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.