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The Space of Architectural InquiryIvan Rupnik aa Northeastern UniversityPublished online: 04 Oct 2013.

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The Space of Architectural Inquiry

GUEST CURATOR How: Techniques and ProtocolsIVAN RUPNIKNortheastern University

inquiry, framing their specific project within a broad-er potential context, thereby gaining some degree of “semi-autonomy” without ever physically retreat-ing from their communities.5 These projects suggest an expansion of the “mental space” of the familiar architectural atelier, into the “social spaces” of the building site and the city.6 By establishing more ex-pansive projects, these architects are able to extract general knowledge from specific and often narrowly defined commissions. I will discuss four “projects” that epitomize the semi-autonomous practice of designing a space of inquiry.

Resolution: 4 Architecture and the Modern Modular (2004–Present)7

Founded in New York in 1990, Resolution: 4 Architecture began with a familiar slew of commis-sions, working on loft interiors, offices, and the oc-casional residential project. At some point in the last decade, one of the firm’s founding partners, Joseph Tanney, developed what he calls a “preoccupation” with the modular housing industry in North America, particularly in the Northeast, where a number of the larger manufacturers are located.8 Tanney at-tempted to channel the constant flow of residential commissions into an interesting form of architectural research, in which the specific demands of his clients interfaced with his evolving comprehension of the limits and opportunities that these manufacturers offered. Through a trial and error process, Resolu-tion 4 discovered that a standard detail for a stair opening could serve as a way of creating larger apertures without significantly interfering with the process of fabrication itself. On the other hand, the architects also realized that while there were certain advantages to off-site production, the envelope was something that was better left to skilled local con-tractors on site. The “Modern Modular,” as Tanney and his colleagues have titled this approach, differs significantly from a utopian vision of an architect-led mechanized workshop, which combines all of the trades under one roof, away from the materially messy and socially chaotic construction site. Tan-

replaced the need to consider the nature of labor, while for Morris the nature of work, labor, and action within a given community was the primary issue, and one that new technologies could not easily resolve.3 A few decades later, Bertrand Russell would expand on Morris’s skepticism towards the dream of techno-uto-pia, relating it to the recent Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He wondered what would happen to “Science and Art Under Socialism,” and whether the individual would be able to “learn, to discover, to know,” to en-gage in meaningful work, individually and collectively, in a post-revolutionary society.4

The critiques raised by Morris and Russell, which may at first glance seem distant from contem-porary issues faced by the architectural discipline, provide a valuable alternative model of practice, one in which the space of inquiry is the primary issue at stake. My own research focuses on architectural practices in which architects first design a space of

In 1890, William Morris published News from No-where, a vision of his own libertarian-socialist utopia, as a critique of Edward Bellamy’s more conventional technologically driven utopia, Looking Backward (1889).1 Morris’s utopian society was an expansion of an earlier and more humble collective experiment, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., the company he started in 1861 as a critique of the role of the artist within society. This precedent in turn served as a ret-roactive utopia for architects and theorists, including Hermann Muthesius, Walter Gropius, and Nikolaus Pevsner.2 In general, I would argue that architecturally conceived utopias say as much about their author’s desired position in society as they do about what so-ciety should be. At their worst, these visions, particu-larly technologically driven ones, reflect a persistent desire to simply escape and not critically engage the material and social conventions of a given context. For Bellamy and many other techno-utopians, machines

Figure 1. Modern Modular (2004–present). Map of the distribution of Modern Modular completed projects as of 2012, reflecting the firms’ location

as well as the concentration of the manufactured housing industry in particular areas of the country, particularly the Northeast (1) (map prepared by

author and Thomas Neal from data provided by Resolution: 4 Architecture).

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Figure 3. Modern Modular (2004–present). Resolution: 4 Architecture’s

Modern Modular utilizes and modifies an existing industrial vernacular

(1), as well as established transportation networks (2). Modifications

to the standard cells off-site, such as the use a stair opening detail

for larger openings (3), as well as responses to site conditions, in the

form of foundations (4), or cladding, which is usually done by a local

subcontractors (5), extend the space of inquiry from the firm’s studio in

New York to factories and construction sites throughout North America

(courtesy of Resolution: 4 Architecture).

ney treats the manufactured housing industry as a vernacular and a space of inquiry for the specific projects he undertakes—after all, it is nearly four de-cades old. Using dozens of residential commissions, he has realized a form of architectural research that, in its details, suggests that instead of architects con-tinuing to berate the building trades for not being more like car or cell phone manufacturers, it may be

worth taking a closer look at their practices and their standard kit of parts. The Modern Modular, as well as a number of other new investigations into the nature of manufactured housing, such as Hive Modular or Connect Homes, suggests that the scale of inquiry should not be limited to the building site or factory but needs to expand to a territorial understanding of contemporary industrial ecologies.9

Landing Studio and Rock Chapel Marine (2005–Present)

During their graduate studies, Daniel Adams and Marie Law-Adams, the founding partners of Landing Studio, became intrigued by the residual industries still functioning on the Boston waterfront at a time when many politicians, developers, and urban planners were celebrating the final realiza-

Figure 2. Modern Modular (2004–present). The variety of internal organization within the standard cell, “Modules of Use” (1), as well as the cell aggregations, “Typology Matrix” (2), are not the elements of a closed system but

are forecasts which help guide this open system while at the same time keeping it open to new inputs from each iteration (courtesy of Resolution: 4 Architecture).

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Figure 5. Rock Chapel Marine (2005–present). The Rock Chapel Marine project began as an expansion of an existing salt distribution facility into an existing oil storage area (1); Landing Studio carefully choreographed the

demolition and partial reuse of these tanks, utilizing their aluminum domes (2), portions of the steel tanks (3, 4), as part of a new public space for Chelsea; their knowledge of the local industrial ecology also allowed them to

barter for other objects such as this tugboat cabin (5), which will be used as part of the public restroom; the resulting space relies less on post-industrial aesthetics common to contemporary spaces which have replaced industry

and more on the untapped potential synergies of industry and the city (6), (7) (courtesy of Landing Studio).

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Figure 4. Rock Chapel Marine (2005–present). The “recycling matrix” documents the initial “capacity” of various objects and their “translation” by Landing Studio as part of the Rock Chapel Marine project (courtesy ofLanding Studio).

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Figure 6. Rock Chapel Marine (2005–present). In this “recycling diagram” the architects demonstrate a choreographic approach to design informed and assisted by the industrial ecology of the expanding (and contracting) salt

facility as well as that of Chelsea, a part of Boston’s active industrial waterfront; this graphic document, like the social space which it documents, argues for a new understanding of industry embedded in and beneficial to the

urban fabric (courtesy of Landing Studio).

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Casa Granturismo Design Village (2004–Present)11

The complete integration of the countries of the Iberian Peninsula with northern Europe during the turn of the millennium began to radically reshape the highly desirable coastal regions of these coun-tries. The elimination of political and economic bar-riers, combined with the advent of low-cost airlines, led to the emergence of a new type of occupant in this landscape—one that could no longer be eas-ily defined as either local or tourist. The physical manifestation of this trend could be seen in the pre-dominance of self-contained gated subdivisions as the primary development model, particularly in the Algarve. A team of young Portuguese architects felt that this typology was being ignored by the architec-tural community, and that this new community was not being fully addressed by existing development models, so they decided to combine design and re-search, as well as architecture, urban planning, and development, through the Casa Granturismo Design Village. In 2004, they asked 40 young practitioners to submit their ideas on these issues, inviting the

Figure 7. CGT Design Village (2004–present). The Casa Granturismo

Design Village design process began with a pool of 40 international

architects in 2004, with the number of participants narrowed down to

24 (one for each of the 24 parcels), and then to 18, who were invited

to Silves for a workshop in August of that year, resulting in the initial

scheme (1). Between 2004 and 2007 the CG team and 7 architectural

teams collaborated on developing the overall scheme at a number of

scales, culminating in a second on-site workshop and a new scheme (2),

which was approved by the municipality in 2008. Legend: L_P – Loret

Payer; F_M – Fareleira Moncada; P_R – Procter Rihl; FRE. – FREE; B_C –

BOB. CAT; ABW – Atelier Bow Wow; PvE – Pezo Von Ellrichshausen; D_G

– Dekleva Gregoric; C_T – CasaGT Team; J_A – Jockisch Architekten;

W_A – Wagner Architekten; R_T – Randic Turato; MO. – MOOV; N+ –

njiric+ (courtesy of CG Team + Author).

Figure 8. CGT Design Village (2004–present). Responding to the economic crisis, the CG team shifted focus to material research conducted

experiments using local stone and rammed earth techniques (1, 2) as well as focusing on the development of the two multi-unit schemes by njiric+ and

SPBR, which are shown here (3, 4), the latter of which was completed in 2012 (photos by CG Team).

tion of a post-industrial utopia of condos, retail, and public spaces. Their work demonstrates a refreshing skepticism towards this contemporary embrace of the “post-industrial condition” and a respect for the ef-ficiencies of the waterfront industries that still oper-ate within cities like Boston and New York. In public presentations of their work, they acknowledge the benefits of removing certain industries from cities, but also question how cities will fare in the future when all goods traffic is dominated by a very inef-ficient medium—the truck? Starting in 2005, these architects began to develop a relationship with a salt dock operating company in Chelsea, MA, acting as liaisons between that entity and the diverse constitu-encies of one of the most industrial municipalities

left on the Eastern seaboard. The emerging network of relationships allowed Landing Studio to propose and develop a unique type of urban landscape, the Rock Chapel Marine, an “integrated landscape of active maritime industrial operations and public waterfront recreation space, the first of its kind” ac-cording to Landing Studio.10 The design, construction and occupation of this project have blurred into a single creative space. The “material” for this project emanated from the architects’ hard-won network of relationships with the salt company and its industrial and community neighbors, including everything from the extra-large company tools that are underutilized in the summer months to discarded resources that are bartered for and exchanged. The first phase of this new kind of urban landscape will be completed and opened to the public this summer. This project calls into question disciplinary conventions as well as established urban regulations and provides an excellent case study of the temporally choreographed design sensibility long advocated for by the discourse of landscape urbanism.

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22 that responded to their call to the city of Silves, on whose western edge the development is located. Studying a number of subdivision precedents from the 1920s and 1930s, when architects last seriously considered this typology, the Casa GT team devel-oped a design methodology and space of inquiry that combined pedagogy, community activism, urban planning, and curation. Architects were given parcels based on their initial proposals, and then asked, in a second round, to redesign their projects in collabora-tion with their neighbors. A game-like point system was even developed to help the international archi-tects work within the Portuguese political economy of construction. New typologies emerged, with one firm developing a multi-unit scheme from their initial single-family house typology. Between 2005 and 2008, a unique fabric emerged, challenging estab-lished notions of authorship and divisions between architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Unfortunately, the project received full approvals to start construction just as the economic crisis hit Portugal. Despite this setback, the Casa GT team has continued to develop the project, researching new building techniques based on the living (but nearly extinct) material cultures in this region, including rammed earth and rubble stone construction. Ad-ditionally, the development of two multi-unit build-ings, the first designed by the Sao Paulo–based firm SPBR, was recently completed. As a design method-ology, the Casa GT approach provided an interesting alternative to two contemporary extremes, the over-emphasis on individual virtuosity we see in a project like Ordos, and the lack of faith in individual creativ-ity and accountability we see in New Urbanism.12

The Barge: A Floating Pavilion for Croatia at the 2010 Venice Biennale13

Croatia’s 2010 submission to the Venice Bien-nale began with Leo Modrcin, the appointed curator, commissioning nine architectural practices to propose a design for a floating pavilion to exhibit at the end of the event. Modrcin was motivated by a number of issues, including the loss of a national pavilion in

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Figure 9. A floating pavilion for Croatia at the Venice Biennale (2010). “Diagram #5: Budget Ballast” documents the shift in time and budget

allocation from an exhibition representing architecture to an architectural experiment / pavilion (image Lana Cavar, graphic designer).

Figure 10. A floating pavilion for Croatia at the Venice Biennale (2010). “Diagram #4: Sail Away” maps the trajectory of the exhibition/pavilion/

experiment from the shipyard in Kraljevica, where it was constructed, to Rijeka harbor, where it was first exhibited, and finally to Venice, on route to

which it was damaged and was never officially exhibited.

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the 1990s, the thirty year anniversary of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo project, a long and complicated shared history of Venice and the Croatian coast, as well as a sense that the local scene lacked the kind of theoretical proposals he had grown accustomed to during his two decades of practice in New York.14 Dur-ing the first meeting, the eight practices that accepted the commission proposed an alternative. Instead of producing eight utopian visions, they would work together to produce one actual floating pavilion, uti-

lizing the process to simulate the collaborative nature of the architectural culture of the country. Despite the fiercely independent nature of these thirteen archi-tects, a common language was found and a singular project emerged. A voided mass of stacked rebar, not unlike the “load” on a barge, the project reflected the importance of programmed or optical art in the contemporary history of visual culture in this country. Where Rossi’s floating pavilion related to its contexts at a more noumenal level, the “barge” was much more

phenomenological, impacting the viewer’s experience of the urban environments it visited. Like the three previous case studies, this project, built with an exhi-bition budget, was only possible due to the architects’ deep local knowledge, another manifestation of the space of inquiry. Without the collective efforts of the thirteen, now expanded to fourteen by a young and ambitious architecture student, acquiring the barge and contracting an underutilized but highly skilled shipyard to construct the pavilion in record time would

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Figure 11. A floating pavilion for Croatia at the Venice Biennale (2010). The complete process, including the collaborative design (1), consensus on a single scheme (2), acquisition of a barge (3), fabrication of the pavilion (4),

as well as its initial installation in Rijeka (5, 6), voyage to Venice (7, 8, 9) and damaged state (10), challenged established boundaries of projection and representation and has yet to be fully documented or published (1–6, 10

courtesy of pavilion team; 7–9 courtesy of Zelimir Grzancic).

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not have been possible. While the team managed to realize this brown moiré in time for the Biennale, the meager budget proved inadequate to fund the struc-tural reinforcing necessary for the long sea voyage. After some deliberation, the team decided to risk the journey; the barge encountered choppy seas on route and arrived in Venice in a partially damaged state. The team and the curator were forced to decide, once and for all, whether this was an exhibition, in which case the damaged structure simply served as part of a larger narrative; or whether this was a pavilion, in which case it should not be shown. Ultimately, the team decided not to show the pavilion in its current damaged state. This decision led to two very different responses. The international press lauded the ambi-tions of the team and dramatized the pavilion’s fate, understanding this to be part of the discursive aspira-tions of the project. Conversely, the Croatian press, as well as many of the architects’ colleagues, positioned these events as a scandal, reflecting the inabilities and shortcomings of these architects as professionals.

The four projects I have discussed have all sought in some way to establish an epistemological system, blending knowledge generation and projec-tion within a single space of inquiry. In this short text, I have alluded to the disciplinary knowledge that these and other projects contain but that architectural aca-demia seems somewhat ill-equipped to engage, with its persistent preference for top-ten lists that privilege final products over methodologies and eschew the social spaces within which they have developed. As the recent exhibition at MOMA reminds us, Henri Labrouste rejected the study of established Roman models for the more peripheral temples of the Greek colony at Paestum, where the interplay of the techno-logical and the social proved to be more legible.15 Her-mann Muthesius espoused a similar emphasis on the study of spaces of inquiry over established and often iconic models during a number of Werkbund debates. This attitude can also be seen in an important spread of Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture, where the Parthenon and the Delage Grand-Sport are placed on equal footing with the Temple at Paestum and the

Humbert—the former is encountered as a refined object, the latter as a catalyst to change.16 While Le Corbusier certainly hoped that his Villa Savoye ap-proached the Parthenon’s status (it has certainly been included in most subsequent top-ten lists), a better understanding of that particular architectural work can be reached through a study of his own consciously de-signed space of architectural inquiry, the “laboratory” at Pessac. Le Corbusier’s laboratory, in combination with his interpretation of a workers’ housing vernacu-lar, serves as the foundation of a new architecture. In order to fashion a better model and methodology for research and teaching, one that extracts more from existing spaces of inquiry and prepares future practitioners to design their own “laboratories,” archi-tectural academia should consider the work of Peter Galison on the history of scientific inquiry. Galison seeks a way out of two “reductionist” approaches in his own discipline, one prioritizing the theoretical, and the other the experimental nature of scientific inquiry. Instead of a compromise between these two poles, Galison argued for a closer examination of the instruments used and the space of the laboratory itself (essentially a large instrument) as the key elements of science’s own material culture which he argued were neither “vulgarized versions of high theory, nor its primitive building blocks.”17 By including the study of the instrument of inquiry with that of the experiment and the theory, Galison hoped to challenge the “hier-archical relationship between theory and practice.”18 He sought a “new space for research,” one where “experimentation is not depicted as mere prerequisite for the construction of theory, nor as a primitive kind of theorizing.”19 This theorization is particularly well adapted to the scientific discipline, where the space of inquiry is primarily focused on the production of new knowledge. Galison’s approach is radical in its consid-eration of the material and social contaminants that transgress the pure epistemological space of the labo-ratory. His framing of scientific inquiry acknowledges that experiment and experience are closely related terms. Galison’s proposed approach is innovative in that he considers the laboratory a social space within

which multiple subjects interact over time. In this sense, the scientific experiment is a social construc-tion, acknowledging the close relation between the concepts of experiment and experience.

Science has successfully convinced society that the autonomy of its own space of inquiry is essential to the discipline; by focusing on the laboratory, Galison particularizes the process by which an autonomous dis-ciplinary space, designed for a specific line of scientific inquiry, is carved out within a given context. Art has essentially achieved its own nearly autonomous posi-tion in society through its space of inquiry, the atelier, and even its space of communication, the gallery, while at the same time making forays into context from this powerful position.20 In his characterization of the archi-tectural work as a “translation from drawing to build-ing,” a movement from the atelier to the building site through the space of the everyday, Robin Evans comes close to defining the space of architectural inquiry sug-gested by the four projects I have discussed.21 Neither the architectural discipline nor the architectural object has attained the degree of autonomy of science or of art. Following Evans’s argument, semi-autonomy can only be achieved at the scale of a single “translation,” a consciously crafted space of inquiry, a particular proj-ect. In this respect, his approach is most similar to that of Galison, with the former allowing for the possibility of a localized achievement of autonomy within a spe-cific context in architecture, and the latter allowing for the possibility of contingency or the impact of context on the nearly autonomous space of scientific inquiry. The conscious design of the architectural project as an instrument and space of inquiry, the size and duration of which can vary greatly as the four projects I have discussed clearly demonstrate, provides a valuable object of study which lies between the drawing, an artifact that is closer to the mental space of the archi-tect, and the building, the production and occupation of which occur in social space.

Notes1. William Morris, News From Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest: Being

Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance (London: Routledge & K. Paul,

1970); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000—1887 (Peterborough,

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Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003).

2. Muthesius enthusiastically embraced Morris’s shift from the atelier

and the medieval workshop to the enterprise as a space of inquiry.

Hermann Muthesius, The English House (London: Frances Lincoln,

2007; originally published 1904–1905), 97. Pevsner goes even further,

calling the founding of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner, Fine Art Workmen

in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals “the beginning of a

new era in Western Art.” Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design:

From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Bath: Palazzo, 2011; originally

published in 1936), 22. An interest in the design of a new space of

inquiry and not only of production is also evident in Walter Gropius’s

design for a new type of enterprise, outlined in his 1910 text “Programm

zur Gründung einer allgemeinen Hausbaugesellschaft auf künstlerisch

einheitlicher Grundlage m. b. H.” [A Program for a General Contracting

Firm Founded on Unified Artistic Principles]. At the Bauhaus, Gropius

placed the versuchsplatz [experimental buildings site] and later the

versuchssiedlung [experimental settlement] at the center of architectural education. For more on this see Andreas Schwaring, Die Siedlung Dessau-

Törten: Rationalität als ästhetisches Programm (Dresden: Thelem, 2010).

3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1958).

4. Russell, like Morris and other libertarian socialists, anticipated that

society would need to evolve even after the establishment of some

utopian community. Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads To Freedom:

Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and

Black Publications, 2007), 124–125 (originally published 1919 by

Henry Holt and Co.). My interest in this particular example is certainly

at least partially a reflection of my own childhood in a rather imperfect

libertarian-socialist utopia, the former Yugoslavia.

5. I borrow this term from Stanford Anderson, who used it as part of

the discussion of his theory of critical conventionalism. See Stanford

Anderson, “Critical Conventionalism in Architecture,” Assemblage 1

(October 1986): 6–23.

6. Here I am referencing Henri Lefebvre’s us of the terms in his critique of

the structuralist and poststructuralist theoretical models of the production

of language, form and space. “No limits at all have been set on the

generalization of the concept of mental space. ... We are forever hearing

about the space of this and/or the space of that. … Epistemological

thought, in concert with the linguists’ theoretical efforts, has reached a

curious conclusion. It has eliminated the ‘collective subject’, the people

as a creator of a particular language, as carrier of specific etymological

sequences. … (This approach) … completely ignores the yawning gap

that separates this linguistic mental space from that social space wherein

language becomes practice.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; original French publication 1974), 4–6.

7. While many of the individual iterations of the Modern Modular have

been published in magazines like Dwell and Architectural Record, there

is little available on the system itself or its evolution. A transcription of

Joseph Tanney’s lecture and a subsequent discussion from Homework,

a conference held at Northeastern University on contemporary North

American industrialized housing delivery systems, are available on the

schools’ web site, http://www.northeastern.edu/camd/architecture/

portfolio-type/conference-proceedings/homework

8. The Modern Modular is described in detail in http://re4a.com/

preoccupations/set/, http://re4a.com/preoccupations/factory, and

http://re4a.com/the-modern-modular/.

9. Antoine Picon has contrasted the “architects’ tackling of their projects

in isolation” to the “engineers’ aim to organize things overall” and to

engage the “dynamic system of tensions and flows, a circulation of men

and commodities” in French Architects and Engineers of the Enlightenment

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 15. During the twentieth

century, architects like Walter Gropius and Charles Eames admired a new

kind of engineer, the organizational or industrial engineer, who focused

on industrial processes and not on mechanical objects. See Charles Eames

and John Entenza, “What Is a House?” Arts and Architecture (July 1944):

28–33. My own doctoral research focuses on the adoption of American

industrial engineering tools by European architects during the first half of

the twentieth century. For more on this see “Building Systems, Building

Territory” in Kiel Moe and Ryan E. Smith, eds., Building Systems: Design

Technology and Society (London: Routledge, 2012), 86–103. Hive Modular

has been developed by a team of architects based in Minneapolis through

relationships with a number of manufacturers. The Connect Homes system,

based in Los Angeles, has focused on developing a relationship with a single

manufacturer and patenting a unique transportation process, leveraging the

efficiencies of the shipping container network and not the container itself.

10. http://www.landing-studio.com/about

11. The project was first initiated in 2004 by Ricardo Camacho and

Nuno Jacinto. The current scheme was curated by Ricardo Camacho and

Casa Team with individual projects by Atelier Bow Wow, njiric+, Randic

Turato, Dekleva Gregoric, Pezo Von Ellrichthausen, N45, FREE Fernando

Romero, Dass Plus, MultitudeAgency, and SPBR Arquitectos. For more

information on this project see Ivan Rupnik, “Tourism after the Recession:

A Discussion with Ricardo Camacho,” Covjek i Prostor, no. 7–8 (2009):

10–23 and “Portugal Turistico: Perspectivas Criticas,” Arqa 102 (May–

June 2012): 22–39.

12. For more on Ordos see Jeffrey Kipnis, “Ordos: Nine Houses by GSD

Faculty,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009): 106–125.

13. The design team included Saša Begović, Marko Dabrović, Igor Franić, Tanja Grozdanić, Petar Mišković, Silvije Novak, Veljko Oluić, Helena Paver

Njirić, Lea Pelivan, Toma Plejić, Goran Rako, Saša Randić, Idis Turato, Pero

Vuković, and Tonči Žarnić. The project was commissioned and curated by

Leo Modrčin. The title of the project is still disputed; the more official

title is “The Ship”; another popular title among the authors is “The

Load”; I prefer “The Barge.”

14. Aldo Rossi’s floating Teatro del Mondo was installed in front of the

Customs House in Venice on November 11, 1979, as part of the Biennale

that year, before setting off on a voyage down the eastern Adriatic coast,

visiting Diocletian’s Palace in Split as well as the walled city of Dubrovnik.

15. The exhibition I am referring to is Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light. Two decades ago, Barry Bergdoll argued that Labrouste sought out the

temples of Paestum instead of settling on the predetermined models of study

because he saw them as a “testimony to the progressive history of a society

arriving on new shores, implanting its traditions, and rapidly adapting them to

new materials, to a new climate, and ultimately even to the new social needs

that arose with this new life far from Attica.” Barry Bergdoll, “The French

Academy in Rome, 1826–1832: Laboratory of Romantic Historicism,” in Leon

Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,

1994), 86. Romanticism, like postmodernism, had an impact on architectural

epistemology that far exceeds a particular language of architectural

expression, one that is still not adequately explored.

16. Allen Brooks discussed the impact of Hermann Muthesius’s theories

of typological evolution on Le Corbusier in Le Corbusier’s Formative Years

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 220. See also Stanford

Anderson (note 4) and Francesco Passanti, “The Vernacular, Modernism,

and Le Corbusier,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56,

no. 4 (December 1997): 438–451. The particular spread I am referring to

is page 106–107 of Corbusier’s first edition, Vers une Architecture (Paris:

Les Editions G. Cres et C., 1923). Hermann Muthesius struggled to define

his own ideas on the evolution of types throughout the first two decades

of the twentieth century. His clearest writing on the subject is included in

a chapter of his manual on settlement design Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung

(Munich: Verlag von F. Bruckman A. G., 1918) titled “Typenbau,” a term

that he uses to mean both “building with types” and “building types.”

17. Peter Galison, “History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor,”

Science in Context 2 (1988): 209.

18. Ibid., 210.

19. Ibid., 211.

20. Peter Burger provides an insightful history of this process in his

Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1984), 49–50. For him, nineteenth-century aestheticism had not only

achieved a “distance from the praxis of life” but had made that distance

the primary “content” of an artistic work. Avant-garde art adopted

this “essential element of Aestheticism,” using this distance as a form

of critique of society as whole. Nikolaus Pevsner discusses the same

historical transformation in Pioneers of Modern Design (note 1), 21–23.

19. Robin Evans has often discussed “the particular disadvantage 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 on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the

thing itself which, naturally, absorbed most of their attention and effort.”

Evans alludes that this “displacement of effort and indirectness of access

still seem to me to be distinguishing features of architecture considered

as a visual art, but whether always and necessarily disadvantageous is

another question.” Robin Evans, “Translation from Drawing to Building,” in Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: AA

Documents, 1997), 156–157.

282 THE SPACE OF ARCHITECTURAL INQUIRY

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