Palladio

Methodology

The process will be initiated by performing a comparative analysis on a series of types, including the following methodologies:

1. Analyzing the Semperian elements making up a type

2. Deconstructing the infiltration of politics and culture

3. Unpacking technological innovation

4. Combination/Hybridization of existing types

5. Tracking deviations from the normative

This analysis will allow a theorization of each type in terms of major and minor conditions.

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.

1 + 3 + 9

1.1Architecture is the becoming minor of the major

3.1 Typology is the internalization of external politics and cosmologies by means of conventionalization in dominant spatial strategies.

3.2 According to Deleuze[i], the subversive action of working within a minor language can place a major language in a condition of continuity and variability, in a state of becoming minor itself.

3.3 Within architecture, this deterritorialization of a dominant type opens up the possibility for alternative modes of subjectivity.

9.1 Hegemonic cultural conditions are implicit to dominant architectural type-forms.

9.2 These type-forms condition the experience of space, the playing out of functions, and the interpretation of signs.

9.3 Simply inserting radical, revolutionary alternatives replaces one dominant type with another, the system is absorbed by the cyclical logic of capitalism.

9.4 The goal, therefore, is not novelty for novelty’s sake, but the opening up of possible alternative readings and modes of habitation within existing strictures.

9.5 A resistance to the conditions of capitalist totalization and ideological dominance can be forged by subverting and deterritorializing dominant type-forms.

9.6 It takes two to tango; Deterritorialization does not occur in isolation; it is achieved through the relationship with a repressed other, a minor language latent within the major.

9.7 The process is not uni-directional; it is mutual. Both the dominant and repressed are thrown into states of instability

9.8 The result is a heterotopic space, pregnant with multiple readings, experiences, and possibilities, sending ripples through a larger field of cultural discourse.

9.9 Architecture is the opening up of states of becoming by operating within and against itself.

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[i] See Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. especially pages 104-105, 174-75.

Of Huts and Heresy… Architecture is?

A warning: this is sketchy and as yet unclear.

Architecture is the overcoming of the Metaphysics of Presence

- Peter Eisenman

Architecture is the battle between the interior and the exterior

- Robert Venturi

Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Architecture is discourse. Architecture is ontology. Architecture is politics.

During the great Enlightenment search for origins, the noble construct of the primitive hut was employed by endless theorists in hope of articulating an archaeology of architecture’s essence. Laugier championed the simple nature of reason, Rousseau the gathering of the social, Lafitau the symbolic, and Quatremere de Quincy saw architecture as a language referring to the character embedded in the type it embodied.

Architecture is the representation of nature

Architecture is the locus of the social

Architecture is a language of conventions

Architecture is the infinite multiplicity of its own possibility

Despite pedestrian connotations, in theorizing architecture as the mediator between inside and outside, Venturi accomplished something rather profound. By reducing the façade to a single surface, he divested architecture of unnecessary structural articulation in favor of the flat semantic games of the decorated shed, reminiscing the lost origins of architecture’s communicative capacity in the textile sheathing of Semper’s primitive hut.

Yet, if taking liberties, another meaning can be projected onto Venturi’s axiom. Architecture is the battle between the interior of its own discipline and its exterior. Venturi rejected the interior references of modernism for the external references of Las Vegas and simple relationships of sign systems for complex ones.

Decades later Peter Eisenman assumed a slightly more sophisticated stance by conceiving of architecture as not merely language, but writing. In seeking the “becoming unmotivated of the sign,” Eisenman destabilized the conventional relationship between sign and signified. As the deconstructivist par excellence increasingly developed his ideas as unique from Derrida, Eisenman invested more in the notion of architecture as an autonomous discourse. This is why Jeff Kipnis refers to Eisenman as a heretic. He subverts doctrines while never straying from the faith.

Typology is the internalization of the external by means of conventionalization.

If we follow Quatremere, we find that the instantiation of type is where the external enters into architecture. The nomadic life style yields the light constructive type of the tent. There is a relationship between a mode of dwelling and the original type.

If then we employ architecture as a discourse as Eisenman desires, we understand through Quatremere that architecture not only links signs to referents, but that it is in communication with its own ontology, the nature of its very being.

Therefore, the destabilization of an architectural type is an assault on the power relations, the modes of domesticity, and the myriad other values embedded within it. One need not stray to an alternative externality to reorient architectural value systems.

It is here that I look to Delueze for strategies of resistance and deterritorialization to open up the repressed other within dominant architectural type forms.

Architecture is the opening up of states of becoming by operating within and against itself.