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Architecture i Theory i since 1968 edited by K. A/licliael Hays

In the discussion of architecture, the prevaihng sentiment of the

past three decades has been that cultural production can no longer

be understood to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course,

but is constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical

procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various

stripes—poststructuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoana­

lytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric—has given scholars a

range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields

and for reasserting architecture's general importance in intellectual

discourse.

This long-awaited anthology is in some sense a sequel to Joan

Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology

(1993). It presents forty-seven of the primary texts of contempo­

rary architecture theory, introducing each by detailing the concepts

and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It

also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major

theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear

here in English for the first time.

K. Michael Hays is Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard

University.

"Hays has done architectural discourse a great service. . . . This col­

lection insistently raises important questions and helps us elucidate

problems that might not have otherwise occurred to us."

John Biln, Architecture

" I f his masterwork becomes universally adopted by schools of

architecture. Hays may yet reverse the current situation where it is

rare to fmd two architects in the same room who have read any­

thing in common at all."

Isabel Allen, Architects'JournuI

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Architecture i Theory i since 1968 edited by K. Michael Hays

Robin Evans In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind

The Frontal Subject ^ The trouble with most criticism, and particularly that brand of interpretive criticism associated with iconology, is that meaning is assumed to exist behind, beneath or within the subjects of criticism. The task of the critic is to delve into, uncover, disclose, reveal, divulge, discover, unfold and show to the reader what lies hidden or unseen, to get to the bottom of things, to plumb the depths, fo see beneath the surface behind the curtain. Behind and beneath are metaphors, since there is no real space surrounding events or objects that is made visible by criticism, but i f we allow ourselves to be drawn into the trope, then we might well ask what hes beside, above and in front of the subjects of criticism too. What is it that excludes these other positions from notice?

The spatial metaphor places the critic as well as the things he regards Whatever he talks about, he faces, and by a trick of anthropomorphization the subject faces him. Or at least this is frequently imagined to be the relation. The metaphor of looking would alone be enough to ensure the positioning of the sub­ject in front of the critic (and i f we do not look into subjects, we approach them— no less frontal an attitude). Yet it is the face-to-face relationship between the critic and his subject that has the greatest effect because with it comes the idea that the phenomena which are presented to us through our senses are presented as front­ages, facades, things that signify what they stand in front of So it is that the critic may look at his subject as i f it were some kind of projection whose meaning is assured by the fact that it is addressed toward him. All the world can still be a stage, and it is then our business to find out what supports the illusion or what gives rise to the representation. Aspects of reality that cannot be thought of in terms of this privileged orientation become more recalcitrant to interpretation because no clue is given as to where we should stand or what we should look toward. As it is, the spatial metaphor leaves us in no doubt; it leads under the skin, beneath the surface' through the frame, behind the stage, beyond the facade.

Often the spatial metaphor is itself already a metaphor of time, but in this instance space and time are interchangeable. Beneath and behind trans­late easily into a chronological before. Time passes; we look back. Sediments accu­mulate; we dig. The face-to-face relationship, no longer possible across time, is replaced by an equivalent arrangement in which the present is construed as a pro­jection of the past, an accessible reahty offering evidence of previous events that can only be recovered through it. Extending from the past it eclipses, the present is turned into the facade of history

The line of sight engendered by the spatial metaphors of hid­den meaning, whether single or doubled, whether expressed in space or spatialized time sets the critic in search of origins, essences, intentions, motives, causes, for these are the things that lie behind appearances. He looks therefore to find some animating or authenticating agency that wi l l account for whatever he confronts. The critics task is always to confront. The pressure of these harmless metaphors

EVANS I 1984 I 483

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at face value. " ^uty not to take things

imported by metapho ' r l Ï lheTrhic 'a l " ' ' ^ f " anthropomorphism ject as general issues but ^ t h e p^S^^^^^^^^ ^ ^ - " ' ^ ^ " ^ cism, there would seem rather £ r c a X " " " " " °^ ^ " given far greater plausibihty by he pre i e o " V ' ' ^ " " - ' ^ ^ ^ ^̂ ^̂ ^̂ "̂ ^̂ P their work often with considerLl. f ' " ^ '"^^'^ Present Would we not b T p e r f ^ f " t i f i d " t .ranted when such r̂:l:r?̂̂ ^̂̂ ^̂̂ ^̂̂ — P artists intention to orient the work to^.rJsnsU.tZlf ' " '"^"^"'^ kmds recent drawings may suggest oth::wise ^ '̂̂ ^^^

Lines without Bodies

overall effect is one of sr.iH r sufficient distance the

close range o a^ one t e T '^^^^ ^'^^^ of the recLgular^ra^e L t ; 3 e d ^̂ ^̂ ^̂ ^̂ ^̂ ^ ''^'''^'^^ ^^^^^^r energy of line within. It is energy h r d t d e c r be f - ^ T ^ ^ ^ expressive of neither velocirv f n r . . n ^^^^nbe, for the lines themselves are

human qualities—febrile .aii.f.H A 1 ' ^"""^^ ^° attribute cause these are J h t e a u r f H ^ " P ' ' hesitant-to mere lines. Be-

us. S ,n ,„„ d e l t t Z J ' " J ™ * » *»'=<i

« d e ,0 p . „ d„„„;Tx;r/, i r ; r̂r,j;r;: - -to lhis line of cntical enquiry ' ^'"^ "P'^ue

when stalkin, ,hel, o n ™ ' i n ' * ^'T"* ° » = ' » s

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are a kind of writing (Eisenman); that they are spatiaUzed scores, musical translations (Forster), pictures ofthe soul (Hejduk), anamorphoses (Forster). It is not that they lack circumspection. Eisenman is aware that his recommending that Chamber Worlcs be read like writing "insists on their having a significance that as graphics they could not have." Hejduk and Rossi (whose contribution is, incidentally, very good) recog­nize the inexphcable in them. Yet they cannot help but treat Chamber Works as having hidden meaning. The machinations of appreciative language force them to fabricate virtual meanings for the drawings to represent in place of what they know they can­not find—and remarkably inventive about it they are—but can their claims to have discovered the modes of representation (if not the content made apparent by the representation) be sustained?

Take the hieroglyphic. For several centuries the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics posed immense problems in Europe, but at the same time held the promise of revealing the secrets of arcane knowledge direct from the fount of civilization. In the popular imagination, which remembers when men and dino­saurs shared the earth, the hieroglyphics are still undeciphered. We do not so easily allow such exquisite mysteries to be trampled on by the advance of palaeography, the quest for the secret being so much more interesting than its eventual recovery It is in this state of latent revelation that Rossi employs the word hieroglyphics to describe Libeskind's drawings. Behind the indecipherable marks there lies locked something about which we remain ignorant, perhaps a lost empire of meaning which we could disinter i f only we had the key It is an enchanting thought, almost irresistible and nonetheless so for one obvious difference. The men who carved the hieroglyphs knew what they meant. Daniel Libeskind claims no such authority in regard to his own work.

His procedure is therefore more like augury than writing: first form the signs, knowing only how, never what, and then look to see i f they signify anything: sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, sometimes good ilews, some­times bad, sometimes nothing. Such a procedure shifts the weight of meaning from behind to in front, from before to after, from the verifiable to the unverifiable, and, as we have already noted, twentieth-century interpretation finds these positions difficult to identify—let alone deal with.

There can be little doubt that Chamber Worlïs are in some way sys­tematic, but they are certainly not a system of conventionaHzed notation or represen­tation. Nor are they writing, hieroglyphics, scores, pictures of the soul or of any other part substantial or ineffable. They are more like the tea-leaves in the cup, the spilt entrails of the eviscerated dove, distributions made in such a way that they can­not be fully understood even by their author.

Returning now to the issue of opacity, it may be useful to com­pare the Chamber Worlcs with Micromegas, a series exhibited by Libeskind in 1979 and similar to Chamber Worfa in technique and format. Employing the ambiguities of archi­tectural projection as their starting-point, Micromegas disrupt the homogeneous, con­tinuous space of axonometry and isometry into a multitude of conflicting spaces. The series is easy to place within the context of modern art, i f not modern architecture; it Delongs to the class of works that investigate fluctuating representations of space and surface. Synthetic Cubist paintings are of this class, so are some of Lissitzky's Proun compositions, the drawings of Josef Albers and the canvases of Al Held. Ah are occu­pants of that fascinating world of visual ambiguity extolled by Ernst Gombrich. The Micromegas, however unrelenting their destruction of unified picture space, are mas­terly compositions; abstract but eminently three-dimensional, belonging to an estab-ished convention of pictorial fragmentation.

After Micromegas, Libeskind's drawings turned back from abstrac­tion. The Secret Life of Vegetables (1981) and Se guarderai le stelle sanza razzi (As Is Done through a Little

EVANS 1984 [ 485

Hole) (1981), for instance, are built up from recognizable fragments of machines instruments, architecture, furniture, limbs and diagrams. Composed of figurative ele­ments embodied in space, they are relatively transparent to normal interpretation, the iconographer s dream, in fact: piles of recondite images, lashings of derived ex­pression. Let loose on these, our essayists would not need to have racked their own brains so hard and could more easily have ransacked Libeskind's; the door ofthe safe was wide open.

By complete contrast, figure and space are nearly absent in Chamber Worlcs, not quite absent but nearly so. A floating nest of semi-breves here, comical crotchets on ruptured staves there; resolution into cipher^ike bits is occa­sional and partial, no more than enough to suggest a resemblance, never ahowing the sign-like element, whether decapitated stick figure, cross, checkerboard or mascot Mondrian, to break free of the lines of which it is made, lines which refuse to synthe­size into bodies, but which for courtesy's sake leave clues as to sources of inspiration. Like animal crackers in my soup, these little hints are more diverting than nutritional. The tendency in the work, in any case, is away from recognizability toward what Libeskind himself refers to as "remoteness."' What is so remarkable is the near total disengagement from signification of any kind. Such a condition is immensely diff i ­cult to achieve; mere abstraction does not begin to approach it.

But are the Chamber Works not in some way spatial representa­tions, as suggested by Forster, however far removed from ordinary experience? The answer turns out to be no. not, anyway, the kind of space that has to be thought and constructed into existence by the draftsman. Micromegas, which derive ultimately from the Cubist enterprise and look similar to the works of Al Held, were easy to place in the history of modern art; Chamber Worlcs are not. Family likenesses are harder to come by They have something to do with Kandinsky's musical compositions, perhaps also with the architectural sketches by Erich Mendelsohn that were drawn while listening to records on the phonograph and titled according to their inspiration. Perhaps the graphical work of Hans Hartung or Roberto Crippa in the 1950s, of Joel Fisher or Sol LeWitt more recently all distant relatives at best. Another kind .of opacity No one to talk about. No transactions to record. No past to reconstruct.

Micromegas were eminendy spatial; Chamber Worlcs allow of only the most detached and uncertain spatial interpretation. The drawings are made of lines that intersect but hardly ever meet. Each ofthe myriad is a separate construction that begins and ends in its own good time, not joining to another of its kind. The work of a line, its functions, the things it does other than just being a line, are to divide one territory from another, to enclose areas, to join points, to mark paths. This is what they do as edges, traces, contours, trajectories, vectors. The lines of Chamber Worlcs do not do any of these things. Though perfectly regular in construction, and looking as i f they belonged to geometry, they may well be amongst the least geometrical lines ever drawn.

Since Descartes demonstrated the relationship between geomet­rical figures and algebraic functions, mathematicians have understood that geometry can do without lines, but here are neat Euclidean lines that do without geometry or, to qualify the absolute proscription, lines which on occasion more or less acciden­tally deposit geometrical figures in the same way that they occasionally engender signs. Yet despite their lack of employment in normal business, despite their individ­ualization, the lines do interact by drifting in parallel sets, intersecting, pairing up into ribbon forms which sometimes intertwine in complex knots (the only deliber­ately illusionistic device, since the first strip drawn ends up appearing to be on top, as ff it had been the last laid). They float together in loose formation or condense into tight fibrous bunches.

Without representing space, any of the Chamber Worlcs can be fanta­sized into three dimensions, given sufficient volition in the observer, for the space is thought into them by him, not projected out of them by the draftsman. The uniform Tne of the architectural pen helps Libeskind to avoid constructing illusions of space in the drawings, but what is curious, and very impressive, is that even within the narrow confines of his chosen medium a dynamic potency emanates from some­where. The mechanically regulated line is not an obvious choice for the evocation of movement.

Engraving, which permits far greater expression of line than a Rotring pen, proved incapable of transferring the vital qualities of cartoons or paint­ings into prints. Marcantonio, excellent in his craft, tried to perform this service for Raphael, and the world he managed to recreate in lines looked as i f it had been steeped in toffee in between times. Libeskind has found a way to make the laborious traipse of upright pen into a frigid calligraphy which does not transfer real qualities of movement into lines (making them porters of their own origin) but invokes kinds of motion unconnected to actions previously performed.

Fragmentation has been the leitmotif of Libeskind's work. First impressions of Chamber Works might lead one to think that it continues to be so. Even the subtitle, "Architectural Meditations on Themes from tieraclitus," helps by impli­cation to confirm it, since Iferaclitus is known to us only through fragments. A co -ection of odd epigrams and sentences from diverse sources, he, Fieraclitus, has to DC reconstituted from bits like an amphora stuck together by archaeologists. Frag­mentation assumes the possibility, theoretical i f not practical, of reconstructing an original that has been broken, of putting together the busted vase. In the past, Libes­kind has exploited the psychotic ambivalence of the technique which may either register a delight in smashing things up or sadness in surveying the shattered scene. Yet fragmentation has to be figurative because only things with a constitution can be broken.

Unity and fragmentation are the two major contrasted modes of twentieth-century composition in architecture as well as painting. A classic dialec­tical pair, married and bickering, they are unable to carry on without each other. The Chamber Worlcs do not move towards unity, nor are they subject to fragmentation. It took me a while to realize that there was nothing to be broken, no virtual space, no subject matter, no substructure, no geometry. Lines that do not make bodies cannot

broken. The discovery of this area outside of unity and fragmentation may be the greatest single achievement of the series.

So it looks as i f all direct communication from the draftsman through the drawing to the observer has been sabotaged by the former. The re­maining signs we may call politenesses; the carry-over of resemblances from earlier works, residua; the words surrounding the project, extraneous. Despite being under the protection of an ancient sage, the past of these drawings is vanishing before our eyes. Yet one transmitted message comes through clearly, and it is propagated not by the individual drawings but by their assembly into a set.

The twenty-eight drawings divide into two groups of fourteen, one group vertical in format, one horizontal. They were, it turns out, exhibited in­correctly. Hung in straightforward sequence, 1 to 14, they should rather have been paired: numbers 1 and 14, 2 and 13, 3 and 12, 4 and 11,5 and 10, 6 and 9, 7 and 8 in the horizontal series, and likewise with the vertical. Pythagoras, referred to in Libeskind's introduction through a quotation from Heraclitus as "the prince of im­postors," makes his presence felt. The number 28 is a summation of integers 1 to 7, a Pythagorean operation. There are 7 pairs in each group of drawings and the sequence numbers of each pair add always to 15.

EVANS 1984 487

The drawings decrease in breadth or width from 2:1 (nothing could be more reverent to convention) to 200:1 (nothing could be less like the things we recognize as drawings). The drawings made out of lines end up turning into a line, provoking the thought that every line could be a world to itself composed also ofa multitude of lines, and so on.

As exhibited, there was a strong suggestion of a plane rotating on a horizontal, then a vertical axis. The anamorphosis, noted by Forster, is this ap­pearance of rotation into the obhque. Hung as Libeskind would have wished, this effect would be largely obhterated; the proportional contraction in the drawings would then be easier to imagine as a compression than as a three-dimensional rotation.

Which leaves the numbers; they are, I think, hardly more than a framing to the drawings, an external principle of organization. Rossi, though, sees them as a pointer towards integral meaning. I f they are, it is a pity because, by point­ing straight backwards, they break through the opacity to frontal interpretation constructed with such careful brilhance by Libeskind. Ironic, too. Pythagorean math­ematics is not only ancient, it is antiquated. It is the subject of intense mystification arising from the behef that Number is the informing principle behind reality Now, Chamber Worlcs, as we have seen, manage to disengage the drawing from its own his­tory—an awesome accomplishment, as the draftsman, allowing himself no certainty at any point, gives himself nothing to lean on except his elbows. The separation between systems of representation and the aspects of reality they normally stand for (the celebrated uncoupling of signifier and signified in linguistics) has not been ap­plied to architecture in this or any other way before, despite large importations of devalued semiological currency into architectural journahsm. Nor is it an idea de­rived exclusively from linguistics. While Saussure was giving his seminal lectures in Lausanne in 1913, modern painting was well on the way to disengaging itself from illustration. But the most conclusive and spectacular severance between reahty and its bonded representation occurred nearly a century before, when the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss devised logically rigorous geometries, as internally consistent as the common-sensical Euclidean variety, but which could not apply to real space. From which developed the now common idea that mathematics has absolutely no preordained affinity with nature but is an independently derived system of correla­tions. Capable, perhaps, of sometimes running in step with nature, it is capable also of traversing vast areas of the possible but unreal: a marvelous new power. So, whether or not Pythagoras was in his own time "prince of impostors," he certainly plays that role in Chamber WorJcs, for his magical numbers that make the world—the ultimate hidden meaning—are as alien from Libeskind's project as it is possible to be.

Architecture without Building So far the drawings have been reviewed without particular reference to architecture in an attempt to find out how they are constituted. In describing how opaque they are to frontal interpretation, how they refuse to make manifest a meaning that lies behind them, they have been characterized in largely negative terms. But then i f we cannot look behind them, we must look in front for the things that the drawing might yet suggest, might lead to, might provoke; in short, for what is potent in them rather than what is latent. Such a posture of observation is maintained by Libeskind himself when he talks of Rossi's Teatro del Mondo, suggesting the question as to whether the 'no longer' of modern architecture actually belongs to its very own 'not

I f this posture is adopted, then criticism as we know it would have only a marginal function, soon exhausted, that of showing the inexplicabiUty

of the work. Interpretation would otherwise have to mutate into another form, with an entirely different orientation, revealing potency not latency. It would become as uncertain an enterprise as any kind of search not assured of at least the possibility of verification. In the meantime my intention is no more than to indicate the empty space outside the interpretive cone of vision, pointing out its qualitative difference from the space within.

The much exercised question "What have they to do with archi­tecture?" may overshadow some qualities of Chamber Works not entailed in the answer. Nevertheless, it can hardly be ignored. Nothing, some say Then there are those who would admit them as a boundary condition, anything further removed from the basic business of making buildings being inadmissible. There are those who might follow Eisenman in describing them as Not-Architecture, a category related by direct oppo­sition. There may be those who would see them the way Werner Oechslin saw Micro­megas,̂ as a graphic exemplification of qualities that could not so well be achieved in Duilding, an imaginative overspill (he compared Libeskind to Piranesi).

Always metaphors of extremity are employed, and there is good cause for this, but I would like to treat the question differently by altering the position of Chamber Worlcs in the metaphor. Suppose the word "architecture," instead of having its center somewhere over a block in Portland, Oregon, had its center close to these drawings. It is not just a center of interest that is being talked about, but a center of activity, an epicenter. Then whatever is renounced in the drawings (and there is a strong renunciation in them) would be excluded from architecture's central con­cerns. Whatever is detached from the drawings wi l l fall away from the word. Build­ing, space, image, program; the essences and crutches of architecture in Pordand would be centrifuged to the outer edge of the subject, maybe beyond. At the center, a way of drawing that makes use of architectural instruments—set-square, parallel motion, drafting pens, drawing board—but otherwise requires litde external suste­nance. Architecture would be moved from building to drawing, which is more like moving from Chicago to Paris than discovering the Antipodes, in so far as the manner of working is concerned. In one way this is a restoration: drawing once again the fountainhead of architectural creation. In another way it is a truncation. Architecture, which has always involved drawing before building, can be split into prior and subse­quent activities: design and construction. The building can be discarded as an unfor­tunate aftermath, and all the properties, values, and attributes that are worth keeping can be held in the drawing; perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that

they retract back into the drawing. And it is true that the imaginative work of architecture has for a

long time been accomplished almost exclusively through drawing, though mani­fested almost exclusively in building. The great peculiarity of architecture as a visual art (a peculiarity it nevertheless shares with orchestral, choral, operatic works and, to a lesser extent, film) is the considerable distance between the process of composi­tion and the thing being composed. By truncating architecture and disposing of building, an intimacy between a way of designing and the thing designed is achieved.

The architect can travel hght. His work does not now involve him in the tedious entropy of getting something built, nor in the dubious politics of improving social conditions, nor in the appalling sycophancy of chent-sucking, nor in reconstructing his personality to fit his job. Libeskind, when asked to explain his work, wi l l talk instead about architecture in general. Sometimes he wi l l say that ar­chitecture is no longer possible. Once it was, but not now. Sometimes, when drawn, he wi l l nevertheless claim that his work is architecture. He moves with the tools of his trade, like a refugee. He does the same thing in a different place, starting from scratch, not as a colonist but as an emigrant. The Chamber Worlcs are prefaced with a luminous quotation which I repeat in full :

EVANS 1984 I 489

"What do you suppose that white line in the sky that you saw from the crack in the cattle-car on your way to Stutthof really was?" the interviewer asked Elaine some thirty years later in her Brooklyn home.

"You see, in order to survive you must believe in something, you need a source of inspiration, of courage, something bigger than yourself, something to overcome reality The line was my source of inspiration, my sign from heaven.

"Many years later, after liberation, when my children were growing up, I reahzed that the white line might have been fumes from a passing airplane's exhaust pipe, but does it really matter?""^

In the uncompleted there is always possibility In an event cut off from its origins there is promise.

There are plenty of people who, either practicing architecture as we know it. or having given it up, regard it, like Libeskind, as fundamentally cor­rupt, but it is just opinion and it makes no real difference to the way anything hap­pens. Except one. Those who stay console themselves with dreams of a Golden Age. Contemporary architecture, they say. is in a state of degeneracy has lost its meaning and, although it cannot recover its original significance in full , its lost past becomes, for them, a subject of endless reminiscence, a droning noise of quotations, images, models and derivations. The great mumble.

Libeskind too believes that much has been lost, but because the loss is irretrievable, he realizes there is no point in repetition and only sentiment in reminiscence. Instead, by cutting out the aspects of architecture that are brimful of meaning—its ah too vivid meaning as a social, economic and pohtical process of construction—he allows for the construction of lines in the sky Like Elaine in the catde-truck, Libeskind invokes a principle of transcendence conditionally the lost past of architecture, perhaps even now recognized as an enabling fiction.

So, yes, i f the center of architecture moved over here it would leave a lot behind. Marvelous. More to be said. Not now. Soon someone might even ask whether it is possible to escape from the truck, and how.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

Daniel Libeskind, "Versus the Old Estabhshed Language of Architecture," Daidalos 1. no. 1 (1981), p. 98. Daniel Libeskind. "Deus ex Machina/Machina ex Deo: Aldo Rossi's Theatre of the World," Oppositions 21 (1980), p. 20. Werner Oechslin, "From Piranesi to Libeskind," Daidalos 1. no. 1 (1981), pp. 15-19. The source is Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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