The Illusion of Novelty: The Predicament of Abstraction Readings

Plato and the SimulacrumAuthor(s): Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind KraussSource: October, Vol. 27 (Winter, 1983), pp. 45-56Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778495Accessed: 11/07/2010 17:24

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Plato and the Simulacrum*

GILLES DELEUZE

translated by ROSALIND KRAUSS

What is meant by the "overthrow of Platonism"? Nietzsche thus defines the task of his philosophy, or more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future. The phrase seems to mean abolishing the world of essences and the world of appearances. Such a project would not, however, be Nietzsche's own. The double objection to essences and appearance goes back to Hegel, and further still, to Kant. It is unlikely that Nietzsche would have meant the same thing. Further, this way of formulating the overthrow has the drawback of being abstract; it leaves the motivation for Platonism obscure. To overthrow Platonism should, on the contrary, mean bringing this motivation to light, "tracking" it down-as Plato hunts down the Sophist.

In very general terms, the motive for the theory of Ideas is to be sought in the direction of a will to select, to sort out. It is a matter of drawing differences, of distinguishing between the "thing" itself and its images, the original and the copy, the model and the simulacrum. But are all these expressions equal? The Platonic project emerges only if we refer back to the method of division, for this method is not one dialectical procedure among others. It masters all the power of the dialectic so as to fuse it with another power and thus to represent the whole system. One could initially say that it consists of dividing a genus into

opposing species in order to place the thing under investigation within the correct species: thus the process of continuous specification in the search for a definition of the angler's art. But this is only the superficial aspect of the division, its ironic aspect. If one takes this aspect seriously, Aristotle's objection is

clearly applicable; division is a bad and illegitimate syllogism, because it lacks a middle term that could, for example, lead us to conclude that angling belongs to the arts of acquisition and of acquisition by capture, and so forth.

The real goal of division must be sought elsewhere. In the Statesman one finds an initial definition: the statesman is the shepherd of men. But all sorts of

* "Platon et le Simulacre" is an excerpt from Logique du Sens by Gilles Deleuze to be translated and published by Columbia University Press.

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rivals - the doctor, the merchant, the laborer- come forward to say, "I am the shepherd of men." In the Phaedrus it is a matter of defining madness, and more precisely, of distinguishing well-founded madness, or true love. There, too, many rush forward to claim, "I am the possessed, I am the lover." Division is not at all concerned, then, to divide a genus into species, but more fundamentally with selection from among lines of succession, distinguishing between the claimants, distinguishing the pure from the impure, the authentic from the in- authentic. Hence the repeated metaphor which likens division to the testing for gold. But Platonism is the Odyssey of philosophy. The Platonic dialectic is not a dialectic of contradiction nor of contrariety, but one of rivalry (amphisbetesis)- a dialectic of rivals or claimants. Division's essence appears not in breadth - in the determination of the species of a genus - but in depth - in the selection of the lineage: the sorting out of claims, the distinguishing of true claimant from false.

To accomplish this, Plato proceeds once again by means of irony. For, when division arrives at this actual task of selection, everything occurs as though the task has been abandoned and myth has taken over. Thus, in the Phaedrus, the myth of the circulation of souls seems to interrupt the effort of division; so, in the Statesman, does the myth of archaic times. Such is the second trap of division, the second irony, this evasion, this appearance of evasion or of renunciation. For the myth really interrupts nothing. On the contrary, it is an integrating element of division itself. It is the property of division to transcend the duality of myth and of dialectic and to join, internally, the power of dialectic with that of myth. The myth, with its constantly circular structure, is really the narrative of foundation. It allows the construction of a model according to which different claimants can be judged. In effect, that which must be founded is always a claim. It is the claimant who appeals to foundation, and it is on the basis of his appeal that his claim is seen to be well or poorly founded, not founded. Thus in the Phaedrus the myth of circulation reveals what souls, prior to their incarnation, could see of Ideas, thereby giving us a selective criterion by which well-founded madness, or true love, belongs to those souls who have seen much and thus have many dormant but revivable memories; while sen- sual souls, forgetful and narrow of vision, are denounced as false claimants. It is the same thing in the Statesman. The circular myth shows that the definition of the statesman as "shepherd of men" literally fits only the archaic god. But from it, a criterion of selection emerges according to which different men within the City share unequally in the mythical model. In short, an elective sharing corresponds to the matter of the selective method.

To share is, at best, to have secondhand. From this arises the famous Neo-Platonic triad: the unsharable, the shared, the sharer. One could just as well say: the foundation, the object of the claim, the claimant; the father, the daughter, and the fiance. The foundation possesses something firsthand, allow-

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Plato and the Simulacrum

ing it to be shared, giving it to the claimant- the secondhand possessor- only insofar as he has been able to pass the test of the foundation. The shared is what the unsharable possesses firsthand. The unsharable shares; it gives the shared to the sharers: justice, the quality of being just, just men. Of course, within this elective sharing, we must distinguish all sorts of degrees, a whole hierarchy. Is there not a third- and fourthhand possessor, continuing to the nth degree of debasement, up to the one who possesses no more than a simulacrum, a mirage, himself mirage and simulacrum? The Statesman distinguishes this in detail: the true statesman or the well-grounded claimant, then the parents, the auxiliaries, the slaves, all the way to the simulacra and counterfeits. A curse weighs on these last. They embody the evil power of the false claimant.

Thus the myth constructs the immanent model or the foundation test, according to whch the claimants must be judged and their claim measured. It is on this condition that division pursues and achieves its goal, which is not the

specification of concept but the authentification of Idea, not the determination of species but the selection of lineage. Yet how are we to explain the fact that of the three great texts on division-the Phaedrus, the Statesman, and the Sophist, the method of division is paradoxically employed not to evaluate just claimants but, rather, to hunt down the false claimant as such, to define the being (or rather the nonbeing) of the simulacrum. The Sophist himself is the simulacral

being, the satyr or centaur, the Proteus who intrudes and insinuates himself everywhere. Construed thus, however, the ending of the Sophist may well contain the most extraordinary adventure of Platonism. Plato, by dint of inquiring in the direction of the simulacrum, discovers, in the flash of an instant as he leans over its abyss, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it calls into question the very notions of the copy . .. and of the model. The final definition of the Sophist leads us to the point where we can no longer distinguish him from Socrates himself: the ironist operating in private by ellip- tical arguments. Was it not inevitable that irony be pushed this far? And that Plato be the first to indicate this direction for the overthrow of Platonism?

We have proceeded, then, from a first determination of the Platonic motive: to distinguish essence from appearance, the intelligible from the sensi- ble, the Idea from the image, the original from the copy, the model from the simulacrum. But we have already seen that these expressions are not equivalent. The distinction moves between two sorts of images. Copies are secondhand possessors, well-grounded claimants, authorized by resemblance. Simulacra are like false claimants, built on a dissimilitude, implying a perver- sion, an essential turning away. It is in this sense that Plato divides the domain of the image-idols in two: on the one hand the iconic copies (likenesses), on the

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other the phantasmatic simulacra (semblances).' We can thus better define the whole of the Platonic motive-it is a matter of choosing claimants, of

distinguishing the good from the false copies, or even more, the always well- founded copies from the simulacra, ever corrupted by dissemblance. It is a

question of insuring the triumph of the copies over the simulacra, of repressing the simulacra, of keeping them chained in the depths, of preventing them from

rising to the surface and "insinuating" themselves everywhere. The great manifest duality - the Idea and the image- is there only for this

purpose: to guarantee the latent distinction between the two types of images, to

give a concrete criterion. For, if the copies or icons are good images, well- founded ones, it is because they are endowed with resemblance. But resemblance must not be understood as an external correspondence. It proceeds less from one thing to another than from a thing to an Idea, since it is the Idea that comprises the relations and proportions that constitute internal essence. Interior and spiritual, resemblance is the measure of a claim. A copy truly resembles something only to the extent that it resembles the Idea of the

thing. The claimant only conforms to the object insofar as it is modeled (internally and spiritually) on the Idea. It merits a quality (for example the quality of justness) only insofar as it is founded on essence (justice). In short, it is the superior identity of the Idea that grounds the good claim of the copies, ground- ing it on an internal or derived resemblance. Let us now consider the other type of image, the simulacra. Their claim--to the object, the quality, and so forth-is made from below, by means of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion, "against the father" and without passing through the Idea.2 Groundless claim, covering over the dissemblance of an internal imbalance.

If we say of the simulacrum that it is a copy of a copy, an endlessly degraded icon, an infinitely slackened resemblance, we miss the essential point: the difference in nature between simulacrum and copy, the aspect through which they form the two halves of a division. The copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance. The catechism, so fully inspired by Platonism, has familiarized us with this notion. God made man in His own image and to resemble Him, but through sin, man has lost the resemblance while retaining the image. Having lost a moral existence in order to enter into an aesthetic one, we have become simulacra.

1. Sophist, 236b, 264c. 2. Analyzing the relation between writing and logos, Jacques Derrida finds this very figure of Platonism: the father of logos, logos itself, writing. Writing is a simulacrum, a false claimant, insofar as it tries to capture logos through violence and trickery, or even to supplant it without going through the father. See "La Pharmacie de Platon," Tel Quel, no. 32, pp. 12ff. and no. 33, pp. 38ff. (Translated into English by Barbara Johnson in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 61-171). The same figure is to be found in the Statesman: the Good as father of the law, the law itself, the constitutions. Good constitutions are copies, but they become simulacra from the moment they violate or usurp the law, in escape from the Good.

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The remark of the catechism has the advantage of stressing the daemonic character of the simulacrum. Doubtlessly it still produces an effect of resemblance; but that is a general effect, wholly external, and produced by entirely different means from those that are at work in the model. The simulacrum is constructed around a disparity, a difference; it interiorizes a dissimilitude. That is why we can no longer even define it with regard to the model at work in

copies - the model of the Same from which the resemblance of the copy derives. If the simulacrum still has a model, it is another one, a model of the Other from which follows an interiorized dissimilarity.3

Take the grand Platonic trinity: user, producer, imitator. If the user is at the top of the hierarchy it is because he judges the results, making use of a true

knowledge which is that of the model, of the Idea. Copies can be said to be imita- tions to the extent that they reproduce the model; since, however, this imitation is noetic, spiritual, and internal, it is a true production guided by the relations and proportions that constitute essence. There is always a productive operation in the good copy and, corresponding to this operation, a correctjudgment, if not

knowledge. Thus we see that imitation is determined as having a pejorative meaning only to the extent that it is nothing but a simulation, or that the term

applies to nothing but the simulacrum and designates the effect of resemblance

only in an external and unproductive way, obtained by trick or subversion. In that case, not even correct opinion is at work, but a sort of ironic encounter that

replaces the modality of understanding by an engagement outside of knowl-

edge and opinion.4 Plato specifies the way in which this unproductive effect is obtained. The simulacrum implies great dimensions, depths, and distances which the observer cannot dominate. It is because he cannot master them that he has an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view.5 In short, folded within the simulacrum there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness, as in the Philebus where "the more and the less always lead to a further point," a constant development, a gradual process of subversion of the

depths, an adept avoidance of the equivalent, the limit, the Same, or the Like:

always simultaneously more and less, but never equal. To impose a limit on this development, to order it to sameness, to make it resemblant- and, for that

3. The Other is, indeed, not only a defect that affects images; it, itself, appears as a possible model as against the good model of the Same. See Theaetetus, 176e, Timaeus, 28b. 4. See Republic, X, 602a; and Sophist, 268a. 5. X. Audouard has clearly demonstrated this aspect: simulacra "are those constructions that include the angle of the observer, in order that the illusion be produced at the very point where the observer is located . . . It is not the status of nonbeing that is stressed, but this slight devia- tion, this slight dodge in the real image, that is tied to the point of view occupied by the observer, and which makes it possible to construct the simulacrum, work of the Sophist" ("Le Simulacre," Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 3).

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part which might remain rebellious, to repress it as deeply as possible, to confine it within a cave in the bottom of the ocean-such is the goal as Platonism strives for the triumph of icons over simulacra.

Platonism thus grounds the entire domain that philosophy recognizes as its own: the domain of representation filled by iconic copies defined not by an extrinsic relation to an object, but rather by an intrinsic relation to the model or ground. The Platonic model is Sameness, in the sense that Plato speaks of Justice as nothing other than justness, or of Courage as courageousness, and so forth-the abstract determination of the foundation being that which possesses at firsthand. The Platonic copy is the Like-the claimant who receives at one remove. To the pure identity of the model or the original there corresponds exemplary similitude, to the pure resemblance of the copy there corresponds a similitude called imitative. But for all that, one cannot say that Platonism continues to develop this power of representation for itself. It is content to stake out the territory, which is to say to ground it, to select it, to exclude from it everything that threatens to confuse its boundaries. But the deployment of representation as well-founded and limited, as finite representation, is more surely the project of Aristotle: representation crosses and covers the whole field that extends from the highest genera to the minutest species, and the method of division at this point takes on a traditional aspect of specification that it had not possessed under Plato. We can fix a third moment when, under the influence of Christianity, there is no longer the attempt only to found representation, rendering it possible, nor to specify or determine it as finite, but rather to render it infinite, to assert its claim to the limitless, to have it conquer the infinitely great as well as the infinitely small, opening onto a Being that exists beyond the highest genera and onto a particularity that resides within the minutest species.

Upon this endeavor, Leibniz and Hegel left the stamp of their genius. But if we have not done with the issue of representation, it is because the double re- quirement of the Same and the Like persists. Quite simply, the Same discovered an unconditioned principle capable of setting up its rule within infinity: namely, sufficient reason; and the Like found a condition by means of which it could be applied to the unlimited: namely, convergence or continuity. In effect, a notion as rich as the Leibnizian compossibility means that, monads being assimilated to unique points, each series that converges around one of these points is extended in other series, converging around other points. Another world begins in the vicinity of the points, causing the series thus obtained to branch off. We thus see how Leibniz excludes divergence by means of distributing it in the domains of the "noncompossible," preserving the maxi- mum convergence or continuity as a criterion of the best possible world, which is to say, of the real world. (Leibniz presents other possible worlds as "claimants" that are less well-founded.) The same is true for Hegel in that it has

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recently been shown to what extent the circles of the dialectic turn around a single center, depend on a single center.6 Whether it's the mono-centering of circles or the convergence of series, philosophy does not leave the matter of representation behind when it goes off in quest of the infinite. Its intoxication is only feigned. Philosophy continues to pursue the same goal, Iconology, adapt- ing it to the speculative demands of Christianity (the infinitely small and the infinitely large). And always there is the selection from among claimants, the exclusion of the eccentric and divergent, and this in the name of a superior finality, an essential reality, or even a meaning to history.

Aesthetics suffers from an agonizing dualism. On the one hand it

designates a theory of feeling as the form of possible experience; on the other, it marks out a theory of art as the reflection of real experience. In order for these two meanings to join, the conditions of experience in general must become the conditions of real experience. The work of art would, for its part, really then

appear as experimentation. We know, for example, that certain literary procedures (other arts have equivalents) allow one to tell several stories at the same time. This is certainly the essential character of the modern work of art. It is in no way a question of different points of view on a single story understood as the same, for these points remain subject to a rule of convergence. It is, on the con-

trary, a matter of different and divergent narratives, as though to each point of view there corresponded an absolutely distinct landscape. There is of course a

unity of the divergent series, as divergent, but it is a continually decentered chaos, itself at one with the Great Work. This unformed chaos, the great letter of Finnegan's Wake, is not just any chaos, it is the power of affirmation, the

power of affirming all heterogeneous series, it "complicates" within itself all series. (Whence Joyce's interest in Bruno as the theoretician of complication.) Within these basic series a sort of internal reverberation is produced, a resonance that induces a forced movement that overflows the series themselves. The characteristics are all those of the simulacrum when it breaks its chains and rises to the surface. It then asserts its phantasmatic power, its repressed power. As we recall, Freud already showed how fantasy results from at least two series, the infantile and the postpubescent. The affective charge connected with fan-

tasy is explained by the internal resonance of which the simulacra are the car- riers, and the impression of death, of ruptured or dismembered life, is ex-

6. Louis Althusser writes of Hegel: "A circle of circles, consciousness has only one centre, which solely determines it; it would need circles with another centre than itself-decentred circles-for it to be affected at its centre by their effectivity, in short for its essence to be over-determined by them" (For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, Vintage Books, 1970, p. 102).

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plained by the amplitude of the compulsion that produces them. This, then, is the way the conditions of real experience and the structure of the work of art reunite: the divergence of series, the decentering of circles, the constitution of a chaos that comprises them, the internal reverberation and amplified movement, the aggressiveness of the simulacra.7

Systems of this sort-formed by the placing in contact of disparate elements or heterogeneous series--are in one sense extremely common. They are signal-sign systems. The signal is a structure which is divided into differences of potential, assuring the communication of disparate elements. The sign is that which flashes between two bordering levels, between two com-

municating series. It seems that all phenomena, insofar as their ground is located in dissymmetry, in difference, in constitutive inequality, correspond to these conditions: all physical systems are signals, all qualities are signs. It is true nonetheless that the series that border them remain exterior; and by the same token the conditions of their reproduction also remain exterior to other phenomena. In order to speak of the simulacrum it is necessary that their difference be enclosed. There is undoubtedly always a resemblance between series that reverberate. But that is not the issue; the issue, rather, is the status or position of this resemblance. Let us take the two formulations: "only that which is alike differs," and "only differences are alike." Here are two readings of the world in that one bids us to think of difference in terms of similarity, or a previous identity, while on the contrary, the other invites us to think of similarity or even identity as the product of a basic disparity. The first one is an exact definition of the world as icon. The second, against the first, defines the world of simulacra. It posits the world itself as phantasm. Now, from the point of view of this second formulation, it makes little difference whether the original disparity, on which the simulacrum is constructed, is big or little; it could happen that the basic series have only slight differences. It is enough, however, that the constituting disparity be judged in and of itself, not prejudged on the basis of any previous identity, and that it have dispars as its unit of measure and communication. Then resemblance could only be thought of as the product of this internal difference. It matters little that the system be in a state of great external resemblance and small internal difference, or the reverse, from the moment that resemblance is produced on the curve and that difference, small or large, continually occupies the center of the system thus decentered.

Hence, to overthrow Platonism means: to raise up simulacra, to assert their rights over icons or copies. The problem no longer concerns the distinction Essence/Appearance or Model/Copy. This whole distinction operates in

7. On the modern work of art, and particularly on Joyce, see Umberto Eco, L'Oeuvre ouverte, Paris, Seuil. In the preface to his novel Cosmos, Gombrowicz offers profound comments on the constitution of divergent series and on their manner of reverberation and communication within the heart of chaos.

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the world of representation. The goal is the subversion of this world, "the

twilight of the idols." The simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it contains a

positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction. Of the at least two divergent series interiorized in the simulacrum, neither can be assigned as original or as copy.8 It doesn't even work to invoke the model of the Other, because no model resists the vertigo of the simulacrum. And the

privileged point of view has no more existence than does the object held in common by all points of view. There is no possible hierarchy: neither second, nor third. . . . Resemblance continues, but it is produced as the external effect of the simulacrum insofar as this is constructed on the divergent series and makes them resonate. Identity persists, but it is produced as the law that complicates all series, causing them to return within each one as the course of compulsion. In the overthrow of Platonism it is resemblance that speaks of interiorized difference, and identity, of Difference as a primary power. Similarity and resemblance now have as their essence only the condition of being simulated, that is, of expressing the operation of the simulacrum. Selection is no longer possible. The nonhierarchical work is a condensation of coexistences, a

simultaneity of events. It is the triumph of the false claimant. He simulates father, claimant, and fiance, in a superimposition of masks. But the false claimant cannot be said to be false in relation to a supposedly true model, any more than simulation can be termed an appearance, an illusion. Simulation is the

phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the operations of the simulacrum as

machinery, Dionysiac machine. It is a matter of the false as power, Pseudos, in Nietzsche's sense when he speaks of the highest power of the false. The simulacrum, in rising to the surface, causes the Same and the Like, the model and the copy, to fall under the power of the false (phantasm). It renders the notion of hierarchy impossible in relation to the idea of the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, and the determination of value. It sets up the world of nomadic distributions and consecrated anarchy. Far from being a new founda-

tion, it swallows up all foundations, it assures a universal collapse, but as a

positive and joyous event, as de-founding (effondement):9 "Behind every cave . . .there is, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every 'foundation."'10 How could Socrates recognize himself in these caves that are no longer his own? With what thread, since the thread is lost? How could he

get out and how could he still tell himself apart from the Sophist?

8. See Blanchot, "Le Rire des dieux," La Nouvelle revuefranfaise, July 1965: "A universe where the image ceases to be second in relation to a model, where imposture pretends to the truth, or, finally, where there is no more original, but an eternal sparkle where, in the glitter of detour and return, the absence of the origin is dispersed" (p. 103). 9. Translator's note: effondement is a neologistic play on effondrement or collapse. 10. Beyond Good and Evil, 5289.

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That the Same and the Like might be simulated does not mean that they would be appearances or illusions. Simulation designates the power to produce an effect. But this is not only in the causal sense, because causality, without the intervention of other meanings, would remain completely hypothetical and in- determinate. It is in the sense of "sign," resulting from the process of signals. And it is in the sense of"costume," or even better, of masks, expressing a process of disguise where, behind each mask there is still another. . . . Simulation constructed in this way is not separable from the Eternal Return, because it is in the Eternal Return that the overthrow of the icons or the subversion of the world of representation is decided. There, everything happens as if a latent content blocked a manifest content. The manifest content of the Eternal Return could be determined in accordance with Platonism in general. It then represents the manner in which chaos is organized through the action of the demiurge, and according to the model of the Idea that imposes on it similarity and resemblance. In this sense the Eternal Return is the process of going mad mastered, uni-centered, determined to copy the eternal. And this is how it appears in the foundation myth. It installs the copy within the image, it subor- dinates the image to resemblance. But this manifest content, far from representing the truth of the Eternal Return, acts as the mark of a mythical use and survival within an ideology that can no longer support that truth and to which its secret is lost. It is fitting that we recall how much the Greek spirit in general, and Platonism in particular, is repelled by the Eternal Return taken in its latent meaning."1 We must grant Nietzsche's claim that the Eternal Return is his own vertiginous idea, fed only by esoteric Dionysiac sources unknown to or repressed by Platonism. Nietzsche's own rare explanations remain at the level of the manifest content: the Eternal Return as the Same which causes the Like to come back. But how are we to overlook the disproportion between this flat truism, that goes no further than a generalized order of the seasons, and Zarathustra's emotion? Or better, the manifest statement that exists only to be dryly refuted by Zarathustra? Once addressing the dwarf, another time his animals, Zarathustra reproaches them with the transformation into platitude of that which is particularly profound, with making a "tired refrain" of that which is quite another music, with changing into circular simplicity that which is es- pecially tortuous. In the Eternal Return one must pass by way of the manifest content, but only to reach the latent content located a thousand feet below (cavern behind all caverns . . .). Then, what seemed to Plato nothing but a sterile effect, reveals in itself the inalterability of masks, the impassibility of signs.

11. On this reticence of the Greeks, and most notably Plato, with regard to the Eternal Return, see Charles Mugler, Deux themes de la cosmologie grecque, Paris, Klincksieck, 1953.

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The secret of the Eternal Return is that it in no way expresses an order that it opposes to chaos, and masters it. On the contrary, it is nothing but chaos, the power of affirming chaos. There is a point at which Joyce is Nietz- schian - when he shows that the vicus of recirculation cannot affect or spin a "chaosmos." For the coherence of representation, the Eternal Return substi- tutes something entirely different, its own c[ha]o-errance. For between the Eter- nal Return and the simulacrum there is a connection so profound that one is only comprehended by the other. What returns are the divergent series, as divergent: that is, each one insofar as it displaces its difference from all the others; and all, insofar as they complicate their difference in the chaos without beginning or end. The circle of the Eternal Return is a continually eccentric circle with a constantly decentered center. Klossowski is right in saying that the Eternal Return is "a simulacrum of doctrine." It is indeed Being, but only when "being" is for its part simulacral.12 The simulacrum functions in such a way that resemblance is necessarily retrojected onto the base series, and an identity is necessarily projected onto the forced movement. The Eternal Return is then indeed the Same and the Like, but only insofar as they are simulated, products of simulation, of the functioning of the simulacrum (will to power). It is in this sense that it overturns representation and destroys icons. It does not presuppose the Same and the Like, but rather, sets up that which differs as the only Same and makes of unlikeness the only resemblance. It is the single phantasm for all the simulacra (the being of all the beings). It is the power of affirming divergence and decentering. It makes of them the objects of a higher affirmation. It is under the power of the false claimant that everything is forced to pass and repass. Further, not everything is allowed to return. The Return is still selective, establishing differences, but not at all in Plato's way. What it chooses are all the processes that oppose choice. What is excluded, what is not allowed to return, are those things that presuppose the Same and the Like, those

things that pretend to correct divergence, to recenter the circles or to make order of chaos, to provide a model and make a copy. As long as history lasts, Platonism will occur only once, and Socrates falls under the knife. Because the Same and the Like become simple illusions, precisely from the moment they cease to be feigned.

Modernity is defined by the power of the simulacrum. It behooves

philosophy not to be modern at any price, nor yet to be timeless, but to ex- tricate from modernity something that Nietzsche called the untimely, which

belongs to modernity, but which must also be turned against it - "in favor, I

hope, of a future time." It is not in the great forests nor on pathways that

12. Pierre Klossowski, Un sifuneste desir, Paris, Gallimard, p. 226. And pp. 216-218, where Klossowski comments on the words of Joyful Wisdom, ?361: "The pleasure in simulation, ex-

ploding as power, repressing the so-called character, submerging it often to the point of extinc- tion. .. "

55

OCTOBER

philosophy is elaborated, but in the cities and streets, including even their most

factitious aspects. The untimely is established, in relation to the most distant past, in the overthrow of Platonism, and in relation to the present, in the simulacrum conceived as the matter of this critical modernity, and in relation to the future, in the fantasy of the Eternal Return as belief in the future. The artificial and the simulacrum are not the same thing. They are even opposed. The factitious is always a copy of a copy, which must be pushed to the point where it changes its nature and turns into a simulacrum (the moment of Pop Art). It is at the core of modernity, at the point where modernism settles its accounts, that the factitious and the simulacrum stand in opposition as two modes of destruction may: the two nihilisms. For between the destruction which conserves and

perpetuates the established order of representations, models, and copies, and the destruction of models and copies which sets up a creative chaos, there is a great difference; that chaos, which sets in motion the simulacra and raises a phantasm, is the most innocent of all destructions, that of Platonism.

I would like to thank Annette Michelsonfor her assistance in the preparation of this translation. -trans.

56

The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the EndAuthor(s): Peter EisenmanSource: Perspecta, Vol. 21 (1984), pp. 154-173Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567087Accessed: 04/10/2010 14:04


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Peter Eisennan

The End of the Classical:

the End of the Beginning, the End of the End

I

Jean Baudrillard, .The Order of Simulacra, ,

,Simulations, , New York City, Semiotext(e)

1983 p83.

Jean Baudrillard portrays the period beginning in

the fifteenth century by three different simulacra:

counterfeit, production, and simulation. He says that

the first is based on the natural law of value, the

second on the commercial law of value, and the third

on the structural law of value.

2

The term ,classical, is often confused with the idea

of the ,classic, and with the stylistic method of

,classicism. , That which is classic, according to

Joseph Rykwert, invokes the idea of <<ancient and

exemplary> and suggests <<authority and distinction-;

it is a model of what is excellent or of the first rank.

More importantly, it implies its own timelessness, the

idea that it is first rank at any time. Classicism, as

opposed to the classical, will be defined here as a

method of attempting to produce a ,classic, result by

appealing to a ..classical> past. This accords with the

definition given by Sir John Summerson, for uwhom

classicism is not so much a set of ideas and values as

it is a style. He maintains that while much of Gothic

architecture was based on the same proportional

relationships as the ,classical, architecture of the

Renaissance, no one could confuse a Gothic cathedral

with a Renaissance palazzo; it simply did not have

the look of classicism. In contrast, Demetri Porphyrios

argues that classicism is not a style, but instead has

to do with rationalism: -as much as architecture is a

tectonic discourse, it is by definition transparent to

rationality . . . the lessons to be learned today from

classicism, therefore, are not to be found in

classicism's stylistic wrinkles but in classicism's

rationality., Porphyrios here confuses classicism with

the classical and the classic, that is, with a set of

values privileging the <<truth, (that is, rationality) of

tectonics over <expression, and error. The fallacy of

this approach is that classicism relies on an idea of

historical continuity inherent in the classical;

therefore it does not produce the timelessness

characteristic of the classic. The classical, by

implication, has a more relative status than the

classic; it evokes a timeless past, a -golden age,,

superior to the modern time or the present.

A rchitecture from the fifteenth century to the present has been under the influence

of three <fictions. > Notwithstanding the apparent succession of architectural styles,

each with its own label-classicism, neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism,

postmodernism, and so on into the future-these three fictions have persisted in one

form or another for five hundred years. They are representation, reason, and history.'

Each of the fictions had an underlying purpose: representation was to embody the

idea of meaning; reason was to codify the idea of truth; history was to recover the

idea of the timeless from the idea of change. Because of the persistence of these

categories, it will be necessary to consider this period as manifesting a continuity

in architectural thought. This continuous mode of thought can be referred to as

the classical.2

It was not until the late twentieth century that the classical could be appreciated as

an abstract system of relations. Such recognition occurred because the architecture

of the early part of the twentieth century itself came to be considered part of

history. Thus it is now possible to see that, although stylistically different from

previous architectures, ?modern> architecture exhibits a system of relations similiar

to the classical.3 Prior to this time, the ?<classical? was taken to be either

synonymous with <architecture> conceived of as a continuous tradition from

antiquity or, by the mid-nineteenth century, an historicized style. Today the period

of time dominated by the classical can be seen as an ?episteme,? to employ

Foucault's term-a continuous period of knowledge that includes the early twentieth

century.4 Despite the proclaimed rupture in both ideology and style associated with

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the modern movement, the three fictions have never been questioned and so remain

intact. This is to say that architecture since the mid-fifteenth century aspired to be a

paradigm of the classic, of that which is timeless, meaningful, and true. In the sense

that architecture attempts to recover that which is classic, it can be called

< classical. >>5

The <<fiction> of representation: the simulation of meaning

3

Michel Foucault, ,The Order of Things, New York

City, Random House, I973.

It is precisely Michel Foucault's distinction between

the classical and modern that has never been

adequately articulated in relationship to architecture.

In contrast to Foucault's epistemological

differentiation, architecture has remained an

uninterrupted mode of representation from the

fifteenth century to the present. In fact, it will be

seen that what is assumed in architecture to be

classical is, in Foucault's terms, modern, and what is

assumed in architecture to be modern is in reality

Foucault's classical. Foucault's distinction is not what

is at issue here, but rather the continuity that has

persisted in architecture from the classical to the

present day.

4

Foucault, pxxii.

While the term .episteme, as used here is similar

to Foucault's use of the term in defining a

continuous period of knowledge, it is necessary to

point out that the time period here defined as the

classical episteme differs from Foucault's definition.

Foucault locates two discontinuities in the

development of Western culture: the classical and the

modern. He identifies the classical, beginning in the

mid-seventeenth century, with the primacy of the

intersection of language and representation: the value

of language, .its meaning,, was seen to be self-

evident and to receive its justification within

language; the way language provided meaning could

be represented within language. On the other hand,

Foucault identifies the modern, originating in the

early nineteenth century, with the ascendance of

historical continuity and self-generated analytic

processes over language and representation.

5

,The End of the Classical, is not about the end of the

classic. It merely questions a contingent value

structure which, when attached to the idea of the

classic, yields an erroneous sense of the classical. It is

not that the desire for a classic is at an end, but that

the dominant conditions of the classical (origin, end,

and the process of composition) are under

reconsideration. Thus it might be more accurate to

title this essay ,The End of the Classical as Classic.

The first ?<fiction> is representation. Before the Renaissance there was a

congruence of language and representation. The meaning of language was in a ?face

value> conveyed within representation; in other words, the way language produced

meaning could be represented within language. Things were; truth and meaning were

self-evident. The meaning of a romanesque or gothic cathedral was in itself; it was

defacto. Renaissance buildings, on the other hand-and all buildings after them that

pretended to be ?<architecture?-received their value by representing an already

valued architecture, by being simulacra (representations of representations) of

antique buildings; they were de jure.6 The message of the past was used to verify the

meaning of the present. Precisely because of this need to verify, Renaissance

architecture was the first simulation, an unwitting fiction of the object.

By the late eighteenth century historical relativity came to supersede the face value

of language as representation, and this view of history prompted a search for

certainty, for origins both historical and logical, for truth and proof, and for goals.

Truth was no longer thought to reside in representation but was believed to exist

outside it, in the processes of history. This shift can be seen in the changing status

of the orders: until the seventeenth century they were thought to be paradigmatic

and timeless; afterwards the possibility of their timelessness depended on a necessary

historicity. This shift, as has just been suggested, occurred because language had

ceased to intersect with representation-that is, because it was not meaning but a

message that was displayed in the object.

Peter Eisenman

156

Modern architecture claimed to rectify and liberate itself from the Renaissance

fiction of representation by asserting that it was not necessary for architecture to

represent another architecture; architecture was solely to embody its own function.

With the deductive conclusion that form follows function, modern architecture

introduced the idea that a building should express-that is, look like-its function,

or like an idea of function (that it should manifest the rationality of its processes of

production and composition).7 Thus, in its effort to distance itself from the earlier

representational tradition, modern architecture attempted to strip itself of the

outward trappings of ?<classical? style. This process of reduction was called

abstraction. A column without a base and capital was thought to be an abstraction.

Thus reduced, form was believed to embody function more <honestly. Such

a column looked more like a real column, the simplest possible load-carrying

element, than one provided with a base and capital bearing arboreal or

anthropomorphic motifs.

This reduction to pure functionality was, in fact, not abstraction; it was an attempt

to represent reality itself. In this sense functional goals merely replaced the orders of

classical composition as the starting point for architectural design. The moderns'

attempt to represent <realism? with an undecorated, functional object was a fiction

equivalent to the simulacrum of the classical in Renaissance representation. For

what made function any more ?real> a source of imagery than elements chosen from

antiquity? The idea of function, in this case the message of utility as opposed to

the message of antiquity, was raised to an originary proposition-a self-evident

starting point for design analogous to typology or historical quotation. The moderns'

attempt to represent realism is, then, a manifestation of the same fiction wherein

meaning and value reside outside the world of an architecture <as is,? in which

representation is about its own meaning rather than being a message of another

previous meaning.

6

Franco Borsi, eLeone Battista Alberti, New York

City, Harper and Row, 1977

The facade of the church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua

by Alberti is one of the first uses of the transposition

of ancient building types to achieve both verification and authority. It marks, as Borsi says, <a decisive

turning away from the vernacular <to the

Latin>,., (p272) It is acceptable in the

<vernacular, to revive the classical temple front

because the function of the temple in antiquity and

the church in the fifteenth century was similar.

However, it is quite another matter to overlay the

temple front uith the triumphal arch. (See

R. Wittkower, <<Architectural Principles in the Age of

Humanism,, Neu, York City, W. W. Norton, 1971, and also D. S. Chambers, <Patrons and Artists in

the Renaissance,, London, MacMillan & Co., 1970) It is as if Alberti were saying that with the authority

of God in question, man must resort to the symbols of his own power to verify the church. Thus the use of the triumphal arch becomes a message on the facade

of Sant' Andrea rather than an embodiment of its

inherent meaning.

7

Jeff Kipnis, from a seminar at the Graduate School of

Design, Harvard University, 28 February 1984. -Form cannot follow function until function

(including but not limited to use) has first emerged as

a possibility ofform. ,

Functionalism turned out to be yet another stylistic conclusion, this one based on a

scientific and technical positivism, a simulation of efficiency. From this perspective

the modern movement can be seen to be continuous with the architecture that

preceded it. Modern architecture therefore failed to embody a new value in itself.

Peter Eisenman

157

For in trying to reduce architectural form to its essence, to a pure reality, the

moderns assumed they were transforming the field of referential figuration to that of

non-referential <objectivity.? In reality, however, their <objective? forms never left

the classical tradition. They were simply stripped down classical forms, or forms

referring to a new set of givens (function, technology). Thus, Le Corbusier's houses

that look like modern steamships or biplanes exhibit the same referential attitude

toward representation as a Renaissance or ?classical? building. The points of

reference are different, but the implications for the object are the same.

8

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour,

,Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of

architecturalform, , rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass.

MIT Press, I977 p87

9

See the film -Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in

American Architecture, , New York City Michael Blackwood Productions, 1983

The commitment to return modernist abstraction to history seems to sum up, for

our time, the problem of representation. It was given its ?Post-Modern? inversion

in Robert Venturi's distinction between the ?duck?, and the <<decorated shed.?8

A duck is a building that looks like its function or that allows its internal order

to be displayed on its exterior; a decorated shed is a building that functions as a

billboard, where any kind of imagery (except its internal function)-letters,

patterns, even architectural elements-conveys a message accessible to all. In this

sense the stripped-down ?abstractions? of modernism are still referential objects:

technological rather than typological ducks.

But the Post-Modernists fail to make another distinction which is exemplified in

Venturi's comparison of the Doges' Palace in Venice, which he calls a decorated

shed, and Sansovino's library across the Piazza San Marco, which he says is a duck.9

This obscures the more significant distinction between architecture ?as is? and

architecture as message. The Doges' Palace is not a decorated shed because it was

not representational of another architecture; its significance came directly from

the meaning embodied in the figures themselves; it was an architecture <as is.

Sansovino's library may seem to be a duck, but only because it falls into the history

of library types. The use of the orders on Sansovino's library speaks not to the

function or type of the library, but rather to the representation of a previous

architecture. The facades of Sansovino's library contain a message, not an inherent

meaning; they are sign boards. Venturi's misreading of these buildings seems

motivated by a preference for the decorated shed. While the replication of the

orders had significance in Sansovino's time (in that they defined the classical), the

Peter Eisenman

158

replication of the same orders today has no significance because the value system

represented is no longer valued. A sign begins to replicate or, in Jean Baudrillard's

term, ?simulate> once the reality it represents is dead. 0 When there is no longer a

distinction between representation and reality, when reality is only simulation, then

representation loses its a priori source of significance, and it, too, becomes a

simulation.

The ?<fiction> of reason: the simulation of truth

The second <fiction> of postmedieval architecture is reason. If representation was a

simulation of the meaning of the present through the message of antiquity, then

reason was a simulation of the meaning of the truth through the message of science.

This fiction is strongly manifest in twentieth-century architecture, as it is in that of

the four preceding centuries; its apogee was in the Enlightenment. The quest for

origin in architecture is the initial manifestation of the aspiration toward a

rational source for design. Before the Renaissance the idea of origin was seen as self-

evident; its meaning and importance <went without saying>>; it belonged to an

a priori universe of values. In the Renaissance, with the loss of a self-evident

universe of values, origins were sought in natural or divine sources or in a

cosmological or anthropomorphic geometry. The reproduction of the image of the

Vitruvian man is the most renowned example. Not surprisingly, since the origin

was thought to contain the seeds of the object's purpose and thus its destination,

this belief in the existence of an ideal origin led directly to a belief in the existence

of an ideal end. Such a genetic idea of beginning/end depended on a belief in a

universal plan in nature and the cosmos which, through the application of classical

rules of composition concerning hierarchy, order, and closure, would confer a

harmony of the whole upon the parts. The perspective of the end thus directed the

strategy for beginning. Therefore, as Alberti first defined it in Della Pittura,

composition was not an open-ended or neutral process of transformation, but rather

a strategy for arriving at a predetermined goal; it was the mechanism by which the

idea of order, represented in the orders, was translated into a specific form. "

o0

Baudrillard pp8, 9.

In referring to the death of the reality of God,

Baudrillard says, .... metaphysical despair came

from the idea that the images concealed nothing

at all, and that in fact they were not images, .

but actually perfect simulacra....

II

Leone Battista Alberti, ,On Painting, Neuw Haven

Yale University Press, 1966 pp68-74

Peter Eisenman

159

Reacting against the cosmological goals of Renaissance composition, Enlightenment

architecture aspired to a rational process of design whose ends were a product of

pure, secular reason rather than of divine order. The Renaissance vision of harmony

(faith in the divine) led naturally to the scheme of order that was to replace it (faith

in reason), which was the logical determination of form from a priori types.

12

Morris Kline, -Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty, >

New York City, Oxford University Press, I980 P5

Durand embodies this moment of the supreme authority of reason. In his treatises

formal orders become type forms, and natural and divine origins are replaced by

rational solutions to the problems of accommodation and construction. The goal is a

socially <<relevant> architecture; it is attained through the rational transformation of

type forms. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, function and

technique replaced the catalogue of type forms as origins. But the point is that from

Durand on, it was believed that deductive reason-the same process used in science,

mathematics, and technology-was capable of producing a truthful (that is,

meaningful) architectural object. And with the success of rationalism as a scientific

method (one could almost call it a <<style? of thought) in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, architecture adopted the self-evident values conferred by

rational origins. If an architecture looked rational-that is, represented rationality-

it was believed to represent truth. As in logic, at the point where all deductions

developed from an initial premise corroborate that premise, there is logical closure

and, it was believed, certain truth. Moreover, in this procedure the primacy of the

origin remains intact. The rational became the moral and aesthetic basis of modern

architecture. And the representational task of architecture in an age of reason was to

portray its own modes of knowing.

At this point in the evolution of consciousness something occurred: reason turned

its focus onto itself and thus began the process of its own undoing. Questioning its

own status and mode of knowing, reason exposed itself to be a fiction. 12 The

processes for knowing-measurement, logical proof, causality-turned out to be a

network of value-laden arguments, no more than effective modes of persuasion.

Values were dependent on another teleology, another end fiction, that of rationality.

Peter Eisenman

I60

Essentially, then, nothing had really changed from the Renaissance idea of origin.

Whether the appeal was to a divine or natural order, as in the fifteenth century, or

to a rational technique and typological function, as in the post-Enlightenment

period, it ultimately amounted to the same thing-to the idea that architecture's

value derived from a source outside itself. Function and type were only value-laden

origins equivalent to divine or natural ones.

In this second ?fiction? the crisis of belief in reason eventually undermined the power

of self-evidence. As reason began to turn on itself, to question its own status, its

authority to convey truth, its power to prove, began to evaporate. The analysis of

analysis revealed that logic could not do what reason had claimed for it-reveal the

self-evident truth of its origins. What both the Renaissance and the modern relied

on as the basis of truth was found to require, in essence, faith. Analysis was a form

of simulation; knowledge was a new religion. Similarly, it can be seen that

architecture never embodied reason; it could only state the desire to do so; there

is no architectural image of reason. Architecture presented an aesthetic of the

experience of (the persuasiveness of and desire for) reason. Analysis, and the illusion

of proof, in a continuous process that recalls Nietzsche's characterization of ?<truth,?

is a never-ending series of figures, metaphors, and metonymies.

In a cognitive environment in which reason has been revealed to depend on a belief in

knowledge, therefore to be irreducibly metaphoric, a classical architecture-that is, an

architecture whose processes of transformation are value-laden strategies grounded on

self-evident or a priori origins-will always be an architecture of restatement and not of

representation, no matter how ingeniously the origins are selectedfor this transformation, nor

how inventive the transformation is.

Architectural restatement, replication, is a nostalgia for the security of knowing, a

belief in the continuity of Western thought. Once analysis and reason replaced self-

evidence as the means by which truth was revealed, the classic or timeless quality of

truth ended and the need for verification began.

Peter Eisenman

161

The ?fiction? of history: the simulation of the timeless

The third <fiction? of classical Western architecture is that of history. Prior to the

mid-fifteenth century, time was conceived nondialectically; from antiquity to the

middle ages there was no concept of the ?forward movement> of time. Art did not

seek its justification in terms of the past or future; it was ineffable and timeless. In

ancient Greece the temple and the god were one and the same; architecture was

divine and natural. For this reason it appeared ?classic> to the <classical> epoch

that followed. The classic could not be represented or simulated, it could only be.

In its straightforward assertion of itself it was nondialectical and timeless.

In the mid-fifteenth century the idea of a temporal origin emerged, and with it the

idea of the past. This interrupted the eternal cycle of time by positing a fixed point

of beginning. Hence the loss of the timeless, for the existence of origin required a

temporal reality. The attempt of the classical to recover the timeless turned,

paradoxically, to a time-bound concept of history as a source of timelessness.

Moreover, the consciousness of time's forward movement came to ?explain? a

process of historical change. By the nineteenth century this process was seen as

?dialectical. > With dialectical time came the idea of the zeitgeist, with cause and

effect rooted in presentness-that is, with an aspired-to timelessness of the present.

In addition to its aspiration to timelessness, the <spirit of the age? held that an

a priori relationship existed between history and all its manifestations at any given

moment. It was necessary only to identify the governing spirit to know what style

of architecture was properly expressive of, and relevant to, the time. Implicit was

the notion that man should always be <in harmony>-or at least in a non-disjunctive

relation-with his time.

In its polemical rejection of the history that preceded it, the modern movement

attempted to appeal to values for this (harmonic) relationship other than those that

embodied the eternal or universal. In seeing itself as superseding the values of the

preceding architecture, the modern movement substituted a universal idea of

relevance for a universal idea of history, analysis of program for analysis of history. It

Peter Eisenman

162

presumed itself to be a value-free and collective form of intervention, as opposed to

the virtuoso individualism and informed connoisseurship personified by the post-

Renaissance architect. Relevance in modern architecture came to lie in embodying a

value other than the natural or divine; the zeitgeist was seen to be contingent and of

the present, rather than as absolute and eternal. But the difference in value between

presentness and the universal-between the contingent value of the zeitgeist and the

eternal value of the classical-only resulted in yet another set (in fact, simply the

opposite set) of aesthetic preferences. The presumedly neutral spirit of the <epochal

will? supported asymmetry over symmetry, dynamism over stability, absence of

hierarchy over hierarchy.

The imperatives of the ?historical moment? are always evident in the connection

between the representation of the function of architecture and its form. Ironically,

modern architecture, by invoking the zeitgeist rather than doing away with history,

only continued to act as the ?midwife to historically significant form.? In this sense

modern architecture was not a rupture with history, but simply a moment in the

same continuum, a new episode in the evolution of the zeitgeist. And architecture's

representation of its particular zeitgeist turned out to be less ?modern? than

originally thought.

One of the questions that may be asked is why the moderns did not see themselves

in this continuity. One answer is that the ideology of the zeitgeist bound them to

their present history with the promise to release them from their past history; they

were ideologically trapped in the illusion of the eternity of their own time.

The late twentieth century, with its retrospective knowledge that modernism has

become history, has inherited nothing less than the recognition of the end of the

ability of a classical or referential architecture to express its own time as timeless.

The illusory timelessness of the present brings with it an awareness of the timeful

nature of past time. It is for this reason that the representation of a zeitgeist always

implies a simulation; it is seen in the classical use of the replication of a past time

to invoke the timeless as the expression of a present time. Thus, in the zeitgeist

argument, there will always be this unacknowledged paradox, a simulation of the

timeless through a replication of the timeful. Peter Eisenman

I63

Zeitgeist history, too, is subject to a questioning of its own authority. How can it be

possible, from within history, to determine a timeless truth of its (<spirit?? Thus

history ceases to be an objective source of truth; origins and ends once again lose

their universality (that is, their self-evident value) and, like history, become

fictions. If it is no longer possible to pose the problem of architecture in terms

of a zeitgeist-that is if architecture can no longer assert its relevance through a

consonance with its zeitgeist-then it must turn to some other structure. To escape

such a dependence on the zeitgeist-that is, the idea that the purpose of an

architectural style is to embody the spirit of its age-it is necessary to propose

an alternative idea of architecture, one whereby it is no longer the purpose of

architecture, but its inevitability, to express its own time.

Once the traditional values of classical architecture are understood as not meaningful,

true, and timeless, it must be concluded that these classical values were always

simulations (and are not merely seen to be so in light of a present rupture of history

or the present disillusionment with the zeitgeist). It becomes clear that the classical

itself was a simulation that architecture sustained for five hundred years. Because

the classical did not recognize itself as a simulation, it sought to represent extrinsic

values (which it could not do) in the guise of its own reality.

The result, then, of seeing classicism and modernism as part of a single historical

continuity is the understanding that there are no longer any self-evident values in

representation, reason, or history to confer legitimacy on the object. This loss of

self-evident value allows the timeless to be cut free from the meaningful and the

truthful. It permits the view that there is no one truth (a timeless truth), or one

meaning (a timeless meaning), but merely the timeless. When the possibility is raised

that the timeless can be cut adrift from the timeful (history), so too can the timeless be cut

away from universality to produce a timelessness which is not universal. This separation

makes it unimportant whether origins are natural or divine or functional; thus, it is

no longer necessary to produce a classic-that is, a timeless-architecture by recourse

to the classical values inherent in representation, reason, and history.

Peter Eisenman

I64

The not-classical: architecture as fiction

The necessity of the quotation marks around the term ?<fiction> is now obvious.

The three fictions just discussed can be seen not as fictions but rather as simulations.

As has been said, fiction becomes simulation when it does not recognize its

condition as fiction, when it tries to simulate a condition of reality, truth, or

non-fiction. The simulation of representation in architecture has led, first of all, to

an excessive concentration of inventive energies in the representational object.

When columns are seen as surrogates of trees and windows resemble the portholes of I3 Martin Heidegger, ,,On the Essence of Truth? from

ships, architectural elements become representational figures carrying an inordinate ,Basic Writings,> New York City, Harper & Row

Publishers, I977.

burden of meaning. In other disciplines representation is not the only purpose of Errancy is the essential counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up

figuration. In literature, for example, metaphors and similes have a wider range of as the open regionfor every opposite essential truth..... Errancy and the concealing of what is

application-poetic, ironic, and the like-and are not limited to allegorical or concealed belong to the primordial essence of truth.

referential functions. Conversely, in architecture only one aspect of the figure is

traditionally at work: object representation. The architectural figure always alludes

to-aims at the representation of-some other object, whether architectural,

anthropomorphic, natural, or technological.

Second, the simulation of reason in architecture has been based on a classical value

given to the idea of truth. But Heidegger has noted that error has a trajectory

parallel to truth, that error can be the unfolding of truth. 3 Thus to proceed from

<error> or fiction is to counter consciously the tradition of <mis-reading> on which

the classical unwittingly depended-not a presumedly logical transformation of

something a priori, but a deliberate <error> stated as such, one which presupposes

only its own internal truth. Error in this case does not assume the same value as

truth; it is not simply its dialectical opposite. It is more like a dissimulation, a

<not-containing> of the value of truth.

Finally, the simulated fiction of modern movement history, unwittingly inherited

from the classical, was that any present-day architecture must be a reflection of

its zeitgeist; that is, architecture can simultaneously be about presentness and

universality. But if architecture is inevitably about the invention of fictions, it

Peter Eisenman

165

I4

Gilles Deleuze, ..Plato and the Simulacrum, ,

,Octoher, no. 27, Cambridge, Mass.

MIT Press, winter 983.

Deleuze uses a slightly different terminology to

address a very similar set of issues; he discusses the

Platonic distinction between model, copy, and

ssimulacrum? as a means of assigning value and

hierarchical position to objects and ideas. He explains

the overthrow of Platonism as the suspension of the

a priori value-laden status of the Platonic copy in

order to: <<raise up simulacra, to assert their rights

over icons or copies. The problem no longer concerns

the distinction EssencelAppearance or ModellCopy.

This whole distinction operates in the world of

representation. . . . The simulacrum is not degraded

copy, rather it contains a positive power which

negates both original and copy, both model and

reproduction. Of the at least two divergent series

interiorized in the simulacrum neither can be

assigned as original or as copy. It doesn't even work to

invoke the model of the Other, because no model

resists the vertigo of the simulacrum., (pp 52, 53)

Simulation is used here in a sense which closely

approximates Deleuze's use of copy or icon, while

dissimulation is conceptually very close to his

description of the pre-Socratic simulacra.

I5

Baudrillard p2.

In the essay <The Precession of Simulacra,

Baudrillard discusses the nature of simulation and

the implication of present-day simulacra on our

perception of the nature of reality and representation:

-Something has disappeared; the sovereign difference

between them (the real and . . . simulation models)

that was the abstraction's charm. ,

should also be possible to propose an architecture that embodies an other fiction,

one that is not sustained by the values of presentness or universality and, more

importantly, that does not consider its purpose to reflect these values. This other

fiction/object, then, clearly should eschew the fictions of the classical (representation,

reason, and history), which are attempts to <solve> the problem of architecture

rationally; for strategies and solutions are vestiges of a goal-oriented view of the

world. If this is the case, the question becomes: What can be the model for

architecture when the essence of what was effective in the classical model-the

presumed rational value of structures, representations, methodologies of origins and

ends, and deductive processes-has been shown to be a simulation?

It is not possible to answer such a question with an alternative model. But a series

of characteristics can be proposed that typify this aporia, this loss in our capacity to

conceptualize a new model for architecture. These characteristics, outlined below,

arise from that which can not be; they form a structure of absences. 14 The purpose in

proposing them is not to reconstitute what has just been dismissed, a model for a

theory of architecture-for all such models are ultimately futile. Rather what is

being proposed is an expansion beyond the limitations presented by the classical

model to the realization of architecture as an independent discourse, free of external

values-classical or any other; that is, the intersection of the meaning-free, the

arbitrary and the timeless in the artificial.

The meaning-free, arbitrary, and timeless creation of artificiality in this sense must

be distinguished from what Baudrillard has called ?simulation>?:5 it is not an

attempt to erase the classical distinction between reality and representation-thus

again making architecture a set of conventions simulating the real; it is, rather,

more like a dissimulation. 6 Whereas simulation attempts to obliterate the

difference between real and imaginary, dissimulation leaves untouched the difference

between reality and illusion. The relationship between dissimulation and reality is

similar to the signification embodied in the mask: the sign of pretending to be not

what one is-that is, a sign which seems not to signify anything besides itself (the

sign of a sign, or the negation of what is behind it). Such a dissimulation in

Peter Eisenman

166

architecture can be given the provisional title of the not-classical. As dissimulation is

not the inverse, negative, or opposite of simulation, a ?not-classical? architecture is

not the inverse, negative, or opposite of classical architecture; it is merely different

from or other than. A ?not-classical? architecture is no longer a certification of

experience or a simulation of history, reason, or reality in the present. Instead, it

may more appropriately be described as an other manifestation, an architecture as is,

now as a fiction. It is a representation of itself, of its own values and internal

experience.

The claim that a <<not-classical> architecture is necessary, that it is proposed by the

new epoch or the rupture in the continuity of history, would be another zeitgeist

argument. The ?not-classical? merely proposes an end to the dominance of classical

values in order to reveal other values. It proposes, not a new value or a new

zeitgeist, but merely another condition-one of reading architecture as a text. There

is nevertheless no question that this idea of the reading of architecture is initiated

by a zeitgeist argument: that today the classical signs are no longer significant and

have become no more than replications. A <not-classical? architecture is, therefore,

not unresponsive to the realization of the closure inherent in the world; rather, it is

unresponsive to representing it.

The end of the beginning

An origin of value implies a state or a condition of origin before value has been

given to it. A beginning is such a condition prior to a valued origin. In order to

reconstruct the timeless, the state of as is, of face value, one must begin: begin by

eliminating the time-bound concepts of the classical, which are primarily origin and

end. The end of the beginning is also the end of the beginning of value. But it is

not possible to go back to the earlier, prehistoric state of grace, the Eden of

timelessness before origins and ends were valued. We must begin in the present-

without necessarily giving a value to presentness. The attempt to reconstruct the

timeless today must be a fiction which recognizes the fictionality of its own

task-that is, it should not attempt to simulate a timeless reality.

16

Baudrillard P5.

Distinguishing between simulation and what he calls

dissimulation, Baudrillard says that -to dissimulate

is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to

feign to have what one hasn't. . . Someone who

feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make

believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness

produces in himself some of the symptoms. (Littre),

Thus feigning ... is only masked; whereas

simulation threatens the difference between ,true,

and ,false, between .real, and ,imaginary,. Since

the simulator produces <true> symptoms, is he ill or

not?, According to Baudrillard, simulation is the

generation by models of a reality without origin;

it no longer has to be rational, since it is no

longer measured against some ideal or negative

instance. While this sounds very much like my

proposal of the not-classical, the not-classical is

fundamentally different in that it is a dissimulation

and not a simulation. Baudrillard discusses the

danger in the realization of the simulacra-for when

it enters the real world it is its nature to take on the

,<real, attributes of that which it is simulating.

Dissimulation here is defined differently: it makes

apparent the simulation with all of its implications

on the value status of ,reality, without distorting the

simulacra or allowing it to lose its precarious

position, poised between the real and the unreal, the

model and the other.

Peter Eisenman

167

17

What is at issue in an artificial origin is not

motivation (as opposed to an essential or originary

cause, as in an origin of the classical) but rather the

idea of self-evidence. In deductive logic reading

backward inevitably produces self-evidence. Hence

the analytic process of the classical would always

produce a self-evident origin. Yet there are no

a priori self-evident procedures which could give one

origin any value over any other. It can be proposed in

a not-classical architecture that any initial condition

can produce self-evident procedures that have an

internal motivation.

18

The idea of arbitrary or artificial in this sense

must be distinguished from the classical idea of

architecture as artificial nature or from the idea of

the arbitrariness of the sign in language. Arbitrary in this context means having no natural connection.

The insight that origins are a contingency of

language is based on an appeal to reading; the origin

can be arbitrary because it is contingent on a reading

that brings its own strategy with it.

19

Jonathan Culler, ,On Deconstruction: Theory and

Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca, Cornell

University Press, i1982.

This is basically similar to Jacques Derrida's use of

graft in literary deconstruction. He discusses graft as

an element which can be discovered in a text through

a deconstructive reading: ,,deconstruction is, among

other things, an attempt to identify grafts in the

texts it analyses: what are the points of juncture and

stress where one scion or line or argument has been

spliced with another? . . . Focusing on these

moments, deconstruction elucidates the heterogeneity

of the text. , (pI5o) The three defining qualities of

graft as it is used in this paper are: () graft begins

with the arbitrary and artificial conjunction of (2)

two distinct characteristics which are in their initial

form unstable. It is this instability which provides the motivation (the attempt to return to stability)

and also allows modification to take place. (3) In the

incision there must be something which allows for an

energy to be set off by the coming together of the two

characteristics. Culler's discussion of deconstructive

strategy contains all of the elements of graft: it begins

by analysis of text to reveal oppositions. These are

Peter Eisenman

I68

As has been suggested above, latent in the classical appeal to origins is the more

general problem of cause and effect. This formula, part of the fictions of reason and

history, reduces architecture to an <<added to? or ?inessential? object by making it

simply an effect of certain causes understood as origins. This problem is inherent in

all of classical architecture, including its modernist aspect. The idea of architecture

as something <added to? rather than something with its own being-as adjectival

rather than nominal or ontological-leads to the perception of architecture as a

practical device. As long as architecture is primarily a device designated for use and

for shelter-that is, as long as it has origins in programmatic functions-it will

always constitute an effect.

But once this <self-evident> characteristic of architecture is dismissed and

architecture is seen as having no a priori origins-whether functional, divine, or

natural-alternative fictions for the origin can be proposed: for example, one that

is arbitrary, one that has no external value derived from meaning, truth, or

timelessness. It is possible to imagine a beginning internally consistent but not

conditioned by or contingent on historic origins with supposedly self-evident

values. 1 Thus, while classical origins were thought to have their source in a divine

or natural order and modern origins were held to derive their value from deductive

reason, <not-classical> origins can be strictly arbitrary, simply starting points,

without value. They can be artificial and relative, as opposed to natural, divine, or

universal. 8 Such artificially determined beginnings can be free of universal values

because they are merely arbitrary points in time, when the architectural process

commences. One example of an artificial origin is a graft, as in the genetic insertion

of an alien body into a host to provide a new result. 9 As opposed to a collage or a

montage, which lives within a context and alludes to an origin, a graft is an

invented site, which does not so much have object characteristics as those of

process. A graft is not in itself genetically arbitrary. Its arbitrariness is in its

freedom from a value system of non-arbitrariness (that is, the classical). It is

arbitrary in its provision of a choice of reading which brings no external value to the

process. But further, in its artificial and relative nature a graft is not in itself

necessarily an achievable result, but merely a site that contains motivation for

action-that is the beginning of a process.20

Motivation takes something arbitrary-that is, something in its artificial state which

is not obedient to an external structure of values-and implies an action and a

movement concerning an internal structure which has an inherent order and an

internal logic. This raises the question of the motivation or purpose from an

arbitrary origin. How can something be arbitrary and non-goal oriented but still be

internally motivated? Every state, it can be argued, has a motivation toward its own

being-a motion rather than a direction. Just because architecture cannot portray or

enact reason as a value does not mean that it cannot argue systematically or

reasonably. In all processes there must necessarily be some beginning point; but the

value in an arbitrary or intentionally fictive architecture is found in the intrinsic

nature of its action rather than in the direction of its course. Since any process must

necessarily have a beginning and a movement, however, the fictional origin must

be considered as having at least a methodological value-a value concerned with

generating the internal relations of the process itself. But if the beginning is in fact

arbitrary, there can be no direction toward closure or end, because the motivation for

change of state (that is, the inherent instability of the beginning) can never lead to a

state of no change (that is, an end). Thus, in their freedom from the universal values

of both historic origin and directional process, motivations can lead to ends different

from those of the previous value-laden end.

The end of the end

Along with the end of the origin, the second basic characteristic of a ?not-

classical? architecture, therefore, is its freedom from a priori goals or ends-the end

of the end. The end of the classical also means the end of the myth of the end as a

value-laden effect of the progress or direction of history. By logically leading to a

potential closure of thought, the fictions of the classical awakened a desire to

confront, display, and even transcend the end of history. This desire was manifest in

the modern idea of utopia, a time beyond history. It was thought that objects

imbued with value because of their relationship to a self-evidently meaningful

origin could somehow transcend the present in moving toward a timeless future,

a utopia. This idea of progress gave false value to the present; utopia, a form of

juxtaposed in such a way as to create movement, and

the deconstruction (graft) is identifiable in terms of

that motivation. This paper, which concentrates

on transposing these ideas from a pure analytic

framework to a program for work, is more concerned

with what happens in the process of consciously

making grafts than finding those that may have been

placed unconsciously in a text. Since a graft by

definition is a process of modification, it is unlikely

that one could find a static or undeveloped moment of

graft in an architectural text; one would be more

likely to read only its results. Graft is used here

in a way that closely resembles Culler's analysis of

Derrida's method for deconstruction of opposition: ,To

deconstruct an opposition . . is not to destroy

it. .. . To deconstruct an opposition is to undo and

displace it, to situate it differently. ( (p150)

oThis concentration on the apparently marginal puts

the logic of supplementarity to work as an

interpretive strategy: what has been relegated to the

margins or set aside by previous interpreters may be

important precisely for those reasons that led it to be

set aside. (pI40) Derrida emphasizes graft as a

non-dialectic condition of opposition; this paper

stresses the processual aspects which emerge from the

moment of graft. The major differences are of

terminology and emphasis.

20

Culler pgg99.

<The arbitrary nature of the sign and the system with

no positive terms gives us the paradoxical notion of

an ,instituted trace, a structure of infinite referral

in which there are only traces-traces prior to any

entity of which they might be the trace. ,

This description of .instituted trace, relates closely to

the idea of motivation as put forth in this paper.

Like Derrida's ,instituted trace, , motivation

describes a system which is internally consistent, but

arbitrary in that it has no beginning or end and no

necessary or valued direction. It remains a system of

differences, comprehensible only in terms of the spaces

between elements or moments of the process. Thus,

motivation here is similar to Derrida's description of

difference-it is the force within the object that

causes it to be dynamic at every point of a continuous

transformation. Internal motivation determines the

nature of modification for the object and is rendered

readable through trace.

Peter Eisenman

169

21

Jeff Kipnis, ,Architecture Unbound, ,

unpublished paper, 1984.

Modification is one aspect of extension which is

defined by Kipnis as a component of decomposition.

While extension is any movement from an origin (or

an initial condition), modification is a specific form

of extension concerned with preserving the evidence of

initial conditions (for example, through no addition

or subtraction of materiality). On the other hand,

synthesis is an example of extension uhich does not

attempt to maintain evidence of initial conditions

but rather attempts to create a new whole.

fantasizing about an ?open> and limitless end, forestalled the notion of closure.

Thus the modern crisis of closure marked the end of the process of moving toward

the end. Such crises (or ruptures) in our perception of the continuity of history arise

not so much out of a change in our idea of origins or ends than out of the failure of

the present (and its objects) to sustain our expectations of the future. And once the

continuity of history is broken in our perception, any representation of the classical,

any ?classicism,> can be seen only as a belief. At this point, where our received

values are <<in crisis,? the end of the end raises the possibility of the invention and

realization of a blatantly fictional future (which is therefore non-threatening in its

?truth> value) as opposed to a simulated or idealized one.

With the end of the end, what was formerly the process of composition or

transformation ceases to be a causal strategy, a process of addition or subtraction

from an origin. Instead, the process becomes one of modification-the invention of a

non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal oriented process.2' The ?invented?

origins from which this process receives its motivation differ from the accepted,

mythic origins of the classicists by being arbitrary, reinvented for each circumstance,

adopted for the moment and not forever. The process of modification can be seen as

an open-ended tactic rather than a goal-oriented strategy. A strategy is a process

that is determined and value-laden before it begins; it is directed. Since the arbitrary

origin cannot be known in advance (in a cognitive sense), it does not depend on

knowledge derived from the classical tradition and thus cannot engender a strategy.

In this context architectural form is revealed as a <place of invention> rather than as

a subservient representation of another architecture or as a strictly practical device.

To invent an architecture is to allow architecture to be a cause; in order to be a

cause, it must arise from something outside a directed strategy of composition.

The end of the end also concerns the end of object representation as the only

metaphoric subject in architecture. In the past the metaphor in architecture was

used to convey such forces as tension, compression, extension, and elongation; these

were qualities that could be seen, if not literally in the objects themselves, then in

the relationship between objects. The idea of the metaphor here has nothing to do

Peter Eisenman

170

with the qualities generated between buildings or between buildings and spaces;

rather, it has to do with the idea that the internal process itself can generate a kind

of non-representational figuration in the object. This is an appeal, not to the

classical aesthetic of the object, but to the potential poetic of an architectural text.

The problem, then, is to distinguish texts from representations, to convey the idea

that what one is seeing, the material object, is a text rather than a series of image

references to other objects or values.

This suggests the idea of architecture as <writing> as opposed to architecture as

image. What is being <written? is not the object itself-its mass and volume-but

the act of massing. This idea gives a metaphoric body to the act of architecture. It

then signals its reading through an other system of signs, called traces.22 Traces are

not to be read literally, since they have no other value than to signal the idea that there

is a reading event and that reading should take place; trace signals the idea to

read.23 Thus a trace is a partial or fragmentary sign; it has no objecthood. It

signifies an action that is in process. In this sense a trace is not a simulation of

reality; it is a dissimulation because it reveals itself as distinct from its former

reality. It does not simulate the real, but represents and records the action inherent

in a former or future reality, which has a value no more or less real than the trace

itself. That is, trace is unconcerned with forming an image which is the

representation of a previous architecture or of social customs and usages; rather, it is

concerned with the marking-literally the figuration-of its own internal processes.

Thus the trace is the record of motivation, the record of an action, not an image of

another object-origin.

In this case a ?not-classical? architecture begins actively to involve an idea of a

reader conscious of his own identity as a reader rather than as a user or observer. It

proposes a new reader distanced from any external value system (particularly an

architectural-historical system). Such a reader brings no a priori competence to the

act of reading other than an identity as a reader. That is, such a reader has no

preconceived knowledge of what architecture should be (in terms of its proportions,

textures, scale, and the like); nor does a <not-classical? architecture aspire to make

itself understandable through these preconceptions.3

22

The concept of trace in architecture as put forward

here is similar to Derrida's idea in that it suggests

that there can be neither a representational object nor

representable -reality. Architecture becomes text

rather than object when it is conceived and presented

as a system of differences rather than as an image

or an isolated presence. Trace is the visual

manifestation of this system of differences, a record of

movement (without direction) causing us to read the

present object as a system of relationships to other

prior and subsequent movements. Trace is to be

distinguished from Jacques Derrida's use of the term,

for Derrida directly relates the idea of ddifference? to

the fact that it is impossible to isolate presence as

an entity. ?The presence of motion is conceivable only

insofar as every instant is already marked with the

traces of the past and future . .. the present instant

is not the past and future . . .the present instant is

not something given but a product of the relations

between past and future. If motion is to be present,

presence must already be marked by difference and

deferral. a (Culler P97) The idea that presence is

never a simple absolute runs counter to all of our

intuitive convictions. If there can be no inherently

meaningful presence which is not itself a system of

differences then there can be no value-laden or

a priori origin.

23

We have always read architecture. Traditionally it

did not induce reading but responded to it. The use of

arbitrariness here is an idea to stimulate or induce

the reading of traces without references to meaning

but rather to other conditions of process-that is, to

stimulate pure reading without value or prejudice, as

opposed to interpretation.

24

Previously, there was assumed to be an a priori

language of value, a poetry, existing within

architecture. Now we are saying that architecture is

merely language. We read whether we know what

language we are reading or not. We can read French

without understanding French. We can know

someone is speaking nonsense or noise. Before we

are competent to read and understand poetry we

can know something to be language. Reading in this

context is not concerned with decoding for meaning or

for poetic content but rather for indication.

Peter Eisenman

171

The competence of the reader (of architecture) may be defined as the capacity to

distinguish a sense of knowing from a sense of believing. At any given time the

conditions for <knowledge> are <deeper? than philosophic conditions; in fact, they

provide the possibility of distinguishing philosophy from literature, science from

magic, and religion from myth. The new competence comes from the capacity to

read per se, to know how to read, and more importantly, to know how to read (but

not necessarily decode) architecture as a text. Thus the new ?object? must have

the capacity to reveal itself first of all as a text, as a reading event. The architectural

fiction proposed here differs from the classical fiction in its primary condition as a

25

C. F. Franco Rella

Tempo della fine e tempo dell'inizio,

(The Age of the End and the Age of the Beginning)

-Casabella, 489/499 JanlFeb 1984 pplo6- o8

The similarity to the title of Franco Rella's

article is coincidental, for we use the terms

,beginning, and ,end, for entirely different purposes.

Rella identifies the present as the age of the end,

stating that the paradoxical result of progress has

been to create a culture that simultaneously desires

progress and is burdened with a sense of passing and

the chronic sense of irredeemable loss. The result is a

culture which -does not love what has been but

the end of what has been. It hates the present, the

existing, and the changing. It therefore loves

nothing. , Rella's article poses the question of whether

it is possible to build today, to design in a way that is

with rather than against time. He desires the return

to a sense of time-boundedness and the possibility of

living in one's own age without attempting to return

to the past. The mechanism by which he proposes to

re-create this possibility is myth. He differentiates

myth from fiction, and it is this difference which

illuminates the opposition between his proposal and

the propositions of this paper. Myth is defined as a

traditional story of ostensibly historical events that

serves to unfold part of the worldview of a people in

the traditional value-laden sense, giving history

and thus value to timeless or inexplicable events.

Rella dismisses fiction as verisimilitude, merely

creating the appearance of truth. Instead of

attempting to return to the past, myth attempts to

create a new beginning merely situating us at an

earlier, and less acute, state of anxiety. But a myth

cannot alleviate the paradox of progress. Against both

of these, ?The End of the Beginning and The End of

the End? proposes dissimulation, which is neither the

simulation of reality as we know it nor the proposal

of an alternate truth, which appeals to the identical

verifying structures of belief-that is, origins,

transformations, and ends. ,The End of the

Classicalf insists on maintaining a state of anxiety,

proposing fiction in a self-reflexive sense, a process without origins or ends which maintains its own

fictionality rather than proposing a simulation of truth.

text and in the way it is read: the new reader is no longer presumed to know the

nature of truth in the object, either as a representation of a rational origin or as

a manifestation of a universal set of rules governing proportion, harmony, and

ordering. But further, knowing how to decode is no longer important; simply,

language in this context is no longer a code to assign meanings (that this means

that). The activity of reading is first and foremost in the recognition of something as

a language (that it is). Reading, in this sense, makes available a level of indication

rather than a level of meaning or expression.

Therefore, to propose the end of the beginning and the end of the end25 is to propose

the end of beginnings and ends df value-to propose an other ?<timeless> space of

invention. It is a ?timeless> space in the present without a determining relation to

an ideal future or to an idealized past. Architecture in the present is seen as a

process of inventing an artificial past and a futureless present. It remembers a

no-longer future.

This paper is based on three non-verifiable assumptions or values: timeless (originless, endless)

architecture; non-representational (objectless) architecture; and artificial (arbitrary, reasonless)

architecture.

The author wishes to thank the following people who have helped in the preparation of this article:

Carol Burns, Giorgio Ciucci, Kurt Forster, Judy Geib,

Nina Hofer, Jeff Kipnis, Joan Ockman, and

Anthony Vidler.

Peter Eisenman

172

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173

Title:Architecture's expanded field: finding inspiration in jellyfish and geopolitics, architects today are workingwithin radically new frames of reference.Pub:Artforum International Detail:Anthony Vidler. 42.8 (April 2004): p142(6). (1925 words)

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

architecture, after several decades of self-imposed autonomy, has recently entered a greatly expanded field.Against neorationalism, pure language theory, and postmodern citation fever, architecture--like sculpture somedecades earlier--has found new formal and programmatic inspiration in a host of disciplines and technologiesfrom landscape design to digital animation. Where former theorists attempted to identify single and essentialbases for architecture, now multiplicity and plurality are celebrated, as flows, networks, and maps replace grids,structures, and history. Where arguments once raged between Corbusian and Palladian sources, now HenriBergson and Gilles Deleuze are studied for their anticipation of nonformal processes. Blobs, swarms, crystals,and webs proliferate as paradigms of built form, while software has replaced traditional means of representationwith dynamic effect. Nearly two and a half centuries after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing inaugurated the search formedium specificity in his Laocoon and more than fifty years after Clement Greenberg articulated a self-reflexivedefinition of modern painting and sculpture, the boundary lines of architecture remain unresolved.

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And yet, underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations ofthe discipline, not so much in singular terms, but in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, whileseeking to overcome the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for over a century: form andfunction, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure. Over the last decade, three newunifying principles have emerged as the most dominant: ideas of landscape, biological analogies, and newconcepts of "program," for lack of a better word. It is perhaps ironic that these new conceptual models arethemselves deeply embedded in the history of architectural modernism, and each has already been proposed as aunifying concept at one time or another over the last two centuries.

The notion of landscape, deriving from eighteenth-century picturesque gardens, with their narrative walks andframed views, has now been extended to include questions of regional and global visions of urban form. Giventhe early development of the genre of landscape painting in Holland, as well as the Netherlands' experience inengineering the national landscape, it is perhaps appropriate that many Dutch architects, including Ben van Berkeland Caroline Bos of UN Studio and Winy Maas of MVRDV, have found inspiration in the idea of landscape,using it to construe digital models of new cities and regional plans out of data flows, and, on a smaller scale, newtopological forms for the interior landscapes of houses.

Questions of biological form strongly influenced architecture and design in the later nineteenth century, especiallyafter the popularization of Darwin's theories, leading to the experiments characteristic of Art Nouveau. Later inthe twentieth century, the development of cybernetics and early research into DNA--including the discovery of



the double helix--led architectural theorists like Reyner Banham in the 1960s to propose biological form as thenext revolution in architecture. Charles Jencks followed up this proposition in his 1971 book Architecture 2000and Beyond, where his chart of architectural "movements" presciently ended in the year 2000 with a prediction of"bioform." Contemporary architects like Greg Lynn have built on these theories and, using the techniquespioneered by animation software, have developed a new repertoire of form: Beginning with the idea of the "blob"and more recently experimenting with the forms of complex organisms from butterflies to jellyfish, Lynn hasdesigned coffee sets that interlock like the carapaces of insects and turtles and institutions that unfold from theground like giant colorful orchids or artichokes.

Finally, the idea of "program" was transformed in the first age of the avant-gardes, from its eighteenth-centurymeaning as a design exercise for student architects into an overriding concept that regulates and generates formaccording to a detailed understanding of its function. In the 1950s the idea was extended by theorists like JohnSummerson to assume a central place as a single "source of unity" for modern architecture, but it was quicklyforgotten in the rush to bury functionalism under postmodern historicism. Now, architects like Rem Koolhaas anda younger generation, including Diller + Scofidio and Lindy Roy, have taken up an expanded idea of program asa means to explode every convention of traditional architectural modernism and to create the basis for anarchitecture that realistically confronts the present global political, social, and economic reality.



Each of these three ideas has been proposed as a way of overcoming the persistence of a theoretical dualism inarchitecture that has its roots in the Enlightenment. The philosopher and mathematician d'Alembert put theproblem most concisely when he defined architecture as the "embellished mask of our greatest need," whichmeant that to the philosophic eye architecture was little more than the aesthetic or "rhetorical" supplement toshelter. One could interpret all of the attempts to define the "essence" of architecture since then as struggles toreduce this dualism to a singularity. Thus the appeals to an architecture of pure metaphysical uplift (John Ruskinthrough Louis I. Kahn) or one of pure functionalism (J.N.L. Durand through Hannes Meyer) and all the shades ofthe "functionalist aesthetic" in between. Each phase of modernism has juggled the equation according to its ownstandards of politics or aesthetics. "Function" has been reduced to structural integrity or spatial economy, while"metaphysics" has been defined as spiritual uplift or sublime effect. Other subsequent theories have posited thepower of the "sign," the return to "tradition," or the fundamentals of tectonics. More recently, some haveproposed the idea of the "diagram" as an attempt to fuse function, space, and aesthetics into a singular entity,while others have privileged the affect in the surface in an aesthetic appeal to the new materials cast and moldedby digital programs. But the paradigms suggested by landscape, biology, and program seem to go beyond thesesingular concepts in order to frame a new field of action for architecture that subsumes form and function within amatrix of information and its animation.

In order to diagram the relationships among the various disciplines that constitute the new expanded field ofarchitecture it might be useful to return to Rosalind Krauss's groundbreaking 1979 essay "Sculpture in theExpanded Field." In that text Krauss set up a diagram of relations and distinctions that for the first time placed the"sculpture" of the 1960s in its relationship to other, nonsculptural arts--landscape and architecture. For her,



sculpture proper was not a universal quality but a historical one, defined by its monumental and memorialcharacteristics; its gradual loss of such specificity began with Rodin's Gates of Hell and was completed bymodernist abstraction's final loss of "site." Modernist sculpture, then, was nomadic. By the 1950s this avant-garde nomadism had grown exhausted, and sculpture began to explore domains outside itself--developing intosomething that was not sculpture but also "not-landscape" and "not-architecture." These "non-sites" were thenelaborated into more specific categories: "site constructions" (Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed,1970), "marked sites" (combinations of "landscape" and "not-landscape" such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970,and Michael Heizer's Double Negative, 1969-70), and "axiomatic structures" (combinations of "architecture" and"not-architecture" such as the work of Richard Serra and Robert Irwin, among others).

It is this last category, which brings together architecture and its opposite, that is of interest here. For as Kraussargues, "in every case of these axiomatic structures, there is some kind of intervention into the real space ofarchitecture ... the possibility ... of mapping the axiomatic features of the architectural experience--the abstractconditions of openness and closure--onto the reality of a given space." If such holds true for the destiny ofsculpture in its postmodern field, might we not be able to construe a similarly expanded field for architecture in itspresent exploratory condition? It is true that both "landscape" and "sculpture," or rather "not-landscape" and"not-sculpture," have been emerging as powerful metaphors within a new condition of architecture. "Landscape"emerges as a mode of envisaging the continuum of the built and the natural, the building and the city, the site andthe territory, while "sculpture" figures as a way of defining a new kind of monumentality--a monumentality of theinforme, so to speak, which at once challenges the political connotations of the old monument, yet neverthelesspreserves a "not-monumental" role for architecture.



In terms that echo Krauss's sculptural field, then, we may find combinations of architecture and landscape,architecture and biology, and architecture and program producing new versions of the "not-landscape" and the"not-sculpture," which are nonetheless not-exactly-architecture. Or at least "not-exactly-architecture" as we haveexperienced architecture up to the present. In architectural terms this involves not the outward citation of analready formed language but the internal study and development of architectural language itself in conjunction witha similarly rigorous and productive approach to these external fields. This effort, of course, has distinguishedroots in avant-garde modernism. For example, it is in this way that architects from Theo van Doesburg to PeterEisenman have understood the formal language of architecture, and others from Le Corbusier to Koolhaas haveunderstood the radicality of the program. Similarly Lynn draws on the forms of the Rococo and Art Nouveau,even as he strikes out into the field of biomorphic complexity, while van Berkel demonstrates knowledge of the"endless" house forms of avant-gardist Frederick Kiesler, as he explores the landscape implications of thetopology of the Mobius strip.

Much of this new work, however, goes beyond reliance on the various avant-garde languages of the 1920s toconfront the programmatic and technological demands of the present. These demands include a recognition of bynow familiar digital technologies--technologies that have been too subservient to the software aesthetic thatarrives with every new program, whether AutoCAD or Rhino or Maya. New critical responses are required toquestions that have been posed throughout the history of modernism but remain unanswered in either political orarchitectural terms: the housing question that still haunts architecture and development on a global scale; thequestion of density raised by population explosions and land scarcity; and the ecological question of resourcesand modes of conservation that, with radical shifts in climate and diminishing energy sources, presents morefundamental problems for architecture than those addressed by developments in materials and "green building"alone.



The posing of such questions is aided by new modeling techniques for assimilating, integrating, and ultimatelyforming data of all kinds so that the consequences of programmatic decisions might be evaluated in terms ofdesign alternatives. These alternatives do not simply appear as random choices among beautiful surfaces orblobs. Rather, they take shape as arguments in forms that propose political, social, and technologicalinterventions and, in turn, imply a critique of business as usual. In sum, this new modernity continues to addressthe questions of the present with an avant-garde imagination, but now with the wisdom of hindsight and a trulyhistorical understanding of the modern. It is perhaps not too much an exaggeration to state that this expandedfield for architecture owes greatly to the previous expansion of the sculptural field. Thus, the spatial arts nowcome together in their superimposed expanded fields, less in order to blur distinctions or erode purity than toconstruct new programmatic and formal conditions that for the first time may constitute a truly ecological



aesthetics.

Anthony Vidler, an architectural historian and critic, is dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture atCooper Union in New York.

Source CitationVidler, Anthony. "Architecture's expanded field: finding inspiration in jellyfish and geopolitics, architects today areworking within radically new frames of reference." Artforum International 42.8 (2004): 142+. AcademicOneFile. Web. 12 Sept. 2010.

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Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern RepresentationAuthor(s): Anthony VidlerSource: Representations, No. 72 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 1-20Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2902906Accessed: 04/10/2010 14:04


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ANTHONY VIDLER

Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation

I

ITS SURFACE SEEMS SLICK, PERHAPS reflective, often translucent, skinlike, visually viscous; its form appears curved, ballooned, bulging, segmental, warped, and twisted; its structure looks webbed, ribbed, and vaulted; its materials might be synthetic, resinous, metallic, and alloyed; its interior would be cavelike, womblike, tunneled, burrowed, and furrowed; its furniture and fittings are envisaged as soft, almost porous in texture, cast or injected, molded, and sensitive to heat and light. Its architect calls it a "blob," and compares it to a history of similar objects in nature that cultural theory since Georges Bataille has identified with the informe. The techniques of its design are drawn not from architecture but from animation software that generates its complex forms with the help of digital avatars that work, independent of the architect, to produce multiple iterations of possible combinations. 1

Or perhaps it resembles a smooth moon landscape seen as if from a low-flying aircraft moving fast, its rifts, folds, crevices, escarpments, faults, and plateaus swiftly zooming into view like the artificial terrain of a Star Wars Racer game; bundles of intersecting tubes and paths, vectors, and force fields are marked on its surface, as if the entire environment had been transformed into a vast fiber-optic network or a magnetic plate whose tectonics were distorted by huge densities of attraction and repulsion. What seem to be the traces of human settlement are layered and com- pressed like so many geological formations, congealed into a solid geometry of crystalline forms. Neither a map nor a model of an existing geography, this environment is a virtual model of data as if it were geography, inserted into the morphologi- cally transformed structures of cities and regions. Its architects refer to topologies and topographies and prefer to identify what they do as mapping rather than drawing.2

Or maybe its edges are hard and sharp, its walls, if they can be identified, are transparent, or luminously translucent; its interiors are filled with semifloating, egg-

REPRESENTATIONS 72 * Fall 2000 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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like enclosures; its levels are marked in bands or zones that respond to similar zones in plan; like some three-dimensional coordinate system at the scale of a building, it codes these zones in color and material a digital chip blown up extralarge and intersects them with composite domains that automatically create neutral areas, mixed in use and ambiguous in form; its outer shapes are cubic or ovoid, mimicking in outline the advanced aesthetics of high modernism, simplifying for the sake of semiotics references to the abstractions of Le Corbusier or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Its architects speak of delirium as embedded in the apparently rational zoning schemes of modernism; they track movement and event in space like choreographers. Their projects and buildings share an ironic sensibility that prefers the arbitrary rigor of an imposed and consciously subverted system to any emotive expressionism. Their drawings are cool and hard-line, black and white diagrams of functional forms.3

Or, again, its roofs are clad in titanium or aluminum that turns gold, grey, and silver according to the light; they rise up in profusion like so many sails or shards; its forms are impacted and apparently randomly juxtaposed and intersected; its profiles are exuberant, like an expressionist utopia come to life, somewhere between the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and a watercolor by Hermann Finsterlin; its intri- cate, lacelike structure creates a web of interstitial space, somewhat as if the Eiffel Tower had been chopped up and rewelded for its materials; its interiors are strangely mobile, flowing walls and undulating ceilings creating volumes of uncer- tain dimension. Its architects work with models cut out of brown cardboard, tearing them apart, sometimes scanning them digitally, always remodeling in an apparently interminable analysis of design en abyme. Their drawings are thin traceries of wire-frame construction, digital or not, that affirm process rather than product and refer to various traditions of the avant-garde, whether constructivist, dadaist, or surrealist.4

Such imaginary objects, composite portraits of contemporary architectural projects, exemplify only a few of the design tendencies that have superseded what in the last decades of the twentieth century was called postmodernism. In place of a nostalgic return to historical precedents, often couched in "renaissance humanist" rhetoric, these new "blobs," "topographies," and "late modernisms" find their polemical stance in a resolutely forward-looking approach and their modes of design and representation in digital technologies. Radically different in their forms and aims, they nevertheless find common cause in their espousal of the one representational technique that they share with their modernist avant-garde antecedents: their affection for what they and their critics call the "diagram."'

This tendency is exhibited on every level of meaning associated with the term diagrammatic, and runs the gamut of a wide range of approaches and styles that at first glance seem entirely disparate from diagrammatic caricature to theoretical discourse, modernist revival to digital experiment. Thus, included under this rubric would be works as radically dissimilar as Dominique Perrault's new Bibliotheque

2 REPRESENTATIONS

de France, with its cartoonlike towers in the shape of open books, andJacques Her- zog and Pierre de Meuron's renovation of Giles Gilbert Scott's 1949 Bankside Power Station as the Tate Modern in London, with its sophisticated minimalism and cool, stripped down, and vast interiors, lit by translucent panels and retaining the simple parallel volumes of the old turbine house and ancillary spaces. More theoretically oriented, Bernard Tschumi, whose early theoretical exercises in the 1970s diagrammed the intersection of movement in space as creating events according to a free adaptation of dance notation, developed a rigorous typology of red follies on a grid for the park of La Villette in Paris. Recently he elaborated the genre in the design center of Le Fresnoy, where a new roof level spans across the existing pavilions of the former factory, creating in a single "diagrammatic" gesture a rich complexity of spatial interaction. The urban projects of Rem Koolhaas, in- volving the physical planning of whole territories at a range of scales "Small, Me- dium, Large, Extra Large," to take the title of his own monograph-move toward a model of architecture as a form of data, anticipating the digital constructs of a younger generation of Dutch architects; his houses, conceived as subtle and ironic transformations of modernist precedents might almost be seen as diagrams of diagrams.6

Supporting this revival of diagrams, an entire theoretical discourse has been developed around the genre, following the coining of the term diagram architecture by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito in 1996 to characterize what he saw as a new sensibility in the work of his compatriot Kajuyo Sejima (fig. 1).7 The strength of Sejima's architecture, he noted, derived from her extreme reduction of the building to a special kind of diagram, constructing it as far as possible as she represented it. As he wrote, "You see a building as essentially the equivalent of the kind of spatial diagram used to describe the daily activities for which the building is intended in abstract form. At least it seems as if your objective is to get as close as possible to this condition."8 In this ascription, architecture itself becomes joined to its diagram a diagram of spatial function transformed transparently into built spatial function with hardly a hiccup. The wall, which technologically takes on all the weight of this translation, thus carries the freight of the line, or vice versa. Sejima herself has developed the genre into a design method of distinct clarity, where simple black and white diagrams of function and space are translated elegantly into building in a minimal aesthetic that goes well beyond the merely functional, in a way that has led some critics to see echoes of Japanese mysticism in the intensity of her material abstractions.9

From a less transcendental, and more neostructuralist position, Peter Eisen- man, whose elegant linear projections of complicated cubic constructions, generated from a combination of historical analysis of modernism and a study of syntacti- cal visual language that derived from his reading of structural linguistics, became the paradigm of what the 1 970s termed "paper architecture," now finds a new intellectual receptivity for his diagrammatic drawings. His recently published Diagram

Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation 3

Roof plan

Typical floor plan

Ground-floor plan

FIGURE 1. Kazuyo Sejima, Project for Middle Rise Housing Prototypes, 1995. Plans. Assemblage 30 (August 1996).

4 REPRESENTATIONS

Diaries at once reframes his life's work under a term whose revived legitimacy offers a means of inventing a pedigree for his digital experiments in morphological projection (fig. 2).1o These projects and many more continue the late-modern critical and ironic investigation of the modernist legacy of the last twenty years, while using the diagram as a device to both recall and supersede its formal canons. As Robert Somol notes in his introduction to Diagram Diaries, for the first time in the modern period, the diagram has become "the matter of architecture" itself, as opposed to its representation. "The diagram," he writes, "has seemingly emerged as the final tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises, for architectural production and

FIGURE 2. Peter Eisenman, Frankfurt Biocentrum, 1987, Diagram of Superpositions and Rotations, in Diagram Diaries (New York), 1999.


discourse."" Operating between form and word, space and language, the diagram is both constitutive and projective; it is performative rather than representational. In this way, it is, Somol concludes, a tool of the virtual rather than the real and a means of building (in both senses of the term) a virtual architecture, of proposing a world other than that which exists.

The diagrammatic turn in architecture, on another level, has been quickly assimilated into design practices that work with digital techniques of representation. Here the "virtual" qualities of the diagram pointed out by Somol take on new significance for a medium that is rapidly supplanting the hand-drawn diagram, sketch, or plan. Despite the resistance of many architects, who mourn the passing of the oft-claimed relations between eye and hand, the evident speed with which digitized images of traditional modes of representation (perspective, axonometric, plan, and so on) can be modified and worked with has for many years supported the introduction of so-called computer-aided design into practice.' But more significant still, what has clearly emerged in recent buildings and projects is an architecture itself not simply aided, but generated, by digital means, whether through animation, morphing, or three-dimensional scanning and milling, in a way that would have been formally and technologically impossible hitherto. The forms of this tendency range from the ecstatic expressionism of Frank Gehry, the topographical and re- gionalist mapping of new Dutch architects such as Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, or Winy Maas of MVRDV; the deconstructionist work of Hani Raschid; the new decorative and spatial orders of Donald Bates and Peter Dickenson of LAB Architects, Melbourne; and the explorations into the architectural informe by Greg Lynn and Karl Chu, whose animations and geometric permutations produce an almost neobaroque efflorescence of formal experiments fueled by software developed originally for the movie, aerospace, and auto industries. In projects like these, the translation of geometry into building is the more direct as a result of the inti- mate relations between digital representation and industrial production, so that, for example, all traditional ideas of standardization can be jettisoned by a cutting or milling factory that runs automatically from the designer's program, as was the case with the titanium panels, all of different dimensions, that surface the vaults of Bilbao. The digital effect of these schemes is further reinforced by the use of materials with smooth reflective or translucent surfaces and of complex structures before only imagined in expressionist or constructivist utopias.'3

II

Architectural drawing has always been, as Walter Benjamin remarked, a "marginal case" with respect to the major arts.'4 In the sense that it precedes the building, that it is produced without reference to an already constituted object in the world, it has never conformed to traditional formulations of "imitation." In the

6 REPRESENTATIONS

sense that it is a drawing toward the work of art itself, it is inevitably regarded as a supplement, part of the evolutionary narrative of a building's production, but not to be valued as art per se. As the late Robin Evans noted, this is "the peculiar disad- vantage under which architects labor; never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors, who might spend some time working on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the thing itself."'5 Yet it is true, as Evans also pointed out, that the architect's drawing, as opposed to the painter's and the sculptor's, is generally the only work actually touched by the architect's hand.'6 This paradoxical separation between the artist and the work, the foundation of much architectural theory concerned with representation, was the occasion for Benjamin's remark that architectural drawings could not be said to "re-produce architecture." Rather, he observed, "Theyproduce it in the first place" ("Study of Art," 89).

Architectural drawing is also seriously "technical" in nature, representing its objects with geometrical projections, plans, and sections that demand a certain ex- pertise of the viewer, one trained to imagine the characteristics and qualities of the spaces represented by these enigmatic lines, as well as interpret them in their context of a long tradition of spatial culture, cued to their often sly and concealed references to former architectural precedents. Even when the architect employs a perspective rendering, this is hardly ever a simple matter of illustration; the particular point of view, the distortion of foreshortening or extension, the medium itself, are more often than not brought into play to emphasize the architect's spatial idea, one that is supported by the position and scale of figures and furnishings, which in turn provide clues as to the kind of life, the nature of the everyday, envisaged as taking place in this space and that the space itself will somehow reinforce. The architect works in code, code that is readily understood by others in the trade, but is as poten- tially hermetic to the outsider as a musical score or a mathematical formula. These encodings of representation have, throughout the modern period, suffered from a second level of difficulty. At a time when architecture was tied to the classical conventions, or later to the historical styles, the amateur might easily enough recognize the period or genre, identify the cultural reference, and comprehend the implied commentary. Modern architectural drawings however, depict a more or less abstract object, assembled out of geometrical forms, with few recognizable building elements such as columns or decorative motifs. Abstractions of abstractions, they have increasingly over the last two centuries become little more than ciphers understood only by the professional circle around the architect, meaningless to client and layperson alike. Le Corbusier's schematic evocations of infinite space, his evocation of a building's principal elements in a few quick lines; Mies van der Rohe's perspec- tives, often signaled by the thinnest of pencil lines situating a plane hovering in universal, gridded, space; such drawings suspended somewhere between a design process and a diagram, carry little weight as popular representations.


This apparent identity of the modernist drawing and its object, both informed by a geometrical linearity that tends toward the diagrammatic, has, throughout the modern period, led to charges that the one is the result of the other, that architecture has too-slavishly followed the conventions of its own representation. Modern architecture, concerned to represent space and form abstractly, avoiding the decorative and constructional codes of historical architectures, is thus accused of reductivism, of geometrical sterility, and thence of alienation from the human. This has been true since Victor Hugo first launched the attack in the first era of architecture's mechanization, and the issue has periodically resurfaced over the last century to be reframed most succinctly in Henri Lefebvre's critique of modernism's "abstract space."'7 For Hugo, the culprit was a geometrically regulated neoclassicism; for Lefebvre, the enemy was enshrined in modernism itself. In both cases, the complaint had as much to do with architecture's chosen means of representation as with the built structures themselves. Hugo's complaint was that architecture, from the French Revolution on, had been transformed into a geometrical caricature of its former self, exemplified in the cubic masses of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's tollgates built around Paris between 1785 and 1789 and confirmed by the powerful influence of the new graphic formulas of the Ecole polytechnique introduced after 1795. Henri Lefebvre's criticism of "abstract space" updated this critique to include the modernism of Le Corbusier. Both Hugo and Lefebvre ground their indictments on what they consider the root cause of the "fall" of architecture: representation, or more specifically, the too easy translation of the new graphic techniques used by the modern architect into built form. Architecture, that is, looked too much like the geometry with which it was designed and depicted. Geometry is thus seen as the underlying cause of architectural alienation, the degradation of humanism, and the split between architecture and its "public." And if for Hugo architecture had become no more than the caricature of geometry, for Lefebvre architectural blue- prints, and more generally the architect's fetishization of graphic representations as the "real," sterilized and degraded lived space. For Lefebvre, the discourse of the graphic image "too easily becomes as in the case of Le Corbusier-a moral discourse on straight lines, on right angles and straightness in general, combining a figurative appeal to nature (water, air, sunshine) with the worst kind of abstraction (plane geometry, modules, etc.)." 18

Such criticisms have been commonplace throughout the life of modernism. "Diagrammatic architecture" has been a term more of abuse than praise, signifying an object without depth, cultural or physical, one subjected to the supposed tyranny of geometry and economy-the commonplace of the "modernist box" caricatured by postmodernists. As early as 1934, at the height of modernist functionalism, the art historian and friend of Le Corbusier Henri Focillon was warning that "in considering form as the graph of an activity ... we are exposed to two dangers. The first is that of stripping it bare, of reducing it to a mere contour or diagram.... The second danger is that of separating the graph from the activity and of considering

8 REPRESENTATIONS

the latter by itself alone. Although an earthquake exists independently of the seis- mograph, and barometric variations exist without any relation to the indicating needle, a work of art exists only insofar as it is form." "Form" for Focillon, as for many modern artists schooled in Adolf Hildebrand's idealist notions of form since the turn of the twentieth century, was to be rather envisaged in "all its fullness. "19

In this context, the diagram was to be avoided, a mechanical trap.

III

Despite such criticisms, the diagram has held a privileged place in the development of modern architecture as at once responding to the aesthetics of rationalism and the authority of functionalism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, and in tune with the geometrical predilections of the scientific Enlightenment, a few architects began to turn away from the elaborate renderings, common to the late-eighteenth-century academy and its heir, the Ecole des beaux-arts. Ledoux, trained as an engraver and inspired by the plates of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie, developed a geometrical style of representation that informed his built work. The architectJean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, appointed to the newly established Ecole polytechnique after 1795 and responding to the demands of its new director, Gaspard Monge, developed a method for representation a code of points, lines, and planes to be organized on the newly introduced graph paper that in his terms corresponded to the stereotomy and metric standardization of Monge and the require- ments of simplicity and economy (figs. 3 and 4).2

Those who think that the aim of architecture is essentially to please the eyes, necessarily regard the rendering of geometrical drawings as inherent to architecture; but if architecture was in effect only an art of making images, at least these images should be true, and present objects as we see them in nature: but rendered drawings offer nothing geometrical to our eyes; consequently the rendering of geometrical drawings, far from adding to the effect or the intelligence of these drawings, can only make them cloudy and equivocal; which is by no means suitable to render them more useful, or even more capable to please. This kind of drawing should be the more severely banished from architecture, because not only is it false, but supremely dangerous. In whatever manner one considers this art, the projects the most suitable to produce the greatest effects in execution, are those which are disposed of in the simplest way.2'

But for Durand, drawing was also a way of constructing what the philosophers had attempted to invent for centuries a kind of universal characteristic: "Drawing serves to render account of ideas, whether one studies architecture or whether one composes projects for buildings, it serves to fix ideas, in such a way that one can examine anew at one's leisure, correct them if necessary; it serves, finally to commu- nicate them afterwards, whether to clients, or different contractors who collaborate in the execution of buildings: one understands, after this, how important it is to familiarize oneself with it [drawing] ."22 In this sense,


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FIGuRE 3. J.-N.-L. Durand, "Horizontal Combinations," in Precis des lefons d'architecture (Paris, 1819), 1: plate 1, part 2.

Drawing is the natural language of architecture; every language, to fulfill its object, should be perfectly in harmonywith the ideas of which it is the expression; thus, architecture being essentially simple, enemy of all uselessness, of all difficulty, the genre of drawing that it uses should be free from every kind of difficulty, pretension, and luxury; then it will contribute significantly to the speed and ease of study and to the development of ideas; in the opposite case, it will only render the hand clumsy, the imagination, lazy, and often even the judge- ment very false. 23

Durand's diagrammatic method, economic of time and resources, and readily communicable to the client, the engineer and the contractor, was widely adopted in the nineteenth century, although it did not, as its inventor had hoped, succeed in displacing the more elaborate renderings of the Beaux-arts. Modernists at the end of the century, however, were quick to seize on its potential for conveying abstraction and function, among them Le Corbusier, who seized on the axonometric projections of historical structures published by the engineer Auguste Choisy in 1899, reprinting them in his articles on architecture for L'esprit nouveau between 1920 and 1923.4

Inheriting this double ideal, of a graphic representation that is itself a tool for the installation of the utopia it outlines, a geometrically driven modernism developed a special affection for the utopian diagram. Ledoux's claims for the circle and

10 REPRESENTATIONS

..... . __ ̂ _ _ 4 _ _ Jo__~~~~J...

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_ _

-. -I

FIGURE 4. Durand, "Horizontal Combinations," 1: plate 2, part 2.

the square as the "letters" of the architect's "alphabet" echoed Enlightenment projects for the development of a universal language, and his Ideal City of Chaux demonstrated the use of such geometry as a pictogrammatic language of three- dimensional form for a Rousseauesque society on natural mores. Le Corbusier, with an architectural sensibility informed by postcubist developments in painting and sculpture, psychology and philosophy, found in "abstraction" a weapon against the historical styles and a powerful support for an architecture based on form (and its qualities of mass and surface) and space (and its qualities of enclosure or infinite- ness). In this sense, abstraction was registered as a primary aesthetic quality, one that allowed for the proportional systems and historical styles formerly making up the aesthetic content of the "art" of architecture, to be superseded by its own con- structive and space-enclosing elements expressed in the pure geometries now co- incident with the technological potential of steel and reinforced concrete. "Archi- tecture has nothing to do with the 'styles,' "wrote Le Corbusier in 1923. "It appeals to the highest faculties by its very abstraction. Architectural abstraction is both specific and magnificent in a way that, rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes it. The brute fact is subject to the idea only through the order that is projected upon it (fig. 5)."25

The neo-Platonic echoes of this form of abstraction were clear, and Le Corbu- sier openly claimed continuity from earlier classicisms-from the formal and spa-


FIGURE 5. Le Corbusier, "Diagram of lines and forms as they affect the

physiology of sensations," in Almanach d'architecture moderns (Paris, 1925), 35.

tial order of the Greeks, the institutional and typological order of the Romans, and the proportional systems of the modern French classicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The representational modes for this kind of abstraction were like- wise derived from the linear obsessions of neoclassicists: the purity of the line, the trace that allowed a contour, whether of a landscape or a body, to represent the "essence" of a natural form, ready to be converted into architecture. Thus Le Cor- busier's characterization of the architectural drawing echoes all the commonplaces of "contour" theory afterJohannJoachim Winckelmann: "A good and noble architecture is expressed on paper by a diagram [une epure] so denuded that an insider's vision is needed to understand it; this paper is an act of faith by the architect who knows what he is going to do." And, like Winckelmann against the baroque, Corbu- sier poses this essential abstraction against the conceits of the Beaux-arts architect: "On the other side, the flattering renderings of the ambitious architect titillate the eager client. Drawing is in truth architecture's trap."26

The diagrammatic representations of such an abstraction were in this sense close replications of a "new world of space," as Le Corbusier called it, that was to dissolve all traditional monumentalisms, styles, institutions, and habitats in the universal flux of the abstract. Transparency, infinity, ineffability, liminality, and the expansive extensions of the post-Nietzschean subject demanded as few boundary conditions as possible; the thinner the line, the more invisible the wall. Succinct and economical, the architect's 'Ypure" reduced a project to its essentials; it described the fundamental organization of a building tersely and in terms that seemed to correspond to the scientific tenor of the times; it was, in some sense the essence of the project, at once a correct and analytic representation of relations and a formal analog to the built structure itself

12 REPRESENTATIONS

Le Corbusier's moral stance in favor of the abstract drawing had its roots in the late Enlightenment, and his attitude toward drawing was remarkably similar to that of Durand. "Drawings," he argued late in 1939, "are made within four walls, with docile implements; their lines impose forms which can be one of two types: the simple statement of an architectural idea ordering space and prescribing the right materials an art form issuing from the directing brain, imagination made concrete and evolving before the delighted eyes of the architect, skilful, exact, inspired; or alternatively we can be faced with merely a dazzling spread of engrav- ings, illuminated manuscripts or chromos, crafty stage designs to bedazzle and dis- tract as much their author as the onlooker from the real issues concerned." Ar- chitectural drawings were thus divided into two species: those that reveal the underlying structure and organization of the project and those that dissimulate in order to seduce the lay client. This contrast between the analytical and the senti- mental, the rational and the deceptive, that echoes French critiques of rhetorical expression since Port Royal, was more than a formal distinction of representation, however; it was a touchstone by which to verify the authentic modernity of an architectural work, one that discarded the "illusion of plans" (to cite the title of his attack on Beaux-arts stylistics in Vers tne architecture) in favor of a design that represented its own "idea." The drawing a "simple statement of an architectural idea ordering space and prescribing the right materials" would thereby serve as an instru- ment of correction and production for an architecture that, as far as possible in the translation from design to building, would represent itself transparently, so to speak, materializing its aesthetic and intellectual order as clearly as a mathematical formula.

IV

Modernist diagrams have not, however, been received without their own diagrammatic transformation at the hands of followers, epigones, and revivalists. Le Corbusier's rapid sketches, diagrammatic as they were, were redolent of spatial and aesthetic potential compared with those prepared by the following generation, either in drawn or built form. Thus the polemical and geometrically closed diagrams of Albert Frey, in their attempt to clarify the principles of modern-movement environmental ideals, rigidly codify both technology and space (fig. 6).27 Other followers of the first generation of modernists built diagrammatic buildings to exemplify modernist principles among the best known would be Philip Johnson's quasi-Miesian Glass House in Connecticut of 1949 (itself a codification ofJohnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's own codification of modernism as "international style") and Harry Seidler's post-Marcel Breuer house for his mother of the same year in Sydney, a perfect composite model of a villa with elements from Le Corbu- sier's Poissy, Breuer's early Connecticut houses, and Oscar Niemeyer's sense of color


and space. Such diagrams, widely repeated in the 1 950s, were essential in the gradual transformation of modernism from its status as a style for the cultural elite, or a minimal response to mass housing needs, to a generalized way of life for middle- class suburbs.

Architectural historians, as they have sought to reduce the complexity of architectural experience to formal order, have also played a role in the diagramming of space and structure, starting early enough with Paul Frankl and A. E. Brinckmann between 1914 and 1924.28 Their schematic renderings of historical space prepared the way for a host of similar spatial analyses heavily informed by gestalt psychology. Perhaps the most celebrated, and in the realm of architectural practice the most influential, was the page of systematized diagrams of Palladian villas published by Rudolf Wittkower in 1949 (fig. 7).29 The Wittkower diagram resonated with a post- war generation of modernists looking for a geometrical and stable authority for form in the demonstrated absence of any single functional determinants. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, among others, were drawn by the idea of the existence of what might have been "architectural principles in the age of humanism" to develop a new and rigorous geometrical modernism.30

FIGURE 6. Albert Frey, "Shape," in In Search of a Living Architecture (New York, 1939).

14 REPRESENTATIONS

Villa Thiene at Cicogna Villa Sarego at Miega Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore

Villa Badoer at Fratta, Villa Zeno at Villa Cornaro at Polesine Cesalto Piombino

Villa Pisani at Villa Emo at Villa Malcontenta Montagnana Fanzolo

Villa Pisani at Villa Rotonda Geometrical Pattern Bagnolo of Palladio's Villas

FIGURE 7. Rudolph Wittkower; Palladian Villa Types, in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1952).


In 1947 this humanist diagrammatics was taken further, now with respect to the villas of Le Corbusier, by the architectural historian John Summerson who, in a lecture to students at the Bristol College of Architecture delivered in 1947, characterized Le Corbusier's transformation of the conventional house as a mark of his "witty, sublime-nonsensical approach to architectural design," his penchant for "sudden, irresistable" "topsy-turvydom." He was referring to the systematic reversals in function and spatial organization that appear, for example, in the villas at Garches or Poissy. If traditionally a house had four walls, Le Corbusier constructed it out of four windows; if a house normally stood in a garden, Le Corbusier would have the garden in the house, and so on. We might add to Summerson's list: if a house stands on the ground, Le Corbusier raises it up, and if a house is centrally planned, Le Corbusier emphasizes peripheral movement.3' In the same year Colin Rowe, a former pupil of Wittkower, published a seminal essay on Le Corbusier, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," demonstrating that what for Summerson was nothing more than "witty nonsense" represented in fact a programmatic con- cern for marking the distance and the relationship between modernism and tradition, between the prototype Palladian villa of aristocratic and bourgeois life and the Corbusian version, between traditional space and modern space.32 Rowe's versions of the diagrams of Le Corbusier's villas at Poissy and Garches have themselves become the canonical references for late-modernist space, referred to by architects as diverse as Rem Koolhaas, in, for example, his own mutation of the twentieth- century villa in the recently completed House at Bordeaux, and Greg Lynn, in his appeal for (digital) geometry to be restored to its primary place in the generation of architecture.

V

The recent attention to diagrammatic form in architecture may then be seen, on one level, as a testimony to the resilience of modernist ideologies, aesthetics, and technologies among those architects who had never thoroughly embraced the return to the past championed by neohistoricists and new urbanists. Thus, continuing modernists celebrate the diagram, in what one can only call a neomodernist return by many architects to rationalist simplicity and minimalist lucidity. Here the appeal to the diagram is both polemical and strategic. In its reduced and minimal form it dries out, so to speak, the representational excesses of postmodernism, the citational hysteria of nostalgia, and the vain attempts to cover over the inevitable effects of modern technologies, effects that modernists had attempted to face with the invention of abstract aesthetics. In its assertion of geometry as the basis for architecture, it opens the way for a thorough digitalization of the field, but in a way that overcomes the simplistic and often rigid models based on functional analysis proposed by design-methods theorists like Christopher Alexander in the early decades of computerization.

16 REPRESENTATIONS

But the stakes of diagram architecture go beyond a simple reaction to the postmodern, and a somewhat retro affection for the old or not-so-old modern, which itself might be interpreted as a postmodern turn. The excitement of digital aesthetics; the potential of mapping, finally, space, time, and movement in formal terms; the possibilities inherent in direct milling from design to finished object, all these too might be understood, if not as directly postmodern in affect, certainly as smoothing the transition from an old industrial to a new digital world one where the distance between image and reality can no longer be measured by any critique of the spectacle.

More fundamentally, the intersection of diagram and materiality impelled by digitalization upsets the semiotic distinctions drawn by Charles Sanders Peirce as the diagram becomes less and less an icon and more and more a blueprint or, alternatively, the icon increasingly takes on the characteristics of an object in the world. The clearest example of this shift would be the generation of digital topographies that include in their modeling "data" that would normally be separately diagrammed the flows of traffic, changes in climate, orientation, existing settlement, demographic trends, and the like. Formerly these would be considered by the designer as "influences" to be taken into account while preparing a "solution" to the varied problems they posed. Now, however, they can be mapped synthetically as direct topographical information, weighted according to their hierarchical importance, literally transforming the shape of the ground. The resulting "map," however hybrid in conception, is now less an icon to be read as standing in for a real territory than a plan for the reconstitution of its topographical form. Similarly, "blobs," however much they look like geometrical diagrams of form, architectural or not, are robbed of their iconic status in favor of their programmatic role in the production of the forms they image.

In this context, the question of architectural abstraction, whether in representation or in building, takes on an entirely new significance. For what seems to be at stake is the instability provoked between the new formal vocabularies generated by the computer and their easy translation into built form, so as to produce, almost simultaneously, an image as architecture and architecture as image. That is, where traditionally in classical and modernist works the architecture might image an idea, be imaged itself, or produce an image of its own but at the same time take its place in the world as experienced and lived structure and space, now the image partici- pates in the architecture to an unheralded degree, a condition that calls for, if not a postdigital reaction, certainly a reevaluation of the nature and role of abstract representation in the production of (abstract) architecture.

For the question raised by the new digital diagrams is whether they are in fact abstract at all, at least in the sense of the word used by modernist aesthetics. Where Corbusian and Miesian diagrams held within them the potential of form to be real- ized as abstract spatial relations abstractions of abstractions, so to speak the digital drawing is nothing more nor less than the mapping of three- or four-

Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation 1 7

FIGURE 8. Greg Lynn, Artists Space, 1995, Axonometric, in Animate Form (New York, 1999), 67.

dimensional relations in two, more like an engineering specification than an abstraction. The aesthetics of digitalization, moreover, seem driven less by a polemical belief in the virtues of an abstract representation of a new world, than by the limits of software's replication of surface, color, and texture and its notorious aversion to any ambiguity: the potential openness of the sketch, of the drawn line in all its subtleties, is reduced to thin-line clarity and allover surface pattern. It would seem, then, that a new approach to aesthetics must be forged in the face of such drawing, one that would take into account the changing definitions of the "real," the "image," and the "object" as it is subjected to the infinite morphings and distortions of animation. An aesthetics of data, of mapped information, would in these terms differentiate itself from the diagrammatic functionalism of the modern movement as well as from the long-lived neo-Kantianism that has served modernism's aesthetic judgments since the Enlightenment. Modernism in these terms has shifted from a diagram that is rendered as an abstraction of an abstraction to one that is a diagram of a diagram (fig. 8).

18 REPRESENTATIONS

Notes

The themes of this essay are a development of questions opened up in my JWVaped SApace: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in AModern Culture (Cambridge, 1Mass., 2000), and were inspired in part by a symposium on "The Activist Drawing," on the occasion of an exhibition of Constant's New Babylon drawings, held at the Drawing Center in New York and organized by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley. The paper I delivered on that occasion, "Diagram Utopias," will be published by M/lIT Press in The Activist Drawing, edited by Mark Wigley and Catherine de Zegher, forthcoming from MIT Press.

1. See Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York, 1999). 2. See MVRDV, MetacitylDatatown (Rotterdam, Neth., 1999). 3. I am referring to recent projects by Rem Koolhaas (The House at Bordeaux, 1999; the

entry for the competition for the French National Library, 1989) and by Zaha Hadid. 4. I am, of course, using Frank Gehry's recently completed Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao,

Spain, as the basis of this pastiche. 5. For a useful summary of this revived sensibility for the diagram, see the collection of

essays edited by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in ANY, no. 23 (1998). 6. Rem Koolhaas, SAJLXL: Small, YA/Iediunm, Large, Extra Large (New York, 1994). 7. Toyo Ito, "Diagram Architecture," El Croquis, 77, no. 1 (1996): 18-24. 8. Ibid. 9. See, for example, Pier Luigi Nicolin, "The Tao of Sejima," Lotus 96 (1998): 7-9. Nicolin

takes issue with Ito's interpretation of Sejima's translucent and transparent "mem- branes" as a reflection of the high-speed media metropolis and proposes instead an alternative reading that of deceleration and slowdown. This, he argues, might represent a shift from "a sociological, or mimetic, phase, related to the world of information processing, to a scientific, philosophical or mystical phase."

10. Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (New York, 1999). 11. R. E. Somol, "Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architec-

ture," in Eisenman, Diagram Diaries, 24. 12. I have sketched the historical background of this technological revolution in architec-

ture in "Technologies of Space/Spaces of Technology," Journal of thie Society ofArchitec- tural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999), special issue: "Architectural History, 1999/ 2000": 482-486.

13. A useful review of these diverse tendencies is to be found in Peter Zellner, Hybrid Spaces: New Forms in Digital Architecture (New York, 1999).

14. Walter Benjamin, "Rigorous Study of Art: On the First Volume of the Aiinstwisseni- schaftliche Forschungen," trans. Thomas Y Levin, October 47 (Winter 1988): 89. This is a translation of Walter Benjamin, "Strenge Kunstwissenschaft. Zum ersten Bande des Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen," Frankfurter Zeitivng, 30 July 1933, appealing under Benjamin's pseudonym Detlef Holz; republished in Walter Benjamin, Gesamnmnelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 3:363-74.

15. Robin Evans, 7Tanslationsfirom Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London, 1997), 156. The original article, "Translations from Drawing to Building," AA Files no. 12 (Sum- mer 1986): 3-18, introduced a subject that was to be developed in brilliant detail in his


posthumously published Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

16. Indeed it is significant that the only large-scale exhibition dedicated solely to the architectural drawing mounted by a major museum in recent years was the decidedly ambiguous installation of nineteenth-century drawings from the Ecole des beaux-arts at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Here, the obvious target was modernism itself, the "International Style" imported by its first architectural curator, Philip Johnson, together with Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932. Obviously appealing to a public said to be tired of minimalism and abstraction in architecture and a profession preoccupied with "meaning," "signification," and the communicative power of architecture to a broader public, this show of ideal projects had, save in its last-minute presentation of Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, little to do with actual building. For a critical review of this exhibition with regard to the tradition of the Museum of Modern Art, see William Ellis, ed., "Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition," Oppositions 8 (Spring 1977): 160-75.

17. See Victor Hugo, "Guerre aux demolisseurs!" (1825-32), in Oeuvres completes: Critique, ed. Pierre Reynaud (Paris, 1985), 187; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), chap. 4: "From Absolute Space to Abstract Space."

18. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 361. 19. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Ku-

bler (New York, 1992), 33. 20. See Werner Szambien, Jean-1Nficolas-Louis Durand, 1760-1834. De l'inzitation a' la norine

(Paris, 1984). 21. J.-N.-L. Durand, Precis des lefons d'architecture donnees a l'Ecole royale polytechnique (1805)

(Paris, 1819), 1:34, my translation. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid. 24. Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l'architecture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1899); Le Corbusier republished

many of his axonometrics that displayed in one projection the space and structure of the buildings represented in the journal L'esprit nouveau between 1920 and 1921, and again in Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris, 1923).

25. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 35. My translation. 26. Le Corbusier, Sur les quatre Routes (Paris, 1941), cited in Jacques Lacan, ed., Le Corbusier:

une encyclopedie (Paris, 1987), 118-19, my translation. The English translation, Le Cor- busier, The Four Routes, trans. Dorothy Todd (London, 1947), 147-48, fails to render the clarity of Le Corbusier's argument.

27. See Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York, 1939). Here Frey, under the heading "Diagrams" simplifies and systematizes Le Corbusier's sketches of formal and spatial principles while developing them with respect to American landscape and climate.

28. See Paul Frankl, Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420-1900, trans. James E O'Gorman (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); and A. E. Brinck- mann, "Schematic Plans of Renaissance and Baroque Spatial Groups," Plastik und Raum. Als Grundformen Kfinstlerischer Gestaltuung (Munich, 1924).

29. Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949). 30. See Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism," Architectural Review 118 (1955): 355-61. 31. John Summerson, 'Architecture, Painting, and Le Corbusier," in Heavenil) AVansions and

Other Essays on Architecture (1 948) (New York, 1963), 177-94. 32. Colin Rowe, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, Palladio and Le Corbusier Com-

pared," Architectural Review 101 (1947): 101-4.

20 REPRESENTATIONS