The Architecture of The Illusive Distance

The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
With love and gratitude this work is dedicated to the memory of

Ezat and Jalal Ardeshir-Rokni.
The Architecture of the
Illusive Distance
Amir H. Ameri
Amir H. Ameri 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Amir H. Ameri has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-4724-3318-3 (HBK)

978-1-4724-3319-0 (EBK)
978-1-4724-3320-6 (EPUB)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Ameri, Amir H.
The architecture of the illusive distance / By Amir H. Ameri.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-3318-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-3319-0 (ebook) --
ISBN 978-1-4724-3320-6 (epub) 1. Architecture and society. 2. Space (Architecture) 3.
Library architecture. 4. Museum architecture. 5. Theater architecture. I. Title.
NA2543.S6A437 2015
727--dc23
2014037651
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I The Architecture of the Illusive Presence
1 Architecture, In Theory 13
The Theory 13
The Beautiful 18
The Remedy 23
The Text 26
Notes29
2 On the Border of the Beautiful 31

The Transgression 31
The Assimilation 37
The Insertion 49
Notes51
Part II The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
3 The Logic of Encampment 55

The Library 55
The Pharmacy 84
The Campus 87
Notes89
vi The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
4 The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity 91

The Collection 91
The Debate 98
The Dispersion 107
The Catharsis 121
Notes134
5 The Architecture of the Illusive Distance 137

The More is Less 137
The Borrowed Spaces 139
The Place Elsewhere 144
The Imaginary Places 153
The Imagined Places 163
The Unimagined Imaginary 178
Notes181
6 The Epilogue 183
Bibliography 185
Index 195
List of Figures
Figure 3.1 Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in his Study, 46 36 cm, oil on

panel, c.1460, National Gallery, London
Image source: Art Resource, NY 56
Figure 3.2 Albrecht Drer, Adam and Eve, 25 20 cm, engraving on
laid paper, 1504, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image source: Art Resource, NY 58
Figure 3.3 Ezra writing the law, Frontispiece to the codex Amiatinus, 35 25
cm, parchment, sixth century, Laurentian Library, Florence
Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY 60
Figure 3.4 Domenico Fontana, The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library,
Vatican, sixteenth century
Photo credit: Left to right (3.5a) Michal Osmenda,
(3.5b) John Willis Clark 61
Figure 3.5 Paul Lacroix, Library of the University of Leyden, engraving,
London, 1870
Photo credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY 62
Figure 3.6 Chapter Library, Hereford
Photo credit: John Willis Clark 63
Figure 3.7 Michelangelo, The Ricetto of the Laurentian Library, Florence,
152371
Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY 64
Figure 3.8 Michelangelo, The Laurentian Library, Florence, 152371
Photo credit: topScala/Art Resource, NY, bottomJohn Willis
Clark 65
Figure 3.9 Christopher Wren, Trinity College library, Cambridge,
c.1870, album of 58 Cambridge University photographs,
New Boston Fine and Rare Books 66
Figure 3.10 Lelio Buzzi, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, 16039
Photo credit: John Willis Clark 67
viii The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
Figure 3.11 tienne-Louis Boulle, Bibliothque Nationale, 1785,

Bibliothque nationale de France 68
Figure 3.12 Henri Labrouste, Exterior Facade of Bibliothque
Sainte-Genevive, 185596, Boston Public Library, Print
Department, Boston 69
Figure 3.13 Henri Labrouste, interior of Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive,
185596
Photo credit: Clockwise from top 3.13aStephanie Benjamin,
3.13bMarie-Lan Nguyen, 3.13cJason Whittaker (bit.ly/
jasongenev) 70
Figure 3.14 Sydney Smirke, Reading Room, British Museum, London, 1856
Photo credit: British Library 71
Figure 3.15 Louis I. Kahn, Phillips Exeter Library, New Hampshire, 1972
Photo credit: Clockwise from left 3.15aPablo Sanchez,
3.15b and 3.15cJacqueline Poggi 73
Figure 3.16 Dominique Perrault, Bibliothque Nationale de France,
198995
Photo credit: Mirco Giglioli 75
Figure 3.17 Ren Koolhaas, Trs Grande Bibliothque project, Bibliothque
nationale de France competition entry, 1989
Photo credit: Office for Metropolitan Architecture,
Heer Bokelweg 149, 3032 AD Rotterdam, Netherlands,
www.oma.eu 79
Figure 3.18 Ren Koolhaas, Seattle Central Library, 2004
Photo credit: Author 82
Figure 3.19 Thomas Jefferson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1819
Photo credit: Karen Blaha 88
Figure 4.1 Engraving of the Francesco Calzolaris Cabinet of Curiosities,

Musaeum Calceolarium, Verona, 1622 94
Figure 4.2 Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Interior of a Picture Gallery with the
Collection of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, 195 264 cm,
oil on canvas, 1740, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,
Hartford, CT
Photo credit: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY 97
Figure 4.3 Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Design for a Museum, Prcis des
leons darchitecture donnes lcole royale polytechnique,
Paris: Chez lauteur, lcole polytechnique, 1809 99
Figure 4.4 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin, 1828
Photo credit: From top, 4.4aLibrary of Congress, Prints
& Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-00338, 4.4b
Photographische Gesellschaft Berlin am Dnhoffplatz 102
Figure 4.5 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Ground Floor Plan, Altes Museum,
Berlin, 1828
Photo credit: bpk/Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett/Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin/Art Resource, NY 103
list of figures ix
Figure 4.6 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Plaza Studies, Altes Museum, Berlin,
1828
Figure 4.7 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Elevation Studies, Altes Museum,
Berlin, 1828
Figure 4.8 Traumbauer, Borie, and Zatzinger, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
191128
Photo credit: From top, 4.8aLibrary of Congress, The Historic
American Buildings Survey, HAER PA,51PHILA, 3285, 4.8b
United States Geological Survey 109
Figure 4.9 Marcel Breuer, Whitney Museum, New York, 1966
Figure 4.10 Tod Williams & Billie Tsien Architects, The Barnes Foundation,
Philadelphia, 2012
Photo credit: Robert Rife 114
Figure 4.11 Clockwise from top, 4.11aI.M. Pei, The Louvre,
Paris, 1989; 4.11bJames Stirling, Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart,
1984; 4.11cRichard Meier, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1981;
4.11dFrank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 1997;
4.11eRichard Meier, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1997
Photo credit: From top clockwise 4.11aAuthor; 4.11bRob
Deutscher; 4.11cSusan Poague; 4.11dMario Roberto Duran
Ortiz; 4.11eUnited States Geological Survey 115
Figure 4.12 Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959
Figure 4.13 McKim, Mead and White, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn,
18931907
Photo credit: 4.13aLibrary of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, LC-DIG-det-4a23706; 4.13bLibrary of Congress, Prints
& Photographs Division, LC-DIG-det-4a18164; 4.13cPatricia
Badolato 118
Figure 4.14 Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959
Figure 4.15 Benot Suve Joseph, Invention of the Art of Drawing,
267 132 cm, oil on canvas, 1791, Groeningemuseum, Bruges
Photo credit: Hugo Maertens, LukasArt in Flanders VZW 122
Figure 4.16 Giuseppe Castiglione, View of the Grand Salon Carre in the Louvre,
69 103 cm, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
Photo credit: Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY 131
Figure 5.1 Holland Brothers Kinetoscope Parlor, 1894

Photo credit: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service,
Edison National Historic Site 140
x The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
Figure 5.2 Lyman H. Howes Animotiscope exhibition poster, 1897

Photo credit: From the collections of the Luzerne County
Historical Society 141
Figure 5.3 Theatorium postcard, c.1912, Gotham Book Mart Collection,
University of Pennsylvania Library 146
Figure 5.4 Sheldon Theatre, Chicago, c.1909
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, LC-USZ6292105 148
Figure 5.5 Normal Theatre, Chicago, c.1909
Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, LC-USZ6292107 151
Figure 5.6 Rubush & Hunter architects, Indiana Theatre, Indianapolis,
1927
Photo Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, HABS IND, 49IND, 2925 156
Figure 5.7 Thomas W. Lamb, Fox Theatre, San Francisco, CA 1929
Photo credit: Motion Picture News 40 157
Figure 5.8 Thomas W. Lamb, Loews Ohio Theatre, Columbus, OH, 1928
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,
HABS OHIO, 25COLB, 424 159
Figure 5.9 John Eberson, Top: Loews Theatre, Louisville, KY, 1928; Bottom:
Avalon Theatre, Chicago, 1927
Photo credit: Top, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, HABS KY, 56LOUVI,1747; Bottom, Motion Picture
News 36 161
Figure 5.10 John Eberson, Grand Riviera Theatre, Detroit, 1925
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, HABS MICH, 82DETRO,1611 162
Figure 5.11 Benjamin Schlanger, Thalia Theatre, New York, NY, 1932
Photo credit: Keystone-Underwood, Architectural Record 71 164
Figure 5.12 George & W. C. Rapp, Rhodes Theatre, Chicago, IL, 1937
Photo credit: Hedrich-Blessing, Architectural Record 84 173
Figure 5.13 William Riseman Associates, Wareham Theatre, Wareham,
MA, 1948
Photo credit: George M. Cushing, Architectural Record 104 173
Figure 5.14 William Riseman Associates, Strand Theatre, Hartford, CT,
1948
Photo credit: George M. Cushing, Architectural Record 104 174
Figure 5.15 Goodwin and Stone Architects, Modern Museum of Art Movie
Theatre, New York, NY, 1948
Photo credit: Architectural Record 104 176
Figure 5.16 Raymond F. Smith, Delman Theater, Dallas, TX, 1949
Photo credit: Architectural Record 105 178
Acknowledgments
This work would not have been if all those many years ago the late Robert D.
MacDougall had not given me the chance to look at architecture through his keen
and penetrating lens. To his memory, I remain grateful for the opportunity.
This work could not have been if during those same years James T. Siegel had
not caringly taught me to look at the world from an analytically different vantage
point. To him I owe an indelible intellectual debt that can only be acknowledged
with much gratitude and never repaid.
Over the years, I have benefited immensely from the dedication and contribution
of numerous students who affectionately shared my questions, dilemmas, and
concerns about architecture. This work is, in no small measure, the fruit of their
dedication.
Yassaman Ameri has embodied for me the creative commitment and intellectual
care I have aspired to my entire life. Without her, I would have not been. For the
gratitude I feel, no word suffices.
Sussan Ameri is the reason for all that I have done my entire adult life. She has
inspired and supported me emotionally and intellectually in ways I can never
recount or hope to match.
Over the years I have benefited immensely from the friendship, the intellectual
support, and the ceaseless encouragement of David Cronrath and Mehrdad Hadighi.
I cannot imagine my academic life without their presence and contributions.
I am grateful to the following individuals for their kind and generous permission
to reproduce their photographs in this volume: Yassaman Ameri, Patricia Badolato,
Karen Blaha, Rob Deutscher, Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz, Michal Osmenda, Susan
Poague, Jacqueline Poggi, Pablo Sanchez, and Jason Whittaker. I also wish to thank
Solmaz M. Kive for her invaluable help in the preparation of this manuscript.
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Introduction
In the abstract, architecture is an insuperable task. Faced with multiple possibilities,

the architect has no ground for the delimitation of his or her many options to
the ultimate one.1 Broadly, the functions of an edifice suggest no one form and
much less a direction. In deference to biological needs, function is nebulous and
multi-directional. However, function assumes a trajectory and becomes highly
prescriptive once it is appropriated by culture and transformed into a ritual.
Sleeping for instance suggests little by way of an appropriate setting. Appropriated,
however, as an instrument for the communication and enforcement of, for instance,
a cultures sexual mores and taboos, and transformed into a ritual, it becomes highly
prescriptive. Though by no means singular, a ritual is distinct and unidirectional. It
has unique spatial requirements. It demands a specific setting. It is this and similar
prescriptive cultural appropriations that make architecture possible.
In relating the advent of architecture to culture, we may appear to be traversing
a well-trodden path. At least since the early 1960s, scholars of architecture have
assumed the connection between architecture and culture as often as they have
envisaged and presented it as a monologic relationship.2 Architecture is recurrently
purveyed to embody, represent, mirror and/or reflect a culture, its values, and ideals.
In this pervasive vision, culture is assumed to precede the architecture that follows
and re-present it. The relationship between culture and architecture is, however,
considerably more complex. The assumed contingency of architecture on culture
is at best a restrictive and partial view. If architecture represents culture, that is,
if architecture is a cultural statement or utterance, it is not merely a constative,
but as well a performative utterance in the sense first introduced by Austin and
specifically as the concept is deployed in Cultural Studies (How to Do Things).3
Whereas a constative statement is meant, Austin tells us, to describe some
state of affairs, or to state some fact, which it must do either truly or falsely, a
performative statement is one in which to say something is to do something; or
in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something (How to Do
Things 12).4 For instance, as official acts, a judges ruling makes law; a jurys finding
2 The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
makes a convicted felon, and so on (154). In each of these and other performative
utterances, the described condition does not precede nor does it exist independent
of the utterance. To the contrary, the utterance creates the very condition it depicts.
As a variation on the theme, Judith Butler describes the performative with a nuance
that shall prove important to our understanding of architecture as a performative
act.
Performative acts are, Butler tells us, forms of authoritative speech: most
performatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform
a certain action and exercise a binding power. Implicated in a network of
authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences,
baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements which not only
perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed. If the
power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked with the question
of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as
discourse (171). For instance, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation
he names invariably cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation
that gives the performative its binding or conferring power (171).
For a simple example of the binding or conferring power of architecture as a
performative act, we may turn to Paul Radins account of Oglala Indians as retold by
Clifford Geertz: The Oglala believe the circle to be sacred because the great spirit
caused everything in nature to be round except stone. Stone is the implement of
destruction. The sun and the sky, the earth and the moon are round like a shield,
though the sky is deep like a bowl. Everything that breathes is round like the stem
of a plant (128). The circle is also the symbol of the year. The day, the night, and the
moon go in a circle above the sky. Therefore the circle is a symbol of these divisions
of time and hence the symbol of all time (128). It follows that for these reasons
the Oglala make their tipis circular, their camp-circle circular, and sit in a circle at all
ceremonies. The circle is also the symbol of the tipi and of shelter (128).
One may readily assume, following a familiar trajectory, the circular Oglala
tipi to be a constative statement that effectively describes and/or references the
presumed circularity of all things in nature and of all time. However, the circular
tipi, placed as it is in a circular camp, by saying or in saying, that the tipi is round
like all else in the world other than stone, that is, by citing the presumed roundness
of all things, also, along with all other circular Oglala artifacts quite powerfully
render the Oglala world both experientially, and in a sense literally, circular. The
Oglala dont simply believe and say all things are round, they render their world
visibly round through the agency of, among others, the circular tipis, set in circular
camps, and so on.
It may well be in tacit recognition of this link between saying and doing
characteristic of performative acts that for the Oglala the circle is interchangeably
the symbol of the world and of time and the symbol of the tipi and of shelter. The
circle unites and confounds them into one. Thereby, the power and authority of
each symbol is conferred by the evidential citation of the other. Much as the tipi is
shaped in the round like the world and time, it also confers its shape on the world
and time.5 The Oglala tipi is as much an inaugural event as it is a citation.
introduction 3
It is important to note here that the constative and the performative aspects
of cultural utterances and/or acts are not mutually exclusive. As Austin noted and
Jacques Derrida has critically argued, there is no pure constative or performative
utterance as such (Austin, Performative Utterances; Derrida, University without
Condition).6 There is a performative aspect to every constative statement, much
as there is a constative aspect to every performative statement. To a degree, the
binding or conferring power of performative acts, inclusive of architecture, is tied
to their constative (reiterative) aspect/function. However, for reasons that we shall
discuss in the next chapter, the discourse of architecture has long disregarded the
performative aspect of architecture in favor of its constative aspect, to the point of
the formers invisibility.
The constative/performative distinction is entwined with the distinction
between culture and architecture, which as the Oglala tipi and numerous other
examples one may readily cite indicate is also complex and nuanced. In their
perpetual interplay, neither culture nor architecture could be readily posited as
a non-contingent prior term. As a performative act, architecture does not merely
re-present culture; it constructs and reifies culture as the unalterable shape of
reality. Insofar as culture is not reducible to a set of beliefs or ideas that come to
be of their own volition, apart from a collection of authoritative and exclusionary
practices, culture is always inevitably and already implicated in the performative
function of, among others, architecture. The power and authority of culture as a
control mechanism, in the sense Clifford Geertz explicates the term, is lodged in this
implication (45). To better envisage the interplay between culture and architecture
we may turn to Clifford Geertzs description of sacred symbols which he tells us:
function to synthesize a peoples ethosthe tone, character, and quality

of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and moodand their worldview
the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most
comprehensive ideas of order. In religious belief and practices a groups ethos
is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life
ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the worldview describes, while the
worldview is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of
an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of
life. (8990)
Although Geertzs description pertains to religion as a cultural system, we can

readily read into his account a compelling description of the role of ecclesiastical
buildings as sacred symbols within their broader cultural context and by
extension, of architecture as another cultural system. We can remind ourselves
of the pivotal role architecture plays in shaping a peoples ethos and trace an
interminable link from their ethos to their worldview. This is a link without which
architecture would be hopelessly lost in having too great a choice of action and
not sufficient grounds for the delimitation of its choices. We can go on to read the
evidence of the confrontation and mutual confirmation between the dominant
worldview and ethos of, for instance, the Gothic, the Renaissance, or the Baroque
period, respectively, in the translucent world of a Gothic Cathedral, the proportional
harmonies of a Renaissance Chapel, or the unfolding, infinite universe of a Baroque

Church. In each instance, we can detail how the specifics of each design objectified
moral and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of
life implicit in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the
unalterable shape of reality, and how the experience of each building served to
support received beliefs about the worlds body by invoking deeply felt moral and
aesthetic sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth (8990).
For an example of the invocation of deeply felt moral and aesthetic sentiments
we may recall Abbot Sugers well-known account of his experience at the remodeled
Carolingian church of St. Denis (11351144) at the onset of the Gothic period.
When out of my delight in the beauty of the house of Godthe loveliness of the
many-coloured gems has called me away from all external cares, and worthy
meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that
which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me
that I see myself dwelling as it were in some strange region of the universe which
neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven,
and that by the grace of God I can be transported from this inferior to that higher
world in an anagogical manners. (Panofsky 61)
What this faith affirming anagogical transportation attests is the binding or

conferring power of architecture as a performative act. It is architectures capacity
to synthesize faith and experience, worldview and ethos, and in so doing
sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other (Geertz 90). Crossing the
monumental threshold of St. Denis front portal, leaving the profane world to
one side and entering the sacred realm thus constituted on the other side, to
then traverse the nave or the analogical path to Christian redemption, to arrive
at the altar and the choir surrounded by the translucent stained-glass walls of the
ambulatory that are brought to life by the light that passes through themlike
Jesus shinning through the world as the new light (Lux Nova)the faithful might
well have come to share Sugers exuberance in a transformative experience that
reified the tenants of Christian faith in the twelfth century. The beauty of this
house, that is, its aesthetic value to Suger and his contemporaries, is effectively
lodged in a performative synthesis that renders God, salvation, and heavenly
reward tangible and experiential. As such, St. Denis cannot effectively be said to
reflect or represent anything other than what it makes emotionally tangible and
evidentially real. In other words, St. Denis does not reiterate mid-twelfth-entury
Christianity per se, it inexorably constitutes it.
One may also move forward to a different place and time to imagine a person
of faith at the turn of the fifteenth century in front of the church of SantAndrea in
Mantua, Italy, by Leone Battista Alberti (b. 1470s), about to embark on a journey
that though sequentially similar to St. Denis, would have a different conclusion by
design. This person too would marvel at the beauty of the house of God as had
Suger, though for reasons that hadnt to do with light and translucency transferring
that which is material to that which is immaterial. Rather the reasons here would
have to do with an unmistakable performative testimonial to a mathematical
introduction 5
order that pervades the buildings design, as it pervades all of nature by divine
ordinance. The reasons here would have to do with the meticulous symmetrical
correspondence of parts and the harmonic proportions that pervade the parts as it
does the whole of the church in the imitation of nature, as the greatest artist at all
manner of composition (Alberti, Ten Books 195). At the conclusion of this faithful
journey, the person may well be prepared to consent with Alberti that nature is
sure to act consistently, and with a constant analogy in all her operations: from
whence I conclude that the same numbers, by which the agreement of sounds
affects our ears with delight, are the very same which please our eyes and our
mind (1967). Harmonic proportions unite nature and architecture, much as the
circle did in the Oglala world.
Even though harmonic proportions may well supplant translucency as an
evidence of Gods existence, the role of architecture as a performative act remains
constant. Yet, it is important to note that powerful as architectures performative
capacity is to synthesize a peoples worldview and ethos, it also speaks to the
volatility of culture and its inevitable susceptibility to change. The need for synthesis
points to an inherent gap between the world as we imagine or wish it to be and the
world as we experience it to be. This gap may be bridged, but never fully closed.
The very gap that necessitates synthesis also sees to the perpetual transformation
of culture as changes in one lead to changes in the other in perpetuity. As such,
culture is never static. Much as total synthesis is desired and sought, it is never
achieved.
Were we to further engage the exercise of tracing the confrontation and mutual
confirmation between worldview and ethos in ecclesiastical edifices of different
ages, we would have, as we did with the Oglala tipi, Sugers St. Denis or Albertis
S. Andrea, the advantage of temporal distance and a markedly different worldview.
Both readily allow us to assume the probing role of the mythologist, as Roland
Barthes described it years ago (2389). Focusing, as we may, on the distortion, or
the mechanics of universalizing the particular, it is not likely that we will experience
the culture under study assume the guise of inevitability through the agency of its
architecture. We will not experience the confrontation and mutual confirmation
of the worldview and ethos that ecclesiastical edifices were erected to affect. Such
a confirmation, when and if it occurs, largely goes unnoted. An edifice performs
its cultural role effectively, when we do not see in it the passage of culture into
objectivity. It succeeds when we do not take note of the edifice as an ideological
construct, or the explicit embodiment of a metaphysics. It succeeds when we take
its peculiarities either for granted, or else attribute them to pragmatic concerns,
and proceed as though the latter were immune to ideological conditioning. This
is to say, that those aspects of an edifice which appear to be the most objective,
that is, impervious to ideological and metaphysical conditioning, are often the
parts more thoroughly conditioned by such considerations, and as that the most
successful from a cultures perspective.
Although it is not with great difficulty or much resistance that we may trace
the confrontation and mutual confirmation of a cultures worldview and ethos
in the design and experience of its ecclesiastical architecture, past or for that
matter present, the same does not hold for secular buildings. The latter are far
more resistive to such explorations, particularly the closer they are to us in cultural
space and time. The more immediately familiar the building type, the greater
is the likelihood of its appearing as no more than a pragmatic response to very
real, practical needs and requirements. The library as a secular building type does
not readily appear to be much more than a response to the need for storage and
dissemination of books, the school to the education of the novice, the museum
to the preservation and public presentation of art, or the movie-theater to the
specific environmental demands and requirements of the medium, and so on. It
is not evident how the design and the experience of these buildings could lend
themselves to a confrontation and mutual confirmation of a cultures worldview
and ethos or to what specific cultural variables they tactfully give the guise of the
objectively inevitable. Their performativity appears as mere performance, that is,
effective/pragmatic disposition.
If our secular institutional buildings do not appear as patent ideological
constructs, this is not, of course, for want of participation in the construction and
objectification of culture. Michel Foucault, in his study of prisons, schools, and
hospitals, outlined the modalities of this participation long ago. If, however, the link
between the formal and spatial properties of secular institutional buildings and a
particular view of the world, or a pervasive metaphysics is rarely, if ever, explicit,
this may well be because these buildings manage all too well in formulating a
basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often,
implicit) metaphysics, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of
the other (Geertz 90). Their opacity silently betrays their success.
Assuming that every building type, secular or ecclesiastical, is a purposed cultural
construct, from its inception and through every stage of its permutation, and that
each type serves, among other cultural mechanisms, to turn our assumptions
about the world into an objective experience of it, this book critically examines
the ideational and metaphysical imperatives that have seen to the formation,
proliferation, and perpetuation of three institutions and their architecture across
time: the library, the museum, and the movie-theater. Collectively these building
types have been instituted as varying domiciles to representation. Each type differs
from the others to the extent that each representational medium in residence
(writing, art, film) differs from the others by a varying/differing formal proximity to
its referent (writing being the farthest and film the closest).
The choice of these three institutions as domiciles to representation stem
from a seemingly simple question. Given the inexorable link between the Oglala
metaphysics and architecture, and for that matter Christian metaphysics and
architecture, and assuming this link to be neither accidental nor unique to
ecclesiastical buildings, what link may we be able to trace between Western
metaphysics and secular architecture? In what way does secular architecture
validate, safeguard, reify, and promulgate Western metaphysics?
Broad and daunting as the question may seem, it is possible to begin the query
by focusing on one basic and pervasive aspect of Western metaphysics, namely,
the metaphysics of presence as Jacques Derrida expounds the concept:
introduction 7
the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence,

with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which
organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the
thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia],
temporal presence as point [stigma] of the now or the moment [nun], the self-
presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, co-presence of the other and
the self, intersubjectivity as an intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth).
(Of Grammatology 12)7
From Plato to Husserl and beyond, the hierarchic privileging of presence and the
matted concepts of reality, authenticity, truth, originality, and so on, has been a
ubiquitous practice in the history of Western metaphysics. Hence:
the enterprise of returning strategically, in idealization, to an origin or

to a priority seen as simple, intact, normal, pure, self-identical, in order
then to conceive of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All
metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded
in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative,
the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before
the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one
metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which
has been the most constant, most profound and most potent. (Derrida, Limited
Inc. 93)
Pervasive as the metaphysics of presence has been, it is, nevertheless, volatile and
susceptible to the unsettling deconstructive effect of the very representation,
iteration, imitation, duplication that is perpetually demoted and segregated, in
words and deeds, as the derivative contingent Other of the real, the authentic,
the original, and so on. As Derrida has extensively demonstrated, the condition
of possibility of representation, iteration, imitation, duplication, and so on, is the
impossibility of any rigorous, much less hierarchical distinction between the pure
presence that reality, authenticity, truth, originality, and other related concepts
are desired to be and the absence and deferral that is said to always designate
the contingent Other. The aporia of any rigorous distinction between reality and
representation always stands the chance of coming to surface by the unbridled
cohabitation of the real and its contingent Other. The uncanny, as Freud expounds
the concept, is an instance in point (1960).
It is the intent of this book to point out that it is in no small measure against
the dangers of unbridled cohabitation and the aporia of any rigorous distinction
between reality and representation that the library, the museum, and the movie-
theater have been instituted, among other measures, as safeguards. Each has
historically accomplished its performative task by uniquely domesticating and
curtailing the specific deconstructive effect of the contingent representation it is
given to administer. This is through adoption of distinct formal and spatial strategies
that in effect constitute and characterize each type. In its own unique way, each
type has seen to the proper dispensation and consumption of representation in a
uniquely segregated domain of each buildings making where the reality outside
as self-presentation is made to retain its privilege and remain impervious to the

challenges of the contingent representation, in no small measure because of these
spatial constructs. The metaphysics of presence is reified and sustained through
the performative function of these building types.
To demonstrate these points, the first part of this book provides an analysis of
the role of architectural theory and criticism as instruments of cultural control in the
production of architectural types. Chapters 12 offer a close critical reading of the
aesthetic theories of Leone Battista Alberti and John Ruskin respectively, in order
to demonstrate how architectural theories that have historically conditioned the
formal production of the building types under study were themselves constituted
as a form of resistance to contingency and representation. These chapters link
the historically overarching preoccupation with aesthetics as a critical tool for the
delimitation of practice in architecture to the metaphysics of presence and discuss
the instrumentality of theory and criticism in safeguarding this metaphysics.
Chapter 3 provides an analytical outline of the history of the library as a building
type. It points out that despite various manifestations and numerous stylistic
discontinuities, the spatial characteristics and processional organization within the
library have remained essentially the same. These characteristics are predicated on
the logic of encampment whose manifestations can be as diverse as the Medieval
book-press, the stall system, the wall system or the modern stack-system libraries.
The persistent encampment of the book within the variously construed confines
of the library is then linked to the historic ambivalence of Western culture toward
writing. Referencing Jacques Derridas essays on writing, the logic of encampment
at work in the formation of the library is, this chapter argues, a humanist
institutional response to the supplemental and paradoxical character of writing.
It is a performative attempt at domesticating and curtailing the aporetic effects of
writing.
The following chapter traces the history of the place and placement of art
from the cabinet of curiosities to the modern art museum. It expounds on the
historic link between the question of authenticity in art and the question of its
place and the modalities of its placement. Between the public and the artwork,
the museum in its various guises has persistently instituted an elaborate and deep
threshold that mediates and oversees the passage to and from the seemingly
infinite world that it fabricates to contain authentic art and the real world from
which it is sequestered. The critical preoccupation with the disjoining of art and
the museum from their context is, persistent as it has been, a perpetual substitute
for what is fundamentally missing and missed: authenticity and unaporetic origins.
As an institution and a building type, the art museum effectively substitutes a
formal, spatial, and experiential clarity of place for the very spatial and temporal
dimensions that painting and sculpture fundamentally put in question. Spacing
is authenticitys indispensable alibi and the museum its performative institution.
The final chapter demonstrates how from inception, the movie-theatre has located
cinema at an imaginary elsewhere by design. The modalities of this displacement
have changed overtime in direct response to the changing relationship between
the real and its imaginary Other. With every technological abridgement of the
introduction 9
imagined distance between reality and its imaginary double, that is, the addition
of sound, color, stereoscopy, and so on, there have been corresponding changes
in the design of the movie-theater aimed at re-establishing the abridged distance.
The motivation behind each change, be it from the nickelodeon to the movie-
palace, to the post-palace mall cinemas and multiplexes, has been a constant. To
safeguard the aura of the real as the self-referential, non-representational Other of
cinema, the movie-theater, as an institution and a building type, has systematically
fabricated an outside to the real, if only to locate and safeguard it by an imaginary
distance.
Notes
1 An idea as simple as shelter can assume, as it has, many different forms under similar
constraintsbe these climatic, economic, and/or ecological in nature.
2 This extends from Amos Rapoports pioneering House Form and Culture in the 1960s
to many architectural history texts and surveys in the interim, to many current
studies, including Emmons, Hendrix and Lomholts The Cultural Role of Architecture:
Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, and the more carefully nuanced Adam Sharrs
Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents.
3 Judith Butlers gender studies is a case in point.
4 Also see Culler and Miller.
5 From a different, though I believe related perspective, we may also refer to the round
tipi as a myth in Roland Barthes sense, that is, a form of speech justified in excess
(Mythologies 240). This is a form of speech whose very principle is to transform
history into nature, the arbitrary into the inevitable, the presumed into the perceived.
6 See also Derrida, Signature, Event, Context.
7 Also: It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to
the center have always designated an invariable presenceeidos, arche, telos, energeia,
ousia essence, existence, substance, subject aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness,
God, man, and so forth (Derrida, Writing and Difference 27980).
Part I
Illusive Presence
1
Architecture, In Theory
The Theory
If culture has a place in architecture, it is not readily located in the various theoretical
edifices construed in the West since the Renaissance.1 This is not an oversight. The
concept of culture, in a number of different guises, has figured prominent in the
history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture. However, every attempt to
locate the place of culture inside the theoretical edifices of architecture inevitably
leads to the outside. We find numerous architectural theoreticians erect the figure
of culture only to chastise and deprecate it as the figure of the particular and the
arbitrary.
If by culture we are to understand a set of values, beliefs, rules, and ritual
practices that are subject to variation in space and time, that is, particular and to an
extent mutable, then we may safely say that more often than not the justification
given for theoretical edification, or more appropriately fortification, is to keep
culture outside the realm of architectural practice. We may begin with Alberti who
justified his theoretical endeavor as an attempt to free the science of architecture
from the mistaken belief that men are guided by a variety of opinions in their
judgment of beauty and of buildings; and that the forms of structures must vary
according to every mans particular taste and fancy, and not be tied down to any
rules of art (Ten Books 11213). The assumption that the practice of architecture
may be tied to anything but eternal and immutable rules is, Alberti tells us, a
common thing with the ignorant, who despise what they do not understand!
(11213).
Nearly 300 years later, Laugier justified his theoretical endeavor as an attempt
to rise above a prejudice unfortunately so common although so pernicious and
blind. A sad prejudice, he tells us, that confronts all reasoning with an arrogant
obstinacy that simple ignorance would not have (107). At issue for Laugier, as
for Alberti before him, is a way of thinking which makes what is right simply
dependent on custom. Although this way of thinking appears to Laugier as a very
easy expedience for ignorant and lazy artists, he adamantly condemns it, because
it obstructs the progress of the arts too much to be generally adopted. He insists
that, If only arbitrary rules are wanted for the arts one can insist on custom, but if
the processes of art must go back to fixed principles, it is necessary to appeal to
reason against custom and to sacrifice to the light of one the force and sway of the
Other (22).
The theoretical edifications of both Alberti and Laugier are as much motivated
by a strong predilection for the universal, as by a vigorous aversion to the particular.
The latter is portrayed as powerful and persuasive, on the one hand, and inherently
dangerous and destructive, on the other. Neither considers it sufficient to merely
enumerate the universal. The particular has to be identified and condemned with
equal zeal. This aversion to the mutable and the particular is not exceptional.
Ruskin, for instance, summarized a prevalent motive for theoretical edification
when he wrote that, I have long felt convinced of the necessity, in order to its
progress, of some determined effort to extricate from the confused mass of partial
traditions and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during imperfect
or restricted practice, those large principles of right which are applicable to every
stage and style of it (Seven Lamps 10). This reasoning is similar, if not identical, to
the one offered not only by Alberti and Laugier before Ruskin, but also by Viollet-le-
Duc and Le Corbusier after himto cite two more examples among others.
What each theoretician identifies as the universal and the immutable principles
of design could not be any different from one text to the next. The proponents
of virtually every style of architecture in vogue since the Renaissance have
championed theirs as the only mode of design that is based on universal and
immutable rules. In turn, each universal has been condemned by the proponents
of the other modes of design as arbitrary and variable in contrast to the latters
universals. This is to say that although specific formal preferences vary in accord
with an ever-changing historic context, the critical justification appears to remain
constant.
What are the reasons, we may ask, for this historic aversion to culture as the figure
of the mutable and the particular in the theoretical discourse of architecture? Why
are so many architectural theoreticians compelled to repudiate their immediate
predecessors universals in their own ultimately illusive search for the same? At
issue in these questions is not the particular nature of what is purported to be
universal. Rather, it is the ways and means of universalizing the particular. It is what
appears to be a singular motive for theoretical speculation on architecture, as well
as the exclusionary critical methodology that is inseparable from it.
The exclusion of culture pertains primarily to the question of architectural
form and formation. On their critical path from the particular to the universal,
architectural theoreticians concede to culture so long as its reach is delimited
to the question of commodity or convenience. Of the Vitruvian triadbetter
known in Henry Wottons paraphrase as commodity, firmness, and delight
commodity pertains to provision for the particular needs and the variable
requirements of buildings inhabitants. For instance, Alberti was more than willing
to provide for the varying needs of a tyrant or a prince, the middling sort or the
architecture, in theory 15
meaner sort, going so far as suggesting, in these particulars, the customs of every
country are always to be principally observed (Ten Books 109). Albertis tolerance
for the particular, however, only extended to the determination of need and not
to the determination of form. Whereas the former is, in principle, variable and
particular, the forms that accommodate it must always abide by universal rules.
The proponents of Modernism, we may note in passing, tried to reduce commodity
to a set of universals as well.
If historically architectural theoreticians concede the particular insofar as it
pertains to the question of commodity or convenience, this is partly because
they regard it as being essentially inconsequential to their ultimate pursuit.
We are persistently told that of the Vitruvian triad the principle of beauty or
delight is singularly decisive. It is because beauty constitutes and separates the
art of buildingthe proper subject of theoretical speculation in architectural
discoursefrom the mere buildingconsidered a menial activity unworthy of
theoretical pursuit. Alberti, for instance, emphasizing that the principle of delight
is by much the most noble of all and very necessary besides, reasoned that,
the having satisfied necessity is a very small matter, and the having provided
for conveniency affords no manner of pleasure, where you are shocked by the
deformity of the work. Therefore, to prevent the shock of deformitythe shock
that invariably stands to reason the necessity of beautyhe concludes: your
whole care, diligence and expense, should all tend to this, that whatever you
build may be not only useful and convenient, but also delightful to the sight
(Ten Books 11213).
Ruskin went so far as suggesting that Architecture concerns itself only with
those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use, that is,
above and beyond the particular (Seven Lamps 16). Le Corbusier expressed a similar,
though a less radical sentiment when he wrote that, When a thing responds to a
need, it is not beautiful; Architecture has another meaning and other ends to
pursue than showing construction and responding to needs (1023).
The aim of architecture as Le Corbusier put it, or rather the aim that is
architecture insofar as this aim, this other meaning or end distinguishes
architecture from mere building, is an aesthetic ideal over whose definition there
appears to be widespread consensus. The desired end is, in principle, a state
of formal and compositional saturation to which addition is superfluous and
subtraction detrimental. John Ruskin summed up an oft-repeated sentiment in the
history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture when he concluded that
the end in every work of architecture is a perfect creature capable of nothing less
than it has, and needing nothing more (The Stones of Venice 400).
The edification of beauty as the ultimate aim of architecture, much as the
use of aesthetics as a critical tool for delimitation of practice to a specific mode
of design are, it is important to note, peculiar to Western architectural discourse.
They are not to be foundnot by the same definition, at any ratein other
discursive traditions. Two prominent examples are the Indian and the Chinese
traditions (Bose; Dagens; Skinner). The criteria used for restricting and regulating
architectural practice in these other examples differ markedly from those in the
West. They appear to condone or proscribe specific modes of design not based
on aesthetic merit, that is, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, but, at the risk of
simplification, based on humane consequences, that is, auspicious or inauspicious
for the inhabitants, conducive to good fortune or bad, beneficial to health or not,
and so on. What both the Eastern and the Western traditions achieve in the end is a
restricted and regulated practice. Their approaches are, however, particular to each
and should not be confused with the other.
Although there is broad consensus among Western architectural theoretician
over the aim of architecture, there is, predictably, no consensus over its literal
form. The path to perfection has had virtually as many twists and turns as there
have been theoreticians of architecture. The origin of this path and the place of
its meandering, on the other hand, have not been a source of dispute: to reach
perfection one must turn to and imitate nature.
The term nature has had both a passive and an active sense in this discourse.
It refers both to a body of objectsbe they all beautiful or notand to an active
process of formationthe formation of beautiful bodies. It is in this latter sense
that various theoreticians have proposed the imitation of nature as the ultimate
aim of architecture. The imitation at issue is not, in other words, the imitation of
natural formsthis is generally considered to be a contemptible activitybut the
imitation of nature as the greatest artist at all manner of composition (Alberti,
Ten Books 195). This is the greatest artist whose work is, nevertheless, regulated by
self-imposed rules and principles that collectively warrant the perfection of every
composition. These are constant, though secret laws that every author seeks to
unravel and reveal.
It is perhaps needless to point out that along with beauty, the laws of nature have
had nearly as varied an interpretation in the theoretical discourse of architecture,
as there have been texts enumerating them. What the Renaissance theoreticians
proclaimed as the laws of nature differs markedly from their counterparts
proclamations during the eighteenth, the nineteenth, or the twentieth centuries.
The ideal and the invariably natural composition to which nothing could be added
or taken away without loss could not be any different, at times from one generation
to the next. However it is precisely these overwhelming differences in both the
interpretation of the laws of nature and the way in which the ideal composition
is circumscribed that make the constancy of the proposal to imitate nature ever
more curious.
One implication of this constant proposal is that the ideal, the aim, or the
end in architecture is, by force of definition, always prefigured by nature. As
innocuous a matter as this may seem, it has far reaching consequences for the
perception of the role of theory in architecture. Since historically theorys subject
the immutable beauty that constitutes and separates architecture from mere
buildingis presumed to always precede the discourse as a natural phenomenon,
the task of writing on architecture, as Laugier were to succinctly put it, is no more
and no less than to tear away the veil which covers it (2). From Laugiers torch to
Ruskins lamps, light has been the prevalent metaphor for the comprehension of
the task of writing on architecture. Theory is purported to do nothing other than to
shed an insightful light on the eternal nature of a subject whose parameters each
generation presumes hidden from the last due to blindness, ignorance, or sheer
indolence.
Although the perception of theory as an act of revelation or unmasking of
the concealed parameters of architecture may initially appear to give theory a
central role in architecture, in effect it marginalizes theory by reducing its role to
a supplemental source of light shed from without on an otherwise autonomous
subject. The prevalent perception of the relationship between architecture and
writing is that of a sovereign subject, secure inside its inherent, natural parameters,
to a subservient text that is said to contemplate, reveal, or unmask the subject from
the outside.
Also, if it is to nature and not culture that historically a majority of architectural
theoreticians have turned for guidance, if nature is the figure of the immutable and
the universal that they have sought to shelter within their theoretical edifices at the
expense of the mutable culture, it is because at stake is the exclusionary privilege
of the beautiful, or what amounts to the same, the authority of the theoretical
edifice to restrict and regulate in the name of the beautiful. At stake is the power
of exclusion that is imperative to the delimitation of practice in architecture. It is
the authority, for instance, that allows Viollet-le-Duc to repudiate, as starting from
a false principle, every order of art which, in subservience to mere traditions, thus
allows itself to deviate from the truth in its expressions, that is, every order of
art other than the one he advocates (451). Without the exclusionary authority of
the immutable, there can be no repudiation. The condition of the exercise of this
authority is the grounding of the beautiful in nature as opposed to culture, insofar
as the former designates the universal and the latter the particular. Once grounded
in nature, the beautiful is rendered as much an ideal to be attained as a critical tool
for the restriction and regulation of the practice of architecture.
An architecture that turns to the mutable and arbitrary rules of culture for
guidance dispossesses itself of the authority to exclude. Boulle explains this
stance best when he tells us that if you admire a building that is based on pure
fantasy and owes nothing whatsoever to nature, your admiration is therefore
the result of a particular point of view and you should not be surprised to hear it
criticized, for the so-called beauty that you find in it has no connection with nature,
which is the source of all true beauty (84). Whereas an architecture based on a
particular point of view is subject to criticism, the architecture based on nature is
not. Whereas a cultural architecture engenders infinite critical debate, the Natural
architecture ends it. It speaks conclusively. Its proclamations are not subject to
debate or alteration.
Since the self-proclaimed point of theoretical speculation is not to engender
more speculation but to end it, since the point is a theory to end all theorizing, it
is evident why culture is not assigned an overt place inside the theoretical edifices
of architecture. Although this may, in part, explain the exclusion of culture from
the theoretical discourse of architecture, it does not explain the rampant aversion
to it. I mentioned earlier that, historically, architectural theoreticians have devoted
as much, if not more time and effort to the condemnation and deprecation of
what they consider to be mutable and arbitrary in architecture as they do to the

enumeration of what they consider to be immutable and universal.
Along with the reasons for the rampant aversion to the mutable and the
arbitrary, what is also unclear is the source of natures undisputed authority as the
benefactor of the universal and the immutable laws of formation in architecture.
What is the provenance of the persuasive appeal and the inhered authority of
nature to which, over time, a bewildering number of mutually exclusive modes of
design have been ascribed without hesitation or reserve?
To explore the reasons for the consistent alignment of aesthetics and nature,
much as the persistent condemnation and deprecation of the mutable and the
arbitrary, we may begin with a closer look at Albertis Ten Books on Architecture
in part because Alberti (re)inaugurated and canonized the alignment of beauty
and nature for generation of architects to come. What I hope to point out is that
nature in theoretical discourse on architecture is, despite its malleable and ever-
changing form/definition, not so much a thing, much less a natural thing, as it is
a strategic resistance to contingency rooted in JudeoChristian theology and the
metaphysics of presence. The alignment of beauty and nature in architecture is not
simply one choice among others, as it has everything to do with what the beautiful,
and by extension architecture, is incessantly desired to be: an autonomous, self-
referential, non-contingent presence.
The Beautiful
Albertis intent in writing the Ten Books is, he tells us, to free the science of
architecturea difficult, knotty and commonly obscured subjectfrom its
present ruin and oppression. The obscurity of the subject is owing to the loss of
a clarifying frame known to the ancients and subsequently lost to the ravages of
time. Therefore, the task of writing, as Alberti sees it, is to explicate the obscured
parameters of architecture by exposing the principles that inherently delimit its
concerns. To this end, Alberti begins with a seemingly innocuous observation: an
edifice is a kind of body consisting, like all other bodies, of design and of matter
(Ten Books XI). Design, he tells us, is produced by the thought and comprised of
a firm and graceful pre-ordering of the lines and angles conceived in the mind
and contrived by an ingenious artist. Alberti insists: nor has this design anything
that makes it in its nature inseparable from matter; we can in our thought and
imagination contrive perfect forms of buildings entirely separate from matter (1).
It is design and not building per se that is the architectures provenance. However,
this is not any form of design. Swiftly, as Alberti declares designs independence
from matter, he divides design into two distinct and mutually exclusive categories:
the beautiful and the ugly. The requisite instrument of their indispensable divide is,
as we may suspect in advance, nature.
Of the three properties required in all manner of buildings, namely, that they
be accommodated to their respective purpose, stout and strong for duration,
and pleasant and delightful to the sight, the third, Alberti insists, is by much the
most noble of all and very necessary besides (Ten Books 112). Your whole care,
diligence and expense, therefore should all tend to this, that whatever you build
may be not only useful and convenient, but also, he insists, delightful to the
sight (113). The source of delight is beauty which Alberti tells us is a harmony of
all the parts, in whatever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion
and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the
worse (113).
The beautiful is neither missing a part to require addition, nor has it any part of
some other to require subtraction. It simply is: a self-referential, non-contingent
presence. This broad definition would be, as noted earlier, upheld and repeated in
every canonical treatise on architecture after Alberti.
Much as beautys presence pleases and delights Alberti, its absence is no neutral
ground. Beautys absence arouses, Alberti contends, nothing but dislike and
hatred. What is not beautiful, that is, what requires addition or subtraction is at
once shocking and disgusting,abhorring and offensive. His vehement reaction
to the ugly is, Alberti insists, not arbitrary.
It is wonderful, how, by a kind of natural instinct, all of us knowing or ignorant,

immediately hit upon what is right or wrong in the contrivance or execution of
things Whence it happens that if any thing offers itself to us that is lame or
too little, or unnecessary, or ungraceful, we presently find ourselves moved and
desirous to have it handsomer. (Ten Books 21)
The ugly is for Alberti a diseased body. It is the beautiful temporally deprived of
its health, awaiting a remedy that only the expert (theoretician) can provide.
Conceptualizing the ugly as a disease is a faithful strategic move that effectively
denies the ugly a right to existence. As a lamed or deformed body beautiful, the
ugly has no place or existence of its own. It merely points to a temporal lapse in the
health of the body beautiful, pending redemption.
To redeem the beautiful, Alberti inquires into that property which in its nature
makes a thing beautiful? The most expert artists among the ancients, he posits,
were of opinion, that an edifice was like an animal, so that in the formation of it we
ought to imitate nature as the greatest artist at all manner of composition (Ten
Books 194). It is both as a shield and a remedy against the ugly that nature enters the
discourse on architecture. Albertis proposition is that by imitating the formative
process and not the product, the greatest artist at all manner of composition, and
not the art object, one can produce beautiful buildings.
It is perhaps needless to note that what Alberti goes on to identify as natures
laws for beauty, merely betray a mathematical worldview specific to Renaissance
culture. In effect, the enumerated laws serve to transform an abstract mathematical
worldview into a tangible lived experience, whereby Renaissance cultures view of
the world and its experience of the world become mirror images of each other.2
However, it is not the cultural instrumentality of the beautiful in the specific that is
so much a question, as it is the disguising of culture as nature in the name of the
beautiful? What particular authority, we may ask, does nature possess and what
authority does it confer on any cultural law that is persuasively ascribed to it?
Beauty, Alberti says, is a quality so noble and divine that the whole force of wit
and art has been spent to procure it (Ten Books 113). That beauty is synonymous
with divinity for Alberti is not coincidental. They share the same attributes. Each is
a non-contingent, self-referential intelligible presence.
Beauty, as the intelligibly and not sensibly visible, solely designates a privileged
state of design. The sensibly visible cannot be beautiful, because it is incapable
of presenting itself to the mind as a non-contingent, self-referential presence.
Philosophers believe, Alberti tells us, that:
If the sky, the stars, the seas, the mountains, and all living creatures, together
with all other objects, were the gods willing, reduced to half their size, everything
that we see would in no respect appear to be diminished from what it is now.
Large, small, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright, gloomy,
and everything of the kind, which philosophers termed accidents, because they
may or may not be present in things, all these are such as to be known only by
comparison. (On Painting 53)
The attributes of the sensibly visible are contingent on difference with a deferred
Other. The identification or comprehension of any sensibly visible attribute always
assumes the prior identification or comprehension of an Other on the bases
of difference with which it can be identified or comprehended as a single term.
Every attribute assumes the priority of its differential other in an endless chain of
deferrals. This to say that every sensibly visible presence perpetually bears the trace
of a deferred and absent Otherone that has always already come and is always
yet to come. This contingency renders pure presence and simple origin or the pure
presence of a single term as origin impossible.
For Alberti what may or may not be present in things, that is, contingency
on difference with a deferred Other is only an accident. This is because the
original and normal state of being for Alberti is a self-referential, non-contingent
presence against which contingency is judged to be an accident or an extra
ordinary event.
What is seen in a thing as sensible visibility may or may not be there. However,
what is there, what is capable of presenting itself as a non-contingent presence to
the consciousness of a subject despite the instability of the vehicle of transmission
is, for Alberti, the intelligible design. Be this Gods design for the world or the
architects design for the building. Design and only design can be beautiful
because, unlike the sensibly visible, it has no need of an Other.
Of course, following Albertis own logic, no duality as such, inclusive of the
designmatter and sensibleintelligible dichotomies can escape contingency
without a certain intervention. Design, no less than matter, is always already
contingent on difference with a deferred Other as its condition of identity and
identification. The original appearance of design to the consciousness of a subject
before expression in cruder terms, much as it is the perceived and perceivable
order of things, is an illusion of simple origin and pure presence made possible by
the contingency on the deferred Other.3
Yet, what requires addition always already cannot by definition be beautiful. The
beautiful must require no Other and no addition to be its perfect self. Therefore, in
so long as architecture, comprised as it is of design and matter, is contingent on

difference and deferral, the desire for beautiful edifices cannot be met. However,
fulfilling the desire that Alberti tells us is a kind of natural instinct is the very point
and purpose of writing ten books on architecture specifically, and of architectural
theory broadly. The only venue to the beautiful is to overcome the irresolute
contingency on difference with a deferred Other by positing an origin or an original
term that alone would be capable of sheltering the beautiful. This is, of course,
precisely what Alberti attempts to do when he equates edifices to bodies in nature.
In equating the two, Alberti appeals to the authority of an established theology that
has already overcome contingency, by an article of faith, and assigned an absolute
origin to the world and to nature, namely, God. Alberti posits, we should recall,
an affinity between man-made edifices and natural bodies only to conclude that
edifices, like natural bodies, consist of design and of matter as well. In the design
matter dichotomy, the truth of designs absolute priority and independence, that is,
its presence to the consciousness of a subject in origin before the Other and before
the contingent, as well as the truth of the precedence of subject over object that
is always assumed in positing the priority of design are beyond question, because
what is stated is the natural order or the divinely ordained order of nature. Albertis
appeal to the metaphysics of presence broadly and to JudeoChristian theology
specifically in the form of an equation between the order of appearance of the
world and in the world is as unmistakable as it is unavoidable. Contingency can
only be overcome by divine intervention. It is only by terminating the contingency
on difference with a deferred Other, be it subject on object or design on matter at a
theological origin that Alberti can assume presence as the norm, indeed as the very
definition of being, and relegate difference with the deferred Other to the status of
an accidental occurrence or a disease that has befallen health. The privileged status
of design and of the subject, much as the beautiful as a non-contingent presence,
can only be divine gifts. If architectural theory has repeatedly turned to nature
since the Renaissance, it is because as a distinct, autonomous discipline subject to
authoritative theoretical inquiry, architecture can only be a divine gift.
The non-contingent, however, has not been and cannot be as such. The
assumed ideal merely points to a desire for simple presence and pure origin. The
impossibility of fulfillment lies in the contingent figure of the ugly, which Alberti
tells us, disgusts all of us knowing or ignorant alike.
Why, we may ask, does the ugly disgust? To find an answer, we must ask what
the ugly is, or what amounts to the same, what it is not. The ugly is not sensible.
Matter is as incapable of being ugly as it is incapable of being beautiful. The value
of matter is solely contingent on the design that is given to or implanted in it.
The ugly is, in other words, like beauty, intelligible. However, it is an unintelligible
intelligibility. The ugly is, like beauty, mathematical in nature. However, unlike
beauty, the ugly is not endowed with divine qualities. It is not based on harmonic
proportions, ordained numbers and/or symmetrical disposition of parts. In short,
the ugly is beauty stripped of its divinity.
But who bears this Other? What is its provenance? This is a question of utmost
difficulty within the bounds of the Albertian frame of thought, whose paramount
concern is the identification of provenance.
It is evident to Alberti that the ugly commonly aligns with ignorance or levity
and instability of mind. As such the ugly may well have humanity as its provenance.
The being of this ugly coulda certain onto-theological model withstanding
be explained. It could be given a father, a birth, and a history. Yet, there is, Alberti
observes, imperfection in nature. Let us therefore enquire, Alberti asks, how it
happens that in the bodies produced by nature herself some are accounted more,
others less beautiful or even deformed (Ten Books 194). Alberti accounts for the
more or less and discounts them as having to do with opinion. The deformed is
never subjected to an inquiry. All Alberti tells us about the ugly is that no man
beholds anything ugly or deformed, without an immediate hatred (dislike) and
abhorrence (disgust) (194).
What is clear to Alberti is that the ugly is not a constituent part of nature and
though the ugly is in nature, that is because it has somehow, from somewhere
outside nature, insinuated itself in nature. It has forcefully invaded a body to which
it does not belong. But, from where and how? This question, which is only of
relevance within the bounds of the Albertian frame of thought, cannot be given an
answer within those boundaries, and for that matter anywhere else. This is precisely
why the ugly disgusts. This frame of thought cannot account for the ugly. Forced
to consume, it cannot digest the ugly. Unable to internalize or externalize the ugly,
this frame of thought can only find itself disgusted by what frustrates all attempts
at appropriation or expulsionmuch as they amount to same. Having made every
effort possible to keep distinctly separate, without the trace of an attachment,
origin from non-origin, beauty from ugly, and so on, this frame of thought cannot
account for the ugly. Confronted with the outside that is not out and, in fact, has
never been quite out, for there has not been either a pure outside or a pure inside,
this frame of thought can only view this spillage with disgust and be filled with the
desire to efface it.
Whence it happens that if anything offers itself to us that is lame or too little, or
unnecessary, or ungraceful, we presently find ourselves moved and desirous to
have it handsomer. (Ten Books 21)
The ugly fills the onlooker with a desire to make it beautiful, that is, to efface it. It
does so because this frame of thought can only withstand the ugly by effacing it.
To this end, when confronting the ugly and all its faults:
The reason of those faults perhaps we may not all of us be acquainted with, and
yet if we were to be asked, there is none of us but would readily say, that such a
thing might be remedied and corrected. Indeed every one cannot propose the
remedy, but only such as are well practiced and experienced that way. (212)
To cure the lamed or the deformed, what Alberti, as the well practiced and
experienced that way offers is ornament, to say nothing as yet of writing ten books
on how to procure beauty or cure the ugly. What remains to determine is what
ornament is and how it may redeem the beautiful?
The Remedy
Alberti tells us: we should erect our buildings naked, and let it be quite completed
before we begin to dress it with ornament (Ten Books 203). This analogy prefigures,
for the most part, the contribution of each subject. Of the body and the dress of
architecture, it is primarily the body that is subject to the natural laws of beauty
and as such it is also the body that is chiefly responsible for the pleasure and
delight which we feel on the view of any building (112). Hence, the body must
be first erected nude and complete to the point of requiring neither addition nor
subtraction.
Once the nude body beautiful is complete, it must be dressed. Ornament, in turn,
constitutes all that is added to cover the body as dress. For instance, Alberti tells us
that the outward coat of the wall is an ornament in that it is not an integral part of
the body of the wall itself, but a dress that covers it. The ornamental outward coat,
however, can itself be adorned with figures, paintings, and other similar additions. It
too, in other words, can be considered a nude body and then dressed. The column,
Alberti tell us, is the principal ornament in all architecture (Ten Books 130). Yet, as a
body subject to the laws of beauty, it itself can be dressed with different ornaments,
for example, different shafts, bases, capitals, and so on. In turn, the building to the
body of which the column is added as ornament, may serve as ornament to larger
bodies. For instance: a temple well built and handsomely adorned is the greatest
and noblest ornament a city can have (136). In short, ornaments are in a manner
infinite, whereby each dress can be considered a nude body in want of a dress in
an endless chain of ornamentation (136).
Although ornaments are in a manner infinite, not every ornament is proper for
all parts of the building or all building types. In general, the type and the quantity
of ornaments determine the status of the body to which they are affixed as dress.
Without ornaments it would be virtually impossible to distinguish the status of one
nude body from another: the meaner from the more honorable.
It is important to note that ornament is not a specific thing. The word does not
even denote a specific class of things. Although in the abstract ornament is defined
as a dress, this definition, as Alberti aptly points out, only engenders an infinite
chain insofar as each dress consists of a body subject to further dressing. There is,
therefore, nothing in architecture that can be specifically designated an ornament.
This is in part because ornament is not so much a thing as it is a process, not so
much a distinct dress as the dressing of the body beautiful. What ornamentation
names is the act of differentiationthe becoming distinct of the body beautiful
in perpetuity. This function, however, as we shall discuss later, far exceeds the
determination of the status of the body. It is partly in recognition of this excess that
Alberti tells us: ornaments annexed to all sorts of buildings make an essential part
of architecture (Ten Books 162).
Setting aside, for the moment, the question of how something that is by
definition annexed or added can be an essential part or a part at all, there are certain
rules to be observed and certain precautionary steps to be taken in the application
of ornaments. This essential part can potentially be a destructive annexation.

The sensible content of ornamentits color, texture, or materialcan divert
the attention of the onlooker. Instead of seeing the dressed body, the onlooker
may end up only seeing the dress. Hence, Alberti recommends the annexation of
this essential part only insofar as there is no chance of interference. A good and a
permissible ornament, he tells us, is a beautiful one. It is the one that charms not by
its sensible content, but by the beauty of its design.
whoever considers the true nature of ornament in building will be convinced,

that it is not expense so much that is requisite, as taste and contrivance. (Ten
Books 187)
I, for my part, hate everything that favors of luxury or profusion, and am best
pleased with those ornaments which arise principally from the ingenuity and
beauty of the contrivance. (192)
Ornament must be beautiful before it can be added as a dress. However, even

though each aesthetic object is a potential ornament and though each permissible
ornament must be a pleasing and delightful object when judged on its own merits,
nevertheless once it is annexed to a body as ornament, it is no longer its beauty that
contributes to the pleasure and delight felt in view of that body but its function as
an addition to the body. Ornament must be essentially beautiful, yet what makes
ornament essential is not its formal beauty, but the role it plays in relation to the
body to which it is annexed. Of the essential role of ornamentation, Alberti writes:
How extraordinary a thing (says the person introduced in Tully) is a handsome

youth in Athens! This critic in beauty found that there was something deficient
or superfluous, in the persons he disliked, which was not compatible with the
perfection of beauty, which I imagine might have been obtained by means
of ornament, by painting and concealing anything that was deformed, and
trimming and polishing what was handsome; so that the unsightly parts might
have given less offense, and the more lovely more delight. If this be granted we
may define ornament to be a kind of an auxiliary brightness and improvement
[complement] to beauty. So that then beauty is somewhat lovely which is proper
and innate, and diffused over the whole body, and ornament somewhat added or
fastened on, rather than proper and innate. (Ten Books 113)
This critic in beauty dislikes that which is not compatible with the perfection of
beauty. The remedy is, it appears, ornament, by whose means the pleasing
perfection of beauty is attained. Before the advent of beauty, or else in the place of
its absence, there is either the deficientan inner part of the body missing from
withinor else the superfluousa foreign part joined to the body from without.
In either case, there is a disseminated totality. There is a body with indeterminate
boundaries: an unsightly ugly something which has neither a proper inside nor a
determinable outside. To this disseminated totality ornament is annexed as remedy.
The addition makes the incompatible, the deficient or the superfluous compatible
with the perfection of beauty. The task implies either the provision of the missing
part of the deficient or the subtraction of the extra part of the superfluous. The
added ornament, however, is neither the missing part of the deficient nor the extra
part of the superfluous. Ornament by definition provides no assimilable parts and
is never assimilated by the body beautiful. It is and remains foreign to both the
compatible and the incompatible. It is always an added or fastened on Other on
both sides of an equation that it alone makes possible. Incompatible + ornament
= compatible + ornament.
Ornament, Alberti tells us, turns dislike and disgust into pleasure and delight by
trimming and polishing the more lovely as it paints and hides the unsightly.
Ornament, in other words, is neither a simple inclusion nor a simple exclusion. If
anything it plays a double role: acting at once as light and shadow, revealing and
concealing, including and excluding by one and the same gesture. Ornaments
insightful light reveals the innate and the proper as it casts a blinding shadow
over what lies beyond the periphery of the proper: the incompatible ugly Other.
Where, however, is this rim, this periphery, or boundary separating the beautiful
from the ugly, the compatible from the incompatible, the perfect from the
imperfect, before ornament is added or fastened on? The ramifications of this
question are grave because the parameters at issue are the very parameters that
separate architecture from mere building, the beautiful edifice from the deficient
construct, and ultimately the text from the subject it is said to contemplate and
reveal from a distance.
As auxiliary brightness, ornament, Alberti would have us assume, adds its light
to the light of beauty and improves or complements its intensity making beauty
shine ever brighter in the foreground amid a concealed and shadowy background.
What ornament is said to improve, however, does not precede it. If ornament adds
its light to the light of beauty, it adds itself to an undifferentiated, unperceived light
before the addition. It is, after all, precisely the absence of this light that mandates
addition. Also, it is only after the addition that we are able to differentiate the
undifferentiated, undifferentiable compatible and proper from the incompatible
and the improper in the same perspicuous manner that light is differentiated from
shadow. Ornament is not, in other words, so much the auxiliary brightness that
Alberti wishes it to be, as it is that which in the absence of any clear borders, any
pre-defined parameters, is imposed, not unlike a frame, on a disseminated totality.4
In turn, it marks the advent of differentiation and the emergence of opposition.
Ornament constitutes the very periphery, parameter or boundary that is presumed
to preexist its addition as auxiliary brightness.
Ornament, as Alberti contends, is an essential part of architecture, and it is so
not only as an addition to the body deficient or superfluous, but as an addition
to the body beautiful as well. In fact ornament is so essential that there can be no
art of building, no beautiful edifices, before ornament is added, on the one hand,
to impose and thus expose its parameters and, on the other hand, to fill and thus
fulfill the desire for beauty.
it is undeniable that there may be in the mere form or figure of a building,

an innate excellence and beauty, which strikes and delights the mind, and is
immediately perceived where it is, as much as it is missed where it is not; (Ten

Books 203)
This innately beautiful building, however, Alberti concludes, no man can bear
to see naked of ornament. And no man can bear to see the body beautiful nude
because:
there is hardly any man so melancholy or stupid, so rough or unpolished, but

what is very much pleased with what is beautiful, and pursues those things which
are most adorned and rejects the unadorned and neglected; and if any thing he
views he perceives any ornament is wanting, he declares that there is something
deficient which would make the work more delightful and noble. (Ten Books 112)
A healthy mind rejects, so Alberti contends, the unadorned and neglected for what
is not adorned, the nude body as such, is deficient. The place of ornament, in other
words, is marked by a gap or lack in the body to which ornament comes as an
addition. The nude body beautiful must be dressed, that is, completed with a dress
before it can give pleasure and delight. The deficient, and the nude body is nothing
other, can only cause dislike and disgust. Therefore, the beautiful is, must be,
always already dressed, framed, or adorned before it appears as such and delights
the onlooker. The dress, however, it should be remembered, in order to allow the
beauty of the body shine forth must itself be beautiful. To be beautiful, the body
of the dress must itself be dressed or ornamented while the ornament to the
ornament must be beautiful before it can be added to complete. There is, in other
words, a paradox here. Each beautiful body as such assumes prior ornamentation
while each ornament assumes prior beauty. Each leads us back to the other in an
endless deferral with no beginning and no end.
Where are we then to locate beauty, that non-contingent absolute that
requires neither addition nor subtraction? How are we to account for a deficiency
in perfectiona certain gap or lack, a certain internal indeterminacy, and an
indispensable contingency that mandates addition? How are we to privilege the
beautiful over the ugly if the contingency and the pernicious deficiency that is
said to constitute a most radical difference between the beautiful and the ugly, is
a shared characteristic? In sum, where are the obscured parameters that this text
had set out to only unravel and reveal?
Insofar as ornament points to a need for addition in the body that must require
no addition to be itself, insofar as the beautiful must be, is always, completed with
something other than itselfneither proper nor inner by definitionin order to
be its perfect self, the parameters are nowhere to be found. There is no outside to
contingency!
The Text
The text within whose volume Alberti appends ornamentation as a remedy to the
deficient or the superfluous, is itself, if we recall, an appendage to a difficult, knotty
and commonly obscured subject. It too is appended as a kind of an auxiliary

brightness whose point and purpose is to reveal and redeem the obscured
parameters of architecture in a state of oppression and ruin. What this text
reveals, however, if it could be said to reveal anything, is not a sovereign subject
outside the text, but an ornamented subject within the text. The body beautiful
never appears in this text without a dress, which is tantamount to not appearing
at all; be this divorced from the text or within it. However, Alberti insists, and for all
intents and purposes rightly so, that the ornamental appendage is nothing but a
dress. If it brings an insightful light to bear on the body, this light is only a kind of
an auxiliary brightness. If ornament contributes to pleasure and delight felt in view
of the body, it is by way of a complement: of more light and more delight. In turn,
what is simply more, what is auxiliary and supplemental, is also unnecessary and
inessential. What is fastened on can readily be removed without a real loss. Yet, as
we have seen, this constitutes only half the story.
The ornamental remedy is at once a poison. If ornament adds, it also subtracts.
If it completes, it also points to a deficiency in what it completes. The ornament
that redeems the beautiful, also denies the beautiful its perfection. What Alberti
gains by ornamentation, he has already lost to decoration. This is the paradox
that is ornamentation. However, the textual appendage is meant to unravel and
reveal what requires neither addition nor subtraction. It is meant to bring to light
that which in architecture is not contingent on difference with a deferred Other.
It is meant, specifically, to subject architecture to the laws of a metaphysics that
has placed nature before culture, beauty before ugly, design before matter, the
intelligible before the sensible, original before copy, presence before absence,
and so on. If Alberti undertakes the arduous task of writing on architecture, his
point and purpose is not to confound but to separate the beautiful from the ugly,
the sufficient from the deficient, the self-referential from the contingent, or else
architecture from mere building. To this end ornament is certainly an impediment.
It is also indispensable. To reveal the body beautiful Alberti must dress it, to reveal
its perfection he must remove the dress. The latter only reveals a deficiency.
Therefore, if the text is to live up to its promise of revelation, short of removing
the ornamentation, Alberti must render it removable without having to remove it.
Hence Albertis recourse to the dress as a metaphor for comprehending the role of
ornamentation.
This metaphor is, in other words, neither arbitrary nor accidental. The perception
of the task of writing as a venture of discovery and not invention, of revelation and
not the textual construction of the parameters of architecture depends on it. The
text can only marginalize its own role, that is, it can only claim a truth value for what
it purports to only be revealing from a distance, if ornament is nothing but a dress
or a kind of an auxiliary brightness.
If this metaphor is compelling and persuasive that is not because ornament is a
kind of an auxiliary brightness, rather because from the outset the beautiful is said
to be a natural, non-contingent absolute divorced from the text and independent
of the textual and the ornamental revelations. It is because Alberti has already
dressed the subject before subjecting it to ornamentation.
Before the ornamental appendage, we should recall, there is the theoretical

text itself on the margins of architecture filling the place of a primal deficiency
in its subject. This is the want of a pre-determined, natural margin or borderline.
The remedy to this deficiencythe initial dressis the imposition of beauty as
the criterion that allows Alberti to separate architecture from mere building. This
delimitational dress is further augmented by nature as the origin of all that is
beautiful and perfect. In turn, the natural dress places the beautiful before any
and all ornamental appendages. As the non-contingent original term, by a natural
decree, the beautiful need no longer assume prior ornamentation as the condition
of its appearance because it has already appeared in nature, even if obscured and
unseen before the textual revelation. Regardless of what it may accomplish, the
ornamental appendage can be nothing but an auxiliary brightness by virtue of
its assigned place in the timely and resolute order of appearances: beauty before
ornamentation, architecture before the written revelation, and nature before
cultural invention and construction.
Therefore, if ornament is, as Alberti insists, a kind of an auxiliary brightness that
is because Albertis text has already assumed the paradoxical role of what it seeks to
reduce to a supplemental source of light. The text has already become the paradox
it is meant to resolve. It has already become a remedy and a poison, an addition
and a subtraction, at once: not only a kind of an auxiliary brightness but also the
origin of light and the impossibility of a determinable origin. As an ornamental
appendage, the insightful light that the theoretical writing is said to shed over
its subject is accompanied by a blinding shadow cast over its own operation. By
assuming an ambivalent supplemental role in relation to its subject, that is, by
reducing its own operation to an act of revelation, theory insures the truth-value of
what it purports to only be revealing. What the theoretical writing promises at the
outset, however, it denies in the end. The sovereign subject as such never appears
before, or for that matter after the external supplemental addition that is theory.
What the theoretical text brings to light is an endless chain of ornamentation
from beauty to nature to the infinity of the ornamental appendage as a dress. The
endless demarcation of borderlines within the theoretical text frames and defines
the subject after the fact, by supplying what is missing and missed in the subject
from the outseta clarifying frame or borderline. Each appended dress takes the
place of a deficiency in an infinite chain with no beginning or end. To reveal Alberti
must resort to ornamentation. The ornament, however, denies what it provides. It
makes impossible what it makes possible. At once.
If, on the other hand, architectures search for an illusive non-contingent beauty
that is universal, immutable, original, and true, appears to indispensably and
irresolutely self-perpetuate into an unremitting chain of theoretical texts, that is
partly because architectures contingency on the dress, in all its guises, culture,
theory, ornament and so on, perpetually instigates and promulgates the desire. The
dress perpetually promises the illusive presence of the nude body beautiful, albeit
one that, appearances to the contrary not withstanding, can never be undressed.
The reason is also the indispensable and synergetic relationship between
architectural theory and the metaphysics of presence. Much as theorys authority
to speak conclusively of the truth of architecture is vested in its appeal to the

metaphysics of presence in the guise of nature, conversely, theorys methodical
and concerted resistance to contingency upholds and protects that metaphysics
indispensably by way of supplementation and/or ornamentation. Much as
architectural theory, in the cause of truth, beauty, origin and so on, cannot shed its
dependency on the metaphysics of presence, the metaphysics of presence cannot
effectively shed its architectural dress. To both ends, the aversion to culture as the
figure of the contingent and the ornamental, always voiced from within culture, is
a matter of course.
The way outinadvertently presuming there is an outmay appear to be, as it
has, the path opposite to the marginalization and exclusion of ornamentation. This
is the path of incorporation, which is also to say domestication of ornamentation.
Whether the nude body beautiful shall await at the termination of this path is a
story we shall have to follow next.
Notes
1 Leone Battista Alberti 1452:

The ancients knowing from the nature of things, ... that if they neglected this main point
they should never produce anything great or commendable, did in their works propose
to themselves chiefly the imitation of nature, as the greatest artist at all manner of
compositions; and for this purpose they labored, as far as the industry of man could reach
to discover the laws upon which she herself acted in the production of her works, in order
to transfer them to the business of architecture. (Ten Books 195)
Andrea Palladio 1570:
I say therefore, that architecture, as well as all other arts, being an imitatrix of nature, can
suffer nothing that either alienates or deviates from that which is agreeable to nature.
(Four Books 25)
Henry Wotton 1624:
I had noted, that all art was then in truest perfection when it might be reduced to some
natural Principle. For what are the most judicious Artisans but the Mimiques of Nature?
(The Elements of Architecture 7)
Marc-Antoine Laugier 1753:
It is the same in architecture as in all other arts: its principles are founded on simple nature,
and natures process clearly indicate its rules. (An Essay on Architecture 11)
Etienne-Louis Boulle 1785:
... what I understand by art is everything that aims at imitating nature; that no architect
has attempted the task I have undertaken; and that if I succeed, as I dare hope I shall, in
proving that architecture, as far as, its relations with nature are concerned, has perhaps an
even greater advantage than the other arts. (Architecture, Essay on Art 85)
John Ruskin 1849:
... whatever is in architecture fair or beautiful, is imitated from natural forms. (Seven
Lamps 71)
Frank Lloyd Wright 1908:

... given inherent vision there is no source so fertile, so suggestive, or helpful aesthetically
for the architects as a comprehension of natural law. (In the Cause of Architecture 63)
Le Corbusier 1923:
Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the
image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature,
our universe. (Towards a New Architecture 6970)
2 The church of SantAndrea discussed earlier is a case in point.
3 For an extended discussion of the concept of trace, difference and deferral and of the
metaphysics of presence please see Derrida, Of Grammatology.
4 For a thorough discussion the role of ornament as a frame see Derrida, The Truth in
Painting.
2
On the Border of the Beautiful
There is a marked likeness between the virtues of man and the enlightenment of
the globe he inhabitsthe same diminishing gradation in vigor up to the limits
of their domains, the same essential separation from their contrariesthe same
twilight at the meeting of the two: a something wider belt than the line where the
world rolls into night, that strange twilight of virtues; that dusky debatable land,
wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temperance becomes severity, and justice
becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each and all vanish into gloom.
Nevertheless, with the greater number of them, though their dimness increases
gradually, we may mark the moment of their sunset; and, happily, may turn the
shadow back by the way by which it had gone down (Ruskin, Seven Lamps 34)
The Transgression
At the outset of the book Pioneers of Modern Design, Nikolaus Pevsner sums up
the basic doctrine of nineteenth-century architectural theory in what has
since become a well-known quote from Ruskins Lectures on Architecture and
Painting. Ornamentation, Pevsner quotes Ruskin saying, is the principal part of
architecture (Pioneers 19). Next, Pevsner goes on to show the comic, and to the
proponents of the Modern Movement, the tragic consequence of the application of
this surprising principle to architectural practice at the end of the last century. This
surprising statement has since become an emblem for all that the proponents of
the Modern Movement believed to be wrong with architectural design around the
turn of the century, and much of what they hoped to re-form in it.
To most theoreticians, architects, and historians of the twentieth century the
absurdity and the comedy in pronouncing ornamentation the principal part of
architecture remained self-evident until Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Browns
daring dictum in the concluding sentence to their book Learning from Las
Vegas. It is now time, Venturi and Scott Brown contended, to reevaluate the
once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of
construction. To this once-horrifying statement, the authors immediately append
Pugins warning that it is alright to decorate construction but never construct

decoration (163).
The permissive and celebratory sentiment toward ornament that was first
(re)publicized by Venturi and Scott Brown, was soon amplified by a sizable
number of authors and architects, to some of whom the renewed sentiment was
the clear indicator of the dawn of a new age in architectural design.1 Ornament, it
was contended, anathema to Modernist designis back in style. Although long
banished as aesthetically retarded, morally reprehensible, or simply the affliction
of people who dont know better, ornament is suddenly reappearing in some of
the most challenging new architecture, interior design, furniture, crafts and even
the fine arts (Jensen and Conway 1). Ornamentation, it appeared then, is a radical
act, quite the opposite of the conservative act that it has been for most of this
century (1).
Despite a changed sentiment toward ornament in the last four decades, Ruskins
surprising statement remains a source of discomfort, if not embarrassment, to
many scholars of Ruskins aesthetic theories. Some scholars stay clear of Ruskins
blustering pronouncements on ornamentation by focusing on his substantial work
on painting and sculpture, in particular, the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843
1860), where the question of ornamentation does not figure prominent. A case
in point is George P. Landows eminent study: The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of
John Ruskin.2 Other scholars, not innocent of a Modernist predisposition, chastise
Ruskin for his preoccupation with detail, which constituted his entire emphasis
in architecture and for being so preoccupied with architectural surfaces that he
did not concern himself with the overall plan of a building, and did not conceive
of buildings as enclosing and molding spaces; apparently, he did not even see
structures as occupying space, vertically or horizontally (Garrigan 49, 62).3
Even John Unrau who, among a hand-full of Ruskin scholars, does not dismiss
his architectural theories on account of his blustery statements on ornamentation,
and is sharply critical of those who do, finds Ruskins proclamations to be at best
problematic. He chastises Ruskin as well, though on account of making it all too
easy for subsequent writers to dismiss his architectural thought without making
the strenuous effort necessary to obtain a full and balanced reading of his work on
the subject (13). Certainly, Unrau contends, it was silly of Ruskin to sum up his
wide-ranging and subtle analysis of architectural ornament with a dogmatic catch-
cry that has effectively repelled generations of readers from making a serious
attempt to find out if there was any substance behind the bluster (65). From a
provocative statement as Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture,
Unrau contends, It is perhaps no wonder that potential readers of Ruskin should
conclude that there is no point in pursuing, through all those fat red volumes, the
views of a man who could say such apparently nonsensical things (13).
The sentenceOrnamentation is the principal part of architecturehas
been made to assume the burden of more responsibility and blame than any one
sentence could readily be made to assume. Emblematically, if not directly, it is held
accountable for the state of architectural practice at the end of the last century
from one end of the spectrum, to the present state of Ruskinian scholarship, on the
other end of the spectrum.
on the border of the beautiful 33
Self-evident as the problem with this sentence may be, it is important to pursue
in some detail that which is purportedly silly, preposterous, nonsensical, absurd,
or generally wrong with this proclamation. Exactly, what in this sentence has
propelled it to a position of such prominent infamy?
The words themselvesornamentation, principal part, and architectureare
clearly not out of place or improper in the context of any discussion on building.
We find them variously stated in many a discourse on architectural ornamentation
since the Renaissance.4 Though the words are not out of place in the wider
context, the problem with the sentence is, at the risk of stating the obvious, a
problem of place or placement. The problem has to do with the exact placement
of ornament with respect to architecture: interior or anterior, central or peripheral.
The nonsense in Ruskins sentence is in its surprising equation of the ornamental
with the principal part of architecture. The silliness and the absurdity of it reside
in confounding the peripheral with the central, the subsidiary with the cardinal,
the supplemental with the pivotal. The ornament in this sentence is placed out of
place. The place of ornamentif it has oneis not a principal place in architecture.
This much is evident to both the proponents and the opponents of Ruskin alike, as
evidenced by their reaction to Ruskins displacement. Neither treats this sentence,
however, as a simple error in judgment. What fails in this sentence is not the faculty
of judgment, but the place of architecture as distinct from the place of ornament.
The problem, without as yet reading too much into it, is the realization of a certain
dependence on place and placement.
The nonsense in Ruskins sentence was self-evident to the proponents of
Modernism from a vantage point that is perhaps best exaggerated by Adolf
Loos well-known equation of ornamentation to crime (Conrads 19). In fact, the
unique identity of the Modern Movement was constituted, in part, by opposing
ornamentation, and placing it firmly outside of architecture, that is, by carefully
distinguishing and separating the essential from the inconsequential, the principal
from the peripheral, or architecture from the ornamental. Modern Architecture,
as Le Corbusier put it, is everythingbut is not the decorative arts (91). The
otherwise all encompassing Modern architecture occupies a place that is made
distinct by virtue of being located against and outside ornamentation and the
decorative arts.
The proponents of the renewed permissive sentiment toward ornamentation
have done no less than their Modernist counterparts in defining their own distinct
identity. They too define the identity of their new architecture by defining its place
in relation to ornamentation. In this instance the place is one that is inclusive of
ornamentation, though not an ornamentation that is free to roam around, or
assume a central position, but one properly placed, administered, and controlled.
Should we recall Venturi and Scott Browns warning, it is once again, all right to
decorate construction, but never construct decoration. Brent Brolin expresses
much the same sentiment in his Flight of Fancy: The Banishment and Return of
Ornament when he tell us that As ornament returns:
The most obvious pitfall is that designers will lapse into doing ornament for
ornaments sake. That would leave us only slightly better off than when they
indulged in ornament for no ornaments sake. The promise of postmodernism

would then fade, to become just another alleged style of the times, to be
followed, at some later date, by the next in line. (Brolin 282)
As the gates were opened once again to allow ornament back in architecture, it
appeared necessary to subject the passage to condition and careful supervision
less, of course, architecture fails the test of time. Ornament cannot be allowed,
Ruskins assertion not withstanding, to assume a principal position. To give
ornament a principal position, that is, to construct decoration or ornament for
ornaments sake, is tantamount to creating an architecture that is tied to the
times and fading away in time, as opposed to one transcending time. Between the
enduring and the ephemeral architecture, lies the determination of the place of
ornament within architecture. So long as ornament serves something other than
itself, so long as ornament is not the end but the means to an end, the architecture
that grants it passage endures. Otherwise the architecture that allows ornament in
for its own sake inevitably fades away, forsaking its place to the next in line.
Given the purported consequence of misplacing ornament, in one instance inside
architecture as opposed to outside it, in the other, in a principal, as opposed to a
subordinate position with respect to architecture, the reason for the strong reaction
to Ruskins pronouncement may become more evident. In this context, perhaps
all that can be said, and all that has been said in Ruskins defense, is that he really
did not mean it. John Unrau, trying to point out the serious intentions behind
Ruskins verbal shock tactics, informs us that Ruskins ideas have often been grossly
misinterpreted, mainly because it has seldom been noticed that Ruskin usually
implies a much wider definition of ornament than the modern reader tends to
expect (656). According to Ruskin, Unrau contends, depending upon the distance
of the viewer from the building, almost any major subdivision of structure might be
considered ornamental (67). Ruskin would, we are told, regard as ornamental all
elements of the building which, at the specific distance from which one is viewing
it, are treated in such a way that they contribute to its aesthetic articulation (67).
Furthermore, Ruskin, we are told, forcefully affirmed the necessity of considering
detail as subordinate to the visual whole, and certain that ornament lacking
subordination to total design will inevitably lead to aesthetic disaster (67). In other
words, verbal shock tactics aside, even Ruskin, the consummate ornamentalist by
some accounts, did not fail to observe the necessity of marking the place of ornament
clearly and decidedly in a subordinate position.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of an actual or assumed disagreement
between Ruskin and numerous other writers on architectural ornamentation over
the place of ornament in architecture, there appears to be a clear agreement
between Ruskin and the majority of his peers since the Renaissance on the
devastating consequence of losing control over ornamentation. What it is that we
must not lose control over, however, no one has as yet identified with equal force
and clarity as the direness of the consequence itself.
Although there is no architectural element or group of elements that can be
labeled an ornament, or for that matter not, although it is virtually impossible
to point to any architectural feature, in and of itself, as an ornamental feature, or

not, nevertheless, virtually every author addressing the subject of ornamentation
appears to assume that there is such a thing as ornament and that it is an addition
or an appendage to the body of the edifice. The consensus among the authors
that address the subject is that ornament is something extra and detachable. It
is, as Ruskin put it within limits that we shall have to discuss later, all that may be
taken away from the building, and not hurt it (The Stones of Venice 400). This is
surprisingly similar to Laugiers definition of ornament as all that one can make use
of or cut out without the essence of the architectural Order being affected, that is,
all that can be admitted or suppressed without changing the thing fundamentally
(152). Alberti, in turn, as discussed before, defined ornament to be a kind of an
auxiliary brightness and improvement [complement] to beauty, that is, somewhat
added or fastened on, rather than proper and innate (Ten Books 113). It was, in
turn, precisely as something added or fastened on that the proponents of Modern
architecture deprecated ornamentation; and in their turn, the post-modern
opponents allowed it to return as all that is added to decorate construction, that
is, as something other than structural, other than functional; as something applied
(Jensen and Conway 7).
Given the prevalent definition of ornamentation as addition, extra, other,
auxiliary, it follows, as Ruskin purportedly assumed, that every architectural element
could be an ornamental element depending on its place and the circumstances of
its placement.5 Every architectural element can become an ornamental element so
long as it is attached to an edifice and yet it appears detachable from it, that is, so
long as from its allotted place it appears as though it can be displaced. However, the
ornamental element, it is important to note, is not simply an external or a displaced
element. It is not detached. If it is simply external or detached, the element in
question is not or is no longer ornamental. To be ornamental an element must be
attached, though detachable. It must add to the body, but not submerge in it. It
must be both an addition and additional. It must be at once a part and apart. It
must be in place and yet out of place. My intent here is not to speak in riddles. The
difficulty in articulating what ornament is, that is, locating its place and identifying
its boundaries, is to an extent involuntary, because ornament, in a sense, has no
decidable place. This is because ornament is not so much an element, as it is a
certain placement of any element with respect to another elementeach of which
appears as what it is in reference to the other. The measure of ornament is never
itself. The ornamental is always measured against another body as an appendage
and a subordinate element. Ornament does not have an identity or a place of its
own, because it is fundamentally a creature of placement. It does not designate so
much a thing, as a specific relationship between two things.
If, on the other hand, the place of ornament has been of considerable concern,
if we find virtually every major movement in architecture since the Renaissance
define its unique identity by assuming a distinct posture on ornamentation
internal or external, principal or peripheralif losing control over ornamentation
is repeatedly purported to have dire consequences, this is in part because it is
by defining and identifying the ornamental, by separating the additive from the
essential that the principal and the peripheral are made to appear as such. To lose
control of the ornamental is in a manner tantamount to losing sight of the essential.
This is another reason why Ruskins proclamation has appeared so problematic. At
face value, it appears to confound two things whose identity depends on their
distinction: the architecture and the ornamentation. Ornament cannot be principal,
because ornament is judged against the principal.
There is yet another dimension to the problem. Ruskins elevation of
ornamentation to a principal part of architecture creates a crisis of identity for the
latter. Architecture is, according to a pervasive Western tradition, what transcends
building. For instance, we may recall Le Corbusiers dictum when a thing responds
to a need, it is not beautiful; Architecture has another meaning and other ends
to pursue than showing construction and responding to needs (1023). From Le
Corbusiers text we may trace our steps through virtually every major, influential
treatise on architecture back to Virtruvius triad commodity, Firmness, and Delight,
or forward to Venturi and Scott Browns reiteration of it, to find in each instance the
same emphasis on the beautiful as the condition of the elevation of building to
architecture. Without delight, there is building, but not architecture. Architecture
is synonymous with aesthetics and beauty.
As discussed earlier, the proposed ways and mean of rendering a building
beautiful have been as diverse and varied over time as the cultural and paradigm
shifts they reflect. Nevertheless, contentious and heated as the debates often have
been, the disagreements have centered on how to make buildings beautiful, not
whether or exactly why one must. In addition, not only has the objective been
beyond theoretical scrutiny or doubt, its definition, as pointed out earlier, has been,
in principle, a constant as well. The beautiful is nothing if contingent on addition
or subtraction. It is precisely in reference to this pervasive understanding of the
beautiful that the question of ornamentation has assumed a critical dimension in
theoretical discourse on architecture. It is also precisely in reference to this definition
that Ruskins equation of ornamentation to a principal part of architecture has been
viewed as absurdly comic and/or sadly tragic.
If the aim, as Le Corbusier put it, that constitutes and separates architecture
from mere building is the non-contingent beautiful, that is, what can accept neither
addition nor subtraction, the question of the place and role of ornamentation, which
is neither simply attached nor simply detached, presents considerable difficulty.
If allowed as addition, it inevitably challenges the self-sufficiency of the beautiful
and as such architecture itself. If disjoined and separated, ornament, nevertheless,
raises questions about its presence and contribution as discussed in Albertis
case. The path of marginalization and/or exclusion of ornamentation, followed
by the theoreticians of the enlightenment before Ruskin and the theoreticians
of the Modern Movement after him, presents its own distinct dilemmas and
contradictions. Condemning and excluding ornament from architecture, Modern
Architects were, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown point out in their scathing
critique of the Modern Movement, only denying in theory what they were doing
in practice (114). Trying to set aside ornamentation, they merely substituted one
set of ornaments for another. Placing ornament in a marginal position as all that
can be admitted or suppressed without changing the thing fundamentally, or

as somewhat added or fastened on, rather than proper and innate is neither a
fundamentally different position nor does it fair better (Laugier 152; Alberti, Ten
Books 113). Earlier, we discussed the problems and paradoxes of ornamentations
marginalization and exclusion. In contrast, Ruskin proposed to pursue, mindful
of his predecessors difficulties, a different path: the path of inclusion and, in
effect, domestication of ornamentation. Whether the path of inclusion has any
greater chance of curtailing ornamentation is a question that must await a critical
examination. The intent would not be to argue for or against ornament. I am not
certain one is afforded this choice, even though one may readily and customarily
exercise it. Rather, of primary interest are the reasons for the preoccupation with
ornamentation. The question is why ornament, which is not even a thing, but a role
that can be assumed by virtually anything, has managed to stir so much passion
and controversy in theoretical discourse on architecture. Why placing ornament,
placing and positioning oneself with respect to it, has been of central concern
within this discourse, so far sketched with broad stokes?
The Assimilation
The fact is, Ruskin boldly notes, by way of clarifying his position on ornamentation:
I never met with the architect yet who did not think ornament meant a thing
to be bought in a shop and pinned on, or left off, at architectural toilets, as the
fancy seized them, thinking little more than many women do of the other kind of
ornamentthe only true kind,St. Peters kind,Not that outward adorning,
but the innerof the heart. I do not mean that architects cannot conceive this
better ornament, but they do not understand that it is the only ornament; that all
architectural ornament is this, and nothing but this; that a noble building never
has any extraneous or superfluous ornaments; that all its parts are necessary
to its loveliness, and that no single atom of them could be removed without
harm to its life, And I use the words ornament and beauty interchangeably, in
order that architects may understand this: I assume that their building is to be a
perfect creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing more.
It may, indeed, receive additional decoration afterwards, exactly as a woman
may gracefully put a bracelet on her arms, or set a flower in her hair: but that
additional decoration is not the architecture. It is of curtains, pictures, statues,
things that may be taken away from the building, and not hurt it. What has the
architect to do with these? He has only to do with what is part of the building
itself, that is to say, its own inherent beauty. (The Stones of Venice 400)
Ruskin keeps well within the bounds of disciplinary tradition in assuming that
architectures objective is a perfect creature that requires nothing less than it has
and is able to accept nothing more without loss, that is, without ceasing to be
autonomous and singular. However, refuting the traditional distinction between
beauty and ornament as a misunderstanding of the limits of the architectures
terrain, that is, of what falls inside or outside it, Ruskin effectively re-positions or
re-draws these limits to incorporate ornament as an interchangeable word for

beauty. He re-proposes the distinction between things that fall inside or outside
architecture as one appropriately made between two kinds of ornament: the inner
or the only true kind that is conducive to beauty and the outward or untrue kind
that is extraneous and dispensable. In other words, despite its internalization as
another word for beauty, a certain kind of ornament remains extraneous. It is of
curtains, pictures, statues, or else things that may be taken away from the building
and not hurt itthings that fall outside and are as such unrelated and unnecessary
to architectures inner loveliness. Curtains, paintings, statues and other similar
ornaments are not, however, as we shall see later, inherently extraneous. Within
limits that are yet to be defined, placed or drawn, each could be an inner ornament
and integral to the beauty of the building. To define these limits and clearly
draw the line separating the inner from the outer, the inside from the outside of
architecturewe need first and foremost to determine a matter of very essential
importance, namely, what is or is not ornament which is also to ask and determine
what is or is not beauty, and therefore what is or is not architecture (The Stones of
Venice 102).
Art, generally, as such, Ruskin tells us, with all its technicalities, difficulties,
and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable
as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing (Modern Painters 8). Assuming a
distinct hierarchy between language and thought, or else the technical or the
constructive and the reflective or the imaginative, in all our speculations on
artRuskin goes on to set the ground rulelanguage is thus to be distinguished,
and held subordinate to, that which it conveys (8). This implies that in the outset
of all inquiry into the subject of architecture, it is very necessary to distinguish
carefully between architecture and building (Seven Lamps 15). It is necessary
to distinguish between the higherthe reflectiveto be venerated and the
lowerthe constructiveto be held subordinate for the risk of interference
or prevalence. Building merely by the stability of what it erects or its fitness to
receive and contain with comfort a required number of people should not be
confused with architecture. The name architecture must be confined to that art
which has building as condition of its working and as condition of elevation to
art impresses on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise
unnecessary, that is, unnecessary or useless, in the well understood and usual
sense, as meaning, inapplicable to the service of the Body (The Stones of Venice
399). This unnecessary or useless addition is the ornamentation without which
there is no architecture. Hence, the interdependence and/or the interchangeability
of the words, architecture, beauty and ornament.
Ruskins distinction between architecture and building, adamant as it is, has
many precedents. What is different here is the radical nature of the divide between
architecture and building, and Ruskins exclusive focus on those ideas or characters
venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary that transform buildings
into architecture. He divides these into two broad classes: the one characterized
by an exceeding preciousness and delicacy, to which we recur with a sense of
affectionate admiration; and the other by a severe, and in many cases, mysterious,
majesty, which we remember with an undiminished sense of awe, like that felt at
the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power (Seven Lamps 70). The
difference between these two impressions, Ruskin warns us:
is not merely that which there is in nature between things beautiful and
sublime. It is, also, the difference between what is derivative and original in mans
work; for whatever is in architecture fair or beautiful is imitated from natural
forms; and what is not so derived, but depends for its dignity upon arrangement
and government received from human mind, becomes the expression of the
power that mind, and receives a sublimity high in proportion to the power
expressed. All buildings, therefore, show man either as gathering or governing:
and the secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rule.
These are the two great intellectual Lamps of Architecture; the one consisting in
a just and humble veneration for the works of God upon the earth, and the other
in an understanding of the dominion over those works which has been vested in
man. (7071)
The beautiful that is always gathered and imitatedwe will return to the question
of governance laterhas to do with certain outward qualities, of certain forms and
colors, that is, ornaments, the simple contemplation of which gives us pleasure. The
feeling of mankind on this subject, by the simple will of the Deity, is universal
and instinctive (Modern Painters 27). Hence, Ruskin tells us that the impressions
of beauty are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral (11). They are moral
because, these common and general sources of pleasure are, I believe, a certain
seal, or impress of divine work and character, upon whatever God has wrought in
all the world (Works 59). Therefore, men, despising all that is not of God, unless
reminding it of God, are to attempt the noble rendering of images of beauty,
derived chiefly from the external appearance of organic nature in all the visual
arts, inclusive of architecture (Seven Lamps 100).
Therefore, Ruskin goes on to conclude, the proper material of ornament will
be whatever God has created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in
accordance with or symbolic of His laws. For instance, all perfectly beautiful forms,
that is, all forms inwardly ornamental, Ruskin tells us, must be composed of curves
because every curve divides itself infinitely by its change of direction, displaying
the seal or impress of that divine character or attribute it is ordained to bear:
infinity (Seven Lamps 104; Works 88). The ugly is, in turn, simply any form that does
not bear the seal, or impress of divine work and character.
Ruskins fusion of aesthetics and theology is both overt and forceful. Ruskin
Scholars broadly contribute this fusion to his deep-seated religious convictions.6
Ruskin is, of course, quite candid on the subject. However, it is important to note
that the fusion of aesthetics and theology in architecture has a long history. It
begins well before and continues well after Ruskin. Theoretical speculations of
Pugin, Boulle, Laugier, Wotton, Palladio and Alberti from one end of the spectrum
to Sullivan, Wright, and Le Corbusier on the other, are just a few examples. There
must be, in other words, more to this story than the strong religious convictions of
any one individual.
Theoretical and aesthetic speculations on architecture are, historically, if not per

force, both prescriptive and proscriptive. They impose distinct boundaries. They
seek to delimit the practice of architecture, in each instance, to the one mode or
style particularly arranged to embody and promote the worldview of the culture
voicing the theory through the author and/or the architect. This delimitation is
accomplished, and perhaps it can only be accomplished, in the name of beauty and
truth, rather than ulteriorcultural, social, or politicalmotives. It is presented to
be not arbitrary, but following immutable laws. The power of exclusion that is
imperative to the delimitation of practice mandates this transformation of culture
into nature and the variable into the invariable. In other words, as we discussed in
the previous chapter, universalizing the particular with recourse to theology and
thereby disguising culture as nature is not a choice that can be readily avoided,
given the intended purpose of the enterprise. For instance, what Ruskin propagates
as an aesthetic architectureVenetian or High Victorian Gothicindubitably
reflects the cultural and historic context within which it was formed. However,
placing the weight of his authority to prescribe this and proscribe other modes
of design on a divine ordinance has a strategic utility in excess of his particular
religious convictions. He prescribes curvilinear forms not because they had, as
they did, a particular meaning to a particular culture at a distinct point in time,
but because they bear the seal, or impress of a divine character, truly, naturally,
exclusively, and eternally.
The beautiful has no overt place in the vagaries of the cultural terrain for another
important reason. In language, which Ruskin proposes art and architecture to
be, there is no positive term, no original event and no autonomous element as
Saussure pointed out long ago (Course in General Linguistics). Difference with a
deferred Other constitutes the identity, or what is not absolutely different, the
non-identity of every element. In language, nothing simply is what it is, immutable
and present. A perfect creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing
nothing more, that is, a creature that is self-referential and autonomous has no
place in language. This immutable creature may only emerge and find shelter on
a theological terrainthe terrain of simple presences, clear origins, and explicit
hierarchies. So long as one conceives and defines the objective of architecture as a
perfect creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing morea
conception always enframed by the metaphysics of presenceone has little
choice but resort to and place architecture within a theological frame. Placing and
securing beautys place within this frame is not, however, without considerable
difficulties.
Bearing in mind that in architecture each ornament constitutes a re-writing of
the written or sealed impression of a naturally frequent form that need first be
sought out through deliberate examination and direct intellectual exertion,
that each ornament is an expression of a beautiful thoughtthe thoughts or
divine attributes impressed and sealed on natural forms of frequent occurrence,
for example, infinity in the case of curvilinear formsRuskin asks us to:
consider for an instant what would be the effect of continually repeating an

expression of a beautiful thought to any other of the senses at times when the
mind could not address that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that in
time of serious occupation, of stern business, a companion should repeat in our
ears continually some favorite passage of poetry, over and over again all day
long. (Seven Lamps 11314)
The effect at the end of the day, Ruskin tells us, is that the entire meaning of
the passage would be dead to us leaving behind only a sickening and wearisome
form or rather no form because here form is to be disallowed the name without
meaning or thought. Repetition incurs a loss. This is not only of meaning, but also
of form, and it is the same with every other form of definite thought:
Apply this to expressions of thought received by the eye. Remember that the eye
is at your mercy more than the ear. The eye it cannot choose but see Now if
you present lovely forms to it when it cannot call the mind to help it in its work,
and among objects of vulgar use and unhappy position, you will neither please
the eye nor elevate the vulgar object. But you will fill and weary the eye with
the beautiful form, and you will infect that form itself with the vulgarity of the
thing to which you have violently attached it. It will never be of much use to you
any more; you have killed or defiled it; its freshness and purity are gone. (Seven
Lamps 11314)
The place of ornament has thus everything to do with its life or worth conceived
and defined as the presence of meaning or definite thought in form. Placed in
the company of vulgar objectsconceived as a violent gestureor in places of
active and occupied life, where no aid could be received from the mind, ornament
loses its freshness, purity, sharpness and clearness. It is infected, defiled, killed
and destroyed forever.
Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the present day, a law of
simple common sense,not to decorate things belonging to purposes of active
and occupied life. Wherever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden,
so is beauty. (Ruskin, Seven Lamps 115)
The determination of what is or what is not the place of ornament follows, not
accidentally, the application of one and the same test determining what is or is
not true ornament: the presence vs. the absence of meaning or definite thought.
Where meaning can be perceived that is the place for ornament. Where ornaments
meaning is killed or defiled, where ornament becomes, by definition, what it is not
meaningless and as such lifeless and valuelessthat is not. Contrary to common
practice, for instance, ornaments that adorn temples and beautify kings palaces
have no place on a tradesmans sign nor shelf nor counter in all the streets of all
our cities (Ruskin, Seven Lamps 115). Thereall socio-political implications and all
socio-political lines and limits at stake withstandingRuskin tells us, absolutely
valuelessutterly without the power of giving pleasure, they only satiate the eye,
and vulgarize their own forms (115).
Hence, that general law of singular importance that is to end vulgarity and
violence, on the one hand, and the absolute loss of value and aesthetic pleasure, on
the other. This is not only because, we should note, misplacement here constitutes
a negation, but also because the misplaced cannot be contained within that place
as a simple negation. True ornaments, misplaced, not only satiate the eye, lose their
meaning, purity, life and value, but in so doing they also, as a matter of singular
importance, vulgarize their own forms. Of the ornaments violently attached,
for instance, to the signs, shelves or counters of tradesmen, Ruskin writes, many
of these are in themselves thoroughly good copies of fine things, which things
themselves we shall never, in consequence, enjoy any more (Seven Lamps 115).
The consequence of misplacement is not a simple inability to read a beautiful
thought at a given time or place. Rather, it is the impossibility of reading, if not
always already, at least thereafter at any time or in any place. Once violently
attached anywhere but its place, ornament can never be enjoyed any more or in
any place. Misplaced, ornament is forever displaceddispossessed of its meaning
in every place. Placed outside its place, that is, outside the limits protective, if not
productive, of its meaning, what ornament loses is not only its place inside but the
very possibility of being placed inside (limits). This passage is the passage of limits,
leaving a violated, vulgarized, valueless form or no form inside and outside. It is a
death or an absence that is notcan no longer be conceivedthe opposite of life
or presence still in place but the impossibility of both in every place.
What is the condition of this possibility or impossibility? How can the good copy
destroy the original? How can a form whose power to please was said from the
outset to be owing to the written or sealed impression it bears of divine attributes
be denied that power inside or outside its place? In sum, why the very question of
place?
To appear or be read as what it indeed isa meaning-full or a formed form
ornament, Ruskin tells us, must be placedretainedin its place. The condition
of this possibility is the impossibility of the form ornament is desired to bethe
written or sealed impression of a beautiful thoughtin its place or any place. The
meaning of ornament, that is, its reading as form(ed), could only be said to depend
on its placeformed in one, de-formed in anotherif this form did not precede
its place or its reading in place as the form of a seal or an impress, if there was no
place where ornament appeared formed or, for that matter, where it did not appear
informed by its place or placement. The good copy, misplaced, could only deprive
the original of its value if that value was not intrinsic but construed in place. That
ornament must forgo the possibility of bearing the form of a seal in every place
in order to appear or be read as the form of a seal in its place is precisely what the
misplaced ornament points to. If Ruskin finds it impossible to enjoy ornament, once
it is misplaced, any more or in any place, if he can no longer read it as the written or
sealed impression of a beautiful thought in any place, that is precisely because the
misplaced, the very possibility of misplacement, which is also the very possibility
of placementthe possibility of dependence of meaning on place or placement
displaces the relationship between meaning and form, conceived and read as a
seal or an impress, always already. Misplaced, ornament fractures its own seal,
exposing a gap in its place between form and meaning, which Ruskin confessedly
can never re-seal. It points to its reading, if not reading in general, as a matter of
place or placement and to the latter as a form, always already, of misplacement, if,
of course, misplacement here is to imply a reading that is conditioned by its place

or placementa reading that marks a violence and vulgarity that must always
have befallen placement already as the condition of possibility of reading form as
(de)form(ed). So long as form could be misplaced, so long as the reading of form is
dependent on its place, every place is the missing/missed place of the desired seal.
Therefore, where the misplaced or rather the possibility of (mis)placement leads
Ruskin is, in a manner, his point of departure and what it leaves him is what he had
to start with: a displaced form or a form with no form. This is no form for which
the metaphysics of presence has or could have an allotted place. This is no form
which in order to be read, to give itself to a particular reading, be this as a true or
a false form, a living or a dead form, a pure or a violated form, need not have been
placedas within a frameand this is only in the absence of a place or any place
for reading that does not always point to a placement already.
Therefore, to read the ornamental form as the written or sealed impression of
a beautiful thought, which is a reading, we should note, already placed within a
theological frame as the condition of its possibility, Ruskin must again place and
then insist on the placement of the ornamental form in its placethe place of rest
for fear of the misplaced. This place, however, provides no relief. It provides neither
simply a background nor a protective shield against which or within which the
ornamental form can give its form to reading as the form of a seal, pure and simple.
What this place provides, it denies by one and the same gesture. If it marks the
place where ornament appears sealed, it also marks the place of its disappearance
as sealed. It gives to the ornamental form what the form lacks without its protective
limits and it gives precisely because the form lacks. It adds and fills only to expose
a gap. It intervenes and does only to construe from outside the seal that is desired
to have come from inside and the seal that then appears to have come from inside.
As such, ornament in its placethe place of resthas, in a manner, no place. It is
neither in place nor out of place. It is neither protected nor exposed, but both in
one and the same place. It is at once placed, misplaced, and displaced. Where then
to place ornament? Where indeed is ornaments place? Where is the place in the
place of rest where the desired seal falls in place or, for that matter, out of place?
Where to locate ornament its desired place indeterminablehere or there
in its placethe place of rest? The answerthe very possibility of providing an
answeras we may expect, requires still further placement and/or displacement. It
requires further separation, distinction, and opposition on two sides of a line called
to place in what amounts to a perpetual placement in search of the ever missing/
missed place. This time at the limits of the domain of architecture, on two sides of
the line that was said to separate what falls inside architecture as inner and true
ornamentation from what falls outside it as outward or superfluous decoration.
Ruskin tells us:
If to produce a good or beautiful ornament, it were only necessary to produce

a perfect piece of sculpture, and if a well cut group of flowers or animals were
indeed an ornament wherever it might be placed, the work of architect would
be comparatively easy. Sculpture and architecture would become separate
arts; and the architect would order so many pieces of such subject and size as
he needed, But this is not so. No perfect piece either of painting or sculpture
is an architectural ornament at all, except in that vague sense in which any
beautiful thing is said to ornament the place it is in. Thus we may say that
pictures ornament a room; but we should not thank an architect who told us
that his design, to be complete, required a Titian to be put in one corner of it, and
a Velasquez in the Other; and it is just as unreasonable to call perfect sculpture,
niched in, or encrusted on a building, a portion of the ornament of that building,
as it would be to hang pictures by the way of ornament on the outside of it. (The
Stones of Venice 236)
No beautiful thing, therefore, is an ornament in anything but a vague sense, if in its

place, the place of rest, it is wherever that it might be placed. A good or a beautiful
ornament, which is, appears, and is read as such in its place, is one and only one
that in the place of rest has or could be assigned a specific place. To this place,
the place of ornament in its place, however, there is first a condition to admission.
No perfect ornament can be allowed in as an architectural ornament. Perfection
places ornament outside the domain of architecture as decoration outward or
superfluous. As to what may allow ornament in, Ruskin tells us:
The especial condition of true ornament is, that it be beautiful in its place, and
nowhere else, and that it aid the effect of every portion of the building over
which it has influence; that it does not, by its richness, make other parts bald, or,
by its delicacy, make other parts coarse. Every one of its qualities has reference
to its place and use: and it is fitted for its service by what would be faults and
deficiencies if it had no especial duty. Ornament, the servant, is often formal,
where sculpture, the master, would have been free; the servant is often silent
where the master would have been eloquent; (The Stones of Venice 236)
The place of ornament in its place, which is the only place where it might appear
beautiful, is a place marked by deficiency and fault, and there the condition
of ornaments admission is imperfection. The objective of ornamentation or
ornamental addition to architecture is, we should recall, to create a perfect
creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing more. Where
ornament that is inner and true fits in its place is at that borderline between the
capacity for nothing less and the need for nothing morethe line bordering
the perfect. Where ornament fits is where it adds to complete as a part to a
self-enclosing, self-perfecting chain of imperfect parts. Admitting ornament
on the condition of imperfection, Ruskin makes virtue of a vice. Whereas the
perfect ornament is tied to no specific place, which is to say that it could always
be misplaced and as such displaced, to the imperfect ornament every place is a
missed place, unless it is in the only place from where it cannot be misplaced. This
is the only place that excludes the possibility of misplacement in being the one
and only place where the imperfect appears as a good or beautiful form or what
amounts to same, where it does not appear as what it is outside that placebad
and ugly. This then is the place of ornament inner and true in its place. A most
difficult question, however, remains. Where to locate the parameters of this place
or rather within what parameters to place this place: the place of deficiency and
fault fitted with imperfection in the place of rest? What to define as deficiency or
fault and what to admit in as imperfection? Where to draw the line between the
master and the servant, the perfect and the imperfect, the inner ornamentation
and the superfluous decoration? Though these are indeed difficult questions, the
difficulty does not dissuade Ruskin in any way. He begins with an inquiry into the
characters which fitted ornament peculiarly for architectural appliance, and into
the principles of choice and of arrangement which best regulate the imitation of
natural forms in which it consists (Seven Lamps 119). Though the full answering
of these questions, Ruskin tells us, would be a treatise on the art of designnot
to mention the difficulty contingent on the taskRuskin chooses to address two
characteristics that are essentially architectural: Proportion and Abstraction (119).
To the perfection of all things, Ruskin tells us, the appearance of some species
of unity is in the most determined sense of the word essential and this for no
reason other than the fact that in united forms lies sealed a divine attribute: unity
(Modern Painters 50). Of the many species of unity, Ruskin tells us, the unity of
things separately imperfect into a perfect whole, that is, the unity of membership
or essential unity is the great unity of which other unities are but parts and means
(51). And it is to this unity that proportion, defined as the connection of unequal
quantities with each other, points the way (71). Unity, Ruskin tells us, cannot exist
between things similar to each other because two or more equal and like things
cannot be members one of another, nor can they form one, or a whole thing (51).
Although two equal things could have symmetry defined as the opposition
of equal quantities to each other and though symmetry bears the seal of divine
justice, in symmetry there is no unity, only equality. For unity three members
are requisite and at that three unequal members united by the proportions they
bear to one another. Therefore, proportion may be summed up as a question
of connection between three terms at least and of those at least one member
unequal to the Others (Seven Lamps 124). The general rule is to have one large
thing and several small things, or one principal thing and several inferior things,
and bind them well together (121).
As to how these unequal things are to be proportioned or bound well together
for the sake of essential unity, that is, a perfect whole capable of nothing less and
needing nothing more, Ruskin tell us:
it is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion

truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works, as it would be
to teach him to compose melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of
the notes in Beethovens Adelade or Mozarts Requiem. The man who has eye and
intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more
tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than
Scott could have told us how to plan a romance. (Seven Lamps 120)
Proportion, we should note, is a question of invention and composition and as such

of that vested, awful, inexplicable power, noted earlier, that defies explanation.
To a vested fewthe men who have eye and intellectthe laws of proportion
as of composition are known; to others they shall remain inexplicable beyond the
general rules noted. Hence, in the cause of unity and perfection, if not the desire
for a place or the only place where ornament may be good or beautiful within
architecture, each inner and true architectural ornament must be fitted to its
place in a proportional relationship to the forms bordering and defining its place.
However, the secret of constituting such a place is known only to a vested few. To
others, it is a very difficult question: where to locate and how to fit ornament in the
only place where it is good or beautiful, if not by a divine intervention as a vested
power to secretly constitute and fit ornament in its place?
Although proportion is meant to tie ornament to its place as a part to a perfect
whole, without abstraction, that second characteristic of architectural ornaments,
the fit, remains incomplete. Architecture, Ruskin tells us, delights in abstraction and
fears to complete her forms (Seven Lamps 120). These are the forms architecture
borrows or imitates from natural forms of frequent occurrence. Architecture fears
completion, however, not because completion or full realization of the imitated
form is always wrong or that perfect sculpture may not be made a part of severest
architecture, but because this perfection is dangerous (130).
It is so in the highest degree; for the moment the architect allows himself to
dwell on the imitated portions, there is a chance of his losing sight of the duty of
ornament, of its business as a part of the composition, and sacrificing its points
of shade and effect to the delight of delicate carving. And then he is lost. His
architecture has become a mere framework for the setting of delicate sculpture,
which had better be all taken down and put into cabinets. (130)
Although a perfect ornamentperfect insofar as the realization of the imitated

form is concernedmay be related proportionally to other ornaments around it as
a part to a perfect whole, nevertheless, its individual perfection can detach it from
its place. The perfect form may step out of its place or appear to step into it as a
work of art into a frame. This is the danger, in the highest degree. In the presence of
the perfectly imitated form, one may readily lose sight of architecture as a work of
art, and let it become a mere frame. Against this danger, proportion cannot guard
and abstraction is, for the sake of ornaments fit in its place, here, by definition, at
the line separating architecture as a work of art from architecture as a mere frame.
The question is first to be clearly determined whether the architecture is a frame

for the sculpture, or the sculpture an ornament of the architecture. If the latter,
then the first office of that sculpture is not to represent the things it imitates, but
to gather out of them those arrangement of form which shall be pleasing to the
eye in their intended places. So soon as agreeable lines and points of shade have
been added to the mouldings which were meager, or to the lights which were
unrelieved, the architectural work of the imitation is accomplished; and how far
it shall be wrought toward completeness or not, will depend upon its place, and
upon other various circumstances (Ruskin, Seven Lamps 127).
Before ornamentation or ornamental addition, there must be a clear determination

of what architecture is or what it ought to be: a work of art or a mere frame, the
master or the servant. This is a determination, we should note, which at once
presupposes and seeks to maintain a clear distinction between the work of art and
the mere frame, as the master to the servant.
Where are we to find or locate this distinction and once there what are we to
mark as the work of art and what to leave out as a mere frame? If anywhere, it is,
as Ruskin points the way, to the place of ornament in its place that we must turn
in search of an answer and there we must make the determination. The place we
must turn to, however, could we have ever left it, is the place of danger, in the
highest degree. It is a place that is neither clear nor distinct. It is a place where,
before ornamentation or ornamental insertion, there is no opposition, no line, and
no distinction. What is neither a master nor a servant emerges here as one or the
other only after ornamentation, depending on the ornamentation.
This latter is itself neither a master nor a servant, neither free nor enslaved
before insertion. It can just as well free or enslave the building as a work of art or a
mere frame, because it confounds in itself the very distinction and opposition it is
meant to affect. Unruly, dangerous, and indeterminate as this addition may be, the
authority of Ruskins entire discourse on architecture, on what is or is not, what falls
within or outside architecture as a work of art depends on the authority over this
imitated form, that is, the ability to reduce it to a servant inside or a master outside,
clearly and simply. Hence:
Lose your authority over it, let it command you, or lead you, or dictate to you in
any wise, and it is an offence, an encumbrance, and a dishonor. And it is always
ready to do this; wild to get the bit in its teeth, and rush forth on its own device.
Measure, therefore, your strength; and as long as there is no chance of mutiny,
add soldier to soldier, battalion to battalion; but be assured that all are heartily in
the cause, and that there is not one of whose position you are ignorant, or whose
service you could spare. (The Stones of Venice 2567)
Soldier to soldier and battalion to battalion we must add in the cause of architecture,
beauty, and perfection, to make certain there is no chance of mutinyno chance
of the servant becoming the master and architecture a mere frame. We must be
certain of our strength and control over the ornamental insertion in order not to
let it lead us to that dusky debatable land which this dangerous insertion is always
ready to take us. This is the place where the work of art and the mere frame become
one and the same and each and all vanish into gloom for want of a clear line or
limit.
How are we to exclude the chance of mutiny from within the parameters that
define architecture as a work of art? How are we to guard against the ever-present
possibility of losing authority, command or lead over the imitated form always ready
to rush forth on its own devices from its place within architecture as a servant? This
is the chance or danger of mutiny that architecture always faces from within its
parameters, to the authority and clarity of those parameters, and not from outside
where the imitated form may be allowed the position of the masteras in a
cabinet or a frameso long as the work of art and the frame appear clearly distinct
and easily detachable. The possibility of commanding and leading ornament to
its placethe place of servitudethe possibility, that is, of reducing ornament to
a servant within architecture, lies somewhere between complete abstraction and

full realization of the imitated form. However, neither the two extremes nor the
various degrees of realization between, in and by themselves, present or exclude
the chance of mutiny. The line separating ornamentation inner and true from
decoration outward and superfluous, resides not between complete abstraction
and full realization, but between the presence and the absence of a clear expression
of servitude or subordination of which a fully realized form is not capable, while
anything less, depending upon its place, and upon other various circumstances is.
The question, in other words, in so far as the line between what is and what is not
architecture, between what falls inside it as ornament inner and true and what falls
outside it as ornament outward and superfluous, is a question not of abstraction
or full realization per se, but of the place and the circumstances within which the
imitated form may express its subordination simply and clearly. A question of:
How far this subordination is in different situations to be expressed, or how

far it may be surrendered, and ornament, the servant, be permitted to have
independent will; and by what means the subordination is best to be expressed
when it is required, (Ruskin, The Stones of Venice 2367)
A question, Ruskin tells us, that is by far the most difficult question I have ever tried
to work out respecting any branch of art. This is a most difficult question, we should
note, only in so long as the desired answer is a precise line, a distinct place and a
clear expression of subordination from a form that does not easily submit itself
to the determination of its being and place as what is or is not, inside or outside
of architecture and this is in spite of Ruskins best constructive efforts. What has
been and remains clear to Ruskin is that for buildings to become architecture, there
is a need for ornamentation or ornamental addition of forms expressive of divine
attributes impressed and sealed on natural forms of frequent occurrence, as such
only in the place of rest, and there only in a specific place as a part in proportion
to a perfect whole, and in that specific place only in a clearly subordinate position.
The only thing that is not clear or is the most difficult question in this successive
placement of limits within limits around the ornamental form is the ways and
means of determining the place, the circumstances or the limits within which the
ornamental form, which is synonymous with architecture, may be confined and
controlled. These are the limits that may limit the movement of the ornamental
form, giving it no chance or possibility of crossing beyond and as such to that
dusky debatable land from which Ruskin has sought architecture refuge through
ornamentation or ornamental addition for the clarity of distinction between
architecture as a work of art and the mere frame. These are the limits of architecture
itself. The limits indistinct before ornamentation and limits over which command
and control remain the most difficult questions after ornamentation.
Therefore, having made every effort to determine the place of ornament and the
circumstances surrounding its addition to architecture, Ruskin finds himself in the
end, as many of his predecessors did before him, at the border of architecture and
there or rather somewhere between the inside and the outside of the work of art,
between the work and the mere frame, confronted not with the clear line or limit
which he, as his predecessors before, had assumed to find there, but instead with
a most difficult question. This is, at the risk of repetition, the question of the place
of ornament inside or outside architecture as a work of art, pending the distinction
and to that end the location of the missing borderline, the condition of the
possibility of which is itself ornamentation. The question of the place of ornament
found not on the sides, but at the border, as the border, irreducible there to a line,
irremovable there to the sides, in a dusky debatable land from where ornament at
once is the condition of the possibility of departure and the impossibility of exit.
There is in this predicament, however, a notable difference between Ruskin
and his predecessors. Whereas the theoreticians of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment made every effort to place and keep ornament outside the place of
beauty and perfection as a mere frame, only to find it intrude on the border from
its assigned place out, Ruskin, having made every effort to find ornament a specific
place inside the place of beauty and perfection in architecture, finds it very difficult
to keep ornament from protruding on the border from its assigned place inside.
In either case, however, we should note, the difficulty encountered in achieving
the desired effect is not so much one inherent to ornamentation, conceived and
placed differently in each instance, as it is a difficulty encountered in every search
for a place with defined or definable limits within which beauty may appear as an
autonomous, self-referential, non-contingent entity in need of neither addition nor
subtraction. The difficulty, in other words, is not ornamentation, rather one named
by ornamentation. The problem is the ever-elusive architecture itself. It is that
perfect creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing more
which only appears placed within successive frames, each of which is put in place
to overcome the perpetual dependence of the beautiful on place and placement.
The Insertion
In the preceding discussions, my intent has not been to point out inconsistencies
or contradictions in Ruskins aesthetic theory per se, much less attribute these to his
deeply felt religious convictions. I do not see Ruskin, much as Alberti before him, having
somehow failed to effectively address and resolve the problem of ornamentation.
I do not presume that a stouter critic may somehow overcome the obstacles they
faced and succeed in curbing and placing ornament in its place. To the contrary, I
have tried to point out how thorough and systematic both Ruskins and Albertis
argumentations are and why the problems they faced is endemic to the theoretical
enterprise and not merely a reflection of personal failings or inconsistencies.
The difficulties Ruskin and Alberti, among virtually all others, face are endemic
because, concerned as theoretical speculations on architecture are with the
place and the placing of architectures borderlines, the borderlines themselves
are presumed to precede speculation over their place. Ruskins and Albertis are
merely cases in point. If architectures borders were a given, however, speculation
over their place would be at best redundant. Though architecture is presumed
to precede theory, from a certain vantage point, there is no architecture before
theoretical addition, supplementation, and/or ornamentation.
The latter is, at the risk of repetition, the primary medium of cultural
appropriation and delimitation of architecture in all its various guises.7 What is at
stake in appropriating, delimiting, and controlling architecture is a cultures power
and authority to fabricate a world that persuasively bears witness to assumptions
about it. Focused as theory is, per force, on the place and the placing of parameters
around architecture, theorys power to delimit, much as its authority to exclude, is
vested in aesthetics. In turn, the exclusionary power and authority of the beautiful,
in whose name Western culture has variously shaped and controlled Western
architecture for much of its history, is founded on a metaphysics that presumes the
ideals that it sums up in the word beautyfull-presence, truth, authenticity, origin,
autonomy, and so onas a given, a ground, a foundation, before their negation
and complication in the figure of the Other. The persistently stated desire for beauty
in architecture is a double take. It frames, shapes, and controls architecture and it
uses architecture to effectively realize, evidence and validate the ideals subsumed
under the aesthetic label.
The only, and at that the all-consuming problem, is that the autonomy,
singularity, and originality on which the exclusionary power and the authority of
the beautiful depend never appear un-appended, un-supplemented, unframed.
There is no outside to contingency that is not always already contingent on
ornamentation. There is no place where the beautiful does not appear without
ornamentation, that is, without the introduction and construction of a borderline
that separates and delimits the beautiful. This borderline is neither internal nor
external to the body beautiful. It can neither be subsumed within it nor detached
from it. It is also not a thing. The measure of the beautiful is the ornamental and
visa versa. It is only by identifying the ornamental, by separating the additional
from the essential that the principal and the peripheral are both made to appear
as such. The border of the beautiful is never there. There is no ornament. There is
only ornamentation perpetually construing the border of the beautiful. This is the
problem and the paradox of ornamentation that neither inclusion nor exclusion
of the ornamental can overcome. This is, however, a problem and a paradox
only insofar as one wishes to sustain the power and the authority to exclude
and delimit in the name of the beautiful, that is, the power and the authority
to control architecture. Hence, the preoccupation with the place and placing of
ornamentation, with its marginalization or domestication, if only to sustain the
pervasive and persuasive illusion of an outside to contingency. This is an outside to
contingency that is perpetually contingent on theoretical supplementationbe
the theoretical supplement a text or a library, a museum, a cinema, and for that
matter any architectural construct that fabricates and imposes limits between the
self-referential and the representational, the original and the copy, the authentic
and the replica, the real and the imaginary, and so on. Each of these constructs,
textual or literal, can only be a theoretical construct.
The story of this latter ornamentation or ornamental insertion, this other
resistance to contingency, this other domestication and exile, we shall follow next.
Notes
1 See Jensen and Conway.

2 Also see Casteras, Phelps Gordon and Lacy Gully; Emerson; Helsinger; Hewison;
Sawyer.
3 See also Bell; Evans; Frankl; K. Clark.
4 See Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture; Laugier; Pugin; Viollet-le-Duc; Sullivan; Wright; Le
Corbusier; Venturi and Scott Brown.
5 A statue in a museum, Brolin tells us, is not an ornament; but place it in a plaza, and it
ornaments the space (Flight of Fancy: The Banishment and Return of Ornament 229).
6 Also see Kirchhoff 4160; Landow, The Aesthetic 814, 1357, 14750, 1623, 24365;
Garrigan 137210; Landow, Ruskin 10, 40, 48; Sawyer 845; Unrau 50; Wihl 16882.
7 A building used as a model or precedent is as much a theoretical construct as any text
labeled theoretical.
Part II
Illusive Distance
3
The Logic of Encampment
The Library
There is a small painting by Antonello da Messina which, Michael Brawne in

introduction to Libraries, Architecture and Equipment, tells us: shows St. Jerome in
his study; the Saint is sitting in an armchair in front of a sloping desk surrounded
on two sides by book shelves (9). The desk and the shelves are part of a wooden
structure raised three steps off the floor of a vaulted Gothic hall that overlooks an
anonymous Italian landscape of hills and buildings (Figure 3.1). In this picture, the
author writes, we have an accurate and brilliant portrayal of the characteristics
most needed if there is to be a successful communication between the accumulated
store of knowledge and the reader (9). Here, condensed into a single picture, we
have a summation of the problems and the solutions that are unique to the library
as a building type (9).
A primary purpose of the library is, Brawne contends, to aid the communication
between the book and its reader,that is, to give the reader access to the accumulated
store of knowledge, expressed in written form, placed within the protective cover
of the book, held well within the bounds of the library (Libraries, Architecture and
Equipment 9). To create a library, Brawne argues, it is necessary to manipulate, as the
painter has done, the furniture, enclosure, space, light, and outlook, to create an
individual and particular space delineated and in some measure separated from
the greater space beyond (9). A successful library allows the reader to make not
only a place for himself, but at the same time detach himself, as Saint Jerome has
done, from an inhospitable ground that is in turn clearly delineated and separated
from the greater landscape in the background.
This prerequisite detachment, it is important to note, is augmented in this
picture by a heightened sense of transition from the anonymous landscape in the
background, past a set of doors whose absence from the picture heightens both
the perception of separation and processional transition, through a vaulted arcade
to the right, up a flight of steps, from a patterned mosaic floor onto a plain wooden
Fig. 3.1 Antonello

da Messina, St
Jerome in his
Study, 46 36
cm, oil on panel,
c.1460, National
Gallery, London
Image source: Art
Resource, NY
platform, into an enclosing chair, within reach of the books, kept well within the
delineated boundaries of this individual and particular space, on shelves.
Therefore, what is required of a library, the constitutional formal gesture, as well
as the primary condition of the librarys success is, as the author aptly points out, a
clear processional organization and transition to an individual and particular space
delineated and detached from its place, in that perspicuous manner center stands
detached from the periphery, foreground from the background, inside from outside,
wood from stone, open from closed, light from dark, upper from lower, and so on.
The library, we may conclude from this account, is analogous to a protective
frame that one must traverse from its fortified outer edges through the sanctified
inner borders that define and protect an individual and particular space. What is
the logic of encampment 57
framed, the object of this ritual frame-up, it is important to keep in mind, is the
book or rather what the book itself keeps well within its own protective frame:
Writing. The difference between the library and the book is, in a manner, none. One
repeats the other as a delineated and detached space keeping the written word in
place.
Why, one might ask, should these particular, if not peculiar, processional and
formal characteristics be required of a building whose primary purpose is to hold
books? Why must this elaborate ritual of detachment and separation be put in
place to aid the communication between the book and its reader?
We find a potential answer in Ruskins discussion of ornamentation in the Seven
Lamps of Architecture. In an attempt to distinguish between proper and improper
ornamentation for architecture, Ruskin argues that there are certain false forms of
decoration which are most dangerous in our modern architecture as being legal
and accepted (112). He feels compelled to warn against these dangerous and false
forms of decoration rather for the barren satisfaction of bearing witness against
them, than with hope of inducing any serious convictions to their prejudice (112).
One such hopelessly dangerous form of decoration is the motto. Ruskin writes:
If any one part of heraldic decoration be worse than another, it is the motto;
since, of all things unlike nature, the forms of letters are, perhaps, the most so.
All letters are, therefore, to be considered as frightful things, and to be endured
only upon occasion; that is to say, in places where the sense of the inscription is of
more importance than external ornament. Inscriptions in churches, in rooms, and
on pictures, are often desirable, but they are not to be considered as architectural
or pictorial ornaments: they are on the contrary, obstinate offenses to the eye, not
to be suffered except when their intellectual office introduces them. Place them,
therefore, where they will be read, and there only; and let them be plainly written,
and not turned upside down, nor wrong end first. It is an ill sacrifice to beauty to
make that illegible whose only merit is in its sense. (1067)
As frightful as letters may appear to Ruskin, he can suffer their presence, for the sake
of their sense, so long as they are placed and in that place, bereft of any aesthetic
appeal, they are clearly seen as obstinate offenses to the eye, introduced solely for
the sake of their sense. Letters become frightful and dangerous, on the other hand,
when they are not in place, that is, in a place where the sense of the inscription
is of greater importance than external ornament. When the material form of the
inscription is allowed to assume any role other than the transparent conveyer of
sense, when with a dash or a tail, turned upside down or wrong end first, the
inscription is allowed to assume a decorative role, it becomes at once frightful and
dangerous (Seven Lamps 107). This danger against which Ruskin so emphatically
warns is, of course, the danger of losing the primacy of the sense or the signified to
the form of the signifier. It is the danger of becoming conscious of the materiality of
the signifier and of reading the form and not the sense. The danger is the letter not
standing apart and being transparent and subservient to its sense, but assuming
aesthetic appeal and merging with its background as a form of decoration at the
expense of its sense.
To obviate this frightful danger, Ruskin asks us to always place writing in a

place where, plainly written, it will be read, and there only. This singular place,
Ruskin tells us, is not on a scroll or a riband, but a tablet or book, or plain roll of
paper (Seven Lamps 108). The difference between an honest and rational tablet
or book or plain roll of paper and the riband, or the flying scroll is that neither of
the former three is considered as an ornament, and the riband, or flying scroll is
(108). Whereas the tablet, as in Albert Durers Adam and Eve, is introduced for the
sake of the writing, understood and allowed as an ugly but necessary interruption,
the riband, or the flying scroll is not an interruption, but a form of decoration that
readily merges into its background (Figure 3.2).
What Ruskin hopes to prevent by the placement of the inscription on a tablet
or a book is the loss of its detachment from its ground or background. The proper
Fig. 3.2 Albrecht

Drer, Adam and
Eve, 24.7 19.1
cm, engraving on
laid paper, 1504,
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
Image source: Art
Resource, NY
place for writing is a place marked by an interruptionin Michael Brawnes term,

an individual and particular space delineated and in some measure separated from
the greater space beyond. So long as inscription is placed where its only merit is
in its sense, so long as we do not focus on its materiality or see any merit in it other
than its sense, so long as it is placed on a ground that Ruskin can readily detach
from the background, it can remain. When it is not part of the architecture, when it
clearly appears as an interruption and an addition, the inscription is acceptable.
Else, it is a frightful and dangerous form, in the least, to those particularly concerned
with the aesthetic performance of forms, for example, Ruskin.
Why writing should be a frightful and dangerous form outside its particular
place is a question that we shall have to address later. For now we should note that
although Messinas picture was not construed in response to Ruskins demand, the
inward layering of space, leading to a well delineated and detached center where
the book is safely kept in place, clearly meets it. Michael Brawnes emphasis on
delineation and separation as the inaugural formal gestures in every successful
library does as well. This is in part because the same logic is at work in each of these
formulations, as well as in the formation of the library as a building-type. This logic
is what I propose to call the logic of encampment, whose manifestations can be as
diverse as the Medieval book-press and the modern stack-system library.
By the logic of encampment, going back to the military root of the word camp
and campus, I mean the demarcation of a place on a ground that defies a sense
of place. I mean the imposition of a protective boundaryliteral or conceptual
on an otherwise undifferentiated ground with the intent to put in place of this
non-place, a confined, ordered, and controlled interiority as distinguished and
opposed to what lies beyond the demarcated boundary. Crucial to this placement
is a heightened sense of transition from the exterior to the interior and a clear
perception of confinement, order, and control within, that is, the two processional
and spatial characteristics of the library as a type aforementioned.
The Medieval book-cupboard or press is a simple, though not a simplistic,
example of the logic of encampment at work in the formation of the library as a
type. Here the book, as we know it, is not given to any place, but confined to a well
delineated, separated, and defined place. Transition and access to this particular
place are subject to a simple, though effective ritual of retrieval and returnof
locks and doors that need be opened and closed. In its press, writing is given to
be endured only on occasions of reaching its sense or endowing it with sense, as
in the case of Ezra, the inscriber of law, depicted in the frontispiece to the Codex
Amiatinus, dating back to the sixth century AD (Figure 3.3). Else, writing remains in
place, hidden from the gaze that may otherwise be subject to, insofar as Ruskin is
concerned, its fright and danger.
The practice of keeping books in locked cupboards or presses was to continue,
as evidenced by Domenico Fontanas Vatican Library, well into the sixteenth
century, and to an extent, beyond (Figure 3.4). The bookshelf, as we know it, is, in
a manner, an extension of the logic that informs the Medieval book-press. It too
is a delineated and defined place which, though open to the gaze, nevertheless,
retains the book in place, by affording it a particular place.
Fig. 3.3 Ezra

writing the law,
Frontispiece
to the codex
Amiatinus, 35 25
cm, parchment,
sixth century,
Laurentian
Library, Florence
Photo credit: Scala/
Art Resource, NY
In the above example as well as in the following genealogical overview of the

library as a type, my intent is not to diminish the value of shelter and protection
that are clearly the overt reasons for the formation of the library as a type, but
to focus on the consequences of each particular solution adopted to shelter and
protect, as well as, in Michael Brawnes words, to aid the communication between
the reader and the book. I am, in other words, concerned with the surplus value
of the shelter and the protection afforded to the book, with the communication
between the reader and the book in mind.
The post-Medieval chained book, lectern and later stall-system library is a Fig. 3.4 Domenico
literal, if not an exaggerated example, of the logic of encampment at work in the Fontana, The Sistine
Hall of the Vatican
formation of the library as a type. In this particular example, best represented by
Library, Vatican,
Leiden University Library (Lieden, sixteenth century) and Michelangelos Laurentian sixteenth century
Library (Florence, 152371), the shell of the Medieval book-press assumes human Photo credit: left to
proportion, as the shelves of the old press take on the form of lecterns arranged right (3.4a) Michal
in rows on two sides of a central aisle (Figure 3.5). The books are no longer locked Osmenda, (3.4b)
John Willis Clark
away, but being exposed to the gaze, they are now chained in place, less, it appears,
they venture out of their new delineated and detached place (Figure 3.8).
Should these chains appear to be a simple safeguard against theft, reflecting
the high material value of the book at the time, it is important to keep in mind
that this admittedly cumbersome and to an extent self-defeating practice
continued well into the eighteenth century (Figure 3.6).1 This is nearly 300 years
after the invention of the printing press that radically diminished the material
value of the book. The perceived value of the chain, in other words, may well have
exceeded the protection it afforded the book against theft. The chain not only
kept the book in place, but it also literally tied the book to its new, though equally
delineated and particular place.
As the shell of the Medieval book-press assume human proportion in the post-
Medieval library, the doors and the locks of the old press also assume a new spatial
dimension. They give way to a new heightened sense of procession and transition
to the world of books. A telling example is the Ricetto of the Laurentian Library
(Figure 3.7). The sole purpose of this tense and complex space is to detach the
particular place of the books behind from its greater monastic context.
Entering below what appears to be the floor line, articulated by string courses
and recessed columns, one is confronted with a monumental staircase whose
highly articulated form offers as much resistance to transition as it gives access
to the reading room from which it cascades down into the vestibule. The drama
of delineation, separation, and processional transition can hardly be given to
greater exaggeration, and for that matter greater economy of space and form,
than it is here. The processional experience from the monastic context to the
Fig. 3.5Paul reading room is analogous to an apprehensive leap over a void separating two
Lacroix, Library of mutually exclusive worlds. One enters this tense and contradictory space only
the University of to depart without ever having had a chance to occupy it.2 The staircase that
Leyden, engraving,
leads to the upper level also leads out of the vestibule to a space that cannot
London, 1870
Photo credit: HIP/ be any different in articulation. Here, in the resting place of the bookhaving
Art Resource, NY had to earn the privilege of accessorder and clarity prevail in glaring contrast
to the slithery vestibule behind (Figure 3.8). As opposed to the preceding
contradictory movements of the receding columns and the projecting aediculea,
in competition with the overlapping upper thrust of the vestibule and the lateral
movement of the staircase, here all is resolved and in place, well within a highly
articulated frame. As compared to Michelangelos library, Messinas delineation
and articulation of Saint Jeromes reading room may well appear subdued, if not
anticlimactic. Both are, however, equally effective.
The heightened sense of transition to the world of books, with an emphasis on
a clear perceptual and experiential separation, in place of the literal separation of
the Medieval press, was to remain a requisite part of the library as a type in each of
its future modifications.3 The bureaucratic and technological apparatus overseeing
access to the stacks of the modern library is, in a manner, a modern supplement to
this experiential separation.
In the next phase of its development, the reading room of the post-Medieval
library became the subject of greater subdivision as the lecterns of the early phase
were replaced by book-stalls (Figure 3.9). Adding another layer of definition,
delineation, and separation to the existing layers, the greater interior space of the
reading room was divided into smaller, more individualized spaces. The reader is
now literally surrounded by walls of books, often in close, if not overwhelming
proximity. The books, still in chains, are now not only in place, but they also
Fig. 3.6 Chapter

Library, Hereford
Photo credit: John
Willis Clark
constitute the boundaries that define their individualized and particular place. We
have here, in a manner, a cross between Messinas reading room and Michelangelos
library, all with the greater good of communication between the reader and the
book in mind.
Although from the stall-system to the Saal-System libraries of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, with their impregnated walls of books en masse, we witness at
once a simple extension and a major transformation of the post-Medieval book-stall
library, the informing logic remains fundamentally the same. In the Saal-System
library, the books, withdrawn from the middle to the inner edges of the reading
Fig. 3.7
Michelangelo,
The Ricetto of the
Laurentian Library,
Florence, 152371
Photo credit:
Alinari/Art
Resource, NY
room, and in the process having shed the chains that literally tied them to their place
in the previous example, become an integral part of the frame that delineates and
defines their place (Figure 3.10). The chains are, to an extent, no longer necessary,
as the books are now well entombed within their own protective boundary and
subject, not individually but collectively, to the gaze of the spectator.
In this superb amphitheater of books, as Boulle referred to his own proposal
for a library, the book is as much the subject of spatial manipulation as the reader
(105). Whereas the focus of the Medieval and the post-Medieval libraries was on the
book, in the Saal-system library, the books assume the position of the spectator
Fig. 3.8
Michelangelo, The
Laurentian Library,
Florence, 152371
Photo credit: top
Scala/Art Resource,
NY, bottomJohn
Willis Clark
and the reader is left to assume the role of an actor who, at the open expanse of the
center stage of this superb amphitheater, is given to the performance of reading,
in place (Figure 3.11).
As opposed to the Medieval book-press that hid the book from the gaze and
the post-Medieval library that exposed it, chained in place, the Saal-system
library celebrates and opens the materiality of the book to public spectacle as a
sublime self-enclosing frame. Superimposing the logic of sublimity on the logic of
encampment, the Saal-system library sacrifices the individuality of the book to
Fig. 3.9 the sublimity of a collective expression. The sheer number of books amassed at the
Christopher Wren, self-enclosing inner edges of the new library present the viewer with an image that
Trinity College
is at once impenetrable and incomprehensible, less one withdraws from the edge
library, Cambridge,
c. 1870, album to the center stage, where the ritual of reading is given to performance.
of 58 Cambridge If the chains of the old library are superfluous to the new, this may be in part
University because, what is now held inescapably in place within the renewed bounds of the
photographs, library is, with greater economy, the identity of the book, as opposed to its individual
New Boston Fine expressions. Along with the chains of the old library, what has also disappeared
and Rare Books from the new is any literal or presumed line separating the book from the library.
As an integral part of the frame that delineates and defines its particular place, the
book, whose identity is now indiscernible from the librarys, no longer requires a
chain, in part because it is now chained to itself.
A telling, though late example, of the Saal or wall-system library is Henri
Labroustes Bibliothque Ste.-Genevive (Paris, 184250). Consciously modeled
after a book, the building presents itself to the viewer from the outside as a
freestanding, inwardly layered, masonry shell that wraps around a well delineated
interior space (Figure 3.12). The content of this space, like a book, is announced on
the cover. The title of this edificial book is inscribed on a series of panels bearing
the names of the authors whose books are kept safe within the masonry cover. The
placement of these panels within the arcade of the upper level is reminiscent of
the flank of Albertis Tempio Malatestiano (Rimini c.1450), where the sarcophagi of
Malatestas courtiers are held within a similar arch on pier structure. The reference Fig. 3.10Lelio
here is not accidental. As we shall see later, the themes of writing and death are Buzzi, Biblioteca
Ambrosiana,
intimately connected.
Milan, 16039
Labrouste had initially intended a large space planted with big trees and Photo credit: John
decorated with statues were laid out in front of the building to shield it from the Willis Clark
noise of the street outside and prepare those who come there for meditation (Van
Zanten 238).4 Had it been implemented, it would have added greater intensity
to the separation and the transition to the buildings interior. Nevertheless, the
processional arrangement of the buildings interior more than compensates for the
gardens absence. Past the masonry frame of the building, the ritual procession to
the world of books in this particular expression of the logic of encampment takes
the form of a relatively dark corridor that takes the participant, from the front entry,
through the entire width of the building, before leading up to a vestibule filled with
light and a characteristic monumental staircase (Figure 3.13). This processional
arrangement, though not as dramatic as Michelangelos, is equally effective in
divorcing the participant from the world behind, before leading the participant
up and around, through another set of doors, into the reading room on the second
level. The processional move up into the place of writing is a gesture of delineation
for which precedent is found not only in Messinas picture or Michelangelos library,
Fig. 3.11 tienne- but in numerous other examples as well. In effect, the stairs detach the place of the
Louis Boulle, book from the ground, as the corridor, in this instance, divorces it from the greater
Bibliothque
space in the background. This double gesture of exclusion displaces and then
Nationale, 1785,
Bibliothque re-places the participant in the delineated and detached place of writing.
nationale de Entering the reading room, past the watchful gaze of the librarian at the
France circulation desk, that is, the gaze of the guardians of the gate to the place of
writing, or the nineteenth century equivalent of the key to the Medieval press, one
is surrounded, at the center stage of this superb amphitheater, with rows upon
rows of books on shelves, whose outward layering from the first through the
massive piers of the second level is counteracted by the light penetrating through
the shell from above and an unseen beyond, in anticipation, one may venture to
guess, the sense awaiting its return to light, pending the performance of reading
at the center stage of this well delineated and sealed space. The books here form a
sublime cover to the light that readily gives one the assurance of a greater presence
beyond the solid materiality of books en masse. In this place, where any presumed
line between aiding and dictating communication between the reader and the
book becomes at best thin, Ruskin, I presume, would have no difficulty seeing that
the only merit of this frightful mass is in the sense it hides behind its cover, pending
the ritual performance of the act of reading.
As reinforcement and a variation to the above theme, the circulation desk was to
find its way from the gates, now de-emphasized, to the center of the reading room.
This is best seen in Sydney Smirkes radial reading room of the British Museum
(London, 18546). The entombment of the book at the edge is now subject to the
watchful gaze of its guardian, placed at a center to which it must return and from Fig. 3.12 Henri
which it radiates back to its resting place at the boundary (Figure 3.14). Labrouste,
Exterior Facade
The modern stack-system library is both an extension of the Wall-system
of Bibliothque
library and a reversion to the lectern and stall-system libraries. It assumes and Sainte-Genevive,
further delineates the three operational parts of the Wall-system library: the 185596, Boston
circulation space, the reading space, and the stack space. However, as yet another Public Library,
manifestation of the logic of encampment, the modern Stack-system library Print Department,
Boston
achieves its predecessors end, not by integrating the books within its protective
frame, but by separating and enveloping itself around the books, in a manner
reminiscent of the post-Medieval library, with its clear divorce between the books
and the librarys enveloping frame.
Although the reading room retains its central position in most early examples
of the type, for example, Asplunds Public Library (Stockholm, 192028) and Altos
Municipal Library (Viipuri, 193035), in most later examples, including most
modern university libraries, the reading space and the resting place of the books
exchange position. In a variation on the theme of center and edge that are the
building blocks of a well delineated and detached place, the books move away
from the edge to the center stage of the old amphitheater, now multiplied and
stacked one on top of the other. The outer edges are, in turn, given to fragmented
and individualized reading spaces or carrels that together form a chain around
Fig. 3.13 Henri

Labrouste, interior
of Bibliothque
Sainte-Genevive,
185596
Photo credit:
Clockwise from top
3.13aStephanie
Benjamin, 3.13b
Marie-Lan Nguyen,
3.13cJason
Whittaker
the new resting place of the book: the modern stacks at the conceptual, if not the Fig. 3.14 Sydney
literal center of the modern library. Smirke, Reading
Room, British
Having returned the books to the center-stage, in the post-Medieval fashion,
Museum,
the modern library, in turn, substitutes the decimal system in place of the post- London, 1856
Medieval chain.5 As opposed to a literal chain, the modern library inscribes the Photo credit: British
identity of each book within a figural chain. Although the books may readily Library
leave their sanctified and entombed place within the modern library, pending the
elaborate ritual of circulation and discharge, their identity never does. It remains in
place within the protective cover of the stack space.
Along with the reading space and the stack space, the circulation desk also
assumes a more autonomous and detached position within the modern library. In
a manner reminiscent of the Ricceto of the Laurentian Library, the circulation space
takes on the form of an additional layer of physical and ritual separation that sees
to the detachment of the book from both the librarys ground and background,
employing the supplemental aid of all the bureaucratic and technological
apparatuses presently afforded it.
A telling example of this reformulation is Louis I. Kahns Exeter Academy Library
(Exeter, New Hampshire, 196572). Here, past the doors and a low vestibule, one
enters a second vestibule with the requisite monumental staircase that leads, on
axis, through a central atrium to an equally monumental circulation space (Figure
3.15). The stacks, placed characteristically above, remain divorced from the ground,
though exposed to the librarians gaze from its new mediating position between
the world outside and the stacks delineated and held above, within the open
concrete frame of the inner atrium and the punctured masonry frame of the library.
In the above, as well as numerous other examples, the exposure of the
materiality of the book to public spectacle in the stacks of the modern library, is
conjoined to a view out. The modern library is, in a manner, a delineated room with
a view. Here, light, coupled with a view out, no longer shines from a presumed and
mysterious beyond through a self-enclosing frame amassed with books, as it was in
the previous model. Rather, it readily penetrates the opened frame of the library to
illuminate the enveloping outer boundary of the stacks, given to the performance
of reading (Figure 3.15b, opposite).6 Surrounded by a ring of light, the books en
masse appear in the center stage of this delineated and detached place as the
holders of a hidden secret that one must decipher at its illuminated edges, caught
between the sublime spectacle of the books piled in repetitive rows of stacks to
one side and the enveloping frame of the library with a view out, to the other.
The view out from the library, as James Siegel explains in Academic Work: The
View from Cornell, offers a stable image whose lines and curves seem to be
linked to the features of the landscape they designate (40). In contrast, the view
in is an unfathomable representation dominated by the straight lines of the rows
of books that repeat themselves regardless of the particular books they stand
for (40). In the face of this profusion of impressions, of books that have lost
their identity because of their great numbers, as indicated by virtually every one
interviewed, there is, a feeling of incomprehension, inaccessibility, and chaos,
coupled as they are with a sense of being trapped or caged in by the books (41).
This sense of being in forced proximity to the books, James Siegel explains, is an
expression of being in the grip of language over which one has no hold (41). A
language, one might add, whose lines and curves in written form are not linked to
the features of the landscape of sense they are meant to summon.
The choice here is either to be controlled by repetition or to sense that something
is hidden and the urge to figure out the mysteries of what is felt to be obscured,
that is, as Ruskin would have it, either to confront this frightful and dangerous mass
of books as form or to assume that there is a hidden merit to itits sensewhich
one must yet decipher, locate, and place. It would be by interpretation, by reading
the books, that one is freed of the sense of being trapped by form, in proximity to
the view out which offers the reassurance of an outside to which one can always
turn for escape (Siegel 41).
The condition of academic work, however, is not to escape, but to remain
turned toward the books. From the vantage point of the reading space, one may
safely turn to the books, assured of the distance and the difference between
the surrounding two images: the comprehensible image of a landscape on the
outside and the incomprehensible material mass of the books on the inside. In
this delineated and illuminated place of reading, one may safely seek authorial
intentions in a landscape of letters whose lines and curves are not linked to the
features of the landscape of sense they summon in absence, all the while assured
of the presence of another, distant and different landscape whose forms readily
coincide with the features of the sense they summon without delay or deferral
Fig. 3.15Louis
the transparent and immediate landscape of speech, of which the place of reading
I. Kahn, Phillips
is an exclusive space by an ancient rule.7 Exeter Library, New
In the space of reading, one may safely summon the absent intentions of the Hampshire, 1972
author, having the means to locate their presence, at a distance, outside the opaque Photo credit:
materiality of the book that is kept safe within the confines of the modern library.8 Clockwise from
left 3.15aPablo
Else, one may have no place to locate the deferred presence of what the letters
Sanchez, 3.15b and
summon in absence. This may well be the fright and the danger Ruskin foresaw 3.15cJacqueline
in the form of the letters that are not detached and well placedthe fright and Poggi
danger of losing the line that safely separates presence from absence, and reality
from representation. The perception of an exterior presence, whether literal as it
is the case in the modern library, or presumed as it is the case in the wall-system
library is, in other words, crucial to the communication between the book and its
reader, which after all, as Michael Brawne put it, is a primary purpose of the library
as a building type.
Whether or not the librarys primary purpose and along with it the librarys
design will have to be modified or changed in response to the advance of the digital
information technologies are questions to which the answers will have to await time.
What is evident so far is that, early predictions to the contrary notwithstanding, the
digital information technologies have not led to a fundamental change in modern
library design, analogous to, for instance, the shift from the wall-system to the
modern stack-system library. Nor have they led to a diminished demand for new
libraries, large or small. In part, this is because the digital apparatus, in its various
guises, is predicated on and readily supports the rituals of access and retrieval for
which the library has been legend. From the start-up screen to all the intermediary
steps and processes, access and retrieval of writing in the digital apparatus follows
a trajectory that closely parallels the librarys. Understandably, the analogous
operations of the library and the digital apparatus have and continue to instigate
trepidation and fear of displacement and substitution. However, the analogous
operations of the digital apparatus also allow it to be, as it has been, appropriated
and subsumed within the library as a complementary apparatus furthering the
librarys age-old institutional agenda. This latter is the path new and old libraries
alike have followed in the past three decades. Two examples should suffice to
demonstrate this trajectory, the Bibliothque Nationale de France (BNF) and
the Seattle Public library, the former for its alleged failings, and the latter for its
purported successes in upholding and furthering the librarys unwavering aim in
the digital, much as the analogue age.
The BNF was intended to be one of the largest and most modern libraries in the
world, incorporating cutting edge technologies to make every form of knowledge
accessible to researchers in the twenty-first century and beyond (Perrault, Jacques
and Lauriot 8).9 Although BNF was to be the forerunner of an entirely new type
of library, almost from the moment the competition winner was announced in
1989, the BNFs design has been the subject of often-severe criticism for its failings
as a library. The criticisms have centered, as Jack Kessler summarizes, upon three
of the basic elements of the design scheme: the towers, the garden, and the
subterranean readers quarters (202). The library is built above and below a raised
rectangular platform, with a large sunken garden at its center. Four proportionally
thin, L-shaped glass towers rise over the four corners of the raised platform to
frame an open void over the platform and the sunken garden (Figure 3.16). A
ring of long rectangular moats that are burrowed into the raised platform links
the widely spaced corner glass towers, separating the central void from the outer
parameters of the platform. In turn, a ring of open stairs and tightly spaced, literally
caged, tall, rectangular planters frame the outer boundaries of the platform.
The glass towers, being the most visible and prominent feature of the BNFs
design, were intended to house the majority of the librarys book collection and
read as four open books framing a void.10 Had the book collection been left
visible through the towers transparent glass curtain wall, the library may well
have read as a conceptual reversion to the wall-system library of a bygone era. In
contrast to Labroustes Bibliothque Ste.-Genevive that was also modeled after a
book, at the BNF one would have seen, not the name of the authors inscribed on
the librarys external frame as it is in Bibliothque Ste.-Genevive, but the books
themselves and at that as an illegible and incomprehensible mass from below.11
The towers would have assumed both texture and depth and bore an experiential
Fig. 3.16
Dominique
Perrault,
Bibliothque
Nationale de
France, 198995
Photo credit: Mirco
Giglioli
analogy to a book, from the outside. However, in response to the immediate outcry
of critics, wooden shutters were incorporated into the tower design and located at
a distance behind the glass curtain wall to save the book collection from exposure
to sunlight, and thereafter the gaze of the spectator from the outside.
The unintended opacity of the glass towers has rendered them mere markers
to an encampment that seemingly holds and protects nothing. The towers glass
faades, according to one reviewer, behind which the entire knowledge of a
nation is preserved, are too flat (Cowan, Part I, 63). They are, another reviewer
clarifies, too insubstantial to anchor themselves or their surroundings in place.
Their smooth facades offer no friction or detail to arrest attention and the flow of
space (Buchanan 66). To rectify this fault, this reviewer wishes Perrault had placed
covers around the towers to clarify the open book metaphor, and allow the
towers to form a single whole, to define a central location, and perhaps also to
convey some civitas (66).
It is not clear the design of this library would have appeared any less enigmatic
had the towers had covers. The four open books, with or without cover, appear
to the viewer to be bereft of content. Though one can clearly see through the
glass faades, there is nothing there for one to see! The metaphoric pages of these
open books, front or back, are blank sheets that offer no friction or detail to arrest
attention in the way a book does and Labroustes Bibliothque Ste.-Genevive did.
Yet, the problem exceeds the unintended open book without content metaphor.
The basic premise of BNFs design, as one prominent reviewer decries, directly
contradicts the typological care and contextual premises taught by respected
architectural ideologues (Vidler 117). This library is, in the typological sense, not
a library. If typologically the library, in its various historic manifestations, has been
predicated on the logic of encampment, the BNF has all the trappings of that logic,
without the requisite effect.
The ritual of entry and access at BNF is as elaborate, forceful, and dramatic as any
critically lauded library. Entering from either of the two streets flanking the short
side of the librarys raised rectangular platform, the visitor has to climb a chorus of
steps, to reach a long and narrow rectangular space flanked by the stairs to one
side and a dramatic gateway defined by a solid volume perforated by tall and deep,
caged planters. To cross, one must traverse between the tightly spaced caged
planters only to enter a long rectangular empty space extending in both directions
to nowhere, on a transverse axis to the path of movement. Beyond the formidable
depth of this empty field, what awaits is yet another and far more monumental
gateway articulated by two flanking glass towers and the deep moat that connects
them. To go past the gate, one must cross the moat on a nefariously balanced
narrow bridge, bordered by a partition wall to one side. What awaits beyond this
monumental gate, at the apparent end of this elaborate journey, is a large empty
space flanked by the two glass towers and a long blank parapet at some distance in
front. Beyond the parapet, one glimpses into more empty space reaching up to the
other two glass towers. The absence in this well-defined void is as profound as the
journeys end is anticlimactic. The camp reached is empty and the encampment
is, monumental as it is, palpably senseless. The experience here is akin to entering
the Ricetto of the Laurentian Library, ascending the stair, only to find oneself not
inside the reading room, but outside on the roof, searching for the missing reading
room. Variation on the theme would be a depiction of St. Jerome having entered
the Gothic hall and ascended the platform only to find neither an armchair, nor a
sloping desk, nor for that matter any books.12 The BNF journey has, in other words,
much of the drama of a typologically correct library without the requisite ending.
The palpable and lingering absence at the climax of BNFs dramatic delineation,
separation, and processional transition leaves the overall impression, according
to one reviewer, of something soulless, ghastly, and oppressive (Bottomore 92).
According to another reviewer with its gigantic book-sculptures dominating a vast
wooden plaza, the whole complex resembles a mausoleum commemorating the
passing of prints hegemony (Buchanan 66). Other reviewers liken the complex to
a gigantic carcass, bereft of a soul, and an enormous animal lying on its back, with
its four legs pointing heavenward (Dawson 65). Yet another reviewer tells us: the
heart of the library, once reached, this heart is revealed not to be there (Vidler 122).
What these analogies have in common is, of course, a missing and missed presence
that all the reviewers assume ought to have been there in a library.
To find the librarys missing heart or soul, one must as yet diagonally cross
the void one had entered to discover a walled-in escalator behind one side of the
bordering parapet. Extending from the top of the raised platform down the short
edge of the enormous tree-lined hole at the center of the platform, the escalator
delivers one at long last to the doors of the library a level below.13 Having finally
reached the librarys interior, both the mood and the reviewers tone change
considerably. Here, we are told, surprisingly, the library takes on a different aspect
and is rather pleasant, with the reading rooms surrounding a courtyard/garden at
the very center of the library edifice (Bottomore 92). The librarys external form,
both forbidding and exhilarating in its enormous scale and Cartesian austerity,
it turns out, shields a rich and surprising interior, an interior rich in colour. An
interior, in sum, that is, to a measure, a typologically correct stack-system library,
where the reading rooms flank the tree-lined courtyard on multiple levels, while
the stacks, devoid of any reading space, hover above the periphery. The only
concession to the digital age in this surprisingly conventional library interior is
the omnipresent computer terminals that will naturally be an indispensable
instrument for our management of men, books and movements. It will be the tool
for the publics access to our treasures. But, like the taperecorder and the video
machine, it will be an intermediary for a part of our heritage; a tool which will be,
like the book itself, fully available to the reader (Perrault, Jacques and Lauriot 14).
Despite this reserved and measured appeal to the digital technologies, the BNF
is remarkably similar in both design and experience to the quintessential digital
apparatus: the personal computer. To the viewer, the BNF similarly presents a blank
screen that provides access to an otherwise invisible content through the multistep
rituals of transition and access that are experientially akin to operating system and
application boot-ups, only to give access to the books it holds for the duration of
readingkeeping them otherwise out of sight in hidden storage.
Although the BNFs interior is surprisingly rich and colorful and to a large extent
conventional, it too does not fail to raise typological trepidations. The BNFs interior has,
similar to its exterior, all the requisite parts without the typologically requisite effect. In
the BNF interior, similar to any typologically correct stack-system library, the spaces of
reading are conjoined to a view out onto a tree-lined exterior. However, unlike other
libraries, this is not an out where one has been and will be, or for that matter, could
be. Similar to the caged plants encountered outside, one reviewer reminds us that
the pine forest in the courtyard is sealed off, as remote as a mirage (Buchanan 66). In
addition to being the mirage of an outside, this garden, another prominent reviewer
laments, is gratuitously introduced without reference to its typological place within
the system of the library per se (Vidler 126).14 The obvious solution would have been,
another reviewer notes, to have the reading rooms and so on in the center and the
garden extended around them (Dawson 83). This would have been the typologically
correct place for the garden. However, instead of surrounding the building, the BNF
garden is surrounded by the building, and the view out is a view in. Offering the
reader no view of the city from the reading rooms or even of the river (Dawson 83)
the BNF reading rooms effectively offer no reassurance of an outside to which one
can always turn for escape, as any typologically correct reading room would (Siegel
41). In addition to lingering and unabated impressions of being caged-in, after a visit
to the BNF, walking through the old areas of Paris (and even some of the new) comes
as an incredible reliefto be once again among people in everyday surroundings,
buildings on a human scale, and trees that are not locked in cages (Bottomore 94).
In contrast to Dominique Perraults winning entry for the BNF design competition,
Rem Koolhaas competition entry, Anthony Vidler tells us, took seriously the
mandate to produce a library for the electronic present (130). Koolhaas entry was
conceived not as a computer, but conceived like some vast three-dimensional
information chip, that is, a solid block of information, a warehouse of all forms of
memory: books, disks, optical instruments, microfiches, computer (131).
But the solid block of information is in fact conceived as a translucent cube,

luminous, and radiating the secrets of its interior to the exterior. On this outside
surface, the shadows of the public spaces within are projected like ghostly
manifestations. (131)
It was not the internal content, that is, the literal or even the figural warehouse
of all forms of memory, that distinguished Koolhaas proposal as a library for
the electronic present. Nor was it the external metaphor per sethe open-book
versus the three-dimensional information chip. The difference was crucially and
essentially lodged in the relationship of the contained to the container, or else the
internal to the external, that is, the extent to which the exterior attested to and
revealed the secrets of its interior (Figure 3.17).
Whereas Perrault hid all forms of memory underneath and around the periphery,
leaving a void in the center, Koolhaas not only located that memory in the center,
as many critics of BNF wished Perrault had done, Koolhaas also gave that memory a
protective coverthe translucent cubewhose outside surface bore the secrets of
its interior as cast shadows that vividly and directly attest to an internal presence. In
other words, much as Perraults warehouse appears empty to the onlooker, Koolhaas
warehouse appeared otherwise by virtue of making its contents thematically visible
on the exterior, without rendering them transparent. The result is, we are told,
a brilliant and architecturally original evocation of the poetics and pragmatics of
information technology, and by far the most successful of all the competition entries.
This is apparently by mere virtue of that one all-important difference in the relationship Fig. 3.17Rem
of the interior to the exterior, the container to the contained. Yet, on that score, the Koolhaas,
Trs Grande
rhetoric of the poetics and pragmatics of information technology notwithstanding,
Bibliothque
Koolhaas design had much greater affinity to a traditional book than a computer project,
chip, in much the same way Perraults design had much greater affinity to a computer Bibliothque
than to an open book. Koolhaas play on the thematic of enclosure and disclosure has nationale
its parallel in traditional book design, where the cover envelops and hides a content de France
competition
that remains, nevertheless, visibly present within its volumetric thickness as the sum
entry, 1989
total of all the pages. This is a content whose presence the outer surface of the book Photo credit: Office
perpetually summons by title, and claims it in the name of the author. for Metropolitan
To be a library for the electronic present, what is requisite is, it appears, the Architecture
conjoining of the traditional enclosure of content to the testimonial disclosure of
its presence. This is to say that the library for the electronic present is not one
that is per se digitally savvy or technologically up-to-date. Rather, it is a library that
ameliorates the consternations that are omnipresent in the electronic present.
The mechanically (re)produced book has, from inception, offered a direct
correlation between its physical outward form and its content (writing). Nunberg,
in the same volume as Vidlers account above, tells us:
A book doesnt simply contain the inscription of a text, it is the inscription. It is

as fat as the text is long, it opens at the beginning of the text, and if we break
off our reading, we are left literally in media res. This property is crucial to the
way we read any book whose content is essentially linear or narrative, as we
subconsciously register the external boundaries of the volume in terms of the

space between our thumb and forefinger, and reckon our place in the text
accordingly. (18)
In contrast, much as the book gives its written content the appearance of
permanence and immutability, the digital media does the opposite. Not only is
the computer screen not correlated with one content, within the physical bounds
of the screen, every content becomes temporal, mutable, and seemingly limitless.
A computer doesnt have to store texts in a form that corresponds to the space
they occupy when they are displayed; that is the source of all its informational
capacity. But for just this reason, there is no perceptible correlation between the
boundaries of the texts we read on a computer and the physical properties of
the artifact or the display itself. So there is inevitably a sense of disconnection
between the text that is immediately present to the senses and the text that
stretches out indefinitely and invisibly on either side of it You literally cannot
grasp an electronic text in its entirety. (Nunberg 18)
Wherever and whenever the electronic text appears, it is de facto partial and
transitory. Its bounds are not elsewhere; they are nowhere. Unlike the book,
the electronic text is spatially beyond grasp. It is incapable of offering a direct
correlation between the appearance of the text and its literal presence, that
is, between where the text is seen (read) and where it is, between its temporal
appearance (the screen) and its spatial presence (the disk) as indiscernible digits.
The electronic text does not forego its physicality as writing. Its physicality is
dissociated and displaced. In other words, the electronic text acts like writing,
but it is not like writing. What the placeless electronic text offers in place of
the correlation that the book has perpetually offered is spatial and temporal
challenges akin to those Ruskin foresaw in ornamental inscriptions. In the latter
case, the text was physically present as ornamental form, whereas its sense was
de facto displaced, if not dispensed with. The problem with the electronic text is
the inversethe sense is present, though the text actually and durably is not. It is
there only in proxy. There is, in both cases, a spatial and temporal dislocation and
dispersion that a supplementary encampment is hoped to recompense. Be this
encampment that of a tablet or a book or an encampment whose outer limits are
as directly correlated with its content as a book.
Of course, the library has been a supplementary encampment to the mechanical
text from inception. However, to incorporate and encamp the electronic text as
well, the library for the electronic present is additionally asked to compensate
for what is missing and missed in the electronic present. It is asked to provide,
by way of substitution and supplementation, what the electronic text cannot: a
perceptible correlation between the boundaries of the texts and the physical
properties of the artifact. The less the electronic text is like writing, the more the
library for the electronic present is wished to be like a book, that is, to enclose
and disclose its content at the same time. This is what Koolhass proposal does
and Perraults does noteven though to a measure Perraults initial competition
entry did. Whereas Perraults final design amplifies all the consternations digital
technologies raise regarding spatial and temporal bounds for writing, Koolhaas
design correlates, compensates, and reassures. Nevertheless, Koolhaas design was
not selected as the winning entry! The reason this typologically correct library for
the electronic present did not win the competition was, Vidler speculates, because
of one mistake.
Koolhaas mistake was to configure information under the sign of translucency

and shadowy obscurity; the politics of the moment insisted, and still insist, on the
illusion that light and enlightenment, transparency and openness, permeability
and social democracy are not only symbolized but also effected by glass. Such
simple wisdom, effective enough in the rhetoric of ideology, is well served by an
architect who asserts: I dislike walls; I like transparencies. (1312)
In time, Koolhass would have a chance to correct the asserted mistake of the BNF
entry in the competition entry for another library for the electronic present:
the winning entry for the Seattle Central Library, completed in 2004 to critical
applaud. Whereas in Koolhass BNF proposal the requisite enclosure and disclosure
of content were tenuous and tangential, consisting of shadows cast on the
autonomous form of a translucent cube, in the Seattle Central Library, under the
banner of transparency, Koolhass was to establish a direct correlation between the
container and the contained (Figure 3.18).
The Seattle Central Library (SCL) was intended to honor books and prepare for
ambitious technology (Kubo and Prat 66). It was intended to redefine the library
as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information
store where all potent forms of medianew and oldare presented equally and
legibly (11). Although, at first glance, we are told, it is easy to miss the logic of
the buildings exterior form, leading some critics to conclude that not only does it
not look like a library; it does not look like a building (Mattern 10), the irregular
form of the building we are assured by another reviewer arises from an almost
slavish devotion to a detailed program developed by the library board and staff
(Olson 88). The exterior form, striking, even startling as it may seem is merely the
correlated outward expression of what is inside (Kubo and Prat 66).
After analyzing functions and space requirements, five broad categories emerged:
administration and staff, collections, information, public space and parking. The
architects visualized the space as five stacked boxes and used that as starting
point for the buildings design. The boxes, or sections, were repositioned to allow
better views and light. The headquarters on top was pushed east to look down
Fifth Avenue toward Mount Rainier, and the area holding the main book stacks
was nudged north to offer reading-room views of Eliot Bay. Moving those upper
floors also let more light into the lower floors. (66)
Having pushed and pulled the programmatic platforms in deference to the view
outa feature no stack-system library can be without, and not be censured as was
the BNFthe stack of shifting, precariously balanced volumes on the inside were
shrink-wrapped in a taut skin of steel and glass that captures the five floating
boxes like a butterfly net (Kubo and Prat 66). The relationship of the buildings
Fig. 3.18Rem
Koolhaas,
Seattle Central
Library, 2004
Photo credit:
Author
exterior form to its interior is, as Andreas Zoch, the project manager notes, like
the relationship of skin to body (quoted in Swimmer 44). An equally apt analogy
would be the book whose outer form directly correlates with the content it
envelops. If SCL does not look to some like a library, or even a building, it is because,
unlike the libraries of the mechanical age, and most conventional buildings, it is
not the external envelop that gives the interior its outline; it is the interior outline
that dictates the external form. The outer skin, literally conceived, is so closely
fused to the irregular outline of the internal bodyshaped in deference to the
requisite views outthat illuminated at night, it glows like a giant X-ray, exposing
its vital organs through its exoskeleton (Olson 88). In daylight, the literal nighttime
transparency is supplanted by the formal transparency of the buildings interior
outline, articulated with a steel and glass curtain wall that much as it reveals the
form of the interior as a whole, it forcefully envelopes and separates that interior
from all that is beyond it. Although the glass panes of the buildings diamond
patterned skin are, for the most part, transparent, ones gaze is not led through
the skin from the outside. Rather, it is dispersed across the buildings uniform outer
surface, if only to underscore its enveloping function. From the interior, on the
other hand, the same seemingly thin enveloping skin reads as a thick and forceful
divider as ones gaze is arrested by and led through the considerable depth of the
aluminum clad, diamond patterned frame, whose cage-like transparency locates
the view out at an imposing distance from the viewer.
Aside from the shift in the relationship of the container and the contained, SCL
is experientially as familiar a library as any preceding it. The logic of encampment
informs every facet of the design, from the carefully layered entry sequences, to the
book-stacks that are separated and enclosed in a spiral and lifted well above the
lower floors, toped and sided by reading spaces with obligatory views out through
the deep cage-like frame, all arrived at not by the familiar monumental staircases
of prior libraries, but brightly colored escalators that play much the same role in a
different form.15
In the preceding discussions, I have tried to point out that despite various
manifestations and numerous stylistic discontinuities, the processional
organization and the spatial characteristics of the library as a building type have
remained essentially the same from the Medieval book-press to the modern stack-
system library and beyond. This is not to decry the significance of the differences
and the important transformations in the history of the library as a building type.
One may readily trace the specifics of these differences and transformations, as I
have tried to do with SCL and BNF, to, among other factors, the specific modalities,
shifts, and changes in the cultural perception and definition of what constitutes
knowledge, how and where it is located (localized), and in what relationship it is
placed with respect to its manifestation(s) and/or representation(s). For instance, in
contrast to the Medieval book-press that was predicated on the idea of knowledge
as a locked and hidden secret awaiting revelation, in the Laurentian Library, having
climbed ones way up the taxing stairs of the slithery vestibule into the calm of
the reading room, one may be well inclined to agree with Alberti that the path to
knowledge is fraught with difficulties and it is on industry and diligence no less
than in the favours of Nature and of times that the ability to achieve the highest
distinction in any meritorious activity relies (On Painting 33). Imagining oneself
arriving in the reading room of a Saal-System library, surround by walls of books
en masse from behind which light penetrates and pervades the space, one may
be readily inclined to agree with Marc-Antoine Laugier among other proponents
of the enlightenment, that truth, indelible as it is, is hidden behind the outer
cover that hides it from view. To discover the truth, one must tear away the veil
which covers it, if only to see the light that awaits only those who make the effort
to penetrate the outer cover (2, 7). In a similar vein, confronted with sublime
spectacle of rows upon rows of books on shelves in the stack-system library, one
may be well inclined to agree with Ruskin that the only merit of this frightful
mass is in its sense (Seven Lamps 107). Nevertheless, these diverse manifestations,
including the reassuringly transparent libraries of the digital information age,
share a common logic. Each, at a certain level, is a different expression of the
logic of encampment and as such an attempt to purvey to the viewer a sense of
confinement, control, and order, that is, to assure the participant that the books
are in place and under control. This latter is, in no small measure, a reflection of the
ambivalence of Western culture toward what the library seeks to place and keep in
place: the written word.
The Pharmacy
Inscribed between reflections on the Coliseumthe locus of the ephemeral body

and the celebration of lifeand the Cenotaphthe locus of the immortal soul
and the consecration of deathwe find Boulles reflections on the library (1035).
This seemingly innocuous siting is neither accidental nor altogether arbitrary. It
marks a step on a much-traversed historic path and ascribes to the pervasive logic
of a powerful myth that the library as a cultural institution and a building type at
once embodies and promotes.
Time and again, we find reflections on the library intertwined with questions of
mortality and immortality, body and soul, life and death, and relatedly, order and
chaos.16 Yet, the library is the locus of neither of the polar opposites it appears to
evoke in reflection. It falls, as Boulles siting already indicates, somewhere between
the two. It marks their meeting place where Boulle tells us: one experiences
those noble transports, that sublime impetus that seem to draw forth soul from
body. It is, in other words, the place of a forced displacement, of body and soul
enjoined and dis-joined at oncethe place of writing.
Writing has been, Jacques Derrida points out, the subject of simultaneous
condemnation and praise throughout the history of Western culture for being the
purveyor of life and the agent of death at the same time.17 It has been commended
and censured for immortalizing and supplanting the author by preserving and
dispensing with living thought at once.
As a device, deemed external to the normal functions of language and thought,
writing allows the living thought to leave of itself a material trace that though
inanimate and dead, unattended and intractable, nevertheless immortalizes the

life it supplants and/or substitutes. Whereas speech functions in the immediacy
of thought as a transparent and seemingly immaterial realization of its presence,
writing entombs and defers thought. It makes the absent present, though devoid
of the immediacy and the pliancy that are its distinguished marks.
Regardless of its immortalizing virtue, or rather because of it, writing has been
consistently assigned a secondary, subservient role with respect to speech and
condemned for being, among others, a bastardized form of speech, a dangerous
supplement, or in Platos term, a Pharmakon: neither simply a remedy nor simply a
poison, but both at once (Derrida, Dissemination).
If writing is deemed to be a precarious and pernicious drug, it is in part because
its effect cannot be delimited in space and to its assigned place and role as the
dead imitation of a living speech. If it is deemed to be a dangerous substitute for
speech, it is in part because writing does not simply insinuate itself in the place of
speech from outside. It also permanently dis-places living thought and the speech
that is presumed to be the privileged locus of its presence.
The alleged derivativeness of writing, however, real and massive, Derrida
notes, is possible only on one condition: that the original, natural, etc. language
had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself
always been a writing (Of Grammatology 56). Writing can take the place of speech
as a poor substitute and a dead imitation of it, if speech itself is a form of writing,
that is, if speech itself functions by virtue of the same difference and deferral that
is presumed to be peculiar to writing. Speech can only be substituted, imitated,
or represented by writing, if it has a repeatable, imitable or re-presentable form
whose signifying function is not governed, or determined by what it signifies. If
the seemingly transparent face of speech was indeed linked to the features of
the landscape of thought it designates, it could never be substituted, imitated, or
represented. If, on the other hand, the landscape of thought can only be located
in the space of representation, if speech itself must necessarily defer the presence
that it can only represent, then the living thought itself must forego its privilege
as a simple presence in order to appear in representation as a deferred presence,
that is, to appear at all. In short, what opens meaning and language is writing
as the disappearance of natural presence (159), along with, one might add, the
disappearance of a decidable place within whose demarcated boundaries writing
may be put to rest as a substitute representation.
Writing has no decidable place. It cannot be readily placed, because what we
shall find outside every assigned place is only more writingan arche-writing
always older than the speech of which writing is said to be a poor and dangerous
imitation (Derrida, Of Grammatology 56). The writing that opens language and
meaning, at once exceeds and defies any sense of place or any act of placement,
predicated on, in the simplest terms, a clear boundary separating two opposite
terms, for instance, an interior and an exterior. Writing is, in a manner, that
undifferentiated ground that precedes the act of encampment.
Should one wish, however, to retain the privilege of speech as the locus of a
living, present thoughtall the metaphysical, theological, and socio-political
implications of this assumption withstandingthen one must indeed make every

effort to delimit the dangerous effect of this paradoxical drug to a decidable place.
Should one wish to heed the imperative call of a world view that assumes presence
and absence, life and death, reality and representation, speech and writing, and
so on, to be mutually exclusive terms, separated by a line, or what amounts to
the same, by various shades of gray, then there is little choice but to resort to the
logic of encampment. One must make every effort to place writing: be this in a
subservient supplemental position with respect to speech or within the protective
cover of the book, held well within the bounds of the library. One must substitute
a clear sense of place for the missing place of this dangerous pharmakon: a place
from which speech can be withdrawn to the outside, safe and untouched by its
effects.
The book is, of course, one such place. The idea of the book which always refers
to a natural totality, Derrida notes, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.
It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the
disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, against difference in
general (Of Grammatology 18).
The library is another place: a supplemental, immobile, and generalized
doubling of the book, encompassing and placing the written word in place. This
is to say that the logic of encampment at work in the formation of the library is, to
a measure, an ideological response and an institutional solution to the enigmatic
place of writing. It is, in a manner, a defensive measure against the disruption and
aphoristic energy of writing: a defensive measure that sees to the encampment
of the book in a heterotopic space,18 that is construed to keep in place that which
has no decidable place.
As much as writing confounds and defies a sense of place, the librarythe
institution and the building typesystematically seeks to delineate, order, and
place. In the space of a non-placethe undifferentiated space of representation
the library insinuates a defensive outpost. It differentiates an otherwise
undifferentiated ground into two distinct and separate realms: the realm of writing
and a realm for all that one may wish to safely withdraw and oppose to writing,
that is, a realm for the presence, the sense, or the living thought that writing defers.
The concerns of the library are, in other words, as much external as they are
internal. Mindful of the pernicious nature of the drug it is given to administer, the
library, as a cultural institution, substitutes a formal, spatial, and experiential clarity
of place for what writing fundamentally lacks and denies: a decidable place. This is
not only a place for itself, but also and of greater concern, for the presence it defers.
Within the delineated, distinguished, and highly elaborated confines of the library,
writing assumes a spatial dimension. It assumes an outside. As the library localizes
and brackets the book, it also renders what lies outside its assigned spatial limits,
immune to the disruptive energies of writing.
As a building type, informed by the cultural/ideological agenda of the institution
it serves, the library provides the participants a conceptual vehicle for thinking the
resolution of the paradox of writing in binary terms. It offers the participantby
designa spatial experience that is profoundly alien to writing as the space of a
non-place.
The careful delineation, separation, and processional transition that are the
hallmarks of a successful library, put the relationship between writing and all that
one may wish to escape its grip, in the proper cultural perspective. Following a
totemic logic,19 within the confines of the library as a requisite individual and
particular space, writing is given to stand in the same relationship to the presence
it defers, as inside stands to outside, path to place, foreground to background, open
to closed, light to dark, upper to lower, center to periphery, and all other binary
spatial and formal terms that are called on to create an individual and particular
space, delineated and detached from its greater place. Should one even wish to
conceive of the relationship between writing and the presence it defers, in any
terms other than in binary terms, one must confront and contradict the immediate
experience of the library. As much as writing resists a sense of place, the library
successfully resists its defiance of a sense of place, to the point of invisibility.
If, within the confines of the library, writing is given to assume a spatial
dimension, outside the delineated boundaries of this cultural and institutional
construct, writing assumes a temporal dimension. There, it is a figure in transition
and/or circulation by virtue of that individual and particular place to which its
identity is irrevocably tied: the library. The production and consumption of this
pernicious drug outside the bounds of the library has the assurance of a destination
that keeps its malevolent and disruptive energies in check and under control.
If writing is a pharmakon, we may conclude, the library is a pharmacy and
the institution the pharmacist who sees to the proper dispensation of the drug.
The cultural participant is, in turn, the consumer of the myth of writing as a pure
remedy, in search of a decidable verity, kept in proxy, deep within the cover of the
book, well within the bounds of the library, frequently found at the conceptual
center of the modern university campus.
The Campus
Turning away from the center to the boundaries of the modern campus itself, we
find ourselves, once again, within the bounds of a well-defined camp. Although
the subject of this particular encampment is not writing, but education, the logic
of this encampment is not fundamentally different from the logic that has seen
to the encampment of the book within the library at the conceptual center of the
campus (Figure 3.19).
While designing the University of Virginia, Paul Turner points out, Thomas
Jefferson described his goal as the creation of an academical village (69).
Although this term expressed Jeffersons own views on education and planning,
Turner argues, it also summarized a basic trait of American higher education
from the colonial period to the twentieth century: the conception of colleges and
universities as communities in themselvesin effect cities in microcosm (69).
Since the inception of the modern campus, and through each modification,
what has remained virtually constant in the design of the campus is the assumption
that the pursuit of higher education is best confined to a well-defined and distinct
camp whose clarity of outline is best summed up by analogies that bring to mind
Fig. 3.19 Thomas distinct boundaries and a clear sense of placea village, a microcosmic city, or
Jefferson, a community in itself. Even though, over time, most campuses lose the clarity of
University
their original boundaries to growth, University of Virginia being a case in point, the
of Virginia,
Charlottesville, presence of these boundaries remain, in part, assumed and implied by the word
1819 campus that sums up, Turner tells us, not only the distinctive physical qualities
Photo credit: Karen of the American college, but also its integrity as a self-contained community (4).
Blaha The desire and the attempt to give education a distinct place, that is, to localize
it within the spatial bounds of a self-contained camp is, as compared to the library
at the center of the campus, yet another cultural and institutional response to the
dilemmas and the paradoxes of the subject of the encampment: in this instance,
the dilemma of education, commonly viewed as an external, cultural supplement
to human nature.
Education as a supplement, Derrida points out, is neither a pure addition nor
a simple accretion (Of Grammatology). If education as a supplement adds to and
completes human nature, it also speaks of a fundamental gap and an internal
deficiency in that nature. The supplemental education makes it impossible to
identify an internal human nature that is not burdened by the weight of things
external to it. If education supplements and completes human nature, it also dis-
places it, that is, the supplementation denies the nature it completes a location or
place within or without, inside or outside the human subject.
It is in place of this dis-placement that the logic of encampment substitutes
a clear sense of place in the form of a campus. If the modern university seeks to
encompass education as supplementation to nature within the bounds of a well-

defined place, the motivating concerns are as much practical as they are ideological.
The campus is the formal and spatial vehicle that allows us to conceive the
deficiency to which education points as having temporal and spatial boundaries
not endemic but specific to time and place. It allows us to conceive of a complete
nature residing, not within, but outside the boundaries of the university as the
place of supplementation. If the library tries to withhold its subject within, we may
conclude, the campus tries to keep it without, only to have an ideal to reflect back
on from within.
Notes
1 The following is a telling case in point:

I would have you know that in the year 1617 the library was completely altered and made
to assume an entirely new appearance. This alteration was rendered necessary by the
serious damage which, to our great sorrow, we found the books had suffereda damage
which was increasing dailypartly from the sloping form of the desks, partly from the
inconvenient weight of the chains. (J. W. Clark 160)
2 For a comprehensive discussion of the unique formal characteristics and insolubly
contradictory readings of this space see Wittkower.
3 Henry James had a specific term for this requisite experiential separation (242):
penetralia, that is, the sense of penetrating out of the everyday hustle and into the
shadowy preserve of learning (249).
4 Also see Levine; Bressani and Grignon.
5 This is not to imply that the invention of the decimal system coincides with the
formation of the modern library, but that the system is an effective aid to the modern
library.
6 By finding space for carrels under the eaves of a building, one library architect tells
us, we not only increase the utilization of the building and improve efficiency, but
create a memorable space to which people are attracted and want to return (Freeman
173).
7 It was required, by the ancient rules of the library, Claude Hmr, the librarian at
the Library of Sorbonne from 163843 tells us: that reading, writing, and handling of
books should go forward in complete silence (qtd. in J. W. Clark 160).
8 One library expert tells us: Trees also go well with books. The idea of readers being
able to take a good book out to read it beneath a tree, or being able, at least, to see
trees through a window as they read, is as attractive to the French as it is to Americans
who know Joyce Kilmers poem (Kessler 200).
9 Jean Favier notes:
Hence the new library had to supply not only a new dimension to our original Bibliotheque
Nationale, but also a whole new concept of our contribution to the civilization of the
Third Millennium. The computer will naturally be an indispensable instrument for our
management of men, books and movements. It will be the tool for the publics access to
our treasures. But, like the taperecorder and the video machine, it will be an intermediary
for apart of our heritage; a tool which will be, like the book itself, fully available to the
reader. (14)
10 Perrault notes:
The four open book evince a concept with absolute clarity and conciseness. Its part of
the new librarys dialogue with people. For many of those people their first act of reading
in association with the library will be done in those four open books. This relationship
between the architectural ensemble and the language is necessary if we are to initiate
communication; it supplies a mnemotechnical means of identifying and locating the
library within the city. Afterwards, less immediate, more contradictory and complex
perceptions will lead to other levels of reading. (qtd. in Favier 48)
11 This latter would have been conceptually similar to the imprinted glass skin of the
Herzog & De Meurons Cottbus Library (20014).
12 A similar experience would be to cross the masonry shell of Bibliothque
Ste.-Genevive, go through the corridor, up the stairs, through the doors, only to
find oneself outdoors.
13 One reviewer notes:
The architect shunned conventional wisdom, which states that the entrance to a building
should be on the outside. Instead, in order to enter these reading rooms, you must first
climb over them, the entrance being on the inner, courtyard side. This absurd journey
exposes the sheer stupidity and full ugliness of the building. (Bottomore 92)
14 Also:
The area reserved for researchers will have a view over a patch of forest, a quintessential
Fontainebleau which will nevertheless be inaccessible, save in the unexpected event of
a disaster. These favored researchers will thus have a view over this garden, but they will
not be able to stroll round it. The entrances for the general public are on the upper floors
only, The public will not be entitled to the view over the garden, except by going to a
walk-cum-resting-place, separated from the reading rooms by a partition, and in effect
prohibiting the concurrence of work and contemplation of nature. (Edelmann 22)
15 Much of what was said about SCL applies to other aspiring libraries of the digital
present. Prominent among these is the SCLs contemporary, amoeba-shaped, etched-
glass-clad Cottbus Technical University Library by Herzog & de Meuron.
16 For an insightful discussion of this subject please see Siegel.
Also a poignant case in point is Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose, where the themes
of life and death are intimately connected to a labyrinthine library and the book posed
as the literal agent of death (Eco).
17 Please see Derrida, Dissemination; Of Grammatology.
18 Please see Foucault, Of Other Spaces 227.
19 Please see Lvi-Strauss.
4
The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity
The use of objects which have properties is usually prescribed by ritual. There
are rules about the way they should be collected. There are regulations
regarding their use, the time, place, quantities involved, without going into
the sometimes vast array of accessory rites which accompany them and which
allow the utilization of their properties and the application of their sympathetic
mechanisms.
(Mauss 102)
The Collection
Museums are, as one contemporary account has it, really last-ditch solutions to
the problem of knowing what to do with artworks when they have been moved
from their original homes for any number of reasons (Bertelli, Bossaglia, and Irace
287). It is, we are told, really as desperate as that. Our civilization has come up with
no better solution than to pigeonhole artworks and lock them safely away (287).
Curious as this determination may be, it speaks to the same logic as the
following account ascribing the inception of the museum to two causes, one, a
level of physical wealth which allows an abundant production of art, and two, a
form of culture in which this art is seen as a kind of surplus not immediately wanted
in any everyday secular or religious activity (Brawne, The New Museum 8). What
both accounts assume, and theirs is a pervasive assumption, is that the museum
is a response to a spatial displacement. Presuming that those works of art that fall
outside everyday secular or religious activity or their original homes present a
problem, both see the museum as a solution, desperate or otherwise, to arts want
of a place, that is, of having to have a designated place.
Once displaced, works of art have to be, both accounts assume, re-placed and at
that not in any place but in a place that, according to another account, must surely
be set apart in the sense of being a special place, where life takes on a different
dimension and there is time and space to think and feel, and room for silence
(Powell, New Museums x). Not knowing what to do with two and three-dimensional
graphic representations that fall outside everyday secular or religious activity or
their original homes, other than re-locating them to a special place is a concept
that is peculiarly Western and not very old.1
Unlike the library and the theater with their long history of development, the
art museum is barely over 200 years old. This is assuming, of course, that the art
museum is a building type serving a public institution that sees to the collection,
preservation, and public display of art. As a public institution, the art museums
history dates back to the July 27, 1793the date of the Decree issued by the
Revolutionary Convention in Paris for the creation of the Museum of the Republic
at the Louvre which subsequently opened on November 9, 1793. The spatial and
formal consequences of this act were not to be fully realized at the Louvre palace for
another 190 years. Elsewhere, the spatial and formal development of the museum
as a building type had to await the heated debates and final codification of the
type in Germany and to a lesser extent England, in the decades of 1810s to 1830s.
The constitution of the Muse Central des Arts, as the museum at the
Louvre palace was renamed in 1796, is significant insofar as it marks a first in the
appropriation of art by a then newly construed entitythe public. In its sphere
the museum would remain heretofore. This is to say that the history of the museum
is thoroughly implicated in the history of the public and its self-constitution as a
sovereign entity. Taking charge and exercising control over art as a body of objects
delegated to a special place was assumed and continues to be one expression of
this sovereignty.
Significant and peculiar as the publics initial and continuing preoccupation
with gathering and administering art is, and we will have to return to this subject
later, it is important to note that the practice of collecting art was well precedented
in Europe. The public assumed, then re-defined, and thoroughly re-organized a
private practice that traces its history back to the onset of the Renaissance. The
practice of collecting art objects, public or private, presupposes, of course, their
designation as collectibles. The history of this classification, recent as it is, is not
patently different in duration from the history of art itself and it is not all too clear
which classification came first.
The Middle Ages, Malraux reminded us long ago, were as unaware of what
we mean by the word art as were Greece and Egypt, who had no word for it (53).
What we understand by art was the invention of the Renaissance, or rather of a
people who, over time, began to see in the Virgin a statue and in the classical
statue not a heathen idol or a mere puppet, but the embodiment of a universal
ideal: the beautiful (53). The invention and the ensuing re-classification of
paintings and statues as art required them to relinquish, in Benjamins terms, their
cult value to assume in its place exhibition value (The Work of Art 224). To be
(re)classified as art, paintings and statues had to eschew their cult referents in favor
of a subject and submit themselves as objects to an aesthetic test for a measure of
their exhibition value.
The designation of art objects as collectibles did not exclusively depend, however,
on their newly acquired aesthetic value. The transformation of the cult referent
The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity 93
into a subject had distinct spatial ramifications and these as well bore directly on
the classification of art objects as collectibles. The first spatial ramification had to
do with the recognition of two and three-dimensional graphic representations
as autonomous objects. As cult objects, paintings and statues were meant to
establish a visual link between the viewer and the cult referent. They were meant to
be seen, not looked at. They functioned as intendedmaking the absent referent
presentso long as they remained invisible as objects. As works of art, on the
other hand, paintings and statues held their newly acquired status so long as they
retained a distance from both the viewer and the place they happened to occupy.
Taking note of the object and not the referent entailed taking note of the distance
and the space between the observer and the observed. As cult objects paintings
and statues collapsed space, as art objects they imposed it.
The spacing that constituted an insular frame all around the art object, in effect,
displaced paintings and statues from their allocated place at home, in the palace,
the church, and so on. The price of autonomy was the loss of place.2 This is the
loss Valry was to deplore at the end of his essay the problem with museums
to which we will turn later. For now, we should note that the autonomy that set
paintings and statues adrift as autarchic self-referential objects transposed them
into collectibles at the same time.
Once without a place and subject to collection, paintings and statues were
collected, re-classified, and re-located to a new and specific place: the repositories
that in various forms were popular among European ruling elite in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.3 The logic that saw to the re-classification and
re-placement of these placeless representations in various repositories is
fundamentally the same logic that had seen to their initial placement as cult
objects and in time would see to their re-placement in the museum. Deciphering it
will be our focus for the remainder of this chapter.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, we find dislodged paintings and statues
reposited in places that, over the course of the succeeding two centuries, would
develop into two distinct realms: the cabinet and the gallery, or else the
Wunderkammer and the Kunstkammer.4 The collections titles vary overtime
and there were considerable overlaps in the holdings. What distinguished one
collection from another was not so much its label, as its distinct collection practice.
The distinction between the cabinet and the gallery is useful, in other words,
only insofar as it serves to distinguish not two specific repositories, but two distinct
practices that were often accompanied by two correspondingly distinct spatial
formulations. The gallery, often a long rectangular room, served as a repository for
paintings and statues gathered there for their aesthetic and iconographic value.
These works were often tightly integrated with the decoration of the room, forming
a path with a multiplicity of views along the way.
The cabinet, on the other hand, was a designated place wherein, as Francis
Bacon put it, whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare
in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things
hath produced; whatsoever nature has wrought in things that want life and may be
kept; shall be sorted and included (quoted in IImpey and MacGregor 1).5
The bafflingly heterogeneous body of objects encountered in these cabinets

appears to have one thing in common (Figure 4.1). Rare, singular, or wanting of
life, the objects of the cabinet eschewed reproduction. They fell outside the
normal cycle of (re)production where they were deemed collectible. Divided, as
Caspar Neickel suggests in his 1727 treatise, Museographia, into the two categories
naturalia and curiosa artificialia, the collectibles in the cabinet were, by nature or
design, out of place in the domain of the ordinary. Most had their origin in other
times and other places. Whether, a horn of a unicorn, a nautilus shell, cameos and
intaglios, Egyptian and Roman antiquities, American featherworks, or oriental
calligraphy, the objects in the continental cabinet were unique productions, not
necessarily in origin, but where they were collected in the one place outside of
which they had no immediate place.
Fig 4.1Engraving
of the Francesco
Calzolaris Cabinet
of Curiosities,
Musaeum
Calceolarium,
Verona, 1622
For all its ambition to behold and collect into one place, as Peter Munday noted
in 1634, more oddities, rarities, and singularities than a man should see if hee
spent all his life in Travel, the cabinet was not meant as a place of exhibition or
public display (qtd. in IImpey and MacGregor 150). The objects in the cabinet were
not meant to be seen. On occasion foreign dignitaries may have been taken there
to impress upon them the sovereign reach of the ruler.6 The cognoscenti were also
given permission to examine and study the cabinets content. For the most part,
however, the cabinet was a secluded, and to the public, an inaccessible place. The
impetus behind the collection was not to make oddities, rarities, and singularities
visible, but to render them invisible. The goal was to gather and hold them in one
place and, in effect, exert spatial control over these otherwise placeless objects.
What the cabinet accomplished was not only the preservation of the rare and the
singular, but also the institution of a distinct domain that kept the rare and the
singular out of circulation and the places to which it did not belong. The spatial
control exerted over these authortic objects may well be what made the cabinet
suitable for the occasional display of sovereignty to foreign dignitaries. What was
put on display was not so much the objects in the cabinet, as the spatial control
exerted over themthe collection.
There was a further distinction between collecting and viewing within the
cabinet. The occasional contact with the objects in the cabinet was often subject to
a divisive spatial dialogue between the center and the edges of what was generally
a simple rectangular room. As Caspar Neickel suggests, the objects in the cabinet
were to be variously kept on the periphery of the cabinet and moved to a table
placed in the center of the room for examination. The requisite spatial ritual of
retrieval and return from periphery to center and back, in effect, further distanced
the resting place of the curious and its point of contact with the outside world on
the examination table.
Among other oddities, rarities, and singularities, paintings and statues were
included in the cabinets of curiosities on account of neither their aesthetic value
nor monetary value. Paintings and statues accounted for little as compared to
such prized collectibles as the horn of a unicorn.7 However, neither was placed in
the cabinet on account of price. Had the monetary value outweighed an objects
value as a unique and rare object, it was more likely to be placed in the treasury
than the cabinet of curiosities. Objects in the cabinet had additional properties:
their singularity where they happened to be. What made paintings and statues
fit for inclusion in the cabinet and the company of other oddities, rarities, and
singularities was their authenticity and historicitywhat Walter Benjamin was to
term their aura or that which even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art
is lacking its unique existence at the place where it happens to be (220).
Although the authortic and auratic objects collected in the cabinet eschewed
reproduction, this is not to say that they were not reproduced. An entire industry
was formed in Italy and elsewhere to feed with fake reproductions and forged
singularities the appetite of the European ruling elite for rare and singular
collectibles.8 What was valued above else for resisting reproduction fast became
the subject of it. In response another industry was formed to safeguard against the
first. It had the task of identifying, authenticating, and certifying the collectibles as
such. A branch of this industry would be consolidated in time into the field of art
history. It is important to note, however, that both industries owe their development
to the European ruling elites search for the singular and the authentic, instigated
by the desire to collect them in one place. The desire to open-up and set aside a
space for authenticity and singularity appears to be independent of the presence
of collectibles as evidenced by the active search for collectibles. Even if it meant
having to search, locate, and import authentic and singular objects, no seat of
power in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seems, could
be without a cabinet and no claim to power could go without instigating a realm
from which the inauthentic and the ordinary were to be carefully and meticulously
excluded.
The idiosyncrasy of the desire to collect curiosities in one place raises, of course,
the question of motive. Why this preoccupation with the spatial control of the
singular and the authentic and why is it linked to questions of sovereignty and
power? Why were the European ruling elite interested in collecting these peculiar
objects with such diligence and concern for authenticity and passing this concern
on to the public when it declared its own sovereignty? To postulate an answer we
need to follow the development of the cabinet into the museum. For the time
being, it is important to note that the emphasis on the authentic in the cabinet is,
as a salient feature of its collection practice, what sets this practice apart from the
prevalent collection practice in the gallery.
Inasmuch as the aesthetic and iconographic concerns of the gallery were
impertinent to the cabinet, the latters preoccupation with authenticity was
irreverent to the gallery (Figure 4.2). The space of the gallery was, unlike the
cabinet, inclusive of the copy and the reproduction. Where and when aesthetic and
iconographical concerns figured paramount, as they did in the gallery, the question
of authenticity did not. Charles de Brosses, Germain Bazin recounts, did not fret over
acquiring originals by the great masters (116). Confessedly, he preferred beautiful
copies of famous paintings, to having originals by minor masters (116). President
de Brosses preference was not the exception. An entire industry dedicated to the
commissioned replication of famous works of art, produced endless copies of old
masters for the galleries of the European elite throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The gallery and the cabinet had, in other words, two distinct
purposes, reflecting two different, though not mutually exclusive, criteria for
valuating art. The gallery, conceived more or less as a path for viewing, housed
aesthetics, the Cabinet, conceived as a place predicated on the spatial dialectics of
center and edge, housed authenticity. In time, the two practices would coalesce
into the museum, though the logic of the cabinet would prevail over the gallery.
The transformation of the cabinet and the gallery into the art museum were
to go by way of the gradual division of the cabinet of curiosities into specialized
cabinets in the eighteenth century, including the formation of cabinets devoted
exclusively to art. This was, of course, in keeping with the greater divisional and
organizational tendencies of the enlightenment and its distinct worldview. The
institution of cabinets devoted exclusively to works of art (Kunstkammer) was, in a
manner, an initial step toward consolidating the cabinet and the gallery into one
homogeneous and exclusive space for art. However, the question of authenticity
was to remain a divisive criterion in keeping separate the two modes of collecting
and administering art for a time to come.
The transformation of the place of art from the exclusive cabinets and the
galleries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the public museums
of nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to closely follow the trajectory of
the two major parallel political developments of the late eighteenth century. It
went in tandem with the development of nation-states, and the fashioning of a
new social identity for state citizens, on the one hand, and on the other, with the
gradual emergence of a new mode of organizing and exercising power centered Fig. 4.2 Giovanni
on exposure and visibility as a new strategy of control, the modalities of which Paolo Pannini,
Interior of a Picture
Michel Foucault has extensively traced in various contexts.9
Gallery with the
Art was to the emerging nation-states an effective instrument for public Collection of
education and the forging of a new national identity and state citizenry. The Cardinal Silvio
charter of virtually every major art museum, since the museums inception, Valenti Gonzaga,
identifies education of the public as a primary mission.10 Works of art did and 195 264 cm,
oil on canvas,
continue to validate and substantiate the historical claims and the distinct mythos
1740, Wadsworth
of the new state, that is, to synthesize aspects of its worldview and ethos, in terms Atheneum
discussed earlier. The concerns here are thematic and focused on works of art and Museum of Art,
their instrumental exhibition. In this respect, the state took over the function of Hartford, CT
the gallery and continued its thematic and aesthetic concerns with a new agenda. Photo credit:
The evolving exhibition practices in museums and the motivations behind these Wadsworth
Atheneum
practices over time have been the subject of a number of studies on museums
Museum of Art/Art
in the past two decades.11 The architecture and the distinct spatial experience of Resource, NY
the art museum itself have been tangential to these studies, given the focus on
the museums subject. Admittedly, the exposure and public visibility afforded art
in the museums of nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an indispensable part
of its instrumentality to the state and can readily be taken for granted. However,
this exposure took place in a new space and a distinct place whose development
was as instrumental and influential in the public reception of art as the exhibition
practices within.
The Debate
The questions of how to house art and how to shape its place once it entered the
public realm were first addressed in France in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century. The inquiries coincided with Comte dAngivillers plans for a public art
museum at the Louvre and led to the assignment of the museum as a speculative
design problem for the Prix de Rome competition in the Acadmie dArchitecture
on a number of occasions between 1778 and 1810.12 Boulle and later his student
Durand, both affiliated with the Acadmie, offered designs for an ideal museum
in their influential theoretical works of the period. These and related proposals
offer elaborate concentric plans that ritualistically proceed from a distinct outer
enveloping frame, along penetrative bisecting cross-arms, to a ceremonial space
at the central core of the building (Figure 4.3). Conceptually and experientially, the
library appears to be what the designers of these early prototypes had in mind as
the generative model for the museuma place to gather, organize, and study art
with all that this act spatially and ritualistically entails (as discussed in the previous
chapter). Durand, for instance, in comparing the museum to a library, distinguished
it from the latter only on account of having a number of different works to display
as compared to only one in the library (215).
The initial modeling of the museum on the library stems in part from a valuation
of art that was deeply rooted in the cabinet, that is, viewing art as a rare and unique
document and not necessarily or primarily as an aesthetic object. Christian von
Mechel, who was put in charge of re-arranging and cataloguing the Imperial
collection in Vienna in 1779, summed up this sentiment well in his introduction
to the collections catalogue: Such a large, public collection, he wrote, intended
for instruction more than for fleeting pleasure, is like a rich library in which those
eager to learn are glad to find works of all kinds and all periods (quoted in Pevsner,
Building Types 121). The antiquarian Alois Hirt was to echo Mechels sentiment in
his appeal to Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1797 for a public art museum attached to the
academy of art as a research and instructional resource. In the final count, however,
the design of the museum would follow a different trajectory. The decisive period
was the second decade of the nineteenth century. Mechels distinction between
instruction and fleeting pleasure was to form the bases of the heated debates
between the artist/archeologist Johan Martin Wagner and the architect Leo von
Klenz in Munich and latter between Alois Hirt on one side and the architect Karl
Friedrich Schinkel and the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, on the other. The
debates were over the conception of the art museum as an experiential variation
on the theme of the library or as something entirely different, if not new. The
outcome of these debates, to which the heads of the respective states and a host
of other concerned officials were party, determined the ground rules for the design
of the art museum as a building type.
Fig. 4.3 Jean-

Nicolas-Louis
Durand, Design
for a Museum,
Prcis des leons
darchitecture
donnes
lcole royale
polytechnique,
1809
The counter argument to the conception of the art museum as a public

collection intended for instruction and the point of view that was to ultimately
shape the art museum, was summarized by Leo von Klenz in a 1816 memo written
in response to Wagners objections to his proposed design for a sculpture museum
in Munich: the Glyptothek. A museum, he wrote, is not a place for artists training,
an akademisher Kunstzwinger, but a place in which to show a number of treasures
of art to all kinds of visitors in a manner to be worthy of the objects and to create
pleasure in them (126). Klenzs sentiment and guiding principle in art museum
design was later echoed in the catch phrase of Schinkel and Waagen, first delight,
then instruct. This was formulated in response to objections raised by Hirt to
Schinkels design for the Berlin museum. The principal and essential purpose of
the museum in the opinions of Schinkel and Waagen was to awaken in the public
the sense of fine art as one of the most important branches of human civilization
All other purposes, concerning individual classes of the population, must
be subdued to this. Among these the first is to give an opportunity to artists to
manifold study; only after that comes the interest of the scholar, and finally and
lastly the museum will facilitate the acquisition of information on the history of art
among all and sundry (128).
All parties to these early debates over the museums purpose, it is important to
note, assumed that the place of art is instrumental in its appreciation as an aesthetic
object or an object of study. All parties presumed that the space where delight
comes first has to be different from the space where instruction comes first. The
disagreement between the two camps was not, it is also important to note, over
functional requirements per se, as the arguments were centered on what should
come first and where the accent was to be placed. Rather, as we shall see, the debate
was over experiential differences between the place meant primarily for aesthetic
appreciation of art as opposed to one meant for its study. It was a debate over how
the spatial and architectural experience of the museum as a building should prepare
the viewer for a particular reception of art. It was a debate over how to spatially
construe and render art an object of study or an aesthetic object primarily. The
former presumes penetration and analysis, the latter, distance and reflection. The
question at the outset was which should be the spatial and architectural experience
of the museum: enclosure and penetration, or separation and distance, an emphasis
on arrival or an emphasis on departure. Nonetheless, what all parties realized was
that any given perception of art is, to a good measure, spatially construed.
The perception of art that found its spatial realization in Altes Museum, among
others then and since, may appear to have its emphasis on aesthetics in common
with the perception of art prevalent in the galleries of the previous generation.
However, there are fundamental differences between the two points of view. In
the same vein, the differences between the parties to the debate over the purpose
of the museum are over-stated by the parties. Both parties, for instance, rejected
iconography in favor of chronology for the organization of the works of art in
their proposed museums. Iconography, a prevalent organizational principle in the
gallery, was unacceptable to the new generation in part because its external focus
on the subject degraded the autonomy of the art object. Frieherr von Rumohr,
the art historian who was, along with Waagen and Schinkel, responsible for the
arrangement of art works in Altes Museum condemned the practice because to
organize art iconographically, he asserted, is to seek art outside the field of art
(128). Looking at art, one was not to take note of the subject that was outside it,
but of what was inherent and internal to the object and what gained it a unique
place in the historic chronology of art.
The chronological organization, agreed upon as it was, presented a unique
dilemma to both parties. Every chronologically organized collection is bound
to have true and significant gaps as Wilhelm von Humboldt, chair of the court-
appointed museum commission in Berlin, noted with regret in 1829. Whether
the purpose of an art collection is defined as the elevation of national character
through exposure to high art as Schinkel and Waagen did or the education of
artists who contributed to the elevation of national manufacture and industrial
products, as Hirt did, the true and significant gaps of any collection inevitably
detract it from fully accomplishing its mission. The gaps are counter-productive to
the instrumentality of the work of art. To alleviate the problem and enhance the
museums efficacy, Hirt had hoped to use casts to complete the historic sequence
in the Berlin collection and later Humboldt suggested the purchase of copies to
fill the gaps in the painting collection. Rumohr was quick to remind Humboldt,
however, that all the value of a painting turns around the idea of originality. The
purchase of copies was out of the question and Hirts casts were exiled from the
collection (Bergdoll 86).
Ever since, the art museum has been, like the cabinet before it, a place adamantly
exclusive of the copy. This is to say that to the hierarchy of missions outlined by
Schinkel and Waagen, we must add one that superseded all others and was so
obvious as to require no elaboration: a sanctuary to the original, the singular, and
the unique around which idea purportedly turns all the value of a painting. No
painting, regardless of its aesthetic value, can be assigned a domicile in the art
museum, if it is not authentic. The copy that had a place in the gallery and even the
museum that aimed to educate, has had no place in the museum that has aimed
to delight. This is a fundamental difference. The two different collection practices
of the cabinet and the gallery, with their respective emphasis on authenticity and
aesthetics, are interfused into one practice in the new art museum. The trajectory of
this interfusion is the constitution of the aesthetic object as a self-referential entity,
that is, an object that has been systematically striped of external reference: be this
reference to a subject or to an original. To the list of potential external references
we may add the problem of labels. They too speak to external dependence in
the art object, which is why they were altogether excluded from the Glyptothek
at Klenzs behest, along with seats. The art museum was not conceived, from the
outset, as a place to rest or linger.
Of the two initial executed designs for the museum, Klenzs Glyptothek or
sculpture museum in Munich of 181530 and Schinkels Altes Museum in Berlin of
182330, the latter, having the advantage of hindsight, played the more decisive
role in shaping the space that was to render authentic art the object of aesthetic
appreciation. We should briefly follow its development, as it would hitherto set the
criteria by which the success of an art museum design is judged.
Alois Hirts initial appeal for a public museum in 1797 was unheeded until 1822
when, first Friedrich Rabe, and latter Karl Friedrich Schinkel were asked to submit
designs for an art museum attached to the Berlin Academy. Schinkels initial design
of four enveloping arms around a central courtyard was in the spirit of Hirts vision
and earlier French speculative museum designs. In the subsequent three years, a
number of significant changes to the initial plan were to radically alter the shape of
the museum and along with it the experience of art in the public realm.
The first departure occurred on January 7, 1823 when Schinkel made the
unsolicited proposal to separate the museum from the Academy building and
move it away from Unter den Linden in the center of town to a new site opposite
the royal palace on an island in the Spree river (Spreeinsel). The new freestanding
building was to occupy the site of an existing canal at the end of the Lustgarten
opposite the palace and away from the urban fabric. This was the first of a series of
spatial and formal manipulations that were to create a highly ritualized path to the
resting place of art (Figure 4.4a).
Schinkels vision for the place where delight was to come before instruction
consisted of a free-standing rectangular building, raised on a high podium above
Fig. 4.4 Karl

Friedrich Schinkel,
Altes Museum,
Berlin, 1828
Photo credit: From
top, 4.4aLibrary
of Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, LC-DIG-
ppmsca-00338,
4.4b
Photographische
Gesellschaft Berlin
am Dnhoffplatz
the Lustgarten. Mediating the garden and the space atop the podium was a
central, monumental staircase above which, facing the garden and the palace,
Schinkel raised a two storey Ionic colonnade that spans the entire length of
the building. Together, the columnar screen in front and the mural wall behind
it form a transparent, but largely impenetrative, transverse corridor in front of
the building. What would otherwise have been the solid line of a facade, here
assumes spatial depth and visual distance. The colonnade institutes two separate
domains in its front and back, much as the podium does with the levels above
and below. In the space behind the colonnade, disjoined from the plaza both
horizontally and vertically, Schinkel located the C-shaped galleries in two floors.
Despite their physical proximity, the galleries are not directly accessible from the
colonnade (Figure 4.5).13 Connecting them is an open recessed staired vestibule
in the center of the colonnade, followed by a large rotunda, leading through the
width of the building to the back where entries to the lower and upper gallery
spaces are located.
Reaching the art works put on display for public enjoyment and appreciation Fig. 4.5 Karl
(Genu und die Erkenntnis) thus required venture on a journey that was, if not Friedrich Schinkel,
deliberately arduous, meticulously elaborate. The ritual procession out to the Ground Floor Plan,
Altes Museum,
new place for art, approached from the initial proposed site on Unter den Linden,
Berlin, 1828
required one to leave the dense city fabric behind, cross the Spree river on a bridge Photo credit:
near the palace, to enter the large open plaza of the island bordered by a church bpk/Berlin/
opposite the bridge and to the sides by the palace and the museum (Figure 4.4b). Kupferstichkabinett/
Having reached the island and entered the plaza in front of the palace, one had to Staatliche Museen zu
then turn left and on transverse axis cross the immense void of the plaza, terminated Berlin/Art Resource,
NY
by the ceremonial staircase and the long monumental colonnade behind which
the main body of the museum was carefully withdrawn. Ascending the staircase
in front of the columnar screen, one was led past this monumental threshold and
through the depth of the colonnade to the central recessed vestibule and from
there, on axis, through a constricted passageway under the pyramidal mass of the
vestibule staircase to the expansive space of the rotunda that put a dramatic end
to the first leg of the journey. Much as the colonnade marks the beginning of a
new territory, the rotunda is, in a manner, the gateway to this other world. To reach
it from the rotunda, one in turn had to continue on axis past another constricted
passageway to enter, having now traversed the width of the building, the galleries
branching out in transverse and opposite directions.
What Schinkel in effect instituted in the name of enjoyment and appreciation
(Genu und die Erkenntnis) of art is a distinct and separate domain for art that
is disjoined from the city by a deep and elaborate borderline. The indivisible
boundary that he conceived and executed as a journey out through a succession
of thresholds to another realm or space for art, would heretofore separate those
works of art that owed the sum of their value to originality from those that were
bereft of value by virtue of simulation, duplication, and/or imitation. This was to be
the legacy of Altes Museum. It transformed the conceptual distinction between art
and non-art on the one hand and the authentic and the inauthentic on the other,
into a spatial experience of separation and disjointing played out at the conceptual
edge of the city. It created a place for and located the aesthetic and the authentic
on the outside, separated from the city by a deliberate journey. The art that was
withdrawn from circulation and made invisible inside the city before, now became
visible outside the fabric that characterized the city. It was brought to sight on
the outside. To see it, that is, for it to become visible, one had to journey out. This
outside, it is important to note, was neither literal nor a given, but construed and
fabricated by the journey and the experience of disjointing that would become the
distinguishing marks of the art museum as a building type.
The carefully orchestrated experience of disjoining from the city, as the place of
habitation, to the museum, as the place of visitation, was significantly enhanced by
four major modifications to the initial design proposal between 1825 and 1828. The
last and the most elaborate modification was to the design of the plaza bordered
by the palace and the museum (Figure 4.6). Schinkel had initially conceived of
the plaza as a unified space connecting the palace, the church, and the museum
together into one integrated composition or what he called a regulated whole
(regelmssiges Ganes) (Pundt 152). Crossing the bridge from the city, one would
have had the distinct impression of entering a different realm encompassing in its
totality the palace, the church and the museum. Wilhelm III rejected the proposal
in favor of a scheme that disjoined the museum from the palace and turned the
plaza that was initially conceived as a distinct place into a ceremonial path across
layers of space to the museum. Following Wilhelms instruction, Schinkel divided
the plaza in two and turned the area bordered by the palace and the bridge into an
open space whose experiential role is similar to the rotunda of the museum. It too
is placed at the nexus of two paths, here at the terminus of the access line from the
city across the bridge and the point of initiation for the path that journeys to the
museum through cross-axial layers of space.
As the modifications to the plaza further disjoined the museum from its broader
context, the other three modifications further disjoined the place of enjoyment
and appreciation from its immediate context. The rotunda dome that was visible in
the initial proposal acted as a central visual terminus to the path that leads through
Fig. 4.6 Karl

Friedrich Schinkel,
Plaza Studies,
Altes Museum,
Berlin, 1828
Photo credit:
bpk/Berlin/
Kupferstichkabinett/
Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin/Art Resource,
NY
the center of the building to the gallery spaces (Figure 4.7). Its visible presence
placed greater emphasis on the destiny of the path than the journey along the
way. The suppression of the dome in the final proposal shifted the visual focus
of the visitor in the plaza from a focal point in the background to the foreground
colonnade and the backward layering of the compositional elements along the
path. The visitor in the plaza no longer had a destination in sight, but was focused
instead on the spatial layers and the thresholds that had to be crossed along the
way. The museum and palace thus assume their disjoined and divided positions in
a space whose boundaries do not relate and connect to define its outer edges. The
latter sit independently as objects within the space.
Fig. 4.7 Karl In the same vein, turning the vestibule staircase behind the colonnade 180
Friedrich Schinkel, degrees, to no advantage other than its visual impact, radically changed the
Elevation Studies, perception of the vestibule from a multidirectional space to a unidirectional path
Altes Museum,
through the imposing mass of the staircase. The vestibule that was a bi-directional
Berlin, 1828
Photo credit: point of connection, vertically and horizontally, became a massive and deep
bpk/Berlin/ threshold to be traversed unidirectionaly.
Kupferstichkabinett/ The changes to the ceremonial staircase in front of the Colonnade had much the
Staatliche Museen zu same impact on the colonnade as the changes to the staircase in the vestibule had
Berlin/Art Resource,
on the latter. Schinkel had initially conceived of the staircase in front of the museum
NY
as a multidirectional pyramidal mass gathering up to a landing that lined up with
the recessed vestibule behind the colonnade. The strong and funneled visual
connection between the two stairs had a negative impact on the perception of the
colonnades depth. Changing the staircase to a unidirectional path that forcefully
cuts through a mass projected from the podium and extending the stairs in both
directions past the vestibule space behind, severed the visual tie between them. It
had the staircase confront the colonnade directly, and reinforced the latters depth
as the imposing threshold that it was meant to be.
What these changes, minute as some may be, clearly indicate is that the
disjointing journey past the multiplicity of thresholds imposed in front of the
galleries that were to house authentic works of art was carefully contemplated
and deliberate in the minute. It was also a collective consideration that had its
opponents along the way. The most vocal opponent was, of course, Alois Hirt who
submitted a lengthy dissenting opinion to the museum commission.
Hirts objections to Schinkels design are telling and predictable given their
differences over the purpose of the art museum. Hirt objected to the new site for
the art museum, to the staircase and the podium over which the museum was
raised, to the monumental colonnade in front, and to the rotunda that he regarded,
along with the other elements, as unnecessary luxuries (pracht). Hirt objected, in
other words, to every major element in Schinkels proposal that served to locate
and place art at a distance in a distinct and disjoined domain, that is, every element
that distinguished the art museum from a library. This is not to say that Hirt
objected to the delegation of art to a distinct and separate domain. Rather, he had
a different form and experience of separation in mindone internally focused on
the experience of penetration and arrival as opposed to Schinkels external focus
on the experience of departure and disjointing.
Schinkel, of course, dismissed Hirts criticism and emphatically defended the
elements in question and the rotunda in particular as being essential to preparing
the visitor for the proper enjoyment and appreciation (Genu und die Erkenntnis)
of art. For Schinkel the spacing that sums up the experience of the art museum
was directly linked to the enjoyment and appreciation of authentic works of
art. However, he did not elaborate on this essential link as though it was patently
apparent to anyone who saw the museum as an instrument for the enjoyment and
appreciation of authentic art. Subsequently, Hirt resigned from the commission
whose members were by and large in agreement with Schinkel. The consensus
has since been that the art museum is the place proper to the enjoyment and
appreciation of authentic art, for which the ritual of spacing is an indispensable
requisite.
The Dispersion
Deferring for the moment the question of why the enjoyment and appreciation of
authentic art should have the ritual of spacing as a precondition, it is important to
note that the logic of the spacing that saw its first expression in Altes Museum has
since informed and characterized the art museum as a new and unique building
type. The manifestations of this logic have been diverse and particular to each
context. They have been as dramatic and elaborate as the Philadelphia Museum
of Art (Traumbauer, Borie, and Zatzinger, 191128) or as minimal and subtle as the
Whitney Museum (Marcel Breuer, New York, 1966). Nevertheless, the modalities
of the implementation and the realization of the requisite spacing have been
the measure of each museums success or failure. We may begin with the success
stories, before addressing the failures, of which Guggenheim Museum in New York
is a notorious example.
As one of the last in a line of monumental art museums that stylistically trace
their roots to the Altes Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was given its
place, after much deliberation, and careful examination, on top of a hill (a former
reservoir), outside the city fabric, at the borderline of the city and the Fairmont
Park.14 The disjointing and the spacing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art begins at
City Hall in the center of the city and traces a path that leads out to the citys edge
on a diagonal axis, along a ceremonial parkway that was dramatically and forcefully
cut through the citys grid to reach the park at its edge (Figure 4.8a). Rarely has
the connection between the seat of state and the seat of art in an urban context
been as overtly stated as they are in Philadelphia. The connection, dramatic as it
is in Philadelphia, is the least of the many similarities between Altes Museum and
the Philadelphia Museum of Art. More substantial are the experiential similarities
between the two.
The parkway that leads out from the city center terminates in an oval at the foot
of the hill that forcefully lifts the museum above its immediate context. The role of
the oval in this drama is similar to that played by the plaza in front of the palace in
the Spreeinsel. It too marks the termination of the line of access from one domain
and the beginning of the other. In Zantzingers words, his partner, Trumbauer,
imagined that the plaza which would eventually take the form of the oval would
while creating a proper foreground for the museum on the height, at the same
time serve as a physical terminus for the Parkway and other radiating avenues
(quoted in Brownlee 24). To reach the museum, one must leave the axis of the
parkway, trace the edge of the oval and approach the museum diagonally, if only to
heed the termination of the axis and further acknowledge the detachment of the
museums immediate surrounding from the city and the axis that could otherwise
read as a line of connection. One cannot approach the museum on the axis of the
parkway, less one twice dares a six lane thoroughfare with no pedestrian crossing.
To reach the museum from the foot of the hill, one must cross a succession
of carefully orchestrated thresholds that begin with an open plaza at the base
of the stairs and reach up through a wide and segmented staircase to a landing
on top that is, in turn, separated and distanced from the forecourt in front of the
museum by a vehicular passageway that encircles the building. Approaching
the museum by car is no less dramatic. One must cross the oval and from the
side of the museum drive up the hill to the back of the museum. From there, one
can enter the museum on foot from either the back or the front. From the back one
has to go underneath a monumental portal, enter a large, multi-storey vestibule,
traverse its length to reach the staircase in the back and from there lead up on
transverse axis to the stair hall that connects to the galleries in front.
Fig. 4.8
Traumbauer, Borie,
and Zatzinger,
Philadelphia
Museum of Art,
191128
Photo credit: From
top, 4.8aLibrary
of Congress, The
Historic American
Buildings Survey,
HAER PA, 51
PHILA, 3285,
4.8bUnited
States Geological
Survey
Like Altes Museum, the design of the Philadelphia Museum of Art underwent
numerous modifications between 1911 and 1915. Here too, with every modification
the designers experimented and in the end further consolidated the disjointing
and the perceptual spacing of the museum before settling on the final solution.
The Museum was initially conceived as a rectangular, horizontal block, placed
perpendicular to the axes of the parkway, on top of the hill. The stairs led directly
up to a podium in the center of the block. In this format, the museum read more as
a termination to the axis of the parkway than a distinct and separate realm. In the
ensuing studies, the architects experimented, to their dissatisfaction, with the form
and the direction of the staircase and the shape of the central and end pavilions,
before introducing, first a wide landing in the middle of the hill, as if to properly
distance the museum from the city, and then transforming this spatial layer into
a forecourt in front of the museum by 1914. The faithful and radical turn came in
the summer of 1914 when the building was pushed back and the gallery wings
were turned to surround the forecourt and together form a self-enclosing U-shape
building block organized around three points: a central pedimented portico and
two end pavilions. The latter were deliberately tuned 180 degrees to face one
another and thereby establish a visual terminal line in front of the forecourt. The
windows in the outer wall of the end pavilions were removed in subsequent
studies, thereby reinforcing their role as the outer boundary of the place fitted
to house authentic art. The staircase was, in turn, decidedly separated from the
forecourt and located at a distance in front of the terminal bounding line of the
museum defined by the end pavilions (Figure 4.8b).
Much as the sequence of thresholds in front of the Philadelphia Museum of
Art is a dramatic expression of the logic of spacing at work in front of the Altes
Museum, the museum building offers, in turn, its own unique interpretation of
the key sequestering components in the Altes Museum. The role of the colonnade
of the Berlin museum is played in the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the end
pavilions and the forecourt that institute a deep, layered, translucent threshold,
past the landing of the front stairs and the encircling passageway, all of which has
to be ceremoniously crossed before reaching the base of the staircase in front of
the central pedimented portico of the back wing. One must then continue the
ascent, cross the columnar screen of the portico and go past two tall vestibules, to
arrive at the central staired hall or the Philadelphia equivalent of the nexus point
in the Altes Museum: the rotunda. Here as well, to reach the galleries, one must
traverse the depth of yet another threshold: a well-sequestered passageway on
either side of the hall, leading to the galleries on each floor.
What is particularly instructive about the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is not only
the exaggerated expression it gives the logic of spacing in the forging of a distinct
and separate place for art in Philadelphia, but also the fact that the institution of
this place took precedent over what, only in due time, was to be housed in it. The
architects of the museum, Charles Borie noted sometime after the completion of
the design, were a bit handicapped in their works as we had but little idea as to the
use to which the building would be putafter all the City owned damned little art
(quoted in Brownlee 48). Also, after the completion of the museum and for quite
sometime to come, the city had no money to purchase art. Regardless, the actual
use of the building was clearly secondary to instituting and having it as an Other
place. This was not unique to Philadelphia. Alexander reminds us that, Usually
communities and patrons have been more than willing to raise funds for impressive
buildings, but securing worthwhile collections becomes ever more difficult as the
price of old masters and modern art zoom upward (37). The impression is echoed
in the following observations:
Every town today seems to need its own museum and Japan, for example, has
museums springing up everywhere with very little in them. (Reichardt 35)
It is distressing how little money has yet been spent on displaying the historic
collections, which are, after all, the raison dtre of the museum. There is the new
eye-catching pyramid, the smart new gallery shops, and the excavated fortress
now revealed, while most of the permanent collection galleries look as dejected
as they have since any of us can remember. (Clifford 20)
Museums in the United States are growing at an almost frightening rate. If we

count the smallest ones with only one person on the staff and he or she without
professional training, about five thousand of them exist today, and recently a
new one has appeared every 3.3 days. (Alexander 5)
Just as Medieval France has gone down in history as the Age of Cathedrals, this
past decade in America may someday be known as the Age of Museums. Indeed,
more museum space has been designed and built throughout North America
during the late 1970s and 1980s than ever before in the continents history.
(Dornberg 26)
Like the cabinet of curiosities before, the spacing and the space of the authentic,
instituted as such, has a use-value all its own, and to a measure independent of its
overt value as display space.
In contrast to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney Museum offers an
abridged, though equally effective expression of the logic of spacing (Figure 4.9).
Having a corner site within the dense urban fabric of New York city, the building
forcefully disjoins itself from its context with an economy of expression, all the
more remarkable for its effectiveness. To its right, where the building would have
had to confront the city fabric, the introjection of a tall concrete retaining wall
effectively frames and separates the site from its immediate context. Pulling the
cubical core of the building away from this wall and leaving a visible void to frame
and separate the building from the wall relieves the core of visual attachment to
the city fabric. A similar sequence of frames, in turn, divorces the building from the
sidewalk. Here, the disjointing frames are a low retaining wall and a deep moat,
over which hovers the cascading and recessing facade of the museum. The moat
whose perceptual depth is made manifold by the weight of the cascading facade
on top is as effective in disjointing and placing the museum at a distance from its
context as the monumental sequence of the island and the plazas in Berlin or the
prolonged sequence of the parkway and the hill in Philadelphia.
At Whitney, the disjointing journey begins at the low retaining wall that literally
holds the sidewalk back to form the first threshold. Behind it is the canopied
gateway that is carefully divorced and slightly set back from the retaining wall.
The divorce is essential to the sequential layering of thresholds on what is meant
to be perceived as a journey out to an Other place. The gateway, in its literality,
Fig. 4.9 Marcel

Breuer, Whitney
Museum, New
York, 1966
Photo credit:
Author
merely underscores the message, while the canopys shape and weight add to the
momentum of the movement through the gate. With the weight of the building
cascading down overhead, urging ones movement forward, the journey past the
gate continues precariously over the moat on the ensuing drawbridge and across
the translucent glass curtain wall in frontthe Whitney Museums equivalent of
the columnar screen in Altes Museum. The drawbridge eventually lands at some
distance past the glass wall at the lobby platform and from there one must cross
the vertical threshold of the elevators that lead to the gallery floors, now worlds
apart from the point of departure.
Should there be any doubt about the distance and the alterity of the world
outside, there are seven windows that cut through the outer frame of the building
from the various galleries and offer views that are meant to transform, in Marcel
Breuers words, the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art
(quoted in G. Bazin 261). Transforming the world into a picture of itself from within
the museum looking back is not unique to the Whitney. It is a well precedented
gesture, of which telling examples are the framed view of the city from the second
floor of the staired vestibule of Altes Museum, well documented by the architect,
and the much noted distance view of the city from the portico of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art through the framing outline of the end pavilions. Among others,
the transformation stabilizes and finalizes the distance. Ill return to this crucial
transformation latter.
Whitneys condensed disjointing strategy has, we may note in passing, a
counterpart in the reflective pool of the Barnes Foundation building (Tod Williams
& Billie Tsien Architects, 2012), located not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
To enter this museum one must arrive at a path running parallel to the buildings
long faade, delineated and separated from it by a row of trees and a long reflective
pool adjoining the building. Having followed the path for half the buildings length,
one must turn and cross the row of trees, traverse over a bridge spanning the
reflective pool, to enter a recessed vestibule, from where a circuitous path leads to
the requisite central court of a museum building that is, on the whole, well isolated
from its context by landscaped gardens, open plazas and parking spaces (Figure
4.10).
Another vivid and far more monumental example of the logic of spacing at work
in the fabrication of the art museum is the corrective renovations and additions to
the Louvre palace (I.M. Pei, 1989) where our museum history begun.15 The changes
have, in effect, belatedly turned the Louvre that was not designed as a museum into
a proper museum. Lacking at the Louvre were the requisite spacing and the ensuing
journey out. Although clearly defined and well-marked off from the city, the Louvre
was a palatial realm to be penetrated rather than journeyed to. The alterations that
remedied the problem are as telling as they are compelling (Figure 4.11a). The
least conspicuous change, that is all the more effective for it, is the alteration to the
exterior walls of the palace. Through its exterior walls and monumental doorways
and portals, one can no longer enter the palace, because they have been sealed
off and turned into an impenetrable limit. The facade has become a tableau to
Fig. 4.10 Tod

Williams & Billie
Tsien Architects,
The Barnes
Foundation,
Philadelphia, 2012
Photo credit:
Robert Rife
be contemplatively looked at from a distance; no matter how close one gets to it.
Devoid of its function as the point of entry and exit, the facade has assumed the
role of an imposing and monumental limit that inconsolably separates the worlds
instituted on its sides. The protracted discussions over the removal of the Ministry
of Finance from the north wing (Rue do Rivoli) are indicative of the importance of
the total delimitation of the realm. I.M. Pei went so far as comparing the museum
to a man without an arm, should the north wing not be procured and sealed off
(Biasini, Lebrat and Bezombes 31). Having restored the arm, to reach the world
within the impenetrable shell of the old palace, one must now make ones way
to and through the forecourt, to the pyramidal glass entry in the middle, marking
the nexus point of the world below the ground plane and the one above. The
disjointing ritual and the journey out continue through the pyramidal glass, past
the imposing threshold of the ground plane, down twisting stairs beneath the
court to the Louvres equivalent of the rotunda at Altes Museum and from there
through a sequence of mediating thresholds up into the meandering maze of the
gallery spaces.
One could, of course, cite numerous other examples in which the logic of
spacing finds a new and different expression pending the unique circumstances
Fig.
4.11Clockwise
from top,
4.11aI.M. Pei,
The Louvre, Paris,
1989; 4.11b
James Stirling,
Neue Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart, 1984;
4.11cRichard
Meier, High
Museum of
Art, Atlanta,
1981; 4.11d
Frank Gehry,
Guggenheim
Museum, Bilbao,
1997; 4.11e
Richard Meier,
Getty Museum, Los
Angeles, 1997
Photo credit: From
top clockwise
4.11aAuthor;
4.11bRob
Deutscher; 4.11c
Susan Poague;
4.11dMario
Roberto Duran
Ortiz; 4.11e
United States
Geological Survey
of the context. Among the more celebrated examples from the past few decades
one that readily comes to mind is Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany (James
Stirling, 1984) with its elaborate entry sequence of stairs and ramps that lead up the
slopes over which the museum is carefully lifted, and connect on an oblique path
through a terrace plaza to and eventually through the entry hall of the museum to
the galleries on top (Figure 4.11b).16 Another example is the High Museum of Art
in Atlanta (Richard Meier, 1981) where the disjointing journey follows the literal
path of a long, ceremonial ramp that leads up on a diagonal axis to a terrace on
the second floor of the building and from there on a twisting and meandering
path through the entrance lobby to the Atlantas equivalent of the Berlin rotunda
(Figure 4.11c). In words that readily bring Schinkel to mind the architect tells us:
the entry ramp reaches out to the city so that initiation into the realm of art begins
at the street. It becomes a low, almost ceremonial promenade in preparation for
the experience of viewing the art within (Searing 11011). It is not explained, of
course, why the preparation is necessary or desired. We find, however, an even
more exaggerated expression of the Atlanta journey in the later Getty Museum
in Los Angeles (Richard Meier, 1997) where to reach the museum that is located
far away from the city, on top of a hill, the visitor must traverse the distance from
the bottom to the top of the hill on a monorail train (Figure 4.11d). And there is
the much-celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Frank Gehry, 1997) that
despite its formal differences is remarkably similar to Altes Museum in the manner,
among others, it dramatically withdraws from the city fabric, both formally and
literally, to occupy its own version of the Spreeinsel flanked by roads, a river, and
a bridge. To reach the museum, one has to leave the city fabric behind, enter and
traverse through an open plaza, journey down a monumental staircase, to arrive
at the equivalent of the Berlin rotunda from where the galleries extend in various
directions (Figure 4.11e).
Much as compliance with the museums ground rules is expected, deviations
from the norm are severely criticized and condemned. The failures are, in this
respect, as instructive as the success stories. Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim
museum (New York, 1959) is a case in point.17 Criticized from inception as an
unsuitable place for art, Guggenheim fails on crucial counts. It fails to distance itself
from the fabric of the city and thereafter it fails to simulate the experience of an
Other, distinct, and separate world for art behind its faade (Figure 4.12).
The novelty of Guggenheims form effectively divorces it from its context and it
has been commended for it. The buildings around it, Ada Louis Huxtable noted
at the time, are not big enough to be overbearing; instead the Guggenheim
cheerfully dominates their discreetness In a civic sense, it is a brilliant success
(336). Lewis Mumford writes Despite its dull color this great monolith stands
out boldly from the flat, anonymous apartment houses in the neighborhood, the
positiveness of the form offsetting the all too congenial mediocrity of tone. The
building is so definitely a thing apart, so different from every other one in Fifth
Avenue (110).
Although successful in divorcing itself from its context, what Guggenheim
lacks as an art museum is the requisite distance and the ritual disjointing from
that context. Guggenheims is a journey in as distinct from the requisite journey
out. The unceremonious entry sequence is abrupt and fails to simulate the
requisite departure across sequentially layered thresholds to an Other place. In
compensation for the missing distance, Guggenheims critics wished it had been
moved out of the city, or relocated across the street in central park where the Fig. 4.12Frank
Metropolitan museum is located at a visible distance from the city fabric (Huxtable Lloyd Wright,
Guggenheim
16).
Museum, New
We may note here, in passing, a related problem at Brooklyn Museum (McKim, York, 1959
Mead and White, 18931907) that was partially rectified in the mid-1930s and Photo credit:
again in 2004 (Figure 4.13). Although Brooklyn Museum is located away from author
the city fabric in Prospect Park, it was initially linked to the avenue in front by a
grand staircase that led directly from the sidewalk to the main entrance on the
third level. The problem with the staircase was its appearance as a connector rather
than a separator. Without the intermediate voids and spatial thresholds found, for
instance in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the staircase here appeared to link
rather than disjoin the world inside from the world outside the museum. The
official explanation for the staircases removal was to create a more direct and
democratic entrance to the museum (Brooklyn Museum). In other words, the
perceived problem was the mode of entry and not the staircase per se. Staircases
that disjoined, rather than connect the museum to its context in similar museums
did not raise concerns or trepidations about the mode of entry, much less lead to
the dramatic removal of any staircase. At Brooklyn, it was removed at considerable
expense in 1934, to leave in its place a void that though patently more effective in
separating the museum from its context, did so unceremoniously and devoid of
the transitional complexities of, among others, the Philadelphia counterpart. This
latter problem was rectified in 2004 with the addition of the Rubin Pavilion and a
public plaza (Polshek Partnership Architects and WET Design) together occupying
the site of the razed staircase. Between the city fabric and the museum building,
now visually appearing in the background, the pavilion that is formally reminiscent
of the lost staircase, in conjunction with the multilayered plaza in the foreground
act effectively to divide and disjoin the museum from its context.
Fig. 4.13 McKim,

Mead and
White, Brooklyn
Museum, Brooklyn,
18931907
Photo credit:
4.13aLibrary of
Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, LC-DIG-
det-4a23706;
4.13bLibrary of
Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, LC-DIG-
det-4a18164;
4.13cPatricia
Badolato
Although the appearance of connection at the Brooklyn Museum proved

redeemable, the lack of sufficient separation that translates in compensation into
a wish for Guggenheims relocation has had no simple solution and it bears on the
interior. Once inside, Huxtable tells us, you understand an art critics anger. The
interior is not really a museum, but a place for merchandising art, and it oversells
(336).
The elements here are familiar. Their juxtaposition is not. The circular glass
entrance vestibule of the museum opens onto the familiar and here aggrandized
rotunda space circumscribed by an outwardly cascading spiral ramp that marches
past the gallery alcoves on a downward spiral. Present as the familiar elements are,
they do not produce the desired effect. As opposed to being sequentially layered
into a chain of discreet experiences, they form a single or total space. Art here is
placed not past the nexus point, but at the nexus point (Figure 4.14).
Unlike the labyrinth common to many temporary shows, the path (ramp) exists
in a comprehensible total space. Although the spectator continually moves he is
never lost and can see where he has been and where he is going. The entire area
has a single, unifying character that is never lost sight of. (Lee 50)
From the story told in the spiral, according to another critic, there is virtually no
escape. Guggenheim is not really a museum because in it there is no Other place,
only a comprehensible space that one can never leave behind to enter a world
proper to art. Spreading all the merchandise before the eye, Mumford tells us,
is a ruinous one for a museum (115). This is not because one can see everything
in a glance. One cannot. Rather the ruin is brought about by everything being in
an inescapable, comprehensible space, where movement produces no alterity.
What is in perpetual sight in this space is not the artworks per se, but where one
has been and where one is going: the one and the same space. In this space art
cannot be at home. The merchandising analogy that is all too prevalent in critiques
of Guggenheim has a temporal implication. It speaks to the transitory nature of
the merchandise as such, that is, a commodity in transit rather than at home, a
commodity for external consumption rather than internal preservation. The
measure of home is, of course, what is really a museum which as Fisher observes:
is made up of rooms and paths. Once the pictures face us in a line on the wall
we can convert rooms to paths by moving sideways from the entrance around the
room, flattening it out, in effect, onto the wall. Viewing the pictures sequentially
as we move from room to room, we follow the room numbers, the centuries,
the schools. In so far as the museum becomes pure path, it becomes a more
perfect image of history, or rather of the single linear motion of history preferred
since Winckelman. (Fisher 9)
In what is really a museum, there are, past the requisite nexus point, rooms and
paths, that is, a sequential unfolding of discrete spaces through which one travels
as though on a journey through a seemingly infinite land. The rooms are not there
to be occupied, but crossed, flattened out, and converted into a pure path. The
sequential continuity of the space along the path is essential. In praise of the Walker
Fig. 4.14Frank
Lloyd Wright,
Guggenheim
Museum, New
York, 1959
Photo credit: Author
galleries, Goldberger notes most galleries offer a view of the neighboring rooms,
one-third level up or one-third level down, providing a degree of spatial interest
that, rather than detracting from the experience of viewing art, enhances it (34).
The experience of viewing art is enhanced when there is no sense of termination
to the space, that is, when one has in view its continuation. When there is no
sense of continuity, when the space is comprehensible and total, there is a crisis
and the space ceases to be really a museum, for example, Guggenheim museum.
Also, the linear pattern of movement found in most museums as opposed to
the circular pattern, we are told, has the following advantages: entrance and
exit do not coincide, the amount of effort needed is unknown, and the goal may
be unconsciously considered as genuine progress. It should also be emphasized
that for reasons of psychological economy, the visitor should never pass the same
way twice (Lehmbruck 63). The circuit should never appear closed. To close it is
to create a comprehensible container for art. This takes us back, of course, to the
debate waged and settled at the museums inception as to whether to contain art
or to distance it. The decision was made long ago. Art is not to be contained within
but spaced out. To contain art is to deny its space its requisite alterity. The ideal art
museum is a space whose boundaries escape comprehension. It is, to a measure,
an unfamiliar, ulterior space to the extent that in it one stands the chance of getting
lost. It is a space that leaves something to incomprehension. The ideal art museum
unfolds as a path through a seemingly infinite world, that is, a seemingly boundless
space of intertwining rooms ad infinituma limitless resource. It is a place where
everyone is, by design, a tourist away from home in search of the authentic in an
Other place.18 Guggenheim does not and is not. It is, in Huxtables words, not really
a museum.
To compensate for Wrights glaring blunders, the museum director, Huxtable
tells us, pulled the canvases from the shell of the building by suspending them
inward from the walls on horizontal rods. They now seem to float in free space like
sculpture, entirely remote from the building (337). Then, we are told, Sweeney
poured torrents of light both in front of and behind the paintings, further
nullifying the structure, making it just a vessel (337). Since the museum does not
divorce itself from its wider context as it should, the only corrective course of action
is, it seems, to divorce the work from this place in compensation.
The Catharsis
Thus far I have tried to point out that between the public and the artwork, the
art museum has insinuated, from inception and by design, an elaborate and deep
threshold that mediates and oversees the passage to and from the seemingly
infinite world that it fabricates to contain art and the real world from which it
is sequestered. This spacing, deliberate as it has been, constitutes the criterion
by which the successes and the failures are persistently measured in the critical
dialogues that have played an indispensable role in the perpetuation of the type.
The lingering question is, of course, why the persistent spacing and the disjointing
of art over the course of the art museums short history. Overtly, there is nothing
about paintings and statues that would remotely suggest the elaborate ritual of
visitation that is the art museum. Much less is there anything about the enjoyment
and the appreciation of art that mandates a disjointing journey. Much of our contact
with art is in fact delimited to replicas and copies that are adamantly excluded from
the space made proper to art. What then sees to this fabrication? What exactly is
at stake in the spacing of art? What logic sees to the persistent spacing and the
exclusive space of the authentic?
Over the course of its history, the relationship of Western culture to painting,
alongside writing and other forms of graphic representation, has been, in the
least, an ambivalent relationship. Conceived at the advent of an unwanted
absence, according to a pervasive myth that ascribes the invention of painting to
the Corinthian youth, Butades,19 the site of painting from its presumed inception
has been the site of a desired presence that it cannot judiciously fill (Figure 4.15).
Fig. 4.15 Benot

Suve Joseph,
Invention of the Art
of Drawing, 267
131.5 cm, oil
on canvas, 1791,
Groeningemuseum,
Bruges
Photo credit: Hugo
Maertens, Lukas
Art in Flanders VZW
As such, painting has been the subject of simultaneous condemnation and praise
for its ability to duplicate and perpetually conjure an absent or else invisible
referent. It has been at once prescribed and proscribed as a mimetic device that
substitutes memory for perception. Plato, for instance, Jacques Derrida reminds
us, condemned painting as a mimetic art, much as Aristotle interrogated it in the
name of mimesis.
The painters products, Plato purported, stand before us as though they

were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence
(quoted in Derrida, Dissemination 136). The painted images are, in other words,
neither simply living, nor simply dead. They have the appearance of the living and
speak with the voice of death: silence. Painting can bring merely to sight what is
rightfully out of sight. It can displace and collapse space. Its space is neither the
immediate space of the present nor the distant space of the absent. Painting,
in a sense, fits into no space and belongs to no one place. The ambivalence
toward painting has as much to do with its irreducibility to either presence or
absence, life or death, as it does to the cause of the confoundment: mimesis.
Plato, Derrida tells us, is obliged sometimes to condemn mimesis in itself as a
process of duplication, whatever its model might be, and sometimes to disqualify
mimesis only in function of the model that is imitated, the mimetic operation in
itself remaining neutral, or even advisable. But in both cases, mimesis is lined up
alongside truth: either it hinders the unveiling of the thing itself by substituting
a copy or double for what is; or else it works in the service of truth through the
doubles resemblance (Dissemination 187).
The lining up of painting alongside truth was not to change with the
transformation of painting into art. The referent merely gave way to a subject
that retained all the privileges of the former in relation to the painted image.
Whether painting is seen as the representation of an absolute ideal, as it was by the
theoreticians of the Renaissance, or as a mode of expression that renders painting
in particular and art in general, as Ruskin put it, nothing but a noble and expressive
language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing, up to and
including the conception of painting as the revelation of the concealed truth
of the subject or the reproduction of a things general essence as Heidegger, for
instance, defined it, the priority and radical alterity of what is painted as compared
to the painted image has not been a question (Modern Painters 8; Poetry, Language,
Thought 37).
What Platonism which stands more or less immediately for the whole history
of Western philosophy, including the anti-Platonisms that regularly feed into it,
Derrida notes, has decided and maintained in the face of the confoundment and
the displacement that is painting, is the presumed possibility of a discourse about
what is.
That which is, the being-present (the matrix-form of substance, of reality, of

the opposition between matter and form, essence and existence, objectivity
and subjectivity, etc.) is distinguished from the appearance, the image, the
phenomenon, etc., that is from anything that, presenting it as being-present,
doubles it, re-presents it, and can therefore replace and de-present it. There is
thus the 1 and the 2, the simple and the double. The double comes after the
simple; it multiplies it as a follow-up. The image supervenes upon reality, the
representation upon the present in presentation, the imitation upon the thing,
the imitator upon the imitated. First there is what is reality, the thing itself, in
flesh and blood as the phenomenologist say; then there is, imitating these, the
painting, the portrait, the zographeme, the inscription or transcription of the
thing itself. Discernability, at least numerical discernability, between the imitator
and the imitated is what constitutes order. And obviously, according to logic
itself, according to a profound synonymy, what is imitated is more real, more
essential, more true, etc., than what imitates. It is anterior and superior to it.
(Dissemination 191)
Doubtless, Derrida continues, this order will appear to be contested, even

inverted, in the course of history, and on several occasions. But never have the
absolute distinguishability between imitated and imitator, and the anteriority of the
first over the second, been displaced by any metaphysical system (Dissemination
192).
What Platonism has decided about the order of appearance in the world, it
has maintained with a host of distinct ritual practices and institutions. Of these,
the art museum, invented as it was at a particular point in time, is an indispensable
element. The art museum as an institution and a building type, along with the
institutions and practices it supplanted, are indispensable to Platonism and its
logocentric determination, because the determination is, as any, a fragile and
volatile determination. Its greatest challenge does not come, however, from other
worldviews or competing determinations. The greatest challenge that this reality
faces is not, in other words, to its shape or content, but to its authority and its
ability to assume the guise of inevitability. The challenge where it is faced is to the
reality of the real. Construed as it is in the West to appear as the non-contingent
other of representation, this virtual or cultural reality faces a constant challenge
to its authority as a self-referential or non-representational inevitability from its
representational other. The greatest challenge comes from that which is placed in
a secondary, subservient position with respect to the present, or the real, that is,
among other modes of representation, painting itself.
The intermingling of reality and representation in the West is a fatal affair. John
Ruskin offers us a pertinent example. His is particularly noteworthy in this context
as his views on art belong to the first museum age.20 Ruskins encounter with the
fatal co-habitation of the real and the copy takes place, interestingly enough, on
the steps of the old British Museum.
Discussing the utterly base and inadmissible practice of painting of surfaces to
represent some other material, Ruskin writes:
I have made it a rule in the present work not to blame specifically; but I may,
perhaps, be permitted, while I express my sincere admiration of the very noble
entrance and general architecture of the British Museum, to express also my
regret that the noble granite foundation of the staircase should be mocked at its
landing by an imitation, the more blameable because tolerably successful. The
only effect of it is to cast suspicion upon the true stones below, and upon every bit
of granite afterwards encountered. (Seven Lamps 51)
What forces Ruskin to voice an uncharacteristic blame is the undemarcated

presence of the real and the copy, or the self-referential and the representational in
the same space. He directs his blame at the imitative representation not for being
a bad representation, but for being tolerably successful. He condemns it not
because it deceives or hides anything from him, but because it reveals too much of
itself and in effect too much about its Other. The successful mock loosens Ruskins
grip on the reality of the real. It casts suspicion on the authenticity of the original.
What distinguishes for Ruskin the reality of the real from its mere representation is
an original and causal link between the appearance and the substance of the real,
for example, between, as he puts it, glitter and gold. What Ruskin loses in the
company of the mock is this link. What he loses is the presumed dependence in
real presence of appearance on being.
If the real stone could become suspect in the company of its mock, if its stone
appearance could be taken for an imitation in this company, then this appearance
must necessarily have nothing to do with the real presence of stone or else
suspicion as much as imitation would not be possible. What the effect of the
successful mock indicates, what in effect is the condition of its possibility and at
that the possibility of repetition, imitation, or representation, is the independence
of representation from the presence or absence of the signified referent in
reality as it is in representation. What it indicates is that real presence is itself a
representation, that only as a representation can real presence ever be subject to
suspicion. Reality offers no greater hold on its appearance and no greater link to its
substance than the mock.
Considering that it is the cohabitation of the real and the mock and not the
individual appearance of either that loosens our grip over appearance, Ruskin
suggests that we take recourse to spacing to (re)establish control. He recommends
that we contain the effect of the mock by framing and separating it from the real.
The framing can be either conceptual or literal. What is imperative, Ruskin tells us,
is to either conceptually distance the copy by making its appearance fall noticeably
short of the real and as such inexchangeable with it or else to literally distance the
copy by framing it.
In the Campo Santo at Pisa, Ruskin writes, each fresco is surrounded with
a border composed of flat colored patterns of great eleganceno part of it in
attempted relief. Having secured the certainty of flat surface with a border, the
framed figures, Ruskin tells us, though the size of life, do not deceive (Seven
Lamps 49). Segregated, and placed within a secured domain, representation ceases
to effect our hold on the appearance of the real and the mock as two diametrically
opposed appearances. In fact, the spacing, literal or conceptual, constitutes our
only hold over these appearances.
Ruskins recommended spacing is not, of course, unique. It follows a widespread
and time-honored practice. Our encounters with graphic representation in the
wider cultural realm are left no more to chance than they are at Campo Santo in
Pisa. These encounters are equally mediated, carefully controlled, and spatially
segregated. We find the logic of spacing and a multilayered demarcation of the place
of representation not only in the picture frames and book covers that mediate our
experience and condition our access to their representational content, but of greater
supplemental force in institutional building-types that serve as exclusive domiciles
to various forms of representation. Of these, the art museum is one example.
The specifics of the design and the particular experience of this building-type,
from inception and through every stage of its permutation, play a vital role in
rendering the modalities of our assumptions about the nature of the relationship
between reality and art into an objective experience of it. As a vital cultural
mechanism, this building-type sees to the proper dispensation and consumption
of art as representation in a world of its own making where the reality outside as
self-presentation retains its privileges and remains impervious to the challenge of
representation, in no small measure because of this spatial construct.
Ideally, of course, there would be no representation to effect our hold over the
reality of the real and the truth of the true. I sometimes wish, Ruskin, the great
advocate of art, tells us, that truth should so far literally prevail as that all should
be gold that glittered, or rather that nothing should glitter that was not gold
(Seven Lamps 53). Nevertheless, he contends, nature herself does not dispense
with such resemblances and he is left having to confront and do his best to
overcome its effect, that is, to harness the benefits of art and avoid its destructive
or deconstructive effect.
What Ruskin sometimes wishes is for truth to prevail over all that appear what
they are not. What he at times wishes is not simply for things to show themselves
for what they are, real or apparent but for a literal link between what is and what
appears, between glitter and gold, always. What Ruskin sometimes wishes for is
no less than the impossibility of representation, that is, the impossibility of a gap
between being and appearing that marks for him, despite what he sometimes
wishes, the beginning and the end of two opposite domains: the domain of the
real and the domain of the apparent.
Faced with the inevitability of representation, what Ruskin assumes and what
Platonism has consistently assumed is that there is an outside to representation
or conversely that representation falls outside of a norm that is characterized by
the presumed attributes of the real. This outside is construed variously, though
consistently both conceptually and literally.
Conceptually, on the trail of a much-traversed path, Ruskin first demotes
representation as compared to the real, only then to elevate and idealize a version
of it as a second order reality. Ruskin asks us to consider how there is not a cluster
of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respect
nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate
sculpture of its stones (Seven Lamps 56). Yet we take interest in the carved work
and all our interest in this carved work, Ruskin professes, our sense of its richness,
though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it; of its delicacy, though
it is a thousandfold less delicate; of its admirableness, though a millionfold less
admirable; results from our consciousness of its being the work of poor, clumsy,
toilsome man (56). The true delightfulness of the carved work, Ruskin asserts,
depends on our discovery in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and
heart-breakingsof recoveries and joyfulness of success (56). This is the worth of
the thing, just as the worth of anything else we call precious (56).
The worth of art has not to do with the forms that it inevitably re-produces, in
that nature is, as Ruskin believes it to be, the origin of all conceivable forms and
as such superior to any reproduction.21 Rather art assumes a worth and becomes
delightful in the same manner that sea sands are made beautiful by their bearing
the seal of the motion of the waters, that is, by bearing the direct seal or impress
of the creators thoughts and intents, through the agency of the creators hands.
Works of art assume their worth, in other words, in proportion to the amount
of the energy of that mind which has visibly been employed upon them (Seven
Lamps 142). This visible record, this original and causal seal or impress of mind
by hand turn the inevitable re-production of form into an original production.
Ruskin, of course, would have had no difficulty with von Rumohrs assertion that
all the value of a painting turns around the idea of originality. Only the original
bears the decisive seal or impress. This presumably irreproducible seal may be
variously conceived. Benjamin, for instance put it in broader temporal terms. The
authenticity of a thing is, he noted, the essence of all that is transmissible from
its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history
which it has experienced (The Work of Art 221). This all that is transmissible
is inclusive, of course, of the testimonial impress left by hand, as it were, in the
beginning. Regardless of the scope of the definition, the irreproducibility, and the
causality that the seal stands for is the constant decisive criteria in the incessant
distinction between the original and the reproduction, or the authentic and the
duplicate. It is precisely in the name of this irreproducible seal that an outside to the
sphere of reproduction and/or representation is presumed and in turn fabricated.
The sealed and impressed original plays the same role with respect to painting
as speech has traditionally played with respect to writing. Both designate
a logocentric appropriation of representation in the name of a seemingly
unmediated, direct translation of thought into form. Both designate an outside to
the absence and delay that is presumed to characterize writing on the one hand
and the reproduction on the other. The privileging of the original in the name of
an irreproducible seal is, as well, a form of resistance to representation over which
there is no hold.
The absence that is exorcised from the original in the name of an irreproducible
seal incessantly returns, however, to haunt it. Much as the successful imitation of
the real threatens its reality, the successful duplication of the original threatens
its originality. Even though originality is a concept that inevitably presumes the
possibility of reproduction, the latter takes away the privileges of the original
as it grounds them. This construct is, much as the real with which it has much
in common, fragile and tenuous. What threatens it with collapse, that is, what
fractures the seal that gives the original all its accorded privileges is the possibility
of production in the absence of engraving thoughts and intents. The original
painting is no more immune to the effect of the reproduction than the real stones
of the British museum.
The successful reproduction as Ruskin would have itthe one that does not
fall noticeably short of the originalfractures the seal of the original always
already, in as much it re-produces the seal without the engraving thoughts or, as it
were, the sea sands without the motion of the waters. The threat of the successful
mock lies in its ability to take the place of the original and supplant it. The condition
of this possibility is the impossibility of an impressed and sealed original, that is,
of a direct and causal link between thoughts and forms on the one hand and the
subjection of the latter to the presence of the former, on the other. The certainty of
the original, and the certainty that is desired in the name of the original are lost to
the successful reproduction. There can be no substitute for the original, because
what would be irretrievably lost in the transaction is the original. This is precisely
why the art museum has been, like the cabinet before it, a domain adamantly
exclusive of the successful reproduction from inception.
The myth of the original is particularly vulnerable, it is important to note, to
mechanical reproduction in the broader sense of the term. Ruskin vehemently
condemned the substitution of cast or machine work for that of hand, as an
imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin not on account of form, but on
account of reproducing the seal without the engraving thought. The only effect
of cast or machine works is, he noted, to cast shame and suspicion over every
work of hand in their company (Seven Lamps 58). Mechanical reproduction,
as Benjamin was to point out later, not only renders the question of originality
impertinent to its production, but in the process, it also and critically challenges
the viability and consequently the authority of the original as a sealed production.
It is not coincidental, therefore, that the proliferation of the museum has gone in
tandem with the proliferation of mechanical and now digital reproduction. Both
add a critical dimension to the preservation of the sanctity and the authority of the
original. If, on the other hand, the aura of the work of art, that is, its authenticity
and historicity, has not withered in the age of mechanical and no less digital
reproduction, contrary to Benjamins prediction, this is in part because the effect
of the latter is successfully curtailed by the museum (The Work of Art 221).
The history of our preoccupation with painting and sculpture as art is, I tried
to point out earlier, inseparable from the history of our preoccupation with the
question of arts place and placement. The museum is merely one historic response
to the question that has loomed large since the inception of painting and sculpture
as art. This preoccupation is, of course, in no small measure, a reflection of the
undifferentiated and undifferentiable space of graphic representation. Art has no
decidable place in as much as every place assumes boundaries and outer limits,
that is, an outside. Art at once exceeds and defies any sense of place or any act of
placement, predicated upon, in the simplest terms, a clear boundary separating
two opposite terms, for example, here and there, inside and outside. Art has no
outside, since outside every presumed or presumable place for representation, one
finds only more representation. This is precisely what the successful mock forcefully
and problematically brings to surface.
To curtail the ever-looming danger of exposure and displacement in the
company of art, it is essential, as Ruskin suggests, to put in place, institutionally
and literally, what art defies and denies conceptually: a sense of place. The
fabrication of the museum as an Other place is, persistent, as it has been, a cultural
substitute for what is missing and missed: an outside to representation. Within the
confines of the picture frame provisionally and within the confines of the museum
permanently, art assumes an outside. The logic of spacing at work in the making of
the museum puts the relationship between art and all that is to escape its grip in
the proper cultural perspective.
From the ever-present picture frame to the cabinet and the museum, the
preoccupation with a place for art is primarily a preoccupation with a place from
which all that is to escape its effect can be safely withdrawn. The customary and
celebrated view out from the museumthe one that transforms the world outside
into a pictureis the consummation of this withdrawal. What is at stake is the
preservation of the presumed alterity of art as measured against the real. Opening
up a place for art is tantamount to opening up a place for its presumed Other and
for otherness as such to representation. At stake is authoritative control over the
determined superiority and anteriority of reality over representation, the imitated
over the imitator, the original over the copy. At stake in placing art is, in other words,
the presumed order of appearance in the world, which is, in a manner, order itself.
If our construed cultural reality is to assume the authoritative guise of inevitability
and truth, then the decisive exorcise of representation is not a choice that can be
readily avoided. If, from the princely and monarchial courts to the public realm
authoritative control over representation and its potentially destructive effect is
entrusted to the state and delegated to specific institutions, it is precisely because
of what is at stake. The institution of the museum is an instituted resistance to
representation. No claim to power can go without evidential control over the
alterity of representation as measured against the real. To control representation is
to control not necessarily what is real, but the possibility of its authoritative being
and presence as a non-representational, self-referential entity.
Writing, problematic as it is from a certain vantage point, retains a polite
formal distance from the speech it is said to duplicate. The relationship between
the signifier and the signified in writing is, at the denotative level, blatantly
conventional. In art, it is not. The materiality of the work of art cannot be readily
idealized as a mere means to an end in the way that writing is, without having
to attribute the same to the real. The segregation and containment of this other
mode of representation requires a different strategy. Unlike the library that forms a
defensive outpost and offers us an inward journey to a clear and secure inside, the
art museum fabricates an outside and offers us an outbound journey to an Other,
parallel space or universe to which art is exiled on the condition of authenticity.
This space or rather this spacing of art is predicated, not on the experience of
penetration as the library is, but on the experience of disjointing and distance, of
leaving one world behind and entering another.
The exorcise the art museum implements architecturally is a two-fold practice.
On the one hand, the art museum, as an institution and a building type, exiles
the inherent representational characteristic of the real in the name of mimesis
and art to the museum. In turn, it curtails the inherent reproducibility that is
art in the name of authenticity through the exclusion of the mock. In the world
outside the museum, the copy may thereby proliferate without undermining the
alterity of the real, because its face is turned toward the authentic in that other
place where the copy has no place by design. What makes room for the docile
cohabitation of the real and the reproduction is the designated and exclusive
place for the authentic on the outside. The copy poses no apparent threat so long
as it is in reference to another reality, at the end of a journey, in an Other place,
that is, so long as its origin is on the outside.22 The museum is, in other words,
the indispensable reserve to the economy that regulates the widespread and free
circulation of images outside the museum.
The sequestering, and placement of the authentic in an Other world is not, of

course, a practice that is unique to the art museum. The entire tourist industry
with which the museum has a historic affinity is predicated on the assumption,
MacCannell points out, that the authentic is outside the sphere of everyday life.23
An extent of tourism is the rite of locating the authentic on the outside, be this
measured in spatial or temporal terms. Authenticity is, in a sense, intimately tied
to distance. The authentic mandates a journey. It is, to an extent, everything that is
inside from the vantage point of the tourist visiting from the outside. The authentic
is, in this context, inside a place to which the visitor does not belong by design and
by force of label: a visitor.
Whereas from the outside the museum as a site for tourism provides the
assurance of a place and a receptacle into which we may, in a manner, project
our trepidations about language and representations, from the inside it is the
place where we face them only to locate representation within the bounds of its
culturally designated place. The place varies, but the placement does not. The
virtual debate over the rite of visitation to the museum between Adorno and
Valry is a case in point.
Confessing to be not over fond of museums, Valry begins his reflections on
the museum by characteristically marking the point of transition from the world
outside into the world inside. The memory of the former would remain with him
throughout the visit as a point of contrast and a place of conceptual refuge. He
marks the borderline by making note of the hand that relieves him of his stick
and the notice that forbids him to smoke at the entrance. Chilled at once by this
act of authority and by the sense of constraint, he nevertheless makes his way
toward things of beauty only to enter a place where, as he puts it, cold confusion
reigns and the total impression is something quite intolerable. Moving from the
sculpture gallery to the painting gallery changes nothing. As a strangely organized
disorder opens up before him in silence, Valry tells us:
I am smitten with a sacred horror. My pace grows reverent. My voice alters, to a

pitch slightly higher than in church, to a tone rather less strong than that of every
day. Presently I lose all sense of why I have intruded into this wax-floored solitude,
savoring of temple and drawing room, of cemetery and school did I come for
instruction, for my own beguilement, or simply as a duty and out of convention?
Or is it perhaps some exercise peculiar to itself, (203)
The rite of visitation is indeed an exercise peculiar to itself in as much as it puts

the visitor in the grip of language over which he or she has no hold. What Valry
is made to confront at the Louvre is what late nineteenth century museum visitors
were designed to confront: a profusion of art works and walls covered with
paintings en tappiserie (Figure 4.16). By sheer force of number, the total impression
simply exceeds comprehension. Only an irrational civilization, Valry protests,
could devise such a domain of incoherence. This juxtaposition of dead visions has
something insane about it, with each thing jealously competing for the glance that
will give it life (203).
Fig. 4.16
Giuseppe
Castiglione, View
of the Grand
Salon Carre in the
Louvre, 69 103
cm, oil on canvas,
Louvre Museum
Photo credit:
Erich Lessing, Art
Resource, NY
The works of art call from all directions for Valrys attention, that is, for the
glance that transforms dead vision into living idea, form into thought, writing into
speech. For the generation that conceived Valrys museum, art was, to use Ruskins
words, nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of
thought, but by itself nothing (Seven Lamps 208). Valry presently finds the mind
inadequate to the demands of this language. The mind, he tells us, can neither
follow nor perform several distinct operations at once (204). The voices that call
from all directions cannot be turned into thoughts in this domain of incoherence.
All alone against so much art, Valry finds himself incapable of conceiving each
work as an individual expression, that is, as rarities whose creators wanted each
one to be unique (204). The uniqueness of each expression is lost to the repetition
that purportedly kills all. The art works are most inimical to each other when they
are most alike. Once again, repetition proves fatal, as it did, in a manner, on the
steps of the British Museum. In defense, Valrys thoughts take refuge outside the
museum in other places and distant civilizations. The uniqueness that he feels lost
inside the museum, he re-locates outside it through an act of virtual tourism. I
feel sure, he tells us, that Egypt, China, Greece, in their wisdom and refinement,
never dreamed of this system of putting together works which simply destroy each
other (204).
The Modern man, on the other hand, is impoverished by the sheer excess of
his riches (Valry 204). Having located what is lost inside the museum at a safe
distance, Valry conceptualizes the loss itself as an attribute of modernity and
its characteristic accumulation of a necessarily unusable excess of capital. The
art works in the museum are conceptualized as excess riches, that is, images in
excess of what is consumable. The slippage between image and thought and the
inability of images to do what they are meant to do, that is, merely and readily
transport thought, are thus conceptualized as not endemic to language and the
consumption of images, but in excess of it. The slippage is conceptualized as being

not permanent, but temporal, and within the bounds of the museum also spatial.
Valrys reflections on the museum become at this point both comforting and
stupefying. The museum, we are told, exerts a constant pull on everything that
men can make. All things end up on the wall or in a glass case (2045). Since
our capacity to use the ever-increasing resources of the Modern age is far from
growing with them, the museums constant pull on all that cannot be consumed is
comforting. It responds to the need to concentrate it all in one place (205). Having
collected the excess outside the place of consumption, the collection is, essential
as it is, also stupefying.
However vast the palace, however suitable and well-arranged, we always

feel a little lost, a little desolate in its galleries, all alone against so much art.
The product of thousands of hours work consumed in painting and drawing
by so many masters, each hour charged with years of research, experiment,
concentration, genius, acts upon our senses and minds in a few minutes!
We cannot stand up to it. So what do we do? (205)
Not being able to stand up to the task, not being able to exert a clear hold over
language and bridge the gap between form and content, we grow superficial
or else we grow erudite. We either acquiesce our inability to control language,
resign ourselves to not getting beyond form, and grow superficial, or we play
the language game and substitute for what is not adequately and authoritatively
expressed. We substitute theories for direct feeling, and encyclopedic memory
for marvelous actuality. In either case, the direct and the actual slip away or rather,
out.
The solution to being in the grip of language is, as Valry sees it, to stagger out
of the museum, which he does, taking refuge and solace in the domain of the direct
and the actual. The glorious chaos of the museum follows him out, however, and
blends with the living activities of the street. It threatens to infect the outside,
less Valrys uneasiness, groping for its cause is put to rest. What remains is to
explain the cause of the slippage and the obsessive feeling of confusion within
the bounds of the museum. What remains is to explain away the slippage as being
not endemic to language and art, but peculiar to the museum and as such safely
contained within its bounds. What remains is to close the doors behind.
Once safely outside the museum:
Suddenly I glimpse a vague ray of light. An answer begins to form itself,

separating out from my feelings, insisting on expression. Painting and sculpture,
says my Demon of Analysis, are both foundlings. Their mother, Architecture,
is dead. So long as she lived, she gave them their place, their function and
discipline. They had no freedom to stray. They had their exact allotted space and
given light, their subjects and their relationship While Architecture was alive,
they knew their function (206)
What is not had in confrontation with art inside the museum is thus merely the loss
of what was readily had in another time and another place. In its place art speaks
vividly. The hold that is never had over language is thus localized safely within the
bounds of the museum at a distance, there. It is symptomatic of that place and of
being out of place.
If Prousts and in turn Adornos reactions are any indication, returning art
works to their presumed place, for example, to exhibit paintings in their original
surroundings or in ones similar, in baroque or rococo castles, is even more
distressing than leaving them within the confines of the museum (175). Both, in
fact, advocate leaving art works in the museum, albeit a reformed museum. This is
a museum, where the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail,
symbolize the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work (179).
Theirs is a museum, in other words, that returns the art works not to the space of
consumption, but further back to the space of creation. Theirs is a display practice
that is far more familiar to the twentieth-century visitor than Valrys Louvre. Both
practices, however, represent, legitimize, and, to an extent, impose a particular
interpretation of art and language in response to one and the same dilemma.
For Adorno, speaking also on Prousts behalf, the work of art is neither a
reflection of the soul nor the embodiment of a Platonic Idea (184). It is not, as
Ruskin had it, a vehicle of thought. Rather, and this is precisely what Adorno
accuses Valry of not seeing, even in the very moment of its conception the work
confronts its author and its audience as something objective, something which
makes demands in terms of its own inner structure and its own logic. (184). The
work of art is a representation that refers only to itself. To appear as a force field
between subject and object, however, works of art have to be uprooted from
their native soil and have been set out along the path to their own destruction
(185). All external references, pressures, and potential distortions, all traces of prior
consumption must be stripped from them, if they are to appear as self-referential
representations. They have to be estranged from human ends, allowed to die in
the museum, in order to return to life by the attentive glance of the visitor who
leaves his navet outside along with his cane and his umbrella (185). This is a
visitor who does not stroll through museums letting him or herself be delighted
here and there (185). Rather, this is a visitor who picks out two or three paintings,
and concentrates on them as fixedly as if they really were idols (185). However,
only some museums at the time were helpful in this respect (185). There were
only some in which the rite of resurrection could be performed effectively. These
were, common as they are now, museums where the works of art were hung in
discrete separation, completing their cycle of isolation and decontextualization
(185). Valrys museum was neither conducive to the rite of resurrection, nor was
it meant to be. It had its sights on the past, and not the future. Both museums are,
however, engrossed by a precarious present.
Despite their considerable differences, Valry and Adorno agree on one thing.
For both the museum withholds death. Valry likens it to a cemetery, Adorno to a
mausoleum. For both, the museum marks off and removes from within the order
of the living what has to be removed by a fatal necessity. This much is voicefully
pronounced by both. They part ways locating the life that is presumed absent in
the museum. One locates the life of the artwork in the past, the other in the future.
One laments its passing and mourns away its felt absence from within the museum,
the other celebrates its passing in the hope of resurrecting it. Each responds to
a display practice that turns his assumptions about the work into an evidential
experience of it. One practice induces and reinforces the dream of a consumption
that has been, the other of one perpetually commencing. What neither worldview
can consume and digest, however, is what both confront presently.
What both worldviews confine to the museum and what each confronts at the
museum is, at the risk of repetition, neither life nor death. The confined defies life,
much as it defies death conceived as its absolute Other. For this confoundment
neither worldview has or could have a place. It erases the very sense of place.
If, in turn, both Valry and Adorno take recourse to supplemental spatial and
temporal boundaries, it is only to overcome the confoundment and re-establish
order. First, there are the spatial boundaries imposed by the museum to incise the
confoundment, then there are the temporal boundaries that serve to deny the
confoundment by its conceptual transformation into a life that has been or one
that will be. In the meantime, the life that is exorcised from the museum is given to
reside safely outside it, in a reality that is thus untouched by the confounding effect
of representation. Both operate with assurance of lifes safety on the outside from
the vantage point of the museum as a mausoleum: the place that keeps death in
place, at a safe distance.
If, as Malraux notes, all art is a revolt against mans fate, the art museum is a
revolt against realitys fate in the company of art.
Notes
1 For a discussion of the Western roots of the museum see Malraux and G. Bazin.
2 Whether they served a religious cult or the cult of remembrance, what had thus far
given paintings and statues a place in the world of things, and what had also kept
them in that place was their specific cult referent. Once they eschewed their referent,
they surrendered their place.
3 For a discussion of subject see Pomian; IImpey and MacGregor; and Weil.
4 See G. Bazin 129; IImpey and MacGregor 3. Also the Kunstkammer is not, it is
important to note, the exact equivalent of the gallery as it was often used to designate
a specialized version of the Wunderkammer.
5 Quotation from Francis Bacons Gesta Grayorum, 1594.
6 See Kaufmann 145.
7 According to Germain Bazin, a collector at the time was likely to pay 30 florins for a
van Eyck or 3 florins for a work by the sculptor Desiderio da Settignano against 6,000
florins for the horn of a unicorn.
8 See Jones for a detailed discussion of the subject.
9 See Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Discipline and Punish.
10 For a detailed discussion of the subject see Lee 1067 and Alexander 316.
11 See Bennett; Elsner and Cardinal; Luke; and Sherman and Rogoff.
12 See Mcclellan 89 and Pevsner, Building Types 118.

13 There are doors on each floor and each side connecting the gallery spaces to the
central vestibule. They were, however, designed and used for transportation of art to
and from the galleries and not for public access.
14 For complete account of the museums design history, see Brownlee.
15 For a complete description of the project see Biasini, Lebrat and Bezombes.
16 For a detailed description of the museum see Davey.
17 See Huxtable.
18 See MacCannell.
19 See Rosenblum.
20 Ruskins own art museum, Walkely, was located on a hill, in the midst of green fields,
and in command of a fine view (The Guild xlii). He reasoned: the Climb to knowledge
and truth is ever steep, and the gems found at the top are small, but precious and
beautiful (xlii).
21 I suppose, Ruskin wrote, there is no conceivable form or grouping of forms but in
some part of the universe an example of it may not be found (Ruskin, Seven Lamps
102).
22 The allocation of an exclusive place to the authentic, in effect displaces the copy from
every place. It dispossesses the copy of a place because inside the museum it has no
place and outside it, it is out of place: an outsider. In the company of the real, the copy
is an import, that is, a substitute for what is at a safe distance elsewhere.
23 See Culler; MacCannell 314, 12158 and Urry 1113.
5
The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
Each representation discards or retains various of the qualities that permit us

to recognize the object on the screen. Each introduces, for didactic or aesthetic
reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit
the original to subsist in its entirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and
necessary chemical action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an
illusion of reality composed of a complex of abstraction (black and white, plane
surface), of conventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic
reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of
the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with
its cinematographic representation. As for the film maker, the moment he has
secured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to
ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no
longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of
calling him a liar because his art consists in lying. He is just no longer in control
of his art. He is its dupe, and hence he is held back from any further conquest of
reality. (A. Bazin 27)
The More is Less
The immediate success and lasting appeal of cinema over the course of its short
history have had much to do with its persuasive and ever-increasing approximation
of reality. Yet, despite Cinemas incessant technological drive toward greater
approximation, from enhancements to image, to sound, to color, to stereoscopy,
and so on, reality has remained a constant measure of cinemas decided and
decisive alterity.1 This may well be the only measure the various theoreticians of
cinema, including Bazin, Mitry, Metz, and Boudry, among others, share in common.
Each evokes reality, only to locate cinema at a measurable distance from it.2 Each
not only assumes a priori that cinema is essentially an illusion, but finds it necessary
to emphasize the imaginary nature of cinemaits unrealityas its salient
characteristic and incontestable ground for theoretical speculation.
The insistence on the illusory nature of cinema, emphatic and incontestable as

it has been, has not to do with any probability of confusing film with reality. Rather,
the two have to be conceptually and for that matter, as we shall see later, spatially
kept apart, partly because of what Metz calls the problem of verisimilitude (72)
and what Bazin attributes to the possibility of substitution (A. Bazin 27). For Baudry
it is the Platonic Cave syndrome (The Apparatus). Admittedly, no one assumes
the images on the cinematic screen to be real. The audience, Metz tells us, is not
duped by the diegetic illusion, it knows that the screen presents no more than a
fiction (72). However, he tells us, it is of vital importance for the correct unfolding
of the spectacle that this make-believe be scrupulously respected that every
thing is set to work to make the deception effective and to give it an air of truth
(72). This is Bazins version of the same:
If the film is to fulfill itself aesthetically we need to believe in the reality of what is
happening while knowing it to be tricked. All that matters is that the spectator
can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic
while the film is also truly cinema. So the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our
imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute. (A. Bazin 48)
It is the air of truth, according to Bazin that enables film as an illusion of reality,
to act as a substitute for authentic reality (27). This substitution has distinct and
potentially dire consequences. The substitution quickly induces a loss of awareness
of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its
cinematographic representation (27). What concerns Bazin is not attributing more
to cinema than it is due; it is attributing less to reality than is prudent. It is not
cinema that may be confused with reality; rather it is reality that may be confused
with cinema to the formers detriment. More may appear to be less. As for the
filmmaker, the price of this transgression is the inability to tell where lies begin or
end, thereby becoming the dupe of his or her art. Once this happens, there can be
no further conquest of reality for want of clear boundaries (27).
The depreciation Bazin ascribes to the identification of authentic reality with
the cinematic illusion has at least one thing in common with the decay of aura
Benjamin attributed to the desire of contemporary masses to bring things closer
spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the
uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction (The Work of Art 223).
In both cases, the substitution of a mechanical reproduction for the uniqueness of
every reality leads to the depreciation of the latter.
The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought
may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always
depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a
landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. (221)
Ill return to this curious consequence and what is, in effect, realitys vulnerability
to film. For now it is important to note that both Benjamin and Bazin gauge the
authentic reality and its mechanical reproduction in spatial terms and in relation
The Architecture of the Illusive Distance 139
to distance. Benjamin defines the aura of the real as the unique phenomenon
of a distance, however close it may be (The Work of Art 222). This is a distance
measured in experiential rather than literal terms, that is, however close it may
be. Conversely, the destruction of aura has to do with attempts to overcome this
distance through the agency of mechanical reproduction, for example, the cinema.
Also, to insist, as Bazin and many other theoreticians of cinema do, on the illusory
nature of film in relation to reality, is to insist on the spacing of reality and illusion
to the two sides of a line that readily allows one to tell where lies begin or end.
Though generally presumed, the implement of this spacing is not necessarily a
given. In the least, the spacing is vulnerable. It fails when and where authentic
reality is identified with illusion of reality. This is why the place and the conditions
under which this identification could happen, which is wherever film takes place,
have been a matter of considerable concern and careful consideration since the
inception of cinema.
If cinema is, as Benjamin contends, a direct response to the desire of
contemporary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly, the history
of cinemas place and placement has followed the opposite trajectory. A reverse
spatial logic has seen to the formation of the place of film from inception. That film
is not reality is not only a persistent theoretical note; it is also implemented and
imposed by the designed experiential peculiarities of the historic places that have
circumscribed the filmic event.
Locating and placing film is a formidable challenge confounded by the fact that
film overlaps and condenses time and space. It, in a sense, displaces every place it
happens to be. It produces a strange cohabitation between heterogeneous spaces,
past and present, real and illusory, virtual and actual. This is something that does
not happen in reality, though it happens in reality.
The ambivalence that persistently overshadows any question of a place for film
is compounded by cinemas constant technological strives toward ever-greater
approximation of reality. Despite the constant strive toward greater technological
approximation, or rather because of it, film from inception has been persistently
placed at a marked experiential distance from reality. The modalities of this
placement have changed drastically overtime. The placement has not. In effect, it
has increased with every technological abridgement of the distance between film
and reality. In the coming pages, I will trace the modalities of films placement from
the Kinetoscope to the multiplex through the course of the twentieth century. I
will come back to address the peculiar logic of this spacing and the ideological
consternations it is meant to circumscribe.
The Borrowed Spaces
In a sense, cinema has never been here, where the I as a measure of reality subsists.
It has always been there, at an irreconcilable distance by design.
In its earliest incarnation, the moving picture was confined within the well-
defined box of the Kinetoscope (1891). To see the moving picture, one had to
look inside the box from the outside through a peephole. The box, despite all the
variations on form, material, and ornamental detail, retained the moving picture
within its limits at a clear distance from the viewing subject who initiated and
terminated the viewing (Figure 5.1). Since the Kinetoscope was self-contained and
mobile, it could be placed at any place, as it was at fairgrounds, parlors, arcades,
department stores, and so on. The novel displacement of time and space that
happened within it remained within it wherever it happened to be.3 And there, it
was always in borrowed space.
Fig. 5.1 Holland As compared to the Kinetoscope, the projected film, in any of its many
Brothers designations, Cinmaographe, vitascope, eidoloscope, bioscope, and so on,
Kinetoscope constituted an entirely different type of viewing experience, and presented an
Parlor, 1894 entirely different set of challenges. The projection brought the moving picture
Photo credit: US
out of the box and into the same space as the viewing subject. The effect is best
Department of the
Interior, National described in an April 4, 1896 New York Journal article enumerating the wonders of
Park Service, the new machine (vitascope): For two hours dancing girls and groups of figures,
Edison National all of life size, seemed to exist as realities on the big white screen which had been
Historic Site built at one end of the experimenting rooms (quoted in Musser 14). The novelty
and wonder of the new machine is, in part, a function of approximation, both of
size and spacethe size of life and in its space. What seemed to exist as reality
comes to inhabit the same space as what exist as reality. However, as the author is
quick to locate and localize the event, this novel displacement of space and time
happens on the white screen and at one end of the room, that is, there, at a
perceived distance from the viewer, however close s/he may be.
The space that intervenes as a divider between what is and what seems to be
what it is not and where it is not, acts in ways that are similar to the bounding box of
the Kinetoscope. Even though the solid has given way to a void, the emplacement
of an experiential divide between reality and illusion is fundamentally the same. Fig. 5.2Lyman
The functioning of this void has everything to do with the novelty of the event as H. Howes
Animotiscope
well as the subject matter of early films or what Tom Gunning calls the cinema
exhibition
of attractionsa cinema that offers scenes to look at, rather than narratives to poster, 1897
be engrossed in (11433).4 Both the novelty and the attraction encouraged the Photo credit: From
viewer to assume the role of a spectator. The spectatorial role fixes the subjects the collections
place outside the spectacle. It requires the subject to look at the spectacle in of the Luzerne
County Historical
recognition of the space that is transformed into distance between the spectator
Society
and the spectacle. Early films often addressed themselves specifically to this
space/distance for the thrill and amusement of the viewing spectators. Cases in
point are the ubiquitous and all too popular films of on-rushing trains and other
moving vehicles, waves breaking at the shore, and so on. One such scene is well
depicted in an 1897 advertising poster for the Lyman H. Howes Animotiscope
exhibition (Figure 5.2). The audience and the train locomotive are depicted
in a head to head confrontation on two sides of a gigantic picture frame that
reassuringly separates and locates the moving picture within a well-delineated
and laterally contained space opposite the spectators gaze. The picture frame
is a recurring theme in depictions of early film exhibits. It is not certain how
prevalent the use of a picture frame around the movie screen, often a stretched
muslin sheet, may have been in the early exhibits. Its absence may well have
exacerbated the audiences reaction. Nevertheless, the frame is a prevalent
feature of idealized depictions of the exhibit.5
Having delineated the spectacle within a frame and located the spectators
outside itin the least in the idealized depictionswhat followed in these early
exhibits, is perhaps best described by Maxim Gorky, in his review of the Lumires
Cinmatographe exhibition at the NizhnyNovgorod Fair of 1896.
Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the

screen. It speeds straight at youwatch out! It seems as though it will plunge
into the darkness in which you sit turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated
flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this
hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice. (408)
Gorky is well aware of his place in the darkness opposite the train of shadows
on the screen. He knows that it only seems as though the train will cross the
line of the screen into the domain of the living. Nevertheless, these shadows
are terrifying to see, because of the graphic images that the contemplation
of an abridged distance brings to mind. What he imagines is not merely death,
but disfigurement. It is bodies and buildings transformed into flesh and bone,
dust and broken fragmentsdeprived not only of life, but also of form! Why the
contemplation of shadowy illusions crossing into reality should evoke such graphic
images of disfiguration, knowing the images to be mere shadows, is a question
well have to answer later. The immediate reaction to the scene unfolding on the
screen was perhaps closer to this account: involuntarily you scramble to get out of
the way of the train (Musser and Nelson 66). Other and perhaps well-exaggerated
accounts have the audience rushing out of the theater in panic. The physical
reaction, whether slight or severe, does not come from any confusion of a dim grey
illusion on the screen with reality. Instead, it is an improper involvement with the
image, that is, being dialogically involved instead of looking at the image that has
the audience react. It is the fear of proximity to something that should remain at
a distance that would have the audience re-establish the distance by physically
distancing themselves from the image.
In the end, the experience of this illusory breach is only reassuring. The uncanny
is transformed into the sublime. Noiselessly, the locomotive upon approaching
the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it (Gorky 407). The edges
of the screen hold the threat of death and disfigurement at bay by keeping the
train where it belongs: there, in the kingdom of shadows. The distance between
the spectators and the spectacle is experientially and forcefully re-established.
However, despite the thrill of defying death and disfigurement, the tampering
with the line separating reality from illusion exacts a price. Having defied death,
Gorky cannot, nevertheless, locate and localize it in the kingdom of shadows
and outside the darkness in which the audience persists. Thoughts of death linger
on and torment him through the remainder of the short-films to follow, as these
shorts did in most early film exhibitions.
The card players in an ensuing film appear full of life and laugh until their sides
split but not a sound is heard. It seems as if these people have died and their
shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity (Gorky 407).
The presence/absence of the players on the screen has Gorky imagine not their
present lives elsewhere, as he well and accurately might have, but their imaginary
death prior to, if not as the condition of, their silent shadowy presence on the
screen. Unable to separate and localize the absence he senses on the screen, Gorky
temporalizes it by locating it in the past, as an imaginary death. Nevertheless, the
problem persists, since it is the film itself.
Much as Gorky tries, from the outset, to imagine film as a distinct placea
kingdom no less, with sovereign boundariesthis place is anything but clear
and distinct. This kingdom forcefully evokes and inexorably confounds presence
and/as absence, life and/as death, at once. It makes the separate inseparable. This is
perhaps the problem with verisimilitude; it cannot be reduced to any one thing, in
any one place. Affording no clear hold on presence or absence, this mute, grey life
finally begins, Gorky tells us, to disturb and depress you (408).
It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning
that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange
imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow
dim (408)
Although Gorky does not specify what the warning of the mute grey life on the
screen is, fraught as he imagines it to be with a vague but sinister meaning, he
is quite clear on the consequence. It disturbs and depresses him. In its company,
he loses his sense of place and forgets where he isin the darkness, amidst the
audience. The dissolution of his sense of place is coupled with a loss of control
over his thoughts. Falling, by all appearances, into the grip of language over which
one has no hold, strange imaginings invade his mind. His thoughts too become
displaced, as his consciousness wanes and dims.
Suddenly a gay chatter and a provoking laughter of a woman in the audience
returns him to his place outside the kingdom of shadows. There, from the vague,
but sinister meaning of this experience he tries to distance himself by locating
and placing cinema elsewhere. In his place he imagines cinema to be out of
place. Why here, of all places, he asks repeatedly, are they showing this latest
achievement of science? Though he is not certain of the exact scientific value of
this invention, he is certain it safely and usefully belongs in the realm of science and
in the hands of scientists within the confines of the laboratory. Any place else, it is
displaced and displacing. Nevertheless, he concludes with the uneasy knowledge
that the entertainment value of this peculiar invention will outweigh its scientific
value, thus placing it where it should have no place. Gorkys fears were, of course,
well founded. The logic of his imaginary placement of film at a distance elsewhere
was, however, to shape the place of film for the remainder of its history.
The addition of a narrator and/or musical accompaniments to early silent film
screenings would soon go some distance toward remediation of the type of
dialogical involvement with silent films that purportedly disturbed and depressed
Gorky. By 1914, Charles Wittemore would go so far as to attribute the broad appeal
of, by then, narrative cinema to the introduction of the organ:
It is difficult to say what new features may be added to the development of the
motion picture in the next few years, but certainly the introduction of the organ
in connection with the picture program has done much to arouse a universal
interest among the class of people who are not fascinated by the thrillers, and to
raise the tone of the programs by this very fact. (C. A. Whittemore, The Moving
Picture Theater 43)
The organ music and the narrators voice acted in ways that were similar to the gay
chatter and provoking laughter that extracted and retuned Gorky to his place.
Interjected between the audience and the screen, the narrator and/or the music
helped stabilize and localize the audience in their place in relation to the screen
located now behind the source of sound directed at the audience. Irrespective of
this stabilizing addition, films place was to remain no place for a time. Pending
the transformation of the cinema of attractions into narrative cinema, film would
be confined to temporal and borrowed spaces. It would be kept on the move by
traveling showmen, such as Lyman H. Howe noted earlier, from locality to locality
and a heterogeneous body of borrowed spaces, including churches, schools, city
halls, vacant stores, vaudeville theaters, and so on, in each of which film was, in a
sense, a novelty out of place. Else, film was placed in the company of other oddities,
wonders and curiositiesthings that had no place inside the place of everyday life,
and were placed in the borrowed and temporal spaces of fairgrounds, circuses, and
other traveling entertainments. All these were carefully demarcated and segregated
spaces at a measurable experiential and literal distance from the course of daily life.
The Place Elsewhere
The technological novelty of the moving image inevitably dissipated in a relatively

short time. With it waned the appeal of the cinema of attractions that celebrated
and in turn sublimated the uncanny effect of film. Meanwhile, as the lasting appeal
and entertainment value of narrative film became clear, it was circumscribed a
permanent place of its own in the space, if not the place of the real. The cohabitation
offered distinct challenges. Where to place a displacement, no less, of space and
time?
The affinity between narrative cinema and theater made the latter a logical
precedent for the constitution of a place for film. This was particularly true of
vaudeville theaters that had hosted the film as a novel supplementary sideshow
from early on. However, as compared to both theater and cinema of attractions,
narrative cinema required a distinctly different mode of reception from the
audience, and as such a different type of space/place. This difference rendered the
spatial solutions associated with prior venues not fully suited to the task at hand.
In contrast to the cinema of attractions, narrative cinema willfully collapsed
the space the former confronted and effectively constituted as distance between
the screen and the audience. Avoiding any recognition of the audience in their
spectatorial role, in what has become a time-honored tradition, narrative cinema
cast the audience in a voyeuristic role. It absorbed and integrated the audience
into the type of immersive experience that was both the source of this cinemas
persuasive appeal and what both Bazin and Metz warned us against as a problem
with verisimilitude, and Benjamin placed at the root of the decay of aura in the age
of mechanical reproduction.
The immersive voyeuristic experience of narrative cinema sets it apart from not
only the cinema of attractions, but the legitimate theater as well. In the latter,
the imaginary is always there, at a marked distance from the audience. It is always
circumscribed to a carefully sequestered and segregated stage where actors may
readily and safely assume identities other than what is presumably and properly
their own. The proscenium arch that locates the audience and the staged fiction in
opposition, elaborately and clearly articulates the line where the imaginary meets
but never touches reality. This dividing line is not only constituted formally and
experientially, but also legally and as such atemporally. This is the only place where
identities become interchangeable without causing consternation or having the
legal consequences they would have any place outside this place.
The distance between the real and the imaginary in theatre is additionally
augmented and controlled by the literal presence of the actors on stage.6 This
presence invariably underscores the absence, and the illusory nature of the
characters staged. In contrast, on the virtual stage of the narrative cinema there
are no actors. There are only characters. The audience is the only presence in the
cinema that is cast, nonetheless, in a voyeuristic role and immersed in the action
for the duration of the film. However, the duration of early narrative films was short
(10 to 15 minutes on average by 1905) and the captions pulled the audience out
of the action at regular intervals and located them opposite the flat screen. Both
effectively kept the illusion at bay in early narrative cinema as it was in the cinema of
attractions. In addition, the narrative short films, accompanied as they were by live
music for the duration, were often seamlessly integrated with live performances
of popular songs and music between reels. Siegfried Kracauer delineated the
role of this auxiliary entertainment long ago. If scenes of real physicality are
displayed alongside the movie Kracauer noted in 1926, the latter recedes into the
flat surface and the deception is exposed. The proximity of action which has spatial
depth destroys the spatiality of what is shown on the screen. By its very existence
film demands that the world it reflects be the only one; it should be wrested from
every three-dimensional surrounding lest it fail as an illusion (916).
It would not be before silence gave way to sound in what by then would be a
very different movie-theater that Kracauers call could and would be heeded. In
the early decades of film, the live performances that preceded and followed the
filmic illusion, in addition to their entertainment value, allowed the illusion to
strategically and effectively fail, that is, to depreciate and distance itself as illusion
by receding into the background.
Therefore, the principal challenge for the designers of first movie-theaters was
not keeping the film at bay in the space of the auditorium. Until the advent of
feature-length movies, the music and captions during and the live entertainment
at the intervals was sufficient. Rather, the principal preoccupation was situating the
narrative cinema in relation to reality. The challenge was to contextualize and explain
how the displacement of time and space that didnt happen in reality, happened
Fig. 5.3 Theatorium postcard, c.1912, Gotham Book Mart

Collection, University of Pennsylvania Library
in reality.7 This challenge was met at a gate erected formally and augmented
experientially in between the real and the imaginary.
The process often began with the conversion of a vacant store (Figure 5.3).
David Hulfish provided a vivid description in 1911 of a process that dated from the
first years of the new century.
A vacant business house having been selected both for its location and for size,
the process of converting it into a motion picture theatre is to remove the glass
front and framing for the door and window, to replace it with a closed front a few
feet back from the sidewalk line and into which are built the ticket sellers booth
and the entrance and exit doors and on the inside of which is built a projection
operators booth. At the far end of the room a muslin screen about three by four
yards is stretched. The room is filled with rows of chairs, either kitchen chairs or
opera chairs, as the expense justified by the location will permit, and a piano is
placed near the picture screen. (13)
A vacant store began its transformation into a movie-theater when the visual
continuity of its transparent faade was supplanted by a requisite opacity. The
implied distance of this opaque facade was in turn amplified by placing it at a
measured distance from the sidewalk. This setback instituted a void that intervened
as an unabridged divider between the inside and the world outside. A vacant store
became a movie-theater, in other words, by withdrawing and distancing itself from
its context.
The reading of this separation was augmented on the street faade with a
superimposed gateway imagery whose ubiquity made it in short order synonymous
with the nickelodeon. An articulated frame, often employing the classical orders
in various degrees of abstraction, was typically superimposed on the physical
borderlines of the nickelodeons street faade. The inscription of an arch within this
frame completed a gateway imagery that more often than not evoked a Roman
Triumphal Arch and the city-gate it symbolically embodied.
The gateway theme for the movie-theater faade became prevalent in short
order, to the point of being prefabricated, and offered for sale by various vendors
(Figure 5.4).8 The Sears & Roebuck companys 1908 catalogue claimed the 5-cent
theater is here to stay and almost any vacant storeroom can be made into a five-
cent theater by removing the glass front and replacing it with a regular Theater
front similar to the illustration shown on the catalogue page (quoted in Schroeder
535).9 The regular is the arch in frame format serving as a forceful dividing line.
The nickelodeons arch in frame facade also bore more than a passing
resemblance to the legitimate theaters proscenium arch. The analogy was
underscored by the omnipresent electric lights that lit up the nickelodeon entrance
like a stage. Strategically, however, the nickelodeon did not erect its proscenium
arch at the edge of the stage and the auditorium, but on the sidewalk. As such, the
nickelodeons audience was made to go not so much to look at the world of illusion
from the other side of the proscenium arch, as they were made to cross it into an
elsewhere constituted on the other side of this instituted and elaborate borderline.
In time, the thematic of elsewhere would be fully explored in the exotic interiors
Fig. 5.4 Sheldon of movie palaces. The nickelodeons focus, however, was entirely on the fabrication
Theatre, Chicago, of a divide, the related production of an elsewhere, and the subsequent transition
c.1909
from the place of the real to the (dis)place(ment) of the imaginary.
Photo credit:
Library of The requisite depth of the nickelodeons regular faade was equally, if not more
Congress, Prints significant, to the thematic of elsewhere than the triumphal arch iconography.
& Photographs David Hulfish explained the intent of this otherwise nebulous void clearly.
Division, LC- Although the front partition of a typical theatre is placed six feet back from the
USZ62-92105
sidewalk, he noted, a still deeper front is desirable if the floor space can be spared
(177). Besides more advertising space, his reasoning had to do with the fact that
the void suggests retirement in the theatre, and when the prospective patron
steps off the sidewalk he feels he is already within the theatre, even before he has
purchased his admission ticket (178). In other words, the void as a third transitional
space was meant to denote departure and prolonged passage. It had one step
off and depart from the place of the real before traversing its depth to enter the
consequently imagined and the imaginary world/place beyond. To underscore
the importance of the outdoor lobby and ticket booth in motion picture theater
design, the anonymous author of a 1911 article on the subject tells us: A spacious
lobby has always been an important consideration with the owners in the planning
of a moving picture theatre, and a pretentious ticket booth, placed in the centre
thereof, considered of the utmost importance (The Moving Picture Theatre).
Placing the ticket booth as a freestanding entity in the center of the outdoor
lobby was to leave no room to ambiguity. It transformed what otherwise would
have been a static space into a bi-directional space on two sides of a well-defined
center. In form and detail, relative transparency, and controlled access, it had
the trappings of a guardhouse at the borderline. More significant, however, was
the elaborate ritual of passage to which the ticket booth along with the outdoor
lobby and the front gate was the setting. The placement of the ticket booth in the
outdoor lobby was a significant departure from an analogous practice in legitimate
and vaudeville theaters, where tickets were commonly vended on the interior
lobby of the theater instead of the exterior. The displacement meant having to
purchase tickets at the gate (border), before and as the condition of entry. The
right of passage to the other side here required the rite of a peculiar and elaborate
exchange.
To enter the movie-theater, then and since, one has had to first exchange
currency at the border. Beyond the ticket booth, only the ticket, as substitute
money, could secure ones entry. In principle, no amount of real money could do
so, without the requisite ritual of exchange prior and as the condition of crossing
the inner borderline. Unlike real money, however, this substitute money is not a
medium of free exchange. Its currency is delimited to the borderline, and even
there, it is not exchangeable or exchanged with any commodity. If the logic of
money is logged in exchange of value, this logic is suspended, in a sense, at the
point of entry into the movie-theater.
Once the requisite currency exchange is complete, one has to carry the movie
currency only a few feet from the ticket booth, across the entry door, and surrender
it to an authority figure whose recognition and subsequent destruction of this
money, both validates and invalidates it as currency.10 Whereas the destruction of
real money causes considerable consternation outside the movie-theater, precisely
because the exchange value is lost, its proxythe ticketassumes currency only
in being destroyed. To gain entry into the movie-theater, one has to consent to
the destruction of the tickets exchange value and carry forward a torn stub that
retains the memory of the destruction/loss at its edge and as such sanctions ones
presence for the duration of stay.
As part of a broader cost-cutting plan for an automatic theater in the early
1930s, Charles S. Lee proposed to forego the ticketing process and have the
audience enter the theater through a turnstile upon cash payment. Prudent as
the proposal may have been at the time, it didnt go past a prototype. The ritual,
expensive as it was for the theater owner, proved indispensible. This is because
what this ritual of transformation and destruction institutes at the border, as the
border between the real and the imaginary, is their irreducibility. What it disavows
is any intermediary or exchangeable value between the real and the imaginary. The
tearing of the ticket locates the imaginary outside the circuit of restricted economy
and renders the divide between the real and the imaginary ritually absolute. The
condition of admission into the movie-theater has been a ritual renunciation of
equivalency/exchange between the imaginary and the real.
The movie-theater does not, it is important to note, exclude real money from
its bounds. One may readily exchange real money for food, and in principle, any
other item, within the bounds of the movie-theater. There is only one significant
exception. What the movie-theater solely and adamantly excludes from within its
bounds, through the ticketing ritual, is any intermediary or exchangeable value

between the real and the imaginary.11 Also, the ticketing ritual is not unique to the
movie-theater. It is used for every occasion where an activity has to be sequestered
and set apart. The extraordinary nature of the event is construed in each instance
by the suspension and exclusion of the ordinary through, in part, the ticketing
ritual. Depending on how the ritual is contextualized, however, its message could
vary considerably. A case in point is the difference between the ticketing rituals
of legitimate theater and cinema. In context, one speaks to transition, the other
separation. In legitimate theater, one is never given to leave the real. In the movie-
theater departure is, it seems, a prerequisite.
Once admitted, the experiential journey that had started on the sidewalk would
be merely prolonged by the directional space of the nickelodeons auditorium. The
directionality of this space had as much to do with the literal dimensions of the
often narrow and long auditoria, as with the strategic location of the screen at the
far end of the room (Figure 5.5). As the focal point of this directional space, ones
movement in the auditorium was progressively toward, though never arriving at,
the literal place of the imaginary: the screen. Placing the screen at the far end
of the auditorium was not, however, the only option. Besides the side walls, John
Klaber noted in 1915, The type of hall where the screen is at the same end as the
main doors has been advocated by some authorities as lessening the fire risk, since
the audience face toward the principal exits, and need not pass the operating room
to reach them (550). Fire was an ever-present threat in early cinema due to highly
flammable nature of nitrate film. Fires often started in the projection booth, whose
proximity to the entrance and exit doors created a very volatile condition. Klabers
suggested relocation of the screen was quite practical. However, the relocation
would have drastically altered the experience and with it the intended relationship
between the real and the imaginary. Consequently, fire exits were placed, at some
expense, in proximity to the screen to allow it to remain in its desired location
at the far end of the auditorium. The screen has since been at the far end of
the auditorium, despite considerable transformations and endless contextual
variations from time to time and place to place.
Though the placement of the screen at the far end of the auditorium kept it at
an unabridged distance from the audience, nonetheless, this arrangement placed
the audience and the screen in the same space. The cohabitation presented a
distinct challenge. This had not to do with the projection of moving images on the
screen. It had to do with its absence as Hulfish explains:
The picture screen is an unsightly object in the theater when there is no projected
picture upon it. The appearance of the room is improved greatly during the
intermission by lowering an ornamental drop curtain over the picture screen. (61)
At face value, it is difficult to imagine what would be unsightly about a blank white
surface. Yet, covering the screen with a curtain was a practice that would persist for
over 70 years. It would only be displaced by a virtual curtain of advertisements and
other projected images at the advent of the multiplex. In contrast to the legitimate
theater, where the drawing of the curtain between performances served both a
ritual and a practical purpose, in the movie-theater the curtain served no purpose Fig. 5.5 Normal
other than to hide the unsightly screen when there was no image projected on it. Theatre, Chicago,
c.1909
The live performances that preceded and followed the screening of movies at the
Photo credit:
nickelodeon took place, unlike legitimate theater, at the closing of the curtain and Library of
in front of it. In other words, the persistent wish to spare the audience the sight of Congress, Prints
the blank screen was primarily ritual and ideational. What was unsightly about the & Photographs
blank screen was what it represented and kept in sight. Division, LC-
USZ62-92107
Echoing Hulfishs sentiment nearly two decades later, Barry advised, that the
audience never see a blank screen. He reasoned the screening of a movie cannot
be satisfactory if something happens to spoil the illusionsomething that reminds
the patron that he or she is sitting in a theatre chair looking at a two-dimensional
surface covered with light and shadow, that is, precisely what caused Gorky much
consternation and anguish. Barry went on to note: the blank screen at any time
makes it so much harder to create that illusion, by which he meant before and after
the screening (12).
As a displacement of time and space, the movie is ideally transformed, at its
conclusion, into the memory of another time and place, leaving behind no trace
of the displacement. However, inasmuch as the screen bounds and localizes the
displacement, it memorializes it. It allocates it an unsightly place that perpetually
speaks to past and anticipates future displacements. While the screen is in sight,
the displacement does not disappear without a trace. The curtain not only hides
this trace from sight; it also divides the auditorium in two. It localizes the audience
to one side and locates the imaginary outside this place, out of sight, in a place that
seemingly recedes infinitely behind the curtain.
The distance the curtain effectively emplaced between the audience and the
screen would be the subject of greater articulation, in the form of elaborate frames
and arches at the far end of the auditorium in the waning years of nickelodeons
near decade long popularity, and that in anticipation of the elaborate proscenium
arches of the movie palaces to come.
Despite its relatively short history, the nickelodeon had a profound influence
on the history of movie-theaters in the century to come. Whereas literally, if not
in effect, cinema brings other spaces and times to our space and time and as
such creates a potentially uncanny cohabitationraising questions of place and
placement as it did Gorkythe nickelodeon effectively side stepped this challenge
by turning the experience on its head, conceptualizing it as a journey out to an
Other place. This was the nickelodeons contribution and lasting legacy. Whence,
cinema would always happen elsewhere, as it would at the end of a journey. If the
movie-theater is, as Mary Heaton Vorse noted in 1911, the door of escape, for a few
cents, from the realities of life, this escapeno less from realitywas not merely
imaginary (442). It was also a literal experience that was enacted architecturally
and ritually to the estrangement of narrative cinema from every place it happened
to be.
Of course, consternation about the adverse effect of the imaginary on the real
did not dissipate with the advent of the nickelodeon. It was merely localized there.
As Lee Grieveson points out, in the imagination of the emergent middle-class the
nickelodeon not only attracted the vulnerable and dangerous, that is, children,
women, and lower-classes and immigrant audiences, also experiences at moving
pictures in nickelodeons were regarded as particularly dangerous, principally
because of the realism of moving pictures, because images were seen to be linked
closely to imitative responses from suggestible audiences and because the ill-lit
space of the nickelodeon provided what the Juvenile Protective Association of
Chicago described as a cover for familiarity and sometimes even for immorality
(13). The middle-class consternation about the imaginarys adverse effect on the
real led to a concerted effort at censoring and policing cinema in the decade that
followed the advent of the nickelodeon. These included legislative measures at
the municipal, state, and federal levels, as well as, self-regulatory practices by the
movie industry.
In contrast, focusing on the experience of the immigrant and women audiences
at the nickelodeon, Miriam Hansen makes a sharp distinction between their
experiences and the audience experience of classic cinema as it would emerge
in the second decade of the twentieth century. In classic cinema, Hansen argues,
the absorption of the viewer into narrative space on a stylistic level corresponded
to an increased derealization of the theater spacethe physical and social space
of the spectator (83). On the other hand, the neighborhood character of many
nickelodeonsthe egalitarian seating, continuous admission, and variety format,
nonfilmic activities like illustrated songs, live acts, and occasional amateur nights
fostered a casual, sociable if not boisterous, atmosphere. It made moviegoing an
interactive rather than merely passive experience (61). The disjunctive exhibition
program of the nickelodeon had two distinct consequences for Hansen. It did
not allow the audience to get fully submerged into the illusory space on screen.
Throughout, the audience remained conscious of the actual theater space and
their collective place within it (84). Also, this aesthetics of disjunction not only
contested the presumed homogeneity of dominant culture and society in the
name of which immigrants were marginalized and alienated; more important, it
lent the experience of disorientation and displacement the objectivity of collective
expression (108). The nickelodeon, Hansen argues, played much the same role
for female audiences in so far as it simultaneously represented, contested and
inverted the gendered demarcations of private and public spheres Bounded by
familiar surroundings and culturally accepted, within the working-class community
at least, the movie-theater opened up an arena in which a new discourse on
femininity could be articulated and the norms and codes of sexual conduct could
be redefined (118).
Hansens acute observations are based on an exclusive focus on the auditorium
space. Taking into account the entire experience may well lead to a more nuanced
interpretation. Though indeed bounded by familiar surroundings, the nickelodeon
was effectively separated and segregated from those surroundings both visually
and ritually. This was the primary focus of the nickelodeon designers, given that the
music and the captions during and live entertainment at the intervals effectively
kept the imaginary at a pronounced distance in the auditorium. If the nickelodeon
was indeed an objective correlative of the immigrant experience, it was by virtue
of leaving ones familiar surroundings, on a journey to an Other world, into which
the audience were given short glimpses, and from which they remained effectively
distanced, if not segregated. In a sense, everyone at the nickelodeon was an
immigrant, that is, an outsider by design (108). Any shift in gender and social
roles within the bounds of the nickelodeon merely underscored the alterity of the
movie-theatre as the fantastic and other worldlyindeed a place apart where real
norms did not apply.
The difference between the nickelodeon experience and the classic movie
experience at the movie-palaces of the late teens and twenties may not have been
as pronounced as Hansen portrays it. The disjunctive program of the nickelodeon
did not entirely cease with the demise of the nickelodeon. The live music at a
grander scale, the captions during, as well as the live entertainment on occasion
would continue to play much the same role in the movie palaces as they did at the
nickelodeon.
The Imaginary Places
As one of a handful of prominent architecture firms specializing in the emerging field

of movie-theater design in the early nineteen teens, the work of the architecture
firm Rapp and Rapp for Balaban and Katz (later Paramount) played a seminal role
in the transformation of nickelodeon into the movie palaces of the late teens
and twenties. Looking back in 1930, at the development of movie-theaters over

the preceding three decades, George L. Rapp attributed the development of the
movie palace to tremendous development in the production end of the motion
picture industry in the early nineteen teens (56). His reference was specifically the
development and ensuing popularity of feature-length movies in the early teens,
which in the words of P.R. Pereira some 16 years earlier, helped to a great extent to
raise the standard of this form of amusement from that of the lower to the higher
branches of dramatic art (178). This change required, he went on to note, a new
form of movie-theater. Rapp was to echo the sentiment:
Logically the tremendous development in the production end of the motion

picture industry was reflected in demands for a similar development in the
exhibition of the pictures. To successfully exhibit the rapidly improving film
productions, ideas and problems were presented which rendered the earlier
picture theaters and even legitimate houses inefficient and obsolete and
altogether unsuited to the presentation of this modern form of entertainment.
(589)
The changes that made the nickelodeon obsolete were not technological per se.
Aside from ongoing improvements to projection equipment leading to relatively
brighter images on the screen, the main developments in the movie industry had
to do with the movies duration and content, in particular, narrative plot, acting
and the relative realism and polish of the production. Although, these wonderful
advances immersed the audience in an imaginary reality to far greater degree
and for far greater duration than the ubiquitous short duration films of the
nickelodeon, nevertheless, none of these advances mandated, for any functional
or practical reasons, a new type of movie-theater to which both Pereira and Rapp
allude (Pereira 178). Even the ever-increasing popularity of the movies that led, by
deliberate choice, to fewer and much larger movie-theaters as opposed to more
numerous smaller theaters, could account for the shape of things to come.12
If, aside from providing a controlled environment for exhibition of film, the
primary purpose of the movie-theater is, as I have tried to argue so far, to locate
and localize the imaginary in relation to the real, what made the nickelodeon
inefficient and altogether unsuited to the exhibition of feature-length movies
was the obsolescence of its localization in face of greater intensity and duration
of involvement with the imaginary. Rapp aptly attributed the shape of things that
became to a new vision for what the movie-theater ought to be in face of rapidly
improving film productions:
A second period in the history of the motion picture theater beganwith the
advent in the field of a different type of showmanone who believed that people
go to the theater to live an hour or two in a different world; that the atmosphere
of a palace should prevail in a theater, and that this could be arrived at by
gorgeous stage settings, luxurious drapes and enchanting music. (59)
Of course, this new vision was not entirely new. Rapp was merely paraphrasing
what had been previously expressed by many authors/architects. For instance:
The people of todays hurly-hurly, commercialized world go to the theater to live

an hour or two in the land of romance. So it is that the sophisticated playgoer
must be taken up on the architects magic carpet, and set down suddenly in a
celestial city of gorgeous stage settings, luxurious hangings and enchanting
music. The atmosphere of a kings palace must prevail to stimulate the
imagination of those who come within its doors. (Bullock 370)
Also:
People come to the motion picture theatre to live an hour or two in the land of
romance. They seek escape from the hum-drum existence of daily life. People
realize that for a small charge they can be lifted up on a magic carpet and set
down in dream city amidst palatial surroundings where worry and care can never
enter, where pleasure hides in every shadow. (Barry and Sargent 12)
Grand as the new vision was, what it had in common with the old is rendering the
movie-going experience a journey out to an Other place. Whereas the nickelodeons
primary focus was the institution and elaboration of a threshold in between the
real and the imaginary, the movie palaces of the silent era focused on fabricating
a different world beyond the nickelodeons threshold, literally. Film was now to
happen in a world apart, where exoticism, and in short order, Orientalism were to
underscore an alterity that was not only visceral, but also dramatic and literal.
Thomas Lamb, whose work for Marcus Loew also played a seminal role in
shaping the history of the movie palace, succinctly articulated the strategy for this
new motion picture theater in 1928:
To make our audience receptive and interested, we must cut them off from the
rest of the city life and take them into a rich and self-contained auditorium,
where their minds are freed from their usual occupations and freed from their
customary thoughts. In order to do this, it is necessary to present to their eyes a
general scheme quite different from their daily environment, quite different in
color scheme, and a great deal more elaborate. (14)
Cutting off the audience from the rest of the city life begun, as it did, on
the sidewalk.13 Assuming the nickelodeons lessons, the street facade was
transformed into a more pronounced, deeper and more directional threshold,
if only to enhance the patrons spirit of adventure,the journey to elsewhere
(Barry and Sargent 12). Extending a marquee over the sidewalk in front of the
outdoor lobby enabled the designers of the new motion picture theater to add
much greater directional depth to the front lobby than their predecessors had in
the nickelodeon (Figure 5.6).
The design of the movie palace faade, erected as it was as a pronounced
threshold over the outdoor lobby, followed no one style. Nonetheless, in a 1925
article devoted to Theater Entrances and Lobbies, E.C.A. Bullock summed up the
overall objective of the faade as creating an attractive theatrical appearance,
by which he meant an exterior design in which the curves of graceful arches
predominate, but are not overdone, provides a pleasing contrast to the cold,
Fig. 5.6Rubush &

Hunter architects,
Indiana Theatre,
Indianapolis, 1927
Photo credit:
Library of
Congress Prints
and Photographs
Division, HABS IND,
49IND, 2925
straight and commercial lines of the usual surrounding buildings (370). The same
exact phrase would be used by, among others, Barry (12) in 1927 and Rapp (62)
in 1930. In addition to having to differentiate itself from its context through overt
formal contrasts, the entrance motifs above and below the canopy, Bullock tells
us, should be made up of large and broad unobstructed openings, providing
generous and alluring glimpses of the interior. To be compelling, and inviting,
the new faade had to be selectively transparent to provide glimpses of a different
world beyond the threshold to underscore passage through the divide. The
distinction also meant greater ornamental embellishment for the movie-theater
faade than was customary in the surrounding commercial buildings.
In contrast to the deep, directional and strategically transparent faade of the
movie palace, dramatically emphasizing division and passage, the nickelodeons
faade may well appear static and subdued, or else, as Rapp had it unsuited and
obsolete.
Past the marquee, the ticket booth, and through the depth of the outdoor
lobby, the moviegoer, having been constituted as such by being taken up, as an
oft repeated metaphor at the time had it, on the architects magic carpet, was
sat down in a celestial city of gorgeous stage settings, luxurious hangings and
enchanting music (Bullock 71). In other words, ticket in hand, the moviegoer was
delivered to the attendant in the grand lobby where the atmosphere of a kings
palace had to prevail to stimulate the imagination of those who come within
its doors (71). Here, they were to be reconstituted as spectator/audience in the
dream city, the land of Romance, or temple of day-dreams the movie palace
was meant to be, by appearance and by experience (Figure 5.7).
The palatial lobby was often the first in a series of sequentially layered spaces Fig. 5.7 Thomas
that included a grand staircase, foyers, vestibules, and mezzanine promenades. W. Lamb, Fox
Theatre, San
These had to be sequentially traversed to reach the auditorium at considerable
Francisco, CA 1929
perceptual, if not literal distance, from the point of entry. The journey was meant Photo credit:
to be transformative. The lobby, Bullock tells us, had to be a place of real interest, Motion Picture
where the waiting throng may be transformed from the usual pushing, complaining News 40
mob into a throng of joyous and contented people (71). The instrument of this
transformation was, of course, the palatial setting.
The construed grand spectacle of a palace, that wasnt, transformed everyone
entering into a spectator. In presenting to their eyes a general scheme quite
different from their daily environment, as Lamb called for, the movie palace
transformed moviegoers into visiting tourists in a displaced and displacing land.
Here, everyone was, by design, out of place by rite of visitation to a place that
was not only out of the ordinary, but also overwhelmingly ornate and complex in
appearance. Ben Rosenbergs remembrance of the encounter is telling: I think my
most memorable impressions of working in the lobby came from the expressions
on the faces of patrons as they walked in, often stopping, looking upward and
uttering words of amazement at the splendor about them (20). Overwhelmed by
the sublime spectacle, the urge was to transform the incomprehensive strangeness
of the sight into tangible information: In the lobby, patrons asked us myriad
questions: What is the seating capacity? Are those marble columns real? How
high is the lobby? Is that piano on the loge floor really gold? How many bulbs are
there in each chandelier? How do they clean the chandeliers? (20). In the spur to
substitute information for the incomprehensive sublimity of the sight, questions
of authenticity, and of substance behind appearance, raised as they were about,
for instance, marble or gold, speak to both a compulsory involvement with
appearances and a disjuncture between substance and appearance in the mind
of those who entered the palace, that wasnt. Here, in this different world, the
imaginary as representation supplanted the real, as marble or gold, for instance,
appeared to the spectator as appearance with indeterminable substance. This
was what was to be different. In the land of romance, by design, one had access
only to impenetrable appearances in disarming multitude. If various authors and
architects insisted, as they did then, on the other worldly character of the movie
palace, in order to stimulate the imagination and make the audience receptive
and interested, what they demanded was the forced suspension of the real and
acquiescence to the imaginary, as appearance relieved of purported substance in
a world apart. The imaginary wasnt per se what the movie brought to its place;
it was a reception the place imposed on the movie in advance. The overarching
assumption in this strategy was that the publics encounter with feature-length
narrative film in that early stage could not or rather should not happen without
proper preparation, stimulation, and mediation, that is, it should not happen
outside the land of sublime appearances.
The lobby and the ensuing spaces, as sites of visitations rather than habitation,
also had to be, Bullock tells us, as open in treatment as possible, permitting the
moviegoer to get one vista after another, which will produce a decided spirit of
adventure and a desire to gain admittance to the other parts of the house. In the
celestial city, one was not to linger or contemplate. Led on by succeeding vistas
through successive spaces that according to another author open into one another
like chambers in a maze the sightseeing adventure of the audience/tourist was to
continue and culminate in the auditorium (L. Lewis 176).
The palatial theme introduced in the lobby and extended to the succeeding
mezzanines and foyers reached its climax in the monumental auditorium of the
movie palace (Figure 5.8). These variously held from 2,000 to over 5,000 seats.
Although the style and the details varied, what movie palace auditoria shared
in common was richly articulated wall surfaces that decisively enveloped the
auditorium space and led up to an imposing ceiling whose monumental concentric
patterns culminated at the center in a grand chandelier. Though the latter may not
have been the most effective means of illuminating a large interior, it was a very
effective way of creating, in conjunction with concentric ornamental patterns of
the ceiling and the wall articulations, a decidedly centralized space that located
and localized the audience in Lambs requisite rich and self-contained place.
An additional measure of the auditoriums requisite self-containment was the
location of the audience in relation to the screen. In contrast to the nickelodeon,
the audience and the screen in the movie palace auditorium were carefully
segregated. Each was designated a place of its own on the opposite sides of an
elaborate proscenium arch erected at the far end of the auditorium opposite the
entry doors. The screen, carefully framed, was located at some distance behind the
Fig. 5.8 Thomas

W. Lamb, Loews
Ohio Theatre,
Columbus,
OH, 1928
Photo credit:
Library of
Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, HABS
OHIO, 25COLB,
424
ornate proscenium arch and away from the audience. When there was no image
projected on the screen, it and the space in front of it were covered by layers of
elaborate and ornamental curtains, bordered by intricate cloth frames at the outer
edge of the proscenium arch. In turn, a raised shallow stage in front of the curtains
articulated the spatial depth of the proscenium arch, followed by a demarcated
and segregated layer of space inside the auditorium devoted to the orchestra
and/or the ubiquitous Wurlitzer organ between the audience and the proscenium
arch. Together, they created both a permanent multilayered spatial barrier and a
temporal sound barrier between the audience and the monumental opening of
the proscenium arch. The curtains role in keeping the audience inside the self-
contained auditorium was assumed, in other words, by the orchestral and/or
organ music at the curtains opening.
In as much as the objective in the movie palace was, from the outset, to localize
the movie event in a different, distant, and exotic world, two further developments
beyond the palatial theme would allow the objective to reach a logical conclusion
in short order.
Whereas the palatial atmosphere of the first movie palaces was derived from the
European baroque architecture and its nineteenth century second empire variant,
the designers of the movie palace soon looked, in the cause of alterity, to more
distant and exotic imagery from a vast and diverse repertoire subsumed under
the label Orient. They borrowed and combined freely from Egyptian, Persian, and
Indian, to Chinese, and every other source in between, to fabricate a world for the
filmic event far more distant and exotic than the first movie palaces ever were.
What mattered to the designers of these movie palaces was neither orthodoxy nor
fidelity to any of the numerous and diverse sources that constituted the Orient in
the public imagination. All that mattered was the exoticism and other-worldliness
of the end result. Thomas Lamb, who played a decisive role in the adoption of the
Oriental theme was, once again, quite succinct in describing the outcome.
The styles of architecture vary, but are all permeated with a touch of the Orient,
which has always been brightly colorful, emotional and almost seductive in its
wealth of color and detail. The grand foyer represents a festive procession all in
Oriental splendor It is pageantry in its most elaborate form, and immediately
casts a spell of the mysterious and to the Occidental mind exceptional.
Passing on into the inner foyers and the mezzanine promenade, one continues
in the same lndo-Persian style with elaborate ornamentation both in relief and
in painting, all conspiring to create an effect thoroughly foreign to our Western
minds. These exotic ornaments, colors and scenes are particularly effective in
creating an atmosphere in which the mind is free to frolic and becomes receptive
to entertainment. (14)
Much as the overt Orientalism of the second-generation movie palaces, conceived

and presented as sensual, emotional, and seductive surface effect, aided the self-
fabrication of the Occidental mind in opposition to it, it also placed and kept
the Occidental mind at an unabridged distance. In this Oriental imaginary, the
Occidental mind was de facto on tour in a foreign land where film was made
to stand in the same relationship to the real as Orient did to Occident, by design
(Figure 5.9).
Having reached unqualified formal and stylistic alterity, perhaps all that
remained was to subvert space and condense time in pursuit of the mysterious
and the exceptional as the site of the filmic event. This would be John Ebersons
contribution to the genre. In his atmospheric theaters, interiors became exteriors,
time became elastic, and any doubt about the suspension of the real at the gates of
the celestial city all but dissipated in the thin matter of interior surfaces.
Eberson and his followers conceived the movie palace auditorium as a stage set
in an Italian garden; in a Persian court; in a Spanish patio, or any multitude of other
distant and exotic outdoor places, all canopied by a soft moonlit sky taking the
place of the centralized ceilings of earlier palaces (373). As the audience/tourists
assumed their designated spectatorial role on seats surrounded by the thin veneer
of any one distant and exotic outdoor place, in un-real time, the mid-day sun would
set in minutes, twinkling stars would fill the evening sky above, moving clouds
would roll overhead, the music would begin, the curtain would open, and the
movie would appear behind the proscenium arch.
However novel, strange, and/or engrossing the displacement of time and
space behind the proscenium arch may have been, at every draw of the curtain,
one inevitably found oneself at a distance from both the event and the illusory
Fig. 5.9 John

Eberson, top:
Loews Theatre,
Louisville, KY,
1928; bottom:
Avalon Theatre,
Chicago, 1927
Photo credit:
top, Library of
Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, HABS KY,
56LOUVI, 1747;
bottom, Motion
Picture News 36
enveloping veneer of an outdoor, that wasnt. Here, in an Other world designed to

be look at and at that from the outside, one was never let in, though all the while
inside.
At the conclusion of the movie, the moonlight sky would turn to dusk, the sun
would virtually rise, and the audience would trace its steps back from the exotic
land of un-real time and distance to the land of the real.
Aiding the audience out, much as they had been on the way in, was an army
of ushers in imaginary military uniforms, complemented by the disciplined
mannerism of an army corps and an exclusive silent sign language. The message
was unequivocal. The celestial citys army not only aided and controlled the
movement of the visiting audience/tourist for the duration of the visit; this army
also effectively underscored both the alterity of this world and authoritative control
over it. Different as celestial city was meant to be, it was nevertheless effectively
guarded under the watchful eyes of the palace guard (Figure 5.10).
Fig. 5.10 John
Eberson, Grand
Riviera Theatre,
Detroit, 1925
Photo credit:
Library of
Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, HABS
MICH, 82DETRO,
1611
Despite the ever-presence of the palace guard, the media coverage of the movie
palaces in the 1920s is replete with reference to the democratic nature of the movie
palace as an institution. This too, however, merely underscored the alterity of
dream city. Lloyd Lewis account is telling.
Most of these cinema palaces sell all their seats at the same price; and get it; the
rich man stands in line with the poor; and usually tipping is forbidden. In this
suave atmosphere, the differences of cunning, charm, and wealth, that determine
our lives outside, are forgotten. All men enter these portals equal, and thus the
movies are perhaps a symbol of democracy. Let us take heart from this, and not
be downcast because our democratic nation prudently reserves its democracy for
the temple of day-dreams. (176)
At the gates of celestial city, ticket in hand, one not only had to ritually disavow
any intermediary or exchangeable value between the real and the imaginary as
condition of entry; one also had to leave behind much that socially and economically
characterized lives outside. If the temple of day-dreams was democratic, it was
so by way of being/construed as the radical other of the real.
The question that we will have to allow to linger for now is the essential
assumption behind all the spatial and experiential drama, the exoticism and the
overt Orientalism of the place designed for and dedicated to the encounter with the
filmic event. It is that unwavering assumption in the filmic encounter mandating
the proper mediation, contextualization, and preparation of a place that appears as
anything and everything other than the real!
The Imagined Places
From the early to mid 1930s, movie-theater design in the United States underwent
a profound transformation. By the end of the decade, new movie-theaters bore
little resemblance to the movie-theaters of the preceding decade. The call for
change had come at least as early as 1927 from, among others, Seymour Stern,
the noted film critic. However, it was not until the early 1930s that the movie
palaces of the preceding decade were supplanted by a new movie-theater
design, of which Benjamin Schlangers Thalia Theater of 1932 was a pioneering
example (Figure 5.11).
The call for change in movie-theater design and its eventual realization coincide
all too conspicuously with the introduction and eventual widespread adoption
of sound in movies. Although introduced to a wider audience in 1927, it was not
until the early 1930s that the initial technological challenges were overcome, the
novelty dissipated, and the talkies became merely movies.14
The initial Vitaphone or sound-on-disk technology proved notoriously unreliable
for keeping image and sound in sync. Donald Crafton notes:
The Western Electric sound-on-disc system, which would become Vitaphone,

may have achieved perfect synchrony in the laboratory, but in the fieldthat
is, in the nations theatersthe picture-sound match was frequently off a bit,
owing to the inevitable slippage in the mechanical link between turntable
and projector head. This small lapse between the flapping of the lips and the
hearing of the voice militated against the illusion of naturalism. Additionally, the
telltale needle-scratching in the background was always audible and must have
reminded viewers that Vitaphonic recording was a product of the phonograph
industry. (59)
It was not until the early 1930s, when Vitaphone was abandoned in favor of sound-
on-film technology that the synchronization problems besieging the early talkies
were finally overcome.15 It took equally long to achieve realistic reproduction
Fig. 5.11 of human voice. It is approximately at this latter date that a new movie-theater
Benjamin design comes into vogue. In the meantime, Alexander Bakshys complaint about
Schlanger, Thalia
being treated to hollow and squawking and lisping voices, and even to imperfect
Theatre, New
York, NY, 1932 synchronization remained commonplace (773).
Photo credit: Significant as the introduction of sound was and closely as it was followed by
Keystone- calls for change in movie-theater design, movie-theater historians have found no
Underwood, apparent connection, besides their temporal coincidence, between the widespread
Architectural
adoption of sound and the advent of a new movie-theater design. For instance,
Record 71
the rise of the talkies and the simultaneous demise of the Atmospheric Theater,
Richard Stapleford notes, seem too coincidental to be unrelated. Yet a clear causal
link between the two phenomena is difficult to establish (12). The link is indeed
difficult to establish insofar as it is posited as a technological and/or acoustic
question.
Equipping an auditorium for sound movies is, the RCA engineer Harry Braun
noted in a 1932 issue of Architectural Forum, a simple procedure, being merely
a matter of selecting the necessary equipment and making provision for proper
installation in conformation with applicable laws or ordinances and in accordance
with manufacturers specifications (381). This procedure was the same for movie-
theaters designed before or after the introduction of sound. Along with the new
theaters, the movie palaces of the 1920s were retrofitted for mechanical sound
in short order, and many remained in operation for many decades to come. The
change was not, in other words, a technological mandate.
Also, whereas the movie-theaters of the 1930s could rely on mechanical
amplification of sound in the auditorium from the outset, movie palaces of the
1920s had to rely solely on the auditoriums design to ensure ample and even
distribution of sound throughout their very large auditoria (upwards of 5,000
seats). In this respect, the architects of the movie palaces, by and large, excelled.
Ben Rosenbergs recollection of movie palaces of Rapp & Rapp in particular is
telling:
The thing which impressed me most was the marvelous acoustical treatment
associated with their work. Remember that in those days no amplification of any
kind was used. The sounds from the stage had to project into every nook and
cranny of those huge auditoriums. I can recall standing in center balcony tunnel
entrances, where I could almost hear the performers take a breath, so wonderful
were the acoustics.16 (22)
Aside from placing sound horns behind the movie screen and related mechanical
equipment in the projection room, the auditoria in movie palaces required little to
no modification. In other words, if the movie-theater design changed in the 1930s,
it was not to achieve better acoustics. In fact, the redesigned auditoria of the new
movie-theaters were, to a degree, acoustically regressive. Whereas an auditorium
that is high, rather than deep, as Edwin Newcomb noted in 1930, allows the
preponderance of melody from a multitude of voices and musical instruments to
rise and blend into a pleasing consistency before reaching the listener, the longer,
narrower, and smaller auditoria introduced in the 1930s taxed the audio technology
of the day (Sexton, American Theatres of Today 41). It presented a distinct challenge
to the even distribution of sound throughout the auditorium. As Fredric Pawley
noted in a 1932 issue of Architectural Record, the volume of sound sufficient to
reach distant seats is generally too great for seats near the screen (439).
Although the American movie-theaters transformation in the 1930s did not,
nor was it meant to affect better acoustics, the transformation had much to do
with sound, or more to the point, the advent of talking image in motion. The link
appeared evident at the time, though it has become obscure since.
Much as George Rapp attributed the second phase in the history of the movie-
theater to the advent of feature-length movie, he anticipated a third phase in
response to another major change in the nature of the filmic experience. The
universal popularity of sound pictures and the prospect of wide dimension film,
in the opinion of many, he wrote in 1930, will result in a new third period in
cinema architecture (56). Charles A. Whittemore had made a similar prediction
as far back as 1917. The technological drive toward greater realism in movies,
focused as it was on bringing sound, color, and stereoscopy to film, would in time
lead to, as Whittemore predicated, corresponding changes in the character of
the theaters themselves (The Motion Picture Theater 171). These changes were
slow in coming, as were the technological advances, and when the changes came,
profound as they were, they had little to do with technology per se.
The advent of the movie palace in the early nineteen teens and the very different
sound/image movie-theater of less than two decades later had at least one thing
in common. Both were conceived in response to a major transformation in the
prevailing mode of film reception. The proponents of both also offered remarkably
similar justifications in defence of their two mutually exclusive solutions. Both

were intended to envelop the filmic event in an environment that not only better
prepared the audience for the filmic event, but made the audience more receptive
to the unfolding imaginary events on the screen. The only contextual difference
was the imaginary being silent in one instance and vocal in the other. What covert
connection there may have been between a transformed architectural setting and
the silent or the vocal moving images it enveloped will be the focus of the ensuing
discussions.
At the outset, it is important to note that of the various changes in the movie-
theater design of the 1930s, the most explicit was stylistic. A new style, variously
termed art deco and/or streamline moderne widely supplanted others.17 The
stylistic change, followed as it was by a shift to modern architecture in the
following decade, has been the aspect of transformation that has received
the greatest attention from movie-theater historians. It has been attributed to
broader formal and stylistic trends in architecture, stemming, in the context
of the Great Depression, from a shift in public taste and changes in aesthetic
ideas, and/or the expression of a utopian ideal of a classless machine world,
coordinated and rooted in egalitarian symbols or an expression of hope and
dynamism in an age of despair and stagnation (May 213).18
Had the design transformations of the early 30s been primarily stylistic, it would
have been, besides its wider cultural implications, of little note or significance in
the context of the stylistic eclecticism of the preceding decadethe golden age
of silent movies. The movie-theater designers of the silent era experimented with
virtually every known stylistic idiom. Art deco would have been a mere addition to
a rich repertoire, as it indeed was in the late 1920s. Benjamin Schlanger, a leading
proponent of change in movie-theater design of the 1930s, saw little difference
between expressing oneself on the side walls of the auditorium in some
Spanish or French historical palatial style of architecture, or in some modernistic
ornamental mode (Motion Picture Theatres 13). The modernistic ornamental
mode is, Schlanger concludes, what is now known blindly (both to the public and
the theatre industry as the modern theatre structure (13).
Significant and instrumental as the dynamic formal characteristics of art deco
may have been to the broader objectives of the movie-theater reformers, what is
evident from Schlangers statement above is that a stylistic shift in movie-theater
design was not the principal objective. Rather, what Schlanger and the other
proponents of change had foremost in mind was to transform the audiences
relationship to the filmic event, conditioned as that experience is by the spatial
characteristics of the auditorium in particular and the movie-theater in general.
The theatre structure of tomorrow must become, Schlanger demanded, more
a part of the art which it is serving, and not be separated, as it is now, into an
auditorium and a stage (Motion Picture Theatres 13).
The plea to alter the customary separation of the auditorium and the stage, and
along with it, the established relationship between the audience and the filmic
event, had much to do with changes in the relationship of the audience to the
filmic event, affected by the introduction of sound. The ensuing transformation
of the auditorium from a place to an experiential path placed between the real
world to one end and the imaginary world of the screen to the other served to
re-establish the ideational distance between the real and the imaginary before and
after the filmic event. This is the distance that is perpetually lost to the uncanniness
of the talking images on the screen for the duration, were it not for an imaginary
journey through a place that was designed to be no place.
Of course, were one to look at architecture in formal and stylistic terms, one
would be hard-pressed to see any connection between sound on the one hand
and art deco or streamline moderne on the other. It would be equally difficult, if
not absurd, to link silence in motion pictures to a baroque palatial style. However,
were one to focus on the broader institutional and ideational agenda of the movie-
theater and see the choice of any one style and/or formal arrangement in relation
to that agenda, a different picture may well emerge.
Although the technology that brought sound to film stood considerable
improvement from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, from the outset the talking
picture challenged the audience in ways that exceeded the technologys initial
deficiencies.19 Complain as Alexander Bakshy did about being treated to hollow
and squawking and lisping voices, and even to imperfect synchronization two
years after the introduction of sound, there was, as he saw it, a greater problem
with the talking picture (773).
For reasons which it is difficult to discern, the total effect of the talking picture
is generally thin, lacking in substance. In the talkies, much as you may
be moved by the drama, you feel it is a drama in a world of ghosts. Perhaps,
the introduction of stereoscopic projection coupled with color will solve this
problem. (773)
As this quote illustrates, sound for Bakshy was not so much an addition as a
subtraction, raising questions of substance, and resurrecting the very world
of ghosts that unsettled Gorky many years before. Here too the problem was
essentially spatial.
Much as sight takes cognizance of distance, sound overcomes and collapses
distance. It is heard and felt here, where the listener happens to be, rather than there,
from where it emanates. As such, sound had the same novel and thrilling effect on
the audience as did Gorkys onrushing train. It too threatened the space and the
distance between the audience and the filmic event. Reaching the audience from
across the multiple thresholds erected to keep the filmic event at a safe distance
in a place of its own, the talking picture radically altered the relationship between
the audience and the filmic event. The defences built to date against the uncanny
effect of film were no defence against sound. Crossing through and filling the
audiences space, the sound film was no longer merely there as silent movies had
been by design, but in effect here. More to the point, it was both here and there,
close and far, two and three dimensional, living and dead. Restoring the imaginary
to its desired place there, at a marked distance from the audience, would require
significant modifications and a very different strategy.
The world of ghosts perception of early talking pictures that Bakshy

presumed stereoscopic or three-dimensional color film would in time overcome
had everything to do with the coupling of the two-dimensional image with the
three-dimensional sound. Luigi Pirandello articulated its effect in greater detail,
arguing that in the talking picture, all illusion of reality is lost, that it ceases to be
merely and clearly an illusion (71). This is because the voice is of a living body
and there are no bodies in film (71). There are only images photographed in
motion. Furthermore, images do not talk, they can only be seen, that is, viewed
in two dimensions, at a safe distance. Should images be made to talk their living
voice is in striking contrast with their quality of ghosts (71). The irreconciled
juxtaposition of the living voice with the illusion of reality, Pirandello noted,
disturbs, like an unnatural thing unmasking its mechanism (71). As with Gorky,
the displacement and juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, which unmask and
expose something disturbing, should remain at a distance. The same disturbing
juxtaposition is the bases for Pirandellos third objection. Given that the setting
represented by the film is outside the hall where the film is being projected
the voices ring inside the hall with a most disagreeable effect of unreality (71).
Well return to this disagreeable effect and the unmasking that disturbs later.
Conscious, if not preoccupied with the dimensional and spatial discrepancy
between sound and image, Pirandello tells us, the quick succession of talking images
tires the eyes and the dialogue loses all forcefulness (71). Pirandello, like Bakshy,
complained of poor sound qualitya machine-made voice far from human, the
vulgar muttering of ventriloquists accompanied by the buzzing, frizzling noises
of phonographs (71). Nevertheless, he too attested that even when technical
improvements have eliminated this frizzling nuisance, and have obtained a perfect
reproduction of the human voice, the main ailment will still be there, for the obvious
reason that images are images, and images cannot talk (71). The one is there, the other
here. To combine them is to leave one nowhere or in no one place that is not disturbing.
Two years before Bakshy and Pirandellos comments, Seymore Stern, like many
film critics of his generation, expressed considerable concern over the imminent
arrival of sound, color, and stereoscopy to film. He believed that these additions
were detrimental to an art that was quintessentially a two-dimensional interplay
of silence and shadow. Each of the innovations, he noted, is the greatest of
bastardizations, the most intolerable of abomination, because each threatened
to turn films distinct identity into a hodge-podge of the stage, painting, and
conventional reality, that is, no one thing, in no one place (78).
Mindful of the impending displacement, Stern imagined a new movie-theater
where the aesthetic appreciation of the work of art of the future will be determined
by the extent to which it permits the projection of the ego of the spectator into
its form, resulting in a complete excitation of the emotional system (78). He
imagined, in other words, the eradication of that carefully instilled distance in the
movie palace that proved all too vulnerable to sound.
Leaving the journey to the auditorium intact, Stern focused his entire attention
on altering the auditorium of the house of spatially discontinuous perception, of
disinterested contemplation, of spectatorshipthe movie palace (19). In the film-
house of the future, he imagined, the role of spectator will be unknown (19). To
this end, his points of attack were consistent and telling. It began with abolishing
the proscenium arch, including all forms and varieties of present-day theatrical
architecture which in any way divide the house into two parts, that is, into a place
for seeing and a place for being seen (27). The stage was also to disappear for the
same reason and the orchestra should be removed because nothing, Stern noted,
is more disconcerting in the contemporary movie house than the presence of a
body of musicians between the spectators and the screen (27). At issue was not
the music, but the location. Though not in the visual path of the audience, in the
orchestras presence, Stern noted, the spectator is made annoyingly conscious of
his spectatorial role (27), and his place in the auditorium in relation to the screen.
This consciousness was, of course, as we noted earlier, deliberately affected in the
movie palace.
The alternative to two places for seeing and being seen, Stern imagined,
was not any one place as such, but in a sense, no place at all. He imagined the
auditorium of the future to be an emphatic path to an illusive/imaginary
destination. As in the past, the screen was to read like the vision of another world
(10). In the film-house of the future, however, the screen was to be evermore like
some hallucinatory sphere, passing uncannily before our eyes (27). To enhance
the screens otherworldliness, Stern imagined it occupying the entire far end of
the auditorium. For the rest of the auditorium the general direction will be one
of converging graduation, ending, visually, architecturally and psychologically, in
the screen (27). All architectural lines must, Stern demanded, lead to and meet in
the screen. Whereas the architectural envelope of the movie palace auditoria was
decidedly vertical in emphasisaffecting its reading as a placethe film-house of
the future was to be decidedly horizontal in emphasisaffecting its reading as a
path (27). Furthermore, the whole interior will be emphatically triangular, and the
screen will be the apex of the triangle even the ceiling will slope till it meets the
screen-top, and focalization will be complete (27).
To further stress the horizontal directionality of the auditorium as a path, the
walls of the auditorium were to be plain and painted in tones of grey. There was
to be no decoration, nothing borrowed from the architecture of the past periods,
nor any note suggestive of the three-dimensional forms belonging to standardized
reality. The latter were to be left entirely behindstylistically, dimensionally, and
tonallyon the journey through a path that, if not entirely surreal, it was to be
pronouncedly phantasmagoric, two-dimensional and cinematic (27).
Finally, to complete the illusion of a path to an imagined destination, Stern
demanded the insertion of a void between the final portion of the visual path
the last row of seats, and the screen. This spatial break between audience and
silversheet was to be a thing of darkness, of absolute emptiness, meant to set off
the screen as a clearer, more emphatic entity than it could otherwise hope to be,
that is, apart from the path and as such, its destiny (27). The spacing of the screen
placed it, in effect, at an emphatic distance that could only be breached virtually.
Frederick Kieslers Film Arts Guild Cinema of 1929 was a close approximation
of Sterns vision for the film-house of the future, though a wide uptake of the new
vision had to await technological advances in synchronization and natural sound

reproduction. It was at that point in the early 1930swhen the novelty of sound
had worn off and with it much of the initial objection and fear, when the talkies had
become merely movies, and instead of being trapped in the discrepancy between
sound and image, film stood to engross spectators in its reality effect, without any
captions or live music to keep them at baythat the call for re-contextualizing the
encounter with film became emphatic and widespread. In time, Sterns vision for
the film-house of the future would be largely realized, because he envisioned, in
advance and for different reasons, a type of immersive experience in the movies
that, contrary to his assumption, talking pictures in motion would eventually affect.
The call for a different movie-theater design, widespread as it became in both
the movie industry and the architecture trade journals starting in 1931, was not
voiced, much less justified in stylistic terms. The early proponents of a new movie-
theater design were careful to make and insist on this point. In a 1931 article for the
Motion Picture Herald, the noted theater architect R. W. Sexton wrote:
Of late there has been a tendency to design so-called modern theatres. And yet
we find on analysis that most of the modern theatres today are based on the
same plan and sectionthat has been adhered to so closely for the last 50 years.
These theatres are modern in their decorative treatments because the design of
their decorations does not suggest the influence at any one of the old styles and
periods. But we still find the elaborate proscenium arch, the huge orchestra, the
squeezed-in mezzanine and the deep-sloping balcony. (25)
Sextons remarks closely echoed Ben Schlangers remarks of a month earlier in

the same journal (quoted earlier). In the prophetically entitled Motion Picture
Theatres of Tomorrow, Schlanger articulated a vision that closely paralleled Sterns
in its immersive experience and would soon become the blueprint for the motion
picture theater of the sound era (Motion Picture Theatres 13). In the years to
come, Schlanger would play a leading role in the articulation and realization of the
various facets of this new vision. To it, he would devote his professional career as an
architect, critic, and theater consultant in the three decades that followed.
From the outset, the objective of Schlanger and the other proponents of the new
movie-theater design was not to alter the stylistic features of the movie-theater, as
noted earlier. Rather, the objective was to fundamentally alter the relationship of
the audience to the filmic event from a spectatorial to an immersive voyeuristic
experience, in tacit recognition of the talkies inherent spatial displacement.
Echoing Stern, Schlanger wrote that the theatre structure of tomorrow must
become more a part of the art which it is serving, and not be separated, as it is
now, into an auditorium and a stage (Motion Picture Theatres 13). As the initial
resistance to sound proved all too futile, the solution to the spatial displacement
that it created was to dislocate the audience from its established spectatorial place
at a distance in the place for seeing, and thereby allowing, if not requiring, every
audience member to completely envelop himself in that which he is viewing,
though only for the temporal duration of the filmic event (13). The solution was, in
other words, to erase the distance that sound had breached. This is the instituted
distance in the movie palace whose breach disallowed both Bakshy and Pirandello
from assuming the familiar spectatorial position in relation to the moving picture,
without also allowing either, in those early days, to assume the type of voyeuristic
posture that the realistic reproduction of sound would allow in the 30s.
The erasure of the breached distance in the movie palace auditoria meant
systematically dispensing with all the architectural implements that constituted
the auditorium as a destination, a place, and at that a different world. It also meant
re-contextualizing the new immersive experience in a new auditorium that would
transform and reconstitute the finite distance erected between the audience and
the screen in the movie palace, into an infinite distance. It meant never being able
to locate the imaginary in a finite place as such and at a distance susceptible to
breach.
As Stern had done, Schlanger focused almost entirely on altering the
auditoriums design. The slaughtering, he wrote, should begin and concentrate
itself on the proscenium frame, since it is here where the mood is determined
(Motion Picture Theatres 13). Next to the slaughtering of the proscenium arch
and with it the auditorium as a place for seeing came the usual treatment of
the rest of the auditorium, that is, the ornamental side walls, which are always
treated vertically with columns, pilasters, arches, etc (13). Schlangers objection
to columns, pilasters, and arches was not stylistic; it was to their verticality and
the symmetrical repetition of motifs from the proscenium to the rear of the
auditorium, which causes a disturbing pull of the eye away from what should be
the main focal point (13). He objected, in other words, to the architectural motifs
that imparted a distinct sense of place to the auditorium and reinforced the
dissociation between a place for seeing and a place for being seen. Instead, the
sidewalls of the auditorium should have a gradual simplification and omission of
forms as they recede to the rear of the auditorium. In addition, the forms used
should have strong horizontal direction, instead of vertical emphasis, fastening the
eye to the screen, the focal point, at the front of the auditorium. To reinforce the
envisioned emphatic horizontal directionality of the new auditorium the ceiling,
even more so than the sidewalls, should be left as simple as possible (13). The usual
domes, suspended from above and resting on air, and all other centralizing motifs,
including the ubiquitous chandeliers were to disappear from the new auditorium.
Schlanger was the inventor of the Parabolic Reverse Floor that was intended
to improve sightlines in the auditorium. The Parabolic Reverse Floor introduced a
pronounced curvature to the auditorium floor that made the floor dip and flare
upwards in the front portion of the seating area, reaching up to meet the screen. In
addition to improved sight lines, it effectively enhanced the directional momentum
of the auditorium.
The screen was next on Schlangers transformation agendaas it had been on
Sterns and for similar reasons:
The screen as it is presented in todays cinema is still an obviously framed

picture instead of a space into which we peer, seeing the projected other world
of the cinema. It should, if possible, dominate the whole forward portion of
the auditorium. The spectator can thereby be made to feel that he is actually
encompassed in the action which he views. (New Theaters 2578)
This meant that not only would the screen get largeras it wouldthe forward
portion of the auditorium side-walls would curve or angle toward the screenas
they wouldto make the screen appear as the sole destination of the path the
new auditorium was meant to become. It is important to note, however, that this
focal point was never quite in sight, but hidden behind a curtain that exponentially
added to its mystery and distance. When the curtains parted, it was not the screen,
but the filmic event that was in view and one was, by then, as it were, already
there.20
Having articulated a clear vision for the new movie-theater, what remained
was the opportunity to realize it. For Schlanger that opportunity came with the
Thalia Theater commission of 1932 in New York City (Ben Schlanger and R. Irrera,
Architects). Thalia Theaters emphatic horizontal directionality and abstract formal
vocabulary were as glaringly different from the prevailing practice in movie-theater
design, as were, of course, the intentions behind each. In sharp contrast, the Thalia
Theater dropped all the trappings of exoticism and Orientalism to be transformed
from an exotic destination into a path to an imaginary destination. Different as
the Thalia Theater was, it was widely acclaimed in various architectural and trade
journals, including the June, 1932 issue of Architectural Record and the September,
1932 issue of Architectural Forum.
Although far fewer movie-theaters were to be built during the Depression and
the ensuing World War, Schlangers vision was soon embraced by most architects
of his generation. Most notably, it was adopted by the very architects who were
responsible for the rise and development of movie palaces of the silent era.
Noteworthy examples are C. W. & G. L. Rapps 1937 Rhodes Theater in Chicago
(Figure 5.12), as well as Thomas W. Lambs 1936 New Rialto Theatre in New York
and John Ebersons 1936 Penn Theatre in Washington, DC. These projects could not
have been more different from to the works of the very same architects of only a
few years prior.
It was no mere boast, therefore, when Schlanger declared the war on movie
palaces to be all but over in the July 1938 issue of Architectural Record devoted
to movie-theaters. We have all but eliminated, he declared, the atmospheric
treatment of the auditorium and its indefensible competition with the exhibition
(Theaters, Cinema, Community, Broadcasting 96). Schlangers justification for the
elimination of the silent era decorations because of competition and distraction
was reiterated by many in various trade publications throughout the late 1930s
and well into the late 1940s. These statements often accompanied the published
reviews of recently renovated atmospheric movie-theaters, such as that in
November 1948 of the Wareham Theater in Wareham, Massachusetts (Figures 5.13),
and the Strand Theater, in Hartford, Connecticut (Figure 5.14), both renovated
by the William Riseman Associates (A New Architecture for The Movie-Theater
122). A florid architectural style, we are told, only competes with the illusion on
the screen (122). Having removed the distracting wall decorations of the old
Fig. 5.12 George & W. C. Rapp, Rhodes Theatre, Chicago, IL, 1937
Photo credit: Hedrich-Blessing, Architectural Record 84
Fig. 5.13 William Riseman Associates, Wareham Theatre, Wareham, MA, 1948
Photo credit: George M. Cushing, Architectural Record 104
Fig. 5.14 William movie-theater, plain wall surfaces now direct the eye toward the screen as they
Riseman must in the post-silent movie era, and that, purportedly, not out of deference to
Associates, Strand
any stylistic conviction or a desire to be formally up to date. In either example,
Theatre, Hartford,
CT, 1948 much as others, what of the old has been renovated is not so much the event as it
Photo credit: is the message, that is, how the filmic event is contextualized and framed.
George M. The oft repeated assertion that distracting wall decorations interfere with
Cushing, the illusion or compete with the presentation are, from a certain perspective,
Architectural
perplexing justifications, coming repeatedly from, among others, Schlanger
Record 104
himself who in his 1931 critique of movie palaces noted (Motion Picture Theatres
13):
The walls and ceiling are usually designed as if they were going to be seen in
broad daylight, neglecting the fact that the light in the auditorium of a theatre
must be kept quite dim during most of a performance. Thus the architectural
forms employed are blotted out and have little or no effect on the viewer during
the performance. (56)
Schlanger, like his contemporaries, was well aware that revisions to the old
auditoria were of little or no consequence for the duration of the filmic event.
The formal and spatial characteristics of the auditorium, old or new, were only
visible and consequential before and after the filmic event. If they contributed
or distracted, competed or promoted, it was not to the filmic event per se, but to
its contextualization and localization before and after the fact, that is, where the
audience found itself and how it localized itself in relation to the imaginary.
For the duration of the event, every detail, from illumination, to sight lines, chair
comfort or air conditioning to make the audience unconscious of surrounding
temperature conditions or even odors was attended to within the dark confines
of the auditorium in order to create the perfect illusion (A New Architecture for
The Movie-Theater).
The comfort of the patron also requires more careful attention in the cinema than
in the legitimate theater. The spectator in the cinema must be at ease and must
feel neither bodily nor ocular discomfort. This is essential to help complete the
illusion of realism desired, despite the fact that the images on the screen have
technically only two dimensions. (Schlanger, New Theaters 255)
In the sound-era auditorium, the illusion was being anywhere and everywhere,
other than where one actually was. In the movie palace auditoria, the music that
filled the auditorium kept the audience at a safe spectatorial distance, or as Stern
put it, made the spectator annoyingly conscious of his spectatorial role (10). In
the post-silent era, sound had the exact opposite effect. It stood the chance of
suspending the audience between where it was actually and where it was virtually.
It stood the chance, in other words, of affecting the type of dialogical involvement
with the imaginary that unsettled Gorkey and in time Bakshy and Pirandello. Hence
the far more acute and urgent need to erase any and all sense of a here in the new
auditorium.
Ideally, in the post-silent era, one had to be able to look at that picture, lose
himself in it completely, and have no reminder of the fact that he is in an enclosure
and looking at a picture (Cutter 21). There was to be no here, only an elsewhere.
Where one actually was had to all but disappear for the duration. In the post-silent
era auditorium, the illusory was not to be the filmic event per se. It was also not
being where one was, by design. This is to say that so long as the illusion of not
being where one happens to be is sustained; sounds uncanny spatial displacement
remains curtailed since sound no longer comes to one from elsewhere. One is
already elsewhere and there is, virtually, no longer a here, and the elsewhere is
nowhere realnowhere that is not an imagined destination or a different world.
This is one reason why the mandate and the measure of success for the post-silent
era movie-theater has always hinged on affecting and maintaining the illusion of
the erasure of being where one is, and with it, the path that got one there.21
Having affected the imaginary erasure of here for the duration, all that remained
was to localize and explain where one found oneself before and after the filmic event,
in the place that one wasnt to be for the duration. It was precisely in this context
that the movie palace auditorias intended sense of place as a different world was
purported to be distracting and indefensible. In time, even the emphatic formal
horizontality of the 1930s auditoria appeared to the movie-theater architects of
the postwar years as giving too much character and identity to the auditorium.
It too was abandoned as a futile effort to create screen importance, whereas its
omission would better serve this purpose (Schlanger, How Function Dictates 7).
In place of formal horizontality there was to be a completely neutral enclosure
with a strong spatial direction toward the screen. The Modern Museum of Arts
movie-theater in New York City by Goodwin and Stone, Architects, published in
the November 1948 issue of Architectural Record is an early example of the type
(Figure 5.15).
Looking back in 1961, Schlanger eloquently reflected on the objectives of the
postwar movie-theater:
The desire in the designing was to permit the viewer to the fullest possible extent
to be able to transport himself in imagination to a different time and space by
Fig. 5.15 furnishing a floating void or optical vacuum to provide the transition to the new
Goodwin and time and space and to hold him there by eliminating all distractions. The name
Stone Architects, Transcenium suggests itself (Motion-Picture System 685)
Modern Museum of
Art Movie Theatre,
This would be the decisive solution. The audience would thus never arrive in a literal,
New York, NY, 1948
Photo credit: much less literally exotic place. The placeless optical vacuum of the Transcenium
Architectural would hereafter keep the audience in transport, as it were, to and from an
Record 104 imagined and imaginary destination. On the way to and from, the audience would
remain in transit through a floating void on the path to everywhere and therefore
nowhere. To be in transit is to be not there. The Transcenium as such would be a
journey without end. Understanding it as the floating, optically vacuous void that
it was designed to be would entail anticipation of going/being elsewhere.
The movie palace auditoria, predicated as they were on a journey to and an
unmistakable arrival at a different world, designated the silent imaginary a
definite place beyond the threshold of the proscenium arch. The Transcenium,
by contrast, having to confine a vocal imaginary that would not be limited or
bordered by any threshold, eschewed any and all sense of place, much less
an arrival at anywhere but an ever-illusive destination. The place of the vocal

imaginary in the Transcenium became no place at all, that is, no place that
was not imagined and imaginary and as such infinitely postponed/distanced.
The Transcenium, in effect, exiled the imaginary from the movie-theater. The
imaginary was no longer located in the movie-theater, that is, not localized
by the movie-theater, as there was to be no movie-theater for the duration
and otherwise merely a path, a floating void, or optical vacuum to nowhere
identifiable as such, much less real. Much as the movie palaces strategy was to
contain and confine, the Transceniums strategy was to postpone and delay. As
images spoke, the auditorium was driven to silence.
Although much of the critical reform in the 1930s and 1940s was focused on the
auditorium, the rest of the movie-theater kept pace. The formal vocabulary and
spatial characteristics of the auditorium were extended to the preceding sequence
of foyer, inner lobby and outer lobby, if only to induce a mood of pleasurable
anticipation in each and thereby extend and link the path through the auditorium
to its conceptual start at the outer faade and the ticket booth beneath the
marquee (Clute 11). Also, as movie-theaters migrated, along with the population,
to the suburbs, freestanding movie-theaters became the norm, relieving the
faade from having to differentiate and separate itself from its context through
overt formal contrasts. In turn, the Transceniums faade became a monumental
opaque, frontal surface that forcefully announced the line where reality ended and
the journey to the imaginary began, aided as this demarcation was by attached or
free-standing pylons whose verticality sat in sharp contrast to the horizontality of
the new faade, together emphasizing both separation and passage (Figure 5.16).
The Delman Theater in Dallas, Texas, (Raymond F. Smith, Architect; A. E. Swank, Jr.,
Associate) published in an Architectural Record issue of 1949 is a telling example of
the type (Where Parking Is No Problem 84).
As color film overcame yet another divide between the real and the imaginary
and went from being an exception to becoming norm in the 1950s and early 1960s,
the movie-theater was transformed yet again to re-establish the abridged distance
between the real and the imaginary. This time the logic of the movie palace was
conjoined to the logic of the Transcenium theater as the movie-theater was
(re)moved to a new profoundly segregated world dedicated to spectatorship: the
mall. To reach the new Transcenium theater, one now had to travel to a new and
different world through roads, across a sea of parking segregating it, like a moat,
from its surrounding environment, only to arrive at an indoor outdoor space, where
the passage of time and the vagaries of weather and seasons were suspended in
a theatrical space dedicated to exhibition and spectatorship. Here, everyone was
transformed into a spectator/tourist away from home in an exaggerated version
of the movie palaces exotic alterity, long before embarking on a temporal journey
through the floating void of the auditorium to an imaginary destination.
From here on, were the movie-theater not to depend on a mall, it would fabricate
its own mall in front of the Transcenium theater, as multiplexes have and continue
to do.
Fig. 5.16
Raymond F. Smith,
Delman Theater,
Dallas, TX, 1949
Photo credit:
Architectural
Record 105
The Unimagined Imaginary
If cinema is indeed a response to what Benjamin referred to in 1936 as the desire

of contemporary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly, the history
of cinemas place and placement has followed, as we have seen, the opposite
trajectory (The Work of Art 222). Much as ambivalence persistently overshadows

any question of a decidable place for film, nevertheless, a persistent spacing has
kept film at bay from inception. While the modalities of the spacing have changed
drastically over time, the actual spacing has not. Movie-theaters over the course of
the last century have been, despite significant changes in form and experience,
variations on a theme introduced in the nickelodeon: a journey to an Other space/
place. The lingering question is why this particular and persistent spatial strategy?
What is the logic, or else the illogic of this persistent (dis)placement?
At face value, the objective has been to keep the real and the imaginary
at a distinct distance from each other. This has not been for fear of unbridled
cohabitation, or any possible confusion between the real and the imaginary per se.
Rather at issue in the exclusion of each from the construed place of the other has
been the clarity of the line separating the real from the imaginarytheir radical
alterity. Gorky forcefully reminded us long ago how even the contemplation of
an imaginary collapse of the distance between the imaginary and the real leads
to consuming anxiety, along with a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister
meaning (408). That experience not only disturbed and depressed Gorky, it
caused him to lose his sense of place, along with his footing in the real, as strange
imaginings invaded his mind. And this was all because he could not localize the
imaginary at a controlled distance.
Although Gorky did not explain what the vague but sinister meaning of his
experience was, certain as he was of its menacing nature, we find one explanation
in Freuds essay on the uncanny, of two decades later. An uncanny effect, Freud
noted in 1919, is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between
imagination and reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and
significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on (50). A case in point, Freud noted,
is confusing ones own reflection for someone real and other than oneself. This
uncanny sensation has not to do with the confusion so much as the sensation
associated with the recognition of the confusion after the factthe recognition of
having momentarily and involuntarily taken the imaginary for the real. Regarding
the cause of the sensation, Freud notes:
This uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-
established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.
This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand
Schellings definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have been
kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light. (47)
What in the uncanny is familiar and repressed, and ought to have been kept
concealed, is not the substitution, but rather it is the condition of its possibility. It
is the possibility of the distinction between the real and the imaginary being the
function and the effect of spacing, or being extrinsic rather than intrinsic to the real
and the imaginary alike. It is the repressed recognition that what is imagined and
imaginary is the line separating the real and the imaginary, as the condition of the
possibility of substitution and/or confusion.
Andr Bazin provided a cogent account of both what gives the imaginary its
power of substitution, and the potential dire consequence of it in the opening
passage of this chapter. As discussed earlier, the depreciation Bazin ascribes to
the identification of authentic reality with the cinematic illusion has at least one
thing in common with the decay of aura Benjamin attributed to the desire of
contemporary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly, which is just
as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by
accepting its reproduction (The Work of Art 223). In both cases, the substitution
of a mechanical reproduction for the uniqueness of every reality leads to the
depreciation of the latter.22 Benjamin recounts an instance of this uncanny effect as
relayed by Pirandello. Before the camera, the film actor, Pirandello noted:
feels as if in exileexiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With
a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its
corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, (229)
Benjamin compares the feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before
the camera to the estrangement felt before ones own image in the mirror (230).
However, now the reflected image has become separable, transportable (231).
The sensation of exile from the self in front of the camera, accompanied as it is
with a vague sense of discomfort, has to do with the recognition of an inexplicable
divide within the self as the condition of possibility of duplication. Whereas ones
image in the mirror remains at a fixed distance, and can be animated at will to
simulate possession and control, cinema dispenses with the possibility of idealizing
the image as a mere reflection. This is not to say the image that is separable and
transportable dispenses with the referent. On the contrary, much as it references
and remains bound to the referent, to the point of involuntary substitution, it
deprives the referent of its corporeality,reality,life, and much of everything else
that may constitute a radical difference between the real and the imaginary.
For the image to be separable and transportable, and at that subject to
involuntary substitution, it must be always separable and transportable already,
in origin, as it is in every repetition. Cinemas dispensation with the presence
of the referent as the point of originwithout the loss of pretense to objective
representationbrings to surface a gap between the visual and the substantive
contents of reality. This gap between form and substance, or image and identity,
may be covered but never bridged. The exposure of this gap offers a serious
challenge to the privileged antecedence and alterity of reality as measured against
representation. Cinema subjects the aura of humanist reality to radical query
insofar as the possibility of its fabrications and the proximity of its representations
strip reality of its endowed authority as the site of a causal link between form
and substance, or image and identity. The visual content of the real can only be
made to precede and be independent of its actual substantive content in the
imaginary world if the two had not a causal, but a conventional relationship
in the real. Cinema can only give visual content spatial and temporal mobility if
reality that is always rigorously distinguished from representation is itself already
a form of representation. Subject as it is to cinemas manipulative interventions
and imaginary doubling that forgo the possibility of a site for causality, humanist
reality stands to disappear as a selfsame entity, only to surface as a suppressed
imaginary and a purposed construction, always already. Otherwise, there could be
no signification without a present referent. In authentic reality, as in the illusion
of reality the referent is perpetually deferred. The self has never been but in exile
from the reality, which is never given though always desired. This is, in a sense,
that warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning, that accompanies any
illusion of reality that encroaches on the space and place of authentic reality by
way of substitution.
That authentic reality is, in a sense, always already an illusion of reality
divided and deferred and as such a substitute for a desired reality that is undivided
and fully present unto itself, is, as Freud says, nothing new or foreign, but familiar
and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of
repression. That the difference between authentic reality and illusion of reality
is also an indifference is what ought to have been kept concealed but which has
nevertheless come to light in the figure of the uncanny. Cinema always stands
to be uncanny, were it not for the spatial supplements that seek to mitigate its
warning. This brings us full circle to the site of our encounter with cinema: the
movie-theater. From the nickelodeon through every mutation and modification of
the movie-theater, the preoccupation with an Other place for film is primarily a
preoccupation with preserving the presumed/desired alterity of the imaginary as
measured against the real. Opening a place elsewhere for film is tantamount to
performatively opening a place for its presumed other and for otherness as such to
the imaginary. Much as the uncanny marks the site of a collapsed distance between
the real and the imaginary always already, its aversion is perpetually pending the
institution of that distance. Hence, the architecture of an illusive distance, that is a
distance never given yet a distance perpetually in place.
Notes
1 To the list one may add such short-lived technological curiosities as Smell-O-Vision
and Odorama.
2 See Metz; Mitry.
3 The television sets in decades to come would have much in common with the
Kinetoscope. The television set too contains the moving image within a well-
articulated frame, subject to the viewers control.
4 See also Strauven.
5 Whether actual or imaginary, the logic of this frame, if not its form, would remain with
cinema for the remainder of its history.
6 For a detailed discussion of this subject please see A. Bazin 76124.
7 This is a question that to legitimate theater had neither the urgency nor the
immediate pertinence it had for movie-theaters.
8 See Bowers 1718.
9 Also reprinted in Bowers 17.

10 The implement of exchange was a gendered role from the outset and for many
years to come. So was the authority that validated and consecrated the exchange
at the inner borderlinethe ticket-taker. The former, all gender role stereotypes
withstanding, was female and the later male.
11 Although food was not initially offered for purchase inside the nickelodeon, what food
was popularly associated with the movies and offered for sale outside and later inside
the movie-theater was and remains frivolous food that bear the same conceptual
relationship to real or substantive food as film is assumed to bear to reality. Be this
frivolous candy and soda, or what denotes deflated valuepeanutsor food that is
all form and little substancepopped corn. In time, the latter supplanted the former
to become virtually synonymous with the movie going experience.
12 Whereas the average nickelodeon had 300 seats and up to 1,200 by the early teens,
the average movie palace had over 3,000 seats and upwards of 5,000 seats in some
cases.
13 Hence, Charles S. Lees famous dictum, the show starts on the sidewalk. For an
in-depth discussion of Charles S. Lees work see Valentine.
14 By 1929 only 37 percent of all movie-theaters in the United States were wired for
sound. By 1931 62 percent of all movie-theaters had converted to sound (Crafton 155).
15 Qualitatively, the sound-on-film system was not superior. As Barney Balaban explained
in 1929: While at the present time it is our experience that sound-on-disc gives better
tonal results, we find sound-on-film to be so much more simple and convenient to
handle that we feel it is much to be preferred (qtd. in Crafton 147).
16 Also,
The advent of talking films has entailed very little reconstruction in German cinemas, as
nearly all of them were originally planned with due regard to acoustic properties owing to
the fact that variety turns are often sandwiched in between the films. (Shand 23)
17 For instance, Valentine notes:
Through the 1930s, owing to changes in aesthetic ideas as well as budgetary
considerations, theatre design became increasingly restrained and simpler, drawing
closer to commercial Art Deco and the strand of Modernism that challenged historical
principles. Streamlined design reached its peak during the middle and late 1930s, by which
time the movie palace had been replaced by the next phase of movie theatre design, the
neighborhood house. (88)
18 Also see Basque; Gomery; Hall; Stapleford; Valentine.
19 For detailed discussion of audiences reaction to early sound films see Spadoni.
20 For a broad discussion of the cinematic screen see Friedberg, The Virtual Window.
21 Illumination levels in the auditorium during the movie screening were carefully
studied with the stated intent of reducing screen consciousness. The adopted
recommendation was to avoid total darkness and screen reflection from surrounding
surfaces, if only to avoid spectatorial consciousness.
22 Benjamin notes:
The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not
touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds
not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review
before the spectator in a movie. (The Work of Art 221)
6
The Epilogue
In much of the preceding discussions my intent has not been to infer any inevitability
either to the theoretical postures and strategies discussed in the first two chapters
or to the spatial postures and strategies discussed in the last three chapters. My
intention has been to point out that the perseverance of these strategies points
to an enduring desire for an alterity to representation that is never given. Much as
the metaphysics of presence instigates the desired alterity, the performative acts
that comprise architectureacts that produce the very condition they purport to
representperpetuate the desire.
Space, of which architecture is a vehicle of articulation, is intimately implicated in
the constitution of the Other as such. The Other is, by definition, spatially distanced.
Alterity is, in other words, a spatial performative whose modalities strategically
differ in deference to the perceived proximity of the Other. The greater, for instance,
the proximity of a mode of representation is to its referent, the more emphatic is
the spacing. To space, it is important to note, is also to sublate contingency, since
contingency is, in effect, a distortion of space and a collapse of distance.
It is this indispensable dependency of the otherness of the Other on spacing
that perpetuates the desire for the alterity of the Other. This spacing, whose other
designate is ornamentation, at once defers what it offers. It thereby sees only to
the perpetuation of the desire. If on the construed line between the self-referential
reality and the contingent representation, there is the architecture of libraries, art
museums, and movie-theatres, among others, seeking to systematically remove
the trace of their indifference, this is not because they inevitably must for any
reason other than a supplemental/ornamental response to the desired alterity of
the real, the original, the authentic, the present, and so on. This is the alterity that
their supplemental/ornamental introjection can only offer and defer indefinitely.
What I have also tried to point out thus far is that the virtual or cultural reality
that architecture helps fabricate as inevitable and natural is both powerful and
persuasive. It is also a fragile and volatile representation. Its greatest challenge does
not come, however, from other worldviews or competing realities. Although these
challenges can affect profound changes in the worldview and ethos of a culture,
they only amplify the call for architecture, among other tools and technologies, to
forge a new synthesis and constitute a new reality, where our assumptions about
the world, changed as they may be, are again transposed into our experience of it.
The reality that a culture forges can successfully undergo radical change, so long
as all traces of fabrication can be perpetually erased from it. The greatest challenge
that this reality faces is not, in other words, to its shape or content, but to its authority
and its ability to assume the guise of inevitability. The challenge where it is faced
is to the reality of the real. Construed, as it is in the West, to appear as the non-
contingent Other of representation, the virtual or cultural reality that architecture
helps fabricate faces a constant challenge to its authority as a self-referential or
non-representational inevitability from its contingent representational Other. No
degree of control can overcome this challenge in any other than a temporal form.
There is also, no outside to this metaphysics. To dream the dream of an outside
is to concede the first and most fundamental assumption of this metaphysics
the outside. Nevertheless, the choice is not to either facilitatewithout any ethical
burdenthe dominion of this metaphysics or seek to supplant it by what can only
amount to an inevitable recourse to its strategies of delimitation, and exclusion.
The first implied choice is merely a call for consequential complacency; the second
a call to ideological warfare that at best merely supplants the players, leaving the
game intact. The very conception of a choice here is and can only be formulated
from within the bounds of the same metaphysics. However, rather than facilitate
through complacency or opposition, one can offer resistance to, not the tenants
of this metaphysics, but to the authority and the ability of this metaphysics to
disguise itself as physics.
One may readily imagine, even if only in principle, an architecture that resists
rather than enables the facile formal and spatial dichotomies that supplement the
authority of this metaphysics. One may readily imagine an architecture that does
not confirm or offer answers, but only questions. An architecture that does not
arm, but disarms. An architecture that is neither and both as measured against the
sides of any formal and spatial dichotomy. Imagining an architecture of resistance
is not difficult. Architecture is, after all, merely a construct. It is not difficult to
think or think through an architecture that contextually resists facile dichotomies.
Committing to this architecture palpably is. The architecture that offers resistance
will not be aesthetic. It may well be uncanny. However, the uncanny is, as Freud
reminded us long ago, as homely as it is unhomely and one can never know which.
The inherent dilemmas of this architecture are not metaphysical or ideological.
They are indelibly ethical.
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Index
Locators given in italics refer to figures auditoria 15052, 151, 157, 158, 158,
16062, 161, 164, 1667, 169, 171,
abstraction 46, 48 177
acoustics 165 authentic reality 1389, 18081
actors 145 authenticity 96, 101, 127, 128, 12930
Adam and Eve (Albrecht Drer) 58 Avalon Theatre, Chicago 161
Adorno, Theodor W. 1334
aesthetic sentiments 4 Bacon, Francis 93
aesthetics 3940, 50, 96, 100 Bakshy, Alexander 164, 1678
Alberti, Leon Battista 1315, 1829, 35, Barnes Foundation building 113, 114
49, 667, 834 Barry, John F. 151
Altes Museum, Berlin 100, 1017, 102, Baudry, Jean-Louis 138
103, 105, 106 Bazin, Andr 137, 138, 139, 180
Animotiscope 141, 141 Bazin, Germain 96
architectural theory 1318, 289 beauty 15, 17, 1821, 36, 39, 40, 50
architectural writing 279 Benjamin, Walter 95, 128, 138, 139,
art 38, 47, 923, 95 see also painting 1789, 180
placement of 1289, 133 Biblioteca Ambrosiana 67
as self-referential representation 133 Bibliothque Nationale de France (BNF)
worth of 1267 68, 7481, 75, 79
art chronology 100 Bibliothque Ste. Genevive 668, 69, 70
art deco 166 binding power 2, 4
art history 95 BNF (Bibliothque Nationale de France)
art museums 91134 68, 7481, 75, 79
as an Other place 128, 129 book-presses 59, 61
boundaries 134 books 57, 58, 72, 7980, 86
design of 989, 99, 101 bookshelves 59
display practices 134 book-stalls 62
external references 101 Boulle, tienne-Louis 17, 68, 84, 98
and Platonism 124 Braun, Harry 164
purpose of 99100 Brawne, Michael 55, 59
rite of visitation 13033 Breuer, Marcel 112, 113
spacing 1078, 11011, 11319, 121, British Museum reading room 689, 71
1256, 1289 Brolin, Brent 334
spatial realization 100 Brooklyn Museum 117, 118, 119
view out from 113, 129 Brosses, Charles de 96
atmospheric movie-theaters 160, 164, building 38
172 Bullock, E.C.A. 1556, 158
Buzzi, Lelio 67 cult referents 134n1

culture 1, 3, 56, 13, 14, 17, 40
cabinets of curiosities 935, 94, 96 curtains 15052, 159, 172
Campo Santo, Pisa 125 curves 39, 40
campuses 879
card players 1423 decimal system 71, 89n5
Castiglione, Giuseppe 131 decoration 43, 48
casts 100101 delight 15
censorship 152 Delman Theater, Dallas 178
chained books 61, 66 Derrida, Jacques 845, 89, 1224
Chapter Library, Hereford 63 design 18, 2021
Chinese architecture 1516 detachment 556, 59, 623, 66
chronology of art 100 digital information technologies 734, 80
churches 35 dressing 23 see also ornamentation
cinema see also movie-theaters Durand, Jacques-Nicolas-Louis 98, 99
in borrowed spaces 144 Drer, Albrecht 58
censorship 152
color 177 Eberson, John 16062, 161, 162
and displacement 1512, 157 encampment 59, 61, 84, 86, 879
experiential divide 14041 Exeter Academy Library 712, 73
and illusion 1379, 142, 145, 168, 175 exhibition practices 978, 101
as immersive experience 1445, exhibition value 92
17071 experiential separation 62, 89n3
immigrants 1523 Ezra (codex Amiatinus) 59, 60
musical accompaniments 1434
narrative 1435, 152 faades 1478, 1556, 156, 177
narrators 1434 Favier, Jean 89n9
picture frames 141 film see cinema
placement of 139, 143, 1789 Film Arts Guild Cinema 16970
sound 1635, 167, 168 Fisher, Philip 119
spectatorial role 1412, 144, 160, 169, Fontana, Domenico 59, 61
175 form 4041, 43
and theater 1445 Foucault, Michel 97
women 153 Fox Theatre, San Francisco 156
world of ghosts perception 1678 framing 125
cinema organs 1434 Francesco Calzolaris Cabinet of
circles 2 Curiosities 94
circulation desks 689, 712 Freud, Sigmund 179
collectibles 924 function 1
collecting art 92
collective expression 66, 153 galleries 93, 96
color cinema 177 Gehry, Frank 115
columns 23 George & W. C. Rapp 173
commodity 15 Getty Museum, Los Angeles 115, 116
conferring power 2, 4 Glyptothek, Munich 101
constative statements 1, 3 Goldberger, Paul 120
contingency on difference 2021 Gorky, Maxim 1424, 179
copies 42, 96, 100101, 135n22 see also Grand Riviera Theatre, Detroit 162
reproductions Grieveson, Lee 152
Cottbus Technical University Library Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 115, 116
89n15 Guggenheim Museum, New York
Crafton, Donald 163 11617, 117, 11921, 120
index 197
Gunning, Tom 141 Lewis, Lloyd 1623

libraries 6, 78, 5584
Hansen, Miriam 1523 encampment 59, 61, 84, 86, 879
harmonic proportions 5 and mortality 84
Heidegger, Martin 123 as pharmacies 847
Hereford Chapter Library 63 processional transition 556, 59, 612,
High Museum of Art, Atlanta 115, 116 678, 87
Hirt, Alois 98, 99, 100, 101, 107 purpose of 557
Holland Brothers Kinetoscope Parlor 140 Saal-System 637, 69, 734
Howe, Lyman H. 141 shelter and protection 60
Hulfish, David 147, 148 stack-system 69, 713
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 100101 view out from 72
Huxtable, Ada Louise 121 wall-system 637, 69, 734
Library of the University of Leyden (Paul
iconography 100 Lacroix) 62
identity 40, 66 lobbies 1489, 1578
imitative representation 1245 Loews Ohio Theatre, Columbus 159
immigrants 1523 Loews Theatre, Louisville 161
imperfection 445 Loos, Adolf 33
Indian architecture 1516 Louvre 92, 98, 11314, 115
Indiana Theatre, Indianapolis 156 Lumires Cinmatographe 142
inscriptions 579
Interior of a Picture Gallery with the MacCannell, Dean 130
Collection of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Malraux, Andre 134
Gonzaga (Giovanni Paolo Pannini) mechanical reproduction 128, 1389,
97 180 see also reproductions
Invention of the Art of Drawing (Joseph- Mechel, Christian von 98
Benot Suve) 122 Meier, Richard 115, 116
involuntary substitution 180 Messina, Antonello da 556, 59
metaphysics 67
James, Henry 89n3 Metz, Christian 138
Jefferson, Thomas 87, 88 Michelangelo 64, 65
mimesis 1223
Kahn, Louis I. 712, 73 misplacement 414
Kiesler, Frederick 16970 Modern Movement 313
Kinetoscope 13940, 140, 181n3 Modern Museum of Art Movie Theatre,
Klaber, John 150 New York 175, 176
Klenz, Leo von 98, 99, 101 moral sentiments 4
Koolhaas, Rem 789, 81, 82 mortality 845
Kracauer, Siegfried 145 mottos 57
Kunstkammer 93, 96, 134n4 movies see cinema
movie-theaters see also cinema
Labrouste, Henri 668, 69, 70 acoustics 165
Lacroix, Paul 62 art deco 166
Lamb, Thomas 155, 156, 159 atmospheric 160, 164, 172
language 40 auditoria 15052, 151, 157, 158, 158,
Laugier, Marc-Antoine 1314, 35, 84 16062, 161, 164, 1667, 169, 171,
Laurentian Library 612, 64, 65 177
Le Corbusier 15, 33, 36 capacity 182n12
lecterns 61 comfort 1745
Leiden University Library 61, 62 conversions 147
letters 579, 73 curtains 15052, 159, 172
democratic nature 1623 performative acts 2, 3

design 1457, 1535, 156, 15960, performative statements 12, 3
1637, 17074 Perrault, Dominique 75, 89n10
faades 146, 1478, 148, 1556, 156, Pevsner, Nikolaus 31
177 pharmakon 85
fire exits 150 Philadelphia Museum of Art 10811, 109
food 182n11 Pirandello, Luigi 168
horizontality 169, 1712, 175 Plato 1223
lobbies 1489, 1578 Platonism 1234
orchestras 169 power 97
Orientalism 160 presses 59, 61
ornamentation 166, 169, 171, 174 processional transition 556, 59, 612,
proscenium arches 1589, 169, 171 678, 87
ritual of exchange 14950, 182n10 projection 140
screens 15051, 169, 1712 proportion 456
sound 1635, 167, 182 proscenium arches 1589, 169, 171
ticket booths 1489 Proust, Marcel 133
ushers 162, 162 Pugin, Augustus 32
multiplexes 177
Mumford, Lewis 119 Rapp, George L. 154, 165
Munday, Peter 94 reading rooms 689
Muse Central des Arts 92 reality 1379
museums see art museums reality of the real 1245, 126, 184
repetition 4041
narrative cinema 1435, 152 repositories 93
narrators 1434 representation 1246, 127, 12930
nation-states 967 reproductions 95, 96, 100101, 1278,
nature 16, 17, 18, 19, 40 138, 180 see also mechanical
Neickel, Caspar 94, 95 reproduction
Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart 115, 11516 Rhodes Theatre, Chicago 173
Newcomb, Edwin 165 ribands 58
nickelodeons 1478, 15055 see also rite of resurrection 133
cinema; movie-theaters ritual 1
Normal Theatre, Chicago 151 ritual of exchange 14950, 182n10
Rosenberg, Ben 157, 165
Oglala Indians 2 Rubush & Hunter 156
on-rushing trains 1412 Rumohr, Frieherr von 100, 127
orchestras 169 Ruskin, John 14, 15, 3149, 579, 73, 84,
organs 1434 123, 1248, 135n20, 135n21
Orientalism 160
originality 1278 Saal-System libraries 637, 69, 734
ornamentation 239, 319, 4050, 57, sacred symbols 34
166, 169, 171, 174 SantAndrea (church) 45
St. Denis (church) 4
painting 1214 see also art St. Jerome 55
Pannini, Giovanni Paolo 97 St. Jerome in his Study (Antonello da
Parabolic Reverse Floor 171 Messina) 556, 59
Pawley, Fredric 165 Saussure, Ferdinand de 40
penetralia 89n3 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 98, 99, 100,
Pereira, P.R. 154 1017, 102, 103, 105, 106
perfect ornaments 44, 46 Schlanger, Benjamin 164, 166, 17071,
perfection 16 172, 174, 1756
index 199
SCL (Seattle Central Library) 813, 82 tourism 130

Scott Brown, Denise 312, 33, 367 tradesmens signs 412
scrolls 58 trains 1412
Seattle Central Library (SCL) 813, 82 Transcenium theaters 1767
secular buildings 6 transition 556, 59, 612
sensible visibility 20 trees 89n8
Sexton, R. W. 170 Trinity College library 66
Sheldon Theatre, Chicago 148 truth 84, 126
shelter 9
short films 145 ugliness 19, 212, 39
Siegel, James 72, 89n16 uncanny effect 179, 180
Smirke, Sydney 689, 71 universities 879
Smith, Raymond F. 178 University of Virginia 87, 88
social identity 967 Unrau, John 32, 34
sound movies 1635, 167, 168, 182 ushers 162, 162
spacing 1078, 11011, 11319, 121,
1256, 1289 Valry, Paul 93, 13034
spatial control 95, 96 Vatican Library 59, 61
spatial displacement of art 912 Venturi, Robert 312, 33, 367
speech 856 View of the Grand Salon Carr (Giuseppe
stack-system libraries 69, 713 Castiglione) 131
Stapleford, Richard 164 view out from libraries 72
state citizenry 967 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugne 17
Stern, Seymore 16870 Virginia, University of 87, 88
Stirling, James 115 Vitaphone 163
Strand Theatre, Hartford 174 Vitascope 140
streamline moderne 166 Vitruvian triad 14, 15
Suve, Joseph-Benot 122 Vorse, Mary Heaton 152
synthesis 5 vulgarity 412
tablets 58 Waagen, Gustav Friedrich 98, 99, 100

talkies 1635, 167 Wagner, Johan Martin 98
television 181n3 Walkely 135n20
Tempio Malatestiano 667 wall-system libraries 637, 69, 734
Thalia Theatre, New York 164, 172 Wareham Theatre, Wareham 173
Ricetto of the Laurentian Library Whitney Museum, New York 11113, 112
(Michelangelo) 64 Whittemore, Charles A. 165
theater curtains 15051 William Riseman Associates 173, 174
theaters 1445, 150 women 153
Theatorium postcard 146 world of ghosts perception 1678
theology 21, 39, 40 worth of art 1267
theory 1318, 289 Wren, Christopher 66
ticket booths 1489 Wright, Frank Lloyd 116, 117, 120
ticketing rituals 14950 writing 279, 579, 847, 129
tipis 2, 9 Wunderkammer 935

The Architecture of The Illusive Distance

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The Architecture of the Illusive Distance

With love and gratitude this work is dedicated to the memory of

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-4724-3318-3 (HBK)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

List of Figures vii

Part I The Architecture of the Illusive Presence

2 On the Border of the Beautiful 31

Part II The Architecture of the Illusive Distance

3 The Logic of Encampment 55

4 The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity 91

5 The Architecture of the Illusive Distance 137

6 The Epilogue 183

Figure 3.1 Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in his Study, 46 36 cm, oil on

Figure 3.11 tienne-Louis Boulle, Bibliothque Nationale, 1785,

Figure 4.1 Engraving of the Francesco Calzolaris Cabinet of Curiosities,

Figure 5.1 Holland Brothers Kinetoscope Parlor, 1894

Figure 5.2 Lyman H. Howes Animotiscope exhibition poster, 1897

In the abstract, architecture is an insuperable task. Faced with multiple possibilities,

function to synthesize a peoples ethosthe tone, character, and quality

Although Geertzs description pertains to religion as a cultural system, we can

harmonies of a Renaissance Chapel, or the unfolding, infinite universe of a Baroque

What this faith affirming anagogical transportation attests is the binding or

the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence,

the enterprise of returning strategically, in idealization, to an origin or

as self-presentation is made to retain its privilege and remain impervious to the

what they consider to be mutable and arbitrary in architecture as they do to the

It is wonderful, how, by a kind of natural instinct, all of us knowing or ignorant,

so long as architecture, comprised as it is of design and matter, is contingent on

of ornaments. This essential part can potentially be a destructive annexation.

whoever considers the true nature of ornament in building will be convinced,

Ornament must be beautiful before it can be added as a dress. However, even

How extraordinary a thing (says the person introduced in Tully) is a handsome

it is undeniable that there may be in the mere form or figure of a building,

immediately perceived where it is, as much as it is missed where it is not; (Ten

there is hardly any man so melancholy or stupid, so rough or unpolished, but

and commonly obscured subject. It too is appended as a kind of an auxiliary

Before the ornamental appendage, we should recall, there is the theoretical

to speak conclusively of the truth of architecture is vested in its appeal to the

1 Leone Battista Alberti 1452:

Frank Lloyd Wright 1908:

Pugins warning that it is alright to decorate construction but never construct

indulged in ornament for no ornaments sake. The promise of postmodernism

to point to any architectural feature, in and of itself, as an ornamental feature, or

can be admitted or suppressed without changing the thing fundamentally, or

re-draws these limits to incorporate ornament as an interchangeable word for

Theoretical and aesthetic speculations on architecture are, historically, if not per

consider for an instant what would be the effect of continually repeating an

of course, misplacement here is to imply a reading that is conditioned by its place

If to produce a good or beautiful ornament, it were only necessary to produce

No beautiful thing, therefore, is an ornament in anything but a vague sense, if in its

it is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion

Proportion, we should note, is a question of invention and composition and as such

Although a perfect ornamentperfect insofar as the realization of the imitated

The question is first to be clearly determined whether the architecture is a frame

Before ornamentation or ornamental addition, there must be a clear determination

a servant within architecture, lies somewhere between complete abstraction and

How far this subordination is in different situations to be expressed, or how

1 See Jensen and Conway.

There is a small painting by Antonello da Messina which, Michael Brawne in

Fig. 3.1 Antonello

To obviate this frightful danger, Ruskin asks us to always place writing in a

List of Figures vii

2 On the Border of the Beautiful 31

3 The Logic of Encampment 55

4 The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity 91

5 The Architecture of the Illusive Distance 137

6 The Epilogue 183