Thresholds

MIT LIBRARIES

MAR 2 2 Z002

ROTCH

'iin

t?ii^

rfeui

Editors

Zeynep E. Celik
Aliki M. Hasiotis

Managing Editor

Carl Solander

Advisory Board

Mark Jarzombek, chair
Stanford Anderson

Dennis Adams
Martin Bressani
Jean-Louis Cohen
Charles Correa
Arindam Dutta
Diane Ghirardo
Ellen Dunhann-Jones
Robert Haywood
Hasan-Uddin Khan
Rodolphe el-Khoury
Leo Marx
Mary McLeod
Ikenn Okoye
Vikram Prakash
Kazys Varnelis
Cherie Wendelken
Gwendolyn Wright
J. Meejin Yoon

Cover Image

An Te Liu, Exchange, from an exhibition titled "Condition"
at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, 2001.
®An Te Liu and Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery.

thresholds 23

deviant

Correspondence
thresholds

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Architecture, 7-337
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
thresh@mit,edu
http://architecture.mit.edu/thresholds/

Editorial Policy

thresholds is published and distributed biannually in January and
June by the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, thresholds attempts to print only original
material. No part of thresholds may be photocopied or distributed
without written authorization.

Opinions in thresholds are those of the authors alone and do not
represent the views of the Department of Architecture at M.I.T. or
the individual editors.

Manuscripts for review should be no more than 2,500 words, sub-
mitted in duplicate and in accordance with The Chicago Manual of
Style. Responses to thresholds articles should be no more than
300 words and should arrive by the deadline of the following issue.

Thanks to

John Christ, Leonardo Diaz, Erdem Erten, James Forren, Christine
Caspar, Patrick Haughey, Zachary Hinchliffe, Janna Israel,
Tonghoon Lee, Andrew Marcus, Robert Morgan. Tim Morshead,
Adnan Morshed, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Matt Simitis, Tracy Taylor,
Florian Urban, Kirsten Weiss, and Katharine Wheeler Borum for edi-
torial, design, and proofreading assistance.

We are grateful to Jack Valleli and Anne Rhodes for their support.
Special thanks to Stanford Anderson and Mark Jarzombek.

thresholds 23

' Copyright Fall 2001

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ISSN: 1091 71 IX

Printing

Printed by Belmont Printing, Massachusetts. Body text set in Univers
type; titles set in Orator: digitally published using Quark XPress.

Zeynep E. Celik 4

Introduction

Adnan Morshed 6
A Tale of Two Symbols

Arindam Dutta 10

Norming Pedagogy

Rodolphe el-Khoury 16
Between Air and Space:
Prologue to An Te Liu's Exchange

Mine Ozkar 24
Anarchic Uncertainty:
The Constructive Role of the Deviant in Creativity

Kennedy & Violich Architects 30

Drywall: a/Material Surface

Robert Haywood 36
Robert Gober's Virgin and Drain

Mary Lou Lobsinger 44
Monstrous Fruit:
The Excess of Italian Neo-Liberty

Normal Group for Architecture 52

Hotel Normal

Kirsten Weiss 58
Recycling the Image of the Public Sphere in Art

Jasmine Benyamin 64
"Stuff":
Gregory Crewdson's Gaze upon the Domestic Sublime

Scott Duncan 68

Panelak

Sunil Bald 74
In Aleijadinho's Shadow:
Writing National Origins in Brazilian Architecture

Katarina Bonnevier 82
Theatrical Devices

J. Meejin Yoon 86

Between Bodies and Walls

David Gissen 90
Is There a Jewish Space?
Jewish Identity beyond the Neo-Avant-Garde

Mark Jarzombek 96
The Getty Kouros:
From History to "History" and Back

Contributors 99
Call for Submissions 100

Karl Blossfeldt. Ferns III, working collage in prepara-
tion for the composition of the final photograph.

1920s.

a /gELIK

ZEYNEP E. gELIK
INTRODUCTION

It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by
organic disposition to "expand" his Individuality In
crime, and just as little can It be expected of us to
permit the degenerate artist to expand his Individ-
uality In Immoral works of art. The artist who
complacently represents what Is reprehensible,
vicious, and criminal approves of It, perhaps glori-
fies It, differs not In kind, but only In degree, from
the criminal who actually commits It.

Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1895.

Attempts to Identify, analyze, and classify criminal types by
measuring their deviation from a norm certainly existed prior
to Max Nordau's writings.' However, Nordau's widely read
book Entartung (1892; trans. Degeneration) was crucial in
popularizing the view that the modernist artist was a social-
ly deviant type produced by the same conditions that
brought into being sadism, anarchism, and hysteria. ^
Nordau's vitriolic attack on modernist art and literature thus
inextricably weaved together modernism and deviance. As
such, It can be said to have prefigured one of the dilemmas
of avant-gardlst modernism In the twentieth century: on the
one hand, modernism's need to formulate itself as a deviant
act upon what it conceived as the norm; on the other hand,
its disgust with deviance and a concomitant desire to order,
regulate, and clean.

Over a century later. It is not sufficient to dismiss Nordau's
late nineteenth-century response as being simply anti-mod-
ernist. At a time when modernity Is being subjected to rig-
orous critiques both In architecture and in other fields, it Is
important to remember that a fascination with deviance has
always been Inseparable from a desire to eliminate it. Today
there seems to exist more willingness to attend to the
deviant instance as an opportunity to challenge the gener-

ality of norms. But the uncritical celebration of deviance
does not guarantee freedom from the norms from which the
deviant is imagined to have escaped.

Hence, despite the titillating ring of the word "deviant," this
Issue of Thresholds is equally concerned with those forms
that present themselves as normal. Many articles published
here focus their critical energies on extreme cases in which
the most normal Instance is found to have transformed
itself Into the most deviant. Rodolphe el-Khoury, for exam-
ple, takes cues from the work of the young artist An Te Liu
to investigate the perverse extremes of the hygienic man-
date of modern urbanism. Sheila Kennedy experiments with
the most generic of building materials, drywall, to produce
unexpected architectural conditions. In his analysis of a
twentieth-century re-publishing of a nineteenth-century
text, Sunll Bald illustrates how narratives of deviance can
be utilized by the institutions of a modern state to promote
a nationalist rewriting of history. Adnan Morshed reminds
us of the potential for inversion latent in modernist Icons. In
each instance, the deviant is not that which simply departs
from the norm — a different species, so to speak — but has
the intriguing quality of always carrying within itself that
which appears to be Its opposite.

Notes

' For example, Cesare Lombroso at the Universitv of Turin. had attempted to
link criminal psychopathology to the physical defects of criminals. Nordau
acknowledges his indebtedness to Lombroso on several occasions.

2 Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895). Onginallv pub-
lished as Entartung in German in 1892,

CELIK/ 5

6 /MORSHED

ADNAN MORSHED
A TALE OF TWO SYMBOLS

It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age
of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we
had everything before us, we had nothing before
us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were
all going direct the other way — in short, the peri-
od was so far like the present period, that some
of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being
received, for good and evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.

From an urban historian's viewpoint, September 1 I's lethal
combination of jumbo airplanes and skyscrapers calls into
question the meaning of these symbols. When the airplane
and the skyscraper were turned into killing machines, what
happened to their ascensional functions masquerading as
nothing less than twentieth-century modernity itself? Did
the collision of these two symbols hint at the collapse of
their idealized meanings? Or did nostalgia and patriotism in
fact reinforce the ideologies of progress formerly embodied
in the airplane and the skyscraper? Was the terrorists'
attack predicated on their belief that these were symbols of
domination that could be put on a fatal collision course
transforming them into the conveyors of a subversive polit-
ical statement? I pose these questions as an operating
framework primarily to look at two compelling urban images
with a view to understanding the semantic zigzag of these
two potent symbols (Figs. 1, 2).

MORSHED/ 7

During the 1920s, the juxtaposition of these two soaring
icons of the modern world — the airplane and the sky-
scraper—almost literally marked the ascendancy of New
York, to paraphrase John Dos Passes, as the "capital" of
the world J It was the so-called "golden age" of aviation
and skyscrapers, both technologies striking a chord with
the popular imagination, as well as changing the ways peo-
ple experienced and viewed the physical world. In its own
right, each symbol reinforced the American belief in tech-
nological advancement. But it was their synthesis — an air-
plane flying over Manhattan's vertical urban form — that
became the trope par excellence for the gospel of progress.
Witness the caption to such an image: "Almost a symbol of
civilization is this picture — the fantastic towers of a great
city rearing from the earth, and above them a machine that
flies — new ways of living and traveling. "2 The image on the
back cover of Le Corbusier's book Aircraft (1935) — an air-
plane flying over Manhattan — retained this doubly operative
modernist myth, as Le Corbusier's gaze simultaneously
focused on the two quintessentially modern phenomena:
the airplane (new forms of mobility) and the vertical city
(new forms of living). Such a double vision revealed not
only the consistency of a dialogue between these two phe-
nomena but also the synergic functioning of their symbol-
ism in instilling the notion of progress into modern life (Fig.
31.3

The combination of the airplane and skyscraper provided a
cultural telescope for multifaceted Utopian imaginings and,
eventually, for focusing on the very ideologies of progress.
Avant-garde urbanists, architects, science-fiction illustra-
tors, film directors, and novelists flitted around this idea to
sing their panegyric to progress. The architect/delineator
Hugh Ferriss narrated his Metropolis of the 1 920s as noc-
turnal airplane journeys between and above the great
canyons of the vertical city (Fig. 4). Although pessimistic in

its depiction of the modern world, the German silent film
Metropolis (1926), reportedly inspired by its director Fritz
Lang's visit to New York in 1 924, employed futuristic urban
images in which airplanes navigated skyscraper cities. The
first science-fiction magazine. Amazing Stories (1926),
transformed Manhattan into a Utopian vertical city swarm-
ing with aerial vessels. And when in King Kong (1933), the
giant gorilla (depicted as a sign of barbarism) attempted to
tear apart the Empire State Building, the symbolic citadel of
capitalism, it was airplanes that flew in as the building's
guardian angels (Fig. 5).

Since the end of World War II, much criticism has been
directed at the semiology of modern icons, including the air-
plane and the skyscraper. Such criticism has often been
based on suspicions of modernity's promises of progress
and emancipation. Nonetheless, these two ubiquitous phe-
nomena of modernity have not ceased to offer a symbolic
pair, enabling ever-newer modes of moving and living in a
capitalist world. In fact, the recent phenomenon of so-called
space tourism and the obsessed global competition to build
the "world's tallest building" form a twenty-first-century
analogue of the earlier pair that animated the modernists of
the 1920s.

8 /MORSHED

5 "

But, as Charles Jencks famously suggested, ideologies can
die an abrupt death: "Modern Architecture died in St Louis,
Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm when the infamous
Pruitt-lgoe scheme [was) given the final coup de grace by
dynamite.'"* Is the world as black and white as Jencks
wants us to believe? Did the symbolism of the airplane/sky-
scraper coupling die a violent death at 8.45 a.m. on
September 11, 2001? Did the silhouetted United Airlines
Flight 175 speeding ominously toward the South Tower of
the World Trade Center subvert the idealized meanings of
the two most powerful symbols of the twentieth century?
The demolition of Pruitt-lgoe was more or less a socially
sanctioned choice, compelled by aesthetic views on inner-
city spatial pathologies, whereas the violent collisions of air-
planes and the twin towers were intended — following the
twisted inner logic of terrorism — as much to stab the heart
of their symbolism as to inflict pain on American con-
sciousness.

Hinged on an imagined "death" of the twin towers, the
post-attack media have spun September 1 1 for various
eschatological prophecies, such as "the world has forever
changed," "the end of civil liberties," and "the defining
moment." But can it be that simple? Alongside the immense
sense of tragedy, the question that also haunts us now is
how the discourse of symbolism straddles the cultural
meanings of death and resurrection. (Many have demanded
that the twin towers be rebuilt exactly the way they were.)5
Having ironed out symbolism's discursive contours, we are
precariously left with stark binary choices: it is either a
lamented "death" of the towers or their triumphal rebuild-
ing. The response of artists Paul Myoda and Julian

LaVerdiere — two light beams rising from Ground Zero refill-
ing the void with incandescent "towers Ithatl are like ghost
limbs, we can feel them even though they're not there any-
more"—cogently articulated the nebulous correspondence
between the towers' death and their anticipated rebuilding. ^
The title of my essay consciously conjures up Charles
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In the opening sen-
tence of the novel, Dickens presents the idea of liminality,
in which the simultaneity of "the best of times" and "the
worst of times" defines the sublime sentimentality of the
French Revolution. Preposterous as it may sound, the post-
September 1 1 culture resonated with similar binary senti-
mentality that has blurred our view of the complex links
between death and resurrection and of the fact that sym-
bolism cannot die a simple Jenckian death. We will proba-
bly know the matrix of the airplane, the skyscraper, and
September 1 1 only retrospectively when we reposition our-
selves outside of a Dickensian liminal time.

Notes

1 would like to thank Mark Jarzombek, John Christ, Jorge Otero-Patlos. Kirsten
Weiss, and Zeynep E. Celik for engaging discussion on the theme of this paper.

^ John Dos Passes. The Big Money: USA, vol. 3 [New York: Random House,
Modern Library, 1937); 63-65.

2 Harry Guggenheim. The Seven Skies (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930):
36.

■^ Not all were as sanguine as Le Corbusier and other modernists, though. H. G.
Wells's The War in The Air (1908), for example, centered on the aerial bom-
bardment of New York City by German zeppelins.

^ Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture INew York:
Rizzoli, 119771 1991): 23.

^ Robert Stern, for instance, has demanded: "We must rebuild the towers. They
are a symbol of our achievement as New Yorkers and as Americans, and to put
them back says that we cannot be defeated. The skyscraper is our greatest
achievement architecturally speaking, and we must have a new, skyscraping
World Trade Center." See The New Yorl< Times Magazine (September 23,
2001): 81,

^ "Filling the Void, A Memorial by Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere," The New
Yorl< Times Magazine (September 23, 2001): 80.

Illustrations

Fig 1: United Airlines Flight 175 speeding towards the South Tower of the
Word Trade Center on September 1 1 , 2001 .

Fig. 2: Airplane/Manhattan. Published in Harry F. Guggenheim, The Seven
Skies (New York. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930): 36.

Fig. 3: Airplane/Manhattan. Published on the back cover of Le Corbusier,
Aircraft (New York: Universe Books, 119361 1988).

Fig. 4: Hugh Ferriss. Overhead Traffic-Ways. 1929.

Fig. 5: Film still from King Kong, 1933.

MORSHED,'

ARINDAM DUTTA
NORMING PEDAGOGY

Because he has no respect for the material he
teaches, he makes no impression on his students.
They lool< through him when he speaks, forget his
name. Their indifference galls him more than he
will admit. Nevertheless, he fulfils to the letter his
obligations towards them, their parents, and the
state. Month after month he sets, collects, reads,
and annotates their assignments, correcting lap-
ses in punctuation, spelling and usage, interrogat-
ing weak arguments, appending to each paper a
brief, considered critique.

He continues to teach because it provides him
with a livelihood; also because it teaches him
humility, brings it home to him who he is in the
world. The irony does not escape him: that the
one who comes to teach learns the keenest of
lessons, while those who come to learn learn
nothing. It is a feature of his profession on which
he does not remark to Soraya Ithe prostitute he
frequents]. He doubts there is an irony to match it
in hers.

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999.

In Disgrace, an allegory of the fate of the white man in the
modern South Africa, David Lurie, an erstwhile Professor of
Modern Languages, is thrown out of the university owing to
a sexual scandal. Lurie's private disgrace, Coetzee sug-
gests, is prefigured in the public fall of his university disci-
pline, Classics and Modern Languages, into the non-disci-
pline of "Communications" under "the great rationalization"
effected in the last decade. Language, born in Lurie's view
out of the emptiness of the soul, suffused thereby with
desire and risk, is now defined by university administrators
by an anodyne platitude: "Human society has created lan-
guage in order that we may communicate our thoughts,
feelings, and intentions to each other." Lurie finds this def-
inition preposterous; hence his disaffection with teaching.

Disgrace is also an allegory of the fate of the humanities in
the era of late capital. In the frenzy of political correctness
and the vengeance of affirmative action roused in the wake
of his aot, he is asked to own up to his moral turpitude in
seducing a young female graduate student, followed by the
equally anodyne retributions: "Sensitivity training,"
"Community service," "Counseling." Refusing to "repent" —
an act commensurate not with the secular world of crimes
and law but markedly religious in its associations — Lurie
resigns. Lurie's resignation is also an assertion of his singu-
larity against generalities. He emphasizes: "There are no
overtones in this case." A "dirty old man" who finds him-
self cast as deviant in the city, seeking to satisfy desires
outside the proper behavioral norms assigned to his age, he

If architectural historiography bears within itself an equally
preposterous set of anodyne platitudes, its fate is surely a
different one, since "the great rationalization," the servitude
of theoretical constructs to the caprices of professional
practice, can be placed right at the origin of its development
rather than its end. Architectural historiography, forever
consigned to its charge of explicating wliat arcfiitects do,
finds itself perpetually obsessed with providing various
accounts of space while the principal task of any history is
to provide an account of time. Let me clarify this: architec-
tural historians, consciously or unconsciously, do see their
work as narratives of time. However, working within pro-
fessional schools rather than as part of the humanities, their
status within the pedagogical field is largely contingent
upon providing accounts — indeed case studies — of space.
The place of theory remains a conversational (or "commu-
nicative" in the above sense) gloss on the extra-theoretical
brilliance of the masters.

10 /DUTTA

In its provenance, the status or place of theory and history
in architecture can be defined by its origins in the "survey"
course. The survey of the practice of the ancients had
always been the principal device through which architecture
defined itself as an intellectual pursuit and a high art as
opposed to a lowly trade. If one reviews the history of his-
tory teaching in the nineteenth-centuryarchitectural acade-
my, then the professionalization of the architect in legal
terms as an adjunct of the industrial revolution is marked by
a commensurate professionalization of the architectural his-
torian. The locus of the architect in the age of capital is
principally characterized not so much as a codification of
responsibilities but an increased definition of entitlements.
While these entitlements (notions of originality and genius,
for example) remain affiliative and associative, in the field
of culture rather than particularly legal in character, these
privileges are garnered only at the price of self-imposed con-
straints. Thus, as architecture moves from an apprentice-
based pedagogy into the university as an adjunct of the
humanities, accepting norms of academia such as examina-
tions and certifications, this formalization by assimilation
ironically secures the secession of architectural historiogra-
phy from professional practice. The transition from the dilet-
tantist historiography of John Soane to the periodized for-
malism of Heinrich Wolfflin is a shift marked not only by dif-
ferent degrees of methodological scrutiny but also the func-
tion and status of architectural historiography in the acade-
my.

The legitimization of architectural history as a semi-discipli-
nary field is, therefore, the Faustian bargain adopted by the
architectural field to bring itself within the embrace of the
university, even as the nineteenth-century academy makes
a transition from a classicist to a humanist arena. This bar-
gain also marks the beginnings of a fundamental rift within
architecture. To the extent that architectural practice
remained outside the university, theory and history could be
molded to the situational demands of the practice. The
entry into the academy opens up a chasm between the
conventionalities of humanities-type theory and the profes-
sional demands of craft-based (even vanguardist theoreti-
cal! practice. Thus, as methodologies within the historical
field acquired new modalities of achieving rigour through
the twentieth century, often borrowed from other fields in
the humanities and social sciences — such as history, phi-
losophy, sociology, economics, literature, and anthropolo-
gy—rather than the demands of architectural practice, one
can begin to discern a non-correspondence with the design
professional's brief to negotiate the vagaries of production

and taste. The Modernist invocation of the Zeitgeist as a
bridge between historiographic and professional practice,
epitomized in the relationship between Siegfried Giedion
and Le Corbusier, is precisely an attempt to cover over this
chasm.

Within the contemporary academy, the "survey course" is
precisely a continued attempt to negotiate this originary
abyss; at the same time it is also an indicator of its persist-
ence. The excellent book edited by Gwendolyn Wright and
Janet Parks, The HistorY of History in American Scfioo/s of
Architecture, gives us an account of the principal figures
and transformations of curricula that characterize the histo-
ry of the survey course in the past century. 2 On the other
hand, even as it scrupulously attends to the details of the
changing themes of architectural history, the historical
function of historians and their professional status within
architectural schools seems to elude the book's grasp.

While this article is not the place to recount the details of
such a history, it might be illuminating to sketch out the lim-
its of practice within which architectural historians operate
in the contemporary academy. If one looks at the notices in
academic magazines pertaining to the recruitment of histo-
rians for architectural schools, most positions require some
form of studio teaching. Thus, the methodological tech-
niques acquired by humanities-based research in the inter-
est of knowledge production within the academy is still per-
ceived by architects (who make most of the hiring decisions
within schools — historians or otherwise) to be relevant only
in an "applied" frame. Theory in the service of practice, his-
toriography in the service of professional vanguardism.

I have suggested earlier that the survey course represents
the archetype for the role historians play within schools. In
the following sections, I would like to suggest that the prin-
cipal demand that this archetype places on the role of his-
toriography is the erasure of historicity itself. Let me give an
example. In the past two years I have been trying to revise
M.l.T.'s required M.Arch. survey course 4.645, "Selected
Topics in Architecture: 1750 to the Present." Although
M.l.T.'s History, Theory, and Criticism Section is one of the
few programs that has a certain degree of autonomy from
the rest of the architectural department, this autonomy is
secured only on the basis that we fulfill a certain service
end of the design degrees, and this service end is epito-
mized by the survey course. In the new 4.645, the effort
has been to reconstruct the survey with a persistent atten-
tion towards issues of marginallty in architectural history

DUTTA/ 11

and theory. Part of the reason that narratives of marginali-
ty are unable to enter into critical discourse within architec-
tural historiography is because "other" populations — be
these women, ethnic or cultural groupings, or even exami-
nations of spatial politics outside of canonical buildings — are
deemed to lack stylistic parity with the formal terms estab-
lished by the Modern Movement. The dominance of formal-
ist historiography in architectural schools until very recent-
ly only meant that the preponderance of the Modern
Movement in pedagogy had become a self-fulfilling prophe-
cy.

In light of new theories from the field of cultural, gender,
and globalization studies, the updating of the survey course
has become a necessity in the context of their critiques of
the terms on which modernity is constructed. This is hard-
ly a radical or novel gesture; to the contrary, it is complicit
in the fetishization of theoretical vanguardism practiced by
the Anglo-American academy. At the same time, scholar-
ship that examines themes of power in the transnational
frame and that ignores stylistic connoisseurship as its major
brief is hard to come by. The pathetic (or "tragic," in
Charles Jencks's language) parochialism of the Modern
Movement does not offer a model for the study of the glob-
al. Much of the work of the "survey" depends on the
dynamics of the classroom. The survey is never a static his-
tory of edifices; rather it reflects the shifting historiography
of events — there is no sixties' idealism here in doing away
with textbooks. In 4.645, I instigated classroom dynamics
by introducing the marginal through the rubric of the broad-
ly comparative: thus, Le Corbusier's status as a modern
master is squared off against his gender-nuanced relation-
ship with Eileen Gray or his colonialist complicities in the
"Poem on Algiers." Mies is introduced as a brilliant orna-
mentist in the tradition of Christopher Dresser and William
Morris rather than as synthesist of technological paradigms.
The Jeffersonian grid in the United States is compared with
the English picturesque. Permanent Settlement in India, and
the neo-traditionalism of late colonialism in Africa. Frank
Lloyd Wright becomes important in terms of an examination
of domestic politics of suburban America that is then com-
pared against feminist and socialist ideals of domesticity
both in the United States and elsewhere. CIAM becomes
important not so much in its ineffective prewar manifestoes
as in its immense influence in specifying the norms of post-
war "development" in the Third World: Le Corbusier in
Chandigarh and ATBAT-Afrique in North Africa. More pre-
dictably, Haussmann is taught in the same session as
Robert Moses and the recent destruction of Sarajevo and

Beirut. The "oceanic" spatial interregnum of the slave ships
in the Middle Passage is shown to be as much a receptacle
of modernity as the Bauhaus notion of the Existenzminimum
(Fig. 1).

In terms of the different agendas that determine the survey
course, two are worth noting. For professional schools, the
architectural survey is the key conduit through which the
student acquires conversability with a putative canon.
Willy-nilly, this has largely meant the student's acquisition
of a sensibility affecting stylistic parity with the Modern
Movement. This, I would submit, is the old boondoggle:
knowledge is power, and through this knowledge the stu-
dent negotiates the social field of the profession. Other than
this conservative task of inculcating students into a "tradi-
tion," the survey course is also deemed to have a "prag-
matic," vanguardist function. I like to think of this as the
imprint of Hegel over historiography in general, not just in
architectural thinking per se: the commandment to learn his-
tory with a view to making its "lessons" relevant for "our
times." I would suggest here that this apparent pragmatism
covers over the repetitively self-arrogating authority of the
sovereign subject of the West.

Let me be very clear: students in the United States acade-
my, diverse in background, not necessarily of ethnically
"Western" origin, and often working within paradigms that
have international provenances, seem to have no problem in
assuming postures of different degrees of moral rectitude.
"Politically correct" to a fault, they seem not to have prob-
lems persuading or apprising themselves of the various the-
matics that link architecture with culture. They assume
these tremendous cultural politics as symptoms of their
own vanguardism, as issues impending upon "their time."
History as a mental aide in consolidation of the self: it is
here that one can begin to see a dissonance of interest
developing between historical pedagogy and historiography
itself.

Perhaps with some degree of irony, an irony not unlike that
of David Lurie's in Disgrace, historians have come to realize
that the principal obstacle in pedagogy stems from attempt-
ing to transmit the methodological problems of historiogra-
phy itself- how to create a responsible account of the sub-
ject's insertion into time. To approximate a narrative of this
insertion is "to write a history" — the violence and incom-
mensurability of this originary moment is at the core of the
reason why histories are written and rewritten. It is because
the past cannot be fixed that the future is open to all realms

12 /DUTTA

fV LJ u 'U u ij J J' ■"U n' U'

J*

JU^-

A

'^-'-'-.i,,.! i;i 1, . .11. ... J ■.,:,-.. .'-' ■ . .■i.i'.il'..V.ii'.riL'L''

Plans and sections of the slave ship
Brooke of Liverpool, early nineteenth
century. Captains used drawings like
these to determine the best manner
in which to pack the maximum num-
ber of slaves into ships. Note that
slaves are drawn as lying on their
backs. With only a few feet of head-
room, slaves could not sit up during
the entire trans-Atlantic voyage.

of possibility. The past cannot be instrumentalized into an
alibi for action. There is an unbridgeable difference, an
asymptotism, in the historian's interest in history and the
architect's. Reflecting upon this problem further, I could
only come up with a simplistic formulation: the modernist
architect is conventionally bound to give an account of
space; the historian's brief is to give an account of time.
History is deviant upon the arcfiitect's imagination. For the
architect, to learn history is to fix the problem of history;
underlying this presumption is an unexamined notion of the
centrality of the subject that I would describe as approxi-
mating the privileged subject position of the West. Of
course, historiography too is susceptible to this position,
but not in the same way. (Again, this is not the most
nuanced separation, but for reasons of space, it will do for
now.)

I would contend that this simplistic formulation has pro-
found consequences when viewed in professional terms.
Methodological asymptotism becomes a full-fledged institu-
tional asymmetry when cast into the power relationships of
the academy. Traditionally, the survey course has been
framed as the site where the professional neophyte comes
into contact with its own conventions. While one cannot
have a problem with this framing, I would argue that the
survey course is also the pedagogical site where, through a
regurgitation of its past history, the profession comes into
a realization of its own status as the value-creator of new
cultural capital. Thus, even while it appears as the arena
where the profession creates its most conservative core
(e.g., survey teachers have to teach their Le Corbusier and
their Mies), it has also been the potential site where radical
ideas could be smuggled in as a counter-canonical history

DUTTA/ 13

(e.g., Eileen Gray). The status of theory, in this sense — and
this is the problem that I identify — is not contingent on
whether you teach Le Corbusier or Eileen Gray but on the
fact that architectural students imbibe both conservative
and radical historiographies inspirationally rather than disci-
plinarily.

In other words, architectural history/theory is even more
necessary to the architectural practitioner than it is to the
historian or theorist of architecture. The profession needs a
sense of its own narrative much more than the historian is
interested in providing it. While the profession has benefit-
ed much from this association, this asymmetry has had sig-
nificant implications for the status of the architectural his-
torian, given that their employment locus tends to exist
mostly within professional schools. Perhaps nothing epito-
mizes this schism more than the drastically changed preoc-
cupations of the history/theory professional when they
move from their doctoral careers to their first teaching job.
If one wishes to corroborate this demographically, I am sure
that a survey of adjunct doctoral or pre-doctorai types
teaching history/theory courses in grossly underpaid and
often non-compensated capacities might be illuminating. On
the other hand, there is every sign that with the global
expansion of architectural practice, one sees a correspon-
ding burgeoning of recruitment within Ph.D. programs as
well as the creation of new ones. On the same note, many
papers are given at conferences and many articles and
books are published in the field with no hope, or even
expectation, of recompense. To their own detriment,
research scholars ritually perceive — and I am not claiming
that this is entirely incorrect or even non-admirable — the
exponentially expanding culture of forums, conferences,
publications, and now e-publications as expansion into new
"radical" directions rather than a slide into generally qui-
etist, albeit many-pronged little corners of particularist dis-
course. Scholars traditionally are much more preoccupied
with what they write and the problems therein; the question
of who reads them remains an uncomfortable, if not
inscrutable, issue for them.

From the standpoint of the university, however, architec-
tural history/theory is not even in the picture. For instance,
the U.S. Government's "Survey of Earned Doctorates"
given to successful Ph.D. students at the time of their
defense, does not even list "Architectural History" as an
option. I would argue that this double marginality, both
within the university (most humanities scholars to whom I
have spoken do not have a very good idea of what we do)

and within the profession (architects do not know this
either) manifests itself in a slew of financial problems and
generally moribund infrastructural arrangements, whether it
be arguing for graduate student stipends or research fel-
lowships and grants. Very few grants cater exclusively to
architectural research. Typically, doctoral candidates in
architectural history are forced to write their research pro-
posals keeping in mind the norms of other disciplines.
Similarly, when Ph.D. graduates get teaching jobs, they find
that while their tenure decisions are largely weighted on
endless numbers of publications, publication is something
they are expected to do in their free time — as a Marxist, I
am tempted to say, labor after 5 o'clock — within the super-
exploited invisibility of domestic homework rather than the
simple exploitation of factory-based visibility (studio char-
retting?).

In the modern era, the shift in the status of the architectur-
al profession from a trade or craft-based profession into a
field purporting an intellectual focus within the humanities-
based university (rather than polytechnic or technological
school) rode, and still rides, precisely on the back of histo-
ry/theory and not practice. Inserting the survey course with-
in the required curriculum is the devil's contract of the pro-
fession for being accorded the status of an intellectual field.
But to accord history/theory of architecture a disciplinary
status is definitely not part of this menu; as far as architec-
tural design faculty are concerned, the doctoral degree
brandished by historians are like wallpaper; they could do
the survey themselves, but it does not really help with the
required academic accreditation. In some senses, then, to
introduce a critique based on marginality within the survey
course today faces very little opposition from design facul-
ty, since to talk about "others" fits perfectly with the pro-
fession's own vanguardist aspiration to a certain radicality.
On the other hand, as I see it, for the designers, these dis-
ciplinary rantings and botherations remain for them margin-
al within the marginalia of historiography itself.

In this sense, it must be pointed out that methodologies
invoking cultural marginalities attempt to do so by decon-
structing—unraveling and therefore enabling — the conven-
tional scholarly practice of demonstrating norms by way of
exceptions. Cultural marginalities do not present impeccable
maps of epistemic marginalities, but there is a relationship
between the two. My theoretical interests continue to be
absorbed in the relationship between epistemic and cultural
marginality, but I have learnt to be careful about being
oppositional when there is no opposition. Theory is nothing

11 /DUTTA

else but the expression of a series of relationships; it is
essential therefore to push the envelope from a sham oppo-
sitionality of theory as a radical practice as such in order to
figure out where we face our institutional limits. To speak
about marginality at a time when the profession is devour-
ing notions of cultural difference in order to acquire projects
abroad is a bit like critiquing the state's affirmative action
guarantees at a time when the state itself is being undone
by privatization. In the long term, we do ourselves in.

Notwithstanding all calls for interdisciplinarity, marginality
can only be theorized through increased and not lessened
rigor in scholarship. I have concentrated here on the con-
cept-metaphor of the "marginal," because at different lev-
els, all forms of vanguardist theory see themselves as prac-
tices of and negotiations with the marginal. In scholarship,
it Is the exception to the norm, rather than its restatement,
that invites notice. In architectural theory, it is about time
that we begin some kind of discussion about the norm,
about, if I dare say, the "discipline" as such. When I say
"discipline," I must clarify that I do not mean any internally
consistent core of reasoning or objecthood, but an exter-
nally sanctioned institutional space where such a core can
either be endlessly debated or entirely ignored.

novel to come to terms with his daughter's decision to live
with the consequences of her rape by a black youth with-
out approaching the authorities. The margins come back to
write the center in brutal fashion, but only those who dis-
engage themselves from the vanguardist norm are in a posi-
tion to understand this rewriting. Inventing pat formulae,
politically correct or not, for the past cannot address the
ethical challenges of the future. My invocation of a literary
tract to set the frame for an essay addressing itself to read-
ers within the architectural field does injustice to both dis-
ciplines. And yet, the artwork as a mode of unverifiable rep-
resentation, the novel as fiction, architecture as the coding
of space as value, can address what is unspeakable within
disciplines. The academy and the classroom also contain
within them unspeakable ethical disciplinary demands and
challenges whose dimensions are at a slight distance from
issues of "policy" or "methodology." It is these unspeak-
able, abnormal, and even deviant undercurrents, which are
testimony to the relationship between the academy and the
outside world and hold portents for the future. These ahis-
torical lessons are the principal lessons that the historian
learns from the writing of history. To learn or to write a his-
tory, however methodologically innovative, is not enough to
fix the problem of history.

I would like to conclude by posing a bit of reductio ad absur-
dum logic. To be mindful of history is a deviant practice in
the architectural imagination. Clearly, if the entire field of
architectural practice suddenly acquired a hole at the bot-
tom of its boat and sank to the bottom of the ocean, archi-
tectural theorists would still have much to write about: how
the hole developed, how it all sank, and so on. Conversely,
architectural practice, as I see it, can carry on perfectly well
in a non-traumatized way if the entire cohort of historians
and theorists were to disappear entirely. (What would be at
stake would be its validation as an adjunct of the humani-
ties, not its status within relationships of production.) The
relationship between history and practice is a matter of his-
torical conjecture that will reveal much of the status of
architectural theory today, but today it is as much Incum-
bent on the historian to pursue the separation between the
two than to repetitively be called upon to offer the terms
that will bridge the two.

In Disgrace, David Lurie refuses to see himself as an exam-
ple or model of anything. Retorting against his colleagues'
suggestion that the academic's role is to set an example, he
says, "There are no overtones in this case." It is Lurie's
refusal to subscribe to the norm that enables him later in the

Illustrations

Fig, 1 : Plans and sections of the stave ship Brooke of Liverpool presented to the
British parliament in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper, "Marginal within Marginalia," was presented at
a conference entitled Hypothesis 4 at Princeton University's School of
Architecture in the spring of 2001 ,

J, M, Coetzee. Disgrace (New York: Penguin Books, 19991.

2 Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks, The History of History in American
Schools of Architecture 1865-1975 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
19901,

DUTTA/ 15

An Te Liu, Airborne, at the "Pathology" exhibition at the
Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, 2000.

16 /EL-KHOURY

RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY
BETWEEN AIR AND SPACE:

PROLOGUE TO AN TE LIU'S EXCHANGE

The work of An Te Liu is strategically situated between
architecture and art. Unlike other works of architectural
means and proportions that we are now accustomed to find
comfortably installed in art galleries, some of Liu's more
unsettling pieces are nowhere quite at home. They are
designed for the gallery, yet they perform as architecture:
"machines for living" seemingly designed to correct behav-
ioral and environmental deviance. The fact that they per-
versely succeed in being totally useless does not detract
from their pragmatic — architectural — logic.

"Condition," Liu's recent show at the Henry Urbach Gallery,
featured Type/Need and Exchange, two new works elabo-
rating themes initially tackled in the Sclerotic (1998) and
Soft Load (1999) series.' Much like its precursor Sclerotic
III — a pair of safety grab-bars flanking an electric outlet —
Type/Need contrives strange but uncannily plausible arti-
facts from a dystopian universe where a hygienic re-con-
struction of the body is played out to perverse extremes
(Fig. 2). 2 Flesh-colored contraptions are assembled from sal-
vaged exercise equipment in unlikely yet seamless configu-
rations. The purpose and origin of the machine parts are still
legible in the new assemblage, much like the latent bicycle
in Picasso's Bull's Head (Fig. 3). The fragments here are not
reconstituted into an organic figure; they are merely reshuf-
fled to produce a different machine. A deviant machine. The
perversion is latent; Type/Need is not so much an iconic
conflation of the mechanical and the organic — the familiar
topos of the historical avant-garde -but more of a catalytic
platform for potentially grotesque rituals and obscene
hybridizations.

Exchange, the piece de resistance of the "Condition" show,
aligns with the Soft Load series — household sponges

EL-KHOURY/ 17

arranged into architectural and artistic parodies (Fig. 4) — in
staging the uneasy convergence of the aesthetic and the
hygienic. Exchange presents fifty-six HEPA air cleaners in
seven column-like stacks (Fig. 5). Together they are claimed
to recycle the air of the gallery every twenty-one seconds.
They also generate a considerably high level of white noise
and a distinct odor akin to that of freshly opened plastic
packages. The installation mobilizes all the senses to dram-
atize the discourse of hygiene in an assault on impercepti-
ble air pollutants.

Exchange is corisistent with Liu's earlier parodies of hygien-
ic practice, contriving a "pathological" performance from
"normal" domestic rituals. What is unusual here — and cer-
tainly not typical of contemporary art practice — is the
empirical preoccupation with air, the air of the gallery.
Exchange operates on the air of the gallery as much as in
the space of the gallery. Ostensibly because of its hygienic
mandate, modern architecture is known in particular to have
occasionally equated air with space. Liu's work overlays a
haptic experience of air on the abstract intuition of space —
the ubiquitous medium of art.

Although equally fixated on space, architecture has had a
more sustained dialogue with air. The notion that air has a
critical role to play in the precarious equilibrium of health

18 /EL-KHOURY

and is therefore subject to architectural speculation has
been a commonplace since antiquity. Hence Vitruvius's
instructions for the optimal orientation of the streets: "They
will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude
the winds from the alleys. Cold winds are disagreeable, hot
winds enervating, moist winds unhealthy." The mechanical
and physiological intricacies of pneumatic processes
remained confused and controversial until the dissemination
of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's (1743-1794) research on
respiration and Jan Ingenhousz's (1730-1799) on photo-
synthesis. Still, the beneficial effects of "fresh air" — i.e.,
freely circulating air — and the hazards of stagnation were
never in doubt. The sight of laboratory animals promptly
dying in hermetically sealed vessels was ample proof.

Air became a focus of scientific research after 1 750, thanks
mainly to Stephen Hales (1677-1761), whose work turned
air, hitherto understood as an elementary fluid, into a het-
erogeneous mixture of chemical components. Research
into its unknown and threatening composition was followed
with particular urgency in the second half of the eighteenth
century, when it was obsessively fueled by the anxieties of
pre-Pasteurian mythologies.

The interest in air pathology was not limited to the scientif-
ic academies. By the end of the century, the trend spread
toward the bottom of the social pyramid to become a sta-
ple of popular culture. Public opinion was repeatedly mobi-
lized to protest the degradation of the urban atmosphere.
The writer Louls-Sebastien Mercier's (1740-1814) invective
is characteristic of the collective hyper-sensitivity to aerial
pollution in eighteenth-century Paris:

The moment that air ceases to contribute to the
preservation of good health, it becomes lethal. But
health is that attribute which man treats with
utmost indifference. Streets that are narrow and
poorly accessed, houses that are too small and
that impede the free circulation of air, butcher
shops, fish stalls, sewers, cemeteries — all these
corrupt the atmosphere. And the enclosed air
becomes laden with impure particles, heavy and
malignant.

The city is consistently incriminated in this discourse: by
virtue of its sheer mass, it is an obstacle to the movement
of the air. Hence, a general tendency toward looser and
more permeable urban fabrics, advocated in many treatises
and partially tested in the "openness" of the Place Louis
XV.

Nicolas Ledoux's (1736-1806) ideal city of Chaux is a rad-
ical departure from the norm and yet is entirely consistent
with the "decongestive" trend (Fig. 6). The traditional — and
pathological — urban fabric is here entirely relinquished in
favor of an open and expanded field where detached and
individuated structures are bathed in unhindered airflow.

For Emil Kaufmann, whose formalist reading was largely
responsible for the postwar revival of Ledoux as a "vision-
ary architect," the jeu de masses of detached pavilions
anticipates the freestanding blocks of Le Corbusier and
Gropius's combinatory of discrete spatial units. The free-
standing structures, Kaufmann claims, are the concrete
manifestation of the principle of autonomy in which the
architectural object is released from all external contingen-
cies to realize its own material, formal, and tectonic voli-
tion.^

For Kaufmann, architectural autonomy is indicative of a par-
adigm shift that is registered in other spheres of cultural
production. It is recognized in the emphasis on line and con-
tour leading to the formal detachment of the figure in late-

EL-KHOURY/ 19

eighteenth-century painting. It is also relevant to the formal
structure of the political order theorized by Rousseau; "a
form... by which each may be united to all but nonetheless
retains command over himself and remains as free as he
had been beforehand. Such is the fundamental problem that
is resolved by the social contract."^

That the ideal city of Chaux should reflect the political phi-
losophy of The Social Contract comes as no surprise, con-
sidering Ledoux's explicit allegiance to Rousseau. Still,
beyond denoted affinities, the freestanding building repre-
sents the confluence of deeper structures converging on the
transformation of the environment since the late-eighteenth
century. From Ledoux to Le Corbusier, efforts at hygienic
ventilation by means of decongestion and separation res-
onate with aspirations for a society of individuated and
emancipated subjects, merging with longings for an unob-
structed view in open space.

Hygienic arguments for thoroughly ventilated and separated
dwellings may have driven the discourse of "decongestive"
urbanism. Yet, the longing and struggle for open space is
largely visual: an aesthetic impulse that was enacted and
legitimized in various ideological registers — political, eco-
nomical, and social.

The hygienic/aesthetic impulse is manifested in the great
optical Utopias of Fourier, Bentham, and Rousseau: imagi-
nary worlds built on varying measures of transparency and
visibility. While some strove primarily toward the trans-
parency of the subject in a naturally crystalline nature, oth-
ers had less faith in the purity of human nature; they sought
the transparency of the environment only to precipitate the
hopelessly opaque subject into greater visibility.

Hence the contradictions of the modernist city. The city
mass is reorganized to benefit from greater exposure and
permeability to its natural milieu: air — an empirical medium.
The city is also reconstituted rationally in space — a theoret-

iiiniiTT

k

i

I.

^^:

20 /EL-KHOURY

ical abstraction. The hygienic building is subject to external
processes; it must be permeable to clean air. While the
rational building is to be an object developed plastically in
absolute space, it must simultaneously be made to go
away, because it is an obstacle to the epiphany of trans-
parency in open space: "Great blocks of dwellings run
through the town. What does it matter they are behind the
screen of trees."

Similar contradictions are effectively rehearsed in Liu's
Airborne exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery in
Vancouver in 2000 (Figs. 1, 7, 9, 10). In this direct precur-

sor to Exchange, sixty household humidifiers, air purifiers,
and negative-air ionizers are painted a uniform gray and dis-
tributed on a white platform in a composition strangely rem-
iniscent of a modernist city. A scale-model of a modernist
city, to be more precise, the kind we are accustomed to see
photographed along with the disembodied hand of the archi-
tect ominously hovering above (Fig. 8).

The modernist city is most promising — and convincing — in
model form, ideally photographed from above as a rational
and total artifact. Ironically, the realized version is typically
found lacking in the bird's-eye view: it looks too much like
a model — the cliche reaction to aerial photographs of
Brasilia! (Fig. 11) The model satisfies the demand for the
rational materialization of the object; the bird's-eye view
frustrates the concomitant fantasy of its dematerialization

9

in space.

Airborne operates on several levels and scales, equally grat-
ifying and frustrating in its oscillation between model and
machine, between symbolic representation and indexical
process, and between a position in space and a situation in
air. It is at once a scale-model for an imaginary modernist

EL-KHOURY/ 21

city; a dizzying mise en abime of the Vllle Radieuse — imag-
ine the same appliances plausibly deployed in Corbusian
housing blocks, stubbornly filtering the air that was sup-
posed to ventilate the same building; a Van Doesburg-
inspired composition of solids in space; a sardonic display
of mass-produced consumer goods — Hannes Meyer comes
to mind (Fig. 12); a show room for Honeywell; a dystopian
domestic setting; a minimalist sculpture; a new-age well-
ness center in downtown Vancouver.

The multiple readings and registers capture the predicament
of the modernist city — and that of its legacy in today's
urbanized world. Just like the air-cleaning appliance, which
is promoted against all sorts of domestic pathologies from
allergy to furniture damage, modern urbanism requires a
leap of faith in its hygienic claims. Its short-lived success
may have been due to the "placebo" effect rather than the
"science" of the Unite c/'habitation.^° It delivered the prom-
ise of a liberated and lucid environment as an aesthetic
experience rather than a material and social fact.

The placebo appliance is most effective in its conspicuous-
ness, as a physical presence in domestic space — the only
tangible evidence of its remedial but imperceptible opera-
tion. As demonstrated in Exchange and Airborne, the cumu-
lative effect of the residual but critical physicality — the
noise-polluting, energy-consuming object — is psychological-
ly counterproductive. An isolated HEPA machine may sug-
gest the possibility of healthier air, but its relentless deploy-
ment is indeed more alarming than therapeutic. The air may
be actually cleaner in the Henry Urbach Gallery — it is recy-
cled and filtered every twenty-one seconds! Its hygienic
virtues are hardly more credible.

In Liu's installatrons, the effect of the placebo-dare we say
"the aesthetic" — falters against the overpowering effect of
the real. And vice versa. May we say the same of the Ville
Radieuse?

The pragmatic and aesthetic agendas of modern urbanism
are ostensibly consistent. Yet, they may not completely
overlap: there is a gap between space and air in the world
they project. This is where Liu's work is uncomfortably at
home.

22 /EL-KHOURY

Notes

' An Te Liu's Exchange and Type/Need axe part of The "Condition" show at the
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery. New York, 2001. Other works mentioned in
this article were displayed at the following: Airborne and Sclerotic. "Pathology"
at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000. Soft Load, "Luster" at the
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 1999.

2 An Te Liu, Sclerotic \\\. 2000 (Fig. 14).

''-* An Te Liu speaks of the appliance's placebo effect in an interview with
Aaron Betsky: "My college roommate and I had two Bionaire purifiers/ionizers
in our apartment. We would sit around drinking scotch in a smoky haze with
the machines running full blast in case our parents showed up unexpectedly.
After a few hours, the air seemed to tingle with clean, negatively charged ions,
and we were sure we could feel it- Or was it the single malt? In any case, the
indicator light was on, and we were assured that something good was happen-
ing, even if we didn't understand the mysteries of negative-air ionization.
'Placebo' comes from the Latin 'to please,' and we were damn happy with our
new devices." Aaron Betsky, "Safe Haven." interview with An Te Liu, Surface
25 (Fall 2000): 155.

' ' The social and political critique of the modernist city that fueled the post-
modern return to a traditional configuration of block, street, and public space is
beyond the scope of this essay but not foreign to Liu's work: that a display of
consumer goods should so readily evoke a modernist cityscape is a striking but
familiar demonstration of the affinities between capitalist and Utopian logic.

^ Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture (New York: Dover Publications,
1960): 24-31.

^Air, formerly an elementary medium of generation and vitality, was hence
recast as a suspicious brew: "...a frightening mixture of the smoke, sulfurs and
aqueous, volatile explosive, oily and saline vapors that the earth gave off, and
occasionally, the explosive material that it emitted, the stinking exhalations that
emerged from swamps, minute insects and their eggs, spermatic animalcules
and far worse, the contagious miasma that rose from decomposed bodies."
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986): 13.

^ Louis-S6bastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris: Mercure de France,
11782-88] 1994): 114.

® In Kaufmann's words: "The new combination of parts is the free assembly of
individual elements that do not have to sacrifice their particular existence and
whose form is subordinated only to their own finality. It is their particular laws
that determine their form." Emil Kaufmann, De Ledoux a Le Corbusier (Paris:
Livre et Communication. 1990): 79.

Illustrations

Fig. 1 : An Te Liu. Airborne, installation view, 2000. Exhibited at the
"Pathology" show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Vancouver. 2000.

Fig. 2: An Te Liu, Type/Need. 2001. Exhibited at the "Condition" show at the
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2001.

Fig, 3: Pablo Picasso, Bull's Head. 1943.

Fig. 4: An Te Liu, Soft Load. 1999. Exhibited at the "Luster" show at the
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 1999.

^ Le Corbusier. The Home of Man (London: Architectural Press, [19421 1948):
91.

° Brasilia and Chandigarh are most photogenic in wide-angle shots at eye level
when the dwarfed monumental architecture defines — negatively — the far more
sublime immensity of open space (Fig. 15).

Fig. 5: An Te Liu, Exchange. 2001. Exhibited at the "Condition" show at the
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery. New York, 2001.

Fig. 6: Nicolas Ledoux. ideal city of Chaux, bird's-eye view. 1804.

Fig. 7: An Te Lm. Airborne. 2000.

Fig. 8: Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Plan Voisin proposal for Paris, 1925, The
hand points out the business center of the proposed city.

Fig. 9: An Te Liu. Airborne. 2000.

Fig. 10: An Te Liu, Airborne, 2000.

Fig. 11: National Congress Complex in Brasilia, view of ramp leading to the
complex, 1958-60. Oscar Niemeyer, architect.

Fig. 12: Hannes Meyer, Co-op Vitrine with Co-op standard products, exhibited
in Basel, 1925.

Fig. 13: An Te Liu. Exchange, detail, 2001.

Fig, 14: An Te Liu, Sclerotic III, 2000. Exhibited at the "Pathology" show at
the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000.

Fig. 15: Museum of the City of Brasilia. 1958-60. Oscar Niemeyer, architect.

EL-KHOURY/ 23

Map of Italy and the Dalmatian
Coast, 14th century.

24 /OZKAR

THE

MINE OZKAR
ANARCHIC UNCERTAINTY:

CONSTRUCTIVE ROLE OF THE DEVIANT IN CREATIVITY

Creativity, as the means to conceptualization, is of concern
In many philosophical matters. Space and representations
of space comprise one such matter in disciplines as dis-
parate as physics and architecture. Acts of reading, inter-
preting, and shaping space and its properties all involve cre-
ativity. It is disconcerting, however, that especially in the
context of architecture, when discussed as the means, cre-
ativity is usually treated as a mysterious ingredient of the
individual's thought process. Diverging from this under-
standing of creativity as an internal heuristic act, one can
look at it as a phenomenon outside of the individual, a phe-
nomenon which is to be understood only within the plurali-
ty of works created by many individuals. Creativity remains
to be the means but with regard to the larger context.
Describing creativity as such — almost as a social enter-
prise—is not to promote any general consensus on judging
what is creative. Rather, creativity emerges from the differ-
ences between the individual's will and those of others.
Following this understanding, this essay proposes a con-
structive description of creativity through the notion of
anarchic uncertainty that rises out of such differences.

Anarchic uncertainty is a phrase with two parts.
Uncertainty is the core of the phrase; anarchy merely sug-
gests an extreme condition of it.

The first step is to acknowledge uncertainty as a positive
and constructive matter of fact. Trying do away with uncer-
tainty is the common tendency, especially in the sciences.
This is an old tradition dating back to Socrates, who put
ambiguity aside either as an accident or as the spoken word
of a "freak." Scientists have been working to diminish
uncertainties for centuries and have claimed to make
progress through such work. This methodology for progress

has been subject to major criticism over the centuries; yet,
there is always more to say.

Hilary Putnam, professor of philosophy and mathematical
logic at Harvard, illustrates this common methodological
problem with a simple example.^ He puts his friend to the
test by asking, "How many objects are there in this room?"
The answer is not as obvious as his friend initially thinks.
The question rather turns out to be, "What is an object?"
There are five objects if the friend only counts the distin-
guishable but non-living items: chair, table, pen, book, cup,
etc. There are seven if he includes Putnam and himself.
There are indefinitely more if he identifies and includes parts
of what he has initially called objects. The key to the ques-
tion is the definition of what an object is. And that is where
the uncertainty is. William James writes:

There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to
any one tiling.... Mediately or immediately, that
one thing is related to everything else; and to
know all about it, all its relations need to be
known. But each relation forms one of its attrib-
utes, one angle by which someone may con-
ceive it, and while so conceiving it may ignore
the rest of it. 2

Depending on how one defines an object — e.g., anything to
which I can refer with a pronoun, anything that is not phys-
ically attached to some other thing, etc.— the conception of
how many objects there are in the room changes.

Putnam's question is an example of an uncertainty that has
to do with the representation of phenomena. 3 A second
account of uncertainty is in the process, in the direction of
the next step. If we think of the present moment as a deci-

OZKAR/ 25

sion node, the decision will be based on the definitions
employed right there and then. Paths of process are just as
indeterminate as the definitions.

The philosophical introduction to such uncertainties brings
us to their practical implications, especially in creative
processes that have to do with defining, interpreting, read-
ing, making, etc. In his influential book The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn identifies two parts to
a scientist's conceptual work: one is operating research
along a paradigm, the other is doing the same across para-
digms. The traditional objective science is the former; the
breakthroughs and discoveries belong to the latter."*
Creative processes incorporate both, but in an ideal descrip-
tion, creativity is a leap from objective consensus and con-
ventional definitions. It is a process in which novelties are
generated to satisfy newly considered criteria. It sees
beyond a priori definitions. The crudeness of Kuhn's
dichotomy is not so important here. What 1 want to point
out is that uncertainties are problematic for progression in
a one-paradigm situation, whereas they are the initiating
constructive condition for creative leaps across paradigms.

Referring back to Putnam's example once again, a definition
is much like an act of discrimination. If the perception of a
fact is changing due to a dynamic context, and thus, the
fact is not known for sure, or more correctly put, always
l<nown from a variety of angles, defining it in set terms is
not so sensible or even logical. Viable definitions emerge
out of contexts spontaneously. Until that specific context is
brought in, "ambiguity is the only rule. "5

In both representation and process, there could be uncer-
tainties between two, three, or ten thousand choices. The
extreme case would be that choices are "indefinitely
many." Let us consider this extreme. "The indefinitely
many" will occur if the definitions are not set. Devoid of a
context, there are indefinitely many ways of counting the
objects in a room. Where there are multiple individuals
involved, the context is even harder to grasp and has to be

acknowledged as such, until reduced to one particular point
of view for practical purposes. The ambiguity is to the inter-
est of someone who is aiming to create and not just choose.
Creativity is not a matter of choice. A priori definitions are
inhibiting for the creative act because they reduce it to a
choice process at best and to a didactic one at worst.

Anarchy comes in right here: who operates with the uncer-
tainty and how. The term has had much more use in the
socio-political context, but the socio-political dynamics of
anarchy are not too distant from those of any creative con-
text. In his discussions about science, Paul Feyerabend
does not refrain, for example, from using the word anarchy
with its political connotations: propaganda, ideology, and
riots are included. He understands science as a fully social
enterprise. In this social setup, the individual is the key ele-
ment. Leaving aside the aggressive connotations, anarchy is
basically the rigorous activity of individuals who challenge a
central convention and assert their own definitions. ^ The
anarchic subject is the person who creates uncertainty and,
in the end, who deals with it. When the role of anarchy is
emphasized in uncertainty, the situation is idealized as
indefinitely plural and thus gives way to creativity in the
sense discussed above, not simply as a selection or a didac-
tic act.

This social take on creativity applies to representations of
space as well, by which I mean all kinds of interpretation
and creation of spaces. In Edwin Abbot's Flat/and, the anar-
chic subject to come across uncertainties is a particular
Square who encounters a Sphere (Fig. 2). Until the moment
he sees a line that is ever changing in size, the Square has
clear definitions and conceptions of what he is to see in his
predictable two-dimensional world. Just then, he takes
what Deleuze refers to as the "line of flight" — always an act
of the marginal — and breaks free of these definitions. He lit-
erally goes to the margins to conceive the third dimension
and sees that the line he has encountered is a sphere.

26 /OZKAR

There are many more instances In which definitions of
space are considered and created from different points of
view.

The Catalan sailor from the fourteenth century brings
together on his map all the elements of space that he con-
ceives as essential: the moon, the sun, the tidal waves, etc.
The horizon is his ultimate reference. He divides a circle into
sixteen parts and creates rhumb lines these for his opera-
tions. This representation diverges greatly from what we
understand as a conventional geographical map (Fig. 1).

In land surveys, the method of triangulation depicts land-
form in reference to a web of shortest distances rather than
the three-dimensional topography as conceived in contour
maps or in our bodily experiences on that land (Fig. 3).

The physical appearance of a landscape is broken into
pieces of various viewpoints in 1909, as Leger challenges
the conventional one-to-one relation of space and time (Fig.
4).

Light — as opposed to planes — comes to the forefront as the
essential element of space in a workshop project at the
University of Chicago in the early forties (Fig. 5).

In their ergonometric studies, the Situationists present the
body as the key reference to architectural space. The under-
standing of space as a void, carved according to the body
of the subject and its movements, deviates from generic
architectures (Fig. 6).

A crowd looks down on a stadium during a soccer game in
Istanbul from a crane onto which they have climbed. In
doing this, they transform the scaffolding and the crane
which, in fact, were intended for the construction of a sky-
scraper on a neighboring site (Fig. 7).

Francis Bacon distorts the box surrounding the subject in a
portrait from 1971 (Fig. 8).

All these examples may appear to be commonplaces at
first. We operate in space with the aid of conceptual con-
structs we develop: the above are just a few. However,
there is a certain set of constructs like these to which we
adapt based on their convenience. This commitment to con-
ventions does not accommodate the flexibility of one's per-
ceptive sensibility, which in turn is essential to one's cre-
ative acts. In all of these examples, and in many other

OZKAR/ 27

aartacf iMfiiulf d« uatall
MooirminU 1" mUiun*
DolfU. potfvfu. ■iu)t-oru

l«» 69 travail daiit la plan horltantat.

instances, the individual deviates from these conventional
conceptions of space to accommodate oneself and one's
own readings. S/he assumes only the uncertainty at the
start, but deviating from conventions, comes up with
her/his own relevant definitions.

In so doing, the anarchic subject contributes to a qualitative
plurality of coexisting alternatives. It is not important that
these alternatives are not compatible, nor that they are tem-
poral, but that, all in all, they introduce criticism that uses
alternatives.^ This critical plurality of marginals sets up a
social scene where there is noise and uncertainty and, as a
result, the possibility that the individual may make a cre-
ative leap that will deviate from conventions.

Uncertainty conveys that we are always looking for descrip-
tions; anarchy implies that everyone speaks. This may not
promise anything better in the sense that we understand
now. In this scheme, progress is relative too. So is its rigor.
But plurality is the only way frontiers are explored to their
full extent so that leaps — to whichever direction — are pos-
sible.

28 /OZKAR

Notes

' Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambndge, MA: MIT Press,
1988): 111-13.

2 William James. Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications,
118901 19501: 332-33. Italics and capitalization in the original.

^ This relates to the larger question of meaning(s) acquired through represen-
tation and opens other doors. The representation that is not a facsimile of the
phenomenon provides this ambiguity by default. (The question could be raised
if representations are ever facsimiles.) Other uncertainties that relate to repre-
sentation occur in language or in similar systems of symbols, i.e., visuals, In the
context of philosophy, representation is usually found in definitions, Aristotle
writes that there is a limit to our symbols but not to the world or the knowledge
thereof, Richard Robmson describes pronouns as the chameleons of language
and as ultimately ambiguous symbols when totally devoid of context Poetic
language, which bears a lot of metaphors, is especially full of this ambiguity.
See Richard Robinson, "Ambiguity," /W/ntf ( 1 94 1 } : 140-55.

^ Kubler's example is more tangible. The invention of oil painting is progress
along a paradigm; the invention of perspective drawing is progress across par-
adigms. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. [1962! 1996) and George Kubler, The Shape of
Time. Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962): 65.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Map of Italy and the Dalmatian Coast, 14th century.

Fig. 2: Square meet the Sphere, From Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland (New York:
Dover Publications, [1884] 1992): 59.

Fig. 3; Triangulation Map of the British Isles, 1852.

Fig. 4: Fernand Leger, The Bridge, 1909.

Fig, 5: Nathan Lerner, Study of Light Space. From Gyorgy Kepes, Language of
Vision (New York: Dover Publications, 11944] 1995): 137.

Fig, 6: Ergonometric Study Diagram, From "Commentaires Contre
rUrbanisme," Internationale Situationiste 6 (1961).

Fig. 7: Crowd watching a soccer match from a crane in a nearby skyscraper
construction site. From Kerem Yazgan. "Olay, Programlanmis Mekan.
Mimar," Mimarlik 272 (November 1996): 31

Fig. 8: Francis Bacon. Study for a Portrait. 1971.

^ Robinson, 140.

° See Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987). Similarly,
Todd May writes that the mam theme of anarchism is the "denial of represen-
tation." Any representation is understood as a product of the central power
structure, Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994): 47.

' Feyerabend argues that "criticism must use alternatives," Paul Feyerabend,
"How to be a Good Empiricist: a Plea for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological,"
Philosophy of Science, the Delaware Seminar vol. 2, B. Bamrin ed. (New York:
Interscience Press, 1963): 7-8.

OZKAR/ 29

KENNEDY & VIOLICH ARCHITECTS
DRYWALL:

A/MATERIAL SURFACE

Dry wall — gypsum wallboard cladding — is America's most
ubiquitous, standardized building product. Yet, the com-
mercial success of drywall has also limited the perception of
this material's palette of architectural applications and its
permanence and value in relation to "natural" materials.
Neither minimalism nor Arte Povera engaged this inexpen-
sive, industrially mass-manufactured material. The develop-
ment of drywall represents the creation of an unprecedent-
ed new "norm" for the wall and the enduring impact of an
aesthetic hegemony that continues to influence the produc-
tion of architecture today.

The fire resistance of gypsum wallboard and its capacity to
be quarried and manufactured at extremely low initial costs
made drywall the perfect cladding companion for the
emerging consolidation of the cavity wall building industry.
The development of a gypsum cladding system for the cav-
ity wall required the unprecedented intersection and affilia-
tion of separate industries and products, labor organiza-
tions, methods of production, and the innovative use of
mass media and television for marketing.

The postwar marketing campaign to "own the wall" repre-
sents not only the branding of an extremely affordable and
versatile product system but also the institutionalization of
its material character and cultural reception. By emphasiz-
ing only a selected set of material characteristics and ignor-
ing others, the market positions the ways In which gypsum
Is understood and used. The "resistant" nature of drywall
extends beyond the practical realm of maintenance and life
safety to the cultural perception of the material itself — or
rather its invisibility as material. Drywall is a product system
designed to conceal its materiality by covering its modular-
ity, its joints, and the local circumstances of its installation.
Whiteness and impermeability — and, by extension, hygiene
and class security— flatness, uniformity, and the ideal of a
standardized norm for the wall were key messages in the
emerging modern aesthetic of drywall and skim plaster
veneer as the paradigmatic a/materlal surface.

The discovery of what could be termed a "catacrestic" use
of post-industrial materials involves a careful account of the
specific physical properties of the material, combined with
an amnesia towards the standardized applications of the
product and a willingness to imagine new uses for it. Such
new uses are. In fact, both a "mis-use" of the material and
a radical demonstration of its fullest use.

To deviate by design from the standardized uses of this
material is not a matter of turning away frorii the norm but
of turning into the material more deeply to explore the full
palette of its properties — such as colors tllBt range from
rose to brown in gypsum's crystal forms land gypsum's
ambiguous physical state that is both wet aiw dry by virtue
of its unique chemistry. Material strategies foAgypsum wall-
board do not abandon the efficiencies of drywall cladding,
but seek to create added value through th^ invention of
ways to intervene in the manufacturing process, to elabo-
rate the transformative and changeable character oj^Jhe sur-
face, to re-appropriate the transivssive properties of the
mix, and to embed the infrastruaure of pressiKe touch,
sensor, and flat membrane techncl|^gies into the^padding
surface. When the material character of drywall Is recon-
sidered—when programs get into the surface — the wall can
play between the categories of furniture, appliance, and
architectural Cladding.

30 /KVA

\x

Markets

Bring together products from both plaster and drywall
industries. HybriKze the resources of these competing con-
struction marl<et^ Use existing tools and techniques to cre-
ate new material effects. Develop these effects to work
against the scripted uses of the product. The wall becomes
affective.

condmo

V

Thick Sulfaces

Create chahgeabie cond\pns of thickness within the con
teinporary architectural cuhure of thin skins. Engage natu-
ral aiKl synthetic coatings that change according to light
levels acd viewer positions. Deploy light-emitting pigments
and ultra\reflective surfaces that suggest an impossible
depth of suifface. The principles of camouflage suggest the
possibility of miqietic behavior in materials and the appro-
priation of properties associated with other materials. The
question is not h'ftw to make piaster more like plaster, but
how to make plaster can become like mirror, lace, or LCD.

Performative Papers

Look for areas to intervene into conventional manufacturing
processes. Identify strategic partnerships for collaboration.
Suspend the differences between "new" and "old" tech-
nologies. Change the wrapper— take advantage of the roll-
to-roll manufacturing process to integrate flat membrane
technologies. Infrastructure migrates out of the cavity wall
and into the cladding.

Mixing

Engage the trade worker as a collaborator in the process of
construction. Design with plaster, and drywall becomes
more like cooking. Details are recipes that affect the mix and
can be adjusted, combined or altered to taste. It is the
recipe— the choice and mix of ingredients that determines
the materials' properties, programs, and forms.

"y

J"

^ A

KVA. "Fabrications' installation, SF MDMA

KVA/ 31

ELECTRO-CONDUCTIVE

Electro-Conductive Drywall Prototype

1. Prostheiic wall proiect by Eric Olsen

2. Model of proslhetlc wall

3- Diagram of electro-conductive drywall

— ^A

•0

32 /KVA

^

• • • •

THERMAL

Thermal Drywall,
SF MOMA

REFLECTIVE

Reflective Drywall,
Wall International Headquarters

4. Plan detail ot slacked, illuminated.
thermal drywall

5. Pyrobar, USGC product

6. Production of image in plane mirror

KVA/ 33

CHAMELEON

Storage Wall,
Printmaker's Studio

TRANSLUCENT

Translucent Window Treatment,
Boote Mills Studios

7. Samples of iridescent finishes

8. Plan detail of storage wall
9- Diagram of light dispersion

"?/

\x

34 /KVA

1^

MAGNETIC

Magnetic Drywall Prototype

12

tf

10. Solid state reveal light

1 1 . Section of solid state reveal light

12. Diagram of magnetic drywall

KVA/ 35

Robert Gober. Untitled [.Virgin), detail of the underworld. 1997,

36 /HAYWOOD

ROBERT HAYWOOD
ROBERT GOBER'S VIRGIN AND DRAIN

Is the Virgin Mary a drain? She is if we consider Robert
Gober's life-size Virgin of 1997 whose womb is pierced by
a giant industrial culvert pipe (Fig. 2)^ She is if we turn to
early Catholic conceptions of the Virgin, formulated by the-
ologians Tertullian and St. Augustine, whose discomfort
with and fear of the female body and human sexuality are
manifest in patently absurd statements: "Woman,"
Tertullian wrote, "is a temple built over a sewer." Horrified
by the organs of the female body that commingle sexual
and excretory functions and produce the human race, St.
Augustine exhorted: "We are born between feces and

Both Robert Gober, a disaffected Catholic, and early church
"fathers" invoke the Virgin and the drain although their pur-
poses are radically different. 3 This difference is not merely
the historical time that separates them, but also, and more
importantly, their view of sexuality and the body. St.

Augustine and other male theologians' repulsion toward the
body of women, specifically the birthing body from which
blood, fluids, and baby are flushed, laid the ground for the
Catholic invention of the modern Virgin, who in the mid-
nineteenth century was officially declared as immaculately
conceived.'' Revered by Catholic doctrine for her "spotless
virginity," the modern Virgin, draped in a figureless gown,
is an absolutely closed form. In contradiction to the Virgin's
downward gaze and sculptural realism, her virtual and
metaphysical power derives, I will argue, from her configu-
ration as a woman without an anus. The woman without an
anus is a way of stating that her body has been purged of
interior canals and orifices that open and close, inhale and
expel. In this way, the Roman Catholic conception of the
Virgin embodies what Sigmund Freud described as anal-
retentive character, manifested through compulsive order-
ing, cleaning, and purifying. ^

HAYWOOD/ 37

Critics often refer to Dada and Surrealism when analyzing
Gober's sculptures and installations. My analysis departs
from these studies, first of all by exploring the radical theo-
logical implications of Gober's Virgin, and secondly by argu-
ing that his reconfiguration of the Virgin evokes Surrealism
most forcefully not as a style, an iconographic motif, or an
avenue to the unconscious but as a mode of anal attack.^
Failing to grasp this critical orientation may well explain
why many critics are mystified by Gober's adoption of the
Virgin motif, apparently fearing that the project marks the
artist's uncritical return to a pious investment in
Catholicism.

In considering Gober's Virgin within the history of Dada and
Surrealism, two works need to be explored that exemplify
different aspects of what I am calling anal attack. The first
of these works is Marcel Duchamp's Elle a chaud au cul.
Salvador Dali's largely forgotten essay, "Why they Attack
the Mona Lisa," clarifies most fully the critical force of
Duchamp's assisted readymade. Dali explained that the pic-
ture, consisting of a reproduction of Mona Lisa to which
Duchamp added a hand-drawn mustache and goatee, is a
"case of aggression by an artist against a masterpiece that
embodies the maximum artistic idealization." This act of
aggression, Dali argued, differs from Freud's "sublime defi-
nition of the Hero las] the man who revolts against the
authority of the father and finally overcomes it." Freud's
sublime hero, Dali continued, "is the antithesis of Dada
which represented a culmination of the anti-heroic, anti-
Nietzchean attitude to life." Instead, Dada seeks "the anal,
erogenous zone of the Mona Lisa." While accepting the
"thermic agitation of the Mother as a Work-of-Art," Dada,
Dali continued, rebels against the idealization of Mother-as-
Art by masculinizing it.^ This gesture epitomizes the anti-
glorification and anti-sublime aspects of Duchamp's work,
which erodes dreamy and angelic conceptions of art by
turning attention to Mona Lisa's non-depicted anal zone.

In a different manner. Max Ernst's The Virgin Chastising the
Infant Jesus in Front of Three Witnesses of 1926 unleash-
es and exposes another form of anal attack (Fig. 3). As
Ernst's scholars have noted, the painting was partly inspired
by Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay titled "A Child is Being
Beaten. "8 The fantasy of a child being beaten produces
what Freud calls onanistic gratification or "gratification in
the genitals." This form of gratification taps into the sadis-
tic, anal organization of sexuality. From this point of view,
we can imagine that the Virgin's forceful swap on the
infant's bottom provokes not only a great cry but also stim-

ulates the baby's bottom, and through the buttocks, the
genitals. The infant Jesus, it has been shown, is a displaced
representation of baby Max Ernst himself, with the adult
Ernst among the three voyeurs pressing against the window
to witness the violent scene. The presentation of the baby's
backside reinforces the anal orientation of the figure so that
his buttocks function as the equivalent of what we identify
as the face in traditional figurative representations.

This orientation is deployed in Gober's untitled floor sculp-
ture of 1991, in which Gober casts the buttocks and legs
of a male figure out of wax (Fig. 4). In male homosexual
culture, the anal zone is a privileged site of sexuality,
although the buttocks and the anus as an erogenous zone
are in no way exclusive to homosexuality. A man's sexual
identity, pleasure, and position are partly defined in relation
to the anus: top, bottom, versatile, or neither. It is not
important whether Gober's figure is displayed as a top or

38 /HAYWOOD

bottom, since the figure's bottom-up position could indicate
either. What is significant is that the anal zone and its sup-
porting armature, the legs, are marked as a site on which
the viewer is called upon to focus his or her attention. With
great precision, Gober has inserted into the legs pieces of
dark hair, along with several plastic drains that bore deep
holes into the buttocks and legs. The drain's interior bottom
contains a crucifix form, which Gober purposely adopted
from an outmoded drain design, as evident in a series of
drawings he produced prior to and following the floor sculp-
ture (Fig. 5). The lower half the body is cut off at the waist
and pressed into the siding that runs along the lowest por-
tion of the wall. From the buttocks, the legs extend hori-
zontally and parallel to the floor. The pointed feet lift the
legs slightly off the ground, while at the same time they
appear to press the waist more forcefully into the wall.

Especially forceful in this piece is Gober's achievement in
producing an effect of absolute vulnerability and exposure.
This effect is partly achieved by the modest underclothing
that adorns the figure. The worn tennis shoes, the generic
white socks, and the plain white briefs, unmarked by a
designer's label, renders a faceless half-figure into one that
is less anonymous than utterly ordinary. The effect of expo-
sure is further defined by the special design of the brief,
which contains a circular cut, bordered by a white band that
generously accommodates and echoes the circular drain
that punctures the left cheek. In contrast to the horizontal
position of the sculpture, the viewer approaches it in a ver-
tical, upright position, while lowering the head to direct his
or her sight toward the object on the ground. This structur-
al opposition places the viewer in a superior and dominating
position in relation to the object. Yet, strangely, the sculp-
ture fails to reinforce or reflect back to the viewer his or her
superior position and detached gaze.

On this point, the drains are crucial. The drains are most
commonly interpreted as wounds and sores that have eaten
away at the body. While acknowledging the importance of
this analogy, particularly given Gober's concern with the
effects of HIV and AIDS, I wish to point out that the drains
also function simply as openings into the sculpture's interi-
or form. The viewer is compelled not only to look down but
also into the drains, placed both on the top and on the side
of the figure. Peering in, even if only to confirm that noth-
ing is in there, has the effect of sucking the eyes into the
drain. Because of this effect, the viewer is stripped of the
God-like, all-prevailing detached eye. The viewer's eye, in
other words, is seductively lured into the interior cavity of

1^

the anal-drain. In Gober's work, the drain serves as a form
that opens the body and invests it with corporeality and
temporality in direct opposition to the closed form of the
immaculate body.

In considering Gober's Virgin, another aspect of Ernst's
painting deserves to be noted. Ernst's picture dramatizes
the Virgin's function as a harsh and disciplinary instrument
in regulating sex, or more precisely, in draining the body of
brute matter, fluid, and sexuality itself. In turn, the blood-
less Virgin is the most complete embodiment of what the
Church calls the "virtue of chastity." Why would a Catholic
gay man such as Gober possess a vested interest in the
Virgin? Catholic dogma demands that "Homosexual persons
are called to chastity." As stated in recent Catholic docu-
ments, homosexuality is a "selfish vision of sexuality," "a
serious disorder," and is "contrary to Natural Law. "9 Natural
Law, as propagandized by Catholicism, is a straightforward
concept; in strict accord with God's will — and God's will, it
should be noted, is also nature's law — a true man is a man
and only a man. Likewise, a true woman is a woman and
only a woman. This is why contemporary Catholicism
deplores what it calls the masculinization of the feminine
and likewise the feminization of the masculine.

The Catholic mandate that anyone outside of marriage must
live in a state of perpetual virginity — with the reward of this
act of self-sacrifice reaped upon entry into heaven's king-
dom—was put to test with the crisis incited by the spread
of HIV infection and AIDS. To reduce the risk of HIV infec-
tion, health experts recommend the use of condoms.
Obsessed with the theological implications of the tiny latex
socks, the Catholic Church rejects this policy on "moral"
grounds. The Church claims that "the promotion of so-

HAYWOOD; 39

called 'safe-sex,' or 'safer sex practices' is a dangerous and
immoral policy based on the deluded theory that the con-
dom can provide adequate protection against AIDS."
Perpetual chastity outside marriage and fidelity in marriage
are "the only true and secure education for the perversion
of this contagious disease. "''^ The Catholic Church, along
with other institutions hostile to homosexuality, does not
simply promote chastity for the devotee but for everyone.
This is why the Church has continued to actively campaign
against safe-sex programs. The Church's message,
although indirectly stated, is that it is better to risk suffer-
ing and death than to engage in sex safely, shamelessly,
and with pleasure.

It is instructive to consider Gober's work in the context of
activist groups that staged, in the name of self-preservation
and life, bold counter-attacks against propaganda and poli-
cies that would exterminate homosexuals. Among such
exemplary projects is Gran Fury's billboard triptych. The
Pope and the Penis (1990) (Fig. 6). The billboard was dis-
played at the Venice Biennale in 1990, but only after Gran
Fury protested against Italian Customs, which strove to
block the billboard from entering the country. This and relat-
ed projects, which Richard Meyer and Douglas Crimp have
valuably documented and analyzed, both condemn the
Catholic Church for its long history of teaching "men and
women to loathe their bodies and to fear their sexual
natures" and for "holding effective treatment of AIDS
hostage to Catholic morality."^' Although the billboard
appears initially to be inflammatory, its claims are level-
headed and reasoned. Stripping the Church of its lofty and
patronizing position in regulating the body with its moraliz-
ing rhetoric, the billboard states directly and clearly: "AIDS
is caused by a virus and a virus has no morals."

Given the Church's extraordinary effort to maintain distinc-
tions between the two sexes as fixed, morally correct, and
pure, it is queer indeed that non-married men, whether het-
erosexual or homosexual, are called upon to emulate the
Virgin. Although other religions repudiate homosexuality
with equal force, the Catholic Church is unique in calling on
men, in addition to women, to emulate the Virgin. This
directive is e.vident in a recent Catholic publication that
advises parents to foster extra "devotion to the Immaculate
Mother of God," if they detect "deviant tendencies and atti-
tudes" in their young boys or girls. '2 Therefore, while all
men, both homosexual and heterosexual, are charged with
preserving masculinity as an identity absolutely distinct
from femininity, non-married men are simultaneously called
upon to model their identity on the Church's supreme model
of Catholic femininity — the Virgin.

A pure and everlasting symbol of virginity, the Virgin is also
upheld as the supreme model of the Bride. She is the Bride
of the Church. Clothed in a white gown, the earthly bride
who emulates the Virgin participates in a marriage ceremo-
ny that both announces her virginity and, with the Church's
blessing, inaugurates its end.

to /HAYWOOD

In an installation project of 1989, Gober paid homage to the
Bride by designing and sewing himself a silk wedding gown
and then propping it up on the floor of the Paula Cooper
Gallery (Fig. 7). The wedding dress, a shell waiting to be
embodied and performed, is set up as both a lure and a trap.
Pasted on the gallery walls is Gober's wallpaper design con-
sisting of alternating images of a lynched black man and a
white glamour-boy in a state of luxurious sleep. Standing
along the edge of the wall are handcrafted bags of cat lit-
ter.

In this project, Gober fashions the Bride as a hollow form
that, even preexisting its embodiment, is implicated in vio-
lent, oppressive forms of subjugation. Two years later,
Gober himself enters more fully the structure and discourse
of the Bride, as if he were following through on the Catholic
demand that he, as a gay man, foster devotion and identifi-
cation with the Virgin Bride. In a project exhibited at the Dia

Center for the Arts in New York in 1992-93, Gober trans-
forms the gallery's interior architecture by painting on the
walls a landscape scene of thick bushes and trees (Fig. 8).
His pallet consists of army greens that heighten the artifi-
ciality of the landscape, infusing it with slight military con-
notations. Gober allows the gallery's white columns, which
stand stiffly vertical, to further accentuate that "nature" is
an artificial construct, a delimiting structure always impris-
oning to someone. Carved into the walls are prison win-
dows, suggesting that nature, like the Bride, is a lure and a
trap. The prison windows open onto an artificial sky, clos-
ing off the possibility that there is a transcendent truth or
natural order outside. Attached to the walls are white sinks
containing faucets from which recycled water pours. Placed
against the wall are red boxes of rat bait, further suggest-
ing that for pure natural beauty and Natural Law to exist,
something in nature has been poisoned and purged (Fig. 9).
Stacks of newspaper fabricated by Gober are piled against
the walls and the columns.

On the front page of the newspapers is an advertisement
for Saks Fifth Avenue bridalwear. The hefty, voluptuous
bride, dressed in a strapless gown that accents her breasts
and then tightens around her waist, is none other than
Gober himself (Fig. 10). The gown appearing in the news-
paper advertisement is the same dress Gober had earlier
designed for the installation at the Paula Copper Gallery.
Above the advertisement is a New York Times report stat-
ing that the Vatican has urged Roman Catholic bishops to
oppose laws that promote the public acceptance of homo-
sexual conduct. Labeled an "objective disorder," homosex-
uality, if elevated as a legally protected civil right, would
threaten the holy institution of marriage, which, in accor-
dance with the doctrine of Natural Law, is reserved solely
for a man and a woman. In the Dia installation, the Rat Bait
disturbs the logic of Natural Law. As a law that proclaims
that its structuring mechanics are both naturally and divine-
ly authored, natural law is based on a conception of nature

HAYWOOD/ 1)1

11

that cannot exist unless there is a rat to poison and purge.
Without a rat, natural law would lose the object that marks
the inside as nature's glory and the outside as its flaw. As
a living, dynamic structure. Natural Law requires an invad-
er that crosses the boundaries, revealing the boundaries to
itself. In the Saks advertisement, Gober performs the role of
the rat that escapes the poison and invades the inside but
only to announce that rat is always both inside and out-

side.^3 jhe rat, one might say, announces: I am your Virgin
and bride. And you who invented the spotless bride, you,
holy one, also invented the rat.

In occupying the shell of the bride, Gober could more fully
imagine that a man possesses a womb. The home, Freud
argued, is a (poor) substitute for the mother's womb, the
first lodging, for which men and women still long. For men,
dreaming about the womb extends into another fantasy,
which is to birth a child. This fantasy results in the imagi-
nary possibility of what Jacques Lacan has described as
anal pregnancy.''* In puncturing the Virgin and Bride with a
drainpipe, Gober opens the womb, which is also to say, he
reinvests the Virgin with an anus. In Gober's drawing of an
anus giving birth to a foot, he graphically depicts the anus
as a substitute vagina and womb (Fig. 1 1).

Turing once again to Gober's Virgin of 1997, observe how
he renders the Virgin respectfully, without satire or mock-
ery (Fig. 12). She is not, however, the Catholic Virgin who
is spotless and wrinkle-free. The drain opens up her other-
wise closed, bloodless, and colorless body, at the same
time the pipe weighs her firmly to the ground. But like
Gober's hollow bridal dress, this Virgin is planted as a lure.
Yet, unlike the bride, she is not a trap. She stands on a
drain, which opens onto a spectacular, exotic, and brightly
lit underwater world that is teeming with artificial flora,
starfish, pearls, and glistening coins. '5 To fabricate this
underworld, Gober and his assistances had to excavate the
concrete floor of the Geffen Contemporary, adapted from
two adjacent warehouses by Frank Gehry to house tempo-
rary exhibitions (Fig. 13). By carving out a vast hole in the
earth to host this underworld, Gober was not directing the
viewer's vision to the horizontal stretch of the floor as min-
imalist sculptors had but rather into a cavity below the ordi-
nary floor of culture. For the viewer, however, this under-
world could only be accessed visually through openings in

B^m^

HE f ^^^^H

13

((2 /HAYWOOD

the drains. Just visible through one of the drains is the
lower section of a man who appears to have given birth to
a baby. The baby is diapered, Gober explains, to make the
man appear nurturing (Fig. 1).

Defending his highly imaginative and thought-provoking
conception of the Virgin from the predictable cry of blas-
phemy by Catholic officials and organizations, Gober
remarks that he was not so much attacking the Church as
he was attempting to get closer to the Virgin. '^ The
Catholic Church's strict guidelines regulating devotion to
the Virgin Mary charge bishops to deplore and ban all devo-
tion that deviates from the Vatican's rules. If, in this proj-
ect, Gober gets closer to the Virgin Mary, she is a virgin
whom Catholic officials could recognize only as unnatural
and perverse. The only way Gober could truly know the
Virgin was to reinvent and dress her with a drain.

Notes

' Robert Gober's Virgin Mary Is the central figure in a complex project, Untitled
Installation, 1 997- The project was commissioned by the Geffen Contemporary,
MOCA, Los Angeles and organized by Paul Schimmel, For details on the instal-
lation, as well as essays by Schimmel and Hal Foster, see Paul Schimmel. ed.,
Robert Gober (Los Angeles. CA and Zurich: The Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles and Scalo Verlag, 19971.

■^ St. Augustine and Tertullian quoted in Simone De Beauvotr, The Second Sex.
trans. H.M, Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971): 167-68.

^ In a 1989 interview in which Gober reflected on his Catholic upbringing, he
stated: "The Church was a very sick place. The Church that I knew was an
extremely hypocritical institution. That might be where I got my initial inspira-
tion of perversity, growing up within the Catholic Church," Robert Gober, inter-
view by Craig Gholson (1989); reprinted in Betsy Sussler, ed.. Speak Art! The
Best of Bomb Magazine's Interviews with Artists (Australia: G + B Arts
International, 1997): 88-96.

^ For one of many historical interpretations of the Virgin Mary, see Marina
Warner. Alone of All Her Sex The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New
York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1976) I wish to thank theologians Jean Porter and
Susan St, Ville for assisting me with research on the Virgin,

^ See Sigmund Freud, "Character and Anal Eroticism." (1908) The Standard
Editions of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol, 9, trans.
James Strachey [London: The Hogarth Press, 1974): 167,

° In this way, my study is indebted to David Joselit's insightful essay on Robert
Gober's Untitled Installation, 1997, See David Joselit, "Poetics of the Drain,"
Art in America (December 1997): 65-71. Making an analogy to Gober, Joselit
cites novelist Jean Genet who, according to Joselit, imagines "an anality, which
might be called a poetics of the drain, 'a sentimental poetics' explicitly laced
with references to Catholicism" Joselit sees Gober's Virgin Mary, however, as
the element of the installation "most difficult to assimilate."

^ See Salvador Dali. "Why they attack the Mona Lisa," Art News 62.1 (March
1963): 36, 63,

° For interpretations of Max Ernst's art, see, for example, Werner Spies, ed..
Max Ernst (London: Tate Gallery, 1991). Also see, Rosalind Krauss, The Optical
Unconscious (Cambridge. MAr MIT Press, 1993).

^ See "The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality," Pontifical Council for the
Family. Guidelines for Education within the Family (November 21, 1995). See
Chapter VI, "Learning Stages,"

10

Ibid.

^ See Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, eds.. AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle:
Bay Press. 1990); and Richard Meyer, "This is to Enrage You: Gran Fury and
the Graphics of Aids Activism," But is it Arti> The Spirit of Art as Activism, Nina
Felshin, ed, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995): 51-83.

' -^ "The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality,"

'■^ For an alternative interpretation of the Dia installation, see Hal Foster who,
in part, sees it as a "comment on the divides in American ideology — between
the transcendalist myths of individual and nature. , and the contemporary real-
ities of mass anonymity and urban confinement." See Hal Foster. "The Art of
the Missing Part," Schimmel, ed. Robert Gober, 57-68; reprinted with revisions
in Octobers! (Spring 2000): 129-56.

'^ In his essay, "Function and Field of Speech and Language," Jacques Lacan
states that he was able to "bring to light in a certain male subject phantasies of
anal pregnancy as well as the dream of its resolution by Caesarian section,"
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans, Alan Sheridan (New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997): 100.

^ Gober's intricate fabrication of this exotic underworld is documented in
Harry Philbrick. ed,. Robert Gober: The 1999 Larry Aldrich Foundation Award
Exhibition (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).

^° On Gober's response to various attacks by Catholic officials and organiza*
tions, especially the right-wing, anti-art watchdog group, the Catholic League
for Religious and Civil Rights, see the invaluable interview and discussion
between Gober and curator Richard Flood in Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999): 121-43.

Illustrations

Fig. 1:

Fig. 2:
Fig. 3:

Fig. 4:

Fig. 5:
Fig- 6:

Fig. 7:

Robert Gober, Untitled [Virgin], detail of the underworld, 1997.
Exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1997.

Robert Gober, Untitled [Virgin). 1997.

Max Ernst, The Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus in front of Three
Witnesses. 1926.

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991-93. Exhibited at the Aldrich Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1998,

Fig.

9:

Fig.

10:

Fig.

1 1:

Fig.

12:

Robert Gober, Untitled Drawing (Drain). 1992-96,

Gran Fury, The Pope and the Penis, 1990. Exhibited at the Venice
Biennale, 1990.

Robert Gober, Wedding Gown. Hanging Man/ Sleeping Man. Cat Litter.
1989-96. Exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1989.

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1992-93. Installed at the Dia Center for the
Arts, New York.

Robert Gober. Untitled, detail of rat bait, 1992-93,

Robert Gober, Untitled, detail of newspaper advertisement with Gober
wearing a wedding dress, 1992-93.

Robert Gober, Untitled Drawing, 1995.

Robert Gober, Untitled [Virgin), view of the Virgin figure from the back,
1997.

Robert Gober, Untitled [Virgin), excavation of the ground of the
museum, 1 997.

HAYWOOD/ 143

MARY LOU LOBSINGER
MONSTROUS FRUIT:

THE EXCESS OF ITALIAI

NEO-LIBERTY

The cult of the new, and thus the Idea of moder-
nity, Is a rebellion against the fact that there Is no
longer anything new.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia.

The September 1957 editorial of Casabella Continuita took
the form of an epistolary exchange between the editor
Ernesto N. Rogers and the Milan-based architect Eugenic
Gentlll, a contributor to the magazine. Decrying the con-
tents of Issue 21 5, Gentlll confronted Rogers with the ques-
tion: If Casabella purports to be a review of modern archi-
tecture, where are the examples of true, explicit, and virile
modernism?! Gentlll's discontent lay. In part, with the
plethora of photographic documentation devoted to the dis-
play of Auguste Ferret's reconstruction of Le Havre, to
Guido Canella's essay on the Amsterdam School, and to the
"manifesto" of architectural neorealism, the Tiburtino hous-
ing quarter. While the attack was aimed at the publishing
policies of the review, Gentlll leveled pointed criticism at the
architecture of young Torinesi architects Roberto Gabetti
and Almaro Isola (Fig. 1|. In contrast to his polite consign-
ment of the illustrations of Tiburtino as a "picturesque" mis-
representation of contemporary Italian society, Gentlll sum-
marily dismissed the architecture of Gabetti and Isola as a
"breed of monstrous fruit. "2 Furthermore, he predicted that
Casabella 21 5 would, unfortunately, come to mark the offi-
cial birth of neo-llberty, a term cleverly derived from the pre-
ponderance of turn-of-the-century to stile liberty, the archi-
tecture of the bourgeoisie. In the hometown of the
accused. 3 Titled "Ortodossia dell'eterodossia," the Gentili-
Rogers exchange was but one episode In a brewing discon-
tent over the contents of the magazine.* However, not only
did the title of this particular installment serve to focus the
terms of the debate, but with the naming of architectural

ll /LOBSINGER

phenomena as neo-liberty, it put — albeit briefly — a provi-
sional stylistic category of derogatory implications into cir-
culation.

Within a few years, the local tempest over Casabella's sup-
port of unorthodox views of modern architecture spilled
beyond the Milan and Turin axis and indeed beyond the con-
fines of Italian academic and print culture. ^ In 1959, Reyner
Banham added fuel to the controversy when he pejorative-
ly labeled a wide range of expressive experimentation with-
in postwar Italian architecture that did not square with his
idea of the true vocation of modernism as "Neoliberty." For
Banham, Neoliberty was evidence of architectural revival-
ism and, as such, a regression from architectural mod-
ernism.6 Thus, while neo-liberty had merely represented the
reaction of one critic to one aspect of a heterogeneous and
exploratory approach to modern architecture as pursued by
two architects, Neoliberty represented tout court the Italian
retreat from modern architecture.^

Between the turn of events around the challenges to
Rogers's editorial mandate, the coining of the neo-liberty
style, Banham's polemic and beyond, there remains as yet
unexamined an eclecticism of ideas that nurtured the diver-
sity of architectural forms explored by Italian architects in
the late 1950s. The architectures espoused as neo-liberty
were authored as conscious deviations from the path of
"formalistic modernism. "^ Paradoxically, these formal devi-
ations were launched as critiques of modernism's deviation
from its original social and moral imperatives. Architects
pursued formal experimentations — deemed as eclectic,
revivalist, or historicist — as a critique of the perceived
degeneration of modernism into a reductive and abstract
style unrelated to contemporary reality. Young Italian archi-
tects such as Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo Rossi, Guido Canella,
Aimaro Isola, and Roberto Gabetti reconsidered the tradition
of modern architecture from a variety of viewpoints, but
they all converged upon a shared belief: that in contempo-
rary experience there, in fact, no longer existed anything
new. 9

That the dominant form of early modernism was ideologi-
cally bound up with the idea of the new is well established.
The call for modern architecture to be of its time was, in
part, responsible for the entrenchment of a tradition based
on the ever-begetting potential for newness. 'o For some
critics, the relentless undialectical pursuit of the new, under
the "veil of temporal succession," petrified into a concep-
tual scheme comprised of a "never-changing core," which

despite external appearance was, in fact, ever the same.'i
What offense did neo-liberty perpetrate against the tradition
of the new? It questioned the conception of time as the
temporal succession of the forever new. Time might be irre-
versible, but irreversible time was not to be understood in
architecture as the linear progression or the advance of
technological invention that naturally spawned new forms.
The technologically innovative might not be equivalently
reflected in formal invention. 12 The subjection of architec-
ture to the antihistorical tradition of the new — that is, to the
irreversible time of avant-garde rupture — was here displaced
by an idea of architecture as a bearer of history made in the
present.

There are two histories inextricably bound in this investiga-
tion. The first is that of Casabella Continuita and Ernesto N.
Rogers's pursuit of the tradition of modern architecture. The
second is the naming of neo-liberty, an event that demar-
cates an increasingly critical attitude toward Rogers's edi-
torial mandate and his emphasis on history, as his detrac-
tors put it. When in 1953-54 Rogers re-introduced
Casabella after a nearly seven-year hiatus, he promised to
uphold a publishing policy that presented the worl< of
"major exponents of modern architectural thought" and of
"younger and less mature but promising talents" as equally
significant contributions. '^ Against exclusivity, Rogers
argued for an interpretation of architectural history as an
"open horizon," for to dwell on "masterpieces" would be
"to arbitrarily falsify the historical process."''* Central to
Rogers's position was the notion of historical continuity
grounded on the belief of modern architecture as a tradition.
An architecture that was both rooted in tradition and was
of its time was poised against architectural formalism — that
of traditionalism or idealism — and against the "a prioristic"
approach to design, that is, an approach that presumed
formal or constructional attributes in advance of cultural
and social-historical conditions. '6 Rogers wrote:

But the real problem arises when people persist in
recognizing the "style" of the Modern Movement
from figurative appearances and not from the
expression of a method seeking to establish new
and clearer relations between content and form
within the phenomenology of a pragmatic and
open process, a process which rejects every l<ind
of a priori dogmatism. '6

Rogers's "phobia of formal codification" guided his pursuit
of a method capable of including the diversity that had char-
acterized modern architecture from its inception.'^

LOBSINGER/ 15

Rogers's support of architectural diversity was held respon-
sible for influencing the turn of Italian architects toward his-
torical reference and eclectic forms of composition. For
example, in L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui of September
1957, the same month as Gentili's letter, a photograph of
the Borsa Valori (Stock Exchange! by Gabetti and Isola was
accompanied by a comment that claimed the building as
representative of a violent reaction against contemporary
architecture and as an affirmation of the "extravagant doc-
trine" supported by the editorial policies of Casabella (Fig.
2). ^8 In fact, Rogers had twice voiced his lack of apprecia-
tion for the work of Gabetti and Isola. '^ He had claimed
that, formal appearances aside, Gabetti and Isola's archi-
tecture presented a personal position and not a method. 20
Their predilection for historical motifs was driven by taste.
The work was autobiographical and literary. Furthermore, it
was undialectical and thus could not adequately represent
the reality of the times.

Gabetti and Isola's architecture seems to have pushed
Rogers's already generous perspective on the relation of
history to contemporary architecture to its extreme limit. 21
Today it is ironic to note that two of the most contentious
works, the Borsa Valori (1953-561 (Figs. 2, 3) and the
Bottega d'Erasmo (1953-56) (Figs. 4, 5), built when the
architects had recently graduated from the Polytecnico of
Turin, have enjoyed a sustained appreciation for their ele-
gant composition and structural sophistication. Both are
located in the center of the industrial city of Turin in north-
ern Italy. The Bottega is a five-storey building sited on a
trapeziodal infill lot located in a perimeter block that is
unusual in Turin's urban typology. The client's antiquarian
bookstore occupies the first and second floors, and the
remaining floors contain private apartments. Undoubtedly,
the facades were the cause of consternation among archi-
tects and critics. The street face is distinguished by bow-

shaped windows and balconies, finished with wrought-iron
railings, and crowned with Luserna stone attached by gal-
vanized hinges. The back presents an undulating facade of
balconies reminiscent of Gaudf's Casa Mila (Fig. 4). Borsa
Valori, on the other hand, is composed of an eclectic selec-
tion of architectural references borrowed from the lexicon
of modern architecture. 22 While the facade of the Bottega
reads as a surface articulated through decorative brickwork
and through details that climax in a slate and copper slope-
backed roof, the Borsa takes advantage of its freestanding
position to explore expressive form (Fig. 2). 23 Dominated by
volumetric forms, a white rectangular mass sits on a dark
gray rusticated base and is topped off by a curvilinear roof
that appears to float effortlessly. It conjures an ambiguous
reference to Le Corbusier. The span over the interior floor
of the stock exchange was achieved by means of a struc-
tural assembly reminiscent of Anatole de Baudot, or Viollet
le Due's proposal for an assembly hall, or Horta at the
Maison du Peuple (Fig. 3). The hanging lights and other inte-
rior details are reminiscent of Aalto's work or Berlage's
Stock Exchange. The Bottega more distinctively owes some

t5 /LOBSINGER

debt to the Amsterdam School or the Wagnerschule and
only vaguely recalls Raimondo D'Aronco's Liberty-style
pavilion for Turin's International Exhibition of 1902. That
these two very different works were designed during a
three-year period would be disconcerting for those critics
and architects who held an idealized conception of the tech-
nical and formal progression of modern architecture.

What reasoning supported this experimentation with archi-
tectural form?^'' In a letter published by way of introduc-
tion, Gabetti and Isola admitted a keen interest in the works
of the pioneers of modern architecture for "the possibilities
they offered. "25 This interest was not compelled by admi-
ration for the enunciation of the "word" over the "event"
but for the realization of "complex achievements. "26 From
this letter one knows that behind their architectural reason-
ing are concepts plucked from readings in existentialism and
phenomenology. 27 That concrete acts are the substance of
events within architectural history counters the a priori des-
ignation of style, that is, the "word" over and above the
"event. "28 By means of philosophical concepts, they argued
that their architecture was not only to be of its time but
was also to present "a non-retrievable past" within "a hori-
zon open toward a future yet to be disclosed. "29 Their
architectural eclecticism hinged on the existential concep-
tion of choice. To choose in the present from the possibili-
ties offered throughout architectural history required the
architect to bracket off the past — to suspend all preconcep-
tions of the natural attitude and about received forms or
prejudices about reality — for the task of choice. 30 Framed in
this way, the highly selective employ of materials, architec-
tural vocabulary, and detail could not be viewed as merely
eclectic but as representative of "the present as an isolated
occasion within history. "3' A strong identification exists
between these statements and the views promulgated by
the Italian existentialist philosopher Nicola Abbagnano who

stated, for example, that "if an event does not have char-
acteristics which allows it to be recognized as something
unique and not repeatable, it belongs to all times and to
none; its chronological location is irrelevant. "32

Here the idea of the unique is not to be conflated with new-
ness or novelty; rather, the unique is the result of individual
acts of choice that situate the author and the architecture
in the present. Architecture as a non-repeatable event was
thought to offer subtle resistance to the universalizing
imperative of academic modernism as a movement. 33 lt
countered the proselytizing "word" with the factual
"event," while the employ of unassimilated forms countered
the modernist propensity to totalization. S"! The l(oine of the
Bottega or the "kaleidoscopic" references assembled in the
voluble Borsa were acts of resistance within a world con-
firmed through standardization and repetition to being ever
the same. 35 Thus, architecture as the ensemble of choices
demarcating the event punctuated the ideology of moderni-
ty and the anti-historical mandate of the tradition of the

LOBSINGER/ 4 7

In an unpublished text of 1959, Aldo Rossi examined the
problem of "the tradition of the anti-tradition of the new" to
argue that the principles of the Modern Movement had been
"deformed" during its early evolution. 3'' For Rossi, early
modern architecture conveniently fell into a misalignment
with the idea of modernity. Characteristics associated with
modernity as a nineteenth-century phenomena, such as
novelty, technological innovation, and progress had become
conflated with and reified as the architectural principles of
the Modern Movement. These principles, married to the
notion of the architect as innovator, were extended sys-
tematically to become integral to modern architecture as a
style. 38 The idea of tradition in architecture, negatively
characterized as building for permanence, was usurped for
the ideal of innovation. From this moment stems the mod-
ernist aversion for eclecticism and revivalism — that is, for
anything that appeared as a repetition of the past. 39
Paradoxically, the tradition of modernism — to be innovative,
to be of its time — was now itself not merely outmoded but
a sign of regressive thinking, since it presented "modern
architecture as a repetition of its original solution. "*o

Rossi's arguments here and in other writings from this time
reveal some debt to the thought of Theodor Adorno and
Georg Lukacs. It is not out of context to cite Rossi's use of
Adorno in Casabella 219, the issue Banham gratuitiously
employed as evidence of the Italian retreat from modernism.
In a book review of Hans Sedlmayr's Verlust der Mine,
Rossi presented a lengthy citation from Minima Moralia to
cut through the ideology of decline and fall that marred
Sedlmayr's view of modernism.'*'

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossi-
ble.... The functional modern habitations designed
from a tabula rasa are living-cases manufactured
by experts for philistines, or factory sites that
have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid
of all relation to the occupant: in them even the
nostalgia for independent existence, defunct in
any case, is sent packing.... From a distance the
difference between the Vienna Workshops and
the Bauhaus is no longer so considerable. Purely
functional curves, which have broken free of their
purpose, are now becoming just as ornamental as
the basic structures of Cubism. "2

The vanguard achievements of the Modern Movement are
here cast aside to argue that to proceed as if nothing has
changed is to deny the reality of technique that dominated
modern culture. Following Adorno, Rossi posits that the
conflation of modernity, modern architecture, and techno-
logically deployed rationality was thrown into doubt by the

mass destruction and suffering experienced during World
War II. The same technological hubris, Rossi points out,
was responsible for the vast expanse of housing quarters on
the seemingly endless peripheries of Milan and Turin. ''^
Postwar mass-produced housing revealed that the distance
between factory-like housing and the factory, or between
the ideological foothold of functionalist claims and those of
ornament-driven architectures was annihilated within the
massification of culture. They appeared like the disposabili-
ty of "old food cans."''''

For many of the young Italian architects who grew under
the mentorship of Rogers's Casabella, the ideology of the
new was most evident in the reified and conventionalized
forms of academicized modern architecture. That architec-
ture was codified and distributed much like the assembly-
line items produced for mass consumption. "5 Against the
reduction of architectural possibilities, the Torinesi enlisted
existentialist concepts to underwrite a personal architectur-
al engage. The Milanesi, on the other hand, underwrote
their readings of existentialism and phenomenology with
varying intensities of allegiance to Marxism to mount a
stringent critique of the Modern Movement and its collusion
with the rise of mass culture. In 1957, Vittorio Gregotti
claimed the architecture of Gabetti and Isola to be repre-
sentative of the intellectual crisis experienced by young
architects in confrontation with modernist functionalist doc-
trine and as an exemplar of a willful resistance to a "cor-
rupt" rationalist tradition. ''s Guide Canella wrote that the
collaborative works by Gregotti, Meneghetti, and Stoppino
exemplified an ironic gesture, a neo-dada-like response to
mass culture.''^ Paolo Portoghesi characterized the Milanese
turn to neo-liberty as promoting an Adorno-like aesthetic
atonalism against avant-gardist novelty. ''^ Still others
referred to the eclectic compositions as ambiguous or as the
architectural equivalent to aphorism, an incompleteness
poised against the presupposition of totality. "^ Detractors
claimed it an opportunistic response to a booming consumer
market, run rampant by developer speculation. In this case,
the reference to architectural forms of the turn of the cen-
tury was a cynical plundering of the past when an earlier
expansion of the Italian economy saw the bourgeoisie trans-
form lo stile Liberty into the garish commodity of real estate
speculation. 50

There is not much built evidence to put these interpreta-
tions to the test. The projects by Giorgio Raineri, Gae
Aulenti, the studio of Gregotti, Meneghetti and Stoppino, as
well as Gabetti and Isola as published in Casabella 219 all

t8 /LOBSINGER

share some formal traits: decorative brici^work, pitched
roofs of varying styles, odd-shaped, punched or bow win-
dows, irregular floor plans, and details more closely aligned
with the Amsterdam School or Aalto rather than the deco-
rative flourishes of the Liberty style (Figs. 6, 7).5i The main
sources of evidence for the so-called neo-liberty are the
exchanges scripted in response to Banham's attack. In
these texts, architects and critics took the opportunity to
examine not only neo-liberty but the turn within contempo-
rary Italian architecture toward revivals, spontaneous
forms, and the eclectic use of forms and details in gener-
al.^2 jhat architects of the postwar generation turned to
formal experimentation as a protest against the Modern
Movement and against mass culture was well understood if
not always found sympathetic. For example, acknowledged
in a critique titled "Trucchi e galateo di un 'aufklarung'
milanese" ("Tricks and Good Manners of an Enlightened
Milanese"! is an adherence to the writings of "... Gramsci,
Lukacs, Sartre, Argan, and Adorno (the professors they
substitute for the fathers of the church or as an infallible
Pope in the dispute of the Milanese)" to launch critiques of
the "triumph of the machine" and to support "their regres-
sion as a critique of interiority."^^ This same review warns
that theory-laden architecture may, in fact, be an intellectu-
al alibi that allowed the architects to evade the current
social-cultural situation. Three years earlier, Eugenio Gentili
had been less understanding of Gabetti and Isola's turn to
philosophical concepts to underwrite their architectural
experimentation. Gentili denounced their work as "a kind of
timid architecture which refuses to look at the possibly
unpleasant reality of our times and imagines that it is build-
ing something serious while it is merely hiding behind the
daisies; it is pure literary snobbery. "5*

By the early sixties all the talk about the odd formal exper-
iments called neo-liberty was well over. The sources of cri-
tique had certainly changed, but one aspect took hold and
evolved: the quest for a theory of architecture that engaged
philosophical concepts to understand the material reality of
architectural production and the city became more rigorous
and focused. A generation of Italian architects mentored
under the auspices of Rogers and Casabella, a generation
which matured within the dramatic economic and cultural
transformations of northern Italian cities, understood that to
be of one's time did not entail the mimetic reflection of sur-
face effects of an ideologically suspect modernity. Rather,
the conflation of modernity and modern architecture posed
a seemingly insurmountable challenge to the realization of a
truly contemporary architecture.

In conclusion, it remains to be asked: what affront did the
architecture of Gabetti and Isola pose to the more conser-
vative architects and critics? Gentili's designation of neo-lib-
erty as a monstrous fruit imputes a sense of excess and
over-ripeness to this architecture, that is, an architecture
"deviated from the assumed natural form or character. "^5 lt
was denounced as an "excessive stylistic and decadent
indulgence. "56 However, if neo-liberty was indeed culpable
of a formal transgression against modern architecture, it
was a violation based on a normative conception of modern
architecture. More likely, the formal attributes of neo-liber-
ty, both in their ambiguous reference to recent history and
eclectic assemblage, contravened the conception of the
progressive unfolding of time as evidenced in the formal and
technical innovation of architecture. Neo-liberty put this
notion of time and thus architectural progress out of joint.
Its confusion of time through ambiguous historical refer-
ences presented an overabundance of signification. This
presentation of heterogeneous and uncontrollable meanings
challenged an idealized view of the Modern Movement and
of modern architecture as a style transparently related — by
means of technique — to its time.

Neo-liberty's deviation, however, is only apparent since
such a claim relies on an assumed correctness of a particu-
lar normative strain of modernism. It was precisely the false
premises of this exclusive view of modernism that Rogers's
Casabella was poised to amend. The modernist dismissal of
tradition and history were for Rogers a falsification of the
diversity always already existing within architectural mod-
ernism. Likewise, the making of a universal style, a repeat-
able abstract idea of architecture was, as the young Aldo
Rossi argued, the original deformation of the Modern
Movement. The continued adherence to this architectural
logic was, in the postwar era, evidence of the "exhaustion"
and "dissolution of the Modern Movement. "^'^

LOBSINGER/ 19

Notes

All translations are by the author unless specified otherwise. Conversations with
Vittorio Gregotti (Milan). Professor Carlo Olmo (Polytecnico di Torino), and
Professor Marco De Michelis (lUAV) have contributed to my understanding of
Italian architecture of the 1950s and 60s.

' Eugenio Gentiti and Ernesto N. Rogers, "Ortodossia deU'eterodossia,"
Casabella Continuita 216 ISeptember 1957): 2. Bruno Zevi calls neo-liberty the
"andropause" of Italian modern architecture. Andropause. the male equivalent
of menopause, refers to the cessation of reproduction. See Bruno Zevi,
"L'Andropausa degli architetti moderni," L'Architettura Cronache e storia 46 4
(August 1959): 222-23,

2 Gentili, "Ortodossia deU'eterodossia," 3,

^ The Art Nouveau style of many of the pavilions at the 1 902 International
Exhibition in Turin and the 1 906 exhibition in Milan had great influence on the
local architecture. Note that the spelling of neo-liberty transforms to neoliberty
in Paolo Portoghesi's article "Dal Neorealismo al Neoliberty." Comunita 65
(December 1958): 69-79. I follow Gentili's spelling.

** See. for example, the dispute between Giancarlo De Carlo and Ernesto N.
Rogers, which was resolved by De Carlo's resignation from the Casabella edi-
torial board in 1957, De Carlo argued that Casabella had become too focused
on historical topics and that the editor was avoiding the real problems of archi-
tecture and of contemporary reality. See Rogers's announcement of the new
advisory board, De Carlo's letter explaining his resignation, and Rogers's
response in Casabella Continuita 214 (February 1957): unpaginated.

^ The contents of the magazine, particularly the view towards history, had been
the subject of debates held by the Movimento di Studi per I'Architertura IMSAI
and among architecture students and young architects from Rome. Milan,
Novara, and Turin. See. for example, the report "Una discussione su Casabella
all'MSA.," Casabella Continuity 215 (1957): 49-50.

° Reyner Banham, "Neoliberty, The Italian Retreat from Modern Architecture,"
TTie Architectural Review 125.747 (April 1959): 231-35. It seems that
Banham's attack on neo-liberty was initially provoked by the projects of young
architects Giorgio Raineri, Gae Aulenti, Vittorio Gregotti. Lodovico Meneghetti,
and Giotto Stoppino as well as the introductory article "II passato e il presente
nella nuova architettura," by Aldo Rossi as published in Casabella Continuita
219 (1958): 16- 31. Banham's definition expanded this initial set of projects to
include the postwar work of architects active since the 1930s, for example,
Figini and Pollini, Ignazio Gardella, and Bbpr, Note that this difference in gener-
ation in the pre and postwar experience was, in part, responsible for the discord
over neo-liberty: Gentili and Rogers on one side and Rogers's students includ-
ing Canella, Gregotti, Rossi, and Aulenti on the other.

^ Banham, 235.

^ See Guido Canella, "La Prova del Nove," Nuovi Disegni per il Mobile Italiano
(March 14-27, 1960): 18; Portoghesi, "Dal neorealismo al neoliberty,"
Comunita (December 1 958): 78; Carlo Melograni, "Dal Neoliberty al
Neopiacentismo." // Contemporaneo 13 (May 1959): 17-28; Annarosa Cotta
and Attilio Marcolli, "Ambiguita dell'architettura Milanese." Superfici 1 (March
1961): 14-18: Manfredo Tafuri. "Neorealismo. neoeclettismo, revivalismo nella
vicenda architettonica romana dal 1945-1961," Superfici 5 (April 1962): 34;
Portoghesi "L'impegno delle nuove generazioni," Aspetii dell'arte contempo-
ranea. Omaggio a Quaroni (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1963): 262; and Guido
Canella, "Processo al Neoliberty," Fantasia 9 (September 1963): 36-43. On the
more "catholic" Torinesi and the Marxist Milanesi. see Vittorio Gregotti, New
Directions in Italian Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1968): 55-56. For
Tafuri's hindsight view of neo-liberty, see "Modern Architecture and the Eclipse
of History," Theories and History of Architecture (New York: Harper and Row
Publishers, (19671 1980): 51-52, More recently, see Jorge Silvetti, "On Realism
m Architecture," The Harvard Architectural Review 1 (Spring 1980): 15, 16-17

° Theodor Adorno, "Late Extra." Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life
(New York: Verso, 1994): 235-38, Minima Moralia was translated to Italian in
1954 by Giulio Einaudi. Note that many Italian architects of this period read and
employed philosophical concepts in a creative manner. For example, they might

freely cite Adorno, Sartre, and Husserl. all positively, within the same context.
Given Adorno's position on the latter two philosophers, this may seem count-
er-intuitive.

^^ On the tradition of the new, see Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture.
Tafuri's conception of the new is adapted, in part, from Harold Rosenberg, 77?e
Tradition of the New (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1959) translated as La
tradizione del nuovo (Milan; Feltrinelli, 1964),

^^ Adorno, "Late Extra," 236-37,

'^ Despite the formal vocabularies of the Bottega d'Erasmo and the Borsa
Valori, for example, aspects of their construction were technologically innova-
tive.

^ -^ Rogers, "Continuita," Casabella Continuita 199 (December 1953-January
1954): 2.

"^^ Rogers, "Continuity. Ortodossia." 3. To focus on polemics or formal criteria
meant that in "accepting Gropius one would have to reject Le Corbusier; to
accept Aalto, one would exclude Mies van der Rohe, etc,"

^ Rogers, "Continuita." 2.

^^ Rogers. "Continuity o crisi," Casabella Continuita 215 (April-May 1957); 5.
Italics mine.

17

Rogers. "Ortodossia." 3. Also see Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture.

1944-1985 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990): 55.

^° "Jeunes Architectes," L 'architecture d'au/ourd'hui 73 (September 1957):
55.

'^ For Rogers's critique of Gabetti and Isola, see the editorials "Continuity o
cnsi" and "Ortodossia deU'eterodossia," cited above.

^^ For a summary of Rogers's concept of "continuita" and its relation to
method, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern
Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000): 201. Also see Tafuri,
History of Italian Architecture, 55.

21 Note that this was not the first publication of architectural projects by
Giorgio Raineri and Roberto Gabetti, See Casabella Continuita 212 (September-
October 1956): 31-57,

^2 The architects won the commission through a limited competition sponsored
by Turin's Chamber of Commerce in 1952. The project team included architect
Giorgio Raineri and structural engineer Giuseppe Raineri. The site for the new
stock exchange was a lot in the center of the city made vacant after a WWII
bombardment, Manuela Morresi claims that the rusticated base is reminiscent
of traditional Italian public palazzo types and the interior space is reminiscent of
the Maison du Peuple of Victor Horta (1895-98) Andrea Guerra and Manuela
Morresi, Gabetti e Isola. Opere di architettura (Milan: Electa. 1996): 291.

^•^ On the use of brick as a local building tradition, see, for example, the Palazzo
Carignano begun by Guanno Guarini in 1679. Note that Gabetti and tsola's
statement on the building process implies that the choice of brick was based on
the presence of local skilled labor power. See "L'impegno della tradizione,"
Casabella Continuita 215 (April-May 1957): 63-64,

^^ Carlo Olmo, "Un frammento di ordine tentato," Parametro 156 (May 19871;

15.

25 Note that Roberto Gabetti (1925-2000) authored and co-wrote several
books on architecture His interest in constructional techniques is evident in
early publications such as "Origini del calcestruzzo armato." Quademi
deiristituto di Storia della Scienza delle Costruizioni. part I, 5 (1955). part II, 6
(1956). His interest in history is evident through writings that range from Perret
to Antonelli to a book co-authored with Carlo Olmo. Le Corbusier e "L 'Esprit
Nouveau" (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). Note his entry "Eclettismo," for the Dizionario

50 /LOBSINGER

Enciclopedico di Architetture e Urbanistica, Paolo Portoghesi, ed (Rome:
Istituto EdJtonale Romano, 1968): 211-26.

2^ Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola. "L'impegno della tradizione," 63- It seems
that they mean the complex architectural and structural achievements.

2^ See Nicola Abbagnano's discussion of the concepts of possibility and situa-
tion presented in popular form in "Existentialism in Italy," La filosofia contem
poranea in Italia (Rome, 19581; reprinted in Critical Existentialism (New York:
Anchor Books, 1 969) : MB. Gabetti was familiar with the writings of
Abbagnano, Husserl, and Heidegger. Conversation with Professor Carlo Olmo,
August 2001, Turin.

28 The architects describe the design and building process of the Bottega in
terms of their choices and of the contributions offered by the craftsmen and
engineers who built the project For example, a suggestion made by stonema-
sons led to the decision to use Luserna stone. Gabetti and Isola state that in
contrast to design processes or constructional production (i.e.. the use of uni-
versal systems) where all is decided in advance of the process of building on
site, many of their decisions took place on site during construction Their
process-oriented mode of decision-making is opposed to that of the Modern
Movement's technical rationalization of construction.

2^ Enzo Paci, "La crisi della cultura e la fenomenologia dell'architettura con-
temporanea," La Casa 6 (1959): 356.

^^ The Husserlian notion of bracketing enables the setting aside, or bracketing
out, both of "reality as such" and our "natural attitude" toward it. "IWje are
concerned with reality only insofar as it is intended, represented, intuited, or
conceptually thought." See David Wood, "Husserl's Phenomenology of Time."
The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press
International, 1989): 41-40. See Enzo Paci, "L'architettura e il mondo della
vita," Casabella Continuita 217 (1957): 53-55,

•^^ Gabetti and Isola, 63.

■^2 Nicola Abbagnano, "Historiographic Work in Philosophy," Rivista di Filosofia.
1 (1955): reprinted in Critical Existentialism, 199.

33 Roberto Gabetti, Aimaro Isola, and Vittorio Gregotti, "L'impegno della
tradizione," Casabella Continuita 215 (April-May 19571: 63.

3^ Nicola Abbagnano, "Existentialism, Old and New," Address to the Third
Program of the Italian Radio (July 1960): reprinted in Critical Existentialism.
226.

35 Carlo Olmo. "La Bottega d'Erasmo. Una architettura, la sua immagine, la sua
interpretazione," Piemonte Vivo 4 (1987): 23,

36 Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, "Mobili Moderni in Antiquariato," Vittono
Gregotti, Aldo Rossi. Roberto Gabetti, Amaro Isola, and Guido Canella, Nuovi
disegni il mobile italiano- Mostra dell'Osservatore delle arti industrial! (Milan:
Lerici. 1960): 16-17,

3^ Rossi, "Qual6 Tradizione?" unpublished manuscript, accession #880319,
Aldo Rossi Archive, Getty Research Institute, Santa Monica, CA. The critique
owes something to Rossi's reading of Georg Lukacs's // Significato attuale del
realismo critico. trans. Renato Solmi (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), Rossi argued for a
somewhat different conception of tradition some years earlier. See
"Architettura moderna e tradizione nazionale." (1955); reprinted in Matilde
Baffa, Corinna Morandi, Sara Protasoni, and Augusto Rossari, // Movimento di
Studi per I'Architettura, 19451961 (Rome: Laterza, 1995): 461.

38

Rossi, "Qual6 Tradizione?" 1.

^^ Adorno, Minima Moralia. 38-39. The Italian version as cited by Rossi is
somewhat stronger in its implications.

'*3 Rossi, "Quale Tradizione?" 2.

44 Adorno, 39,

45 Portoghesi, "Uno studioso inglese giudica I'architeltura italiana," Comunita
72 (August-September 1959): 69

46 Vittorio Gregotti, "L'impegno della tradizione," 64,
4^ Canella, "Processo al Neoliberty," 36-43.

4° Portoghesi. "L'impegno delle nuove generazioni," 262.

49 See various articles in Superfici 1 (March 1961).

^^ A thorough examination of the relation of the Liberty style to economic and
social transformations in Italy at the turn of the century remains to be written.
A good source book is Eleonora Bairati and Daniele Riva. // Liberty in Italia

(Rome: Laterza, 1985),

5^ Aldo Rossi. "II passato e il presente nella nuova architettura: Casa a
Superga, di architetto Giorgio Raineri, Abitazione e scuderia a Milano, di
architetto Gae Aulenti; Casa in Duplex a Camen, degli architetti Vittorio
Gregotti, Lodovico Meneghetti, Giotto Stoppino," Casabella Continuita 219
(1958): 16-32.

52 It is important to mention that neither the Torre Velasca in Milan by Bbpr nor
Casa alle Zattere in Venice by Ignazio Gardella were considered in Italian circles
to be examples of neo-liberty. Rather, they were considered contextual respons-
es to the conditions of the historic city,

53 Superfici 1 (March 1960); 42.

54 Gentih, 3.

55 Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed,. s,v, "monstrous."

56 Banham citing Gillo Dorfles, 235.
5^ Rossi, "Qual6 Tradizione?" 3.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Bottega d'Erasmo, detail of elevation, 1953-56, Turin Roberto
Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, architects.

Fig, 2: Borsa Valori, exterior view from the street, 1 952-56, Turin. Roberto
Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, architects-

Fig. 3: Borsa Valori, interior view, 1952-56, Turin, Roberto Gabetti and
Aimaro Isola, architects.

Fig, 4: Bottega d'Erasmo, rear elevation, 1953-56, Turin. Roberto Gabetti
and Aimaro Isola, architects.

Fig, 5: Bottega d'Erasmo, exterior view from the street, 1953-56. Turin,
Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, architects.

41 Rossi, "Una critica che respingiamo," Casabella Continuity 219 (1958): 32-

Fig. 6: House and Horse Stable. 1 956. San Siro, Milan, Gae Aulenti, architect.

Fig. 7: Apartment Duplex, 1956, Novara. Vittorio Gregotti. Lodovico
Meneghetti, Giotto Stoppino, architects.

LOBSINGER/ 51

NORMAL GROUP FOR ARCHITECTURE
HOTEL NORMAL

The following is an entry for an open competition sponsored
by one of the largest former socialist corporations in
Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and the second largest
city in the Balkans. The competition brief asked architects
to provide the city with an "infrastructure for international
exchange, tourism, and business in Belgrade." Despite tight
UN sanctions, it seemed that Yugoslavia had not given up
its ambition to be part of the global economy but was
instead seeking proposals for a large hotel in the center of
the city.

In October 1 998, the NATO alliance issued its first threat to
bomb Yugoslav cities. With the submission deadline set for
that November, we were faced with a new paradox: how
and why does one propose a design for a hotel in the mid-
dle of a city targeted for destruction?

Furthermore, we received more news from Belgrade about
the uncertainty of the site: if the existing buildings were to
be selected for bombing, we were informed, then the prob-
lem of "context" would be eliminated altogether. On the
other hand, if the buildings were to be spared, we would
still have to think about how to blend our proposal to the
new surroundings.

We felt that the most radical answer to match the spectac-
ular brief under the threat of war is a direct response, a pro-
posal that can best be described as normal. Hotel Normal
consists of a 100-meter-long bar building dividing an exist-
ing urban void into two squares at different levels, visually
connected through the main lobby. Building remnants of the
city block from the past wars were thus not replicated nor
juxtaposed but joined by a new horizontal volume. At the
corner of the block facing the park — where a previous hotel
was demolished in the 1950s — the new Sport's Hotel over-
looks the city. A twelve-story tower, 28x28 meters deep in

plan, is an intertwining mix of recreation programs and hotel
units. A series of concrete bridges spanning over one of the
remaining buildings connect the vertical volume to the hor-
izontally laid-out hotel. Finally, as a response to the
between the ambitions of local politics and wartime realism,
we decided to avoid photo-realism by not showing any pho-
tographs of the site. The competition jury awarded the
entry with a prize.

Recently, this project has led us to further research the
notion of "normal." This research has been triggered by the
need to develop an approach for designing under circum-
stances when design seems irrelevant and even unneces-
sary. Under such conditions, "normal" does not prove to be
an actual condition; it describes hope for the future, nostal-
gia for the past, and an illusory judgement for the present,
a present full of absurdities. In the case of Belgrade, these
absurdities included nationalism, international sanctions,
isolation, and a war of ideologies in a city still physically
unaffected by the recent wars in the region. Untouched by
bombing only until the spring of 1999, Belgrade expected
that the future would become normal again.

Hotel Normal is a place for a city where the absurd had last-
ed long enough to momentarily appear normal. It is a place
without a representative image but offering a sequence of
spaces. The sequence leads through wide corridors with
hotel rooms occupied by an uncertain type of visitor to this
isolated city. It continues along the large halls for concerts
and speeches, and the intertwining spaces of the Sports
Tower. While moving under the spell of uncertainty, we will
have to accept that the normal can only exist in our minds.
This may be because — curiously analogous to the agenda of
modernism — being normal implies changing the world in
order to accommodate ourselves as opposed to changing
ourselves to find a place in the world.

52 /NORMAL GROUP

park

city

city

Hotel Normal, aerial view of the complex.

NORMAL GROUP/ 53

mr

-bJ-

B

img

I : ! I

-^^^

Ground Floor Plan
Level of the Street

^^ :

aid

a .Q

fllff

First Floor Plan
Level of tfie Main Hotel Lobby

fii an id

I "in I rjn I nj •-_ m ryi [

I I I I I

fl \a \a m m m to \n m m td ta ta

Second Floor Plan
Level of the Hotel Rooms

C¥LE

Htfi]

I

E

m

n I ihlnlnlr^ m n-l-n I r4i I nl-T I n

fiiiQ [Q [d iQ tfl ta tn [d [a to m in ta to to IQ [Q

Tl

Third Floor Plan
Level of the Hotel Rooms

54 /NORMAL GROUP

HSTMli^^^^^

{Above) Perspective view of the main hotel

volume and the lower square.

{Right) Views of the upper square showing

the transformation of the facade.

{Left) Sequence of Sections and
Elevation Facing the Upper
Square.

NORMAL GROUP/ 55

{Right) View of the Sports Hotel
from the street with interwining pro-
grams articulated on the facade
{Betow) Sequence of sections and
elevation facing the lower square.

1 i • i 1 1 1

1 1

1 1 1 . 1 '1

J "

^^^^^^^^ iS

J""'

irLf

56 /NORMAL GROUP

ht

'

Hz

II 1!

■IJ

Ittl^

WE
lIMIl

t^::^

E

EbL

Ln

m I Til

^n

XX

1 li

r

:

■

'_

-1

iia.iii; 1

""" "

TJ

IIHIHII

a

hB

'Mpifii^^J I lnl"3

m-

Hl

^

10,

.rn Irh

rm

2

11

HE

till
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1

K

t

r±

m.

-D [

tm

M

J

Sequence of plans showing the intertwining
of recreational programs within the tower of
the Sports Hotel.

NORMAL GROUP/ 57

Chrisloph Schlingensief, The "Auslander raus!" container set
up in Herbert-von-Karajan Platz in Vienna. 2000.

58 /WEISS

KIRSTEN WEISS

RECYCLING THE IMAGE

OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN ART

The term "public art" does not exist as such in the German
language. The literal translation of the term offentliche
Kunst would seem like a tautology, as art is usually acces-
sible through public museums in Germany. Unlike in the
United States, private collections are rarely on view, and, if
they are, they are usually considered public. More impor-
tantly, though, offentlich is a term that is met with ambiva-
lence by Germans. Although the problem of defining the
public is not limited to Germany, Germans cannot help but
be paranoid about the combined concepts of national iden-
tity and public art as the 55-year-long absence of a public
Holocaust memorial proves.^ Still, there is little Germans are
more intent on achieving than reconstructing a tarnished
public identity in the prestigious field of culture. Many con-
temporary German artists succeed in the global art industry,
a realm that is detached from national problematics as well
as the direct involvement of a greater public. In the past,
public involvement — or the image thereof — has been the-
matized by German artists repeatedly, most notably by
Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Klaus Staeck, and Ernst
Volland in the 1960s and 70s. The problem remains: what
might constitute public involvement in art and how can the
public legitimately be represented, if at all?2 Can art exem-
plify the difficulty of locating and discerning public and pri-
vate spheres statically, especially in a public sphere defined
supposedly by itself?

Examples of the possibility of staging images of a represen-
tative public can be seen in the work of the contemporary
German artist, Christoph Schlingensief (b. 1960), who facil-
itates a reenacting of a simulation of public sphere. After
studying philosophy, philology, and art history,
Schlingensief started his career in filmmaking and theater. 3
He soon moved on to television, talk shows, and live per-

formances (Fig. 2). One example of his performances was
"48 Hours Survival for Germany — My Felt, My Lard, My
Hare," or "What Are 700 Oaks in Light of 6 Million
Unemployed," which was staged in 1997 at the
Documenta, a prestigious show of contemporary art that
takes place every five years.* At the event, invited artists
and actors slept at the Documenta for forty-eight hours and
participated in events such as viewing childhood films of
Schlingensief. The subtitle "My Felt, My Lard, My Hare"
was a reference to Beuys, the authoritarian social-sculpture
hero and his favored materials. When Schlingensief started
proclaiming "Kill Helmut Kohl" {"Totet Helmut Kohl"} around
the thirty-sixth hour of his performance, he was arrested by
the German police. Another version of the events was that
Schlingensief was arrested because he had started singing
about the death of Lady Diana to the melody of "Staying

WEISS/ 59

Alive. "5 Schlingensief published his own account: suspect-
ing that the police were called by the owner of a cafe next
door, he had used the speaker-system to warn the visitors
of the cafe. He had announced: "I'm urging all guests of the
cafe next door, to leave this ugliest cafe in Kassel; the wait-
ress has AIDS and only a few more days to live."S

Schlingensief increasingly created events and campaigns
that would reference and manipulate media representations
not only of his own work but also of the constantly recon-
figured image of public culture, which he continues to use
as his raw material. His activities are by now certain to be
widely distributed by means of extensive media coverage
and thus can take place in spaces (private or public in basic
economic terms) that may retroactively be defined as "pub-
lic spaces."' Using campaign slogans such as "Failure as
Chance" or "Prove Your Existence" for his political party
"Chance 2000," he made a point of promoting unemployed
and disabled people as candidates for party offices, alluding
to concepts of affirmative action in democracies. 8

Because it apparently qualified as beneficial to public wel-
fare, Schlingensief recently managed to have the German
government subsidize the production of his version of
Hamlet, performed in Switzerland. Neo-Nazis, who suppos-
edly wanted to quit being Neo-Nazis, participated in the play
so as to facilitate their re-socialization. The former Neo-
Nazis were described by Schlingensief's press speaker as
"Pop-nazis" as they were primarily utilizing their Neo-
Naziness — clearly communicated by their stereotypical
looks — as an asset for media distribution. ^

One of the most complex projects of Schlingensief was
"Wien-Aktion," also called "Please Love Austria — First
European Coalition Week," or "Foreigners Out — Artists

against Human Rights. "'° Within the scope of the annual
Wiener Festwochen, director Luc Bendy had commissioned
Schlingensief to stage a performance in Vienna. From June
1 1 until June 1 7, 2000, a container was set up on the cen-
trally located Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz adjacent to the
opera (Fig. 1). Just like in the Dutch TV-show "Big Brother"
that had been immensely popular in Germany and Austria,
twelve persons, who were identified as refugees that had
applied for political asylum in Austria, were asked to live in
the container for a week. What happened inside of the con-
tainer was aired around the clock on an Internet TV chan-
nel. As in the television show "Big Brother," the audience
could call in daily and place their votes for the two candi-
dates they would most like to see deported from the coun-
try. The last refugee to stay in the container was promised
a prize of 30,000 Austrian Schillings and marriage to an
Austrian citizen through which the refugee would attain the
status of a legal resident.

Biographies of the participants were posted on
Schlingensief's website containing tabloid-style characteri-
zations of each individual's views on sex, money, and fam-
ily values. One refugee, for instance, Teresa Beqiri, was the
"party girl" who would not mind having sex in front of the
container cameras — a topic heavily debated in popular
media — as opposed to the "family man," Wole Osifo from
Nigeria.'' A large banner with the inscription "Auslander
Rausl" ("Foreigners Out!") was attached to the container
from the beginning and a few days later was supplemented
by another banner reading "Unsere Ehre heisst Treue"("Out
Honor is Called Loyalty"), an SS-motto forbidden in
Germany (Fig. 3). The motto had been purportedly used by
a member of the Austrian right-wing party FPO.'^
Interestingly, members of the FPO whose successful cam-
paign during the previous year had been based on anti-for-

/ .ncp.us»frAm>f^fiJi

UNSERE EHRE HEISST TREUE

60 /WEISS

eign sentiment reported both signs to the police with the
claim that these signs were publicly encouraging violence
against foreigners. While trying to make an official state-
ment against discrimination against foreigners, they needed
to avoid making a statement against art. So, Heidemarie
Unterreiner, the FPO's cultural attache, accused
Schlingensief of "not even [beingl a real director. "^^ On
June 15, about 600 protestors attacked the container and
tried to demolish the "Auslander raus!" sign (Fig. 4). A
spectator asked: "Is this real?" {"1st das jetzt echt?")""^

The extent of the emotions raised by the event can be seen
in the weeklong public debates in Austria about the con-
tainer, Austrians, Germans, Luc Bondy, and art in general
(Fig. 5). A documentary about "Auslander raus!" is report-
ed to contain a clip of a woman getting so upset about
Schlingensief's Aktion that she ends up shrieking:
"Foreigners in, Piefkes Out" {"Auslander rein, Piefkes
raus!"], the latter being a derogatory Austrian term for
Germans. In addition, the Viennese were worried about the
effect that the odd spectacle might have on tourists. With
regards to reception in Germany and Austria, the perform-
ance relied heavily on superficial but common place and
deeply rooted "knowledge" on the Austrian as well as the
German side. While in Austria, the term Anschluss was
coined for the collaboration of Austria with Nazi-Germany,
implying that Austrians were not really responsible for their
endorsement of National Socialism, it is a well-known fact
in Germany that Hitler was, after all, not German but
Austrian. The fact that details such as these are so widely
circulated makes apparent the degree of unresolved anti-
sentiments between Germans and Austrians, sentiments
that viciously erupt on the occasion of "Auslander raus!"
Ever since the Waldheim-affair, Germans, who prefer to
think of themselves as Europeans, have felt the need to be
especially watchful of right-wing politics in Austria and else-
where. Thus, the widespread support of Jorg Haider's FPCD

in Austria has been received with much concern by German
liberals. 15 According to Schlingensief, he was satisfied to
have shown the potential extent of Haider's xenophobia by
facilitating the production of "dirty images from Austria," an
aim that could have hardly been achieved in a more perfid-
iuos manner with regards to the extent of the individuals
and the official Austrian institutions lastly involved. '^
Ultimately though, the piece was just as much about
Germans as it was about Austrians as the displacement
allows for an open, international rotation of German prob-
lematics.

In this and most other pieces, Schlingensief's dramaturgy
relies on common place types as a starting point. My use of
the term "common place" here is similar to that used by
Svetlana Boym, who defines cultural common places as
"recurrent narratives that are perceived as natural in a given
culture but In fact were naturalized and their historical,
political, or literary origins forgotten or disguised. "^^ In such
a construction, internationally renowned artists such as
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Josef Beuys, and Luc Bondy
symbolize the bourgeois circles that still have an elitist con-
tempt for low-brow culture found in television shows such
as "Big Brother." In Schlingensief's pieces, such heroic
intellectual figures are almost always paired with lower-
class common place types, such as "The Unemployed"
{"Der Arbeitslose") used in the television talk shows, "48
Hours Survival for Germany" and "Chance 2000." The
Unemployed is the epitome of fascist potential in Germany,
because the unfortunate situation of the unemployed in
Weimar Germany was one of the main causes of Hitler's
rise to power according to contemporary popular German
mythology. "The Refugee" {"Der Asylan") is an ambivalent
type, who is let into the country as an exception only under
constantly changing and formally restrictive immigration

0*t-^

^W*

WEISS/ 61

policies. With regards to the underprivileged, Germans are
torn between a sense of what they view as their responsi-
bility and what they fear — a mixture that accounts for their
permanent unease, to say the least. According to Jurgen
Habermas, the resulting yearning for relief from this dilem-
ma is illustrated by the creation of "life lies" {Lebensluge),
the German post-reunification version being: "We Are
Normal Again. "'^ At first glance, Schlingensief violently
questions this "life lie" as he obviously does not behave in
normal terms according to supposed bourgeois notions of
normalcy. At the same time, trying to behave in a normal
way is not possible for an artist in post-Nazi Germany. '^ In
addition, it is commonly known that trying to look normal
can hardly ever result in one actually being — or even less
looking — normal. Therefore, although the lie undoubtedly
exists, there can only be evidences of its futility in the pub-
lic sphere.

And, how can deviance be defined in the absence of nor-
malcy? The art press in particular is placed in a difficult sit-
uation by Schlingensief who potentially impersonates an
avant-garde desire for "deviance. "^o Deviance from what?
In fact, Schlingensief receives far more coverage from gen-
eral news and popular tabloid media. Some of this coverage
is negative; some explicitly admire his "craziness" evidenc-
ing the involvement of the mass media geared towards —
but certainly not representative of — a contemporary form of
the German proletariat. 2' Within the bourgeois realm of art
production and reception, conventional artistic trash-appeal
is often validated by an ironic distance to an origin other
than itself, but Schlingensief renders this assumption of dis-
tance absurd by re-importing popular material to its sup-
posed origin, i.e., the tabloid press. The absurd and the sur-
real derived from and redistributed in public space reference
the potential existence of a heterogeneous public.

without an introduction, Schlingensief is probably hardly
comprehensible or even interesting to anyone outside of
Germany. 23

As Negt and Kluge have stated, language is one of the most
important mechanisms for exclusion from the bourgeois
public sphere. 24 This is especially true for the sphere that
pertains to anything clearly demarcated as "art." It seems
that this barrier is less inhibiting in Schlingensief's case,
possibly because he uses the assumed language of what
Negt and Kluge term the "proletarian sphere" as represent-
ed in mass media. It is not necessarily relevant whether this
is the "real" language of a proletariat, or who this might
actually be — it would be naive and pretentious to try locate
"the proletarian" in a static manner: identities in public are
in constant circulation and can only be defined tentatively
in relation to the conditions that necessitate the act of iden-
tification. Accordingly, "the bourgeois" is not a clearly
defined entity but rather — in Negt and Kluge's sense — a sig-
nifier for the provenance of a specific hegemony of defini-
tions of publicness.25

Although Schlingensief's own role as an artist and produc-
er would need to be further examined, the detached posi-
tion of the artist as well as the actual production of the
work are already dissolved in the process of distribution in
"Auslander raus!"^^ At best, Schlingensief's projects facili-
tate the appearance of a great range of effects and prod-
ucts. And if an "authentic political language" is defined as
continuously emerging from conflicts and use as well abuse
of rhetoric by various subjects, those effects and products
are, at the least, an interesting example of such a contem-
porary (and perishable) language that offers itself for further
examination and reuse. 2^

Are Schlingensief's spectacular activities public, or are they
"private activities displayed in the open"?22 They are prob-
ably neither; rather, his work — and more importantly, what
becomes of it — is a simulation of different possibilities of
action in the public sphere. It could be argued that by using
any available "public space" for his work, especially daily
news media space, Schlingensief reclaims public audience
not as an idealized object of enlightenment through art but
as momentary reference points in an otherwise indefinable
mass of characterizations of the public. Polemics are thus
not directed against a specific imagined group within the
public sphere. Rather, common place types found anywhere
are thematized with reference to different public realms. But

Notes

^ Hans Magnus Enzensberger talks about his strategy to alternately accept or
refuse German identity in Hans Magnus Enzensberger. "Bin ich em Deutscher?"
Die Zeit 23.5 (June 1964). Theodor Adorno addresses the problem of being
German in fiis "Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch," Stichworre. Kritische Modelle
2 (Frankfurt am Mam: Suhrkamp. 1969): 102 12. One of the most comprehen-
sive accounts of the debate about the Holocaust memorial with regards to the
problem of a public identity is given by James Young, James E. Young, At
Memory's Edge: After images of tfie hfofocaust in Contemporary Art and
Arc/iitecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

2 I am drawing on the question of the representation of bourgeois and prole
tarian public spheres as it is addressed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in
Offentlictikeit und Erfafirung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). Translated
into English under the title Pubtic Sphere and Experience, Toward an Anafysis
of the Bourgeois and Protetarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Negt and Kluge later further illustrate

62 /WEISS

their concept of the public as "public spheres of production"
{Produktionsoffentlichkeiien) in Geschichte und Eigensinn (Frankfurt am Main:
Zweitausendeins, 1981). Also Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn,
(Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1981): 388-

3 Among Schlingensief's first films are 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler. 1989 (One
Hundred Years Adolf Hitler); Das deutsche Kettensagen Massaker, 1990 (The
German Chainsaw Massacre): TERROR 2000 Deutschland ausser Kontrolle,
1992 (TERROR 2000 Germany Out of Control); and Die 120 Tage von Bottrop.
1996 (The Hundred and Twenty Days of Bottrop). In 120 Tage von Bottrop, res-
idents from the "Rainer Werner Fassbinder Home of Aging Actors" are asked to
come to Berlin to star in a remake of Pasolini's The 120 Days of Sodom, but
end up climbing over the construction site at the Postdamer Platz in Berlin
{"Europas grdsste Baustelle") wearing construction helmets emblazoned with
the word "SODOM." The actors, such as Irm Herman, are original actors from
Rainer Werner Fassbmder's films.

Shortly after the former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim was elected
as the president of Austria in 1986, reports surfaced about his participation as
an officer in the German Wehrmacht during the period between 1942-45, when
his battalion committed atrocities in Yugoslavia. Waldheim denied any knowl-
edge of the crimes.

Schlingensief in an interview in Spiegel Online, http://www.spiegel.de/kul-

16

tur/gesellschaft/0,1518. 80502, OO.html, June 11, 2000.

Svetlana Boym, Common Places (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1994): 4- Boym herself follows Claude Levi-Strauss's and Roland
Barthes's definition of myths as formed by cultural common places.

Jijrgen Habermas, "Die zweite Lebenslijge der Bundesrepublik: Wir sind
wieder 'normal' geworden," Die Zeit (December 11, 1992}: 48.

^ The original German title of the performance was "48 Stunden Uberleben fur
Deutschland —Mein Filz. mein Fett. mein Hase" or "Was sind schon 700 Isic'l
Eichen gegenuber 6 Millionen Arbeitslosen. " The title is a reference to the pro|-
ect that Joseph Beuys initiated on the occasion of Documenta 7 in 1981 The
project entailed the planting of 7,000 oak trees next to 7.000 basalt monoliths
throughout the town of Kassel over the course of five years until 1987,

^ Georg Seesslen, "Vom barbanschen Film zur nomadischen Politik," Julia

Lochte, Julia and Wilfried Schuiz,
(Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1998): 48.

eds.. Schlingensief! Notruf fur Deutschland

" Chnstoph Schlingensief, "Wir sind zwar nicht gut, aber wir sind da,"
Schlingensief] 31 . The slogans in the original were "Scheitern als Chance," and
"Beweise, dass es Dich gibt." respectively,

' His television talk shows, for example, take place in the mess hall of an avant-
gardist theater in Berlin, the Volksbuhne. and are aired via national private TV
stations. The performance "48 Stunden Uberleben fur Deutschland" took place
in an inconspicuous room at the art exhibit Documenta 10 in the small German
town of Kassel.

° "Chance 2000" was documented by an editorial crew of the public TV sta-
tion ZDF iZweites Deutsches Fernsehen).

One German equivalent of the American concept of "affirmative action" is the
concept of the "quota" {Quote), which entails the mandatory (or voluntary)
inclusion of certain minorities into various bodies according to specific quota.
The idea is met with great suspicion, so that, for instance, women who are
promoted in politics are often still suspected of being a "quota women"
{Quotenfrauen).

'^ Thomas Elsasser describes this problematic of the obligation of German
artists. Thomas Elsasser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); 13.

^^ In an article about Schlingensief in Kunstforum International, Marion
Lbhndorf claims that Schlingensief makes popular media uncomfortable. Marion
Lbhndorf, "Christoph Schlingensief, Lieblingsziel Totalirntation," Kunstforum
International 10-12 (1998): 192.

A German starlet proclaims in the daily tabloid BUd: "\ am voting for
Christoph Schlingensief, He thinks as 'queer' as I do, and the country needs
new people." Bild Online, http://www-bJld,de/service/suche/archiv/suche.html
September 20, 1998.

^2 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas
Facing Modern Man (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1959): 101-102.

^^ Christopher Phillips, "Art for an Unfinished City," Art in America (January
1999): 67.

"^^ Negt and Kluge, Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung. 87-93.

^^ Ibid., 8, Long before Foucault, Durkheim had described society as defined
by social facts that included 'every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exer
cising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting
which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in
Its own right independent of its individual manifestations," Emile Durkheim, The
Rules of Sociological Method (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1 1 895)
1938): 13.

^ Ulrich Seidler, "Echtes Wasser. Schlingensiefs sechs neue Freunde diJrfen in
Zurich Hamlet mitspielen," Berliner Zeitung. 12 May 2001. Joachim Guntner.
"Was zu Schlingensiefs Hamlet noch zu sagen bleibt," Neue Zurcher Zeitung.
26 May 2001,

The original title was Bitte liebt Osterreich — erste europaische
Koalitionswoche or Auslander Raus-KOnstler gegen Menschenrechte. Many
aspects of the event were soon documented in a publication. See Matthias
Lilienthal and Claus Philipp, Schlingensiefs Auslander raus (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2000),

All biographies can be viewed at http://www.schlingensief.com/auslaender-
raus/html/auslaenderliste html, November 6. 2001.

Later, Gramsci uses the term "hegemony" to elaborate on the process of the
transformation of (initially) economic interests into the social sphere, creating
an apparently "universal plane." Antonio Gramsci, "The Modern Prince," The
Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957):

169-70,

2® Negt and Kluge. Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung. 104-105,

^' Negt and Kluge, Massverhaltnisse des Politischen (Frankfurt am Mam: S.
Fischer, 1992): 58.

FPO is the acronym for Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs. the right-wing party

12

led by Jbrg Haider.

13l

Heidemane Unterreiner on a television show on the Austrian television chan-
nel ORF as cited tn Spiegel Online. http://www,spiegel,de/kultur/gesellschaft/
0,1 51 8, 80991, 00. html, July 7, 2000,

14

die tageszeitung (June 17, 2000): 14.

Claus Philipp, "Schlingensiefs Container gestiJrmt; 1st das jetzt echt?" taz.

Illustrations

Fig. 2:

Christoph Schlingensief, "Auslander raus!" Container in Herbert-
von- Karajan Platz, Vienna, 2000.

Schlingensief, Talk 2000. 2000. Schlingensief is here imitating the
Hitler hairdo and moustache.

Fig. 3: SS-motto on the "Auslander raus!" container.

Figs. 4, 5: Protesters and spectators of the "Auslander raus!" container.

WEISS/ 63

JASMINE BENYAMIN

"STUFF":

GREGORY CREWDSON'S GAZE UPOI

THE DOMESTIC SUBLIME

A critical inquiry into the photographs of Gregory Crewdson
begins with problems of how to make liminality visible and
how to question the means by which the discarded and the
accidental register their effects. Throughout Crewdson's
work, nature engages with the iconography of the American
landscape to produce effects of fear and desire, repulsion
and beauty. Mystery — the strange coupled with the recog-
nizable—resides in both the making and the reading of these
photographs. In Crewdson's most recent work, a series
entitled Twilight (1998-1999), domestic space appears as a
space of beauty, hyper-reality, and violence. At the moment
when the grown intervenes with the made, the viewer is
made keenly aware of the artifice of both.

Crewdson's superimposition of everyday domestic equip-
ment with theatrical lighting and lush, nuanced color cre-
ates an image of suburban life gone awry, where the site of
leisure has become one of fear, loss, and nostalgia. Nothing
is removed: discarded objects of daily consumption are
brought back to the scene of the crime as if to remind us of
the project of domesticity where order is often employed to
conceal. Crewdson parodies this tradition of covering up by
exerting explicit control over the staging and the crafting of
his "scenes." The irony of the resulting disarray is that it is
born out of a need to control with precision but nonetheless
fails to order nature. Crewdson's self-proclaimed "realist
vision" provokes spaces where neither reality nor fiction is
suppressed.' Instead, both are depicted with equal rigor. 2

Crewdson challenges home's power of enclosure as a
weapon against concealment and elimination. Tactility,
impoverished by the postwar advocacy of streamlining, has
given way to a quasi-Victorian return to shag and chintz,
where trash, wood paneling, and "Laz-I-Boy" recliners main-
tain their structural and material integrity. Crewdson dis-

plays the anxieties of modernism in full view by reinforcing
the false transparency of the glass box and by choosing to
preserve the banished and the outmoded instead. He revels
in the toxicity of ordering and the symbiosis between
progress and pollution.

As the title of the series implies, the spaces of Crewdson's
photographs exist in the luminescent interval between the
natural and the artificial. The dioramic quality of
Crewdson's models is achieved by the use of both natural
and artificial light and the construction of stage sets.
Context is crucial for Crewdson: space is not made but
taken as a precondition for the scenes that are created.
"Stuff" has a paradoxical double meaning: as taxidermy, it
fixes, limits, and freezes moments, but in the colloquial
sense, "stuff" refers to the nameless, de-sublimated refuse
of the everyday that accumulates to visual excess.
Crewdson directs, arranges, orders, and fixes to make the
traces of domestic life visible. Ironically, this process-driven
work cares little for process: all models and sets, which
take months to complete, are dismantled once an accept-
able photograph has been taken. As such, the photograph
becomes the sole survivor of a laborious and largely undoc-
umented process of model making and stage setting.

In architecture, "stuff" is often perceived both as a threat
and as a containment of infinity. Crewdson stuffs his
images with details that hoard memory and shared cultural
experience. His images deviate to a pathology that their
architectural referents do not. They provoke discomfort by
pointing to the complicity of architects in promoting a cul-
ture that has long equated cleanliness and order with nor-
malcy. The sublimity of these photographs rests not in the
mysterious but rather in the obsessive inscription of over-
abundant details within an atmosphere of invisible traces
and unspeakable remainders.

61 /BENYAHIN

BENYAMIN/ 55

Notes

' Gregory Crewdson, interview by Bradford Morrow, Gregory Crewdson —
Dream of Life (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1999): 19.

^ James Casebere and Gregory Crewdson, "The Jim and Greg Show," Bhnd
Spot 2 (1993): unpaginated.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from the Twilight series, 1998.

Fig, 2: Gregory Crewdson. Untitled, from the Twilight series, 1998.

Fig. 3: Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Flower Mound), from The Twilight
series, 1999.

Fig. 4: Gregory Crewdson, Production Shots for Twilight Series, 1999.

Fig. 5: Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Rug Lady Formation) , from the Twilight
series, 1999,

66 /BENYAMIN

2^2:- ^j"*;- &ift.i.;*K?.

JENYAMIN/ 67

SCOTT DUNCAI
PANELaK

panelak (Czech)

1. prefab 2. (derogatory) a type of multi-unit
apartment building constructed using a system of
prefabricated concrete panels configured to define
a highly-regularized series of unit types. The build-
ings were built in the 1 960s, 70s, and 80s in vast
quantities primarily in the periphery of many
European cities and were intended to alleviate
housing shortages and inadequacies.

The promise held forth by a clear and absolute ideology is
often compromised when that ideology is tested in its
implementation. The massive public building campaigns
undertaken in countries under the control of the former
Soviet Union illustrate how architecture can be enmeshed in
this problematic. In the Czech Republic, a communist polit-
ical agenda has ostensibly been abandoned in favor of a
social democracy. Capitalist development has ensued, but
the architecture remains.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has put into question those
programs, which were provided for a communist society by
a strong, centralized government through massive public ini-
tiatives. Prague and other cities in the Czech Republic have
inherited colossal urban infrastructural projects that contin-
ue to encourage growth today. Transportation networks,
for example, were thoroughly integrated with urban devel-
opment projects. Master plans always included public trans-
portation—typically metro or tram networks — in addition to
parking lots and highways planned for automobiles. If there
was an underlying agenda at work, it had to do with creat-
ing a sense of collective use and public life.

For many living in Prague today, the most immediate results
of this urbanism are housing estates in which roughly
420,000 people — one-third of Prague's population — live.

68 /DUNCAN

Panelak is the Czech name for a type of multi-unit apart-
ment building commonly found in Prague. The panelaky are
constructed using a system of prefabricated concrete pan-
els configured to create a highly regularized series of unit
types. Often reaching over 300 meters in length, these
buildings exist along the city's periphery in formal and infor-
mal groupings called sidliste. Uniformity manifests itself at
different levels: within the buildings themselves, which are
typically the accumulation of four to thirteen stories of six-
meter-wide flats; from one building to the next; and often
from one community to the next. The layout of access
roads, parking lots, bus stop sheds, and other urban ele-
ments in one panelaky village is often identical to others.
Repetition and uniformity are also part of the construction:
panelaky have come to be known as "crane urbanism"
because of the construction process which entails cranes
set on rails to produce buildings in a serial array. By con-
trast, the current population of the panelaky is heteroge-
neous. This is due largely to a pro-rated rent subsidy pro-
gram, which tied rent to individual income during the com-
munist regime.' Overall, however, panelaky urbanism is
remarkably undifferentiated — obsessively so — and amidst
this uniformity aberrations glare.

The panelaky should be seen as part of a relatively well-
established tradition of modern social housing existing in
Czechoslovakia following WWI. The Czech Functionalist
housing projects of the 1930s often employed a modernist
formal language, new construction techniques using mate-
rials such as steel, glass, and concrete as well a "tower-in-
the-park" approach to site planning. The pre-1989 text.
Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, published under the
Communist regime made the connection clear:

After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia was
the only European country with a highly devel-
oped tradition of modern architecture in which the
mature principles and theories of functionalism
continued to be applied in the changed social con-

ditions. The reforming endeavors of li.c pui.od
between the two wars developed, after 1945,
into the requirements of a uniform organization of
designing and industrialization of construction,
which were gradually brought into being. In 1 948,
the Socialist Design Organization was founded, at
that time the biggest organization of its type in
Europe, and a year later, the Study and
Typification Institute originated to prepare the
first typified (standard) designs valid for the whole
territory of the country. 2

Panelaky fell short, however, of the "open plan" aspirations
of modernism. Formal variation was limited by the modular
system. Since panelaky were not constructed of plastered
brick or reinforced concrete but were instead assembled
from prefabricated flat concrete panels, the system allowed
rapid and extensive construction, providing much-needed
housing throughout the 1950s and 60s into the 80s. In the
1950s, there were 4,500 apartment flats constructed per
year using the panel system; in the 1960s and 70s the fig-
ure rose to 10,000 per year; and by the end of the 1980s
there were approximately 70,000 panelaky flats completed
annually in the country. 3

DUNCAN/ 59

The radova sekce, or "typical section," of panelak typology exhibits
two lateral and two longitudinal section configurations.

lOSiaSIHHEHHaaSStffilSfflS IE ' BZ

gypMSpf»CTMM

pp.

^^

tiiijipr'.niL i^^t^'.jip'-ALi3!rimw: fftafc

EXISTING PLANS AND SECTIONS

The selected building incorporates four plan types. Floors 8 and 13
link adjacent stair towers for fire egress purposes. Floors 2 through
7, and 9 through 12 are typical one-bedroom and two-bedroom resi-
dential floors. The ground floor and the basement provide an entry
foyer and storage, respectively

Prague's "Building Project Institute" was responsible for
developing prototypical designs with the goal of minimizing
the number of panels required per dwelling unit. State-
owned contracting monopolies executed the designs, striv-
ing to perfect the system of construction and to produce a
"high-quality product."* Because of its formulaic approach,
the design of the panelaky has been described as a purely
economical exercise. When viewed from a post-communist
standpoint, the question then becomes: if the communist
economy has spawned the panelaky, what becomes of it in
the new capitalist economy?

Furthermore, since panelaky were intended at the time of
their construction as a temporary solution to housing needs
with an expected life span of 20 to 30 years, they have
begun to deteriorate. Demolition is not only too costly but
would also introduce the problem of re-locating 30% of
Prague's population. Recognizing that the panelaky are
exceeding their intended life span, a group of engineers
responsible for the original planning of the pane/aky devel-
oped a study for the rehabilitation of the buildings that were
identified to have technical problems — panel deterioration,
acoustic bridging, heat loss/heat gain inefficiency, roof
leaks, and spatial inefficiencies.

Taking the engineers' study as a starting point, this project
utilizes existing paradoxes of panelak to intervene in a site
that presents a typical panelak condition. Situated between
a pastoral landscape and panelak urbanism, the sparseness
of the site offers an uninterrupted carpet of landscape. In
this landscape, there exists an emphatic separation: the
ground plane represents the public whereas the individual
living units represent the private. The tower-in-the-park
strategy has. created an abundance of open space whose
vastness and impersonality contribute to this divorce. This
was a deliberate strategy of the original panelak scheme: by
means of this strategy, social interaction would concentrate
elsewhere, in separate buildings such as clubs, schools, and
government buildings. The strategy of dispersal relied on a
fairly elaborate landscape scheme that was foregone for
economic reasons.

The existing urban diagram segregating zones for working
and zones for living is subverted through a reintroduction of
non-residential programs to the panelak. This, however, is
not a "clean" reintroduction. Responding to the emergent
demand for office space, existing storage and shared
spaces throughout the building are reprogrammed as work-
space. These range from large, single-tenant, and open

70 /DUNCAN

offices to workshops for artisans and light industrial uses.
The proposed scheme thereby blurs living and working con-
ditions. The new — or perhaps the first— site plan proposed
here attempts to integrate the needs of the workplace, such
as additional parking, access, and services, within the build-
ing volume and its precinct. The Internal logic of the build-
ing generates an apron of precincts of varying degrees of
propriety at its base.

The proposal also disrupts the even texture of the sidliste
produced by the regularity of the panels that make up its
surfaces, a composition of identical gray units. At the time
of the buildings' construction, great effort was dispensed to
ensure uniformity in the aggregates used in the panels.
Frequently, aggregate stones that deviated from the even
gray of the control samples were discarded in large quanti-
ties. This proposal disrupts the undifferentiated masonry
box by overlaying a strong color on the one side and
smoothness on the other, giving the building a "front" and
a "back."

In pane/ali buildings, the height of all interior spaces is gov-
erned by the dimension of a single panel, 3100 mm. A
"house of cards" condition is created as the panels are
mortared in place and arrayed into crate-like grids that are
extruded to generate the building form. Ironically, the desire
to regularize the panel type resulted in structural redundan-
cy: the dimensions of the panels on the top floor are iden-
tical to those in the basement although the former support
only a fraction of the weight. Such over-sizing permits the
removal of panels from the top floors without compromis-
ing the building structurally. The resulting voids open up the
building for re-habitation and add a larger volumetric "grain"
to uniform surface of the panelal<.

Notes

^ Currently, the panel^k flat is by far the least expensive and the most "liquid"
housing option in the city. The figures at the time of this study (1997) were as
follows; the average subsidized rent vyas about 1 200 crowns ($401 per month,
and the average non-subsidized rent was about 4000 crowns (S144) per month.

^ Dosl'al Oldrich. Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (Prague, 1967): 239,

3 Interview with Karel Soun, February 1997. Soun was an original planning
engineer for Jizni Mesto.

J 1=1 1 =

1=1 1=1 1=1 1 =

PI

lnlTlJ T\3\ \ !ij-FU' l-N r-l4T-N-|-!j1-F!3l-|

n.i.n.i.n.i n.i 11,1.11.1.11.1,11,1.11,1,11,1.11

^5Nr1al=^|-

*aii9»fsii

^Nlfl

Inl 1. 1^1: ilnl .1 hi I |.| I Ul t_Ul \:[nl LAM j.J^-L [4J

ii^03a-:3=FnTiiTnTnT-ni:n-xni^n-i

^^ ^fl ^W ^W ^CT ^ff

=1 ' 1=1 ' 1=1 < 1^1 I
M Rfl 1"^ I- 1

. rfeLLBTrtel I

~f!W"F'ff~W11 I

1 i^l^tBdilSEfel'i

1g

1=1 I 1=1 I Ul I 1=1 i 1=1 I 1=1 I 1=1 1=1 I Ul I 1=1 I 1=1 J

_n;a-iJiij:iu:oxaxa-JiXH-TJi3;ffl

\=] I U| iN 1 Ul I Ul I Ul I Ul I 1=1 1 Ul I Ul-f H
Ul I Ul |:-=UT-| Ul I Ul I Ul I Ul I 1=1 1 Ul I Ul I Ul

II J,ji.ijil jii.,11 ,Lji J, II ,1. n i n ,1. 11 i IT

Ul I Ul I Ul I Ul ! Ul I I

=M=1 I N I Ul I 1=1

"■1.1 1 ! i n,i,ii

e t_

rUt-rNi u- I M I U! I Uii 1=1 I 1^.1 I Ul I h-

,|;-|i,iiiin.fn4.-n,l.ii ;i,ji^44i4.ii

* i i * f> j ij t * ^ * •-'■ ' ^' ' * ■■■ ' f ^ ■-■' t I.'' * * * * ^ * t '

\_H I N I N I N I N I 1=) I N I N I N I (=1 i Hi

riiTnTiiTnTiiTiiTiiTnTiiTnTiii

DEMOLITION PLAN

Selective demolition and removal of overstructured panels (shaded areas)
create 10 unique sectional conditions and 13 unique plans. In this manner,
both the plan and the section of the existing building are de-serialized.

DUNCAN/ 71

The existing north elevation is comprised of 1,452 concrete panels, 2,821 windows, and 11 stair towers. The panel surface is embedded with a
small "washout aggregate that gives the panels a uniform appearance. A thin insulation interlayer is sandwiched beween the inner and outer con-
crete surfaces.

o 0 0

The existing occupancy is prescribed by the arrangement of two unit types: one for a family of two and another for a family of three. The relative
inflexibility of unit types limits further the affordable housing options.

Rents for individual panelak units were tied to the income levels of households during the former regime and have often remained unchanged. In
2005, the rents will be aligned with market rates, which is expected to result in a threefold increase on average as represented by the black areas
above.

The existing south elevation utilizes an additional panel type that incorporates a door opening providing access from the kitchen to the balcony,
except at the two ends of the building where balconies are omitted.

72 /DUNCAN

OPEN OFFICE

REZONING DIAGRAM

The existing residential block is rezoned to incorporate a range of commercial uses, drawing non-residents to the building and providing amenities to

both residents and non-residents. This inverts the original diagram of the building, which segregated public from residential functions.

PROPOSED OCCUPANCY

The new range of unit types afforded by combining units and further partitioning others creates the potential for a heterogeneously distributed building

population, which will be in a perpetual state of flux over the course of a day. Building use density is varied over the building length.

PROPOSED RENT INCREASES

The anticipated 2005 rent increase may be mediated by tying rent adjustments to use, creating the potential for one part of the building to subsidize

the other.

PROPOSED SOUTH ELEVATION

Replacing the deteriorating and inefficient panels on the south elevation with a new series of panels and window types will allow a calibration of unit

function and facade articulation. The elevation will thus respond to the specific conditions of the context.

DUNCAN/ 73

SUNIL BALD

IN ALEIJADINHO'S SHADOW:

WRITING NATIONAL ORIGINS IN BRAZILIAI

ARCHITECTURE

One of the more pervasive assumptions in architectural dis-
course is the mythical stature of the hero-architect. Despite
the influence of societal, technological, and cultural forces
and the collaborative nature of architectural production,
notions of individual genius have situated the origins of
movements and styles within specific personalities. The
architect is often portrayed as a savior and proponent of
societal and cultural progress and is consequently seen in
alignment with the rhetoric of nations formulating their
goals, purposes, and identities. In the United States, for
example, the myth of the figure of Frank Lloyd Wright has
been imbued with the spatial aspirations of an anti-urban
and anti-European America. Wright's architecture has
become associated with the individualism and expansionism
that have helped structure an American national imagina-
tion.^

The case of the Brazilian architect and sculptor Antonio
Francisco Lisboa (1 738-1 814) — better known as
Aleijadinho or "the Little Cripple" — is particularly interesting
as an example of how the mythical figure of an architect
can be assimilated into national narratives (Fig. 1). This
essay will discuss the mechanisms and motivations behind
the mythology of Aleijadinho by focusing on a specific doc-
ument: the 1949 re-publishing of a nineteenth-century text
on Aleijadinho and his architecture. 2 The original text, writ-
ten in 1840 by a government official called Rodrigo Bretas,
was republished in 1949. The re-publication was introduced
by Liicio Costa (1902-1998), an architect who had an
active role in shaping the cultural policies of the new repub-
lic. The republished text became important in fixing
Aleijadinho's myth and in connecting it to the modern con-
text.

71 /BALD

Aleljadinho's particular story is especially intriguing as it
proposes a figure who — due to the deformities of his body-
is seemingly more grotesque than heroic. However, within
the larger narratives of Brazilian architectural, cultural, and
national development, this figure's grotesque nature can be
more accurately considered as a deviation from a colonial
status quo — a deviation that not only distinguishes
Aleijadinho individually but also separates his architecture
from its colonial precedents. Consequently, an alternative
trajectory of history results, along which subsequent forms
of cultural production can be aligned, and a new system of
identification is instituted, a system that is not colonially
but rather nationally hegemonic.

Although Aleijadinho worked in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century, it is crucial to understand him in
the context of Brazilian modernism in the twentieth centu-
ry. After Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 and
the foundation of the republic in 1891, the country began
its quest towards industrialization under the populist dicta-
tor Getulio Vargas who came to power in a 1930 coup.
While modern architecture in Brazil is frequently character-
ized by the construction of Brasilia in the late fifties and
early sixties, Vargas formed the alliance between national-
ist politics and architectural culture twenty-five years earli-
er with the design of the Ministry of Culture, Education, and
Health (1937-43) in Rio de Janeiro. ^ The building was the
first large-scale project to incorporate Le Corbusier's five
points of architecture, and the team of architects — includ-
ing Oscar Niemeyer (b.1907) and Lucio Costa — who con-
structed it went on to dominate one of the century's most
vibrant architectural milieus.''

In addition to its architectural importance, the Ministry of
Culture, Education, and Health was the most important new
administrative branch of the Vargas government. As an
agent of dissemination, it articulated a nationalism that
overwhelmingly equated Brazil's progress with rapid indus-
trialization and modernization. Modeled after strategies of
indoctrination that Brazilian government officials observed
in Fascist Italy, its goal was to create new strategies that
actively employed culture, education, and health to formu-
late a new state, 0 Estado Novo.

The Ministry became the guiding hand in the production and
distribution of all nationalist cultural transactions including
music, cinema, radio, and physical education. Led by
Gustav Capanema and the rallying cry "To Civilize from
Above," the office completely dedicated itself to "the con-

struction and eugenic formation of the Brazilian people. "5
The Ministry positioned itself as the paternalistic guide of
the population with the stated objective to "centralize,
coordinate, orient, and guide the national image internally
and externally" through the creation of an intellectual elite
to supply "points of view and constructive criticism. "6 This
"constructed culture" was vigorously presented in the
classroom as the springboard to a shared national future.
Health and education were combined with an intense gov-
ernment involvement in physical education, blurring the
boundaries between the mind and the body and between
individual conditioning and national strength. The concept
of the Estado Novo was thus complimented by O Homen
novo Brasileiro, the new Brazilian Man, which emphasized
that the machine of the state was only as strong as its indi-
vidual human parts.

While the ministry positioned itself as the steward for the
nation's social and cultural future, an important part of it
was deeply involved in the nation's past. This branch, the
National Institute for Historical and Artistic Patrimony in Rio
de Janeiro, enlisted many of Brazil's intellectual elite to
assist in the national endeavor of building a cultural legacy
through the rediscovery of national treasures. Prominent in
the organization were the architect Lucio Costa, who head-
ed the Patrimony for many years, the poet Carlos
Drummond de Andrade, and the writer Mario de Andrade.
The Patrimony's methods were simultaneously revisionist
and preservationist. As most of Brazil's past was as a
colony, it became important to frame cultural products so
as to identify their qualities as specifically Brazilian."' By
claiming artifacts and histories as their own rather than
refuting them as foreign remnants of Portuguese colonial
power, the state could claim a cultural foundation and avoid
having to formulate the premises of a new nation.

The 1949 re-publishing of the Bretas text was an endeavor
of the Patrimony of History. While Aleijadinho's work was
already well known in Brazil, Bretas's piece, as the first
written text about the architect and his architecture,
became the work that informed most subsequent studies.
The short piece is based on observations of the writer on
Aleijadinho's architecture, some research of municipal
records, and interviews with descendents and acquaintanc-
es. The most remarkable aspect of Bretas's text is its focus
upon Aleijadinho's mythical stature; it is through this lens
that his architecture is described, and his architecture
describes him.

BALD/ 75

Aleijadinho's mythology begins at birth as the illegitimate
child of a slave and a Portuguese architect. The nickname
"Aleijadlnho" describes his condition that was originally
believed to have resulted from an advanced form of syphilis
(Fig. 2). 8 Bretas's text graphically describes the grotesque
corporeal manifestations of this illness that was a conse-
quence of his earthly indulgences:

Antonio Francisco came to lose all of his toes.
Consequently, he atrophied and curved, and even
some of his fingers fell off leaving him with only
the thumbs and forefingers and practically devoid
of movement. The excruciating pains he frequent-
ly felt in his fingers and the sourness of his chol-
eric temper led him to the paroxysm of cutting off
his fingers using the chisel he worked with.^

As Bretas details Aleijadinho's misery, he creates a suffer-
ing character that transcends his physical state to recreate
himself through his work. According to Bretas, Aleijadinho's

best-known work, which was completed at the end of his
life when Aleijadlnho discovered religion, is Congonhas do
Campo (1796-1808) consisting of seven Stations of the
Cross and a chapel (Fig. 3). One reaches the pilgrimage
church only after moving through the statues of the twelve
prophets (Fig. 4). These statues are corporeal representa-
tions which describe the religious narrative and give mean-
ing to the ascent of the devoted: "It is said that some
women, having gone to Congonhas do Campo and passing
by the Last Supper Station, greeted the figures depicting
Christ and his Apostles solely due to the perfection of the
work. "10 The sculpted bodies are in contrast to their creator
whom Bretas describes as "a priceless treasure lying in a
disease-ridden body that must be carried everywhere with
tools fastened to him; though having unquestionable talent,
one cannot fail to acknowledge also that he was better
inspired than taught."' ^

Although Aleijadlnho was removed in time from the Estado
Novo, and his architecture, with its connection to the
Baroque, was formally antithetical to the Ministry's own
modernist monumentality, Costa's introduction to the 1949
publication gives authority and relevance to the architec-
ture, emboldening the stature of its maker. Costa credits
Aleijadlnho with transforming the Portuguese Baroque into
an architecture "truly Brazilian. "'2 However, in this case,
Brazilianness was a result of this particular Brazilian's indi-
vidual creativity rather than a consequence of indigenous
influences. Costa's introduction chronicles Aleijadinho's
stylistic development within the Portuguese Baroque style
and identifies his Igreja de Sao Francisco in Ouro Preto
(1766-94) as a turning point: "This Franciscan chapel, an
unparalleled work, acquired his definitive character where
the energy, force, and elegance conferred upon it gives the

76 /BALD

architectural creation the pulse of a living thing.... This
Brazilian from MInas gave the highest Individual expression
of his time to the Portuguese art form. "''3 It Is Interesting to
note that this was also the period when Aleljadlnho's Illness
became manifest.

At first glance, the later publication's edification of the
grotesque figure of Aleljadlnho is seemingly at odds with
the heroically classical homen novo Brasileiro.^'^ Many of
the Estado Novo's propaganda photographs emphasized
healthy and sculpted representations of active Brazilians,
not unlike Images similarly propagated by many European
countries of the same period (Fig. 5). In this case, howev-
er, the narrative of the grotesque recreating Itself Into a
classical Ideal through religion actually allied Itself with the
transformational and devotional nationalist rhetoric of the
homen novo Brasileiro. The emphasis on Aleljadlnho's body
addressed the extreme conditions of human existence. On
the one hand, Aleljadlnho was a larger-than-life figure — to
the extent of being almost monstrous — with mythical value
attributed to him. On the other hand, he was an example of
how any man could go from ultimate corporeal misery to
glory through devotion and hard work. The myth of
Aleljadlnho served as an example of transcendence by
which paradigms constructed by the post-colonial state
could be directly consolidated In the physical body by
means of narratives both religious and nationalist In nature.
Like the majority of the population, Aleljadlnho was of
mixed race and poor, but he possessed the Inspiration to
transcend his own existence and create for a higher cause.
In the context of a new republic striving for economic inde-
pendence and national Identity, this allegory offered a role
model to a new multi-racial Industrial working class. A poor,
uneducated, and heterogeneous Brazilian population could
empathize with Aleljadlnho and his architecture. Consider
this excerpt of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poem of the
Igreja de Sao Francisco:

Give me Lord, only the beauty
of these ornaments. And not the soul.
One Foresees the pain of a man.
Parallel to the five wounds. ^5

By assuming the format of biographical narrative,
Aleljadlnho's work was able to distinguish itself from a
string of cultural products defined within the Incremental
development of Iberian Baroque architecture. Once archi-
tecture becomes imbedded with biography, its position can
be defined outside the model of linear stylistic development
and can assume specificity. The individuation that accom-
panies the biography distinguishes the architecture by giv-
ing it value and meaning beyond Its Immediate presence. As
a result of this distinct break from stylistic development,
Brazilian cultural production was able to assert Its singular-
ity while still being legitimized In relation to that develop-
ment. ^ 6 Furthermore, Aleljadlnho's architecture was highly
valued not only as an Important point In the development of
Baroque but also as a point of origin in the national cultural
development. In building a post-colonial nationalism, it was
Important to reference the colonizer, against whom the new
nation would position and measure Itself, within the Inter-
nationalism of modernity. Mario de Andrade wrote In early
years of the Patrimony about Aleljadlnho: "Brazil had In him
Its greatest artistic genius, a grand human manifestation. Of
anyone from the colonial period, only he could be called
national because of the originality of his solutions. He was
already a product of this land, of his suffering, and a psy-
chological extension of his time."'^

Furthermore, Costa's narrative Infused value Into the archi-
tecture that was Inextricably tied to It. While Aleljadlnho's
work was classified as Baroque, Costa claimed that
Aleljadlnho was able to transform the Portuguese style Into
something Identlflably Brazilian through stylistic Innovation.
Indeed, If one examines Aleljadlnho's work In relation to Its
Immediate Portuguese predecessors, there are discernible
differences (Fig. 6). Typically, the smaller eighteenth-centu-
ry Portuguese churches had tri-partlte facades with pilasters

6 isao

S.,XVII

1766

BALD/ 77

7 '»

and beams articulated on a flat surface (Fig. 7)J8 in his
Igreja de Sao Francisco, Aleijadinfio began to slightly curve
the front facade of the building to give complexity to the
composition (Fig. 8). In addition, while the Stations of the
Cross in Braga, Portugal, designed by Andres Soares in
1858 (Fig. 9) seemed more elaborate in detail than its
Brazilian counterpart. It lacked the complexity of oblique
axial crossing one undertakes in ascending Congonhas (Fig.
10). On the other hand, when one arrives at the church at
Congonhas, one is met with a facade designed by
Aleijadinho twenty years after Sao Francisco, one that is
actually much closer to the Portuguese examples. The
facade is flattened and its axial relationship is directional
rather than encompassing (Figs. 11, 12).^^

k

il A

1

'^■|*ii^:

^4s.^-^&.i^, ,

^-^^-^-^

"^^

m,i

1 r

10

Although it was important to legitimize Aleijadinho's
"Brazilianness," doing the same with the Baroque became
equally significant in writing an indigenous history of
Brazilian modernism. In his short Ministry of Culture book
Arquitetura Brasileira {Brazilian Architecture), Costa con-
nected Brazil's most famous and prolific modern architect
Oscar Niemeyer to a Brazilian lineage: "Aleijadinho is both
the key and the enigma that intrigues and wins the utmost
admiration of our modern architects, especially the person-
ality of Oscar Niemeyer, an architect whose background
and mentality are genuinely Carioca."20

Niemeyer is an especially interesting case in point. He was
one of the architects who worked with Le Corbusier on the
Ministry of Education as well as on a joint submission for
the United Nations. Niemeyer's first major work after the
ministry was a complex of buildings at Pampulhua designed
in 1942. One building in the complex, the casino, was a

78 /BALD

very skillful manipulation of Le Corbusier's five points, as
has been praised by Kenneth Frampton.21 In Arquitetura
Brasileira, however, Costa focused his attention on
Niemeyer's small Igreja de Sao Francisco de for Pampuiha
Assis with the purpose of relating Niemeyer to Aleijadinho
(Fig. 13). The building, which is situated only fifty miles
away from Aleijadinho's Igreja de Sao Francisco de Assis,
broke out of the Corbusian free plan into a series of curved
roof surfaces that referenced Aleijadinho's innovative
curved facade. The connection to Aleijadinho thus served to
distinguish Brazilian architecture from the hegemonic
genealogical narrative of modernism.

In this context, it is also important to note that Baroque was
not the only European stylistic precedent in Brazil. Rio itself
had been planned by a French planner from the Beaux-Arts,
and there were numerous important buildings designed by
immigrant French architects in the academic tradition. 22
While the dominant form of European modernism has been
inextricably tied to the nineteenth-century tectonic, pro-
grammatic, and formal investigations of the Beaux-Arts by
historians including Banham and Pevsner, in Brazil the
Beaux-Arts tradition — unlike the Baroque — was character-
ized as being "imported. "^3 From the outside, Brazilian
architecture was seen as derivative of the hegemonic line-
age of European modernism that drew from nineteenth-cen-

tury academicism and developed into the "international
style." For Costa, however, it was important to establish a
national narrative in order to assert that modernism was nei-
ther imported nor regionalized but rather endemic to Brazil.

Furthermore, aligning Brazilian modernism with Aleijadinho
and the Baroque brought multiple associative meanings to
its abstract formal expression. For example, in Erwin
Panofsky's essay "What is Baroque," there exists an ambi-
guity in distinguishing an identifiable style from mannerist
forays. 2^ This inherent ambiguity allows the expressionistic
tendencies of the architect to exist within the larger frame-
work of style. Not unlike Aleijadinho, Niemeyer, whose
work was criticized for being indulgently mannerist and self-
referential by critics such as Max Bill and Walter Gropius,
could therefore be legitimized within a genealogy while at
the same time being nationally claimed because of person-
al creativity and formal deviation^^ (Fig. 14). In fact, it was-
not the referencing of indigenous precedents, but the cre-
ative deviations of the architecture and the deviant charac-
ter of the architect that identified the architecture as
uniquely "Brazilian." While academicism might deny the
gestural or the intuitive, the Baroque model accommodated
and empowered it.

BALD/ 79

Notes

I translations bv the author unless indicated otherwise.

Finally, it is interesting to consider the possibility of the
Baroque heritage as a tool to re-characterize the modern.
While Heinrich Wolfflin, Erwin Panofsky, and Gilles Deleuze
are separated by decades, there is a consensus among them
regarding Baroque's resistance to containment. Wolfflin
looks at architecture's continual movement from a corpore-
al perspective positing relationships established by how we
judge our body in relation to the relative stability of the
architectural body. ^6 Panofsky, on the other hand exam-
ines psychological projections that question both the sub-
ject's stasis in relation to time and space and the frame's
role as boundary. ^'^ Much later, Deleuze completely disinte-
grates the boundary by acknowledging a multiplicity of sys-
tems that exist in a dynamic and heterogeneous field. ^8

The implied fluidity and heterogeneity in these analyses,
which question the centrality of the Enlightenment body,
congeal in the Baroque and the grotesque narrative of
Aleijadinho. To then frame Brazilian modern architecture in
such terms is to open it to another set of possibilities which
emphasize national specificity rather than formal abstrac-
tion. Both the narrative of Aleijadinho and the spatial char-
acterizations of the Baroque suggest the connection of
modern Brazilian architecture to a larger spatial and social
field. The implied heterogeneity and fluidity are not only
found formally in Brazilian modernism but are fundamental
in national paradigms, such as homen novo Brasileiro,
which is foregrounded in the hybridity and the multi-racial
identity of the population. Therefore, the heterogeneous
field is relevant not only to Brazilian architecture but also to
the Brazilian national subject. While architecture and the
narratives of its makers are clearly intertwined, it is inter-
esting to consider how architectural narratives position us
as subjects as clearly as architectural space positions us as
bodies.

^ For an example of this connection, one need not look further than Wright's
lecture to the Royal Institute of British Architects on organic architecture. Frank
Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture: Architecture of Democracy (London:
Lund and Humphries. 1939): 1-8.

^ The publication O Aleijadinho (Rio de Janeiro: Ministry of Education, 1949}
includes Costa's introduction "A Arquitetura de Antonio Francisco Lisboa,"
v^fhich IS a formal and historical outline of the Igreja de Sao Francisco in Sao
Joao del Rei. The main text by Rodngo Bretas has recently been republished in
Rodrigo Bretas, Passes da Paixo (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Alumbramento, 1989).
Costa's introduction can now be found in Lucio Costa, Registro de uma
Vivencia (Sao Paulo: Empresa da Artes): 521-33.

^ Concurrent with Vargas's rise to power in a 1930 coup was the appointment
of Lucio Costa to direct the state-supported Escoia das Belas Artes in Rio de
Janeiro, which was previously run following the Beaux-Arts curriculum. Costa
was at the center of the modern movement in Brazil. He brought in the Russia-
born emigre Gregon Warchavchick as well as Affonso Reidy. Both had recently
completed unabashedly modernist projects. When the competition for the
Ministry Building was held, a Beaux-Arts scheme was selected. However, the
minister, Gustav Capanema, with Vargas's blessing, paid off the winner, and
hired Costa to organize a team. Costa would later collaborate with Oscar
Niemeyer for the design of Brasilia.

^ Other members of the team were Affonso Reidy and Jorge Moreira. In addi-
tion, Le Corbusier came for a month to help guide the team.

^ Pregrino Junior, Ministry of Education official, "O Papel da Educacao Fisica na
Formacao do Homem Moderno," Educacao Fisica, 62-63 (Rio de Janeiro,
1942): 32.

6 Lippi et al., O Eslado Novo (Zahar: Rio, 1982): 72, 73.

Lucio Costa, Registro de uma Vivencia. 437.

8 There are a number of Brazilian texts that try to decipher the mystery of
Aleijadinho's affliction. It is now thought to be a variant of leprosy. Among
them are A Doenca do Aleijadinho (Rio de Janeiro: Ministry of Education, 1 961 )
and Rene Laclerte, O Aleijadinho e Suas Doenpas (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria
Editora Catedra, 1976).

3 Bretas, 53.

'^ Lucio Costa, Registro de uma Vivencia. 524.

■13 Ibid., 527.

^^ Bakhtin formulates the grotesque as that which "ignores the closed, smooth,
and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescencies
(sprouts, buds) and orifices." Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1968): 310.

^^ Carlos Drummonde de Andrade, "Postcards from Vila Rica-Sao Francisco de
Asis," The Minus Sign, trans. Virginia de Araujo (Redding Ridge, CT: Black
Swan Books, 1967): 85.

^^ For a clarification of this use of biography, see Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural
Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in Arjun Appadurai ed.. The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).

80 /BALD

^' Mario de Andrade, "Aleijadinho: Funcao Historica," Carlos Drummond de
Andrade ed., Brasil, Terra, e Alma (Rio de Janeiro: Ed, Do Autor, |1 9351 1 967).

'^ The Portuguese Baroque examples that most closely relate to the Brazilian
examples are somewhat restrained compositionallv while effusive on the interi-
ors. This is of the highest period of colonization from the late seventeenth cen-
tury into the eighteenth as Portugal was re-discovenng Classicism. A good
example is the Church of Sao Francisco in Braga. See Carlos de Azevedo,
Churches of PortuganNew York: Scala, 1985): 34-40.

^^ For an excellent comparison between these two Stations of the Cross, see
Germain Bazin, Aleijadinho et la Sculpture Baroque au Bresil (Paris:
Panoramique, 1963): 200-219.

2^ Liicio Costa, Arquitetura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Ministry of Culture,
19521: 34,

21 Kenneth Frampton highlights this building in his Modern Architecture: a
Critical History applauding its "reinterpretation of the Cofbusian notion of a
promenade architecturale in a spatial composition of remarkable balance and
vivacity" Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: a Critical History (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1992): 255.

22 See Norma Evenson, Two Brazilian Capitals (New Haven: Yale, 1973).

23 See Nikolaus Pevsner, Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1 968) and Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1960).

2^ Erwin Panofsky, "What is Baroque," Three Essays on Style (Cambridge. MA:
MIT Press, [19341 1995): 38-45.

25 Max Bill, "Report on Brazil," Architectural Review (Oct. 1954): 238-9.

26 Heinrich Wblfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell, [18881 1966):
77,

27 Panofsky. 61-75.

28 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. 1993): 27-36.

Illustrations

Fig. 1: Portrait of Aleijadinho with hands hidden, mid-1 Bth century.

Fig, 2: Plate from The Sickness of Aleijadinho, published by the Ministry of
Education, 1959. This was an example of a government-sponsored
study that set out to pinpoint Aleijadinho's illness.

Fig. 3: Congonhas do Campo, 1800-1808. Aleijadinho, sculptor and archi-
tect.

Fig. 4: Statues of the twelve Prophets, Congonhas do Campo, 1800-1808.

Aleijadinho, sculptor and architect.

Fig. 5: Propaganda shot from the ministry of Education, circa 1938, showing
public physical education program.

Fig. 6: Sketch by Lucio Costa showing the development of the Brazilian
Baroque. It begins with the Portuguese settlement in the region of
Minas Gerais and ends with the date of Aleijadinho's first chapel in the
city of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Fig. 7: Small Chapel, Braga. Portugal, mid- 18th century.

Fig. 8: Church of Sao Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto, Brazil 1 778.
Aleijadinho, architect and sculptor.

Fig. 9: Stations of the Cross, Braga, Portugal, 1858. Andres Scares, archi-
tect.

Fig. 10: Congonhas do Campo showing six stations of the Cross leading to the
pilgrimage chapel.

Fig. 1 1 : Congonhas do Campo. view of exterior stair leading to the plinth that
foregrounds the pilgrimage chapel at Congonhas do Campo-

Fig. 12: Stations of the Cross, Congonhas do Campo, 1800-08. View of sta-
tion with pilgrimage chapel in background.

Fig, 13: Chapel of Sao Francisco de Assis. Pampulhua, Minas Gerais, 1940.
Oscar Niemeyer, architect.

Fig. 14: National Cathedral with statues of the Prophets, Brasilia. 1960 Oscar
Niemeyer, architect.

BALD/ 81

KATARINA BONNEVIER
THEATRICAL DEVICES

Tins project is not simply the images or simply the text, A
Pidgin Play; not simply the masks, models, and furniture nor
the staging and the animations. All the parts are entangled
into an architectonic skein. It plays with the appearance of
architecture to reveal patterns that are hidden in the sur-
face.

'Cause isn't there a strange provoking, formless figure
crawling within that conspicuous front design?

Stage

The theater emphasizes the appearance: the story is told
through stage sets, costumes, masks, and body languages
in addition to the spoken word. It is the surface of the the-
ater that evokes narratives. In this project, theatrical
devices have been borrowed to play with an architecture
that exhibits itself. This project began with a Cast of
Characters and a specific site, the World's Columbian
Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

Mask

The mask is the sur-face of acting. The essential character-
istic of the mask is that it hides and reveals at the same
time. The audience is the mirror: the actor can tell how the
mask is played by the response of the audience. The mask
changes the relation between the self and the other.

Jacques Lecoq taught us how to create a character.^ You
do not have to be a swan to play a swan. Study the body
language of the bird, the look in its eyes, the color of its
feather dress, the rhythm of its movements, and then re-
play it. The psychology of the bird is irrelevant. If you can
mask yourself as a swan, you can play a swan. The char-
acter is within the mask, not behind. There is no inner truth
to be found by unveiling her. The disguise is what enables
us to act.

Decor, Costumes and Props

I inherited elements for this project from Jennifer Bloomer's
Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbies of Bower, a collabo-
rative project staged in the early 1990s.2 The target of
Bloomer's project is the Ornament/Structure dichotomy, in
which the former is historically burdened with the negative
connotations of the feminine, the superficial, and the
impure. The battle is fought with the Amulets. These stones
or mosaic tiles of Tabbies of Bower ate both decorative and
monstrous. The Amulets also behave like masks, as they

82 /BONNEVIER

are generative models infested with life. As I inherited the
Amulets from this work, I was confronted by the tricky
question of how to construct their home.

The answer came analogically: they would get accessories,
for example, gloves. The gloves dressed the Amulets as the
research and the construction of the project went hand in
hand. Excavating nine pairs of fine leather gloves in the
99C:-bin at the Goodwill Thrift Store in West Ames triggered
a thinking about the sequence of accessories: amulet,
glove, mannequin, tableau (scene), stage, department
store, world's fair. Every step in the series served as a
model for the next step, while each had its independence.

Table

The architectonic construction of The 1893 Faire of Masks
is a sliding scale of things and scenes. A scene is both a
vertical background and a stage, the floor where the action
takes place. The Table of Contents, a blackboard Singer
sewing-machine table with the map of the project, is one of
the stages for this project.

But what drama was to be staged here? The Cast of
Characters makes their entry again. I let them interact with
the rest of the borrowed, found, and fabricated collection of
things. I constructed a dramatic text, A Pidgin Play, a his-
tory of associative details. The text is a program for yet
another architecture. An architecture which is animated,
which allows one stage to unfold into another. And, lucky
for me, when the skein got too tight I could just let the god-
dess—in this case the performer Lady Sitwell — enter as a
deus ex machina to comb out the entanglements of the
plot. And the play disappears into a tapestry leaving the
empty stage behind. ^

BONNEVIER/ 85

CAST OF CHARACn- RS

2. Sopliin i Uyticii I Amylin Bloomtr

Arehitcct Ediioi of 'I'hc Lil>

5. King Buii. Bhilo and others, -1, l-rcdnkfl Bremer 6, Annie Oaklcv/ljtdc Sure Shoi

Siuni ptKipIc on ditpUy Swrduli Auihot I'crlQtmcf

8. Ijidy Ediih Siiwell 7. Bcriha M. Honore Potcct Palmer 9. Ciharlotic Perkins Giiimn

f^nglith Pocicw 1 lead of ihc Lady Managers Auihor

A PIDGIN PLAY

SCENE 7; WROUGHT WITHII

ITS WALLS

(Charlotte and Sophia move along the mezzanine that is
lined by the audience. They turn around a corner through a
passage to a parallel gallery with golden walls. Bertha
comes pottering with a feather duster)

SOPHIA: Charlotte, look there is Mrs. Potter Palmer, Let's
hide in the wall.

{They slide into a pocket in the wall)

MANAGER BERTHA: {rehearsing her speech for the
Farewell Reception on October 28, 1893) When our palace

in the White City shall have vanished like a dream...

CHARLOTTE: She will discover that there is a woman
stooping down and creeping behind the front pattern.

SOPHIA: Ssh! Sshewillseeuss.

{Manager Bertha stops as she has heard something. She
decides that it is just her imagination and continues rehears-
ing)

MANAGER BERTHA: When our palace in the White City
shall have vanished like a dream; when grass and flowers
cover the spot where it now stands; may its... may
itssssss... Darn that pesky fly!

{She has stopped again right in front of where Charlotte and
Sophia are hiding. She is whisking her feather duster like a
fly swatter to remember the next line. Charlotte and Sophia
try to suppress their giggle)

CHARLOTTE: {whispering) The faint figure behind seems to
shake the pattern, as if she wants to get out.

SOPHIA: Ssh! Keep quiet please!

{Manager Bertha has not heard or seen them. She stands in
the pose of a praying mantis)

MANAGER BERTHA: When our palace in the White City
shall have vanished like a dream; when grass and flowers
cover the spot where it now stands; may its memory and
influence still remain as a benediction of those who have
wrought within its walls.

TABELLE (narrator): Sophia Hayden produced all the draw-
ings in three months. And she was paid less than a third of
her male colleagues. The building was constructed out of
plaster and wood. She was exhausted and taken in to a rest
home. The vultures were thrilled to have proof of women's
weakness.

{Manager Bertha starts to dust while humming the last line
over and over again)

MANAGER BERTHA: ...who have wrought within its
walls... who have wrought within its walls...

TABELLE: The Columbian Exposition ran for six months.
The Woman's Building caught fire like many of the buildings
in the fair and was demolished. The Fine Arts Building was

SH /BONNEVIER

redressed in a more weather-resistant costume of limestone
and marble and is today the Museum of Science and
Industry. The Swedish building was dismantled and put
together again in Norway, Wisconsin.''

MANAGER BERTHA: There is gold dust everywhere. These
walls stain everything they touch.

CHARLOTTE: Aaatjhoo!

^

\~.' !^:.^-

{Manager Bertha bounces [Swedish "studsar till'1. Sophia
and Charlotte start to titter [Swedish "fnittra'T)

MANAGER BERTHA: Iss thiss a surprise, ett skamt?

CHARLOTTE: {as she starts to creep^] The front pattern
does move, because the women behind it crawl around and
shake it.

h

(Sophia follows her example and also starts to creep. The
whole wall is trembling)

MANAGER BERTHA: T'is a joke, no?

CHARLOTTE: Let's creep out of the wall, most women
don't creep by daylight. And so they do. It is very humiliat-
ing to be caught creeping by daylight.

MANAGER BERTHA: Sssoffia!?

(Manager Bertha turns jaundice and faints. Sophia and
Charlotte have to creep over her)

TABELLE: Hayden made drawings for a memorial building
that was to be erected after the fair to commemorate the
Woman's Building. She sent her plans to Palmer, who
intended to make it into a woman's shelter. There was a
site for the project in the garden of The Art Institute of
Chicago on Michigan Avenue, but the project was never
realized. Hayden wanted to charm the world through her
building, and she did, but the world still didn't want Sophia
Hayden, a woman without charm. They wanted a role
model.

CHARLOTTE: {from the floor) Oh, my eyes flood with
tears... Will you never stop lecturing?

TABELLE: Anyway, Sophia Hayden disappeared from the
scene and is not known to have practiced architecture
again.

Notes

Thts expose is extracted from a thesis project entitled "The 1893 Faire of
Masks: A Play on Ephemeral Architecture," completed at Iowa State University,
2001. Professor Jennifer Bloomer advised the project.

For further reading, see Jacques Lecoq vi/ith Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-
Claude Lallias. Le Corps Po^tique. Un enseignement de la creation th^atrale
(Pans, Actes Sud. 19971

^ See Jennifer Bloomer. "Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbies of Bower,"
Assemblage 17 (April 1992): 7-29.

•^ The scene that follows relies heavily on Charlotte Perkins Oilman, The Yellow
Wallpaper and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 19971. Originally published in
The New England Magazine in May 1 892.

^ Norway was part of a union with Sweden until 1905.

^ English owes the following words, among others, to Scandinavian languages:
skulk, crawl, scream, gape, titter, sky. die. they, them, their.

BONNEVIER/

J. MEEJIN YOON

BETWEEN BODIES AND WALLS

MIT LEVEL II STUDIO, FALL 2001

This studio explores the mutability of material concepts as
a means to inscribe, contain, and extend the body in space.
Beginning with the body's own living container and largest
organ, the skin, students were asked to analyze and exca-
vate a selection of second skins worn to clothe, protect,
obscure, extend, enable, reveal, constrict, constrain, or
enclose the body. Students were then asked to conceptual-
ize, design, and fabricate at one-to-one scale a third skin —
the WALL as a tectonic and occupiable body.

Overlaps in architectural and clothing terminology — such as
curtain wall, skirt board, trim, flute, dress, fabric, pin, and
pattern — reveal a continued semantic and tropic association
between second and third skins — between clothing and
architecture. The relationship between the German words
Wand (walll and Gewand (garment) have been drawn by
Gottfried Semper. While walls can exist as barriers,
dividers, seams, fragments, filters, and gaps, they too can
be worn — deployed to challenge territory and force new
ways of occupation. Walls can be used to define space
while also containing space within them.

It is this "thickness" of the wall — its ability to define space
and inscribe occupation — which generated the tectonic
speculation for the studio. Tectonics, while denoting a pre-
occupation with materiality and craft, and connoting the
expression or representation of those material properties,
has become a mutable and unstable term. The recent evo-
lution of mutant materials and their technologies has creat-
ed a material culture pregnant with possibilities while simul-
taneously challenging our inherited notions of material sig-
nificance and signification. Material instability challenges
tectonics itself, placing the architect in a role of invention
and intervention in both the construction and the manufac-
turing process. Students in this studio were asked to take
on this challenge by exploring tectonics as an inquiry as
opposed to a given. Through their tectonic investigations,
they were required to employ their wall to both define and
inscribe space externally and internally, allowing the walls
to be occupiable in some manner. Clothed in architecture,
the body was infinitely extended.

The tectonic interweaving of two semi-
transparent surfaces creates a self-sup-
porting container/wall/screen which
pulls apart to allow one to occupy its
thickness. The body's presence in the
wall is registered as a deflection map on
one surface and a transparency map on
the opposite surface.

.'

< ■■m-i-

1

> "!* •

^ '," ••

^ ,,. . .•••*•
«■■ •'<•••••

••iitat*

••<«!••«•

' •>•••

MEREDITH ATKINSON

TIM MORSHEAD

SHEER WALL

86 /YOON

This "intelligent" mass structure explores
and inscribes the body's trace and activity
into a stratified mass. Its varied materials
and degrees of transparency mark the
"imprint" of the body's moments of flexibil-
ity and range of vision. As a result of this
response to the human condition, the mass
deteriorates in particular moments, reveal-
ing its internal structure, while simultane-
ously remaining a formidable solid edge.

Aluminum Construction: anondized
sheets, hollow tubes, wire mesh, piano
hinges, rivets

Hinging Motion: dialogue between vary-
ing ranges of motion of two systems

Contorted Body: result of interaction
between the body and its armors

AARON GREENE

KRISTINE GOLDRICK

STRATA WALL

REBECCA LUTHER + TRACY TAYLOR

FULL CONTACT ORIGAMI

YOON/ 87

MICHAEL LEHNER

INTENSION

The jnterdependency of the alu-
minum and rubber create a self-sup-
porting, perforated, rigid surface.
The wall uniquely defines space in
response to the body and acts as a
delivery system using the vinyl tub-
ing as infrastructure and activator of
surface contour. Different materiali-
ties specifically condition the experi-
ence on each side affecting sound
quality, varying tactility, and filtering
light.

KARL flUNKELWITZ

Begin with an empty space, X. Divide X
into smaller units of varying dimensions.
Fill part of each acrylic unit of X with rub-
ber. Each of these rubber units should
contain a void and be open toward the
top. Remove the acrylic units from vol-
ume X. Fill each rubber unit of X with
piaster. The rubber units will distort as
they are filled and will need to be sup-
ported by hand. As each plaster unit is
formed within volume X, it will be distort-
ed according to the relative position of the
maker's body within and around volume
X. Remove the rubber units from volume
X.

KYLE STEINFELD + AMY YANG

WALL-MAKING-WALL

88 /YOON

I

This wall was designed to refer to the
physical proportions of the body: glass
panels are suspended at critical heights
indicating knees, pelvis, waist, chest,
shoulders, and head. An image project-
ed onto the glass reflects and extends
to the the walls, floors and ceilings of
the surrounding space and abstractly
defines those surfaces in relation to the
measurements of the body. Glass is
both active and passive; visually, it
dematerializes yet its reflectivity acti-
vates a comparison of body, image,
and space.

ALIKI HASIOTIS

MEASURE

The wall is inhabited between layers of
a single composite membrane folded
upon itself in the form of a labyrinth.
One facing surface of the membrane is
pleated latex, accumulating at 1.5x the
length of the muslin fabric that makes
up the other facing surface. Cones of
vision are extruded through the layered
construct, allowing a choreographed
visual permeability through the accu-
mulated membrane. When unwrapped,
the membrane extends to forty-eight
feet in length and the extruded cones
are seen as a composition of openings
in a cinematic, frame-by-frame move-
ment across the membrane's elevation.

ANNA GALLAGHER + BRIAN ALEX MILLER

SURFACE SURPLUS

YOON/ 89

DAVID GISSEN

IS THERE A JEWISH SPACE?

JEWISH IDENTITY BEYOND THE NEO - AVANT - GARDE

In recent years, architects have explored their diverse iden-
tities in ways that would seem inconceivable thirty years
ago. The 1990s saw the emergence of African-American,
queer, and feminist perspectives in architecture. These
architects used their "deviant" positions to critique modern
architecture and popular culture while affirming their roles
as cultural producers. The identity movement is an aesthet-
ic discourse that has enjoyed palpable results: more artists
and designers were able to represent their cultures, reli-
gions, nationalities, and sexualities in their writings and
projects. Nevertheless, these identities often emerged in
architecture in problematic ways. Among the myriad repre-
sentations of particular identities, I wish to examine how
the architectural neo-avant-garde explored Jewish identity
in the 1980s and 90s. This essay examines some of the
problems that exist in representations of this identity with-
in the writings and works of architects who claimed own-
ership to its exploration. In particular, I will examine how
Peter Eisenman and his critics (and here we must also men-
tion related explorations by Daniel Libeskind and Stanley
Tigerman) re-examined "Jewishness" in architectural dis-
course and how they enhanced certain essentialist positions
that were introduced much earlier. i In many ways, I will
argue, these explorations worked against the identity dis-
courses developed from African-American, queer, and fem-
inist perspectives.

Identity discourse in the nineties, especially in architecture,
was fueled by a replacement of essentialism with an
approach that examines social constructions instead. In an
essentialist position, "objective" labels are developed for
groups through presumably scientific means. Biology and, in
part, psychology are seen as the determinants of — in the
case of our analysis — a "Jewish" mindset, a "Jewish"

sense of spatial experience that emerges from the physical
and psychological state of "Jewishness." A social con-
structionist model, on the other hand, might examine the
context under which such terms are presented and see
them as relative to the way groups are portrayed in a par-
ticular time, place, and culture. Social constructionists
might examine the way groups portray themselves and are
portrayed in the variety of arenas that make up culture — tel-
evision, radio, film, journalism, design, etc. The distinctions
between essentialism and social constructionism are signif-
icant; the practitioners of various identity movements in
architecture have proved how different groups are framed
by socially constructed spatial and material practices. ^

Until quite recently, the identification of groups from with-
in and without was primarily based on the essentialist
model. Essentialist descriptions of a Jewish architecture
and a Jewish space — in what we know as the history of
architecture — emerged outside of Jewish self-identification,
often to the detriment of Jews. Margaret Olin describes the
nineteenth-century French architectural historian George
Perrot's discovery of the "rootless" and "empty" qualities of
Jewish architecture in Solomon's Temple. 3 More notorious
are the writings of Paul Schultze-Naumburg and the state-
ments of Paul Bonatz who attempted to align interwar mod-
ernism—exemplified by the Weissenhof Siedlung — as hav-
ing its roots in Palestine. Bonatz claimed that the Werkbund
exhibition of Weissenhof was like "the suburb of
Jerusalem."'' In his later writings, Schultze-Naumburg
resorted to the "rootlessness" and "Jewish" nature of mod-
ernist space and form.^

In the 1 980s, Peter Eisenman engaged this early discourse
on Jewish architecture to control it from within as a form

90 /GISSEN

of self-identification in architecture, in a way similar to
other identity movements in art and literature. In numerous
works, writings, and interviews, Eisenman attempted to
align a state of "Jewishness" with the formal qualities of
deconstructivist and post-structuralist architecture. Taking
cues from Eisenman's own descriptions, the critic and his-
torian Richard Joncas sums up Eisenman's project: "He
speaks of 'deconstruction,' 'repression,' 'texts,' and
'between,' and his architecture epitomizes 'fragmentation,'
'incompleteness,' and, most disturbing, 'loss of center.' He
draws on psychoanalysis and literary theory to explain his
designs and ascribes his own experience as a Jew living in
New York to the ever-present sense of 'dislocation' in his
work. Like many twentieth-century architects, Eisenman
has invented a language which captures the angst of con-
temporary societies. "6 The qualities described by Joncas
became dominant in the construction of a Jewish identity in
architecture in the 1990s, particularly in the practice of
Eisenman and, in part, that of Libeskind, Tigerman, and
Gehry. Both Eisenman and Libeskind relied on notions of
Jewishness — associated with chaos, absence, wandering,
and un-homely domestic lives — to fuel formal explorations
that grappled with historical stereotypes.^

Eisenman's "public" (sic. "published") exploration of his
Jewish identity began in interviews, during which he began
to introduce his architectural theories as emerging from his
past as a Jew. In an interview with Leon Krier, Eisenman
claimed that his aversion to classicism was a result of the
fact that "as a Jew and an outsider I have never felt part of
the classical world. "8 While Eisenman had been exploring
the theme of architectural otherness much earlier — claiming
that it was present in architecture from Palladio to
Terragni- suddenly he was making an organic claim to its
origins as an essential aspect of his identity. Charles Jencks
probed the limits of Eisenman's thinking on the subject of
Jewishness:

Jencks: It seems to me that you are trying all the
time to reconcile people to alienation and to pres-
ent being a Jewish outsider as a universal state.
You're trying to take the homeless Jewish intel-
lectual as Kant's imperative and say that every-
body should be, or is, a homeless Jewish intellec-
tual, either openly admitting it like yourself, or
inadvertently.

Eisenman: I do not think it is inadvertent, but
rather subconscious. I do not think you have to be
a Jewish intellectual to be desperately lonely, an
island of the unconscious. Architecture has
repressed the individual unconscious by dealing

only with consciousness in the physical environ-
ment that is the supposedly happy home. I think
it is exactly in the home where the unhomely is,
where the terror is alive — in the repression of the
unconscious. What I am trying to suggest is that
the alienated house makes us realize that we can-
not be only conscious of the physical world but
rather of our own unconscious. Psychoanalysis is
talking about this. Psychoanalysis is partly a
Jewish phenomenon, understandably for a people
who need to be in touch with their own psycho-
logical being. I would argue that we all have a bit
of Jew in us; that the Jew is our unconscious;
that's why there is anti-Semitism, because we do
not want to face our unconscious; we do not
want to face our shadow; the Jew stands for that
shadow. We do not want to face the issue of
rootlessness. I am from New York, but I do not
necessarily feel more at home here than in many
other places.... But this is not necessarily a
Jewish problem, but rather one of modern man in
general.

Jencks: Well, I would agree that to be in New
York is to feel alienated and alone, and at the
same time to be a Jew in New York is to feel
everybody is alienated and alone, so that it's a
kind of universal New York experience. I think a
certain amount of irony should creep into your
view of yourself in that light. I mean you get a lot
of Woody Allen films made on precisely that sub-
ject.9

The comparison between Allen and Eisenman is a surpris-
ingly powerful one for examining the problems of essen-
tialist thinking. Sander Oilman has often described how
stereotypes are reinforced from within by members of a
"labeled" group as a way to understand the geographic and
cultural situation of that group. Yet, as Oilman points out,
because the label itself is not critically examined — in this
case, within Eisenman's work or by Jencks, for that mat-
ter—other problems quickly ensue. ^o

For many contemporary thinkers that explore Jewish identi-
ty, the images of an "unhomely" Jewish domestic experi-
ence that permeates the films of Allen as well as many tel-
evision dramas are deeply problematical Annie Hall,
Manhattan, and other works by Allen present paradigms
that many Jewish thinkers grapple with and overcome. Yes,
some homes are alienated, but Allen — and also Eisenman —
describe this unhomeliness as a universal experience that
gets at "the Jew in all of us." Eisenman makes homes that
are uprooted and chaotic because he is a Jew; Woody Allen
shows domestic spaces in similar ways for autobiographical
reasons. In the end, does Jewish identity benefit from this
essentialist discourse?

GISSEN/ 91

The problems are more exaggerated in a review published in
The New York Times ten years after the Jencks and
Eisenman interview. In "Architecture of Light and
Remembrance," the critic Herbert Muschamp analyzes the
nature of Jewish space in the buildings designed by sever-
al progressive Jewish-American architects. Examining the
work of such prominent Jewish-American architects as
Moshe Safdie, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, and Frank
Gehry, the article praises the "blazing talent of twentieth-
century Jews," while exploring how Jewish architects —
from Louis Kahn to a list of contemporary architects — "lead
the field. "12

Muschamp thus attempts to arrive at the essence of a
Jewish space by examining the work of Jewish-American
architects. He speculates about whether there is a Jewish
style in architecture: "I asked Moshe Safdie if there was
anything explicitly Jewish about the [Skirball Center's]
design." Drawing on the work of Norris Kelly Smith,
Muschamp concludes that Jewish thought should be seen
as "dynamic, vigorous, passionate," as opposed to "classi-
cal" thought which is "static, moderate, and harmonious."
At the end of this investigation, Muschamp claims that the

open-floor plan, the "pinwheeling" house, and the impulse
to flee the city, evident in Frank Lloyd Wright's work, are
the modern master's own explorations of the Jewish
mind!'3

Perhaps most troubling is that this article associates emerg-
ing technologies with the Jewish experience and in this way
contributes to the establisment of new stereotypes. In ref-
erence to the electronic facade of Eisenman's aborted
Jewish Museum project in San Francisco (a commission
now being developed by Daniel Libeskind), Muschamp
claims: "Layers of meaning overlap here. One is the juxta-
position of two kinds of power: the industrial model, repre-
sented by the power station, and its displacement by the
information economy. Another reflects San Francisco's
leadership in communications technology. Finally, the
screen reflects the degree to which members of the infor-
mation society have become electronic nomads, not unlike
'wandering Jews,' surfing the net for fragments of meaning
and place. "1*

Articles, such as the one by Herbert Muschamp, inhibit the
critical aspects of identity politics while claiming to repre-

92 /GISSEN

sent and support identity issues. It is the notion of the Jew
as wanderer, as the other, and as an alien in his own
domestic surroundings — introduced to the architectural con-
text earlier — that must be countered. Architects who are
interested in exploring their spatial identities — or architects
interested in complicating the old stereotypes — must re-
invest in the emerging identity practices that are based on
the social constructionist model.

What is most missing from explorations into Jewish space
by American architects are the actual experiences within
spaces created by and for Jewish-Americans. This may
include examinations of synagogues, but also neighbor-
hoods, painful and complicated spaces where Jews experi-
enced feelings of both oppression and of cultural re-birth.
The bathhouse that emerged in the nineteenth-century san-
itation movement is one such space (Fig. 1). What is absent
is an examination of Jewish experience that exists in spe-
cific times, spaces, and ecologies. I would argue that if one
were to look at the actual spaces of Jewish cultural pro-
duction that continue to exist, one could see their relation-
ship to a myriad of contemporary issues such as feminist or
ecological explorations and other forms of material
activism.

I would not want to end this essay without pointing to some
possible new perspective for examining Jewish identity and
identity in general in architecture. In recent years, Jewish
artists and architects — including Allen Wexler, Alexander
Gorlin, and Amy Landesberg — have produced promising
work that challenges the spatial tropes and essentialism of
earlier work (Figs. 2, 3). Coming primarily from feminist and
ecological critiques (drawn from the work of the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and post-structuralist
thinkers), several artists, architects, and historians have
explored their identities in complex ways that question
some of the old stereotypes.

GISSEN/ 93

Among those invested in this exploration, the work of the
artist Rachel Schreiber has examined the production of
Jewish meaning specifically in socially constructed Jewish
spaces since the mid-1990s. While one project cannot sum
up the entirety of these ideas, it is worth examining one of
her works in order to demonstrate its critical potentials for
architecture.

In her project Life Blood, exhibited in 1 994 at the Judah L.
Magnus Museum in Berkeley, California, Rachel Schreiber
explores the numerous roles that the mikvah (the ceremoni-
al bath) and the sukkah (the space of the tent) may take in
a new era of Jewish-American representation (Figs. 4, 5).
The project includes a series of videos and images installed
in a red iukkah-WWe space. Life Blood explores the ritualistic
purpose of the mikvah through Schreiber's personal histo-
ry—her sexuality, Judaism, and her decision to have an
abortion. The project plays off the original meaning of the
mikvah, particularly its use as a place for washing after

menstruation, with the meaning Schreiber instills in the
space. Critical of the orthodoxy that the space represents
for many Jewish-Americans, Schreiber recites a chapter
from the Torah that describes the mikvah. An image of a
woman swimming — it could be anywhere — fills another
video screen while the biblical text is read. As Schreiber dis-
cusses the original text, which has an excruciatingly sexist
tone, she begins to realize that this space is open to inter-
pretation. Through her experience of the mikvah, she claims
a new significance for the space relating to her control over
her body in secular American culture.

Actual historical spaces such as the mikvah may serve as
sites where architects re-examine Jewish spatial identity.
The mikvah is a fascinating space in this era of ecological
awareness. It is predicated on the use of ground water in
order to "purify" men and women alike. (Contrary to com-
mon assumptions, mikvahs are also used by men.) The mik-
vah is alsoa fascinating space for discussion in an age of
feminist activism. It is a space simultaneously associated
with freedom and oppression — women congregate in them,
however, as some believe, women are also unduly pres-
sured to use the space to "purify" themselves after each
menstrual cycle.

It is in such an imagined, historical, and "live" place that
Jewish identity in architecture can re-ground itself. It is in
such a space that identity may produce the complexity that
it initially instigated as a subject in architecture. In such a
space, one may build an identity that enables debates about
the future of Jewish and non-Jewish spatial experiences
alike.

94 /GISSEN

Notes

I wish to thank Sander Gilman. Miriam Gusevich, and Christian Zapatka for
reviewing this essay and providing helpful comments.

' I do not want to suggest in this essay that the formulations of Eisenman and
his critics were completely flawed. Any discussion of Judaism and architecture
within academic architectural culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s was
extremely brave. As has been noted many times, architecture is a profession
that has been dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants — to the point of
exclusivity at times, Eisenman's writings and projects represented a significant
leap in introducing Jewish identity into architecture. For Jewish architects of
my generation (I am 31 years old), the writings and statements of architects
such as Eisenman, Tigerman, and Gehry, were important affirmations of
American-Jewry. Through such efforts, we were coming out of our own, unique
Jewish closet. Nevertheless, I believe that thinking about Jewish identity in
architecture has ceased to evolve, becoming incomplete and stifling.

^ The architects Mark Robbins, Joel Sanders, and Mabel Wilson as well as his-
torians, such as Dolores Hayden, have examined the "social construction" of
architectural spaces. For a good introduction to the role that identity politics
may play in architecture, see Joel Sanders, ed.. Stud: Architectures of
Masculinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); and Deborah
Berke and Steven Harris, eds,. The Architecture of the Everyday (New York,
Princeton Architectural Press. 1997),

in Berlin, Libeskind was, in some ways, able to move a discussion of
Jewishness away from the Jewish-American cliches of Eisenman and his crit-
ics. Yet, Libeskind's ideology was still close to Eisenman: he claimed that it was
the "void" m his Jewish Museum in Berlin that could best represent the Jewish
experience

Illustrations

Fig. 1 : Reconstruction of the Lower East Side Floating Bath of 1870. Model by
David Gissen and David Pascu, 1999. Exhibited at the "Floating
Bathhouses Exhibition" at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New
York in 1999.

Fig. 2: Allan Wexler, Gardening Sukkah, 2000. Installed at the Aldnch Museum
of Contemporary Art, Fairfield, CT.

Fig. 3: Allan Wexler, detail from the interior of Gardening Sukkah. 2000-

Fig. 4: Rachel Schreiber, Life Blood. Installed at the Judah Magnes Museum.
Berkeley. CA. 1994.

Fig. 5: Rachel Schreiber, Image from video. Life Blood. 1994.

■^ Margaret Olin, "C[lementl Hardesh [Greenberg] and Company: Formal
Criticism and Jewish Identity," Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities.
Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed, (New York and New Brunswick, NJ: Jewish Museum
and Rutgers University Press, 1996): 42

** Paul Bonatz. "Noch einmal die Werkbundsiedlung," Schwabischer Merkur
Abendblatt 206 (5 May 1926). Also see Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto,
Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1991),

^ See, for example. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Fiasse (Munich: J, F.
Lehmanns. 1928),

° Richard Joncas, "Fixing a Hole: A Commentary on the Architecture of Peter
Eisenman," http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/ioncas.html, 1998.

' These architects were not alone in claiming the stereotype as a tool to exam-
ine their identities, The queer movement and the "Grr!" movement also claimed
labels such as "dyke," "butch." and "sissy." Eisenman, Libeskind, and Tigerman
may not have been directly invoking these movements, but considering that the
journal October published the work of these groups, they may have been aware
of such emerging discourses,

° Leon Krier as quoted by Charles Jencks, "Peter Eisenman: an Architectural
Design Interview by Charles Jencks," Andreas C, Papadakis ed,, Architectural
Design, Deconstruction in Architecture. (London: Academy Editions, 19881: 52
The original Kner/Eisenman interview was published in Skyline (February,
1983): 12-16-

9 Jencks, 52-53,

'^ Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language
of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

'' See Too Jewish^ Challenging Traditional Identifies. In particular, see the
article by Maurice Berger. "The Mouse that Never Roars: Jewish Masculinity in
American Television." 93-107.

'^ Herbert Muschamp, "Architecture of Light and Remembrance." The New
York Times. Arts and Leisure Section (December 15, 1996): 1-

13 Ibid.

Ibid. With a series of projects beginning with his Jewish Museum extension

GISSEN/ 95

•I^IB'

:ty Museum, the curators
their famous Kouros out oHie basement and put it on
view in the middle of an exhidHlon hall dedicated to con-
temporary art.'' It was a brave move, for in 1985 the muse-
um had celebrated the Kouros as the best example ever of
Archaic Greek art, only to discover some years later that it
was most likely a fake. The ofc-ators did noi act alone.
Actually, the Kouros served as Irackdrop for foiir large-scale
color photographs entitled Kouros and me by the artist
Martin Kersels.2 These photographs showed the Kouros in
various bizarre situations. In one, for example, the hapless
statue seems to have been launched through space with the
aid of a trampoline. In another, it stands in a garage as if
waiting to be picked up «ifter ^ yard sale. Kersels was not
using the "real" statue, of coo jW but the one that he had

Humor aside^RB)HHon se |Kilay som^nlther serious
questions as tc^HeHSiSlocate Hs statue's history. One ol.,
'histories" is that which haBo be crafted for it by its
lers, who, after all, had to kWw a considerable amount
about Greek art to make it. In that sense, the forgers were
like historians in that they had tp craft the statue into the
narrative of Greek Art. In other words, the forgers had to
know what historians were still "looking for." Then, of
course, there is the history of the actual making of the
object and its subsequent deception. It is a history of sabo-
tage, one that is still largely unknown and has yet t(

A third "history" centers on the Enlighterhrient noKon o
"genuine" historical artifacts. As we all know, once muse-
ums were defined as places where objects could be studied
away from their context, the balance between artifact and
artifice was often so small that it could be— and has alwajMj

been— easily exploited by clever minds. Th s is in < ~

an institutional history. A fourth "history|^is tha
research that the Kouros created in the wal* of its acquisi-
tion by the Getty. It was of such formidable 'quantity that in
1992 the museum hosted a scholarly colloquium^n Athens
to discuss all the scientific issues surrounding its authentic-
ity. And finally, a fifth "history" of the Kouros is that sLc
temporary art, the one in which this piece and the work
Kersels find common locatiMfe i

In surveying this
the mistake that

"iSk^ML

igBp^nMgl^^^rahould^
oduction is to be discussed si

academic ambitions and exploitative "reductions." VV}t§t
face is a philosophical problem about history. In this case,
it is about the transformational energy which, in coming to
accept the ambivalences of modernity's desire for a past,
continually feeifs on itself as a way to work through that
past. ' .^ L

written. To solve the case, f
become "historians." In the latt
of extrapolating out of the text-
rative, whereas in the first "his.
' of internalization of the

'licemen themselves wi
listory, there is a process
}roduction its hidden nar-
y" there is the inverse, a
[t into the body of the

^^

JARZOMBEK/ 97

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Celik (4-5) Fig. 1 reprinted from Ann and Jurgen Wilde, eds., Karl
Blossfeldt, Working Collages (Cambridge, IVIA: MIT Press, 2001):
plate 16.

Morshed (6-9): Fig. 1 reprinted from Newsweek, Extra Edition,
America under Attack (September 2001): unpaginated. Fig. 2 from
Harry F. Guggenheim, The Seven Skies, 36. Fig. 3 from Le
Corbusier, Aircraft, bacl^ cover. Fig. 4 from Hugh Ferriss, The
Metropolis of Torr^orrow, 65. Fig. 5 from Robert A. IVI. Stern et al..
New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism between the Two
World Wars, 85.

Dutta (10-15): Fig. 1 reprinted from James A. Rawley, The
Transatlantic Slave Trade. 214.

El-Khoury (16-23): Figs. 1, 7, 9, and 10 {Airborne) and Fig. 14
(Sclerotic (II) reprinted courtesy of An Te Liu. Figs. 2, 4, 5, and 13
{Exchange, Soft Load, and Type Need) courtesy of the Henry Urbach
Architecture Gallery.

dzkar (24-29): Figs. 1 and 3 reprinted from Charles Singer et al.,
History of Technology Volume III From the Renaissance to the
Industrial Revolution c 1 500 c I 750, 524-5 and 609. Fig. 2 from
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 51 and
59. Fig. 4 from Linda D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, plate 27. Fig. 5 from Gyorgy
Kepes, Language of Vision, 51. Fig. 6 from Simon Sadler, The
Situationist City. 6. Fig. 7 from Mimarllk 272 (November 1 996): 31 .
Fig. 8 from Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self,
161.

Weiss (58-63): All images reprinted from Matthias Lilienthal and
Claus Philipp, eds., Schlingensiefs Auslander Raus: Bitte liebt Oster-
reich [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000) except Fig. 2 from
Christoph Schlingensief, Talk 2000 (Vienna: Deuticke Verlag,
1998).

Benyamin (64-67): All images reprinted courtesy of the artist and
Luhring Augustine Gallery.

Duncan (68-73): All images are by the author of the article.

Bonnevier (82-85): All images are by the author of the article.

Yoon (86-89): All images are by the authors of individual projects.

Gissen (90 95): Fig. 1 printed courtesy of David Gissen and David
Pascu. Fig. 2 and 3 courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman
Gallery. Figs. 4 and 5 courtesy of the artist.

Jarzombek (96-97): Image reprinted from Lisa Lyons ed..
Departures: 1 1 Artists at the Getty (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2000).

Errata

The following image credit information has been unintentionally
omitted from Lydia M. Soo, "Fashion and the Idea of National Style
in Restoration England," Thresholds 22 (Spring 2001): 64-71.

Kennedy & Violich Architects (30-35): All images by Kennedy &
Violich Architecture except "Storage Wall, Printmakers Studio
1999," on page 34 by Bruce T. Martin.

Haywood (36-43): Figs. 1,2, 12, and 13 reprinted from the exhibi-
tion publication Robert Gober published by the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997, pages 23, 31, 82, 90, and
91 . Fig. 4 from the exhibition publication Robert Gober published by
the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998, page 22. Fig. 5
and 1 1 from Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 98 and 1 12. Fig. 6
from But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, 75. Fig. 7 from the
publication of the Hamburg Kunsthalle Family Values: American Art
in the Eighties and Nineties, 24-25. Figs. 8, 9, and 1 0 from the exhi-
bition publication Robert Gober published by the Dia Center for the
Arts in 1992.

Lobsinger (44-51): All photographs by the author except Fig. 1
reprinted from Storia dell'architettura italiana. II secondo novecento,
108; Figs. 3 and 4 from Casabella Continuita 215 (April-May 1957):
72 and 69: Fig. 6 from Casabella Continuita 219 (1958): 25; and
Fig. 7. from Casabella Continuita 219 (1958): 27.

Normal Group for Architecture (52-57): All images are by the
authors of the article.

Fig. 1 (Christopher Wren, Pre-Fire Design for Old St. Paul's, London,
1666, elevation and section through nave). All Souls, II. 6. All Souls
College, Oxford. The Warden and Fellows of All Souls College,
Oxford. Fig. 2. (Christopher Wren, Pre-Fire Design for Old St. Paul's,
London, 1666, longitudinal section). All Souls, II. 7. All Souls
College, Oxford.. The Warden and Fellows of All Souls College,
Oxford. Fig. 3 (Old St. Paul's, London, from the north, drawn by
Wenceslas Hollar, 1656). From William Dugdale, History of St.
Paul's Cathedral, London, 1658, pi. 163. University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Rare Book Room and Special Collections
Library. Fig. 4 (Jacques Lemercier, Church of the Sorbonne, Paris,
section). From Jean and Daniel Marot, L'Architecture francoise,
Paris, Jean Mariette, 1727, pi. 134. Collection Centre Canadien
d'Archilecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Fig. 5
(Gerard Soest, portrait of John Hay, Second Marquis of Tweeddale,
c. 1665). From Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery & Museum,
Kelvingrove. Fig. 6 (Gerard Soest, portrait of Cecil Calvert, 2nd
Baron Baltimore and his grandson). Photograph Maryland
Department, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore. Fig. 7. (Claude
Perrault, design for a Gallic order, 1673). From Dix livres d'architec-
ture de Vitruve, trans. Claude Perrault, 2nd ed., Paris, 1684, detail
of frontispiece. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ricker
Library of Architecture and Art.

98 /ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

CONTRIBUTORS

Sunil Bald teaches at the Parsons School of Design. He has been
awarded the Fulbright Fellowship for his study of Brazilian modern
architecture in the context of nation making.

from the N.E.A., an Interdisciplinary Award from Progressive
Architecture, and six National Honor Awards for Design Excellence
from the A. I. A.

Jasmine Benyamin is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Architecture at
Princeton University, Her research involves questions of realism in
the photography of architecture.

Katarina Bonnevler acts in the field between Architecture and
Theater. She was trained at Iowa State University, Ecole
Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, Paris, and the Royal
Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm, where she currently
teaches.

Gregory Crewdson received his B.A. from SUNY Purchase and his
M.F.A. from Yale University, where he also teaches. His photo-
graphs have been exhibited worldwide, both in one-person exhibi-
tions and in group shows. He is represented by the Luhring
Augustine Gallery in New York.

Scott Duncan is an architect at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in
New York.

Arlndam Dutta is Assistant Professor and Richard H. Blackall Chair
in Architectural History at MIT's History, Theory, and Criticism
Section. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has
degrees in architecture from Harvard University and the School of

Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad, India.

David Gissen is a curator and designer whose interests include
issues of identity and ecology. He is currently the associate curator
for architecture and design at the National Building Museum in
Washington D.C. and a visiting instructor at the Maryland Institute
College of Art and American University in Washington D.C.

Robert E. Haywood is a Visiting Associate Professor in the History,
Theory, and Criticism Section at the Department of Architecture at
MIT. Among his publications are numerous essays and the exhibition
catalogue Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert
Watts. His book, Allan Kaprow and Class Oldenburg: Art.
Happenings, and Cultural Politics (c. 1958-1970) is forthcoming
from Yale University Press.

Mark Jarzombek is an Associate Professor in the History, Theory,
and Criticism Section at the Department of Architecture at MIT. He
has written widely on a variety of subjects from the Renaissance to
the modern.

Kennedy & Violich Architecture is an interdisciplinary design practice
co-founded by Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich. KVA works col-
laboratively with industrial manufacturers, scientists, business lead-
ers, educators, and public agencies on projects that integrate archi-
tecture, technology, and contemporary culture. KVA has received
national recognition for research and built work, including grants

Rodolphe el-Khoury is an architect, historian, and critic who teach-
es at the University of Toronto.

An Te Liu received his M. Arch, from the Southern California
Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, He is an Assistant
Professor of Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and
Design at the University of Toronto and is Director of the B.A.
Architectural Studies Program. His recent installation work has
explored issues of utility, representation, and desire in the domestic
realm and has been exhibited at the Henry Urbach Gallery in New
York and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Mary Lou Lobsinger is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University and
an Assistant Professor of Architecture History and Theory at the
University of Toronto. The essay published here is adapted from the
second chapter of her dissertation on Italian architecture and urban-
ism between the years 1956-68.

Adnan Morshed is completing his Ph. D. in the History, Theory, and
Criticism Section at the Department of Architecture at MIT. His dis-
sertation is on an aesthetics of ascension in the avant-garde imagi-
nation, He is currently a Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington D.C.

Normal Group for Architecture was founded in 1998 by Srdjan
Jovanovic Weiss and Sabine von Fischer after they won second
prize in the competition for the Foundation Mies van der Rohe in
Barcelona (BLUR). Weiss has degrees from the Faculty of
Architecture in Belgrade and from Harvard University. Von Fischer
graduated from E.T.H. Zurich in 1997. Projects by Normal Group
include Kollektiv, a competition for a school in Liechtenstein and
Thread Waxing Space, a non-profit art organization in New York.

Mine Ozkar received her B.Arch. from METU, Turkey. She is cur-
rently a Ph.D. student in the Design and Computation Section at the
Department of Architecture at MIT.

Kirsten Weiss is a Ph.D. student in the History, Theory, and Criticism
Section at the Department of Architecture at MIT. She received her
Master of Art in 2000 from the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University
in Frankfurt, Germany.

J. Meejin Yoon is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of
Architecture at MIT. As a Fulbright Research Scholar, she authored
and designed Hybrid Cartographies: Seoul's Consuming Spaces, a
mbbius book exhibited in "A Century of Innovative Book Design" at
the American Institute of Graphic Art. She is also the co-author of
1,007 Skyscrapers, published by Princeton Architectural Press, and
a project editor for Praxis.

CONTRIBUTORS/ 99

REPRODUCTION

/\ A H

AND

iMc

X }

K

A is >l ■■' n H

PRODUCTION

jf )t K H ;r K

>! 11

»• n

\

We invite essays, projects, analyses and other explo-
rations. Essays are limited to 2500 words. Digital copies of
texts/images/etc. are required. Please include a two-sen-
tence biography of the author(s) for publication.
Thresholds aims to print material not previously published
elsewhere.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE MARCH 18, 2002.

Please send materials or correspondence to:

Aliki Hasiotis, Editor

Thresholds

MIT Department of Architecture

Room 7-337

77 Massachusetts Ave.

Cambridge, MA 02139

thresh@mit.edu

In an age of digital and bio-technological
reproduction, the distinction between the pro-
duced and the reproduced has become
increasingly unclear, calling into question what
constitutes an "original". Innovations in sci-
ence, art, architecture and industry have devel-
oped amidst a preference for the particular, at
a time of actual de-particularization in the
form of globalization, media saturation and
rapid population growth.

Given these circumstances, how have repro-
ductive techniques and technologies in sci-
ence, industry, art and architecture influenced
notions of "authenticity"?

How have these innovations altered temporal
and spatial relationships in art and architec-
ture compared to those of historical prece-
dents?

What are the cultural, artistic, social and ethi-
cal implications of such reproductions? What
are the implications for production?

This issue of Thresholds seeks to include criti-
cal perspectives that address and cross
diverse disciplines including architecture, art,
science, ethics and beyond.

100 /CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

thresholds is funded primarily by grants from

the Department of Architecture at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alumni

support also plays a major role. Individuals

donating $100 or more will be recognized as

patrons.

This issue of thresholds has been made

possible in part by the Grants Program of the

Council for the Arts at M.I.T.

Patrons

Gail Fenske

T. Freebairn-Smith

Annie Pedret

Richard Skendzel

< < o

A °- ^

<- O) Si.

s «

o to
z 3

^1
if

(0 (U
U CL

O)

o

o

c

£

u

0)

1-

0)

o

3

n

0)

U

o

3

>

ro

o

<

(N

p

o

M

<

ji

o

73

>

<D

£

tf)

O

11

ro

n

E

•a

to

a.

IE

S3

F

<u

r^

m

^

Q

1^

O

Sunil Bald

Jasmine Benyamin

Katarina Bonnevier

Scott Duncan

Arindam Dutta

David Gissen

Robert Haywood

iVIark Jarzombek

Kennedy & Violich Architects

.B.QdQiphe ei-Khoury . ,

Mary Lou Lobsinger
Adnan Morsiied

Normal Group for Architecture

Mine Ozkar

Kirsten Weiss

J. Meejin Yoon

OEC0 6Z013

Cf Z 1 ^004

1^

APR 1 4 200!
APR 1 9 2CC5

DEC 1 3

Lib-26-67

3 9080 02538 qS'