Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Architectural Projections Libre
Architectural Projections Libre
Andrew Benjamin
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 1
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
Andrew Benjamin
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 2-3
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Contents
19
61
79
99
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 4-5
vi
115
124
27/04/12 5:30 PM
vi
Architectural Projections
Introduction
The undertaking worked through time and again throughout the
chapters comprising this book concerns the differing ways in which the
relationship between history, theory and the practice of design allows for
a coniguring and reconirming of the project of architecture. That project
has an inherent plurality; hence the title, Architectural Projections. There
is a twofold supposition that directs and organises these writings. The
irst supposition is straightforward. The locus of architectural theory
is the practice and pedagogy of design. Thus, it is not the application
of philosophical or theoretical positions, which in being external to
architecture can then be applied. Rather, both the philosophical and
the theoretical are deployed within, and as part of, a range of practices
that constitute architecture. Moreover, there is the related contention,
namely, that it is possible to write the history of architecture or to
reconigure fundamental instances within that history such that any
subsequent writings are also orientated around the concerns of design.
(The distinction at work, no matter how tentative it may be, concerns
a history for design rather than a history of design. Such an approach
does not preclude the writing of architectural history. On the contrary,
it invites it.) The second supposition which, while related, has its own
distinct modes of argumentation and presentation is that there cannot be
any easy separation of architecture from the way in which architecture is
represented. Indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that the history
of representational techniques within architecture becomes one of the
central ways to avoid both an idealisation of form and an idealisation
of materials. Precisely because representational techniques have a
history as well as engendering speciic practices, they too should be
incorporated within any concern with architectural theory.
And yet, the evocation of architectural theory and the rewriting of
architectural history in terms of its relation to the practice of design has
become an inherently problematic activity. Moreover, the afirmation
of the deinition of research in architecture as constituted by the
relationship between theory, history and design has become, as a
consequence, untimely. As a general claim it can be suggested that
theory began to lose its hold within the context of the university at
the moment at which architecture came to be deined as a digital
practice. While there were straightforward domestic reasons why this
was the case for example, the sheer dificulty of mastering the rapid
development of software programs the overall effect of the diminution
of the importance of theory was linked to the emergence of
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 6-7
Introduction
vii
27/04/12 5:30 PM
viii
Architectural Projections
An example will serve to indicate the way in which criticality has speciicity,
that is, its location within architecture (and by extension, therefore, criticality
remains necessarily unrelated to questions of instrumentality). One of the
ways in which it is possible to write a history of architectural drawing is by
concentrating irstly on the meaning of those drawings and secondly, by
ignoring the fact that the presence of lines within those drawings is always
the after-effect of the technologies that produced them. While this reduction
of the line to the purely pragmatic on the one hand or its idealisation on
the other warrants a detailed history in its own right, the signiicant point
in this context is the occluding of what might be described as the founding
relation between the line and the technologies of production deployed in their
realisation. (The occluding of lines is understood as the after-effect of the
technologies that produced them.) However, once attention is paid to those
technologies then it becomes clear that the lines are incorporated within a
history that is marked by the necessity of discontinuities and ruptures which
are the consequence of those technologies. Hence, it is possible to argue that
central to a history of architectural drawing is the disjunctive relation between
an era of technical reproducibility and an era of digital reproducibility.
(A development some of whose theoretical implications are taken up in
Chapter 2.) The former within architectural drawing as it now exists has
ceded its place to the latter. Accepting this position is to accept that history
is constituted by signiicant points of differentiation and disjunction rather
than historicisms insistence on continuities. The latter historicism is a
set up that would emerge in this context in terms of the idealisation of either
geometries (as occurs in the work of Colin Rowe) or tectonics (as occurs in
the writings of Kenneth Frampton). If therefore there are disjunctive relations,
if, that is, history is marked by discontinuities rather than continuities, then
a different project is in place. It becomes important to make speciic claims
concerning both the location of discontinuities and disjunctive relations in
the irst instance as well as noting their effects in the second. The work
presented in this book can be understood therefore as the attempt to enact
continually this other project.
It is possible to take these comments further by arguing that what is
occurring within them is a clariication of how criticality within architecture
is to be understood. The locus of the critical is architecture as a material
event. Moreover, criticality as a consequence is inextricably bound up with
the presence of the continuous and the discontinuous. The continuity of
architecture though this will be a claim that can be made about continuity
tout court has to be thought in terms of discontinuities.1 (And thus the
possibility for further staging of the discontinuous.) With this structure of
repetition continuity understood as a form of repetition discontinuity
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 8-9
Introduction
ix
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
this point. The creation of a volume does not just have a necessary relation
to its capacity to incorporate the body, that body is itself already determined
both by the history of bodies as well as the history of architectures own
engagement with body. (An engagement in which the body igures either
as an analogy for architecture or as the site of architectural investigation in
its own right.) However, the fact that there is an already present relation
between architecture understood minimally as the creation of a volume
and its incorporation of a body having an already deined history and set
of relations, does not mean either that that history cannot be rewritten in
terms of discontinuities rather than continuities or that it is not possible to
investigate other ways of coniguring architectures relation to the body.
Hence the material event as the site of an iterative reworking. Other
possibilities, ones that hold to the reiteration of the architectural, form part
of the engagement with both Kiesler and more emphatically with the work
of NOX speciically the Son-O-House that takes place in Chapter 4. By
concentrating on speciic projects it becomes possible to demonstrate the
way in which the nexus of body/volume is present as the site of an iterative
reworking. The signiicant point in relation to NOX is that the reworking in
question concerns neither program nor materials taken as an end in them
let alone as indifferent to each other. Of signiicance is the nature of their
speciic relation. Again, the reworking in question concerns architectures
presence as a material event.
There are many important consequences arising from an insistence on the
presence of architecture as a material event. As a beginning it involves
avoiding both an idealisation of architecture (an idealisation that is of the
constituent elements of architectures presence as a material event) or
its reduction to a simple pragmatism. Both of these possibilities can only
be resisted once emphasis is given to architectures materiality and once
that materiality is connected to the different technologies and complex of
geometries that accompany architecture. What this then means is that the
material event names the reality of architecture. (In a sense it names its
truth.) In other words, the reality of architecture is that it has always been
the location in which the critical has been at work. Part of the engagement
with that work and indeed part of what marks the works presence is
the possibility of the denial of architecture as a material event. Idealism and
historicism are central to such denials. Denying it, however, necessitates
the undoing of the forces at work that constitute the reality of architecture.
(Reciprocally, of course, what this opens up are moments within
architectures history marked by the afirmation of architecture as a material
event.) Criticality therefore not only holds to architectures identiication with
the material event, it is the material event that generates both the conditions
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 10-11
Introduction
xi
Endnotes
1
27/04/12 5:30 PM
1 Nomadism
and Design
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 12-1
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 2-3
conlict. Here, however, the conlicts are new. Alliances, on the level of theory
and practice, are remade in relation to them. Moreover, new and different
histories have to be written.
These concerns will be approached here in terms of the relationship between
nomadism and design. Fundamental to the approach developed is that the
nomadic becomes the place name for a reworking of relationships that
were once marked by unity and directness and which are now marked
by complexity, plurality and the indirect. Such a term owes no particular
allegiance to any speciic philosophical or theoretical position. While the term
nomad may be thought to have an interpretive inevitability, it is deployed
here in terms of an open ield of possibilities. The nomadic designates a
thinking whose determinations are not prescribed in advance.
Any understanding of a potential nomadism within architecture where
nomadism is understood as has been indicated as one possible term
in which to think the project of design has to situate itself in relation
to the shifts that mark out the terrain of architectural practice. Using the
term nomad, a further consideration, while it cannot be pursued here,
nonetheless needs to be noted. Either the nomad designates an essentially
marginal position such that the nomad becomes the actual eccentric or
the nomad deines the centre even though such a deinition, and therefore
such a place, is yet to be discovered. This latter possibility involves
understanding how nomadism would have to be linked to a reconsideration
of place in architecture. Any such reconsideration would start from the
recognition that neither place nor architectures symbolic dimension worked
in a way that constructed either a uniied community or a uniied urban
ield. What this means is that the nomadic opens up the possibility of a
reconsideration of place and symbol in terms of a cosmopolitan architecture.
Here, rather than pursue that possibility, nomadism will be restricted to the
way it opens up the actuality of design.
What this means, in this instance, is allowing the relationship between the
process of design and the realisation of that design in built terms to be an
indirect one. Once the indirect is allowed to predominate then this opens
up the space in which it is possible to develop a conception of the diagram
that is not a representation but which carries the capacity to become
a representation. The move from diagram to plan, therefore, has to be
indirect. Indirectness is a direct result of allowing the computer centrality
within the design process. However, the movement is not always one way.
Precisely because an indirect relationship is possible one in which the
representational was an unactualised potential within the diagram it is also
the case that such a relationship can be effaced by being made direct. What
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
this means is that the diagram would be refused its diagrammatic status
and would be turned into a representation. Potential would be effaced in the
name of the already actualised.
There is another sense in which it possible to position the indirect. In
this instance it pertains to what can be described as the temporality of
completion. In this instance, the argument would be that it is possible to
inscribe a conception of the incomplete into that which has been completed.
Whether this is an internal interstitial space demanding programmatic
negotiation, or an event space whose performativity is an inherent
architectural element, what is involved in such instances is the maintained
presence of the incomplete within the complete. At work here is the
inscription of a yet-to-be quality into form.2 This quality can be understood as
nomadic.
Endnotes
1
There are two points being made here. The irst is that due to the changes
in the technology of design the relationship between the diagram and its
realisation need no longer be direct. The movement can be thought of as
nomadic rather than as that which demands a single direction of realisation.
The second point is that rather than attributing inality programmatic
completion to the inished object or work it can remain a site of negotiation
and possibility in which the potential for programmatic openings are part of
the work itself. That potential would be an intrinsic part of what could be
described as the works work. In this instance, the nomadic would be located
in a potential for movement that formed part of the objects actual structure.
Not literal movement but programmatic openings. The term nomadic can be
applied to this quality.
The signiicant point in both instances is that the nomadic needs not be
taken literally. The term comes to mark out a mode of thinking in which the
nomadic is linked to movement and time within the activity of an architectural
works self-realisation as architecture. Allowing the nomadic to designate
these possibilities is bound up with that movement in the history of design
that allows the computer centrality. What this means is that there is no longer
a divide between theory and practice in a way that would yield the closure
of a gap or the divides overcoming. The theoretical is now relocated. Theory
is inherently bound up with the questions that arise from within the design
process. Those questions only arise because of there no longer being direct
relationships. The presence of an inescapable nomadism now there as the
potential allowed by the computer means that locus of theory has to be
understood as set by engagements with the practice of design.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 4-5
27/04/12 5:30 PM
2 A Plurality of
Actions:
Towards Ontology of Techniques
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 6-7
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
Art practices as well as the practice of architecture occur within the age
of the digital. No longer, however, is it enough to argue that art occurs in
the age of its mechanical reproducibility. Such a claim, while true, remains
limited. The digital has now become a way of constructing images that are
themselves original from the very start. And yet, even this distinction needs
to be developed since the digital image consists of elements that can be
subject to differing manipulations depending upon how the relationship
between the image and its components is then worked on by the
distinctive possibilities inherent within differing software packages.1 What
marks out the digital image is not to be understood in terms of originality in
any direct sense. Rather the potential within the digital image can be initially
described as concerning the relationship between the image and software.
However, that connection can be reformulated in more theoretical terms as
involving the relationship between the material and the immaterial.
It is precisely because of the necessity for that reconiguration that the digital
occasions a fundamental interruption both in the production of images, the
extension that those images can then have, and in the theoretical innovations
that are demanded as a result. Extension, in this context, refers as much to
the incorporation of the image within an extended digital form functioning
as the work of art, as it does to the digital image that is constructed in order
for a move from, for example, the screen to forms of prototyping. These
changes give rise to a new demand. The move to the digital brings with it
the need to reconigure the relationship between technology and practice.
The transformation of practice brings a number of considerations into play.
One can be explicated in terms provided by Walter Benjamin. In his 1934 text
Author as Producer, Benjamin wrote in relation to artistic production, though
it is now possible to make the same claim in relation to the production of the
architectural, that:
What matters is the exemplary character of the production which
is able irst to induce others to produce and, second, to put an
improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better
the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is,
readers or spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 2003)
The digital allows for a connection to be drawn between production
and collaboration in ways that earlier methods of image creation made
inconceivable. As will be suggested, the advent of the digital, and thus
the location of practice deined as much by the diverse, if not divergent,
possibilities raised by the way the material and the immaterial are
interconnected. This means that rather than the singularity engendered
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 8-9
27/04/12 5:30 PM
10
Architectural Projections
an image to have meaning, however, meaning would always be the aftereffect of the speciic modalities of production. In sum, meaning would be the
results of techniques rather than an end in itself. Consequently, separating
any one of the elements that deine the produced image that is, machine,
practice and ontology would yield an account of the image that oscillated
between idealism and the anecdotal. Allowing for their interconnection is to
occasion a spacing in which there is transformation of the setting in which
theory and practices connect.
Machine
The convention underpinning most discussions of technology identiies
the technological with an apparatus or with equipment. The relationship
between the user and the product while mediated by the apparatus would
then have attributed to the machine a singular status. Machines in this
sense are tools. Tools form a fundamental part of the history of practice.
This position brings with it a more complex state of affairs than a simple
connection between the history of a discourse and the technology proper
to it. What has to be added is that the relationship between the technology
and discourse works to delimit ields of practice. In the case of architecture,
a deining aspect of the interconnection of technology and practice is the
production of representations that are taken to have a generative quality.
(The question of how the generative is to be understood, and thus the
move from the image to built form, remains open.) While this may seem too
abstract a claim, it is not. The argument is that the history of any discourse
cannot be separated from the ways in which the discourse represents
its own activities. Moreover, it is possible to argue that developments
in the technology of representation are integral to developments in its
practice. Practice is modiied as a consequence. The history of architecture
necessitates the incorporation of the history of representational techniques
and the means by which they are produced.
What this argument entails, therefore, is that there is from the start a
fundamental interconnection between a speciic representation and the
processes of representation. The technical means by which representations
are created forms an integral part both of the nature and the status of the
representation. It should be noted, however, that this is not to accord a
privileged status to representation taken as an end in itself. Nor is it to claim
that images are straightforwardly representational (if by representation what
is intended is a relationship between an inside and an outside). Rather, the
central point is that the discursive practice of architecture, though there will
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 10-11
27/04/12 5:30 PM
12
Architectural Projections
Practice
Practice deines a speciic type of activity. Speciicity is given by the nature
of the machine and implicitly by its related conception of potentiality. Taken
together machine and potentiality deine use. With the arrival of the digital
as a design tool rather than as that which merely represented design, the
practice of design is reformulated. There is a move away from a conception
of the machine in which use is delimited by the machines material presence
and in which the machine remains a tool. What occurs subsequently is the
move to a conception of practice that takes the site of use as a relation
between a machine and the realisation of divergent potentialities given by the
different relationships existing between the machine and different software
packages. An intrinsic part of this conception of practice is the transporting of
images from one program to another. The transformations have to be thought
beyond the hold of strict teleological development. Such a conception of
development the move from an assumed arch to a posited telos would
work, and only work, with the assumption that the interplay between drawing
and the instruments of its realisation does, all things being equal, lead in only
one direction. The goal or telos would then be the realised result. Its state
of realisation would be such that it is possible to trace the effectuation of a
project both from its point of inception and to its actualisation. Changes are to
be thought in terms of perfections or adaptations.
With the digital this sense of direction is interrupted (an interruption occurring
within both practice and the conception of machine and thus demanding an
interruption on the level of the conceptual). An example will indicate how
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 12-13
this takes place. Transporting images from one program to another for
example, opening an ostensibly two-dimensional digital image within an
animation software program introduces a sense of progression that has to
be thought beyond teleological and thus linear development. This occurs for
at least two reasons. The irst reason pertains to the nature of the difference
between programs. Different senses of the image are produced. Moreover,
the potentiality of each of the subsequent iterations will vary from program to
program. Understanding how to negotiate with these variations becomes part
of the operative dimension within technique. Some images will have a direct
relation to material form while others will necessitate the retention of forms
of abstraction in order that an eventual relation to material presence can be
realised. Engaging with these varying senses of distance is not just another
instance of technique; it underscores the fact that the move from the material
presence of the machine to further instances of material presence the
constructed object, or elements thereof involves the continual mediation
of the immaterial. It will be precisely the reintroduction of the material as an
analogue model one allowing for its digitisation that locates a sense of
potentiality in material models. It is, however, a potentiality that can only be
realised in the move from the material to the immaterial (that is, from the
analogue to the digital).
The second reason why the conception of linear development that
characterised representational practices prior to the advent of digital design
no longer pertains is the result of the introduction of unpredictable elements
transformations that could not have been predicted in advance. The
presence of the unpredictable within the relation of the material and the
immaterial signals a fundamental shift. With the abeyance of linearity a new
set of issues has to be confronted. Again it is a confrontation demanded as
much by a different location of potentiality as its ontological transiguration.
To the extent that the digital is understood as introducing a new era in how
images are produced and deployed, then while it is always possible to
resist the interruption and insist on the continuance of traditional modes of
practice practice in terms of design and the interpretation of design and the
theoretical engagement with it in the end that insistence will be undone
by the demands of practice itself. Allowing for what has been identiied as
the relocation of potentiality generates different senses of practice. Not
only do questions of design technique need to be rethought, there needs
to be an accompanying recognition that this shift has an impact both on the
teaching of design as well as in the content and purpose of the pedagogy of
architectural theory. Practice, as with research, needs to be understood as
extending from teaching to the architectural ofice.
27/04/12 5:30 PM
14
Architectural Projections
Ontology
As has been suggested, implicit in the argument that has presented thus
far is ontology. This can be addressed initially in terms of the image. That
the digital image deines a ield of activity is commonplace. What is central,
however, is that work with the image, the identiication of elements within
it and their incorporation into other images, is for the most part an activity
that is deined by a relationship between the initial image and software.
The potentiality of the image does not lie in its depth, as though the more
an image is opened up the closer it gets to showing a hidden element an
element given at the site of a possible collision between depth and truth.
Rather, with the digital image, potentiality has a different locus and thus
a different conceptual coniguration. This was the point indicated above,
namely that with the produced image there is a concomitant shift in the focus
and deinition of architectural theory.
However, if there is a locus classicus of the earlier position the site of
collision between depth and truth it is Antonionis 1966 ilm Blow-Up.
The narrative of the ilm circulates around the possibility that the results of
a crime may have been inadvertently photographed. Whether or not this
supposition is true depends upon the possibility of discovering it within the
image. If there is a truth, it lies not just hidden in the image but hidden in
order to be revealed at a later stage. This is the conceit that the ilm exploits.
What is played with, a play both structuring and providing the narratives
ilmic presence, is the possibility of a relationship between depth and truth.
(It should be noted in addition that this is a ilm in which it can only be a
speciic image, a ilmic one that presents an investigation into the nature
and the possibility of an image, that is, the analogue photograph as image.)3
Potentiality in this instance, therefore, does not just inhere in the nature of
the image and in the images relation to the ield of techniques; its location is
internal to the image. The technique of enlarging part of the image depends
on the one hand on the analogue nature of the photograph and on the way
that part of an analogue photograph can be excised and then blown up.
The technique, which is itself reliant on the analogue nature of the image,
is deployed in order that elements that were not immediately visible can
then become visible. Not only is this an impossible state of affairs with a
digital photograph because it is comprised of pixels, it is also the case, as
was suggested, that its possibility locates potentiality within the image itself.
With the digital image depth is replaced by the primacy of relation between
the material and the immaterial, and thus potentiality acquires an inherently
different location.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 14-15
Conceptually the direct result of this repositioning is that the binary opposition
surface/depth is no longer adequate in order to interpret images. It is not as
though the move from the analogue to the digital image means that in the
place of depth there is now only the surface. The opposition between surface
and depth will not allow for the locus of potentiality to move from the image
qua image to the images production and subsequent relation to software and
then to a repositioning of the generative. Once relation is attributed centrality,
then the unity of the machine as a given and its position as the source
of techniques is also effaced. With the advent of software the machine
becomes the site of a different set of techniques. Each set is deined not just
by the relationship between the computer and a given software program but
also by the differing and complex relationship between software programs.
While on one level there is little remarkable in the transformation of images
images as both photos and designs in the movement through differing
programs the signiicance of the effect of this movement needs to be noted.
Once description is recognised to be inadequate, then noting it means
developing a theoretical account. The project leading to the development of
an ontology of techniques is part of that account.
What is occurring, as has been suggested, is not just a transformation in how
both the machine and its use are understood. (Use, once it includes the user,
means that the transformation marks the move from the solitary individual to
the design team.) Of equal importance is the centrality of the machine as a
given, and as such, the originator of a range of techniques has been replaced,
not by a new sense of the uniied machine if the machine the computer
is taken as an end in itself. Rather, it is no longer possible to speak of the
machine independently of activity nor, moreover, is it possible to speak of
activity as though the term designated a form of synthetic unity. The machine
therefore is no longer deined by material presence. Its relationship to the
hand or to the eye to the body in general is mediated from the start. That
mediation does not mean that there is a deferred or inauthentic relation to
the machine. On the contrary the machine is a site of original relatedness.
In other words, the ontology of the machine what the machine is in terms
of the being proper to the machine has to be formulated in terms of an
original relation. The relation at its most abstract can be described as existing
between the material and the immaterial. The computer, however, is not an
abstract machine. Such a conception of machine still deines it in terms of
its internal possibilities. What needs to be recognised is that the computer
is only ever given in terms of relationality. Unlike the purely material tool
whose use lay in the potentialities of its material presence, the original
relation between the material and the immaterial means that the singular
machine is only ever present in terms of its own dispersion through a ield
27/04/12 5:30 PM
16
Architectural Projections
The key texts in this regard are by Heidegger. While it has not been
undertaken here, the project of developing an ontology of techniques needs
to be understood as signalling the need to think through another conception
of the ontological. A conception that takes a founding relational ontology as its
point of departure, and thus works to displace Heideggers understanding of
ontological difference. I have identiied one direction such a possibility might
take in my The Plural Event (Benjamin, A. 1993). For a critique of Heideggers
conception of technology see Michael E. Zimmermans Heideggers
Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, politics and art (Zimmerman,
1990).
Endnotes
1
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 16-17
27/04/12 5:30 PM
19
3 Surface Efects:
Borromini, Semper, Loos
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 18-19
27/04/12 5:30 PM
20
Architectural Projections
Surface/Theory
Within architecture the surface igures as both a historical and a theoretical
concern. As an introduction to the speciic engagement with Borromini,
Semper and Loos all of whose work will play a pivotal role in this recasting
of the surface as a concept within architectural theory a more detailed
consideration needs to be given to a concern with the surface in the
context of architectural theory.1 Three elements guide this approach to the
relationship between theory and the surface. All are integral to the operation
of the architectural.
In the irst place, there is the deinition of architectural theory. It needs to
be understood as an engagement with issues arising from the practice of
design. Practice has to be given as great an extension as possible running
from issues delimited by pedagogy to those whose concern is with the detail
of structures and the nature of research. Within practice understood in this
extended sense these speciic issues will have autonomy because of such
a positioning. Secondly, integral to a theoretical engagement with architecture
as a practice, is the recognition that architecture is necessarily bound up with
its means of representation. (These means igure as much in the production
of images as they do in form creation itself.) This does not entail that
architecture is identical with the image of architecture. Indeed the opposite is
the case. What it does mean, however, is that drawings, diagrams, computer
images, three-dimensional print outs, models, and so on, all form part of the
focus of architectural theory. To the extent that the means of representation
change, there will be subsequent changes in how the practice of architectural
theory works. There needs to be a certain reciprocity since moves within
the means of representation should be accompanied by changes, or the
very least accommodations, on the level of theory. (For example, theory
cannot remain indifferent to the move from Cartesian based CAD systems to
animation software programs such as Maya.)2
The inal element concerns the relationship between theory and history.
The conjecture here is that there is an important difference between the
objects that comprise the history of architecture and the presence of the
same objects within architectural theory. While there will be an important
relationship between history and theory, the signiicance of this distinction
should not be overlooked. What is at issue is the possibility of the history
of architecture having a productive presence within the practice of design.
Again, the argument will be that it is only by construing the history of
architecture theoretically that it will then become possible for that history to
play a role in particular modalities of practice. In regard to this inal point it will
be essential to distinguish between history as a speciic discursive activity
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 20-21
and what will be called a theoretical history. The details of these elements
need to be taken up. While there is the temptation to treat each separately
there are important connections between them. The point of departure,
however, has to be with the deinition of architectural theory.
If the theoretical is deined as an internal condition internal to architectural
practice then it cannot be readily separated from the possibilities that obtain
for form creation. There are different ways in which it can be engendered. As
an activity, form creation can be guided, for example, as much by program as
it can by the abstract activity in which volume (or form) is the consequence
of the deformation of a grid. Equally, form creation will always be connected
to what a certain set of materials will allow and what others will preclude. To
the extent that form and materials are involved, then the geometries within
which they are articulated are also central. Once it can be assumed that the
relations between materials, geometries and forms are not given in advance
then this has the twofold effect of delimiting a space in which architectural
research can be done. At the same time it begins to deine the ambit of that
research. In addition, and this is the second point, it locates not just the space
of theory but more signiicantly its necessity. Precisely because relationships
have to be established and decisions made this opens up the need for forms
of deliberation that are continually informed. What occasions the introduction
of theory is the presence of a space opened by a relationship whose formal
presence cannot be determined in advance.
History, as generally understood, involves the location of an object within a
ield of activity in which the object has meaning because of that context.3
Writing history involves showing in what way the ield individuates the
particular object; though equally, it is concerned with the way in which the
ield is maintained by the particulars reference to it. As such, history can only
insist on particularity to the extent that what continues to be held in place
is the network or ield. This ield occasions the objects meaning (and thus
the objects presence as a cultural or historical sign). While such a position
enables an account of innovation to be given, and thus an account of how an
object may interrupt a ield of activity, perhaps to the point of redeining it,
what cannot be given within such a setting is an account of the object that
insists both on the centrality of innovation and on the object of innovation as
able to cause an iterative reworking of the elements of history. The historical
question does not concern the possibility of another form of innovation,
or a reworking of the given, in order that a further innovative potential be
released. The latter possibility the destruction of the ield of meaning in
order to occasion innovation becomes the deinitional concern of theory.
The preoccupations of theory, in such a context, are with the effectuation
of the particular as architecture. In regard to the objects of history, what this
27/04/12 5:30 PM
22
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 22-23
27/04/12 5:30 PM
24
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 24-25
27/04/12 5:30 PM
26
Architectural Projections
height, while the depth from navel to kidneys was a tenth. (Alberti,
1988, p. 309)11
What is important in this passage is twofold. Not only is there the strength
of the analogy, measurement and the geometry of proportion are structured
by it. Measure is always deined externally. Not only is the body a given, it
provides accepting a symbiosis between building and body the ground of
construction and evaluation.
Part of the force that can be attributed to the analogy is this structuring
potential. Fundamental to the process was an essential anthropocentrism.
This is not the pursuit of humanistic values though that may have been
the case but the identiication of the generative element of design within
an analogy in which architecture was always determined externally. When
architecture moves to the modern period a movement, which, as is being
suggested, sanctions a retrospective reinterpretation of the tradition then
the external control will have vanished. The body has not been deferred if
only to be reincorporated as a concern within architecture. More signiicantly,
an external control, a control structured by analogy (an instance of which is
the body), has given way to a fundamentally different way of construing the
generative dimension of architecture. That dimension has become internal
to the object. The object is redeined in terms of its self-effectuation as
architecture. A clear example, as has already been suggested, is the way that
the Raumplan intersects with the role of cladding in Loos Haus Mller to
construct the object as architecture. (This is, of course, a position that will be
pursued in greater detail.)
If architecture has been freed from the analogy of the body, how then does
this freedom open up the concerns of the history of architecture? Surely it
could be argued that while this freedom may have some impact on future
projections, the conceptions of symmetry that appeared in earlier buildings, or
plans, deined symmetry in terms of the order of the body, or if not the body
then nature. (In both instances what determined symmetry was external to
built form.) Even if that argument could be sustained there is no need to limit
interpretations in this manner. To the extent that elements of the history of
architecture can be differentiated from their insertion into a given history, the
possibility of reinterpretation and thus reactivisation occasions the emergence
of another object. As has already been indicated, such a connection is only
possible because the objects potential will not allow the insistence of history
to still that possibility.
In order to trace the potential in the work of the surfaces comprising
Borrominis San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1682), a detour will be
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 26-27
27/04/12 5:30 PM
28
Architectural Projections
weight is borne by his left leg. The right leg is raised indicating the possibility
of movement and yet the relationship between the eye and the left leg
indicates a stationary position. All that is being marked is the moment. Ovid
insists on the simultaneity of seeing, loving and abducting (Metamorphoses
Book V.395). The sculpture is of that point in time. The movement of hand,
facial skin and legs involves a careful balance. As a work it can be said to
be deined by the temporality of the instant. What is seen is that particular
instant. Each of the elements comprising the relation that deine the
sculpture can be viewed. There is a real extent to which the work is complete
in itself. The completion delimits what is seen. The relationship between
presentation and the instant deines the work in terms of both representation
and expression. Neither claim can be made of David. This will be the reason
why David is an architecturally more interesting sculpture. Moreover, though
this is a contention to be argued, David, in procedural terms, opens the way
towards Borrominis extraordinary faades and interiors. More particularly,
David, despite being a body, leads away from the analogy between body and
building. Even though there is a body, at work here is a conception of form
that is no longer anthropocentric in nature.
What marks out David as a site, and therefore what delimits its particularity,
has initially to do with a conception of relatedness that is no longer held by
the instant. Time igures in a different way. The insistence of the instant
cedes its place to the temporality of process. What this conception of time
brings with it is work. Work is both object and activity. Once the temporal and
active dimension comes to deine the ontology of the object, then while a
work is present, the presentation has to be deined in terms of an interiority
that eschews any reduction to the instant. In other words, it is deined in
terms of a set of internal relations whose work comprises the work. While
those relations have exteriority insofar as the object has material presence,
the exterior is the presentation of pure interiority. And yet, the relations
comprising this interiority have to be deined in terms of dynamic relations
rather than the interconnection of static points. What will emerge, therefore,
is another way on construing internal relations.
One of the most remarkable qualities of the sculpture is the impossibility of
standing in front of it as opposed to behind it. Equally, it is not possible to
stand to one side and see it from that side rather than being either in front
or behind. No matter where the viewer stands the sculpture stands before
the eye. In a sense this is because Davids body is turned such that in being
ready to release the catapult a rope containing a rock stretched between
his hands a circle has been constructed. What is viewed is that circle.
However, to insist on the formal circularity of the object would be to miss
both the counter-balancing of forces as well as the dynamic relations that the
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 28-29
circle constructs (or equally, of which the circle is the effect). While it may
be necessary to provide a semiology of the sculpture in which the relations
are described, the points being described maintain a different sense of
relationality than one understood as mere connectedness. The work is not
the connection of points. Nor is it that points connect dynamic lines. Points
would only ever be after-effects of lines. A dynamic quality predominates.
What is maintained is a pure interiority that continues to present itself. What
is presented, while having a singular quality, is not reducible to a simple
singularity. Within the process of relation it is always possible to construct
a point of view, however, that point is the effect of the process. Equally, it
cannot be identical with the object. This is not a claim about relativity but
about the process of pure internal relatedness. The ininite in question is that
which has already been identiied as the material ininite.13
In Berninis David the right foot is on the ground. The back of the left is
raised with the toes of that foot taking the weight. The body is neither
turning nor not turning. The tension created by the feet instantiates process.
Process here is movement. The rope of the catapult is held tight. The hands
are pulling and yet at that moment the catapult is still; a still point within
the process that marks the catapult being held and which is, at the same
time, the process of its being released. His loins are wrapped by a folded
garment and around his shoulder there is a pouch held in place by further
folded material. The folds of the material are not, in this context, what is
interesting. The signiicance is that they cannot be differentiated from the
work of the body. The wrap of the material over his loins forms part of the
bodys unfolding. It neither lows with the body nor against it. It is neither
on the body nor is it separate from it. Body, material, pouch, sling, all form
part of the process. The error would be to see the body as adorned and,
therefore, the body as central. Indeed, it can be argued that what deines
the sculpture are the relations between the body and by body what is
meant is Davids literal body and what could be taken, albeit wrongly, as
secondary, that is, material, sling, pouch and the like. On an abstract level it
is possible to see the sculpture and it should be remembered that there is
a potential endlessness that comprises this seeing as a surface. Different
elements are not placed on a single surface. The sculpture is the endless
articulation of relations in which what are individuated can be attributed
speciic qualities. In other words, on the level of description it is possible to
distinguish the material around the body, or connected to it, from the body
itself. Nonetheless, such a formal distinction would miss the way they form
part of a continuum involving neither adornment nor ornamentation. Rather,
these formally distinct elements form part of a continuous surface. Moreover,
the only way the distinct elements are able to be distinct, and to be viewed
27/04/12 5:30 PM
30
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 30-31
towards the motif of a bird. Not only is the eye dragged up through the rich
array of forms it is then tempted further tempted towards the ininite
by light. As the eye soars the ininite is captured as much by light as it
is by the geometry. The ininite in question is the ininite of illusion. The
interplay of symbolism and a vanishing point maintained by the intersection
of geometry and light create a feeling of ininite movement towards a
divine ininite. While the illusion is important, it is not as though ininite
transcendence can have material presence other than as illusion. This is
the restriction of this conception of the ininite. As Descartes argued in
the Meditations, what could not be represented was the ininite nature
of God. There is, however, another conception of the ininite.15 Here the
ininite is not linked to representation but to the ininity of pure becoming.
Within the philosophical writings of the period the most exact formulation
of this position is found in Leibnizs conception of substance as force (vis).
Substance is never static nor transcendent, it is un tre capable daction (a
being capable of action).16 Activity deines substance. Its continuity is its
continual self-realisation and thus self-effectuation. Movement, therefore,
is an ininitude of relations. In following Leibniz as opposed to Descartes,
an architecture of illusion is put to one side. The question to be addressed
therefore concerns the architectural correlate to this conception of the
ininite. It should be added immediately that this conception of the ininite
can have material presence. The ininite is linked to relation. Baroque
architecture is not Leibnizian. The relation has to do with how the ininite is
understood. Architecture is not philosophy. The importance of the distinction
lies in the nature of the formers material presence.
One of the central elements deining the internal operation of the church is
the movement of bays, columns and walls. While each element has a distinct
quality there is an interconnectedness that is neither arbitrary nor the work
of chance. Their interrelation is held by an entablature that divides the overall
building into three sections. The physical presence of the entablature has
the effect of emphasising the columns even though it is an emphasis that
is dissipated formally, once it is recognised that they form part of the walls
which in turn form the bays since the latter cannot be disassociated from
the walls articulation. There is a complex pattern in which even though the
elements are separate, in that they have either ornamental or functional
speciicity and as such can invite and maintain particular programmatic
possibilities, they are nonetheless articulated together. If the walls were
understood as a continuous line, then the measure and counter measure
the movement of the curvilinear would have become a surface. In other
words, what is at work here is not a straight line that has become curved.
Measure and countermeasure continue to yield openings that become
27/04/12 5:30 PM
Architectural Projections
backwards and forwards a pulling and pushing that produces the curvilinear
by the work of the internal coniguration. On one level a movement of
this type has to be the case. However, to the extent that the production of
the line remains central, then an account of the line will be in terms of that
production. Any account, therefore, will oscillate between those involving
the history of geometry, and in particular the role of geometry in drawing,
and more ideologically based versions in terms of architectural attempts
to reconcile various religious and philosophical positions.20 The end result
is that the line remains secondary to that which is taken to have produced
it. There is another possibility, which, while alluding to these accounts of
the line, is not deined by them; namely, giving emphasis to the line itself.
This means more than a change in emphasis. Another area of concern
emerges. Henceforth, the interpretive question concerns: what is it that the
line produces? This question and it is one that can be taken to a range of
different drawings of the plan has to start with what can be described as
the lines density. Density means that the line is not the single line but the
double line marking, if only as a beginning, an inside and an outside. The
dense line the line itself is this double (perhaps doubled) line. In general
terms, it is a line of information.
32
The plan allows two different aspects to be emphasised. The irst would be
to show how the walls and the structure are an effect of the oval (or ellipse),
which is itself part of the internal geometry. The oval is the result of the
juxtaposition of two equilateral triangles inscribed within two circles. Whether
it is an oval or an ellipse, the end result is that the line is present as a result
of the internal coniguration.19 Moreover, as Steinberg argues, it is possible
to see that the produced line marks out the plan in the drawing as pulled
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 32-33
27/04/12 5:30 PM
34
Architectural Projections
While accepting that the columns have a load-bearing function within the
overall structure, they do not stand opposed to the wall. Nor is it that the
columns, which may have been historically separated from the wall, have
now been placed next to it. Within the conines of the dense line, how is
the relationship between the column and the wall to be understood? This
question cannot be asked independently of the movement that the line
marks out. While it is possible to account for the movement of the line in
terms of the effect of the founding internal geometry, it is also true that
any account of the line has to begin with the recognition that its movement
effects. The curvilinear creates and distributes internal and external volumes
that are themselves the distribution of programmable space. Whether that
program is used in one way rather than another that is, locating speciic
functions proper to the operation of a church, or even places for statues or
ornamentation is not the point. What matters is that this line has to be
understood as that which distributes volume. In other words, the volumes
(bays) are the effect of the line. At work, therefore, is a line that works. This
line becomes the architectural correlate to the surface of Berninis David.
That surface too, needs to be understood as a generalised production, and
therefore as a workful line.
Allowing the line this capacity will account for the relationship between the
column and the wall. What the line makes clear is that the relation is no
longer one either of opposition or ornamentation. If it can be argued that the
volumes are produced by the operation of the line they are its effect then
it is also the case that both wall and column are themselves effects of a line.
There is no opposition between column and wall. The line though now
viewed as a surface that individuates presents elements that can at a given
moment, and for a speciic reason, be given the designation bay (volume)
or wall or column. As with Berninis David, individual elements are the
after-effects of a surface that effects. Finally, the absence of an opposition
between column and wall precludes the question of their relation. Relation
is concerned with separate deinable entities. Here, they only have a relation
insofar as the same line produces them.
The drawing is not the building. However, the drawing cannot be
disassociated from the actual presence of San Carlo. What this means
is that part of its presence is a quality that allows for a greater degree
of abstraction to be attributed to it. The process of abstraction will allow
for the decontextualisation. However, this is not a process that refuses
the particularity of the actual building. Abstraction refers to the inherent
architectural quality of the work that allows it almost in virtue of a form of
autonomy to have a life independently of its speciic historical presence.
The dense line in Albertina 175 works to distribute certain fundamental
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 34-35
27/04/12 5:30 PM
36
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 36-37
27/04/12 5:30 PM
38
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 38-39
27/04/12 5:30 PM
40
Architectural Projections
perception. Perceiving the use of the eye alters in order to perceive colour.
In Semperian terms, seeing abstractly is to posit a distinction between form
and colour. In other words, abstraction, in this context, means holding colour
and form apart. However, in order to give such a move coherence it would
have to be grounded, almost of necessity in a conception of form that locates
particulars within a deining oscillation between the ideal and the actual. As
such, form acquires an inherently transcendent quality.
The aesthetic response therefore is fundamental. What Semper is pointing
out is a shift in the categories of how seeing takes place. While it is not
Sempers actual argument, implicit in his position is the claim that colour
has the capacity to overcome the hold of classicism. Colour undoes the
opposition between form and the ornamental or decorative. This development
provides the setting in which Sempers discussion of Trajans Column needs
to be situated. The basis of the interpretation resides in the column having
traces of paint (die Spuren von Malerei) (Semper, 1989, pp. 67/248). What
is signiicant about the passage is not just the depth of description, but
attributing to the column the capacity to have the effect of spaciality and
thus to space. This effect is explicable in terms of the operation of colour.
What this means, of course, is that spacing is an effect of the surface.
The igures on the monument stood out golden against an azure
background. The lat relief on the pedestal, too, were undoubtedly
given their proper appearance through the rich variety of gold
and colour. Only in such a way could the column be in harmony
with the richly coloured and gilded forum, the porphyry cornices
and green marble columns of the temples as could the bronze
statues with the columns. (Semper, 1989, p. 67/p. 249)
Leaving aside any lingering hyperbole that may be evident in the passage,
what is clear is that not only is there an urban coherence spatiality is held in
place and in play it is also realised, for Semper, by the work of colour. The
Column, while not strictly architectural, plays a fundamental role within the
visual coherence of the Forum. Coherence is realised by the accord between
the form and the colour. For Semper, it would be an accord which, once the
debilitating effect of the abstract eye is left to one side, would have been
effective and thus would have functioned if the eye had perceived the almost
ineliminable reciprocity between form and colour; that is, their conjoined
presence rather than their separate existence. It would have operated in
relation to the object, the column, then with the other objects in the ield. The
latter would now be understood as an urban condition operating on the level
of affect as well as the structural and functional. Surfaces in this context are
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 40-41
27/04/12 5:30 PM
42
Architectural Projections
architecture. What is important about these elements is the way they lead,
almost inexorably, to establish the centrality of the wall as surface as the
focus of architectural consideration.
The wall igures signiicantly in the short text published in 1851, The
Four Elements of Architecture: A contribution to a comparative study of
architecture. In fact this work set in play the role of the wall throughout his
subsequent writings. It drew on both his archaeological activities in addition
to some of the conclusions reached during the period in which one of his
overriding intellectual concerns was polychromatic antiquities. Semper
uses the so-called elements the hearth, the roof, the enclosure and the
mound (Semper, 1989, p. 102) to account for the origins of architecture.
While these elements are, to a certain extent fundamental, they are almost
inextricably connected to an historicist if not a nostalgic account of the
origins of architecture. The interesting move occurs when Semper begins to
trace the emergence of the wall from the enclosure. Before looking at the
consequences of the move to the wall, it is essential to note that in Sempers
account what is of interest to him is that it involved the introduction of a
technique. It was not just any technique: the wall itter (Wandbereiter) as
proto-architect deployed an Urtechnik (Semper, 1989, p. 258); the way the
wall emerges brings more than just a physical wall into consideration. The
manner in which Semper engages with the wall is in terms of its presence
as a surface. Moreover, a surface that effects. This is the position that has
to be established. (Reiterated therefore is the way that the coloured surface
was present in terms of its effect. While colour did not provide volume, it
was colour that allowed Trajans Column its capacity to create space and,
therefore, enabled it to have a civic function.)
Prior to taking up the key passage from The Four Elements concerning
the emergence of the wall, the claim announced a few lines earlier that
wickerwork was the essence of the wall (Semper, 1989, p. 104), needs
to be noted. Its signiicance is twofold. In the irst instance, it is indicative
of the general move within Sempers writings to preclude the possibility of
a sustained distinction between the decorative and the functional, except
insofar as the decorative becomes evidence of not just function but the
necessary interconnection of the functional and the material. Moreover,
in the case of wickerwork, what is essential is the relationship between
materials and effect. What is signiicant about the claim that wickerwork
comprises the essence of the wall, is that the essential cannot be
differentiated from the operation of materials. Not only is this to insist on
interiority, it allows for a link between materials, and that which demarcates
the architectural, to have to be thought together. Moreover, it can be
concluded that what the wall does is effect spatial enclosure, and therefore
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 42-43
the function of the wall that is, as that which spaces cannot be thought
as though it were independent of the operation of materials. This further
accounts for why he states that wickerwork is the essence of the wall. It
involves the effects realisation through the use of materials. That move can
then be abstracted such that it begins to deine the nature of the wall. Walls,
for Semper, cannot be separated from the activity of spatial disclosure.
From a Semperian perspective space is not a given that is then divided.
The contrary is the case. Space is a result. Hence, the wall is that which
brings about spatial enclosure. In sum, space is the result of the surfaces
operation. The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of
Architecture in the following terms:
Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries
of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary
for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space;
they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their
permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary
functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means
for separating space. Even where building solid walls became
necessary, the latter were only the invisible structure hidden
behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the
colourful woven carpets. (Semper, 1989, p. 104)
The importance of this formulation is that the wall is moved away from being
no more than a structural element to having a clearly deined function within
an overall structure.25 While for Semper there needs to be an accord between
the outward appearance of structural elements and the nature of that
function, such a relationship resists any reformulation in terms of a theory
of ornamentation. What has to be opened up is the potential in Sempers
conception of the wall.
Sempers project can be understood as the attempt to identify within the
history of architecture speciically Hellenic art a principle that could be
extracted. The nature of Sempers relation to Quatremre de Quincy should
inform a contemporary response to his own work. The value for Semper of
Quatremres writings on ancient sculpture is that they provide an opening. In
Sempers terms it lay in their practical tendency. He continues:
In line with this tendency the work does not as it were parade
the form before us as a inished product according to the lessons
of aesthetic ideality, but lets us see the artistic form and the
27/04/12 5:30 PM
44
Architectural Projections
high idea (der Kunstform und der hohen Idee) that dwells within
it; it considers and shows how both were inseparable from the
material and technical execution and how the Hellenic spirit
manifested itself in the freest mastery of these factors, as well as
the old, sanctiied tradition. (Semper, 1989, p. 249/p. 207)
The signiicance of the formulation lies in the differentiation of form from
what can be termed aesthetic ideality. Form and ideas could not be
separated from materials, the presentation of those materials and then inally
from questions of technique. Semper undoes the opposition, therefore,
between form and idea by incorporating both as material possibilities. Any
vestige of the metaphysical distinction between form and idea is displaced
by emphasis having been given to materials and techniques. Once the idea
is no longer understood as external, then the building cannot be understood
as the ideas symbolic presentation. Hellenic style, therefore, involved an
interrelationship of all these elements. This accounts for why, in addition, art
form and decoration cannot be separated. They are, in Sempers terms, so
intimately bound together by the inluence of the principle of surface dressing
(des Flchenbekleidungsprinzips) that an isolated look at either is impossible.
(Semper, 1989, pp. 252-3/p. 211)
What emerges from giving centrality to materials is the possibility of arguing
that materials are what they bring about, what they effect. When Semper
argues that wickerwork was the original wall, it had this quality only because
it was the original space divider. This realisation of division deined the
essence of the wall. Any consideration of the wall therefore has to do with
how materials realise their effect. This accounts for the move in the same
text to the claim that the wall retained this meaning when materials other
than the original were used (Semper, 1989, p. 104). (It should be noted, if
only in passing, that the connection is between meaning and materials, and
not between meaning and symbolic determination.) The history of the wall,
therefore, becomes the history of the way materials realise the wall effect.
The wall effect is spatial division, though only ever as a result. Hence, it
becomes possible to question both the quality of the space produced and the
material creating it since spatial division is produced (effected) by the work of
speciic materials.
There is a further result that should also be noted. Once it can be argued that
the deinition of the wall has to do with spatial enclosure and is not reducible
to the presence of literal walls a possibility also evident in Loos, as will be
argued in relation to the Haus Mller, where the intersection of the Raumplan
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 44-45
and the work of cladding produce volumetric difference, hence the effect of
the wall it then follows that the wall is not given in opposition to the loor.26
This point can be extended since if the wall/loor opposition no longer deines
the work of the wall but the wall is the wall effect, that is spatial division
this will result in the need for a reconsideration of the corner since the corner
is deined by the intersection of an already determined loor/wall relation.
That reconsideration means that the relation between wall, loor and corner
can be rethought; a relation rearticulated as a surface. Not just a surface as a
lat exterior but also a surface as tectonic entity; the reciprocity of materials
and geometry. Furthermore, programmatic demands necessitating that the
elements of architecture have a distinct quality can locate that difference as
individuated by a surface. Finally, therefore, the function of the wall is internal
to the architecture in question thereby generating a sense of autonomy,
one reinforced by the move from an externally orientated symbolic meaning
to an internally regulated system of activity. Furthermore, the wall cannot
be thought outside its relation to materiality. Sempers work dissolved the
distinction between structure and ornament. The wall was given an integrity
that came from its deinition in terms of the effecting of spatial enclosure
while at the same time locating that realisation in the operation of materials.
27/04/12 5:30 PM
46
Architectural Projections
This passage can be juxtaposed usefully with the one advancing the central
argument of Ornament and Crime. What the juxtaposition shows is that
Loos argument is not against ornament as such but on the role and place of
ornament within modernity.
As ornament is no longer organically related to our culture, it is no longer
the expression of our culture. The ornament that is produced today bears no
relation to us or to any other human in the world at large. It has no potential
for development.28
What is being worked through in both passages is the way forms of material
presence are already interwoven with issues pertaining to historical time
and thus modernity. The retention of ornament, much like the wearing of
a costume, is viewed as antithetical to the way the modern is understood.
Ornament, in this sense, is a vestige. The overcoming of ornament does not
give rise either to the positing of simple structure stripped of ornament or
the recourse to mere form. What arises as a consequence is the surface.
Even if the interior surfaces of Loos Haus and buildings appear to be heavily
ornamented, from a Loosian perspective they are not. Cladding (Bekleidung)
is not ornamentation. As with Semper, cladding operates within architecture.
Its presence is organisational and hence related to programmatic
distribution rather than having a purely symbolic role. Moreover, as with
Semper, there is an important distinction between walls, understood as loadbearing, and what was referred to before as the wall effect. The effect is the
creation of space. Before pursing the detail of the position it should be noted
that the shift from Semper to Loos is that the capacity of a surface to effect
is located within the operation of architecture, though now architectures
operation is itself a consequence of having overcome the need to invest
architecture with automatic symbolic value. The surface effect, therefore,
is a sign of the modern both in its overcoming the hold of vernacular, yet at
the same time resisting the slide into the ubiquity of form in which formal
presence is thought independently of programmatic effects. As a result the
effect of cladding needs to be understood as being as much a connection of
surfaces, function and modernity as it is the operation of architecture. In order
to pursue how the effect of cladding operates, it is essential to trace the way
Loos begins to distinguish between literal walls and the wall as surface in his
The Principle of Cladding.29 As with Semper and thus recalling Borromini
space (spacing as an activity and therefore as spatiality) results from
the surfaces effect. With Loos, however, there is an important additional
element.
Again, the setting is the critique of a logic of ornamentation, one in which
substitution and imitation not only predominate but also deine part of the
operation of ornamentation. Opposition to imitation not only reiterates the
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 46-47
27/04/12 5:30 PM
48
Architectural Projections
opposed both to the decorative and the ornamental once it is assumed that
there is a necessary disjunction between these terms and the operation of
architecture. That operation can, in this context, be described as occurring at
the point of interchange between affect, structure and program. Ornament
is deined, therefore, as that which is irrelevant to this conception of the
generative in architecture. While from a contemporary perspective the actual
cladding used by Loos may now appear to be decorative, it is essential to
recognise that as an abstract ield of activity, the speciic role of cladding
needs to be understood in terms of this generative quality. That there may
have occurred a shift in perception does not obviate the force of the initial
claim. That force, however, can only be maintained by the decontextualising
move in which this founding set-up is understood as a productive abstraction
rather than as the only literal expression of the way cladding, affect and
program can be interconnected. Working with this conception of abstraction
namely as having an inherently productive quality that works outside the
hold of representation allows for a form of decontextualisation in which the
surfaces generative quality, rather than just its historical location, is given
priority.
In a sense Loos own argument concerning carpets allows for precisely this
approach. What is clear is that understanding the carpets on the wall as
already positioned within the logic of ornamentation would have incorporated
the carpets into the realm of meaning and, as such, would have undone the
work of materials. When Loos argues that the carpets do not claim to be
anything other than carpets it follows that their meaning is what they are.
And that is why he can conclude that they attain their purpose (Zweck)
according to the principle of cladding. While any material object will have a
symbolic dimension, Loos argument is that within architecture the carpets
function or purpose is realised through the operation of material presence.
Rather than a pure functionalism, function has to do with the objects
materiality. What matters, therefore, is how carpets as cladding and thus as
surface work to space; in other words, the question to be addressed relates
to the capacity of a given material operating as a surface to establish
spatial conditions. Not only is space not a given it is always created
spatiality, equally, is not an empty condition identiied by a neutral term.
When Loos argues that a true building (ein rechtes Bauwerk) makes no
impression as a picture, reduced to two dimensions, the argument is not
against plans as such but is a reformulation of the tight relation that has
already been established between the operation of architecture and the work
of the surface.30 Surfaces create space. And yet, for Loos spatiality is not
just the work of surface. Integral to the system is the Raumplan. The latter
can be deined as volumetric juxtaposition and interpenetration resulting in
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 48-49
27/04/12 5:30 PM
50
Architectural Projections
stage, be posed separately. The irst is who circulates? The second refers to
the structural possibility for circulation. The importance of attributing primacy
to circulation is that it makes the position of the sedentary subject a more
complex one.33 In other words, a stationary position occurs because of the
volume and cladding work to disclose spaces. One of the most important
instances of this is the living room.
Prior to taking up the living room it should be noted in advance that there
are two circulation routes within the house. There are the routes taken by
the family. Then there is the route taken by the servants. What Loos has
managed to achieve and this is evident in the sectional drawings is the
incorporation of two paths that will not readily intersect. Instead of locating
the circulation for the servants on the buildings exterior it had been located
within the house itself. Part of the force of the house is the way these two
routes operate. While they mark divisions of class and wealth and, therefore,
are signs of social division, they can also be understood organisationally.
Such an understanding would not insist on the sign per se, but on how two
different circulation paths each with their own programmatic differences
can cohere. One could be linked to the private and the other to the public, and
yet both would cohere in the same object.
In regards to the living room the immediate question it raises is one of
deinition. What is a room? How is it a room? These questions arise because
of the way it takes on the quality of a speciic spatial domain thus becoming
space or room. This does not occur by a form of enclosure realised by the
work of a literal wall running from loor to ceiling. Rather, in place of the
conventional vocabulary of rooms, the living room needs to be understood as
a speciic spatial condition. Part of that condition is the enclosed space of the
sedentary subject. Equally, it is the location of the room within a nexus of the
structural presence of the possibilities of movement with the Raumplan,
the lines of movement running through space are also at work in constructing
its spatiality that privilege the role of the ambulatory subject. However, that
condition does not arise from repositioning part of the room in terms of an
extended series of corridors. There is both movement and arrest. The two
subject positions are the effect of the architecture.
Once seated within the room the cladding both in terms of material
and colour consistency provides the overall integrity. (This is a condition
that will be reproduced elsewhere in the Haus, for example, in the role of
wood wood as cladding in the library.) Atmosphere, the realm of affect,
is not given by an enclosed space but one created by the operation of a
surface. At the end of the room, the evolution of the wall as that which
also incorporates three load-bearing columns an act of incorporation in
which the cladding constructs a continuous relation between the elements
means that structural elements and programmatic elements have the same
literal surface. What is signiicant, therefore, is that once the relationship
between space creation and affect begins to deine the operational quality
of architecture, then there is no need for a necessary consistency between
structure and the visual presence of that quality. While this opens up the
path towards a conception of ornamentation a conception which becomes
manifest in the advent of postmodern architecture that path can be
circumvented once it is recognised that cladding is not just the cladding on
a structure but that in Loos cladding has no architectural importance other
than in an already present relation with the Raumplan. Cladding, therefore, is
integral to the construction and maintenance of spatiality. When Loos argues
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 50-51
27/04/12 5:31 PM
52
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 52-53
Reopening he Surface
What emerges from this consideration of aspects of Borromini, Semper
and Loos is twofold. In the irst instance, it is the creation of a history for
the contemporary concern with the surface within architectural design.
That concern, while linked to techniques, is itself dependent upon the
possibilities possibilities always in a state of development of certain
software programs. A theoretical history takes the concerns of the present
as its point of departure. In the second, it is the recognition that if their work
has a potentiality and thus a connection to design practice, then it lies in
the capacity to generate productive abstractions. These positions are clearly
interconnected. In the guise of a conclusion, therefore, that connection will
be made more explicit.
The present to which a theoretical history refers cannot be understood as a
generalised sense of the contemporary (often masquerading as the pragmatic
now). In the irst instance that present has a location within the complex
movement of historical time. This is a movement that is reconigured
within design to the extent that the means of design begin to alter, such
that different concerns arise. That difference, however, cannot be deined
simply by architectures link to its means of representation. Drawn into these
concerns and they will igure as much by their afirmed presence as by
their possible occlusion are, for example, fundamental shifts in how affect
is conceived, experienced and deployed within design, or programmatic
concerns are given detail. Affect and program, however, are sites that are
as much architectural as they are points through which cultural and political
concerns are registered. In other words, the concerns of the present that
work at the periphery, and thus which are always beyond architecture, come
to be reinscribed during the process of architectures own effectuation.
While that reinscription need not be instrumental in fact there are strong
27/04/12 5:31 PM
54
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 54-55
Endnotes
1
For a paper that begins to address this precise issue see Manuel de Landas,
Philososphies of Design: The case of modeling software (de Landa, 2002).
27/04/12 5:31 PM
56
Architectural Projections
It not enough to suggest that the history of architecture should play a role in
the practice of design. What has to accompany such a suggestion is what is
involved in such a suggestion having some reality and this has to involve a
reworking of the object.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 56-57
to a body in movement and in action rather than static (Blunt, 1979, p. 51).
Part of the position developed here is that the move from stasis to movement
is fundamental. However, what loses its centrality is the body as the
organising analogy. Part of the discussion of Berninis David could be used as
a counter measure to Michelangelos David. In regard to Borrominis San Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane, Wittkower argues that its ordering principles break with
a central position of anthropocentric architecture (Wittkower, 1973, p. 199).
Again, the central point will be how such a break is to be understood.
13 What characterises the material ininite is the relationship between a
dynamic system that is characterised by potentiality and immateriality whose
actualisation is always material in nature. It should be clear that this is a
description of the elements of the Baroque as it is of the connection between
software and built form.
14 One of the most persuasive, though general accounts, of the move to the
Baroque in which questions to do with movement are fundamental is Heinrch
Wlflins Renaissance and Baroque (Wlflin, 1992, pp. 71-92).
15 The clear distinction here is the conception of the ininite held in the
architecture of, for example, Gothic churches. The Cathdral St-Pierre StPaul in Troyes involves, in terms of the operation of the eye, a simultaneous
movement from loor to ceiling. The uninterrupted line of the columns
not only creates the volume of the nave and the choir, more importantly it
reinforces the inite nature of the human in relation to the ininite nature
of God. While the ininite cannot be given a material presence, the pure
and uninterrupted line of light from loor to ceiling reinforces the ininite of
illusion. At work here is a theology of straight lines. The move to the Baroque
can be understood, at least initially, as complicating the ininite.
16 G.W. Leibnizs Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, Fonds en Raison
(Leibniz, 1965, p. 598). I have discussed the centrality of Leibniz for
architectural theory (Benjamin, A., 2001).
17 It is possible to see this process at work in some of the early drawings. See in
particular Albertina 171 reproduced in Blunt (Blunt, 1979, p. 59).
18 Leo Steinbergs San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Steinberg, 1977). Steinbergs
has to be taken as the deinitive historical account of the church. Nothing that
is suggested in the following is intended to undermine the importance of his
work. The shift in emphasis occurs to the extent that a theoretical account
acquires priority over the more straightforwardly historical account.
19 The distinction between the oval and the ellipse is pursued by George L. Hersey
in Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Hersey, 2000).
27/04/12 5:31 PM
58
Architectural Projections
20 For a detailed account of this setting and an interpretation of San Carlo that
is in part orientated by what is taken to be Borrominis debt to the NeoPlatonism of Ficino, see John Hendrixs The Relation Between Architectural
Form and Philosophical Structure in the Work of Francesco Borromini in
Seventeenth-Century Rome (Hendrix, 2002).
21 In English translation, Semper, G. (1989). The Four Elements of Architecture
and other writings. In German, (1884) Kleine Schriften.
22 I have attempted to present a detailed examination of this position in my
Style and Time: Essays on the politics of appearance (Benjamin, A., 2005, in
particular Chapter 1).
23 London Lecture, November 18, 1853 (Semper, 1986, p. 38).
24 This is a consistent theme in Sempers work. He argues is Der Stil that, in
Greek architecture, both the art form and decoration are so intimately bound
together by the inluence of the principle of surface dressing that an isolated
look at either is impossible (Semper, 1878-9, pp. 252-3).
25 This position is argued for in considerable detail in 62 of Der Stil. In that
context walls are described as spatial concepts (ramlichen Begriffe)
(Semper, 1878-9, pp. 255, 214). There is the important addition that concerns
for load-bearing were foreign to the original idea of spatial enclosure (des
Raumsabschlosses). While this formulation holds to a distinction between
wall and structure, it allows for the development of materials in which wall
again as an effect and structure come to be interarticulated.
30 Loos makes this claim in Architecture (Loos, 2002, p. G70, E78). In regard
to the Haus Mller, Giovanni Denti refers to the dificulty of providing a two
dimensional representation of the works tectonic operation. See his Casa
Mller a Praga (Denti, 1999, p. 10).
31 For a meticulous room-by-room description of the house, see Christian Khns
Das Schne, das Wahre und das Richtig, Adolf Loos und das Haus Mller in
Prag (Khn, 1989, pp. 43-72). Kenneth Frampton has also provided a detailed
description of the interior of the house (Frampton, 1996, in particular p. 19).
32 The Haus, now a research institute for architecture, speciically that of Loos,
has a very useful website. This quotation has been taken from the website. It
is also to found in Leslie Van Duzer & Kent Kleinmans indispensable book on
the Haus Mller (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994). The image of the Living Room
is reproduced from the website. Its address is http://www.mullerovavila.cz/
english/vila-e.html.
33 Van Duzer and Kleinmans work (Van Duzer & Kleinman, 1994) contains an
important architectural discussion of the role of the differing subject positions
within the house.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 58-59
27/04/12 5:31 PM
61
4 Notes on the
Surfacing of Walls:
NOX, Kiesler, Semper
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 60-61
27/04/12 5:31 PM
62
Architectural Projections
Openings
this sense, the material event can deine architectures autonomy as much as
its potential for criticality. Architecture becomes the work of matter.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 62-63
Semper
In the Prolegomenon to his great work on style (Der Stil), and during a
survey of the different approaches to art (art including architecture), Semper
makes the following claim: Art in its highest exaltation hates exegesis; it
therefore immediately shuns the emphasis on meaning (Semper, 1878-9,
pp. 195/XX-XXI). The passage moves on to a concern with materials.
27/04/12 5:31 PM
64
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 64-65
27/04/12 5:31 PM
66
Architectural Projections
less, concedes the same in 63 of Der Stil.) His claim that wickerwork was
the essence of the wall is well known. Its importance, both historically and
for the present, resides in its giving to the wall the quality of a textile that is
already the tectonics of the surface. The surface has, therefore, a geometry
of construction that will open the way in which the buildings overall geometry
will work.
This formulation needs to be connected to the related argument that
establishes a distinction between the wall (involving, of course, the
essential function of the wall) and load-bearing. Walls, for Semper, cannot
be separated from the activity of spatial disclosure. From a Semperian
perspective is not a given that is then divided. The contrary is the case.
Space is a result. Hence, the wall is that which brings about spatial
enclosure. In general terms therefore space is the result of the surfaces
operation. The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of
Architecture in the following terms:
Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries
of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary
for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space;
they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their
permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary
functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means
for separating space. Even where building solid walls became
necessary, the latter were only the invisible, structure hidden
behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the
colourful woven carpets. (Page 104)
The importance of this formulation is that it moves the wall away from
being simply a structural element to its having a clearly deined function
within (or as part of) an overall structure.4 While for Semper there needs
to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural elements
and the nature of that function, such a relationship cannot be understood
straightforwardly in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be
opened up is the potential in Sempers conception of the wall.
Sempers project can be understood as the attempt to identify within the
history of architecture speciically Hellenic art in this context a principle
that could be extracted. In a sense it is, for example, the nature of Sempers
relation to Quatremre de Quincy that should inform a contemporary
response to his own work. The value for Semper of Quatremres writings on
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 66-67
27/04/12 5:31 PM
68
Architectural Projections
need for another understanding of the decorative and thus the bodys relation
to ornamented walls.)
Kiesler
While Kieslers work is linked, rightly, to the history of surrealism and
often discussed in relation to Duchamp, there is an inherently architectural
dimension that should not be neglected. In A Brief Note on Designing the
Gallery, Kiesler outlines some of the positions resulting in both the Surrealist
Gallery and the accompanying Studies for Perception.5 Fundamental to the
project the gallery design is a rethinking of the place and the placing of
the frame. The framed work has to move beyond the duality of vision and
reality. The barrier separating the human world and the world of art needs
to be overcome. Kiesler argues that the:
barrier must be dissolved: the frame, today reduced to an arbitrary
rigidity, must regain its architectural, spatial signiicance. The
two opposing worlds must be seen again as jointly indispensable
forces in the same worldIt is up to the architectural technician of
today to invent, in terms of his techniques a means by which such
unity can again be made possible (Kiesler, 2002, p. 34).
The distinction between vision and reality touches on the distinction between
wall and loor. Any detailed consideration of Kieslers gallery spaces has to
start from the position that it is not simply the projection of the framed works
into space, it is the projection which, once understood in connection to the
curving of the wall has an effect both on the body and therefore on the loor/
wall relation. The interconnection between these projects and those taking
place under the heading of the Endless House Projects is given by what
could be described as the move from a potential to an actual vanishing of
the corner. Writing of his own project, it is deined by Kiesler in the following
terms:
The Endless House is not amorphous, not a free for all form. On
the contrary its construction has strict boundaries according to the
scale of our living, its shape and form are determined by inherent
life forces, not by building code standards or the vagaries of dcor
fads. Space in the Endless House is continuous; all living areas can
be uniied into a single continuum. (Kiesler, 2002, p. 140)
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 68-69
Many questions arise. Two are central. The irst has to concern the
relationship between the single endless continuum and the wall. The second
is to account for what is meant by life forces. Part of that account involves
arguing that giving a determining centrality to these life forces will entail that
the body that which moves, sees, in sum inhabits has a different place
within architecture. It is a place that is structured as well as structuring.
Deined in these terms, the body will lose both its singular, as well as its
exemplary, status. Part of what these forces denote, therefore, are bodies
(plural and therefore different) in the place of an idealisation of the body
(singular and therefore always the same; the body of myth.)
And yet, the argument cannot just be that that a different sense of program
has been invented, and thus experimentation in architecture will have no
more than a discursive quality; what would amount to experimentation
purely on the level of meaning.6 Another form of invention is necessary.
Kiesler identiies it in terms of the development of techniques. In fact what
Kieslers work, taken into conjunction with his own project descriptions,
makes clear is that rearticulating the relationship between the wall and the
loor into the continuous surface occurs as the result of an architectural
practice necessitating the creation of techniques proper to its potential built
realisation. The interruption of the relation between wall, corner, and loor
by the projection of art into a volume, thereby redeining both arts spatiality
and the viewing of objects, occurs as ends that are linked to this possibility.
Techniques delimit speciic architectural interventions. They are therefore
inseparable from material possibilities. In architectural terms Kieslers project
needs to be understood as a diagram that demands realisation as a material
event. Such a move would bring to Kiesler the tectonic dimension that the
presentation of the projects so clearly lacks.
NOX
The Son-O-House recalls Kiesler and allows both Btticher and Semper to
be evoked.7 (See Figures 1-3) Prior to any engagement with its speciicity,
a point concerning representation has to be made. Architecture is as much
bound to its varying means of representation and thus to what these means
make possible, as it is to material possibility. There is, of course, an important
connection between them. As has already been noted, the limitations
inherent in the work of Kiesler limitations only ever discovered afterwards
have to be located in how the project was represented. It is not simply
that the computer and more exactly animation programs has altered
the means of representation. This has occurred. Of greater signiicance is
27/04/12 5:31 PM
70
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 70-71
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Architectural Projections
that the use of these representational tools has altered the nature of the
representation. Moreover, the process of what Kiesler referred to as life
forces can now be calibrated. The body can play a role as a design tool.
This capacity of the body plays an important part in the production of the
Son-O-House. What needs to be identiied, therefore, is the way the initial
experimentation took place. It is not as though the end result is explicable
simply in term of its origins. Nonetheless, the signiicant point of departure
was the way the tracing of bodily movement could then be traced in the
production of volumes. Their initial shape bears a direct correlation to the
movement of bodies. What this means is that movement is not a metaphor.
Nor do bodies function in a way that would be analogous to the operation of
the architecture. The object has not been choreographed. In sum, analogy
and metaphor no longer determine architectures relation to the body.
The reason for insisting on the absence of choreography or at least
choreography as conventionally understood namely as anticipating
movement is because of the role of what Lars Spuybroek describes as
anologue-computing models. While Btticher wanted to link architecture
to its realisation through the inherent property of materials a position
that reappears in Semper in this instance the intermediary use of models
enables their material presence to have an effect on the construction of the
project. The studies of the movement of bodies studies involving ilming
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 72-73
72
27/04/12 5:31 PM
74
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 74-75
27/04/12 5:31 PM
76
Architectural Projections
The images of these projects, as well as the text Brief Note on Designing the
Gallery, can be found in Friedrich Kieslers Art of This Century (Kiesler, 2002).
The distance of the relation between NOX and Semper occurs at this point.
The latter was interested in materials as given by the distinction between
Werkform and Kunstform. Part of the interest for NOX lies in the geometric
possibilities inherent in material. This accounts for the role of Frei Ottos work
within the projects, and therefore situates the references to him and the
Institute for Light Structures occurring elsewhere in the book.
Endnotes
1
If there were the space, attention could be given to the interior of Sempers
Dresden Synagogue, as an exercise in the relationship between program and
cladding.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 76-77
27/04/12 5:31 PM
79
5 Plans to Matter:
Towards a History of Material Possibility
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 78-79
27/04/12 5:31 PM
80
Architectural Projections
A concern with the history of any practice has to recognise that the status
of the object and thus its presence within differing ields of activity is
always negotiable.1 And yet, objects are never determined absolutely.
Rather, they are always in a state of construction. Forms of determinacy,
therefore, have a type of inevitability. To be speciic, what this means is
that arguments to do with breaks and ruptures, as marking the history of
any discursive practice, cannot be taken as ends in themselves. Breaks
and ruptures forms of discontinuity are not just internal to the history
of any practice, more signiicantly they are internal to the way the object of
that history is constituted. These opening considerations, ones that clearly
demand greater precision, nonetheless allow for differences within the way
the history of architecture is thought. The result of this reformulation is that
history cedes its place not only to histories but also to their intention or use.
Within this frame of reference a distinction can be drawn, and this despite
the inherent fragility in any distinction, between a history of architecture
that becomes the history of the plan, and a history of architecture as
the history of material possibilities. (And thus a history that afirms the
presence of architecture as a material event.) It should be added that the
former will still maintain a concern with materials and the latter will also
be bound up with the presence of plans. (While recognising that the term
plan has a certain elasticity within discussions of architectural practice
and history, in this context the term is taken as identifying architectures
drawn presence, where presence is deined by the project of instantiation
deined in terms of representation and scale.) The conjecture to be argued
here is that to the extent that emphasis moves from the centrality of the
plan to that of material possibility, there is a concomitant rethinking how
both materials and plans are to be understood. Moreover, they have a
different status depending upon the nature of the practice involved. The
use value of these differing conceptions of history also changes. The
implicit project at work here concerns the relationship between history and
design. Once a form of relationality is central, then history cannot be taken
as an end in itself nor is there just history. History for design has a status
that begins to allow for its separation from any immediate conlation with a
history of design.
While there is an obvious conluence between the terms matter and
materials, central to the overall argument of this chapter is that materials
are sites of potentiality. Material possibilities can be understood in a
number of different ways. Three of the most immediate are the following.
In the irst instance it concerns the potentiality of a given material. In
the second it involves using the properties of one material to open up
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 80-81
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Architectural Projections
82
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 82-83
27/04/12 5:31 PM
84
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 84-85
27/04/12 5:31 PM
86
Architectural Projections
images of architecture; that is, between the Baroque and the Neo-classical
deined in terms of the pavilion system.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 86-87
Rowes tracking back and forth between the two villas starts with the
supposition that what is central in both instances is the block. Variation
is set by that centrality. Rowe argues, for example that in both there is a
dominant scheme which then becomes complicated by interplay with a
subsidiary system (Rowe, 1987, p. 9). The identiication of difference within a
subsidiary component indeed even the identiication of such a component
as subsidiary allows for the retained centrality of the block. Rowe, however,
is not going to argue that the villas should be approached, as though they
were simply identical, or even the same in any straightforward sense. The
relation between them is signiicantly mediated by an all-important almost.
There is no point arguing that there is a simple continuity. The worlds, opened
by Palladio and Le Corbusier, differ radically. The pretensions of modernisms
versus classicism involve obvious differences. And yet, even in recognising
such distinctions the possibility of there being points of connection opens
up the possibility for Rowe of having to rethink what is at stake in the
departure from Palladio. Equally it necessitates rethinking as much the move
to modernism as it does modernisms own self-theorisation.10 (This latter
concern modernisms self-conception is treated extensively by Rowe in
later texts.)11
The point of departure should not be the question of similarity, but the
ground of difference. On what basis can two buildings differing in time
of construction by hundreds of years be compared? Asking this question
does of course open up architectures own fascination for its own founding
myths. Whether it is Laugiers primitive hut or Sempers four elements,
architecture continues to create myths of origin that then allow all of its
variants to be versions of the same. On one level a similar narrative occurs
here. However, what is important is the way these differences come to
be expressed. The roof in both instances furnishes for Rowe important
differences. Rowe argues that:
Another chief point of difference lies in the interpretation of the
roof. At the Malcontenta this forms a pyramidal superstructure,
which ampliies the volume of the house; while at Garches it is
constituted by a lat surface, serving as the loor of an enclosure,
cut from and thereby diminishing the houses volume. Thus,
in one building the behaviour of the roof might be described
as additive and in the other as subtractive; but, this important
distinction apart, both roofs are then furnished with a variety of
incidents, regular or random, pediment or pavilion, which alone
enter into important though very different relations with
vertical surfaces below. (Rowe, 1987, p. 9)
27/04/12 5:31 PM
88
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 88-89
27/04/12 5:31 PM
90
Architectural Projections
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 90-91
27/04/12 5:31 PM
92
Architectural Projections
The importance of this formulation is that it moves the wall away from
its being no more than a structural element to its having a clearly deined
function within (or as part of) an overall structure. While for Semper there
needs to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural
elements and the nature of that function, such a relationship resists any
reformulation in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be opened
up is the potential in Sempers conception of the wall.
The wall cannot be separated from the effect of space creation. Potentially
what counts as a wall need not have anything necessarily to do with the
literal presence of the wall as a structural element, but will be there in terms
of what can be described as the wall-effect. This position is argued for in
considerable detail in 62 of Der Stil. In that context, walls are described
as spatial concepts (ramlichen Begriffe). There is the important addition
that concerns for load-bearing were foreign to the original idea of spatial
enclosure (des Raumsabschlosses) (Semper, 1878-9, p. 255/p. 214). While
this formulation holds to a distinction between wall and structure, it allows
for the development of materials in which wall again as an effect and
structure come to be interarticulated.
Sempers interest in materials a key example is wickerwork is located
in the way materials operate to realise such effects. There is no need to
attribute an essentialism to Semper since his chief concern was exploring the
complex relationship between materials and their inherent possibilities. The
possibilities lie as much in the creation of effects as they do in the potentiality
within a material in terms of the realisation of that effect. Materials become
registers of what they allow. What they allow will in the end be speciic to
the materials in question. What can never be precluded are attempts to win
Semper to the projects of idealism. However, there is enough in his work to
delect, if not resist, precisely that possibility.
Materials in the writings of Semper can be interpreted as resisting their
idealisation precisely because they are bound up with architectural effects.
Effects necessitate that a distinction be drawn between, on the one hand,
materials understood as sites of potentiality and implicit geometries and,
on the other, the reduction of architectures material presence to the strictly
empirical and thus, to brute matter. Flowing from Semper, there is the
possibility of connection between materiality and both the conceptual and
the ideational. However, both of these elements are not external to matters
work. On the contrary, as indicated by reference to the wall, they are realised
within the work of matter. The work of matter matter understood as workful
becomes another formulation of material possibility. In sum, therefore,
Semper opens up, pace Frampton, the possibility for a materialist account
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 92-93
27/04/12 5:31 PM
94
Architectural Projections
The central text here is Michel Foucaults Le Mots et les Choses (Foucault,
1978). While Foucaults approach differs fundamentally from Kaufmanns,
the productive point of comparison is the insistence on discontinuity. For
Foucault, the regimes that organise discrete conigurations episteme are
themselves sites that can generate differences explicable in terms of the
episteme itself. Kaufmanns sense of discontinuity is itself articulated within
a teleological conception of historical time. Discontinuity, therefore, as an
operative principle within different conceptions of historiography, will have its
own complex history.
Even allowing for the signiicance of Deleuzes work (Deleuze, 1987) on the
fold (le pli) for the presentation of architecture, the important question for a
concern with writing history for design is accounting for what occurs when
Endnotes
1
I wish to thank Katie Lloyd-Thomas, John Macarthur and Tony Vidler for
comments on an earlier version. The direction of the interpretation is
mine alone.
The German text was published in Karlsruhe in 1828. Hbschs text and other
texts central to the Style Debates are available in English (Hbsch, 1992). I
have examined this text and the context in which the question of style and
its relation to material possibility is posed in greater detail in Style and Time
(Benjamin, A., 2005).
This is the point at which the centrality of the work of Lars Spuybroek can be
located. See Machining Architecture (2004).
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 94-95
27/04/12 5:31 PM
96
Architectural Projections
What is opened up here does not concern the diagram per se. Rather, what
is involved is the relationship between the drawn line and material presence.
Clearly this treatment of the diagram draws on Deleuzes discussion of the
same in his work on Foucault and on Bacon (Deleuze, 1986 and 1981).
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 96-97
27/04/12 5:31 PM
99
6 Porosity at
The Edge:
Working Through Walter Benjamins Naples
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 98-99
27/04/12 5:31 PM
What is it that identiies a city?1 Where is the feeling or sense of that identity
located? Could that sense of identity no matter how it was discovered be
generalised? The encounter with a city endures within attempts to articulate
that experience within writing. Equally, an encounter with a speciic city
once it admits the possibility of generalisation may become productive
within design. Walter Benjamin continued to work through the city.2 The
modern and the urban coincide. And yet, that coincidence brings with it
more than a simple equivalence. Cities have a past. The modern contains
vestiges. The question of the city if only as a beginning concerns that
complex presence. In a text that demands consideration not just because
of its content, but equally due to its actual design Einbahnstrae the
presence of the affective city, the city as the place of experience endures.3
A brief entry under the heading Freiburg Minster opens a possible interplay
between the particular and the related move to a form of generality. Or if not
the movement itself, what is at work within this brief note is the provision of
two of the categories within which movement within the city can be thought.
(In the end, it will be movement that constitutes the urban and thus deines
the city.)
Freiburg Minster The special sense of a town (dem eigensten
Heimatgefhl einer Stadt) is formed in part for its inhabitants and perhaps
even in the memory of a traveller who has stayed there by the tone
and intervals with which its tower clock begins to chime (Benjamin, W.,
1977/2003, IV.1. 124/1. 213).
Accounting for the Heimatgefhl of a town can be located in the way
the relationship between material presence and time is worked out. Here
material presence is the clock tower itself standing as a point of orientation.
Time is inscribed, in this context, within the intervals marking the striking
of the bells. Orientation in relation to distance is always intermingled with a
temporal dimension. Both combine in the feeling gefhl that a town
engenders. What this means is that spatiality is not the central element in
any account of what can be described as the effect of urbanism. Spatiality
is always measured. The nature of its measure, however, involves time.
The time in question is not the universalising time that is arbitrarily though
exactly enacted an exactitude with its own exigency either by the clock
or by chronology. If there is another conception of time then it arises from
the operative quality of the city itself. It will not be time as a series of single
moments, those heard on each occasion the bell is struck. Rather, it will
involve the complex temporality suggested by the interplay of differing
temporal systems articulated within different forms of spatial presence. The
relationship between space and time thought as a relation of inherently
complex sites both opens a way towards Benjamins discussion of Naples,
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 100-101
while at the same time signalling the extent to which it may become possible
to generalise that account.
Writing of the caf in Naples, Benjamin states, A prolonged stay is barely
possible (Lngerer Aufenthalt ist kaum mglich) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003,
p. 420/p. 316). However, what is it that is not possible, or only barely? What
type of stay perhaps even what form of lodging is precluded? While these
questions refer to time they are equally concerned with issues of spatiality.
What is in play is the nature of the place in which one stays, or in which this
form of staying takes place. Staying here is measured by time. The Neapolitan
caf is not a place for an Aufenthaltzeit. Measuring place by time thereby
allowing time a form of complexity reconigures place by allowing it to take
on a position in which there is the interplay of times. Prior to taking up the
consequences of this move from a singular conception of time to a plural one,
it is essential to stay with the caf and the positioning of what is, or is not, or
only barely, possible within it.
The contrast Benjamin provides is with the Viennese coffee house. The latter
are marked by a sense of the conined (beschrnkte). While the term is
deployed speciically to describe the literary world of Vienna, it is a world that
has an architectural correlate. Noting this distinction, however, is not enough.
The contrast is not between the contained and the open, as though the
only possible response to a form of restriction or containment could be the
elimination of all borders and thus the creation of the purely open. (It may be
that such an aspiration is no more than a gestural reiteration in another guise
of a conception of place as a terra nullus.) Movement through space is always
temporal. It takes place through time. Presented in this way, movement
comes to deine the way in which space is both contrasted and then worked
within. Of the Neapolitan caf it should be recalled that Benjamin wrote, A
prolonged stay is barely possible (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 420/p. 316).
What delimits the length of stay has to do with the way coffee is drunk.
Coffee is ordered by gestures. Naples is characterised by the language of
gestures (Die Gebrdensprache) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 421/p. 316).4
The ordering of the drink, its consumption and the passage out from the
caf, all need to be understood within the rhythm of the gesture. Space
is positioned and therefore created by one particular rhythm rather
than another. What occurs within the caf is the interarticulation of spatial
positioning and the rhythm of the body. The argument as to why it is barely
possible to stay within the caf for a sustained period of time has to do,
therefore, with the way the space of the caf is constructed. It is not a
given domain that is simply occupied in a range of different ways. The caf
becomes a site whose presence is created. Time, space and the rhythms
of the body work together. If there is a way into the general sense in which
27/04/12 5:31 PM
actual terminology, one that refuses to position the private and the public as
a productive opposition, does not ignore the private realm. On the contrary
it brings both the public and the private into play, but freed from their ready
insertion into a simplifying opposition. (As will be noted, it is an opposition
undone by the work of porosity.) And yet, within the terms of the texts
narrative what is recounted is an occurrence. And as an occurrence, it is over.
Moreover, it is an event whose impersonal quality is carried by its passive
construction (wurdegefahren). What has been identiied, therefore, in
this opening in its impersonal pastness is as much an opening towards
the present as it is to different possibilities of involvement. Both of these
openings holding the actuality of the present and its inherent complexity in
play indicate not just ways of avoiding the complete identiication of the text
with Naples, but of allowing that possibility to be already contained in the text
itself. The opening of Naples, understood as a threshold, is already doubled.
Complexity pertains ab initio.
Naples, once named, means that avoiding the hold of the idiosyncratic
will depend upon allowing the name Naples to name both the city itself
and, in the process, to name and as signiicantly to produce an abstraction
that has an inherently generative dimension. While Benjamin writes about
Naples, there is an additional question a question driven not just by the
imperative of design but also by the possible construction of a site in which
those imperatives may come to take on a political texture. The questions
force resides in the power of abstraction. (This is abstraction not as an act of
withdrawal, but as the relocation of effect. Abstraction is that which allows
for potentiality precisely because the original is no longer held by interplay of
representation as the locus of meaning and re-presentation as deining either
the image or the description.) The question is the following: Is it possible to
reconigure that writing Benjamins Naples diagrammatically? In other
words, can the text be read as occasioning design? This is designing arising
neither from the application of an analysis nor from the simple identiication
of the texts concerns. Rather, the potentiality for abstraction the diagram
opens up design as a practice. As a result, design would be a practice rather
than the enactment of a predetermined task. If only to indicate how such a
possibility would be realised, part of the answer will involve reconiguring the
urban and here Naples names the urban in terms of time and movement.
Time and movement should not be understood as simple generalities. They
are given a speciic coniguration within Naples. If there is a way through
Naples, it has to do with the use of porosity as a temporal concept rather than
a purely spatial one. This is a position that can only emerge from working
through Naples.
The value of such an approach to this text is that it allows for the possibility
that the complex density of the urban endures as a recurrent thought within
writing.5 The question of density, however, needs to be set in relation to
an understanding of place as that which is already contested. The real
signiicance of the term porosity, and this is the term used by Benjamin to
analyse the city of Naples, is that it does not refuse the distinction between,
for example, the sitting room (die Stube) and the street (der Strasse), or
between day (Tag ) and night (Nacht ). What it does, however, and this is
part of the strength of Benjamins approach, is begin to deine their relation
in terms of an already present sense of interpenetration (Durchdringung).
The question that arises here concerns to what this term interpenetration
pertains. Porosity, if it were thought to do no more than mark mere process,
would involve nothing other than a form of seepage; as though edges
could be permeated, entered but no more than that. What occurs with the
evocation of the porous brings additional elements into play.
The texts opening words carry the quality of storytelling. The text begins
with the evocation of an event whose completion marks the point of entry
into the text. Completion is the enclosure into the narrative at the same time
as its creation. Completion and threshold conjoin at the texts beginning.
At work here, and this is just the beginning, is a doubled entry. Benjamin
writes, Some years ago a priest was drawn through the streets of Naples
for indecent offences (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 414/p. 307). (It needs to
be noted that indecency (unsittlicher) should not be understood in terms
of a realm of private or personal morality. Indecency already brings into
consideration the realm of tradition and custom, that is, die Sitte.) Naples
will continue to rework the private, depriving it of its privative quality. The
The term irst occurs in the following context. Benjamin has been describing
a series of rooms within the city, its buildings and inally within the cliff
faces. Overall the city is craggy (felsenhaft) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003,
p. 416/p. 309). This is, however, no more than a spatial description. It is as
though all that is involved is a series of interlinked chambers and rooms; as if
porosity were no more than courtyards that led to arcades or vestibules which
in turn lead to ante-chambers and inally to inner rooms themselves. If there
were a way of describing the temporality and thus the form of movement that
such a conception of porosity engenders a conception in which its force
would be stilled and thus its productive possibilities contained then it would
be in terms of a sequence and thus as a linear narrative through the city.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 102-103
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 104-105
another response, one that while opening up the singular does so in a way
that causes the positing of singularity to become problematic. Two strategies
emerge. The irst is the borders refusal; traversal as refusal. The second is
what can be described as the borders undoing.
In regard to the former traversal borders can always be traversed.
However, such crossings are incursions and consequently would then be
deined as illegal. If there is a way of approaching the border that refuses
the terms in which the border is traditionally given terms that are under the
dictate of control, a dictate that is inscribed within statutes for control (legal
provisions no matter how arbitrarily created) then it has to be linked to the
undoing of the border.7 Undoing is not destruction. Moreover, it is in terms of
undoing that Benjamins work a work in which Naples has already come to
name a more generalised urban condition is central. Porosity as a temporal
concept temporal with its own spatial determinations emerges as a form
of undoing. In Benjamins text what has been identiied here as undoing is
linked to the movement of interpenetration. Prior to pursuing the passages
in the text in which what is addressed are the temporalising movements
that reconigure spatial locations, it is important to stay with this undoing.
The term undoing makes demands. In part, it enacts the work of porosity.
The work in question begins with the interruption of the opposition between
the singular and the closed on the one hand and the completely open on the
other. However, there is more at work that just a speciic strategy for reading.
Part of the argument will be that through undoing, it becomes possible to
reconigure urban conditions. Porosity as an undoing will lead to a differing
conception of the urban, and thus of an urbanism, from one directed by the
interplay of the temporal singularity of simple lines. (Equally, this difference
will itself be registered in the representational means used to create these
differing possibilities.)8
In general terms, lines of demarcation simple lines are held in place.
Neither natural nor arbitrary, they are placed and held there. In its most
benign form this will concern lines drawn on a map that indicate the presence
of streets, or speciic urban locations. This type of map is used to deine
zones that in turn will have an effect as much on building regulations, as they
will on the creation of infrastructure. While lines and maps of this nature
allow for contestation the argument, for example, to have a certain area
rezoned whatever sense of contestation there is, it will have been delimited
by the sense of lines, time and spatial relations that engender it. What is at
work here is a deined sense of enclosure. Part of the deinition comes from
privileging not just spatial relations, but also a deinition of spatial relations
and the lines used to create them in terms of a founding simplicity. Despite
these simplifying moves, such a conception of the line once it becomes the
27/04/12 5:31 PM
border, brings an exacting reality into play. One response to the actuality
of such a demanding presence is destruction. However, the process of
destruction does not just move in one direction. The creation of the arbitrary
border constructed as a single line can also be understood as a form of
destruction. In the latter case what is destroyed is the originally complex
or plural sense of place. Destruction in such a context is the refusal of the
border in the name of the open as though the borders destruction will allow
for a sense of the common deined as the open. It is in relation to both of
these senses of destruction that the process of undoing can have its most
exacting effect. Undoing becomes a productive activity. Undoing allows.
Porosity, as the term moves through and organises Benjamins text Naples,
is bound up with the provisional. And yet, the usual temporality of the
provisional, a temporality and conception of action deined by a move to
completion, a move which is itself explicable in terms of linearity, is precisely
the conception of the provisional which is undone by porosity. Moreover,
porosity comes to be inscribed within, and as part of, a dynamic process.
Movement and mobility characterise porosity. It is not just that everything
joyful (Lustige) is mobile (fahrbar) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311).
There is a more profound sense of the dynamic. After arguing that there is
founding interpenetration of feast days and work days, an interpenetration
that is not simply occasional, rather it is irresistible such that the kernel
of one exists irrevocably and irrecoverably in the other, allowing each the
possibility for a reconiguration, a repositioning, perhaps the adoption of a
different colour or another form, that could occur, perchance unforseen, at
any moment, Benjamin conigures porosity as the law of life (Gesetz dieses
Leben) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). However, this is not just any
law. Benjamin described it as inexhaustible (unerschplich) (Benjamin, W.,
1977/2003, p. 417/p. 311). In other words, it is not a conception of law that
deines both obedience and obligation, and which because of its externality
yields subjects and in the end will deine subjectivity as subject to it. Action
is neither regulated nor deined by following this law. The inexhaustible law
is the actative itself. While the term inexhaustible (unerschplich) recurs
within the text, what is central is the way in which an active dimension
comes to deine what is usually taken either as static or as complete. (An
ontology deined by movement begins to supplant one positioned by stasis.)
Building (Bau) and action (Aktion) work together (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003,
p. 416/p. 309). They go in and through each other. This could, however, be
no more than a simple, and in the end simplifying if not reductive, evocation
of process. While the opposition of the static and the dynamic is opened
once building and action are deined in terms of their interpenetration
(rather than their so-called essential qualities), the undoing of that opposition,
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 106-107
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 108-109
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 110-111
There, that is, in grey as inexhaustible potentiality. The faint (Benjamin, W.,
1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311) sun shines, refracted through glass vats of iced
drink (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311). Light through liquid comes
out as colouring, bathing thus creating surfaces. Benjamin writes:
day and night the pavilions glow (strahlen) with the pale aromatic
juices that teach even the tongue what porosity can be.
(Benjamin, W., 1977/2003, p. 418/p. 311)
Faint sun in a city, which can itself fade (welken) (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003,
p. 417/p. 311). However, as it fades, the faint is no longer a dissembling,
what would have been a literal feint in which, what is, would have done no
more than vanish. Indeed, the contrary is the case. Fading and the suns faint
presence form part of the continuity of coming-out-from. Form continues.
The pavilions are bathed. As the tongue tastes, what is tasted colours
walls. Light slips through liquid to solid and taste from tongue to sight.
Interpenetration, though not as an amalgam, rather as the continually enacted
set of complex relations, reworks the differences between time and space. (A
reworking and not a vanishing, hence spaces become timed as time acquires
spatiality.) What continues to be presented is form; a presentation another
coming-out-from that is ground in movement.
The diagram of Naples, Naples as a diagram, emerges not from questioning
the literal accuracy of Benjamins description of Naples but from within its
formulations. Terminology and modes of thought grip the text. Their release,
perhaps a hands unfolding, carry the mark of an original setting that is
coming apart. Not, however, under the sway of destruction destruction
is undone by working through as an undoing but because that setting is
envisaged as porous. And yet, porosity, porosity within Naples, is not an
addition ornamenting the text. Porosity is not an option. It organises Naples
(text and place, melding for a moment), working as its law. Moreover, the text
both announces porosity as a topic iguring, therefore, within it as part of
its content and, at the same time, porosity igures as integral to the texts
operative quality. Porosity has an effective presence. As a beginning, the
texts doubled entry stages its porous nature. Once Naples, instead of being
about porosity can be seen to be porous, the text as place will admit the
original complexity that the place Naples an urban condition necessarily
contains. This is a complexity, which, in both instances, is bound up with
time. The city will have been deined by its porous edges. Edges proliferate.
They have an inexhaustible potential.
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Endnotes
1
This paper was irst given as a lecture in the Institut for Knst und Architektur
at the Akademie der bildenden Knste in Vienna on 20 May 2005.
All references to Benjamins works are to the Gesammelte Schriften and the
Selected Writings (Benjamin, W., 1977/2003). The pagination and volume are
given in the text. The German precedes the English. At times translations
have been slightly modiied. In regards to the city it should be noted that
while Benjamins writings on Paris have attracted the most attention, he
continued to write short texts on a range of cities. Moreover, as the reference
to Einbahnstrae makes clear, the urban works as a continual igure throughout
his writings. As such, it is never just the city, nor moreover could it ever be just
Paris or Berlin and so on. Inevitably, something else is at work. The project
here is to begin to identify one possibility for that additional element.
While not referred to by Benjamin it would have been surprising had he not
been familiar with the writings of Andrea de Jorio. His celebrated work of
1832 La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestia nepoletato set out to
describe not just the centrality of gesture to Neapolitan social life, but sought
to indicate a possible conluence between the use of gesture in the Roman
world with its then current practice in Naples.
In 1925 Bloch wrote a text on Naples. Not only is it a clear engagement with
Benjamin, it is also an attempt to reposition the concept of porosity. For Bloch
porosity is more closely deined and thus limited by its link to the Baroque
(Bloch, 1985).
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 112-113
Without signalling it directly, once Benjamin links building and action this
move overcomes any attempt to reconigure the architectural in terms of the
attempt to recover that which is essential to either building or dwelling.
The obvious implication of this particular orientation is that what is distanced
is Heideggers approach to these questions. In Heideggers most important
text on this question Bauen Wohnen Denken (Heidegger, 1959) the
deining element is always couched in the language of essentialism. The
term predominating the philosophical task as understood by Heidegger is the
recovering of the wesen (essence). That recovery will always efface the hold
of what Benjamin calls the law of life; that is, porosity.
27/04/12 5:31 PM
115
7 Passing hrough
Deconstruction:
Architecture and he Project of Autonomy
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 114-115
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 116-117
The irst direction retains the criticality inherent in the philosophical. The
relationship between criticality and autonomy within any discursive practice
be it architecture or philosophy has to do with a complex sense of
continuity. Continuity cannot be avoided. Architecture, as with philosophy,
continues. What the necessity of continuity sets up is the link any discursive
27/04/12 5:31 PM
practice has to its own history. The history of philosophy could be understood
as the continual reposing of questions that rarely vary, such that history is the
continuity of the always-the-same. However, once a concern with the critical
enters, then any practice, while continuing, does so with the recognition
that continuity is itself an engagement with its own possibility. In other
words, there cannot be simple continuity, nor can continuity be understood
as the repetition of the same ideal elements. Continuity emerges, therefore,
as a form of discontinuity. In regards to philosophy, this means that while
writing still takes place and that books and academic articles still appear, the
structure of their content and the topics addressed are more likely to have a
disjunctive relation to a pervasive and idealised sense of tradition than one
allowing for its simple repetition. In philosophy, deconstruction provided a
means by which there could have been a transformation; one thought beyond
the destructive hold of nihilism and thus enjoining what could be described as
the continuity of discontinuity.
Clearly at work is a type of formalism in which the transformative potential of
a particular practice is found in the way criticality is evidenced by the formal
possibilities for continuity. Again, it is the continuity of discontinuity. This link
to formalism form as a site of continual transformation provides the way
into architecture. However, it is precisely the insistence on form that opens
up the other dimension within autonomy, namely the recourse to a deinition
of the autonomous in terms of the aesthetic. Prior to pursuing the presence
of form as a site of transformation and here it is possible, at least initially,
to position such proper names as Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind it is
important to note the way autonomy and the aesthetic work together.
On one level all architecture has an aesthetic dimension. It exerts an
appeal. Having visual presence both in terms of its projection into the
urban fabric and in its creation of internal spaces architecture is a site of
affect. Architecture has an ineliminable affective component. Allowing for
affect is to attribute a speciic quality to space. Affect in both sculpture
and architecture is the creation of spatial experience. In architecture,
however, there is an important difference, since the aesthetic need not be
present in terms of either beauty or attraction. An aesthetic response could
be one of indifference. The reason for such a response indifference
being understood as aesthetic has to do with the inherent relation between
aesthetics and experience. If the aesthetic is the site of experience, then
it is always possible for there to be an experience that does not occur. In
other words, what this allows for is a site of potential experience in which
the objects presence, both in terms of appearance as well as functional
possibilities, is so mute, and thus unable to engender a connection, be it in
terms of affect or more banally in terms of use, that it becomes possible to
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 118-119
argue that the aesthetic is marked by its non-concurrence. What this means
is that in a context of this nature the aesthetic would be deined in terms
of non-occurrence; the experience that does not arise with a corresponding
absence of affect. (The question of how to evaluate this state of affairs could
take its point of departure from Walter Benjamins argument that within
modernity architecture is often experienced in a state of distraction.) All
possibilities will have been drained from the event.
Once this description is given to an aesthetic response marked by a type of
emptiness, then one way of responding is to heighten the aesthetic content.
Heightened content will always be positioned on the level of appearance.
This will not take place in terms of ornamentation, since that would merely
repeat postmodernisms indebtedness to the history of the symbol and thus
to a type of ornamentation. Rather it will have two interrelated components.
In architecture, as opposed to art, this means, in the irst place excluding
the link between affect and function, while in the second privileging
appearance over program. The connection between both these possibilities
should be clear. While there is an obvious dificulty in that even though
both function and program will be retained their retention marking the
presence of architecture the fact of their presence will not automatically
be attributed architectural signiicance. Nor will they emerge as sites of
research or experimentation. What matters will be appearance. One way
of accounting for this position will be in terms of having provided form with
a uniquely aesthetic characterisation. This will not be the same as deining
architecture in terms of form, nor even in relation to forms ornamental
presence. Ornament involves a relation to structure, while appearance as a
term situated within autonomy is concerned with the affective nature of a
structures external projection.
If there is a clear example of this approach the privileging of appearance
and thus the aesthetic over the programmatic then it resides in the work
of Frank Gehry. While it is a late project in relation to the work of Gehry
that was identiied with deconstructivist architecture, the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao dramatises the twofold move that characterises the
aestheticisation of architecture. On the one hand, there is the sustained
failure of programmatic possibilities the relationship between scale and
exhibition was never properly analysed or resolved. And yet, on the other, the
visual hold of the exterior gives rise to the buildings clear success in terms of
a visual urbanism. The buildings appearance is what matters. The disjunction
between program and appearance evidences the aesthetic, since what is
of signiicance is not affect in terms of program. Rather the affective has to
do with the relationship between the urban body and the appearance of the
exterior (perhaps more accurately the exterior as appearance). That relation
27/04/12 5:31 PM
deines the site of affect. If anything it is the disjunction between the urban
body and the body positioned by, and for, an encounter with art the project
of the art museum in general that reinforces the necessity to view this
instance of Gehrys work in terms of the aesthetic.
In sum, the argument is that in terms of the interconnection between affect
and program the possible encounter with art, an encounter that would
deine the buildings program the buildings operation remains problematic.
However, in terms of the buildings visual urbanism, its role in the
construction of the urban fabric and thus the experience of being in the city,
it is a clear success. While aesthetics triumph over program, this instance of
the centrality of the aesthetic needs to be understood in terms of its being
one possibility within the emergence of architectural autonomy.
Once deconstruction can be seen as a version of autonomy, then its presence
in architecture opens up in these two directions. The identiication of
criticality with formal possibilities and the denial of criticality in the name of
the aestheticisation of the architectural establish the two directions to which
autonomy operating in part as deconstruction in architecture gives rise.
Taking this formulation a step further necessitates showing in what way a
form of architectural innovation operating as formal innovation allows for
this interconnection between autonomy and deconstruction to emerge. The
example here is the work of Peter Eisenman. However, instead of developing
the argument in relation to a building, of greater interest, in this context, is
his analysis of the architectural works of Giuseppe Terragni (Eisenman, 2003).
That analysis has to be understood, at least at the outset, as a deconstruction
of the tradition of the plan. This is a tradition exempliied both in Wittkowers
redrawing of Palladio, and then in Rowes arguments that neither Mies nor
Le Corbusier departs in a sustained way from the structuring presence of
the Palladian plan and elevation and hence remains Neo-Palladian.2 It should
be noted from the outset that Eisenman redraws Terragni. His approach,
therefore, mimes Wittkower and Rowe. However, it is in the miming that
the transformation can be located; drawing, perhaps redrawing, becomes an
instance of discontinuity as continuity.
When Derrida writes on Maurice Blanchot, what is of interest to him is not
the move in which the strategies of metaphysics are identiied and subject
to the process of deconstruction. Blanchots writings have an importantly
different relation to any dominant tradition. There is a sense in which his texts
do not invite deconstruction because in the openings and thus in the need
to trace the work of those openings there is already a productive distancing
from any simple repetition of the demands of classical metaphysics. Instead,
Derridas writings on Blanchot have a different status from those devoted
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 120-121
to philosophical works and projects that fall readily within the domain of
logocentrism.3 The space between the writings of Blanchot, and that domain,
is identiied and afirmed by the process of deconstruction. This afirmation
becomes an instance of criticality where criticality is deined by the distance
and the continuity of discontinuity, both of which are internal to the operation
of the philosophical. Deconstruction in architecture, if the term is still to
have real purchase, is not the application of Derridas work to architecture
but a reiteration within architecture, conceived as an autonomous discourse,
of the identiication of distance and the afirmation of openings that refuse
their reincorporation within the dominant traditions operative within it. This
formulation of the relationship between deconstruction and architecture
identiies the centrality of Eisenmans engagement with Terragni as a pivotal
site of investigation.
For Eisenman, the Casa del Fascio and Casa Giuliani-Frigerio are both critical
architectural texts because, as he argues, the readings of their faades,
plans and sections are not stable; they can be read as displacements from
an architecture of hierarchy, unity, sequence, progression and continuity
(Eisenman, 2003, p. 11). What matters here is how displacement is
understood. Criticality enters because there is both a disruption of hierarchy
as well as the undoing of a sense of architectural continuity deined in terms
of the repetition of the same. Repetition identiies both the continuity of
architecture and the internality of architecture as the locus of intervention.
Repetition allows, therefore, for the possibility of the interplay of continuity
and discontinuity. What this means is that criticality has to assume
architectures internality in sum, autonomy as its condition of possibility. In
his analysis of the Casa del Fascio, Eisenman uses the term transformations.
Again this term, as with the earlier displacement, signals a move within a
formal vocabulary that attempts to break the hold of a certain tradition of the
plan, while at the same time holding to architectures own continuity.
There are two elements that need to be noted here. The irst is that criticality
concerns both formal invention the invention of work, and thus of having
worked through the tradition and thus a deinition of the critical as provided
by autonomy.4 The second is that Eisenmans argument, while concerning
form, is not formalist. Formalism involves the refusal of architectures
affective nature. As will be noted, affect is fundamental to Eisenmans
argument.
In regards to the irst of these elements, what has to be argued is that
Eisenman is recovering from Terragnis work that which makes it irreducible
to the already given conventions of architecture. To that extent the approach
mimes the one taken by deconstruction to texts that distance the hold of
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 122-123
Endnotes
1
It is now possible to see that the original exhibition that brought together
a number of different architectural projects under the heading of
Deconstructivist Architecture did so by deferring to philosophy. What was
not undertaken was the necessity to think how what pertained in philosophy
could also come to pertain in architecture. While that may itself be a
philosophical observation, it is one that insists on the limit of philosophy
and thus on the emergence of a differing site of autonomous activity. In this
instance, this other site is the architectural. For the catalogues of the 1988
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Philip Johnson and Mark
Wigleys Deconstructivist Architecture (Johnson & Wigley, 1988).
See for example Derridas discussion of the problematic status of the term
rcit in Blanchots La Folie de Jour, in La Loi du Genre in Parages (Derrida,
2003). Derridas introduction to this collection of his papers on Blanchot
addresses the transformative effect that Blanchots writings have on attempts
to write about him.
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Bibliography 125
Alberti, L. B. (1988). On the art of building in ten books (J. Rykert, N. Leach
& R. Tavenor, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work
De Re Aediicatoria written 1443-1452)
Benjamin, A. (1993). The plural event. London: Routledge.
Benjamin, A. (1997). Present hope: Architecture, Judaism, philosophy.
London: Routledge.
Benjamin, A. (2001). Architectural philosophy. London: Continuum Press.
Benjamin, A. (2005). Style and time: Essays on the politics of appearance.
Evanston: North Western University Press. Evanston.
Bibliography
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 124-125
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Bibliography 127
Kaufmann, E. (1955). Architecture in the age of reason: Baroque and postBaroque in England, France, Italy. New York: Dover Publications.
Khn, C. (1989). Das Schne, das Wahre und das Richtig, Adolf Loos und das
Haus Mller in Prag. Baulwelt Fundamenta 86. Braunschweig, Vieweg
& Sohn.
Loos, A. (1982). Spoken into the void. (J. D. Smith & J. H. Smith, Trans.)
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 126-127
27/04/12 5:31 PM
Bibliography 129
Van Duzer, L. & Kleinman, K. (1994). Haus Mller: a work of Adolf Loos.
New York: Princeton University Press.
Vidler, A. (1987). The writing of the walls: Architectural theory in the late
Enlightenment. London: Butterworth Architecture.
Vidler, A. (1992). Architecture dismembered. In The architectural uncanny
(pp. 69-85). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vidler, A. (2002). The Ledoux effect: Emil Kaufmann and the claims of Kantian
autonomy. Perspecta, 33, 16-30.
Wigley, M. (2001). White walls, designer dresses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wittkower, R. (1973). Art and architecture in Italy 1600-1750. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Wlflin, H. (1992). Renaissance and Baroque. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Zimmerman, M. E. (1990). Heideggers confrontation with modernity:
Technology, politics, and art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 128-129
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 130-131
27/04/12 5:31 PM
AP_Benjamin_TEXT-2pp.indd 132
27/04/12 5:31 PM