David Goldblatt “The Dislocation of the Architectural Self ...



David Goldblatt “The Dislocation of the Architectural Self” 1991

[pic] [pic]

Peter Eisenman 2000 David Goldblatt [the only picture of him around]

1. The term “ecstasy” comes from the Greek ecstasis: put out of place, hence besides oneself: in moral theory it involves removing oneself from one’s passions. I will discuss the role of ecstasis in the recent architecture of Peter Eisenman.

2. It is a paradox that the architect creates institutions but must resist institutionalizing, must resist being

1. Eisenman: to reinvent a site, the idea of the site must be freed from its tradition, a dislocation. [vs. Scruton]

2. He seeks to break with architecture’s hierarchical presuppositions.

3. Difficulty: the architect is implicated in the tradition of architecture, and architecture is enmeshed with everyday life. It is harder than in other arts to maintain independence from bourgeois [upper-class] taste.

1. What Goldblatt calls the “architectural self” works within the context of a traditional architecture, and it must be overcome.

2. But Eisenman wonders whether an architecture that examines its own assumptions can be designed by such a self.

3. He wishes to overcome an unconscious anthropomorphism [shapes based on humanity], i.e., as Kipnis puts it, man as he wants to see himself

4. An architecture that does not assume man as the measure of all things will, as Derrida put it let “other voices speak,” let design begin from a dislocated vantage point.

5. Eisenman accomplishes this in part through using the “arbitrary text” to start the design process.

6. He wishes to overcome unconscious anthropomorphism in architecture to release a repressed power of the creative artist.

7. 1988: “Deconstructivist Architecture” show: combined the ideas of Derrida’s deconstructionism and the constructivist architecture of pre-revolutionary Russia.

1. This was an answer both to the easy architectural postmodernism of the time [an attack on Venturi and Brown] and to classical/modern architecture.

2. Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry were key figures [also Zaha Hadid, an Iranian female architect]

8. Eisenman’s “Guardiola House” has windows in the floor and floors that are unlevel etc.: appears fragmented.

1. It involves breakdown of the traditional forms of place, simultaneity of traditionally contradictory states, betweenness, and suspending the privilege of one member of a binary opposition (Derrida).

2. While Heidegger and Derrida criticized binary oppositions, Eisenman gives this an architectural context. As he said: “Traditional opposition between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function could be dissolved. Architecture could begin an exploration of the ‘between’ within these categories.”

3. One example, collaboration with Derrida in Bernard Tschumi Parc de Villette

4. Another example, in the Wexner Center, the scaffolding remains permanent: it is between.

9. Does not want to please aesthetically but to deeply explore meaning, especially meaning repressed by traditional forms of meaning. [In this respect he is somewhat like Hegel who stressed the importance of the idea expressed.] Architecture would then, engage in the same tensions between tradition and innovation as modern painting or literature.

10. For Eisenman, modernism is another form of classicism. Traditional architecture includes Le Corbusier: the moderns tried to reduce architectural form to its essence, but their forms were simply stripped down classical forms, e.g. Le Corbusier’s houses are like Renaissance buildings in that they represent something, e.g. biplanes. [This is a similar point to the one made by Venturi, but used differently.]

11. Unhierarchical non-anthrocentric [non human-centered] architecture would refuse to acknowledge the stability of the concept of architecture, the essence of architecture: Derrida taught suspicion against the question “what is the essence of?” [vs. Plato, Aristotle, Bell, Greenberg, and Le Corbusier]

1. One anthrocentric idea opposed: to be pleased and feel perceptually and emotionally satisfied by what is designed. [He seems to reject commodity, firmness, and delight, all three of the traditional architectural ideas.]

12. Do not express the self that makes design merely a matter of taste or preference: get beyond the intuition expressed in “I like this.” [vs. Hume]

13. Derrida: we forget the historical nature of architecture and take it to be nature.

1. A certain metaphysics of architecture presents itself as architecture itself.

2. But the concept of architecture is a construct.

14. Eisenman: autonomy depends on distancing oneself from the design process.

15. The arbitrary text is selected more or less at random, and the architect accepts the consequences even if they violate the architect’s taste.

16. This reverses the traditional opposition between essence and accident.

1. Eisenman uses a text from outside architecture: for example, his use of DNA in his BioCentrum piece.

2. Another example: scaffolding for the Wexner.

3. The architect chooses some materially applicable aspect of the text and gives it equal influence to the usual texts, resulting in betweenness.

4. The text functions analogically: only certain of the aspects of the arbitrary text are transplanted by the architect.

17. It is forced metaphor, “catachresis,” which can bring revelation.

18. This is not unlike Nietzsche’s idea of the Apollonian imposition upon the Dionysian.

19. The Wexner center is a non-building that instantiates betweenness, although it still functions by providing shelter: unlike modern architecture, it neither represents nor celebrates function or shelter.

20. Eisenman is comfortable with the idea of not wanting to live in one of his houses: the issue here is not about satisfying comfort.

21. He does not believe his art should replace all other kinds.

22. The arbitrary text replaces the architect in the role of the arbiter. For example, a column is allowed to fall on a major stairway.

1. Eisenman’s use of arbitrary text undermines the search for origins.

23. Architecture does not lack the philosophical depth that paintings and novels have: as Eisenman’s work shows, it thinks about the possibilities of self.

Comment: Although Eisenman shares with Venturi a criticism of the modernism of Le Corbusier his main purpose is to overcome traditional notions of architecture including the idea of architecture as decorated shed. In overcoming all oppositions and arguing for betweenness he, and his fellow deconstructivists, seek to reject all of the philosophers, art critics and artists we have read, except for Kant, who stresses the importance of autonomy and the sublime, and Greenberg in thinking that architecture should be self-critical and should oppose kitsch. He (and his philosopher ally, Derrida) opposes Plato and Le Corbusier in his rejecting eternal essences and essential forms, Hume in rejecting taste, Bell in rejecting significant form, Venturi in rejecting traditional forms, Venturi and Solomon in rejecting kitsch (in terms of comfort and soothing ideas), Scruton in rejecting centrality of context and place, and Collingwood in rejecting art as expression. (He also opposed Dickie who we will read latter, for accepting the institutionality of art.) None of these, he believes, allow other voices to speak. He seems most like Nietzsche in stressing the Dionysian aspect of the Dionysian/Apollonian duality in art and in allowing for the destruction of self in art, and perhaps Bell in the idea of ecstasy (ecstasis). He is also like Heidegger (with whom Derrida has an ambiguous love/hate relationship) in believing that art should allow truth to happen, and who questions our complacency. His is an architecture that seems to exist for the sake of challenging convention. He may, finally, be like Socrates in Plato’s “The Cave”: someone who tries to tear us from our complacent seat in the cave where we accept all the shadows on the cave wall as real.

Questions.

1. Read the interview of Derrida by Christopher Norris. Does Derrida confirm the position attributed to him by Goldblatt in his article, or is his view different in any way?

2. Do you think that the Modernism of Corbusier and the Postmodernism of Venturi are guilty of the weaknesses described by Goldblatt and Eisenman?

3. Given the idea that each age has its own definition of architecture what would the definition of architecture be for the age of Deconstructivist architecture?

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download