Crisis of the Object

The Architecture of Theatricality

Gevork Hartoonian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134172092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Looking back over the twentieth century, Hartoonian discusses the work of three major architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, in reference to their theoretical positions and historicizes presentarchitecture in the context of the ongoing secularization of the myths surrounding the traditions of nineteenth century architecture in general, and, in particular, Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic.

Providing a valuable contribution to the current debates surrounding architectural history and theory, this passionately written bookmakes valuable reading for any architect.

CHAPTER 1: THE CRISIS OF THE OBJECT

We belong to the future. We must put ourselves into it, each one at his situation. We must not plant ourselves against the new and attempt to retain a beautiful world, one that must perish. Nor must we try to build, with creative fantasy, a new one that claims to be immune to the ravages of becoming. We have to formulate the recent. But that we can only do if we say yes to it; yet with incompatible heart we have to retain our awareness of all that is destructive and inhuman in it. Our time is given to us as a soil on which we stand, as a task that we have to master.

- Romano Guardini

THESE WORDS OF ROMANO GUARDINI have not lost their allure even today at the dawn of this new century.¹ Like many other thinkers of his time, Guardini seemingly addresses the sensitive issue of cultural heritage and the ways its foundation should be shaken and readjusted according to the demands of the “present”. Contemporary history is full of instances of architects’ attempts to rethink architecture in the context of socio-cultural and technical imperatives of modernity. From the 1914 debate of the Werkbund, concerning architecture of Sachlichkeit, to Peter Eisenman’s advocacy for the “Futility of Objects”,² architecture is relentlessly reformulating itself according to formal and contextual factors. It is the intention of this volume to discuss the theoretical issues pertinent to the crisis of the object, thus historicizing contemporary architectural praxis. Of interest is the thematic shift from construction to surface, a subject central to the advocates of the international style architecture, but more important is the current turn to “surface”, despite or because of the proliferation of media technologies. The project’s importance has to do with the early modernist infatuation with the machine, but also with the fact that it is not the image of machine any more but the very technique itself that determines the processes of design and perhaps the final form of architecture. In spite, or perhaps because of the crisis of the object, a comprehensive understanding of the present state of architecture demands a rethinking of the thematic of the disciplinary history of architecture. Central to the objectives of this book is Gottfried Semper’s discourse on theatricality and its theoretical potentiality in offering a different interpretation of the dialogue between construction and “expression” that permeates contemporary architecture.

The title of this introduction recalls André Breton’s text, “The Crisis of the Object”, published in 1932.³ Against the early modernists’ intention to transform artifacts according to the vicissitudes of technology, Breton and other surrealists presented a project of reconstitution of the object that in one way or another would problematize the total and smooth transformation of the traditional object into the “new”. Their project also differed from the romantic nostalgic yearning for craftsmanship and the desire to defuse the drive of mechanization that was shaking the ethics and moralities with which the guild system was imbued. The weight of the antinomies of modernity did indeed haunt the architectural tendencies permeating both the Bauhaus School, and the work of architects like Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, to mention two figures among a few others, whose view of the crisis of the object remained peripheral to the mainstream of the Bauhaus.

The impact of technology on art and architecture is a complex one. Mechanization and industrial production posed problems for artistic activity that had no precedent in works of art created under a pre-industrial production system. The history of the Werkbund School in Germany, the decorative arts in France, and the arts and crafts movement in England demonstrate the complex and manifold issues involved with the phenomenon of the crisis of the object. To sustain a reasonable trade balance around the turn of the last century, each industrialized nation had to have an answer for the questions of how to reorganize a system of apprenticeship appropriate to the new educational institutions, or how to accommodate design skills developed in the old guilds to the needs and technical skills imposed by the industrial production system, and, more importantly, how “to resolve the conflict of interest between artists and manufacturers.⁴” And yet, if we broaden the scope of industrialization beyond the Romantics and their legitimate concern for the dehumanization brought about by mechanization, then the relationship between style and production is another issue that should be attributed to the socio-technical difficulties caused by the abolition of the guilds.⁵ Many groups involved in the production of industrial commodities had no choice but to collaborate with each other within the newly established institutions. In spite or because of this development, the question concerning the crisis of the object retained its own momentum for the reason that architecture exercises a complex relationship both with its own disciplinary history, and with the technical and programmatic needs unleashed by modernization.

Most European architects, in one way or another, participated in the debate for the New Objectivity, i.e. the Neue Sachlichkeit.⁶ The early modernists sought to dress both the interior space and the exterior body of architecture with a garment that was cut according to the aesthetics of abstraction; a plain form devoid of any ornamentation.⁷ Le Corbusier even proposed a new vision of the city to rise above the ashes of the old one. Others, like Mondrian and the de Stijl group, saw that the time was ripe for the integration of architecture with painting and the city. Central to understanding these artists and architects is the idea of total design, one implication of which was to make homologies between private and public spaces. Another was to see the project of modernity embodying ideas and visions that framed ensembles unaccessible to the horizons experienced in pre-modern life-world. One might go further and suggest that even Loos’s dichotomy between interior and exterior spaces, and his belief that only tombs and monuments deserve the name architecture, were indeed his way of endorsing the nihilism of technology, and the need for a different concept of objectivity.⁸

Modernization forced architects and historians to respond to the unfolding conflict between what, after Fritz Neumeyer’s reading of Otto Wagner’s architecture,⁹ might be called the “culture of stone” and the rising spatial and visual sensibilities invigorated by steel and glass structures. What some historians have termed “realist architecture”¹⁰ is a reference to the theoretical transformations brought about in response to the situation wrought by the techniques of industrialization, but also Semper’s discourse on monument, ornament and the tectonic. Equally important was another nineteenth-century German architect, Carl Botticher, and his observation that the spatial potentialities of the so-called “stone culture” were exhausted, and thus the need for architects to explore the artistic and spatial potentialities vested in new structural materials like iron.¹¹ The abstract forms of the International Style formulated around the 1930s nullified the dialectical synthesis of tradition and modernity expressed in the realist architecture. Again, the date recalls Breton’s article and the surrealists’ refusal to see and construct the object merely in terms of the organic or mechanistic paradigms at work since the modernization of the production process.¹² But were there equivalent developments taking place in architecture?

Again, Loos’s architecture comes to mind. His work, unlike the abstract and homogeneous white architecture of the International Style, brings together the architectonic experience of the vernacular, modern and even classical traditions, presenting a work that is not uniform but hybrid. Equally important is Loos’s criticism of the Bauhaus’s blind reliance on technology, and the school’s theoretical shortcomings in making a distinction between the objet d’art and the utilitarian object. While this aspect of his work demonstrates the gap separating Loos from the avant-garde, it does not suggest that there is no place for tradition in Le Corbusier’s architecture: it is rather the level of abstraction involved in his early work that is in question. Loos’s simultaneous esteem for tradition and modernity presents a vision of objectivity in which technology does not reduce the object to its mirror image; it rather helps to save the claim of the past, i.e. the culture of building, without denying the usefulness of modern technology. When this is established, then one might propose the centrality of the concept of montage in architecture whose use and implications differ from those of film and the work of surrealists. There is another reason for introducing the concept of montage: it recalls Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “wish-images” which, as will be demonstrated shortly, was instrumental in understanding the shortcomings of the project of surrealism and the esteem for Sachlichkeit.

That the concept of montage was instrumental in modernism is obvious. What needs to be addressed here is the role montage might play when the act of representation is informed by images of a technical nature. The proliferation of computer technologies has shifted the interest of architects from the tectonic of the final product to its surface. For many, the early modernists’ concern for the impact of industrial building techniques on architecture is no longer a formative theme. This line of thinking is supported by the belief that the building industry, especially in America, has been unable to introduce new materials and techniques, thus the impossibility of changing the “image” of architecture beyond that of modernism. From this point of view, the use of glass, steel and even new synthetic materials in the architecture of the past two decades has not pushed the tectonic thinking beyond what the Dom-ino frame has to offer.¹³ By modifying existing techniques, however, the building industry is slowly accommodating its products and techniques to the architects’ esteem for virtual images. Thus we observe the moment of departure from the postmodern concept of both–and, and architecture’s entry into the world of spectacle, i.e. theatricalization, the expressionistic forms of which can be associated with the virtual fluidity of capital and the information industries as capital achieves global domination.

A brief examination of the most celebrated architectural work supports the claim that, for some, the architectural form has little to do with poetic articulation. What is obvious today is an aesthetic form whose animated body can be associated with Benjamin’s idea of the phantasmagoria, or the aesthetic of what Karl Marx termed commodity fetishism.¹⁴ This development undermines the object’s connection with the craft of building. Others have gone further, claiming that a Baudrillardian concern for simulacra is no longer even a critical issue.¹⁵ Still, a few would consider concepts such as model, type or the machine relevant to contemporary architectural praxis. This line of thinking has been pushed to extremes by theoreticians and architects such as Bernard Cache, for example, who believes that “the design of the object is no longer subordinated to mechanical geometry; it is the machine that is directly integrated into the technology of a synthetical image”.¹⁶ Most recently, the discussion has shifted in favour of “digital tectonics”,¹⁷ which reduces the dialogue between structure and dressing to that of surface effect. The common thread running through these theoretical developments is that instead of emphasizing the thematic of the disciplinary history of architecture, i.e. the culture of building, what informs the index of the architectural object today is the marriage between a couple of philosophical concepts and the computer-generated form.

The infiltration of computer technology into the various spheres of production and consumption has also left its mark on architectural education. Paperless design, or virtual design studio, practised in many schools of architecture, offers a way of seeing and conceptualizing architecture that is nothing more than a series of truncated perspectives comparable to those of video games. Digital techniques can be used to generate an ideal image of the object that is independent of the specific site conditions and the forces of gravity. Such an image is an abstract floating object that suspends orientation and dispenses with the need to articulate form by reference to the idea of frontality or by part-to-whole techniques of composition. Challenging the basics of the classical vision of the object, telecommunication technologies offer a vista in which “play” performs a critical role. Computer-aided design also provides a level of formal exploration that is not available in traditional drafting techniques. Explosion of the object has ended in a truncated spatial labyrinth that ironically sustains the very basics of the perspectival regime, the Cartesian grid system. Virtual architecture gets around the “thingness” of architecture, reducing the latter to a cinematic experience, though experienced through a “paperless” frame.

The accommodation of architecture to the nihilism of technology has opened a new chapter in the book of the crisis of architecture written since the Renaissance. However, the current rush to absorb technology into every facet of culture does not allow for the ideology of postmodernism, which has to sell its architectural vision as an indicator of progress. The question to ask is whether the present esteem for technology has learned its lessons from the modernists’ understanding of the Zeitgeist. It is equally important to ask whether the modernists’ theorization, aiming at a uniform response to the spirit of the time, did not eliminate the possibility of linguistic difference. Paradoxically, present architectural praxis is over-determined by the very infusion of the Zeitgeist with linguistic multiplicity. Any attempt to answer these questions necessitates, in the first place, an investigation into the historicity of the crisis of the object.

THE MATERIAL OF TECHNIQUE

Written in 1935, Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, discusses the impact of technology on human perception, a subject already touched on by Heinrich Wolfflin, Alois Riegl and a number of other German scholars.¹⁸ Presenting the case of montage in film, Benjamin articulated the idea of “wish-images” in conjunction with the loss of aura; that is, the magical and ritualistic origin of the work of art where space and time are intermingled, and where a harmony between the desire of the subject and the skill of the hand prevails. On another occasion, Benjamin describes the idea of aura in the following words: “in a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or resemblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be. While resting on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance – that is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains.”¹⁹ Juxtaposing impressions such as “the unique appearance or resemblance of distance” and “resting on a summer’s noon”, Benjamin presents the idea of wish-images by way of analogy to the moment of awakening when it is difficult to distinguish between dream and reality. The wish-images have no task except to radicalize the moment of awakening. This was a project where, according to Benjamin, the surrealists came short of its full realization, and their work thus remained in a state of intoxication. One might speculate that the idea of wish-images also concerns a state of mind that is purged from historicism: “In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch which is to succeed it”, the latter, according to Benjamin, “appears coupled with elements of prehistory – that is to say of a classless society”.²⁰ Distancing himself from historicism, and discussing architecture in reference to the work’s tactile and optical dimensions, Benjamin’s position both benefits and departs from the discursive horizon of art-history, and the Bauhaus interest in the New Objectivity.

Benjamin’s position is important because his discourse on historical material alludes to a shift from individual to collect...