problem, who imagined trombone bridges, clothes-pin triumphal arches, and strawberry pie buildings. The signiication of architecture, as in the Venturian “duck,” and Eisenman’s dictum that a column is not a column, but the sign of a column also play into the ideas of artiiciality, reality, scale, and signiication. But the brass palm trees at Hans Hollein’s Austrian Travel Agency adds an environmental dimension to these ideas, one that surpasses scale and sign.

Great Kitchen in the Royal Pavillion. Henry Holland

Hollein’s 1968 manifesto “Everything is Architecture” brusquely states that “Man creates artiicial conditions,” and that we determine our own environments, in the widest sense of the term. His 1967 “Non-physical environment” is a photograph of a capsule pill, invoking the thought that chemically modifying one’s body alters one’s perception of environmental conditions. Artiiciality is not necessarily physical or non-physical, but consists of aspects of both. For example, Walter Pichler’s TV Helmet (1967) is a mounted portable display helmet that fully encompasses one’s head. It’s a wearable microenvironment that physically alters the immediate space surrounding one’s head, while non-physically injecting images from a TV screen into one’s mind, preiguring what we know today as the Virtual Reality headset.

Hollein’s 1978 Austrian Travel Agency in Vienna consists of brass palm trees, Austrian lags and stage curtains cast in bronze, ornithological taxidermy specimens, and a ruined Roman column in chrome. These elements of architecture make the space they inhabit theatrical, meaning that each element performs. They combine into a holistic and novel environment—a phantasmagorical fantasy world. Rather than invoking virtual or augmented reality, Hollein’s artiicial elements—the bronze palm trees in particular—

Hans Hollien, Austrian Travel Agency interior (1978).

present interior space as an artiicial construction. It can be noted that Hollein’s bronze palm trees ind precedent in the Great Kitchen in the Royal Pavilion designed in the 18th century by architect Henry Holland (not to mention Murray’s Roman Gardens, a lucrative, luxurious lobster palace on New York’s erotic 42nd street).

Unlike the Royal Pavilion palm trees, those at the travel agency are non-loading bearing.

Rather than functioning like a column, these palm trees function as a tree. However, they do bear the idyllic weight of columns, recalling Alberti’s observation that a row of columns is really a wall with openings. In clusters and rows, Hollein’s palm trees delineate divided space, rather than occupying homogenous space. They work to simulate an augmented environment—an alternative world—within the interior. Neither carrying the biology of trees, nor the physics of columns, they appear like trees without carrying the image of trees. It subverts the palm tree and column motif in architecture by being not fully one or the other, but containing aspects of both.

Meaning is immanent in the physicality of Hollein's palm trees. Made of polished bronze and stainless steel, they contain material content unassociated with the form of trees.

The dark stainless steel palm branches fan-out, and look like bent paper-thin razors.

The bronze shafts relect and refract space into a surreal, burnished, rustic environment.

The space becomes the repository of ephemeral objects – of ghosts lurking in a mirage.

Magic Hollein’s Travel Agency building is illed with objects that subvert their originality.

Taxidermy birds, artiicial trees, and ruined Roman columns in chrome accumulate into a fantastical interior. The bronze palm tree is not only the idea of a tree, but through its physicality, becomes real. The bronze palm is a uniied thing, despite containing (and emitting) a multitude of qualities. Yet, its physicality, the distorted conic relection, the burnished, crepuscular bronze, and the simple strangeness of a palm tree's form - an elongated, thin, bare-bones trunk with fanned-out branches on top – is subverted through these material qualities, and becomes seemingly immaterial.

More like an apparition of a tree than an image of one, the bronze palm may be thought of as haunting the space, rather than occupying it and giving it measure. By these material qualities, Hollein's grove of golden palms at the Travel Agency renders the interior immeasurable.

The phantasmagoria of the Travel Agency suits the normative spaces of working life, and the imaginary spaces of vacation life. Imaginary not because they are unreal, but because one daydreams for vacation in the banality of smelly train cars and numbing jobs. As if in a daze, the Travel Agency mediates the transition between waking labor and dreamlike leisure. Hollein’s hallucinating travel agency is a place where people go to experience a precursor for beach resorts. The very words “travel agency” conjures images of fanny pack tourists lying irst-class to exotic places like Rome, New York, Paris, or the Cayman islands. Exotic travelling has become a soi-disant ritual – a First World luxury within First World boundaries. Even Third World countries like Mexico have First World resort cities—like little luxury islands.

Experiencing new places displaces routine into strangeness. It shifts the normative and privileged customs we assimilate to, like drinking artisanal coffee, commuting on public 49

transit, working in commercial ofice buildings. Monuments and world wonders are the ultimate destinations – the leaning tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal.

Hollein’s ghostly bronze palms facilitates this transition from everyday life to the exoticism of resorts and monuments. Not only the image of tree, but an image of exoticism, the bronze palms are the tenebrous – the foreshadowing – of destinations like Cancun. They relect and refract space around it, conceptually dissolving into a shadow of the place we want to be. Homesickness, the desire to be home, reverses into vacation sickness, the desire to be in an exotic place. Perhaps this is why so many islands are vacation spots.

But no one really needs a travel agent anymore. Want to book a light? Expedia. Looking for travel locations? Tripadvisor. The very ideas of labor and leisure have changed; the distinction between them is less clear today than it was in 1978. Productivity has colonized our time for leisure. Platforms for "sharing economies" like Uber, Airbnb, and Getaround blur the distinction between when we work and when we don't.

Independent workers, people who work contingently or temporarily for a company, make up a huge percentage of the US workforce. Even on vacation one is still at the ofice, just open a laptop.

This blurry line between labor and leisure is what makes Hollein's bronze palm trees so important today; as the boundaries between labor and leisure become less clear, the bronze palms follow this dissolution, making an environment immaterial by means of material qualities. Yet not all is dissolving and decay. Environments like Hollein’s Travel Agencies are sites of heteronomy against the homogeneity of space. Like islands, the character of Hollein’s Travel Agency environments is contingent to physical and biological conditions.

Islands are the plenipotentiaries of other spaces. People vacation on islands to get away, kick back, cut loose, get drunk, and other various phrasal verbs. One can imagine an island full of bronze palms as easily as a forest of them. Forests, like islands, are places where common things go to experience uncommon events—like Bilbo leaving the safety of the Shire to tread in the perilous territories of Mirkwood, Lothlorien, and Fangorn Forest. Any number of fairy tales, myths, and folktales contain forests with lurking creeky creatures, creeping crawling and croaking. In literature, forests are sites of enchantment, places to either encounter danger or take refuge. The Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter, the forest home of the Totoros in My Neighbor Totoro, or the Cedar Forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh all embody qualities of horror and magic.

The bronze palm tree contains as much latent magic in its material qualities as the enchanted forest contains magical beings. But these metaphors surpass the connection between the similarities of a bronze palm tree to an enchanted forest, or a travel agency to exoticism - the bronze palms are environmental. Unlike space, environments do not exist without the physical factors that occupy it. Environments obey a different set of rules than spaces. Our current conception of space, as immaterial and homogenous, is free of objects. Environments depend on physical and biological entities to give measure to its conditions - whether it be through people, plants, or animals.

This is what makes the Travel Agency enigmatic, that the elements of architecture which give it measure are both artiicial and natural. The bronze palm is the image of a tree, and functions like one. The taxidermy birds are physically real, but inanimate. And the ruined roman column appears structural, but bears the weight of nothing.

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More like an apparition of a tree than an image of one, the bronze palm may be thought of as haunting the space, rather than occupying it and giving it measure.

By these material qualities, Hollein's grove of golden palms at the Travel Agency renders the interior immeasurable.

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Constructivist and Rationalist Montage

This is the second essay I wrote in “Architectural Visions of the City” taught by Alexander Eisenschmidt.

To introduce the paper, I would like irst to layout the constellation of references: Russian Constructivism, namely, the debate of deurbanism circling around the Vesnin brother’s, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Okhitovich, Le Corbusier, El Lizzisky, and, um, Rembrandt (of my own addition).

A near sighted comparison of El Lizzisky’s collage The Constructor and Rembrandt’s self-portrait (1630) introduces the concept of montage as a parallel methodology in the work of Italian Rationalism, namely, Aldo Rossi’s urban artifact, and his reading of Canelleto’s Cappricio (c 1753) depicting unbuilt work

by Palladio.

M. Barshch and Moses Ginzburg’s “Green City” plan for the socialist recostruction of Moscow (1930) unhinges the possibility for the concept of montage in Russian Constructivism to connect to the concept of montage in Italian Rationalism.

These references were premeditated, and the sets of relationships in the resulting essay became somewhat tenuous. In this esssay, my purpose is to better understand montage as a principle that permeates both visions of the city, and forms of representation.

The “deurbanists,” a group of Russian constructivist architects in the late 1920s, sought to usurp the idea of the city as a capitalist process (an accumulation of land values) with the idea of the city as a formation of socialist collectivity (a condensation of social values).

The deurbanists were in debate with the “urbanists” between the years 1929 and 1930. Much of the debate focused on visions of housing. The deurbanists rejected the conventions of the nineteenth century capitalist, centralized city in favor of a collectivist formation under socialist ideals. The Constructivists understood the relationship of the collective and the individual to be mutual—the stronger a collective contiguity, the stronger an individual personality—and their concept of the city relected this relationship, even at a national scale.

The centralized city of the nineteenth century may be viewed as an encrusted embodiment of capital.

As Anatole Kopp has noted, the controversy between the advocates of urbanization and deurbanization has “always been presented as an anomaly in the development of Soviet city planning, as the aberration of a few irresponsible utopians who refused to take part in the immediate task of building socialism.” (Kopp, 168) The debate of deurbanization, Kopp says, raised unsolvable problems with the deliberate intention of sabotaging actual construction. (Kopp, 168) For deurbanization, the city would be a “social condenser” of a new individual, one that divides time among many activities including productive labor, collective study, cultural recreation, and physical training. The Vesnin brother’s proposal for a Communal house in Kuznetsk (1930) depict what housing might be like for such an individual. The Kuznetsk Communal house is based on individual housing units to which every inhabitant of the city has a right, eliminating the problem of overcrowding. Individual units develop a collective whole through shared utilities, and public space for culture and recreation. (Kopp, 172) Collective needs accumulate into a whole—a social condenser— where thin and it individuals could grow and lourish in community. These utopian, urbanist notions may appear naïve, even puerile, but they are symptomatic of a belief in the perfectibility of man. For the urbanists (in opposition to the deurbanists) the city was composed 53

preexisting urban systems.

Kopp notes that this was the “fundamental proposition of the deurbanists” and that by “making it possible to establish industrial centers almost anywhere… the deurbanists hoped to eliminate the inequalities between rural and urban life.” The Green City is one illustration of this vision. The proposal shows an area outside of Moscow where individual homes are dotted along highways running through the countryside. Unlike the “urbanists,” which advocated for communal housing agglomerates such as the Kuznetsk Communal House, the deurbanist Green City dilutes industry and housing into a homogenous landscape. The Green City was a program for socialist resettlement, not a plan for capital investment. For the deurbanists, architecture is a societal desideratum, not a consumerist commodity.

of communal houses satisfying the needs of both bachelors and couples alike. Communal houses would be clustered around factories without peripheries, centers, or distinct neighborhoods. (Kopp, 172) In contrast, the deurbanists, as Kopp says, “Rejected the very idea of the city and dreamed of a Russia dotted with individual homes consisting of lightweight structures set in unspoiled natural surroundings,” like a Casper David Friedrich landscape of lightweight Russian domestic frameworks where the alienation of mechanization is reversed. The urbanists sought a condensation of communal life around mechanized production; the deurbanist sought to dissolve domesticity into a homogeneous landscape of agriculture and electricity of food and electric power.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Okhitovich, a Bolshevik sociologist and theorist of deurbanism, rejected Moscow’s concentric rings rippling from a governing center in favor of a new hydroelectric power grid that would cover all of Moscow, making possible the ability to build a factory or power plant at any location free from

Le Corbusier was in Moscow during the debate of deurbanism and attended the “Green City” exhibition illustrating the deurbanists proposals. In his book The Radiant City (1967), he claims (in his characteristic brusqueness) that the “the mystic belief in deurbanization has fallen lat on its face!” (Kopp, 173) He dismissed it as a fad that would smash the city into thousands of pieces. The debate between urbanization and deurbanization is an interesting detour in the rhetoric of 20th century Russian constructivism. Or, to use Le Corbusier words, deurbanization is a brief “mystic” state in constructivism’s realist exactitudes.

The Green City transcends the stock distinction between urban and rural. Far from adopting an escapist strategy from the capitalist city, the Green City is a radical, socialist vision of rural urbanism—not only either country or city, but preserving aspects of both without extinguishing its autonomy.

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FIGURE 1: El Lissitzky, Self-Portrait, 1924. Gelatin silver print. 5 1/2 x 3 1/2” (13.9 x 8.9 cm) Thomas Walther Collection. MoMA. Copyright 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn.

Facing page: M. Barshch and Moses Ginzburg: “Green City,” plan for the socialist recostruction of Moscow, 1930.

Next page left: El Lissitzky, Self-Portrait, 1914.

Next page right: Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, c. 1630. Germanisches Mationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

How is one to view deurbanization within the larger context of constructivism? Is deurbanization a subtext of constructivism? Or a brief lapse in constructivist logic?

El Lissitzky’s self-portrait The Constructor (1924) acts as a point of reference to help answer these questions.

Twenty-four year old Lissitzky took this monochromatic portrait (this selie) in his studio in 1914. His physiognomy appears content, but his gaze is intent, and a bit piercing. He wears a corduroy turtle neck, and a receding hair line, under chiaroscuro lighting. One may recall Rembrandt’s 1630 self-portrait where the lighting in both is nearly identical (and both men are 24 years old). Lissitzky wears a white turtle neck, and Rembrandt a white lace collar. Lissitzky stands before a gridded partition, and Rembrandt before a blank, dark wall.

This grid provides an entrance point into the technique of montage in The Constructor (Fig. 1). The top left of The Constructor fragments into rectilinear, black and grayscale shapes as though emerging from the grid as a basis for transformation. Lissitzky’s right eye occupies the center of the picture, superimposed over a hand holding a compass. The combinatorial logic of The Constructor results in a photomontage of head, hand, and tool over a lexible grid.

In addition to the principles of deurbanization and decentralization, the deurbanists valued a third concept—that of mobility—which is similar to the lexibility seen in The Constructor. For the deurbanists, the principle of mobility makes the house a dynamic entity. Structures are not ixed, but lexible—capable of peripatetic movement, as though they are inhabitants themselves. And they are inhabitants, but of a larger homogenous system of omniscient transportation and energy. It can be noted that the Green City, with it’s underlying principles of a homogeneity and it’s emphasis on linear construction, recalls the gridded networks of Superstudio and the linearity of Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. However, Aldo Rossi’s idea of an urban artifact offers a point of comparison that moves beyond visual appearance, and presents a third condition apart from urbanization and deurbanization.

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Mental Montage The contrast between the universal and particular, as introduced in Rossi’s seminal book The Architecture of the City (1984), is foundational for his study of the city. The dialectic of the universal and particular does not eliminate the difference between them, as did the duck and decorated shed, but reinforces their autonomy through mutual dependency. Rossi translates “universal and particular” as “collective and individual,” which, in abstract terms, views the idea of a building as the reiied memory of a collective. He writes, “By architecture of the city we mean two different things: irst, the city seen as a gigantic man-made object, a work of engineering and architecture that is large and complex growing over time; second, certain more limited but still crucial aspects of the city, namely urban artifacts, which like the city itself are characterized by their own history and thus by their own form.” (Rossi, 29)

Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Capriccio with Palladian buildings, 1753-59.

over the Grand Canal in Venice. Rossi includes an image of this painting at the beginning of the “Preface to the Second Italian Edition” of The Architecture of the City.

Rossi writes, “These three Palladian monuments, none of which are actually in Venice, nevertheless constitute an analogous Venice formed of speciic elements associated with the history of both architecture and the city.” (Rossi, 166)

This quote evinces a mutual relationship between the universal and particular that both surpasses and preserves a scalar distinction between them. The city (collective) is a large object, and architecture (particular) is characterized by its own history. For Rossi, architecture is far more than a particular instance of a larger whole; far more than a igural increment of urban coniguration (although also that). The idea of an urban artifact embodies this dialectical role, evident in the very title of The Architecture of the City, where architecture depends more on its own formal autonomy than on its material construction. For Rossi, Architecture is a complicated entity, containing the full richness of its own history. “The union between the past and the future,” Rossi says, “exists in the very idea of the city that it lows through in the same way that memory lows through the life of a person.” (Rossi, 131)

Rossi’s interest in the Capriccio is indicative of his theory of the urban artifact—and it is in this painting where the Constructivist city and Rossi’s city meet, namely, in the concept of montage. The analogical motive of the Capriccio is in the contrast between static Palladian monuments and the commotion of the canal activities—the gondolas, markets, and movement of people along the painting’s bottom frame. Palladio’s bridge and Basilica designates the absolute value of form—a “mental montage” as Tafuri says—against the bustle of eighteenth century life in Venice. (Tafuri, 139) However, beyond this contrast, the very idea of montage in the Capriccio is commensurable with the idea of urban artifacts. Through a uniied perspectival view, montage creates the illusion that two unlike things belong in the same representational space. In the Capriccio, these two unlike things are Palladio’s buildings, and a landscape view of the Grand Canal. Furthermore, the Rialto Bridge is unbuilt, and the Basilica is in Vicenza, not Venice. As if in a dream, Canaletto paints the phantasmagoria of Venice as a strange scene depicting a shadow of reality.

The Capriccio is the tenebrous of Venice, its negativity, is implicit in the relation of an individual, idealist shadow within a collective, realist scene.

Thus, memory is not only the trace of history in urban artifacts, but also forecasts the possibility of future realities. Rossi’s account of urban artifacts is extensive.

He uses a vast number of examples to illustrate and describe the individuality of urban artifacts. The most unique example perhaps being Giovanni Antonio Canaletto’s Capriccio, depicting Palladio’s Basilica of Vicenza, his lost competition entry for the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and a partial view of the Palazzo Chiericati.

Canaletto paints these three projects of Palladio’s design 57

The principle of montage is implicit in the work of constructivism. Emerging from the blurry ethereality of impressionism, constructivist montage has the same roots as cubist collage. The work of montage must necessarily disrupt unity—rather than reifying its moodladen essence as with impressionism. The function of montage disavows unity in the emerging disparateness of parts that, at the same time, reafirms a formal unity.

The principle of montage both destroys and receives elements of reality, and shapes them into something altogether different. The autonomy of art is embedded in the permanent tension between dissonance and unity in montage, deriving from the pastepot newspaper clippings of Picasso’s collages.

Another interpretation could be that Rossi was commenting on his own work—that in the petriied remains of the capitalist city, the only agency of urban artifacts is to situate moments of unity within an altogether fragmented whole. Urban artifacts, under the principle of montage, both destroys and restructures the city. Montage mutually dissipates and uniies the city.

Montage is sabotage.

The brief Constructivist debate of deurbanism was animated by the reconciliation between the metropolis as a concentration of industry, and the village of agricultural production. The deurbanists sought to combine the individual unit of housing with the collective infrastructure of the city without fully synthesizing them. In principle, Constructivist photomontages do the same thing—combining like elements into a “dificult whole,” both preserving and subverting the autonomy of individual parts against a collective and pictorial whole. All of these ideas surpass the classicist doctrine of mereology by including the whole as an individual unit of scale itself.

For Rossi, the city is a “gigantic man-made object.”

For El Lissitzky, the city is “to be built as a complete entity.” (El Lissitzky, 62) The connection between Constructivism and Rossi is less direct than, say, Constructivism and Deconstructivism, or the Green City and Wright’s Broadacre City. But the common ground of the architecture of constructivism and the urban artifact is in the principle of montage. That these two share montagist principles places them in a bastardized genealogy of previously unwed histories, namely, Russian Constructivism and Italian Rationalism.

If the deurbanists raised unsolvable problems with the deliberate intention of sabotaging actual construction, what might be the intent of the urban artifact? Rossi’s drawing Architecture Assassinated, for Manfredo Tafuri (1973) suggests one answer. In this sketch, Rossi depicts his own works of architecture—bits of the Gallaratese, a portion of the Segrate monument—as fractured and fragmented, a loose collection of broken typological bones. One interpretation could be that Rossi was making a statement about Tafuri wickedly killing—deconstructing—the architecture of the city.

End Notes Kopp, Anatole. Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917-1935 (New York: Braziller, 1970).

Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).

El Lissitsky, “The New City” in Russia: An Architecture for World-Revolution (Cambridge: 1970).

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Tafuri, Manfredo. Venice and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

Aldo Rossi, Architecture Assassinated, For Manfredo Tafuri, 1973.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial & the possibility of an aesthetic environmentalism

This piece is a review of the Chicago Architecture Biennial written in “Design Criticism� taught by Sam Jacob. Given the eclectic response by the participants to a vague prompt by Herda and Grima, this review attempts to draw a circle around a certain vein of coherency within the Chicago Cultural Center - one that I identify as a possible and repressed project in architecture: aesthetic environmentalism. Rather than denying sustainability as irrelavent to the intellectual dimensions of architecture, this review adopts sustainability as a discipline emerging from within the language of architecture itself.

Much of the work presented for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial surrenders intellectual work to the current geist of sustainability. The Biennial's slogan “The State of the Art of Architecture” is intentionally vague. Although it offers an openness to present a variety of works, the moniker can really only be interpreted in two ways: as either geist or autonomy. ‘Geist’ meaning the current spirit of the discipline of architecture as a mediator for making the intent of sustainability real. And ‘autonomy,’ meaning architecture as a kind of art practice.

Perhaps this urgency of sustainability is a way for BP, the Biennial's Presenting Sponsor, to ask forgiveness for their long history of environmental destruction. Projects lauded as models of sustainability are being supported by a company responsible for destroying forms of life on the planet. Such an oxymoronic relation makes these works appear more like shows of guilt in the creation of waste, rather than viable solutions for making nature more permanent.

Yes, we understand that natural resources should be renewed, and that we face the challenge of what to do with existing buildings. And yes, architecture plays a role in meeting these challenges, but it is important to acknowledge disciplinary boundaries. For architecture, the opportunity is to imagine focused and formal spaces that assists the improvement of existing cities. Against the Biennial's spreading rhetoric of sustainability, the following attempts to map veins of coherency within the Biennial that posits an environmentalism originating from the terms of architecture itself.

Throughout the cacophony of works, veins of coherency do surface. As the artistic directors— Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima—put it, the Biennial is a dialogue to address four things: housing crises, pressing climate change, the surge in economic inequality, and the vertiginous expansion of the world’s urban footprint.

In the spirit of these categories, responsibility to the wellbeing of society and environmentalism dominates many of the discussions taking place within lectures, panels, and roundtables throughout the city.

They ask: How are architects addressing the enduring social, political, and environmental challenges of our times? What are the biggest challenges that Chicago will face in the next two decades? How are they tackling the unanticipated crises and prospects of life in the twenty-irst century? These questions are undoubtedly important and immanent, but they shy from other topics that architecture is arguably more qualiied to address.

To be clear: sustainability is a discipline that has not yet found an identity. It has latched on to architecture.

Environmentalism is the Biennial’s veil. It seems to avoid the presence of more autonomous work. Despite this shyness, Herda and Grima do identify one value that unites all participants, “the certainty that architecture matters.” This is the best ground of agency that the Biennial can stake. Unlinchingly, the discipline, practice, and discourse of architecture from Chicago, and all around the world, insist in the importance of architecture to a public we often alienate.

The Chicago Rooms, three large rooms along the Cultural Center's east edge, contain drawings by Wai Architecture Think Tank, Fala Atelier, Johnston Marklee, Ofice KGDVS, Bas Princen, and Point Supreme Architects, among others. This is a select list— the San Rocco axis, if you want. The representational ideas of collage, montage, and bricolage are the common denominator of these works. They cut and paste the drawings and paintings of Piranesi, Boullee, Hockney, Seurat, and Rousseau, to name a few. Through collagist representation, this work forms an affective environmentalism.

The expansive array of works in the Cultural Center can be dizzying, especially to a dilettante audience.

This is a positive thing because it communicates the vitality of contemporary architecture to the public, even beyond sustainability. But the Biennial often confuses sustainability with architecture. To be clear: sustainability is a discipline that has not yet found an identity. It has latched on to architecture. The two are mutually exclusive, not synonymous, and conlating them wanders into territory bordering on the fetishism of social practice art.

Ofice KGDVS and Bas Princen’s “Model for a Pavilion (Thinkbelt)” also intuitively counters the Biennial’s environmentalist tendency. The installation is a twelvefoot tall curtain delineating the perimeter of a space about four times taller than its width. A panoramic 61

The actual veil of "Model for a Pavilion (Thinkbelt)" counters the veil of sustainability overshadowing the Biennial, which proves unproductive against the opportunities of an aesthetic environmentalism. The ruined state of the Madely Transfer Area provides context to reimagine a postindustrial, idyllic landscape.

This, combined with logics of perception, poses an environmentalism that comes from within the discipline of architecture itself, privileging how we manipulate, conceive of, and perceive space.

photo of the verdant, forested Madeley Transfer Area in London (the site of Cedric Price’s seminal Potteries Thinkbelt project) is printed onto the curtain, raised above eye height.

In perception, this intervention reverses photographic and actual space. As a photograph, the curtain appears to be a window onto a background, as though we look through a transparent curtain. As a material fabric, the curtain foregrounds the space through its actual opacity.

Simultaneously foreground and background, reality and illusion, the curtain oscillates between two poles of perception. This is a synthetic method of collage (its combinatorial logic is subtractive), rather than the traditional, mechanical method of collage (which is additive).

Aesthetic environmentalism is a projective condition, a suppressed potential inherent to architecture, and not a utopian condition, which is an imagined alternative for architecture's current state.

Aesthetic environmentalism is a projective condition, a suppressed potential inherent to architecture, and not a utopian condition, which is often an imagined alternative for architecture’s current state.

“Model for a Pavilion (Thinkbelt)” is indifferent to issues exterior to it—social, sustainable, and environmental. Instead, this installation is environmental, as in surrounding-cognition. It wraps space in a mental environment. Sustainability is problematic when is imposes physical and psychological constraints on inhabitants. Instead of predetermining the built environment with sustainable solutions, what we need is an amoral, aesthetic environmentalism. Such an environmentalism justiies itself on (1) aesthetics as a science of perception, rather than on sciences of ecology; and (2) on an aesthetics of natural beauty, rather than the positivism of natural science.

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Model for a Pavilion (Thinkbelt), by Office Kersten Geers David van Severen and Bas Princen. 2015.

Photograph from www.officekgdvs. com.

Suprafunctionalism

This is the term paper I wrote for “Aesthetic Theory” taught by Lisa Lee and Blake Stimson. In some ways, it’s a sythesizes of many things that I’ve studied this past semester - with inluences from my History of Theory class (18th century French Absolutism in particular), and my History and Theory class (Constructivist montage, Rossi, and Canelleto in particular).

Theodore Adorno explored the aesthetic implications of Adolf Loos’s critique of ornament in his lecture “Functionalism Today” (1967) and within important passages in Aesthetic Theory, in addition to other texts.

Adorno’s critique is based on a dialectical view of functionalism that, unlike Loos, does not condemn ornamentation, but sets it in a dialectic with autonomy. The following traces an incomplete and nonlinear history of the concept of functionalism in architecture as articulated by Marc-Antoine Laugier (protofunctionalism), Peter Eisenman (postfunctionalism), and Adorno (suprafunctionalism). This paper delineates a loose history of the concept of functionalism in architecture, and the role that Adorno has to play in that history. It assumes a nonlinear view of time, beginning with the end of functionalism, to a middle outlining the beginning of functionalism, and ending with the beginning of a new functionalism based on Adorno’s aesthetics of technology, construction, and expression.

This new functionalism (but not neofunctionalism) is what I call “suprafunctionalism.”

Post-Functionalism

ism to modernity. As Foucault notes in his seminal book The Order of Things, the very idea of man is a recent invention, suggesting that man did not exist before the nineteenth century. In “Post-functionalism” Eisenman observes that architecture did not participate in the fundamental aspects of these metaphysical changes. The dialectic of form and function is culturally based, and does not follow the metaphysical and political shifts that occurred with other art forms.

Several shifts away from the dominant attitudes of humanism are evident in painting, literature, music and ilm—the non-objective abstract painting of Malevich and Mondrian, the Non-narrative, atemporal writing of Joyce and Apollinaire, the Atonal and polytonal compositions of Schonberg and Webern, and the Non-narrative ilms of Richer, Eggeling, and Moholy Nagy (Eisenman, 237). These shifts suggest a displacement of man away from the center of the world. Eisenman’s positing of this dis-placement is highly convincing, but he offers no positive re-placement for a loss of humanism. In linear time, pre-humanism may be viewed as a theocentric world (God-centered), and humanism, beginning with the Renaissance, may be viewed as an anthropocentric world (human-centered).

But what new ‘centric’ replaces humanism? Many philosophers and writers have tread in posthumanist waters, including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Katherine Hayles, and (in architecture) K. Michael Hays, among many others. The cybernetic, hypermodernist labyrinth of posthumanist thinking and writing is already vast. Perhaps the inlation of information in these web of thoughts in not navigable, and that orientation is now impossible— which asks: if the operative term for information in posthumanist thinking is truly “inlation,” then when will the bubble burst? And what will this implosion produce?

Eisenman is differentiating between modernism and modern style in architecture. He says that modernism had not been elaborated in architecture. What was known as “modern” in architecture was stylistic, and did not address the ontological changes evident in technology, painting, literature, music, and ilm. “What is being called post-functionalism,” he writes, “begins as an attitude which recognizes modernism as a new and distinct sensibility. It can best be understood in architecture in terms of a theoretical base that is concerned with what might be called a modernist dialectic, as opposed to the old humanist (i.e., functionalist) opposition of form and function.” (Eisenman, 237) In his own characteristic terms, he concludes his editorial by positing this new modernist dialectic as transformation and decomposition.

In the early years of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), Peter Eisenman wrote an editorial in Oppositions called “Post-Functionalism” which, as Bernard Tschumi has noted, “dismissed program and function as part of a 500-year-old, pre-industrial humanist practice.” At the time, the discourse of the Institute was that of autonomy. The Institute was a multifaceted entity. It was one of the only architectural settings at that time that grasped and pursued architecture as a rigorous intellectual discourse.

In “Post-functionalism” Eisenman presents two views of architecture that have persisted throughout architectural history from the Renaissance to nineteenth century modernism. These two views are Rationalism (form/function) and Beaux Arts (program/type), both of which enclose the project of architecture within the same deinition, and differs in no signiicant way from the 500-year-old tradition of humanism. The various humanist theories of architecture are characterized by the dialectical opposition of these two themes.

Tschumi offers an interesting third alternative to Rationalist and Beaux Arts views—one comprised of intertextuality. For Eisenman, the difference between form/ function and program/type is for Tschumi the difference between set/script, which he theorizes in his book Manhattan Transcripts, written right after leaving the IAUS around 1980. For rationalism, form is inextricable from its functional content, and for Beaux Arts architecture, where program is embedded within and solidiies a speciic formal typology, for Tschumi, the ideas of set and script introduces time into architecture—negating the “timelessness” of classical and rationalist formal types.

For Tschumi, time matters. Architecture is the trace of intertextual relationships unfolding in time, rather than contextual relationships solidiied in time.

Eisenman presents functionalism as a species of positivism, an “ethically constituted form-giving,” as with the English Revisionist Functionalism of Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, and Archigram. This kind of ethical positivism issues from within the terms of an idealist view of reality, and clothes idealist ambition in the radically stripped forms of technological production.

Although stripped forms may appear to break with the pre-industrial past, Eisenman argues that it is in fact no more than a late phase of humanism.

The nineteenth century saw a signiicant shift in western consciousness—from agrarian preindustrial cities to the emergence of the modern metropolis, from Feudal economies to industrialization, and from human65

Transformation, literally a change in form, is temporal.

Its basis is with a primary unity, and references platonic solids, from which a series of registrations produce an indexical object. Transformation is a relic of humanist theory, beginning with the proto-functionalism of Marc Antoine Laugier. Decomposition, unlike transformation, is a subtractive process with a basis in fragmentation and multiplicity. It is atemporal. In decomposition, form is a series of fragments, and is without reference to a more basic condition. Decomposition is an artifact of post-humanist theory, rather than a relic of humanist theory. Objects of decomposition are, in Eisenman’s terms, post-functional. This means that the form of an architectural object is free from functional and programmatic indices. Both of these conditions describe the inherent nature of the object itself—and its capacity to be represented.

Following the above relective summary, a number of questions arise from Eisenman’s posthumanist approach, and what the nearly forty years that have passed might say about his essay: How is Post-functionalism a term of absence? Because it does not—for architecture— positively label the shift in human consciousness that arose with industrialization (the abdication of the subject)? If post-functionalism does not propose to supply a label for a new consciousness in architecture, then did the actual label become what we know today as post-modernism? If post-functionalism does not provide an adequate label for what proceeds humanism, why give it a name? Because it is a negative term? Is post-modernism then a term of presence?

Within architecture, post-functionalism recognizes modernism as a fundamental disruption of humanism—a disruption that other disciplines had already internalized. Eisenman’s essay identiies what was irst known as “modernist” in architecture to be merely stylistic.

Architecture settled for the image of modernism without the material and metaphysical shifts that would have invoked real change. Writing in 1976, Eisenman suggested that those concrete shifts appeared to be underway, and that post-functionalism is the negative deinition of architecture’s positive modernism.

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Proto-Functionalism

sance treatises, meaning that these underlying principles are surface effects of a deeper source. The concept of proportion is the sharpest point of contention between Blondel and Perrault. For Perrault, proportion is not a law of Nature, but is determined by custom and tradition.

This view relativizes proportion, making it empirical and conventional, derived from external sensory perception, rather than a deep internal relection on the nature of proportion, as with Perrault. Therefore, for Blondel, proportion is an overmining process, based on the absolute depth of natural laws; for Perrault, proportion is an undermining process, based on the immanent surface of agreed upon conventions.

Although Marc-Antoine Laugier was unassociated with the French Academie, his view of proportion occupies a third critical position that surpasses both Blondel and Perrault. By briely viewing Blondel and Perrault’s view of proportion, Laugier’s view becomes clearer, and shows a theory of proportion based on the logics of functionalism without technology.

For Laugier, the truth of architecture lies in its structural logic. The concept of structural logic is summed up in the doctrine of caractere (character), which is a natural principle. Laugier says that proportion works in accordance with the building’s character, and encompasses the buildings entirety, not just the orders. Despite this, Laugier held that the positive deinition of proportion is a philosophic matter, not an architectural one. Proportion, as a philosophical category, exists within a nonrelational immaterial sphere, rather than a measurable material one that is bound by relational dimensions.

Like Blondel, Laugier believed in a naturally apparent absolute beauty. For Laugier, not only proportion, but all architectural elements are natural, rational, and functional. Laugier’s primitive hut is an important illustration of these beliefs. Kruft writes that, “In the proposition that the truth of architecture lies in its structural logic, Laugier formulates a new concept of functionalism.” (Kruft, 153) The primitive hut embodies all of the logic of nature, reason, function, and structure. For him, proportion affects the volume of the entire building.

Structural logic is readily apparent in Laugier’s primitive hut. Formally, the hut consists of edges delineated by tree trunks and branches, not walls. Reducing architectural form to the deinition of the most structurally austere outline depicts architecture as a structural logic in its most condensed state—preiguring (perhaps initiating) the twentieth century debate of functionalism.

Humanist proto-functionalism reduces architectural form to a receptacle for function and activity.

The above paragraphs have attempted to articulate the

Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769), an eighteenth century Jesuit priest and architectural theorist, is often viewed as the origin of functionalism in architecture, only without new technology, which categorrizes him as a kind of proto-functionalist. The concept of proportion is critical for understanding Laugier’s functionalist logic. The following situates his position on the concept of proportion as a third alternative to the debate of proportion between Francios Blondel and Claude Perrault at the Academie Royal d’Architecture, who were contemporaries of Laugier.

The Academie was founded in 1671 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert as part of a systematically developed series of academies to bring virtually all of the arts and scholarship under state control in France. The task of the Academie was to pass a set of resolutions that would universalize a “normative architectural aesthetic” in French architecture. The discussions taking place within the Academie were derived from philosophy and the natural sciences and were not speciic to architecture. This is especially evident with Blondel and Perrault, who were two of the leading igures of the Academie. Blondel came to architecture as a mathematician. Perrault came to architecture as a physiologist. This shows, as Hanno-Walter Kruft writes in his sizable book A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, “that the most important architectural theorists of French absolutism were scientists.” (Kruft, 142) The question of bon gout (good taste) was one of the key points of debate and aesthetic discussion in the Enlightenment, especially within the Academie. Although the Academie never approached a consensus on the issue, several ideologies emerged. Two of the most animate views of bon gout were between Blondel and Perrault. In the ifth part of his 1675 treatise Cours d’architecture, Blondel wages a polemic against Perrault—one devoted to a view of proportion that departs from the Vitruvian tradition of proportion (which consists of rhythm, symmetry, and propriety). For Blondel, proportion is a criteria of architecture that has ‘a sure and real foundation in Nature,’ meaning that proportion is naturally apparent or self-evident, and not based on human conventions.

Perrault’s physiology is representative of epistemological empiricism, in the vein of John Locke, which holds that natural ideas do not exist. (Kruft, 133) Perrault likens the original state of the mind to a tabula rasa as a receptacle for external sensation and internal relection. (Kruft, 133) Perrault's Ordonnance undermines Vitruvian aesthetic principles and those of the Renais67

humanist origins of functionalism in Laugier’s primitive hut, and the posthumanist reception of functionalism in Eisenman’s post-structuralist rhetoric.

In 1965, Theodore Adorno wrote an essay called “Functionalism Today,” addressed to an audience of architects and students of architecture, in which he, in part, addresses the work and writings of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933). Loos was of great consequence to Adorno, especially the aesthetic implications of Loos’s critique of ornamentation in his inluential and dogmatic 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” which attacked ornamentation in architecture, viewing it as culturally immoral and degenerate. This notion is ridiculous today, especially in view of the “object-oriented” work of Tom Wiscombe and Mark Foster Gage, to name two. But Loos’s essay was and remains an important and inluential text in the history of modern thought even today.

Several concepts in Adorno’s Functionalism Today and Aesthetic Theory are important to address in order to expand the concept of functionalism beyond its scientific origins towards an aesthetics of montage, technology, and construction.

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Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier: Essai sur l'architecture 2nd ed. 1755 by Charles Eisen (1720-1778). Allegorical engraving of the Vitruvian primitive hut.

Adorno’s “Functionalism Today”

Loos’s delimitation of ornamentation is similar to the positivism of Laugier, where form is entirely embedded within a post-and-beam structural logic. The view that an object, already within itself, bears its own adequate form, apart from meanings exterior to it such as activity and material construction, acknowledges the meaning naturally apparent to the object. This aligns more closely with Blondel’s view that meaning within architecture is based on natural laws outside of human perception and convention. Objects invested with their own meanings creates an “aura of essentiality” about them.

Although unnecessary to his views (and perhaps unnecessary for this paper) it is nonetheless interesting to note the way that Adorno begins his speech by addressing his audience with an apology, saying “I can make no claim to competence in matters of architecture. And yet, I do not resist the temptation, and knowingly face the danger that you may briely tolerate me as a dilettante and then cast me aside…in the meantime, I need not be holier than the pope.” One of the primary questions of this paper is this: What does aesthetics have to say about architecture? In an attempt to answer this question, the following views what Adorno has to say about Loos.

According to Loos, “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulills a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.” (Loos, 15) As in Loos’s Mausoleum for Max Dvorak (1921), architecture is reduced to its most essential conditions—a simple, rectilinear, material volume. Here, architecture is not divested of all function, but the activity it contains is inactive. For Loos, the closest that architecture can be to art is housing a dead person, rather than existing as a stripped receptacle for the necessities of life like sleeping, eating, and playing.

Admitting oversimpliication, Adorno’s speech is a critique of Loos: by equating ornamentation with crime, Loos establishes a very one-sided, nondialectical approach to functionalism. In short, Loos wanted to eliminate ornamentation, a vestige of Renaissance and Baroque classicism, because it served no purpose for the building’s functions. Adorno, in dialectical fashion, wanted to recover ornamentation’s autonomy. His speech provides a view of ornamentation that places it within a dialectic with “purpose” rather than making a call to recover ornamentation in architecture, which he clearly sheds the authority to do. His view, as one might easily imagine, based within his disciplinary bounds.

“In Loos’s thought and in the early period of functionalism,” Adorno says, “Purposeful and aesthetically autonomous products were separated from one another by absolute fact.” (Adorno, 3) Adorno situates this separation, this lobotomy of purposeful and autonomous objects, within the arts and crafts movement, which he addresses at length through the concept of “handicraft” in Aesthetic Theory. Loos, as Adorno says, preached for a return to an honest “handicraft.” The word Handwerk in German means both “handwork” and “craftsmanship.” Such a view eliminates the need for ornamentation and situates Loos within a history of the movement of applied arts beginning with Ruskin and Morris. For Adorno, an autonomy in art, one that is purpose-oriented (re: functional), is not necessarily free of ornamentation (elements without purpose) He writes, “That art aspires to autonomy does not mean that it unconditionally purges itself of ornamental elements; the very existence of art, judged by the criteria of the practical, is ornamental.” (Adorno, 4)

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Adof Loos, Mausoleum for Max Dvorak, (1921)

Technology, Construction and Expression

fulilling the need for objectivation; rather, construction must conform to the mimetic impulses without planning…construction gains expression through coldness.”

Construction is a form empty of human content, and does not wait to be illed with expression. (Adorno, 44) Adorno suggests that this may be the way beyond the debate of functionalism. He writes, “Functionalism today, prototypically in architecture, would need to push construction so far that it would win expression through the rejection of traditional and semitraditional forms.” Such a rejection would divest architecture of history, which is exactly what postmodernism did.

“Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are,” Adorno says, “It views them in the way they could be according to the status of their own productive energies as embodied in technology.”

(Adorno, 13) Technology is an important concept in Aesthetic Theory, and is adjacent to architecture. According to the above quote, technology embodies the status of productive energies within human beings. Architecture becomes worthy when it views subjects according to this productive status. The concept of technology, which Adorno closely ties to “technique” in Aesthetic Theory, is predicated on this view of human beings.

For Adorno, great architecture both expresses and surpasses its purpose at the same time. By assimilating itself to functional conditions, a building becomes prisoner to human content. Adorno would have a building know everything, and be prisoner to nothing. Where a completely subjective building conforms to human needs and functions, an objective building contains absolute expression as an object itself. Adorno recognized (and Loos did not) that these dialectics are always present in architecture, and that the way architecture survives these contradictions of object and subject, expression and construction, is by carrying through their conlict, rather than seeking their false resolution.

In the Renaissance, art was emancipated from “cultic heteronomy.” (Adorno, 57) This emancipation “was part of the discovery of construction, then called composition.”

This emancipation is perhaps best exempliied in the work of Palladio. In traditional works since Palladio, “traditional masterworks” gained authenticity from technical integration, until technology exploded traditional procedures.

Technology did not govern the work of many renaissance master works, which were often predetermined by vernacular construction techniques, as with Palladio, whose work (the palazzos in particular) is founded on concepts of frontality, proportion, and spatial administration. Adorno writes that “technologization purges artworks of their immediate language,” which drives out the autonomy of the artist—the “contingency of the individual who produces the work.” (Adorno, 60) Technology subvert authority and authorial intention, and this is what Adorno wants to recover from the functional object. In addition to technology, the concept of construction addresses architecture more directly in Aesthetic Theory.

Adorno would have a building know everything, and be prisoner to nothing.

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno says that a historiography of the principle of montage tracing how it became a principle of construction does not exist. I’m unsure if this historiography has been written, but an important observation can be drawn from his statement—that montage became a principle of construction (not became construction itself). He writes that “Montage disposes over the elements that make up the reality of an unchallenged common sense, either to transform their intention or, at best, to awaken their latent language.” (Adorno, 56) That montage can awaken the latent language within objects is a fascinating idea, and recalls the “aura of essentiality” mentioned above with Laugier. Within functionalism, perhaps originating in the proto-functionalism of Laugier, architecture is reduced to its most essential elements of structure. Within post-functionalism, architecture sheds function in favor of a language interior to itself.

Adorno writes that “Construction is currently the only possible form that the rational element in the artwork can take.” (Adorno, 57) Construction is a rational element of an artwork, and is a mereological concept involving the aggregation of parts that form a whole. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno sets construction within a dialectic with expression. He writes, “Construction is not the corrective of expression, nor does it serve as its guarantor by 71

Montage

Venice. Rossi includes an image of this painting at the beginning of the “Preface to the Second Italian Edition” of The Architecture of the City. Rossi writes, “These three Palladian monuments, none of which are actually in Venice, nevertheless constitute an analogous Venice formed of speciic elements associated with the history of both architecture and the city.” (Rossi, 166)

One of the more immediate common grounds between Rossi and Adorno is in the concepts of the universal and the particular. The contrast between the universal and particular, as introduced in Rossi’s seminal book The Architecture of the City (1984), is foundational for his study of the city. The dialectic of the universal and particular does not eliminate their difference, as did the Venturian duck and decorated shed, but reinforces their autonomy through mutual dependency. In The Architecture of the City, “universal and particular” can be translated as “collective and individual,” which, in abstract terms, views the idea of a building as the reiied memory of a collective. Rossi writes, “By architecture of the city we mean two different things: irst, the city seen as a gigantic man-made object, a work of engineering and architecture that is large and complex growing over time; second, certain more limited but still crucial aspects of the city, namely urban artifacts, which like the city itself are characterized by their own history and thus by their own form.” (Rossi, 29)

Rossi’s interest in the Capriccio is indicative of his theory of the urban artifact. The analogical motive of the Capriccio is in the contrast between static Palladian monuments and the commotion of the canal activities— the gondolas, markets, and movement of people along the painting’s bottom frame. Palladio’s bridge and Basilica designates the absolute value of form—a “mental montage” as Manfredo Tafuri says—against the bustle of eighteenth century life in Venice. However, beyond this contrast, the very idea of montage in the Capriccio is commensurable with the idea of urban artifacts.

Through a uniied perspectival view, montage creates the illusion that two unlike things belong in the same representational space. In the Capriccio, these two unlike things are Palladio’s buildings, and a landscape view of the Grand Canal. Furthermore, the Rialto Bridge was never built, and the Basilica is in Vicenza, not Venice. As if in a dream, Canaletto paints the phantasmagoria of Venice as a strange scene depicting a shadow of reality. The Capriccio as the tenebrous of Venice, its negativity, is implicit in the tense relation of an individual, idealist shadow within a collective, realist scene.

This quote evinces a mutual relationship between the universal and particular that both surpasses and preserves a scalar distinction between them. The city (collective) is a large object, and architecture (particular) is characterized by its own history. For Rossi, architecture is far more than a particular instance of a larger whole; far more than a igural increment of urban coniguration (although also that). The idea of an urban artifact embodies this dialectical role, evident in the very title of The Architecture of the City, where architecture depends more on its own formal autonomy than on its material construction. For Rossi, Architecture is a complicated entity, containing the full richness of its own history. “The union between the past and the future,” Rossi says, “exists in the very idea of the city that it lows through in the same way that memory lows through the life of a person.” (Rossi, 131)

The principle of montage is implicit in the work of constructivism. Emerging from the blurry ethereality of impressionism, constructivist montage has the same roots as cubist collage. The work of montage must necessarily disrupt unity—rather than reifying its moodladen essence as with impressionism. The function of montage disavows unity in the emerging disparateness of parts that, at the same time, reafirms a formal unity.

The principle of montage both destroys and receives elements of reality, and shapes them into something altogether different. The autonomy of art is embedded in the permanent tension between dissonance and unity in montage, deriving from the pastepot newspaper clippings of Picasso’s collages.

Thus, memory is not only the trace of history in urban artifacts, but also forecasts the possibility of future realities. Rossi’s account of urban artifacts is extensive.

He uses a vast number of examples to illustrate and describe the structure and individuality of urban artifacts. The most unique example perhaps being Giovanni Antonio Canaletto’s Capriccio, depicting Palladio’s Basilica of Vicenza, his lost competition entry for the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and a partial view of the Palazzo Chiericati. Canaletto paints these three projects of Palladio’s design over the Grand Canal in 72

Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Capriccio with Palladian buildings, 1753-59.

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Suprafunctionalism The history of functionalism from Laugier to Eisenman lacks aesthetic principles. Filtered through Adorno’s critique of Loos, and his concepts of technology, construction, and montage, functionalism surpasses the technocratic dependencies of Laugier and Loos, and even the pure autonomy of Eisenman, towards a functionalism that surpasses the extremes of both while preserving the dialectical tension between them. Such a functionalism might be called suprafunctionalism. Adorno writes, “In retrospect, even as a constituent element of the art of the past, technique can be recognized with incomparable clarity compared with what is conceded by cultural ideology, which portrays what it calls the technical age of art as the decline of a previous age of human spontaneity.”

Three observation can be drawn from this statement: Technique is a constituent element of the art of the past, the technical age of art is the decline of a previous age of human spontaneity, and functionalism is the decline of humanism.

Technology is the extended arm of the nature-dominating subject—purging artworks of their immediate language.

The requirements of technology drive out the contingent traces of authorial intent. These requirements signal a loss of intent, the abdication of the subject, and architecture’s true shift from humanism to modernism. What Laugier started, what Eisenman intuited, is perhaps what Adorno realized through the work of aesthetics.

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Endnotes

Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas, “2 Architects 10 Questions on Program Rem Koolhaas + Bernard Tschumi” in Praxis 8: RE: Programmin (May 2006).

Hanno-Walter Kruft, “Relativist architectural aesthetics, the Enlightenment and Revolutionary architecture” in A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (January 1996).

Adolf Loos and Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos: Das Werk des Architekten (Locker, 1985) Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Capriccio with Palladian buildings, 1753-59.

Aldo Rossi, “Preface to the Second Italian Edition” in The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 165-167 Andrea Palladio, “Stone bridge of my own invention,” design for the Rialto Bridge as engraved in the Quattro libri dell’architettura (1570).

“The image of the temple contrasts with the hectic life of the Grand Canal. The project shows Palladio’s dialectical montage of forms at its best.”

Peter Eisenman, “Post-Functionalism,” in Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976).

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Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), ed.

Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, tran. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Orig. published as Asthetische Theorie, 1970 Suhrkamp Verlag, Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Capriccio with Palladian buildings, 1753-59. Furt am Main.

This is a portfolio of writings by Paul Mosley from his first semester in the Master of Arts in Design Criticism (M.A. Design Criticism) program at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture (UIC).