The Architecture of the Illusive Distance

Amir H. Ameri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138567412
• eBook ISBN: 9781317044703
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Focusing on three secular institutional building types: libraries, museums, and cinemas, this book explores the intricate interplay between culture and architecture. It explores the cultural imperatives which have seen to the formation of these institutions, the development of their architecture, and their transformation over time. The relationship between culture and architecture is often perceived as a monologic relationship. Architecture is seen to embody, represent and/or reflect the values, the beliefs, and the aesthetic ideals of a culture. Ameri argues that this is at best a partial and restrictive view, and that if architecture is a cultural statement, it is a performative one. It does not merely represent culture, but constructs, reifies, and imposes culture as the unalterable shape of reality. Whereas the concept and the study of cultural performatives have had an important critical impact on the humanities, architecture as a cultural performative has not received the necessary scholarly attention and, in part, this book aims to fill this gap. Whereas building-type studies have been largely restricted to elucidating how best to design building-types based on historic and contemporary precedents, studies in the humanities that analytically and critically engage the secular institutions and their history as cultural performatives, typically cast a blind or perfunctory glance at the performative complicity of their architecture. This book aims to address the omissions in both these approaches. The library, the museum, and the movie-theater have been selected for close critical study because, this book argues, each has been instituted to house, 'domesticate,' and restrain a specific form of representation. The aim has been to protect and promulgate the metaphysics of presence as Jacques Derrida expounds the concept. This book proposes that it is against the dangers of unconstrained cohabitation of reality and representation that the library, the m

PART I
The Architecture of the Illusive Presence

1

Architecture, In Theory

THE THEORY

If culture has a place in architecture, it is not readily located in the various theoretical edifices construed in the West since the Renaissance.¹ This is not an oversight. The concept of culture, in a number of different guises, has figured prominent in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture. However, every attempt to locate the place of culture inside the theoretical edifices of architecture inevitably leads to the outside. We find numerous architectural theoreticians erect the figure of culture only to chastise and deprecate it as the figure of the particular and the arbitrary.

If by “culture” we are to understand a set of values, beliefs, rules, and ritual practices that are subject to variation in space and time, that is, particular and to an extent mutable, then we may safely say that more often than not the justification given for theoretical edification, or more appropriately fortification, is to keep culture outside the realm of architectural practice. We may begin with Alberti who justified his theoretical endeavor as an attempt “to free the science of architecture” from the mistaken belief “that men are guided by a variety of opinions in their judgment of beauty and of buildings; and that the forms of structures must vary according to every man’s particular taste and fancy, and not be tied down to any rules of art” (Ten Books 112–13). The assumption that the practice of architecture may be tied to anything but eternal and immutable rules is, Alberti tells us, “a common thing with the ignorant,” who “despise what they do not understand!” (112–13).

Nearly 300 years later, Laugier justified his theoretical endeavor as an attempt “to rise above a prejudice unfortunately so common although so pernicious and blind.” A “sad prejudice,” he tells us, that “confronts all reasoning with an arrogant obstinacy that simple ignorance would not have” (107). At issue for Laugier, as for Alberti before him, is a “way of thinking which makes what is right simply dependent on custom.” Although this way of thinking appears to Laugier as “a very easy expedience for ignorant and lazy artists,” he adamantly condemns it, because “it obstructs the progress of the arts too much to be generally adopted.” He insists that, “If only arbitrary rules are wanted for the arts one can insist on custom, but if the processes of art must go back to fixed principles, it is necessary to appeal to reason against custom and to sacrifice to the light of one the force and sway of the Other” (22).

The theoretical edifications of both Alberti and Laugier are as much motivated by a strong predilection for the universal, as by a vigorous aversion to the particular. The latter is portrayed as powerful and persuasive, on the one hand, and inherently dangerous and destructive, on the other. Neither considers it sufficient to merely enumerate the universal. The particular has to be identified and condemned with equal zeal. This aversion to the mutable and the particular is not exceptional. Ruskin, for instance, summarized a prevalent motive for theoretical edification when he wrote that, “I have long felt convinced of the necessity, in order to its progress, of some determined effort to extricate from the confused mass of partial traditions and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during imperfect or restricted practice, those large principles of right which are applicable to every stage and style of it” (Seven Lamps 10). This reasoning is similar, if not identical, to the one offered not only by Alberti and Laugier before Ruskin, but also by Viollet-le-Duc and Le Corbusier after him—to cite two more examples among others.

What each theoretician identifies as the universal and the immutable principles of design could not be any different from one text to the next. The proponents of virtually every style of architecture in vogue since the Renaissance have championed theirs as the only mode of design that is based on universal and immutable rules. In turn, each universal has been condemned by the proponents of the other modes of design as arbitrary and variable in contrast to the latter’s universals. This is to say that although specific formal preferences vary in accord with an ever-changing historic context, the critical justification appears to remain constant.

What are the reasons, we may ask, for this historic aversion to culture as the figure of the mutable and the particular in the theoretical discourse of architecture? Why are so many architectural theoreticians compelled to repudiate their immediate predecessors’ universals in their own ultimately illusive search for the same? At issue in these questions is not the particular nature of what is purported to be universal. Rather, it is the ways and means of universalizing the particular. It is what appears to be a singular motive for theoretical speculation on architecture, as well as the exclusionary critical methodology that is inseparable from it.

The exclusion of culture pertains primarily to the question of architectural form and formation. On their critical path from the particular to the universal, architectural theoreticians concede to culture so long as its reach is delimited to the question of “commodity” or “convenience.” Of the Vitruvian triad—better known in Henry Wotton’s paraphrase as commodity, firmness, and delight—commodity pertains to provision for the particular needs and the variable requirements of buildings’ inhabitants. For instance, Alberti was more than willing to provide for the varying needs of a “tyrant” or a “prince,” the “middling sort” or the “meaner sort,” going so far as suggesting, “in these particulars, the customs of every country are always to be principally observed” (Ten Books 109). Alberti’s tolerance for the particular, however, only extended to the determination of need and not to the determination of form. Whereas the former is, in principle, variable and particular, the forms that accommodate it must always abide by universal rules. The proponents of Modernism, we may note in passing, tried to reduce commodity to a set of universals as well.

If historically architectural theoreticians concede the particular insofar as it pertains to the question of “commodity” or “convenience,” this is partly because they regard it as being essentially inconsequential to their ultimate pursuit. We are persistently told that of the Vitruvian triad the principle of beauty or delight is singularly decisive. It is because beauty constitutes and separates the art of building—the proper subject of theoretical speculation in architectural discourse—from the mere building—considered a menial activity unworthy of theoretical pursuit. Alberti, for instance, emphasizing that the principle of delight “is by much the most noble of all and very necessary besides,” reasoned that, “the having satisfied necessity is a very small matter, and the having provided for conveniency affords no manner of pleasure, where you are shocked by the deformity of the work.” Therefore, to prevent the shock of deformity—the shock that invariably stands to reason the necessity of beauty—he concludes: “your whole care, diligence and expense, … should all tend to this, that whatever you build may be not only useful and convenient, but also … delightful to the sight” (Ten Books 112–13).

Ruskin went so far as suggesting that “Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use,” that is, above and beyond the particular (Seven Lamps 16). Le Corbusier expressed a similar, though a less radical sentiment when he wrote that, “When a thing responds to a need, it is not beautiful; … Architecture has another meaning and other ends to pursue than showing construction and responding to needs” (102–3).

The “aim of architecture” as Le Corbusier put it, or rather the aim that is architecture insofar as this aim, this other “meaning” or “end” distinguishes architecture from mere building, is an aesthetic ideal over whose definition there appears to be widespread consensus. The desired “end” is, in principle, a state of formal and compositional saturation to which addition is superfluous and subtraction detrimental. John Ruskin summed up an oft-repeated sentiment in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture when he concluded that the “end” in every work of architecture is “a perfect creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing more” (The Stones of Venice 400).

The edification of beauty as the ultimate “aim” of architecture, much as the use of aesthetics as a critical tool for delimitation of practice to a specific mode of design are, it is important to note, peculiar to Western architectural discourse. They are not to be found—not by the same definition, at any rate—in other discursive traditions. Two prominent examples are the Indian and the Chinese traditions (Bose; Dagens; Skinner). The criteria used for restricting and regulating architectural practice in these other examples differ markedly from those in the West. They appear to condone or proscribe specific modes of design not based on aesthetic merit, that is, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, but, at the risk of simplification, based on humane consequences, that is, auspicious or inauspicious for the inhabitants, conducive to good fortune or bad, beneficial to health or not, and so on. What both the Eastern and the Western traditions achieve in the end is a restricted and regulated practice. Their approaches are, however, particular to each and should not be confused with the other.

Although there is broad consensus among Western architectural theoretician over the “aim” of architecture, there is, predictably, no consensus over its literal form. The path to perfection has had virtually as many twists and turns as there have been theoreticians of architecture. The origin of this path and the place of its meandering, on the other hand, have not been a source of dispute: to reach perfection one must turn to and imitate nature.

The term “nature” has had both a passive and an active sense in this discourse. It refers both to a body of objects—be they all beautiful or not—and to an active process of formation—the formation of beautiful bodies. It is in this latter sense that various theoreticians have proposed the imitation of nature as the ultimate “aim” of architecture. The imitation at issue is not, in other words, the imitation of natural forms—this is generally considered to be a contemptible activity—but the imitation of nature as “the greatest artist at all manner of composition” (Alberti, Ten Books 195). This is the greatest artist whose work is, nevertheless, regulated by self-imposed rules and principles that collectively warrant the perfection of every composition. These are constant, though secret laws that every author seeks to unravel and reveal.

It is perhaps needless to point out that along with beauty, the laws of nature have had nearly as varied an interpretation in the theoretical discourse of architecture, as there have been texts enumerating them. What the Renaissance theoreticians proclaimed as the laws of nature differs markedly from their counterparts’ proclamations during the eighteenth, the nineteenth, or the twentieth centuries. The ideal and the invariably natural composition to which nothing could be added or taken away without loss could not be any different, at times from one generation to the next. However it is precisely these overwhelming differences in both the interpretation of the laws of nature and the way in which the ideal composition is circumscribed that make the constancy of the proposal to imitate nature ever more curious.

One implication of this constant proposal is that the ideal, the “aim,” or the “end” in architecture is, by force of definition, always prefigured by nature. As innocuous a matter as this may seem, it has far reaching consequences for the perception of the role of theory in architecture. Since historically theory’s subject—the immutable beauty that constitutes and separates architecture from mere building—is presumed to always precede the discourse as a natural phenomenon, the task of writing on architecture, as Laugier were to succinctly put it, is no more and no less than “to tear away the veil which covers it” (2). From Laugier’s torch to Ruskin’s lamps, light has been the prevalent metaphor for the comprehension of the task of writing on architecture. Theory is purported to do nothing other than to shed an insightful light on the eternal nature of a subject whose parameters each generation presumes hidden from the last due to blindness, ignorance, or sheer indolence.

Although the perception of theory as an act of revelation or unmasking of the concealed parameters of architecture may initially appear to give theory a central role in architecture, in effect it marginalizes theory by reducing its role to a supplemental source of light shed from without on an otherwise autonomous subject. The prevalent perception of the relationship between architecture and writing is that of a sovereign subject, secure inside its inherent, natural parameters, to a subservient text that is said to contemplate, reveal, or unmask the subject from the outside.

Also, if it is to nature and not culture that historically a majority of architectural theoreticians have turned for guidance, if nature is the figure of the immutable and the universal that they have sought to shelter within their theoretical edifices at the expense of the mutable culture, it is because at stake is the exclusionary privilege of the beautiful, or what amounts to the same, the authority of the theoretical edifice to restrict and regulate in the name of the beautiful. At stake is the power of exclusion that is imperative to the delimitation of practice in architecture. It is the authority, for instance, that allows Viollet-le-Duc “to repudiate, as starting from a false principle, every order of art which, in subservience to mere traditions, thus allows itself to deviate from the truth in its expressions,” that is, every order of art other than the one he advocates (451). Without the exclusionary authority of the immutable, there can be no repudiation. The condition of the exercise of this authority is the grounding of the beautiful in nature as opposed to culture, insofar as the former designates the universal and the latter the particular. Once grounded in nature, the beautiful is rendered as much an ideal to be attained as a critical tool for the restriction and regulation of the practice of architecture.

An architecture that turns to the mutable and arbitrary rules of culture for guidance dispossesses itself of the authority to exclude. Boullée explains this stance best when he tells us that if “you admire” a building “that is based on pure fantasy and owes nothing whatsoever to nature, … your admiration is therefore the result of a particular point of view and you should not be surprised to hear it criticized, for the so-called beauty that you find in it has no connection with nature, which is the source of all true beauty” (84). Whereas an architecture based on a particular point of view is subject to criticism, the architecture based on nature is not. Whereas a cultural architecture engenders infinite critical debate, the Natural architecture ends it. It speaks conclusively. Its proclamations are not subject to debate or alteration.

Since the self-proclaimed point of theoretical speculation is not to engender more speculation but to end it, since the point is a theory to end all theorizing, it is evident why culture is not assigned an overt place inside the theoretical edifices of architecture. Although this may, in part, explain the exclusion of culture from the theoretical discourse of architecture, it does not explain the rampant aversion to it. I mentioned earlier that, historically, architectural theoreticians have devoted as much, if not more time and effort to the condemnation and deprecation of what they consider to be mutable and arbitrary in architecture as they do to the enumeration of what they consider to be immutable and universal.

Along with the reasons for the rampant aversion to the mutable and the arbitrary, what is also unclear is the source of nature’s undisputed authority as the benefactor of the universal and the immutable laws of formation in architecture. What is the provenance of the persuasive appeal and the inhered authority of nature to which, over time, a bewildering number of mutually exclusive modes of design have been ascribed without hesitation or reserve?

To explore the reasons for the consistent alignment of aesthetics and nature, much as the persistent condemnation and deprecation of the mutable and the arbitrary, we may begin with a closer look at Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture in part because Alberti (re)inaugurated and canonized the alignment of beauty and nature for generation of architects to come. What I hope to point out is that nature in theoretical discourse on architecture is, despite its malleable and ever-changing form/definition, not so much a thing, much less a natural thing, as it is a strategic resistance to contingency rooted in Judeo–Christian theology and the metaphysics of presence. The alignment of beauty and nature in architecture is not simply one choice among others, as it has everything to do with what the beautiful, and by extension architecture, is incessantly desired to be: an autonomous, self-referential, non-contingent presence.

THE BEAUTIFUL

Alberti’s intent in writing the Ten Books is, he tells us, to “free” the “science” of architecture—“a difficult, knotty and commonly obscured subject”—from “its present ruin and oppression.” The obscurity of the subject is owing to the loss of a clarifying frame known to the “ancients” and subsequently lost to the ravages of time. Therefore, the task of writing, as Alberti sees it, is to explicate the “obscured” parameters of architecture by exposing the principles that inherently delimit its concerns. To this end, Alberti begins with a seemingly innocuous observation: “an edifice is a kind of body consisting, like all other bodies, of design and of matter” (Ten Books XI). Design, he tells us, “is produced by the thought” and comprised of “a firm and graceful pre-ordering of the lines and angles conceived in the mind and contrived by an ingenious artist.” Alberti insists: “nor has this design anything that makes it in its nature inseparable from matter; … we can in our thought and imagination contrive perfect forms of buildings entirely separate from matter” (1). It is design and not building per se that is the architecture’s provenance. However, this is not any form of design. Swiftly, as Alberti declares design’s independence from matter, he divides design into two distinct and mutually exclusive categories: the beautiful and the ugly. The requisite instrument of their indispensable divide is, as we may suspect in advance, nature.

Of the “three properties required in all manner of buildings, namely, that they be accommodated to their respective purpose, stout and strong for duration, and pleasant and delightful to the sight,” the third, Alberti insists, “is by much the most noble of all and very necessary besides” (Ten Books 112). “Your whole care, diligence and expense, therefore should all tend to this, that whatever you build may be not only useful and convenient, but also,” he insists, “delightful to the sight” (113). The source of delight is beauty which Alberti tells us “is a harmony of all the parts, in whatever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse” (113).

The beautiful is neither missing a part to require addition, nor has it any part of some other to require subtraction. It simply is: a self-referential, non...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Architecture of the Illusive Presence
• Part II The Architecture of the Illusive Distance
• Bibliography
• Index