polytekton: mikeschDesign volume 2, 1990-1997 by polytekton.com

Culicidae Architectural Press an imprint of Culicidae Press, LLC 918 5th Street Ames, IA, 50010-5906 USA www.cularchpress.com

First published in 2011 polytekton: mikeschdesign Volume 2, 1990–1997. Copyright © 2011 by Mikesch W. Muecke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanized means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Culicidae Architectural Press, 918 5th Street, Ames, IA 50010-5906 or write to editor@culicidaepress.com

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-0-557-43361-2 eBook edition ISBN: 978-1-105-20567-5

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Table of Contents 1990 — 007 1991 — 173 1992 — 263 1993 — 293 1994 — 349 1995 — 375 1996 — 429

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1997 — 435

zweiundvierzig

Overview

Logic

The bulk of this volume consists of what I call Architexts, hybrids of writing and designing that test the intersection of the literary and the material. Other parts cover drawing, photography, graphic design, etching (integrated into my Master’s Research Project), ceramics, architectural projects, and design-build work (as part of an architectural studio and an architectural detailing course), following again the same logic as in Polytekton Volume 1 from twodimensional investigations to three-dimensional work. This collection of work covers my two years of grad school at the University of Florida, one in-between-year of teaching at Iowa State University, residency years at Princeton University from 1992 to 1994, and finally the not triumphant but underthe-wire return to Iowa State University as an Adjunct Assistant Professor, that academic state of purgatory where any engagement in the curricular process has no impact, unlike the more exulted state of being an Assistant Professor whose work accrues credit toward tenure. I would have to wait for another two years before that career started.

The book is organized by year— with indicators at the bottom of each spread—and by material/representational actions/verbs/nouns (upper left corner on each spread). I have decided to leave the Architexts in their fragmented and selfreflexive state rather than try to “polish a turd,” as my colleague Derham Groves so eloquently wrote in a recent email about finishing up his own work.

A Note About Polytekton

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The domain for www.polymath.com was already taken. Perhaps the elision of poly and tekton would work. Polytekton is multiple: nom de plume and identity container for a variety of venues. The word derives from the Greek polus ‘much,’ polloi ‘many,’ and the Greek tektonikos, from tektōn ‘carpenter, builder.’ For more information go to www.polytekton.com

Happy reading.

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main text (varies)

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main text body will be narrower than the notes body. A teacher of mine called this “wagging the dog” (with the tail). I call it a dynamic balance between research and narrative. The gentle reader may find himor herself sliding across the page, shuttling between narrow main text and wider notes, or narrower notes and wider main text, or even, as happens sometime, between evenmeasured text columns. This is intended and shall not be construed to be a defect of the book. One last note: the images are like hobos: they go wherever they want on a page, although as in every good construction there exists an invisible but quite powerful matrix, a mother of sorts, who knows how large or small an image might be, and where it hovers on the page.

The Architexts in this book don’t follow conventions of proper layout. Rather than list footnotes or endnotes in their rightful places (at the foot of the page or at the end of a chapter) I placed the notes parallel to the main text body, emphasizing the dialogue between reference and main text. The diagram below will clarify the layout: the outside columns will always be main text body, except in those cases where this order is reversed, while the inside columns will always be notes. The width of each adjusts depending on a reciprocal relationship: the main text body will be as wide as the notes body has to be to accommodate the number of notes the main text body can accommodate on each page, and vice-versa. In essence both main text body and notes body balance each other on every page. Some times, really quite often, the

How to Read the Architexts

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Architexts

A brain map of sorts....

Architexts Introduction

the process of these two graduate semesters, however, my construction moved out of the office building and into the back-streets of Chicago. As an alternative to the institutionalized homeless shelter my construction (called the ‘Thing’) offers the opportunity of protection rather than a fixed certainty of occupation. Inhabitation is suggested, quite quietly, in the back alleys of the city. The literal site for my construction is the fire escapes that occupy the marginal places of Chicago’s urban fabric. In its role as an occupied ornament the Thing oscillates between structure in its task to support a potential inhabitant and ornament in its role as a supplemental attachment to an existing architecture (the fire escape). The construction becomes a critique of the separation between structure and ornament. The text itself is anything but final. It retains at this stage a generative fluidity that allows further study and development. The drawings and photographs, documents of the Thing’s construction process, were partially created with the help of an Apple Macintosh computer and Architrion II, 5.5 CADD software.

The following text represents a collection of thoughts, really a literary fragment, that I assembled during a two-semester graduate seminar/studio taught by Dr. Jennifer Bloomer at the University of Florida in the Department of Architecture. The project is concerned with issues in the post-modern American urban landscape, such as the homeless, the relationships between ornament and structure, corner conditions, and language and architecture. The specific site is Chicago, Illinois. The charge of the studio was to make a construction (in the form of drawings, a built fabrication, and a text) that could simultaneously be the ornament on a Chicago building and afford temporary shelter from the elements to the homeless. Expressed differently: the goal was to create a full-scale in-habitable ornament that could potentially be introduced into the city under the guise of an addition to an existing building. My own interpretation of this project connects to an earlier undergraduate project: the Reading Room for an Executive (see Polytekton Volume 1). There I had already both a site in Chicago and a corner condition within the Marquette building. In

ALLe gory or an in— vest— igation into the possibilities of miss— reading Ar chicago— T ex c ture

Architexts Pre-Script This text is a map1 that references a build object.2 This text is an open text. It is the outline for a closed project.3 This text describes an architecture of more than three dimensions. This text and its architecture are explicitly non-linear.4 This is architecture miming a text.5 This is a reciprocal text.6 This is not a thesis.7 This is not about what architecture should look like. It is about the role architecture can play when it points at problematic conditions in society such as the increasing number of homeless people. This is habitable ornary-ment.8 This is a corner project.9 Claimer The arguments in this text are framed by a white, male, caucasian mind, who is embedded loosely in Western culture, influenced by the necessity of a collective, dazed by a forest of meanings in languages, raised in a late-medieval town in Central Europe, thrust into the late-capitalistic field of American pragmatism, and seeking a different10 approach towards architecture and life.

I. Writing11 about Allegory The framework of this paper, including its ornaryment, consists of a variety of texts12 that include James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake13, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum,14 and the 24 work/ life stations of Joseph Beuys, de-scribed by Caroline Tisdall in her book on Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys.15 Other reference

From medieval Latin mappa mundi, literally ‘sheet of the world,’ from Latin mappa ‘sheet, napkin’ + mundi ‘of the world’ (genitive of mundus). 2 This object will reside from August 1990 until indefinite in the SOM Foundation’s Charnley House in Chicago. [Editor’s note: As it turned out later, this assumption was premature. Due to budget problems at SOM the object never made it to Chicago.] 3 “An author can foresee an ‘ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia’ (as happens with Finnegans Wake), able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpretation. An open text outlines a ‘closed’ project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy.” Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader, p. 9. 4 The making of architecture can be described linearly. The design process however is non-linear. This means also that the established conventions of design schematics, design development, production, etc. are an artificial attempt to force the design process into a linear structure. 5 Architecture, like a text, can be constructed/written/built and it can be read/interpreted/understood. The text itself or the architecture means nothing. Meaning is read into it by the reader. 6 Architecture, as well as any other discpline, exists in a field of reciprocity. There is always the other besides the one, not isolated (unless the scientific method is used for investigation) but part of a field of relationships. The architecture of this text and the text of this architecture is ambiguous, ambivalent, and multivalent. 7 Especially not in the Hegelian sense. I consider Hegel’s vectorial and essentially linear (and closed) structure of history and progress, mirrored in his thesis/antithesis/synthesis order, as no longer a valid model for thought structures at the end of the 20th century. Thesis then is understood here in its Greek meaning of placing a thing down, hence a ‘statement.’ This text, then, is initially an experiment into pure research in the discipline of architecture. Programmatic of functional concerns did not have priority over generating ideas in the decision-making process. 8 Ornary refers to bother? 9 CORNEA? acute vision? precision? check! A corner in architecture is at the extreme point from the center. A corner is ex-centric which is a dangerous architectural condition. People get cornered, they paint themselves in corners, they eat cornered beef [Corned Beef (But then I suppose we have to back the cow into a corner to get the beef ), ed. note]. Corner can also be traced to cornu, an animal’s horn [AUNTLERS], which has an Medieval Latin derivative “corneria, a place (or point) where two converging lines or sides meet.” Eric Partridge. Origins: 296. A corner, in other words, is a place of intersection. 10 This ‘different’ carries with it no moral implications. My architecture is not more important than anybody else’s. It is also not less important but stands beside, with and is developed through and out of existing architecture. 11 Writing, righting, riting, and wrighting. 12 Text as evidence of texturing or weaving. 13 Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1976. 14 Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace 1

texts include Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (second edition) and the Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Origins by Eric Partridge.16 Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a highly allegorical and critical construction that uses different languages (English, German, French, Sanskrit, among others) to reconfigure a new language out of other languages. Finnegans Wake is a text that consists simultaneously of many languages and no language. Joyce’s work is critical of the very foundations of cultures and states, our communication system.17 My choice of Foucault’s Pendulum can be explained by my interpretation of the text as a critique of major histories, and as an inquiry into the possibilities, dangers, and joys of writing minor histories, or rather myths and mystories.18 Finally Joseph Beuys’ work found its way into this project as a critique of cultural production in the arts (which include

Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989. 15 Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979. 16 Partridge, Eric. Origins, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Greenwich House, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983. 17 Joyce is also, through Finnegans Wake, important as an architect of sorts: “HCE has sinned, as have all men, but the sin has driven him out of the Garden of Eden only to plant in him the urge to create Eden substitutes—cities and civilizations. [...] Broadly speaking, then, HCE plays man the father and creator, Bygmester or Masterbuilder [ARCHITEKTON]. Ultimately he is identified with what he creates — the city itself.” Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p. xvii. 18 Mystory is “a translation (or transduction) process researching the equivalencies among the discourses of science, popular culture, everyday life, and private experience. Ulmer, Teletheory, p. vii. With this in mind I, the one who researches is thus inextricably bound up with the object of research.

Architexts architecture19) as expressed in his Theory of Sculpture.20 As such Beuys’ work locates the site of art and architecture within a cultural and political energy field in which the individual’s actions are consciously and subconsciously a vital part of the collective thought process within a society. Art and architecture can have intensely cultural and political ramifications. The three texts then address some of the necessary conditions for the discipline and also the profession of architecture. These > continued on page 28

Thing in plan and the relationship of its columns to the solar system

I understand architecture here not as that which is built by a master (architect from Gr arkhitekton, with arkhi- connoting ‘chief, principal’, Partridge, Eric. Origins, p. 698) but as a bent or crooked text, an arch(ed) text, that comes through rather than from the author and turns right back to the author as that which is read. In Geometry this action may be compared with the U-shape or the Bloomerang. [MORE] The architecture that develops out of this consciousness can be described with Wolfgang Pehnt’s words, which are also the title to his book, as the ‘beginning of modesty’ (Der Anfang der Bescheidenheit). This more humble way of making architecture has as its foundation not an arrogance of being the ‘better alternative’ but rather attempts to acknowledge an-other, a supplemental or allegorical approach to the production of architecture. Contrary to expectation, this kind of architecture is not necessarily less powerful. Its strength, and its weakness, lies in a multivalency that allows for many interpretations or readings. This architecture is not complex out of capriciousness but out of necessity. Out of this view grows the realization that I am not a student of master-building or master-builders, but a student of the crooked text; a text that is convoluted, sinuous, twisting, meandering. 20 “This Theory of Sculpture describes the passage of everything in the world, physical or psychological, from a chaotic, undeterminded state to a determined or ordered state. Chaotic [WRITING A HISTORY OF CHAOS, ELISABETH] is the state of raw material and unchanneled will power, characterized as WARM [TEMPERATURE, THERMOMETER]. Ordered is the state of material that has been processed or formed, symbolized by the heart [OUTHOUSE] sign of movement at the centre. Here it acquires form and definition and appears in a crystal line state, represented in the diagram by a tetrahedron and characterized as COLD and INTELLECTUAL. If the process goes too far the crystal becomes a burnt-up, overintellectualized ‘clinker’ [BRICK], and falls out of the system. Carried on to a psychological level, this is a diagram of those at one extreme 19

Process: this page through 27

Architexts

Architexts Vertical Layers Version 1

Vertical Layers Version 2

Architexts

Early geographical information system: using phone numbers as three-dimensional building blocks

Architexts

Architexts > continued from page 14

conditions are a language21 (a codified system of communication and mis-communication), a fabricated history (a codified system of conscious and para-conscious memories, references, layers of meaning)22, and a site or locus (a place of intersection, gathering, joining, and collecting of both language and history).Through a process of transmogrification and transduction these texts yielded a constellation of situations and citations which exist and ma tter simultaneously as a billding23, a construction, a fabrication, a device. This U-dimensional contraption grew out of Dr. Jennifer Bloomer’s 5th-year graduate studio at the University of Florida. The instrument that connects the texts with the object is allegory, here used in its Greek meaning as ‘an-other speaking in the assembly (agora), or a ‘speaking otherwise’.24 An-other other use of allegory is expressed in the essay ‘The Object of PostCriticism’ by Gregory Ulmer where he quotes Craig Owens: “If allegory is identified as a supplement 25 [“an expression externally added to another expression,” hence “extra,” yet supplying a lack], then it is also aligned with writing, insofar as writing is conceived as supplementary to speech.” 26 In this context it is also important to note the relationship between allegory and grammatology. Again Ulmer notes that Grammatology has emerged on the far side of the formalist crisis and developed a discourse which is fully referential, but referential in the manner of “narrative allegory” rather than of “allegoresis.” “Allegoresis,” the mode of commentary long practiced by traditional critics, “suspends” the surface of the text, applying a terminology of “verticalness, levels, hidden meaning, the hieratic difficulty of interpretation,” whereas “narrative allegory” (practiced by post-critics) explores the literal — letteral — level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves — in etymologies and puns — and in the things the words name. The allegorical narrative unfolds as a dramatization or enactment (personification) of the “literal truth inherent in the words themselves.” In short, narrative allegory favors the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signifieds.27

This emphasis on an-other meaning is crucial for the writing, making, and understanding of this project. Ulmer further states that “post-criticism writes ‘on’ its object [THING] in the way Wittgenstein’s [ZETTELKASTEN/BRAIN BOX] knower exclaims, ‘Now I know how to go on!’28 — with this ‘on’ carrying all the dimensions and ambiguities of the ‘on’ in Derrida’s ‘Living On’ (beyond, about, upon, on — including the parasitical connotation [PARACITATIONS]). Writing may show more (and other) than it says — the ‘surplus value’ of writing which interests Derrida [and myself ]. The name of this ‘more’ is ‘allegory.’ “ 29 The shuttle that can be used for a transformation of and translation [TRANSDUCTION?] between these texts is allegory, understood here not only in terms of allegoresis. It is a vertical re-placement of signifiers but also narrative allegory, i.e. a horizontal sliding of meaning

who are motivated by the chaotic warmth of will power, those in the central area who are governed by feeling and the heart, and those who have reached the over-intellectualized pole of extreme theory. Ideally a balance should be achieved, though the overriding tendency today is towards the intellectual pole. Balance, reintegration and flexible flow between the areas of thinking, feeling and will, all of which are essential, are the objective of the Theory. The moulding processes of art are taken as a metaphor for the moulding of society; hence, SOCIAL SCULPTURE. Fat is an ideal material for demonstrating the Theory, since it can exist as a physical example of both extremes, as a chaotic, formless and flowing liquid when warm, and as a defined and ordered solid when cold; a paradox that is compounded when it is placed in that most ordered of forms, a right-ang[E]led corner or wedge.” Joseph Beuys as quoted by Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p. 147. 21 ZUNGE and ZANGE. Tongue and tong. 22 ‘History’ in German means literally a ‘set of layers’ (Geschichte); a word that is obviuosly understood in section (Archeology). 23 Literally a ‘sign-thing’; ‘Ding’ is German for ‘thing’. 24 Partridge, Eric. Origins, p. 12. Gr allegoria , allos, other (cf ELSE)+a n deriving from , or akin to agoreuein, to speak in the agora (s agor-) or assembly (from agein, s ag-, to drive or lead), became L allegoria, whence F allégorie and E allegory, ‘a speaking otherwise’. 25 This is not any supplement; it is Derrida’s supplément, which is important — with the supplément we get the paradox of the excessive to the complete which points to the lacking of the complete. Editor’s note. 26 Ulmer quoting Owens, Craig. ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,’ October 12 (1980), p. 84. 27 Ulmer, Gregory. ‘The Object of PostCriticism’ in The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 95. Text in quotation marks from Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory, Cornell University: Ithaca, 1979. pp. 30-33. 28 ‘Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. Anscombe (Blackwell: Oxford, 1968), p. 105’, quoted in ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’ by Gregory Ulmer in The AntiAesthetic, p. 94. 29 Gregory Ulmer, ‘The Object of PostCriticism’ in The Anti-Aesthetic, Ed. Hal Foster, p. 94.

“Encryption would add another dimension. Also interesting how ‘Egyptian’ hides in here.” Editor’s note. 31 The telephone is a unique yet ubiquitous, and highly perversive system of communication and control at the end of the 20th century in late -capitalist, western culture. 32 “The age of the Antonines . . . . The world was full of marvelous correspondences, subtle resemblences; the only way to penetrate them — and to be penetrated by them — was through dreams, oracles, magic, which allow us to act on nature and her forces, moving like with like. Knowledge is elusive and volatile; it escapes measurement. That’s why the conquering god of that era was Hermes, inventor of all trickery, god of crossroads [‘Trivial’ comes from ‘three roads’ (coming together) which is what happens at the corner. Editor’s note] and thieves. He was also the cretor of writing, which is the art of evasion and dissimulation and a navigation that carries us to the end of all boundaries, where everything dissolves into the horizon, where cranes lift stones from the ground and weapons transform life into death, and water pumps make heavy matter float, and philosophy deludes and deceives . . . They call him Exu, messenger of the gods, go between, trader, who is ignorant of the difference between good and evil. Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 184. 33 See Appendix 1. 34 As are the Rosicrucians. Their origins are obscure. Their message messianic in two nomadic ways: first they move from a seat of power to the seat of an oracle [BARNACLE]. Then they return, bring back with them the message [HERMES]. Or they move from ritual to ritual [PROCESSION,PILGRIMMAGE] and interpret this ritual while moving from one place to the next. Both modes of nomadic travel are about the interpretation of events. Both rely on an intermediary, a communication link to interpret the message. The link is crucial. The truth of the message is local and exists in the event of the interpretation. 35 “A vessel if I may quote myself.” Editor’s note. 36 ‘Interpretation’ from “Latin interpres, negotiator, agent, hence interpreter” [HERMES]. Eric Partridge, Origins, p. 525. 37 ‘Explanation’ from “Latin explanare, to flatten, hence spread out, both literally and before the mind.” Eric Partridge, Origins, p. 500. 38 Status, the way one stands, attitude, hence condition, position (not moving).

through association, repetition, non-hierarchical placing beside one-an[d]-other, appropriation, overlay. Allegory is the instrument that ties everyThing together. It is a Gedankensprung [literally a thought jump], the encryption30 of letters into numbers and back, two intersecting crossword puzzles that cross words, breed words, make texts, fabricate architecture. The allegorical instrument for connecting these ideas is the telephone,31the modern equivalent of the ancient god Hermes 32, Mercury, Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus; the God of thieves and cunning, the inventor of writing and numbers. Hermes as messenger god is the line of communication. But this line, this phone– line has also the possibility of mis-communicating, of interfearing. In Finnegans Wake the washerwoman section33, where two women try to talk to each other across a river, is an examle of the slippage of meaning through the communication channel of language. This slippage operates as an oscillation, a constant flickering between meanings, an-other consciousness of what language can be beside [PARA] the conventional. My position, then, shifts constantly. My architecture is nomadic.34 It is about passage and voyage.35 I am, among many, a wanderer between the possibilities of meaning. My study is one of interpretation36, not explanation.37 ‘Explanation’ uses scientific inquiry to achieve resolved conditions of causality [IF-THEN PATTERN, QUOTE BASIC PROGRAM, FP]. Interpretation is less about causality and more about meaning. It is a coming-to-terms-with. Interpretation allows for different readings by different people; it is about generation of meaning. In other words while explanation tends toward a fixed state38 [STATUS] or effect, interpretation tends toward an openendedness or affect. Since Hume stipulated that results from experiments are probably true and Popper required that science be falsifiable, scientific thought has been moving away from the idea of absolute truth. What I am advocating with respect to architecture is a design process of the give-and-take; an architecture that challenges simultaneously the autonomy of both profession and discipline of architecture through architecture.

Architexts

Matrix

Architexts

Generating 3D-shapes from telephone numbers of people in Chicago who have the same last name as my studio colleagues, studio mother, and myself The value for each x in the phone number turns into spatial construction using the following logic: xxx-xxxx = x, y, z (e, s, w, n)

And I quote Dr. Franz Kafka: “Die Logik ist unerschütterlich, aber einem Menschen, der leben will, widersteht sie nicht.”

Architexts Architecture39 and Language What is important to me is to expand the field of architecture to include the writing of texts, which is to say that I acknowledge the possibility of designing projects through the use of a shared language,40 without falling into the paralyzing trap of infinite regress. The theory and the practice of architecture might address the extra but necessary supplement of a writing as architecture. At the intersection of the disciplines of architecture and language is the site for this experiment with which I want to increase the sensibility towards an-other language of architecture.41 This other language writing this an-other, an allegorical text operates via compression and encagement of multiple meaning into one thing/word. The product is not a unified whole but a problematic construction that refuses to stay fixed. The nature of this text is that of a partial language, not a meta-narrative. Derrida states that the problematic is a question of producing a new concept of writing. This concept can be called a gram or différance. . . . Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ — phoneme [PHONE ME!] or grapheme — being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, [THIS ARCHITECTURE] is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. The gram, then, is the most general concept of semiology — which thus becomes grammatology.42 Writing, in other words, can be considered to be a meaningful fabricaion or construction of traces. Language allows for both meaningful and meaning—less interchange of ideas, thoughts, emotions, yet it simultaneously is the very channel that prevents a complete or total understanding43 since not all ideas or things have the same meaning for all people. Language exists as a line that simultaneously connects and divides. However, this line is neither straight nor clearly defined.44 Just like the development of language is not linear....... “Take the debate on the Corpus Hermeticum. When that document came to light in Europe in the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, and many other people of great wisdom immediately realized that it had to be a work of most ancient

ertaking .......so architecture is not a linear und 47 s . My ship but a self-reflexive network of relation with man wo/ interest then is in the engagement of

or third in the second me... en tt ri w as w ti belief that the Corpus era. [...] The lation is not time r u o f o ry tu cen e final reve of The time of th ds are rooted in the time n of o b rs s te It af . d by the clock the before45s an e er h w ,’ ry ‘subtle histo ant importance. nning f sc science are o ear, directed sequence ru it can n , li ct ...is a illusion. In fa is a modern B to A m o fr ing the A, the effect produc also go from B to cause. . . . “ . .” is “But at this point . ea of ‘point’ that id le “It is the who ts have been mistaken. Ever since Parmenides, poin h whence blis posited by science in an attempt to esta nothing fact and whither something moves. But in from one the moves, and there is only one point, ”46 ant. inst e which all others are generated at the sam

wisdom, antedating the Eg himself. It contained ideas yptians, antedating even Moses that would later be expres sed by Plato and by Jesus.” “What do you mean, lat of Plato and Jesus, it must er? [...] If the Corpus repeats ideas have been written after the m!” “[...] That was exactly the reasoning of modern philo who also added wordy lin logists, guistic analyses intended to show that

Writing is a specific for inferior beings, for mortal men, and the king of the gods has no need of it; Thamous, like Amon Ra, needs only to speak and the world is created. Hélèn Cixous in The Exile of James Joyce or the Art of Replacement, p. 742. 40 A shared language does not mean that there exists a 1:1 relationship between architecture as a field of knowledge and, for example, Literary Criticism. 41 This sentence is somewhat misleading. The content of this text was developed by working on it. There was no goal in sight when I started this investigation. 42 Derrida in Positions, p. 26. quoted in ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’ by Gregory Ulmer in the Anti-Aesthetic. 43 This implies politically also a position against any form of totalitarianism. 44 See Catherine Ingraham’s work. These lines can neither be toed nor towed. They are toad lines. [“In the speech of southerners, ‘told’ is pronounced ‘toad.’” Editor’s note] 45 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 207. 46 Ibid, p. 206ff. 47 At issue then is not the search for origins but the spinning of a meaningful tale of connections; a “geneology [which] is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused 39

parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.” Quoted from Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Geneology, History’ in Language, CounterMemory Practice, Foucault (Boucharde, Ed.), p. 139. 48 This minor language acts as a supplement to the major language. A supplement that is surplus and extra but also points to a lack. 49 A text or object that can be read and that means something to the reader. Conversely the maker of the text finds meaning in the making of the object. 50 Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. 51 “Thoth. n. Egyptian Religion. the god of wisdom, learning, and magic, inventor of numbers and letters, and scribe of all the gods, represented as a man with the head either of an ibis or of a baboon [a dog-faced ape=pea with a red and naked ass arse]: identified by the Greeks with Hermes.” Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, second edition. 52 margarine, march, marque, mark, ulmer applied grammatology, beuys section 53 Laurie Anderson: ‘Ramon’ [AMON RA?] from the all-bum Strange Angels.

this network using a minor language of architecture [which is always already part of a major language].48 I think that architecture can be both a text...... (it can be used as an instrument of investigation and critique.49 1. It is that which a minority constructs within a major language, involving a deterritorialization of that language. 2. Minor literatures [ARCHITECTURES] are intensely political: “[I]ts cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified because a whole other story is vibrating within it.”340 In other words, in minor literatures [architectures] the distinction between the personal and the political dissolves. 3. Minor literatures [architectures] are collective assemblages; everything in them takes on a collective value.50 In this project with its focus on the homeless, corners, ornament) ......and an instrument to investigate and critique these different realms of existence. In consequence i am against a metahistory or a grand narrative in architecture but instead i work with that which falls outside of the mainstream of architectural practice. My field of investigation is the th’ oth51er, the margin52, the repressed, the ignored, the violated by neglect, the minority. A legitimate question would be who this minority is? We all. We all are home-less, without a solid base or foundation — doubting, afraid, because we do not know for sure. All we can do is speculate, fabricate and construct. And just as i started to leave just as i turned to go i saw a man who’d fallen he was lying on his back in the snow. some people walk on water some people walk on broken glass some just walk round and round in their dreams some just keep falling down so when you see a man who’s broken pick him up and carry him and when you see a woman who’s broken put her all into your arms cause we don’t know where we come from we don’t know what we are53

language of architecture [which is always already part of the major language] [SUPPLEMENT, [MORE ON line[s]] CATHERINE INGRAHAM? I am searching for relationships, vessels that carry meaning [bathtub]...

Architexts Anselm Kiefer’s bathtub would be a vessel in point [Diogenes. Editor’s note]. See Kiefer, Anselm. Anselm Kiefer, p. 189. 55 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 327. 56 Ibid, p. 180. 57 “History is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake.” [This is Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, speaking. I believe it appears near the beginning of Ulysses. Editor’s note] 54

The zinc tub, which Kiefer had earlier provided as a podium for the saluting Nazi in “Occupations”, was apparently in use in virtually every home in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, an allocation by the National Socialist Party to insure a minimum standard of hygiene in daily life.54 ...for the other, in languages, in words, in communication. I search for relationships between and in words. I am unable, here and now, to write with this language anything that has not been said. Yet i can quote and edit... Though [...]even in the days of truth he had been a spectator, watching the birth of other men’s memories, the birth of History, or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to write.55 ...fabric ate my-stories out of existing texts, and apply them as instruments for making a theory and practice of architecture. Yet a codified system of communication in itself is not sufficient to explore a particular field of inquiry. Language needs to interact with histories... The world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation, they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not repeated but they resemble one another . . . 56 ...to become meaningful. I ask myself whether there are other languages (besides a quantitative) that i can use to describe, interprete, understand and make a critical architecture. This paper is an attempt to uncover and explore another language; a language as a tool of communication [that acknowledges as part of communication the necessity of miscommunication], an instrument for understanding and misunderstanding. Language as a paradoxical connector [MICHEL SERRES, HERMES].

History57 and Mystory The origins of the Rosicrucians? Para-celsus: historical origins, and Christian Rosencreutz: mythical origins. How much is history a myth and how much is a myth a history? The Rosencreutzlers are messianic in two nomadic ways: they go from the seat of power to the oracle [barn acle], bring it back and interpret the message. Or they go from ritual to ritual [procession] and interpret from one to next. Both modes of nomadic travel are about the interpretation of events. Both rely on a mediary between, a communication link to interpret the message. The link is crucial [Kreuz]. The truth of the message exists in the event of the interpretation, what is called hermeneutics. Hermes the go-between, messenger [60 fathoms, phantoms] god.

[An Oedipus text is a history which is a “crooked-footed” text...Oedipus Rex/Text/ Complex. Editor’s note.] 58

“My wing is ready for the move, I’d like to return, for even if I would stay for my life time, I would have little luck. Gerhard Scholem, greetings from Angelus 59

Site and Cite One site for this project is, generally, the City of Chicago,60 and more specifically and officially the Charnley House, designed by Louis Sullivan. Rather than limit myself to one particular building in the city I expanded my project to include other sites that I relate to personally. I lived in Chicago between Winter 1979 until Summer 1980, renovating, repairing, and maintaining apartment buildings on the economically depressed Southside, around Hyde Park. I worked together with a carpenter, Phil Beaver,61 who had service contracts for buildings in the mostly AfricanAmerican neighborhoods around the University of Chicago. Our work sites were dilapidated and run down, four- to six-storeyed brick-clad frame buildings with broken entry doors, blown out windows, non-functioning elevators, and rusted fire escapes. These architectural ruins left scars in my memory. They became the other sites. They became parasites or paracitations.62 They are sites of an in between, gaps63 between buildings, empty lots, gaping wounds, back

There exists a picture by Klee which is called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted in it who appears to distance himself from something that he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is gaping and his wings are stretched out. The angel of history must look like this. He has the face turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees only a catastrophe that unremittingly piles up debris upon debris and throws it in front of his feet. He would like to stay, to wake the dead and put the destructed back together. But a storm is blowing from paradise, which is caught in his wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him unrelentingly back into the future, whom he has turned his back to, while the pile of debris front of him grows into heaven [TOWER OF BABBLE]. That which we call the progress is this storm.” Walter Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, These IX, in Illuminationen, p. 255 (translation by Mikesch). 60 “[T]he creator needs nature as his inspiration and consort, and cities are built on rivers,” as is Chicago. Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p. xvii. 61 His real name. 62 ‘From the medieval habit of quoting in order to demonstrate, Joyce acquired the taste for quotation at any cost, even if camouflaged quotation. Finnegans Wake, even more than Ulysses, can be seen in its entirety as an immense catalogue of authoritative quotations, a Walpurgisnacht of philosophy à rebours. [...] dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantium humeris insidentes ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantes. This means that the contemporary thinker, small and incapable in respect to the giants of the past, nonetheless has the chance to hoist himself upon their shoulders and see, if only slightly, further ahead. Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce, p. 11.

The importance of writing becomes evident with regard to history. The histories we are taught are the stories of success even when they were describing defeat. They survived because they were re-corded—knots in a rope—in written form. In contrast oral histories have not survived as well. They remain today marginalized in the form of myths. Yet the histories of any field of study, including architecture, were fabricated and constructed around survived texts [EX. VITRUVIUS]. Histories, in other words, are normalized myths. As a student of the crooked text58 I am interested in the problematic of writing and hence establishing my-stories of architecture, histories that fell out of the mainstream of History for reasons of denial, excess, and/o[h]r suppression. One form of a critical non-positivist and nonhistoricist architectural history is collage; collage as a kind of writing of history, rubble piling up at our feet,59 a pile of garbage. Writing that is about collage and is collage. The reference here is to history as an accumulation of elements that are pulled into the present. The past becomes a force acting upon the present. History as such becomes inseparable from the present. The production of history becomes a part of culture. It has an effect and it is affected by culture. This consciousness is what might generate critical architecture, through many methods of production [VARIETY].

Architexts alleys, margins of the city. These other sites can be compared with reciprocals, copies or doubles64... “One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory....Another [school argues] that while we sleep [DREAM] here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every wo/man is two wo/men.65” ...of the original; they are bad dreams, nightmares of civilization that are nevertheless always a part of our culture. Another other site is the field of relationships developed out of four MA words, given to us by our studio Mother, Dr. Jennifer Bloomer: Mask, Mark, Map, and Machine, or MaMaMaMa, rather than MaMaLuJo.66 The MA stands here for mater, as in the Mother of Chicago, or HCE’s wife Ann in Finnegans Wake.67 Wrap Up The language of architecture depends on a historical/ mystorical consciousness of the reader as well as the writer. This awareness can be used at least in two different ways. I can accept the authority [auctoritas, power structure] of architectural language and history (a reactionary approach) or I can critically question and challenge both language and history (an approach of resistive inquiry). In other words architecture is political. Both language and history... “History does not happen randomly. It is the work of the Masters of the World, whom nothing escapes. Naturally the Masters of the World protect themselves through secrecy. And that is why anyone who says he is a master, a Rosicrucian, a Templar is lying.”68 They must be sought elsewhere.” ...make up the framework of my inquiry into the possibilities of an-other, a critical architecture that engages culture at the same time that it is a part of culture. ”Then the story goes on endlessly.” “Exactly.” And it is a part of and simultaneously apart from culture. My project then addresses a process of inquiry in[to] architecture.

Gaps are connected to the chaos of Vico’s recorso via chasm. “Intimately akin to Gr khaos, a gaping abyss, a vast cleft in the earth: whence L chasma.” Eric Partridge in Origins, p. 91. 64 “Joyce is concerned with hinting that the events of history repeat themselves, not only in time but in space as well. [...] The reference to the ‘doublin’ on the river Oconee in Laurens County, Georgia, is an accurate piece of geographical information. [...] The gypsy word ‘gorgio’ means ‘youngster’, implying that the American Dublin is a child of the Irish one, as Shaun, founder of new worlds, is a child of HCE.” Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p. xxvi. 65 Jorge Luis Borges in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius from Ficciones. 66 “There are four weeks in a lunar month, and these will give you the four old men who have so much to say, though what they have to say is rarely of much value — Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal. They are the four gospellers, as well as the four provinces of Ireland, and they take off to impersonal regions where they represent the four points of the compass, the four elements, the four classical ages, and so on. They are always together, followed by their donkey [DON KEY HOTE, ASS], and it is in order to think of them as a single unit, their names truncated to Ma, Ma, Lu, and Jo and crushed together to make Mamalujo.” Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p. xiv, xv. 67 “Ann, whose dream-name is Anna Livia Plurabelle — the Anna Liffey [...] on which Dublin stands. The ‘Plurabelle’ indicates her beauty and plurality (she contains all women).” Anthony Burgess in A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p. xvii, xviii. [The name ‘Ann’ must be Burgess’ conceit — she is rarely ‘Ann’ in Fineegans Wake. Editor’s note] 68 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 208 69 Ibid, p. 208 63

“But what do they want people to know?” “Only that there’s a secret. Otherwise, if everything is as is appears to be, why go on living?” “And what is the secret?” “What the revealed religions have been unable to reveal. The secret lies beyond.”69

Important in my production of architecture is the question of producing a new concept of making architecture.

Transducer, a device that receives energy from one system and retransmits it, often in a different form, to another. Related to traduce, to speak maliciously and falsely; to slander; defame; malign [MA LINE]. From transducere to transfer, display, expose. Random House College Dictionary, pp. 1395, 1392. 71 In this case i understand the telephone booth not only as a shelter for making phone calls but also as an architectural instrument that is situated, sited in any city. The telephone booth exists as a set of similar islands, isolated and insulated lands within the city of Chicago. 72 Disappointed I set fire to the contraption. 73 [Do you mean that your are moving towards hanging it up altogether? Editor’s note] 74 see the Reading Room for an Executive. 75 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 276. 76 Ibid, p. 169. ‘Unheimlich’ is German for ‘un-homey’ or ‘uncanny.’ 77 Icarus and Daedalus, father and sun. [The father/son, writing/speed, subject/object, etc. relation is wonderfully exploited/explored in Mark Taylor’s Altarity [...] It is nomad-writing/ archite-writing. Editor’s note] 78 Catcher in the Rye, pp. 197, 198. 79 Mother Goose, no page number. 70

My project then addresses [what is thrown forward in front of You] a design of inquiry in[to] architecture. This investigation then involves problems of methodology in the reading (understanding, interpreting) and writing (making, producing) of architecture. Both the reading and writing of this architecture constitutes the unsafe foundation for this paper [SHAKY FOUNDATION, HANGING, DANGLING, MOVING] as well as for the construction in Studio 413. From a more personal stand[point] the project, [AUF SICH ZU UND ZURUECK, HEATHTILLER] which has been invaded by two influences that have acompanied me throughout my lifetime. They can be described with the image of the hangwo/man [TAROT CARDS] and the transducer70 telephone booth71. As a youngster I remember being fascinated with the suspension of objects. I read books on flying machines and Otto Lilienthal. I even built a glider out of broomsticks and newspaper paper paper. Needless to say the first attempt at free flight, a jump from an electrical transformer, ended in a crash-landing.72 Subsequently I constructed sus-pended tables and shelves out of rope and wood. Only later did I realize that there exists a continuity between these earliest desires to hang something up and the direction my creative development has taken in the production of architecture.73 Throughout my undergraduate career I have been building and writing about these precariously dangling designs.74 [EXAMPLES, SCAN DINA VIA SCANNER]. Now I understand the need to suspend things as an attempt to defy gravity, to deny foundations, to question accepted beliefs, and to doubt the authenticity or originality of histories/herstories/my-stories. “[W]ould you try to sell readers something they knew nothing about? The [...] books must deal with the exact same subjects as all the others. They confirm one another; therefore they’re true. Never trust originality.75” “The whole thing is—as the Germans say— unheimlich.76” The suspended objects are also indicators of the crisis between object and subject.77 This crisis is the fear of getting involved with the object of study too closely, of flying too close to the sun. Thus suspension addresses, they address the fear of falling, “Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side ot the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again. [...] But I kept going and all. I was sort of afraid to stop, I think.78”

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.79

Architexts This refers to the second fall, the catastrophe without redemption. In other words hanging becomes an allegory for the crisis80 of existence and thus for history which, according to Walter Benjamin, is always in crisis.81 The hanging also recognizes a tension, an intersection of conditions that do not go together very well, comparable to two forces that try to occupy the same space. Sus-pension also points towards a condition of an in—between, a precarious and dangerous state of affairs; yet sus-pension in a positive sense encourages creative incredulity. “Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it.82 Anticipation, involvement, and suspicion (with both eyes toward the possibility for change). “When you assume an attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue.83” I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.84 The transducer telephone booth enters the discussion from a personal perspective as well. I have always had an uneasy alliance with the telephone. It allows action at a distance. The caller is removed yet close. But AT&T and MA Bell only give us half the story. Beside [PARA] the convenience and ease of operation, exists an-other reality of the telephone as a communication machine; the crank call, the distress call, the harassment and the control of the telephone over the ‘customer’ can not be denied. The telephone can also be the messenger good of bad news.85 A telephone is about the failure of language. In other words what the telephone is to communication, history is to architecture. It is an allegory for someThing other. The telephone booth, then, stands in for an architecture that houses one of the most pervasive instrument of communication in use today in conjunction with the computer. Telephones are tools for the making of relationships, they make con-tact possible. A telephone is also commonly used instrument. It translates letters into numbers figuratively when speech is transformed into electrical impulses and literally when i punch either letters or numbers on the telephone keypad or spin the dial.86 My focus then lies at the intersection of the fields of experience and philosophy.87 With rearguard to the scientific method as an investigative tool i am interested in the slippage of subject and object rather than a strict separation of both entities

Crisis is the Latin transliteration of the Greek kritikos, a sifting, from krinein, to sift. A crisis suggest the need to sift, to make a decision. [So criticism and cisis are sisters? Interesting. Editor’s note] 81 Crisis in Benjamin’s case can also be traced to the instrument of allegory. “Paul de Man, who invokes Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory as a negation of all external reference, or identity, of all attempts to trace the genesis of a meaning to its origins in an object, is a major example of a critic working with a theory of allegory.” Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, p. 88. {see also Owen’s assertion of allegory/criticism marriage. Editor’s note] 82 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 50. 83 Ibid, p. 381. 84 Ibid, p. 467. 85 As an Alien Resident [I know an Oxymoron when I see one] in this country the telephone connects me to my relatives in Europe. Yet I do not have a telephone at home. There have been too many distress calls; and I am not even considering the suggestive power of the telephone bell. I do not have a phone but have a neighbour relate messages to me. 86 The letters ‘Q’ and ‘Z’ fall out of the system. 87 I am sitting on two chairs [CATHEDRA]. This approach is inclusive rather than exclusive. 88 I understand theory in this context as a highly conditional construction which is 80

[EXAMPLES FROM SCIENTISTS? HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE, QUANTUMPHYSICS]

From this position emerges a difficult and complex relationship, instead of a clearcut and simple distance, between theory88 (scientific method) and practice (method of production). I understand the différance between subject (myself ) and object (Thing) as an irregular and non-linear network of lines...

constantly in a state of becoming. Theory in this sense is an engendering device, a generator [THE KNEE]. 89 Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago, Chicago, 1981), pp. 41-42. 90 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 478. 91 Ibid, p. 339. 92 Ibid, p. 529. 93 Ibid, p. 164. 94 Ibid, p. 59. 95 U has an oblique reference to the boardgame GO (and via this game also to computer memory), “the only game which has survived the trial of many centuries without any material change in its rules. It is three times as old as Chess, if we believe old Chinese sources, according to which the famous Chinese Emperor Shun, who reigned from 2255 until 2206 B.C., invented the game. [...] Another version ascribes the invention to U, a vassal of Emperor Ketsu, who is also said to have invented playing cards. This version seems more likely because it makes the game five hundred years younger and because U was a vassal and not an emperor. One is inclined to believe that in those old days, too, emperors left it to others to invent things for them.” Lasker, Edward, GO and GO-MOKU, The Oriental Board Games, p.xiii. 96 Nil 97 [pidgin English was the language spoken on the Tower of Babble] 98 For many years now pidgeons have occupied this marginal place.

“[Grammatology] complicates the boundary line that ought to run between the text and what seems to lie beyond its fringes, what is classed as the real. 89” ...that from far off looks deceptively like one line, simultaneously separating and connecting both domains. “We’re here to see connections.90” “You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn’t. Nature doesn’t; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.91” “Why write novels? Rewrite history. The history that then comes true [locally].92” “It was also the day I began to let myself be lulled by feeling of resemblance: the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else.93”

The Process of Construction Initially i transmogrified the thing via literal appropriation into a telephone switching panel that could be occupied by one of us, the homeless. Then, through another association, it became a newspaper article; columns, headlines and all. Later i thought it could be a crossword puzzle, maybe an acrostic. Even later i considered a particular kind of computer memory made of a network of intersecting wires with electrically charged or uncharged metal rings at the crossing points. Now I believe that it is all of the above, and more. Allegory becomes other, e labor ate d a pun by Jennifer Bloom er_in [=ire land, the angry country] her forthcoming book Desiring Architecture. “Yet in all these manuscripts, at one point or another, Desire appears, and the Object of Desire. It must be a trend.”94

The sigla of Finnegans Wake, here especially the [ , which stands for many things, is a placeholder. Sigla are fluid composites, irreconcilable undecidables [UNDESIRABLES]. The [ turns into the ‘c’ or ‘C’ or, by rotation into ‘u’ or ‘f ’ [ standing for everything that is unwanted, like parasites, the homeless, the poor, communists, ?]. The U95 has been in its past a v or V [Roman five] which is also related to f or F and W [FINNEGANS WAKE], the double-u, the I, aye, eye, and the other i, alter [older] i [‘EI’, German for ‘egg,’ The W is two you’s, as well as to you! In Finnegans Wake the [ also stands for Shem the penman who is the Other versus Shaun, the Same, the one who is able and Abel. Shem has good hearing and bad eyesight. He is deaf as Taub, which, with the appropriate e, as in Taube, becomes the pigeon97 in the gap between the architecture building and the stair-case building.98

Architexts What am i doing here?

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 383. Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 529. 101 ‘When trying to propose a model for an ideal text, current theories tend to represent its structure in terms of levels — variously conceived as ideal steps of a process of generation or of a process of interpretation (or both). So shall I proceed’. Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce, p. 12]. 102 multiplied times π to add another layer of undecidability. [π is another [Editor’s note] 103 Woody Allen, “the Metterling List,” Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p. 8 quoted by Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 532. 99

100

“Of course—I reminded myself on my way home—the idea is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it.99” “But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.100” What are the functions of the Ding? There are many ways to use this Thing. I have a notecard collection of descriptions, associations, word definitions, relevant numbers, and encryptions that describe tendencies of other elements which are related to the Thing. They describe the possibilities of use. Since August 1989 I have been trying to assemble these fragments into an object, i. e. superimpose and connect what the Thing is with what it does. So far I have found twenty possible identities or layers101 for the Thing. The translation from words to layers happened via an analogy of note-cards and layers. These layers and thus its uses are: I homeless shelter II phonebooth III catastrophe IV outhouse V fire escape VI parasite VII citation VIII tribune IX tower X scaffold

XI ruin XII sight XIII machine XIV site XV frame XVI mask XVII mark XVIII map XIX cell XX cage

There are more but I had to stop somewhere. Then in an attempt to undermine any preconceived notion of what this thing should ‘look’ like I translated the words on the note cards into numbers102 which might then be used to create an architecture or drawings or a text like this one, i.e. another existence of the twenty things. I realized soon though that twenty things were too much. This project is about an object[ive] so I kept the concrete elements. Now the list... “List No.5 6 undershirts 6 shorts 6 handkerchiefs has always puzzled scholars, principally because of the total absence of socks.103”

...looked like this:

104 Later, after a more conscious reading of the decision to use the phonebook as a generator I realized that in the North-American society at the end of the 20th century it seemed more appropriate to investigate a highly pervasive system of communication like the telephone rather than a relatively unique language like WASP English. Not the highground of exchange. 105 [Do you know about the evub in Washington D.C.? (In)visible urban construction. An evub renders public space private — a Jewish practice dating to Solomon. Editor’s note] 106 an oblique reference to Jennifer Bloomer’s three-four construction in her PhD dissertation. 107 Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, second edition.

I homeless shelter II phonebooth III catastrophe IV outhouse (V fire escape) is site VI parasite VII cite-ation VIII tribune IX tower X scaffold

XI ruin XII sight XIII machine XIV site XV frame XVI mask XVII mark XVIII map XIX cell XX cage

By chance104 I was wondering whether there were any other people in the Chicago Telephone Book that have my name or the name of the other people in my design studio. I found two Bloomers, seven Heilmans, five Hofers, fourteen Landrys, six LaRosas, two Mueckes, and seven Sapers. One way to make a link with Chicago would be to use the addresses from the telephone book and then make an architectural construction, a fabrication, an intervention in those places. Another possibility would be the use of the telephone or rather the telephone’s address, i.e. the telephone’s number as a literal device for the generation of the project.105 The seven-digit number, usually written as a three-four sequence106 could be the code for a three-dimensional form. I interpreted the first three digits as an x-y-z sequence (width-length-height) and the next four numbers as the four cardinal directions. This transductional method generated a three-dimensional frame that became the matrix/frame which accomodates the twelve different layers. communication, only exists because we mis-understand each other. Language is the vehicle for understanding and at the same time the very prevention of communication. This relationship intrigued me. It became the joint with the city. But i am getting ahead of myself. [RENE MAGRITTE]What are the rules [ASSOCIATION, REPLACEMENT], runes, rooms? [RED HERRING IN ZIP-LOC BAG, CHESTNUTS HIDDEN IN FELT BAGS, SOWN SHUT TRIANGLE FORM, PEA AS LEADER, ARIADNE’S THREAD, HANSEL UND GRETEL, LAURIE ANDERSON] Frame as supplement, cannot control, so supplement. Ornament displays a lack of architecture. Architecture can not, ornament can.

Writing as All Gory Thoth. (thºth, tºt) n. Egyptian Religion: the god of wisdom, learning, and magic, inventor of numbers and letters, and scribe of all the gods, represented as a man with the head either of an ibis or of a baboon [A DOG-FACED APE=PEA WITH A RED AND NAKED ASS ARSE]: identified by the Greeks with Hermes.107 [MERCURY, THERMOMETER, MESSAGE GOD, PHONEMAN, HERMES TRISMEGISTUS (ART OF MEMORY, F. YATES) PREDATES PLATO]

Architexts

108 Writing is ornament, supplemental to speech, allegorical. Writing is silent speech. Allegory takes its place in architecture between structure and ornament. The existence of ornament indicates a lack in architecture. Ornament can do what architecture cannot. Yet ornament is also a part of architecture. 109 Jennifer Bloomer in ASSEMBLAGE 5, p. 59. 110 Hélène Cixous. The Exile of James Joyce, p. 472. 111 the German word for poison. 112 LI, Character for COW from Chinese Dictionary. Roman numeral LI=51, Dr. Bloomerang’s birthyear. 113 James Joyce. Finnegans Wake, p. 214. 114 [LOCATE PHONEBOOTS IN LAKEVIEW] 115 This term was coined by Dr. Jennifer Bloomer in a bastardization of Deleuze’s and Guatari’s minor literature in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature . They describe minor literature as 1.It is that which a minority constructs within a major language, involving a deterritorialization of that language. [It is also] 2. Minor literatures [architectures] are intensely political: “[I]ts cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” In other words, in minor literatures [architectures] the distinction between the personal and the political dissolves. 3. Minor literatures [architectures] are collective assemblages; everything in them takes on a collective value. 116 Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 95.

This paper developed out of a need to wright l e t t e r s,108 to construct a need that is based partially on a lack of ordered memory or to put it differently, a saturation of the mind. If Shem or Mikesch is suspected of hoarding for the musey room,109 “his greed is for words, and this brings us back to the Socratic argument, for if he has such a ‘verbigracious’ appetite, it can only be because he was his bardic memory low.”110 There is no strategy and no overall plan of what this will be like when it is welldung. It is an assembly of small tactical steps that can be read and thus mis-read. Yet it does not fall into the trap of infinite regression either. The field of operations is this text, which is limited. What is this? This is a gift111ed poison, a trojan cow112 for Chicago. A poison and a present, a poisent, a Trojan “forehengist”113 horse shore that enters Chicago through the Lakeview telephone exchange.114 A gift implies a relationship between giver and receiver, author and reader. The receiver is expected to be thankful for being given, and vice versa the giver is expected to be thankful for being able to give to a receiver. A recyclocal relationship. An I-U relationship. If I=on then U=off. Superfishially this is a bipolar condition, well grounded into Western thought. But it is also a tripartite condition. The difference between I and U is the third part to the mpuzzle. Out of this dualistic principle grows my architecture, this archi-ecriture, this crooked text. This is a minor architecture,115 an illicit architecture, peanuts, an architecture that transduces and transmogrifies one thing into an-other thing. Both transduction and transmogrification connect the languages of architecture. I am concerned about three similar, but also different languages. One system consists of numbers, the other of words, and the third of architecture. If architecture translates one thing into an-other thing what happens when there is crosstransfertilization between the languages that generate architecture, words, and numbers? Relation-ships might appear, ships that connect, vessels that interact. The architecture consists of conditions of interdependence. ‘Transformation of the self must first take place in the potential of thought and mind. After this deep-rooted change, evolution can take place. There is no other possibility in my understanding, and this was perhaps too little considered by Marx, for instance. The idea of revolution coming from outer conditions, in the industrial field or the so-called reality of economic conditions, can never lead to a revolutionary step unless the tranformation of soul, mind, and will power has taken place.116

“However primitive these means were, it seems they had the power to move areas of feeling in people which until then had been fairly untouched by the most gruesome depictions of human suffering, illness, want, concentration camps, and so on. Our consciousness does not always have its seven senses coordinated. For many people causal meaning as opposed to acausal meaning is nonsense. In order to think in accordance with reality, both kinds of thinking are needed.117”

Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 92. Latin: Not by words but by things. 119 Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 105. 117 118

What is the orderment? What is the frame, the structure? A crosswordpuzzle, a structure of words that run horizontally and vertically, and into the page via overlay. The thing becomes a puzzle/muzzle... “non verbis sed rebus118” ...something that arrests, traps the routine, something that smells, fishy. The connections are homophones, similar sounds, similar letters, syn-phonic syllables, bare knuckles of words that become joints in the three-dimensional reality of the buildThing. What is re-peat-bogged? The connections which become codes for the under-standing, both intellectually and emotionally of the thing. On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where ar[chitecture] and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or questioning. The problem lies in the word ‘understanding’ and its many levels which cannot be restricted to rational analysis. Imagination, inspiration, ituition and longing all lead people to sense that these other levels also play a part in understanding. [M]y technique has been to seek out the energy points in the human power field, rather than demanding specific knowledge or reactions on the part of the public. I try to bring to light the complexity of creative areas.119 both intellectually and emotionally of the thing. What is masked by a word, what is masked by a joint, what is masked by architecture?

Shem is naturally sinister, for the left is the direction of Th’Other, of one who like Thoth is illegitimate. The right is for Shaun, the Same, who is seen as “Undivided reawlity,” the single cruelty of the “same Patholic”. Shem’s inferiority becomes a secret superiority and strength insofar as it is “the iside true inwardness of relaity” that is true. The white light of Shaun and the shining prism (prison) of Shem becomes mingled together, as man is “nother man, wheile he is asame” (Finnegans Wake, p. 356). The bitterness of the discussions in which Shem and Shaun confront each other is explained by their need to differentiate themselves and to attribute guilt to each other; yet because

Architexts they only have one non-identity made up of the coincidence of contraries, they are no sooner ditinguished from each other than they try to replace each other. Shaun claims for himself the gift of language, which is Shem’s, and Shem attempts to seduce the world of women who idolise Shaun.120

Hélèn Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, p. 474 Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 105. 122 Ibidem, p. 72. 123 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 459. 124 Ibidem, p. 530. 120 121

Shem is a sham which is Beuys as shaman. Just as Joyce in the development of both Shem and Shaun blurs their respective characteristics so do I blur the edges and corners, the dividing lines, the grapes, by operating on the difference between science and art. This difference becomes the link, couple, coupling and oslo, NOrWAY, the generator of change. The problem of material [BEUYS] the ma-ther of all things: “[I like] to bring about discussion of the human position at a critical time when materialist and rational ideas are still current, coupled with a loss of imagination, inspiration and understanding of other things. It’s a question again of Which Reality? Is it the limited materialist understanding of materia, or is it subtance? Substance for me is a greater issue and includes evolutionary power which leads ultimately to the real meaning of Materia, with its root in MATER (mother-as in ‘mother earth’), as one pole of spirituality while the other encompasses the whole process of development.121” “Fat is an ideal material for demonstrating the Theory, since it can exist as a physical example of both extremes, as a chaotic, formless and flowing liquid when warm, and as a defined and ordered solid when cold; a paradox that is compounded when it is placed in that most ordered of forms, a right angled corner or wedge.122” What follows now is a text about the layers. Eventually and as part of the process of building the Thing, this written text will partake in the built text and the built text will take part in the written text. As such this paper does not really exist here but is already and always was part of the Thing. “Not bad, not bad at all [...]. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.123” “Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize. [...] To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.124”

peanuts, an architecture that translates one thing into another thing. Translation [TRANSMOGRIFICATION]

125 126

connects languages. There are at least three similar, but also different languages. One of numbers, one of words, one of architecture. If architecture translates things into things then what happens when there is cross-trans-fertilization between the languages of architecture, words, and numbers? Relation-ships appear, ships that connect, vessels that interact, conditions of interdependence. Reference texts, tools for this bridging include but are not limited to Joseph Beuys’ Theory of Sculpture, James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake’s washerwomen section, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, Robert Harbison’s Eccentric Spaces, Jennifer Bloomer’s Desiring Architecture, etc. SEE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 95. ibidem p 92.

‘Transformation of the self must first take place in the potential of thought and mind. After this deep-rooted change, evolution can take place. There is no other possibility in my understanding, and this was perhaps too little considered by Marx, for instance. The idea of revolution coming from outer conditions, in the industrial field or the so-called reality of economic conditions, can never lead to a revolutionary step unless the tranformation of soul, mind, and will power has taken place.125 However primitive these means were, it seems they had the power to move areas of feeling in people which until then had been fairly untouched by the most gruesome depictions of human suffering, illness, want, concentration camps, and so on. Our consciousness does not always have its seven senses coordinated. For many people causal meaning as opposed to acausal meaning is nonsense. In order to think in accordance with reality, both kinds of thinking are needed.126 This Theory of Sculpture describes the passage of everything in the world, physical or psychological, from a chaotic, undeterminded state to a determined or ordered state. Chaotic [WRITING A HISTORY OF CHAOS, ESISABETH] is the state of raw material... [ materials which were chosen not for their clear ambiguity but because of their banality ]

...and unchanneled will power, characterized as WARM [TEMPERATURE, THERMOMETER]. Ordered is the state of material that has been processed or formed, symbolized by the heart [OUTHOUSE] sign of movement at the centre. Here it aquitres form and definition and appears in a crystal line state, represented in the diagram by a tetrahedron and characterized as COLD and INTELLECTUAL. If the process goes too far the crystal becomes a burnt-up, over-intellectualized ‘clinker’ [BRICK], and falls out of the system. Carried on to a psychological level, this is a diagram of those at one extreme who are motivated by the chaotic warmth of will power, those in the central area who are governed by feeling and the heart, and those who have reached the over-intellectualized pole of extreme theory.

Architexts Ideally a balance should be achieved, though the overriding tendency today is towards the intellectual pole. Balance, reintegration and flexible flow between the areas of thinking, feeling and will, all of which are essential, are the objective of the Theory. The moulding processes of art are taken as a metaphor for the moulding of society; hence, SOCIAL SCULPTURE. Fat is an ideal material for demonstrating the Theory, since it can exist as a physical example of both extremes, as a chaotic, formless and flowing liquid when warm, and as a defined and ordered solid when cold; a paradox that is compounded when it is placed in that most ordered of forms, a right-ang[E]led corner or wedge.127 We studio members have something in common with Chicago. We share our last name with another person in the Chicago Phonebook. Gifts are shared. And our namesakes in Chicago all have the Chicago Lakeview exchange in common. Chicago

Lakeview

127

ibidem p 72.

[ the Chicago Board of Trade [THE BUILDING TOPPED BY A 32â&#x20AC;&#x2122; STATUE OF CERES, GODDESS OF GRAIN, EGYPT?] trades in wheat, corn {corn has ears like hares or donkeys. It is also Korn, the grain, seed. Corn is also a horn[COWFOOT]y callosity of the epidermis, i.e. a horny hardening of the cuticle}, oats {Who is feeling h/er/is?}, soybeans, and orange juice (cfoj) ][ the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trades in cattle, feeder cattle, hogs {besides the obvious also a sheep about one year old that has not been shorn and the wool shorn from such a sheep, i.e. the first fleece, before it went the whole hog} , and pork bellies {the soft part where the guts are, the leather bellow belly, also the womb and the inside of anything [BALG,SACK]} ] [LITTLE SACKS FILLED WITH WHAT? TRIANGELN, MUSIK IN BAELGE, BELLOW?]

I translated the phone numbers, which are the numerical addresses of our counterparts, based on the x-y-x and N-E-S-W transformation, into a CAD program (Architrion II, 5.5).

Institute of Industrial Race Relations Internationale Vereinigung fĂźr Germanische Offenheit Dual Independent Map Encoding Cocuk Esirgene Kurumn Turkiye Central Circulation Blood Temperature Royal Institute of British Columbia Extraocular Norm Network High Gain Antenna Volume Papyri [THOTH] Oxorhynchus International Union of Local Authorities Logical Input Output Crossing

Xenophobic Joint Range Junction

Long version of last 4 digits (last 4 digits

Layer Name Phone # in # & letters) I homeless shelter II phonebooth Bloomer 1177/IIRR III catastrophe IV outhouse Heilman 1840/IVGO V fire escape Hofer 3163/DIME VI parasite Landry 2358/CEKT VII cite-ation VIII tribune IX tower Landry 2228/CCBT X scaffold Landry 7422/RIBC XI ruin Landry 3066/EONN XII sight XIII machine LaRosa 4428/HGAV XIV site XV frame Muecke 7696/POXO XVI mask Muecke 1851/IULI XVII mark XVIII map Saper 5109/LIOX XIX cell XX cage Saper 9575/XJRJ

Architexts

Cage/Map

Frame/Mask

Tower/Scaffold

Ruin/Machine

Fire Escape/Parasite

Phonebooth/Outhouse

Thing’s matrix disassembled in paired layers

Through a process of translation these twelve Chicago Lakeview phone numbers, which are the numerical addresses of our counterparts, turned into a computer drawing [ARCHITRION] which then transmogrified into the architectural fabrication of the Thing. Here are now the twelve layers of the object in written text form, at this point only juxtaposed with Joseph Beuys Stations. This will be elaborated upon later on with injections of celtic mythology (related via Beuys to Ireland and James Joyce Finnegans Wake), misread idioms (ala Joyce), the difference between digital and analog (a look at the other side of the computer which is what i am using right now), the ship of fools (related also to Madness and Civilization), Eco and Foucault’s Pendulum, Wittgenstein’s Zettel (a collection of pieces of paper, just like my b rain b ox, with thoughts on everything, thrown into a shoe box by Wittgenstein), and

Zilch Nil 130 Nil 131 Laurie Anderson in ‘Beautiful Red Dress [ADDRESS] from her all bum Strange Angels.

Well, I could just go on and on and on. . . But tonight I’ve got a headache131

128

129

Architexts LAYER 1

Terms like ‘insulator ‘, ‘ battery ‘ [batterbeat], ‘ transmitter ‘,’ receiver [bathtub, phone]’, are all derived from the passage and storage of physical energy. 132

g feoh wealth a ur aurochs station 1, Jennifer Bloomer 11 13 51 0scorpio, genitals Bloomer B 2500 NLAKEVWAV 248-1177 bathtub 1960 [ISOLATION [FELT FAT GREASE{HAIL MARY FWWAIT UNTIL THE HONEYING OF THE LOON} GREECE], ISLAND, RECEIVER, TELEPHONE] station 2 Pt Co Fe, 1948-72 [PLATINUM, COPPER, IRON] Double Fond, 1954 Fond ) + iron plate, 1957 phonebooth/Telephonzelle in foyer/hallway A machine in a cell, in an isolation cell. Above it hangs the silent loudspeaker which does absorb but which transmits nothing. When not in use the telephone is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here, no sound is possible and the telephone, like a prisoner, is condemned to silence [cell, mask, the secret block for a secret person in Ireland]. Silence is a magnetic tape of the sounds in a parking garage. A phonebooth is about isolation/insulation132, being an island. The insula[ROMAN SOCIAL HOUSING]ting material could be aliphatic, i.e. oily or fatty, resin, Elmer’s Woodglue. Phonebooths have telephones and phonebooks in them. They also have a door which opens toward the inside when you pull it out. Phonebooks are libraries of information, key of keys [ROSETTA]. They are the structure of us and the US. Phonebooks like telephones are about connections. They are also about the status quo. As soon as they are published they become inaccurate, just like maps. To read a phonebook you have to know the Latin alphabet, read from left to right and from up to down and you have to know that names are translated into numbers and vice versa. Phonebooths [PHONEBOOTS MERCURY/HERMES WINGS/ FEATHERS ON HEELS, BOOTS LEATHER WALDO, PHON E BOOTS, PHONEY BOOTS (IM)PEDIMENT FOOT CROOKED OEDIPUS FATHER AND SON?] have a machine inside, a telephone/ Telefon A working telephon is the physical indication of a network of millions [KERJILLIONS] of miles of cable (copper mostly, but also fiber optic) which facilitate communication to virtually any point on the globe, and some above and below. Yet the same lines that allow partial understanding also are cause for interference. A telephone line becomes its own enemy, a self destructive cell. The enemy lies within not without. [VICTOR HUGO QUOTE?] homeless shelter/Obdachlosenheim An appropriate shelter for the homeless addresses opportunity rather than fixed certainty. Shelters offer possibility, quite quietly, in the back alleys, the silent places [fire escapes offer escape. The Thing becomes an occupiable ornament. It is a construction that oscillates between structure in its task to support a potential inhabitant and ornament in its role as a supplemental attachment to an existing architecure [the fire escape].

Architexts LAYER 2

f thorn thorn [ROSE] d aesc ash [TREE OR FIRE RUIN?] station 3, Bob Heilman 5 4 63 4taurus [BULL, OX, BOUS, I.O., COW], neck Heilman Steve 2739 MAGNOLIAAV 281-1840

heilman Heilmann, the healing man, shaman, medicine man. He who works with supernatural powers as both priest and doctor. Grauballe Man, 1952 [PEAT BOG, IRELAND, BRAUNKOHLE, FOSSILIZED TREES] station 4 SaFG-SaUG, 1953/8 [SONNENAUFGANG, SONNENUNTERGANG, HONIGPUMPE, KASSEL 1982, ROSICRUCIAN, WESSEL, VESSEL, CROSS, BEE, ROSE, BUMBLE BEE (BUM BEE, BUMBY, BAMBY, STAG), FUZZY BODY, LITTLE WINGS, CAN’T FLY, ICARUS, DAEDALUS, FATHER SACRIFICING SON (FLYING TOO CLOSE TO SUN/AMON RA, WAX WINGS, ANGEL OF HISTORY/ HERSTORY), GOD SACRIFICING CHRIST, KILLING SUN, CASTRATION DREAM (FREUD)] outhouse/Plumpsklo in Bedroom [PREGNANT IN OUTHOUSE] h An outhouse [DIAGRAM FOR OUTHOUSE IS CHINESE/JAPANESE SIGN FOR ?] is a place to s it in, to defecate, to purify, to refine and to relief [RELIEF? GERMAN? LAYERS, NOT 3D NOT 2D] myself. The structure has an inverted u-shape geometry in plan section. The division line [LINE, INHABITED?, CRACK, ULMER] between above and below is the seat, the cathedra [THE ONLY PLACE THE CHESS KING WALKS TO, ONE STEP AT A TIME (AT A BOY!) PICTURE OF MIKESCH TAKING FIRST STEP]. The positioning with reargard to the horizontal dividing line is critical. Above is quite different from below. [QUOTE FROM F.PENDULUM.] In the US outhouses are as much a sign of being backwards as hanging your laundry out on a phone line [COPPER, FIBERGLASS, PHONE, COMMUNICATION, COMMUNION?, CATHOLICK CHURCH] to dry. Outhouses have halfmoons or crescents [HALF MOON AND HEART AS LINKING FRAME OF REFERENCE, DIFFERANCE], c-shaped holes cut into the door. These half moons [COW OVER, MOTHER GOOSE] are ornamental stars on the firmament [STRARS, ANGELS, QUOTE L.A.]. And strange angels which leave the Little Prince wondering where my brother went. Death caught him standing on a ladder [UDDER COW] and looking over the crow[IRELAND]ds [BLACK]. In Germany outhouses have hearts carved into the door [PHOTO OF ENTRUP OUTHOUSE? BEUYS T.O.S.]. Both halfmoons and hearts become windows [FRAME] to the outside of the outhouse. STUHL stool shit fat chair fat chair [SEAT, CATHEDRA, COW HOOF SHAPE?]

LAYER 3

b rad [WHEEL, MACHINE] riding h cen torch station 5, Nina Hofer 10 30 59 0scorpio, genitals Hofer James CHGOIL 327-3163 Virgin, 1961 station 6 Pythia Sibylla, 1959 Horns, 1960 [COW’S HOOF, CORNER, THERMOMETER, HOLLOW TUBES] fire escape/Feuertreppe in laundry room [FIRE CLEANS] A fire escape is allegorical, a supplement that supplies a lack, yet is extra, like ‘noise’ or pauses in John Cage’s music. Just when you thought you were safe. The danger of an escape. The f ire e scape, the f rage of th e scape goat PHARMAKOS, RELATED TO PHARMAKON, BOTH CURE AND POISON - SEE DERRIDA LA DISSEMINATION SECTION CALLED PLATO’S PHARMACY], violence, abused power. A fire escape has a latent importance. Its role starts with a catastrophic event. People inhabiting fire escapes at any other time are people you meet at night in a forest [FEAR, FOEHR FOREST, André Heller’s story of the wolf in the forest]. A fire escape is a ruin, abandoned but open for re-habitation, an opportunity without the second knock. From bel low [BALG] a fiery escape is a stairway to nowhere, a lacey tower of babeL [PHOTO OF CHICAGO FIRE ESCAPE TOWER, TOWER/HEIGHT] where even the first step is out of reach. Aside from this a fire escape is a social event. It does not impose, but wraps over, hangs out of buildings [LET IT ALL HANG OUT, PARASITE, HANGER-ON], attaches, barnaclelesque [SHELL, ENCRUSTED CRUSTATION? BOOK ON 19TH CENTURY ILLUSTRATIONS] Bou[BULL, TAURUS, HEILMAN]strophe don(key) !! [SOUSAPHONE, BRASS, (BOMBARDON, JACOPO BELBO, OPHELOCLEIDE)PHONE, TELEPHONE, GRAM ‘O’ PHONE] An escape for fire, a firescape, a landscape with fire. A fire place. A place for fire to escape the catching fire which hung without missing. This could be a play with fire with the implicit dangers that may set fire to some accepted ideas which are then under fire. That is the question: to be under or to be over fire? A fireplace is that part of the chimney (which allows fire to escape) which opens into a room and in which fuel is burned. No smoke without fire. A fireplace also contains fire and directs it. A fire escape is about catastrophe, disaster. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history sees progress as a pile of debris, trash, garbage that gets piled up in the back alleys of the cities, guarded by the fireescapes, petrified witnesses of catastrophe. It is dangerous to let too much garbage accumulate in the gar age. Danger of fire.

[PUT INTO INTRO]material/Material [BEUYS, JOSEPH] The mother of all things, i(n/m)-material or not. A major minor material: the popular poplar, part of the people, common, a soft hard wood. [ULME] Then there are also the metals, bloomers, [BEUYS], Platinum, Zinc, Copper (female), Iron (male), Phosphate (?), Brass, aliphatic resin, felt, fat.

Architexts

Architexts LAYER 4

z gyfu giving p wyn joy station 7, Wendy Landry 12 12 61 sagitarius, thighs Landry Ernest 3017 NDAMENAV 327-2358 [FIBONACCI SERIES 2358] Val, 1961 [VALLEY, TAL, DALE] Mountain king, 1961 Back support for a fine-limbed person (hare-type) of the 20th century AD, 1972 [HARE FELT, FELT HAIR, HERR] How to explain pictures to a dead hare lies in the combination of that title, which says much about our anxious need for explanations, with the ritual mask through which the identity of the man is psychologically obscured, and the intimate inclusion, where we are excluded, of an animal in a state of total vulnerability.133 station 8 Rubberized box, 1957 [ASPHALT, ISOLATION, INSULATION] Fat chair, 1964 parasite/Parasit [BARNACLE] in living room Parasites [SYCOPHANT, FIG SHOWER, FIG FIG LEAF, PROTECTION, MASK, GIF-T; ALSO MICHEL SERRES, THE PARASITE] are uninvited [UNDESIRABLE] guests that eat at another parasite’s, the host’s, table to. They feed beside, they hang onto each other [FIRE ESCAPE], bungling sycophants. They are beside, near, beyond and aside but never right there. They always miss each other, like an open triangle [MAPPING, FIELD DAY FOR THE MAPMAKER, EASTERN EUROPE] that can never be closed [CONTAMINATED TRIANGLE, TIP OF ERROR, ARROW, EROS, CUPID, STUPID].

133 Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 10.

cite-ation/Zitat [WHAT MIGHT BE A PARA-CITATION?] To summon someone before a court. Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear u! A citation brackets, puts into shackles before the judgement. It denies judgement. A quote removes responsibility, ruptures at the same time that it makes a link. Anything can be cited by putting it into brackets or ‘ ‘. Yet even without ‘ ‘ writing is always citation. Every word that is written here stands already in a dictionary, except hjsav eioqv fej hjqbcuryqvb bn/M’ p, which stands already in Jorge Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’. [QUOTATION OF LIBRARY OF BABEL, BABEL, OTHER LANGUAGES,

MORE LANGUAGES, LANG WITCHES, QUOTATIONS OF WITCHES ON THE WALL]. Let us quote that again: “hjsav eioqv fej hjqbcuryqvb bn/M’ p.” A citation provides a frame [FRAME] for that which is cited. The thing becomes an architectural frame through a translation [TRANSMOGRIFICATION] of a linguistic frame. tribune/Tribüne [ANNOUNCING ACTION, SCAFFOLD CONNECTION, THE TRIBUNE A CHIEF OF A TRIBE, CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE, GATHERING OF PEOPLE, MASS PSYCHOLOGY, THE COLUMN, ADOLF LOOS (TO LOOSE) DORIC, DOORIC, D’OR HICK COLUMN] A tribune is close to a tri angle that went jingle jangle. The Dubliners know more about this than i. But, the triangle is, in its idealized form, a closed plane figure with three sides and three angles, tri angles, drei Ecken. Mein Hut der hat drei Ecken, drei Ecken hat mein Hut; und hat er nicht drei Ecken, dann ist das nicht mein Hut. There exists a more interesting triangle than the closed one. The musical percussion instrument, also called Mike Ancientcampo’s tubular bell [TRIANGEL, THREE FISHING RODS, FISH, ARCHANGEL, LUCIFER, LIGHT], that consists of a steel rod bent into a trijugular scape, open at one corned. This instrument is struck, given a blow [OTHER WORDS] with a small straight steel rut. There is also the problem of triangulation in map-making where an imaginary triangle is never closed but made to appear to be closed. And finally the love triangle where two people are in love with a third peeple person.134 [INTO MATERIAL SECTION, MAKE LIST OF MATERIALS?] A bound pile of newspapers could be called Battery [MORE FROM FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM ON ELECTRICITY] flat-high. A compact battery of ideas. If all that were left of this century were this pile of newspapers, it would give more information about our civilization and society that remains to us from many previous centuries.135 134

Nil ibidem, p ?.

135

Architexts LAYER 5

e haegl hail n nyd need station 9, Wendy Landry 12 12 61 sagitarius, thighs Landry John T 3660 NLAKESHRDR [WATER] 883-2228 Snowfall, 1965 [WATER, STEAM, ICE, ELEMENTS] station 10 Spade with two handles, 1965 [IRON AND WOOD, PIQUE, CARDS ANSELM KIEFER, HIGH PRIESTESS, TAROT, KING OF HEARTS [OUTHOUSE] SPADE, PLAYING CARDS, PIK, PIQUE, PIKE{WASSERMANN, AQUARIUS, NEPTUN, TRIAD, TRIANGLE}, SCORPIO ZODIAC M, INSANE, NOT SANE, SOANE] 84 tower/Turm [BABBLE, CIPHER, CODE AND AN CODE, N CODE, ENCODE] in living room, womb There is the tower [LIBRARY TOWER NAME OF THE ROSE, JORGE BORGES’ LIBRARY OF BABEL, CHICAGO MARQUETTE LIBRARY, WINDMILL TOWER DON KEY CHOTE (CHOKEJOKE, YOKE, OX, BULL), TOWER FOR CONTEMPLATION AND OBSERVATION SAMMONS DESIGN 4, TOWER, ADVANTAGEOUS POSITION, BUT ALSO VISIBLY VULNERABLE, STICKING OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB] of bab b le. The cassette recorder inserts itself into this level to attest to the confusion, interference between lines of communication [MORE].

LAYER 6

i is ice W ger season station 11, Wendy Landry 12 12 61 sagitarius, thighs Landry Ronald 428 WBELDENAV 975-7422 Iron chest from the action Vacuum <> Mass, 1968 station 12 felt objects, 1964-67 [FELT AND FAT, GREASE, AXLE GREASE UNDERARM GREASE, UNDERARM IS A JOINT, A CORNER, GREASE IN CORNER {HAIL MARY IN FINNEGANS WAKE}, ISOLATION, INSULATION, INSULA, CASULA, CASUBLA] Felt attracks and absorbs what surrounds it. Felt is a natural material, built up of layer upon layer of animal hair, rabbit fur being the best. The layers are compressed to give it density, and it has no warp or weft like woven materials. Hence its flexibility [feltxibility].136 scaffold/Ger端st [BACKBONE, KNOCHEN] living room, womb [NE UTER, KRELL, CHORA WAX] A scaffold holds something up, supports. But what is supporting what? Does the scaffold hold up the structure it hangs from or does it have some other interesting things to do? Hardened (old?) criminals are usually executed through hanging on an elevated platform which is called a scaffold. This event can be watched by spectators sitting [SEAT, CATHEDRA] on a raised platform or stage, another scaffold. The word scaffold seems to have one of its origins in the old french word escadafaut which is close to catafalque, a raised structure on which the body of a deceased person lies in state. A scaffold is thus simultaneously a place for watching life, a place for the literal (letteral) and figural trans-lation from life to death in a vertical manner, and finally one for death in the horizontal. One size fits all. For materials wood seems to be the choice. The Latin word catafalicum means a wooden siege tower [TOWER OF BABBLE, TOWER].

ibidem, p 74.

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Architexts LAYER 7

y eoh yew q peorth tune station 13, Wendy Landry 12 12 61 sagitarius, thighs Landry Tim 3639 NOAKLEYAV 525-3066 Fond II, 1968 [FONT, FOUNTAIN?] station 14 Lavender filter, 1965 [PERFUME, SMELL, VIOLE(N)T COLOUR, GAUZE WOUND BEUYS] ruin/Ruine in living room, womb [QUOTE W. B. ON RUIN AND ALLEGORY] A ruin is an incomplete, ambiguous thing. A ruin makes place for thoughts to dwell in and what i am doing here is a fruitless endeavor. Ruins can not be defined with words. But, they can be de-scribed. A ruin wants to be romantic [DEFINITION, FINIT?], fanciful [MORE], unpractical, the opposite of what major architecture pretends to be. It allows indirect, oblique use. A ruin wants to be about the silence after destruction which is the second movement in Beethoven’s 7th symphony or the cello solo in King of Hearts after a rowdy night or the second movement in Mozart’s last Clarinet concerto. A ruin could be the debris left over after the storm which Walter Benjamin and Hänsel call progress has moved blindly into the future. A ruin leaves by its incompleteness room for interpretation. It allows for a trans-lation into an unknown language. Usually ruins are made out of stone which is what one of James Joyce’ washerwomen turns into after an unsuccessful attempt to communicate across a moving dividing line, the river [MORE]. Setting off to see a building that we find has been demolished produces a different shock from a ruin’s. A demolished building cannot be reconstructed by imaginative effort, so when the trip is over we have seen the surroundings but not the object, a diagram of the building, and now know the edges from experience, the center from photographs.137 [RUIN?] From Van Eyck to Bruegel they are all creating little worlds, even worlds within worlds, further ranges of diminishment. They think in separate bits and try to put as many of them as they can in every picture. Most of them work very little by suggestion, so that to be effective a thing must be clearly present. In the best ones the details swallow the whole to present an image of plenitude like that of all creation, where you can lose yourself completely in a [SCALELESS, SKINNED FISH] corner selected at random.138 sight/Sicht Sight relates to observation with one’s eyes. Also cross hairs? [CROSSED HAIRS, HAIRS, HERREN OUTHOUSE, CROSSED HARES CHROMOSOMES, CHROME ‘O’ SOANE’S, MALE XY, FEMALE XX] Robert Harbison in Eccentric Spaces, p 130. 138 ibidem, pp 133 and 134.

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LAYER 8

e eolh-seg eel [HORSE HEAD, COW] grass s sigel sun station 15, Julio LaRosa 10 27 64 0scorpio, genitals LaRosa Gail 2256 NORCHARD 327-4428 Warmth sculpture, 1968 station 16 Site, 1967 Fond III/3, 1979 machine/Maschine in garage [MACHINE IN GARDEN?, MACHINE, CAR, BICYCLE] [QUOTE FROM VITRUVIUS vitrvvivs VITRVVIVS The Thing is a machine [CRANK, THROW JENNIFER]. Deus Ex Machina? A machine is mechanistic, like a clockwork without orinjes. Cogs, wheels ‘n’ deals, cogging the dice and die (!) Walküre. The question has to be asked. Who is in control? Who is the counter roll? Who is countre encountering whom? The meet against the roll. Rotula, the wheel of a clock. A time piece, a time machine. Wheel from hweol and wiel, also hjol and kyklos, cycle. The wheel in control, or better even the pendulum, hanging down loosely [PARASITE], swinging freely, like the reader of Finnegans Wake oscillating between Shem and Shaun, vascillating, fluctuating, driven by, counter-rolled controlled by the thing’s weight, hung from itself like Baron von Münchhausen. The pendulum stays undecided, hangs, suspends, overhangs, juts, a pending pendant. A pendant, the hanging ornament, a hanging electrical lighting fixture (a hang lamp), but also a match, parallel, a companion and counterpart. Maybe a pennant for you sailors, a hanging length of rope having a block or thimble secured to its free end. The thimble thing. Yet a pendulum is also a piece of a clock, a piece of a time piece [VITRUVIUS QUOTE]. Architecture like the pendulum depends still on gravity? The cable drum turns into a storage device of energy, a battery, a gravity battery [BATTERY, BEATING, SCHLAGEN HAKEN (HARES, HAIRS) HOOKS, BEATING].

Architexts James Joyce wife was Nora Barnacle whom he met in 1904 [IRISH, CELTIC CONNECTION]. 140 Laurie Anderson? Moby Dick, melville? 141 Caroline Tisdall in Joseph Beuys, p 101. 139

LAYER 9

T Tir star b beorc poplar station 17, Mikesch Muecke11 9 59 0scorpio, genitals Muecke M 2730 NPINEGRVAV 929-7696 Fond IV/4/IV, 1979 [MATER I AL SOURCE OF ENERGY? CHEMICAL ELEMENTS, CHYMICAL WEDDING OF CHRISTIAN ROSENCREUTZ] station 18 Infiltration-homogen for grand piano, 1966 frame/Rahmen [BALOONFRAME] in bathroom [relieve (relief from standing under, understanding) through frame, seat? shit, sit] A frame encloses, becomes a border (guard) and is sometimes pretty [ORNAMENT]. Frames have been used in architecture in Fachwerk, windmill, and half- or quarter-timbered wood construction. A frame is the friend of a dictator/ess. It is the order upholding glass jars under the feet of Joseph Beuys’ table. A frame is a skeleton that limits but also supports. It acts as a spine, a Rücken der rückt und auf sich zu-rück gehtm [HEIDEGGER, HEATH TILLER]. A sp(l)ine is a Rückrat, a back wheel or fifth wheel, a back bone made of bare bones that turn into bare knuckles and barnacles139. Every whale has a bone-white [JENNIFER, GWENDOVIEVE? WHITE FAIR, JENNIFER, PHONEBOOTH] skeleton [FRAME], bonewhite like a bathtub, whale-white,

What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish, and a FastFish, too? 140 like Walter Benjamin’s angled angel [HAKENSCHLAGEND]. A frame is a welsh-rabbit, a strange whale skeleton [WALPOLE, HORACE, SCALES ON A FISH, MAMMAL] that carries a celtic cross [ROSICRUCIAN] in the honour of Joseph B [THE SECOND JOSEPH, THE SECOND JENNIFER, THE SECOND JORGE, THE SECOND SECOND, SECUNDA SECUNDAE THOMAS AQUINA]. A frame is used as a device to make limits, it frames an in-between thing. Frames are used as locators to frame views that are fragmented, segmented. A frame puts the focus on something with cross-Beuys’ hares which are rodentlike mammals of the genus Lepus, of the family Leporidae. Hares have long ears [THEY CAN HEAR WELL], much like donkeys, a divided upper lip [A HARELIP IS A CONDITION WHICH CAUSES A SPEECH IM PED IMENT, FOOT IN MOUTH, MOUF?, RUN IMPEDIMENT THROUGH TEXT, PARASITIC READING], unlike donkeys, and long hind limbs adapted for leaping, making associations with the mind behind. Hares [PLAYBOY BUNNY, SCAN (DINA VIA) AND PUT IN] are the jumping words of a crossword-puzzle or the chess horse [COW LAURIE ANDERSON] that jumps four-fold hare-like [HAKEN SCHLAGEND, BEATING THE HOOKS, WHEN FLEEING] Hagen Liebenknecht: Do you know the legends in which the hare appears? In Ireland such legends can be traced back to the eightH century. In them the hare is usually a spiritual fIgure who works both for and against human beings in a strange way [Monty Python’s Holy Grail]. The hare relates more to the lower part of the body, so in particular he has strong affinity to women, to birth and to menstruation, and generally to chemical transformation of blood [RED]. That’s what the hare demonstrates to us all [YOU’LL] when he hollows out his form: the movement of incarnation. The hare incarnates himself into the earth, which is what we human beings can only radically achieve with our thinking: he rubs, pushes, digs himself into Materia (earth).141 Dürer made a woodcut of a hairy rabbit [FUR, FELT, I FELT, YOU FELT, HESHEIT FELT, SCAFFOLD]

fuzzy was s/he was a bear fuzzy was s/he had no hair fuzzy was s/he(m)?, which is a smaller hare. There exists a game called hare and hounds which is played outdoors. The hares start off early on a long run, scattering small pieces of paper known as fragments or Zettel [WITTGENSTEIN] called s cent (penny/copper/female). The other players are the hounds who follow the

marked trail in an effort to catch the hares [USE A RE A D HERRING TO TURN THE HOUNDS OFF THE SCENT, NEED RE A D HERRING IN ZIP LOC BAG] before they reach a designated point. You don’t want to be the hare, unless you run faster than the hounds or you know some tricks about tricking. Hänsel und Gretel use pieces of paper, maybe nuts [LITTLE NUTS, SOANE’S DOME, HANGING ORNAMENT, PARASITE], rocks, peas, or pebbles, to mark [MARK, YELLOW MELLOW POSTIT NOTES] their trodden path like Ariadne without a thread [MORE]. A frame is a broken frame [PICTURE, PICT, SCOT].

LAYER 10

m eh horse [COW] m man man station 19, Mikesch Muecke 11 9 59 0scorpio, genitals Muecke Vance K 1933 WOAKDLAV 871-1851 The Pack, 1969 [COYOTES, JACKALS, DOGS] station 20 Fat up to this level I, II, 1971 [FAT, ISOLATION] mask/Maske in bathroom [CLEAN MASK, FACE MASK, DEGEN ON MAKE UP, DEGEN SCREEN FOR FACE TO PROTECT, PROTECT WOUND, GAUZE AND HAIR] A mask hides and reveals. We try to hide beneath an infinite number of masks. Layers upon layers, like onion skins, fried, or Soviet woo d olls. A mask prevents an identity check and allows for different roles to be played, different genders to be explored. A mask is a megaphone, not a telephone. It amplifies sound like a funnel. The mask turns into a propaganda tool, an ancient loudspeaker that was used in Greek drama to throw forth [THROW/LEVER] sound. Masks are maid out of paper, porcelain, cardboard, clay, wood and 52 other materials. Masks are made for carnivals in Venice, Venezia and Venedig. A hide acts as a hair’s follicle, secreting, oozing secret e s.

mark/Zeichen/Wasserzeichen A trace if i ever seesaw one. D Mark. Bones, white with watersign [MORE ON TRACES, MARKERS, BOJEN, HEULBOJEN IM NEBEL, FOEHR-DAGEBUELL]

Architexts LAYER 11

l lagu water i ing ing station 21, Craig Saper 5 22 60 5? Saper J 600 WDIVRSYPKWY 883-5109 Hearth II, 1978 [FIRE PLACE, FIRE ESCAPE, NINA] station 22 Tram stop, 1976 [AKIRA KUROSAWA, DO DES GA DEN, FOOL, BELLS ON FOOL’S CAP, ACTOR?] map/Landkarte in kitchen [COOKING, PRODUCING, MIXING INGREDIENTS, LABELS ON FOOD PRODUCTS?] A map is a diagram, an outline, a frame of reference, also a device like a machine, a tool. A map is plotted, step by step, following a theater scenario. A conventional map exists in the second dimension, i.e. an image of the third dimension collapsed into the flat wörld. A map in the conventional sense shows one of the gods’ view of the world or the view of an astro/cosmonaut, a star sailor world sailor. The argonaut142 Jason (with the hockey puck mask) searches for the golden fleece [ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE, TOISON D’OR, DOOR, GOLD, GOLDEN DOOR] with the help of Argus, the 100-eyed giant who set to guard the heifer [HOFER, ADELINE], feeder cættle Io. After his death (Argus’) his eyes were transfered to the pea [GREEN PEAS, GREEN BEHIND YOUR EARS, GOOD HEARING, GOOD HERRING, GREEN HERRING]cock’s [-nut’s] tail [PEANUT OIL]. The hog fleece is the furst (sick!) skin of a ewe that fleeced someone’s pockets. A shifty fleece. A reversed map shows the view of a fish or someone deep-sixed looking up. A reverse ceiling plan. The question ‘What does it re-veal?’ brings us to quadro-peds. Sheep, cows, and (land-scape-)goats [pharmakos]. A map gets read when we are lost or when we try to get somewhere, usually in a hurry. When we are not completely lost, when there is still hope, we try to orient ourselves with the having-been-lost of someone else. A map is laminated paper [PARCHMENT, SKIN OF SHEEP]. Greased paper becomes transparent and lasts longer than the ungreased, unwaxed kind. Pergamon pergament [PERGAMON, SOLOMON, KING?] and firmament. Terra firma & terra incognita [same and other].. Maps give a kind of false intimacy to adjacent towns like the pleasure we have from seeing a nearby but noncommunicating nest in Bruegel, and we imagine their proximity into a relationship, as if the eyes of these towns could meet, or they call each other over a fence [COMMUNICATION, FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS].143 The problem of naming and numbering in maps brings us to the problem of meaning. Fifth Avenue and Thirtysecond Street are no more true names than designations for pieces of music like Opus 94 or Concerto 21, and tell only of relations, not of natures.144 Meaning [CONTENT? HEIDEGGER?] which is nature, i.e. what is this thing like, how does it work, how do i relate to it versus non-meaning like how tall is it? Quality versus quantity. catastrophe/Katastrophe [PHONEBOOTH] Catastrophe and the telephone have a close relationship. A telephone is about communication and lack thereof. The lines, whether they are glassfiber [MATERIAL/BATHTUB] or copper [FEMALE] are not only facilitating communication but they are also preventing the same and the other.

cell/Zelle The secret cell for a secret person in Ireland [BEUYS]

The Narrenschiff, of course , is a literary composition, probably borrowed from the old Argonaut cycle, one of the great mythic themes recently revived and rejuvenated, acquiring an institutional aspect in the Burgundy Estates. Fashion favored the composition of these Ships, whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them , if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth.[...] It is [also] possible that these ships of fools, which haunted the imagination of the entire early Renaissance, were pilgrimage boats, highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization, pp. 7, 8, 9. 143 Robert Harbison in Eccentric Spaces, p ? 144 ibidem, p. ? 142

LAYER 12

e ethel home d daeg day station 23, Craig Saper 5 22 60 5ZODIAC???????? Saper Jack 444 WFULRTNPKWY 883-9575 Tallow, 1977 [TALG, WAX, FAT. FETT, LARD, OIL] station 24 Honey pump, 1977 [HONIGPUMPE, OUTHOUSE] cage/Käfig in kitchen [EATING, CONSUMING, HANSEL IN WITCHE’S CAGE, PEAS, CHICKEN BONE, NARRENKAFIG? LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, POLLES?] A cage is about the fear of getting trapped. A cage keeps animals inside or outside. Animals here include also the human animal. A cage is good only when it is closed yet animals get used to being caged in like the lion in the movie King of Hearts who will not leave his cage even though the door is left open. A cage is like a cell which traps somebody/thing. Cages should have thick walls to isolate/insulate whatever is caged in from what is not [WOMB, WOOM, ROOM]. A cage, like a corner, sets limits, it defines a place, a locus, a can. [OUTHOUSE] Hänsel, brother of Gretel, lived in a cage for a while and used a chicken bone to fool his only love, the wicked witch. If we believe Laurie Anderson both Hänsel und Gretel are alive and well, and living in Berlin. There are similarities between cages and baskets [BASKETS AS PART OF STORY OF ORIGIN, CORINTHIAN COLUMN, SOMETHING TRAPPED INSIDE GETS OUT]. Both tend to have a woven texture and both act as screens [MASK]. Mach kein Theater! Cages have been used to jail others. They confine, enclose and restrain. They also trap, become a contraption [SHUT YOUR TRAP, BE QUIET. TRAP = MOUTH, DOOR]. Looking at the tectonics of cages we find that they can be read as skeletons with joints between members. Like a body without flesh cages are permeable. The border, the skeleton of the cage oscillates between inside and outside. A cage imposes spatial control in lieu of mental control. Physical restraint as a strapping into something. A cage is also a metaphor for the condition of life. We all are trapped in cages, waiting to get out, but not able or willing to. Like the Bladerunner we are helpless. Where am i going? Where do i come from? How much time do i have? And there is John’s Cage, Joe Change, for the birds. bathtub/Badewanne [THE BIG CONNECTOR, A SWITCH {TELEPHONE?}, SWATCH? INHERENT DUALITY, DIRT CONTAINER AND PURIFIER, DEAD CAT IN ENTRUP IN BATHTUB, SIDENOTE?] heimliche/unheimliche things (secret/homely/uncanny/unhomely) toaster/Toaster clock/Uhr fireplace/Kamin A bathtub is an untrustworthy ship in which the fools145 of Sebastian Brant set to sea. INSCRIBE IN BATHTUB AS RUNE INSCRIPTION

145 Ships of Fools crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.’ Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization, p. vii.

Architexts

Thing in 1. vertical mode (vertical circulation) and 2. horizontal mode (at rest, for sleeping)

Thing in site in Chicago back alley

Architexts

Architexts Von fasnacht narre Ich weiß noch ettlich faßnacht narren Die inn der dorenkapp beharren Wann man heilig zyt sol vohen an So hyndern sie erst yederman.146

Sebastian Brant in Das Narrenschiff, canto 110, p ?. 147 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 459. 148 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p. 530. 146

The bathtub becomes a link between the layers and the possibility for under-standing the thing. Like the columns it connects vertically. Formally through its u-shape it receives on the inside, and rejects on the outside. [A contaminated triangle (a sullied delta), fails to close and thereby lacks conclusion. Also forms (or is informed by) a bent [, see? As a vessel — a jug —, it holds things. It has a continuous inner/outer surface. Goes ‘DING’ when struck. Editor’s note] Not bad, not bad at all [...]. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.147 Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize. [...] To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.148

Cranking my way up.

The Thing in situ, hanging in its temporary place from the second floor of the University of Florida Architecture building. No permits were sought, nor any received for this event.

Bibliography

Allen, George. The Way Things Work Book Of The Computer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Andersen, Jørgen. The Witch on the Wall. London: George Allen & Unwin Publishers Ltd., 1977. Atherton, James S. The Books at the Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Bain, George. The Methods of Construction of Celtic Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Benjamin, Walter. Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. Bock, Hans-Michael. Über Arno Schmidt. Rezensionen vom “Leviathan” bis zur “Julia”. Zürich: Haffmans Verlag, 1984 Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschiff. Nach der Erstausgabe (Basel 1494), mit den Zusätzen der Ausgaben von 1495 und 1499 sowie den Holzschnitten der deutschen Originalausgaben, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968. Braude, Jacob. Origins and Firsts. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1965. Braude, Jacob. Proverbs, Epigrams, Aphorisms, Sayings and Bon Mots. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1965. Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. New York: The Viking Press, 1968. Campbell, Joseph and Robinson, Henry Morton. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1947. Cixous, Hélèn. The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally Purcell. New York: John Calder Publishers Limited, 1976. Davies, W. V. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Deavours, Cipher A. and Kruh, Louis. Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis. Norwood, MA: Artech House, Inc., 1985. Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe. Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981. Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989. Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965. Gautruche, Pierre. The Poetical Histories, London 1671. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976 Gianni, Benjamin and Shiles, Bryan and Kemner, Kevin. Dice Thrown. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989. Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd. Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. Boulder: Shambala, 1979. Goscinny and Uderzo. Asterix chez les Bretons. Neuilly-Sur-Seine: Dargaud, 1966. Goscinny and Uderzo. La Serpe d’Or. Neuilly-Sur-Seine: Dargaud, 1962.

Architexts

Glushkov, Viktor M. Introduction to Cybernetics. New York: Academic Press, 1966. Green, Miranda, Ph.D., F.S.A. The Gods of the Celts. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986. Grover, Eulalie Osgood. Mother Goose. New York: Derrydale Books, 1984. Harbison, Robert. Eccentric Spaces. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1988. Heise, Kenan and Frazel, Mark. Hands on Chicago. Chicago: Bonus Books, 1987. Huygens, Christiaan. The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks. Translated with notes by Richard J. Blackwell. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986. Joyce, James. A Shorter Finnegans Wake. Edited by Anthony Burgess. New York: The Viking Press, 1967. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: New American Library, Inc., 1962. Lasker, Edward. Go and Go-Moku. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960. Landsverk, O. G. Ph.D. Ancient Norse Messages on American Stones. Glendale, CA: Norseman Press, 1969. Locks, Gutman G. The Spice of Torah-Gematria. New York: Judaica Press, 1985. MacCulloch, J. A. The Religion of the Ancient Celts. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911. Macey, Samuel L. Clocks and the Cosmos. Time in Western Life and Thought. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980 Mahon, Rev. Michael P. Ireland’s Fairy Lore. Boston, MA: Thomas J. Flynn & Company, 1919. McHugh, Roland. The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1976. Megill, Alan. Prophets of Extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. No author. Memory and Storage. Alexandria, Virginia: Time Life Books, 1987. Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1964. Partridge, Eric. Origins, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Greenwich House, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983. Rees, Alwyn and Rees, Brinley. Celtic Heritage. Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Oppositions, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1981. Rutherford, Ward. The Druids and their Heritage. London: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1964. Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise. Gods and Heroes of the Celts. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1949. Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1987. Thomas, Charles. Celtic Britain. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1986 Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Ulmer, Gregory L. Applied Grammatology, Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jaques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Ulmer, Gregory L. ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’ in The Anti-Aesthetic. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Walpole, Horace. Hieroglyphic Tales (1785). Los Angeles, UCLA: The Augustan Reprint Society, 1982. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Berkeley: University of California Press: 1967 Wright, Dudley. Druidism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Ceramics Ceramics

Handbuilding

As a counterpoint to the heavy theory/practice lifting in studio I decided to take some ceramics courses during the summer. On the following pages are pieces I designed and built during a handbuilding ceramics class where every object had to be made using non-turning techniques.

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12 Clay tiles, arranged (4â&#x20AC;? x 4â&#x20AC;?); stacked pieces of clay

Biomorphic flying forms, made from leftover handbuilding clay

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Northeast corner tile of 12 Clay tiles (4â&#x20AC;? x 4â&#x20AC;?)

Ceramics

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Double-axe vessel, below and right, based on Minoan precedent; coiled clay

Ceramics

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Alien Invasion plate, details; built-up pieces of clay slipped onto large plate (24â&#x20AC;? diameter)

Ceramics Alien Invasion plate

Ceramics

Postcard storage, based on a grainery seen in the book â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Prodigious Buildersâ&#x20AC;?

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Postcard storage, details

Postcard storage, in use

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Postcard storage, details

Ceramics

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Large clay beaker, based on Egyptian precedent

Ceramics

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Teatro del Mundo Clay Cookie Jar, based on Aldo Rossiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architectural piece

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Teatro del Mundo, detail (above) and lid (below)

Architexts Le Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers or The Museum of the Arts and Trades in Washington D.C.

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Studio brief by Robert Segrest

Site research

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Projective site section

e mall

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n of projectiv

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Negative of 1/2” = 1’ scale model

Architexts Le Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers or The Museum of the Arts and Trades in Washington D.C.

Pretext

his paper is the written part of a semester-long studio project that took place in the graduate architecture program at the University of Florida in the fall of 1990. The studio critic was Professor Robert Segrest. In the areas with which we deal here cognition [Erkenntnis] comes as a lightning. The text is the long reverberating thunder.”1 “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhouna wnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!2 The text is not a replacement for the architecture it attempts to interpret but, in Derrida’s sense, a ‘supplement’ or an extra;3 it is necessary for a more meaningful understanding of the architecture it represents, but it is not vital. The construction can stand on its own. One advantage of a written paper, however, is that it can demonstrate the different possible readings of an architecture that is multivalent. As such this paper is about communication and its necessary pendant, miscommunication. What is spoken may not be heard as intended on the other side. James Joyce wrote about one such problem of communication in his seminal book Finnegans Wake describing the vain attempts of two washerwomen to communicate across a dividing river.

Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. Band V: 1021. 2 James Joyce. Finnegans Wake: 3. 3 This brings us to allegory and writing: Gregory Ulmer quotes Craig Owens from “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” in October 12 (1980): 84, in The Anti Aesthetic: 95, as saying that if “allegory is identified as a supplement [‘an expression externally added to another expression,’ hence ‘extra,’ yet supplying a lack], then it is also aligned with writing, insofar as writing is conceived as supplementary to speech.” However, I am not suggesting that writing a text is like making architecture. There are similarities but to me the physicality of occupation in a built ‘text’ with all my senses is very different from the act of reading a literary text. 4 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 215. 5 ‘Origin’ in Benjamin’s understanding as the emergence “out of the process of becoming and disappearing”, quoted by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing: 8. 6 Note that James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake was written in approximately the same time frame, and partially in the same city, namely Paris, as Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk; the former between 1922-1939, the latter from 1923 until Benjamin’s untimely death in 1940.

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of.4

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That which is written here, and that which is built out there as a ½-inch-is-equal-to-1-foot scale model, is as much about circulation of information across a mediating channel as it is about interruption and interference of that information. The origin5 of this paper lies in the question of whether Walter Benjamin’s last literary work, the Passagenwerk6—a vast collection of essays and quotations critical of early twentiethcentury society via an allegorical interpretation of nineteenth-

century northern European culture—could be appropriated as a generator for an architecture critical of late-twentieth century culture in the USA. This question coincided with a studio project to design on the Mall in Washington D.C. a Museum of the Arts and Trades that already exists as a real building—more precisely as a converted Gothic church in Paris, the Musée des Arts et Metiers—and as a literary construction in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum. The intersection of these three trajectories became more problematic through three other influences that contain, for reasons that become apparent later, the Goose game, the game of Pall Mall, and the Mosquito.

Museum Site

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Overlay of an early survey of Washington D.C. onto an aerial photograph of the city, showing the Goose Creek (or Tyber Creek) flowing from the Patawmack River (Potomac River) through the current Mall toward the Capitol and further north through the city. Overlay by author. Original images from http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1800_bmf01.jpg and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Washington _77.03160W_38.89260N.jpg, accessed December 31, 2006 at 11:35 am EST.

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Architexts My proposal for the museum in Washington, and this text, is structured formally into five webs and four intersections that mime the physical construction which exists as a 1/2 inch = 1 foot scale model and as a full scale detail of one of the nine entry doors into the museum, and as a series of computer-generated drawings, or plots. The methods of assembly of both texts—this literary text and the literal building or rather, the model—can be read in their respective construction methods, which are sectional, allegorical, parasitic, and nomadic.

Web7 1 The Bridge #6

his museum is a bridge across a difficult terrain. Michel Serres writes that a bridge is a path that connects two banks, or that makes a discontinuity continuous, or that crosses a fracture, or that patches a crack. The space of an itinerary is interrupted by a river; it is not a space of transport. Consequently, there is no longer one space; there are two spaces without common boundaries. They are so different that they require a difficult, or dangerous, operator to connect their boundaries—difficult since at the very least a pontiff is necessary, dangerous since most of the time a devil of some sort stands watch or the enemies of Horatius Cockles stand ready to attack.8 The museum bridges. Communication was interrupted; the bridge re-establishes it vertiginously.9

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On the site in Washington D.C. a “considerable stream known originally as Goose Creek ran through the city”10 and the future Mall. In 1871 the creek was “filled in, and the greatest nuisance of Washington thereby put out of sight”11 but not out of mind. I would like to offer another reason for the filling-in of this creek which I understand as one particular non-critical analogy to interpret history, namely as a continuous linear sequence of progress. Contrary to this positivistic point of view stands Walter Benjamin’s idea of a history that denies continuity and can instead by understood as a series of catastrophes. In order to concretize this interpretation I propose as an initial step to expose the non-critical reading by re-discovering a section of the old Goose Creek’s riverbed. This activity of digging a hole fortunately emulates what architects have been doing for centuries when they go about making building objects. In other words, what I propose here is not a new but a different type of construction: conventionally we pour foundations and fill in the remaining hole. In my proposal, however, the hole, this absence, remains uncovered. However, to expose is not enough. According to Benjamin the ‘continuity’ of history has to be broken or interrupted in order to make a difference in the here and now. The museum works as an interrupter by plugging up

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The word web is “akin to [the] Old English wefan or Old English webbian, whence to web, and the Old English noun webb, Middle English web—and probably Old High German waba, Middle High German wabe, a honeycomb [Beuys would have liked this...], which looks almost as if the framework has been woven. From Old English webbian comes Old English webbestre, a female—later, any—weaver, English webster (archaic), whence Webster.” Origins:799. The dictionary writer is a weaver. The museum is a woven construction. 8 Horatius Cocles was a legendary Roman soldier who held back the Etruscan army of Porsenna, preventing it from crossing the wooden Sublican bridge before it was demolished. 9 Michel Serres in Language & Space: From Oedipus to Zola in Hermes: 43. 10 From Washington. The National Capital by H. P. Caemmerer, (United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.: 1932): 41. 11 Ibidem: 59.

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Perspective view from 6379 ft looking northeast showing an overlay of an early survey of Washington D.C. onto a contemporary aerial photograph of the city. Overlay by author. Parts of the Potomac River and the Goose Creek are filled in to show the original shorelines.

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Architexts the partially exposed remnants of the Goose Creek. This accompanying text can now be understood as a written history of the museum, a history whose goal is “to bring to consciousness those repressed elements of the past (its realized barbarisms and unrealized dreams) which place the present in a critical position.”12 The building is also a working critique of the existing architecture on the Mall, especially the Government buildings (Capitol, White House) and several of the older museums that, for the most part, are neo-classicist interpretations of pagan Greek temples.13 They represent the residue of an attempt to revive a historical ‘period’.14 Benjamin remarks that the “area where neo-classicism fails fundamentally is that it builds the passing gods an architecture that denies its fundamental relationships of coming-into-being. (A bad, reactionary architecture).”15 In the Passagenwerk he describes this cominginto-being as a process of ‘waking up out of the dream of being awake’. In other words, the building functions as an interrupter of this dream. Waking up is a threshold16 experience between sleeping and waking; it is about transitioning from one state into another; it is about movement and circulation between and within. The projected building is located within the excavated section of the Goose Creek about 2311’ due west of the Capitol and approximately 1321’ due south of the addition to the National Gallery. The two facing concrete foundations17 for the structure are set into the long edge of this excavation. They are anchored into the surrounding Mall with oneinch-diameter high strength steel cables (200 k/si) that are connected to individual concrete dead men (2’ x 2’ x 7’).18 The museum’s foundations are the banks of the old Goose Creek. The structure is hung from this unstable margin.

Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: 338. More on Greek temples can be found in George Hersey’s The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. 14 This, again, only exists as a ‘period’ because of a particular reading of history as a progressive, linear, and continuous sequence of events. 15 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, V, G°, 26: 1012. 16 Threshold describes a difference, a between between inside and outside. The word comes from the German dreschen to beat grain, to thrash [to trash?], from terere: to rub, to beat (grain), from terse, tergere, to rub off, or away [to erase with rubber?] and stlengis, a scraper [Spachtel], also detergent: cleaner, to trample, tread, walk, move. The German Schwelle connects us to tracks [railroad], railroad ties, and doors. A door threshold is a sill or Süll. 17 They are also the washing–s-ton-es from the washerwomen section in Finnegans Wake in which two washerwomen try to communicate across a river, a line of division. 18 Dead Men, a technology borrowed from the land-claiming industry. Used especially in places where the ground is loose or shifty as in bogs or swamps. 13

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The building type of the arcade [...] was

considered marginal among the wide variety of nineteenth-century building types.19

Friedrich Geist. Arcades: 115. These are made of steel or iron. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The first iron buildings served transitory needs: market halls, railroad stations, exhibitions, [and arcades]. Thus the iron is allied immediately with functional moments in the economic life. However what was functional and transitory then begins today to have, at a different speed, a formal and 20

There is no support from below. The gap between the foundations is bridged by structural webs20 constructed of individual steel members forming a network of triangles. Michel Serres comments that his

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body is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; it hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go. [...] My body, therefore, is not plunged into a single space, but into the difficult intersection of this numerous family, into the set of connections and junctions to be established between these varieties. [...]

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Architexts Photomontage of building in the site in front of the Capitol, Washington, D.C., with the Washington Monument in the far left distance. The Capitol is to the right, just out of view of the picture frame.

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Perspective view of building in site, looking northerly from the edge of the sloping ground.

iso

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The five structural trusses, derived by reading the letter ‘T’ as a truss joint in the washerwomen section of James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake.

Goose Creek level

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Longitudinal section (looking west) showing the five trusses (section cuts), the overall building in the site as well as the sloped ground on the south and north sides.

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Architexts

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108

“A

section22 is not a mirroring construction, but a kind of text that has been lifted out (dissected), a text that can be read, that is, misread or rewritten. The information provided by the section is always incomplete.”23 This paper is not a complete text, be it architectural or literal. It deals with the difference between methods of textual construction. Sections on an architectural drawing and the sections of this museum and the sections of this text function similarly: they are all instruments of generation, tools of transduction that lead beyond, far “beyant, pharphar,”24 encouraging completion through individual reading, misreading, and interpretation.25 In order to know what lies beneath the skin the surgeon cuts into and through the fabric, into the ground, searching for certainty, knowledge.26 What is the science of cutting? The word ‘section’ can be derived via ‘science’ from scire to know, to cut through, to know through a section, and to decide, from sanskrit chyati he cuts, Irish scian, a knife. The noun is the verb. The knife mimes the act of cutting. A knife divides, severs a connection, interrupts a continuity. The action of cutting creates slices and the arcade which is an architecture of repeated sections. An architecture of section is marginal27 in that it suggests an incompleteness already inherent in another section: the plan. However, a plan locates adjacencies or linkages between spaces while a vertical section always suggests location of the body,

Section Method

Intersection I

What lies between the web sections are the sections between the sections, the intersections, the places of transition.

stable effect. F 2,9,” and: “Very remarkable is that the constructions, in which the specialist recognizes the forerunner of the current mode of building, affect the conscious, but architecturally not educated mind, not at all as forerunner but as especially outdated and nostalgic. (Old railroad stations, gasworks, bridges) K Ia, 4.” These quotes from Benjamin’s Passagenwerk refer to changed perceptions of collective buildings made out of iron or steel. However, I am not trying to conjure up a nostalgic yearning for times that are ‘gone forever’, and neither does Benjamin. Rather I attempt to bring these architectural histories into the present in order to invest the ‘outmoded’ types with an-other reading which can then be used to create a different and critical architecture. 21 Michel Serres, Hermes: 44. 22 The language field of ‘section’ includes the words to cut into, saw, sawn [connection between looking, gazing, and cutting, sawing, see, saw, seen, see-saw, pivot]. The incomplete thesaurus [treasure] field of “cut’, the science of the cut contains to cut, slice, dice, scramble, shred [of evidence > prison joint joint], break, crack, groove, lash, mark, notch, thrust, trench, cleave, delete, eject, engrave, excise, injure, hurt, harvest, inscribe, open, record, sever, sculpture, shorten, hatch, hacken, coup all of which are actions employed by architects and students of architecture. The question remains where to make the first cut? 23 This quote was lifted out of Jennifer Bloomer’s paper In the Museyroom in Assemblage 5: 60. 24 James Joyce. Finnegans Wake: 215. 25 However, I see the value of this architecture not only in the vast range of readings but also, and especially, in the cultural, political, and social implications that this construction has on the site and its occupants in Washington, D. C.. 26 This, via a misreading as ‘no ledge’, may imply the opposite of that certainty: the fear of not knowing enough, of not having a ledge(r) to hold on to. 27 Incidentally the arcade was “never an object of instruction. It was never chosen as the theme for the Prix de Rome. It cannot be found in contemporary textbooks as an architectural exercise. The architectural concept of the arcade is promulgated anonymously [nomad, Hermes on the run],

This intersection, these junctions, always need to be constructed.21

through travelogues, word-of-mouth reports, direct observation, and study of the arcade site itself. It is difficult to reconstruct an unambiguous, demonstrable course for the development of the arcade [...]. We lack [...] records, names of architects, building plans, and any statement of the builders concerning their motives.” Geist, Arcades: 115. 28 Very few of us ever float above rooms, and yet many architects still produce designs that are extrusions from a plan. 29 Not only the architectural gutter but also the person, the one who guts, who eviscerates. Another surgeon. 30 Another architecture of transport: letters are sent in envelopes. What is the politics of a letter? 31 Ramparts resemble barricades in nineteenth-century Paris. “In 1830 the populace used rope [from reif > hoop, penny, pall mall, material for prison connection, or labyrinth, red thread] to barricade the streets.” Susan Buck-Morss, The

i.e. inhabitation or occupation.28 Consequently my museum and this text consist of sections. Section refers to an action in the margin and in the gutter29 which in this text is the footnote, and in the other architectural text (the museum) the place between the ramparts and the building envelope.30 The rampart31 structure, a wall of flat 6”-reinforced concrete bands staggered horizontally, on both sides, along the whole length of the museum holds back the ground. The bands are held back by a series of crockets or ramparts. A crocket is a medieval ornament that looks like a ram’s horn. It is an architectural piece that curves up and away from the supporting surface, in this case the ramparts, and returns partially upon itself in a knoblike termination [crocket-hook-knob]. Attached to these crockets are the above mentioned 1” diameter high tension steel cables, joined in turn to concrete dead man buried beneath the Mall. I should clarify that I consider all these pieces extending out into the Mall proper still a part of the museum, that is, there exists

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Structural diagram of ramparts, trusses, and dead men

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Architexts

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Foundations of building in 1/2”= 1’ scale model made of wood and concrete

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Constructing trusses in situ between the rampart foundation walls

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Architexts a physical linkage between the site (the Mall) and the other site32 (the museum). The edge, the margin, the demarcation line between building and landscape becomes fuzzy. The Museum is a stitched scar in the fabric of the Mall; the edge of the former wound is the shore of the former Goose Creek. The two foundations above the ramparts have four 44’-wide incisions each that contain the stairs and ramps which lead down from the Mall’s surface into the building proper. Since the building hangs in the site, the intersection of the major structure (webs) in the museum with the secondary structure (walkways, stairs) consists of long holes in which the webs can slide and shift depending on the loading pattern which changes with visitors moving through the building. These connections are sliding joints, conscious misalignments in the transfer of loads, slip joints that can move past each other.33

Subsection

hat distinguishes Walter Benjamin from the majority of his contemporaries is his view of history not as progress but as a series of catastrophes. He writes that the “concept of progress is to be based in the idea of catastrophe. That something ‘just continues’ is the catastrophe. It is not that which lies in the future but that which exists now.”34 For Benjamin the present is a section, or rather, an intersection of the past with the present. In this intersection the possibility of action lies not in distant future but in the very intensity and actuality of the present. Incidentally the Passagenwerk works on a formal level as an interrupter of a literary practice35 that is biased towards a linear and continuous narrative that is mirrored in architecture in the existing museums on the Mall. This type of linear museum developed out of the great expositions in nineteenth century Europe, especially the exhibits in London, Paris and Chicago. The view of history as linear progress was amplified in the buildings that housed the latest industrial and cultural developments in the western world as it was interpreted by the ruling class. Benjamin writes that it can be seen as one of the “methodical objectives of [the Passagenwerk to demonstrate a historical materialism that has annihilated the idea of progress itself. Especially in this case historical materialism has all reason to be separated from the bourgeois mode of thinking. Its [historical materialism’s] basic concept is not progress but actualization.”36 However, he sharply differentiates between empathy, a nostalgic longing directed towards the past past, and its reversal, the “[T]elescopage of the past through the present”37 Section has changed from a tool of representation to an instrument of generation.

Dialectics of Seeing: 317. The ramparts’ slope is slippery, about 32-foot rise over an 11-inch run. 32 This is a hint of more to come on other sites which are para-sites in Intersection III. 33 More on slipping and sliding in Intersection II. 34 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften V: 592. 35 See Rosen’s essay in On Benjamin: 152. 36 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften V: 574. 37 Ibidem: 588. 38 Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk: 2.

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The true method of making the things present is to imagine them in our space [Raum] (not us in theirs). [...] The things thus imagined, do not allow a mediating construction out of ‘grand relationships.’ [...] Not we imagine ourselves in [their space]: they step into our lives. - The same technique of proximity can be observed with respect to epochs via the calendar. Let us imagine that a man dies on -his fiftieth birthday which is also the birthday of his son, who again dies when he turns fifty, etc. - it follows that since the birth of Christ not more than forty human beings have lived. Reason for this fiction: to apply to the historical times of a human being an adequate, appropriate scale. This pathos of nearness, the hate against the abstract configuration of human lives in epochs has given life to the great sceptics.38

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Image of train through fireplace39

The museum achieves this nearness on one hand by disturbing the present via a sectional interruption of the Mall, and on the other hand via a seemingly chaotic collision of structural and non-structural members in its interior. “The interieur steps outside. It is as if the citizen is so sure of her/his way of life, that s/he scorns the facade in order to explain: my house, wherever you may cut a section, is facade. [...] the street becomes a room and the room turns into a street. The observing occupant [Passant] stands, as it were, in the niche,”40 The niche in its extreme or rather peripheral position can be compared to the corner, a place that activates people after they have been pushed into one. Friedrich Geist establishes a link between the Palais Royale, a ‘museum of action’ in Paris at the end of the 18th century, and the architectural type of the arcade. “The Palais Royale [...] served as a site of political agitation, a promenade, luxury market, and place of learning and entertainment. It was, in short, a model of the arcade,”41 which is the English word for the German Passage and one of the architectural generators for Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, literally ‘Arcades Project’. “The German term comes from the French passage, which was used as early as the eighteenth century to refer to the narrow private streets which divided and connected the interiors of larger building blocks. The root is passus, the Latin word for step, conveying the element of movement, of passage through a space. It has numerous meanings in common linguistic usage: street, roadway, thoroughfare, alley, transit, crossing, part of a book or musical composition, measured gait of a horse, or, in French, the sense of passage de la vie. All these meanings, either spatial or temporal in emphasis, have one element in common: they express transition, threshold, passing, measured distance, or disappearance. Something occurs, comes to pass; movement becomes an event.”42 The Passagenwerk, then, is essentially a collection of sections or thresholds. The sectional method employed in the generation of both this text and the museum creates deep thresholds that attempt to make the occupant conscious of the act of passage. The thresholds in the museum are designed to wake up visitors rather than put them to sleep.43 Sections in the operating sense of interruption work in this building not only in the foundations or in the main structure but also in the interior. The museum is a place of stalls/booths that interrupt the building’s volume. Stalls are for standing, for stationing, for taking a temporarily fixed position. Stalls are where things are placed44 and kept. In this case the stalls are simultaneously the exhibit spaces, that is, static vessels that forestall45 events, and gift shops, that is, places where consumer goods are moved into and out of. The museum is a collection of giftshop stalls that collectively make up one large giftshop or shopping mall. The museum is a giftshop shopping mall, or, in other words, an arcade. The museum simultaneously circulates

This is an image of the painting ‘Punctured Time’ by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. 40 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften: 512. 41 Geist, Arcades: 60. Arcades are architectural connectors or bridges. They are inside thresholds. 42 Geist. Arcades: 11. 43 Many conventional museums have a narcotic effect on its visitors. 44 “Stall is very closely linked to German Stelle, a place, itself to Old High German stellen to place, or set, upright.” Origins: 659. 45 The word ‘forestall’ implies a placing (of oneself ) fore, in front of (another person). It suggests a blocking of movement forward, a stalemate. There is also to install, stille, motionless, quiet, stool, throne, folding stool used by bishop: faldistory > fauteuil an upholstered armchair, stoop, a post, a support, especially a prop (in a mine), stele Greek an upright gravestone, hence a pillar, stole long loose garment, long, narrow silken band, falling from the shoulders’ whence the feminine adornment. Systole and diastole, contraction and dilation of the heart, apostellein, to send away.

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Architexts

Nine Entry Thresholds

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Entry door No. 5

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Wireframe image showing below-ground spaces of the museum

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he museum as an embodied place of transition takes on the role of a hotel, a temporary stay for travelers, a hostel, a house of shelter and sustenance for nomads, a receiver of strangers. The hotel is an outside brought together in an inside.47 “The arcades are a cross between a street and an interieur.”48 That is, the museum-arcade as hotel can be seen as the intersection of outside and inside. “The street becomes the dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in her/his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses [in the arcades] are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafes are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. [...] If the arcade is the classical form of the interieur, which is how the flaneur sees the street, the department store49 is the form of the interieur’s decay.”50 Benjamin describes this decaying condition of the inside when he writes at the end of the 1930s in his chaotic personal world of fleeing from place to place that he “was living like a mollusc lives in the shell in the nineteenth century which now lies hollow like an empty shell before me.”51 Molluscs are animals with soft interiors. They invite being inside, in the side, in the wall, intensely enclosed. The museum’s stalls create an extremely dense place. They defy monumentality and encourage individuality by breaking up the bombastic but also uniform volume of other conventional museums. The interiority is amplified by the enclosure of the site, the Mall. Geist mentions that “the arcade, understood as interiorized (and hence once again truly possible) public space, acquired [in the nineteenth century] an almost strategic importance. The arcade is a building with many entrances and exits,”52 nine in this case. These multiple possibilities of entry find their resemblance in Jennifer Bloomer’s argument for a minor architecture53 the space of which “cannot stop at the building, with its major entrance, but proliferates across the lines among drawing and constructing and writing. It can be entered at many locations.”54 Just as the museum has nine entry doors (one on each side of each intersection and one at the elevator) this text can be ‘entered at many locations’, too. Each intersection as well as each section encourages individual investigation. All doors into the building

The Ho tel46 #19

A yellow sign reading ‘FOR SALE, call 1-800-MIKESCH’ was affixed to the south side wall of the ½-scale museum model (4’ x 6’ x 5’ 6”). When called, a voice would answer that ‘This call can not be completed as dialed! Please try again!” Something obviously did not connect. 47 The interior of this museum in its density makes architectural references to other texts, for example Piranesi’s etchings of the carceri or the underground palaces from the Polish saltmine in Wieliczka. 48 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism: 37. 49 Department stores are children of the arcade. 50 Ibidem: 54. 51 Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: 9, quoted from IV: 261. 52 Geist, Arcades: 82. 53 See also Deleuze and Guattari’s work. 54 From the paper by Jennifer Bloomer, D’OR: 21.

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and interrupts. It circulates people, commodities, air, water and, via the structural system of beams and columns that interrupt the gangways and stairs in a way that precludes a passive contemplation between outsides. The word ‘threshold’ comes from the Latin terere: to rub, to beat (grain), from stlengis: a scraper. The museum is a scraper that shears away the fill of the Goose Creek. Scrapers lay bare, they open wounds, old and new, of the exhibited commercial art, it interrupts the continuity of historical time and creates a vacuum of the present which has to be engaged by the occupant. What is on display demands action. It is on sale. Things can be moved. They are, like the occupants, anything but static.

Once closed the door can not be opened again from the inside. It is a trap door that allows entry but no exit. There is a parallel here to Benjamin’s understanding of history as a oneway-street; the past is irredeemably gone. There is no way back. We can only go forward. 56 Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker: 12. 57 Geist, Arcades: 68. 58 Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker: 13. 59 Ibidem: 15.

have different heights and widths. This is not only to suggest that there are different people who will enter through these doors but also to engage visitors consciously into the act of entering through a threshold into a different realm. Entry Door no. 5, for example, is two feet wide and five feet high. It is constructed with a pinned, split hinge cut at a 45° angle that closes the leaf automatically with the help of gravity. The door swings out into the path, against the flow of the visitor. It cuts through the path of entry. The act of moving through an expanded frame, that is the passing over this threshold, becomes an event.55 As you can see one “flight up, a door has been devised so as to block access, if need be to the more remote of these two staircases, but since it is attached to the stairposts only, one can easily circumvent [bypassvalve] it by stepping over the banister. [...] What is the meaning of this door?”56 The door is sheathed in five copper plates (screwed to a door core with stainless steel screws in seemingly random patterns that resemble the pattern of joints from the five structural webs’ members) separated from each other by bands of galvanized steel. The copper plates can be read as conductors of energy that reinforce passage through a resistor. The door is an indicator of the museum as a battery which is both collector and reservoir. Batteries work by extension or repetition of sections which is also how an arcade works. The sections through this arcade are self-similar. ‘’Two features were common to all these arcades [...]: their dimensions and the method of interior organization. A narrow, independently accessible, two- or three-storied building with a shop and apartment formed a unit which was then repeated in two parallel rows.”57 Bookstores or Libraries are other storage devices of energy. On the ground floor of the hotel web is a book stall, “the Rey bookstore where literary reviews, popular novels, and scientific publications are displayed on racks.”58 There is also, in the hotel web, a mailing agency/post office; a place where things get lost and where things get connected. Maybe one could” arrange to have letters mailed from any point on the globe to any given address, thus making it possible to fake a voyage to the Far East without straying even one inch from the Far West of some lawless escapade. I couldn’t uncover a clue: the concierge had never heard of any such place...”59

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The ‘realm of things’ contains the realm of architecture. Based on Benjamin’s idea of allegory I understand it here not only as a “representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through a concrete or material form”62 but also in its other significance as allegorein, Greek for “so to speak as to imply something other”, or literally an ‘other marketplace’.63 That is, this text speaks in another language, a secret code. “An allegory is a rebus, a writing composed of concrete images.”64 Let me substitute here the word ‘writing’ with the word ‘building’, and ‘images’ with ‘materials’. Allegory, then, becomes a vehicle for the construction of architecture. Ulmer, in writing about the object of post-criticism, suggests that there are two different kinds of allegory. The one, “[a]llegoresis’, [a] mode of commentary long practiced by traditional critics, ‘suspends’ the surface of the text, applying a terminology of ‘verticalness, levels, hidden meaning, the hieratic difficulty of interpretation,’ whereas “ the other,’’’ narrative allegory’ (practiced by post-critics) explores the literal— letteral—level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves - in etymologies and puns - and in the things the words name.”65 Allegory in this kind writing and in this museum consists of logical slides, slippages, unsafe grounds, not expected proximities, abrupt adjacencies, shear. In other words, this is about the decay of a linear progress which implies a need to look at abandoned buildings66 and ruins. Such an approach also contains the chance to invent a history that is not based on the exclusion but inclusion of transience, movement, and disappearance. That means paradoxically for architects to design buildings that will last possibly a long time: only when an architecture has been around for many years are we able to

enjamin’s procedure was ‘to collect and reproduce in quotation the contradictions of the present without resolution,’ [...] juxtaposing the extremes of a given idea. This [...] strategy was itself an image of the ‘break-up,’ the ‘disintegration’ of civilization in the modem worlds, relevant to one of Benjamin’s most famous formulas: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (Tragic Drama, 178), the premise being that something becomes an object of knowledge only as it ‘decays,’ or is made to disintegrate [...].61

Allegoric Method

Intersection II

The word scene comes from the Greek skene or Doric skana: a covered place [arcade: from passage ouvert to passage couvert > Briefcouvert] from sanskrit chaya: brilliance, lustre, and shade, shadow. The contradiction between light and shadow is not resolved but coexists side by side in this building. 61 Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism in the Anti-Aesthetic: 97. 62 Random House College Dictionary, revised edition, 1975. 63 Alle- from Greek allo-, meaning other; and agora from Greek agora marketplace. The method turns into the program for the architecture. The museum is a market place. 64 Ulmer quotes Barthes from Allegorical Impulse, Part 2: 74, in The Anti-Aesthetic: 96. 65 Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism in the Anti-Aesthetic: 95. 66 From my point of view as a student of architecture all buildings are abandoned. They may be occupied but the people involved in their construction are no longer involved, un-

What a scene60

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notice and record its degree of decay. Allegorical architecture, then, implies quality construction.67 Benjamin describes his method for creating this Passagenwerk within the Passagenwerk as “literary montage.” He says “I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will not collect any smart formulations, nor steal anything of value. But the rubbish, the trash: that I will not describe but produce [in the sense of ‘show’ or ‘exhibit’].”68 Montage is seen by Benjamin as an allegoric form of investigation. Montage, according to Ulmer, “does not reproduce the real, but constructs an object [which is very much what architects do], (its lexical field includes the terms ‘assemble, build, join, unite, add, combine, link, construct, organize’ - Montage, 121). [It] mounts a process ( ‘the relation of form to content is no longer a relation of exteriority, the form resembling clothes [laundress [lawn dress made of grass] HERMES] which can dress no matter what content, it is process, genesis, result of a work’Montage, 120) in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality.”69 “Montage became for [Benjamin] the modern, constructive, active, unmelancholy form of allegory, namely the ability to connect dissimilars [mosquito cocoon and museum] in such a way as to ‘shock’ people into new recognitions and understandings,”70 for example: passing through the foundations of a building rather than over them or stepping through a trap-door that, by its design, only allows movement in one direction. Susan Buck-Morss in her book Dialectics of Seeing argues that in the Passagenwerk Benjamin tried to “bridge the gap between everyday experience and traditional academic concerns.”71 The Passagenwerk was to be a “’materialist philosophy of history,’ constructed with ‘the utmost concreteness’72 out of the historical material itself, the outdated remains of those nineteenth century buildings [the arcades], technologies [like encasing], and commodities [the souvenirs] that were the precursors of his own era.”73 Buck-Morss also suggests that in “the concept of Naturgeschichte [natural history or history of nature], if hollowed-out nature (the fossil) is the emblem of ‘petrified history,’ then nature too has a history, so that historical transiency (the ruin) is the emblem of nature in decay.”74 This nature in decay could be seen in this case as the Mall, a hypothetical Garden of Eden, an Arcadia surrounded by the city rather than a city surrounded by a garden; an idealized and sacred piece of green, decaying from below (after all, this is a swamp). A ruin suggests decay or disappearance but also the gradual completion of a life cycle. If this museum is a monument of a ruin that once was (the Goose Creek), then that which is sold in it, the souvenir, is a monument to the memory of having been there. However, to borrow again Benjamin’s interpretation of the past as a telescoping through the present, the souvenir does not induce a passion toward the past. It exists and influences us in our space right here. That reality can be clearly seen in the way souvenirs have been appropriated for everyday usage: The Washington Monument, for example, becomes transmogrified into a salt shaker, the capitol turns into a pepper vessel; the Eiffeltower has a thermometer attached on its outside; the Sunsphere in Knoxville, Tennessee has a pencil sharpener attached to its base. These pieces have lost their monumental power. Interestingly enough this subversive activity of undermining the potency of America’s historical heritage is supported vigorously in the existing Mall museum’s (and for that matter in most other museums, too), namely in the giftshop.

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less, of course the architect lives in her/his own building. 67 Good, because durable materials include Lead, Copper, Zinc, galvanized steel, and any precious metal like Gold, Silver or Platinum. 68 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften: 1030. 69 Ulmer, Anti-Aesthetic, The Object of Post-Criticism: 86. 70 Ulmer, in Anti-Aesthetic, The Object of Post-Criticism: 97, quoting Stanley Mitchell’s Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, (New Left Books: London, 1979): xiii. 71 Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: 3. 72 Here the word ‘concreteness’ is important to me as a student of architecture because I am interested in the making of things that exist in many dimensions, and at least in three. 73 Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: 338. 74 Ibidem: 161.

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A cockle is also a wrinkle or a pucker, a cockle in fabric [A Wrinkle in Time?]. It is a shallow boat. By the cockle’s of my heart [re cord]: the depths of my emotions of feeling. Cockles are about to contract into wrinkles, fold, pucker [like from lime[n] threshold] or lemon juice [LEMONS]. They rise in short, irregular waves; ripple, cause to wrinkle, pucker, or ripple. The cockle is a bivalve which is one of the two or more separable pieces composing certain shells; a flap or lid-like [How does a lid work? eye, trap door > bridge] part of certain anthers or one of the leaves of a double or folding door [double door—two ways in? Hung door?]. 76 Taylor, John David. Shell Structure and Mineralogy of the Bivalvia: 10. 77 Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, VII, Illuminationen: 254 78 Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing: 158, quoting Benjamin quoting Aragon.

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The museum as giftshoppingmall acts as a device for circulation of goods, commodities, things. It moves fluids, people, electricity, memories, chemicals, texts, signs. Now the museum has become a storage place of fragments/relics/souvenirs that are devices of cultural transformation. The museum is a collection of fossils. One of these fossils is a cockle75 shell. A cockle is a bi-valve or double-valve which can be counted to the common cockle shell or cockle edule, found in the riverbed of the Goose Creek; it consists of “three folds [FAULTS, lines of interference, fault line, wrong lines, crooked lines]—an inner muscular, a middle sensory and an outer secretory fold.”76 What these three parts are to the shell they are in sequence for the wall section of the museum: a smooth inner layer of cloth, wallpaper or tapestry over a structural steel support layer followed by a hard corrugated steel, concrete or lead weather layer on the outside. The museum houses fossils that are souvenirs, objects that have lost their use but not their potential. Fossils and souvenirs are ruins, the first of a decaying natural history the latter of a decaying economic history. For Benjamin the disappearing of the arcades in Berlin, Moscow, Paris and Naples were specific historical events that in their decay had the power to arrest the “triumphal march (Triumphzug] that carries along with it [a nation’s] cultural assets [Kulturgüter]”77 which are kept in museums. Again another interpretation of history lies not in shiny new accomplishments but in a decaying environment that makes concrete the temporalness of life and buildings. ‘’To cite an observation of Aragon that constitutes the hub of the problem: That the passages are what they are here for us, is due to the fact that they in themselves [an sich] are no longer.”78

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On the bottom of riverbeds such as the Goose Creek one can find remains or traces of animals or plants which have turned over time into fossils; they are nature’s petrified souvenirs, nature’s ruins. The Mall induces another connection to the game of Pall-Mall, the name of which “derives from pila ‘ball’ and malleus ‘mallet’ (or ‘hammer,)79. The game was related to golf, chole, Ieolven andjeu de mail and may well be the origin of croquet. [...] Samuel Pepys mentions it at least twice in his diary and records a conversation he had with the Keeper of Pall Mall (where, of course, it was often played), who described how powdered cockle-shells80 were spread over the surface of the playing area to quicken it up.”81 The ruin appears again in another quotation on croquet. “Our knowledge of croquet, the immediate predecessor to Pall-Mall “is mainly due to the accidental discovery in a ruined house [the museum - fossil - ruin] of the

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The hammer is a stone from greek akmon: anvil, sanskrit asma: stone, anvil, hammer; old norse: hamarr, originally rock [motion?], primitive hammer being made of stone. The stone may well be the same one that one of Joyce’s washerwomen in Finnegans Wake transmogrifies into. A hammer is also a pendulum or plumb bob, or in sports, a metal ball, usually weighing 16 pounds, which is attached to a steel wire at the end of which is a grip [handle] for throwing it a distance in the hammerthrow. The athlete stands in the cage that deflects erroneous hammers [glitches]. 80 A cockle [limestone, fossil] has three layers: a hard outer shell, a middle machine layer which produces the hard shell and simultaneously sustains the soft third, inner part. It is also the shell of the cockle or of some other mollusk, as the scallop [gallop, trip-trap], nautical: a cockboat; the bridge is a frozen ferryboat, a shuttle, b. any light or frail vessel (late Medieval cokilke shell) [ship of fools, Narrenschiff], a small boat, especially one used as a tender [extra, allegory]. Also cockleboat. Also called cockleshell [late Medieval cokboot [BOOTS, SHOES] variation of cogboat [COG in a gear, cognition, ignition]. 81 Cuddon, J. A. International Dictionary of Sports and Games, (Schocken Books, New York, 1979): 587.

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Web 3

The Well #31

he well85 is a hole in the ground.86 It is the link to the underground.87 The museum is a well, a vertical connector, an escalator that escalates the difference between above and below. The museum exists in the ground, underground. It is an interior place, a cavern or s crypt of a different author, a space between sods. Jennifer Bloomer describes the basement, the crypt, and its inscriptions, the scrypt, or the scrypt in Sir John Soane’s house (which functions simultaneously as a museum) as “the critical joint. It belongs to the museum, but is monad88 of the hatchery: a mined field, a holey space, [a web] vessel of the nomad. The inscriptions (the encrypted) of the hatchery undermine the foundations of the museum,”89 that is, these inscriptions, both this written construction and the built model question the authority of the museum architecture existing currently on the Mall. Cambuca, one of the foremothers of Pall-Mall was a game “played in England in the reign of Edward m (1327-77), but also probably much earlier than that. [A] crooked stick was used and the ball was made of leather and stuffed with [goose] feathers. In the Middle Ages the words cambata and cambuca denoted a curved club or staff.”90 This curved staff could be read as the letter J which is a crochet hook that is used to make textural networks out of yam. When you limp you need a walking cane.

There is no reference in Colman’s quotation as to where he found the sentence on the powdered cockle-shells. 83 Colman, C. S. in Encyclopedia of Sports and Games in Four Volumes, Volume II Crocodile Shooting - Hound Breeding with about five hundred illustrations. Sportsman edition, London: MCMXII: 3. 84 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 216. 85 The word ‘well’ comes from ‘voluble’, to well, to bubble forth, wallen, to undulate, a wave, welt [world?], to roll around, to roll over in once mind, to think. 86 France and Spain are linked by a geological formation, the Pyrenees which are dotted with deep holes called ‘garouffes’. 87 The visitor enters the building’s domain by stepping down through the foundation not up and over as in a conventional building. 88 Note: ‘monad’ means one all, an individual part, an atom. 89 Bloomer, Jennifer in In the Museyroom, Assemblage 5: 62-63. 90 Cuddon, J. A. International Dictionary of Sports and Games. (Schocken Books, New York, 1979): 187. 91 The contrary Mary probably refers here to the Black Mary, a scape virgin. 92 The garden of Eden as represented in the Mall, also the mythical Arcadia. 93 As used on the hard-beaten earth to play Pall-Mall. 94 Mother Goose, unpaginated. 95 Geist, Arcades: 83.

Mistress Mary, quite contrary,91 How does your garden grow?92 With silver bells and cockle shells.93 And pretty maids all in a row.94

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The lightwell “makes the deeper recesses of the building accessible.”95

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Intersection III Parasitic Method

parasite is a hanger-on.” Am I the one who is called W[alter] B[enjamin]? Or is my name simply W[alter] B[enjamin]? That is indeed the question that leads into the secret of the individual name; and Herman Ungar formulates it quite correctly in an inherited fragment: “Does the name hang on us or do we hang on a name?”96 If I consider what hangs on my name, it is the mosquito, the animal that hangs off my arm and on my last name, Muecke, which means mosquito in English.97 The mosquito98 is a gnawing animal, a bothersome and pervasive nomadic parasite that can move in its lifetime up to 5000 miles, and exists on five continents. There are over 2500 species which means that the mosquito is anything but a minor nuisance. If we consider the mosquito in its role as a parasite which not only eats besides but also marks an other site, then it is an emblem for that which stands in contrast to the conventional site. In this other site, where the ground is unstable and shifty, the museum stands or rather, hangs. It does not sit on the Mall on a plinth but in the Mall in a hole that was at some time filled with water. The emblem of the mosquito returns as an insect, an animal made of sections, a sectional animal. Its body is a body of interruptions and divisions. It consists of an anatomy of thresholds. What the mosquito buzz is for the sleeper the museum is for the Mall. It interrupts the dream of being awake. It interferes. It hangs off of the existing riverbank. It is a hanger-on, resisting strong foundations.99 “The parasite is [...] a guest who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel” (like the Goose Creek). These seemingly dissimilar activities are, according to Lawrence Schehr, not “merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinsically related and, in fact, they have the same basic function in a system.”100 This distinction is important because in the English language the word ‘parasite’ has a negative connotation which does not consider the culturally positive actions of the functions ‘guest’ and ‘host’. If I adopt the multivalency of meanings inherent in the French word, the mosquito as a parasite has the potential to become a generator of action. The mosquito becomes an example of a different method of design which is called parasitism: Michel Serres suggests that parasitism consists of a “new logic with three elements: host, guest, and interrupter [receiver, sender, and line] (noise is ‘the random element, transforming one system or one order into another’).”101 The noise in this system is the Goose Creek water running through a 9’ pipe on the bottom floor of the museum, and the flooding potential of the water in the wetpipe sprinkler system.

Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften V: 1036. 97 The name in German is a combination of Mu—the lost continent—and Ecke (there is also Ecce Homo by Nietzsche), the German word for corner. Corners are located at the extremes of buildings. They are on the edge. They are the edge. They are the margin. 98 My middle name is Walter which is also my father’s name. And then there is Walter B., my other father. 99 Its probosis is the only substantial link with the host’s body. 100 Ulmer quoting Lawrence Schehr’s introduction to Michel Serres’ The Parasite, (Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1982) x. 101 Ulmer, in his paper The Object of PostCriticism in the Anti-Aesthetic: 101.

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It is often said that mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, a term that denotes lack of movement and usually implies a certain degree of foulness as well. In fact almost every type of freshwater is exploited by one species or another. While the gully trap and pit latrine may be suitable and in fact may be the preferred sites for some species, others are much

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more particular and will breed only at the edges of clearrunning streams and rivers [like the Goose Creek].102

[cog]-boat-shaped with pointed and often upturned ends, giving it the appearance of a miniature canoe. Along each side is a float structure resembling the ballast tanks that flank each side of a submarine. [...] The float ensures that it remains at or returns to the surface, and the general lifeboat-like shape with its upturned ends increases its chances of remaining right way up.103 The wall of the egg-shell is composed of two layers [hang in hotel/prison. flush tanks/sprinkler system]. The inner wall [...] is the actual egg-shell [cockle shell and Humpty Dumpty] and it is dark when dry. The outer wall [...] is composed of transparent material which is often ornamented with frills, floats, and bosses. [...] The upper surface of the egg, usually without ornamentation, may show pale punctuate spots or polygonal markings. The lower surface may be ornamented with a polygonal network [web] in some species. [...] The frill, which is often wholly or partially striate, may not surround the entire upper portion of the egg in some species.104

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Another hanger-on or parasite is the pendulum.105 The period of Foucault’s Pendulum is “governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by π.”106 Nine penduli are hung from the roof structure of the museum to record the movements of bodies moving along the galleries, over the catwalks, and through the stalls. The museum is a place of the built-down, not the built-up. The roof is level with the ground or the limit of the air, the between between sky and earth. In this dusky place one has to be careful not to lose one’s balance.107 It is easy to stumble or fumble. The floors are not at all level. They shift as much as the logic that created them. Michel Serres quotes from George Dumezil’s L’Assommoir that one of the character’s husband, a “roofer, falls from a roof and begins to limp,”108 the danger of falling109 is implicit in the construction of the museum as an architecture that is suspended from above. This is where Tim Finnegan, the hod carrier enters the scene. He did not fall off a roof but off of a ladder while working as a go-between, a mediator between the mortar mixer and the mason [son of ma]. A hod carrier lives constantly with the danger of falling while he carries the hod which is a basket or a sieve. Here the image of the sieve as a web or weir—another kind of interrupter— surfaces again. A place of change is marked. The hod carrier scales a ladder down to the museum’s roof which is heavy but ambiguous110 because lead as a material has the paradoxical qualities of protecting and poisoning. In case of nuclear radiation it shields and protects the human body but, when in direct physical contact with it for an extended amount of time, lead poisons the body. Lead in another reading also stands with its longevity in contrast to that which passes through the building it covers: the short-lived commodities.

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The mosquito’s eggs are

Gillett, J. D. Mosquitos: 27. Ibidem: 12. 104 Russel, Paul F. Keys to the Anopheline Mosquitos of the World, published by the American Entomological Society, The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 1943: 18. 105 The pendulum like the section is a generator but rather than using the cut it depends on gravity and oscillation. An architectural pendulum is a plumb bob. Plumb(um) [mercury, Hermes] bob, plump bob, plum [prune, the current bob, the fruit, PLUMCAKE TOBACCO?] Bob, HUYGENS, CHAOS PENDULUM. 106 Umberto Eco. Foucault’s Pendulum: 3. 107 Justitia’s scales are not in balance. “Every historical perception can be visualized as a scale, the one side of which is weighted down with the past, the other with the perception [Erkenntnis] of the present. Whereas the facts collected in the former cannot be too insignificant or numerous enough, those on the other side should be only a few heavy, massive weights.” Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften V: 585. 108 Serres, Hermes: 41. 109 Humpty dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty dumpty had a great fall, All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Couldn’t get humpty dumpty together again. From Mother Goose, unpaginated. 110 It is made of lead (2.5#s/squarefoot) laid over a corrugated steel deck covered with concrete. 103

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Web 4 The Labyrinth #42

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTThe museum is a labyrinth, a palace of many halls interconnected by tortuous passages. It is a maze, from labrus: a two-edged battle ax (which is like the T for Trabeation); a labyrinth is the palace of the two-edged battle ax. Labyrinths are the places where we get lost. They are places of bifurcations, forkings, irreversible decisions, lines of division.

What we can follow through the labyrinth of the museum is not the path marked by Ariadne’s linear thread but the network of Arachne’s112 spiderwebs. Spiderwebs are where things get caught. The public “reveled in this illusionistic realm, this manmade [labyrinth] under glass, this urban reality which replaced nature [, the Goose Creek].”113

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In the modern city, as in the ur-forests of another era, the ‘threatening and alluring face’ of myth was alive and everywhere. [...] It appeared, prototypically, in the arcades, where ‘the commodities are suspended and shoved together in such boundless confusion, that [they appear] like images out of the most incoherent dreams.’114

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Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, F° 13. 112 Arachne was in Greek mythology a woman who was turned into a spider for challenging another goddess to a weaving contest which Arachne would probably have won, considering the beautiful creations of spiders. 113 Geist, Arcades: 114. 114 Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: 254.

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Most hidden aspect of large cities: this historical object of the new metropolis with its uniform streets and vast rows of houses has its invented architectures of the old [times]: labyrinths realized. [Wo/man] of the mass. The drive that makes the large cities into a labyrinth. Completion through the covered corridors of the arcades.111

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Landing on these special squares creates delaying obstacles or quick passages towards the final square. Some of the squares have tactical importance: #6 which is the Bridge square; #19 a Hotel or Inn; #31 the Well; #42 the Labyrinth; #52 the Prison; #58 Death. “For the present we may omit death, which subsequently differs in at least in one respect in that it is not an artifact,”117 which are the things we keep in museums. The numerical difference between these numbers is a series of 13-1211-10 which I have appropriated, after multiplication by two and conversion into feet [Oedipus], as the respective lengths of the four sections of the museum. There is also a series of white or Goose squares that follow an alternating four-five118 pattern (#5, 9, 14, 18, 23, 27, 32, 36, 41, 45, 50, 54, 59 used in the design to determine the museum’s interior organization). This oscillation between four and four-plus-one119 signifies the ambiguous relationship between that which seems to be complete—four— and that which is essentially incomplete—(four plus) one. A fifth wheel is extra but sometimes necessary.120 The Goose game is a game of circulation. It is about movement of tokens along a spiraling path which can be compared to the movements of nomads. There is a difficulty here in controlling or determining traffic. In the Goose game the distance a token can advance or retreat depends on luck, in the museum movement of its occupants relies on their personal preferences and desires. In opposition to conventional museums there is no prescribed path of circulation. The only degree of control is exercised at the bottom of the first flight of stairs or ramps that follow the trap doors: a gatekeeper or concierge in a loge guards the entry that has already been made. Each gatekeeper’s loge is built into the stair or ramp in such a way that the circulation path turns into a bench and table for the gatekeeper’s use within her/his loge.121

uses a board containing 63 squares arranged in a spiral configuration beginning from the outside and moving toward the center [...], a closed path moving back upon itself. [...] A player throws two dice to advance a token along squares. When a player lands on certain key squares, he is required to make special moves, for example, on the well square, the bridge square, the hotel square, the prison square, or the goose’s square.116

ll true insight creates turbulence [Wirbel]. Early to swim against the direction of the circulating stream. As in art the decisive is: brush nature against the grain.”115 Brushes are used for broad application of ink; the goose quill takes over the detail work. There is another goose (which are migrating birds) hidden within these pages: the ancient Goose game. The game

“A

Nomadic Method Symmetria of the Museum

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, V: 1011. Cats do not like to be brushed against the grain. 116 Editor’s note in Hermes: 40. 117 Michel Serres, Hermes: 42. With regard to death “I had nearly forgotten to observe that the Passage de l’Opéra is a large glass coffin.” Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker: 26. 118 “Four is symbolic of the earth, of terrestial space, of the human situation, of the external, natural limits of the ‘minimum’ awareness of totality, and finally, of rational organization. It is equated with the square and the cube, and the cross representing the four seasons and the points of the compass. A great many material and spiritual forms are modeled after the quaternary. It is the number associated with tangible achievement and with the Elements. In mystic thought it represents the tetramorphs. Five Symbolic of man, health and love, and of the quintessence acting upon matter. It comprises the four limbs of the body plus the head which controls them, and likewise the four fingers plus the thumb and the four cardinal points together with the centre. The hieros gamos is signified by the number five, since it represents the union of principle of heaven (three) with that of the Magna Mater (two). Geometrically, it is the pentagram, or the five-pointed star. It corresponds to pentagonal symmetry, a common characteristic of organic nature, to the golden section (as noted by the Pythagoreans), and to the five senses representing the five ‘forms’ of matter.” From J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962): 222. 119 A not-so oblique reference to Jennifer Bloomer’s three-plus-one construction (in her forthcoming book Desiring Architecture) which is a not-so oblique reference to Derrida’s oscillatory 3/4 structures, and Joyce’s 313+1 structure. 120 So is this text in the understanding of the architectural ‘text’. 121 “What stands in the windowless house, is the truth. By the way the arcade is a windowless house too. The windows that look down on it are like loges, that allow one to look into but not out of. (The true has no windows; the true looks nowhere into the universe).” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Scbriften Q 2a.7. I would interpret ‘the true’ here as not meaning a collective truth but a personal truth. A truth or understanding of this world, then, which can not be controlled from above but has to be constructed by each individual in a dialogue with other beings.

Intersection IV

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Edges are the margins where things slip, slide, shift, shear, shore. 123 Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker: 14. 124 The appearance and disappearance of these swirls can be estimated but not definitively determined. In other words: we are dealing here with a non-linear system. 125 Guidoni, Enrico. Primitive Architecture: 18. 126 Ibidem : 23.

From the doorway [no. 5] one can see, recessed from a staircase which leads to the rooming house, the glazed lodge of the passage’s custodians. [...] For years on end, this couple has sat within its molehill watching [...]. For years they have sat bound in the straitjacket of this absurd place on the edge122 of the arcades.123 This edge is where the action is, the place of turbulence and movement. The velocity of the Goose Creek’s water moving along a fixed element such as its banks will cause more turbulences closer to the edge of the stream than in the middle.124 The place on the edge is the place of the nomad. “For nomadic societies, architecture is essentially organization of the territory, of the land about which they move.”125 The territory itself acts as architecture—as construction, utilizable object, instrument of social order—and [...] it is on the territory that the community concentrates its interpretive activities attributing to the physical environment significances that the other, more advanced, cultures reserve for their buildings.126

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This architecture addresses both territory and building simultaneously. The building grows out of the Mall’s social and political territory in opposition to the existing museums which do not engage the landscape but are removed from it on plinths for strong bases. While I am not suggesting that the museum is a nomadic architecture in the kinetic sense of the word, I do imply that a nomadic design, i.e. one that does not understand architecture as a linear problem-solving process but as a complex network of dynamic forces, might give a more accurate understanding of how architecture can be a tool for political, social and cultural change. Nomadic existence is about both dispersion and concentration of energy. The museum is a battery that distributes energy and collects it. A nomadic method of design suggests other elements: rather than relying, as conventional architecture does, on a partis or concept which can be summarized as a strategic approach, a nomadic approach uses local tactics, small steps that do not foresee that which is never whole or complete to begin with. Again the result is that the museum visitor is not able to understand the building in its totality. Lastly the nomadic approach toward architecture leads away from the egocentricity so prevalent among architects. Nomads leave behind what they have built when they move on. Architects do to. However, many

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Architexts designers do not seem to be aware that when something is built and occupied it belongs no longer to the maker but to the collective user. To see built architecture as something we, as architects, leave behind seems to be a more appropriate evaluation of the importance of architects and their offspring.

Web 5 The Prison #52

he museum is a prison,127 a place of desire to break out of the conventions, the routines, and simultaneously a place of anxiety, of fear, of not knowing what to do when you are ‘out there, there.’ A prison is also the place of intense confinement, limited mobility, tight, concrete spaces. “The long corridor which could pass for the wings of a theater, has dressing rooms—bedrooms I mean—on only one side, facing the passage. A double system of staircases leads to separate exits on the street. Everything seems arranged in view of the quick getaway.”128

Post-Script

“[T

he Passagenwerk has to do with [...] achieving the most extreme concreteness for an epoch, as appears now and again in children’s games [the Goose game], in a building [the Museum of Arts and Trades], a life situation.”129 In the nineteenth century this ‘building’ was the arcade, in the twentieth century it is the shopping mall whose precursor is the arcade. Usually the Mall is a place of goods circulating while the museum displays static goods.130 However, this museum displays goods that can be bought and thus taken away. They have the potential to be moved. The museum turns into a shopping mall. It is a museum-gift131-shop museum. “What is sold in the arcades are souvenirs. The ‘souvenir” [Andenken in German: both as a noun for souvenir and as a verb for literally ‘to-think-of, i.e. to remember] is the form of the commodity in the arcades.”132 From the nineteenth century we can make a linkage into this time frame: Geist argues that

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The word ‘prison’ derives from prehendere, to seize, taking, seizing, capturing, prize, a lever, to pry, to move, raise with a lever. The instrument of breaking in is the same as the container which keeps the prisoner from breaking out. 128 Aragon, Nightwalker: 12. 129 Susan Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing: 262. 130 These goods may still have a static charge, especially if you wear rubber-soled shoes when you pick them up. 131 Incidentally the word ‘gift’ in German means poison which opens up an avenue of thought about poisoned presents like the Trojan horse or the booby-trapped letter. 132 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V: 1034. 133 One misreading might be ‘foolproof suitcase.’

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it is necessary [...] to persue the destiny of the arcade into the twentieth century. The architectural idea of the arcade is once again entering the consciousness of those who are discussing the future of the city as a form of life. They must seek out specific new forms under changed economic, technological, and social conditions. [...] Before World War I the arcade died an almost official death: no building authority would permit it in its nineteenth-century form [...]; no fire inspector, when faced with the prospect of such an arcade, could forget for a moment his laboriously developed categories, like fire containment, prevention of smoke accumulation and fireproof staircase.133

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IN CASE OF FIRE a wet-pipe sprinkler system with 280 heads spaced at 12’ on center on each floor will be activated. At the edge of the atrium the sprinklers are spaced 6’ on center to create, in the event of fire, a water wall or waterfall. Fire, or its predecessor, smoke, is sensed by photo-electronic smoke detectors. Passive prevention includes smoke barriers or curtain boards built into the structure between floors. The HVAC system includes fire-dampers between the stalls and the floors. 135 Geist, Arcades: 81. 136 James Joyce. Finnegans Wake: 215, 216. 137 Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker: 13. 138 Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften: 490. 139 Ibidem: 1024.

To rewrite Geist’s proposal somewhat; the only alternative left to the arcade was to go underground [into the old Goose Creek channel, constructed with 2-hour fire-rated paint on the structural steel134], to dissolve into its separate aspects [i.e. sections], to mask itself [as a giftshopmuseum-giftshop], and to reappear in another form [as the museum of the Arts and Trades], another time [1990], and another context [on the Mall in Washington D.C.], once again giving shape and space to an articulated need,135 i.e. a museum for people on the move; a museum with shifty foundations; a critique of the existing architecture on the Mall, and by extension a critique of the United States, since Washington [and Washing Ton], and especially the Mall with its historical and thus political museums, stands in as a show case for the nation. Washington is the place of washing stones where people launder dirty collars and spread gossip and rumors from one side of the Mall to the other. Some survive, others are turned into one of the stones they were beating their dirty laundry on. “Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I fell as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? [...] Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone.”136 “Occasionally a light flickers on in the corridor, but [the] dusk [of Finnegans Wake] is its native colour.”137 After night follows day: Awakening as a stepwise process that emerges in the life of an individual and a generation. Sleep [is] its primary status. The experience of growth has much in common with the dream experience. Its historical figure is the dream figure. Each epoch has this side towards dreams, the side of the children. With respect to the former century this appears very markedly in the arcades. However, while the education of former generations read these dreams via tradition and religious teachings, today’s education simply addresses the diversion, amusement of children.”138 However, in this break between the tradition of education and the current condition lies also the chance not to reinscribe the repressive values that have been implanted via tradition into our parents. What that calls for is certainly not an education of diversion and amusement but a teaching of interruption that engages the student at a time of boredom.

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We are bored if we do not know what we are waiting for. And that we know, or believe to know, that is almost always nothing but the expression of our shallowness or absentmindedness. Boredom is the threshold to large deeds.139

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Architexts Bibliography

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Aragon, Louis. Nightwalker (Le Paysan de Paris). Translated by Frederick Brown. (Prentice Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1970). Aston, James and Story, Edward B. Wrought Iron. Its Manufacture. Characteristics and Applications. (A. M. Byers Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 1956). Augaitis, Daina. Siting Technology. (Exhibition Catalogue from the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff: 1987). Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann. (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main: 1982). Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing;. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press: 1989. Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Orlando: 1989). Fürnkäs, Josef. Surrealismus als Erkenntnis. Walter Benjamin - Weimarer Einbahnstraße und Pariser Passagen, (J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart: 1988). Geist, Johann Friedrich. Arcades, (MIT Press, Cambridge: 1983). Originally published in German under the title Passagen Ein Bautyp des 19. Jahrhunderts, third edition © 1979 by PrestelVerlag, München. Gillette, J. D. Mosquitos. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London: 1971). Guidoni, Enrico. Primitive Architecture. Translated by Robert Erich Wolf. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: 1978). Serres, Michel. Hermes. Literature. Science. Philosophy. (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1983). Taylor, J. D., Kennedy, W. J. and Hall, A. The Shell Structure And Mineralogy of the Bivalvia. Introduction. Nuculacea - Trigonacea. Bulletin of The British Museum (Natural History) Zoology, Supplement 3, London: 1969. Witte, Bernd, Walter Benjamin mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, (Rowohlt, Hamburg: 1985).

Views of final model at 1/2” = 1’

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Design+Build Advanced Connections Design Build Detail

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As part of this course I decided to build one of the entry doors, door no. 5, which leads into the Museum of the Arts and Trades on the Mall in Washington D.C. (see parallel studio project from Fall 1990). The entry works as a threshold. It is a joint between the foundation of the Museum and the actual interior of the building. This design is similar to the first project in that it expands the act of moving through a critical space by extending the distance and experience of entry. The door works like a two-leafed trap door. Upon opening one part of the door, the other one closes. When the first leaf closes the second one opens the passage down the stairs into the bowels of the Museum. There is a parallel here to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of history as a one-way-street where the past is irredeemably gone. There is no way back. We can only go forward. The temporality of existence is reinscribed in this threshold. Entry Door no. 5 is two feet wide and fIve feet high. It is constructed with a pinned, split hinge cut at a 45° angle that closes the leaf automatically with the help of gravity. The door swings out into the path, against the flow of the visitor. It cuts through the path of entry. The act of moving through an expanded frame, that is the passing over this threshold, becomes an event. Once closed the door can not be opened again from the inside. On the outside the door is sheathed in five copper plates (screwed to a door core with stainless steel screws in seemingly random patterns that resemble the patterns of joints from the five structural webs’ members) separated from each other by bands of galvanized steel. The copper plates can be read as conductors of energy that reinforce passage through a resistor. On the inside the door is covered with felt, an insulator. Again the difference between interior and exterior is overtly emphasized to increase the awareness of the entry sequence as a threshold.

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Design+Build Plans Version I

Version II

Trap door axonometric

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Trap door plan

Trap door section with selfclosing hinge

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Design+Build

Trap door No. 5 section perspective from below (door radius dashed)

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Trap door No. 5 section perspective from above (door radius dashed)

Trap door No. 5 in situ

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Final full-scale assembly with designer/builder

Construction

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Completed trap door in exhibit space

Zinc kick plate

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Copper-clad external surface with turned door handle

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Exterior: copper + zinc + steel + wood

Interior: felt Door details

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Details

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Entering (not breaking)

Quote from Umberto Eco, Foucaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pendulum

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Logo

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Design+Build In use, twice

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Quote from Umberto Eco, Foucaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pendulum

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Quotes from Umberto Eco, Foucaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pendulum

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Architectural Projects Steel-and-Glass Wall

Advanced Architectural Connections Design a glass-steel wall assembly with an exterior canopy for light control. My approach to the problem of the wall was to do the opposite of what is conventionally done with respect to a curtain wall system. Rather than try to design the wall as thin as possible I chose to expand the distance between inside and outside. The Idea was not only to question conventions but at the same time to explore the possibility light offers as an instrument of design. By expanding the quantitative aspect of a wall the qualitative character

changes as well. Light coming in from the outside is first softened by the canopy and then bounced off of the built-in shelving. A person can occupy the built-in bench which is sited in a place between inside and outside, the wall.

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Section sketch of version I

Design sketches

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Section through canopy

Corner facade, version I

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Corner plan, version I

Wall section

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Design sketch section

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Section through wall and floor, version I

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Roof wall section (sketch above, hardline below)

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Window/column plan section

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Floor/wall section, version II (sketch above, hardline below)

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Wall/floor section, version III, showing built-in seat

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Wall Section/Facade (left) and Wall Section (right) through Steel-Glass Wall Assembly, Version III showing different places of the wall

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Facade of corner (right) and figureground of section and plan (above)

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Plan section of steel-glass wall assembly, version III, showing built-in seat, windows (open and closed), and coffee mug on heat grill/shelf

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Detailed sections of cantilevered canopy end, version I

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Section of canopy, version II, showing attachment to built-up roof and wall header.

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Etching The following pages show etchings on zinc plates that I created as part of my Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Research Project at the University of Florida. The Architext to these plates starts on page 189.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Thesis Parts: Roof/Wing

Version I

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Version II (with aquatint and worked over plate)

Final version showing further development

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Zinc plate

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Version II detail

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Etching Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Thesis Parts: Carrels/Labyrinth

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Etchings on zinc plate

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Transparency positive for photo etching

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Final version (also next page spread >)

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Lightened up final version of carrels/ labyrinth

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Master’s Thesis Parts: Dance Stage/Printing Room/Hypogaeum

Etchings on zinc plate

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Worm’s eye view (above) and construction detail (left) of Dance Stage/ Printing Room/Hypogaeum

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Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Thesis Parts: Dance Stage/Printing Room/Hypogaeum Etchings on zinc plate

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Detailed view of Dance Stage/Printing Room/Hypogaeum etching

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(The Library of the Future or) A Virtual βιβλιοτηεκα for Perdix and Daidalos or A Secret Block for a Secret Person in the U.S.

by Mikesch W. Muecke

A Master’s Research Project presented to the Department of Architecture at the University of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Architecture University of Florida

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June 12, 1991

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Figure 1: Antonella Da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study (from Michael Brawne, Libraries: 9).

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To Miriam1

From the title page of Viollet-LeDuc’s Entretiens sur L’Architecture. tome premier, (Morel et Cie Éditeurs, Paris: MDCCCLXIII).

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Acknowledgements 2

See the discussion on ‘corner’ on p. 196.

wonder whether the ‘ack’ in the word ‘acknowledgements’ could refer to the German Ecke (which means ‘corner’2), or one might consider Partridge, who, in his etymological dictionary Origins, locates ‘acknowledgement’ next to ‘acme’. Acme comes from the Greek akme, a point, the topmost point, the prime. For anterior etymology of ‘acme’ he adds the source ‘acute’, from the Latin acutus, acuere, to sharpen. Both the proverbial corner stone—which supports this project— and the acute sharpening of my senses was due to the following Menschen to whom I am deeply indebted:

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• To Dr. Jennifer Bloomer, Chair of this Master's Research Project, for opening up my mind to the other sides of architecture. • To Professor Robert Segrest for an enlightening studio that was a major influence on this project. • To Professor William Tilson who gave up his office and computer for a good part of the last two years. • To my parents Irma and Walter Mücke for a great childhood that taught me how to use my imagination. • To Millie and Bob Ramey who asked probing questions at the right time and supported me financially over the past five years. • To my mother-in-law Margaret Zach who has supplied much of the needed infrastructure, economical and otherwise. • To Sara for allowing me to romp with her in the evenings. • To Miriam, my best friend and Kupferstecher, Geliebte, Lebensgefährtin, wife, and independent colleague, for editing my early attempts of putting this project in writing, for time shared, and for nudging me into the field of architecture in the first place. • To those who in their absence here are still present.

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Architexts (The Library of the Future or) A Virtual3 βιβλιοτηεκα4 for Perdix and Daidalos or A Secret Block for a Secret Person5 in the U.S.

Introduction

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The title refers to the word ‘virtue’ which means strength and also something that is not actual but equivalent. In computer language ‘virtual’ means just that: a non-actual, but nevertheless existing reality. In this case the books, which in conventional libraries can take up an enormous amount of space, are virtual in that they are not really in this library but stored in another place. They are located in electronic on-line libraries that can be located anywhere in the world. 4 The word βιβλιοτηεκα is the Greek word for library. However, βιβλιοτηεκα in its literal translation as ‘bookshelf ’ is a more accurate description because in this library shelves play a major role. 5 This partial title connects Joseph Beuys with James Joyce. It refers to Joyce’ Finnegans Wake, an important literary work that figures in this project, and the words “secret cell” on page 182 of the same text. It also points to a collection of drawings by Beuys that were published as A Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland. Beuys, according to his Life Course/Work Course, added two chapters to Ulysses, on request by Joyce, in 1961, and read Finnegans Wake publicly in 1950 in ‘Haus Wylermeer.’ It is likely that Beuys’ title for his ‘Block’ comes from Finnegans Wake and the secret person might well be Joyce. Furthermore the Encyclopedia of the Book defines ‘Block’ as an ‘engraved or etched zinc or copper plate’. The drawings for this project are engraved and etched into zinc plates that will be installed in the finished building. The etching process includes aquatinta, a method of creating dark areas on the paper by etching many small pockets, or cells, into the metal plate (see etchings on pages 174-187). 6 As one would expect, this detail is controversial. Most writers of mythology see in her Daidalos’ nephew. Hathorn in Greek Mythology: 311, writes that Daidalos “had been forced to flee Athens for murdering his nephew, Perdix, in a fit of envy.” Kenneth McLeish in his Children of the Gods: 141, calls Perdix Talos and suggests that Daidalos’ motive was jealousy about Perdix’ invention of the saw. Daidalos, “raw with jealousy, took him [sic!] for a walk on the steep rocks of the Acropolis, led him [sic!] to the edge and pushed him [sic!] over.” No mention here of Athena’s sisterly rescue. The only one who identifies Perdix as the sister of Daidalos is Edward Barthell, Jr. in Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece: 243. “By his wife, Alcippe, Eupalamus had two daughters, Metiadusa and Perdix, and a son named [Daidalos].” 7 Her destiny was already contained in her name. Eric Partridge traces ‘partridge’ to the Greek perdix. 8 Encyclopedia Brittanica, 11th edition, volume 7: 728. Daidalos was the Greek John Doe. 9 These inventions, which Sir Walter Evans believes to have discovered at the Palace of Minos in Knossus, are the cow mount, the circular dance stage, the labyrinth, the plumb bob, and wings. 3

oth Perdix and Daidalos were mythical inventors who resided in ancient Greece. Daidalos is probably better known than Perdix for two reasons. He pushed Perdix off the acropolis in a futile attempt to eliminate professional competition, and she was a woman.6 Perdix, however, was not killed in the fall but saved by Athena. Just before she hit the ground Athena changed her into a partridge.7 If Daidalos resorted to attempted murder because of professional envy it would not be far fetched to suggest that he never was the famous inventor he is known to be. There is even some proof in an ancient tradition that casts doubt on his abilities. “To [Daidalos] the Greeks of the historic age were in the habit of attributing buildings, and statues the origin of which was lost in the past, and which had no inscription belonging to them...”8 All of this might imply that both siblings—Perdix and Daidalos— are responsible for the inventions9 that generated this Library. The speculation that Daidalos shared his capacities with his sister has wider ranging consequences. It may suggest, for example, that the title ‘first architect’, until now considered to belong to

Colomina, On Architecture, Production and Reproduction. Introduction to ARCHITECTUREPRODUCTION: 7. 11 Bloomer, Jennifer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 47. 12 The title of this section refers to the partial title of Jennifer Bloomer’s PhD dissertation Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi. The prescrypt is simultaneously an abstract of this project and a prescription of how to read it. ‘Scrypt’ refers to this paper, its accompanying drawings, and the architecture to be built, with its crypt-like center. 13 When the word ‘Library’ is capitalized in this paper it refers to my design, unless noted otherwise. 14 Latin: “for the convenience of scholars.” 15 It is loaded in more than one way. ‘Gift’ means ‘poison’ in German. This gift becomes a poisoned present, or poisent. It is Derrida’s pharmakon, simultaneously cure and poison. 10

Design sketch

Daidalos, was shared by a woman. Of course, Beatriz Colomina goes further when she implies that Ariadne deserved the title of first architect because she interpreted the labyrinth that Daidalos supposedly built.10 Perdix, however, preceded Ariadne. If indeed Daidalos was not creating those marvelous inventions alone then these speculations suggest also the acknowledgement of what Jennifer Bloomer calls a ‘minor architecture’. She coined this term in response to Deleuze’ and Guattari’s Kafka; Toward a Minor Literature in which the authors interpret Kafka’s writings as an alternative and critique of major literatures, and Bloomer defines it as an “architecture of desire [that] will operate in the interstices of this [major] architecture. [It is n]ot opposed to, not separate from, but upon, within, among [...].”11 The acknowledgement of a minor architecture opens up this investigation to the possibilities of anotherthan-established architecture, or, in the case of a male-dominated mythology, to a reinvention, and thus reinterpretation and critique of an existing body of knowledge.

PreScrypt12

fter my five-year residence here at the University of Florida it is only fitting that as a farewell present I shall leave a gift to the Department of Architecture. This gift is the design of a Research Library13 for graduate students of architecture and pro communi doctorum vivorum comodo14 from other disciplines. That there exists a need for such a library at this department becomes apparent if one looks for a place where architecture graduate students could do research in a supportive environment. There is none. This gift, I hope, will remedy the situation. However, like its precedent in Troy,15 this gift is loaded; it has properties that might undermine the foundations and other vital parts of this established institution.

The Premises

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his project requires initially an investigation into the possibility of understanding architecture as a text. With this I am suggesting that architecture can be occupied like, for example, literary, televised, or graphical texts. However, there

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Diagram showing corner/intersection of northfacing and east-facing wall of the University of Florida architecture building

When the word ‘text’ is capitalized in this paper it refers to my own texts which are this paper, the drawings, and the proposed building. Also, architecture, which contains the word ‘texture’ or ‘text’, can be constructed, written, built, and read, interpreted, understood, that is, given meaning by a client, or rather, a reader. 17 “An author can foresee an ‘ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia’ (as happens with Finnegans Wake), able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters are not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like structure of the text.” Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts.: 9. This may explain why this text is difficult to read. In its complexity it mimes the Library as a labyrinth. 18 A corner in architecture is the origin of everything. When laying out a building the architect uses so-called batter boards. A batter board is one of a pair of horizontal boards which are nailed (at right angles to each other) to three posts set beyond the comers of a building excavation. They are used to indicate a desired location. Strings, fastened to these boards, indicate the exact comer of the building. The corner, and thus the corner of a foundation or the corner of a corner stone is indicated by a plumb bob hung from crossing lines. 19 The word corner can be traced to cornu, an animal’s horn, which has a Medieval Latin derivative “corneria, a place (or point) where two converging lines or sides [or two voices] meet.” Eric Partridge. Origins: 296. 20 See Catherine Ingraham’s discussion on the dimensions of lines in Lines and Linearity: Problems In Architectural Theory in Drawing. Building. Text, Andrea Kahn, editor, (Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 1991). 21 The site as a gap offers the unique possibility to question the polarities and hierarchies implicit in a univalent approach towards architecture. By not restating the polarized positions, but considering what is possible between their absences, a different architecture may be possible. This refers to Bloomer’s investigation of the Ornament/Structure pair in her essay Tabbies of Bower where she questions the polarization of the two terms by looking at the possibilities architecture offers if the urge to privilege one over the other is absent. 22 This refers to Bloomer’s idea of ‘dirty drawings.’ The dirty drawing “occupies the territory between a working drawing and a pornographic photograph [...] [which suggests the pictorial qualities of a rendering]. Thus, it is both technically correct and improperly ornamental. In its oscillation between the poles which might be considered those of sanctity and sensuality, and in its bizarre and emphatic mundaneness, the dirty drawing is baroque. [Footnote within quote: ‘These characteristics, along with its ‘dirtiness,’ also place it within the realm of the hatchery.” See Jennifer Bloomer, In the Museyroom, Assemblage 5, ed. K. Michael Hays, (Cambridge, Mass.: 16

is a difference between architecture and these other, less-than-three-dimensional texts. Architecture cannot only be occupied intellectually but also inhabited physically. This specific architecture or Text16 acknowledges its affinity to the literary text of James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake, to the five inventions by Perdix and Daidalos, and to Piranesi’s Carceri etchings. This text is an open text. It is the outline for a closed project.17 This project originated and is located in a corner.18 The corner is the virtual intersection19 of two multidimensional lines.20 One is the northfacing wall of the Architecture Building staircase. The other is the east-facing fourth floor studio wall. Both walls do not quite intersect. A gap21 marks their potential intersection. The project is about lines that do not quite meet each other. It is about communication and the breakdown of communication. This project includes a set of drawings, created with the help of an Apple Macintosh computer, that are critical of conventional drawings and, by extension, built architecture. Drawings, like spoken language or written text, are mediators between two entities. In this case my drawings compress two conventionally excluded means of architectural representation, the rendering and the working drawing, into one plane.22 Umberto Eco writes

that “[y]ou cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it may be, cannot afford whatever interpretation. An open text outlines a ‘closed’ project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy.”23 This may explain why this text is difficult to read. In its complexity it mimes the Library as a labyrinth. From one viewpoint this Library can be understood as an architectural object that, with its location on24 an existing building, comments on this host25 building. The Library, in relationship to the Architecture Building, is different from, but also deferring/deferrent to its host. The building works in its site the way the Gothic cathedral works in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris; it is a four-dimensional26 book that contains conventional books. However, rather than consisting of carved stones that tell stories about death and creation, my Library contains etching plates that describe how to construct it and other architectures. The building is a place that both encourages students to learn from books and to learn from the building itself. “Storage, accessibility and expansion had in St. Jerome’s time simple and direct solutions.”27 The same is true again for this Library. Rather than supplying a large amount of storage space the Library uses electronic technology to access and import information into micro computers located in each study carrel. This means that the primary storage of the books, be it physical or electronic, can be located anywhere.28 This project is an inclusive treatise.29 To write a treatise is to draw or drag, or to move slowly across a terrain and to leave traces of those actions. Drawings/treatises and the architecture they describe are remnants of past actions. Built architecture is a trace of these actions. This approach toward the generation of architecture acknowledges

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MIT Press, 1987).’] The dirty drawing addresses architectural representation by colliding the rendering with the working drawing (the sacred with the profane), while at the same time pointing toward the fetishistic role of the image in architecture. It comments as well on the contemporary phenomenon of the architectural drawing as art commodity.” Bloomer, Tabbles of Bower (Manuscript), 1991: 35-36. The drawings, both the ones created on the computer and the etchings are an assemblage of many lines. “All he could see was a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other, which covered the paper so thickly that it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them. ‘Read it,’ said the officer. ‘I can’t ,’ said the explorer. ‘Yet it’s clear enough,’ said the officer.” Bloomer, “In the Museyroom”, Assemblage 5: 61, from Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” The Penal Colony: 202. 23 Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts: 9. 24 This ‘on’ carries with it “all the dimensions and ambiguities of the ‘on’ in Derrida’s ‘Living On’ (beyond, about, upon, on - including the parasitical connotation.” Ulmer, Object of Post-Criticism, Anti-Aesthetic: 94. 25 Michel Serres refers to ‘host’ in the context of his discussion on parasitism which includes the guest, host, and interrupter, or noise. Gregory Ulmer mentions this ibidem: 101. 26 The fourth dimension is time which is what it takes to traverse three-dimensional space. 27 Brawne, Libraries; Architecture and Equipment: 9. See also da Messina’s painting on the title page of this paper. 28 This constitutes a potential crisis for architecture. What is the role of architecture with respect to libraries when the large stack spaces commonly associated with them are no longer necessary? What are other generating devices beside function that can be appropriated for the design of libraries? 29 The word ‘treatise’ comes from the Latin verb tractare which connects to the Middle English tretis, well made, from the synonym tracticius which relates to the Late Latin Tracticius, the nickname for Heliogabalus, whose corpse was dragged through the streets. Dragging is another form of drawing which is a major activity of architects, and, at least in this semester, a major activity of this writer. 30 See also the discussion on allegory under ‘Methods’. To use allegory as a method for the theory and practice of architecture “is to point to a deconstruction of theory itself, and particularly to a disacknowledgement of a separability of theory and practice. Theory and practice are suspended in the construction; theory is embedded, or disseminated, in the construction itself. Theory becomes potentiality, a possible pattern, uncircumscribed by such concepts as foundation, rules, validation, etc. Theory is viewed not as a foundation or relic, but as dynamic, trac-

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Theory and practice are suspended in the construction; theory is embedded, or disseminated, in the construction itself. Theory becomes potentiality, a possible pattern, uncircumscribed by such concepts as foundation, rules, validation, etc. Theory is viewed not as a foundation or relic, but as dynamic, tracing a fragmentary process of object-making,”36creating an architecture that has as its foundation not an arrogance of being the ‘better alternative’ but attempts instead to acknowledge an-other, a supplemental or allegorical approach to the production of architecture.37

ing a fragmentary process of objectmaking.” 31 in the Benjaminian sense as “that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing” From Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung tks deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften I: 704, quoted in Dialectics of Seeing by Susan Morss: 8. This origin, then, is not a point in time, but a time frame. It is spatial and thus architectural. 32 The orders, depending on the author, are: doric, corinthian, ionic, tuscan, and composite. 33 Flaubert, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: 15. This dictionary was published as a supplement to Flaubert’s novel Bouvard and Pecuchet. 34 Including that which is proper. 35 In its German sense as Handhaber, literally ‘someone who has a hand’ [in something]. 36 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire; The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: ix. 37 Contrary to expectation this kind of architecture is not necessarily less powerful. Its strength, and its weakness, lies in a multi-valency that allows for multiple interpretations or readings. This kind of architecture is not complex out of capriciousness but out of necessity.

the indifference between theory and practice30 by compressing the generation, that is, the origin of the project31 with its meandering thought processes and theories, into a construction that is built, and thus an expression of practice. Former treatises of architecture (as guides to architectural practice) have always been texts of exclusion. Architectural authors such as Vitruvius, Alberti, and Langley privilege the four architectural orders.32 However, the domination of these orders is more an indication of what has been excluded than of what the orders of architecture are. Flaubert articulates this omission in his famous, and witty, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. Under the heading ARCHITECTURE the reader finds the following: “There are but four architectural orders. Forgetting, of course, the Egyptian, Cyclopean, Assyrian, Hindoo, Chinese, Gothic, Romanesque, etc.”33 With reference to Flaubert this project is a proposal for an expanded, and thus more inclusive architecture than is conventionally accepted by practicioners of architecture. This architecture, these drawings, and this Library violate what is considered the property34 of architecture by using conventional means of construction, but unconventional methods of generation. By ambiguously occupying a space that is both conventional and non-conventional, the project positions itself in a peripheral field that is enforced by my own position in the social and political margin as a Resident Alien in this country. However, rather than seeing this position as an impediment, I consider it a potential model for a different architecture in which the architect is no longer a heroic figure, but a manipulator35 in a complex network of actions. This suggests a worldview which is no longer anthropocentric but anthroexcentric. The architecture that develops out of this consciousness can be described with Wolfgang Pehnt’s words, which are also the title to his book, as the ‘beginning of modesty’ or Der Anfang der Bescheidenheit. Pehnt, a European architecture critic, describes this humble manner as a refusal to separate theory and practice.

History of Libraries

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Brawne. Libraries: 10. Ibidem: 10. 40 The access to knowledge generally, and books specifically, has always been an issue of power. Here the control was believed to be established by the physical separation of responsibility over the information. What happened if the two key-holders banded together in their desire for knowledge? 41 Pevsner, History of Building Types: 92. The importance of this kind of library is evident in Geoffrey of Ste Barbe-en-Ange’s dictum that ‘claustrum sine armario quasi castrum sine armentario’, meaning ‘a monastery without a book-cupboard is like a fort without an armoury.’ Quoted ibidem. 42 The importance of ‘chest’ will become apparent later on with respect to the physiognomy of the mosquito. 43 Brawne. Libraries: 12. 44 Ibidem: 11. 45 Lecterns are low tables with a sloped surface. 46 Pevsner, History of Building Types: 102. There is a contemporary parallel to Gibbs’ building in Kahn’s Exeter Library with its empty central space. 38

o one knows what or where the first library was. However, one of the earliest libraries existed at Ephesus, in Asia Minor, where the librarian stored papyrus rolls in shelving alcoves carved out of walls at the perimeter of a central ‘monumental’ hall. Brawne writes that the “notion of the large room in which books and possibly sculpture fitted into the recesses of the wall [...] placed considerable emphasis on the book and a symbolically important room in which to house it; book and space became an architecture.”38 The large room signified one type of library. Another type, according to Brawne, consists of individual carrels. This type “gave very much greater emphasis to the reader”39 and was found predominantly in the monasteries of Northern Europe. Before the carrel was developed, books were often kept in cupboards or so-called presses to which access was usually restricted40 by a lock requiring two different keys. In this case the ‘library’ was more furniture than building. Another indication for the compression of a building into a piece of furniture is that at that time the “most usual name for the library was armarium”41 which means chest42 or cupboard, and gives us the contemporary armoire. A primary example for the beginnings of a carrel library is Gloucester Cathedral’s south walk in the cloister which was added to the main building in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Here, “[t]wenty carrels were built down one side. [E]ach [carrel] allowed a monk to sit within a secluded, lit space.”43 The typical college library in such places as Oxford and Cambridge developed from a cumulative arrangement of these individual carrels. Writers described the carrel described in terms of architectural furniture: “book case, bench and a reading shelf [were] placed at right angles to the solid parts of the wall between the regularly spaced windows.”44 Toward the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century Gutenberg’s invention of movable type caused a rapid increase in the quantity of books which pushed the design of libraries away from the carrel system towards monumental spaces with lecterns45 placed initially in parallel rows. Later, when the placement of low lecterns came to be seen as too wasteful of space, the lecterns developed into alcoves or stalls through the addition of shelves placed on top of the lecterns. The result was a library that combined the hall type with the carrel type. In the eighteenth century the design of libraries was characterized by an increase in monumentality and in what Pevsner calls ‘wasted’ space. As examples he cites Hawksmoor’s Codrington Library of All Souls (built 1715-1740), Gibbs’ Radcliffe Camera (“eight radial alcoves with an upper gallery and a total, splendid, monumental waste of the whole center.”46), a round detached addition to the Bodleian Library in Oxford (1737-1739), and finally Boullee’s design for the Bibliotheque du Roi (1784). To call these spaces wasteful is to ignore that at least in these last three cases the place that holds the books is still an integral and essential part of the space occupied by the reader.

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Architexts Ibidem: 100. This is purposefully not a cycle which implies circle and consequently only one center, but an ellipse with at least two, and possibly more centers. 49 MacKendrick in Greek Stones Speak: 48 explains that the “most impressive architectural survival of [the Early Minoan age] is the great hypogaeum or underground [storage] vault under the south porch of the [Knossus] Palace. It is twenty six feet wide and twice as high, curving up to a beehive vault” Happily the 52’ height correspond to the height of the architecture building on site. The name, however, had to be changed from hypogaeum to hypergaeum to clarify that my storage vault is above ground rather than below. The hyper attests to that . 50 A fact that was noted by Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris with reference to the potential demise of the cathedral as an architecture that was threatened by the book. 51 One reason for this decline is the tendency towards miniaturization and compression of hardware. Printed knowledge that might have taken up several feet of shelf space five years ago can now be stored in the form of a 1/16 inch thick laserdisk. 52 In Information Theory a series of ‘ones’ and ‘zeroes’, which can describe any number, is graphically expressed as a zig-zag line on an x-y graph. X represents time, y shows the height of a ‘one’. It is interesting to know that a zig-zag line in hieroglyphic script is the sign for water, and for labyrinth, which brings us back to one of Perdix’ and Daidalos’ inventions. 53 That still leaves us with the problem of understanding these devices. The nineteenth century approach to comprehend these machines no longer works. The miniaturization has gone beyond what our body can comprehend. Without tools like microscopes the structure of a computer chip is hid47

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At the end of the eighteenth century the library at Karlsruhe in Germany “anticipated the great innovation of the early nineteenth century in the separation of the stacks from the reading room...47 This development led to the grand public libraries like the Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve in Paris (1843-1850) where the stacks occupy the ground floor with the reading room above, or the Bibliotheque National (1865-1868, both by Labrouste) in which the stacks and the reading room are separated horizontally, although they are still connected visually through a glass partition. In the twentieth century both Alvar Aalto’s libraries in Finland and Louis Kahn’s Exeter Library in New Hampshire exemplify attempts to give the scholar access to her/his sources in the open stacks, and to create a sense of seclusion in the individual study carrels. My proposed Library for the University of Florida Department of Architecture completes this historic ellipse48 with a reinterpretation of the carrel type and starts a new development whose limits have so far not been mapped out. It also makes references to the hall type without literally being monumental. It contains millions of books without occupying the space formerly needed to hold those books. The Library reintroduces initially a virtual proximity between reader and book by making the desired book available on a computer monitor in each study carrel. The perceived proximity is then made actual in the hypergaeum49 where the book, essay, paper or manuscript can be printed out, pressed, bound, and read (all over). Another ellipse comes to completion, and a new one begins with the ascension of the computer marking the decline of yet another object of instruction. In Knossus clay tablets were used to record information. Then the paper scroll replaced the clay tablet. In the fifteenth century the scroll or manuscript were slowly replaced by the book.50 Five centuries later the book’s continued existence is threatened by the computer.51 However, this crisis of the book can also be seen as a challenge to re-evaluate the design of libraries at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than seeing both book and computer as mutually exclusive communication instruments there may be a middle ground—in this Library—where the two can meet. Along with the changes in recording information there has been a continuous decline in the dimensionality of the media that hold information. In the medieval times the cathedral, a three-dimensional storage device, played the role which the book, still three-dimensional, but assembled out of almost two-dimensional pages, took over after Gutenberg’s invention. A further decline has taken place in this century where information is stored as non-dimensional ones and zeroes52 in an almost two-dimensional object: the computer diskette or the laser disk. At the same time that dimensions decrease, storage capacity has skyrocketed. A laserdisc the size53 of an LP can hold today the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. The problem lies no longer in storage quantity but how to access the desired information. This project offers an attempt to bridge the gap between cathedral and computer by utilizing non-dimensional technology to produce books that can be investigated in a four-dimensional reality, the Library.

The Proposed Library Programme

den from us. The certainty that the linearity of steam engines offered no longer exists. 54 I would like to thank Jimmie Harrison for this insight into the possibilities of programming. 55 Newspaper excerpt from the Gainesville Sun, Thursday, June 27: “COMPUTER DISRUPTS PHONES. Service disruptions blamed on computer trouble plagued millions of telephones in the nation’s capital and three nearby states Wednesday and phone users across much of California had similar problems.[...] Bell Atlantic said 6.7 million telephone lines in Washington, Maryland, Virginia and parts of West Virginia were hit with service disruptions. A software glitch disrupted Pacific Bell service in the Los Angeles area at midday Wednesday, interfering with phone calls in much of the 213, 818, 714 and 805 area codes.” Italic emphasis mine. 56 The kind of map has not yet been decided but it might be the projection of oceans with continents shown as fragments. This would correspond to the fluidity of the processes that take place in the Library and that took place to create this project.

he programme of a conventional architectural project is for the most part expressed in abstract quantities such as square footage, number of floors, material specifications, etc. Space classifications are given as nouns, i. e. office, bathroom, janitor’s room. This approach toward programming denies the proximity that verbs offer when writing a programme.54 Nouns do not usually imply an activity while verbs do that by definition. For example the verbs ‘sifting’, ‘searching’, and ‘sampling’ might represent actions that could take place in carrels. The programme for this library comprises at least four actions: 1. Locate the source(s) of information through actions such as searching, sniffing, sleuthing, sifting, screening. These actions are about finding valid addresses within a network of information. In conventional libraries this is done via a card catalogue that could, in the case of the virtual Library, be located physically anywhere, since its information would be stored in an electronic format. The transfer of that information from any on-line library to this specific one is readily accomplished via common telephone lines [interference?55] or satellite. 2. Retrieve the source(s) of information, i. e. import the information contained in the book, manuscript, or papyrus roll. This activity will take place locally in the respective study carrels via a computer terminal. The computers utilize the Macintosh interface. The screen displays a map of the world.56 By clicking with a mouse on a desired city the student calls up a list of available on-line libraries. After selecting the desired library the student can browse through the collection or do a specific search and then download the desired source(s). 3. Print out into tangible format, then press, bind, produce, and create. These actions take place in the hypergaeum, a cone-shaped room that links the library wing and the Architecture Building. Here a laser printer, a linotronic printer, and a hand printing press are located on two floors. A book-binding press allows the printed pages to be assembled. 4. Study, read, write, and argue. These actions take place in any part of the library, even in the relatively small individual study carrels which are linked among each other via computerized bill boards that allow students to write messages with a light-sensitive pen onto their own computer screen. A software program then transfers these messages to the desired carrel.

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Architexts Parts of the Library

Stratigraphic section below the pavement of the West Court (from the excavation report of 1904).

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With respect to Benjamin I am not interested in a search for final or definitive origins, but the weaving of a meaningful tale of connections. This approach towards history can be compared to a “genealogy [that] is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.”59 If origins are no longer considered to be points in time, an archaeological approach toward history may be more appropriate than the conventional one that focuses on a specific historicity. Knossus, with its layers of recorded history, makes a good example as a generative instrument for this Library. It becomes a project “[o]f the thirty-eight feet of deposit which Evans records under the west court of the Palace at [Knossus].”60 In these layers was compressed five thousand years of recorded61 histories. In the Library these layers become the ordering devices for the carrels. The layers determine the height of the shelves that separate the study carrels from the stack carrels. Each shelf marks a horizontal break point in the history of Knossus.62 The building consists of twenty-four carrels, or study niches, twelve on each floor, hung from a wing-like super structure that is balanced on the top of the Architecture Building’s west studio wall on the fourth floor,

5. the wings which are both roof and structural support for the floors and stairs below.

4. the plumb bobs which are the structural counterweights for the study and stack carrels.

3. the circular dance-stage which is the hypergaeum, a place where books, essays, or manuscripts are printed out, bound, and pressed.

2. the labyrinth which is a series of study and stack carrels.

1. the cow mount which is the main entry into the library.

They are:

From Walter Benjamin’s ‘Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels’, in Gesammelte Schriften I: 704, quoted in Susan Morss. Dialectics of Seeing: 8. This origin then is not a point in time but a time frame that is also spatial. 58 Libraries are also marked by a history of catastrophes. Many fires have destroyed enormous amounts of recorded knowledge as for example the disastrous fire at the Library of Alexandria in 31 B.C. 59 Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in Language. Counter-Memory Practice, Foucault (Boucharde, Ed.): 139. The documents in this case are the works of Joseph Beuys, Jennifer Bloomer, and James Joyce. 60 McKendrick, Greek Stones Speak: 46. 61 Palmer, A New Guide to Knossos: 32. 62 Could the height of the Neolithic Stratum, about which is very little known, resemble the distance between the ground and the first 57

alter Benjamin writes that “origin [Ursprung), although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings [...]. The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing.”57 That which has come into being over time and has almost disappeared by now is an archaeological site and one of the generators for this project: it is the Palace of Knossus on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea south of Greece. Myth has it that this place or what remains of it after three earthquakes and several conflagrations58 contains five inventions of Perdix and Daidalos.

Influences Communication

s an exile66 and Resident Alien but German citizen,67 I have somewhat adjusted after five years residence to the Southeastern United States, albeit not without my share of misunderstandings, misreadings, and misadjustments. Those slippages in communication have lead to some curious situations but they also taught me that the communication instrument we call language is anything but a perfect device of information exchange. Rather than look for perfection in an imperfect tool I have come to realize the opportunity that lies in these misalignments that allow me to create with this Library an architectural construction of multiple readings. The Library simultaneously acknowledges a gap in communication and, through this recognition, creates a critical proximity between the two ends of a communication system that consists of two writers. The two are myself in the role of the initial writer; the other is you as the reader or second writer.68

Languages

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hat is usually left in archaeological sites such as Knossus is a heap of dirt or a midden with as yet undeciphered clay tablets.69 The midden is physically a place where matter ferments. It generates

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floor of the Library? The ground which we move on in the here-and-now would signify a place we know little about. And yet we think this ground is safe. 63 This absence of the physical object (the ‘book’ can be anywhere before its pages appear on the computer screen) brings about another crisis: that of the role architects might play when their past monumental creations no longer coincide with the reality of the present; or, in other words, what will be left for architects to do when there is no longer a need for monumental buildings like Boullee’s Bibliotheque du Roi or Sharoun’s Staatsbibliothek in Berlin? 64 The standard screen size for the terminals in this library is 32 inches by 11 inches. This size is based on two pages of the Gutenberg 42-line bible. 65 A wing is “a part or extension of a building architecturally subordinate to the main part; a part of a large building of any shape, regarded as a separate section according to its use or to its location with relation to a central point.” Webster: 2097. In other words: a wing is eccentric. It is on the edge or in the margin of something centrally located. 66 Also an ex-ile, or ex-isle who is someone coming out of a different island, another continent. 67 The German becomes via expansion the Germ man which, I think, would have been appreciated by Louis Sullivan who used the seed germ as the basis for his theory on ornament. Bloomer has been writing on Sullivan’s work in her manuscript Tabbles of Bower, a literary work that also has a built counterpart. 68 You cannot know my intentions. There is only the Text. The reader re-writes with her reading the text and becomes a second writer. 69 Linear A—a language inscribed on tablets that were found in Knossus—has not yet been deciphered. However, the code for Linear B tablets, which superceded Linear A and was also found at Knossus, has been cracked. Another as yet undeciphered text is the Phaistos Disc (see image on next page) whose hieroglyphs are inscribed in the ground-floor of the hypergaeum. Doblhofer, Voices in Stone: 268.

at elevation 42’. The counterbalance to the niches consists of a suspended brick wall. There are thirteen stack carrels and eleven individual study carrels. Each study carrel is equipped with a micro computer that is connected via modem/satellite to a network of national/international electronic on-line libraries. A student, using standard cutand-paste operations cannot only call-up on the computer screen a desired book’s location63 but the entire book, two pages at a time, depending on the relationship between the book’s paper size and the size of the computer screen.64 Like the texts that are written and edited within it, the library is an expansion of an existing building. It is an added wing to another building.65

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ibraries are the places of texts. “In the areas with which we deal here cognition [Erkenntnis] comes as a lightning. The text is the long reverberating thunder.73”74 The cognition may be what the inhabitant gains when she visits the Library. Yet, this paper, in its function as text, is not immediate as the built architecture. Instead it mediates, like the drawings that describe it, and thus it can be read and misread. Neither the paper nor the drawings are a replacement for the architecture they interpret, but they are, in Derrida’s sense, a supplement75 or extra;76 they are necessary for a more thorough understanding of the architecture they complement, but they are not vital. After all, I will not be standing next to the finished building

Roland, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake: 30. Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S) crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 21. 72 The texts that I used to write this Text are Bloomer’s Ph.D. dissertation Towards an Architecture of Desire; The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi, and James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake, especially the Washerwomen section in chapter 2 [see Appendix I and II]. Bloomer states in her analysis of Finnegans Wake that “[t]he story, or narrative, of the book does not unroll along a line of time. Its units of narrative are assembled in space—in the space of the text. Thus the text pushes at a privileging of spatiality over temporality. (It is important to remember that post-Enlightenment Western architecture and architectural theory are founded on modes of thinking which are predominantly linear and rational (temporal), not spatial, regardless of the prevalence of the notion that architecture is a discourse about spatiality.)” Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 19. 73 “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 3. 74 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band V: 1021. 75 Jennifer Bloomer, in Tabbies of Bower (manuscript): 8, describes supplement as “an entity which is added to another entity, which is both in excess of that to which it is added, i.e., is excessive, and which by nature of being added, points to, by supplying, a lack in the original entity.” 76 This brings us to allegory and writing: Gregory Ulmer quotes Craig Owens from The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, October 12 (1980), p. 84 in The Anti Aesthetic, p. 95 as saying that if “allegory is identified as a supplement [‘an expression externally added to another expression,’ hence ‘extra,’ yet supplying a lack], then it is also aligned with writing, insofar as writing is conceived as supplementary to speech.” Bloomer adds to this in her essay Tabbles of Bower that “[t]his is, of course, an identification that Walter Benjamin had made long before, when he identified baroque 70

Texts72

The Phaistos disc, from http:// membres.lycos. fr/musicand/ATELIER/PHAISTOS/ PHAISTOSB.jpg

heat. It is a thermal exciter. It is the place, described in Finnegans Wake, where the great cackler or the hen or Anna Livia Plurabelle found an important letter. “The midden is a symbol for the inhabited world in which women/men have left so many traces. The letter stands as a symbol for all attempts at written communication including all other letters, all the world’s literature, The Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred booksof the world, and also Finnegans Wake itself.”70 The letter, in all its ambiguity, stands also for all the different interpretations that are attempted in its decipherment. Multiple meanings cannot only be read in the details of the Library but in their relationship to other parts as well. The meanings lie in the differences and similarities. For example, in the Library a book page or leaf is also a door; the wing of a mosquito is the sheltering roof and simultaneously the structural foundation of the Library, as well as a new addition to an existing building. What I am suggesting is that the language used in the building resembles the language of Finnegans Wake about which Jennifer Bloomer writes that its “[s]ignifiers do not signify in a linear or hierarchical fashion, but [...] in multiple directions: they slide, they move, suggesting a space of the signifier, created by the signifier as it indicates the directions of its own movement through knowledge fields.”71

allegory with hieroglyphs and other forms of script.” However, I am not suggesting that writing a text is the same as making buildings. There are similarities but to me the physicality of habitation in a built ‘text’ with all my senses is still very different from the act of reading, or occupying, a literary text. 77 But it is not autonomous since it is still sited in a specific physical, political, cultural, and social environment. 78 The panels are installed over the respective niche walls facing east, and are also the skin of the hypergaeum. 79 Footnote within quote: Michel Serres. Hermes: Literature. Science. Philosophy, eds. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983): 38. 80 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 37. 81 The importance of the washerwomen is emphasized by the fact that the only tape recording which exists of Joyce is his reading of the washerwomen section. 82 Consider also the telephone conversations in Finnegans Wake, see McHugh. 83 Footnote within quotation: Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969): 181, quoted by Stephen Heath, Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce, in Post Structuralist Joyce: 31.

telling a potential occupant what this is all about. The architectural construction will have to stand on its own.77 However, the architectural drawings will be installed in the Library as exterior wall panels. In that position they complement the role of this paper.78 A written paper has an advantage in that it can elaborate upon the different possible readings of an architecture that is always already multivalent. The building is both an object which is repeatable, or lends itself toward repetition, and an object which exists in a complex network of actions. The existence of this object is then textual, and depends upon a mental construct of space and time which is not bipolar, not even dialectical. Architecture in this sense (and architectural theory) is, to a degree, ‘always already’ allegorical in the Benjaminian sense. That is, architecture contains the instrument for radical critical operations upon itself within itself. ‘The strategy of criticism is located in the object of criticism.’79 80 This Text, then, is less about the two entities in a communication system and more about the problematic relationship between them. James Joyce wrote about the difficulty of communication in Finnegans Wake when he describes the vain attempts of two washerwomen to communicate across a dividing river.81 My Library similarly establishes a problematic linkage between two partners, Perdix and Daidalos, and uses the always existing slippages in communication as generating devices. For example a carrel door, reinterpreted as a leaf which is a page appropriates, i. e. makes proper, the characteristics of one of Gutenberg’s 42-line bible pages for this architecture. It becomes clear that that which is written here is as much about circulation of information across a mediating channel as it is about interruption and interference of that information. The mediating channel constitutes the link, which is the Library and simultaneously the interrupter. It is also the phone line that links the computers to the other on-line libraries.82

The Role of the Reader

n overtly textual library like this one asks from its inhabitant an engagement that goes beyond casual acquaintance. I interpret the act of engagement to be a second reading or re-writing of that which was written before. Bloomer suggests that this kind of writing, namely “[t]his narrative assemblage of bits and pieces[,] forces an abandonment of the idea of reader as a passive receptor. The reader must engage, work on, rewrite this text. The reader must be a writer. She must be the kind of reader Julia Kristeva describes:83

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For the Ancients the verb to ‘read’ had a meaning that is worth recalling and bringing out with a view to an understanding of literary practice. ‘To read’ was also ‘to pick up’, ‘to pluck’, ‘to keep a watch on’, ‘to recognize traces’, ‘to take’, ‘to steal’. ‘To read’ thus denotes an

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Architexts aggressive participation, an active appropriation of the other. ‘To write’ would be ‘to read’ become production, industry: writing-reading, paragrammatic activity, would be the aspiration towards a total aggressiveness and participation [...]’84

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created the library essentially with two different tools. One is my sketchbook, the other is the Macintosh computer. However, as mentioned earlier, designing is not a linear but an elliptical task. It is a kind of shuttling performance between alternating actors.89 What generated this paper, the drawings, and may eventually cause the

Methods

If the second reading is a re-writing there will be a difference or slippage between the two texts. In the Library these slippages can be found for example in the shifted planes of the shelf walls that separate the stacks from the study niches. Here it is no longer clear on which part of the wall the books are located, especially not if the observer or occupant is located outside the carrels on the balcony. The comprehension of the Library is only revealed inside where the object of investigation has a critical proximity to its investigator. This suggests a crisis of identity and authority that ties in with my idea about a more anthro-eccentric positioning of the architect in this world. Similar ambiguities exist between other couplets like structure and ornament, Shem and Shaun,85 and , as mentioned earlier, Perdix and Daidalos. An example of structural ambiguity, which suggests an undecidability of whether the architectural component can be classified as structure or ornament, exists in the Library’s floor supports where gravity loads are not carried directly into the ground but are detoured through the existing architecture building. There is also not a clear distinction between the structural necessity of materials and their simultaneous function as ornament in the counterweights. The brick coursing, for example, is just that, but it also spells, in morse code,86 the washerwomen section of Finnegans Wake.87 In this Library the writing is not only on the walls but in the walls as well. A conventional library usually contains books that are copies of other books in other conventional libraries. The works in this Library may appear to be similar but rather than being copies of other books they are editions. The import of books via a computer creates a virtual database which the student can use to edit existing books. I could conceivably import Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture. rewrite it with my own critical comments and then publish it, with the help of the tools in the hypergaeum, as a newly edited version.88 The electronic format encourages students to engage written works actively the way a CADD program like Architrion, which I used to generate the drawings that describe the Library, pushes them to consider design as a dynamic process of generation.

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Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 19. 85 Shem and Shaun are two characters in James Joyce’ Finnegans Wake. Shem represents an elm tree and Shaun a stone. However at times their characters are almost indistinguishable. McHugh notes that they are “often briefly noticed in pairs so poorly delineated that we are unable to decide which brother is which. [...] The origin of the names Shem and Shaun is of limited assistance. Richard Ellmann says that they ‘were based in part upon two feeble-minded hangers-on [parasites], James and John Ford, who lived in Dublin on the North Strand. They were known as Shem and Shaun and were famous for their incomprehensible speech and their shuffling gait.’” They were obviously, like myself, not from these parts. McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake: 28,29. 86 The morse code describes “the letters of the alphabet [...] [as a] series of arbitrary dots and dashes.” Webster: 1170. Here’s the list: a .-, b -... , c -.-, d -.., e ., f ..-., g --., h ...., i .., j .---, k -.-, l .-.., m --, n -., o ---, p .--., q --.-, r .-., s ..., t -, u ..-, v ...-, w .--, x -..-, y -.--, z --.., & . ..., - -....-, () -.--.-, “” .-..-., . .-.-.-, : ---..., ? ..--.., ‘ .----., / -..-, ! --..--. 87 See Appendix I for the text in English. 88 The copyright is re-interpreted as the right to copy. See Gregory Ulmer’s discussion on Sherrie Levine’s work in his article Object of PostCriticism, Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster: 96. 89 See Jennifer Bloomer’s shuttle. 84

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use allegory here in its Greek meaning as ‘an-other speaking in the assembly (all-agora), or a ‘speaking otherwise’.91 Allegory acknowledges the other in the conventional. Gregory Ulmer92 quotes Craig Owens as saying that if “allegory is identified as a supplement [‘an expression externally added to another expression,’ hence ‘extra,’ yet supplying a lack], then it is also aligned with writing, insofar as writing is conceived as supplementary to speech.”93 ‘Supplement’ refers to Derrida’s supplement. Jennifer Bloomer,94 describes Derrida’s supplement as “an entity which is added to another entity, which is both in excess of that to which it is added, i.e. is excessive, and which by nature of being added, points to, by supplying, a lack in the original entity.” Ulmer also notes that ‘’’Allegoreisis’, the mode of commentary long practiced by traditional critics, ‘suspends’ the surface of the text, applying a terminology of ‘verticalness, levels, hidden meaning, the hieratic difficulty of interpretation,’ whereas ‘narrative allegory’ (practiced by post-critics) explores the literal— letteral—level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves—in etymologies and puns—and in the things the words name. The allegorical narrative unfolds as a dramatization or enactment (personification)95 of the “literal truth inherent in the words themselves.” In short, narrative allegory favors the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signifieds.”96 This emphasis on other or multiple meanings is crucial for the writing, making, and understanding of this project. Ulmer further states that post-criticism writes ‘on’ its object, in this case the Library, in the way Wittgenstein’s knower exclaims, ‘Now I know how to go on97—with this ‘on’ carrying all the dimensions and ambiguities of the ‘on’ in Derrida’s ‘Living On’ (beyond, about, upon, on - including the parasitical connotation). Writing may show more (and other) than it says—the ‘surplus value’ of writing which interests Derrida [and myself ]. The name of this ‘more’ is ‘allegory.’98 Allegory is a horizontal sliding of meaning through association, repetition, non-hierarchical placing beside one-an[d]-other, appropriation, overlay. What emerges is an architectural knot that can be tied and untied in different ways. The method is allegorical translation,99 a Gedankensprung [thought jump], the encryption of

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Allegoric Method

I share this predicament with Vico, the other writer of texts, who refused to separate poetry and science: “His mind was crowded with ideas, but ordering and systematizing them was a trying task for him. He thought as a poet, not as a dialectician.” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th edition: 104. 91 Eric Partridge. Origins: 12. “Gr allegoria , allos, other (cf ELSE)+a n deriving from, or akin to agoreuein, to speak in the agora (s agor-) or assembly (from agein, s ag-, to drive or lead), became Latin allegoria, whence French allégorie and English allegory, ‘a speaking otherwise’.” 92 Ulmer, Object of Post-Criticism, Anti-Aesthetic: 94. 93 Owens, The Aliegorical Impulse, October 12 (1980): 84. 94 in Tabbies of Bower (manuscript): 8. 95 See Joseph Beuys’ performances and Gegenbilder. 96 Ulmer, Object of Post-Criticism, Anti-Aesthetic: 95. Text in quotation marks from Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Cornell University: Ithaca, 1979: 30-33. 97 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. Anscombe (Blackwell: Oxford, 1968): 105’, quoted ibidem: 94. 98 Ibidem, p. 94. 99 The different languages used are described in Appendix IV. 90

actual construction of the Library, has been an oscillating dialogue between the thought process that went into the drawings and their development in the computer. Over the past two-and-a-half years this dialogue has developed into four complementary approaches toward architecture and design. They are allegoric, parasitic, sectional, and nomadic. These approaches have the character of methods that occupy ambiguously the realm of both science and poetry, i.e. they exhibit at times a rigor or a precision of thought, and at other times an acknowledged recklessness and irresponsibility.90

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Architexts letters into numbers and back, two intersecting crossword puzzles that cross letters, breed words, make texts, fabricate architecture. The writing in the walls of the Library is allegorical. The words are “tatoos: ornamental patterns on the body, ink in crypts.”100 The Library is a tatooed building. As a tool, allegory reads texts “through other texts; fragmentary, partial, hieroglyphic, ambiguous; paradigm of palimpsest; critical in the involvement of a misreading; disregard for aesthetic boundaries, especially that between the visual and verbal.”101 One of the predominant characteristics of Benjamin’s construction of allegory is a slippage of the boundary between visual and verbal criteria. The hieroglyph, a form of picture writing, is the instrument he uses to demonstrate and elucidate his notion of allegory.102

Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire; The (S)cryt of Joyce and Piranesi: 58. 100

Bloomer, in her article In the Museyroom, published in Assemblage 5: 60, describes Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory from his Origin of German Tragic Drama. 101

102

In the Library hieroglyphs are the tools that write its history. On the outside of the carrel doors an engraved hieroglyphic script spells out the twelve questions and twelve answers103 that appear in Finnegans Wake in chapter 1. The allegorical instrument for connecting all these ideas is the telephone modem which in the virtual Library constitutes the life-line of collection and generation. With it the students can access the other on-

Ibidem: 15.

For the English version see the Appendix. 103

- What is your numb? Bun! line libraries. - Who gave you that numb? Pool The telephone is the late twentieth-Have you put in all your sparepennies? I’m listening. Sree!

Design sketch

century Hermes. It is a connecting apparatus that makes contact. Like this Text it creates a proximity -Keep clear of pro pennies! Fore!104 between two entities. It is a switch in the same way that the Library is a switching mechanism, connecting a single user with an infinite number of records, texts, journals, and books through a telephone line. But this connecting line, this phone line has also the potential to mis-communicate. In the Washerwomen section105 of Finnegans Wake Joyce uses a water stream as an interfering channel between two parties trying to talk to each other. The stream is the noise in a system, the unaccounted middle, that which lies between you, the reader, and myself, the writer. The stream is, like the library, an example of slippage of meaning through the communication channel of language. The library slips at the in-between pieces like the walls,

104

Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 546.

105

See Appendix I and II.

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Design sketch

doors, and windows. It slips in the places where contact is made, in the details. Allegory as a technique, then, is an

The ‘realm of things’ contains the realm of architecture. That might mean paradoxically for architects to design buildings that will last possibly a long time. Only when a building has been around for many years are we able to notice and record its degree of decay. Allegorical architecture potentially implies quality construction. Allegory as montage connects the Library back to Benjamin. The Library is a montage of materials in the Benjaminian sense of a “constructive, active, unmelancholy form of allegory. [It has] the ability to connect dissimilars in such a way as to ‘shock’ people into new recognitions and understandings.”107 Montage, according to Ulmer, “does not reproduce the real, but constructs an object [which is what architects do], [...] in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality.”108 The resultant of this technique is a Library that is not only an image or representation of the prevailing authorities but a critical tool for students to question those powers.

Parasitic Method

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arasitic design refers to the possibility of making architectural constructions on existing buildings. A parasite is a hanger-on.109 What hangs on me is my last name, Mücke, which is German for mosquito.110 The mosquito, a bothersome nomadic parasite, lives at “altitudes as high as 14,000 feet in Kashmir and as low as 3760 feet below sea level in the gold mines of South India.”111 If we consider the mosquito in its role as a parasite that not only eats besides (para-) but also marks a site with its bite, then it is an emblem for that which stands in contrast to a conventional site. In this other site, where the ground is unstable and shifty, the Library stands, or rather hangs off of the architecture building. Mosquitos play another role in their function as interrupters of an ongoing action. What the mosquito buzz is for the sleeper, the Library is for the architecture building. It interrupts and interferes with the perception that everything can go on as usual. It has the potential to wake people up out of the dream of being awake.112 “The parasite is [both] a guest [and a host] who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel.”113 These seemingly dissimilar

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106

Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism in Anti-Aesthetic: 97. 107 Ibidem: 97. Ulmer quotes Stanley Mitchell’s Walter Benjamin. Understanding Brecht, (New Left Books: London, 1979): xiii. 108 Ibidem: 86. 109 “Am I the one who is called W[alter] B[enjamin]? Or is my name simply W[alter] B[enjamin]? That is indeed the question that leads into the secret of the individual name; and Herman Ungar formulates it quite correctly in an inherited fragment: ‘Does the name hang on us or do we hang on a name?’” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V: 1036. 110 The name is a combination of Mu, the lost continent and Ecke (which includes Ecce Homo by Nietzsche), the German word for corner. See the discussion of corners and batterboards at the beginning of this paper. 111 Keys to the Anopheline Mosquitoes of the World: 3. “They have an ancient history, for their fossils have been found in beds dating back to the Jurrassic or Cretaceous age, and they have a modern history in Bataan, along the Alaskan Highway, and in Central Africa. There are also over 2500 species which means that the mosquito is anything but a minor nuisance. 112 This constitutes one of Benjamin’s goals when he assembled the Passagenwerk, his collection of comments and quotations on nineteenth century European culture and politics. 113 If the interference happens in the transmission of a book parts of it may be altered. However, rather than seeing those alterations as problematic deviances from the original text it may be more interesting to see them as editions which can become the generators, always with the idea of interference in mind, of a particular design.

image of the ‘break-up,’ the ‘disintegration’ of civilization in the modern worlds, relevant to one of Benjamin’s most famous formulas: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (Tragic Drama: 178), the premise being that something becomes an object of knowledge only as it ‘decays,’ or is made to disintegrate [...].106

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In at least one dialogue, Musca (the fly),117 Alberti imitates Lucian explicitly [...] Alberti’s anti-hero Momus had made occasional appearances in classical literature as the god of mockery and satirical wit.118 [...]

Ulmer quoting Lawrence Schehr’s introduction to Michel Serres’ The Parasite, (Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1982): x. 115 Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism, Anti-Aesthetic: 101. 116 Summary of the classification of insects, according to von Lengerken (1953). Quoted by Nachtigall, Insects in Flight: 12. The mosquito is part of order #20, the two-winged or true flies. “Class: Insecta (Hexapoda) [Is there a resemblance, that goes beyond the verbal, between hexapoda and Borges’ hexagons in The Library of Babel in Labyrinths?] I Subclass: Apterygota. Primitive insects. Order 1. Protura, semi-insects 2. Collembola, springtails 3. Thysanura, bristletails II Subclass: Ptergota. Higher, or winged insects. Order 1. Ephemeroptera, Mayflies 2. Plecoptera, stoneflies 3. Odonata, dragonflies and damselflies 4. Embioptera, embiids, web-spinners 5. Orthoptera, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets. 6. Dermaptera, earwigs. [HCE, one of the protagonists in Finnegans Wake, also know as HCEarwicker, and among other things, Here Comes Everybody, belongs to the same order as the mosquito. Editor’s note] 7. Isoptera, termites 8. Copeognatha (psocoptera), booklice 9. Mallophaga Chewing lice, feather lice 10. Anoplura. sucking lice 11 Thysanoptera, thrips 12. Rhynchota (Hemiptera), bugs 13. Hymenoptera, bees, wasps, ants, etc. 14. Coleoptera, beetles 15. Strepsiptera, stylopids 16. Neuroptera, net-winged insects 17. Mecoptera, scorpionflies 18. Trichoptera, caddisflies 19. Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths 20. Diptera, two-winged, or true flies. 21. Aphaniptera, fleas” 117 According to Partridge’s Origins the word mosquito comes from the Latin musca and the Spanish mosca, which is diminutive for mosquito, a little fly. 118 These are qualities that are also ascribed to Daidalos. The word daidalos can be interpreted as “’cunningly wrought,’ especially [if it is] used in the neuter plural to mean ‘puppets, images of the gods.’ Trickster-artificers, perhaps because of their association with fire, sometimes have characteristics of solar deities; so Daidalos flies like the sun, and he seems to be a doublet of his nephew Perdix, ‘the partridge,’ the sun being often likened to birds, the partridge among others. The name Daidalos is possibly from the same 114

activities are, according to Lawrence Schehr, not “merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinsically related and, in fact, they have the same basic [parasitical] function in a system.”114 This distinction is important because in the English language the word ‘parasite’ has only a negative connotation which does not consider the positive actions of ‘guest’ and ‘host’. If I adopt the multivalency of meanings inherent in the French word, the mosquito as a parasite has the potential to change into a generator of action, an engenderer of construction. It turns into an example of a different method of design, parasitism. Michel Serres suggests that parasitism consists of a “new logic with three elements: host, guest, and interrupter [receiver, sender, and interference in the line that connects] (noise is ‘the random element, transforming one system or one order into another’).”115 The noise, host, and guest in the system is the Library. The mosquito in its role as an insect116 interrupts and thus marks the place of an intersection or insection. An insection in this architecture is a disturbance in a system that, according to those in power, should not exist in the first place. It is a nuisance or in the case of the Library, ornament. Ornament, that minor mode of architecture, is compared by Alberti to the mosquito. Rykwert writes:

root as Talos, the Cretan sun-god [...] Talus [other name of nephew?], in his turn, has an unexplained characteristic of trickster-artificier and solar heroes: they are either vulnerable or afflicted in the foot or the leg [Tim Finnegan, Vico, etc.] (compare Hephaestus, Chiron, Oedipus, Philoctetes, and Achilles).” Hathorn, Richmond Y. Greek Mythology: 316. Daidalos has thus an affinity to Ebert, the librarian who was killed falling off of a ladder, Tom Finnegan from Finnegans Wake, and Vico, who also fell off of a ladder, without getting killed. 119 Josef Rykwert in the introduction to the translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books: xv. 120 “The wall of the mosquito’s egg-shell is composed of two layers. The inner wall [...] is the actual eggshell and it is dark when dry. The outer wall [...] is composed of transparent material which is often ornamented with frills, floats, and bosses. [...] The upper surface of the egg, usually without ornamentation, may show pale punctuate spots [poche] [.]” Russel, Paul F. Keys to the Anepheline Mosquitos of the World, (the American Entomological Society, The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 1943): 18. 121 Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 20. 122 McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake: 31.

we arrive at the ultimate minutiae, punctuation marks. Putting two and two together it becomes obvious that these were inflicted by ‘that odious and still insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher ... Shem the Penman.’ [...] Mr. Atherton notes that The Book of Kells [one of the generators for Finnegans Wake] was dated by Sir Edward Sullivan’s analysis of its punctuation marks, and the [...] narrator says that [Shem’s] ‘paper wounds’ were made ‘to introduce a notion of time’ [...].122

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The mosquito leaves marks on the skin. It leaves in its territory traces which in a text become punctuation marks or, in architecture, ornament.120 In Finnegans Wake the punctuation marks in some places become words that interrupt the text for the reader “Fillstup”121 McHugh quotes another example on page 124 where

McHugh relates this ‘notion of time’ also to the twelve question and answers in chapter 1. In my Library these questions are inscribed, in a hieroglyphic translation, in the sliding doors that lead to the carrels. In Finnegans Wake they represent a threshold after which only the artist Shem has the right to move further into the maze of the story. In the Library the doors are thresholds into the carrels that are the places of generation and potential interference with conventional thought. The parasitic columns interrupt the space in the study carrel, the stacks and the hypergaeum. They are also the only structures that hold up the floors. The precedent for those supports can be found at Knossus where Perdix and Daidalos used inverted columns. If in conventional architecture columns signify security—of being on or in the ground— suspension in the Library suggests the danger of falling, which is anything but a safe condition.

Design sketch

At the beginning of Alberti’s book the gods are invited to provide some ornament to the world that Jove has made. [In response] Momus produces the insects that so much troubled Alberti’s contemporaries.119

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Architexts

‘[T]rue history is not that which cloaks itself in indisputable ‘philological proofs,’ but that which recognizes its own arbitrariness, which recognizes itself as an ‘unsafe building.’123 An unsafe construction, then, not only questions its object of criticism, but always throws itself into crisis as well. The work is toujours deja in progress. It is generative. It is never complete. It is never completely clear.124

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hat is the science of cutting? The word ‘section’ can be derived via ‘science’ from scire to know, to cut through, to know through a section, and to decide from sanskrit chyati he cuts, Irish scian, a knife. The noun is the verb. The knife is the act of cutting. A knife divides, severs a connection, interrupts a continuity. The action of cutting creates slices and the Library which is an architecture of repeated sections that vary slightly. An architecture of section is marginal in that it suggests an incompleteness already inherent in another section: the plan. However, a plan lacks the quality of occupation which is always implicit in the vertical section. Consequently my Library, this paper, as well as the drawings were constructed primarily in section. Considering the dominance of the plan in todays architectural schools and offices the section can be seen as belonging to the margin or gutter128 which, in this paper, is the footnote. In the Library it is the place between the staircase and the studios, as well as the shelf walls. Bloomer writes that a “section129 is not a mirroring construction, but a kind of text that has been lifted out (dissected),130 a text that can be read, that is, misread or rewritten. The information provided by the section is always incomplete.”131 Sections on an architectural drawing, the sections of this Library, and the sections of this Text function similarly: they are all partial instruments of generation,132

Sectional Method

Vico, whose three phases of universal history where used by Joyce to structure Finnegans Wake, “injured his head falling from the ladder that led to the small second-floor attic that served as the sleeping room”125 in his parents’ house. The Library columns are assembled in pairs with spokes as spacers so that one complete column assembly, a couplet, works also as a ladder. Of course Tim Finnegan, the hod carrier and name-giver to Finnegans Wake, fell off a ladder and broke his skull. And then there is “F.A. Ebert, the distinguished Dresden librarian, [who,] in 1834 fell off a ladder to his death.”126 These falls are not only emblematic of the danger of ladders or roofs but also of knowing too much, especially if that knowledge is critical of the dominant body of knowledge. Attempts to limit knowledge in my Library should prove difficult since there are no locks on the doors. Access to the computers is granted to students who have the right password. “’Do you have the password?’ I typed: NO.”127

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Footnote within quotation: Manfredo Tafuri. The Historical Project. The Sphere and the Labyrinth, (1980) trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Conolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987): 12. 124 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 46. 125 Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 15th edition, volume 11: 103. 126 Pevsner, History of Building Types: 96. 127 Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum: 42. 128 Not only the architectural gutter but also the person, the one who guts, who eviscerates. Another surgeon. 129 The incomplete thesaurus field of ‘cut’ contains the words slice, dice, scramble, shred, break, crack, groove, lash, mark, notch, thrust, trench, cleave, delete, eject, engrave, excise, injure, hurt, harvest, inscribe, open, record, sever, sculpture, shorten, hatch, hacken, coup; all of which are actions employed by architects and students of architecture at one time or another. 130 “To dissect [...] is a form of revenge.” According to Jacques Barzun, Flaubert wrote this line in a letter to George Sand. From the Introduction to the Dictionary of Acce. pted Ideas, the appendix to Bouvard and Pecuchet: 2. 131 Bloomer, In the Museyroom. Assemblage 5: 60. 132 Tools of transduction that lead beyond, far “beyant, pharphar”. Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 215. 123

Partridge, Origins: 615. which with its homonym ‘no ledge’ contains the opposite of that certainty: the fear of not knowing enough, of not having a ledge to hold on to, of falling at 32 feet per second. 135 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V: 592. 136 Incidentally his collection of comments and citations, the Passagenwerk, works on a formal level as an interrupter of a literary practice which is biased towards a linear and continuous narrative. 137 This supports Foucault’s understanding of history as a genealogy. 138 Benjamin, Passagenwerk: 2. His idea of sectional history loops back to Knossus and its 39’ of layers which can only be understood in section. 139 The action of carving aligns writing with engraving where lines are carved into a metal plate. The word book comes from “beech which derives from Middle English beche, from Old English bece, akin to Old Frisian bok, Old English (and Old Saxon) boc, bok, Old High German buohha (German Buche=beechwood, see MA). The Old English variant boc, bok, became Middle English bok, book, and fmally English book, [...] originally ‘beechwood sticks on which runes were carved’ (Walshe).” Partridge, Origins: 44. 140 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 15. 133 134

encouraging further development through individual reading, misreading, and interpretation. One example for a part of the Library that can be understood only in section is the meandering wall of shelves that separate the reading stacks from the study carrels. In order to allow the student to read this section, and to get light into the study carrels, the facade has a vertical sheet of glass at the heads of the shelves that face east. However, to understand the ambiguity of the wall the reader has to be inside the Library. From the balcony one cannot see how the shelves divide the study carrels and stack carrels. The etymology of ‘shelf suggests an architecture of section. ‘Shelf is “akin to Medieval Dutch schelf and with p for f, the Latin scalpere, to scrape, carve into, cut.”133 In order to know what lies beneath the skin a surgeon cuts into and through the fabric, into the ground, searching for knowledge.134 Architects are surgeons when they carve up buildings to take a look inside. This everyday action has political ramifications. Benjamin writes that the “concept of progress is to be based in the idea of catastrophe. That something ‘just continues’ is the catastrophe. It is not that which lies in the future but that which exists now.”135 For Benjamin the present is a section, or rather, an intersection of the past with the present. In this intersection the possibility of action lies not in the near or distant future but in the very intensity and actuality of the present.136 Using section as an architectural generator has the potential to make the one who cuts acutely aware of where she/he stands. This intersection, which marks the relationship between a section and its occupant, is directional. Benjamin writes that the method of making the things present is to imagine them in our space [Raum] (not us in theirs). [...] The things thus imagined, do not allow a mediating construction out of ‘grand relationships.’137 [...] Not we imagine ourselves in [their space]: they step into our lives.138 The intersection between section and occupant resembles the difficult relationship between stack- and study carrels. There is no longer a clear separation as in library buildings of the nineteenth century. Bloomer suggests that the carving139 of hieroglyphs—which appear in the doors to the carrels—is a sectional activity. Hieroglyphic writing has come down to us in time preserved as engravings upon stone tablets or obelisks or sarcophagi, which ties it to cutting and incising in its methods and to threedimensional objects [i.e. architecture] in its media, as well as in its cryptlike character (i.e., the voids in the stone which describe the ‘pictures’ themselves are spatial).140 The etchings that partially represent the Library are marginally spatial drawings. The word ‘etching’ refers to acid, which is used to

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Design sketch

213

Architexts bite into a prepared metal plate. The acid carves into the plate in the places where I have scraped away, line by line, the protective layer of asphaltum. The three-dimensionality of the metal plate leaves threedimensional lines as a trace on the paper. The Library is the Hatchery. It is a place of production, flow, desire, signifiers on the cheep. It is chaotic, dynamic, dirty. There is no author-ity.141 It is the place of hatchinghatching lines of poche-and the place of hatches-small doors opening into dark places. The gesture of hatching a drawing is also a kitchen gesture: the French verb hacher denotes both these things, as well as the act of hacking something to bits. The hatchery bears the trace of architectural terrorism, ‘as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs.’142 Here, in this smooth space, plots are hatched.143

Or if an author does claim authority s/he may be met with the actions of Sherrie Levine “who literally ‘takes’ (other peoples) photographs, as an extreme version of the allegorical capacity of collage as ‘readymade[,]’ and claims them as her work. [..] Levine [..] de-monstrates the grammatological writing appropriate to the age of mechanical reproduction in which ‘copyright’ now means the right to copy anything, a mimicry or repetition which is originary, producing differences.” Ulmer, Object of PostCriticism, AntiAesthetic: 96. 142 Footnote within quote: FW, 615.09-10. 143 Bloomer, In the Museyroom, Assemblage 5: 62. 144 Webster: 1213. 145 A term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine in Thousand Plateaus: 353. 146 Ibidem: 353. 147 Guidoni, Primitive Architecture: 18. 148 Ibidem: 23. 141

Nomadic Method

artridge traces nomadic to ‘nimble’ which Webster defines as “quick-witted, alert [and] moving or acting quickly and lightly.”144 This corresponds to understanding the field of architecture not as a vertical, hierarchical pyramid but as a territory of ‘smooth’ space.145 Deleuze and Guattari explain that this smooth space is the space of the board game GO where “the movement is not from one point to another [as in chess] but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.”146 With respect to architecture this suggests an attention to places of transition, the joints between pieces, the thresholds. “For nomadic societies, architecture is essentially organization of the territory, of the land about which they move.”147 The “territory itself acts as architecture—as construction, utilizable object, instrument of social order—and [...] it is on the territory that the community concentrates its interpretive activities attributing to the physical environment significances that the other, more advanced, cultures reserve for their buildings.”148 This implies a sensitivity not only toward a particular building but also, in its widest sense, the territory it occupies. Bloomer explains the anti-nomadic characteristics of architecture when she writes that

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214

[b]efore we come in to the world, we are beings in motion, blind projects in the dark, bodies tossed and rolled, rocked, on the move. This is the way we are. Once we come in, assaulted by the light, rocking makes us feel at home. We are nomads born, haptic creatures, and we spend our lives forgetting it. Architecture is the evidence of this denial. It stands between the unrepresentable and us. [...] We pile up stones feverishly in an attempt to reproduce the container, the vessel, the thing, producing the image at the expense of the voluptuous. We, like

Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 39. 150 Perez-Gómez, The Myth of Daedalus, AA Files no. 10, 1985: 50. 151 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire: The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 50, from Deleuze and Guattari: 401.

Sisyphus, never reach the goal because the impossibility of so doing is programmed into the rules of the game.149

149

While I am not suggesting that we should make nomadic architecture in the conventional sense of ‘it literally moves’, I do imply that a nomadic design, i.e. one that does not understand architecture as a linear problem solving process but as a complex network of dynamic forces, might give a more accurate understanding of how architecture can be a tool for political, social and cultural change. Nomadic existence is about dispersion and concentration of energy, not its control. The Library collects and distributes energy in the form of information. A nomadic method specifically includes design work on the computer. It suggests a fluidity of the design process that can be retained literally up to the last minute before a drawing is plotted. The same holds true for models that are not seen as finished products but as generative objects that reinforce certain parts of the design at the same time that they suggest changes in that design. One indirect example of a nomadic presence in the Library are the bookshelves that separate the study carrels from the stack carrels. They are made of elm wood with steel sphyrelation over it. Sphyrelation loops back to Daidalos who gave his name to the word ‘daidala ‘. Metal daidala were [...] the product of a combination of carpentry and metal-plating using a method of hammering and moulding the metal called sphyrelation which was used for architecture and for the manufacture of arms, chariots and statues.150 Bloomer makes the link by quoting Deleuze and Guattari as saying that “metalworking was the ‘barbarian,’ or nomad, art par excellence...”151

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Design sketch

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Architexts The Five Parts of the Library 1. Entry/Cow mount

erdix/Daidalos “constructed a wooden frame and covered it with the hide of a cow.”152 The modern equivalent of the cow mount is, according to this author, the vaulting horse. Joyce mentions in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man153 among thinly veiled allusions to the other four inventions of Perdix/Daidalos, that “in the midst of countless hillocks of gymnasium shoes and sweaters and singlets in untidy brown parcels there stood the stout leather-jacketed vaulting horse.”154 It is only appropriate that the vaulting horse/cow mount entry leads to the storage vault of the Library, the hypergaeum beyond. The doors into the entry/cow mount resemble Gutenberg’s 42-line bible pages, but rather than having 42 lines in each column, each door leaf contains only 21 in reference to the mosquito. “If a fly is disected, a total of twenty-one bundles of flight muscles will be found to lie in each lateral half of the thorax.”155 Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, recognized that empis (his word for a mosquito) was an aquatic creature during its early life [i.e. as egg], and only later changed into the familiar flying form. He believed, however, that empis did not copulate or lay eggs, and that the aquatic stage was a result of spontaneous generation in putrefying waters, a view which, as Sir Rickard Christophers has emphasized, was still largely held some 2000 years later [3]. As late as 1562 one reads, ‘ - some moysture [sic!] (of the Elm Tree)156 after yt [sic!] is dried up, is resolved into little flies like Ganattes’ [sic!].157

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153

The wood used in the entry/cow mount corresponds to the elm tree into which one of the washerwomen, in Finnegans Wake, changes. Elm wood is used in the entry/cow mount to mark the threshold or metamorphosis158 from one realm, the architecture building, to another, the Library. Ovid wrote his epic Metamorphoses in which one section, that concerns Daidalos, is quoted under the title to another one of Joyce’ works, namely A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The quotation runs as follows: Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.159

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Hathorn, Greek Mythology: 312. The main character in this book’is another Daidalos, named Stephen Dedalus. 154 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, from the Portable James Joyce: 321. Partridge, in Origins: 790 defines a vault as an “arched structure, especially as forming a roof or a ceiling” and traces the word vault back to volvere, turn, to completely turn around. This might signify the fourth stage, the recorso of Vico’s ages of history in his Scienza Nuova or Joyce’ number 11 in Finnegans Wake. 155 Nachtigall, Insects in Flight: 10. The thorax is the middle part of the mosquito’s three-part body. In Latin thorax means breastplate, which, with the mosquito’s extra wings that links it with angels, also points to a connection with Benjamin’s Angel of History, and the breastplate of the angels in the movie Der Himmel über Berlin, better known as Wings of Desire. 156 A potential reference to one of the washerwomen in Finnegans Wake who changed into an elm tree at the end of chapter 2. 157 Gillette, Mosquitos: 9. 158 A mosquito’s life is characterized by a metamorphosis through four stages: egg, pupa, larva, and adult. 159 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188: 257. Translation: “Then to new Arts [their] cunning Thought applies.” The trickster/ artificer raises its head once more in order to stumble and fall. 152

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Entry/Cowmount Plate, computer-generated 3D-model by author, transfered to zinc plate (18â&#x20AC;? x 24â&#x20AC;?), then printed on watercolor paper.

Architexts 2. Carrels160/Labyrinth161

A carrel in its role as a part of the labyrinth or maze is also known as a small house. “In medieval churches a maze was often outlined on the floor; sometimes it was called House of Daidalos.” Hathorn, Greek Mytholog: 315. 161 “The Palace of Knossus is not an artistic unity. [...] Older structures are adapted to a new plan; old foundations, once built over, lie in what at first seems a confusing labyrinth where the spade has uncovered them.” Pendlebury, Handbook to the Palace of Minos Knossos: 26. Italic emphasis mine. 160

There is a small painting by Antonello da Messina [ca. 1430 1479] [...] which shows St. Jerome [ca. 340-420] in his study; the Saint is sitting in an annchair in front of a sloping desk surrounded on two sides by book shelves. [...] There is a lion, [and] curled up to the 162 left of the Saint there is a cat asleep on the podium.”163

Brawne, Libraries: 8, modified by author (see computer screen over desk). 162

Ibidem: 9. Another place of intersection. 165 Hathorn, Greek Mythology: 314. 166 Ibidem: 314. 167 Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th edition: 573b. Sir Walter Evans discovered the Hall of the Double Axe which he named after the similar “masons’ marks cut into building blocks,” and the actual double axes found in it. 168 The word niche comes from the French niche and Latin nidus, a nest. It is 1. a recess or hollow in a wall [poche]; 2. a place or position particularly suitable for the person or thing in it. 169 Book of Kells: 174. 170 Webster: 277. 163

Gold double axe. Width 8.6 cm. Marinatos, Crete and Mycenae: 110.

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From the title page of Viollet-Le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’Architecture.

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his painting describes the interior of one of the Library’s study niches quite well, except for the lion and the cat. The carrels are very tight, personal spaces. Their arrangement resembles a labyrinth in section as well as in plan. Partridge traces ‘labyrinth’ to labrus, the double axe which looks like the letter T. [Also the ‘1’s in Finnegans Wake. See Bloomer, In the Museyroom]. However, Hathorn doubts labrus as origin of labyrinth and suggests that the word means “’the place where the double-axe (i.e. the lightning) struck, which is to say ‘the meeting place of heaven and earth,164 of death and life.’’’165 Lightning comes with thunder which brings us back to the Ts of Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Lightning bolts are a series of zigzagged or jagged lines that are the sign for water as in ALP or the sign for the labyrinth. “A Babylonian tablet designates a maze-figure as ekal tirani, ‘the Palace of the Entrails.’”166 The body is not understood as a beautiful shell or skin, but as a chaotic and obscene collection of innards. At Knossus Walter Evans dug up a smaller palace, next to the large one, in which a “remarkable shrine with fetish idols was [...] discovered. The sacred Double-Axe symbol is prominent, as in the greater paIace.”167 The etymology of carrel or niche168 suggests a nest which is a place where things hatch. Architects169 hatch the poche in their drawings with closely spaced lines. When old enough chicken hatch and can then be found on the pages of The Book of Kells or in this text they are ornaments in the text. The Book of Kells was, according to McHugh, a model for Finnegans Wake. On the interior the carrels are hung with carrel, “a fabric of the seventeenth century composed of silk and worsted.”170 What is woven into the carrel, and into the carrels, is the

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text, from Finnegans Wake that describes “The house O’Shea or O’Shame”171 which Joyce, among other things, calls “the secret cell.”172 The floors are made of terrazzo, a material and a technique that consists of marble chips embedded in a concrete base which, after drying out, is polished to a smooth surface.173 Terrazzo is still a great flooring material for Florida because it is an excellent heat sink. Also, since things are embedded174 in it, one could conceivably introduce other materials than marble, say marbles or peas. Terrazzo flooring has a precedent at Knossus where, as MacKendrick mentions, the buildings had “floors of pebbles.”175 The doors of the Library resemble distorted pages from Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible,176

Bloomer, In the Museyroom. Assemblage 5: 61, from Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 182. 172 The text woven into the carrels runs as follows: “The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts, were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unsyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, bon-owed brogues, reversible jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars, neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirls’, young ladies’, milkmaids’, washerwomens’, shopkeepers’ wives, merry widows’, ex nuns’, vice abbess’s, pro virgins’, super whores’, silent sisters’, Charleys’ aunts’, grandmothers’, mothers’-in-laws’, fostermothers’, godmothers’ garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from antipodes, presents from pickpockets, bon-owed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of whine, deoxodised carbons, convertible collars, diviliouker doffers, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, gloss teeth for a tooth, war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos, yeses and yeses and yeses, to which if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised, to skin and bone an an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.” Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 183-184. 173 The use of terrazzo refers not only to emblems but also to the location of the Library. Florida has had a tradition of using terrazzo flooring in residential application up to the 1950s. 174 This refers back to the allegoric method and the origin of the word ‘emblem’. “The Latin word emblem means inlaid work, like mosaic, made of bits of stone, or like certain (primitive’) forms of jewelry. [...] The Latin word emerged from the Greek emballein, which means to throw in.” Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire, p. ? Terrazzo flooring is emblematic of the word emblem. 175 MacKendrick, Greek Stones Speak: 48. 176 The page size is approximately 11 x 16 inches; a double page spread measures 32 x 11 inches. [This number connects to 3211 which is used in different combinations throughout Finnegans Wake. 32 stands for the speed of a body in free fall, i. e. 32 feet per second. The 11 stands for the beginning of a new cycle. We count up to 10 with our fmgers and then start over for 11. This danger of falling is implicit in the construction of my library with its suspended columns. The beginning of a new cycle can be seen in its historical siting as an end to the monumental libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century and the beginning of a new, virtually monumental, library that has its precedent in St. Jerome’s study.] The reverse of 42 is 24. 24 171

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Architexts which was printed in Mainz, Germany, in 1456. In the sixteenth century whole printed sheets of paper where called a ‘leaf.177 In architecture a leaf is “one of a pair of doors or windows.”178 The doors become pages or leaves with script on them. They mark a place of transition, i. e. the door threshold that interrupts the perceived continuity of time like a blade or knife. The languages that are inscribed on the doors, etched in the windows and sphyrelated onto the shelves include Hieroglyphic, Runic,179 Linear A, and Cuneiform scripts.180 All four share ideographic, pictographic and numeric characteristics. One combination of letters or signs may signify one thing when the reader applies ideographic analysis but may mean something different when numbers or pictographs are substituted for the signs.181

which is 2 x 12. In chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake there are “[t]welve questions of equal gravity and highly unequal length” [McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake: 31.], that require twelve answers. These questions and answers are inscribed in hieroglyphs on the study carrel doors. According to McHugh, Joyce used twelve major siglas to encrypt the characters of Finnegans Wake. One sigla each marks and identifies each study carrel. 177 It is also interesting to note that Partridge in Origins: 342, traces the word ‘leaf back to ‘library’. 178 Harris, Dictionary of Architecture and Construction: 289. 179 A system of writing that shares formal characteristics with Linear B are Runes which Partridge traces back to ‘secret’ and hence ‘secret conversation.’ “As early as the second century the Goths learned to recognize Greek culture, and designed a series of signs derived from Greek and Latin cursive script These signs we call Runes. Following the example of the Greeks they gave each sign a [..] name. The shapes of the letters conformed to their mode of writing and the uses to which they put it. Most of their inscriptions were either scratched or carved; Runes are therefore almost entirely rectilinear in form, vertical lines predominating.” Koch, The Book of Signs: 99. They may be compared to the marks hens leave after they have scratched the ground for food. 180 The library, like the languages used to describe it, works on at least three levels, too: as building/structure, engenderator/idea, and as gematrion/referent. Today hieroglyphs are used in Macintosh computers as interfaces between the computer and the operator. Actually the very machine I am using to write this text with has pictographic icons. The Macintosh computer interface uses a pictographic signing system. Rather than typing commands to make the computer do certain tasks I point with and arrow on an icon that describes the task to be performed and then click on it to start the action. This allows for a much faster learning curve compared to command-driven computers. The icon acts as a kind of imagines agentes, a memory device, which is easier to remember than a word. 181 Doblhofer, Voices in Stone: 259.

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Inventory from Pylos of tripods and vases [...].

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Carrel/Labyrinth Plate, digital 3D-model transfered to zinc plate (18â&#x20AC;? x 24â&#x20AC;?), then printed on watercolor paper

Architexts 3. Dance Stage/Printing Room/ Hypogaeum182

The hypogaeum which means low storage room is transformed into a hypergaeum which stands for high storage room. In Knossus the storage pits were underground. In my Library what was below has been elevated above ground level. 183 Hathorn, Greek Mythology: 312. 184 McKendrick, Greek Stones Speak: 51. The Minoans did not discard their rubbish carelessly. The building of these underground pits can be interpreted as an attempt to store and preserve broken clay sherds which in turn became the study objects for archaeologists in their attempts to reinvent the histories of the Minoans. Linear B and Linear A, which has not been deciphered yet, were found in the Knossus hypogaeum. The Linear B tablets are dealing with “lists, catalogues, or inventories of persons, domestic animals, cereals, and other commodities, with numbers or quantities recorded in a decimal system.” MacKendrick, The Greek Stones Speak: 82. History, then, is reinvented via decipherment from lists, archives, and catalogues of debris [Ruins?]. 185 Bloomer, Drawing, Building, Text: 52 182

erdix and Daidalos “had designed a circular dancing floor in [Knossus], where [...] Ariadne led the youths and maidens as they danced the Cretan dances on festival days[.]”183 In the Library the dancing floor is transmogrified into the hypergaeum, a crypt above ground-level. “[T]hree deep round pits [...] were sunk under the west court to contain the broken pottery from the palace rubbish heaps.”184 The hypergaeum is the generative void or vessel where things are created from fragments. Bloomer writes that the void is the middle between known and unknown or speakable and unspeakable. Wittgenstein’s Tractatusclosing aphorism (‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’) is a section—a middle— delineating the border between the unspeakable and language [...] It points out the difficulty of middles—the place where emptiness and intricacy are the same, the place of perplexing (thoroughly woven) emptiness. (The void where the family secrets are encrypted [...]).185

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The hypergaeum with its shape of a submersed egg points to the problematic search for a final origin. McHugh in his analysis of sigla in Finnegans Wake compares the egg laid by the hen to the letter she unearths in the mud mound. The hypergaeum, a place where letters are printed onto paper, becomes a place of generation, too. Its skin is made of joined zinc plates that can be dismantled and used as etching plates or blocks. After they have served as a tool for the creation of other texts they are reinstalled in the hypergaeum.

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Printing Room/Hypergaeum plate, digital hidden-line and wireframe 3D-model, transfered to zinc plate (18â&#x20AC;? x 24â&#x20AC;?), then printed on watercolor paper

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Architexts 4. Plumb Bob Pendulum/Counterweight

he word ‘library’ contains the word ‘libra’, which is Latin for weigh scale.186 The Library’s counterweight is a double-withe brick wall made of Alabama Dung187 suspended beneath the fourthfloor floor under Studio 421. The brick bond consists of stretchers and headers that spell in morse code the Washerwomen section of Finnegans Wake.188 The stretcher stands for the long duration of the morse code, the header for the short.189 The brick wall—as an emblem of misunderstanding—is the balance to the other part of the library, the carrels or niches, where communication runs smoothly with the help of the on-line libraries. The brick courses, like the books on the computer screen, can be read; an understanding is possible by deciphering the text.190 The writing is not only on the walls, but in the walls as well, or more precisely, in the brick courses of the counterweight. Jennifer Bloomer suggests that the language of Finnegans Wake “is construed not as a mirror, but as a constellation of points of exchange, a kind of switching mechanism of potential transformations.”191 The central control office is to AT&T what the Library is, without the centrality, to the Department of Architecture. It is a ‘switching mechanism’ with unforeseeable results.

Another referent to the mosquito or Mücke comes from traveling trades people [nomads] who carried portable weigh scales with them to determine the weight of their goods. The smallest weights, because of their size and light weight, were called Mückengewichte, literally ‘mosquito weights’. 187 Alabama Dung is a residual clay found only in the southeastern United States. “Residual clays have remained more or less at the site of the decomposed rock. They are less plastic than sedimentary clays, and because they have been subject to fewer erosive forces their particle size is much larger.” Nelson, Ceramics: 3. Dung loops back to the midden or mud mound, the place where Joyce’ hen found a letter which was the beginning of communication and miscommunication. 188 See Appendix II. 189 Since the bricks used in the counterweight wall are not modular, now and then a plumb bond, which is any bond in which the vertical joints are precisely in line, appears. 190 Also, has anyone tried to use the morse code as a deciphering tool on Piranesi’s cross section of Castel S. Angelo with its bridge out of the Amichita romane IV? Piranesi’s bricks look deceptively as if they spell something. 191 Bloomer, Towards an Architecture of Desire’ The (S)crypt of Joyce and Piranesi: 26. 186

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Unfolded Interior Elevation/Section/Plan of typical Study Carrel.

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Counterweight/Plumb Bob Plate, digital 3D-model, transfered to zinc plate (18â&#x20AC;? x 24â&#x20AC;?), then printed on watercolor paper

Architexts 5. Roof/Wing

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he Library compresses both roof and foundation into one construction. The roof is simultaneously the structural foundation from which the researchand reading-carrels hang. It resembles in shape the two extreme wing sections of a mosquito;192 that is the position the wings take (in section) just before they reverse direction. However, the wings are too heavy193 to fly.194 They are covered with lead195-coated copper to protect the carrels below from the elements. In this function the roof can be compared to a canopy.196 Lead as a material has the ambiguous qualities of protecting and poisoning. In case of nuclear radiation it shields and protects life, but when in direct physical contact with it for an extended amount of time, lead poisons the body. Lead in another reading also stands in its longevity in contrast to that which passes through the building it covers: letters written in ink on bound pages, decaying batteries of information. “The letter is thalatta is the ladder— Jacob’s or Wittgenstein’s [...] The letter is poche, black spots scattered; also, systems of Ts, trabeation, architecture.”197 The Library wing is made of steel T-sections. It is winged trabeation. “The veins do not run at random, but according to a definite pattern, which is slightly different in each order of insects. Wherever the veins fork or cross each other they enclose a space known as ‘cell’.”198 The cell is a place of exchange. It is the place in the roof where loads get transferred,199 and where the columns that hold up the floors are connected to the wing.200 Anselm Kiefer, who designed and built his own library— High Priestess/Zweistromland—that contains books made of lead, has created several sculptures that reflect the character of the material lead. One of them is called Palette mit Flügeln (Palette with Wings). “[R]ecalling Icarus, the wings are often rather sorry looking and the weight of the lead is, narratively, a difficult load to carry. Hence, even at these triumphant moments, there are hints of impending doom and of the need for further evolution.”201

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A mosquito’s wings are special: “Flight in birds, mammals and reptiles has been made possible by the modification of a pre-existing arm, hand and finger respectively to form a wing. The wing of a flying fish is merely a modified pectoral fin. But the wing of an insect is different in origin. It is something added to an already full complement of functional limbs [Insects’ wings are allegorical, an extra added, but necessary], a distinction it shares with fairies and angels [of history].” Gillette, Mosquitos: 7. 193 Nachtigall, Insects in Flight: 56, Text under figure: “Sketches of the wing movement of several different types of insect [...], reading from right to left. From above downwards: locust, beetle, butterfly, dragonfly. The upper surface of the wing is shown in white and the lower surface in black. [...]” 194 Lead is used as a partial roofing material (together with copper) on the wings and as a sound attenuator in the top half of the study carrels. Lead has a double value. It protects against nuclear radiation but it is also a poison that causes madness. It is a drawing tool as well. “[L]ead was [...] fashioned into little discs for drawing lines. [I]t was used as a writing surface for inscribing curses, oaths, questions to oracles and answers from oracles. [...] Lead resists weathering longer than iron, and in some circumstances longer than copper: which explains why it has been used at least since the Middle Ages for coffins, and also for containers for the separate interment of hearts.” Zweite, High Priestess/ Zweistromland: 90–91. 195 As a material to conserve something lead was used in the palace at Knossus, too. “In the rich storerooms beneath [the public rooms] Evans found the lead linings of chests that had once contained objects of value.” MacKendrick, Greek Stones Speak: 93–95. 196 Webster explains that ‘canopy’ comes from the Latin canopeurn, a curtain [in architecture: an enclosing wall that does not support a roof (however, in this case the roof is the support), Latin cortina: a small court], e.g. one over a bed. Partridge says that it derives from the “Greek kanopeion, a mosquito-net, originally the neuter of konopeios, the adjective of konops, mosquito, gnat: kon became kan perhaps under the influence of the ancient Egyptian city of Canopus. Konops itself is apparently a loan word: perhaps compare Egyptian khenus, khnemes, gnat, mosquito. Partridge, Origins: 75. This returns us to the mosquito as the generator for the wing/roof. 197 Bloomer, Towards Desiring Architecture in Drawing, Building, Text. Editor Andrea Kahn: 50. 198 Nachtigall, Insects in Flight: 15. A secret cell, perhaps?. 199 “Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me!” Joyce, Finnegans Wake: 214. 200 It should be noted that each stack carrel is equipped with a wing chair or Ohrensessel which is a great instrument for intensive studying because the wings attached to its back lean prevent unwanted visual distractions. 201 Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer: 137. 192

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Roof/Wing Plate, digital 3D-model, transfered to zinc plate (18â&#x20AC;? x 24â&#x20AC;?), then printed on watercolor paper

Section through connection between wing structure and suspended columns.

Architexts Conclusion

he virtual Library has the potential to include all books. Jorge Luis Borges, in The Library of Babel, writes about a fantastic structure that would contain everything, including the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.202

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What is left, then, is the design for a library and a set of methods that may help the potential architect to create more meaningful constructions than the conventional ones we are expected to live with. Finally the limits of this project are not clear. They are not the thin and perfect lines of the computer drawing, but fuzzy and undulating borders or regions with pochĂŠs, or cells made of hatched lines. The borders of these fields are marginal. They, like the Library, occupy the extreme position from the center.

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Borges, The Library of Babel, Labyrinths: 54. 202

Bibliography

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Barthell, Edward E. Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece. (Coral Gables, Fla.,: University of Miami Press, 1971). Bloomer, Jennifer. “Towards an Architecture of Desire: Architecture, Writing, the Body.” 1988). Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. (New York: New Directions, 1964). Brawne, Michael. Libraries: Architecture and Equipment. (New York,: Praeger Publishers, 1970). Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989). Colomina, Beatriz, and Joan Ockman. Architectureproduction, Revisions--Papers on Architectural Theory and Criticism ; 2nd V. (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). Doblhofer, Ernst. Voices in Stone; the Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings. (New York,: Viking Press, 1961). Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture. 1st ed. (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983). Gillette, J. D. Mosquitos. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall, and Geoffrey Ashall Glaister. Encyclopedia of the Book. 2nd ed. (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1996). Guidoni, Enrico, and Enrico Guidoni. Primitive Architecture. (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1978). Hathorn, Richmond Yancey. Greek Mythology. (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1977). Hayles, Katherine N. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Henry, Françoise. The Book of Kells : Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin. 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1974). Howard, L. O. The Insect Book. (New York,: Doubleday Page & company, 1901). Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. (New York: Viking Press, 1976). Joyce, James, and Harry Levin. The Portable James Joyce. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). Kahn, Andrea. Drawing/Building/Text : Essays in Architectural Theory. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). Koch, Rudolf, Vyvyan Holland, and First edition club London. [from old catalog]. The Book of Signs. (London,: The First edition club, 1930). MacKendrick, Paul Lachlan. The Greek Stones Speak; the Story of Archaeology in Greek Lands. (New York,: St. Martin’s Press, 1962). Marinatos, Spyridon, and Max Hirmer. Crete and Mycenae. (New York,: H. N. Abrams, 1960). Matheson, Robert. Handbook of the Mosquitos of North America. (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1966). McHugh, Roland. The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976). McLeish, Kenneth, and Elisabeth Frink. Children of the Gods : The Complete Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece. (Harlow, Essex, England: Longman, 1983). Nelson, Glenn C. Ceramics : A Potter’s Handbook. 5th ed. (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1984). Ovid, Pierre Bersuire, and Thomas. Metamorphoseos : Lyon, 1518, The Renaissance and the Gods; 3. (New York: Garland, 1976).

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Ovid, and Hermann Breitenbach. Metamorphosen : Epos in 15 I.E. Fünfzehn Büchern. Jubiläumsausg. ed, Die Bibliothek Der Alten Welt. Römische Reihe. (Zürich: ArtemisVerlag, 1958). Palmer, Leonard Robert. A New Guide to the Palace of Knossos. (New York: Praeger, 1969). ———. Mycenaeans and Minoans; Aegean Pre-History in the Light of the Linear B Tablets. (New York,: Knopf, 1962). Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. (New York: Greenwich House, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983). Pendlebury, J. D. S. A Handbook to the Palace of Minos, Knossus, with Its Dependencies. (London: M. Parrish, 1954). ———. The Archaeology of Crete, an Introduction. (New York,: Biblo and Tannen, 1963). Pevsner, Nikolaus. A History of Building Types, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts ; 19. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). Rosenthal, Mark. Anselm Kiefer. (New York: Neues Publishing Company, 1978). Serres, Michel, Josué V. Harari, and David F. Bell. Hermes--Literature, Science, Philosophy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Webster, Noah, and Jean Lyttleton McKechnie. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged : Based Upon the Broad Foundations Laid Down by Noah Webster. 2nd , extensively revised / ed. (New York: New World Dictionaries/Simon and Schuster, 1979).

Life Course/Work Course of Michael Walter Mücke November 9, 1959 born in Detmold, in view of the Hermannsschlacht site203

1979 Abitur

Great grandmother

Canada

Spork-Eichholz forest

Mexico

Primary School

Light and colour

Learning to whistle while delivering Der Spiegel

Yucatan

Architecture Louis L Kahn Elevators Adolf Loos Vienna

Raps fields 1969 Secondary school

Crossroads

1989 First scholarship

Ships, airplanes, machines

Cafe Pergolesi

Germany by bicycle

Miriam204 and apple cake

November 9, 1989 Thirty years old and the Berlin wall comes down

Ulrike Meinert

London

Jennifer Bloomer

London

Germany’s prisons

Theory = Practice

Schweden by mofa

Kinderheim Wiembeck

Anselm Kiefer

Oslo

Kommune Entrup

Elysabeth Yates Bums McKee

Kinderladen e.V. Lcmgo

Gerda, the tractor

Nuts and Peas

Amsterdam

Repairing cars

Poplar and Elm

Wyk auf Föhr

Finnegans Wake

Sandwall

1974 Honigpumpe and Joseph Beuys in the Fridericianum in Kassel

August Endell

Smell of oil paint

Allegories, Sections, Parasites, and Nomads

Ronchamp

Da Capo & Al Fine

History/herstory/mystory

1991 Master of Architecture or Who Put The Master In The Master Plan?205

Rene Magritte Watermill

The essential is not yet done206

White bathtub Citroën

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Barbara Kruger? The last six words are quoted from Anselm Kiefer’s autobiography.

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Miriam, the architect, according to Nina Hofer.

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“[T]he archetypal moment of German independence. In A.D. 9, when three legions of Roman soldiers under the command of Quintilius Varus were marching through the Teutoburg Forest, they were ambushed and massacred by a Germanic tribe led by a chieftain named Arminius (Hermann).” Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer (New York: Neues Publishing Company, 1978): 49.

Humid heat

Amerika

Time 1980 Chicago

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1984 Marriage to Miriam in Gainesville, U.S.A.

Nordsee

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Architexts Appendices207 Appendix I Facsimile of Joyceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Finnegans Wake, the Washerwomen section: 213-216.

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which are more hanger-ons.

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Examples of trussjoint ‘T’s (see page 107)

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Unable to communicate they disappear into a wintry night of total unknowing.â&#x20AC;?208

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McHugh, Sigla of Finnegans Wake: 37.

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Architexts Appendix II

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James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, the Washerwomen section in Morse code.

Detail view of Finnegans Wake Morse code

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”209

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Borges, “The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths: 58.

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Architexts Appendix III Plates

All drawings on the following pages were created with Architrion software for the Mac, plotted on a pen-plotter (this was heady stuff in the early 1990s) on 36” x 24” paper, then digitized again on a wide-bed scanner in the late 1990s. The etchings in the latter half of the appendix were done as part of a print-making course I took in 1988. In that case I plotted each Architrion file to an 18” x 24” inch transparency, coated the zink plate with a photo-sensitive emulsion, overlaid the plate with the transparency and exposed the whole assembly to a buzzing/smoking arc light (which I always thought of as an odd marriage of technology and nature: the mimicing of sun light through electricity; and it works). Etching in acid follows this process, with repeated burnishing, the adding of more lines, some aquatint, and finally a few proofs...

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Deciphering Alphabets

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Aspect from northeast with existing University of Florida architecture building to the left

Architexts

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Combined hidden line and wireframe hybrid showing relations between carrels and hypogaeum

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Aerial perspective of carrel/library wing with roof removed to show carrel/library interior

Architexts

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View from west showing concrete counterweights and existing University of Florida architecture studios on the right

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Aerial perspective showing hybrid hidden line/ wireframe of complete wing structure with hanging carrels/library to the right and hypergaeum on the left center

Architexts

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East elevation

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Section through carrels and library

Architexts

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Narrow-angle section perspective showing carrels/library, partial hypergaeum, and existing University of Florida architecture building

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Cross section through carrels/library and existing architecture studios (on the left)

Counter weight

Architexts

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Section perspective through hypergaeum and architecture building looking northwest

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Entry door facade

Entry door plan

Section through entry door and hypergaeum with atrium wall beyond

Architexts

251

Section showing relation between hypergaeum and existing University of Florida architecture building floors

Architexts

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Wide-angle section perspective of carrels/library

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Entry/cowmount facade

Entry/cowmount plan

Architexts

Foldout of carrel interior

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254

Section perspective of carrel

Door section

Sliding-door facade

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Door No. 1

Three of eleven carrel sliding doors

Door No. 2

Door No. 3

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Detail of connection between shelves and suspended columns

Section through wall separating stack niches from study carrels

Plan section of wall at suspended columns

Page layout of Gutenbergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 42-line bible

Architexts

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Section of hypergaeum wall with joint detail

Handrail detail

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Architexts

Hypergaeum in situ

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Architexts

While I attended Princeton University studying toward a Ph.D. in architectural history and theory, I wrote a series of papers as part of the pro-seminars that are required during the first two years of the program. The following architexts cover a broad range of thinking and writing. Each essay has a brief introductory paragraph siting the project.

Of Halls, Hell, Holes, and Hulls: A Partial Mapping of the Princeton Architecture Building

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uring the first semester, in the fall of 1992, I took Mark Wigley’s seminar Post-Structuralist Readings of Architecture. Wigley was then still at the Princeton School of Architecture. The everyday routine of walking the hallowed halls of the Architecture School turned for me into an obsession with understanding the building as a textual artifact that had been constructed over time. In a sense my writing about this building was a defensive move. Its tone is consequently a bit too in-your-face for my usual way of writing. It was almost as if, to succeed in Princeton, I had to consciously undermine what I would call ‘home’ for a few years. Methodologically the project involved some detective work, some sleuthing, some nosing around in the past of the architecture program, and in the history of the building. I was trying to understand how this very special place could frame perhaps also a continuous sequence of everyday, routine patterns of inhabitation that were anything but special, or that would counter the perceived hallowedness with a banal hollowness. Finally the following text was an attempt to come to grips with the idea that it doesn’t matter what I analyze but how I analyze a project, which did not prevent the former Dean of the Princeton School of Architecture, Ralph Lerner, to be mildly irritated by this paper.

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Architexts

Of Halls, Hell, Holes, and Hulls: A Partial Mapping of the Princeton Architecture Building One does not necessarily gain access to a piece of architecture by following the order of its production, starting at the foundations and arriving at the roof ridge. Why de-tail [dé-tailler: cut out]? For whom [Pour qui]. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987)

1. Introduction

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onvention has it that architecture “is understood as a kind of object to be looked at, inhabited by a viewer who is detached from it, inhabited precisely by being looked at, whether it be by the user, visitor, neighbor, critic, or reader of architectural publications,”1 or architectural essays like this one. In this paper my purpose is to interrogate, to exercise a form of inquisition, from a Princeton University building that currently houses the School of Architecture. More specifically I am interested in the surfaces of this building. The investigation concerns what is obvious, or ob viam, that is, placed in the way as an obstruction, a kind of hindrance. The idea is to make more opaque what appears through its daily use to be a transparent object. Not unlike Gottfried Semper who considered woven surfaces, or rather the act of weaving these surfaces, as a starting point of architecture, I suggest that the Princeton architecture building is more than it seems; it is in fact more than its seams or joints, although these details play an important role in this paper, too. Aside from the seams, the building, especially at a prestigious place like Princeton, represents,2 that is, it stands in the place of something other. It displaces and it represents simultaneously. This interrogation is therefore not only an exercise in exposing what some assume to be hidden behind the (sur)faces of this building but also an essay, in other words, an attempt, to show that the obvious reading of this construction is quite literally super-facial and is yet strangely enough what allows a relevant reading in the first place. Therefore, rather than be merely a paper about the writings of the walls, it is as well about writings on the walls;3 accessible to anyone who cares to read them. Interpretation in this case is a reading of appearances, i.e. readings that are sur-face, on-the-face. Interpretation as a transfer from the built into the written (textual) realm is also an Übersetzung,4 an exchange involving travel or displacement.

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Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 362. 2 Translated into German ‘representation’ means, besides words which link it to introduction into society, and the apparently fine arts, to standingin-front-of (Vorstellung) which would open up the discussion to Heidegger’s Ge-stell. 3 As important as the clothed body is the fact that clothes construct the body. Kleider machen Leute. See also Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 198, note 13. 4 In German the verb übersetzen means not only ‘to translate’ but ‘to physically transport someone or something from one side of a river to the other one.’ It describes a crossingover, a transgressing, not only a shifting as the word trans-late might imply.

Translation, as movement between two texts and concerning two texts, sug gests the inadequacy of binary mode(l)s. J. Hillis Miller, when referring to ‘univocal’ and ‘deconstructive’ readings in relationship to a text describes this type of relation as a “triangle, not a polar opposition. There is always a third to whom the two are related, something before them or between them, which they divide, consume, exchange, across which they meet.”5 On first sight the Princeton architecture building appears as a tight, excessively ordered, and highly controlled construct with its repetitive columns, windows, and frames. However, the question here is whether the repetition of parts does not simultaneously deflect, like a smooth surface, the inquiry into the building. What would happen if I were to re-spect it, if I would look again, take a second look? I might observe that, by borrowing from the architectural theoretician Mark Wigley, “the building masquerades as order;” that this “mask of order uses figures of rationality to conceal the essential irrationality” and that the “rationality is literally added to the building as the representation of the effacement of representation.”6 The building represents the university as much as it is a part of this institution. Yet it also stands, literally, in opposition to some of the older ‘neo-gothic’ campus buildings. Housing a discipline that is neither at home in the sciences nor in the fine arts, it is figuratively both joined and separated from the university’s other disciplines.7 The building appears from a distance as an or dered, clearly articulated, ‘transparent’ construct. A plan reading reveals the division of the building into two parts (north and south) with a joining, “ornamental”8 staircase; an ornament that separates and links the two parts and their program: the south section contains the administration, offices, the library, Ph.D. room, rest-rooms, hallways, and computer room; the north part holds workshops, studios, the gallery, slide-library, rest-rooms, and the auditorium—a rational, one could even say, reasonable division. Close-up, however, this reading of the distribution of parts is contradicted by the realization that the building is also an apparatus of repression inscribed in the very surface that yielded the first reading. The close-up view, the tactile (and tactical) approach, the proximate survey, is a detailed view,9 and in this case, a consideration of a few details that seem out of place or that seem rather too much in place.

Miller, “The Critic as Host.” In Deconstruction and Criticism (1979): 224. 6 Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 379. 7 For a detailed reading of the relationship between the discipline and the institution of architecture, see Wigley, The Disciplining of Architecture, in Ottagono. (1990). 8 Lerner, Feasability Study for the Improvement of the Architecture Building, Princeton University (1991). 9 A reading of details is, to use Riegl’s word, haptic, and thus also partial since it is impossible to see the whole for the parts. The impossibility of completion is built into this approach. For the consequences of a detailed reading see Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989).

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Three questions that I will attempt to answer: what is out of place in this building? What is in place? And what was placed in place of what has been displaced?

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Architexts

2. Halls 10

See History of the School of Architecture in Princeton University, School of Architecture. (1992): 9. 11 Latin for ‘seed plot’, which gave ‘seminar’ its name. 12 The shadow of this divorce still falls on the strained relations between students of architecture and art history. 13 Wigley, The Disciplining of Architecture, in Ottagono. (1990): 24 and 25, footnote 8. 14 Quetglas, Fear of Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion (1992): 125.

he architecture building occupies a questionable site on the Princeton University campus. Thirty years ago the building displaced the Prospect House vegetable garden. In a publication mailed to students applying to the Princeton Architecture School the authors write that many faculty members wanted the building to be adjacent to McCormick Hall to better retain the School’s close ties with the Department of Art and Archaeology, and many alumni were horrified that the new building would destroy the open quadrangle between Prospect House, 1879 Hall, McCosh, and Palmer Laboratory. But the University was determined, and plans went ahead despite protests.10

This determined divorce, this split, this violent displacement of a different seminarium11 constitutes more than a mere separation from the Art History Department.12 A questioning of this vanished garden points towards the fragility of the ground, or rather the perceived ground the building stands on, or denies to stand on in its displacement of the garden. The architecture building as a neo-classical interpretation of a Greek temple is a hallowed hall, a temple, a sacred house. The difficult foundation announces itself in the negative plinth that is, against all classicist precedents, smaller than the building’s superstructure. The building is both too large for its plinth and the foundation is too small for the building. It is a misfit that echoes its duplicitous role as both “insider” and “foreigner” of the university.”13 José Quetglas writes about Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion—another classicist temple—that a double barrier separates the visitor from the house: a line of columns segregating the spectator’s space from the space of the house, and a platform displacing the ground of the spectator from the ground of the house. The house is always perceived as behind this double barrier, and this image of the double exclusion of the spectator constitutes the architecture of the temple.14

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It should be noted that this barrier not only is effective in keeping someone out. It is equally capable of containing some-body.

3. Hell

he temple is a house, a house for gods, which means that we have en tered the slippery intersection between religion and the domestic—and one of their disputes: the repression of sensuality. One way to repress the undesirable is to overlay perceived chaos with apparent, abstract, objective order. n this house of architecture the control and rigidity is evident in the order of its 13’-10” x 13’-10”, 7’-6” x 7’-6”, and 7’-6” x 13’-10” tartan column grid. Significantly the rigor of this system is only modified at the joint marking the main entry,15 which holds the aforementioned “ornamental staircase” between the north- and south wing. Wigley notes that “the threat of ornament is its sensuality, which distracts the proper eye. The need to appropriate architecture from the feminine domain of pleasure has its risks, the risk precisely of seduction. [...] The risk of ornament is an impropriety in which the sensuality of the body confuses the mind that seeks to control it.”16 The interdependence of sexuality and space is evident in that the “mechanisms that define the house cannot be divided into those that are spatial and those that are representational.”17 The architecture building as a Doric temple represents the masculine appropriation of the feminine. The maintenance of secure boundaries is aligned with the masculine even though the building, as vessel, is considered feminine: it consists of physical and thus sensual materials. Wigley has suggested that the sensuality of the physical is always violently controlled by the male ratio.18 The need for control includes the surfaces of the buildings as well as their openings. However, the male desire for objective distance meets a different and more messy reality. The difficulties in determining identity from changing positions is telling. The resulting ambiguities are echoed in Hillis Miller’s work on the parasite. The παρα of the site, the still mobile pre-fix, signifies

Here the 13’-10” dimension expands to 19’-10”. The short dimension 7’-6” becomes 10’-8”. In a description whose importance will become more evident in the latter part of this paper Lerner, Feasibility Study for the Improvement of the Architecture Building, Princeton University (1991): 15, calls this link structure the School’s “undistinguished entry.” 16 Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 355. 17 Ibid.: 347. 18 This would not only include reason but also some architects’ method of using proportions as a means to justify form. 19 Miller. “The Critic as Host.” In Deconstruction and Criticism (1979): 219.

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at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in παρα, moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside.19

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This is a Greek word which means to turn and ox, hence to mark lines on a field by moving in alternating directions. 21 See my Master’s Research Project A Virtual Βιβλιοτηεκα or A Secret Block for A Secret Person in the U.S., 1989 at the University of Florida. 22 This term is also not gender-neutral in German: the verb zieren can mean adorn, embellish, grace, decorate, garnish; sich zieren can mean to be affected, to give oneself airs, and with respect to women to be prim or prudish, to act coy, to stand on ceremony, to refuse. A Zierpuppe is a dressy woman. From Langenscheidt’s New College German Dictionary. 23 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1924): 65 (translated by author). 24 Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 335. 25 Ibid.: 336.

This παρα is written all over the architecture building in its details. The ancient form of βουστροπηεδον20 which describes among other things an obsolete form of writing, also signifies the cultivating action of plowing a field, and the figure the choir traces in Greek drama. In Greek architecture it describes a meandering, infinitely continuous and therefore mobile ornament. In addition the meander is known for its ambiguous quality as a frame that marks simultaneously interior and exterior fields. In the architecture building the βουστροπηεδον appears in plan, section and facade as a figure that marks a difficult boundary, a complex line.21 The παρα surfaces in Kant’s Critique of Judgement as the παρεργον: “Even what is known as adornment [Zierat22] (Parerga), [...] only increases the pleasure of good taste through its form, like the frames for paintings or clothes on statues or colonnades around magnificent buildings,”23 like temples. Paintings are usually painted on woven cloths like linen. What is woven into the architecture building is a text that was perhaps not intended, nor did it play an important role in its construction. The building as material construct appears static, immobile. We, its inhabitants, move, shift shapes, construct by moving, and weaving. Weaving is shape-shifting, constructing by traversing a terrain. This nomadism disrupts the figure of stability set up by the architectural order of the tem ple’s structure. The history of ornament as the control of the feminine within the spatial construct erected by the male parallels the domestication of the feminine. The opportunity of domestication is its inability to maintain a clear difference between inside and outside. Mark Wigley writes: The woman on the outside is implicitly sexually mobile. Her sexuality is no longer controlled by the house. In Greek thought women lack the internal self-control credited to men as the very mark of their masculinity. This self control is no more than the maintenance of secure boundaries.24 With that in mind the “role of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality.”25 This repressed mobility of the feminine in the architecture building surfaces in the Corinthian and Ionic column capitals that are displayed/displaced in the marginal domains on the site.

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Figure 1: Exterior wall of the Princeton Architecture Building in plan. section. Scan from original building blueprints.

Hence the title of this paper. Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983): 275-276. Square brackets are mine. 28 In the case of the architecture building maintenance crew, the true caretakers of the building have replaced the gods in their absence. The maintenance crew is also conspicuously absent from the official sign next to the main entry that lists the occupants of the architecture building and their respective locations. 29 One χελλα contained the statue of the goddess Athena, the other the treasury. In this case, too, a male, Doric temple, frames the female goddess. 30 One could question my investigation of columns as a deviance from surfaces. But any object can be framed as nothing but an assemblage of surfaces; especially if one considers the development of imaging technology that is currently available to architects. Some of the most advanced CAD software packages are primarily surface modelers. The search for increasingly better resolution of printers and monitors is another indication for the emphasis on surfaces and screens. 31 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (1988): 23. 32 The fear of closeness, the repression of proximity is echoed even in the support structures for the column capitals. They consist in both cases of two c-channels joined and held apart by three two-inch-diameter steel disk spacers held in place by nuts and bolts.

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The cella in Greek temples marks the place of controlled absences. It inscribes and circumscribes the places where place where the gods are conthe gods dwell28 and also the cealed: in this case there are two cellas. Just as there was a double cella in the Parthenon,29 the north- and south wing of the architecture building hold column capitals in their respective staircases. Staircases are the places of vertical circulation and maximum mobility. A χελλα is also the holiest of places. George Hersey writes that “the most human and also the most sacrificial part of a column30 is the capital (κεϕαλιον, κεϕαλισ, head). It is of course the column’s head, the head of the personage whose feet, form, and throat stand below.[...] But just as a trophy consists of the warrior’s outer teguments [...] so the column head really consists of headdresses, head ornaments.”31 The two column capitals, the Corinthian at the main entry under the stairway, and the Ionic, at the base of the north wing stairwell represent sacrifices. They are the architectural equivalent of headhunter’s trophies. The sacrifice is that of sensuality and proximity through a framed, and therefore controlled display32 of the column fragments in the two potentially highly mobile and at the same time fixed spaces in the building: the double χελλα. The repression of proximity functions as an increase of the spectators’ mobility. Few people ever dwell in the staircases of the architecture building. Sensuality, proximity, and ornament share the same fate as the grotesque. They are framed so that they can be neutralized.

kel-, which has the variant roots kal-, kil-, kol-, and kul- that give us such words as the Greek καλυπτειν and the Latin celare, to hide, the Greek καλια, a hut, the Greek κολεοσ, a sheath [the container], the Latin cella, a small room, cellar, which means cell [the private study of the patriarch] in Late Latin, the Latin cilium, eyelid [control device between inside and outside], and finally the Latin occultare, to conceal [what surfaces do]. Furthermore, the Indo-European apparently has the variant roots khal-, khel-, khol-, khul-, whence the Germanic hall, hell, hole, and hull.26 Note, too, the variant represented by Sanskrit sala, a house.27

he foundations of most buildings begin in the basement or cellar. The word Cellar goes back to the Indo-European root

4. Holes

Figure 2: Column capital in the Princeton Architecture Building.

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The more threatening they appear to be, the more there is a need to constrain and confine them. The two column capitals disturb the surfaces of the building. They are like those branch knots that are ordinarily cut out of plywood sheets (to be used for concrete framing), and replaced with lozenge-shaped inlays. Cyril M. Harris writes that a knot in “fabric construction [marks] the presence of an imperfection that will cause a surface irregularity.”33 In the architecture building the architects framed and fixed the imperfections, so that the occupants can return to smooth surfaces. The Oxford English Dictionary Online describes a knot as a “knob or embossed ornamentation in carved or hammered work; a stud employed as an ornament or for fastening; a boss; also, the carved foliage on the capital of a column [or] a mass formed by the aggregation and cohesion of particles; esp. one that formed as a hard kernel in the surrounding softer material; a lump, clot, concretion.”34 Figure 3: One of the knots from Semper, Der Stil (1860): I: 180

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The column capitals’ placement just off center and in each case too close to another, adjacent surface (the under side of the stair and wall) may be more than a mere accident, especially in an architecture building. It can be seen as an attempt to limit disembodied sensual ity, to frame off this grotesque in a similar way Ruskin framed off the infamous ignoble grotesque he describes, but never renders, from a building in Venice.35 Wigley notes that “as in the house, excess is understood as sensuality, an improper pleasure [...].”36 The grotesque is diametrically opposed to what is considered pure. The architecture building is a grotesque temple, an illicit union of the sacred and the profane.37 The grotesque thus calls into question the role of the frame that is broken in those places where control is no longer possible. The identity crisis of the temple becomes acute if we consider Barbara Stafford’s tools for identifying deviance from classical conventions. Stafford describes four interrelated means38 of which the first one consists of material joints that are expressed rather than hidden. In this case the architecture refuses to be seamless, as classicist architecture would demand, and instead celebrates the joint to the point of grotesqueness.39 The extravagant expression of joints falls back upon its own limitations when it becomes clear that in the Princeton architecture building the joints are not differentiated but kept the same no matter under what conditions. The possibility of individually expressing connections constitutes the one thing modern architecture needs to control by all means, even at the cost of appearing to

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Cyril M. Harris, Dictionary of Architecture and Construction (1975): 281. 34 Oxford English Dictionary from the “Parker Glossary of Architecture,”1875. 35 Again the profane and the sacred intersect. For an analysis of this detail see Paulette Singley’s lecture entitled “The Head on Santa Maria Formosa: License and Excess in Ruskin’s Stone of Venice,” presented as part of the Hypotheses conference at Princeton University on April 22, 1994. 36 Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 352. 37 See Bloomer, Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower (1992). 38 Stafford, From Brilliant Ideas to Fitful Thoughts: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (1985): 333. 39 See also Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989) on the changes in the reading of details since the late 1700s.

be about the obsessive expression of connections. Each and every one of the architecture building’s 86 columns sits on a grid intersection. The column width is without exception 14”, its length on the ground floor is 120”. Thus, instead of the apparent Doric order, the columns in fact represent, based on a slenderness ratio of each ground floor column of 1:8.5, a dis-order halfway between proper Ionic and Corinthian columns. Mitchell recalls Vitruvius’ mythical tale of the origins of the three orders. After the description of the Doric column Vitruvius continues with the Ionic column: “Just so afterwards, when they desired to construct a temple to Diana in a new style of beauty, they translated these footprints into the terms characteristic of the slenderness of women, and thus first made a column the thickness of which was only one eighth of its height, so that it might have a taller look”40 than the Doric column which Vitruvius, among others, identified with the masculine. The Ionic41 order occupies the space between the severity of the Doric and the delicacy of the Corinthian order. It is itself a condition of the undecided middle, of that which cannot be confined because its identity is not clear, its limits not known. In the end, fragments, like column heads, refer to an absent whole, a disembodied body, while the detail in relationship to weaving marks the impossibility of reading an undifferentiated totality. The architecture building resembles an appara tus of respect to Semper’s theory of weaving.42 It is a loom. With architecture emerging out of the textile arts, Wigley writes that architecture “is no longer seen to begin with naked structures gradually dressed with ornament. Rather, it begins with ornament.”43 Ornament is on the surface, or is attached to the surface. It is a hull, the skin of a vessel.44

Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture (1990): 201. 41 “The construction of temples of the Ionic order [...] will be in keeping with the middle position.” Ibid.: 202. 42 Weaving is also a speaking without making a sound, a complex sign language that confuses the eye. The eye loses itself in the patterns. Weaving is seductive. 43 Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 367. 44 For a discussion of politically incorrect vessels see Bloomer, Big Jugs (1992). For constructions of vessels as skin see McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993). 45 Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 22 and 43. 46 Bloomer, D’OR (1992): 45 quoting Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989).

5. Hulls

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ccording to the treatises of Vitruvius one of the important rules of classical architecture was the hierarchical relationship of the parts to a whole. In the case of a classical temple the details are always subjugated to the overall building. This subjugation is not neutral. Schor observes that “the association of details, femininity, and decadence is perhaps the most persistent legacy left to us by Classicism.[...] Decadence is a pathology of the detail: either metastasis or hypertrophy or both.”45 Bloomer cites Schor’s comment on neo-classical aesthetics where “the ornamental is equated with ‘....the feminine, when it is not the pathological—two notions Western culture has throughout its history had a great deal of trouble distinguishing.’”46

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In the following section I present some observations about the Princeton architecture building. I. Open Surfaces Are the windows in the architecture building merely an acknowledgment of the need for air and light? Or are they also a sign of the need to control the boundary through surveillance? Do the openings point to the desires of a voyeur or as well to those who are being watched? The assumed exchangeability of control and identity is evident in the margins, at the edges of this building. The enfilade of windows lets the view pass all the way through the building without actually escaping its confines. It is almost impossible to look out of the building directly from one’s room. The oblique view dominates. In the seminar spaces the openings signify either the complete absence of a wall or they are so high up that they prevent viewing out. Two sets of curtains, one opaque and toward the outside, the other a veiling but translucent screen on the inside. The former reappears in the men’s first floor bathroom47 where the absent stall wall is replaced by an opaque curtain.

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II. Textured Surfaces The wall surfaces in the seminar room ex tend almost from floor to ceiling. Plastic baseboards, which appear to be the only malleable material in the room, aside from the insulating binding of the hot-water pipes that feed into the heat exchangers above the large window, bend around the corners at the foot of the door frames. The corners have become breeding grounds for dirt and dust, the enemies of a well-kept house. This is the house Le Corbusier describes in The Decorative Arts of Today as the “real question”48 with the fitting metaphor of the “snail putting together the pieces of the shell”49 which comes possibly closer to the issue of surface than he wanted us to know. The continuity of the wall surfaces from floor to ceiling reinforces their reading as a series of panels50 that find their analog in hung tapestry.51 These panels come first, not in the construction but in the understanding of the building: the structure is just there to support the panels. The textures, be they tapestries, gobelins, carpets or ubiquitous building boards question the identity of the space or room they delimit. The internal52 identity crisis is the opposite of the image the architecture building represents in its external appearance and figurative reading as a temple of reason. The exposed 8” square concrete block has to fit, in order to express its rigor. But even here the shiftiness is revealed in the coursing. The ‘shiftiest’ contains in itself, as Jeff Kipnis has pointed out, the anagram of ‘fetishist’.53

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Is it the dis-ingenious result of a code violation to make the restroom accessible for the physically challenged? Or does the stalled curtain point back to Semper’s theory about the beginning of architecture? And why only in the men’s room? The persistence of Adam is striking. 48 Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today (1987): 186. 49 Ibid.: 186. 50 For a detailed discussion see Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860). 51 In German the word ‘tapestry’ means wallpaper (Tapete). The cloth has made in this case the transfer to printed paper. For Tapezierkunst or the art of wallpapering, see Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860). 52 However, this crisis is not limited to the interior. The ambiguities abound also in the facade and the siting of the building. 53 See Kipnis, Freudian Slippers (1992).

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IV. Written Surfaces There is a certain absurdity of having ten foot tall blackboards in the seminar rooms. With respect to ‘boards’ Derrida notes that “if we wanted to play a little [...] at etymology, the à-board [the border, on board] would refer us to the Middle High German bort (table, plank, deck of a vessel [a hull]). ‘The bord is thus properly speaking a plank; [...]. The primary meaning is the deck of a vessel, i.e., construction made of planks; then by metonymy, that which borders, that which encloses, that which limits, that which is at the extremity.’ Says Littré.”61 The bankruptcy of the white surface is evident in the profusion of graffiti on the walls and columns in the architecture

Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender (1992): 355 referring to Alberti’s Della Famiglia which follows Xenophon’s writing. 55 “We set to work: our intention must be clear, because we are not madmen.” Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today (1987): 178. Corbusier sounds here like Descartes in his Meditations where he symptomatically assures himself through reason that he cannot possibly be mad. 56 As I have mentioned earlier, Semper described paint as a cheap way of weaving: painting functioned as a simulated wall hanging until the advent of wallpaper, tapestry or woven cloth. 57 Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today (1987): 190 and 192. This is where a tele-evangelist and the architect Le Corbusier would see eye to eye. 58 Ibid.: 188. 59 Both architects and physicians keep their distance to the patients who are quite literally immobilized. The building is always a patient patient. 60 Recall Le Corbusier’s police-directed demand to give all rooms in Paris a coat of whitewash. This act would be, according to Corbusier, “a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people.” Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today (1987): 192. 61 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 54.

III. Painted Surfaces “. . . feminine makeup [-] masculine transparency.”54 Who gains from maintaining clear distinctions? The desire for clarity, transparency, purity, readability can be traced at least as far back as the enlightenment55 but has been most convincingly polemicized in the twentieth century by Le Corbusier in his book The Decorative Arts of Today. The white walls in the seminar room, examined close-up, reveal a myriad number of tiny holes from push pins: the apparently smooth surface turns into pockmarked landscape. Pock-marks are the sign of advanced disease. White walls come about through whitewash, a coat of white paint56 of which Le Corbusier argued loquaciously that it is morally correct: “The white of whitewash is absolute, everything stands out from it and is recorded absolutely, black on white; it is honest and dependable. [...] Whitewash is extremely moral.”57 Anything dark, read immoral, bad, inferior, stands out against the white, read good, and superior. We return to religion. The effect of whitewash on the house is unambiguous in Le Corbusier’s writing. It is “made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness, for the course adopted leads to refusal to allow anything at all which is not correct, au thorized, intended, desired, thought-out: no action before thought.”58 Here architecture functions as a cure. The white physician’s coat is the same one that was worn by the architecture students at the École des Beaux Arts.59 Whitewash is associated with the representation of clarity, transparency, purity, cleanliness, and moral correctness.60 The important issue is not that the whitewash is faking cleanness but that the color white is enough to sustain the power of convincing those perceiving it to think of cleanliness.

The rigor belies the repression of that which is always sliding through the cracks.

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Some of these flutings are still visible in the gaps of the beams in the architecture building. 63 After all, theory is not surprisingly related to the word ‘theater’. Theory itself comes from the Greek “theorein, a looking, a seeing, an observing or a contemplation.” Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983): 710. 64 Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979): 228. 65 Derrida quoting from Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, in Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 32. The closer you look the more steps there are. The closer you get the more the circle segment tends toward a straight line. If you walk, drive, fly a perfectly straight line on or above the earth, you will, with the help of gravity end up quite close to where you began your journey.

building. The inscriptions, the carvings62 in the columns and on the walls of a classical temple have been replaced in the architecture building with other messages, illegal lines of communication. The building’s initially headless and unadorned concrete columns have now become places for traces: many columns are festooned with graffiti of some kind or other between hand- and head-height. In the absence of prior adornment, and in the face of whitewashed surfaces in the seminar rooms, graffiti is added ex post facto.

6. Fine

he Princeton architecture building points to the potent confusion of gender and ornament: in the absence of binary logic the temple’s ideology collapses like a house of cards. The architecture building stands in as a figure of the repression of sensuality, sexuality, proximity, difference and the grotesque, at the same time that it turns into the index which points to these conditions. Its surfaces simultaneously hide and reveal. The question of the architecture building is always already a question of an identity that remains ambiguous; that its boundaries are constantly shifting belies the image the casual viewer has of the building. In the end the wish to clarify the view through theory63 aligns theory only once again with the goals of modernism. But here opens yet another gap which constitutes the belief in the Word writ large, in the center of λογοσ, in a logo-centrism that is precariously close to nihilism. Hillis Miller argues that as the “parasitical stranger within the house of metaphysics, ‘nihilism’ [...] is the latent ghost encrypted within any expression of a logo-centric system.”64 Even though this seems to reintroduce a binary opposition, the relation is still triangular or possibly, through numerous, incremental steps, circular. The impossibility to escape is built in:

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‘We must therefore complete the circle (den Kreisgang vollziehen). It is neither a stopgap measure (Notbehelf ) nor a lack (Mangel). To engage upon such a road is the force of thought and to remain on it is the feast of thought, it being admitted that thinking is a craft (Handwerk). [...] each of the steps we attempt to take here circles in that circle (kreist in diesem Kreise).’65

Figure 4: Graffiti on the wall in the Princeton Architecture Building. Photos by author.

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Figure 5: View of one of the column capitals and the stairway. Photo by author.

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Strategies of Transgressing Boundaries: the Good (Beauty), the Bad (Ugly), and Caricature

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hen I entered the Ph.D. Program in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University in the fall of 1992, with all those misplaced expectations and illusions about what it would mean to do doctoral studies at an Ivy League institution, I took my first pro-seminar—Representation in Architecture: Aesthetics, Art Criticism, Theory—under the tutelage of my later doctor father Georges Teyssot, who taught the introductory courses for the entering Ph.D. students. While Tony Vidler held at that time still the official position of program director—prior to his move to UCLA—Georges became soon my main reference beacon at Princeton. His hybrid background (educated in Paris and Venice) and inexhaustible interest and expertise (ranging from early computer games to high-level architectural history and theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) made it an intellectual pleasure and an academic adventure to work with him. The resulting text that I wrote as a final essay for the course had initially the irreverent and later changed title Getting the Uglies - Disgust in the Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Lessing, and Winckelmann. The text represents an exploration into what might be called negative aesthetics. After I discovered Karl Rosenkranz’ work on ugliness, in German no less, writing an analysis of the ugly in the history of aesthetics seemed to be a fruitful venture into the required original research. I certainly was not yet ready to write on beauty...

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Strategies of Transgressing Boundaries: the Good (Beauty), the Bad (Ugly), and Caricature

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Figure 1: The Pope’s Mule. Engraving after Johann Wolf, 1608. Schiff, Images of Horror and 1 Fantasy (1978): 43.

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Not surprisingly, for Hegel the horse (and there is always a horse in a mule) drawn in “misshapen lines” becomes a figure for something that belongs “neither to art nor beauty.” Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 9. 2 The fore-stall is “a look-out in front of the operator, or ugly man.” See Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983): 263. The ugly man is “in garrotting the actual perpetrator of the outrage: his operations are covered in front by the fore-stall and in the rear by the back stall” (ibid.: 751), hence the title for the sections of this paper. 3 Rosenkranz is important in this discussion in more than one way. Cosack mentions in a footnote to Lessing, Lessing’s Laokoon (1869): 112 and 147, “that Professor Rosenkranz bases his interesting work Aesthetic of the Ugly [...] fundamentally on [the] explications of Lessing.” Rosenkranz is however predominantly known as a Kantian and Hegelian scholar. In 1833 he took over Kant’s teachingchair in Königsberg from Johann Friedrich Herbart and subsequently published the complete works of Kant between 1838 and 1840. See Japtok, Karl Rosenkranz als Literaturkritiker: Eine Studie über Hegelianismus und Dichtung (1964), especially the introduction. 4 Rosenkranz identifies Christian H. Weiße as the first author who acknowledges ugliness as part of his aesthetics in System der Aestetik, Part 1: 163-207, followed by Lessing in chapters XXIII to XXV of the Laocoon.

1. Forestall2

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n this paper I investigate the relations between beauty and ugliness through the work of Karl Rosenkranz3 who, in 1853, wrote Die Ästhetik des Häßlichen, the only comprehensive aesthetic treatise on ugliness ever produced. For Rosenkranz the ugly can be configured in at least two diverging ways vis-a-vis beauty: as a deviating, decadent Other of beauty or in its own right as an aesthetic category that informs the production of works of art. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing4 established a detailed theory of the ugly with respect to poetry and painting where, briefly stated, the representation of ugliness is sanctioned in painting (as imitative art, not as fine art5) and poetry (in tempered form as the ridiculous and the horrible) but in both cases only as an “ingredient for strengthening other sensations.”6 Lessing’s Laocoon, while a critique of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s earlier work on aesthetics,7 is an attempt to establish clear boundaries between poetry and plastic arts which, I would argue, include the art of building.8 Both Winckelmann and Kant mention the ugly briefly but are more concerned with its apparent counterpart—beauty.9 In this paper I will focus not only on the comparison of the different meanings ascribed to beauty and ugliness but also on a discussion of how both ideas function and interact with each other. Rosenkranz, in a form that reveals his Hegelian scholarship, assembles in Ästhetik des Häßlichen a detailed system of the ugly.10 He initially subdivides the field of aesthetics into three classes. One deals with the “idea of beauty, the second with the concept of its production, [... and] the third with the system of the arts, with the representation of the idea of beauty through a particular medium.”11 This idea of mediated beauty introduces of

Goethe, Die Guten Weiber (1804)

Aus dem Häßlichen lass sich viel machen, aus dem Schönen nichts.”

Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853)

An Aesthetic of the Ugly? And why not?

Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet; Dictionnaire des Idées reçues (1970).

Onward! Enough speculation! Keep on copying! The page must be filled. Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublime—the beautiful and the ugly—the insignificant and the typical, they all become an exaltation of the statistical. There are nothing but facts—and phenomena.

The fine arts “produce agreeable impressions.” Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1904): 153. Imitative art covers all visible objects. 6 Ibid.: 156, i.e. as a supplément. Lessing allows poetry, as a diachronic art form, more freedom to express ugliness than the more permanent art forms of painting and sculpture. 7 In spite of their differences, however, both Lessing and Winckelmann agree that the Greeks were a “morally superior people whose creations in the realm of art and literature are both unsurpassed and unsurpassable.” Rudowski, Lessing contra Winckelmann, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (1986): 236. 8 The Laocoon has certainly a place in architectural discourse since Lessing himself states at the end of his preface to the Laocoon that “under the name of painting, I include the plastic arts generally,“ (Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1904): xi) which would include the art of building, or as it is known in Germany, the Baukunst. Consequently the architect is a Baukünstler or building artist instead of a master builder. 9 Although Kant, as I will show later, addresses the characteristics of the ugly via the sublime. 10 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): xiii. 11 Ibid.: ii.

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course the art of building in Hegel’s description of architecture as “mere media.”12 Rosenkranz argues subsequently through mediation that a thorough investigation of beauty can only be achieved when one acknowledges the inseparability [Unzertrennlichkeit] of ugliness and beauty. In other words, the idea of the ugly, or what he calls negative beauty, has to be considered as part of the larger field of aesthetics where beauty is assigned an absolute, i.e. stable, value while ugliness occupies a relative, that is mobile, position.13 This initially hierarchic interdependency points to a difficulty I will address later in this paper, namely the question of ambiguous identity. Jacques Derrida, borrowing from Lessing, identifies the problem of aesthetic judgment in reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a boundary condition where one “assumes that one can distinguish rigorously between the intrinsic and the extrinsic.”14 Schor articulates this dialogue between interior and exterior in her discussion of Hegel’s concept of beauty as a relationship between the general and the particular where the ideal is exemplified in beauty, while the ugly is represented in the detail.15 In Truth in Painting Derrida investigates this difficult yet opportune middle-ground through what Kant calls parerga which are “picture frames, prefaces, footnotes, illustrations, everything that is ‘hors d’oeuvre’.”16 These parerga come “against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done.[...] Not simply outside nor simply inside.”17 Rosenkranz identifies another parergon when he locates the ugly in the space between beauty and comic.18 The difficulty to discern what is inside and outside is thus reframed as a problem of the boundary. Derrida concludes that the “frame here, the Mitte, the third element, is art, and, to be more specific, the work of art, the Kunstwerk, the work, the ergon.”19 Rosenkranz understands beauty as the “sensible appearance of natural and spiritual freedom in harmonic totality. That is why the first requirement of beauty is [...] the need for a border [Grenze].20 [...] The negation of this general unity of form is therefore formlessness.”21 The crispness of the framing line that defines the field of beauty stands in contrast to what the Greeks called αμορφια, which stands in for the shapeless. The shapeless border transgresses,22 crosses boundaries, creates distances,23 and thus also specific proximities. It celebrates joints and blurs identities. It seduces in its overstepping of the proper; it is sensual, material, unstable, nomadic. The difficult limit of the frame, and this is what Derrida is interested in when he reads Kant, its failure to close, can be located in minute, detailed perception of paradoxically beautiful works of art. Stafford, for example, describes Winckelmann “discussing the great unity of contour found in youthful, androgynous forms, [and] how the edges of such figures flow imperceptibly one into the other so that the observer cannot determine pre-

Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 25. Incidentally, when distinguishing between different schools of painting Hegel assigns the ugly a mobile characteristic as well, in opposition to the “quiet, [...] effect of calm, interior piety” of beauty. Ibid.: 255. The alignment between the sacred and beauty is of course no accident in Hegel. 14 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 63. 15 See Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 25. 16 Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985): 92. 17 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 42. In Hegel’s scheme that middle ground is, for example, represented in classical architecture. 18 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): iv. 19 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 42. 20 This can be read at different scales: At the macro level it might refer to geo-political boundaries or borders. At the micro scale it can allude to the border of the picture frame, to the page margin, to anything at the edge. 21 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 54. 22 Allegory enters the breach. Benjamin quotes Horst (Barockprobleme (1912): 39-40) as saying that allegory is always “a transgressing of borders.” See Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): 353. 23 It maybe interesting in this context to consider Heidegger’s selfconsciously ambiguous and modified term for ‘distance’ in German, namely Ent-fernung (properly Entfernung) which can be read either as distance 13

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he border and boundary-violating characteristic of the ugly is evident in its definitions. For the Greeks the difference between beauty and ugliness was a matter of degrees: Rosenkranz invokes Plato’s understanding of beauty in relation to infinity (a reference that points towards its connections with the sublime), which is neither ugly nor beautiful, as the more beautiful with the word περαζ. More important though is μετρον, the measure. He calls the ugly (δυσειδεζ)30 everything that can be counted to the gender of αμετρια,31 that is, what exists without measure.32 And here Rosenkranz’ is once more Hegel’s neighbor, at least with regard to the intersection of measure and the history of building: architecture might just be closer to the ugly than Hegel would like. As the beginning of all arts33 it has to be satisfied, Hegel writes, with the “mere searching for the true commensurability [Angemessenheit].”34 More specifically, though, Rosenkranz identifies three characteristics of the ugly. The first is ‘amorphy’ or what he calls Gestaltlosigkeit or formlessness (αμορφια in Greek). The second attribute is asymmetry, in German

2. Ugly Man

this indicates at once the relation of decorative design to proper artistic design. It is closely connected with it, so closely that it may be impossible to discover the exact line of junction and of separation. They run into each other, as do mechanical design and artistic design; as in fact light shades into darkness, and body into limb. We can in neither case so draw a line of separation as to be able to say on this side is the one exclusively, and on that side is the other exclusively.29

or as the removal of that which is far, i. e. closeness; see Being and Time, if possible the German version since the English translation contains several rather severe omissions and errors. 24 Stafford, Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. (1980): 67. 25 A possible congruence can be located between this ambiguity of perception and Winckelmann’s own sexual orientation. “[I]mplicit in Winckelmann’s description is a constant antinomy between appearance and true being, between the visible and the invisible.” Ibid.: 68; although here one could argue that his ambiguous sexuality was inscribed already in his arguments about ambiguous identity. 26 Quite literally something diverse and complex, i.e. folded many times. 27 See Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 130131. 28 Semper published Der Stil in 1860. 29 Day, The Science of Aesthetics or The Nature, Kinds, Laws, and Uses of Beauty (1872): 222. 30 This means literally ‘two-images.’ 31 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 442. See also A. Ruge’s Die Platonische Ästhetik, (1832): 22-60. 32 Incidentally Lessing comes close to the connection between ugliness and the sublime when he refers, via ugliness as terrible, to the horrible things in nature that are “not wholly devoid of charme.” Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1904): 164 The pleasure of the horrible. 33 The inferiority is built in since the earliest manifestations of art are by definition the least developed. 34 Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 17.

cisely [...] the nature of the circumscribing outline.”24 If the outline cannot be determined precisely, the identity of what is perceived remains essentially unclear.25 Hegel’s resistance against manifoldness [Mannigfaltigkeit],26 which works against the individual and its unity [Einheit], underscores once more his difficulty with respect to amorphous boundaries.27 A century later, and twenty years after Rosenkranz had written his treaty, Henry N. Day, referring to the ongoing discussion about lines of division between decorative art and ‘proper artistic design, points out the impossibility of determining aesthetic limits decisively. Even though he initially repeats the by then outmoded assumption28 that “all decoration [...] [is] not self-subsistent, but only accessory or appended form,” he goes on to make the surprising statement that

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Ibid.: 68. “Hass [hate], a sentiment carried by hostility, passionate reluctance; old high German (8th century), middle high German haz ‘grudge, hostility’, old saxon heti ‘hostility, pursuit, middle low German hat(e), linked to the related Greek kedos (κηδοζ), (doric) kados (καδοζ) care, sorrow, burial, relationship by marriage, relationship, it [...] can be traced back to the indo-european root *kad-, *ked-, disagreement of the soul, grief, hate, concern.” in Pfeifer 1989: 654 37 Pfeifer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen (1989): 654. 38 The ugly’s criminal character is evident in the French vilain. Mansion, Harrap’s Standard French and English Dictionary (1977): 1362 defines the ugly as a. (of persons) laid; disgracieux, and b. (of things) vilain, which, I believe, gives us the English ‘villain,’ a wicked or evil person, a scoundrel. 39 Brodsky, Architecture and Architectonics: The Art of Reason in Kant’s Critique, in Canon. (1988): 106. 40 See also Hegel’s doubled reading of the term ‘Sinn’ that connotes both sensual perception and interpretation or ascribed meaning in Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 133. 41 Ekel derives from *aikla- which is related to the Anglo-Saxon ácol, excited; it also links to heikel, erk, to throw up. 42 To be specific: The ugly appears in §48 of the Critique of Judgement in the chapter on the ‘Relation between Genius and Taste’ which is headlined ‘Deduction of Pure Æsthetic Judgements’ and is part of the second book of the first section of the first part on the ‘Critique of Æsthetic Judgement’. 43 See also Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1904): 154 on disgust as linked to nature, not imitation. 44 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1968): 174. Excerpt of §48 in

Ungestalt or misshapeness, in Greek δυσειδηζ, unsightly, ugly, ill-favored, or deformed. The third type is Mißeinheit, translated here as disharmony or literally mis-unity.35 In Greek this αισχροζ can be rendered as shame, infamy, or disgrace which echoes the relationship in German between the adjective ‘ugly’ and the verb ‘to hate’. Wolfgang Pfeifer36 traces the word hässlich [ugly] to Haß [hate], hassen [to hate], and hetzen [pursue, hunt],37 which derives from the Greek κηδοζ or καδοζ. Here the ugly is explicitly framed within its own, repulsive character as that which is hateful; it contains within itself the conventional reaction to the ugly.38 Claudia Brodsky has articulated the importance of Kant’s contribution with regard to aesthetic judgment with her argument that all knowledge in Kant refers to a “sensory object [...] and all sensory objects in Kant are never experienced purely [...]. The mind, in short, knows neither itself nor anything else in and of itself but knows itself always in relation to something else.”39 This suggests the impossibility of a distanced observer. It implies, too, that there exists always a difficult interdependency, not a pure and comfortable isolation between idealism and empiricism, between mind and sensual reality.40 The problem of the boundary, of property, of the proper, of what is least proper to represent, is evident in the word Ekel.41 The only place Kant mentions the ugly in the Critique of Judgement is in §4842 where he describes the virtual impossibility for sculpture to represent Ekel which Meredith translates as disgust.43 The collusion between nature and art occurs precisely at the point where unproblematic identity is no longer possible. Kant argues that one kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust [Ekel]. For, as in this strange sensation, which depends purely on the imagination, the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we still set our face against it, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful. The art of sculpture, again, since in its products art is almost confused with nature, has excluded from its creations the direct representation of ugly objects.44

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Gilles Deleuze, without stating it explicitly, links Kant’s sublime with the ugly and with the rejection of objectivity when he writes that “in the sublime all is subjective [and it] is carried out on what is formless or de-

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Furthermore, Brodsky acknowledges that like “the sublime, the art of architecture is the one aesthetic form which Kant recognizes specifically as having a ‘use;’ but then again, unlike the sublime, conventional architecture is anything but a ‘nonform’ [Unform].”47 And if there were non-formed architecture? Does non-form imply the impossibility of existence or does it refer to an extreme state of a form that is impossible or at least extremely difficult to delimit visually and structurally? Is it perhaps a form that resists quantification and measurement since it is amorphous? In this case the boundary might turn into a bound array,48 a woven border, a fuzzy line, a splendid attire, a finery,49 a holey50 space of lace. Derrida’s reading of Kant’s privileging of the disinterested subject— when he quotes Kant as saying that “one must not be in the least prepossessed in favor of the real existence of the thing (Existenz der Sache) but must preserve complete indifference in this respect in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste”51—articulates the perceived passivity expressed later by Rosenkranz. Elsewhere Derrida describes Kant’s category of the disinterested character as “the very thing that determines the formality of the beautiful object: it must be pure of all attraction, of all seductive power, it must provoke no emotion, promise no enjoyment.”52 When Winckelmann describes the Apollo Belvedere statue as a figure “whose muscles are like molten glass blown into barely visible waves which are more perceivable to feeling than to the face,” or when he compares its outer skin “with a smooth and polished surface [that] appears somewhat rough, rough as a soft velvet contrasted with a lustrous satin,”53 or when he writes that the “muscles of the [Apollo] Belvedere torso [as suggestive of ] a misty, soft swell rising from the surface,”54 it is apparent just how seductive this very physical construction could be to him, and how developed his interest was in the material as well as the ideal world.55 Stafford makes the connection between materiality, darkness, and allegory56 when she appropriates Lavater for a connection between the passivity of an object and its degree of stability represented through light.57

enjoys an important and anomalous position, for while it is included among aesthetic objects whose forms please freely in that they are beautiful, it shares a singular characteristic with those objects of disinterested aesthetic contemplation which always border instead on the ‘formless’ [formlos]: sensory objects which are not beautiful but sublime.46

formed in nature.”45 Brodsky, in her reading of the Third Critique, comes to a similar conclusion when she argues that architecture

German: “Die schöne Kunst zeigt darin ihre Vorzüglichkeit, ‘daß sie Dinge, die in der Nature häßlich oder mißfällig sein würden, schön beschreibt’. Nur eine Art Häßlichkeit kann nicht künstlerisch dargestellt werden, daß Ekelhafte. Ferner hat die Bildhauerkunst, ‘weil an ihren Produkten die Kunst mit der Natur beinahe verwechselt wird’, die unmittelbare Vorstellung häßlicher Gegenstände von ihren Bildungen ausgeschlossen.” Eisler, Kant-Lexikon (1961): 240. Emphasis mine. 45 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1984): 52. Elsewhere he writes that the “feeling of the sublime is experienced when faced with the formless or the deformed [...] The Sublime thus confronts us with a direct subjective relationship between imagination and reason. But this relationship is primarily a dissension rather than an accord, a contradiction between the demands of reason and the power of imagination.” Ibid.: 50 and 51. 46 Brodsky, Architecture and Architectonics: The Art of Reason in Kant’s Critique, in Canon. (1988): 109. 47 Ibid.: 109. 48 The word ‘array’, a type of field, contains things arranged in order. It is also, in a diverse abundance characteristic of a certain Chinese encyclopedia, an impressive collection, splendid attire, or finery. 49 Derrida, in The Truth in Painting (1987): 63, suggests that aesthetic “beauty must properly bear upon intrinsic beauty, not on finery and surrounds.” What is curious here is the negligence of admitting the beauty of finery, or rather, the subjugation of the external beauty under the intrinsic. Is this possibly the fear of the obvious, of that which stands ob viam, that is ‘in the way’? 50 See Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 48 on this construct. 51 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 45. 52 Ibid.: 74. 53 Winckelmann, Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten (1762): 128. Hegel connects the smoothness of surfaces with a need to construct economically, i.e. through “straight lines, right angles, and the evenness of surfaces,” architectural forms that serve the purposes of its inhabitants. See Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 46. 54 Stafford, Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. (1980): 69.

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“If the body has nothing deranged, offensive, dark, rude, heterogeneous and patched, then everything in it is sound, then all is harmony, then ... all becomes luminous.”58 This is the same light in which Winckelmann describes his beloved Apollo whose name derives from the Greek απολλψναι meaning to destroy. “In Greek and Roman mythology [Apollo is] always represented as the highest type of masculine beauty and grace. [Later he is] identified with Helios, a sun god.”59 Here the gender of that which is the opposite, and yet not quite the other of ugliness, is male.60 However, Apollo, in his personification as (blinding) light is negating any clear perception of his form. He marks the site of the confused gender, of that which transgresses the unclear boundary of ambiguous gender identity. Rosenkranz, not surprisingly, condemns hermaphrodites, who are simultaneously man and woman, as monsters.61 Benedetto Croce found the excessive character of allegory “‘monstrous’ precisely because it encodes [at least] two contents within one form.”62 And Craig Owens describes this synthetic condition of the allegorical work as “hopeless confusion of all aesthetic mediums and stylistic categories (hopeless, that is, according to any partitioning of the aesthetic field on essentialist grounds).”63 J. Hillis Miller, when writing about Benjamin’s formulations of allegory as being beyond beauty, links the ugly (without mentioning it by name) as ruin to Hegel’s history which, as irresistable decay, has ‘physically merged into the setting.’ The word translated as physically is in Benjamin’s German, sinnlich, a key term in Hegel’s formula. In allegory, what is sensibly apparent (sinnlich) is not the idea, but the absence of the idea. Allegory makes visible ruin, fragments of matter unenlightened by any ‘spirit.’ It is therefore beyond beauty.64

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And yet, if hybridity were stripped of its negative connotation the allegorical could be read positively as generative and synthetic, crossing “aesthetic boundaries.”65 The absence of a clear identity is also the “possibility for the turning of everything into anything [and] is, therefore, a nothing in itself. [It is] associated with the negation of the material world, with that ‘darkness of errors which is dense and capable of being touched.’”66 The darkness of errors, that which is tactile and thus potentially seductive since it denies optical distance and disassociation is averted by rendering something as ugly. Maureen Quilligan further explores the dark/light relationship when she describes allegory as a “fluctuating figure-ground relationship, which contains within it the relations between the two meanings of a single word, as in a simple pun.”67 Just as the pun,68 or caricature,

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Walter Benjamin incidentally uses Winckelmann’s ‘un-classical’ descriptions of the Apollo Belvedere to argue for the fragmentary and rune-like quality of allegory in Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): I.1: 352. 56 Stafford, From Brilliant Ideas to Fitful Thoughts: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. (1985): 329; See also Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): I.1, 337 and 340, 353-354 and ibid.: II.1: 133-140. 57 Beauty is to light what darkness is to the ugly. The absence of light is not necessarily only marked in shadows but also with unclean surfaces that are marred by amorphic blotches and blemishes, birthmarks or moles, or as they are called in Germany, Muttermale. Here the ugly is not gender-neutral but identified with the feminine. 58 Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy. Designed to promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind...Illustrated with More than Eight Hundred Engravings accurately copied; and Some Duplicates added from Originals. Executed by, or under the Inspection of, Thomas Holloway, (1789-1798). 59 Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993). 60 Another indication of the problematics of identity is Apollo’s title Helios, who, in Greek mythology, is known as the sun-god and the son of Hyperion. Hyperion is the son of Uranus and Gaea, and father of the sun god Helios. He is also Helios himself which suggests that Apollo was his own father. 61 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 406. Derrida considers on a parallel track the sublime as Ungeheuer which as noun and adjective respectively means monster and uncanny. Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 124. Hegel, on his part, frames pilasters as “widerliche” hermaphrodite columns [Halbsäulen]. Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 60. 62 Croce, Aesthetic (1966) cited in Borges, From Allegories to Novels (1964): 155. 63 Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I, in October. (1980): 75. 64 Miller, The Two Allegories (1981): 364.

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When something melts it loses its form, it becomes formless, it becomes, arguably, ugly. Winckelmann also accepts this oscillation between both a close, tactile, physical, sensual [sinnlich], and a distanced, intellectual, reading of a work of art. Haptic comprehension is not only sanctioned but considered a vital part of any perception of art.72 As a consequence Winckelmann’s method of multi-sensory, optical and tactile observation as a means to evaluate works of art emphasizes the surface, that is it relies on an understanding of sculpture literally ‘on the face of it’. 73 He writes that “the ornamentation of a building [...] should look like an addition, and [...] it should not alter the nature of the place and its function. It is to be regarded as clothing which serves to cover nakedness.”74 Winckelmann’s argument that a “building without decoration is like health in a state of poverty”75 indicates the importance of ornament with regard to the constitution of a (beautiful) healthy body, or a sound architectural structure. This theory leads to the possibility of structural ornaments and the realization that buildings can be read as an assemblage of surfaces, whether the reading privileges visual perception, tactile perception, or both. Here the only structure that matters is the surface. It is only a small, minor step from surfaces to clothing and Winckelmann clarifies this relationship between ornament, clothing,76 and the body when he argues that ornaments were like the drapery of the vestal virgins which “never obscured the beautiful contour of the nude body, visible to our eyes without restraint.”77 The body is both veiled and unveiled through the clothes that are thus supplemental

stands out [se détache] both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu [...]. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds [fonds], but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges [se fond] into the other [,...] melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”71

is undecidable in language so allegory in architecture operates precisely through its own undecidability.69 Benjamin explains this undecidability with the German word Zweideutigkeit [literally two-meaningness] which he alters because of its negative connotation to Mehrdeutigkeit when he quotes Hermann Cohen as saying that Mehrdeutigkeit is the fundamental characteristic of allegory [which] is therefore always the contradiction to purity and unity of meaning.”70 Derrida echoes this figure-ground relationship in the way the parergon

Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I, in October. (1980): 75. 66 Stafford, From Brilliant Ideas to Fitful Thoughts: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. (1985): 331. 67 Quoted in Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985): 89; Later Ulmer states that Quilligan clarifies the “relationship of allegory to pun in a way that illuminates Derrida’s strategy, as does her stress on the distinction between ‘allegoresis’ (what Northrop Frye had in mind when he described contemporary critical methods as ‘allegorical’) and ‘allegory’ (personification). Deconstruction tends to employ the former (suspicious reading) and grammatology the latter mode. Theoretical grammatology is an allegory (a narrative investigation of a threshold text) of the history of the decipherment of the Rosetta stone.” Ibid.: 318, note 18. 68 Let’s play on the material of the word: pun rotated 180° reads ‘und’, German for ‘and’, eindeutig zweideutig, the prime characteristic of hermaphrodites. 69 Walter Benjamin appropriately describes allegory as a “dark background against which the symbol might stand out.” Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): 161. 70 Cohen 1912: 305 quoted by Benjamin, Ursprung: 352-353. However, Joyce adds a margin note: “Zweispaltung as Fundamaintalish of Wiederherstellung.” Translated possibly as: “Division in two as fundamaintally restauration.” Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1976): 296. 71 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 61. 72 Yet optic perception does not necessarily suggest long distance. There seems to be a need here to qualify that works of art can be judged optically close-up, an action that would precisely acknowledge through this proximity a detailed study. 73 Although he would probably never publicly accept the tactile as an equal to the optical. 74 Irwin, Winckelmann: Writings on Art (1972): 86. 75 Ibid.: 86. The effect of Winkelmann’s work on artists like Schinkel, Klenze, Ledoux, Smirke, Wilkins became only obvious after his death. In these works ornament was as much as possible suppressed, “reducing architectural forms to their uncluttered essentials.” 76 Ibid.: 86. Winckelmann states that decoration “is to be regarded as clothing which serves to cover nakedness.” But not just as ‘cover’. In Greek statues clothing acts as a veil, a semi-

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but paradoxically also instrumental in revealing the shape of the body.78 Yet his focus remains on the form visible beneath the surface and not on the surface itself. The potential of the ugly lies precisely in foregrounding this surface. Derrida, in paraphrasing Kant, argues that ornaments and parerga work similarly: the clothing on statues (Gewänder an Statuen) would have the function of a parergon and an ornament. This means (das heisst) [...] that which is not internal or intrinsic (innerlich), as an integral part (als Bestandstück), to the total representation of the object (in die ganze Vorstellung des Gegenstandes79) but which belongs to it only in an extrinsic way (nur äusserlich) as a surplus, an addition, an adjunct (als Zuthat80), a supplement.81

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The ugly joints between parerga and ornaments are reflected in the visual or surface definitions of the ugly. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, suggests that the ugly is “offensive or repulsive to the eye; unpleasing in appearance; of disagreeable or unsightly aspect.”82 This emphasis on the visual in the ugly is, as one would suspect in a male-dominated society, not gender-neutral: ugliness is further defined as a “beldam [..], an ugly, loathsome old woman, [an] eyesore, an ugly sight [; a] hag.”83 The ugly quickly turns into the intersection of the feminine and the visual. The one who is loathsome, ugly and a hag is not male. However, in response the ugly sight, the eye sore as an ugly Kunstwerk might cause a sore eye, an irritated eye and bring some movement into the stationary hierarchies of aesthetics. As mentioned at the beginning of this text, there exists a third element, a joint between ugly and beauty, which Rosenkranz identifies as caricature84 which “can take into itself all forms of the ugly, but also the forms of the beautiful.”85 Caricature thus becomes a parergon, a frame of dubious identity that contains within itself opposing conditions of both beauty and ugliness. Rosenkranz finds the origin of caricature in the Italian caricare which, he writes, in German means überladen, or ‘to overload’.86 This filling to the extreme, this overfilling, echoes the extra, the supplementary but now overbearing character of ugly ornaments. One example from the building arts can be found in gargoyles which represent the intersection of the sacred and profane, the ornamented and structural, the superfluous and the essential.87 Rosenkranz links αμορφια and caricature when he points out that the latter is “more exactly [...] the overstatement of a part of a figure into formlessness [Unförmlichkeit].”88 Besides formlessness he considers incor-

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transparent and difficult, since folded, mediator between inside and outside. 77 Vidler, Notes on the Sublime: From Neoclassicism to Postmodernism, in Canon. (1988): 133. 78 Jennifer Bloomer appropriates Tafuri’s description of the symbol in order to compare it with Benjamin’s allegorical sign. “The symbol is, in fact, something that because of its nature rejects a univocal reading. Its meanings tend to escape and its characteristic is that of revealing and hiding at the same time.” Bloomer 1993: 40, quoting Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (1980): 198. Emphasis Bloomer’s and mine. 79 The object itself becomes, is, a parergon. The object [Gegenstand] is a thing that is about the condition of ‘standing against’ [Gegen-stand]. For a more elaborate discussion of Gegenstand see Heidegger’s Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (1984) and Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. 80 Although Zuthat here could also mean a part of a recipe. A possibly vital piece in the preparation of a meal. So, a Zuthat may not be as adjunct as the translator wants us to believe. 81 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 57. 82 Oxford English Dictionary online under the keyword ‘ugly’. Its ability to question property and to transgress boundaries is expressed in its meaning as “morally offensive or repulsive; base, degraded, loathsome, vile. In later use [it is also known to be] offending against propriety.” 83 Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993): keyword ‘ugly’. 84 in one of its forms it mixes images and words which would introduce this discussion into the realm of allegory. 85 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 431. 86 Ibid.: 395. Derrida adds to this that “the sublime, if there is any sublime, exists only by overspilling.” Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 122. Hegel, when distinguishing between strict style [der strenge Stil], ideal style [der ideale Stil] and pleasing style [der gefällige Stil] in his explication on the general development of the arts, uses the term Überfluß [overflow] to describe the dynamics of the ideal style. Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 11. 87 The Oxford English Dictionary online, under the keyword ‘Ornament’ states that the etymology of ornament connects the Old French

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n the end Rosenkranz does not acknowledge the non-formal but operative linkage between the sublime and the ugly.102 In his conclusion he

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rectness as the second determining characteristic of the ugly.89 Incorrectness can be seen in this case to refer to impropriety, to the condition of not knowing one’s own boundaries. It marks the place of non-propriety, of deviant behavior.90 However, he also asserts that it is not enough for a formless body-out-of-proportion merely to be in relationship to other objects. “Only that can be called caricature which reflects itself in a certain positivist contradiction and distorts its form into the ugly. [...] Its disorganization has to become organic. This term is the secret to produce caricature. A certain harmony is re-created through the false yearning of a part of the whole in its disharmony.”91 The characteristic of caricature is thus precisely the cognizability of that which it deforms, or makes form-less. Caricature as an ambiguous construct occupies therefore an operative joint between beauty and ugliness. Along with confused identity ambiguous boundaries also deny clear ownership.92 Ambiguous identities remain even in the works of highest art a caricature.93 They lead to distortions [Verzerrungen] that evoke the grimace [Fratze or Frazze], described by Rosenkranz as an extreme form of caricature “because of its bizarre and grotesque design.”94 Frazze is a distorted face [verzerrtes Gesicht], a deformed sur-face [Oberfläche], that is, a distortion of the face on-the-face. In addition, caricature as a fuzzy boundary condition operates not only via distortion but also through exaggeration.95 Exaggeration, as a disproportionate enlargement or overstatement returns us to the sublime. Exaggeration and distortion as methods of deformation,96 of metamorphosis and thus transformation differentiate the ugly from the beautiful object in that the former’s joints show. Here the rejection of classical elimination of details97 reconstitutes itself in the celebration of joints that articulate hybrid98 objects as an assemblage that resists seamlessness. Stafford concurs when she refers to Lavater who maintains that manifestations of artistic genius is not revealed in assemblages that consist of small assorted and inlaid pieces.99 The technique of the inlaid work, a design set into a surface, leads to emblems which derive from “emble ma, inlaid work, a raised ornament on a vessel from the Greek εμβλημα, an insertion, further εμβλη, perfect [which derives from the] stem of εμβαλλειν, to throw in.”100 Things thrown into a smooth surface disturb the perceived purity of beauty.

ournement with the Latin ornamentum which means equipment, trapping. Equipment, or its verb ‘to equip’ returns us to hulls, vessels, and edifices, the domains of the Bauwerk. The word equip developed via eskippe, esquippe, equippe, aquip, ‘quip, French équipe-r, esquipe-r, [to the] Old Norwegian skipa, to man (a vessel), fit up, arrange, prob. f. skip=ship. [It also makes allusions to clothing when it means] to array, dress up, rig out.” Oxford English Dictionary online, under the keyword ‘equip’. The link to ‘ugly’ can also be made via καδοζ, which, in a deliberate mis-reading of the Greek means “a jar or vessel for water or wine.” Liddell, Greek-English Lexicon. (1951): 848. 88 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 387. 89 Ibid.: 60. 90 A possible model for these deviant spaces can be found in De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1988): 129 where it is written that the “space of operations of travels is made of movements: it is topological, concerning the deformations of figures, rather than topical, defining places.” Emphasis mine. 91 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 390. 92 An example of national proportions can be found in the at times amusing border dispute about the ‘actual’ length of the border between Spain and Portugal, leading the mathematician Mandelbrot to develop fractal theory. 93 Rosenkranz mentions on the same page that hermaphrodite representation is nothing but a caricature. 94 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): 403. Again, in architectural terms the gargoyle, as both a distorted face [Frazze] and grotesque building ornament could be considered as one example for the blurring of the sacred and the profane in its conventional location on holy buildings. Recall Ruskin’s dangerous liaison with that unnamable grotesque in Venice. 95 Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993) defines caricature as a representation in which a “subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are exaggerated for comic or grotesque effect.” Emphasis mine. 96 see, for example, Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 14 and 15. 97 A very close examination of any architectural surface will reveal disgusting details, especially in places of cleanliness: hair in a bathtub drain, mold on a shower curtain, ‘dust breeding’ on kitchen shelves.

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reaffirms “how the ugly has as its positive prerequisite the beautiful and how it produces through distortion the common instead of the sublime, the contradictory instead of the pleasing, the caricature instead of the ideal.”103 Both ugly and sublime remain part of an opposing bi-polar system in opposition to his early contention of their Unzertrennlichkeit. Before Rosenkranz Hegel had condemned the ugly as not proper for the art of building based on the idea of architecture as ‘permanent art’,104 always assuming that building is a permanent, safe art. And if it were not safe? Then judging the ugly—or the beautiful—might not be as disinterested as Kant would have us believe. Aesthetic judgment has always already sexual, political, social, and/or cultural consequences. The most recent parallel, at least with respect to the everyday and the ugly, can be found in Denise Scott-Brown’s and Robert Venturi’s architectural practice where they associate the ugly with the common, the banal, and the ordinary.105 However, rather than see the potential of the ugly in its operation, they defuse the productive, generative force of the term by aestheticising, i. e. reframing it in the everyday milieu. Venturi and ScottBrown claim to build not a heroic and original but an ugly and ordinary architecture.106 Yet these claims turn out to be just that: an attempt to frame a territory that, by being demarcated and thus limited loses the ugly’s potential as a generator of problematic, since non-identifiable forms.107 It also denies the potential of an unbridled, that is, excessive and thus frame-resisting beauty that always undermines and transgresses in this very condition unambiguous boundaries.

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Webster mentions a hybrid named the ugli, derived from ugly because of its deformed appearance, which is a “Jamaican citrus fruit that is a three-way cross between a grapefruit, orange, and tangerine: also ugli fruit.” Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993): keyword ‘ugly’. 99 Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy. Designed to promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind...Illustrated with More than Eight Hundred Engravings accurately copied; and Some Duplicates added from Originals. Executed by, or under the Inspection of, Thomas Holloway, (1789-1798): 364 in Stafford, From Brilliant Ideas to Fitful Thoughts: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. (1985): 331. 100 Oxford English Dictionary online, keyword ‘emblem’. 101 The back stall is “an accomplice who ‘covers’ the actual thief, especially in garrotte robberies, in which the back-stall has two functions, first to screen his companion, and then, if necessary, to ‘make off’ with the booty.” Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983): 16. 102 The writer Jean Paul does, however, when he links humor and the sublime by writing that humor is the inverted sublime and the sublime is the applied infinite (Köpke, Jean Paul Richter’s School of Aesthetics: Humor and the Sublime (1988): 194). Inversion here refers to an interchange between humor and the sublime which puts the emphasis on the interdependence of both ideas, rather than their bi-polar opposition. 103 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): v. 104 See Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 204 The difference between the more permanent arts like sculpture or architecture and the more temporal arts like music or poetry was already argued by Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1904). 105 For a discussion of the link between brutalism and ugliness see Banham, Reyner. New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic. (London: Architectural Press, 1966). The other set of articles that deals with the ugly is Venturi, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed, in Architectural Forum. (1971). 106 Scott-Brown, Learning from Brutalism (1990): 92. More recently, Venturi published a

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Categories of the ugly the negative as such the incomplete the ugly-by-nature the ugly-in-spirit the ugly-in-art the ugly in relationship to the individual arts the pleasure of the ugly Formlessness A. the amorphous B. the asymmetrical C. the disharmony Incorrectness A. the incorrectness in general B. the incorrectness in the special styles C. the incorrectness in the individual arts The Defiguration or the Deformation A. the mean I. the meager II. the weak III. the low a. the common b. the accidental and arbitrary c. the raw B. the adverse I. the plump II. the dead and the empty III. the hideous a. the tasteless b. the disgusting c. the evil a. the criminal b. the ghostly c. the diabolical the demonic the witchlike the satanic C. the caricature

Appendix

manifesto that, belatedly, addresses some of the issues facing architecture in a society saturated with electronics. Deformation returns in the “twist” Venturi, Sweet and Sour, in Architecture. (1994); the overloading returns in the hyperbole of his text. 107 Their emphasis on the billboard as a ready surface had the seed for a radical critique of classical, fixed representation. Yet neither did they move beyond the appearance of a critique nor did they theorize, for example, television as a powerful tool that reaches and influences more people than any other form of representation beside architecture. See Wigley, The Decorated Gap, in Ottagono. (1990) on ScottBrown’s and Venturi’s books. Significantly Wigley ends the article with a speculation on television as the “true home of popular culture, the medium without surface.” Ibidem: 45. 108 Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853): xiii.

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A Link Of Knots: O.M.A. in Euralille

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he late Ignasi de Solá-Morales was a visiting professor at Princeton in 1993, and I was fortunate enough to take his seminar Categories of the Metropolitan Experience. I had always been suspicious of the claims by urban planners to be able to design something as vast, chaotic, and unpredictable as a city, and yet de Solá-Morales’ research and teaching inspired me. The resulting essay, originally with the title Of Swerves, Turbulences, and Insurrections: OMA’s Eurolille, represents my analysis of Rem Koolhaas’ design for the TGV railroad station/convention center/shopping mall in Lille, France.

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A Link Of Knots: O.M.A. in Euralille

Figure 1: Schematic site plan of Euralille, showing the various parts. From Slessor, Lille revival (1993): 73.

A given expressway interchange1 is a multiple road junction without an intersection: or, if you prefer, it is an intersection that has no crossroads. It receives and redistributes. [...] It is an ‘almost point’ that analyzes [...] the lines of flow of which it is the receiver. [...] At the same time, it is a point which moves along a single line; it is a point of inflection, a cuspidal point, a return point, a ribbon, a ring, a simple or multiple junction, an open or closed circuit. [...] It is that a knot is a point, as it were, although it has several dimensions.2

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he above rendering of an expressway intersection by Michel Serres serves as an evocative analogue for the object of this study, the Euralille TGV station which began operations in the spring of 1994 in Lille, France, with the official opening of the Channel tunnel between Great Britain and the European continent. Lille is the first stop and intersection for the trains coming from London, Paris, and Brussels, with connecting trains to Frankfurt, the industrial Ruhr zone, and The Hague. Catherine Slessor writes that “Lille’s fortunate geography and emerging transport connections make it a natural centre of gravity in north-western Europe.”3 For Rem Koolhaas, who was designated ‘master-planner,’4 the project had mythological proportions. He stated that “paradoxically, at the end of the twentieth century, there continues to be a taboo around the idea of openly expressing ‘Promethean’ ambitions, such as, for instance, the desire to change the destiny of an entire city.”5 The rhetorical evocation of a mythological figure may point to more than a reference to problematic acts of Titans in that the

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Expressway interchanges are known in Germany as Verkehrsknotenpunkte, or literally traffic-knot-points. 2 Serres, Hermés II. L’interference (1972): 131-133, quoted more extensively in Teyssot, The Metropolis “Theatre” (1988): 13. 3 Slessor, Lille revival (1993): 72. 4 And here one may ask by quoting Barbara Kruger: “Who put the Master in the Masterplan?” 5 Martin, Een choreografie van stedelijkheid: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenario’s van stedelijke inrichting/A choreography of concepts of the city: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenarios of city design (1993): 19.

designing of a large section of a decaying industrial city at the end of the twentieth century in Europe appears to be also an anachronism. In the 1920s Le Corbusier, with a now famous rhetorical gesture of his hand, could still propose the erasure of a large section of downtown Paris in order to replace it with a cluster of skyscrapers set into an undifferentiated landscape. In the 1990s Koolhaas could realize Euralille because of a constellation of unique circumstances: the proposed site had been recently abandoned by the military and was sold by the state for 1ff to the city of Lille.6 In addition the mayor of Lille, Pierre Mauroy, had previously been the prime minister of France. Furthermore, Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture knew how to sell their idea by supplying a grand concept for Euralille. The proposal consists of a late-modern montage7 of several activities: the TGV railroad station, an urban park, an international hotel, a bank (Credit Lyonnais), a World Trade Center, a shopping mall (Euralille Center), and a convention/exposition center (Congrexpo).

Knot 1: a complex problem

oolhaas borrowed another figure from mythology to articulate this pile of activities. He called the pre-existing, complex intersection of lines in Lille a Gordian Knot8 which was solved in antiquity either by an act of brute strength or by cunning. At Gordium Alexander saw the chariot of Gordius [...] and was informed of the oracle that any man who loosed the knot binding the yoke to the pole would rule over Asia. Alexander succeeded where all had failed, either by an impetuous sword-cut or by pulling out the pole-pin.9

Grossmann, Eine Provinzstadt auf dem Weg zur Metropole (1991): 36. 7 Slessor mentions the “brute monumentalism [which] does seem somewhat déjà-vu.” Slessor, Lille revival (1993): 72. 8 Another character who evoked the knot as the earliest example of a cosmogonic idea is Semper in Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860). See also Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (1893): 475. It may not be insignificant in reference to Semper ‘s and Riegl’s work on knots that the anagram for ‘Gordian’ is ‘adoring.’ 9 Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B. C. (1986): 608. The chariot references the problematic linkage between architecture and the military. A chariot was originally a two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle used in war and races in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. As a tool of conveyance the chariot as vehicle points to the railroad station as the trailer of a locomotive.

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Figure 2: Gordian Knot: TGV, tram, metro, beltway, main sewer. From Martin, A choreography of concepts of the city: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenarios of city design (1993): 34.

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But let me begin with a description of the project, a description which is a de-scribing, an un-writing of the architectural text at hand, an unraveling of lines that are not quite straight but discursive. These intersecting lines resemble not only sewing patterns but also the gaps between the lines or what is called χαοσ in Greek, “a gaping abyss, a vast cleft in the earth: whence Latin chasma.”10 The knot as complex problem,11 unsolvable in the absence of violence or cunning, is also a gap that in the presence of fear and the absence of a simple solution is filled with vestiges and residues of new constructions. Koolhaas evokes chaos when he re-spects the development of Euralille: We started with an attempt to disentangle chaos, to cut through a Gordian Knot of infrastructure and of urban situations that have been neglected for nearly 30 years, in which an element of a completely new order had to be inserted almost in a collision-like pattern [...] We started imposing or inventing order. But when you see how, for instance, even the choice of the architect is a completely chaotic process, when you work for a client who has a professional planner of commercial centers as advisor who at every gesture you make, makes a kind of counter-gesture, — you realize that this is the real chaos.”12

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Or is it? Χαος stands also for the gap between that which exists and that which is in a state of becoming, for the difficulty of how to deal with what is there already. For the master-planner Koolhaas the site was a tabula rasa that had to be ordered. He thought of the location as empty, devoid of anything that might influence the planning of the programmed activities. Euralille appears as a complex irregular shape but it is in fact not. Instead the means by which the project was conceived and developed resists chaos. Fractal geometry does not question Euclidean geometry with respect to regular shapes (triangles, for example) but with respect to complex irregular forms. Alejandro Zaera Polo comes to the conclusion that “Lille is a classical operation to minimize the chaos.”13 There exists a linkage between gap, an in-between space, and what is called χωρη in ancient Ionic Greek, i.e. the space “between a horse and a chariot.”14 However, χωρη is not only a gap but also the territory of the polis.15 Urban planning, in its attempt to control chaos has also always been about the attempt to control χωρη, the territory.16 I offer another gap by quoting the master planner himself: Koolhaas writes that “architects suffer from the difference between the mythical role they play and the real work situation. The gap opens up between what this profession really is and what it pretends to be.”17 This gap returns us to

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Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983): 91 11 Chaos theory would not be noteworthy if it would state the obvious, namely that chaos is disordered. What makes it relevant is the discovery of order in the midst of disorder. “Order within disorder allows chaos theory to be operating not only locally but also globally.” Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990): 216. Hayles shows that the work of Lyotard, in its attempt to mobilize chaos theory for local goals, misses the aspirations of chaos theorists who have been working on the universal aspects of chaos. 12 Polo, Finding Freedoms: Conversations with Rem Koolhaas (1992): 28. 13 Ibid.: 27. 14 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 81. 15 “Physically the polis consisted of the αστψ, town, and its χωρα, territory.” Ibid.: 155, footnote 4. 16 See Grosz, Woman, Chora, Dwelling (1993) and Yates Burns Mckee, Chora in the Education of the Architect (1990) among other writers on χωρα. 17 Koolhaas, Untitled (1993): 24. “Architekten leiden darunter, dass zwischen ihrer mythischen Rolle und der wirklichen Arbeitssituation gewissermassen ganze Welten liegen. Der Zwiespalt öffnet sich zwischen dem, was dieser Beruf wirklich ist, und dem, was er vorgibt zu sein.”

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raditionally clothiers used textile materials such as cords and ribbons to make knots by tying together lengths of material, such as rope, in a prescribed way to hold or bind several parts of a dress together. And yet as ornament a knot19 represents excess. As ornament the knot20 stands also in for structure and equipment,21 two meanings that move beyond the decorative and into the narrowly defined functional domain of architecture. Koolhaas’ plan for Euralille connects to woven surfaces and the early understanding of the polis as a surface woven by women.22 And weaving, as a to-and-fro motion, as an oscillation (and perhaps negotiation) evokes a reading and writing (drawing) on/of discursive surfaces. It is only fitting that Koolhaas started his career as a journalist/script-writer, and he mentions that not much has changed since his move into architecture: “Anyway, a crucial element of the work — whether writing or architecture — is montage. Ultimately, I’m still writing scripts.”23 Let me see whether I can find some burls24 in this montage. Perhaps Euralille could, at first glance, pass for a montage. However, upon closer examination it becomes clear that the design is not a composite of closely juxtaposed elements but a collection of discrete items in a field.25 This discreteness works on several scales. At the urban scale the project resists any articulated joints with the existing city fabric. At a more intermediate scale the different parts of the project such as Congrexpo, Hotel, World Trade Center are isolated from each other, either through horizontal displacement (the distance between Congrexpo and TGV station is almost 1 km) or vertical isolation (the Hotel, World Trade Center, and the Bank straddle the TGV station but are clearly separated from it). Finally the absence of what I would call detail articulation in the projected buildings at the occupant’s scale points once more to an approach toward construction that differs from montage. It seems ironic that a project that relies so much on the appearance of connections should be as dispersed, and disconnected, as Euralille. The isolation and redundancy of structure recalls the metabolist movement of the 1950s and its insistence on flexibility within a given structural framework. This analogy can be stretched even to the conception of the project. The master-plan for Euralille represents the structure which is then

The word ‘intricate’ derives from the Latin intricare, to entangle. 19 The knot as an ornamental figure links to textiles and their production via specialized drawings or sewing patterns that mark a series of seams, borders, and limits. 20 For a more thorough discussion on knots and their consequences for textile arts and ultimately architecture see Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): I, 82-83. 21 The online Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of ornament to the Old French ournement and the Latin ornamentum which means equipment, trapping. The word equip developed via eskippe, esquippe, equippe, aquip, ‘quip, French équipe-r, esquipe-r, [to the] Old Norwegian skipa, to man (a vessel), fit up, arrange, prob. f. skip=ship. It also makes allusions to clothing when it means to array, dress up, rig out.” 22 See McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 81. 23 Davidson, Rem Koolhaas: Why I Wrote Delirious New York And Other Textual Strategies (1993): 43. Montage is known in film production as “a rapid succession of different images or shots in a movie and the use of such successive images as a cinematic technique.” Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993) under keyword ‘montage.’ 24 A burl is a knot, lump, or slub in yarn or cloth. 25 This reading may be a consequence of the earlier mentioned consideration of the site as tabula rasa, another (empty) field.

Knot 2: an ornamental bow of ribbon, fabric, or braid

knots, although in this case it is the knot of the clothier who makes textiles into dresses that establish status and simultaneously conceal a potentially different status. This knot is not the space of discrete elements but of intricate, that is, entangled lines.18

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filled in by individual architects26 interpreting the different requirements of the program. However, the uniqueness of each building does not assist in identifying function. Rather than work as clearly identifiable objects, the structures operate as scaffolds for activities, backdrops for spectacles that can be consumed from safe distances. The structure in this case is order; κοσμος,27 not χαος.

Knot 3: a tight constriction

uralille can be described as a zone of economic intensification, a place of compression and density. In fact Koolhaas emphasized the importance of density for Euralille, although he considers this ‘thickness’ “not as a physical or material [entity] but a kind of pressure that affects people through different networks, among them immaterial ones like radio or telephone.” He concludes that in medium-sized cities there exists therefore the same density as in large cities [Grosstädten]. It is a condition of modern society. [...] Today exists already a culture of density [Kultur der Dichte] which connects cities like Lille, Paris and London both concretely and virtually. And that means that even when there is no [concrete] density in Lille it stands in direct contact with that general density.29

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With the acknowledgement of these concrete and virtual linkages to other places, Euralille represents the problematic relations between local and global forces.30 The friction between these two opposing, yet interdependent conditions occurs at the transference points, the points of adjustment between different functions. However, it is obvious that the density articulated by Koolhaas as part of Euralille is not reflected in his design and turns out to be rather mythical in its virtual manifestation. Euralille has been advertised as a tight cluster of people or things but appears instead as an agglomeration31 of discrete activities, investments, and desires. Polo’s idealized assessment of OMA as “far from Cartesian, Kantian, or modern space, [where the] work treats space as a non-modular, diverse, directional and smooth fluid”32 misses the inherent modularity, order, and petrification evident not only in the physical but also virtual reality of Euralille. In another interpretation the privileging of time over space leads to a foregrounding of the idea of exchange.33 In order to facilitate exchange, physical and virtual displacement are framed in comforting representations within precisely calculated limits. The precision can be noticed on one level

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Christian de Portzamparc is responsible for the Credit Lyonnais boot-shaped tower. Francois and Marie Delhay designed the sign-wave hotel, and Claude Vasconi developed the World-Trade Center. 27 In Greek κοσμος means both order and ornament. 28 The word ‘knot’ derives from the Old English cnotta which is akin to the Old High German knoto. Cnotta derives from the Lithuanian gniusti, to press, in use before the 12th century. 29 Koolhaas, Untitled (1993): 25. It is curious in how far Koolhaas’ ideas of density in the 1990s coincides with explications on modern life, and its nervousness as a result of density. See Georg Simmel’s book The Metropolis and Mental Life (1971): 324-339, originally published as “Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben” in 1903. 30 Katherine Hayles fittingly writes that “in the sciences of chaos, the local designates the site within the global at which the self-similarities characteristic of the system are reproduced. Conceived as images of each other, local and global are related as microcosm is to macrocosm, although each level also contains areas so complex that they are effectively chaotic. Movement between levels is easy or possible only when the symmetries align.” Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990): 219. 31 I use the word here in the sense of collection, aggregation, and accumulation, i.e. several things grouped together without a concern for connections between the disparate pieces of the ‘group.’ 32 Polo, OMA 1986-1991: Notes for a Topographic Survey (1992): 40. 33 Solà-Morales, Mnemosis or Rhetoric: The Crisis of Representation in Modern City and Architecture (1988): 174. I would argue that precisely because OMA was not able to design Euralille as a whole Koolhaas had to empha-

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In Europe distances [Entfernungen],39 which had been structured prior to the arrival of the TGV in spatial magnitudes, are now considered as temporal durations.40 Time has replaced physical distance as meaningful scale to measure speed. This change from distance to time is more than a simple shift. Privileging distance foregrounds space, while privileging duration

London to Lille: then seven hours, now one hour and ten minutes. Paris to Lille: then two hours and thirty minutes, now fifty minutes. Brussels to Lille: then one hour and thirty minutes, now eighteen minutes. Frankfurt to Lille: then five hours, now two hours.

oolhaas used the following comparisons to articulate the effect of the new TGV connection in Lille on train travel in Europe:

Knot 4: a unit of speed and distance

the distinction between the classical and new paradigms is not, then, that one globalizes and the other does not, but that one is scale-invariant and the other is not. In this respect chaos theory extends the lessons of quantum physics and relativity theory. After Einstein, Bohr, Planck, and Schrödinger, physicists learned to specify that Newtonian equations applied only at non-relativistic speeds and to distances and masses where quantum effects could be ignored. Quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity thus introduced scale considerations — but only for the very small and the very fast. Chaos theory, by contrast, teaches that scale is generally important for complex systems, even at non-relativistic speeds and for macroscopic dimensions.”37

size time since any focus on spatial aspects would point to the failure of the connections between the parts. 34 This isolation has its non-mobile referent in the increasing use of networked home computers that are linked to an international network of other computers. In order to make contact with other humans from the comfort of ‘home’ there is no need for physical interaction beyond pressing keys on a keyboard. 35 At TGV speeds ‘windows’ are inoperable, tinted, and the interior is air-conditioned. The speed prevents a close, detailed perception of the exterior. The eye focuses instead in the distance. 36 The nineteenth-century assumption that a ball moves through space the same way a planet does reflects the belief in the uniform laws of motion. However, fluid in turbulent flow can not be analyzed with Newtonian mechanics. 37 Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990): 211 38 “A division on a log line used to measure the speed of a ship. [...] A unit of speed, one nautical mile per hour, approximately 1.85 kilometers (1.15 statute miles) per hour. [...] A distance of one nautical mile.” Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993) under the heading ‘knot.’ 39 See for a paradoxical connotation Heidegger’s use of the word where Entfernung becomes Ent-fernung, distance as a disappearance of distance [dis-stance]. 40 What Americans have been doing since the early days of motorized transportation has become the new standard in rail travel between European centers.

in the ubiquitous timetables that indicate the temporal limits of the train’s space along a linear chain of events, and on another level in the TGV train itself which cocoons its occupants and isolates34 them from unwanted conditions like excess light, sound, or wind.35 Paradoxically the idea of exchange points to a shuttling between entities where the difference between global and local becomes non-trivial. The effects of the difference between catching a train and missing a train mirror the transition from the classical paradigm, where small causes had small effects, to the behavior of complex systems, where small initial changes can have large effects in the final stages of a process.36 Hayles suggest that

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Polo, OMA 1986-1991: Notes for a Topographic Survey (1992): 32. 42 Ibid.: 40.

foregrounds time. Of course, speed=distance divided by time. Accepting the importance of both parameters to the right of the equation allows me to focus the attention on the part left of the equal sign, namely speed and its resultant, movement. A knot as an intersection of movements may juxtapose, i.e. bring into proximity, points on these crossing lines that were initially far apart. Juxtapositions operate at two levels in Euralille, that of speed and that of scale. One example of these adjacent scales and speeds can be found in the Piranesian space with which Koolhaas marks the joint between the TGV platform, the linkages to the triangular shopping center, and the street infrastructure above.

Figure 3: Piranesian spaces. Martin, A choreography of concepts of the city: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenarios of city design (1993): 37. Photos by Hans Werlemann.

This celebration of the intersection of physical and visual stimuli reinforces not linear but circular movement, i.e. circulation. Polo notes that “while the city is historically built as a geographical accumulation of surpluses, the metropolis is the physical infrastructure of the modes of economic integration based on the circulation of surpluses rather than their localization.”41 He obviously privileges a diachronic perception of time. In synchronic perception the simultaneity of events would require a spatial separation of difference between entities. Continuing this thought Polo writes that the space-time experience is often warped in OMA’s recent work whether through the establishment of a multitude of speeds within a single space by the juxtaposition of different routes or through a diversification of connections between two spaces [...] OMA experiments with the simultaneity of movement and the juxtaposition of spaces and trajectories, questioning the validity of the uniform, linear concept of space and time categories within an artificially implemented environment.42

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Orientation is difficult in these warped spaces. When navigating through uncharted territory, precision is crucial for survival. Delicate move-

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The curvature of writing is thus equated with the swerve that Serres identifies with chaotic turbulence. Writing is turbulence, or more precisely, brings turbulence into being. The association suggests that before the world could exist, there had to be chaos; and simultane-

knot as a protuberant growth implies the disturbance of a surface condition.46 It implies interruption,47 a change from movement to stasis,48 perhaps a kind of counter-movement.49 When trains stop, itineraries are on hold. Paradoxically modern transportation interchanges such as railroad stations or airports are less characterized by speed than by interruption of movement. These are the places where things come to a halt. Here people wait in line for tickets, baggage checks, and information. Speed is not at all experienced as ecstasy but as relief from stasis. This space between stasis and movement is occupied by a kind of hovering, a lingering and loitering, a condition of something that is about to move, a potential for action. Its protagonists saw the acceptance of Lille as the site of the new TGV station as economic salvation, a positive disturbance or turbulence. The desire for interruption turns in this case a move away from linear logic. Hayles describes it as a swerve. In Chaos Bound50 she recalls Italo Calvino’s character Qfwfq who falls through space in a straight line and wishes for a swerve or clinamen to bring him into contact with another character falling simultaneously in a parallel line. However, rather than intersect with its counterpart, Qfwfq finds release in the curves of the text that writes it. The interaction between the characters is made possible through the swerves of the text.

Knot 5: a hard place or lump

ments become not only useful but necessary. Under these conditions motion turns into a calculated, precise change in position.43 Smooth travel at high speeds, more comfortable than a car and as fast as a plane, demands exact patterns of behavior: when the pneumatically activated doors open those who have reached their destination disembark first. Those waiting have a narrow window of interchange and exchange to make their connection. Formally Jean-Marie Dutilleul’s design for the railroad station proper consisted of an attempt to spatialize temporal effects by suggesting motion through the repetition of the same cross-section.44 However, the design only suggests motion and like most conventional architecture today does not literally move but does quite the opposite: it interrupts and therefore arrests motion.45

The civilian motion finds its correlative in the military maneuver where precision depends on manual dexterity. See Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983) under ‘maneuver.’ 44 Slessor, Lille revival (1993): 75/11. 45 The emphasis on movement, circulation, and flows can also be read as a way to postpone potentially uncomfortable decisions about the here and now. Philosophy relies on this deferment, architecture, with its dependency on life safety codes and material structure, can not. 46 Here the discussion could loop back to ornaments since they are interruptions of smooth surfaces. Knots as hard places or lumps in wood has been used successfully in wood veneer for the ornamentation of surfaces. 47 Koolhaas writes that “in a situation where the flow of traffic dominates we wanted to short-circuit, that is, interrupt the flow. Our efforts were aimed at finding a symbolic expression for this interruption.” Koolhaas, Untitled (1993): 24. This approach is not that unique. Koolhaas’ design reinforces in Euralille what happens already in other, existing, railroad stations. 48 The idea of stasis corresponds to a menemonic understanding of the metropolis while an emphasis on movement refers to a rhetorical approach. See Solà-Morales, Mnemosis or Rhetoric: The Crisis of Representation in Modern City and Architecture (1988): 177. 49 The lexical field of counter-movement includes cessation, idleness, inactivity, indolence, inertia, laziness, pause, quiescence, resignation, rest, sleep, and slumber. 50 Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990): 24.

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ously with chaos came writing, in the swerving inscriptions of the atoms when they first deviated from their linear paths.51 51

Ibid.: 24. The interruption of a flow, the thickening of a line are signs of blockage. Hermes as messenger god has the power to link people but he can also interrupt the flow of information, or at least postpone transmission by putting people to sleep. 53 Hermes is also the “creator of writing, which is the art of evasion and dissimulation.” Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989): 184. 54 OMA designed this, too. The sacredness of exterior form is evident in several schematic designs in which the interior of the Congrexpo goes through a series of dramatic changes without having any influence on the exterior shape. See Altos, Quantic Leap: Urban Plan for Business Centre and Convention and Exhibition Centre in Lille (1992): 168, bottom half of page. 52

Swerves as cunning deviations from prescribed lines return the discussion to gods, mythology, and rituals.

Knot 6: a unifying bond, especially a marriage bond

he channel tunnel constitutes a connection, a physical and legal link through which the TGV trains connect the major centers in Europe. Hermes, the god of commerce, invention, cunning, and theft, also served as messenger, scribe, and herald for the other gods. As messenger or go-between he is responsible not only for vital linkages but also for their interpretation through writing.52 As such he would probably have been a better mythological character to choose as figure for this project than Prometheus. When Koolhaas evokes mythology he writes about himself. Koolhaas is Hermes, the script writer.53 Writing establishes not only connections between two authors (writer and reader) but also creates a distance between the author and what is being written/read. As in writing/reading the spatial distance between simultaneously occurring events is bridged visually in Euralille. This is especially apparent in the egg-shaped Congrexpo,54 a congress hall, exposition center, and parking garage of mythical origins.

Figure 4: The egg-shaped form of the Congrexpo. From Altos, Quantic Leap: Urban Plan for Business Centre and Convention and Exhibition Centre in Lille (1992): 181. “And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mourn him, sunny side up with care.“ Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1976): 10.

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The Congrexpo’s three horizontal layers (congress, expo-hall, parking) are separated physically and linked visually. The horizontal slices resist any

complex connections that might blur the identities of their individual parts. Koolhaas’ celebration of visual linkages displaces the connections from the exterior of the body into the mind of the spectator. A focusing is only possible in the distance which has its appropriate referent in the dynamics of train travel: when a train moves as fast as the TGV does, the occupants can only focus in the far distance. Appropriately, most of OMA’s drawings representing the project show only distant views of the design. The distance to the project extends also to its scale which rivals Le Corbusier’s urban projects. Like Le Corbusier Koolhaas appropriates scale references from technologically outdated modern constructions: the Concorde, an aircraft carrier, and the Eiffel tower.

See Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1992). 56 The usual amount of time spent in traveling to the airport plus waiting time, added at both ends, may easily equal or exceed the actual flying time.

Figure 5: Visual scale references. Altos, Quantic Leap: Urban Plan for Business Centre and Convention and Exhibition Centre in Lille (1992): 181.

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And as in Le Corbusier’s work Koolhaas’ use of these icons remains just that: the borrowing of the looks of a machine, not its actual economy as elaborated by Reyner Banham or Buckminster Fuller.55 Visual distance [again with all the ambiguity of Heidegger’s Ent-fernung], which plays a large part in the theories of perception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, does not mean necessarily an increase in freedom. Rather it signifies a loss of independence. In a place as complex as a railroad stationworld-trade-center-hotel-bank-shopping mall the occupant increasingly relies on information centers and signs for guidance and navigation. This interdependence rather than independence becomes clear when traveling by plane.56 One way to approach this dilemma of dependence/independence is through cunning which happens to be a characteristic of Hermes. Cunning

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suggests a swerving, an abrupt turning from a straight line or course, a deviating or changing course without warning.57

Knot 7: not a knot

cEwen writes that “physically the polis consisted of the αστψ, town, and its χωρα, territory.”58 The choice of the site for Euralille depended to a large degree on geography, opportunity, and coincidence. In 1986 the site was an abandoned military territory, in the eyes of OMA a tabula rasa with its assumption of empty space59 that is waiting to be filled. The description then of the site as being ‘green’ or ‘empty’60 betrays a resistance to acknowledge that no site is ever empty or devoid of forces acting upon and within it. Koolhaas is instrumental in repressing the existing city, conveniently named the ‘old city’, as if what exists in the site yesterday constitutes a complete break with what is there today.61

Knot 8: grayback bird, Calidris canutus, sandpiper that breeds in the arctic and winters in the southern hemisphere

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s the name suggests urban planners commonly visualize their designs from the bird’s eye view, i.e. in plan. This knot’s view of Euralille begs the question of two-dimensional representation and its distance from three or four-dimensional perception. Those who occupy Euralille are not going to experience it in plan. On the other side, plans and maps have historically been used to claim ownership of territory.62 What are the dynamics of the plan and planning when dealing with such monumental constructions as Euralille? It appears that the complexity of the design process is countered with monumentally simplified moves. The admission that control is vital in large projects such as this may point to the failure to search for and experiment with models of representation63 and design that demand a different approach than that of the ‘master-planner’. Koolhaas seems to have realized that there exists a need for an alternative tool to the plan to represent the city. Even though his firm did many of the macro-scale presentations with the help of conventional plan drawings, OMA also utilizes cartoon and comic-strip drawings that betray a close relationship to Koolhaas’ earlier mentioned profession as story-boarder and film script writer.

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It is not a far step from deviation to deviant behavior. After all, Hermes was the god of thieves, too. 58 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 155, footnote 4. Χωροσ is the masculine form of χωρα or χωρη. 59 The logic of colonization depends on this concept: the site as tabula rasa, as blank territory exists to be conquered: colonization, a putting of columns in place, the first move of architecture, marks the proper occupation, i.e. property, of the site. 60 These are Koolhaas’ words. 61 One question that requires further discussion is why Koolhaas could be successful in spite of a scheme that denies its context as much as possible. The answers may shed some light on the sorry state of urban planning today. 62 For example, the power of the plan [Aufriss] or survey was stressed by Goethe when he lets the character of the Captain describe Eduards reaction to a drawn map of his property: “It seemed to him that only now was he coming to know [his possessions], only now did they really belong to him.” Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963): 24. 63 This discussion could loop back to the resistance against decorated surfaces and ornament in the work of OMA.

Figure 6: Comic strip drawings of the Congrexpo. CuĂĄntico, Quantic Leap: Urban Plan for Business Centre and Convention and Exhibition Centre in Lille, in El Croquis. (1992): 178. 64

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Altos, Quantic Leap: Urban Plan for Business Centre and Convention and Exhibition Centre in Lille (1992): 181. 65 See also the sewing pattern drawing of Euralille in Martin, Een choreografie van stedelijkheid: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenarioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s van stedelijke inrichting/A choreography of concepts of the city: Maastricht, Lille, Nantes: scenarios of city design (1993): 34.

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This alternative representation of the project does not address the problem of missing context and connections. The models of the Congrexpo are photographed in isolation as reified objects without context in an idealized isotopic Newtonian space.64 The plan drawings also consciously attempt to exclude context with questionable results. For example, in order to resist the seventeenth-century fortifications which became a ring road in the early 1970s Koolhaas has to include it in his drawings. The suppressed returns as trace65 or residue. This ring-road is as divisive as the former fortifications, only now it has become also an efficient form of circulation.

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Traces of chaos theory return in the form of self-similarity over different scales in the lines of the former fortifications which are echoed in the border of the property to be developed. The site appears self-similar at the scale of the city and the scale of the insertion.

Knot 9: the last knot

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Nostalgia comes from the Greek combination of νοστοσ, a return to one’s home, and αλγια, pain. 67 The Congrexpo may serve as an example here. It is a shape that was not developed out of a set of complex operations. 68 Polo unwittingly articulates this problem when he describes Koolhaas’ method of design via surrealism which he considers “one of the genuine inventions of this century, a rational method which does not pretend to be objective, through which analysis becomes identical to creation.” Polo, Finding Freedoms: Conversations with Rem Koolhaas (1992): 25. Emphasis mine.

ven though the design of Euralille appears to resist nostalgia with its clean lines and monumental architectural volumes it is precisely the longing for another time, characteristic of the late modern, that can be identified in OMA’s architecture. Koolhaas has gone home but not without pain.66 Euralille’s design is still neo-classical in its use of master-planning, reliance on precise boundaries, composition,67 and dependence on recognizable shapes. In the end OMA’s design turns out to be anything but a knot. Its resistance to overlapping functions beyond visual linkages violates what makes a knot possible, namely friction. To maintain friction appears to run contrary to an architect’s profession which considers one of its credos to solve problems, to make processes run smoothly. However, in Euralille the separation of different activities, while useful in the analysis68 of complex problems, only makes circulation more difficult, a condition not necessarily desirable while traveling. On the other hand the primacy of physical circulation can be questioned as much when developments in communications technology are considered. The explosive growth of resources on the Internet, e-mail, voice mail, and the ubiquitous fax machine have displaced, if not eliminated, the need (but not the desire) for physical travel. If this need remains, and I suspect that it does for some time to come, how will the space which was un-designed in Euralille be appropriated once it has been in use for some years?

Gaudy Colors: Of Difficult Surfaces in Semperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Minor Works

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n 1993 I took a reading course with Georges Teyssot, whose academic generosity encouraged me to explore marginal topics, like the following paper on a little known design for a lavishly ornamented laundromat located on a barge in the Swiss capital of Zurich. A slightly different version of this paper was published in Aurora, Journal of the History of Art, Volume II, Issue 2 (2001): 54-88, with the title Mobile Foundations: A Reading of Complex Surfaces in Gottfried Semperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Treichler Laundry Ship. This essay became also the central piece of my dissertation about the intersection of theory and practice in the work of Semper while he lived in Zurich between 1854 and 1871, and is now available as a book through Culicidae Press, LLC as Gottfried Semper in Zurich - An Intersection of Theory and Practice.

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Gaudy Colors: Of Difficult Surfaces in Semper’s Minor Works Would it not be fair to at least consider the possibility that what appears to us as bizarre, glaring, gaudy, and dazzling would no longer be so if we were to look at it with somewhat less stupid eyes. Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834) ....some sort of painted decoration had to be admitted—even if the result was the clothing of the Greek temples in monstrous dress. Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977)

Figure 1: The laundry ship, in the near foreground, on the Limmat river in central Zurich, from the Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

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t began as a hunch about a thing out of place. One could describe it as an oddity, a discrepancy perhaps. The object in question—arguably a questionable object—is a highly ornamented barge, or more specifically a shipbased public laundromat designed by Gottfried Semper for the entrepreneur Heinrich Treichler in Zurich between 1861 and 1864. Fröhlich1 called it an “odd job [Gelegenheitsarbeit]” and Wegmann describes it as an exception to all of Semper’s other works2 in light of wood and metal sheeting over a steel profile frame.3 This eccentric project—out of place for someone who is known for the monumental designs of the Federal Polytech Institute, the Dresden opera, and the Richard-Wagner Theater project in Munich—has made cameo appearances over the years in articles or books4 about Semper’s work. However, aside from a descriptive article by Martin Fröhlich, there

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Fröhlich calls it an odd-job [Gelegenheitsarbeit] even though Semper spend three years on its design/construction, and developed three different versions. 2 To use the word ‘building’ here would be too limiting since his works differ in scale from a baton for Richard Wagner to an urban design scheme for the Kratz quarter in Zurich. See Fröhlich, Gottfried Semper (1991): 166 and 153 respectively. 3 Wegmann, Gottfried Semper und das Winterthurer Stadthaus: Sempers Architektur im Spiegel seiner Kunsttheorie (1985): 38. In this respect the laundry ship can be considered as much a prototype of modern architecture as the Crystal Palace, perhaps even more so in that the former uses not only prefabricated materials but also foregrounds the importance of dressing or clothing a building, a practice not often acknowledged but nevertheless enjoyed by modernist architects. For the joints between architecture and fashion see Wigley, White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2] (1994). 4 See for example Bletter, On Martin Fröhlich’s Gottfried Semper (1974) and Wegmann, Gottfried Semper und das Winterthurer Stadthaus: Sempers Architektur im Spiegel seiner Kunsttheorie (1985) who show the early version of the ship from which the built version differed in some significant details. 5 This is upstream from the city, i.e. the Limmat flows out of the Lake Zurich through the city. In other words the ship contaminates the city both literally and figuratively. 6 See Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974): 126. 7 Semper took the position as Professor für Baukunst on a recommendation by Richard Wagner who had moved to Zurich in 1848 when Semper fled to London.

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has been an odd silence about this equally odd project. The ship’s displacement extends to its simultaneously central (not far from the city hall) and peripheral position (in the zone between river and lake) in Zurich at the mouth of the Limmat river5 where it took up operation in the fall of 1864.6 At that time Semper had lived in Zurich for nine years. In 1855 he had moved here from London to accept the position as professor for building arts7 at the new Federal Polytech Institute where he taught until 1871. While David Van Zanten frames Semper as a champion of a dematerialized symphonic and universal vision of polychromy8—which can only succeed when Semper’s work is confined to the limits of Greek polychrome temples, or to his famous neo-Renaissance works—he leaves out those of Semper’s projects that have not been part of the discourse because they are perhaps disturbing as well as difficult to classify. The Treichler laundry ship is one of those ill-fitting works. It qualifies as one of what I would call Semper’s minor9 constructions produced during his tenure in Zurich. Among these minor works are the Astronomical Observatory (18621864), a wardrobe/cabinet design10 (1854), the project for a Bazaar at the Tiefenhof in Zurich (1857), the project for the Villa Rieter in Zurich-Enge (1864), and the design and construction of the Textile Trading Store Fierz in Zurich-Fluntern (1865). The word ‘minor’, though, does not necessarily imply inferiority. To the contrary, I will argue that these lesser known designs are relevant as counter-mo(nu)ments to Semper’s more widely known works mentioned above. In opposition to his canonic buildings11 I propose that his minor projects are useful as models for an art of building that transgresses the perceived boundaries12 between binary opposites such as structure/ornament, surface/depth, and theory/practice. By 1854 Semper had articulated a theory of Kleinkünste,13 that is, industrial or technical arts which exist not in clear-cut opposition but in a relationship of interdependency to the fine arts.14 In his important essay Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst15 he laments the sorry state of architectural education in the midnineteenth century due to a separation of “ideal and applied art, expressed in the dualism of institutions standing alongside one another.”16 In 1851, three years before he had the chance to develop the architecture curriculum at the Federal Polytech Institute in Zurich, Semper criticized the inability of the fine arts (architecture being taught at the academy where a student learns drawing and modeling but is “not trained as a metalworker, potter, carpet weaver or goldsmith”17) to influence industry for their lack of a “true, practical foundation.”18 In other words, Semper locates the crisis of architecture in a gap that separates but provides also an opportunity to work between opposite edges, not unlike the laundry ship, anchored between the two edges of the Limmat. And, as history shows, the transgression of

Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 34. 9 The term is used here in more than one sense. I borrow it from Jennifer Bloomer’s minor architecture’ which she in turn “illegitimately appropriated” from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ [see Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 173]. In another sense Semper’s minor works are those which resist consummation into the major, canonic Semper whose work on architectural history has been analyzed by architectural ethnologists, and whose theory has been theorized but whose buildings have been consistently ignored or rejected as non-congruent with his theories. 10 Originally designed for Queen Victoria. It was built in London and exhibited in the Paris Exposition of 1855. 11 Reading Semper’s major buildings, i.e. the canon, uncanonically would be more of a celebration of these buildings than I am at this point ready to allow. However, I also acknowledge the impossibility of investigating a work without making it public, which is another form of celebration. 12 The Treichler laundry ship is a ‘contaminated’ work since it makes a compromise between technology [iron construction] and appearance [paintings on exterior couching industrial construction in art]. See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 50. 13 Literally ‘small arts.’ “The arts and crafts [Kunsthandwerk] or art industry had already achieved a high degree of development many centuries prior to the invention of architecture as an art.” Semper, Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur (1854): 344. 14 Semper admired Quatremère de Quincy because in his Jupiter Olympien he “traced the origin of the high arts to the technical arts and demonstrated that the media were essentially interrelated.” Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 55. 15 Semper wrote this essay. 16 Semper, Science, Industry, and Art (1989): 148. 17 Ibid.: 147. 18 Ibid.: 147. In 1854 he wrote that the building art [Baukunst] is “without original-

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ity and [has] lost its primary position before the other arts. She will only be revitalized when modern architects give more attention to the current state of our art industry.” Semper, Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur (1854): 350. 19 Virgil, Aeneid (1909). 20 In computer parlance “a Trojan horse is a program which appears to do something useful, yet additionally does something destructive behind your back [...]. Trojan horses do not replicate.” From a virus library that is part of the public domain virus protection program Desinfectant. 21 Stanyhurst, Aeneis II (1583): 44.

a simultaneously dividing and connecting boundary rarely occurs without violence.

Figure 2: Left, site plan of central Zurich showing the location of Semper’s first design which was twice the size of the eventually built version, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich. Right, the wooden horse in front of the gates of Troy, from a Strasbourg edition of Vergil from 1502.

It was around 1200 BC when the Grecians had embark’d their naval pow’rs / From Tenedos, and sought our well-known shores, / Safe under covert of the silent night, / And guided by th’ imperial galley’s light; / When Sinon, / favor’d by the partial gods, / Unlock’d the horse, and op’d his dark abodes; / Restor’d to vital air our hidden foes, / Who joyful from their long confinement rose. / Tysander bold, and Sthenelus their guide, / And dire Ulysses down the cable slide: / Then Thoas, Athamas, and Pyrrhus haste; / Nor was the Podalirian hero last, / Nor injur’d Menelaus, nor the fam’d / Epeus, who the fatal engine fram’d. / A nameless crowd succeed; their forces join / T’ invade the town, oppress’d with sleep and wine. / Those few they find awake first meet their fate; / Then to their fellows they unbar the gate.19 ... and went back to their hollow vessels. Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer (1951)

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The colossal horse built by the master carpenter Epeius afforded the Greeks the opportunity to destroy Troy. Pretending to leave, the Greeks went to the nearby island of Tenedos. They left behind Sinon who persuaded the Trojans that the horse, purportedly an offering to Athena, would make Troy impenetrable. Despite warnings by Laocoon and Cassandra Troy’s residents took the horse into the city limits.20 However, in this “od hudge ambry they ramd a number of hardye Tough knights”21 who emerged at night, opened Troy’s gates and let the returning Greeks into the city. Similarly Semper’s design for the Treichler laundry ship is a vessel that is other than what it ap-

pears to be. With this in mind I have to speak of allegory which is a description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance. The Trojan horse gained access to Troy by appearing as a solid sculpture that was actually a container. The laundry ship gained access to Zurich22 by appearing as a public service that does more than clean dirty linens in its interior; that is, the ship points with its exterior surfaces to a rather subversive theory of the art of building that is possibly more cunning than the first horse’s deceit. Its tactic is written all over the exterior. Allegory as a device appears to be useful in this context since it “always implies not only the use of figures, but a making public, available to profane ears, of something which otherwise would remain secret.23 The something other can only be made public, visible and audible, ‘theatrical’ in the root sense of ‘open to seeing’, by such means.”24 Allegorical reading constitutes also a misreading or at least a resistance to univocal readings. It suggests an openness to difference.25 What I propose, then, is an allegorical reading of the laundry ship that foregrounds what is already in the open, yet unseen—a kind of writing on the wall, in other words, the (s)crypt26 of the ship.

Figure 3: The laundry ship in its original position in 1870, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich. The ship was anchored between 1864-1872 on the sun-quay, a short distance from the city hall, the place of public discourse, the agora. Recall 27 that allegory is the other speaking in the marketplace, a public assertion of difference.

For a brief account of the ship’s cunning entry into Zurich see Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974): 126-131. 23 Allegory is also the language that is other than the mother-language, which is never the father-language. 24 Miller, The Two Allegories (1981): 356. Bloomer has already pointed out that allegory as a construct for theory questions the perceived binary opposition between theory and practice. 25 For a more thorough discussion on the relevance of allegory for postmodern art see Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I and II (1980). 26 This is an appropriation from and reference to Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993). Borrowing as technique is also a kind of burrowing. Bloomer notes that “writing the feminine is mole work, writing on the wall.” Ibid.: 198, note 13. 27 Hegel, when writing about the general character of painting symptomatically assigns the wall paintings of Pompeii an indexical role. Symptomatically of his idealism he considers Pompeian paintings as present yet inferior survivors that point to the absense of their original, superior predecessors. See Hegel, Ästhetik (1966): 177.

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In the meantime, however, architecture must step down from its throne and go into the marketplace, there to teach – and to learn. Semper, Science, Industry, and Art (1989)

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Semper borrows the following two lines from Goethe’s Faust: “Gray, dear friend, is all theory / and green life’s golden tree,”28 and uses them in 1834 on the back cover of his first publication.29 The quotation is puzzling to say the least. Semper’s book is a treatise on polychromy in ancient architecture and thus the Goethe quote could be read as an indication of the superiority of life (as colorful practice) over (gray) theory. Yet the quote appears on a book, evidence of the practice of writing, and it appears, moreover, on its back cover, that, however, following German convention of writing book titles beginning at the bottom of a book’s spine (in opposition to anglophone practice), turns the back into the front of the book when it is lying, closed and ready to be read, face down yet showing off its title right side up, on its spine. As you can see, even when theory and life are separated by a riddle, they may be closer than they appear.

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Figure 4: Left, frontispiece, and right, detail of back cover of Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834)

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“Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie / und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.” The words are framed in shallow niches that frame either side of a sphinx that in turn is framed within a niche that is part of an etching of a Pompeian wall painting. 29 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834) translated into English by Mallgrave and Hermann in Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989). 30 For a history of that debate see Zeitler, Sempers Gedanken über Baukunst und Gesellschaft in seiner ersten Schrift: ‘Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten’. 1834 (1976), Hittorff, On the Polychromy of Greek Architecture (1851), Hamilton, On the Polychromy of Greek Architecture (1836), Kugler, Ueber die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Sculptür und ihre Grenzen (1835), Mallgrave, Introduction (1989), and Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977). For related theories of color see Goethe, Gesammelte Werke ): part II, as well as Runge, Farbenlehre: 1806-1810 (1840) and Schopenhauer, Über das Sehn und die Farben (1888). For a critical analysis of Goethe’s work visa-vis Newton’s theory see Glockner, Das Philosophische Problem in Goethes Farbenlehre (1924). 31 However, Semper’s resistance to an uncritical historicism becomes obvious in this statement: “Not to copy their [the Greeks] dead alphabet, but to imbibe their spirit and draw nourishment from the tender, southern plant of art again [...] until it degenerates once more on our barren soil—that would be helpful.” Semper,

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y taking sides in the then raging polychromy debate,30 and arguing for the importance of a history of polychrome Greek architecture, Semper challenged the notion of Greek culture as an isolated zenith in the history of construction of both building and art. History as continuous development of small changes over time locates Greek art in a bracket between earlier Egyptian and Assyrian, and later Roman cultures.31 However, against a Hegelian model of history as linear progression Semper posits instead that architecture [Baukunst], even in its infancy, did not trace in its development a linear transfer from simplicity to riches and from riches to the excessive [Ueberladene]32 but was rather “very early on even in all simplicity of basic forms, highly decorated and glittering.”33 For Semper, ornament is not something added after the fact but is part of the construction, is in fact the construction, from the very beginning. In response to the accusations that polychrome Greek architecture is barbaric, Semper responded that the Greek buildings had instead become “monochrome through barbarism,”34 i.e. through a lack of care that allowed the disappearance of colored surfaces on most buildings, except those that were preserved through catastrophic events in 79 A.D., only to emerge once more in the late 1700s in archaeological excavations at Paestum and Pompeii. Semper’s theory vis-a-vis polychrome buildings can not be dissociated from his investment35 in the concept of Bekleidung that is, in one interpretation, the “ornamentation of a structural surface not derived from the material of that surface but rather a thin coating [Kleidung] of carved, that is written, or painted symbols referring back to an aboriginal structural type.”36 This structural function does not lose its importance over time but undergoes a transfer from physical structure to symbolic, yet not less real, structure. Semper developed this theory of the structural function of Bekleidung over time in his work. In 1834 he thinks of the coating of architectural surfaces as merely protective. “Wood, iron, and all metal is in need of coatings [Überzüge] in order to protect it from the consuming force of the air.”37 However, by the late 1850s he argues that the “wall is that building element which presents the enclosed space [...] and makes it known to the eye.”38 Fifty pages later he adds that scaffoldings are necessary for the reinforcement of the original textile walls and space enclosures. The former have, however, “nothing directly [unmittelbar] to do with space and spatial enclosures [Raumabschlüsse],”39 i.e. the textile-based ornaments on the walls, seen as space dividers, function structurally in the viewer’s eyes.40 Semper locates the origin of polychrome ornamentation in the production of textiles through “spinning and weaving with natural materials of different color.”41

Polychromy

The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989): 48. 32 The excessive as ueberladen or overloaded will return in a discussion of the ship’s wall ornaments. 33 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): 6. 34 Ibid.: 20. “Im Gegentheil, die Monumente sind durch Barbarei monochrom geworden.” 35 This is quite literally the construction of an identity through vests, a wrapping. 36 Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 5455. 37 “Das Holz, das Eisen und alles Metall bedarf der Überzüge, um es vor der verzehrenden Kraft der Luft zu schützen.” Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): xi. 38 Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): I, 277. 39 Ibid.: I, 288. Van Zanten acknowledges the important role of polychromy and ornament in Semper’s reading of antiquity. Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 51-52. However, while he argues that Semper’s ornamental vocabulary was anti-structural, I would propose instead the term ‘counter-structural’ in the sense that it questions, or resists the structures in/of power, without, however, freeing itself from those very relations of power. 40 Joan Copjec describes the increasing separation of a building’s symbolic function from its use between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in the French academy, evident in the change of classifying architecture from using adjectives to nouns that describe the function of buildings, which may have lead to the perception of ornament as clothing. Copjec, The Sartorial Superego (1989): 66-67. 41 Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten

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By necessity the original purposes [Zwecke] of polychrome textile art can be found in two operations: threading [reihen] and binding, and covering, protecting and enclosing. The former is utilized in the making of connections and joints, the latter in the construction of ceilings, roofs, and walls that operate in Semper’s scheme of elementary needs as sheltering devices but at the same time as reminders of the origin of architecture in the textile arts, and more specifically in the production and use of carpets as walls. Semper writes in 1860 that both the Greeks and, partially at least, the Romans saw in the wall never a load-bearing [tragende] but always only a space-separating [das Raum trennende] element. That is why they always hide the wall behind the real42 [dem wirklichen] or painted carpet. The carpet is the wall even when it is not hung but merely painted on the ‘structural’ wall behind it. The source of this structural ornament developed out of Semper’s idea of Stoffwechsel, a biological metaphor for the material transfer of ornamental or symbolic forms from one material to another. The ornaments undergo in this process a metamorphosis from an initially visually structural surface (carpets held up by hidden posts) to a both visually and physically structural surface in bent or folded sheet metal. In reference to the development of hollow columns he cites as one example the Assyrian type of construction in which “gradually, the structural function was transferred from the original wooden kernel43 to the surrounding shell [Hülle]. [...] The complete opposite can be found in the order of pharaonic Egypt where the surrounding shell [Kunstform] was fundamentally separated from the structure.”44 In the process of this development the wooden kernel transfers its function to the surrounding shell and disappears,45 i.e. the manifold ornament works at this stage not only figuratively but also literally as structure. Here the profusely ornamented hollow body reinforces the power of surfaces to project the existence of a physically absent support structure on the interior that, in its absence, creates a space to operate from within. One could therefore argue that the success of the Trojan horse depended on the impossibility of the Trojans to imagine the subversiveness of the interior. Aside from their cunningness to shield the ‘nature’ of their structural function the painted walls of the laundry ship are Semper’s architectural invitation to remember the development of the wall from rugs by adorning a wall with the painting of a rug.46 The walls advertise their ancestry.47 However, the wall paintings Semper used as precedents on the laundry ship were used in the interior of Pompeian houses. Rather than be a simple inversion, the interior of the ship48 has been displaced and reappears on the exterior. By exteriorizing the interior [Umstülpung] they publicize the domestic as much as they domesticate the public space. They speak other

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oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): 228. 42 In German the word for ‘real’ [wirklich] is related to gewirkt or woven. It seems that in German at least, what is real is woven. 43 Mallgrave speculates on the impact Semper’s theories had on the Chicago architects in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Mallgrave’s commentary in Semper, On the Origin of Some Architectural Styles (1985): 53, note 2. 44 Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik: ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde. Nachdruck der beiden Teile von 1860 und 1863 (1979): I, 417. The terms Kernform, which describes the center or core of an artwork, and Kunstform, or external artistic shape, were coined by Bötticher. See Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (18441852): 20-25. Compare also Börsch-Supan, Berliner Baumeister nach Schinkel 1840-1880 (1977), p. 556ff. The work-form [Werkform] serves only material and static purpose. In earlier times, when the static function was expressed in the kernel-form [Kernform] both Kernform and Werkform were identical. Incidentally Bötticher denies any material purpose to the exterior Kunstform, even though he argues elsewhere that its existence was “caused [hervorgerufen] by material service [Leistung] and are quite dependent on it.” Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen. (1869): 20. 45 Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983): 300, cites Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): I, 304. See also Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1844-1852): I, 129 and 29 of the excursus 2 on metal and hollow-body structure. For more references on hollow bodies and their construction see Semper, Textile Kunst (1859): 14, and Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): II, 252-253. 46 Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (1851): 100. As Mallgrave points out in his introduction to the translation of Semper’s The Four Elements of Architecture and Other

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[Iron] used as constructive material according to its nature in thin [schwachen] sections [...] withdraws, because of its small surface, increasingly from the eye the more perfect its construction, and therefore the building arts, which impresses the mind through sight [das Organ des Gesichtes], can not get involved with this almost transparent material when used not as light addition but to effect mass. [...] Metal, except in the case of light and decorative grillwork, is only useful in thin sheets [Blechform]58 for the fine building arts.59

he roof of the laundry ship’s final version from 1864 appears as an almost flat,52 slightly bent surface or blanket [Decke]53 of metal sheets. That Semper used metal in sheet form is significant since he has been accused of not realizing the potential of metal for modern architecture54 when in fact he had a rather complex theory of its use in the building arts based on historical precedent and, what I would call, a theory of visuality. The main reason for these accusations were Semper’s severe criticism and rejection of Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale (1859-1867) reading-room, which ironically uses “slim iron ‘Pompeian’ columns”55 as supports.56 More importantly though, Semper’s rejection of the use of metal as thin wire or sections in his own work goes back to his insight that metal can create large spaces in which the naked structure appears too thin to the eye. Semper’s earlier acknowledgment of the potential of metal for light construction,57 depicted in Pompeian wall paintings, has given way to an apparently more defensive position when he writes the following about the use of metal in architecture:

One does not necessarily gain access to a piece of architecture by following the order of its production, starting at the foundations and arriving at the roof ridge.51

Ouvrir e(s)t Couvrir

in a public space. The carpet itself works here as a figure at several levels. It is, for once, an armature, i.e. a framework (warp and weft) serving as a supporting core49 for Semper’s theory of Bekleidung. It is, too, an emblematic assemblage of knots, a motley ensemble, a pile of lumps, with a picture “cunningly crafted” and “curiously wrought.”50 The ship’s painted surfaces work, lastly, as a ‘merely’ protective covering in the sense of a Decke which is both ceiling and blanket (an exterior cover).

Writings, Semper borrowed this terminology from Bötticher. See Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989): 37. 47 Ettlinger, in reference to Semper, called the carpet as vertical wall the basis of the building art. Ettlinger, Gottfried Semper und die Antike (1937): 59 and 72. 48 The only visual documentation of the ship’s interior is a plan that shows the disposition of the different elements of the laundry operation, such as the power plant and washing basins. 49 An armature is also a defensive mechanism when traced via the Middle English armor, from Old French, and Latin armatura, equipment, from armatus, past participle of armare, to arm, which, in a twist of the same, could turn into a lever, a useful tool for opening up things. 50 This is a description of daidala, those mobile figures constructed by Daidalos. It is also the name given to the quality of densely woven textiles. See McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 53. 51 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 50. 52 In this context it would be interesting to introduce the history of the flat roof, especially with its ideological baggage vis-a-vis modernism. It may be relevant to note that the Egyptians had already flat roofs, although probably more in the sense of a flat horizontal surface than a device spanning any large distance. Jennifer Bloomer has pointed out that the Egyptians represented the sky as the slightly arching, but flattened, body of the goddess Nut. 53 The interior roof was sometimes represented as kosmos by painting stars or the figures of the zodiac on the ceiling. See Semper, Textile Kunst (1859): 16. See also Bötticher’s structural understanding of the Decke [blanket or ceiling] as an externally visual counterweight to walls. Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (18441852): 9. 54 Hermann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (1984). For a 19th-century bibliography of books on metals see Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): 458. 55 Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 44. 56 Van Zanten suggests that rather than supporting the roof visually, the columns appear to hold down the dome-like velaria.

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However, rather then see this statement as proof of Semper’s inability to realize the importance of iron construction, which would keep him off the throne of the heroic moderns, I consider it instead a key statement in support of his theory of Bekleidung that relies for its comprehension, as does modernism, on visual perception. The use of metal panels returns us directly to Semper’s theory of structural textiles.60 Metal is in its structural capacity quite close to textiles: it is “flexible, tough [ductile], has a high resistance to being torn, and great, absolute, strength.”61 Semper’s aversion against “thin metal sections” makes sense in light of the theory that these sections are merely the threads or thin lines that still need to be woven into surfaces before they can be considered relevant representations of the art of building. When using metal panels over a steel profile skeleton, as Semper did in the laundry ship, the result is a physically light architecture that would have a heavy effect, were it not for the ‘airy’ Pompeian wall paintings that reinscribe once more a represented lightness reinforcing Semper’s architectural demands, when he states that because of its “heaviness and strength [Widerstands-Fähigkeit]62 [metal] proscribes light, graceful, and perforated forms.”63 The following statement from 1860 sounds like a blueprint for the laundry ship’s walls: “The characteristics of metal (solidity, hardness, impregnability, durability, and ductility) make it ideal for protection, to keep the enclosed [das Umkleidete] taut [straff], and adorn it.”64

In Defense of Fencing

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s mentioned earlier, for Semper spatial differentiation began in textile arts, and there more specifically, with the fence and the mat as the original woven materials [Flechtwerk] from which developed other finer woven fabrics. The fence is one of the earliest manifestations of the wall. The word ‘fence’,65 originally a verb denoting defending oneself, is related to ‘seam’66 and ‘sewing.’ ‘Fold’ and ‘fence’ mark the simultaneous separating and joining of exterior and interior.67 The seam, in German Saum, which gives us Zaun or fence, marks the joint between the base and superstructure of the ship. The fence is the seam that holds the ship together; the seam is also an emblematic joint of Semper’s theories. The seam, as a sown joint, recalls the method of the laundry ship’s construction in the woven fence painted on its wall panels, and its construction method of riveting the metal panels to the vertical iron sections.68 The seaminess of the ship’s surfaces is reinforced by the vertical members clad on the exterior with metal pilasters that surround internal wood cores. It should be noted here that nineteenth-century

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“Auch bei den Alten bildeten Constructionen aus Holz, Eisen und Bronze einen wesentlichen Theil der Baukunst. Auch bei ihnen wurden sie nach ihren eignen Gesetzen der Statik, unabhängig vom Steine, gebildet. Nur wenige Spuren davon erhielten sich;—Aber manche Auskünfte geben die Pompejanischen Wandgemälde, die offenbar nur von dieser leichten Architektur entlehnt sind.” Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): xii. 58 To this Semper counted any form whose surface is significant in relation to its cross section, for example hollow, cast columns. In 1839 he had proposed iron-clad roofs carried by metal box girders for the Zwinger museum in Dresden. See Semper, Der Wintergarten zu Paris (1849): 522. 59 Semper, Ueber Wintergärten (1849): 485487, and Semper, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, und andere Schriften über Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Kunstunterricht. (1966): 22. He cites market halls and railroad stations as examples where the use of metal in formed sections is appropriate. 60 ‘Panel’ derives from the Latin pannellus, diminutive of Latin pannus, a piece of cloth or rag from the root pan-.‘Panneling’ may therefore be a better term to describe Semper’s idea of Bekleidung than the commonly used terms cladding or coating since it combines both meanings in one word. 61 “.... biegsam, zäh, dem Zerreisen in hohem Grade widerstehend, von grosser, absoluter Festigkeit.” Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): 9-12. For a discussion of Semper’s thoughts on building materials see Kühne, Über die Beziehung Sempers zum Baumaterial (1976), especially p. 115. 62 Literally resistance capacity, not “load-bearing” as translated by Mallgrave and Hermann in Semper, Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture (1989): 48. 63 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): xi. 64 Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): II, 461. Nevertheless, Semper’s argument against the use of solid

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Following Semper’s theory of structural Bekleidung the coating of surfaces takes on a structural function. A contemporary of Semper, Bucher writes: “I had the impression—and the longer I stayed, the stronger it became—that the coarse matter with which architecture works was completely dissolved in color. The building is not decorated with color, but built of it.”71 This was in response to the color painted on the interior of the structural columns and trusses of the Crystal Palace. It is peculiar though

Figure 6: Left, one of Semper’s water color drawings of the laundry ship’s wall panels. Right, detail view of the upper part of the wall panels that hinge out to ventilate the interior space, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

The fence painted on the lower section of the walls of the laundry ship was in an earlier version a net-like handrail surrounding the perimeter of the ship. Fröhlich70 has pointed out the shifty nature of this virtual barrier where the painted fence with its three-part section per 6’-1” wall panel is compressed at the corners because of the smaller wall panel size (3’-7”). A similar displacement occurs in the upper half of the middle section of the wall where the upper part of the painted niche is duplicated in the repeating 6’-1” panels behind the operable windows. The upper sections of the wall, which appear, in a trompe-l-oeil manner, as billowing laundry or sails, are in fact windows, or rather wind-eyes, affording both ventilation and viewing.

Figure 5: Wall panel detail showing the painted fence, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich . Plan section showing hollow columns, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

purists rejected pilasters, or engaged columns, for their ambiguous nature. Hegel found them disgusting since they represent two opposing purposes that stand side by side without an inner necessity.69 He called them halfcolumns [Halbsäulen] or hermaphrodites [Zwitter], a name that reinforces their questionable status in architecture.

iron sections is based not only on aesthetic but also structural considerations. He argues that hollow profiles can carry more load more efficiently than do solid shapes. See Semper, Ueber Wintergärten (1849): 486 [Three years later hollow beams would be used in the construction of the Galerie des Machines in the Paris World Exposition. See Meyer, Eisenbauten: Ihre Geschichte und Aesthetik (1907): 17]. On the same page he cites a precedent to metal sheet construction in Roman tin-metal ceilings [Blechdecken]. 65 In German the word for fence [Zaun] develops into the English word ‘town’ via tun. See Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1899): 432-433. 66 Saum in German means border, edge, margin, and outskirts or fringe of a town. In Semper’s theory the seam occupies the middle ground between weld, suture or joint [Naht] and the band. “The seam works according to its width, the band according to its length.” Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): I, 85. 67 Ibid.: I, 214. 68 The words for joint, weld, and suture, or Naht in German, are related to rivet, or Niethe. 69 Hegel found it “widerlich, weil dadurch zweierlei entgegengesetzte Zwecke ohne innere Notwendigkeit nebeneinander stehen und sich miteinander vermischen.” Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (given between 1820 and 1821) (1835): part III, section I, chapter 2 and 2b. Hübsch characterized the pilaster as the “first great lie of convention in architecture.” See Hübsch, In what style should we build? The German debate on architectural style (1992): 20. 70 Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Zürich (1974): 126. 71 Bucher, op. cit. cited in Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1975): 356.

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not surprising that in widely published books of architectural history little is mentioned about this system of striking (light blue, yellow, and red) colors, even though they appear to have been as important to the realization of the building as the fact that it was constructed of prefabricated metal and glass panels. Here is another eye-witness report of the effect of the Crystal Palace’s color scheme on an observer: “As the eye wanders up the vistas, the three primitive colors of Sir D. Brewster, red, yellow, and blue, strike the eye by the intensity of their brightness [...]. Looking up the nave, with its endless rows of pillars, the scene vanishes from extreme brightness to the hazy indistinctness which Turner alone can paint.”72

Walls of Paint

he design for the exterior wall panels on the laundry ship has two precedents: one is a water color, painted by Semper in Pompeii73 during his Grand Tour between October 1830 and January 1833. The other example consists of the frontispiece (as well as the aforementioned back cover) to his treatise on polychromy,74 written shortly after he returned to Hamburg in 1834.75 When Semper decided on a design for the exterior panels of the

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Figure 7: The first, colored version, of the ship’s facade. Watercolor by Semper, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

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Saun, The Splendors of the Crystal Palace (1851): 424. When the construction of the Crystal Palace began at the end of September 1850, Semper had just left Paris to move to London where he would arrive in time to design the Mixed Fabrics Court as well as the exhibits for Egypt, Denmark, Canada, and Sweden, and supervise their installation in the Chrystal Palace. For an account of Semper’s time in London see Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983). 73 The source is a wall painting from the Casa della Fontana Piccola in Pompeii. See Fröhlich, Gottfried Semper (1991): 46. 74 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834). Semper appropriated in his essay the theory, advanced earlier in a more muted form by Quatremère de Quincy and Hittorff, that antique temples were covered with bright colors. 75 In a response to Raoul Rochette’s assertion that the Greeks did not know any wall painting Semper traces the development of wall painting back to Corinthian master painters who followed Demaratus’ move to Tarquinia where the Etruscans learned the art. See Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): 44. 76 For a detailed analysis of these styles see Mau, Pompeii: Its Life and Art (1982). For visual examples see plates XXII, XXIII, and XXVI in Pernice, Pompeji (1926). Semper used neo-Pompeian motifs in other major projects, most notably in his art gallery in Vienna (see Abb. 21 in Planner-Steiner/Eggert. Schmidt - Semper - Hasenauer. Die Wiener Ringstrasse VIII.2) and in the Second Theater in Dresden (see the chapter “Der ‘künstlerische Schmuck’ im Gesamtkunstwerk Gottfried Sempers” in Gottfried Sempers Zweites Dresdner Hoftheater, 1985: 80-140). Other neo-Pompeian references in architecture can be found in the works of Sir John Soane, and in the Hermitage in Wörlitz, used by Hamilton, the ambassador to the court of Naples, among others. 77 Parts of the design also seem to have been borrowed from the fourth or Intricate Style (in use from about 50 B.C. on) in which frequently the whole wall appears as an intricate scaffolding with representations of thin bent sheets of material that are echoed on the exterior of the laundry ship. See Plate XIII in Mau,

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ornament [Schmuck], of whatever kind, consists of two principally different elements: firstly out of those units [Einheiten] [...] that make up the essence of the ornamentation, and secondly out of that

he art of Toreutic was highly perfected in Pompeii. “Lamps, candelabras, tripods, cups, bowls [...], weapons, etc. were adorned [geschmückt] with the finest ornaments.”83 Pompeii, the ancient Greek settlement south of Naples, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvio in 79 AD. and subsequently rediscovered in 1748, was a city known for its excessive ornamentation. Almost all of its walls were covered with paint. 84 Schoener commented in his guide to the city that the wall paintings are known for their “.... voluptuous amount of lively colored surfaces, strips, frames, edges of architectural ornaments, festoons, arabesques,”85 as was the laundry ship. However, Semper differentiates between ornaments that exist solely as an addition and not as a structural [struktive] part86 and those that play a structural and ornamental role. He writes that

Equipped with Ornament

laundry ship he had to choose from four different styles that had influenced Pompeian wall painting over four centuries.76 Finally he appropriated a design from the third or Ornate Style,77 en vogue in Pompeii from about 80 to 50 BC.78 Pompeian artists divided the wall of a typical dwelling into three parts both vertically and horizontally which resulted in a nine-panel division. The upper panels, painted in light colors, depict usually an open space with a tectonic assemblage of scaffolding constructed of thin pieces that in three dimensions could only have been constructed in metal, and here, specifically, smooth metal sheets. Semper argues that the quality of smooth surfaces to resist the application of three-dimensional ornament was his reason to use slick metal panels for the walls that could then be decorated much easier than three-dimensional surfaces. The precedent could be found in early wall paintings, where ornaments were incorporated [einverleibt] into the wall surface “as one still finds it now and then in Pompeian wall paintings.”79 McEwen points out that “works of carpentry, especially ships, were also daidala.”80 Daidala are associated with tightly woven, αρηαωσ, or textiles, that, because of their density and smoothness, exhibit a luminous sheen “like the metal plates of a warrior’s armor.”81 The shimmering surfaces of the wall paintings allow precisely because of their smoothness an unprecedented freedom to decorate their surfaces in a painterly manner.82

Pompeii: Its Life and Art (1982): 470. 78 Mau, Pompeii: Its Life and Art (1982): 463. For an excellent analysis of the different styles of Pompeian wall painting, as well as a critique of Mau’s limited taxonomy, see Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990): 33-46. 79 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): 45. 80 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 48. Daidalon initially meant a cutting up or cutting out (découpage) and was used to describe, for example, armor, which is an assembly of cut-out pieces. 81 Ibid.: 53. Semper refers in several places of Der Stil to military weapons covered in thin metal sheets and armor; see Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): II, 464, 467, 468, and 524. 82 Wiegmann describes the machine-like slickness and density of the surfaces in Pompeian wall paintings as “smooth as [...] polished marble.” Wiegmann, Die Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik: insbesondere als Decorationsmalerei (1836): 24-26. Incidentally, Semper considered a completely smooth stonecoursing the most ideal surface of a wall which was perfectly realized in Greek temples whose marble he thought of as a “natural stucco.” Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (1851): 66. 83 Schoener, Pompeji: Beschreibung der Stadt und Führer durch die Ausgrabungen (1878): 76. See also the treatise on cryselephantine sculpture by Quatremère de Quincy, Jupiter olympien, ou l’art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue (1815). The fundamental importance of ornament is also expressed in its definition as equipment or trapping. Equipment, or its verb ‘to equip’ returns us to hulls, vessels, and edifices, the domains of ship building and Baukunst. What gets potentially trapped here is the eye in its movement over the ornamented surfaces. See also Hildebrand’s theory about “kinesthetically sensing eye activity [rege abtastende Augentätigkeit]” in Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1994): 229. 84 Incredulously both Mau and Wiegmann describe Pompeii as an unimportant provincial city, a minor city with minor works. Wiegmann, Die Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik: insbesondere als

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which frames [umfaßt], links and attaches these units to that which is ornamented. The first element is closed in itself [...] and shows no conflict of mechanical structural forces. The second element is structural, it functions mechanically, it frames [faßt], links [verkettet], binds [bindet], and should simultaneously [zugleich] contribute cosmetically.”87 In both cases ornament precedes structure temporally, but in addition it obliterates any clear demarcation between structure and ornament functionally. Rather than simply reverse the historically hierarchical relationship of one over the other, ornament is both structure and adornment. The possibility of ornament for the building arts emerges precisely out of this hybrid position that considers adornment no longer as a mere addition but as architecture’s constitutive force. The simple opposition between unadorned surfaces and those covered with ornaments, so fashionable from the end of the nineteenth century on, becomes untenable. Hermann’s reading of Semper’s alleged “truth of materials” argument is thus an unfortunate mis-reading. Hermann quoted Semper’s statement from 1834 that “brick shall appear as brick, wood as wood, iron as iron, each according to its own structural laws.”88 But what Hermann did not acknowledge were the following sentences. “This is the simple truth on which one can let oneself go with all the love of the [...] embroidery of adornment.“89 Semper adds that it is very natural that this need for adornment is satisfied in a way that contributes simultaneously to the work’s beautification. “Instead of boring paint one chooses pleasing alternating colors. Polychromy becomes [...] necessary [nothwendig].”90

Gaudy Surfaces

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lato writes in Der Staat: “Let us consider the case that someone approaches us while we are busy with the coloring [painting] of statues, and [this person] scolds us since we are not using the most beautiful colors for the most beautiful parts of the body, since the eyes, the most beautiful, are not painted in purple but in black.”91 Aside from the above, literary reference, proof of brightly painted architecture surfaced when structural members with traces of “vivid, flat painted colors which faded rapidly upon exposure to the air”92 were pulled out of the earth during informal digs at Aegina, Bassae, and Selinus. Initially archaeologists believed that, since colored examples of sculpture were only found in Italy, Greek works were not colored. The examined buildings in Italy were made of rough limestone cov-

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Decorations-malerei (1836): 18. 85 Schoener, Pompeji: Beschreibung der Stadt und Führer durch die Ausgrabungen (1878): 71. He also commented on the Corinthian columns “with many willful capitals enriched with phantastic ornaments.” Schoener, Pompeji: Beschreibung der Stadt und Führer durch die Ausgrabungen (1878): 68. 86 Semper, “Über architektonische Symbole,” in Kleine Schriften (1880 [1854]): 299. 87 Semper, Ueber die formelle Gesetzmäßigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol (1856): 337-339. An example of structural ornaments can be located in Otto Wagner’s Postsparkasse in Vienna where he used aluminium screws and cap-nuts to hold exterior marble plates, which clad and thus construct the facade. Nevertheless, the ambivalence in Wagner’s work has been characterized by Karl Schorske as “a persistent dissonance between a functional ethic and an aesthetic of embellishment.” Schorske, Otto Wagner (1982): 359. 88 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834). 89 Ibid.: X and XI, and Hermann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (1984): 174 and 175. 90 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): X and XI; for a discussion on the instrumental use of color see Hildebrand’s section in Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1932), especially 76-79. 91 Plato, Der Staat (1916): 134/420. Footnote text: “The term ανδριασ clearly indicates in this fictive situation not the image of a god but the statue of a mortal. That the latter was not made of bronze can be derived from the fact that the eyes were supposed to be painted while in contemporary bronze statues all statues had incrusted eyes.” 92 See Cockerell, On the Aegina Marbles (1819): 340-341. 93 Semper’s argument that the ancients knew no subdued colors intersects with his theory of how paint was not mixed on a

ered with painted stucco. The fact that these temples were painted was acceptable to nineteenth century architects. But the more radical speculation was whether the Parthenon, constructed of pentelic marble, was painted, too.93 The German neo-classicist architect Leo Klenze believed that bright colors were only used on limestone temples. He joined Kugler in his opinion that the Parthenon’s polychromy was “only touched up with color and gilding to articulate its form and material.”94 Hittorff showed the Parthenon painted pale yellow overall with touches of color elsewhere. 95 Both Gau, who published in 1822 “a series of brightly colored studies of ancient Egyptian painted facades and tomb interiors at the Paris Salon,”96 and Huyot made no connection between the polychromy of Egyptian and Greek architecture.97 Quatremère de Quincy’s attempt to halt the decline of antique art limited itself to “revival [...] of chryselephantine sculpture and Doric architecture.”98 As mentioned earlier, Semper considered Greek art as part of a continuously unfolding history. The difference between Quatremère de Quincy’s99 and Semper’s understanding of polychromy is evident. Van Zanten writes that “Quatremère is nervous about it; he tries to keep it within the bounds of Classical doctrine. Semper revels in it.”100 Both Semper’s and Jones’ suggestion that the Parthenon may have been painted entirely red, set off with touches of green, purple and gold “presented theories which no longer operated within the confines of Classicism.”101 Enter the gaudy, the transgression of leaden limitations of mediocrity [Mittelmäßigkeit]. With their reconstructions both Semper and Jones had left the realm of good taste. Yet was not the idea of the festival with its excesses central to Greek culture? Then maybe the gaudy is very much a part of classicism, although it is certainly not the classicism revered by Winckelmann, Lessing, or Quatremère de Quincy.

Carnival Masks These are Towers of [BABEL], chatterers’ architecture, the [HATCHERY], an architecture of the carnivalesque. Bloomer, Architecture and the Text (1993) ....the first needs of youthful humanity are play and adornment. Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur (1834)

palette but on the wall itself. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989): 59, 60. 94 Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 23. 95 It should be noted here that Hittorff, just as Quatremère de Quincy, never went to Greece for his research but relied instead on literary sources for his research. 96 Gau, Les Antiquités de Nubie (1822). 97 Ibid.: 16-17. 98 Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 17-18. Concurrent with Quatremère de Quincy’s reconstructions of monumental sculptures in Greek temples was his proposal for a colossal Patrie sculpture as part of the alterations to Soufflot’s church of Ste. Geneviève. Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 18. Van Zanten recalls Quatremère de Quincy’s proposition to construct, in ivory and gold, a replica of the Athena Parthenos which was, however, not completed until 1855 “by the sculptor Simart under the patronage of the Duc de Luynes. The statue is still in place in the chateau at Dampierre.” Ibid.: 18 and footnote 31. 99 Quatremère de Quincy visited Paestum with J.-L. David in 1779. The first edition of the Jupiter Olympien was published in 1814-15. 100 Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 56. 101 Ibid.: 27. 102 Mau, Pompeii: Its Life and Art (1982): 464.

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au writes that the architectural design of the Pompeian wall paintings has lost “all semblance of real construction [and that] every part of the framework of the third style is profusely ornamented.”102 The scaffolds

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represented on Pompeian wall paintings operate as props or facades that shuttle between illusion and reality. Bryson recognizes a systematic shuttling in Pompeian wall paintings where what is “actual (the experience of local interior space) is invaded by a principle of irrealisation or fiction.”103 In Semper’s theory this representation of illusory reality developed out of two fundamental needs [Bedürfnisse], namely “dressing [das Bekleiden] and masking [Maskieren] [which] are as old as human civilization, and the joy of doing both is identical to the joy that turns human beings into sculptors, painters, architects, poets, musicians, actors, briefly said, into artists.” Both dressing-up and masking are part of everyday life but gain importance especially at the time of festivals or carnivals.104 “Any creation of art on one side, any consumption of art on the other requires a certain carnivalesque mood.” The emblem of this mood is the haze of carnival candles [Karnevalskerzendunst] which Semper believes can only be evoked through the “destruction of reality, of the material [dem Stofflichen].”105 He elaborates on the expression of these needs in festival constructions—and the laundry ship is a celebration of both dressing and masking—when he writes that the tradition of decorated surfaces developed out of provisional festival armatures that were “improvised scaffoldings [...] hung with carpets, dressed up [bekleidet] with reeds and flowers, adorned with festoons and wreaths, fluttering bands and trophies.”106 That is, before a safe, grounded and stable architecture there was a time of temporary, mobile constructions that retain the potential for showing up unexpectedly to disturb the status quo.107 In these early times the architect’s task was that of a choragus,108 and here it is useful to remember that the Greek chorus is a “group of masked dancers who performed ceremonial songs at [...] festivals.”109 Not surprisingly, masks are displayed on the ship’s exterior walls in several places. They appear, carved in the cyma recta, painted on the upper panels that double as vents, and they are strung on garlands in the upper parts of the flat niches. Semper’s theory of Bekleidung has been continuously misread as merely masking structure, yet his demand of architecture is more radical. To the destruction of the material [des Stofflichen], “that is where the unspoiled instinct [unverdorbenes Gefühl] leads the primitive people [die Naturmenschen] in all early attempts at art; that is where the great true masters of all arts in all subjects [Fächern] return with the exception that the latter in times of high artistic development masked the material [das Stoffliche] of the mask.”110 ‘Masking the material of the mask’ means to make what constitutes or produces the mask invisible without effacing the mask itself. The tool is color, a thin coating that represents or depicts material but is itself virtually invisible. In ancient boat building the shell or skin, χρος, of

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Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990): 35. 104 The convergence of dressing/ masking and the festival has the potential for a volatile intersection of the sacred and the profane (temple and laundry), as well as a resistance to remain within the boundaries of good taste. The laundry ship signifies the arrival of carnival into town. Gaudiness is associated with striking color and variety that signifies a condition of excess and stands in opposition to an architecture of colorlessness, blandness, and dullness. 105 Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): I, 217, footnote 3, starting on page 216. 106 Ibid.: 229-230. 107 The late twentieth-century reincarnation of the laundry ship, without washing machines but with the idea of mobile festivals in mind, is Aldo Rossi’s Theatro del Mundo. Where is it now? 108 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): 6. 109 Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993). 110 Semper, Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1878): I, 217218, footnote 3. Moranvánsky, The Aesthetics of the Mask: The Critical Reception of Wagner’s Moderne Architektur and Architectural Theory in Central Europe (1993): 199 considers Semper’s theory of dressing as the basis for what he calls Otto Wagner’s “aesthetics of the mask.”

111

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a boat was constructed first with planks joined by mortise-and-tenon connections.111 McEwen compares this construction by shipwrights to weaving. Boat construction or weaving constitutes the production of a skin, that was, moreover, an “επιφανεια, both a surface and an appearing.”112 Χρος113 [skin or color] was understood as a bearer of visibility, visibility being the guarantor of existence or being. This making-visible of the covering material is not gender neutral. For the Greeks, when a “woman kosmese (adorned) herself, she wrapped her χρος in a second skin or body, in order to bring the surface-body so clothed to light;114 to make it appear. If women, in ancient Greece, were essentially invisible, cosmetic κοσμος made them visible.”115 Putting on make-up is here quite literally the tool for existence through a constructed surface, a mask. Yet the knowledge of a mask, even if it is doubly masked, does not expose the kind of structure that holds the mask up. Clérambault’s photographs may serve as another example. Here the ‘nature’ of the structure is completely hidden behind the assemblage of clothes and “... what is obscured in these cases is the very prop on which the drapery’s purpose hangs.”116 The masking of structure is rarely innocent and usually calculated. The mask as an indication of play, as a pretending to be other, recalls the Trojan horse, which evokes the laundry ship whose masks on its windows, that masquerade as immobile panels, are openly on display like a purloined letter. These painted panels represent windows as switches into another, layered, assemblage of spaces where the distinction between what is real and what is represented is thoroughly confused. Even if the wall paintings on the laundry ship are a far cry from their more elaborate precedents in Pompeii, where “columns become tendrils and

Figure 8: Masks on the cornice and painted on other parts of the metal panels, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

Casson, as quoted by McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 49 describes two different ways of “putting together a wooden hull. One is to set up a skeleton of keel and frames (ribs) and fasten a skin of planks to it. The other dispenses with the skeleton and simply builds up a shell of planks, pinning each plank in some fashion to its neighbors.” Casson, Ancient Shipbuilding: New Light on an Old Source (1963): 28-29. 112 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 71. 113 Ibid.: 43-44. McEwen articulates the difference between Homer’s use of σομα, (dead) body and χηρος (skin) which designates the living human body. And here “chros does not mean skin in the anatomical sense (the skin or pelt that can be skinned off an animal, derma) but skin in the sense of a surface that is the bearer of colour and visibility.” Voegelin, Order and History (1956): II, 102. 114 The importance of light in relationship to wall painting was already conceded by Wiegmann in his statement that “light is the first condition [Bedingung] of ornamental painting.” Wiegmann, Die Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik: insbesondere als Decorationsmalerei (1836): 28. 115 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 44. On the same page McEwen argues that clothing and movement were intimately linked in Greek art. “Ideal youths (kouroi) are depicted naked and appear to be moving forward. Ideal maidens (korai) stand still and are beautifully dressed.” 116 Copjec, The Sartorial Superego (1989): 69.

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Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990): 42. 118 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (1960): VII, 5 and 2, quoted by Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked : Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990): 43. 119 He theorizes that in Pompeii the wall paintings were created to counter the very tiny, “cramped, windowless, [and] compressed “ spaces whose “internal pressure built up in such claustral interiors has no outlet except through the fictional vistas that surround the viewer on all sides.” Ibid.: 45. 120 Bryson describes a similar scene in his discussion of the second style where “masks suspended between the capitals establish [..a] proscenium arch in front of a stage.” Ibid.: 40.

weightless stalks made of a substance half way between vegetable life and metal,”117 or where reeds are put in the place of columns, fluted appendages with curly leaves and volutes are put instead of pediments, candelabra support representations of shrines [...] with human figures . . . sometimes stalks having only half-length figures, some with human heads, others with the head of animals,118 the viewer is soon lost in the multiple layers that operate here as illfitting masks, slightly out of place to reveal beyond, one more space, one more vista. The representation of space on the laundry ship’s walls may be less dramatic than the originals in Pompeii, yet a detailed analysis reveals a surprising depth of a physically flat wall. First of all there is a subtle play between the three-dimensional frame (hollow pilasters marking the position of the iron sections behind them) and the frames painted on the flat surface of the metal panels. In the middle corner panel, for example, the painted meandering line that separates and joins in a sinuous boundary the upper receding space from the lower foreground, is located visibly behind the painted ‘structural’ frames that divide each main panel (between the pilasters) into a nine-’square’ grid. Bryson describes the shifts that take place in wall paintings of Pompeian interior spaces, where, starting with a real room, the frames or dados shift, imperceptibly at first, into painted lines that lead the eye from one space into the next. 119 I have already pointed out the shift that occurs in the lower part of the corner panel where the fence has to be compressed to accommodate the shorter end section. Above this fence the representation of a niche, articulated through the foreshortening of a painted piece of cloth floating on a dark background, holds seven masks suspended from a garland120 strung along the upper edge of the cloth.

Figure 9: Detail view of wall panel, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

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From here the viewer’s eye moves off to the left and right into a lightcolored background where, at an indeterminable distance, metal vessels hang from bows attached to the edges of a frame that should be in the foreground

but could not be, considering the position of the vessels. From the second panel on, the presence of pedimented windows, with a foreshortened and therefore bent surface represented in its window panes, adds an additional layer that reveals above the pediment the upper section of the earlier mentioned piece of cloth with its strung masks. Finally there are frames within frames within frames, some depicting exterior scenes (viewed through windows) while others oscillate between painted metal panels and painted wall sections of the representations of walls in Pompeian houses. And again, all of this happens on the exterior of the ship. If the Pompeian interior refers to compressed and contained domesticity, and their wall paintings represent a necessary relief from those pressures, as Bryson suggests, then the laundry ship’s reversal of those conditions implies an advertising of the domestic on the exterior, a making public while at the same time containing behind its walls an interiorized exterior. In the end masquerade is more than mere play; what remains hidden behind the multiple masks of the ship is an apparatus for the cleaning of dirty laundry, an apparatus whose status remains to be analyzed.

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King, Description and Philosophy of James T. King’s Patent: Washing and Drying Apparatus, adapted for the use of families, Hotels, Public Institutions, and large Laundries (1855) cited in Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1975): 564. 122 Cleaning and adorning are related. In German aufputzen means to dress up, deck out, clean up. Its noun, Aufputz, is a layer of stucco as well as finery, attire, and get-up. 123 See Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1975): 560-571.

Doing Laundry Will we spread them here now?

Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1976)

. . . just as cleanliness becomes the greatest need wherever there is much dirt. Semper, Science, Industry, and Art (1989)

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leaning laundry means to purify, to separate, and to neutralize the cohesion of “a compound held together and fastened to the fabric by oily glutinous or vegetable particles.”121 Washing dirty clothes is characterized by repetition, the absence of production, and the presence of servicing, or maintenance. Dirt avoidance, i.e. the desire for cleanliness coincides with the history of clean surfaces, the history of hygiene and its mechanization in the late 1700s.122 The earliest mostly unsuccessful attempts to clean laundry imitated the to-and-fro motion used by washerwomen. What made cleaning laundry eventually possible at a larger, commercial, scale was the development of steam-powered washing machines.123 With its trompe-l-oeil exterior the laundry ship points to the difficult intersection of the clean and the unclean. It is both dirt eliminator and producer. Its steam engine marks the interval between the hearth as a

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Οικος is Greek for economy. Hermann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (1984): 140. Essential to any greek city was the public hearth in the agora, hestia koine, as site of power. McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 118. 126 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 101. 127 Fröhlich classified the laundry ship as a temple; see Fröhlich, Gottfried Semper (1991): 51-55. The domestics of laundry is still evident in the German word for laundry facility or laundromat, also known as Waschküche or washing kitchen. See Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Zürich (1974): 126. 128 Templum is also a transverse beam. Trabeation returns and with it the loom. 129 The central space of a church is still called a nave which comes from navis, ship. 130 “In French the entire church is often referred to as le vaisseau, the vessel.” McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (1993): 161, footnote 72. 131 Most other buildings do not. Architecture has always had a tendency toward stasis. 132 This term courtesy of my former colleague at Princeton, Dan Monk. 133 Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1986). 134 The importance of smooth, clean surfaces for the modern can not be underestimated. From Otto Wagner via Adolf Loos to Le Corbusier, the smooth surface was a deflector. The latters ‘machines for living-in’ were less a real machine and more a series of buildings that had the look of machines. For a detailed discussion of the importance of surface, looks, and fashion in modernism see Wigley, White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2] (1994).

representation of home and domesticity, and the machine as the industrialization of οικος.124 In Greek to build is οικοδομειν. The construction of the household, of domesticity is bound up with the machine in the house. Before Semper published his Four Elements, Bötticher had already identified the hearth as symbolic center of human gathering and occupation.125 The word ‘hearth’ is related to the gothic hauri, coal, whose plural haurja means fire. The domesticated, contained fire is the steam engine. “Hestia, the hearth, is a feminine noun linked to the verb histhmi, I set up, a link that is further stressed by the Ionian spelling of hestia as histia. But histia [...] are also sails [a noun that is connected] to the verb histhmi[.] As essential to the construction of every Greek household as its hearth was the loom,”126 called histon, which can also mean mast of a ship. Perhaps the mast is the smoke stack of the laundry ship’s steam engine. Then the steam engine is to the ship what the altar is to the temple. The publication of the domestic127 is inherently part of the temple,128 the house of gods, the ritual place for the cleansing of body and mind. Now the temple is a public building, a house, and a ship.129 The ναος, that place in the temple where the goddess is kept, is related to ναυς, ship.130 However, this ship does not move anywhere but retains the potential to move.131 Foucault describes the ships of fools that cleansed cities of their dirty human laundry132 by sending indigents, the socially ill, vagabonds, and madmen, on a journey into other spaces from which they would often not return.133 In architecture the obsession with purity, cleanliness, disinfection, and expulsion of the unwanted is represented in the polemics of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier who propagated nothing other than smooth white surfaces, at least on the exterior.134 In 1872 the laundry ship’s exterior surfaces were whitewashed after it had been towed from its strategic location in the center of Zurich to a peripheral position on the edge of the Lake in the Zurich suburb of Wollishofen. Here it became the beginning of the still existing laundry fac

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Figure 10: Left, the grounded ship as seen from the lake in 1910, and, right, the ship in 1959, shortly before its destruction, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

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ility of Zurich [Waschanstalt Zürich] which grew around it and ultimately, quite literally, incorporated the ship. Until 1872 the ship was an ungrounded temple, an unfounded, and therefore potentially mobile construction that threatens the assumed stability of conventional architecture.135 The grounding of the ship signifies the end of its mobility. has once again been disciplined by stability and order.

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Allegory returns as a threat to the “security of the foundations upon which aesthetics is erected.” Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I and II (1980): 84. 136 In mythology the sea horse is half fish and half horse, ridden by Neptune and other sea gods.

Figure 11: By 1900 the ship has returned to its origin, a stable, founded condition. The exterior walls have once again been interiorized as the ship has been subsumed into the enlarged Treichler laundry company, today the Laundry Facility of Zurich [Waschanstalt Zürich], an institution of cleanliness, from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich.

Επι−λογος

n my second visit to Zurich in the summer of 1994 I went to the still existing laundry facility to find some information on the ship’s former location at the edge of the Zurich lake. However, ironically, and I believe, significantly, the only parts left of the ship today are three of the Aphrodite Pontia sculptures that used to join the ship’s roof and walls, and grace, or brace, now a minor, back entry to the main building of the laundry facility. Notice, too, the sea horse whose body is covered with bony plates, not unlike the chryselephantine sculptures of ancient Greece.136

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Figure 12: Left, the bow figures as installed, on a corner of the ship (from Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) - ETH Zürich), and, right, as sole survivors above the back entry into today’s laundry facility (photo by author).

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Mau, Pompeii: Its Life and Art (1982)Mau, August, Pompeji in Leben und Kunst. Pompeii: its life and art; translated into English by Francis W. Kelsey (New Rochelle, N.Y: Caratzas Bros, 1982), 395. See also the illustration of fullers doing laundry in Pompeii in Overbeck, Pompeji in seinen Gebäuden, Alterthümern und Kunstwerken (1884): 392.

Minerva was worshipped by the fullers as their patron divinity,137 so it seems only fitting that I end this essay with an image of one of Minerva’s favorite animals: the cock who, as the emblem of the current laundry facility in Zurich, wearing a starched white shirt, stands before a dark, dirty body of water. At the same time he appears up to his neck in that same water.

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Figure 13: Emblem from one of the service trucks of the Waschanstalt Zürich, photo by author.

Questioning the Idyll: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Interiors in Jean Paul, Goethe, and Kersting

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hile taking the required courses toward my general exam at Princeton’s School of Architecture, I registered for a Ph.D. seminar in 1993 with Alan Colquhoun on the concept of ‘Space’. In my final course paper, originally entitled Innerlichkeit: Representations of Domestic Interiors between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Germany, I analyzed the intersection between literary and visual works of Jean Paul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Friedrich Kersting. This essay turned out to be an early foray into interdisciplinary research using the interieur as a reference point in painting and literature.

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Questioning the Idyll: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Interiors in Jean Paul, Goethe, and Kersting Das Leben ist eine Schauspielerprobe, aber nicht das Schauspiel, die Erde ein Zimmerplatz, aber nicht die Baustelle. Soffke, Raum und Zeit bei Jean Paul (1959): 18.

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n this paper I investigate three different but related representations of domestic idylls in the works of the writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter1 (1763-1825), his contemporary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), and the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847). For the purpose of this discussion I borrow Jean Paul’s and Goethe’s literary descriptions of the idyll and read them against Kersting’s visual representations of the idyll in painting. The Jean Paul expert Peter Sprengel has shown that the concept of the idyll relies on the idea of an fixed viewing frame which introduces the interdependent relations between exteriority, interiority, and their shared boundary, the frame. Following Sprengel I will argue architecturally that the various representations of the idyll depend on a resistance to movement while their critique reinforces a dynamic relationship between subject and object. This static/exstatic interdependence can be found in the respective manifestations of interior and exterior space in Goethe’s and Kersting’s productions while Jean Paul negotiates his literary terrain by shuttling between these two opposing conditions. The idyll and its inherent threat of disruption can be located as a convergence of three meanings in the figure of the German word Stube. This word is linked to the English ‘stove’ and the Old Norwegian stofa which means both room and house. The Swedish stuga suggests small house, hut, or living room. In German Stube can mean a generic room, as well as a parlor, a drawing-, sitting-, or living room. Stube thus covers the range from a piece of furniture to a complete dwelling. I will argue that this synecdochal condition is the symbolic ground on which the idea of interiority manifests itself at three different scales. The paper is organized into three parts of which the first one relates Stube in its meaning as stove to Jean Paul’s identification of aristocracy with coldness, and the bourgeois through his appropriation of the whole house idea (Ganzes Haus) with warmth.2 In the second part I suggest that Stube as house or hut can be identified in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften as representations of three different architectural constructions with related functions: the moss-hut, the pavilion, and the mansion. The last part com-

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Better known as Jean Paul. He borrowed his first name from Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he greatly admired. 2 For a more involved discussion of the Ganzes Haus history see Ipsen, Das Ganze Haus—Zur Kontinuität des Vergangenen—Eine Skizze (1992): 31-36, and Weber-Kellermann, Der Oikos, Das Ganze Haus (1992): 2931. 1

prises an analysis of Kersting’s interior paintings which represent the Stube as interior room with symptomatic differences in the articulations of gendered space. For each artist the complex topos of Stube coincides with a wider historical and political framework. I will argue that in each case Stube operates as a figure of Innerlichkeit 3 which is closely related to the early nineteenth-century idea of the idyll. At the end of the eighteenth century what is known today as Germany consisted then of a motley collection of principalities and small towns that could only envy the powerful national monarchies to the west. ‘Germany’ was then still a patchwork of rival fiefdoms, independent cities, and small kingdoms. The existing power-centers were, beside France in the West and Russia to the East, the northeastern Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. These powers had no interest to see a consolidated nation in the center of Europe. Napoleon, in his bid for a larger share of Europe, had defeated the Prussian armies decisively at Jena and Auerstädt in 1806 and had thus caused not only a military but also a moral collapse of a government “that had taught its citizens that obedience to authority was the supreme political virtue.”4 However, Napoleon’s domination of Europe came to a halt when France was beaten by Tsarist Russia in 1813, the same year in which Jean Paul published his second edition of the Vorschule der Aesthetik, Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften was almost complete, and Kersting had just painted the first version of Die Stickerin.

Innerlichkeit can be variously translated as inwardness, contemplative nature, profoundness, or warmth. 4 Hamerow, History of Germany (1977): 102.

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Figure 1: G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], first version, painted in Dresden in 1812, from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 54.

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These years of political consolidation were still dominated by German idealism whose proponent Goethe, among other thinkers of his time, emphasized introspection and spirituality. Theodore S. Hamerow suggests in this context that culture was seen as “an escape from the narrow world of princely absolutism”5 and that intellectual energies were not spent to reform the community but instead “to emancipate the individual through self-purification and self-perfection.”6 Wulf Köpke suggests that this condition is echoed in Jean Paul’s literary work where “sublimity of action, if it was to be achieved had to be of an inward kind.”7 The frustrations encountered in the exterior world preempted any revolutionary actions by rebels and radicals in Jean Paul’s ficticious countries since they would be without practical consequences.8 I would suggest that the incapacity of the rulers to think at a national, not to say international level has its architectural counterpart in the representations of domestic Innerlichkeit in literature and painting. Sprengel identifies Jean Paul’s work with the foundations of bourgeois subjectivity which can be expressed in a longing for another world and a flight into fantasy.9 He considers Jean Paul’s writing as a reaction to, or symptom of, the egotistic isolation of the individual, the commercialization of all areas of life and the suppression of sensuality in bourgeois society. Instead of subjectivity Sprengel uses the term Innerlichkeit10 which he frames as an intersection of three ideas. The first is sentimental love11 signifying warmth which differs from the coldness of feudal society; the next is ethical idealism, expressed as emphatic support [Bejahung] of ethical ideals beyond mere physical needs; the last is fantasy as an evasion of objective reality, a characteristic Innerlichkeit shares with the idyll.12 Jean Paul identifies Innerlichkeit with a kind of connectedness which he sees exemplified in the large family of a petit-bourgeois household. In contrast to this collective, he points to the lack of intimacy, the lack of Anteilnahme in other people’s relations, and lack of execution of familial duties as the sign of aristocracy.13 Jean Paul’s polemic against the feudal way of life as well as the central meaning of familial Innerlichkeit comes into relief before the societal background of the late eighteenth century which evokes the decay of the “whole house” [ganzes Haus],14 an undifferentiated, unified social structure of work, interaction and power [Herrschaft]. Historically the word familia suggested the totality of a group of people being dependent on a house, castle, or even town. Innerlichkeit can thus be considered to be an emblem of proto-German political, cultural, and social conditions concretized in the increased dependency of the interior on the exterior. In Die Unsichtbare Loge, for example, Jean Paul describes how some family members wait in the dark living room at home to save light when the pater familias Schulmeister Wutz, who works outside the

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Ibid.: 99. Ibid.: 99. 7 Köpke, Jean Paul Richter’s School of Aesthetics: Humor and the Sublime (1988): 196. 8 See ibid.: 196. 9 Sprengel, Innerlichkeit: Jean Paul oder das Leiden an der Gesellschaft (1977) [available only in German]. I appropriate here for my purposes Sprengel’s ideas from the chapter on Intimacy and Representation, which is a sub-chapter about his discussions on the characteristics of the feudal society. 10 Sprengel notes that Jean Paul is “generally considered to be the embodiment of subjectivist tendencies, as incarnation of German Innerlichkeit.” Ibid.: 11. 11 In German the word is Anteilnahme. 12 Jean Paul suggests that the Innerlichkeit of a bourgeois family life allows no sentimental love, no ethical idealism, and no fantasy. 13 Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften with its descriptions of aristocratic relations is a case in point. A further discussion might trace in this context the relationship between Zivilisation and Kultur. 14 See Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte (1968). 5

See Benjamin, “Louis-Philippe oder das Interieur” in “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (1991). 16 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 265. 17 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1980). Translated as Preschool to Aesthetics. The German version was originally published in 1804, with a second edition in 1813. 18 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 265. He writes that the range of happiness is small while the gradations of pain are many. 19 Ibid.: 267.

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house in the town, comes back from the market. In architectural terms the change can be noticed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the increased separation of the household as interior from the shop [Kontor] as exterior,15 as well as the compartmentalization of interior space into distinct functions. The cultural historian Jens Tismar has argued that the idyll depends always on a particular position of the viewer that requires a separation from any disturbing influence, both physical and temporal. Idylls operate thus in a space of ahistoricity which is only possible when viewer and object are separated infinitely in time and space. A critique of the idyll would therefore require a short-circuiting of objectified distance that would result in a kind of proximity only possible in close, detailed writings/readings. Jean Paul’s work is appropriately known for its microscopic views of reality; he is, however, careful not to link the idea of the idyll with a romantic perception of pastoral life. Timothy Casey quotes Jean Paul: “Pastoral life in itself has in any case little more to offer, apart from quiet and boredom, than the life of the gooseherd [;] Saturn’s blissful globe is not a sheep pen, and its heavenly bed and celestial chariot no shepherd’s barrow.”16 The classical idyll is therefore always also a representation of another space outside the narrow viewing frame. It is not only written, painted, and constructed for those who occupy the idyll but also for those who appear to be outside while they are in fact still inside, watching, reading, surveying, and consuming the representation of their own condition. Jean Paul elaborates his ambiguous position, which includes both critique and affirmation of the idyll, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik17 where he considers the idyll as an “epic representation of complete happiness in limitation [Beschränkung].”18 Beschränkung can be read here literally as spatial limitation but also, more figuratively, as narrow-mindedness. Jean Paul reinforces this ambiguous state at the end of the discussion on the character of the idyll. There he encloses the word Beschränkung in quotation marks as he refers to the possibility that anyone, independent of social class, can participate in this paradoxical representation of happiness. To support this position Jean Paul reverses the argument that an idyll can exist only outside bourgeois society. “Is a petty society, then, of shepherds, huntsmen, of fishermen not a bourgeois one?”19 The only concession he makes is that an idyll can not have too many participants, nor can it include the ‘big wheels of state.’ In his texts the idyll turns into a small garden with extra small people, Lilliputians, who have myopic vision. Tismar understands the idyll as “fantasy [Wunschbild] of an existence that rests free of any danger in itself, keeps its distance through an acknowledged self-limitation from social and political change, and preserves a myth

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Tismar, Gestörte Idyllen: Eine Studie zur Problematik der idyllischen Wunschvorstellungen am Beispiel Jean Paul, Adalbert Stifter, Robert Walser und Thomas Bernhard (1973): 7. Jean Paul, however, resists this negative assessment of fantasy which he considers not an escape but a circuitous approach to reality. See Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 75. 21 Not without trouble: the dreamer goes, quite literally, home in pain: nostalgia comes from the Greek combination of nostos, a return to one’s home, and algia, pain. 22 These are Jean Paul’s words. 23 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 77. 24 In German Wunschraum, literally a wish-space. 25 See Tismar, Gestörte Idyllen: Eine Studie zur Problematik der idyllischen Wunschvorstellungen am Beispiel Jean Paul, Adalbert Stifter, Robert Walser und Thomas Bernhard (1973): 42. 26 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1980): 41. 20

of power-free [herrschaftsfreie] conditions.”20 The idyll shares this characteristic with utopia. However, utopia is an absent ‘presence’ where a better social existence than the present one is thought possible in the future, while in the idyll the dreamer retreats from the present situation and contemplates, nostalgically,21 conditions in the past that appear more beautiful in the imagination. Consequently Tismar names the idyll a “restorative utopia” whose irony lies in the contradiction that the hope to become happier than objective conditions in society allow, reaffirms initially these same conditions. The opposition describes a general dilemma: it is the difficult state [Zwangslage] of an individual who sees no way out of the social pressures except to interiorize what is presented to the self. The idyll as utopia depends on a pre-stabilized harmony where the “infinite unity”22 of the universe is visible, especially at a small scale. However, there exists in this self-assurance also a general fear that reality outside the fantasy could really be different. The more the external conditions in the form of social, economic, political changes give reason to those fears, the more the idyll threatens to revert to its opposite. The idyll represents therefore both intimacy and familiarity, as well as their opposite, extreme isolation and alienation of a subject divorced from any reality outside itself. “The zero of naught and the circle of perfection have the same sign” Jean Paul writes in Siebenkäs.23 The represented ‘space of fantasy’24 turns into a locus where the subject, in defending itself against disturbing conflicts, encounters the social and historical pressures from which it tried to distance itself in the first place.25 The consequences of the escape turn back on the dreamer. Jean Paul recalls in Schulmeisterlein Wutz how the protagonist, after closing the shutters at night, looks from the interior apprehensively out into his own Stube which mirrors itself in the glass panes.26

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Figure 2: G. F. Kersting: Mann beim Lampenlicht [Man in the Lamplight], from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 53.

Hamerow, History of Germany (1977): 100. 28 The namesake of Die Wahlverwandtschaften was a translation of the Latin natural science work De attractionibus electivis, published in 1785, whose author, the Swedish scholar Tobern Bergmann, described different chemical substances that attract or repel each other. See Beutler, Nachwort zu Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1988): 263. 29 The assigning of relationships [Verwandtschaften] happens not until well into the book. Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 41/57. Please note the following convention: the number before the slash in the references to Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften refers to the German edition of 1963. The number behind the slash refers to the English edition of 1971. 30 For an in-depth discussion of the importance of names in Die Wahlverwandtschaften see Schlaffer, Namen und Buchstaben in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1981): 211229. 31 Zons, Ein Denkmal voriger Zeiten: Über die Wahlverwandtschaften (1981): 349. For a more thorough analysis of the importance of names in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, see Ibid.: 327. His understanding of the various appearance of the name Otto is compelling: Eduard and the Captain are called Otto; both Charlotte and Ottilie contain variations of this name: Charlotte, Ottilie. However, it may be indicative of both Zons’ and Goethe’s position with respect to women that Charlotte’s and Ottilie’s names are modified male names; i.e. their incomplete identity depends on a complete male counterpart.

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In contrast to Jean Paul, Goethe accepted the existing system of civic and social values, regarding the disunity of proto-Germany as an “expression of its historic character” and consequently “urged his countrymen to seek greatness not in collective action but in individual perfectibility.”27 The gravity with which Goethe defends this position stands in direct opposition to Jean Paul’s method of utilizing humor as an arguably effective antidote and tool of critique to repressive social and political conditions. While Jean Paul blurs the difference between interior and exterior space, Goethe, in Die Wahlverwandtschaften,28 takes pains to retain the established hierarchies and to uphold the barriers that exist between different social classes. Die Wahlverwandtschaften begins as an idyll, a setting in the countryside. An aristocratic couple, Eduard and Charlotte, work hard on maintaining their cultivated idleness through the manipulation, design, and transformation of their social, cultural, and physical environment. But even on the first pages of the novel the idyllic frame is threatened with the invitation and subsequent arrival of two new characters, Ottilie and the Captain, who form the respective complement of attraction to Eduard and Charlotte.29 In the course of the story Charlotte represents a rational character who resists her desire for the Captain. Eduard, however, becomes increasingly passionate and irrational in his desire for Ottilie. The Captain is Charlotte’s ‘natural’ complement, Ottilie is Eduard’s.30 These coupled relationships explain also the title of the novel which initially was planned as a novella to be inserted into Goethe’s earlier novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. The novella, which mirrors the form of the idyll as a small poem, is to the novel what the idyll is to the poem. The economy of Die Wahlverwandtschaften is evident in its sparse writing and the absence of characters’ names (aside from the four main actors), or, in the case where names are given, their intersection with the actors’ functions. For example, Mittler (the English equivalent would be Meddler), represents a character who both mediates between and meddles in other peoples’ affairs; Otto, both Eduard and the Captain share this name, derives from the Germanic ‘the one who owns’ (der Besitzende, literally ‘the one who sits on’). Eduard, from the Anglo-Saxon means the one who takes care of what he owns.31 This doubling, reflecting, and shifting of names finds its equivalent in the events that take place in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Ironically, while Eduard maintains his possessions initially through constant adjustments and improvements, he focuses later, as Otto, exclusively on attempting to own Ottilie. Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften can be read as the construction and simultaneous destruction of three interrelated idyllic spaces. In the first reading the main house or mansion is the place where soon after the idyllic

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beginning of the story, personal relationships begin to shift: Charlotte and Eduard, and the Captain and Ottilie split. The women occupy one part of the mansion, the men the other.32 The balance of forces, a forced balance, exists no longer. In the second case the moss-hut, Charlotte’s construction, appears almost finished on the novel’s first page. The moss-hut as place of Ur-interiority, as primitive hut, can also be understood as the desire to leave the mansion, to mark off an exterior space differentiated from the patriarchial control in the main house. Charlotte has sited the hut not insignificantly opposite the mansion, that is, in opposition to it. In the third reading the pavilion or Lusthaus (a house of pleasure) works as a figure of illicit liaison and isolation. Ottilie has located the building so that from its position one can see “neither the mansion, the village nor any other settlements.”33 In the course of Die Wahlverwandtschaften the pavilion takes over the role of the moss-hut as an idyllic refuge: when the skeleton of the former is finished, the structure is decorated with branches and flowers in “order to take the raw looks from the building.”34 The threat of destruction, however, is built into the very substructure of the pavilion. The foundation-stone [Grundstein] functions at the same time as a memory capsule [Denkstein].35 The Grundstein is supposed to provide a solid foundation but in order to function as a Denkstein it has to be hollow: the hollow stone vessel contains trifles, “different coins, buttons from the uniform of a soldier, combs, small flasks”36 that the owner inserted into the space at a special celebration.37 The possibility that this “firm-sealed lid [Deckel] may one day be opened again, which could not happen unless that which has not yet even been built were all to be destroyed again,”38 threatens to transform the idyllic utopia into an ‘unnatural’ heterotopia. The idyll, however, is not only threatened by the architectural detail of the pavilion but also by Eduard’s and Charlotte’s illicit desires. The crisis comes to a head when Ottilie copies Eduard’s handwriting39 to the point where a distinction between his and her script is no longer possible. The ability of Ottilie to copy, to forge Eduard’s handwriting so accurately requires the capacity to think and act as the other person. It is symptomatic of Goethe’s ambivalent relationship to women that, on one side, he frames Charlotte as heroine and, on the other hand, increasingly silences Ottilie until in the end she no longer speaks and her ‘presence’ is reduced to mute diary entries. As a consequence of Ottilie’s identity-shift and transmogrification into a Doppelgänger of Eduard, the latter moves beyond the contractual and conventional frames of reasoned behavior. He is lost in his own house, “his rooms, his surroundings have all changed, they all look different.”40 He is driven toward infinity—beyond all bounds. The “gardens are too confined”, the “field too broad and distant.”41 Internal passion has torn apart the comfortable middle ground of the idyll. The exterior is no

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Ibid.: 46. Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 62/76 The view is into another space, a space of ‘neither’, a no-space: utopia. 34 Ibid.: 109/123. 35 A Denkstein is literally a thinkstone. 36 Ibid.: 1988: 65. 37 In Germany this event is still observed in construction today as a Richtfest, that is, a festivity in celebration of things that have been both righted [gerichtet] and judged [richten] to be fit for occupation. 38 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 72/85. 39 The metamorphosis is gradual. On the first pages of the manuscript her handwriting is still discernable. Only towards the end of the copying process does she become he. 40 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 107/120. 41 Ibid: 100/113. 32

Ibid: 117/131. “Das Aeußerste liegt der Leidenschaft zu allernächst.” In German außen and aeußerst appear more closely related than the English exterior and extreme, respectively. 43 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 8. “Ich übernahm das Innere, du das Aeußere und was in Ganze geht.” 44 Ibid.: 119/133. 45 Ibid.: 118/132. “Ich will mich ihrer bemächtigen,” literally “I will have power over her.” 46 Ibid.: 48/63. 47 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971). 48 For a reading of the gendered spaces in Loos’ buildings see Colomina, Beatriz, ed. Sexuality and Space. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). 49 The Oxford English Dictionary (online edition) defines the tableau vivant or pose plastique as a “representation of the action at some stage in a play, created by the actors suddenly holding their positions or ‘freezing’, especially at a moment critical to the plot, or at the end of a scene or act.” 50 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1963/1971): 170/184 “she kept the rest [of the people] strictly within those bounds of propriety which she seemed at any moment to be on the point of overstepping herself.” Emphasis mine.

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longer different from the interior. Ironically it is Charlotte who states later, in a different context, that “extremes and passion go hand in hand.”42 Goethe’s initially ambiguous position in Die Wahlverwandtschaften gives way to a solidly conservative stance when he restricts the women’s spatial mobility (Charlotte, Ottilie, Luciane) while he simultaneously allows the male characters (the two Englishmen, Eduard, Mittler, the Count) to control or at least attempt to control the spatial relations in the narrative. Furthermore, in their inability to deal with women on equal ground Goethe lets his male characters refocus their agoraphobia in a relentless effort to order, plan, control, and limit exterior nature. Goethe reveals the gendered interior in his characterization of Charlotte’s relationship to Eduard: Charlotte says that she “took over the interior, and [Eduard] the exterior and what concerns the whole.”43 Women thus operate on the partial, the detail, while men work on the exterior and on that which tends towards totality. Women in Goethe’s world occupy relative, men absolute, Newtonian, space. The degree of violence to which Goethe takes the physical limitation of women in Die Wahlverwandtschaften can be discerned in one of several of Eduard’s attempts to own [besitzen] Ottilie. At some point Eduard decides to leave the mansion, on the condition that Charlotte can keep the house if Ottilie stays there, too.44 This double-bind would keep both women immobilized in the space he owns, or sits on [besitzt] which is the historical meaning of the word ‘own’. Eduard states unambiguously that “she belongs to me and I will have her” if she leaves the grounds.45 Outside these set boundaries Ottilie is fair game for Eduard, inside she is confined to the same limits.46 The architectural boundary works both ways: the congruence between ascribed identity and space goes so far that in German the word Frauenzimmer47 can be used to describe both the woman and the architectural object as in “the room of the woman”, or Zimmer der Dame as the architect Adolf Loos would use the word less ambiguously but nevertheless symptomatically in his house designs at the end of the nineteenth century.48 The forces that attempt to restore the threatened idyll in Die Wahlverwandtschaften can be located in another figure in the form of the tableaux vivant49 which works as both an attempt to arrest time and limit the mobility of women in the story. A tableaux vivant is the extension of a painting into the third dimension where movement and time are excluded—or rather, time becomes here an element of tension. As a transitory element, time is the enemy of permanence. Goethe’s temporary confinement of Luciane,50 Charlotte’s daughter, in a tableaux vivant represents the only possibility to limit her subversive domination of the chateau. Ironically it is Luciane, not Charlotte or Ottilie, who determinably questions her identity.

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In contrast to the distanced and not surprisingly predictable figure of the architect, she changes roles so often that nobody knows who she is any longer.51 In opposition to Luciane, the role of the architect suggests a complicity with the forces that represent permanence, order, and control. He not only directs but also constructs the tableaux when he builds the frames that maintain the distance between audience and performance.52 Goethe is very specific about the functions of the architect who provides safety and permanence.53 The architect’s assurance is written into his appearance “which was in itself one to inspire confidence and awaken affection.”54 He is, however, also the go-between, the mediator, and jack-of-all-trades—someone whose very mobility between functions is conveniently not threatening to his clients: “He was happy to take on any responsibility and to take care of any task, and because he had no difficulty in doing the accounts he soon knew all about the household and its running, and his beneficient influence was felt everywhere. He was usually the one to receive callers and he knew how to turn away an unexpected visitor, or if he could not do that, at any rate to prepare the women so that they suffered no inconvenience.”55 The intersection of Tismar’s interpretation of the idyll and Goethe’s tableaux vivant is apparent in the emphasis of a fixed viewpoint.56 Precisely because the staging of the characters is static, the desire for movement in an n-dimensional environment that attempts to erase time and history (although ironically the tableaux vivants in Die Wahlverwandtschaften are a staging of historical paintings), creates the palpable tension between audience and framed stage (idyll). The tableaux vivant as an operative figure of Die Wahlverwandtschaften marks the erasure of a specific historical/spatial context and the affirmation of an undifferentiated universality: nowhere in the story can the reader recognize an identifiable landscape. There are no references to any historical or political events. If one could characterize the landscape (with its multiple meanings and references to viewing) at all, it represents the idealized classicist middle-ground that had been glorified earlier by Winckelmann and Lessing. In architectural terms, Die Wahlverwandtschaften can therefore also be read as a struggle between the slow emergence of relative space, and a desperate attempt to maintain the abstract order of absolute space. The story outlines a homogeneous space that threatens to transform itself according to events not controlled by the characters; Goethe maintains the unity of time with the absence of any historical specificity; he retains the unified central constellation of the characters against all odds, and, in the absence of any fundamental change. Jean Paul writes that “every play/game is a copy of the serious.”57 The instrument that allows the infinite and the finite to occupy the same space in Jean Paul’s literary work is humor whose inverse, the sublime,58 he thinks

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Ibid.: 161/175. Ibid.: 106-107/119. 53 Not “secure and lasting foundations” as translated in the English version. 54 Ibid.: 139/155. 55 Ibid.: 139/155. 56 Zons speaks appropriately of the ossified frames of the signs and figures in Goethe. See Zons, Ein Denkmal voriger Zeiten: Über die Wahlverwandtschaften (1981): 328. 57 “Jedes Spiel ist eine Nachahmung des Ernstes.” Jean Paul, Gesammelte Schriften (1991): 444. 58 Köpke, Jean Paul Richter’s School of Aesthetics: Humor and the Sublime (1988): 188 argues that one has to distinguish Jean Paul’s applied infinite of the sublime from Kant’s and Schiller’s infinite sublime which, as a mathematically determined sublime affects vision, and as a dynamic sublime affects hearing. 51

Ibid.: 194. Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 243. 61 With a second edition printed in 1813. 62 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1980): 43. 63 See Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 244. “Whereas Jean Paul urged his audience to grasp life with their senses [and the mind] Goethe wants to make the audience blissful [heiter].” Köpke, Jean Paul Richter’s School of Aesthetics: Humor and the Sublime (1988): 195. 64 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 77. 65 Jean Paul lived in Weimar from 1798-1800 and developed during that time a close friendship with Herder. The Preschool, published in 1804, is dedicated to Herder, who died in 1803. 59

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of as the applied infinite. Jean Paul’s example to elucidate this theory runs as follows: if the sublime sensation would be one of pain mixed with pleasure due to the greatness of the sensation, then the most sublime object, God, would have to cause the greatest pain. Jean Paul’s resistance to authority, expressed in the statement that “if one gave the Bible to a savage to read, he would scarcely deduce from it anything resembling the orthodoxies,” does not go so far as to deny an individual’s need for a belief in God. It questions, however, the uncritical acceptance of power structures. His humor functions via a shuttling between affirmation and criticism. “Humor as inverted sublime annihilates not the individual but the finite through its contrast with the idea. [The] individual humorist is caught in the web of details of this insignificant finite world, measuring it against that infinity and eternity which has to be posited, but cannot be experienced as real.”59 Goethe’s language in Die Wahlverwandtschaften stands probably most clearly in opposition to Jean Paul’s humorous writing. Ernst Beutler, in his epilogue to the 1988 Reclam edition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, compares Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers to Die Wahlverwandtschaften and notes the latter’s cold and barren language as dictated by reason rather than by the heart. The difference between both writers is also evident in another shared figure. While Jean Paul compares the gardener to the true poet who marries art and nature,60 Goethe’s gardener Eduard, who in the opening sentence of Die Wahlverwandtschaften produces hybrids by grafting small branches on young trees, starts a process that will have destroyed two lives by the end of the novel. Jean Paul theorized his ideas in the Vorschule der Aesthetik [Preschool of Aesthetics] which was published in 1804 (with a second .61 The humorous character of the Preschool is revealed on the first page where Jean Paul parodies the Kantian need for organization and categorization: “In order to assert the strict form and uniformity of the whole even in the preface, I will write it in paragraphs.”62 Humor aside, though, the Preschool is the theorizing of a practitioner who is not only interested in the formal aspects of literature but also in the ways in which it operates.63 Jean Paul consequently considers poetry not as a predominantly aesthetic but rather as a productive art. In opposition to late romantic authors, he understands writing to have an external objective. Writing is not art for art’s sake. His statement that “we play for real, not for play”64 can therefore be seen as a criticism of Schlegel’s irony and an affirmation of Herder65 who conceived of poetry as a “mode of coming to terms with reality. Whereas most of [Herder’s] contemporaries conceived of [poetry] either as a product of learning or as a means of amusement, he considered [it] as an involuntary

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reaction to the stimulus of events rather than as a deliberate act.”66 Here is an example of Jean Paul’s operative writing: already in 1796 he states explicitly that the prologue to the second edition of his Quintus Fixlein is a declaration of war against “aestheticising tendencies of conceiving art as autonomous.”67 Nevertheless, Herder’s work on the fusion of haptic and optic perception into feeling [Gefühl] as a medium of thought which he compared to the sense of touch [fühlen] influenced both Jean Paul’s and Goethe’s production. Whereas sight apprehends things at a distance, “feeling enjoys an immediate experience of reality.”68 While Goethe moved in his later years toward a classicist mode of writing, Jean Paul always understood the relationship between the subject and its environment as an experience of infinity which he considered a precondition of the sublime which emerges as a result of the experience of ultimate limits. Casey echoes this when he states that “comic romanticism, that is, Jean Paul’s work is—by contrast with classical objectivity—the sovereign of subjectivity.”69 This, among other idiosyncratic characteristics like the use of invented words, puns, and the use of homonyms, makes the reading of Jean Paul‘s work difficult but also challenging in a positive sense. The multi-valent aspect of his work is expressed in Villa’s assessment: Jean Paul‘s writing “resists reduction into a two-dimensional plane: it has to perform on multiple levels; it is a polyvalent prose, with several keyboards and pedals.”70 Maria Mnioch finds Jean Paul most interesting because of his experiments with language. She comments that his work can not be called by one name.71 Wolf Zucker reads Jean Paul’s complexity in an arguably baroque manner where “things are no longer important, but their possibilities to relate [Beziehungsmöglichkeiten]. That is why for the poet all things have equal value. The smallest thing is as important as the largest, [...] all things can enter into all relations with each other.”72 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a language rivaling that of Jean Paul, describes the latter’s preference of proximity [Nähe]. He writes that in Jean Paul’s work everything is “patched together and constructed chaos, everything is allusion and simile, newly invented and strange, artificial words brought together from astronomy, gardening or law as well as the art of cooking.”73 Unfortunately, Jean Paul’s work has also been compared with the art of the conservative Biedermeier painter Spitzweg74 and that presumably not only because he appropriated for his theory of novels the names from schools of painting. Furthermore Hofmannsthal wrote about Jean Paul’s literary ‘paintings’,75 and Walter Benjamin has articulated the ‘colors‘ in Jean Paul’s work and his fantastic descriptions as being at home in the world of color.76

Irmscher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1985): 869. 67 Sprengel, Innerlichkeit: Jean Paul oder das Leiden an der Gesellschaft (1977): 97. 68 Irmscher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1985): 868. 69 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 255. 70 Villa, Wiederbegegnung mit einem Modernen. Jean Paul zum 200. Geburtstag (1980): 297. 71 Mnioch, Excerpt from Gedanken über mancherlei Lektüre: Goethe und Jean Paul (1798): 15. Her emphasis. 72 Zucker, Der barocke Konflikt Jean Pauls (1927): 253. The parallel to Benjamin‘s characterization of allegory is striking. 73 Hofmannsthal, Jean Pauls Werk (1913): 229. 74 Sprengel, Jean Paul im Urteil seiner Kritiker: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Jean Pauls in Deutschland (1980): 292 Spitzweg is to Germany in the nineteenth century what Norman Rockwell is to the United States in the twentieth century. 75 Hofmannsthal, Jean Pauls Werk (1913): 228. 76 See Benjamin (1934) quoted in Sprengel, Jean Paul im Urteil seiner Kritiker: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Jean Pauls in Deutschland (1980) 267. Benjamin published this article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on March 29, 1934, Nr. 160/161 under his pseudonym K. A. Stempflinger. 66

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Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847) was a friend of the painter Caspar David Friedrich whose landscape paintings can be seen as the exterior complement to Kerstings interiors. The interpretation of Friedrich’s work as patriotic paintings which influenced nationalistic tendencies in the Confederation of the Rhine had its parallel in a brief series of works by Kersting, created during the Wars of Liberation, in which he represented no longer his well-known interiors but instead exterior landscapes similar to Friedrich’s. However, the failure of the liberal forces to succeed in this war was apparent by 1815 and the disillusioned Kersting moved in 1816 to Warsaw to resume painting idyllic interiors. The interior as genre, where the world of things [Dingwelt] portraits the objectified character of its occupants, marks the Verselbständigung of the interior space.78 The objectification of the interior in Kersting’s work can be read as the figure of a classicist ideal—a complete world [heile Welt] that is “symbolically reduced to the interior.”79 However, Kersting’s interiors do not represent Winckelmann’s ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’80 but are instead depictions of a cool sobriety [Kargheit]81 in which his solitary figures are usually shown from the back. There is however a clear differentiation in the work these figures do. The men are without exception engaged in an abstract activity such as reading or writing and/or are depicted in a detached space: Kersting’s Mann am Sekretär [Man at the Bureau] is shown writing a letter at a bureau standing perpendicular to a window. On the top of the bureau stand various bottles, several books, the plaster cast of a hand, some rolled-up sheets of paper, and an anatomical figure shown from the back

Figure 3: Painting on wall in G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], first version, painted in Dresden in 1812, from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 54.

Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 267. 78 Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 78-79, investigates some of Kersting’s interior drawings that are devoid of people but full of present absences. 79 Neidhardt, Die Malerei der Romantik in Dresden (1976): 123 quoted in Spitzer, ‘Die Stickerin’. Überlegungen zu Modell und Motiv (1985): 38. 80 Irvin, Winckelmann: Writings on Art (1972): 73 from Winckelmann, On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755). 81 In their absence of excess, Kersting’s interior paintings, described by Wohlfarth as an undecorated and bourgeois, somewhat “sober-cool milieu,” (Wohlfahrt, Die Frau am Fenster (1937): 68), have a proximity to Goethe’s language in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, which Beutler characterized as cold and barren. Beutler, Nachwort zu Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1988): 263. 77

Casey argues that an idyll demands the “brightest [...] colors.”77 The word ‘idyll derives from the Greek eidullion, which is a short, descriptive poem, diminutive of eidos, a form or picture. In other words, an idyll may be that small picture which hangs on the walls of several of Kersting’s interior paintings where the representations of Stube take on a more visible form.

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Kersting painted the different versions in 1812, 1817, and 1827 respectively. 82

with its right arm missing. On the wall hangs a plaster cast of a foot. The resistance of man in relationship to material is figured here in the simulated physicality, and in a deflection away from sensual ‘nature’. The men in the paintings study the body in its absence, not in its materially but in its form. In Der elegante Leser [The elegant Reader] tactile hand-work gives way to an optical activity of scanning pages. Kersting’s obsession with working (reading, writing, embroidering) yet stationary people in an interior can be seen particularly well in the sequence of three slightly different versions of Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer]82 where a woman is shown facing a window. Although her view, if she were to look up, would not only be filtered, screened, and mediated by the flowerpots on the exterior window sill but also blocked off physically from the outside by the embroidery frame. The exterior is filtered through domesticated ‘nature’ brought to the threshold of inside and outside as a doubled representation: the painting of plants in flowerpots. A comprehension of the exterior in Kersting’s paintings is only possible through framed, domesticated, regulated viewing. Nature is here simultaneously medium and mediated representation of an other exterior.

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Figure 4: Top row from left to right: G. F. Kersting: Mann am Sekretär [Man at the Bureau], from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 50; G. F. Kersting: Mann am Sekretär [Man at the Bureau], detail, from ibid.: 49; G. F. Kersting: Der elegante Leser [The elegant Reader], from ibid.: 51; and G. F. Kersting: Der elegante Leser [The elegant Reader], detail, from ibid.: 52. Bottom row from left to right: G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], second version, 1817, from ibid.: 99; G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], third version, 1827, from ibid.: 156; and G. F. Kersting: Stickende Frau [Embroidering Women], from ibid.: 187.

According to Spitzer, ‘Die Stickerin’. Überlegungen zu Modell und Motiv (1985) the first version shows Louise Seidler, a painter and musician who lived together with another painter, Lotte Stieler, in the house of their teacher Wilhelm von Kügelgen. The latter two depict Kersting’s wife Agnes. 84 Spitzer, ‘Die Stickerin’. Überlegungen zu Modell und Motiv (1985), using the bindweed around the picture frame as reference (it was used in the early nineteenth century as a symbol of trust and connectedness [Verbundenheit] as well as a cemetery plant) suggests that the painting on the back wall in the 1812 version shows Seidler’s dead husband Geoffrey. 85 Spitzer, ‘Die Stickerin’. Überlegungen zu Modell und Motiv (1985) points to the practice of bourgeois women to supplement their income through embroidering in times of financial duress. See also Uhde, Erinnerungen der Malerin Louise Seidler (1965): 41 and 111. 86 Runge was given the title ‘embroidery director’ in the house of the artist Graff since he designed many embroidery patterns for furniture. See Traeger, Philipp Otto Runge (1975): 337.

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Kersting continues this shuttle between inside and outside as a play of complementary forces in the interior representation of space. The woman’s face83 is reflected in the mirror to the right of the window. The individual—body and reflected face—appears as a divided entity of complementary parts, not as a doubling as the mirror might initially imply; the window has the mirror as its referent: the mediated view passing through the window frame (glass, mullions) and through the flowers into the exterior is complemented by the (reflected) view of the interior through the mirror; between inside and outside the embroidery frame works as a secondary barrier to its accompaniment, the part of the wall under the window sill which is level with the embroidered textile. The embroidery itself is supplemented on the exterior by the window sill and, at a larger scale, by the landscape beyond. The absent man in Die Stickerin returns in the guitar on the sofa and the portrait on the wall, still scanning, surveying the room (and the woman) from a superior, privileged position.84 One question that has not been answered so far is why Kersting would depict Louise Seidler (the woman in the first version) not in her profession as a painter or pianist but as an embroiderer,85 especially in light of designs for embroidery patterns by such male artists as Phillip Otto Runge86 and Caspar David Friedrich as well as Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The difference of how men represent women points once more to the power of literary and painted images to influence and thereby construct repressive social, cultural, and political relations. In other words, the idyll is not as idyllic as it seems. And perhaps a return to the idyll is in the end as impossible, and as undesirable, as a future utopia.

Figure 5: Left, Stickerin and detail of window with plants blocking the view, G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], detail of first version, 1812, from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 55; right, G. F. Kersting: Die Stickerin [The Embroiderer], detail of second version, 1817, from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 100.

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The German Dichtung comes from dichten which means both to densify and to write poetry. 88 As shown above, this undecided tableaux, and its concomitant resistance to movement, is also characteristic of Kersting’s other interiors. The activities of both man and women are strictly differentiated spatially. 87

The eidullion as a short poetry form [Dichtung]87 and hence as a representation of increased density, pressure or difficulty, finds its pictorial counterpart in a late sketch by Kersting entitled Ernst und Ännchen auf dem Sofa from 1843. Figure 6: G. F. Kersting: Ernst und Ännchen auf dem Sofa [Ernst and Ännchen on the Sofa], Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 147.

In this case the combination of the tightness of the space, the couple’s placement—squeezed onto a sofa with no place to move—and the difference in their respective work, Ernst’s writing and Ännchen’s sewing, indicates a particularism in thought and action still in place in proto-Germany at the middle of the nineteenth century. This particularism depended on close proximity of its constitutive parts, i.e. density, and yet also an individual resistance to interaction between oneself and others [Abschottung]. Sprengel calls this condition in reference to Jean Paul’s writing this ‘miserable tightness [kümmerliche Enge].’ In other paintings by Kersting, where couples are represented, for example in Paar am Fenster, both are caught in a moment that resists interaction and renders them isolated in their separate activities: the parallel and petrified contemplation of the exterior through the open window frame.88

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Figure 7: Left, G. F. Kersting: Paar am Fenster [Pair in front of the Window], from Gärtner, Georg Friedrich Kersting (1988): 98; and right, detail of the same.

A Furche is literally a ‘rut’ in a field. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1980): 5. 91 Sprengel, Innerlichkeit: Jean Paul oder das Leiden an der Gesellschaft (1977): 93. 92 Ibid.: 95. This undermines Casey’s reading of Jean Paul’s embrace of extremes as a synthesis. Synthesis implies too much a neutralization of the effects extreme opposites assert in a dialectical relationship. The methodological parallels between Jean Paul and Benjamin remain to be traced. 93 Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1988): 3 and 261 respectively. 94 Ibid.: 204/217. 89

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For an idyll to operate it has to delimit the space and thus the people who occupy it. Both Kersting and Goethe abide by this dictum. Their work, however, in its support of the dominant ideologies of the time does not question authority but is rather complicit with them. On the other hand, Jean Paul, in his rendering of the idyll, is critical of these cultural conditions at the same time that he acknowledges the impossibility to work from the outside. He distinguishes between three related modes of production, that is, writing. The first, utopian, approach is to push “far beyond the clouds of life”; the second, more pragmatic, “to comfortably occupy a niche [Furche];89” and the third, which he thinks is the most difficult and most cunning (and not surprisingly the one he prefers), “to move back and forth between the two others.”90 In this shuttling motion Jean Paul is unable to occupy the classical middle ground of idealized aesthetics91 for any length of time since the discrepancy between self and world is too large to allow for restrained statements.92 Goethe’s complicit stance in alignment with the dominant powers of state emerges once more if Die Wahlverwandtschaften is read as a didactic piece [Lehrstück] or perhaps an allegory of early nineteenth-century conditions in Germany where the ultimate idyll as rationally and physically inaccessible utopia is restored when both Ottilie and Eduard occupy their respective coffins in the interiority of the chapel. At the end of the novel the ‘enlightened’ characters of Charlotte and the Captain survive, although they are certainly anything but happy with their lives. But then again, the story is perhaps nothing but a fairy tale; and here the seriousness of the play can be inscribed in the very complexity of the fairy-tale construction: the first sentence refers clearly to a fictitious account (not recognizable in the 1971 English translation) and the last sentence, in proper fairy-tale manner, suggests that both Eduard and Ottilie might still live happily ever after when they awake again together in another world: “Eduard - that is how we will call a rich baron in his best years. . . ” and “. . . what a joyful moment it will be when they will awake again in another time.”93 While Goethe and Kersting focus in their work on the limitations imposed on their characters in a way that reinforces the acceptance of these restrictions, Jean Paul understands the same limitations as the possibility of moving beyond the sense of confinement they represent. Goethe argues conformistically in Die Wahlverwandtschaften that “we think we are acting of our own volition, ourselves choosing what we shall do and what we shall enjoy; but when we look more closely we see they are only the intentions and inclinations of the age which we are being compelled to comply with.”94 In the end, elective affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften] have little to do with choice and neither have the figures in Kersting’s paintings who remain

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Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 36. 96 Villa, Wiederbegegnung mit einem Modernen. Jean Paul zum 200. Geburtstag (1980): 297. 97 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 76. 95

framed within the confines of their domestic interiors. And yet, even in Jean Paul’s work the apparent difference between ‘lived’ and represented reality is not beyond reproach: he apparently produced most of his writing away from home in a rented study in the Rollwenzelei, a bed-and-breakfast in the outskirts of Bayreuth, where ”he could write undisturbed his idylls of domesticity.”95

Figure 8: Left, Jean Paul’s workspace on the second floor of the guesthouse Rollwenzelei in Bayreuth, image from Oberfränkischer Ansichtskartenverlag Bayreuth, from Krüger, Wuz und Quintus Fixlein: Eine vergleichende Betrachtung (1961): 39; and right, Jean Paul’s workspace [Arbeitsstübchen] at the Rollwenzelei, drawn after nature, lithography by H. Stelzner. Berend, Auf Besuch bei Jean Paul (1962): 17.

Nevertheless, Jean Paul’s emphasis on humorous and hypertrophied subjectivty, which finds its negative and completely non-humorous referent in Goethe’s Eduard, may explain the tension in their relationship expressed in Goethe’s evaluation of Jean Paul as a “contemporary nightmare.”96 Goethe referred with this statement to Jean Paul’s published Dream of a Mad Person “as one of the most dreadful examples of the way in which the humorous, because it has in itself no law and support, easily degenerates into melancholy and ill humor. For his part, however, Jean Paul rejected such support. The comic genius is like a bell, he says in The Comet - dull when it touches the earth. It must hang free in order to give a full sound.”97

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Figure 9: Jean Paul painting by Bruno Höflinger. Langenmaier, Jean-Paul-Aphorismen, zusammengestellt von Dr. Th. Langenmaier - Teil V der ‘Goldenen Worte Jean Pauls’ (1961): 3; notice the canary in the right foreground.

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Workspace for a Musician and an Architect

While still taking pro-seminars I yearned to develop some conventional designs. Since Miriam and I were mostly reading and writing (she finished her dissertation on the choral music of Ernst Toch during these years as well) I designed a double desk for a musician and an architect. The musicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side has a keyboard, the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a desktop computer. The structure links both sides of the desk. The proportional system of the desk parts are based on our respective names: each letter is assigned an inch value based on its position in the alphabet. The design remains a project but I imagine it being built at some point in the future. The rough renders are formZ-based.

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Double desk al fresco

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The Dialectics of the Collector: On Museums, Images, and Practical Recollections

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n 1994 I took a seminar with Alan Colquhoun on the Frankfurt School where we read classics like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger. Being able to read these authors in their original German language was difficult but also quite useful, especially when it came to the translations of Heidegger’s seminal Sein und Zeit, which—as I found out during the seminar—has in some cases serious shortcomings in the English translation.

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The Dialectics of the Collector: On Museums, Images, and Practical Recollections When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an “other” among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum: where shall we go this weekend—visit Angkor ruins or take a stroll in the Tivoli of Copenhagen? We can very easily imagine a time close at hand when any fairly well-to-do person will be able to leave his country indefinitely in order to taste his own national death in an interminable, aimless voyage. Ricoeur, Civilization and National Cultures (1965)

Collecting is the ur-phenomenon of studying: the student collects knowledge. [...] A kind of productive disorder… Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991)

Section 1

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his paper consists of a string of sections in the form of dialectical Bilder (images and pictures)1 that are emblematic of the different manifestations of the collector in relationship to public collections in museums, individual collections in private houses, and the (inter)section of the collection with the interior and exterior in contemporary information technology. Jennifer Bloomer’s rendering of the architectural section as “a kind of text that has been lifted out (dissected), a text that can be read, that is, misread or rewritten,”2 and the implied incompletion of the section points to a tactic employed by both Walter Benjamin and Aloïs Riegl,3 a tactic that is concerned with the analysis of artifacts from everyday life and their position in history. Riegl’s influence on Benjamin can be traced to the former’s rejection of the “supremacy of the individual creator as central to the significance of the work,”4 which developed in Benjamin’s theories into the well-known essay on mechanical reproduction. Another influence was Riegl’s assertion that there exists nothing outside history.5 His main contribution to scholarship

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The German word Bild, used by Walter Benjamin to describe the relationship of the past to the present, has usually been translated as image. However, in its meaning as picture the word ‘Bild’ also refers to a more concrete manifestation that would include not only the objects being viewed but also the viewer as occupant. 2 Bloomer, In the Museyroom (1987): 60. 3 On at least one occasion Benjamin called Riegl his intellectual godfather [Ziehvater]; see Unseld, Zur Aktualituat Walter Benjamins. Aus Anlass des 80. Geburtstages von Walter Benjamin (1972): 46 and 51. For a more thorough analysis of the intellectual interdependence between Riegl and Benjamin see Levin, Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to “Rigorous Study of Art” (1988). Both were avid collectors who worked within collections; Benjamin in Paris in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Riegl in Vienna in the Museum of Arts and Crafts. 4 Zerner, Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism (1976): 179; Benjamin read Riegl’s Der Moderne Denkmalskultus in 1933; see references in Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke (1991): III.1, 372, 562 and 656ff. 5 See Zerner, Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism (1976): 183.

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The result is that any human activity and human fate of which there is “proof or knowledge can claim without exception historic value.”12 The resistance to leave anything out mirrors the interest of the collector for whom the last missing piece in a collection is as important as all the parts already gathered. This fragmentary condition of any incomplete collection reflects, at a larger scale, the isolation of the modern individual in western society.13 More specifically I will argue that the collector can be read as an archetype of the modern. This hypothesis is based on an analysis of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk which Heiner Weidmann reads as an attempt to rehabilitate the nineteenth century as a secret, unredeemed twentieth century in that the former still influences the latter, assuming that the ‘nineteenth century’ as it is used in Benjamin’s work does not describe only a

Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalskultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (1929): 147; see Zerner, Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism (1976): 180 for the variant interpretations of this term. 7 See Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Das Holländisches Gruppenporträt and Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, for example. Riegl is also the proponent of a cultural history for which “even the smallest and especially the smallest can have meaning. This meaning rests merely in the historical conviction of the irreplaceability of even the smallest within the development.” See Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalskultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (1929): 155. 8 Levin, Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to “Rigorous Study of Art” (1988): 77. 9 Riegl 1929a: 146. See also Alan Colquhoun’s discussion of these terms in Colquhoun, ‘Newness’ and ‘Age Value’ in Aloïs Riegl (1991). 10 Zerner, Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism (1976): 186, paraphrasing Riegl. 11 Ibid.: 186. 12 Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalskultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (1929): 145. 13 One of these conditions is that the modern individual “in his or her inner core at least, remains isolated. [...] What is totally absent [in modernity], and what Kracauer calls for, is a form of association based on community.” Frisby, Siegfried Kracauer: ‘Exemplary Instances’ of Modernity (1985): 114-115.

There is always an aesthetic side to our historical interest, but there is an art-historical value as well, which considers the object specifically as an irreplaceable link in the development of art. This value is a historical value, the object being considered as a record, but as a record of art, its aesthetic value comes to the fore.11

was, however, to question the relative importance of a work of art. Riegl always considered the individual work of art in relation to its cultural context, expressed in his rather pliable term Kunstwollen6 which Zerner believes replaced the word style or what we call fashion today. The above reference to tactics reflects both Riegl’s and Benjamin’s preference for a historiography concerned not with the grand narratives of a history of winners (those who make and write official histories) but rather the history of those who were left in the margins.7 My analysis of the collector coincides with Riegl’s and Benjamin’s concern to consider art history as a cypher of cultural production.8 Within this cultural production their emphasis on marginal, and from an art historian’s point of view, questionable periods in history can be read in itself as a tactic that simultaneously threatens (as an emphasis on ex-centric borders) and supports (as a framing) the center of conventional historiography. Riegl’s taxonomy of values may be useful here to point to a historiography that is mindful of the importance of minor works. Riegl argues that every art object is a record,9 has thus historical significance, and has also a value as art. What he calls ‘historical value’ [Geschichtswert] is objective and stable; the ‘artistic value’ [Kunstwert], however, is “entirely dependent on the taste of the day (and of the individual observer) [and] is consequently subjective and variable.”10 In the end he points to the rather close alliance between the following two aspects of an artifact:

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See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 13. 15 Kracauer, Abschied von der Lindenpassage (1963): 327. 16 See Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1975). 17 Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 132. 18 Kracauer fittingly called the arcade an “anatomical museum.” See Kracauer, Abschied von der Lindenpassage (1963): 329. 19 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut N: Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts (1991): 578. 20 Ibid.: 578. Benjamin might refer here to Otto Pächt’s positivist reading of art history as an attempt to find through the elaboration of a particular Kunstwollen the “truly determining factor which shaped [the work] exactly.” See also Pächt, Art Historians and Art Critics—VI: Alois Riegl (1963): 190.

literal time-period [Zeitraum] of one hundred years but rather a field of play [Spielraum] on which the patterns of the more rigid time frame are still being worked out. The Passagenwerk is thus not only an attempt to remember the nineteenth century as past but also to make it a thing of the past.14 Benjamin’s interest in the marginal resurfaces in the arcades that operate as figures of difference and potential societal change. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, renders the Lindenpassage in Berlin as the home of marginality and opposition. “Everything that was cut off from it because it was not worthy of representation or even ran counter to the official world view, made itself at home in the arcade.”15 More than potential sites for revolution, however, the arcades were emblems of decay; a condition that will, in another section of this paper, expand the discussion into the realm of allegory as a figure of disintegration. The dissolution into parts can also be seen in the increasing differentiation of the social, cultural, and technological environments in the nineteenth century which find their architectural expression in the subdivision of housing units into clearly defined rooms and in the specialization of machines and tools fulfilling single functions.16 Along with this increase in function comes a loss of historical consciousness. Christoph Asendorf writes that “once-familiar things have become a multitude of commodities, about which there are no stories to tell because they have no histories.”17 The fragmentary quality of the arcade, its contents, and Benjamin’s writing converge in the citation which, as a sectional insertion, has the potential to disturb the continuity of the text, and—at an architectural scale—the urban fabric. Since their ‘original’ context is missing, citations, be they literal or architectural, demand respect on the side of the reader, that is, they require re-spect, a second look, in order to decipher the multiple connections that open up with any fragmented object. The arcade is a collection of dissections.18 The ambiguity of saving the text through citation and simultaneously destroying its context is doubled when the collector saves the artifact by taking it out of market circulation and destroys its use value at the same time. Benjamin’s historical materialist “blasts the dialectical images out of the historical continuum”19 in order to site/cite them as potential spaces of action in the present. The citation of texts—a collection of artifacts—is thus also one way of reading and re-writing history. In his work Benjamin makes no attempt to write history “as it really was”20 but suggests instead that any historiography depends on the position of the historian who cannot evade his or her own involvement and investment in that re-writing.

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The building arts intersect with the collector’s historiography in three interdependent cases. One is the museum as a public house of memory with its collection of cultural artifacts in an arrangement of rooms that reveals the ideological foundation of its collectors as much as the gathered artifacts. The second is the collector’s private collection space, a kind of Wunderkammer in which the exterior is re-presented as a controllable, miniaturized interior. The third, the networked computer, is a hybrid of the former two; it makes no claims to the building arts except for some desk space, and it promises the world, albeit a virtual one, in return.

Figure 1: Paul Klee, Laboratorium, mysthische Requisiten in Art einer Käfersammlung (1915) [ink on paper on carton]; at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (in private ownership).

Section 2

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Literally to ‘keep the truth.’

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he history of collecting goes back to the beginning of time; its institutional manifestation in public museums, however, gains acceptance only in the nineteenth century. Earlier, gallerias and Wunderkammern provided the spatial enclosures for collected artifacts. The former refer to large collections while the latter consist of single rooms filled with objects that would cause wonder, as the name Wunderkammer implies. The need for either type of collection came about with the rise of archaeology as a discipline that required a place to preserve and exhibit the ‘found’ artifacts. The German bewahren [preserve] contains the root of Wahrheit [truth]. Preserving as ‘giving truth’ to a collection corresponds with aufbewahren [to keep safe].21 Both verbs point to the fictional coher-

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For a dialectics of the relationship between artifact and context see Adorno’s Valéry-Proust Museum (1977). 23 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991): 271. 24 Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 50. 25 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991): V, 279. Compare also Baudrillard, Le système des objets. La consommation des signes (1968): 110-112. 26 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991): 271.

ence of a construction that is contingent on those who make decisions of what to include in the collection, and what to keep out. According to Benjamin the complement to preservation is the destruction of the context out of which the artifact was taken.22 He writes that when collecting it is vital to extract the object out of its original context in order to bring it into the most intimate relationship with its equals. This stands in diametrical opposition to use [Nutzen] and belongs to the strange category of completeness [...] which is a grandiose attempt to overcome the complete irrationality of [the object’s] mere existence by incorporating it into a newly, especially created, historical system—the collection.23 The stripping of the object’s use value is more important to the private collector than to the museum; after all, the museum’s objects still have educational use for the public. Asendorf paraphrases Nietzsche’s understanding of the collector’s relationship to his objects: Things are not seen as commodities to be appraised but as objects with which one can communicate. The collector’s frequently eccentric life is explicable by way of this double determination: he is both a greedy, self-sacrificing miser in the economic analysis of Marx and, beyond the gesture Nietzsche styles as noble, one who tries ‘to save’ things and, in so doing, save himself. He preserves the things he has withdrawn from circulation as rudiments of the past.24

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However, the collector’s relationship with his/her constructed past is more than a self-serving attempt to preserve since there is still a need to understand, that is read, the collection. In German sammeln [collecting] has a synonym in lesen [to read] and auflesen [to pick up]. Collecting as reading is thus an interpretation of the past (and through the use of dialectical images, the present), a differentiating activity (only picking certain things and not others), and an undifferentiating accumulation of objects. Infinity is built in: reading is, like collecting, never a completely closed activity. A collection of citations like the Passagenwerk has to remain incomplete to be of use to the collector. “With regard to the collector his collection is really never complete; even if he is missing only one piece, everything he collected remains patchwork [Stückwerk].”25 Benjamin introduces the term ‘practical recollection’ [praktische Erinnerung]26 to point to the relationship between the collector and the past in the form of a reading that is a re-collective construction. History

becomes in this context an irreversible process, a distancing from origins that the historian can speculate on but not know for certain. The collector as reader/interpreter re-writes history through the collection. This action of the collector is related to the writing subject in Derrida’s theory where writing is an “attempt at immortality, [...] an enterprise by which the subject makes the self historical.”27 History is in this case something that is written/ constructed and it has to be read/deciphered. It takes on the form of a writing which is both visual and verbal, both script and image (in the sense of Bild, i.e. a construction). “When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel,28 history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script (als Schrift). The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance (Antlitz) of nature in the characters [letters] of transience (in der Zeichenschrift der Vergängnis).”29 This confusion of the visual and verbal is one characteristic of Benjamin’s understanding of allegory that requires a conscious effort by the reader to decipher objects that are taken out of their context since the expected references are absent. Owens ascribes the characteristic of uncertainty, when reading, to one of the characteristics of allegory as “the distance which separates signifier from signified, sign from meaning.”30 This acknowledgment for the difference between form and content was to accompany Benjamin throughout his life. Nowhere in his writing, however, does he articulate a clear theory of what allegory is. Instead he points to the different historical manifestations of allegory in opposition to the symbol. In a more recent interpretation of the role of allegory for contemporary criticism, which circumvents the symbol altogether, Ulmer suggests that there are two different yet interdependent types of allegory. One is

Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 53. 28 Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 33 identifies Trauerspiel with history while tragedy becomes the figure of mythology. 29 Benjamin quoted and translated by Miller, The Two Allegories (1981): 355. 30 Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part II (1980): 95. 31 Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism (1983): 95. 32 Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I (1980): 79.

‘allegoresis’, a “mode of commentary long practiced by traditional critics, ‘suspends’ the surface of the text, applying a terminology of ‘verticalness, levels, hidden meaning, the hieratic difficulty of interpretation,’ whereas the other, ‘narrative allegory’ (practiced by postcritics) explores the literal—letteral—level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves—in etymologies and puns—and in the things the words name.31

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For the building arts this tactic would have to be translated, possibly into a shuttling between a close literal—material reading of the buildings, and an attempt to uncover the hidden meanings behind, in, and on the building’s surfaces. In two essays that investigate the allegorical impulse in post-modern art Owens identifies some characteristics of allegory32 that include appro-

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Bloomer, Architecture and the Text (1993): 57. 34 Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): 325. 35 Ibid.: 320 and 332. 36 Ibid.: 406. 37 Steinhagen, Zu Walter Benjamins Begriff der Allegorie (1978): 672.

priation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, and hybridization, all of which are useful in identifying the collector: appropriation as the extraction of objects out of their former context; site-specificity as the creation of a new context in which the object gains excess meanings; impermanence as the collector’s melancholic acknowledgment of decay; accumulation in a literal (the collection itself ) and figural sense as Derrida’s supplément which Bloomer describes as “an entity added to another entity that is both in excess of that to which it is added—is excessive—and that, by nature of being added, points to, by supplying, a lack in the original entity;”33 discursivity as an impossibility of a complete collection, the unlikelihood of an ending, and the resistance to a closed totality; hybridization as a lack of perfection and the potential for new connections. These connections, though, do not allow the allegorist to break out of his/her melancholic state. Benjamin differentiates between two types of melancholic characters; the first one appears in the knowing [wissende] figure of the scholar, the brooding person, the artist and the genius.34 The other is the acting [handelnde] figure of the sovereign, tyrant, and courtier,35 all of whom rule the domain of inanimate things.36 In the last instance, however, the allegorist is a materialist who, in his/her melancholic state, “trusts the things because of their decay, and rebels secretly against their frailty and futility.”37

Figure 2: Loading dock of Decorationsdepot [Stage-prop depository] in Vienna, attributed to Gottfried Semper; from Eggert, Friedrich von Schmidt: Gottfried Semper, Carl von Hasenauer (1978).

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Benjamin’s theory of the modern as a continuous history of decline which demands a concern for objects that decay, finds its referent once more in Riegl who considers the changes in the development of perception as moving from a tactile to an optic, and from an objective to a subjective perception, with an implied loss of truly comprehending [begreifen] the object.

The history of tactile and optic perception can be traced back to Hildebrand (1847-1921) who differentiated between Fernsicht38 and Nahsicht in painting and sculpture in 1893. Hildebrand concedes preference to an active, spatial perception that would in fact shuttle between distance sight [Fernsicht], which requires no movement from the eye, and Nahsicht which only develops a clear representation of form [Formvorstellung] through a kinesthetically sensing eye activity [rege abtastende Augentätigkeit].39 Benjamin appropriated Riegl’s dialectics of tactile and optical perception of art works, expressed through Kunstwollen as a kind of metaphysical Weltanschauung, replaced the latter with a concern for the “integral expression of religious, metaphysical, political, economic tendencies of an epoch,” and in 1926 translated this concept for himself as “materiales Wollen,”40 or ‘desire for the material’. Benjamin’s concern for material is reflected in his interest in the building arts. He argues that we experience buildings “through use and through perception [Wahrnehmung],” and, he adds more pointedly, through both “tactile and optical”41 perception.

Section 3

nitially museums signify an institutionalized expression42 of the need to collect43 and exhibit artifacts whose presence as representation suggests the dispersion of knowledge. Here the museum reaches out to the encyclopedia, and marks the intersection of reason and unreason, pushing categorization and classification to the edge of absurdity while attempting to keep in control something that in the end gets by quite nicely without it. The master of this writing on the edge is surely Borges, especially in his short stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and the incomparable The Library of Babel.44 For a French representative Crimp recalls that Flaubert’s incongruous Bouvard and Pécuchet, as a literary space of heterogeneity, is an emblem not for the nineteenth century library-encyclopedia but for the museum. Crimp suggests that Bouvard and Pécuchet’s museum supersedes the library because of the “absolute heterogeneity it gathers together. The museum contains everything the library contains and it contains the library as well.”45 However, the official history of museums can be read as an attempt to deny the heterogeneity of their collections, “to reduce [them] to a homogeneous system or series.”46 Heterogeneity comes at a price, namely the absence, or possibly the apparent absence of order. Eugenio Donato writes that

The English translation (1932) of Fernsicht (literally ‘distance sight’) as visual projection in Meyer’s and Morris Ogden’s translation (revised with Hildebrand’s coöperation) is very imprecise. 39 See Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1994): 229. 40 Kemp, Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft. Teil I: Benjamin’s Beziehungen zur Wiener Schule (1973): 34. 41 Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1991a): 465; interestingly enough Benjamin compares the perception of buildings with movies, an observation that may have been based on Hildebrand’s essentially proto-cinematic theory of sculptural perception. 42 See Geddes, The Index Museum: Chapters from an Unpublished Manuscript (1989): 65-69, and his proposal for an index museum. 43 Taylor, Babel’s Tower (1945) calls it fittingly the “‘magpiety’ of mankind.” 44 Both in Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (1964): 3-18, and 51-58 respectively. 45 Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (1983): 48. 46 Ibid.: 49.

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the set of objects the museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe.

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Donato, The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet (1979): 223 quoted in Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (1983): 49. 48 See Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (1983): 45. 49 Adorno, Valéry Proust Museum (1977): 181. 50 See Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1991a): I.2, 696-697. 51 Benjamin 1991: 697. Ironically, Benjamin’s description of the historical materialist as brushing history against the grain coincides with the title of Huysmans’ book, À Rebours, whose literal translation means Against the Grain, and whose protagonist is anything but a historical materialist.

The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but ‘bric-a-brac,’ a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations.47 Crimp, when using Foucault’s description of the archive as the èpistèmé of modernism,48 points to the intimate link between modernity and the museum. Adorno, with a more critical perspective, uses the word museal [museum-like] to refer to a condition of loss in which the observer no longer has a vital relationship [to the artifacts] which are in the process of dying. [...] Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchres [Erbbegräbnisse] of works of art.49

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The instrumental interest of these writers vis-a-vis the museum is a critique of empathy, a technique Benjamin associates with the victors in history who dominate the losers. The museum as the landfill of cultural commodities [Kulturgüter] provides an incomplete version of history that leaves out the history of the repressed. In contrast to the empathetic historicist the historical materialist distances himself/herself as an observer and recognizes that the production of the Kulturgüter was possible not only through the work of geniuses but also the slave labor [Fron] of the nameless. His/her existence is never a document of culture without being simultaneously one of barbarism.50 This critical stance vis-a-vis a cultural institution like a museum allows the historical materialist to question tradition [Überlieferung] and “to brush history against the grain.”51

Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in his study (1514) [Engraving]; at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.

Section 4 Frisby 1985: 186. The word emblem comes from the Greek symballein, meaning ‘to throw in’. 54 See Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut N: Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts (1991). 55 The dialectics of the collector are reflected in the tension of Benjamin’s own production. Lindner cites a letter from Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in which Benjamin describes his thinking and writing consciously as a “scene of contradictions [Schauplatz von Widersprüchen].” Lindner, »Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln…« (1985): 8. 56 Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 94. 57 Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1991): 354.

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n opposition to the museum the hard-core collector may also be interested in apparently insignificant things. Benjamin, for example, describes his friend Siegfried Kracauer as a trash collector, “a loner [, a] discontent, not a leader. [...] A rag-picker early in the dawn, who with his stick spikes the snatches of speeches and scraps of conversation in order to throw them into his cart.”52 This throwing-in is quite literally an emblematic53 act, an activity that needs to be deciphered. Rather than focus on the clearing action of the rag-picker, however, I am interested in the contents of the cart.54 The collector, like many of Benjamin’s figures (the flaneur, the gambler, the forger, the student), is rendered as a constellation of dialectic forces.55 The collector relates to his environment in the same way as the flaneur, who is able to protest with his “idleness [Müßiggang] against the division of labor only by relying on that division.”56 More complex is the contested relationship between collector and allegorist. Initially Benjamin describes the allegorist as the antipode to the collector. The former piles “up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal,”57 then releases them out of their context and leaves it to his “melancholy [Tiefsinn] to illuminate

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their meaning.”58 The collector, on the other hand, unifies what belongs together based on some fictitious taxonomy. “Nonetheless—and that is more important than anything that divides them—in every collector hides an allegorist and in every allegorist a collector.”59 What the collector gathers is never complete; “and if he were missing only one piece, everything that he has collected would remain patchwork as things are for allegory from the beginning. On the other side the allegorist will never have enough things, which are for him only indexes of a secret dictionary that divulge their meanings solely to the initiated.”60 The allegorist/collector tears off the mask of the objects’ ‘natural’ meanings61 and exposes their transitory quality. The collector extracts the artifacts out of circulation and thus gains power over them since now he can assign his own meanings. The collector/allegorist objects to the devaluation of the world of things [Dingwelt] and replays this devaluation, which is the actual separation of thing [Sache] and meaning [Bedeutung] only in order to rescue the artifact once more. That is why in the end the allegorist is criticized for repeating endlessly the very action that allows the devaluation of objects and makes their repeated rescue (once more) necessary. Hopelessness in the sense of literally having-no-way-out [Ausweglosigkeit] characterizes both collector and allegorist who relate to the same condition of the world “in which they find all things dispersed and confused.”62 The collector takes up the fight against distraction/dispersion and “attempts, through collecting, to escape incompletion, and ultimately his own death, but succeeds only in anticipating the latter.”63 The collector isolates the discovered object and “puts it carefully [behutsam] yet violently [gewaltsam] into a new constellation [Zusammenhang].”64 However, the collector’s action to isolate objects affects more than the artifact itself. While the museum functions as a shared, collective monument to the gathering of artifacts, the private collection represents a surrealist montage of objects that signify in some cases their owner’s self-imposed isolation. For example, Huysmans’ protagonist Des Esseintes goes so far as to hermetically seal off certain rooms from each other in his own house to prevent the passage of sound and smell between spaces.65 However, this desire for isolation depends on imagining oneself in a distant past that appears somewhat better than the world outside the controlled interior.66 In this process of idyllic projection the collector’s passion has been displaced from people onto things, a move that creates potentially a “complete alternative world [...] which supplies [the collector] with substitutes for all the pleasures of the real world.”67 Sometimes the objects of one’s desire refuse to remain inanimate, and threaten to take over the interior and its occupants. The nineteenth century as the spatial and cultural intersection

Ibid.: 355. Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991): 280. 60 Ibid.: 279-280. 61 Steinhagen, Zu Walter Benjamins Begriff der Allegorie (1978): 672. 62 See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 98. 63 Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 52. 64 Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 93. 65 See Huysmans, Against Nature (1959): 33. 66 See Benjamin, “Louis-Philippe oder das Interieur” in “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (1991): 53. 67 Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 52. 59

Weidmann 1992: 52. Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 53. 70 Kracauer, Ginster: Von ihm selbst geschrieben (1928): 15. 71 Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 123. 72 Ibid.: 128. 73 Benjamin, Central Park (1985): 49. 74 Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I (1980): 83, quoting Croce, Aesthetic (1966): 35.

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[Verschränkung] of inside and outside68 makes complete isolation from the exterior impossible. Even the promise of an escape from the exterior69 is thwarted when the threat of the outside repeats itself on the interior where objects dominate the life of the collector and question simultaneously the supposed autonomy and identity of the collector as subject. For example, when Kracauer’s character Ginster contemplates the interior of his apartment, objects become animated [daidalons], especially when viewed from an unusual position, as through a mirror: “The objects, which were usually invisible, appeared out of their hiding places and locked him in. He was afraid of the sink; the side railings [of the desk] were barriers.”70 The surveillance by the object of the subject articulates the reversal of the control desired by the subject. The individual’s subjectivity is contingent on the construction of the object’s gaze. If the collector’s interior is about the creation of a reality that mimics the exterior, the hoarded objects themselves become accretions of surfaces to be coated and covered with materials that appear to be other than what they are. What I propose in light of Kracauer’s observation is an analysis of the surfaces that constitute the collector’s interior which manifests itself as a montage of materials as surfaces. In the nineteenth century the function of surface covers cannot be disassociated from the furniture whose perception relies on the drapes that create the forms which we consider to be structural. Asenhof writes: “Everything in the furniture that once referred to an internal structure is covered over with fabrics.”71 However, rather than join Asendorf ’s exclusively negative assessment of this condition, i.e. as a denial of an “industrial present which can only be made acceptable in decorated form,”72 allegory enters once more in the collector’s interior as that which “left the exterior world in order to settle in the inner world.”73 Owens quotes Croce as saying that allegory is “an expression added to another expression.”74 What is detachable from a surface can only be considered additive in a negative sense when that addition is not considered as fundamental to the construction/ perception of the work, which is precisely the case in the collector’s interior at the end of the nineteenth century. The draperies covering walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture are simulacra of the hidden structure, but simulacra that construct the interior as much as they decorate it. In Asendorf ’s taxonomy of the nineteenth century interior the cabinet, as a piece of furniture, takes a middle position between the container or case and the house. “The cabinet [parergon] is based on the fortifications of a medieval castle: around the contents, drawer, or chamber, there is a massive external structure consisting either of a defensive installation or

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of ornamentation, meant to provide impenetrable protection.”75 Furniture as fortification becomes here not only an aesthetic but also a physiological defense against the external world. And again this defense may turn out to function as the inverse of itself. The very accumulation of objects that crowd the interior and isolate the occupant can become the “mirror image of the world of commodities that the bourgeois citizen has tried vainly to flee.”76 Kierkegaard’s description of the interieur as fortress turns out to be useless since the interior is already infiltrated by the simulacra of the exterior.77 While the museum follows a hands-off approach, the collector pursues a more practical relationship to his/her collection. Collecting is not only contemplative absorption but also quite practically a handling [hantieren] of objects when Benjamin assigns a tactical/tactile78 instinct to collectors. The tactical condition is expressed in experience [Erfahrung], and Benjamin differentiates between two kinds of experiences. He uses the words Erfahrung and Erlebnis, both of which translate in English indiscriminately into ‘experience’. Erfahrung represents the more general form of experience and suggests an internalization of known memories/events that have been acquired over time. Erlebnis, in contrast, refers to a more immediate, spatial reception of reality. Many Erlebnisse gathered over time may grow into Erfahrung.79 Benjamin’s theory of language is congruent with his theory of Erfahrung. For him language and experience are synonyms.80 Both contain temporal opposites such as Erfahrung/Erlebnis, Narrative/Information, Aura/Shock which represent complex figures of the discontinuous history of the modern. Implied in his work is also a tendency for the latter to displace the former. The natural is displaced by the technical, the continuous by the abrupt, the necessary by the arbitrary, the total by the fragment. Benjamin observes poetically in a lecture about collecting that “when [children] conquer a foreign city, the smallest antique store can be a fort, the most distant stationary shop can have a key position.”81 The tactile component of perception thus ties in with the comprehension of architecture that operates both at a conscious/optic and unconscious/tactile level. He writes that buildings are received in two ways: through use [Gebrauch] and through perception [Wahrnehmung]. Or, in other words: tactically and optically. Tactile perception evolves therefore not as much through attention [Aufmerksamkeit] as through practice [Gewohnheit].82

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The physically non-threatening distance in optical perception is countered by the corrective of the tactile condition which represents “the relations of objects of the image/picture [Bildgegenstände] and thus relativizes the op-

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Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and their Perception in Modernity (1993): 136. 76 Ibid: 130. 77 See Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989): 40-43. 78 There exists partial proof for the idea that taktisch [tactical] and taktil [tactile] are related. See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 96. 79 “Benjamin is suspicious of the intensity of present experience where it includes as a component an authentic attitude or response to the past. Benjamin pursues the opposition between two types of experience, Erlebnis (which can degenerate into a vacuous intensity of the present) and Erfahrung (which has an essential relation to continuity with the past) into the opposition he draws between different types of memory: Erinnerung (recollection, reminiscence, based on the kind of continuity embodied in Erfahrung but, just for that reason, under threat) and Gedächtnis and Andenken [souvenir], the active remembrance of the past, on the basis of real discontinuity.” Spencer and Harrington (Translators) in Benjamin 1985: 57, footnote 32a2. 80 See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 11 and 12. 81 Benjamin, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln (1991): 391. Benjamin borrowed this term from Riegl who used taktisch in the haptic sense in Late-Roman Art Industry, Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1927): 32. He admits later that the term should have been replaced with haptic (see Kemp, Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft (1985): 224-257. 82 Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1991b): I.2, 505.

tical-subjective point of view of art through a kind of tactile objectivism.”83 This outmoded distance appears in Benjamin under the name of aura which stands in for the figures of loneliness, collection, distance, dominance of the optical, in short, contemplation. In opposition to aura, Benjamin argues, modern perception relies on the crowd, distraction, dispersion, proximity [Nähe], and dominance of the tactile which find their testing ground in cinema. According to Benjamin, film—really nothing more than a collection of image frames in a temporal sequence—is perceived optically but in a distracted and inattentive [unaufmerksam]84 state of mind; on the other hand painting, the classic medium represented in museums, requires optical attentiveness. The building arts take a middle position: their production is received both optically and tactically, although not as much through attention [Aufmerksamkeit] as through inattentive, or distracted usage [Gewohnheit].85 However, Benjamin’s theory is in need of modification. If in the late 1920s he could argue that architecture’s perception relies on everyday optical and tactile dispersion with the exception of the tourist’s or traveler’s relationship to their environment—where the unknown constitutes a threat that is countered with attentiveness—in today’s media-saturated environment the perceiver plays increasingly the role of the tourist. And yet, is there not a difference between armchair tourists traveling via books or computers and those who make the effort of not only moving their minds but also their bodies? Benjamin identifies the inattentive tendency of perception with the figure of the child to whom everything happens86 [shock-like] as if in a dream but who is also productive in its dreamlike state. It knows nothing that endures [...] Its nomad years are hours in the dream forest. That is where it drags its loot, in order to clean, stabilize, and demystify it. Its drawers have to be arsenal and zoo, criminology museum and crypt. To tidy up would mean to destroy a construction [Bau] full of prickly chestnuts, that are morning stars, aluminium paper that is a silver nest, building blocks that are coffins, cacti, that are totem poles, and copper pennies that are shields.87

Verspohl, “Optische” und “Taktile” Funktion von Kunst: Der Wandel des Kunstbegriffs im Zeitalter der massenhaften Rezeption (1975): 29, quoting Riegl, Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde (1929): 206. 84 “Distraction and collection stand in an opposition [...]. The one collecting himself in front of an art work becomes absorbed in it. On the other side the distracted crowd absorbs the work of art into itself [..]. This is most obvious in buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an art work whose reception occurs through distraction and through the collective.” Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1991a): 465. 85 The word Gewohnheit harbors the verb wohnen, to dwell and gewöhnen, to get used to. Usage thus refers to an almost unconscious, certainly inattentive, everyday activity. 86 The word zustoßen conveys the physical nature of this operation more than the English term ‘to happen to someone.’ 87 Benjamin, Unordentliches Kind (1991): 115.

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Tactile proximity as shock stands in contrast to contemplative aura, which, as distance sight [Fernsicht] allows the viewer to perceive reality in a reposed position. Near sight [Nahsicht], however, threatens the viewer who has to be prepared for any eventuality in order to be able to react. Near-sighted perception of reality allows tactile testing which is forfeited in the process of growing up. Again the modern condition is characterized by loss. “Just as the child has given up [abgewöhnen] touching all things in order to understand [begreifen] them, humanity has given up

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Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (1917): 23. 89 Hans, Les femmes, la pornographie, l’ erotisme (1978): 50. 90 See Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (1983): 53. 91 Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (1983): 67.

testing the artwork [Bildwerk] according to its tactile impact.”88 Hans writes that the look maintains the distance. In western culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. [...] The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.89

Figure 4: Charles Willson Peale; from a postcard.

With regard to production at times of the dominance of visual perception Benjamin points to collections of reproductions [Abbilder] that now satisfy the need [Bedürfnis] to hold onto objects, i.e. with the development of mechanical reproduction techniques representations of objects are considered satisfactory simulacra of objects. This attitude is reflected in the contemporary art scene where the fiction of the creating subject gives way to frank confiscation, quotation, excerpting, accumulation and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined.90

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In the absence of masters “[a]esthetic production has degenerated today into a massive deployment of the signs of artistic labor—violent, ‘impassioned’ brushwork, for example.”91 What is left to those who re/produce is a

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The collector, dwelling in his shell [Gehäuse]95 which takes on the characteristic of a second skin, is an extreme case of occupying the interieur. The apartment [Wohnung] as something that stands apart at the same time that it is incorporated into a larger unit, is a lining [Futteral]. Huysmans writes about the walls of Des Esseintes’ house as being folded into niches that create rooms within a room.96 This process of increased compartmentalization is echoed in the differentiation between a space to live [Lebensraum] and a work place [Arbeitsstätte] or office.97 The subdivided house, furniture, draperies/textiles, and cases that house smaller objects are signs of the potentially infinitely layered relations between exterior and interior. The collector shares this willed isolation with children who “build themselves in [bauen sich selber ein].”98 This building-in is an unconscious activity in that it does not follow a recognized pattern or prescribed order. The child’s collection “grows [gedeit] in the disorder which it constructs untiringly around itself and creates a building [Bau] in which it really lives and dwells [haust] in every sense.”99 However, the mere appearance of chaos is no guarantee for the absence of order. A chaotic looking room may be ordered according to a spatial order that appears chaotic. Benjamin writes that “a type of productive disorder is the canon of the mémoire involontaire as well as the collector.”100 While the museum operates on an institutionalized memory, the collector’s “passion borders on the chaos of memories [Erinnerungen].”101 Benjamin, via Proust and Bergson, differentiates between two types of

Benjamin points to Dada and film where a contemplative-distanced perception is not possible since both art media actively negate not only distance but also befall the viewer shock-like. They have a tactile quality. Kemp, Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft (1985): 252. 93 Benjamin, Unordentliches Kind (1991): 115; I. 94 Benjamin, “Louis-Philippe oder das Interieur” in “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (1991): 53. 95 At the end of the Benjamin’s essay Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus, the collector (Benjamin himself ) fittingly disappears into his shell [Gehäuse] which is made of books. Benjamin, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln (1991): IV.1, 396. 96 Huysmans, Against Nature (1959): 26. 97 Benjamin argues that under the reign of Louis Philippe the interior exists to make one forget the office [Kontor]. Benjamin, “Louis-Philippe oder das Interieur” in “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (1991): 52. 98 Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 103. 99 Ibid.: 95. 100 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut H: Der Sammler (1991): 280. 101 Benjamin, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln (1991): 388.

The interieur is not only the universe but also the encasement [Etui] of the bourgeois gentleman. To live means to leave traces. These are articulated in the interieur. One invents devices, covers, and protectors, boxes and cases en mass in which the traces of everyday-use objects imprint themselves.94

melancholic, aural, contemplation of loss and the inability to consider their environment non-contemplatively, i.e. through diversion and distraction.92 Let me return to those children who, in Benjamin’s words, collect in their distraction with a passion [Leidenschaft] that is oblivious to the consequences of their action. While they rid the found objects from the traces of their former context they resist the “imposed tidying-up [Aufräumen]”93 and ordering required in official collections. To tidy-up means to erase the traces of one’s existence which are the traces of one’s tactile involvement with the environment. The nineteenth century interior represents one of the key spaces to leave traces.

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memories. One operates consciously [willkürlich] by registering fragments (retentive memory or Gedächtnis), and blocking the entry to the other involuntary memory [unwillkürliche Erinnerung] which Weidmann recalls in Proust’s mémoire involontaire102 where Erlebnis displaces Erfahrung.103 The other is a process of recollection [Erinnerung] as an uncontrollable physical event. The former, the Gedächtnis, as a fragmentary, foreign, and exterior [auswendig-äußerlich] mnemo-technique, stands against the other, Erinnerung, literally as an er-innern, a becoming internal, inwardly, and appropriated [angeignet].104 Involuntary memory is intimately linked with Benjamin’s figure of dialectical images as a representation of a materialist theory of history, that is, the intersection of the past with the present in this image/ picture. “Involuntary memory presents itself in difference to the voluntary never as process but only as a picture/image [Bild]. (Therefore ‘disorder’ [‘Unordnung’] as the representational space [Bildraum] of involuntary memory.)”105 Images, as representation of the past, appear involuntarily in moments of danger. “The present collides with the past and petrifies in this process into a ‘picture/image,’ destroying any continuity.”106 If we associate continuity with order, then disorder as a type of disruption of both space and (material) history refers perhaps back to the interieur of the collector’s house. Practical recollection suggests therefore a placing of the past in the present, where ‘to presence’ means “to imagine [things] in our space [Raum] (not us in theirs). [...] The things thus imagined, do not allow a mediating construction out of ‘grand relationships.’”107 For Benjamin the relations between past and present are not hierarchical but based on a dialectics where neither past nor present cast their light on each other but the “image is that in which the past [Gewesene] coincides with the Now [Jetzt] like lightning in a constellation. In other words: [the] image is dialectics at a standstill.”108 Time stops momentarily, long enough to create a picture of the past within the present that allows the spectator to be a part of, and simultaneously apart from, the image/picture.

Section 5

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hat is the status of the collector and the collection today? Benjamin argued that “the collector can only be conceived in a process of dying-out.”109 However, the assumption that the collector is extinct at the end of the twentieth century is erroneous. More than ever, especially with the use of computers and the prospect of the paperless office, collection of information and its safe-guarding are on the mind of those who deal in it. Not

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Proust recognizes in the artifacts’ ability to decay “their similarity to nature. He knows the physiognomy of decay of things as that of their second life. Since nothing endures but that which is mediated by memory [Proust’s] love hangs onto the second life more than the first.” Adorno, Valéry Proust Museum (1977): 189; memory is paradoxically more resistant to decay than concrete objects. 103 Both words are translated in English as experience. Erlebnis is the form of experience as an event the perceiver has registered and can recall, Erfahrung on the other side is not directly accessible in that it has become an integral part of one’s history. 104 See Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 66, 67. 105 Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke (1991): I.3, 1243. 106 Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (1992): 96. 107 Benjamin, Passagenwerk, Konvolut N: Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts (1991): 2. 108 Ibid.: 577. 109 Benjamin, Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln (1991): 395.

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For a digital version of this idea to become reality it would take until the late 1980s, when the military Arpanet had metamorphosed into the Internet, which then linked all major universities. Today’s digital collections are not museums. They are embodied in non-descript architectures like computer clusters that are located in spaces containing objects that are not the collection. The contemporary collector no longer needs a large room or a house for artifacts but a monitor, a networked computer, some inexpensive software, and a good-sized hard-drive for storing the downloaded information. The computer box, which represents with its non-marring surfaces another case that resists traces, has turned now into the twentieth-century emblem of interiority. Once networked, the access to the digitized collections is easier than reaching the layered interior of the nineteenth-century collector. The mechanism that makes these museums-in-a-box possible also highlights the main reason museums still exist today, namely for the consumption of cultural artifacts. The management of a museum demands now as much skill to run a business as it requires knowledge about art: in fact today the museum gift-shop113 is one of the major contributors to a museum’s financial well-being. Benjamin’s oppressive victor who carries the cultural artifacts as loot along in the triumphal march114 can no longer be sure that the artifacts be-

It is no accident that bookstores have begun to sell cardboard contraptions that can be attached with velcro to the front of one’s monitor in order to frame the computer screen and make it more like one of those pictures that used to hang on the wall. The same bookstores sell also software that is packaged and displayed like books. 111 The current state of computer imaging programs such as Lightscape allows for such realistic representation through ray-traced images that the image on the screen becomes more of a window to look through into a different and distant reality, rather than a two-dimensional representation that the viewer could seize. 112 Malraux, The Voices of Silence (1978): 44. 113 Kracauer calls souvenirs these “tactile memory-aids.” Kracauer, Abschied von der Lindenpassage (1963): 329. For Benjamin, on the other side, the souvenir is devaluating the sacred relic by being secularized, i.e. commodified; see Benjamin, Central Park (1985): 48. 114 Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1991b): I.2, 696.

For all alike—miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek vase paintings, ‘details’ and even statuary— have become ‘color plates.’ In the process they have lost their properties as objects.112

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much has changed in the desire and need [Bedürfnis] to collect. What has changed is the representation of what is collected as picture. The literal and figurative manifestation of the dialectic image at the end of the twentieth century is the computer screen.110 In opposition to what Benjamin thought, mechanical reproduction has not effaced aura since today the realism of computer imaging has created a new sense of distance in the relationship between viewer and image that preclude action.111 In the case where action, proximity, and shock intersect, virtual reality is either appropriated exclusively for self-serving pleasure purposes and/or for military gaming. By the middle of the twentieth century the chaotic interior, which was so much part of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interieur, exploded. André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, which was to consist of photographs of artifacts, was a deliberate flattening-out of the contents of its physical predecessor.

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ing offered on the Internet would pass a non-Rieglian art censor. However, the latest possibilities again do not guarantee a blissful future, least for the collective, but might result once more in a retreat from the world of action. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s objects that crowd-in on the collector may be tools for controlling oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life and the life of others who have the same equipment, but the ubiquitous answering machines, along with call-waiting and -screening, as well as servers that store e-mail messages, represent also the latest buffer zones or layers of storage and virtual space with which the late twentieth century collector surrounds him or herself. These new tools allow vast amounts of information to be collected, accessed, and shared, which, to use Benjaminâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words, will increase the intensity of experience [Erlebnis] without, however, the certainty that the other experience [Erfahrung] will develop out of the former.

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Architectural Projects Beach House Ă la Da Capo A House for Atopia

Since I missed our beloved Da Capo trailer (see polytekton Volume 1) I decided to design another building that took its cues from our earlier domicile in Entrup, Germany, except that this new incarnation does not have any wheels but columns with rat caps, to keep the critters out, a trick I had learned from the amazing work by Bernhard Rudowsky about architecture made by non-architects.

Precedent: Da Capo in situ in Entrup`

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Early sketches

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Architectural Projects Wire frame perspective

Walls and windows

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Wirefrme showing rat caps on top of columns

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Platform with wood stove, stove pipe, kitchen, and stairs

Wireframe section

No-roof perspective

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Side elevation

Shadow studies

Ocean elevation

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In situ

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Section perspective

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Site photomontage of Florida situation

Early morning shading in Florida

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In January of 1995 I submitted the following dissertation proposal to my committee. The text has a certain baroqueness and defensiveness to it, as a proposal by a non-native English speaker ought to have, given the struggle I faced with not only organizing my divergent thoughts but also the words that I used to express those thoughts.

Dissertation Proposal submitted by Mikesch Mücke for the General Examination on January 17, 1995 School of Architecture Princeton University Advisor: Georges Teyssot

Of Seams, Carpets, and Ships: Crossing Borders in Semper’s Minor Works “Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”1 “I have to admit to you [...] that I am intrigued precisely by those investigations that apparently start out insignificantly and then lead to important results.”2 “Let us return to writing with pleasure.”3 “The horse, especially, is bothersome.”4

Exordium:5 An Embroidered Border6

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The proposal for a dissertation needs some dismantling. Besides offering marriage and presenting something for consideration or discussion, the pose of the proposal carries within it the danger of deception, of representing falsely, of pretending to be other than what it appears to be. Recall the Trojan horse, this “hollow vessel, this [mobile] monument, this gift to the state, [that] holds within it the potential for undermining the state.”7 As an act of putting forward, the proposal poses a threat to what is, presumably, securely fixed in place and offers simultaneously some threads to follow toward some things out of place. The threads8 mark the possibility of a trace without the guarantee of a definitive ending, or, for that matter, a definitive beginning. They point to a project already underway. “We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace [...] has already taught us that it

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) quoted in Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 1 2 Kracauer, Ginster: Von ihm selbst geschrieben (1928): 45. “Ich gestehe Ihnen, [...] daß mich gerade solche Untersuchungen entzücken, die scheinbar geringfügig anfangen und zu wichtigen Ergebnissen kommen.” 3 Casey, Jean Paul: A Reader (1992): 265. The lavish use of notes and quotes in this work points to its collective character: I may have written these lines but only with the support of those people whose names and works appear in the adjacent notes on the left. They occupy appropriately a space before the main text — at least in the western convention of reading from left to right. 4 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 105 5 A beginning or introductory part, especially of a speech or treatise; from the Latin exordiri, to begin to weave. 6 Borders are never clear lines. ‘Border’ is an anagram for broder, French for ‘to embroider’. 7 Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 190 8 The threat of threads lies in their ability to connect apparently disjointed pieces. The ensuing binds — literal, letteral, figurative, and legal — cannot be detached from what they link.

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Architexts was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are in a text where we already believe ourselves to be.”9 The dissertation as a tractatus or treatise points to two conditions: the first is a ‘treat’ that marks the potential for pleasure, delight and indulgence. The pleasure of this work lies in its character of a writing– around, a circumstantial writing, a writing on a collection of mobile architectures (both meubles and immeubles) “with this ‘on’ carrying all the dimensions and ambiguities of the ‘on’ in Derrida’s ‘Living On’ (beyond, about, upon, on — including the parasitical connotation).”10 The second condition is a ‘drag’ that can be deduced from treatise via the Middle English tretien, from Old French traitier, from Latin tractare, to draw or drag about. The latter refers to the process of writing as the construction of a series of threads that have the potential to unravel the carefully made blanket covering (and keeping out of sight) much of Semper’s lesser-known, but nevertheless crucial, minor work. The proposed dissertation consists of three looping threads or chapters (plus this introductory exordium) spun around a cluster of Semper’s neglected works from his seventeen-year stay in Zurich, Switzerland. The titles for the threads are as follows. Thread 1, Fencing Textiles: The Writing on the Walls Thread 2, Groundless Faults: The Passing of Vessels Thread 3, An Assemblage of Joints: Reading in Detail. The threads move out from and return to this cluster, in(ter)secting11 with both Semper’s writings and buildings,12 incising, cutting into, detailing. Writing loops, a loopy writing, refers to weaving, a working with doubled lines (double-entendres), knotted threads. This text represents therefore a warp(ed) approach to writing that takes the weft into account without insisting on right or correct angles. Warp(ed) writing deflects and swerves from the proper way of writing.13 It

Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976): 162 10 Ulmer, The Object of PostCriticism (1983): 94 11 Mallgrave writes that Semper was fond of the idea of crosssection to describe his work. See Mallgrave, Gustav Klemm and Gottfried Semper: The Meeting of Ethnological and Architectural Theory (1985): 71, n14 12 The term ‘buildings’ are here not only understood in the limited architectural sense of ‘edifice’ but rather as built-Ding, or built thing, i.e. anything made or constructed. This extension of ‘building’ is useful since Semper’s works run the gamut from small objects (a baton for Richard Wagner) to urban design projects (the designs for the Vienna Ringstraße). 13 The question of excess will undoubtedly be raised. The response revolves around the pleasure of writing, and reading, excessively and excentrically. The response, too, might include a tactic of writing other than the proper way, not out of capriciousness but out of necessity for the complexity of a detailed reading. Furthermore, as excessive, warp(ed) writing enters the field of pleasure and play, without which a project as arduous as a dissertation could not be completed. Although the pleasure of writing in this manner might also cause a repulse in the readers, which would not be surprising since a repulse is an anagram of pleasure. 9

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deviates but also emerges from that same way: de via. It resembles the ex-orbitant paths of returning comets. The reference to hirsute celestial bodies and their space of action, the universe, figures at the beginning of Semper’s Prolegomena to his 1860 work Der Stil (fin-

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Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): v. The image of a returning comet, and the calculation of its path, appears thirty-one pages later in reference to one of Semper’s categories influencing the production of works of art. 15 For Semper architecture is the intersection of different materials, modes of construction, local and ethnological influences, climate, religious and political institutions, and the personal characteristics of the patron, artist, and producer of the work. See Moranvánsky, The Aesthetics of the Mask: The Critical Reception of Wagner’s Moderne Architektur and Architectural Theory in Central Europe (1993): 203 16 Photograph by author (1994). The German word for observatory is Sternwarte, a term that implies both the active maintenance of and the passive waiting for stars. 14

ished in Zurich) where he evokes the destruction and re-creation of parts of the universe as an analogue to the alternating process of decay and rebirth in contemporary arts, a condition he identifies as a transition [Uebergang],14 both a transfer and a threshold. The character of a threshold as marking and transgressing spatial boundaries points to both Semper’s own nomadic life and the broad role he assigns to the role of the architect.15 The range of his own work, aside from his numerous published texts, was equally great, shuttling, in scale, between a baton for Richard Wagner and the planning of an urban quarter [Kratzquartier] in Zurich. This broad-cast of architecture, however, does not imply the possibility of a detached, exterior observer. On that same page of Der Stil Semper points to a position [Standpunkt] of the designer within architecture that does not allow a distant and objective overview. His is an architecture from within. Furthermore the reference to comets points, obliquely, to the importance of ornament in Semper’s work and in this proposal as well. The universe of the Greek Κοσμος [cosmos] suggests the intersection of ornament and order, a rather subversive crossing that implies a structural (order is always structural), load-bearing, kind of adornment, a transgressive ornament that refuses to be bound by property or propriety. This proposal, this work underway and put forward, started out as a hunch that some of Semper’s projOne of the entry doors of the ects did not fit quite neatly into the observatory with cosmetic transom.16

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Architexts category of Neorenaissance architecture by which much of his built work is classified. The works mentioned below appeared as strange17 artifacts, designs out-of-place, non-fitting and defying easy consummation into Semper’s canonic work. What makes these projects even more puzzling is the fact that they were not the product of a young and inexperienced architecture student but a seasoned writer and builder in his fifties and sixties. The work discussed in this dissertation belongs to the “mature”18 Semper, a non-trivial detail that makes the silence surrounding this late work even more suspect. More specifically I am writing this dissertation on the following works of Semper: The Treichler19 laundry ship (1862-1864, destroyed in 1955), a nomadic public laundromat with an almost flat roof and motifs of Pompeiian wall paintings gracing its exterior metal panels.

This strangeness is, as its origin in *ghos-ti- suggests, ambiguous since *ghos-ti- can mean both guest and host. 18 Rykwert, Semper’s ‘Morphology’ (1990): 40 19 Semper’s client Heinrich Treichler may have been related to Johann Jakob Treichler, the Swiss socialist revolutionary who, lured by political power in Zurich’s ruling class, would give up his marginal status to become part of the political establishment in the 1860s. Nevertheless, if H. and J.J. Treichler were related, the latter’s political views may have contributed to Semper taking on the laundry ship project in the first place. 17

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Detail of exterior metal panels with Pompeiian wall motifs.

The split-identity cabinet (probably designed for Queen Victoria),20 consisting of a lower table on which is placed a cabinet standing on four silver turtles.21

built by Holland and Sons, exhibited at the world exposition in Paris in 1855, and located today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. See Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass and der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974): 80 and GTA Semper Archive at the ETH Zurich #168-130 21 Fröhlich describes the cabinet/table as uneinheitlich [non-unified]: “Auch der Kredenzschrank, den Semper für die Pariser Industrieausstellung 1855 entworfen hat, macht mit seiner uneinhaltlichen Formensprache eine Beurteilung recht schwer.”Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass and der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974): 71. 22 Built between 1861-1864. GTA Semper Archive at the ETH Zurich #168-320 23 Ibidem: #168-171 24 Ibidem: #168-181 20

The observatory for the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, (hereafter E.T.H.)22 with its shifty balustrades and split roof that facilitates sky access to the meridian chamber.

The villa Garbald (1862-1863) in Castasegna, canton Graubünden,23 completely whitewashed and sporting an open attic.

The textile trading store Fierz (18651867),24 a storage place and residence,

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with its lacy staircase and mottled exterior surfaces.

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Architexts The project for a bazaar/ warehouse25 (1857-1858) at the Tiefenhof as part of the urban renovation of the Kratz quarter. The warehouse, if built, would have been one of the first buildings in Europe with a facade clad completely in glass.

Ibidem: #168-148 Stockmeyer is actually the only one who mentions all of Semper’s minor works in Zurich. See Stockmeyer, Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie (1939): 74, n26 27 See Allen, Zürich — The 1820’s to the 1870’s: A Study in Modernization (1986): 8-9 28 See Ibidem: vi 29 See Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (1982-1985): IX, 69 30 See Ibidem and Allen, Zürich — The 1820’s to the 1870’s: A Study in Modernization (1986): 5-6 31 Semper designed its main building between 1858 and 1864 25 26

The buildings still in existence are the E.T.H. observatory, the Fierz textile trading store, and the villa Garbald. The first two were extensively altered on the interior in the early part of the twentieth century. The observatory was subdivided and used for supplemental E.T.H. office space and classrooms while the Fierz building became the Gerichtsmedizinische Institut of Zurich. Both buildings are currently empty and undergoing restauration.26 When Semper arrived in Zurich in 1854, Switzerland, as a sovereign country was only six years old. In 1848 it had finally reached the status of a federation after initial attempts to establish a Swiss Constitution in 1798, modeled after the French Constitution of 1795, failed to rid the loose association of cantons from its oligarchic government.27 In the course of fifty years, between 1820 and 1870, Zurich made the transition from a medieval to a modern city.28 Its last defensive works were not destroyed until 1873, although much of the old entrenchments had been demolished in the 1830s. Between 1836 and 1880 its population doubled.29 Zurich’s economic foundation consisted of cotton and silk weaving until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The city was the textile-producing and trading center of Switzerland in the 1850s.30

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Semper’s move to Zurich brought him in contact with an illustrious group of people who were teaching at the E.T.H.31 in Zurich. Among these were the historians Theodore Mommsen and Jakob Burckhardt

(1855-1858); the philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (18551866),32 and the physiologist Jakob Moleschott (1856-1861), founder of the materialist movement in Germany. De Saanctis gave lectures on aesthetics in the winter semester 1858 to 1859. The writer Gottfried Keller, one of Semper’s few close friends in Zurich, became the city’s poet laureate [erster Stadtschreiber] in 1861. Switzerland has a history as temporary refuge for many intellectual emigrées from other European countries. In the mid-nineteenth century Zurich, specifically, was not only a city of textiles but also a place for exiles. Georg Büchner, whose 1834 newspaper Hessischer Landbote carried the motto Friede den Hütten, Krieg den Palästen,33 arrived as one of the first political emigrées from Germany in 1836. Richard Wagner fled Dresden after the 1848 revolution and settled in Zurich in 1849, followed by Semper, via London, in 1854. Arnold Böcklin, a friend of Gottfried Keller, moved here in 1880. Other emigrants of note include Franz Liszt, Georg Herwegh, and Julius Fröbel whose publishing house Literarisches Comptoir allowed emigrants to circumvent their home country’s censors by publishing controversial manuscripts in Switzerland.34 In the twentieth century Zurich became a temporary home for Alfred Einstein, Nikolai Lenin, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, and Thomas Mann. Yet Zurich had an intellectual history of its own. Former citizens include Johann Jakob Bodmer (scholar of Montesquieu and Rousseau), Johann Kaspar Lavater (who corresponded with Herder and Goethe35 and wrote the controversial work on physiognomy),36 and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (who was known for his educational reforms). Yet all this intellectual man-power can not distract from the conservative bias of a country that took until 1969 to give women the right to vote.37 Semper’s relationship with Zurich remained understandably ambivalent. Even though Fröhlich describes Semper’s seventeen years in Zurich as the most productive time in his life — the time of “significant projects and his most important publications.”38 Compared with

See Morgan, The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky (1992) on Vischer’s philosophy that centered in large part around the notion of symbol. See also Ikonomou, Introduction (1994): 19 for Vischer’s intellectual debt to Schelling and Schlegel. 33 “Peace to the Huts, War to the Palaces.” See Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (1982-1985): X, 32 34 Among others, he published works by Herwegh, Büchner, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and Marx. See Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (1982-1985): IX, 111 and X, 32 35 Dilthey incidentally called Semper “the real successor to Goethe.” See Dilthey, Die drei Epochen der modernen Ästhetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe (1924): 204 quoted in Ikonomou, Introduction (1994): 49 36 Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy. Designed to promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind...Illustrated with More than Eight Hundred Engravings accurately copied; and Some Duplicates added from Originals. Executed by, or under the Inspection of, Thomas Holloway, (1789-1798) 37 It took until 1984 for the first women to be elected to the House of Representatives. 38 Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass and der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974): 92. See also Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (1982-1985): IX, 79 39 He frequented the salon of Eliza Sloman Wille (who published poems and novels) and her husband François. Other visitors to Wille’s salon, beside

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his earlier stays in such politically active places as Paris and London, Semper was relatively isolated in Zurich.39 There were no barricades

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to build here so the politics migrated from the streets into the buildings he designed. Semper was, like his minor projects, the product of diverse influences from his travels across Europe. In the absence of a category of Other he has been classified in architectural histories as a Neorenaissance architect. Yet his writings, and designs, locate the art of building40 consistently within a larger socio-political and historical framework than the one his contemporaries were willing to admit. His political activism and refusal to accept architecture merely as form manipulation demands of his profession a more engaged position, an architecture that is not only different but that makes a difference. Semper’s statement that “politics and art always go hand in hand”41 underlines his broad view of the architect’s role. I will elaborate on the relevance of his position for the profession of architecture today toward the end of this project. His earlier involvement as a barricade builder in the 1848 uprising in Dresden points to this role of an architect who questions authority as much through building as through writing. Pecht argues, in fact, that Semper’s 1834 volume on polychromy was the latter’s “complete programme of artistic and political intentions.”42 Zeitler concurs when he names Semper as the only one who, in the 1830s, combines politics and architecture into one programme.43 The politics of Semper’s writings and buildings can be reframed via Bloomer’s extension of minor literature to minor architecture,44 i.e. constructions of a “minority within a major language,”45 the impossibility to maintain clear boundaries between the personal and the political, and the collectivity of both literature and architecture (not made for one person but written/built for an audience). Blurring of the distinction between public and private is one means of uncovering the politics of architecture. At another level Schor quotes Nietzsche on the ever present linkage between one’s own investment and a supposedly objective scholarly treatise. “Once one has trained one’s eyes to recognize in a scholarly treatise the scholars idiosyncrasy — every

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Semper, included Keller, Herwegh, Mommsen, Liszt, Kinkel, Böcklin, and C.F. Meyer. Another favorite place of intellectual stimulus was the house of the German couple Mathilde and Otto Wesendonk who were also friends of Richard Wagner. Nevertheless Semper lamented his isolation quite openly. See Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (19821985): IX, 81 40 This is a conscious choice to use the term ‘art of building’. It refuses the master or arche part of architecture and points to the opportunity and the difficulty of constructing a space between art and building 41 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834): 17 quoted in Hänsch, Die Semperoper: Geschichte und Wiederaufbau der Dresdner Staatsoper (1986): 8. Bloomer has argued more recently that buildings are never neutral instruments and that architecture is, “by association, political.”Bloomer, Looking for America Part III: ‘Failed Attempts to Heal and Irreparable Wound’. Session on Poststructuralism and Feminism Undermine (1988): 9 42 Pecht, Deutsche Künstler des 19. Jahrhunderts: Studien und Erinnerungen (1877): 157 43 See Zeitler, Sempers Gedanken über Baukunst und Gesellschaft in seiner ersten Schrift: ‘Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten’. 1834 (1976): 19 44 “illegitimately appropriated” by Bloomer from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature. Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 173-174 45 Ibidem: 173

scholar has one — and to catch it in the act, one will almost always behold behind this the scholar’s ‘pre-history,’ his family, and especially their occupations and crafts.”46 My own prehistory consists of a homemaker and a journalist, both professions that require great attention to detail, which, to borrow from Schor once more, is intricately bound up in a triangular relationship with ornament and the quotidian. This may explain at least partially my affinity for Semper’s own methods as he borrows from empirical analysis, linguistics, art history, and philosophy, among other disciplines, to develop his writings and buildings.47

Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 7 quoting Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974): 290 47 Kruft, Geschichte der Architekturtheorie: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (1991): 356. 48 Kracauer, Ginster: Von ihm selbst geschrieben (1928): 47, slightly altered in the translation. “Er lobte die Methode, weil sie das Gewicht auf Nebensachen lege und Schleichwege benutze. [...] Eine Hypothese ist nur unter der Bedingung tauglich, daß sie das beabsichtigte Ziel verfehlt, um ein anderes, unbekanntes zu erreichen.” 49 Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 5 50 The etymology of ornament can be traced to the Old French ournement and the Latin ornamentum which means equipment, trapping. The word ‘equip’ came via eskippe, esquippe, equippe, aquip, ‘quip, French équipe-r, esquipe-r, to the Old Norwegian skipa, to man (a vessel), fit up, arrange, prob. f. skip=ship. It also makes allusions to clothing when it means to array, dress up, rig out. Important derivatives of its root ar- are arm, army, alarm, disarm, harmony, art, artist, inert, article, aristocracy, order [evident in apparent order or kosmos], ordinary, ornate, adorn, rate, ratio, reason, read, hatred, riddle, rite, arithmetic, rhyme.

Tactics “He praised the method since it would focus on minor things and use secret ways [Schleichwege]. [...] A [pro|s|thesis] is only useful under the condition that it misses its intended goal in order to reach a different, unknown one.”48

Instead of strategies that, with their implication to national or global planning, seem incompatible with a writing on minor works, tactics are employed for the methodic apparatus of this dissertation. Tactics take on the role of tools for operating on Semper’s minor works. The German word for tool is Werkzeug, a montage of ‘work’ and ‘cloth.’ The tools used here to investigate Semper’s works operate on this doubling of work as textile and textile as work with the implication that both building and writing are works of texts. However, I am not suggesting that the production of buildings and the writing of texts are interchangeable. Yet, in the context of written constructions, as is the case with a dissertation, the correspondence49 between building and writing becomes useful, like a tool. For a work to be done, tools, and equipment, are required. Here the usefulness [Nützlichkeit] of ornament enters. It can be traced via the Latin ornare, to equipment.50 The

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place equipped with tools is the τεκτονειον [tektoneion], a workspace or Werkstatt that is a parergonal site since the statt of the latter not only refers to a specific place but also means ‘instead’ or ‘in-itsplace.’ The worksite that consists of Semper’s minor works is the space of work and simultaneously the instead-of-work, the site of displaced

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Architexts work, the work out of place. Margins, like minor works, and like this writing occupy the epistomological fringe. They are structural ornaments around the edge of a textual frame, marking off a space that is both central and peripheral.

Anne Brochet as Roxane in the film Cyrano de Bergerac by Jean-Paul Rappeneau. 52 Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985): 40. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 3 mentions Derrida’s use of textual details, parerga, notes, epigraphs, postscriptums, and marginalia. 53 Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 8-9 referring to Derrida’s modes of writing. 54 And here I have to admit that I am constantly in danger of confusing these terms. Often the figurative, as body, appears to me much more concrete than the literal, while the literal frequently evokes the letteral or what is written and therefore more abstract rather than bodily. 55 Mallgrave, Introduction (1989): 33 paraphrasing Semper in Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860) 51

“Embroider your words.”51

This kind of writing borrows from Derrida’s work on the “marginal, supplementary, [and] everything having to do with borders rather than centers,”52 without implying that this shift from center to margin will necessarily abolish dominant hierarchies. “Simply to reverse the privileging flow, to privilege the previously inferior term over the previously superior term, is to remain within the same system of privileging.” Privileging as an operation tending towards stability, “gives way to oscillating (or shuttling).”53 One of the tactics is therefore already built into the process of writing this dissertation. To assume that this kind of writing could be disassociated from the work, i.e. the historiography of a specific collection of buildings, would deny the opacity of language and its attendant potential to point out relations of power difference that are rarely in the interest of those in power. Consequently I am faced with the impossibility of writing a historicist analysis of Semper’s minor works content with the goal of finding the Truth behind them. Language is considered in this project not as a communicating, transparent medium (although it is that, too, for the sake of communicability) but an opaque, visible, obvious instrument that is quite literally ob viam, i.e. in the way. To resist the always useful limpidity of language, to make language opaque means in this context to read and write Semper’s minor works (buildings + texts) both literally and figuratively.54 This approach to reading requires a translation [Übersetzung], a ferrying back and forth between writing and building that works with/in the mobility of language. Semper’s concept of architecture is, like language, a dynamic system “capable of impoverishment as well as enrichment,”55 implying at a diachronic

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scale an oscillation that also operates at the micro level of the word.

Enter allegory, which, in its interdependent relation to the symbol, operates in ambiguous modes.57 Ulmer differentiates between traditional ‘allegoresis’58 and ‘narrative allegory’. The former is a mode of commentary that “‘suspends’ the surface of the text, applying a terminology of ‘verticalness, levels, hidden meaning’ [...] whereas ‘narrative allegory’ [...] explores the literal — letteral — level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves — in etymologies and puns — and in the things the words name. [...] In short, narrative allegory favors the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signifieds.”59 Words become switches. However, rather than limit myself only to narrative allegory, as a builder and writer I opt to shuttle between these two modes of production. The resulting tactic might be called allegraphy, an other writing of built things that minds, mines and mimes Semper’s own writings, buildings, and methods of production. In the introduction60 to the first volume of Der Stil61

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Semper appropriates comparative linguistics to construct an analogue to the language of art forms [Kunstformensprache]62 which allows him to argue that the search for definitive origins in either language or the art of building is irrelevant since they lie irrevocably in an unknown past. Semper was, as I am now, not concerned with origins but rather a work underway and on the move.63 This destabilizing tactic can also be located in his hybrid writing style. Stockmeyer characterizes Semper’s method of writing Der Stil as follows: “In spite of a more or less unified tendency of Der Stil, one can recognize in Semper’s statements, shot through with style-critical protests, technical explications and historical hypotheses, the character of the developmental and of something brought together in many fits and starts. Subjective impressions mingle with factual observations; second or third rate questions spread out

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“Tout n’est qu’allegorie.”56

Gébelin, Le monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (1773): 65 quoted in Rubin, Allegory Versus Narrative in Quatremére de Quincy (1986): 387 57 For a discussion of the allegory/symbol relation based on Derrida, Benjamin and Tafuri, see Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993): 36-42. See Semper, Über architektonische Symbole (1880) on the role of architectural symbols as types. The English version was subsequently published in Semper, On Architectural Symbols (1985) 58 Allegoresis describes a type of writing that tears off ‘naturalized’ meanings and points to the transitoriness, fleetingness and futility of things. The allegorist is protesting against the separation of thing and meaning, and yet only repeats that same separation by assigning arbitrarily meanings to things. “Object and interpretation relate to each other like thing and meaning in the allegoric-emblematic representation. Interpretation would be therefore projection, a reading-into of meaning into an object that would then be defined compellingly and yet in a hardly acceptable consequence by its own indeterminacy.” Steinhagen, Zu Walter Benjamins Begriff der Allegorie (1978): 670-672 59 Ulmer, The Object of Post-Criticism (1983): 95 60 In yet another case in the history of vital omissions this introduction to Der Stil was left out of the translation in Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989) 61 Entitled Technischer Ursprung der wichtigsten Grundformen, Typen und Symbole der Baukunst, Erstes Hauptstück, Einleitung, § 1, Allgemeines. 62 see Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860): 1-9 63 With this in mind his ‘four elements’ are less objects and more types of actions. 56

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Architexts at the cost of more principal ideas. The spontaneity and individuality of this manner of expression, which does not shy away from bizarre terms, polemic invective, and occasional repetition, hardly offsets the dissonances of its form and content.”64 I would suggest, however, that this detailed, and ornamental, mode of writing is less an indication of Semper’s inability to express himself succinctly and more a sign of his resistance to occupy, both as writer and builder,65 a detached and objective position as author.66 This unstable tactic, evident in Semper’s writing and buildings, becomes the referent of the roaming character of my own work. Writing as a writing-around, a nomadic writing, is simultaneously defensive, evasive, and aggressive. Its parastatic mobility inscribes a meandering course across a lavishly detailed fabric.

“Trotz eines einheitlichen Zuges im ‘Stil’ im großen und ganzen lassen seine mit stilkritischen Protesten, technischen Explikationen und historischen Hypothesen durchsetzten Ausführungen den Charakter des Entwicklungshaften und in vielen Anläufen Zusammengetragenen erkennen. Subjektive Eindrücke mischen sich mit sachlichen Feststellungen, Fragen oft zweiten und dritten Ranges machen sich breit auf Kosten von Prinzipiellem. Die Sponaneität und Individualität seiner Ausdrucksweise, die vor bizarren Wendungen und polemischen Ausfällen, bisweilen auch vor Wiederholungen nicht zurückschreckt, tragen kaum zum Ausgleich der formalen und inhaltlichen Dissonanzen bei.” Stockmeyer, Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie (1939): 10 65 Mallgrave has already stated that Semper’s architecture “comes to be defined in its essence as an ornamental activity,” although I would question the essence here, unless it also refers to parfume, one of the more ephemeral and yet also pervasively present materials. The quote is from Mallgrave, Introduction (1989): 29 66 Author = creator = god 67 Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987): 181 68 Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1989): 3 69 Both in the sense of ‘taking care of,’ (i.e. minding) and ‘hiding.’ 70 Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt (1972): 33 quoted in Ward, Foreign and Familiar Bodies (1992): 30

“Why de-tail [dé-tailler: cut out]? For whom [Pour qui].”67

Writing the detail is at once the reinforcement of an already fashionable affair with the particular at the end of the twentieth century and the recollection of an-other time when the detail was anything but a welcome condition, especially in the art of building. I am thinking here of Neoclassicism, which, to quote Schor, “recycled into the modern age the classical equation of the Ideal with the absence of all particularity,”68 and with this move attempted to erase difference at the expense of a myopic sense for material that was too close for comfort. Writing returns to weaving and the production of a letteral tapestry that covers69 Semper’s minor works.

Pro|s|theses “So, when do we get his thesis?”70

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Instead of the expected hypotheses, that is, instead of something put below that would support a superstructure above, I offer in this dissertation proposal a series of pro|s|theses in the form of questions and speculative answers that are advanced and added to something already established. As extensions they are not under-foot but rather strung out ahead which necessitates, instead of a safe structure to be constructed on them, a network of thickening lines that prop-up these initial strands. They are tentative tentacles that reach out and extend

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the architectural body of knowledge, suggesting that what may be considered today a pro|s|thesis might at some point in the future be recognized as part of a new body.71 Part of my objective in this dissertation is to mobilize both Semper’s writings and buildings, not with the idea to build a bridge but to uncover the existing yet hidden joints between them, based on the assumption that the connections need to be re-constructed. I limit this investigation to a collection of Semper’s projects that are considered non-representative of his main works based on the idea that if his major works do not appear to have any discernible link to his writings, his minor projects, in their apparent difference, might may offer new insight with regard to this apparent gap. By extension, if the pro|s|theses hold water with respect to Semper’s minor works, a re-writing of his major works would be in order. The model I am espousing in this project could be coined a “supplemental historiography”72 in that I propose a re-viewing and a re-writing of a particular historical time frame. In this re-writing I am, however, not interested in re-righting history but instead in opening up Semper’s minor works to a different perception. The joints remain visible and the body thus constructed may be called demonstrous in the double sense of the word as something that deviates “greatly from the norm in appearance and structure”73 and something other that demonstrates, and indicates, a new body (of knowledge).

By inference, should these pro|s|theses hold water, a reinvestigation of Semper’s major buildings would be in order. I am thinking here specifically about his theater projects. 72 Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989): xiv-xv. Cf. also Nochlin’s notion of “thinking art history Otherly.” 73 Bankston, American Heritage Electronic Dictionary (1993): keyword ‘monstrous’ 74 Fröhlich, Gottfried Semper (1991), Fröhlich, Zürcher Bauten Gottfried Sempers (1976), Fröhlich, Zeichnerischer Nachlass and der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog (1974), Mundt, Das Verhältnis einiger kunsthandwerklicher Entwürfe Sempers zum historischen Kunstgewerbe (1976), and Zoege von Manteuffel, Die Baukunst Gottfried Sempers (1952): 222-223. 75 Bletter, On Martin Fröhlich’s Gottfried Semper (1974) 71

To what extent is the influence of Semper’s minor works on modern architecture not as minuscule as their name suggests? Semper’s disjointed and minor body of works marks the absence of a unified body. Given the difficulty of fitting them neatly into categories his minor works have been quietly ignored. Their very insignificance is significant and their relative absence in the annals of architectural history may have as much to do with a subconscious and selective forgetfulness as with a deliberate suppression. Aside from some descriptive sections in books and articles on Semper’s work74 and some ghostlike

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appearances as images without any reference as to their import75 there

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Architexts ‘Locating’ in the double sense of ‘siting’ and ‘finding’. 77 One exception is Wegmann’s work on Semper’s cityhall in Winterthur. See Wegmann, Gottfried Semper und das Winterthurer Stadthaus: Sempers Architektur im Spiegel seiner Kunsttheorie (1985) 78 Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (1986): 422 79 Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983): viii, emphasis mine. 80 It is, I believe, significant that the revised and enlarged third edition of Frampton’s book (first edition in 1980), published in 1992, keeps Alberto Sartoris’ axonometric drawing of the Notre-Dame du Phare church and religious center on the front cover, albeit slighty changed: the image has moved up on the frontispiece to displace the title and author reference to a position below. The representation of a church as the ‘door’ into the history of modern architecture, i.e. the sanctification of the profane through the sacred, should also not be underestimated, nor should the change of the background color: from black to red, the hue of urgency and warning. When few people listen it is always advisable to turn up the volume. 81 Stockmeyer points out that the thought of theory preparing the ground for practice was already evident in the work of Jakob Burckhardt (Semper’s colleague in Zurich between 1855 and 1858) in Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860): I, 290 82 Hitchcock Jr., Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1993): 38 76

hangs a shroud of silence around these works. Could it be that there is more of an interdependence between Semper’s writing and his buildings than has been acknowledged in architectural histories until now? And if so, how could Semper’s minor works be instrumental in locating76 this interdependence? In the past architectural historians and theoreticians have written about the importance of Semper’s theories, yet only few have investigated his buildings in relation to his theories.77 Watkin, symptomatically, calls Semper the “most important architectural theorist of nineteenth-century Germany [...] whose buildings were of a somewhat lacklustre quality.”78 Even Mallgrave who at some points in his extensive writings hints at the importance of Semper for contemporary architecture, describes him in the preface to his dissertation merely as the “most influential and prolific German theorist on architecture in the nineteenth century.”79 What is left out of these histories of Semper’s work in the field of architecture is as telling as what is included. In Modern Architecture: A Critical History, arguably one of the more widely used texts on architectural history in use today at architectural schools across the U.S., Frampton has not changed his assessment of the relevance of Semper’s work between his first and last edition of the book. He mentions Semper only in reference to type, rationalism, rhetorical manner, industrialization, mass-consumption, and machine production.80 What is missing are, what I consider to be, the main parts of Semper’s theory (and practice).81 Nowhere does Frampton mention Bekleidung, polychromy, or textiles. There is a complete effacement of that which the historiographers of the modern have to hide at all costs, keep transparent, even at the moment where its impact is most visible. Hitchcock wrote in 1929 that Semper was “theories aside, [...] really no more than a competent architect of the eclecticism of taste.”82 Time and time again theory is

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pushed aside to make room for practice, as if practice could exist without theory, or possibly because practice cannot exist without theory. Even if Semper’s importance for architectural theory is

his name appears twice, once in reference to an article he wrote on greenhouses in Paris,86 the other time Semper is mentioned as “a German architect who [...] had been exiled from his own country for revolutionary activities in Dresden” and who was “one of the founders of the first English school of design.”87 A notable exception to this suppression of Semper’s relevance (both written and built) is Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, although even here Semper is initially only framed as the German counterpart to Willis (Great Britain), and Viollet-le-Duc and Choisy in France.88 Later, however, Banham elaborates on the influence of Semper’s Der Stil on Berlage’s Gedanken über den Stil as well as the apparent overlap between Muthesius and Berlage.89 But in the end Semper is quoted once more out of context (by Hilberseimer) as someone who was limiting the use of iron to “‘increase the tensile strength of mass construction,’ and [did not consider it] as a visible architectural element in its own right,”90 not withstanding the exposed

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iron-truss roof of Semper’s project for the Zurich railroad station91

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beyond doubt, his relevance for modern architecture remains to be mapped out in detail. Pevsner, for example, mentions Semper twice in his admittedly British-biased book. The first time Pevsner brackets Semper in the statement that “simple Neo-Renaissance was [...] coming to an end. [...] (Dresden Opera: Semper, first building 1838-41; Dresden Gallery: Semper, 1847-54).” The second time he uses Semper’s reference in Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst to the report of a German engineer describing a stuccoed cast iron facade in New York, in order to make a link between an earlier example of cast iron construction in Pennsylvania and James Bogardus’ “pamphlet on Cast Iron Buildings in 1856.”83 Semper is bracketed and referenced but his potential impact on modernism through his essay Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst is completely suppressed.84 He does not fare better in Giedion’s monumental work85 where

Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1975): 56 and 122 respectively 84 Semper, Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition (1989): 165. This essay was written in London in 1852 in response to the International Exhibition of 1851 as a speculative project for the adaptive use of the Crystal Palace as a design school based on Semper’s theories. 85 The durability of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (almost unchanged since its initial publication in 1940, even though, at last count, the book it now in its fifth edition and thirteenth printing) is in itself an indication of architecture’s resistance to change. 86 Ibidem: 181. Giedion does not give a reference to Semper’s article. It is Semper, Der Wintergarten zu Paris (1849) 87 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1982): 338 88 See Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1992): 14 89 Ibidem: 143-144, repeated in Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983): vii 90 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1992): 307 quoting from Hilberseimer’s Beton als Gestalter (1928). 91 There may be a link between the arched trusses for this design and the discussion advanced by Fiedler in the mid 1870s relating to the re-introduction of the Romanesque style [Rundbogenstil] into ar83

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Architexts described by Reinle as a “strange mixture of art and technology.”92 More recently, however, Semper has been framed in a more positive light. Much of his work Interior of Zurich railroadstation project(1860) has been translated into English in the last ten years by the late Wolfgang Herrmann and by Harry Mallgrave. A translation of his main, if incomplete, work Der Stil is currently underway at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. On the east coast Mark Wigley has uncovered the influence of Semper’s writings on Muthesius and Le Corbusier. Yet, as the above work shows, much is left to be done. One of the objectives of this dissertation is therefore to dispense with the myth that there exists no link between Semper’s writings and his buildings. Characteristic of this latter assessment is Mundt’s work, who, in an analysis of some of Semper’s designs for craft objects, renounces the importance his texts would have for an investigation of his buildings. She recalls how at the 1979 symposium on Semper in Zurich, those present emphasized again and again that his buildings “have little to do with his theoretical challenges.”93 Mallgrave reinforces this discrepancy between Semper’s writings and his buildings when he states that historians have “complained of the hiatus that divides the modernity of [Semper’s] thought with his stubborn use of classical forms.” Yet he concludes that, based on the current level of interest in nineteenth-century architecture, Semper’s “stodgy architectural designs [...] now seem less ‘old-fashioned.’”94 Mallgrave,

chitecture, an idea championed by Semper, taken up by Fiedler for his theory and put into practice by such architects as Richard Lucae and Hans Auer. See Ikonomou, Introduction (1994): 34-35 and Lucae, Über die ästhetische Ausbildung der Eisen-Konstruktionen, besonders in ihrer Anwendung bei Räumen von bedeutender Spannweite (1870) 92 Reinle, Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz: Die Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts: Architektur/ Malerei/Plastik (1962): 49. As Reinle mentions, Semper did in fact design two other railroad stations (Leipzig and Oschatz), in 1841 and 1842, but both designs are lost. 93 Mundt, Das Verhältnis einiger kunsthandwerklicher Entwürfe Sempers zum historischen Kunstgewerbe (1976) 94 Mallgrave, Gustav Klemm and Gottfried Semper: The Meeting of Ethnological and Architectural Theory (1985): 79 95 Mallgrave, Introduction (1989): 44. In addition to his framing of history at a safe, since parallel, distance, Mallgrave’s statement that “Semper’s struggle with the origin and meaning of art may provide us with no clear solutions to our contemporary dilemma” might betray his own desire to uncover a unified base on which to erect an architecture that, I believe, can instead only exist in and through diversity, videlicet Semper’s own work.

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in fact, hints at the as of yet little acknowledged influence of Semper’s work on modernism. However, while he reads Semper’s writings as a “cogent historical parallel”95 to the confusing practice of architecture today (1989), I would propose a reading that intersects Semper’s

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work with the present where the Baukunst is still what Semper argued it primarily to be in the 1850s, namely the Bekleiden of a structure. Here is one more statement by someone borrowing Semper’s theories while at the same time refusing to examine closely some of the lesser known works of Semper to recognize the interaction between writing and building. Fiedler, in a letter to his friend Hildebrand from 10 December 1875, suggests that “all of Semper’s individual originality [Erfindung] and daring has been buried [ist untergegangen] under his historical and artistic erudition. [...] I have once more worked my way through his writings and am always surprised again at his revelations [Aufschlüsse]. But, when he expounds upon the origin of architectural forms, individual artistry is never important, it is never immediate invention, free artistic deed but derivation, reformulation [Neuformung] etc. And so his buildings [Bauwerke] tediously wind their way through the historically determined paths [vorgezeichneten Gängen] and a grandiose absurdity would always be more interesting than this deadly boring erudition.”96 Fiedler did obviously not know about the laundry ship. As mentioned above, it has been argued by others that Semper’s theories were quite influential on modern architecture, yet Semper’s buildings curiously do not figure in the history of modernism. The apparent absence of ‘modern materials’, i.e. glass and iron, is certainly one reason that has kept Semper’s buildings out of contention for the canonic position in architectural history books. Herrmann’s reading of Semper’s alleged “truth of materials” argument may have contributed to the suggestion that Semper did not recognize the importance of these ‘new’ materials for architecture. Although there is evidence in his work proving that his thought and practice may have been more advanced than is generally admitted by architectural historiographers. I am thinking here specifically of Semper’s design of the Donner greenhouse in Neumühle near Altona, the bazar project at the Tiefenhof — a puzzling hybrid that combines the function of villa and shop by colliding two types: the Italian Renaissance palazzo with a completely glazed facade fronting the street97 and resembling the

Fiedler, Adolf von Hildebrands Briefwechsel mit Conrad Fiedler (1927): 54-55 quoted in Ikonomou, Introduction (1994): 32 and 74 n98. Stockmeyer, Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie (1939): 268 quotes from the same letter. 97 See Reinle’s description in Reinle, Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz: Die Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts: Architektur/Malerei/Plastik (1962): 49 96

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Architexts early department stores built in the U.S. — and the Treichler laundry ship.98 Yet rather than focus only on the analysis of formal aspects and prove that Semper’s minor projects actually contradict the accepted belief of his backwardness vis-a-vis new materials — and I will show that they do — another thread might focus precisely not on material as presence but on the destruction of material and the reliance on the visual as characteristics of modern architecture. I could, in fact, trace an intellectual lineage of what Semper would call a “destruction of reality” that privileges the visual, going through several permutations. I could start with early theories on color by Goethe99 (especially vis-a-vis Newton), Runge,100 and Schopenhauer,101 continue via the raging polychromy debate in the early part of the nineteenth century — the big players were Hittorff, Semper, Brönsted, and Kugler — and the visibility theories of Fiedler and Riegl, with a related but opposing side track following Schmarsow’s theory of full-body perception, to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century polemics on the primacy of the visual in Loos’ and Le Corbusier’s writings (as well as the important relationship between architecture and fashion102), and arrive at contemporary scholarship when Wigley writes, in reference to the strained and strange coupling of architecture and philosophy, that “architecture is involved in the construction of the visual before it is placed in the visual.”103

There exists somewhat of a precursor to the ship in Semper’s design for the theater, to be inserted into the Crystal Palace, that sported Pompeiian wall paintings on its exterior walls. See Fröhlich, Geschichte und Fortschritt: Über Sempers Verhältnis zu Eisen und Glas (1980): 52 99 See especially Glockner’s superb essay on Goethe’s Farbenlehre in Glockner, Das Philosophische Problem in Goethes Farbenlehre (1924) 100 Runge, Farbenlehre: 18061810 (1840) 101 Schopenhauer, Über das Sehn und die Farben (1888), English translation as Schopenhauer, On Vision and Colors (1994) 102 See Wigley, White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2] (1994) for the influence of Semper’s thought on Muthesius 103 Wigley, Architecture after Philosophy: Le Corbusier and the Emperor’s New Paint (1990): 84 104 Bergren, The (re)Marriage of Penelope and Odysseus: Architecture, Gender, Philosophy (1993): 14 98

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To what extent does Semper’s emphasis on architecture as a textile art, expressed in his concept of Bekleidung (clothing, cladding, dressing, painting, coating) intersect with his minor works? According to Semper the presence of textiles in architecture can be traced all the way back to the hazy beginnings of architectural production and is therefore anything but minor. The recognition of architecture as a textile art comes not without consequences. And here, in a twist that undermines the classical as seen through the lense of Neoclassicism, Bergren states that “in marking weaving as exclusively female, early Greek thought attributes to women the founding of architectural art.”104 It is therefore not surprising that Semper’s

writings and his minor buildings, in their celebration of the textual in architecture have been disregarded by a male-dominated profession. It is an indication of architecture’s difficulty to acknowledge the central role of fabrics when Mallgrave, recalling the development of Der Stil, downplays the importance of textiles in Semper’s theory. He argues that Semper’s “decision to begin with textiles is not significant in itself, since he had initially hoped to start with ceramics. His late decision to append the ‘dressing’ thesis to the textile section is not entirely logical, for this principle also appears in other classes of motives [transgressive]. The early consideration of this motive, in fact, may have deterred him from beginning the third volume [of Der Stil] by robbing him of its relevant subject matter.”105 What can be discerned from this statement? Textiles are not relevant for architecture. Bekleidung is an appendage and not quite syllogistic since it crosses boundaries, the precise reason why it would show up in all parts of the four elements and certainly no reason not to include it in the first section of Der Stil. And finally, textiles effect the exclusion of the relevant. Architecture is here written with a capital A, it is not mere textiles. Semper’s theory of modern architecture would be unthinkable without smooth, textual surfaces. Mallgrave mentions Berlage, who, in an addendum to a published lecture from 1905 argues that the “nature of the wall was surface flatness.”106 For Semper smooth surfaces are useful since they give the designer free reign to decorate. Kühne mentions that the coatings [Verkleidungen] of these flat surfaces can be decorated much more freely since they do not project into space.107 The emphasis on smooth, decorated surfaces points to the representative or symbolic function of architecture which could be mobilized for political purposes. Ward suggests that “any transgression of the social order is necessarily and intimately linked to transgression of the symbolic order.”108 The politics of the symbol is evident in the

Mallgrave, Introduction (1989): 36, emphases mine. 106 Berlage, Gedanken über Stil in der Baukunst (1905) quoted by Mallgrave, Introduction (1989): 42 107 See Kühne, Über die Beziehung Sempers zum Baumaterial (1976): 114 108 Ward, Foreign and Familiar Bodies (1992): 26 105

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German word Sinnbild, i.e. an image/picture that makes sense and is sensual and underlines therefore both the artificial construction of the symbolic, an interpretation that stands in contrast to reading the symbol as something whose meaning is beyond question,

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Architexts and the physical, bodily reference to the material it is made of. As Mallgrave points out, by 1854, Semper’s concept of symbol has been widened to the point where type, ornament, symbol, and Bekleidung are synonymous.109 The difficulties historians have when faced with Semper’s broad view of ornament are telling. Watkin suggests that Semper’s “complex and not always very lucid arguments implied that pattern-making preceded structural technique so that it was legitimate to regard ornament as in some sense more fundamental than structure.”110 However, for Semper the symbolic is evidently not only ‘in some sense’ fundamental but it provides the very foundation on which architecture builds its edifice. It may be useful to differentiate at this point between structural in the conventional sense as tectonics, and Structural in the Semperian sense where what is physically non load-bearing is nevertheless Structural in the sense that it is what constitutes the wall, the enclosure in the first place. Pompeiian walls are for the most part independent, i.e. structurally non-load-bearing.111 Semper’s choice of Pompeiian wall motifs as decoration for the exterior metal panels of the laundry ship is therefore non-trivial. He differentiates between ornament that exists solely as an addition and not as a structural [struktive] part and those that play a structural and ornamental role. “Ornament [Schmuck], of whatever kind, consists of two principally different elements: firstly out of those units [...] that make up the essence of the ornamentation, and secondly out of that which frames [umfaßt], links and attaches these units to that which is ornamented. The first element is closed in itself [...] and shows no conflict of mechanical structural forces. The second element is structural, it functions mechanically, it frames [faßt], links [verkettet], binds [bindet], and should simultaneously [zugleich] contribute cosmetically.”112 The implied danger of a constructed and

See Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983): 290ff and Semper, On Architectural Symbols (1985). Semper then underlines the Structural value of the symbolic as Bekleidung, by developing a history of structural symbols. See Semper’s lecture of 1854, especially the part entitled Structural Symbols. Semper, On the Origin of Some Architectural Styles (1985): 64-66 110 Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (1986): 422 111 Semper borrowed the differentiation of structural-symbolic and structural-technical from Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1869): 20-25, who, however, did not develop it further. 112 Semper, Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur (1854): 299 113 Jones, Gleanings from the Great Exhibition of 1851 (1851): chap. XX, 2 quoted in Mallgrave, The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London (1983): 267 109

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structural ornament lies in its ability to blur the distinction between the essential and the supplemental was by Owen Jones assertion that “construction should be decorated” but “decoration should never be purposely constructed”113 indicates the resistance to this challenge of

the distinction between structure and ornament. Redgrave similarly relegates ornament to decoration and therefore an implicitly and explicitly inferior position. “Ornament is thus necessarily limited, for, so defined, it cannot be other than secondary, and must not usurp a principal place; if it do so, the object is no longer a work ornamented, but is degraded into a mere ornament.”114 Not surprisingly the highly ornate minor projects (with the exception of the villa Garbald) stand in contrast to the main works, especially the Winterthur city hall and E.T.H. main building where the planned exterior and interior decoration was for the most part suppressed. Reinle describes the exterior surface of the E.T.H. main building in its current stage as a “naked torso,”115 exactly the opposite of what Semper ‘s designs show in the E.T.H. archive. Semper’s minor projects have an advantage over his major ones in that they can more easily articulate his theories since there were fewer restrictions on their production. Their peripheral position and relative obscurity allowed Semper to work on them as sites for experimentation and speculation, two conditions that usually have to be disregarded in major projects where the economy of structure that drives design decisions leaves little room for experimentation. Again, the laundry ship may serve as an example where Semper could work out a doubled relation to new materials, in this case, the use of iron. It was, on one hand, a means to fulfill the practical demands of his time, i.e. light-weight construction (metal frame with metal panels), and on the other hand the ship’s exterior decoration, painted on its sheet metal panels can be seen as a reference to a politically engaged culture in Pompeii with its ubiquitous graffiti.116

Redgrave, Supplementary Report on Design (1852): 708 115 Reinle, Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz: Die Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts: Architektur/Malerei/ Plastik (1962): 40 116 See also Fröhlich, Geschichte und Fortschritt: Über Sempers Verhältnis zu Eisen und Glas (1980): 53 114

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What are the consequences of assigning the minor arts [Kleinkünste] a major role on the stage of architecture? And in what way do Semper’s minor works articulate his theory of the relevance of minor arts in architecture?

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The term ‘minor’ surfaces around 1854 in Semper’s notion of a theory of Kleinkünste117 in reference to the emergence of the art of building out of the industrial or minor arts, expressed in the statement that “the arts and crafts [Kunsthandwerk] or art industry had already achieved a high degree of development many centuries prior to the invention of architecture as an art.”118 Architecture as industrial arts or technical arts exist not in clear-cut opposition but in a relationship of interdependency to the fine or high arts,119 even though in 1852 Semper had written that the high arts are unable to affect industry because the former “lack a true, practical foundation.”120 By the middle of the nineteenth century, from the position within the academy, he articulates the crisis by writing that the contemporary art of building is “without originality and [has] lost its primary position before the other arts. She will only be revitalized when modern architects give more attention to the current state of our art industry.”121 This desire for a re-unification of high and low arts is also evident when he argues that the “dualism of institutions standing alongside one another [in this case architecture and engineering], is altogether inappropriate.”122 The proper place of architecture has been an ongoing theme since the nineteenth century. For Semper the place of architecture is in the academy yet architecture must at times also “step down from its throne and go into the marketplace, there to teach — and to learn.”123 That is, architecture, as a form of knowledge, has to take advantage of the mobility it had in the early stages in the history of knowledge, prior to its peripheral yet structural housing at the academy, when the Sophists would roam Greek city states in search of students. Wigley writes on the limited purpose of architecture as building, that it was “only used to ‘stabilize’ an already operating university by persuading the highly

The industrial arts, literally ‘small arts’ or ‘minor arts’. Based on this theory he developed the four ‘elements’or rather modes of building — they were based on actions, not objects — that would take care of basic necessities [Bedürfnisse, not Notwendigkeiten as Goethe would use it] of human existence. See Semper, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, und andere Schriften über Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Kunstunterricht. (1966): 15 and Semper, Kleine Schriften (1884): 263. Stockmeyer quotes Goethe as saying that “art rests on the industrial arts [Handwerk],” which, in the early part of the nineteenth century in Germany, still means manual work. See Goethe, Ueber Kunst und Altertum (1828) quoted by Stockmeyer, Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie (1939): 75, n47. See also ibidem: 15 quoting Goethe as saying that “All arts begin with necessity” or“Alle Künste fangen von dem Notwendigen an.” See Goethe, Kunst und Handwerk ) Bedürfnis implies a choice that is not yet part of the notwendig. 118 Semper, Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur (1854): 344 119 Semper admired Quatremère de Quincy because in his Jupiter Olympien he “traced the origin of the high arts to the technical arts and demonstrated that the media were essentially interrelated.” Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s (1977): 55 120 Semper, Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition (1989): 147. For a detailed list of how the influence of the high arts is expressed in the industrial arts, see ibidem: 145 121 Semper, Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur (1854): 350 122 Semper, Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition (1989): 148 123 Ibid: 146 117

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mobile faculty and students to remain in one place.”124 Still, toward the end of the century Hartmann reiterates the belief voiced today by many members of the profession that architecture “does not belong to the fine arts but is a building art.”125 Yet this “misfit”126 status is both a handicap and a plus for architecture. Wearing two hats means on one hand that the maintenance of a unified position of power is impossible. On the other hand, the mobility required to maintain a janus existence allows architecture to operate within the gap of writing and building. The ambiguous position of architecture is mirrored in Semper’s minor work. All of them share the characteristic of operating as joints between opposing sides, i.e. they are working within and transgressing a gap. In its early life the laundry ship worked as a spacer between two View of the limmat quai in front of the Hotel edges. It was a W-edge between two Bellevue in 1858.127 serrated boundaries. Yet the two edges of the space the ship operated within were not always as clean and straightlaced as today. Until the early 1950s,128 crennalated, meandering lines consisting of a bewildering array of trading ships, pleasure boats, landing-stages, platforms, and shore pilings made up the shore line of the Limmat. This difficult line fell prey to local politics of streamlining and cleansing that made the determination of what is in-line and out-of-line an easy task. The cabinet can be considered an other case in point for this shifty condition that is only revealed upon close, detailed inspection. Its upper, removable part underlines the apparent mobility (standing on carved feet appropriated from a Pompeiian tripod) of the complete assembly (table and top) while it rests on four small silver turtles.

Wigley, The Disciplining of Architecture (1990): 21 125 Hartmann, Gehört die Baukunst zu den freien Künsten? (1887): 391 quoted by Ikonomou, Introduction (1994): 281 126 Wigley, The Disciplining of Architecture (1990): 24 127 Widmer, Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte (1982-1985): IX, 59. The laundry ship will appear at this site six years later. The first steamship to operate on Lake Zurich, similar to the one shown in the image, was brought to Zurich from Great Britain in 1835. Its name was ‘Minerva’. See ibidem: IX, 61 128 At that time a movement called Freie Limmat lobbied successfully for the streamlining of the riverbanks. 124

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Architexts The literal and figurative mobility of both the laundry ship and the cabinet suggests a displacement, a being out of place that stands in opposition to proper architecture, the art of placement par excellence which has difficulty with things in disarray. The laundry ship, by displaying Pompeiian wall paintings that are conventionally painted on the interior, on its exterior,129 announces, by displacement and inversion, the suppressed condition of the formerly interior, domestic space while the exterior has been internalized. Bryson, in an analysis of Pompeiian wall paintings, maps the relationship between the real, placed, and the fictional, displaced and displayed on Metal tripod at the walls, as an oscillation. This shuttling or Charlottenhof villa in Potsdam. Photo by author. weaving recalls the difficulty to separate the real from the fictional, emblematized in the 129 See Bryson, Looking at German wirklich [real] that refers to wirken, the Overlooked : Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990): meaning both to work and to weave. What 36-40 is real is woven. Consequently the Sem130 Paré, The Collected Works of Ambroise Paré (1634): 869 per’s minor works can be counted to the 131 Detail of cabinet (1854) See Wigley, The Disciplincategory of hybridic, shifting architectures ing of Architecture : 20 on prosthesis in architectural that expose the nature of their structure on their (sur)faces without discourse as a defensive device implying that this would construct a stable base from which to launch related to theory “as a kind of ” building that is “made to a new ideology. With this work the abîme, the absence of a ground, is stand”. still the only ground to build on and within. At this point the proposal itself turns into a pro|s|thesis,131 and, following my nose, I move forward into this cluster of hors-d’oeuvres. The following parts, still missing at this point, will be the three threads/chapters mentioned at the beginning of this proposal.

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Paré’s nose prosthesis130

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Especially p. 123 on the relationship of Kunstform and Kernform, the former described as erklärende Hülle. Form is representative of function, but not identical with it. Brawne, Michael, “What is wrong with Eclecticism,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 347-355. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Part of a symposium on Semper from December 2-6, 1974 at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at the Federal Polytech Institute in Zurich. Brodsky, Claudia, “Writing and Building: Ornament in ‘The Sleepwalkers’,” Hermann Broch: Literature, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Stephen D. Dowden. 257-272. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988). Brolin, Brent. Flight of Fancy: The Banishment and Return of Ornament. (Niew York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked : Four Essays on Still Life Painting. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Buddensieg, Tielman, ed. Die Nützlichen Künste. Berlin: 1982). Burckhardt, Jakob. Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. (1860). 11th edition, 1913. Burckhardt, Jakob. Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien. (1867). Burelli, Augusto Romano. Le Epifanie di Proteo: La Saga nordica del classicismo in Schinkel e Semper. (Venezia: Rebellato, 1983). Bürkli, David, “Die Entwicklung der Waschanstalt Zürich AG,” David Bürklis Züricher Kalender für das Jahr 1950 (1950): 72-73. History of the laundry facility Zurich with two photographs of the ship. Cable, Carole. Gottfried Semper. (Monticello, Illinois: Vance Bibliographies, 1988). Carmichael, Peter, “The Sense of Ugliness,” Aesthetics and Art Criticism (30, 1971/72): 495-498. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). Casson, Lionel, “Ancient Shipbuilding: New Light on an Old Source,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 194 (1963): 28-33. Caylus, Graf. Recueil d’antiquités. (1752). Contemporary of Winckelmann and promoting, like the latter, the rebirth of a Greek antiquity. Centouri, Jeanine, “Building Codes as Dress Codes for the Protective Clothing of Buildings,” Architronic 1992 1 (1.04, 1992): 1-8. Chytry, Josef. The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. (Berkely: University of California Press, 1989). Cichy, Bodo. The Great Ages of Architecture: From Ancient Greece to the Present Day. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964). Collignon, Maxime. Polychromy in Greek Statuary. (Washington: 1896). Colomina, Beatriz, ed. Sexuality and Space. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1994). Colquhoun, Alan, “‘Newness’ and ‘Agevalue’ in Alois Riegl,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980-1987, ed. Alan Colquhoun. 213-221. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Connah, Roger. Writing Architecture: Fantômas, Fragments, Fictions: An Architectural Journey through the 20th Century. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Conta, Friedrich Anton von. Grundlinien der bürgerlichen Baukunst Nach Herrn Durand. (Halle: 1806). Copjec, Joan, “The Sartorial Superego,” October (50, 1989): 56-95. Corbusier, Le. The Decorative Arts of Today. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Däubler, Theo, “Sempers Fresken im Japanischen Palais zu Dresden,” Die Antike (1932): Berlin und Leipzig. Day, Henry N. The Science of Aesthetics or The Nature, Kinds, Laws, and Uses of Beauty. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1872).

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Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Derrida, Jacques, “Differance,” Speech and Phenomena, ed. Jacques Derrida. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). semper, spacing. Derrida, Jacques, “Ein Portrait Walter Benjamins,” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner. 171-179. (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1985). Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Derrida, Jacques, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf. 277-309. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Originally published in 1978 as part of The Truth in Painting (‘Restitutions: De la vérité en pointure’ in La Vérité en peinture). Detmold, J. H. Randzeichnungen. (Reclam, 1843). Dilthey, Wilhelm, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Ästhetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe,” Gesammelte Schriften Volume 6 (1924): Leipzig und Berlin. Donato, Eugenio, “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet,” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. (London: Art Paperbacks, 1984). Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis. Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre anciens et modernes. (1800). See also expanded edition by J. G. Legrand in 1833. Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis. Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’Ecole Polytechnique. (18021805). Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis. Abriß der Vorlesungen über Baukunst. (Karlsruhe und Freiburg: 1831). Durant, Stewart. Ornament: A Survey of Decoration since 1830. (London: McDonald, 1986). Eckhardt, Wolfgang, “Gottfried Sempers Planungen für ein Richard-Wagner-Festtheater in München,” Jahrbuch für das Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Band III (1984): Hamburg. Egbert, Donald Drew. The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture, Illustrated by the Grands Prix de Rome. (Princeton: 1980). Eggert, Klaus, “Der Begriff des Gesamtkunstwerks in Sempers Theorie,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 121-128. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Eggert, Klaus. Edited by Planner-Steiner, Ulrike. Friedrich von Schmidt: Gottfried Semper, Carl von Hasenauer. (Wiesbaden: 1978). Enzensberger, Christian. Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt. (London: Calder, 1972). Ettlinger, Leopold David. “Gottfried Semper und die Antike.” C. Nieft, (1937). Wrote on Raphael (1483-1520) and Wien und die Entwicklung der Kunsthistorischen Methode. Wien: Bohlau, 1984. See especially chapter IV on “Die Bedeutung der Polychromiefrage für Semper”, pp 49-78. Also chapter V, section 2 on the Gesamtkunstwerk. Fenger, L. Dorische Polychromie: Untersuchungen über die Anwendung der Farbe auf dem dorischen Tempel. (Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1886). Fiedler, Conrad. Schriften über Kunst I und II. (Piper, 1914). Fiedler, Conrad. Adolf von Hildebrands Briefwechsel mit Conrad Fiedler. (Dresden: Wolfgang Jess, 1927). Fiedler, Konrad, “Bemerkungen über Wesen und Geschichte der Baukunst,” Schriften zur Kunst [Reprint Halbband 1971 (1913/1914): München: W. Fink. A commentary on Semper’s theory, translated into English by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Alvina Browner, and Victor Hammer, as Conrad Fiedler’s Essay on Architecture (Lexington, KY, 1954).

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Fiedler, Konrad, “Observations on the Nature and History of Architecture,” Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis and Ikonomou Mallgrave Eleftherios. 125-146. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). Fischer, Albert. “Die ästhetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers und die moderne psychologische Aesthetik.” (1904). Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard et Pécuchet; Dictionnaire des Idées reçues. (Paris: Editions Rencontre, 1970). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Francke, Bernhard. Die Nikolaikirche nach dem Hamburger großen Brand. (Hamburg: F. Wittig, 1989). Friedell, Egon. A Cultural History of the Modern Age. (New York: Knopf, 1954). Fröhlich, Martin. “Semper als Entwerfer und Entwurfslehrer: Materialien zur Entwurfslehre im 19. Jahrhundert aus dem Zürcher Semper-Archiv.” Zürich: ETH, 1974. PhD Dissertation. Fröhlich, Martin. Zeichnerischer Nachlass and der ETH Zürich; kritischer Katalog. (Basel und Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1974). Fröhlich, Martin, “Zürcher Bauten Gottfried Sempers,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 83-94. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Fröhlich, Martin, “Geschichte und Fortschritt: Über Sempers Verhältnis zu Eisen und Glas,” Archithese 10 (July/August, 1980): 51-53. Fröhlich, Martin, “Hommage au grand maître,” Fünf Punkte in der Architekturgeschichte, ed. Katharina Medici-Mall. 134-147. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1985). Published as Festschrift für Adolf Max Vogt. Fröhlich, Martin. Gottfried Semper. (Zürich: Verlag für Architektur, 1991). Has Semper’s biography/Lebenslauf, listing of archive locations and selected bibliography in back of book. Fuenmayor, Jesús; Haug, Kate and Ward, Frazer, “Preface,” Dir & Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine, 5-7. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992). Furtwängler, Adolph. Aegina das Heiligtum der Aphaia. (München: 1906). Gantner, Joseph. Revision der Kunstgeschichte: Prolegomena zu einer Kunstgeschichte aus dem Geiste der Gegenwart. (Wien: A. Schroll & Co., 1932). Mit einem Anhang: Semper und Le Corbusier, Antrittsvorlesung an der Zürcher Universität 1927. Also wrote Heinrich Wölfflin’s Autobiographie (1984) und Jacob Burckhardt und Heinrich Wölfflin’s Briefwechsel (1989). Gantner, Joseph. Schönheit und Grenzen der klassischen Form: Burckhardt, Croce, Wölfflin. Drei Vorträge. (Wien: A. Scholl, 1944). Gantner, Joseph. Jacob Burckhardt und Heinrich Wölfflin: Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente ihrer Begegnung 1882-1897. (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1948). Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Garrucci, Raffaele. Graffiti de Pompei. Inscriptions et gravures tracees au stylet recueillies et interpretees. (Paris: B. Duprat, 1856). Gau, Franz-Christian. Les Antiquités de Nubie. (Paris: 1822). German translation: Stuttgart, 1823. Germann, Georg, “Gottfried Semper über Konvention und Innovation,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte (33, 1976): 224-228. Germann, Georg, “Sempers Werk über den Stil als Anleitung zur Praxis,” Fünf Punkte in der Architekturgeschichte, ed. Katharina Medici-Mall. 122-133. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1985). Giedion, Siegfried. Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen, Eisenbeton. (Leipzig und Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928). Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975). Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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Gloag, John and Bridgwater, Derek. A History of Cast Iron Architecture. (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1948). Glockner, Hermann. Fr. Th. Vischer und das 19. Jahrhundert. . Glockner, Hermann. Das Philosophische Problem in Goethes Farbenlehre. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1924). Investigation of the problems philosophy has with Goethe’s empirical investigations on color. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Kunst und Handwerk. . Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Zur Theorie der bildenden Künste. (Insel Verlag, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Schriften zur Kunst, (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1788). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Ueber Kunst und Altertum. (1828). Especially Volume VI, folio 2. Goethe, Joahnn Wolfgang. Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert in Briefen und Aufsätzen. (Leipzig: VEB Seemann Verlag, 1969). Gralfs, Bettine. Metallverarbeitende Produktionsstätten in Pompeji. (Oxford, England: B.A.R., 1988). Greenough, Horatio. Form and Function. (Berkeley: Berkeley University of California Press, 1947). Gregotti, V., ed. Storia del disegno industriale. Milan: Electa, 1989). Gruben, Gottfried. Die Tempel der Griechen. (München: Hirmer, 1986). Habel, Heinrich, “Sempers städtebauliche Planungen im Zusammenhang mit dem Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus in München,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 129-152. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Halttunen, Karen, “From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality,” Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner. 157-189. (New York: Norton, 1989). Hamilton, W. R., “On the Polychromy of Greek Architecture,” Transactions of the Institute of British Architects of London Sessions 1835-1836, 1 (1836): 73-99. Hammer, Karl. Jakob Ignaz Hittorff. Ein Pariser Baumeister 1792-1867. (Stuttgart: 1968). Hänsch, Wolfgang. Die Semperoper: Geschichte und Wiederaufbau der Dresdner Staatsoper. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1986). Harris, Ann Sutherland and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists: 1550-1950. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Hartmann, Eduard von, “Gehört die Baukunst zu den freien Künsten?,” Gegenwart, 391ff. 1887). Harvey, Lawrence. Semper’s Theory of Evolution in Architectural Ornament. (1885). Haug, Walter (editor). Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie: Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1978. (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1979). Hauser, Andreas, “Der ‘Cuvier der Kunstwissenschaft’: Klassifizierungsprobleme in Gottfried Sempers ‘Vergleichender Baulehre’,” Grenzbereiche der Architektur (Festschrift Adolf Reinle), ed. Thomas Bolt. 97-114. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1985). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (given between 1820 and 1821). (1835). Especially part III. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Heidegger, Martin, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” Holzwege, 69-104. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1952). semper. Heidegger, Martin, “‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’: Spiegel Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger am 23. September 1966,” Der Spiegel 30 (23, 1976): 193-219. Heidegger, Martin, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 115-154. (New York: Harper, 1977). Heidegger, Martin. Die Frage nach dem Ding. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984). Helas, Volker, “Einige unbekannte Zeichnungen Gottfried Sempers,” Jahrbuch für das Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Band 1 (1982): 31-38. Mystification of Semper’s early drawings.

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Helas, Volker. Architektur in Dresden 1800-1900. (Braunschweig und Wiesbaden: 1985). Hennig-Schefeld, Monica and Schmidt-Thomsen, Helga. Transparenz und Masse: Passagen und Hallen aus Eisen und Glas 1800-1880. (Köln: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1972). Herderer, Oswald, “Die Architekturtheorie bei Gottfried Semper,” Bericht über die 25. Tagung der Ausgrabungswissenschaft und Bauforschung (1969):146-150. Herington, John. Aeschylus. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Herrmann, Wolfgang. Deutsche Architektur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. (Breslau for Volume I, Basel and Stuttgart for Volume II: 1932). Volume I from 1770-1840. Volume II, which was supposed to be published in 1832 together with Volume I, was suppressed in 1933 and published subsequently in 1977. Herrmann, Wolfgang. Gottfried Semper im Exil: Paris, London 1849-1855: Zur Entstehung des “Stil” 1840-1877. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1978). Herrmann, Wolfgang. Gottfried Sempers theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Zürich: Katalog und Kommentare. (Basel und Boston: Birkhäuser, 1981). Herrmann, Wolfgang. Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984). Excellent bibliography and index. Hersey, George. The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). Hildebrand, Adolf. The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture. (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1932). Hildebrand, Adolf, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Ikonomou Eleftherios. 227-279. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). Hirt, Aloys. Die Baukunst nach den Grundsätzen der Alten. (Berlin: 1809). Published later (18211827 in Berlin) under the title Die Geschichte der Baukunst bei den Alten in three volumes. For more on Hirt compare Borbein, 1979, p. 106ff. Hirt also supported Winckelmann by arguing that Pompeiian fresco painting was similar to that used in Greece. See p. 234235 of this book. Hitchcock Jr., Henry Russell. Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). Originally published in 1929. Hittorff, “De l’Architecture polychrôme chez les Grecs,” Annales de l’Institut de Correspondence Archéologique, II (1830): 263-284. Published in 1851 in London in The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal. Hittorff, Jakob Ignaz. “Mémoires sur mon voyage en Sicile, lu à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut avec l’extrait du procèsverbal de la séance du 24 juillet 1824.” Institut de France, 1824. Compare with Hammer, 1968, p. 101f. Hittorff, Jakob Ignaz, “On the Polychromy of Greek Architecture,” The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal (1851): Hittorff (and Gau) with whom Semper worked in Paris kept close connections with Alexander von Humboldt. Hittorff, Jakob Ignaz. Restitution du Temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte ou l’Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs. (Paris: 1851). Hittorff, Jacques Ignace. Hittorff : un architecte du XIXeme siecle: Musee Carnavalet, 20 octobre 1986-4 janvier 1987. (Paris: Le Musee, 1986). Hittorff, Jakob Ignaz. Jakob Ignaz Hittorff : ein Architekt aus Köln im Paris des 19. Jahrhunderts: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Koln, Graphische Sammlung, 21. Januar bis 22. Marz 1987. (Köln: Das Museum, 1987). Hittorff, Jacques Ignace. Architectural drawings and watercolors by Jakob Ignaz Hittorff, 1792-1867. (Cologne and Washington D. C.: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1990). Hittorff, Jakob Ignaz and Zanth, Karl Ludwig Wilhelm von. Architecture antique de la Sicile ou Recueil des plus intéressants monuments d’architecture des villes et des lieux, les plus remarquables de la Sicile ancienne, mesurés et déssinés... (Paris: 1828).

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Hogan, James C. A Commentary on the Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Hope, Th. An Historical Essay on Architecture by the late Thomas Hope, illustrated by drawings by in Italy and Germany. (London: 1835). Semper borrows from Hope his emphasis on the importance of material, tools, and climate in the production of archtitecture. Hübsch, Heinrich. In welchem Style sollen wir bauen. (Karlsruhe: 1828). Reprinted in 1984. Hübsch considers style no longer as a historical concept but as a technological principle, similar to the later Schinkel. Hübsch, Heinrich, editor. In what style should we build? The German debate on architectural style. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 1992). Originally published by Hübsch in German as In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (1828). Hübsch’s essay is a defence and proclamation of the Romanesque style. Ikonomou, Eleftherios. “Theories of Space in Nineteenth Century Aesthetics, and History of Art: A Discussion.” 1982. Ikonomou, Eleftherios and Harry Francis Mallgrave, “Introduction,” Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis and Ikonomu Mallgrave Eleftherios. 1-85. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). Irwin, David, ed. Winckelmann: Writings on Art. London: Phaidon, 1972). Iversen, Margaret, “Style as Structure: Alois Riegl’s Historiography,” Art History 2 (1, March, 1979): 62-72. Iversen, Margaret. Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Jameson, Frederic. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. (1993). Japtok, Eugen. Karl Rosenkranz als Literaturkritiker: Eine Studie über Hegelianismus und Dichtung. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Eberhard Albert Verlag, 1964). Jarzombek, Mark, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism,” Assemblage (23, 1994): 28-69. Johnson, Philip. “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” New York: Museum of Modern Art by Arno Press, 1969. The exhibit took place from February 10 to March 23, 1932. Jones, Owen. An Apology for the colouring of the Greek court in the Crystal Palace. (1854). Jones, Owen. Grammar of Ornament. (London: Day and Son, 1856). Jöns, Dietrich Walter. Das ‘Sinnen-Bild’: Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit by Andreas Gryphius. (Stuttgart: 1966). Referenced in Esselborn, 1989: 139. Kahn, Andrea, “The Invisible Mask,” Drawing, Building, Text, ed. Andrea Kahn. 85-106. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Kant, Emmanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. (Meiner, 1924). Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Kemp, Wolfgang, “Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft. Teil I: Benjamin’s Beziehungen zur Wiener Schule,” Kritische Berichte 1 (1, 1973): 30-50. Kemp, Wolfgang, “Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft,” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner. 224-257. (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1985). King, James T. Description and Philosophy of James T. King’s Patent: Washing and Drying Apparatus, adapted for the use of families, Hotels, Public Institutions, and large Laundries. (New York: American Steam Washing Company, 1855). Klemm, Gustav. Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1843). Klemm was royal librarian and curator at the Zwinger in Dresden while Semper was teaching at the Bauakademie. Semper knew the famous ceramics collection at the Zwinger and he cites Klemm profusely.

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Klenze, Leo von. Der Temple des olympischen Jupiter von Agrigent. (Stuttgart and Tübingen: 1821 and 1827). Compare also Van Zanten’s dissertation, 1977, p. 23ff. Klenze, Leo von. Versuch einer Wiederherstellung des toskanischen Tempels nach seiner historischen und technischen Analoge. (München: 1822). Klenze, Leo von. Aphoristische Bemerkungen gesammelt auf einer Reise nach Griechenland. (1838). Klopfer, Paul, “Bauwerk als Bildwerk: Versuch einer Parallelsetzung von Baukunst und Bildnerei,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XXXI (2, 1937): 97-116. Comparison of Baukunst and Bildkunst. Koch, H. Studien zum Theseustempel in Athen. (Berlin: 1955). Kornbichler, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichtsschreibung im 19. Jahrhundert: Wilhelm Dilthey und die Begründung der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft. (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, 1984). Kracauer, Siegfried. Das Ornament der Masse: Essays. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963). Kramer, Lawrence, “Carnaval, Cross-Dressing, and the Woman in the Mirror,” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie. 305-325. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Krenz, Gerhard, “Zur Semper-Ehrung in der DDR,” Architektur der DDR 28 (1979): 196. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Kruft, Hanno-Walter. Geschichte der Architekturtheorie: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. (München: C. H. Beck, 1991). Kugler, Franz, “Ueber die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Sculptür und ihre Grenzen,” Kleine Schriften und Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart. Volume 1. 1835). Kugler, Franz. Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte. (1842). Kugler, Franz, “Über die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Sculptur und ihre Grenzen, erweiterte Version von 1835,” Kleine Schriften und Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, Teil I, ed. Franz Kugler. 265-361. (Stuttgart: 1853). Kühne, Hellmut R. W., “Über die Beziehung Sempers zum Baumaterial,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 109-120. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Labrouste, Henri. Temples de Paestum par Labrouste. Restaurations des monuments antiques par les architectes pensionnaires de France à Rome. (Paris: 1877). Lammert, Marlies. David Gilly: Ein Baumeister des deutschen Klassizismus. (Berlin: 1982). Reprinted 1982. Lang, Mabel L. Graffiti and Dipinti. (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1976). Laudel, Heidrun. “Das Problem der architektonischen Form in der Theorie Gottfried Sempers.” Technische Universität, Fakultät für Bau-, Wasser- und Forstwesen, (1984). Laudel, Heidrun. Gottfried Semper, Architektur und Stil. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1991). Laudel, Heidrun, “Architektur im Zwiespalt zwischen Demokratieanspruch und Staatsrepräsentation - das Beispiel Semper,” Workshop: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen (3, 1993): 81-85. Laudel, Heidrun, “Ein Schritt zurück zu Gottfried Semper,” Marxistische Blätter (2, 1993): 74-77. Laurence, Frederick S. Color in Architecture. (New York: National Terra Cotta Society, 1924). Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy. Designed to promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind...Illustrated with More than Eight Hundred Engravings accurately copied; and Some Duplicates added from Originals. Executed by, or under the Inspection of, Thomas Holloway,. (London: 1789-1798). Lavin, Sylvia. Quatremere de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture. . Lefebvre, Henri. La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. (Paris: Gallimard, “Idees”, 1968).

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Levin, Samuel R., “Allegorical Language,” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. 23-38. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Levin, Thomas Y., “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to “Rigorous Study of Art”,” October (Winter, 47, 1988): 77-83. Levine, Neil, “The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo-Grec,” The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, ed. Arthur Drexler. 325ff. (London/New York: 1977). Lindner, Burckhardt, “Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft,” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burckhardt Lindner. (Königstein/Taunus: Athenaeum, 1985). Lindner, Burkhardt, “»Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln…«,” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner. 7-11. (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1985). Lindner, Burkhardt, “Technische Reproduzierbarkeit und Kulturindustrie: Benjamins »Positives Barbarentum« im Kontext,” Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner. 180223. (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1985). Linfert, Carl, “Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung: Mit einem Versuch über französische Architekturzeichnungen des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Kunstwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, ed. Hans Sedlmayer. 133-210. (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 1931). Linfert, Carl. “Vom Ursprung großer Baugedanken.” In Frankfurter Zeitung, ed.^eds. Frankfurt am Main: 1936. Lipsius, Constantin, “Gottfried Semper,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 14 (January 3, 1880): 2-195. Semper biography. Lipstadt, Helen, “Soufflot, De Wailly, Ledoux: La Fortune Critique Dans La Presse Architecturale (1800-1825),” Soufflot et l’Architecture des Lumières, ed. Monique; Rabreau Mosser Daniel. 298-303. (Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, 1986). Löffler, Fritz. Das alte Dresden, Dresden 1958, Frankfurt 1966. (Neuauflage: Leipzig und Frankfurt: 1981). Loos, Adolf, “Das Prinzip der Bekleidung,” Adolf Loos: Sämtliche Schriften in Zwei Bänden, ed. Franz Glück. 105-112. (Wien and München: Verlag Herold, 1898). Also ‘Glas und Ton’ in the same volume, pp. 55-61. Loos, Adolf, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” Adolf Loos: Sämmtliche Schriften 1., ed. Franz Glück. 276-288. (Wien: Herold, 1908). Lotze, Hermann. Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland. (München: 1868). Lucae, Richard, “Über die ästhetische Ausbildung der Eisen-Konstruktionen, besonders in ihrer Anwendung bei Räumen von bedeutender Spannweite,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 4 (2, 13 January 1870, 1870): 9-12. Lucan, Jacques, “Decoration as Building: A Paradox?,” Ottagono (94, 1990): 56-67. Magirius, Heinrich. Gottfried Sempers Zweites Dresdner Hoftheater. (Wien: Böhlhaus, 1985). Mallgrave, Francis. The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London. (University of Pennsylvania, 1983). Mallgrave, Harry Francis, “Gustav Klemm and Gottfried Semper: The Meeting of Ethnological and Architectural Theory,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring, 9, 1985): 68-79. Mallgrave, Harry Francis, “Introduction,” Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave. 1-44. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Man, Paul de. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Man, Paul de. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Manteuffel, Zoege von, “Schinkel und Semper — Idee und Ratio als Grundlage der Stilbildung,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 291-302. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Marées, Hans von. Briefe. (Piper, 1923).

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Marx, Harald. Gemäldegalerie Dresden. (Dresden: E. A. Seemann, 1992). Masiero, Roberto, “In Praise of Decoration against Superficiality,” Rassegna XII (41/1 March, 1990): 14-25. Mau, August. Pompeji in Leben und Kunst. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1908, 1908). Mau, August. Pompeii: Its Life and Art. (New Rochelle, N.Y: Caratzas Bros, 1982). For a more accurate analysis of the four Pompeiian styles see Barbet, 1985. McEwen, Indra Kagis. Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). Medici-Mall, Katherina von, ed. Fünf Punkte in der Architekturgeschichte: Festschrift für Adolf Max Vogt. Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur. Basel und Boston: Birkhäuser, 1985). Menke, Bettine. Sprachfiguren : Name, Allegorie, Bild nach Benjamin. (München: Fink, 1991). Meyer, Alfred Gotthold. Eisenbauten: Ihre Geschichte und Aesthetik. (Esslingen am Neckar: Paul Neff Verlag (Max Schreiber), 1907). Middleton, Robin, ed. The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture. London: 1982). Middleton, Robin, “Hittorf ’s Polychrome Campaign,” The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton. 175-195. (London: 1982). Middleton, Robin and David Watkin. Neoclassical and 19th century architecture. (New York: Abrams, 1980). Milde, Kurt; Laudel, Heidrun, “Gottfried Sempers städtebauliche Leitgedanken,” Architektur der DDR 28 (1979): 218-233. Miller, J. Hillis, “The Critic as Host,” 217-253. Miller, J. Hillis, “The Two Allegories,” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. 355370. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Moranvánsky, Akos, “The Aesthetics of the Mask: The Critical Reception of Wagner’s Moderne Architektur and Architectural Theory in Central Europe,” Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Mallgrave. 198-239. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993). Morgan, David, “The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (3 (Summer), 1992): 231-242. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Götterlehre oder Mythologische Dichtungen der Alten. (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1966). Morris, Sarah P. Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art. (Princeton: 1992). Müller, Karl Otfried. Handbuch der Archäologie. (Göttingen: 1835). Müller was influenced by Goethe. Müller, Karl Otfried. Ancient Arts and its Remains: or a Manual of the Archeology of Art. (London: 1850). Müller, M. Die Verdrängung des Ornaments: Zum Verhältnis von Architektur und Lebenspraxis. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). On Kracauer, pp 49+. Müller, Sebastian. Kunst und Industrie – Ideologie und Organisation des Funktionalismus in der Architektur. (München: Kunswissenschaftliche Untersuchungen des Ulmer Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, 1974). Influence of Semper’s thought on the Werkbund, especially pp. 24-27 and 100. Mundt, Barbara, “Das Verhältnis einiger kunsthandwerklicher Entwürfe Sempers zum historischen Kunstgewerbe,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva BörschSupan. 315-328. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Mütterlein, Max Georg. “Gottfried Semper und dessen Monumentalbauten am Dresdner Theaterplatz.” Technische Hochschule, (1913). Neumann, Alfred R., “The Gesamtkunstwerk as a Romantic Form,” Studies in Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century German Literature: Essays in Honor of Paul K. Whitaker, ed. Norman H.; Wonderly Binger A. Wayne. (Lexington, Kentucky: APRA Press, 1974).

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Neumeyer, Fritz, “Iron and Stone: The Architecture of the Großstadt,” Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Mallgrave. 114-153. (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993). Nochlin, Linda. Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Nochlin, Linda. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Normand, Charles-Pierre-Joseph. Recueil varié de plans et de façades de maisons de ville et de campagne... (Paris: 1815). Odenthal, Johannes. Imaginäre Architektur. (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus-Verlag, 1986). Von Lequeu bis Humboldt, especially pp. 63-83. Olin, Margaret. Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, Overbeck, Johannes. Pompeji in seinen Gebäuden, Alterthümern und Kunstwerken. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1884). Owens, Craig, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I and II,” October (Spring,12 and Summer 13, 1980): 67-86. Owens, Craig, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. 57-82. (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983). Pächt, Otto, “Art Historians and Art Critics — VI: Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine (May, 1963): 188-193. Panofsky, Erwin, “Begriff des Kunstwollens,” Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1920): 335f. Parker, Roczika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Account of women’s exclusion from the Royal Academy, especially p. 28. Paulson, Ronald M. Robert Musil and the Ineffable: Hieroglyph, Myth, Fairy Tale, and Sign. (Stuttgart: H.-D. Heinz, 1982). Pecht, Friedrich. Deutsche Künstler des 19. Jahrhunderts: Studien und Erinnerungen. (Nördlingen: 1877). Pecht, a liberal and republican lithographer, painter, and writer, knew Semper personally from his time in Dresden. Pehnt, Wolfgang, “In der Vorratskammer der Kostüme: Architektur als Mode betrachtet,” Die Erfindung der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Gespräche zur Architektur unseres Jahrhunderts, ed. Wolfgang Pehnt. (München: Prestel Verlag, 1989). Pelt, Robert Jan van and Westfall, Carroll William. Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Pendle, Karin, ed. Women & Music: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Penkert, Sybille, “Zur Emblemforschung,” Emblem und Emblematikrezeption: Vergleichende Studien zur Wirkungsgeschichte vom 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Sybille Penkert. 1-22. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978). Percier, Charles and Fontaine, Pierre Francois Léonard. Recueil de Décorations intérieurs, comprenant tout ce qui a rapport à l’ameublement..... (1801). Designs for interior decoration considering an interdependence between architectonic construction and decorative forms. Expanded edition in Paris, 1812. Percier, Charles and Fontaine, Pierre Francois Léonard. Résidences de Souverains. Parallèle entre plusiers Résidences de Souverains de France, d’Allemagne, de Suède, de Russie, d’Espagne, et d’Italie. (Paris: 1833). Reprint with introduction by Hans Foramitti, Hildesheim and New York, 1973. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, “The Myth of Daedalus,” AA Files (10, 49-52. Pernice, Erich. Pompeji. (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1926). Peschken, Goerd, ed. Das Architektonische Lehrbuch — Karl Friedrich Schinkel — Lebenswerk. München-Berlin: 1979). Another famous uncompleted work. Classicist David Gilly

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(father of Friedrich) was teacher of Schinkel. Schinkel attended Fichte’s lectures at the Berlin University. Petsch, Joachim. Eigenheim und gute Stube : zur Geschichte des bürgerlichen Wohnens: Städtebau, Architektur, Einrichtungsstile. (Köln: DuMont, 1989). Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. (London: Penguin Books, 1975). Originally published in 1936. Phleps, Hermann. Die Farbige Architektur bei den Römern und im Mittelalter. (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1930). Pochat, Götz. Der Symbolbegriff in der Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft. . Podro, Michael. The Critical Historians of Art. (1982). Pogacnik, Marco, “Gottfried Semper: The Government of Style,” Ottagono (94, March 1990, 1990): 7-15. Ponte, Alessandra, “Everyone here speaks Sign Language,” Ottagono (94, 1990): 105-118. Prendergast, Christopher. The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Prinzhorn, H. Gottfried Sempers ästhetische Grundanschauungen. (München: 1908). Pugin, A.W. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. (New York (reprint from 1973): 1841). Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome. Jupiter olympien, ou l’art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue. (Paris: 1815). Based on lectures given a decade earlier. See his four criticisms on pp. 389-391. Quetglas, Jose, “Fear of Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion,” ARCHITECTUREPRODUCTION, ed. Beatriz Colomina. 122-151. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Quitzsch, Heinz. Die Ästhetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962). Quitzsch, Heinz, “Die Bedeutung der Bekleidungstheorie in Sempers Anschauungen,” Gottfried Semper - praktische Ästetik und politischer Kampt. Im Anhang: Die vier Elemente der Baukunst, 86-105. (Reprint der ersten Auflage in Braunschweig by Vieweg in 1851; Braunschweig und Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1981). Quitzsch, Heinz. Gottfried Semper - praktische Ästetik und politischer Kampt. Im Anhang: Die vier Elemente der Baukunst. (Reprint der ersten Auflage in Braunschweig by Vieweg in 1851; Braunschweig und Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1981). Raeburn, Michael. Architecture of the Western World. (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). Randall Coats, Catharine, “Reading Emblematically: Text, Tapestry and Transcendence in d’Aubigné’s ‘Avantures du Baron de Fæneste’,” Emblematica 2 (1, 1987): 95-107. Redgrave, Richard?, “Unsigned Article,” Journal of Design and Manufactures 1 (March, 1849): 56. Mallgrave assumes Redgrave’s ownership of this article. Redgrave, Richard, “Supplementary Report on Design,” Reports by the Juries (1852): 708-749. Redgrave, like Semper, rejects any nostalgia for the preindustrial past. Rees, Nigel. The Graffiti File. (London and Boston: George Allen & Unwin: 1981). Reinle, Adolf. Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz: Die Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts: Architektur/Malerei/Plastik. (Frauenfeld: Huber & Co, 1962). Reutersward, Patrik. Studien zur Polychromie der Plastik: Griechenland und Rom; Untersuchungen über die Farbwirkung der Marmor- und Bronzeskulpturen. (Stockholm: Svenska Bokforlaget, 1960). Reynolds, Sir Joshua. The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852). Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). According to Schor, 1989: 5 the “supreme formulation of neo-classical aesthetics” and the concomitant women-detail association. Ricoeur, Paul, “Civilization and National Cultures,” History and Truth, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).

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Riegl, Alois. Die Ägyptischen Textilfunde im K.K. Österreich Museum. (Wien: Waldheim, 1889). Riegl, Alois. Altorientalische Teppiche. (Leipzig: Weigel, 1891). Rather dry historiography of carpets, hangings, and rugs. Quotes Semper’s Der Stil re: weaving. Riegl, Alois. Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik. (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893). Riegl, Alois. Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. (Wien: 1901 and 1927). Riegl, Alois, “Der moderne Denkmalskultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung,” Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Alois Riegl. 144-193. (Augsburg/Wien: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag GmbH, 1929). Riegl, Alois, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt in der modernen Kunst,” Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Alois Riegl. (Augsburg/Wien: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag GmbH, 1929). Riegl, Alois. Gesammelte Aufsätze. (Augsburg/Wien: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag GmbH, 1929). Riegl, Alois, “Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde,” Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Alois Riegl. (Augsburg/Wien: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag GmbH, 1929). Originally published in 1903. Riegl, Alois, “Das Holländische Gruppenporträt,” Jahrbuch der Kunstsammlungen d. ah. Kaiserhauses, XXIII. (Vienna: 1931). Rodenwalt, G. O. M. von Stackelberg: der Entdecker der griechischen Landschaft. (Berlin: no date). Roller, Lynn E. Nonverbal Graffiti, Dipinti, and Stamps. (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1987). Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste. Traité théoretique et pratique de l’art de bâtir. (Paris: 1802-1817). Especially volumes II-IV for systematic treatise of iron construction and its structural behavior. Probably influenced by Soufflot. Volume IV, p. 491ff and 537ff and plate CLXXV. Rosenkranz, Karl. System der Wissenschaft: Ein philosophisches Encheiridion. (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1850). Rosenkranz, Karl. Aesthetik des Häßlichen. (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1853). Rubin, James Henry, “Allegory Versus Narrative in Quatremére de Quincy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1986): 384-392. Rudowski, Victor Anthony, “Lessing contra Winckelmann,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1986): 235-243. Rumohr, Carl F. Italienische Forschungen. (1927). Runge, Philip Otto, “Farbenlehre: 1806-1810,” Hinterlassene Schriften von Philipp Otto Runge, Mahler, ed. Daniel Runge. 84-170. (Hamburg: Verlag von Friedrich Perthes, 1840). Ruppel, Richard R. Gottfried Keller: Poet, Pedagogue and Humanist. (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). Rykwert, Joseph, “Semper’s ‘Morphology’,” Rassegna XII (41/1 March, 1990): 40-47. Saun, Nymo, “The Splendors of the Crystal Palace,” Illustrated London News (1851): 424-425. Schädlich, Christian, “Gottfried Semper,” Architektur der DDR 28 (1979): 202-217. Schädlich, Christian, “Gottfried Semper 1803-1879,” Große Baumeister, 144-180. (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1987). Has as supplement a short collection of Semper citations on art and society, architecture, art, on style, and contemporary architecture. Schauer, Lucie. Elementarzeichen: Urformen visueller Information. (Berlin: Frolich & Kaufmann, 1985). Schelling. Ueber das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zur Natur (Festrede). (1807). stockmeyer fn 288. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Lichtblicke : zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. (München: C. Hanser, 1983). Schmarsow, August Hannibal Johann Mathias. Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung. (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894). Schmarsow, August Hannibal Johann Mathias. Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft. (Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1905). Schnaase, Carl. Geschichte der bildenden Künste. (Düsseldorf: 1843-1864). Dedicated to Kugler, however, beginning in 1844 more distancing from Kugler’s approach.

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Schneider, Donald David. The Works and Doctrine of Jacques Ignace Hittorff (1792-1867): Structural Innovation and Formal Expression in French Architecture, 1810-1867. (New York: Garland Pub., 1977). Originally published as Dissertation at Princeton. Schneider, René. Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts 1788-1830. (Paris: 1910). S. IIIm 127f, 221, 224. Schoener, Richard. Pompeji: Beschreibung der Stadt und Führer durch die Ausgrabungen. (Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1878). Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. (Leipzig: 1819, 1844, 1859). Favors Greek architecture based on static loads and deriles their proposed origin in historical precedents of the body or nature. Especially volume I, §43 on support and load of columns. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Über das Sehn und die Farben. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1888). Originally written in 1815 and published, belatedly, as Schopenhauer complains in the introduction, in 1816 (Schopenhauer had lent the original to Goethe who had kept the manuscript longer than intended. Schopenhauer, Arthur. On Vision and Colors. (Oxford, UK and Providence, RI: Berg, 1994). (F) QC495.S331994. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. (New York: Routledge, 1989). Feminist archaeology of the Detail. Schumacher, Fritz. Strömungen in der deutschen Baukunst seit 1800. (Leipzig: 1935). Schumacher, Fritz. Wie das Kunstwerk Hamburg nach dem großen Brande entstand, Reprint. (Hamburg: 1969). Schwarzer, Mitchell W., “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of ‘Raumgestaltung’,” Assemblage (15, 1991): 49-61. Semper, Gottfried. Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten. (Altona: Hammerich, 1834). The addendum is a direct attack against Raoul Rochette. Semper, Gottfried. “Die Anwendung der Farben in der Architektur und Plastic.” New York: New York Public Library, 1834-1836. Semper, Gottfried, “Der Wintergarten zu Paris,” Zeitschrift für Praktische Baukunst 9 (1849): 515525. Semper, Gottfried, “Reise nach Belgien im Monat Oktober 1849,” Zeitschrift für praktisches Bauwesen 9 (1849): 501-514. Semper, Gottfried, “Ueber Wintergärten,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans and Manfred Semper. 484490. (Berlin und Stuttgart: 1849). Abbreviated version of an essay entitled “Der Wintergarten zu Paris”, published originally in the Zeitschrift für praktische Baukunst, ed. A. Romberg. Semper, Gottfried. Die vier Elemente der Baukunst. (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn, 1851). Semper, Gottfried, “On the Study of Polychromy and Its Revival,” Museum of Classical Antiquities, I (1851): 228-255. This article made Semper’s opinions available to a U.K. audience. Semper, Gottfried, “Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theory,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (6, Autumn, 1853): 5-22. Preface by Rykwert. Commentary by Mallgrave. Was translated by Hans Semper and published as ‘Entwurf eines Systems der vergleichenden Stillehre’ in Gottfried Sempers Kleine Schriften, (1880): 258-291. Semper, Gottfried, “Ueber das Verhältnis der dekorativen Künste zur Architektur,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans und Manfred Semper. 344-350. (Berlin und Stuttgart: 1854). Semper, Gottfried, “Ueber die formelle Gesetzmäßigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans und Manfred Semper. 304-343. (Berlin und Stuttgart: 1856). Semper, Gottfried, “Textile Kunst,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans and Manfred Semper. 3-17. (Berlin and Stuttgart: 1859). Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde. (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 1860).

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Semper, Gottfried. “Treichler Laundry Ship.” Zurich: Semper Archiv am Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur. ETH Zürich, 1861-1864. Semper, Gottfried. “Dekoration der ETH Aula: Plan der Composition.” 1865. Semper, Gottfried. Ueber Baustyle: Ein Vortrag gehalten auf dem Rathaus in Zürich am 4. März 1869. (Zürich: Friedrich Schulthess, 1869). Semper’s last publication. A polemic against Kugler. Architecture is seen completely in dependence to social history; the democratic and therefore still valid model are the Greeks; the monuments of architectural history are now only the “fossile shells of extinct organisms of society.” Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde. (München: Friedrich Bruckmann’s Verlag, 1878). Semper, Gottfried. Gottfried Semper in seiner Bedeutung als Architekt. (Berlin: Deutsche Bauzeitung, 1880). Semper, Gottfried, “Über architektonische Symbole,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans and Manfred Semper. 292-303. (Berlin und Stuttgart: 1880). Transcript and translation of a lecture given in London in 1854. English original in Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Nr. 9, Spring 1985, pp. 61-67. Semper, Gottfried, “Die Klassifikation der Gefäße,” Kleine Schriften, 18-34. (Berlin und Stuttgart: Verlag W. Spemann, 1884). Originally a lecture given in 1852. Semper, Gottfried, “Entwurf eines Systemes der vergleichenden Stillehre,” Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans and Manfred Semper. 259-291. (Berlin und Stuttgart: Verlag W. Spemann, 1884). Originally a lecture given in London in 1853. Semper, Gottfried. Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, und andere Schriften über Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Kunstunterricht. (Mainz und Berlin: Kupferberg, 1966). Originally dated October 11, 1851, published in Braunschweig in 1852. This edition has an essay by Wilhelm Mrazek. Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik: ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde. Nachdruck der beiden Teile von 1860 und 1863. (Mittenwald: Mäander-Kunstverlag, 1979). Semper, Gottfried. Kleine Schriften. (Berlin und Stuttgart: Reprint: Mittenwald, 1979). Contains the important lecture given by Semper in Zurich: “Ueber die formelle Gesetzmäßigkeit des Schmuckes und Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol.” Semper, Gottfried. Baumeister zwischen Revolution und Historismus; Katalog zur Ausstellung Gottfried Semper zum 100. Todestag, die 1979 in Dresden im Albertinum stattfand. (München: 1980). Semper, Gottfried, “London lecture of November 11, 1853,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (6, Autumn, 1983): 5-31. Edited with a commentary by Harry Mallgrave. Preface by Joseph Rykwert. Semper, Gottfried, “On Architectural Symbols,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring, 9, 1985): 61-67. Semper, Gottfried, “On the Origin of Some Architectural Styles,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring, 9, 1985): 53-67. Lecture originally given in London in December 1853. Edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Semper, Gottfried. Das Königliche Hoftheater zu Dresden. (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1986). Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Semper, Gottfried, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture,” The Four Elements of Architecture, 45-73. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Semper, Gottfried, “Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition,” Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave. 130-167. (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1989). An essay on the importance of the industrial arts vis-a-vis the high arts. Also a proposal for the adaptive use of the Crystal Palace. Originally written in 1852. Semper, Hans. Gottfried Semper: Ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens mit Benutzung der Familienpapiere. (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co., 1880). Semper, Hans und Manfred, ed. Kleine Schriften. Berlin und Stuttgart: Verlag W. Spemann, 1884). Semper, Manfred. Das Münchener Festspielhaus: Gottfried Semper und Richard Wagner. (Hamburg: Conrad H. U. Kloß, 1906). Serres, Michel. Hermés II. L’interference. (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972). Serres, Michel, “Language & Space: From Oedipus to Zola,” Hermes: Literarture, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V; Bell Harari David F. 39-53. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Singelenberg, Pieter. H. P. Berlage: Idea and Style, the Quest for Modern Architecture. (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1972). Traces Berlage’s appropriations of Semper’s theory/practice. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de, “Architettura Debole — Weak Architecture,” Ottagono 92 (September, 1989): 87-129. Solon, Leon Victor. Polychromy: Architectural and Structural, Theory and Practice. (New York: The Architectural Record, 1924). One of the chapter headings: “Books for Reference or Avoidance (!) in Polychrome Research”: p. 143-156. Sörgel, Hermann. Architektur-Aesthetik. (1918). see stockmeyer note 29. Soufflot, Jacques Germain. Soufflot et l’architecture des lumieres. (Paris: Ministere de l’environnement et du cadre de vie, Direction de l’architecture: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1980). Soufflot, Jacques Germain. Soufflot et son temps. (Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 9 octobre 1980 - 25 janvier 1981, 1980). Speltz, Alexander. Das farbige Ornament aller historischen Stile. .Part I, Antiquity on Greek Architecture. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. (New York: Methuen, 1987). Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von. Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arcadien und die daselbst ausgegrabenen Bildwerke. (Rome: 1826). Stafford, Barbara Maria, “Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 43 (1980): 65-78. Stafford, Barbara Maria, “From Brilliant Ideas to Fitful Thoughts: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 48 (3, 1985): 329-363. Stahl, Johannes. “An der Wand: Graffiti zwischen Anarchie und Galerie.” Köln: DuMont, 1989. Stallybrass, Peter; White, Allan. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Steadman, Philip. The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Biological analogy in architecture and medicine. Especially chapters 1-3, 6-11. Chapter 7 is on the evolution of decoration. Stegemeier, Henri, “Sub verbo “Sinnbild”,” Emblem und Emblematikrezeption: Vergleichende Studien zur Wirkungsgeschichte vom 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Sybille Penkert. 23-29. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978). Steinhagen, Harald. “Zu Walter Benjamins Begriff der Allegorie.” In Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie in Wolfenbüttel, Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung Stuttgart 1978). Steinlin, Laurenz. Gottfried Kellers materialistische Sinnbildkunst. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1986). Stieglitz, Christian Ludwig. Geschichte der Baukunst der Alten. (Leipzig: 1792). Stieglitz, Christian Ludwig. Archaeologie der Baukunst der Griechen und Römer. (Weimar: 1801).

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Stieglitz, Christian Ludwig. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ausbildung der Baukunst. (Leipzig: 1834). Stockmeyer, Ernst. Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie. (Zürich: 1939). Dedicated to Theodor Fischer. Has section on Semper’s theory in relationship to the Modern “and sub specie aeterni.” Streiter, Richard, “Architektonische Zeitfragen: Eine Sammlung und Sichtung verschiedener Anschauungen mit besonderer Beziehung auf Professor Otto Wagners Schrift Moderne Architektur (1898),” Richard Streiter: Ausgewählte Schriften zur Aesthetik und KunstGeschichte, 55-149. (München: Delphin, 1913). Taut, Bruno. Die neue Wohnung – Die Frau als Schöpferin. (Leipzig: 1924). Mentions Semper, incorrectly, as inventor of the word Kunstindustrie. Teyssot, Georges, “Emil Kaufmann and the Architecture of Reason: Klassizismus and ‘Revolutionary Architecture’,” Oppositions (13, 1978): 46-75. Teyssot, Georges, “‘The Simple Day and the Light of the Sun’: Lights and Shadows in the Museum,” Assemblage (12, 1990): 58-83. Teyssot, Georges, “Storia come ricordo distruttivo - History as a Destructive Remembrance,” Lotus International (81, 1994): 117-123. Thomson, Garrett, “Kant’s Problem with Ugliness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (2, 1992): 107-115. Tickner, Lisa, “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference,” Genders (3, 1988): Tiedeman, Dietrich. Versuch einer Erklärung des Ursprungs der Sprache. (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1985). Unabridged reprint of the edition of 1772. Treichler, “Ehemaliges Treichlersches Waschschiff im Wäschereigebäude eingebaut,” Züricher Kalender (#25512, 1910): 60. Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Ulmer, Gregory L., “The Object of Post-Criticism,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. 83-110. (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983). Van Zanten, David. The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s. (New York: Garland, 1977). Originally a Ph.D. Thesis at Harvard University, 1970. Van Zanten, David, “Architectural Polychromy: Life in Architecture,” The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton. (London: 1982). Venturi, Robert, “Sweet and Sour,” Architecture 83 (5, 1994): 51 and 53. Vidler, Anthony, “From Tattoo to Trinket: Architecture as Adornment,” Ottagono (94, 1990): 14-35. Vischer, Friedrich-Theodor. Das Schöne und die Kunst, Vorträge zur Einführung in die Aesthetik. (Cotta, second edition, 1890). cites Semper in “Die Aesthetik oder die Wissenschaft vom Schönen,” 1852, vol III, 2, § 581 f. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. (München: 1846-1858). Especially on architecture see part III (ed. 1922) p. 206-395. Refers already to Semper. Vischer, Fr. Th. Faust, der Tragödie III. Teil. (1862). Anti- allegoresis satire published by Vischer under the pseudonym Deutobold Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinski in reaction to the interpreters of the second part of Goethe’s Faust. Vischer, Fr. Th. Kritische Gänge, Neue Folge, Bd. I-IV. (1866). especially Bd. IV, p. 404 [stockmeyer fn 219]. Wagner, Otto. Die Baukunst unserer Zeit: Dem Baukunstjünger ein Führer auf diesem Kunstgebiete. (Wien: 1914). Ward, Frazer, “Foreign and Familiar Bodies,” Dirt & Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine, 8-37. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992). Ward, James. Colour Decoration of Architecture, treating on Colour and Decoration of the Interiors and Exteriors of Buildings. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913). Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Wegmann, Peter. Gottfried Semper und das Winterthurer Stadthaus: Sempers Architektur im Spiegel seiner Kunsttheorie. (Winterthur: Stadtbibliothek Winterthur, 1985).

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Weidmann, Heiner. Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin. (München: W. Fink, 1992). Weinbrenner, Friedrich. Architektonisches Lehrbuch. (Tübingen: 1810-1819). First two parts (1810 and 1817) about geometric and perspective drawing; the third part (1819) is an attempt to build a bridge between Kant (aesthetics) and Durand (functionalism). Weingarden, Lauren S., “The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-Century Color Theory,” Winterthur Portfolio 20 (4, Winter, 1985): 243-260. Widmer, Sigmund. Zürich, eine Kulturgeschichte. (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1982-1985). Wiegmann, Rudolf. Die Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik: insbesondere als Decorations-malerei. (Hannover: Hahnsche Hofbuchhandlung, 1836). Wigley, Mark, “Architecture after Philosophy: Le Corbusier and the Emperor’s New Paint,” Philosophy and Architecture, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts (2, 1990): 84-95. Wigley, Mark, “The Decorated Gap,” Ottagono (94, 1990): 36-45. Wigley, Mark, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina. 326-389. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1993). Wigley, Mark, “White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2],” Assemblage (22, 1994): 6-49. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, “Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancients,” Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. Irwin. (London: Phaidon, 1762). Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. (Dresden: Walthersche Hofbuchhandlung, 1809). Originally published as Schriften über die Nachahmung der alten Kunstwerke in 1756. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. The History of Ancient Art. (Boston: 1880). Winkes, Rolf, “Foreword,” Late Roman Art Industry, ed. Alois Riegl. (Rome: Bretschneider, 1985). Wirth, Franz. Johann Jakob Treichler und die soziale Bewegung im Kanton Zürich (1845/1846). (Basel: Verlag Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1981). Wohlfarth, Irving, “Et cetera? Der Historiker als Lumpensammler,” Passagen: Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Norbert; Witte Bolz Bernd. 70-95. (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984). Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. (München: 1917). Wood, D. and Bernasconi, R., ed. Derrida and Différance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Zeising, Adolf. Neue Lehre von den Proportionen des menschlichen Körpers. (1854). Zeising was little known German aesthetician. Zeising, Adolf. Aesthetische Forschungen. (1855). Humboldt and Goethe were spiritual mentors of Zeising. According to Mallgrave, 1989: 35 Semper borrowed his grouping of architecture with dance and music from this work, section 503. Zeitler, Rudolf, “Sempers Gedanken über Baukunst und Gesellschaft in seiner ersten Schrift: ‘Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten’. 1834,” Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eva Börsch-Supan. 11-22. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1976). Zerner, Henri, “Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism,” Daedalus (Winter, 1976): 177-188. Zoege von Manteuffel, Claus. Die Baukunst Gottfried Sempers. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Universität Freiburg, 1952). Ph.D. Dissertation. Essentially a listing of most of Semper’s works, categorized by type. See also Fröhlich’s Gottfried Semper (1991). Zschobke, Walter, “Urhüttenersatz,” Fünf Punkte in der Architekturgeschichte, ed. Katharina MediciMall. 101-121. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1985). Ethnological analysis of Semper’s theory.

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Photography Iowa State Capitol Attic Des Moines, Iowa

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Five years before 9/11 it was still relatively easy to sneak into the attic of the State of Iowa Capitol in Des Moines without being stopped by zealous guards. There used to be an unlocked trapdoor in the west corner of the law library, that great space box of a room that should have been long ago used for other things than studying dusty books about how humans ought to behave, and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. That trapdoor led right into amazing spaces made of wrought iron, glass, strange ladders leading to rooftops and to flags made by our foremothers. These are spaces of imagination.

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Architectural Projects SoloHouse Prototype

Mobile Home for an Itinerant Mensch Design of a small, affordable mobile home prototype using off-the-shelf materials and a short, 20â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Park-Model chassis. Sleeping loft

Aerodynamic roof shape Structural frame Desk

Wet room enclosure Storage stair

Kitchen and shower

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Trailer without walls and roof

Bed/loft accessible via storage stair

Unfolded 3D-model

Rendered interior

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360째 panorama renderings

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Design+Build Projects Cricket Barn

A House for a Bambi Airstream Trailer

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In the spring of 1997, while still writing my dissertation on that other beacon of mobility, Gottfried Semper, I felt the need to work outside the house in something more akin to a cabin. I had bought a 1963 Bambi Airstream trailer a year earlier to travel around in but at this point I was more interested in designing and building a second skin around this silver bullet, both for protection of its aging skin and as a test case to see if I could translate my spatial ideas into a practice of building.

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To keep construction manageable I devised a system of gambrel frames—bought at a local hardware store and delivered to the site at 604 Brookridge Avenue in Ames, Iowa—and recycled wood pallets or skids (sized about 48” x 40”) that I received for free from local businesses along the Union Pacific railroad corridor. The skin consists of corrugated, translucent fiberglass (for the walls) and corrugated galvanized steel sheets (for the roof). Over the winter months during 1997/1998 I constructed the barn piece by piece until it was completed in the spring of 1998.

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Construction images

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Construction as planned and executed

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View from north entry before roofing was completed

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Construction images

Cricket weather vane on roof

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Final views from March 1998

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Night shots from March 1998

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Final detail views of barn showing metal roofing and some context

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