On Practice (1979)
The Critical Practice
A critical practice is developed as a process acting both at the level of architectural ideology, that is, on architectural and other related ideas and notions, and at the level of projects (forms) and buildings. This process sets up a confrontation between the discourses and buildings that persist within architecture and other discourses and buildings that exist external to it.
We confront the current architectural ideology and discourse with the discourse of linguistic theory. We confront the current architectural lexicon and syntax with the vocabulary and syntax belonging to the urban realm, the city. We begin this confrontation by marking out a space, a distance between architectural discourse and other, foreign discourses, between architectural buildings and spaces and built forms and spaces that are not considered architectural.
Architectural discourse and buildings have always been seen, until the arrival of the Modern Movement, without distance, that is from an architectural point of view or, in other terms, from a point of view located within architectural boundaries and definitions. Within such a situation, a truly critical approach is impossible. The Modern Movement’s successful contestation of classical architecture is due in part to the introduction of external, sometimes foreign, discourses and models—the discourse of abstract geometry as opposed to architectural geometry, the discourse of industrial imagery, of the machine. These external discourses and forms are still viable as challenging instances, but their nature must be reassessed.
We begin a reassessment through the challenge of two other discourses, linguistic theory and the city, by which we criticize both the lack of a distanced position characteristic of architectural discourse that accepts and works within the ideological limits historically imposed on it without questioning them, without a critical attitude; and the isolated position that divorces architectural from cultural issues and rejects a consideration of socio-political contexts.
We propose that:
While the linguistic theory provides an abstract model of the social activity par excellence—language—the city provides a physical and symbolic place where the social drama is played out. We propose to build our theoretical practice at the site of this intersection, in relation to the movement of this play of forces.
The Function of Theory
The theory that we propose is a critical discourse that confronts the most vital forces of architecture—the symbolic force, the forces of meaning production. It is critical because it does not pretend to be purely neutral or descriptive; it does not attempt to naturalize its object. It is a discourse that makes explicit its own rules, questions its own basic assumptions. It is a discourse that confronts formal and symbolic architecture with the conditions of its historical determinations. It confronts architecture with other discourses, establishing a distance from which the fiction of the unitary system of architecture loses its hold.
This new distance allows us to see beyond the simple and unproblematic separation of theory (discourses, drawings) from practice (buildings) to an understanding of the interpenetrations of their multiple and heterogeneous texts. We contest the simple exteriority of practice to theory that tends towards the homogeneity of the sensible against the sense, the subject against the social. Architectural drawings are not simple, completed texts, ideas to be more or less fully realized in completed buildings. Nor are buildings simple texts that completely embody ideas and thus eclipse the need for drawings. Theory and practice, designs and buildings, do not relate simply and directly the one to the other. Rather they relate through subjects (as they are) formed within a social context. We propose a critical theory that investigates three sources of symbolic, formal energies. We investigate not only architecture as subjectivity and architecture as an autonomous institution, but also the formal systems that configure the political, economic, and ideological determinations of the urban realm, and that implicate the other two forces in the investigation.
On Reading
The linguistic and urban models are not reproduced or syntactically recombined in our critical theory. They are read as texts that traverse the architectural discourse and buildings and are at the same time rewritten by them. They provide architecture with an opportunity for abandoning its autonomy and redefining its specificity. Architectural texts are always part of a larger set of texts with which they are designed to engage in a dialogue.
Reading, in the sense that we are using it, is not just a passive consumption of texts, a silent, listening attention, but is an aggressive participation and active appropriation of them. Architectural writing is a reading that has been transformed in actual production. Architecture does not begin at any instant, is not inscribed on a blank page, but continues to rewrite an already written text. The rewriting affects not only the content, but also the form, and the form of dealing with the form, that is, the structure of the text and its relation to ideology.
We call our approach to the design process “design-as-reading”—a reading-transformation of existent architectural texts.
With the exception of the period in which the Modern Movement broke away from classical language, architecture has always been an art of transformation. Elements, and the arrangement of the elements have been transformed in relation to the architectural problems with which they were contemporary. These transformations, however, have moved within certain limits. Beyond these limits one confronts plagiarism or illegibility. In between, the stylistic changes mask the continuity of a deeper conceptual and formal nucleus. We attempt a more critical transformation that acts on the iconic logic in the relationship between image and text. We attempt to test and force these limits not only in order to expose their ideological functioning, but also to forge new symbolic experiences.
The Transformation of the Architecture Practice
The consideration of architecture as a text and its practice as writing affects the theory and practice of architecture. Criticism and design have been for a long time distinct and separate practices representing the consumption and production of architectural ideas and forms; that is, they have been considered as opposed instances in the production process. To propose that criticism and design become equivalents of reading and writing is to propose the recognition of a transformation in the practice of architecture—a transformation that erodes the boundaries that separate criticism from practice, the purely theoretical from the purely technical and pragmatic. We propose, in short, a transgression of boundaries.
The Question of Language
The theory of language poses a problem for architecture. The problem is not that of architecture as language, but rather of language in the practice of architecture. We confront the apparent paradox of the situation defined by the impossibility of language and the inevitability of language—“apparent” because, in fact, this is not a simple contradiction. The term “language” that appears in the two phrases names two different referents. When we speak of the impossibility of language, we refer to the specific notion of a natural language, language in the strict sense. When we note this impossibility, we criticize the utopian belief in the possibility of creating a totally structured architectural language and the objective rationalism that presupposes the possibility of a diaphanous communication between the architect and the public. When we speak of the inevitability of language, we refer to the more general notion of language as a system of rules institutionalized through history. Language in this sense is unavoidable and reveals the belief in the possibility of a purely subjective architecture ecstatically expressing itself, as an idealist illusion.
Not to address these issues of the relationship of architecture to language is to avoid the complex problem of elaborating the relationship between the forces that are constituent of the history of architecture as a cultural practice—that is, the relationship between subject and history, between the forces of desire and the forces of the social, between the forces of poetry and the forces of language. To undertake an understanding of the way these forces are sutured in architectural production is to begin an active “writerly” practice of architecture.
The Order of the City
There was once an urban vision that recognized the cities of Europe and America. European cities were seen as the markings of the development of a civilization. American cities were seen as visions of a new start; their plans resembled those plans for cities that the Renaissance produced—endless grids running from south to north and from east to west.
But modern architecture has forgotten the city. The Modern Movement has attempted to raze the European city that now represents a blind spot in its architectural vision. The American city and its suburbs are perceived as mere hallucinations and their inherent challenge to both classical and modern formal and visual ideology is disavowed. A fetishistic culture is erected on the foundations of the denial. In both cases, the cities represent images of chaos, the one as a residue of the past, the other as a symptom of future disorder. They are held by eyes that do not see the underlying order, the emergence of new typologies that do not exist as part of the history of architecture. The new mode of thinking that the city proffers has no precedent in any part of our memory.
The city is a public place, a place with no function, a place that canner be consumed. Our design practice takes the city as a point of departure for the development of new critical concepts that reveal the limits and weaknesses of both the urban ideology of the Modern Movement and the simple reversal of this ideology. We use the city as the source for a new vocabulary and a more powerful syntax of architecture.
On Reading the City
Traditional notions of typology propose a complete repertory of types and mechanical formulas for their combination. Within such a system combination is conceived as simple juxtaposition rather than articulation and the elements themselves are left virtually unchanged.
We introduce, through the process of reading that we described, another aspect of types, a dimension that has been repressed by exclusive concentration on structural analyses. We introduce a consideration of symbolic performance. In symbolic performance, the types themselves are transformed and articulated in the confrontation between different languages or systems. Change is motivated by confrontation and not merely arbitrarily, that is, formally, induced. Elements are shifted and recast to produce meanings in a process analogous to that involved in dream production.
Our work exhibits examples of symbolic performance. The French hotel transformed into housing takes advantage of the potential for its public context to invade its private space (Projet Architecture Nouvelle). The column towers in the Roosevelt Island project read as a colonnade. Where the building wall behind and the spaces between are read as fragments of a Greek temple designed in a colossal order. The articulation in these works becomes more important than the types themselves. Entities give way to relations; structure open up, unfinished.
It is a reading of the city that explodes the metaphorics of wholeness inherent in traditional notions of type and traditional notions of architecture as a language system. The city produces the difficulty of (acts as an obstacle to) the static conception of systems. It is the body in excess of its inertia.
The city is an inconsistent multiplicity of discourses figured out simultaneously on its syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Its types are an anagrammatic configuration of signifiers. This criss-crossing of axes interrupts the unity of objects within the city. A building within a city cannot be read as an isolated sign or symbol. Rather, its meaning is dispersed along the chains of its relations. Its mise-en-sequences, the linear narration of its sequential visions, are violated by other relations that are independent of the syntagmatic logic.
As site of the social drama, the city reveals the implication of metaphoric substitutions in the metonymy of desire. The urban subject is not an isolated, unified individual but a process and a construction of heterogeneous intentions. The Modern Movements critique of classical language falls short of the idea of unity that this language presupposes. It is this failure that causes the Modern Movement to misrecognize the radical heterogeneity that characterizes the logic of the urban order, and accounts for the lack of theoretical and iconic development, for the impasses at which the final third of this century finds itself.
Fragments
We distinguish our approach from a simple historicism and from a complex and contradictory picturesqueness by attempting to use a logic of contradiction, through the denial of an originary order and simplicity, through a textual density that is always related to the development of an architectural problem. Moreover, our work is always critical; that is, it always presupposes a parallel theoretical development. Since our designs work within and against classical and modern language, the resulting tensions lead to an explosion of languages and previous texts, to the subversion of the notion of unity, and, as a result, to the notion of “fragments,” which might be the starting point or the final stage of the design of buildings and places.
Amnesia
The actual limit of the process of transformation is the point where the invariant aspect that allows one to recognize an architectural text as a transformation of a previous text—written, drawn, or built—is no longer recognizable, where the memory or reminiscence of the past is lost. Design implies the transformation of sense, of memory of the known. It is not only memory, but also amnesia.
The Critical Practice
A critical practice is developed as a process acting both at the level of architectural ideology, that is, on architectural and other related ideas and notions, and at the level of projects (forms) and buildings. This process sets up a confrontation between the discourses and buildings that persist within architecture and other discourses and buildings that exist external to it.
We confront the current architectural ideology and discourse with the discourse of linguistic theory. We confront the current architectural lexicon and syntax with the vocabulary and syntax belonging to the urban realm, the city. We begin this confrontation by marking out a space, a distance between architectural discourse and other, foreign discourses, between architectural buildings and spaces and built forms and spaces that are not considered architectural.
Architectural discourse and buildings have always been seen, until the arrival of the Modern Movement, without distance, that is from an architectural point of view or, in other terms, from a point of view located within architectural boundaries and definitions. Within such a situation, a truly critical approach is impossible. The Modern Movement’s successful contestation of classical architecture is due in part to the introduction of external, sometimes foreign, discourses and models—the discourse of abstract geometry as opposed to architectural geometry, the discourse of industrial imagery, of the machine. These external discourses and forms are still viable as challenging instances, but their nature must be reassessed.
We begin a reassessment through the challenge of two other discourses, linguistic theory and the city, by which we criticize both the lack of a distanced position characteristic of architectural discourse that accepts and works within the ideological limits historically imposed on it without questioning them, without a critical attitude; and the isolated position that divorces architectural from cultural issues and rejects a consideration of socio-political contexts.
We propose that:
- 1. the theory of language, as a critical discourse, and the urban realm, as a critical configuration, allow an understanding of the way a practice of architecture may be articulated within the present ideological and political conjuncture, the theory of language allows the systematic and critical “demontage” of the different varieties (behavioral, sociological, cybernetic, or communicational) of the present functionalist discourse, which implies an architectural practice completely dependent on external forces or meanings and reflecting unproblematically a pregiven order;
- 2. the urban realm as a “storehouse” of unexplored configurations allows the critique of the notion of an architectural practice completely detached from political and economic determination, that is, an architecture postulated as an autonomous practice; and
- 3. the theory of language and the urban realm introduce into the practice of architecture a recognition of the preeminence of the social through which it exists.
While the linguistic theory provides an abstract model of the social activity par excellence—language—the city provides a physical and symbolic place where the social drama is played out. We propose to build our theoretical practice at the site of this intersection, in relation to the movement of this play of forces.
The Function of Theory
The theory that we propose is a critical discourse that confronts the most vital forces of architecture—the symbolic force, the forces of meaning production. It is critical because it does not pretend to be purely neutral or descriptive; it does not attempt to naturalize its object. It is a discourse that makes explicit its own rules, questions its own basic assumptions. It is a discourse that confronts formal and symbolic architecture with the conditions of its historical determinations. It confronts architecture with other discourses, establishing a distance from which the fiction of the unitary system of architecture loses its hold.
This new distance allows us to see beyond the simple and unproblematic separation of theory (discourses, drawings) from practice (buildings) to an understanding of the interpenetrations of their multiple and heterogeneous texts. We contest the simple exteriority of practice to theory that tends towards the homogeneity of the sensible against the sense, the subject against the social. Architectural drawings are not simple, completed texts, ideas to be more or less fully realized in completed buildings. Nor are buildings simple texts that completely embody ideas and thus eclipse the need for drawings. Theory and practice, designs and buildings, do not relate simply and directly the one to the other. Rather they relate through subjects (as they are) formed within a social context. We propose a critical theory that investigates three sources of symbolic, formal energies. We investigate not only architecture as subjectivity and architecture as an autonomous institution, but also the formal systems that configure the political, economic, and ideological determinations of the urban realm, and that implicate the other two forces in the investigation.
On Reading
The linguistic and urban models are not reproduced or syntactically recombined in our critical theory. They are read as texts that traverse the architectural discourse and buildings and are at the same time rewritten by them. They provide architecture with an opportunity for abandoning its autonomy and redefining its specificity. Architectural texts are always part of a larger set of texts with which they are designed to engage in a dialogue.
Reading, in the sense that we are using it, is not just a passive consumption of texts, a silent, listening attention, but is an aggressive participation and active appropriation of them. Architectural writing is a reading that has been transformed in actual production. Architecture does not begin at any instant, is not inscribed on a blank page, but continues to rewrite an already written text. The rewriting affects not only the content, but also the form, and the form of dealing with the form, that is, the structure of the text and its relation to ideology.
We call our approach to the design process “design-as-reading”—a reading-transformation of existent architectural texts.
With the exception of the period in which the Modern Movement broke away from classical language, architecture has always been an art of transformation. Elements, and the arrangement of the elements have been transformed in relation to the architectural problems with which they were contemporary. These transformations, however, have moved within certain limits. Beyond these limits one confronts plagiarism or illegibility. In between, the stylistic changes mask the continuity of a deeper conceptual and formal nucleus. We attempt a more critical transformation that acts on the iconic logic in the relationship between image and text. We attempt to test and force these limits not only in order to expose their ideological functioning, but also to forge new symbolic experiences.
The Transformation of the Architecture Practice
The consideration of architecture as a text and its practice as writing affects the theory and practice of architecture. Criticism and design have been for a long time distinct and separate practices representing the consumption and production of architectural ideas and forms; that is, they have been considered as opposed instances in the production process. To propose that criticism and design become equivalents of reading and writing is to propose the recognition of a transformation in the practice of architecture—a transformation that erodes the boundaries that separate criticism from practice, the purely theoretical from the purely technical and pragmatic. We propose, in short, a transgression of boundaries.
The Question of Language
The theory of language poses a problem for architecture. The problem is not that of architecture as language, but rather of language in the practice of architecture. We confront the apparent paradox of the situation defined by the impossibility of language and the inevitability of language—“apparent” because, in fact, this is not a simple contradiction. The term “language” that appears in the two phrases names two different referents. When we speak of the impossibility of language, we refer to the specific notion of a natural language, language in the strict sense. When we note this impossibility, we criticize the utopian belief in the possibility of creating a totally structured architectural language and the objective rationalism that presupposes the possibility of a diaphanous communication between the architect and the public. When we speak of the inevitability of language, we refer to the more general notion of language as a system of rules institutionalized through history. Language in this sense is unavoidable and reveals the belief in the possibility of a purely subjective architecture ecstatically expressing itself, as an idealist illusion.
Not to address these issues of the relationship of architecture to language is to avoid the complex problem of elaborating the relationship between the forces that are constituent of the history of architecture as a cultural practice—that is, the relationship between subject and history, between the forces of desire and the forces of the social, between the forces of poetry and the forces of language. To undertake an understanding of the way these forces are sutured in architectural production is to begin an active “writerly” practice of architecture.
The Order of the City
There was once an urban vision that recognized the cities of Europe and America. European cities were seen as the markings of the development of a civilization. American cities were seen as visions of a new start; their plans resembled those plans for cities that the Renaissance produced—endless grids running from south to north and from east to west.
But modern architecture has forgotten the city. The Modern Movement has attempted to raze the European city that now represents a blind spot in its architectural vision. The American city and its suburbs are perceived as mere hallucinations and their inherent challenge to both classical and modern formal and visual ideology is disavowed. A fetishistic culture is erected on the foundations of the denial. In both cases, the cities represent images of chaos, the one as a residue of the past, the other as a symptom of future disorder. They are held by eyes that do not see the underlying order, the emergence of new typologies that do not exist as part of the history of architecture. The new mode of thinking that the city proffers has no precedent in any part of our memory.
The city is a public place, a place with no function, a place that canner be consumed. Our design practice takes the city as a point of departure for the development of new critical concepts that reveal the limits and weaknesses of both the urban ideology of the Modern Movement and the simple reversal of this ideology. We use the city as the source for a new vocabulary and a more powerful syntax of architecture.
On Reading the City
Traditional notions of typology propose a complete repertory of types and mechanical formulas for their combination. Within such a system combination is conceived as simple juxtaposition rather than articulation and the elements themselves are left virtually unchanged.
We introduce, through the process of reading that we described, another aspect of types, a dimension that has been repressed by exclusive concentration on structural analyses. We introduce a consideration of symbolic performance. In symbolic performance, the types themselves are transformed and articulated in the confrontation between different languages or systems. Change is motivated by confrontation and not merely arbitrarily, that is, formally, induced. Elements are shifted and recast to produce meanings in a process analogous to that involved in dream production.
Our work exhibits examples of symbolic performance. The French hotel transformed into housing takes advantage of the potential for its public context to invade its private space (Projet Architecture Nouvelle). The column towers in the Roosevelt Island project read as a colonnade. Where the building wall behind and the spaces between are read as fragments of a Greek temple designed in a colossal order. The articulation in these works becomes more important than the types themselves. Entities give way to relations; structure open up, unfinished.
It is a reading of the city that explodes the metaphorics of wholeness inherent in traditional notions of type and traditional notions of architecture as a language system. The city produces the difficulty of (acts as an obstacle to) the static conception of systems. It is the body in excess of its inertia.
The city is an inconsistent multiplicity of discourses figured out simultaneously on its syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Its types are an anagrammatic configuration of signifiers. This criss-crossing of axes interrupts the unity of objects within the city. A building within a city cannot be read as an isolated sign or symbol. Rather, its meaning is dispersed along the chains of its relations. Its mise-en-sequences, the linear narration of its sequential visions, are violated by other relations that are independent of the syntagmatic logic.
As site of the social drama, the city reveals the implication of metaphoric substitutions in the metonymy of desire. The urban subject is not an isolated, unified individual but a process and a construction of heterogeneous intentions. The Modern Movements critique of classical language falls short of the idea of unity that this language presupposes. It is this failure that causes the Modern Movement to misrecognize the radical heterogeneity that characterizes the logic of the urban order, and accounts for the lack of theoretical and iconic development, for the impasses at which the final third of this century finds itself.
Fragments
We distinguish our approach from a simple historicism and from a complex and contradictory picturesqueness by attempting to use a logic of contradiction, through the denial of an originary order and simplicity, through a textual density that is always related to the development of an architectural problem. Moreover, our work is always critical; that is, it always presupposes a parallel theoretical development. Since our designs work within and against classical and modern language, the resulting tensions lead to an explosion of languages and previous texts, to the subversion of the notion of unity, and, as a result, to the notion of “fragments,” which might be the starting point or the final stage of the design of buildings and places.
Amnesia
The actual limit of the process of transformation is the point where the invariant aspect that allows one to recognize an architectural text as a transformation of a previous text—written, drawn, or built—is no longer recognizable, where the memory or reminiscence of the past is lost. Design implies the transformation of sense, of memory of the known. It is not only memory, but also amnesia.