Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 19. bis 22. April 2007 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚Die Realität des Imaginären. Architektur und das digitale Bild

Hays, K. Michael

Digitale Bibliothek Thüringen

The Desire called ArchitectureK. Michael HaysArchitectural discourse in the 1970s famously deve-loped a structuralist model of architectural signi-ﬁcation. But the most advanced architecture in this“age of discourse” could never be explained by thevery model it helped generate. For example, lingui-stics-based interpretations could not account forthe brooding, melancholy silence of the work ofAldo Rossi; the radically reductive “decompositi-ons” and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman; even lessthe carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk; or the“cinegrammatic” delirium of Bernard Tschumi. Iwant to suggest that a more adequate interpretati-on of the architecture of the neo-avant-garde mustaccount for the complex machinery of Architec-ture’s Desire. Marks of desire form a pattern in theworks, a structured ﬁeld, which I will summarizehere.Desire arises from the Lacanian triad, Imaginary-Symbolic-Real. Since issues of perception, subjectformation, language, image, and code are funda-mental both in the architecture theory of the 1970sand in Jacque Lacan’s discourse, and since thosetwo discourses are almost exactly contemporaneous,it is not arbitrary that we start here.It is perhaps easiest to think of Lacan’s threeorders as force-ﬁelds which operate in every experi-ence or act (including architectural experiences andacts), each one bringing its own particular characte-ristics and inﬂuence and possibilities. They are threeturns in a Borromean knot (Lacan’s metaphor),three laminates of a single reality, but they can bebroken apart and used as a system of classiﬁcation.The Imaginary Order comprises parts that areinﬁnitely substitutable for one another—what Lacancalled objets petit autre. These are the objects ofdesire, or better analogs for the single object ofdesire, L' Autre, or the big Other, that has been lostand cannot be recovered directly. Aldo Rossi calledthe Other of architecture the “Analogous City.”Rossi’s architectural types, which arise inthe “Ana-logous City,” can be placed in the ArchitecturalImaginary. Rossi understood architectural types asentities, analogues of the social text itself. Typesoperate mimetically, which is a characteristic of theImaginary made vivid by Lacan’s mirror imagemodel. And like the objects in the Imaginary, thetypological images from the Analogous City desig-nate the original, deﬁning status of man—“[theAnalogous City] concerns the collective imaginati-on,” Rossi said; it is “a synthesis of a series of [soci-al and architectural] values.” While Rossi’s typological, analogical obsessionsseem to be a way of constantly conﬁrming thedeterminate presence of the traditional Europeancity—refracting its historical logic of form through aneo-Enlightenment lens in contingent, contradic-tory, and quasi-surreal ways—their peculiar mne-monic function also makes it possible to see inthem a new beauty in precisely that which is va-nishing. The originality of Rossi’s work may well beits capacity to convey, alternately with melancholyor unblinking disenchantment, that the traditionalpractice of architecture itself is being forever lost.Dieses ist lange her is the title of one of Rossi’s mostenigmatic drawings. It is a perfect picture of thedesiring ﬁeld which is the Architectural Imaginary.No one has grasped the radical anachronicity ofthe Analogous City better than Peter Eisenman.Eisenman characterizes Rossi’s work as signifyingthe impossibility of meaning in our own time:“Incapable of believing in reason, uncertain of thesigniﬁcance of his objects, man [has lost] his capaci-ty for signifying… The context which gave ideasand objects their previous signiﬁcance is gone.”Then he writes, “Rossi’s ‘rationalism’ … consists inthe combination of logic—the conscious—and theanalogic—the shadow… Rossi’s conscious imagesexist only as a key to their shadow imagery. It istheir intrinsic, often unconscious content whichconfronts the more problematic and perhaps funda-mental reality of the cultural condition today.”The passage rather precisely invokes the La-canian Real, what Eisenman calls the shadowyunconscious of the ana-logic, which is “behind” theImaginary. The Real is what exceeds Imaginaryidentiﬁcations—all that typology fails to include. Itis something that persists only as failed, missed, ina shadow, and dissolves as soon as we try to graspit in its positive nature. This Architectural Real isthe place of the void opened up by the Imaginaryexclusion of the polymorphous wealth of architec-ture beyond what can be imagined and identiﬁedas a type.Lacan’s Symbolic Order, then, designates theendeavor to bring to light something about theReal, but backwards, as it were, not through imagesbut from its structural effects. The Symbolic Orderis the realm of language and the law, of authorityand its exchanges. And Eisenman’s work around the1978 project for Canarregio is Symbolic is exactlythis way. Eisenman’s early work was concerned almostexclusively with isolating and elaborating architec-ture’s symbolic elements and operations that wouldensure autonomy and self-reﬂexivity of the archi-117tectural object and its structured determinants. AtCanarregio, the grid of Le Corbusier's unrealizedVenice Hospital project operates as the absent bigOther—the law, the authority, the code, the archi-tectural unconscious, what Lacan called the Nameof the Father. Le Corbusier’s grid is reduced to ageometrical abstraction and replicated onto theirregular fabric of the adjacent site. (And it shouldbe emphasized that there is no better metaphor forthe Symbolic than the grid.) Then Eisenman’s ownpreviously worked out House XIa—itself a formalrecord of the history of its own formation, compri-sing nothing more than a series of ﬁlm-like stillsthat trace the steps from one state of the object tothe next—is multiplied across the grid. With Canarregio, one discovers the existence ofcertain bindings and constraints: the constraints ofthe architectural code or grammar, and of the socialorder, the social unconscious—in short, the structu-res of which Lacan has named the Symbolic. We can summarize: 118RossiImaginarypartsanalogic imagesabsence, loss of maternal plenitutdememory of place,identiﬁcationdiachroniciterationmimesisEisenmanSymbolictotal system, ground, inventorydigital codespresence of dead father (Name of the Father)counter-memory, tracing placesynchronicrepetitiondifference, alterityLate in 1973 John Hejduk traveled to Zurich for anexhibition of his work together with Aldo Rossi’s atthe eth where Rossi was teaching. In putting theworks of these two architects together, the curatorsprobably meant to elucidate the highly reduced andprecise formal, geometrical research that Rossi andHejduk shared. But what Hejduk saw—for the ﬁrsttime—were Rossi’s provocative and haunting dra-wings, especially for the Cemetery of San Cataldo atModena (1971). The encounter with Rossi cut acrease in Hejduk’s career, which between 1973 and1975 would fold back on itself in a reexaminationof accomplishments thus far and a reconsiderationin the light of what Hejduk saw in Zurich. What struck Hejduk in Rossi’s work was notsimply a typology of reduced form comparable toHejduk’s own: a limited range of single-volume ele-ments, geometrically precise, ﬁxed and continuous-ly reﬁned. What struck him was the discrepancybetween Rossi’s stated intent to subsume all of thearchitectural imagination into a ﬁnite, iterable typo-logy and the dimension of Rossi’s work that eludesor resists such enclosure—the discrepancy betweenthe Imaginary and the Real. In the Modena projectHejduk noticed, for example, the estrangementsand detournments from Ledoux’s ideal city ofChaux, Boullée’s cenotaph, and Piranesi’s CampoMarzio; the latent references to the Sachlichkeit ofHilberseimer, Loos, Hannes Meyer; but also allusi-ons to the paintings of de Chirico and Morandi, theﬁlms of Fellini and Visconti, and the novels ofRaymond Chandler and Raymond Roussel (all ofwhom, we found out later, were among Rossi’sinspirations). Hedjuk heard the multimedia babelbehind Rossi’s silence. The guardian spirits of theAnalogous City were whispering to him. And hewondered about unleashing all that Rossi had sup-pressed.The Wall House was Hejduk’s only availabledevice to begin to address what he took to be achallenge from Rossi. The Wall had the potential ofradical ﬁguration, and that potential would be usedby Hejduk to structure a desiring ﬁeld. Hejduk’spreliminary response (in what seems at ﬁrst a sur-prisingly tentative staking out of new territory) wasthe Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought, 1975, forthe Venice Biennale, in which Hejduk took hisalready worked-out Wall House 3, reanimated it tostand as sentinel in a lagoon across from the oldMolino Stucky building in Venice.1 “The little housewas colored overlooking the monochromatic, syste-mic, European world. What I am doing is I am thequestionnaire upon the question. I am the interro-gation upon the interrogator. So when Rossi and allthose things in Europe are going on, the totalitarianstuff which has to do with deep political and socialmeanings, then I answer it with The Cemetery forthe Ashes of Thought.”Other than the Wall House and the mill, theproposal is for nothing more than a courtyard de-ﬁned by low walls with holes (“holes,” not niches)holding containers with ashes, and plaques with thetitles and authors of canonic Western literature. Anexisting abandoned mill, a house designed thatsame year, a courtyard—next to nothing. And yet,Hejduk himself sees this project as a turning pointin his work: “People did see that [project], butbaby, nobody talks about that project. The Ceme-tery for the Ashes of Thought was one man’s con-frontation with that whole European condition.” All of which suggests that the radical lack wefeel with regard to this project is quite fundamen-tal.The Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought preciselyconstructs an elementary diagram of desire, accor-ding to which the unavailability or interdiction of adesired object, the Other—in this case, the Thoughtthat is both dematerialized and made manifest inthe ashes—becomes an attracting void of enormoussigniﬁcance. We recall Lacan’s citation of Heideg-ger: “The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in thematerial of which it consists, but in the void thatholds.” It is the void at the center of the Real thatorganizes desire. The cemetery is a template ofdesire. Lacan stresses vigorously that this particularnameless Other, the void, the Thing, is the primaryobject on which is grounded all possible subject-object relations, and equally, the empty site thatremains when entry into the Symbolic is complete.What is more, Lacan uses architecture as a primaryexample, citing the ancient temple as “a construc-tion around emptiness that designates the place ofthe Thing.” In Hejduk’s cemetery, the Thing is theThought, the central object of Western culture thatcannot be signiﬁed even as it is the event horizonof all signiﬁcation, that must be continually “refo-und” but was “never there in the ﬁrst place to belost,” (Lacan), in comparison with which all otherobjects—those Imaginary objects that both Hejdukand Rossi would repeat almost obsessively—will bemore unsatisfactory substitutes. Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought was for the1975 Biennale. Teatro del Mondo was for the 1980Biennale. Did Rossi take something back fromHejduk?After this encounter with Rossi, Hejduk wouldconstruct his architectural Masques. In the traditionof the Italian maschera and the festival architectureof Inigo Jones, the masques propose various inter-acting architectural characters and human inhabi-tants—architectural troubadours, vagabonds, anditinerants—that travel in caravans from city to city(Berlin, Vladivostok, Hanover), twisting the munda-ne urbanism of their sites into carnivalesque narra-tive events. The taking of place is the very mode ofbeing of the Masques. The Masques open the lensmore daringly onto architecture’s otherness, toeruptions from the order of the Real, as Hejdukbegins to catalogue his multiple, idiosyncratic cod-ings of architectural elements—his menagerie ofangels, animals, martyrs, and machines; his stylisticpreference for basic geometric forms and elementalbiomorphism (buildings that seem to have hair,beaks, eyes, and legs) combined with typologicalvariations on theaters, periscopes, funnels, traps,chapels, and labyrinths; his thematic explorations offalls from grace, itinerancy, passage and transforma-tion.Around 1975–76 Bernard Tschumi constructedhis Advertisements for Architecture—a series ofarchitectural montages, some of which featuredphotographs of the Villa Savoy he had taken in1965 while a student at the eth, where he found“the squalid walls of the small service rooms on theground ﬂoor, stinking of urine, smeared with excre-ment, and covered with obscene grafﬁti.” Howshould we read these Advertisements? When theyhave been read at all, they have been seen as anexplicit alternative to the over-privileging of pure,autonomous form by Rossi, Eisenman, and Hejduk(known in the 1970s as the “Whites”) and to ColinRowe’s inﬂuential preference for the uncorrupted,pristine ﬂesh of Le Corbusier. Surely this reading iscorrect as far as it goes. But Tschumi augments thisinterpretation elsewhere, describing the Advertise-ments project as a notational device to “trigger” thedesire for architecture—an architecture of perversepleasure, an erotics of architectural performance.Tschumi: “The usual function of advertisements… isto trigger desire for something beyond the [imageor form] itself. As there are advertisements for pro-ducts, what not advertisements for architecture?” The peculiar visual logic of the Advertisementscorresponds, once again, to that archaic stage ofsubject production Lacan termed the Imaginary. Inthe Advertisements the subject of desire is nothingless than architecture itself, architecture as such.Lacan’s so-called L Schema from Écrits famouslyconstructs the subject of desire as an effect of adynamic structure of internal contradictions—inclu-ding a relationship between the subject (S on theleft in the “graphe du désir”), the desired object (a,on the right, the objet petite autre, denizen of theImaginary), and that object’s double, the ego (a’under S), which in this case can be understand todesignate the Advertisments’ mimicry of the com-mercialized, eroticized milieu in which they haveappeared. The system of desire (indicated by a) isopposed to the system of identiﬁcations (indicated119by a’). The shifting, reﬂecting, doubled relationshipbetween the object and the object-effect that is theego, is indicated in the graph by the diagonal line,which must be read both as a vector of desireﬂowing between a and a’ and also as having animplicit planar dimension, which is to say that it isalso the image-screen of Lacan’s mirror stage, as ismade explicit by the label “imaginary relation,” theinteraction staged by the mirror. Written into thisschema the Advertisements provide the objects ofdesire primarily as images, of course, immanent tothe works themselves—the “morselized” photogra-phs of the Villa Savoye are nothing if not objets a,but so are the ropes and fatal falls and text frag-ments (Tschumi is an absolute master at construc-ting appropriated images, often from famous avant-garde architecture, ﬁlm, and photography, as inten-se, but forever lost objects of desire). But the ima-ges themselves are nothing without the ﬂow ofdesire, which they produce but which also acts astheir support. The eventing of the objets a—thepresentation of them as substitutes for an architec-ture we want but do not have, the setting up ofthem as triggers—construes them as signiﬁers andmirrors them back to the viewer as marks of aspeciﬁc, even unique and personal, affective archi-tectural encounter—an event: this moment of expe-rience, this sensation of architecture condensedhere, this ﬁguring of architecture that happened forme just now. Such is the performative dimension ofthis work—to constitute the desire for architectureout of an impossible-to-ﬁll lack, ﬁgured by part-objects in a ﬂash of recognition.All this so far has taken place on the side of theImaginary, where the architecture subject is elicitedby a movement of desire through part-objects in anact of enunciation, an experience, a performance.But as the L Schema makes quite clear, the morefundamental relationship that mediates all of thismachinery is that between S, the subject of desire,and a big Other, A. Reading the Advertisementsthrough the complete L Schema forces the recogni-tion that the ﬂows of desire structuring the viewer’sexperience are projected from and return to thelocus of that Other, which Lacan calls the Symbolic(or language, or law, or the unconscious itselfdeﬁned as the “discourse of the Other”). Architec-ture, the subject of desire, is not produced willfullyin an act of consciousness, but rather is the effectof what is repressed. Note that in the graph, theimage-screen absorbs the vector of the unconsciousand blocks a representation of the unconscious,even as desire is an effect of the unconscious. Now, at the time of the Advertisements Tschumidoes not give a name to A, the Other of thisSymbolic realm. But we know it already: it City inthe sense that Rossi ﬁrst introduced the relation ofarchitecture and City. This is conﬁrmed in TheManhattan Transcripts (1977) in which it is nowManhattan, rather than the Villa Savoy, that is thecathexis-object—a city understood as having anerotic, transgressive, and violent programmaticpotential woven into its grid of streets and avenues.It is reconﬁrmed in the project for La Villette,which returns to Eisenman’s interest in architectu-re’s total system, but now with a concern for onlythe effects, not the form of that system.The diagram of Architecture’s Desire can nowbe completed as follows:120121ANALOGUE (Rossi)partsanalogic imagesabsence, loss of maternal plenitutdeImaginarySpatial, imagesmemory of placediachronicthe iterable codeblank, white surfacerealismREPETITION (Eisenman)total system, ground, inventorydigital codespresence of dead father (Name of the Father)SymbolicAbsence/presencecounter-memory, tracing placesynchronicthe reiterable codearcheology of surface tracesmodernismENCOUNTER (Hejduk)partsbecoming ﬁgures (affects)trace of Architecture’s GazeImaginary-Realtaking (of) placediachronic, theatricalthe exorbitant image-ﬁguredecorative surfacemodernism/postmodernismSPACING (Tschumi)total system, ﬂowsgrams, diagramstransgression of GazeSymbolic-Realdissolution of placesynchronic, cinegrammaticthe form-ﬁgureprojective surfacepostmodernism/end-of-the-lineNote:1 The Molino Stucky was a pasta mill and grain silo at the western end of the Giudecca designed inlate nineteenth century by Ernest Wullkopf.

The desire called architecture

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https://e-pub.uni-weimar.de/opus4/files/1315/hays.pdf

The desire called architecture

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Online-Publikationssystem der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar