ten canonical buildings_peter eisenman

Ten Canonical Buildings: 19502000

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TEN CANONICAL BUILDINGS

19502000

Peter Eisenman

Foreword by Stan AllenEdited by Ariane Lourie


First published in the United States of America in 2008 byRizzoli International Publications, Inc.300 Park Avenue SouthNew York, NY 10010www.rizzoliusa.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-3048-0LCCN: 2007921092

2008 Rizzoli International Publications 2008 Peter EisenmanEisenmans Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern Stan Allen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher.

Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York

This book was developed with the support and cooperation of the School of Architecture, Princeton University.

DESIGNERAndrew Heid

Printed and bound in China

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Eisenman, PeterTen Canonical BuildingsISBN-13: 978-0-8478-3048-0 (alk. paper)1. Postmodern Architecture2. Critical ArchitectureII. Title.NA2760. E45 2006720.1--dc222007921092


Acknowledgments 6

Eisenmans Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern 9 Foreword by Stan Allen

Introduction 15

1. Pro les of Text 26Luigi Moretti, Casa Il Girasole, 194750

2. The Umbrella Diagram 50Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 194651

3. Textual Heresies 72Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrs-Strasbourg, 196264

4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic Space 102Louis I. Kahn, Adler House and DeVore House, 195455

5. The Nine-Square Diagram and its Contradictions 128Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 195964

6. Material Inversions 154James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building, 195963

7. Texts of Analogy 178Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, 197178

8. Strategies of the Void 200Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, 199293

9. The Deconstruction of the Axis 230Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 198999

10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram 256Frank O. Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building, 19972002

Bibliography 288

Contents


Acknowledgments

The ideas and arguments presented in Ten Canonical Buildings were developed in seminars I gave over four years while a visiting lecturer at Princeton Universitys School of Architecture. The schools support, in particular the support of the dean, Stan Allen, made this book possible. I especially want to recognize the Princeton students who both participated in the seminars and spent summers producing drawings to illustrate these building analyses: John Bassett, Andrew Heid, Ajay Manthripragada, Michael Wang, Carolyn Yerkes and, later, Matthew Roman. Andrew Heid also stayed on to design this book. Clearly this book is the result of a team effort. Ariane Lourie endured numerous drafts and rewrites to help me bring this manuscript to its nal formeven editing and repairing drawingsand Cynthia Davidson reviewed it for clarity. Jeffrey Kipnis made insightful comments on drafts of the introduction. Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown helped to obtain the best historical images from the archives of Le Corbusier, Luigi Moretti, Mies van der Rohe, John Hejduk, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling necessary to illustrate each building. I want to thank the architects who lent images from their of ces: Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, OMA, Studio Daniel Libeskind, and Gehry Partners. Finally, I would also like to thank David Morton and the editorial staff at Rizzoli New York for their patience and for reproducing these drawings with such care. P.E.


Eisenmans Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern Stan Allen

Effective history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because history is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. Michel Foucault

The title of Peter Eisenmans new book, Ten Canonical Buildings, suggests the construction of a new orthodoxy. Indeed, there is something didactic about Eisenmans canon, and it is important to remember that these meticulous formal readings were developed in the context of seminars taught at Princeton from 2003 to 2006. At one level what is proposed here is nothing less than a new pedagogy, which would have at its center the close reading of exemplary twentieth-century buildings. In the past Eisenman has often been criticized for his reliance on concepts from outside of architecture. With this analytical work he declares explicitly that it is buildings themselves that are the source of ideas in architecture, and not applied philosophical concepts from outside the discipline.

But to leave it at that would be to miss the force of his argument. His title, I would suggest, is something of a ruse; a sly bit of misdirection to distract the reader while he palms another ace off the bottom of the deck. Eisenman is operating on the basis of a rather unorthodox notion of the canonical, which places him much closer to Foucaults idea of an effective history than to the conservative idea of maintaining a timeless, undeviating canon.


10 Eisenmans Canon

It is the liberating divergence of archi-tectures marginal or apparently insigni cant moments that Eisenman has identi ed as canoni-cal in this collection. In other words, innovation occurs when the previously marginal is absorbed into the discipline, triggering internal adjust-ments to the logic of the discipline itself. Eisenman understands the modern condition as shot through with contradiction, which is in turn manifested in formal discontinuity and historical rupture. The purpose of history, Foucault writes, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. A canonical work, Eisenman writes here, is a hinge, a rupture, a premonition, in other words, of something that necessarily signals a change. For Eisenman (an attentive reader of Foucault) the task of history is to make contradiction and discontinuity vis-ible. He is searching for those moments when the ground of the discipline changes and the para-digm shifts. In this sense, Eisenmans canon is the opposite of an eternal canon: it is precisely bound to the historical moment of rupture, mean-ingless outside the horizon of possibilities that it opens up at that particular time.

To identify discontinuity as the primary ana-lytical trope of this collection is also to take note of a conspicuous counterpoint to Eisenmans mentor Colin Rowe. To mention Rowe here (as Eisenman does in his own introduction) is both to acknowl-edge the intellectual debt that Eisenman owes to Rowe and to measure the distance between the two. Rowe had famously postulated an underly-ing geometrical continuity between the classical and the modern. For Eisenman, Rowes empha-sis on continuity locked modern architecture into a humanist tradition. To disengage modern architecture from its humanist tradition it was necessary to construct an alternative genealogy, in which fragmentation and discontinuity would now take precedence. Eisenman takes Rowes method of close formal readings and sets it to a

distinct task: the identi cation of breaks, ruptures and divergent pathways. He remains, however, indebted to Rowe for his analytical methodology: Colin Rowe rst taught me how to see what was written into the building but was not thematic of seeing as opticality. Eisenman takes Frank Stellas famous literalist dictumWhat you see is what you seeand turns it on its head. Like his mentor Rowe, he is not interested in what is literally there, but what is implied by what is there.

Perhaps the best known example of this method, and the essay that declared in the stron-gest possible terms his ideological distance from Rowe, is the article Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign. In this essay (which opens with an epigraph from Foucault), Eisenman identi es the idea of the self-referential sign as the aspect of Dom-ino that makes it truly modernist. Eisenmans start-ing point is the iconic perspective drawing of the Dom-ino system. Ostensibly the demonstra-tion of a construction system, it is often taken as a diagram of the basic principles of the free plan. Eisenman reads the drawing against the grain, teasing out a series of small but signi -cant formal moves that produce a kind of degree-zero of architectural form: the minimum formal differentiation necessary to de ne the artifact as architecture, as opposed to mere structural diagram. All of the elements of the Eisenman methodology are here: the ostentatious disre-gard of structure, site, and program in favor of a nuanced formal reading, and the extension of that analysis as a more generalized proposition, which Eisenman calls a diagram. Maison Dom-ino is one of the key diagrams discussed in this book. As in the previous articles, it is a privileged point of departure, a conceptual lever to open up the eld of modern and postmodern architecture. The reference to Dom-ino here is then both to a method of analysis and to an exemplary modern-


11Eisenmans Canon

ist work. It is emblematic of the democratization of space under modernity and of postmodern architectures turn toward self-referentiality. For Eisenman, it remains a true and seminal break from the 400-year-old tradition of Western humanist architecture.

Many of these same arguments are present in an earlier essay that pre gures the analytical method here: Eisenmans brilliant, counterin-tuitive, formal deconstruction of James Stirlings Leicester Engineering Building in Real and English: The Destruction of the Box, published in the rst issue of Oppositions (1974), although written a decade earlier. Stirling stands in as Eisenmans avatar in the intellectual tug-of-war with Rowes interpretive models: In his need to clear a kind of turf for himself, Stirling had to take on not only Le Corbusier but also the received interpretation of Le Corbusier provided by Stirlings own tutor, Colin Rowe. In a key passage and a sequence of diagrams that antici-pate the more fully developed argument of the Dom-ino essay, Eisenman teases out the formal consequences of the Dom-ino diagram. While set-ting the structural support back from the edge of the horizontal plane of the slab emphasized the horizontal ow of space (sponsoring the free plan), it also freed the vertical surface from its structural support and allowed a layering of space in the vertical dimension. Eisenman locates Stirlings formal innovation in an alternative proposition for the vertical surface that implies the potential for presenting the vertical plane as a dominant spatial datum, while using a vocabu-lary which runs counter to the by-now traditional dematerialized cubist aesthetic.

The accuracy of this formal reading is per-haps less signi cant than its methodological implication. To me, the real force of the essay is to foreground the formal characteristics of Stirlings architecture against the then-dominant interpretations of his workas well as Stirlings

own explanatory framework. At that time, as is still the case today, Leicester was interpreted almost exclusively in terms of the clarity of its functional arrangements, its direct (not to say brutalist) use of industrial materials, and a series of quotations of canonical modernist pre-cedents (the echo of Melnikov, for example, in the thrusting angle of the auditorium). To claim early Stirling instead for the camp of self-referentiality and formal innovation is provocatively counter-intuitive. It opens the work up to wider inter-pretation, and serves to con rm the idea that a complex work like Leicester will always exceed de nitive explanation.

The analysis of Leicester is reprised in the current volume, with added anecdotal back-ground, which makes it a better read, and newly drawn diagrams, which make the argument clearer. More important than chronology and pre-cedence is the method itself: Eisenmans dogged determination to read certain of these buildings against the grain of the received interpretation, through the primary vehicle of the cut-away axonometric diagram. This has its awkward moments. The drawings of Frank Gehrys Case Western Reserve project, which emphasize the roof geometries seen from above, seem inad-equate to the sculptural effects of an architect who designs almost exclusively in model form, and with a close attention to the experience of the building from street level. It does, however, yield brilliant formal insights in the analysis of the Jussieu Libraries, and reminds us that Rem Koolhaas, for all his engagement with architec-ture as social/cultural prop, is an architect of subtle and sophisticated formal invention. After all, would we really be so interested in Koolhaas if he were simply using architecture as an instru-ment of social criticism? Similarly, in his patient explication of the changing plan strategies for Robert Venturis mothers house, Eisenman reminds us that Venturi, although usually asso-


12

ciated with the semiotic capacity of the vertical plane, is a brilliant plan maker, whose buildings can stand up to extended formal analysis.

A nal point of reference, perhaps less imme-diately obvious; it seems to me that Eisenman has internalized Harold Blooms idea that, as an author takes on his predecessors, rather than confront a fully realized, mature masterwork, it is often the early work, or the slightly marginal and unresolved aspects of the mature work, that offer a kind of handhold, or a crack to open up the eld, and clear space for working. While Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth House and Stirlings Leicester Engineering Building are inarguably central to postwar architectural history, Luigi Moretti is a less obvious choice. To examine Louis Kahns Adler and DeVore Houses, rather than his better-known public buildings, is similarly counterintuitive. We understand Le Corbusiers Palais des Congrs in Strasbourg as canonical today primarily because it has sponsored several generations of work on the warped surface. In this case, Koolhaass Jussieu Libraries confer a retrospective canonical status to this previ-ously somewhat overlooked building.

But there is more here than a pursuit of the obscure for its own sake. Eisenman nds and zeros in on those momentsin well-known and in less well-known buildingsthat still offer room for working. Eisenmans canon is de nitively not a new orthodoxy. A canon usually implies looking back to validate historys great, untouch-able monuments. Eisenmans canon is instead anticipatoryit lays the groundwork for future monuments. It is alsoin contradistinction to the notion of an anonymous canon handed down from on highsomewhat idiosyncratic, and in the end, highly personal. For all that, it is surely not a teleology with Eisenman at its endpoint. It is neither a universal canon nor an individual genealogy. It is both the record of one architects intellectual trajectory and a method that sug-

gests other, future trajectories. These buildings are precisely where the possibility of the new becomes evident for the rst time, even if in a tentative and incomplete manner. This may be Eisenmans most telling insight. He presents here a collection of suggestive possibilities, of architectural problems opened up and provision-ally addressed, but always leaving room for the next author to complete the work, and create a new break, which will in turn open up new terri-tory for generations of architects to follow.

Eisenmans Canon


In reading Harold Blooms book The Western Canon, I discovered that the term canon has more mobility than might have been at rst assumed, and that it could help to structure my thinking about the fundamental project of this book, which is to address the necessary evolution of close reading in architecture. While The Western Canon looks at what consti-tutes canon in Western literature, some of Blooms various and perhaps subtle uses of the term help to clarify my thinking concerning this period of time. Bloom says in different contexts that canon refers to the experience of limits, which are extended or broken (74), or which are vital, original, arbitrary and personal (75). For Bloom, canon refers to authors and their entire oeuvre; in the context of this book, however, canonical buildings are singular works without reference to their authorial provenance. For Bloom, canon has centers; in this book, the edges and cusps are of interest. For Bloom, canon also has a heretical intensity (72), which is useful in distinguishing canon from its use in religious, as opposed to artistic or scienti c contexts. The idea of canon would refer to an operative dogma in a religious context: an orthodoxy, as in canon law. In science, a canonic patternsuch as canonical coordinates or canonical conjugatescontains an uncertainty. A canonical pattern in music is contrapuntal, repeating but also constantly changing. In the context of this book, the term canoni-cal encompasses the potential heretical and transgressive nature of ways of close reading architecture. If, as Bloom suggests, political correctness can be considered a polemic against dif cult art, then the canonical is a combination of dif cult and popular (56); in this book, it is the distinction between the easy and the dif cult in terms of readings that will be made. Finally, no less an author than Michel Foucault rails against the idea of canon

Introduction

Introduction

and replaces it instead with the idea of the archive, which reorganizes hierarchies. I did not set out to de ne or co-opt the term canonical for archi-tecture. In fact, even though I have attempted a provisional de nition here, this is not the purpose of what follows. Rather, the idea of the canonical informs my interest in reading architecture, and also explains the inclusion of each building in this book, which lays out their roles in de ning todays particular historical moment in architecture. If part of the meaning of the term canon is to con-travene its own accepted de nition, then its use here represents that possibility. More speci cally, the term canonical begins to de ne the history of architecture as a continual and unremitting assault on what has been thought to be the persistencies of architecture: subject/object, gure/ground, solid/void, and part-to-whole relationships. These concepts become canonical over time; therefore, in their attack on the canon, these buildings become canonical in themselves. But as a group, the build-ings herein do not represent a canon. Rather, the idea of the canonical begins to describe potential methods of analysis, which derive from an interest in reading architecture in a more exible and less dogmatic way.

While this is a personal selection of architec-tural works, the ten buildings in this book do not represent my personal canon. Rather, they were chosen, in retrospect, for two reasons: they rep-resent both a necessary evolution in the terms of close reading and an evolution in the nature of that close reading, from the formal to the textual and perhaps even the more phenomenal. Perhaps most importantly, these buildings not only challenge the canons of architecture, they also challenge our received idea of the canon of close reading. All of the architects discussed here represent different ideological, theoretical, and stylistic points of view, as well as different atti-tudes toward site, material, and program. What de nes them, however loosely, in my opinion, is

at the core of a postmodern practice, as distinct from a modernist practice and from the current state of architectural practice. This book seeks to locate the core ideas that form the basis for their argumentation. Ultimately this will be seen to involve both a rethinking of the reading strate-gies which sustained modern architecture and, at the same time, reiterate a demand for other forms of close reading.

***

Colin Rowe rst taught me how to see what was not present in a building. Rowe did not want me to describe what I could actually see: for exam-ple, a three-story building with a rusticated base, increasingly less rustication in each of its upper stories, and with ABCBA proportional harmon-ics across the facade, etc. Rather, Rowe wanted me to see what ideas were implied by what was physically present. In other words, less a concern for what the eye seesthe opticaland more for what the mind seesthe visual. This latter idea of seeing with the mind is called here close reading.

Each of the buildings discussed here requires one to see in a different way, particular to the building under consideration. While these ten buildings may reduce the effects or thematic of opticality, each in turn organizes a different demand on visuality. Visuality does not refer to a prima facie response to image, but rather to what is apparent and implied by aspects of the build-ings formal organization. Each of these buildings requires close reading. Close reading can be said to de ne what has been known until now as the history of architecture. But for our purposes here, close reading also suggests that a building has been written in such a way as to demand such a reading. If the rst question posed in this book is: close reading of what? then one of the answers proposed in the following chapters involves the

16

Introduction 17

close reading of critical architectural ideas. The readings proposed in this book would

not have been possible before 1968, with the effect of Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology and the idea of the undecidability of any single reading invoked therein. The use of the term undecidable in the context of this book is no mere wordplay between ambiguity, indeterminate, multiple and undecidable. The differences between these terms are crucial. Modernism was perhaps best de ned by William Empsons seven types of ambiguity. The idea of ambiguity lodges itself in a dialectical notion of either/or and determinate/indetermi-nate, which, as decidable characteristics, possess a supposed clarity which belies any need to examine their repressions. Undecidability questions the very nature of the notion of ambiguity itself. It is in this context that Derridas work remains under-examined in todays architectural culture, which has gravitated toward the more facile interpreta-tions of a Deleuzian schema of the multiple.

If since 1968, undecidability is an aspect of criticality, and since undecidability as opposed to ambiguity is perhaps more dif cult to tease out in architecture as opposed to say in literature, then today, more than ever, a close reading comes to terms with undecidability. The idea of undecidabil-ity makes it possible to look back and see changes in work which in turn demand a new kind of close reading, which, it will be argued, responds to the evolution of canonical in architecture.

It is rst necessary to distinguish between a canonical period in history and the period from 1950 to 2000 covered here. One way to study the discipline of architecture is to use a particular period in history as a master exemplar, to use the historical conditions of a particular period to stand for history per se. For example, instead of using history as a narrative structure, it is pos-sible to take the period in northern Italy from 1520 to 1570 to describe a canonical moment in the history of architecture. This speci c canonical

moment could serve to shed light on other such canonical moments in architectures history. It may not be necessary therefore to study many such moments to understand what is meant by a canonical moment.

Canon in that sense requires a speci c his-torical context, but it is not necessarily an expres-sion of such a moment, a Geist, or a comparable historicizing imperative. It could be argued that a canonical moment describes what could also be called a paradigm shift. But the idea of a paradigm shift does not necessarily implicate the critical content latent in the idea of the canonical. The pur-pose of distinguishing a canonical moment from a history is that while history provides a narrative ow to the discipline of architecture, it does not in itself provide a necessary basis for close reading and for opening the discipline to question its own history, and thus to alternative interpretations of that history.

As used here, the term canonical initially provides a possible basis for an alternative read-ing of what today constitutes the critical in archi-tecture. Rather than focusing on history qua historythis building was built at this time, used in this way by this architect, etc.the idea of canon in architecture also makes possible the recording of the changes in close reading, in issues that range from the formal to the textual, or from the phenomenological to the performative. Thus canon is a way of opening up a particular dis-course to reading its own history as something other than a narrative of facts. These readings are the wedge that allows postwar modernism to be seen, absent its former ideology and clichd rhet-oric, as imbued with other powerful concepts. If canon establishes a perimeter to the center of the discipline, then such readings suggest that a cri-tique of canon ultimately displaces this perimeter with a new canonic idea. It will be argued that the canonical will inevitably be a critique of what at any moment is termed the canon.

Introduction18

These ten buildings do not so much describe a history as they de ne the evolution of canonical works that eventually became known as postmod-ernism. Close readings that are other than formal or conceptual remain within and are at once canonical to a postmodernism and at the same time heretical to mainstream modernism. The term postmodernism is not used here to denote a style but rather refers to the period of time after modernism. Postmodernism re ects an attitude concerning ideas about architecture which are articulated as a critique of modernism and particu-larly of abstraction, modernisms dominant mode of close reading. Not all buildings in the years 1950 to 2000 describe this moment. The ten buildings here are read, each in their own way, through a different lens, producing arguments which, taken together, de ne a series of canonical moments that loosely identify some of the transgressive concepts of the postmodern period.

The idea of the canonical is often confused with the idea of a so-called great work. In the context of this book, canon is not necessarily a list of great work, nor is it necessary for a canonical building to be a great work. In one sense, canon and great work have little to do with each other. A great building may be just that, requiring no more than an initial look that de nes a single, directed reading, while a canonical building presupposes in this context undecidable, often diffuse readings as a necessary condition of the critical. As will be seen here, a close reading of a great building is complete unto itself, like Jrn Utzons Sydney Opera House or Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which requires little or no outside references in order to be read. This is not the case with a canonical building, which requires a reading forward to what the building inspired, as well as backward to what the building denoted.

2. Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House.1. Luigi Moretti, Casa Il Girasole.

Introduction 19

In this sense, great buildings are timeless, while canonical buildings are identi ed with speci c moments in time. For example, in the eighteenth century, Palladios Villa Rotunda was considered canonical because its close reading pro-duced an interpretation of his Villa Malcontenta. Yet in the twentieth century, Villa Rotunda was seen as a great work, and Malcontenta came to be called canonical because its close reading spawned an interpretation in Le Corbusiers Villa Stein at Garches. A canonical building requires study, not in and of itself as an isolated object, but in terms of its capacity to re ect on its particular moment in time and its relation to buildings which both precede it and come after it. In the study of the buildings collected here, each canonical work impinges on those works created in its wake, works that in turn rede ne what is considered canonical. Thus canon is intimately linked to and dependent on both the concept of close reading

operative at a particular moment in time and on the speci c works which at the time provoke such a close reading. The canonical both places in doubt previous work and demands new interpretations, not only of the individual work, but also of archi-tecture in general. In short, while the canonical building requires close reading, it also problema-tizes the idea of a great building or masterwork as a historically sedimented concept, without the mobility and exibility that canonical implies.

For example, one of the buildings discussed here is Gehrys Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve, which is neither as well known nor as great as his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. There can be little doubt that Bilbao changed the architectural face of the ensuing decade, and it is certainly what can be called a great building or a masterpiece of its time. The rst question is, then, why Case Western rather than Bilbao?

4. Louis Kahn, DeVore House.3. Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrs-Strasbourg.

Introduction20

While Bilbao is effectively the most well-known and popular of Gehrys buildings, this building was not so much concerned with reading and producing a critical stance on modernism as it was the re ection of a personal sensibility, albeit about the siting of a building in the city. Bilbao may be a great postmodern building, and its quality establishes Gehrys personal view of the object in the city, but it does not embody an argu-ment about its relation to history in the critical terms that characterize the Lewis Building. The argument set forth in this book considers the Lewis Building to be a canonical, as opposed to a great building, in that it organizes a demand for a close reading of a different kind, one that dif-fers from the formal and conceptual readings that dominate architectures recent past. The Lewis Building can be considered canonical in de ning more clearly its theoretical rupture with classic modernist readings than does Bilbao, because it refers back to the history of the discipline, espe-

cially to the plan of Schinkels Altes Museum, as a progenitor of the modern.

Also discussed here are the Adler and DeVore Houses by Louis Kahn, as opposed to his better-known, even seminal projects such as the Indian School of Management at Ahmedabad, the Exeter Library, or the Yale University Art Gallery. The Adler and DeVore Houses are an obscure pair of houses that were never built, yet they demonstrate certain of Kahns ideas in what was a crucial turn-ing point in his career. They represent a moment in Kahns career between the Trenton Bathhouse, which preceded these houses, and the Richards Medical Building; the houses represent a moment which articulated several possible directions for Kahns architecture. The Adler and DeVore Houses also contain the origins of his eventual career direction; in fact, his next major project, the Richards Medical Building at the University of Pennsylvania, evolves as a stylized Kahnian trope that is clearly derived from these two houses. The

6. James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building.5. Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House.

Introduction 21

same can be said for each building in this book, some more obvious than others. While individually these buildings may each be canonical, there is no intention in their collection here to de ne any so-called postmodern canon.

A canonical building also spawns subsequent interpretations by other architects as a commen-tary on that particular moment. For example, Le Corbusiers Palais des Congrs-Strasbourg both manifests his own critique of his earlier Five Points, and serves as a model for Rem Koolhaass Jussieu Libraries project. Thus each project dis-cussed here represents a moment in architecture in which there is an acknowledgment of the past, a break with the past, and simultaneously a juncture with a possible future. While a great building per-haps is self-suf cient, a canonical building is not. Its outward references, forward and back, make it contingent on external factors.

The difference between a canonical work, as de ned here, and a critical work is more nuanced. All canonical works are per se critical, but not all critical works are canonical. The critical can be considered a necessary but not suf cient com-ponent of the canonical. In this book, the term critical refers to the capacity to open up to ques-tioning problems which are essentially architec-tural. In the sense that it is used here, critical is a concept that distances the object or subject from the terms of the analysis at the same time that the analysis is also part of the subject or object. The important distinctions between critical and canonical are twofold: rst, a canonical work is a hinge as well as a rupture, while a critical work can function principally as a break with its pre-cedents. Canonical in this context refers to a rup-ture that helps to de ne a moment in history; it is a constant reevaluation in the present as to what constitutes such a rupture. Of course, a rupture can only be seen in hindsight, looking back rather than looking at the present. Second, a canonical work is time-bound: it depends on a particular

moment in history in order for it to be seen as a hinge/rupture in either the architects career or the architectural discourse.

A buildings function, structure, and typeits instrumentalityare not the criteria for understanding its importance in the discipline of architecture, nor would these be considered aspects of its criticality. All buildings stand up; all buildings function; all buildings enclose. These qualities comprise neither the central character-istics nor the thematic of the buildings analyzed in this book. Canonical buildings are not consid-ered canonical because they have functioned well; their instrumentality has never been the cause of their canonical role in the discipline. For example, whether or not Borrominis churches functioned well has not been a concern in history, because the functioning of the church was not necessarily its thematic. Rather, the representation of those functions in the artifact was important. Whether the mass could be heard or whether Easter ser-vice was crowded was not the issue for Borromini or for his patron; in fact, these matters have never been the issues for the history of architecture. Equally, very few people care whether Gehrys Guggenheim Museum Bilbao functions well or not; and many great museumsthe Louvre in Paris, the Frick Museum in New York, and otherswere not designed as such. There is no such thing as a good plan for a museum, because there is no plan for a museum.

If canon is commonly associated with the critical as a reference to prior work, canon is also commonly associated with the textual, that is, an internal critique or questioning of its own status as a narrative. For the textual, I am referring to the Derridean idea that texts manifest the leg-ible dimensions of ideas and objects while linking them with preexisting ideas and objects. In the context of this book, the textual will also connect ideasfor example, in the form of a diagram, an explanatory or analytical device aims to uncover

Introduction22

latent organizations. The textual becomes a tissue of marks that are no longer only represen-tational as the three types of sign identi ed by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: the icon, the symbol, and the sign. According to Peirce, the icon has a visual similitude to its object; the symbol establishes a visual convention for the relationship of the symbol to some object, and the index, which does not rely on the thematic of the optical, functions as a record or a trace.

Each of these ten buildings will be situated as the fulcrum of an argument that the building de nes, an argument that can be grasped through a close reading of textual, formal, and conceptual strategies. These will not always be the most well-known buildings, but they will stand for a moment when the relationship between the sign and the signi ed, the relationship between the

subject and the object, the relationship between form and meaning, and between instrumentality and discourse come into sharp focus.

The period from 1950 to 1968 could be char-acterized by a rethinking of modernist abstrac-tion. Thus the rst four buildings shown here, each in its own way, de ne and critique previous invocations of close reading af liated with mod-ernism. For example, while Luigi Morettis Casa Il Girasole demands a formalist close reading, it begins to introduce concerns such as historical references and materiality, which later become known as postmodernism. Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth House, while continuing Miess investigation of the column grid in relation to interior space, external surface, and the corner, is still the most abstractif not the most overtly modernistof the four buildings, but it also becomes a manifestation of Miess rst diagram.

7. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery. 8. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries.

Introduction 23

Le Corbusiers Palais des Congrs-Strasbourg requires a reading beyond formalist close read-ing because at root it is a reversal of his own Five Points, but more importantly because it introduces a centripetal energy as well as a cen-trifugal energy that moves attention away from the center to the periphery and thus away from any classical, centric, deep-space composition. The last of the early projects is Kahns Adler and DeVore Houses, which represent both a rejection of the modernist free plan but also deny tradi-tional part-to-whole relationships. Instead they introduce a play of readings, which ultimately are undecidable. This pair of houses is thus a hinge in Kahns career, but also a hinge between the rst phase of postwar building and the second, transitional postmodern phase in America.

The three buildings that characterize the second generation, from 1968 to 1988, exhibit

similar characteristics in orienting their critique of modernism toward a new realism, expressed in structure, materiality, and iconography. Aldo Rossis San Cataldo Cemetery presents a critique involving surreal or superreal shifts; James Stirlings Leicester Engineering Building reverses the conventional solid/void character-istics of material, and Robert Venturis Vanna Venturi House evokes the form of an American shingle style with European overtones. However, none of these buildings lapse into a simple phe-nomenology. In fact, the characteristics of these buildings have less in common with the pure mate-riality of Kahns Trenton Bathhouse than they do with each other in broaching the conceptual impli-cations of organization, type, and material.

The three projects in the last section of this book, from 1988 to 2000, not only require close reading but also mark suf cient changes in what

9. Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum. 10. Frank Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building.

Introduction24

constitutes the idea of close reading. This period begins with the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which included, if not the speci c projects of Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry dis-cussed in this book, at least their sensibilities. What links them is a concern for diagram, as opposed to type, but each architect employs the diagram in a different way. In Koolhaass Jussieu Libraries, the diagram is an iconic device where the building displays a visual similitude to the animating dia-gram. As such Koolhaass work begins to de ne another reading strategy, one that Jeffrey Kipnis de nes as performative rather than conceptual. In the performative strategy, the human subject becomes involved in the architectural object in a way similar to the minimalist sculptors involve-ment with the subject, the object, and the site speci city of the work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Libeskinds Jewish Museum also invokes the diagram, but to indexical ends, where the building marks a series of traces of its process of becoming. This organizes the demand for a close reading of not only the traces within the building but also the traces of its own origins in a prior project. It will be argued that Gehrys Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School also relies on a diagram that invokes a shift in reading from the formal or conceptual to the phenomenological. These three projects, more than the other build-ings assembled herein, best describe the dilemma of close reading today. Equally, it is perhaps too early in the architects respective careers, and in time, to assess which buildings in their oeuvre could be considered canonical, although it is cer-tainly possible to understand their effect on the idea of close reading.

In each case, the buildings herein disturb the complacency of the act of reading. The idea of undecidability suggests that readings are no longer necessarily dialectical. Ultimately it is not buildings but their readings which are undecid-

able. These buildings not only challenge the formal and conceptual conventions sedimented in the history of close reading, but also challenge what constitutes the persistencies of any architecture: part-to-whole, subject/object, Cartesian coordi-nates, and abstraction/modernism. In attacking the clichs of modernism, these buildings of the postmodern period remain engaged in a challenge to opticality and the metaphysics of presence. In suggesting that the challenge posed by one era becomes clichd in the next, this book offers nei-ther solutions nor instructions for contemporary architecture, but rather presents a slice in time that is part of an endless cycle of becoming, and as such an idea of in nite displacement.

1. Luigi Moretti, Casa Il Girasole. Rome, Italy, 194750.

One of the first critical articles to appear in English on Luigi Morettis Casa Il Girasole was written by Peter Reyner Banham in 1953. Banhams article, published in the February issue of Architectural Review, labeled Casa Il Girasole the de ning monument of Roman eclecticism, which was an eclecticism that Banham considered operated within the con nes of the vestiges of modernism. If the label eclecticism has different con-notations today, in 1953 it implied that Morettis work could be seen as a haphazard collection of classical tropes and architectural strategies lack-ing any single organizing principle other than having been assembled by Moretti in a single building. In this sense Banhams argument was pro-phetic, though his use of the term eclecticism, it will be argued here, was awed. It is interesting to note that as early as 1953, Banham proposed that modern architecture had already become a style, and thus he was able to cite Moretti as deviating from its formal and supposed social impera-tives. Morettis Casa Il Girasole would subsequently earn an important citation in Robert Venturis 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a citation that would become physically manifest in Venturis own Vanna Venturi House (see chapter 5). One important distinction between Banhams conclusion and a possible present reading is that prior to 1968, and the rethinking of the idea of a text proposed by Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology, it was not possible to propose a textual reading of what appeared to Banham to be mere eclecticism. Post-structuralism offered methods of analysis and composition as a new lens through which to under-stand complex phenomena; in certain cases, these phenomena defy a clear reading altogether, and instead represent a condition of what can be now called undecidability.

1. Pro les of Text Luigi Moretti, Casa Il Girasole, 194750

Casa Il Girasole

In this context, Moretti becomes neither an eclectic nor a modernist; rather, his work de es any easy categorization, even as one of the rst, if rarely acknowledged, postmodern architects. It is this condition of what can be termed undecidability that emerges in his Casa Il Girasole and will develop as one of the de ning themes of this book.

Completed in 1950, Morettis Casa Il Girasole incorporated the rst appearances of historical allusion in the wake of modernist abstraction. This overture to history is not, how-ever, why Casa Il Girasole is the rst building in this book. Rather, it is because Casa Il Girasole represents one of the rst postwar buildings to manifest a hybrid condition of both abstraction and literal gured representation. These simul-taneous yet seemingly antithetical positions are never resolved as a single narrative, meaning, or image. Rather, it is the dialectical relationship between the two positions that is questioned in a postwar climate that challenged the innate value of such a dialectic. Furthermore, it could be argued that Casa Il Girasole represents one of the rst buildings after World War II to embody the unde-cidable nature of truths in attempting the parallel use of both abstract and gured tropes. It is here that an idea of what might be considered a text in architecture might be introduced. While the abstract and the gured refer to what is usually

described as the formal, the distinctions between the formal and the textual in what follows will be seen to be important. The term formal describes conditions in architecture that can be read not necessarily in terms of meaning or aesthetics, but in terms of their own internal consistency. This internal coherence involves strategies that have nothing to do with the primary optical aspects of the aesthetic (proportion, shape, color, tex-ture, materiality) but rather have to do with the internal structure governing their interrelation. Formal analysis looks at architecture outside of its necessarily historical, programmatic, and symbolic context.

The term textual can be de ned in relation-ship to one of post-structuralisms key concepts in the Derridian idea of text. Derrida suggests that a text is not a single linear narrative, but a web or a tissue of traces. While a narrative is unitary, continuous, and directional, a text is multivalent, discontinuous, and nondirectional. In the context of this book, the idea of a text, like the idea of a diagram, helps to initiate a change from the idea of reading a work as a unitary entity to under-standing a work as an undecidable result of vary-ing forces. In my work on Giuseppe Terragni, for example, the idea of a text reoriented my analy-sis of Casa Giuliani-Frigerio from essentially for-malist interpretations to a more textual reading.

3. Casa Il Girasole, north elevation.2. Casa Il Girasole, south elevation.

28

Casa Il Girasole

Texts, therefore, do not deploy the same internal consistency as in the formal.

In addition to provoking formal reading, buildings can equally be read as textual, offer-ing different modes of reading, which may chal-lenge established architectural vocabularies. For example, Albertis superposition of the Arch of Titus over the vernacular Greek temple-front at SantAndrea becomes textual, because this mon-tage of architectural forms from different histori-cal periods destabilizes a singular meaning. The textual provokes a reading outside of the facts of an objects physical presence, or the underlying structures which govern its being; in the case of Albertis SantAndrea, the superposition of historical tropes creates this disturbance in pres-ence that takes the building out of the category of the conventionally formal. If the formal begins from a conception of presence that is both a linear narrative and what can be called xed or decid-able, then the textual suspends the narrative of presence, in which a hierarchy is implicit, and offers instead undecidable relations rather than a single static condition. It is this undecidability of relations with both historical and modernist tropes that Moretti invokes to produce an initial critique of modernism.

The abstract languages of cubism and futur-ism were subjected to a critique, which rst took

form in Italy through neorealist cinema and its unvarnished view of Italy and the detritus of ve years of war. Neorealist lms like Open City and The Bicycle Thief were a form of empirical existentialism, in that they represented attempts to move the language of abstraction toward a language more closely associated with what could be considered the real. Morettis postwar work, which also proposed a didactic view of architec-ture that now critiqued abstraction, evolved out of such a neorealist sensibility. However, it is to Morettis credit that little of his rst postwar work can be considered neorealist, just as it cannot be dismissed as eclectic.

The subtlety of Morettis critique of mod-ernist abstraction was articulated in his now much sought-after magazine Spazio (Space) in the early 1950s. Spazio followed in the tradition of architects little magazines, which began with Le Corbusiers magazine LEsprit Nouveau in 1920 and Mies van der Rohes magazine G, with Theo van Doesberg and El Lissitzky, in 1923. While Le Corbusiers magazine referred to a new spirit, and the G of Miess magazine stood for Gegenstand (object) and effectively addressed ideas about objecthood, Morettis Spazio made an important distinction between the object -thing and the object of containment as space or volume. An object can be seen and analyzed as

4. Casa Il Girasole, west elevation. 5. Casa Il Girasole, section, north-south.

29

Casa Il Girasole

a geometric abstraction, but space is dif cult to analyze as a physical entity because it is usually de ned by other things. While space is a concep-tual entity, its container is formal. Such a rede -nition of the modeling of space was among the issues Moretti broached in Spazio.

It was Morettis article Valori della Modanatura, (The Value of Modeling) in Spazio 6 (1952) that challenged the modernist concep-tion of space. The article suggested that surface had the capacity to be modeled in such a way as to create a dialogue between volume and at-ness, and therefore that the modeled surface could engage the affective potential of light and shadow. The article challenged the boxlike abstractions of modern architecture by raising the issue of pro le, which is articulated through both hard edge and gured form.

Pro le is the edge of a gurein other words, how a surface in architecture meets space:

the edge of a volume seen against the sky is a literal pro le. This means that all architecture, because it is three-dimensional, will have some sort of pro le. While in architecture a pro le is the edge of a plane or the edge of a surface, it is also either the edge of the containing surface or the edge of the exterior space in relationship to the containing surface of the interior. In either case, pro le tends to be the result of gured form, which in turn produces shadows. Moretti was not referring to a literal pro le per se but to a con-ceptual pro le, which was made thematic in the design. Moretti made pro le thematic in his work by suggesting that pro le becomes more than just the edge of a three-dimensional volume and instead serves to question the clarity of boundar-ies between edge and volume. In Morettis terms, pro le is not a narrative device, revealing shape or gure, but rather can be disassociated from any shape or gure; this disassociation is not

6. Casa Il Girasole, ground- oor plan. 7. Casa Il Girasole, second- oor plan.

30

Casa Il Girasole

merely a line but can be, for example, the dark edge of cast shadows. By calling attention to pro- le in architecture, Moretti suggests its role as a marker of undecidable relationships and engages space as an object for close reading. As hierarchy and singularity of meaning are made problematic, the rhetoric becomes textual rather than formal.

The idea of space as volume was illustrated in Spazio by Morettis series of cast models of histor-ical buildings, churches, and villas. Moretti broke with the conventions of architectural models by representing a buildings interior space as a solid volume and dispensing entirely with its exterior enclosure, structure, facades, or any other indica-tions of an exterior skin. These volumetric models seemed to deny a relationship to the exterior. Rather, they embodied space itself, conceptualiz-ing space by turning void into solid. In the history of architecture, analysis usually begins from the geometric, and from elements that can be touched

and de ned physicallylinear elements such as structure and wallsand subsequently broaches the spatial, that which is contained within physical boundaries. The history of architecture has been largely de ned by this progression from object or geometry to space. Morettis models inverted this convention by taking space, rather than its enclosing surface, as a starting point for analysis. On the one hand Moretti deals with the edge of the surfaceits pro leand on the other he engages volume without surface in these model studies. Morettis notion of pro le and space, as articu-lated in his volumetric models, raises formal and conceptual issues that refuse resolution as a single narrative or meaning. These models pre gure a radically new diagram of space that Moretti fur-ther developed in Casa Il Girasole.

The rst impression of Casa Il Girasole is a dynamic tension between volume and edge. The cut in the center of the front facade is the

8. Casa Il Girasole, third- oor plan. 9. Casa Il Girasole, roof plan.

31

Casa Il Girasole

dominant motif of the neoclassical, and if the frontal picture plane was a dominant motif of the modern, then Morettis Casa Il Girasole uses elements of each while breaking with both tradi-tions. The corners of Casa Il Girasole are sites of fracture: both the front and rear facades over-hang the main mass of the building as thin screens, separated from the main volume of the building. The corner is also shadowed by an undecidability as an assembly of concrete solids and voids. This develops from the idea of pro le that Moretti put forward in Spazio, yet the layered character of the facade creates a different understanding of pro le. Casa Il Girasole is no longer a building where pro le can be said to de ne a continuity, as would be the case in classical architecture where pro le and shape were one and the same thing. One of the important theoretical propositions set into play at Casa Il Girasole is that the pro le does not equate to the shape of the building.

rst postwar use of the aedicular motif, whereby a spatial division occurs between two solids, which nevertheless remain related across its void. Morettis use of the aedicule comes out of an historical tradition, from the Palladian window to Carlo Rainaldis Santa Maria in Campitelli. Morettis facade cannot be considered a pastiche of history, however, because he uses historical motifs in a new way. The aedicule divides the planar surface of the facade of Casa Il Girasole into two volumetric pieces which, though paired, are not identical, nor do their edges align across the void. The physicality of the facade is equally ambiguous, in that it appears to be a cleft volume when viewed frontally, but when viewed obliquely, the facade becomes attenuated at the edges, resembling a screen.

The tension between the facade seen as a screen and as a volume is further developed at the corners of the facade. If the corner was a

10. Casa Il Girasole, northwest corner.

32

Casa Il Girasole

Zumthors use of stone or wood. Rather, material functions here as notation, articulating difference in a manner reminiscent of Looss turn-of-the-cen-tury Viennese interiors. Loos juxtaposed marbles, granites, woods, metals, and stuccos to articulate their iconic value as individual materials. Looss interiors are not about the richness of the materi-als but their juxtaposition.

The lobby of Casa Il Girasole is a riot of materialsmetal, stone, glass, woodthat obeys no structural or compositional logic. No dominant material system can be discerned, and there is no governing color palette. The use of material is both notational and didactic, to call attention to the possibility of material as text. Material elements refer back and forth to one another, yet they do not represent anything other than the mere fact of their existence. While this could be considered a form of neorealism in architecture, in their refusal to refer to any external systems

Another theoretical proposition resides in the problematic of the corner: Casa Il Girasole does not present a clearly subjective view of the object, seen perspectively as Greek space, nor does it offer a frontal view as modern Roman space. It is something other, and makes an argu-ment of its otherness, similar to the manner in which Adolf Loos disarticulated the exterior envelope from inner volumes. For Moretti, the play of solid, void, and edge are simultaneous conditions. Thus Casa Il Girasole is one of the rst didactic examples of the idea of the pro le as breaking up the regular outline of the modernist box: the modernist envelope is confronted by its opposite in the idea of contained volume.

In modern architectures free plan, columns were usually the same size and shape as functional grounding elements. At Casa Il Girasole, the columns become gured, changing shape and size as they move through the building, signaling difference. The paired volumes and paired sets of columns speak to a formal order that is different from an abstract or neutral column grid. The pairing of the columns creates a play between symmetries in two different axes while at the same time disrupting an abstract nine-square grid and a plaid grid of servant and served spaces. In this, Morettis plan critiques the uniformity of space in the free plan. The importance of these two forms of notation lies in the breaking down of historical continuity, which for Moretti was the Renaissance villa, the baroque palazzo, and the nineteenth-century htel-de-ville. This is an evolution of the idea of the whole as a consistent relationship of parts, as would be the case with any idea of type to a condition no longer described by a dominant whole.

The materiality of Casa Il Girasole lodges another critique of modernist abstraction. Material here is used rhetorically, but not in the tradition of formal rhetoric, as material in and of itself, nor for its purely phenomenological value, as in Peter

11. Casa Il Girasole, front facade pro le.

33

Casa Il Girasole34

13. Casa Il Girasole, entrance.12. Casa Il Girasole, base of west facade.

patterns that deny their structural logic. The sculpted remnant of a human leg is incorporated into a window jamb as if a relic from an early classical sculpture had found its way into the fabric of Casa Il Girasole. This historicizing motif triggers a thought about the past, but it is not aimed at a nostalgic or adulatory remem-brance. Rather these sculptural elements are archaic and anarchic, as if the arbitrariness of everyday life, as portrayed in neorealist lm, informs what Banham might consider the arbitrary, whimsical, and unsystematic use of materials. The sculptural leg has no meaning and could be considered purely arbitrary, but this is an order of arbitrariness divorced from an expression of will, historicism, and expres-sionism. Morettis calibrated arbitrariness calls attention to its own condition as arbitrary in an internal referencing that is textual rather than purely meaningful.

Morettis Casa Il Girasole uses histori-cal motifs to make a critical commentary on the formal coherence of architecture. Historicizing

of material meaning, the materials function textually.

The stonework of the base takes on a notational quality in its use of false rustica-tion, varied patterns, and sculptural motifs. In Casa Il Girasole, the rusticated base turns out to be a play on rustication. Rustication in a Florentine palazzo follows a logic of mass: heavi-est at the base and increasingly thinner at upper levels. Countering this convention, the rustica-tion at Casa Il Girasole harkens back to Giulio Romanos sixteenth-century Palazzo del Te in Mantua, whose paper-thin rustication does not look like stone and whose keystones seem to drop out of their holding positions, questioning how the stone arch is structurally supported. The state of suspension between support and collapse, between heavy and paper-thin rustica-tion, calls the materiality of stone into question.

Moretti inverts the conventions of rusti-cation by putting heavy stones on thin stones, incorporating stony blocks within window open-ings, or cutting rusticated stone in chevron

Casa Il Girasole 35

which may explain one reason why Morettis work has gone almost unnoticed in the interven-ing years. Morettis Casa Il Girasole rewrites the conditions that suggest architecture itself, and which this book argues, relate canonic build-ings to close reading. While Morettis building transitions from the abstractions of modernism to a sensibility more closely related to neorealism, it proposes methods of close reading of a differ-ent kind, methods no longer tied to modernisms formal lexicon but rather to an undecidability of the text. Casa Il Girasole is the rst and per-haps the earliest exemplar of such a discourse.

references such as the aedicular motif of the facade and the rusticated textures of the base point toward postmodern practices, yet at Casa Il Girasole these belong to a wholly different order. Such conditions make Casa Il Girasole both formal and textual; certain formal coher-ences are emphasized and simultaneously dis-placed. In Casa Il Girasole Moretti does not thematize proportions, materials do not cohere into narrative, and the masses of the build-ing remain a series of juxtaposed volumes and screens, if not random notations, which replace the formal conventions of the plan. Many of the possible readings are undercut by other read-ings, and therefore do not provide any synthesis. If the notion of a text posits the breakdown of a decidability leading to closure or synthesis, then the textual in architecture suggests a breakdown in the notion of the meaningful organization of a single narrative.

Casa Il Girasole has many possible con-tingent readings as a textual work; it does not sustain a single, dominant view of architecture,

14. Casa Il Girasole, rusticated base of west facade.

Casa Il Girasole

16. The mass of the building is cut in two through most of its center, essentially creating a U-shaped building condition. The central void creates the initial appearance of an axial symmetry running through the building, but the implied symmetry is belied by the actual con guration of the side blocks, which are not parallel to each other. Rather, the volumetric sidepieces are splayed from the central axis of the building. In addition to marking this destabilized symmetry, the void registers as a vertical cut in the facade.

15. Casa Il Girasole in Rome sits on a nearly rect-angular block bounded by two major streets, Viale Bruno Buozzi to the south and Via Schiaparelli to the west. While the front facade is orthogonal to Viale Bruno Buozzi, the rear facade of the building is paral-lel to its street, thus deviating at a slight angle from the front facade. Other disruptions of symmetry that occur in the building include the central north-south axis, which is not a continuous axis and bends at the stairs.

36

Via Schiaparelli

Vial

e Bru

no B

uozz

i

Casa Il Girasole

17. The massing of Casa Il Girasole alludes to certain classical ideas: its tripartite organization com-prises a seemingly rusticated base; a middle portion that is accentuated in the facade as a glazed zone; and an upper zone that resembles a pediment crowning the upper portions of the building. The pediment is di-vided by a central cut that recalls a classical aedicule. The broken pediment is asymmetrical in that the right piece rises slightly higher than its corresponding seg-ment on the left.

18. The vertical division in the facade, as well as the facades extension beyond the body of the building, produces a pro le. The vertical cut creates the idea that the facade is volumetric, revealing the corner and inboard edge at its center. Yet at the outer edges of the facade, this presumed mass becomes an attenuated screen. On the upper three residential oors, the build-ings two long sides are fractured by three minor cuts. The building thus presents a series of conditions which literally and conceptually cut into the modernist box.

37

Casa Il Girasole

20. In Casa Il Girasole pro le no longer de nes a continuity; this contrasts with classical architecture, where pro le and shape were conceptualized as one and the same thing. Here pro le and shape are dis-juncted from one another; that is, the pro le is not the shape of the building.

19. The analysis of the ground plan reveals that the front and rear facades extend beyond the building base. Both facades are screenlike, but the front facade resembles a screen cleaved in two, while the rear facade hangs off an intermediate boxlike volume. Immediately apparent in the ground- oor plan are the two curved walls, which disrupt the axis of symmetry and appear to displace the staircase.

38

Casa Il Girasole

21. The facade of Casa Il Girasole breaks down the unity of the modernist frontal plane into a series of com-pressed layers. The complex articulation of these layers is apparent at the corners, which are no longer legible as singular entities. An oblique view demonstrates that the facade is not just a thin plane but rather is composed of three layers: a screen as the outermost layer, a void slot between the screens, and a glazing layer.

The void between the screen and the building mass articulates the edge of the facade as a distinct element, and creates what could be considered a gasket space especially apparent in the side views of the building. This layering, along with the deep cut in the front facade, further erodes the physical presence of these layers, since they uctuate between two volumes and a series of layered planes.

39

Casa Il Girasole

22. For analytical purposes, it is necessary to examine the columnar organization. Columns are numbered 1 to 4, from left to right, and A through K from front to back. Column line 1 initially appears reciprocal to column line 4, and column line 2 reciprocal to column line 3. This sets up an initial symmetry. However, column lines 3 and 4 relate to each other because they are skewed at the same angle from the orthogonal, while column lines 1 and 2 are related because they remain on the orthogonal. In column lines 2 and 3, the A column is a slab column. Columns 2B and 3B are also slab columns that on three sides still read much as columns. Columns 2C and 3C are different: 2C is a square column; 3C is a freestanding slab.

23. Other pairings involve columns in line 1 and line 4: columns 1A/1B and 4A/4B are thin rectangles. Columns 1C/1D and 4C/4D are square columns, which are slightly smaller in column line 4. In both cases they are attached in a way that makes them seem to bleed into an external wall poch. Column lines 1E/1F (4E/4F) and 1G/1H (4G/4H) consist of paired rectangles, which alternately extend out into wall poch or bend into a splayed exterior plane. Columns 2D and 3D, 2E-F and 3E-F, and 2G-H and 3G-H are each small square paired columns, except for the additional column beside 2D. In 2J and 3J there remains the slight trace of a column, provided by a slight articulation in what is otherwise a seemingly solid wall.

40

Casa Il Girasole

24. An organization of paired columns occurs from the front to the back. This begins with the freestanding col-umns 1A and 4A. Columns 3A and 3B begin as a pair with 2A and 2B as orthogonal and freestanding. There is no longer an orthogonal alignment between 2A and 3A. Rather, 3A is slipped toward the right while remain-ing the same distance from both exterior faces. Further pairings occur among square columns. In modern architectures free plan, columns were usually the same size and shape; they were ground elements. Here the col-umns have become gural, changing shape and size as they move through the building, signaling their internal differences.

25. The paired columns can be read as reinforcing the rhythmic progressions from the wider column group-ings in A and B at the front of the building to the more tightly paired groupings at the rear of the building. While this progression can be read in plan, it has little to do with the organization of the functional spaces. As evidenced in the ground- oor plan, column line 3 is where much of the wracking, splaying, and distorting is concentrated. This column line serves not so much as a reading datum as a receiving datum, not so much the static place where vectors originate as the dynamic place where vectors are recorded.

41

Casa Il Girasole

26. Ground- oor vector analyses. An analysis of the interior volumes following the column subdivisions allows one to track several vectors. An erasing arc or force (A) seems to push against the mass de ned by column lines 3 and 4 until only column 3C remains, but in a attened and distorted state. This erasing arc (A) is joined by the partial S-curve of a second curved surface (B), which is also dislocated from its former linear position. This conjunction of forces creates a gure that seems to have been compressed to the rear and expanded outward to the center. The bulging part of the gure seems to affect the alignment of the main staircase with the central axis.

These forces suggest two different ideas of form: one as the product of a vector coming from the inside and causing a convex form; the other as produced by a vector originating outside of the space, which carves away the solid to create a convex form. Space is simul-taneously positive and negative. The two curves play against one another, as the result of these forces. This is purposeful, typical of Morettis articulation of the active nature of space as carved away or compressed by a solid. The play between the carved out and pro-jecting space can be seen as two opposing ideas embod-ied in the same form.

42

Casa Il Girasole

27. The organization of columns, alternately paired and single, creates an ABABA rhythm that suggests a compression at the back of the building and a sense of extension at the front. The columnar relationships are both partial orders and symmetries.

The pairing of the columns also creates a play between two abstract nine-square grids and a plaid grid of ser-vant and served spaces. Morettis idea was clearly a critique of the free plan, where space was uniform.

43

Casa Il Girasole

Traditional rustication in a Florentine palazzo obeys a structural logic: heavy at the base, with increasingly re ned rustication in the higher oors. Moretti con-founds these conventions by placing heavy stones on thin stones, and by adopting a vertical chevron pattern for the implied rustication (d). This chevron pattern indicates that the rustication is not structural, but iconic. The stone base is rhetorical: it is not a Greek plinth, which implies a datum, nor is it in the modern idiom of piloti.

28 a-d. Certain conditions on the south or front facade on Viale Bruno Buozzi complicate a more traditional reading. The facade (a) can be read as a classical, vertically tripartite, rusticated base, fenestrated body, and solid cornice. However, once this general type is accepted, deviations can be seen, for example, in the facade (b) in which the middle zone actually sits on steel columns rather than on the base. There is an articulated slot between the base and the main body. Moretti exposes the actual structural elements between the rustication and the underside of the oor (c).

44

b.

a. c.

d.

Casa Il Girasole

30 a-b. The various types of rustication, both smooth and rough, at Casa Il Girasole deny a structural role for one that is notational. The diagonals of the chev-ron-shaped rustication reappear in the geometry of several textured blocks (a). The windows in the back facade register the cut of the front facade, and seem to compress the space toward the center (b) .

29 a-b. The side elevation on Via Schiaparelli compli-cates the readings already established on the front eleva-tion. First, the heavy rustication continues around the corner, again marking the line of the structural columns behind. The same paper-thin chevronlike stone pattern appears, echoing the patterning on the right front base element. Second, the columns are again revealed, this time in the horizontal slot that runs across the top of the facade. Moreover, the alignment of windows is partially determined by the implied line of columns running behind the screenlike plane of the facade.

45

b.

a.

b.

a.

Casa Il Girasole

31. Casa Il Girasole, second oor, axonometric view.

.

46

Casa Il Girasole

32. Casa Il Girasole, fourth oor, axonometric view.

47

Casa Il Girasole

33. Casa Il Girasole, axonometric view.

48

1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House. Plano, Illinois, 1951.

Mies Layout 02 08.indd 50Mies Layout 02 08.indd 50 4/9/2008 10:52:47 AM4/9/2008 10:52:47 AM

According to Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe lived by his aphorism Less is more. Some years later, Robert Venturi, in a reply to Mies, said, Less is a bore. While Venturi meant this as a pejorative comment, it resonates differently when read through Roland Barthess citation of the boring as a locus of resistance; the boring was a way to stand against the rampant consumption of art by a postwar consumerist culture. Miess less is more is a key statement for architecture; it makes its rst appearance in the Farnsworth House, where less is more in the sense that this is not an architecture of modernist abstraction, but one which provokes another kind of close reading. Of all the works in this book, the Farnsworth House is the most abstract, while seemingly retaining a modernist vocabulary and conception of space. But a close reading of the Farnsworth House reveals important deviations from the modernist conventions of the open plan and the expression of structure. Together these point toward what could be considered Mies van der Rohes rst diagram.

All houses are traditionally thought of as a unity. The Farnsworth House is a tour de force that denies this idea. From its detached and oversized entry portico to its pervasive yet disrupted symmetries, the Farnsworth House marks one of the beginnings of the breakdown of the classical part-to-whole unity of the house. While for the early modernists the house was often a place for the study of radical innovation, from Le Corbusiers two canonical diagramsthe Maison Dom-ino and the Maison Citrohanto Gerrit Rietvelds De Stijl Schroeder House, these were still single, de nable entities. The early houses of Mies were no exceptions to this attitude.

2. The Umbrella Diagram Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 194651


Farnsworth House

From his early Brick and Concrete Country Houses to the Lange House, Mies worked out many of his later large-scale projects at a resi-dential scale. But the Farnsworth House disrupts this cycle; it is no longer a single, de nable entity, and the little-mentioned detached entry platform produces the most poignant clue to this idea. Miess rejection of the part-to-whole unity is more subtle than Walter Gropiuss and Marcel Breuers obvious bi-nuclear houses, which are conceptu-ally two-thirds of a palazzo type. The Farnsworth House does not function as a fragment, but pro-poses another type of reading altogether.

Miess idea of buildingand in particular, of building a housecan be contrasted with Heideggers idea of dwelling as an object in a speci c place. Heideggers notion of dwelling concerned the rootedness to a place: site speci c-ity, the grounding of the subject, and ultimately the presentness of presence. For Mies, dwelling is an abstract series of conditions and, in the case of the Farnsworth House, the dwelling itself offers the opportunity to enact a critical reading of modernity. The Farnsworth House can be seen as a transition from Miess earlier work to his later work; it is a hinge between what modernism was in Mies and what will appear postmodern in his work. The shift with the Farnsworth House also sets up the difference between a scenographic, or

postmodernist, use of architectural elements to create a visual illusion, and the alternative use of the column and wall to provoke a critical reading of modernity. This confrontation, from what had been containers in Miess early abstract building denying the idea of dwelling, to containers that were no longer only abstractions, produces a diagram of a different sortone which is meta-phorically guredinitiated at the Farnsworth House.

It is the interplay between column, wall, and horizontal plane that marks the evolution of Miess thinking, beginning with his early houses, which emphasized the formal and organizational role of the vertical wall plane. The Brick Country House, for example, used vertical walls extending and pinwheeling out from a central vortex ( la De Stijl), while the later houses of the 1930ssuch as the Tugendhat House in Brno and the prototypi-cal courtyard houseswere composed of vertical planes which no longer extended out from the main volume, but rather de ned and enclosed space. The rst two houses, the Brick Country House and the Concrete Country House, were both load-bearing concepts without columns. These houses were essentially walls that did not enclose volumes in a boxlike rectangle; the space is fractured by the way the walls extended out into the landscape. Following from these two

2. Farnsworth House, north elevation, 1946.

52


Farnsworth House

houses, Miess Barcelona Pavilion introduced a new set of questions regarding the relationship of column, wall, and roof. The walls here are no longer load-bearing, rather the columns become the load-bearing elements; the enclosing elements are distinguished from the tectonic elements. The pavilion could be called an open plan, as opposed to a Raumplan or even a free plan, because the column in this space is conceived differently from Corbusian columns, which allowed for the free movement of enclosing walls.

The Farnsworth House is a transitional point that moves Miess idea in several new directions. First, unlike Le Corbusier, Mies had no diagram until the Farnsworth House. This, it could be argued, is an important distinction between the two architects. The Farnsworth House, however, sets the groundwork for a diagram, and in this sense it functions as an incipient diagram. Second, at the Farnsworth House Mies is no longer deal-ing with the corner or the column in space; rather, at Farnsworth he introduces the use of outboard columns, which rethinks structure in proposing the idea of the sign of the column. Miess use of the column suggests a movement from the abstract to the real: the sign of the column is a real column, exposed on the outside of a real oor slab. Thus the Farnsworth House poses two questions: one, the question of the representation of structure as

opposed to structure itself; and two, the disasso-ciation of the column from its use as a spatial inte-ger. The Farnsworth House is the rst of Miess many projects to follow that questions the truth of what is seen as structure.

Such use of the column can be related to Albertis critique of Vitruvius, which Alberti articulated in his De Re Aedi catoria (Ten Books on Architecture), regarding Vitruviuss three basic principles of architecture: commodity, rm-ness, and delight. Commodity was usefulness, rmness was structural utility, and delight was beauty. Alberti said that all architecture is rmi-tas because all architecture must stand up, and suggests that Vitruvius was stressing rmitas not in reference to standing up, but in reference to the appearance of standing upin other words, as the sign of structure. Thus a column or a wall has two functions: it stands up, and it represents the idea of standing up.

The three categories of signs proposed by C.S. Peirce are useful in characterizing Miess use of the column: the icon, which has a visual and formal similitude to its object; the symbol, which has a cultural and an agreed-upon conventional meaning in reference to its object; and the index, which describes a prior activity of the object. Peirce also is one of the rst to use the term diagram, which for him is an icon having a visual

53

3. Barcelona Pavilion, 1929. 4. Tugendhat House, Brno, 1928-30.


Farnsworth House54

similitude with its object. As a sign of standing up, the column embodies a double condition: a column is an icon that looks like a column, and it also is the sign or index of being a column. In the Peircian triad of icon, symbol, and index, a column is both an icon and an index. This condition of simultaneitythe column used simultaneously as a critique and a representation of structuredis-rupts a single reading and provokes both formal (as a representation of structure) and conceptual (as a critique of structure) readings.

These simultaneous readings of the column informed what could be considered Miess incipi-ent diagram. This diagram responds on several levels to two other preexisting diagrams in modern architecture: the Dom-ino and Citrohan diagrams proposed by Le Corbusier. The Maison Dom-ino illustrated Le Corbusiers Five Points as well as instituted an idea of the possibility of a spatial continuum in the horizontal dimension. The Maison Dom-ino presents a diagram as a hor-izontal sandwich of space, in that the oor and the roof are conceptually equivalent integers. Miess architectural development is in one sense a sus-tained critique of the Dom-ino diagrams notion of a horizontal continuum of space. The Farnsworth House proposes what could be considered Miess rst diagram: the umbrella, a critical diagram dis-

tinguished from those of Le Corbusier in that it makes a conceptual distinction between the hori-zontal oor plane and the horizontal roof plane while at the same time denying any horizontal continuum.

Miess evolution of the column section can also be distinguished from Le Corbusiers use of the column. In Le Corbusiers work, the column was a didactic mark that punctuated space in the free plan. Usually these punctuations were round, allowing space to ow freely around them. The Dom-ino diagram does not reveal much about structural intention, but expresses intentionality about the continuum of space, set up in part by the locations of columns, which are ush from the ends and set back from the sides equally, imply-ing a cut on both ends. Le Corbusier, for the most part, used round and square columns relative to their placement. If he wanted to stress the edge, he would use a square column ush with the facade; if he set the column back from the glass plane, he would typically use a round column. Miess columns are set back from the wall plane in the Barcelona Pavilion, but are also cruciform in section. The cruciform column section illustrates Miess position between Adolf Looss Raumplan and Le Corbusiers free plan: the cruciform stain-less steel columns de ne a series of cubic volumes

6. Barcelona Pavillion, plan, 1929.5. Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-ino, 1914.


Farnsworth House 55

in articulating the corners of each spatial unit. The chrome plating on the columns serves as a mirror, inverting conventional square columns: that which is typically solidthe actual corner of a space de ned by a real columnbecomes a mirror or a re ection of the space and thus becomes a void. The real column in some sense becomes a virtual column, even while it continues to de ne a spatial unit. For Mies, columns de ne and circumscribe spatial units; for Le Corbusier, columns allow space to pivot and act as a fulcrum rather than as corners. For Mies, the column and the corner become one didactic model, from the Barcelona Pavilion to the buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The position in space and the sectional properties of the column at the corner frames a conceptual discourse for Mies.

Yet at the Farnsworth House, the corner would seem to be a nonthematic element: the col-umns are no longer at the corner, neither gridding space internally nor holding the outboard corners. Miess initial sketches for the Farnsworth House demonstrate his intention to use the columns in a different way, namely outboard of the oor slab. It is possible to assume that the outboard columns are more of a structural expression, that the columns are functioning as structural elements. But this is not the case. This is the rst time that

Mies places the columns outboard. He seems to suspend the roof between the columns, suggest-ing that another strategy is intendedone which occurs in many of the buildings that follow. At the Farnsworth House, the horizontal oor slab and roof are framed between the columns, so the columns are no longer supporting the roof, but rather the roof and oor are slung like hammocks between the columns. Miess postwar work rep-resents a transition from the column as either load-bearing or marking a spatial quadrant to a condition where the column is the support of a suspension structure, in which the horizontal members are hung from the outboard structural columns and the overhead roof beams. This will lead to a subsequent development, in which the beams are articulated above and the roof hung from these beams, giving rise to what will become the Miesian umbrella diagram. The metaphorical umbrella is a diagram in which the roof and its appended columns seem to be hovering above a podium base. The Farnsworth House is the rst realization of this umbrella diagram.

The Farnsworth House is also perhaps the most didactic critique of the column and the wall as merely structural elements. This building has often been misread as an articulation of the principles of Le Corbusier because of its seem-

ten canonical buildings_peter eisenman

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