Architecture Theory Course Notes Univ of Auckland PDF

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING COURSE OUTLINE: ARCHHTC 236 / Semester 2, 2010
1.0 GENERAL COURSE INFORMATION 1.1 1.2 1.3 Course Title: HISTORY & THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM 2 Course Code ARCHTC 236 Staff: Tim Adams, Room 404, tim.adams@auckland.ac.nz.
2.0 TIMETABLE Tuesdays, 9 to 9.55 a.m. The Clock Tower/South Wing, Level 0, Room 039. Thursdays, 9 to 9.55 a.m. Architecture Building, Level 2, ALR1. 3.0 COURSE PRECRIPTION An introduction to architectural and urban theory with emphasis on significant developments in the modern and postmodern periods. Introduction to the contribution of architectural theory to an understanding of the phenomenon of architecture, of architectural design practice and of the problems that architecture and urbanism must solve in the early twenty-first century.
ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2
4.0 COURSE AIMS The aims of this course are to: Gain competence in the application of a body of knowledge in the areas of architecture and urbanism, including the ability to intelligently and critically use key concepts from these fields. To understanding and appreciate how these key concepts apply to, and have serious implications for, the current practice of architecture. To understand and appreciate the historical and philosophical origins of the concepts used, the research methodologies and qualities of good scholarship, and the need to make original contributions to the field. Be able to apply the ideas and concepts learned in the course to architectural projects currently undertaken by students in the studio and vice versa, to incorporate knowledge of practical architectural-design skills into the assignment set for this course. 5.0 LEARNING OUTCOMES On the successful completion of this course, students should be able to: Demonstrate a basic understanding of the key concepts of architectural history and theory. Be able to show they can intelligently and critically apply these concepts to new situations arising from contemporary architectural practice. Be able to understand historical-theoretical writings at a high level. Have learned to structure written arguments and critiques about architecture and urbanism that freely and intelligently draw on the concepts and critical arguments discussed and studied in the course. 6.0 TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS 6.1 Teaching Schedule Week 1 Tues 20/7 Introduction to the course. Posing the question what is architecture and urbanism? Thurs 22/7 Discussing the Assignment. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio: The Emergence of the Architect Leon Battista Alberti: The Inauguration of Architectural Theory. Filarete: The Third Architectural Theorist Three French Theorists: Claude Perrault, Marc-Antoine Laugier and Jean-Nicolas Durand. 2
Week 2 Tues 27/7 Thurs 29/7
Gottfried Semper: The Architect as Weaver Le Corbusier: The Most Influential Architect of the 20th Century. Sigfried Giedion: The Prophet of Modernism Martin Heidegger: On the Way to a Philosophy of Architecture. Charles Jencks: The Semiotician of Architecture and Theorist of Postmodernism Jacques Derrida: The Philosopher of Deconstruction.
Week 5 Tues 17/8 Thurs 19/8 Week 6 Tues 24/8 Thurs 26/8
MID SEMESTER BREAK Week 7 Tues 14/9 Thurs 16/9 Mark Wigley: Theorist of Deconstructivist Architecture Rem Koolhaas: Emergence of the Conceptual Persona in Architecture. Gilles Deleuze: The Philosopher of the Baroque Fold Peter Eisenman: The Theorist and Architect of Deleuzes Fold. Bart Lootsma: Architectural Theorist of the Diagram Ben van Berkel: Diagrammaniac Architect. Mark Goulthorpe: Non-Standard Architecture Albena Yaneva: Mapping Architectural Reality
Week 8 Tues 21/9 Thurs 23/9 Week 9 Tues 28/9 Thurs 30/9 Week 10 Tues 5/10 Thurs 7/10
Week 11 Tues 12/10 Current Theories of Architecture and Urbanism. Thurs 14/10 Conclusion. What did we learn? What are the implications for future design practice? 6.1 Consultations and Discussions Students can discuss any issues they may have concerning the course with the coordinator on Tuesdays between 2:00 and 5:00 pm in his office, Room 404, School of Architecture and Planning, or contact him at (09) 373 7599 ext. 89565 or email tim.adams@auckland.ac.nz.
7.0 ASSESSMENT 7.1 Method of Assessment Assessment is based on one written assignment. There are five options for the essay assignment from which students are to choose one option. These are given in the assignment handout included in the course notes. Assessment: Coursework Weighting: 100%. 7.2 Assignment Format and Assessment Criteria A 2500-3000 word essay, well-illustrated with captioned architectural images, presented on one-sided A4 sheets, bound together in the portrait orientation. Use the Chicago Referencing Style, see http://www.cite.auckland.ac.nz/ for guidelines. The assessment will be based on the intelligence and originality demonstrated in handling the chosen sources and materials as presented. The grading of work is based on the NICAI Grade Descriptors printed in the School Handbook. 7.3 Assignment Hand In The assignment should be placed with course cover sheet in the assignment box allocated to this course on level 4 not later than: 12:00 noon, Friday 29 October 8.0 LEARNING RESOURCES 8.1 Lecture Notes A complete set of course notes, one section for each lecture topic, covering the entire course will be handed out as a course reader during the first lecture. 8.2 Reading List Each section of the course notes finishes with a bibliography of the best available books for that topic. Further to this there are two books that cover the entire course available as desk copies at the Architecture Library: Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1994). Nesbitt, Kate (ed.). Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). 4
9.0 UNIVERSITY POLICIES AND GUIDELINES This course is based on the University Policies and Guidelines and further information is available in: - in the Studio and Design Guidelines - in the School of Architecture and Planning Handbooks - in the University of Auckland Calendar 9.1 Programme Handbook See the programme handbooks for information on the following: University Libraries Other Resources Plagiarism Referencing Methods Students must note the following warning that applies to all material provided for this course. This includes printed material and electronic material, and material posted on CECIL. If you are not sure about the requirements ask for clarification from the course coordinator. COPYRIGHT WARNING NOTICE This material is protected by copyright and has been copied by and solely for the educational purposes of the University under licence. You may not sell, alter or further reproduce or distribute any part of this course pack/material to any other person. Where provided to you in electronic format, you may only print from it for your own private study and research. Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement and/or disciplinary action by the University.
The Assignment
Method of Assessment Assessment is based on one written assignment. From the five essay options listed below students are to choose one option. Assignment Format and Assessment Criteria A 2500-3000 word essay, well-illustrated with captioned architectural images, presented on one-sided A4 sheets, bound together in the portrait orientation. Use the Chicago Referencing Style, see http://www.cite.auckland.ac.nz/ for guidelines. The assessment will be based on the intelligence and originality demonstrated in handling the chosen sources and materials as presented. The grading of work is based on the NICAI Grade Descriptors printed in the School Handbook. Assignment Hand In The assignment should be placed with course cover sheet in the assignment box allocated to this course on level 4 not later than: 12:00 noon, Friday 29 October Assignment Options (Choose One Only) Option 1 Choose any one of the architectural theorists discussed in the class and included in the course notes. Extend the research already begun in these notes. If they are still living then you will find your chosen theorist will have produced new writings in recent years. For earlier theorists new interpretations or new facts will change our 7
understanding of their writings. Address the question: do the concepts of your chosen theorist help us to better understand our own architectural projects and/or recent architecture in the world? Give and illustrate concrete architectural examples to prove your argument. You will need to read at least one of their books or essays in detail for yourself to arrive at your own conclusions. Option 2 The last theorist discussed in the course is the sociologist Albena Yaneva. Yaneva is currently revolutionizing architectural theory by shifting the focus of investigation away from cross-disciplinary contextualizing of architectural objects, i.e. putting architecture into the endlessly expanding realm of society and politics, towards simply observing what architects actually do in the mundane everyday world of the office. She calls this new kind of investigation an ethnography of design. Do your own ethnography of a real live architectural practice. You will have to spend at least one full day in an architects office (Yeneva spent two years with OMA in Rotterdam!) and show evidence that you did this by documenting your visit with photos and transcripts of interviews. In preparation for this you must read Yanevas book Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, available for reading as a Google Books, searchable at http://books.google.co.uk/books. Option 3 Recently Paul Walker from the University of Melbourne gave a lecture at Auckland University entitled Architectural History and Theory, Contexts and Agency, Now And Then. In this lecture Walker made the startling claim that history and theory will no longer form a research cluster for funding by the ERA (Excellence in Research Australia). History and theory is being replaced by interest in computers and sustainability, or so it seems. Perform an empirical investigation into this controversy. Are architectural schools in fact restructuring their programs away from history and theory courses? Can you verify this trend with data? Is there a decline in the quantity and quality of publishing in this area, or is it all a myth? Write an essay that defends history and theory in architectural education, grounded in a sound knowledge of the realities of todays architectural education and practice. Option 4 Mark Jarzombek, professor of history and theory at MIT, in his essay The state of theory (available for free download at http://web.mit.edu/mmj4/www/downloads/arch_prodrefl.pdf) observes that the current generation of architects are basically a-theoretical, postcritical and empty of all political agency. Critical, intelligent and politically-engaged architects now only exist at the margins of an architectural world dominated by starchitects and their submissive supporters. Visit these margins of architecture, go to these pockets of resistance where radical designers lie in wait for their moment to overturn our complacent capitalist and centrist world. Write a report on how these marginal architects live and work and what it would take for the situation to change so that 8
architecture would once again have a positive political and ethical role to play outside of the circuits of bourgeois consumption and mass spectacle. Option 5 In the first treatise on architecture written by the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, there are listed nine disciplines an architect needs to know; they should be able to write well, be skilled at drafting, be a mathematician, be familiar with current science, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, medicine, law and astronomy. This sounds like an impossible achievement for any one person but Vitruvius does not expect the architect to be able to perform surgery or play music like a professional, only they should know something of the theories of biology or music. Today access to knowledge bases of all disciplines is so fast and so open it is hard enough for anyone to know their own disciplines theories let alone nine of them, yet many architects still feel the need to cross disciplinary boundaries and create transdisciplinary knowledge. Choose an architect who obviously practices this transgressing of disciplines. For example, they may use environments to make musical sounds interactively with passers-by or apply a state-of-the-art knowledge about neuroscience to rewrite architectural history. Write an essay about transdiscipinary research in architecture using your chosen architect/theorist as a concrete example.
Good luck with your assignment. I hope that, among the five options offered, you will find one that you find interesting and a challenge well worth taking. It is not meant to be too difficult so if you are stuck please ask for advice.
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What is Architectural Theory?

Introduction to the Question
To ask the question: what is something is known in philosophy as an ontological question, from the Greek word ontos which means being. To ask what something is then is to ask what is its mode of existence. But since architecture is predominantly a practice wouldnt such questions be better left to those who are more qualified to answer them, philosophers for example? Architects being by necessity pragmatic people are more likely to ask what can we do with something? In other words what is theory good for? Then we can answer that concepts from the world of architectural theory are useful for explaining and defending our projects in the crit, and later on to clients, and ultimately to the public who will use the buildings that we design. Or we could simply say that theory is what architectural theorists do, they make up theories about architecture, and since each one has a different theory they each have a different definition of what theory is, so there is little point in giving one definitive answer. For some, theory will be a form of writing about the aesthetics of architecture, the perception of what makes a beautiful building, for others it will be the opening up of the imagination to future unseen possibilities of architecture and so on. But in the end it seems perfectly reasonable to expect some kind of definition of just what a subject is before you are asked to study it. So what follows is a very tentative and incomplete attempt to define architectural theory.
Reformulating the Question: What is Architecture?

Before we can say what architectural theory is we must define its two subcomponents, architecture and theory. First of all, what is architecture? A good place to start to formulate an answer to this would be to consult the dictionaries, encyclopaedias and general introductions to architecture. Here we find there are in general two ways of answering the question, one is by negation and the other is by intersection. 1 Either we define architecture by what it is not or we define it by intersecting other fields of endeavour. Firstly architecture is said to be not ordinary buildings but only particularly significant buildings, in other words cathedrals but not bike sheds. 2 Or it is the design of buildings but not the trades that actually construct the building. One term is described negatively by excluding another term. Alternatively architecture is said to be the art and science of building. That is the intersection of three things: art, science and building. That leads us to defining what
1 See the bibliography at the end of this section for some of the texts that were consulted before formulating these generalizations. 2 Most famously Nikolaus Pevsner in An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968) says that Lincoln Cathedral is architecture while a bicycle shed is only building.
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those three things are and then asking what would be their three-way intersection. Presumably that task is easier than defining the first term of architecture head on. Using Venn diagrams the two kinds of definitions would look like this:
Figure 1. Definition by negation.
Figure 2. Definition by intersection.
There is another way to represent architecture with Venn diagrams by modifying a diagram found in Giorgio Agambens book Homo Sacer, one that perhaps more accurately resembles a definition of current architecture. 3 In his book Agamben describes, how in the Western tradition, what starts out as the exception becomes included into the norm and is then made the rule. The homo sacer or sacred man of Roman law is at first totally separate from Roman law but becomes included through
3 See the original unmodified diagram in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 38.
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exclusion into law and finally becomes the rule. To apply this universal pattern to architecture, architecture is at first outside the everyday building of human dwellings, so for instance the term architecture is reserved for the monumental stone pyramids of Egypt but not the mud-brick housing of the Egyptian workers who built them. Then the definition of architecture is extended to include those dwellings as well. Finally what was the exception now becomes the rule. The relatively small production of architects now becomes the model for the entire human habitat. This pattern is repeated again and again until the entire planet and every human endeavour becomes subjected to architectural interpretation and inquiry. All is architecture.
Figure 3. Diagram of architecture after Agamben. Exclusion (left), inclusion by exclusion (centre) and the exception becomes the rule.
Another often used way of defining a term is to look at its etymology (historical origin in language). The word architecture comes from the Greek words arche meaning chief or beginning and tkton meaning builder or craftsman so an architkton was simply a master builder in ancient Greece. This was translated into Latin as architectus when this trade was elevated to an honourable profession that was then called architectura from which we get our word architecture. But staying with the most obvious definition, the one in the most respected dictionary of the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), architecture is the art and science of building. To define art and science seems even more daunting than defining architecture by itself, so for the sake of saving time, we will take the readymade definitions given in Deleuze and Guattaris book What is Philosophy? 4 Art is the erection of something that lasts, monuments, in order to make assemblages of bodily sensations endure, while science is the construction of states of affairs using mathematical functions and planes of reference. A building in simple terms is any
4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994).
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construction for habitation. 5 So architecture therefore is the study and the product of the monumentalising of artistic sensations combined with the measuring of scientific functions associated with constructions for habitation.
Reformulating the Question 2: What is Theory?

If we look up the OED we find two very different definitions for what theory is. Theory1 is what we normally mean by theory, a set of mental explanations, contemplations, generalisations, or merely an hypothesis, that accounts for a wide variety of known facts. In other words, a mental model used to explain the workings of a range of things in the physical world. But theory2 means, in Ancient Greece, a group of theors (official state witnesses) sent to observe a religious festival in a foreign land. This is the original meaning of the word that was taken up by Plato and Aristotle the fourth century BC in order to legitimate the new teaching profession of philosophy and it is from this that we take our word theory. 6 The Greek word thea means a view, a spectacle, so theoria means viewing a spectacle. Theoria in its social context was the entire journey to a foreign sanctuary and the return home to explain what had taken place. In Andrea Nightingales terms, the fourth-century philosophers turned this physical journey to a religious spectacle into a metaphysical quest for truth; they turned wandering into wondering and physical seeing into mental contemplation.7 Platos allegory of the cave shows just how this well-established cultural practice was used as a metaphor for the new discipline of philosophy. 8
Figure 4. Platos allegory of the cave, engraving by Jan Saenredam, 1604, Albertina, Vienna
5 See the later notes on Heidegger for the claim that we should never take building to be separate from the act of dwelling and the act of thinking. 6 See Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7 Ibid. pp. 3-5 8 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 2003), Book VII, pp. 240-248.
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In this story the philosopher leaves the community of people who do not realise that they are actually living in a cave and that everything they see is in fact shadows cast on the wall. The philosopher takes a trip (a theoria) outside the cave and sees the complete picture in the full light of day. When he returns to the cave to tell those who stayed what he saw the people in the cave think he is mad. In Platos account the philosopher possesses a divine perspective that is foreign to ordinary people, but because of this contemplative wisdom they will be better informed for practical and political action and rightfully take their place as a philosopher king, theory providing the only proper grounding for the political practice of governing the city. Aristotle also takes theory as the key metaphor for the new practice of philosophy but contrary to Plato he sees it as an end in itself. 9 Aristotle, trying to elevate the role of the philosopher, makes the highest goal for human beings the perfection of the intellect. All practical and political activities should ultimately serve this higher goal by creating enough wealth and leisure time for certain people to engage in such idle contemplation. Here at the very outset of the word theory being used in the modern sense of abstract contemplation we have the same dilemma that occurs today. How does theory relate to practice? And can we justify the existence of pure theory supported by other more productive activities as claimed by Aristotle, or should theory itself lead to practical applications as claimed by Plato?
Reformulating the Question 3: What is Architectural Theory?

Before attempting to extrapolate from what we have just discovered about the history and the meaning of the words architecture and theory, we will review two definitions from the prescribed texts for this course. In the introduction to the first text, Hanno-Walter Kruft attempts to define architectural theory, a subject on which he has just written over 700 pages! He observes that all architecture is based on some form of theory although these theories are not always written down nor even explained by architects because architects have no need to write down their thoughts before practicing architecture. But theorists of architecture do, so often the principles behind a building are extrapolated by others long after the building was completed. After considering the entire history of architectural theory, and no one knows this better than him, Kruft writes: Bearing all this in mind, we may now be in a position to offer a practical definition of our subject as follows: architectural theory comprises any written system of architecture, whether comprehensive or partial, that is based on aesthetic qualities. 10
9 Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth, p. 5. 10 Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1994), p. 15.
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Therefore Kruft sees architectural theory as being primarily the written description of what makes a beautiful building (the aesthetic qualities), abstracting universal harmonies from the chaos of our built environment.
Kate Nesbitt, the editor of the second prescribed text for this course sees things very differently from Kruft. In her introduction she defines architectural theory heuristically, that is by comparing and contrasting it to other similar kinds of activities. She compares architectural theory to architectural criticism and architectural history, the HTC (history, theory, criticism) of ARCHHTC in the course code for this paper.
Nesbitt defines architectural theory in the very first sentence of her introduction. Since this is the best definition available it will be quoted here at length.
Within the discipline of architecture, theory is a discourse that describes the practice and production of architecture and identifies challenges to it. Theory overlaps with but differs from architectural history, which is descriptive of past work, and from criticism, a narrow activity of judgment and interpretation of specific existing works relative to the critics or architects stated standards. Theory differs from these activities in that it poses alternative solutions based on observation of the current state of the discipline, or offers new thought paradigms for approaching the issues. Its speculative, anticipatory, and catalytic nature distinguishes theoretical activity from history and criticism. 11
Instead of Krufts written system based on aesthetic values we have the prescription of an anticipated future architecture that could emerge from todays architectural reality. Obviously that does imply a shift taking place in aesthetic values but here the emphasis is placed on changing architecture itself.
11 Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 16.
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Figure 5. Diagram after Nesbitt of the heuristic comparison of history, theory and criticism.
To Conclude with a Tentative Definition of Architectural Theory

Every practice has its own set of theories. For example a plumber carries a theory or knowledge of plumbing with them from job to job that is a set of invisible tools that exists alongside their physical tools like spanners and welders. These mental tools are passed on to them through long apprenticeship or else abstracted from their own experiences so that when they encounter a new job and a new set of problems they can apply the knowledge abstracted from the past to the new situation. It is the same with architecture. The only difference is that in architectural theory we are learning mental tools that have been abstracted from architectural practice over a period of 2000 years starting with Vitruvius. These mental tools are concepts that need to be light enough to be carried from job to job and flexible enough to be applied to a different situation. We must search through this vast toolbox of inherited concepts to find the ones that suit the specific tasks we want to perform or else invent new ones. Either theory makes our practice better or else it lies in wait for other practitioners to make good use of it in the future. Like the original theoria we must take the trip to a strange land and risk being treated as strangers when we return home. The alternative is that we just keep building according to the current practice of building and be blind to the potential for change that always exists whether we choose to recognise it or not. 17
Architecture is, in the most general terms, the art and science of building, and building is the construction for habitation. Theory is a set of conceptual tools used to explain the hidden workings behind a large range of phenomena. Architectural theory is the set of conceptual tools used to understand the current situation of the built habitat in order to expand its range of possible outcomes in the future. In this way architecture keeps changing in order to be of use to a constantly changing society.
Figure 6. The theory of plumbing and the theory of architecture. Both are knowledge bases abstracted from hard-earned experience, hours of learning and long apprenticeships, only with architecture we can access 2000 years of abstracted experience.
Bibliography
The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed., prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th ed. Chicago [Ill.]; (Sydney [N.S.W.]: Encyclopaedia Britannica, c2002). Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
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Ballantyne, Andrew (ed.) What is Architecture? (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994). Kruft, Hanno-Walter, A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1994). Nesbitt, Kate (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). Roberts, Gareth Edward. What is Architecture? (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1969). Shepheard, Paul. What is Architecture?: An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). Sturm der Ruhe: What is Architecture? edited by Architekturzentrum Wien (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 2001) Tim Adams June 2010
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Marcos Vitruvius Pollio 84 25 BC

The Emergence of the Architect
The Roman military engineer and architectural theorist, Marcos Vitruvius Pollio, or Vitruvius for short, is the earliest architectural theorist whose writing has been saved from the ravages of time. His treatise, De architectura libri decem (The Ten Books on Architecture, originally on ten scrolls), probably written between 33BC when Vitruvius retired and 25BC approximately when he died, while perhaps not the first treatise (a methodical study on a particular subject) on architecture Vitruvius himself gives credit to many now-lost Latin and Greek sources for his work in the introduction to Book 7 it is the first attempt to assemble all that was known about architecture at that time into an easily-digested package for a literary audience. In doing so Vitruvius was self-consciously lifting the status of architectural writing from mere guidebooks of interest only to tradesmen to an art that even the emperor of Rome himself would find worthy of reading: Vitruvius makes it clear from the start that he is addressing Caesar. 1 As The Ten Books is the oldest surviving work on architecture it has acquired a cult status in the history of architectural theory, and up until the 19th century it was the key reference for all architectural theorists and practitioners. Like all the texts from Classical Greek and Roman times we only have it today because it was saved in the libraries of monasteries during the middle ages (1000-1400AD), it re-emerged during the Italian Renaissance where it was fundamental in the rebirth of classical architecture.
1 By addressing the Emperor directly at the start of Book I Vitruvius is following the usual Roman practice known as auctoritas, a moral authority granted to the individual by mutual exchange with the Emperor. In exchange for the genuine and voluntary allegiance to the Emperor, Vitruvius would receive in return the authority to act on his own initiative. This was a key aspect of Augustus rule of Rome. See Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) pp. 10-20 and Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing on the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003) pp. 32-38.
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Figure 7. Vitruvius presenting De Architectura to Augustus, by Sebastian Le Clerc 1684, from Thomas Gordon Smiths Vitruvius on Archtitecture.
The Structure of the Ten Books on Architecture
Vitruvius ten books were originally contained in the form of ten scrolls. In the original Latin Vitruvius himself concludes the entire work by saying: In the nine earlier ones I have dealt with single topics and details so that the entire work contains all the branches of the whole body of architecture [corpus omnia architecturae] set forth in ten scrolls [volumina]. 2
2 Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), X.xvi.12. As more and more translations become available, each with their own page numbering, it is standard practice for classical texts to refer to book, chapter and paragraph numbers, so for example X.xvi.12 refers to the 12th paragraph of the 16th chapter of the 10th book of The Ten Books on Architecture which is p. 319 in the Morgan translation. The Latin words in square brackets follow words where I have slightly modified Morgans version to better conform to the original Latin version freely available on the internet. Morgan like most translators uses the term books where Vitruvius writes volumina. He leaves out Vitruviuss phrase whole body of architecture completely, a phrase often repeated in The Ten Books and a cornerstone in McEwens argument linking the body of architecture (corpus architecturae) to the body of the empire (corpus imperii).
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So as not to create unnecessary confusion we will continue the tradition of calling the scrolls books. Many commentators over the centuries have noticed that The Ten Books has an irregular and illogical structure, that Vitruvius fails in his aim to make a homogeneous body of knowledge about architecture, and that the fragmentary sources he pulls together remain fragmentary. Claudio Sgarbi sums this up best when he writes:
Despite Vitruviuss effort to organize the subject by using metaphors and models, despite the bipartite and tripartite division and hierarchies, we get an imperfect image of architecture points where the account breaks down moments of evident uneasiness caused by obscure terms subjects mentioned in passing but never dealt with properly suspended phrases of ideas that get lost in divagations; other digressions that seem to have no reason for existing. 3
And for this very reason Kruft in the recommended reading for this course is led to say, rather negatively, that the erratic terminology was in part due to Vitruvius misunderstanding and therefore bad translation of his Greek sources, and that the obscure passages in Vitruvius are responsible for all the obscurities that followed in the long history of architectural theory. 4 Regardless of our position on Vitruvius supposed failings as an architect, writer and architectural theorist, the best way to see the fragmentary and lop-sided structure of The Ten Books is in diagram form. The following diagram shows the basic underlying structure of De architectura libri decem by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.
3 Claudio Sgarbi, Rereading Vitruvio, Space & Society 14, n. 55 (July/September 1991), p. 74. 4 Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1994), p. 21. Note that Kruft is clearly revealing his bias towards modernism and its tendency towards unifying discourse here. This bias becomes even clearer when he shows his dislike of postmodernism and its heterogeneous little narratives at the end of his book. A more postmodern reading of Vitruvius, for example one that we find in Sgarbi, would not condemn Vitruvius for his lack of coherency but in fact rejoice in the fact that architecture cannot be unified into an grand narrative and therefore always leaves the door open for experimental minor literatures such as those of feminism, ecology, art and the outer regions of philosophy.
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Figure 8. Diagram of the subjects covered by The Ten Books, showing how they can be grouped into two and threes.
Notice how the work is structured by division into twos and threes, and how the first division into buildings, sundials and machines seems rather strange. Why are sundials and machines included at all, and then since they are included why are they given such a small amount of space? Notice also the inclusion of water, the topic of Book 8. This section seems to float free from the overall structure. But given what we now know about Roman architecture and engineering it makes perfect sense water was a primary concern of the Roman Empire and Vitruvius being a military engineer first under Julius Caesar and then under Octavian/Augustus would have had first-hand experience of the extensive aqueduct and road building projects going on throughout the newly formed empire. The Romans made the ample supply of water free to the inhabitants of their cities and the Caesars often built large heated-baths accessible to all, such as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Their roads and aqueducts were so well engineered that they can still be seen intact in many parts of Europe, for example the Pont du Gard viaduct in Nmes, France. That the science of sundials (early clocks based on the principle of mapping the moving shadow of the sun) and machines feature is not surprising given the need for Romans to regulate the labour of vast numbers of soldiers and slaves and to conquer foreign armies the machines include war machines such as the catapult and the siege tower during the period of their most rapid expansion under the emperor Augustus.
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The Vitruvian Concepts of Architecture

The most famous phrase from Vitruvius is that architecture is the combination of firmness, commodity and delight. 5 In Latin Vitruvius says firmitas, utilitas and venustas (I.iii.2, Morgan: p. 17). Morgan translates this as durability, convenience and beauty, Granger renders it strength, utility and grace, and with McEwen it is strength, use and beauty, but in more modern terms these can be considered as the division of architecture into the study of building structures, building economics and architectural theory or aesthetics. The architect must master all three aspects of design to be successful and acquire wealth and fame. Despite the fact that Vitruvius was an engineer, and a military one at that, his main interest in writing The Ten Books is clearly the aesthetic aspects and this leads some like Kruft in the introduction to his History of Architectural Theory to conclude that all architectural theory is, or at least should be, about aesthetics. 6 Vitruvius divides the aesthetic into a further six principles for which he sometimes provides Greek terms as well as his usual Latin ones, no doubt reflecting the vast amount of Greek treatises he claims to have combined to form this complete body of knowledge in his introduction to Book 7.
5 This is the most famous translation of the Latin words firmitas, utilitas and venustas and in fact originates from Sir Henry Wottons Elements of Architecture, 1624. Morgan translates these terms into the more contemporary sounding durability, convenience and beauty but this loses some of the poetry of Wottons better known terms. 6 The word aesthetics comes from the Greek aisthanomai: to perceive, hence aesthetics is the study of beauty. As we will discover with postmodernism the sublime (giving pleasure and pain simultaneously) rather than mere beauty (pure pleasure) becomes an aspect to be studied and furthermore economic and structural aspects are also now aspects considered well worth including in architectural theory.
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Figure 9. Diagram of the relationship of concepts used by Vitruvius, slightly modified by placing arrangement in a new category of design, with the aim of introducing a logical sequence that absent from The Ten Books.
The above diagram tries to make sense of this confusing accumulation of concepts at I.ii.1-8, many of which seem at first to be repetitive and therefore redundant. This supposed confusion has been seen by many to be due to the introduction of Greek terms that Vitruvius, so it is claimed, poorly understood, but if we extract arrangement (dispositio) from the list and put it in a separate category under the heading of design the list becomes more clearly logical. Order, eurythmy (what we would today call harmony) and symmetry, all fall under the category of proportion. Order is the principle to be followed, eurythmy/harmony is the effect this principle has on the beholder of the building, and symmetry is the result of the principle of order applied to the building. Another inconsistency frequently noticed by Vitruviuss readers is that economy (distributio) has two aspects, the first, the economic use of materials, should be placed in the category of commodity (utilitas) while only the second aspect, being appropriate to the standing of the client, is properly located by Vitruvius under delight (venustas). Finally a term that has caused much debate is the Latin term scaenographia, usually translated as perspective. Design, the arrangement of parts, is divided into ichnographia (plan), orthographia (elevation) and scaenographia (perspective?). This last term cannot be perspective because the science of perspective was first developed by Brunelleschi during the Renaissance so to translate it as perspective is anachronistic. It would be best to leave the term as scenography. This is less misleading but also more accurate if we think of the current meaning of scenography as the art of stage design, including how the actors interact with the set during a play. This is an often overlooked human aspect of design that Vitruvius, intentionally or not, brings to our attention with the word scaenographia/scenography. 26
The Interpretation of the Ten Books

Given the conceptual tools we have acquired over the course of history, it is possible to read Vitruvius project to assemble all the available knowledge about architecture as a thoroughly modern one. Just like Siegfried Giedion in his book Space, Time and Architecture, Vitruvius is attempting to make a unified view to be followed by all others, in a univocal (one voice) style. All heterogeneity is absorbed into a single grand narrative, a narrative that harmonises perfectly with the totalitarian aims of Emperor Augustus to whom the work is addressed and who was the first emperor of the expanding Roman Empire. The Ten Books primary intention according to this interpretation is normative follow these well-considered rules and become part of the glorious empire under the divine authority of Caesar. Romans loved laws and made sure they were strictly enforced, law breakers could find themselves being fed to the lions for the entertainment of the masses in the Coliseum! But as Vitruviuss intriguing early use at I.i.3 of the dualistic sign model of signifier (the sign, the word e.g. when I say or write dog) and the signified (the concept of dog, a small hairy animal kept as a pet) we can, given our contemporary understanding of postmodernism and its dependence on semiotics (the science of signs) determine a postmodern moment in Vitruvius. This may not necessarily be anachronistic given that Lyotard has taught us that postmodern beauty is in fact anterior, in other words comes before, the modernist sublime. This is confirmed by Vitruvius listing all the concepts of architecture under the heading of beauty (venustas). The architects main role according this interpretation is to give pleasure, to harmonise the faculties of conception and perception according to Kants definition of beauty. And we can see this reflected in Roman architecture itself. Their innovative use of the arch and cement was covered up with the display of Greek columns applied to the surface like a billboard, not unlike the work of postmodernists such as Venturi and his concept of the decorated shed. We could therefore describe Roman architecture as the decorated arch. Interestingly, Vitruvius makes no mention of Roman innovations and instead places the emphasis on Greek beauty confirming his postmodernism. Furthermore there is a deconstructive and diagrammatic aspect to The Ten Books. As Indra Kagis McEwen in her book Vitruvius: Writing on the Body of Architecture makes clear, The Ten Books is a diagram of the Empire. A complete body of architecture is a model of the totalitarian ambitions of Augustus and the Roman Empire. But as we have seen there are many irregularities in this completeness. The totality of The Ten Books self-destructs on closer inspection, there is much incompleteness within its completeness. This leaves the door open for minor narratives, and this is just what we find in the 2000 years of the history of architectural theory. Right up to our day, people have been filling the gaps left open by Vitruvius. Hence Vitruvius deconstruction, whether intentional or not, of the totality of architecture. 27
The Enunciation of Architecture

Vitruvius by enunciating architecture, making it speak, for the first time, is calling it into presence by circumscribing it, and thus also enunciates the architect for the first time. In other words, he gives birth to the concept of an architect (Architectus in Latin as opposed to the Greek Architkton), as someone who studies the nine disciplines and projects human attributes onto the building. Simultaneous with the emergence of the persona of the architect, Vitruvius brings forth the architect as the maker of concepts, the conceptual persona, the treatise writer that he himself is, in his body and in his practice, the first. The following sample document consists of the passages from Vitruvius first book that were used to generate the 3 diagrams above. Here Vitruvius outlines what he thinks an architect should know, and then what he thinks are the key concepts of architecture, the fundamental principles and the departments of architecture. Here we can witness for ourselves the first emergence of the famous Vitruvian man, the polymath with an encyclopaedic knowledge of various disciplines, a model for the later Renaissance man embodied in such multi-talented artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Alberti. William MacDonald in The Architecture of the Roman Empire says that this ideal of multi-disciplinary learning was not unrealistic, that the architects of Vitruvius day did indeed possess such wide learning. But it must be kept in mind that libraries were much smaller in classical times. One could for example acquire all the current knowledge of medicine by simply reading the works of Galen. That is not possible today with thousands of medical researchers around the world everyday making additions to the collective knowledge of medicine. And the same goes for all the other increasingly specialized branches of todays evermore fragmented disciplines.
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The Ten Books on Architecture7

By Marcos Vitruvius Pollio
(Excerpt)
Book I Chapter I: The Education of the Architect

1. The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. Practice is the continuous and regular exercise of employment where manual work is done with any necessary material according to the design of a drawing. Theory, on the other hand, is the ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion. 2. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance: But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them. 3. In all matters, but particularly in architecture, there are these two points: the thing signified [qoud significatur], and that which gives it its significance [quod significant]. That which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking; and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles. It appears, then, that one who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions. He ought, therefore, to be both naturally gifted and amenable to instruction. Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist. Let him be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.
7 Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), pp. 5-17. I have added the original Latin in square brackets for terms I want to draw attention to. Multiple full stops indicate an ellipsis, where I have left out text to save space.
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4. The reasons for all this are as follows. An architect ought to be an educated man so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises. Secondly, he must have a knowledge of drawing so that he can readily make sketches to show the appearance of the work which he proposes. Geometry, also, is of much assistance in architecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics, again, the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. It is true that it is by arithmetic that the total cost of buildings is calculated and measurements are computed, but difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of geometrical theories and methods. 5. A wide knowledge of history is requisite because, among the ornamental parts of an architects design for a work, there are many the underlying idea of whose employment he should be able to explain to inquirers. 7. As for philosophy, it makes an architect high-minded and not self- assuming, but rather renders him courteous, just, and honest without avariciousness. This is very important, for no work can be rightly done without honesty and incorruptibility. Let him not be grasping nor have his mind preoccupied with the idea of receiving perquisites, but let him with dignity keep up his position by cherishing a good reputation. These are among the precepts of philosophy. 8. Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpions to the proper key. 10. The architect should also have a knowledge of the study of medicine on account of the questions of climates (in Greek klimata), air, the healthiness and unhealthiness of sites, and the use of different waters. For without these considerations, the healthiness of a dwelling cannot be assured. And as for principles of law, he should know those which are necessary in the case of buildings having party walls, with regard to water dripping from the eaves, and also the laws about drains, windows, and water supply. From astronomy we find the east, west, south, and north, as well as the theory of the heavens, the equinox, solstice, and courses of the stars. If one has no knowledge of these matters, he will not be able to have any comprehension of the theory of sundials. 11. Consequently, since this study is so vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture. 30
12. This is what led one of the ancient architects, Pytheos, the celebrated builder of the temple of Minerva at Priene, to say in his Commentaries that an architect ought to be able to accomplish much more in all the arts and sciences than the men who, by their own particular kinds of work and the practice of it, have brought each a single subject to the highest perfection. But this is in point of fact not realized. 15. It appears, then, that Pytheos made a mistake by not observing that the arts are each composed of two things, the actual work and the theory of it. One of these, the doing of the work, is [proper to men trained in the individual subject, while the other, the theory, is common to all scholars: for example, to physicians and musicians the rhythmical beat of the pulse and its metrical movement.
Chapter II: The Fundamental Principles of Architecture

1. Architecture depends on Order (in Greek taxis), Arrangement (in Greek diathesis), Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety, and Economy (in Greek oikonomia). 2. Order gives due measure to the members of a work considered separately, and symmetrical agreement to the proportions of the whole. It is an adjustment according to quantity (in Greek posotes). Arrangement includes the putting of things in their proper places and the elegance of effect which is due to adjustments appropriate to the character of the work. Its forms of expression (in Greek ideai) are these: groundplan [ichnographia], elevation [orthographia], and perspective [scaenographia]. A groundplan is made by the proper successive use of compasses and rule, through which we get outlines for the plane surfaces of buildings. An elevation is a picture of the front of a building, set upright and properly drawn in the proportions of the contemplated work. Perspective is the method of sketching a front with the sides withdrawing into the background, the lines all meeting in the centre of a circle. All three come of reflexion [cogitatio] and invention [inventio]. Reflexion is careful and laborious thought, and watchful attention directed to the agreeable effect of one's plan. Invention, on the other hand, is the solving of intricate problems and the dicovery of new principles by means of brilliancy and versatility. These are the departments belonging under Arrangement. 3. Eurythmy is beauty and fitness in the adjustments of the members. This is found when the members of a work are of a height suited to their breadth, of a breadth suited to their length, and, in a word, when they all correspond symmetrically. 4. Symmetry is a proper agreement between the members of the work itself, and relation between the different parts and the whole general scheme, in accordance with a certain part selected as standard. Thus in the human body there is a kind of symmetrical harmony between forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small parts; and so it is with perfect buildings. 31
5. Propriety is that perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles. It arises from prescription (Greek thematismon), from usage, or from nature. 6. Propriety arises from usage when buildings having magnificent interiors are provided with elegant entrance-courts to correspond; for there will no propriety in the spectacle of an elegant interior approached by a low, mean entrance. 7. Finally, propriety will be due to natural causes if, for example, in the case of all sacred precincts we select very healthy neighbourhoods with suitable springs of water in the places where the fanes are to be built, particularly in the case of those to Aesculapius and to Health, gods by whose healing powers great numbers of the sick are apparently cured. 8. Economy denotes the proper management of materials and of site, as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense in the construction of works. This will be observed if, in the first place, the architect does not demand things which cannot be found or made ready without great expense. 9. A second stage in Economy is reached when we have to plan the different kinds of dwellings suitable for ordinary householders, for great wealth, or for the high position of the statesman. A house in town obviously calls for one form of construction; that into which stream the products of country estates requires another; this will not be the same in the case of money-lenders and still different for the opulent and luxurious; for the powers under whose deliberations the commonwealth is guided dwellings are to be provided according to their special needs: and, in a word, the proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.
Chapter III: The Departments of Architecture

1. There are three departments of architecture: the art of building, the making of time-pieces, and the construction of machinery. Building is, in its turn, divided into two parts, of which the first is the construction of fortified towns and of works for general use in public places, and the second is the putting up of structures for private individuals. There are three classes of public buildings: the fist for defensive, the second for religious, and the third for utilitarian purposes. Under defence comes the planning of walls, towers, and gates, permanent devices for resistance against hostile attacks; under religion, the erection of fanes and temples to the immortal gods; under utility, the provision of meeting places for public use, such as harbours, markets, colonnades, baths, theatres, promenades, and all other similar arrangements in public places.
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2. All these must be built with due reference to durability [firmitas], convenience [utilitas], and beauty [venustas]. Durability will be assured when foundations are carried down to the solid ground and materials wisely and liberally selected; convenience, when the arrangement of the apartments is faultless and presents no hindrance to use, and when each class of building is assigned to its suitable and appropriate exposure; and beauty, when the appearance of the work is pleasing and in good taste, and when its members are in due proportion according to correct principles of symmetry.
Conclusion
The question remains, why learn about Vitruvius today, or in fact any other historical theorist? Shouldnt we just keep to current theories that have proven themselves relevant to the types of problems we face today? Perhaps the teacher has, for unknown reasons, researched this topic and therefore just wants to get it off his chest! One reason to learn about Vitruvius might be cultural. Gary Stevens in his provocative analysis of the sociology of the architectural profession reveals that there are two kinds of architects, those who seek financial rewards and those who seek cultural capital. 8 The first group do most of the work but get almost no recognition for it, while the latter group build very little and are world famous. By casually dropping firmitas, utilitas, and venustas into your conversations you are showing that you belong to the latter group. But there might be a deeper, more structural, and less cynical reason to learn Vitruvius. Almost any analysis of architecture invariably ends up repeating, in one form or another, the Vitruvian triad of firmness (structure, construction, science), commodity (function, utility, comfort, space), and delight (aesthetics, beauty, art). Perhaps, just as every super power takes on attributes of the Roman Empire, including its love of pageantry and the murder of foreign nationals and dissenters, so too does the monumental impulse to build something permanent take on aspects of Roman engineering. And the best concepts to understand this monumental impulse are the ones generated at the beginning of the Roman Empire, when these impulses where fresh and therefore more clearly defined. Regardless of the reason, whether cultural or structural, Vitruvian concepts do have practical uses for todays architects. At the very least, you will no longer need to feel inferior the next time someone says, just like Vitruvius. There is in fact, besides the on-going antiquarian interest in Vitruvius among classical scholars, some interest in Vitruvius for what his concepts could possibly contribute to contemporary architectural practice. The French architect Bernard Cache who is at the cutting edge of applying new computer-controlled manufacturing techniques to architecture, and who is currently teaching at the Berlage Institute in the
8 Garry Stevens, The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998).
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Netherlands, is now writing a PhD on Vitruvius called Transposition: From Vitruvius to Semper and Nowadays. 9 As Caches research demonstrates, Vitruvius interest in machines (Book 10 of The Ten Books is dedicated to machines) and his suggestion that architects should be familiar with the theory, if not the actual practice, of many different disciplines has more relevance today than ever before. Today there is a clear need for cross-disciplinary research and to keep up with advances in the machine fabrication of architectural components and here the concepts of Vitruvius still have a role to play.
Annotated Bibliography
Cache, Bernard. Sollertiae ac rationis pro portione, Hunch: The Berlage Institute Report: 9 (Summer 2005), pp. 56 65. The leading architect of the numerical control of architectural fabrication shows how relevant the concepts of Vitruvius can be for todays architecture. Galinsky, Karl. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Combines a knowledge of Roman history, art and literature and makes auctoritas (authority) the key concept for understanding this period. Geertman, H. and J. J. de Jong, (eds.). Munus non ingratum: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Vitruvius De Architectura and the Hellenistic and Republican Architecture, Leiden, 2023 January 1987 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989). A sampling of the rich tradition of Vitruvius scholarship that takes place mainly outside of England and America. MacDonald, William L. The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Volume 1: An Introductory Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Probably the most thorough source for putting Vitruvius into context. Chapter 6 reviews everything that is known about actual architects practicing during the Roman period. McEwen, Indra Kagis. Vitruvius: Writing on the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003). This first book in English on Vitruvius since McKays small book from 1978. Incredibly well-researched argument for Vitruvius being a tool for the expansion of the Roman Empire. The emergence of architecture as a discipline is at the same time the imperial project of turning the world into a state-run and state-controlled body, making Vitruvius very relevant to our own time.
9 A small preview of this PhD has been published as: Bernard Cache, Sollertiae ac rationis pro portione, Hunch: The Berlage Institute Report: 9 (Summer 2005), pp. 56 65.
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McKay, Alexander. Vitruvius, Architect and Engineer: Buildings and Building Techniques in Augustan Rome (Exeter, Short Run Press, 1978). A very useful introduction to the practical aspects of Vitruvius career as an engineer and an architect. Sgarbi, Claudio, Rereading Vitruvio, Space & Society 14, n. 55 (July/September 1991), pp. 68- 75. A short but profound essay that analyses the breakdown of double and triple divisions of The Ten Books showing (contra Indra McEwen) that it does not form a unified body but in fact shows the inevitable contradictions that arise when trying to unify architecture and, by implication, which also arise when architecture tries to unify itself with the state. Stevens, Garry, The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998). Stevens imports the concepts of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to make a very provocative and stimulating analysis of how architecture functions to maintain a privileged few in the role of recognised creators of architecture. Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960). This is the most available version, first issued in 1914. It tends to reduce the original Latin for the sake of readability but this does make it easier and, for better or for worse, this has become the standard version. Vitruvius Pollio, Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland, commentary and illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe with additional material by Ingrid D. Rowland and Michael J. Dewar (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Misleading in that it goes against the inherited translation of terms, so for example Orders (genera in Latin) is translated as type, thus connecting it to the later theories of typology. Vitruvius Pollio, Vitruvius on Architecture, trans. Thomas Gordon Smith. (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003). Includes only the five books most relevant to architecture but has new drawings and watercolours by Smith that illustrate Vitruvis's concepts of proportion and composition. Vitruvius Pollio, Vitruvius: On Architecture, Books I-V (Loeb Classical, No 251) and Vitruvius: On Architecture, Books VI-X (Loeb Classical, No 280) trans. Frank Granger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) Originally issued in 1931, includes the both Latin and English versions. This is the most authoritative version. Tim Adams June 2010 35
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Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

The Inauguration of Architectural Theory
Who was Alberti?
The Italian humanist, writer, painter, sculptor, architect, mathematician, art and architectural theorist, was the uomo universalis (universal man) of the early Italian Renaissance, a man of rare brilliance, acute judgement, and extensive learning there was no field of knowledge however remote, no discipline however arcane, that escaped his attention. 1 His treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books) was the first since Vitruviuss Ten Books was written 1500 years earlier, making it the second ever treatise written on architecture. Kruft describes it as perhaps the most significant contribution ever made to the literature of architecture (A History of Architectural Theory, p. 49). Franoise Choay in her award winning book, The Rule and the Model, describes Albertis On the Art of Building as the inaugural moment of architecture, the position usually accorded to Vitruvius work. What is more, a pattern that is emerging in this course, this great thinker was also a great doer; his buildings are universally admired and have inspired generations of architects. An aspect of Albertis output that is often overlooked today because in our period of increasing specialization we have come to expect that being highly regarded as a writer and having studied many disciplines is incompatible with being a practicing architect.
Figure 10. Two churches by Alberti, Santa Maria Novella in Florence, 1458-71 (left) and Sant' Andrea in Mantua, 1472-94.
1 Angelo Poliziano, a contemporary of Albertis, quoted in Robert Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. ix.
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The Structure of On the Art of Building
Figure 11. Diagram of Albertis On the Art of Building after Choay (1997) p. 287.
In the above diagram Franoise Choay shows the emergence of On the Art of Building as an inverted pyramid growing in space (the horizontal axis) as the reader progresses through the book in time (the vertical axis). The categories of necessity (nesessitas), commodity (commoditas), and aesthetic pleasure (voluptus) are obviously taken from the well known Vitruvian triad of firmitas/firmness (becoming in Alberti necessity), utilitas/commodity, and venustas/delight (pleasure in Alberti). The prologue is shown as a miniature pyramid announcing the larger one to come like foundations laid out for a building. The more the reader reads, the more architecture gets built, eventually reaching a stage where repairs are required. Significantly since this course places the emphasis on the emergence of the architect theorist in history and in the individual living thinking subject Alberti enunciates (gives voice to architect as a dignified and honourable category of person) at the very moment he switches from the third person (we) to the first person (I) in the first paragraph of the Prologue. So he starts out by saying we are forced to practice some of these arts by necessity and then he switches to, Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and how to realize by construction [and] to do this he must have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines. 2 Choay says that it is here that the books essential tone is established. The emergence of the imperious I which is reason incarnate, the embodiment of honour and dignity that
2 Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 3.
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will then cast its power to do good and create lasting beauty over the humble trade of carpentry which is but an instrument in the hands of the architect. 3 What identifies the architect then is their knowledge of the highest disciplines but also the fact that the architect is both enunciated (called forth) and enunciating (calling forth): both reader and writer of architectural treatises, thus assuming the power to write Architectum ego constituam (him I consider the architect).
Albertis Concepts of Architecture
Figure 12 Diagram of Albertis six elements of architecture represented as linear journey from the largest scale of region to the smallest scale of openings and other fittings.
In the first book titled Lineaments (mental form, schematic outline) of Alberts On the Art of Building he outlines his six elements of architecture. They are, with Albertis Latin in brackets: 1. Region (regio) 2. Site (area) 3. Divison of spaces/planning/compartition (partitio) 4. Walls (paries) 5. Roofing (tectum) 6. Openings (apertio) These are quite reasonable categories rationally ordered from the largest to the smallest. For example, you have a commission or a studio project to do. You head out
3 Ibid.
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to the site, you notice the character of the region thinking what would be contextual for a building in this location and eventually you get to the site. You measure it, you take note of the topography and the views, and that night you sit down and draw a plan of the required spaces, how they are divided and how they relate to each other. Later you thicken the lines and they become the walls. You now pay attention to the roof and finally the openings, the doors and windows and other important details. Albertis declared aim in writing On the Art of Building was to replace Vitruviuss Ten Books, not simply by cleaning it up and removing any confusing terminology or by simply translating it into his native Italian. His aim, and the aim of the Italian Renaissance in general, was something much more creative. Alberti wanted to do what Vitruvius had intended to do but lacked the necessary skills to bring it off, so Alberti, immersed in Latin scholarship, would write a treatise in Latin, just like an ideal Ancient Roman might have written, given enough time and learning. The aweinspiring creativity of the Italian Renaissance is due to this fact: they did not so much as slavishly copy the ancients as try to do what they considered the ancients had been trying to do but lacked the means.
Albertis Modification of the Vitruvian Triad
Figure 13. List of the key concepts of Vitruvius and Albert compared, showing Albertis modification of firmitas into dignitas.
When in section 9 of book 1 (p. 23 of the Rykwert translation, see the extract below) Alberti makes use of the famous Vitruvian triad of what a building requires, that is firmitas (firmness, structure), utilitas (commodity, economy) and venustas (delight, aesthetics), he uses instead the terms dignitas (dignity), utilitas (utility) and amoenitas (delight, amenity). The meanings of amoenitas and venustas are similar, both having to do with beauty, but dignitas (dignity) is something new. John Onians makes a convincing argument for Albertis source of this term being the highly respected Roman writer Cicero. Cicero writes The object of a house is to be useful and the design should be made with that goal in mind, but at the same time attention
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should be given to comfort and dignity. 4 By using Cicero, a source available to Vitruvius, Alberti applies moral writing to architecture and in so doing raises the dignity (the gravity, the seriousness) of the architect to that of a man of letters, a project recommended but not fully carried out by Vitruvius. In so doing Alberti tries also to raise the dignity of the entire profession of architecture. This new Ciceronian emphasis on dignity also helps to explain Albertis famous analogy between the house (private, individual dwelling) and the state (public space of the city, the government). He reverses the usual analogy of the city being a large house with functionally specialized zones, the suburbs being like the bedrooms, the university like the study and so on, so that now the house itself takes on the importance usually reserved for the city. The planning of rooms is now as important as the planning of a city and architecture takes on the dignity of the city-state, and the architect now has the importance of a statesman. Because we decorate our house as much to adorn our fatherland and family as for the sake of elegance, says Cicero/Alberti, who will deny that such activity is the duty of a good man?5 In the following sample document we see Alberti discussing the third, and for him the most important, element of architecture, patitio: the planning and relationship of parts, or compartition in the Rykwerts awkward sounding translation of the term. This sample also includes his modification of the Vitruvian triad and his famous house-state analogy.
4 Ciceros De officiis, I, 39 quoted in John Onians, Alberti and Filarete: A Study of Their Sources, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes: 34 (1971), p. 100. 5 Ibid.
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Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1

Book 1: Lineaments Section 9
All the power of invention, all the skill and experience in the art of building, are called upon in compartition; 2 compartition [partitio] alone divides up the whole building into the parts by which it is articulated, and integrates its every part by composing all the lines and angles into a single, harmonious work that respects utility, dignity, and delight. 3 If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the house is in turn like some small city, 4 cannot the various parts of the house atria, xysti, 5 dining rooms, porticoes, and so on-be considered miniature buildings? Could anything be omitted from any of these, through inattention and neglect, without detracting from the dignity and worth of the work? The greatest care and attention, then, should be paid to studying these elements, which contribute to the whole work, so as to ensure that even the most insignificant parts appear to have been formed according to the rules of art. To achieve this properly, all that has been said above about the locality and the area is highly relevant: just as with animals members relate to members, so too in buildings part ought to relate to part; from which arose the saying, Large buildings should have large members. This was a principle followed by the ancients, who would give everything, including bricks, a larger scale in grand, public buildings than in private ones. Each member should therefore be in the correct zone and position; it should be no larger than utility requires, no smaller than dignity demands, nor should it be strange and unsuitable, but right and proper, so that none could be better; 6 the most noble part of the house, for example, should not be left in some forgotten corner, nor should the most public be hidden away, nor anything private exposed to view. Account should also be taken of the seasons, so that rooms intended for summer use should not be the same as those intended for use in winter, in that they should have different sizes and locations; summer rooms should be more open, nor is it amiss if winter ones are more closed in; summer ones require shade and draught, while winter
1 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), pp. 23 24, 421 and 426 427. 2 Compartmentalization provides the closest translation of Albertis partitio. However, Leonis compartition, though obscure, is perhaps more convenient, but see glossary: Compartition. 3 See glossary, Vitruvian triad. 4 For the influence of this concept, see Wittkower, Architectural Principles, p. 67. 5 Although Vitruvius provides an accurate description of a xystus (5.11.4), its precise meaning in Albertis time was probably somewhat vague; Flavio Biondo, for example, comments, There were also curved xysti in the guise of a half circle, with other members of diverse Greek names, which the Greeks today, however, do not know how to interpret. F. Biondo, Roma Trionfante, trans. L. Fauno, Venice, 1544, pp. 332ff. 6 An opinion shared by Vitruvius (2.3.3). and mentioned elsewhere by Alberti (6.10).
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ones need sunlight. Care must be taken to prevent the inhabitants moving from a cold place to a hot one, without passing through some intermediate zone, or from a warm place to one exposed to the cold and the wind. This can be very detrimental to the bodys health. 7 The parts ought to be so composed that their overall harmony contributes to the honor and grace of the whole work, and that effort is not expended in adorning one part at the expense of all the rest, but that the harmony is such that the building appears a single, integral; and well-composed body, rather than a collection of extraneous and unrelated parts. Moreover, in fashioning the members, the moderation shown by nature ought to be followed; and here, as elsewhere, we should not so much praise sobriety as condemn unruly passion for building: each part should be appropriate, and suit its purpose. For every aspect of building, if you think of it rightly, is born of necessity, nourished by convenience, dignified by use; and only in the end is pleasure provided for, while pleasure itself never fails to shun every excess. Let the building then be such that its members want no more than they already have, and what they have can in no way be faulted. Then again, I would not wish all the members to have the same shape and size, so that there is no difference between them: it will be agreeable to make some parts large, and good to have some small, while some are valuable for their very mediocrity. It will be equally pleasing to have some members defined by straight lines, others by curved ones, and still others by a combination of the two, provided, of course, that the advice on which I insist is obeyed, and the mistake is avoided of making the building appear like some monster with uneven shoulders and sides. Variety is always a most pleasing spice, where distant objects agree and conform with one another; but when it causes discord and difference between them, it is extremely disagreeable. Just as in music, where deep voices answer high ones, and intermediate ones are pitched between them, so they ring out in harmony, a wonderfully sonorous balance of proportions results, which increases the pleasure of the audience and captivates them; so it happens in everything else that serves to enchant and move the mind. 8 This whole process should respect the demands of use and convenience, and follow the methods sanctioned by those who are experienced: to contravene established customs often detracts from the general elegance, while conforming to them is considered advantageous and leads to the best results. Although other famous architects seem to recommend by their work either the Doric, or the Ionic, or the Corinthian, or the Tuscan division as being the most convenient, there is no reason why we should follow their design in our work, as though legally obliged; but rather, inspired by their example, we should strive to produce our own inventions, to rival, or, if possible, to surpass the glory of theirs. 9 We will deal with these matters, however,
7 Cf. Hippocrates, Air, Waters, Places 11. 8 See glossary: Variety. 9 This is a good example of Albertis nondogmatic stance in relation to the classical canons of architecture.
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more thoroughly in the appropriate place, when we consider how the city, the members of the city, and their respective services ought to be disposed.
Three Excerpts from the Glossary, pp. 420 428.

1. Compartition (partitio)
Alberti defines this term quite clearly in 1.2.8: Compartition is the process of dividing up the site into yet smaller units, so that the building may be considered as being made up of close-fitting smaller buildings, joined together like members of the whole body. A morphological analogy appears again in 7.5.199, after Vitruvius 3.1.1 and 9: What is more, just as the head, foot, and indeed any member must correspond to each other and to all the rest of the body in an animal, so in a building, and especially a temple, the parts of the whole body must be so composed that they all correspond one to another, and any one, taken individually, may provide the dimensions of all the rest. Alberti devotes book I, chapter 9 (1.9.23-24), to compartition: All the power of invention, all the skill and experience in the art of building, are called upon in compartition; compartition alone divides up the whole building into the parts by which it is articulated, and integrates its every part by composing all the lines and angles into a single, harmonious work that respects utility, dignity, and delight (see also Vitruvian triad). Alberti continues with the well-known city-house/house-city analogy.
2. Variety (varietas)
Variety is an extension of ornament and one of the visual highlights of a building. It is clear from the following extracts that, as much as any of the main principles that Alberti followed in his architectural theory, even variety needed careful consideration in a design (2.1.35). I mean that certain variety possessed by both angles and lines, as well as by individual parts, which is neither too much nor too little, but so disposed in terms of use and grace, that whole may correspond to whole, and equal to equal (1.8.20). Variety is always a most pleasing spice, where distant objects agree and conform with one another; but when it causes discord and difference between them, it is extremely disagreeable (1.9.24) . Cicero follows Platos teaching, and holds that citizens should be compelled by law to reject any variety and frivolity in the ornament of their temples, and to value purity above all else. Let us have, he added, some dignity for all that (7.10.220).
3. Vitruvian triad: firmitas, utilitas, venustas

This is familiar to many English readers in the form in which it is given by Sir Henry Wotton, after Vitruvius, in his Elements of Architecture of 1624: Well building has three conditions, Commodity, Firmnesse and Delight. Without specific reference to Vitruvius (1.3.2), Alberti refers to (1.2.9) three [characteristics of building] that should never be overlooked. Their individual parts should be well suited to the task 44
for which they were designed and, above all, should be very commodious; as regards strength and endurance, they should be sound, firm, and quite permanent; yet in terms of grace and elegance, they should be groomed, ordered, garlanded, as it were, in their every part. Here he uses the terms commoda . . .firmitatem. . .gratiam et amoenitatem; elsewhere (1.9.23), utilitatis, dignitatis, amoenitatisque. In book 7 this concept of building is allied to compartition (7.1.189): We shall now describe compartition, which contributes more to the delight and splendor of a building than to its utility and strength; although these qualities are so closely related that if one is found wanting in anything, the rest will not meet with approval. (See also Compartition).
Conclusion: The Deconstruction of Alberti

Albertis treatise, The Art of Building in Ten Books, being the inauguration of architecture as a subject worthy of serious and dignified study, is naturally also the target of many critiques of architecture. For example Franoise Choay in The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism sees Albertis treatise as being, along with Thomas Mores Utopia, the instaurational text of architecture. It is, Choay explains, structured by a meta-mythic figure (the newly dignified architecthero) who in an act of transgression (crossing over from literary endeavour to the act of building) liberates the art of architecture. But this transgressive/enunciative act also leaves the disciplines of architecture and urbanism exposed and unstable, thus requiring endless new transgressions to sustain them. Architects and urbanists then become entangled in scientism (mimicking the appearance of science without actually doing any real scientific research) in the vein attempt to shore up their inherently unstable professions. All this is inaugurated by Alberti. In a similar vein Mark Wigley attacks Alberti for making architecture complicit with patriarchy (male dominance). Women are confined to the home while men are free to travel. Architecture has a role in controlling womens sexuality, the chastity of young girls and the wifes fidelity to her husband, by confining them to private quarters. 10 The wild potential of women is thus domesticated by the house10 There is a leading French philosopher, a champion of many feminists although she dislikes the label leading feminist philosopher, who totally contradicts Wigleys feminist critique of Albertis theories. Luce Irigaray, like Alberti, believes that women should in fact have their own small apartments within the house where they will find the solitude needed to become who they really are outside the roles established for them by men. Irigaray says the infantile obligation to share the same spaces, the same bedroom, which Wigley in deed advocates, has wrecked many loving relationships that could have flourished if the individuals had their own spaces in which to cultivate their singular differences. See Luce Irigaray, How Can We Live Together in a Lasting Way? in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004) pp. 123 133.
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surveillance machine. Wigley homes in on Albertis recommendation, in Book 5: p. 149, that the husband and wife have separate bedrooms with an adjoining side door so they can seek each others company unnoticed, and from this builds a Heideggerian critique of control that works through absence. Architecture privatizes sexuality by veiling it. But there will always be closets for unplanned sensuality. Discourse like Albertis On the Art of Building has its closets as well, and it is only by shifting our attention to these hidden aspects that we can start to escape the shackles built up by Alberti. Presumably this search for closets is endless and the techniques of deconstruction are never exhausted, analysis is interminable and the patient is never completely cured, meanwhile the doctors of architecture get rich or at least become deans of prestigious schools of architecture. Both these critiques can seem a little bleak. It seems hardly fair to lay all the blame for later developments at the feat of the unsuspecting father. In fact these critiques are another form of Oedipal myth: we are all cursed because of the sins of our fathers. An anti-oedipal reading of Alberti might rejoice in the fact that such a brilliant scholar spent the time to write about our profession. We might even celebrate him as a champion of diversity rather than condemn him as a dogmatist of male dominance. After all, Alberti does introduce the important concept of vareitas (variety, see the Glossary above) and this concept harmonises with todays politics and philosophy of difference. Different genders and races add to the richness and beauty of life and this fact must be celebrated in architecture. In todays increasingly multicultural mix of various races and sexualities, Albertis always a most pleasing spice of variety is a fact of life, but equally important is the need for each group not force it its culture or sexual preference onto another: Alberti quoting Cicero, Let us have some dignity for all that.
Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988). The definitive translation with very useful glossary of Albertis concepts Choay, Franoise, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997). Analysis of Albertis treatise (the rule) and Thomas Mores Utopia (the model). Criticised by Kruft for anachronistically applying contemporary thought to a classic texts but it is actually fascinating for this very reason. Kruft, Hanno-Walter, A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1994), chapter 3. Irigaray, Luce. How Can We Live Together in a Lasting Way? in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004) pp. 123 133. Irigarays lecture at the 46
AA in London, where she gives her view of what architects need to do to raise the quality of life of women, which totally reverses what Wigley believes. Irigaray is a world famous French philosopher and a champion of feminists everywhere. Onians, John, Alberti and Filarete: A Study of Their Sources, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes: 34 (1971), pp. 96 - 114. Finds much evidence for Cicero being the major source for Albertis use of dignitas. Also criticised by Kruft! Tavernor, Robert, On Alberti and the Art of Building, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). A timely reminder of the great works of architecture produced by Alberti, whose famous treatise often leads people to forget that Alberti could design as well as he could write. Beautifully illustrated with many computer reconstructions of what Alberti really wanted. Wigley, Mark, Untitled: The Housing of Gender, Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) pp. 326 389. Wigleys deconstruction of how architecture, by veiling sexuality, is complicit with patriarchy (male dominance) using Albertis treatise as a key example. Wigleys usual thesis about the house as a scene of domestic violence against women, the studio and intellectual pursuits being reserved for men contrasted with the subservience of the feminine/ornamental. Tim Adams June 2010
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Filarete (1400-1469)
The Third Architectural Theorist
Introduction
Vitruvius had to wait 1500 years for the next theoretical work on architecture to be written, Alberti didnt have to wait so long. The third work was written only a decade after Albertis when Antonio di Pietro Averlino, better known as Filarete (Italian version of the Greek philo-arete: lover of virtue), wrote his Trattati di Architettura (Treatise on Architecture) between 1461 and 1464. Furthermore, Filaretes Treatise written in the vulgar Italian, is the first work of architectural theory written in a modern language (both Vitruvius and Alberti wrote in Latin) and the first treatise to include illustrations (all illustrations to Vitruvius and Alberti were added later). We are not going to discuss every treatise on architecture in sequence, Kruft has already done that, it just so happens that the third one is particularly interesting and worth including in our course. If we can say that Vitruvius introduces the idea of an Architect as someone who possesses multi-disciplinary knowledge, and Alberti: the idea of the Architect as someone who grants dignity to buildings with their literary skills, then Filarete introduces a third way of being an architect, as a lover, because Filarete describes the architects role as an amorous process.
The Life of Filarete

Filarete was a goldsmith, sculptor, engineer, architect and architectural theorist born in 1400 in Florence, Italy. He was trained by the famous sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and must have been a great sculptor himself because in 1433 he went to Rome where he was commissioned by Pope Eugenius IV to design and make the bronze doors for St Peters cathedral. In these doors we can see one of Filaretes constant aims: to mingle Christian and Classical pagan symbols and ideas, and to juxtapose the sacred and the profane in a provocative way. Filarete left Rome in 1447, passed through Venice and arrived in Milan in 1541 where he worked as an architect and an engineer for Duke Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, for whom he planned the Ospedale Maggiore from 1456 to 1465. This was the most advanced hospital in its day and was later copied throughout Europe. It included excellent ventilation and drainage and cruciform halls. At the court of Sforza, Filarete became friends with Francesco Filelfo, one of the leading Greek scholars of the time, and under Filelfos 49
influence he took a Greek sounding name and wrote his Treatise on Architecture (1461 1464). The similarities between the Treatise and Platos dialogues such as the Critias and the Laws, which also describe ideal cities and take the form of a recorded conversation, are obvious.
Figure 14. The plan of Filaretes Ospedale Maggiore, Milan, 1456 1465
Filaretes Treatise on Architecture

Filaretes Treatise is described by Kruft as a utopian novel, an architectural allegory and a loose narrative, all making it sound more like a work of fiction than a serious theoretical text.1 The Treatise consists of twenty-five books, all in the form of a recorded conversation between an architect and a circle of friends at a dinner party. Someone says architecture doesnt seem that big of a deal, so why the importance of Vitruvius and theory in general they ask. The architect replies with a long story about the design and construction of an imaginary town called Sforzinda, revealing along the way all his practical and theoretical knowledge about architecture in a novelistic and entertaining style. In Book 14 we are told that in the course of excavations a libro doro (Golden Book) is found dating from Greek times and Filelfo translates it and this then becomes the guide for all subsequent building of Sforzinda. The differences between this work and Albertis could not be more striking. Alberti the humanist writes very eloquently in Latin in the style of Cicero, while Filarete the craftsman writes in vulgar Italian. Alberti writes for a republican aristocracy while Filarete writes for his God-fearing master. Albertis treatise takes the form of a Vitruvian/Ciceronian account while Filaretes takes the form of a Platonic dialogue. In short, Abertis model is Roman while Filaretes is Greek. The key concept for Alberti is dignitas (dignity) and for Filarete it is virtue, after Platos concept of arete.
1 Kruft, Hanno-Walter, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 55 and 51.
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Alberti and Filarete Compared

Alberti Filarete
Ciceronian Latin....vulgar Italian for a republican aristocracy....for his God-fearing master humanist....craftsman Vitruvian/Ciceronian account...Platonic dialogue key source: Ciceros De officiis....Platos Laws key concept: dignitas (dignity).aret (virtue)
Filaretes Architectural Animism

Filarete extends Vitruvius and Albertis anthropomorphism to an extreme and unexpected conclusion. Not only does the form of the human body provide the model for a well-proportioned building but the building itself lives like a human, it is in fact a living being and he proves this with the example of a neglected and therefore dying building. You say that a building does not sicken and die like a man, Filarete says anticipating our criticism, I say to you a building does just that, for it sickens when it does not eat, that is, when it is not maintained and begins to fall off little by little exactly as a man does when he goes without food, and finally falls dead. 2 So according to Filarete every ruin stands as a testimony to the fact that buildings do in fact live and die. Granting life to inanimate objects, known as animism, is a common form of early religion and is found around the world. The Shinto religion of Japan for example sees spirits indwelling in trees and rivers and therefore venerates such natural phenomena by tying ropes around rocks and trees for example. The Romans had something similar with their idea of a genius loci (indwelling spirit of a place). Filarete caries this metaphor even further, adding that a building is also conceived and born like a human, taking about the same time, nine months. So the architect is the mother who must be impregnated by the client father. And even before that the architect should dream about this amorous contact with the client because building is nothing more than a voluptuous pleasure, like that of a man in love. The living building needs
2 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 12.
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our constant love and attention and it becomes sick if it doesnt receive this attention from the architect/mother/doctor, then may die and become another ruin.
Diagram of Filaretes Architectural Animism

Client
___________
living building lives
sickens Architect
9 months gestation birth
dies
Commission/ conception
on-going restoration
Figure 15. Illustration from the margins of Filaretes Treatise showing the dinner party during which the question was asked why do we need to know so many things about architecture when those who dont know these things can still design an adequate building. Filarete replies and this dialogue forms the 24 books of his treatise.
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Filarete, Treatise on Architecture1

Book 1
Once I was in a place where a noble and many others were eating. In the course of a conversation about many different things they entered on architecture. One of them said, It certainly seems to me that you have a high opinion of architecture, yet it doesnt seem as great a thing as many make it out to be. They say you have to know so many kinds of geometry, drawing, and many other things. It seems to me I heard someone speak the other day of a certain Vitruvius and of another who seems to have been named Archimedes. He said, They have written about building, measure, and many other bits of information that one ought to know. I dont search out all these measurements and other things when I have something built. I dont go looking for as many principles of geometry as they advise, and still it comes out all right. Then one of the others who seemed to speak more seriously said, Dont talk that way. I think that anyone who wants to construct a building needs to know measure very well and also drawing in order to lay out a large house, a church, or any other sort of building. I do not believe he could do it at all correctly if he does not have drawing, measuring, and the other things. I also believe that anyone who commissions a building should know these things. Nevertheless, do not say that, since it is not my craft, I only know enough to argue about it. I would pay a great deal to find someone who would teach me what it takes and what measure should be used to make a building well proportioned, the source of these measurements, and why one reasons and builds in this manner. I would also like to know what their origins are. On hearing this conversation I stepped forward, because it pertained to my profession and because there was no one else there who practiced it. I said, Perhaps you will think me presumptuous for attempting to tell you these modes and measures, since other capable men both ancient and modern have written very elegant works about this discipline. For instance, Vitruvius, among others, wrote a worthy treatise on this subject, as did Batista Alberti. 2 The latter is one of the most learned men of our times in many disciplines, very skilled in architecture and especially in design which is the basis and means of every art done by the hand. He understands drawing perfectly and he is very learned in geometry and other sciences. He has also written a most
1 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 4-5, 12, and 15-16. 2 (Note from the original text) In naming Vitruvius and Alberti, Filarete cites his only predecessors in the field of architectural theory and underscores the importance of his own work as the first modem treatise on architecture in a modern language. His debt to Vitruvius De Archihitectura is considerable and is generally indicated in the text. Albertis influence has generally been minimized. However I cannot agree with Oettingen, Tractat, p. 687, n. 1, that Filarete was unacquainted with Albertis De Re Aedificatoria. Vitruvius was available to Filarete both as a popular tradition and after 1409 in the Latin manuscript discovered by Poggio Bracciolini at St. Gall. Albertis treatise was probably finished by 1452. Since Filarete read Latin, errors in transcription from either author are probably due to a poor manuscript or to scribal errors.
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elegant work in Latin. For this reason and also because I am not too experienced in letters or in speaking, but rather in other things, I have applied myself. Perhaps I shall seem to have been too rash and presumptuous in attempting to describe the modes and measure of building. I do this in Italian and only because I am pleased by and experienced in these skillsdrawing, sculpture, and architecturein several other things, and in investigations. At the proper place I shall make mention of them. For this reason I am bold enough to think that those who are not so learned will be pleased by it, and that those who are more skilled and learned in letters will read the abovenamed authors. Because these matters are a little arduous and difficult to understand, I beg your excellency to be attentive while he listens to my arguments to the same extent that he would if he had ordered his troops to reconquer or defend one of his dearest possessions, and as if letters had been sent from them to him telling that they had reconquered or, better, defended that thing and with no small difficulty had enjoyed a victory over the enemy. To this degree, turn your ears to this. If you do so, I think that it will please you and it will not be at all tedious for me to talk. While enjoying it, you will derive some utility from it. As I have said, the building is constructed as a simile for the human figure. You see that I have shown you by means of a simile that a building is derived from man, that is, from his form, members, and measure. Vitruvius also says that the building is derived from the human form. 3 Now, as I have told you above, I will show you how the building is given form and substance by analogy with the members and form of man. You know that all buildings need members and passages, that is, entrances and exits. They should all be formed and arranged according to their origins. The exterior and interior appearance of the building is arranged effectively in such a way that the members and passages are suitably located, just as the exterior and interior parts and members are correct for the body of man. When they are measured, partitioned, and placed as best you can, think about my statements and understand them clearly. I will then show you that the building is truly a living man. You will see what it must eat in order to live, exactly as it is with man. It sickens and dies or sometimes is cured of its sickness by a good doctor. Sometimes, like man, it becomes ill again because it neglected its health. Many times, through the cares of a good doctor, it returns to health and lives a long while and finally dies in its own time. There are some that are never ill and then at the end die suddenly; others are killed by other people for one reason or another.
3 (Note from the original text) Although Alberti likens the building to an animal (De Re Aedificatoria, IX.5) neither he nor Vitruvius (3.1.) goes to such anthropomorphic extremes as Filarete.
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You can say that a building does not sicken and die like a man. I say to you that a building does just that, for it sickens when it does not eat, that is, when it is not maintained and begins to fall off little by little exactly as man does when he goes without food, and finally falls dead. This is exactly what the building does. If it has a doctor when it becomes ill, that is, the master who mends and cures it, it will stand a long time in good state. This is obvious. I can attest to this, for the court of the Signoria of Milan was ill from lack of food and half dead, when at great expense I restored it to health..
Book 2
You perhaps could say, You have told me that the building is similar to a man. Therefore, if this is so, it needs to be conceived and then born. As it is with man himself, so it is with the building. First it is conceived, using a simile such as you can understand, and then it is born. The mother delivers her child at the term of nine months or sometimes seven; by care and in good order she makes him grow. Tell me, how is this conception achieved? The building is conceived in this manner. Since no one can conceive by himself without a woman, by another simile, the building cannot be conceived by one man alone. As it cannot be done without a woman, so he who wishes to build needs an architect. He conceives it with him and then the architect carries it. When the architect has given birth, he becomes the mother of the building. Before the architect gives birth, he should dream about his conception, think about it, and turn it over in his mind in many ways for seven to nine months, just as a woman carries her child in her body for seven to nine months. He should also make various drawings of this conception that he has made with the patron, according to his own desires. As the woman can do nothing without the man, so the architect is the mother to carry this conception. When he has pondered and considered and thought about it in many ways, he then ought to choose, according to his own desires, what seems most suitable and most beautiful to him according to the terms of the patron. When this birth is accomplished, that is when he has made, in wood, a small relief design of its final form, measured and proportioned to the finished building, then he shows it to the father. As I have compared the architect to the mother, he also needs to be the nurse. He is thus both nurse and mother. As the mother is full of love for her son, so he will rear it with love and diligence, cause it to grow, and bring it to completion, if it is possible; if it is not, he will leave it ordered in such a way that it will not perish because of its incompleteness. A good mother loves her son and with the aid and knowledge of the father strives to make him good and beautiful, and with a good master to make him valiant and praiseworthy. So the good architect should strive to make his building good and beautiful. As the mother makes every effort to find good 55
masters for her son, so the architect ought to find good masters, masons and all the others who are needed for the work, if the patron does not prevent him. Without the goodwill of the patron he would be like a woman who can do nothing against the will of her husband; the architect is exactly the same. We will state here some things that the architect ought to do and also what ought to be done to him. Building is nothing more than a voluptuous pleasure, like that of a man in love. Anyone who has experienced it knows that there is so much pleasure and desire in building that however much a man does, he wants to do more. Sometimes he is never concerned with the expense; examples of this are seen every day. When a man is in love, he gladly goes to see his beloved. When she is in a place where he can see her, he is not sorry for the time spent nor is he bored. So he who builds goes gladly to see his building, and as often as he sees it the more he wants to see it and the more his heart swells. Time passes and he is never reluctant to look at it or to talk about it exactly as a man in love talking about his beloved. He is pleased when it is praised, and his heart swells even more. When he is absent and someone comes to talk about it to him, he is greatly pleased and desires to go see it. His soul is drawn to it and he always desires the things that he thinks are best for it, exactly as a man in love would do. There is no half way for him; he loves it. He makes it useful and honorable for only two ends. The first is for utility and the second for fame, so that they will say it was he who made such a beautiful building to rise.
Conclusion
Filaretes architectural animism seems very strange to us today, and this leads Paolo Portoghesi to lament that this is because we have become so bureaucratized and sterile in our relationships with the client and with the building that we now become fertilized in vitro, artificially inseminated with cold concepts that give rise to bastard buildings that do not know their father. I am speaking of the tendency of the architect, Portoghesi elaborates, deprived of love (and sometimes even family ties) inherent in the relationship with the male/client, to transfer this role into the realm of the printed word or even the immaterial person represented by the international system of architectural magazines and mass communication media. 4 To remedy this inherent frigidity in our relations with concepts and with the building, taking an animistic approach like Filaretes would be beneficial. Architect/theorists like Bernard Tschumi have for a long time been trying to return to this more sensuous, seductive and erotic view of architecture, an alternative position for architects to take and one that has existed ever since Filarete wrote his provocative Treatise in the 15th century.
4 Paolo Portoghesi, From Filarete to Victor Hugo, Lotus International 70 (1991), p. 123.
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It is worth mentioning two fascinating recent continuations of Filaretes metaphor of the conception of the building being the same as the reproduction of life. The first occurs in chapter 5 of the book Architecture from the Inside Out by Karen Franck and Bianca Lepori. 5 Here the two architects, without knowing it even though one is an Italian, have extended and updated Filarete for the 21st century. They take the metaphor of architectural conception being the same as human fertilization and examine the process in great detail with all the benefits that contemporary embryology (the science of the development of the embryo) can bring to the subject. So not only are the interactions of clients and architects like the meeting of sperm and ovum but at the molecular level there must be an exchange of enzymes of recognition prior to the fusing of client/sperm and architect/egg, just as we now know takes place in human fertilization. The specific enzyme ... transforms anonymity between the two gametes into recognition, they say, so that, only then can they come together to create a third cell, different from each other yet impregnated with the qualities and the biological aspirations of both. Then they make the connection to architecture, Design, too, is a matter of a certain chemistry being right for the choosing partners: the right architect for the site and client or the right site and client for the architect. 6 So Filaretes animism is here brought up to date with recent advances in medical science. They extend Filarete by proposing that there is much ejaculation without conceiving taking place in architecture because no enzyme of recognition with people and context can be found. Such ejaculation is not a sin because it is the force that actively approaches the topic at hand, producing motion and action, always with dynamic energy, sometimes with enthusiasm. 7 One further surprising elaboration of Filarete needs to be mentioned. In Peter Sloterdijks monumental Spheres trilogy, consisting of 2457 pages of well-illustrated and densely-argued text, in which the German philosopher rewrites the history of human beings from the perspective of the human as the sphere producing animal. 8 In volume 1, called Blazen in German (Bubbles, which concerns the general human condition) Sloterdijk makes an argument that has far reaching consequences for the theory of architecture. Since human beings are mammals we spend our early life in the womb attached to our mothers life support system through the placenta. The foetus and the placenta he says are connected like Orpheus and Eurydice, and every Orpheus must leave their Eurydice behind, thereafter leaving an empty space for which endless spherical substitutions become necessary. Compared to other species all humans are born too soon and are extremely vulnerable and helpless at birth. This endows us with the constant necessity of finding replacements for our first home in the womb, and this forms Sloterdijks starting point for his grand narrative of mans search new
5 Karen A. Franck and R. Bianca Lepori, Architecture from the Inside Out: From the Body, the Senses, the Site, and the Community (Chichester : Wiley, 2007). 6 Ibid., p. 132. 7 Ibid., p. 134. 8 Peter Sloterdijk, Shren I: Blasen, Mikrosphrologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), Shren II: Globen, Makrosphrologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), Shren III: Blasen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), Schume, Plurale Sphrologie( Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).
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companions and new substitute spheres. These substitute spheres grow in size in the second volume entitled Globen (Globes, dealing with the age of globalization which for Sloterdijk starts with the Greeks obsession with spheres) and becomes microspherical in the third volume entitled Schume (Foam, dealing our current atomized and fragmented way of life in the metropolis). The third volume has a large section called Foam Architecture and this deals with contemporary apartment living inhabited by co-isolated individuals whose only companions can be found by selfpairing. When these works are finally translated into English this vast updated extension of Filaretes project is sure to have profound effects on the way we think about ourselves and about our relation to architecture and the world.
Figure 16. Leonardo Da Vinci: Studies of Embryos, ca. 1510, detail.
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Ferrante, Paolo, The Ca Granda, Milan and An Interview with Liliana Grassi Abitare 237 (September 1985), pp. 110 118. The Ca Granda is the local nick-name for Filaretes Ospedale Maggiore which is now the State University and is currently being restored under the direction of the architect Liliana Grassi who says Filaretes Treatise is an indispensable guide to the restoration. Includes many good illustrations. Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). This is the only translation available. Volume 1 is the translation and Volume 2 a facsimile including the famous illustrations in the margins. Volume 1 includes a useful introduction by John Spencer. Frank, Karen A. and R. Bianca Lepori. Architecture from the Inside Out: From the Body, the Senses, the Site, and the Community (Chichester : Wiley, 2007). Chapter 5 is called Product and Process, and is a very useful updating of Filaretes animism, although no reference to Filarete is made despite one of the authors being Italian. King, Catherine, Filaretes Portrait Signature on the Bronze Doors of St Peters and The Dance of Bathykles and His Assistants, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990), pp. 296 299. Shows a rather humorous side to Filaretes character in the form of a self-portrait showing him holding hands and dancing with his assistants. Kruft, Hanno-Walter, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 51 55. As always, Kruft is concise, accurate, and opinionated. He gives an excellent overview of all the sources available on Filarete but he is unjustifiably dismissive of John Onians argument for the importance of Greek influences in Filarete in contrast to Albertis Roman influences. Lang, S. Sforzinda, Filarete and Filelfo, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), pp. 391 397. Lang finds that Filarete had a great humanist to draw on in the form of his friend Francesco Filelfo, a famous Greek scholar, and this could explain the wealth of knowledge of Plato shown in the Treatise. Lord, Carla, Solar Imagery in Filaretes Doors to St. Peters, Gazette des beaux-arts 87 (April 1976), pp. 143 148. An analysis of the intriguing blend of Christian and pagan motifs in Filaretes bronze doors at St Peters. Onians, John, Alberti and F.......: A Study in Their Sources, Journal of the Warburg 59
and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971), pp. 96 114. A very interesting comparison between Alberti and Filarete revealing the key sources to be Ciceros De officiis for Alberti and Platos Laws for Filarete. Interestingly both architectural theorists choose texts from ethical philosophy. Portoghesi, Paolo, From Filarete to Victor Hugo, Lotus International 70 (1991), pp. 122 124. Here a leading exponent of postmodernism sees the relevance of Filaretes Treatise for today. Portoghesi claims Filaretes description of design as an amorous process between the client and the architect only seems strange to us because today this relationship is bureaucratised, insemination is now in vitro, thus we are deprived of the joys of love when designing. Saalmann, Howard, Early Renaissance Architectural Theory and Practice in Antonio Filaretes Trattato de Architettura, The Art Bulletin 41 (March 1959), pp. 89 99. A pioneering study that concentrates on the proportional system proposed in the Treatise and emphasises the continuation of mediaeval mysticoreligious geometrical theory into Renaissance theory and practice. Sloterdijk, Peter. Sphren I: Blasen, Mikrosphrologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), Sphren II: Globen, Makrosphrologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), Sphren III: Schume, Plurale Sphrologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). A monumental 2457-page trilogy that rewrites human history from the point of view of the sphere-producing animal. The most profound view of architecture since the work of fellow German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Werdehausen, A. E., Filarete, article in Jane Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art (New York: Groves Dictionaries, 1996). A short outline of the sculptural, architectural and literary works of Filarete, with a very good bibliography. Tim Adams June 2010
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Three French Theorists
Claude Perrault
(1613-1688)
The First Anti-Vitruvian
Introduction to Three French Theorists
From a previous lecture we discovered that Alberti and his treatise On the Art of Building in Ten Books (1452) truly inaugurated the practice of writing architectural theory after Vitruvius false start with his Ten Books 1500 years earlier. There was a veritable explosion of writings on architecture after Alberti, the very next one, and the first to be written in a language other than Latin was Filaretes Treatise on Architecture (1464), the subject of the last lecture. Other post-Albertian Italian writers along with their writings on architecture include Francesco di Giorgio Martini: Civil and Military Architecture, Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Love Struggle in a Dream, an allegorical novel which combines an erotic dream with an architectural study-tour), Luca Pacioli: Divine Proportion, Sebastiano Serlio: Larchitettura (9 books consisting mainly of illustrations), Vignola: Rules for the Five Orders of Architecture, just to name a few. Some of the common themes running through all these treatises are; the reinterpretation of Vitruvius, the inclusion of an increasing number of illustrations there were none in either Vitruvius or Alberti and the search for the proper proportions for columns. For the next shift away from this style of writing we have to travel to a different century and a different country. Beginning in France in the 17th century with the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns), architects for the first time started to question the validity of Vitruvius. These architects have been described by Joseph Rykwert as the first moderns because although their work is still classical with the emphasis on columns, capitals, entablatures etc. they took the tentative first step towards a progressive forwardlooking architectural theory that embraced current developments in science and technology. 1 Up until then ancient writers, with Vitruvius as their representative, had
1 Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980).
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been the key reference for architectural theory, but theory from this time on had to be tested to see if it fitted with the empirically observable facts. Essentially the ancients such as Franois Blondel defended the authority of the ancient texts because they believed the Greeks and Romans had reached a state of perfection that we should try to emulate, while the moderns such as Charles Perrault (the famous writer and brother of the architect Claude Perrault) argued that the achievements of the Greeks and Romans could now be surpassed and therefore we ought to question their out-dated rules. This was the beginning of the period known as the French Enlightenment or the Age of Reason which occurred when advances made in science where first applied to the arts. A key point of reference for this modernisation was the English philosopher Francis Bacon. Bacons empiricism (the doctrine that all true knowledge is based on observable facts) as outlined in his Novum Organon (New Instrument) promotes the new inductive method that claims all valid knowledge must be abstracted (induced) from a large number of observable cases. This is in contrast to the older deductive method that deduces new knowledge from pre-existing knowledge, as the orthodox followers of Vitruvius did for example. Claude Perrault was the first to apply this scientific principle to the traditional art of architecture and the result was the instrumentalization of proportion to use the apt phrase of Alberto Prez-Gmez who concurs with Joseph Rykwert that, Perraults theoretical writings on architecture constitute a fundamental point of departure for modern architecture. 2
Figure 17. First plate of Ordonnance for the Five Columns by Claude Perrault showing what Perrault considers to be the best standard solution or ordannance for the proportion of five orders of columns. 2 Alberto Prez-Gmez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 27.
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Deductive and Inductive Methods Compared
Figure 18. Rembrandt: Philosopher in Meditation 1632
Figure 19. An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby 1768.
Deductive Method
Inductive Method
new knowledge deduced from.......new knowledge induced from pre-existing knowledge large number of observable cases logical reasoning from prior principles.......direct experience close reading of ancient texts.gathering evidence to test hypotheses
Later in France, architectural theorists such as Laugier and Durand would push architecture even further towards rational science by undermining the authority of ancient texts and by emphasising the importance of empirical observation. This trend culminates in the extreme proposals of Le Corbusier in the early twentieth-century to make architecture a machine for living in, and following that, the postmodern reaction in the 1970s against such a one-dimensional approach to building. The consequence being the re-emphasis on texts and the sometimes illogical, historically meaningful, spiritual, psychological and emotional aspects of architecture, all things beyond the quantification of science. And today we are still experiencing the repercussions of that reaction against the reduction of architecture to a science.
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Claude Perrault
The French architect and theorist Claude Perrault was, like many leading figures of the French Enlightenment, primarily a scientist. In this capacity he wrote books on various subjects including physics, mechanics, and zoology. He was also a practicing medical doctor and a professor of physiology and anatomy at the University of Paris. Hence the inscription in the portrait above reads, There is not the smallest mystery in the whole of nature or the arts that is unknown to him. And modestly he only uses all his brilliance to see and not to be seen. He first turned his brilliance towards architecture in 1664 when the Kings advisor Jean Baptiste Colbert asked him to translate Vitruvius into French. Not only did Perrault do a fine translation but he also added his own extensive annotations and commentary which later became the basis for his own contribution to architecture theory, the Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns published in 1683 (see the extract below). At the same time he was translating Vitruvius he also proposed his own design for the east faade of the Louvre, at that time the residence of King Louis XIV. This scheme was chosen despite fierce international competition and is now considered to be the greatest example of French neoclassical architecture.
Figure 20. The Colonnade, the east wing of the Louvre by Claude Perrault, Paris, 1667, under construction.
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In the following text we see Perraults attack on the Vitruvian idea that there is one perfect system of proportion based on the human body. Perraults anti-Vitruvianism clearly shows itself here. Instead of the deductive referring to the existing text of Vitruvius, Perrault looks inductively at the empirical evidence and asks what can we observe from our own experience? So he starts with the human face and observes that it can be both ugly and beautiful despite having the same proportions. Then he introduces the proportions of various architects to show that there is no agreement amongst them. And then comes his main idea the distinction between arbitrary and positive beauty. Arbitrary beauty is what we would today call cultural relativism, different cultures having different preferences so that what one group finds agreeable another can find distasteful. One example would be the various taste-cultures in music a fan of hip hop listening to Bach and vice versa. Positive beauty on the other hand is whatever can be is universally agreed to be beautiful, a smooth and symmetrical face is universally considered more beautiful than a bumpy asymmetrical one for example. Perrault claims the universal positive beauties in architecture are; richness of materials, size and magnificence, precision of construction, and symmetry. But today we might question whether beauty itself is really the goal of architecture given that modern architecture tends towards the sublime (the conflict of the faculties of conceiving and perceiving that simultaneously gives us pleasure and pain) rather than the beautiful (harmony of the faculties, pure pleasure) in terms of Kants analysis outlined by Lyotard. 3 The category of size and magnificence might also be better understood as being sublime rather than beautiful, it is doubtful that everyone finds largeness beautiful in itself and this probably reflects the context of absolute monarchy that Perrault was working within. An absolute ruler needs monuments that inspire awe in the people they rule to legitimise their dictatorship and architects of the day made themselves well-equipped for such a task.
Figure 21. Franois Mansard and Claude Perrault ,painting by Philippe de Champaigne.
3 See the last chapter, What is Postmodernism, in Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
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Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients4
by Claude Perrault Preface
A face can be both ugly and beautiful without any change in proportions, so that an alteration of the features for example, the contraction of the eyes and the enlargement of the mouth can be the same when one laughs as when one weeps, with a result that can be pleasing in one case and repugnant in the other; whereas, the dissimilar proportions of two different faces can be equally beautiful. Likewise, in architecture, we see works whose differing proportions nevertheless have the grace to elicit equal approval from those who are knowledgeable and possessed of good taste in architectural matters. The case of the different projections given to the Doric capital readily demonstrates this. Leon Battista Alberti makes this projection only two and one-half minutes where the columns diameter is sixty; Scamozzi makes it five minutes; Serlio seven and onehalf; it is seven and three-quarters in the Theater of Marcellus, eight in Vignola and in Palladio nine, in Delorme ten, and in the Colosseum seventeen. Thus, for nearly two thousand years architects have tried out solutions varying in dimension from two and one-half to seventeen minutes, some making this projection as much as seven times as large as others without being disconcerted by the preponderance of proportions at variance with the one they would like to have accepted as true and natural. In order to judge rightly in this case, one must suppose two kinds of beauty in architecture and know which beauties are based on convincing reasons and which depend only on prejudice. I call beauties based on convincing reasons those whose presence in works is bound to please everyone, so easily apprehended are their value and quality. They include the richness of the materials, the size and magnificence of the building, the precision and cleanness of the execution, and symmetry, which in French signifies the kind of proportion that produces an unmistakable and striking beauty. Against the beauties I call positive and convincing, I set those I call arbitrary, because they are determined by our wish to give a definite proportion, shape, or form to things that might well have a different form without being misshapen and that appear agreeable not by reasons within everyone's grasp but merely by custom and the
4 Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, trans. Indra Kagis McEwen (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993), pp. 47 53.
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association the mind makes between two things of a different nature. By this association the esteem that inclines the mind to things whose worth it knows also inclines it to things whose worth it does not know and little by little induces it to value both equally. This principle is the natural basis for belief, which is nothing but the result of a predisposition not to doubt the truth of something we do nor know if it is accompanied by our knowledge and good opinion of the person who assures us of it. It is also prejudice that makes us like the fashions and the patterns of speech that custom has established at court, for the regard we have for the worthiness and patronage of people in the court makes us like their clothing and their way of speaking, although these things in themselves have nothing positively likable, since after a time they offend us without their having undergone any inherent change. The first works of architecture manifested richness of materials; grandeur, opulence, and precision of workmanship; symmetry (which is a balanced and fitting correspondence of parts that maintain the same arrangement and position); good sense in matters where it is called for; and other obvious reasons for beauty. As a result, these works seemed so beautiful and were so admired and revered that people decided they should serve as the criteria for all others. And in as much as they believed it impossible to add to or to change anything in all these positive beauties without diminishing the beauty of the whole, they found it unimaginable that the proportions of these works could be altered without ill effect; whereas, they could, in fact, have been otherwise without injury to the other beauties. In the same way, when a person passionately loves a face whose only perfect beauty lies in its complexion, he also believes its proportion could not be improved upon, for just as the great beauty of one part makes him love the whole, so the love of the whole entails love of all its parts.
Conclusion
Claude Perraults theories of architecture mark an important shift away from the dominance of Vitruvius and The Ten Books, the legacy of which we are all a part of because few of us, besides historians of classical architecture, read let alone follow the advice of Vitruvius today. But as already mentioned, we might find good reason to object to Perraults easy distinction between two kinds of beauty in architecture. Perraults description of positive beauty (undisputable and absolute, based on reason), being characterised by richness of materials, magnificence, precision, and symmetry, now seems all too well suited to the taste of the day to convince us that they do not in fact belong to what Perrault calls arbitrary beauty (taste determined by habit and desire). The key example of the human face that he uses to argue that these qualities outweigh the importance of any underlying proportions, that a face can be equally beautiful with different proportions, would be disputed by todays plastic surgeons such as Dr. Stephen Marquardt who has devised a universal beauty mask based on 67
the ratios of the golden section (see more on this in the Le Corbusier notes below). It is now widely accepted that a beautiful face does need to have good proportions, that a models face must have good bone structure to use the language of the fashion industry.
Figure 22. Dr. Stephen Marquardts Universal Beauty Mask.
No doubt we can find architects still working today in a way that would satisfy all the criteria set out by Perrault for positive beauty. One architect in particular who is also French actually shares the same last name. He is Dominique Perrault and he has recently built the Bibliothque Nationale de Paris (National Library of Paris). This library is certainly magnificent; here the usual library tradition of housing stacks of books in a basement is inverted to make four monumental glass towers just for books. This library certainly has a richness of materials; many different kinds of wood, textiles and woven metals are used throughout and a rust-coloured steel mesh loops across the ceiling. This library is certainly put together with great precision; the architect worked closely with manufacturers and suppliers to make sure all the elements came together just as intended. And this library is quite clearly symmetrical; the four towers sitting on a rectangular podium reminiscent of a mosque with four minarets, one at each corner of an open square. This library was in fact the last of the monumental Grands projets (large projects) built during the presidency of Franois Mitterand. The intention behind the Grands projets was not that different from the desire to build magnificent palaces in the era of monarchy, despite the French Revolution and the advent of democracy. Both royal palaces like the Louvre and 68
Grands projets like the Bibliothque Nationale de Paris use positive beauty to legitimise the government of the day, so it is not surprising that we find in both a conformity with the ordonnances of Claude Perrault. Thankfully now every visitor to Paris today can use and enjoy these positively (in Perraults sense of the word) beautiful buildings.
Figure 23. Dominique Perrault, The Bibliothque Nationale de Paris, 1989 1995.
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Bibliography
Choay, Franoise. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997). Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 133 136. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Migarou, Frdric (ed.). Dominique Perrault Architect (Basil: Birkhauser, 1999). Perrault, Claude. Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, trans. Indra Kagis McEwen (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993). Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980). Tim Adams June 2010
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Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769)

The Return to Lost Origins
Abb Marc-Antoine Laugier was a Jesuit priest who secretly yearned to be a man of letters so in 1753 he wrote his Essai sur larchitecture (Essay on Architecture) which became one of the most famous texts in the history of architectural theory. The frontispiece illustration by Charles Dominique Eisen (see below) added to the second edition of 1755 became one of the most famous images in the history of architecture. It found immediate success it was widely discussed beyond the usual readership of architectural theory because it was written in an elegant yet accessible style that can be read with pleasure by almost anyone. But also because its message was so attractive: architecture must return to its origins, the simple rustic hut. The timing was perfect because the Parisian public at that time was growing tired of excessive ornamentation of the Baroque style and hungered for simplicity. The story of the origin of the classical orders in primitive dwellings can be traced back to Vitruvius: Some made [primitive shelters] of green boughs, others dug caves on mountain sides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions, they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on (The Ten Books: II.I.1). Laugiers revolutionary difference with Vitruvius is his advocatation that we return to this hypothetical original hut as a model for today, whereas Vitruvius is merely giving us an historical account of an ongoing development. Joseph Rykwert in his book On Adams House in Paradise traces the long history of the idea of the simple rustic hut in architecture and finds it in every period, including the modern one. Le Corbusier presents a primitive tent temple as a model of simplicity in Towards a New Architecture and Walter Gropius built a log cabin in Berlin in 1921. 1 Rykwert could also have included a structure designed by Le Corbusier because he spent a lot of his later years living in a simple rustic hut that he built at Cap Martin on the southern coast of France.
1 Joseph Rykwert, On Adams House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1981).
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Figure 24. The frontispiece for the second edition of Laugiers Essay on Architecture (1755) by Charles Dominique Eisen. Architecture is personified as a young woman who redirects the attention of an angelic child away from treatises of the past, symbolised by the ionic ruins she is seated on, towards the structural clarity embodied in nature and the primitive hut.
In the short extract below we can read the opening lines of this famous text. Laugier lulls us, like the narrator of a childrens story, into his idyllic green site, he makes us feel we are inside this primal scene of architecture. Later in the book Laugier will use this little scene to argue that we only need three elements to make architecture: free standing columns, horizontal beams, and a simple pediment (the triangular end of a pitched roof), in other words, an extremely austere version of neo-classicism that became popular after the success of Laugiers essay. 72
An Essay on Architecture2
by Marc-Antoine Laugier
Chapter 1: General Principles of Architecture

It is the same in architecture as in all other arts: its principles are founded on simple nature, and natures process clearly indicates its rules. Let us look at man in his primitive state without any aid or guidance other than his natural instincts. He is in need of a place to rest. On the banks of a quietly flowing brook he notices a stretch of grass; its fresh greenness is pleasing to his eyes, its tender down invites him; he is drawn there and, stretched out at leisure on this sparkling carpet, he thinks of nothing else but enjoying the gift of nature; he lacks nothing, he does not wish for anything, But soon the scorching heat of the sun forces him to look for shelter. A nearby forest draws him to its cooling shade; he runs to find a refuge in its depth, and there he is content. But suddenly mists are rising, swirling round and growing denser, until thick clouds cover the skies; soon, torrential rain pours down on this delightful forest. The branches; on these he hoists from two sides yet another row of branches which, inclining towards each other, meet at their highest point. He then covers this kind of roof with leaves so closely packed that neither sun nor rain can penetrate. Thus, man is housed. Admittedly, the cold and heat will make him feel uncomfortable in this house which is open on all sides but soon he will fill in the space between two posts and feel secure. savage, in his leafy shelter, does not know how to protect himself from the uncomfortable damp that penetrates everywhere; he creeps into a nearby cave and, finding it dry, he praises himself for his discovery. But soon the darkness and foul air surrounding him make his stay unbearable again. He leaves and is resolved to make good by his ingenuity the careless neglect of nature. He wants to make himself a dwelling that protects but does not bury him. Some fallen branches in the forest are the right material for his purpose; he chooses four of the strongest, raises them upright and arranges them in a square; across their top he lays four other Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendours of architecture ever conceived have been modelled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved. The pieces of wood set upright have given us the idea of the column, the pieces placed horizontally on top of them the idea of the entablature, the inclining pieces forming the roof the idea of the pediment. This is what all masters of art have recognized. But take note of this: never has a principle been more fertile in its effect. From now on it is easy to
2 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977), pp. 11 13.
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distinguish between the parts which are essential to the composition of an architectural Order and those which have been introduced by necessity or have been added by caprice. The parts that are essential are the cause of beauty, the parts introduced by necessity cause every license, the parts added by caprice cause every fault. This calls for an explanation; I shall try to be as clear as possible. Let us never lose sight of our little rustic hut. I can only see columns, a ceiling or entablature and a pointed roof forming at both ends what is called a pediment. So far there is no vault, still less an arch, no pedestals, no attic, not even a door or a window. I therefore come to this conclusion: in an architectural Order only the column, the entablature and the pediment may form an essential part of its composition. If each of these parts is suitably placed and suitably formed, nothing else need be added to make the work perfect.
Conclusion
As has been well documented in Rykwerts book, On Adams House in Paradise, the idea of a primitive hut is one of the most enduring images in architectural theory, and no one epitomises this popular myth of a simple original dwelling better than Laugier does. This begs the question: why has this speculation on an original hut been so attractive to both architectural writers and their readers? The French philosopher Benot Goetz has written an entire book called La Dislocation that addresses this problem. Goetz takes architecture to be a fundamental a priori condition of space itself. Before the dislocation or expulsion of man from the continuum of nature (paradise) there can be no inside or outside, and so there can be no architecture either. Space is architectured when is becomes differentiated and fragmented, some parts inside, some parts outside, and the human being is thereafter displaced from the continuum, always either inside or outside of something. After commenting on Rykwerts book, Goetz comes to this surprising but entirely logical conclusion: We should allow this allegory to be subjected to a slight modification of detail: in paradise Adam did not have a house. Or if he had one it would not have been outside, and consequently would not have constituted an inside either. Paradisiac space is without division, strictly speaking it is nowhere and only the tree of knowledge introduces rupture into the field of immanence such that an anywhere, a this is paradise becomes possible. On leaving this place, on leaving Place, the first man and first woman did not only discover suffering and shame, they discovered an outside, and by trying to construct an inside they then, and only then, invented architecture. The meaning of this
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apologia is that the partition of space that constitutes the first dislocation is constitutive of architecture itself. 3 Therefore the popular myth of a primitive hut or first dwelling is so popular precisely because it conveys a fundamental truth: that human beings, because they have acquired the sin of knowledge have become alienated from the continuum of unknowing nature. The primitive hut seems to hold out the promise of some kind of direct access to nature, but in reality it is the outcome of our forever dislocated condition of existence. The architecture of the hut responds in fact to a condition of space itself which for the knowing human is always divided into inside and outside. Little wonder then the attraction of the Japanese teahouse in the mountains or the New Zealand bach by the sea: they combine in a singular built form both the promise of a therapeutic return to a lost contact with an unknowing and unquestioning nature, and they are the very product of our sophisticated knowledge about the architectural nature intrinsic to all space.
Figure 25. A Kiwi bach at Sunset beach, a simple low cost primitive shelter near a beach anywhere in New Zealand.
3 Benot Goetz, La Dislocation: Architecture et philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001), p. 27. Translation taken from Tim Adams, Heretical Rhapsodies: A Survey with Translations of Architectural Theories in France from 1982 to 2004, MArch thesis, Auckland University, 2007, p. 97.
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Bibliography
Adams, Tim. Heretical Rhapsodies: A Survey with Translations of Architectural Theories in France from 1982 to 2004, MArch thesis, Auckland University, 2007. Choay, Franoise. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997). Goetz, Benot. La Dislocation: Architecture et philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 2001). Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 152 154. Laugier, Marc-Antoine. An Essay on Architecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977). Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980). Rykwert, Joseph. On Adams House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1981). Tim Adams June 2010
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Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834)

Towards a Unified Science of Architecture
If Claude Perrault was the pioneer in the trend towards anti-Vitruvianism by applying scientific rationalism to the problem of proportions, then Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand is one of the most extreme developments of that trend because he sees architecture as a kind of science. Durand was a functionalist before his time. He avoids any philosophising or idle speculation and gets straight to the utilitarian core of architecture: buildings are for providing comfortable shelter with the least expenditure of labour and capital. Beauty and giving pleasure are merely side affects of achieving a comfortable shelter and should never be the aim of architecture. Durand reduces architecture to an ars combinatoria, a combinatory art of assembling a finite number of components into infinite variations of assembled wholes, much like a child playing with a Lego set or a computer programmed to create a series of objects. How did Durand reach such an extreme point of view? As a student in Paris in 1779 and 1780 Durand twice came second in the most prestigious prize for architecture students, the Prix de Rome. During his studies he was also a draughtsman for the famous French architect Etienne-Louis Boulle. He formed his own partnership in 1794 and although he won competitions none of his designs were built due to the turbulent political situation following the French Revolution. Disappointed with the lack of commissions he took up teaching in 1795 at the newly formed Ecole Polytechnique, a polytechnic college giving preliminary lessons for aspiring engineering students. He soon became a professor of architecture there. So Durand had the difficult task of teaching architecture to engineering students who by nature are more interested in physics than aesthetics, furthermore, his course was limited to just a few lessons because most of the course was given over to geometry. But the outcome of this difficult situation was his Prcis des leons darchitecture (Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture, 1802-1805) which became an instant classic in architectural education and was still used a hundred years later at the Ecole des BeauxArts. Durand starts the Prcis by attacking Vitruvius for his emphasis on beauty (venustas) and his illogical story about the origin of the orders. What comparison, asks Durand, is there between a mans body, which varies in width at different 77
heights, and a kind of cylinder with a constant diameter throughout, and so he concludes, Clearly, the proportions of the human body did not serve, and can never have served, as a model for those of the orders. 1 He also attacks Laugier and his little rustic hut. Using the hut as a model Laugier had argued that architecture is essentially just columns, beams and pediments. Durand mocks Laugier by adding, and walls, doors, windows, vaults, arcades, and all the other parts that necessity alone compels us to add, are no more than indulgences, to be tolerated at best. Durand of course thinks the opposite that these necessities are in fact the very essence of architecture and all the classical columns, entablatures and pediments are superfluous to its function. In the extract included below Durand criticises how architecture is taught as three separate areas of study construction, distribution and decoration because this encourages the student to prefer one above the others, but to be a successful architect you need to be equally good at all three. These divisions of course have their origins in Vitruvius firmness (construction), commodity (distribution) and delight (decoration). But this equally applies to our own course here at Auckland University which consists of Architectural Technology (construction), Design (distribution) and History, Theory and Criticism (decoration). Perhaps Durands criticism still applies today.
Figure 26. Assembled buildings resulting from various horizontal and vertical combinations from Durands Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture showing how it is possible make an endless range of different buildings from a limited number of building blocks.
1 Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,, Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2000). pp. 81 82.
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Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture2

by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand
Introduction
The Usual Division of Architecture into Three Parts
In all courses of architecture, the art is divided into three distinct parts: decoration, distribution, and construction. At first sight, this division appears simple, natural, and fruitful [but to] divide architecture into three entirely independent arts, which may and indeed must be studied separately, is to ensure that the aspiring architect will develop a predilection for one of those arts, devote himself to it, neglect the two others, often fail to concern himself with them at all, and consequently acquire only a portion of the knowledge he needs. To succeed in anything, one must have a tangible and rational aim Nor is it enough to have a tangible aim in view: one must have the means to attain it. And so, our first concern must be with the aim to be pursued in the composition and execution of buildings, both private and public, and the means to be employed.
The Aim of Architecture

Whether we consult reason or examine the monuments, it is evident that pleasure can never have been the aim of architecture; nor can architectural decoration have been its object. Public and private utility, the happiness and the protection of individuals and of society: such is the aim of architecture. Whether it be accorded or denied the name of art, it will nonetheless deserve to be practiced, and the means to its end will deserve to be examined; and this we shall now do.
The Means that it must Employ

We shall find, on looking into the matter, that, in all ages and in all places, all of mens thoughts and actions have sprung from two principles alone: love of comfort and dislike of all exertion. Accordingly, whether building their own private dwellings in isolation, or erecting public buildings in society, men inevitably sought (1) to derive from their buildings the greatest possible advantage, consequently making them as fit as possible for their purpose; and (2) to build them in the way that would in early
2 Ibid. pp. 77 87.
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times be the least laborious and later when money had become the price of labor the least costly. Thus, fitness and economy are the means that architecture must naturally employ, and are the sources from which it must derive its principles: the only principles that can guide us in the study and exercise of the art.
General Principles Relative to Economy

If a given area demands less length of perimeter when bounded by the four sides of a square than when bounded by those of a parallelogram, and less still when bounded by the circumference of a circle; if the square form is superior in symmetry, in regularity, and in simplicity to that of the parallelogram, and inferior to that of a circle: it will be readily supposed that the more symmetrical, regular, and simple a building is, the less costly it becomes. It is hardly necessary to add that, since economy demands the utmost simplicity in all necessary things, it absolutely forbids all that is unnecessary. Such are the general principles that must have guided reasonable men, everywhere and in every age, when they came to erect buildings; and such are the principles that governed the design of the most universally and justly admired of ancient buildings, as will later become apparent.
Architecture Consists in the Solution of Two Problems

Disposition must therefore be the architect's sole concern even if he were a lover of architectural decoration, even if he wished only to please since decoration cannot be called beautiful or give true pleasure, except as the necessary effect of the most fitting and the most economical disposition. Thus, all of the architect's talent comes down to the solution of two problems: (1) in the case of private buildings, how to make the building as fit for its purpose as possible for a given sum; (2) in the case of public buildings, where fitness must be assumed, how to build at the least possible expense. It will thus be seen that in architecture there is no incompatibility, and no mere compatibility, between beauty and economy: for economy is one of the principal causes of beauty.
The Example
One example will serve to cast light on these ideas and present these principles with the greatest certitude. The building now known as the Panthon Franais was first intended as a temple. The purpose envisaged in buildings of this kind, whatever the form of worship for which they are intended, is not only to assemble the multitudes but to capture their imagination through the senses. Grandeur and magnificence are the aptest means to this end. It might consequently appear that decoration ought to be, if 80
not the sole aim, at least the principal concern in the composition of such a building; and that expense must be no object. We shall see, however, that if, in the building in question, all idea of decoration had been set aside in order to dispose it in the fittest and most economical way, the result would have been a building far more likely to produce the desired effect. The Panthon Franais is 110 meters long by 80 wide. It is made up of a portico and four limbs united by a dome, the whole forming a Greek cross. The perimeter of the walls is 612 meters. There are 206 columns, distributed as follows: 22 in the portico, 136 in the limbs, and 48 in the dome, which has 32 outside and 16 inside.
Figure 27. Plate 1 from Durands Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture showing Soufflots Panthon above with Durands alternative scheme below. Durand considers his scheme to be more economical, practical and grander than Soufflots church that was built with only beauty in mind.
If, instead of pursuing the forms that the architect considered most apt to produce effect and movement, he had used those that economy naturally suggests for the disposition of a building that is formed of a single room, in other words a circle; if he had arranged his columns concentric to this circle, so as to reduce the span of the vault on the inside, and to form a spacious portico on the outside capable of receiving a vast crowd from every direction: then what would have been the grandeur, the magnificence, of such a building! Its area, no part of which would have been concealed from the eye, would have been 4,292 [square] meters; the exterior would have presented, from every angle, 32 columns to the view, while the interior would 81
have offered a multitude of them. These are two very different buildings. And wherein lies the difference? In the former, there was an effort to create something beautiful, and it was supposed that the only way to do so was to spend lavishly; whereas, in the latter, the only consideration was to dispose the building in the fittest and most economical way. And, indeed, the latter, though grander and more magnificent than the former, incorporates only 112 columns; its walls are only 248 meters in circumference; and it would cost just half as much. That is to say that, for the cost of the other, two buildings might have been built, not like the one that exists but like the one that here replaces it; or else one single building, twice the size of the one just proposed. This example, although the least favorable to the system that we propose, nevertheless suffices to make known the truth of our principles and the consequences, for the wealth and the comfort both of private individuals and of society at large, that stem from an ignorance of those principles, or from the failure to observe them.
Conclusion to Three French Theorists

This anti-Vitruvian drive to make architecture more rational and scientific antiVitruvian because Vitruvius himself wanted architects to study nine disciplines with only three of them being what we would today call science 3 had its birth on French soil and also reached its apogee there too, its highest point in the form of Le Corbusier who wanted to make architecture a machine for living in and who wanted to flatten Paris and replace it with a more efficient skyscraper city in his ideal city, Ville Radieuse. The trend to rationalisation is synonymous with modernism itself. In an earlier course note we discovered in Franoise Choays reading of Alberti that Alberti inaugurated, and lent dignity to, the discipline of architecture by making the transgression from the art of writing to the art of building. In Choays view the discipline of architecture is forever in need of shoring up with either new transgressions, bringing philosophy into architecture for example, or scientism, the pseudo-scientific mimicking of science without any real research taking place. 4 Modernism and architectural science obviously follow the latter strategy. But why cant architecture be a proper science with all the trimmings research grants, laboratories, men in white coats and Nobel Prizes awarded to architects? Christian Girard (another French theorist) in his treatise, perhaps the last treatise ever written on architecture, Architecture et concepts nomads: Trait dindiscipline (Architecture and
3 Vitruviuss nine disciplines required by the perfect architect are: writing, drawing, geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy. Today only geometry, medicine and astronomy, that is one third of the Vitruvian subjects, would qualify as science. 4 Franoise Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 273.
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Nomadic Concepts: Treatise of an Indiscipline) claims that architecture is not a real discipline at all but rather an indiscipline. 5 It lacks the hard boundaries and rigorous definitions that are the usual signs of a discipline, whether it be a science or an art. Architects being indisciplined are free to roam all the disciplines in search of nomadic concepts that they then incorporate into their open discourse of architecture, concepts such as Le Corbusiers ocean liner in Towards a New Architecture which caries boat loads of ideas about modernisation and new materials, or concepts like Norman Fosters Boeing 747 jumbo jet, the building he chose to examine when he was invited to make an episode of the TV series, Building Sites.
Figure 28. Norman Foster with his favourite building, the Boeing 747.
5 Christian Girard, Architecture et concepts nomads: Trait dindiscipline (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1986).
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Bibliography
Choay, Franoise, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997). Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis, Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2000). Girard, Christian, Architecture et concepts nomades: Trait dindiscipline (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1986). Kruft, Hanno-Walter, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 273 375. Tim Adams June 2010
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Gottfried Semper (1803 1879)

The Architect as Weaver
Introduction
If we reduce the history of architectural theory to its barest essentials, then we will find one Roman dominating the classical period (Vitruvius), Italians dominating the 14th and 15th centuries (Alberti, Filarete), the French dominating the 17th and 18th centuries (Perrault, Laugier and Durand), and in the 19th century it is the Germans who become the most important theorists. Of all these architect/theorists, the subject of this course note is quite possibly the one who has the most relevance to todays architectural practice. That is because Gottfried Semper (18031879) shows us how to conceptualise the faade and the surface of buildings in a way that is not the slightest bit superficial, and the surface is where the interest of many of todays leading architects lie, architects such as Herzog and de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Cache, Rem Koolhaas, and Toyo Ito. Almost all of the current generation of architects are fascinated by the conceptual and tactile qualities of surfaces. To an earlier generation of modernists this would seem to be fussing over decorative details when we should, they would claim, concentrate on the more important structures and spaces of buildings. The modernists thought that the real aim of architecture was to create space, and this is just the approach Le Corbusier took since he was perfectly happy to leave his concrete surfaces rough so long as the underlying proportions were right.
The diagram below locates this interest in the tactile qualities of the faade in relation to other ways of treating the faade. This diagram is not meant to imply a linear progression in history, but rather simply indicate an expansion in the range of possibilities, hence the arrows at both ends. Starting from the left we find; 1) the traditional faade as a simple projection of the plan, the plan as generator of the walls, 2) Le Corbusiers plan libre (free plan) which creates the possibility of the faade being independent of the plan, 3) the postmodern faade-as-billboard, the liberated faade is now free to carry signs, typically signs from classical or vernacular forms of architecture, and finally, 4) todays tactile or haptic (textures that can be sensed through vision) faade. This last faade is a surface that requires some depth to it and that it consist of materials with varying degrees of transparency. It also requires more 85
involvement of our perceptions and sensations in reading the complex surface in contrast to surfaces that simply wall off the outside. 1
Figure 29. Diagram of several ways of treating the facades of buildings: 1. Plan as generator, simply projecting the plan upwards, 2. The free plan, load-bearing columns free the walls from the perimeter 3. The decorated shed, walls become visual signs like a billboard and 4. The haptic facade, the walls have depth to contain layers with various kinds of textures.
Who was Gottfried Semper and why is He Still Relevant Today?

The German architect, educator and writer, Gottfried Semper was born in Hamburg in 1803. Like many of the people studied in this course, his first area of study was not architecture. Semper first studied mathematics in Munich, but between 1826 and 1830 he lived in Paris in order to study architecture. It was there that he met the controversial art historian Jakob Ignaz Hittorff. Hittorff argued that, despite being long admired for their white marble forms, classical temples were originally painted in many bright colours, that they were in fact originally polychromatic. From 1830 to 1833 Semper travelled throughout Italy, Sicily and Greece seeking evidence for Hittorffs theory and in 1834 he published his first work, Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity, which led to his appointment as Professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Sempers approach to architecture was innovative because he applied ethnology (the scientific study of different races and cultures) to architecture. Semper shared the same intellectual climate that produced Darwins Origin of the Species in 1859 and Marxs Das Kapital in 1867, and
1 For the best introduction to this new emphasis on the faade, which has the advantage of being both well-illustrated and brief, see Mirko Zardini, Skin, Wall, Faade, Lotus International 82 (1994), pp. 38-51.
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Semper also shared this grand vision of looking for the larger biological, cultural and economic forces at work behind everyday appearances. Painting their temples, Semper argued, was evidence that the Greeks lived in a society that granted them the freedom to express themselves symbolically on the surface of their buildings and in doing so they were democratically reflecting the desire within the community for colour in architecture. Semper was so strongly committed to this democratic vision of architecture that during the Dresden social uprising of 1848 he helped make barricades for the street protests and because of this he was thereafter considered a dangerous revolutionary by the authorities. He was then forced to go into exile, living in England between 1849 and 1855. There work was hard to find, other than organising displays for the Great Exhibition of 1851, but this is where Semper discovered the Caribbean bamboo hut that would become ethnological proof for his argument in The Four Elements of Architecture, also published in 1851.
Figure 30. A dwelling from the Caribbean Island of Trinidad, similar to the model that Semper discovered at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which Semper considered to confirm his theory of the four elements of architecture.
This was no dreamt-up primitive hut in the manner of Vitruvius or Laugier purely invented for the sake of the argument but a full-sized pre-existing dwelling
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from the Caribbean island of Trinidad. 2 Using the Caribbean hut as his model, Semper determined that architecture consists of four essential elements, which along with their corresponding practical arts are; 1) walls/weaving, 2) hearth/moulding or ceramics, 3) roof/carpentry, and 4) platform/joinery (see the diagram included in the extract below). And these four elements and techniques structure Sempers major theoretical work of 1863, the 980-page long Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, volume 1: Textile Art (walls), 1860, and volume 2: Ceramics, Tectonics, Stereotomy (hearth, roof, and platform respectively). By this time Semper had been appointed professor of architecture at the new Polytechnic in Zurich (now the ETHZurich) where he spent the rest of his life, and for which he designed the main building in 1858. This wasnt Sempers first commission by any means because besides being the most important theorist of his day Semper was also the architect of some of the most beautiful buildings of the day. Buildings such as the Winterhur Town Hall near Dresden (1864-1870), the Hoftheater in Dresden (1870-1878) and the Art History Museum in Vienna (1896-1891). Stylistically his architecture is in the neoRenaissance style of the period. Semper pragmatically accepted the current fashion, yet as always for Semper there is great attention paid to the surface qualities, where Semper believes culture should be given the freedom to play. In the extract below we see Sempers ethnological style of writing at work. The original form and techniques of architecture are found in the ethnographic record, in handcrafts and rituals of tribal societies. Semper here makes use of the closeness of the German words for wall (Wand) and dress (Gewand) to further validate his theory that walls, the first element of architecture, were conceived as a kind of ceremonial dress and involved the craft of weaving (see the diagram below). Likewise cladding (Bekleidung) is a kind of clothing (Kleidung). We can perhaps find find similar connections in English, for example between fabric, which means woven material (for clothing) and fabrication, a construction (of a building). Also we call the continuous glazing of high-rise buildings curtain walls, making the connection between curtain (a textile) and wall (a building element).
2 See Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 197-198.
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textiles
buildings
Gewand (dress)<............Wand (wall) Kleidung (clothing)..>............Bekleidung (cladding)
Figure 31. Sempers use of the German language to validate his theory of the textile origin of building.
This leads Semper in a long footnote (included below) to consider both the mask and the carnival fundamental to architecture because they veil reality. It is this destruction of reality, of the material, Semper claims, that is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous human creation. Finally Sempers observations on the Caribbean hut are included as ethnological proof for his argument about the four elements. All this seems like a defence of faadism, as if the faade was independent of the structure and the structure is therefore left entirely in the hands of others, such as the developers, engineers, economists and local building-authorities that today have so much influence on the design of everything that is built. But this is not what Semper did in his architecture nor is he advocating this in his writings because what Semper actually says is that what lies behind the cladding, behind the mask, is equally important. Masking does not help, he elaborates, when the thing behind the mask is not right or when the mask is no good. If the material, the indispensable, is to be completely destroyed in the artistic creation in the sense meant here, then the material must first be completely mastered. The cultural imperative that Semper grants to the surface can only be sustained when it is in harmony with the underlying structure. In other words, a mask is only truly beautiful when the body wearing it is also beautiful. 89
Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics 3

by Gottfried Semper 62 The Oldest Formal Principle in Architecture Independent of Construction and Based on the Concept of Space; the Masking of Reality in the Arts
The art of dressing the bodys nakedness (if one does not count the painting of ones skin) is presumably a more recent invention than the use of coverings for encampments and spatial enclosures. There are tribes of the most primitive savagery that are unfamiliar with clothes but use skins and even possess a more or less developed industry of spinning, plaiting, and weaving to furnish and defend their camps. It may be that climatic influences and other circumstances suffice to explain this cultural-historical phenomenon, and that the normal, universally valid course of civilization cannot necessarily be deduced from this, but it is certain that the beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles. The wall is the architectural element that formally represents and makes visible enclosed space as such, absolutely, as it were, without reference to secondary concepts. We might see the pen the fence of interwoven and tied sticks and branches as the earliest partition produced by the human hand, as the most original vertical spatial enclosure invented by man, whose completion required a technique that nature, so to speak, placed in the hands of man. The transition from plaiting branches to plaiting bast [the fibrous bark of trees] for similar domestic purposes was natural and easy. Next came the invention of weaving: first with grass stalks or natural plant fibers, later with spun threads made from vegetable or animal stuffs. The diversity of natural color in the stalks soon led to their use in alternating arrangements, resulting in the pattern. These natural art materials were soon improved with synthetic preparations; dyeing and weaving were invented to create colorful carpets for wall dressings, floor coverings, and canopies. Whether the gradual development of these inventions occurred in this order or not matters little to us here, for it is certain that a kind of crude weaving began with the pen, as a means of dividing the home, the inner life from the outer life, as a formal construct of the spatial idea. It preceded the simple wall made from stone or another material....
3 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research, 2004), pp. 247-248, 438-439 and 665.
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Here again we have a remarkable case in which the spoken language assists the early history of the arts by clarifying the symbols of the formal language in their primitive manifestation, thereby confirming the validity of our interpretation. In all Germanic languages the word Wand [wall], which has the same root and basic meaning as Gewand [dress, garment], directly alludes to the ancient origin and type of the visible spatial enclosure. Likewise, Decke [cover, ceiling], Bekleidung [clothing, dressing], Schranke [barrier, gate], Zaun [hedge, fence] (similar to Saum [hem, fillet]), and many other technical expressions are not linguistic symbols applied to building at a later stage but clear indications of the textile origin of these building elements.... [Footnote n. 85, pp. 438-39] I think that the dressing and the mask are as old as human civilisation and that the joy in both is identical to the joy in those things that led men to be sculptors, painters, architects, poets, musicians, dramatists in short, artists. Every artistic creation, every artistic pleasure, presumes a certain carnival spirit, or to express it in a modern way, the haze of carnival candles is the true atmosphere of art. The destruction of reality, of the material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous human creation. Let us forget the means that must be used to achieve a desired artistic effect, and not blurt them out and thus woefully forget ourselves. The unspoiled feeling led primitive man in this direction in all early artistic endeavors. The truly great masters of art in every field returned to it, except that in times of high artistic achievement these individuals also marked the material of the mask. This instinct led Phidias to his conception of the subject matter for the two tympana of the Parthenon. Evidently he considered his task, the representation of the double myth and its actors (the deities), as the material to be treated (just like the stone in which he formed them), which he veiled as much as possible, thus freeing it of all material and outward expression of its nonpictorial and religious-symbolic nature. Therefore his gods confront and inspire us, individually and collectively, first and foremost as expressions of true human beauty and grandeur.... For similar reasons drama could have meaning only in the beginning and at the height of the progressive education of a people. The oldest vase paintings give us an idea of the early material masks of the Hellenes. In a spiritual way, like those stone dramas by Phidias, the ancient mask is taken up again by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and at the same time by Aristophanes and the other comic dramatists. Thus the proscenium frames an image of a noble piece of human history that did not simply occur somewhere once but happens everywhere as long as human hearts beat.... The spirit of the mask breathes in Shakespeares dramas. We meet the humor of masks and the haze of candles, the carnival spirit (which, in truth, is not always joyous), in Mozarts Don Giovanni. For even music needs a means to destroy reality.... But masking does not help when the thing behind the mask is not right or when the mask is no good. If the material, the indispensable, is to he completely destroyed in the artistic creation in the sense meant here, then the material must first he completely mastered. Only complete technical perfection, only the judicious and proper treatment of the material according to its properties, and above all only the consideration of these 91
properties in the act of shaping form can cause the material to be forgotten, can liberate the artistic creation from it, can elevate even a simple landscape painting to become a high work of art.... How Greek architecture too supports what has been said, how it was dominated by the principle that I have sought to convey, according to which the appearance of a work of art should make us forget the means and the materials by which and through which it appears and works and be sufficient to itself as form to demonstrate this is the most difficult task of a theory of style.... [end of footnote]
145 Greco-Italic Tectonics: Timber Architecture

The Primitive Hut For the Greco-Italic peoples the mystical-poetic and artistic motive for the temple, though not its material model or scheme, was the leaf-covered hut the protective roof supported by tree trunks, covered with straw or reeds, and enclosed with woven mats. According to Vitruvius, the marble temple is in fact nothing more than a petrified primitive hut, whose whole and parts materially arose or were directly derived from the basic elements of a wooden hut. Opponents of this homebred theory, in their zeal for the immediacy of the stone temple, nevertheless have to return to the (as they call it) hieratic allegory or symbol of the sacred arbor. And even though this may be a late poetic creation, perhaps first completely developed by dramatists in the golden age of Athens and placed onstage before the Athenians, it remains as such a very important element in the history of style. The architecture of a period that produced such theories was necessarily influenced by them to a greater or lesser extent. Having said this, the author does not wish to he misunderstood when he places before the reader as the equivalent of the Vitruvian primitive hut in all its elements not a figment of the imagination but a highly realistic example of a wooden structure taken from ethnology.
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This is an illustration of a model of a Caribbean bamboo hut displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It shows all the elements of antique architecture in their pure and most original form: the hearth as the center-point, raised earth as a terrace [platform] surrounded by posts, the column-supported roof, and the mat enclosure as a spatial termination or wall.
Conclusion: Weaving Today

When a painter out of frustration cuts their canvases into strips and then carefully weaves them back together to make new patterns, or when an architecture student tears out pieces of their drawings and then proceeds to glue them together with other pieces, they are not returning to some primitive stage nor are they necessarily going mad. Both the French painter Franois Rouan (born 1943) and the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) worked this way. Their work in no way constitutes a return to the past and they are not mad, rather they have rediscovered for themselves a timeless technique that they then proceed to redeploy in order to make something entirely new. In the case of the painter Franois Rouan, weaving takes on the regulating role that the now-outdated perspective once performed. And weaving of the wall allowed Carlo Scarpa to blend his new additions seamlessly into their historic locations. In New 93
Zealand there is an excellent example of this technique in the work of the architect Andrew Patterson. Not only does Patterson weave Pacific Island pattern making into a Western architectural tradition in his work, but he literally weaved an aluminium basket around an existing building in the D-72 Building in Dominion Road here in Auckland.
Figure 32. Tressage by Franois Rouan, 1967.
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Figure 33. Wall detail of the Castelvecchio Museum, Verona by Carlo Scarpa (1956-1964).
Figure 34. The D-72 Building in Auckland by Andrew Patterson, 1997.
Semper is important in the history of architectural theory for many reasons, and no one makes this claim more explicitly than Peggy Deamer, the former head of school of the Auckland School of Architecture now teaching at Yale. In her article Detail: The Subject of the Object, Deamer elegantly contrasts Laugiers hut (see the course notes
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on Laugier above) with Sempers hut from Trinidad. 4 Deamer points out that Sempers hut shifts the focus of architectural theory away from the abstract and visual style of a building (still evident in Laugiers version) towards the technical procedures of making a building. And by elaborating on four technical arts (textiles, ceramics, carpentry and masonry) Semper shifts the focus away from the single master-designer towards a community of people with various different sets of technical skills, including some of which are traditionally mastered by women such as the weaving of textiles. Deamer also reminds us that Semper shifts the focus away from the bare structure of architecture towards its skin and enclosure. Finally, Semper shifts our attention away from the purely utilitarian aspects towards the expressive ornamentation of a building, an inherent condition of weaving, and grants these expressive elements the ability to carry deep cultural significance. Deamer furthermore makes a thought-provoking comparison between Semper and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (the subject of course notes to follow). Whereas Heidegger always considers the human subject as being someone who acts alone to make a clearing in the forest and then erects a solitary dwelling (the connections here to Laugiers ideal maker of the primitive hut are obvious), the human subject presupposed by Sempers theory of architecture always works in a group of people who bring together various different sets of technical skills and experiences, all of which are equally valuable in the social fabrication of a shared architecture. The implication of this last shift of focus is profound. In todays highly-fragmented multi-cultural globalised society, Semper presents us with a timely reminder of the inherent necessity of architecture to at least allow room for the coming together of a community of widely different people, no matter how fragile and tenuous that community may sometimes seem.
Bibliography
Deamer, Peggy. Detail: The Subject of the Object Praxis, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 2000), pp. 108 115. Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Mallgrave, Harry Francis. Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Melvin, Jeremy. Semper Ubique, Building Design: 979 supplement (March 30, 1990), pp. 20-23.
4 Peggy Deamer, Detail: The Subject of the Object Praxis, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 2000), pp. 108 115.
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Semper, Gottfried. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research, 2004). Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Zardini, Mirko. Skin, Wall, Faade, Lotus International 82 (1994), pp. 38-51. Tim Adams June 2010
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Le Corbusier (1887 1965)

The Most Influential Architect of the 20th Century
A Brief Introduction to the Concept of Modernism

We are familiar with term modern being applied by advertisers to any new product in order to contrast it with everything else that is now presumed to be obsolete. But to better understand the term it will be helpful to begin by differentiating the terms modernism and modernisation. 1 Modernisation occurs in varying degrees in all periods, it is simply the adjustment of life to new living conditions that have been brought about by the impact of new technologies. An example familiar to us is the information technology revolution that meant all institutions in society had to adjust to the new conditions brought about by the computer or otherwise die. In earlier times the invention of writing and printing would have caused similar social and economic upheavals. All theories of architecture are modern to the extent they form a set of concepts that help us adjust to the new conditions of culture, the economy and urbanism. The term modernism on the other hand is an historical term referring to early-20th-century art and architecture, while the Modern Movement refers to the architecture of that period and to the heroes of modern architecture such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. When the majority of people began to lose faith in the Modern Movement and its theories, a new set of theories was formulated. Thus modernism was itself modernised to become postmodernism. Postmodernism was in turn modernised by deconstruction and so on in an endless cycle of modernisation.
An important distinction to remember

Modernisation = the ongoing adjustment of life to new conditions brought about by advances in technology. Modernism = the art and architecture of the early-20thcentury, including The Modern Movement which refers to the architects of that period such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.
1 The source of this useful distinction is Marshall Berman in his excellent book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
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Figure 35. Le Corbusier and model of The Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1928 1931.
Biography of Charles-Edouard Jeaneret (Better Known as Le Corbusier)

When TIME magazine chose the one hundred most influential people of the 20th century, Le Corbusier was the only architect to make it onto their list. The most influential person of the century was the physicist Albert Einstein. Many would be dismayed by this fact because Le Corbusiers legacy is a mixed one, on the one hand he did more than anyone else to modernise architecture while on the other hand his vision of the future city came to fruition in the international style cities. We can see these modern cities everywhere today and many consider them to be a disaster. As anyone can see, Le Corbusiers purist houses such as the Villa Savoye (pronounced vee-LAR sar-VWAR, see image above) seem just as radically new and innovative today as they did 70 years ago. Equally obvious is the ugliness and inefficiency of todays modern cities that do in fact follow much of what Le Corbusier advocates in his famous Athens Charter 2 such as the strict separation of functional zones:
2 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter, trans. Anthony Eardley, (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973).
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dormant suburb there, business centre here, and shopping district elsewhere, all needing to be connected by ever increasing over-crowded transportation networks. 3 Le Corbusier (shortened to Corb or Corbu: sounding like corbeau in French, which means crow, a joke since all his family had large beak-like noses) is actually a pseudonym, a nom darchitecture. This name is a modification of his cousins name, Lecorbesier. His real name, which he reserved for his paintings, was Charles- Edouard Jeaneret. Charles-Edouard was born in 1887 at La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. He originally trained as an engraver but after designing a few houses in his home town travelled widely, arriving in Paris in 1909 where he worked for the architect August Perret, a pioneer in the use of ferro-cement (steel-reinforced concrete). In 1918 he teamed up with the painter Amde Ozenfant and together they established the Purist movement in painting as an alternative to the then dominant Cubism of Picasso, and together they published the journal LEsprit Nouveau (The New Spirit). Le Corbusiers articles in these journals where later collected and republished as four books: Towards a New Architecture (1923), The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1924), Modern Painting (1925) and The Decorative Art of Today (1925). The text below comes from Towards a New Architecture. This is the most often quoted section of what is the most influential book of 20th-century architecture. His often repeated argument is clear and simple: architecture is in decline while engineering is in ascendancy. This is because engineers have access to the new materials of glass, steel and concrete, meanwhile architects have been wallowing in the past with their love of stone. The solution is equally clear: architects must learn from the engineers, specifically from advances made in the design of ships, planes and cars. In short, Le Corbusier wants to do for architecture what Henry Ford did for the motorcar standardise it, mass produce it and sell it cheap. His most famous phrase is the house is a machine for living.
3 See Simon Richards, Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (London: Yale University Press, 2003) for reasons why Corbusier wanted cities to be this way. To summarise a very rich and well-argued book, Corb was a follower of Blaise Pascal who claimed that the only way to know God and therefore the truth was through the self, so therefore isolation of the individual is to be desired. I consider this book to be an ideal example of the overall approach taken in this course: the architect creates a certain concept of self in their own self formation and then they project this concept onto the users of their buildings and this in turn determines the outcome of their design.
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Towards a New Architecture4 by Le Corbusier

The Engineers Aesthetic and Architecture
The Engineers Aesthetic and Architecture two things that march together and follow one from the other the one at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression. A QUESTION of morality; lack of truth is intolerable, we perish in untruth. Architecture is one of the most urgent needs of man, for the house has always been the indispensable and first tool that he has forged for himself. Mans stock of tools marks out the stages of civilization, the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age. Tools are the result of successive improvement; the effort of all generations is embodied in them. The tool is the direct and immediate expression of progress; it gives man essential assistance and essential freedom also. We throw the out-of-date tool on the scrap-heap: the carbine, the culverin, the growler and the old locomotive. This action is a manifestation of health, of moral health, of morale also; it is not right that we should produce bad things because of a bad tool; nor is it right that we should waste our energy, our health and our courage because of a bad tool; it must be thrown away and replaced. But men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves. The lair has been dear to their hearts since all time. To such a degree and so strongly that they have established the cult of the home. A roof! then other household gods. Religions have established themselves on dogmas, the dogmas do not change; but civilizations change and religions tumble to dust. Houses have not changed. But the cult of the house has remained the same for centuries. The house will also fall to dust. A man who practises a religion and does not believe in it is a poor wretch; he is to be pitied. We are to be pitied for living in unworthy houses, since they ruin our health and our morale. It is our lot to have become sedentary creatures; our houses gnaw at us in our sluggishness, like a consumption. We shall soon need far too many sanatoriums. We are to be pitied. Our houses disgust us; we fly from them and frequent restaurants and night clubs; or we gather together in our houses gloomily and secretly like wretched animals; we are becoming demoralized. Engineers fabricate the tools of their time. Everything, that is to say, except houses and moth-eaten boudoirs. There exists in France a great national school of architecture, and there are, in every country, architectural schools of various kinds, to mystify young minds and teach them dissimulation and the obsequiousness of the toady. National schools!
4 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. Trans. Frederick Etchells, (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), pp. 13 - 23. Originally published as Vers une architecture, 1923.
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Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work. Our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, we have got to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and they will be our builders. Nevertheless there does exist this thing called ARCHITECTURE, an admirable thing, the loveliest of all. A product of happy peoples and a thing which in itself produces happy peoples. The happy towns are those that have an architecture. Architecture can be found in the telephone and in the Parthenon. How easily could it be at home in our houses! Houses make the street and the street makes the town and the town is a personality which takes to itself a soul, which I can feel, suffer and wonder. How at home architecture could be in street and town! The diagnosis is clear. Our engineers produce architecture, for they employ a mathematical calculation which derives from natural law, and their works give us the feeling of HARMONY. The engineer therefore has his own aesthetic, for he must, in making his calculations, qualify some of the terms of his equation: and it is here that taste intervenes. Now, in handling a mathematical problem, a man is regarding it from a purely abstract point of view, and in such a state, his taste must follow a sure and certain path. Architects, emerging from the Schools, those hot-houses where blue hortensias and green chrysanthemums are forced, and where unclean orchids are cultivated, enter into the town in the spirit of a milkman who should, as it were, sell his milk mixed with vitriol or poison. People still believe here and there in architects, as they believe blindly in all doctors. It is very necessary, of course, that houses should hold together! It is very necessary to have recourse to the man of art! Art, according to Larousse, is the application of knowledge to the realization of a conception. Now, today, it is the engineer who knows, who knows the best way to construct, to heat, to ventilate, to light. Is it not true? Our diagnosis is that, to begin at the beginning, the engineer who proceeds by knowledge shows the way and holds the truth. It is that architecture, which is a matter of plastic emotion, should in its own domain BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING ALSO, AND SHOULD USE THOSE ELEMENTS WHICH ARE CAPABLE OF AFFECTING OUR SENSES, AND OF REWARDING THE DESIRE OF OUR EYES, and should dispose them in such a way THAT THE SIGHT OF THEM AFFECTS US IMMEDIATELY by their delicacy or their brutality, their riot or their serenity, their indifference or their interest; these elements are plastic elements, forms which our eyes see clearly and which our mind can measure. These forms, elementary or subtle, tractable or brutal, work physiologically upon our senses (sphere, cube, cylinder, horizontal, vertical, oblique, etc.), and excite them. Being moved, we are able to get beyond the cruder sensations; certain relationships are thus born which work upon our perceptions and put us into a state of satisfaction (in consonance with the laws of the universe which govern us and to which all our acts are 103
subjected), in which man can employ fully his gifts of memory, of analysis, of reasoning and of creation. Architecture today is no longer conscious of its own beginnings. Architects work in styles or discuss questions of structure in and out of season; their clients, the public, still think in terms of conventional appearance, and reason on the foundations of an insufficient education. Our external world has been enormously transformed in its outward appearance and in the use made of it, by reason of the machine. We have gained a new perspective and a new social life, but we have not yet adapted the house thereto. The time has therefore come to put forward the problem of the house, of the street and of the town, and to deal with both the architect and the engineer . We are all acquainted with too many big business men, bankers and merchants, who tell us: Ah, but I am merely a man of affairs, I live entirely outside the art world, I am a Philistine. We protest and tell them: All your energies are directed towards this magnificent end which is the forging of the tools of the epoch, and which is creating throughout the whole world this accumulation of very beautiful things in which economic law reigns supreme, and mathematical exactness is joined to daring and imagination. That is what you do; that; that, to be exact, is Beauty. One can see these same business men, bankers and merchants, away from their businesses in their own homes, where everything seems to contradict their real existence rooms too small, a conglomeration of useless and disparate objects, and a sickening spirit reigning over so many shams Aubusson, Salon dAutomne, styles of all sorts and absurd bric--brac. Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shrivelled like tigers in a cage; it is very clear that they are happier at their factories or in their banks. We claim, in the name of the steamship, of the airplane, and of the motor-car, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection. We shall be understood. These are evident truths. It is not foolishness to hasten forward a clearing up of things. Finally, it will be a delight to talk of ARCHITECTURE after so many grain- stores, workshops, machines and sky-scrapers. ARCHITECTURE is a thing of art, a phenomenon of the emotions, lying outside questions of construction and beyond them. The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE us. Architectural emotion exists when the work rings within us in tune with a universe whose laws we obey, recognize and respect. When certain harmonies have been attained, the work captures us. Architecture is a matter of harmonies, it is a pure creation of the spirit. Today, painting has outsped the other arts. It is the first to have attained attunement with the epoch. 5 Modern painting has left on one side wall decoration, tapestry and the ornamental urn and has sequestered itself in a frame flourishing, full of matter, far removed from a distracting realism; it lends
5 [Le Corbusiers footnote from the original text] I mean, of course, the vital change brought about by cubism and later researches, and not the lamentable fall from grace which has for the last two years seized upon painters, distanced by lack of sales and taken to task by critics as little instructed as sensitive (1921).
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itself to meditation. Art is no longer anecdotal, it is a source of meditation; after the days work it is good to meditate. On the one hand the mass of people look for a decent dwelling, and this question is of burning importance. On the other hand the man of initiative, of action, of thought, the LEADER, demands a shelter for his meditations in a quiet and sure spot; a problem which is indispensable to the health of specialized people. Painters and sculptors, champions of the art of today, you who have to bear so much mockery and who suffer so much indifference, let us purge our houses, give your help that we may reconstruct our towns. Your works will then be able to take their place in the framework of the period and you will everywhere be admitted and understood. Tell yourselves that architecture has indeed need of your attention. Do not forget the problem of architecture.
Le Corbusiers Concept of the Modulor

I had the pleasure of discussing the Modulor at some length with Professor Albert Einstein at Princeton ... at one point, Einstein took a pencil and began to calculate. Stupidly, I interrupted him, the conversation turned to other things, the calculation remained unfinished. In a letter written on the same evening, Einstein had the kindness to say this of the Modulor: It is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy. There are some who think this judgement is unscientific. For my part, I think it is extraordinarily clear-sighted. Le Corbusier, 1948 6 His [Le Cobusiers] play with the Golden Section and the Fibonacci series [the Modulor] is school-boy mathematics wrapped in a cloak of mystification. Rudolf Wittkower 7
6 Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 58. The original French version was published in 1948, it was written during World War II when Le Corbusier could not get any commissions. 7 Rudolf Wittkower, Le Corbusiers Modulor, in Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 204. This essay was presented at a Columbia University Symposium in 1961.
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The Modulor? I couldn't care less about it. Le Corbusier, 1957 8
Introduction to the Concept

In the three epigraphs above we see two very different self-appraisals by Le Corbusier of his Modulor concept, the first wildly enthusiastic, the second resigned to its failure, and between them the architectural historian Rudolph Wittkowers negative summation of the Modulor. So what is the Modulor concept and why did Le Corbusier come to reject his own invention? The word Modulor is a portmanteau word invented by Le Corbusier by combining module a unit for expressing proportional relationships and or the French word for gold, so the Modulor is a proportional system using the ratios of the Golden Section. The Modulor was the culmination of Le Corbusiers life-long two-fold aim to 1) unify sculpturally all the elements of a building and 2) to integrate his buildings with todays modernised industrialised society. Le Corbusier had witnessed first-hand the attempts made in Germany by the Duetsche Werkbund to rationalise building construction by trying to enforce standard modular sizes for all building components. On top of this he was forever searching for the underlying laws for beautiful lines and proportions. Furthermore the Modulor, as Le Corbusier tells us in his two books Modulor (1947) and Modulor II (1955), is intended to do to the dimensions of architecture what the tempered scale had done for the frequency of sound in music. In other words, just as the well-tempered or equal spacing of notes in music allow musicians to play together in harmony, so the Modulor would establish universally agreed dimensional steps that would unify all buildings. The Modulor is therefore meant to be something like the clarinet that plays the note A before a concert starts so all the other musicians in the orchestra can tune their instruments to the same pitch. Both Le Corbusiers mother and brother were musicians so it is not surprising that he says in Modulor II that he too is a musician at heart and that he instinctively knows how music is structured despite not being able to read music. The Modulor claims Le Corbusier, is a working tool, a precision instrument; a keyboard shall we say, a piano, a tuned piano. The piano has been tuned: it is up to you to play it well. 9 Before we take a closer look at the Modulor we need to know some of the mathematics behind it.
8 Le Modulor, je men fiche, Le Corbusier quoted by Rudolf Wittkower in Report of a Debate on the Motion that Systems of Proportion make Good Design Easier and Bad Design More Difficult, RIBA Journal: 64, (September, 1957), p. 462. That meeting took place at the RIBA in London in 1957. 9 Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 130-131.
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The Origins of the Golden Section

In the 1930s Professor Andreas Speiser at the University of Zurich showed Le Corbusier a book by Matila Ghyka in which various cultural artefacts as diverse as Egyptian ornaments and the music of Bach and Beethoven are all shown to conform to the ratio of the golden section. 10 Le Corbusier did not always understand the mathematics involved he left school when he was 13 to become an apprentice watchengraver and was thereafter self-taught but he intuitively understood its potential for unifying architecture with the universal laws of nature. This assumption is in fact a continuation of the age-old Pythagorean belief that the entire universe is mathematically structured and therefore if we use this mathematics we will be able to harmonise with the universe. The golden section has fascinated mathematicians, artists and architects even before Classical times, its proportions appear in Minoan architecture for example. 11 It also appears in Proposition 30, Book 6 of Euclids Elements (c.300 BC) and more recently it has been used by American plastic surgeons as a guide to what makes a face more attractive, the ratio of the width of the nose to the width of the mouth ideally being a divine proportion and so on. 12 To construct a golden section geometrically is quite easy you simply draw a square and make a diagonal from a midpoint of any side to the opposite corner and then arc that diagonal line down so it extends one side of the square which then becomes the long edge of a golden rectangle.
10 Matila Ghyka, Le Nombre dor (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), now translated as The Geometry of Art and Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1977). See The Modulor, p. 29 for Le Corbusiers account of this story. 11 See Donald A. Preziosi, Harmonic Design in Minoan Architecture, Fibonacci Quarterly: 6, no. 6, (1968), pp. 370-84. 12 As shown on the BBC documentary The Human Face hosted by John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley. See also Dr. Stephen Marquardts Universal Beauty Mask at http://www.beautyanalysis.com/.
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Figure 36. Diagram showing how simple it is to construct a golden section rectangle. The mathematics to describe this is not so easy and has fascinated mathematicians for centuries.
While geometrically simple, it is mathematically complex, hence its fascination to mathematicians throughout history. The ratio of the two sides of a golden rectangle is, using the theorem of Pythagoras to work out the length of the long side if the short side is 1, the divine proportion of: 1: 1+5 2 or 1: 1.61803
This is called an irrational number in mathematics because the decimal fraction will continue forever without ever repeating itself. For the sake of convenience we will round it off to 1.618 for the rest of the handout. Algebraically the divine proportion is expressed like this:
a b
b . a+b
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What is the Fibonacci Series and how is it Linked to the Golden Section?
The connection of the Fibonacci series with the Golden Section has been known since Fibonacci published his book Il Liber Abbaci in 1202. 13 Quite simply a Fibonacci series is a series of numbers where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers in the series (except for the first two numbers needed to get the sequence started). For example the series of 1, 1, 2 (2 because 1+1=2), 3 (3 because 1+2=3), and so on, so we get: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21
As the series gets longer the ratio of any number in the Fibonacci series to the previous number in the series approaches the divine proportion of 1:618 and this is the link between the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section. For example below is the same series repeated below itself but shifted one place to the left. Beneath them is the result of dividing the top line by the bottom line. Notice how the result is tending to or getting closer and closer to 0.618 as the series progresses.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,... 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,... ________________________________________________ 1, 0.5, 0.66, 0.6, 0.625, 0.615, 0.619,
It seems this ratio of 1:0.618 is common in nature, in any plants and animals with a spiral arrangement for example, because it is the only proportion that allows the ratio of the smaller segment to the larger one to always be same as the larger segment to the sum of the two. Expressed in mathematical terms that relationship looks like this: a b = b . a+b
Or written numerically, letting b=1:
0.618 1
1 . 1.618
13 Newman W. Powell, Fibonacci and the Golden Mean: Rabbits, Rumbas, and Rondeaux, Journal of Music Theory: 23, no. 2, (Fall, 1979), pp. 227-273.
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Written numerically we can see clearly the recurring sequence of numbers 618, this means that less information is required to generate a form due to the reiteration of the same factor and perhaps this is why it occurs so often in nature, it is simply a matter the most economical use of information to generate the greatest variety of forms. Whether or not these forms are more beautiful to the human eye is debatable. In fact the validity of all systems of proportion has always been under question throughout the centuries. Le Corbusiers Modulor (1948) along with Rudolf Wittkowers Architectural Principals in the Age of Humanism (1949) helped to revive this age-old debate in the 1950s when faith in functionalism was in decline and interest in proportional systems was on the rise. This debate resurfaced at the First International Congress on Proportion in Milan in 1959. This is where Wittkower heard Le Corbusier express his doubts about the Modulor in the quote at the top of this section. At the RIBA debate on proportion in 1957 it was put to the vote does or does not the use of proportional systems make good design easier and bad design more difficult? 60 out 108 thought it doesnt help thus contradicting what Einstein had claimed for Le Corbusiers Modulor. Thereafter the use of systems of proportion in Architecture began to go out of fashion once again.
The French Modulor Man becomes English

Le Corbusier was perhaps the last in a long line of architects who have tried to make human proportions the centre of his proportional system for architecture, the anthropomorphic projection that is a recurring theme throughout the history of architectural theory. What makes Le Corbusiers Modulor unique in the history of proportional systems is not that it is, as Le Corbusier himself says, anthropocentric (centred on the human figure) like Vitruvius description of the orders, but that in the Modulor system the scale of the human body is precisely stated along with its proportions. 14 Le Corbusier takes what he considers to be a standard-sized human, the Modulor man, and generates two Fibonacci series that intertwine with this scaled figure. The first red series coincides with the solar plexus (pit of the stomach) and the top of the head while the second blue series coincides with the tip of the raised hand and the bench height for resting the elbows. All the necessary dimensions smaller than the man (for furniture) plus all the dimensions larger than the man (for the building) are generated and therefore unified by one or other of these two red and blue Fibonacci series. The image below is the original French height Modulor man. The figures Le Corbusier gives for the red series on the left is 2, 7, 9, 16, 25, 41, 66, 108 (the solar plexus), 175 (head height) and the blue series on the right is 2, 9, 11, 20, 31,
14 Viollet le Duc makes the distinction between proportion which is a purely geometric, arithmetic relationship independent of size, e.g. the steps of a Greek temple that are relative to the columns but not to human legs, and scale which is always relative to human size. Vitruvius and all other anthropomorphic architects project human proportions only onto buildings, whereas Le Corbusiers great achievement is to unify both proportion and scale within a single scale-specific proportional system. See Alain Pottage, Architectural Authorship: The Normative Ambitions of Le Corbusiers Modulor, AA Files: 31, (Summer 1996).
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51, 82, 133 (bench height for elbows), 216 (height of up out-stretched hand). Once again notice Le Corbusiers bad arithmetic here. The red series should have been: 2, 7, 9, 16, 25, 41, 66, 107(not 108) and 173(not 175). No wonder this had Einstein reaching for his pencil when it was shown to him by Le Corbusier.
Figure 37. An early version of Le Corbusiers Modulor man.
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Le Corbusier made his first Modulor man precisely 175 cm tall. He then found this French height too small and changed it to an English 6 feet, which converts to 182.88 cm. This meant he needed to adjust all the numbers of both series and he later rounded off all the numbers to the nearest centimetre making the Modulor man 182 cm. He later regretted the imprecision this introduced and so then he only rounded off to first decimal place making the Modulor man 182.9 tall. This constant changing of all the Modulor measures makes a mockery of Le Corbusiers desire that these measures be universally accepted on both sides of the Atlantic to avoid problems caused by the incompatibility of metric and imperial measures. To avoid these complications all measurements given here are from the original French height. This is perhaps one of the great intellectual weaknesses of the Modulor, by having a precisely scaled human at its centre it then becomes problematic what that scale should then be, the average man? What about women and children? The average Englishman? Why not the average American, Chinese, or African?
The First Applications of the Modulor Concept

Le Corbusier drew sketches for the Modulor while on board a ship sailing to New York to work on the United Nations building project. The boat was caught in a storm so he used his writing to keep his mind off his immediate unpleasant predicament. Once in New York he was caught up in another kind of storm, only this time it was political. Soon after presenting his scheme to the jury a local architect Wallace Harrison was appointed. Rightly or wrongly Le Corbusier always accused the Americans of stealing his design.
1. The Factory of Saint-Di 1946-51

Back in France the first constructed building to use the new system was the hatmaking Factory at Saint-Di, looking like a 5-story test bed for the 17-story Unit to come. Here the new bton brut (rough concrete left bare thus showing the imprints from the wooden form work) is in evidence. The Fibonacci sequence of the Modulor can be seen in the independently overlapping rhythms of the spacing between the concrete frame and pilotis, the concrete brise-soleil (sun cutting grill on the south facade), and the wooden joinery of the glazing behind the brise-soleil. The music played here by the architect will be firm and subtle, shaded like Debussys, explains Le Corbusier in his description of this first use of the Modulor. 15 The spacing of the frame, the brise-soleil, and the glazing occurs at 625cm (red series), 592cm (blue series), and 366cm (blue series) respectively. The Factory of Saint-Di shows that Le Corbusiers high-minded concept (the harmoniously unified proportions) is not reduced when embodied in the low-grade materials (the rough concrete) necessitated
15 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complete: 1946-1952, (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1953), p. 14.
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by post-war shortages, and in fact it gains an added quality of irony: Pythagorean philosophy in the form of rough concrete.
Figure 38. The Factory at Saint-Di, Le Corbusiers first application of the Modulor system of proportion.
2. The Units
In all, Le Corbusier designed 5 Units, one each in Marseilles, Nantes, Briey, Firminy and Berlin, but the first one built in Marseilles between 1946 and 1952 is the best known. The Unit dhabitation (the unity of housing or housing unit) was intended as a prototype for future low-cost urban apartments after the war. It was a free-standing slab elevated on pilotis (Le Corbusiers trademark slender columns). The 2-story maisonette units are accessed through interior corridors on every third floor. Like the Factory of Saint-Di, every measurement from the bathroom fittings to the height of the roof deck conforms to the Modulor and its two Fibonacci series. These are carefully indicated red and blue series in the Oeuvre complete. Given the expanding intervals of the Fibonacci series, only fifteen measures were needed. On the left wall on the ground floor Le Corbusier has celebrated this achievement with a relief composition depicting the Modulor man and the two series, red and blue.
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Figure 39. The Unit dhabitation at Marseilles built between 1946 and 1952, one of only five Units that were built.
Conclusion: Review of Recent Literature on Le Corbusier and Modernism

Le Corbusier, being the most highly recognised of all the modernist architects has also come under the most severe criticism in the postmodern era. But recently there has been something of rebalance taking place in the appraisal of this most famous of architects. One of Le Corbusiers harshest critics in recent years has been Beatriz Colomina. She has mounted an ad hominem attack on Le Corbusier by assassinated his character; accusing Le Corbusier of being aggressively sexist and homophobic. Colomina claims he exploited women in the erotic sketches he made during his visit to Algeria, and that he vandalized and defaced E.1027, the house designed by Eileen Gray at Cap Martin, by painting murals on its walls. This was, Colomina claims, an act of aggression against Gray for being both a woman and a lesbian. Furthermore, like a colonist, he tried to efface Eileen Grays authorship of this house and 114
appropriate it as one of his own. 16 Flora Samuels more recent book, Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist totally demolishes this accusation of sexism and exploitation of women. Le Corbusier in fact worshipped both his mother and his wife his entire life. He employed more women in his office than was the average for the time, and he gave Charlotte Perriand a senior role in it. In Samuels more balanced view the murals painted on the walls of Eileen Grays house were indeed insensitive given that the designer was not consulted, but Jean Badovici, the actual owner of the house, did consent to it and the themes of the murals were in no way intended to cause offence. Le Corbusier often painted such murals on the walls of his friends houses and no offence was intended or taken. 17 Simon Richards in his book Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self addresses another common critique of Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier has often come under attack for the lack of spaces for casual social interaction in his buildings and city plans, as if this was a major failing of the architect. Richards goes deeper into Le Corbusiers motivations for this and discovers Le Corbusiers interest in the philosophy of Blaise Pascal, among others. The argument in a nutshell goes like this, Pascal (and therefore Le Corbusier as well) believed that only by avoiding all diversions such as socializing, gambling, admiring beauty and intelligence, can we then begin to contemplate our own truly wretched condition and thereby open ourselves to divine grace. So in Richards carefully researched reading of Le Corbusiers intentions, the lack of opportunities for socializing in his designs is not necessarily a failing so we can now on the contrary begin to enjoy the spaces he has given us for quiet contemplation and perhaps even be touched by their gracefulness. And on the same theme one more instance of reappraisal is well worth mentioning. In an essay by Jean-Franois Lyotard entitled Conventus, Lyotard describes the free plan of Le Corbusier as a peace plan. 18 Lyotard contrasts this with the temptation to create timeless monumental unities, a symbol of imperial strength but ultimately the architects own grave. He describes the primal scene of Le Corbusier as a conversation that took place after a meal when all the dirty plates were still scattered around the table. Le Corbusier then comes upon the idea: if the assemblage of ruins at the Acropolis in Athens is so beautiful, it is not because someone has measured up the plan in advance, rather, it is because it has been intensely inhabited. As if the gods had a feast there and the buildings left distributed at random on the rocky plateau are the remains of their meal. Here again we have a new reading of this famous architect, not as a despotic modernist trying to control every aspect of the lives of the citizens of the modern city, but someone who allows the inhabitants of his buildings the freedom and quietude necessary in order to be touched by grace.
16 See Beatriz Colomina, War on Architecture: E.1027, Assemblage 20 (April 1993) pp. 28 29. 17 See Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist (Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2004) pp. 35 37. 18 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Conventus, Misre de la philosophie (Paris: Editions Galile, 2000) pp. 198 208.
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New and important theories of what modernism is are still emerging. There is much mention today of a new modernism in contemporary architecture because, having passed through to the other side of the postmodern period (the subject of course notes below when we discuss the theorist Charles Jencks), architects are once again designing clean and abstract forms without any reference to historical styles and are once more looking to advances in technology for inspiration, just as the pioneers of modernism such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe did. But two influential writers put a stop to any idea of a return to modernism. The first is the French sociologist Bruno Latour who in his book We Have Never Been Modern makes the surprising claim that we have never been entirely modern. 19 Modern for Latour means the complete separation of human culture from nonhuman nature and the exclusion of hybrids and networks from that culture. A house is simply and purely a machine for living in, claimed Le Corbusier, but no one ever achieved that level of purity. The Villa Savoye for example was in fact handmade with bricks and mortar then plastered smooth to give it a machine-like appearance, so it could be argued that it is not a purely modernist building but is in fact a hybrid of pre-modern brick and modern glass and steel architecture. On a deeper level the purely human rationality that Le Corbusier desired was never fully separated from a more animal-like experience of emotions and the need for stimulating sensations. So Le Corbusier was never entirely modern. Therefore any talk of a new modernism does not make sense since we have always lived in world full of hybrids between animal and man and between the hybrids and networks and the purity dreamed of by modernists. Another sociologist, this time German, also has a new and influential theory of modernism. Ulrich Beck in his book Reflexive Modernization contrasts simple orthodox modernism with todays reflexive modernism (the modernisation of modernism itself). 20 Beck claims that the similarity between the two modernisms means that most people have not noticed the profound changes now taking place. While modernism was tied up with the upheaval of the industrial revolution, which led to the global spread of industrialised capitalist society, reflexive modernisation occurs after the victory of capitalism when society slowly slides into the new risk society. In industrial society there was a bitter struggle over access to goods; the benefits of mass production and the unfair distribution of capital, whereas in our current risk society there is the largely unnoticed conflict over the distribution of the bads, the unwanted and dangerous by-products of industry. Taking nuclear power as an example, it creates the potential for there to be enough energy for everyone but the real problem is how to deal with the threat of nuclear waste. And taking architectural practice as an example, most architects are no longer experimenting with new materials (the properties of concrete, glass and steel are mastered and well known to
19 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 20 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
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all) but are now spending more and more of their time learning about their professional liabilities and legal obligations, taking out personal indemnity insurance, putting their assets into trust accounts etc. In other words, how to avoid risks now becomes a major concern of architects since they are becoming ever more exposed to litigation. And the entire sustainable architecture movement can be seen as part of this unnoticed slide into a risk society and the new struggle over who has to deal with the bads of industrial society, such as toxic waste, climate change and the risk that buildings wont perform as expected.
Bibliography
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Colomina, Beatrizl. War on Architecture: E.1027, Assemblage 20 (April 1993) pp. 28 29. Elam, Kimberly. Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Ghyka, Matila. The Geometry of Art and Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1977) Originally published in French in 1931. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Trans. Frederick Etchells, (New York: Dover Publications, 1986). Originally published as Vers une architecture, 1923. Le Corbusier. Toward an Architecture. Introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2007). Le Corbusier. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). Originally published in French in 1948. Le Corbusier. The Modulor 2: Let the User Speak Next, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). Originally published in French in 1955.
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Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Oeuvre complete: 1946-1952 (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1953). Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Conventus, Misre de la philosophie (Paris : Editions Galile, 2000) pp. 198 208. Preziosi, Donald A. Harmonic Design in Minoan Architecture, Fibonacci Quarterly: 6, no. 6, (1968), pp. 370-84. Powell, Newman W. Fibonacci and the Golden Mean: Rabbits, Rumbas, and Rondeaux, Journal of Music Theory: 23, no. 2, (Fall, 1979), pp. 227-273. Pottage, Alain. Architectural Authorship: The Normative Ambitions of Le Corbusiers Modulor, AA Files: 31, (Summer 1996). Samuel, Flora. Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist (Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2004). Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949). Wittkower, Rudolf. Report of a Debate on the Motion that Systems of Proportion make Good Design Easier and Bad Design More Difficult, RIBA Journal: 64, (September, 1957), p. 462. Wittkower, Rudolf. Le Corbusiers Moduor, in Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 204. Tim Adams June 2010
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Sigfried Giedion (1888 1968)

The Prophet of Modernism Introduction
In his book Towards a New Architecture Le Corbusier tells architects to open their eyes to the progress made in cars, planes, and ocean liners, and to learn from the engineers who design them. It is no surprise then that next theorist we will study was trained as an engineer. The Swiss engineer and art historian Sigfried Giedion wrote the book Space, Time and Architecture (published 1941) and this work is universally considered to be the bible of modern architecture. Giedion, although not an architect himself, became the spokesman and chief promoter of architectural modernism through his work as the secretary general of the CIAM (Congrs Internationale dArchitecture Moderne or International Congress of Modern Architecture). The CIAM had its first conference at La Sarraz, Switzerland in 1928 and continued to have meetings up until 1956. This group of architects under the leadership of Giedion and Le Corbusier attempted to set the agenda and the rules for all modern architects to follow. The so-called Athens Charter that Le Corbusier produced from the 4th CIAM meeting in Athens in 1933 codified the rules that many architects and town planners followed for years to come. One of the legacies of this charter can be found everywhere today: the strict zoning of cities into functionally divided areas that necessitate ever more congested transportation links between them.
Giedion Biography
Sigfried Giedion was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1888, one year later than Le Corbusier. He was in fact Swiss and spent most of his life in Zurich. He graduated as a mechanical engineer in Vienna in order to take over the family textile business. But that prospect didnt interest him so he went on to study art history, completing his dissertation Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism at the University of Munich in 1922. Meanwhile he had been writing poetry and prose and had his play Arbeit Drei Akte (Work A Play in Three Acts) performed in various German cities during 1917. Then by chance Gideon happened to meet some architects, including Le Corbusier, and was inspired by their use of new materials to write Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete in 1928, the same year as the first CIAM meeting. In 1929 Giedion started writing a multi-volume work called The Origin of Modern Man which he never completed. Although an active freelance writer he had no academic 119
position until 1938 when Walter Gropius invited Giedion to him to Harvard University in the United States to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. These lectures were later published as Space, Time and Architecture in 1941. For many years this huge 800 page book was the only architectural theory required in most schools of architecture. In fact Space, Time and Architecture was taken to be the only history book required too! That was a mistake because the whole work uses history merely as a prop to present the architects that Giedion has chosen to champion in the best possible light. The well-known Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri in his groundbreaking book, Theories and History of Architecture, labels Giedions work as operative criticism. 1 Tafuri defines this as criticism that distorts the past in order to justify the present, and so operative criticism is therefore ideological in the Marxist sense of the term: a false consciousness used by the bourgeois elite to maintain their privileged position in society by preventing change. Tafuris critique of Giedion is quite severe and we could perhaps read Giedion in a less cynical light by seeing him as an engaged critic willing to take sides and therefore change the status quo. In a more balanced evaluation Arthur Molella concedes that Giedions works do have a strong, even propagandistic flavour, and that they were a type of scientific vulgarization misusing concepts taken from Einstein and Heisenberg for example, but nevertheless Molella concludes, to dismiss Giedions speculations as unrigorous, non-scientific, and, ipso facto, invalid is to miss their deeper cultural and philosophical meaning a meaning that transcended science. 2 Giedion was ahead of his time in making scientific concepts interfere in the realm of architecture. By doing so he created what Molella calls science moderne, the extra e making it the French word for Art Deco, the popular decorative and toned-down version of modernism. Science moderne is the sensual subjective synthesis of relativity, quantum mechanics and gestalt psychology that gripped the public imagination following the vindication of Einsteins theories in 1919.
The Structure of Giedions Bible

Except for the long introduction added to later editions, and Part 1 which discusses methodology, Space, Time and Architecture follows a chronological order starting with the Italian Renaissance and finishing with contemporary America. The selected text below is at the centre of the book and at the heart of Giedions argument: technology has created a gap between thinking and feeling, between rationality and emotion. Modern painting shows us how this dichotomy can be bridged. Picassos Cubist paintings harmonise perfectly (so Giedion argues but this is now strongly
1 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (London; New York: Granada, 1980). 2 Arthur P. Molella, Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedions Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command, Technology and Culture, vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2002), p. 387.
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disputed 3) with Einsteins theory of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Cubist paintings do this by capturing the movement (and therefore also the time taken to move) of the viewer by representing simultaneous overlapping views of the same object. Just as the invention of perspective unified science, art, and architecture in the Renaissance, so too can the art of our time unify architecture with contemporary developments in physics. In the most reproduced image of Space, Time and Architecture Giedion juxtaposes a cubist painting by Picasso with the Bauhaus buildings by Walter Gropius, thus making his project of forming an assemblage of art and architecture plain for all to see.
Figure 40. Pages 494 and 495, the two most famous pages, from Sigfried Giedions Space, Time and Architecture. Picassos cubist painting LArlsienne of 1911 is juxtaposed with Gropius Bauhaus buildings at Dessau of 1926. By making an assemblage of art, architecture and physics, Giedion argued that Gropiuss building bridged the gap between thinking and feeling, just as the Cubist painters had done by taking on aspects of Einsteins theory of relativity.
3 See for example Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1983) for an account of how little the Cubists really understood Einstein.
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Space, Time and Architecture4

by Sigfried Giedion
The New Space Conception: Space-Time

Social, economic, and functional influences play a vital part in all human activities, from the sciences to the arts. But there are other factors which also have to be taken into account our feelings and emotions. These factors are often dismissed as trivial, but actually their effect upon mens actions is immense. A good share of the misfortunes of the past century came out of its belief that industry and techniques had only functional import, with no emotional content. The arts were exiled to an isolated realm of their own, completely insulated from everyday realities. As a result, life lost unity and balance; science and industry made steady advances, but in the now detached realm of feeling there was nothing but a vacillation from one extreme to the other. The scope and strength of the emotions are both greater than we sometimes suppose. Emotion or feeling enters into all our affairs speculation is never completely pure, just as action is never entirely practical. And, of course, we are far from having free choice in this matter of feeling. Large tracts of our emotional life are determined by circumstances over which we have no control: by the fact that we happen to be men, of such or such a kind, living at this or that period. Thus a thoroughly integrated culture produces a marked unity of feeling among its representatives. For example, a recognizable common spirit runs through the whole baroque period. It makes itself felt in activities as distinct from each other as painting and philosophy or architecture and mathematics This is not particularly surprising. Techniques, sciences, the arts all, these are carried on by men who have grown up together in the same period, exposed to its characteristic influences. The feelings which it is the special concern of the artist to express are also at work within the engineer and the mathematician. This emotional background shared by such otherwise divergent pursuits is what we must try to discover.
Do We Need Artists?
Some people question whether any pervasive unity of feeling is possible in a period like ours. They regard science and industry as inimical to art and feeling: where the former prosper, the latter decline. Or they see science taking over the arts, opening up
4 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 430-437. Originally published in 1941.
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new means of self-expression which make us independent of them. There is some basis for views like these. Do we, then, really need artists any longer? In any civilization, feeling continues to filter through every activity and situation. An environment whose chief aspects remain opaque to feeling is as unsatisfying as one which resists practical or intellectual control. But just this sort of emotional frustration has prevailed for a long time past. An official art has turned its back upon the contemporary world and given up the attempt to interpret it emotionally. The feelings which that world elicits have remained formless, have never met with those objects which are at once their symbols and their satisfaction. Such symbols, however, are vital necessities. Feelings build up within us and form systems; they cannot be discharged through instantaneous animal outcries or grimaces. We need to discover harmonies between our own inner states and our surroundings. And no level of development can be maintained if it remains detached from our emotional life. The whole machinery runs down. This is the reason why the most familiar and ordinary things have importance for the genuinely creative artists of our generation. Painters like Picasso, Juan Gris, the lyricist of cubism, and Le Corbusier have devoted themselves to the common objects of daily use: bowls, pipes, bottles, glasses, guitars. Natural materials have received the same attention: stones hollowed out by the sea, roots, bits of bark even weatherbleached bones. Anonymous and unpretentious things like these scarcely figure at all in our normal consciousness, but they attain their true stature and significance under the artists hand. They become revealed as objets raction potiques, to borrow Le Corbusiers phrase. Or, to put it somewhat differently, new parts of the world are made accessible to feeling. The artist, in fact, functions a great deal like an inventor or a scientific discoverer: all three seek new relations between man and his world. In the artists case these relations are emotional instead of practical or cognitive. The creative artist does not want to copy his surroundings, on the one hand, or to make us see them through his eyes, on the other. He is a specialist who shows us in his work as if in a mirror something we have not realized for ourselves: the state of our own souls. He finds the outer symbols for the feelings which really possess us but which for us are only chaotic and therefore disquieting, obsessive stirrings. This is why we still need artists, however difficult it may be for them to hold their place in the modern world.
The Research into Space: Cubism

In many places, about 1910, a consciousness that the painters means of expression had lost contact with modern life was beginning to emerge. But it was in Paris, with cubism, that these efforts first attained a visible result. The method of presenting spatial relationships which the cubists developed led up to the form-giving principles of the new space conception. 5
5 [Footnote from the original text] We shall treat contemporary movements in art here only so far as their methods are directly related to the space conceptions of our period, and in order to understand
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The half-century previous to the rise of cubism had seen painting flourish almost nowhere outside of France. It was the high culture of painting that grew up in France during this period which formed the fostering soil for our contemporary art. Young people of talent whether Spanish like Picasso, or Swiss like Le Corbusier found their inspiration in Paris, in the union of their powers with the artistic tradition of that city. The vitality of French culture served to the advantage of the whole world. Among the general public, however, there was no sympathetic response to this achievement. It was from a form of art which the public despised that nineteenth- century painting drew its positive strength. Cubism, growing up in this soil, absorbed all its vigor. Picasso has been called the inventor of cubism, but cubism is not the invention of any individual. It is rather the expression of a collective and almost unconscious attitude. A painter who participated in the movement says of its beginnings: There was no invention. Still more, there could not be one. Soon it was twitching in everybodys fingers. There was a presentiment of what should come, and experiments were made. We avoided one another; a discovery was on the point of being made, and each of us distrusted his neighbors. We were standing at the end of a decadent epoch. From the Renaissance to the first decade of the present century perspective had been one of the most important constituent facts of painting. It had remained a constant element through all changes of style. The four-century-old habit of seeing the outer world in the Renaissance manner that is, in terms of three dimensions rooted itself so deeply in the human mind that no other form of perception could be imagined. This in spite of the fact that the art of different previous cultures had been twodimensional. When earlier periods established perspective as a constituent fact they were always able to find new expressions for it. In the nineteenth century perspective was misused. This led to its dissolution. The three-dimensional space of the Renaissance is the space of Euclidean geometry. But about 1830 a new sort of geometry was created, one which differed from that of Euclid in employing more than three dimensions. Such geometries have continued to be developed, until now a stage has been reached where mathematicians deal with figures and dimensions that cannot be grasped by the imagination. These considerations interest us only in so far as they affect the sense of space. Like the scientist, the artist has come to recognize that classic conceptions of space and volumes are limited and one-sided. In particular, it has become plain that the aesthetic qualities of space are not limited to its infinity for sight, as in the gardens of Versailles. The essence of space as it is conceived today is its many-sidedness; the infinite
the common background of art, architecture, and construction. For an understanding of these movements the elaborate catalogues of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, are very useful. See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936), and Robert Rosenblaum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art (New York, 1960). For a short survey with emphasis on historical relations, see J. J. Sweeney, Plastic Redirections of the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1935): for the relation of contemporary art to education, industrial design, and daily life, see L. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York, 1938). The close relation of contemporary sculpture to primitive art, on the one hand, and, on the other, to an enlargement of our outlook into nature is stressed in C. Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture (New York, 1955).
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potentiality for relations within it. Exhaustive description of an area from one point of reference is; accordingly, impossible; its character changes with the point from which it is viewed. In order to grasp the true nature of space the observer must project himself through it. The stairways in the upper levels of the Eiffel Tower are among the earliest architectural expression of the continuous interpenetration of outer and inner space. Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system of Newton. And in modern art, for the first time since the Renaissance, a new conception of space leads to a selfconscious enlargement of our ways of perceiving space. It was in cubism that this was most fully achieved.
Space-Time
The cubists did not seek to reproduce the appearance of objects from one vantage point; they went round them, tried to lay hold of their internal constitution. They sought to extend the scale of feeling, just as contemporary science extends its descriptions to cover new levels of material phenomena. Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides from above and below, from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries there is added a fourth one time. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was the first to recognize and express this change, around 1911. The same year saw the first cubist exhibition in the Salon des Indpendants. Considering the history of the principles from which they broke, it can well be understood that the paintings should have been thought a menace to the public peace, and have become the subject of remarks in the Chamber of Deputies. The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life simultaneity. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work, Elektrodynamik bewegter Krper, in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity. When Ozenfant, and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) came together as young painters in 1917, they called their painting Purisme. In comparison with the movements preceding it (constructivism in Russia or neo-plasticism in Holland), purism, coming out of French soil, was the closest of all to the aim of cubism and, at the same time, to architecture.
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Figure 41. Amde Ozenfant, Accords, 1922.
Conclusion
Given what we now know about architectural theory, in particular what Franoise Choay has taught us in regard to Alberti, we can see the continuation of two of the major themes of architectural theory at work in Giedion: transgression and scientism. Firstly, Giedion makes the concepts of twentieth century physics travel from science to architecture, he makes them transgress disciplinary boundaries. And secondly, he creates the mere appearance of doing something scientific without the proper rigour and hard definitions of science, in other words scientism, or to use Molellas apt term for what Giedion does; science moderne. And just as is the case for Alberti, this leaves architectural theory standing on shaky grounds. But what Giedion does do very successfully is make an assemblage of art, architecture and science, and by doing so he simultaneously gives a broader cultural context to the new developments in science, and, a deeper motivation to the forms being generated by contemporary architects. The bridge he uses to get between architecture and science is art. Giedions arguments are not always convincing, mainly because he relies on art to explain the physics, and
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Einstein himself was critical of Giedions misuse of his theories. 6 But at the heart of Giedions project is redemption. He wants to unify art, science and architecture in order to unify thinking and feeling in the individual. He wants to replace the sterile and disenchanting mechanistic universe that we find ourselves inhabiting today with a vital and organic enchanting universe, one where the discoveries of science are just as colourful and intoxicating as the latest works of painters and sculptors. And isnt this is just what we find today? Thanks to the aid of the computer the dry subjects of physics and mathematics can now produce startlingly beautiful images, images that some might argue are more beautiful than those produced by contemporary artists. Images such MRI scans of the living brain, fractal geometry, chaos theory, images of distant galaxies from Hubble, images from electron microscopes, and computer renderings of future architectures.
Figure 42. Four views of a Lorenz attractor, a 3-dimensional mapping of a chaotic flow.
6 See Molella, Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedions Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command Technology and Culture, vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2002), p. 377 for Einsteins criticisms of Giedions Space, Time and Architecture.
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Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion, An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Fascinating biography, contextualizes Giedions work in art history, tracing Giedions concept of space to Riegl and stylistic periods to Wlfflin. Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967). The bible of modern architecture. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command, A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York, Oxford University Press, 1948). Giedions larger project of mapping the creation of a new man through mechanization. Giedion, Sigfried. Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (Santa Monica, The Getty Center, 1995). The most original of Giedions works. Later toned-down by Giedion for parts of Space, Time and Architecture. Le Corbusier. The Athens Charter, trans. Anthony Eardley, (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973). This doctrinaire document became the planning guide for every modern city. Molella, Arthur P. Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedions Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command, Technology and Culture, vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2002), pp. 374 389. Tim Adams June 2010
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Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

On the Way to a Philosophy of Architecture Introduction
It is hard to find agreement among philosophers, argument being their forte, but most philosophers can agree that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. That such an important philosopher wrote an essay about buildings is something to be celebrated by students of architectural theory and we should honour this by devoting a little of our time to it. 1 To summarise any philosophers ideas in a few pages is always impossible, to do it for someone as profound and as knowledgeable about the history of philosophy as Heidegger is undoubtedly so. Therefore in order to get a small glimpse into his thought we will introduce something about his early life as a student. When Heidegger was 18 years old and a school pupil in Freiburg he was given a copy of Franz Brentanos book On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. 2 On page 115 of Brentanos book you will find the diagram shown below. 3 From this the young Heidegger learnt that Aristotle, and the entire Western tradition that follows Aristotles example, divides being, that is everything that exists, into various categories of being. The first division divides being into 1) substances (the things themselves) and 2) attributes of things (the quantities, qualities, actions and locations of things). Attributes, which Aristotle calls accidents, are then divided into 1) relations and 2) absolute accidents and so on until we arrive at the final six categories of being. Heideggers life-long goal and his great contribution to Western philosophy was to ask what this scheme overlooks. In other words, what is the overall meaning or essence of Being? In the English translations of Heidegger Being is capitalised to distinguish this underlying overall Being from the many categories of being in Aristotle. Heidegger describes his project as a fundamental ontology in Greek onto means being, therefore the search for an overall fundamental sense of Being.
1 Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 145 161. Note the lack of commas in the essay title. This is often mistakenly corrected but the absence is quite deliberate, it is intended to show that the three terms are continuous and should not be considered independently. 2 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Fontana Press, 1994), p. 51. 3 Franz Brentano, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, trans. Rolf George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
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Figure 43. Diagram of Aristotles categories of being from page 115 Franz Brentanos On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, a book Heidegger read as a school student and gave him the his lifelong project of search for the overall or fundamental meaning of Being.
Heideggers Famous Essay on Building

Moving along quite a bit to 1951, Heidegger was invited to present a lecture at a conference for architects and artists on the theme Man and Space. The organisers intended the participants to address the problem of the housing shortage in the aftermath of World War II, when millions of people were still homeless. Heideggers approach was not to look at the various types of solutions to the housing shortage (the several senses of being) but to ask what might be the fundamental essence of building (the Being of building). Heideggers starting point, as always, is to listen to what language (which in his case was the German language) and the etymological origin of certain key words can tell us. In German the words for building (Bauen) comes from the word buan (to dwell) which has the same meaning as Wohnen (dwelling). This link is revealed to us when are we are thinking (Denken) with language, hence the title of the essay is Bauen Wohnen Denken (Building Dwelling Thinking) which, as mentioned earlier, has no commas to indicate that these words are essentially linked together. The natural habit of Western thinking is to look for causal links between cause and effect or means and ends, such as Louis Sullivans famous phrase form follows function, function being the cause (the way of proceeding in design) and form the effect (the building as end result of using function to guide the design process). So our usual way of thinking is to think that we make buildings to house people, that building is the means and active dwelling (inhabitation of the building) the end. Heidegger shows us that when we think about language and the original meaning 130
of the words building and dwelling, we discover that building is in fact a subset of dwelling and not its cause, likewise dwelling is a subset of thinking. Diagrammatically we can contrast Heideggers thinking to our normal causal thinking like this:
Figure 44. Normally we think that the building is the cause of human inhabitation and that this inhabitation is one of the buildings effects. Heidegger challenges this habit of thought by ruling out all causality: building can only happen when dwelling is happening, and dwelling for humans always happens when thinking in language is happening.
A consequence of this shift in our thinking about building is that before we build we must first think in language, then we must think in language about dwelling, and only then can we think about dwelling in buildings. Keep in mind that for Heidegger there is no causality implied in these terms, they all must happen together. The key concept in Heideggers essay is the simple oneness of the fourfold (Geviert) of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Heidegger claims that as humans we cannot treat one element of the fourfold without implying the other three elements. The source for this concept is Platos dialogue Gorgias 507e 508a where Socrates says to Callicles, Wise men, Callicles, say that the heavens and the earth, gods and men, are bound together by fellowship and friendship, and order and temperance and justice, and for this reason they call the sum of things the order of the world, not the world of disorder and riot(emphasis added). Another source for the fourfold is a poem by Heideggers favourite poet Friedrich Hlderlin called As on a holiday: Drift on between Heaven and Earth and amid the peoples. / The thoughts of the communal spirit they are, / And quietly come to rest in the poets soul, / So that quickly struck and long familiar / To infinite powers, it shakes / With recollections and kindled by / The holy ray, that fruit conceived in love, the work of gods and men, / To bear witness to both, the song succeeds (emphasis added). 4 The underlying image here is the myth of Prometheus as a metaphor for the work of the poet. Prometheus caught the lightning bolt from the gods (the holy ray) with his bare hands in order to
4 Friedrich Hlderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 195. For Heideggers analysis of Hlderlins poem see Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Werner Brock (ed.), Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1949).
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capture fire for the benefit of all people, just as the poet builds word bridges between the eternal and the everyday for the benefit of humanity. So then the work of the architect is also this poetic capture of a sudden bridge arcing from the sky to the earth and then generating a permanent monument to the momentary oneness of earth (the site), the sky (the cosmos, the infinite, geometry), gods (eternity), and mortals (the community). Little wonder then that Heideggers key example of a building is a bridge, the old bridge at Heidelberg that, allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.
Figure 45. The fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and gods described in Heideggers essay Building Dwelling Thinking.
Figure 46. The old bridge in Heidelberg over the Neckar River, Germany, built by Prince Elector Karl Theodor (1786 - 1788). This bridge is Heideggers key example of a building that allows for the fourfold.
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Building Dwelling Thinking5 by Martin Heidegger

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask: 1. What is it to dwell? 2. How does building belong to dwelling?
1. What is it to Dwell?
We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?
5 Heidegger, Martin, Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 145 161.
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It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first. But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things: 1. Building is really dwelling. 2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. 3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings. If we give thought to this threefold fact, we obtain a clue and note the following: as long as we do not bear in mind that all building is in itself a dwelling, we cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the building of buildings might be in its nature. We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth. But on the earth already means under the sky. Both of these also mean remaining before the divinities and include a belonging to men's being with one another. By a primal oneness the four-earth and sky, divinities and mortals-belong together in one. Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. 0ut of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment. When we speak of the divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities. When we speak of mortals, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. 134
This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold [Geviert] by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing. Accordingly, the preserving that dwells is fourfold.
2. How Does Building Belong to Dwelling?

The answer to this question will clarify for us what building, understood by way of the nature of dwelling, really is. We limit ourselves to building in the sense of constructing things and inquire: what is a built thing? A bridge may serve as an example for our reflections. The bridge is a location. As such a thing, it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted. The space allowed by the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg [see illustration above], this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing. Spaces, and with them space as such space are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man.... Building puts up locations that make space and a site for the fourfold. From the simple oneness in which earth and sky, divinities and mortals belong together, building receives the directive for its erecting of locations. Building takes over from the fourfold the standard for all the traversing and measuring of the spaces that in each case are provided for by the locations that have been founded. The edifices guard the fourfold. They are things that in their own way preserve the fourfold. To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing, of dwelling. However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.
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Figure 47. Martin Heideggers mountain hut near Todtnauberg in the Black Forrest region, Southern Germany.
Conclusion
Heideggers gift bestowed upon architectural theory has not gone unnoticed. Many have taken this essay into consideration, Kenneth Frampton and Alberto Prez- Gmez being the two most prominent ones. 6 But more often than not the use of Heideggers thinking in architecture has been put to reactionary and conservative ends. Heidegger is used to promote a return to simple vernacular forms of architecture, a return to a time when building was supposedly in harmony with the community it housed and the site upon which it was located. Here it is easy to recognise a return to Laugiers theme of the primitive hut which Joseph Rykwert has shown to be a perennial theme throughout the history of architectural theory. This interpretation is quite understandable given Heideggers veneration for simple country life in many of his
6 Kenneth Frampton, On Reading Heidegger in Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 440 - 446 and Alberto PrezGmez, Dwelling on Heidegger: Architecture as Mimetic Techno-Poiesis, available at <http://www.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/TheoArch/Wolke/eng/Subjects/982/Perez-Gomez/perezgomez_t.htm>.
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writings and the fact that he spent most of his life in the provincial city of Freiburg in Southern Germany, and that he would often retreat even further to his simple mountain hut near Todtnauberg in the Black Forrest region of Germany. 7 But Heidegger was not entirely anti-technology, in fact he had a telephone installed in this primitive hut, he only asked that we consider what the essence of technology might be. In recent years Heidegger has been an easy target for deconstructivists like Mark Wigley. Wigley reminds us that Heidegger joined the National Socialist party (the Nazis) leading up to World War II, and then uses Heidegger to argue that the uncanny sense in which public violence [of the Nazis against the Jews] is necessarily private. Or more precisely, domestic. [and that there is a] role of architecture in Heideggers complicity with the violence of that.... 8 Obviously Heideggers thinking of the fourfold is a powerful tool and like all powerful tools it is capable of being used and abused, so it can be made to do good or evil. But to ignore it completely would be to overlook one of the most profound contemplations on the art of building that has ever taken place. Perhaps the most profound commentary ever written on Heideggers essay comes from Massimo Cacciari, an important philosopher in his own right and one who also happens to teach in an architecture school, the Istituo Architettura in Venice. 9 Cacciari finds that Heidegger has no nostalgia for an easy return to the rooted situation of dwellers happy in their dwellings, in the manner that Oswald Spengler does in his work The Decline of the West. Heidegger, claims Cacciari, on the contrary sees the estrangement of the human spirit from any dwelling whatsoever as necessary, this is what permits our control over nature. Heidegger so detaches us from the idea of building-dwelling, Cacciari argues, that he renders absolutely problematic not only its effectuality, but even the nostalgia for it. There is no doubt that Heidegger keeps listening for the call to dwell. But this listening is just silence.in demonstrating the built thing in terms of a bridge, he show us the actual inconceivability of a bridge . He tells us of the total impotence of shelter disguised as homes, of cities disguised as places. 10 Cacciari leaves us with only one possibility: we must represent this silence in the negation of dwelling, in the absence of home, in the glass architecture of Mies van der Rohe.
Bibliography
7 See Heideggers Why Do I Stay in the Provinces in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 27 29 for his description the hut and his love of peasant life. 8 Mark Wigley, Heideggers House: The Violence of the Domestic, D: Columbia Documents in Architecture and Theory, 1 (1992), pp. 92 and 93. 9 Massimo Cacciari, Eupalino or Architecture, Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980) pp. 106 115. This appears to be a book review of Tafuri and Dal Cos Modern Architecture, yet Cacciari being one of Italys leading philosophers cant resist this opportunity to delve deeply into one of the most philosophical essays ever written on architecture, Heideggers Building Dwelling Thinking. 10 Cacciari, p. 108.
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Brentano, Franz, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, trans. Rolf George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Cacciari, Massimo, Eupalinos or Architecture Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980) pp. 106 115. Frampton, Kenneth, On Reading Heidegger, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 440- 446. Heidegger, Martin, Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 145 161. The full text of this essay is available for download on the net on many sites, here is just one of them: <http://foucault.info/links/relatedheidegger/heidegger.buildingDwellingThinking.en.html>. Heidegger, Martin, Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Werner Brock (ed.), Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1949). Heidegger, Martin, Why Do I Stay in the Provinces in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 27 29. Ott, Hugo, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Fontana Press, 1994). Alberto Prez-Gmez, Dwelling on Heidegger: Architecture as Mimetic TechnoPoiesis, available at <http://www.tucottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/TheoArch/Wolke/eng/Subjects/982/ PerezGomez/perez- gomez_t.htm>. Wigley, Mark, Heideggers House: The Violence of the Domestic, D: Columbia Documents in Architecture and Theory, 1 (1992), pp. 91 121. Tim Adams June 2010
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Charles Jencks
The Semiotician of Architecture and Theorist of Postmodernism
Introduction: What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism was the dominant architectural theory and practice during the 1970s and 80s. The pioneering architect of postmodernism was Robert Venturi. Other important postmodernists include Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, and Arata Isozaki. Postmodernism (hyphenated as post-modernism in older texts) can be briefly defined as the art of quoting without quotation marks, to misquote the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco. 1 What Eco actually says is that it is no longer possible to say anything without quotation marks. He says, for example, that we can no longer say I love you madly without quoting the pulp-fiction writer Barbara Cartland. In contrast to the modernist who would, prior to starting a painting or building, first ask themselves what is the intrinsic potential of this medium and how can I make it respond to our industrial, technological age? the postmodernist would ask who can I quote and how can I make the work into an ironic or witty reference? Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye refers to Palladios 18th-century Villas respectfully and at a distance through its similar emphasis on proportions, its relation to the site, the villa typology and so on. 2 Contrast this with Robert Venturis Vanna Venturi House which wears its Palladian rigidity and symmetry on its facade for all to see (see illustrations below). Another often quoted definition of postmodernism comes from the French philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard who says, simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. 3 Metanarratives, also called grand narratives by Lyotard, are those universalising stories intended to give legitimacy to
1 See Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985). Despite Eco being a difficult-to-read theorist, his novel The Name of the Rose became a best-seller and later a film starring Sean Connery, and is the best example of postmodernism in literature and film. Set in medieval times it concerns an English monk/scholar/detective who solves a murder mystery while hunting down a lost book by Aristotle in a labyrinthine Italian monastery. It has much to tell us about postmodern semiotics while being set in a quoted pre-modern architectural setting. 2 Colin Rowe was the first to find direct links between Le Corbusiers and Palladios proportional systems in his famous essay The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, see Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976). 3 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.
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the present that were so popular with the modernists. So postmodernism is incredulity or lack of belief in these big stories intended to legitimise current practices. A good example would be Sigfried Geidions Space, Time and Architecture (as discussed in a previous section) which elevates Le Corbusiers story about the decline of architecture and the ascendancy of engineering into a universal history of architecture. Therefore in place of the modernists single universal account, postmodernism introduces various little stories that may and often do contadict each other.
Figure 48. The Villa Rotonda by Palladio 1566-69, the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier 1928-31 and the Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi 1961-5. All three houses conform to the Palladian villa typology. The modernist Villa Savoye does this abstractly through its geometry and its relation to the site, while postmodern Vanna Venturi House does this overtly by mimicking the Palladian triangular pediment and the symmetry of the facade.
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Postmodern Beauty versus Modernist Sublime

The most rigorous and perhaps also most useful definition of postmodernism comes from Lyotards short essay What is Postmodernism that forms the appendix to his book The Postmodern Condition. Here Lyotard makes use of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the concept of the sublime from Kants Critique of Judgement. Whereas the beautiful is the unity of the faculties of thinking (the concept) and perception (the representation), the sublime is the conflict of those faculties. So for example, if we have an idea of what a beautiful face is and we see someone in the street that matches that idea then that will give us pleasure. But if we have a concept for which there can be no representation, heaven on earth, the fourth dimension or a ghost who walks down a busy street for example, then there will be a mismatch between the idea and all our attempts to represent it, and this is what Kant calls the sublime. The sublime gives us both pleasure and pain, pleasure in the concept and pain in our inability to adequately represent it. Quite clearly modern art and architecture strives for the sublime, think of Malevichs abstract paintings and Mies van der Rohes less-is-more architecture. Both try to represent the unrepresentable, the fourth dimension for Malevich and silence for Mies. In contrast, postmodern art and architecture quite consciously strive for a unity between the idea and the object. Postmodernists use forms from popular culture and history to make sure that the public will find their work agreeable and therefore beautiful.
Figure 49. The modern sublime compared with postmodern beauty. Malevichs Black Square and Mies Barcelona Pavilion try to represent what cannot be represented, the fourth dimension and silence. This leads to a pleasure taken in the concept but also a painful lack of physical realisation. The painting by Kitaj and Jencks Thematic House are pure pleasure because the concepts they deal with, historical narratives and traditional forms, are easily represented and instantly recognised.
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Lyotard makes one further useful distinction within the sublime. We can either place the emphasis on the power of the concept or the weakness of the representation. He calls the former novatio (innovation) and the latter melancholia (sadness). This is a useful distinction because it allows Lyotard to differentiate between a positive postmodernism which is sublime, as a continuation of the modernist project of novatio, from a negative postmodernism that simply tries to be beautiful. This helps explain why postmodernism is attacked and defended in equal amounts. It is attacked for being a superficial surrender to what is popularly perceived as being beautiful, and it is defended for its sublime innovation, for being a continuation of modernism. Lyotards examples are; Charles Jencks for the negative postmodern (beautiful); the English writer James Joyce for the positive postmodern (sublime novatio); and the French writer Marcel Proust for nostalgic sublime (sublime melancholia).
The Historical Context for Postmodernism

In Latin post means after as in postgraduate or Post-Impressionist, while modo means just now so the term postmodern means after the just now, in other words, the indeterminate and unknowable future. This is just one of the many contradictions of postmodernism. But as a reaction to the homogeneous dogma of modernist theory aiming to force a consensus, it is only logical that the alternative to this would be a heterogeneous pluralism of theories and approaches to architecture, happy to live with dissension and conflicting views. During the 1960s modernism increasingly came under attack for not delivering on any of its promises. Le Corbusiers Villas were not mass-produced houses and did not improve the lives of ordinary people; they were in fact virtually uninhabitable handmade sculptures for the gardens of the rich. So in the early 70s a sudden overturning of modernist rules occurred. For example, Modernist theory consistently mocked eclecticism (the borrowing of stylistic elements from historical examples) that it saw as belonging to the nightmare of the 19th century battle of the styles. With the introduction of postmodernism this ban was suddenly lifted and the floodgates of history were allowed to burst open. The history of architecture was no longer the preserve of erudite academics and specialist journals but now became the hunting ground of practising architects looking to tie their work to more popular pre-modern styles. So in the architecture of the period we have, to use the humorous summation of Frederic Jameson, a baroque postmodernism (Michael Graves), a rococo postmodernism (Charles Moore and Robert Venturi), a classical and neo-classical postmodernism (Aldo Rossi and Christian de Portzamparc), and even a HighModernist postmodernism (Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas) because modernism itself became just another historical style to be used or abandoned according to individual preference. 4
4 Frederic Jameson, The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernist Debate, in David Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory, A Reader (New York: Longman Group Limited, 1988), p. 375.
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Charles Jencks 1 The Semiotician of Architecture

The theorist most often associated with postmodernism is Charles Alexander Jencks, an American architectural critic and historian born in Baltimore in 1939. He studied English literature and then architecture under Siegfried Giedion (a theorist discussed in a previous section) at Harvard University. He gained his PhD at London University in 1970 and then began a distinguished career teaching on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1979 he designed his own house in London, The Thematic House with the help of Terry Farrell and many others. Postmodernist theory of the 1970s followed in the footsteps of the widespread interest in semiotics (the science of signs) that occurred in the 1960s. Writings on language and communication date back to classical times. The Stoics from around 300 BC had a sophisticated theory of language and meaning that is still used by some philosophers today. 5 We can find traces of the Stoic theory of language in Vitruvius Ten Books on Architecture. But contemporary theories of communication originate from two important sources: the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced Perse, 1839-1914) and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (pronounced so-SER, 1857-1913). 6 Each developed their own theories and models of the sign independently. Since almost all theories of the sign in use today are based on one or the other of these two pioneers, and since Jencks combines them in his own theory of the architectural sign, it will necessary to introduce you to a few of their difficult concepts.
Peirce and Saussure: Two Sign Models Commonly Used Today

Since we are not linguists trained to think in terms of sign models, these terms will seem quite strange and confusing at first. But anyone who has learned a second language will know that signs can seem quite arbitrary when they are not familiar to us. When a foreign sign seems opaque we see it for what it really is, a material sound or image that is only connected to a mental thought after we have learned the relevant social habits and conventions. This fact is forgotten by native speakers who
5 See for example Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) for a brilliant use of Stoic theory of meaning applied to the mathematics and childrens literature of Lewis Carroll. 6 For a useful introduction to the subject, see Winfried Nth, Handbook of Semiotics (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) which includes excellent brief outlines of each semiotician, Peirce on pages 39-47 and Saussure on pages 56-63. For an easy to understand introduction to semiotics and architecture, see Geoffrey Broadbent, A Plain Mans Guide to the Theory of Signs in Architecture, in Kate Nesbittt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 - 1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 124 - 139.
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see signs transparently and therefore they assume that the meaning and the word are inseparable. So to introduce these difficult terms as briefly as possible, Saussures semiology uses a dyadic or two-part sign model made up of the signifier (the physical expression, the spoken or written word) and the signified (the mental concept, the meaning we carry in our heads). So for example, when a Frenchman says le chien, a Mandarin speaker says gu and an Englishman says dog, they all produce quite different spoken sounds, in other words different signifiers for the same signified which is the mental image of a furry domestic animal that barks. In contrast to Saussures dyadic semiology, Peirces triadic semiotics uses a three-part sign model; the referent (the real object, the real dog for example), the representamen (the expression dog) and the interpretant (the mental image of the dog we carry in our heads). In the extract below Jencks actually refers to Ogden and Richards three-part sign model but this is clearly based on Peirces sign model, but Jencks also overlaps this with Saussures binary terms as well which can become confusing if we are not aware of the two kinds of sign models. The great hope of architectural theory in the 1960s was that the application of semiotics to architecture would fill the gap left behind by the now unfashionable theories of modernism. The interest in architecture as a sign that carries meanings led to speculation on how to enrich those meanings, which in turn led to a renewed interest in popular culture and historicism that we now know as postmodernism.
Figure 50. Two models of the sign: Saussures dyadic (2 part) sign model on the left and Peirces triadic (3 part) sign model on the right. Note that with Saussures model the two elements, the word tree and the image of the tree, are both mental, indicated by placing them in thought bubbles, while Pierces model includes the referent, the actual tree itself. This is quite an advantage for modelling the pragmatic usage of language. Saussures model is the one used more often so it is still useful know and understand his dyadic model.
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Semiology and Architecture 7 by Charles Jencks
The Sign Situation

For Plato, the object table existed as a copy of some ideal, absolute table which itself existed in some absolute realm of ideas. As such, the object was at one remove from the ideal table. Moreover, the painter who drew the table was copying a copy or creating a double lie (of sorts). Continuing Platos epistemology and morality for the moment we can see how many more times the word table is removed from the ideal. Consider what happens in the sign situation in which we say I see the table. There is (1) the ideal table of Plato, or the thing in itself of Kant, or the concrete set of events of the scientist particles in motion at a certain moment in time and space, (2) the phenomenon of the table made up of light waves, (3) of a certain spectrum which man can see, (4) coming at a certain angle (5) just from the surface of the table (not the set of events), (6) which make an image on the retina, (7) which is more or less adequate to our thought or expectation of a table, (8) which is called by an arbitrary convention, the word, table.
Figure 51. The Sign Situation.
7 Charles Jencks, Semiology and Architecture, Charles Jencks and George Baird (ed.s) Meaning and Architecture (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1969), pp. 14 - 16.
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Thus if we take this simple breakdown of the sign situation, we see that the word table is at least eight times removed from the thing in itself. Instead of saying merely I see the table, we should, less ambiguously, say something like: I have an hypothesis about certain light waves out there which come from a surface which stand for an object we socially call a table. Of course this sounds ridiculous and we would be regarded as quite mad if we avoided the common and understandable contraction. But for speaking in such contractions and regarding words as part of things, we often pay a heavy price; as in the Cretan Liar Paradox, or the scientists hypostatization of concepts. This abuse of language is really quite prevalent and can be traced from the politicians clich to the astronomer who said: What guarantee have we that the planet regarded by astronomers as Uranus really is Uranus. Or the architects who search for the essence of architecture, or the aesthetician who scoured the British Museum looking for what by definition all the objects must have in common: beauty. Perhaps the most convincing example of the power of signs is that of the shaman cited by LeviStrauss. 8 By the effective use of signs in a social situation the shaman can destroy another man without touching him: the sympathetic nervous system is upset, the blood pressure drops, food and drink are rejected, the capillary vessels become more permeable and the man dies without a trace of damage or lesions. All because a sign was effectively coordinated with a strong belief and social situation. Naturally most sign situations are less extreme than that of the sorcerer, but they are similar in theory and may even reach the same pitch as in religion, or on a mundane level, hypnotic trauma. In addition, the nausea due to misunderstanding a language, the fear due to unfamiliarity with a style, the conflict of generations, are all mild examples of sign shock. Historically, semiology has been concerned with the right part of Figure1 [Figure 51 above]; that is, basically, what happens when man perceives a sign through one of his five senses. Obviously most perception, particularly that of architecture and the new multi-media which are prevalent today, is a compound of several senses. In fact the present interest in unusual combinations makes semiology almost an inevitable study. It would grow from the happening, if not the laboratory. Yet, in any experience, one or two of the senses are bound to predominate, and for the present purpose we may discuss them together in general terms. Thus in the usual experience there is always a percept, a concept and a representation. This is irreducible. In architecture, one sees the building, has an interpretation of it, and usually puts that into words. In each sign situation we can see language immediately entering and thus understand why semiology first grew out of linguistics. Following this course and using the model developed by Ogden and Richards 9, we can further articulate the right side of Figure1 [Figure 51 above].
8 [Note from the original text] C . Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, 1963, Chapter IX. 9 [Note from the original text] C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
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Figure 52. The Semiological Triangle.
The first point the authors make, is that in most cases there is no direct relation between a word and a thing, except in the highly rare case of onomatopoeia. That most cultures are under the illusion that there is a direct connection has to be explained in various ways. One explanation is neoplatonic; another is psychological. In any case, everyone has experienced the shock of eating a thing which is called by the wrong name, or would question the adage that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It would not smell as sweet if called garlic. But the main point of the semiological triangle is that there are simply relations between language, thought and reality. One area does not determine the other, except in rare cases, and all one can really claim with conviction is that there are simply connections, or correlations. 10 Unfortunately more is claimed, much more. In fact the behaviourists hold that reality determines both thought and language and the Whorfians that language determines the other two, whereas the Renaissance Platonists claimed that thought is determinant. Each semiologist points the arrows in the direction he believes in, but, as the diagram shows, the relations are always two- way and never absolute. A moments reflection on the history of architecture will elicit the relative autonomy of one area from another. Gothic form, for example, evolved and changed over two hundred years without the content drastically altering. Then the Renaissance
10 . [Note from the original text] See for instance R. M. W. Dixon, What is Language? Longmans, 1965, p. 170.
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reinterpreted the content of Gothic calling it barbaric, ugly, irrationalwithout changing either the form or the objects. Or, in our own age, the correlations have undergone an equally radical inversion. For instance the Pop theorists and artists decided to change the pre-existing relation between form and content, calling all the previous detritus and trivia significant and vice versa. In any new movement, by definition, the pre-existing relations have to be destroyed and also, by definition, the older generation annoyed (even repulsed). The new generation must be confused. If there is not repulsion and confusion in the face of the new, then either it is not new or the viewer is uncomprehending. There is no third alternative if the semiological triangle is correct. What is interesting in the present situation (since this has always been known) is that the avant-garde has become addicted to the notion of change and the animated state of muddled suspension. They change the conventions faster than they can be learned or used, either in the belief that thats life or that its enjoyable. The logic seems binding. If one assumes that the artist must operate in the gap between life and art, and then that life is ultimately pointless and based merely on changing fashions, the result will naturally be an art which approaches fashionable life and sensuous appearance as a limit. One has to grant Pop Art and Neo-Dada their consistent logic.
Figure 53. Charles Jencks (right) presenting one of his genealogical flow charts to fellow American architect Peter Eisenman.
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Charles Jencks 2
The Theorist of Postmodern Architecture
The concept of postmodernism was made popular in architecture by Charles Jencks book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture of 1977, a book that was widely read and discussed in its day. In this book Jencks defines postmodernism as architecture that uses double coding, a development of his earlier semiotic (science of signs) theory. Architecture now has two meanings, both high (elitist) and low (popular), whereas modern architecture was limited to just elitist meanings. Today postmodernism has itself become an accepted fact and a legitimate period in history posing the problem of what is post-postmodern, but at the time it was hotly debated, with older architects strongly defending modernism from what they considered to be an attack on its orthodoxy. But both modernism and postmodernism are sets of theories to help us understand and adjust to the on-going modernisation, the ever-expanding globalisation of capitalism and industrialisation. The shift from modernist to postmodernist theory corresponds to the more fundamental changes of society moving from one centred on Fordism (after Henry Fords mass-production) to one centred on post-Fordism, meaning that economic growth as well as symbolic importance has shifted away from the secondary manufacturing sector to the tertiary service and retail sectors. With this shift comes a change in emphasis from the single product for all, for example the model T Ford car that you could in any colour so long as it was black, to the niche marketing of multiple products lines, for example cars come in the multiple product lines of SUVs, MPVs, sports cars, family sedans, with 2, 3, 4 or 5 doors, each with a large variety of engine options and equipment levels. They all have short product lives forcing us to have a much greater creative involvement in the act of consumption, and this leads to an accelerated growth of individualism and perhaps narcissism as well.
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Figure 54. Fordism: mass production making the car cheap enough for anyone to buy but as Henri Ford said, you could have any colour so long as its black.
Figure 55. Post-Fordism: niche marketing with multiple product lines and short product lives leading to a creative engagement of the consumer in the act of consumption.
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The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 11 by Charles Jencks
Pluralism versus Monism

Thankfully, today no single orthodoxy dominates Western society.... If anything reigns today it is pluralism and that ism is incapable of ruling since it depends on fostering choice. There is a paradox here because pluralism is the Post- Modern ideology above all others. How can this condition exist without the triumph of the Post-Modern style? Because, as even the remaining Modernists now grant, we live in a post-modern era, the information age where plural cultures compete and there is simply no dominant cultural style or ethos... In the pre-industrial past Traditional culture was the leading way of thought; during the industrial age Modernism became the most important episteme; while in the postindustrial period none of these competing cultures High, Low, Traditional, Mass, Pop, Ethnic or Other speaks for the majority of urban dwellers. Most of the time in the huge megalopolis we are all minorities yes even those who have cornered what used to be called the ruling taste, the Establishment. This can be alienating, and many people deplore the competition of language games and values, and the retreat into a previous orthodoxy, whether Modern or Traditional. But those with a PostModern sensibility enjoy the diversity, and know why it is necessary and positive.
What is Post-Modern Architecture?

Post-Modern Architecture is obviously concerned with more than pluralism and complexity, although these two key words begin to locate its centre. To suggest the wealth involved in its definition, I will briefly summarise and emphasise some essential definers. The primary strategy architects have created to articulate the pluralism of culture is that of double-coding: mixing their own professional tastes and technical skills with those of their ultimate clients the inhabitants. Double-coding exists at many levels and has to be done so in several periods: it may be an ancient temple which mixes abstract geometry and representational sculpture, high and low art. It may be the Post11 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 10 and 12. Originally published in 1977, this book has been incredibly successful, going through 6 editions, each having additional text and different page numbers. This sample is taken from the last edition of 1991. In 2002 it was re-issued and greatly enlarged as The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism (Yale University Press).
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Modern Classicism of James Stirling that contrasts monumental and high-tech codes; or vernacular and commercial codes, as in the case of Charles Moore. The dualities invariably contrast the local with the contemporary hence the label Post-Modern. But whatever the combination, it is the concept of coding itself which is essential to this growing tradition. Modern architects simply, and somewhat naively, perceived and constructed the meanings they cared about in architecture. This could be successful of disastrous, as I point out in the first two sections of this book. By contrast, Post-Modernists are keenly aware that architecture is a language perceived through codes, and that codes and therefore actual seeing differs somewhat in every culture. Hence the complex relation of the architect to the client again partly explicable by an emergent science of complexity, semiotics: the theory of signs. This theory forms the background for Part Two, and is one of the crucial ways in which Post-Modern thought differs from its predecessor; but this book is about a growing tradition of architecture, not its intellectual foundations. I have tried to give just enough theory here to explain, for Post-Modernists, the perceptual codes of the users are just as important as those of the architects another reason for double-coding. Modernists and Traditionalists, by contrast, focus on the producers.
DUAL CODING, Temple of Artemis at Corcyra, early 6th c. B.C. The typical Greek pediment shows the mixture of meanings, popular and elite, which could be read by different groups of people, on different levels. Here the running Gorgon, Medusa, with her snakes, and the rampant lion-panthers, and the various acts of murder are all represented dramatically in strong colour. This representational art literally breaks the abstract geometry at the top, but elsewhere harmony and implicit metaphor reign. Human proportions, visual refinements and a pure architecture of syntactic elements also have their place. Two different languages, each with its own integrity and audience.
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Conclusion
During the 1990s postmodernist theorists came under increasingly severe attack for their political naivety and their emphasis on superficial commercialism. Nevertheless, postmodernism did create a necessary break with the dogmas of modernism. No one could now design like Corbusier or Mies, unless of course they were trying to make some kind of ironic statement about the death of modernism. Jencks has now published a long series of books, each one attempting the capture the zeitgeist or contemporary spirit of the times for the constantly changing situation of architecture, books such as The Architecture of the Jumping Universe in 1995 and The Iconic Building in 2005. All of these have interesting ideas well worth pursuing but none of them come close to his original success with The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, now in its 7th edition and republished in 2002 with many additions as The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism. Now based at Portrack House near Dumfries in Scotland, Jencks own practice has moved away from architecture and into landscape design where he is still quite active. He designed Landform Ueda for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, 19992002, and his own extensive multiple garden called The Garden of Cosmic Speculation around his home in Scotland, 1989-2007. Jencks wife Maggie Keswick Jencks died of cancer in 1995 but just before she died they founded the Maggie Keswick Jencks Cancer Caring Trust together, which is now building series of Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres around the UK, one each designed by the architects Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas, with many more to come, each with a garden designed by Charles Jencks.
Figure 56. Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick, Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House, Dumfries in Scotland, 1989-2007.
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Habermas, Jurgen. Modernity--An Incomplete Project, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3-13. Best short essay on the subject. Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). Popular, easy reading. This is the 6th expanded edition. Includes concise definitions but badly illustrated. The source for the extract in this handout. Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1996). Further developments of postmodernism, with better illustrations. Jencks, Charles. The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic: How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture (London: Academy, 1995). Another attempt by Jencks to capture the zeitgeist of current architecture, this time with the help of the new nonlinear paradigm in science. Jencks, Charles. The Iconic Building: The Power of the Enigma (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005). Here Jencks gives his take on the phenomenon of the starchitect and their the spectacular landmark buildings, now known as the Bilboa effect after the success of Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Many commentators including Peter Eisenman have understood this book to be a defence of iconic buildings whereas Jencks insists it is in fact a critique. Jencks, Charles and Edwin Heathcote (ed.s). The Architecture of Hope: Maggies Cancer Caring Centres (London: Frances Lincoln, 2010). A well-illustrated account of the day centres built by the Maggie Keswick Jencks Cancer Caring Trust that was established prior to the death of Charles Jencks wife in 1995. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benington and Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1984). A proper conceptual analysis of the concept and the times. Concepts that go well beyond the subject and the time, but very difficult reading. Nesbitt, Kate (ed.). Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 - 1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). Chapter 1 on postmodernism. Dont miss Geoffrey Broadbents excellent introduction to semiotics in architecture, A Plain Mans Guide to the Theory of Signs in Architecture, pp. 124 - 139. Tim Adams June 2010 154
Jacques Derrida (1930 2004)

The Philosopher of Deconstruction
Introduction
Architectural theory in the 80s and 90s was dominated by French philosophy, the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in particular. Why did this happen? We know that postmodernism replaced Modernism as the leading architectural theory in the 70s. Rather than copying Le Corbusier and Mies, as many modernists had done, practicing architects in the postmodern period would turn for inspiration to historicism and regionalism, learning from historic and local buildings. But their buildings ended up looking like a Walt Disney theme-park or a flimsy Hollywood film-set, which Venturi celebrated as the decorated shed 1, because there were neither the budgets nor the skilled craftsmen needed to do pre-modern styles properly. This led postmodernism to a dead end and the need for an alternative theory. Postmodernists theories of architecture grew out of studies on the sign known as semiotics in America and semiology in France. The application of these theories beyond linguistics is called structuralism because it treats language as an autonomous structure rather than simply as a means of communication. The French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss for example created a structuralist anthropology by showing how primitive societies used myth-making to structure their social bonds (see Jencks reference to Lvi-Strauss in the last section). When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was invited in 1966 to give a paper on Lvi-Strauss at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Charles Jencks home
1 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," Part I, Architectural Forum (November 1971), pp. 64-67; Part II, Architectural Forum (December 1971), pp. 48-53. These articles later formed the second chapter of Learning From Las Vegas. The concept arrived in New Zealand 14 years later in the form of David Mitchell and Gillian Chaplins book and 6-episode TV series called The Elegant Shed: New Zealand Architecture Since 1945 (Auckland, N.Z.: Oxford University Press, 1984). Although Mitchell and Chaplin make no mention of Venturi the connection is obvious.
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town) it was expected that he would introduce French structuralism to America. 2 Instead he presented a devastating critique of the entire structuralist project by claiming that structure implied the search for origin and centre but at the same time it never gets there. This type of immanent critique (extending someones argument until it self-destructs) Derrida called deconstruction, but the more general term is poststructuralism. Thus the desire to learn about structuralism was trumped (playing a winning hand of cards in bridge) by Derridas deconstruction of structuralism. But Derrida was just one of many French philosophers who travelled to America and had their works republished in English, and then through American globalisation exerted a worldwide influence. Others include Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, just to mention those who have written about architecture and who have also been written about by architectural theorists. But Derridas philosophy has had by far the greatest impact on architecture, thanks in part to the New Zealand architectural theorist Mark Wigley.
What is Deconstruction?
Deconstruction was the most hotly debated topic in architectural theory during the late 1980s. Stylistically deconstructivist architecture (as it came to be known playing on the similarity to Russian constructivist architecture of the 1920s) can be summarised as the violation of the traditional orthogonal geometry of architecture (made up of straight lines and right angles) with elements piercing through it at acute angles. So we find an old house with what seems to be randomly-tilted cubic forms jutting out as additions (Frank Gehrys own house) or a neoclassical office building with what appears to be a glass wing haphazardly perched across its roof (Coop Himmelblaus Rooftop Remodeling, Vienna). As James Wines concisely put it, What distinguishes this recent work is the use of certain formal devices-rotated axes, shattered grids, crossed beams, tilted walls, and radical juxtapositions of materials that appear to violate the more orderly and ideological tenor of the original sources. 3
2 Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Danto, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) pp. 247-272. 3 James Wines, The Slippery Floor, Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (ed.) Andreas Papadakis et al (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 135.
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Figure 57. Coop Himmelblau, Rooftop Remodeling, Vienna, 1985. A typical example of the deconstructivist aesthetic: elements piercing through at acute angles that violate of the traditional orthogonal geometry of architecture.
A Short Biography of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian philosopher, born in 1930 in El-Biar near Algiers, who emigrated to Paris in 1949 and attended the prestigious Ecole Normale Suprieure university where he later taught history of philosophy, although as a part- time lecturer his position there was marginal. In 1956 Derrida won a scholarship to travel to Harvard in the United States (where Sigfried Giedion taught) and translate a work by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. His first book Edmund Husserls Origin of 157
Geometry: An Introduction was published in 1962. But he established himself as an innovative philosopher in 1967 when he published three books, Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology. Around 1985 Derrida became interested in contemporary architecture, writing essays on Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman and being interviewed for the Italian architecture magazine Domus. 4 In 1986 Derrida was invited to collaborate with the American architect Peter Eisenman on a marble garden for Tschumis Parc de la Villette project in Paris. 5 He also participated in the influential ANY architectural conferences in Los Angeles in 1991 and in Japan in 1992. 6 He visited New Zealand in 2001 and he gave a lecture at the Auckland Town Hall to a full house. He died in Paris in 2004 after a long illness suffering from pancreatic cancer but his legacy lives on in many disciplines, not least of all in architecture.
Understanding Derridas Philosophy

Derridas work is notoriously difficult to understand but perhaps therein lies the attraction for those who have time on their hands and like an intellectual challenge. When presented with any interpretation of his work Derrida would invariably say that he has been misunderstood. So keeping that in mind, Derridas philosophy which he calls deconstruction can be summarised as having the following three stages. 7 Firstly he takes a standard philosophical text (one by Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Freud) and shows that it has been constructed using conceptual oppositions such as inside/outside, origin/copy, universal/particular, culture/nature, one/many, right/left, male/female. He shows how one term is always privileged and tries to suppress the other, yet it only has meaning and identity in relation to its opposite. It is therefore haunted or contaminated by the marginalized opposite term. Secondly, by reversing the hierarchy he shows the inherent instability of any institutionalised power that depends on these binary terms. Thirdly, because reversing the hierarchy merely swaps the terms but leaves the hierarchy intact, he displaces the opposition itself by barring the bar that separates them so their very identity becomes uncertain. Deconstruction replaces a polarity of negative and positive terms with a field of free-floating affirmative terms. This is why Derrida always insists that the term deconstruction is not negative despite appearances since it sounds so similar to
4 Point de folie - Maintainant larchitecture (on Tschumi) AA Files: 12 (Summer 1986) pp. 65-75, Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books, Eisenmanamnesie, ed. Toshio Nakamura (Tokyo: A+U Publishing, 1988) pp. 114-124, and Architecture Where the Desire May Live, (interview with Eva Meyer) Domus: 671 (April 1986) pp 17-24. 5 This small garden was named Choral Works by Eisenman and incorporated a small element sketched by Derrida. It was never built. For an account of the many arguments and misunderstandings that arose around this project see Chora L Works, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997). 6 Jacques Derrida, Summary of Impromptu Remarks, Anyone, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli, 1991) pp. 39-45 and Faxitexture, Anywhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli, 1992) pp. 20-33. 7 See for example the entry for Derrida in The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers ed. J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Re (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 71-72.
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the word destruction. 8 Summarised in this way deconstruction sounds like some kind of generalised womens liberation: to end male domination first analyse how the male gender is privileged in society, then women must be put on top, but only when gender becomes an irrelevant issue will equality of the sexes finally be achieved. And this probably explains why Derridas deconstruction and Wigleys translation of it into architectural theory have always been so popular with feminists. In applying this summary of Derridas method to his understanding of architecture, we can see that, in terms of architecture, some of the binary opposites are, as analysed by Derrida in the extract below: practice/theory, simple technique/complex thought, closed building/open pathway, static object/changing event, and methodical procedure/letting something happen according to its own nature (the way or Tao in Chinese philosophy), all of which hinge on the more fundamental division of space/writing inherent in the Western metaphysical tradition. For each of these binary pairs architecture traditionally privileges the former term but is always haunted by latter term. Derrida effaces the division between these terms by first emphasising the latter set of terms, for example thinking as a way and habitable place as an event, and finally by affirming a play of pure difference impossible to master-the labyrinth or tower of Babel. To deconstruct architecture is therefore also to deconstruct the architecture/philosophy opposition, the aim being to generate a field of affirmation where it would make no difference whether you call yourself an architect or a philosopher, where writing a text would be just as monumental as making a building and designing a house would be just as free of constraints as philosophising. But in more philosophical terms, this time in the words of the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou, Derridas philosophical project can be summarised in the following way. If we take being in the Heideggerian sense to be any multiplicity that we happen to take interest in, in other words its becoming, its appearing or existence as standing out from the pure multiplicity of generic Being, then this multiplicity is also a horizon of the world. Here says Badiou, We find ourselves within an entirely classical distinction between Being and existence.... Existence is what can be conceived as the being there of the multiplicity, on the horizon of a determined world. 9 Having updated Heideggers language to his own more contemporary and mathematical sounding terminology, Badiou is now ready to clearly state just what it is about Derridas contribution to philosophy that makes it so unique: A very complicated and important point emerges here, something to which Derrida gave some
8 Derrida tells us that he term deconstruction is his own translation of Heideggers word Destruktion because destruction sounded too negative. Heidegger in Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p. 44 describes destruction (Destruktion) as loosening a hardened tradition to reveal its positive possibilities rather than the negative sense of shaking off a tradition. Derrida also refers to the Littr French dictionary where one of the meanings of deconstruction is to render poetry into prose. See Jacques Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend, Derrida and Difference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985) pp. 1-5. 9 Alain Badiou, Homage to Jacques Derrida in Costas Douzinas (ed.) Adieu Derrida (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 37.
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attention and in relation to which, he taught us the following: a multiplicity can appear in several different worlds. We accept the principle of the ubiquity of Being which, I would say, continues Badiou, is what defines humanity. Why is it that humanity can represent itself as superior to everything else it knows, if not for its capacity to appear in a great number of different worlds, to be assigned transcendentally to extraordinarily diverse intensities of existence? 10 So a multiplicity, which is any particular being or thing, for us, must appear, with varying degrees in intensity, in many different worlds or horizons. What we call life, according to Badiou, is simply the passage from a world where the degree of intensity is weak to a world where the degree of intensity is strong. Derridas lifelong project according to this view was to locate the world where the multiplicity was at its weakest, where it existed only minimally, which is the same as not existing at all, and this Badiou names the inexistent. The wager of Derridas work, Badiou concludes, of his immense writing ramified in a number of varied works, of infinitely diverse approaches, is to inscribe the inexistent. Additionally, to recognise, in the work of inscribing the inexistent, that this inscription is properly speaking impossible. Derridas stake in his writing writing designating here an act of thought is to inscribe the impossibility of the inscription of the inexistent as a form of its inscription. 11 Now to understand Derridas short essay on architecture properly, that is to say philosophically. Derrida is not necessarily here trying to gift to architecture the intelligence, subtlety and profundity usually reserved for philosophy, nor is he trying to grant philosophy the solidity and permanence associated with architecture, which is perhaps the implicit aim of many previous philosophers interest in architecture. He is instead attempting something much more difficult, the impossible task of locating the inexistent that lies within architecture. We are defined as humans as existing in a great diversity of worlds, one of which is the world of architecture. Now suppose that we exist the most feebly when we exist within the world of architecture, that we are stronger on every other horizon, that would be of the greatest interest to a philosopher like Derrida.
Figure 58. Jacques Derrida reading Plato by candle light.

10 Ibid., pp. 37-38 11 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
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Architecture Where the Desire Can Live12

by Jacques Derrida
Let us consider architectural thinking. By that I dont mean to conceive architecture as a technique separate from thought and therefore possibly suitable to represent it in space, to constitute almost an embodiment of thinking, but rather to raise the question of architecture as a possibility of thought, which cannot be reduced to the status of a representation of thought. Since you refer to the separation of theory and practice, one might start by asking oneself how this working separation came about. It seems to me that from the moment one separates Theorem and Pratem, one considers architecture as a simple technique and detaches it from thought, whereas there may be an undiscovered way of thinking belonging to the architectural moment, to desire, to creation. We will talk about the labyrinth later. First of all, I would like to outline how the philosophical tradition has used the architectural model as a metaphor for a kind of thinking which in itself cannot be architectural. In Descartes for instance you find the metaphor of the founding of a town, and this foundation is in fact what is supposed to support the building, the architectonic construction, the town at the base. There is consequently a kind of urbanistic metaphor in philosophy. The Meditations, the Discourse on Method are full of these architectonic representations which, in addition, always have political relevance. When Aristotle wants to give an example of theory and practice, he quotes the architekton: he knows the origin of things, he is a theorist who can also teach and has at his command the labourers who are incapable of independent thought. And with that a political hierarchy is established: architectonics is defined as an art of systems, as an art therefore suitable for the rational organisation of complete branches of knowledge. It is evident that architectural reference is useful in rhetoric in a language which in itself has retained no architecturality whatsoever. I consequently ask myself how, before the separation between theory and practice, between thinking and architecture, a way of thinking linked to the architectural event could have existed. If each language proposes a spatialisation, an arrangement in space which doesnt dominate it but which approaches it by approximation, then it is to be compared with a kind of pioneering, with the clearing of a path. A path which does not have to be discovered but to be created. And this creation of a path is not at all alien to architecture. Each architectural place, each habitation has one precondition: that the
12 Jacques Derrida (Interviewed by Eva Meyer): Architecture Where the Desire Can Live, Kate Nesbittt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 - 1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) pp. 144-149. Originally published in Domus: 671 (April 1986) pp 17-24. Note that I have left Meyers questions out to save space, not because they are uninteresting, but because Derrida does not really respond to them so his replies stand on their own just as well.
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building should be located on a path, at a crossroads at which arrival and departure are both possible. There is no building without streets leading towards it or away from it; nor is there one without paths inside, without corridors, staircases, passages, doors. And if language cannot control these paths towards and within a building, then that only signifies that language is enmeshed in these structures, that it is on the way. On the way towards language (Martin Heidegger), on the way to reaching itself. The way is not a method, that must be clear. The method is a technique, a procedure in order to gain control of the way, in order to make it viable. I refer once more to Heidegger who says that odos, the way, is not mthodos, that there is a way which cannot be reduced to the definition of method. The definition of the way as a method is interpreted by Heidegger as an epoch in the history of philosophy starting with Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and G. W. E. Hegel and concealing its nature of being a way, making it slip into oblivion, whereas in fact it indicates infinity of thinking: thinking is always a way. If thinking doesnt rise above the way, if the language of thinking or the thinking system of the language is not understood as metalanguage on the way, that means that language is a way and so has always had a certain connection with habitability, and with architecture. This constant being on the move, the habitability of the way offering no way out entangles you in a labyrinth without any escape. More precisely, it is a trap, a calculated device, such as James Joyces labyrinth of Dedalus. The question of architecture is in fact that of the place, of the taking place in space. The establishing of a place which didnt exist until then and is in keeping with what will take place there one day, that is a place. As Stphane Mallarm puts it, ce qui a lieu, cest le lieu [what takes place is place]. It is not at all natural. The setting up of a habitable place is an event, and obviously the setting up is always something technical. It invents something which didnt exist beforehand and yet at the same time there is the inhabitant, man or God, who requires the place prior to its invention or causing it. Therefore one doesnt quite know where to pin down the origin of the place. Maybe there is a labyrinth which is neither natural nor artificial and which we inhabit, within the history of graeco-occidental philosophy where the opposition between nature and technology originated, From this opposition arises the distinction between the two labyrinths. Let us return to the place, to spatiality and to writing. For some time, something like a deconstructive procedure has been establishing itself, an attempt to free oneself from the oppositions imposed by the history of philosophy, such as physis/techne, God/man, philosophy/architecture. Deconstruction therefore analyses and questions conceptual pairs which are currently accepted as self-evident and natural, as if they hadnt been institutionalised at some precise point, as if they had no history. Because of being taken for granted they restrict thinking. Now the concept of deconstruction itself resembles an architectural metaphor. It is often said to have a negative attitude. Something has been constructed, a philosophical system, a tradition, a culture, and along comes a deconstructor and destroys it stone by stone, analyses the structure and dissolves it. Often enough this is the case. One looks at a systemPlatonic/Hegelianand examines how it was built, which keystone, which angle of vision supports the building; one shifts them and thereby frees oneself 162
from the authority of the system. It seems to me, however, that this is not the essence of deconstruction. It is not simply the technique of an architect who knows how to deconstruct what has been constructed, but a probing which touches upon the technique itself, upon the authority of the architectural metaphor and thereby constitutes its own architectural rhetoric. Deconstruction is not simplyas its name seems to indicatethe technique of a reversed construction when it is able to conceive for itself the idea of construction. One could say that there is nothing more architectural than deconstruction, but also nothing less architectural. Architectural thinking can only be deconstructive in the following sense: as an attempt to visualize that which establishes the authority of the architectural concatenation in philosophy. From this point we can go back to what connects deconstruction with writing: its spatiality, thinking in terms of a path, of the opening up of a way whichwithout knowing where it will lead toinscribes its traces. Looking at it like that, one can say that the opening up of a path is a writing which cannot be attributed to either man, or God, or animal since it designates in its widest sense the place from which this classification-man/God/animal-take shape, This writing is truly like a labyrinth since it has neither beginning nor end. One is always on the move. The opposition between time and space, between the time of speech and the space of the temple or the house has no longer any sense. One lives in writing. Writing is a way of living. What emerges here can be grasped as the opening of architecture, as the beginning of a non-representative architecture. In this context it might be interesting to recall the fact that, at the outset, architecture was not an art of representation, whereas painting, drawing and sculpture, can always imitate something which is supposed to already exist. I would like to remind you once more of Heidegger, and above all of The Origin of the Work of Art in which he refers to the Riss (rip, break-up, drawings). 13 It is a Riss which should be thought of in its original sense independently of modifications such as Grundriss (ground plan), Aufriss (vertical section), Skizze (draft). In architecture there is an imitation of the Riss, of the engraving, the action of ripping. This has to be associated with writing. From here originates the attempt of modern and postmodern architecture to create a different kind of living which no longer fits the old circumstances, where the plan is not oriented towards domination, controlling communication, the economy, and transport etc. A completely new rapport between surface, the drawing, space and architecture is emerging. This relationship has long been important. In order to talk about the impossibility of absolute objectivation, let us move from the labyrinth to the building of the Tower of Babel. There too the sky is to be conquered in an act of name giving, which yet remains inseparably linked with the natural language. A tribe, the Semites, whose name means name, a tribe therefore called name want to erect a tower supposed to reach the sky, according to the Scriptures, with the aim of making a name for itself. This conquest of the sky, this taking up of a position in the sky means giving oneself a name and from this power, from the power of the name, from the
13 Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) pp. 63 and 70.
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height of the meta-language, to dominate the other tribes, the other languages, to colonise them. But God descends and spoils this enterprise by uttering one word: Babel and this word is a name which resembles a noun meaning confusion. With this word he condemns mankind to the diversity of languages. Therefore they have to renounce their plan of domination by means of a language which would be universal. The fact that this intervention in architecture, with a construction and that also means: deconstruction-represents the failure or the limitation imposed on a universal language in order to foil the plan for political and linguistic domination of the world says something about the impossibility of mastering the diversity of languages, about the impossibility of there being a universal translation. This also means that the construction of architecture will always remain labyrinthine. The issue is not to give up one point of view for the sake of another, which would be the only one and absolute, but to see a diversity of possible points of view. If the tower had been completed there would be no architecture. Only the incompletion of the tower makes it possible for architecture as well as the multitude of languages to have a history. This history always has to be understood in relation to a divine being who is finite. Perhaps it is characteristic of postmodernism to take this failure into account. If modernism distinguishes itself by the striving for absolute domination, then postmodernism might be the realisation or the experience of its end, the end of the plan of domination. The postmodernism could develop a new relationship with the divine which would no longer be manifest in the traditional shapes of the Greek, Christian, or other deities, but would still set the conditions for architectural thinking. Perhaps there is no architectural thinking. But should there be such thinking, then it could only be conveyed by the dimension of the High, the Supreme, the Sublime. Viewed as such, architecture is not a matter of space but an experience of the Supreme which is not higher but in a sense more ancient than space and therefore is a spatialisation of time. All the questions we have raised so far point to the question of doctrine and that can only be placed in a political context. How is it possible, for instance, to develop a new inventive faculty that would allow the architect to use the possibilities of the new technology without aspiring to uniformity, without developing models for the whole world? An inventive faculty of the architectural difference which would bring out a new type of diversity with different limitations, other heterogeneities than the existing ones and which would not be reduced to the technique of planning? At the Collge International de Philosophie, a seminar is held where philosophers and architects work together because it became evident that the planning of the Collge also has to be an architectural venture. 14 The Collge cannot take place if
14 The Collge International de Philosophie (International College of Philosophy) was established in 1983 by Jacques Derrida, Franois Chtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt as an autonomous academic institution specifically to encourage new forms of collective reflection between philosophy and science, art, urbanism, education, health and psychiatry. Flix Guattari in an interview says it was taken over by people who wanted to teach the history of philosophy in way that could be done elsewhere within existing universities rather than interfacing with people outside the university field of philosophy. Derrida was its president after 1985. Today its address is 1 rue Descartes, Paris.
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one cannot find a place, an architectural form for it which bears resemblance to what might be thought in it. The Collge has to be habitable in a totally different way from university. Until now, there has been no building for the Collge. You take a room here, a hall there. As architecture, the Collge does not exist yet and perhaps never will. There is a formless desire for another form. The desire for a new location, new arcades, new corridors, new ways of living and of thinking. That is a promise. And when I said that the Collge does not exist as architecture yet, it might also mean that the community it requires does not exist yet and therefore the place is not being constituted. A community must accept the commitment and work so that architectural thinking takes place. A new relationship between the individual and the community, between the original and the reproduction is emerging. Think of China and Japan for example, where they build temples out of wood and renew them regularly and entirely without them losing their originality, which obviously is not contained in the sensitive body but in something else. That too is Babel: the diversity of relationships with the architectural event from one culture to another. To know that a promise is being given even if it is not kept in its visible form. Places where desire can recognise itself, where it can live.
Figure 59. Installation by Los Carpinteros at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2009.
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See Charles J. Stivale, Pragmatic/Machinic: Discusion with Flix Guattari, PRE/TEXT: 14.3-4 (1993) pp. 215-247.
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Conclusion
After the death of Jacques Derrida on 9 October 2004 newspapers around the world, including the New Zealand Herald, published obituaries for this French philosopher such was his international reputation. Then came the inevitable summing up of his life and philosophy. 15 Many journalists and hack-philosophers took the opportunity to dismiss his work as being obscure and therefore harmful to clear and logical thinking. This was no doubt their chance to get even with the man who demanded so much of their time and effort in the attempt to understand his writings. There was a political dimension to this also: Derrida became the figurehead for what was perceived to be fashionable French over-intellectualising in contrast to good oldfashioned English common sense (or American pragmatism, or Kiwi ingenuity etc.). Whatever our opinion may be it is a fact that today few architects and theorists mention Derridas name. Wigley, the key theorist of deconstructivist architecture, never does, claiming instead to be now writing the history of architecture. Nevertheless, the spiky shard-like forms and shattering of perfection associated with deconstructivist architecture continue to appear in contemporary architecture, although now without any hint of an association to the convoluted rhetoric and philosophy of deconstruction. The work of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry continues in this direction and many students continue, if somewhat unconsciously, to produce deconstructivist forms in the studio. So why did Derrida have such an impact in architecture in the 80s? Perhaps there is a standard repertoire of formal gestures in current use by architects at any one time, and in order to introduce any changes to that set of forms it is first necessary to cloak any new forms in a rigorous conceptual apparatus imported from other disciplines. Once the smoke screen has done its work the fog is gently lifted and we are left with pure form, which then becomes freely available for all to use regardless of their understanding of the original concepts. This is the case with the so-called neo-modernism so popular today. How many architects now putting together steel and glass boxes have bothered to read Le Corbusier and Siegfried Giedion? There is no need to, their conceptual work is done. But if we want to broaden the palette of todays repertoire of architectural form we had better practice our skills at reading, understanding, and applying difficult concepts to architectural form, and there is no better way of doing that than studying Derridas deconstruction and carefully observing how it was applied to architecture in the 1980s. This has particular relevance for us here in Auckland at the periphery of the dominant cultures and major flows of capital, because this particular case of philosophy interfering with architecture was master-minded by someone educated right here at Auckland
15 See The New Zealand Herald, 11 October 2004 for the short obituary and 19 December for the summing up of his life and work by Herald columnist Frances Grant. For a considerate and intelligent series of obituaries, see Obituary Symposium for Jacques Derrida in Radical Philosophy: 129 (January/February 2005).
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University, showing how the periphery can still make fundamental contributions to the centre.
Badiou, Alain. Homage to Jacques Derrida in Costas Douzinas (ed.) Adieu Derrida (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 34-46. Derridas lifelong project put into the more simple terms of a fellow French philosopher. Broadbent, Geoffrey. Deconstruction, A Student Guide (London: Academy Editions, 1991). Pretends to be an objective plain mans guide but is in fact a thinly disguised attack of Derridas philosophy. Derrida, Jacques (Interviewed by Eva Meyer). Architecture Where the Desire Can Live, Kate Nesbittt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 - 1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) pp. 144-149. Originally published in Domus: 671 (April 1986) pp 17-24, with the excellent illustrations left out of Nesbitts anthology. Derrida, Jacques. Point de folie Maintenant larchitecture, AA Files: 12 (Summer 1986), pp. 65 75. Derridas first major essay on architecture, specifically Bernard Tschumis winning competition entry for the Parc de la Villette. Derrida, Jacques. Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books in Toshio Nakamura (ed.) Eisenmanamnesis (Tokyo: A+U Publishing, 1988), pp. 114 124. Derrida major essay on Eisenman. Discusses their collaborative work, Choral Works for Tschumis Parc de la Villette, but never built. Compares Eisenman to his hero, Friedrich Nietzsche and introduces Platos concept of chora (place). Derrida, Jacques. Fifty-Two Aphorism for a Foreword, Andreas Papadakis, Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), pp. 67 69. Derridas most cryptic statements on architecture. Deconstructs the idea of project and says there can be no project for deconstruction. Derrida, Jacques. In Discussion with Christopher Norris, Architectural Design: 58. 1/2 (March 1988), pp. 7 11. Transcript of a video interview. Continues his discussion of the collaboration with Eisenman and his critique of the idea of project.
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Derrida, Jacques. Fragments of a Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Precis: 6 (Spring 1987), p. 49. A discussion that took place at Yale in 1985 with Peter Shinoda and David Kesler. Derrida, Jacques. A Letter to Peter Eisenman, Assemblage: 12 (August 1990), pp.7 13. A new critical tone enters his comments on Eisenman. Says Eisenman needs to deconstruct his nave dependence on Judeo-transcendental absences. Includes a discussion of Walter Benjamins essay, Experience and Poverty. Derrida, Jacques. Summary of Impromptu Remarks in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.) Anyone (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 38 45. Discusses the relation of the human subject in architecture in response the theme of the conference, Anyone. Derrida, Jacques. Faxitecture in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.) Anywhere (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 38 45. Lengthy discussion on architecture, place, technology and politics within the context of the recent Loss Angeles riots. Derrida, Jacques. Response to Daniel Libeskind, Research in Phenomenology: 22 (1992), pp. 88 94. Discussion of Libeskinds Jewish Museum in Berlin. Derrida, Jacques. Jacques Derrida: Invitation to a Discussion, moderated by Mark Wigley, Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory: D, vol: 1 (1992), pp. 7 27. Derrida answers a series of increasingly difficult and hostile questions from architecture students. Derrida, Jacques. Eisenman Derrida, Talking About Writing, ANY: 1 (1993), pp. 18 21. A discussion with Peter Eisenman about the confusion between writing with architecture (designing) and writing about architecture (criticism). Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the
Decorated Shed, Part I, Architectural Forum (November 1971), pp. 64-67; Part II, Architectural Forum (December 1971), pp. 48-53. These articles later became the second chapter of Learning from Las Vegas.
Jencks, Charles, Deconstruction: The Pleasures of Absence, Architectural Design: 58. 3/4 (1988), pp. 17-31. Attacks deconstructivist architecture for being a form of elitist late-modernism or neo-constructivism. He prefers Gehry for his punk aesthetic to the more purist Hadid and Eisenman. Obituary Symposium for Jacques Derrida in Radical Philosophy: 129 (January/February 2005). The best summing up of Derridas life and philosophy from those who knew his work best. An antidote to the stupidity that was published about Derrida in the popular press. 168
Papadakis, Andreas, Catherine Cooke and Andrew Benjamin, Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (New York: Rizzoli, 1989). Useful, well illustrated introduction. Includes Derridas important essay on architecture and philosophy, Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Forward, pp. 67-69, and Catherine Cookes valuable insights into the connection with Russian constructivism, pp. 11-37. Tim Adams June 2010
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Mark Wigley
Theorist of Deconstructivist Architecture
Introduction
Mark Wigley, a New Zealander, has done more than anyone else to promote Derridas philosophy of deconstruction in architecture. Wigley graduated at Auckland University in 1979 with an undergraduate thesis called A Case for Chance arguing that architecture should follow the lead of John Cage in music and introduce chance and indeterminacy into the design process. In 1986 he completed his PhD thesis, Jacques Derrida and Architecture: The Deconstructive Possibilities of Architectural Discourse under the supervision of Mike Austin. This thesis formed the basis of his 1993 book, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt. In 1988 Wigley emigrated to New York where he teamed up with the legendary modernist architect Philip Johnson to co-curate the influential Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition included projects by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Coop Himmelblau (the blue sky cooperative of the Vienese architects Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky). Most of these architects later denied any connection with Derridas difficult philosophy, nevertheless a new movement in architecture was formed. After this success Wigley was invited to join the staff at Princeton University as Director of Graduate Studies in 1989. In 1999 Wigley was made Director of Advanced Studies at Columbia University and in 2004 he was chosen to become the new dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, taking over from Bernard Tschumi. He is currently working on the prehistory of virtual space. In the following extract Wigley introduces his domestic violence thesis, an argument that reappears in much of his writing. This extract is too brief to really follow the argument, which furthermore would require a good grounding in Heideggers philosophy, but there is just enough to get a sense of Wigleys love for Jacques Derridas convoluted style of philosophy. Note for example the excessive number of footnotes for such a short extract. Wigleys concept of a constitutional violence of the house is of course a variation of Derridas concept of divine violence illustrated by the destruction of the Tower of Babel in the Derrida sample document above.
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Figure 60. The New Zealand-born architectural theorist Mark Wigley, the Dean of Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation since 2004.
The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt 1

by Mark Wigley The Violence of the House
The symptomatic way in which Heideggers questioning of the familiar through a questioning of home begins to slide into a questioning of the house can be seen when the 1935 essay The Origin of the Work of Art locates the uncanny danger within the very comfort of home: We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary, uncanny. 2
1 Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 110-115.
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Heidegger is not speaking about literal houses, that is, spatial enclosures erected on particular sites. Significantly, he always describes the home as a kind of interior, but it is the very sense of spatial interior that masks the interiority he is describing. From his earliest texts, Heidegger always insists that the fundamental sense of the word in is not spatial in the sense of the occupation of a spatial container (room, building) but is the sense of the familiar. 3 Through the endless double movement of the fundamental violence (Gewult-ttigkeit), man cultivates and guards the familiar, only in order to break out of it and to let what overpowers it break in 4 [emphasis added]. Man both occupies the enclosing structure and tears it open, but cannot master the overpowering and so is tossed back and forth between structure and the structureless, 5 between using the structure to violently master and violating it both of which fling him out of the home 6 [emphasis added], the homeland, the place, the solid ground, and into the placeless confusion of the groundless abyss as a homeless alien.... Just as the edifice conceals itself in concealing the abyss, the house conceals itself in concealing the uncanny (the theme of the abyss being entangled with that of the uncanny throughout Heideggers work. It is because the house conceals the unhomeliness that constitutes it that the mere occupation of a house, which is to say the acceptance of its representation of interior can never be authentic dwelling. Those residing in the home the merely casual possession of domestic things and the inner life 7-are not at home. Home is precisely the place where the essence of home is most concealed.... In this way, the origin around which the tradition of philosophy organizes itself is not a primitive innocence: A beginning, on the contrary, always contains the undisclosed abundance of the unfamiliar and extraordinary, which means that it also contains strife within the familiar and ordinary, 8 which is to say that the origin itself becomes uncanny. It is already defined by an exchange between internal violation and external violence. The original sense of logos on which metaphysics is based
2 [Footnote from the original text] Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) p. 54. 3 [Footnote from the original text] In the middle of Heideggers lectures at the University of Marburg in 1925, he rejected the idea that to be in refers to a spatial container (room, building) and refers to an etymological study by Grimm (which compares the archaic German words meaning domus, or house, that have the same form as the English word inn) to argue that in primarily refers to dwelling rather than the occupation of space: In comes from innan, which means to dwell, habitare; and means: I am accustomed, I am familiar with, I take care of something-the Latin colo in the sense of habito and diligo. Dwelling is also taken here as taking care of something in intimate familiarity, being-involved with [Seinbei]. . . . in primarily does not signify anything spatial at all but means primarily being familiar with. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 158. He then employed this key argument in the same form at the beginning of Being and Time in a way that organizes the whole text that follows Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 80. 4 [Footnote from the original text] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 163. 5 [Footnote from the original text] Ibid. 161. 6 [Footnote from the original text] Ibid. 7 [Footnote from the original text] Martin Heidegger, Remembrance of the Poet, trans. Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being (Washington: Gateway, 1949), 233-269, 267. 8 [Footnote from the original text] Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 76.
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necessarily participates in this violence. It is itself, for Heidegger, an act of violence 9.... Heideggers argument convolutes traditional thinking about space. Spaces are not simply built and occupied. It is only with metaphysics that a stable ground is seen rather than an abyss, a secure house rather than an exile from it. Because of the very familiarity of these images, their violence is concealed. And more than this, they become generic figures of the exclusion of violence. For Heidegger, the supreme act of violence is to conceal the originary violence behind the mask of the familiar. It is this constitutional violence of the house that is the opening within Heideggers discourse that could be exploited to displace the philosophical tradition from within. But whereas Heidegger explicitly identifies the violence of the figure of the edifice, associating violence with the uncanny, 10 and arguing that it is precisely because violence is built into the apparent innocence of building that violence is itself uncanny, 11 he never directly identifies the violence of the house itself. He identifies the uncanniness of housing but not the uncanniness of the house. Like Freud, he seems to preserve the familiar status of the house while defining an unfamiliar scene within it. The house becomes the site of a violence of which it is innocent.
Figure 61. From left to right, Bernard Tschumi, Helmut Swiczinsky, Wolf Prix, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Mark Wigley at the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988.
9 [Footnote from the original text] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 169. 10 [Footnote from the original text] Of the usual interpretation of the modern atomic age as a crisis of violence perpetuated by modern science that alienates man, Heidegger notes that the interpretation is itself alienating and uncanny. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, the 1953 address, 122. It is uncanny because it identifies the violence of atomic energy as foreign to man and a recent historical event rather than a mark of the way the entire history of Western thought has always been organized around the architectonic principle of ground. It is the veiling of the originary violence of architectonic thinking that is uncanny. 11 [Footnote from the original text] Only if we understand that the use of power in language, in understanding, in forming and building helps to create . . . the violent act [Gewalttat] of laying out paths in to the environing power of the essent, only then shall we understand the strangeness, the uncanniness of all violence. An Introduction to Metaphysics, 157.
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Conclusion
Mark Wigley periodically returns to Auckland where he receives huge adulation as the most famous graduate from any New Zealand School of Architecture. On a recent visit in May 2005 he was the keynote speaker at the NZIA conference where he gave a lecture to a packed audience entitled Coffee Culture. It was a theme picked out for him by the conference organisers and characteristically he said he wasnt prepared to talk about coffee and then proceeded to give a very erudite and well- researched discussion about the role of coffee in the studio, how coffee tastes better in New Zealand than America because of the way its blended, and the tricky political implications of exploiting the third world where most of our coffee comes from. But the real theme of his talk was the history of, and his vision of the future for, the Graduate School at Columbia University in New York where he is the dean. He finished by making the radical assertion that not only must we reinvent the entire profession of architecture to make it relevant to a rapidly changing world but we must also reinvent the client. Wigley these days never mentions Jacques Derrida or any other philosopher. He nowadays keeps to the relatively safe shores of architectural history although some of Derridas adventurous philosophy has certainly left a permanent mark on his thinking.
Soltan, Margaret. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt (book review), Journal of Architectural Education: 49. 4 (May 1996) pp. 266-268. Devastating but accurate critique of Wigleys book. Comments on Wigleys total lack of any reference to particular buildings which creates an abundance of whirling asserting. She mocks it as an overlong love letter to the father of deconstruction. Wigley, Mark and Philip Johnson. Deconstructivist Architecture, Exhibition Catalogue (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988). The catalogue that popularised deconstruction in architecture. All in black and white, it simply illustrates the models and drawings shown in the exhibition. Strangely, Wigleys introduction states that this architecture is not an application of deconstructive theory. Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993). Largely made up of Wigleys PhD thesis and his published essays, a painstaking analysis of the architectural metaphor in Derridas non-architectural writings. Despite the almost universal criticism heaped on this book, it is still the standard reference on the subject and cannot be overlooked.
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Wigley, Mark. Towards the Perforated School, Volume: 1 (2005), pp. 35 47. Essentially this is the talk that Wigley gave to the NZIA in May 2005. He gives a selective history of the Graduate School at Columbia University in New York where he is dean. An example of Wigleys current shift away from Derrida towards a more standard architectural history. Tim Adams June 2010
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Rem Koolhaas
The Emergence of the Conceptual Persona in Architecture
Koolhaas Biography
Rem Koolhaas is the most widely published architect alive today. His 1,376 page book S,M,L,XL (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) of 1995 is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary architectural and urban theory and his 1978 book Delirious New York is now a cult classic. Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944 but lived in Indonesia as a child from 1952 until 1956 because his father Anton Koolhaas, a writer, theatre critic and director of a film school, was invited by the government of Indonesia to be their cultural director. He returned to Holland and became a journalist for the Haagse Post in Amsterdam and a freelance screenwriter. As a journalist he covered the student riots in Paris known as May '68. He attended the AA School of Architecture, London, from 1968 to 1972. In 1972 he received a Harkness Fellowship to study at Cornell University, New York, and later attended Peter Eisenmans Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS). It was during this time that he wrote Delirious New York, a work that established him as a leading architectural theorist when it was published in 1978. In 1975 Koolhaas established his architectural firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture or OMA (which means grandmother in Dutch) in London with his wife Madelon Vriesendorp and the Greek architect Elia Zenghelis and his wife Zoe Zenghelis. Elia Zenghelis was one Koolhaass teachers when he was at the AA in London. The OMA office relocated to Rotterdam in 1978. In 2000 Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Prize for architecture, the equivalent of the Nobel award in science, architectures highest accolade. In 2004 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA in London.
The Harvard Project on the City

Today Koolhaas office in Rotterdam is very busy with commissions coming from all over the world, but since 1995 he has been Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard University and has devoted half of his time to teaching. He runs the influential Harvard Project on the City proposing research topics for masters thesis students. This is an on-going project for a group of eight to fourteen students who go on study trips with Koolhaas for one semester and spend another semester writing up their research which Koolhaas then publishes. The first topic in 1996 was the Pearl River Delta, a zone of rapid urbanization in Southern China. This work was shown and catalogued at the Documenta X art exhibition in Kassel, 177
Germany and later became published as Great Leap Forward. 1 In 1997 the theme was Shopping, investigating the effects of global consumerism on urbanism in Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 1998 there were two topics: Roman Cities and West African Urbanization. These projects involve groups of students joining Koolhaas on study trips to gather information that is then used to form new concepts in order to gain a better understanding of architecture and urbanism as they exist today. Similar concepts can be found in S,M,L,XL, such as Bigness, Lite Urbanism, Tabula Rasa and Generic City. Koolhaas is one of the most important and influential architects today, he is a model for research-based architects both now and in the future.
Koolhaas and the Conceptual Persona

John Rajchman in a 1994 interview with Koolhaas suggests that Koolhaas ideas have many similarities with contemporary French philosophy, Gilles Deleuze in particular. Koolhaas replies, When I first came across Deleuze maybe six or seven years ago, through conversations with Hubert Damisch I started to read the books and almost immediately closed them because of their uncanny analogies, their incredibly free-ranging speculations. I closed, clearly, out of fear of becoming Deleuzian and a sense that maybe it was already too late. Now I have read them in small doses. Its the anxiety of influence. 2 Koolhaas has no need to read French philosophy because, in a sense, he is a French philosopher. If we take the description of what the philosopher must do from Deleuze and Guattaris book What is Philosophy? it perfectly describes how Koolhaas operates in the world of architecture and architectural education. 3 The philosopher (Koolhaas) must create their own concepts in order to open up a new territory. These concepts must be singular and intensive (not extensive generalisations), they must create interferences in other practices (not just for idle speculation), and they must maintain their consistency despite such transgressions (not becoming abstract and diffuse). To do this the philosopher (Koolhaas) must create for themselves a conceptual persona, that is, an identity as an original thinker that exists in the work, as a creator of new concepts. Deleuze and Guattari go beyond the endless and futile arguments for and against the superiority of one or other among art, science, and philosophy. They say art, science, and philosophy are all equally creative and all equally truthful. Each one simply samples reality in different ways and for different purposes, each slicing through the chaos of reality with different tools. The philosopher uses reality to create conceptual personae (private thinkers) and concepts on planes of immanence (the concrete works
1 Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and the China Group, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Pearl River Delta, in Politics-Poetics, Documenta X-The Book, ed. Catherine David and Jean Franois Chevrier, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997), pp.557-592 and Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sze Tsung Leong (ed.) Great Leap Forward (Kln: Taschen, 2001). 2 Thinking Big, John Rajchman Talks with Rem Koolhaas, Artforum: 33 (December 1994) pp. 99. 3 See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchall (London: Verso, 1994).
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of philosophy, not transcendent abstract planes). The scientist uses the same reality to make for themselves a selective partial observer (the scientist and their instruments) creating functions on a plane of reference (a quantifiable grid). And the artist uses the same reality to manipulate percepts and effects (colours, shapes, sounds, sensations, etc.) as an aesthetic figure to create permanent monuments called art. Architecture, by definition, is the art and science of building. Koolhaas forces us to extend that definition because in his practice and in his writings he shows us that architecture is the art, science, and philosophy of building. That is, the manipulation of sensations, the quantifying of functions, and the creation of concepts associated with building.
Figure 62. Diagram after Deleuze and Guattaris What is Philosophy? showing how philosophy, science and art all cut through the same chaotic block of reality and are all equally creative. Philosophy creates concepts with conceptual personae (or agents of thought) on planes immanence, science creates functions with partial observers and planes reference, while art creates percepts and affects with aesthetic figures who make things that endure on the plane of composition. Architecture being the art, science, and sometime also philosophy of building must do all three. Certain architects, such as all those discussed in this, become conceptual personae capable of creating concepts.
In the following sample document we see the central passages of Koolhaas first ground-breaking book, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In his hands the city of New York itself becomes a concept, a concept he calls, on the first page of the introduction, Manhattanism. Koolhaas creates concepts retroactively for the New York skyscraper, in other words, after the fact since New York already exists. Until this book the high-rise building, although the dominant urban form throughout the world, had been almost totally ignored by architectural theorists, as if it were a typology too commercial, too tainted with capitalism and 179
property speculation to be of any interest to them. Here Koolhaas opens up a new territory for theory and creates concepts that allow us to understand this new discovery without prejudice, and this is what he continues to do today; for China, for shopping malls, for African cities and for ancient Rome with his on-going Harvard Project on the City. Here he takes the Downtown Athletic Club, an Art Deco tower built by Starrett and Van Vleck in 1931, as the apotheosis or highest development of the New York skyscraper. He says it is the realisation of the 1909 theorem. The 1909 theorem is the concept Koolhaas has extracted from a 1909 cartoon of a high- rise. It is the multiplication of the site as virgin plots that can be put to various uses because they are disconnected by being placed on different levels. In short, the theorem means programmatic density or metropolitanism, a recurring theme for Koolhaas theory and practice at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas discovers that on the 9th floor of this athletic club besides locker rooms there is also an oyster bar. He has his wife, the artist Madelon Vriesendorp, draw a picture of naked club members eating oysters with boxing gloves on. This became the most famous image from the book.
Figure 63. A satirical cartoon rendering of the high-rise concept from Life magazine, October 1909 which Koolhaas names the 1909 theorem.
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Delirious New York 4

by Rem Koolhaas
Definitive Instability: The Downtown Athletic Club

APOTHEOSIS The Downtown Athletic Club stands on the bank of the Hudson River near Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. It occupies a lot varying from 77 feet wide on Washington Street to 78 feet 8 Inches wide on West Street with a depth of 179 feet inches between streets.... 5 Built in 1931, its 38 stories reach a height of 534 feet. Large abstract patterns of glass and brick make its exterior inscrutable and almost indistinguishable from the conventional Skyscrapers around it. This serenity hides the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion. The Club represents the complete conquest floor by floor of the Skyscraper by social activity, with the Downtown Athletic Club the American way of life, knowhow and initiative definitively overtake the theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various 20th-century European avant-gardes have been insistently proposing, without ever managing to impose them. In the Downtown Athletic Club the Skyscraper is used as a Constructivist Social Condenser: a machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.
TERRITORIES In only 22 years, the speculations of the 1909 theorem 6 have become reality in the Downtown Athletic Club: it is a series of 38 superimposed platforms that each repeat, more or less, the original area of the site, connected by a battery of 13 elevators that forms the north wall of the structure.
4 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 127 133. 5 See The Downtown Athletic Club, Architectural Forum (February 1931), pp. 151 166 and The Downtown Athletic Club, Architecture and Building (January 1931), pp. 5 17. 6 The 1909 theorem is in fact a satirical cartoon published in Life magazine in October 1909 that depicts the skyscraper as a simple steel scaffold that creates unlimited levels, each level is a plot of land with a typical large country house with servants house and garden on it. See Delirious New York, p. 69.
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To the financial jungle of Wall Street, the Club opposes a complementary program of hyper-refined civilization in which a full spectrum of facilities all ostensibly connected with athletics restores the human body. The lowest floors are equipped for relatively conventional athletic Pursuits: squash and handball courts, poolrooms, etc. all sandwiched between locker rooms. But then ascent through the upper layers of the structure with its implied approximation of a theoretical peak condition leads through territories never before tread upon by man. Emerging from the elevator on the 9th floor, the visitor finds himself in a dark vestibule that leads directly into a locker room that occupies the center of the platform, where there is no daylight. There he undresses, puts on boxing gloves and enters an adjoining space equipped with a multitude of punching bags (occasionally he may even confront a human opponent). On the southern side, the same locker room is also serviced by an oyster bar with a view over the Hudson River. Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor such is the plot of the 9th story, or: the 20th century in action. In a further escalation, the 10th floor is devoted to preventive medicine. On one side of a lavish dressing lounge, an array of body-manipulation facilities is arranged around a Turkish bath: sections for massage and rubbing, an 8-bed station for artificial sunbathing, a 10-bed resting area. On the south face, 6 barbers are concerned with the mysteries of masculine beauty and how to bring it out. But the southwest corner of the floor is the most explicitly medical a special facility that can treat 5 patients at the same time. A doctor here is in charge of the process of Colonic Irrigation: the insertion into the human intestines of synthetic bacterial cultures that rejuvenate man by improving his metabolism. This final step brings the sequence of mechanical interference with human nature; initiated by such apparently innocent attractions as Coney Islands Barrels of Love, to a drastic conclusion. On the 12th floor a swimming pool occupies the full rectangle, the elevators lead almost directly into the water at night, the pool is illuminated only by its underwater lighting system, so that the entire slab of water, with its frenetic swimmers, appears to float in space, suspended between the electric scintillation of the Wall Street towers and the stars reflected In the Hudson. Of all the floors, the interior golf course on the 7th is the most extreme undertaking: the transplantation of an English landscape of hills and valleys, a narrow river that curls across the rectangle, green grass, trees, a bridge, all real, but taxidermized in the literal realization of the meadows aloft announced by the 1909 theorem. The interior golf course is at the same time obliteration and preservation: having been extirpated by the Metropolis, nature is now resurrected inside the Skyscraper as merely one of its infinite layers, a technical service that sustains and refreshes the Metropolitanites in their exhausting existence. The Skyscraper has transformed Nature into Super-Nature.
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From the 1st to the 12th floors, ascent inside the Downtown Athletic Club has corresponded to increased subtlety and unconventionality of the programs offered on each of the platforms. The next 5 floors are devoted to eating, resting and socializing: they contain dining rooms with a variety of privacies kitchens, lounges, even a library. After their stringent workouts on the lower floors. the athletes puritanical hedonists to a man are finally in condition to confront the opposite sex women on a small rectangular dance floor on the 17th-story roof garden. From the 20th to the 35th floors, the club contains only bedrooms. The plan is of primary importance, because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants 7 that is how Raymond Hood the most theoretical of New Yorks architects has defined Manhattans version of functionalism distorted by the demands and opportunities of density and congestion. In the Downtown Athletic Club each plan is an abstract composition of activities that describes, on each of the synthetic platforms, a different performance that is only a fragment of the larger spectacle of the Metropolis. In an abstract choreography, the buildings athletes shuttle up and down between its 38 plots in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can make it each equipped with techno-psychic apparatus for the mens own redesign. Such an architecture is an aleatory form of planning life itself: in the fantastic juxtaposition of its activities, each of the Clubs floors is a separate instalment of an infinitely unpredictable intrigue that extols the complete surrender to the definitive instability of life in the Metropolis. INCUBATOR With its first 12 floors accessible only to men, the Downtown Athletic Club appears to be a locker room the size of a Skyscraper, definitive manifestation of those metaphysics at once spiritual and carnal that protect the American male against the corrosion of adulthood. But in fact, the Club has reached the point where the notion of a peak condition transcends the physical realm to become cerebral. It is not a locker room, but an incubator for adults, an instrument that permits the members too impatient to await the outcome of evolution to reach new strata of maturity by transforming themselves into new beings, this time according to their individual designs. Bastions of the anti-natural, Skyscrapers such as the Club announce the imminent segregation of mankind into 2 tribes: one of Metropolitanites literally self-made who have used the full potential of all the apparatus of Modernity to reach unique levels of perfection, the second simply the remainder of the traditional human race.
7 [Note from the original text] Arthur Tappan North, Raymond Hood (New York: Whittlesey House, 1931) p. 8.
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The only price its locker-room graduates have to pay for their collective narcissism is that of sterility. Their self-induced mutations are not reproducible in future generations. The bewitchment of the Metropolis stops at the genes; they remain the final stronghold of Nature. When the Clubs management advertises the fact that with its delightful sea breezes and commanding view, the 20 floors devoted to living quarters for members, make the Downtown Club an ideal home for men who are free of family cares and in a position to enjoy the last word in luxurious living. . . . 8 they suggest openly that for the true Metropolitan, bachelorhood is the only desirable status. The Downtown Athletic Club is a machine for metropolitan bachelors whose ultimate peak condition has lifted them beyond the reach of fertile brides. In their frenzied self-regeneration, the men are on a collective flight upward from the specter of the Basin Girl.
Figure 64. The Downtown Athletic Club, New York, by Starrett and van Vleck, 1930, for Koolhaas it is the apotheosis of the New York skyscraper and the new culture of congestion 8 [Note from the original text] William Parker Chase, New York the Wonder City 1932 (New York: New York Bound, 1978), p 63.
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Figure 65.The CCTV tower, Beijing, Headquarters for China Central Television, 2002 2010, by OMA and Rem Koolhaas.
Conclusion
As we discovered in a previous lecture, Koolhaas participated in the Deconstructivist exhibition co-curated by Mark Wigley. But Koolhaas defies such easy categorisation. He is without doubt one of the most highly-awarded architects of his time and at the same time he is one of the most prolific architectural theorists of his day. Such practical and theoretical talents possessed by one person is rare in todays world of increasing specialisation, yet this is just the kind of multi-disciplinary knowledge that Vitruvius demands for the architect at the dawn of architecture in the 1st century BC. It is ironic then that Koolhaas possesses these diverse skills precisely because he didnt originally set out to be an architect. His first career was as a journalist and freelance screenwriter. That is not surprising given that his father Anton 185
Koolhaas was quite well-known in the Netherlands as a writer and director of a film school. So Koolhaas came to architecture relatively late, not starting to practice it until he was 31. It seems this long incubation was worthwhile because he is now one of the most intellectually engaging of all practicing architects and has received recognition for this with the Pritzker Prize and the RIBA Gold Medal. With the publication of S, M, L, XL he started a worldwide trend for very large books, a kind of analogy for surfing the internet, but none of the imitations have come close to the depth and vastness of the original. Single-handedly Koolhaas has sparked off a kind of renaissance in Holland known as SuperDutch with so many young architects following his lead. Many have actually come out of his office, such as the MVRDV group led by Winy Maas. Many of todays most talented young architects have gone through Koolhaas OMA office in Rotterdam, including Alejandro Zera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi. Koolhaas is the best example we have of the emergence of the architect as a gradual formation of a particular kind of subjectivity, the combination of the conceptual persona and the aesthetic figure, the underlying theme of this course on architectural theory.
Bibliography
Adams, Tim. Metropolis Now (interview with Rem Koolhaas), The Observer (Sunday June 25, 2006), available at <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1803857,00.html>. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchall (London: Verso, 1994). AD Profile 5: OMA, Architectural Design, Vol. 47, No. 5, (1977). Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 1248- 1264. Koolhaas, Rem, Rem Koolhaas, Maison a Bordeaux, GA Houses: 57, ed. Yukio Futagawa, (August, 1998), pp.54-75. Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, and the China Group, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Pearl River Delta, in Politics-Poetics, Documenta X-The Book, ed. Catherine David and Jean Franois Chevrier, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997), pp.557-592.
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Koolhaas, Rem, Pearl River Delta, movie of the Documenta X presentation, click on Lezing tijdens Documenta X in Real Video at <http://www.archined.nl/links/src_rk.htm>. Kwinter, Sanford, Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future Begin?, Rem Koolhaas, Conversations with Students, ed. Sanford Kwinter (Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, 1996), pp. 69-91. Moore, Rowan, The Best House in the World, Ever, Blueprint: 153, (September, 1998), pp. 32-36. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, 1987-1993, El Croquis: 53 (1994). OMA/Rem Koolhaas, 1992-1996, El Croquis: 79 (1997). OMA/ Rem Koolhaas, Living, Vivre, Leben, ed Michel Jacques, (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 1998). Koolhaas, Rem, Thinking Big, John Rajchman Talks with Rem Koolhaas, Artforum: 33 (December 1994) pp. 47 55, 99 and 102. Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sze Tsung Leong (ed.) Great Leap Forward (Kln: Taschen, 2001). Tim Adams June 2010
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Gilles Deleuze
(1925-1995)
The Philosopher of the Baroque Fold
Introduction to the Concept of the Fold
Today it is rare to see Derridas name and his concept of deconstruction appear in architectural theory. But after the fashion for deconstruction went onto decline there was another French philosopher who was often referred to, Gilles Deleuze, or Deleuze and Guattari when referring to books he co-wrote with his friend Flix Guattari. In 1993 the influential magazine Architectural Design published a profile on Folding in Architecture which was republished with additions in 2004. This issue included essays by Greg Lynn, Jeffrey Kipnis, John Rajchman and Peter Eisenman, all referring to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuzes book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque had just been translated into English. The general theme was that deconstruction has done its job as Kenneth Powell wrote in the introduction, because it was now time to move out of subversive speculation and into constructive practice, and since Deleuzes philosophy was both formally and practically better suited to this new task we should now bring his concepts into architecture.
Deleuze Biography
Gilles Deleuze is in many ways a much more conventional philosopher than Derrida. He was born in Paris in 1925 where he remained all his life, he attended the Sorbonne, the most prestigious university in France, he gave seminars at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes and he wrote introductory guides for students with conventional titles like Nietzsche and Philosophy, Proust and Signs and Kants Critical Philosophy. Although Deleuze and Derrida share many interests their styles are very different. Compared to Derridas obsessive immanent critique of certain texts, endlessly hunting down oppositions to be deconstructed, Deleuzes style is joyfully open and expansive. Whatever his subject Deleuze takes the reader on a wild ride through classical and contemporary art, music, literature, physics, and biology, giving plenty of concrete examples along the way. He even draws his own diagrams like an architect to illustrate his ideas, one of which can be seen below. Deleuze is never content to pick holes in someone elses argument like so many deconstructivists did, instead he is like a great musician who composes variations on other writers themes, adding his own inventions as he goes. Thus while his book The Fold seems on first 189
reading to be an introduction to the 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, it does in fact transform a concept, the fold, into an active key that unlocks not only Baroque art and science in works from the Baroque period (16001750) but also reveals the inner workings of contemporary painters such as Simon Hanta. and young architects such as Bernard Cache.
Figure 66. Deleuzes diagram of the of the Baroque house as an allegory of the monad, which Leibnizs monism proposed as an alternative to the dualism of Descartes. Instead of the two unbridgeable dimensions of mind and body, there is the single enclosed house with two levels: the closed private room of the mind with its innate knowledge represented as a folded cloth, hence the title of Deleuzes essay The Fold, and the lower level of the senses with the senses represented as five openings.
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The Fold1
by Gilles Deleuze Material Coils 2
The Baroque does not refer to an essence, but rather to an operative function, to a characteristic. It endlessly creates folds. It does not invent the thing: there are all the folds that come from the Orient, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, classical folds. But it twists and turns the folds, takes them to infinity, fold upon fold, fold after fold. The characteristic of the Baroque is the fold that goes on to infinity. And from the beginning it differentiates them along two lines, according to two infinities, as if the infinite had two levels: the coils of matter, and the folds in the soul. It is certain that there is communication between the two levels (which is why content rises up into the soul). There are souls below, animal, open to communication between the two levels, between the two labyrinths, between the coils of matter and the folds in the soul. A fold between the two folds? And the same sensation or even bottom levels in souls, and the coils of matter surround them, envelop them. When we discover that souls can have no windows to the outside, we will need, at least at first, to think of this in reference to the souls above, the rational souls, which have risen to the other level (elevation). It is the upper level which has no window: a darkened compartment or study, furnished only with a stretched cloth diversified by folds, like the bottom layer of skin exposed. These folds, ropes, or springs set up on the opaque cloth represent innate knowledge, but an innate knowledge which passes into action when called upon by matter. For the latter unleashes the vibrations or oscillations at the lower extremity of the ropes by means of small openings which do exist on the lower level. It is a great Baroque apparatus which Leibniz sets up between the lower level, pierced by windows, and the upper story, sealed and sightless but in return resonant, like a sounding box which would render audible the visible movements coming from below. 3 It will be objected that this text is not an expression of Leibnizs
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Yale French Studies: 80, (1991) pp. 227-241. The full version of this extract from Deleuzes book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque is available for download from the Auckland University catalogue-search under Yale French Studies then find issue 80. 2 [Note from the original text] Deleuze distinguishes, not entirely consistently, between the replis of inorganic matter and the plis of the organic. Pli and repli both have a primary meaning of fold and are otherwise largely synonymous, although the form of the latter suggests an idea of repetition. An introverted person is furthermore said to be repli sur soi, and the word repli consequently has a connotation of turning inward, or invagination. To maintain a distinction in English, I have translated pli as fold and repli as coil, since the latter evokes the movements of a reptile (referred to in French as replis but not plis), the idea of folding in on oneself and the springs (resorts) which Deleuze says underlie Leibnizian matter.Translators note. 3 [Note from the original text] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays: 144-45. In this book, Leibniz reworks Lockes Essays; the darkened compartment has been referred to by Locke, but not the folds. Hereafter cited in the text.
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thought, but rather the limit of his possible agreement with Locke. That does not hinder it in the least from offering a way of representing what Leibniz will continually assert: a correspondence, even a image of veins of marble is applied to both in different contexts; sometimes the veins are the twisted coils of matter which surround the living beings caught in a block, so that a bank of marble is like an undulating lake full of fish. Sometimes the veins are the innate ideas in the soul, like the bent figures or the potential statues caught in a block of marble. Matter is marbled, and the soul is marbled, in two different ways.
What is Baroque?
The modern reader might call to mind a film shown in the dark, but the film was nonetheless shot. Is one then to imagine numerical images that have no model, the products of a calculation? Or more simply, a line of infinite inflection, which works for a surface, as we find in the works of Pollock or Rauschenberg? It has in fact been said that with Rauschenberg the pictures surface is no longer a window onto the world but becomes an opaque table of information on which a numbered line is inscribed. 4 In place of the picture/window there is substituted tabulation, the table on which are inscribed lines, numbers, changing characters (object-matter). 5 Leibniz ceaselessly draws up linear and numerical tables in place of holes there are folds. Against the system window/countryside is opposed the pair city/information table. 6 The Liebnizian monad would be such a table, or rather a room, an apartment entirely covered with lines of variable inflection. It would be the dark room of the New Essays, furnished with a stretched cloth diversified by moving, living folds. The essential point about the monad is that it is background: it draws everything from this, and nothing comes from outside and nothing goes outside.... Finally, there is the architectural idea of a room in black marble, where light penetrates only through orifices so artfully twisted that they allow not the slightest glimpse of the outside but illuminate or color the decorations of a pure inside (is it not the Baroque spirit which, in this sense, inspires Le Corbusier in the La Tourette abbey?). It is impossible to understand the Leibnizian monad, and its system of light/mirror/point of view/interior decoration without relating them to Baroque architecture. The latter sets up chapels and chambers whose glancing light comes from openings invisible even to their inhabitants. One of its first acts is the Studiolo in Florence, with its secret, windowless room. The monad is a cell, more a sacristy than an atom: a room with neither door nor window, where all actions are internal.
4 [Note from the original text] Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972): the flatbed picture plane. 5 [Note from the original text] Objectile (object-matter) is a neologism apparently based on the model of subjectile, which means the material support, such as canvas, board, wall, that underlies a painting Translators note. 6 On the Baroque city, and the importance of the city in the Baroque, cf., Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938) and Severo Sarduy, El Caravaggio / la ciudad barroco in Ensoyos generales sobre el Borroco (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econmico, 1987), 17982.
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Among the so-called Baroque painters, Tintoretto and El Greco stand out, incomparable. And yet they share this characteristic of the Baroque. The Entombment of the Count of Orgaz is, for example, divided in two by a horizontal line, and below the bodies squeeze up against one another, while above the soul rises, in a thin coil, awaited by holy monads each of which is endowed with its own spontaneity. For us, however, the criterion or the operative concept of the Baroque is the Fold, in its full comprehension and extension: fold upon fold. If one can extend the Baroque beyond precise historical limits, it seems to us that it is always by virtue of this criterion, which allows us to recognize Michaux when he writes To live in the folds, or Boulez when he invokes Mallarm and composes Fold upon fold, or Hanta when he creates a method out of folding. And if, on the contrary, we go back further into the past, how might we already have to find the Baroque in, for example, Uccello? Because he is not content to paint blue and pink horses, and to draw lances like streaks of light directed toward all the points of sky; he is forever drawing mazocchi, which are circles of wood covered with cloth and placed on the head, such that the folds of the fabric, when pulled back, surround the entire face; he runs up against the incomprehension of his contemporaries, because the power of developing absolutely all things and the strange series of folded hoods seem more revealing than the magnificent marble figures of the great Donatello. There would thus be a Baroque line, passed down in strict accordance with the fold and which could bring together architects, painters, musicians, poets, philosophers.
Figure 67. Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher and author of The Fold, a text that had a huge impact on architectural theory during the early 1990s.
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Figure 68. The Studiolo of Francesco I deMedici, installed by Vasari 1569 -1575 in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. This is Deleuzes primary architectural illustration from the Boroque period of the Leibnizian monad, one of its first acts.
Figure 69. The crypt of the side chapel of La Tourette Convent by Le Corbusier 1953 1957 in a valley near Lyon, France. Deleuzes example of the Baroque spirit in modern architecture, a closed room that nevertheless communicates with the universe through its light canons.
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Conclusion
In the early 21st-century Deleuze and Guattari are still perhaps the most often cited philosophers in architectural theory. To take the recent 2004 Architecture of Philosophy/Philosophy of Architecture conference in Bradford, England as just one example, 14 speakers mention Deleuze and Guattari in their online abstracts, more mentions than any other writer, in second place was Derrida with 11 mentions and third was Heidegger with 10. 7 But in recent years there has been something of a backlash against these difficult-to-read philosophers with even the most theoretical of architects proclaiming they are now too busy building to be bothered with such abstract thinking. Ironically this move to a more pragmatic position was in fact advocated by Deleuze and Guattari who always claimed their philosophy was pragmatic. For example, a common theme in recent theory has been the diagram, a eminently practical tool, and the diagram was a key concept in Deleuze and Guattaris later writings.
Adams, Tim. The Eisenman-Deleuze Fold, BArch Thesis, Auckland University, 1993. Useful bibliography, well illustrated. The key source for these notes on Deleuze. Brott, Simone. Inside the Fold: The Form of the Form Architectural Design, vol. 69, no. 3/4 (March/April 1999) pp. vi - ix. Brott argues that folding is a legitimate new style and not just passing fashion because, on the one hand it is based on new software that can handle smoothly curved-surfaces, and on the other because it has a solid philosophical framework. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). The most condensed, and therefore most difficult, but also the most rewarding of Deleuzes books. Requires some prior knowledge of Leibniz to understand it. Folding in Architecture, A. D. Profile No. 102, Architectural Design, vol. 63, no. 3/4 (March/April 1993) The journal that marked the end of deconstruction in architecture. Includes a useful extract from Deleuzes book The Fold. Re-issued in 2004 with additional introductions by Greg Lynn and Mario Carpo. Carpo claims that this journal marks the turning point between deconstruction and contemporary digital architecture and for this reason it should have enduring importance for todays architects. Tim Adams June 2010
7 See the programme for the conference with links to the abstracts for each speaker at <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/congress/2004/programme/prog_sunday.shtml>.
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Peter Eisenman
The Theorist and Architect of Deleuzes Fold
Peter Eisenman was the leading architectural theorist in America in the latetwentieth-century. He was born in 1932 in Newark, New Jersey and studied at Cornell, Columbia, and Cambridge Universities. Ever since his pioneering application of the work of linguist Noam Chomsky to architectural theory in the 1970s he has been one step ahead of all the major trends in late-twentieth-century architectural theory. For example, he was using Derridas concept of deconstruction as early as 1975 in his House X project, by comparison Mark Wigleys PhD thesis, Jacques Derrida and Architecture was written 11 years later in 1986. Naturally Eisenman was one of the first to introduce the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze into architecture. He used Deleuzes concept of the fold to describe his Rebstock project of 1991. Rebstock was an unbuilt project for a large combined residential and commercial park in Frankfurt, Germany, which literally folds together residential and commercial uses, the park area and building zones, and the free-standing slab and perimeter block typologies.
Figure 70. Rebstockpark, Frankfurt 1991 by Peter Eisenman presented side by side with The Fold essay by Gilles Deleuze in Architectural Design, vol. 63, no. 3/4 (March/April 1993).
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Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock1

by Peter Eisenman
Now, because of media, time has lost its immediacy. Time can be speeded up or slowed down, replayed or fast-forwarded. The consequence of this change of the condition of time in the electronic media also clearly faces us with the loss of individual expression and response to an immediate or present action. This loss cannot be replaced by merely reinstating the old forms of individual expression, because media has brought about a permanent change in the nature of multiplicity and repetition.... The original that may be on a disk in a computer is no longer an object but rather a series of electronic impulses stored in a matrix. Even the disk original is often modified by corrections and thus a unique original is rarely kept.... The question remains how does one make an urbanism in this new media time, a simultaneous time of narration and repetition? For this answer it is possible to introduce two interconnected concepts: the idea of the fold and the idea of singularity - concepts which are both active in the Rebstock project. For Gilles Deleuze, the fold opens up a new conception of space and time. He argues in Le Pli [The Fold] that, Leibniz turned his back on Cartesian rationalism, on the notion of effective space and argued that in the labyrinth of the continuous the smallest element is not the point but the fold. If this idea is taken into architecture it produces the following argument. Traditionally, architecture is conceptualised as Cartesian space, as a series of point grids. Planning envelopes are volumes of Cartesian space which seem to be neutral. Of course these volumes of Cartesian space, these platonic solids that contain the stylisms and images of not only classical but also modern and postmodern space, are really nothing more than a condition of ideology taken for neutral or natural. Thus, it may be possible to take the notion of the fold -the crossing or an extension from a point -- as an other kind of neutrality. Deleuze goes on to argue that Leibnizs notion of this extension is the notion of the event: Extension is the philosophical movement outward along a plane rather than downward in depth. He argues that in mathematical studies of variation, the notion of object is change. This new object for Deleuze is no longer concerned with the framing of space, but rather a temporal modulation that implies a continual variation of matter. The continual variation is characterised through the agency of the fold: No longer is an object defined by an essential form. He calls this idea of an object, an object event. The idea of event is critical to the discussion of singularity. Event proposes a different kind of time which is outside of narrative time or dialectical time. This other time, this outside of time begins to condition the idea of event as well as the idea of
1 Peter Eisenman: Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock, Architectural Design: 63. 3/4 (March/April 1993), pp. 24-25.
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singularity.... For singularity does not mean that a thing is simply unique. Singularity refers to the possibility in a repetition or a multiple for one copy to be different from another copy.... Therefore any condition of place has to be more concerned with this other notion of the particular and the specific which acknowledges this time of repetition. Image must be replaced by mapping, and individuality reconceptualised in the idea of singularity.
Figure 71. Peter Eisenman visiting the site of his current project, the $140 million City of Culture of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. Due for completion in 2012.
Conclusion
As mentioned above Peter Eisenman always seems to be one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to architectural theory. This is quite worrying because during the last decade of the twentieth century he ran the influential ANY series of conferences and books that were held every year in a different country, finishing in his home town of New York in 2000. This series of conferences brought together along with usual star architects, many intellectuals and philosophers including Jacques Derrida. In Eisenmans last paper at the conclusion of this mammoth series of 199
conferences Eisenman regrets ever having inviting these outsiders to his conferences and desires from now on to hear only what other architects have to say. This was baffling to say the least given Eisenmans own long history of incorporating the concepts of linguists, philosophers and art theorists into his theoretical writings. But perhaps this desire will be soon become widespread among the architectural intelligentsia, only time will tell. If this does indeed happen architectural theory will be a lot less colourful and imaginative when it excludes all non-architects from its domain.
Folding in Architecture, A. D. Profile No. 102, Architectural Design, vol. 63, no. 3/4 (March/April 1993) The journal that marked the end of deconstruction in architecture. Includes a useful extract from Deleuzes book The Fold. Re-issued in 2004 with additional introductions by Greg Lynn and Mario Carpo. Carpo claims that this journal marks the turning point between deconstruction and contemporary digital architecture and for this reason it should have enduring importance for todays architects. Simone Brott, Inside the Fold: The Form of the Form Architectural Design, vol. 69, no. 3/4 (March/April 1999) pp. vi - ix. Brott argues that folding is a legitimate new style and not just passing fashion because, on the one hand it is based on new software that can handle smoothly curved-surfaces, and on the other because it has a solid philosophical framework. Tim Adams, The Eisenman-Deleuze Fold, BArch Thesis, Auckland University, 1993. Useful bibliography, well illustrated. Tim Adams June 2010
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Bart Lootsma
Architectural Theorist of the Diagram
Introduction to the Diagram
As we move closer to our own time it gets increasingly difficult to determine precisely what are the most important architectural theories. Most people will agree that Modernism was the major topic 100 years ago, but to say what is happening today, yesterday, or even last year will generate many arguments. That is because current ideas are very much alive, with many researchers around the world committing themselves to one or other theory as they attempt to establish themselves as valuable contributors to the ongoing development of architectural theory. Some branches of theory will turn out to be dead ends while others will bare unexpected fruits, we cannot be sure which one is which until we travel down the branch a bit and give it time to grow. Some will argue that the concept of the diagram is not the most significant theory for the turn of the millennium, or, if it was we are well past that period now and should move on. With that precautionary warning in mind, there can be no argument that between 1998 and 2000 several architectural journals published issues dedicated to the concept of the diagram, that many important architects started writing about the diagram, that between 2000 and 2004 three design papers given at the Auckland School of Architecture were called The Diagram and in 2010 Mark Garcia edited a book called The Diagrams of Architecture. 1 When we think of diagrams we immediately think of texts that we came across at school, perhaps in geography or mathematics, which tried to condense some larger complex process or set of relationships into a small black and white line-drawing. This is actually what modernist architects have always done with their plans, plan as generator was one of their catch phrases as we discovered when reading Le Corbusier. This led to an over-emphasis on two-dimensional functionally-divided zones and circulation at the expense of the walls. The walls came afterwards by simply projecting up from the plan, hence Klaus Herdegs derogatory term for modernist planning as the decorated diagram. 2 The walls were merely decorating the plan. This traditional meaning of diagram is greatly expanded by the current group of
1 For example of journals see ANY, OASE and Daidalos and and for architects see Lars Spuybroek, Ben van Berkel, Peter Eisenman, Toyo Ito and Alejandro Zeara-Polo. See also Mark Garcia (ed.) The Diagrams of Architecture: AD Reader (Chichester: Wiley, 2010). 2 Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Buahaus Legacy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983).
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architects who have written about diagrams or who are using them in their design process, such as the Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and Lars Spuybroek, the Japanese architects Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima, and the Spanish architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo. Their sense of diagram has more to do with the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari than with Modernism. The new sense of the diagram also links the simple with the complex but in a way that does not try to reduce the complexity of what is being diagrammed but on the contrary aims to complicate the diagram that is being made with the chaotic reality of the world. Furthermore, what is being diagrammed is no longer simple patterns of foot traffic or relationships between functional zones but absolutely anything at all that can be quantified and digitised, from weather patterns to shifts in the stock market. Another difference between the new diagram and the modernist one is that traditionally diagrams are considered to be static representations of past events, tracking population or climatic changes for example. But the diagram can also be a tool for dealing with reality in the future. Like any tool the diagram must be small enough to carry from one job to the next, it must be versatile and light enough to be applied to future tasks. A good example here would be the periodic table of elements first diagrammed by the Russian chemist Mendeleev. Anyone who know something about chemistry will know that this table aligns all the known elements in the universe in a small grid that looks like a page of a calendar. Each element is placed according to its atomic weight and its number of electrons. Now the periodic table not only mapped all the substances known to exist at the time, it also created empty spaces for elements that could only be discovered after the periodic table was constructed. It showed scientists were to look. Not only that, it shows them infinite possibilities for making new compound molecules by showing how the existing elements could be recombined. Similarly each one of the current diagram architects working today is trying to make charts with their architecture that will allow for unseen possibilities, with infinite possible compounds of art, science and philosophy. A good example is the work of FOA (the London based Foreign Office Architects of Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi). Their Yokohama Port terminal is essentially layers of large platforms folded together to create large uncontrolled spaces for unknown future public use.
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Figure 72. Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid (FOA) Yokohama Port terminal. An example of architects using diagrams to bring complex realities into architecture rather than using diagrams to reduce a complex program into something simple.
Figure 73. The Dutch architectural historian, theorist and critic, Bart Lootsma. Lootsma has captured what is unique about the current use of diagrams among architects better than anyone else.
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Who is Bart Lootsma?

Bart Lootsma is a Dutch architectural historian, critic and curator born in Amsterdam in 1957. Lootsma often writes about the new generation of Dutch architects following in the footsteps of Rem Koolhaas the global success of his office OMA. This generation includes Winy Maass MVRDV partnership, Ben van Berkels UN Studio, and Lars Spuybroeks NOX architects and has collectively come to be known as SuperDutch after Lootsmas book of the same name. Bart Lootsmas degree in Architectural History and Theory from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 1983 included a reconstruction of the Pome Electronique, a multimedia immersive installation at the Philips pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World Fair designed by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varse. His first teaching position was at the Hochschule fr Knstlerische und Industrielle Gestaltung Linz, Austria in 1985, as an assistant to Laurids Ortner, one of the founders of the radical Austrian collective Haus Rucker Co. Since then he has had held teaching positions at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, The AA School in London, The Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, The Academy of Arts in Nuremberg, the ETH in Zurich and the Academy of Arts in Vienna. Since 2006 Lootsma has been Professor of Architectural Theory at the Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck, Austria. In 2009 he was Guest Professor at the University of Luxembourg. He has edited the Dutch magazines de Architect, Forum and Archis. More importantly for us, Lootsma is the most intelligent observer of the new sense of the diagram used by todays generation of young architects. In the following excerpt Lootsma proposes that Lars Spuybroek has best captured the new idea of diagram because Spuybroek doesnt treat his diagrams as images or metaphors to be translated into architecture but rather as machines that create flows and interruptions. The diagram tracks the effects of a mobile process which should not be confused with its static image. Ideally, says Lootsma, the diagram serves as a conceptual tool through which things evolve, eventually reappearing transformed. But most often, he warns, architects use them to express simply an overall complexity within the framework of communicating with the client. It is the former and not the latter use of diagrams that Lootsma wants to encourage in this short text.
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Figure 74. The H2O Pavilion by Lars Spuybroek at Neeltje Jans in the Netherlands. Bart Lootsma sees the work of Spuybroek as the best example of the new sense of the diagram as a machine that creates flows and interruptions.
The Diagram Debate, or the Schizoid Architect3

by Bart Lootsma
Over the past few years, the diagram has occupied an essential place in the debates relating to architectural design. In the introduction to a special issue of the architecture review OASE devoted to the diagram Like Bijlsma, Wouter Deen and Udo Garritzmann write, The diagram is a graphic representation of the evolution of a phenomenon. There are lines, a structure and a form; it works by reduction, abstraction and representation. As a medium, the diagram serves as a dual function: it is a form of notation, analytical and reflexive, which sum up; but it is also a model for generative, synthesizing and productive thought. The way architects make use of the diagram sometimes favours the former role, sometimes the latter. Most often, the diagram constitutes a practical solution that enables one to express simply an overall complexity within the framework of communicating with the client, the members of
3 Bart Lootsma, The Diagram Debate, or the Schizoid Architect, Archilabs Futurehouse, ed. MarieAnge Brayer and Batrice Simonol (London: Thames amd Hudson, 2002), pp. 20-27.
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the firm or the general public. Ideally, the diagram serves as a conceptual tool through which things evolve, eventually reappearing transformed. It is in the fundamental works of philosphers like Michel Foucault, Flix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze that one should seek the theoretical reason for the use of diagrams in design work in architecture. In the first chapter of Capitalism and Schizophrenia 4, a text that architects have more or less forgotten or suppressed, Deleuze and Guattari write, Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capital being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. At the time (1972), Deleuze and Guattari could not go too far. At most, they could sketch out a parallel between wishful production and social production.... Nowadays, to establish a relationship between wishful and social production no longer poses a problem: the computer takes care of it as a sophisticated tool, the computer not only influences every particular aspect of social life, but above all it establishes a multitude of new relationships. Everything is in effect converted to a flow of data, an infinite interpolation of 0 and 1, which can be apparently exchanged and manipulated without difficulty.... For architecture and the software that has been developed for architectural design, the consequences of this evolution are obviously important. In a text recently published in conjunction with an NAi workshop, Lars Spuybroek (NOX) writes, Maya is the most integrative tool available today. Students can combine typical data analysis from programs like Excel (Microsoft Office) with image manipulations from stills or films from Adobe Photoshop or Premiere and the amazing surface modelling tools in Maya.... One cannot overestimate the effect of this type of software on the minds of architecture students. 5 Spuybroek is nevertheless one of the few to understand that these effects are the effects of machines, not metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari write, An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.... Hence we are all handymen: each with our little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flow and interruptions. Yet if we interpret everything in terms of machines and the effects of machines, if everything flows and merges, how are we going to get a grip? Here the diagram plays a fundamental role.
Conclusion
The diagram is still a common topic for discussion among architectural theorists today, perhaps because it seems to hold the promise of creating a bridge between
4 [Note from the original text] Flix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 5 [Note from the original text] Lars Spuybroek, Machining architecture in The Weight of the Image (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001).
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imagination and reality, and, between architectural theory and building construction. Arcane theorists and pragmatic builders can equally accept that the use of diagrams is beneficial. Architectural education is forever coming under attack by practicing architects for not producing office-ready graduates and the teaching of a certain competency in the use of diagrams could be a to satisfy both the prosaic and economic requirements of the profession and at the same time allow room for the use of creativity and imagination, the reason most people become interested in architecture in the first place. In fact, if architecture was redefined as the intelligent making of diagrams of the human-environment interface, that could be a beneficial way move architectural practice into the 21st century. Therefore the poetic/pragmatic diagram might take a central role in the future reinvention of architectural practice and education. At the very least it could one day be a sub-discipline of architecture, just as drawing and structures are today.
Adams, Tim. Schnittstellen-Diagramme [Interface Diagram], Der Architekt: 9 (September 2000), pp. 38- 42. Describes how Deleuze and Guattaris definition of the diagram as used by architects today originates in the work of Hjelmslev and especially Peirce. ANY: 23 (December 1998) Special issue on the diagram. Chtelet, Gilles. Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Murial Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, ?) Essentially Deleuze and Guattaris concept applied to the history of mathematics. Shows how this concept can be rigorously scientific and intuitive at the same time but dont attempt to read this unless you are a mathematician. Daidalos: 74 (October 2000) Diagrammania. Special issue on the diagram. Do, Ellen Yi-Luen and Mark D. Gross. Thinking with Diagrams in Architectural Design, in Alan F. Blackwell (ed.) Thinking with Diagrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 135 149. An investigation of freehand-drawn diagrams as a means to problem-solving in architectural design with a useful overview of the available literature on the subject. Ednie-Brown, Pia, The Texture of Diagrams: Reasonings on Greg Lynn and Francis Bacon, Diadalos: 74 (October 2000), pp. 72-79. Notes the danger of thinking the diagram is still just a line drawing and makes the case that it is also a material texture.
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Eisenman, Peter. Diagram Diaries (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). Besides two essays on the diagram by Eisenman, includes a very useful general introduction to diagrams by R. E. Somol. Fraser, Iain and Rod Henmi. Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis of Drawing (New York: Van Nostand Reinhold, 1994) See the excellent if rather conventional analysis of diagrams used in architecture in chapter 6. Garcia, Mark (ed.). The Diagrams of Architecture: AD Reader (Chichester: Wiley, 2010). The definitive reader on the subject, with many multidisciplinary contributions, prooving that this concept is still contemporary. Herdeg, Klaus, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983). Interesting history of the modernist use of diagrams in America, why it failed and why the older generation of architects have reason to be suspicious of the new interest in diagrams. Lootsma, Bart, Diagrams in Costumes, A+U: 03 (March 1999), pp. 98-102. Introduction to van Berkels definition of the diagram. Lootsma, Bart, The Diagram Debate, or the Schizoid Architect, Archilabs Futurehouse, ed. Marie-Ange Brayer and Batrice Simonol (London: Thames amd Hudson, 2002), pp. 20-27. Compares Lars Spuybroeks to van Berkels use of diagrams and finds van Berkels diagrams are merely transferred images while Spuybroeks are proper Deleuzian machines. OASE: 48 (Autumn 1999) Diagrams. Special issue on the diagram. Spuybroek, Lars, Machining architecture in The Weight of the Image (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001). According to Bart Lootsma, Spuybroek in this essay captures the new sense of diagram better than anyone else. Ito, Toyo, Diagram Architecture, Kazuyo Sejima, El Croquis: 71 (1995), pp. 18-24. Good analysis of what makes Sejima so unique, her diagrammatic quality, the same of course can be said of Ito himself. Zaera-Polo, Alejandro, FOA Code Remix 2000, Foreign Office Architects, 2G: 16 (2000), pp. 122-142. This is the FOAs manifesto, includes a subsection on diagrams. Tim Adams June 2010 208
Ben van Berkel

Diagrammaniac Architect
The diagram has long been a key concept in the design process of Dutch architect Ben van Berkel. He is famous for collecting vast amounts of diagrams from various sources and incorporating some of these into his architectural projects. His best known work, the House at tGooi in Holland is based on a mbius strip, a circle of ribbon with a twist in it so that the inside and outside edges continuously swap over. Van Berkel uses it as a diagram of the daily life patterns that take place within a house. Van Berkel was born in Utrecht in Holland in 1957 and studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Architectural Association in London, gaining an honours Diploma in 1987. He set up his own practice with the art historian Caroline Bos in 1988, which later became UN (United Network) Studio, Amsterdam in 1998. Van Berkel is also an architectural educator, as a visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, a visiting critic at Harvard University, and a teacher at Princeton University.
Figure 75. Ben van Berkel drawing a diagram of the Mercedes Benz Museum, Stuttgart, 2006.
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In the extract below van Berkel spells out what the new concept of diagram, inherited from Deleuze and Guattari means in the most direct way possible: it is an abstract machine that mediates between concepts and forms. Therefore it is not representational but rather instrumental. It is an operative device for introducing concepts that are normally considered to be foreign to architecture, and prevents the architect from repeating normative existing models or typologies. The function of the diagram, says van Berkel, is to delay typology and advance design by bringing in external concepts in a specific shape: as figure, not as image or sign. [and] to distract us from spiralling into clich.
Figure 76. The Panopticon, the ideal prison by Jeremy Bentham. The key example of a diagram in the book Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, who claims that this is a diagram of power diagramming surveillance by means of architecture. The prison warden sits unseen in a tower in the centre observing the prisons who are under 24 hour observation.
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Diagrams
by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos1
Diagrammatic technique provides a foothold in the fast streams of mediated information. The meaninglessness that repetition and mediation create is overcome by diagrams which generate new, instrumental meanings and steer architecture away from typological fixation. What is a diagram? In general, diagrams are best known and understood as visual tools used for the compression of information. A specialist diagram, such as a statistics table or a schematic image, can contain as much information in a few lines as would fill pages in writing. In architecture, diagrams have in the last few years been introduced as part of a technique that promotes a proliferating, generating and instrumentalising approach to design. The essence of the diagrammatic technique is that it introduces into a work qualities that are unspoken, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic . qualities that can be physical, structural, spatial or technical. There are three stages to the diagram: selection, application and operation, enabling the imagination to extend to subjects outside it and draw them inside, changing itself in the process. Diagrams are packed with information on many levels. A diagram is an assemblage of solidified situations, techniques, tactics and functionings. The arrangement of the eighteenth century Panopticon prison plan is the expression of a number of cultural and political circumstances cumulating in a distinctive manifestation of surveillance: It conveys the spatial organisation of a specific form of State power and discipline. It incorporates several levels of significance and cannot be reduced to a singular reading; like all diagrams, the Panopticon is a manifold. Characteristically, when a diagram breeds new meanings, they are still directly related to its substance, its tangible manifestation. Critical readings of previous interpretations are not diagrammatic. Put in the simplest possible terms, an image is a diagram when it is stronger than its interpretations. The diagram is not a blueprint. It is not the working drawing of an actual construction, recognisable in all its details and with a proper scale. No situation will let itself be directly translated into a fitting and completely correspondent conceptualisation. There will always be a gap between the two. By the same token concepts can never be directly applied to architecture. There has to be a mediator. The mediating ingredient of the diagram derives not from the strategies that inform the diagram, but from its actual format, its material configuration. The diagram is not a metaphor or paradigm, but an abstract machine that is both content and expression. This distinguishes diagrams from indexes, icons and symbols. The meanings of
1 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Techniques, Move vol. 2, (Amsterdam: UN Studio and Goose Press, 1999) pp. 19-26.
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diagrams are not fixed. The diagrammatic or abstract machine is not representational. It does not represent an existing object or situation, but it is instrumental in the production of new ones. The forward-looking tendency of diagrammatic practice is an indispensable ingredient for understanding its functioning. Why use diagrams? Diagrammatic practice delays the relentless intrusion of signs, thereby allowing architecture to articulate an alternative to a representational design technique. A representational technique implies that we converge on reality from a conceptual position and in that way fix the relationship between idea and form, between content and structure. When form and content are superimposed in this way, a type emerges. This is the problem with an architecture that is based on a representational concept: it cannot escape existing typologies. In not proceeding from signs, an instrumentalising technique such as the diagram delays typological fixation. Concepts external to architecture are introduced rather than superimposed. Instances of specific interpretation, utilisation, perception, construction and so on unfold and bring forth applications on various levels of abstraction. How is the diagram chosen and applied? The function of the diagram is to delay typology and advance design by bringing in external concepts in a specific shape: as figure, not as image or sign. But how do we select, insert and interpret diagrams? The selection and application of a diagram involves the insertion of an element that contains within its dense information something that our thoughts can latch onto, something that is suggestive, to distract us from spiralling into clich. Although the diagram is not selected on the basis of specific representational information, it is not a random image. The finding of the diagram is instigated by specific questions relating to the project at hand: its location, programme and construction. For us, it becomes interesting to use a diagram from the moment that it starts to relate specifically to diagrams ... all maps of worlds yet to be constructed, if only as a detail. To suggest a possible, virtual organisation, we have used ideograms, line diagrams, image diagrams and finally operational diagrams, found in technical manuals, reproductions of paintings or random images that we collect. These diagrams are essentially infrastructural; they can always be read as maps of movements, irrespective of their origins. They are used as proliferators in a process of unfolding. How do diagrams become operational? The abstract machine of the diagram needs triggering. It has to be set in motion so that the transformative process can begin, but where does this motion originate? How is the machine triggered? What exactly is the principle that effectuates change and transformation? Furthermore, how can we isolate this principle and give it the dimensions that make it possible to grasp and use it at will? The insertion of the diagram into the work has organisational effects. Among our collection of diagrams are flow charts, music notations, schematic drawings of industrial buildings, electrical switch diagrams that ultimately point to the role of time and action in the process of design. Interweaving time and action makes transformation possible, as in novels where long narrative lines coil around black holes within the story. If there were no black holes for the story's protagonist to fall into, the landscape of the narrative would be a smooth and timeless plane, in which the hero, whose character and adventures are formed by this landscape, cannot evolve. 212
The story is an intrinsic combination of character, place, event and duration. The landscape of the story, the black holes and the character become one. Together they trigger the abstract machine. In architecture, it goes something like this: the project is set on its course. Before the work diverts into typology a diagram, rich in meaning, full of potential movement and loaded with structure, which connects to some important aspect of the project, is found. The specific properties of this diagram throw a new light onto the work. As a result, the work becomes un-fixed; new directions and new meanings are triggered. The diagram operates like a black hole, which radically changes the course of the project, transforming and liberating architecture.
Conclusion
The diagram is now a well established concept in architectural theory and for this very reason some commentators will think that it should be replaced with another concept. Like all concepts when first introduced into architecture the diagram has a certain utopian flavour to it. The diagram will, supposedly, make architects more connected to the prevailing conditions of life, in particular the computer and its need for quantified digital input, it will help the architect untangle the ever increasing amounts of chaotic data that now flows like a river into their offices, and it will allow them to finally bridge the gap between theory and practice. Inevitably these utopian hopes are smashed against the rocky shores of commercially motivated self-interest and the soulless expansion of global capitalism. Once again a young Tafuri or new Lootsma will proclaim that the emperor has no clothes, or in other words they will compare the extravagant claims made by current architect/theorists in their writings with their built projects and demand a new and more realistic theory better able to make use of current realities. Perhaps that is always the task of architectural theory.
Figure 77. UN Studio, Mercedes Benz Museum, Stutgart, 2006, UN Studios masterpiece.
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Figure 78. UN Studio, Theatre Lelystad, Lelystad, the Netherlands, 2005.
Adams, Tim. Schnittstellen-Diagramme [Interface Diagram], Der Architekt: 9 (September 2000), pp. 38- 42. Describes how Deleuze and Guattaris definition of the diagram as used by architects today originates in the work of Hjelmslev and especially Peirce. Berkel, Ben van and Caroline Bos, Move, Volume 2: Techniques (Amsterdam: UN Studio and Goose Press, 1999). Second of the three volumes of Move which includes a very concise and accurate description of the Deleuze and Guattariinspired diagram used by the new generation of architects. Berkel, Ben van and Caroline Bos, UN Studio Design Models: Architecture, Urbanism, Infrastructure (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). UN Studios most recent theoretical statements with increased emphasis on the multidisciplinary approach to architecture. Berkel, Ben van and Caroline Bos, Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz: The Book of the Museum (Actar, 2006). An account of the design and construction of the UN Studios masterpiece, the Mercedes-Benz Museum. Berkel, Ben van, Caroline Bos and Falk Jaeger, UN Studio (Berlin: Jovis, 2009). Falk Jaegers book on UN Studios recent work including Five Franklin Place, an apartment building intended for New York's TriBeCa Neighbourhood. Tim Adams June 2010 214
Mark Goulthorpe
Non-Standard Architecture
Introduction to the Concept
If the long-term importance of concept of the diagram is still uncertain, then that applies even more so for the concept of non-standard architecture because this concept only came into prominence in 2004. But like all new concepts it picks up and continues pre-existing strands from various disciplines. The Non-Standard Architectures exhibition curated by Frdric Migayrou and Zeynep Mennan at the Pompidou Centre in Paris included a theory ribbon that wound its way through the gallery. 1 On the ribbon were images showing historical precedents for this new concept from the worlds of science, mathematics, art and architecture. The exhibition attracted 3000 people to the preview, a record number even for the popular Pompidou Centre, and it generated a follow-on conference called Non Standard Praxis at MIT in Boston later in 2004. In the short time since its conception in Paris this concept has become a permanent part of architectural theory as indicated by the fact that there is now a course called Non-Standard and Interactive Architecture at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in the Netherlands, one of the largest schools of architecture in the world.
Figure 79. The catalogue for the 2004 Non-Standard Architectures exhibition in Paris and the poster for the Non Standard Praxis conference at MIT in Boston in 2004.
1 The catalogue for the exhibition is Non-Standard Architectures, ed. Frdric Migayrou, (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2004). The theory ribbon consisted of 11 themes; biomorphisms, shells, imprints, figures, forms, helicoidals, inflections, lines, ribbons, sequences and mathematical objects. The 12 practices featured in the exhibition with their key principals were R&Sie (Franois Roche), Objectile (Bernard Cache), Asymptote (Hani Rashid), Servo (David Erdman), KOL/MAC Studio (Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald), Tom Kovac Architecture, Greg Lynn FORM, Nox (Lars Spuybroek), Kas Oosterhuis, UN Studio (Ben van Berkel), and dECOi (Mark Goulthorpe). They were called the 12 apostles of the new modernism in the French press. Mark Goulthorpes Aegis Hyposurface was part of the exhibition.
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Figure 80. The Non-Standard Architectures exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, 2004, showing the theory ribbon that documented the many historical connections that this new concept had in the worlds of science, mathematics, geometry and art.
Frdric Migayrou points out that the concept of non-standard originates in the work of mathematician Abraham Robinson, but in the domain of architecture it can be taken to stand for the shift from the analogue to the digital and the new potentials created by the computer at every stage of the design process, from its conception to its production. 2 More specifically, non-standard means that because the design of architecture now involves numerical information in CAD software, architectural form can now be directly transferred to Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling machines. For the first time it is now possible to produce non-standard building components (which are all different) at the same cost as the traditional repetition of standardised components (all the same). Once CNC milling of non-standard building components becomes possible at the production end, then the design end of the process will need to be modified to provide for the variety of forms now possible. This is why terms like parametric design, algorithmic design, evolutionary architecture, artificial life, series working, generative
2 See the press release for the exhibition at <http://www.cnac-gp.fr/Pompidou/Communica tion.nsf/docs/IDCC337242435D0C06C1256DF2005EA9E8/$File/archinonstandang.pdf>.
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systems, emergence and datascape are now appearing in architectural journals. 3 All these terms imply there is some kind of abstract machine at work producing a continuous variation of form without the need for an individual designer to make decisions at every level. To explain just two of the most relevant terms; an algorithm is simply a process of calculation that can be reiterated or repeated many times to produce a series of results. So algorithmic design is one where the rules for generating form are abstracted and then repeated so that different inputs will create a continuous variation of forms. The designer then works like a gardener or selective breeder weeding out the results they dont want from a vast range of specimens that are produced beyond their direct control. The implicit aim here is that this will produce unexpected outcomes beyond the designers own tired repertoire of clichd architectural forms. And a parameter is any one of the measurable elements that make up an object. Depth, width, length and density are parameters of a beam for example. Parametric design varies the individual parameters one at a time with the others automatically being adjusted. The newer software like Revit is based on threedimensional parametric design so a window for example can be stretched in any direction and all the junctions to the wall will be automatically taken care of. This encourages designers to quickly try out many alternatives in the way that financial planners have for many years been doing with spreadsheet software. On a more philosophical level we can see this shift as move away from Aristotles dualist hylomorphism (Greek hule: matter + morphe: form) towards Deleuzes monist continuous variation. Hylomorphism takes the end product as its starting point and looking backwards considers objects to be the product of forcing pre-formed matter to conform to an external form (matter + form, therefore dualist), just as bricks are lumps of clay forced into a mould then fired in a kiln. In contrast, continuous variation considers form and matter to be inseparable (form = matter, therefore monist) and so the shaping of matter is a process without beginning or end. An object is then considered to be one part of a smooth modulation rather than a discrete one-off moulding.
3 The pioneer of this parametric or algorithmic thinking in architecture is undoubtedly John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture (London: Architectural Association, 1995). The complete book can be downloaded free from <http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/intro.html>.
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Figure 81. Sculpting (the model for Aristotles concept of hylomorphism) compared with rapid prototyping (the model for Deleuzes concept of continuous variation).
Mark Goulthorpe Non-Standard Architect

One of the many interesting architects from the Non-Standard Architectures exhibition is the English architect Mark Goulthorpe. His firm is called dECOi which is based in Paris but also active in London and Kuala Lumpur. Goulthorpe along with Greg Lynn (another one of the 12 exhibitors in Paris in 2004) visited Auckland University in October 2004 and captivated an overflowing theatre-audience with his paper Non-Standard Praxis: Emergent Principals of Architecture. Mark Goulthorpe was born in London in 1963. He received his Diploma from the University of Liverpool in 1988 and since then has taught at the AA School (London), the University of Kassel (Germany), in Lubjana (Slovenia), in Paris, in Barcelona, and at MIT (Boston). He formed his company dECOi in 1991 with his Malaysian partner Yee Pin Tan. Like many of the leading architects of his generation Goulthorpe theorises and writes about the new potentials for architecture arising from the IT (information technology) revolution. What makes his thinking unique is that he has gone beyond simply making observations about these changes and started to consider what the social and psychological consequences are of this technological advance and how best to take advantage of these changed conditions of life. One of Goulthorpes constant references in this matter is the work done on psychological trauma by the Hungarian psychiatrist and colleague of Sigmund Freud, Sndor Ferenczi (1873-1933). Ferenczi worked with soldiers during the First World War and he later applied his discoveries to psychology in general. He defined trauma as the permanently retained effect of a sudden shock that could not be controlled or understood by those suffering from the trauma. In Ferenczis terms if no alloplastic modification of the environment is possible as a reaction to the shock then an autoplastic modification of the self takes place. These autoplastic changes often reveal themselves as neuroses in the traumatised person, mental problems such as over 218
sensitiveness to future shocks, self-hatred, feeling cut-off from external reality, loss of identity, interest in death and so on. 4 Mark Goulthorpe using Ferenczis theories concludes that as we enter a period where the operative cultural tendency seems to be a mode of trauma, as trauma becomes operative, in a sense there is a shift from autoplastic to alloplastic mode, both in a productive and receptive sense. Creatively we operate within an alloplastic space as one begins to work in a responsive, conditional environment, sampling and editing the proliferating capacity of generative software. 5 Goulthorpes aim is to examine the effects of the new conditions of life brought about by the computer revolution on the psychology and lived experience of the individual; how we as individuals can move the shock and possible trauma of new technologies from internal autoplastic modifications that may lead to neurosis, towards external alloplastic modifications of our environment that would be therapeutic. Goulthorpes key example for this shift towards the alloplastic is the American dancer/choreographer William Forsythe. Forsythe has been the director of the Frankfurt Ballet in Germany since 1984 and is widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and influential figures in the world of dance. Goulthorpe collaborated with the Frankfurt Ballet in 1995 when he digitised the movement of dancers in Forsythes ballet Quintett (1993) to generate a sculptural work for the 50th anniversary of the UN in Geneva that Goulthorpe titled Ether/I. Ever since that collaboration Goulthorpe has been making reference to the work of Forsythe in his writings and his architecture.
Figure 82. Ether/I, 1995 by Mark Goulthorpe based on digital capture of the movements of dancers inWilliam Forsythes 1993dance Quintett.
4 Given the widespread nature of trauma in society according to Ferenczi, it is surprising that there isnt a lot more people suffering from post-traumatic mental illnesses. Ferenczis pessimistic view of widespread trauma is today countered by more optimistic theories of psychological resilience. Many people do in fact manage to stay strong when faced with serious trauma (illness, grief, rape, torture, assassination attempts, deportation and war). Because they have been loved in the past they keep faith that they will be loved again this allows traumatised people to survive and return to a full and active life. The leading psychiatrist of the theory of resilience is Boris Cyrulnik, see his book, The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2005). 5 . Mark Goulthorpe, Aegis Hyposurface: Autoplastic to Alloplastic, Architectural Design vol. 69, nos. 9/10 (September/October 1999) p. 63.
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William Forythe and the Frankfurt Ballet: The New Body for a New Architecture
It is impossible to describe what makes William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet so fascinating to an architect like Mark Goulthorpe in a few short sentences. Heidi Gilpin in an essay that Goulthorpe refers to, sees Forsythe as taking ballet into the 21st century by redefining what the body of the dancer can do. Classical ballet treats the body as a means of creating graceful forms in space by moving the body in a sphere radiating from the centre of the dancers body, as clearly shown in diagrams of Labans kinesphere (see below). Forsythe decentres the dancers body by shifting our attention to individual parts of the body; an elbow, a knee, a shoulder etc. Like classical ballet Forsythe also uses the body to draw forms in space but now these forms have their centres outside the body. In classical ballet we notice the beautifully curved arms and out-stretched pointed toes of the classical dancer, all focusing on the centre of the dancers body. In contrast to this Forsythes dancers, with their jerky improvised movements, always appear off-balanced and on the brink of falling over. The centre is now in space. In his writings Forsythe in fact claims to be making an invisible architecture with the body in space.
Figure 83. On the left, Rudolf von Laban's kinesphere, the notation of the centred body of a dancer, compared with William Forsythes decentred body on the right. If what the human body can do has radically shifted, as indicated by these two notations of the dancers body, then architecture, which must house the body, must have radically shifted too.
The Changing Relationship of the Body to Architecture

Given that the anthropomorphic projection of the organic body onto the inorganic building is a constant theme in the history of architectural theory, this decentring of the body must have profound consequences for architecture. If we chart this bodily 220
change and its relationship to architecture, as in the diagram below, then we will also create a diagram of the overall development of architectural theory. Starting with Vitruvius we find the identification of the standing figure with the columns of classical architecture, so the Doric column represents the proportions of a strong man, the Ionic column the form of a woman, and the Corinthian column the slenderness of a young maiden (The Ten Books: Book IV, Chapter 1). For Alberti the compartition (planning) of rooms of a house parallels the functional division of organs of the body (On the Art of Building: Book 1, Section 9). Filarete makes a break with this purely material projection of the body and allows the building to live and therefore have thoughts and feelings. The architect can now have a voluptuous relationship with the building just as they would with a lover (Treatise on Architecture: Book 2). Now to place Mark Goulthorpe in this sequence. The body is now decentred as shown by Forsythes dancers. Without a unifying centre the body becomes an assemblage of part-objects, the morsellated body. 6 At the same time the building becomes an assemblage of building parts. Hence todays emphasis on the individual components of buildings; faades (which are themselves broken up into various component layers each with different degrees of opacity), floors, walls, ceilings, openings and fittings, each set free to follow their own eccentric dance.
Figure 84. The changing relationship of the body to architecture. Starting from the left, Vitruvius standing figure projected onto a column, Albertis harmonious relationships between organs of the body projected onto the arrangement of rooms of a house, and Filaretes projection of the most important attributes of the human body, its ability to live, have feelings and to think. Finally, if is possible to say that current architecture continues this tradition of projecting the body then it is the decentred or morsellated body that is being projected onto a deconstructed and fragmented building.
6 For an excellent overview of the changing relation of the body to architecture see Anthony Vidler, The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture, AA Files 19 (Spring 1990) pp. 3 -10. See also Tim Adams, White Walls, Black Holes: The Molecular Face of Contemporary Architecture, Interstices 5 (2000) for an alternative diagram of this changing relationship and also an extension of Vidlers argument to include faces and facades.
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Figure 85. The dancer William Forsythe performing a solo improvisation, demonstrating the contorted and jerky movements of the decentred body of the dancer.
Mark Goulthorpe: The Philosopher and Psychologist of Digital Architecture

In the next extract, the last one for this course, Mark Goulthorpe goes further than anyone else when it comes to mapping the paradigm shift from the analogue to the digital. That is because he has begun the difficult but necessary work of describing the philosophical and psychological impact of this technological revolution. Using concepts borrowed from the Hungarian psychiatrist Sndor Ferenczi, in place of neurotic autoplastic changes to the self, the dominant mode of Modernist absorption of the shock of the new, the digital creates the possibility of transferring the shock of technological change into a productive and healthy alloplastic modification of the environment. Goulthorpes Aegis Hyposurface is a kinetic wall that can be computercontrolled to ripple in infinitely different ways, Goulthorpes own work of nonstandard architecture. The alloplastic potential of the Aegis Hyposurface lies in its ability to be manipulated by anyone, either by writing computer programmes to control its oscillations, or, when it is programmed to register peoples presence through digital cameras and react to their movements, by direct physical interaction.
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Figure 86. Mark Goulthorpe with the Aegis Hypo-Surface, a 10 by 3 metre wall consisting of 560 pneumatic activators that give 50 cm of lateral movement across the entire surface. When activated by sound and motion sensors via a computer this wall participates in an alloplastic (a term that Goulthorpe borrows from psychology) modification of the environment
Aegis Hyposurface: Autoplastic to Alloplastic7

by Mark Goulthorpe
Here we attempt to trace a shift in cultural manner in the transition to an electronic cultural environment in psychological as much as technical terms. The suggestion we develop is that we are moving from a cultural mode of shock (Modernism) to a mode of trauma (suspension of shock) which carries the implicit suggestion of hypo- rather than hyper- tendency: subliminal rather than expressive effects. Hyper: excessive, overmuch, above, from Greek huper- over, /beyond e.g. hyperbole . a figure of speech which really exaggerates the truth, hypercritical . too critical, esp. of trivial faults. Hypo- below, under, deficient, from Greek, hupo-, hupunder e.g. hypocritical . of or characterised by hypocrisy, a pretence of false virtue, benevolence. 8 The evident formal capacity of new generative media in architecture to produce complex or non-standard form(s) is perhaps as nothing compared to the shifts in
7 Mark Goulthorpe, Aegis Hyposurface: Autoplastic to Alloplastic, Architectural Design vol. 69, no.s 9/10 (September/October 1999) pp. 60 65. 8 [Notes from the original text] Taken from Longman's English Larousse.
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cognition that such technical change engenders in a subliminal but widespread sense. For what has been claimed as a paradigm shift in architecture is not so much the sudden utilisation of CAD by architects, but the ongoing cultural adaptation of society to an electronic environment. 9 If we consider that technology constitutes the base textile of a culture (its ge-stell, or en-framing, in Heideggerian terms . its base language) the impact of any new development is most pertinently measured as the degree to which such terrain is reconfigured in the implication of a new technical weft. In presenting the Aegis project for Hypersurface we will therefore consider current technical developments in psychological as much as technical terms, considering shifts in general patterns of cultural (not just architectural) production but also reception. This will suggest a transition from a mode of shock (Heidegger's stoss) to a more subtle one of sustained dis/reorientation . almost a suspension of shock . which we will interrogate consider in terms of trauma. Here we will draw in particular from Sandor Ferenczi's reconsideration of Freud's analyses of trauma to suggest a move from an autoplastic to an alloplastic cultural mode. Implicitly this will shift emphasis to consideration of hypo- rather than hyper-surface(s) as the prescient (in)forms of electronic genera(c)tion in architecture.
Trauma
In The Transparent Society 10, Gianni Vattimo's compelling update of McLuhan's Understanding Media 11 he hints that contemporary cultural production relies no longer simply on shock but on an effect of sustained disorientation . almost a suspension of shock. For Vattimo the effective event/work endlessly differs/defers cognitive assimilation, marking a shift (for me) from a reactive to an interactive cultural mode, which I here characterise in psychological terms as trauma (the mind struggling to comprehend a lack). This suggests a substantial shift in cultural pattern . a sharp contrast, for instance to Gombrich's Sense of Order 12 circa 1960 (subtitled A Psychology(!) of the Decorative Arts), in which he continually asserts that disorientation cannot be tolerated and is quickly grounded by representative predilection (the mind short-circuiting the difficulty).
9 I developed this argument in a twin essay, The Active Inert: Notes on Technic Praxis in AA Files 37 (Autumn 1998), p. 40 where I offer a loose comparison of the work of Greg Lynn, FORM and dECOi in their response to the effects of technological change on the cultural scene. 10 The Transparent Society (Polity Press, 1992). See for example Art and Oscillation: ... the aim of this is not to reach a formal recomposed state Instead, aesthetic experience is directed towards keeping the disorientation alive, p. 51. 11 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT Press, 1994). Even here, in a text which is highly optimistic about the influence of electric Media, McLuhan hints at quite disturbing psychological undercurrents: having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters. p. 252. 12 Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. (Phaidon Press, 1979): for example, no jolt should take us unawares. the most basic fact of aesthetic experience is the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion ... a surfeit of novelty will overload the system and cause it to give up. p. 9.
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Vattimo's suggestion that the effectiveness of strategies of shock seems to be giving way to softer, more fluid modes of operation, corresponds to current cultural strategies throughout the arts, which I'd characterise as being those of precise .indeterminacy. Such thesis draws from Heidi Gilpin's suggestive essay, Aberrations of Gravity 13 where she attempts to account for the bewildering effect of William Forsythe's indeterminate creative strategies (where he asks his dancers to represent loss, sustain the reinscription of forms, capture an absent presence, etc) with the effect they engender, accounting for cultural effect in terms of trauma. Both production and reception, now as extensions of one another, are traumatic in that there is no a priori, no representational dictat they stage that which does not take place in Forsythe's terms. 14 Shock has long been considered the modus operandi of the Modernist arts, writers from diverse fields (Heidegger, Benjamin, Barthes, etc) all accounting for the effectivity of art-works in terms of the shock of the new and the disorientation that it engenders. In considering the effects of a profligate and radical new productive electronic media that rapidly infiltrates all aspects of the cultural field, an art in the age of electronic (de)production as it were, one senses that there is a dissipation of shock-effectivity. Rather than this being due simply to the over-proliferation of such strategy, it seems that different patterns of cultural registration are emerging, engendered by an electronic media which reconfigures the field subliminally For shock implies comprehension for it to be effective, the resulting disorientation figured consciously as a strategy of reactivity, and frequently as a strategy of re-orientation. But much contemporary work, in its genera(c)tive profligacy, disenfranchises comprehension in an absence or over-abundance of evident reference, the trace of its coming-into-being 'digitally' indeterminate. The ensuing disorientation differs from that of shock in that it aims at no particular assimilation, instead offering itself as an endless transformation of the same, engendering a range of effects propitiated in the struggle for comprehension: this is a strategy of interactivity. Psychological accounts of trauma are varied, but generally it is characterised as stemming from a moment of incomprehension or cognitive incapacity. 15 At a moment of severe stress, for example, there is a frequent shut-down of the conceptual apparatus (as if for protection), which creates an anxiety of reference. Cathy Caruth, who has written extensively on the relations of trauma and memory suggests that in its
13 Heidi Gilpin, Aberrations of Gravity in ANY (Architecture New York) vol.1 no.5 (1994), pp. 50 53. 14 My knowledge of William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet derives from study of their work over a number of years, and many discussions with them. 15 The classic texts on trauma are those of Sigmund Freud which deal largely with the neuroses associated with vividly disturbing events. Sandor Ferenczi offers a more subtle interpretation extending Freud's thought to a wide range of everyday events, in effect using the discourse on trauma as a means of developing a generalised psychological theory. In my view such extension does not imply opposition to Freud's basic thought, rather, a requalification, and in seeking to extend Ferenczi's thought to the consideration of cultural reception I would note the basic similarities of both thinkers in their descriptions of trauma. A good account of their respective differences is given by Jay B. Frankel, Ferenczi's Trauma Theory, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 58. no.1 (May 1998), pp. 41 - 61.
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repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence. 16 Trauma, that is, develops not as a direct response to shock, but through the very inability to register it conceptually through the absence of its assimilation and the struggle of the mind to account for this cognitive incapacity. While the traumatised are called upon to see and relive the insistent reality of the past, they recover a past that enters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection. The ability to recover the past is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, in trauma, with the inability to have access to it ... an event that is constituted, in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness. 17 As we enter a mode of electronic production that implicates time in multiple ways, to the extent that the generative patterns of creativity are left as indeterminate traces of transformative process - transformation displacing origin and dispersing its vertical legitimacy across a now limitless electronic territory - so such accounts of trauma seem redolent. But if it is the very lack of cognitive assimilation from which derives trauma, then it produces a variety of effects, not all of which are debilitating For instance, there is a compulsion to account for the apparent lack (a stimulus) and a frequent heightening of bodily awareness, as if the very lack of cognitive assimilation dispersed thought throughout the sensorium, stimulating neglected modes of cognition as an intense 'sampling' of experience This raising of the body to a cognitive level, a chemic as well as optic mode of thought, metonymic as much as metaphoric, Forsythe characterises as a proprioreceptive mode production/reception, a thinking with/in the body. This posits a linkage of trauma with technological change, not simply in our incapacity to assimilate the rapidity of its development, but in its realignment of conceptual capacity. A recurring theme throughout 20th century discourse has been that technical change shifts the privileging of the senses in relation to cognitive thought. William Blake perhaps originated this idea in light of cultural changes propagated by rapid industrial development, and it was expressed cogently by Marshall McLuhan in regards to the development of electric media. Latterly, Derrida has sought to refine and requalify McLuhan's speculations, his experimental writing a highly suggestive matrix of sensorial realignment a re-qualification of cognitive privilege in light of a now fully electronic media. This suggests whole new genres of cultural strategy and effectivity a shift in the balance of the sensorium that I have pursued elsewhere 18, trying to account not only for an apparent shift in cultural
16 Cathy Caruth, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma (part 2), The American Imago, vol. 48, no. 4 (Winter 1991) p 418 - 9. 17 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History, Yale French Studies 79 (1991), p. 187. 18 Derrida's multiple interests in technological change (and technology itself) are well articulated in Gregory Ulmer's stimulating, Applied Grammatology (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). In particular Ulmer emphasises Derridas interest in the possible shift in the balance of the sensorium, and the extent to which Derrida appears to extend and correct McLuhan's interpretation of technical change. To my knowledge this aspect of Derrida's work has been largely unacknowledged.
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receptivity, but also of changing modes of creativity emerging in the interstices of technical change. Evidently, then, such technical transformation may be considered through a variety of conceptual frameworks (psychological, philosophical, art historical, etc), but perhaps most evidently through the apparent break-up of representative strategy. The current generative environment, in which the image becomes primary 19, dislocates familiar patterns of comprehension and the referential strategies they seem to imply. The turmoil this engenders for determinate creative strategy both productive and receptive then poses profound questions for cultural (and not simply technical) activity.
Autoplastic / Alloplastic
Drawing from Ferenczi's analyses of trauma, one might characterise this as a shift from an autoplastic to an alloplastic mode of operation. Autoplastic being defined as a self-determinate operative strategy, and alloplastic as a reciprocal environmental modification. Classically in trauma alloplastic response is predetermined by the inertia and indifference of the environment: for trauma to have effect, no effective alloplastic action, that is, modification of the environmental threat, is possible, so that the autoplastic adaptation of oneself is necessary. 20 As we enter a period where the operative cultural tendency (whether through technological change or otherwise) seems to be a mode of trauma as trauma becomes operative, in a sense there is a shift from autoplastic to alloplastic mode, both in a productive and receptive sense. Creatively we operate within an alloplastic space as one begins to work in a responsive, conditional environment, sampling and editing the proliferating capacity of generative software. But increasingly this also extends to our physical context, which is itself interactively malleable, and where our very determinacy is placed in flux: there is a reciprocal negotiation between self and environment an interactive uncertainty. Asked what his ideal theatre might be, Forsythe suggested that it would be an indeterminate architecture in which the surfaces themselves would ceaselessly reconfigure, even the floor offering differential resistance and support which would compel the dancers to continual recalibration and requalification of movement strategy. Some measure of this was given in an experiment with accelerators attached to the dancers limbs: movement created an electric current which produced a synthesized sound which transfigured an interactive ribbon on a screen, programmed to distort with changing sound frequency. 21 This in turn was read by the dancers
19 This is an expression of Bernard Cache in Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, (MIT Press, 1995) describing the extent to which the computer image is no longer a representation of something prior, but begins to develop a life of its own to become primary, or generative, in the creative process. 20 Sendor Ferenczi, Notes and Fragments in Final Conributions, 1930-32 (Hogarth, 1955), p. 221. This is the third volume of his collected notes and papers, published posthumously. 21 These experiments were carried out during rehearsals of Eidos/Telos, 1995 which I studied whilst running Intermediate Unit 2 at the Architectural Association.
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who improvised sequences from predetermined alphabets of movement according to the letter they recognised This in turn led to new accelerations, new sounds, new distortions ... a circuitous and non-linear creative path which, in its utter disqualification of temporal priority (of either movement or music), led to a conceptual vertiginy which sustained itself to the point of a sort of physicalised feedback loop, traumatic for dancers and audience alike. 22
Conclusion
The underlying theme of this course has been the emergence of the architect beginning with Vitruvius and then the inauguration of architectural theory beginning with Alberti, and this is why there has been an emphasis on case studies of individual theorists starting with Vitruvius and ending with Goulthorpe. Winston Churchill famously said, We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. 23 Extending his argument the logical conclusion is that we are constantly remaking ourselves by making architecture and so this course has examined how architecture participates in subjectification, that is the formation of human subjectivity. Modernisation, as opposed to Modernism which belongs to a particular period in the early-20th-century, is the continuous work of adapting culture to the new conditions of life brought about by the successive waves of new technologies. Modernism was the art and architecture of the period of Fordist mass-production, postmodernism was the art and architecture of post-Fordism or consumerism and so on. Mark Goulthorpe in a similar fashion is helping us adjust to and make better use of the information technology revolution. His theorising about alloplastic modifications of the environment after the shock of modernism, which tended to autoplastic internalisation of trauma, is both timely and therapeutic for the new kind of subjectivity being constructed by our current situation. Furthermore, his work with algorithmic and parametric design leads the way for the intelligent use of computer numerical control milling of building components by architects. Goulthorpes non-standard Glaphyros apartment in Paris includes many parametrically-designed elements such as the stairs, the hearth, the aluminium screens, the bath and the hand basins. Each basin in this apartment is a unique, customdesigned work of art, as beautiful as any sculpture by Brancusi. These building parts therefore function like the body parts of William Forsythes dancers; decentring the body to create an architecture in space, an architecture that allows us to recognise ourselves as subjects constructing and in turn constructed by the flows of information that defines our post-media age.
22 See my essay An Architecture of Disappearance (Une architecture de la disparition) in Contredanse, 1998. 23 Winston S. Churchill, Architecture, July 25, 1924, Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches 1897 1963, vol. IV ed. Robert Rhodes James (London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974) p. 3467.
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Figure 87. Mark Goulthorpe: Glaphyros apartment, Paris, 2004.
Adams, Tim. White Wall, Black Holes: The Molecular Face of Contemporary Architecture, Interstices 5 (2000). An overview of the changing relation of the body and the face to architecture using the Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu as a key example. Churchill, Winston S. Architecture, July 25, 1924, Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches 1897 1963, vol. IV ed. Robert Rhodes James (London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974) pp. 3467 - 3468. A speech made at an Architectural Association prize-giving in which Churchill made his often quoted statement about architecture. Cyrulnik, Boris. The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2005). An optimistic view of the the resilience to trauma as a counter balance to Ferenczis overly pessimistic view of the prevalence of traumatic experiences in modern society. Forsythe, William. Improvisation Technologies, A Tool for the Analytical dance Eye (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, 1999). A CD-ROM with 60 video chapters and audio commentary 229
made by Forsythe to speed up the training of new dancers at the Frankfurt Ballet but also a rare and beautiful insight into his revolutionary thinking about dance. Frankel, Jay B. Ferenczi's Trauma Theory, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 58. no.1 (May 1998), pp. 41 - 61. The key source for Goulthorpes reading of this Hungarian psychiatrist. Frazer, John. An Evolutionary Architecture (London: Architectural Association, 1995). The pioneer of parametric or algorithmic thinking in architecture. The complete book can be downloaded free from <http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/intro.html>. Gilpin, Heidi. Aberrations of Gravity, ANY (Architecture New York) vol.1 no.5 (1994) pp. 50 - 53. The most profound essay on the dancer/choreographer William Forsythe. Interestingly it was published in an architectural magazine and not a dance journal. See sample document 1 of this handout for a small selection. Goulthorpe, Mark. Aegis Hyposurface: Autoplastic to Alloplastic, Architectural Design, vol. 69, nos. 9/10 (September/October 1999) pp. 60 65. A short summary that includes most of the areas of Goulthorpes research over the past decade. A selection of this essay is reproduced in the sample document 2 of this handout. Goulthorpe, Mark. The Possibility of (an) Architecture: Collected Essays (London ; New York : Routledge, 2008). An enthology of all of Goulthorpes writings up to 2008. Migayrou, Frdric (ed.), Non-Standard Architectures (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2004). The catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Unfortunately not available in our library but you can read the press release at <http://www.cnacgp.fr/Pompidou/Communication.nsf/docs/IDCC33724 2435D0C06C1256DF2005EA9E8/$File/archinonstandang.pdf>. An English translation of Migayrous key article Non-Standard Orders: NSA Codes from the catalogue can be found in Marie-Ange Brayer et al (ed.) Archilabs Urban Experiments: Radical Architecture, Art and the City (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005) pp. 309-320. Vidler, Anthony, The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture, AA Files 19 (Spring 1990) pp. 3 -10. An excellent overview of the changing relation of the body to architecture. Tim Adams June 2010 230

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SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING COURSE OUTLINE: ARCHHTC 236 / Semester 2, 2010

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Week 2 Tues 27/7 Thurs 29/7

Week 3 Tues 3/8 Thurs 5/8

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Week 4 Tues 10/8 Thurs 12/8

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

What is Architectural Theory?

Reformulating the Question: What is Architecture?

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Figure 1. Definition by negation.

Figure 2. Definition by intersection.

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Reformulating the Question 2: What is Theory?

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Reformulating the Question 3: What is Architectural Theory?

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

To Conclude with a Tentative Definition of Architectural Theory

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Marcos Vitruvius Pollio 84 25 BC

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Structure of the Ten Books on Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Vitruvian Concepts of Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Interpretation of the Ten Books

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Enunciation of Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Ten Books on Architecture7

Book I Chapter I: The Education of the Architect

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Chapter II: The Fundamental Principles of Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Chapter III: The Departments of Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

The Structure of On the Art of Building

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Albertis Concepts of Architecture

ARCHHTC 236 History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism 2

Albertis Modification of the Vitruvian Triad