Simulation in modernist architecture and it’s fiction, according to Peter Eisenman
“For what made function any more <<real>> a source of imagery than elements chosen from antiquity?” – Peter Eisenman
Best known by projecting the Holocaust Memorial, Peter Eisenman is also an important deconstructivist theorist. In his article “The end of the classical” published in 1984, he makes a profound and sharp analysis of the modernism to think what would replace it. In his analysis he identifies three great architectonic fictions perpetuated by the modernists and this text is about the first of them, the fiction of representation.
Eisenman begin with the renaissance’s architecture which, inspired in classic models, used them as base in a way that their meaning in the present was derived from the buildings of the past. For this reason Eisenman claims that the first fiction, even if involuntary, comes from the renaissance, because their works we simulations of previous projects, therefore, fictions of a meaningful architecture.
“Modern architecture claimed to rectify and liberate itself from the Renaissance fiction of representation by asserting that it was not necessary for architecture to represent another architecture; architecture was solely to embody its own function. With the deductive conclusion that form follows function, modern architecture introduced the idea that a building should express– that is, look like– its function, or like and idea of function.”
However, an essential question:
“For what made function any more <<real>> a source of imagery than elements chosen from antiquity?”
The attempt of using function to transmit the message of utility would be the same fiction of the renaissance using the classical to give meaning to their works, says Eisenman. The modernist architecture would be then, and yet, still a simulation, even if using a new vocabulary, because its meaning came from outside, the building being only a representation of the meaning.
“Functionalism turned out to be yet another stylistic conclusion, this one based on a scientific and technical positivism, a simulation of efficiency. From this perspective the modern movement can be seen to be continuous with the architecture that preceded it.
For in trying to reduce architectural form to tis essence, to a pure reality, the moderns assumed they were transforming the field of referential figuration to that of non-referential <<objectivity.>> In reality, however, their <<objective>> form never left the classical tradition. They were simply stripped down classical forms, or forms referring to a new set of givens (function, technology). Thus, Le Corbusier’s houses that look like modern steamships or biplanes exhibit the same referential attitude toward representation as a Renaissance or <<classical>> building. The points of reference are different, but the implications for the object are the same.”
Thus the modernist choice trapped them in the very place they wanted to leave, history:
“The commitment to return modernist abstraction to history seems to sum up, for out time, the problem of representation. It was given its << Post-Modern>> inversion in Robert Venturi’s distinction between the <<duck>> and the <<decorated shed.>> […] In this sense the stripped-down <<abstractions>> of modernism are still referential objects: technological rather than typological ducks.”
By subverting one the most popular adages of architecture, Peter Eisenman make it clear that there’s no obligatory connection between form and function as the modernism made us believe. At light of the deconstructivist critic, it’s interesting to go back to another areas of knowledge, like the minimalist movement, and analyze the use and the objective of the forms.
The alienating architectural machine projected by its alienated product, the architect
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals;
To the architect, the drawing, as any language, is a subjective process, dependent on the interpretation of what we see, but subjacent to that there´s something essential that may pass unnoticed. The architect as designer is also a canvas, painted by himself and always modulated, reesculpted by the multiple realities in which one’s submerged, or as proposed by Anne Marie-Willis, there’s always a loop of variating influences imposing their own inconstancy upon both the architect and the project:
“designing is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed” – Anne Marie-Willis
The prefiguration of the action is where the architect puts himself as the intermediary between what is and what is expected to happen. This prefiguration is dependent on the way the other will interpret it and in this frontier many complications can arise, sometimes even preventing the architect’s intents, as an author, to take place. Despite the architecture being experience and stretch beyond the symbols by which it’s composed, we can try to comprehend this problem through what Roland Barthes alerts about interpreting the creative activities without the original Author:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” – Roland Barthes
Not being only image, even if it’s constituted of symbols, and also based on external point of views to realize itself, the architecture is a foggy region between the seen and the unseen. It’s in this not seeing that much of it´s potential is lost or made real. This other side is what the theory tries to uncover and can be only be intellectually comprehended.
The urban tension, the many filters and focal points in shock inside the space are not visible in the moment of the experience. The architect’s duty is to know the space being altered, not only from the technical standpoint but also through the theoretic apparatus. Architecture is impossible without knowing the unseens behind the project. If a political, economic or social relation goes unnoticed and creates a future problem or maintain a segregatory status quo, for example, it’s not fair to exempt the architect since if the construction crumbled it wouldn’t be less of a disaster than your project perpetuating a historical problem in your country. This invisible side is part of the special reality and the architect must take responsibility over it.
In the city it’s wrong to suppose the architectural experience only as special, external and individualistic. This ideal autistic architect still thrives in the discourse used to comment the history of architecture. The creation of categories to such an extent that both drawing and project, where the intellectual, the design, the internalized activity happens, get to extremes that not only are far from real but also risk aesthetic and stylish solutions in flagrant opposition with a minor (as the term is used by Deleuze and Guattari to talk about literature) and less arrogant architecture.
Every action presupposes in some level a complex social and psychological mechanism. The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the idea of the human being composed by a dichotomy between internal and external or thought and action as totally distinct fields of the human nature. When proposing the humane as a psychophysical unit, Wittgenstein sees thinking and acting as one. Taking this concept freely and even with certain irresponsibility, we can think the architectonic prefiguration inhabiting the thinking and the acting as a process beyond the individual psychology, including the inescapable ranging from each society superstructure to each individual personality nuances.
The physical space is translated by the architect through the drawing – the language that will later become a text space – this intentional sewing to create a multiple tapestry of signs with their possibilities. The intentionality matters only as it relates to the designer’s thoughts since once it’s determined, there’s (or should have) an uprooting of the project before it can go to it´s true creation phase: the exposition to multiple and unrestricted interpretations steaming from the collective imaginary around those signs, bringing new meanings both for the project and for the signs at the same time. However, being a psychophysical unity, the architect and his entire creative production are based on an intellectual refinement that, in this situation, pass through the studies of a deep theoretical repertoire acting as a foundation for the architecture and is able of both to potencialize or to restrain. The architect truly capable of prefiguring an engaged architecture is that whose theoretical apparatus gives him the best tools to see that which is not visible.
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals; it does not prevent anyone from getting the diploma, but prevent many architecture students from seeing the neighborhood where they study and live, the people with whom they share the space, the surrounding shocks. Blindness and superficiality are both programmed, they have an agenda and it’s not in the best interest of the architect nor of the people who need his education.
We are being convinced that the architect is part of a fancy office or the hero of an aborted revolution, an egocentric artist, most of all an excess. Given this, to search for the unseen, this structure that, laid upon us, crush so many things is a necessity, an act of lucid rebellion. Without thinking outside the given conjuncture the architecture is just a name, a technic, one more product.