Architectural Projections Libre

Architectural ProjectionsAndrew Benjamin

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Published by RMIT University Press,an imprint of RMIT Publishing.PO Box 12058, A’Beckett Street, Melbourne, Victoria 8006, AustraliaTelephone: +61 3 9925 8100Fax: +61 3 9925 8196Email: [email protected]://www.rmitpublishing.com.au

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© Andrew Benjamin, 2012.Copyright of all drawings and photographs is held by the author unlessnoted otherwise.

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All opinions expressed in material contained in this publication arethose of the author and not necessarily those of the publishers.Every effort has been made to trace the original source materialcontained in this book. Where the attempt has been unsuccessful,the publishers would be pleased to hear from the author/publisher torectify the omission.

National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication entry

Benjamin, Andrew E.

Architectural projections / by Andrew Benjamin.

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Architectural ProjectionsAndrew Benjamin

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Contents

Introduction: The Project of Architecture vi

1 Nomadism and Design 1

2 A Plurality of Actions: Towards Ontology of Techniques 7

3 Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos 19

4 Notes on the Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper 61

5 Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility 79

6 Porosity at the Edge: Working Through Walter Benjamin’s

Naples 99

7 Passing through Deconstruction: Architecture and the Project

of Autonomy 115

Bibliography 124


vi Architectural Projections Introduction vii

Introduction

The undertaking worked through time and again throughout the chapters comprising this book concerns the differing ways in which the relationship between history, theory and the practice of design allows for a coniguring and reconirming of the project of architecture. That project has an inherent plurality; hence the title, Architectural Projections. There is a twofold supposition that directs and organises these writings. The irst supposition is straightforward. The locus of architectural theory is the practice and pedagogy of design. Thus, it is not the application of philosophical or theoretical positions, which in being external to architecture can then be applied. Rather, both the philosophical and the theoretical are deployed within, and as part of, a range of practices that constitute architecture. Moreover, there is the related contention, namely, that it is possible to write the history of architecture or to reconigure fundamental instances within that history such that any subsequent writings are also orientated around the concerns of design. (The distinction at work, no matter how tentative it may be, concerns a history for design rather than a history of design. Such an approach does not preclude the writing of architectural history. On the contrary, it invites it.) The second supposition which, while related, has its own distinct modes of argumentation and presentation is that there cannot be any easy separation of architecture from the way in which architecture is represented. Indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that the history of representational techniques within architecture becomes one of the central ways to avoid both an idealisation of form and an idealisation of materials. Precisely because representational techniques have a history as well as engendering speciic practices, they too should be incorporated within any concern with architectural theory.

And yet, the evocation of architectural theory and the rewriting of architectural history in terms of its relation to the practice of design has become an inherently problematic activity. Moreover, the afirmation of the deinition of research in architecture as constituted by the relationship between theory, history and design has become, as a consequence, untimely. As a general claim it can be suggested that theory began to lose its hold within the context of the university at the moment at which architecture came to be deined as a digital practice. While there were straightforward domestic reasons why this was the case – for example, the sheer dificulty of mastering the rapid development of software programs – the overall effect of the diminution of the importance of theory was linked to the emergence of

a conservative force within architecture in the context of the university. The advent of the digital was simply the means by which this was achieved. (The digital itself was, and remains, neutral in this regard.) Not only was the distancing of theory contemporaneous with the celebration of a spurious form of professionalism – where ‘professionalism’ took the place of experimentation – there was the related argument that the failure of architecture to have an instrumental role within a progressive politics meant that the entire project of criticality could itself be abandoned. This was accompanied by a reciprocal move in which there was a politicisation of commentary on design and history. However, it must be noted that this took place in its complete differentiation from the process of design. As such that process was left untouched by such developments and, therefore, this compounded the presence of a disjunctive relation between the history and theory of architecture on one side and design on the other.

All of these elements occurred at once. With the abandoning of the critical part of what was also lost was the capacity for judgement. While the intricacy of these positions demands its own history, it is still vital to proceed with caution precisely because the critical does not have a necessary relation to a conception of architecture as instrumental. (And this will be the case whether the question of instrumentality is conceived positively or negatively.) The positing of instrumentality became one of the means by which criticality as a project could be undone in the name of an unannounced though nonetheless virulent form of conservatism. In order to begin to understand the force of the term ‘criticality’ the particularity of its location needs to be recognised, namely, criticality can only ever be a claim made about that which is internal to the practice of architecture. In other words, it relates to as architecture’s own self-conception. That self-conception involves the relationship between program, function, materials and the effective presence of speciic geometries. Taken together they comprise what will be described in this context as architecture as a material event. If arguments concerning criticality have an extension beyond architecture then they are to be based not on the extension of architecture into other domains, but on the identiication of the possibility of criticality as a concern within those domains. What this means is that the extension in question pertains to criticality itself – thus the issue in question would be what would count as the critical within, for example, the domain of the political; the extension in question therefore is not the extension of architecture into that domain. The critical is always regional. One of the regions is architecture.


viii Architectural Projections Introduction ix

An example will serve to indicate the way in which criticality has speciicity, that is, its location within architecture (and by extension, therefore, criticality remains necessarily unrelated to questions of instrumentality). One of the ways in which it is possible to write a history of architectural drawing is by concentrating irstly on the meaning of those drawings and secondly, by ignoring the fact that the presence of lines within those drawings is always the after-effect of the technologies that produced them. While this reduction of the line to the purely pragmatic on the one hand or its idealisation on the other warrants a detailed history in its own right, the signiicant point in this context is the occluding of what might be described as the founding relation between the line and the technologies of production deployed in their realisation. (The occluding of lines is understood as the after-effect of the technologies that produced them.) However, once attention is paid to those technologies then it becomes clear that the lines are incorporated within a history that is marked by the necessity of discontinuities and ruptures which are the consequence of those technologies. Hence, it is possible to argue that central to a history of architectural drawing is the disjunctive relation between an era of ‘technical reproducibility’ and an era of ‘digital reproducibility’. (A development some of whose theoretical implications are taken up in Chapter 2.) The former within architectural drawing as it now exists has ceded its place to the latter. Accepting this position is to accept that history is constituted by signiicant points of differentiation and disjunction rather than historicism’s insistence on continuities. The latter – historicism – is a set up that would emerge in this context in terms of the idealisation of either geometries (as occurs in the work of Colin Rowe) or tectonics (as occurs in the writings of Kenneth Frampton). If therefore there are disjunctive relations, if, that is, history is marked by discontinuities rather than continuities, then a different project is in place. It becomes important to make speciic claims concerning both the location of discontinuities and disjunctive relations in the irst instance as well as noting their effects in the second. The work presented in this book can be understood therefore as the attempt to enact continually this other project.

It is possible to take these comments further by arguing that what is occurring within them is a clariication of how criticality within architecture is to be understood. The locus of the critical is architecture as a material event. Moreover, criticality as a consequence is inextricably bound up with the presence of the continuous and the discontinuous. The continuity of architecture – though this will be a claim that can be made about continuity tout court – has to be thought in terms of discontinuities.1 (And thus the possibility for further staging of the discontinuous.) With this structure of repetition – continuity understood as a form of repetition – discontinuity

needs to be understood as an iterative reworking. What this means is straightforward. While architecture has to involve forms of repetition in order that architecture itself continues, what has to endure as a possibility within that continuity is the presence of a repetition that takes place again for the irst time.2 Identiied here, therefore, is the temporality within which the critical is operative.

The project linked to the retention of the term ‘criticality’, in this context, takes as its premise the argument that the location of these discontinuities is architecture as a material event. (Tracing the way this position occurs in the writings and projects of Peter Eisenman is presented in Chapter 7.) It follows from this insistence on the location of the critical within architecture, that criticality within other domains is also marked by the effective presence of productive forms of interruption. What is being suggested, therefore, to repeat the point made above, is that criticality has a form of abstraction insofar as criticality pertains to the presence of discontinuities, however, the locus in which they occur is only ever speciic. It is precisely this mode of argumentation that severs the link between criticality and instrumentality.) However, there is an additional element that needs to be noted here. Part of the effect of the presence of discontinuities is that what marks these discontinuities – in part what establishes them as disjunctive relations – is that they allow for a reworking of speciic histories within the terms set by the discontinuities themselves. Equally, an insistence on history as comprised of disjunctive relations provides the grounds for a critical engagement with conceptions of history that refuse the presence of the discontinuous. Both a reworking of the way the surface functions as an operative element within the architecture of Borromini, Semper and Loos (in Chapter 3) on the one hand and the critical engagement with the historical methodologies at work within the writings of Emile Kaufmann, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton (Chapter 5) are occasioned by these concerns. Moreover, the interpretation of the paper written by Walter Benjamin in conjunction with Asja Lacis on Naples (Chapter 6) is equally an attempt to reposition a ‘reading’ of what might be described as an ostensibly philosophical text in terms of its being relocated as a prompt for design. This occurs by trying to uncover within it a set of abstract formulations that can be attributed a generative quality. What this allows, therefore, is a reworking of the concerns of the text.

In sum, what the term criticality identiies is the way repetition functions in a determined context – here architecture (though, as has already been suggested, this is an argument that qua argument has much great extension). Architecture, in order that it remain architecture, has to be deined by its presence as a material event. Architecture as a material event has, however, a necessary ideational content. Again an example can clarify


x Architectural Projections Introduction xi

this point. The creation of a volume does not just have a necessary relation to its capacity to incorporate the body, that body is itself already determined both by the history of bodies as well as the history of architecture’s own engagement with body. (An engagement in which the body igures either as an analogy for architecture or as the site of architectural investigation in its own right.) However, the fact that there is an already present relation between architecture – understood minimally as the creation of a volume – and its incorporation of a body having an already deined history and set of relations, does not mean either that that history cannot be rewritten in terms of discontinuities rather than continuities or that it is not possible to investigate other ways of coniguring architecture’s relation to the body. Hence the material event as the site of an iterative reworking. Other possibilities, ones that hold to the reiteration of the architectural, form part of the engagement with both Kiesler and more emphatically with the work of NOX – speciically the Son-O-House that takes place in Chapter 4. By concentrating on speciic projects it becomes possible to demonstrate the way in which the nexus of body/volume is present as the site of an iterative reworking. The signiicant point in relation to NOX is that the reworking in question concerns neither program nor materials taken as an end in them let alone as indifferent to each other. Of signiicance is the nature of their speciic relation. Again, the reworking in question concerns architecture’s presence as a material event.

There are many important consequences arising from an insistence on the presence of architecture as a material event. As a beginning it involves avoiding both an idealisation of architecture (an idealisation that is of the constituent elements of architecture’s presence as a material event) or its reduction to a simple pragmatism. Both of these possibilities can only be resisted once emphasis is given to architecture’s materiality and once that materiality is connected to the different technologies and complex of geometries that accompany architecture. What this then means is that the material event names the reality of architecture. (In a sense it names its truth.) In other words, the reality of architecture is that it has always been the location in which the critical has been at work. Part of the engagement with that work – and indeed part of what marks the work’s presence – is the possibility of the denial of architecture as a material event. Idealism and historicism are central to such denials. Denying it, however, necessitates the undoing of the forces at work that constitute the reality of architecture. (Reciprocally, of course, what this opens up are moments within architecture’s history marked by the afirmation of architecture as a material event.) Criticality therefore not only holds to architecture’s identiication with the material event, it is the material event that generates both the conditions

for an understanding of the reality of architecture and the basis for an identiication and then the critical engagement with that denial.

Each of the papers collected here mark stages in repositioning the project of architecture. History, theory and design are not the same; each has its own determinations. While it is the presence of architecture as a material event that allows for moments of connection and productive interrelation, what their afirmation opens up is the place of both research and experimentation in architecture. The refusal or denial of that project, whether it be in the form of an idealisation or a naïve pragmatism (as though there were any other form!) will always stand opposed to the reality of architecture. What allows them to be articulated together – and that articulation can have a number of different forms, one of which is research within architecture – is the reality of architecture itself.

Endnotes

1 This is of course a methodological imperative for a rethinking of historical time in terms of the discontinuous. Such a person can be argued for from a number of sources. For example, it can be sustained as a position deploying arguments as much based on the work of Walter Benjamin as it can the work of Michel Foucault. Especially, the latter’s Les mots et les choses (Paris, Gallimard, 1966).

2 The conception of repetition thought both in terms of a conception of repetition in which what occurs does so again for the irst time taken in relation to a foundational interconnection between repetition and production identiied by the term ‘iterative reworking’ form part of both my more general philosophical writings as well as those more directly concerned with architecture. See in particular, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (London, Routledge, 1991), Architectural Philosophy (London, Continuum, 2001), Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Chicago, North Western University Press, 2006) and Writing Art and Architecture (Melbourne, re:press, 2010).


1

1 Nomadism and Design


2 Architectural Projections Nomadism and Design 3

There have been a number of different ways in which the relationship between theory, on the one hand, and the practice of architecture on the other, has been thought and presented.1 Without rehearsing that history, what has characterised it is, for the most part, a divide between theory and practice within the terms set by that history. Central to the activities it engendered was the need to overcome the divide. Part of that ‘overcoming’ – and here it must be acknowledged that the project of overcoming a divide was misplaced from the start – led to different strategies in which the architectural and the theoretical could be joined. Two different, though ultimately related, forms of argumentation were deployed in such a project. In the irst instance it was argued that the theoretical (or the philosophical) was already implicated in the architectural and therefore that architecture would set the terms for any overcoming. In the second place, it was argued that because architecture, in its use of the arché, was already within the realm of metaphysics and that therefore the reiteration of metaphysics or a critique of metaphysics would allow, from the position of the philosophical, the divide to overcome.

This contestation led either to an abandoning of an interest, on the part of theory, in the actuality of the design process; or to the ignoring of theoretical concerns on the level of design. While there have always been those – theoreticians and architects – whose work can be located in a more central position, it remains the case that theory became trapped in the problem of the divide, and as such it began to move towards a concern with history which was marked by the absence of any relation to the practice of design.

What dramatically altered this set-up was the introduction of the computer. Animation software, initially from the ilm industry, began to intrude into the design process. Moreover, it began to redeine that process and the pedagogy proper to it. While there are, and remain, different responses to the question of the computer, the centrality of its presence demands a different understanding of the role of theory with architecture. Questions of the divide and its overcoming are no longer appropriate. It is not as though the debate has been resolved. It simply lacks any contemporary force. Precisely because the computer marks a deining moment in repositioning the nature of the design process, the question of theory and its relationship to design must be posed in an emphatically different way. No matter what questions come to be asked, they cannot avoid this situation. And yet, the computer need not determine thinking, nor need it lead, necessarily, to an ‘acritical’ conception of design. (Questions of criticality have themselves to be redeined.) The challenge concerns how the now ineliminable presence of the computer and the inevitable changes in the practice of design are to be thought. It goes without saying that, in there being more than one answer to such a question, the differing answers signal the presence of a productive and important

conlict. Here, however, the conlicts are new. Alliances, on the level of theory and practice, are remade in relation to them. Moreover, new and different histories have to be written.

These concerns will be approached here in terms of the relationship between nomadism and design. Fundamental to the approach developed is that the nomadic becomes the place name for a reworking of relationships that were once marked by unity and directness and which are now marked by complexity, plurality and the indirect. Such a term owes no particular allegiance to any speciic philosophical or theoretical position. While the term ‘nomad’ may be thought to have an interpretive inevitability, it is deployed here in terms of an open ield of possibilities. The nomadic designates a thinking whose determinations are not prescribed in advance.

Any understanding of a potential nomadism within architecture – where ‘nomadism’ is understood as has been indicated as one possible term in which to think the project of design – has to situate itself in relation to the shifts that mark out the terrain of architectural practice. Using the term ‘nomad’, a further consideration, while it cannot be pursued here, nonetheless needs to be noted. Either the nomad designates an essentially marginal position – such that the nomad becomes the actual eccentric – or the nomad deines the centre even though such a deinition, and therefore such a place, is yet to be discovered. This latter possibility involves understanding how nomadism would have to be linked to a reconsideration of place in architecture. Any such reconsideration would start from the recognition that neither place nor architecture’s symbolic dimension worked in a way that constructed either a uniied community or a uniied urban ield. What this means is that the nomadic opens up the possibility of a reconsideration of place and symbol in terms of a cosmopolitan architecture. Here, rather than pursue that possibility, nomadism will be restricted to the way it opens up the actuality of design.

What this means, in this instance, is allowing the relationship between the process of design and the realisation of that design in built terms to be an indirect one. Once the indirect is allowed to predominate then this opens up the space in which it is possible to develop a conception of the diagram that is not a representation but which carries the capacity to become a representation. The move from diagram to plan, therefore, has to be indirect. Indirectness is a direct result of allowing the computer centrality within the design process. However, the movement is not always one way. Precisely because an indirect relationship is possible – one in which the representational was an unactualised potential within the diagram – it is also the case that such a relationship can be effaced by being made direct. What


4 Architectural Projections Nomadism and Design 5

Endnotes

1 This chapter was irst given as a contribution to a discussion on architecture and nomadism. While its initial project was delimited by the need to make that contribution, what is named here, as ‘nomadism’ became another way of thinking of the speciicity of design as a locus of architectural theory. <AUTHOR: Please check this sentence above; as it was it originally didn’t quite make sense.>

2 I have discussed some of the issues relating to diagrams and the identiication of the ‘yet-to-be’ in much greater detail in Architectural Philosophy (Benjamin, 2001).

this means is that the diagram would be refused its diagrammatic status and would be turned into a representation. Potential would be effaced in the name of the already actualised.

There is another sense in which it possible to position the indirect. In this instance it pertains to what can be described as the temporality of completion. In this instance, the argument would be that it is possible to inscribe a conception of the incomplete into that which has been completed. Whether this is an internal interstitial space demanding programmatic negotiation, or an ‘event space’ whose performativity is an inherent architectural element, what is involved in such instances is the maintained presence of the incomplete within the complete. At work here is the inscription of a yet-to-be quality into form.2 This quality can be understood as nomadic.

There are two points being made here. The irst is that due to the changes in the technology of design the relationship between the diagram and its realisation need no longer be direct. The movement can be thought of as nomadic rather than as that which demands a single direction of realisation. The second point is that rather than attributing inality – programmatic completion to the inished object or work – it can remain a site of negotiation and possibility in which the potential for programmatic openings are part of the work itself. That potential would be an intrinsic part of what could be described as the work’s work. In this instance, the nomadic would be located in a potential for movement that formed part of the object’s actual structure. Not literal movement but programmatic openings. The term ‘nomadic’ can be applied to this quality.

The signiicant point in both instances is that the nomadic needs not be taken literally. The term comes to mark out a mode of thinking in which the nomadic is linked to movement and time within the activity of an architectural work’s self-realisation as architecture. Allowing the nomadic to designate these possibilities is bound up with that movement in the history of design that allows the computer centrality. What this means is that there is no longer a divide between theory and practice in a way that would yield the closure of a gap or the divide’s overcoming. The theoretical is now relocated. Theory is inherently bound up with the questions that arise from within the design process. Those questions only arise because of there no longer being direct relationships. The presence of an inescapable nomadism – now there as the potential allowed by the computer – means that locus of theory has to be understood as set by engagements with the practice of design.


7

2 A Plurality of Actions: Towards Ontology of Techniques


8 Architectural Projections A Plurality of Actions: Towards Ontology of Techniques 9

by the identiication of technology, with hardware deining the locus of conceptual consideration, a different conceptual coniguration has emerged. There is, therefore, a different set of demands. What is demanded necessitates a response. The locus of that response deines, as has been suggested, the place theory in relation to the digital.

The traditional way of construing the relationship between technology and practice has for the most part operated with a number of interrelated assumptions. Three are central. The irst is that the technological refers to machinery or equipment. The second is that technology is an all-encompassing and therefore singular term, and thus the activities linked to it have a similar status in that all are instances of a technological practice. The third assumption, while the most demanding, is only ever implicit. This assumption is that technology as a uniied ield, and practices as divergent but dependent upon a founding unity, work together to deine the ontological status of both technology and techniques. While these assumptions need to be sketched in greater detail, what needs to be noted in advance is that the move from technology to techniques gives rise to their radical reconiguration. In other words, a move of this nature – one in which emphasis will shift to techniques and away from a monolithic conception of technology – necessitates, in the irst place, a rethinking of how machinery is understood. In the second place, it will demand taking up the concomitant conception of practice linked to this reconsideration. Finally, and more emphatically, the move from a uniied ontology of technology to a differential ontology of techniques has to be incorporated into these concerns. Ontology is not an additional concern. The ontological is always at work within the operative nature of both technology and techniques. Once again there is a similar recasting insofar as the move from technology to techniques entails a reworking of the ontological.

While the terms ‘machine’, ‘practice’ and ‘ontology’ provide the setting through which these notes will be directed, the terms are themselves interconnected. Not only does one presuppose the other, each is already at work within the other. Indeed, the only productive way of charting moves within the history of the image is to take the question of the image’s production and its subsequent practice as integral to any account of the image. Such an approach resists an idealisation of the image by insisting both on it its productive nature – its having been produced – and on its location within a ield of activities. A distinction would need to be drawn therefore between a conception of the image in which the image was identiied as a site of meaning and one in which the account of the image referred of necessity to its production. With the move to digital reproducibility the image cedes its place to the ‘produced image’. A move of this nature still allows for

Art practices as well as the practice of architecture occur within the age of the digital. No longer, however, is it enough to argue that art occurs in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. Such a claim, while true, remains limited. The digital has now become a way of constructing images that are themselves original from the very start. And yet, even this distinction needs to be developed since the digital image consists of elements that can be subject to differing manipulations depending upon how the relationship between the image – and its components – is then worked on by the distinctive possibilities inherent within differing software packages.1 What marks out the digital image is not to be understood in terms of originality in any direct sense. Rather the potential within the digital image can be initially described as concerning the relationship between the image and software. However, that connection can be reformulated in more theoretical terms as involving the relationship between the material and the immaterial.

It is precisely because of the necessity for that reconiguration that the digital occasions a fundamental interruption both in the production of images, the extension that those images can then have, and in the theoretical innovations that are demanded as a result. Extension, in this context, refers as much to the incorporation of the image within an extended digital form functioning as the work of art, as it does to the digital image that is constructed in order for a move from, for example, the screen to forms of prototyping. These changes give rise to a new demand. The move to the digital brings with it the need to reconigure the relationship between technology and practice. The transformation of practice brings a number of considerations into play. One can be explicated in terms provided by Walter Benjamin. In his 1934 text Author as Producer, Benjamin wrote in relation to artistic production, though it is now possible to make the same claim in relation to the production of the architectural, that:

What matters is the exemplary character of the production which is able irst to induce others to produce and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 2003)

The digital allows for a connection to be drawn between production and collaboration in ways that earlier methods of image creation made inconceivable. As will be suggested, the advent of the digital, and thus the location of practice deined as much by the diverse, if not divergent, possibilities raised by the way the material and the immaterial are interconnected. This means that rather than the singularity engendered



be a real connection to other practices for which the image is central, is inextricably bound up with the way in which images – representations of that practice – are produced. That production is internal to, and thus forms, part of architecture as a discursive practice. Representations are not the result of a series of magical operations. Quite simply, they occur because of the use of certain tools or machines. (Here, of course, the term ‘tool’ is being extended to cover pencils, compasses, drafting equipment, and the like.)

Each of the terms designating the machine – ‘equipment’, ‘apparatus’, ‘tool’ and of course ‘machine’ itself – have their own complex history. Equally the terms ‘technology’ and ‘technique’ are grounded in the Greek term tekhné; a term, which has been subject to a range of extended philosophical and philological investigations.2 While by no means precluding the necessity to work through the detail of their historical as well as the etymological afiliations, what underlies them is a speciic conception of function. Even though a given piece of equipment or tool may have a number of uses that number is deined by the shape, size, weight, mobility and so on, of the piece of equipment itself. Function, even if there is a possible variety of functions, is always delimited by the speciicity of the equipment’s physical presence. The singularity of the machine – thus construed – is located in the way its material presence translates into functional activity. The translation in question needs to be understood as a speciic conception of use. Any limitation in regard to use has a direct relation to physical possibility. Machines reach their limit when demands are in excess of physical possibility; when, that is, they are literally no longer of use. (This of course also occurs with computers. Nonetheless the demands determining use only ever exist in relation to software.)

Such a formulation of the machine repositions both its presence and its operative quality. (In other words, there is a fundamental shift in the nature of the machinic.) While an approach of this type maintains a relationship between the machine and its physical presence, rather than let that presence deine how the machine is to be understood, as would be the case when the machine exists as no more than a tool, it also deines use in terms of the machine’s internality; that is, in terms of its singular operative quality. In other words, it locates the machine’s potentiality as internal to the machine itself. (Reciprocally, as will be noted, it also brings to the fore the centrality of potentiality as a key concept.) Internality, in this precise sense, gives the machine a singular presence that deines and locates the range of practices that it enables. With the advent of the digital it is not as though machines no longer igure. What comes to be changed is the way potentiality is understood. Rather than being internal to the machine’s material presence, potentiality is a relationship between the material and the immaterial.

an image to have meaning, however, meaning would always be the after-effect of the speciic modalities of production. In sum, meaning would be the results of techniques rather than an end in itself. Consequently, separating any one of the elements that deine the produced image – that is, ‘machine’, ‘practice’ and ‘ontology’ – would yield an account of the image that oscillated between idealism and the anecdotal. Allowing for their interconnection is to occasion a spacing in which there is transformation of the setting in which theory and practices connect.

Machine

The convention underpinning most discussions of technology identiies the technological with an apparatus or with equipment. The relationship between the user and the product while mediated by the apparatus would then have attributed to the machine a singular status. Machines in this sense are tools. Tools form a fundamental part of the history of practice. This position brings with it a more complex state of affairs than a simple connection between the history of a discourse and the technology proper to it. What has to be added is that the relationship between the technology and discourse works to delimit ields of practice. In the case of architecture, a deining aspect of the interconnection of technology and practice is the production of representations that are taken to have a generative quality. (The question of how the generative is to be understood, and thus the move from the image to built form, remains open.) While this may seem too abstract a claim, it is not. The argument is that the history of any discourse cannot be separated from the ways in which the discourse represents its own activities. Moreover, it is possible to argue that developments in the technology of representation are integral to developments in its practice. Practice is modiied as a consequence. The history of architecture necessitates the incorporation of the history of representational techniques and the means by which they are produced.

What this argument entails, therefore, is that there is from the start a fundamental interconnection between a speciic representation and the processes of representation. The technical means by which representations are created forms an integral part both of the nature and the status of the representation. It should be noted, however, that this is not to accord a privileged status to representation taken as an end in itself. Nor is it to claim that images are straightforwardly representational (if by representation what is intended is a relationship between an inside and an outside). Rather, the central point is that the discursive practice of architecture, though there will



this takes place. Transporting images from one program to another – for example, opening an ostensibly two-dimensional digital image within an animation software program – introduces a sense of progression that has to be thought beyond teleological and thus linear development. This occurs for at least two reasons. The irst reason pertains to the nature of the difference between programs. Different senses of the image are produced. Moreover, the potentiality of each of the subsequent iterations will vary from program to program. Understanding how to negotiate with these variations becomes part of the operative dimension within technique. Some images will have a direct relation to material form while others will necessitate the retention of forms of abstraction in order that an eventual relation to material presence can be realised. Engaging with these varying senses of distance is not just another instance of technique; it underscores the fact that the move from the material presence of the machine to further instances of material presence – the constructed object, or elements thereof – involves the continual mediation of the immaterial. It will be precisely the reintroduction of the material as an analogue model – one allowing for its digitisation – that locates a sense of potentiality in material models. It is, however, a potentiality that can only be realised in the move from the material to the immaterial (that is, from the analogue to the digital).

The second reason why the conception of linear development that characterised representational practices prior to the advent of digital design no longer pertains is the result of the introduction of unpredictable elements – transformations that could not have been predicted in advance. The presence of the unpredictable within the relation of the material and the immaterial signals a fundamental shift. With the abeyance of linearity a new set of issues has to be confronted. Again it is a confrontation demanded as much by a different location of potentiality as its ontological transiguration. To the extent that the digital is understood as introducing a new era in how images are produced and deployed, then while it is always possible to resist the interruption and insist on the continuance of traditional modes of practice – practice in terms of design and the interpretation of design and the theoretical engagement with it – in the end that insistence will be undone by the demands of practice itself. Allowing for what has been identiied as the relocation of potentiality generates different senses of practice. Not only do questions of design technique need to be rethought, there needs to be an accompanying recognition that this shift has an impact both on the teaching of design as well as in the content and purpose of the pedagogy of architectural theory. Practice, as with research, needs to be understood as extending from teaching to the architectural ofice.

Equally, use is no longer given by a conception of translation that is deined simply in terms of material presence. With the advent of the digital – and thus the presence of the computer as the generator of design possibilities – another conception of use comes into play. Henceforth, it concerns the limits established by a relationship between hardware, that is, the computer, and software. While the latter operates internally, that operation only ever occurs in relation to the hardware. There is an obvious reciprocity here as the hardware operates with a range of divergent software programs. Relationality rather than internality has come to deine the site of potentiality. Prior to the digital there is both a different conception of machine and a different conception of potentiality. In that instance potentiality was deined in terms of a singular operative quality. The redeining of potentiality needs to be understood as concomitant with a shift in the ontological status of the locus of image creation and thus of design.

Practice

Practice deines a speciic type of activity. Speciicity is given by the nature of the machine and implicitly by its related conception of potentiality. Taken together machine and potentiality deine use. With the arrival of the digital as a design tool rather than as that which merely represented design, the practice of design is reformulated. There is a move away from a conception of the machine in which use is delimited by the machine’s material presence and in which the machine remains a tool. What occurs subsequently is the move to a conception of practice that takes the site of use as a relation between a machine and the realisation of divergent potentialities given by the different relationships existing between the machine and different software packages. An intrinsic part of this conception of practice is the transporting of images from one program to another. The transformations have to be thought beyond the hold of strict teleological development. Such a conception of development – the move from an assumed arché to a posited telos – would work, and only work, with the assumption that the interplay between drawing and the instruments of its realisation does, all things being equal, lead in only one direction. The goal or telos would then be the realised result. Its state of realisation would be such that it is possible to trace the effectuation of a project both from its point of inception and to its actualisation. Changes are to be thought in terms of perfections or adaptations.

With the digital this sense of direction is interrupted (an interruption occurring within both practice and the conception of machine and thus demanding an interruption on the level of the conceptual). An example will indicate how



Conceptually the direct result of this repositioning is that the binary opposition surface/depth is no longer adequate in order to interpret images. It is not as though the move from the analogue to the digital image means that in the place of depth there is now only the surface. The opposition between surface and depth will not allow for the locus of potentiality to move from the image qua image to the image’s production and subsequent relation to software and then to a repositioning of the generative. Once relation is attributed centrality, then the unity of the machine as a given and its position as the source of techniques is also effaced. With the advent of software the machine becomes the site of a different set of techniques. Each set is deined not just by the relationship between the computer and a given software program but also by the differing and complex relationship between software programs. While on one level there is little remarkable in the transformation of images – images as both photos and designs – in the movement through differing programs the signiicance of the effect of this movement needs to be noted. Once description is recognised to be inadequate, then noting it means developing a theoretical account. The project leading to the development of an ontology of techniques is part of that account.

What is occurring, as has been suggested, is not just a transformation in how both the machine and its use are understood. (Use, once it includes the user, means that the transformation marks the move from the solitary individual to the design team.) Of equal importance is the centrality of the machine as a given, and as such, the originator of a range of techniques has been replaced, not by a new sense of the uniied machine if the machine – the computer – is taken as an end in itself. Rather, it is no longer possible to speak of the machine independently of activity – nor, moreover, is it possible to speak of activity as though the term designated a form of synthetic unity. The machine therefore is no longer deined by material presence. Its relationship to the hand or to the eye – to the body in general – is mediated from the start. That mediation does not mean that there is a deferred or inauthentic relation to the machine. On the contrary the machine is a site of original relatedness. In other words, the ontology of the machine – what the machine is in terms of the being proper to the machine – has to be formulated in terms of an original relation. The relation at its most abstract can be described as existing between the material and the immaterial. The computer, however, is not an abstract machine. Such a conception of machine still deines it in terms of its internal possibilities. What needs to be recognised is that the computer is only ever given in terms of relationality. Unlike the purely material tool whose use lay in the potentialities of its material presence, the original relation between the material and the immaterial means that the singular machine is only ever present in terms of its own dispersion through a ield

Ontology

As has been suggested, implicit in the argument that has presented thus far is ontology. This can be addressed initially in terms of the image. That the digital image deines a ield of activity is commonplace. What is central, however, is that work with the image, the identiication of elements within it and their incorporation into other images, is for the most part an activity that is deined by a relationship between the initial image and software. The potentiality of the image does not lie in its depth, as though the more an image is opened up the closer it gets to showing a hidden element – an element given at the site of a possible collision between depth and truth. Rather, with the digital image, potentiality has a different locus and thus a different conceptual coniguration. This was the point indicated above, namely that with the produced image there is a concomitant shift in the focus and deinition of architectural theory.

However, if there is a locus classicus of the earlier position – the site of collision between depth and truth – it is Antonioni’s 1966 ilm Blow-Up. The narrative of the ilm circulates around the possibility that the results of a crime may have been inadvertently photographed. Whether or not this supposition is true depends upon the possibility of discovering it within the image. If there is a truth, it lies not just hidden in the image but hidden in order to be revealed at a later stage. This is the conceit that the ilm exploits. What is played with, a play both structuring and providing the narrative’s ilmic presence, is the possibility of a relationship between depth and truth. (It should be noted in addition that this is a ilm in which it can only be a speciic image, a ilmic one that presents an investigation into the nature and the possibility of an image, that is, the analogue photograph as image.)3 Potentiality in this instance, therefore, does not just inhere in the nature of the image and in the image’s relation to the ield of techniques; its location is internal to the image. The technique of enlarging part of the image depends on the one hand on the analogue nature of the photograph and on the way that part of an analogue photograph can be excised and then ‘blown up’. The technique, which is itself reliant on the analogue nature of the image, is deployed in order that elements that were not immediately visible can then become visible. Not only is this an impossible state of affairs with a digital photograph because it is comprised of pixels, it is also the case, as was suggested, that its possibility locates potentiality within the image itself. With the digital image depth is replaced by the primacy of relation between the material and the immaterial, and thus potentiality acquires an inherently different location.



as an ontology of techniques. For Benjamin’s text see The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 2003). For one of the most signiicant contributions to the project of responding philosophically to the role of software within design, see Manuel de Landa’s Philosophies of Design: The case of modelling software (de Landa, 2002).

2 The key texts in this regard are by Heidegger. While it has not been undertaken here, the project of developing an ontology of techniques needs to be understood as signalling the need to think through another conception of the ontological. A conception that takes a founding relational ontology as its point of departure, and thus works to displace Heidegger’s understanding of ontological difference. I have identiied one direction such a possibility might take in my The Plural Event (Benjamin, A. 1993). For a critique of Heidegger’s conception of technology see Michael E. Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, politics and art (Zimmerman, 1990).

3 Indeed, if there were to be a detailed analysis of the ilm – an analysis not driven by a concern with mere content but with its effective presence as ilm – then it would be this point that would provide the point of departure. The ilm’s limit does not lie in its narrative content. Blow-Up is delimited by its relation – and the incorporation of that relation – to the history of photography.

of activities. These activities are themselves only possible because of this original relation. The situation, in which the unity of the tool determined use and the range of uses depended upon the nature of the tool’s material presence, has given way to a network of divergent activities that assumes the original relatedness between the material and the immaterial as its condition of possibility. (That original condition is itself already the locus of a founding ontological difference; namely, the one pertaining to the difference between the material and the immaterial.) However, unlike the pre-existing ontological coniguration, which deined variety in terms of the determining presence of a founding unity, there is an original condition of ontological plurality – itself dependent upon the complex relation between the material and the immaterial – but which works beyond the hold of the predictive. The unpredictable transformative potentials within programs, the possibility of emergent intelligences occurring in the movement between programs or with the incorporation of plug-ins – programs learning – is a possibility that resists synthesis. That resistance is the impossibility of a reduction to a founding sense of unity.

An ontology of techniques cannot be contained since the capacity for transformation and development is given within a series of relations whose internal determinations can be neither known nor determined in advance. (Hence the use of the term ‘nomadism’ in Chapter 1). Potentiality is always to be realised. Its realisation is the presence of architecture as a material event. The realisation, however, is not mere abstraction; it is only ever present as technique. Techniques are of course the name in terms of which potentialities are realised. In addition, the relationship between potentiality and technique – itself dependent upon the relationship between the material and the immaterial – deines as much an area central to the development of research in architecture as it does a central element of architectural pedagogy.

Endnotes

1 Elements of the argument advanced here are obviously indebted to Walter Benjamin’s work on technical reproducibility. Part of the force of Benjamin’s argument is that there needs to be compatibility between technological innovation and concomitant shifts in the concepts and categories through which the products of those innovations are interpreted. The digital needs to be understood as just such an innovation. The project of theory in relation to the digital is to develop the concepts and categories through which its signiicance can be noted and judged. This chapter is a modest attempt to indicate some of the issues in play in formulating what has been described


19

3 Surface Efects: Borromini, Semper, Loos


20 Architectural Projections Surface Efects: Borromini, Semper, Loos 21

and what will be called a theoretical history. The details of these elements need to be taken up. While there is the temptation to treat each separately there are important connections between them. The point of departure, however, has to be with the deinition of architectural theory.

If the theoretical is deined as an internal condition – internal to architectural practice – then it cannot be readily separated from the possibilities that obtain for form creation. There are different ways in which it can be engendered. As an activity, form creation can be guided, for example, as much by program as it can by the abstract activity in which volume (or form) is the consequence of the deformation of a grid. Equally, form creation will always be connected to what a certain set of materials will allow and what others will preclude. To the extent that form and materials are involved, then the geometries within which they are articulated are also central. Once it can be assumed that the relations between materials, geometries and forms are not given in advance then this has the twofold effect of delimiting a space in which architectural research can be done. At the same time it begins to deine the ambit of that research. In addition, and this is the second point, it locates not just the space of theory but more signiicantly its necessity. Precisely because relationships have to be established and decisions made this opens up the need for forms of deliberation that are continually informed. What occasions the introduction of theory is the presence of a space opened by a relationship whose formal presence cannot be determined in advance.

History, as generally understood, involves the location of an object within a ield of activity in which the object has meaning because of that context.3 Writing history involves showing in what way the ield individuates the particular object; though equally, it is concerned with the way in which the ield is maintained by the particular’s reference to it. As such, history can only insist on particularity to the extent that what continues to be held in place is the network or ield. This ield occasions the object’s meaning (and thus the object’s presence as a cultural or historical sign). While such a position enables an account of innovation to be given, and thus an account of how an object may interrupt a ield of activity, perhaps to the point of redeining it, what cannot be given within such a setting is an account of the object that insists both on the centrality of innovation and on the object of innovation as able to cause an iterative reworking of the elements of history. The historical question does not concern the possibility of another form of innovation, or a reworking of the given, in order that a further innovative potential be released. The latter possibility – the destruction of the ield of meaning in order to occasion innovation – becomes the deinitional concern of theory. The preoccupations of theory, in such a context, are with the effectuation of the particular as architecture. In regard to the objects of history, what this

Surface/Theory

Within architecture the surface igures as both a historical and a theoretical concern. As an introduction to the speciic engagement with Borromini, Semper and Loos – all of whose work will play a pivotal role in this recasting of the surface as a concept within architectural theory – a more detailed consideration needs to be given to a concern with the surface in the context of architectural theory.1 Three elements guide this approach to the relationship between theory and the surface. All are integral to the operation of the architectural.

In the irst place, there is the deinition of architectural theory. It needs to be understood as an engagement with issues arising from the practice of design. Practice has to be given as great an extension as possible running from issues delimited by pedagogy to those whose concern is with the detail of structures and the nature of research. Within practice – understood in this extended sense – these speciic issues will have autonomy because of such a positioning. Secondly, integral to a theoretical engagement with architecture as a practice, is the recognition that architecture is necessarily bound up with its means of representation. (These means igure as much in the production of images as they do in form creation itself.) This does not entail that architecture is identical with the image of architecture. Indeed the opposite is the case. What it does mean, however, is that drawings, diagrams, computer images, three-dimensional print outs, models, and so on, all form part of the focus of architectural theory. To the extent that the means of representation change, there will be subsequent changes in how the practice of architectural theory works. There needs to be a certain reciprocity since moves within the means of representation should be accompanied by changes, or the very least accommodations, on the level of theory. (For example, theory cannot remain indifferent to the move from Cartesian based CAD systems to animation software programs such as Maya.)2

The inal element concerns the relationship between theory and history. The conjecture here is that there is an important difference between the objects that comprise the history of architecture and the presence of the ‘same’ objects within architectural theory. While there will be an important relationship between history and theory, the signiicance of this distinction should not be overlooked. What is at issue is the possibility of the history of architecture having a productive presence within the practice of design. Again, the argument will be that it is only by construing the history of architecture theoretically that it will then become possible for that history to play a role in particular modalities of practice. In regard to this inal point it will be essential to distinguish between history as a speciic discursive activity



in his discussion of antiquities especially Trajan’s Column, and inally in Adolf Loos’ Haus Müller, while on one level having little in common, on another level do have an important afinity. That afinity is constructed retrospectively. It has to do with the way either the writings or speciic buildings are concerned with the surface. What is important, therefore, is to begin to establish how each of these moments, when run together, creates part of the history of the surface effect. The lack of immediate similarity marking each of these domains means that a different way in to the question at hand – the surface that effects – has to emerge in each case. In regards to Borromini what will become important is the way that the move from an externally regulated system – in this instance the one given by the analogy between the body and the building – to one whose regulation is internal marks the presence of the surface effect. The move to the surface will be accompanied by a decontextualising move in which both the internal and external aspects of the building as well as certain drawings by Borromini come to be repositioned as objects within a theoretical history.

In the case of Semper, the key opening moment, at least for this project, is his discussion of the wall in The Four Elements of Architecture.4 If the wall’s ‘original meaning’ is identiied as spatial enclosure, it is then possible to distinguish between a structure that is simply load-bearing and the wall. (The former may be no more than that which supports the realisation of spatial enclosure.) Once this conception of the wall – transformed into a concern with the surface – is interarticulated with Semper’s refusal of the distinction between ornament and structure, then surface can begin to be identiied with concerns delimited by program and function. At the minimum, it allows the elements of architecture – wall, loor, column, corner and so on – to be an effect of an operative or generative conception of the surface. (Hence a surface deined in terms of potentiality rather than simple literal presence.) This positioning of Semper will take place in terms of an initial juxtaposition with Ruskin for whom architecture is the ‘adornment’ on any ‘ediice’. It is not as though Semper returns to the ediice by a refusal of the identiication of architecture and ornament. His position is far more radical. What will be argued is that he refuses the terms set by the opposition.5 As a result architecture can be thought beyond the opposition structure/ornament. This refusal should now be seen as a radical opening in architectural thinking, one resisted by so-called postmodern architecture whose aims were for the most part explicable in terms of a reintroduction of that very distinction.

Loos’ signiicance, initially, can be identiied in those writings, which try to identify the futility of ornamentation. The distancing of ornamentation needs to be read, at least in part, as a move to the centrality of the surface. With Loos there is an important addition. Programmatic concerns are brought

means, as has been indicated, is their capacity to be given another context in order that a potential – unrecognised by the founding context – can play a productive role in form generation. This is a possibility that emerges if the hold of history – as deined by a strict contextualism – is released.

The immediate question that has to be addressed is the position of the surface – the surface both as an existing architectural reality and as a theoretical concept – within these large formulations of the concerns of architectural theory. To ask the question – what is a surface in architecture? – is to ask as much about the practical implications of how surfaces are used and materials are deployed to create them, as it is to ask about the generation of surfaces on computer screens. This latter possibility means that surfaces can be granted complex histories internal to the construction of the surface itself. More signiicantly, it will allow for the logic that generates the surface and the one that enables change to be registered to be one and the same and thus internal to the surface as an operative ield. The key move here, however, and it is the one that necessitates that a theoretical history of the surface be written – this chapter should be understood as a contribution to that history – is that such a form of production gives rise to a conception of the surface as that which can have an effect rather than simply being the consequence of the process of its creation. Once a surface can effect – that is, it can bring something about – then it can be understood as that which works to distribute program. The effect will not be instrumental; rather it will be inherent in the operation of the surface itself. (This will, of course, transform the way the term ‘surface’ is understood.) Once the surface can be construed either as that which distributes programmable space, or functional concerns, or the elements of architecture (for instance, walls and columns), then what is at work is a form of production; hence the surface effect. While such a conception of the surface has only arisen since the use of animation software in the design process, it will allow a history of the surface effect to be constructed. Such a project would have the salutary effect of robbing the present of its claim to pure novelty by allowing a retroactive history to be constructed. It will be a history of the surface written from – indeed made possible by – that which occasions and deines the present. This occurs in the precise sense that the moments within this retroactive history are given coherence by the concerns of the present and those concerns are the issues that arise – today – for and from the practice of design. While the nature of this conception of the historical – decontextualisation allowing for a theoretical history – demands further clariication, at the very minimum what has been provided is a point of departure.

Procedurally what will be argued is that the role of the surface in Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Semper’s writings on ‘cladding’ as well as



presentation of that which opens up ields of activity. The productive sense of the surface gives rise to a range of research projects that are determined by the nature of the relationship between the diagrammatic and its ensuing architectural representation. From within this framework the surface will remain an abstract possibility. The release of the potential that abstraction contains, and the manner in which that release occurs, or more problematically is occluded, is the act of realisation.

Opening: The Body

Architecture has relied on models or analogies in order to deine its activity or delimit its ield of operation. From Vitruvius, up until the recent past, one of the most pervasive analogies has been the body.9 What will be suggested here, in order to open up the place of the surface, is that not only have developments in architecture overcome the hold of that analogy, that freedom has allowed a return to earlier architectural forms. Such a return means that these forms can be reinterpreted. In a sense architecture can develop another relation to the body by its having been freed from a relationship based on an analogy between the building and the body. Consequently, it is possible to take up, from within architecture, issues that pertain, for example, to the disabled body or the gendered body precisely because issues that relate to embodied existence are no longer positioned by the analogy between the built and the body. The body has not been reconigured and the nature of the analogy changed. Rather, the body can be reconigured because the analogy has been overcome. Part of the move to the surface accompanies this repositioning of architecture’s relation to the body.

Of the many formulations of the relationship between body and architecture the one found in Alberti’s On the Art of Building captures the nature of what is involved.10 It is not just that beauty is deined in terms of the internal adequacy of proportion, the internal divisions of the human body also provide the measure for the building. Of the many passages that could be cited one of the more apposite is the following:

The shapes and sizes for the setting out of columns, of which the ancients distinguished three kinds according to the variations of the human body, are well worth understanding. When they considered man’s body, they decided to make columns after his image. Having taken the measurements of a man, they discovered that the width, from some side to the other, was a sixth of the

about by the interrelation of surface and volume. Starting with Semper’s redeinition of the wall as that which effects spatial enclosure, the project is then to establish in what way the cladding within Loos’ Haus Müller moves the wall away from reductive identiication with the literal wall.6 Moreover, when it becomes possible to locate the actual functional operation of the building in the cladding (Bekleidung), cutting the Raumplan in order to allow for circulation and program, then it is equally possible to allow for the presence of the effect of the wall without there having to be a literal wall.7 Even though Loos’ claim that the interior of the house should reveal all, while the exterior remain ‘mute’, is well known, the force, perhaps the potential, created by the Haus Müller cannot be reduced to this one authorial comment. The silence of the exterior cannot be enforced. It has an ineliminable potential. (A potential that decontextualisation can release.) What this means is that the interior’s presence can be described as functionally indifferent to the exterior of the building. Not only does this create two different surfaces – surfaces held by the literal wall though not reducible to it – it also allows those surfaces programmatic possibilities that are capable of a relation of indifference. (The literal wall would then need to be understood as that which carried two surfaces.) Freed from their initial structural or tectonic constraints actual walls are able to function as surfaces that effect. In other words, they are able to work as distributors of program rather than as markers of putatively neutral spaces. As a consequence, walls – now as surfaces – can become effects of the surface.

In sum, what Loos achieves is a practical and workful conception of the surface, by having freed the surface from its reduction to the literal wall, even if it is one whose potential was not fully explored in his actual buildings. Nonetheless, there is a signiicant opening. From within the purview of this argument the vocabulary of walls and loors has to be reworked such that what is given central place is the surface. Whether a surface is also a wall or a loor becomes a consideration that has to be integrated into its presence as a surface. They become moments of ixity on a surface, moments that are usually the consequences of programmatic constraints. Instead of its being attributed a static quality, the surface will henceforth have a dynamic one. While this can be generalised in terms of the surface effect, the details will always need to be examined. Only then is it possible to occasion that move in which what becomes important is the surface as a process and, therefore, as a locus of activity. Process and activity will always work to displace the surface from a historically determined context.8

Once it can be argued therefore that, from the position of theory, Loos allows for the intersection of surface and volume to distribute program, the surface takes on a particular quality. It becomes the abstract or diagrammatic



taken.12 Instead of proceeding directly to the detail of Borromini’s work, two sculptures by Bernini will set the scene. The second, David (1623), is by far the more signiicant. Nonetheless, the move from the slightly earlier sculptures to this one needs to be understood as the move from a work deined by a clear sense of front and therefore of sides and behind, to one that resists all the dimensions of frontality by working as a continual surface. In architectural terms the possibility demanded by Palladio in which, if the Villa Rotonda begins to deine an ideal and where part of the ideal is the symmetry of the front, then such a set up would cede its place to an internally generative system in Borromini. This movement is present within the Bernini sculptures. Frontality is overcome by an internally regulated system that individuates speciic elements. They are after-effects of a system, rather that being incorporated into a totality whose organisational logic leads in a different direction; namely, to the object as symbol. While symbolism, both in architecture and sculpture, is almost impossible to avoid, there is a real difference between the attribution of a symbolical quality and the necessity of a symbolic presence derived from the object’s relation to an external order of organisation. The argument is not that sculpture opens up architecture. Rather, in holding to the speciicity of sculpture it then becomes possible to examine how a distinction between stasis and movement is at work within this particular ield. As such, what can then be asked is what the architectural correlate to this distinction would be like.

Bernini. The process – David

As a point of departure it should not be forgotten that with David what is at work is a body. A sculptured body, and yet as sculpture it can be interpreted as the move from the body understood as proportion towards a body understood as a dynamic process of internal relations. Moreover, it is a dynamic process that is neither one of simple movement nor one of unending oscillation. What is at work is the movement of what will be called the material ininite. While this term will need to be clariied, at this stage it should be understood as identifying a process in which inite moments are the effect of the process; a process that is potentially ininite. As such materiality has a certain immateriality as its condition of existence.

This sculpture involves a marked development from earlier works such as The Rape of Proserpina (1621-2). What deined that particular work was its static quality, which is brought about by the relationship between the planted left leg of Pluto and the force of Proserpina’s left hand against his face. The skin above her abductor’s left eye is being forced up while all the

height, while the depth from navel to kidneys was a tenth. (Alberti, 1988, p. 309)11

What is important in this passage is twofold. Not only is there the strength of the analogy, measurement and the geometry of proportion are structured by it. Measure is always deined externally. Not only is the body a given, it provides – accepting a symbiosis between building and body – the ground of construction and evaluation.

Part of the force that can be attributed to the analogy is this structuring potential. Fundamental to the process was an essential anthropocentrism. This is not the pursuit of humanistic values – though that may have been the case – but the identiication of the generative element of design within an analogy in which architecture was always determined externally. When architecture moves to the modern period – a movement, which, as is being suggested, sanctions a retrospective reinterpretation of the tradition – then the external control will have vanished. The body has not been deferred if only to be reincorporated as a concern within architecture. More signiicantly, an external control, a control structured by analogy (an instance of which is the body), has given way to a fundamentally different way of construing the generative dimension of architecture. That dimension has become internal to the object. The object is redeined in terms of its self-effectuation as architecture. A clear example, as has already been suggested, is the way that the Raumplan intersects with the role of cladding in Loos’ Haus Müller to construct the object as architecture. (This is, of course, a position that will be pursued in greater detail.)

If architecture has been freed from the analogy of the body, how then does this freedom open up the concerns of the history of architecture? Surely it could be argued that while this freedom may have some impact on future projections, the conceptions of symmetry that appeared in earlier buildings, or plans, deined symmetry in terms of the order of the body, or if not the body then nature. (In both instances what determined symmetry was external to built form.) Even if that argument could be sustained there is no need to limit interpretations in this manner. To the extent that elements of the history of architecture can be differentiated from their insertion into a given history, the possibility of reinterpretation and thus reactivisation occasions the emergence of another object. As has already been indicated, such a connection is only possible because the object’s potential will not allow the insistence of history to still that possibility.

In order to trace the potential in the work of the surfaces comprising Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1682), a detour will be



‘circle’ constructs (or equally, of which the circle is the effect). While it may be necessary to provide a semiology of the sculpture in which the relations are described, the points being described maintain a different sense of relationality than one understood as mere connectedness. The work is not the connection of points. Nor is it that points connect dynamic lines. Points would only ever be after-effects of lines. A dynamic quality predominates. What is maintained is a pure interiority that continues to present itself. What is presented, while having a singular quality, is not reducible to a simple singularity. Within the process of relation it is always possible to construct a point of view, however, that point is the effect of the process. Equally, it cannot be identical with the object. This is not a claim about relativity but about the process of pure internal relatedness. The ininite in question is that which has already been identiied as the material ininite.13

In Bernini’s David the right foot is on the ground. The back of the left is raised with the toes of that foot taking the weight. The body is neither turning nor not turning. The tension created by the feet instantiates process. Process here is movement. The rope of the catapult is held tight. The hands are pulling and yet at that moment the catapult is still; a still point within the process that marks the catapult being held and which is, at the same time, the process of its being released. His loins are wrapped by a folded garment and around his shoulder there is a pouch held in place by further folded material. The folds of the material are not, in this context, what is interesting. The signiicance is that they cannot be differentiated from the work of the body. The wrap of the material over his loins forms part of the body’s unfolding. It neither lows with the body nor against it. It is neither on the body nor is it separate from it. Body, material, pouch, sling, all form part of the process. The error would be to see the body as adorned and, therefore, the body as central. Indeed, it can be argued that what deines the sculpture are the relations between the body – and by body what is meant is David’s literal body – and what could be taken, albeit wrongly, as secondary, that is, material, sling, pouch and the like. On an abstract level it is possible to see the sculpture – and it should be remembered that there is a potential endlessness that comprises this seeing – as a surface. Different elements are not placed on a single surface. The sculpture is the endless articulation of relations in which what are individuated can be attributed speciic qualities. In other words, on the level of description it is possible to distinguish the material around the body, or connected to it, from the body itself. Nonetheless, such a formal distinction would miss the way they form part of a continuum involving neither adornment nor ornamentation. Rather, these formally distinct elements form part of a continuous surface. Moreover, the only way the distinct elements are able to be distinct, and to be viewed

weight is borne by his left leg. The right leg is raised indicating the possibility of movement and yet the relationship between the eye and the left leg indicates a stationary position. All that is being marked is the moment. Ovid insists on the simultaneity of seeing, loving and abducting (Metamorphoses Book V.395). The sculpture is of that point in time. The movement of hand, facial skin and legs involves a careful balance. As a work it can be said to be deined by the temporality of the instant. What is seen is that particular instant. Each of the elements comprising the relation that deine the sculpture can be viewed. There is a real extent to which the work is complete in itself. The completion delimits what is seen. The relationship between presentation and the instant deines the work in terms of both representation and expression. Neither claim can be made of David. This will be the reason why David is an architecturally more interesting sculpture. Moreover, though this is a contention to be argued, David, in procedural terms, opens the way towards Borromini’s extraordinary façades and interiors. More particularly, David, despite being a body, leads away from the analogy between body and building. Even though there is a body, at work here is a conception of form that is no longer anthropocentric in nature.

What marks out David as a site, and therefore what delimits its particularity, has initially to do with a conception of relatedness that is no longer held by the instant. Time igures in a different way. The insistence of the instant cedes its place to the temporality of process. What this conception of time brings with it is work. Work is both object and activity. Once the temporal and active dimension comes to deine the ontology of the object, then while a work is present, the presentation has to be deined in terms of an interiority that eschews any reduction to the instant. In other words, it is deined in terms of a set of internal relations whose work comprises the work. While those relations have exteriority insofar as the object has material presence, the exterior is the presentation of pure interiority. And yet, the relations comprising this interiority have to be deined in terms of dynamic relations rather than the interconnection of static points. What will emerge, therefore, is another way on construing internal relations.

One of the most remarkable qualities of the sculpture is the impossibility of standing in front of it as opposed to behind it. Equally, it is not possible to stand to one side and see it from that side rather than being either in front or behind. No matter where the viewer stands the sculpture stands before the eye. In a sense this is because David’s body is turned such that in being ready to release the catapult – a rope containing a rock stretched between his hands – a circle has been constructed. What is viewed is that circle. However, to insist on the formal circularity of the object would be to miss both the counter-balancing of forces as well as the dynamic relations that the



towards the motif of a bird. Not only is the eye dragged up through the rich array of forms it is then tempted further – tempted towards the ininite – by light. As the eye soars the ininite is captured as much by light as it is by the geometry. The ininite in question is the ininite of illusion. The interplay of symbolism and a vanishing point maintained by the intersection of geometry and light create a feeling of ininite movement towards a divine ininite. While the illusion is important, it is not as though ininite transcendence can have material presence other than as illusion. This is the restriction of this conception of the ininite. As Descartes argued in the Meditations, what could not be represented was the ininite nature of God. There is, however, another conception of the ininite.15 Here the ininite is not linked to representation but to the ininity of pure becoming. Within the philosophical writings of the period the most exact formulation of this position is found in Leibniz’s conception of substance as force (vis). Substance is never static nor transcendent, it is un être capable d’action (a being capable of action).16 Activity deines substance. Its continuity is its continual self-realisation and thus self-effectuation. Movement, therefore, is an ininitude of relations. In following Leibniz as opposed to Descartes, an architecture of illusion is put to one side. The question to be addressed therefore concerns the architectural correlate to this conception of the ininite. It should be added immediately that this conception of the ininite can have material presence. The ininite is linked to relation. Baroque architecture is not Leibnizian. The relation has to do with how the ininite is understood. Architecture is not philosophy. The importance of the distinction lies in the nature of the former’s material presence.

One of the central elements deining the internal operation of the church is the movement of bays, columns and walls. While each element has a distinct quality there is an interconnectedness that is neither arbitrary nor the work of chance. Their interrelation is held by an entablature that divides the overall building into three sections. The physical presence of the entablature has the effect of emphasising the columns even though it is an emphasis that is dissipated formally, once it is recognised that they form part of the walls which in turn form the bays since the latter cannot be disassociated from the wall’s articulation. There is a complex pattern in which even though the elements are separate, in that they have either ornamental or functional speciicity and as such can invite and maintain particular programmatic possibilities, they are nonetheless articulated together. If the walls were understood as a continuous line, then the measure and counter measure – the movement of the curvilinear – would have become a surface. In other words, what is at work here is not a straight line that has become curved. Measure and countermeasure continue to yield openings that become

as separate, is because they are interarticulated within, and as, a continuous surface. Such an argument would be consistent with the claim made earlier that points are the after-effects of lines that work.

What then of David’s body? The body becomes the site of ininite relatedness. In refusing to privilege any one position – and thus by extension any description – it becomes a inite point, the condition of possibility for which is the ininitude of relations. The latter is the work of the material ininite. Internality, therefore, is given priority, and then, as has been argued, individual elements are individuated by the work as a site of process. The object is no longer the totality of individual parts precisely because individuation always occurs as the effect of a process. The elements are effected by the work’s organisational logic; that logic brings them about. What this means is that the sculpture, as an activity, has to be seen as a surface. However, it is not a surface on which things are placed, rather, in sculptural terms it is a surface that effects.

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

Borromini died in 1667. At the time of his death the façade of San Carlo was not yet inished. (The building, except for the façade, was inished in 1641. The façade was completed in 1682.) The remaining plans, however, indicate the extent to which the existing building follows the original drawings. Steinberg, Blunt and Wittkower, among others, have provided detailed descriptions of the building. What is important here is to see the building within what could be described as another history of the curvilinear. Fundamental to the inception of the Baroque was the distinction between the static and the dynamic.14 Accepting that development, while essential, is to repeat a commonplace until the nature of the movement in question is characterised. Even then, it should not be thought that there is simple consistency within all Baroque architecture. However, in this context what has to be noted, is the path that stems from a consideration of Bernini’s David. What is opened up is complexity within movement. In regards to San Carlo what needs to be emphasised, as a beginning, is the distinction between a conception of movement that involves illusion and one that deines movement by the continuity of counter-measures. The latter realises complexity. It is not as though the two are in direct opposition or that they do not overlap or even reinforce each other. However, what is signiicant is the way their difference provides particular openings.

The dome consists of a texture of geometric shapes – crosses, octagons and hexagons – that move towards a naturally lit opening which rises up



backwards and forwards – a pulling and pushing that produces the curvilinear – by the work of the internal coniguration. On one level a movement of this type has to be the case. However, to the extent that the production of the line remains central, then an account of the line will be in terms of that production. Any account, therefore, will oscillate between those involving the history of geometry, and in particular the role of geometry in drawing, and more ideologically based versions in terms of architectural attempts to reconcile various religious and philosophical positions.20 The end result is that the line remains secondary to that which is taken to have produced it. There is another possibility, which, while alluding to these accounts of the line, is not deined by them; namely, giving emphasis to the line itself. This means more than a change in emphasis. Another area of concern emerges. Henceforth, the interpretive question concerns: what is it that the line produces? This question – and it is one that can be taken to a range of different drawings of the plan – has to start with what can be described as the line’s density. Density means that the line is not the single line but the double line marking, if only as a beginning, an inside and an outside. The dense line – the line itself – is this double (perhaps doubled) line. In general terms, it is a line of information.

locations within, and as, a surface.17 A similar operation is at work in the façade. While the status of the façade is contested it is, nonetheless, worth noting the way in which the curvilinear is once again a series of measures and counter measures that yield space. The curvilinear does not maintain space, rather it is part of the process of spacing. In the process, and in the potential endlessness that marks the presence of the curvilinear, it is possible to locate the work of a material ininite. Finitude understood as the individuation of elements always takes the ininite as its conditions of possibility.

While it is possible to emphasise that the building as a totality is a complex negotiation with differing ordering systems. The most powerfully argued interpretation of San Carlo is Steinberg’s for whom the building is an attempt to integrate oval, cross and octagon. He wants to see this three-part system reiterated throughout the church as a whole.18 On one level it is impossible to deny the acuity of this observation. Nonetheless, it is still possible to complicate this particular description. Again, this complication should not for a moment be seen as diminishing its historical importance. Indeed, no attempt is being made here to deny that the building can be understood as the continual attempt to reconcile symbolic, theological and philosophical elements that characterise the seventeenth century in general and the Baroque in particular. The complication in question can be demonstrated by concentrating on a speciic drawing by Borromini; namely Albertina 175. The importance of the drawing is that it generates a further opening. What allows it to be made is the relationship architecture has to its means of representation. However, fundamental to this position is what while those means are an ineliminable part of architecture, it does not follow that what is an ostensible representation has to be read in that way. In other words, representations can be read diagrammatically. This is the claim that lines, drawings, in sum representations once understood as diagrams, have the capacity to generate representations but should not be assumed to be straightforwardly representational. This move introduces into the history of drawing and architectural representation an abstracting element that interrupts the low of history by linking the abstracting process to the possibility of a ‘representation’ having an afterlife. To be precise, the afterlife is the move from abstraction to a further representation.

The plan allows two different aspects to be emphasised. The irst would be to show how the walls and the structure are an effect of the oval (or ellipse), which is itself part of the internal geometry. The oval is the result of the juxtaposition of two equilateral triangles inscribed within two circles. Whether it is an oval or an ellipse, the end result is that the line is present as a result of the internal coniguration.19 Moreover, as Steinberg argues, it is possible to see that the produced line marks out the plan in the drawing as pulled

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architectural elements delimiting, as part of that process, programmable spaces. The line individuates these elements; equally, the line also individuates spaces. What is individuated is marked by initude. Hence, the line, precisely because other instances of individuation could have occurred, can be understood as the work of a material ininite.

In regards to the façade, the entablature has a different role from the one it played within the building. Internally, while having a tripartite form it can nonetheless be described as holding two different orders in place by marking their point of division. Moreover, the visual power of the entablature works to control the eye and thus to regulate the experience of the building. The façade incorporates the entablature. Even though it divides it, it is also the case that acts of division are part of the work of the façade. Formally, it consists of convex and concave lines that delimit spaces (bays). As with the interior, columns and ornamentation cannot be differentiated from the façade itself. In forming part of the façade it becomes, once again, a complex surface. Questions of addition and ornamentation are not to be separated from the possibility of their presence as that which is enacted by the measure and counter measure of the surface. While it is possible to see the two parts of the façade as responding to each other insofar as a concave line on one level is positioned in relation to a convex line on the other, there is more at stake. Two elements need to be noted. The irst is that the relationship of the convex and the concave is part of the totality of the surface. The second point is that the work of these lines – the work that is the complexity of the curvilinear – is the disclosure of spaces that allow for program because they await it. Programmable space is the consequence of lines that work.

What Borromini’s adventure allows is not a claim about the modernity of the Baroque or even the extent to which the concerns of the Baroque could still play a determining role in design. Such claims would have to overlook the need to reconstruct historical periods. The inventing of histories and the establishing of points of connection occur because of openings afforded by the present. What is central to Borromini in this context is the way San Carlo can be seen as demanding another account of the generation of form. As an account it has to involve the movement of matter beyond the body, precisely because the generation of form is internal to the object. The limitation of the Baroque is the way both internality and form were conceived. The limitation is merely the Baroque’s particularity. In moving from externality and thus from an anthropocentric architecture, the Baroque demonstrates the impossibility of architecture having a forma inalis. The future opened up by Bernini and Borromini is not to be found in the detail of their formal inventions. That would be to reduce those inventions to an image. The future is allowed by a different repetition, one guided by a process of abstraction. If what is

While accepting that the columns have a load-bearing function within the overall structure, they do not stand opposed to the wall. Nor is it that the columns, which may have been historically separated from the wall, have now been placed next to it. Within the conines of the dense line, how is the relationship between the column and the wall to be understood? This question cannot be asked independently of the movement that the line marks out. While it is possible to account for the movement of the line in terms of the effect of the founding internal geometry, it is also true that any account of the line has to begin with the recognition that its movement effects. The curvilinear creates and distributes internal and external volumes that are themselves the distribution of programmable space. Whether that program is used in one way rather than another – that is, locating speciic functions proper to the operation of a church, or even places for statues or ornamentation – is not the point. What matters is that this line has to be understood as that which distributes volume. In other words, the volumes (bays) are the effect of the line. At work, therefore, is a line that works. This line becomes the architectural correlate to the surface of Bernini’s David. That surface too, needs to be understood as a generalised production, and therefore as a workful line.

Allowing the line this capacity will account for the relationship between the column and the wall. What the line makes clear is that the relation is no longer one either of opposition or ornamentation. If it can be argued that the volumes are produced by the operation of the line – they are its effect – then it is also the case that both wall and column are themselves effects of a line. There is no opposition between column and wall. The line – though now viewed as a surface that individuates – presents elements that can at a given moment, and for a speciic reason, be given the designation bay (volume) or wall or column. As with Bernini’s David, individual elements are the after-effects of a surface that effects. Finally, the absence of an opposition between column and wall precludes the question of their relation. Relation is concerned with separate deinable entities. Here, they only have a relation insofar as the ‘same’ line produces them.

The drawing is not the building. However, the drawing cannot be disassociated from the actual presence of San Carlo. What this means is that part of its presence is a quality that allows for a greater degree of abstraction to be attributed to it. The process of abstraction will allow for the decontextualisation. However, this is not a process that refuses the particularity of the actual building. Abstraction refers to the inherent architectural quality of the work that allows it – almost in virtue of a form of autonomy – to have a life independently of its speciic historical presence. The dense line in Albertina 175 works to distribute certain fundamental



Architecture, Ruskin deines architecture as an art that ‘adorns the ediice raised by man for whatsoever use’ (Ruskin, 1880, p. 46). In this instance what is signiicant about Ruskin is not the argument concerning the use of general symbolism in architecture, nor is it architecture’s relation to religion and nature. The signiicance of this deinition is that it gives a clear place to architecture. Working with the deinition is essential in order to see how it deines architecture. The irst part deserving attention is the description of architecture as an ‘adornment’. Adorning is always an after-effect. Jewellery is a form of adornment. The pearl buttons or sequins sewn on a dress can be said to adorn it. They become an adornment to the extent they can be differentiated from that on which they are placed. Such a differentiation is envisaged by the contrast between adornment and the ‘ediice’. Ediice is a description of the object. It is the pure presence of the object – one that is not given speciicity – though more importantly does not need to be given it. The description of the ediice as ‘raised by man’ is signiicant as it locates architecture as a practice that involves a necessary distinction from nature, thereby inviting a possible accord with nature. Architecture is artiice, though only in the sense that it serves human purpose. If the human being creates, then the question of purpose has to emerge. To what end has the human created? If the end cannot be distinguished from the ediice (to retain Ruskin’s terminology) insofar as the ediice will always have had, and will always have, a purpose, then there is the recognition of the necessary and ineliminable functionality of architecture. Once the ediice has this quality then there can be no question of the denial of functionality. Purpose is the already present identiication of function. The question that has to be asked, however, concerns, from within the purview of Ruskin’s deinition, the relationship between purpose and architecture.

Answering that question necessitates paying particular attention to the inal words ‘whatsoever use’. It is not just that they eliminate the place of function; they do this by denying it to architecture and then by locating it in the ediice. In other words, the force of the whatsoever use is that function is maintained by its being radically distinguished from architecture. As such the question that needs to be brought to Ruskin’s formulation has to concern the presence of architecture. This is both a question of almost brute physicality as well as a more straightforwardly conceptual one concerning how, within the formulation, ‘architecture’ is to be thought. These questions are related. The presence of architecture – presence as location – deines how it is to be thought. Architecture, from within the position that is being extrapolated from this deinition of the art of architecture, is located on the surface. More precisely, and this is the essential point, it is the literal surface understood as adornment.

fundamental to their work is the operation of a material ininite that continues to be generative of form – contextually, it occurs through the operation of a surface in which elements are individuated – then as an abstraction this operative quality is what can be retained.

Once the dense line that characterises Albertina 175 is given priority – in addition it is a line that once reworked yields the façade – the continuity of its folds will always have to be arrested. The cessation of movement is the precondition of form. Cessation becomes initude. Finitude can be equated with architecture’s material presence. The precondition allowing for initude is the line’s potentiality. As has been suggested, materiality has its conditions of possibility in what was called the material ininite. The inal point that needs to be reiterated is that the density of this line need not be literal. Density has to do with the information that the line distributes.

If there is a limitation in this conception of the line, then it lies – despite density – in the restriction of relatedness; a relation that would be linked to a sense of productive interruption. An example would be the way volume and surface may be interconnected. While this possibility emerges at its most emphatic in Loos, it is the writings of Gottfried Semper that will allow, again retrospectively, these opening considerations of the surface to be taken a step further.

Ruskin and Polychromatic Antiquities

In order to position Semper – or rather to rework the force of Semper’s positioning of the surfaces – a setting is essential. This will be provided in this context by looking irstly at the way Ruskin deines architecture, and secondly at the way Semper’s approach to the surface cannot be separated from the dispute concerning polychromatic antiquities that had such an important historical inluence in the development of architectural thinking in both France and German in the early to mid-nineteenth century. While both of these attempts to establish a context may seem too distant from Semper, the contrary is the case. Ruskin’s thinking still echoes in architectural arguments for decorum and the stylistic determination of context. The discovery of polychromatic antiquities can be reworked as the discovery of the surface that was the interarticulation of surface and function.

As has already been suggested, the importance of Ruskin’s deinition of architecture is that it provides the backdrop against which both the radicality and the commitment to the form of materialism that structures Semper’s conception of architecture can be understood. In The Seven Lamps of



the presence of colour being either a mistake or simply exceptional and, therefore, only of marginal interest. Semper sums up this concern in the following terms: ‘they are sure that colour applied to sculpture must confuse the forms and pamper the eye’ (dass Farben angewendt auf Bildenerei die Formen verwirren und das Auge verwohen müssen) (Semper, 1989, p. 61/p. 239). Prior to taking up his response, it is worth noting the detail of this objection to colour. It should be remembered that it is, as it were, the aesthetic objection and thus one not checked let alone overcome by additional – ‘factual’ – discoveries. While appearing as merely aesthetic insofar as it is a defence of ‘form’, such a position is best understood in terms of form’s metonymic links. Once understood in this sense, the threat to form can be understood as the threat to the continuity of historical time that allows for form’s own repetition. Form, precisely because it is continually positioned by the movement between the ideal and the actual can be repeated ad ininitum. The refusal of form – its having become ‘confused’ – would be the concession that allowed this sense of continuity to have been interrupted. Semper’s language in responding to his own presentation of the aesthetic response has an important aesthetic register itself. He argues, that colour:

clariies the form (sie entwirren die Formen) because colour provides the artist with a new way to throw the surface into relief. It brings the eye back again to the natural way of seeing, (Sie bringen das Auge weider zuruck auf den natürlichen Weg des Sehens) which is lost under the sway of that mode of abstraction that knows precisely how to separate the visible and inseparable qualities of bodies, the colour from the form – knows it by those unfortunate principles of aesthetics that deine exactly the sphere of the individual arts and do not allow any excursions into a neighbouring ield. (Semper, 1989, p. 61/p. 239)

What is signiicant about this formulation is that the defence of colour is given an aesthetic register, almost in terms of naturalism. Importance here has to be attached to another aesthetic possibility. That possibility does not separate ‘colour and form’ – noting of course that once this position is expressed in this way the register of form will have changed. No longer held by the opposition between the ideal and the actual, it becomes the material instance of form. Emphasising colour, therefore, becomes the afirmation of the materiality of form. The move is not simple empiricism. Nor, moreover, should the evocation of the material be understood as suggesting that form has become the empirical instantiation of the ideal. Rather, it is materiality itself. As a result of this repositioning there has to be an accompanying shift in

The centrality of ornament as the locus of the architectural has an important history. While not originating in Ruskin, what is repeated is a sensibility that locates what is essential to architecture in ornament. In the modern period this conception of architecture continues to have relevance. Not only does it deine so-called postmodern architecture as a moment within the history of ornament, it continues to deine the architectural in terms of the opposition between ornament and structure (Ruskin’s ‘ediice’.) The contention here is that Semper’s writings can be read as a critique not just of the retention of this opposition but of its deining architecture. With Semper architecture is redeined. While this position – Semper’s redeinition – inds its most exact expression in the discussion of style and the ‘elements of architecture’ – a discussion that will be taken up in this context in terms of working through Semper’s treatment of the wall – his earlier writings on polychromatic antiquities not only set the scene, it is in his engagement with the discovery of colour that the already present relation between function and surface comes to be expressed. That expression overcomes the opposition between ornament and structure. This is to argue in the irst place that colour is functional – as opposed to simply decorative – and in the second that structure works in accord with that function. In sum, the interplay of function and colour overcomes the tradition that attempts to identify the architectural with the ornamental.

Semper’s intervention into the debate on polychromatic antiquities occurred in 1834 with the publication of his pamphlet Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity.21 While they are only implicit in the pamphlet’s argument, it has to be understood as involving two subtexts. The irst is an undoing of the Winkelmanian aesthetic that was concerned with the purity of form and, therefore, the retention of ‘ideals’ as that which prompted form and which form had to imitate. At the same time, however, there was a general concern with establishing both the speciicity of the modern, and more particularly, opening up the question of the appearance of the modern.22 The argument is that a debate as apparently arcane as one concerning the possibility of coloured antiquities was in fact a debate about the nature of the modern. The discovery of Etruscan art not only had the effect of destabilising the nature of the Classical tradition, that destabilisation meant that the grounds of assessment and judgment in both art and architecture – the grounds of classicism – were no longer secure.

There were two arguments against the presence of colour. The irst is an archaeological one, while the second is aesthetic. Clearly, the response to such arguments is to show through the reports of contemporary excavations that coloured antiquities had been in ‘fact’ found. And yet, that would not have been suficient since there were aesthetic reasons for holding to



as much implicated in questions of form (structure) as form is in the question of the surface (literal surface) namely colour.

Semper, Walls and Surfaces

In one of the lectures given in London during his period of residence in the city, Semper did not just distinguish between Greek and what he termed ‘Barbarian’ architecture, he formulated the distinction in a way that concerns the nature of architecture’s material presence. While Semper’s generalised account is part of an overall attempt to categorise and detail the practice of ancient architecture, in distinguishing between the Greek and the Barbarian he introduces one of the deining motifs in his writings, namely a distinction between that which occurs within architecture and architecture’s exteriority.

The Greek ornaments are emanations of the constructive forms and in the same way they are the dynamical function of the parts to which they belong. They have no other meaning than to explain the construction forms by analogical notions, taken from nature itself or from other branches of art, while the ornaments on the barbarian monuments ind generally their explanations in some historical, local or religious notions, which have nothing in common with the part of the building, whereon they are applied.23

Central, then, to the Greek is a conception of ornamentation. However, it has to be understood as an explanation of the ‘construction’.24 In other words, it is deined internally to the architectural object. Admittedly, this occurs via analogy. Nonetheless, the relation is structured by interiority. The Barbarian on the other hand involves a conception of ornamentation in which the additions have to be explained in terms of symbolic values, which, as Semper concedes, are always accounted for externally. The move to the historical, the religious and so on, deines these additions in terms of exteriority and therefore, to use the language of Ruskin, they play the role of ‘adornments’. The move to interiority – not one where form is opposed to ornament, but where there is an already present interarticulation – begins to identify the particularity of Semper. While it is always possible to emphasise his engagement with ornamentation and even to construe the insistence on cladding in those terms, it is more productive to connect architecture’s concern with interiority to one with the centrality of materials. As such, what this allows is a connection to be drawn between three aspects of his project. In the irst instance, the importance of the surface that emerged during the earlier engagement with his writings on polychromatic antiquities; in the second, interiority as a concern with architecture’s self-deinition given through materials; and inally his identiication of the ‘four elements of

perception. Perceiving – the use of the eye – alters in order to perceive colour. In Semperian terms, seeing abstractly is to posit a distinction between form and colour. In other words, abstraction, in this context, means holding colour and form apart. However, in order to give such a move coherence it would have to be grounded, almost of necessity in a conception of form that locates particulars within a deining oscillation between the ideal and the actual. As such, form acquires an inherently transcendent quality.

The aesthetic response therefore is fundamental. What Semper is pointing out is a shift in the categories of how seeing takes place. While it is not Semper’s actual argument, implicit in his position is the claim that colour has the capacity to overcome the hold of classicism. Colour undoes the opposition between form and the ornamental or decorative. This development provides the setting in which Semper’s discussion of Trajan’s Column needs to be situated. The basis of the interpretation resides in the column having ‘traces of paint’ (die Spuren von Malerei) (Semper, 1989, pp. 67/248). What is signiicant about the passage is not just the depth of description, but attributing to the column the capacity to have the effect of spaciality – and thus to space. This effect is explicable in terms of the operation of colour. What this means, of course, is that spacing is an effect of the surface.

The igures on the monument stood out golden against an azure background. The lat relief on the pedestal, too, were undoubtedly given their proper appearance through the rich variety of gold and colour. Only in such a way could the column be in harmony with the richly coloured and gilded forum, the porphyry cornices and green marble columns of the temples – as could the bronze statues with the columns. (Semper, 1989, p. 67/p. 249)

Leaving aside any lingering hyperbole that may be evident in the passage, what is clear is that not only is there an urban coherence – spatiality is held in place and in play – it is also realised, for Semper, by the work of colour. The Column, while not strictly architectural, plays a fundamental role within the visual coherence of the Forum. Coherence is realised by the accord between the form and the colour. For Semper, it would be an accord which, once the debilitating effect of the abstract eye is left to one side, would have been effective and thus would have functioned if the eye had perceived the almost ineliminable reciprocity between form and colour; that is, their conjoined presence rather than their separate existence. It would have operated in relation to the object, the column, then with the other objects in the ield. The latter would now be understood as an urban condition operating on the level of affect as well as the structural and functional. Surfaces in this context are



the function of the wall – that is, as that which spaces – cannot be thought as though it were independent of the operation of materials. This further accounts for why he states that wickerwork is the ‘essence’ of the wall. It involves the effects realisation through the use of materials. That move can then be abstracted such that it begins to deine the nature of the wall. Walls, for Semper, cannot be separated from the activity of spatial disclosure. From a Semperian perspective space is not a given that is then divided. The contrary is the case. Space is a result. Hence, the wall is that which brings about spatial enclosure. In sum, space is the result of the surface’s operation. The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of Architecture in the following terms:

Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means for separating space. Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the invisible structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colourful woven carpets. (Semper, 1989, p. 104)

The importance of this formulation is that the wall is moved away from being no more than a structural element to having a clearly deined function within an overall structure.25 While for Semper there needs to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural elements and the nature of that function, such a relationship resists any reformulation in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be opened up is the potential in Semper’s conception of the wall.

Semper’s project can be understood as the attempt to identify within the history of architecture – speciically Hellenic art – a principle that could be extracted. The nature of Semper’s relation to Quatremère de Quincy should inform a contemporary response to his own work. The value for Semper of Quatremère’s writings on ancient sculpture is that they provide an opening. In Semper’s terms it lay in their ‘practical tendency’. He continues:

In line with this tendency the work does not as it were parade the form before us as a inished product according to the lessons of aesthetic ideality, but lets us see the artistic form and the

architecture’. What is important about these elements is the way they lead, almost inexorably, to establish the centrality of the wall – as surface – as the focus of architectural consideration.

The wall igures signiicantly in the short text published in 1851, The Four Elements of Architecture: A contribution to a comparative study of architecture. In fact this work set in play the role of the wall throughout his subsequent writings. It drew on both his archaeological activities in addition to some of the conclusions reached during the period in which one of his overriding intellectual concerns was polychromatic antiquities. Semper uses the so-called ‘elements’ – ‘the hearth, the roof, the enclosure and the mound’ (Semper, 1989, p. 102) – to account for the origins of architecture. While these elements are, to a certain extent fundamental, they are almost inextricably connected to an historicist if not a nostalgic account of the origins of architecture. The interesting move occurs when Semper begins to trace the emergence of the wall from the enclosure. Before looking at the consequences of the move to the wall, it is essential to note that in Semper’s account what is of interest to him is that it involved the introduction of a ‘technique’. It was not just any technique: the ‘wall itter’ (Wandbereiter) as proto-architect deployed an ‘Urtechnik’ (Semper, 1989, p. 258); the way the wall emerges brings more than just a physical wall into consideration. The manner in which Semper engages with the wall is in terms of its presence as a surface. Moreover, a surface that effects. This is the position that has to be established. (Reiterated therefore is the way that the coloured surface was present in terms of its effect. While colour did not provide volume, it was colour that allowed Trajan’s Column its capacity to create space and, therefore, enabled it to have a civic function.)

Prior to taking up the key passage from The Four Elements concerning the emergence of the wall, the claim announced a few lines earlier that ‘wickerwork was the essence of the wall’ (Semper, 1989, p. 104), needs to be noted. Its signiicance is twofold. In the irst instance, it is indicative of the general move within Semper’s writings to preclude the possibility of a sustained distinction between the decorative and the functional, except insofar as the decorative becomes evidence of not just function but the necessary interconnection of the functional and the material. Moreover, in the case of wickerwork, what is essential is the relationship between materials and effect. What is signiicant about the claim that wickerwork comprises the ‘essence of the wall,’ is that the essential cannot be differentiated from the operation of materials. Not only is this to insist on interiority, it allows for a link between materials, and that which demarcates the architectural, to have to be thought together. Moreover, it can be concluded that what the wall does is effect spatial enclosure, and therefore



and the work of cladding produce volumetric difference, hence the effect of the wall – it then follows that the wall is not given in opposition to the loor.26 This point can be extended since if the wall/loor opposition no longer deines the work of the wall – but the wall is the wall effect, that is spatial division – this will result in the need for a reconsideration of the corner since the corner is deined by the intersection of an already determined loor/wall relation. That reconsideration means that the relation between wall, loor and corner can be rethought; a relation rearticulated as a surface. Not just a surface as a lat exterior but also a surface as tectonic entity; the reciprocity of materials and geometry. Furthermore, programmatic demands necessitating that the elements of architecture have a distinct quality can locate that difference as individuated by a surface. Finally, therefore, the function of the wall is internal to the architecture in question thereby generating a sense of autonomy, one reinforced by the move from an externally orientated symbolic meaning to an internally regulated system of activity. Furthermore, the wall cannot be thought outside its relation to materiality. Semper’s work dissolved the distinction between structure and ornament. The wall was given an integrity that came from its deinition in terms of the effecting of spatial enclosure while at the same time locating that realisation in the operation of materials.

Loos: The Place of Ornament

Loos’ critique of ornament is well known. However, it acquires another dimension once that critique is connected to the work of the surface. Moreover, Loos relates, both implicitly and explicitly, a concern with the surface to the project of modernity. This emerges strikingly in his discussion of costumes. Implicit in the argument is the position that differences in clothing habit are always more than the register of personal taste. Indeed, they are the enactment of different conceptions of historical time. These differences mark the presence of a conlict that not only has a determining effect on the nature of the present, but also yields conlict as that which identiies the present. Writing of costumes Loos argues the following:

I too admit that I really take pleasure in the old costumes. But this does not give me the right to demand that he put them on for my sake. A costume is clothing that has frozen in a particular form; it will develop no further. It is always a sign that its wearer has given up trying to change his circumstances. The costume is the symbol of resignation. (Loos, 1982, p. 56)27

high idea (der Kunstform und der hohen Idee) that dwells within it; it considers and shows how both were inseparable from the material and technical execution and how the Hellenic spirit manifested itself in the freest mastery of these factors, as well as the old, sanctiied tradition. (Semper, 1989, p. 249/p. 207)

The signiicance of the formulation lies in the differentiation of form from what can be termed ‘aesthetic ideality’. Form and ideas could not be separated from materials, the presentation of those materials and then inally from questions of technique. Semper undoes the opposition, therefore, between form and idea by incorporating both as material possibilities. Any vestige of the metaphysical distinction between form and idea is displaced by emphasis having been given to materials and techniques. Once the idea is no longer understood as external, then the building cannot be understood as the idea’s symbolic presentation. Hellenic style, therefore, involved an interrelationship of all these elements. This accounts for why, in addition, art form and decoration cannot be separated. They are, in Semper’s terms, ‘so intimately bound together by the inluence of the principle of surface dressing (des Flächenbekleidungsprinzips) that an isolated look at either is impossible’. (Semper, 1989, pp. 252-3/p. 211)

What emerges from giving centrality to materials is the possibility of arguing that materials are what they bring about, what they effect. When Semper argues that wickerwork was the original wall, it had this quality only because it was the ‘original space divider’. This realisation of division deined the essence of the wall. Any consideration of the wall therefore has to do with how materials realise their effect. This accounts for the move in the same text to the claim that the wall ‘retained this meaning when materials other than the original were used’ (Semper, 1989, p. 104). (It should be noted, if only in passing, that the connection is between meaning and materials, and not between meaning and symbolic determination.) The history of the wall, therefore, becomes the history of the way materials realise the wall effect. The wall effect is spatial division, though only ever as a result. Hence, it becomes possible to question both the quality of the space produced and the material creating it since spatial division is produced (effected) by the work of speciic materials.

There is a further result that should also be noted. Once it can be argued that the deinition of the wall has to do with spatial enclosure and is not reducible to the presence of literal walls – a possibility also evident in Loos, as will be argued in relation to the Haus Müller, where the intersection of the Raumplan



critique of ornament it does so by introducing a more nuanced sense of structure. There are at least two moments in the text that are central for noting the emergence of the surface as a ield of operation. The irst is the opposition established by Loos between an architectural strategy that starts with the wall and then creates rooms or spaces. (They are the spaces left inside the walls.) In German, of course, the distinction between space and room is elided. Räume – in this context – denotes both. Loos’ point, therefore, is to contrast a position in which room-making or space-creating is an after-effect with one in which instead of assuming the neutrality of space, and then seeking to divide it and in so doing create rooms, there is a radically different approach, one starting with the recognition that what is wanted is not mere space but the creation of ‘effects’ (Die Wirkung). As such, what is at work is affect. The effects – the creation of affect – however, come from the operation of material and forms. Effects are the work of surfaces that create spaces (rooms). The introduction of effects not only reinforces the proposition that program remains fundamental to the operation of surfaces – allowing of course for the program, potentially if not actually, to admit a far greater sense of complexity than those envisaged by Loos – there is the more radical proposition that program is only possible because of the operation of surfaces. Program and affect are interconnected. The locus of interconnection is the surface.

This opens up the second element that needs to be noted, namely the discussion of carpets in terms of their material presence. As will be seen, materiality as productive of affect takes precedence over any ornamental or iconic value the carpets may have. The initial argument concerning the carpet’s materiality is advanced in the following terms:

(But) is a living room that is lined all round with carpets not an imitation? The walls are not built of carpet! Of course they aren’t. But these carpets do not claim to be anything other than carpets. They do not pretend either in colour or pattern, to be masonry but make their function as cladding for the wall surface clear. They fulil their purpose according to the principle of cladding. (Loos, 2002, pp. 43-44, 46)

Implicit in this formulation is the distinction that was already noted in Semper between the load-bearing function of the wall and the operation of the surface as that which realises spatial division. The addition by Loos of affect allows the creation of space to rid itself of the feint of neutrality and thus to include the interplay between subjectivity (understood as the nexus of emotional and bodily presence) and program. Cladding, therefore, stands

This passage can be juxtaposed usefully with the one advancing the central argument of ‘Ornament and Crime’. What the juxtaposition shows is that Loos’ argument is not against ornament as such but on the role and place of ornament within modernity.

As ornament is no longer organically related to our culture, it is no longer the expression of our culture. The ornament that is produced today bears no relation to us or to any other human in the world at large. It has no potential for development.28

What is being worked through in both passages is the way forms of material presence are already interwoven with issues pertaining to historical time and thus modernity. The retention of ornament, much like the wearing of a costume, is viewed as antithetical to the way the modern is understood. Ornament, in this sense, is a vestige. The overcoming of ornament does not give rise either to the positing of simple structure stripped of ornament or the recourse to mere form. What arises as a consequence is the surface. Even if the interior surfaces of Loos’ Haus and buildings appear to be heavily ornamented, from a Loosian perspective they are not. Cladding (Bekleidung) is not ornamentation. As with Semper, cladding operates within architecture. Its presence is organisational – and hence related to programmatic distribution – rather than having a purely symbolic role. Moreover, as with Semper, there is an important distinction between walls, understood as load-bearing, and what was referred to before as the wall effect. The effect is the creation of space. Before pursing the detail of the position it should be noted that the shift from Semper to Loos is that the capacity of a surface to effect is located within the operation of architecture, though now architecture’s operation is itself a consequence of having overcome the need to invest architecture with automatic symbolic value. The surface effect, therefore, is a sign of the modern both in its overcoming the hold of vernacular, yet at the same time resisting the slide into the ubiquity of form in which formal presence is thought independently of programmatic effects. As a result the effect of cladding needs to be understood as being as much a connection of surfaces, function and modernity as it is the operation of architecture. In order to pursue how the effect of cladding operates, it is essential to trace the way Loos begins to distinguish between literal walls and the wall as surface in his ‘The Principle of Cladding’.29 As with Semper – and thus recalling Borromini – space (spacing as an activity and therefore as spatiality) results from the surface’s effect. With Loos, however, there is an important additional element.

Again, the setting is the critique of a logic of ornamentation, one in which substitution and imitation not only predominate but also deine part of the operation of ornamentation. Opposition to imitation not only reiterates the



the creation of different volumetric conditions. In order that the relationship between cladding and Raumplan have a precise location, its work will be noted in Loos’ Haus Müller. Again, it needs to be remembered that what is fundamental, in this instance, is that the Haus becomes the locus in which surfaces, spaces and circulation operate. (An operation whose work is the Haus.) However, that interconnection takes on an abstract quality once it is viewed in terms of its potentiality. The actuality of the Haus, therefore, lies more in its diagram than in its historic detail. The diagrammatic needs to be located, however, in the detail.

The Haus Müller

The house is located in Prague. The initial design plans for the house were submitted on 28 December 1928. After being initially rejected they were approved in June of 1929 and the house itself was completed in 1930.31 Possibly the most signiicant, and much quoted, comment made by Loos and which provides the setting for any interpretation of the house concerns Loos’ relationship to the practice of design as exempliied in this particular project. (The comment, of which there is a shorthand record, was made during a conversation in Pilsen in 1930.) Again what needs to be remembered is the relationship between surface and spatiality.

My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design loor plans, façades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground loor, irst loor, etc. ... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces, etc. …To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Müller’s house. (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994)32

What is initially signiicant here is the way spatiality (a generalised term which in this instance will include rooms and spaces, vestibules and terraces) is deined in terms of interconnection. In other words, if there is an argument that circulation is fundamental to the Haus and that if circulation is not for an anonymous individual, but that there is a connection between circulation and affect (remembering, of course, that affect is a way of locating program), then two important questions arise. While they are interrelated they can, at this

opposed both to the decorative and the ornamental once it is assumed that there is a necessary disjunction between these terms and the operation of architecture. That operation can, in this context, be described as occurring at the point of interchange between affect, structure and program. Ornament is deined, therefore, as that which is irrelevant to this conception of the generative in architecture. While from a contemporary perspective the actual cladding used by Loos may now appear to be decorative, it is essential to recognise that as an abstract ield of activity, the speciic role of cladding needs to be understood in terms of this generative quality. That there may have occurred a shift in perception does not obviate the force of the initial claim. That force, however, can only be maintained by the decontextualising move in which this founding set-up is understood as a productive abstraction rather than as the only literal expression of the way cladding, affect and program can be interconnected. Working with this conception of abstraction – namely as having an inherently productive quality that works outside the hold of representation – allows for a form of decontextualisation in which the surface’s generative quality, rather than just its historical location, is given priority.

In a sense Loos’ own argument concerning carpets allows for precisely this approach. What is clear is that understanding the carpets on the wall as already positioned within the logic of ornamentation would have incorporated the carpets into the realm of meaning and, as such, would have undone the work of materials. When Loos argues that the carpets ‘do not claim to be anything other than carpets’ it follows that their meaning is what they are. And that is why he can conclude that they attain their ‘purpose’ (Zweck) according to the ‘principle of cladding’. While any material object will have a symbolic dimension, Loos’ argument is that within architecture the carpet’s function or purpose is realised through the operation of material presence. Rather than a pure functionalism, function has to do with the object’s materiality. What matters, therefore, is how carpets – as cladding and thus as surface – work to space; in other words, the question to be addressed relates to the capacity of a given material – operating as a surface – to establish spatial conditions. Not only is space not a given – it is always created – spatiality, equally, is not an empty condition identiied by a neutral term.

When Loos argues that ‘a true building’ (ein rechtes Bauwerk) makes no impression ‘as a picture, reduced to two dimensions’, the argument is not against plans as such but is a reformulation of the tight relation that has already been established between the operation of architecture and the work of the surface.30 Surfaces create space. And yet, for Loos spatiality is not just the work of surface. Integral to the system is the Raumplan. The latter can be deined as volumetric juxtaposition and interpenetration resulting in



the circulation for the servants on the building’s exterior it had been located within the house itself. Part of the force of the house is the way these two routes operate. While they mark divisions of class and wealth and, therefore, are signs of social division, they can also be understood organisationally. Such an understanding would not insist on the sign per se, but on how two different circulation paths – each with their own programmatic differences – can cohere. One could be linked to the private and the other to the public, and yet both would cohere in the same object.

In regards to the living room the immediate question it raises is one of deinition. What is a room? How is it a room? These questions arise because of the way it takes on the quality of a speciic spatial domain – thus becoming space or room. This does not occur by a form of enclosure realised by the work of a literal wall running from loor to ceiling. Rather, in place of the conventional vocabulary of rooms, the living room needs to be understood as a speciic spatial condition. Part of that condition is the enclosed space of the sedentary subject. Equally, it is the location of the room within a nexus of the structural presence of the possibilities of movement – with the Raumplan, the lines of movement running through space are also at work in constructing its spatiality – that privilege the role of the ambulatory subject. However, that condition does not arise from repositioning part of the room in terms of an extended series of corridors. There is both movement and arrest. The two subject positions are the effect of the architecture.

Once seated within the room the cladding – both in terms of material and colour consistency – provides the overall integrity. (This is a condition that will be reproduced elsewhere in the Haus, for example, in the role of wood – wood as cladding – in the library.) Atmosphere, the realm of affect, is not given by an enclosed space but one created by the operation of a surface. At the end of the room, the evolution of the ‘wall’ as that which also incorporates three load-bearing columns – an act of incorporation in which the cladding constructs a continuous relation between the elements – means that structural elements and programmatic elements have the same literal surface. What is signiicant, therefore, is that once the relationship between space creation and affect begins to deine the operational quality of architecture, then there is no need for a necessary consistency between structure and the visual presence of that quality. While this opens up the path towards a conception of ornamentation – a conception which becomes manifest in the advent of postmodern architecture – that path can be circumvented once it is recognised that cladding is not just the cladding on a structure but that in Loos cladding has no architectural importance other than in an already present relation with the Raumplan. Cladding, therefore, is integral to the construction and maintenance of spatiality. When Loos argues

stage, be posed separately. The irst is who circulates? The second refers to the structural possibility for circulation. The importance of attributing primacy to circulation is that it makes the position of the ‘sedentary subject’ a more complex one.33 In other words, a stationary position occurs because of the volume and cladding work to disclose spaces. One of the most important instances of this is the living room.

Prior to taking up the living room it should be noted in advance that there are two circulation routes within the house. There are the routes taken by the family. Then there is the route taken by the servants. What Loos has managed to achieve – and this is evident in the sectional drawings – is the incorporation of two paths that will not readily intersect. Instead of locating

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ornamentation) dominated, what vanishes is that opposition as providing an adequate way of tracing the operation of the surface and thus the creation of the wall effect. This is, of course, another obvious link to Semper. Everything is on the surface precisely because the surface distributes programmatic differences. And yet, as has been argued, for Loos this is linked to an important sense of spatial creation. The operation of the surface cannot be taken as an end in itself. In fact, it can be argued that the surface’s operational success is dependent upon its interarticulation with the Raumplan. What this means is that spatiality has to be thought in terms of an original connection to the operation of the surface.

Reopening he Surface

What emerges from this consideration of aspects of Borromini, Semper and Loos is twofold. In the irst instance, it is the creation of a history for the contemporary concern with the surface within architectural design. That concern, while linked to techniques, is itself dependent upon the possibilities – possibilities always in a state of development – of certain software programs. A theoretical history takes the concerns of the present as its point of departure. In the second, it is the recognition that if their work has a potentiality and thus a connection to design practice, then it lies in the capacity to generate productive abstractions. These positions are clearly interconnected. In the guise of a conclusion, therefore, that connection will be made more explicit.

The present to which a theoretical history refers cannot be understood as a generalised sense of the contemporary (often masquerading as the pragmatic ‘now’). In the irst instance that present has a location within the complex movement of historical time. This is a movement that is reconigured – within design – to the extent that the means of design begin to alter, such that different concerns arise. That difference, however, cannot be deined simply by architecture’s link to its means of representation. Drawn into these concerns – and they will igure as much by their afirmed presence as by their possible occlusion – are, for example, fundamental shifts in how affect is conceived, experienced and deployed within design, or programmatic concerns are given detail. Affect and program, however, are sites that are as much architectural as they are points through which cultural and political concerns are registered. In other words, the concerns of the present that work at the periphery, and thus which are always beyond architecture, come to be reinscribed during the process of architecture’s own effectuation. While that reinscription need not be instrumental – in fact there are strong

that a carpet on a wall should be understood in relation to its capacity to effect space, attention is drawn immediately to the materiality of the carpet. If there is a conception of tectonics that emerges with Loos it does not have to do with the idealisation of structural elements but with the capacity of materials to realise effects. In Loos, materials are limited to what they can effect. Moving on from Loos means retaining the centrality of the relationship between materials and spatiality but it also necessitates taking up the position implicit in Semper that materials have, qua materials, an intrinsic tectonics.

The other sense in which the Haus is the work of a surface is the façade. While it is initially only of minor interest to recall the fact that the interior of the building is not legible from the exterior, that observation takes on a different quality when it is used as evidence for the indifference that deines the relationship between the interior and the exterior surfaces. Part of the building’s productive potential lies in the way it can be conceptualised as the site of two surfaces whose operation deines its architectural presence. On the interior, of course, the surface loses any simply generalised sense and becomes a locus of plural possibilities. On the exterior the building masks the interior. Appearing as a ‘box’ it takes on the quality of a container. And yet, the architecturally important aspect of the container concerns its presence, once presence is no longer conlated with the image. Merely to describe it as a mask or even, to use Loos’ own language, to view it as ‘mute’, reduces the façade to that which has interest only as a historical sign. Counter-posed to the sign is the façade’s potentiality. If the exterior and the initial interior surfaces are viewed as two surfaces held in place by the same structural element, then it can be argued that there are two possible wall effects realised by the same literal wall. In other words, there are three interrelated elements. Once the productive potential of this possibility is taken up, the relationship between these three elements becomes a site of investigation and eventual experimentation. (The combination of these two domains, investigation and experimentation, begin to delimit part of the locus of research within architecture.)

Arising from the following consideration of elements of the Haus is that on one level it consists of two surfaces – the interior and the façade – that remain indifferent. In the irst instance the interior operates because of the relationship between volume and surface. In writing about the singularity of the Haus Müller in relation to other works by Loos, van Duzer and Kleinman argue that in the building ‘everything is on the surface’ (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994, p. 17). This description is right and yet it needs to be made more emphatic. The surface in question is not articulated in terms of an opposition between surface and depth. Recalling Ruskin’s formulation in which a distinction between the structure and its adornment (or



possibilities – as it is to a conceptualisation of the present as the locus in which the project of modernity is being worked through.

Endnotes

1 Architectural theory is linked to the interiority of architecture and, therefore, it forms part of the construction of architecture as a discursive practice. The concern of theory is not, therefore, with the application of theoretical models that are external to architecture. What will always matter is the way such models can be construed architecturally. Nor, moreover, is architectural theory concerned with the juxtaposition of images that are equally external to architecture with ostensibly architectural ones in order that the former illuminate the latter. What must always be central are the possibilities, inherent within any image, for architecture. Architectural theory has to address the practice of architecture. Emphasising interiority does not mean that architecture is reduced to mere formalism. Rather, what is central is that this shift in emphasis provides a location for theory. Only within that location is it possible to approach the question of how autonomy and formalism are to be understood. This is the setting within which the following chapter on the surface will be positioned. It should be noted, in addition, that there is a great deal of contemporary work in this area. For a good overview, see Surface consciousness, edited by Mark Taylor (Taylor, 2003).

2 For a paper that begins to address this precise issue see Manuel de Landa’s, Philososphies of Design: The case of modeling software (de Landa, 2002).

3 Part of the argument here is that whether the ield is understood chronologically – for instance, the nineteenth century – or in terms of a period – for example, the Baroque – or discursively – such as Foucault’s arguments concerning the ‘episteme’ as formulated in Les Mots et les Choses (Foucault, 1973) – each one is deined in terms of simultaneity. The differences within the ields indicate to what extent simultaneity is a problem, and yet, of course, it is only a problem because of the insistence on simultaneity. Part of the argument advanced throughout this chapter is that the project of theory and criticism has to refer to these ields of simultaneity. However, it can neither be conined nor constrained by them. This accounts for why architectural theory is not the history of architectural theory.

4 References to Semper will be to the following editions. In each instance the pagination, English preceding the German, will be given in the text. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (Semper, 1989.) Vier Elemente der Baukunst (Semper, 1851). Der Stil (Semper, 1878-9). The text Preliminary

arguments against thinking of its presence in these terms – its avoidance is impossible since affect and program, in addition to materials and thus tectonics, remain integral to any deinition of the activity of architecture.

In addition, the present can be deined in terms of a continually modifying locus of techniques. The advent of techniques can cause, if not demand, transformations within the conceptual. Allowing for both – transformations of techniques as well as concepts – means that opening up aspects of history, and theory within theoretical histories, involves establishing connections between them and the exigency of the present. Within the argument developed throughout this chapter that connection is bound up with potentiality, the locus of that potentiality was initially delimited by the proper names Borromini, Semper and Loos.

Potentiality has to be deined in terms of a yet-to-be realised possibility. However, while the realisation of that possibility may have to be described in futural terms, nonetheless the locus in which potentiality is realised is the present. Potentiality, understood in relation to its release, not only occurs in the present, it is fundamental to any conception of the present thought beyond its conlation with the ‘now’ of chronological time. As has been argued, the potentiality of the Loosian surface effect for example – a position marking the interplay of cladding, affect and the Raumplan – does not lie in its literal re-enactment. Not only does that misunderstand potentiality, it locates it within the structure of representation. As such, potentiality would be no more than the continual re-presentation – hence re-production – of an already envisaged architectural state of affairs. Within a formulation of this nature the dominance of the image is central, dominating within the demand that it be represented or reproduced. However, once potentiality is deined in terms of the generative, where the generative can be located in a set of relations rather than being reduced to an image of those relations, then the realisation of potentiality will always have a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive connection to any founding set of relations.

Theoretical histories can be understood, therefore, as the attempt to examine the detail of architecture’s history that is guided by the attempt to discern potentiality. Discernment, as a practice, will always bring with it the possibility of judgement. The judgement, however, will not be concerned with any sense of accuracy other than one connected to the productive realisation of potentiality. The site of potentiality is not found in the past as though that were a domain that was simply given. The site is the present and thus the activation of the past by the present. As has been argued, this is linked both to the discontinuous continuity that deines the production of techniques – ones linked as much to the means of representation as they are to material



to a body in movement and in action rather than static’ (Blunt, 1979, p. 51). Part of the position developed here is that the move from stasis to movement is fundamental. However, what loses its centrality is the body as the organising analogy. Part of the discussion of Bernini’s David could be used as a counter measure to Michelangelo’s David. In regard to Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Wittkower argues that its ordering principles break with ‘a central position of anthropocentric architecture’ (Wittkower, 1973, p. 199). Again, the central point will be how such a break is to be understood.

13 What characterises the material ininite is the relationship between a dynamic system that is characterised by potentiality and immateriality whose actualisation is always material in nature. It should be clear that this is a description of the elements of the Baroque as it is of the connection between software and built form.

14 One of the most persuasive, though general accounts, of the move to the Baroque in which questions to do with movement are fundamental is Heinrch Wölflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (Wölflin, 1992, pp. 71-92).

15 The clear distinction here is the conception of the ininite held in the architecture of, for example, Gothic churches. The Cathédral St-Pierre St-Paul in Troyes involves, in terms of the operation of the eye, a simultaneous movement from loor to ceiling. The uninterrupted line of the columns not only creates the volume of the nave and the choir, more importantly it reinforces the inite nature of the human in relation to the ininite nature of God. While the ininite cannot be given a material presence, the pure and uninterrupted line of light from loor to ceiling reinforces the ininite of illusion. At work here is a theology of straight lines. The move to the Baroque can be understood, at least initially, as complicating the ininite.

16 G.W. Leibniz’s Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, Fondés en Raison (Leibniz, 1965, p. 598). I have discussed the centrality of Leibniz for architectural theory (Benjamin, A., 2001).

17 It is possible to see this process at work in some of the early drawings. See in particular Albertina 171 reproduced in Blunt (Blunt, 1979, p. 59).

18 Leo Steinberg’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Steinberg, 1977). Steinberg’s has to be taken as the deinitive historical account of the church. Nothing that is suggested in the following is intended to undermine the importance of his work. The shift in emphasis occurs to the extent that a theoretical account acquires priority over the more straightforwardly historical account.

19 The distinction between the oval and the ellipse is pursued by George L. Hersey in Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Hersey, 2000).

Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity in English translation is in the volume cited above (Semper, 1989). In German it can be found in Kleine Schriften (Semper, 1884).

5 Hence it becomes possible to question Rykwert’s interpretation of Semper on this topic. For Rykwert, Semper gives ‘logical priority to ornament over structure and so to try and reconcile the ancient structure ornament opposition which has dogged classical architectural theory’(Rykvert, 1976, p. 78). Part of the argument to be developed here is that the opposition, far from being reconciled, is in fact displaced.

6 There has been a great deal of recent work on the wall. Perhaps the most signiicant is Mark Wigley’s White Walls, Designer Dresses (Wigley, 2001). Other recent work of signiicance includes Fritz Neumeyer’s, Head First Through the Wall: an approach to the non-word façade (Neumeyer, 1999) and Brian Hatten’s The Problem of Our Walls (Hatten, 1999).

7 For a general overview of Loos’ conception of the Raumplan – albeit one that the explicates it in relation to Heidegger – see Cynthia Jara’s, Adolf Loos’ ‘Raumplan Theory’ (Jara, 1995).

8 It not enough to suggest that the history of architecture should play a role in the practice of design. What has to accompany such a suggestion is what is involved in such a suggestion having some reality and this has to involve a reworking of the object.

9 For an excellent overview of the issues involved in this analogy as well as presenting one way through it, see Anthony Vidler’s Architecture Dismembered (Vidler, 1992).

10 The following reference to Alberti is intended to indicate the way the analogy between the body and the building operates in his text. There is no suggestion being made here that there are not other possible readings that would open up the De Re Aediicatoria. The richness of the text cannot be reduced to a source of simple citations. In a more sustained engagement the analogy would need to be incorporated into a reading of the text as a whole. For an important interpretation of the text see Francoise Choay’s De Re Aediicatoria Alberti ou le désir et le temps (Choay, 1996). For a reinterpretation of the text set within the corpus of Alberti’s writings see, Mark Jarzombek’s On Leon Baptista Alberti (Jarzombek, 1989).

11 Leon Baptista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, (Alberti, 1988, p. 309).

12 The argument concerning the relationship between architecture and the body is more complex with Borromini. Blunt, in his indispensable monograph on Borromini argues that the move is from Alberti’s conception of the body towards one developed by Michelangelo who ‘thought of a building as related



30 Loos makes this claim in Architecture (Loos, 2002, p. G70, E78). In regard to the Haus Müller, Giovanni Denti refers to the dificulty of providing a two dimensional representation of the work’s tectonic operation. See his Casa Müller a Praga (Denti, 1999, p. 10).

31 For a meticulous room-by-room description of the house, see Christian Kühn’s ‘Das Schöne, das Wahre und das Richtig, Adolf Loos und das Haus Müller in Prag’ (Kühn, 1989, pp. 43-72). Kenneth Frampton has also provided a detailed description of the interior of the house (Frampton, 1996, in particular p. 19).

32 The Haus, now a research institute for architecture, speciically that of Loos, has a very useful website. This quotation has been taken from the website. It is also to found in Leslie Van Duzer & Kent Kleinman’s indispensable book on the Haus Müller (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994). The image of the Living Room is reproduced from the website. Its address is http://www.mullerovavila.cz/english/vila-e.html.

33 Van Duzer and Kleinman’s work (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994) contains an important architectural discussion of the role of the differing subject positions within the house.

20 For a detailed account of this setting and an interpretation of San Carlo that is in part orientated by what is taken to be Borromini’s debt to the Neo-Platonism of Ficino, see John Hendrix’s The Relation Between Architectural Form and Philosophical Structure in the Work of Francesco Borromini in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Hendrix, 2002).

21 In English translation, Semper, G. (1989). The Four Elements of Architecture and other writings. In German, (1884) Kleine Schriften.

22 I have attempted to present a detailed examination of this position in my Style and Time: Essays on the politics of appearance (Benjamin, A., 2005, in particular Chapter 1).

23 London Lecture, November 18, 1853 (Semper, 1986, p. 38).

24 This is a consistent theme in Semper’s work. He argues is Der Stil that, ‘in Greek architecture, both the art form and decoration are so intimately bound together by the inluence of the principle of surface dressing that an isolated look at either is impossible’ (Semper, 1878-9, pp. 252-3).

25 This position is argued for in considerable detail in §62 of Der Stil. In that context walls are described as ‘spatial concepts’ (raümlichen Begriffe) (Semper, 1878-9, pp. 255, 214). There is the important addition that concerns for load-bearing were ‘foreign to the original idea of spatial enclosure (des Raumsabschlosses)’. While this formulation holds to a distinction between wall and structure, it allows for the development of materials in which wall – again as an effect – and structure come to be interarticulated.

26 It is not as though an extensive literature on the relationship between Loos and Semper does not already exist. Most of the discussions, however, are concerned with points of historical connection and inluence. While these exist the point argued here is that they create a more effective constellation once both can be viewed as concerned with different aspects of what has already been identiied as the surface effect. For an important discussion of the historical connection see among others: Mario Biraghi’s La ilosoia dell’avedamento nel primo Loos (Biraghi, 1995).

27 Adolf Loos’ Spoken Into The Void (Loos, 1982, p. 56).

28 Adolf Loos’ Trotzdem (Loos, 1981, p. 84). English translation (Loos, 1985, p. 102). It goes without saying that Loos’ function as a cultural critic is more complex than the critique of the role of ornament within modernity. For a judicious assessment of Loos as a cultural critic see Janet Stewart’s Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’ cultural criticism (Stewart, 2000).

29 Adolf Loos’ On Architecture (Loos, 2002). In German, Über Architektur (Loos, 1995).


61

4 Notes on the Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper


62 Architectural Projections Notes on he Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper 63

this sense, the material event can deine architecture’s autonomy as much as its potential for criticality. Architecture becomes the work of matter.

Contemporary concerns with the surface in architecture are already positioned beyond the hold of traditional oppositions. The practice of criticism, therefore, has to contend with a new series of constraints. The point from which any departure, and thus this ‘contending’ has to be made, is the work of Gottfried Semper.1 Semper’s signiicance resides in his insistence on rethinking architectural practice in terms of textiles and materials. It will be in relation to that positioning that recent architectural works – in this instance projects by NOX – can be taken up. It is, however, vital to be clear here. The argument is not that there is a sustained historical development leading from Semper to the present. The inherent historicism of such a position overlooks the vital fact that it is the presence of contemporary work that activates the potential in Semper. The actuality of his work lies in the way geometry and matter working together open up architectural possibilities.

In general terms, the work of Gottfried Semper continues to exert a hold on a range of architectural activities. While the work is of genuine historical importance – for instance, no adequate historical account of the Ringstrasse can be given that does not engage with Semper’s Kunsthistorische Museum – the contention here is that there are signiicant elements of his writings that can be understood as addressing issues within contemporary design practice.2 While a beginning will be made with Semper – a beginning that will lead in terms of a narrative via Kiesler’s Endless House Projects of the 50s and then to NOX – the implicit argument, as has been intimated, is that it is only because of the presence of works by Kiesler and NOX that the potential in Semper can come to the fore. Starting from the centrality of textile it becomes possible to argue for the primacy of the surface within Semper’s project. The surface thought in terms of its material presence – in Semper’s speciic case, textile as the interrelation of geometry and matter – opens up as a question how the wall is to be understood. While this is a general argument, what is also true is that different textiles will have different geometrical implications.

Semper

In the ‘Prolegomenon’ to his great work on style (Der Stil), and during a survey of the different approaches to art (art including architecture), Semper makes the following claim: ‘Art in its highest exaltation hates exegesis; it therefore immediately shuns the emphasis on meaning’ (Semper, 1878-9, pp. 195/XX-XXI). The passage moves on to a concern with materials.

Openings

When architecture, in seeking an analogy in order to understand its own use of notation, deployed the relationship between choreography and dance, there was a temptation to concentrate on the movement and not on what took place in the dance. Choreography, and its resultant activity, provided a prompt in the same way that conceptualism is often understood to have prompted a type of architecture. The prompt, however, is not just external to architecture’s materiality; once the logic of the prompt is pursued, then materiality may fail to igure as a site of architectural experimentation and research. And yet, the danger inherent in distinguishing, in too simple a sense, between the dance and the surface on which it takes place, is that reducing dance and choreography to the role of a prompt within architecture may lead to an evocation of the surface – the literal surface, the surface independent of any effects, the surface tout court – as evidence of materiality. (The material is then identiied with the empirical.) As such, the surface would be no more than what is given in opposition to the conceptual. What has to occur is the freeing of the surface from this opposition in order that it can be repositioned within the practice and theory of architecture. Bodies and surfaces can only ind a way of connecting if the material presence of architecture – architecture as a material presence – comes to deine its reality.

Before this can happen, however, a further possibility has to be distanced, namely the tradition of architectural thinking that takes Ruskin and Pugin as the points of departure – a tradition resulting in postmodernism as an architectural style – and which attempts to distinguish between ornament and ‘ediice’ (Ruskin’s term) such that the architectural effect will always be located in either the ornamental or the symbolic. Any concern with the surface would be almost immediately subsumed. Surfaces would have become either the bearer of ornament, or construed as merely ornamental. The counter argument is that what has to occur if the surface’s materiality, and not just its empirical presence, is taken as signiicant is, once again, the repositioning of the surface outside its location within an opposition between the ornamental and the structural. The surface has to be incorporated in what will be described as a material event. This material event is the moment at which geometry, program and the work of materials are interconnected. And yet, that cannot be all. Once the term ‘event’ is introduced, then what has to be acknowledged is the possibility of singularity. Not the singularity of the idiosyncratic, but a conception of the singular in which the speciic interconnection between geometry, program and materials resists any form of generality except as an abstraction and thus as a diagram. Understood in



meanings, and thus the idea had to have a transcendent or transcendental quality in order for the built form to express a meaning. The concern, therefore, is not with the idea in and of itself. Rather, at issue is how the idea is understood. That there can be ideas is not incompatible with an architectural strategy that insists on materials and the realisation of function through material effects. Rather what has to be distanced is what could be described as an idealist conception of the idea. The idea, therefore, rather than being external and thus regulating from outside, is bound up with the presence of the object as architecture.

In order to develop his position, Semper drew on and then redeployed the distinction between Kernform (core form), Werkform (structural member) and Kunstform) (art form) established by Bötticher.3 For Bötticher, Kunstform was the outward projection of the structural presence of the object. Ornamentation therefore was not an addition. It was given within that relationship. While Bötticher would link that interrelation of the different types of form to ‘universal unities of beauty and truth’, that was not a necessary connection. The important point was that the idea – the architectural work’s ideational content – was bound up with its structural and material presence. If there had to be sense of propriety or adequation, then it was not given by the architectural object having either a symbolic or expressive quality such that the object stood for an idea. Adequation was always deined internally. It was the relationship between materials and their outward presence. Holding to this relationship was, of course, to hold to a version of architectural autonomy. The force of this position can be seen in Semper’s quasi deinition of form as the ‘idea becoming visible’. In order to purse the connection between autonomy on the one hand and the interrelationship between the three types of form on the other, what will be taken up is Semper’s treatment of the wall. The wall, as an object of architectural consideration, is present from the earliest writings on polychromatic antiquities to the inal writings on style. The wall, however, needs to be understood as surface positioned as much beyond the opposition between surface and depth as it is beyond any reduction to a lat screen. The wall as surface – surface as wall – has for Semper an already given textile quality. The wall does not have a tectonic dimension as an addition; it is tectonic from the start.

The point of entry has to be the approach to the wall as presented in The Four Elements of Architecture. While an integral part of the overall historical importance of Semper is the way that these elements – hearth, roof, enclosure and mound – provide a way dealing with the question of the origins of architecture, by far the most signiicant for contemporary concerns is the account of the emergence of the wall from the enclosure. Indeed it may be that the ‘Wandbereiter’ is the proto-architect of today. (Semper, more or

However, prior to any more detailed consideration of the way such a concern unfolds, the signiicance of this comment needs to be noted. The immediate question that emerges is what the hating of ‘exegesis’ entails. The straightforward answer is that this resistance amounts to the privileging of the material or tectonic nature of architecture over architecture’s symbolic presence. A concern for meaning is often equated with symbols or expression. While it will always be true to argue that architecture, in virtue of being built form, will have an ineliminable symbolic dimension, such a claim does not address architecture in its totality. On one level the presence of a symbolic dimension cannot be denied. Architecture will always stand for something, and yet this is not the central point. Rather, the force of the claim is that it announces a shift in emphasis. The move, whose effect is to distance a concern with architecture as a site of meaning, involves emphasising both the relationship between the building’s inherent materiality and the connection between material presence and function.

Now, while the issues involved are clearly more nuanced than the one allowed by a simple opposition between meaning and materials, it is nonetheless the case that to write of the shunning of ‘meaning’ is already to tie questions of the work’s activity to that which is realised through material presence. And yet, in the same section of Der Stil, Semper is critical of the positions held by those whom he identiies as the ‘materialists’. He argues that they:

can be criticised in general for having fettered the idea too much to the material, for falsely believing that the store of architectural forms is determined solely by the structural and material conditions, and that only these supply the means for further development. The material in fact is subservient to the idea and is by no means the only decisive factor for embodying the idea in the phenomenal world. Although form, the idea becoming visible (Die Form, die zur Erscheinung gewordene Idee), should not be in conlict with the material out of which it is made, it is not absolutely necessary that the material as such becomes an additional factor in the artistic appearance. (Semper, 1878-9, p. 190/XVI)

What, here, is meant by ‘idea’? This question has to be addressed. The term idea is Semper’s. The force of this question resides in how the idea is to be understood. The mistake of the materialists is that they thought they were opposed to any sense of idea, precisely because they conlated ideas and



ancient sculpture is that they provide an opening. In Semper’s terms it lay in their ‘practical tendency’. He continues:

In line with this tendency the work does not as it were parade the form before us as a inished product according to the lessons of aesthetic ideality, but lets us see the artistic form and the high idea (der Kunstform und der hohen Idee) that dwells within it; it considers and shows how both were inseparable from the material and technical execution and how the Hellenic spirit manifested itself in the freest mastery of these factors, as well as the old, sanctiied tradition. (Page 249/207)

The signiicance of the formulation lies in the differentiation of form from what is termed ‘aesthetic ideality’. Form and ideas could not be separated from materials, material’s presentation and questions of technique. Semper undoes the opposition between form and idea by incorporating both as material possibilities. Any vestige of that metaphysical opposition is displaced by emphasis having been given to materials and techniques. Once the idea is no longer understood as external, then the building cannot be understood as the idea’s symbolic presentation. Hellenic style, therefore, involved an interrelationship of all these elements. This accounts for why, in addition, art form and decoration cannot be separated. They are, in Semper’s terms, ‘so intimately bound together by the inluence of the principle of surface dressing (des Flächenbekleidungsprinzips) that an isolated look at either is impossible’ (pp. 252-3/211).

What emerges from this way of giving centrality to materials is the possibility of arguing that materials are what they affect. When, as has already been noted, Semper argues that ‘wickerwork’ was the original wall, it was because it was the ‘original space divider’. This realisation of division deined the ‘essence’ of the wall. What this means is that any consideration of the wall has to do with how materials realise their effect. This accounts for the move in the same text to the claim that the wall ‘retained this meaning when materials other than the original were used’ (p. 104). (It should be noted, if only in passing that the connection is between meaning and materials and not meaning and symbolic determination.) The history of the wall, therefore, becomes the history of the way materials realise the wall effect. The wall effect is spatial division though only ever as a result. Hence, it becomes possible to question the quality of the space produced. Since it is produced (effected) by the work of speciic materials. (While it cannot be pursued, what is opened by emphasising the fact that space is not given but produced is the

less, concedes the same in §63 of Der Stil.) His claim that ‘wickerwork was the essence of the wall’ is well known. Its importance, both historically and for the present, resides in its giving to the wall the quality of a textile that is already the tectonics of the surface. The surface has, therefore, a geometry of construction that will open the way in which the building’s overall geometry will work.

This formulation needs to be connected to the related argument that establishes a distinction between the wall (involving, of course, the essential function of the wall) and load-bearing. Walls, for Semper, cannot be separated from the activity of spatial disclosure. From a Semperian perspective is not a given that is then divided. The contrary is the case. Space is a result. Hence, the wall is that which brings about spatial enclosure. In general terms therefore space is the result of the surface’s operation. The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of Architecture in the following terms:

Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means for separating space. Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the invisible, structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colourful woven carpets. (Page 104)

The importance of this formulation is that it moves the wall away from being simply a structural element to its having a clearly deined function within (or as part of) an overall structure.4 While for Semper there needs to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural elements and the nature of that function, such a relationship cannot be understood straightforwardly in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be opened up is the potential in Semper’s conception of the wall.

Semper’s project can be understood as the attempt to identify within the history of architecture – speciically Hellenic art in this context – a principle that could be extracted. In a sense it is, for example, the nature of Semper’s relation to Quatremère de Quincy that should inform a contemporary response to his own work. The value for Semper of Quatremère’s writings on



Many questions arise. Two are central. The irst has to concern the relationship between the ‘single endless continuum’ and the wall. The second is to account for what is meant by ‘life forces’. Part of that account involves arguing that giving a determining centrality to these life forces will entail that the body – that which moves, sees, in sum inhabits – has a different place within architecture. It is a place that is structured as well as structuring. Deined in these terms, the body will lose both its singular, as well as its exemplary, status. Part of what these forces denote, therefore, are bodies (plural and therefore different) in the place of an idealisation of the body (singular and therefore always the same; the body of myth.)

And yet, the argument cannot just be that that a different sense of program has been invented, and thus experimentation in architecture will have no more than a discursive quality; what would amount to experimentation purely on the level of meaning.6 Another form of invention is necessary. Kiesler identiies it in terms of the development of ‘techniques’. In fact what Kiesler’s work, taken into conjunction with his own project descriptions, makes clear is that rearticulating the relationship between the wall and the loor into the continuous surface occurs as the result of an architectural practice necessitating the creation of techniques proper to its potential built realisation. The interruption of the relation between wall, corner, and loor by the projection of art into a volume, thereby redeining both art’s spatiality and the viewing of objects, occurs as ends that are linked to this possibility. Techniques delimit speciic architectural interventions. They are therefore inseparable from material possibilities. In architectural terms Kiesler’s project needs to be understood as a diagram that demands realisation as a material event. Such a move would bring to Kiesler the tectonic dimension that the presentation of the projects so clearly lacks.

NOX

The Son-O-House recalls Kiesler and allows both Bötticher and Semper to be evoked.7 (See Figures 1-3) Prior to any engagement with its speciicity, a point concerning representation has to be made. Architecture is as much bound to its varying means of representation and thus to what these means make possible, as it is to material possibility. There is, of course, an important connection between them. As has already been noted, the limitations inherent in the work of Kiesler – limitations only ever discovered afterwards – have to be located in how the project was represented. It is not simply that the computer – and more exactly animation programs – has altered the means of representation. This has occurred. Of greater signiicance is

need for another understanding of the decorative and thus the body’s relation to ‘ornamented’ walls.)

Kiesler

While Kiesler’s work is linked, rightly, to the history of surrealism and often discussed in relation to Duchamp, there is an inherently architectural dimension that should not be neglected. In A Brief Note on Designing the Gallery, Kiesler outlines some of the positions resulting in both the Surrealist Gallery and the accompanying Studies for Perception.5 Fundamental to the project – the gallery design – is a rethinking of the place and the placing of the frame. The framed work has to move beyond the duality of ‘vision’ and ‘reality’. The ‘barrier’ separating the human world and the world of art needs to be overcome. Kiesler argues that the:

barrier must be dissolved: the frame, today reduced to an arbitrary rigidity, must regain its architectural, spatial signiicance. The two opposing worlds must be seen again as jointly indispensable forces in the same world…It is up to the architectural technician of today to invent, in terms of his techniques a means by which such unity can again be made possible (Kiesler, 2002, p. 34).

The distinction between vision and reality touches on the distinction between wall and loor. Any detailed consideration of Kiesler’s gallery spaces has to start from the position that it is not simply the projection of the framed works into space, it is the projection which, once understood in connection to the curving of the wall has an effect both on the body and therefore on the loor/wall relation. The interconnection between these projects and those taking place under the heading of the Endless House Projects is given by what could be described as the move from a potential to an actual vanishing of the corner. Writing of his own project, it is deined by Kiesler in the following terms:

The Endless House is not amorphous, not a free for all form. On the contrary its construction has strict boundaries according to the scale of our living, its shape and form are determined by inherent life forces, not by building code standards or the vagaries of décor fads. Space in the Endless House is continuous; all living areas can be uniied into a single continuum. (Kiesler, 2002, p. 140)



Figure 1: Son-O-House. Exterior. Architects: NOX



and the subsequent digital registration of the results – are transferred to strips of paper. Cuts within these strips refer to different aspects and intensity of movement. Not only are the paper strips to be understood as lines, they are lines conveying information. The lines are not representational in any direct sense. They already have two intrinsic properties. They are informed. In addition, however, the material of construction – ‘paper’ – has its own qualities. As the informed strips are stapled together, they begin to form a complex arabesque, which has the potential to yield wall, loor, and corner relations. Those relations emerge out of the interconnection of the vaults implicit in the analogue-computer model but which are only truly actualised once the model is digitised. In addition, the digitisation of the models gives rise to further developments – ones with their own important consequences. Digitisation allows, via a movement from surface to line, each of the vaulted sections its own discreet termination. In other words, surfaces reach their own termination in a line. This occurs because of the move from one form of modelling to another. The potential of paper is actualised through digital transformation.

One of the aspects of this overall project delimiting its particularity is the temporality of construction; that is, the stages of its realisation. The conventions of spatiality always see movement and by extension circulation as the result of construction. While it is possible to establish circulation

that the use of these representational tools has altered the nature of the ‘representation’. Moreover, the process of what Kiesler referred to as life forces can now be calibrated. The body can play a role as a design tool. This capacity of the body plays an important part in the production of the Son-O-House. What needs to be identiied, therefore, is the way the initial experimentation took place. It is not as though the end result is explicable simply in term of its origins. Nonetheless, the signiicant point of departure was the way the tracing of bodily movement could then be traced in the production of volumes. Their initial shape bears a direct correlation to the movement of bodies. What this means is that movement is not a metaphor. Nor do bodies function in a way that would be analogous to the operation of the architecture. The object has not been choreographed. In sum, analogy and metaphor no longer determine architecture’s relation to the body.

The reason for insisting on the absence of choreography – or at least choreography as conventionally understood namely as anticipating movement – is because of the role of what Lars Spuybroek describes as anologue-computing models. While Bötticher wanted to link architecture to its realisation through the inherent property of materials – a position that reappears in Semper – in this instance the intermediary use of models enables their material presence to have an effect on the construction of the project. The studies of the movement of bodies – studies involving ilming F

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to movement. Differing modalities of bodily position have an effect on the production. The curvature of the wall positions bodies in different ways. The potential in Kiesler’s life forces now has another life: an architectural nachleben occurring through having realised the potential in materials. (It was, of course, precisely this state of affairs that was lacking from Kiesler’s initial projects.) However, the life involved, much like the bodies, will be deined by different ways of being present. The curvature of the wall and the manner in which spatial enclosure is effected are implicated in how sound is produced. Instead of a simple process of interaction where sound production would be the direct result of crossing thresholds, here sensors register movement and that registration provides a patterning in relation to which composition occurs. The movement diagram created by the building’s occupants scores the music. There is therefore an intermediary step. What this recapitulates is, of course, the original diagram of construction. Movement leads to construction. However, the direction was not literal. The initial registration of movement gave rise to the analogue computer which allowed material possibilities to be worked out – what emerged was that the ‘truth’ of steel could be discovered in paper. This was because of the material quality of the paper. The move to the digital and the adaptation of the paper model in the process have to be understood as shifts. What enables them to occur, however, is the use of material as sites both of the registration of research and as that which occasions research. Materiality, in both instances, is central. Materiality cannot be reduced to simple tectonics. It incorporates both tectonics as well as the geometry inherent in differing materials.

Given this level of description – and the intention has been to identify the presence of the project in terms of a material event – the inal element that remains to be addressed concerns the object’s relation to Semper and Kiesler. This has already been identiied in terms of the relationship between the unpredictable and the history of architecture. In regards to developing an understanding of the connection between Semper and NOX, the argument is that the movement of historical time can be understood as working in a more complex direction than is usually assumed. In other words, historical time is not the linear progression from past to the present. The connection between the projects and the undoing of the insistence of linear time can be accounted for by the connection having been given through, in both instances, the retained centrality of textile and materials. Neither term should be simply generalised and thus viewed as abstract. Differing materials, as with textiles, will have differing potentials. The Son-O-House emerges therefore as singular. There are two interrelated aspects to singularity. The irst is that what is meant by the singular object is one that cannot function as a prototype but only as a diagram. This entails emphasising the building’s

diagrams prior to construction and thus to give priority to circulation and materials as deining the logic of the building, its actual occurrence is always after the event of construction. (An example here would be Mendelsohn’s use of glass in the 1927 Stuttgart Department Store to locate and house circulation.) In the case of the Son-O-House, movement is diagrammed directly onto material. The intermediary step is excluded. In addition, as has been noted, the very fact that these materials – here paper – have their own properties is what enables them to function not as scale model, in any direct sense, but as analogue computers. (There is an interesting representational question here concerning what is ‘seen’ in these paper models.) Materials, already informed, yield geometry as a consequence of the nature of their materiality.8 Movement, working through modelling – both analogue computer and digital – is what makes construction possible. Construction becomes the place of movement, though it was movement’s relation to materials that was the generator of the initial process.

As a result of the methods used to create the vaults they function by refusing any straightforward distinction between column and wall. It is the process of their integration that yields the wall. However, the way that occurs means that the melding of what are traditionally taken to be ixed distinctions – vault, column, wall – establishes what could be described as an openness in relation to functional designation, with the result that the attribution of precise determinations will have the same quality as ixing a static point on a dynamic surface. The surface yields ixity. The steel ribs touch the ground creating edges. Nonetheless, the internal dynamic of the way this occurs means that the edges which are created will have a complex relation to the ground. (Ground understood as both an architectural condition, as well as implicated in the conventions marking the history of the corner.) There are corner and walls, yet the nature of the walls dissolves already determined distinctions between them, compounding thereby the project’s complexity. An inherent part of that complexity is that these relations (wall, loor, corner and so on) are unpredictable within the way such relations are generally conceived in the history of modernist architecture. There is another side to this complication, a side that addresses how the unpredictable allows for the retroactive creation of sites of prediction.9 It will be essential to return to this point after taking up, albeit briely, programmatic concerns.

The Son-O-House is an art project staging the relationship between movement and sound. The built work houses sound that is produced by movement through the building. However, this does not occur as the result of a simple correlation between position and sound production. In the same way as the building’s structuration – the process of its acquiring structure – is linked to movement, the internal operation of the building links sound



5 The images of these projects, as well as the text Brief Note on Designing the Gallery, can be found in Friedrich Kiesler’s Art of This Century (Kiesler, 2002).

6 What is opened up here is the general problem of what counts as experimentation and research in architecture. In might be necessary in order to answer this question to distinguish between experimentation for architecture and experimentation in architecture. In regards to the former it is clear that experiments by engineers and software manufacturers, working together, have created a range of materials that makes an important addition to architecture. The question of the nature of that addition, or the incorporation of such developments, becomes a way of understanding the role of experimentation in architecture. Furthermore, it indicates why collaboration between engineers and architects is fundamental rather than the expectation that the architect can resolve in advance questions of materials. Equally, it indicates, or this would be the argument, that the second form of experimentation is inextricably bound up with what has been identiied here as the material event.

7 The Son-O-House is a public art work undertaken in collaboration with the composer Edwin van der Heide.

8 The distance of the relation between NOX and Semper occurs at this point. The latter was interested in materials as given by the distinction between Werkform and Kunstform. Part of the interest for NOX lies in the geometric possibilities inherent in material. This accounts for the role of Frei Otto’s work within the projects, and therefore situates the references to him and the Institute for Light Structures occurring elsewhere in the book.

9 I have discussed this aspect of time in a number of contexts. In sum it draws on Freud’s conception of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ (A term I understand as ‘iterative reworking’.) For Freud this means that in regards to two occurrences, the second charges the irst with a quality that reveals the potential within it. Allowing this to become a way of thinking about historical time gives repetition a fundamental role. However, it is repetition that has to be thought within the movement in which something is given again by its having been brought into relation. See my The Plural Event (Benjamin, A., 1993).

capacity to generate further architectural propositions that have to do with its presence as a material event rather than its presence as an image. The second aspect of singularity is that such an object has the capacity to cause a retroactive movement in which connections are established. This move occurs because the basis of the connection cannot be adequately provided by the image. On the contrary, any connection will be given by the object’s organisation; that is, the intrinsic qualities of the object. Organisation has to be understood therefore as diagrammatic. No longer being deined by the image – and thus reduced to the status of an image – it can then have a generative capacity. What are generated are representations. And yet, they occur precisely by insisting on the abstract quality of the material event. Indeed, it is only once work such as the Son-O-House is thought in terms of its presence as a material event, that it then becomes possible to identify similar states of affairs. They exist beyond the simplifying hold of appearance. (Similarities and dissimilarities constructed simply on the level of the image are just that, similar and dissimilar images.) Identiications beyond the hold of the image are retroactive connections. Their construction has the effect of securing history within theory and, therefore, winning history for the practice of design.

Endnotes

1 References to Semper will be to the following editions. In each instance the pagination, English preceding the German, will be given in the text. The Four Elements of Architecture and other writings (Semper, 1989), Vier Elemente der Baukunst (Semper, 1851), Der Stil (Semper, 1878-9).

2 If there were the space, attention could be given to the interior of Semper’s Dresden Synagogue, as an exercise in the relationship between program and cladding.

3 The most sustained introduction to Bötticher’s work is Mitchell Schwarzer’s Ontology and Representation in Karl Bötticher’s Theory of Tectonics (Schwarzer, 1993, pp. 267-280).

4 This position is argued for in considerable detail in §62 of Der Stil. In that context walls are described as ‘spatial concepts’ (raümlichen Begriffe) (Semper, 1878-9, pp. 255/214). There is the important addition that concerns for load-bearing were ‘foreign to the original idea of spatial enclosure (des Raumsabschlosses)’. While this formulation holds to a distinction between wall and structure, it allows for the development of materials in which wall – again as an effect – and structure come to be interarticulated.


79

5 Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility


80 Architectural Projections Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility 81

architectural possibilities within other materials. Finally, it allows drawings or diagrams to suggest spatial relations given through material possibilities as opposed to form creation. The afinity between each of these positions is located in the deinition of the architectural in terms of the relationship between materiality and potentiality. As such what is also reconigured is what counts as the image of architecture. The aim of this chapter is to move towards the position in which materiality could begin to play an important role in the creation of architectural histories that, to use the formulation advanced above, are written for design.

Pursuing these possibilities will occur via three approaches to the question of history. For the sake of brevity they will be identiied with three proper names: Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton. Their strengths and limitations will open up another path of engagement, namely one deined by material possibility. Questions immediately arise. How is the potential of a material to be identiied? What, in such a context, would material possibility involve? Is possibility potentiality? It is not as though these are new questions. While they have a certain ubiquity, more speciically they play a fundamental role in the German style debate inaugurated by Heinrich Hübsch’s pamphlet of 1828 In welchem Style sollen wir bauen?2

After taking up the central concern of this chapter – preparing the way for the argument that a fundamental shift occurs if material possibility is taken as providing aspects of architecture’s history with a form of coherence rather than explicating that history in terms of the centrality of the plan – the problem of the relationship between materiality and potentiality will still have to be addressed. The problem is as much philosophical as it is central to architectural theory. This is especially the case irstly when the latter is delimited by the complex and divergent demands of design, and secondly when the material is not reducible to mere matter – such a move equates materialism with empiricism – but allows for a connection between the material and the digital.3 (While this latter point – the connection between the material and the digital – is not the direct concern of this chapter, it is important to note that once representation is moved to one side as the framework within which architectural diagrams are to be understood, then it becomes possible to see a relationship between the immateriality of the digital image (for instance, a spline-based geometry) and a different form of connection to material realisation. A connection, precisely because of its directness, that eschews questions of representation, while distancing at the same time the determinations of scale. A digital image acquires scale, it is not automatically scaled.

A concern with the history of any practice has to recognise that the status of the object and thus its presence within differing ields of activity is always negotiable.1 And yet, objects are never determined absolutely. Rather, they are always in a state of construction. Forms of determinacy, therefore, have a type of inevitability. To be speciic, what this means is that arguments to do with breaks and ruptures, as marking the history of any discursive practice, cannot be taken as ends in themselves. Breaks and ruptures – forms of discontinuity – are not just internal to the history of any practice, more signiicantly they are internal to the way the object of that history is constituted. These opening considerations, ones that clearly demand greater precision, nonetheless allow for differences within the way the history of architecture is thought. The result of this reformulation is that history cedes its place not only to histories but also to their intention or use.

Within this frame of reference a distinction can be drawn, and this despite the inherent fragility in any distinction, between a history of architecture that becomes the history of the plan, and a history of architecture as the history of material possibilities. (And thus a history that afirms the presence of architecture as a material event.) It should be added that the former will still maintain a concern with materials and the latter will also be bound up with the presence of plans. (While recognising that the term ‘plan’ has a certain elasticity within discussions of architectural practice and history, in this context the term is taken as identifying architecture’s drawn presence, where presence is deined by the project of instantiation deined in terms of representation and scale.) The conjecture to be argued here is that to the extent that emphasis moves from the centrality of the plan to that of material possibility, there is a concomitant rethinking how both materials and plans are to be understood. Moreover, they have a different status depending upon the nature of the practice involved. The use value of these differing conceptions of history also changes. The implicit project at work here concerns the relationship between history and design. Once a form of relationality is central, then history cannot be taken as an end in itself nor is there just history. History for design has a status that begins to allow for its separation from any immediate conlation with a history of design.

While there is an obvious conluence between the terms ‘matter’ and ‘materials’, central to the overall argument of this chapter is that materials are sites of potentiality. Material possibilities can be understood in a number of different ways. Three of the most immediate are the following. In the irst instance it concerns the potentiality of a given material. In the second it involves using the properties of one material to open up



Autonomy cannot be separated from a certain conception of the architectural. What is on view is the pavilion system. The methodological impetus guiding the analysis is advanced by Kaufmann in his later work Architecture in the Age of Reason, in which he argues that ‘forms recur; systems don’t’ (Kaufmann, 1955, p. 132). (Parenthetically, such a supposition would be the point of departure for any real engagement with Deleuze’s claim in Le Pli that the Baroque should be understood not as a historical period but as an ‘operative function’.)7

What has to be brought out here is that what underpins the analysis that Kaufmann is undertaking is the centrality of a certain conception of the drawn line. (A conception in which the line – the lines deining the plan – are of necessity representational. As such not only is it delimited by the structure of representation – a structure in which representation becomes the image and thus the presence of architecture – it is also that it cannot have a diagrammatic and hence a generative quality.)8 On one level there is simply no doubt that if the plans for any of the walls of La Saline are compared with Borromini’s drawings of plans for San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (assuming such a drawing to be quintessentially Baroque), then it is clear that the

Discontinuity Between Plans: Kaufmann

In opening a space in which material possibility will be a concern for an approach to architectural history that is formulated in terms of design, a beginning can be made with the way Emil Kaufmann in his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier interprets what he takes as the fundamental shift from the Baroque to the Neo-classical.4 Kaufmann’s signiicance does not lie in the limits that would be established by concentrating on the implicit operation of historicism within his text, but in his commitment to an interpretation of the history of architecture in terms of interruption and discontinuity. However, it is not as though either discontinuity or interruption exist. The question that has to be posed, therefore, concerns how the locus of the disjunction is itself to be understood.5

For Kaufmann the fundamental moment that marks the end of what he refers to as the Baroque ‘concatenation’ (Verband) is Ledoux’s plans for The Salt Works (La Saline) at Chaux. What occurs with this movement is in Kaufmann’s words the ‘break up of the Baroque concatenation’ (die Zertrümmerung des Barocken Verbandes) (Kaufmann, 1933, pp.16-17). He then goes on to argue that:

in a remarkable parallelism with general historical evolution, the pavilion system, the free association of autonomous existence is substituted for the concatenation henceforth becoming the dominant system. (Kaufmann, 1933, p. 17)

In regards to the master plan for the city of Chaux, in Kaufmann’s formulation of the argument, the plan has even more autonomy in regards to nature than is found in ‘medieval cities’, while the planner (Der Baumeister), ‘no longer attempts to raise up the countryside as was done by artists in the Baroque’ (Kaufmann, 1933, p. 18).6

An examination of the Vue Perspective de la Ville de Chaux (Figure 1) indicates the extent to which autonomy prevails. The intrinsic interrelatedness within the Baroque, from this perspective, has indeed been broken. The levels of autonomy are not simply external to each block, the blocks are autonomous in relation to each other. In addition, the wall separating the city from the countryside has to be interpreted as another marker of autonomy. It should be noted that the Plate presenting this structuring of autonomy is called a Vue Perspective. The image of architecture – and, as such, what will count as the architectural – is that which can be presented within a perspectival view. Autonomy, therefore, does not exist as an end in itself.

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these as drawn plans. In other words, to the extent that architecture is equated with the plan such that plans not only represent architecture they are also the objects of its history. Borromini’s drawing brings the thick line that incorporates column and wall and locates the entrance (door and porch) as given by the relationship between the operation of the ellipse that generates the internal volume in relation to the line carrying the wall and column. All aspects of the drawing are interconnected. The particular relationship of architectural elements – wall, column and internal volume – cannot be separated from each. This is what Kaufmann refers to as the Baroque concatenation. The drawing, therefore, has to be understood as the presentation of these concatenated elements. The relationship between the elements within Borromini’s drawing – an interconnection that lends itself to the description of an already present interrelatedness – represented an actual possibility that, on the level of the plan, is discontinuous with the state of affairs present in Ledoux’s drawing of the plans and elevation for L’hospice.9

What is presented by Ledoux is different. The question, however, must concern the nature of that difference. Merely positing difference lacks any explanatory force. It is no more than a form of philosophical essentialism. The drawing includes loor plans and elevations. In addition, there is a contextual illustration. In every instance, what is a work is a representation of autonomy. However, it is far from suficient to understand autonomy as mere internal regulation. All architectural drawings, on that account, would tend towards the autonomous. The illustrations deine the architectural in terms of a system of additions and divisions. Lines demarcate space. Each block has, as a result of drawing, a separate existence. Each block can be further divided – a division that is regulated by the initial dimensions – such that subsequent divisions remain autonomous in relation to others. What coheres, therefore, is a unity of separable and thus isolatable entities. The plans lack the possibility of interwoven interconnection. Connection involves separation. In addition, it is not dificult to envisage – either on the level of the elevation or the plan – further addition. The system allows for such a possibility. The Baroque concatenation precludes it by deinition. Kaufmann sums up the position in the following terms:

In place of the conception of architectural form as living organic nature, there enters the feeling for strict geometry. (Kaufmann, 1933, p. 20)

Finally, therefore, whatever force Kaufmann’s argument has it is located in the incommensurability on the level of plan, where the plan is understood as a static representation rather than a dynamic play of forces, between these two

autonomy, and what could be described as a conception of relatedness that depends upon separation and which structures the approach taken by Ledoux, sunders any possibility of an original conception of interrelatedness. (This point will be pursued presently in relation to the respective images.) Initial interrelatedness – a form of connection in which separation is always an after-effect rather than a point of origination – is another way of identifying what Kaufmann means by the Baroque concatenation.

While, on one level at least, the reality of the distinction cannot be doubted, there are two elements that warrant consideration. The irst is the conception of line – and, by extension, plan – that is implicit in the argument. The second is that once the process is repositioned, in terms of the abstract conceptions of relation and separation on the one hand, and the temporal dimensions inherent in the initial versus the punctual on the other – the latter being the moment of separation that allows as much for autonomy as it does connection – then a possible transformation both of the line and what is being staged becomes possible. And yet, while possible it need not be actualised. The question of actualisation – a possibility held in place by abstraction – bringing with it not just a link to material but an inscription of material possibility into the process, is integral to the move from the centrality of the plan. Conversely, part of the argument has to be that despite appearances to the contrary, the convention of the plan as well as the relation of separation and connection – including temporal determinations – will allow for the incorporation of a certain conception of materiality and which can be thought of in terms of these conventions. In other words, if there is to be a redeinition of the architectural object, then the move from the plan is not to materiality tout court. Materiality cannot be simply invoked as though there were only one way of accounting for its presence; although, in other words, precisely because it is matter it would then only have determinant quality. Rather than simply positing the presence of matter, what is important is developing a materialist account of matter. As will emerge from the discussion of Frampton’s evocation of tectonics – as if that evocation alone brought matter into play – it is all too easy to provide an idealist account of materials.

As was suggested, two images can be juxtaposed in order that what is implicit in Kaufmann’s argument can be brought out. (It should be noted that these images do not form part of the textual detail of Kaufmann’s argument, rather, they provide a way of privileging both the notion of interruption and the interarticulation of interruption and the drawn plan.) The irst of these is Albertina 175, Borromini’s drawing of the plan of San Carlo. The second is Le Doux’s L’architecture, which consists of the plans and elevations of the Hospice at Chaux. Of central concern here is the interpretation of



Rowe’s tracking back and forth between the two villas starts with the supposition that what is central in both instances is the ‘block’. Variation is set by that centrality. Rowe argues, for example that in both there is a ‘dominant scheme’ which then ‘becomes complicated by interplay with a subsidiary system’ (Rowe, 1987, p. 9). The identiication of difference within a ‘subsidiary’ component – indeed even the identiication of such a component as subsidiary – allows for the retained centrality of the block. Rowe, however, is not going to argue that the villas should be approached, as though they were simply identical, or even the same in any straightforward sense. The relation between them is signiicantly mediated by an all-important ‘almost’. There is no point arguing that there is a simple continuity. The worlds, opened by Palladio and Le Corbusier, differ radically. The pretensions of modernisms versus classicism involve obvious differences. And yet, even in recognising such distinctions the possibility of there being points of connection opens up the possibility for Rowe of having to rethink what is at stake in the departure from Palladio. Equally it necessitates rethinking as much the move to modernism as it does modernism’s own self-theorisation.10 (This latter concern – modernism’s self-conception – is treated extensively by Rowe in later texts.)11

The point of departure should not be the question of similarity, but the ground of difference. On what basis can two buildings differing in time of construction by hundreds of years be compared? Asking this question does of course open up architecture’s own fascination for its own founding myths. Whether it is Laugier’s ‘primitive hut’ or Semper’s ‘four elements’, architecture continues to create myths of origin that then allow all of its variants to be versions of the same. On one level a similar narrative occurs here. However, what is important is the way these differences come to be expressed. The roof in both instances furnishes for Rowe important ‘differences’. Rowe argues that:

Another chief point of difference lies in the interpretation of the roof. At the Malcontenta this forms a pyramidal superstructure, which ampliies the volume of the house; while at Garches it is constituted by a lat surface, serving as the loor of an enclosure, cut from and thereby diminishing the house’s volume. Thus, in one building the behaviour of the roof might be described as additive and in the other as subtractive; but, this important distinction apart, both roofs are then furnished with a variety of incidents, regular or random, pediment or pavilion, which alone enter into important – though very different – relations with vertical surfaces below. (Rowe, 1987, p. 9)

images of architecture; that is, between the Baroque and the Neo-classical deined in terms of the pavilion system.

Continuity Between Plans: Rowe

Contrary to the spirit of Kaufmann – a spirit that seeks discontinuity – are the arguments of Colin Rowe. Rowe’s position, irst developed in his paper ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’, and continued throughout the differing attempts to forge relationships between Palladio on the one hand and Mies and Le Corbusier on the other hand, is preoccupied not simply with the problem of continuity but with the more insistent one of how, were there to be discontinuities, they would be identiied (Rowe, 1987). Rowe and Kaufmann can be seen, at least initially, as staging two radically different possibilities. Again, the question is the nature of this difference.

Rowe’s early paper in which the initial arguments are irst formulated involves the continual charting of differences and similarities between Palladio and Le Corbusier. The argument is not a general one. In the end it concerns the relationship between Villa Foscari and Villa Stein. Wary of too quick a generality, Rowe is always concerned with an argument through speciics. Prior to any encounter with Rowe’s actual positioning of these two buildings, the question that has to be addressed, and which must preigure any encounter with analyses of this nature, concerns what it is that is being compared and thus what drives the analysis. In other words, what allows for such a comparison? What provides it with its ground?

The answer to these questions is given as much by the epigram from Wren’s Parentalia as it is from the quotation from Le Corbusier that provides the opening moves of the argument. The central point in the passage cited from Wren concerns the status of the line within architectural drawing. The line is not just deined in representational terms; the representational and the aesthetic are combined. Wren, in Rowe’s citation, writes, ‘(T)here are only two beautiful positions of straight lines, perpendicular and horizontal’ (Rowe, 1987, p. 2). Rowe uses the citation in a description of Le Villa Savoye central to which is the formulation ‘Le plan est pur’ (Rowe, 1987, p. 2). This will come to predominate. It is of course not just the purity of the plan that is central; it is the conception of line – ‘perpendicular and horizontal’ – that informs such a thinking of plans that will also play a structuring role. In other words, central to the identiication of similarity and dissimilarity is the centrality of this conception of the line – a geometry with an in-built aesthetic dimension – and the possibility, one perhaps always mediated by the inevitability of its realisation of the plan’s inherent purity.



of historicism, rather it is structured by idealism. The important conclusion to be drawn – and part of that importance includes its implications in relation to a concern with materials – is that there is an ineliminable divergence within formulations of architectural history that are determined by the plan. While the plan has a history, it will also be the case that any one form it takes – a history as a discursive event – may diverge importantly from another. Not only does the recognition of this state of affairs have real implications for any understanding of historiography, it also indicates that the plan cannot, by deinition, have an essential quality. The presence of conlict precludes, from the start, that very possibility. In sum, the actual history of the plan precludes its idealisation.

Idealist Tectonics: Frampton

If the plan as that which orientates or deines the object of architectural history is put to one side precisely because a link between the representational line and materiality cannot be established, then it would seem to be the case that it looks, though only initially, that standing opposed to this insistence on the plan is a concern with tectonics. The reason for a necessary equivocation here is that there are fundamentally different conceptions of the tectonic. One of the most inluential is the position argued for by Kenneth Frampton which emerges from his engagement with Bötticher and Semper (and it needs to be emphasised that the engagement is Frampton’s, the potential of both Bötticher and Semper is not exhausted by this one encounter.)13 Frampton’s classic formulation of this position is found in his paper, ‘Rappel à l’Ordre: The case for the tectonic’ (Frampton, 2002). Frampton’s explicit point of departure involves arguing against a conception of architecture that can be identiied with ‘spatial invention as an end in itself’ (Frampton, 2002, p. 92). The production of form cannot be taken as that which both delimits and deines the design process. Architecture cannot be reduced to form creation. For Kaufmann, what marked Ledoux out was his ‘will to form’.14

While only implicit in the formulation of Frampton’s argument, the move against ‘spatial invention’, in which invention and creation come to be linked, is not just a position intended to open up the tectonic, it is equally, and as signiicantly, a claim that the site of criticality is not the plan. The important point is, therefore, that even if dominance involves the retention of the plan – retained within either a history written from the position of discontinuity or continuity – an engagement with dominance, and therefore the project of the critical, has to dissociate itself from the varying possibilities that deine a plan

What is being staged here is the location of difference in terms of a relation to the centrality of the block. Addition and subtraction allow for distinctions to be noted and thus differences established. Even programmatic concerns, which are effects of structural variation, are occasioned because the retained centrality of the block allows for them to occur and for structure to sustain program.

Rowe, by incorporating a redrawing of the work of Palladio – thus allowing drawing to provide the basis of comparison – equally re-presents Le Corbusier’s work in order to demonstrate irstly that organisation and reorganisation takes the purity of the plan as the point of departure. However, and this is the second point, the identiication of a commitment to ‘elementary mathematical regulation’ necessitates its location for Palladio in the loor plan and the in case of Le Corbusier they are ‘transposed’ to the elevation. Questions of continuity and discontinuity are located in the way this transposition is presented and then commented upon. In others words, it is not only the case that the ground of the analysis lies in the way the redrawing is presented, it is equally as important to recognise that what the drawings are taken to represent – the guarantee they possess as the image of architecture – is their relation to a mathematical ideal.

Two interrelated conclusions can be drawn here. The irst is that the plan, while functioning as the representation of architecture, is itself governed by a form of ideality. In relation to the ideal, differences become epiphenomena. The second consequence is that precisely because of the interconnection – a connection present in and as the drawn line – between representation and a governing ideal, there cannot be any direct relation between geometry and materiality. The drawn line, as a consequence, represents – of necessity – something other than a material possibility precisely because the lines are taken to represent spaces which are themselves understood in terms of ideals. What is opened up, therefore, as a question is how the relationship between the drawn line and material presence could be brought about. Once the relation can be posed as a question then rather than there being a sense of entailment, what is reinforced is the plan’s purity and, therefore, the plan is inscribed further in the realm of ideals rather than material possibilities.

A inal point needs to be added. While it can always be argued that Kaufmann’s historicism may limit his project, much can still be gained by comparing his approach to Rowe’s.12 Kaufmann retains the centrality of the plan. He is, therefore, committed to a history of architecture as the history of plan even though that history allows for a form of discontinuity. Rowe, equally, is committed to a history of architecture in which the plan deines its object. Rowe’s conception of continuity is, however, not structured by a form



fundamentally different sense of continuity from the one already identiied as at work in Rowe, is established through what can be described as the idealisation of matter. Indeed, a concern with materials actually becomes a concern with a complex sense of structure and thus not a concern with materials at all. What deines this sense of structure, as opposed to one in which there is a reduction of tectonics to structures and façades, is the operation of material possibilities and tectonics. What is meant by an idealisation of matter is straightforward. Instead of viewing matter – now understood as a general term for structure and the tectonic – in terms of matter’s material qualities, it becomes the site in which the essential is at work. (And hence matter would no longer matter.) Precisely because of this conception of matter, what then comes into play is the necessity for there being a relation of constancy – almost one bound by a conception of propriety, though linked too quickly to the visual – between the frame and building’s appearance.

The necessity within Frampton’s argumentation for an idealist as opposed to a materialist conception of matter is clear from the use made of Semper. Not only is the already noted possibility that for Semper the joint has an essential quality, there is also the additional point that links between a number of architects (again Viollet-le-Duc, Wright and Kahn) can be discerned from the ‘cultural priority that Semper gave to textile production and the knot as the primordial tectonic unit’ (Frampton, 2002, p. 100). While it is always possible to argue that there is a historicist dimension in Semper, and moreover, that Semper has a mythic account of the origins of architecture, an account transformed almost as though it were unproblematic by Frampton, what is a more dificult argument to sustain is that Semper idealised the ‘knot’. For Semper, it can be argued, the position is importantly different.16 Part of the evidence for the real possibility of a different approach – and thus another Semper – can be found in his treatment of the wall.17

The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of Architecture in the following terms:

Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means for separating space. Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the invisible, structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colourful woven carpets. (Semper, 1989, p. 104)

or form based history of architecture. Equally, it has to differentiate itself from a conception of design that takes the plan as either the locus of continuity or of an enacted disruption brought about by a reworking of the plan. To the extent, therefore, that deconstruction in architecture takes the plan, and thus form creation, as its point of orientation – and it is not dificult to see Eisenman’s engagement with Terragni in precisely this light – it becomes possible to argue that while deconstruction may be a version of architectural autonomy, it is so precisely because it is a critical practice – even if self-deined as such – that is structured around the centrality of the plan. The dominant plan becomes the object of a deconstruction.15

Rather than deconstruction or other variants of innovation as form creation, for Frampton, there needs to be a radical alternative. The alternative position involves, at least in its formulation, the elimination of the plan as that which deines the object of the architectural. What has to occur is a return to ‘the structural unit as the irreducible essence of architectural form’ (Frampton, 2002, p. 92). At the beginning the actual formulation of the architectural while not mythic in a direct sense evokes, nonetheless, original and transcendental motifs. They function as that which falls outside history in order to provide history’s transcendental condition of possibility. What other meaning could be attributed to the presence of an ‘irreducible essence’? It must be transhistorical in order that it ground the historical. Furthermore, Frampton’s recasting of history pivots around the ‘joint’. The centrality of the latter is found in its being the point of connection between the telluric and the immaterial. The joint, in Frampton’s argumentation, brings together movement towards the earth and the opposing light into space. Semper is evoked in the formulation of the argument.

Semper’s emphasis on the joint implies that fundamental syntactical translation may be expressed, as one passes from the stereotomic base to the tectonic frame, and that such transitions constitute the very essence of architecture. They are the dominant constituents whereby one culture of building differentiates itself from the next (Frampton, 2002, p. 92).

Prior to any consideration of the role of Semper in the argument, Frampton’s formulation warrants attention.

In the passage cited above, the joint becomes the site in which the ‘very essence of architecture’ can be detected. This formulation reiterates the one noted above in which the ‘structural element’ becomes the ‘irreducible essence of architectural form’. The presentation of structural elements and thus tectonics in terms of essences is not the work of chance. Part of the result of this use of a productive essentialism is that it allows Frampton to connect Viollet-le-Duc, Wright and Kahn on the basis of structural similarities. Continuity, though it is a



of matter precisely because matter reconceived in terms of work becomes a locus of potentiality. Potentiality is a quality intrinsic to materials once materials no longer have to bear the weight of being part of architecture’s irreducible essence.

Tectonics, as a term, designates a range of divergent possibilities. In Frampton’s work it cannot be readily separated from an idealisation of matter. Were that not to be the project and thus if what was actually at stake involved developing a materialist account of tectonics, then central to such an undertaking would be the theoretical necessity – a necessity imposed by design practice and, therefore, forming an intrinsic part of architectural theory – of developing a materialist account of materials. As such, idealism would have ceded its place to materials and hence would have avoided the hold of empiricism. This would have occurred to the extent that materials can themselves become sites of experimentation and research. The latter takes place to the extent that diagrams, models and materials are approached in terms of their potentialities rather than as representations, the loci of meaning and the staging of ideals.

Perhaps as a conclusion there needs to be a word of warning. One way of taking the distancing of meaning, representation and the ideational would result in the reduction of architecture to a series of pragmatic operations. It would be as though, therefore, a concern with experimentation and the critical were abandoned in the process. At its most polemical it would be as if in the move to the interrelationship of the digital and the material what then became impossible was criticality in the age of digital reproducibility. (A concomitant casualty of this so-called impossibility would be the irrelevance of architectural theory: theory having been effaced in the name of the pragmatic.) Two points need to be made in response.

In the irst instance criticality is internal to architecture. Neither architecture nor the critical is to be understood in terms of teleological development. As such innovation and experimentation remain possibilities. However, that possibility has to be situated in relation to the conception of the architectural object. Once a move is made from the centrality of the plan to the relationship between the material and the digital, a relationship in which, on the level of both theorisation and practice, what has to dominate is a materialist account of the work of matter, then what counts as the experimental, and thus how the critical is to be understood, become questions with as great an exigency as before. Nonetheless, with a shift in the conception of the object, in the move from the centrality of the plan to the materialist account of the relationship between the digital and the material, the architectural object acquires a different ontological status. This

The importance of this formulation is that it moves the wall away from its being no more than a structural element to its having a clearly deined function within (or as part of) an overall structure. While for Semper there needs to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural elements and the nature of that function, such a relationship resists any reformulation in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be opened up is the potential in Semper’s conception of the wall.

The wall cannot be separated from the effect of space creation. Potentially what counts as a wall need not have anything necessarily to do with the literal presence of the wall as a structural element, but will be there in terms of what can be described as the wall-effect. This position is argued for in considerable detail in §62 of Der Stil. In that context, walls are described as ‘spatial concepts’ (raümlichen Begriffe). There is the important addition that concerns for load-bearing were ‘foreign to the original idea of spatial enclosure (des Raumsabschlosses)’ (Semper, 1878-9, p. 255/p. 214). While this formulation holds to a distinction between wall and structure, it allows for the development of materials in which wall – again as an effect – and structure come to be interarticulated.

Semper’s interest in materials – a key example is wickerwork – is located in the way materials operate to realise such effects. There is no need to attribute an essentialism to Semper since his chief concern was exploring the complex relationship between materials and their inherent possibilities. The possibilities lie as much in the creation of effects as they do in the potentiality within a material in terms of the realisation of that effect. Materials become registers of what they allow. What they allow will in the end be speciic to the materials in question. What can never be precluded are attempts to win Semper to the projects of idealism. However, there is enough in his work to delect, if not resist, precisely that possibility.

Materials in the writings of Semper can be interpreted as resisting their idealisation precisely because they are bound up with architectural effects. Effects necessitate that a distinction be drawn between, on the one hand, materials – understood as sites of potentiality and implicit geometries – and, on the other, the reduction of architecture’s material presence to the strictly empirical and thus, to brute matter. Flowing from Semper, there is the possibility of connection between materiality and both the conceptual and the ideational. However, both of these elements are not external to matter’s work. On the contrary, as indicated by reference to the wall, they are realised within the work of matter. The work of matter – matter understood as workful – becomes another formulation of material possibility. In sum, therefore, Semper opens up, pace Frampton, the possibility for a materialist account



freedom: Sigfried Giedion, Emil Kaufmann and the constitution of architectural modernity (Mertin, 1997). In addition, Hubert Damisch has provided an excellent introduction to Kaufmann’s work in relation to the general question of autonomy in his preface to the French translation of Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. See Ledoux avec Kant (Damisch, 2002).

5 The central text here is Michel Foucault’s Le Mots et les Choses (Foucault, 1978). While Foucault’s approach differs fundamentally from Kaufmann’s, the productive point of comparison is the insistence on discontinuity. For Foucault, the regimes that organise discrete conigurations – ‘episteme’ – are themselves sites that can generate differences explicable in terms of the episteme itself. Kaufmann’s sense of discontinuity is itself articulated within a teleological conception of historical time. Discontinuity, therefore, as an operative principle within different conceptions of historiography, will have its own complex history.

6 The most signiicant overview of eighteenth century architecture, which situates Ledoux in relation to the question of modern architecture, is Anthony Vidler’s The Writing of the Walls: Architectural theory in the late enlightenment (Vidler, 1987). In addition, Vidler has provided the most exacting and judicious overview of Kaufmann’s project. Drawing on a range of sources, Vidler is able to position the centrality of Kaufmann’s work for any discussion of architectural autonomy. (Vidler, 2002) In the context of the argument developed here, autonomy has not been the central concern. Greater signiicance has been attributed to the question of discontinuity and continuity. The argument developed in this chapter is not antithetical to arguments concerning autonomy, or at least there is no intent that this be the case. Rather, what is at stake is the nature of the object – and thus its discursive construct – that is taken to be autonomous. Moreover, when Kaufmann begins to reformulate the propositions of his 1933 work in English, the centrality of the autonomy shifts. What emerges is the importance of the historiographical argument that underpins it. For example, in the paper given to the American Society of Architectural Historians in August 1942 (Kaufmann, 1943), Kaufmann is at pains to argue that with Ledoux there is the expression of ‘an entirely new system’ (1943, p. 20) and that with the House designed for Bellevue Park ‘the principle of unity, evoked by Alberti in his sixth book, and so dear to Baroque hearts was abandoned’ (1943, p. 17). Kaufmann’s interest lies in the history of form and thus with the history of what he calls an ‘architectural system’ (1943, p. 13). This is the aspect of Kaufmann’s project that is being privileged. There is no doubt, however, that formal innovation is itself bound up with the Enlightenment project of autonomy.

7 Even allowing for the signiicance of Deleuze’s work (Deleuze, 1987) on the ‘fold’ (le pli) for the presentation of architecture, the important question for a concern with writing history for design is accounting for what occurs when

occurs precisely because the latter involves a repositioning of the immaterial and the material. As such, therefore, questions pertaining to the critical and the experimental demand new forms of response. Responding to those demands – response as the creation of a locus of research – is the distancing of the pragmatic.

The second point is related. Precisely because this repositioning demands conceptual innovation (therefore, there has never been a greater need for architectural theory) both the repositioning and the possibility of research can always be resisted. However, that resistance needs to be analysed, it cannot be naturalised. Any analysis will give rise to further clariication of the repositioning of the architectural object and how techniques in relation to that object are themselves to be understood. While innovation and experimentation can always be dismissed as novelty (though equally novelty can always be presented as though it were experimental and innovative) once the historicist gesture of assimilation no longer dominates then a materialist account of the work of matter comes into play, especially when that work involves, of necessity, the productive presence of the immaterial, (for instance, software). A materialist account, and not an empiricist or pragmatist one, will by the nature of the activity itself occur within the space created by allowing for the afirmation of the shift in the ontology of the architectural object to identify the parameters of research. The move to materialism will work to redeine both the nature and the project of architectural theory.

Endnotes

1 I wish to thank Katie Lloyd-Thomas, John Macarthur and Tony Vidler for comments on an earlier version. The direction of the interpretation is mine alone.

2 The German text was published in Karlsruhe in 1828. Hübsch’s text and other texts central to the Style Debates are available in English (Hübsch, 1992). I have examined this text and the context in which the question of style and its relation to material possibility is posed in greater detail in Style and Time (Benjamin, A., 2005).

3 This is the point at which the centrality of the work of Lars Spuybroek can be located. See Machining Architecture (2004).

4 Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (Kaufmann, 1933). Subsequent page references are given in the body of the article. (All translations are my own.) On the modernity of Kaufmann, see Detlef Mertins’s System and



15 I have developed this approach to both the ‘deconstruction’ in architecture and Eisenman’s work on Terragni in my ‘Passing through deconstruction: Architecture and the project of autonomy’ (See Chapter 7).

16 References to Semper will be to the following editions. In each instance the pagination, English preceding the German, will be given in the text. Gottfried Semper. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (Semper, 1989), Vier Elemente der Baukunst (Semper, 1851), and Der Stil (Semper, 1878-9).

17 Another, and different, attempt to argue for the actuality of Semper can be found in the work of Bernard Cache (2000 and 2002).

a form of thought and form creation at work in the seventeenth century acquires an insistent contemporary presence. John Rajchman has traced, with real philosophical acuity, the complex set of relations between Deleuze’s writings and architecture. See his Constructions (Rajchman, 1998).

8 What is opened up here does not concern the diagram per se. Rather, what is involved is the relationship between the drawn line and material presence. Clearly this treatment of the diagram draws on Deleuze’s discussion of the same in his work on Foucault and on Bacon (Deleuze, 1986 and 1981).

9 There are, of course, other ways of understanding the relationship between the Baroque – here present in the igure of Borromini – and the modernism of Le Corbusier. For example, Giedion argues the following in relation to the Villa Savoye:

It is impossible to comprehend the Savoye House by a view from a single point: quite literally, it is a construction in space-time. The body of the house has been hollowed out in every direction: from above and below, within and without. A cross section at any point shows inner and outer space penetrating each other inextricably. Borromini had been on the verge of achieving the interpenetration of inner and outer space in some of his late Baroque churches. (Giedion, 1967, p. 529)

The contrast that would need to be established between Giedion and other historians would have to incorporate the way differing conceptions of the architectural object igured within the analyses.

10 It is in relation to this point that Robin Evans argues that within the structure of Rowe’s argument, Mies and Le Corbusier remain Neo-Palladian (Evans, 1997).

11 See in this regard, Rowe’s papers ‘Neo-classicism’ and ‘Modern Architecture I + II’ (Rowe, 1987, pp. 119-159).

12 For an interpretation of Semper that concentrates on this aspect of his work see Mari Hvattum’s Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Hvattum, 2004).

13 For a judicious evaluation of the importance of Bötticher in any evaluation of the history of tectonics see M. Schwarzer’s Ontology and representation in Karl Bötticher’s theory of tectonics (Schwarzer, 1993).

14 Emil Kaufmann’s ‘Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Inaugurator of a new architectural system’ (Kaufmann, 1943, p. 15).


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6 Porosity at The Edge: Working Through Walter Benjamin’s Naples


100 Architectural Projections Porosity at The Edge: Working hrough Walter Benjamin’s Naples 101

while at the same time signalling the extent to which it may become possible to generalise that account.

Writing of the café in Naples, Benjamin states, ‘A prolonged stay is barely possible’ (‘Längerer Aufenthalt ist kaum möglich’) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 420/p. 316). However, what is it that is not possible, or only ‘barely’? What type of stay – perhaps even what form of lodging – is precluded? While these questions refer to time they are equally concerned with issues of spatiality. What is in play is the nature of the place in which one stays, or in which this form of staying takes place. Staying here is measured by time. The Neapolitan café is not a place for an Aufenthaltzeit. Measuring place by time – thereby allowing time a form of complexity – reconigures place by allowing it to take on a position in which there is the interplay of times. Prior to taking up the consequences of this move from a singular conception of time to a plural one, it is essential to stay with the café and the positioning of what is, or is not, or only ‘barely’, possible within it.

The contrast Benjamin provides is with the Viennese coffee house. The latter are marked by a sense of the ‘conined’ (‘beschränkte’). While the term is deployed speciically to describe the literary world of Vienna, it is a world that has an architectural correlate. Noting this distinction, however, is not enough. The contrast is not between the contained and the open, as though the only possible response to a form of restriction or containment could be the elimination of all borders and thus the creation of the purely open. (It may be that such an aspiration is no more than a gestural reiteration in another guise of a conception of place as a terra nullus.) Movement through space is always temporal. It takes place through time. Presented in this way, movement comes to deine the way in which space is both contrasted and then worked within. Of the Neapolitan café it should be recalled that Benjamin wrote, ‘A prolonged stay is barely possible’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 420/p. 316). What delimits the length of stay has to do with the way coffee is drunk. Coffee is ordered by gestures. Naples is characterised by the ‘language of gestures’ (‘Die Gebärdensprache’) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 421/p. 316).4 The ordering of the drink, its consumption and the passage out from the café, all need to be understood within the rhythm of the gesture. Space is positioned – and therefore created – by one particular rhythm rather than another. What occurs within the café is the interarticulation of spatial positioning and the rhythm of the body. The argument as to why it is ‘barely possible’ to stay within the café for a sustained period of time has to do, therefore, with the way the space of the café is constructed. It is not a given domain that is simply occupied in a range of different ways. The café becomes a site whose presence is created. Time, space and the rhythms of the body work together. If there is a way into the general sense in which

What is it that identiies a city?1 Where is the feeling or sense of that identity located? Could that sense of identity – no matter how it was discovered – be generalised? The encounter with a city endures within attempts to articulate that experience within writing. Equally, an encounter with a speciic city – once it admits the possibility of generalisation – may become productive within design. Walter Benjamin continued to work through the city.2 The modern and the urban coincide. And yet, that coincidence brings with it more than a simple equivalence. Cities have a past. The modern contains vestiges. The question of the city – if only as a beginning – concerns that complex presence. In a text that demands consideration not just because of its content, but equally due to its actual design – Einbahnstraße – the presence of the affective city, the city as the place of experience endures.3 A brief entry under the heading ‘Freiburg Minster’ opens a possible interplay between the particular and the related move to a form of generality. Or if not the movement itself, what is at work within this brief note is the provision of two of the categories within which movement within the city can be thought. (In the end, it will be movement that constitutes the urban and thus deines the city.)

Freiburg Minster – The special sense of a town (dem eigensten Heimatgefühl einer Stadt) is formed in part for its inhabitants – and perhaps even in the memory of a traveller who has stayed there – by the tone and intervals with which its tower clock begins to chime (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, IV.1. 124/1. 213).

Accounting for the ‘Heimatgefühl’ of a town can be located in the way the relationship between material presence and time is worked out. Here material presence is the clock tower itself – standing as a point of orientation. Time is inscribed, in this context, within the intervals marking the striking of the bells. Orientation in relation to distance is always intermingled with a temporal dimension. Both combine in the ‘feeling’ – ‘gefühl’ – that a town engenders. What this means is that spatiality is not the central element in any account of what can be described as the effect of urbanism. Spatiality is always measured. The nature of its measure, however, involves time. The time in question is not the universalising time that is arbitrarily though exactly enacted – an exactitude with its own exigency – either by the clock or by chronology. If there is another conception of time then it arises from the operative quality of the city itself. It will not be time as a series of single moments, those heard on each occasion the bell is struck. Rather, it will involve the complex temporality suggested by the interplay of differing temporal systems articulated within different forms of spatial presence. The relationship between space and time – thought as a relation of inherently complex sites – both opens a way towards Benjamin’s discussion of Naples,



actual terminology, one that refuses to position the private and the public as a productive opposition, does not ignore the private realm. On the contrary it brings both the public and the private into play, but freed from their ready insertion into a simplifying opposition. (As will be noted, it is an opposition undone by the work of porosity.) And yet, within the terms of the text’s narrative what is recounted is an occurrence. And as an occurrence, it is over. Moreover, it is an event whose impersonal quality is carried by its passive construction (wurde…gefahren). What has been identiied, therefore, in this opening – in its impersonal pastness – is as much an opening towards the present as it is to different possibilities of involvement. Both of these openings – holding the actuality of the present and its inherent complexity in play – indicate not just ways of avoiding the complete identiication of the text with Naples, but of allowing that possibility to be already contained in the text itself. The opening of Naples, understood as a threshold, is already doubled. Complexity pertains ab initio.

The value of such an approach to this text is that it allows for the possibility that the complex density of the urban endures as a recurrent thought within writing.5 The question of density, however, needs to be set in relation to an understanding of place as that which is already contested. The real signiicance of the term ‘porosity’, and this is the term used by Benjamin to analyse the city of Naples, is that it does not refuse the distinction between, for example, ‘the sitting room’ (die Stube) and ‘the street’ (der Strasse), or between ‘day’ (Tag ) and ‘night’ (Nacht ). What it does, however, and this is part of the strength of Benjamin’s approach, is begin to deine their relation in terms of an already present sense of ‘interpenetration’ (Durchdringung). The question that arises here concerns to what this term – interpenetration – pertains. Porosity, if it were thought to do no more than mark mere process, would involve nothing other than a form of seepage; as though edges could be permeated, entered but no more than that. What occurs with the evocation of the porous brings additional elements into play.

The term irst occurs in the following context. Benjamin has been describing a series of rooms within the city, its buildings and inally within the cliff faces. Overall the city is ‘craggy’ (‘felsenhaft’) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309). This is, however, no more than a spatial description. It is as though all that is involved is a series of interlinked chambers and rooms; as if porosity were no more than courtyards that led to arcades or vestibules which in turn lead to ante-chambers and inally to inner rooms themselves. If there were a way of describing the temporality and thus the form of movement that such a conception of porosity engenders – a conception in which its force would be stilled and thus its productive possibilities contained – then it would be in terms of a sequence and thus as a linear narrative through the city.

porosity igures within Benjamin’s writings on Naples, then it resides in its effects. Effects are productive. Porosity, if only as a beginning, provides a way of making space and time work together to deine both the urban condition and the body’s place within it. Time is integral to an understating of urban affect.

‘Naples’, once named, means that avoiding the hold of the idiosyncratic will depend upon allowing the name Naples to name both the city itself and, in the process, to name and as signiicantly to produce an abstraction that has an inherently generative dimension. While Benjamin writes about Naples, there is an additional question – a question driven not just by the imperative of design but also by the possible construction of a site in which those imperatives may come to take on a political texture. The question’s force resides in the power of abstraction. (This is abstraction not as an act of withdrawal, but as the relocation of effect. Abstraction is that which allows for potentiality precisely because the original is no longer held by interplay of representation as the locus of meaning and re-presentation as deining either the image or the description.) The question is the following: Is it possible to reconigure that writing – Benjamin’s Naples – diagrammatically? In other words, can the text be read as occasioning design? This is designing arising neither from the application of an analysis nor from the simple identiication of the text’s concerns. Rather, the potentiality for abstraction – the diagram – opens up design as a practice. As a result, design would be a practice rather than the enactment of a predetermined task. If only to indicate how such a possibility would be realised, part of the answer will involve reconiguring the urban – and here Naples names the urban – in terms of time and movement. Time and movement should not be understood as simple generalities. They are given a speciic coniguration within Naples. If there is a way through Naples, it has to do with the use of porosity as a temporal concept rather than a purely spatial one. This is a position that can only emerge from working through Naples.

The text’s opening words carry the quality of storytelling. The text begins with the evocation of an event whose completion marks the point of entry into the text. Completion is the enclosure into the narrative at the same time as its creation. Completion and threshold conjoin at the text’s beginning. At work here, and this is just the beginning, is a doubled entry. Benjamin writes, ‘Some years ago a priest was drawn through the streets of Naples for indecent offences’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 414/p. 307). (It needs to be noted that ‘indecency’ (‘unsittlicher’) should not be understood in terms of a realm of private or personal morality. Indecency already brings into consideration the realm of tradition and custom, that is, die Sitte.) Naples will continue to rework the private, depriving it of its privative quality. The



another response, one that while opening up the singular does so in a way that causes the positing of singularity to become problematic. Two strategies emerge. The irst is the border’s refusal; traversal as refusal. The second is what can be described as the border’s undoing.

In regard to the former – traversal – borders can always be traversed. However, such crossings are incursions and consequently would then be deined as illegal. If there is a way of approaching the border that refuses the terms in which the border is traditionally given – terms that are under the dictate of control, a dictate that is inscribed within statutes for control (legal provisions no matter how arbitrarily created) – then it has to be linked to the undoing of the border.7 Undoing is not destruction. Moreover, it is in terms of undoing that Benjamin’s work – a work in which Naples has already come to name a more generalised urban condition – is central. Porosity as a temporal concept – temporal with its own spatial determinations – emerges as a form of undoing. In Benjamin’s text what has been identiied here as ‘undoing’ is linked to the movement of interpenetration. Prior to pursuing the passages in the text in which what is addressed are the temporalising movements that reconigure spatial locations, it is important to stay with this undoing. The term ‘undoing’ makes demands. In part, it enacts the work of porosity. The work in question begins with the interruption of the opposition between the singular and the closed on the one hand and the completely open on the other. However, there is more at work that just a speciic strategy for reading. Part of the argument will be that through undoing, it becomes possible to reconigure urban conditions. Porosity as an undoing will lead to a differing conception of the urban, and thus of an urbanism, from one directed by the interplay of the temporal singularity of simple lines. (Equally, this difference will itself be registered in the representational means used to create these differing possibilities.)8

In general terms, lines of demarcation – simple lines – are held in place. Neither natural nor arbitrary, they are placed and held there. In its most benign form this will concern lines drawn on a map that indicate the presence of streets, or speciic urban locations. This type of map is used to deine zones that in turn will have an effect as much on building regulations, as they will on the creation of infrastructure. While lines and maps of this nature allow for contestation – the argument, for example, to have a certain area rezoned – whatever sense of contestation there is, it will have been delimited by the sense of lines, time and spatial relations that engender it. What is at work here is a deined sense of enclosure. Part of the deinition comes from privileging not just spatial relations, but also a deinition of spatial relations and the lines used to create them in terms of a founding simplicity. Despite these simplifying moves, such a conception of the line once it becomes the

In relation to sequence – a relation that resists simple linearity – Benjamin introduces a terminology that will structure the effective, hence productive, presence of porosity. Describing the base of the cliffs, the point at which the city touches the sea, a point of encounter, a place of touch that could have been an actual border – there are, Benjamin notes, doors and caves. They are neither separate nor merely connected. In relation to them he writes:

If it is open one can see into large cellars, which are at the same time (zugleich) sleeping places and storehouses. Farther on, steps lead down to the sea, to ishermen’s taverns installed in natural grottoes. Dim light and thin music come from them in the evening. (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309)

Central to the orientation of this passage – indeed central to the orientation of the evocation of the sense of place at work here – is that complexity depends upon the overdetermined moment. The present as a site of original complexity is noted by the use of the term ‘zugleich’ (‘at the same time’), recalling, therefore, the doubling that marks the point of entry into the text. In other words, what undoes the linear is the complexity of the moment. Allowing for this complexity is already to have demanded a different sense of mapping than one that would have been driven to by linear sequence and singular moments.6

The contrast needs to be made more emphatic. The linear, itself becoming moments within a sequence, would deine passage through the urban, a passage in which these singular moments gave rise as much to their continuance as to their cessation. One place would lead to another. One singular place would open onto another. Within such a conception of movement how is the border to be understood? Whether it be a border that is no more than the entrance to a building, or more dramatically the entrance to another country, the singular – and hence linear, a structure that must generate and contain its own narrative of the city – demands that it be retained. The singular as door or entrance – equally the singular as the spatial condition existing after the entrance – must stage and constrain both movement and the quality of the spatial conditions. Inside must be radically distinct from outside. What this involves is a conception of movement that has to resist the threshold as a condition and maintain the entrance as either open or shut. The border as the singular brings another exigency into consideration: its being policed. The border, precisely because of its projected singularity and the related demand that it be policed, opens up the possibility of its being traversed. That would be the response – the singular response – to the presence of the border understood as a single line. There is, however,



however, is dependent upon allowing the interpenetration – and, therefore, porosity – a productive dimension.9 For Benjamin, their interpenetration is positioned within the framework of a productive sense of the provisional. Only by allowing for this original sense of connection can there then be the actuality of interruption and thus the occasion of what Benjamin describes as ‘new and unforseen constellations’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309). It is the condition for the emergence of the new, and it should be noted that the new while ‘unforseen’, in the precise sense that it does not have an image, is that which occasions by a counter movement a productive cessation that can be neither restricted nor constrained by predication. The new is allowed. The new, in the precise way the term is used in this instance, for Benjamin, neither corresponds nor mimes. It is nonetheless a ‘constellation’.10 Rather than an already-given image of the future that inds expression, the new is the result of an interruption. After all, how could that which is unforseen occur other than as an interruption? Moreover, the emergence of the new resists inality (hence the recourse to a language of inexhaustibility). That resistance is as much ground in the temporality of inexhaustibility, as it is in the interconnection of the inexhaustible and the incomplete. While Benjamin is offering a literal description of buildings in Naples – a description that holds to the interplay of dilapidation and construction – the formulation opens up beyond the literal. He writes of these buildings that they ‘are not inished or self-contained’ (fertiggemacht und abgeschlossen wird nichts) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 310).

Caution is necessary here for this is a real sense in which a designation of this type needs to be moved from positing a direct equivalence of the provisional nature of forms of completion and the self-contained with a description of Naples. It must be more. The designation needs to be a generalised description of the urban condition itself (Naples/‘Naples’ adopting the status of a diagram), a redescription in which the setting is changed; a situation in which there will be lines of division – lines that will still demarcate areas – even the culmination of lines in borders. However, to the extent that the provisional is taken as identifying this position, and moreover, if the provisional is understood as bound up with the process of undoing, it is possible to maintain edges and forms of separation; and yet rather than deining them in terms of the presence of single lines that need to be policed, they will emerge as porous sites. Edges and borders are held in place by movement through them. Movement, instead of taking linearity as its model, will need to be rethought in terms of the presence of a divergent set of attractors creating eddies allowing for forms of occupation that will draw their force and have a pulse (though, in the end, it will be pulses) derived from a divergent set of sources. All of these elements – the materiality of the

border, brings an exacting reality into play. One response to the actuality of such a demanding presence is destruction. However, the process of destruction does not just move in one direction. The creation of the arbitrary border constructed as a single line can also be understood as a form of destruction. In the latter case what is destroyed is the originally complex or plural sense of place. Destruction in such a context is the refusal of the border in the name of the open as though the border’s destruction will allow for a sense of the common deined as the open. It is in relation to both of these senses of destruction that the process of undoing can have its most exacting effect. Undoing becomes a productive activity. Undoing allows.

Porosity, as the term moves through and organises Benjamin’s text Naples, is bound up with the provisional. And yet, the usual temporality of the provisional, a temporality and conception of action deined by a move to completion, a move which is itself explicable in terms of linearity, is precisely the conception of the provisional which is undone by porosity. Moreover, porosity comes to be inscribed within, and as part of, a dynamic process. Movement and mobility characterise porosity. It is not just that ‘everything joyful (Lustige) is mobile (fahrbar)’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). There is a more profound sense of the dynamic. After arguing that there is founding interpenetration of ‘feast days’ and ‘work days’, an interpenetration that is not simply occasional, rather it is ‘irresistible’ such that the kernel of one exists irrevocably and irrecoverably in the other, allowing each the possibility for a reconiguration, a repositioning, perhaps the adoption of a different colour or another form, that could occur, perchance unforseen, at any moment, Benjamin conigures porosity as the ‘law of life’ (Gesetz dieses Leben) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). However, this is not just any law. Benjamin described it as ‘inexhaustible’ (unerschöplich) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). In other words, it is not a conception of law that deines both obedience and obligation, and which because of its externality yields subjects and in the end will deine subjectivity as subject to it. Action is neither regulated nor deined by following this law. The inexhaustible law is the actative itself. While the term ‘inexhaustible’ (unerschöplich) recurs within the text, what is central is the way in which an active dimension comes to deine what is usually taken either as static or as complete. (An ontology deined by movement begins to supplant one positioned by stasis.)

‘Building’ (Bau) and ‘action’ (Aktion) work together (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309). They go in and through each other. This could, however, be no more than a simple, and in the end simplifying if not reductive, evocation of process. While the opposition of the static and the dynamic is opened once ‘building’ and ‘action’ are deined in terms of their interpenetration (rather than their so-called essential qualities), the undoing of that opposition,



becomes thereby an ‘inexhaustible reservoir’ (unerschöpliche reservoir) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 420/p. 315). Thus for one living in Naples – occupying, therefore, a generalised urban condition – solitude takes on a different condition. ‘Private existence (Privatexistenz) is the Baroque opening of a heightened public sphere (gesteigerter Öffentlichkeit)’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 310).

Another instance of the way the undoing of the opposition between the private works to redeine space – and it will need to be remembered that the extent to which this undoing and redeinition is allowed an abstract quality, the quality of a diagram, is the extent to which it can be taken as generative – can be located in Benjamin’s description of the effect of population size on the structure of the family. If the family increases too quickly or there is the loss of a parent then, as Benjamin writes:

A neighbour takes a child to her table for a shorter or longer period, and thus families interpenetrate (durchdringen) in relationships that can resemble adoption. (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 421/p. 315)

Of the many aspects of this passage that warrant consideration two are uppermost. The irst is the role of time and the second is the interconnection of time to the way in which the family is no longer identiied as a discreet unit but as part of a self-organising system. Now, while what Benjamin is describing concerns the result of a speciic set of social relations, there is another dimension. In the same way as the house cannot be directly opposed to the public – and accepting the obvious reciprocity concerning the public – positions are deined in terms of the interplay of movement and occupation on the one hand and space and the rhythms of the body on the other.

The movement of family members from one ‘table’ to another is not deined by a sense of permanence. Change occurs for either a short or longer period. Time is not deined by civil law but by the ‘law of life’. The constellation that delimits the family is potentially continually shifting. The provisional and porous nature of architecture – understood now as the interpenetration of building and action – is reiterated in the description of the interpenetration of families. Architectural relations and social relations begin to have a similar diagram. Again, it has to be noted that this is not the construction of an open ield. Divisions – from the door to the border – endure. The difference, and here the difference is paramount, is that divisions and relations are not characterised by the enforcing oppositions that usually deine the urban. Rather the complex work of undoing and porosity – two terms that work

occupation, the immateriality of forces – cohere in a continually provisional coniguration. They are containing, yet not self-contained, and therefore, openings not deined by (or as) the purely open but by an inexhaustible potentiality. And yet from one position – and correctly – this would still be the same place, and what occurs does so at the ‘same time’. Retaining as sense of the same is the precondition by which destruction is avoided even though place and time are reconigured. At work is undoing as porosity and porosity as undoing.

Porosity is also linked to personal life. However, the moment that the private realm is rethought in terms of porosity it comes to be articulated within the movement of undoing and the provisional. Private life is equally porous. Accepting the interplay of ‘building’ and ‘action’ as the point of departure means that to exist in Naples, for Benjamin, and it should be noted that it is literally ‘to exist’ (Existeieren) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 314), has a different orientation. Thinking being within the urban condition necessitates the recognition that the predicament of modern existence is a ‘matter of collectivity’ (Kollektivsache) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 314). Therefore architecture – taken as including the weave of urbanism and individual design projects – meets the political in at least two senses. The irst involves the question of how this ‘matter’ (sache) is given architectural expression. Of course, architecture is from the start an expression of political concerns even when this is not recognised. However, once human existence – urban being – is positioned beyond either a unifying generality, or the individual as an apparently undetermined consuming unit, then what emerges is an afirmative conception of place and thus an architecture that is no longer deined by that opposition. Secondly, architecture encounters the political when what type of collectivity is envisaged can itself be raised as a question that gives rise to an architectural resolution. As such, giving centrality to collectivity, and thus to the movement through spaces, means for Benjamin opening up the private.

Public lines are drawn through the private. Moreover, what are taken to be merely private concerns are drawn through the public. Their opposition is thus undone and the terms are radically transigured. The house does not vanish as a place – undoing is not destruction – rather it is repositioned. (Perhaps what emerges is an ‘unforeseen constellation’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309).) Rather than allow the house and thus the private to be equated with the domestic – such that house and domus are one and the same, an equation in which the house would be no more than a ‘refuge’ (Asyl ) (p. 314/419) – Benjamin repositions it.11 A move enacted by the particularity of the space having been given by, and through, the continuity of movement – movement as constitutive of space – the house



There, that is, in grey as inexhaustible potentiality. The ‘faint’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311) sun shines, refracted through ‘glass vats of iced drink’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311). Light through liquid comes out as colouring, bathing thus creating surfaces. Benjamin writes:

day and night the pavilions glow (strahlen) with the pale aromatic juices that teach even the tongue what porosity can be. (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311)

‘Faint’ sun in a city, which can itself ‘fade’ (welken) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). However, as it fades, the faint is no longer a dissembling, what would have been a literal feint in which, what is, would have done no more than vanish. Indeed, the contrary is the case. Fading and the sun’s faint presence form part of the continuity of coming-out-from. Form continues. The ‘pavilions’ are bathed. As the tongue tastes, what is tasted colours walls. Light slips through liquid to solid and taste from tongue to sight. Interpenetration, though not as an amalgam, rather as the continually enacted set of complex relations, reworks the differences between time and space. (A reworking and not a vanishing, hence spaces become timed as time acquires spatiality.) What continues to be presented is form; a presentation – another coming-out-from – that is ground in movement.

The diagram of Naples, ‘Naples’ as a diagram, emerges not from questioning the literal accuracy of Benjamin’s description of Naples but from within its formulations. Terminology and modes of thought grip the text. Their release, perhaps a hand’s unfolding, carry the mark of an original setting that is coming apart. Not, however, under the sway of destruction – destruction is undone by working through as an undoing – but because that setting is envisaged as porous. And yet, porosity, porosity within ‘Naples’, is not an addition ornamenting the text. Porosity is not an option. It organises Naples (text and place, melding for a moment), working as its law. Moreover, the text both announces porosity as a topic – iguring, therefore, within it as part of its content – and, at the same time, porosity igures as integral to the text’s operative quality. Porosity has an effective presence. As a beginning, the text’s doubled entry stages its porous nature. Once ‘Naples’, instead of being about porosity can be seen to be porous, the text as place will admit the original complexity that the place Naples – an urban condition – necessarily contains. This is a complexity, which, in both instances, is bound up with time. The city will have been deined by its porous edges. Edges proliferate. They have an ‘inexhaustible’ potential.

together and which are themselves productively interpenetrated – announce, though also demand, the urban’s reconceptualisation.

Porosity continues to be at work. There is a further register, one that moves between sight and taste, hence between eye and tongue. As a prelude, however, porosity is connected to one of the most demanding terms in Benjamin’s work, namely ‘grey’.12 After all, in relation just to Naples, Benjamin writes ‘in reality it is grey’ (In Wirklichkeit ist sie grau) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 415/p. 309. Porosity works together with grey. Grey as a colour, as a layering, perhaps even as a surface, is the sheen of potentiality. Grey is pure gossamer. (Perhaps, though, this is to speculate, if beauty is refused the structure of surface and depth, if beauty, the Platonic and Neo-Platonic remnant is allowed to be just that, that is a remnant and thus can no longer work to guarantee the beautiful, if therefore, as the correlate, this beauty is no longer longed for, a longing whose most determined form is the stern gaze of melancholia, then the site of beauty – beauty as immediate potentiality – is grey. Perhaps, to speculate further, it is the grey.)13

Given grey, what, therefore, is there to be seen? What is it to see grey? The speculative question does, of course need to be asked – what is it to see the grey? As a beginning, it is to see all colours in grey. Grey is always the range of colours. Benjamin concedes that this predominating grey may have detracting effect. He continues, that ‘anyone who does not see (nicht auffaßt) form sees little here (hier wenig zu sehen)’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 416/p. 309). A lack of concern with form, perhaps the reluctance to see grey as form(ing) amounts not to a failure to see – there is no suggestion of blindness – but to seeing ‘little’ (wenig). What is there to see in the grey? Seeing into the grey – rather than merely to see grey – is to allow for sight to acquire its own type of porosity. Again, what is at work here is the movement of interpenetration. What can be described as a seeing-into occurring at the same time as a coming-out-from. The latter is the continuity of that which is inding form. The former – seeing-into – is allowing for this continuity’s registration. Seeing grey dissolves surfaces – or rather dissolves surfaces as given in opposition to depth. ‘Brightly dressed boys ish in deep-blue streams and look up at rouged church steeples’ (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311). Flatness founders, the stream is ‘deep blue’ (tiefblauen), the steeples are wearing make-up (geschminkten), thereby allowing surfaces, apparent planes, to have been captured – perhaps momentarily held then released, dispersed – by the continuity of coming-out-from. They start to appear, to shine, capturing light, displacing its effect, caught, amongst other things, as a moment within refraction. Becoming, reappearing no longer as one but as the continual play of light, colour and in the end texture, though this is no mere end. All of which is there in the grey.



8 The important point here is that as conceptions of the architectural begin to change, what occurs is a move in the nature of the representations – and by ‘nature’, what is meant is their status – and the tools by which they are created. The single line demands the pencil or its equivalent in the realm of the digital. There would be the possibility of continual oscillation between the two. Once movement is taken as central and the lines involved have to capture a dynamic process, then what emerges is the need for a representational device adequate to such an undertaking. In regards to the latter, what this opens up is not only the move to forms of animation software but also the necessity to use such a form of software if the urban is deined in terms of movement.

9 Without signalling it directly, once Benjamin links ‘building’ and ‘action’ this move overcomes any attempt to reconigure the architectural in terms of the attempt to recover that which is essential to either ‘building’ or ‘dwelling’. The obvious implication of this particular orientation is that what is distanced is Heidegger’s approach to these questions. In Heidegger’s most important text on this question – Bauen Wohnen Denken (Heidegger, 1959) – the deining element is always couched in the language of essentialism. The term predominating the philosophical task as understood by Heidegger is the recovering of the ‘wesen’ (essence). That recovery will always efface the hold of what Benjamin calls the ‘law of life’; that is, ‘porosity’.

10 Moreover, it is only in terms of a constellation that it becomes possible to allow for modernity – modernity understood as a founding interruption. This reference to the ‘constellation’ needs to be understood as structurally similar to Benjamin’s formulation of ‘dialectics at a standstill’. I have discussed this formulation in terms of temporal montage. The value of such a deinition is that it overcomes the possibility of deining the singular moment in terms of pure singularity. What is afirmed, on the contrary, is the original complexity of the singular. See in the regards the discussion of Benjamin throughout my Present Hope: Architecture, Judaism, philosophy (Benjamin, A., 1997) and Style and Time: Essays on the politics of appearance (Benjamin, A., 2005).

11 For an important discussion of the domus see Jean-François Lyotard’s Domus et la Mégapole (Lyotard, 1988).

12 While it is pursued in a different direction, any discussion of colour in Benjamin’s work in indebted to Howard Caygill’s exceptional engagement with Benjamin (Caygill, 2003).

13 The reference here is of course to Dürer’s engraving Melancholia (1514). The problem of overcoming the structure of beauty cannot be taken up here. It should be suficient to note that the structure of beauty concerns as much the guarantee of its presence – a position allowed for by Plato and which inds its reiteration within both the history of art and philosophy – as it does the longing for its presence, a longing that remains unfulilled. In this regard see Erwin Panofsky’s The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Panofsky, 1971, p. 170).

Endnotes

1 This paper was irst given as a lecture in the Institut for Künst und Architektur at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna on 20 May 2005.

2 All references to Benjamin’s works are to the Gesammelte Schriften and the Selected Writings (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003). The pagination and volume are given in the text. The German precedes the English. At times translations have been slightly modiied. In regards to the city it should be noted that while Benjamin’s writings on Paris have attracted the most attention, he continued to write short texts on a range of cities. Moreover, as the reference to Einbahnstraße makes clear, the urban works as a continual igure throughout his writings. As such, it is never just the city, nor moreover could it ever be just ‘Paris’ or ‘Berlin’ and so on. Inevitably, something else is at work. The project here is to begin to identify one possibility for that additional element.

3 Einbahnstraße (One Way Street) (Benjamin, W., 1955) continues to be cited as though the text were only ever part of a larger work and not a discreet work on its own. It means that for the most part this occurs while neglecting the text’s particularity. Its construction – indeed the appearance of the original edition – warrants consideration not just in relation to content but also as a part of the contents itself.

4 While not referred to by Benjamin it would have been surprising had he not been familiar with the writings of Andrea de Jorio. His celebrated work of 1832 – La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestia nepoletato – set out to describe not just the centrality of gesture to Neapolitan social life, but sought to indicate a possible conluence between the use of gesture in the Roman world with its then current practice in Naples.

5 In 1925 Bloch wrote a text on Naples. Not only is it a clear engagement with Benjamin, it is also an attempt to reposition the concept of porosity. For Bloch porosity is more closely deined – and thus limited – by its link to the Baroque (Bloch, 1985).

6 The general question of mapping and its reconsideration in light of a philosophical thinking linked to the dynamic has been undertaken by Teresa Stoppani in Mapping: The locus of the project (Stoppani, 2004).

7 The term has a clear afinity with the conception of ‘désœuvrement’ introduced by Bataille in his treatment of poetry and form creation. I have discussed Bataille’s approach to form and its link to this term in Architectural Philosophy (Benjamin, A., 2001). See in particular Chapter 1. In this instance, as has been indicated, ‘undoing’ needs to be interpreted as a term that refuses the opposition between modes of ixity (for example, the border) and its complete destruction.


115

7 Passing hrough Deconstruction: Architecture and he Project of Autonomy


116 Architectural Projections Passing hrough Deconstruction: Architecture and he Project of Autonomy 117

within institutions. Fundamental to deconstruction, therefore, was a twofold concern: in the irst instance with philosophy’s speciically textual presence, and in the second with its institutional one. It is not just that both these aspects are internal to philosophy and thus provide a critical sense of autonomy, they are concerned, in addition, with the way that philosophy constructs itself as a discipline. Deconstruction opened up as a question philosophy’s self-construction, and thus allowed philosophy’s image to be a site of investigation and radical reappraisal. Deconstruction, therefore, made it possible to rethink the practice of philosophy and, therefore, its construction in ways that attempted to eschew both novelty and the utopian. The former, novelty, would insist on simple invention and thus neglect the already given situation – perhaps place – within which thinking and thus philosophy takes place. The latter, the utopian, would equally neglect the same determinations by reducing alterity to an image of the future.

Deconstruction is inextricably connected to the project of autonomy. However, the presence of that project within architecture differs importantly from the way it igures within philosophy. From a philosophical perspective, autonomy cannot be readily differentiated from questions of criticality. Within the philosophical, the critical can be linked to a sustained investigation of the possibility – perhaps the pretensions – of classical metaphysics. Autonomy within the philosophical locates the critical in a space other than one informed by simple instrumentality. Within architecture the stakes are different. The role of any discourse within a practice whose material presence involves the move from diagrams and plans to literal material presence will always have a different status from a form of practice that remains literally discursive. Moreover, within architecture, autonomy opens in two directions. One direction leads towards an emphasis on the aesthetic (an emphasis in which the abandoning of any intentional interest in the project of autonomy and thus the possibility of criticality and a politics of architecture all igure as signs). The other direction retains the critical impulse identiied within deconstruction as a philosophical project. In architecture these two directions, while real, were nonetheless conlated under the general heading ‘deconstructivist architecture’.1 As with any distinction – here it is marked by questions of direction – there will always be points of overlap and intersections. At certain moments differences blur. Nonetheless differing tendencies can still be detected.

The irst direction retains the criticality inherent in the philosophical. The relationship between criticality and autonomy within any discursive practice – be it architecture or philosophy – has to do with a complex sense of continuity. Continuity cannot be avoided. Architecture, as with philosophy, continues. What the necessity of continuity sets up is the link any discursive

With the emergence in the 1980s of a series of architectural strategies that came to be grouped under the heading of deconstruction, a number of different tendencies were conlated. Analysing that conlation now is productive both in terms of acquiring a greater understanding of the differing directions at work within architecture during that period (and enduring up to the present), as well as reconiguring what characterised that particular moment into something productive for contemporary design practice. On one level what the term ‘deconstruction’ did was to legitimate an architectural practice that had broken the hold of symbols on the one hand and the ubiquity of certain modernist conceptions of form on the other. This occurred at the same time as a number of philosophers – most notably Derrida – became interested both in writing about architecture and even in collaborative activity with architects. There is, however, a more complex background that needs to be noted. There are two initial aspects that should be addressed.

The irst is that architecture has often sought justiication or legitimation in that which is external to it. For Alberti this lay in the human body, for others in a commitment to architecture being the enactment or realisation of ideal geometries. Equally, there was a belief that architecture could be an instrument for social change. In all of these instances not only was legitimacy addressed, at the same time a ground of judgement was established. While deconstruction provided such a possibility, there was nevertheless a fundamental difference. What was outside had entered architecture. This is the second aspect, and it provides another important setting – one larger than deconstruction itself – in which architecture’s relation to deconstruction needs to be situated.

Rather than seeking legitimacy in a series of external constraints, architecture’s embrace of modernity – perhaps, the way the modern began to igure within architecture – was in terms of architecture’s emerging autonomy. Autonomy should not be understood as involving architecture’s separation from the social or the political. Rather, autonomy becomes a way of locating architecture’s potential both for development and for criticality – these terms can be as much afirmed as they can be disavowed – within the practice of architecture. What this means is that architecture cannot be evaluated merely in terms of its symbolic value. Evaluation has to do with its own internal operation and therefore in terms of its own self-conception.

Deconstruction had a similar relation to philosophy. It was an intervention, initially at least, that operated within philosophy. Moreover, it took philosophy to be a practice with a series of internally deined activities linked to the evaluation and construction of philosophical texts. In addition, central to deconstruction’s site of engagement was the presence of philosophy



argue that the aesthetic is marked by its non-concurrence. What this means is that in a context of this nature the aesthetic would be deined in terms of non-occurrence; the experience that does not arise with a corresponding absence of affect. (The question of how to evaluate this state of affairs could take its point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s argument that within modernity architecture is often experienced in a state of ‘distraction’.) All possibilities will have been drained from the event.

Once this description is given to an aesthetic response marked by a type of emptiness, then one way of responding is to heighten the aesthetic content. Heightened content will always be positioned on the level of appearance. This will not take place in terms of ornamentation, since that would merely repeat postmodernism’s indebtedness to the history of the symbol and thus to a type of ornamentation. Rather it will have two interrelated components. In architecture, as opposed to art, this means, in the irst place excluding the link between affect and function, while in the second privileging appearance over program. The connection between both these possibilities should be clear. While there is an obvious dificulty in that even though both function and program will be retained – their retention marking the presence of architecture – the fact of their presence will not automatically be attributed architectural signiicance. Nor will they emerge as sites of research or experimentation. What matters will be appearance. One way of accounting for this position will be in terms of having provided form with a uniquely aesthetic characterisation. This will not be the same as deining architecture in terms of form, nor even in relation to form’s ornamental presence. Ornament involves a relation to structure, while appearance – as a term situated within autonomy – is concerned with the affective nature of a structure’s external projection.

If there is a clear example of this approach – the privileging of appearance and thus the aesthetic over the programmatic – then it resides in the work of Frank Gehry. While it is a late project in relation to the work of Gehry that was identiied with ‘deconstructivist architecture’, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao dramatises the twofold move that characterises the aestheticisation of architecture. On the one hand, there is the sustained failure of programmatic possibilities – the relationship between scale and exhibition was never properly analysed or resolved. And yet, on the other, the visual hold of the exterior gives rise to the building’s clear success in terms of a visual urbanism. The building’s appearance is what matters. The disjunction between program and appearance evidences the aesthetic, since what is of signiicance is not affect in terms of program. Rather the affective has to do with the relationship between the urban body and the appearance of the exterior (perhaps more accurately the exterior as appearance). That relation

practice has to its own history. The history of philosophy could be understood as the continual reposing of questions that rarely vary, such that history is the continuity of the always-the-same. However, once a concern with the critical enters, then any practice, while continuing, does so with the recognition that continuity is itself an engagement with its own possibility. In other words, there cannot be simple continuity, nor can continuity be understood as the repetition of the same ideal elements. Continuity emerges, therefore, as a form of discontinuity. In regards to philosophy, this means that while writing still takes place and that books and academic articles still appear, the structure of their content and the topics addressed are more likely to have a disjunctive relation to a pervasive and idealised sense of tradition than one allowing for its simple repetition. In philosophy, deconstruction provided a means by which there could have been a transformation; one thought beyond the destructive hold of nihilism and thus enjoining what could be described as the continuity of discontinuity.

Clearly at work is a type of formalism in which the transformative potential of a particular practice is found in the way criticality is evidenced by the formal possibilities for continuity. Again, it is the continuity of discontinuity. This link to formalism – form as a site of continual transformation – provides the way into architecture. However, it is precisely the insistence on form that opens up the other dimension within autonomy, namely the recourse to a deinition of the autonomous in terms of the aesthetic. Prior to pursuing the presence of form as a site of transformation – and here it is possible, at least initially, to position such proper names as Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind – it is important to note the way autonomy and the aesthetic work together.

On one level all architecture has an aesthetic dimension. It exerts an appeal. Having visual presence – both in terms of its projection into the urban fabric and in its creation of internal spaces – architecture is a site of affect. Architecture has an ineliminable affective component. Allowing for affect is to attribute a speciic quality to space. Affect – in both sculpture and architecture – is the creation of spatial experience. In architecture, however, there is an important difference, since the aesthetic need not be present in terms of either beauty or attraction. An aesthetic response could be one of indifference. The reason for such a response – indifference – being understood as aesthetic has to do with the inherent relation between aesthetics and experience. If the aesthetic is the site of experience, then it is always possible for there to be an experience that does not occur. In other words, what this allows for is a site of potential experience in which the object’s presence, both in terms of appearance as well as functional possibilities, is so mute, and thus unable to engender a connection, be it in terms of affect or more banally in terms of use, that it becomes possible to



to philosophical works and projects that fall readily within the domain of logocentrism.3 The space between the writings of Blanchot, and that domain, is identiied and afirmed by the process of deconstruction. This afirmation becomes an instance of criticality – where criticality is deined by the distance and the continuity of discontinuity, both of which are internal to the operation of the philosophical. Deconstruction in architecture, if the term is still to have real purchase, is not the application of Derrida’s work to architecture but a reiteration within architecture, conceived as an autonomous discourse, of the identiication of distance and the afirmation of openings that refuse their reincorporation within the dominant traditions operative within it. This formulation of the relationship between deconstruction and architecture identiies the centrality of Eisenman’s engagement with Terragni as a pivotal site of investigation.

For Eisenman, the Casa del Fascio and Casa Giuliani-Frigerio are both ‘critical architectural texts’ – because, as he argues, ‘the readings of their façades, plans and sections are not stable; they can be read as displacements from an architecture of hierarchy, unity, sequence, progression and continuity’ (Eisenman, 2003, p. 11). What matters here is how ‘displacement’ is understood. Criticality enters because there is both a disruption of ‘hierarchy’ as well as the undoing of a sense of architectural continuity deined in terms of the repetition of the same. Repetition identiies both the continuity of architecture and the internality of architecture as the locus of intervention. Repetition allows, therefore, for the possibility of the interplay of continuity and discontinuity. What this means is that criticality has to assume architecture’s internality – in sum, autonomy – as its condition of possibility. In his analysis of the Casa del Fascio, Eisenman uses the term ‘transformations’. Again this term, as with the earlier ‘displacement’, signals a move within a formal vocabulary that attempts to break the hold of a certain tradition of the plan, while at the same time holding to architecture’s own continuity.

There are two elements that need to be noted here. The irst is that criticality concerns both formal invention – the invention of work, and thus of having ‘worked through’ the tradition – and thus a deinition of the critical as provided by autonomy.4 The second is that Eisenman’s argument, while concerning form, is not formalist. Formalism involves the refusal of architecture’s affective nature. As will be noted, affect is fundamental to Eisenman’s argument.

In regards to the irst of these elements, what has to be argued is that Eisenman is recovering from Terragni’s work that which makes it irreducible to the already given conventions of architecture. To that extent the approach mimes the one taken by deconstruction to texts that distance the hold of

deines the site of affect. If anything it is the disjunction between the urban body and the body positioned by, and for, an encounter with art – the project of the art museum in general – that reinforces the necessity to view this instance of Gehry’s work in terms of the aesthetic.

In sum, the argument is that in terms of the interconnection between affect and program – the possible encounter with art, an encounter that would deine the building’s program – the building’s operation remains problematic. However, in terms of the building’s visual urbanism, its role in the construction of the urban fabric and thus the experience of being in the city, it is a clear success. While aesthetics triumph over program, this instance of the centrality of the aesthetic needs to be understood in terms of its being one possibility within the emergence of architectural autonomy.

Once deconstruction can be seen as a version of autonomy, then its presence in architecture opens up in these two directions. The identiication of criticality with formal possibilities and the denial of criticality in the name of the aestheticisation of the architectural establish the two directions to which autonomy – operating in part as deconstruction in architecture – gives rise. Taking this formulation a step further necessitates showing in what way a form of architectural innovation – operating as formal innovation – allows for this interconnection between autonomy and deconstruction to emerge. The example here is the work of Peter Eisenman. However, instead of developing the argument in relation to a building, of greater interest, in this context, is his analysis of the architectural works of Giuseppe Terragni (Eisenman, 2003). That analysis has to be understood, at least at the outset, as a deconstruction of the tradition of the plan. This is a tradition exempliied both in Wittkower’s redrawing of Palladio, and then in Rowe’s arguments that neither Mies nor Le Corbusier departs in a sustained way from the structuring presence of the Palladian plan and elevation and hence remains Neo-Palladian.2 It should be noted from the outset that Eisenman redraws Terragni. His approach, therefore, mimes Wittkower and Rowe. However, it is in the miming that the transformation can be located; drawing, perhaps redrawing, becomes an instance of discontinuity as continuity.

When Derrida writes on Maurice Blanchot, what is of interest to him is not the move in which the strategies of metaphysics are identiied and subject to the process of deconstruction. Blanchot’s writings have an importantly different relation to any dominant tradition. There is a sense in which his texts do not invite deconstruction because in the openings – and thus in the need to trace the work of those openings – there is already a productive distancing from any simple repetition of the demands of classical metaphysics. Instead, Derrida’s writings on Blanchot have a different status from those devoted



However, because affect is linked to programmatic expectation rather than simple aesthetics, it has a necessarily different quality. Furthermore, since affect is at work and because it cannot be separated from program, not only is the aesthetic effectively distanced, the force of the difference between deconstruction in philosophy and deconstruction in architecture is announced.

Eisenman’s is a deconstructive approach to Terragni. The deconstruction in question involves the interrelationship between criticality and autonomy.5 As opposed to Gehry, for whom autonomy emerged as an aesthetic concern, Eisenman’s deconstruction is a replanning and, therefore, a reprogramming of architecture’s possibilities.

Endnotes

1 It is now possible to see that the original exhibition that brought together a number of different architectural projects under the heading of Deconstructivist Architecture did so by deferring to philosophy. What was not undertaken was the necessity to think how what pertained in philosophy could also come to pertain in architecture. While that may itself be a philosophical observation, it is one that insists on the limit of philosophy and thus on the emergence of a differing site of autonomous activity. In this instance, this other site is the architectural. For the catalogues of the 1988 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley’s Deconstructivist Architecture (Johnson & Wigley, 1988).

2 See Rowe 1987.

3 See for example Derrida’s discussion of the problematic status of the term ‘récit’ in Blanchot’s La Folie de Jour, in La Loi du Genre in Parages (Derrida, 2003). Derrida’s introduction to this collection of his papers on Blanchot addresses the transformative effect that Blanchot’s writings have on attempts to write about him.

4 The concept of ‘working though’ (Durcharbeiten) forms a fundamental motif in psychoanalysis. See Sigmund Freud’s Erinnen, Wiederhoilen und Durcharbeiten (Freud, 2000). I have used this concept in developing a philosophical conception of repetition that involves a link between discontinuity and production in my The Plural Event (Benjamin, A., 1993).

5 A similar argument could be advanced in relation to Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, in which the program becomes the operation of formal creation, understood as the project of ‘replanning’.

logocentrism. In other words, criticality is not mere invention, nor is it utopian speculation. The recovery of a project allows architecture to work though the hold of dominance. The twofold move of recovery and ‘working through’ deines more precisely the way in which criticality operates. For Eisenman, they are linked to ways of reading. Reading, however, cannot be divorced from the process of redrawing. (Hence what is at stake is architecture rather than philosophy.) This re-presentation involves shifts in rendering. Again there is the mime. Eisenman argues that rendering the south-west façade of the Casa del Fascio using one mode of representation rather than another opens up its possibilities. This is of course the opening of recovery. Eisenman argues that when:

the volume is rendered white, it conceptually compresses the plan and the volume together…This condition in the front façade allows the solids and the voids to become critical textual igures that undercut the traditional referential status of elements such as windows and columns so that these elements are not merely read either functionally or aesthetically. In the face of the notations produced by the juxtaposition of solids and voids, explanations engendered by rationalist mathematics and nostalgic metaphysics begin to recede as persuasive, and other explanations become more dominant. (Eisenman, 2003, p. 55).

The detail of this position needs to be noted. The argument presented by Eisenman involves a reading; a reading that amounts to the process of re-representing, thus redrawing in order to recover (or establish) the project’s criticality. The interest does not lie in the object’s appearance. Rather, what is of interest is to be found in the way the object is presented such that it is in the formulation of another plan, with the emergence of a new notation. Not only is an earlier one distanced, there is an overcoming of the ideational qualities that were inherent in it. The recovery of the object – recovery as redrawing – is at the same time an afirmation of the distance inherent in criticality, as it signals the already-present deconstruction of ‘rationalist mathematics and nostalgic metaphysics’.Affect for Eisenman is also linked to a type of reading. In regards to the façades of the Casa del Fascio, he argues that a ‘textual reading of these façades relies on a perceptual approach different from our acculturated one’ (Eisenman, 2003, p. 37). Perception is just that. A ‘critical textual reading’ involves as much the object’s physical presence as it does its repositioning within a conceptual argument; a repositioning that, once again, would be the result of a redrawing. Once the terminology of perception is introduced then what is at stake is affect.


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