Post-Research Architecture

Transcription

1 Post-Research Architecture Gevork Hartoonian School of Design and Archite, University of Canberra Abstract Post-Research Architecture Any discussion of research in design involves many issues, including the crisis of disciplinary history of architecture, education, and the place of architecture within the capitalist system of appropriation and recycling of capital. Presenting a critical view of the state of architectural pedagogy, this paper will discuss issues involved in the main theme of this conference. If the instrumental vision implied in project based research in architecture is suspended momentarily, then the chance is given to suggest that, since the dawn of modernity, design has indeed evolved through constant re-adjustment of the foundations of architecture. What needs to be added here is that architectural research is carried out either in response to the internal demands of the discipline, or due to the pressure introduced by external factors; such as innovation of new techniques and materials, migration of new architectonic ideas from one region to another, and interdisciplinary exchange between architecture and other fields. The idea of research in architecture, however, has taken a different direction since the end of World War II, when architecture in most western countries had to re-think its internal economy according to the emergence of new technologies. These techniques, contrary to the ones architecture faced at the beginning of modernization, are mostly research-based and their subject matter is primarily concerned with the science of building. By the mid1960s, one theoretical implication of this development would be design methods derived from system theory. Another would be the position taken by architects who attempted to re-think architecture within its disciplinary history. Presenting the issues involved in architectural design from two divers historical periods, this paper wishes to argue that any critical discussion of research in modernity necessarily involves addressing the crisis of architectural pedagogy, and the impact of technification of architecture on design theories. In addition, the design methodologies practised in most schools of architecture warrant the following question: Would not a positivistic approach to design further alienate architecture from its disciplinary history tossing the art of building into the realm of knowledge based theories? Keywords: History, theory, criticism, architectural pedagogy 1.0 License to Design The following examples from two different periods allow an opening to discuss the specificity of research in architectural design. The intention is not to prescribe a recipe for design, in general, and studio teaching in particular. The aim rather is to demonstrate that design and research are not two separate entities, and that any attempt to address design from a scientific paradigm suggests that either research is exclusive to design, or else, design as practised in the schools of architecture or in the profession does not show any evidence of research. In either case, design is the subject to be addressed. The paper wishes to examine architectural design practised in two different periods of architectural history. The first three images demonstrate how architects would respond to a particular design problem during mid-fifteenth century Italy. The second set of images addresses a similar problem but chosen from a closer historical time, the early experimental houses designed by Peter Eisenman. The first example concerns the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi by Michelozzo Michelozzi begun in 1444 (Figure 1), and Palazzo della Cancelleria, (Figure 2). These images open a 1

2 Number 5, Chaoyang Journal of Design discussion concerning the courtyard typology, which was well known in the Renaissance though its genealogy can be traced in vernacular architecture, but also in the early Roman houses. Transplantation of this typology into the urban context of Renaissance cities begged modifications that had both tectonic and compositional implications. For Leon Batista Alberti it was appropriate to use porticoes with a trabeated construction system in edifices that belonged to influential citizens. Design problems generated by the use of the arched portico, however, raised a different set of issues. Consider, for example, the line where the surface of two facades in these images meets each other. In the Palazzo Riccardi Medici, following Brunelleschi s Spedale degli Innocenti, the architect bent the received facade type around to form a square. In doing so, Michelozzi left a major design problem unnoticed: that the angles at the corner of the courtyard meet over a single column, and that the windows above are placed too close to each other. This failure is visible in the awkward connection maintained between the two adjacent arches and the way they sit on the capital of the column. The connection is improved in Palazzo della Cancelleria. The improvement necessitated two transformations: firstly, the corner line is not perceived as a transformational line where architectonic elements move smoothly from one surface to another; it rather marks a line where two identical facades meet each other. Secondly, in the two identical facades, two L-shaped piers the width of which is similar to that of the arch hold up the arch. Paradoxically, the decision to continue the rhythm of the arched portico overrides the tectonic configuration that is essential to portico: the round column of the corner is replaced by a tectonic figuration that seems to have more to do with the experience of Gothic architecture. A move from columnar support to a combination of piers and buttresses is worth noticing. The situation becomes more dramatic in Palazzo Ducale designed by Luciano Laurana, (Figure 3). Here the meeting line of the two facades of the courtyard demonstrates a number of design resolutions. Firstly, like the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the corner support is composed of two L-shaped piers but with a half-column attached to its narrow end face. This configuration, according to Peter Murray is visually more satisfactory than Michelozzi s single column, and it also looks back to the entablature carried on pilasters which Brunelleschi introduced over the arcade of Innocenti. [17] Secondly, by attaching a pilaster to the front face of each L-shaped pier, the architect not only extends the space between the two adjacent arches of the portico, but it also presents a rhetorical composition essential for the humanist discourse on architecture. The two applied pilasters of della Cancelleria recall Leon Battista Alberti s Palazzo Rucellai where, as the architect wrote in De re aedificatoria, the column is one element along with the proper arrangement of structure, the choice of materials, its surface treatment that deserve the name ornament [20]. The juxtaposition of this column with the round columns of the portico indeed confirms the suggested observation that in their advanced design, the courtyard facades were conceived as four separate entities. This is not a farfetched claim: in the Renaissance it was common practice to adapt the classical temple front to the needs of the traditional Christian church. The separation of the face from the constructed form is a huge achievement in architectural history, extending its influence even in modern architecture. Variation on the theme of courtyard facades presented in these examples is suggestive of the extent to which design and its improvement in late fifteenth century Italy could advance. Design or disegno, to use Vasari s word, not only designated drawing, it also presented no other than a visible expression and declaration of the concept one has in the mind and which others have formed in their mind and built in the idea. [1] Aside from the obvious Platonic tone, Vasari s words aptly define design and its progress in those decades. Artistic progress was judged in terms of the work s quality to imitate nature, and the capacity to form beautiful elements for the work of art in the mind, and then to execute them. Two indexes could be extrapolated from Vasari s reflections on style and open a venue for further discussion of research and design that is more pertinent to the contemporary experience of architecture. The first index designates both objective and subjective aspects of the culture of building. It encompasses the body of work, both in the form of written treatises (architectural theories) and executed buildings, the totality of which embodies the disciplinary history of architecture. That during the Renaissance the culture of building was understood and 2

3 Post-Research Architecture implemented in design differently from what a modern architect would do, is obvious. What needs to be said is the formativeness of the idea of license in the humanist practice. Licentia or license embodies the anxiety that concerns the architects correct handling of conventions. How should design progress within a given convention and yet sustain freedom of individual expression? The question is still a valid one even today, but it played a critical role in the Renaissance when ornament was perhaps the topical theme, extenuated in its understanding because of the possibility of re-writing old architectural treatises facilitated by the invention of printing press. The scope of discussion radiated by licentia complemented both visual and textual elements. According to Alina A. Payne, reflecting on formal experimentation and the perplexity caused by the process of appropriation merged and called for a linguistic space where forms contrived by man as the principal artifice of architecture could be discussed, thought about, brought into a consistent and hence comprehensible set of relationships discursively, in and through language [19]. Thus, both the textual and visual aspects of design were central for any work attempting to have a place in the disciplinary history of architecture. The second index introduces a different set of limitations, most visible when architecture meets the demands of its time, both in terms of technical innovations and typological necessities. The three-discussed palazzos were designed with an eye on the issue of typology. In the Renaissance, most architects were convinced that the palace of business gets to be separated from the palace of residence, or, at least, if business quarters are removed from street access and located inside the palace or its courtyard. [8] Renaissance architects also searched for different languages based on the locality of a palace; Palazzo della Cancelleria represented the finest early Renaissance palaces in Rome, whereas the Palazzo Medici Riccardi is typical Florentine Renaissance. More importantly, the limitations were sought in terms of the demands assumed or posed on artists by historical time. This subject was so important for Vasari that his system of judgement became the ultimate confinement of license. Vasari s ideas were nurtured by the work of Michael Angelo for whom drawing was an important exploratory realm. In the Projective Cast, Robert Evan (1995) demonstrates the significance of geometry in the shape of building and in the shape of drawings of buildings. His observation is also informative for understanding the humanist discourse on architecture for which composition plays a critical role in architecture s realization. Though developed within the disciplinary history of architecture, licentia had to be modified by techniques and ideas developed in other production activities. 2.0 Whatever Happened to License The second example recalls the early experimental work of Peter Eisenman, mostly designed in the 70s. Though centuries apart from the experience of the Renaissance, these images underline the continuous importance given to drawings and models, to test different set of design ideas. Cardboard architecture [9], discussed by Eisenman, designates a moment in contemporary architecture when the conventions of modern architectural experience need to be re- evaluated. Again, and beyond the architect s intention, the work of the Five, in general, and the particularity of Eisenman s houses, should be discussed in reference to the culture of building and the state of architecture in post-war America (Figure 4). The intention is not to exhaust these subjects and their impact on each other. The obvious point to be stressed is the fact that research remained internal to design, though in modernity this internality is troubled by the technification of architecture; that is, introduction of techniques to the art of building which in the first place has nothing to do with the tectonics. In a retrospective glance at his own work, and in regard to recent esteem for diagram and its influence on design, Eisenman makes a contestable argument, though useful for any discussion concerning the state of research in architectural design. If it is correct to say that since modernity architecture had to adjust its disciplinary history to the forces unleashed by modernization, then the particularity of that historical awareness and its relevance to the situation of post-war architecture is best stated in Eisenman s following statement: If in the interiority of architecture there is a potentially autonomous condition that is not already 3

4 Number 5, Chaoyang Journal of Design socialized or that is not already historicized, one which could be distilled from a historicized and socialized interiority, then all diagrams do not necessarily take up new disciplinary and social issues. Rather diagrams can be used to open up such an autonomy to understand its nature. And if this autonomy can be defined as singular because of the relationship between sign and signified, and if singularity is also a repetition of difference, then there must be some existing condition of architecture in order for it to be repeated differently. This existing condition can be called architecture s interiority. [5] This long quotation was necessary because it reveals a number of issues pertinent to any discussion concerning research and design in contemporary architecture. Firstly, Eisenman addresses the question of the autonomy of architecture, a subject that was central to post-war architecture. Architects discussed autonomy as one way to avoid the experience of modern architecture, which in most cases was sought from a socio-political or functionalist point of view. To save architecture from the exigencies of modernity, architecture in the 1970s turned to look at its own discursive formation. While the Tendenza group in Italy [14], for example, pursued architecture in terms of typological and morphological studies, the Five maintained a formalist agenda. This group s position also differed from those architects identified with the Grays. Robert Venturi s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) opened the theoretical possibility to revisit the major formal achievement of early modern architecture in historicist terms. The Grays took semiological discussion of sign and signifier literally and made rhetorical composition, if not charging architecture with a new set of functions associated with civic architecture or onumentality. The Five instead emphasized the arbitrariness of the sign/signifier relation and attempted to exhaust various formal potentialities of the signified. To preserve the singularity of architecture, Eisenman contests, would mean a process that would displace form from its assumed necessary relationship to function, meaning, and aesthetics without at the same time necessarily denying the presence of these conditions. [6] What should be underlined here has a paradoxical nature: the advocacy for the autonomy ended in opening architecture to other discourses; semiology and linguistic theories in the first place [22]. What this means is that the singularity mentioned in Eisenman s statement achieves an absolute value, but not an empirical one. This much is clear from Mario Gandalsona s critical reflections on Eisenman s House X (Figure 5): In Eisenman s architecture, the process of design is process of research into formal structures and shapes, which do not exist prior to the design. At the beginning there is an idea that is both formal and conceptual, and the design becomes an obsessive search for the corresponding shape. [13] Eisenman s drawings and models are suggestive associating that which is architectural in architecture with the basic elements of forms, which until the House Ten, remained in the confinement of platonic geometries. The underlaying grid of these forms allows for a different idea of universality than the classical: Whereas the classical doctrine associated the idea of universal architecture with that of a characteristic [4], the grid at work in these experimental houses sustains autonomy of architecture by placing the emphasis on the elements of architecture and its compositional potentialities. Eisenman s cardboard architecture reiterated the formal analysis well known in the Bauhaus school; that the most complex forms can be analysed into essential elements shared also by the teaching curricula of visual arts. The singularity of Eisenman s analysis, however, has to do with his acknowledgment that architecture s diagram differs from those of painting and sculpture. Thus point, line, and plane were conceived, as the formal genesis of a form that in the first instance has no resemblance to the image of a house. These basic elements were seen as denominator of a field where many compositional possibilities would lead to an architectural form that is informed by the absence of any constraints including function, traditional aesthetics, social concerns and metaphors of machines, let alone the conventions which put certain limitations on the scope of the humanist idea of license. Another particularity of Eisenman s advocacy for autonomy has to do with his criticism of the ethos of humanism that he noticed Rossi s discourse on analogous architecture [7], for example, is trapped by. In doing so, and this is another paradoxical point in Eisenman s theory of cardboard architecture, architecture s autonomy was maintained by design methodology discussed by Christopher Alexander. This association should be qualified. 4

5 Post-Research Architecture Alexander published Notes on the Synthesis of Form in The book inaugurated rational and problem solving methods to design. The theoretical premises of his argument intended to avoid the simplified axiom that would relate form directly to a single function. Design methodology considers form as the result of multiplicity of factors (Figure 6.), justice to which could only be done by diagram analysis capable of solving complex problems. Alexander was addressing a broader theoretical spectrum of post-war America where architects had either to channel design decision-making based on historicism, or else, to utilise problemsolving methods and techniques, which had passed their test in American military industries and were now available to be used in other production activities. This was indeed part of the new positivism that Alexander and others found useful, especially when design involved decision- making concerned with environmental and regional issues. Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Alexander was also benefiting from the emerging criticism launched against the Bauhaus School. In the late 50s, both in Europe and America, schools of design like the Hochschule fur Gestaltung Ulm, and the Harvard School of Design [10], were looking for a pedagogical program that would surpass the Bauhaus principles. In his 1958 speech at the occasion of the Brussels World s Fair, the Argentinian painter/designer Tomas Maldonado said, a new educational philosophy is already in preparation; its foundation is scientific operationalism. It is no longer a question of the names of things, not of things alone; it is a question of knowledge, but operational, manipulable, real knowledge. [18] Maldonado and Alexander presented a vision of design, which would stress research methods and mathematics [15]. The shift was discussed and justified based on sociological and technical demands of the years following the end of the war. What is missing in both Alexander and Maldonado s paradigm is the disciplinary history of architecture and the search for a different interpretation of that history s knowledge beyond the discourse of historicism, a point of view evident in the early work of Rossi. In the absence of a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between design and history, and in spite of Maldonado s interest in information theories, the school s dominant position landed in logical positivism of design, which more often than not would side with solution rather than synthesis of ideas [11]. The need for systematic processes of design was seen as an intellectual project saving architecture from the intuitive and unrigorous approaches to design that prevailed in post war years. Also implied in these approaches is a shift from traditional roles and conventions as the domain of design through which the architect would reformulate the problem and seek a proper solution for it. According to Alexander, physical clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is first some programmatic clarity in the designer s mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to find some sort of pattern in them. [2] Instead of pattern language Eisenman reiterated the essentiality of point, line, and plane advocated by the DeStjil group during 1920s. Eisenman also intended, at least since the House Eleven, to look for diagrams, which would break the rigidity and logic embedded in the structuralist approach to cultural and linguistic theories [3]. His work in those years aimed to intermesh the operative and communicative aspects of design, the consequence of which was to loosen up the tight hold of grid in his later architecture. Among other consequences [21], the debate between Whites and Grays transformed the relationship between the profession of architecture and academia. Before the 1960s, the so-called masters developed their 5

6 Number 5, Chaoyang Journal of Design practice independent of the visions prevailing in the schools of architecture. At best the schools would follow the state of architectural thinking submitted by famous practitioners whose good intentions were already being questioned by the new generation of the situated [16] modernists such as the Tendenza Group in Italy, the Team Ten and Archigram in England, and finally the Situationists in France. These were a few of the major tendencies developing in the wake of the failure of the project of modernity in architecture. Since the debate, the protagonists of the Whites and Grays have conquered major schools of architecture in the Ivy League universities of America, promoting a design agenda and educational vision that conforms to their theories and critical practices. The profession, by which I mean the big corporate-oriented architectural firms of the late 1970s, had no choice but to follow the professors, whose theoretical work infiltrated those firms through the recruitment of young architects graduating from the Ivy League schools. After three decades, the status of the relationship between academia and the profession of architecture, at least in North America, has only changed in one direction: the professors and their design work have taken the lead in both the profession and academia. One could argue that this historical transformation, the takeover of academia by radical architects, is unique to America and whatever else one means by postmodern architecture, the term also defines the matrix of modern architecture in that country [12]. If the observation presented in this essay has merit, then any debate concerning the state of design taught at schools of architecture demands more than just adding research to design. Without wanting to exhaust the subject beyond what has been already said, it is enough to underline the essentiality of the idea of modernity for any discourse on design. That techniques internal to architectural design are empty of artisan practice says nothing but that crisis is haunting the disciplinary history of architecture. On the one hand, the eclipse of techne of the classical language of architecture, and the collapse of the idea of licentia has forced architects to search for conceptual paradigms that would endorse the autonomy of architecture. On the other hand, separated from the domain of construction, design process is left with no choice but to seek enforcing its own autonomy by borrowing ideas developed in disciplines that have the least to do with architecture. The challenge today is not to call for research methods connecting design with knowledge based theories. Having accepted the nihilism of modernity, the centrality of crisis in capitalism and the perpetual re-inventions of methods of production driven by positivistic logic, the task rather is to look for sites of research where the discourses and practices of architectural history/theory and design intersect. Reference 1.Ackerman, J., 2002, Origins, Imitations, Conventions, Cambridge: the MIT Press, p Alexander, C., 1964, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 15. Alexander opens his argument based on the necessity of logical approach to design. His conviction is based on the complexity surrounding contemporary societies. According to him, design decisions in premodern societies were easier and perhaps more successful because any design innovation would be tested against traditions and rituals. In modern societies, instead, involvement of many factors in the process of decision-making and the prevalence of relativism necessitate an established mathematical and logical system of decision-making. 3.Consider the following statement made by Christopher Alexander, there is a deep and important underlying structural correspondence between the pattern of a problem and the process of designing physical form which answers that problem. Quoted in Ockman, 1993, p Damisch H., 2002, Ledoux with Kant, Perspecta 33, p. 14. Damisch revisits the idea of autonomy in the context of Emil Kaufmann s association between the sharing principles that prevailed in the work of both Ledoux and Le Corbusier. This issue of Perspecta presents a number of essays discussing the autonomy of architecture beyond the ideas painted as the subject central for the architecture of the 1970s. 5.Eisenman, P, Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing, in Eisenman, 1999, Diagram Diaries, New York: Universe Publishing, p

7 Post-Research Architecture 6.Eisenman, 1999, p. 51. Here Eisenman is defining the ways his interest in diagram differs not only from the Bauhaus bubble diagram, but also those formulated by Colin Rowe and Rudolf Wittkower, both of which relied on an analysis of formal as a stable and a priori condition Eisenman s diagrams, instead, proposed the possible opening of formal interiority of architecture to the conceptual, the critical and perhaps to a diagramming of a pre-existing instability in this interiority. Eisenman, 1999, p Eisenman, P., 1979, The House of the Dead as the City of Survival, Aldo Rossi in America, New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. 8.Forster, K. W., 1976, The Palazzo Rucellai and Questions of Typology in the Development of Renaissance Buildings, Art Bulletin 58, pp For Peter Eisenman s discussion of cardboard architecture see Eisenman, 1972, House II 1969, in Five Architects, New York: Wittenborn & Co., pp The book was published on the occasion of Conference of Architects for the Study of Environment, held in the Museum of Modern Architecture, The book includes critical reflections on the work of the Five by Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton. For a comprehensive criticism of the Five work see, Manfredo Tafuri, 1976, American Graffiti:FiveXFive=Twenty-Five, in Oppositions 5, pp For a criticism of the work of architects educated during the leadership of Walter Groipus at Harvard School of Design see Klaus Herdeg, 1983, The Decorated Diagram, Cambridge: The MIT Press. The title of the book alludes to the visual and textual dimension of the design process implemented in the GSD during those years. 11.Frampton, 1974, p For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism constitutes the very dominant and hegemonic aesthetics of consumer society itself and significantly serves the latter s commodity production as a virtual laboratory of new forms and fashions, Jameson, 1984, Periodizing the 60s, in Sohnya Sayers and Andres Stephanson, The 60s Without Apology, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, p Also see Serge, G., 1983, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago: University of Chicago. 1 3.Gandalsona, M., From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language, in Peter Eisenman ed., 1982, House X, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., p Here is how Massimo Scolari spoke of the group in 1973: The new architecture s renunciation is actually a full historical awareness. For the Tendenza, architecture is a cognitive process that in and of itself, in the acknowledgement of its own autonomy, is today necessitating a refunding of the discipline; that refuses interdisciplinary solutions to its own crisis; that does not pursue and immerse itself in political, economic, social, and technological events but rather desires to understand them so as to be able to intervene in them with lucidity. In Hays, M. ed., 1998, Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge: the MIT Press, pp Here is how Kenneth Frampton characterized Tomas Maldonado s stress on mathematics: first on the creative and manipulative use of mathematical constructs in pragmatic design training, and second, on mathematical logic as the conceptual basis of design method. Frampton, 1974, Apropos Ulm: Curriculum and Critical Theory, Oppositions 3, p I am borrowing this term from Sarah Williams Goldhagen s coda in Goldhagen and Legault, R., 2000, Anxious Modernisms, Cambridge: The MIT Press. 17.Murray, P., 1971, Architecture of the Renaissance, New York City: Harry N. Abrams Inc., p Maldonado, T., New Developments in Industry and the Teaching of the Designer, in Joan Ockman, edited, 1993, Architecture Culture , New York: Rizzoli Publications Inc., p The statement down plays the aesthetic, visual, and manual training methods at work since the inception of the Bauhaus, if not the arts and craft movement advocated by William Morris and others. 19.Payne, A., 1999, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 7. 7

8 Number 5, Chaoyang Journal of Design 20.Rykwert, J., 1976, Inheritance or Tradition, Architectural Design Profile, 49, p. 3. According to Peter Murray, Alberti took the initiative of using pilasters applied to the surface of walls from the Colosseum. 21.See the entire issue of Perspecta 23, 2000, especially Peggy Deamer, 2000, Structuring Surfaces: The Legacy of the Whites, pp This was a common theoretical practice in the 60s, first formulated by thinkers outside architecture and then introduced into architecture through the semiological approach to architectural design. For the latter case see Diana Agrest, 1976, Design versus Non-Design, Oppositions 6, pp In philosophical discourse mention should be made of Michel Foucault s argument in the Archaeology of Knowledge, and Althusser s criticism of the reductionist Marxism. Following Althusser s discourse on ideology, Agrest contested that design could be informed by plurality of information developed outside of architecture s attempt to cultivate its own autonomous techniques. Her argument went beyond those who would narrow the cultural dimension of architecture mainly to building s reflection of the spirit of culture as was discussed by the advocates of the international style. On the importance of the linguistic theories for architecture of the early 1970s, see Gandelsona, M., 1973, Linguistics in Architecture, Casabella 374, pp