Post-functionalism Student: LEC KAO Sandrine Class : ELEMENTS OF ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY Essay texts : Postfunctionalism, Opposition 6 (fall 1976), Peter Eisenman / The end of the Classical: the end of beginning, the end of the end, Perspecta 21, Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman’s The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End make us understand the relationship between time and architecture by analyzing the influence of the classical on the modern movement, and thus, explains with three “fictions” the congruence of language and representation, the “ever lasting” need for the architecture to get rid and emancipate from the past, in order to initiate new concepts, new paradigms. “Forms are no longer a means to an end but an end to itself”: Eisenman wants to destroy the idea of the classical and the not-classical and proposes an architecture of the timeless in the sense that its origins are not defined by a historical basis. “Architecture is representation of itself as construction, responding to a purpose”: it needs to represent itself instead of an object.
From the fifteenth century, architecture has been influenced by three fictions: representation, reason and history, and their underlying purpose as representation was to embody the idea of meaning. Reason was to codify the idea of truth, and history was to recover the idea of timeless from the idea of change. The persistence of these categories for 500 years gave way to continuity in architectural thought, referred to as the classical. For Eisenman, these three fictions remain unquestioned and intact even though a rupture is claimed in both the ideology and style associated with the modern movement. Then, architecture aspired to be a paradigm of the classic: timeless, meaningful, true. To employ Foucault’s term, the period of time dominated by the classical can be seen as “episteme”, meaning it is a continuous period of knowledge that includes the early twentieth century. The first fiction is “representation”, the simulation of meaning. Before the Renaissance, language and representation were tightly related, as the meaning of language was “in a “face value”” conveyed within representation. In other words, the way language produced meaning could be represented within language. Truth and meaning were de facto, things were (for example a Gothic cathedral). As a matter of fact, regarding the Renaissance buildings, the value they received was due to the simulacra, as they represented an already valued architecture. The values of the past were used to verify the meaning of the present; the origin of the architecture was then the referent point. Then, by the eighteenth century, the search for certainty was prompted by a new view of history. Historical relativity came to supersede the “face value” of language as representation. Truth was no longer thought to reside in representation but believed to exist outside of it: in the process of history. Modern architecture claimed that it wasn’t necessary for architecture to be the image of another architecture, thus wanting to liberate itself from the Renaissance fiction of representation, with the idea that architecture was to embody its own function that it should look like it. Architecture then was trying to escape from the classical “boundaries” and defined style. This process of reduction of the style was called abstraction. It was an attempt of represent reality itself because what is more real than the function of the building itself? The undecorated realistic functional object replaced the classical composition. Post-functionalism – LEC KAO Sandrine
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The second fiction is “reason”: the simulation of truth. “If representation was a simulation of the meaning of the present through the message of antiquity, then reason was a simulation of the truth through the message of science”. Before the Renaissance, the idea of the origin was seen as self-evident (for its meaning and importance), it belonged to an a-priori system of values. The Renaissance generated the loss of selfevident universe of values, origins were found in the natural and divine sources. The belief was of the existence of an ideal origin and end. Following these beliefs, enlightenment architecture aspired to a rational process of design whose ends were products of pure secular reason rather than of divine order. Therefore, we can say that beginning in Renaissance and escalation in the Enlightenment, reason is an attempt to understand the meaning of the truth through science and rational deduction. In Durand treaty, formal orders become type forms and natural and divine origins are replaced by rational solutions to the problems of accommodation and construction (as rational solutions of science can be applied to architecture). Therefore, if architecture looked rational (represented rationally), it was believed to represent truth. In this second fiction, reason “began to turn on itself”, questioning its own status, its authority to convey truth, nevertheless, Renaissance and modern architecture remained, as their basis of “truth” was above all requiring faith. Once analysis (as a form of simulation or illusion of proof, series of metaphors as Nietzche’s characterization of truth) and reason erased the self-evidence, the classic or timeless truth ended and the need for verification began. The third fiction is “history”: the simulation of the timeless. Before the mid-fifteenth century, time was conceived non-dialectically, as there was no concept of forward movement of time. Art was timeless, and the temple was connected to god hence architecture was divine and natural. Then, in the mid-fifteenth century, the idea of a temporal origin appeared: the loss of the timeless required a temporal reality to understand the origin and the past. Eisenman discusses the concept of the “zeitgeist”, german term meaning the spirit of the times, and he notes that the zeitgeist bounds the moderns to their present history “with the promise to release them from their past history; they were ideologically trapped in the illusion of the eternity of their own time”, rather than being absolute and eternal. The modern movement then introduced a new set of aesthetics with asymmetry over symmetry, dynamism over stability, and absence of hierarchy over hierarchy. Eisenman explains that to escape the dependence on the zeitgeist, we must propose an alternative idea of architecture as expressing its own time and not only expressing architecture itself. As a result, “once the traditional values of classical architecture are understood as not meaningful”, we can understand that classicism and modernism are part of a single historical continuity; there aren’t any self-evident values anymore for representation nor reason or history “to confer legitimacy on the object”. We should break free from the timeless, which becomes un-universal. Origins are no longer natural or divine, we break free from the classical. The precedent fictions can be considered as simulations. Therefore, for architecture, not to be classical must be meaning free, arbitrary and timeless creation of artificiality. Although Eisenman discusses this, and says that it’s rather a dissimulation, the not-classical, proposing an end to the dominance of the classical values: “It is a representation of itself, of its own values and internal experience”. The not-classical presents then new ends not revealing new values or a new zeitgeist argument but instead, another condition, a new way of understanding the architecture as an architecture of its time. As a logical path, one must begin by eliminating the time bounds concepts of the classical (origin and end), and keep the freedom from a-priori goals and ends, and keep free from the object representation. Then, texts and representations must be distinguished, because if architecture is a text, there must be a reader instead of a user or observer. The theory of Eisenman follows a slightly different lead in his article about “Postfunctionalism”. He discusses postmodernism comparing it to the modernist period, noting that “modern architecture was an outmoded functionalism”. He alternatively defines modernism as abstraction, atonality, atemporality, and says that it is “the displacement of man away from the center of his world”. Again, he mentions the form (or type) and function (or program) referring to their very beginning with Post-functionalism – LEC KAO Sandrine
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humanism in Renaissance, and the balance between form and function was disrupted with the rise of industrialization, as architecture became a social art. He argues that “functionalism is really no more than a late phase of humanism” as the form of buildings and structures was inspired by the human body, having the man for center of all things. On the other hand, functionalism allows structures to have a form that is made after the function or program. Because the program is based on human needs and activities, functionalism can as well be seen as a later phase of humanism.
According to Eisenman’s point of view, we should consider function and form not as opposites but more as in a dialectic relationship: “begin to define the inherent nature of the object in and of itself and its capacity to be represented”. Humanist architecture plays to accommodate program and materialization in forms. The industrial era introduced a new complexity for which typological solutions weren’t appropriate: function started to overtake the form. Functionalism evolved to show that the program should determine the form and height of the building. Although in the perspective of creating an architectural manifestation of “modern sensibility”, Eisenman wants to put the function away, as a basic concept, as the post-functionalism. He rejects the literal expression of the function and exaggerates the expression of the program in form, shape and mass construction. What can then be understood is that postfunctionalism doesn’t mean that the building doesn’t have a function: the form doesn’t necessarily have to represent the function. As a matter of fact, post-functionalism is concerned by both humanism and modernism, understanding of the form and function dialogue, it is then defined by the absence of functionalism. He explains that post-functionalism gathers two tendencies: the one of reductionism (to recall a simpler geometric condition “assuming some primary unity as both an ethical and aesthetic basis for all creation”) and the one of fragmentation (the form seen as atemporal, decompositional, simplified, derived from a series of fragments). After all these readings of Peter Eisenman, we can understand that post-functionalism isn’t a completely new style without attaches, an utopia, but more of the will to fight against the very defined codes of architecture we now know: centrality, functionality, hierarchy… Eisenman leads us to make a revolution in architecture in the sense that Duchamp made a revolution in contemporary arts. It proposes a completely different approach in which we could sense freedom of the form, freedom of the origin, and also of the future, which isn’t quite defined, as architecture is now a tool not to represent an object but to define new meanings, new times.
Post-functionalism – LEC KAO Sandrine
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