Response to Liz + Lowell

For some reason, I can't get this to show up as a comment on Liz's blog, even when broken into pieces, so I'm posting it here.

The original post: http://archthesis2011-duray.blogspot.com/2010/09/reply-to-lowell.html

Although, I agree that employing the Parthenon as a spectacle is using it as a political and economic device or as an aesthetic object from which one can derive artistic pleasure. But the term use has very specific utilitarian connotations, to clear up these confusions, it would be useful to posit a more specific definition. Do you mean teleology? Function? Interpretation? Yes, interpretation is a cultural function, but if you include everything in your definition, what does the term contribute to your investigation?

1.Does the term “use” imply a subject-object relationship between the “user” and the object?

It is true that with interpretation, the “user” carries a set of cultural predilections and imposes upon the object a particular meaning. Likewise, programmatic use is similarly imposed. The children who play upon the topology of Eisenman’s memorial in Berlin impose upon it a use, ignoring the authorial will.

Yet, what about the sublime, for instance? What happens when architecture imposes upon the inhabitant its particular logic? The sublime is not an interpretation; it is a reaction. This reaction may vary; it may even be subjective. But, the user does not employ the building for some end. The inhabitant is not using the building, merely experiencing it.

The human condition is at least partially an effect of its environment.

2. Foucault famously disconnected form and function by showing that a school can be converted with equal likelihood to a monastery or a prison. In “AA Memoir,” Rem equally depicts the tenuous relationship between object and meaning.

Yet, are there not affects and effects that belong specifically to formal characteristics? An elongated rectangle cannot be assigned the concept of roundness. Foucault’s school, monastery, and prison assume different social meanings yet enforce the same affect. Isolation is common to all; only, in the monk it is a meditative virtue, while in the prisoner and the schoolboy, it is oppression. While the isolation can be interpreted negatively or positively, it is inherent and autonomous to the formal type itself.

3. Doesn’t this autonomy open up the possibility for a reading of architecture that is separate from use? For instance, in Mies’s generic pavilion type, can we not read the contradicting characteristics of the type-element of the grid and the type-element of the plinth, without regard to any function? Can not we derive meaning out of these semiological pairings? An elaboration of autonomous semiological pairings in Art can be found in Hubert Damisch and Rosalind Krauss).

My point is that there is always information embedded in architecture, as ordered matter, even if it is a hut in the woods that nobody sees. The interpretations come when a subject interacts with that matter yes, but the particular matter assemblage conditions and limits the possibilities of that interpretation.