Manipulations, Or, Rethinking Tabula Rasa

Author(s): Gabriele Mastrigli

Source: Log, No. 10 (Summer/Fall 2007), pp. 71-79, 33
Published by: Anyone Corporation
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Gabriele Mastrigli
MICHELANGELO, SISTINE CHAPEL,
1sos-1s12, DETAIL, ALL IMAGES COUR-
TESY THE AUTHOR.
1. Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1998), xix.
2. Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno
Contardi, Michelangelo Architect (New
York: Henry N . Abrams, 1993), 25. Called
upon by Julius II to fresco the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's first
act is to propose and negotiate a new
doctrinal program of the work itself.
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Manipulations,
Or, Rethinking
Tabula Rasa
The more architecture mutates, the more it confronts its
immutable core.
- Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XD
The concept of contamination, with all of its metaphorical
implications, runs a complex and seductive course in the his-
tory of Western ideas. At a cultural level, beyond biological
metaphors, the idea of contamination evokes change, a
transformation that occurs within an object due to the action
of a force external to it. In its use, the word contamination
suggests a denouncement of its etymological meaning - the
act of "leaving a tactile print" (from the Latin cum tangere)
upon something. That is, a transformation implemented
through the use of the hand.
In Western civilization, the human hand has repeatedly
been used to represent the transformation of reality by a
higher power. The hand embodies the very act of creation,
the act of taking something from nothingness and bringing it
into being. In Romanesque iconography God positions the
Earth with his hand; the same hand with which he sculpts
Adam as if he were a statue. When the role of the creator
progressively became the prerogative of man during the
Renaissance, Michelangelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel
[COLORPLATE 1] "recorded" this emblematic passage: through
outstretched fingers that barely touch one another, man
assumes the role of creator from God. From this moment
onward, art embodies the existential condition of the artist.
In this sense Michelangelo is the first artist to understand
that art is not mere representation but also, and primarily,
an action upon reality. He is also the first to conceive the
artist's work as an activity carried out in complete autono-
my. According to Giulio Carlo Argan, Michelangelo's art is
therefore the first truly political work, not just in the sense
of the commissions he received and carried out, but also in
his autonomy and responsibility with respect to the politico-
religious struggle of his time.2
Michelangelo's work represents not only the artist's
71
LE CORBUSIER AND A BONE (TOP)j
LE CORBUSIER'S HAND ABOVE THE
PLAN VOISIN MODEL (RIGHT).
l. Henri Focillon, J'ita de/le Forme reguito
da Elogio de/la mano (Turin: Einaudi,
1972), 105. My translation.
4. See Rem Koolhaas, Deliriou, New York
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), 211. Le Corbusier's well-known
obsession with the hand was rediscov-
ered and interpreted by Koolhaas in
Deliriou, New York. The hand that holds
the Cartesian skyscraper is, for Koolhaas,
the emblem of the "trick" performed by
Le Corbusier in Manhattan, the magician
who pulls the rabbit out of his hat. After
first (re)appearing in OMA's iconogra-
phy some time in the second half of the
1980s, pictures representing hands in the
act of manipulating models have since
become very common in architectural
communication around the globe.
5. See Andre Wogenscky, Lt Mani di Le
Corbu,itr (Rome: Mancosu, 2004), 25.
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action upon matter but also the very essence of art, its condi-
tion ofpossibility: the presupposition that things are available
to be modified according to a specific will, and that this trans-
formation generates a constant dialectic between the artist
and the concreteness of his artwork - as Michelangelo's
unfinished sculptures, the Prigioni and the Rondanini Pieta,
illustrate. Hands, as Henri Focillon writes, with their force,
violence, and ingeniousness, "precede man" and pose ques-
tions about the reasons for his actions. By using his hands,
man - and to a greater degree the artist - "comes into con-
tact with the hard consistency of thought" and the mandate
to create "a concrete universe that is distinct from nature."l
Depicting oneself in the act of manipulation - of picking
up an object with one's hands and operating on it - is not sim-
ply a communicative stratagem or, as Rem Koolhaas argues, a
conjurer's trick. 4 Instead, it is the representation of a specific
interpretative act that transfers the distinctive characteristics
of an object from one field of observation to another. In the
hands of Le Corbusier, for example, the form, structure, and
consistency of an object as banal as a bone are potentially
available for use in an architectural discipline.S Here the pos-
sibilities for manipulation signify the awareness that in mod-
ern culture every object is, in principle, available for the act
of making architecture. In 1881, William Morris wrote,
"Architecture represents the whole of modifications and
alterations carried out on the earth's surface with the excep-
tion of the pure desert." That is, the problem of architecture
- as the summa of human potential - is that nothing can
escape it. Likewise, for Le Corbusier there is no longer any
nature outside of architectural thought, particularly when
nature is evoked as an ideal condition and recreated based on
72

6. Le Corbusier, The Cit, of To-morror>
and its Planning (New York: Dover
Publications, 1987), 288.
7. Ibid., 298.
8. Ibid., 287.
9. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, 19]8-
1946 (Zurich: Erlenbach-Ziirich, 1947),
154.
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the needs of architecture. Le Corbusier's sense of manipula-
tion, like Michelangelo's, is not the emblem of the profession
of architecture but is the essence of the act of design. This is
demonstrated with the hand that indicates his Plan Voisin in
La Yille Radieuse. Referencing the image that he uses at the
end of Urbanisme, which shows Louis XIV presiding over the
founding of the complex of Les Invalides in Paris, Le
Corbusier transforms the gesture of the "great town plan-
ner" into a more general concept about authorship. The
author of the project is outside of the frame of the image; in
the foreground we see only a hand. What counts is not the
individual who designs - or better, signs - architecture, but
that the project is presented as the concrete and visible sedi-
ment of a deliberate will and a specific idea: an idea, accord-
ing to Le Corbusier, that "sets up principles against the silly
medley of little reforms with which we are constantly
deceiving ourselves." 6
MODERNITY
The most emblematic example of the clean slate that under-
lies the myth of modernist planning, the tabula rasa strategy
of the Plan Voisin has, in principle, nothing of the subver-
sive. "I invent no Utopia in which to build my city. I assert
that its proper place is here, and nothing will remove it," Le
Corbusier said.7 The Plan Voisin was not about destroying
the center of Paris but about sanctioning its transformation.
The creation of a new business center in the areas of the
Marais, Archives, and Temple simply reiterates that the his-
tory of the city continues. He goes further, saying that with
Plan Voisin, "the historical past, our common inheritance, is
respected. More than that, it is rescued." 8
Beginning with his first project for Paris in 1922, Le
Corbusier presented his ideas as something entirely different
than a generic starting from scratch. For him, some of the
most famous Parisian monuments are the elements that evoke
the "spirit" of the city, not only for their symbolic value, but
also as concrete spaces in the urban structure. "We have a
legacy of objects we admire, whose dimensions and presence
are an unfailing source of joy: Place Vendbme, the courtyard
of the Louvre, Place de la Concorde.''9
The analytical gaze with which Le Corbusier looks at
Paris can be compared with that of Piranesi in Rome in the
mid-1700s: a gaze that could be appreciated in Piranesi's
famous Yedute di Roma - which Le Corbusier studied and
meticulously copied - and that Piranesi made explicit in his
Scenographia of the Campo Marzio in 1762, one of the
73
G.B. PIRANESI, SCENOGRAPHIA, 1762.
10. Pier Vittorio Aureli, "Archaeology in
the Age of Empire," in Hunch 8 (2004):
154.
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preparatory drawings for his famous Ichnographia. While the
Ichnographia represents the past as a timelessness in which
the language of architecture exceeds the space of the city
(and even replaces it), in the Scenographia the future of
Rome is represented by a meticulous removal of the present,
uncovering the few existing ruins of its imperial past and
transforming the city into a desolate wasteland. However,
Piranesi's elimination of successive layers from the monu-
ments of antiquity is not equivalent to cancelling out history.
On the contrary, as Pier Vittorio Aureli has observed, it is the
ability "to move history forward through a desolate and
meaningless present which could only develop in 'positive'
terms, and only if confronted by the scenographic and icono-
graphic trauma produced by its forgotten or at least uncon-
scious past.mo
Piranesi's harsh judgment of mid-18th-century Rome,
like Le Corbusier's view of the fervor of urban planning in
Paris during the 1920s, transforms the so-called tabula rasa
into a selective, that is, critical, act. While the Scenographia
shows the monuments of the Campo Marzio in their present
condition of ruin, yet liberated from the strata of all subse-
quent cities and therefore established as the new beginning
of a possible city, in Le Corbusier's sketches of the Plan
Voisin the monuments of the city are intact, appearing in the
foreground as points of reference for a new Paris. In both
images the project of the architect is primarily a selection of
elements that represents, in a radical manner, the necessary
manipulation of the current conditions of the city. Rather
than utopian attempts to substitute the real city with an ideal
one, both projects are specific acts whose rational methods
imply empirical presuppositions. For Le Corbusier, as for
Piranesi, judgment of the existing monuments is based on
74
LE CORBUSIER, PLAN VOISIN WITH
PARIS MONUMENTS, 192S,
11. See Giuliano Gresleri, Le Corbusier.
/Tiaggio in Oriente (Venice: Marsilio
Editori/Fondation Le Corbusier, 1984),
401. My translation.
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the immediate and direct evaluation of the quality of their
architecture. Just as Roman architecture is not a question of
archaeology for Piranesi, but a living and real problem in the
city of his time, for Le Corbusier the Eiffel Tower, the
Louvre, and Montmartre are not simply urban relics to be
preserved; they constitute the very idea of the city that the
Plan Voisin projects into the future. "We are important, great,
and worthy of past eras. We will do better. This is my credo ..
. . What will remain of us will be coliseums, bath complexes,
an acropolis, and mosques," 11 the young Jeanneret wrote to
his friend William Ritter in 1911, expressing the exact scope of
the great Piranesian project for Rome. Recognizing the great
works of historical architecture meant identifying them as
elements in their own right and thus isolating them from
their contexts, preparing, in this way, a real space of projec-
tion in the future of the city on par with its history. There is
no trace of a fetish for the past in either Piranesi or Le
Corbusier but rather an anxiety about freeing it from the grip
of a present that does not understand its meaning, and ren-
dering it once again available to the future of architecture
and the city.
Unlike pseudomodernist vulgate, the tabula rasa does
not represent a nai:ve loss of historical memory, but the
result of the action of a critical instrument through which
the design of architecture can formulate a judgment about
the city and its past. Not only does it not separate, it actually
creates a bridge between the modern and postmodern tradi-
tions, the latter being the most recent and most controversial
terrain of confrontation between architecture, the city, and
their histories.
POSTMODERNITY
While held accountable as an example of the original sin of
modernism, the tabula rasa actually sanctioned, in its deliber-
ate removal of the recent past, the debut of the postmodern
era. According to the now-famous definition of Charles Jencks,
75
LE CORBUSIER, PLAN VOISIN, 192S.
OPPOSITE: OFFICE FOR
METROPOLITAN ARCHITECTURE,
PLAN FOR LA DEFENSE, 1991.
12. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-
Modern .Jrchitecture (New York: Rizzoli,
1977), 9.
H. Koolhaas, "Bigness, or The Problem
of Large," in S,M,L,XL, 495-516.
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this debut can be traced back to the demolition by dynamite in
1972 of Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis.
This demolition,Jencks says, was of twofold importance: on
the one hand, it definitively resolved the problem of this ineffi-
cient residential complex, kept alive over the years by useless
acts of maintenance in the face of systematic acts of vandalism
by its inhabitants. On the other hand, it was emblematic of the
failure of modernism, and as such, Jencks continues, its ruins
must "undoubtedly" be preserved: "As Oscar Wilde said, 'expe-
rience is the name we give to our mistakes,' and there is a cer-
tain health in leaving them judiciously scattered around the
landscape as a continual lesson."12
If we look closely, destroying and conserving are two
intrinsically connected acts for both the postmodern and mod-
ern approaches to cities. They represent two sides of the same
coin: the potential manipulability of things. Notwithstanding
the emphasis that postmodern culture wished to assign to
complexity, richness, redundancy, hybridity, and multiplicity
- the process that Robert Venturi called "both-and," in pre-
sumed opposition to "either-or" - the terms of the problem
do not change, only the increased number of variables
changes. In postmodernism the problem of defining things is
simply more complex, making the objective, according to the
conclusion reached by Venturi, more "difficult."
In the recent history of postmodernism, the most
emblematic example of the problem of defining architec-
ture, its objectives, and its conflict with the philosophy of
both-and is the mammoth project known as S,M,L,XL, the
book-monograph by OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau.
On the one hand, the book is obsessed with overblowing the
complexity of its apparatus through an excess of informa-
tion, data, forms of representation, and "things." On the
other hand, it is an extreme attempt to confront "the
immutable core" of architecture, asking questions "on the
basis of contemporary givens" about "what architecture is
and what it can do."11 Not surprisingly, in the "Dictionary
of References" that runs along the margins of the book's
76

14. Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL, xxiv. My
emphasis.
15. The introduction of the division of
S,M,L,XL came late in the development
of the book. Initially the chapters were to
have corresponded with more architec-
tural categories such as Residential,
Buildings, Big Buildings, and Planning.
It is this architectural cataloguing that
led to Small, Medium, Large, Extra
Large, and not the other way around.
See Gabriele Mastrigli, "The Last Bastion
of Architecture", in Log 7 (2006): B.
16. Koolhaas, "Imagining Nothingness",
in S,M,L,XL, 198-203.
17. Koolhaas, "Imagining Nothingness,"
in S, M, L, XL, 201.
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pages, the term architecture does not correspond to a defini-
tion but to the most radical and definitive kinds of ques-
tions raised by Peter Eisenman: "What is the act of
Architecture, what are its elements, its conditions, its mate-
rials, its motives?" 14 Behind the strategy of accumulation,
the S,M,L,XL project reveals the presuppositions of its struc-
ture: Small, Medium, Large, and Extra-Large are not four
simple containers in which to archive by size, once and for
all, the history of OMA, but represent a number of operative
plans for making architecture. The first act of architecture in
S,M,L,XL is defining these fields of action; a definition that
removes the original context of the projects, texts, buildings,
stories, and references in order to create entirely new ones. 15
The presentation of 20 years of OMA activity does not result
in a simple cataloguing of what has been, but rather attempts
to create a new space of possibility around them; a conceptual
tabula rasa within which to reveal the structure - that is, the
theory - that unites these projects, allowing them to project
toward the future. Its manifesto (not such a great secret)
opens the essay "Imagining Nothingness": "Where there is
nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture
nothing (else) is possible.1116
Completing the mandate of Koolhaas's Delirious New
York., S,M,L,XL presents the relationship between architec-
ture and the city in its most extreme dimension: a world
that, like the Berlin Koolhaas studied with O.M. Ungers in
the 1970s, begins to move toward "a post-architectural
landscape of erasure.1117 This is not a result of the natural
77

THE HAND MANIPULATES AN
STUDY MODEL OF MISSION GRAND
AXE IN S,M,L,XL (TOP). LE
CORBUSIER, PRESTO! THE CARTESIAN
RABBIT, OR, THE HORIZONTAL SKY-
SCRAPER (BOTTOM).
18. Koolhaas, "Bigness," in S,M,L,XL,
S16.
19. Koolhaas, "Tabula rasa revisited," in
S,M,L,XL, 1090-tlS.
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consumption of its substance, but a result of the decline
specifically designed by the most radical and deliberate
manipulation: a world from which architecture has been
scraped away in the same way that color is scraped away in
Richter's paintings: inflexible, definitive, eternal, produced
by a superhuman strength. 18
The most literal representation of this position in
S,M,L,XL is the Mission Grand Axe competition for the
enlargement of La Defense in Paris in 1991. This is not only
an attempt to invoke the most abused of modernist taboos and
to reawaken the secret aspirations of the grandeur of French
urban planning, taking advantage of "the incredible elo-
quence" of Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin. It also postulates that
any action in the city, any manipulation, conserves the city -
that is, safeguards its history - because it also destroys it.19 In
Paris - as in Singapore, Berlin, or Nevada - the tabula rasa
is not, for Koolhaas, the simple residue of a modernist obses-
sion but the condition of possibility for the modernization of
the city. A modernization that, as seen in Le Corbusier's Plan
OMA
Voisin and Piranesi's Scenographia, begins with the identifica-
tion of what is to be conserved (Nanterre University, the
prefecture building by Andre Wogenscky, the new Pare
Andre Malraux, the Grande Arche, and the nearby Tour
FIAT and CNIT). These singular elements are assigned the
role of "premonitions of identity" of the future city. At the
same time, by filling the void space with a uniform grid,
these works of architecture are recomposed as part of a vast,
unitary framework: a new project that emancipates them
from being mere witnesses of the past, transforming them
from simple documents of the history of Paris into true and
proper monuments within the city. The uprooting of this part
of the city, which appears so explicit in the gesture of the
hand that manipulates the OMA study model, is emblematic
of the design act through which the city can possess its own
history. The grid revealed "underneath the thinning crust of
our civilization" is already part of the gesture of removal
and, what is more, constitutes its presupposition. It both sep-
arates and unites the monuments: it contains and preserves
their identity from the moment in which it offers a new
context that once again establishes meaning. In contrast to
Piranesi's drastic and immobile Scenographia, OMA presents a
"choreography" wherein the monuments, operated by the
grid, represent the "mobile" scenario of the city that evokes
its history. The establishment of the grid does not therefore
represent the imposition of an abstract system of regulation
but the frame, the project within which the single parts,
78
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20. Argan and Contardi, 46.
21. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The
Case for Contamination," The New York
Times Magazine Qanuary 1, 2006): l0-l9.
GABRIELE MASTRIGLI IS AN ARCHI-
TECT AND CRITIC IN ROME. HE
TEACHES THEORY AND DESIGN AT
THE ASCOL! PICENO SCHOOL OF
ARCHITECTURE AND IS RESEARCHING
PUBLISHING AS A CRITICAL FORM OF
ARCHITECTURE.
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even while maintaining their own autonomy, belong to a
whole. This is the sense of the image of the Sistine Chapel
that suddenly appears in S,M,L,XL, among the pages of the
Parisian project. The architectural frame shown in the pho-
tograph is not simply the support for Michelangelo's reli-
gious narrative. It defines the doctrinal program of the work
itself. For Michelangelo, as Argan explains, space is not an
objective reality in which the work of art is situated. Rather,
it is "an image within an image, which is its intrinsic, innate
principle of order." Thus, "The Sistine representation is not
the preliminary condition for a vision, it is the vision
itself.1120 A vision confined within a unitary, homogeneous
structure that simultaneously informs the work of art and
reconfigures its program.
From the grid of Manhattan to the City of the Captive
Globe (OMA's the first intuitive design exploration of the
potential of the grid) to the "block" structure of Delirious
New York., to that of S,M,L,XL, concluding with the grid
proposed for Paris, the strategy employed by OMA reiterates
that any architectural act, any manipulation, is the literal
reconfiguration of its context; a reconfiguration achieved not
through its abstract, or worse, its utopian reinvention, but
through an empirical evaluation of its characteristics.
The work of Piranesi, Le Corbusier, and OMA reveals
that in architecture, "the endless process of imitation and
revision" that Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses in "The
Case for Contamination" is simply history.21 Only through
history can we speak about architecture as process. This
process is not an abstract, detached, or mindless procedure
for the multiplication of possibilities: rather, it is an opera-
tion through which architecture reduces and focuses in on a
range of possible choices. From this selective procedure
emerges architecture's quality (in the original sense of the
term qua/is, or "which" - the problem of decision and thus
of project), a quality that is a product of an encounter with
the city and its history. Within this context, architecture
ceases to be understood as a rabbit pulled out of the archi-
tect's hat, as Koolhaas has claimed. Rather, architecture con-
fronts its immutable core: it not only moves the history of
the city forward, through the progressive destruction and
reconstruction of its urban fabric, but ultimately offers itself
as a device capable of illuminating the common plan that lies
beneath the crust of the modernization of the city, its idea.
79
COLORPLATE 1. MICHELANGELO BuoNAROTTI (147S-1S64), GENERAL VIEW OF THE SISTINE CEILING,
SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN PALACE, VATICAN STATE, 1508-1512. PHOTO: SCALA/ART RESOURCE.

3l

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