(DIs) Courses

Advanced Studies Programs
MDesS, HISTORY AND THEORY SERIES

(DIS) COURSES

ESSAYS ON ARCHITECTURE HISTORY AND THEORY
2006-2007
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

(DIS) COURSES

2006-2007
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

Master in Design Studies, History and Theory
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

{0l$) 608$E$

Master in Design Studies, History and Theory
Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design. 2007
ISBN 0-9771224-8-4
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2007 Harvard University Graduate School of Design
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. The work herein is that of individual authors; it does not
necessarily represent the views of Harvard University Graduate School of Design or any of its programs or faculty.
This publication is sponsored by Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Book layout and cover designed by Yanel de Angel Salas.
Master in Design Studies, History and Theory Series, 2006-07
In 2005 a group of Master of Design Studies (MDesS) students in the
History and Theory program got together to articulate what has materialized
in this publication. This original group of students from the class of 2006,
included Dubravko Bacic, Sinisha Brdar, John P. Gendall, Francisco Gonzlez
de Canales, Jamie Hand, Mark R. Mansfield, Paul Yager, and myself. We
believed this publication to be an appropriate medium to share the academic
work our program rigorously pursues. In 2006 we were joined by students
from the 2007 class: Joris Fach, Luis Miguel Lus Arana, Marcelo Rangel,
Juan Luis Rodrguez and Delia Wendel, whose papers represent half of the
contributions to this book.
This effort was possible with the support of the MDesS department chair
Daniel Schodek, the program coordinator Eve Blau and the Advanced Studies
Programs administrator Barbara Elfman. We are also deeply grateful to the
Frances Loeb Library and its staff, the Widener Library, the Fine Arts Library
and the invaluable resources Harvard University offers to the academic
community. The essays in this publication developed as part of course and
research interests under the tutelage of various professors, to whom we are
indebted for sparking the theoretical concepts that motivated these intellectual
pursuits. Some of these professors and courses are: Prof. Antoine Picons
Digital Culture, Space and Society, Prof. Michael Hayss The Architectural
Imaginary: Experimental Architecture of the 1970s, Prof. Kari Jormakkas
Outside the Canon: Revisionist Readings of Aalto, and the many professors
that contribute to the course series Buildings, Text and Contexts. Given the
variety of themes these courses allowed us to explore, this book is organized
alphabetically by author.
Finally, we are grateful to Harvard University Graduate School of Design,
a place that nourishes our minds and creativity and whose community,
including faculty, staff and fellow classmates, contributed to our formation.
Our sincerest appreciation goes to Book Masters, Inc., especially Sue Bray, for
their consistent patience and support through out this publication process.
Yanel de Angel Salas
MDesS 2006
Editor
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2007
k6k0NLE06EMEI$
The Master of Design Studies is a post-professional degree program at
the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The History and Theory
concentration draws students with professional degrees in architecture, urban
design, landscape, and other design fields, who have specialized interests in a
broad range of historical and theoretical areas of advanced study. The program
has a scholarly focus. Particular emphasis is placed on the history of modern
and contemporary architecture and on current theoretical and methodological
approaches to the analysis and interpretation of architectural culture in its
broadest sense. The core courses are intentionally interdisciplinary with
offerings in all the design fields encompassed by the school as well as in other
schools and institutes within the University. Collaborative group learning is
the primary mode for study in the History and Theory concentration; students
frequently organize specialized reading groups, lectures and presentations.
This volume represents the first project of its kind, initiated and produced by
the students themselves.
The essays in this publication offer a sampling of the diverse themes students
in the History and Theory concentration have explored using various techniques
of analysis and interpretation. Some of the contributions were developed in
the context of course work, others as part of independent studies or larger
thesis investigations. The title of this volume, (Dis)courses, is appropriate to
the type of learning and expansion of knowledge propagated by the program.
We hope that (Dis)courses will continue publication and to provide a forum
for future students in the History and Theory progam to share their work and
to carry forward and expand discussions begun at the Graduate School of
Design.
Eve Blau
Adjunct Professor of Architectural History
Master in Design Studies, History and Theory Area Coordinator

Cambridge, Massachusetts
2007
lI8006Il0
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Eve Blau
FORMS OF CRITICALITY
Sinisha Brdar
TSCHUMIS FIREWORKS DESIGN FOR THE INAUGURATION OF
PARC DE LA VILLETTE: Pyrotechnic Architecture Translated
AALTO AUTHENTICATED
On Alvar Aaltos Jargon of Authenticity
Joris Fach
AVATAR FOR DYSTOPIA
The Digital Implications of the Separation Barrier
John P. Gendall
ANIMALIZATION!
Francisco Gonzlez de Canales
PIRANESI / SCHUITEN: ARCHITECTURE, COMICS AND CLASSICISM
From Piranesi to Schuiten: The Hypertrophy of Style
Luis Miguel Lus-Arana
TECHNOLOGY, THE CHANGING SUBJECT OF
ARCHITECTURE AND ITS ARTICULATION
Frosken, a Case Study
Mark R. Mansfield
MULTIPLE READINGS ON ARCHITECTURE AND FILM
Marcelo Rangel
CITY HALL ON A HILL
Juan Luis Rodrguez
TECHNOLOGICAL TOPOS, AND THE RE-VISION OF THE LOWER NINTH WARD,
NEW ORLEANS
Delia Wendel
1
14
27
46
55
68
97
122
127
148
Ik8LE 0F 60IEI$
ESSAYS
1
In order to sustain itself within metropolitan space,
architecture seems obliged to become a spectre of itself.
1

Manfredo Tafuri, 1973
Superstudios Continuous Monument and Rem Koolhaas project Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture are both symptoms of and responses to the
conditions of possibility analyzed in the work of Manfredo Tafuri. The following
essay will attempt to articulate this proposal by revisiting the main protagonists and
their historical intersections, and discussing the issues on which their respective
ideas converge.
Perhaps the decisive factor for a proper understanding of this juxtaposition is the
specific historical conjuncture of the late 60s and early 70s, and the geist of
May 1968, admittedly elusive and difficult to grasp for the later generations. The
enthusiasm of the post-war period gave way throughout the 1960s to a growing
disenchantment with the socio-political condition across Europe. The unrests
of May 1968 were the culminating point of this mounting upheaval, opening up
many questions, but ultimately providing very few answers. Arguably, May 68
induced a massive heart attack to the European intellectual body, leaving its left
artery chronically clogged. Although 68 is currently an exotically topical subject
and that there exists a variety of 68s interpretations, the events of that year
shaded the intellectual scene of continental Europe with an overwhelming sense of
disillusionment, crisis, and impasse. Echoes of 68 had a significant and multifold
impact on architecture, as well as on Tafuri and Koolhaas, both in Paris during the
May episode. As Koolhaas later commented,
68 was a strange amalgamation of very reactionary, almost luddite, tendencies:
against civilisation, against artificiality, against the system 68 was less a
critique than a visceral movement that triggered all kinds of critical possibilities.
I was not unambiguously committed to 68. [!?] It was the impact of 68 that
made the difference. It was the beginning: you sensed that any architecture
was fragile.
2
Sinisha Brdar
F08M$ 0F 68lIl6kLlII
2
Tafuris Threat
The critical revisionary charge of that moment strongly reflected on the work of
Manfredo Tafuri. Through a series of books and articles, published between 1968
and the early 1980s, Tafuri formulates one of the most substantial and poignant
theoretical critiques of architectures modern movement and its avant-gardes.
Building on the Marxist materialist canon, and the theoretical writings of Simmel,
Lukacz, Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault and Barthes, Tafuri dissects the trajectory
of architecture and the metropolis since the Enlightenment, throughout capitalist
development. Through negative thought conveyed to him by Cacciari, Tafuri
demystifies the naive messianic social utopia of the moderns and reveals its
subversion into a capitalistic-industrial ideology, subservient to the technological
and cultural apparatus of capitalism. Tafuris final verdict is daunting: its aura
stripped by its own ideologues-architects, architecture is reduced to a pure
instrumental representation of capitalist planning mechanisms; and architects
self-devolved from ideologues of social redemption to mere technicians of
building technology. The drama of architecture, he claims, is its being obliged to
return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime
uselessness.
3
Any attempt to reactivate the ideological function of architecture
is futile, warns Tafuri, and uselessly painful, because it is useless to struggle for
escape when completely enclosed and confined without an exit.
4
Architectures
capacity to bring a new and better society is reneged, and all attempts to do so
ultimately bound to be absorbed by capitalism. The defeat of the avant-garde, he
claims, gives architects no choice but to give-up all architectural ideology, and
reduce utopian residue to a zero-degree.
In his 1974 essay Architecture dans le boudoir,
5
Tafuri reiterates this line of thought
and sense of impasse, and expands his assessment by engaging the more recent
European and American neo-avant-garde movements. In keeping with his grand
schema, Tafuri dismisses en bloc the diverse neo-avant-gardes emerging in the
60s and 70s. All possibility of avant-garde, he claims, is completely incorporated
within the modernist ideology of the plan and any attempts to reactivate it are,
at best, a kind of futile nostalgia which fails to understand historically the road
travelled.
6
Tafuri remains sceptical towards any pathetic ethical relaunchings of
modern architecture which by means of the image alone, try to anticipate the
conditions of an architecture for a liberated society.
7
In other words, he remains
sceptical with regard to any simplistic belief that a construction of a supposedly
reconfigured non-rationalist architecture or anti-design would in any substantial
way alter the course of architectures complicity with capitalist development, as it
continues to hold the nave belief that aesthetic form in itself may provide a model
for the projection of revolutionary change.
Tafuris historical project proposes criticism as a mean to reformulate architectures
response to the challenges of the modern capitalist condition and the metropolis.
In its reassessment of modernity, the systematic ideological criticism is to do
away with impotent and ineffectual myths, which so often serve as illusions that
permit the survival of anachronistic hopes in design.
8
A rigorous criticism of Tafuri
himself would most likely reveal that his project is priori part of a larger socio-
political Marxist enterprise - arguably a myth in itself. As Tafuri himself hinted, the
ultimate objective and solution to all contradictions layed in the hope of taking
power.
9
3
Superstudio | The Continuous Monument
Sometimes reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.
10

J-L Goddard, Alpha 60
Parallel to Tafuris formulation of increasingly radical criticism, and sharing his
sense of impasse and despair with regard to the progressively debilitating crisis
in Modernist architecture, a number of young Italian design practices reflected the
critical charge of the moment into radical design projections. Labelled Radical
Architecture by MoMA [traditionally, a kiss of death], this new generation of the
avant-garde was constituted by groups as diverse as ArchiZoom, 9999, UFO,
Zziggurat, Strum, Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, with Superstudio as
its poster-child. Each group attempted to challenge and subvert the dominant
dogmatic functionalist methodology. Their visions were also reactions to what was
perceived to be an increasing hegemony of the capitalist market, technology and
consumerism. For the most part, they originated in Florence under the influence of
radical art movements and University of Florence professors Savioli, Benevolo and
Quaroni, on whom Tafuri had written a book in 1964.
Like Tafuri, Superstudio adhered to the neo-Marxist ideological premise and
negative dialectics. The groups program was perhaps best described by one of its
founders, Adolfo Natalini in his 1971 lecture at the AA in London;
If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design;
if design is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and
society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is
merely the formalization of the present unjust social divisions, then we must
reject town planning and its cities until all design activities are aimed towards
meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. Architecture is one
of the superstructures of power. We can live without architecture
The construction of a revolutionary society is possible through the phase of
radical, concrete criticism of the present society of its way of producing,
consuming, living Our work today has this precise sense of critical
reconnaissance activity into the revolutionary possibilities of architecture.
11

The rejection of the discipline released new freedoms. Superstudios incursions
into seductive, seemingly utopian imaginary realms were in fact highly charged
ironic criticisms and demonstratio quia absurdum negative utopias, forewarning
images of the horrors that architecture has in store for us.
12
These dystopian,
aberrant visual worlds sought to reveal the contradictions, paradoxes and threats
of the capitalist industrial society, of degenerate metropolitan conditions, and of
architectural disciplines messianic pretensions. On the one hand, Superstudios
fictions aimed to induce a shock therapy to the atrophied discipline of architecture,
challenge the status quo, and provoke polemical discussion about our cultural and
social system and its behaviour models.
13
On the other, as a Trojan Horse to the
society of spectacle, Superstudios visual rhetoric was to destabilize and undermine
the systems public image on the level of desire.
14
Irony, provocation, paradox,
absurdity, falsity, obsoleteness, sarcasm, uselessness, ambiguity, [ir]rationality,
dialectical overcoming, ambivalence, seduction, desire, as well as a vital dose
of humour and playfulness, were the conceptual arsenal and driving forces of
Superstudios critical utopias, or dystopias.
4
The Continuous Monument must be read within these terms, as an architecture
that does not portray architecture, but as an architecture overdosed with critical
meaning, where the apparatus of architecture is high-jacked in order to convey a
socio-cultural commentary rather than building for the sake of building. Generated
between 1966 and 1969 as a series of architectural fictions, The Continuous
Monument was conceived as a form of architecture all equally emerging from
a single continuous environment: the world rendered uniform by technology,
culture and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism.
15
Absorbing the entire
imagination of architecture in a single gesture, The Continuous Monument is a
single piece of architecture that is to be extended over the whole world, as a model
of total urbanization. In other words, a totally artificial trope that stands out and
crosses the natural surface of the planet, cleared and rendered homogeneous by
the economic and political processes of second capitalism.
16
Ironically winking
to the revolutionary architectures of the Enlightenment [Boulle and Ledoux], The
Continuous Monument is proposed as the final act of architecture - a monument
to end all monuments, obliterate all archimanias and rediscover architecture
positioned to reclaim its full power.
17
It is an autonomous, self-reflexive silent
object leading nowhere but to itself and to the use of reason.
18
Superstudios
fiction is a zero-degree architecture, a mute urban sign, an inside without an outside,
an authoritarian totality providing infinite egalitarian possibilities within, a sweet
tyranny.
In one of its most striking and emblematic depictions, Manhattan is engulfed
by The Continuous Monuments infinite superstructure, except for a bunch of
ancient skyscrapers, preserved in memory of a time when cities were built with
no single plan. Ironically, in a paradoxical, or perhaps prophetic reversal of
Superstudios critique of Manhattans capitalism, and in anticipation of Koolhaas
NY Automounument,
19
the World Trade Center buildings erected in 1977 reflected
much of The Continuous Monuments generic, purist, inventionless and detailless
attributes.
What remains central, as Natalini articulated in his lecture at the AA, is the territory
between the parallel planes of theory and practice; a realm that Superstudio sought
to conquer through non-violent intelligence, and from there destabilize the system
and induce a crisis. Crisis as a project, or the project of crisis, was thus pursued
by both Superstudio and Tafuri, albeit with different means. Seeking to manifest the
inadequacies of every-day reality and of status quo, Superstudios projects explore
utopia as a conceptual framework for critical debate and a tool for critical reflection,
sarcastically mocking the naivety of modernist utopias redemptive hopes and
pretensions.
5
Rem Koolhaas | Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture
It is precisely this critical code that runs through and propels Exodus, a 1972 project
by Rem Koolhaas/OMA - a project often cited, but seldom properly interpreted and
deciphered. Radiated by the added influence of Berlin and Moscow [Manhattan
was already partially encoded], and unleashed on London, the codes DNA has
here evolved into an even more potent, layered and elusive script. Operating at the
intersection where dystopia meets desire, urbanism flirts with psychology, and
sinister critique projects into forceful optimism, Exodus casts an ironic critique of
the dogmatic, modernistic pastoral utopia and its derivatives. Posited against the
frivolous utopias of the 60s [read Archigram], where architecture was always fun,
pleasurable, innocent and playful, Exodus reflects the lessons from the Berlin Wall
and observes that architecture is inevitably heavy, sinister, limiting, oppressive, and
authoritarian.
20

Exodus was Rem Koolhaas AA thesis project, and a winning entry to the City as a
significant environment competition organized by the Italian magazine Casabella,
a strong supporter of new avant-garde and a platform for the dissemination and
legitimization of the work of groups like Superstudio and Archizoom. The origins of
Exodus are to be found in the 1971 study of The Berlin Wall as Architecture [one of
Koolhaas prior provocative intellectual Molotov cocktails to AA ayatollahs], and
1
2
6
the encounter with the terrifying beauty and sinister efficiency of the Berlin Wall,
and its authoritarian violation of the city through architecture;
The greatest surprise: the wall was heartbreakingly beautiful. Its impact
infinitely stronger than the artifact The Berlin Wall revealed the ambiguous
power of architecture As so often in this history of mankind, architecture was
the guilty instrument of despair The Wall was a Masterpiece.
21
The Wall is thus seen as a modern monument that inverts ones perception of reality
and induces a mutant urban condition. Per its prologue, Exodus sought to realize the
potential of the Berlin Wall by reversal - inverting its values and sinister performance
into something good: It is possible to imagine a mirror image of this terrifying
Architecture; a force as intense and devastating but in the service of positive
intentions.
22
The inhabitants of this artificial, architectural paradise, those strong
enough to love it, would forever enjoy a paradoxical liberation, an ecstatic freedom
in their architectural confines.
23
Exodus draws a linear strip of intense urban desirability, incarcerated by two parallel
walls, crossing London from east to west. Divided into ten programmatically and
formally diverse squares, or scenarios for urban living inspired by Baudelaire and
his spirit of modernity, the strip would offer such level of attractiveness that the
inhabitants of London would flock into its confines, therefore becoming eternally
enchanted voluntary prisoners of architecture. This Exodus injects a psycho-
metropolitan fix to Londons somnolent, notoriously un-public urbanity. Dubbed
Magnitogorsk-upon-Thames for its references to Leonidov and the Constructivists,
the scheme fuses a longing for collectiveness and the celebration of hedonism into
a rather formless social condenser.
This would be an immodest architecture committed not to timid improvements
but to the provision of totally desirable alternatives Contrary to modern
architecture and its desperate afterbirths, this new architecture is neither
authoritarian nor hysterical: it is the hedonistic science of designing collective
facilities that fully accommodate individual desires.
24
Under the threat of doom, the common concern, that is the fulfillment of
all private desires within a subliminally collective and deliriously permissive
common effort, produces phantom proposals, in the knowledge that phantom
reality is the only possible successor to the present reality shortage.
25
Exodus appears as a critical fiction which overlays a multitude of elusive metaphors
into a somewhat ironic and surreal rhetoric of architectural horror. As Koolhaas
notes, it is a manifesto, a short-circuit of good and bad intentions
26
, with the
emphasis on the negative. Traces of playful innocence and aesthetization, still
lingering in the work of Superstudio are here subverted into cynicism and blunt
rendition of power. The project mocks the self-effacement of the architecture
of good intentions [ie. Team X], ridicules the naive frivolity and innocence of
1960s utopias [ie. AA rival faction - Archigram], and questions the megastructure
trend. It was both a sign of postmodernism and a polemic against it. Somewhat
convolutedly, it sought to jump-start or relaunch the modern tradition by
[re]activating its less explored frequencies. From the subversion of orthodox
modernist paradigms, to the bond with Nietzschean and Baudelairian veins of
modernity, and to the engagement with the dirty realities of the metropolis and
its mass culture, Exodus, as much as Delirious New York and OMAs later work,
proposes a dialectic reversal of modernism.
7
In many ways, Exodus can be considered as the embryo of everything that OMA
later became - programmatic innovation, juxtaposition of radical divisions and
contrasts, celebration of artificiality, acontextuality, enclaves, mise-en-scne of
desire, hedonistic flirts, longing for collective, bigness. What Delirious New York
later reveals in form of a retro-active manifesto, Exodus radiates in a dirty-reality-
bitten projective manifesto. As a horizontal skyscraper, it anticipates the mechanics
of Manhattanism. The name Exodus refers, on one level, to the historic migrations
that made the metropolis of the 19
th
century, underlining OMAs persistent
engagement with and commitment to the metropolis, or Simmels Grosstadt,
and on another level, to the exodus [esodo] current of Italian 60s leftist politics
[sympathised by Superstudio] which promoted liberation through refusal of work
- an engaged withdrawal from the structures of capitalism and its institutions.
Critical Intersections
The formal and conceptual resemblances between Exodus and Superstudios
Continuous Monument - exuberant inside without an outside, total artificiality, ten
diversified enclaves, dialectic engagement with the metropolis, scalelessness,
popular means of representation - are not surprising. Zanghelis and Koolhaas were
4
3
8
most likely introduced to the work of Superstudio and other Italian radicals through
Charles Jencks, an influential protagonist at the AA, who prepared a series of articles
published in Architectural Design about Italian Supersensualists.
27
Koolhaas
himself situated Superstudio appearing on the horizon
28
as early as 1970, prior to
his Berlin study. As a student, in his challenge to the hegemony of Archigram at the
AA, in 1971 Koolhaas courted Natalini for the AA Chair position [apparently even
traveled to meet Natalini in Italy], promoted Natalinis candidacy, and organized
lectures by Superstudio at the AA, namely the previously mentioned 1971 lecture.
He also managed to bring Natalini to the AA in February 1972, at the beginning
of the Zanghelis Unit studio dedicated to Casabellas The City as a Significant
Environment competition, for a three week warm-up program entitled The 14
th
Ideal
City, during which Koolhaas established the premises for what was to become
Exodus.
29
Koolhaas later frequently underlined this influence, noting for instance
that in the late 60s Superstudio offered one of the few inspiring and stimulating
models of a retrieval of a modern tradition applied to a new sensibility Next to the
Berlin Wall [and Leonidov], their Continuous Monument was an obvious inspiration
for Exodus.
30
These visionary architectures of the proliferating and diverse neo-avant-gardes
were thus responding to the prevailing sense of disenchantment, to the perceived
exhaustion of the modernist doctrine, and its grotesque inadequacy in facing the
evolving modernity. Challenged by this looming sense of crisis and impasse, and
threatened by claims of the death of architecture and the metaphysical closure of
the modern project, both theory and practice found themselves at the foot of the
same wall.
Given the common Neo-Marxist ideological base and the sophisticated seduction
of Superstudios designs, Manfredo Tafuri initially developed a sympathy and
friendship toward the Florentine group. However, as the polarizations on the Italian
left accentuated, and as he further developed his criticism of the modernist avant-
gardes, Tafuri became one of the most virulent opponents of visionary architecture
and articulated the sharpest criticism of the avant-garde ethos. Beyond his general
critique of the recent avant-gardes, briefly exposed earlier, Tafuri dismisses
Superstudio renditions as monstrous marriage between populist anarchism and
liberating events influenced by the events of 1968, [that] attempted to haul a
mythical proletariat onto the stage of psychedelic action
31
In the 1973 Italy, New
Domestic Landscapes exhibition catalogue, Tafuri reasserts that alignment with the
structures of production as the only path forward and attacks the radicals work as
large-scale architectural fantasies, futile appeals to self-desalienation, and ironic
and irritating metaphors. While still sympathetic to Constructivist and Futurist
utopias, Tafuris claims that liberation through irony goes over the same ground
covered by the utopias of the avant-garde of earlier years, and that new utopias
private leap into the sublimated universe of artificial paradises has not proven
prescient.
32
This appreciation quickly became mutual, with Superstudios members
referring to Tafuri as the enemy.
33
As a relative latecomer, Koolhaas is largely spared of what would, at that point, likely
be a similar criticism. In April 1974, while delivering a speech that later became
Architecture dans le boudoir, at a conference also attended by Koolhaas, Tafuri
dismisses the cynical play of Koolhaas as esentially ineffective and pointless. He
reiterates this point in The Sphere and the Labyrinth [1984] referring to the jokes
of Koolhaas.
34
Conversely, Koolhaas may have been aware of Tafuris work as early
as 1970, through his Dutch friend Gerrit Oorthuys, who collaborated with Tafuri on
a book about Soviet urbanism. In 1974, articles by both Tafuri and Koolhaas were
9
published in Oppositions 3. As their consequent respective work on New York kept
them intersecting paths, in 1978 Koolhaas addressed acusations that his work is a
mystification of New York, retorting rather dismissively;
You mean people like Tafuri? Sure, exasperation and rage at their production has
been an important source of energy. ... I have a strong feeling that Tafuri and his
supporters hate architecture. They declare architecture dead. For them, architecture
is a series of corpses in the morgue. Yet, even though dead, they do not leave the
corpses in peace; rather, they are vain enough to want to be the morgues experts.
They engage in namedropping at the morgue. Every now and then, they take one
of those corpses, say something about it and push it back in place; by and large,
however, it is all impossible, anyhow. Except, for some inexplicable reason, Aldo
Rossi.
35
By 1985, Tafuri was downgraded from an enemy to an intimidating threat. Elaborating
on the intentions behind Delirious New York, Koolhaas explained that he was pursuing
an architecture that was purely program, almost without form, that could coexist
with any other type of architecture that opposed the intelligence of Leonidov with
the intimidation of Tafuri.
36
Manfredos Remnants
The evident mutual antagonism and irritation between the neo-avant-gardes such as
OMA and Superstudio, and Tafuri has however to be nuanced and situated within the
highly charged polemical context surrounding May 1968. In this confrontation of forms
of criticality, Tafuris realignment of the role of criticism is paramount. While Tafuri
regarded the visionary paper architectures as a retreat, indeed exodus, from the
realities of architecture as social practice into meaningless artificial paradises and
futile deliriums, it could be argued that Tafuris retreat was just as problematic. In his
drive for the autonomy of theory and criticism, and against the operative criticism
of which he accused Zevi, Benevolo and Giedion, Tafuri retreated from the prevalent
role of critic as an engaged accomplice of the development of modern architecture
and a biased promoter of trends in architectural production. For Tafuri, the task of
[class] criticism was to scrutinize, reveal and strip the impotent and ineffectual
mystifications, values, contradictions and their internal dialectics, and explode their
entire charge of meanings.
37
As criticism/critics largely withdrew from a relatively
direct involvement with the production of architecture, leaving architects on their
own, from the mid-70s new architecture practices emphasized self-awareness and
incorporated mechanisms of [self]criticality within their own modus operandi.
Tafuri most succinctly articulated his view of modern architectures limits and
conditions of possibility in his 1973 book Progetto e Utopia [Architecture and
Utopia]. The main themes of his critique are the co-option of the avant-garde, the
reassessment of the mythologies of the architectural profession, the re-examination
of the modernist response to the metropolis, and the call for the re-engagement
with the reality and the forces of production [under threat of obsolescence]. Exodus,
and much of Koolhaas earlier work, can be seen as a part of the neo-avant-gardes
creative, yet critical revisionism. Bundling it together with the other avant-gardes,
Tafuri dismisses it as cynical plays and jokes, or yet another symptom of the
avant-gardes futile deliriums.
Yet, Koolhaas work can be seen as one of the most stimulating responses to Tafuris
position and the conditions that he described. While Tafuris argument was crafted
5
10
around a restricted scope of modern architecture, seen in opposition to a singular
monolithic capitalist enemy, Koolhaas, along with practices like Superstudio and
Tschumi, sought to broaden the scope of architecture and activate less explored
dimensions of modernity in architecture. The challenge posited by Tafuri is thus
interpreted as a cautionary provocation to discover new modes of hybrid, critical
and subversive practice, rather than the death of architecture. As Tschumi puts
it, referring to architectures conditions of possibility under adverse economic and
political systems, we cannot block them but we can use another tactic, which I call
the tactic of judo, that is, to use the forces of ones opponent in order to defeat it
and transform it into something else.
38
Tafuris conclusion that it is useless to propose purely architectural alternatives to the
crisis, together with his perspicacious assessment that modern architecture never really
came to terms with the anguish of urban dynamism and ultimately never dealt with the
metropolis, is answered in the work of Koolhaas with a persistent commitment to the
metropolis and its urban complexities. Although Exodus arguably addresses the city
less thoughtfully than Koolhaas later projects and writings, it treats the Grosstadt
in a drastic, post-humanist way, similar to that of Hilbersimer, commended by
Tafuri. The inherent ambiguity and disorder of the city described by Simmel,
evoked by Tafuri, is the very basis of OMAs practice, which is often described
as relating to the forces of the Grosstadt like a surfer to the waves. Against the
formalist experiments of the avant-gardes, OMAs early formula to the metropolis
and the resurrection of modern architecture primarily relied on program.
Tafuris call for an architectural practice which is engaged with the reality and aligned
with the forces of production, while it at the same time critically exploits the
contradictions and fissures inherent to the capitalist system, finds an echo in
Koolhaas work throughout his career, most directly in his post-1990 period. Exodus
exhibits early symptoms of this attitude as it turns the withdrawal from the system
into a pathetic satire. Formulating his threat, Tafuri argued that the failure to engage
with reality would be dooming as ominously present on the horizon is the worst of
evils: the decline of the architects professional status to the role of the technicians
of the capital.
39
Echoes of this daunting predicament of professional impotence,
demystification, marginalization and obsolescence are omnipresent throughout
Koolhaas later writings and S,M,L,XL. As OMAs mode of [self]critical practice and
relentless renewal propel Koolhaas into ever further explorations of architectural
modernity, the looming ghost of Tafuri seems increasingly retroactivated;
Todays architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has
supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package
itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.
40

Rem Koolhaas, 2006
11
Endnotes
1
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia; Design and Capitalist Development.
[Cambridge: MIT Press. 1976] 145.
2
Koolhaas, Rem. Spot check: a conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah
Whiting. Assemblage 40 [December 1999] 41.
3
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development.
4
Ibid., 181.
5
Tafuri, Manfredo. Larchitecture dans le boudoir: the language of criticism and the
criticism of language. Oppositions 3 [May 1974] 37-62.
6
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development.
[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976] 178.
7
Ibid., 178-179.
8
Ibid., 182.
9
Tafuri, Manfredo. quoted in Exit Utopia: architectural provocations, 1956-1976.
[ed.] Martin van Schaik and Otaker Mcel. [Munich: Prestel, 2005] 311.
10
Jean-Luc Goddard, in his 1965 film Alphaville; quoted in De Bruyn, Eric.
Alfaville, or the Utopics of Mel Bochner. Grey Room 10 [Winter 2003] 76.
11
Natalini, Adolfo. Inventory, Catalogue, Systems of Flux A Statement. in
Superstudio: life without objects. [ed] Peter Lang. [Milano: Skira, 2003] 168.
12
Natalini, Adolfo. quoted in Exit Utopia: architectural provocations, 1956-1976.
[ed.] van Schaik and Mcel. [Munich: Prestel, 2005] 188.
13
Natalini, Adolfo. Inventory, Catalogue, Systems of Flux A Statement. in
Superstudio: life without objects. [ed] Peter Lang. [Milano: Skira, 2003] 167.
14
Ibid., 164.
15
Lang, Peter. Superstudio: life without objects. [Milano: Skira, 2003] 164.
16
Toraldo di Francia, Cristiano. Memories of Superstudio. in Superstudio: life
without objects. [ed] Peter Lang. [Milano: Skira, 2003] 70.
17
18
Toraldo di Francia, Cristiano. Memories of Superstudio. in Superstudio: life
without objects. [ed] Peter Lang. [Milano: Skira, 2003] 69.
19
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978]
100.
20
Koolhaas, Rem. in lecture Utopia. at Harvard GSD, 2003.
21
Koolhaas, Rem. quoted in Exit Utopia: architectural provocations, 1956-1976.
22
Ibid., 238.
23
Heynen, Hilde. in Exit Utopia: architectural provocations, 1956-1976. [ed.] van
Schaik and Mcel. [Munich: Prestel, 2005] 264.
24
Ibid., 238.
25
Ibid., 253.
26
Koolhaas, Rem. quoted in Exit Utopia: architectural provocations, 1956-1976.
27
Jencks, Charles. The Supersensualists. Architectural Design 41 [June 1971]
345-347.; and, The Supersensualists II. Architectural Design 43 [January 1972]
18-21.
28
Koolhaas, Rem. S, M, L, XL. [New York: Monacelli Press, 1998] 216.
29
Zanghelis, Elia. Urban Design Course Outline, Architectural Association School
of Architecture, Session 1971-1972.
30
Koolhaas, Rem. Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Architectural Design 47
[1977] 333.
31
Tafuri, Manfredo. History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985. [Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989] 99.
12
32
Tafuri, Manfredo. Design and techno utopia. in Italy, the new domestic
landscape : achievements and problems of Italian design. [ed] Emilio Ambasz.
[New York: MoMA, 1972] 388.
33
34
Tafuri, Manfredo. The sphere and the labyrinth: avant-gardes and architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s. [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987] 300.
35
Koolhaas, Rem. quoted in Hans van Dijk, Rem Koolhaas interview. Wonen TA/
BK [November 1978] 18.
36
Koolhaas, Rem. quoted in Patrice Goulet. Deuxime chance de larchitecture
moderne. Architecture daujourdhui 238 [April 1985] 10.
37
Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and history of architecture. [New York: Harper &
Row, 1980] 1.
38
Tschumi, Bernard. discussion forum comment quoted in Anyplace. [ed] C. C.
Davidson. [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995] 229.
39
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia; Design and Capitalist Development.
40
Koolhaas, Rem. quoted in interview Evil Can also Be Beautiful. Der Spiegel
[March 27, 2006].
List of illustrations
1. Superstudio | The Continuous Monument, An Architectural Model for Total
Urbanisation [Perspective collage of NY] 1969
2. Rem Koolhaas | Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture [Perspective
collage of London] 1972
3. Superstudio | The Continuous Monument, An Architectural Model for Total
Urbanisation [Plan] 1969
4. Rem Koolhaas | Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture [Plan] 1972
5. Manfredo Tafuri with Rem Koolhaas [Assembly-collage] 2006
The photograph of Rem Koolhaas [professor at GSD] is sometimes credited and
copyrighted to Sanne Peper. Sanne Peper.
13
14
I$6hMl$ Fl8EN08k$ 0E$l6 F08 IhE lk68kIl0 0F
Fk86 0E Lk lLLEIIE: FrotechnIc krchItecture IransIated
1
Abstract: As part of the third inauguration of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, a
spectacular display of fireworks was commissioned from the Parks architect,
Bernard Tschumi. For this occasion, Tschumi created an exploding pyrotechnic
architecture momentarily illuminating the sky with bursting sparkling lights. This
event underscored key points in Tschumis architectural theories. This paper is
an investigation into the unique circumstances and orchestration of the fireworks
display at La Villette and an analysis of the implications to Tschumis architectural
agenda. Arguably, this ephemeral medium is perhaps most fitting to communicate
Tschumis event-architecture.
Introduction: This investigation developed out of an interest in how the fleeting
realities of ephemeral urban events inform and alter our perception of space and
the city. The ideas investigated arose from fruitful discussions under the tutelage of
Professor K. Michael Hays in his course The Architectural Imaginary: Experimental
Architecture of the 1970s. The central focus of this research is the 1992 fireworks
designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, which were deployed as part of the third
inauguration of Parc de la Villette in Paris. A deeper understanding of this subject
was possible thanks to an interview with architect Tschumi, which took place on
April 7th of 2006 (figure 1).
1
The analysis of the fireworks is divided in three
components: the notational system developed for the fireworks, the relationship
of the fireworks with Tschumis theory of the pleasure of architecture, and the
fireworks as a means to ephemerally translate and deconstruct La Villette as an
architectural project.
Notating the event
Though the formulations of the fireworks have yet to be fully considered, the history
of the Parks conception is well established. Bernard Tschumi has discussed the
influence of the theoretical project of The Manhattan Transcripts (1976-1981) on
the conceptual development of Parc de la Villette.
2
The Manhattan Transcripts were
drawings, or as the title suggests, transcriptions, representations and recordings of
fantasies taking place in a physical world. Developed in four episodes - the park, the
15
street, the tower, and the block the Transcripts explored the interchangeability
of objects, people, and events, what Tschumi called cross-programming.
3

This interchangeability, similar to the flexibility allowed by film montage and its
permutations, influenced the autonomy of the three architectural systems employed
in La Villette: points, lines, and surfaces (figure 2). As Tschumi points out, the
possible interactions between these systems was key: Independent; each with
its own internal logic, these three systems would then begin to contaminate one
another when superimposed.
4
Further, through these three systems Tschumi was
able to explore his theory of spatial experience, conceived in terms of space, event
and movement, which he coined into the acronymic shorthand, SEM.
5
In the Park,
each system was paired with particular activities: point-like activities (localized
activities represented by the red follies), linear activities (movement or mobile
events represented by two orthogonal lineal pedestrian routes and the cinematic
promenade curving line), and surface activities (suitable for entertainment of
mass-crowds, gardens and the like).
6

The Manhattan Transcripts were influential for the Parks architecture but, moreover,
instrumental as a mode of writing and notating, one that became essential for the
development of a new notational system for fireworks (figure 3). Informed by this
mode of thinking, Tschumi immediately envisioned the design of the fireworks as
a nontraditional medium that would become the canvas to explore his architectural
ideas. During our interview he recalled the origins of the design concept:
I knew what the what-to-do would be. I thought La Villette is really a two
dimensional grid on a relatively flat plan. Conceptually there is no reason not
to have it as a three dimensional grid. And with the fireworks lets do a three
dimensional grid and then continue with the concepts of La Villette the lines,
the surfaces through the media of the fireworks.
7

In essence, Tschumis transposition of the two-dimensional plan into three
dimensions reflected his eagerness to explore architecture by transcending the
strictures of conventional forms. The challenge was how to communicate the
concept to the pyrotechnics engineers who had no notational system of their own.
Drawing from his interest and previous explorations on notation, he developed a
mode of diagramming and notating to communicate with the firework manufacturers
(figure 4).
8

In The Manhattan Transcripts and later in the fireworks storyboard, the choice
of information and its graphic orchestration was largely influenced by notational
systems originating in fields outside architecture such as theatrical performances,
football games, and cinema, among others. In the case of the fireworks notational
system, Tschumi discusses the importance of his influence:
2
3
16
As soon as you have movement you have vectors and these vectors could be
notated therefore it formed an architectural-notation with lines coming from
a variety of influences, whether they be from dancers or choreographers or
the influence of a major one from Sergei Eisenstein, the director for the
score for Ivan Groznyy. [Therefore] my drawing was already influenced by the
original score, by Eisenstein.
9

The fireworks notational system was also developed to correspond with the
theoretical basis of SEM (space, event and movement) while at the same time
incorporating the architectural concept of the Park: the points, lines and surfaces,
and their superimpositions.
10
Five horizontal bands organized the information: (1)
a perspective view, (2) a plan, (3) an elevation, separated by a thin band, (4) color,
and (5) sound intensity (figures 4 & 5). In the third band, the precise elevation and
movement was conveyed with vectors or arrows, similar to the ones employed in
Eisensteins scores. According to Jos Bosman, these vectors or the expression of
the lines of force could also be an influence from Oskar Schlemmers method
of notation for ballet performances.
11
While the fireworks notation effectively
used arrows or vectors to depict movement, The Manhattan Transcripts employed
corridors of space to depict the direction of movement. Despite using different
techniques, Tschumis interest in movement emerged in both notational systems.
Moreover, issues of time, intervals and sequence were addressed in both cases.
The fireworks, which lasted 30 minutes, were designed to occur in three distinct
phases that blended together. Four individual but consecutive notations constitute
each phase: (1) points, (2) lines, (3) surfaces and lastly (4) their superimpositions.
These phases of the fireworks display were the equivalent to three performance
acts, becoming visually complex in their spatial depth. This visual drama yielded a
coordinated escalating intensity of sound to the explosion of colors: red for points
or follies, white for lines (including rectilinear routes, the cinematic promenade
and sinuous paths) and blue/green for the surfaces. Incidentally, these colors
corresponded with earlier representations of the project (figure 6), and also
happened to be the French flags colors. Although the original notational system
did not have a full color rendition of these components, figure 7 shows how the
application of color could be referenced.
In The Manhattan Transcripts and La Villettes fireworks, the notation structure and
frame arrangement, served as primary organizational devices. Tschumi describes
4
5
17
frame as the moments of the sequence equivalent to the act of examining
architecture frame by frame, as through a film-editing machine.
12
Comparable
to film montage techniques, a frame system permits manipulation of the sequence,
which Tschumi believes resonates with formal strategies found in architecture:
repetition, disjunction, distortion, dissolution or insertion.
13
As explained,
the structure behind the fireworks notational system was informed by the Parks
architectural language and the decision of articulating a three phases notational
division. In extruding the Parks architectural components in three dimensions
by means of fireworks, Tschumi took into account the location of the Parks main
architectural components. The twelve notations that summarized the three phases,
all published in his first Event-Cities (Praxis),
14
illustrate these components: a
grid of squares represent follies in formation to which lines and surfaces are added
and later layered as superimpositions. In contrast with The Manhattan Transcripts
narratives in episodes representing fantasies to be read in different ways,
15
the
structure of the fireworks notations, like Eisensteins system, read like a set of
precise instructions for the execution of the work. Arguably, in the fireworks case,
the careful orchestration of the frame in sequence and crescendo was intentional
and not necessarily interchangeable.
The frame strategy was already implicit in the architectural conception of the Park.
In this light, Tschumi discusses the frame as photogram and their succession
in series as cinegram.
16
He thought of the Park as a series of cinegrams
that could be montaged either by superimposition or by contiguity.
17
He also
conceptualized the Parks grid as a series of frames. In an interview with Alvin
Boyarski, Tschumi explains:
You could say that the grid is a series of regular frames or, for example, that
within New York grid every block is like a frame with its own appearance.
There, the container is the frame. In the case of La Villette it was the implosion
of a frame its reversed frame, the frame reduced to a point, but the content
of the frame is outside the point instead of being inside. The frame is emptied
inside out.
18

In the Park, the follies materialize the frame or point grid. For Tschumi, the follies
act as anchoring points, a somewhat fixed element among the variables and
fragmentation around it.
19
This grid plays an important role in the fireworks design,
mainly as an architectural organizational device that becomes an air suspended
6
18
hierarchical framework. Similar to the Park, this grid providing the regular and
consistent frame was not literally depicted, rather, the event within: the follies,
the weaving cinematic promenade and horizontal surfaces, were protagonists.
20

Conceptually, the fireworks became the event within the Parks grid/frame: an
ephemeral programmatic component. They were the action that developed within a
films frame. This dynamic action corresponded to Tschumis theoretical proposition
of SEM (space, event and movement). The space was determined by the strategic
location of the individual fireworks rockets and informed by the Parks spatiality,
the event was the action and architectural narrative that developed in the fireworks
themselves and in the inauguration celebration, and the movement was articulated
in the sequencing of the fireworks and how, like actors, each element made an
entrance into the skys ephemeral stage.
Pleasure (eroticism), delight and desire
Tschumi first introduced the word pleasure in the context of his work in Manifesto
1: FIREWORKS, published in Architectural Manifestoes in 1979.
21
In this
manifesto, fireworks were seen as a pleasurable commodity to be consumed by
spectators. At this point in Tschumis theoretical thinking, Adornos notion of
spectacle consumption was a notable influence.
22
Tschumi writes in the manifesto:
good architecture must be conceived, erected and burned in vain. The greatest
architecture of all the fireworkers: it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption
of pleasure.
23
Speaking strictly from the point of view of pleasure, the fireworks
were pure pleasure because having no pragmatic use they could be considered
useless. To this effect, Tschumi writes about the simple act of lighting a match:
when you light the tiny brown head just to see it, for the hell of it, just to
see the colours, to hear the tiny noise, to enjoy the death of the little piece of
wood, then you love gratuitous consumption, the one that leads to nothing,
the one that is a complete loss. Real pleasure can always be recognized by its
uselessness.
24

Tracking Tschumis early theoretical development on pleasure and eroticism
of architecture, Louis Martin points out that between 1975 and 1977, after the
FIREWORKS manifesto, Tschumi developed a theory of the pleasure of architecture
through a series of articles in which the architectural basis was textual.
25
Tschumi
7
19
looked at architecture through the lens of Barthess theories on text, both as a
system of language and as a vehicle for pleasure.
26
This textual influence was
slightly explored in The Architectural Manifestoes as metaphors of text and pleasure.
In the introduction of the 1979 publication of the Manifestoes, Tschumi uses a
textual metaphor to describe his work: In addition, like love letters, they [the
manifestoes] provide an erotic distance between fantasy and actual realization.
27

In other words, as a textual creation the manifestoes remain on an idealized plane
distant from a tangible reality. I believe the fireworks for the 1992 inauguration
of Parc de La Villette shorten this erotic distance between fantasy and actual
realization by connecting fantasy and pleasure with a rational creation that was
spatially structured.
28

Although ideas of pleasure resurfaced when dealing with La Villette as an
architectural project (for instance, the garden for pleasure and delight),
29
in
designing the 1992 fireworks, pleasure and excess are seen again in relation to fire
and gratuitous consumption while at the same time connecting it to the architectural
act. This understanding seems to be in tune with Tschumis thoughts on pleasure
and architecture: The ultimate pleasure of architecture is that impossible moment
when an architectural act, brought to excess, reveals both the traces of reason and
the immediate experience of space.
30
With these words, Tschumi validates the
marriage between real pleasure and a rational order to produce the pleasure of
architecture.
Moreover, in our interview, he connected this notion of fireworks pleasure with the
rationality of La Villettes architecture by explaining how he sees this dichotomy as
an integrated logic:
Because now we have different ways to experience pleasure and in many ways
architecture and pleasure is a mix between rationality and a sensual sort of
conundrum. It goes back to the definition I always like of eroticism: it is not
the excess of pleasure it is the pleasure of excess. And so there, there [in the
fireworks] was an architecture of excess of sorts. So that, if you would like, is
my own conceptual and experiential pleasure.
31

The integration of pleasure with the rational creative-design act in the 1992
fireworks suggests the ephemeral event transgressed mere pleasure thereby
becoming a fleeting architectural act. This is a key point to articulate Tschumis
theoretical posture on event-architecture were one might consider the action as
an intrinsic architectural component, or further, as architecture itself. The event
served as a momentary record, evidence that the architecture existed. On one hand
there were mesmerizing light and sound effects and on the other, an ephemeral
but rational architectural event that extruded the spatial components of the Parks
design into another dimension.
20
Deconstruction
my own pleasure has never surfaced in looking at buildings, at the great
works of the history or the present of architecture, but, rather, in dismantling
them.
32
Bernard Tschumi
During the 1970s Tschumi was among the first architects to talk about
deconstruction, a discussion already present in other disciplines. Borrowing
concepts from others, Tschumi studied architecture through new lenses. In
literature there was an interest to break down the structure of language. For
instance, Roland Barthes understanding of the production of text as an active
exercise on deconstructing-reconstructing former texts resonated with Tschumis
conceptualization of architecture as a form of writing where it was possible to
dissect text-architecture down to its bits and pieces.
33
Tschumi also used Freudian
psychology of fragmented dreams as metaphor for assembling fragments in
architecture.
34
There was also the political dimension: a Constructivist language,
not only coming from Russian Constructivist per se (a vocabulary that influenced
La Villettes follies), but also seen in some of Eisensteins movies. Philosophy was
also an influential field particularly in the case of La Villette. Philosopher Jacques
Derrida read La Villette through his deconstruction theories, which were published
in Architecture Where Desire May Live. For Derrida, La Villettes follies dealt with
deconstruction of meaning (figure 8). In an interview with Eva Meyer, Derrida
explains how deconstructive architecture relates to philosophy and writing:
One could say that there is nothing more architectural than deconstruction but
also nothing less architectural. Architectural thinking can only be deconstructive
in the following sense: as an attempt to visualize that which establishes the
authority of the architectural concatenation in philosophy. From this point we
can go back to what connects deconstruction with writing: its spatiality, thinking
in terms of a path, of the opening up of a way which without knowing where it
will lead to inscribes its traces.
35

La Villettes architectural concept embraces this deconstructive language spatially
by maintaining three separate and readable systems: points, lines and surfaces.
Even when these systems are erased or suppressed producing a particular
composition or syntax, the traces remain inscribed reminding the reader of their
existence. The design strategy gets complicated when the systems interact tempting
to contaminate each others realms. Anthony Vidler explains the dynamics of the
interactive systems resulting in innumerable configurations: Open to the play of
associations, contiguities, dislocations, overlappings, it would be a plural condition,
set in an intertextual matrix that denied any secure individuality.
36
In the fireworks,
this play of associations is not chaotic, rather structured by the Parks grid of follies
serving as abstract anchors, a framework and constant datum.
37
This discussion
goes back to an idea explored earlier that interchangeability of objects is facilitated
by anchors or a set structure and frame.
The process of notation is also an act of deconstruction where the constituent parts
are taken apart, disassociated from context, and reassembled into codes. These
codes coexist and convey meaning within the structured frame. After The Manhattan
Transcripts Tschumi was keenly interested in modes of deconstructive notation.
Specifically, he was interested in calling into question and transgressing the
traditional canons of architectural representation. These transgressions were also a
way of provoking contradictions that marginally cohabited, but when put in the right
context, questioned boundaries in the work. Discussing the Transcripts notations in
8
21
relation to La Villette, Tschumi points out that in the disjunctive strategy used both
in the Transcripts and at La Villette, facts never quite connect, and relations of
conflict are carefully maintained, rejecting synthesis or totality. The project is never
achieved, nor are the boundaries ever definite.
38
These undefined borders are of
particular interest because when something transgresses realms and is subject to
change in a particular operation of metamorphosis, it raises questions about what
is lost or gained in that very process. If the 1992 fireworks event extrapolated and
extruded ideas directly from the Parks architecture, what elements survived the
operation? This paper would like to argue that the notational system designed by
Tschumi was not a means for literal transference or merely re-representing the Park
but that in the process of notating a transgression occurred in which the fireworks
became a translation of the language already written in the Parks architecture.
Philosophers and architectural theoreticians have studied translation within
the context of architectural deconstruction. Mark Wigleys The Translation of
Deconstruction, in The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt, argues
deconstruction is similar to the thinking process that takes place in a translation of a
text because in this act of taking apart a sort of purity is distilled.
39
In other words,
the process of translation has the possibility of distilling content to a more pure
and unified state. Wigley indicates that both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida
believed that in this conversion the text neither lives nor dies, it survives.
40
The
content of the text is liberated in the translation but at the same time, Derrida thinks
that the original language and its counterpart are bounded in an unusual kind of
contract.
41
Therefore, the original and the translation have some sort of reciprocal
relationship, which is needed to understand one in regard to the other.
In La Villettes fireworks, what does it mean to translate an architectural language
that is deconstructed-reconstructed on the ground? First, it seems important that
the fireworks reinstated the architectural proposition of the Park through a non-
permanent medium: the ephemeral apparitions of the fireworks without material
residue. The physicality of the three systems (points, lines and surfaces) was
translated into lights that followed their specific ground location. In addition, the fire
rockets vectors, movement and colors were based on the systems without being
mimetic. Second, while a new creation emerged or was liberated in the translation
process, the content of the architectural language was distilled to a pure and
simple state still inherently related to the original meaning. In other words, the
translation was not totally independent; it was bound to the original language
and therefore linked to the physicality and architecture of Parc de La Villette. The
translation lifted in the air, so to speak, the formal architectural moves of La Villette
leaving the abstract concept intact but becoming, in expression, an architectural
event in its own right.
42

The reading here proposed of this rendition seems to follow Tschumis own views
on translation of narratives. He explains: The ability to translate narrative from
one medium to anotherto translate Don Juan into a play, an opera, a ballet,
a film or comic stripsuggests architectural equivalences, equivalences that
are not made by analogy to an architectural strip of course, but through carefully
observed parallels.
43
These corresponding analogies could be extrapolated to
the relationship that existed between the Parks architecture and its translation
through the medium of the fireworks. The relationships in this translation are not
literal one-to-one but of parallel associations. Moreover, it could be said that the
spatial experience happened through the production of effects. Michael Hays sees
in this occurrence certain independence that he calls the autonomy effect.
44

Hays points out: Not architecture itself is offered, Adorno might say, but only
22
evidence that it existed exists as an event, exists in its concept and its effects,
which are nevertheless every bit as material as the real thing. Further, Hays sees
in La Villette an architecture of pure event where emergent architecture and our
perception of it is spatial, it is architecture as autonomy effect.
45

From this point of view, the process during the act of creation, including the
notations, cant be disassociated from the final product and is perhaps of equal
importance to the ultimate displayed event because it is in this development that
the original idea began its metamorphosis. Therefore, the translation resides in the
event while it is enacted in the notational system that enabled the orchestration of
the fleeting act. Moreover, the autonomy effect goes hand in hand with the idea
of film frames that once detached from a specific sequence become autonomous
loosing contiguity and reference. Once the fragmented frames are re-arranged,
a new narrative emerges. Traces of the original idea still permeate but there is a
new syntax in place, which is in itself a new expression. The final product is then a
translation with recognizable parallels.
The fact that Tschumi developed a notational system for the fireworks already
suggests that it was a design problem, an architectural proposition that needed to
be communicated. As an event the fireworks could be interpreted as an ephemeral
programmatic component in the Park, very similar to the open or sporadic programs
the follies and the Park in general allow. At the same time, once he decided the
fireworks were to relate to the Parks conceptual design, the architectural solution
was already suggested but not resolved. The three-phase notational division,
although suggestive of the Parks three autonomous systems, was further divided
into fourths to address and celebrate the superimpositions of the systems, which
in the fireworks turned into a new expression. Even thought this notational system
drew organizational ideas from other forms of recording, Tschumi integrated also
the constitutive elements of architectural drawings - plan, elevation and perspective
- developing a hybrid representation technique. The integration of the film strip
sequential frame defined time intervals while technical drawings communicated
height for the rockets, directionality and movement. In this deconstruction-
reconstruction operation a new architectural project emerged. Moreover, the
fireworks, like Barthes production of text, rewrote the former text: Parc de la Villette.

23
Endnotes
1
Interview with Bernard Tschumi on The Fireworks of La Villette by Yanel de
Angel Salas and Mark R. Mansfield. The interview was conducted on April 7th, 2006
at the New York Office of Bernard Tschumi (227 West 17th Street, New York, NY
10011), in association with Professor K. Michael Hays course The Architectural
Imaginary (GSD 3305), Spring 2006, Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University. (hereafter Yanel de Angel Salas and Mark R. Mansfield).
2
See Bernard Tschumi. The Manhattan Transcripts: Theoretical Projects. London:
Academy Editions and New York: St. Martins Press, 1994. (hereafter The Manhattan
Transcripts).
3
See Bernard Tschumi. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA and London,
England: MIT Press, 1996. (hereafter Architecture and Disjunction).
4
Ibid, 187.
5
See Louis Martin. Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumis
Architectural Theory. Assemblage 11 (April 1990): 23-35. Martin traces the origins
of Tschumis SEM theory, which occurred after the publication of The Pleasure of
Architecture. In p.31 Martin explains: One concept the invention of new modes
of writing was seemingly the origin of The Manhattan Transcripts of 1977-81,
a reading machine of architecture by which Tschumi reorganized, once more,
his tripartite division of architecture. He replaced his earlier triad of conceived,
perceived, and experienced spaces with a new one of space, movement, and event.
(hereafter Louis Martin).
6
See Bernard Tschumi. Event-Cities (Praxis). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 57.
7
See Yanel de Angel Salas and Mark R. Mansfield.
8
Ibid. I offer here a passage of the interviews transcription: This interest in
notation was clear as a means to then fill that missing link between the fireworks as
I would see it and I am an architect- I do it first through mode of diagram. Right?
So I thought lets invent a mode of notation for the firework manufacturers. And that
is exactly what happened. We developed the mode of notation and here (gesturing to
printed notation) you know exactly how it works.
8
Ibid.
10
Regarding SEM in relation to notations, Tschumi points out in The Manhattan
Transcripts, p.9: The original purpose of the tripartite mode of notation (events,
movements, spaces) was to introduce the order of experience, the order of time
moments, intervals, sequences for all inevitably intervene in the reading of
the city. It also proceeded from a need to question the modes of representation
generally used by architects: plans, sections, axonometrics, perspectives.
11
See Jos Bosman. Introduction. Bernard Tschumi Architecture In/of Motion:
Architecture In/of Motion. Bernard Tschumi and Hans Ibelings. Rotterdam:
Netherlands Architecture Institute, 1997, 11.
12
See Architecture and Disjunction. 166.
13
Ibid.
14
See Bernard Tschumi. Event-Cities (Praxis). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
15
See Richard Dagenhart. Urban Architectural Theory and the Contemporary
City: Tschumi and Koolhass at the Parc de la Villette. EKISTICS January / February,
March/April, vol. 56, num. 334/335 (1989): 87. Richard Dagenhart discusses The
Manhattan Transcripts as having a structure with two separate but interdependent
and conflicting parts: a formal structure of the frames of the drawings; and, the
architectural transcriptions within the frames. Further, he explains this sequence of
frames allow for overlaps and transgressions.
16
See Architecture and Disjunction. 196-197.
17
Ibid.
18
See Alvin Boyarski and Bernard Tschumi. Interview. Bernard Tschumi, La Case
24
Vide, La Villette, 1985 FOLIO VIII. London: London WC1, Architectural Association,
1985, 25.
19
Tschumi has discussed the follies as anchoring points in various publications,
for instance see Architecture and Disjunction. 178.
20
The cinematic promenade as an architectural strategy uses montage techniques
that recall ideas from film production. This strategy was previously explored in The
Manhattan Transcripts and in Tschumis academic exercises assigned at the AA
and Princeton in which Joyces Garden and Italo Calvinos stories were read and its
narratives reinterpreted via drawings.
21
See Bernard Tschumi. Manifesto 1: FIREWORKS (1974). Architectural
Manifestoes. London: Architectural Association, 1979. The Architectural
Manifestoes were originally developed as part of an earlier collaborative
exhibition in 1974 entitled A Space: A Thousand Words. (hereafter Manifesto 1:
FIREWORKS).
22
This notion is also interrelated to theories developed by Henri Lefebvre,
specifically the term bureaucratic society of organized consumption (or later
known by its shorter version: consumer society). In fact, Guy Debord is another
French thinker whose theories inform in this discursive arena.
23
See Manifesto 1: FIREWORKS.
24
Ibid.
25
See Louis Martin. 23-35.
26
Ibid, in p.25 and p.30 Louis Martin explains how Tschumis pleasure of
architecture theory was influenced by Roland Barthes Le Plaisir du texte (1973),
specifically he discusses Barthess theory of textual pleasure and how Tschumi
translated it into the architectural medium. Tschumi has openly discussed this
Barthesian influence, see Bernard Tschumi, The Pleasure of Architecture.
Architecture and Disjunction. 83-84.
27
See Bernard Tschumis introduction to Architectural Manifestoes. London:
Architectural Association, 1979.
28
Ibid.
29
See Architecture and Disjunction. 86: Built exclusively for delight, gardens are
like the earliest experiments in that part of architecture that is so difficult to express
with words or drawings; pleasure and eroticism. Whether romantic or classical,
gardens merge the sensual pleasure of space with the pleasure of reason, in a most
useless manner.
30
Ibid, 89. The Pleasure of Architecture was first published in 1977 in
Architectural Design magazine.
31
See Yanel de Angel Salas and Mark R. Mansfield.
32
33
See Louis Martin. 29.
34
Ibid.
35
See Jacques Derrida. Architecture Where Desire May Live (Interview with Eva
Meyer published in Domus 1986). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader of Cultural
Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 321.
36
See Anthony Vidler. Trick/Track. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the
Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 104.
37
See Yanel de Angel Salas and Mark R. Mansfield. During the interview Tschumi
explained: But I think all of the work uses (construction) even The Manhattan
Transcripts I could show you parts that are not about disassembly. Disassembly
requires that you start from something. And of course architecture has so much
baggage that you have to get rid of. (Laughter) And indeed you have something
to start with. Right? But there are certain moments when you have to find certain
abstract anchors I would call them like that at La Villette the anchors were the
follies. We call them points of intensity.
25
All illustrations, except figure 1, are courtesy of architect Bernard Tschumi.
1. Bernard Tschumi and Yanel de Angel during the interview on April 7, 2006. Photo
by Mark R. Mansfield.
2. Parc de la Villette, superimposition of the three autonomous systems: lines,
points and surfaces.
3. Photo of the fireworks.
4. Bernard Tschumis fireworks notational system. Notations corresponding to
Phase I - Third minute: surfaces 250 meters high, rhythm: every seven seconds;
and Phase I - Fourth minute: superposition, points, lines, surfaces 250 meters high,
rhythm: every seven seconds.
5. Bernard Tschumis sketch of notational system drawn during the interview of April
7th, 2006.
6. Parc de la Villette rendition of superimposed systems: lines, points and surfaces.
7. Bernard Tschumis fireworks notational system with applied color rendition by
author.
8. Exploded follie: Tschumis representations for the Park reflected his ideas of
deconstruction.
38
See Architecture and Disjunction. 211. Also, regarding deconstruction and
interchangeability see pp.185-186.
39
See Mark Wigley. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt.
Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 1993. (hereafter Mark
Wigley).
40
Ibid, 4.
41
Ibid. Derrida exposes his ideas on deconstruction and translation using the
metaphor of the Tower of Babel, which he developed in his text Des Tours de
Babel.
42
Derrida uses a great metaphor to describe the translation process as some
sort of transparent screen that still allows reading the source of original intent:
The deconstruction of the Tower of Babel, moreover, gives a good idea of what
deconstruction is: an unfinished edifice whose half-completed structures are visible,
letting one guess at the scaffolding behind them. From Derridas Des Tours de
Babel, quoted in Mark Wigley. 24.
43
44
See K. Michael Hays. The Autonomy of Effect. Tschumi. Ed. Giovanni Damiani.
New York: Rizzoli, 2003. 9.
45
Ibid, 12-13.
26
Bibliography
Bosman, Jos. Introduction. Bernard Tschumi Architecture In/of Motion:
Architecture In/of Motion. Bernard Tschumi and Hans Ibelings.
Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute, 1997.
Boyarski, Alvin and Bernard Tschumi. Interview. Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide,
La Villette, 1985 FOLIO VIII. London: London WC1, Architectural Asso
ciation, 1985.
Dagenhart, Richard. Urban Architectural Theory and the Contemporary City:
Tschumi and Koolhass at the Parc de la Villette. EKISTICS January /
February, March/April, vol. 56, num. 334/335 (1989): 84-92.
De Angel Salas, Yanel and Mark R. Mansfield. Personal interview with Bernard
Tschumi on The Fireworks of La Villette. The interview was conducted
on April 7th, 2006 at the New York Office of Bernard Tschumi (227 West
17th Street, New York, NY 10011), in association with Professor K.
Michael Hays course The Architectural Imaginary (GSD 3305), Spring
2006, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
Derrida, Jacques. Architecture Where Desire May Live (Interview with Eva Meyer
published in Domus 1986). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader of Cultural
Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Hays, K. Michael. The Autonomy of Effect. Tschumi. Ed. Giovanni Damiani. New
York: Rizzoli, 2003.
Martin, Louis. Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumis
Architectural Theory. Assemblage 11 (April 1990): 23-35.
Tschumi, Bernard. Event-Cities 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
_______. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT
Press, 1996.
_______. Event-Cities (Praxis). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
_______. The Manhattan Transcripts: Theoretical Projects. London: Academy
Editions and New York: St. Martins Press, 1994.
_______. Manifesto 1: FIREWORKS (1974). Architectural Manifestoes. London:
Architectural Association, 1979.
Vidler, Anthony. Trick/Track. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt. Cambridge, MA
and London, England: The MIT Press, 1993.
27
Joris Fach
kkLI0 kIhEIl6kIE0
0n kIvar kaItos Jaron of kuthentIcIt
One of the tasks of art is to safeguard the authenticity of human experience,
writes Juhani Pallasmaa in a recent essay.
1
In the rainfall of images, as the
human mind is being increasingly conditioned by commercial advertising and
benumbing entertainment, architecture must defend us against excessive noise
and communication, or so Pallasmaa claims: Architecture must maintain and
defend silence. He goes on to explain that authentic architecture can only be born
through a process of idealization. The role of ideals and idealization is equally
important in architecture. An authentic architect thinks of an ideal society or dweller
as he designs. Only a construction that constructs something ideal can turn into
meaningful architecture.
2

Another writer who seeks to define authenticity in architecture is the historian
William Curtis. In responding to architectural critics, such as Pallasmaa, who for
decades accused modern architecture of being inhuman and inauthentic here
one should think for example of the work of Mies van der Rohe and his more
commercially-minded epigones Curtis argues that the works of the great masters
of modernism radiate an air of authenticity that lets them communicate before they
are understood and exercise a dynamic effect on the emotions and thoughts of
the observer. Presenting the Parliament buildings in Chandigarh and Dacca by Le
Corbusier and Louis Kahn as authentic masterpieces, Curtis defines the authentic
work as the vital expression of a deeply felt idea.
3
Here, authenticity is understood
in a somewhat Heideggerian sense. A subject is authentic when it is identical to
itself, hence, subjectivity ultimately decides and grounds the authenticity of artifacts
as well.
Alvar Aalto, by contrast, offers a different view of modernism and a different
interpretation of authenticity. This interpretation is grounded on a dual foundation:
on one hand, there is the popular understanding of his work as essentially Nordic,
as something derived, impossible to realize without conceptual or other mediation
either from the landscape and people of Finland, or directly from the nature of
materials. On the other hand, there is the legendary silence of the architect, his
refusal to write manifestoes or intellectualize his work, which seems to be issued
by intuition alone. Yet both notions, as well as the link between them, can be
1
28
questioned. The adequacy of scrutiny becomes sensible in an interview from 1972,
in which his biographer, Gran Schildt, asks: Do you think youve been able to add
something specifically Finnish to international architecture, themes rooted in our
conditions? and Aalto responds: I have nothing against that interpretation.
4
This paper sets out to illustrate the constructedness of Aaltos authentic image
and how its constituting elements like nature, Finnishness, material, and silence
support each other. For this purpose Adornos concept of the jargon of authenticity
is deployed. It guides through Aaltos designs, his writings, and especially the
photographic staging of himself in images that were taken by Eino Mkinen in
Aaltos office. Originally applied to modern language, Adornos jargon of authenticity
hereby terms the authenticating mechanisms at play in Aaltos architectural, as well
as medial appearance to telling effect.
I The Search for Authenticity
To understand how Aaltos architecture came to be respected as perhaps the best
example of authenticity in modernism, we have to take a look at the situation in the
early thirties, when Aalto emerged on the international scene. Around 1930, three
years after Walter Curt Behrendt had confidently announced the victory of the new
functionalist style
5
even leading protagonists of the architectural revolution had
started to express second thoughts. Additionally the initial enthusiasm for all things
modern suffered a major blow with the great depression of 1929. Voices that called
for a re-humanization of architecture became more and more perceptible within
modern architectural discourse. Especially in the German controversy of the Neue
Sachlichkeit prefabrication, perpetual repetition and abstract materiality were placed
into question by pre-modern architects like Konrad Nonn, Paul Schultze-Naumburg
and Emil Hgg. They accused the mechanistic architecture of Gropius and his
radical likes of The Ring of having lost touch with fundamental human needs and
spiritual values. Especially Schultze-Naumburg, whose unostentatious villas, built
before the First World War, placed him among the most progressive architects
in Germany, now aligned himself with the Nazis and turned against the modern
movement - aesthetically as well as politically.
6

But it was not only critics from the far right who criticized the inhumane
abstractions of the twenties. Giedion himself, the leading advocate of architectural
modernism, maintained that modernism had adjusted and had, after all, become
humane by material means. As he put it, The feeling for mass production and for
standardization has not been discarded at all, only now we have at hand not only
the necessary techniques but also perhaps an insight into the use of these from
a human standpoint. Alongside iron and ferroconcrete construction, the ancient
material, wood, came again to the fore.
7
As a result, he said, it was possible to
strive for further development and to dare the leap from the rational-functional to
the irrational-organic.
8
This formulation may owe something to Alfred Barrs essay
in a catalogue for a 1936 exhibition of Surrealist Art, demanding the recognition of
irrationality as a balancing force to the rationalism of the previous decade.
9

When the question of re-humanization arose in the discourse of art and architecture,
the social sciences had already analyzed contemporary society in related terms.
Ferdinand Tnnies proposed the dichotomy Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft as early
as 1887, the former a society characterized by organic solidarity and authenticity,
the latter by mechanical solidarity and bureaucracy.
10
Even modern philosophers
tried to resolve such seemingly irreconcilable oppositions, including Ludwig
29
Wittgenstein with his famous proposition: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent.
11

Yet, the systematic discourse on authenticity was developed in the
phenomenological existentialist tradition. In Sein und Zeit Heidegger approached
the renewal of thinking through the ideal of the archaic and exemplified it with
the use of antiquated language.
12
Heidegger summarized this idea when he
wrote: Das lteste des Alten kommt in unserem Denken hinter uns her und doch
auf uns zu.
13
Simultaneously, Heideggers preference for countrymen and the
provincial, as opposed to the urban, is explained by their closer proximity to the
things themselves, allowing them a more open gaze on the unveiling of the
things essentiality. In this sense the term of the essential is actually the term of
authenticity in its becoming. Even though the problematization of the distinct term of
authenticity would not unfold its full impact until the outbreak of the Second World
War, discussion of the conditions of reliability, reality, naturalness, originality, and
materiality accompanied the modern movement all along.
Although Giedion can hardly be grouped together with Heidegger in what Jeffrey
Herf has called the reactionary modernists, his thought often shows similar
concerns, in particular with regard to authentic life.
14
While Heidegger put his hope
in Hitler as providing the foundation for a true, authentic life in November 1933
he announced to the students at Freiburg University that der Fhrer selbst und
allein ist die heutige und knftige deutsche Wirklichkeit und ihr Gesetz
15
Giedion
was convinced that a new authenticity was required for democratic societies to
survive. Together with Jos Llus Sert he wrote a manifesto for a new, democratic
monumentalism in 1943,
16
outlining a relatively conservative program that called
for a Gemeinschaft in Tnnies sense. Of course, this Gemeinschaft was to be
achieved with architectural means and clearly aimed for the instantiation of a new
authenticity.
In any case, it was Aalto whom Giedion identified to instill a humane trace into
modern architecture. Speaking of wood, the material that was most closely
associated with the re-orientation of modernism, Giedion proclaimed: It seemed as
though the constellation under which Aalto was born predestined him to discover
the new potentialities of this organic material, with which his name will ever be
associated.
17
During Aaltos early years,
18
even Le Corbusier toyed with ideas that he presumably
would have rejected as absurd only a few years earlier. In 1929, Le Corbusier
designed a weekend house for Madame de Mandrot with natural stone walls and
exposed wooden beams and also flirted with surrealist effects, employing mirrors
and a fake fireplace in the elevated roofgarden of the Maison Beistegui.
19
Yet,
Giedion did not identify Le Corbusier with irrationalist tendencies, but continued
to look for another antithetical figure, presumably to create a balanced synthesis
of architectural history. As early as 1933, he seemed to have found what he was
looking for. Especially in retrospect, Giedions remark on Aaltos future Sie werden
ja noch zum Magus des Nordens!
20
seems more strategic than merely speculative.
The Romantic anti-rationalist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, the original
Magus des Nordens, connected the idea of an authentic culture to the Volk,
the language and the Boden, as opposed to the uprooted intellectualism of the
Enlightenment. The association of the young Finnish architect Aalto with the Magus
des Nordens is surprising, given that by this time Aalto was known for only a few
buildings, most notably the Southwestern Agricultural Cooperation Pavilion of 1927,
30
the Paimio Sanatorium from 1929 and the Turun Sanomat Newspaper Offices of the
very same year. On the contrary, it may have been Le Corbusiers comprehensive
rationalist oeuvre that made Giedion hesitate in advancing Le Corbusiers volte-face.
Nevertheless, Le Corbusier tried to emphasize the ineffable space
21
in his work and
used the term as early as 1946 and again during the planning of Chandigarh. Instead
of pursuing the difficult task of ascribing the irrational to an established, intellectual,
and Western European high modernist like Le Corbusier, it was much easier to
attach it to a sapling from the European fringes that was wedded neither to the
right angle nor to the cube.
22

Even before Giedion wrote his first extended essay on Aalto in 1941, entitled
Irrationalitt und Standard which he later included in a revised version in the
second edition of his magnum opus Space, Time and Architecture, Aalto had been
recognized as representing the new values of modernism as Barr had defined
them in 1936. When in 1938 Aalto was invited to present his furniture designs
along with his architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the
catalogues foreword by John McAndrew left no doubt about his importance for
modern architecture: Since then [the legendary exhibition Modern Architecture:
International Exhibition at New Yorks MoMA in 1932], modern architecture has
relinquished neither the functionalist approach nor the set of esthetic principles, but
both have been modified, particularly by the younger men who have since joined the
established leaders. Among these none is more important than Aalto.
23

The modification of modern architecture, which Aalto was here assigned to lead, was
nothing less than a reconciliation of rationality and irrationality. To the heritage of
pure geometric shapes, McAndrew continued, the younger men have added free
organic curves; Aaltos designs are the result of the complete reconciliation of
relentless functionalists conscience with a fresh and personal sensibility.
24
Neither
functionalism nor intuition was rejected, both poles rather sought a new relation
in equilibrium. Giedion, much later, assisted this call for a reunification of life and
architecture and the reestablishment of an authentic and whole culture. In Space,
Time and Architecture he introduced Aalto with the following lines: Aalto is the
strongest exponent of the combination of standardization with irrationality, so that
standardization is no longer master but servant.
25
II Towards an authentic architecture
Aaltos architecture has often been said to be authentic and was authenticated in
many ways. The following circumscribes the specific instances through which Aalto
was perceived as the architect of authenticity and how these instances can actually
be put into question.
Nature
The connection between Aaltos work and nature was already made in the 1932
MoMA exhibition mentioned above. It showed the curvilinear forms in the plans of
the Turun Sanomat building next to photographs of Finnish lakes.
26
The catalogue
by Philip Johnson and Henry Russel Hitchcock also stressed the juxtaposition of
built and natural amoebic shapes in Aaltos work.
27
The curved walls of the New
York Pavilion of 1939 were loaded with images from the Finnish countryside,
focusing on its largest natural resource: wood. Also the curved wall itself, made
from wood, was often compared to the Aurora Borealis, a natural spectacle often
observable in Finland.
31
In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion presented Aalto along the same lines. The
first picture in the chapter on him Alvar Aalto did not depict architecture, but timber
logs floating on a river.
28
A few pages later, Giedion juxtaposed an aerial view of the
Finnish landscape with the curvy plan of the New York Pavilion and the Savoy vase,
designed by Aalto in 1937. The proximity of Aalto to nature was thus underlined
from early on. It was suggested that the secret of Aaltos genius was his close
connection to his home country and its people and that this guaranteed his personal
authenticity.
In Giedions and countless other books on Aalto, pictures of landscapes
accompanied his architecture just as pictures of cars, airplanes and machine
devices accompanied Le Corbusiers. The images promoted the re-humanizing
aim for bonds between nature and architecture and took advantage of persuasive
techniques usually deployed in associative advertising. Against this background
the landscapes published along with Aaltos work connoted the architecture in a
specifically primordial way. This new media-made authenticity of the Finn close
to nature was both distinct, as it differentiated Aalto from standardization and
pure utility of any kind, and served the prevalent aim for a grounded and humane
architecture, which like a good advertising slogan was easily and unmistakably
comprehensible. Non-Finnish-speaking critics for example liked to point out that the
word Aalto in Finnish translates as Wave, suggesting that the curvilinear forms in
Aaltos work should actually be interpreted as personal signatures of his name.
Finnishness
The foundation stone for the new position of Nordic modernism was actually laid
by Gunnar Asplunds distinct Swedish rationalism some years before Aalto became
active as an architect.
29
Continuing this trait, Aalto further consolidated the basis of
distinct Northerness a construction whose benevolent reception was prepared by
the peculiar proto-rationalist forms of Asplund and his likes.
30
Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes
31
as Sigfried Giedion declares in the
definitive text of modernism, Space, Time and Architecture. This Finnishness,
Giedion said, was part of Aaltos authenticity, since he refused to break with his own
identity and to become just another imitator of Le Corbusier. Instead, the Finnish
architect turned to his native landscape and its natural materials for inspiration,
intuitively becoming at one with it. This direct and deep connection to the essence
of landscape and materials has made Aalto into the hero of regionalist architecture,
responding to climate, site, and above all, material, to quote Edward Ford.
32
For
Kenneth Frampton as well, Aalto is a paragon of critical regionalist architecture
one which continued the essential Nordic tradition of fusing the vernacular with
the Classical the idiosyncratic with the normative.
33
The resemblance of Aaltos architectural shapes to the Finnish landscape is not
the only proof of his authentic image. An oft-quoted statement that seemingly
grounds his Finnishness is his 1941 essay on Architecture in Karelia.
34
This
essay on the culture of Finno-Ugric tribalism in Karelia, a region which perpetually
changed possession between Finland, Sweden and Russia, is often quoted in
relation to an assumed vernacular nationalism in Aaltos work. In this text Aalto
studied the presumed origins of a purely Nordic culture. In fact, the polemically
formulated article is neither dogmatically political in terms of having a nationalist
undertone, nor romantic in terms of a mere revival of specifically vernacular forms.
The articles political vigor rather stems from the immediate threat of Finlands
32
annexation by the Soviet Union, and so does not disturb too much Aaltos generally
apolitical character. In any case, architectural interest in the article circled much
more rationally around the processes which determined the indigenous buildings
inhabitation and growth. As Aalto writes, The Karelian house is in a way a building
that begins with a single modest cell or with an imperfect embryo building, shelter
for man and animals and which then figuratively speaking grows year by year.
35

However, Aaltos personal interest in a study on Karelias historical culture which,
as every primitive or semi-primitive culture, maintained close bonds to nature, went
hand in hand with a not to be underestimated media-effect. His personal interest
is hereby not put to question. The mere engagement with what was interpreted as
Ur-Finnishness, however, conveniently further mystified Aaltos own supposedly
Ur-Finnish architecture.
This constructed association of Aalto with Finnishness is all the more surprising,
as he himself had a truly ambiguous relationship with his country. In a postcard to
Walter Gropius, sent in the year 1930, Aalto wrote: The fact is that we are eagerly
looking forward to our next time with the Gropiuses, while trying to make buildings
for people into whose heads the organic line will not fit for another 100 years.
We know with astronomical certainty that the only fixed point of our collegial life
is in international work. Our private statistics indicate that it isnt possible to find
companions among the three million who surround us. Three million is too little.
36
Just a year later, around 1931, when Aalto thanked Lszl Moholy-Nagy for visiting
Finland, he became critical of his country once again: We want to thank you for
bringing us so much joy by having the courage to visit our poor Finland which
can offer nothing but mud roads and fly-infested forests.
37
Noticeably both mail
recipients were not Finnish and Aalto, who always took good care which opinion
he addressed to whom, might have considered such irony to simply be more
companionable when writing to the internationals.
Aalto evidently maintained a substantial international network of professional
contacts. Besides the CIAM (Congrs Internationaux DArchitecture Moderne of
which he became a member as early as 1928) there was first of all his teacher
Eliel Saaringen in Finland, who moved to the USA in 1923; then his Hungarian
friend Laszlo Moholy Nagy who emigrated from Germany via the Netherlands and
Great Britain to the USA in 1935-1938; the German Walter Gropius who emigrated
via Great Britain to the USA in 1934-1937; the French Andr Lurcat in the Soviet
Union; and of course Sigfried Giedion in Switzerland. During Aaltos own period of
emigration to the US, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright and James Sweeney were
colleagues he became close with. Amongst the artists with whom he constantly
exchanged ideas were the French-Rumanian Constantin Brncui, the German Hans
Arp and Ferdinand Lger, all mainly living in France. These contacts placed Aalto
among the rather few evidently internationally operating architects of his time,
especially in Finland and again draws into question his absolute Finnishness.
Even after the Second World War, during which he had lectured and published
articles in the US that were very much in favour of his own country, he nevertheless
made numerous ironic, if not cynical comments. When Malcolm Quantrill visited
Aaltos office in 1960 Aalto asked: Well, and how do you like Finnish winters?,
and before Quantrill could even answer Aalto continued: I can tell you, they are
truly wonderful. Because they are so long, and you can spend them in India or
Africa or South America.
38
As much as he used the advantage that arose out of
the Finnishness attached to his architecture, he personally remained much more
ambiguous and critical of his native country and was much more distant from any
patriotic identification than the mediated image of his work and himself suggests.
33
Material
Scott Poole explains that Aaltos recovery of archetypal images bound to elemental
matter gives the Villa Mairea a sense of authenticity that is especially poignant in
our time, when so few images touch the concrete world of the spirit.
39
Indeed, the
image of Aaltos authenticity is intrinsically linked to materiality. Pallasmaa, who has
written extensively on Aalto, comes close to the quality of the prevalent discussion
of materials when, in his recent book, he speaks of glass and metal as scale-less
sheets, unyielding surfaces and ageless materials. This reductive focus gives rise
to a sense of architectural autism, an internalized and autonomous discourse that
is not grounded in our shared existential reality.
40
In Aaltos architecture, we can
trace the trajectory away from autism into a form of authenticity. His acclaimed
masterpiece, the Villa Mairea from 1939, showed austere surfaces interrupted,
metals clad with organic materials and glass framed in bulky wooden frames,
exhibiting a vivid and expressive multiplicity of sensual experiences. In a way the
Villa Maireas material diversity summed up Aaltos accumulated knowledge about
the authenticating use of materials he had collected in his work so far.
After an initial inclination towards classicizing architecture and then a wholehearted
embrace of rather abstract international rationalism during his offices Turku period
from 1927 to 1933, Aalto started to integrate his typical - what were later perceived
by critics as traditionally Finnish and vernacular elements and details into his
work. He increasingly drew on natural and historical references and spotlighted
organic matter. He made use of various natural building materials like brick, wood,
earthenware and tiles, occasionally integrating even leather and basketwork into his
interiors.
In the Finnish context, Aaltos use of materials before the Second World War was not
perceived as especially inclined to local patriotism or a national language. His friend
Gustaf Strengell, for example, characterized the use of light wood in the interiors
of the Villa Mairea as a Japanese and not a Finnish trait. Certainly, compared to the
great masters of modernism like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Aaltos
architecture appeared pronouncedly natural. However, neither did Aalto include
organic materials in all of his buildings, nor was the use of an organic notion in
modernism solely limited to him.
In order to determine just what it was that made Aaltos use of materials authentic,
we should first dismiss the simplistic idea that the more unworked a material,
the more real or authentic it is. Leading modernists that they were, Aalto and Le
Corbusier would have condemned a categorical repudiation of industrial building
materials as totally inconsistent and inopportune of their time. Their option of a
more humane architecture rather consisted in a reintroduction and blending of
unworked materials with industrial and standardized elements, both of which could
not make for true authenticity on their own.
Also, organic materials did not guarantee authenticity. The experimental Haus
Sommerfeld, erected in Berlin by the early Bauhaus between 1920 and 1921,
was a timber block house and as such made from organic material through and
through. However, designed by Walter Gropius, Adolf Meyer and their colleagues
and students, the house was intended as an intellectual manifesto of expressionism
and herewith detached from any over-pronounced earthiness. A decade later, Le
Corbusiers project for the house Errazuris in Chile deployed exclusively organic
materials too. In a time when the attention to authenticity just took shape, this
project far away from the pertinent critics would have tested an engagement
34
with vernacular architecture and local materials. However, the project never realized
under Le Corbusiers guidance. Aaltos architecture meanwhile displayed both
unworked and organic materials in a notable way.
Occasionally, the actualization of the true potential of a material led to results that
were less than perfect in a technical sense. For the Baker House project, Aalto
found a brick factory on the brink of bankruptcy and insisted that the bricks be used
without sorting.
41
One could perhaps argue that the twisted clinkers show the traces
of the manufacturing process and thereby guarantee the authenticity of the material
in its entirety. Much more than this, the resulting brick wall, full of imperfections,
evoked an almost organic reading of the genuinely low-quality bricks that were
industrially manufactured, and thereby stressed a typically Aaltoesque naturalism.
Perhaps an even more extreme case is the 1952 Rautatalo office building in
Helsinki. The Travertine panels of the interior courtyard were artificially aged through
sandblasting.
42
In this context, Aalto stated: It is not what a building looks like
on the opening day but what it is like thirty years later that counts.
43
The artificial
handling of the material so to speak amplified its authenticity.
Thanks to homogenizing momentums like the International Style exhibition at
MoMA in 1932, modern architecture was still perceived as a largely white and
rectangular affair. Though Le Corbusier formulated his theory on the application of
the vernacular in architectural design, being an integral part of the international style
his work continued to be perceived as classically modern. In turn, Aaltos medial
appearance, that deducted a strictly humanist architecture from his typically
organic palette of materials, only functioned successfully against the contrasting
background of the international style, which was stereotypically whiter than his
own. Hosting Aaltos exhibition in the MoMA John McAndrew assisted: Like the
designs of other men first active in the 30s [Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Oud , Le
Corbusier], he wrote, Aaltos work, without ceasing in any way to be modern, does
not look like the modern work of the 20s.
44
Although, as stated in the introduction
to this text, many protagonists of 1930s modernism altered their architectural
scope with a humanizing dimension, the contrast between classical and Nordic
modernism was propelled through globally operating media. The question of a
characteristic materiality was consequently sharpened artificially in true favour of
Aalto, the saviour of anthropogenic and livable architecture.
Silence
In his later years, Aalto made it clear that architecture was not a matter of theorizing,
not even a matter of imagination, but rather a world of doing. In 1956 he stated: In
the end building means grappling with the very matter yielded to us by the earths
crust. It is conscious to find what a wide gap exists between the arts, sciences
and practical work based on pure thought and literary effort, and those based on
matter we can construct dreams of reality in our mind, but the next step usually
fails, and that is making them come true.
45
Aalto here draws a distinction between
reflective thinking and mere doing. It seems as if for him the rather unconscious
engagement with architecture, the practical and bodily part of actual building, is
largely determined by the existent matter one deals with in the building process,
and not so much by an intellectual process of design. According to the previous
quotation it is this semi-conscious engagement with ones dreams and the process
of making them come true that not only builds the building, but also creates it as a
new authenticity.
Significantly enough, this kind of authenticity is warranted by its elusiveness or
35
ineffability. Famously Aalto stated: We dont talk about architecture we just draw
beautiful lines.
46
This phrase would later distill into the even catchier phrase:
I dont talk. I build.
47
This statement is no doubt a deliberate echo of Goethes
advice, Bilde, Knstler! Rede nicht!
48
For Goethe it was obvious that verbal
analysis was not able to capture the essence of art or the essence of the human
soul but would only result in inauthentic description. In the words of Goethes friend
Schiller: Warum kann der lebendige Geist einem nicht erscheinen! Spricht die
Seele, so spricht ach! die Seele schon nicht mehr.
49
Critics have eagerly jumped on this bandwagon. Poole, to give just one example,
remains remarkably vague when he describes the Villa Mairea and its collections
of materials and collaged constructions, whose interiority evokes something
essential in us.
50
The deeply emotional surplus of Aaltos buildings which,
as Poole said, was mediated by materiality, seemed to escape any intellectual
formulation. At the same time this elusiveness seemed constitutive for the
establishment of a new authenticity inherent to the materialized building. The
presumably rooted authenticity of Aaltos work fostered an almost mystical notion
of silence and finally turned him into the human and sympathetic modernist that he
still is perceived as today.
III Mechanisms of a Medial Jargon
In his book, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Jargon of Authenticity) Theodor W. Adorno
outlined the inherent operational method of a persuasive system of language that
instilled exactly what Aalto was associated and advertised with: authenticity. He
generally conceptualized this phenomenon as an effect perceived by the senses,
much like Aalto had characterized, to name just one example, the atmosphere of his
Worlds Fair Pavilion in New York fifteen years earlier.
51
The jargon of authenticity
used disorganization as a principle of organization and decomposed language into
individual words that, when reassembled as a jargon, carried a specific connotation
they did not communicate beforehand.
Constructed Authenticity
Adornos book is actually an attack on the philosophy of Heidegger whose works
Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) of 1927 and Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Origin
of the Artwork) of 1935 were important statements about authenticity, also insofar as
it pertained to architecture and art. In the Origin of the Artwork, Heidegger defined
art in the Greek sense as the happening of truth. He said: The [art] work belongs,
as work, uniquely within the world opened up by itself.
52
This interpretation implied
that the worlds, as they come and go, also determined the artworks greatness, as
it inevitably came and went with its very own world. According to Heidegger, the
artworks ability to unlock a world and to allow for a full understanding of it would
cease as soon as its own world in which the artwork itself had emerged would pass
away. The world is used here as a system of references that equals Heideggers
understanding of truth, the truth of beings, and the being of beings in other words,
true authenticity.
Heidegger furthermore stated that an authentic culture could never directly preserve
its full momentum. The only possible way to preserve [that] full momentum
is to repeat, to iterate [wieder-holen] more deeply than ever from the source.
53

The source that he also mentioned elsewhere in the book, was defined as societal
heritage - societys literature, folklore, myths and its cultural mood, etc. Such
36
drawing from heritage must not necessarily equal copying. We must rather, he
said, take a creative view of tradition.
54
In this sense creativity was vital, since any
plain heritage was valueless to the progress of present culture. Though its heritage,
the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of
Jesus, exists and is known, it is no longer appropriated, does not any longer
gather men and things unto [itself]
55
In contrast to Heidegger, Adorno argued that whatever emerged in times of
modernity would inevitably drown in the mechanisms of reification, instead
of becoming a critical and integral momentum of its time. Once termed, any
attempt, even the most original forms of culture, would immediately experience a
reinterpretation by the jargon of authenticity. The resulting anonymity of any such
reinterpreted term would thus instantaneously dress with a fashion-like pseudo-
authenticity. Adorno claims that the jargon of authenticity has at its disposal
a modest number of words which are received as promptly as signals
56
The
words become terms of the jargon only through the constellation that they negate,
through each ones gesture of uniqueness.
57
In this sense the specific fragments
of a language become abbreviated signals of a newly installed truth. A jargon comes
into being when the meaning of the individual fragment, material, or form, becomes
subordinate to a larger measure and meaning instilled into it. This argument was
emphasized by Adorno when he stated: What is or is not the jargon is determined
by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in
opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the
expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.
58

According to Adorno, Heideggers language worked in a way comparable to
advertising - it privileged effect over content. Words were divorced from their
contexts and used as signals. The same could be said of Aaltos way of using
signs of authenticity in architecture. The Villa Mairea, for example, is a collage of
separate signs that assert simultaneously the uncompromising modernity of the
building, its internationality, as well as its timeless Finnish character: the classically
rationalist steamship railing on the roof that follows a typically Finnish lake-shape
- the series of wooden bay-windows in the white South faade that dimly recall Le
Corbusiers fentre en bande
59
- the archaic smoke sauna in direct relation with the
fashionable free-formed pool - the simultaneously Asian and rustic wooden poles
screening the main staircase - all these deliberately ambiguous elements escaped,
as Giedion admitted, singular interpretation: Even one accustomed to judge
immediately the qualities of a building will not easily comprehend the architectural
instrumentation of Mairea.
60

This sensual complexity conveys an unmistakable undertone that arguably becomes
most obvious in the Villa Maireas schizophrenic fireplace. In this configuration
one fireplace faces the inside dining room, while another one, sitting back to back,
faces the outside and is covered by a small canopy. Both fireplaces, however, share
the same flue. The outside one is made of flat, natural stone slabs whose rough
irregularity emphasize its primordial and authentic appearance, while the inner one
is clad with regularly laid bricks of the same thickness as the outside stones.

It is tempting to read the bareness of the outside wall as a quotation of Nature, its
local stones as Finnishness, the similar dimensioning of plain stones and cultured
bricks as a trait of Aaltos sensitive handling of Material, and the motif of the double
fireplace as an inexplicability that leaves nothing but Silence. More correctly
one should say that far from being essentially true to itself in the Heideggerian
sense, this Janus-faced fireplace generates its aura of authenticity through the
37
configuration of materials. It is an architectural complex that successfully evokes
all kinds of associations, but bears no retraceable validity apart from its evocative
effect; in other words, it is a construct that closely resembles the function of
Adornos jargon of authenticity.
Publicity
The concept of the jargon of authenticity not only applies to Aaltos architecture, but
in a similar way to his strategies of publicity. It is in this frame that one should look
at Aaltos personal background carefully.
In certain ways the image of Aalto the Silent alluded to above is a remarkable
misconception and misconstruction. He may not have filled bookshelves like Le
Corbusier, but he did continue to write and express himself throughout his career.
Consequently the title of the poet amongst architects, as he was called by his
assistant Leonardo Mosso, applies to Alvar Aalto in a double sense. Already,
before his graduation from Helsinkis Technical University as an architect in 1921,
Aalto wrote several remarkable literary columns in Kerberos, a satiric magazine
which appeared from 1916 to 1921. Thereafter, before turning to architectural
practice in 1923, he also wrote as an art critic and contributor to Finnish and Italian
architectural journals. Later, when architecture occupied most of his time, he did
not always write himself anymore, but definitively did not unhand control over his
writings either. Many texts assigned to him actually stem from rough dictations,
which were typewritten and refined in an Aaltoesque parlance by his confidents.
Especially Nils Erik Wickberg and Gran Schildt in Finland as well as Karl Fleig in
Switzerland occasionally formulated entire papers themselves in Aaltos name.
Even Schildt admitted: It also happened from time to time that I myself wrote
the questions and the answers for interviews with Aalto to be published in various
contexts.
61

It was certainly one of Aaltos medial qualities to unhand control and he perpetually
did so, if he knew it was in his favour. Although he polemically claimed: What
an architect says doesnt mean a damn thing
62
, it is quite unlikely that he
underestimated the impact of architectural publications. Being familiar with the craft
and power of writing and a skilled author himself, Aalto was furious when Giedion
did not include him in the first edition of Space, Time and Architecture in 1941.
His scarce writings are therefore not a conscious renunciation of writing. Aalto
rather freed his own time through the reliable writing skills of others - employees,
publishers, and critics.

As far as personal characteristics go, Aalto did not exactly match the image of the
silent genius from the Northern Woods. He was rather outgoing, lively and popular
already as a student at the Technical University in Helsinki from 1916 - 1921.
According to his children, Johanna Aalto and Hamilkar Aalto, he maintained close
and warm-hearted relations with his wider family and cared for a general balance
of professional and private life. Johanna and Hamilkar also characterize him as
chummily companionable, sometimes exhibiting a festive loudness and regularly
drinking a lot.
63
Professionally Aalto was exceptionally skilled in self-presentation.
In his lectures he masterly involved his audiences by avoiding clear statements
altogether and constantly posing counterarguments to his own. As Gran Schildt
noted: Not surprisingly, this attitude made Aalto highly appreciated as a speaker,
no least because he made consummate use of humor and mimicry to strengthen
the sense of affinity with his audience.
64
For all these reasons it was him who
successfully advertised and represented the office, while Aino Aalto, his first wife
38
and office partner, and later his second wife Elissa, rather acted internally.

Just as any other protagonist of the modern movement, Aalto was born into a world
shaped by the overwhelming rise of mass-media. This pretext in mind, the silent
Aalto that we know through architectural history today, would not have existed
without a pronounced sense for the instrumentalization of media and extraordinary
advertisement skills. Actually Aalto was a rather bold, self assured and extremely
ambitious young architect, as the massive billboard he installed in front of his first
office in Helsinki proved. It said in giant letters: Alvar Aalto. Office for Architecture
and Monumental Art.
65

Although it violated the professional code of the SAFA, the Finnish Association of
Architects, the billboard testified to the quintessentially modernist mindset of Aalto.
It was around the same time that no lesser a commentator than Walter Benjamin
specified advertising as a technique of modernity, a technique that defined our
experience of the modern world: Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the
heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation
moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic
proportions, careens at us out of a film screen. And just as the film does not present
furniture and facades in completed forms for critical inspection, their insistent, jerky
nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us
with the tempo of a good film. ... What in the end makes advertisements so superior
to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says ... but the fiery pool reflecting
it in the asphalt.
66

Discussing the externalization of the avantgarde discourse, Beatriz Colomina
described the culture of advertising and mass media as a new reality
67
. This
applies to Aalto just as well as to other modern architects: the validation of their
work was increasingly generated through, and dependent on publicity. In a way, only
what was mediated became really real and was received as authentic much more
easily.

In this context, visual images play a more central role than verbal expositions. In
the case of Aalto, it is useful to study the series of portraits of Aalto that were taken
in his studio in the 1940s. The photographer was Eino Mkinen, a friend of Aalto
who also worked in his office as a product designer and had already arranged and
adapted the ethnographic pictures and landscape photographs in Aaltos Finnish
Pavilion in New York a year earlier. The series of portraits of Aalto are carefully
staged in order to bring to mind all the salient characteristics of the organic genius.
It is in this instance that we can truly speak of a visual jargon of authenticity that
unfolds.
The overall setting of Aalto at his desk suggests a particularly inartificial, prosaically
natural reading. While portraits were normally taken in front of neutral backgrounds,
Aalto sits here in front of the offices corner window. In some pictures the view
is released onto trunks and treetops of his offices garden his trademark, the
Finnish landscape, peers in. In others his posture is more concentrated and to
emphasize this mood of contemplation, the curtains are drawn. The clothes he
wears are specifically non-metropolitan, although not too lax either, since he wears
shirt and tie under the casual jacket. Of course he holds a pen, but what springs
even more to the eye than the obligatory architects pen are the jigs on the table, of
which the curvilinear one is displayed most visibly at the forefront of the picture. It
unmistakably hints towards the curvilinear shapes in his designs and, again, to the
forms of Finnish lakes and landscapes. Also his pipe is not missing. Unlike Mies
1
2
3
39
magisterial cigar, Gropius intellectual cigarette, or Le Corbusiers elegant pipe,
Aaltos model is rather simple and quotes the silent, contemplative and humble
smoker. Under close observation, many other photographs of Aalto equally reveal
their contrived nature, especially when entire series of the same motive show only
slightly varying gestures and facial expressions.

As mentioned above Mkinen took many other canonic photographs of Aalto and
his work. While the images of Aalto in his office use select objects to convey the
desired undertone, it is exactly the absence of people, windows and other mundane
references that evoke the scaleless and monumental character of the New York
Pavilions interior. Mkinens photographs thus often functioned more successfully
than reality in establishing an aura of authenticity

At this point it makes sense to come back to Pallasmaa and his initial quest to
safeguard the authenticity of human experience. In articulating what exactly are
the characteristics of such authentic architecture, Pallasmaa takes a critical stance
against much of modern and contemporary architecture, which in his opinion
has often been excessively concentrating on images and visuality while lacking
haptic qualities and neglecting the temporal dimension of architecture. The
authentic architectural experience, according to Pallasmaas popular reading of
phenomenology, involves all the seven senses
68
a totally unmediated experience
of authenticity.

If observed closely, Aalto expressed quite a different perspective. His alert
awareness of the necessity for advertising and his attention to the effect of the
whole image were most admirably manifested in the following comment he
made in relation to the Worlds Fair in New York: A true image of a country cannot
be conveyed with individual objects alone; it can be done convincingly only by
the atmosphere such objects create together, that is, only by the overall effect
perceived by the senses.
69
The reference to a collectively created atmosphere
clearly acknowledges the mechanisms of the jargon of authenticity, in that it is the
specific constellation of objects that, at least ostensibly, generate meaning and not
the individual objects alone. Aalto himself champions the effects of objects over the
objects themselves. In speaking of a true image, Aalto, in contrast to Pallasmaas
instantaneous understanding of authenticity, was well aware of the mediated image
of authenticity that his work and his publicized image evoked.

The staged photographs of Aalto in his office and elsewhere, as well as his essay
on Karelian building culture thus form examples of a professional self-presentation
and self-interpretation. The careful and effective selection of publicized images
and texts maintained a romanticizing self-portrayal as the Nordic modernist, the
architectural genius close to nature. This image, produced by Aalto, his critics
and institutions of modern mass media alike, did not necessarily falsify Aaltos
personality and architecture and it is not to say that Aaltos architecture is for any
reason invalid. However, it is important to notice its constructedness through the
dialectic of the architects contribution and the willing interpretation by his critics
- the architectures brilliance relies on Aaltos jargon of authenticity forms as an
indispensable part. This study thus gives an answer to Giedions hypocritical
question: About 1930 Alvar Aaltos name began to be known outside Finland.
What part was he to play?
70
If Aalto became the authentic architect par excellence
that could regive to modernism what it had lost, this was not achieved through
his architecture alone, but equally through his masterly constructed image of
authenticity.
40
Endnotes
1
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Task of Art, http://www-1.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/
TheoArch/Wolke/eng/Subjects/011/Pallasmaa/3Pallas.htm
2
Ibid.
3
William Curtis, Authenticity, abstraction and the ancient sense: Le Corbusiers and
Louis Kahns ideas of parliament, Perspecta, no. 20, 1983, p. 181-194.
4
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto In His Own Words, Rizzoli, New York, 1998, p. 275.
5
W.C. Behrendt, Der Sieg des neuen Baustils, Fr. Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1927, p. 3.
6
Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1968.
7
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture.The Growth of a new tradition, 2nd
ed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949, p. 454.
8
Ibid., p. 454.
9
Alfred Barr, Fantastic Art Dada Surrealism, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1936.
10
Ferdinand Tnnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen
Soziologie, K Curtius Verlag, Berlin, 1922
11
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Trans. C. K. Ogden,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, New York, 1981.
12
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, M. Niemeyer, Halle, 1929.
13
Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, V. Klostermann, Frankfurt am
Main, 1983, p. 19.
14
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1984.
15
Victor Faras, Heidegger and Nazism. Tr. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987, p. 118.
16
Sigfried Giedion, Jos Luis Sert and Fernan Lger, Nine Points on
Monumentality, written in 1943, first published in Sigfried Giedion, Architektur und
Gemeinschaft, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1956, p. 40-42.
17
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture.The Growth of a new tradition,
2nd ed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949, p. 455.
18
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto, the early years, Trans. Timothy Binham, Rizzoli, New
York, 1984
19
Samantha Krukowski, Le Corbusiers Beistegui as Emblem of Surrealist Space,
1993: http://www.cm.aces.utexas.edu/faculty/skrukowski/writings/corbubeistegui.
html
20
Sigfried Giedion, Postcard to Alvar Aalto, 1933.
21
Le Corbusier, Lespace indicible, LArchitecture dAujourdhui, Special Issue,
January 1946, p. 9-10.
22
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. The Growth of a new tradition,
2nd ed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass, 1949, p. 663.
23
John McAndrew, Aalto. Architecture and Furniture, The Museum of modern Art,
New York, 1938, p. 3.
24
Ibid., p. 3.
25
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture.The Growth of a new tradition,
2nd ed, Harvard University Press, Camrbridge Mass., 1949, p. 618.
26
Philip Johnson and Henry Russel Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: International
Exhibition, Museum of Modern Arts, New York, 1932.
27
Philip Johnson/Russel Henry Hitchcock, The International Style, Architecture
since 1922, W. W. Norton & Company inc., New York, 1932.
28
2nd ed., Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1949, p. 622.
29
Morton Shand, Stockholm 1930, Architectural Review, vol. 68, August 1930, p.
41
66-95.
30
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture. A Critical History, 3rd ed., Thames and
Hudson, London, 1997, p. 195.
31
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949, p. 567.
32
Edward R. Ford, The details of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge
Mass., 1990-1996, p. 119.
33
Hudson, London, 1997, p. 202.
34
Alvar Aalto, Architecture in Karelia, Uusi Suomi, Alvar Aalto Archives, no. 4127,
1941, quoted From Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in his own words, Rizzoli, New York,
1997, p. 116.
35
Alvar Aalto, Sketches, edited by Gran Schildt, trans. from Swedish by Stuart
Wrede, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1978, p. 80.
36
Alvar Aalto, Postcard to Walter Gropius, October 23, 1930, Alvar Aalto
Foundation Helsinki.
37
Alvar Aalto, Undated letter to Ellen and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ca.1931, Alvar Aalto
Foundation, Helsinki.
38
Malcolm Quantrill, Alvar Aalto. A Critical Study, Schocken Books, New York,
1983, p. 4.
39
Scott Poole, The New Finnish Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1992, p. 25.
40
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the senses, John Wiley
& Sons Ltd, West Sussex, 2005.
41
Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto, Phaidon Press, London/New York, 1995, p. 141.
42
Alvar Aalto, Rautatalo, Arkkitehti, Helsinki, 1955, p. 129.
43
As quoted in John Wilson, The inheritance of the 1920s, p.100, compiled
in: Kirmo Mikkola, Alvar Aalto vs. the modern movement: ja modernismin tila,
Rakennuskirja, 1981
44
New York, 1938, p. 3.
45
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, Rizzoli, New York, 1998, p. 181.
46
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto. The mature years, Trans. Timothy Binham, Rizzoli,
New York, 1989, p.121.
47
William Miller, Journal of architectural education, vol. 47, no. 1, September
1993, p. 53, Book review of: Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto. The Mature Years, Rizzoli,
New York, 1991
48
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Smtliche Werke, Gedicht: ber Kunst, Artemis
Verlag, Zrich, 1977.
49
Friedrich Schiller, Tabulae Votivae, Musenalmanach, 1797
50
Scott Poole, The New Finnish Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1992, p.26. To
quote Poole again: He [Aalto] imagines a world of original contemplations, a world
enlarged by material cause.
51
Alvar Aalto, Maailmannyttelyt: New York Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition
[World Exhibitions: New Yorks Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition], Arkkitehti
8, 1939, p.113. Trans. in Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, Rizzoli, New
York, 1998, p.121.
52
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. A. Hofstaedter, Harper and
Row, New York, 1971, p. 44.
53
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Trans. R. Mannheim, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1959, p. 191.
54
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Trans. R. Mannheim, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1959, p. 38.
55
Julian Young, Heideggers Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2001, p.54.
42
56
Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, Trans. K. Tarnowski, F. Will,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973, p. 6.
Der Jargon verfgt ber eine bescheidene Anzahl signalhaft einschnappender
Wrter , Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1964, p.9.
57
Die Worte werden zu solchen des Jargons erst durch die Konstellation, die sie
verleugnen, durch die Gebrde der Einzigkeit jedes einzelnen davon , Theodor W.
Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1964,
p. 9.
58
Was Jargon sei und was nicht, darber entscheidet, ob das Wort in dem Tonfall
geschrieben ist, in dem es sich als transzendent gegenber der eigenen Bedeutung
setzt, ob die einzelnen Worte aufgeladen werden auf Kosten von Satz, Urteil,
Gedachtem, Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main, 1964, p. 11.
59
Le Corbusier, Un Homme sa Fentre: Textes choisis 1925-1960, Muse des
beaux-artes de Nantes, Nantes/Lyon, 2006.
60
61
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in his Own Words, Rizzoli, New York, 1997, p. 7-8.
62
Alvar Aalto, Lecture at the Architectural Association, London, 1950
63
Louna Lathi, Interview with Johanna and Hamilkar Aalto, Alvar Aalto aikalaistensa
silmin, Taschen Verlag, Kln, 2004.
64
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in his Own Words, Rizzoli, New York, 1997, p. 7.
65
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto. The Early Years, Rizzoli, New York, 1984, p. 126.
66
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter.
London: New Left Books, 1979, p. 89.
67
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 5th ed.,
2000, p. 153.
68
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Task of Art, http://www-1.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/
TheoArch/Wolke/eng/Subjects/011/Pallasmaa/3Pallas.htm
69
Alvar Aalto, Maailmannyttelyt: New York Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition
[World Exhibitions: New Yorks Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition], Arkkitehti
8 (1939), p. 113. Trans. in Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, Rizzoli,
New York, 1998, p.121
70
List of Illustrations
1. Photograph by Eino Mkinen, courtesy of Alvar Aalto Foundation, no. 1-017.
43
Bibliography
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1941.
_______, Maailmannyttelyt: New York Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition
[World Exhibitions: New Yorks Worlds Fair. The Golden Gate Exhibition],
Arkkitehti 8, 1939.
_______, Rautatalo, Arkkitehti, Helsinki, 1955.
_______, Sketches, edited by Gran Schildt, trans. from Swedish by Stuart
Wrede, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1978.
_______, Postcard to Walter Gropius, October 23, 1930, Alvar Aalto Foundation
Helsinki.
_______, Undated letter to Ellen and Moholy Nagy, ca.1931, Alvar Aalto
Foundation, Helsinki.
Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,
1964.
_______, Jargon of Authenticity, Trans. K. Tarnowski, F. Will,
Alfred Barr, Fantastic Art Dada Surrealism, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1936.
W.C. Behrendt, Der Sieg des neuen Baustils, Fr. Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1927.
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter.
London: New Left Books, 1979.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 5th ed., 2000.
William Curtis, Authenticity, abstraction and the ancient sense: Le Corbusiers and
Louis Kahns ideas of parliament, Perspecta, no. 20, 1983.
Victor Faras, Heidegger and Nazism. Tr. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987, 118.
Edward R. Ford, The details of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.,
1990-1996.
Hudson, London, 1997.
Sigfried Giedion, Jos Luis Sert and Fernan Lger, Nine Points on Monumentality,
written in 1943, first published in Sigfried Giedion, Architektur und
Gemeinschaft, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1956.
_______, Space, Time and Architecture.The Growth of a new tradition,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1941.
44
_______, Space, Time and Architecture.The Growth of a new tradition,
2nd ed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949.
_______, Postcard to Alvar Aalto, 1933.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Smtliche Werke, Gedicht: ber Kunst,
Artemis Verlag, Zrich, 1977.
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Trans. R. Mannheim,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1959.
_______, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, V. Klostermann,
Frankfurt am Main, 1983.
_______, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. A. Hofstaedter, Harper and Row,
New York, 1971.
_______, Sein und Zeit, M. Niemeyer, Halle, 1929.
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1984.
Philip Johnson, Henry Russel Hitchcock, The International Style, Architecture since
1922, W. W. Norton & Company inc., New York, 1932.
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Datutop, no. 20, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, 1999.
Samantha Krukowski, Le Corbusiers Beistegui as Emblem of Surrealist Space,
1993: http://www.cm.aces.utexas.edu/faculty/skrukowski/writings/
corbubeistegui.html
Louna Lathi, Interview with Johanna and Hamilkar Aalto, Alvar Aalto aikalaistensa
silmin, Taschen Verlag, Kln, 2004.
Le Corbusier, Lespace indicible, LArchitecture dAujourdhui, Special Issue, January
1946.
_______, Un Homme sa Fentre: Textes choisis 1925-1960, Muse des
beaux-artes de Nantes, Nantes/Lyon, 2006.
New York, 1938.
Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1968.
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Journal of architectural education, vol. 47, no. 1, September 1993.
Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943-1968, Columbia Books of Architecture,
Rizzoli, New York, 1993.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley &
Sons Ltd, West Sussex, 2005.
45
_______, Kenneth Frampton, Carsten Thau, Arne Jacobson: Absolutely Modern,
Hatje Cantz Publishers, Stuttgart, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,
2003.
_______, The Task of Art, http://www-1.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/TheoArch/Wolke/
eng/Subjects/011/Pallasmaa/3Pallas.htm
Eeva Liisa Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto and the Geopolitics of Fame, Perspecta, no. 37, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, London, 2005.
Scott Poole, The New Finnish Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1992.
Malcolm Quantrill, Alvar Aalto. A Critical Study, New Amsterdam Books, New York,
1983.
Gran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in his own words, Rizzoli, New York, 1997.
_______, Alvar Aalto, The early years, Trans. Timothy Binham, Rizzoli,
New York, 1984
_______, Alvar Aalto. The mature years, Trans. Timothy Binham, Rizzoli,
New York, 1989.
Friedrich Schiller, Tabulae Votivae, Musenalmanach, 1797
Morton Shand, Stockholm 1930, Architectural Review, vol. 68, August 1930.
Ferdinand Tnnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen
Soziologie, K Curtius Verlag, Berlin, 1922
Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto, Phaidon Press, London/New York, 1995.
John Wilson, The inheritance of the 1920s, compiled in: Kirmo Mikkola, Alvar Aalto
vs. the modern movement: ja modernismin tila, Rakennuskirja, 1981
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Trans. C. K. Ogden, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, New York, 1981.
Julian Young, Heideggers Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2001.
46
John P. Gendall
kkIk8 F08 0I$I0Flk
Ihe 0IItaI lmIIcatIons of the $earatIon 8arrIer
Modernist utopian provocations imagined megastructures encompassing (and
constituting) entire environments. Superstudio conceived their utopia as a grid
whose universal reach equalized everything into a state of total sameness. Iterated
in the Arizona desert as a wall built of repetitive units, Superstudios Continuous
Monument would wrap its way around the globe to support complete utopian
urbanization.
Currently winding through the Israeli/West Bank desert is a megawall that has in fact
been realized, and that bears an uncanny resemblance to Superstudios monument.
Built of indefinitely extendable repetitive concrete units, this wall is predicated on
forceful divisiveness, and not on Modernist utopianism. It is dystopias response to
Superstudios utopia.
The Berlin Wall, the central line of convergence in the Cold War signaled the end of
architectures contribution to utopia. Paradoxically, cyberspace, regarded as another
vehicle for utopia, initially germinated from the matrix of tensions that fueled the
Cold War. But now its utopian hopes have also been cut short by yet another wall:
the Separation Barrier in Israel/West Bank. But in the new indeterminate space of
the digital, the role of the object has been reconstituted, so the concrete barrier
in the West Bank acts not just as a tectonic barrier, but as the avatar for a more
comprehensive Digital Wall.
ARCHITECTURAL UTOPIA
Modern architecture was a discipline full of utopian aspiration. The emphasis on
creating a continuous space devoid of boundaries signified its potential as an agent
of liberation. The canonized locution International Style represented its intended
global reach. If nationalism and wars between nations persisted, then architecture
could overcome those conflicts with its international language.
Fundamental to this enterprise was a reconsideration of walls and borders. This
was manifest in architecture with its skewing of boundaries between interior and
1
47
exterior. These ambiguities also forced a reconsideration of urban compositions.
Cities were once clearly delineated from the country by walls, and for centuries, the
wall was one of the most prominent features of the city.
1
Two important treatises
on architecture, Vitruvius Ten Books on Architecture and Serlios Five Books of
Architecture, specifically call for walls to encircle cities. And more recently, Max
Weber held that the wall was itself essential to the definition of a city. Not limited
to physical separation, the border also signified religious, political, and cultural
difference.
But modern architects sought to undo these sorts of tectonic distinctions, and
modern town planning envisioned a more homogeneous and infinitely extendable
city. This urban condition is evident in Le Corbusiers Ville Radieuse, which created
a tabula rasa that homogenized the urban condition. Other urban proposals expand
on this notion of continuous space devoid of boundaries and distinctions. Frederick
Kieslers 1926 City of Space specifically called for no walls, which would
restructure society and lead to the creation of new possibilities of living.
2

Archizoom proposed a No Stop City that could be expanded indefinitely, and as
its name suggests, would be free from interruptions and boundaries. Archigram
similarly challenged the wall and the boundaries it creates with its Instant City
and Walking City. Here cities have form and a certain idea of boundary, but the
boundary is undermined by the ease with which the city can be either moved or
assembled and disassembled. In this formulation, cities become a generalized
notion of event space.
But the liberatory apotheosis of architecture was no more evident than with the
proposals put forth by Superstudio. The Continuous Monument of 1969, the global,
gridded megastructure, homogenized everything in its wake. Manifested in the
Arizona desert as a wall, it connected, rather than divided, the landscape.
With firm ideological underpinnings linking the objectives of the discipline to
notions of utopia, these proposals hoped that by eradicating barriers, they would
also eliminate social and economic inequalities.
2
48
CONTINUITY DENIED
But the Berlin Wall represented the failure to achieve these utopian goals. It was
here that wall reasserted the abject materiality of architecture in an incontestably
tangible way. Unlike the wall proposed by Superstudio, this was a wall that divided
a city and a people. As such it became the ontological epicenter of a worldwide
conflict of ideology.
It also revealed not simply the failure to achieve utopia, but also the oppressive
potential of architecture. Three years after Superstudio ran a wall through the
Arizona desert meant to unify entire swaths of landscape, Rem Koolhaas published
an essay documenting the deleterious effects of the wall in Berlin. In his 1972
essay The Berlin Wall as Architecture, he explains that architectures liberating
potentialevaporated on the spot once the wall had been built.
3
He further
categorized architecture into the oppressive role of division, enclosure (i.e.,
imprisonment), and exclusion.
4
And with this, Koolhaas sounded the death knell
for architectures capacity to build utopia.

E-TOPIA
5
But in this crucible of this conflict, where the failed attempt at emancipation was
made manifest in the wall, a new utopian possibility emerged. The looming
potential for nuclear war, signified by the division of Berlin, led to a surge in the
development of cybernetic technologies. With this apocalyptic potential also came
a utopian potential empowered by its possibility to overcome the barrier imposed by
the wall.
In transcending the physical limitations of architecture, cyberspace could restore
the prospect of space on a global scale. One need only glance at a world map of
internet networks to appreciate the infinite potential of this new spatiality. Free from
the limitations of architectures boundary, cyberspace could be at once a No Stop
City and an Instant City and a Continuous Monument. Borders and boundaries
could for once be eradicated.
The mantle of utopia passed to cyberspace. What the Berlin Wall enclosed,
cyberspace re-opened. In other words, the utopian project was once again a
possibility.
Marshall McLuhans proclamation that the city no longer exists, and that the
metropolis is obsolete, forecasts the emerging prevalence of cyberspace as an
alternative to the modern metropolis.
6
It was hoped that in the global village of
cyberspace, a borderless, boundary-less space could finally be realized.
In his conversation with Jean Nouvel, Jean Baudrillard says la ville nest plus une
forme en devenir, elle est un rseau extensif. He elaborates that cette urbanit-l
nest plus celle dune ville, cest celle de sa possibilit infinie. It is une urbanit
virtuelle.
7
Cyberspace, therefore, holds the possibilit infinie, whose architectural
predecessor abruptly ended in Berlin.
49
THE ISRAELI CONDITION
But just as Berlin cut short the hopes of architecture as liberation, so too is the
hope of cyberspace as a liberatory condition cut short by yet another wall. The
Separation Boundary currently being built in Israel evaporates the hope for a
cybernetic utopia.
Unlike the Berlin Wall, which could be overcome by cyberspace, the Israeli wall
is being constructed in a condition where the global potential for cyberspace has
already been largely realized.
Eventually extending over 750 km, the Israeli Government is building the wall
ostensibly to establish a definitive border between Israel and Palestine, but which
will eventually create isolated and fragmented Palestinian enclaves.

OBJECTHOOD QUESTIONED
After the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, widespread accessibility to internet networks
reconfigured notions of space. The cybernetic condition recasts subjects as neo-
nomads who are free from the constraints of tectonic architecture.
This reconsideration of space demands a reconsideration of the object. The
contemporary condition is one that prompted Baudrillard to claim that lobjet
nxiste plus, la limite, il disparait.
8
No longer can the object can be
characterized in a privileged ontological status. The primary attribute of the modern
material object is its impending potential to dematerialize. Baudrillard again: toute
chose relle est prte disparatre.
9

The computer further undermined the potency of the object. By acting in an
intermediary or even surrogate role, the computer further estranges the human
relationship with the tangible. Paul Virilio has identified this as a condition where
material things disappear into the network.
Within the context of this new cybernetic spatiality and cybernetic objecthood,
the efficacy of a concrete barrier must be questioned. The Berlin Wall imposed a
spatial limit condition. By way of its tectonics, it created a definitive enclave. The
now famous images of the Berlin Airlift demonstrate the power of the wall as a
means to interrupt space. Only with cargo aircraft could this wall be overcome.
While the tectonic quality of Berlin was itself a limit condition, cyberspace pushed
beyond that limit and forced a new definition of space and object.
DIALECTICS OF THE WALL
The Separation Barrier opens up a dialectic vis--vis the walls objecthood. It can
be said that the wall as object, in the context of a global cyberspace, is instantly
prte a disparatre. It capitulates its own objecthood in the face of cyberspace.
Conversely, it could be perceived as the ultimate triumph of the object, its salient
materiality a resistance against its own dematerialization.

50
Wall as Immaterial
In a global network where space is infinitely indeterminate, the wall is impotent
as a means of establishing a boundary. In this way its objecthood is negligible or
nonexistentinstantly immaterial.
Toute chose relle est prte disparatre. The physical walls existence is
predicated on its own impending obsolescence. In the walls reality, it readies itself
to disappear and to be transcended by cyberspace. Concrete barriers are irrelevant
in the global village. The wall will be overcome by e-topia.
Wall as Object
The reverse could also be true, where its existence reclaims the ontological primacy
of the object, and thereby negates the indeterminacy of space.
At first glance this eight meter high concrete wall would seem to accomplish just
that. It runs through urban areas like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and in so doing, it
aggressively forces a tectonic rupture in the city. It is oftentimes flanked by barbed
wire fencing, and it is framed on each side by ten meters of empty space called
the seam-line. Its monolithic quality is broken up rhythmically by imposing
cylindrical guard towers. Its abject materiality is unavoidably tangible, and it
restores to the object a tectonic quality lost in the cybernetic era.

Dialectic Resolution: Wall as Avatar
But a third possibility emerges from this dialectic. The wall is indeed an object de
rigeur, but it is effective inasmuch as it is an avatar for a larger conceptthe digital
fortress of Israel.
This wall is neither strictly ontological nor is its materiality immediately
ephemeralized by cybernetics. Rather, the wall becomes an avatar for a larger
security concept. Berlin was a limit condition as a real and efficacious boundary.
Israel is problematic in that its boundary exists in an environment where it has been
deemed possible to transcend physical boundary through cyberspace.
In its role as a Digital Wall, it too is a limit condition of exclusion. Just as the hopes
of modern architecture were denied by a wall in Berlin, so too are those utopian
hopes of cyberspace denied by a system of exclusion in Israel.
This is not meant to ignore the urgent humanistic implications of the wall itself, for
it is highly oppressive and exclusionary to those whose lives are affected by it. But
the wall as avatar highlights a potentially more oppressive exclusion generated by a
program of digital exclusion.
When the barrier is completed, the concrete portion of the wall will ultimately
comprise only 6% of the total wall. The remaining 94% will consist of a digital
security concept.
This system is an unmistakable physical intervention, but it cannot be interpreted as
a twenty-first century, Mediterranean version of Berlin. This is a digital wall.
51
DIGITAL WALL: GROUND PLANE
The separation line is officially known to the Israeli Defense Force as a Multi-
Layered Fence System
10
Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer explains
that the continuous obstacle is not only a fence, but rather a security concept.
11

This is not a wall that is maintained or patrolled. It is a system that is
implemented within the Ground Forces Command by the Digital Ground Forces
Project.
12

Except for the concrete sections that run through the urban areas of Jerusalem and
Bethlehem, the wall is composed of an Intrusion Detection Fence that bears a
striking resemblance to a basic chain-link fence. This fence gathers information
about events along its perimeter. Its sensitivity is sufficient to detect the difference
between a breeze and a squirrel.
13
This wall is in fact a taut wire intrusion
detection system that is connected to a data network.
14
As a security concept more than a wall, the borderline converts the human intruder
into digital information. The information gathered is transmitted online to a central
command and control unit. Soldiers, who are equipped with real-time GPS maps,
are then directed to the areas of suspicion.
THE VERITCAL COASTLINE
The space that internet networks actually occupy is the altogether intangible,
unrepresentable milieu of cyberspace. With the advent and explosive growth of
wireless networks, the airspace above becomes the site of occupation. In this way,
cyberspace sees its manifest destiny not only horizontally, but vertically, and indeed
indeterminately in all directions.
The physical wall on the ground, along with the digital Intrusion Detection Fence,
is limited in that it is restricted to the ground plane. Cyberspace, however, does not
have such restrictions.
The emphasis on the vertical is an outgrowth of Modernist thinking that identified
the sky as a frontier to be developed. The CIAM Charter of Athens concluded that
town planning is a three-dimensional science, not a two-dimensional one.
15
3
52
Rem Koolhaas valorized the vertical in Delirious New York. Verticality, he said, was
a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
16
Paul Virilio also identified a shift in orientation when he spoke of a vertical
coastline.
17
And Deleuze and Guattari expanded on Virilios notion by
characterizing this vertical coastline of the sky as smooth space par excellence.
18

And it is this frontierthe vertical coastlinethat has been settled by the network
signals that comprise cyberspace. It is the sky, therefore, that holds the utopian
promise of a global community. And it is in the sky that this hope for the global is
denied by a digital wall in the spirit of enclosure and exclusion.
Vertical space is a paramount concern in the contemporary condition, but it comes
to a critical crescendo in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Meron Benvenisti, writer and
mayor of Jerusalem, once described the area as a collapse of three dimensions
into six: three Israeli and three Palestinian.
19
Israel and Palestine are not two different places that can be imagined to coexist
side by side, but are in effect different readings of the same place, with overlapping
memories.
20
Given this condition of overlapping claims, the dimension of height
becomes critically important.
This situation reaches its most condensed embodiment at the Temple Mount.
Purportedly the site where Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac, this is a site of
utmost sacrality to the three major monotheistic religions in Jerusalem. To further
complicate the complexity of the site, it is also the place where Mohammed is said
to have left the earth to heaven. The rock that is his last point of contact on earth
is monumentalized by the Dome of the Rock. This edifice is built over the Wailing
Wall, which is the last physical remnant of the Temple of Solomon, the most sacred
tangible place in Judaism.
This convergence of sacred spaces has been at the epicenter of the larger Arab-
Israeli conflict. Former US president Bill Clinton proposed a vertical solution to the
problem of partitioning the Temple Mount whereby the rock from which Mohammed
ascended and the Dome of the Rock that monumentalizes it would be under
sovereign Palestinian control, and the ground plane along with the subterranean
foundation would be Israeli.
DIGITAL WALL: 6-D
The digital ramifications are manifold in this environment of six-dimensionality.
One of the major outcomes of the Clinton Camp David talks was that Israel agreed
to the concept of a Palestinian state in exchange for continued sovereignty over the
airspace. The end result is that Palestinians will have municipal authority over
their towns, but Israel retains effective control over security, water, land, air space
and airwaves.
21
The Israeli Defense Force currently exercises control over airspace, including in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
General Shimon Navez, Director of the Israeli Defense Forces Operational Theory
Research Institute, explains that as long as Israel controls the air space, what
53
happens on the ground is essentially irrelevant from a security standpoint.
22

Implicit in this assessment is that the most acute forms of exclusion now happen in
the 6-D airspace.
Israel also controls electromagnetic radiation, and thus the elusive matrix of
cyberspace. The Oslo Accord of 1993 states that all aviation activity or usage
of the airspaceshall require prior approval of Israel. And at Camp David Israel
demanded continued use of the airspace and electromagnetic space and their
supervision.

In addition to controlling the airspace itself, Israel controls most licenses and
satellite microwave frequencies.
23
Until the 1993 Oslo Accord, Israel controlled
all telecommunication business in the country. As a result of a compromise in
the Accord, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was able to establish its own
telecommunications company. In 1995, Palestine created PALTEL as a response
to that concession. But paradoxically, Israel continues to retain control of the
Palestinian frequency spectrum as a result of the same Accord that allowed for the
creation of PALTEL. So while the company is free to run a telecommunications
company, Israel continues to control the spectrum in which it operates.
Thus Israel has unbridled access to surveillance, and the unilateral option to
exclude Palestinians from cyberspace. In this way, Palestinians are isolated from
the global space that carried with it the potential for utopia, what Baudrillard calls a
condition dexclusion.
24
Like modern architecture, which also promised utopia but which also resulted in
creating a system of division, enclosure, and exclusion, digital space must confront
its own failed objectives. And the line of confrontation is drawn again by a wall, but
one that acts as an avatar for dystopia.
54
Endnotes
1
Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York: Harcourt (1989), 63.
2
Frederick Kiesler, Space City architecture in Programs & Manifestoes on 20th
century architecture, Cambridge: MIT (1971), 98.
3
Koolhaas, Rem, Field Trip in S,M,L,XL, New York: Monacelli (1996), p. 226.
4
Koolhaas, p. 226.
5
A term coined by Bill Mitchell, and the title of his book.
6
Marshall McLuhan, The Alchemy of Social Change, in Verbi-Voco-Visual
Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967).
7
Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, Les objets singuliers, Paris: Calmann-Lvy
(2000), 76. [The urban life is no longer the life of the city but its infinite possibility:
a virtual urban life]
8
Baudrillard & Nouvel, 56. [the object ceases to existat some point it simply
disappears]
9
Baudrillard & Nouvel, 53. [every real thing is prepared to disappear]
10
http://www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/pages/eng/operational.htm
11
Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, as cited in Ellis Shurman, Construction of Security
Fence Criticized as Setting Political Border, Israel Insider, June 17, 2002, http://
web.israelinsider.com/articles/security/1137.htm
12
http://www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/pages/eng/operational.htm
13
David Rosenberg, Playing it Safe?, The Jerusalem Report, April 8, 1993, 49.
14
Daniel Bertrand Monk, Border Spaces/Ghettospheres in Against the Wall, New
York: The New Press (2005), 207.
15
CIAM: Charter of Athens: tenets in Programs & Manifestoes of 20th century
architecture, 141.
16
Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York, New York: Monacelli (1994), 87.
17
Virilio, Paul, Linscurit du territoire, Paris: Stock (1975), p. 100.
18
Deleuze and Guattari, Milles Plateaus, p. 480.
19
Meron Benvenisti, An Engineering Wander in Pre/occupations despace/
Jerusalem au Pluriel. Marseille: Image en Manoevres Editions (2001), 171.
20
Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: The Barrier Archipelago and the Impossible
Politics of Separation in Against the Wall, 247.
21
Edward Said, The Middle East Peace Process, in The Edward Said Reader,
New York: Vintage (2000), 384.
22
New York Times, Jan 1, 2006
23
Keller Easterling, Parrandos Paradox: Error in Holy Lands in The Next
Jerusalem, Michael Sorkin, ed., New York: Monacelli (2002), 185.
24
Baudrillard & Nouvel, 109.
All illustrations courtesy of Rina Castelnuovo.
55
Is it nowadays possible to talk about Nature?
During the last decades, Science Studies have tried to redefine the
concept of nature according to our present time, its knowledge and
technologies.
1
People like Ilya Prigogine, Michel Serres, Edgar Morin,
Manuel De Landa, Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour have attempted to
draw up how a new alliance between Nature and Sciences could be
signed.
2
This task has not only meant a re-shaping of our understanding of
scientific disciplines related to nature, like biology or physics, but it has
also arisen some social, cultural and political debate. In general terms, we
could consider that these consequences have been channelled through
two main perspectives, one that can be labelled as global or totalizing,
and another one that can be understood as particular or differential.
Although it may sometimes be difficult to disjoint these two trends, we
could roughly describe them with these short statements: 1- the unity of
the ecosystem in which we live; 2- the dissolution of the particles of the
subjects we used to be.
Nevertheless, constructing the argument from the opposite side, it is also
true that most of the socio-cultural preoccupations posed by Science
Studies have been re-captured by contemporary society itself. If people
like Michel Serresor Edgar Morin have arisen the question of constructing
a consciousness of the unity of the Earth, its ecological biodiversity and
our anthropobiophysic status within it (what they call the becoming of the
Planetary Age and our terrestrial destiny), nothing has been more actively
powerful to fuel these perceptions than the social consciousness of totality
inspired by our Digital Culture -from the data transmission during the Cold
War to mass media and the Internet-.
3
Likewise, if people like Donna
Haraway or Peter Sloterdijk have posed the question of a redefinition of
the contemporary subject and its environment in terms of human and nonhuman
being particles and composition mixed up-, there is nothing better
than the present anxieties of the contemporary subject with his technoscientific
conscience dissolved in fluxes of information, genes and digital
seduction, to feed this contemporary metaphysics.
4
Francisco Gonzlez de Canales
klMkLlIkIl0 l
0, 1
56
Obviously, Architecture, as socio-cultural and political construction, cannot
be alien to this determinant cultural event, and it has to realign its battle
fronts in order to confront the collapse of culture and nature proposed by
the authors above, which changes around the external referent on which
modern and classical architectural discipline were laying on. Deeply
immersed in the digital culture of the image, architectural discipline has to
confront this question not only as a general principle of re-organization,
but also as a matter of sensitivity. That is, the idea of nature will transcend
towards a new definition of materiality that will re-configure our way of
looking at our environment.
If the question of nature has been approached from global/particular
points, the question of materiality will also have two possible answers in
architecture. On the one hand, this new material realm could be
understood as an expansion of our bodies through the natural-artificial
infrastructure that configures our present world, re-defining our place in it.
Thus, the consciousness of our common in-touch-ment in a single
collective (nature, artefacts, and society) and its management and
maintenance will reconfigure our present construction of ethics. On the
other hand, the Digital World will magnify the experience of this new
environment, exaggerating all physical sensations. Thereby, the attempt to
enjoy a pure sensual world, absolutely informal and fluid, will illustrate
most of our contemporary fantasies. In short: co-belonging to our
environment as an ethic and expanding our pure material sensation as a
projection, will trace the two main guidelines for realigning our architectural
thinking according to the new conceptions of this society-nature.
5
Finally, these two attributions can be organized around a new figure of
action, or in other words, a new symbolic metaphor of the subject. Hence
humans are moving toward their integration into the new ecosystem
derived from the redefinition of a society-nature, the circle of life of animals
will become the first step of interaction, testing and experimentation.
Animals and animal life would evoke the pureness of that sensitivity, both
sensual and absolutely soaked in its own environment. In our recent
imaginary, literally or metaphorically, the boundaries between man and
animal will begin to be blurred.
The worrying humanized animals designed by Patricia Piccinini (figures 1,
2), the animalized symbolism of the artist Matthew Bartney in his
Cremaster Cycle (figures 3, 4) or the biological hybridisms in films like
David Cronenbergs Existenz, begin to shape the new sophisticated
bestiary of our days. However, this issue can also be understood as a
broader cultural phenomenon in itself. As Steve Baker has written on the
presence of animals in contemporary art: a familiar feature of the rhetoric
of much recent art and philosophy has been the characterization of the
human self or body as impure, hybrid or monstrous, in contrast to the
allegedly uncreative propriety of modernist and humanist accounts of
subjectivity. Neither the aesthetics of modernism nor the philosophical
values of humanism, it is believed, can cope easily with hybrid forms
which unsettle boundaries, most especially the boundaries of human and
not human.
6
Somehow, the presence of biological monsters, man-animal
hybrids, transgenic hominids and so on, has been fostered by a society
which considers transculturation and multiculturalism as positive and
desirable values. But when a transgenic flux goes from men to animals,
2
57
from animals to plants, we are not only talking about a matter of
hybridizing different cultures or social conceptions. The deep issue is that
we are also talking about hybridizing different natures. In a world where
culture and nature are collapsing, the collective no longer construes itself
as a society in a single nature. In other words, we could say that
multiculturalism is related to the traditional cultures in the same way as the
traditional universe -the single nature of modernism- has to be open to a
pluriverse;
7
or following our own argument on man-animal hybrids, we
could say that the openness that relates man-culture to transculturation,
has to be the same as the one that relates man-nature to animalization.
Nevertheless, we should also point out that the culture which confuses
subject and infrastructure; the culture that has the concept of mixture as its
best potential (at a very low cost); the culture that could review the
pluralism of natures (through free replication), in short, the culture we are
talking about, it is no other than the Digital Culture that exists within our
own cybernetic condition. The biological hybrid has to be necessarily
understood within that culture as an advanced cyborg, or probably, as a
post-cyborg presence. So finally: could it be that the arousal of an Age of
the Digital Culture has inevitably led us towards a whole process of human
animalization?
Each period has usually related its own way of doing architecture to the
very specific subject that was supposed to inhabit it. Hence, modern
architects used to build for their ideal subject; the post-WWII architects
wanted to build for the ordinary person; the architects deserting from
modernity brought the angels; later the humans became cyborgs And
now, it seems that it is the transgenic monster which is introduced as the
new contemporary inhabitant. The old cyborgs have to be updated. Donna
Haraway wrote: I begin with stories, histories, ecologies, and technologies
of the space-faring NASA machine-organism hybrids named cyborg in
1960. Those cyborgs were appropriated to do feminist work in the
Reagans Star Wars time of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium,
however, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to
gather up the threads needed for serious critical inquiry.
8
However, the
common man did not actually displace the ideal man, nor did the angel
displace the cyborg. The transgenic animal has been collecting its
attributions since the collapse of modernity. As a consequence, it will still
3
58
have something of the ideal, but also the closeness of the ordinary; it will
keep the aura of the angel and the weak confusion of the cyborg being.
Nevertheless, before entering into the logic of the contemporary
transgenic hybrid, the man-animal relationship has to deal with two
concepts that have tried to prevent their encounter for a long time. These
two concepts, strongly fostered in the second half of the twentieth century,
are humanism and identity.
Beyond humanism: Post-History and Post-Human
In the chapter Animalization of Giorgio Agambens book The Open, he
writes: It was in some ways already evident starting with the end of the
First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of
taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to
disappear. We completely misunderstand the nature of the great
totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century if we see them only as
carrying out of the nineteenth century nation states last great tasks:
nationalism and imperialism. The stakes are now different and much
higher, for it is a question of taking on as a task the very factual existence
of peoples, that is, in the last analysis, their bare life. Seen in this light, the
totalitarisms of the twentieth century truly constitute the other face of the
Hegelo-Kojevian idea of the end of history: man has now reached his
historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there is
nothing left but the de-politicing of human societies by means of the
unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life
itself as the supreme political (or rather apolitical) task.
9
Although the idea of the end of the history has already been exploited by
our contemporary post fever anxieties, the concept of the end of the
history take us to the first French existenialism, and in particular to
Alexandre Kojve, who popularized it among others such as Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty or Bataille. Kojve re-read Hegel from an anthropological
point of view in which the end of history means the end of the obstacles
until now interposed between the man and the control of its own destiny.
However, resituating this concept from the perspective of contemporary
bipolitics, Agamben poses another interesting historical point, that is:
Could we say that totalitarian biopolitics and the total management of
biological life is the consequent result of the failure of modernism and its
great collective tasks? In other words, when the traditional potentialities of
poetry, religion and philosophy are cultural shows, it seems that the only
serious task to be accomplished is the total management of biological
life, and that is what European totalitariansms certainly tried to do.
For a long time the main task of the human collective was its selfdistinction
from other realities. To become human was to get separated
from the animal nature of man, thus to differentiate human from nature.
Classical ontology is based on this disjunction of man, in this caesura that
is extended to all categories: man and animal, nature and history, life and
death. The fall of the great tasks is the fall of the jointed collective, but it is
also the liberation of the animal nature of man. In light of these reflections,
it seems that all the intellectual attempts of recovering the spirit of
humanism after the animalization of WWII are prone to be misaddressed.
59
What was wrong about Nazis animalization was not the animalization
itself (the re-introduction of the biological life), but the totalization and way
of managing this animal life now freed. The intellectual problem after WWII
was not how to be human again, how to retrieve humanism, but rather
how to bring the collective together again maintaining the animal nature of
man. Neither Sartre nor Heidegger seemed to understand this. Peter
Sloterdijk has pointed out this misunderstanding revising the concept of
humanism. According to Sloterdijk, it is ridiculous to continue maintaining
the humanist dream which Heidegger wanted to back up for the last time
with his letter on humanism, and all he achieved was the masking of an
irreversible situation for longer. It is not, therefore, as Heidegger would
say, in the waking up of the being, in the revelation of the being who
contemplates the dismantling of the categories of language where man
becomes man and obtains its liberation.
10
Humanity has to let humanism
go. Now is time for reconciliation between men and animals, human and
nature.
Co-existing: Hybridizing natural identities
Where does one body end and where do the other ones begin to exist?
In our daily life we share vapor and air, microbes, bacteria and all kind of
microorganisms that move from body to body, from men to animals. It is
difficult to say, for instance, that the intestinal flora living within us is not
part of our body, although according to the old categories of objects and
subjects it had to be consider as an alien living organism. The same
occurs when someone suffers a xenotransplantation. Is the man who
received in his body the pancreas of a pig more animalized? In a project
called Utility Pets Elio Caccavale asked himself this same question. The
problem would lay in how the relationship between a man and his potential
donor pet had to be.
11
For someone like Donna Haraway, the
consequences of this world of biological exchanges have changed around
all our consciousness about ourselves. Following the pig example, every
animal would be like a potential donor, or more exactly, as if their organs
could be considered an extension of our organs. But that does not have a
utilitarian meaning. Contrary to cyborgs, cats, pigs, and dogs are neither a
projection nor a realization of a human intention. They are just what they
are: cats, pigs and dogs. His definition of companion species has to do
with that extension of the human body towards a sort of animalism.
12
In
fact, if we try to identify the boundaries of our contemporary subject the
question then would be: could we really separate this subject from the
others (artifacts, nature, people) if we really want to construct an accurate
definition of his identity?
The issue of animalization arises, then, a deep metaphysical problem.
Genetic technologies have radically pointed out this indiscernible
boundeary between man and animal. Seen in the light of genetics, the
question of the definition of the human self changes from the objective
spirit in which classical ontology was based (object-subject, culture-nature)
to the principle of information (genes). Configuration and existence are
related to the fact that there is information, not to a delimited body to which
we address our preoccupations. In the genetic fluxes man becomes
something like a vector of forces, a concentration, a possibility of
60
composition.
13
Nevertheless, although the problem of genetics is very
recent, the question of transcending the classic ontology was already
posed before the arrival of transgenic realities. In fact, could we nowadays
say that the pure subject of modernity had ever existed? In other words,
could it be that man had always been a hybrid?
Different scholars have tried to prove this same hypothesis from very
different perspectives. Donna Haraway, for instance, has researched into
the history of man-animal co-habitation through the lens of evolutionary
Darwinism. As domestic animals appeared in human life from very early
times, their presence could be more accurately situated in human
evolution as a co-constitutive element. In fact, it is this extended
cohabitation what has made man and animal what they are. There had to
be certain reciprocity in their respective developments. According to
Haraway, this common history where dogs and humans shape each other
in a long and complicated history is what makes humans and dogs
companion species from the beginning. There is like some kind of coevolution
and co-constitution of man and animal.
14
In a parallel way, the
same occurs with artifacts. It would not be so weird to say that humans
have always been cyborgs. Certainly, they have always been carrying and
keeping their tools and artifacts with them. Man always appears in his
biological evolution with its own tools as something co-constitutive to
himself, as an inseparable fact. In short, from a revised evolutionary
Darwinism, man has never appeared isolated, pure, alone, and its own
constitution has a lot to do with the animals and artifacts that were born
and raised with him.
From another point of view, Bruno Latour has turned around towards
comparative anthropology in order to search for a model of man-nature cohabitation,
what he calls the new task of political ecology. But his research
has nothing to do with finding natural values in exotic societies. Latour
clarifies: If comparative anthropology offers a helping hand to political
ecology, it is once again for a reason that is precisely the opposite of the
one advanced by popular ecology. Non-western cultures have never been
interested in nature; they have never adopted it as a category. On the
contrary, Westeners were the ones who turned nature into a big deal, an
immense political diorama, a formidable moral gigantomachy, and who
constantly brought nature into definition of their social order.
15
If
comparative anthropology is helpful it is because it offers a model in which
humans and non-humans are not separated. The problem for Latour is
4
61
that once we have accepted the fact that we cannot maintain our
understanding of the world as this separation of subject-objects,
nature/society, we have to look for new means of maintaining the new
collective of human-non humans together. We cannot simple bring
objects and subjects together, since the division between Nature and
Society is not made in such a way that we can get beyond it. We have to
consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans
capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the
apportionment of capabilities.
16
For Latour, some non-western cultures
have maintained this state of things where neither animals nor artifacts
have been separated from man, thus they can keep a hybrid collective
together. Probably, as he asserts in his first works: it would be better to
think that we have never been modern, that we have never stopped doing
-in praxis- what the most important schools of Philosophy prohibited us,
in other words, that we have been mixing object and subjects, bestowing
intentionality to things, socializing the matter and redefining human
beings.
17
The Becoming Animal
We have seen that humanism wanted to preserve the old dichotomy of
classical ontology, which prevented the reintroduction of biological life into
the human orders (Agamben). Likewise, in the light of the fluxes of genes
(Sloterdijk), the consciousness of co-evolutions (Haraway) and the
assumption of new collectives of humans and non humans (Latour), the
traditional preoccupation of identity has become irrelevant. However, to
propose an inhabitable environment which would close the gap between
man and animal will not be so easy. The question is again: how could we
nowadays inhabit with/as animals again? And even more: how could we
foresee the settings for this cohabitation?
The human that is opened to the animalism that modernity had repressed
is also open to his biology and his physical reality, to his flesh and body.
Gilles Deleuze has written about his concept of becoming animal in
relation to Francis Bacons paintings: (becoming animal) It is not an
arrangement between man and beast, it is not a likeness. It is a profound
identity; it is an indiscernible zone deeper than any other sentimental
5
62
identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast which suffers is a
man.
18
Furthermore, according to Deleuze, Bacon is bringing art closer to
man as the suffering piece of flesh that he is, closer to mans animal
reality. The artist is moving around an uncertain unspeakable zone
between human and animal, a new fleshy realm where, nevertheless,
spirituality is not absent. It is not a lack of spirit; it is a spirit that is body, a
corporeal and vital insufflations, an animal spirit. It is the animal spirit of
man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit... For Deleuze, the logic of
sensation brings together the animal spirit with a way of painting in which
the sensation is neither a simple play with light and colors nor a
sentimental expression; instead, it is a way of acting-presenting (more
than representing) directly addressed to the body, to the piece of flesh.
That is why Bacons paintings affect directly to the nervous system and
instincts, triggering very different sensitive points. Between a color, a
flavor, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential
communication which would constitute the pathic (non representational)
event of sensation.
19
(figures 5, 6).
Bringing together the concepts becoming animal and the logic of
sensation, Gilles Deleuze is opening a way to understand an artistic
production which could provide us the animalized environments which the
animal-human hybrid could inhabit today. Hence, some of this logic could
be directly translated to contemporary designers such as Diller & Scofidio,
Pipilotti Rist or Petra Blaisse. Thus for example, in the paradigmatic Blur
Project designed by Diller & Scofidio, a blurred architecture will be
understood as a group of particles floating in the air, moving from body to
body, penetrating our flesh in a totally informal way where the self is
dissolved in the logic of the inapprehensible cloud (figure 7).
On the other hand, the work of the intriguing artist Pipilotti Rist explores
the potentiality of unusual and exaggerated relations between forms and
colors. Confronting her video-installations we feel that the fragments and
spots that we are receiving seem to connect us directly with the very deep
corporeal and visceral sensation, appearing as an overwhelming set of
experiences that can not be processed by the brain (figure 8). In her last
works, she is also expanding this logic to multi-screen performances,
which wrap us into a fully hyper-sensorial environment (figure 9). Likewise,
something similar could be said about the designer Petra Blaise, who has
recently mastered the augmentation of the material properties in the
interiors of some OMAs buildings. In her case, the extensive use of
sensual curtains and digitally modified materials also approach us to this
animal ideal of a pure sensitive environment (figure 10). So it seems that,
finally, at the beginning of the 21st century, the sensual path towards
animalization is definitively open, arising with it all our unavoidable
becoming animal.

6
7
63
Endnotes
1
Science Studies is an interdisciplinary and critical research area that seeks
to situate scientific activity into a social, political or philosophical context. It is
concerned with the history of scientific disciplines and the interrelationships
between science and society.
2
De Landa, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2002; Haraway, Donna. The companion species
manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm,
2003; Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004; Morin, Edgar and Kern, Anne Brigitte. Homeland
earth: a manifesto for the new millennium. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998;
Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. Order out of chaos: mans new dialogue
with nature. Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1984; Michel Serres. The
natural contract. translated by Elizabeth MacArthur. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995. Although not all that people have very different background
and expertise, I have found the recent term Sciences Studies very useful to joint
all that production of intelligensia together. Probably we could also add people
like Peter Sloterdijk -who has worked from metaphysics- or Felix Guattari -
from psychoanalysis-. The later popularized the term Ecosophy, which refers to
philosophies which have a predominant ecocentric or biocentric perspective such
as ecofeminism, social ecology, and deep ecology. I do not put them directly in
the list above because it is not so clear that they are so strictly related to Science
Studies, but their works are complementary to it.
3
Morin and Kern. Homeland earth: a manifesto for the new millennium; Serres.The
natural contract.
4
Haraway. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant
otherness; Peter Sloterdijk, El hombre auto-operable, in Sileno, Madrid, 2001
(translated by Fernando Lavalle)
5
I will call socio-nature the collective assembly of machines, nature and people (or
humans and nonhumans), and its common recognition, values, orders and
institutions. An idea of common assembly, or in other words, the no necessity of an
exterior to define the things, has been clearly proposed by Bruno Latour and Michel
Serres. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004
and Michel Serres. The natural contract. translated by Elizabeth MacArthur. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
6
Baker, Steve. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2000, 99
7
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, 43
8
Haraway, Donna.Cyborgs to companion species: Reconfiguring kinship in
technoscience, in The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004, 307
9
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open. Man and Animal. Traslated by Kevin Attell.
Standford: Standford University Press, 200476
10
Sloterdijk, Peter. Notas para el parque humano. Madrid: Siruela, 2000
11
In a close future, Caccavale imagines how people will be given a piglet with their
own DNA engineered into it when they are born, something like a life assurance.
Caccavale, Elio. Utility Pets in Dune; Anthony and Raby, Fiona, eds. Bioland.
London, 2003. There are other interesting projects about man-animal identity in
Caccavales work like My Bio (2004) or Hybrids (2005)
12
Refering to that relation she writes: companion species is about a four-part
composition, in which co-constitution, finitude, impurity and complexity are
what is, Haraway. Cyborgs to companion species: Reconfiguring kinship in
technoscience, 302
8
10
9
64
13
See for example the careful metaphysical explanation in Sloterdijk, Peter, El
hombre auto-operable, in Sileno, Madrid, 2001, 80-91
14
Haraway, Cyborgs to companion species: Reconfiguring kinship in
technoscience, 305-306
15
Latour, 34
16
Latour, 37
17
Latour, Bruno. Ciencia en accin, Barcelona: Labor, 1992, 260 (translation by
author)
18
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon. Lgica de la sensacin, Madrid: Arena Libros,
2001, 33 (translation by author)
19
Deleuze, 48

0, 1. Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family, in We are family, 2003, Courtesy of
Paticia Piccinini
2. Patricia Picinini, Undivided, in Nature Little Helpers, 2004, Courtesy of
Paticia Piccinini
3. Matthew Barney, Loughton Manual, in Cremaster 4, 1994, (still from film),
Harvard Fine Arts Library
4. Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3, 2002 (still from film), Harvard Fine Arts Library
5. Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944,
Harvard Fine Arts Library
6. Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes, 1969, Harvard Fine Arts
Library
7. Diller & Scofidio, The Blur Building, Swiss National Expo 2002, Yverdon-Les-
Bains (Switzerland), 2002, Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro
8. Pipilotti Rist, Kyss frosken, 2003 (still from video), Courtesy of Pipilotti Rist
9. Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, 1996, Courtesy of Pipilotti Rist
10. Petra Blaisse, Mick Jagger Center, Dartford (England), 1999-2000, Andreas
Pauly
65
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by Fernando Lavalle from the transcription of the original lecture in
German: Der operable Mensch, Harvard, CES, May 19, 2000)
_______: Notas para el parque humano, Madrid, Siruela, 2000 (translated from the
original lecture in German by Teresa Rocha Barco: Regeln fr den Menschenpark,
Frankfurt, 1999)
Web pages
www.patriciapiccinini.net
www.cremaster.net
www.eliocaccavale.com
www.davidcronenberg.de
www.insideoutside.nl
www.pipilottirist.net
www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/dillerscofidio.html
67
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Luis Miguel Lus-Arana
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I. INTRO: Piranesi and Schuiten:
I.I. Des Auteurs Obscures
Bramante felt that he could not do without it: It was a tool which stimulated his
imagination to produce the invenzione (...) It was able to extend the real into
the illusory as moving artistic creation.
Arnaldo Bruschi in Bramante
1
Since he first appeared in the world of comic books as a partner to Claude Rnard
2

in 1980, Franois Schuiten has become a fundamental author to explain the
evolution of European comics through the last quarter of the 20th Century. Along
his career, Schuiten and his works have revealed an extraordinary example of both
theoretical and formal coherence in the creation of a fragmentary world where his
different interests and obsessions if the term obsessive can be anyhow applied
to Schuitens Germanic rigor- crystallize in architectural shape. Architecture and
engineering, their logics, and their representation have been the vehicle for Schuiten
to reshape this multiplicity of interests into imaginary scenarios where an exquisite
heterogeneity coexists with the unbearable coherence of the surreal.
Often related to Yona Friedmans (un)feasible architectural utopias, with the
publication of The Tower in 1987, Schuiten will call attention towards the depiction
of an inner world that will recall E.C. Eschers visual deceptions, but, above all,
the creations of another master of speculative architecture: Giambattista Piranesi.
Schuiten brings back a reflection on the concept of heterotopia, that Michel
Foucault had coined
3
to depict the times of simultaneity and has been recurrently
used to refer to the Italian master. Like Piranesi, Schuiten will become, through
his partnerships with Claude Rnard, Benot Peeters and his brother Luc, a master
of architectural prospective that will attain fascination through complexity and will
recreate in his work Kantian sublimity through a surrealistic plausibility.
0
69
Built in the style of an inner veduta, in La Tour (The Tower) Francois Schuiten and
Benot Peeters offer us a new reading of Giambattista Piranesis work, through a
rendition of the spaces he created for the Carceri dinvenzione (1745 - 1760)
that progressively reveals as a contemporary treatise on the work of the Venetian
architect of amazing lucidity.
4
I.II. La Tour : Piranesi by Schuiten
Cest un abandon, une pourriture des lieux qui constituent pour moi un rel
plaisir graphique(...).
Franois Schuiten on Giambattista Piranesi
5
In this study, we will describe and analyze, through Schuitens work, some of the
characteristics of Piranesian space, a mental and, above all, graphic - construct
that has fascinated historians, painters,
6
writers and architects along History, and
that today retains its validity, being it possible to track its presence in the images
that the architectural neo-avant-garde offers to us.
7
Along the text, we will identify the features of Piranesis pictures that can be found in
the Belgian artists work, not only those concerning the very architectural syntax, but
also those ones that the traditional historiography (Wittkower, Robinson, Tafuri) has
emphasized. As related to the first point, we will analyze the concept of veduta in
Piranesi, and the mechanisms of formal and stylistic juxtaposition, superimposition
and hierarchy (Parere sull architettura), which can be seen in a new light through
the interpretation of Schuitens Germanic mind. Among the second group, we will
focus on recurring features that appear both in Piranesis and Schuitens work,
such as the dramatic use of lighting and perspective (la scena per langolo
8
) and
the geometric construction of impossible views- the role of the labyrinth and the
staircase (especially the helicoid stairs), the use of scale, the presence of machines
or the role of human figure in the representation of space.
9
The study of the binomial Schuiten/Piranesi will help us define concepts as that
of Stylistic Hypertrophy, that reveals fundamental in the Belgian artists work
but that can also be outlined in the excessive yet eclectic mannerism of the
Venetian architect. Drawings have always been the architects medium for formal
experimentation, for speculation beyond reality. In comics worlds, this exploration
steps up to a further stage. The creation of drawn (and narrated) universes allows
us to experiment the effects of architecture in society in an innocuous way and
at the lowest cost. Through his work in The Obscure Cities, Franois Schuiten
proposes, along with Benot Peeters, a revision and interweave of the historic styles
that surpasses the cynical and intellectualized Postmodern attempts, to dive into
the inherent characteristics of those styles, and their ability to evolve and dialog
in architecture, much in the same way as Piranesi did with classical language,
perverting his Albertian and Palladian- heritage.
With this work, that is framed in a more ample investigation about the representation
and recreation of architecture and the city in the comics field, we aim at exploring
the ability of this medium to develop the parameters previously set by an author,
Giambattista Piranesi, whose work is revived for a generation of architects educated
in the visual culture of mass media.

1
70
II. Setting up the context (I): Architecture, Comics and Classicism
The search for Authenticity
With the creation of Prince Valiant by Harold Foster in 1937, Comics, Architecture
and History would institutionalize a relationship that would last until today.
10

However, if Palladio depicted the age of the Goths as a dark era that had thrown over
the legacy of Antiquity nothing but sadness and ignorance,
11
today we experience
nostalgia of the Middle Age similar to that of Ancient Rome that the artists of
the Renaissance felt. Thus, to find any trace of classicism, classic or classical
architectures in comics, we often have to go back to the depiction of the cities of the
Ancient World. If the Middle Age is generally depicted in comics through recreations
of its urban environments, the polis of the Classic Greece will usually be translated
into comics by adding colonnades and frontispieces to generic cubic volumes,
12

trying to convey a conventional plausibility that refers to the imagery that cinema has
installed in our collective subconscious. In this sense, the image of antiquity that
comics recreate is not very different from that which the masters of Renaissance and
Baroque had: a succession of temples and monumental groups that, in their white
timelessness and serene grandiosity recreate an idealized era of wisdom and virtue
very distant from its polychrome and quotidian reality.
The wide knowledge we have of Classic Rome, and the amount of buildings that
have made their way towards our time allow the construction of replicas of the urban
landscapes and landmarks in varying degrees of accuracy. Thus, the aging of
nowadays Rome provided by Hal Foster (notice the anachronically wide avenues
in Prince Valiant) can be contraposed to the precise archaeological reconstruction
offered by the long sagas created by Jacques Martin (Alix, 1948), Xavier Snoeck
and Sirius (Les Timour, 1953) or Ren Goscinny and Albert Uderzo/ Ren Goscinny
(Asterix, 1959). However accurate in the rendering of the specific buildings, a
certain flattening of History can be found even in the most respectful examples,
and if in Prince Valiants early Middle Age we could easily find Roman legionnaires
and Vikings coexist with Islamic cities (long before Mahoma was born), Alix or
Asterix often travel to a ficticious Julius Caesars Rome where the Coliseum already
exists, the Forum has reached a much greater level of development than it should
have by that time, and marble is extensively used in buildings and monuments (we
seem to be in Hadrians Rome instead). Anyway, those and also the rare depiction
of other classic architectures (such as the Byzantine and Baroque cathedrals we
find in Winsor McCays Little Nemo in Slumberland) have all a purely background
role (even though they often represent a source of knowledge comparable to that
of Viollet-le-Ducs histoires
13
), being the architectural research consigned to the
prospective mainly eclectic- worlds created by Moebius, Otomo, Mezires, Enki
Bilal, Juan Gimnez or Fernando Rubio among many others. It is in this context that
the work of Franois Schuiten in La Tour acquires its relevance, bringing unexpected
coherence to the fragmentary work of Giambattista Piranesi while exploring the
evolutive capacity of classical language.

III. Setting up the context (II): Francois Schuiten, The Atelier of the
Urbatect
14
Inhabiting the Utopia
Being the son and brother of architects,
15
Franois Schuiten showed, from his very
first works (Aux mdianes de Cymbiola,1980) an experimental vocation that had less
to do with the narrative aspects of comics than with the possibilities of the media
to create coherent realities from fragmentary elements. His inclination towards
2
71
drawing and graphic representation would join this interest to give birth to a body
of work where architecture and infrastructure would gain a decisive significance,
surpassing the role of the characters or even the story which is told. In all cases,
the stories would be developed partnering other authors, such as Claude Rnard,
in the Mutations series, his brother Luc
16
in Les Terres Creuses, or Benot Peeters
in The Obscure Cities, his most extensive and (in)coherent work, and the one that
would establish his reputation as one of the most revered modern icons of comics
intellectuality.
17
III.I The Obscure Cities
It would be since his association with Benot Peeters
18
that Schuitens work would
evolve from the creation of entire worlds of surrealistic yet precise logic onto
the exploration of cities and urban planning as the catalyst of this creative logic.
The object of the study did not really change, but the scope of the experiment was
somehow amplified, as the effects of this artificial world on the characters were
studied more in depth. Focusing on a city each time, Schuiten and Peeters started
to create a net of growing complexity.
In The Obscure Cities (the title somehow resounding with echoes of Italo
Calvinos Invisible Cities), both authors leave behind the fantastic universes that
Schuiten had previously explored with his brother Luc
19
in The Hollow Grounds to
dig into a world that is not totally detached from ours, but, on the contrary, mirrors
it, developing a sort of parallel reality built out of bits and pieces of ours.
20
Images,
places and people from our reality would interweave and develop, up to hypertrophy
(in an exercise of Barthesian intertextuality), to give birth to that kaleidoscopic,
heterogeneous but coherent totum we refer to. Because Schuiten and Peeterss
cities are, above all, coherent.
Apparently.
III.II About Style.
Creation, plausibility and unreality.
The Obscure Cities represent a study made on the basis of successive approaches
to an imaginary world which is (re)created in each new intervention.
21
This world
will end up absorbing Schuitens ample range of graphic obsessions, recycling
old images and associating them with new concepts that add further complexity to
what had already been told. This process becomes highly facilitated by the nature of
Schuitens graphic creatures. Being mainly interested in the optimistic mechanicism
of the late XIXth Century, Schuiten shapes his imaginary architectures in an eclectic
style where neoclassic rigor coexists with Art Nouveau, the futuristic avant-garde or
even as we will see- with Piranesian baroque.
With the publication of Les Murailles de Samaris (Tournai : Casterman, 1983),
the combined work of Schuiten Peeters turned not only into an exploration of
urbanism, but also a sophisticated reflection on style and its capacity to generate
coherent worlds in an autonomous way, somehow leading to an extreme the
controversy on the autonomy of architecture that defined the architectural debate in
the sixties and seventies.
3
4
72
Je me mfie beaucoup de limagination soit-disant pure. (...) Pour crer un
univers fantastique, jai besoin davoir une foule dlments de rfrence, ce
faisant je minstruis, je continue apprendre.
22

--F. Schuiten.
Being fascinated by the eclectic aesthetics of the turn of the century,
23
Schuiten
builds architectural landscapes where the German Jugendstyl is mixed with the
post-neoclassic eclecticism, and the first iron architectures or the Italian Futurism
combine with the machinery and mechanical devices a la Verne
24
to create a
reality of amazing continuity. A reality, however, provided with an exactness, a
cold precision that transmit an eerie feeling of unreality. In spite of their exquisite
perfection or maybe because of it -, the Obscure Cities have an aura of artificiality,
of being only a theater set, an elaborate Palladian optical illusion.
25
In La Tour, Schuiten digs into the construction of la cit interieur (the inner city),
actually a complete inner country (a city of cities, or a world-city and a city-world,
according to Frank Thibault
26
) that aims at giving coherence to Piranesis eclectic
visions, through the depiction of a Tower of Babel taken from Brueghels dreams. In
the recreation of this interior landscape, Schuiten will evoke the space of Piranesis
Prisons without directly rendering them. Paradoxically enough, Schuiten brings
homotopic thought
27
into Piranesis heterotopic prisons, building a complex scenery
with a thoughtful selection of a few Piranesian tools.
In La Tour, Schuiten makes a paper and ink-made Piranesi, who borrows for
the occasion the physical features of Orson Welless John Falstaff,
28
face his
own invention. Like in DeQuincys and Coleridges feverish dream,
29
here he
is sentenced to travel through the bowels of an infinite prison that melts his
experiments with classic forms into a unique architectural landscape.

IV. La Tour or the Inner City
The Prisons and The Tower of Babel.
In 1987, Schuiten and Peeters published Larchiviste, a revised compilation of great
part of the formers graphic oeuvre, where both authors made an effort to integrate
it within the discursive logic that had been outlined in Les murailles de Samaris,
(1983), and developed in La fivre dUrbicande (1985), framing different materials
of very diverse inspirations and sources into the universe of The Obscure Cities
30
.
Among the spectacular chain of images the album offers, we find a wide variety
of architectural fantasies. However, the authors decided to end the album with an
unusual portrait. Below it, we can read: Giovanni Battista and his friends. A few
months later, Casterman Editeur surprised its readers with a new album of the saga.
With La Tour (1987),
31
the French-Belgian duet would detach from the temporal
continuity of their preceding works, and Schuiten would settle his debt with a certain
Venetian master, true creator of obscure cities.
32
IV.I From the Vedute to le Carceri dinvenzione.
La Tour tells the story of Giovanni Battista, a master maintainer in charge of the care
and repair of a section of an immeasurable construction he refers to as the Tower,
and the total extension of which none not even the omniscient reader- knows.
33

Along the more than 120 pages that the album comprises, we will accompany
5
6
73
Giovanni in his travel through the interior of the Tower, as mute witnesses of a
parade of delirious architectural landscapes built upon an eclectic classicist
language where different Palladian shapes superimpose one time and another in
perfect articulation. Built in the style of an inner Veduta, the Tower shows the
ability to find an order in heterogeneity.
Le vedute di Schuiten. Eclecticism and hypertrophy
All through Schuitens work, two concepts appear as a basis for the design work.
On the one hand, the structured eclecticism, on the other, that of stylistic
hypertrophy. In his designs for cities such as Samaris or Urbicande, Samarobriva
or Brssel, the Belgian Artist makes his way to bring order in heterotopia through
a thoughtful superimposition of elements on a system chosen a priori. However,
in Schuitens obscure world we also find cities where the historic styles have
evolved to the limit, up to the point when the whole society is cohesive with that
style.
In Xhystos (Las Murailles de Samaris, 1983), an Art Nouveau sophistication
permeates all aspects of daily life: not only the buildings, but also the vehicles,
the machines, or even peoples clothing seem to be designed by a free-of-all-
constraints Victor Horta. The same runs for Blossfeldtstad (formerly Brentano),
which is built in a florid vegetalistic Jugendstijl that seems to come from an
architectural dream on Karl Blossfeldts photographs.
34

The concepts of eclecticism, style and hypertrophy were not alien to Giambattista
Piranesi. As a Venetian, Piranesi was familiarised with the vedutista genre that,
having been conceived in the XVIth century by Antonio Dosio and Vicenzo Scamozi,
would be codified in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries by Heintz and Van Wittel, and,
above all, Luca Carlevaris, Canaletto, Panini, and that would lately lead to the birth
of the Capriccio.
Nevertheless, although Piranesis work is clearly vedutstico, his invented
architectural landscapes would go much further than Paninis additive
orchestrations. Both in the Prisons, but also in his vedute of Rome and specially
in his delirious Opere Varie, and the plates that accompanied his Parere
sullarchitettura (1765), or his Prospettive,
35
Piranesi would make a systematic use
of the two procedures outlined before. Piranesis work would rely on an accurate
archeological study of the ruins of antiquity, but with a very eclectic taste of Ancient
World. If in his early Prisons Piranesi sought for the desired effect of complexity
in the chaotic superimposition of walkways, bridges, arches, aerial structures and
stairs, his later work would show a similar superimposition in the very conception
of style. In the Antichites, or the Parere, - and, obviously, in the Diversi Maniere
dadornare i cammini - we see Roman Ruins mix with Etruscan recreations and
imaginative Egyptian influences. Those styles would be put together till they melt
into each other, creating a new hybrid that would later develop up to hypertrophy,
in a confusing balance of chaos and coherence that would attract the continuous
despise of the critics.
36
Setting aside the similarities in its strategy to handle classicism and providing
an evolution for it, The Tower leads us to Piranesi by referring literally both to
him (in the character of Giovanni Battista) and to his work: from the cover, where
we can see a rendition of The Mole of Hadrian, to the images with which each
chapter is presented, but especially in the very design of the space itself, which
7
8
74
offers a reinterpretation of le Carceri dinvenzione. This homage seems somehow
inevitable, attending to Schuitens own strategy of stylistic combination and
spatial superimposition. In Le Carceri, more than in Prima Parte di Architettura e
Prospettiva (1743), Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de Romani (1761), or Parere
sull Architetura, Piranesi creates inner worlds where different planes accumulate
one behind the other. Wherever we direct our glance, it digs into a succession
of different stages that endow the drawing with an exaggerated sense of depth,
achieved through the use of a careful and dramatic (indeed theatrical) lighting.
In fact, the drawing style will be one of the most crucial factors in the immediate
association with Le Carceri that La Tour produces in the viewer.
IV.II. Architecture and representation.
Of drawings and engravings.
Technically, Piranesi is astonishing and inimitable: a nervous and precise
hatching, a gray that looks like polished metal makes the middle tones of the
minor pieces glow; a gloomy, chiaroscurist impetus, that creates a dramatic
contrast among the black surfaces.
37
From his architectural inheritance, Schuiten had acquired a heroic attitude towards
drawing.
38
Subsequently, his imaginary universes will always be, above all,
delightfully built. In his renderings we can clearly identify every element -be it
structural or ornamental- of the buildings, but also every detail of the machinery
of the vehicles or of the characters clothes.
39
In the travel from the late seventies
to the middle eighties, Schuitens drawing evolved from the elegant but still
conventional Belgian clear line style he used in his first works to a sophisticated
celebration of the engraving which he used with a mentality that was more
engineeristic that purely artistic.
40
By means of a careful control of the line,
Schuiten gets to render intricate urban landscapes that tell us of the fascination
by a future city dreamt in the beginnings of the 20th century.
41
It will be due to
the recurring use of a mechanic, rigorous line that Schuiten will be able to confer
homogeneity to (the representation of) such a multiplicity of different objects, ages,
styles and influences which frame the storyline. The kind of engraving we find here
is, then, a cold, geometrically descriptive nineteenth-century engraving that masks
the differences, giving to the whole the exact, academic appearance we find in
Viollet Le Ducs drawings.
In the Tower, however, Schuitens drawing acquires a greater density, and even
though the mechanicism is still there, we see a bigger work on textures that seems
to seek for a certain sense of weight. Piranesis drawings are always charged with a
materiality gained through layers of frenetic, nervous hatching that creates shadow
along with texture. Schuitens cold rendering cannot achieve this success through
spontaneity, so he relies on a process of sculpting the shadow. Through a careful
planification of lighting and progressive blackening of the page with superimposing
cross-hatching traces, Schuiten seeks to gain the tenebrism we find in The Prisons.
However, the Prisons he renders are not the playful, researching plates of the
young Piranesi, but the dark, gloomy spaces of the man in his forties.
42
Light, and,
especially, shadow, are the main building materials in the Prisons of imagination,
and Schuiten looks for the resemblance in the atmosphere, even more than in the
constituent elements of the space. In the first chapter, Giovanni gets asleep near
the exterior wall of the Tower. In the morning, when he is awaken by the sunlight, he
cannot avoid exclaiming: There is too much light out here. This is not healthy. Here
again, Schuiten seems to distill and codify Piranesis tools, developing a method to
9
10
75
recreate his presence without directly copying his drawings.
43
IV.III Building up the Prisons. Order in heterotopic space
The elements of Piranesis Carceri
As result, in La Tour, Schuiten seeks to evoke the complexity and oppressive
atmosphere of The Prisons without directly rendering them. To do so, he takes some
of the typical features Piranesi uses to create his heterotopic space and places them
onto a grid that allows him to control the spatial construction. The main element will
be the arch mostly the round arch-, omnipresent in all the plates of Le Carceri, that
will support an ever-darkened ceiling, or will form buildings that will alternate with
bridging or hanging flat pathways.
The arch had been extensively used by Piranesi throughout his career, due to its
properties to render complex and mysterious spaces, cast multiple shadows and
mask, by hiding the junctures, the incohrerences of the perspective construction.
The arches of the Prisons, disposed in perpendicular planes, offer multiple opaque
zones where to elude the resolution of the joints and create new events, being
their relative dimensions and correspondences often difficult to elucidate. The
arch offered Piranesi dramatic and operative conditions that a column-and-lintel
system could not, and also an indisputable Romanesque
44
nature that made it the
favourite tool to create the dark, heavy and chaotic Carceri. To build the interior
space of La Tour, Schuiten uses a combination of arches made either of stone,
bricks, or different types of opus mixtum, that, due to the extremely high pillar/arch
proportion would often evocate the intersection of two systems of parallel aqueducts
perpendicular to each other (in pages 4 and 5 of the First Chapter Giovanni climbs
to a structure that looks like a spatial evolution of the Branch of the Acqua Claudia
of 1775). If not for the proportions, this space would perfectly resemble an ancient
cistern. In fact, in page 2 we find an almost direct translation of the pillars of
Piranesis rendering of The Cistern at Castel Gandolfo (1764).
By a progressive scaling and superimposition of those elements, linking them with
archery bridges and footbridges, Schuiten recreates a fake heterotopy that, through
a wise use of detail, texture and shading, achieves a generic evocation of the
Prisons (see pages 4, 5, and 6 in comparison with plates X and XI) that corresponds
much better to an earlier foray in the Prisons topic by Piranesi: Carcere Oscura...
(Dark Prison..., Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive, 1743) . However, even
when the elements are not the same neither in shape nor in their function, the
images Schuiten creates still remind us of those of Le Carceri (see the crossroad in
page 3 and the circular structure in page 8 as compared to the famous Plate III of
the prisons).
Pieter Brueghel and the Tower of Babel
But, in his travel towards the exterior border of the construction, Giovanni will reveal
us the true nature of this carceristic Tower. If in the cover we had been shown the
exterior wall of the tower as a massive stone curtain supported by thick buttresses
(taken from Piranesis Spaccato degli Speroni, i quali servono de contraforti al gran
Fondamento del Mausoleo dElio Adriano, in Le Antichit Romane IV, 1784), as we
get closer to it, we discover an underlying structure of pillars and flying buttresses.
The Tower is really a circular structure of concentric and radial galleries that recalls
Piranesis obsession with the complexity of Roman Circuses he so often depicted,
45

11
12
76
or the fan shaped structures of his reconstruction of Il Campo Marzio,
46
but above
all, reminds of the painting The Great Tower of Babel (1563),
47
by Pieter Brueghel, a
topic that will accompany Schuiten along his career.
48
This extent will be confirmed
when, in his stay in the city of Elas Aureolus Palingenius, in one of the upper levels,
he is shown a depiction of the intended appearance of La Tour, a canvas that will
recall immediately that of the Flemish architect. From the city of Elias, located in
the perimeter of the Tower, the radial structure of this can be clearly seen. Also, the
facade of low arches it shows relates to that of Brueghels other attempt, The Small
Construction of the Tower of Babel (1563). The labyrinth space of the Prisons, an
infinite succession of gloomy hypostyle rooms has a further meaning now, as
the inner structure for a colossal tower. The inner cistern space, like the morlocks
world in Metropolis, is just a basement on which to build the exterior strata of the
hyperbolic Renaissance of the Eloi.
49

With his construction of the Tower of Babel, Schuiten seems to be trying to bring
a centre to the Prisons of Piranesi, an author whose engravings, as Tafuri states,
present us not merely a set designers whim, but rather a systematic criticism of the
concept of center.
50
Significantly enough, when Giambattista reaches that center,
there is nothing inside it. It is a void. In contrast with the complexity of the Prisons
Piranesian space, the center is a no-place.
From La Tour to the Grand Tour
After learning the true nature of The Tower, Giovanni will decide to travel through it
in order to reach the top. The story will turn, at this point, an initiation journey that
will offer a travel through Piranesis vedute. If in the inner spaces we sometimes
encountered visions that seem to have been taken from the Prospettiva della piscina
delle medesime conserve (Antichit dAlbano e di Castel Gandolfo, 1764), or the
Pars Residua porticuum, et concamerationum... (Il Campo Marzio dellAntica Roma,
1762), in the upper levels of the tower we will find ruins covered with vegetation that
will remind of those drawn by Piranesi of the Baths of Caracalla, or the Constantinian
Basilica, but also the gigantic doric columns of the porch of the Pantheon, walls
carved with apses like in his designs for triumphal arches or a depiction of the
ruinous stairs of the Cistern at Albano (1764). It is in this part where Schuiten
makes the use of the Piranesian pastiche most evident. In his article Kinemastiche
Kerker...,
51
Alexander Kupfer identifies one frame as an interpretation of Piranesis
Gruppo di Scale...
52
However, the panel is a direct superimposition of two
engravings: Galleria grande di statue (Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettiva)
and one of the motifs of Monumento antico e due vasi (Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi I,
1778).
The tower is really a megastructure, a built landscape in which to place those
different visions. Near the end of the album, we encounter his rendition of an empty
Camera sepolcrale, (Camera sepolcrale inventata e disegnata conforme al costume,
e allantica magnificenza deglimperatori Romani), one of Piranesis first etchings
that was firstly published in Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettiva (1743), a look
back to a model that, along with Carcere Oscura lies in the basis of Schuitens
elaboration of Piranesian space.
53

13
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77
Of staircases, ladders and scales
The stairs will be, however, the one element of the Prisons that will not make its
way to the Tower. In the Carceri, footbridges, hanging wooden stairs and ladders
have an equal role of linking the stone gigantic inner structure, signifying, more
than the multiplicity of superimposed levels, the deliberate chaotic nature of this
superimposition. Thus, the ample, stony staircases of the lower level settle the
heaviness of the floor plane, whilst suffering from a progressive dematerialization
in their way to the unreachable ceiling. The verticality of the space is underlined,
in order to magnify the scale of the prison and its oppressive character, their
inhabitants being transformed into virtual dwarfs. The tower, however, is conceived
as an infinite, dark void that is fulfilled with a spatial grid of classical language. In a
sense, Schuiten makes real Alberto Cuomos interpretation. More than a Labyrinth,
The Tower is the homage to Newtons absolute space empty, infinite, where
bodies gravitate- that Cuomo sees in Le Carceri.
54
In fact, the spatial conception of the Tower is not very different of that of its
predecessor: La Fivre dUrbicande, which explains the difference in the methods of
both artists: Piranesi proceeds mainly through aggregation, choosing a point of view
and setting a structure, then adding elements in the blank zones between elements.
Schuiten, on the contrary, relies on an underlying structure that is progressively
completed (or that grows, evolves). The space where Giovanni lives is, then,
infinite in all directions, and we, the observers, are trapped in the middle of it. This
circumstance is clearly transmitted by the spatial, classical grid, and the presence
of the stairs is no more needed.
The Prisons are thought to be seen from an only point of view. They exist to be
contemplated from the angle, from the floor. It is in this setting that they acquire
their full meaning. The Tower, on the contrary, is a space that invites the viewer to
move freely. In La Tour, Schuiten liberates the space of the Prisons, allowing us to
move freely through its interior, and offers us a unique opportunity to become virtual
voyeurs of Piranesis space, and gaze downwards, into the complexity of the spaces
below us.

IV.IV Piranesi, Escher and the depiction of impossible.
About perspective and vision
Piranesi clearly shows that Euclydean geometry does not represent for him the
only architectural solution. The artists definitive break with the laws of central
perspective is here evident. Piranesi not only shifts the vantage point of the
painting, but even adopts several vantage points, thus literally causing the
Euclydean space to collapse.
Ulya Vogt-Gknil.
55
It is not possible to understand Piranesis work without locating him into the
currents of thought that were developing along the XVIIIth Century. A new,
subjective, empiricist glance towards the world was coming into conflict with the
objective knowledge and the idealism that came from the Renaissance heritage.
With the publication of The Pleasures of Imagination (1712), a new door would
open for perspectivism and a mainly visual understanding of experience and
pleasure. The big and the unapproachable would gain a progressive relevance
that would culminate in Kants reinvention of the sublime.
56
It is not surprising
that all those concepts can be found in Piranesis Carceri (literally the Prisons of
15
16
78
Imagination). In the perspective construction of the Prisons, Piranesi uses Bibienas
scena per il angolo method, which he had probably come in contact with through
the Valeriani or Zucchi families of stage-designers. The superposition of several
perspective axes leads to an artificial expansion of space that overwhelms the
spectator. The Prisons introduce the spectator into them by recreating the real
experience of perception. Like a cubist painting, the inner space reacts to the
viewer, offering an ever-changing point of view (and vantage point). The interior
landscape of the prisons is made of events, of individual parts (and glances) that
are orchestrated in a whole, but do not surrender to its supremacy, and movement
is implicit in this struggle between individuality and unity. As Andreas Huyssen puts
it, Piranesi refused to represent homogeneous enlightened space in which above
and below, inside and outside could be clearly distinguished. (...) While massive
and static in their encasings, the prisons do suggest motion and transition, a back
and forth, up and down that disturbs and unmoors the gaze of the spectator. But,
unlike the cubism, Piranesi does not make an argument on discontinuity. Moreover,
he creates impossible continuities that, as in Escher, produce a bloodcurdling
effect
57
: (...) Ulya Vogt-Gknil has shown how three dimensional spaces evolve into
two-dimensional planes, how depth dimensions are being pulled apart and breadth
dimensions ar being shrunk.
58
In Schuiten, however, there is no search of the
geometrical paradox, the eventualist disjunction or the scenographic exaggeration.
On the contrary, Schuiten comes to complete the circle, making, in the Tower, the
mathematical rendering of Piranesis idealized space. By doing so, Schuiten creates
a veduta of the veduta.
(...) in the Carceri, the constrition comes not from the absence of space, but
from an opening toward the infinite.
Manfredo Tafuri.
But there is an obsession with the rendering of the infinite (a succession and
uniformity of the parts as instruments capable of constructing the artificial infinite,
according to Tafuri) that we also find in E.C. Escher and in Schuiten, a rupture with
Euclydean geometry that multiplies the dimensions in a piece of paper; a folding
and unfolding of space into itself without collapsing, like the net that coexists in the
same space as Urbicande.

IV.V Of men and machines.
The human figure and the inventions in Schuiten and Piranesi
La Tour semble donc tre un espace ludique, ou plutt un espace narratif et
exprimental dans lequel les deux auteurs exploitent les possibilits du mdia,
jouent sur les diffrents sens de concepts tels que celui de Cit obscure, de
labyrinthe ou de tableau, manipulent les images.
59
Piranesi and Schuiten, the dramatist and the storyteller
Both in Piranesi and in Schuiten, the human figure is designed as the necessary
counterpart for the worlds they have created. In Piranesi, the critics have always
pointed out his tendency to represent a degraded humanity. The human being is
cartoonized and drawn in its darker, more extreme condition. In his etchings, the
Italian artist depicted cripples and hunchbacks, members of the lowly that in the
Carceri become tortured prisoners, like punished Roman slaves.
60
The Prisons have
been acknowledged as a prigione pittoresca (Paolo Contessi). Hylton Thomas
17
18
79
claimed that, instead of dead natures, Piranesi etched dead architectures.
61

However, the Prisons are alive. Notwithstanding their nature of perfectly studied
compositions, the prisons are inhabitable spaces that attract the viewer towards
them. Moreover, the Prisons are always crowded with people, like a painting by E.C.
Escher or a cross section by Norman Foster. However, their role is different from
those. The numerous people that appear in them have an indicative role: in the first
case, they help locate the floor plane so that the abnormality of the space is most
evident and uncomfortable; in the second they also underline the location of main
spaces, and give scale. Even though those functions exist in Piranesis Carceri as in
any architectural representation, the human figure has also a role of quotidianizing
space, of making them exist in a plane of reality. People in the Carceri authenticate
the drawn space as real, physical spaces, attracting the viewer into them.
Le Citate de linvenzione (De Obscurae Civitatis): atmosphere, stage and
reality
I know nothing which is sublime which is not connected to the sense of power;
this branch proceeds naturally... from terror, the common origin of all that is
sublime.
--Edmund Burke
62
Schuitens Tower as often happens with his cities- is empty. Even when there are
some people to be found in them, they seem alien to their surroundings, as if they
did not belong to that place, to the same plane of reality. The Obscure Cities re-read
the man in front of nature romantic topic. In Giovannis contemplation of the built
horizon of the endless tower, we find Caspar David Friedrichss Wanderer Above
the Sea of Fog (1817),but now transformed into the man in front of architecture,
or, better, man vs. the urban. The characters in Schuitens worlds are also slaves.
When reading Aux mdianes de Cymbiola, Les murailles de Samaris, La fivre
dUrbicande, Larchiviste or La tour, one cannot avoid a certain sense of inevitability.
In the world of the Obscure Cities it is architecture that rules, the main character,
being human beings mere puppets, whose destiny is controlled by the cities they
inhabit.
In Piranesis Carceri, man and architecture belong to the same reality. They reinforce
each other, interweave, doing a collective architectural performance. Again,
Piranesis drawings are made of events. Their drama draws the viewers empathy.
In Schuitens cities, however, we experience a curious variation of the Stereoscopic
Principle of Campbell as defined by Thierry Smolderen.
63
In the Obscure Cities
we look at the world both from our position as omniscient reader but also from
the main characters eyes. However, no empathy comes from this perception. The
gloomy, oppressive world of le Carceri, reveals viscerally closer to us than the not
so dark, but Obscure Cities, and their creepy, cartoonish inhabitants look more real.
Drawn in a precise, cold, naturalistic style, Schuitens characters tend to look like
automatons, artificial beings that wander through an inhumane urban environment.
However dramatic they are, the drama the Prisons transmit is one that we feel
familiar. On the contrary, there is something inhuman, even metaphysical in the
Obscure World that reveals alien to us. Even though the Prisons can be regarded as
theater stages for their characters to play, it is in Urbicande, Xhystos, Samaris or
Brssel where we find an unbearable artificiality that confers them that sense of
frozen reality that can only come from a theatrical set.
19
20
80
As Tafuri notes, Piranesis threatening use of machines might be a critical yet
unconscious- reaction against the atmosphere of the machine culture of the
eighteenth century (...) with its antinaturalism and its skepticism that mixes with
his longing for Roman Justice (hence the depiction of torture in Plate II). However,
he also explains the presence of human figures more to accentuate the functioning
of the machines than to communicate the experience of torment. Schuiten
shares with Piranesi a distrust of machines ( Sometimes, we even discovered
odd machines the use of which I could not figure out ), as seen in Samaris
(nevertheless, it is not the machine, not even the strange forces hidden under a Dark
City,
64
but the very city, that traps its visitors), and a fascination for the mechanical,
for that machinery that still spoke of craftmanship, of Swiss rigor, and that imbues
Giovanni with a Renaissance, optimistic view a la Leonardo.

V. Piranesi and Schuiten: the future through the past.
Perspective, prospective and the question on autonomy (as a conclusion)
Je me mfie beaucoup de limagination soit-disant pure. (...) Pour crer un
univers fantastique, jai besoin davoir une foule dlments de rfrence, ce
faisant je minstruis, je continue apprendre.
Franois Schuiten
65
I will not tire you by telling you once again of the wonder I felt in observing
the Roman buildings up close, of the absolute perfection of their architectonic
parts, the rarity and the immeasurable quantity of the marble to be found on
all sides, or that vast space, once occupied by the Circuses, the Forums and
the Imperial Palaces: I will tell you only that those living, speaking ruins filled
my spirit with images such as even the masterfully wrought drawings of the
immortal Palladio, which I kept before me at all times, could not arouse in
me. It is thus that the idea has come to me to tell the world of some of these
buildings.
Giambattista Piranesi
66
Throughout his life, Giambattista Piranesi dug around Rome to find traces of the
past he wanted to build. In Roman antiquity he looked for the liveliness, grandiosity
and joy of a mythical Etruria that would give him the legitimacy to overcome the
constraints of Winkelmanns encoding of classicism.
Piranesi was much aware of the pedagogic role of his vedute, but not only as
accurate replicas of an antiquity from which to learn. Piranesis legacy is that
of invention,
67
not only of a new style or a formal procedure, but also of a new
conception of space and individuality. Piranesi, as Picasso, displayed a new glance.
They owned an eye that scrutinized the reality with a new kaleidoscopic approach
that surpassed the issues of style or zeitgeist. If we can track the traces of Piranesian
Carceri in Eisenmans inner spaces, and Koolhaass performative architecture
equally seeks to introduce events, regardless of programmatic realms, Schuitens
Urbicande materializes that Barthesian/Derridean intertextuality that Tschumi
metaphorically looked for in La Villette. Like Eisenman or Rossi, Piranesi looked for
an authenticity that is only possible in imagination or in the drawing. As Andreas
Huyssen notes, (...)the Carceri present, as it were, pure architectural spaces far
from all nature, complex interior halls that seem to be partly ruins, partly unfinished
buildings.
68
21
81
When Milena and Giovanni escape from the Tower, soon it collapses, ceases to exit.
The black and white universe of the architectural dream gives way to the colourful,
although mundane, reality. The Tower exists in a reality where the coherence of a
megalomaniac made up world is sustained by human will. According to Kupfer, the
Tower posits an argument about the limits of architecture and human intellect.
69
In
the Tower, Schuiten struggles to bring coherence to the whole Piranesian legacy,
making up a building/city /world to the fragmentary oeuvre of the Venetian
architect.
Like Piranesi, Schuiten recovers along his works the heritage of tradition to reinvent
it, bringing the historic styles into dialogue, mixing and developing them to their
further completion, up to hypertrophy. After him, Franois Schuiten transforms us
in voyeurs of a monster world brought about by the dream of style, a dream that
comics can evoke better than built architecture, or even cinema. Schuiten takes
Piranesis narrative aim to the following stage, without loosing their essence.
He recreates the experience of superimposition, collage, heterotopia, for a
spectator that faces architecture completely alone, as a passenger in the bodies
of the desperately lonely characters of his books. With his anachronistic, skillful
craftsmanship, Schuiten invents a new Grand Tour through the imaginary for a
generation of architects brought up in the era of the digital media.
82
Endnotes

1
Of course, we are using Brushis words in a different let us say ampler- context.
With these words, he was referring to Bramantes claim for the use of perspective:
(...) Perspective is still useful to the architect because with it he can imagine the
whole building. In the context of Piranesis - and Franois Schuitens- work, these
words acquire a new dimension.
2
Franois Schuiten met Claude Renard in the atelier Bande Dessine (Comic book
workshop) of the Sint-Lukas Institute (Institut Saint-Luc) in Brussels, creating with
him his first two albums, Aux Mdianes de Cymbiola (1980), and Le Rail (1982),
published by Humanodes Associs. They also did the art direction and costume
design for the movie Gwendoline by director Just Jaeckin in 1984.
Claude Renard (Belgium, 1946) had also attended the Institut Saint-Luc, where he
studied painting. He took a few courses in comics art under Eddy Paape, prior to
becoming his assistant until 1976. For eight years, he ran the famous Atelier R
(latelier de bande dessine le 9e rve ), where he educated a great number of
other famous Belgian comic artists such as Swolfs, Sokal, Berthet, Goffin, Cossu or
Andras Martens. Three of the collective publications edited by this workshop would
feature Schuitens work. After working with Francois Schuiten he created his own
comic series, Les Aventures dIvan Casablanca, and then turned into illustration,
being also the author of several illustration books like Galile, journal dun hrtique
and Maroc : Lettres Matisse sous le protectorat, with Yves Vasseux (ditions
Pyramides, 2001). Recently he published Un got de biscuit au gingembre, in
collaboration with the writer Xavier Hanotte (Estuaire, collection Carnets Litteraires,
September, 2006) He also collaborated making costume designs for Franco
Dragone in his show Le Rve. All those designs have been collected in the book
Le Tailleur du rve (Les Impressions Nouvelles, October 2006).
3
In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970). See also
Of Other Spaces (1967).
4
Due to the scenographic nature of the works of Piranesi, it is not surprising that the
most interesting researches from an architectural viewpoint- on his work have been
done in the realms of both comics and cinema. If the illustrations of E.C. Escher
relied in no small part in Piranesis compositions (and perspectival incoherences),
the most compelling three dimensional rendering (save for Eisenmans House VI) of
a Piranesian space are still the ones created by Jim Henson in Labyrinth (1986) or
Jean-Jacques Annaud in Der Name der Rose (1986).
5
In the catalog of the exhibition Rves de pierres. He also adds: Je trouve en
effet trs agaant de dessiner des choses parfaites: ce qui fait au contraire la beaut
et le plaisir du dessinateur, ce sont les craquelures dans les murs, les pierres qui se
dfont, toutes choses que Piranse parvient sublimer.
6
Among the renditions of Piranesis Carceri, let us mention the impressive work
of the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, that adds a new layer of complexity to the Italians
oeuvre.
7
Although it surpasses the scope of this study, some connections between the
deconstructivist space of Eisenmans or the performative architecture of Rem
Koolhaas and Piranesis Carceri could be easily made.
8
Piranesi was mainly influenced by Giusepe Galli Bibiena (son of Fernandino,
author of Architettura Civile, 1711) author of Architettura e prospetive (Hamburg,
1740). On the influence of theatrical scenography in Piranesi see Wittkower, R.: Art
and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750.
9
All of them discussed in Wittkower, Rudolf. Piranesi as an architect in Studies in
the Italian Baroque. London, 1975. 247-58.
10
In this sense, the French magazine Vcu is one of the landmarks of this marriage
between History and Comics. Following the motto Lhistoire cest aussi laventure,
83
Vcu (ditions Glnat) has offered a selection of the most significative authors
(Bourgeon, Juillard, Hermann, Cothias, Ana Miralles, Adamov) and works on the
field. In the magazine, directed by the prolific and encyclopedic- Henri Filippini
we can read De 1250 avant notre re et jusquaux annes 1940, de lEgypte
ancienne la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, plus de cinquante sries vous entranent
aux confins du monde et vous invitent revisiter en bande dessine les origines de
nos civilisations.
11
Paraphrasing the words of Jacques Gubler (History of Architecture professor in
Lausanne and Genve) in his article Por fin lleg Viollet-le-Duc! (At last, Viollet-le-
Duc!) in VV.AA. Cairo (especial arquitectura). Norma Editorial. Barcelona, 1985
12
See Vich, Sergi. La historia en los cmics. Glnat. Barcelona. 1997
13
We should mention here Michel Thibaut: la Bande Dessine facilite la lecture
du monument: la composition des planches o se seccdent les images dessines
selon un certain angle, dans un plan spcifique, permet de dcouvrir simultanment
les multiples aspects de ldifice. De lalternance plan densemble / plan repproch,
plonge / contre plonge, champ / contre-champ, nait une meilleure comprehnsion
de larchitecture, renforc par lutilisation de cadres appropris chaque vignette
(THIBAUT, M. (IV-V-1984): Approche du monument dans la Bande Dessine
dexpression franaise, in Monuments Historiques, 132. C.N.M.H.S. Paris, pp.
18- 27).
14
The word urbatect (urbatecte in the original) was coined for the album La
fivre dUrbicande (Casterman, Tournai, 1985). This term, applied to Eugene
Robick (Urbicandes most prominent urbatect), is used to refer to the integral
shaper of cities . Both an architect and an urban planner, an urbatect is literally an
Architect of Cities .
15
Franois Schuiten (Brussels, Belgium in 1956) is the son of Robert Schuiten
(see Robert Schuiten; Architecte et Peintre by Maurice Culot and Dominique Lamy,
Archives dArchitecture Moderne (AAM), 2000) and Marie-Madeleine De Maeyer,
both architects. Among his five brothers and sisters, both Luc and one of his sisters
are architects as well, being Luc co-author (as a writer) of the series Les Terres
Creuses. Among other works concerning architecture, Schuiten together with
Benot Peeters also helped to save and restore, along with architect Francis Metzger
the Maison Autrique (see bibliography), the first house designed by Art Nouveau
architect Victor Horta.
Franois Schuiten has also collaborated in the graphic development of two films:
the forementioned Gwendoline (Just Jaeckin, 1983) and Taxandria (Raoul
Servais,1994). He is also co-author of the 3D animation series Les Quarxs
(Maurice Benayoun, 1991), and has developed several scnographies such as la
ville imaginaire (Cits Cin-Montral), Lvasion (Grenoble, Festival du Polar) or
Le Muse des Ombres (presented in Angoulme, Sierre, Bruxelles et Paris). He
also intervened in the interior design of the Luxembourg Pavillion in the Universal
Exhibition at Seville and designed a temporary decoration for the subway station
Porte de Hal in Bruxelles and the station Arts et mtiers in Paris. In 2000, he
designed the scenography for A planet of visions, one of the main pavilions of the
Hannover Worlds Fair. He also created the interior of the Belgian pavillion at the
Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan along with painter Alexandre Obolensky. In 2004-2005
he designed a large exposition, The Gates of Utopia, showing different aspects of
his work, that was held in Leuven. Since 1991, Franois Schuiten has also designed
15 Belgian stamps.
16
Along with his brother Luc, Franois Schuiten has done three albums, grouped
under the title Les Terres Creuses (The Hollow Grounds) : Carapaces (1981),
Zara(1985) and Nogegon (1990) all published by Les Humanodes Associs.
17
Only eclipsed, probably, by another Belgian, Jean Giraud (Mobius),
representing the European avant-garde that was bred in the May 68 contra-cultural
84
vindication.
18
Franois Schuiten and Benot Peeters first met at the age of 12 in the Sainte-
Barbe School at Brussels, where they collaborated in the school journal already
with their current labour divission, being Franois Schuiten the designer and Benot
Peeters the scriptwriter. After that, Schuiten would stay to attend the Institut Saint-Luc
in Brussels while Peeters moved back to Paris to study and work under the direction
of Roland Barthes, developing an analysis of Hergs work. After that, Peeters would
move towards the Nouveau Roman . Peeters and Schuiten met again in the late
seventies, again in Brussels, deciding to do a new work together: Les Murailles de
Samaris. Happy with the result, but feeling that it did not cover the whole idea they
wanted to explain, they decided to further develop it in a new album of the same
type. While discussing it with the publisher, the latter suggested to gather their
creations under a generic title, and so, The Obscure Cities were born. Through the
time, Schuiten and Peeters also decided to blur the border between reality and
fiction, which gave birth, as well as to the comic books, to books, journals and
exhibitions on the same topic, presenting them as chronicles of a real world. (From
the chronicle of the Rtrospective Schuiten / Peeters au Forum des Images.)
19
Luc Schuiten remains such an iconoclastic figure in the field of architecture as
his brother Franois does in the comics world. Sharing both his brothers graphic
style and his inclination towards speculative architecture and urbanism, Luc (and the
Atelier Schuiten) has specialised in developing the concept of archiborescence, that
refers to the architecture that uses as its main elements of construction all kind of
live organisms (especially vegetables). This concept has been further explained in
the book of the same title, co-authored by Luc Schuiten and Pierre Loze (Mardaga,
October 2006). According to the principles of archiborescence, Luc Schuiten has
developed a substantial amount of projects, such as those of the Arborescent
Cities , the vertical gardens and the maisons biosolaires .
In the Revue darchitecture Neuf (September, 1995), Marie-Claire Regniers says:
Dans le paysage de larchitecture belge contemporaine, Luc Schuiten est une
figure part. Saffranchissant des lignes rigides ou traditionnelles de la construction,
il tente de grer diffremment les matriaux et les techniques, axe sa recherche
sur des maisons bioclimatiques, rve dhabitarbres,ces logements organiques en
osmose avec le vgtal.Et face aux aires abandonnes, nes de discontinuits
urbaines, construit des jardins verticaux issus du mme imaginaire potique. Au fil
des annes, Luc Schuiten dessine sans jamais se lasser une multitude de projets
anims par le souci dautres choix de vie. Une manire de penser qui a donn forme
une nouvelle architecture base sur une vision potique o linvention et la relation
avec la nature occupent une place prpondrante.
20
The Obscure Cities are placed in an undefined age in a world that looks like a
reflection of ours. In fact, like a series of reflections of different ages of ours that
resemble and distort it at the same time. Among the resemblances, we can find the
correspondences between cities (Bruxelles and Brsel, Paris and Phry) or people
(Jules Verne, Nadar -Gaspard-Flix Tournachon-, Victor Horta). Among the
distortions, the fact that there are no countries in this reflective world , being the
geopolitic system comparable to that of Italy in the Fifteenth Century, where each
city was an independent state with an area of influence. Each city has also been
developed in a mixture of styles that range from neoclassicism to art nouveau, and
this aesthetics also affect their technologic devices, that come from an optimistic
XIXth Century fantasy. The world and stories of The Obscure Cities are a multi-
referential (and multi-layered) work that has been subject to different prospections
and interpretations, and that continues to develop in several directions, including
literature, theatrical performances and operas, exhibitions, conference-fictions
and fiction documentaries (Le Dossier B and LAffaire Desombres) mantaining a
continuous interactive relation with the readers.
85
21
Furthermore, Schuiten and Peeters have sometimes reworked their previous
creations in order to achieve, if not a greater coherence, a deeper intertextuality.
This is especially evident in the new ending they developed for Les Murailles de
Samaris or the changes in Lenfant penche.
22
In VV.AA. Schuiten & Peeters. Auteur des Cits Obscures, Mosquito, 1994. Pp.
82
23
A fascination that has his American reflection in Chris Wares obsession for
the Chicago School, being both Schuiten and Ware influenced by the architectural
eclecticism we find in the graphic delights of one of the fathers of American
comics, Winsor McCay.
24
Schuitens fascination for Vernes work has, in fact, transcended the world of
comics. In the early nineties, Schuiten was involved in the publishing of Jules
Vernes lost book Paris in the 20th Century , a twentieth century dystopia (set in
August, 1960) for which he made the cover and inner illustrations. Written in 1863
and rediscovered in 1989, it was first published in 1994 (Random House published
an English translation in 1997).
25
This makes itself most evident in the first album of the series, Les Murailles de
Samaris, wich remains their most chilling fable on the unreality of urban landscape.
26
In Obscurae Civitates et Phantastique Imagines: Visite gare de La Tour
de Schuiten & Peeters: De plus, alors que la Tour tait un espace labyrinthique,
le puits se caracteris par sa simplicit. Le chemin y est en effet unique. Cest
cette simplicit que lon retrouve encore dans le cadre, le dcor: la Tour est la
fois ville-monde et monde-ville. linverse, le puits est vide. De plus, sa structure
circulaire, ainsi que lobscurit qui y rgne, renforcent encore son uniformit, son
dpouillement.
27
On the concepts of heterotopia and homotopia, see also The ordering
sensibility of Heterotopia, in Porphyrios, Demetri. Sources of modern eclecticism:
Studies on Alvar Aalto. London: Academy Editions; New York, N.Y. : St. Martins
Press, c1982.
28
Chimes at Midnight. (Campanadas a medianoche). Internacional Films Espaola
and Alpine Productions. Spain, 1966.
29
(...) when I was looking over Piranesis, Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge,
who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his
DREAMS, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a
fever. (...)Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon
it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and
you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade,
and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the
depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his
labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second
flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing
on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of
stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on,
until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings.
Edited with an introduction and notes by Grevel Lindop. Oxford : Oxford University
Press, 1998.
30
In 1987, Casterman was planning to publish a series of large size albums of
pictures by famous cartoonists. The idea was that the individual pages could be
taken out and used as posters. The concept never really took off, but Schuiten and
Peeters were approached in the early stages. At that time, Franois had already
produced a number of pieces for various projects, and although the idea of merely
displaying a collection of pictures did not appeal much to the authors, they decided
to consolidate the disparate elements of Schuitens work and include them in the
86
still underdeveloped universe of the Obscure Cities. After some discussions with the
editor, they managed to have the original layout modified to include text and images
on the back of the prints, turning the whole portfolio into a cohesive story.
The series of The Obscure Cities comprises, up to the present date, the
following albums : Les murailles de Samaris, (1983), La fivre dUrbicande (1985),
Larchiviste (1987), La tour (1987), La route dArmilia, (1988), Brsel (1992) Lenfant
penche (1995), Lombre dun homme (1999), La Frontire invisible, tome 1 (
2002) and La Frontire invisible, tome 2 (2004). The series has been completed
with the publication, by the same authors, of the following related books, with a
mixture of texts and illustrations: Le mystre dUrbicande, par Rgis de Brok (1985),
Encyclopdie des transports prsents et venir par Axel Wappendorf (1988), Le
muse A. Desombres : catalogue raisonn des oeuvres et des biens ayant appartenu
a Augustin Desombres (1990), Lcho des cits (1993), Le guide des Cits obscures
(1996), Mary la penche (2002) and The Book of Schuiten (2004).
31
The first editions of La Tour in the different languages were: La tour (Casterman,
1987); De toren, (Casterman,1987); La tour (Casterman, 1988); La torre (Madrid:
Eurocomic, 1988) Der Turm : die wahrhaftige Geschichte des Mannes, der ihn
bereiste (Reiner-Feest-Verlag, 1988); A Torre (Lisboa: Edioes 70, 1989); The tower,
(New York, Dark Horse, 19--).
32
In 1999, more than 10 years after the publication of The Tower, and thanks to
the offer by Richard Dagorne, attach la conservation at the Muse de Gajac of
Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Franois Schuiten and Benot Peeters would complete their
private homage to the universe of Giambattista Piranesi. In an exhibition held
between April 10 and september 30, Piranesis engravings and the original pages
of La Tour thirty of each- were showed together, with a XIIIth century mill as
background. The exhibition, that was designed, as usual, in collaboration with Bleu
Mthylne, Bleu Lumire, was divided into five spaces that resembled different
chapters of the album. A commented projection of the drawings of Piranesi (most of
them from the 1836 Firmin Didot Edition of his engravings, property of the Museum)
and those of the Tower explained the common features an specificities of both. In
2000, the exhibition would travel to the Muse de Fesch in Ajaccio.
33
This is no exception in the series. The expectation of a final solution of the
enigmas of the plot at the end of the story never comes, in the case of The Obscure
Cities, that always claim for a further reading, being this part of their unquestionable
magnetism.
34
In the revised edition of Les Murailles de Samaris, Benot Peeters explains: In
(the design of) Xhystos, Art Nouveau imposed almost instantaneously. Not the real
Art Nouveau, that which Victor Horta and some others invented at the end of the
XIXth Century: that style did not have enough time to develop; it could barely give
birth to some isolated constructions, lost in urban tissues with no link to them. The
Art Nouveau where Xhystos would breed would have the opportunity to impose itself,
to extend to a whole city its arabesques and arrebides. Starting with some of the
buildings we knew, but also with plans of future cities designed by the architects of
1900; we tried to conceive Xhystos up to its most insignificant details, imagining
what a Brssel entirely reinvented by Victor Horta could have turned into.(...)
Immediately this style appeared to us as adequate to conceive a whole city(...). The
architects of that age became passionate for all the objects they were offered. They
designed furniture, clothes, invented plates or wallpaper. Rapidly, we were able to
imagine the political system of the city, its weather, the way of life of its inhabitants.
35
Along his life, Giambattista Piranesi did many editions (and re-editions)
of his works. The bibliography we will use in this article would be as follows:
LA VILLA ROYALE DE LAMBROSIANA, VARIE VEDUTE DI ROMA ANTICA I
MODERNA and VEDUTE DELLE VILLE E DALTRI LUOGHI DELLA TOSCANA (1744);
ANTICHITTA ROMANE DETEMPI DELLA REPUBBLICA, E DEPRIMI IMPERATORI
87
(1748); INVENZIONI DI CARCERI (1749); OPERE VARIE DI ARCHITETTURA,
PROSPETTIVE, GROTTESCHI (1750); LE MAGNIFICENZE DI ROMA (1751);
RACCOLTA DI VARIE VEDUTE DI ROMA (1752); TROFEI DI OTTAVIANO
AUGUSTO (1753); ANTICHITA ROMANE(First 4 Volumes, 1756); LETTERE
DI GIUSTIFICAZIONE (1756), DELLA MAGNIFICENZA ED ARCHITETTURA
DEROMANI and second version of CARCERI DINVENZIONE (1761); LAPIDES
CAPITOLINI, IL CAMPO MARZIO and DESCRIZIONE E DISEGNO DELLEMISSARIO
DEL LAGO ALBANO (1762); ANTICHITA DALBANO E DI CASTEL GANDOLFO and
ANTICHITA DI CORA (1764); OSSERVAZIONI and ALCUNE VEDUTE DI ARCHI
TRIOMFALI (1765); DIVERSE MANIERE DADORNARE I CAMMINI (1769);
TROFEO O SIA MAGNIFICA COLONNA COCLIDEDI MARMO (1773); PIANTA DI
ROMA E DEL CAMPO MARZIO and VASI, CANDELABRI, SARCOPHAGI (1778).
Second edition of ANTICHITA ROMANE (1784).
36
Among those (both the critics and the critiques), the most famous would be
the polemic developed between Piranesi and Pierre Jean Mariette, which would
lead to the publication of Ozzervazioni di Giovanni Battista Piranesi sopra la Lettre
de Monsieur Mariette aux auteurs de la Gazette Littraire de lEurope (1765) and
the Parere su larchitettura (1765). In la Gazzette Littraire de lEurope of 4 of
November of 1764, Mariette, trying to defend Greek Architecture had stated: (...)
This author, who prefers (Roman Architecture), does not seem to me to speak of the
Greeks with all the esteem that is their due. (...). There is no composition that is not
full of superfluous ornament, and absolutely hors doeuvre. Everything is sacrificed
for luxury, and in the end one is left with a style that quickly becomes ridiculous and
barbarous (From the Introduction by Kevin C. Lippert to Thoughts on Architecture,
as published in Oppositions. Spring, 1984. 5-25.)
37
From the catalogue of the Exhibition Piranesi: a vision of the artist through the
collection of engravings in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos.
38
In The Book of Schuiten , Franois recalls how his father gathered all his sons
and daughters and taught them how to paint. He made us draw from memory :
he would show us a picture, then turn it over and wed have to reproduce it. (...)he
would produce cut-paper images by Matisse or Picasso, and ask us to work with the
same approach.
39
Schuiten is in this sense, a disciple of Winsor McCay, from whom he will take
the taste for repetition and precision, as well as for the prospective representation of
the urban landscape.
40
The difference with other comics artists that also use the engraving aesthetics
such as Bernie Wrightson (see the illustrations for Mary Shelleys Frankenstein) or
Andreas Martens (Cromwell Stone) would lie in a structural level. Whilst in those
the line is used to create a dramatic atmosphere la Dor, Schuiten uses it to better
render the volumetric specifics of the constructions, which confers his drawing that
nineteenth-century catalog of inventions look.
41
As we can find in Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927), but also in Robert Schuitens
futuristic townscapes (see Robert Schuiten; Architecte et Peintre by Maurice Culot
and Dominique Lamy, Archives dArchitecture Moderne (AAM), 2000).
42
The first edition of Le Carceri was published in 1745, comprising 14 plates. All
the drawigs were re-elaborated for the second edition in 1761, where they appeared
numbered in Roman from I to XVI, two new plates being added (II and V). Those
later plates were presented in a horizontal layout (paesaggio), whilst the previous
fourteen were presented in a vertical one (ritratto). In this second edition the prisons
were also darkened, as ordered by the publisher to obtain a more theatrical effect.
This is the way in which most of the following editions have been done. As well
as the images, also the title for the series changed from edition to edition. From
Invenzioni Capricci di Carceri (imaginary inventions of prisons) the title would
evolve to the definitive Carceri dInvenzione ( Prisons of the Imagination).
88
43
It is remarkable how different the inherent mentalities of Piranesi and Schuiten
towards drawing are, no matter how much the results relate to each other. Schuitens
rigorous perspective construction and academic lighting contrasts with Piranesis
eclectic compositions, and the Germanic trace of La Tour is very distant from the
spontaneity the Italian showed in his etchings, which has probably more to do with
the other Belgian school, that represented by Andr Franqun (in this sense, it might
be very clarifying to compare the Prisons with Franquns plates for Idees Noires-
Editions A.U.D.I.E, 2001.)
44
In fact, the use of archs and vaults was a statement on his innovative view on the
History of Roman Architecture (as opposed to that of J.J. Winkelmann), having been
the archeries and vaulted systems directly taken from Etruscans.
45
Among those: Hadrians tomb from the back, 1754; Theatre of Marcellus, 1757;
Arch of Constantine and the Colloseum, 1760; Vedutta dell anphiteatro Flavio detto
il Coliseo, and, of course, Colosseum, 1776.
46
Il Campo Marzio dell Antica Roma. Rome, 1762.
47
Pieter Brueghel The Old, worked on this topic on three different occasions,
although the third one did not make its way till our days.
48
In fact, he would finally build his own little tower of Babel made of real
stone- in the Pavillion Planet of Visions at the Hannover International Exhibiion
(2000), for which he designed the scenography.
49
The term was coined by H.G. Wells in The Time Traveller (1895).
50
According to Tafuri, this criticism of the concept of center is clearly shown in the
Pianta di ampio magnifico Collegio, inserted in the 1750 edition of the Opere varie
di architettura. Tafuri also acknowledges the following: It has already been pointed
out that, as far as the perspective compositions of the Prima parte di architetture e
prospettive (1743), Piranesi presents organisms that pretend to have a centrality but
that never achieve one. In plate X of that collection, the elliptical courtyard, which
seems to constitute the focus of the organism, is seen, in the reconstruction of the
plan, to be deliberately inserted as a spiral into the continuum of the columns; while
in the ancient temple invented and designed in the manner of those which were
built in honor of the goddess Vesta, the outer circle winding around the Pantheon,
the directrix of the stairway, and the Corinthian colonnade prove to be off-center in
relation to one another and dislocated onto independent rings. Tafuri, Manfredo.
The Wicked Architect: G.B. Piranesi, Heterotopia and the Voyage in The Sphere
and the Labyrinth. Cambridge, MA, 1987.
51
Kinematische Kerker : Zur Rezeption von Piranesis Carceri im Film und
Comic Strip. In VV.AA. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Faszination und Ausstrahlung
: Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung im Grassimuseum Leipzig/Museum fr
Kunsthandwerk. Leipzig, Das Museum, 1994.
52
Gruppo di Scale ornato di magnifica Architecttura, le quali stanno disposte in
modo che conducano a varj piani, e specialmente ad una Rotonda che serve per
rappresentanze teatrali. Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, 1743.
53
On the relevance of Camera Sepolcrale, see Piranesi, terico de la arquitectura
y grabador del s. XVIII, by Leonardo Fidalgo Fontanet.
54
See Alberto Cuomos G.B. Piranesi e larcheologia per frantumi come scienze
della citt, in V.V.A.A. Dalla citt preindustriale alla citt del capitalismo. Edited by
Alberto Caracciolo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975. Pp 103-120.
55
In Vogt-Gknil, Ulya; Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carceri. Zrich. Origo-Verl.
1958.
56
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790).
57
In his essay, Tafuri also quotes May Seklers words on this topic: In the
description of the prison, a stimulation much more effective than allusions to the
diabolical aspect is the substitution and even the destruction of what the observer
is led to believe and suppose. (...) What seems coherent at first sight, upon closer
examination disintegrates; the mind is finally defeated in its attempt to rationalize
89
the irrational. In Sekler, Patricia May. Giovanni Battista Piranesis Carceri:Etchings
and Related Drawings. The Art Quaterly 25, no. 4 (1962). Pp. 331-336.
58
Among those, one of the most disturbing is the one pointed out by Ulya Vogt-
Gknil in plate XIV, where the presence of the stairs in the bottom left contradicts
the nature of the piers as part of the same plane, in a totally Escher-esque way. As
the author points out, the space that the flight of stairs occupies, in reality, then,
does not exist.
59
In Thibault, Franck. Obscurae Civitates et Phantasticae Imagines: Visite gare
de La Tour de Schuiten & Peeters. Sept. 2001.
60
Compare with the prisoners and the mantis-like celebration in Zara. Schuiten,
Franois; Schuiten, Luc. Les Terres creuses (II): Zara, Franois Schuiten, L.
Schuiten, Les Humanodes Associs, 1985.
61
Introduction. Thomas, Hylton. The Drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Faber
and Faber, 1954.
62
In Enquiry into... the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756). The quotation comes
from Tafuri.
63
In his article HISTOIRES EN FORME DE PLANETES, DE VILLES ET DE BATEAUX
(published in les Cahiers de la Bande Dessine n69, May-June 1986), Thierry
Smolderen defines the double point of view that, according to the writer John W.
Campbell, must guide the creation of imaginary worlds: Dans une lettre datant
de 1952, John W. Campbell Jr (...)se montre trs prcis sur un point de thorie
qui devrait intresser tous les apprentis-dmiurges. Daprs Campbell, lauteur
de Mission Gravity est parvenu donner une consistance stroscopique
sa plante parce quil a su : 1) Matriser toutes les donnes scientifiques de son
modle de monde. 2) Respecter parfaitement lintgrit du point de vue dun hros
non-humain.(...) Dans LUnivers lenvers, le Monde du Fleuve et Lord Tyger (pour
ne citer que quelques exemples), la plante - le microcosme artificiel - se forme
entre deux points de vue quasi inconciliables: celui dun dmiurge, plac sur une
orbite basse - ou au sommet dune tour qui surplombe le champ daction -, et celui
dun personnage immerg dans la ralit interne de la plante, dont la mission
consiste souvent conqurir la position dominante (= trouver la cl mtaphysique
du monde, rallier le point de vue externe, transcendant). En exacerbant cette
opposition externe/interne sur laquelle reposent tous les grands romans en forme
de plante, Farmer est parvenu des rsultats tout fait ludiques et fascinants.
64
The perpetual change of a fake urban landscape was later explored in Alex
Proyass Dark City, albeit with a more sci-fi approach that, still, evokes some of the
metaphysical of Samaris. See Proyas, Alex. Dark City, New Line Cinema, 1998.
65
In VV.AA. Schuiten & Peeters. Autour des Cits Obscures, Mosquito, 1994. P. 82.
66
In Prima parte de architetture e prospettive (1743).
67
In Tafuris words, The invention, fixed and circulated by means of the etching,
renders concrete the role of utopia, which is to present an alternative that departs
from actual historical conditions, one that pretends to be in a metahistorical
dimension but only in order to project into the future the bursting forth of present
contradictions.
68
Huyssen, Andreas. Nostalgia for Ruins in Grey Room 23. MIT, Cambridge.
Spring 2006, pp. 6-21.
69
As difficult and surprising as the end of this graphic novel may seem, there
is an argument about the limits of architecture and the human intellect that gets
formulated with quite some precission. The Tower, whose spiritual basis is the dream
of unlimited human greatness, is an ivory tower that can only exist if the inhabitants
neglect the view to the outer world. It is therefore not necessarily to be called less
real as the surrounding reality, but his reality is a fragile fabric that rips appart easily;
the tower is like a castle of cards whose inhabitants can only move with utter care,
since the slightest breath of doubt could make it collapse. In this sense, also an
90
earlier argument of Giovanni is to be understood, when he gets woken up by the
sound of crumbling stone masses and who departys to fix the damage: Come on!
lets bring it in order before it all collapses.... Like the Carceri, also the Tower is a
document that thematises the esthetic qualities of the mighty, as well as the dangers
of human megalomania along the example of an architecture out of control. The
appreciation of the ever-higher striving artistic community is mixed with the anxiety of
the catastrophe that could occur when the genius artist loses power over his collosal
creation and, like Goethes sorcerers apprentice is not able anymore to ban the
ghosts he called. (Translation by Joris Fach).
0. Cover: Poster for the exhibition From Piranesi to Cits Obscures, in Villeneuve-
sur-Lot.
1. PLATE I. Covering the Tower. Two examples of literal translations from
Piranesis imaginary. Top: cover of the French edition of the album and engraving
entitled Spaccato degli Speroni, i quali servono de contraforti al gran Fondamento
del Mausoleo dElio Adriano (Le Antichit Romane IV, 1756). Bottom: main title
page of La Tour (Spanish Edition, left) and title plate for Descrizione e disegno
dellemissario del Lago Albano (1762).
2. PLATE II. Comics and classicism. From left to right and top to bottom: Images
from Opera Boum, by Alex Varenne; Le dernier spartiate and The lost legions,
from the series Alix, by Jacques Martin; and Les Lauriers de Cesar, from the series
Asterix, by Albert Uderzo and Ren Goscinny.
3. PLATE III. Page of La fivre dUrbicande (Casterman,1985), where the principle of
superimposition gets into the field of deconstruction, when two different structures,
the city of Urbicande and a growing net occupy the same space at the same time.
4. PLATE IV. Plausibility and surrealism. On this page: A feverish Franz discovers the
real nature of the city of Samaris, a living mechanism that traps its visitor in an ever-
changing labyrinth (Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Les murailles de Samaris,
Casterman. Tournai. 1983).
5. PLATE V. Piranesi in the Tower. Giovanni and Milena wandering through
Corinthian landscapes intheir trip through the Tower. On top, The Porch of the
Pantheon, from the Antichit Romane (c. 1769)
6. PLATE VI. La Tour and Le Carceri dinvenzione. Top, left: The inner landscapes
of The Tower as compared to Piranesis Carceri: from top right to the middle: Plate
X (2nd edition), Plate XI (1st edition) and Plate XI (2nd edition). Note that the
image comes from the superimposition of elements from Plate XI (I) and a generic
aqueduct structure. Bottom: Schuiten making a rendition of Plate XV (2nd edition).
7. PLATE VII. Complexity without contradiction. Schuitens beautiful rendering
confers unity to a multi-layered tower-world where gothic inputs can coexist with a
hyperbolic Renaissance or Piranesis picturesque vedute, invaded by vegetation (all
images from La Tour).
8. PLATE VIII. Top half: The circular structure in Plate III of The Prisons gives birth
to two different parts of La Tour. Bottom half: The work on the textures reminds of
91
Piranesis style in Lantichita dAlbano e di Castel Gandolfo.
9. PLATE IX. Top: Giovanni in one of his repairments along the Tower. Bottom: The
Cistern at Castel Gandolfo (1764) from Lantichita dAlbano e di Castel Gandolfo.
10. PLATE X. From Carcere Oscura to the Carceri. Top, left: Piranesis rendering of
Carcere Oscura... (Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive, 1743) seems the main
inspirion for Schuiten spatial organization in La Tour. Some of the panels (bottom)
reproduce faithfully the revision of the topic Piranesi did in Plate VI of the Carceri
(right:, final version: note the pulley motif; the rope hang straight in earlier versions)
or in Plate XIV, whose lighting is the one used by Schuiten. The pillars, however, are
redesigned according to the cistern type.
11. PLATE XI. Prison and Mausoleum. As they ascend through the higher levels
of the Tower, Giovanni and Milena get into a travel through Piranesis vedute. Top,
left: Camera Sepolcrale... (Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive, 1743). Bottom:
Ruins in The Tower (bottom, left) and in Piranesis Porticum Panthei (bottom, center;
Il Campo Marzio DellAntica Roma, 1762), Avanzo del Tempio della Speranza
Vecchia (Right; Le Antichit Romane I, 1756), and Tempio di Minerva Medica vicino
Porta Maggiore (bottom, right; Varie Vedute, 1745).
12. PLATE XII. Renaissance and Baroque. Top, left: The central spine of the Tower
resembles the depiction of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel, the old. Right
(top to bottom: Giovanni contemplates a picture of The Tower, and images of The
Great Tower of Babel and The Small Construction of the Tower of Babel, both of
1563. Bottom: The world of the Renaissance Eloi, depicted in a thorough central
perspective.
13. PLATE XIII. Schuitens vedute. Apses and niches in the Tower (top, left and
right) and in Piranesis triumphal arch-like structures. Center, right: Tempio detto
volgarmente di Giano (Vedute di Roma, 1778). Bottom: Una delle due Fornici di
Stertinio nel Foro Boario (Le Antichit Romane I, 1756).
14. PLATE XIV. Architettura, Prospettive, Candelabri, et altri. In their trip, Milena
and Giovanni come across fantastic constructions imagined by Piranesi. Top,
right: Kupfers suggestion of a precedent in Gruppo di Scale ornato di magnifica
Architecttura, le quali stanno disposte in modo che conducano a varj piani, e
specialmente ad una Rotonda che serve per rappresentanze teatrali (Prima parte di
Architettura e Prospettive, 1743). The panel (bottom, left), is really a superposition
of Galleria grande di statue (bottom,right; Prima parte di Architettura e
Prospettiva) and one of the motifs of Monumento antico e due vasi (top, left; Vasi,
Candelabri, Cippi I, 1778).
15. PLATE XV. LAntichit di Albano. Top, left: Prospettiva della piscina delle
medesima conserve... Bottom, left: Prospettiva della Scalla della Conserva
dacqua...(Both from LAntichit di Albano e di Castel Gandolfo, 1764).
16. PLATE XVI. The inner voyeur. Giambattista, in his free wandering through the
Prisons offers us visions of Newtons absolute space.
17. PLATE XVII. On top: The disturbing impossible stairs in Plate XIV of the
Prisons. Bottom: Eschers ambiguous stairs in Relativity, and Schuitens ladders as
compared to the impossible ascent in Eschers Belvedere.
92
18. PLATE XVIII. The engineer and the Swiss clockmaker. In this page: Giovanni
encounters the clock-like machines that the pioneers used to build the Tower.
19. PLATE XIX. Where the Prisons end. In this page: The centre of the Tower and the
end of Giovannis trip, an entropic spiral that runs down to the beginning.
20. PLATE XX. The book of Prisons: Illustration published in The Book of Schuiten
(Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Book of Schuiten. Translated by Catherine Mc
Millan. NBM Publishing Company. 2004).
21. PLATE XXI. The Tower. Giovanni and his friends: Illustration published in The
Archiviste (Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Larchiviste, Casterman. Tournai.
1987). Surrounding Giovanni, a bunch of painters, among the greatest of their time:
Corot, Coubert, Manet, Delacroix and, at the back, the dreadful Gustave Dor.
Copyrights of images as follow:
Le dernier spartiate and Les lgions perdues Casterman. Copyright Spanish
edition: Las legiones perdidas Oikos-Tau, Barcelona, 1970.
Les Lauriers de Csar Dargaud. Copyright Spanish edition: Los Laureles del
Csar Grijalbo-Dargaud, Barcelona, 1972.
Opera Boum Alex Varenne
Les Murailles de Samaris, La fivre dUrbicande, La Tour, LArchiviste
Casterman. Copyright Portuguese edition: As Muralhas de Samaris Witloof
Edioes, Abril de 2003. Copyright Spanish edition La torre Eurocomic,
Madrid, 1988.
Book of Schuiten NBM Publishing Company. 2004.
93
Bibliography
I. Selected bibliography on Giambattista Piranesi
Alfieri, M. Il complesso del Priorato allAventino. In P.Santoro et al., eds.
Piranesi nei luoghi di Piranesi. Rome, 1979, 4ff.
Contessi, Gianni. Scritture Disegnate. Arte, Architettura e Didattica da Piranesi a
Ruskin. Serie Nuovi Saggi. Edizioni Dedalo, Bari. 2003.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings.
Edited with an introduction and notes by Grevel Lindop. Oxford : Oxford
University Press, 1998.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Piranesi, or The Fluidity of Forms in The Sphere and the
Labyrinth. Cambridge, MA, 1987. First appearance in Oppositions 11.
The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies/ MIT Press, 1978.
Ficacci, Luigi. Piranesi: The Complete Etchings. Kln ; New York : Taschen, c2000.
Kaufmann, E. Piranesi, Algarotti, and Lodoli (A Controversy in 18th Century
Venice). GBA (1955).
Kieven, E. Von. Bernini bis Piranesi. Romische Architekturzeichnungen der Barock.
Stuttgart, 1993.
Mayor, A. Hyatt. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. New York: H. Bittner and Company,
1952.
Pazzi, Sandro (a cura di). Giovanni Battista Piranesi : stampe del Gabinetto delle
stampe e dei disegni della Biblioteca comunale di Fermo : Fermo, Chiesa
del Carmine dal 19 luglio al 23 novembre 2003 (Texts by, Maria Chiara
Leonori, Anna Lo Bianco). Italy : s.n., 2003
Perona Snchez, Jess J. La Utopa Antigua de Piranesi. Universidad de Murcia.
Servicio de Publicaciones. Murcia, 1996.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Parere sullArchitettura (1756) in Oppositions. Spring,
1984. 5-25.
Tafuri, Manfredo. The Wicked Architect: G.B. Piranesi, Heterotopia and the Voyage
in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Cambridge, MA, 1987. 25-35.
Thomas, Hylton. The Drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Faber and Faber, 1954
VV.AA. Piranesi (Giambattista Piranesi: Le Antichit Romane, Carceri, Alcune Vedute
di Archi Trionfali, Vedute di Roma). The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta. 2001.
VV.AA. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Faszination und Ausstrahlung : Begleitpublikation
zur Ausstellung im Grassimuseum Leipzig/Museum fr Kunsthandwerk.
Leipzig, Das Museum, 1994.
94
Wittkower,Rudolf. Piranesi as an architect in Studies in the Italian Baroque.
London, 1975. 247-58.
II. Selected bibliography on Franois Schuiten
Castro, Roland ; Peeters, Benot; Schuiten, Franois: Un lieu dimages in
Connaissance des arts n.460, June 1990, pp.80-87
Groensteen, Thierry. Schuiten, in Le cahiers de la bande dessinee, n.56, 1984.
Lameiras, Joo Miguel; Santos, Joo Ramalho; Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot.
As cidades visveis: a histria do 1o. Congresso sobre as cidades
obscuras de Schuiten e Peeters e dos estranhos acontecimentos que
a ocorreram. Organizao de Joo Miguel Lameiras e Joo Ramalho
Santos, com ilustraes de Franois Schuiten e posfcio de Benot
Peeters. Lisboa: Edies Cotovia : Bedeteca de Lisboa, 1998.
Peeters, Benot; Schuiten, Franois. Maison Autrique : metamorphosis of an Art
nouveau house. Translation, Marie-Franoise Pinteaux-Jones; photo
graphs, Marie-Franoise Plissart; lay-out :Martine Gillet. Bruxelles : Les
impressions nouvelles, c2004.
Verne, Jules. Paris au XXe sicle ; suivi de, Une ville idale. Illustrations par Franois
Schuiten; tablissement du texte Vronique Bedin et Piero Gondolo della
Riva; [dition, Vronique Bedin avec Marianne Lechapt]. Paris: Hachette,
c1995.
VV.AA. Schuiten & Peeters. Autour des Cits Obscures, Mosquito, 1994.
III. Selected bibliography by Franois Schuiten
III.I. Mutations
Schuiten, Franois; Renard, Claude. Aux mdianes de Cymbiola. Les Humanodes
Associs, 1980.
Schuiten, Franois; Renard, Claude. Le Rail, Les Humanodes Associs, 1982.
III.II. Les Terres creuses
Schuiten, Franois; Schuiten, Luc. Les Terres creuses (I): Carapaces, Les
Humanodes Associs, 1981
Schuiten, Franois; Schuiten, Luc. Les Terres creuses (II) : Zara, Les Humanodes
Associs, 1985
Schuiten, Franois; Schuiten, Luc. Les Terres creuses(III) : Nogegon, Les
Humanodes Associs, 1990
III.III Les Cits Obscures:
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Les murailles de Samaris, Casterman. Tournai.
June,1983.
95
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. La fivre dUrbicande. Casterman, Tournai.
1985.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot; Smolderen, Thierry. Le mystre dUrbicande,
par Rgis de Brok,) Presses de lAcadmie des Sciences de Brsel,
reprint Schlirfbook. 1985.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Larchiviste, Casterman. Tournai. 1987.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. La tour, Casterman. Tournai. 1987.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. La route dArmilia, Casterman. Tournai. 1988.
Schuiten, Franois & Peeters, Benot. Encyclopdie des transports prsents et
venir par Axel Wappendorf, Casterman. Tournai. 1988.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Le muse A. Desombres : catalogue rai
sonn des oeuvres et des biens ayant appartenu a Augustin Desombres,
Franois Schuiten, Benot Peeters, Marie-Franoise Plissart, F. Young, T.
Gnicot. Casterman, Tournai. 1990.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Brsel. Casterman, Tournai. 1992.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Lcho des cits. Casterman, Tournai. 1993.

Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Lenfant penche. Casterman, Tournai. 1995.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Le guide des Cits obscures. Casterman,
Tournai. 1996.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Lombre dun homme. Casterman, Tournai.
1999.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Voyages en Utopie. Casterman, Tournai.
November, 2000.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. La Frontire invisible, tome 1. Casterman,
Tournai. 2002.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. La Frontire invisible, tome 2. Casterman,
Tournai. 2004.
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Book of Schuiten. Translated by Catherine Mc
Millan. NBM Publishing Company. 2004
Schuiten, Franois; Peeters, Benot. Les Portes du Possible. Casterman, Tournai.
October, 2005.
96
97
Mark R. Mansfield
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Foreword
The pavilion for Kyss Frosken (Kiss the Frog) resolved (at least temporarily) a
decade long controversy over what type of civic architecture should be built on
an essential piece of property in Oslo, Norway (Fig. 1). The buildings name
playfully evokes the promising engagement of a princess to find her prince. Over
the course of a decade, numerous architectural competitions resulted in winning
solutions that were embraced and celebrated, yet all, eventually were abandoned.
The past trysts had not revealed a prince. Finally, with the institutional merging of
four museums and the auspicious occasion of the centennial of Norways absolute
sovereignty, they had their muse.
1
In a gesture recognizing the magnitude of the
past contemplations and flagging commitments, the built pavilion opened with
an exhibition of the sites forgone prospective architectural history, presented in
the various architects distinct models, plans, and drawings. This hodgepodge of
solutions chronicled the protracted timeline of evolving, modern solutions, and
revealed a changing architectural response to the professions contemplation on the
potential and purpose of the city.
Incredulously named, Frosken - Norwegian for the frog - the temporary pavilion
was an arresting structure, a flowing serpentine membrane of bulging green skin.
Needless to say, it stood out, and stood in stark contrast to the National Gallery
to which it was connected as well as to other buildings of brick, stone, and
glass rising from the grid of the citys streets surrounding it. Although a difficult
building not to notice, because of its temporary construction one might overlook
it as an object that hails both persisting and current facets of the architectural
discourse. However, it provides an exemplar case, stimulating a recent theorizing
on technology and evoking a history of buildings, projects, and ideas. This is not
only in spite of its temporary status, but also because of it. Accepting the temporal
dimension of architecture promotes a select criteria of values; values that eschew
the absoluteness of conventional monumentality: instead of lasting evidence of
an ideal, there is the ephemeral and the contingent. As Charles Baudelaires
discernments of modernity were predicated on these fleeting aspects, the work of
Magne Wiggen - the principal of mmw, and the architect of Frosken - is prudently
1
98
considered in the ways that it is a continuation of, as well as an evolution from,
the modern project.
2
Georg Simmel linked the social sphere to the environmental
landscape of modernity in his fundamental essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life
(1903). The intensification of emotional life that Simmel observed, can be tuned
to the agitated frequency and amplitude of our current condition.
3
As a result,
we can locate the resultant unique modes of sociability of our emerging digital
culture to the transformations we are now seeing in our cities. Indexed to these
transformations, Wiggens work punctuates a specific contemplation on the city that
percolates through a (mostly theoretical) architectural discourse of recent decades
and asserts a politic as to how our cities might continue in their transformation.
In light of Froskens stimulating attributes, I will excavate the social and aesthetic
discourses in which this exceptional building and its technology is embedded to
trace the cultural-consciousness of its forms and map its developments within
these broader forces so as to relate its offerings on the status of technology in the
architectural object. To construct a theoretical framework for Frosken, it is necessary
to both situate the fantastical green undulating form into the history of proposed
solutions and consider its conception within the evolving theoretical discourse.
This history includes a diverse group whose writings and projects constitute an
architectural discourse on a performative architecture. Such ideas came to the fore
in the sixties by architectural groups such as Archigram, Archizoom, Situationist
International, Superstudio, and were nurtured by the work of Barthes, Deluze,
Derrida, Lacan, Eco, Foucault, and Sartre - among others. By examining this near
history, we can better read the protean discourse veiled in an ostensibly simple
green skin.
Simply put, this investigation is about Frosken, the temporary pavilion, and its
technological complexion. It is an analysis of the means and metaphors of its
construction. In such an inquiry, an analysis of technology can become stymied by
fixating on its overt engineering entailments; the focus on the engineering aspects
can obscure the greater cultural significance of technology. Seeing this potential
foible, Lance Lavine warns, calculated performance has replaced architectural form
as the primary definition of what is technological about buildings.
4
Technology,
for Lavine, is neither an abstract idea nor a material state, but a complex condition
that becomes a constituent element of the real. I am intrigued by the implications of
this more robust definition of technology and accordingly, I interrogate technology
of building as the co-existence and conflation of both the ideas and essence of
architecture. Consequently, I pay particular attention to the theoretical concepts
as much if not more than the buildings forms (although the indivisibility of these
aspects is at the core of my inquiry).
Digital tools have become essential to defining new forms and fostering the related
digital consciousness necessary to apprehend the significance of these forms - if
not to engender their very signification. Consequently, emerging technologies
are tacit to spheres of knowledge that result in dominant epistemological realities
shaping the way we apprehend and experience our cities. Technology, its image in
architecture, and its manifestation in other human activities, shapes distinct modes
of sociability. Verily, the digital realm has a direct bearing on the physical realm
(of architecture) and, moreover, the two can be understood in communion with our
formative culture. This proposal is aligned to Neil Spillers claim that, This virtual
aspect of the city is becoming more and more important as a definable component
of human habitation.
5
To be clear, mine is an examination of the physical and
philosophical technological constructions of architecture in order to reveal the
fortifying exchange - between architectures symbolic nature and empirical reality.
99
Thesis
These opening observations give rise to questions about the exchange between
technology, sociability, and the environments at stake in their intercourse. A change
in the socio-phenomenal experience of the city, as well as the shifting perceptual
register of the subject, can be mapped to coordinate theories of technologies and
their prevailing hallmark forms (e.g., new technologies give rise to new philosophies
and vice versa). Architecture has a profound ability to vividly express technological
thinking and technologies are leveraged for their expressive formal manifestations as
well as for their functional capabilities. It can be seen that, architecture and the city
at large are simultaneously a material construct and a construct of the mind.
As technology can be understood as a metaphorical thought of architecture, I look
to the way Frosken expresses and shapes a technological ontology. I also borrow the
device of metaphor to reveal a way this building functions in order to communicate
its enduring offering - a suggestion as to how we might build and transform our
cities. In doing so, I must request an active and flexible discernment from the reader
as, of course, the two spheres of technology -its image and its measurable utility
- are easily conflated.
The term, virtual also has an essential nuanced meaning, not to be confused with
the related notion of virtual reality or computer simulated environment; for my
purposes, the virtual recognizes a condition of the experiential not inherent in the
actual. This definition, leveraged and expounded by Gilles Deleuze, refers to an
aspect that objects are beholding to, that is neither its actuality nor its potential,
rather, it is what it is imagined to be. In this case, the virtual is a condition of
existence and our relationship to this dimension constructs our reality.
Even though the conception of building is seemingly inextricable from its
technology, this inquiry necessarily interrogates technology and architecture as
separate domains. More succinctly then, I will explore the technique of Froskens
construction in the ways it mediates technological metaphors. This analysis
elucidates sources of meaning by deconstructing the metaphors through contextual
social signification and historiographic construction.
Frosken and the City
Frosken promotes the current technological vanguard of the architectural discipline.
Architectural historian, Sylvia Lavin contends that practice which smacks of
contemporaneity must possess certain special effects.
6
By this criterion,
Frosken appears to have no shortage of stimulating attributes. In the ways Frosken
transcribes the freedoms and constraints of its form-rendering software, it can be
said to exemplify the pure artistic value of digital architecture, akin to Gehrys
work on Spains Bilbao Museum.
7
It is exemplar of the parametric curves, planes,
and volumes of a computerized form.
8
In a word, it is blobitechture.
9

Froskens novel architectural skin of laminated PVC creates a continuous undulating
surface contouring nonstandardized forms and volumes that serve counterpoint
to the planar surfaces and platonic geometry of traditional architecture.
10
It is a
building that typifies the emerging CAD/CAM process of design and development.
11

In essence, it is emblematic of the current digital practice and characteristic of a
digital tectonic expression. Kenneth Frampton, whose work on tectonics emphasizes
constructional form and material character as essential to architectural expression,
notes, new materials and joining methods have shifted the focus away from load-
100
bearing masonry towards dematerialized modes of assembly.
12
Magne Wiggens
architecture is exemplar of Framptons observation, as the traditional load-bearing
structure has been supplanted by a pneumatic engineering which stabilize the
largest pod of the Frosken pavilion (Fig. 2).
Frosken hails the current lineaments of a technologically progressive architectural
practice and privileges a dynamic space for performance - rather than a static place
of edifice. Frosken can be said to rely on performance as an architectural element
- as the intent of the architect was to emblematize durability as a creation of
possibilities instead of memorialize static ideals with an edifice of more traditional
and permanent architecture.
13

Contemporary architectural forms seem largely characterized by their technological
conception. Such is the case with the undulating titanium skins of one of Gerrys
buildings or the transformation of the digital into the material with Nox Architects,
Fresh H2O eXPO Pavilion. These forms, far from merely structural expressions of
their constructive technologies, evoke the very process of their conception. So
too with Frosken, the transformation of method, expression, and experience is
dependent on its technological conception (Fig. 3). The computer has generated,
mediated, and assisted in the manufacturing of the buildings unique forms. Chris
Able observes this trend, noting a preoccupation with the formal expression of
complexity for its own sake.
14
A complexity that, I would argue, is related to how
computers serve as a medium in addition to as a tool. Nox Architects pavilion, for
example, was not only a computer-generated building, rather an attempt to recreate
the experience of the virtual space, exponent of the new digital imaging software.
15

Theirs is an acute example of Mitchell Williams observation that, Routinely, events
in cyberspace are being reflected in physical space, and vice versa.
16

Marc Anglil proposes, the physical material reality of architecture can be seen
in relation to the formulation of thought.
17
Accordingly, Froskens complexion
reflects mmws conception. An elegant working definition that adumbrates these
less empirical facets of technology is offered by Lance Lavine, who in his book,
Mechanics and Meaning in Architecture, notes, Architectural technology is the
way in which human beings create metaphorical ideas that place them in nature
through the manipulation of habitable form that redirects natural force.
18
As
such, blobitecture might be momentarily profound, as it is novel, in its figurative
expression of our current technological culture.

The Archigram group is noted for having celebrated the potential of technology
in a conceptual architecture that has proved to be quite prophetic. In this lineage
of radical architects, the forecasting fantasy of Archizooms fascination with
technology, the Situationists proposal of an ephemeral interface for the city, and
the polemical architecture of Tschumis event cities, chart a trajectory of certain
virtual realities emerging in our cities. Magne Wiggen is part of a new generation of
architects working in if not with - the heritage of Bernard Tschumi and others who
have recycled techniques of the radical projects of the sixties and seventies.
19

Frosken manifests many ideas of Archigrams propositions, as well, evokes both
ephemeral and Pop-art fascination - leitmotifs of their projects. In light of this
legacy, Frosken can be regarded as a neo-expressionist, post-Fordist condenser
conjuring the promise of the instant city, and heralding the concept of event
cities.
20
Iconographically, there is a curious and striking resemblance of the
Harmonica pod-like pavilion of Kyss Frosken to Ron Herrons Walking City (1964)
(Fig. 4, 5). This resemblance alone, calls to mind the fanciful legacy of Archigram
and its contemporaries.
3
2
101
Frosken is characterized by an architectural curvilinearity.
21
The parametric
algorithms and the digitally driven design process is itself a potent metaphor to
the open-ended unpredictable but controlled status of the space-scapes of our
digitally transformed cities. The architectural object, achieved through new uses
of technology is (ostensibly) tailored to the fluctuating demands and the variable
programs enabled by our cyborg interface and converging at any moment.
The multiplicity and heterologous experience evoked in Rem Koolhaass quip from
Delirious New York, Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor is
noted as the plot of the ninth story as well as the 20th century in action.
22
This
multiplicity of experience in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can
make it is exploded to multivalent possibilities of the digitally enabled networks;
however, the principle is the same. The city, as the skyscraper in Koolhaas
retroactive manifesto, is a Constructivist Social Condenser: a machine to generate
and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.
23

The fusion of human and machine is by no means relegated to science fiction.
Individuals technological devices and the internet shape our cyborg interface as our
lives territorialize cyberspace. The symbolic dimension of this reality is especially
relevant to our current social norms, where we are constantly participating in virtual
networks. Frosken complies with a network metaphor in provocative ways: It does
not subjugate the system (city), nor supplant its hardware (infrastructure); rather
it can be understood as an applet a (software) component that operates in the
context of another program.
24
Whereas the applet enables a functionality that
supersedes that of the container, the architectural applet, - if you will - catalyzes
new use of the existing urban environment. Rather than an overbearing Hausmanian
intervention or a utopian master plan, like Le Corbusiers Contemporary City Plan for
Three Million, this building operates as an interface to the virtual and actual networks
of the city. It works within the existing physical infrastructure and programs space for
4
5
102
both tangible and virtual realities. A more comprehensive understanding of an applet
enriches the metaphor as - in software - it does not run independent of an existing
system and is usually recognized by a unique graphic user interface (i.e., a GUI).
Instead, the container (the space-scape) is provided by a host program (the city). In
this line of thinking, the essential contemplation of program for the architect and
computing environment are drawn together. When considered this way, Archigrams
fantastical Logplug makes perfect sense to the programmers plugin, necessary in
the container application for an applet to function (Fig. 6). Applets intentionally both
interface and effect the host application as does this architecture.
These network metaphors draw attention to the existing transformation in how we
experience cities and suggest the character of future interventions. As architecture
can be reprogrammed for new uses, architectural meaning is subject to an
open-ended negotiation of signification. Roland Barthes takes a post-structuralist
approach, dismissing a fixity of the relationship between sign and meaning.
25

Extrapolating from Barthes premise, Gram Macphee glibly but poignantly notes,

Meaning [Barthes] realized, arises not from events or things in themselves
but from their association and context. Be it a striptease or all-in wrestling,
pommes frites or a murder trial, the Citron DS or the Battle of Dien Bien Phu,
we can only read them in any useful way if we can analyze their mythic context
as well as their superficial context.
26

As the context of the city is always changing, these metaphors point to how the
experience of the city develops asynchronous to the change of its infrastructure.
Architectures Metaphors
The parametric curves of Frosken, the temporary nature of its construction, and its
performative intent, assert a politic about the economics of building, the ecology
of resources used, and a criteria by which a project should be measured. The
ephemeral construction calls attention to its architectural assets: the programmatic
transformation of the city and the impact of architectural thinking; and its temporary
status challenges status-quo equations and expectations of investment and lifespan
of buildings. For Frosken, as the unbounded network, virtual space becomes an
exercised real estate and the rote equations of square footage alone, no longer
serve a meaningful measure of the utility of a place. Above the discrete program
for the museum, the intention of Frosken was to activate the whole of the city, it
6
103
was an architectural applet programmed to upgrade the operating system (Oslo).
The metaphors of technology and the frog-shape become protagonist statements of
transformation on this precious real estate.
A selective read of the 20th century Modern movement promotes technology as
a key agent to its aesthetic developments with a multitude of examples where style
is idealized to progressive industrial forms. In this way, emblems of technology call
attention to the progressiveness of practice. Le Corbusiers polemic juxtaposition in
Towards a New Architecture, between the esprit of technology in automobiles and
archetypes of architecture, reveals the ideological potency of such association.
27
Le
Corbusier used the technological complexion of the automobile to draw attention
to the potential of architecture. It can be seen that there is a productive exchange
between architecture and technological ideas, where the architectural form is
enriched by a technological historiography. I would go further to argue that a virtual
dimension of the city is leavened by the agency of such technology-thinking, and
again, call upon Neil Leach who states this position succinctly: New technologies
breed new ways of thinking.
28

Returning to Froskens theoretical progenitors, the Situationists unitary urbanism,
that mapped the city by activity, rather than geography, understood the networked
space-scapes of the city holistically and anticipated the ways that our current cyborg
status empowers us as agents in a network of interstitial connections. In Me + +
The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell notes, The ongoing shift
of functions from urban and architectural to bodily real estate inverts some familiar
customs and rituals. You once slipped into a telephone booth to make a call (and
Clark Kent did so to change his costume), but you now slip a cell phone out of
your pocket.
29
Social practices are largely distinguished by the multiplicity of the
network and the individual choices of a technological interface (Fig. 7).
Architecture historian Sha zkan notes, Archigram was in active search of both
a new language and a new mythology for architecture for the masses.
30
Prophesy
begat practice begat pedagogy begat pragmatics and, today, Magne Wiggens work
can be seen as a rational response which provides an architectural interface that
engages and activates the potential of the city. In this way, we have reached the
point where the radical ideas of the sixties are supplanted with an extant form, where
the once radical is now quite practical.
31

Magne Wiggens perspective on the city, his focus on events and an architecture
that engenders performance, resonates with a Deleuzian network of interactive
forces stimulating a rhizomatic multiplicity of coordinate agents. Wiggens initial
concept sketches, in fact, did not indicate form, but drew lines of connectivity
between buildings and into the city, emphasizing the conceptual dimension of a
program that extended past the plot of the site development (Fig. 8). Neil Spiller,
drawing upon research in virtual theory, concurs upon the role of the invisible in
urban planning. For Spiller, this interconnectedness results in a dispersion of the
nodal nature of the city, emphasizing, the accelerating complexity of the city has
always been part product of the virtual.
32
Antoine Picons work also examines
this dialectic. He questions: What is the reality of an architectural design?, and,
weighing-in on the cognitive over the empirical, provides the keen resolve, It is
precisely a virtual reality.
33
While the final design of Frosken provides limited
literal connections to the citys fabric, the connective tunnels of the frogs arms
suggest this capacity, and more: its jointed form appears poised to spring beyond
its current location.
7
8
9
104
Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, the title of Simon Sadlers book
on the group, provides a cryptic offering in light of our current status: daily
life unbounded to the grid of the city and a transformation of city independent
of a change of building. The title seems to make no small allusion to Bernard
Rudolfskys canonical text, Architecture Without Architects. Rudolfskys book,
originally published in conjunction with a show at the Museum of Modern Art,
emerged contemporaneous with Archigrams formation. Whereas both texts provide
a polemic that runs counter to the modernist strictures, Rudolfsky looks back to the
primitive and the vernacular, whereas Archigram, on the other hand, looks forward
to a fantastical future.
34
Contemplating this intertextual exchange between titles
highlights the curious similarity how both perspectives understand a community as
shaped by events - rather than by designers. In this sense, Archigram can be seen
as contemplating modes of living more so than architectural form. Grafting Magne
Wiggen into this tradition, it follows that the initial sketches, which sired Frosken,
depicted not form, but flow, and represented circulation and connection (Fig 9).
Recently, the complex diagram of internet interconnectivity has become the most
vivid icon of globalization, giving rise to William Mitchells observation that:
Increasingly, we are living our lives at the points where electronic
information flows, mobile bodies, and physical places intersect in
particularly useful and engaging ways. These points are becoming
the occasions for a characteristic new architecture of the twenty-first
century.
35

Constant Nieuwenhuys, a member of the Situationists, is known for his translations
of the groups ideas into conceptual architecture.
36
His program sought to activate
a dynamic space counter to the static space of society. Guy Debords cover of the
essential Situationist document, the Psychogeographic guide of Paris, provides a
vivid expression of this thinking. The cover image shows the map of Paris cut-up.
Distinct areas once cohered by urban landscape are recomposed to represent
the temporal relations and psychographics of the city. Arrows indicate the social
circulation and connection over physical proximity and transportation corridors
of spatial planning. Like the psychographic map of Paris, the digital world is
logically, spatially, and temporally discontinuous,
37
its networks are unbounded
to geography of the city. This dynamic space of the city is increasingly important
as our lives are mapped to activities of virtual networks over the topographic grid,
and as our lives become increasingly complicated by this condition, the program
of architecture will likely change. Chris Able underscores this concept, proposing
the extension of self-organizing networks and software agents into all aspects of
urban life [as immanent].
38
The name of the exhibition, Kiss the Frog! The Art of
Transformation, was inspired by mmws temporary pavilion and related both the
content and attitude of the exhibition. Capitalizing on this dynamic space of the
city, it can also fly as a banner to a promising way of building and thinking about
our cities future.
105
Background
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5tons.
Popular Mechanics, 1949
Though our cities are not (yet?) populated by the curvilinear forms of a hegemonic
digital culture, the extant buildings of this avant-garde exist as more than
bellwethers for a future condition, rather, they flag our attention to a condition in
which we are already living. These forms implicate the multiplicity of converging
programs and the (de)materialization of our experiential space-scapes in the
morphology of the city. Though the concept of a technologically expressive
architecture may evoke images of some sort of contemporary version of Fritz
Langs Metropolis or other later-day visions of a fantastical future, a technological
architecture is not necessarily characterized by a high-tech architecture.
Computers have evolved from massive mainframes used by a multitude of people,
to computers as personalized platforms, to our current situation where a multitude
of processing technologies serve one individual. Mark Weiser, a researcher at Xerox
PARC, attributed with coining the term ubiquitous computing in the late 1980s,
refers to this evolution, where technology ostensibly vanishes, noting, they weave
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
39

Yet, it is just as the presence of a processing entity is becoming less visible the
impact of digital technology on daily life is becoming increasingly apparent.
Ubiquitous computing inverts some of the connotations of virtual reality: instead of
an environment simulated by the computer, the computer is a constituent element of
the constructed reality. This shift calls attention to the broader implications of the
term. Thus, instead of a virtual world a simulacrum - enabled by the computer,
we are experiencing a real world shaped by digital culture.
There is a semantic parallax that bridges from virtual reality to the virtualization
of reality. Slavoj ieks draws upon Lacan to establish the warrant between
these ideas, citing Lacans notion that, fantasy is the ultimate support of
reality.
40
Considering Froskens fantastical foundations, it can be seen that the
Archigram group was not an isolated case. Others were eager to ingeniously- and
to some, irreverently- question the bounds of architecture at the dawning of a
new technological age. Hans Hollein, noted as promoting Deleuzian rhyzomic
multiplicity before Deleuze, is another representative voice from this troupe.
41

Liane Lefaivre, translates Holleins opening statements from a symposium he hosted
in Vienna in 1966, relating, The limited categorical foundations and traditional
bound definitions of architecture and its means on the whole lost their validity. He
does, however, offer a resolve: [A] true architecture of our time, then, is emerging,
and is both redefining itself as a medium and expanding its field. He concludes,
Everything is architecture.
42

A productive counterpart to these ideas of the city called for its own version of
everything. Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price set forth the
non-plan, arguing that the most rigorously planned citieslike Haussmanns
and Napoleon Ills Parishave nearly always been the least democratic.
43

Archigram postulated an architectural object such as a dwelling that you wear
where the object is determined by sociable impulses rather than traditional typology.
This suited Banhams prophetic promotion of a flexible, portable architecture.
Banham, re-conceptualized the definition of the home as, the integration of a
complex of intrapersonal relationships and mainservices.
44
Banhams fetish for
106
inflatables would have found favor with Frosken.
William Mitchells history of the cyborg self thematizes these architectural
offerings, noting, By the 1960s, the architectural avant-garde had begun to take
note of all this. It was sensing a shift from composition of space and structure.
45

Guy Debord and the Situationists were exploring a phenomenological frontier;
Archigram, was speculating a futuristic form, and Archizoom was envisioning the
type of superstructure that was yet to be an engineering reality. Though the sixties
predate the inextricable complications of the information age as a normative
condition, it is perhaps just for this reason that the technological possibilities
of architecture could be playfully explored, as the immanence of their agitated
condition were not yet omnipresent. These diverse influences pave the way for
Froskens use of public space, temporary program, and technological articulation,
but moreover, seed the architectural imagination providing virtualization to
technology: the fantasy supporting our current reality.
Reflections on Technology, Architecture, meaning and Metaphor
Perhaps the most striking transformation effected by these [digital]
technologies is the change in our perception of materiality, space,
and information, which is bound directly or indirectly to affect how we
understand architecture, habitation, and the built environment.
Elizabeth Grosz
Magne Wiggins Frosken project responds to and enunciates virtuality qua
materiality and stimulates a recent-discourse on technology. I extend some
reflection here to explicate its pronouncements of technology in architecture.
More than a simple metaphor, technology is a complex cultural framework
for conceptualizing the structure and apprehension of architecture. As such, the
conceptual structure bears as much consideration as its material manifestations.
There are, however, traps in ascribing meaning to such paradigmatic constructions.
Fredric Jameson, among others, warned against such structuralist-association,
reminding us of the relativity of meaning attributed to a sign. He reminds us that,
Symbolic meaning like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, but is no less
real for that.
46
Chris Abel provides a complimentary and elegant phrasing to the
complicated role of metaphor in the evolution of architectural concepts, noting,
When we speak of changes in the relations between people and their
environment, we refer implicitly to changes in our conception of those
relationsBut if we accept the intermediary function of a concept or
mental categories in human action, then all forms of human change boil
down to changes of ideas, which are in turn mediated by the form of the
language in which ideas are expressed.
47
Abels reasoning substantiates the proposal that understanding the role of metaphor
in our evolving concepts of technology illuminates the nature of architectural
signification.
For, Alberto Prez-Gmez, If architecture can be said to have a poetic meaning
we must recognize that what it says is not independent of what it is. Architecture
is not an experience that words translate later. Like the poem itself, it is its figure
as presence, which constitutes the means and end of the experience.
48
To
this I say that the technological formulations of thought are as important as the
107
technology essential to its physical construction in the phenomenology of our built
environment. There is a relativism between conceptions of technology and culturally
conditioned modes of thinking. For, if our ability to speak with poetry is grounded
in a symbols functioning within a Zeitgeist, then it follows that we must evolve the
lexicon of our forms at exactly the rate of cultural integration of sign in order for
them to manifest a novel poetic potency. Again, this concept is complicated by
architectures relationship to language. Whereas Ludwig Wittgenstein proffered, The
meaning of a word is its use in language.
49
I would contend that the meaning of
technology is its use (in architecture). In this case, Wittgensteins post-structuralist
observation is both true to architecture and its linguistic counterpart. By this I mean
the meaning of form itself - as architecture is understood as a form of irreducible
knowledge is negotiable, as is the language which we use to describe it. Thus, like
language, we understand the potential and complexities of architectural meaning in
its constructions.
Roland Barthes, in his essay on the Eiffel Tower, famously stated, the Tower
materializes an imagination.
50
Barthes surmised it materialized an idea which was
first expressed in literature, noting it is frequently the function of the great books
to achieve in advance what technology will merely put into execution.
51
So too
is the exchange with the great books of architecture and the discourses of theory
and practice can be said to seed the future forms of practice. Lloyd Conway Morgan
provides further insight to this relationship:
Narrative implies sequence, and also consequence: a narrative is a
structured set of events, within which meaning drives as much from the
links between the events as the events themselves, from content and
context. We, the slaves of time, that most artificial of all our inventions
as Sebald puts it in Austerlitz, see narrative as a necessary structure,
defining both our own lives and those around us, time providing a
sequence to which we can attach consequence.
52

This thinking helps transgressing a binary relationship of sign and symbol to the
exchange between a modernistic digital culture and architecture with a distinct
phenomenology of technological contemporaneity. It emphasizes that a cultural
construct engenders the expression and experience of digital architecture. Our
cyborg interface, with the emerging techno-scape of the city, fosters a synasthestic
experience, the concomitant sensation of physical form, space, and their cognitive
counterparts. Thus, as experienced, the space-scapes of cites are already (and
continually) transformed by their use.

Architecture is the site - the interface of an experience - where multiple technologies
engage and, within the daily activities of our cities, we experience the realities of the
world. What is at stake in my proposition then, is a condition of our cities delimited
to current definitions of architecture and the predominant narratives of technology.
With hindsight, Archigram, in their playful iconoclastic sentiments, culturally keen
sensibility and Pop-art aesthetic, proved somewhat profound in their prescriptions.
Their oeuvre still looks somewhat improbable in its past-perfect futurism, however
it is noteworthy how, without too much abstraction, their ideas seem to predict if
not prefigure the situations arising in our current digital age and the possibilities for
reconceptualizing architecture in light of new technologies, materials, and changing
ideas of society and the individual.
53
To this point, I am most inclined to emphasize
how they prefigure: providing creative-germ for the architectural imagination. As
we construct myths to illuminate the unknown
54
, such prescriptions of architecture
108
and their cultural counterparts inform the becoming dimension our citys forms.
The reverberation of the ideas and images from these utopian projects invest in the
conception of the city and its potential. In this way, the metaphor of architecture
leverages an abstraction to communicate this always-becoming dimension of our
cities to ourselves. We mythologize the virtual in the physical forms we build and
our buildings become exoteric manifestations of our technological thinking. The
mythic charge is not an empirical fact, rather it persists as a social construct, yet
one that shapes architectures reality nonetheless.
The construction of architectural form emerges coterminously with the construction
of the subject; tools are a product and the social consciousness a symptom of a
historical state of technology. Antoine Picons observation that, the criteria for
judgment are displaced, from an evaluation of the form toward an assessment of
the motivations that underlie the process of its birth,
55
is especially relevant to
a digital architecture which expresses its computational development. Particular
technology translates the skins of Gehrys models, computes the spaces of Foreign
Office Architects, but furthermore, the apprehension of this architecture becomes
inseparable from the cultural relationship to the associated technology. Digitized
architecture thus has a physical and phenomenological implication. These forms of
practice shape further apprehension and thus activate the dynamic of signification.
The forms are meaningful because they evoke the process of their conception and
or the technique of the programmatic analysis. As for example, the novelty of Fashid
Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera Polo of FOAs Ferry Terminal was that the form was
emblematic of the process. As Neil Leach remarked, programmatic, constructional
and structural concerns are fused into a single formal expression, yielding the
critical remark, This project was not only born of the digital it was also realized
through the digital.
56

Digital imaging tools shape the current architectural practice, this due both to the
properties of the enabling technique and the context of the coordinate technological
manifestations: a broad sphere including, but not limited to, computer aided
manufacturing techniques, a multitude of cyborg interfaces, and the ideologically
produced consciousness of the modern individual. Kathleen Woodward flags our
attention to this contextual influence, noting, One of the most fascinating results of
the invention of the computer and other communication systems is the permeation
of other realms of discourse by the vocabulary of information theory and data
processing, altering our vision of ourselves and the world.
57

Our current cultural mode is arguably one of image and representation; architecture
is activated by and provokes this condition. Theodor Adorno offers insight to the
symbolic functioning of architectures forms relevant here, According to Freud,
he notes, symbolic intention quickly allies itself to technical forms. He thus
concludes, purposeful forms are the language of their own purposes.
58
It follows
then, that tool shapes technique and technology shapes teleology. By extensions,
this process of digital design - the concatenations of conception, design and
construction - yield a purposeful digitized form of building.
There is some belief that the new technological condition is dematerializing
architecture. Kenneth Frampton is one who argues that, these innovations have
brought about a dematerialization of building together with a literal mechanization/
electrification of its fabric. He warns against the tendency of technology to
become a new nature covering the surface of the earth while simultaneously
destabilizing both the natural and the man-made worlds.
59
Whereas Frampton has
argued that the tectonic requirements of architecture are unsatisfied by prospect of
109
a digital architecture a digital tectonic if you will, Niel Leach, among others, has
realized that there currently is a big difference between the algorithmic potential
of software programs and the tectonic parameters of actual building materials.
60

Antoine Picon has interrogated this disassociation between architectural
representation and tectonic and points to a chasm between the screen and the site
between slick renderings and the physical world. He offers the case of Zaha Hadids
science center in Wolfsburg. Here, the ethereal essence of the digital rendering can
be seen in contrast to a brutal tectonic when concretized as constructed form.
61

From the macro of city zoning to the micro of specialized rooms, modernist
planning can be seen as promoting the specialization of space. Alternatively,
the digital culture, unlike the industrial culture, does not rigidly bind activity to a
certain use of space. Aligned to this thinking, Lefebvre proffered a diversification
of space, wherein the (relative) importance attached to functional distinctions
would disappear.
62
Our technological prosthetics are buoying the potential of our
cyborg selves, and today, we are the manifestation of the prophecy of David Greene
and Mike Barnard of Archigram, that micro technology will enable new lifestyles.
In their soothsaying insight they claimed, people are walking architecture.
63

Magne Wiggen proposed a profound contemplation for the redefinition of materiality
emblematized by his architecture when he promoted a creation of possibilities as
the most durable element of his architecture.
64

The anfractuous skin of Frosken is another example of late-twentieth /early
twenty-first century architectural forms that fetishize the potential complexity of
a CAD form and possibilities of CAM construction. A cursory assessment might
presume its complexities reject the reductionism of early Modernists as well as
eschew the didactic quotation of the Postmodernists. There is, however, a ghost of
modernisms historiography looming in this analysis. I am especially struck by the
ways that new structures are rationalized as integral to the digital imaging tools,
and the tool rationalized to process more complex coordinates of program (such as
the case with FOAs ferry terminal). This all smacks of a rehash of the quip form
follows function. This hackneyed dictum, with only superficial relevance to the last
centurys modernist architecture, has nonetheless become a boilerplate remark for
understanding and, at times, excusing tenets of modernism. Still, it appears to be
exercised again; an old rational for a new functional form. As such, the rational of
functionalism again rears its head to legitimize the propositional validity of the new
forms.
My interest, in fact, is grounded in the inverse of this phrase. What is the function
that follows form? especially in terms of the metaphoric, symbolic, as well as
programmatic functioning which necessitates contemplation of architectures social
functioning and the discursive context of the digital age in which these forms are
built. A myth of functionalism promoted the idea of an anti-aesthetic, or rather a
style that emerged purely from shaping form to the utilitarian concerns. In Adornos
words, when the absolute rejection of style becomes style.
65
Now too, style is
ascribed to the agency of our current technological functionalism.
110
Findings
Branko Kolarevic, prefaces the book Architecture in the Digital Age Design and
Manufacturing with the claim Digital technologies are changing architectural
practice in ways that few were able to anticipate just a decade ago.
66
This
paper then, looks to the few who had such insight and their legacy. Though
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers took some inspiration for the playful techno-
fetishized Pompidou Center in Paris, we are now seeing a reality of verisimilar
Manzaks, Rokplugs, Cushicles, Suitaloons, Capsule Homes, Plug-in and Instant
Cities.
67
I cant help but see the likeness of Archigrams electric tomato in Apples
iPod advertisements with a gesticulating individual plugged into their highly
technologically personalized experience; it seems as if the most abstract of the
analytic architecture of Archigram has been realized (Fig 10, 11). Our reality has
been engendered by these past, inspired representations. And as architectural
technology engenders metaphorical ideas through these projects, it is perhaps more
accurate to see theirs as a prescriptive vision than a prophetic insight.
I see the practice of mmw, and their Frosken project beholding a vision for the
transformation of architecture and our cities. Peter Cook provides additional fodder
for my case, noting that Archigram riled against the attitude of a continuing
European tradition of well-mannered, but gutless architecture that had absorbed
the label Modern but had betrayed most of the philosophies of the earliest
Modern.
68
As such, their plight was to recapture the true essence of the
modern project. At least in this sense, Magne Wiggen seems to be continuing in the
ambitions vision of the modern project.
Conclusion

Our digital culture is fraught with new perceptual entities and our notion of space
is socialized and shaped by the cybernetic practices of our culture; technology
shapes the socio-phenomena of the city. As a consequence, the architectural
subject is changing and, as keenly noted in Innovation in Architecture, this means
a change in the subject of both the body and the practice of architecture.
69

We are to understand that A new language of technology is evolving as the
construction process becomes increasingly complex.
70
This complexity implicates
both subjects of architecture. Succinctly stated, The appeal of the topological
geometries is in part aesthetic, in part technological, and in part ideological.
71

My inquiry seeks to understand the ways that architectural thinking is shaped by
the culture of technology and looks to the expressive forms and observes the ways
these novel forms are inflected in the discourse of the digital. Blobitecture is a
signifying form with coordinating points in the historical trajectory of architecture
and its technology.
72
Architectural expressions of technology are pregnant with
myths of our digital culture. This is not to emphasize a fictional content but attends
to the ways we participate in the constitutive virtual dimension of our reality. In
the words of Aldo Rossi, Ultimately, the history of architecture is the material of
architecture.
73

The virtual implications of technology shape both individual and collective
experience: the virtual is a constitutive element of our reality, thus, cyberspace
is shaping the space-scapes of our cities. As Antoine Picon notes, Today, the
computer is symptomatic of a profound change in the way we make worlds.
74
His
reflection provides incisive insight to our current condition, where representation
and reality are homologous.
10
11
111
I contend that the way in which Magne Wiggen constructs meaningful form
intelligible at different levels - is indebted to the historiography of technology
and the evolving promise of the city in the architectural discourse. It is grounded
both in the representations that prefigure his form and other modes of technological
invention which arise from our information age and global culture. The set of tools
provided to the architect are coincidental to a new technology-enabled sociability.
In our ever-expanding digital environment, the status of the architectural object
relates to the current social context of our information age. These forms and other
artifacts of our digital culture are already readjusting our spatial apprehension
and expectation of the city. Such interplay of virtual and actual dimensions
of architecture emphasizes the ways that theory shapes practice. Indeed, the
experience of the built environment is tied to a (con)fusion of these architectural
conditions and a productive exchange between form and metaphor.
The built environment does not function as a binary cause and effect, but as a
protean discourse that necessitates engagement with transient meaning within a
contextual framework. Architecture is thus shaped by mans intellectual needs. As
an embodiment of these needs, architecture is an explicit expression of dominant
modes of thinking and a subjective interface of the architects intention within a
social, psychological, and phenomenological milieu. It can be said then that Philip
Johnson rightly prompted, Can there be a satisfaction in visual pleasures not
complicated by theories?
75

To the initiate, Frosken further intensifies the trajectory of architectural thinking
on technology, and activates recent history of ideas revealing the potency of the
metaphors for architectural meaning.
76
Magne Wiggens work is insightful to a
dynamic set of relations compromising contemporary architecture, and though his
work has a deliberate agenda to explore the way we dwell in our cities, he does so
without a cumbersome criticality. Furthermore, his work relies on, calls to mind, and
activates the poetic potency of architectural technology embedded in the evolving
narrative of its own history.
A perspicacious historiography engenders contemplation of the social potency
of architecture and elucidates the multivalent forces shaping the architectural
discourse. With a trenchant mediation on such iterable truths, Mark Jarzombek
concludes, There is no historicity that is authentic, and yet there is no history
without the open-endedness and self-referentiality of historicity.
77
Discounting the
possibility of pure invention does not invalidate the authorship of the designer; to
the contrary, I believe it provides a basis for a more intriguing understanding of how
impulses are assimilated in order for them to have a distinct social potency.
David Nye keenly recognizes landscape as a cultural, rather than natural phenomena,
embracing the nuanced meaning of nature, technology, and virtual promoted
in this paper. In a book surveying 150 years of ideas on technologies and
landscapes he notes, Landscapes are part of the infrastructure of existence, and
they are inseparable from the technologies that people have used to shape land and
their vision.
78
Though technologys imprint is obvious in some ways, it is perhaps
more difficult to discern how it alters the existing space-scapes of the city. It seems
that at exactly the moment when a supposed crisis of a dematerialized architecture
is upon us, The virtual aspect of the city is becoming more and more important as
a definable component of human habitation.
79

Magne Wiggens architecture is comported to the demands of the digital age and
an architectural interface with the city. The serviced mega structures activated by
112
interfacing architectural applets, disposable architectural elements, and plug-in
proposition once relegated to the somewhat utopian proposition in the 1960s, are
exercised as pragmatic, programmatic objectives in the architecture of Wiggins
firm, mmw. Myth, Barthes noted, has a social and political context and Magne
Wiggens architecture is responsive to social concerns and leverages both the
technology and the materiality of his buildings in the service of his plight. His is an
optimistic vision and investment in the transformative potential of the city.
Epilogue
The free-formed shapes enabled by digital architecture demarcate a juncture of
building and technology. Consequentially, such forms are indexed to a moment
that must pass if it has not already. Hallmarks of the evanescent vanguard must
be vanquished by new forms that hail contemporenaity. Algorithmic architecture
tests some fundamental presupposition of design process where the designer
conceives and the machine computes. What Branko Kolarevic calls the the digital
morphogenesis is the resounding use of digital media, not for visualization, rather
as a generative tool for the derivation of form and its transformation.
80
One
speculative but perhaps not too radical proposition is that a digital architecture, its
manifestation and the corresponding cultural condition, will bridge the gap between
vanguard architecture and the more prosaic everyday buildings.
It is perhaps easier to fathom the ways that the sociability of our cyborg-culture
is shaped by the composite technologies and architectural manifestations at the
level of the city, rather than the ways that on-line, text messaging, cellular, and a
host of wireless communication interfaces are currently shaping our daily social
patterns for they constitute the fundamental social activities of our individual
lives. My proposition is consistent with the thesis of Pierra Francastels book
Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, that architecture
expresses, more than other media, the technological discourse of an epoch.
81

The communication networks in which we participate influence our physical
environment and social patterns. Today, in the development if not dominance of a
digital culture, cyberspace is inextricable from real space and we will engage in a
meaningful architectural practice if we can build mindful of both. Frosken, provides
one example of the very serious playful and political architecture of Magne Wiggen
that does just this.
113
Endnotes
1
The National Gallery, The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, The Norwegian
Museum of Architecture and The National Museum of Contemporary Art merged into
one institution: The New National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.
2
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Le Figaro, 1963, ed.
and translation by Jonathan Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
(London: Phaidon, 1964) 13.
3
Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), in The Sociology of
Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1950).
4
Lance LaVine, Mechanics and Meaning in Architecture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001) xv.
5
Neil Spiller, Architecture and the New Alchemic Technologies (London: Ellips,
1998) 73.
6
Sylvia Lavin, lecturing on Contemporaneity proposed theoretical tools and
historical perspectives necessary to apprehend contemporaneity which she
regards as first, and foremost, an epistemological problem. A theme running
throughout these lectures was the special effects that architecture possesses
operating within theories of modernity and historical consciousness. Lavin, Sylvia.
Contemporaneity Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Cambridge, Ma.
Oct. 28, Nov 11, Nov. 14, Dec 2, Dec. 5, 2005.
7
This apt phrasing and the observation of form is attributed to Frank Gehrys work.
See, Yu-Tung Liu, Architecture of Tomorrow: Ecological, Digital, Pure-artistic, and
Non-linear Thinking Yu-Tung Lie, ed., Demonstrating Digital Architecture 5th Far
Eastern International Digital Architectural Design Award (Basel: Birkhuser, 2005) 7.
8
Antoine Picon, among others, implicates the inherent controls of computer into
the process of the designer. He noting, The structure of a particular design software
constitutes an additional constraintgraphic programs implicitly suggest to the
user certain types of geometric solutions. See, Antoine Picon, The Ghost of
Architecture: The Project and Its Codification Perspecta 35 Building Codes: The
Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004) 17.
9
These Blobs Charles Jencks defined as a new paradigm in architecture and
hailed its arbiters such as Greg Lynn - Blobmeisters: those determined to capture
the field with blob grammars and obtuse theories based on computer analogies.
Jencks, Charles, The New Paradigm in Architecture, Architectural Review (London:
February, 2003). The term - blob architecture- widely used, has since been
catalogued in Tom Porters guide to architectural terms. Tom Porter, Archispeak
(London: Spoon Press, 2004) 15.
10
PVC is the common abbreviation for Polyvinyl chloride, a thermoplastic polymer
widely used in construction in its various forms.
11
CAD/CAM is an Acronym for computer-aided design/computer-aided
manufacturing. The term implies a system used to control both the design and
manufacturing process.
12
Kenneth Frampton, Introduction: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture
Kenneth Frampton, ed. Technology Place & Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1996)
14.
13
Magne Magler Wiggen Interview, The Exhibition Kyss Frosken By Mark
Mansfield, Oslo Norway, May 19, 2005.
14
Chris Able notes: A distinguishing feature of much architecture in the 1990s
has been a preoccupation with complexity for its own sake most of all with its
formal expressions. Chris Abel, Architecture and Identity: Response to Cultural and
Technological Change, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000) 48.
15
See, Jon Goodbun, Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of
spatial demands, The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 Summer (2001) 157-158.
114
16
William Mitchell, Me + + The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press Cambridge, 2003) 3.
17
Marc M. Anglil, ed., On Architecture the City, and Technology (Stoneham,
Massachusetts: Butterworth_Heinmann, 1990) 9.
18
Of course, this definition requires a selective semantic of the words nature as
well as technology, one that is relevant for my inquiry, where nature is more
about creative agency and technology implies an application of knowledge. See:
Lance LaVine, xviii.
19
Magne Wiggen, in fact, worked in the office of Bernard Tschumi, and reflects
favorably on the ways that his current practice celebrates the ideas of event. Magne
Magler Wiggen Interview.
20
This series of phrasing makes reference to the various characterizations of the
project upon whose ideological concepts Frosken rests. Instant city a concept
and design of Archigram; event cities calls to mind the series by Bernard Tschumi
emphasize Tschumis thematic points that architectural development is linked to
events which take place within and around it.
21
The phrasing architectural curvilinearity is bracketed in quotations to
make specific reference to the title of Greg Lynns 1993 essay which ushered in
examples of the new approach to design that were aligned to a more fluid logic of
connectivity. See, Greg Lynn, Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant
and the Supple in Greg Lynn (ed.), AD Profile 102: Folding in Architecture (London:
Academy Editions, 1993) 8-15.
22
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
(Monacelli, 1997) 155.
23
Rem Koolhaas, 152.
24
Whereas there is a long and problematic relationship with the analog of language
to architecture, the utility of the comparison is a helpful tool for examination. In
this case, a linguistic computer metaphor is used to reveal the functioning of the
technological metaphor functioning with architecture (so if the analogue of language
is problematic this compounding commingling of physical and (linguistic)
metaphors is recognizably hazardous to my plight).
25
Barthes thoughts on myth, enriches this argument. He notes Myth has the
task of giving an historical intention a natural justification and making contingency
appear eternal...what the world supplies to myth is an historical reality redefined by
the way in which men have produced or used it; and what the myth gives in return
is a natural image of this reality. See, Roland Barthes Mythologies, trans. Annette
Lavers (Jonathan Cape: London) 1972.
26
Conway Lloyd Morgan, Triad Berlin: Culture Media Environment (Stuttgart:
Avedition rockets, 2003).
27
The original, French title of Le Corbusiers book underscores this observation.
Though published as Towards A New Architecture, the original manifesto was
published in French as Vers une Architecture (1923), offering a nuanced
difference if not distinctly different meaning. Towards an architecture, seems
to imply a definitive case and potential manifestation, whereas Towards A New
Architecture implies an evolution.
28
Leach continues with this thought, quoting Mark Goulthorpe, who observes that
the current engagement with technology constitutes a digital revolution and marks
a profound realignment of our base categories of thought, our relation to memory,
our cultural aptitude. Neil Leach ed., Designing For a Digital World (London: John
Wiley & Sons, 2002) 6 7.
29
Mitchell, William, 81.
30
Abel, Chris, vii x.
31
Antoine Picon concurs, having traced the formation of this evolution from
such radical projects of the early seventies he notes: Once marked by utopian
115
thinking, these techniques are now made to work in the service of tangible goals,
in accordance with the logic of globalization. Antoine Picon, The Ghost of
Architecture: The Project and Its Codification Perspecta 35 Building Codes: The
Yale Architectural Journal, 19.
32
Neil Spiller, 73.
33
Antoine Picon, Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm
Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, Antoine Picon and
Alessandra Ponte, eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) 296.
34
Andrew Ballantyne, I have since found, also makes this comparison between
Salders book Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture and Bernard Rudolfskys
Architecture Without Architects in the Journal of Architectural Education. However,
in the limited scope and space of the review, he stops short of extrapolating how
the two texts might play off each other. For the review, see: Andrew Ballantyne,
rev. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, by Simon Sadler, Journal of
Architectural Education , vol. 59, 3, February, 2006, 88 89.
35
William Mitchell, 3-4.
36
Andreotti, Libero, Costa, Xavier Costa, T. McDonough, and T. Levin, M. Bandini,
Situacionistas/Situationists: Arte, Politica, Urbanismo/Art, Politics, Urbanism
(Distributed D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers Inc, 1997).
37
Mitchell, 15.
38
Abel, Chris, 56. William Mitchell further extrapolates this point: Our networks
are similarly discontinuous structures; they have well-defined access points,
and between these points things are in a kind of limbo. He likens the interface
to mail and email noting, We experience networks at their interfaces, and only
worry about. See, Mitchell, William, 15. Privileging architecture as an access
point makes an incisive valuation of their interface, and as a critical node of virtual
networks, however, applied to the city, this analogy begs the questions: what are the
well defined access points and what is the limbo between?
39
In 1991, Weiser stated, The most profound technologies are those that
disappear. Mark Weiser, The Computer for the Twenty-First Century, Scientific
American, September 1991, 94-10.
40
Reality for Lacan, is stabilized by some fantasy frame of a symbolic bliss
[which] forecloses the view into the abyss of the Real, iek, Slavoj, From Virtual
Reality to the Virtualization of Reality Neil Leach ed., 122.
41
Cited in, Liane Lefaivre, Everything is Architecture Harvard Design Magazine
Spring/Summer 2003, 1-2.
42
This gathering predates his manifesto Everything is architecture by two years.
Invited and in attendance were such strange bedfellows as Buckminster Fuller,
Theodor Adorno as well as Ernst May, and Udo Kulterman. Liane Lefaivre, 1-2, 5.
43
See Experiment in Freedom, New Society 13, no. 338, 20 March, 1969, 435-
43. Reprinted with commentary in Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, Non-Plan:
Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism
(Oxford: Architectural Press. 2000). Additionally, Jean Nouvel can be regarded as
a telltale to this condition when he recognized, Architecture was an autonomous
discipline a century a go, or even seventy or eighty years ago, but not today. See
the discussion between Jean Nouvel and Zvi Efrat in, Kenneth Frampton, Technology
Place & Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1996) 14.
44
Though this definition can be indexed in various writing, here it is notably
expressed in: A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham. Mary Banham, Paul
Barker, Sutherland Lyall, and Cedric Price ed., A Critic Writes: Essays by Rener
Banham (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
45
William Mitchell, 24.
46
Neil Leach, 21-30.
47
Chris Abel, 97.
116
48
Prez-Gmez, Alberto. The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and
Representation in Holl, Steven. Questions of perception : phenomenology of
architecture / Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Prez-Gmez = Chikaku no
mondai : kenchiku no genshgaku (Tky : ando Y, 1994) 8.
49
This sentiment is attributed to Wittgenstein. Specific investigation of his
thoughts on contribution to critical inquiry can be found in: Hacker, P. M. S.
Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishers (1996).
50
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard
(Hill and Wang: New York, 1979) 8.
51
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, 8.
52
Conway Lloyd Morgan.
53
See, Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2005) as well as, Herbert Lachmayer, Pasqual Shoenig, Dennis
Crompton A Guide to Archigram 61-74 (John Wiley & Sons, 1995); and Cook, Peter.
Archigram (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
54
Woodward, Kathleen, ed. The Myths of Information: Technology and
Postindustrial Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1980. xvi.
55
Picon, Antoine, The Ghost of Architecture: The Project and Its Codification
Perspecta 35 Building Codes: The Yale Architectural Journal, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004, 17.
56
Leach, Neil Ed.,10.
57
Kathleen Woodward, ed. The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial
Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) xvii.
58
Theodor Adorno, Functionalism Today in Leach (Ed.) Rethinking Architecture,
London; Routledge, 1997, 10.
59
Frampton, Kenneth, Introduction: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture
Kenneth Frampton (ed. ) Technology Place & Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. 1996.
12-13.
60
Neil Leach, Ed., 9.
61
Antoine Picon, Lecture Digital Architecture and the Crisis of Tectonics? Towards
a New Materiality, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, Graduate School
of Design. May 4, 2006.
62
Mitchell, William, 165.
63
Peter Cook, 119.
64
Magne Magler Wiggen Interview.
65
Theodor Adorno, among others, keenly pointed to the counterpoint: that
functionalism is a style itself an aesthetic fetishization. See Theodor Adorno,
Functionalism Today, 10.
66
Branko Kolarevic, ed., Architecture in the Digital Age Design and Manufacturing
(London: Spon Press, 2003)
67
For overview of Archigram, see Peter Cook, ed., Archigram.
68
Cited in, Archigram British Counsel: Design Museum, see Peter Cook.
69
Neil Spiller, Architecture and the New Alchemic Technologies (London: Ellips,
1998) 73.
70
Alan J Brookes and Dominique Poole, Innovation in Architecture (London: Spon
Press, 2004) 13.
71
Branko Kolarevic, 6.
72
Chris Able, authoring Architecture and Identity, asserts that, Coincidental
with the surface complexities of this movement, other more profound forces for
complexity have been at work shaping the environment. Chris Abel, 48.
73
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (1966), trans. D. Ghirado and J. Ockman
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1982)170.
74
Picon, Antoine, Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm
117
Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, 301.
75
This notable quote is abstracted from the preface of Anatxu Zabalbeascoa,
Houses of the Century (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1998) 13.
76
Today the significatur of architecture can no longer be a discursive logos, with
its emphasis on clarity and truth as correspondence; it cannot be a cosmology
a formal aesthetic, or a functional or technological logic. The signified is that of a
poetic discourse, the gap between the two terms of a metaphor Alberto Prez-
Gmez, 10.
77
Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity Art, Architecture, and History
(Cambridge University Press, 2000) 11.
78
David E. Nye, ed., Technologies of Landscape From Reaping To Recycling
(University of Massachusetts Press: 1999) 3.
79
Neil Spiller Neil, 73.
80
Kolarevic, Branko. (ed.), Architecture in the Digital Age Design and
Manufacturing. London: Spon Press, 13.
81
Pierre Francastel, Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(New York: Zone Books, 2000) especially chapter two: Technology and Architecture
in the Nineteenth Century 87 103.
1. Computer Rendering - The Frosken Pavilion at Tullin, Oslo, mmw.no - render:
Helle Gundersen/Jon Arne Jrgensen
2. The pneumatically engineered pavilion, mmw.no - photo: Svein Hertel-Aas
3. 3D CAD-drawing of Frosken-framework, mmw.no - render: Helle Gundersen/
Jon Arne Jrgensen
4. Pod-like pavilion, mmw.no - photo: martin Sunde Skulstad
5. Walking City, 1964, Ron Herron, Archigram, Ron Herron Archives
6. Log-Plug, 1969, David Greene, Archigram, Dennis Crompton, Archigram
Archives
7. 50% Personalized Environment - photomontage, Archigram, Dennis Crompton,
Archigram Archives
8. Frosken - concept drawing of connection and circulation, Magne Magler
Wiggen, mmw.no
9. Frosken - concept sketch, Magne Magler Wiggen, mmw.no
10. Electric Tomato, 1969 Dennis Crompton, Archigram Archives
11. i-pod advertisement, Apple Computers
118
Bibliography
Abel, Chris. Architecture and Identity: Response to Cultural and Technological
Change. 2nd ed. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.

Adorno, Theodor. Functionalism Today. Rethinking Architecture. Ed. Neil Leach.
London: Routledge, 2002. 5-19.
Andreotti, Libero and Xavier Costa. Situacionistas/Situationists: Arte, Politica,
Urbanismo/Art, Politics, Urbanism. Art Publishers Inc, 1997.
Anglil, Marc M., ed. On Architecture the City, and Technology. Stoneham,
Massachusetts: Butterworth-Heinmann, 1990.
Ballantyne, Andrew. Rev. of Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, by Simon
Sadler, Journal of Architectural Education. 53 Feb. 2006: 8889.
Banham, Mary, Paul Barker, Sutherland Lyall, and Cedric Price. ed. A Critic Writes:
Essays by Reyner Banham. Los Angeles: University of California Pres.
1996.
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill
and Wang: New York. 1979.

_______: Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Jonathan Cape: London. 1972.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. Le Figaro, 1963, ed. Trans.
Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London:
Phaidon, 1964.
Brookes, Alan J. and Dominique Poole. Innovation in Architecture. London.
Spon Press, 2004.
Cook, Peter. Archigram. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
Cunningham, David. Architecture, Utopia and the Futures of the Avant-Gard.
The Journal of Architecture 6 Summer 2001.
Frampton, Kenneth. Introduction: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture
Ed. Kenneth Frampton. Technology Place & Architecture.
New York: Rizzoli, 1996.
Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
New York: Zone Books, 2000.
Goodbun, Jon. Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of spatial
demands. The Journal of Architecture 6 Summer 2001.
Hacker, P. M. S. Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy.
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Holl, Steven. Questions of perception: phenomenology of architecture /
Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Prez-Gmez = Chikaku no
mondai: kenchiku no genshogaku. Tokyo : E ando Yu, 1994.
119
Jarzombek, Mark. The Psychologizing of Modernity Art, Architecture, and History.
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Jencks, Charles. The New Paradigm in Architecture. Architectural Review. London.
Feb. 2003.
Kolarevic Branko, ed. Architecture in the Digital Age Design and Manufacturing.
London: Spon Press, 2003.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
Monacelli. 1997.
Lachmayer, Herbert, Pasqual Shoenig, and Dennis Crompton. A Guide to Archigram
61-74. John Wiley & Sons, 1995.
LaVine, Lance. Mechanics and Meaning in Architecture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
Lavin, Sylvia. Lecture series: Contemporanetity Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University. Cambridge, Ma. Oct. 28, Nov. 11, Nov. 14, Dec 2,
Dec. 5, 2005.
Leach, Neil ed. Designing For a Digital World. London: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Lefaivre, Liane. Everything is Architecture. Harvard Design Magazine. Spring/
Summer 2003.
Liu, Yu-Tung. Architecture of Tomorrow: Ecological, Digital, Pure-artistic, and
Non-linear Thinking Ed. Yu-Tung Lie. Demonstrating Digital Architecture
5th Far Eastern International Digital Architectural Design Award. Basel:
Birkhuser, 2005.
Lynn, Greg. Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple.
Ed. Greg Lynn. AD Profile 102: Folding in Architecture. London: Academy
Editions, 1993: 8-15.
Macphee, Gram. The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual
Culture. London: Continuum, 2002.
Mitcham, Carl. Philosophy and the History of Technology, Carl Mitcham & Robert
Mackey. Philosophy and Technology, readings in the Philosophical
Problems of Technology. New York: Free Press,1972: 163 201.
Mitchell, William. Me + + The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press Cambridge, 2003.
Mitcham, Carl, and Robert Mackey. Philosophy and Technology, readings in the
Philosophical Problems of Technology. New York: Free Press, 1972.
Morgan, Conway Lloyd. Triad Berlin: Culture Media Environment.
Stuttgart: AVedition rockets, 2003.
Nye, David E. ed. Technologies of Landscape From Reaping To Recycling.
University of Massachusetts Press. 1999.
120
Picon, Antoine. Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm.
Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors. (Antoine Picon
and Alessandra Ponte, eds.). New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
_______: Lecture: Digital Architecture and the Crisis of Tectonics? Towards a
New Materiality. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University,
Graduate School of Design, May 4, 2006.
_______: The Ghost of Architecture: The Project and Its Codification.
Perspecta 35 Building Codes: The Yale Architectural Journal.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Sadler, Simon. The Living City Survival Kit: a Portrait of the Architect as a Young
Man. Art History. 26:4 September, 2003.
Porter, Tom. Archispeak. London: Spoon Press, 2004.
Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City (1966), Trans. D. Ghirado, and J. Ockman.
Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1982.
Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
SantElia, Antonio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manifesto of Futurist
Architecture (1914). Ed. And Trans. Ulrich Conrads. Programs and
Manifestoes on 20th century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
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Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903). Ed. And Trans. Kurt H.
The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Wolff, 1950.
Spiller, Neil. Architecture and the New Alchemic Technologies. London: Ellips, 1998.
Weiser, Mark. The Computer for the Twenty-First Century. Scientific American.
September 1991: 94-10.
Woodward, Kathleen, ed. The myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial
Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Anatxu Zabalbeascoa. Houses of the Century. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1998.

121
122
Marcelo Rangel
MLIlFLE 8Ek0l6$ 0 k86hlIE6I8E k0 FlLM
I find it truly interesting when an author has the capability of relating with the
spectator by means of delivering a product that is highly charged with intellectual
and emotional content; one that regardless of its formal characteristics and
message will trigger certain relevant codes that have been accumulated by a
cultures experiential relationship to its context, thus creating a subtle but strong
link between the work and the reader. The deeper the references are engrained in a
cultures collective memory, the more engaging the dialogue. And it comes to mind
because that is the case for me with Jean-Luc Godards film: Le Mpris and, its
setting: Curzio Malapartes house in Capri. Both the film and the house are powerful
autobiographical statements that evoke a vast amount of accumulated knowledge
and experience and have at the same time the qualities of self-expression of a true
work of art; that is to say, they eloquently speak for themselves. The works prove to
be fertile grounds for the amateur architectural (and filmic) voyeuriste to build the
foundations of a narrative based in both what is said and what is implied. Guided by
the author, the spectator will now engage in a multiplicity of readings.
I am a primitive, a child-or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I
refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own.
Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida
Fritz Lang chooses the Casa Malaparte to be the filmic set for the Odyssey in
Godard classic, Le Mpris; Metropolis had been Langs (who was trained as an
architect) almost prophetic statement about the future of mechanized society and its
relationship to architecture, so his choice of site cannot be taken lightly, particularly
not in a Godard film.
1
So what is he trying to say this time by choosing Malaparte?
Is he suggesting that the house in Capri is as close as we can get, architecturally,
to the a-chronical, universal qualities of the Homeric epic? Has it got to do with
the buildings possibility of having multiple readings: a contemporary ruin or an
avant-garde archaeological site that is reminiscent of the relationship between Greek
theatre and nature, of the Roman bathing culture, of homely Ithaca, or the fortified
Troy? We can only guess. What is true is that the site is heir of the powerful inertia
of the Mediterraneans rich cultural tradition. The Iliad and the Odyssey have been
present in the area for more than three millennia. They are previous to the existence
1
123
of the Greek alphabet and have for a long time, permeated constantly into the
subconscious of the Mediterranean cultural-scape. Initially, and for centuries, the
epics were transmitted orally by Bards that improvised their own readings out of a
basic framework of essential passages that passed through generations with formal
variation but clarity in content.
2
In the 1960s, Lang follows the same pattern, and
gives his own interpretation not orally, but through cinema.
The Odyssey is, as we know, the story of Ulysses long return voyage home to Ithaca
after the war of Troy. In it, the hero demonstrates his wit and bravery on several
adventures; against the cyclops Polyphemus (Phillip Lopate relates the idea of the
cyclops to Langs monocle and to the very first scene where the camera, like a one-
eyed animal, looks at the spectator in Le Mpris) whom he blinds, fooling Circe the
sorcerer that tried to turn him into a pig, and tying himself into the mast of his boat
not to succumb to the deathly songs of the Sirens, where he becomes, according to
Theodor Adorno, the first assistant to a concert.
3
His wife Penelope in the meantime
avoided commitment to other men until Ulysses timely arrival home. An epic. With
Godard, nevertheless, the epic becomes a disengaged tragedy. Not a contemporary
reading of a classic tragedy, like that of Euripidess Medea by Lars Von Trier, that
is familiar to us thematically but astonishes us contextually and visually, but a
reading (or a set of readings) parallel to that of Homer; Godard overlaps several
narratives into an intellectually challenging spectacle of filmic delight where
classical antiquity shares space with the culture of its time. As Lopate puts it, it
accommodates discussions about Homer, Dante, and German Romantic poetry,
meditations on the role of the gods in modern life, and the creative process.
4
An a-
temporal setting, an a-temporal drama, and a film that is devoted not to the content
itself, but like its contemporary oneiric voyage through the life of Guido, Fellinis
alter ego in his masterpiece 8 1/2, it is about the process of filmmaking.
5
Godard
once said that a movie should have a beginning, a development, and an end, though
not necessarily in that order. I believe he goes even further; by means of the use
of multiple references he keeps us navigating in different narratives both in time
and content, and with his hallmark Jumpcuts, he disrupts what could be a linear
understanding of the movie and forces a more powerful individual engagement of
the viewer with the document; once again, in a multiplicity of readings. It is a film
about deceit. Beautiful Camille (Brigitte Bardot) feels vilified after she perceives that
her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) is taking her for granted, allowing his employer,
a powerful producer, to flirt with her. Paul is a detective fiction writer that was hired
by the vile American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script
used by Fritz Lang for the making of the Odyssey. Paul, out of disinterest, arrogance,
or possibly just not to appear apprehensive, lets Prokosch get close to his wife
(too close we shall say) and the inevitable tragedy takes place. Rupture, death,
and deceit, are all narrated visually, in a stunning chromatic experience captured
on Cinemascope by the almost abstract language of Raoul Coutards eloquently
manipulated lens.
6
Le Mpris is to me an archeological survey of the intellectual
and aesthetic world of Jean-Luc Godard. Architecturally, it is an archeological
venture through the intellectual and emotional world of Curzio Malaparte.
The house in Capri is Curzio Malapartes built autobiography. Together with some
of his literary work, it is a synthetic, abstract manifestation of his life experience,
and a true extension of his body of thought. Casa come me (A house like me), as
he used to call it, is without a doubt a self referential venture of three-dimensional
poetry by a figure that proved to be as well versed in architectural, as in literary
terms. Kurt Erich Suckert was a radical, outspoken, handsome and charismatic
intellectual figure that in the first half of the twentieth century was one of Italys
most widely read journalist.
7
He was prolific, controversial and highly political.
124
Always associated with the famous, the powerful; he belonged to the highest social
circles and was known to have a weakness for women. He adopted the name Curzio
Malaparte after Napoleon Bonaparte, stating that while Bonaparte literally means
good part, he would be the bad part.
8
His life was intense. He was closely
related to the Fascist Party and held important editorial commissions because of
his link to Mussolini. In 1928 he became editor of the daily La Stampa (converting
it into a Fascist publication) from which he was later dismissed, and being accused
for subversive activities, imprisoned for two and a half years; first, in the island of
Lipari and then in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi. He was allowed by
Mussolini to write again in 1935. After that, apart from working as an independent
writer, he served as war correspondent for Corriere della Sera, where his advance
report on the Germanys attack on the Soviet Union granted him previously unknown
fame. Malaparte published a number of articles and books, including his famous
Kaputt, and La Pelle; he wrote plays, and even directed Il Cristo Proibito, a film that
was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Malaparte was without a doubt
prolific as a man of letters, and versatile, as we will see, as a creator.

Throughout his life he had searched for a quiet spot on the coast to build a house,
a leisure villa where he could retreat the world in order to concentrate in his writing.
Paradoxically, after being a prisoner, the need for an isolated space of his own
grew stronger, and then through a series of coincidences, soon after his liberation,
he was able to find the actual spot in the island of Capri. Capri had become the
favorite vacation spot for officers of the Fascist Regime. A fascination for Greece
and the Mediterranean had become particularly strong in the thirties in Rome due
to Mussolinis staging of the Mostra Augustea della Romanita and in Capri due to
Tiberiuss highly publicized Villa Jovis, which eventually lead Malaparte to visit
the island and fall in love with the area around Punta Masullo. He purchased land
and decided to build a modern house. Not just a building that rejected the false
Capri style-therefore no little Romanesque columns, no arches, no narrow exterior
stairway, no ogival windows, none of those hybrid marriages between Moorish,
Romanesque, gothic, and secessionist styles, which some Germans brought to
Capri thirty or fifty years ago, thus contaminating the purity and simplicity of the
Capri house- but a manifesto-house of modern architecture. A showpiece -as
the choice of site indicates- to embody, after the period of confinement, a new
self-image, removed from the spirit of parochial traditionalism.
9
Initially, the
project of the house was commissioned to architect Adalberto Libera, a key figure
in the Roman literary and artistic scene, and probably the architect who in Rome
had done the most for the success of the Razionalismo Italiano. Libera was at the
moment working at the Palazzo dei Congressi at the EUR, which was a modern
quarter in Rome being built for the Esposizione Universale di Roma in 1942, and
where truly representative buildings of fascist Italy were being built.
10
The writer and
the architect met in 1937 while preparing an issue on fascist architecture for the
journal Prospettive, which Malaparte lead, and the commission for the house was
formally set in January of 1938. The result was the project for a long, low, building
block that sitting on the edge of a cliff, 650 feet above sea level at Punta Masullo,
seemed to naturally protrude out of the rocks. It was the initial stage of what would
later become, in Peter Eisenmans words, a curious blurring of reason and nature;
the house as it stands today. What happens immediately next is unclear, but the
collaboration between the architect and the writer seems to have seized. Malaparte
overtook the project in his own terms. He was not an architect.
11
He relied on
Liberas initial layout of the program as a basic starting framework, but as time
went on it was his own criteria and patient observation, backed by the construction
knowledge of local masons and contractors, as well as the aesthetic and conceptual
feedback of his network of artists and friends, that allowed Malaparte to transform
125
an intellectually charged rationalist house into his own Ritratto di Pietra.
12
The
house nurtured from its academic inception and its deeply rooted vernacular,
popular Italian cultural heritage, and turned into some sort of an avantgarde mass of
undecipherable program that by its formal and contextual characteristics challenges
a straightforward reading, and lives in the realm of the a-temporal. When Field
Marshal Rommel asked Malaparte whether the house was already built when he got
there, he said that the house was there, and then pointing to the surrounding cliffs of
Matromania, Faraglioni, the Sorrento Peninsula, the Islands of the Sirens, the Amalfi
coastline and the Paestrum shores, he added: I designed the scenery.
13
Marida
Talamona suggests that Malaparte apparently perceived that only a complete
indifference to the demands of daily use allows architecture to take that mythic
aspect which he was seeking and the landscape demanded. All signs of function
had to go. The truth is that Curzio Malaparte built a house that spoke of his past,
of himself. The stairway is his stage, reminiscent of the church of the Annunziata in
the Island of Lipari. The seclusion of the site and the bars in the windows represents
(as he himself suggests in Fughe in Prigione), a romantic conception of life as
imprisonment. The terrace, with its openness to the vast ocean and its veiled
enclosure provided by the diminishing curved wall, is no more than an extension
to his experimental, open and at times enclosed personality.
14
As Giorgio Ciucci
states it, the house was born, and remains, a mausoleum within which Malaparte
himself wished to preserve, in the wildest and most inaccessible part of Capri, the
constructed image of an isolated, romantic, rebellious intellectual.
Bringing the film and the building into one narrative responds, obviously, to their
authors paths suggestive interplay in the filming of Le Mpris and also to the
fact that both works are highly self-referential. They are presented together as an
exercise on the possibilities of understanding texts through the eyes of our own
interests. It is a capricious effort to enjoy the pleasures of the related fields. They are
autobiographical narratives whose language is complex in its content and clear in
its perceptive qualities. The experiential body of knowledge from which they come
into being is so much embedded in our visual and spatial culture (as it was in their
own time) that even after a prolonged period of time, the works somehow seem,
dare I say it, universal.
Silenzio.
Endnotes
1
See Giuliana Brunos Atlas of Emotion (p. 39)
2
See Daniel Boorstins The Creators (p. 29)
3
See Dietrich Schwanitzs Cultura (p. 39)
4
See Phillip Lopates Totally, Tenderly, Tragically (p. 2)
5
In the same way that 8 1/2 and Le Mpris are chronological and thematical
siblings, Luchino Viscontis 1954 Senso and Le Mpris are related; they both rely on
the Leisure-Work Villa as a referential motif and setting, one in the Casa Malaparte
and the other on Andrea Palladios 1542 Villa Godi.
6
Certain scenes seem to be prophetic in terms of both their technical, aesthetic
and conceptual approach to landscape. In the very last scene we are left with a half-
half composition of the ocean and the sky that reminds us of the later Seascapes
series by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Also the far away, symmetrical framing of the Villa,
when Paul goes up the stairway to the rooftop, works well when compared to Hilda
and Bernd Bechers straightforward compositions.
7
See Marida Talamonas Casa Malaparte (p. 17)
126
8
See Michael Mc Donoughs Malaparte A House Like Me (p. 7)
9
10
The site was shared, among others, with the Palazzo della Civilt Italiana, a
monumental arcaded building that has been a recurrent thematic in film and
architecture criticism, from John Hejduks Cable from Milan to Peter Greenaways
Belly of an Architect. See Giuliana Brunos Atlas of Emotion and John Hejduk in
Michael Mc Donoughs Malaparte A House Like Me.
11
Interesting to notice other non architects perspective on the fifth faade and
local vernacular culture: Luis Barragan (Pritzker Prize - Civil Engineer), in his 1949
Casa Estudio, dealt with a completely different environment, that is an uninspiring
suburban settlement of antennas and water tanks, by means of a high-walled rooftop
composition that framed the sky as its sole subject, creating space of chromatic
(locally inspired) experimentation.
12
13
14
Curious statement of which is the fact that the man used to ride his bicycle
on the rooftop of the house; or the strangeness of the fireplace in the livingroom,
where you can see the exterior through the filtering of the fire (in a deChirichoesque
gesture) due to the unusual opening behind it. See Michael Mc Donoughs
Malaparte A House Like Me.
1. Still from Le Mpris, film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Bibliography
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators, A History of Heroes of the Imagination (New York:
Random House, 1992)
Dietrich Schwanitz, Cultura, Todo lo que hay que Saber (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002)
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York:
Verso, 2002)
Jean Luc Godard & Youssef Ishaghpur, Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005)
Jean Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo, 1986)
Phillip Lopate, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically (New York: Random House, 1998)
James S. Ackerman, Palladio (New York: Penguin Books, 1978)
Marida Talamona, Casa Malaparte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992)
Michael Mc Donough, Malaparte A House Like Me (New York: Clarkson Potter
Publishers, 1999)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982)
127
Juan Luis Rodrguez
6lII hkLL 0 k hlLL
This is the canonic image of the Syntsalo Town Hall, an evocative photograph by
Eino Mkinen shown in the exhibitions of Finnish architecture all around the world
and reproduced in countless books, academic lectures, and architects personal
records. It shows what might be just the final steps on an uphill path, framed by
randomly shaped volumes, leading to a space not yet visible. From the distance, the
invisible space seems to have been there as an original hill-top which was carefully
embraced by the inevitable visit of architecture and civilization. The irregular steps
that lead into this place also appear as if they had been delicately carved out of the
original site topography. The grass covering the steps suggests that the place has
always been there as in the ruins of Rome or Greece. The tall, massive and singular
volume at the end of the visual axis is located in such a way that its singularity
becomes unforgettable, generating an emblematic image for the community. The
lack of people and windows makes the masses appear monumental and without
scale, further enhancing the timelessness of the atmosphere.
Given these suggestions, the photograph works as an ideal illustration of the
qualities that many critics and historians have associated with the Syntsalo Town
Hall, or Aaltos work as a whole: sensitivity to place, topography, nature, and cultural
locality; appreciation for the temporal dimension of architecture and the longue
dure of human existence; a careful working of natural materials; the creation of a
center for the community; and a human and democratic architecture. Such qualities
make the Town Hall in Syntsalo the very opposite of the invasive, insensitive,
heedless and universalizing architecture of Heroic Modernism. Indeed, for Colin
St. John Wilson, Aalto represents an Other Modernism while Kenneth Frampton
presents Aalto as one of the idols of Critical Regionalism, a movement challenging
the reifying aspects of modernity.
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A representative example of how Aaltos architecture has been received by
mainstream critics is Winfried Nerdingers reading of the Syntsalo Town Hall. The
author begins by calling it a masterpiece that succeeded in linking architecture and
nature and then goes on to explain that the Town Hall is situated on a slope, which
Aalto exploited to differentiate the various functions to be accommodated here. Set a
full story-height above street level is a half-open courtyard, about which the library,
reading rooms, and the administration are laid out to for a campo for the citizens,
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a little acropolis for cultural events and leisure activities. The courtyard is also
reached via a grassed staircase, so that the surrounding nature flows into the heart
of the town hall.
Moreover, in addition to being connected to nature, the building in Nerdingers
reading also has a particularly democratic and human character: The council
chamber is set at a higher level: its function is literally elevated something that
is also signaled by the tower-like structure visible from the outside. If it is possible
to speak of democratic architecture at all, then it is more likely to be found in
Aaltos spaces in Syntsalo, which are entirely oriented toward peoples needs,
than in the contorted efforts to achieve transparency in, for example, the German
Bundestag building in Bonn.
2
Nerdinger finishes by adding that the little town hall
in Syntsalo is significant for another specific feature of Aaltos humanist, natural
architecture: avoiding a too perfect, mechanical appearance in the brick faade. To
this end, he insisted that the brick should not be laid precisely to plane. The result
is a lively, natural-looking surface that acquires a sculptural quality in the light.
3

Nerdinger, St. John Wilson and Frampton portray Aalto as a critic of modernism
instead of an insider within a contested cultural project. This familiar version
of Aalto as a Northern lone ranger has been recently contested by historians of
modernism, including Sarah Goldhagen and Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen. For Goldhagen,
Aalto brought new and challenging points into an ongoing international debate
within which he felt he was a member;
4
for Pelkonen, Aaltos career constitutes
the example par excellence of a person consciously fashioning himself in order to
become absolument moderne.
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Based on critical stances like those of Goldhagen and Pelkonen, on the chronology
of Aaltos ouvre, and more importantly, on visual observations of plans and
buildings, I intend to debate some of the canonical aspects on Aalto criticism,
namely: naturalism as connectedness to place; humanism as non-mechanistic;
tectonic as artfulness of construction and cultural resistance; fulfillment of peoples
needs to embody democracy; and the exclusiveness of Italian and Greek precedents.
Let us begin returning to Nerdingers account of Syntsalo.
Place
Nerdinger claims that the building is situated on a slope which Aalto exploits,
presumably to arrive at the two-level solution with the courtyard one story above
street level in connection to the natural topography. In actual fact, however, the
slope is very gentle indeed, the ground behind the building being five steps higher
than the street, which is less than a meter. Looking at an aerial photograph of
the site, we realize that the impression of an acropolis or an Italian hill-town that
one easily gets from the canonic image is mistaken. Actually, the Town Hall is
made of two buildings placed on an almost flat site: a U-shaped element around
an elevated courtyard and a straight bar along the street. The aerial view reveals
a more suburban free-standing building, instead of the random, mountainous
character suggested by the intelligently cropped photograph; an architectural idea
that criticism has successfully implanted in the consciousness of the architectural
community.
There are two different ways to enter the courtyard from where one gets into the
main spaces. The main entrance is through the staircase in the east, while the one
shown in the famous picture is hardly ever used; because it has higher rises, it is
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better suited for sitting than walking. One might expect that the elevated courtyard
actually covers some functions below, but the sections show that it is all in fact an
infill, and also that the grassy stairs looking like they are simply terraced from the
natural slope are in fact all built up. Thus, the solution is not derived from natural
topography but only made to look as if it was; instead, Aalto creates a completely
artificial hill.
Given the radical restructuring of natural topography to create the simulated hill-
town in Syntsalo, the Town Halls relation to place is not as natural as Nerdinger
suggests. Lets now review Framptons claim that Syntsalos architecture
exemplifies critical regionalism. In defining how a critical regionalist building relates
to its site, Frampton explains:
It is self-evident that the tabula rasa tendency of modernization favors the
optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum
is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the
rationalization of constructionThe bulldozing of an irregular topography into a
flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute
placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped
form of a building is an engagement in the act of cultivating the sitein-
laying the building into the sitehas the capacity to embody, in built form, the
prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and
transformation across time.
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Instead of enhancing the natural contours with terracing, the existing slope on the
site was bulldozed away; the earth was collected in the middle of four retaining
walls, creating an artificial back-against-the-mountain for all areas on the ground
level; thus, any prehistory or identity of the site is gone. Therefore, following
Framptons Heideggerian understanding of how architecture cultivates (schonen)
the earth, we would have to conclude that the Syntsalo building, more than a
modernist creation, would be a postmodern, scenographic simulation of a pre-
existing ideal, possibly the Italian hill town like the ones that Aalto had admired
since his student days.
Another prominent expert on Aalto and the author of a monograph on Syntsalo,
Richard Weston acknowledges the invention of a site but presenting it as a virtue,
as it makes possible the use of another device of classical architecture: the
establishment of a piano nobile reserved for important functions. In other words,
natural landscape was indeed radically -and positively- disregarded following
an architectural model, be that of the Southern European hill-town, as Mkinens
photograph seems to insinuate, a campo or an acropolis as Nerdinger would have it,
or the piano nobile of a palazzo, as Westons virtuoso reading suggests. We should
acknowledge, however, that accepting a degree of unnatural-ness in the conception
of place as modified topography; this latter interpretation contradicts those of
Nerdinger and Frampton.
Precedents
Other than the Italian palazzo, the Italian hill-town, or the Greek acropolis, Aalto
himself suggested yet another precedent for his design. According to Schildt, when
Aalto presented his design to the city council, the necessity of a tall chamber was
put in question, to which the architect responded by exclaiming: Gentlemen! The
worlds most beautiful and most famous town hall, that of Siena, has a council
chamber 16-meters high. I propose that we build one that is 17 meters.
7

However accurate Aaltos information about Siena is, this comparison may be more
illuminating, as the building most obviously shares with its Italian counterpart the
use of brick inside and outside.
8
However, brick as an inspirational source for the
hill town appearance deserves a closer examination in relation to the technical
functions of the material. Thus, lets question the use of brick through a second
critical-regional aspect which Frampton identifies as tectonic, and begin by
differentiating modern brick from classical brick.
9

Tectonic
On the one hand, before the modern use of skeletal structures in steel or reinforced
concrete, the walls in brick buildings were necessarily load bearing. According
to Westons description, the Town Hall has a combined structure: the building
is structurally straightforward, with reinforced concrete columns, floor slabs and
ceilings and black painted circular steel columns supporting the roof around the
glazed corridor. The walls are of brick work and mostly load-bearing. However, by
looking at drawings and pictures such straightforwardness is not so clear as brick
seems to be only a veneer in all parts of the building, including the massive council
chamber.
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The east and south elevations show the second levels clearly supported by columns;
north and west elevations could have load bearing brick walls, although visually
supported on black marble tiles. Regardless of Westons description it seems
though that the structural function belongs only to the reinforced concrete system of
columns and beams. Even if Syntsalo evokes ancient buildings or epochs, it does
not follow that its brick is also structural, as Westons ambiguous characterization
suggests.
Frampton, on the other hand, mostly uses the Town Hall to exemplify his ideas
of tactile sensitivity and phenomenological awareness; he does not discuss its
construction. However, this aspect should be necessarily implied when the building
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is recurrently used as an example of critical regionalism; therefore, one could expect
that Syntsalo complies with his characterization of tectonic, which it does not,
at least in full sense. Lets hear Framptons conception, acutely summarized by
Stanford Anderson:
Despite the critical importance of topography and light, the primary principle of
architectural autonomy resides in the tectonic rather than the scenographic:
that is to say, this autonomy is embodied in the revealed ligaments of the
construction and in the way in which the syntactical form of the structure
explicitly resists the action of gravity. It is obvious that this discourse of the
load borne (the beam) and the load-bearing (the column) cannot be brought
into being where the structure is masked or otherwise concealed. On the
other hand the tectonic is not to be confused with the purely technical for
it is more than the simple revelation of stereotomy or the expression of
skeletal frameworkTektoniknot just the activity of making the materially
requisite constructionbut rather to the activity that raises this construction
to an art formThe functionally adequate form must be adapted so as to
give expression to its function. The sense of bearing provided by the entasis
of Greek columns became the touchstone of this concept of TektonikThe
tectonic remains to us today as the potential means of distilling play between
material, craftwork and gravity, so as to yield a component which is in fact a
condensation of the entire structure. We may speak here of the presentation of
a structural poetic rather than the re-presentation of a facade.
Following Andersons synthesis, a second reduction would show that three aspects
seem to be necessary for tectonic qualification: 1. The ligaments and the skeletal
system must be revealed or expressed by the form, not masked or concealed. 2. An
additional art of construction must be revealed by the form, similar to the entasis
of a Greek column; it is not enough to show the joints and the structure. 3. The
function also has to be expressed or revealed by the form.
Observing the building, the ligaments of brick are obviously visible as in any
brick work; whereas columns and beams, although visible in some parts such as
library, shops, and corridors, are mostly concealed. Also, the combination and
differentiation of materials seems to be straightforward with the exception, again,
of the concealed concrete columns. Finally, the functions are indeed expressed or
revealed as confirmed by plans and elevations. Therefore, only the third requirement
would be fulfilled; the first and second requirements, both related with the
treatment of concrete are absent, rendering the building incomplete for the art of
construction Frampton assigns to the tectonic.
Interestingly, the latter characteristic of revealing function takes us to a point from
which the building, as critical of modernity, would be exempt. It might not fully
reveal its construction but it does reveal its different functions through different
window treatments. Paradoxically, a very functionalist characteristic: the formal
recognition of different functions, for which Aalto as town planner of the industrial
town of Syntsalo should be acknowledged. Weston points out that in 1944,
Aalto had already tried and failed a similar functional integration for Avesta in
Sweden.
The [Avesta] town hallfor example, had boutiques on the arcaded ground
floorjust as at Syntsalo it contained a bank and the library stood above
shops. Aalto argued that such combinations of activities were healthy in
promoting day-and night-time use of the civic centre, and hoped that by
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grouping them he could create a complex of sufficient scale, variety and
presence to withstand the onslaught of commercial buildings which in many
cities had already wiped out any possibility of establishing the civic complex as
a visual and symbolic crown.
10
Contradicting the brief, Aalto had proposed a plan for Avesta which was rejected
by the community, partly because it combined different functions in the same
building. For Syntsalo, a distant and provincial industrial town with no special
projections, it would seem enough to have had a few square meters of office space,
probably with a multiple room to be used for sports and social events. However,
the competition brief proposed by Aalto as town planner implied an advocacy for a
complex Civic Center which is a civic multifunctional complex, instead of a more
simple or mono-functional Town Hall. Aalto then, should also be praised for his
persuasiveness to pull ahead such an odd program in Syntsalo offices, shops,
apartments, library and council hall.
Nevertheless, less than forty years after completion, the apartments have become
offices and the shops have been taken over by the library. The Town Hall has
become an administration building with a library instead of the intended mixed-use
civic center. The new two-storey library has a new entrance through the former shop
windows, which are now serving a purpose for which they were not designed. In
functional, and surprisingly, also in tectonic terms, it would mean that its forms do
not correspond with its functions; or that materiality negates functionality.
We have observed Aaltos response for a civic building in a small town that was
conceived to combine administrative, recreational, commercial, and symbolic
functions. From the point of view of the site, the response of the building could be
interpreted as topographic, in the sense of Weston, but also as non-topographic,
in the sense of Frampton and Nerdinger. Also, following Frampton, it can be
interpreted as tectonic in relation to the expressiveness of the program and non-
tectonic in relation to the structure. Lets now expand our point of view to better
situate Aaltos brick in a cultural context.
Finnish brick
Brick in itself never was a particularly Finnish material. Until the early nineteenth
century, almost everything in Finland, except for medieval stone churches and
castles, was built of wood. In the late seventeenth century, however, it became
fashionable to paint the houses in towns. Due to the additional cost of paint, one
would only paint the street faade which was the minimum required by the crown.
The only available pigment was reddle (iron ore), mixed with earth. When oil paints
became available in the beginning of the nineteenth century, pastel colors were
used on the street faade (most often light ochre, sometimes light grey, seldom
light blue), and reddle on the back, side, or courtyard facades. The riddle paint was
supposed to imitate brick construction and the pastel colors stone facades.
11

In the nineteenth century, Russian authorities started to build both orthodox
churches and army barracks out of exposed brick. In addition, brick was the material
of choice for many industrial buildings, such as breweries and warehouses. Still,
brick was often understood as a symbol for the oppressive Russian regime, and
despite for a brief period in the early 1920s, when for example the Etu-Tl area in
Helsinki was built, exposed brick was not popular except for industrial contexts.
It is probably because the subversion of convention that it had the criticality that
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Frampton calls for in his agenda for Critical Regionalism. However, from the point
of view of tradition, Aaltos use of brick for large public institutional buildings, such
as the National Pensions Institute, the Otaniemi University, and the Syntsalo Town
Hall actually constitutes an aberration of Finnish conventions. Given that its design
also seems to disregard or disfigure its natural context, as argued above, if the use
of brick does not belong to a local tradition, then it is difficult to see how we could
call the Syntsalo Town Hall an example of Critical Regionalism.
Natural brick
According to Nerdinger and Weston, the brickwork gives the Syntsalo building
its natural quality. Nerdinger argues that Aalto avoided a too perfect, mechanical
appearance in the facade by insisting that the brick should not be laid precisely to
plane; Weston explains that Aalto instructed the masons to lay them slightly out
of line to avoid any mechanical effect, adding that when the sun rakes obliquely
across the wall surfaces they appear to ripple and come alive.
12
Given that Aalto did not repeat this instruction in later works, judging that this
technique was successful in creating a lively, natural-looking surface is debatable.
The deliberate misalignments are certainly visible in some photographs and there
is a note Aalto wrote after the building was completed, praising the bricklayers for
having done an exceptional work:
The masonry at Syntsalo Town Hall, which I consider to be, architecturally
speaking, one of the most important pieces of masonry, has been carried
out by Toivo Nyknen, Paavo Asplund, Yrjo Marjamki, Aimo Renlund,
Vin Puolanen and Sakari Sundvall. To me, as an architect, it is of utmost
importance to develop the culture of masonry in our, country. It is for this
reason that the masonry at Syntsalo is fair-faced brick in the facades and
almost everywhere in the interior. I have to say that I am extremely pleased
with the results of our cooperation and that an exemplary case of Finnish brick
culture has been achieved. Alvar Aalto. Helsinki, April 3rd, 1951.
13
If Aalto was as impressed by the results as this note suggests, it is surprising that
he did not apply the same method of misaligning the brick in order to animate
the surfaces in any later building. It may be that he felt it should or could not be
repeated without losing the authenticity of the solution, or he may have found
simply too difficult to develop the culture of masonry in our country.
In addition to the unorthodox use of brick at Syntsalo and the playful variations
in the Experimental House close by at Muuratsalo, Aalto did put forth one specific
innovation in brick construction, the slightly trapezoidal brick for the House of
Culture in Helsinki. The specially designed brick would allow for curved surfaces
with a small radius; nevertheless, this first experiment also remained the last. It
might have also resulted difficult to repeat, unsatisfactory, or even unnecessary;
after all, very similar curves could be obtained with regular brick. Although in
retrospect it may be argued that Aaltos brick buildings are among his greatest
masterpieces, the Brick Period was rather brief, lasting only about a decade. For as
by the time the Otaniemi University and Jyvskyl University were finally completed,
Aalto had stopped designing brick buildings several years ago.14 In turn, in his
Helsinki studio, started in 1954, he had returned to whitewashed brick, as in his first
buildings of the 1920s.
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Precedents
Historians usually point to Willem Dudoks buildings in Hilversum as possible
precursors for the Syntsalo Town Hall, which indeed bears a certain resemblance
to Dudoks 1920 Rembrandt school and the 1921 Dr. Bavinck School.
15
In addition
to the mannerist excesses of Nordic Classicists, such as Sigurd Lewerentz or
even Eliel Saarinen (whose work in Cranbrook Aalto had seen some years before
designing the Baker House), Aalto must have been aware of the brick architecture in
Northern Europe in the twenties.
Not only were the Dutch architects of the Amsterdam school performing incredible
feats with bricks, but also the German expressionists such as Fritz Hger and
Bernard Hoetger. Fritz Hgers Chilehaus in Hamburg and his Anzeiger building in
Hannover are the most famous examples of buildings which take the materiality of
the brick to extremes, using unconventional brick laying to create three-dimensional
ornaments fields. Bernhard Hoetgers Haus Atlantis in Bremen is a similar attempt
to create extremely decorative surfaces by means of bricks of many colors laid in
all kinds of patterns. Interestingly, one of Hoetgers buildings in Worpswrede, the
Weaving shop (1930), shares with the Syntsalo Town Hall not only the material
but some aspects like massing and cornice details. Aaltos 1953 Experimental
House in Muuratsalo seems to continue these experiments, although with a more
collage-like compositions.
Expressionist brick architecture was suspect in the eyes of orthodox functionalists
in the 1920s partly because its ornamental exuberance and partly because of its
political connotations. Hger and Hoetgers were both members of the Nazi party
but Hoetger was a particular enthusiastic supporter of lunatic vlkisch speculations,
which he painstakingly illustrated on the facade of the Atlantis building in Bremen.
Aaltos brick architecture is of a different cast altogether, surely more pragmatic,
realistic and functional, although not completely free of ornament. Looking at the
walls of the Syntsalo Town Hall, we notice not only the vibrant visual effect of
irregular brickwork but the fact that three of the facades have thin vertical bands
that seem to serve no practical purpose. Many critics describe these lines as
crenellations, and they are said to refer to medieval buildings, including the Civic
Palace of Siena. If these lines really are ornamental forms whose only function is to
represent the crenellations of the Sienese building, then they really are ornament in
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a double sense, in that the crenellations in the Civic palace have also never served
any defensive function, as in Medieval castles, but only imitated real ones. Aalto
would be making a reference of a reference; an ornament in the second power.
Given that Aaltos Brick Period only begins after the Second World War, one should
not exaggerate the influence of Dutch, German or Italian brick architecture. It is
more significant that the Brick Period begins on American soil. It seems likely that
Aaltos visit to Boston made him reconsider the value of brick. For instance, one of
the striking aspects of the Town Hall in Syntsalo is the use of brick on the walls
and on the floors in the interior, including the steps leading to the council chamber;
in Finland, brick was not used as a paving material, whether indoors or outdoors; in
Boston, brick pavements were the rule.
16

It is instructive to compare the irregular brickwork at Syntsalo with Aaltos first
work of his Brick Period, the Baker House in Cambridge. Most of Bakers facades
are of multicolor Flemish bond with shattered bricks, fused double bricks and
twisted black clinkers. The most wildly twisted, sculptural bricks are reserved for
the facades; there are no banana shaped bricks in the few spaces where the same
brick is used inside, such as the fireplace and the communal meeting areas near the
entrance. Contradicting Aaltos intentions to use brick for the rooms and corridors
and copper or ceramic tiles cladding for the stair wall, corridors and student rooms
were finished in terracotta, just as the exterior stair wall was plastered and painted.
Surely against Aalto, in both cases less expensive materials were finally chosen.
Schildt and Weston report that Aalto had gone out of his way to find a factory on the
brink of bankruptcy and had insisted that the bricks be used without sorting.
17

Regardless of the relevancy of the factory anecdote, it is important to notice that
stories of this sort contribute to disguise the fact that the Bakers shattered brick
technique constitutes part of a New England tradition which uses New England
water washed brick. Aalto was not the inventor of the technique, just as he was not
alone in showing interest in rough and seemingly unfinished products. The Baker
House can be compared with the Harvard Hemenway Gymnasium built by Coolidge,
Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott in 1938; these architects also built the Harvard
Lamont Library in 1947, where Aalto did the interior of the Poetry Room. As the
type of brick and the laying technique are the same in Hemenway and Baker, it is
reasonable to assume that Aalto was curious to talk his colleagues about the quality
of the brick and maybe the ability of the bricklayers. If they did not, however, all
Aalto had to do was to wander around the campus for a while and run unavoidable
into the Hemenway battered brick gym in the North Yard, right behind Richardsons
emblematic and also highly textured Austin Hall.
18
Given that Baker and Hemenway
bricks and techniques are roughly the same and that Syntsalo was the next design
after MIT, with a unique technique similar to no other Aalto building, it is reasonable
to claim as legitimate the New England precedent, alongside or even above the
classical precedents. The claim, however, would be insufficient to explain Aaltos
change of mood at this moment of his career, especially in Finland.
In The Use and Abuse of Paper, Kari Jormakka explains Aaltos interest in bricks
of inferior quality by referring to Aaltos teacher Usko Nystrm, as well as to John
Ruskin, both of whom felt that imperfection was a sign of life, as opposed to the
spiritless perfection of the machine. It should be added that the topic of modern
and natural building materials had already been explored since the 1930s. Even a
former purist such as Le Corbusier had already turned towards natural materials
and their exaggerated imperfection, with the design of a weekend house near Toulon
for Hlne de Mandrot, the Maison Errazuris in Chile and the Maison Weekend
in St. Cloud, Paris. It Finland, in 1935, Aaltos compatriot and friend Pauli E.
15
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Blomstedt in his Villa Jskelinen in Kirjavalahti had gone even further than Le
Corbusier, harking back to the national Romanticism of the previous generation with
a functionalist massing built of rustic logs and natural stone masonry.
To further investigate and reconstruct a discursive context for Aaltos interest in
irregular brickwork in Finland, Jormakka suggests two sources of inspiration. First,
beginning before the Second World War when the style known as the Romanticism
of the 1940s was already established:
It is characterized by a softening of the original functionalist language;
the introduction of a few organic curves and irregular angles; the use of
natural materials, including multicolor brick; as well as attempts at a new
ornamentation which is the reason why this period was often attacked by
critics and ignored by historians. However, if we compare for example the
Luukkaa day care center in Lappeenranta, Finland, built in 1938 by Martta
and Ragnar Ypy, we see many aspects that anticipate Aaltos explorations in
Cambridge, most notably the application of bricks of a very broad color range.
A second source of inspiration, according to Jormakka, might have been
contemporary industrial design. He singles out a few designers working for the
Finnish ceramic company Arabia:
The ceramic artist Toini Muona set the precedent for exhibiting technically
inferior products. Since the thirties, her work relied on an accidental creative
processes based on an impulsive and intuitive empathy with nature
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In
the forties, Muonas and other designers experiments with colors and glazing
further intensified. Particularly the chance creation of a certain intensive hue
of red, sang du buf, fascinated both the artists and the press. Contemporary
critics mystified the baking process and venerated the accidental effects
of fire on both colors and forms. Friedl Holzer-Kjellberg, another Finnish
ceramic artist, who became famous for developing a method of producing
rice porcelain in the forties, held private show in 1953 in which she exhibited
clustered vases, accidentally stuck together, and other porcelain objects
that had taken a new shape (or, to be blunt, collapsed) during the firing
process.
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Jormakka concludes that even if Aalto was aware of these tendencies in pottery, we
still need to find why he would have found it relevant to modern architecture. He
suggests the post-purist experiments of Le Corbusiers during the war as a possible
answer, mainly the Unit dHabitation in Marseilles where Le Corbusier introduced
bton brut. In his opening address Le Corbusier emphasized that the marks and
hazards of the form work and the defects of bad craftsmanship were not smoothed
away: they shout at one from all parts of the structure. Although the use of the
natural imprints of wooden boards to vitalize a concrete surface was far from new,
Le Corbusier introduced a twist in the discussion as he now claimed ferroconcrete
had the properties of a natural material: It seems to be really possible to consider
concrete as a reconstructed stone worthy of being exposed in its natural state.
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Thus, by the power of discourse, a former industrial material par excellence was
elevated by Le Corbusier to the same rank as stone, wood or terra cotta. Similarly,
materials like brick or wood are indeed modified through industrial processes to
the point where their naturalness or artificiality depends on a discursive frame of
reference. Hence, a discursive operation is also needed for a rough brick wall to be
more natural than a smooth brick wall.
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Following Jormakkas contextualization, we could assume that Aalto was prepared
to understand and willing also to respond the challenge launched by Le Corbusier.
As MIT and Syntsalo buildings are roughly contemporaneous with Marseille,
Aaltos first response would have been the Baker House, continuing New England
building traditions; his second response would have been the Town Hall, rebirthing
Finnish certain cultural traditions. This assumption would also have to accept that
Le Corbusier was at the moment the leading figure in steering the architectural
culture in Europe and the responsible for declaring war on ornament, barely two
decades before. This takes us to a situation where Le Corbusier, one of the harshest
critics of ornament, allegedly following Adolf Loos, now seemed to be harking back
to ornament himself. Therefore, lets take a closer look at the reception of Looss
argument.
Crime
In 1924, in response to a survey concerning aesthetic education, Loos complained
to have been misinterpreted on his attack on ornamentation of 1908. He had
predicted in Ornament and Crime that the use of ornamentation on objects
of practical use would disappear. Yet in 1924 he was explicitly advocating
ornamented public architecture, and favoring the teaching of ornamentation:
Our education is based on classical cultureAn architect is a bricklayer who
has learned Latin.The starting point of our drawing instruction should be
classical ornamentationWe should cultivate not only classical ornament, but
also the orders of columns and moldingsClassical ornament plays the same
role in drawing instruction as grammar does in teaching of Latin. There would
be no point in trying to teach Latin by the Berlitz methodClassical ornament
brings order into shaping of our objects of everyday useAnd brings order
into our lives.
22
Loos might have changed his mind but his answer to the survey shows he was
taking advantage of the situation to clarify what he considered a mistake:
By that I did not mean what some purists have carried at absurdum, namely
that ornament should be systematically and consistently eliminated. What I
did mean was that where it had disappeared as a necessary consequence of
human development, it could not be restored; just as people will never return
to tattoo their faces.
23
Although Loos only mentioned some purists, it was almost like saying that Le
Corbusier and Ozenfant were the ones who misinterpreted his idea. In turn, when
Le Corbusier and Ozenfant used the crime argument to reinforce their aesthetical
idea of purist architecture, they were clearly referring to Ornament and Crime. As
recalled by James Dunnett, it is known that Le Corbusier had been in contact with
Looss essays, at least from 1912, when a selection was printed in the magazine Der
Sturm.
24
In 1920, Le Corbusier himself had reprinted Ornament and Crime in the
first issue LEsprit Nouveau. Dunnett also points out that Le Corbusier even credits
Loos a little grudgingly with the formulation: the more cultivated a people becomes,
the more decoration disappears; also, that le Corbusiers primary argument
asserted the importance of differentiating between a work of art and an object of
use. Indeed, some passages in Decorative Art are directly reminiscent of Loos; and
most importantly, for Dunnett, the absolute rejection of ornament must owe much
to the influence of this sensational article.
25
Yet, this absolute rejection was in the
139
service of promoting purism; quite a different intention from that of Loos.
Le Corbusier claimed that decoration is charming entertainment for a savage
and also that art, not decoration, was necessary for our existence. Not exempt
of ambiguity, Le Corbusier is at least clear in recognizing Looss argument and
terminology:
Ornament is an excellent thing to keep an element of the savage alive in us
a small oneBut in the twentieth century our powers of judgment have
developed greatly and we have raised our level of consciousness. Our spiritual
needs are different and higher worlds than those of decoration offer us
commensurate experience. It seems justified to affirm: the more cultivated a
people becomes, the more decoration disappears. (Surely it was Loos who put
it so neatly.)
26
When Loos started his journalistic career, nearly ten years before Ornament and
Crime, he defended the crafts and attacked artists who were allowing our crafts
to starve for the sake of high art.
27
His early writings indicate he was against the
Wiener Werksttte and other groups that tried to create a new, artistic ornament for
objects of everyday use. Except for the exterior or public side of private buildings,
he was not against crafts-ornament in architecture.
To understand Looss conception it is essential to emphasize the difference he
established between craft-ornament and art-ornament. Craft-ornament was done
out of experience by artisan workers like carpenters or masons. Art-ornament was
artificially created by artists like Josef Hoffmann or Henri van de Velde. In defense
of craft-ornament and against applied art-ornament, Loos also wrote several articles.
In 1898 he criticized the applied arts on display at the Liberty and Bing stores
because: They have nothing to do with our times. They are full of references to
abstractions; full of symbols and recollections It was an art that had not been born
of our time.
28
In 1908 a similar criticism was repeatedly directed to the German
Werkbund:
My question is, do we need applied arts? And my answer is no The
activities of the Werkbund are completely ineffectiveAll crafts that have so
far managed to keep the superfluous character out of their workshops are
working at the height of their powers. They are the only crafts whose products
represent the style of our age. They are so much in the style of our agethat
we do not see them as being in a styleno artist has tried to barge in and
take them under his -unqualified- tutelage.
29
For Loos, the crime took place out of the aesthetical realm when added labor or
waste of human effort was unnecessarily applied to objects of everyday life. He did
mention architecture: Do not weep. Do you not see the greatness of our age resides
in our very inability to create new ornament? We have gone beyond ornament we
have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity. Soon the streets of the cities will
shine with white walls.
30
If we hear this sentence again: Soon the streets of the
cities will shine with white walls, we can give him the benefit of contradiction and
understand why architects like Le Corbusier or May might have found it so close
to their purposes. However, he should not be read as progressive avant-gardism;
instead, we should respect his pledge: The ideal I preach is the aristocrat. I accept
decoration in my own person, if it brings pleasure to my fellow men. If it brings
pleasure to them it brings pleasure to me too.
31
140
Ornament
We could also argue that Ornament and Crime was simply useful or developed
further. In any case, Loos had only claimed that ornament would disappear from
objects of every day use, but Le Corbusier, in order to promote purism, extended
the argument to buildings. Similarly, Ernst May, the organizer of the CIAM Congress
of 1929, might have also used the crime argument for his own promotion of
rationalization within the context of socializing modernism. On the first day of the
congress, presumably upon Mays suggestion, the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung
published Looss article in 1929 with a dedication: to the Second International
Congress for New Building, meeting today in Frankfurt.
32
However, despite Le
Corbusiers use of Looss argument he also criticizes his terminology, claiming
he did not only find decorative art inappropriate but he lamented that for thirty
years no one has been able to find an accurate term, and that the German word
Kunstgewerbe (industrial art) is even more equivocal than applied art.
Le Corbusier might have rejected ornament on aesthetic and, moral grounds,
while May might have attacked it as incompatible with rationalization; and for
the modernist discourse in general, the hyperbolic use of the word crime might
have transformed a cultural misdemeanor in product design into an architectural
aberration. Nonetheless, despite its criminalization, ornament was never really
banished from modern architecture.
For instance, Le Corbusiers city plans could be understood as ornamental
patterns, sometimes inspired by some of the Frbel Gifts, albeit translated into a
colossal scale. Also, Mies van der Rohes onyx walls in the Barcelona Pavilion or
the Tugendhat House were also accepted by the architectural community as an
honest use of material, although the material produced great ornamental effects.
It is arguable that both Le Corbusiers bton brut and Aaltos irregular brickwork
are attempts to animate the surfaces of a building in a way that comes close to
traditional ornamentation and yet, since both result not from a deliberate design
of a new ornament but rather from a particular way of working the material, they
became acceptable for modernist ideology.
Despite Le Corbusier, we could propose a working definition to situate MIT,
Marseille and Syntsalo as ornamental propositions. A short revision of two key
moments in the ornamentation debate has allowed us to differentiate between
applied-art, industrial-art, craft-ornamentation, art-ornamentation and decoration,
providing enough nuances for a basic definition. Ornamentation, therefore, would be
differentiable in at least three classes: 1. Applied or decorative ornament consisting
of new elements superimposed on or glued to the form; as in any architecture
with additional elements which are basically attached to different parts of the
construction like ceilings, walls, windows or roofs. 2. Integral or organic ornament
consisting of variations obtained from the assemblage of one or more construction
materials, built as to avoid the appearance of superimposition of forms; as in the
architecture of Arts and Crafts related modernisms. 3. Integral or organic ornament
consisting of variations obtained from in the construction processes, built as to
emerge from the form; as in Marseilless bton brut.
The same set of premises cannot be used to look at modern and non modern
ornaments. For instance, if the Greek entasis which Frampton considers the model
for an art of construction were to be considered decorative, there would be at least
a fourth class of ornamentation to classify any classical order. A capital, unless it
belonged to a non-ornamental architecture, cannot be considered glued to a former
element, nor can it be taken as emerging from the construction. Yet, the definition
141
provided works to differentiate between the organic decorative character of the use of
brick at Baker House and the Town Hall.
Ornament in Baker would be integral to the variation in quality of the material;
in Syntsalo and Marseille, integral to variations in the construction process.
Having stated this we can explore Aaltos own negation of decoration by examining
his words, quoted by Frampton:
The structures which were means to create a new architecture have been
wrested from us and turned into commercialized decorative ends in
themselves with no inner value. There was a time when a misconstrued,
lifeless traditionalism was the chief enemy of good architecture. Today its
worst enemy is the superficial decorative misuse of means acquired during the
breakthroughThe contrast between deep social responsibility and decorative
surface effects is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most topical issue in the
debate on architecture. Please do not think that I want to disparage beauty in
rejecting decorativeness. Architecture must have charm; it is a factor of beauty
in society. But real beauty is not a conception of form which can be taught, it
is the result of harmony between several intrinsic factors, not least the social.
34

The reference to decorative ends, decorative misuse, decorative surface effects
and decorativeness are justifying Aaltos conception of beauty. Beauty is not a
caprice and it should be accompanied by other factors, the social factor seemingly
important for both, Aalto and Frampton. Beauty might be associated with charm,
harmony and even social purpose but not with decorativeness. Criticism usually
assigns this negative stance to Loos but as we have also argued before, it actually
belongs to Le Corbusier.
Having confronted criticism and Aalto himself on the grounds of ornamentation in
favor of Syntsalo as a modern statement on ornamental brick, lets now take a final
stance against flexible standardization; a topic especially keen to Weston, for whom
Aalto would have taken part in the standardization debate through the Town Hall.
This final aspect could be addressed at least from two points of view: the coeval
Corbusian debate launched through his work on The Modulor in which Aalto never
showed any interest, or from the more distant polemic of the Werkbund reunion of
1914 in Cologne. For the purpose of the current argument the latter should suffice.
Standardization
In Cologne, the original Werkbund call to unite art and industry turned into the well
known and publicized battle on standardization versus art, the two poles personified
by Hermann Muthesius and Henri van de Velde. The confrontation can also be seen
as a dialogue of the deaf: Muthesius was not against art but in favor of industry
and van de Velde was not against industry but in favor of art. Muthesius wanted
artists working for industry to produce better German products to compete with
England and France to take over the world market as part of the War effort; van de
Velde wanted industrial capitalists to hire artists to infuse life with artistic values.
Muthesius was in favor of artistic industrial products, much in the vein of industrial
design; van de Velde was openly against standardization because he considered it
was unfertile ground for liberty of expression or free decoration. Van de Veldes main
argument was the old Arts and Crafts claim that modernism and decoration were
not opposed, as long as decoration was not anachronistic: For twenty years many
of us have been seeking forms and decorations entirely in keeping with our epoch.
142
In the end, decoration was supposedly banished and standardization supposedly
adopted by modernist ideology, although both topics kept their own uncertain pace.
Aalto would join the standardization debate rather soon in his career, yet for only for
a brief period.
In 1927 Aalto used standard precast, light-weight concrete for the Tapani
apartments in Turku, Finland. In 1929, at the CIAM meeting in Frankfurt he
exhibited the ingenious solutions he devised for light fittings, handrails, and door
handles for Paimio Sanatorium and the Turun Sanomat newspaper buildings; he
also exhibited prototypical casement and sliding double-glazed windows, in both
timber and steel.
35
By 1930 he tended to value standardization only at a relative
small and incremental scale. As far as the larger whole was concerned, particularly
in respect to housing, he moved away from the Zeilenbau or row housing pattern
to adopt a more organic dwelling formby 1935 he had begun to question the
techno-scientific and productive criteria that were still being insisted upon by
materialist architects and intellectuals.
36
By this time he does not speak about
standardization in architectural design but limited to standard articles objects
of every day use for Loos and still, with a disavowal: a standard article should
not be a definite product. Aalto complemented this idea by claiming that even
if standardized, the article should on the contrary be made so that the form is
completed by man himself according to all the individual laws than involve him.
Only in the case of objects that have a neutral quality can standardization coercion
of the individual be softened and its positive side culturally exploited.
37
Like
van de Velde, Aalto felt that standardization was too limiting. It would be flexible if
it is kept to a minimum; it should be limited to articles of every day use. As for
architectural design, it seems to be unnecessary for it contradicts the harmony of
organic logic.
Gran Schildt tells us that Aalto often remarked, in his old age, that you cant
save the world, but you can set an example. This rather vague comment has much
importance for Weston as he claims that Aalto twice set an example to the world
in Syntsalo. First by the making of place which we have already discussed; the
second was the use of brick, which represented,
38
according to Weston, Aaltos
concept of flexible standardization.
18
143
For Aalto brick represented precisely the kind of cellular standardization in
which he believed, and in the brickwork he made strenuous effects to avoid
a mechanical effectFor Baker Househe insisted that the bricks should
be used without sortingFor Syntsalo, Aalto could not find such highly
individualized bricks and so to enliven the walls he asked the bricklayers
to lay them slightly out of line. Aaltos fastidious attention to brickwas
driven by more than a desire to achieve a visually beautiful resultAfter his
largely unsuccessful efforts to promotethe kind of flexible standardization
he believed was vital to overcome the deadening effects of industrialized
technologyhe came to accept that the best he could do as an architect was
to offer the world concrete demonstrations of his beliefs.
40
In a different text, Weston clarifies that such an alleged exemplarity is only a verbal
concept: Aalto returned repeatedly to the idea of nature as the model for flexible
standardization, and the related concept of elasticity yielded fruit in his large-
scale planning studieshowever, flexible standardization remained primarily a
verbal concept with which to beat the system builders rather than a viable design
strategy.
41
Westons acceptance of this strategic position to beat the builders, if
not cynical, is at least odd, for it would insist on some flexible standard topic, where
there is none. The only aspect he seems to prove is Aaltos rejection of standards;
which one can seemingly verify by observing that apart from the strategic rhetoric,
there is not a single trace of any standard in the Town Hall. As Le Corbusiers
shouting walls in Marseille, one can only hear non-standard screams from
Syntsalos walls.
Fiction
The writer Gabriel Garca Mrquez once confessed he thought he had a problem
when he discovered that a massacre he described in one of his novels had not been
as spectacular in reality as the narrative required. For the purpose of the novel, he
argued, a train full of corpses was needed as the outcome of really wonderful and
bloody slaughtering; therefore he simply made up the massacre, complete with
the train. The historian Marco Palacios tells this story because he wants to criticize
other writers who use Marquez novel as a source of facts. If there is any historical
problem, Palacios argues, it is not in the novel but in the historians who quote it as
if it was a primary source.
42

One problem in much of Aalto criticism is the tendency to accept the aphoristic
statements by the architect as apodictic revelations. Such an attitude can lead to
explanations that are all but empty. For example, Schildt and Weston use Aaltos
promise to set the world an example as a device to rationalize the work: although
the architects attempts at flexible standardization manifestly failed, Weston
nonetheless claims that these failures are successful as examples for the world to
follow. Such legitimative criticism is based upon a confusion of the roles of the
architect and the critic.
Aalto clearly enjoyed misleading gullible critics, such as Schildt who never
seems aware of his jokes.
43
While such misinformation, often for the sake of
self-promotion, is normal with architects, historians and critics may need other
justification for perpetuating the myths, especially when they make us blind to many
qualities in the architecture discussed.
Of course, depending on their frames of reference, critics can legitimately give
144
different meanings to the same aspects of a building. A structure that serves the
needs of the people can be described as functional but it can also be interpreted
as democratic; an irregular brick-laying technique could be understood as human
or it could be seen as decorative. But assigning meaning to a building or to its
aspects is not infinitely flexible: exploiting a site by restructuring its topography
(Weston) really is opposed to laying out the building into the site (Frampton). These
two descriptions of Syntsalo are not just two different ways of describing or
valuing the same aspect of the building: in truth, these interpretations contradict
each other and cannot be valid at the same time. Nevertheless, both ways of seeing
seem equally popular among book publishers and the architectural reading public.
Perhaps architectural criticism should strive more for veridical than rhetorical, at
least if we accept Thomas De Quinceys characterization of rhetoric as dealing with
truths such that the affirmative and the negative are both true.
44

Another possibility is that architectural historiography is engaged in active myth-
building where the value of individual buildings is constructed within a narrative.
For the purposes of their own narrative, Weston and Frampton need to discover a
massacre and a train full of corpses in Aaltos buildings, even if none should be
forthcoming.
However, even if we understand historiography not as a search for objective and
timeless truths but as the construction of contingent and grounded narratives, the
traditional image of Aalto seems unnecessarily constricted. Many of the published
texts on Aalto show a complacent tendency to fit him into the straightjacket of
coherence and heroism. In doing so, these texts fuel a consumer rhetoric of an
architecture that is human, natural, Finnish, and critical of modernism; and avoid
reasonable questions, such as, for example, the role that the city of Boston or the
work of conservative German architects might have played in Aaltos attempt to
develop a regional or national architecture; or fail to address issues that might give
Aalto a new relevance today, such as the debate on ornament and decoration.
Dedicated to Rogelio Salmona, for his scientific mind.
145
Endnotes
1
Goldhagen, Sarah. Something to Talk About. Modernism, Discourse, Style.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1995.
2
Nerdinger, Winfried. Toward a Human Modernism. Prestel, Munich, New York,
1999.
3
Nerdinger. Toward a Human Modernism.
4
Goldhagen. Modernism is a discourse or an ongoing debate.
5
Pelkonen, Eva Liisa. Unpublished dissertation. Aalto became modern through his
travels, friendships, readings, and buildings.
6
Frampton, Kenneth. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture
of Resistance. In The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press, 1983, p-26.
7
Weston. Sense of Place p-137.
8
Talking about Syntsalo, Simo Paavilainen makes this point and adds that the
association with Siena is created by the brick, the clear self-assertiveness of the
building and the elevated courtyard, which was originally covered with cobblestones
like the yard of an italian farmhouse. Conversation with Kari Jormakka,
Cambridge, June 15th, 2006.
9
Mosso, Leonardo, Alvar Aalto, teokset 1918-1967. Otava Publishing Comp.
Ltd., Helsinki 1967, p. 86. Quoted in: Sippo, Hanni, Ed., Alvar Aalto, The Brick, AA
Foundation Helsinki, 2001, p 54.
10
Weston. The inspiration of Italy, p-27.
11
This claim comes from the art historian LIlius, Henrik, The Finnish Wooden
Town. Rungsted Kyst: A. Nyborg A/S, 1985. Conversation with Kari Jormakka,
Cambridge, June 6th, 2006.
12
Weston. Alvar Aalto.
13
The Brick. Editor, Hanni Sippo. Alvar Aalto Foundation, Helsinki, 2001. Instead
of a letter sent to the brick layers, by the way it is written it seems it was a note or
a letter to someone else, p-57.
14
Mount Angel Library was built much later, also in brick, but not in Finland. All
of Aaltos buildings in Finland and Europe designed after the 1950s period were not
in red brick.
15
Dudoks best known design, the Hilversum Town Hall and the Vondel school
were under construction during the spring of 1928 when Aalto visited Hilversum
on his way to Paris. At this time, Aalto also saw Johannes Duikers Zonnestraal
Tuberculosis Sanatorium which was a major inspiration for Aaltos Paimio
Sanatorium. Conversation with Kari Jormakka, Cambridge, June 12th, 2006.
16
Conversation with Kari Jormakka, Cambridge, June 12th, 2006.
17
Schildt 1989, p-159; Weston, p-141. Aalto noted that the colors ranged black
to canary yellow, though the predominant shade is bright red.
18
Bunting Bainbridge. Harvard. An Architectural History. Completed and Edited
by Margaret Henderson Floyd. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge. Massachusetts, and London, England, 1985. Coolidge, Shepley,
Bulfinch and Abbott also designed the Littauer Center (1937), Gordon McKay
Laboratory (1953), Aiken Computation Center (1946; expanded 1964), Nuclear
Laboratory (1949), and Allston Burr Hall (1951). The Allston Burr Hall features
Aalto-like fan-shaped forms in the lecture halls.
19
Bjrkman, Gunvor, Friskt och finskt, Bonniers 7-8/1941, 15. As quoted in
Kalha, 169. Conversation with Kari Jormakka, Cambridge, June 12th, 2006.
20
Kalha, p-218.
21
Le Corbusier, as quoted by Giedion In Space, Time, and Architecture, p-546.
22
From Paris, in August of 1924Survey by Prof. F.V. Morky for the Czeck review for
drawing and aesthetic education. Ornament and Education pp184-189
23
Essay 29. Ornament and Crime.
146
24
Ornament and Crime was published in French in 1913 in Cahiers dajourdhui.
Hitchcock, Modern Architectecture p-157.
25
James Dunnett. Introduction. The Decorative Arts of Today, Le Corbusier, (1925)
The Architectural Press, London, 1987 Translated by James I. Dunnet.
26
Decorative arts of Today p-85.
27
Essay 1 Our School of Applied Art (1897) p-14
28
Essay 21 A Review of Applied Arts I (1898)
29
Essay 25 Surplus to Requirements (1908) (The German Werkbund)
30
P-168
31
P-174
32
Essay 29 Ornament and Crime (1929) p-176 this essay was written in 1908.
We dedicate it to the Second International Congress for New Building, meeting
today in Frankfurt (1929 Frankfurter Zeitung)
33
Decorative arts of Today, p-85.
34
Frampton. Between Humanism and Materialism. The Museum of Modern Art,
1998. The Legacy of Alvar Aalto: Evolution and Influence. P-119
35
Frampton, Aalto centenary. Frampton also quotes Schildt to explain how
technologically progressive Aalto was in 1929 on matters of standardization :
The structural principle of transverse bearing walls between non-load bearing
facades was borrowed from Mies van der Rohes house at Stuttgarts Weissenhof
exhibition in 1927, and provides flexible variation of secondary wall and windows,
allowing for varied apartment size, from studio flats to three-room apartments with
kitchen and servants room. p-121.
36
Frampton, Aalto centenary, p-123.
37
Frampton, Aalto centenary, p-124. Quoting Aalto from a lecture in Stockholm.
38
Weston. Alvar Aalto, p-145.
39
Weston. Nature, the best standardization committee In the note quoted above
the brick layers are being mentioned, not addressed.
40
Weston, p-104
41
Weston.
42
Frank Safford, Marco Palacios. Colombia. Pas fragmentado, sociedad
dividida. (Fragmented Land, Divided Society). Norma, Bogot, 2002, p-522.
Marco Palacios, referring to an interview with Gabriel Garca Mrquez on British
TV, 1991 eso fue un problema para mcuando descubr que no se trat de
una matanza espectacular [pero] en un libro en el que las cosas se magnifican,
tal como en Cien aos de soledad, necesitaba llenar todo un tren con cadveres.
La conversacin deja en claro que el problema no es del novelista sino de los
historiadores que citan la obra como si se tratara de una fuente primaria.
43
To give just three examples of deliberate misleading from Schildts biography:
Aalto imputes to Nietzsche a statement, only the men of the dark look back;
Aalto quotes Dante as saying that the worst thing in hell is that the stairs have the
wrong proportions; Aalto misrepresents the height of the Sala pubblico in Siena.
Conversation with Kari Jormakka, Cambridge, June 15th, 2006.
44
De Quincey, Rhetoric and Style, pp. 4-5.
147
1. Hill-like angle. Phaidon, Simo Rista picture.
2. Main entrance. Phaidon, unpublished.
3. Courtyard. Section east-west. Phaidon, unpublished.
4. Stairs. Section east-west. Phaidon, unpublished.
5. Courtyard. Section north-south. Phaidon, unpublished.
6. Roman-like, Council Chanber. Phaidon, unpublished.
7. Plans. Levels 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Phaidon, Darren Stwart Capel drawing.
8. South elevation. Phaidon, Darren Stwart Capel drawing.
9. North elevation. Phaidon, Darren Stwart Capel drawing.
10. East elevation. Phaidon, Darren Stwart Capel drawing.
11. West elevation. Phaidon, Darren Stwart Capel drawing.
12. Visible misaligned bricks. Phaidon, Simo Rista picture.
13. Invisible misaligned bricks. Phaidon, unpublished.
14. New England-MIT, Waterwashed brick. 1947. JLR.
15. Hemenway Gymnasium, Harvard University. 1938. JLR.
16. New England-Hemenway, Waterwashed brick. JLR.
17. Science Museum, traditional brick. Boston, JLR.
18. The Hill Behind the Hill. Phaidon, Somo Rista picture.
148
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The research presented here identifies an activist architectural position for the
redevelopment of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which relies on a radical
re-visioning of the relationships and roles for technologies, cultural identity (of
bodies in residence), and nature inscribed within this neighborhood. It comprises a
part of a larger study developed during volunteering efforts and thesis field research
from 05 June 03 July 2006, during which the Lower Ninth Ward was (and of this
writing continues to be) poised in a speculative urban rebuilding process concerned
with both physical and ideological re-visions. In the city of New Orleans, finite
funding has contributed to a climate of exclusionary investment distributions post-
Katrina, and the competitive ideological claims put forward by neighborhood groups
regarding their cultural worth became integral to their physical reconstruction.
Before reconstruction the recuperation of community identity in public discourse
- especially for a neighborhood like the Lower Ninth Ward that was portrayed as
criminal and destitute rather than culturally valuable and physically viable - has
emerged as a necessary component to the rebuilding process, and particularly
necessary to justify the communitys right to financial investment, and thereby its
right to remain and right to dignified shelter.
The need for radical re-visions for the Lower Ninth Ward post-Katrina follows
in reaction to planners fixed and hierarchical relations among technologies,
cultural identity, and nature that has reinforced the notion of futility in rebuilding
the neighborhood. The companion studies to this chapter demonstrate that
constructions within the social imaginary in both contemporary public
(and national media) discourse and the dominant historical versions of the
neighborhoods identity and physical construction have posed significant
limitations on the maintenance and progressive physical development of the
neighborhood. The chapter therefore proposes a necessary deferral to an approach
in which external and preconceived ideas of ordered space give over to three
subjects (technology, the residents who have in possession an idea of their own
cultural and spatial identities, and nature) that are equally weighted to develop
meanings and relations in reference to themselves. Such a non-Cartesian attitude
is foremost locally appropriate because each subject is at this point in equal need
of reconstruction and re-situation within the neighborhood. This case study is also
1
149
relevant as a reflection of a global context in which the boundaries of meaning
and practice between and within territorial, economic, natural, biographical,
social, and technological spheres are always shifting.
1
The chapter draws from
Merleau-Pontys discussion of the construction of subjects to consider how an
actor-network understanding of the city might have a more political-activist focus in
relation to rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward. An analysis of empirical observations
in the neighborhood locates potential assemblages of technologies, bodies and
nature that represent a contemporary and progressive blurring of their purified
distinctions.
For most of us, Nature is no more than a vague and remote entity, overlaid
by cities, roads, houses and above all by the presence of other people.
...cultural objects and faces owe their distinctive form, their magic power,
to transference and projection of memory, so that only by accident has the
human world any meaning. ...not only does empiricism distort experience by
making the cultural world an illusion, in fact it is in it that our existence finds
its sustenance. The natural world is also falsified, and for the same reasons.
...every cultural object refers back to a natural background against which it
appears and which may, moreover, be confused and remote. Our perception
senses how near is the canvas underneath the picture, or the crumbling
cement under the building, or the tiring actor under the character.
2
- Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception: 27-28.
Following from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, we might ask how and why
our contemporary culture constructs distinctions between bodies, technologies and
nature. No longer invisible, infrastructural networks and metastructural protective
systems have come to the fore of social consciousness post-Katrina. Their very
inadequacies contributed to the dismantling of whole spaces and communities in
New Orleans. Their subsequent prolonged absence in some of the worst-affected
areas represents and reinforces popular consensus regarding the undesirability
of these neighborhoods, which are considered spaces too risky for investment.
Our cultural intimacy with technology the range of scale in which technology is
used (from infrastructural networks to corporeal implantations), our overwhelming
reliance on technological systems to maintain a minimum standard of residence,
and the associations of identity with types of technological use (e.g. criminal,
cybernetic, quotidian, and expert, etc.) is further indication of the extent to
which constructed distinctions are not progressive representations of our social
reality. And if bodies, technologies, and nature are so intertwined within physical
and cultural construction, why do redevelopment plans continue to reinforce their
separation?
3

The following identifies the various fixed and hierarchical distinctions amongst
redevelopment strategies for technologies, cultural identity of residents, and
nature in the Lower Ninth Ward. Technological strategies, including utility
networks, structural rehabilitation, and flood barrier/ drainage remediation, are
considered obvious first actions toward crisis abatement and redevelopment in this
neighborhood. However, the areas inert state of technological absence indicates
the citys convenient circular logic: while it is unwilling to upgrade and repair
infrastructure ahead of repopulation, residents cannot return without necessary
improvements to their technological environment. Meanwhile, environmentalists
continue to mythologize technology as harmful to natural ecosystems. In the arena
of cultural identity, a similar dilemma persists. As has been demonstrated over the
past 17 months, reliance on historic cultural assets alone has not been a valued
justification for the city to confirm its support of the Lower Ninth Wards right to
150
remain and rebuild. Critics of such a position cite the mobility of culture and its
embodiment within individuals, most of whom forcibly vacated the neighborhood.
Even so, a recent poll indicates that 94% of the displaced residents surveyed
would mobilize their embodied culture back to the neighborhood and rebuild,
given the means to do so.
4
Advocates for the return of culture have cited historic
representations of cultural authenticity, and these are believed distinct from both
technological systems and nature. A preservationist treatment of the Lower Ninth
Ward is popularly disconcerting for the rest of the city, which assumes errantly that
the neighborhoods place as a source of New Orleans culture has been subsumed
by its contemporary image as a source of crime.
5
Finally, in consideration of nature
in the neighborhood, proposals for the preservation of natural ecosystems and
reversion to preexisting ecologies have emerged in direct confrontation with human
occupation. The early Urban Land Institute recommendation to shrink the citys
footprint by converting five New Orleans neighborhoods into wetlands and green
spaces would have converted technologically supported social spaces into inert
natural buffers. Under threat of replacement by nature, the residents of the Lower
Ninth Ward reacted with protest and arrested more mediated approaches which
could have considered nature, residents, and the built environment within symbiotic
relationships. As these vignettes demonstrate, ideological motivations behind one
proposal for redevelopment have often worked to disqualify another. Paradoxically,
in planners visions for the neighborhood the problematic separation of technology,
nature and culture has an effect parallel to inactions from those disinterested in
redeveloping the Lower Ninth Ward.
With reference to Merleau-Pontys prescient observation, it is clear that here,
underneath the picture of the neighborhoods planned redevelopment, the
canvas is in strips. Technology, bodies (residents and culture), and nature remain
in distinct operational and ideological spheres of the redevelopment process.
Suspended in inaction, redevelopment in this neighborhood has been stunted by a
cultural proclivity to purify, thereby disengaging natural environment, technological
construction, and human settlement. This kind of astringent conceptualization
of urban space aligns closely to a Habermasian philosophical tradition, which
excluded technological progress and organizational systems from the realm of
communicative reason where ethical judgments and political actions developed.
A contemporary separation of the technological and ethical realms has produced
unanticipated repercussions: to date, none of the subjects (technology, cultural
identity, and nature) have alone been sufficient enticement for market forces to
engage with redeveloping the Lower Ninth Ward.
6

Heuristically building from a technological and spatial framing of social justice, this
chapter aims to reinvigorate discussions of the future curation of the Lower Ninth
Ward neighborhood with ethical arguments contextualized by re-visions of the
three subjects.
7
It asserts that it is a political and ethical disservice when cultural
identity and nature are understood as essentialist and autonomous preconditions for
redeveloping the neighborhood. Furthermore, the modern aversion to considering
artificial technologies as necessary components of organic bodies and nature
persists here. As such, they are not extended into radical hybridities that might
provide greater impetus for redevelopment action. As the following discussion on
technological assemblages will demonstrate, necessary hybridities are occurring
both in the citys economic plan for future survivability, and at the micro-level of
technological constructions. Both examples are administratively and conceptually
outside of planners visions for the Lower Ninth Ward. Borrowing again from
Merleau-Ponty, we could conclude that the polarization of cultural identity, nature
and technology subjects are merely constructed representations, that should
151
be more malleable and can be potentially reconstructed within this post-Katrina
context.
The empiricist will concede that every object is presented against a background
which is not an object, the present lying between two horizons of absence, past
and future. ...these significations are derivative. The figure and background,
the thing and its surrounding, the present and the past, are words
which summarize the experience of a spatio-temporal perspective, which in
the end comes down to the elimination either of memory or of the marginal
impressions.
8
In other words, ordering space so as to purify and delineate modes of action is
less productive than considering combinatorial projects in which both figure
and background, subject and object merge in non-Cartesian conceptions of
territorial identity. It is the assertion of this chapter that the neighborhood can be
re-visioned if we take cue from ways in which a conscious and locally-specific
consideration of technology, nature, and cultural identity is mutually constitutive of
identity and environment.
Assemblages.
In this chapter, considerable reliance has been placed on assemblages of
technologies, cultural identity, and nature as potential ethical and political recourse
for redeveloping the Lower Ninth Ward. While the idea developed contrary to the
inadequacies in the redevelopment process and to cultural persuasions for forcing
purified terms, it was not wholly reactionary. The idea of applying assemblages to
the analysis of this case study developed primarily from a desire to work outside
a deterministic ideological framework of assigned weakness and inequity. The
identity of place and people in the Lower Ninth Ward has been (and continues to be)
assigned a public image of victimhood and criminality which overrides other (past)
constructions of identity, and overshadows an alternative (future) reconstruction
of place. As I demonstrate elsewhere in the companion studies of contemporary
ideological discourse situated in the city, such ideological devaluations of place
and people constitute the rhetorical contestation of the right to rebuild and remain in
New Orleans. Contemporary ideological discourse continues to construct minority
residents in the city as Cartesian subjects in relation to an ideological master
structure, which is similar to what Brian Massumi describes in the context of his
discussion on positionality:
Signifying subject formation according to the dominant structure was often
thought of in terms of coding. Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms
of positioning on a grid. The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework
of cultural constructed significations: male versus female, black versus white,
gay versus straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a site on the grid
defined by an overlapping of one term from each pair. The body came to be
defined by its pinning to the grid. ...The sites, it is true, are multiple. But...is
the body as linked to a particular subject position anything more than a local
embodiment of ideology?
9
A non-Cartesian concept of space and subject assumes that they are not necessarily
pre-coded; and assemblages new merged and proximate configurations of
technologies, bodies and nature are therefore understood as generative of
alternative values and material constructions. Prevailing views in urban and social
152
complexity provided relevant models of urban research here, including: Deleuze and
Guattaris rhizomatic diagrams and machinic assemblages, DeLandas meshworks
and more recent approach to social ontology, Swyngedouws discussions of
urban political ecology, Groszs body-city isomorphism, Virilios third revolution,
Latours quasi-objects and actor-network theory, and Haraways cyborgs.
10
Within
these accounts, ideas of relations between non-megalithic components of social
materialism and subjectivity, and the agency of multiple (and marginal) human
subjects and inorganic objects in constituting identity and enacting change emerged
as most salient in relation to re-visioning New Orleans. Famously, for Haraway, the
imprecision that results from the hybridization of human and machine deconstructs
the restraints of identity based on race and gender:
It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human
satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can
suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our
bodies and our tools to ourselves. It means both building and destroying
machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.
11
Haraways elemental example of an assemblage is introduced here to underscore
the dialectical project inherent in its productive and descriptive metaphors. The
process of creating or identifying assemblages is foremost analytic, in that it
educes a decomposition of the parts particular significations and roles outside
of the whole assemblage. With assemblages, there is an assumption that the
parts did not previously belong. Additionally, there is an obvious synthetic
component to the process, which seeks to reconstitute these previously alien
parts. Here, assemblages are purposeful because they facilitate a deconstruction of
preconceived distinctions thought unhelpful because of their ideological relations
(i.e. regarding technology, bodies and nature in the Lower Ninth Ward). Further,
in synthesis, there is an initial ambiguity of the new identity and meaning of the
assemblage, which can be productive as suggested in Haraways example. But if
we were to also follow Deleuze, there is also a tendency toward the territorialization
of assemblages, which marks an increased homogeneity of the parts and fixing
of the assemblages signification and spatial boundaries.
12
This is to say that
assemblages are not always assumed novel, and it is not the intent of this chapter to
re-vision the Lower Ninth Ward based on assemblages whose parts are always on
the move.
Accepting that not all assemblages must be radical, we should note that many
reconstitutions of meaning and function occur globally through economic incentive.
A municipal-wide example of new assemblages might serve to reinforce these
points. A public-private business consortium has refashioned New Orleanss
economic viability toward a post-industrial technological identity. Within the context
of competitive urban centers, survival is connectivity and New Orleans extends
its financial boundaries by filling technological market niches.
13
Accelerated
by the obliteration of its economic mainstays post-Katrina, the city has initiated
partnerships and incentives with the digital animation industry to reconceive its
creative authenticity within digital arts culture rather than exclusively through
jazz. Toward further diversification, the city is lobbying the federal government for
consideration as the regional terrorism watchdog ahead of other port cities like
Houston. Further supplementing its technologically sophisticated image, the city
has enacted a free urban wireless connectivity program after the Philadelphia model.
In each case, technology is an integral component of the citys economic and
cultural identity reformulations. Paradoxically, New Orleans might in the future be
advertised as the Anime Big Easy, allowing transcultural crossings while instituting
153
one of most sophisticated territory surveillance programs in the United States. A
less extreme effect of such assemblages finds technology and culture reconsidered
in a post-Katrina context through reinterpretations of the technological sublime
and cosmopolitanism two core values on which New Orleans was settled and
historically developed.
Similar economics-generated assemblages cannot be thought excluded from the
Lower Ninth Ward. At a recent community meeting, a resident suggested that
devastation landmarks tourism should be formalized as part of the new urban
plan for the area, and as a way of simultaneously memorializing and capitalizing
on loss.
14
What would this do to reconstituting a notion of cultural identity and
authenticity, and what material changes would the necessary tourism infrastructure
(e.g. preservation of decrepit housing, widened streets for buses, audio walking
tours, etc.) produce? The focus of the following assemblages refers to a more
explicit political project, which unequivocally assumes the neighborhoods right
to remain and rebuild. The companion studies to this text have demonstrated the
extent to which historical configurations of technologies, nature and bodies in the
Lower Ninth Ward have characterized an environment of material, economic and
social inequity. By contrast, it is the intent of this research to produce speculative
propositions for new assemblages of technologies, bodies, and nature toward the
upending of structuralized inequity and in support of future imaginations of the
neighborhood.

The following two sections, Assemblages: bodies at work and Assemblages: for
secession present speculative propositions based on empirical observations in the
Lower Ninth Ward during the summer of 2006. The identification and analysis of
these assemblages sprung from four technological modalities that were conceived
to frame investigation: metastructural technologies, local technologies, the absence
of technology, and sublime technologies. Metastructural technologies were
identified as the basic systems that sustain the settlement of New Orleans on its
hazardous ground; including drainage, flood barrier, electrical, water conveyance,
and sewerage technological systems. Local technologies were identified as
those that recalibrated metastructural technology applications that had failed
post-hurricane, and those that addressed the immediate and basic needs of a
neighborhood (e.g. debris removal, foundation repairs, environmental pollution
abatement, and other projects). During the period of field research, the absence
of technology in the neighborhood was overwhelming, both as a result of the 2005
hurricanes and long-term neglect by municipal and federal authorities. However,
it was also acknowledged that the search for absence can also have a constructive
critical role in indicating a process of change and the identification of possibilities
for improvement. Finally in the sublime modality, it was thought inappropriate to
use the technological sublime in the Modern sense identified by Perry Miller
15

when speaking of a technologically devastated eastern New Orleans. In the
2
154
Lower Ninth Ward, the function of this modality ascribes more to a postmodern
paradigm, re-introduced as an analytical and exploratory discourse to challenge
prescriptive formalism and normative ideals.
16
The sublime modality served to
force consideration of technological innovation, reorganization, and hybridization
in its most unexpected forms. The catalog of technological modalities was not
intended as a rigid method for categorization, but is a malleable system that starts
to frame and account for the iterative processes at work in this neighborhood. As a
method established prior to the field research, it was of benefit in an environment in
which absence, and its attendant emotional effects, was everywhere apparent. The
modalities served to remind and reorient toward the positive and the obscured, and
the following sections serve to elucidate this with the objective of identifying an
activist architectural position for redeveloping the Lower Ninth Ward.
1-Assemblages: bodies at work.
1-01.Assembling.
The assemblage of labor and technology in post-Katrina New Orleans locates
tensions to do with racial identities behind the tools of reconstruction. The
possession of labor technologies is intertwined with the survivability of particular
minoritized groups in a post-Katrina city where such groups have been affected
by extensive job, housing, and personal losses. There is a relation here between
the association of particular identities (bodies) behind the reshaping (through
technology) of the environment (both natural and built). At the scale of individuals,
capitalizing on the reconstruction market niche is of immediate importance
for personal stories of recovery. At the scale of cultural identity and its spatial
locations, galvanizations of political and economic power based on the identity of
the laborers and entrepreneurs behind these reconstruction technologies are already
evident.
Demographic shifts have occurred within the reconstruction effort at two scales. At
the scale of single family home reconstruction and debris cleanup, the shift relates
to the August 2005 evacuation of the city. A joint study by Tulane University and
the University of California, Berkeley found that New Orleans underwent the most
rapid racial shift of any city in the United States, losing more than 250,000 African
Americans and gaining some 14,000 Hispanics.
17
This demographic shift is due
in part to the economics of migrant labor, which dictates a largely illegal immigrant
population of laborers can be paid less than the minimum wage without health
insurance coverage, which almost guarantees more hazardous working conditions
and wage disputes. At the scale of neighborhood debris cleanup, hazards
remediation and reconstruction, the shift occurs as outside corporate conglomerates
(rather than local sources) are given government contracts for the remediation of the
environment. The previous chapter discusses this monopoly of disaster capitalism
in greater detail. The shifts from African American to Hispanic, and from local to
transnational has been connected to a historic withdrawal of skills training in Ninth
Ward public schools, decades of inequitable and racist hiring practices, and a
historic reduction in the number of government labor contracts and entrepreneurial
programs for African Americans.
18

Reconstituting the assemblage of bodies, labor technologies and environment is
undoubtedly a primary political and economic project for the Lower Ninth Ward. In
the June 2006 community meetings that I attended, a recurring item on the agenda
was the training of African American youth in the skills related to the reconstruction
effort, as a tactic for economic and social empowerment. The desire to relocate
3
155
labor technologies with African American identities does not seem related to
interpersonal racial antagonisms.
19
Rather, it merely represents a communitys
struggle to take control of its technological environment, and as such is presently
a generalized objective. Increased attention to the actual parameters for how this
instrumentalization might occur could start to differentiate the universal treatment
of bodies and technologies. Residents might decide to independently fortify the
levees along the Industrial Canal and Mississippi River, remove all of the toxins
spread into the ground by the flood waters, establish large wetlands parks, or
rebuild the entire neighborhood according to sustainable design principles, etc.
There is a demonstrated history of identities associated with labor technologies and
spatial types. Docklands, telephone call-centers, stock exchanges, and garment
factories are recalled to reinforce that labor identities are sometimes discriminative,
sometimes enabling, and sometimes do shift. Articulating particular attitudes
toward nature and technological constructions carry implications for neighborhood
bodies, then able to organize around the local provision of particular skills, services,
and re-visions of spatial use.
1-02. Assembling.
In a second assemblage related to work, the post-Katrina reappearance of informal
social networks
20
is introduced here as analogous to a technological system in
the Lower Ninth Wards rebuilding process. This comparison is made on the basis
of the delivery of technical expertise and apparatus, and because the absence of
technological systems in the area relegates the provision of technology to a social,
rather than material, system. Briefly, a personal encounter is relayed to illustrate
the ways in which re-visions of individual bodies can instantiate a more stochastic
approach to redevelopment.
Dan is a mid-40s male who returned to the neighborhood post-hurricane after
over a decades absence as a truck driver. His extensive social network of
returning residents, grassroots organizations, and volunteers developed from the
ad-hoc provision of his technological expertise to unpaid rebuilding efforts in the
neighborhood. At its most rudimentary, a resident would sight Dans black pickup
truck on the street and raise a hand, and Dan would stop because both he and
the resident would be looking for each other. The technological system enacted
mobilizes tools, transports laborers, identifies residents that need help, liaises with
activist organizers and their networks, provides his own skilled and experienced
labor, and connects those in his network through the wide distribution of his mobile
number and personal contact. The network is constantly updated through his
movement in the neighborhood. His activities are not comprehensive, but provide
direct response infrastructure which is a model for expansion. Dan exemplifies the
provisional replacement of a material system with a social system of technological
delivery. Similar emergent social networks encountered during the field research
period are equally poignant as future speculations on the local technological
management of nature.
2-Assemblages: for secession.
2-01. Sociopolitical secession.
The third example of a Lower Ninth Ward assemblage describes a kind of neoliberal
management of area needs. In reaction to inadequate disaster response and the
absence of centralized municipal control of rebuilding efforts in the neighborhood,
church-based groups and activist organizations are acting independently of
government. These groups are drawing from a network of mostly extralocal
4
5
156
volunteers (including university students, career activists, and church affiliates)
to perform as advocacy and action groups for the Lower Ninth Ward and other
area residents. Although these groups often do not collaborate in their efforts,
what is remarkable here is the independent replacement of a single managerial
body with a polynucleic collection of managers who simultaneously operate in
the neighborhood under different ideological rubrics. For example, the various
church groups locate the recipients of their volunteerism (gutting, reconstruction)
through a network of denominational affiliation, and progress with a scattered-
but-orchestrated rehabilitation of particular churches and residences. Common
Ground Collective organizes their efforts by locating single mother families, the
disabled and the elderly, and provides gutting and roofing services along these
priorities. Architecture for Humanity is funding a house and photographic studio
for two community photographers, who are widely considered cultural keystones.
In addition to targeting particular groups, these various ideological perspectives
re-vision the neighborhood by articulating particular attitudes toward nature and
technological constructions, which will affect immediate and future spatial uses
and aesthetics. For example, Common Ground Collective is addressing the toxic
soil with bioremediation, which has the visible effect of large sunflower patches
on the empty lots interspersed throughout the neighborhood. Although they lack
broad efficiencies and the capital of larger systems, these groups can distribute
technology and information as a direct response. Rather than working from the
macro-level of a coordinated city plan that might include local suggestions,
technological actors, tools, systems and knowledge are coordinated based on
individual and community calibrations. In the mapping and making of many
common grounds, these assemblages of activists, technologies and nature are the
result of a kind of laissez faire-induced secession.
2-02. Physical Secession.
In the fourth assemblage, a commonplace attitude toward building technologies
is politically invigorated through its promises for separation from municipal
networks. Sustainable design practice is extended to consider methods by which
buildings can incorporate energy gathering and storage mechanisms, and water
reservoirs. This assemblage locates activist groups and residents with specific
technologies that are dually concerned with impacts on nature and humanitarian
effects. Some discussion of locating sustainable home manufacturers in the
Lower Ninth Ward subsequent to the Global Green USA competition had a more
politically moderate objective in the provision of jobs and proximate influences for
rebuilding the neighborhood. By contrast, Common Ground Collective plans to
redesign a public housing complex in St. Bernard Parish as a self-sustaining facility
replete with rain-water collection, biologically treated waste systems, and solar
panels for energy collection. Although the project is not located in the Lower Ninth
Ward, the community is involved with a similar though more heightened dispute
with the city over its right to remain. A material disconnection from electricity,
potable water, internet, and flood drainage infrastructure symbolizes a political
and social disconnection from a governing body unable or unwilling to address
basic community needs. This secession enables bodies to reestablish ideas of
cultural worth in relation to the efficacy of the technologies deployed to support
their residence, by ensuring that their maintenance is locally calibrated. In addition,
extending this type of material and technological attenuation to the Lower Ninth
Ward might have the effect of identifying the community as green a label which
is soon to be in as popular demand as organic. In this fourth assemblage, we see
how new concepts related to material technological constructions might substantiate
and enforce changes to political and social relations, and cultural identities.
6
7
8
157
A Third Nature?
In each of the above vignettes, technology is assumed to have a leading catalytic
role within Lower Ninth Ward assemblages. There are basic cultural tendencies
which support this reliance on technology as a primary facilitator for enacting
urban change. First, technics is originary
21
and can be traced as a tools-
and-technological-systems index to the human evolutionary process. Second,
in our desire to improve or fix, we tend to augment noticeable defects through
technological means. For examples we have only to think about the development of
prosthetics in Ambroise Pares illustrations, A Supplement of the Defects in Mans
Body,
22
or contemporary cyborg scholars examinations of technologies that
supplant bodily functions (e.g. reproduction, contraception, organ transplantation,
etc.).
23
Third, machines and technological systems are crucial and fundamental to
the efficient operation of our urban environments, leading to the conclusions that we
wouldnt want technologies unless they could provide for us outside our means,
24

and that artifice is fully a part of nature.
25
Despite these logics, technology,
bodies, and nature remain in distinct operational and ideological spheres of
the formal redevelopment process. The assemblages above represent nascent
problematizations of such separations. Furthermore, the demonstrated simultaneity
of organic (bodies, nature) and artificial (technology) agency is critical to forging
re-visioned cultural and physical forms that can enter into social and ecological
processes.
26
It is in this projection of the above assemblages as causal to new spatial formations,
and intertwined with social and ecological processes, that this case study offers
possibilities for revitalized citizenship, and models for urban transformation
and disaster recovery. If the untouched frontier was the first nature and the
second was the city that improved on nature for human ends,
27
then perhaps in
our contemporary context we are embarking on a third nature. This third nature
occurs only in particular areas of cities, and is distinguished from the second by
virtue of a radical rethinking of marginalized peoples local management of their
environment. In such a concept, the re-visions of bodies, technologies and nature
develop with the assumption that ours is an artificial environment composed of
social constructions. There is no longer a timidity for moving forward with such
assemblages on a basis of questioned authenticity, but rather an understanding
that artifice does not hold authenticity hostage. The necessity to locate these
assemblages stems from a political project to produce new images, tropes and
metaphors for the radical transformations necessary within the technological, socio-
cultural and natural realms in this neighborhood. Such liminal thresholds locate the
visions that represent and re-invent constructions of territorial identity.
158
Endnotes
1
Amin and Thrift, 2002: 78.
2
Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 27-28.
3
ACORN, A Peoples Plan for Overcoming Hurricane Katrina Blues: A
Comprehensive Strategy for Building a More Vibrant, Sustainable, and Equitable 9th
Ward, 6 January 2007; and NOLA 8th District Neighborhood Redevelopment Plan,
17 June and 10 October 2006.
4
ACORN, 6 January 2007.
5
The companion studies provide a more detailed discussion of each of these
conditions.
6
In a recent Times-Picayune article (18 December 2006), Mayor Ray Nagin cited
market forces as the reason for the delay in rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward and
the progress of reconstruction in other neighborhoods.
7
In regards to a spatial and technological framing of social justice, elsewhere in
this project the notion of a technological topos has been developed as a central
concept. A few words on its etymology and use here serve to frame the work.
Topos follows from the Greek koinos topos, or literally common place or ground
(OED, 1989: 258). Although it was used in the mid-twentieth century as a literary
convention and rhetorical commonplace (ibid.), the idea behind its use here is to
return to a definition of topos as a place or ground that is claimed as culturally
common or public. In speaking about the city of collective memory M. Christine
Boyer employs topoi to describe vernacular and rhetorical tableaux of place that
are culturally held, emblematic embodiment[s] of power and memory (1994: 133,
321). I am suggesting that topos describes neighborhoods, cities, and ethnic or
gendered spaces; or, urban landscapes in which identity and space are mutually
constructed. The use of technological topos in this research is multifaceted. It
describes an urban landscape that is necessarily sustained by technology. It
concerns a concept of technological justice, or the common right to equal
access and distribution of technologies necessary for the occupation of an urban
environment. And, it refers to the symbolic content of (technologically supported)
space, which is also collectively and culturally constructed. The technological
topos is a technologically supported common ground; an ideal that is historically
remiss in New Orleans. The racial tensions present in other southern American
cities also manifested in ethnic conflicts over the right to occupy spaces in New
Orleans. The familiarity of spatial contestation is reflected in the colloquial usage
of neutral ground to refer to traffic medians, which represents the geographical
recognition of armed truce between Creoles and Americans in the early nineteenth
century (Lewis, 2003: 45). The citys early cosmopolitanism and comparatively
better integration policies devolved into pronounced segregation patterns in the
mid-twentieth century (Lewis, 2003: 95-100). In the post-Katrina city, the history
of socioeconomic tensions suggests a careful evaluation of equity, technological
disinvestment, and cultural tensions evident in the topos, and a reevaluation of
common ground.
8
Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 26.
9
Massumi, 2002: 2-3.
10
Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; DeLanda November 1994 and 2006; Swyngedouw,
2006; Grosz, 1992; Virilio, 1999; Latour, 1993 and 2000; Haraway, 1991.
11
Haraway, 1991: 181.
12
Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 323-27.
13
Interview with Mark Lewis, President of the Louisiana Technology Council, 26
June 2006; and Interview with Greg Meffert, Chief Technology Officer for the Mayors
Office, 10 July 2006.
14
Lower Ninth Ward Development Association Meeting, 17 June 2006.
159
15
Miller, 1965.
16
Nesbitt, 1996: 31-32.
17
Belsie and Axtman, 12 June 2006; GAO, Sept 2002; Valenzuela, 2003.
18
As a contemporary example: the Lower Ninth Wards new (and largely
undamaged) Martin Luther King Science and Technology magnet public school has
been closed and reopened under private management at a different location in the
city. The withdrawal from the neighborhood of public access to this school has
been the subject of community protest. Sources for disinvestment of skills training
and government contracts in the area: Interview with Keith Calhoun, 12 June; 17
June Survivors Council Meeting and conversations with residents in attendance;
Ritea, 1 Aug 2006: N-1; interview with MLK School Assistant Principal Steven
Martin; conversation with Survivors Council member 14 Sept 2006.
19
Interviews with two mid-40s women on St. Maurice St. 09 June, and Jim 09
June. Residents seemed grateful for the presence of skilled labor, and pleased
with the quality of work. One remarked that the Hispanic day laborers who had
worked for her had inspired greater trust than the small handyman businesses she
used to hire from the neighborhood. The resident implied that this had more to do
with a comparison of a tenuous labor practice, in which hard work is encouraged
by questionable survivability, to an established labor practice of neighborhood
handymen that had grown comfortable with a steady flow of work.
20
These types of intimate social networks that involved residents in collective
projects related to music, religion and civic activism were historically common to
the Lower Ninth Ward. See: Southern University New Orleans panel discussion with
Dr. Romanus Ejiaga, director of the Center for African and African American Studies,
Dr. Felix James History Department, and Dr. George Amedee Urban Studies
Department, 28 June 2006.
21
Amin and Thrift, 2002: 78.
22
Pare, 1579 cited in Wigley, August 1991: 23.
23
See Hopkins ed., 1998; Cowen, 1997: 318-325; Gray, 2001: 69-142; and
Armitage, 2003: 1-12.
24
Latour, 1993.
25
Deleuze, 1991.
26
Swyngedouw, 2006: 25.
27
Cronon, 1991.
160
All images are the authors, taken from 05 June 03 July 2006 in the Ninth Ward,
New Orleans.
1. Signs of return in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans. Clockwise from left:
Handwritten sign scrawled on house window in the owners absence; Common
sign of solidarity in the front yard of a residence; One of the few instances of new
construction in June 2006; Fats Dominos renovated studio on Caffin Avenue.

2. June 2006 photographs of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. Top row of
photographs indicates the most obvious and visible example of technological
absence: the clearance of structures on several residential blocks in the north.
Bottom row of photographs shows examples of the extent of the residential damage
from around the neighborhood.

The following photographs represent examples of past, interim and current
technological presence in the Lower Ninth Ward.

3. Middle school annex of the Martin Luther King Jr. public school for science &
technology.

4. House newly elevated on temporary wood pilings the house was hydraulically
lifted from its previous foundations and awaiting insertion of new concrete pile
foundations.

5. FEMA trailer parked outside of damaged residence although few are installed
in the Lower Ninth Ward, this setup allows the owner to renovate while living in
nearby interim housing and usually indicates a desire to return to the neighborhood;

6. Logo for Common Ground Collective. Local grassroots activist organization
that organized post-Katrina to aid residents of New Orleans. The group has utilized
informal social networks as an integral part of their operations.

7. Ad-hoc electricity supply pulled from public utility lines for the Common Ground
housing site.

8. Sunflower fields on property lots indicate a Common Ground soils
bioremediation project in progress.
161
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