science Paper

PU 515 Applied Biostatistics Midterm Exam

 

1. Glucose levels in patients free of diabetes are assumed to follow a normal distribution with a mean of 120 and a standard deviation of 16.

a) What proportion of patients have glucose levels exceeding 115?

b) If a patient has a glucose level of 140, what percentile is this?

c) What is the probability that the mean glucose level exceeds 115 in a sample of

12

patients?

2. The following are body mass index (BMI) scores measured in 12 patients who are free of diabetes and participating in a study of risk factors for obesity. Body mass index is measured as the ratio of weight in kilograms to height in meters squared. 25 27 31 33

26

28 38 41 24 32 35 40

a) Compute the mean BMI

b) Compute the standard deviation of BMI

c) Compute the median BMI

d) Compute Q1 and Q3

e) Are there outliers in the distribution of BMI (justify your answer)?

3. The following table shows the numbers of patients classified as underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese according to their diabetes status.

8346543

12859340

    

    

Underweight	Normal Weight	Overweight	Obese
Diabetes
No Diabetes

  

 If a patient is selected at random,

a) What is the probability that they are overweight?

b) What is the probability that they are obese and diabetic?

c) What proportion of the diabetics are obese?

d) What proportion of normal weight patients are not diabetic?

e) What proportion of patients are normal weight or underweight?

 

4. Approximately 30% of obese patients develop diabetes. If a physician sees 10 patients who are obese,

a) What is the probability that half of them will develop diabetes?

b) What is the probability that none will develop diabetes?

c) How many would you expect to develop diabetes?  

 PU 515 Applied Biostatistics Midterm Exam

5. A new non-invasive screening test is proposed that is claimed to be able to identify patients with impaired glucose tolerance based on a battery of questions related to health behaviors. The new test is given to 75 patients. Based on each patient’s responses to the questions they are classified as positive or negative for impaired glucose tolerance. Each patient also submits a blood sample and their glucose tolerance status is determined. The results are tabulated below.

8

Screening Test	Impaired Glucose Tolerance	Not Impaired
Positive	17	13
Negative		37

  

a) What is the sensitivity of the screening test?

b) What is the false positive fraction of the screening test?

 

6. BMI in children is approximately normally distributed with a mean of 24.5 and a standard deviation of 6.2.

a) A BMI between 25 and 30 is considered overweight. What proportion of children are overweight?

b) A BMI of 30 or more is considered obese. What proportion of children are obese?

c) In a random sample of 10 children, what is the probability that their mean BMI exceeds 25?

  

7. A national survey is conducted to assess the association between hypertension and stroke in persons over 55 years of age. Development of stroke was monitored over a 5 year follow-up period. The data are summarized below and the numbers are in millions.

12 37

4 26

    

Developed Stroke	Did not Develop Stroke
Hypertension
No Hypertension

   

a) Compute the incidence of stroke in persons over 55 years of age

b) Compute the relative risk of stroke comparing hypertensive to non-hypertensive persons

c) Compute the odds ratio of stroke comparing hypertensive to non-hypertensive persons  

   

8. Answer True or False to each of the following

a) If there are outliers, then the mean will be greater than the median.

b) The 90th percentile of the standard normal distribution is 1.645.

c) The mean is the 50th percentile of any normal distribution.

d) The mean is a better measure of location when there are no outliers.  

  

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, ,t(

,. ( …. Also by

Gilles Deleuze

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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(with Felix Guattari) ~.} ,

\,!.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(with Felix Guattari)

Kant’s Critical Philosophy

Foucault

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

Cinema 2: The Time-Image

”
“;,,

, Kafka: Toward a lv1inor Literatll1’e
(with Felix Guattari)

.’.;’.
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

‘;.~r
,’,

L. Essays Critical and Clinical

Proust and Signs: The Complete Text

,.:’,’

:, ~”

Francis Bacon
The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

Translated and with an
Introduction by Daniel W. Smith

Afterword by Tom Conley

I
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

30 – Bacon’s Periods and Aspects

extends itself in order to better close in on itself; and there is a sys­
tole in the second movement, when the body is contracted in order
to escape from itself; and even when the body is dissipated, it still
remains contracted by the forces that seize hold of it in order to re­
turn it to its surroundings. The coexistence of all these movements
in the painting … is rhythm.

CHAPTER 6

Painting and Sensation

Cezanne and sensation The levels ofsensation ­
Figuration and vioknce – The movement oftranslation,

the stroll The phenomenological unity ofthe senses:
sensation and rhythm

There are two ways of going beyond fIguration (that is, beyond
the illustrative and the figurative): either toward abstract form or to­
ward the Figure. Cezanne gave a simple name to this way of the
Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sen­
sation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the
flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts through
the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone. Certainly
Cezanne did not invent this way of sensation in painting, but he
gave it an unprecedented status. Sensation is the opposite of the
facile and the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the “sensational,” the
spontaneous, etc. Sensation has one face turned toward the subject
(the nervous system, vital movement, “instinct,” “temperament”-a
whole vocabulary common to both Naturalism and Cezanne), and
one face turned toward the object (the “fact,” the place, the event).
Or rather, it has no faces at all, it is both things indissolubly, it is
Being-in-the-World, as the phenomenologists say: at one and the
same time I become in the sensation and something happens through
the sensation, one through the other, one in the other.! And at the

it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives
and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation
only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing

the sensed. This was Cezanne’s lesson against the impression­
ists: sensation is not in the “free” or disembodied play of light

31

,
32 ­ and Sensation

,i

color , on tne contrary, it is in the

of an Color is in the body, sensation is in and not in

the air. Sensation is what is painted. What is painted on the canvas is

the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, hut insofar as

it is experienced as sustaining this sensation (what Lawrence, speak­

ing of Cezanne, called “the appleyness of the apple”).”

This is the very general thread that links Bacon to Cezanne: paint
the sensation, or, as Bacon will say in words very close to Cezanne’s,
record the fact. J “It is a very, very close and difficult thing to know

some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and

other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.””

There would seem to be only obvious differences between these two

Cezanne’s world as and still life (even before the

versus Bacon’s inverted

the world as Na­

are not these obvious differences in the service of “sensation” and

“temperament”? In other words, are they not inscribed in

Bacon to Cezanne, in what they have in common? When Bacon

speaks of sensation, he says two things, which are very similar to

Cezanne. Negatively, he says that the form related to the sensation

(the Figure) is the opposite of the form related to an object that it is

supposed to represent (figuration). As Valery put it, sensation is that
which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of

6 And positively, Bacon constantly says that sensa­

one “order” to another, from one “level” to

one “area” to another. This is why sensation is the

the agent of bodily deformations. In this re-

the same criticism can

ing and abstract they pass through the

act directly upon the nervous system, they do not attain the sensa­

tion, they do not liberate the Figure-all because they remain at

one and the same level. 7 They can implement transformations of fonn,

but they cannot attain deformations of bodies. In what sense Bacon

, Painting and Sensation 33
~

is even more so than if he were a disciple of Cezanne,

we will have occasion to consider later.

corresponds to a

the interviews, he

” “areas of sensa­

think that each

sensation: sensa­

tion would thus he a term in a sequence or a series. For the

series of Rembrandt’s self-portraits involves us in different areas of

feeling. 9 And it is true that painting, and especially Bacon’s painting,

proceeds through series: series of crucifixions, series of Popes, series

of self-portraits, series of the mouth, of the mouth that screams, the

mouth that smiles … Moreover, there can be series of simultaneity,

as in the triptychs, which make at least three levels or orders coexist.

And the series can be closed, when it has a contrasting composition,

but it can be open, when it is continued or continuable beyond the

three.lO All this is true. But it would not be true were there not some­

that is already at work in each painting,

sensation. It is each paintimr. each Fi!!llre. that is

itself a shifting sequence or series (and not

it is each sensation that exists at diverse levelS, III dltterent orders, or

in different domains. This means that there are not sensations

different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation.

It is the nature of sensation to envelop a constitutive difference

level, a plurality of constituting domains. Every sensation, and every

Figure, is already an “accumulated” or “coagulated” sensation, as in

a limestone figure.!! Hence the irreducibly synthetic character of

sensation. What then, we must ask, is the source of this synthetic

character, through which each material sensation has several levels,

several orders or UVllldlll:>. what makes up

their sensin!!” or

“Vhat makes up

http:three.lO

34 and Sensation and Sensation – 35

Bacon does, that something is nonetheless figured (for instance, a
screaming Pope), this secondary figuration depends on the neutral­
ization of all primary figuration. Bacon himself formulates this prob­
lem, which concerns the inevitable preservation of a practical figu­
ration at the very moment when the Figure asserts its intention to
break away from the figurative. We will see how he resolves the prob­
lem. In any case, Bacon has always tried to eliminate the “sensa­
tional,” that is, the primary figuration of that which provokes a vio­
lent sensation. This is the meaning of the formula, “I wanted to paint
the scream more than the horror.”12 When he paints the screaming
Pope, there is nothing that might cause horror, and the curtain in
front of the Pope is not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him

view; it is rather the way in which the Pope himself sees noth­
ing, and screams before the invisible. Thus neutralized, the horror is
multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the re­
verse. And certainly it is not easy to renounce the horror, or the
mary figuration. Sometimes he has to turn against his own instincts,
renounce his own experience. Bacon harbors within himself all the
violence ofIreland, and the violence of Nazism, the violence of war.
He passes through the horror of the crucifixions, and especially the
fragment of the crucifixion, or the head of meat, or the bloody suit­
case. But when he passes judgment on his own paintings, he rejects
all those that are still too “sensational,” because the figuration that
subsists in them reconstitutes a scene of horror, even if only second­
arily, thereby reintroducing a story to be told: even the bullfights are
too dramatic. As soon as there is horror, a story is reintroduced, and
the scream is botched. In the end, the maximum violence will be

in the seated or crouching Figures, which are subjected to
neither torture nor brutality, to which nothing visible happens, and
yet which manifest the power of the paint all the more. This is be­
cause violence has two very different meanings: “When talking about
the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war.” 13
The violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the repre­
sented (the sensational, the cliche). The former is inseparable from
its direct action on the nervous system, the levels through which it

passes, the domains it traverses: being itself a Figure, it must have
nothing of the nature of a represented object. It is the same
Anaud: cruelty is not what one believes it to be, and depends less
and less on what is represented.

A second interpretation must also be rejected, which would
confuse the levels of sensation, that is, the valencies of the sensation,
with an ambivalence of feeling. At one point, Sylvester suggests, “Since
you talk about recording different levels of feeling in one image …
you may be at one and the same time a love of the person
and a hostility towards them … both a caress and an assault?” To
which Bacon responds, “That is too logicaL I don’t think that’s the
way things work. I think it goes to a deeper thing: how do I feel I
can make this image more immediately real to myself? That’s aU.”14
In fact, the psychoanalytic hypothesis of ambivalence not only has
the disadvantage of localizing the ambivalence on the side of the
spectator who look., at the painting; for even if we presuppose an
ambivalence in the Figure itself, it would refer to feelings that the
Figure would experience in relation to represented things, in rela­
tion to a narrated story. But there are no feelings in Bacon: there are
nothing but affects, that is, “sensations” and “instincts,” according
to the formula of Naturalism. Sensation is what determines instinct
at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one sen­
sation to another, the search for the “best” sensation (not the most
agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular
moment of its descent, contraction, or dilation).

There is a third, more hypothesis. This would be
the motor hypothesis. The levels of sensation would be like arrests
or snapshots of motion, which would recompose the movement syn­
thetically in all its continuity, speed, and violence, as in synthetic
cubism, futurism, or Duchamp’s Nude [102]. It is true that Bacon is
fascinated by the decomposition of movement in Muybridge, which

has used as a subject matter. It is also true that he obtains very in­
tense and violent movements of his own [39], such as George Dyer’s
ISO-degree turn of the head toward Lucian Freud [42]. More gener­
ally, Bacon’s Figures are often in the middle of a strange stroll

., 36 – Painting and Sensation
,’I [68], as in Man Carrying a Child [22] or the Van Gogh [23]. The
“:~:

round area or the parallelepiped that isolates the Figure itself be­

comes a motor, and Bacon has not abandoned the project that a mo­

bile sculpture could achieve more easily: in this case, the contour or

pedestal would slide along the length of the armature so that the

Figure could make its “daily round.”15 But it is precisely the nature

of this daily round that can inform us of the status of movement in

Bacon. Beckett and Bacon have never been so close, and this daily

round is the kind of stroll typical of Beckett’s characters: they too

trundle about fitfully without ever leaving their circle or paral­

lelepiped. It is the stroll of the paralytic child and its mother cling­
ing to the edge of the balustrade in a curious handicapped race [36].

It is the about-face in Figure Furning [30]. It is George Dyer’s bi­
cycle ride [40], which closely resembles that of Moritz’s hero: “his

vision was limited to the small piece of land he could see about

him…. To him, the end of all things seemed to lead, at the end of his

journey, to just such a point. “16 Therefore, even when the contour is

displaced, the movement consists less of this displacement than the

amoeba-like exploration that the Figure is engaged in inside the

contour. Movement does not explain sensation; on the contrary, it is

explained by the elasticity of the sensation, its vis elastica. According

to Beckett’s or Kafka’s law, there is immobility beyond movement:

beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down,

lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates. The true acrobat is

one who is consigned to immobility inside the circle. The large feet

of the Figures often do not lend themselves to walking: they are al­

most clubfeet (and the large armchairs often seem to resemble shoes

for clubfeet). In short, it is not movement that explains the levels of

sensation, it is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of

movement. And in fact, what interests Bacon is not exactly move­

ment, although his painting makes movement very intense and vio­

lent. But in the end, it is a movement “in-place,” a spasm, which

reveals a completely different problem characteristic of Bacon: the

action of invisible forces on the body (hence the bodily deformations,

which are due to this more profound cause). In the 1973 triptych

,I”l

Painting and Sensation – 37

[73], the movement of translation occurs between two spasms, be­

tween the two movements of a contraction in one place. tThen there would be yet another hypothesis, more “phenome­
1,lilinological.” The levels of sensation would really be domains of sen­

sation that refer to the different sense organs; but precisely each

level, each domain, would have a way of referring to the others, in­

dependently of the represented object they have in common. Between

a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an

existential communication that would constitute the “pathic” (non­

representative) moment of the sensation. In Bacon’s bullfights, for

example, we hear the noise of the beast’s hooves [56, 57]; in the 1976

triptych, we touch the quivering of the bird plunging into the place

where the head should be [79], and each time meat is represented,

we touch it, smell it, eat it, weigh it, as in Soutine’s work; and the

portrait ofIsabel Rawsthorne [41] causes a head to appear to which

ovals and traits have been added in order to widen the eyes, flair the
III

nostrils, lengthen the mouth, and mobilize the skin in a common ex­ ‘II
ercise of all the organs at once. The painter would thus make visible a

I

kind of original unity of the senses, and would make a multisensible

Figure appear visually.

But this operation is possible only if the sensation of a particular

domain (here, the visual sensation) is in direct contact with a vital

power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power

is Rhythm, which is more profound than vision, hearing, etc. Rhythm

appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting

when it invests the visual level. This is a “logic of the senses,” as

Cezanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate

is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in

each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This

rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of

music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in

around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world it­

self. 17 Cezanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the

visual sensation. Must we say the same thing of Bacon, with his co­

existent movements, when the flat field closes in around the Figure

38 – Painting and Sensation

and when the Figure contracts or, on the contrary, expands in order
to rejoin the field, to the point where the figure merges with the field?
Could it be that Bacon’s closed and artificial world reveals the same
vital movement as Cezanne’s Nature? Bacon is not using empty
words when he declares that he is cerebrally pessimistic but nerv­
ously optimistic, with an optimism that believes only in life. IS The
same “temperament” as Cezanne? Bacon’s formula would be: figura­
tively pessimistic, but figurally optimistic.

CHAPTER 7

Hysteria

The body without organs: Artaud UIOrringer’s Gothic line
“What the “difference oflevel” in sensation means – Vibration

Hysteria and presence Bacon’s doubt ­
H.ysteria, painting, and the eye

This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only
by going beyond organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is
perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But
the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more pro­
found and almost unlivable Power [puissance}. We can seek the unity
of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos,
into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpet­
ually and violently mixed.

Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there
lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs.
“The body is the body I it stands alone I it has no need of organs I
the body is never an organism I organisms are the enemies ofbodies.”1
The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that orga­
nization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive
body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the
body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body
does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qual­
itative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer
determines within itself representative elements, but allotropic vari­
ations. Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this
state of the body “before” organic representation: axes and vectors,
gradients, zones, kinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in
relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. “No mouth.

39

before80 – The r
these traits, figuration recovers and re-creates, but does not

the figuration from which it came. Hence Bacon’s constant

formula: create resemblance, but through accidental and nonreseIIl­

bling means.

So the act of oscillat­

ing between a of paint­

ing … Everything is already on the canvas, and in the him­

self, before the act of painting begins. lIenee the work of the

is shifted back and only comes later, afterward: manual labor, out of

which the Figure will emerge into view …

CHAPTER 12

The Diagram

Tbe diagram in Bacon (t1’aits and color-patcbe.lj1 ­
Its rmmual cbaracter Painting and tbe experience

ofcatastropbe Abstmct painting, code, and
Action Painting, diagmm, and rlUmual space

vVbat Bacon dislikes about both tbese 1l’tlys

We do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say.

say that the is alrea~y in the canvas, he or she encoun­

ters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy and pre­
occupy the canvas. An cntirc battle takes place on the canvas between

the painter and these There is thus a preparatory work that

belongs to painting fully, and yet precedes the act of painting.

can be done in sketches, though it need not be,

in any case sketches do not replace it (like many contemporary

painters, Bacon does not make sketches). This preparatory work is

invisible and silent, yet intense, and the act of painting it­

self appears as an afterward, an apres-coup (“hysteresis”) in relation to
this work.

What does this act of painting consist of? Bacon defines it in

this way: make random marks (lines-traits); scrub, sweep, or the

canvas in order to clear out locales or zones (color-patches); throw

the paint, from various and at various

or these acts, presupposes that there were already tlguranve gIVens

on the canvas (and in the painter’s head), more or less virtual, more

or actual. It is precisely these givens that will be removed the
act of painting, either by wiped, brushed, or ruhbed, or

covered over. For example, a mouth: it will be elongated, stretched

one side of the head to the other. For example, the head: part

HI

S2 – The – S3The

”
of it will be cleared away with a brush, broom, sponge, or rag. This
is what Bacon calls a “graph” or a DifJgram: it is as if a Sahara, a zone

of the Sahara, were suddenly inserted into the head; it is as if a piece

of rhinoceros skin, viewed a microscope, were stretched over

it; it is as if the two halves of the were split open by an ocean; it

is as if the unit of measure were changed, and micrometric, or even

‘A”’HHL, units were substituted for the figurative unit.’ A Sahara, a
rhinoceros skin: such is the suddenly outstretched diagram. It is as
if, in the midst of the figurative and probabilistic givens, a rntnct,,.n!1h,,

overcame the canvas.

It is like the emergence of another world. For marks, these
are irrational, involuntary, accidental, random. They are

nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer

either significant or signifiers: they are a-signifying traits. They arc

traits of sensation, but of confused sensations (the confused sensa­

tions, as Cezanne said, that we bring with us at birth). And above

they are manual traits. It is here that the painter works with a rag,

stick, bntsh, or sponge; it is here that he throws the paint with

hands. 4 It is as if the hand assumed an independence, and began to
guided by other forces, making marks that no longer depend on

either our will or our sie-ht. These almost blind manual attest

to intrusion of another world into the visual world of

Ti-l a certain extent, they remove the painting from the optical orga­
nization that was already reigning over it and rendering it

in adv;”mce. The painter’s hand intervenes in order to shake its own

dependence and break up the sovereign optical organization: one

can no longer see anything, as if in a catastrophe, a

is the act of painting, or the turning point of the painting.

There are two ways in which the painting can fail, once visuallv and

once manually. One can remain entangled in the figurative

and the optical organization of representation; but one can also

the diagram, botch it, so overload it that it is rendered inoperative

(which is another way of remaining in the figurative: one will have

mutilated or mauled the cliche …).5 The diagram is thus the

set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones,

line-strokes and color-patches. And operation diagram, its

1U1lCUUll, says Bacon, is to be “suggestive.” Or, more rigoronsly, to

similar to Wittgenstein’s, it is to introduce “possibili­

“6 Because they are destined to give us the it is all

the more important for the traits and color-patches to break with

figuration. This is why they are not sufficient in themselves, but

must be “utilized.” They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not

constitute a fact (the pictorial fact). In order to be converted

into a fact, in order to evolve into a

into the visual whole; but it is precisely through the action of these

marks that the visual whole will cease to be an optical organization;

it will give the eye another power, as well as an object that will no

longer be
The diagram is the operative set of traits and color-patches, of

lines and zones. Van Gogh’s diagram, for example, is the set of straight

and hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist the

trees, make the sky palpitate, and which assume a particular inten­
sity from 1888 onward. \Ve can not only differentiate diagrams, we
can also date the diagram of a painter, because there is always a mo­

ment when the painter confronts it most directly. The diagram is in­

deed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of or rhythm.

It is a violent chaos in rclation to the figurative but it is a

germ of rhythm in rclation to the new order of the painting. A’i Bacon

says, it “unlocks areas of sensation.”7 The ends the prepara­

tory work and begins the act of painting. There is no painter who

has not had this experience of the chaos-germ, where he or she no

longer sees anything and risks foundering: the collapse of visual

coordinates. This is not a psychological experience, but a properly

experience, although it can have an immense influence on

the psychic life of the painter. Painters confront the of

dangers both for their work and for themselves. It is a kind of expe­

rience that is constantly renewed by the most diverse painters:

Cezanne’s “abyss” or “catastrophe,” and the chance that this abyss

will way to rhythm; Paul Klee’s “chaos,” the vanishing “gray

” and the chance that this gray point will “leaD over itself”

84 – The Diagram

and unlock dimensions of sensation …~ Of all the arts, painting is
undoubtedly the only one that necessarily, “hysterically,” integrates
its own catastrophe and consequently is constituted as a flight in
advance. In the other arts, the catastrophe is only associated. But
painters pass through the catastrophe themselves, embrace the chaos,
and attempt to emerge from it. Where painters differ is in their man­
ner of embracing this nonfigurative chaos, and in their evaluation of
the pictorial order to come, and the relation of this order with this
chaos. In this respect, we might perhaps distinguish three great paths,
each of which groups together very different painters, but each of
which designates a “modem” function of painting, or expresses what
painting claims to bring to “modem man” (why still paint today?).

Abstraction would be one of these paths, but it is a path that re­
duces the abyss or chaos (as well as the manual) to a minimum: it
fers us an asceticism, a spiritual salvation. Through an intense spiri­
tual effort, it raises itself above the figurative givens, but it also turns
chaos into a simple stream we must cross in order to discover the
abstract and signifying Forms. Mondrian’s square leaves the figura­
tive (landscape) and leaps over chaos. It retains a kind of oscillation
from this leap. Such an abstraction is essentially seen. One is tempted
to say of abstract painting what Peguy said of Kantian morality: it
has pure hands, but it has no hands. This is because the abstract
forms are part of a new and purely optical space that no longer even
needs to be subordinate to manual or tactile elements. In fact, they
are distinguished from simple geometrical forms by “tension”: ten­
sion is what internalizes in the visual the manual movement that de­
scribes the form and the invisible forces that determine it. It is what
makes the form a properly visual transformation. Abstract optical
space has no need of the tactile connections that classical represen­
tation was still organizing. But it follows that what abstract painting
elaborates is less a diagram than a symbolic code, on the basis of
great formal oppositions. It replaced the diagram with a code. This
code is “digital,” not in the sense of the manual, but in the sense of a
finger that counts. “Digits” are the units that group together visu­
ally the terms in opposition. Thus, according to Kandinsky, vertical-

The Diagram – 85

white-activity, horizontal-black-inertia, and so on. From this is
rived a conception of binary choice that is opposed to random choice.
Abstract painting took the elaboration of such a properly pictorial
code very far (as in Auguste Herbin’s “plastic alphabet,” in which the
distribution of forms and colors can be done according to the letters
of a word). It is the code that is responsible for answering the ques­
tion of painting today: what can save man from “the abyss,” from
external tumult and manual chaos? Open up a spiritual state for the
man of the future, a man without hands. Restore to man a pure and
internal optical space, which will perhaps be made up exclusively of
the horizontal and the vertical. “Modem man seeks rest because he
is deafened by the externaL”lO The hand is reduced to a finger that
presses on an internal optical keyboard.

A second path, often named abstract expressioni~m or art in­
formel, offers an entirely different response, at the opp~)site extreme
of abstraction. This time the abyss or chaos is deployed to the max­
imum. Somewhat like a map that is as large as the country, the dia­
gram merges with the totality of the painting, the entire painting is
diagrammatic. Optical geometry disappears in favor of a manual line,
exclusively manuaL The eye has difficulty following it. incompa­
rable discovery of this kind of painting is that of a line (and a patch
of color) that does not form a contour, that delimits nothing, neither
inside nor outside, neither concave nor convex: Pollock’s line, Morris
Louis’s stain. It is the northern stain, the “Gothic line”: the line does
not go from one point to another, but passes between points, contin­
ually changing direction, and attains a power greater than 1, becom­
ing adequate to the entire surface. From this point of view, we can
see how abstract painting remained figurative, since its line still de­
limited an outline. If we seek the precursors of this new path, of this
radical manner of escaping the figurative, we will find them every
time a great painter of the past stopped painting things in order “to
paint between things.”11 Turner’s late watercolors conquer not only

the forces of impressionism, but also the power of an explosive
line without outline or contour, which makes the painting itself
an unparalleled catastrophe (rather than illustrating the catastrophe

86 – The Diagram

romantically). Moreover, is this not one of the most prodigious con­

stants of painting that is here being selected and isolated? In Kandin­
sky, there were nomadic lines without contour next to abstract geo­
metric lines; and in Mondrian, the unequal thickness of the two sides

the square opened up a virtual diagonal without contours. But
with Pollock, this line-trait and this color-patch will be pushed to
their functional limit: no longer the transfonnation of the form bnt

a decomposition of matter, which abandons us to its lineaments and
granulations. The painting thus becomes a catastrophe-painting and
a diagram-painting at one and the same time. This time, it is at the
point dosest to catastrophe, in absolute proximity, that modern man

discovers rhythm: we can easily see how this response to the ques­
tion of a “modern” function of painting is different from that given

by abstraction. Here it is no longer an inner vision that gives us the
infinite, but a manual power that is spread out “all over,”1l from one

edge of the painting to the other.

In the unity of the catastrophe and the diagram, man discovers
rhythm as matter and materiaL The painter’s instruments are no
longer the paintbrush and the easel, which still conveyed the subor­
dination of the hand to the requirements of an optical organization.

The hand is liberated, and makes use of sticks, sponges, rags, ~yringes:
Action Painting, the “frenetic dance” of the painter around the paint­
ing, or rather in the painting, which is no longer stretched on an
easel but nailed, unstretched, to the ground. There has been a con­
version from the horizon to the ground: the optical horizon reverts

completely to the tactile ground. The diagram expresses the entire
painting at once, that is, the optical catastrophe and the manual
rhythm. The current evolution of abstract expressionism is complet­

this process by realizing what was still little more than a meta­

phor in Pollock: (1) the extension of the diagram to the spatial and
temporal whole of the painting (displacement of the “beforehand”
and the “afterward”); (2) the abandonment of any visual sovereignty,
and even any visual control, over the painting in the process of be­
ing executed (the blindness of the painter); (3) the elaboration oflines
that are “more” than lines, surfaces that are “more” than surfaces,

The Diagram – 87

or, conversely, volumes that are “less” than volumes (Carl Andre’s
planar sculptures, Robert Ryman’s fibers, Martin BarnS’s laminated

works, Christian Bonncf”oi’s strata).ll
It is all the more curious that the American critics, who took the

analysis of abstract expressionism very far, could have defined it as
the creation of a purely optical space, exclusively optical, peculiar to
“modern man.” This seems to us to be a quarrel over words, an am­

biguity of words. In effect, what they meant was that the pictorial
space lost all the imaginary tactile referents that, in classical three­
dimensional representation, made it possible to see depths and con­
tours, forms and grounds. But these tactile referents of classical rep­
resentation expressed a relative subordination of the hand to the eye,
of the manual to the visual. By liberating a space that is (wrongly)

claimed to be purely optical, the abstract expressionists in fact did
nothing other than to make visible an exclusively manual space, de­
fined by the “planarity” of the canvas, the “impenetrability” of the
painting, and the “gesturality” of the color-a space that is imposed

upon the eye as an absolutely foreign power in which the eye can
find no rest.14 These are no longer the tactile referents of vision,
precisely because it is the manual space of what is seen, a violence
done to the eye. In the end, it was abstract painting that produced a

purely optical space and suppressed tactile referents in favor of an
eye of the mind: it suppressed the task of controlling the hand that
the eye still had in classical representation. But Action Painting does
something completely different: it reverses the classical subordina­

tion, it subordinates the eye to the hand, it imposes the hand on the

eye, and it replaces the horizon with a ground.
One of the most profound tendencies of modern painting is the

tendency to abandon the easel. For the easel was a decisive element
not only in the maintenance of a figurative appearance, and not only
in the relationship between the painter and Nature (the search for a

motif), but also in the delimitation (frame and borders) and internal
organization of the painting (depth, perspective …). \Vhat matters
today is less the fact-does the painter still have an easel?-than
the tendency, and the diverse ways this tendency is realized. In an

http:strata).ll

88 – The Diagram

abstraction of Mondrian’s type, the painting ceases to be an organ­
ism or an isolated organization in order to become a division of its
own surface, which must create its own relations with the divisions
of the “room” in which it will be hung. In this sense, Mondrian’s

is not decorative but architectonic, and abandons the easel
in order to become mural painting. Pollock and others explicitly re­
ject the easel in a completely different manner, namely, by making
“all-over” paintings, by rediscovering the secret of the “Gothic line”
(in Worringer’s sense), by restoring an entire world of equal proba­
bilities, by tracing lines that cross the entire painting and that start
and continue the frame, and by opposing to the organic notions
of symmetry and center the power of a mechanical repetition ele­
vated to intuition. This is no longer an easel painting but a ground
painting (true easels have no other horizon than the ground).l)
in truth there are many ways of breaking with the easeL Bacon’s
triptych form is one of ways, very different from the two pre­
ceding ways. In Bacon, what is true of the triptychs is also true of
each independent painting, which is always, in one way or another,
composed like a triptych. In the triptych, as we have seen, the bor­
ders of each of the three panels cease to isolate, though they con­
tinue to separate and divide. This uniting-separating is Bacon’s
technical solution, which brings his entire set of techniques into
play, and distinguishes them from the techniques of abstract and in­
formal painting. Are these three ways of once again becoming
“Gothic”?

The important question is, Why did Bacon not become involved
in either of the two preceding paths? The severity of his reactions,
rather than claiming to pass judgment, simply indicates what was
not right for him and explains why Bacon personally took neither of
these paths. On the one hand, he is not attracted to paintings
tend to substitute a visual and spiritual code for the involuntary dia­
gram (even if there is an exemplary attitude on the part of the artist).

code is inevitably cerebral and lacks sensation, the essential
reality of the fall, that is, the direct action upon the nervous system.
Kandinsky defined abstract painting by “tension,” but according to

The Diagram – 89

Bacon, tension is what abstract painting lacks the most. By internal­
izing tension in the optical form, abstract painting neutralized it.
Finally, because it is abstract, the code can easily become a simple
symbolic coding of the figurative. 16 On the other hand, Bacon is not
drawn to abstract expressionism, or to the power and mystery of the
line without contour. This is because the diagram covers the entire
painting, he says, and because its proliferation creates a veritable
“mess.” All the violent methods of Action Painting-stick, brush,
broom, rag, and even pastry bag-are let loose in a catastrophe­
painting. This time sensation is indeed attained, but it remains in an
irremediably confused state. Bacon will never stop speaking of the
absolute necessity of preventing the diagram from proliferating, the
necessity of confining it to certain areas of the painting and certain
moments of the act of painting. He thinks that, in this domain of
irrational trait and the line without contour, Michaux went further
than Pollock, precisely because he remained a master of the diagram. I?

Save the contour-nothing is more important for Bacon than
this. A line that delimits nothing still has a contour or outline
Blake at least understood this.IS The diagram must not eat away at
the entire painting; it must remain limited in space and time. It must
remain operative and controlled. The violent methods must not be
given free rein, and the necessary catastrophe must not submerge
the whole. The diagram is a possibility of fact-it is not the Fact it­
self. Not all the figurative givens have to disappear; and above all, a
new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram
and make the sensation clear and precise. ii:> emerge from the catas­
trophe … Even if, as an afterthought, one finishes a painting with a

of paint, it functions like a local “whiplash” that makes us
emerge from the catastrophe rather than submerging us further. 19

Could we at least say that during the malerisch period the diagram
covered the whole painting? Had not the entire surface of the paint­
ing been lined with traits of grass, or variations of a dark color-patch
functioning as a curtain? But even then, the precision of the sensa­
tion, the clarity of the Figure, and the rigor of the contour continued
to act beneath the color-patch or the traits-which did not efface

http:further.19

90 – The Diagram

the former, but im;tead gave them a power of vibration and nonlocal­
ization (the mouth that smiles or screams). And in his subsequent pe­
riod, Bacon returns to a localization of random traits and scrubbed
zones. Bacon thus follows a third path, which is neither optical like
abstract painting, nor manual like Action Painting.

CHAPTER 13

Analogy

Cezanne: the motifas diag;ram The analogical and
the digital Painting and analogy – The ptzradoxical

status ofabstract ptlinting – The analogictll
language 0fCizanne, ofBacon: plane, color, and mass­

Moduttltio?l – Resembltl?lce recovered

There would thus be a tempered use of the diagram, a kind of mid­
dle way in which the diagram is not reduced to the state of a code,
and yet does not cover the entire painting, avoiding both the code

its scrambling … Must we then speak of wisdom or classicism?
It is hard to believe, however, that Cezanne followed a middle way.
Rather, he invented a specific way, distinct from the two preceding
ones. Few painters have produced the experience of chaos and catas­
trophe as intensely, while fighting to limit and control it at any price.
Chaos and catastrophe imply the collapse of all the figurative givens,
and thus they already entail a fight, the fight against the cliche, the
preparatory work (all the more necessary in that we are no longer
“innocent”). It is out of chaos that the “stubborn geometry” or
“geologic lines” emerge; and this geometry or geology must in
turn pass through the catastrophe in order for colors to arise, for the
earth to rise toward the sun. I It is thus a temporal diagram, with two
moments. But diagram connects these two moments indissol­
ubly: the geometry is its “frame” and color is the sensation, the
oring sensation.” The diagram is exactly what Cezanne called the
motif. In effect, the motif is made up of two things, the sensation
and the frame. It is their intertwining. A sensation, or a point
view, is not enough to make a motif: the sensation, even a coloring
sensation, is ephemeral and confused, lacking duration and clarity

91

opposite: Fumihiko Maki. Congress
Center,

Salzburg, Austria. Competition

proposal, 1992. Detail of Rainerstra&
(principal) facade

Terence Riley Light Construction

Tn recent years a new architectural sensibility has emerged, one that not only reflects

the distance of our culture from the machine aesthetic of the early twentieth centu­

ry but marks a fundamental shift in emphasis after three decades when debate about

architecture focused on issues ofform. Tn projects notable for artistic and technical

innovation, contemporary designers are investigating the nature and potential of

architectural surfaces. They are concerned not only with their visual and

qualities but with the meanings they may convey. Influenced by of our culture

including electronic media and the computer, architects and artists are rethinking

the interrelationships of architecture, visual perception, and structure.

Represented in this survey are some thirty projects, created in response to com­

missions and competitions in ten countries. As the majority of the works have been

or are being built, they engage their environments on material as well as theoretical

levels. This essay situates the projects in a broad, synthetic context, addressing both

their cultural and aesthetic dimensions. Priority is given to the visual encounter with

a structure, a choice that is not meant to imply a hierarchy of importance but to rec­

ognize that the appearance of architecture provides not only the initial but frequently

the most defining contribution toward its eventual comprehension.

The sensibility expressed in these projects refers, but does not return, to the

visual objectivity embraced by many early modernists, particularly as it is expressed

in their fascination with glass structures. Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 192

9

essay “Glas­

represents that rationalist outlook and serves as a historical antipode to

contemporary attitudes. For him the use of glass in architecture furthers hygienic

and economic goals; he discusses its formal properties only insofar as they enable the

architect more clearly to express the structural system. Aesthetic concerns are

essentially negated: “Glass is all the fashion today. Thus it is used in ways that are fre­

quently preposterous, having nothing to do with functional but only formal and dec­

orative purposes, to call attention to itself; and the result, grotesquely, is that very

often glass is combined with the load-bearing structure in such a way that glass’s

characteristic effects of lightness and transparency become completely 10st:’1

Hilberseimer’s sachlich approach contains its own understated implications for

an aesthetic vision. Describing the Crystal Palace, London (1850-51), which “for

the first time showed the possibilities of iron and glass structures:’ Hilberseimer

writes, “It obliterated the old opposition oflight and shadow, which had formed the

9

1: Michael Vall Valkenburgh.

‘e lee Walls, Cambridge,

·husetts. Instal/atioll, 1988

proportions of past architecture. It made a space of evenly distributed brightness;

it created a room of shadowless light:’2 The extensive use, in contemporary archi­

tecture, of semitransparent glazing materials (such as frosted or mottled glass),

translucent plastic sheathings, double layers of glass (which, even if clear, produce

enough reflections to function as screens), and an apparently infinite number of

perforated materials, results in spaces very different from Hilberseimer’s

“room of shadowless light.” Indeed, recent projects point to the possibility

that “transparency” can also express the shadows of architecture.

The literary critic Jean Starobinski begins his essay “Poppaea’s Veil”: “The

hidden fascinates:’3 His title refers to a passage in Montaigne’s essay “That

difficulty increases desire” (II: 15), where the philosopher examines a com­

plicated relationship between Poppaea, who was Nero’s mistress, and her

admirers: “How did Poppaea hit on the idea of hiding the beauties of her face

behind a mask if not to make them more precious to her lovers?”4

Starobinski analyzes the veil: “Obstacle and interposed sign, Poppaea’s veil

engenders a perfection that is immediately stolen away, and by its very flight

demands to be recaptured by our desire:’5 To describe the action of the view­

er, Starobinski rejects the term vision, which implies an immediately penetrating

certitude, in favor of gaze: “If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote

directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally

referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consid­

eration, and safeguard:’6 Starobinski’s metaphor is literary, but it easily translates

into architectural terms: the facade becomes an interposed veil, triggering a subjec­

tive relationship by distancing the viewer of the building from the space or forms

within and isolating the viewer within from the outside world.

Created by streams of water running over light-gauge metal fencing in frigid

weather, Michael Van Valkenburgh’s elegantly simple Radcliffe Ice Walls (Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1988, fig. 1 and pp. 34-35) gives the metaphor substance: like

Poppaea’s veil, the walls interpose between the viewer and the landscape an

ephemeral material (a frozen cloud) and an image (the fence) signifying protection or

‘: Fumihiko Maki. Congress

Salzburg, Austria. Competition

I, 1992. Exploded diagram

obstacle. Another germane example is the Ghost House by Philip Johnson (New

Canaan, Connecticut, 1985, pp. 36-37), also made of chain-link fencing, which
recalls Frank Gehry’s made from off-the-shelf materials and

Robert Trwin’s diaphanous landscape projects. This minimalist rendition ofthe

archetypal house was designed as a nursery, a latter-day lath house, for growing

flowers. The chain-link surfaces not only render the house and its interior as a spec­

tral form but prevent foraging deer or other inquisitive visitors from reaching the

flower beds: a most succinct representation of Poppaea’s distanced perfection, a lit­

eral expression of the watchful and concerned gaze.

A similarly mediated relationship between the viewer and a distanced space

within can be seen in larger, more complex projects such as the Saishunkan Seiyaku

Women’s Dormitory by Kazuyo Sejima (Kumamoto, Japan, 1991, pp. 38-43) and

Fumihiko Maki’s project for a new Congress Center in Salzburg (1992, pp. 8 and

44-47). The dormitory’s heavily screened facades, finely perforated like a sieve,

figure 3: Jacques Herzog and
Pierre de Meumn. Goetz Collection,

Munich. 1992

Figure 4: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Farnsworth House,

Plano, lIlinois. 1946-51

provide maximum blockage with the fewest of hints of the interior spaces. Inside,

these spaces are relatively free and open, with light filtering through the facades

and descending from above. Still, various screened materials used throughout the

project impose physical limitations on vision. The Congress Center’s facades are

more open, but the distance between the viewer and the space within is no less rig­

orously maintained. As in a Russian doll, the spaces nest one inside another, farther

and farther removed from the viewer’s grasp (fig. 2).

Tn these projects and others, the distance created between the viewer and the

space within suggests, on some level, a voyeuristic condition made explicit in a gym­

nasium designed by Charles Thanhauser and Jack Esterson (New York City, 1993,

pp. 48-49). Tn place of typical locker rooms for showering and changing are four

freestanding cubicles within the training area, partially enclosed in frosted glass.

From various perspectives, the obscured images of athletes dressing and undressing

can be observed, accentuating the sensual aspects of physical culture. As in Alfred

Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the anonymity and detachment of the images enhance

sensuality; in Montaigne’s words, they “entrap our desires and … attract us by keep­

ing us at a distance:’7

That all of the preceding projects might be referred to as “transparent” suggests

a newfound interest in a term long associated with the architecture of the modern

movement. Yet the tension between viewer and object implied by the use of the archi­

tectural facade as a veiling membrane indicates a departure from past attitudes and

a need to reexamine the word transparency as it relates to architecture. The presence

of a new attitude is confirmed by a brief glance at such

projects as the Goetz Collection by Jacques Herzog and

Pierre de Meuron (Munich, 1992, pp. 50-53), the Cartier

Foundation for Contemporary Art by Jean Nouvel (Paris,

1994, pp. 54-59), or the TTM Building by Toyo Ito

(Matsuyama, Japan, 1993, pp. 60-65). The Goetz Collec­

tion, whose supporting structure is enclosed between the

frosted surfaces of a double-glass facade, appears ghost­

like, a complete reversal of the of the so­

called Miesian glass box (figs. 3 and Seen through a

freestanding, partially glazed palisade, the frame structure

of the Cartier Foundation is more explicit and the use of

clear plate glass more extensive than in the Goetz

Collection. Even so, the Cartier Foundation achieves

extreme visual complexity-“haze and evanescence” in the

words of the architect-due to the overlapping buildup of

views and multiple surface reflections. Transparency in the

TTM Building and the Cartier Foundation is not created

simply by applying a glass curtain wall to the exterior of

the building’S frame. Rather, the jdea of transparency is

present deep within the structures; one seems to be sus­

pended within multiple layers of transparency, not only

10 11

, Rem Koolhaas-O.M.A.
)que Nationale de France,

)mpetition pmposal, 1989.

etric

..

vertical wall surfaces but horizontal surfaces such as the translucent floor panels of

Nouvel’s project and the reflective floor and ceiling materials of the ITM Building.

About the latter, the critic Yoshiharu Tsukamoto has noted: “The result is an

bleached of all sense we customarily associate with the materials, sublimated into an

experience of ‘weightlessness; in Ito’s own terminology:’8

Hilberseimer’s ideal of shadowless light is difficult to see in the banal office tow­

ers and residential blocks erected in the postwar building boom. The depredations of

the debased International Style of those years provided fertile ground for critics of

both the modern rationalists and their latter-day followers. The antipathy of the

architectural historian Colin Rowe for the kind of architecture proposed by

Hilberseimer was buttressed by a distaste for the technological, anticlassical ethos of

the glass curtain wall, which he felt was bereft of the intellectual complexities to be

found in the traditional facade. Tn his critique of the purported objectivity of the early

modern rationalists, Rowe found an ally in the painter Robert Slutzky, a former stu­

dent of Josef Albers. Slutzky’S interest in Gestalt psychology had led him to question

the claims to objectivity of some modern painters. Together, they wrote in 1955-56

the essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” which was first published in 1963

and was widely read in the 1960s, influencing several generations of American archi­

tects. In it they state: “[The observer] may enjoy the sensation oflooking through a

glass wall and thus be able to see the interior and the exterior of the building simul­

taneously; but, in doing so, he will be conscious of few of those equivocal emotions

which derive from phenomenal transparency.”9 They propose “phenomenal trans­

parency” as an abstract, theoretical sense of transparency derived from skillful for­

mal manipulation of the architectural facade, viewed frontally, as opposed to the

more straightforward “literal transparency” that they ascribe to the curtain-wall

architecture of the modern rationalists.

Rem Koolhaas’s 1939 Bibliotheque Nationale de France project (fig. 5), a mas­

sive, glass-enclosed cubic structure, offers a kind of transparency that appears to

entirely outside Rowe and Slutzky’S scheme: a building with the visual complexity

they sought, which nevertheless rejects the traditional facade that Rowe ultimately

defended. It is a building in which transparency is conceived, in the words of the

architectural historian Anthony Vidler, “as a solid, not as a void, with the interior vol­

umes carved out of a crystalline block so as to float within it, in amoebic suspension.

These are then represented on the surface of the cube as shadowy presences, their

three-dimensionality displayed ambiguously and flattened, superimposed on one

another in a play of amorphous densities.” Vidler also takes us a step further toward

understanding the new direction of contemporary architecture: “The subject is sus­

pended in a difficult moment between knowledge and blockage:’10

The visual experience described by Vidler is certainly not the type that Rowe and

Slutzky disparage as literal. But does the viewer’s ambiguous perception ofthe build­

ing’s interior volumes evoke those “equivocal emotions” that derive, those authors

argue, from phenomenal transparency? The word ambiguous plays an important role

both in their writings and in the more recent ones of Koolhaas; but it is not enough

to think that all things ambiguous are necessarily related. The distinction between

Figure 6, Pablo Picasso. Man with

a Clarinet. 1911. Oil on canvas,

41 3/8 x 273116 in. MuseD Thy,’Sen’

Bornemisza, Madrid

Figure 7, Georges Braque. The
Portuguese. 1911-/2. Oil on canvas,
46 x

32

in. Offentfiche KUllstsammlung
Basel. Kunstmuseum. Gift of Dr. h. c.
Raoul La Roche, 1952

the experience of Koolhaas’s design, as Vidler describes it. and the terms of analysis

proposed by Rowe and Slutzky can best be understood if we look to the passage in

which they use paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to provide a “previ­

sion;’ as they call it, ofliteral and phenomenal transparency.11 They see Picasso’s Man

with a Clarinet of 1911 (fig. 6) as an example of literal transparency, “a positively

transparent figure standing in a relatively deep space”; only gradually does the

observer “redefine this sensation to allow for the real shallowness of the space.”

Braque’s The Portuguese of the same year (fig. 7) reverses this experience: the paint­

ing’s “highly developed interlacing of horizontal and vertical gridding … establishes a

primarily shallow space”; only then does the viewer “become able to invest this space

with a depth:’

At this point it seems necessary to separate Rowe from Slutzky, whose concerns

led him into a deep investigation of the relationship between the fine arts and

psychology of perception. 12 While admiring Slutzky’s analysis, Rowe is

concerned with how the cubist paintings might support his conviction that modern

architecture represents nothing more than a formal evolution out of, rather than a

break with, the architecture of the classical past. Disregarding the fundamental dif­

ferences between traditional perspectival construction and synthetic cubism, and

setting aside for the moment the differences between Man with a Clarinet and The

Portuguese on which Rowe and Slutzky we can three aspects of the

paintings that made them useful to Rowe for architectural analysis: their frontality,

analogous to that ofthe traditional facade; their figure-ground relationships, which

privileged formal discernment; and their synthetic spatial depth, which suggested to

Rowe an affinity with the compositional elements of the classical orders. Thus, the

analytical tools developed by Slutzky to undermine rationalist objectivity in painting

12 13

http:perception.12

http:transparency.11

: Marcel Duchamp. The Bride

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

rge Glass). 1915-23. Oil, var­

dfoil, lead wire, and dust on

;s panels (cracked), each mount­

een two glass panels, with five

‘ips, aluminum foil, and a wood

Iframe, 109 112 x 69 1/4 in.

‘phia Museum ofArt, Bequest

rine S. Dreier, 1953

ironically serve Rowe to defend the objective viewpoint of the architectural con­

noisseur. Tn an extended comparison of Gropius’s Bauhaus workshop wing, dis­

playing literal transparency, and Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches, representing phe­

nomenal transparency, Rowe and Slutzky even criticize Gropius for

“relying on the diagonal viewpoint;’ rather than the fixed, orthogo­

nal viewpoint of Le Corbusier’s work and, for that matter, the can­

vases of Picasso and Braque.13 Tn so doing, they continue, Gropius

“has exteriorized the opposed movements of his space, has allowed

them to flow away into infinity:’

Regardless of their ultimate positions, Rowe and Slutzky’s ideas

about transparency rest on the premise that the viewer has visual

access to the object, either by penetrating to it directly or by con­

structing a visual path through the shallow space of the Cubist grid.

Vidler’s term blockage has no function in a discussion of penetrating

the spaces created by Picasso and Braque (or Rowe’s architectural

exemplar, Le Corbusier), but the term strongly resonates with the

work of Marcel Duchamp, particularly his Large Glass of 1915-23

(fig. 8). For Duchamp the surface of the Large Glass is a kind of

threshold, distinct from the object itself, suggesting a subjective ten­

sion between the viewer and the object like that created by

Poppaea’s veil; it is to be “looked at rather than through;’ in the

words of the architecture critic Kenneth Frampton.14 Another way

of describing the effect on the viewer is suggested by Octavio Paz;

whereas Picasso’s work represents “movement before painting;’ Paz

explains that “right from the start Duchamp set up a vertigo of delay in opposition

to the vertigo of acceleration. Tn one of the notes in the celebrated Green Box he

writes, ‘use delay instead of “picture” or “painting”; “picture on glass” becomes

“delay in glass:””15

Frampton’s comments on the Large Glass are made in an essay in which he com­

pares Duchamp’s great work to Pierre Chareau’s 1932 Maison de Verre, a long­

neglected masterpiece of prewar architecture, which ran completely against the grain

of modern rationalist thought (fig. 9). It was sheathed in layers of transparent and

translucent materials, which alternately obscured and revealed a sequence of views­

“ambiguous characteristics;’ Frampton notes, which “would surely have been anath­

ema to the fresh air and hygiene cult of the mainstream Modern Movement.”16

Though the glass architecture of the Maison de Verre might have been dismissed by

the rationalist Hilberseimer, it remains resistant to the visual delectation espoused by

Rowe. Frampton points out that it served as both a private residence and gynecolo­

gist’s office, a combination offunctions richly analogous to the division of the Large

Glass into the Bride’s domain above and that of the eroticized Bachelor Apparatus

below. Frampton writes, “The works are unclassifiable in any conventional sense;

they are ‘other’ in the deepest sense of the word and this ‘strangeness’ is a conse­

quence of their opposition to the mainstream of Western art after the Renaissance:’17

Frampton’s writings, which underpin many of the thoughts expressed here by myself

Figure 9: Pierre Chareau. Maison

de Verre, Paris. 1932. Facade

Figure 10: Rem Koolhaas-O.M.A.

BibliotMque Nationale de France,

Paris. Competition proposal, 1989.

PeripMrique facade

and others, point to the relationship between delay in glass and a potential delay in

architecture that this essay attempts to establish.

These modes of delay resist the kind of classification that inevitably results from

visual objectivity’s fixed point of reference. Herzog and de Meuron’s 1989 project for

a Greek Orthodox Church in Basel and Ben van Berkel’s ACOM Office Building ren­

ovation (Amersfoort, the Netherlands, 1993, pp. 66-67) provide examples of “delay

in architecture:’ The church is a volume of glass and translucent marble enclosing a

second volume of translucent alabaster, which is the sanctuary. On the alabaster are

ghostlike photo-etched images of ancient icons, which act as filters, interposing faith,

history, and memory, “delaying” the headlong rush of visual perception into the inte­

rior. The new facades surrounding the ACOM Office Building similarly provide a

visual threshold, revealing the “memory” of the preexisting structure, built in the

1960s and now subsumed. Van Berkel employs translucent materials and perforated

screens to hinder visual penetration, creating the greatest possible distance between

the interior and exterior membranes.

Like Poppaea’s veil, these facades have a positive presence and, in distancing the

viewer, a specific function: they are something inserted between. The facades of

Koolhaas’s library not only transmit the shadowy presences of forms within but

acknowledge equally amorphous forms without, specifically clouds, whose generic

shapes are etched on the Paris and Peripherique facades (fig. 10). In this respect as

well as in acting as thresholds, Koolhaas’s facades have a certain affinity with the

Large Glass, whose upper panel is dominated by the image of a cloud. The cloud is

an appropriate symbol of the new definition of transparency: translucent but dense,

substantial but without definite form, eternally positioned between the viewer and

the distant horizon. Koolhaas describes the library’s facades: “transparent, some­

times translucent, sometimes opaque; mysterious, revealing, or mute…. Almost nat­

ural-like a cloudy sky at night, like an eclipse:’18

The “mysterious” facades mentioned by Koolhaas and the “haze and evanes­

cence” that Nouvel sees in the Cartier Foundation originate in conditions Rowe and

Slutzky somewhat derisively refer to as the “haphazard superimpositions provided by

the accidental reflections of light playing upon a translucent or polished surface:’19

But the architects’ words are not simply poetic, and the effect they describe is not

haphazard, as a brief excursion into quantum electrodynamics may suggest.

Transparent and translucent materials allow some photons (particles of light) to pass

through them while they partially reflect others. This activity in the surface of the

transparent membrane can account for the reflection of as much as 16 percent of

the light particles that strike it, creating visible reflections and, frequently, a palpa­

ble luminescence.2o The doubling of the glass found in many of the projects here

increases the potential for the glass surface to cast back photons: up to 10 percent of

those that pass through the outer layer are reflected by the inner one; still others ric­

ochet between the two. The dynamics of light passing through transparent surfaces

is described as a “slowing” of light by the physicist Richard Feynman.21 The similar­

ity of his term to Duchamp’s “delay in glass” provides a striking bridge between the

languages of the physicist and the artist.

14 15

http:Feynman.21

http:luminescence.2o

http:Frampton.14

http:Braque.13

Figure 12: Reconstruction of
Brunelleschis perspective experiment,

1417. After Alessandro Parronchi,

Studi su la dolce prospettiva (Milan:
A. Martello, 1964), fig. 91

1994. see fig. 26) proposed by David Chipperfield, and other projects all show a

dense volume surrounded by open, unprogrammed space, itself enclosed by a glazed

skin. Analogous to thermally efficient double-glazed walls, these designs isolate activ­

ities from light, sound, or heat. Yet the extravagance of these efficiencies reminds us

that isolation is not simply a functional goal in these structures, but a visual and ulti­

one.

The tension between viewer and object engendered by the use ofveil-like built-up

membranes parallels a tension between architectural surface and architectural form

that is evident in many of the works presented here. The art historian Hubert

Damisch has written at length about the invention of perspective drawing, one of the

principal design tools since the Renaissance, and its inherent bias toward form:

“Perspective is able to comprehend only what its system can accommodate: things

that occupy a place and have a shape that can be described by Iines.”22 Damisch fur­

ther notes that the limitations of perspective’s ability to describe visual experience

were apparent even at its inception. He cites Brunelleschi’s 1417 experiment in which

he tested the accuracy of his perspective drawing of the Baptistery of San Giovanni,

seen from the door ofthe Cathedral in Florence. The drawing on a panel was held by

the observer, who peered through a small hole in the back of it toward the Baptistery

while holding at arm’s length a mirror that reflected the right half of the panel, thus

allowing him to compare the actual view of the structure with the reflection of

Brunelleschi’s drawing of it (fig. 12). Damisch notes that the architect attempted to

compensate for the limitations he clearly saw in his drawing system: having rendered

the Baptistery and the surrounding square, Brunelleschi added a layer of silver leaf to

the upper area of the panel to mirror the sky and the clouds, those aspects of the

actual view that escaped his system of perspective. Brunelleschi’s addition of silver

leaf not only “manifests perspective as a structure of exclusion, the coherence of

which is based upon a set ofrefusals; but, by reflecting the formlessness of the uuuu~,

must “make room … for even those things which it excludes from its system:’23

Many ofthe projects presented here exhibit a similarly compensatory attitude, an

attempt to “make room” for that which neither perspective nor Cartesian space can

describe. Dan Graham, in Two- Way Mirror Cylinder inside Cube, a component of his

Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1991, see fig.

27

and pp. 86-87), recognizes the usefulness of geometry, plan organization, and sys­

temization ofthe structure while refusing to assign them a transcendent, defining role.

The environment, endlessly reflected, literally superimposes formlessness on the struc­

ture’s architectural surfaces, easily overcoming the certitude ofthe structurally framed

view and the idealized abstraction ofthe circle and the square that create its plan, dis­

solving their Platonic forms in contingent perceptions. Similarly, the transparent sur­

faces, flickering video screens, and tilted volume ofthe Glass Video Gallery by Bernard

Tschumi (Groningen, the Netherlands, 1990, see fig. 14 and pp. 88-91) counteract

the ability of a structural grid and perspective vision to determine the overall image of

architecture. As Tschumi explains, “The appearance of permanence (buildings are

solid; they are made of steel, concrete, bricks, etc.) is increasingly challenged by the

immaterial representation of abstract systems (television and electronic images):’24

Ire 11: Ludwig Mies van dCT Rohe.

endhat House, Bmo, G”zechoslova­

1930. Exterior view of retractable
dows.

While Feynman’s writings apply specifically to the passing of light through mate­

rials, the D. E. Shaw and Company Offices by Steven Holl (New York City, 1991,

pp. 68-69) demonstrate a “slowing of light” as it reflects off opaque surfaces. Tn this

project, natural light enters through the building’s windows, strikes screen walls

back-painted in various colors, and ricochets into the interiors, suffusing them with

reflected colored light recalling the soft, pervasive glow of James Turrell’s sculptures.

The contrast between a classic modernist project and recent works illustrates

the difference between today’s attitudes toward the architectural surface and earli­

er conceptions of transparent and translucent skins. While capable of creating a

remarkably complex surface, Mies van der Rohe intended in his Tugendhat House

(Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1929) to achieve the greatest transparency (fig. 11). To real­

aim, Mies employed the simplest kind of skin. The house was sheathed floor

to ceiling by the largest sheets of plate glass produced in Europe up to that

time. Ironically, given its expense, he hoped that the glazing would be

essentially nonmaterial; in fact, a mechanism allowed the glass walls to be

lowered into the basement, removing them altogether.

The projects presented here rarely display a skin that could be called

instead, they exploit the positive physical characteristics of

glass and other substances. As opposed to the fraction of an inch by which

the windows of the Tugendhat House separated its interior from the exteri­

or, these newer projects frequently have very complex sections comprising

a variety of materials, with discrete spaces between. This gives the surfaces

a depth that is sometimes slight, as in the tightly bound sheathing of the

Signal Box auf dem Wolf by Herzog and de Meuron (Basel, 1994, pp. 72-73),

and sometimes more pronounced, as in Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz

(Bregenz, Austria, pp. 74-77), currently under construction, whose interior

and exterior are separated by layers of translucent shingles, a passable air

space, and an interior wall. Such built-up sections increase emphasis on the

architectural surface and reveal a desire for greater complexity, visual and otherwise,

in the structure’s skin. The reasons for multiple layers of material frequently include

reducing the transmission of heat and cold, but the aim of insulating the structure is

not solely a technical one. As does Poppaea’s veil, layers of transparency define the

viewer’s relationship to the world, creating not only insulation but a notable isolation­

removal from the continuum of space and experience implied by the nonmaterial sur­

faces of the Tugendhat House.

Architecture-though it may be read as a text with definite relationships to liter­

ature, philosophy, the fine arts, and so on-is a specific kind oftext with its own crit­

ical tools. The section, a conceptual device with little application outside architec­

ture, can be used to develop details, like the elements of a structure’s surface, or

even the building as a whole. The section on page 78 of Harry Wolf’s proposed ABN­

AMRO Head Office Building (Amsterdam, 1992) is analogous to details of the struc­

ture’s curtain wall: each represents a volume of space suspended between glazed sur­

faces. Section views of the Leisure Studio (Espoo, Finland, 1992, pp. 82-85) by

Kaako, Laine, Liimatainen, and Tirkkonen, the Neues Museum extension (Berlin,

16 17

Rosalind Krauss has recently described a phenomenological reading of minimal­

ist sculpture, on the part of certain architecture critics, which effects a shift in mean­

ing that closely parallels the shift from form to surface evident in the projects pre­

sented here. She writes, “Far from having what we could call the fixed and enduring

centers of a kind of formulaic geometry, Minimalism produces the paradox of a cen­

terless, because shifting, geometry …. Because of this demonstrable attack on the

idea that works achieve their meaning by becoming manifestations or expressions of

a hidden center, Minimalism was read as lodging meaning in the surface of the

object, hence its interest in reflective materials, in exploiting the play of natural

light:’25 This interpretation of minimalist sculpture’s tendency to shift the meaning of

the object from its form to its surface has broad implications for architecture. Jean

Nouvel expresses a similar idea when he describes the architecture of his Cartier

Foundation as one whose rules consist in “rendering superfluous the reading of solid

volumes in a poetry of haze and evanescence:’

26

The position that Krauss describes need not be limited to a building wit)1 pol­

ished, reflective surfaces that record “actual, contingent particularities of its moment

of being experienced.”27 For example, the “contingent particularities” of the Goetz

Collection do not lie solely in the subtle reflections of the birch trees surrounding it.

The project achieves a specific rather than universal character in its construction as

well: it “reflects” its site in the laminated birch veneer panels of the facade. And even

though the surfaces of the minimalist gymnasium by Tfiaki Abalos and Juan Herreros

(1991, pp. 98-101) are much less transparent or translucent, that project also resists

being perceived as an abstract formal exercise, insisting on its site-specificity, reflect­

ing the character of the walled Spanish hill town of Simancas.

In telling contrast to the ultimate importance given to architectural form in both

historicist postmodernism and deconstructivism, many of these projects exhibit a

remarkable lack of concern for, if not antipathy toward, formal considerations. In

fact, most of the projects could be described by a phrase no more complicated

than “rectangular volume:’ Commenting on one of his recent projects, Koolhaas

explains the logic of this formal restraint: ”It is not a building that defines a clear

architectural identity; but a building that creates and triggers potential:’28 The ten­

sion between surface and form in contemporary architecture is not limited to rel­

atively simple forms: the overall silhouettes of Renzo Piano’s Kansai International

Airport (Osaka, Japan, 1994, pp. 110-17), Frank Gehry’s Frederick R. Weisman Art

Museum (Minneapolis, 1993, pp. 106-9), and Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners’

Waterloo International Terminal (London, 1994, pp. 92-98), for example, are far

too complex to be characterized as minimalist. Kansai Airport’s sheer scale pre­

vents us from grasping its form, and the extent of the new Waterloo terminal can

only be seen from the air. Yet even when experiencing parts of Kansai Airport, we

realize that its silvery, undulating skin is more critical to its design than is its for­

mal composition; equally, the form of the Waterloo International Terminal reflects

peculiarities of the lot lines of existing rail yards rather than any preconceived for­

mal conceit. Tn both projects, the overall form is complex but indefinable, specific

but nonrepresentational.

•

None of the above projects, nor any of the less articulated ones previously con­

sidered, displays interest in “timeless, unchanging geometries;’ and all of them com­

plement the diminished importance of overall form by an increased sensitivity to

the skin. And while the large projects may seem not just indifferent to but funda­

mentally estranged from the geometric rigors of perspectival construction, what

impresses the viewer of a project such as Toyo lto’s Shimosuwa Municipal Museum

(Shimosuwa, Japan, 1993, pp. 118-23) is not that its form is difficult to grasp, which

it is, but that it simultaneously appears so precise. In effect, it suggests a new con­

ception of measure and order. Brunelleschi perceived an unbridgeable gap between

the measurable (the Baptistery) and the immeasurable (such as a cloud). Similarly,

Leonardo identified two kinds of visible bodies, “of which the first is without shape

or any distinct or definite extremities …The second kind of visible bodies is that of

which the surface defines and distinguishes the shape:’29 Leonardo’s distinction is

essentially false, however, determined by the inability of Renaissance mathematics to

describe complex surfaces. Fractal geometry has shown that there is no such funda­

mental distinction between the Baptistery and the cloud, only a difference in the

manner of calculating their physical characteristics.

The computer has diminished the realm of the immeasurable in architectural

design. In describing the uniquely shaped panels that compose the skin of the

Shimosuwa Museum, lto noted that without computer technology their cost, rela­

tive to that of standardized panels, would have been prohibitive. The use of extensive

computer modeling in the design of Kansai Airport (fig. 13) and Waterloo Terminal
further demonstrates the extent to which technolo­

gy has overcome the “problem” of structure, once a

primary focus of design, whose “solution” subse­

quently defined, visually and otherwise, all other
-kf:B;

——— -­.–.—‘

aspects of a project. This relativization of structure

can be seen in various ways in the projects pre­

sented here; for example, Nagisa Kidosaki, writing

T

Figure 13: Renzo Piano Building

Workshop, Japan_ Kansai Tnternational

Airport, Osaka. 1994. Diagram showing

top-bottom chord axial forces under

vertical loading

about the Shimosuwa Museum, explains: “Thin

membranes meant a thin structural system:’30

The use of sophisticated computer modeling is

only one sign of the impact of technology on the architectural surface. The incorpo­

ration of electronic media into contemporary structures may result in the transfor­

mation of a building’S skin, which literally becomes a screen for projection in Herzog

and de Meuron’s 1993 Olivetti Bank project (see fig. 15). A more architectonic syn­

thesis of the electronic media can be seen in those projects in which electronic tech­

nology is not simply grafted to the structure but transformed into material and spa­

tial qualities. The flattening of objects and activities projected onto translucent

glazing gives a facade or interior surface the aura of a flickering electronic screen. On

a small scale, this phenomenon is evident in the Thanhauser and Esterson gymnasi­

um, where the athletes’ silhouettes are projected onto the surfaces of dressing room

cubicles (each cubicle has splayed walls, as if to suggest projection). On a larger

scale, the farmhouses and elements of the natural landscape outside lto’s ITM

18
19

Building collapse, in effect, as they are projected onto the surface glazing of the

triple-height atrium. Tn Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s portable translucent set for

the play The World Upside Down (Amsterdam and New York, 1990-91, pp. 104-5),

projections actually became part of the performance as actors’ sil­

houettes were cast onto screens and magnified by manipulation of

the lighting. Jacques Herzog writes of “these surfaces for projection,

these levels of overlapping, the almost-identity of architecture.”31

Despite the ambiguous, equivocal, and at times even erotic

undertones of many of the projects discussed here, it would be

incorrect to assign them to a world of smoke and mirrors, where all

is illusion, indecipherable and unattainable. Rather, they realign

or rethink a nexus of ideas that has fueled much of architectural

development since the Renaissance: perspectival vision, Cartesian

space, and, by inference, the structural grid. Inherent in the works

presented here, particularly Joel Sanders’s studied Kyle Residence

project (1991, pp. 124-25), is the possibility of a position that

includes the certitude of objective vision and the equivocal nature of

the gaze; these works recognize the efficacy and the utility of per­

spectival construction without subordinating all else to its language

of measure and order. The fusion of the two might be best under­

stood in the designers’ attitude toward structure, for centuries the

most evident expression of the theoretical coincidence of perspec­

tival vision and Cartesian thinking. Many of these projects share a

common approach to relationship between the structure and

the skin: the structural members, rather than framing and there­

fore defining the point of view, are lapped over by single and dou­

ble layers of translucent sheathing, as in the interior partitions of

the Cartier Foundation, the clerestory of the Goetz Collection, and

Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer’s Kirchner Museum Davos (Davos,

Switzerland, 1992, pp. 126-29). The structure, while providing

support in a straightforward manner, has a diminished potential to

ure 14: Bernard Tschumi.
ass Video GaTtery, Groningen,

e Netherlands. 1990. Exploded

‘onometric diagram

determine the appearance of the building. Other projects here vir­

tually erase the boundary between support and surface: the Glass Video Gallery

makes no material distinction between the glass ribs that give it stability and the

glass sheathing that encloses the space (fig. 14). The monocoque design of the

Phoenix Art Museum Sculpture Pavilion by Williams and Tsien (Phoenix, Arizona,

pp. 130-31) similarly merges structure and sheathing. The Pavilion’s translucent

resin panels, ranging from one-half to one inch thick and connected only with stain­

less steel clips, are self-supporting and stabilizing.

It could be argued that these self-effacing but critical details relativize the role of

the structure in a more self-confident way than deconstructivist ploys such as tilted

columns, destabilized surfaces, and structural redundancies, which, though meant to

undermine the role of structure, frequently achieve the opposite: the specter of the

displaced rises up endlessly to haunt the architecture. More fundamentally, such

detailing can be unambiguous about creating ambiguity.

Calvino expresses this idea well: “Lightness for me goes with

precision and determination, not vagueness and the haphaz­

ard:’32In “Lightness;’ one of Calvino’s Six Memos for the

Next Millennium, he writes, “T look to science to nourish my

visions in which all heaviness disappears”; and further, “the

iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weight­

less bits:’33 Calvino reminds us that just as the current con­

ception of transparency is distant from that held by early

modern rationalists, these contemporary expressions of

Figure 15: Jacques Herzog and Pierre lightness are distinct from earlier conceptions of lightweight architecture: they imply
de Meuron. Olivetti Bank Project. 1993

a seeming weightlessness rather than a calculation ofrelative weight.34 Calvino’s bal­(prototype)
ance between iron machines and weightless bits is also seen in Starobinski’s pre­

scription for the “reflexive gaze;’ which incorporates the wisdom associated with

vision, yet “trusts in the senses and in the world the senses revea!:’35

The subject ofStarobinski and Calvino is literature, but their observations have

numerous implications for understanding the aesthetics of the architecture pre­

sented here, as well as its broader cultural context.36 Calvino refers to Guido

Cavalcanti as a poet of “lightness;’ which he defines as follows: “(1) it is to the high­

est degree light; (2) it is in motion; (3) it is a vector of information:’37 Tto’s Tower of

the Winds (Yokohama, 1986-95, pp. 132-33) practically begs to be analyzed in

these terms. Relatively nondescript in daylight, the structure was brought to life at

night by thousands of computer-controlled light sources whose constantly changing

patterns responded to sounds and wind. Tn the architect’s words, “The intention

was to extract the flow of air (wind) and noise (sound) from the general flow of

things in the environment of the project and to transform them into light signals,

that is, visual information. Simply put, it was an attempt to convert the environ­

ment into information:’38

Tt is not surprising that the pervasive presence in contemporary culture of film,

television, video, and computer screens, representing a unique sen­

sibility of light, movement, and information, should find its way into

architecture. Koolhaas’s composition for the Karlsruhe Zentrum fUr

Kunst and Medientechnologie is perhaps the most provocative con­

figuration of the electronic screen and the architectural facade, but

the proposed display of financial quotations on the facade of Herzog

and de Meuron’s Olivetti Bank project is no less explicit and equally

convincing, given its program (fig. 15). Among built projects, Tto’s

Egg of the Winds (fig. 16), Tschumi’s Glass Video Gallery, and

Mehrdad Yazdani’s CineMania Theatre (1994, pp. 102-3) represent

Figure 16: Toyo Ito. Egg ofthe Winds, more restrained uses of electronic imagery but still demonstrate the ability of the
Tokyo. 1991

architectural object to be transformed by the dull glow and flickering image of the

electronic media. The effect, as Tto has described it, is to render urban space as a

“phenomenal city of lights, sounds, and images … superimposed on the tangible

urban space of buildings and civil engineering works:’39

20 21

http:weight.34

igure 17: Jan Vermeer. Woman
ith a Pearl Necklace. C. /662-65.
‘it on canyas, 21 11lt6 x 17% in.

x 45cm). Staatliche Museen

Berlin-Preullischer Kulturbesitz
emiildegalerie

The architects’ interest in electronic media is neither an expression of techno­

logical fantasy nor simply a fascination with the aesthetic allure of low-voltage lumi­

nescence. It is rooted in the ability of these electronic modes of communication to

portray the immediacy and the poignant transience of contemporary life. Their

works bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, “It seems as though there is

nothing intangible about the chair or the table, but there is about the fleeting human

experience.”40 Dennis Adams’s installation Bus Shelter TV (Munster, Germany, 1987,

pp. 134-35) narrows the gap between the tangible and the intangible. Adams trans­

forms an ordinary bus shelter into the setting for an urban drama in which com­

muters find themselves both observers and observed. Interposed between enlarged

backlit transparencies, they find their own image projected and reflected by a high­
ly manipulative visual environment.

The many images here that portray the architecture at night, lit from within, sug­

gest that Ito is not alone in seeking an architecture that “is to the highest degree

light:’ Tn Zaha Hadid’s 1994 proposal for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, the nocturnal

view is not simply the inverse of the building’s daylight appearance. Indeed, the draw­

ings prepared for the competition indicate that the design was conceived as a night­

time phenomenon. Floor Plan, an installation by Melissa Gould (Linz, Austria, 1991,

pp. 136-37), equally depends on darkness, literally and metaphorically, to convey

its message. The project consisted of a nearly full-scale outline of the plan of a Berlin

synagogue destroyed during the Nazi terror. The ghost building was evoked by lights

shallow trenches, which traced the configuration of the synagogue’s walls and

columns. Photographs document the poignant dramatic character of the project: we

see eerily lit faces of visitors moving through the installation. More tragically, the

work can disappear at the flick of a switch. Gould’s project demonstrates unequivo­
cally that “lightness” should not be confused with frivolity.

The current fascination with the architecture of lightness in many ways depends

on recent technological developments. It also manifests a persistent theme in

Western culture. Describing his proposed ABN-AMRO Head Office Building, Harry

Wolf refers to the “longstanding concern for light in the Netherlands; that is, the

association of luminosity, precision, and probity in all matters:’ However, notwith­

standing the philosophical associations of light with the Enlightenment, illumination,

and so on, the attempt to magnify the presence of natural light in northern European

projects is primarily a response to the immediate setting-also a longstanding con­

cern. Wolf recalls “Vermeer’s preoccupation with subtle modulations of light through

a window.”41 Jan Vermeer’s emphasis on ambient light is, among other things, an

attempt to magnify its diminished presence in northern latitudes (fig. n); a similar

motive led to the gilding of architectural features, from the cupolas of New Haven’s

churches and the Goldene Dachel of Munich’s imperial residence to the reflective

sheathing of Gehry’s Weisman Art Museum. The Kirchner Museum’s principal gal­

leries are lit by a clerestory level, capturing light from all directions in a plenum and

diffusing it through the galleries’ frosted glass ceilings. This sensitivity to low levels of

natural light also may be a response to the flattening of the shadowless landscape,
particularly during the winter months.

Herzog usefully observes: ULe Corbusier … wrote, ‘Architecture is the scientific,

correct, and wonderful game of volumes assembled under light: What, however, if

architecture is not a game at all, especially not a scientific and correct one and if

the light is often clouded over, diffuse, not so radiant as it is in the ideal southern

landscape?,,42 Holl’s Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art (under construction,

pp. 138-43) traps this diffuse northern light within its section in order to introduce

both directly and by reflection, into the lower parts of the building-suggesting,

perhaps, an architectural antithesis of Le Corbusier’s brise-solei/, a shield from Medi­

terranean sunlight. Oriented to maximize exposure to the sun, which is low on the

horizon most of the year, the museum incorporates a reflecting pool as an extension

of nearby Toolo Bay. In Holl’s words, “The horizontal light of northern latitudes is

enhanced by a waterscape that would serve as an urban mirror, thereby linking the

new museum to Helsinki’s Toolo heart, which on a clear day, in [Alvar] Aalto’s words,

‘extends to Lapland:”43

In climates far removed from the idealized, sun-filled landscape of the Mediter­

ranean, which Le Corbusier encountered in his youthful voyage en Orient, the long­

ing for light may conflict with another more recent cultural concern. The past two

decades have seen an increasing consciousness of architecture’s environmental impli­

cations, particularly the energy consumption of buildings. Two approaches, both of

which avoid or minimize mechanical heating and cooling systems dependent on fuel

consumption, attempt to balance environmental concerns with the widespread use of

glass and other thermally inefficient materials.

The first approach is essentially passive, in the technical sense of employing non­

mechanical systems to heat and cool structures and often electing to forgo optimal

climate control. Williams and Tsien’s Phoenix Art Museum Sculpture Pavilion is to

have no mechanical air-conditioning system; instead, it will employ a low-technolo­

gy cooling device based on commonsense thermodynamics. Approximately twenty

feet above the viewing area, scores of nozzles emit a fine mist of cool water, which

evaporates before reaching ground level. The heat exchange that occurs during the

evaporation process lowers the air temperature by ten to twenty degrees, and this

heavier air then descends to cool visitors in the open pavilion. The simple principles

behind this low-technology approach are equally useful in the colder climate of

Munich, where the Goetz Collection is enclosed by a double layer of glass that not

only contributes to the “slowing” of light but acts as a sort of a duct, like a chimney.

As heat accumulates in the lower floor (which is below grade and therefore has a

more stable temperature), it escapes into the space between the layers of glass and

rises to the upper floor, providing a secondary source of heat. The Leisure Studio and

Glass Video Gallery reject systems requiring high energy consumption to compensate

for low thermal efficiency; users must simply accept constraints imposed by the cli­

mate: diminished comfort or restricted use when temperatures reach seasonal

extremes. This attitude should not be perceived as a kind of obliviousness to the real­

ity of climatic conditions but as a value judgment: a conscious decision reflecting a

deep-rooted preference for the enhancement of available light, for one particular

kind of comfort instead of another.

22
23

igure 18: Sir Norman Foster and

‘artners. Business Promotion Center.

‘uisburg, Germany. 1993. Axonometric

utaway of layered glass cladding and
“oor slab

The second approach uses higher technology to achieve energy efficien­

cy. Just as the computer has rendered the problem of structure less funda­

mental, limitations on the efficiency of mechanical heating and cooling are

being overcome by technological advancements. Norman Foster’s Business

Promotion Center (Duisburg, Germany, 1993, pp. 144-47) is a building with

an insulated glass facade wrapped in another layer of glass (fig. 18). A con­

tinuous air space between the two layers rises from the ground to the top of

the structure. Large buildings, in contrast to smaller ones such as the Goetz

Collection, absorb too much heat. To control heat intake, the air space in the

Duisburg project has translucent louvers that can admit light but deflect

heat, which can then be exhausted upward before entering the interior glaz­

ing. Within this system, there is an attempt to address micro environmental

differences between interior spaces. Even though the louvers adjust them­

selves automatically to the position of the sun, office workers can readjust

them. Occupants may also open windows in the inner glazing to ventilate

offices from the air moving through the twenty-centimeter gap between the
inner and outer glazing.

Just as lightness offers a way to understand much of contemporary archi­

tecture in terms other than formal ones, cultural concerns with light and the

environment are not limited to glass structures. The shimmering skin of

metal tiles that covers Kansai Airport not only evokes the architect’s stated

goal of “lightness;’ but acts as a huge umbrella, protecting the structure from

which become translucent when a preset thermal threshold is reached:’44 The former,

used in sunglasses, is not yet sold for architectural use, but the latter, according to the

authors, will become more widely available in the near future. A third type of smart

glazings, called electrochromic, consists of multilayer assemblies through which a low­

voltage electric current can be passed, causing ions to move to the outer layer where

they may reflect heat-producing ultraviolet light but transmit visible wavelengths.

To speak of the technological attitudes of the projects discussed here as cultural

phenomena requires further scrutiny, particularly given the prominence of glass

structures over the course of this century. Glass architecture is not, however, unique

to our time; a centuries-long fascination with it is evident in Jewish, Arabic, and

European literature and mythology. As the architectural historian Rosemarie Haag

Bletter has demonstrated, the “glass dream” that inspired these cultures has ancient

roots, traceable to the biblical accounts of King Solomon’s temple having reflective

floors made of gold.45 The glass dream was sustained through the Mozarabic culture

of medieval Spain, principally in literary form, but it also found built expression in

small metaphorical structures such as garden pavilions. “Because an actual glass or

crystal palace was not technically feasible, the semblance of such a building was

attained through allusion: water and light were used to suggest a dissolution of solid

materials into a fleeting vision of disembodied, mobile architecture:’46 In the Gothic

period, the glass dream found greater expression in built form, in the soaring cathe­

drals with their expansive walls of colored glass, as well as in literary sources, par­

ticularly the legends of the Holy Grail. Tn Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifa1, the

sought-for Grail is symbolized by a glowing crystal hidden in a cave. The association

between the image of a crystal or jewel and glass architecture is enduring. Zaha

Hadid, describing her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, refers to the overall

organization as an “inverted necklace” that strings together the various service ele­

ments, which she calls the “jewels” of the program.47 Similarly, Harry Wolf speaks of

his attempts to “create a heightened sense of transparency, just as light reflected and

refracted in a gem seems more compelling and brilliant:’48

This literary and architectural motive continued through the Renaissance, emerg­

ing as a central theme of Francesco Colonna’s widely read Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

of 1499. An expression of the romantic aspect of the Renaissance fascination with the

ruins of classical antiquity, it invokes images of structures with transparent alabaster

walls and floors of highly polished obsidian, so mirrorlike that viewers thought they

were walking through the reflected sky. While the Enlightenment was characterized

by a fascination with light and the scientific investigation of optics, its architectural

expressions were not as poetic. The Crystal Palace might seem equally rationalist,

though it is hard for us to imagine the impact of this first extensively glazed large struc­

ture, envisioned as the stage for a global event, and the spectacle created by its con­

struction and dismantling. Furthermore, the glass fountain at its crossing was an under­

stated but direct reference to the fantastic Mozarabic structures described by Bletter .49

As Bletter has demonstrated, the association of crystalline architecture with the

transcendent (and its counterpart, the association of opaque materials with the pro­

fane) is central to the glass dream in all of its manifestations. The expressionist

heat gain as well as rain. The building’s undulating wave shape is, borrowing

Calvino’s words, “to the highest degree light;’ but it also interestingly embodies his

emphasis on movement. Its shape expresses the flow of passengers across the struc­

ture from the “landside” to the “airside;’ as they move from check-in to departure,

and it is also calculated to channel streams of air. The voluptuous interior ceiling

carries ribbonlike channels, their shape derived from computer models of the flow of

air, which guide heated and cooled air through the length ofthe building without the
use of enclosed air ducts.

Such applications of innovative solutions to environmental problems bespeak a

confidence in technology that has become discredited in some quarters. But the dis­

missal of a technological approach as evidence of an unjustified faith in the myth of

progress is refuted by the successes of Foster, Piano, Peter Rice, and many other

architects and engineers. Much of their research seeks to justify the ongoing use of

glazed structures, so it is not surprising that their attention often focuses on glazing

materials. While this research, like that devoted to conversion of solar energy, has

limited application today, new glazing materials are on the edge of wide use.

“Superwindows” with various coatings and gas-filled cavities have already proven to

have better insulation properties than today’s thermally efficient opaque materials.

Perhaps more intriguing than this new class of high-performance but essentially

static systems are what Stephen Selkowitz and Stephen LaSourd call “smart” glazings,

which react to changing conditions. ‘These include “photochromic glass, which

reversibly changes optical density when exposed to light;’ and “thermo chromic glazings,

24
25

http:program.47

movement in the twentieth century added to the spirituality, fantasy,

transformation, and utopianism with which glass architecture had

historically been identified. In the aftermath ofthe First World War,

expressionists such as architect Bruno Taut were seeking not only

new forms but a new society. Bletter notes, “The crystalline glass

house [fig. 19] … concretizes for Taut the kind of unstructured soci­

ety he envisions. Class is here no longer the carrier of spiritual or

personal transformation but of a political metamorphosis:’::;o

In an essay published ten years ago, K. Michael Hays proposes

the possibility of a “critical architecture” that is perceived as a cul­

tural phenomenon, as a readable text, without forgetting that it is a

particular kind of text with specific references to its own history, “a

Figure 19: Bruno Taut. Glass

Pavilion. Cologne. 1914 (demolished)

igure 20: Paul Nelson. Model of

‘uspcnded House. Project. 1938. The

‘useum ofModern Art. New York. Gift
if the Advisory Committee

critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient

representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an

abstract formal system:’51 If the architecture presented here can claim to occupy

such a position, one might ask, Where is that place? Of what exactly is this contem­
porary architecture critical?

First and foremost, it is a critique of the canonical history of modern architec­

ture. The historian Reyner Banham writes: “The official history of the Modern

Movement, as laid out in the late Twenties and codified in the Thirties, is a view

through the marrow-hole of a dry bone … The choice of a skeletal history of the

movement with all the Futurists, Romantics, Expressionists, Elementarists and pure

aesthetes omitted, though it is most fully expressed in [Siegfried] Ciedion’s Bauen in

Frankreich, is not to be laid to Ciedion’s charge, for it was the choice of the move­

ment as a whole. Quite suddenly modern architects decided to cut off half their
grandparents without a farthing:’::;2

The modern past is reconfigured by many of the projects discussed here in tha~
they offer a chance to reconsider the reputations of certain figures whose work was

largely ignored in the postwar period. Fritz Neumeyer Uses terms strikingly similar

to Starobinski’s when describing Otto Wagner’s 1904-6 Postal Savings Bank in

Vienna: “Like the then floating garment that clothes the female body in ancient Creek

sculpture, revealing as much beauty as it conceals, Wagner’s treatment of the

structure and construction exploits a similar kind of delicate, sensuous play that was

probably only evident to a connoisseur of a certain age and experience. Exactly

this principle gives the interior of the [Postal Savings Bank] its quality of silk-like

transparency. The glass veil

is lifted up on iron stilts that

carefully cut into its skin and

gently disappear :’53

Paul Nelson’s “technosur­

realist”54 Suspended House

(fig. 20), a glazed volume with

free-floating forms suspended

within, provides a model for a

Figure 21: Manfred and Laurids Ortner.
The Museum ofModern Art.
Museumsquartier Vienna. Competition

proposal. 1990. Diagram ofcomponent

structures

Pigure 22: Prank Lloyd Wright.
S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Research
Laboratory Tower, Racine, WIsconsin.

1943-50. Exterior

presences” could equally be applied to Chareau’s masterwork or

Johnson Research Laboratory Tower (fig. 22) by Frank Lloyd Wright, the great

American architect whose contribution to modern architecture was frequently mar­

ginalized by European historians.

Oscar Nitzchke’s seminal project of 1935, La Maison de la Publicite (fig. 23), was

similarly neglected by modern historians, whose interests

were more focused on the machine metaphor than on

populist expressions of modern culture such as cinema

and advertising. 58 Yet the project offers an early example

of the current fascination with electronic media and the

nocturnal transformation of architecture. Recalling

Calvino’s triad of light, movement, and information,

Nitzchke’s project assumes a prophetic aura. Louis Kahn’s

decision to use glass for its specific material qualities in

his projected Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs

(1966-72), instead of regarding it as a nonmaterial, is

unusual for its time, and dECOi’s 1991 Another Class

House (fig. 24) is a recent project that transforms its inspi­

ration, Philip Johnson’s 1949 Class House, by emphasizing

glass’S materiality, which Johnson implicitly denied.

In postmodernism’s caricature (ironically based large­

lyon Ciedion) of modern history, the wholesale devaluation of buildings such as

Cordon Bunshaft’s 1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale

University (fig. 25) has further obscured the roots of a number of works presented

here. The Beinecke’s section within a section-an outer layer of translucent alabaster

enclosing a glazed, climate-controlled rare books library – is revived in various ways

number of projects, from Sejima’s Women’s Dormitory to Maki’s

Congress Center project and Manfred and Laurids Ortner’s pro­

posed Museum of Modern Art for Vienna’s Museum Quarter

(1990, fig. 21 and pp. 148-51). Describing his unbuilt project of

1935, Nelson said, “Suspension in space … heightens the sense

of isolation from the outside world:’::;::;

The Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, largely ignored by

modern historians until the publication of Kenneth Frampton’s

monograph on Chareau in 1969, looms large in any discussion of

lightness.56 Recognized in its time as having transcended the then

ossifying parameters of the International Style, it was referred to

as having a “cinematographic sense of space;’ a description that

invokes much of the imagery employed here to describe contem­

porary architectural synergy. 57 In its visual complexity, the coy­

ness with which it reveals its interior space, and its willful subor­

dination of structural clarity, the facade of the Maison de Verre

could serve as a precis for Starobinski’s notion of the gaze as a

reflexive act. Vidler’s description of facades that reveal “shadowy

26
27

in Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz, David Chipperfield’s pro­

posed extension of the Neues Museum in Berlin (fig. 26), and the

Herzog and de Meuron Greek Orthodox Church project.

Besides representing an attempt to recapture lost figures in mod­

ern architectural history, the projects here also reflect the current

reevaluation ofthe canonical masters. As a result of the historical par­

ody of “glass boxes” offered by postmodern critics, a new generation

is rediscovering an architecture of the not so recent past. Charles

Jencks’s dismissal of the work of Mies van der Rohe exemplifies post­

modernist criticism: “For the general aspect of an architecture creat­

ed around one (or a few) simplified values, I wiU use the term univa­

lence. No doubt in terms of expression the architecture of Mies van

der Rohe and his followers is the most univalent formal system we

have, because it makes use offew materials and a single, right-angled

geometry:’59 Detlef Mertins’s writings are among recent, less hostile

appraisals: “Could it be that this seemingly familiar architecture is

still in many ways unknown, and that the monolithic Miesian edifice refracts the light

of interpretation, mUltiplying its potential implications for contemporary architec­

tural practices?”60 Mertins could well be speaking of Koolhaas’s Two Patio Villas

(Rotterdam, 1988, pp. 152-55), in which the use of clear, frosted, green-tinted, and

armored glass recalls not the nonmaterial of the Tugendhat House but the rich sur­

faces and the mUltiplicity of perceptions evident in Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion.

Although the expressionists were rejected by rationalist architects such as

Hilberseimer and effectively written out of the history of modern architecture by

Giedion and others, the influence of Taut and his followers, referred to as the Glass

Chain, is evident in the work of a number of canonical modern masters, including

Mies’s glass skyscrapers of about 1920. Walter Gropius, in his manifesto for the

Bauhaus, was influenced by Taut’s expressionist utopianism: “Together let us desire,

conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture

and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven

from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith!’61

Frampton, Banham, and others have noted that standard modern histories frequent­

•

Figure 23: Oscar Nitzchke.

Maison de la PubliciUi, Paris. 1934-36.

Perspective, Gouache and photo­

montage, 28 x 20 1/2′. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of Lily Auchincloss, Barbara

Jakobson, and Walter Randel

Figure 24: dECOi. Another

Class House. Competition proposal,
1991. Axonometric

ly underestimate the important rela­

tionships between what have come to

be perceived as irreconcilably opposed
tendencies.

The success of Rowe and Slutzky in

awakening a generation of American,

and to a lesser extent European, archi­

tects from the “glass dream” over the

course of four decades depended on

establishing a more narrow dialectic

than the fundamental one between

transparency and opacity described by

1;#111′” 25: Gordon Bunshaft­
‘kidmore, Owings & Merrill. Beinecke
/I,,,,,. Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
f tliVf~rsity. New Haven. Connecticut.

IfJrd. Interior view

Figure 26: David Chipperfield.

Nelles Museum Extension, Berlin.

Competition proposal, 1994.

Computer-generated light study

ofinterior of the Temple Hall

Bletter. Given Rowe’s nostalgia for the classical facade and his antipathy

toward technological imagery, that longstanding relationship was enor­

mously inconvenient. Rowe and Slutzky inverted the dichotomy by

equating the literal transparency of glass structures with materiality and

the phenomenal transparency of Le Corbusier with the higher functions

of intellectual abstraction: “A basic distinction must perhaps be estab­

lished. Transparency may be an inherent quality of substance-as in a

wire mesh or glass curtain wall, or it may be an inherent quality of orga­

nization … a phenomenal or seeming transparency:’62

If much of the architecture herein can be seen as a critical response

to Giedion and the “room of shadowless light” that he helped canonize,

it also represents a critique of the formalism espoused by Rowe in the

course of devaluing glass architecture. The facades seen here express

not only a post-Rovian sense of transparency but the rejection of the

frontally viewed classical facade and its “structure of exclusion;’ its “set of refusals.”

While there is a common interest in maintaining a level of ambiguity, in limiting the

overreaching certitude of architectural expression, this recent architecture goes

beyond evoking the “equivocal emotions” that Rowe and Slutzky found in the pres­

ence of architectural form, investigating the possibility of rethinking, and investing

with meaning, the architectural skin. As membranes, screens, and filters, the sur­

faces ofthis architecture establish a vertigo of delay, blockage, and slowness, upend­

ing the “vertigo of acceleration” that has dominated architectural design since the

invention of perspectival drawing.

In a contemporary context, the critique of Rowe’s Epicureanism represented by

the projects here need not be taken as endorsement of a new sachlich architecture

of shadowless light, an expression of the renewed puritanism of our time. Just the

opposite: this recent architecture, trusting in “the senses and in the world the sens­

es reveal,” can be described as beautiful a word infrequently heard in architectur­

al debates. Indeed, academic rationalists enjoyed such success in establishing the

basis for architectural discussions that architects have been called “secret agents for

beauty:’ As a group, the projects here have a compelling visual attraction, undimin­

ished by close reflection, that implicitly criticizes Hilberseimer’s rejection of the aes­

thetic dimension. They likewise reject the strictures of postmodernism, which have

alternated between invoking, as inspirations for architecture, a suffocating suprema­

cy of historical form and arid philosophical speculation. Of the latter Koolhaas

writes, “Our amalgamated wisdom can be caricatured: according to Derrida we can­

not be Whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be Real, according to Virilio we

cannot be There-inconvenient repertoire for a profession helplessly about being

Whole, Real, and There:’63

Tn Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, part two opens with Aleksii Ante­

dilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik, haranguing the

audience: “What System of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad

swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenome­

non, calamity?”64 Prelapsarianov’-s taunts remind us that the already muddied waters

28
29

Figure 27: Dan Graham. Two-Way

Mirror Cylinder inside Cube. 199 f.
The Rooftop Urban Park Project. Diu

Center for the Arts, New York City

of the postmodern debate, played out over the last thirty years, are further roiled by

the approaching millennium, with its own set of critical references. Even so, without

claiming an overreaching system ofthought, it is possible to see in the current archi­

tectural synergy further evidence of a renewed adherence to the spirit of the centu­

ry, a spirit that most often expressed itself as one of invention and idealism. Tn

response to the “inconvenient repertoire” of poststructuralism, Koolhaas imagines a

“potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective,

reclaim maximum possibility.”65

Beyond his own work, Koolhaas’s words resonate in projects at vastly different

scales, though, as is often the case, they can be most distinctly seen in smaller pro­

jects, where simpler programs allow for more direct expression. Despite its modest

scale, the Leisure Studio eloquently fits Hays’s definition of a critical architecture, but

it is also an expression of an idealism too easily dismissed in a cynical age. Designed

by an architectural collaborative as a contre-projet in response to an official housing

exhibition, it is currently used as an informal meeting place

where artists and architects socialize and exchange ideas. Tn con­

trast to standard professional practice, the structure was built

and paid for by the architects themselves. Tod Williams and Billie

Tsien’s mobile, translucent stage set evokes the choreographer’s

theme of societal transformation, and in doing so reminds us that

the realm of the aesthetic has social dimensions. Graham’s Two­

Way Mirror Cylinder inside Cube, a work which clearly occupies

a position “in between,” consciously refers to the history of glass

architecture. (Bletter’s commentary on expressionist design

could well be applied to it: “Those very aspects … that appear on

first glance to be its most revolutionary ones-transparency,

instability, and flexibility-on closer examination turn out to be

its most richly traditional features:’66) But Graham’s work, too, transcends a purely

aesthetic approach. By incorporating it into his Rooftop Urban Park Project, which he

characterizes as a “utopian presence” in the city, he elevates the work from the sta­

tus of mere formal abstraction (fig. 27). His contemporary urban park – which, like

its traditional counterparts, seeks to reintegrate alienated city dwellers with their

environment while providing a contemplative place apart-restores the aesthetic

dimension of the glass dream and points toward the idealism that sustained it.

Notes

I would like to thank Kenneth Frampton, Michael

Hays, Rem Koolhaas, Guy Nordenson, Joan

Ockman, Jean Starobinski, Bernard Tschumi, and

Kirk Varnedoe for their suggestions and comments.

I also thank Christopher Lyon for his dedication and

insights during the editorial process, and Pierre

Adler, Bevin Howard, Lucy Maulsby, Vera

Neukirchen, and Heather Urban for research and

translation assistance.

1. Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Glasarchitektur;’ Die

Form 4 (1929): 522. Translated by Vera

Neukirchen.

2. Ibid., 521.

3. Jean Starobinski, “Poppaea’s Veil; in The

Living Eye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1989), 1.

4. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel

de Montaigne, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech

(London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1991), 697.

The passage continues: “Why do women now cover

up those beauties-right down below their heels­

which every woman wants to display and every man

wants to see? Why do they clothe with so many

obstacles, layer upon layer, those parts which are

the principal seat of our desires-and of theirs?

And what use are those defence-works with which

our women have started to arm their thighs, if not

to entrap our desires and to attract us by keeping

us at a distance 1″

5. Starobinski, “Poppaea’s Veil:’ 1-2.

6. Ibid., 2.

7. See note 4.

8. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, “Toyo Ito: An Opaque

‘Transparency;” in JA Library 2, special issue of The

Japan Architect (Summer 1993): 154.

9. Colin Rowe and Robe[t Slutzky,

“Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal; in Rowe,

The Mathematics of the Tdeal Villa and Other

Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 171.

10. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny:

Essays in the Modern Un homely (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1992), 221.

11. Rowe and Slutzky, ”Transparency,” 163-64.

12. In a recent communication with the author,

the architectural historian Joan Ockman summa­

rized the elements of phenomenal transparency as

“free play in the object, the extension of ‘aesthetic

time; and oscillating readings or meanings that are

ultimately unresolvable: Her description clearly

shows that a foundation of Gestalt psychology,

provided by her husband Robert Slutzky, support­

ed the concept of phenomenal transparency.

13. Rowe and Slutzky, “Transparency:’ 171.

14. Kenneth Frampton, “Pierre Chareau, an

Eclectic Architect:’ in Marc Vellay and Frampton,

Pierre Chareau, Architect and Craftsman,

1883-1950 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 243.

15. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp, or The

Castle of Purity, trans. D. Gardner (London: Cape

Goliard Press, 1970), 1-2. I am indebted to Peter

Eisenman for suggesting that I look at Paz’s discus­

sion of transparency.

16. Frampton, “Pierre Chareau, an Eclectic

Architect,” 242.

17. Ibid.

18. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL

(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995 [prepublication

copy]), 654.

19. Rowe and Slutzky, “Transparency; 166.

20. Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange

Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1985), 69. I thank Guy Nordenson

for suggesting Feynman’s writings.

21. Ibid., 109.

22. Hubert Damisch, TMorie du nuage (Paris:

Editions du Seuil, 1972), 170. Translated by Pierre

Adler. lowe to Rosalind Krauss my introduction to

Damisch’s book, to which she refers in the essay

cited in note 25.

23. Ibid.

24. Bernard Tschumi, “Groningen, Glass Video

Gallery, 1990; in Event-Cities (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1994), 559.

25. Krauss, “Minimalism: The Grid, The/Cloud/,

and the Detail,” in Detlef Mertins, ed., The

Presence of Mies (Princeton: Princeton Archi­

tectural Press, 1994), 133-34.

26. Jean Nouvel, “The Cartier Building; archi­

teet’s statement,

n.d.

27. Krauss, “Minimalism;’ 133.

28. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 126″

29. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of

Leonardo da Vinci, an., trans., and intra.

E. MacCul’dy (New York: George Braziller, 1939),

986-87.

30. Nagisa Kidosaki, “Shimosuwa Municipal

Museum,” in JA Library 2, special issue of The

Japan Architect (Summer 1993): 27.

31. Jacques Herzog, architect’s statement, n.d.

32. Italo Calvino, “Lightness,” in Six Memos for

30
31

the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage

International, 1993), 16.

33. Ibid., 8.

34. The linguistic relationship between lightness

and lightweight exists principally in English.

35. Starobinski, “Poppaea’s Veil:’ 6.

36. For further analysis of Calvino and lightness

in architecture, see Cynthia Davidson and John

Rajchman, eds., Any Magazine 5 (March/April

1994).

37. Calvino, “Lightness:’ 13.

38. Toyo Ito, “A Garden of Microchips: The

Architectural Image ofthe Microelectronic Age:’ in

JA Libnuy 2, special issue of The Japan Architect

(Summer 1993): 11-13.

39. Ibid., 11.

40. Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books,

1990),355. The passage is from notes taken by

Rush Rhees of Wittgenstein’s 1936 lecture ,vrhe

Language of Sense Data and Private Experience -\.”

41. Harry Wolf, “ABN-AMRO Head Office

Building:’ architect’s statement, n.d.

42. Jacques Herzog, “The Hidden Geometry of

Nature:’ Quaderns, no. 181-82 (1989): 104.

43. Steven Holl, “Museum of Contemporary Art,

Helsinki,” architect’s statement, n.d.

44. Stephen Selkowitz and Stephen LaSourd,

“Amazing Glass,” ProgT’essive ArchitectuT’e 6 (June

1994), 109.

45. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretation

of the Glass Dream – Expressionist Architecture

and the History of the Crystal Metaphor:’ Journal

of the Society of Architectural Historians 40, no.l

(March 1981): 20.

46. Bletter, “Glass Dream,” 25.

47. Zaha Hadid, “Cardiff Bay Opera House

Architectural Competition;’ architect’s statement,

n.d.

48. Wolf, “ABN-AMRO Head Office Building:’

49. Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg, the royal

patron of the Crystal Palace, commissioned Edward

Lorenzo Percy to design a centerpiece based on

literary accounts of a fountain in the Alhambra.

See Hermione Hobhouse, Prince Albert: His Life

and Work (London: Hamish Hamilton Limited/

The Observer, 1983), 103 (caption).

50. Bletter, “Glass Dream,” 37.

51. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture:

Between Culture and Form:’ Perspecta (The Yale

Architectural Journal) 21 (1984): 15.

52. Reyner Banham. “The Glass Paradise;’ A,’Chi­

tectural Review 125, no. 745 (February 1959): 88.

53. Fritz Neumeyer. “Iron and Stone: The

Architecture of the GroBstadt,” in H. F. Mallgrave,

ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of

Modernity (Santa Monica. Calif.: Getty Center for

the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993), 134f.

54. Kenneth Frampton, “Paul Nelson and the

School of Paris,” in Joseph Abram and Terence

Riley, eds.• The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul

Nelson (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 12.

55. Judith Applegate, interview with Paul

Nelson, Perspecta 13/14 (April 1971): 75-129.

56. Kenneth Frampton, “Maison de Verre;’

Perspecta (The Yale Architectural Journal) 12

(1968): 77-126. For further discussion of the rela­

tionship between Nelson and Chareau, see Abram

and Riley, eds., The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul

Nelson (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

57. Paul Nelson, “La Maison de la Rue Saint­

Guillaume,” I:ArchitectuT’e d’aujourd’hui 4me annee.

ser. 3, vo!’ 9 (Nov.-Dec. 1933): 9.

58. For an interesting but somewhat incom­

plete account of the relationship between

Nitzchke. Nelson. and Chareau. see Se’an Daly,

“Composite Modernism: The Architectural

Strategies of Paul Nelson and Oscar Nitzchke,”

Basilisk [journal online] 1, no. 1 (1995), available

at http://swerve.basilisk.com.

59. Charles Jencks, The l.anguage of Post­

Modem ArchitectuT’e (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 15.

60. Detlef Mertins, “New Mies;’ in Mertins, ed.,

The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Archi­

tectural Press, 1994),23.

61. Bletter, “Glass Dream,” 38.

62. Rowe and Slutzky, “Transparency;’ 161.

63. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 969.

64. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Cay

fantasia on National Themes, Part T/: Perestroika,

(New York: Theater Communications Group, 1994),

13-14.

65. Koolhaas and Mau, S.M,L,XL, 510.

66. Bletter, “Glass Dream;’ 43.

32

http:http://swerve.basilisk.com

Matters of
Sensation

Marcelo Spina and
GeorGina HuljicH

ARTISTS SPACE

1110

Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich
Matters of Sensation: Materiality in the Sublime

Introduction

MofS focus closely on an evolving materialism in
architecture by a group of emerging contemporary
architects; a “Sensuous Materialism”, an affluent
materialism of sensations rather than an abstract
materialism of pure matter. While materialism implies
a philosophical outlook; a conception of the world
derived from physical phenomena and those relation-
ships which are directly dependant on it; materialism
in its ontology can not be detached from the body. In
fact, as Peter Zellner argues, material bodies can only
be appreciated through sensations. The pursuit of
sensations in these contemporary practices constitutes
a novel form of artistic research that implies “an evolv-
ing materialist/sensualist architecture that gestures
towards a far more negotiable set of relationships
between form, perception and action”1 while still away
from the realm of subjectivity or phenomenology.

To be clear, materialism does not imply here the idea
that material organization at a certain scale will simply
trigger formal organization and structural evolution of
an entire project at another; nor it suggests form find-
ing or form optimization processes as a priori design
criteria. Materialism in these architects has a further
meaning beyond a philosophical one, it indicates a con-
cern with materials as such. In fact the working pro-
cess of this group is rather open. It combines research
and intuition with an obsessive creative surge. This
interest explains not only an experimental approach to
architecture but the will in exploring many different
aspects of architectural form. For these architects, it is
not enough to formulate an idea once; they are inter-
ested in playing through various instantiations of an
idea to demonstrate and rehearse its potential. None-
theless, these architects are not interested in merely

proposing, positioning or illustrating questions, but
they rather choose to produce provisional responses
to them emphasizing in their outcomes the material,
physical and sensorial aspects of form and matter.
Hence the multiplicity of the senses needed to scruti-
nize their work instead of the primacy of the visual.

Grounding Sensation

Sensation is synthetic by definition. Its space is optic
as it is tactile. Bodies are not merely perceived but
they take on a sculptural or tactile quality such as
mass, depth, contour and relief. Deleuze following
Riegl, terms it “haptic space, a space in which there is
no longer a hand-eye subordination in either direction.
It implies a type of seeing distinct from the optical, a
close-up viewing in which “the sense of sight behaves
just like the sense of touch” 2.

In thinking about the exhibition, we wanted to con-
struct an atmospheric ecosystem, a whole ecology of
sensation building objects that could be seen at “close
range” 3, in close proximity to each other. We knew the
architects in the show have worked towards producing
sensations in their work, either consciously or un-
consciously they all have made projects, installations,
prototypes or large models which dealt in one way or
another with matters of sensation and in doing so took
pleasure in the sensations of matter.

As an idea, the exhibition focuses on architects that
have moved beyond a pure digital practice into a ma-
terialist domain based on robust forms of sensation.
Contrary to the naïve belief that supports the idea of
digital design and fabrication as having eroded issues
of materiality and craftsmanship in architecture, we
are now witnessing a welcomed return to material.

This should not imply a loss of a conceptual or abstract
dimension to the work, but it certainly suggests a
needed amplification to an architectural palette. MofS
suggests an obvious departure from abstract process
driven approaches to computation and constitutes a
fresh reinvigoration of the discipline as an inherently
material practice.

As a show, MofS focuses on objects that are not so
germane to traditional architectural production and
which have only became promi-
nent in recent years as a form
of research oriented practice.
These artifacts [bodyworks] are
outside the realm of conventional
architectural representation
such as drawings, renderings
or models; and they don’t quiet
constitute edifices since they are
neither building components, nor
prototypes or full installations.
Dimensionally proportioned
and formally evolved, they engage and connect with
the body one to one, not only visually but haptically.
These objects are the outcome of a decidedly not linear
and complex design and production where specific
materials and techniques entangled in unseen ways.
Like sculpture, they produce
spatial, formal and material
affects at their own scale while
ambiguously maintaining a
latent potential for scalar shifts
into building form. Though truly
experimental in their essence
and with no direct practical
purpose, these pieces are pure
potential; materially formed
sensation building artifacts and
true vehicles for architectural
innovation.

Figuring the Real

“It is a very, very close and difficult thing to know why
some work comes across directly into the nervous
system and other work tells you the story in a long
diatribe through the brain.”4 To come across directly
into the nervous system, implies a particular kind of
engagement with the body. In Francis Bacon’s paint-

ings the body is always the human figure. In the case
of Bacon paintings, the results were never completely
new figures, but rather moment of figuration within
material bodies. In the context of architecture, a full
sensation can only be generated within the specificity
of the real and, outside the abstract or generic. In fact,
engaging the real implies a dual reasoning: first, the
careful orchestration and calibration of sensations
which are purposely scaled and directed to the body;
second, the need to tap into specific elements and

internal systems within the archi-
tecture discipline from which to
produce those sensations. Hence
it is the architectural body with
all its physical and spatial sub-
stance and constitutive systems
[and the body itself ] that plays
the role of the figure: it functions
as a framework, a material sup-
port by which to substantiate and
sustains sensations. In the context
of MofS, the real has multiple

connotations. It implies a particular engagement with
notions of structure, tectonics, assembly and building
systems for some; as well as with massing, fenestra-
tion, opening and ornament for others; or with issues
pertaining to coloration, tonality, light and contrast for

others; or even with motion and
interactivity for some others. In
every case, these particular [ar-
chitectural] domains function
as a material support, a physical
and conceptual framework that
sustains precise sensations.

Unibodies: The indivisibility

between material bodies

and the body

“Sensation is the opposite of the
facile and the ready-made, the cliché, but also of the

“sensational”, the spontaneous, etc. Sensation has one face
turned towards the subject [the nervous system, vital
movement, “instinct,” temperament…] and one face turned
toward the object. Or rather, it has no faces at all, it is
both things indissolubly… It is the same body that, being
both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation” 5

Spina / HuljichSpina / Huljich

Above:

UniBodies, PATTERNS with Kreysler and Associates
Artists Space, Architecture and Design Series, 2006

12
Exhibitor Name

13
Exhibitor Name

“In fact, many of the work
on Matters of Sensation is
characterized by a form
of plasticity. The idea that
plastics could

generate infinite formal
variations is echoed in
Roland Barthes
essay “Plastic”.

Aside from the possibility of bodies sensing objects
and the consequences for all kinds of sensorial specu-
lations, one of the most significant and somewhat
uncharted problems of sensation is the possibility that
the very material-bodies acquire the capacity of being
sensitive. That is to say that internal systems, subsys-
tems, various tectonic elements or components are in a
constant state of vibration, a rhythmic activity of sens-
ing. In UniBodies 6 for instance, the armature of a ribbed
shell is embedded within the skin, giving way to a sort
dual reverberation process: of
vein like system of different thick-
nesses and depths appears in the
underside of the skin while its top
creases producing near cellular
compartments by means of egg-
like partition of surface morphol-
ogy. This partial absorption of one
system by another where there
is no longer as a result neither a
duality within the body nor a total
fusion of a priori discrete systems,
but rather a synthetic, composite quality to the overall
body amounts to a different but quiet unique form of
material sensation. Many of these qualities are also
visible in the work of the show.

Dynamic Sublime: Three Instances

Kant distinctively identified two
types of sublime: the mathemati-
cal sublime and the dynamic
sublime. The realm of sensations
in design and artistic practices
is definitely concerned the latter
and not the former.
Whether is about induced body
movement, abrupt changes of
scale and sequencing; or is about
the rich anisotropic materiality,
lively color, spiky contrast and subtle tonal variation;
or about shimmering, internal light; or about articulat-
ed and intricate assemblies of parts, gradient relief and
texture; or about viscously molded manifolds, embed-
ded within thick surfaces; all these attributes and the
inner activity they entail are indicative of a sensitive
behavior. Eventually, only an attuned and synthetic
coordination of such aspects amounts to a robust sen-
sation, a synthetic and dynamic sublime.

DS1 / A Sensitive Constructivism in

David Fincher Films

Contrary to a misconception and its confusion with
sensational, Sensation building is a potent constructive
mechanism. Filmmaker David Fincher made a signifi-
cant contribution by introducing computer graphics
in movies in a radical new way. Indeed, Fincher uses
CG to inventively animate unattainable sequences
that capture micro spaces otherwise impossible to
detect, but that are however absolutely essential to the

construction of a sequence’s mood
and spatial sensibility. The elabo-
rate and difficult trajectories that
the camera undergoes allow for an
intimate relation with the spatial
structure [the intricate and trash
populated world of a garbage can
in the “starbucks galaxy”], complex
mechanisms [the complex cable
circuitry of a bomb inside a van lo-
cated in the basement of the world
financial center], materiality and

color [the polished but somewhat greasy stainless steel
burner in the kitchen of the “ikea” apartment], and
therefore affect of certain spaces and objects around us.
In continuity with a filmic script and a narrative, these
intensive segments amount to an affective constructiv-
ism, a spatio-temporal constructivism of sensation that

instigates a heightened awareness
of the extents of our material en-
vironment.

Different from the use of CG to
create a total ‘other” reality such
as in science fiction films, in Finch-
er, spatial effects are absolutely
embedded within the “real”. They
are there but the idea is that you
don’t see them. In fact, the ulti-

mate spatial effect is the one you don’t see. You don’t
know what they are, when and how they happen. You
just know they are there somewhere.

The spatial implications of such techniques are mani-
fold. They not only suggest sudden and abrupt changes
of scale but also of time, speed and trajectory; from a
general and global view to the almost tactile intimacy
of a close range. By engaging the real, accentuating and

Spina / Huljich Spina / Huljich

exacerbating its features, the real becomes dynamically
sublime. It is then not simply a coincidence that David
Fincher would look at Francis Bacon’s painting to create
a sensually blurry and erotically strange scene between
Ed Norton and Elena Bonham Carter in Fight Club.

DS2 / Anisotropic Materiality in

Richard Deacon Sculpture

Richard Deacon’s recent food inspired sculpture com-
bines a formal interest for complex manifold forms,
[much more tectonically inarticulate
and materially inexact than his previous
work] with a painterly interest in pro-
ducing anisotropic finishes. Materially,
these finishing mixtures are achieved
by color dripping glaze pigments until
there are several layers to form a semi-
transparent surface. Embedded in the
finish, is the idea of a thick surface pro-
duced by the use of glaze.
These sculptures seem haunted with a
terrible unease. “What is really peculiar
here is the surface of these ceramic
forms. At a distance, the glaze sparkles and glints. Up
close it drools and drips, its shiny wetness making the
shapes look as though they suffer some terrible skin
disease, and are also sweating: a clammy, drunk sweat,
a fear sweat, giving the sculptures a disturbingly or-
ganic, unhealthy quality. The stuff drips
and dribbles the way silicon saliva drools
from the jaws of Ridley Scott’s Alien.” 7

Applied to the surface, the glaze is like
the make-up of a viscous skin, a strange
color, at once luscious, repulsive and
somehow vulgar. Within it persist the
anisotropic properties of the material,
full of a rich and exotic variability. The
dynamic sublime and strange sensation
of its materiality is the outcome of the
intentional fortuitous coagulations and
slippery quality of the glaze and the vitality of the
paint drifting and dripping down the complex aggre-
gate forms.

DS3 / Light, Shine and Sensuality in George

Hurrell Portrait Photography

The theatrical use of lighting has become somewhat

paramount to atmosphere. George Hurrell revolution-
ized Hollywood still photography by introducing bold
new idiom of conceiving portraits. An acknowledged
artist Hurrell was not a conventional fashion photog-
rapher but a film photographer. Even more than the
movies themselves, his lush and superbly illuminated
portraits depicted a polished grace and refinement that
transcends age and time while propagating an alluring
image and a certain magnetic charisma in his subjects.

Partly synthetic, these photographs were
not entirely artificial. Hurrel photos
intensified the defining qualities of their
subjects, while creating a veil of mystery
with light and shadow. Hurrel used to
light his subjects with a really big spot
light from a fair distance away producing
a concentrated beam effect in their faces,
exalting their silluetes and most promi-
nent features while accentuating their
sharp contrast with the background.

“Like Rembrandt using glazes to make
the material come alive in the paintings”, George Hur-
rell often used to put lanolin to lighten the bodies of
his subjects; “to create a part shine, part sexy and part
sweat effect in their appearance” 8 This “wet” feeling
of transpiration intensified by the punctual light glare

suggests a sensation of fear, anxiety and
agitation in Joan Crawford 9 body [see
picture below]; while a more relaxed, se-
rene but intensely sensual look in Johnny
Weissmuller photograph for Tarzan.

A Friendship of Sensation

In thinking about the show and the body
of work that would fulfill its ambitions
as curators, we have to admit that we
always thought about specific architects,
all of them working in the context of the
US, and all of them from a somewhat

similar generation. Absolutely intentional on our part,
we aimed at evidencing a family, a sensibility, call it a
friendship of sensation, reflecting on its work and pro-
jecting its potential contribution.

As designers, our interest in the show was of course
not only conceptual but of a visual nature as well. In

Above:

Joan Crawford, Photography by George Hurrell

Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, 1932

Gelatin silver photograph printed image 29.8 x 23.3 cm.

Above:

Richard Deacon, Scrambled Eggs

15
Exhibitor NameExhibitor Name

MATTERS of SEnSATIon 14

a somewhat playful way, we sought to put together
stuff we like, in close proximity to each other. In doing
so, we had to resist our own temptation [often times
induced by some of our colleagues] to include our own
work in the show. Thus it is both with pleasure and a
bit of anxiety that we observe this exhibition come to-
gether, and we don’t see our work in it. Or maybe we do.

Although they attract our curiosity and consideration,
we are always a bit skeptical of any form of restrictive
discursive definition in design and architecture given
the characteristically short life span of it in light of
criticism, history and the inevitability of time and in-
dividual need for change. MofS does not attempt to de-
fine “a” style neither it suggests a rigid position around
more or less sensually striking objects. We have had
too much of that and its time to relax. MofS ultimate
goal is to collectively share our passion, maybe even
exaltation for these objects, their propensity for and
overabundance of articulation…and a true enthusiasm
for the body. •

— —————

1. Material Sentience, Peter Zellner
2. Maldiney, Regard Parole Espace, 195
3. Cezanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its

chaos; he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer
see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to loose oneself in the land-
scape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms
or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities. Daniel W. Smith,
Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories. The Logic of Sensation

4. David Sylvester, Interviews” with Francis Bacon. Quoted in Gilles
deleuze: The Logic of Sensation

5. Gilles deleuze: The Logic of Sensation, “Painting and Sensation”, Chapter
six, page 31

6. UniBodies, a collaboration with Kreysler and associates for Artists
Space Architecture and Design Series in September 2006. Consisting of
a family of objects, UniBodies was as much about the cohesive material
sensation and intimacy within the physical bodies, as it is about the
potential induced resonances between those bodies and the body.

7. Adrian Searle, What’s red, white and wet all over? The Guardian, Tuesday
January 10, 2006, ‘Range’ was exhibited at the Lisson Gallery, London.

8. Jeffrey Kipnis generously introduced me to the work of George Hurrell
during the interview for the book Sessions. He brought up the work of
George Hurrell as a significant contribution to the problem of special
effects in photography. Sessions, SCI-Arc Press. “Kipnis discusses the
work”.

9. Joan Crawford, who was just 26 when Hurrell first photographed her,
became his most frequent subject. Hurrell’s most striking portraits of
her downplay her outfits, focusing on her intense eyes and determined
mouth. He preferred to have his subjects relax and move spontaneous-
ly, allowing him to add the photo’s artifice. From his heavily retouched
photos, you would never know that Crawford’s face was covered with
freckles.

BIO

paTTernS is a design research architec-

tural practice based in los angeles and

operating globally. Founded in 1999 and

headed by co-principals Marcelo Spina

and Georgina Huljich, paTTernS work

has gained international recognition for its

innovative approach to design and archi-

tecture that fuses advanced computation

with an extensive understanding of form,

tectonics and materials. paTTernS’s vision

is to generate innovative spatial forms that

actively engage, enhance and influences

the body, constantly challenging its rela-

tionship to the built environment akin to

the complexity of contemporary life.

paTTernS has received numerous prizes

and awards including first prizes in the

competitions for the Vertical Garden at the

Schindler House in West Hollywood and

the new Sci-arc café, the third prize in the

prestigious Young architect of the year

award in 2003 and most recently, an hon-

orable mention for a concert Hall in Skopje,

Macedonia. current projects include Sunset

8746 Boutique, and the Sci-arc café both

to be completed in 2008 in los angeles, a

Hybrid office Building in chengdu and an

entertainment pavilion in ningbo, both in

china, and a vertical apartment building in

rosario, argentina.

paTTernS work has been shown and

exhibited worldwide, most notably at the

art institute of chicago, San Francisco Mu-

seum of Modern art, the Venice Biennale

in italy, The architectural league of new

York, and its first solo show “uniBodies” at

artists Space also in new York. paTTernS’

work is part of the permanent architecture

collection of the San Francisco Museum

of Modern art, the MaK center in Vienna

and the Sculpture collection at Gyeonggi

cultural Foundation in Korea. in addition to

their individual work, Spina and Huljich are

the curators of “Matters of Sensation” at

artists Space. The show is one of the most

important collective exhibitions in architec-

ture that artists Space has organized and is

accompanied by a catalogue published by

charta Books.

Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich have

lectured extensively in the uS, South

america and europe and his work has been

published internationally in books, exhibi-

tion catalogues, magazines and newspa-

pers such as next Generation architecture,

new architecture, architectural record,

praxis, a+u, casabella, icon, index

architecture, l’arca, los angeles Times,

and the recently released Sci_arc Book

“Sessions”. in 2004, architectural record

selected the work of the firm among 11

emerging practices worldwide to integrate

their prestigious “design Vanguard”.

paTTernS first monograph Sensitive Form:

Inside and Outside Material is forthcoming

by princeton architectural press.

Marcelo Spina holds a professional degree

from the national university of rosario and

a Master in architecture from columbia

university in new York where he was the

recipient of several honors including the

William Kinne Fellowship and the Honor

award for excellence in design. Marcelo

Spina is a design Faculty at The South-

ern california institute of architecture

since 2001. He teaches design studios

and technical seminars in the Graduate

and undergraduate programs. He has

been a Visiting professor at the Graduate

School of design of Harvard university, a

distinguished Visiting professor at Tulane

university, the Friedman Visiting professor

at the university of california Berkeley and

a Visiting professor at the Technical univer-

sity of innsbruck, austria. He has previously

held positions at the national university

of rosario and The di Tella university in

Buenos aires in argentina.

Georgina Huljich holds a professional

degree from the national university of

rosario and a Master in architecture from

ucla where she graduated with distinc-

tion and was the recipient of several design

awards. She has previously worked at the

Guggenheim Museum and the architectural

firm dean/Wolf architects in new York,

as a project designer at Morphosis in los

angeles, and as the co principal of fl-oz

she was awarded one of the Six Winning

entries for the 21st. century park competi-

tion organized by the Graham Foundation

in chicago and designed the exhibition

‘pass Through’ at the School of cinema and

Television at uSc. She has also partici-

pated at Beyond Media ’05 Script Show in

Florence, italy with her video installation

Fairy_Tails in collaboration with video artist

Gaby Hamburg. She is currently a design

Faculty at the department of architecture

at ucla, having previously taught at uc

Berkeley as a Maybeck Fellow and the

university of Southern california.

— —————