Performalism

Form and Performance in Digital Architecture

Yasha J. Grobman, Eran Neuman, Yasha J. Grobman, Eran Neuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135722319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Today, with the advent of digital media technologies and the ability to conceptualize, express and produce complex forms using digital means, the question of the status of the architectural form is once again under consideration. Indeed, the computer liberated architecture from the tyranny of the right angle and enabled the design and production of non-standard buildings, based on irregular geometry.

Yet, the questions concerning the method of form expression in contemporary architecture, and its meaning, remain very much open. Performalism takes up this discussion, defines it and presents changes in form conception in architecture, followed by their repercussions.

The book is supported by a wealth of case studies from some of the top firms across the globe and contributed to by some of the top names in this field. With a unique and insightful emphasis on professional practice this is essential reading for all architects, aspiring and practicing.

THE ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS

Church of the Year 2000, Rome, 1996 In the Church of the Year 2000, a form of nature is used to symbolize a condition between proximity and distance in the pilgrimage church. The most precise condition of between in nature is the condition of the liquid crystal, which is a state of suspension between the static crystal and the flowing liquid state. The forms of the church literally grow out of the molecular order of a crystal. They represent the gradual distortion of an original crystal phase to a nematic state, which is a between phase in the molecular order prior to the isotropic, or liquid, phase.

CHAPTER TEN

Eisenman Architects

THE IMPLICATIONS OF PERFORMALISM / PETER EISENMAN

Ground level plan

THE CONCEPT OF PERFORMALISM, like its predecessors, postmodernism and postcritical, is ultimately an accommodation of late capital. The term projective, its counterpart today, is also an attempt to find an active design role that is useful to consumption. Performative design and projective design are theoretical placebos to overcome the thought-to-be negative connotations in modernist theories (see Benjamin, Tafuri, Cacciari, Jameson, Hayes, Aureli, and so forth). But it is precisely the critical nature (as opposed to merely negative) that makes their commentaries even more important today.

The key issue in performalism is, what is the nature of the design activity? What is implied in the term is a design activity that is synthetic and that only deals with the new, or the look of the new. Critical analytic activity, on the other hand, is something other than synthesis. Clearly that is not the major thrust of the activity proposed in performalism.

Our work has never subscribed to any category of “ism” and is not viewed as synthetic. Thus performalism is not an ambition in our work. But new terms are tricky, especially words that are new combinations, or portmanteau words. Take, for example, one of the more well-known recent such words, deconstructivism, made popular in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 1988. As a combination of two words, deconstruction (already a problem in itself, but in the philosophical sense) and constructivism, a style of Eastern European avant-gardism in the 1920s, this portmanteau word was at least meant to give form and ideology to a new group of formal appearances, which, at the time, seemed refreshingly to overcome the kitsch, banal historicism of a corrupt postmodernism that was nothing more than an accommodating placebo for capital.

Domplatz Hamburg, Hamburg, 2005 Mixed-use public library
There is no better place to signal and symbolize the paradigm shift of the first digital age than in a library, because its cultural program records the movement from the machine age to the digital age. The Domplatz Hamburg library also records the passage of time and archaeology of Hamburg in its structuring system, which is developed from the mapping of the columnar organizations of the St. Petri and St. Marien churches and their projection on the Domplatz site. This produced a misalignment, which created an internal vortex of energy that allows for a central public passage through the building and skews the structural grid from this center outward, so that the columns no longer look like structure.

Twenty years later, enter performalism, another portmanteau term made up of perform and formalism, or so it would seem for architecture. But the explanatory subtitle for the exhibition with this name belies the title word, because form and performance are quite different from a type of formalism. What is being proposed by performalism is far from the autonomous critical matrix of a formalism. If performalism stood for “through formalism” (in the Latin meaning of per) that would be a different story. But as it stands, there is little formalism in performance.

The operative verb is perform. According to the authors of performalism, it has two trajectories: one is the performance of the object – the architecture – and the other is the performance of the subject – the human in the space. But the criteria never state what it is that constitutes architecture or list the requirements for its performance. If one didn't know better, one would think performalism is in the grips of an old-fashioned functionalism, except for the “newness” of a digital architecture. The statement techniques turning into operative possibilities certainly seems like a new functionalism, not an ideological or critical resistance to the creeping in of international capital.

While my work, and perhaps that of Bernard Tschumi, may have been the only work that fulfilled both the ideological and stylistic duality of deconstructivism, it adheres to very few of the ideas of performalism. My work has most often been seen as counter to any explicit performance, as well as a plea for a certain formal autonomy, which may be one of the few possible critiques that architecture can make of capital and the placebo of design.

Sheikh Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi, 2007
The proposal for the Sheikh Zayed National Museum denies the homology of the plan for a new attitude toward section. Using the shifting patterns of the arabesque, a complex yet repetitive geometric form with characteristics similar to the natural forms of the shifting desert landscape, this single-surface design holds many sectional possibilities, not just a single plan layer. Using contemporary modeling technologies and three different arabesque patterns, a formal system that responds to its unique site conditions was produced. The system is self-generating and free from the conventional aspirations of the plan as a basis for building.

Axonometric projection

Santuario Station, Pompeii, Italy, 2006–present
Santuario Station, in central Pompeii, is one of two new railroad stations for arrivals and departures that flank the decumanus of the excavated ancient city. The new station is an extension of an urban concept developed from a reading of ancient Pompeii as a three-part city: an early foundation, later development, and an in-between condition; between the regular grid of the Roman city and the irregular pre-Roman city, an interstitial zone exhibits characteristics of both. Built in dark volcanic stone and white concrete, and roofed partly with a translucent fabric that will allow a white, natural light to penetrate the interior, Santuario Station emerges from the new landscape, stitching together the two conditions of the modern city and connecting the ancient city wi...