Somol Five Easy Mies

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Five Easy MiesesAuthor(s): R. E. SomolSource: ANY: Architecture New York, No. 24, Design After Mies: BOXING THE LONG SHADOWAT IIT (1999), pp. 20-27Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856291Accessed: 18-03-2016 18:55 UTC

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24.20

Five Easy Mieses

R.E. Somol

What makes Mies such a great influence is that he is so easy

to copy.

- Philip Johnson

In order to "sustain" metropolitan space, architecture seems

obliged to become a spectre of itself. It is as if it were in this way

expiating an original sin, which is nothing other than its own

claim to the right of informing - solely with its own disciplinary

means - the primary structures of the city. Surely it is significant

that in the United States - the country in which this phenome-

non is most evident - it is the university cities which, in a sort of

museum of living architecture, collect the formal experiments

expelled from Manhattan or Detroit. What the apodictic prod-

ucts of that enfant terrible of modern architecture, Mies van der

Rohe, prophesied has now become a reality. In their absolutely

asemantic quality the Seagram Building in New York or the

Federal Center in Chicago are objects that "exist by means of

their own death," only in this way saving themselves from cer-

tain failure. All the same, Mies's "silence" today seems out of date

in comparison to the "noise" of the neo-avant-garde. But is

there really something new in the neo-avant-garde in respect to

the proposals of the historical avant-garde movements? It

would not be difficult to demonstrate [that] ... in comparison

to the coherence of the historical avant-garde movements there

is certainly something less.

- Manfredo Tafuri

Less is more.

- Mies van der Rohe

The much denigrated architecture of Park Avenue known as

"cold glass boxes" . . . have helped to create the entropie mood.

-Robert Smithson

Inviting five contemporary architects to "play" Mies, the Illinois

Instimte of Technology's international competition for a new cam-

pus center has staged an event where - with the spectre ofTafuri as

absent conductor - noise meets silence. Perversely, this architectural

noise is intended to block that of the elevated train, the last trace of

the city that the campus was unable to expunge through its "exper-

iment" in urban disappearance. For Tafuri, of course, the formations

of late capital had appropriated and absorbed modernist architec-

ture s "ideology of the plan," reducing the role of contemporary

design to (at best) perpetually lamenting the end of its instrumental

ambitions or (more than likely) simply accommodating the market

forces that have assumed them. Perhaps die greatest confirmation

for this diagnosis is that contemporary experimental architecture

has largely become exiled to the theme park of the university cam-

pus, particularly (if perversely) as school administrations attempt to

reorient themselves to a changing market.

While recent interventions on typical campuses may prove

Tafuri s point - the quest for brand names amidst a sea of the gener-

ic, as at Irvine or Cincinnati - the intervention on a Mies campus,

where the generic has already been raised to the level of its own

signature, complicates the situation and opens alternative possibili-

ties. Despite the obvious irony (if not new urban fantasy) of retro-

fitting a modernist campus with a "center," the ÏÏT master plan and

campus center program are in many ways the truly inventive docu-

ments in the competition, providing the material requests that pro-

voke the most dynamic elements among the various entries. These

requirements entail not only a response to the el noise and the

application of advanced technology in a discursive way, they also

furnish organizational cues in their calls to densify the campus,

"intensify the landscape," and provide nonorthogonal pathways

that follow the "'lines of desire* of the pedestrian." Thus, for the

ÍIT establishment, architecture still has an informing role to play,

even an instrumental one: architecture as commentary, as infra-


http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/9

uThe Campus Center will deal with

light as its guiding principle: Light

inside the building, emanating from it

and flowing through it. This is

enhanced through natural air and flex-

ible control of a dynamic envelope to

create a dynamic tool, adjusting to

the exterior conditions and the

requested interior environment. Such

an innovative environment and hard-

ware require new technologies in

construction and use. The building is

of a synthesized, integrated quality.

It is designed for performance

through rational engineering and

construction and choice of material

and systems. There is less attempt for

design and styling; rather the results

are realities from solving the prob-

lems. Combining nature and technol-

ogy, it establishes a technically facili-

tated revival of traditional proto-

types." - Jahn and Sobek

24.21

structure, as landscape. And if Tafuri is correct about the nature

and validity of Mies s "prophetic" statements of withdrawal, then

IIT is the only possible site for this investigation, as one would

have to return to the scene of the crime in order to rewrite the

postwar implications of Mies s built lessons. Ultimately, the com-

petition poses the question of whether Chicago's perceived

architectural legacy - from the loud "failure" of the White City

to the silent confession of Mies - can become undone.

Perhaps more than any other 20th-century architect, Mies s

authority has been constructed through repetition: both his own

(as critique) and that of others (as consumption) . While expo-

sitions of the former have become largely the domain of acade-

mia, the latter has generally characterized postwar professional

practice. This dual failure of "Miesian" modernism - rendering it

a technological-developmental tool for capital (or, secondarily, a

subject of academic canonization) - was evidenced as early as

1 956, even as Mies was completing Crown Hall. In that same

year, Colin Rowe wrote several articles that focused on Mies and

that, in the midst of his American corporatization, attempted to

elaborate a formal-linguistic project for modernism that was

quickly being repressed. In part, this endeavor led Rowe to give

reluctant approval to neoclassical and Palladian repetitions of

Mies, such as those by John Johansen. Meanwhile, in his

"Chicago Frame" essay, Rowe s juxtaposition of Burnham and

Root s Reliance Building and Mies s Glass Skyscraper project was

intended to contrast the American penchant for economic and

functional rationalization - forces which Mies s work at the time

was itself undergoing - with the European understanding of

architecture as a larger ideological and cultural project.

Curiously, it is precisely as a continued expression of this duality

(architecture as tool of economic speculation or as ideological

critique) that several of the entries pursue their own version of

Miesian repetition.

It is not surprising that among the current field Helmut Jahn

most direcdy extends the corporate legacy of Mies s production,

while Kazuyo Sejima assumes his most recent form of academic

institutionalization. Though almost diametrically inverse proposi-

tions, the schemes by the corporate professional and the academic

craft-artist are the most sensitive and predictable: repetitions

that in one way or another point back directly to an ideal model

of Mies. With seemingly little understanding of the context of

the competition (aside from preventive remarks that his scheme

is not about "form or aesthetics"), Jahn primarily addresses, and

attempts to distinguish himself from, the corporate copyists of

Mies. Jahn argues that, unlike the slavish disciples of Mies, his

project applies the most advanced form of technology: adding,

for good measure, that this is exactly what the master himself

would do if he were alive today. There is apparently no reason to

rethink the conceptual or organizational principles of Mies, but

simply to employ a technological standard that has at last caught

up to seventy-year-old practices. In the end, Jahn's scheme - more

a campus terminal than center - can largely be viewed as merely

building a better Mies trap, one where current building systems and

materials provide the final solution to modernist space.

Jahn s proposal delivers a techno-environmental Mies, one

where advances in glazing systems enable architecture to act

more like nature, in a state of imagined equilibrium. It is a

Miesian upgrade that simultaneously serves as belated compensa-

tion for Jahn's own State of Illinois Center and the infamous fail-

ure of i ts conditioning systems. Technology for Mies, however,

was never simply technical. Rather, he pushed existing technolo-

gies to the point of collapse in order to reveal new social and

aesthetic "diagrams," new modes of perception, occupation, and

behavior: technology was never about adequacy but excess. Mies

understood implicitly Deleuze s later observation that "tools or

material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and

1. For the two accounts of this repetition, see K. Michael Hays, "Critical

Architecture: Between Culture and Form," Perspecta 21 (1984), and

Stanley Tigerman, "Mies van der Rohe: A Moral Modernist Model,"

Perspecta 22 (1986).




4/9

AboveiThe el connection, a glass lined

link between the two halves of the

Jahn/Sobek schemes, slips under the ele-

vated train tracks

The primary structure of Jahn and Sobek's campus center consists of

steel columns with a 30-inch spacing that carry an isotropic mesh-grid

roof structure. The facade and the floor tray system are secondary struc-

tures. The roof grid accommodates various types of cells for light trans-

mission, exterior and interior heat absorption, solar energy conversion,

ventilation, and acoustic damping. The floor tray sits on the slab and can

be fitted with five-by-five concrete panels.

Garden 0 o o 0

Gr ta " ' 2 12 1

Interior 0 14 0 0 0 1

Park ÂÉWBSÍ 0 0 6 i

Transparency O 7 0 O 1 I

Urban/-ism 0 8 0 0 1

Void 2 8 0 7 O I

taken up by assemblages." Finally, Jahns proposal assumes that

technology exists only in and through the built object itself, and

thus neglects advances in the processes of design and production

(offered by the computer) as well as techniques of reception and

communication (the mass media) . Focussing narrowly on devel-

opments in building systems and materials represses the much

larger field of contemporary techniques from which architecture

(perhaps as opposed to "building") is fabricated.

Whereas Jahn s scheme is all-too-visible in its full "building-

ness," Kazuyo Sejima s project is practically imperceptible: Miess

"almost nothing" raised by the power of electronic media. As

Sejima explains, "instead of a material object" her entry suggests a

"reflective, image-like architecture" with "t. v. -like spaces." In

Sejima s project, one views the world as mediated (the roof plane

that reflects clouds and sky; the glass barrier that frames the el

train as a silent moving image through an equally artificial park-

scape) while at the same time intensifying the experience of

inhabiting a cool, abstract mise-en-scene. In some ways more

Hilberseimer than Mies, Sejima s barcode garden-urbanism iter-

ates and dematerializes the generic to such an extent that it pro-

duces a new ideal: silence as virtual. If Jahn s strategy was to get the

building to work like nature (to simulate and supplement it),

Sejima s was to frame and screen nature: thus, the former s interest

in technologizing nature (in terms of production) and the latter s in

formalizing it (through reception). This alternative is suggested by

the fact that Jahn s most frequently used terms in describing his

project are "building" and "technology," while Sejima s are "archi-

tecture" and "garden."

Wagering entirely on neominimal affect by turning Mies into

the sign of Mies (or the sign of silence), Sejima precludes the pos-

sible elaboration of new spatial organizations that she has suc-

cessfully developed in previous projects. Instead, the campus

center is completely contained within a 1 2 -foot-high pancake

section, fully grounded and orthogonal, within which unrelent-

Roof

Tray

Energy Slab




5/9

24.23

ing corridors parallel a series of endless cellular offices, occasion-

ally bounded by one of five interior courtyards. In this way, both

Jahn and Sejima "repeat" Mies by returning to reduced, currendy

dominant readings of his production, the one material-technical

and the other aesthetic-formal. Rather than extend these tectonic

or minimalist readings of Mies, Zaha Hadid suggests that these

understandings of Mies are correct yet irrelevant for architectural

production today, perhaps indirectly affirming Mies s sometime

invocation of the Zeitgeist. Consequently, Hadid produces the only

explicitly (or, should one say, exclusively?) critical project of the

five, in many ways the most extreme proposal but one which

nevertheless maintains a stable reading of Mies due to its pre-

dominantly oppositional character.

Through a computer-animated site analysis that reveals a field

of potential forces, Hadid escapes the more static associations of

Jahn s building or Sejima s architecture by initially conceiving the

project as a sectional landscape. For Hadid, "beyond Mies" implies

the avoidance of reduction and simple order. Ultimately, however,

the initial solicitation of overlapping fields results in planar trans-

parencies that are taken as cues for compositional complexity and

ambiguity. As in much postwar formalism, horizontal fields

become largely understood in vertical and optical (i.e., "painter-

ly") terms. Although the project proceeds through continuities of

interior and exterior, the final effect of the project is oddly schiz-

ophrenic: uncharacteristically static in its massing and elevations;

exceptionally sophisticated and developed in its planning and

interior organizations. The interior landscape that weaves through

the three levels, culminating in the Mies Interpretive Center,

accommodates both "soft" and "hard" programs, the latter

emerging in more bounded or cellular elaborations along the

continuous surface. Meanwhile, particles of furniture modules

are strewn across this surface organization as a kind of program-

matic confetti that accumulate and disperse as necessary. In more

formal though still flexible moments, as in the conference and

meeting rooms, telescoping walls serve as a miniaturized version

of the sliding planes of the larger site analysis, so that the overall

urban diagram comes to inform interior program clusters. In

Hadid's project, the city is in the details.

While the interior views suggest an almost Piranesian endless-

ness, the properties of the folded landscape are much more

delimited in relation to the expanded field of site and context.

The most vertical scheme, Hadid's is also the only one to remain

exclusively west of the el tracks, which effectively turns her pro-

ject into an edge that defines the State Street corridor and privi-

leges an orientation to the academic campus. Contextually, the

proposal exists as a bar of massing that establishes and frames a

new centralized quad, just as the recessed and centered entry,

combined with a dominant frontality, produces a strangely hier-

archical object despite its presumed emergence from a field of

visual and physical forces. Whereas the interior is susceptible to a

strong centrifugal pull, the exterior is fully centripetal. In the

end, the project appears as a figure on a field rather than one

emerging from a field, and its notable ambitions of permeability

and transience are unable to compensate for its ultimate status as

a sculptural barrier.

Rather than either simply confirm or oppose dominant fram-

ings of Mies, the proposals by Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas

make possible alternative configurations of modernist discourse

precisely by producing "copies" that serve to question the stable

traits of the presumed "original." Operating "diagrammatically"

- either by reworking a disciplinary opposition or aligning dis-

parate cultural realms - the projects engender difference from

their repetitions. "Mies" is here understood as a discursive and

institutional effect that enfolds within i tself, in one genealogical

or untimely moment, the premodern history of the discipline

alongside contemporary technologies and experiences, as well as

formulations from Rowe.Tafuri, and Venturi to those of Superstudio

and postminimalist art, and so on. It is not surprising, then, that




6/9

"Mies" is the most frequently invoked of 1 5 terms in the presenta-

tions of both Eisenman and Koolhaas, and it may well be that

Mies s collage for the Resor House - where architecture's identifi-

cation with the "wall" is displaced by continuous surfaces of land-

scape with interior objects and finishes - provokes the two

directions respectively pursued by both. Significantly, Eisenman s

second most used term is "grid," while Koolhaas s is

"urban (ism)." In this way, their swerves from Mies are informed

by specific and long-standing research agendas: for Eisenman, the

geometric infrastructure of architectural organization (from the

extended analyses of Palladio, Bramante, Serlio, etc.); for Koolhaas,

the work on shopping and on the city in both its contemporary and

Roman guises. Both attempt to expose and extend the dark side, or

perhaps the "optical unconscious," of Mies s supposed idealism:

Eisenman by turning geometry against itself, Koolhaas by invoking

the "stuff" of cultural matter. And thus the promise of new discipli-

nary diagrams: form without beauty, function without efficiency.

Less is a Bore.

- Robert Venturi

Boring, if seen as a discrete step in the development of an

entire site, has an esthetic value. It is an invisible hole. . . . One

does not impose, but rather exposes the site - be it interior or

exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa.

- Robert Smithson

As one of the primary ideologues for "design after Mies," Robert

Venturi opposes the legacy of modernism found in both the

"building-as-city" (the mini-megastructure) as well as the

"building-as-sculpture" (the duck). It is precisely these two

options that are respectively pursued - at once solicited and sub-

verted - by the Pompeiian carpet of OMA and the folded ground

cocoons of Eisenman. In this manner, both proposals imply that

it is only possible to revisit Mies by introducing variation (or

perhaps more accurately in the case of these two schemes,

"noise" or "interference") in the terms of a contemporary con-

figuration. Thus the term building is now replaced as Koolhaas

reads Venturi 's "city" through the lens of the interior (hence, the

mall), whereas Eisenman sees "sculpture" as a species of landscape

(via postminimalist environmental art) . Significantly, both the

internalized city and the grounded duck exhibit aspects of

"entropy" - the trait that Smithson associates with the possibility

of a new monumentality, one evinced not only in the "cold glass

boxes" of Sixth Avenue but also in the continuous development of

suburban sprawl (Koolhaas 's consumer ist mat) as well as the crys-

talline structures of geology and mineralogy (Eisenman 's faceted

figures submerged in the earth) . As Smithson writes in "The

Crystal Land" :

The highways crisscross through the towns and become

man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire

landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome

diners to glass window shopping centers, a sense of the crys-

talline prevails.

A hybrid of consumption and geology, both projects are

buried: Eisenman s literally, Koolhaas 's under a folded plate

roofscape that "grounds" the raised datum of the elevated plat-

form: a past, present, and future context for OMA's campus

center as socle.

By wrapping the el platform in a chromium-plated steel tube,

the OMA proposal reframes the train as a kind of horizontal ele-




7/9

- Columns in the Jahn/Sobek scheme are tapered

steel tubes with supporting cross arms at slab

locations and at the roof grid mesh. The center

is designed uto highlight in an architectural

setting the research interests of the schools of

engineering, thermodynamics, materials

research, performance of fabrication . . . with-

in the design of the dynamic and technically

advanced building envelope/'

24.25

vator connecting the building to the city so that a l arger urban

infrastructure assumes the site traditionally occupied by a

Miesian mechanical penthouse. Beneath this new urban datum, a

thickened field condition emerges, one distinct from the "open,"

well-lit fields of Mies. In the OMA project - more a material

phase space than a field - dense "islands" of program are broken

by five diagonal "shortcuts" that operate as gradient edges

between the disparate activities and substances of the islands. In

fact, just as Koolhaas inscribed the skyscraper lessons identified

in Delirious New York in earlier OMA projects, the campus center

proposal experiments with the new paradigms introduced by the

space of shopping. The material phase space of the project might

be seen as a response to what Koolhaas has recently referred to as

"junk space," his description of which has multiple correlates to

the IIT proposal:

Junk space looks as if a hurricane has rearranged a previously

ordered condition, but that impression is misleading. It never

did achieve coherence, and it never aspired to it. . . . Junk

space: consider it as a site, a web site, designed or conceived

or assembled by Photoshop, with the same promiscuous ease

of collecting and accumulating desirable conditions, a field, a

trajectory that may start as web, turn horizontal without

warning, intersect, step down, suddenly confront an immense

void from a glass elevator, brutally shift to a seemingly

blocked perspective from which an escalator picks you up at

the last moment to drop you off at the monumental granite

staircase, that leads to a vista of sheetrock that hides the trea-

sures of an upgrade. In plan all episodes seem uncoordinated,

except for the needs of emergency evacuation. The presumption

of geometry is routinely deflected. In fact, survivals of former

geometries now create new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of

resistance that create unstable eddies of opportunistic flows

The ceiling, too, is like a folded, crumpled plate, agitated like

the Alps. Deep chasms between joints, former caverns of

asbestos, which, for all we know, may still be preserved, reveal

harsh beams and brute concrete in expectant ceiling voids that

represent undefined latencies

lence, not only perform their duties in terms of human flows,

they also connect strictly incompatible dei tinations

All surfaces are

ideological - i.e., a palimpsest of

uncounted periods

nate shag, marble, concrete,

rubber, tile, parquet,

travertine,

vinyl

After explo-

sions of trash,

suddenly the

luxury of a court.

. . .The only certainty

is conversion or upgrade

followed, in rare cases, by restora-

tion. ^

Junk space is the new species of minimum architecture; flexible

like its historical correlate, the Roman city, the neutrality of its

field exists as a perverse apotheosis of Miesian space. A contem-

porary response to alternate technologies and ecologies, junk

space is entropie space: the path of least resistance. The OMA pro-

ject thus actualizes a bizarre and virtual trajectory from Mies

through Superstudio to the mall - a continuous monument for

the slacker, a stockpile of opportunity. What was open (or at least

OMA's early elevated tube proposal.

2. From Koolhaas's keynote lecture for the "Learning from the Mall

of America" conference, 22 November 1997, held in Minneapolis.




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24.26

optically distant) in modernism, however, is here ahnost claustro-

phobic, thick, and viscous. Less optical than tactile, the IIT program

itself provides the terms for what Koolhaas has previously described

as the "perversion by proxy" conducted by the interior collabora-

tors of Mies. ^ In other words, against the virtuous, tectonic readings

of Mies, Koolhaas affirms that there has always been an almost kitsch

dimension to Mies - a material excess not simply located in the

chrome-plated columns and luxury marble, but in the delegated silk

and velvet of Lily Reich, the chain mail of Philip Johnson. Shopping -

perhaps almost decorating - meets modernism. As opposed to the reg-

ular uniformity of the grid, shopping entails a situational organization.

It is not simply concerned with smooth efficiency, but instead relies on

delay and drift - a "cooling down" of modernist efficiencies for the

sake of greater exchange; more a stochastic space, the simple ordering

(at once commercial and minimalist) of "one thing after the other."

In their own ways, both Koolhaas and Eisenman (mis) recognize

Mies s campus as a giant Carl Andre installation, less involved with

form or function than with the plasticity of potentially infinite

material arrangements. While Koolhaas loosens Mies s simple iden-

tifications with functionalism, Eisenman deflects Mies s exhaustion

by ideal forms (in this regard, it might be said that the former poses

an alternative to Jahn, and the latter to Sejima). Like Koolhaas,

Eisenman also invokes material, though in this case the materialist

("real") grid of IIT against the ideal Miesian grid. "Noise" (in the

form of decibel readings from the train) is then filtered through

these grids, producing a series of emergent landscape-field figures

that are suspended "between" the two grid systems, caught within

a thickened, underground network of structure and circulation.

Buried underground, the Eisenman scheme ducks the infrastruc-

tural requirement, preferring to insulate itself and i ts students from

the el noise, refusing to take the bullet for Mies s historic campus.

Moreover, it similarly refuses architecture's traditional identification

with the wall as vertical surface of arti culation in favor of a prolifer-

ation of backgrounds. Against the optical, gestalt model of architec-

ture and urbanism where figure-field relations are heightened and

articulated to the point where they become domesticated as figure-

ground balance, Eisenman experiments with field-field organiza-

tions which - like the "unmemorable" planning of Koolhaas -

reassert discourses once considered peripheral to architecture

proper (landscape, interiors, and infrastructure). Both projects dia-

gram and activate blind spots of modernism. These include not

only presumed oppositions between function and form but also

between practices understood as commercial and critical, the

dialectic Rowe specifically identified between Chicago and Mies, a

nationalist split of "economic speculation" (American) and "ideo-

logical critique" (European). These oppositions are simply no

longer tenable today: commerce can be critical, just as the critical

can become a marketable image.

Despite the apparent obviousness of the above observation, it

bears repeating, particularly as there are those who would today

simply invert Rowe s dichotomy. For some, America is now the last

refuge for criticism (and "form") while Europe is the new terrain

for a market-responsive practice (and "function"), and perhaps not

surprisingly (if ironically) these tendencies are located precisely

with the legacies of Eisenman and Koolhaas. In part, this attempt to

resurrect a late '90s version of the Whites-Grays debate (would it be

the Informais and the Performers? The Apples and the Oranges?) is

simply a marketing ploy that keeps others out of the game and

appears to be a useful way to make a name for oneself (as a critic as

well as an architect, for those who continue to insist on such distinc-

tions). There are those, for example, who consistently mistake what

Koolhaas says for what he does. This duplicity may be impossible to

avoid, of course, since, like any good magician, the trick is to keep

the audience (one's would-be follpwers or competitors) looking

3. Rem Koolhaas, "Ena/obling Architecture/' in

Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-

garde in America, ed. R.E. Soinol (New York:

Monacelli Press, 1997), 298: "From the 1930s,

when he began 'working' with Lily Reich, on, Mies

left the theatrical to others - perversion by proxy."




9/9

The entire architecture is supported by columns of 5.5 inches in

diameter that are placed on a grid of 20 feet by 20 feet.

Walking through this space gives the impression of strolling

within a forest.

24.27

somewhere else. Nonetheless, although he may talk about Jon Jerde,

Koolhaas secretly knows (and accepts) what all great chefs (and

designers) understand - that selling a billion hamburgers is simply

another Mc World. Despite the warnings of Le Corbusier, there are

still those with "eyes that do not see" who appear in unlikely places

and continue to overlook what Koolhaas s work actually does. For

instance, program in the IIT project is not understood as a set of sta-

tic requirements to be satisfied but as part of a "vast firmament of

statistics" in the sense Smithson described in his proposal for the air

terminal. Program as potential matter, not literally (thus not really a

functionalism), but simply stuff, quantifiable data to be organized

and manipulated.

Perhaps, as also indicated in the nature of this project, if "func-

tionalism" has been historically connected to the spaces of work -

the factory and the office - a new term will have to be invented

when the concern shifts to the spaces of shopping and consump-

tion. In any case, any invocation of functionalism in OMA's project

is not as a direct reflection of "reality," but activates both an histor-

ical aspect of discourse and a future context for the virtual. As

much as Corbusier is associated with a "classical" orientation to

geometry and the grid, for example, he also displays a statistical

orientation - thus, reflections on both geometry and density are

equally discursive or disciplinary agendas. Neither can be praised

or condemned for its presumed avoidance or capitulation to "reali-

ty." Koolhaas does not simply produce "junk space," but distills

principles by extracting a modernist lesson from the contemporary

mass cultural landscape - in this case concerning the utter fungi-

bility and plasticity of spatial, material, and behavioral relations. By

condensing and accelerating these traits a reinvigorated mod-

ernism may be produced, though one whose ultimate project

remains to wrest architecture from junk space (or cuisine from

junk food). Similarly, Eisenman s formal manipulations are equally

conditioned by, and capable of, market-oriented and political

effects. Despite the posturing by all concerned, Koolhaas and

Eisenman have much more in common than either the former has

with Jerde or Jacques Herzog or the latter has with Frank Gehry or

Richard Meier. As evidenced in the IIT competition, by operating

diagrammatically, by opening a territory for potentially new work

(i.e., by performing in the realm of the virtual), they continue to

advance an alternative mode of modernist repetition.

Repetition as a form of entropy suggests a transformation in

state - a transformation that strategies for preservation of the

Miesian legacy have been unable to achieve (e.g., through the tech-

nical conservation of energy located in new glazing systems or the

aesthetic maintenance of the orthogonal via a minimum geome-

try). In this way, it is that signal artist-critic of diagrams and matter,

Robert Smithson - along with his post-optical quest for a new

monumentality - who serves as the missing link between the pro-

gressive slackening of Mies (or "Mies made easy") found in both

Koolhaas s endless consumerism of the interior and Eisenman s

mineralogical noise in the landscape. As an initial maxim for repe-

tition as difference, entropy does IIT.

I wish to thank Donna Robertson, dean of the College of .Architecture at the Illinois

Institute of Technology, for generously providing materials on the competition and for

informative discussions held in transit at various airports throughout the country.

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