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you will find the question in the pdf

Introduction to Contemporary Architecture SCI-Arc Fall 2013
Wednesdays, 10-1, Room 160 Todd Gannon, instructor

1

Final Essay Prompt:

1. In a variety of ways, the essays assigned for Week 14 by R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting,

Michael Meredith, Andrew Zago, and Sylvia Lavin revisit arguments we have
encountered earlier in the semester. Paying close attention to concepts such as
Nietzsche’s genealogy and Deleuze’s simulacrum, write an essay that critically assesses
each of these positions. Be sure to demonstrate the ways in which earlier arguments are
echoed and/or attacked in these texts.

Papers should be 4-5 pages (double spaced, 12 pt). Illustrations may be included, but should not
reduce the amount of text to less than approximately 1200-1500 words.

Final paper due:
Monday 16 December 2013 at 12:00 noon in my mailbox next to the director’s office. No late work
will be accepted.

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The First Kiss

“The basic concept was not to try to destroy or be pro­

vocative to the architecture, but to melt in. As ifI would
kiss Taniguchi. Mmmmm,” (said with closed eyes and
elaborate flourish, a bright yellow down vest, and a
heavy Swiss accent). 2This is how Pipilotti Rist described

her installation in the atrium of the Museum of Mod­

ern Art titled Pour Your Body Out (735

4

Cubic Meters)­
a multichannel immersive video, twenty-five feet high,
that wrapped the museum’s traditional white walls

with a softly psychedelic garden of Eden populated with
a prelapsarian Eve, apples, and animalism (fig. I). The
installation also included pink curtains and a gigantic,
soft gray, doughnut-shaped pouf, black in the center so
it would look like a pupil from above, where scores of
people jostled for comfy spots, blanketed by the oozing,
pinkish soundtrack playing animato.

Rist was not, ofcourse, talking about actually
Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the museum. Tani­
guchi was long gone by the time she entered the scene,
as was Barnett Newman’s largely phallic broken obelisk

punctuated the center of the atrium.
Rather, Rist was describing how her work would come
into temporary contact with Taniguchi’s, how her mov­
ing images would brush up against his still volume,
how her shifting colors would apply moist pressure to
his white walls, how sound-filled nipples would bud
from his flatness, and how this “big room,” 7,354 cubic
meters of uselessness devoted to ritualized transcen­
dence, would get filled up by sensuous bodies pouring
in and out (fig. 2).

She was speaking with the voice of a non-architect
about how a new medium (I call it superarchitecture)
and a new sensibility-postfeminist certainly, but more
acutely one of intense affect-could simply and with
devastating generosity slip itself on and over the old
medium of architecture and its even older sensibilities
of authority and autonomous intellection, thereby
enveloping the increasingly archaic figure of the archi­
tect in an entirely new cultural project. Her remarks
offer a starting point for reconsidering disciplinarity,
expertise, and medium specificity in architecture
because her affective yet alien embrace marks a regime
change that is happening with neither the confronta-

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

tion or violence prescribed by the avant-garde nor the
endless accommodations of new practice, but through
the gesture of a sweetly gentle and yet thoroughly over­
powering kiss.

A kiss has been many things in many places (fig. 3).
In the seventeenth century, Martin von Kempe wrote
more than a thousand pages on kissing. But even von
Kempe could never have imagined that kissing would
serve as a theory of architecture. The kiss offers to
architecture, a field that in its traditional forms has
been committed to permanence and mastery, not
merely the obvious allure of sensuality but also a set of
qualities that architecture has long resisted: ephemeral-

and consilience. However long or short, however
socially constrained or erotically desiring, a kiss is the
coming together of two similar but not identical sur­
faces, surfaces that soften, flex, and deform when in
contact, a performance of temporary singularities, a

bedazzling convergence and identification
separation is inconceivable yet inevitable.

the division between two bodies,
creating new definitions of threshold that

through suction and slippage rather than
and boundary. A kiss puts form into slow

and stretchy motion, loosening form’s fixity and relax­
ing its unities. Kissing performs topological
inversions, renders geometry fluid, relies on the atec-

THE FIRST KISS 5

” “”‘­

4

tonic structural prowess of the tongue, and updates the
metric of time. Kissing is a lovely way to describe a con­
temporary architectural performance.

Kissing is also a gentle way to say goodbye to an
architectural drama in which architecture is inevitably
cast as a tragic figure, sometimes victim sometimes
lain but always closer to failure than to success. While
architecture’s sense of disciplinary inferiority ulti­
mately derives from the antique pyramid of expression
that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and
building down amid the mud and toil of the ground,
architecture’s Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only
became more futile with development of modern
capitalism on one hand (to which architecture is
inevitably attached) and avant-garde strategies of oppo­
sition on the other (to which architecture is attached
not inevitably but by desire). Architecture’s original sin
was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry
and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering
up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante
and postmodernism. Abstraction solved that problem,
because by at least the nineteenth century, painting and
all the typically figurative and narrative forms, from
graphic design to the novel, were no longer interested
in telling stories, and therefore the promise of parity
between architecture and the other arts seemed almost
in reach. But the very abstraction that made it possible
for painting to define itself no longer in terms of the

KISSING ARCHITECTURE10

eral content of its images also made it possible for capi­
tal to seemingly float free from the literal labor of its
production-capital that most obviously, more obvi­
ously than in painting, was needed by architects to
build. Different mediums understood and exploited the
apparent freedom of this world (which Marxism called
the superstructure) in different ways, but for architec­
ture this fantasy freedom became just another source
of envy and a new form of cultural privilege-the glori­
ous stance of the rejecting, angry avant-gardist in need
of nothing but a paintbrush-to which it did not have
access. Consider this irony: abstract expressionism is
historically coincident with the invention of corporate
architecture.

One important strain in contemporary architectural
discourse is defined by the net result of these conver­
gent histories of capital and culture. Today the disci­

is crippled by a futile debate between those who
hold that architecture has failed to establish autonomy
and those who contend that architecture has failed to
develop adequate means of engagement. During the
past thirty years, some have even argued that architec­
ture’s most important social role is to reveal and repeat
this symptomatic hopelessness. As a result, the field
has generated a plethora of responses to this double
bind, referred to variously as postmodernism, decon­
struction, or the neo-avant-garde, that have in common
the pursuit of devices for admitting, articulating,

THE FIRST KISS 11

“‘I, ,!!!.’f__.l.illmlilljjijtlRi!1!iIIII!I!II!

4. Andy Warhol, Kiss.

Still. © 2011 The Andy

Warhol Foundation for

the Visual Arts, Inc.!

Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York

,
l

t
describing, mapping, and representing architecture’s
cultural paralysis. Today, I would say at last, this disci­
plinary Tourette’s syndrome, where suddenly and even
in the face of tremendous productivity architecture still
blurts out a sense of shame, is starting to be under­
stood as self-imposed and more likely to prolong paraly­
sis than move the discipline further. It is precisely
release from architecture’s suspended state of repeated
mea culpas that kissing offers.

Andy Warhol once wryly remarked, “Two people kiss­
ing always look like fish” (fig. 4). Now, however much
Elmo the Muppet loved his pet goldfish, fish are not
generally known for returning such affection. To turn
kissers into fish is therefore to call into question not
only the romantic tradition of the kiss as expression of
love but of the kiss as expression of any traditional set of
emotions. Warhol’s comment does not eliminate the
force of kissing, as he ascribes to it an utterly trans­
forming capacity-it takes a lot of something to turn a
person into a fish-but it does interrupt the chain of
signification into which kissing is historically locked.

“Two people kissing always look like fish” makes it pos­
sible to argue that kissing does not a priori signify a
particular set of emotions but rather produces sensa­
tion and affect that are subsequently named a posteri­
ori and variously by culture, language, and disciplines.

Warhol’s comment had to be about fish. First, fish
are cold-blooded and therefore a good species to use to

THE FIRST KISS 13

,
evacuate from flirting. Second, fish do not have
faces. Sometimes, they even have both eyes on one side

their heads. It’s hard to dreamy looking at a
flounder staring at you from two adjacent globules, and
a cry looking longingly at the big-eyed, small­
nosed, pouty-lipped of, say, an overly cathected
Disney rodent. Kissing cold-blooded fish not only
divorces the kiss from traditional notions of emotion,
love, and death, but kissing gets in the way even of the
language and apparatus we use when we do want to
express such emotions. No one can speak when kissing.
Kissing is distorting and obstructing to the mouth. In
short, kissing interrupts how faces and facades com­
municate, substituting affect and force for representa­
tion and meaning.

If fish don’t love you, they don’t hate you either. Fish
are not like the traditional psychoanalytic mother, of
which it is said that there are two kinds, critical scolders
and idealizing kissers. Even if alienating and deform­
ing, kissing cannot be criticaL A critical kiss is a bite,
not a kiss. And kissers, whether or not they like each
other, inevitably lack the separation needed for critical
distance and opposition. Kissing fish are also not
the Lacanian mother through whose gaze the infant’s
uncoordinated body becomes a legible face, IJ’-‘-,c……~’­
kissing aborts the regime of faciality in toto. In
dIe of a kiss, there is inadequate space for any
things that are needed for a face to appear as a face,

14 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

t

certainly no room for the mother’s detached gaze to
give the infant autonomy. Bringing architecture and
kissing together is therefore not only to reconsider
architecture’s relation to other mediums but to think
beyond prevailing models of the criticaL Because archi­
tecture has served long and well as a model of failure,
disaster, and complicity, it now really deserves a kiss,
needs to kiss, needs a theory of kissing.

Before losing ourselves further in I would
like to consider for a moment why Rist would ever kiss
Taniguchi in the first place and what it means, if any­
thing, that this kiss took place at MoMA (figs. 5 and 6).
The Museum of Modern Art has long considered
to be the very home of good architectural It
remains the institution ofrecord for architecture,
its exhibits and collections to constitute
standard bearer of value and importance, not only in
the United States but for Europe as well. In other words,
what happens at MoMA does not stay at MoMA
rather aspires to the status of disciplinarity as such. Yet
MoMA has consistently betrayed its obligation to archi·
tecture by constructing a series of buildings that is
each more boring than the last. By the I980s, the differ­
ence between the exhibited architecture of deconstruc­
tion (I988, the apex of the critical turn) and the built
architecture of Cesar Pelli’s mall-like addition (1984,
the apex of capitalist capitulation) was stupefying. The
most recent failure-Taniguchi’s I997 addition-was

THE FIRST KISS 15

5. Barnett Newman,

Broken Obelisk,

1963-69. MoMA

Gallery Second Floor,

Public Space, winter

2005. © 2011 The

Barnett Newman

Foundation, New York/

Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York

an expected but no less disappointing confirmation of
MoMA’s historic commitment to distinguishing (and
benefiting from the contrast) between the progressive
architecture displayed in the museum and the unspeak­
ably banal architecture of the museum.

And yet banality is an integral part of why and how
Rist’s kiss operated architecturally. Pour Your Body Out
inserted an intensely affective environment into an

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

architectural volume that itself was nothing, barely
even rising to the occasion of the generic or white box
with a few windows punched out to remind you that
you are located in the center of the world, the common
if parochial view of New York. Instead, the architecture
of MoMA (and all architecture for which MoMA is not
a scapegoat but a stand-in) is merely what you bump up
against when you back up to see some art, with neither

THE FIRST KISS

6. Pipilotti Rist, Pour

Your Body Out (7354

Cubic Meters), 2008.

Multichannel audio

video installation

(video still). The

Museum of Modern

Art, New York

1716

an inside nor outside, neither utopian nor existential,
but rather perfectly and intentionally insipid. In fact,
MoMA’s architectural banality is the key means by
which the museum has attempted to maintain its com­
mitment to the modernist, or, in Clement Greenberg’s
terms, the avant-garde project. For Greenberg, the proof
that the spirit of modernity was present was revealed
when the viewer’s response to an object was purely
laboriously cognitive without affect.3 All experience of
intensity or immediacy betrayed, he thought, the pres­
ence of emotion that risked overcoming intellection

therefore risked turning art into kitsch. Insisting
that architecture maintain such a profound lack of
character without even the hint of any feeling is not a
lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a
commitment to a once progressive but now
outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded
hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pur­
suit of universality and utopia is today just banal accom­
modation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.

The behavior of MoM A visitors immediately reveals
this transformation. A continuous movement of people,
goods, and images ties the museum together. The tra­
jectory begins in the street, where most visitors’ time is
spent waiting in a slow-moving line. After money has
been paid and each person has squeezed through the
narrow turnstile, a space that seems generous by com­
parison invites visitors to move more quickly up the

18 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

stairs, through the atrium, which we now know has
7,354 cubic meters of space, to the once again more con­
trolled upward motion of the escalator. When they
finally arrive in a gallery, the pace picks up even further.
No one can actually stop to look for long. There are
always others behind you, jostling you forward so they
can keep up with the speed of their prerecorded itiner­
ary murmuring into their headphoned ears. Even those
following their own itinerary do not stop for
because the exhibition spaces are only weakly distin­
guished from the non-space of circulation. As in an air­
port, the intrinsically peripatetic museumgoer is, in

Taniguchi addition, rendered as a potential obstacle
that needs to be constantly moved along. The final
descent and channeling of the herd into the artfully
designed store, where versions of objects glimpsed
along the ride can be found for sale, is just one more in
a chain of peripherally perceived attractions.

MoMA is characterized by a consistency of move­
ment and distracted forms of attention that equate the
experience of being in line to buy a ticket at the begin­
ning of a visit or a postcard at the end with looking at a
work of art, or moving on an escalator. This equaliza­
tion is by no means unique to MoMA. Rather, the
reography describes a well-known collective and ines­
capable performance that collapses the opposition
between kitsch {characterized for Greenberg by com­
merce, desire, and immediacy} and the avant-garde

THE FIRST KISS 19

{characterized for Greenberg by the slow pace and focus
of intellection}. Less understood is what this collapse
produces: an index ofthe flow ofaffect and its effects on
behavior. In this case, the logic of the museum that sep­
arates the aesthetic and the commercial realms is
undercut not just by the capital operates in
but by unleashing acquisitive desire in the store as a
means of compensating for the “don’t touch” distance
demanded in the galleries. Increasingly, museums
offer mere foreplay, creating excited visitors who can
only consummate their aesthetic experiences else­
where. The museum is an affect-producing machine,
an ideal mechanism for a culture that contains, as
Brian Massumi has argued, an excess of affect but a
lack of places to put it and even less vocabulary to
describe it. 4

By kissing Taniguchi, Rist provided a first step in
developing a new vocabulary for the character of con­
temporary culture, because their kiss was utterly imper­
sonal: it did not involve their bodies, it described no
feelings love, and yet it generated diSciplinary inti­
macy and material closeness. The visitor to Pour Your
Body Out could perceive the heat of entanglement
could not read a love story. Their kiss produced experi­
ence, but no narrative of that experience. Our capacity
to understand the aesthetic, particularly the range
the aesthetic that is housed at MoMA, is still rooted in
Greenberg’S belief that art comes into being at the very

20 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

moment experience is superseded by intellection.
In order to launch what was first written as an argu­
ment against fascism and its appeal to unreflective
sentimentality, Greenberg had to go so far as not only
associating but even equating affect as such, the apper­
ception of experience, with personal feelings shaped
and therefore susceptible to symbolism, language, and
other forms of cultural predeterminations. Thus for
Greenberg all affect was kitsch.

Greenberg, however, belonged to an era still
nated by Kantian notions of the disinterested viewer.
For Kant, an aesthetic response was characterized by
detachment. To react to a representation of grapes
feelings of hunger or other sensations of interest in the
fruit was to obliterate the aesthetic dimension. Today,
on the other hand, we need the aesthetic to produce
new experiences rather than to evacuate them and
more forms of interestedness rather than If, think­
ing along more Deleuzian lines, we avoid assumptions
about natural or causal links between sensation and
feeling, we can explore more broadly what it feels like to
kiss or to cry. When we cry it is said and assumed that
we feel sad, whereas we may feel myriad other and per­
haps unnamable things. Today, affect should be defined
as the internalization of perception and not as feelings
overdetermined by cultural codes. We no longer need
to equate detachment and distance with intellection
and abstraction nor feeling with crude sentimentality,

21THE FIRST KISS

..
“r.iii

and so we can return to experience with new theoreti­
Rist’s was neither a shock to the architec­

tural system in the tradition predicated on the detach­
ment of the critical avant-garde, nor a reinforcement of
the distinction between architectural abstraction and
kitsch, but a vivid moment-the pulsating pink swerve
itself-of intense in the otherwise opiated milieu
of MoMA.

Confounding Mediums

The convergence of Rist and Taniguchi in MoMA is an
excuse for describing a series of contemporary contra­
dictions that characterizes both the external environ­
ment in which architecture is produced and the inter­
nal logic of architectural thought itself. Architecture
can expand its affective range-and therefore its conse­
quence-by hooking up with more cultural players.
And now is the time to do it, because the mutual attrac­
tion between architecture and other forms of visual
practice has never been more intense and more varied.
From James Welling’s sustained focus on Philip John­
son’s Glass House to the pavilions of
Hirsch horn to the spaces in which Nicolas Bourriaud’s
relational aesthetics unfolds, architecture has become
for many a necessary accomplice. And even more aston­
ishing than its prevalence is that the nature of the
attraction is shifting ever so slightly beyond the prevail-

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

ing model of competitive disciplinarity toward the
cious surprise of an embrace. 5 Welling’s “Glass House,”
for example, produces a soft and almost erotic intimacy
between the photographic image and the architecture,

unlike the more pornographic splitting, cracking,
and exposing that once dominated the image of
ing in the work of everyone from Gordon Matta-Clark
to Gregory Crewdson (fig.

Architecture today is increasingly feeling its disci­
plinary boundaries pressing up to and being superim­
posed with the boundaries of other fields. But even if
architecture’s cultural stasis is put at momentary risk

the potential infiltration of other agents that occurs
when its bodily membranes are tested and pushed
against, architecture can only become more resilient in
the end. What Pour Your Body Out and the species of
work to which it belongs to architecture stems
not so much from the particular content of Rist’s
but from her use of a medium, which like others that
came before it, from installation art to site-specific art,
relies on architecture and is often anatomically isomor­
phic with architecture but which nevertheless operates
according to a different set of assumptions about
medium’s modes of production and reception. Her
installation, composed of moving projected images,
sound, furniture, and other materials, depends on the
structural support of Taniguchi’s building and yet has
nothing genetic or material in common with it. The

CONFOUNDING MEDIUMS 22 23

Notes

I This comment by Baldessari was affixed to the wall below the
work Series: Simone Palm Trees (Near) at his 2010 retro­
spective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, held at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 27-September I2,
and organized in association with Tate Modern, London.

2 “Behind the Scenes with
MoMA,”

Rist, Pour Your Body Out
(7354 Cubic Meters), http://www.youtube.
comjwatch?v=89vgdELbVyQ.

3 The texts by Greenberg on this subject include “Modern­
ist Painting” (1965), in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Gregory Battock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), roO-III:

“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An
Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, I992), 554-60; and “Avant-Garde and
Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (Fall I939): 34-49.

4 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural
3I (I995): 83-1°9.

http://www.youtube

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Michael Meredith

For the Absurd.

Are you reading this? You must be bored. If you’re looking for
I-‘, ………. ~… , it might be a good idea to look elsewhere. Haven’t
you heard of the Internet? There’s everything you can think
of on the Internet, everything all the time. It’s so fantastic I
can hardly bear it. Architecture seems so dull and primitive
in comparison. If you’re still reading, I have to say I’m not
trying to be self-effacing or nihilistic. It just happened. To be
honest, nihilists are awful, always constructing arguments in
those dialectical structures only to negate them or to finally
find some other third condition – High vs. Low, Classicism
vs. Modernism, Hot vs. Cold, Easy vs. Difficult, Inside vs.
Outside, Abstraction vs. Realism, Up vs. Down, etc. You know
the setup. You know the punch line. But did you know that
those intolerably heroically tragic people are just a second
order of nihilism? Their predecessors were just as annoying
to bring to a cocktail party, critical of everything, scream­
ing —– when everyone else was saying ++++. Exhausting.
Eventually someone wanted to annihilate them. I don’t blame
them. That’s when the second order came along. Actually,
I’ve heard there’S also a third order of nihilists out there
who just decided it’s all completely meaningless. They jabber
on about the inaccessibility of language, but I don’t get it.
They think it’s better to be quiet, to be nothing, to be static,
to be meaningless. They think at the core of everything is a
mathematically precise and rigorous vacuum. They believe
time stopped in Vienna at 6:32 pm, August 21, 1905. They’re a
very clandestine group, and from what I’ve heard, they stay
indoors mostly. They’re real misanthropes, quote-unquote
posthumanists; whatever you do, don’t look them directly
in the eyes. But who knows, I wasn’t there when any of this
happened, this is just what someone told me.

Trust me, I’m not negative. I don’t want to be a nihilist.
Nihilists think everything is ending constantly, that every­
thing is meaningless. They’re intellectual valley girls that
are so post-whatever. They’re easy to spot they avoid eye
contact and they typically dress in black. I’m sure you’ve
seen them before. They’re lurking everywhere, especially in
schools. They prefer to talk in absolutes, in meta-dialects. It’s
evangelical mumbo jumbo, if you ask me. You know what

7

they say: misery loves company … but whatever you do, please
don’t get seduced by their self-proclaimed oh-so-complex
anxieties – “company” is okay, but the “misery” part isn’t
great. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying these things … Listen, I
don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but really, I wish they
would just go away already. All I’m asking is for some kind of
awareness, just a little self-consciousness.

How did we get so far astray? When I started writing this
I was just trying to be utterly straightforward. I suppose a
part of me believes that writing anything about architecture
is ridiculous, a diversion from the concrete facts of building
– the weight, the materials, the performance, the propor­
tions, the organization … Another part of me believes that
our cultural fictions are at the core of this discipline. All we
are is a group of weirdos who share a common disorder. Well,
maybe theY’re the same part of me. I’m not sure. Does anyone
understand why architects obsess and care about something
most people just ignore? Why do we follow the history of
inanimate objects? Why do we study them and their invis­
ible geometries? Frankly, it’s a pretty arcane profession and
it’s downright scary at times. It’s like being part of a Masonic
lodge – what are they doing in there? I’m just glad we don’t
have to wear funny hats. Most other people walk by and live
in buildings, but don’t think about them not like we do.
They have other things on their minds. They only seem to
care when it doesn’t work or when they stub their toe on it
or if it isn’t right or if it’s too different, etc …. but otherwise
they don’t think about the fact that all of this is constructed.
That we’re all wandering around an endless artifice, a never­
ending hall of mirrors. Someone made it up, someone else
believed in it, and then someone repeated it! Those of us who
care, we try to track the pieces in motion as best we can the
choices, the discussions, etc. But there are few of us and a lot
of pieces.

It’s been said before, but Architecture is a narrative of
interesting buildings, the ones we remember and debate,
the ones we build stories around, the ones we dissect and
recycle. Architecture is not a discipline, it’s a book club. It’s
a book club where the illustrations are usually more impor­
tant than the texts. Architecture is a sequestered jury. It’s a
cultural bracket under intense pressure trying to produce
diamonds out of dirt. And if it could have any autonomy it
wouldn’t be formal or technical, it would be social; but it’s
all temporary, I suppose. I know we’ll both forget this, but
in the meantime, it’s comforting that we oddballs have each
other for a little while to discuss and project possibilities, to

Log 22

try to convince each other (and the others) to see the world
as it could be. Look how different, exciting, and liberating it could
be. This sounds right. This feels interesting, I can relate to this. I
can’t stand that other stuff, the stuffthose otherpeople like. This is
better for these reasons, etc. … In reality, though, I’m not sure
why anyone would be interested. Really, we should focus on
the facts of the world-at-Iarge, try to make things better. We
should probably be engineers. Anything else is absurd.

Architecture’s self-serious tragedy has been written and
rewritten ad nauseam. I’d prefer something else, something
I can relate to. You know what I mean. I guess what I’ve
been trying to say, if it wasn’t clear already, is that someone
should really write a manifesto, a manifesto for the absurd.
It’s probably the most earnest thing to write. At this moment
we don’t need a manifesto for the competent or the sustain­
able. Those have already been written and theY’re so com­
pletely boring and so totally obvious. This yet-to-be-written
manifesto should be called “Absurd Realism,” so that people
would know that it’s not simply solipsistic ironic winking
but that it’s actually engaged in the world. It is not against
Realism or Humanism. It’s not against Abstraction or
Formal Logic or Positivism. It’s not art for art’s sake, and
it’s not about heteronomy of life, of urbanism, of function.
It’s for both and neither. “Absurd Realism” would be ex­
treme in its parallel, multiple ontologies. The more I think
of it though, the more I realize I can’t write it, I wouldn’t
know how to begin.

Maybe you could write it? “Absurd Realism!” – I could
help you with it. My advice would be to keep it simple, like a
Beckett play.

Well, I suppose I should confess – I actually wrote this
manifesto already. It was great, incredibly original and utterly
searing. Unfortunately this was before auto-recovery … suffice
it to say it was a devastating loss. Years and years of my best
writing erased with one inadvertent push of a button. DELETE.
I really don’t have it in me to start over, it would just be a pale
copy of the original. You understand. I did manage to find an
old bibliography and a partial list of footnotes from an earlier
draft. Maybe you can start with that.

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Notes to
Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Columbia Uni­
versity Press, 1991. 241-76.

9 Log 22
8

Allen, Stan. “From Fields to Emergent Particle Systems that
Begin to Coalesce toward Malformed Objects, then to Objects
and Finally to Fields Again.” Points and Lines: Diagrams and
Projects for the Ciry. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1999.90-137.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame 2: The Rematch. 1964.

Bois, Yve-AIain, Rosalind Krauss, et al. Appendix ‘With Every
Illustration of the Formless That Became Form and an Institution­
alized Technique As Soon As We published This Book. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2007.

Cage,John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown: Wes­
leyan University Press, 1961.

Cohen, Preston Scott. Private Arguments rIIith Anxious and Un­
rulY Geometries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002.

Eisenman, Peter. Notes on Conceptual Architecture: The Revised
2010 (~lternate History” Edition In Which Illustrations of LeWitt
andJudd Have Been Replaced rIIith Serra and Smithson. New
York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2011.

Eisenman, Peter. Post-Post-Formalism and Post-Post-Post­
Functionalism, 4th edition, with new post-introduction. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Fried, Herbert Simon. Ludrllig Wittgenstein’s PreviouslY Un­
published Knock-KnockJokes and philosophical Pick-Up Lines.
Pocket ed. London: Vintage, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund.Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.
New York: W.W. Norton &: Company, 1990.

Herzog,Jacques. A Pictures’!”e ofFlatulence. Vienna: Springer
Vienna Architecture, 200 ….

Johnson. Philip. “The Gentleman’s Index of Stylish, Mean­
ingle.., and Happy Buildings.” Writings. London: Oxford
University Pre .., 1979.

Joyce, William. ed. Tb, Anxiev Caused f?y Reading the Anxiery of
Injl”,nC’t: A R,.J,r. London: Oxford University Press, 1997.

10 Log 22

Kipnis, Jeffrey. “The Importance of the Insignificant.” Log 4,
Winter 2005.

Koolhaas, Rem.Junkspace Recycled. New York: Taschen, 2010.

Lavin, Sylvia. Sparkles: Architecture’s EphemeraliV. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2012.

Martin, Reinhold. More Postmodern Than You. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2009.

Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music. New York: Schirmer
Books, 1974.

Ranciere,Jacques. “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Out­
comes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.” Nerll
Left Revierll14, March-April 2002. tn-51.

Ross, Alex. “Searching for Silence.” The Nerll Yorker, 4 Octo­
ber 2010. 52-61.

Rossi, AIdo. “Still-life Urbanism: The City is Dead, Long Live
the City!” Oppositions, 1983.

Stiriing,James F. Fruit Salad, Modernirm, Classici.rm, Oversized
Bundt Cak.es and Lime Jello: Disembodied Urbanirm, Melted Objects,
Soft Spaces and Missing Corners. London: Thames &: Hudson, 1977.

Sample, Hilary M. and Michael Meredith. The User’s Guide to
Becoming Robert and Denise, Alison and Peter, Charles and Ray,
Liz and Ric and Every Other Architecture Couple You Can Think
Of. New York: Actar, 2010.

Schmitt, Louise. Schoenberg, Dodecaphorv and the Inherent Com­
e4.J of Technique. London: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Somol, Robert. Huh + WOrII = WhoafLondon: AA Publications, 2004.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction In Architecture, Ab­
breviated CliffsNotes Edition. New York: CliffsNotes, 1993.

Wallace, David Foster. “Laughing with Kafka.” Harper’s
Magazine Quly 1998): 23-27.

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to Band
Back. Again. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.

11 Log 22

http:Classici.rm

RECOVERED FOOTNOTES TO “ABSURD REALISM”

1. Ibid. Actually, this may not be the case.

2. Tragedy, after all, being the dominant narrative of “Avant­

Garde” Architecture!

3. The final at the end of that incredibly thoughtful
sentence on the meaning of architecture seems out of place.
Its meaning has been debated for years by various esteemed
scholars, including K. Francis Klarknip, Rosalie Cracken, and
M.P. Taftuti. Personally, it made me feel a little uneasy. You
usually don’t see a ” ” hanging out there at the end of a
statement like that. Possibly it’s there for effect, to leave things
unresolved, to make it “funny” – not laugh-out-Ioud funny,
but weird funny, or maybe even absurd. Why is that important?
Who knows. But it has been generally acknowledged that that
sort of absurdity produces humor through a nihilistic approach
toward nihilism, utilizing non sequiturs, misplaced elements,
awkward relationships, and incongruity. Even with all of the
mishaps, it doesn’t devolve into an absolute atomization of the
elements, a complete erasure, an infinite fragmentation, or a
tragic totalizing alienation. may be the conclusion of
what architecture means, but it isn’t a sad ____’

4. [Note to self: Look up the metrics of the situation, in­
sert into methodological formula, surf Internet, and canvas
friends to see what they think of it all.]

S. R. “Not The Body” Ventur begins to hint at this paradox in
Complexity and Confusion in .Architecture (1966),26-27, where
the meaning and the making of a work of art are suggested
to be two sides of the same coin, sharing the same space, but
with different views. In expanding his argument to archi­
tectural practice, Ventur proposed that orthodoxy toward
the medium of architecture was more impediment than
opportunity, especially if one assumed the so-called “Ultra­
clear” communication to be the penultimate goal of cul­
tural production. In “No Need to Tie the Dollar to the Gold
Standard” (see Brochure Architecture 11), Ventur continued to
frame medium in terms of currency. That piece ended with his
now-legendary statement, “Does anyone really care about the
material composition of cash other than counterfeiters?”

6. Simply: there is a preference for relative complex confusion
over absolute darity, although that preference can produce an
absolute clarity. More work needs to be done on this.

Log 2211

7. If your primary residency is established on a foreign vessel,
you can be declared legally dead but the government can’t
levy an estate tax until your body is repatriated. Your untaxed
assets are transferable by power of attorney as long as you/
your body remains in international waters, and of course
you’ll have to be buried at sea. Seriously, theY’ve got whole
cruise lines based on this. It’s a pretty big deal.

8. In a little known postscript to the White/Gray debate, the
“Splinters,” led by K. Frampton, responded to the rising criti­
cism of What i.r an .Architect’.r Medium? by pleading, “Tecton­
ics and Materials are all we have left, can we as a profession
please not shoot ourselves in the foot?” (see “Frampton
Comes Alive”), to which “The Academy” replied, “No, thank
you.” (See the essay “No, Thank You” in Oppo.ritionalitie.r VII).
Though some Splinters stayed to fight, many retreated into
the hills of Switzerland and parts of Canada.

9. [“Total Clarity!” section expand or remove entirely.]

10. In retrospect, Ventur’s call for contradiction and ambi­
guity in architectural production laid the groundwork for
Absurd Realism’s demand for an architecture that is “post­
medium” (Po’ Me). (See R. Krauss, “The Grid – What’s it
done for me lately?”) Absurdist architecture is diffuse and
relational. It is made up of incomplete and unresolved bits
and fragments, but “Collage” (C: Roew) is not its product.
“Both-And,” “Either-Or,” “Simple-Complex” – all dualisms
are to be stricken from the record as being too lazy to indulge.
Reductive thinking is the enemy of the Absurd, though it’s
worth pointing out that reductive thinking is of the utmost
absurdity (see T. Pard).

11. Frankly, I couldn’t be more serious, I just don’t understand
how you could deal with this without a sense of humor.

12. “A joke, when successful, induces a sense of the familiar
de familiarized …” (Simon Critchley, On Humour, 29).

13. The former was based upon the Greek mathematician
Hippapus, who was known to laugh while working through
his calculations of the Golden Ratio. In a paraphrased copy
of the speech given by David Foster Wallace titled “Laugh­
ing with Kafka,” later published as an essay, he discusses the
humor and absurdity of Kafka’s work. According to the piece,
Kafka is funny (but not ROFL funny) precisely because of the

13 Log 22

removed from the work, that which is connotative or
implied. of course, timing is everything.

14. H. Murakami later expanded on this theme in his 2002
novel, Kafk.a on the Shore, which, had it been set in Tangier in
the 1970s, may have put the somber insurance clerk looking
for his parents’ lost cat on a collision course with a vacation­
ing Beckett. This alternate ending, in fact, is said to be the in­
spiration for one of 1. Calvino’s unfinished manuscripts titled
HEstranged Quarks,” where Kafka was played by a proton and
Beckett an electron.

15. Reductio ad absurdum: a proposition is disproven by fol­
lowing its implications to their logically absurd end. Alterna­
tively: a proposition is proven through self-contradiction.

16. As one follows the signage, the experience of the memorial
is embodied in the fruitless search for the monument itself.

17. Ontological relativism must accept the devastatingly real­
ist implications of its own truth claim. Absurd Realism, on
the other hand, is open to the momentary action of multiple
interpretations – even (especially!) the interpretation that
says it is the only absolute interpretation and that all the other
interpretations are baloney.

18. Most notably, Magical Realism in literature and post­
surrealist economics.

19. Absurd Realism produces a space in which the search for
meaning in something both vague and concrete is highly
encouraged, unlike a search for one’s keys, which is concrete
and vaguely frustrating, or the search for Hthe Other,” which
is vague and concretely frustrating. Neither promoted nor
forbidden, frustration is a common side-effect of both games
and reality.

20. This argument has been put forward by S. Lavin in
Spark./es & co.

21. i.e., No stable grid, no absolute datum. Language itself is
in continual transformation and renegotiation through its
use, misuse, and need for our strange construction of on­
tological relevance. In any event, the “familiar” here is not
necessarily a general familiar to everyone, but remains in the
court of the respective audience, producing a polyphony of

14 Log 22

MICHAEL MEREDITH IS A PARTNER

IN THE AACHITECTURE PRACTICE

MOS AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL

OF ARCHITECTURE. HE IS THE GUEST

EDITOR OF LOG 22.

legible illegibilities. Absurd Realism operates with a disciplin­
ary “familiar” within our own sequestered group.

22. This is a reference both to D.F. Wallace and to one ofJ-P.
Sartre’s later essays, “I Know You Are, But What Am H”
which states that “hell” is not merely comprised of “other
people,” but more specifically next-door neighbors and family
members. In contrast, WaUace reminds us that both humor
and meaning are not something to “get,” and neither is the
“self.” They are about the search. Without this basic under­
standing, what Wallace calls the “laugh traK,” it becomes im­
possible to appreciate Kafka’s knock-knock jokes, as it is only
through a contingent situation of the Self that the subject can
challenge the void: Hwho’s there?”

23. Unlike Dasame, a belief that it has all been done before,
Heideregel’s Thro’Wness opens up the space between ironic
know-it-all-ness and nai”ve know-nothingness. It engages
without expectation, celebrating wit, intuition and playful­
ness, engagement and informality. It is a way of working that
avoids tasteful composition and the construction of absolute
ideals.

24. ( ) Both ( ) Neither

15

Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism
Author(s): Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 33, Mining Autonomy (2002), pp. 72-77
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
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72 / SOMOL & WHITING

No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of thiA kind occurfar

more often than we suspect, since we all move, one after the other, along the same

roads mapped out offor us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is

nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater

frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seemn as if I had already heard the

same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way,

with the same worda, turns of phrase and gestures … Perhaps there is in this as

yet unexplained phenomenon of apparent duplication some kind of anticipation

of the end, a venture into the void, a sort of diAengagement, which, like a gramophone

repeatedly playing the same sequence of notes, has les to do with damage to the

machine itself than with an irreparable defect in its programme.

W.G. SEBALD, THE RINGS OF SATURN

I would like to show that these unitie form a number of autonomous, but not independent

domains, governed by rules, but in perpetual transformation, anonymous and without a

subject, but imbuing a great many individual works.

MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

MINING AUTONOMY / 73

FROM CRITICALTO PROJECTIVE

In 1984, the editors of Per,pecta, Carol Burns and

Robert Taylor, set out an ambitious agenda for

issue 21: “Architecture is not an isolated or autono-

mous medium, it is actively engaged by the social,

intellectual, and visual culture which is outside

the discipline and which encompasses it … It is

based on a premise that architecture is inevitably
involved with questions more difficult than those

of form or style.” While this orientation bears a

curious connection to the “realist” or “grey” tradi-

tion of an earlier Yale generation, it also serves as a

sign of the nascent mixture of a critical, neo-Marx-

ism with a celebration of the vernacular or everyday
with which Yale would soon become synonymous.’
Published in that same issue, K. Michael Hays’s
canonic essay “Critical Architecture: Between Cul-

ture and Form” offered a useful corrective to the

editorial position of the issue by indirectly imply-

ing that the editors were insufficiently dialectical

in their understanding of engagement and auton-

omy. Hays’s sophistication has always been to rec-

ognize that autonomy is a precondition for engage-
ment. Using Mies as a paradigm, Hays argued
for the possibility of a “critical architecture” that

would operate between the extremes of concilia-

tory commodity and negative commentary.
Twelve issues and seventeen years later, the

editors of issue 33 have returned to the theme of

interdisciplinarity. This time, however, the topic is

explicitly underwritten by the terms established

in Hays’s 1984 essay: “PerApecta 33 is built around

the belief that architecture stands in the critical

position between being a cultural product and a

discrete autonomous discipline.” Yet, while Hays
was suggesting that only critical architecture oper-
ated in his privileged “between” position, the edi-

tors of 33 imply that all architecture now automati-

cally occupies a de facto critical status. What for

Hays was then an exceptional practice, has now

been rendered an everyday fact of life. If nothing
else, however, this inflation of critical practice by
the editors of 33 has perhaps unconsciously iden-

tified a fact of the last twenty years: namely, that

disciplinarity has been absorbed and exhausted

by the project of criticality. As Hays’s first articu-

lation of critical architecture was a necessary cor-

rective to the realist position of Pernpecta 21, it

may be necessary (or, at least, useful) to provide
an alternative to the now dominant paradigm of

criticality, an alternative that will be character-

ized here as projective.
As evidenced by Hays’s insightful polemic,

critical architecture, under the regime of textu-

ality, required the condition of being “between”

various discursive oppositions. Thus “culture and

form” can alternatively be figured as “kitsch and

avant-garde” (Clement Greenberg), “literal and

phenomenal” (Colin Rowe), “objecthood and art”

(Michael Fried), or “capitalist development and

design” (Manfredo Tafuri). Within architecture,
Rowe’s and Tafuri’s discourses most fully enable,

if never completely realize, the critical project of

“betweeness,” whether within history/theory, as

with Hays, or in terms of design, as with the work

of Peter Eisenman.

It is from Rowe’s and Tafuri’s conceptual

genetic material that architecture’s critical proj-
ect has been formulated. For both authors, there

is a requisite assumption of contradiction or ambi-

guity, regardless of whether it is subsumed or

sublated (dialectical materialism) or balanced (lib-
eral formalism). Even before examining the vari-

ous reconfigurations of Rowe and Tafuri, however,
it is important to recognize that the opposition
between them is never as clear as would be imag-
ined: Rowe’s ostensibly formal project has deep
connections to a particular liberal politics, and

Tafuri’s apparently engaged practice of dialectical

critique entails a precise series of formal a prioris
as well as a pessimistic prognosis with regard to

architectural production. Seen in this way, there is

no more political writer than Rowe, and none more

formalist than Tafuri.

The criticality of Hays and Eisenman main-

tains the oppositional or dialectical framework in

the work of their mentors and predecessors, while

simultaneously trying to short-circuit or blur their

terms. In their various attempts to hybridize Rowe

and Tafuri in order to fashion a critical position,2
both Hays and Eisenman rely on dialectics – as is

immediately evidenced in the titles of the journals
each was responsible for founding: Oppositions

ROBERT SOMOL

SARAH WHITING

74 / SOMOL & WHITING

Right and below right
“1909 theorem: the Skyscraper as

utopian device for the production
of unlimited numbers of virgin sites

on a single metropolitan location.”
From Rem Koolhaas,

(NY: Monacelli, 1994), p.83.

“Dom-ino house prototype. Le Cor-
busier: Perspective.” From Peter

Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism:
Maison Dom-ino and the Self-

Referential Sign,” Oppositions 15/16.

and AAAemblage. Despite their implicit critiques
of Michael Fried’s aesthetics,3 both Eisenman and

Hays ultimately fear literalism as much as Fried

does; both warn against the isomorphic remap-

ping of life and art. For both, disciplinarity is

understood as autonomy (enabling critique, rep-
resentation, and signification), but not as instru-

mentality (projection, performativity, and prag-

matics). One could say that their definition of

disciplinarity is directed against reification rather

then toward the possibility of emergence.^
reification concerns itself with the negativ
tion of qualitative experience to quantificat,

emergence promises that serial accumulation may
itself result in the production of new qualities. As

an alternative to the critical project – here linked

to the indexical, the dialectical and hot representa-
tion – this text develops an alternative genealogy
of the projective – linked to the diagrammatic, the

atmospheric and cool performance.

FROM INDEXTO DIAGRAM

In the significant production of both Hays and

Eisenman, as parallel realignments of Rowe and

Tafuri, the critical project is inevitably mediated;

in fact, it is perpetually obsessed by, and inextrica-

bly linked to, reproduction.’ This obsession mani-

fests itself both in Hays’s account of Mies van der

Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Peter Eisenman’s

rereading of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino, where both

authors adopt the technique of the index.5Mi”

WlRsLCLY- eLlI_m i Il llm with signi-
fication: in other words, it exists as a physically
driven sign, one that is not culturally or visually

determined, as are the symbol or icon. For Hays,
Mies’s architecture situates itself “between the

efficient representation of preexisting cultural

values and the wholly detached autonomy of an

abstract formal system.” This status of being in

the world yet resistant to it is attained by the

way the architectural object materially reflects its

specific temporal and spatial context, as well as

the way it serves as a trace of its productive sys-
tems. Hays describes the Barcelona Pavilion as

‘an event with temporal duration, whose actual

existence is continually being produced,” or whose

meaning is continually being decided. This act of

decision is both in fact and etymologicallythe crit-

ical gesture par excellence.

In Eisenman’s discussion of the Dom-ino, it

is the design process itself that is being registered
rather than the material productive and technical

systems or specific context discussed by Hays. In

marking the status of its existence, in its ability to

function as a self-referential sign, the Dom-ino is

one of the first modernist and critical gestures
in architecture: “Architecture is both substance

and act. The sign is a record of an intervention –

an event and an act which goes beyond the pres-
ence of elements which are merely necessary con-

ditions.” For Eisenman and Hays, the Dom-ino and

Barcelona Pavilion are at once traces of an event,

indices of their procedures of design or construc-

tion, and objects that potentially point to a state of

continual transformation. In both cases, the criti-

cal forms of self-referentiality are demonstrated

via serial reproductions: be they Eisenman’s re-

drawn axonometrics of the non-existent Dom-ino

perspective, or the historical photographs Hays
uses to extract the experience of the defunct, orig-
inal Barcelona Pavilion. Just as the architectural

artifacts are indices of a missing process or prac-

tice, the objects themselves are also significantly

missing in both cases, so that a series of reproduc-
tions must stand in as their traces. This process
of infinite regress or deferral is constitutive of the

critical architectural project: architecture inevita-

bly and centrally preoccupied by its status as rep-

resentation, and its simultaneous commentary on

that condition.

As an alternative to Eisenman’s reflections

on the high European frame, which situated the

frame within the context of the critical-indexical

project of the 1970S, one might look to Rem Kool-

s’s appropriation of the mass cultural Amer-

frame at the same moment. As suggested

above, Eisenman understands Le Corbusier’s Dom-

ino as the trace of a transformative process, and

in so doing he deviates from Rowe by animating
the grid. Just as the indexical project assumes

or invents a particular kind of reading subject
for architecture, its imagination of architectural

movement relies on a narrative for the grid. Thus,

although the indexical program for architecture

may proceed through diagrams, it is still tied to

a semiotic, representational and sequential ambi-

..
**

. – . .’ l

r
,

–
, . 3 j;

. **- _

MINING AUTONOMY / 75

tion. Koolhaas’s invocation of the “cartoon-theo- notion of interdisciplinarity, which seeks to legiti-
rem” from Life magazine – as well as the section mize architecture through an external measuring
cut from the Downtown Athletic Club – alterna- stick, thereby reducing architecture to the entirely

tively enlists a vision of architecture as contrib- amorphous role of absorber of heterogeneous life.

uting to the production and projection of new A projective architecture does not shy away from

forms of collectivity. These New York frames exist reinstating architectural definition, but that def-

as instruments of metropolitan plasticity and are inition stems from design and its effects rather

not primarily architecture for paying attention to; than a language of means and materials. The Dop-

they are not for reading, but for seducing, becom- pier shifts the understanding of disciplinarity

ing, instigating new events and behaviors. The as autonomy to disciplinarity as performance or

skyscraper-machine allows the projection infi- practice. In the former, knowledge and form are

nitely upward of virtual worlds within this world, based on shared norms, principles, and traditions.

and in this way extends Michel Foucault’s reflec- In the latter, a more Foucaultian notion of disci-

tions on heterotopias and prisons. Gilles Deleuze plinarity is advanced in which the discipline is

argues that Foucault understands Jeremy Ben- not a fixed datum or entity, but rather an active

tham’s Panopticon not simply as a machine for organism or discursive practice, unplanned and

surveillance, but more broadly and productively ungovernable, like Foucault’s “unities formling]
as a diagram which “imposes a particular form of a number of autonomous, but not independent
conduct on a particular multiplicity.” Koolhaas’s domains, governed by rules, but in perpetual

investigation of the frame structure is diagram- transformation.”9 Rather than looking back or crit-

matic in the same way. icizing the status quo, the Doppler projects for-

From these two inventions of the frame struc- ward alternative (not necessarily oppositional)
ture in mid-7os architectural discourse, one can arrangements or scenarios.

discern two orientations toward disciplinarity: projective architecture does not make\a
that is, disciplinarity as autonomy and process, claini for expertise outside the field of architc-
as in the case of Eisenman’s reading of the Dom- ture nor does it limit its field of expertise Qw

ino, and disciplinarity as force and effect, as in absolute defittt aetitecture. Design iswht

Koolhaas’s staging of the Downtown Athletic Club. keeps architecture from slippingstoa cloud of

Moreover, these two examples begin to differen- Peterogeneity. It delineates the fluctuatinf bor-

tiate the critical project in architecture, with its ders of architG9’s- disCe aiand expertise f
connection to the indexical, from the projective, So w en architects engae pic that are seem-

which proceeds through the dfigram. The diagram ingl outside oMciteure’s historically-defined
is a tool of the _rtualet the sce – questions of economics or civic politics,
index is the t?eWe real.7 for example – they don’t engage those topics as

–< \ ~~ / ^^~ \^ ~ ~ \^^~ ^ experts on economics or civic poltlcl b4t,patief, ) ^^?-" '^aS~~~~s rts on dqilnd how design may affect

h-FlO D I A L E C T I C rv-r hOF, F LE k c th–Se itfter

Ratherthaen the oppositionars- nsi -attionshiptothfi/ – – ~~~~~~~~~~~~~%_
other disciplines, rather than as critics. Design
encompasses object qualities (form, proportion,

materiality, composition, etc.) but it also includes

qualities of sensibility, such as effect, ambiance,
and atmosphere.

An example of a projective architecture that

engages the strategy of the Doppler effect in lieu

of that of the dialectic is ww’s IntraCenter, a

40,000 ft.2 community center located in Lexington,

Kentucky. The IntraCenter’s client provided ww

with a program list of dizzying operational hetero-

geneity: daycare, athletic facilities, social services,

cafe, library, computer center, job training facili-

ties, shops, etc. Rather than figuring these multi-

ple programs so as to provide each with its own

formal identification, or rather than establishing
a neutral field so as to allow the programs to define

the project, the IntraCenter elides the expected

of critical dialectics, the projective employs some-

thing similar to the Doppler Effect – the perceived

change in the frequency of a wave that occurs

when the source and receiver of the wave have a

relative velocity. The Doppler Effect explains the

change in pitch between the sound of a train as

it approaches and then moves away from the lis-

tener.8 If critical dialectics established architec-

ture’s autonomy as a means of defining architec-

ture’s field or discipline, a Doppler architecture

acknowledges the adaptive synthesis of architec-

ture’s many contingencies. Rather than isolating a

singular autonomy, the Doppler focuses upon the

effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent

multiplicities: material, program, writing, atmo-

sphere, form, technologies, economics, etc. It is

important to underscore that this multiplying of

contingencies differs greatly from the more dilute

Above

Projective Architecture: diagram
of overlap of A (architecture) with P (politics),
E (economics) and T (theory).

Middle
The Doppler Effect.

7

e__. ” –PiW

76 / SOMOL & WHITING

overlap between form and program. Their lack

of alignment leads to a perpetual Doppler shift

between the two. This strategy of non-concentric-

ity generates other Doppler Effects, including the

many reverberations among overlapping constit-

uencies as well as material and structural condi-

tions. The IntraCenter is projective rather than

critical in that it very deliberately sets into motion

the possibility of multiple engagements rather

than a single articulation of program, technology
or form (contemporary architecture’s commodity,
firmness and delight).

The Doppler Effect shares some attributes

with parallax, which, as Yve-Alain Bois notes,
comes from the Greek parallaxis, or “change”: “the

apparent change in the position of an object result-

ing from the change in the … position from which

it is viewed.”10 Claiming that Serra consciously

responded to the possibilities of parallax, Bois

cites as an example Serra’s description of his sculp-
ture entitled Sight Point: “[It seems at first] to fall

right to left, make an x, and straighten itself out

to a truncated pyramid. That would occur three

times as you walked around.”1 In other words, par-
allax is the theatrical effect of a peripatetic view

of an object tjs xo at ihof tL

a building’s material palette or site. As the nov-

elist W.G. Sebald explains, each one of us experi-
ences moments of repetition, coincidence or dupli-
cation, where echoes of other experiences, conver-

sations, moods and encounters affect current ones.

Such momentary echoes are like tracks out of

alignment, hearing and seeing out of phase that

generate momentary deja vus, an overlap of real

and virtual worlds.

FROM HOT TO COOL

Someone should eAtabliAh an anthropology of
hot and cool…

lean Baudrillard

Overall, one might characterize the shift from crit-

ical to projective modes of disciplinarity as a pro-
cess of cooling down or, in Marshall McLuhan’s

terms, of moving from a “hot” to a “cool” version

of the discipline. Critical architecture is hot in the

sense that it is preoccupied with separating itself

from normative, background or anonymous condi-

tions of production, and with articulating differ-

ence. For McLuhan, hot media like film are “high-
definition”, conveying very precise information

on one channel or in one mode. By contrast, cool

media, such as television, are low-definition and,
since the information they convey is compromised,

they require the participation of the user. In this

regard, the formalist-critical project is hot in its

prioritization of definition, delineation and dis-

tinction (or medium specificity). One alternative,

minimalism, would be a cool art form; it is low-

definition and requires the context and viewer to

complete it, lacking both self-sufficiency and self-

consciousness. Minimalism explicitly requires

participation and is related to Smithson’s promo-
tion of entropy. While cooling suggests a process
of mixing (and thus the Doppler Effect would be

one form of cool), the hot resists through distinc-

tion, and connotes the overly difficult, belabored,

worked, complicated. Cool is relaxed, easy. This

difference between the cool and the hot may be

amplified by briefly examining a medium McLu-

han does not discuss: performance.
In his obituary on the actor, Dave Hickey

writes that with Robert Mitchum you get perfor-
mance,12 and performance, he says, not expressed
(or represented), but delivered. The Mitchum effect

relies on knowing something is back there, but

not being sure exactly what it is. Hickey says that

what Mitchum does, then, is always surprising
and plausible. And it’s exactly this trait of surpris-

ing plausibility that might be adapted as a projec-
tive effect, one which combines the chance event

with an expanded realism. There are two kinds

of actors, Hickey argues. First are some who con-

struct a character out of details and make you
believe their character by constructing a narra-

tive for them. One could say that this is the school

of the “Method,” where the actor provides gesture
and motivation, and supplies a sub-text for the text

of the script. The second group of actors create

plausibility by their bodies; Hickey says they are

not really acting, but rather “performing with a

vengeance.” While Robert De Niro is an actor in

the first category, Mitchum is in the second.

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, archi-

tecture’s relationship to philosophy was like that

of De Niro to his character. In other words, a kind

of Method acting, or Method designing, where

the architect expressed a text or where architec-

ture represented its procedure of formation. As

with the “critical project,” Method acting was con-

nected to psychoanalysis, to calling up and reen-

acting memories and past events. In contrast, Mit-

chum, Hickey says, is,

Like Coltrane, playing a Atandard, he iA inveating
the text with hiA own aubversive viLion, hiA own

pace and senAe of dark contingency. So what we

Aee in a Mitchum performance iA less the character

portrayed than a propoAitional alternative: What if
someone with Mitchumrn AenAibility grew up to be

a sea captain? a private eye? a school-teacher? 13

a _ x is in

that it is not purely optical. Predicated on waves

that can be auditory or visual, the Doppler sug-

gests that the optical and conceptual are only two

of many sensibilities. Additionally, it is not a read-

ing strategy – that is, it is not just an unfolding

reading of an artwork – but an atmospheric inter-

action. It foregrounds the belief that both the

subject and the object carry and exchange infor-

mation and energy. In short, a user might be

more attuned to certain aspects of a building
than others. He or she might understand how the

building responds to a formal history of archi-

tecture or deploys a specific technology or he

or she might have particular associations with

MINING AUTONOMY / 77

re ” , edited by Deborah Berke and

1997).

iisenman misread Rowe and

;isreading as poetic influence:

tic poets – always proceeds by a
ton that is actually and necessarily

WF ..njfBn nfluence: A Theory of Poetry (NY: Oxford

Fried was a trical anathema that undermined modern-

: Frei.ci.ameson’s theorization of mediation as an active

ageAi,. ‘i~0ion between two subjects or between a subject

pas.. Feen that operates as pure conciliation between

McLUt’ jnriderstanding of mediation as mass media’s

.0:hoQw:;Chitecture can resist, rather than reflect, an external

Ha;ys:,.?i’etween Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (Cambridge,

e?Pet-r’ Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino

1′!.liOpOsitions 15/16 (Winter/Spring, 1979).

see Deleuze and Guattari: “Diagrams must be distinguished

tporial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to reter-

bols, which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization.

:this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure

t instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the

plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine

It, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet
y.” A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

wvered by the Austrian mathematician and physicist, Christian

wledge.

.onary, “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,”

“:'”‘- m ‘-‘ ‘ambridge: MIT Press October

ember/October 1997): 10-13.

Opposite page
IntraCenter, ww, 2001.

Form-Program Diagram 1,
IntraCenter, ww, 2001.

Left
Robert Mitchum.

.* -i:: arios, not psychodramas. The

:.;. ?;: of the unhomely has been replaced wil

:”; -‘ ;:rop’ositional alternative of the untimely.
: ; i.^ i

‘
Within -ect of deli

:.f.”’ ..’:’: ……..

“. ‘
; ., Ot” ;’ a~e; ~’

“n.

oEA . :ii
?:”,.;,.i:i. ~;.?.:,i:::;!i’:-:’:v’:~,…<:::,::.

• Article Contents

p.72
p.73
p.74
p.75
p.76
p.77

• Issue Table of Contents

Perspecta, Vol. 33, Mining Autonomy (2002), pp. 1-135
Front Matter [pp.1-9]
Editors’ Statement [p.7]
Ledoux with Kant [pp.10-15]
The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy [pp.16-29]
Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for an ‘In-Between’ [pp.30-37]
Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000 [pp.38-47]
Why Autonomy? [pp.48-53]
Twenty Projects at the Boundaries of the Architectural Discipline Examined in Relation to the Historical and Contemporary Debates over Autonomy [pp.54-71]
Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism [pp.72-77]
Notes on the Thing [pp.78-79]
Gottfried Semper: Stereotomy, Biology, and Geometry [pp.80-87]
Digital de l’Orme [pp.88-89]
Ultrasuede [pp.90-103]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Urbanism of Good and Bad Intentions [pp.104-113]
Constants in Motion: Le Corbusier’s “Rule of Movement” at the Carpenter Center [pp.114-125]
Belonging: Towards a Theory of Identification with Place [pp.126-133]
Back Matter [pp.134-135]

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

208

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

209

Intentionally awkwar

d

conditions occur with increasing frequency across a num-
ber of creative fields. This repeating occurrence alone, unaided by any articulated
agenda, suggests that some emerging vein of aesthetic and social possibility is being
tapped. Conditions creating unease and discomfiture—hallmarks of the awkward—
are more than an unforeseen byproduct of this new work; they must be understood
as their defining feature. Distinct from both formal elegance and critical dissonance,
the awkward’s near-fit with cultural and societal patterns is what defines its unique
and troubling timbre. This is not to suggest that the awkward is part of the zeitgeist;
the zeitgeist may be intangible, but it already exists. Rather, it is part of a more
subtle phenomenon of articulating what isn’t quite here—unexpected, yet obvious
in retrospect.

awkwaRd
PosiTio

n

Andrew Zago

Co
nt
or
ti
on
is
t
Cl
if
to
n
Ge
rr

y
II
I

The behaviors manipulated to produce the luminous fountains are
precisely the same as those that are manipulated in fiber op-
tics. Indeed, any transparent medium can be manipulated in a
similar manner. Smartness does not reside in the material, but
in the manner of its instrumentalization.
One must, however, understand the fundamental physics
of light. Ironically, this type of direct and discrete control
of light all but disappeared from the field of architecture
during the 20th century, and has only resurfaced in timid uses
of fiber optics, in which the phenomena are attributed to the
material and technology, and not to the behavior of light.Fig. 09, 10

Conventional materials in architecture are commonly
treated as artifacts: things that have specific and fixed attri-
butes. Naming the material specifies its appearance, its perfor-
mance, and its range of applications. The choice of material
is presumed to be deterministic, and as such, its properties
are foregrounded in its application. In both the approaches
from 19th century magic, however, the physical material is but
a tool, a subordinate actor in the background. The material has
no significance as an artifact; its purpose is only to facili-
tate the manipulation of phenomena in order to create effect.
The theater historian Frederic Woodbridge Wilson, in the cata-
logue of an exhibition he curated on 19th century magic, dif-
ferentiated the sophistication of skilfull manipulation from
the sophistry of the spectacle:

Magicians transformed themselves in the nineteenth
century… No longer were they to be perceived as pos-
sessors of supernatural powers. No, they asserted,
their feats of wizardry were made possible by exqui-
site skill—a special dexterity, a formidable memory,
or a subtle knowledge of nature…05

As constituents in the normative material palette of architec-
ture, smart materials bring little innovation. Indeed, they
are generally expensive and often clumsy substitutes for con-
ventional materials and technologies, without supplying any
substantial performance benefits. Truly innovative exploitation
of these materials demands a real understanding of phenomena,
a direct definition of effect. The attributes that we have tra-
ditionally assigned to artifactual materials are meaningless
as we are forced to wield knowledge rather than rhetoric in the
pursuit of an architecture that is efficient and responsive.

�Fig. 09
The phenomenon of total internal reflec-
tion can be demonstrated in any transpar-
ent medium.

�Fig. 10
This textile uses discretely placed LEDs
as a local and low power light source with
translucent woven fibers for distribution.
The fibers are cut and scored at various
points to allow the emission of light.

Magic or Material

�05
Cfr. Frederic W. Wilson, “Imagery of
Illusion”, a catalogue accompanying
the eponymous exhibition that took
place at the Harvard University Nathan
Marsh Pusey Library from 12/9/1998 to
3/26/1999.

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

210

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

211

Predictably, at the novice level, a small increase in expertise can bring about a sig-
nificant improvement in the work produced, while at the master level, large advanc-
es in expertise bring work only asymptotically closer to perfection.
Although this relationship—and the profession’s sense of its importance—
has never completely disappeared, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was no
longer taken as axiomatically true. As architecture began to reflect on its own tradi-
tion during its postmodern phase, the twin impulses of revival and critique served
to recast expertise as either historic scholarship to be referenced or as an insidious
tool of control to be unmasked and purged.
It’s unlikely that prior to this period of self-reflection, the relationship of
mastery to authenticity presented itself as a problem to architects. The constituent
parts of mastery have, of course, been deeply contested at times, but not the as-
sumption of the mechanism itself. This is no longer the case. The critical tradition
within postmodernism employed irony as a powerful and necessary tool to reveal
and disarm systems of power and suppression, both in architecture and in culture
and politics at large. While liberating, this employment has left in its wake an in-
grained reflex to level an ironic gaze towards any presumption of mastery. This re-
flex casts mastery and traditional authenticity as quixotic beliefs at best and sinister
manipulations at worst. Figure 2[

]

In the wake of postmodernism, restless architects conceived of various
responses to this impasse, which necessitated a reinvention of the terms of archi-
tecture’s ambitions. One response has been to uncouple architectural production
from assumptions of mastery. With this strategy of easy-expertise, first deployed by
OMA and its followers, architects either explicitly disavow traditional mastery or at
least devalue the role of technique in their production. This attitude willingly risks
an impoverishment of the artifact of architecture in order to gain some degree of
political freedom. Another response to this impasse has been to see in computation-
al design and fabrication tools a self-justifying methodology for new architecture.
While attempting to arrive at a new, non-historical form of expertise, those who
confuse the technical for technique (which has its antecedents in some ideologically
strident strains of Modernism) seek expertise by stripping mastery of its cultural

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Th
e

Ir
on
y

Ho
ri
zo
n

As an emerging cultural sensibility, the awkward may help define fertile territory for
new architecture. It goes to the core of a persistent dilemma: how to employ mastery
in a profession that finds the traditional display of such expertise untenable. Consid-
ered not in general, but rather as an unlikely adjunct to expertise, the awkward can
deflect and redefine the architect’s traditional range of instrumental control.

MasTeRy and auThenTiciTy

The profession of architecture historically ascribed great value to the attainment of
mastery over the means of producing a work of architecture, the assumption be-
ing that this type of expertise was a prerequisite for creating noteworthy buildings.
While it was understood that the architect should have some measure of talent,
intelligence, industriousness, and experience, the notion of mastery suggested more
than a combination of these attributes. It posited that the architect should be an
expert in a constellation of working techniques—most unique to the discipline and
many singular to his or her own practice—and should understand the application of
this expertise to be the single defining attribute brought to any project. Tradition-
ally, this expertise was based on a relatively fixed body of knowledge, whether it
was an understanding of the classical orders and principals of proportion, of build-
ing types, of statics, of material properties, of ornamentation, or the development of
artistic skill in draughtsmanship and rendering. In the revolutionary fervor of early
Modernism, historical models and methods for architecture were largely rejected,
replaced by new referents of aesthetics, technology, and politics. However, while
reliance on much of architecture’s canonical knowledge ended, a presumption of
mastery—with its attendant body of knowledge and skills—persisted.

The relationship of mastery to quality—of expert technique giving a work
of architecture its gravity and depth—can be understood as the means by which
work achieves its sense of authenticity. That is, it achieves a condition in which the
nature of the project’s existence supersedes its apparent intentions and becomes, in
itself, resonant with and explicative of the nature of things. This traditional depen-
dence of authenticity on mastery is depicted in the accompanying graph. Figure 1

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Cl
as
si
c

a

l
Mo
de
l
of
R
ec
ip
ro
ci
ty

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

212

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

213

The steep angle of approach to the irony-horizon causes neo-traditional architecture
to bounce and fall short, despite its expertise-velocity.
The problem, it seems, is not that the mastery of architecture’s material
means is axiomatically impotent, but that nearly all of the traditional ways in
which that mastery has been defined are either irrelevant or simply untenable.
The issue is not to dispense with technique, but to reconceive of technique for a
post-ironic authenticity.

The awkwaRd

At the core of traditional expertise is a sense of correctness. Historically, the canon
of architectural knowledge provided the architect with the instruments to create
work, but it also provided an elaborate reassurance that the work was grounded in
a verified set of presumptions. Today, our faith in these canons has all but vanished,
but there remains the vestigial armature of assumptions and predilections regarding
proportion and form, composition and ornamentation, material expression, and tec-
tonics against which architects either claim or reject the mantle of mastery. That is,
there persists a sense of correctness shaped by the traditional notion of authenticity,
even if architectural work no longer explicitly references it. A post-ironic authen-
ticity could begin by positing techniques that are, by intention, incorrect. Where
traditional mastery strove for a perfection of form, new mastery stumbles into an
awkward position.
The awkward stands in peculiar relation to the correct. It doesn’t align with
normative manners, but it doesn’t critique them either. It gains its special resonance
by maintaining a clear relationship to larger cultural norms while constructing an
alternate logic within them; neither in step, nor totally out of step. This alternate
logic does not clash with the normative so much as it bumps and grinds against it.
To pursue the awkward in the context of mastery is not so much subversive
as perverse. The awkward requires the architect to perform contrary to his or her
best judgment, to tactically undermine fine-tuned skills in an attempt to define new
and unsettling aesthetic territories. While the awkward runs the risk of appearing
as mere ineptitude, that appearance also gives it the potential to side-step irony. In
its apparent artlessness, it seeks neither to perpetuate the power structure implicit in
traditional mastery nor reduce its role to critical reflection on that structure. Rather,
by opting out of any obvious relation to correctness, the awkward demands a new
set of aesthetic coordinates. To the wedded strategies of assertion and negation, the
awkward appears baffling.
The difference between the awkward and other displays of expertise can be
illustrated through three examples, set in Paris, of tactically distinct approaches to
the inhabitation of urban space. In the first, Gustave Caillebotte’s painting La Place
de l’Europe, temps de pluie of 1877 Figure 4, we see Haussmannian boulevards ex-
tend into deep perspective. The flaneurs, as connoisseurs of the street, stroll with its

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

dimension. A third response has been to re-acquire the traditional model of mastery
through a neo-traditional authenticity that transcends irony. In this strain, which
runs from Louis Kahn to Peter Zumthor, mastery incorporates modern abstrac-
tion (thereby avoiding the pitfalls of literal historicism) while simply dismissing the
ironic gaze as a form of theoretical game-playing.
Of these responses, the first—the uncoupling of production from mastery—
has had the most valiance. Its indifference towards expertise has produced novel
architecture while deftly deflecting the withering stare of irony. Although they cede
important aesthetic territory, its proponents are responsible for rekindling the belief
in the new for its own sake. The third graph illustrates this trade-off. Figure 3 The
work of easy-expertise is able to pass the irony-horizon, but stops when its tech-
nique mastery is exhausted.

The neo-traditional approach, however, bears further consideration. Efforts
to attain a neo-traditional authenticity spring, of course, from the recognition that
the physical fact of a building has had demonstrable success as the prime agent for
transformative architectural experiences and insights. The architect’s skillful deter-
mination of form and material can give buildings a presence that is, in itself, archi-
tecture’s primary sensation. The demonstration of this ability has been the source,
historically, of architecture’s most notable achievements. Irony, to some, seems a
feeble barrier to this potent capacity. Architects of this strain believe that redou-
bling efforts of earnest diligence can make the obstacle of irony irrelevant. Despite
that belief, neo-traditional authenticity, which has both its capable practitioners
and its self-righteous proponents, has been incapable of fostering either a degree of
contemporary relevance or urgent novelty. Both of these qualities—relevance and
novelty—are as central to authenticity as is its timelessness. This owes to the fact
that even though there may be qualities of architecture that categorically transcend
a particular era, its specific formulation must also resonate with its moment of entry
into the world and is inconceivable in isolation from it. As much as one may like
to see architecture move past the limit of irony, it is a deeply ingrained part of our
current cultural landscape that must be accounted for. The incongruity of neo-tra-
ditional authenticity in the contemporary climate is also depicted in the third graph.

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Tr
ad
it
io
na
l
Au
th
en
ti
ci

ty
a

nd

Ea
sy
E
xp
er
ti
se

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

214

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

215

grain, not confronting Paris, but merging their own perambulations with its urban
geometry. Flaneurs practiced a rarified cultural art form that both exploited the form
of the street and depended on its ability to reinforce their own sense of propriety.

In the second example, a traceur leaps crosswise over a walkway in a Pa-
risian housing project. Figure 5 The traceur’s astonishing physical feats (called
parkour) are enthralling not only because of the agility required, but also because
his leaps are a direct counter-point to the intended use of the urban form. A decon-
structivist art form, parkour reveals the presence of embedded social oppression in
the form of the city by working against its grain, thereby highlighting and calling
into question its proscriptive nature. Acting in this way, however, the traceur is as
dependent on the status quo of the urban form as is the flaneur. Both are defined by
the existing city they wish to challenge.

The third example is set in front of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Figure 6
Here, French contortionist Pierre-Antoine Dussouillez displays a novel approach
to ascending public stairs. While requiring (one imagines) as much physical dex-
terity as the traceur, the intention and the result are markedly different. Neither
the staid elegance of the flaneur nor the edgy grace of the traceur is evident here.
Dussouillez is in error; the discomfiting juxtaposition of limbs renders him inca-
pable of either conforming with or acting against the existing urban form. He is also
funny. The absurd transformation of his own figure disarms the proscriptions of the
urban fabric and demands not that he find a way to fit into the existing context, but
that a new urban arrangement account for him.

Pi
er
re
-A
nt
oi
ne
D
us
so
ui
ll

ez
o

n
th
e

st
ep

s
of
t
he
B
ib
li
ot
he
qu
e
Na
ti

on
al

e,
P
ar
is

,
Fr
an
ce

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zagoawkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Gu
st
av
e
Ca
il

le
bo
tt
e,

L
a

P
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d
e

l
’
E
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ro
p
e
,

te
m
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s

d
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p
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i
e

(
18

77

)

Bl
ue
,
fr
om
U
rb
an
F
re
efl
ow
,
pe
rf
or

ms
a

Ko
ng
v
au
lt

Cringe Comedy: The currency of an emerging cultural sensibility can sometimes be mea-
sured in humor before it can be articulated in another form. Something can be funny
before we know why. The awkward, as a sub-category of humor, has become a noted phenom-
enon in recent years. So-called cringe comedy, as practiced by comedian-writers Larry
David or Ricky Gervais [Figure 19], seems to mine new comic territory. Awkwardness blows
through their work like an inevitable and unstoppable force of nature, bringing with it
at least as much discomfort as laughter. They create the sensation of an alternate real-
ity that is coherent, sensible to many, and embedded within normative experience yet
never quite commensurate with it. The newness and political potency of awkward humor was
famously displayed in the reaction to Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House
Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006. His searing performance, targeting both the
Bush administration and the press, was met largely by blank stares from the crowd and
was initially reported in mainstream media outlets as an incoherent flop. However, as
word of the performance spread, it was embraced by many as very funny indeed. More than
just a comic routine, this unsettling satirical performance has come to be regarded as
an instance of long-overdue civil disobedience.

Ri
ck
y
Ge

r
va
is
a
s
Da
vi
d
Br
en
t

da
nc
in
g
on
B
BC
’s
T
h
e

O
f
fi
c
e

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

216

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

217

in the context of expertise. Thomas Ruff, noted student of the strident perfectionists
Bernd and Hilla Becher, employed this approach in his Jpeg series of photographs.
These indulgently-produced large prints were all derived from images lifted from
the internet. The images were then heavily manipulated, not to enhance them, but
to subject them to extreme file compression. The type of compression used creates
digital artifacts in the images, which is known as quilting. Figure 7 This usually
undesirable byproduct of technology typically occurs when one misunderstands file
compression. The intentional quilting of the photos, while at first off-putting, even-
tually yields to the reading of a reticulated skein that creates its own atmospheric
surface, independent of and oscillating with the pictorial content of the photograph.

A more telling example of the use of amateur error can be shown by con-
trasting Peter Zumthor’s baths at Vals Figure 8 with a photograph of Zumthor’s
Kunsthaus Bregenz from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Architecture series. Figure 9 At Vals,

Zu
mt
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fr
om
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ir
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awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

zuMThoR vs. sugiMoTo

The awkward necessarily encompasses a wide array of possible applications. There
are at least as many ways to be awkward as to be correct. Its strategic deployment,
however, requires that it appear, at first, incorrect, that it offend refined sensibilities,
and that, as a latent reading, it create an unexpected and novel effect.
Although not yet articulated as such, employment of the awkward is gaining
currency in contemporary culture. One example is the amateur error, which appears

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nd
awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Th
om

as
R
uf
f,

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p
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g

a
n
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cm
)

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

218

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

219

Zumthor demonstrates his consummate skills as a master of his craft by stridently
clinging to traditional formulations of authenticity. This is evident in his use of
stone (a material that is not only substantial, but is traditionally understood to be
the embodiment of substantiality), in the expression of that stone and its tectonic
arrangement, and in the formal correctness of the volumes. The Sugimoto photo-
graph, while no less technically formidable, is out of focus (as are all of the photos
in the series). How to properly focus is an early lesson in photography; the absence
of that basic skill in the work of an expert is baffling. Sugimoto commits an obvi-
ous—and intentional—error, then relies on his expertise to transform the work by
incorporating this error, thereby achieving an uncanny new spatial effect. While
the expert architect insists on displaying his mastery, the expert photographer
does not so much hide his mastery as he dislocates it through an unlikely and dis-
arming technique.

FRoM Balloon dogs To heRzog & de MeuRon

Abstraction had a privileged position in architecture and art for most of the 20th
century. Capable of tapping into pure and rarified sensations—and not mediated
by the legibility of meaning required of representation—abstraction was seen as
a vehicle through which one achieved the purely abstract. Furthermore, with the
discrediting of the classical canons, abstraction was seen as a necessary feature of
authenticity. However, abstraction has lost its axiomatic relation to both the abstract
and the authentic. The same mechanisms of irony that render authenticity suspect
have turned the various manifestations of abstraction into nothing more than imag-
ery, as loaded with legible meaning as a Madonna or a Doric column.

In this context, the representation of banal subject matter (as distinct from
Pop or kitsch) in inappropriate contexts has emerged as an unexpected manifesta-
tion of the awkward, one capable of evading this obstacle to abstraction. In Jeff
Koons’s Balloon Dog series, for example, investing the trivial nature of the subject
with an inordinate amount of effort and expense to transform its scale and material-
ity creates astonishing sculptural effects. Figure 10 Although patently representation-
al, the subject matter is incapable of sustaining meaning, or even of evoking a sense
of surrealistic enigma. The content is dismissible, but perversely, its obvious pres-
ence makes it a Trojan horse for the reading of pure authenticity and abstraction.
Closer to the discipline of architecture are Greg Lynn’s tables from his
recent Toy Furniture series. Figure 11 As with the Balloon Dogs, these tables are
formed from trivial playthings. Unlike the sculptures, they are not a representation
of the toys, but are composed of the toys themselves. The transformation from toy
to table is achieved through the dissection and recombination of multiples of the
same toy, rather than through a change of scale and materiality. The assembly is
carefully calibrated to fall between the abstraction of Lynn’s related Blobwall proj-
ect and a representation that is comically inane. While allowing for some degree
of the literalness of Koons’s dogs, Toy Furniture suggests that this tactic of banal
representation has to differ by discipline. The degree of literal representation that
proves effective as sculpture would likely be too strong to succeed as furniture. The
formal success of the tables also suggests that this tactic could shift scales and have
an application in architecture.

Although they are yet to be articulated as such, aspects of the awkward are
already and increasingly finding their way into contemporary practice. No firm has
gone further in exploiting the peculiar potential of the awkward than Herzog & de
Meuron. Having created such building features as the cuspidal edges of the Roche
Tower, the glassed courtyard stuffed with a black rubber box of REHAB Basel Fig-
ure 12, the oddly drooping cantilever of the de Young Memorial Museum Figure 13,
or the artlessly massed volume of the Schaulager Figure 14, Herzog & de Meuron
demonstrate the disarming potential of the awkward and the error in expert hands.

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Je
ff
K
oo

ns
,

B
a
l
l
o
o
n

D
o
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ie
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ta
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at
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ay
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re

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

220

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

221

Across the spectrum of practice, architects are creating works that seem
to revel in clumsiness, from Johnston Marklee’s Hill House Figure 15 to Toyo Ito’s
Tama Art University Library Figure 16 or OMA’s Seattle Public Library. Figure 17
While their formal attributes are often couched in terms of adherence to program-
matic imperatives, view corridors, property and setback restrictions, or other non-
visual criteria, these projects seem to go out of their way to be overtly indifferent to
formal and tectonic propriety.

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

Of
fic
e
fo
r
Me
tr
op
ol
it
an
A
r-

ch
it
ec
tu
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le
,
Wa
sh
in
g-

to
n

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago

He
rz
og

&
d

e
Me

ur
on
’s
S
ch
au
la
ge
r,
L
au
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ou
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ar
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ac

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Ca
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am
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Ca
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ok
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Ja
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&
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Me

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au
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un
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pr
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it
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rl
an

d

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

222

The Real PeRsPecTa 42

223

The promise of the awkward in architecture is illustrated in the fourth
graph. Figure 18 Awkwardness allows expert work to approach the irony-horizon at
a more salient angle than neo-traditional authenticity. Like easy-expertise, it is able
to cross that horizon. But where easy-expertise is ultimately limited by its lack of
mastery, the awkward, in capable hands, can continue on an asymptotic trajectory
towards perfection.

The awkwaRd and The coMPlex

On one hand, the awkward is presented here as a tactic and not a principle, a pro-
visional approach to a cultural impasse that has hamstrung architecture’s access to
authenticity. On the other hand, as with any new sensibility, it has the potential to
reengage the world through its own logics. Part of the efficacy of the awkward, it
seems, is that it suggests a pattern of forms and encounters that, taken individually,
could be easily dismissed as mere novelty, but that, taken in aggregate, point to a
new logic of space. The awkward accumulates as a series of inexplicable instances,
but already these individual points begin to connect and form the ground of a new
landscape of cultural production.
Architecture, as a cultural practice, is imbedded in and coextensive with the
material world. As such, it is simultaneously responsible for its role as cultural arti-
fice and for a degree of fidelity to an evolving sense of reality. The awkward, by op-
erating at the level of technique (that is, by altering the parameters of expertise and
mastery over the material means of architecture) engages this nexus of the artifice
and the real while harnessing unpredictable effects. A valid critique of traditional
mastery is that it aspires to total determination of architecture’s means, materials,
and effects. This is no longer a tenable framework for the production of architec-
ture. Like another related sensibility, the accident, the awkward acknowledges the
limits of instrumental control (the limited viability of the “top-down” model of
mastery) and develops techniques that, by design, produce uncertain and unpredict-
able results. In doing so, it does not simply abandon individual volition to the fiction
of pure self-organizing complexity, but rather allows that volition to be inflected by
novel and unlikely possibilities.

awkwaRd PosiTion / andRew zago
Th
e
Ir
on
y
Ho
ri
zo
n

#1
Ski Dome
Tokyo, Japan, 1998

#2
WEF World Economic Forum
Davos, Switzerland, 2005

#3
Swimming pool at the settlement
Ma’ale Adumim, West Bank, 2003

#4
Soccer game
Atacama Desert, Chile, DATE

#5
Mountain with antennas
Kitakyushu, Japan, 2006

#6
Oriental Pearl Tower observation
room
Shanghai, China, DATE

#7
Ertan Dam, downstream side
Panzihua (Sichuan), China, 1998

#8
Unknown Soldier Museum
Baghdad, Iraq, DATE

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