Zago An Awkward Position PDF

AWKWARD POSITION
Author(s): Andrew Zago

Source: Perspecta, Vol. 42, THE REAL PERSPECTA (2010), pp. 205-218
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
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205
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POSITION
Andrew Zago
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Intentionally awkward conditions occur with increasing frequency across a num-

ber of creative fields. This repeating occurrence alone, unaided by any articulated
agenda, suggests that some emerging vein of aesthetic and social possibility is being
tapped. Conditions creating unease and discomfiture - hallmarks of the awkward -
are more than an unforeseen byproduct of this new work; they must be understood
as their defining feature. Distinct from both formal elegance and critical dissonance,
the awkward's near-fit with cultural and societal patterns is what defines its unique
and troubling timbre. This is not to suggest that the awkward is part of the Zeitgeist;
the Zeitgeist may be intangible, but it already exists. Rather, it is part of a more
subtle phenomenon of articulating what isn't quite here - unexpected, yet obvious
in retrospect.
THE REAL PERSPECTfl 42
AWKWARD POSITION / ANDREW Z AGO
206
As an emerging cultural sensibility, the awkward may help define fertile territory for
new architecture. It goes to the core of a persistent dilemma: how to employ mastery
in a profession that finds the traditional display of such expertise untenable. Consid-
ered not in general, but rather as an unlikely adjunct to expertise, the awkward can
deflect and redefine the architect's traditional range of instrumental control.
MASTERY AND AUTHENTICITY

The profession of architecture historically ascribed great value to the attainment
of mastery over the means of producing a work of architecture, the assumption being
that this type of expertise was a prerequisite for creating noteworthy buildings.
While it was understood that the architect should have some measure of talent,
intelligence, industriousness, and experience, the notion of mastery suggested more
than a combination of these attributes. It posited that the architect should be an
expert in a constellation of working techniques - most unique to the discipline and
many singular to his or her own practice - and should understand the application of
this expertise to be the single defining attribute brought to any project. Tradition-
ally, this expertise was based on a relatively fixed body of knowledge, whether it
was an understanding of the classical orders and principals of proportion, of build-
ing types, of statics, of material properties, of ornamentation, or the development of
artistic skill in draughtsmanship and rendering. In the revolutionary fervor of early
Modernism, historical models and methods for architecture were largely rejected,
replaced by new referents of aesthetics, technology, and politics. However, while
reliance on much of architecture's canonical knowledge ended, a presumption of
mastery - with its attendant body of knowledge and skills - persisted.
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The relationship of mastery t

a work of architecture its gravit
by which work achieves its sense
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and becomes, in itself, resonant
This traditional dependence of au
nying graph.Flg 01
THE REAL PERSPECTA 42
RWKWRRD POSITION / ANDREW ZflGO
207
Predictably, at the novice level, a small increase in expertise can bring about a sig-
nificant improvement in the work produced, while at the master level, large advanc-
es in expertise bring work only asymptotically closer to perfection.
Although this relationship - and the profession's sense of its importance -
has never completely disappeared, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was no
longer taken as axiomatically true. As architecture began to reflect on its own tradi-
tion during its postmodern phase, the twin impulses of revival and critique served
to recast expertise as either historic scholarship to be referenced or as an insidious
tool of control to be unmasked and purged.
It's unlikely that prior to this period of self-reflection, the relationship of
mastery to authenticity presented itself as a problem to architects. The constituent
parts of mastery have, of course, been deeply contested at times, but not the as-
sumption of the mechanism itself. This is no longer the case. The critical tradition
within postmodernism employed irony as a powerful and necessary tool to reveal
and disarm systems of power and suppression, both in architecture and in culture
and politics at large. While liberating, this employment has left in its wake an in-
grained reflex to level an ironic gaze towards any presumption of mastery. This re-
flex casts mastery and traditional authenticity as quixotic beliefs at best and sinister
manipulations at worst.Flg 02
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In the wake of postmodernism

responses to this impasse, which
tecture's ambitions. One respons
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While attempting to arrive at a
confuse the technical for techni
strident strains of Modernism) s
THE REAL PERSPECTR 42
AWKWARD POSITION / ANDREW ZAGO
208
dimension. A third response has been to re-acquire the traditional model of mastery
through a neo-traditional authenticity that transcends irony. In this strain, which
runs from Louis Kahn to Peter Zumthor, mastery incorporates modern abstraction
(thereby avoiding the pitfalls of literal historicism) while simply dismissing the
ironic gaze as a form of theoretical game-playing.
Of these responses, the first - the uncoupling of production from mastery -
has had the most valiance. Its indifference towards expertise has produced novel
architecture while deftly deflecting the withering stare of irony. Although they cede
important aesthetic territory, its proponents are responsible for rekindling the be-
lief in the new for its own sake. The third graph illustrates this trade-off.Flg 03 The
work of easy-expertise is able to pass the irony-horizon, but stops when its tech-
nique mastery is exhausted.
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RWKWRRD POSITION / ANDREW ZRGO
209
The steep angle of approach to the irony-horizon causes neo-traditional architecture

to bounce and fall short, despite its expertise-velocity.
The problem, it seems, is not that the mastery of architecture's material
means is axiomatically impotent, but that nearly all of the traditional ways in
which that mastery has been defined are either irrelevant or simply untenable.
The issue is not to dispense with technique, but to reconceive of technique for a
post-ironic authenticity.
THE ñWKWñRD
At the core of traditional expertise is a sense of correctness. Historically, the canon

of architectural knowledge provided the architect with the instruments to create
work, but it also provided an elaborate reassurance that the work was grounded in
a verified set of presumptions. Today, our faith in these canons has all but vanished,
but there remains the vestigial armature of assumptions and predilections regarding
proportion and form, composition and ornamentation, material expression, and tec-
tonics against which architects either claim or reject the mantle of mastery. That is,
there persists a sense of correctness shaped by the traditional notion of authenticity,
even if architectural work no longer explicitly references it. A post-ironic authen-
ticity could begin by positing techniques that are, by intention, incorrect. Where
traditional mastery strove for a perfection of form, new mastery stumbles into an
awkward position.
The awkward stands in peculiar relation to the correct. It doesn't align with
normative manners, but it doesn't critique them either. It gains its special resonance
by maintaining a clear relationship to larger cultural norms while constructing an
alternate logic within them; neither in step, nor totally out of step. This alternate
logic does not clash with the normative so much as it bumps and grinds against it.
To pursue the awkward in the context of mastery is not so much subversive
as perverse. The awkward requires the architect to perform contrary to his or her
best judgment, to tactically undermine fine-tuned skills in an attempt to define new
and unsettling aesthetic territories. While the awkward runs the risk of appearing
as mere ineptitude, that appearance also gives it the potential to side-step irony. In
its apparent artlessness, it seeks neither to perpetuate the power structure implicit in
traditional mastery nor reduce its role to critical reflection on that structure. Rather,
by opting out of any obvious relation to correctness, the awkward demands a new
set of aesthetic coordinates. To the wedded strategies of assertion and negation, the
awkward appears baffling.
The difference between the awkward and other displays of expertise can be
illustrated through three examples, set in Paris, of tactically distinct approaches to
the inhabitation of urban space. In the first, Gustave Caillebotte's painting La Place
de l'Europe, temps de pluie of 1877, Flg 04 we see Haussmannian boulevards extend
into deep perspective. The flaneurs, as connoisseurs of the street, stroll with its
210
grain, not confronting Paris, but merging their own perambulations with its urban
geometry. Flaneurs practiced a rarified cultural art form that both exploited the form
of the street and depended on its ability to reinforce their own sense of propriety.
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In the second example, a traceur leaps crosswise over a walkway in a Pari-

sian housing project.Flg 05 The traceurs astonishing physical feats (called parkour)
are enthralling not only because of the agility required, but also because his leaps
are a direct counter-point to the intended use of the urban form. A deconstructivist
art form, parkour reveals the presence of embedded social oppression in the form of
the city by working against its grain, thereby highlighting and calling into question
its proscriptive nature. Acting in this way, however, the traceur is as dependent on
the status quo of the urban form as is the flaneur. Both are defined by the existing
city they wish to challenge.
AWKWARD POSITION / ANDREU Z AGO
211
The third example is set in front of the Bibliotheque Nationale/18 06 Here, French
contortionist Pierre-Antoine Dussouillez displays a novel approach to ascending
public stairs. While requiring (one imagines) as much physical dexterity as the tra-
ceur, the intention and the result are markedly different. Neither the staid elegance
of the flaneur nor the edgy grace of the traceur is evident here. Dussouillez is in
error; the discomfiting juxtaposition of limbs renders him incapable of either con-
forming with or acting against the existing urban form. He is also funny. The
absurd transformation of his own figure disarms the proscriptions of the urban fabric
and demands not that he find a way to fit into the existing context, but that a new
urban arrangement account for him.
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Cringe Comedy : The currency of an emerging cultural sensibility can sometimes be mea-
sured in humor before it can be articulated in another form. Something can be funny
before we know why. The awkward, as a sub -category of humor, has become a noted phenom-
enon in recent years. So-called cringe comedy, as practiced by comedian-writers Larry
David or Ricky Gervais, seems to mine new comic territory. Awkwardness blows through
their work like an inevitable and unstoppable force of nature, bringing with it at least
as much discomfort as laughter. They create the sensation of an alternate reality that
is coherent, sensible to many, and embedded within normative experience yet never quite
commensurate with it. The newness and political potency of awkward humor was famously
displayed in the reaction to Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Corre-
spondents' Association Dinner in 2006. His searing performance, targeting both the Bush
administration and the press, was met largely by blank stares from the crowd and was
initially reported in mainstream media outlets as an incoherent flop. However, as word of
the performance spread, it was embraced by many as very funny indeed. More than just a
comic routine, this unsettling satirical performance has come to be regarded as an in-
stance of long-overdue civil disobedience.
THE REfiL PERSPECTfl 42
AWKWARD POSITION / ANDREW ZfìGO
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The awkward necessarily encompasses a wide array of possible applications. There

are at least as many ways to be awkward as to be correct. Its strategic deployment,
however, requires that it appear, at first, incorrect, that it offend refined sensibilities,
and that, as a latent reading, it create an unexpected and novel effect.
Although not yet articulated as such, employment of the awkward is gaining
currency in contemporary culture. One example is the amateur error, which appears
213
in the context of expertise. Thomas Ruff, noted student of the strident perfectionists
Bernd and Hilla Becher, employed this approach in his Jpeg series of photographs.
These indulgently-produced large prints were all derived from images lifted from
the internet. The images were then heavily manipulated, not to enhance them, but
to subject them to extreme file compression. The type of compression used creates
digital artifacts in the images, which is known as quilting.¥lg 07 This usually un-
desirable byproduct of technology typically occurs when one misunderstands file
compression. The intentional quilting of the photos, while at first off-putting, even-
tually yields to the reading of a reticulated skein that creates its own atmospheric
surface, independent of and oscillating with the pictorial content of the photograph.
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A more telling example of the use of amateur error can be shown by con-
trasting Peter Zumthor's baths at ValsFlg 08 with a photograph of Zumthor's Kunst-
haus Bregenz from Hiroshi Sugimoto's Architecture series.Flg 09 At Vals, Zumthor
demonstrates his consummate skills as a master of his craft by stridently clinging to
214
traditional formulations of authenticity. This is evident in his use of stone (a mate-

rial that is not only substantial, but is traditionally understood to be the embodiment
of substantiality), in the expression of that stone and its tectonic arrangement, and
in the formal correctness of the volumes. The Sugimoto photograph, while no less
technically formidable, is out of focus (as are all of the photos in the series). How to
properly focus is an early lesson in photography; the absence of that basic skill in
the work of an expert is baffling. Sugimoto commits an obvious - and intentional -
error, then relies on his expertise to transform the work by incorporating this error,
thereby achieving an uncanny new spatial effect. While the expert architect insists
on displaying his mastery, the expert photographer does not so much hide his mas-
tery as he dislocates it through an unlikely and disarming technique.
FROM BALLOON DOGS TO HERZOG & DE MEURON

Abstraction had a privileged position in architecture and art for most of the 20th
century. Capable of tapping into pure and rarified sensations - and not mediated by
the legibility of meaning required of representation - abstraction was seen as a
vehicle through which one achieved the purely abstract. Furthermore, with the
discrediting of the classical canons, abstraction was seen as a necessary feature of
authenticity. However, abstraction has lost its axiomatic relation to both the abstract
and the authentic. The same mechanisms of irony that render authenticity suspect
have turned the various manifestations of abstraction into nothing more than imag-
ery, as loaded with legible meaning as a Madonna or a Doric column.
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In this context, the representation of banal subject matter (as distinct from
Pop or kitsch) in inappropriate contexts has emerged as an unexpected manifesta-
tion of the awkward, one capable of evading this obstacle to abstraction. In Jeff
Koons's Balloon Dog series, for example, investing the trivial nature of the subject
with an inordinate amount of effort and expense to transform its scale and material-
ity creates astonishing sculptural effects.Flg 10 Although patently representational,
the subject matter is incapable of sustaining meaning, or even of evoking a sense of
surrealistic enigma. The content is dismissible, but perversely, its obvious presence
makes it a Trojan horse for the reading of pure authenticity and abstraction.
Closer to the discipline of architecture are Greg Lynn's tables from his re-
cent Toy Furniture series.Flg 1 1 As with the Balloon Dogs, these tables are formed
from trivial playthings. Unlike the sculptures, they are not a representation of the
toys, but are composed of the toys themselves. The transformation from toy to
table is achieved through the dissection and recombination of multiples of the same
toy, rather than through a change of scale and materiality. The assembly is care-
fully calibrated to fall between the abstraction of Lynn's related Blobwall project
and a representation that is comically inane. While allowing for some degree of the
literalness of Koons's dogs, Toy Furniture suggests that this tactic of banal repre-
sentation has to differ by discipline. The degree of literal representation that proves
effective as sculpture would likely be too strong to succeed as furniture. The formal
success of the tables also suggests that this tactic could shift scales and have an ap-
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Although they are yet to be articulated as such, aspects of the awkward are
already and increasingly finding their way into contemporary practice. No firm has
gone further in exploiting the peculiar potential of the awkward than Herzog & de
Meuron. Having created such building features as the cuspidal edges of the Roche
Tower, Flg 12 the glassed courtyard stuffed with a black rubber box of REHAB
Basel, Flg 13 the oddly drooping cantilever of the de Young Memorial Museum, Flg 14
or the artlessly massed volume of the Schaulager,Flg 15 Herzog & de Meuron
demonstrate the disarming potential of the awkward and the error in expert hands.
THE REAL PERSPECTIV 42
RWKWRRD POSITION / ANDREW ZRGO
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Across the spectrum of practice, architects are creating works that seem to
revel in clumsiness, from Johnston Marklee's Hill HouseFlg 16 to Toyo Ito's Tama
Art University LibraryFlg 17 or OMA's Seattle Public Library.Flg 18 While their
formal attributes are often couched in terms of adherence to programmatic impera-
tives, view corridors, property and setback restrictions, or other non-visual criteria,
these projects seem to go out of their way to be overtly indifferent to formal and
tectonic propriety.
AWKWARD POSITION / ANDREW ZflGO
218
The promise of the awkward in architecture is illustrated in the fourth graph.Flg 19

Awkwardness allows expert work to approach the irony-horizon at a more salient
angle than neo-traditional authenticity. Like easy-expertise, it is able to cross that ho-
rizon. But where easy-expertise is ultimately limited by its lack of mastery, the awk-
ward, in capable hands, can continue on an asymptotic trajectory towards perfection.
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THE AWKWARD AND THE COMPLEX

On one hand, the awkward is presented here as a tactic and not a principle, a pro-
visional approach to a cultural impasse that has hamstrung architecture's access to
authenticity. On the other hand, as with any new sensibility, it has the potential to
reengage the world through its own logics. Part of the efficacy of the awkward, it
seems, is that it suggests a pattern of forms and encounters that, taken individually,
could be easily dismissed as mere novelty, but that, taken in aggregate, point to a
new logic of space. The awkward accumulates as a series of inexplicable instances,
but already these individual points begin to connect and form the ground of a new
landscape of cultural production.
Architecture, as a cultural practice, is imbedded in and coextensive with the
material world. As such, it is simultaneously responsible for its role as cultural arti-
fice and for a degree of fidelity to an evolving sense of reality. The awkward, by op-
erating at the level of technique (that is, by altering the parameters of expertise and
mastery over the material means of architecture) engages this nexus of the artifice
and the real while harnessing unpredictable effects. A valid critique of traditional
mastery is that it aspires to total determination of architecture's means, materials,
and effects/This is no longer a tenable framework for the production of architecture.
Like another related sensibility, the accident , the awkward acknowledges the limits
of instrumental control (the limited viability of the "top-down" model of mastery)
and develops techniques that, by design, produce uncertain and unpredictable results.
In doing so, it does not simply abandon individual volition to the fiction of pure self-
organizing complexity, but rather allows that volition to be inflected by novel and
unlikely possibilities.
THE REAL PERSPECTR 42

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AWKWARD POSITION

Author(s): Andrew Zago

Intentionally awkward conditions occur with increasing frequency across a num-

THE REAL PERSPECTfl 42

MASTERY AND AUTHENTICITY

The relationship of mastery t

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In the wake of postmodernism

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bad degree of success good адчз

The neo-traditional approach,

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The steep angle of approach to the irony-horizon causes neo-traditional architecture

At the core of traditional expertise is a sense of correctness. Historically, the canon

THE REAL PERSPECTfl 42

In the second example, a traceur leaps crosswise over a walkway in a Pari-

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ZUHTHOR US. SUGIMOTO

The awkward necessarily encompasses a wide array of possible applications. There

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traditional formulations of authenticity. This is evident in his use of stone (a mate-

FROM BALLOON DOGS TO HERZOG & DE MEURON

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THE REfiL PERSPECTfì 42

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The promise of the awkward in architecture is illustrated in the fourth graph.Flg 19

THE AWKWARD AND THE COMPLEX

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