Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique

Gevork Hartoonian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351957434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Crítica de la arquitectura

Focusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, this book puts forward a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture. It discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but does so by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present. The work of each discussed architect is seen as addressing a historiographical problem. To this end, and this is the second important aspect of this book, the chosen buildings are discussed in terms of the thematic of the culture of building (the tectonic of column and wall for example) rather the formal, and this through a discussion that is informed by the latest available theories. Having set the aesthetic implication of the processes of the digitalization of architecture, the book's conclusion highlights "strategies" by which architecture might postpone the full consequences of digitalization, and thus the becoming of architecture as ornament on its own right.

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 “time.” Contemporary history is full of instances of architects’ attempts to rethink architecture in the context of the 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 of architecture, but more importantly is the current turn to “surface” in spite 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 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, the present state of architecture is suggestive of a return to 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” permeating contemporary architecture.

The title of this chapter recalls André Breton’s text “The Crisis of the Object” published in 1932.³ This crisis, some argued, “was brought on in part by recent discoveries in physics and by the new science of psychology, both of which privileged the subjective and relative over the objective and absolute.”⁴ 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 romanticist nostalgic yearning for craftsmanship and the desire to defuse the drive of mechanization that was shaking the ethics and moralities imbued with the guild system. The weight of the antinomies of modernity did indeed haunt 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 the work carried out through the pre-modern production system. The history of the Werkbund School in Germany, the decorative arts in France, and the arts and crafts movement in England present three historical cases each demonstrating 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 to the following questions: how to reorganize a system of apprenticeship appropriate to the new educational institutions? Or, how to accommodate design skills developed in the old guilds with the needs and technical skills imposed by the industrial production system? More importantly, how “to resolve the conflict of interest between artists and manufacturers?”⁵ And yet, if one broadens his/her scope of industrialization beyond the romanticists and their legitimate concern for dehumanization created 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.⁶ 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., Neue Sachlichkeit. In various disciplines, the term Neue Sachlichkeit is interpreted and applied differently. G.F. Hartlub used it in its general connotation during an exhibition in Mannheim in 1923. Most participants in the show inclined for formal objectivity and minimal ornamentation.⁷ According to Harry Francis Mallgrave, Richard Streiter introduced the word Sachlichkeit to architectural discourse, and Hermann Mathesius later reinterpreted it in the context of the 1914 Werkbund debate on norm and innovation in architectural style. While realism in architecture compromises with Sachlichkeit in the first decades of the twentieth century, in painting and literature, some scholars have discussed the two terms from a political point of view.⁸ Recently, Fredric J. Schwartz has looked at the subject from a fresh point of view. His main thesis is that, by aligning architecture with technology, the Bauhaus of Walter Gropius came short of touching the other side of production, i.e., exchange and consumption. Schwartz sees the theoretical discourse of the Werkbund as the first step towards the formation of a mass culture that debunks the idea of style motivated by historical forms or craft-oriented techniques.⁹

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.¹⁰ Le Corbusier even purposed a new vision of the city to rise above the ashes of the old one. Others, like Mondrian and the De Stijl group, saw the time ripe to integrate architecture with painting and the city. Central to the discourse of 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 as embodying ideas and visions that framed ensembles inaccessible to the horizons experienced in the 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.¹¹

Modernization forced architects and historians to respond to the unfolding conflict between what, after Fritz Neumeyer’s reading of Otto Wagner’s architecture,¹² might be called the “culture of stone” and the rising spatial and visual sensibilities invigorated by steel and glass structures. What historians have coined “realist architecture”¹³ speaks, among other things, for theoretical transformations responding to the situation induced by techniques of industrialization, but also Semper’s discourse on monument, ornament, and the tectonic. Equally important was Carl Bötticher’s 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. Unlike Semper “who was not concerned with visually expressing new structural developments, and who condoned the wrapping of the structural frame by a decorative wall system, Bötticher required maximum visibility of the structural/serial frame.”¹⁴ According to Stanford Anderson, Semper “chastised Bötticher for his Struckturschemen and his applied symbolic ornament.” The difference between these two nineteenth-century German architects becomes more obvious in Anderson’s remark that, for Semper, the very artistic dimension of form was itself a derivative of a “production-related concern.”¹⁵ For Harry F. Mallgrave, on the other hand, the difference between Semper and Bötticher rests in their approach to Greek architecture: “Semper rejected Bötticher’s claim for Greek cultural artistic autonomy, for the creation of these tectonic symbols in stone temples rather than in other prototypical forms.” However, he underlines Bötticher’s theoretical contribution to Semper.¹⁶ And yet, 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.¹⁷ Were there equivalent developments taking place in the discipline of architecture?

Again, Loos comes to mind, whose work, unlike the abstract and homogeneous white architecture of the international style, brings together the architectonic elements of vernacular, modern, and even the classical traditions. In addition to the hybrid nature of his work, equally important is Loos’s criticism of the Bauhaus’s blind reliance on technology, and the school’s theoretical shortcoming in making a distinction between the art object and a utilitarian object.¹⁸ Whereas this aspect of his work discloses the gap separating Loos from the avant-garde architects, it nevertheless does not suggest that there is no place for tradition in Le Corbusier’s architecture, for example. At question is the level of abstraction involved in the French architect’s early design. 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 assists 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 we can underline 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-image” 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 for 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.¹⁹ The proliferation of computer technologies has shifted architects’ attention from the tectonic of the final product to the surface. For many, the early modernists’ concern for the impact of industrial building techniques on architecture is not a formative theme any more. 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 architectural “image” beyond that of modernism. From this point of view, the use of glass, steel, and even new synthetic materials in the architecture of the last two decades has not pushed the tectonic thinking beyond what the Dom-ino frame has to offer.²⁰ Modifying existing techniques, the building industry, however, is slowly accommodating its products and techniques to the architects’ esteem for virtual images. Thus the moment of transgression of the postmodernist concept of both/and (narrative montage?) for the architecture of theatricalization the aesthetic of which is in harmony with the virtual fluidity of capital in the present corporate and global world system.

A brief examination of the most publicized architectural work supports the claim that, for some, the architectural form has less to do with construction, let alone it’s poetic articulation. What is accountable today is an aesthetic form whose animated body can be associated with Benjamin’s idea of phantasmagoria, or the aesthetic of what Karl Marx coined commodity fetishism.²¹ This development undermines the object’s umbilical cord with the craft of building. Others have gone further claiming that even a Baudrillardian concern for simulacra is not a critical issue anymore.²² Still, some are less interested in considering concepts such as model, type, or the machine relevant to contemporary practice. Bernard Cache pushes this line of thinking to an extreme. According to him, “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.” Making a distinction between craftsmanship and mechanical production based on the meaning of “contract,” he suggests that digitalization has replaced our understanding of contract based on custom and norm for one centered on the maximization of utility. As a result, “the primary image is no longer the image of the object but the image of the set of constraints at the intersectio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Crisis of the Object
• 2 Theatricality: The Structure of the Tectonic
• 3 Peter Eisenman: In Search of Degree Zero Architecture
• 4 Bernard Tschumi: Return of the Object
• 5 Rem Koolhaas: Exuberant Object of Delight
• 6 Zaha Hadid: Proun Without a Cause!
• 7 Frank Gehry: Roofing, Wrapping, and Wrapping the Roof
• 8 Steven Holl: Fabrication Detailed
• 9 Surface: The A-tectonic of Roofing and Wrapping
• Afterword
• Index