To the Privileged Observer
Image – Coop Himmelb(l)au, Museé des Confluences. Lyon, FR 2001-2014.
Source: http://www.coop-himmelblau.at/architecture/projects/musee-des-confluences/
Postmodernism’s dissolution, and by association the debasement of its beloved collage, may be inextricably linked to the rise of Deleuzianism and the space of transparency. The choice image of this space is no longer the collage but the diagram. With the diagram comes secrecy. It ushers in an architecture of hermetics. The simplified notation of the diagram demonizes the drawing and its representational capabilities, opting instead for “internalized, self-reflexive, speculative, and self-referential formal reality”1. This self-reference is given philosophical credibility by Deleuze’s notions of immanence and, resultantly, architecture’s new primary mode of communication need no longer concern itself with “placement in a semiological context”2.
Avant-garde desires for things generative and emergent again find their fortification through Deleuze, and are aided by Kwinter’s exposure of Rowe’s paradigm as “classical reductionist theories of form…‘unable to account for the emergence…of forms without recourse to metaphysical models’”3.
The Neo-Naturalist tendency to shed historical and metaphysical/ontological concerns in favor of data (simulation, algorithm) and its physical manifestation has indeed, as Petit claims, lost it luster4. With this enticing naiveté now gone, Petit is correct in his demand for the reestablishment of architectural precedent. Parametric morphologies, now ubiquitous, should no longer be explained simply as “amorphous” as this superficial assessment is “used by analysts when they are unable to explain the relation of that form to the system of historical analysis used”5. Historical analysis has indeed shifted. The individual is no longer able to step back from the architectural object as this privileged vantage point has been consumed by the diaphanous transparencies of the computerized diagram. Whatever secrets may lie behind bulging surfaces or patterns of gradation remain indeterminate to the external observer. All information has been sucked into the building itself and again radiates outward, loosing intensity by the time it reaches the envelope, remaining only as the slightest suggestion of perverse internal logics6. This is the avant-garde’s repurposing (hijacking?) of Rowe and Slutzky’s transparency. Gone are the “sharp ruptures” upon which the two scholars relied as internal logics now govern external expressions. Petit attributes this new manifestation of transparency to “new media of representation…always converging on the multiple orbiting views of the avatar of virtual space”7.
Skillfully unravelling these tangled, introverted architectural universes is the only solution8. The detached observer must now be placed at the heart of these complex spatial environments, moving through space to understand sets of internalized relations9. Ultimately, and ironically, literal transparency (you know, the transparency of Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, and the Bauhaus?) has, by way of the diagram, returned. Perpetually rotating wireframes and swirls of particles have rendered the digital object utterly and completely transparent.
The transparency, of both literal variety and of substance (there is very little, these works are easy to see through) is masked by the architect’s strategic employment of forms. Endless morphing, attraction, and contortion serve to devolve the building (in the case of Galaxy Soho, but also Coop Himmelb(l)au in Lyon, where the building’s envelope is sucked inward by some mysterious force) into an object that may be identified only as ‘other’10. It is otherness which enables this brand of architecture, along with its apologist proprietors, to escape historical and disciplinary bounds to which others opt to adhere.
Notes
1 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg.10.
2 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg. 11.
Furthermore, Deleuze’s immanence is so transformative a power that it allows “linguistic structures to transform…to a point where the symbolic value of the initial source figure is obliterated”. Gone now are links to history. The present is hardly referenced as contextual cues are not welcome on the plane of immanence.
3 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg.13.
4 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg. 16.
5 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg. 18.
6 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg. 19.
Petit points the need for Rowe’s classical analysis to be replaced “with a discussion about the relationship between volumetrically defined centripetal versus itinerant organizations — between structures that define a center and those that explicitly avoid a center”.
7 Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe. pg. 20.
8 Ibid..
9 Ibid..
10 Ibid..
Petit points that the undefinability of these buildings “indicates the thatness of a volumetric diagram…of the whatness of it”, illuminating the existence of this architecture as a reductionist formal strategy.
Bibliography
Petit, E. and Maxwell, R. (2015). Reckoning with Colin Rowe.
