Architecture, Disciplinarity, and The Arts - Andrew Leach and John Macarthur

A&S/books selected back list : Table of Contents:
Leach & Macarthur Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts

* Maarten Delbeke, La Fenice degl 'ingegni. Een Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts : Considering the Issues /
alternatief perspectief op Gianlorenzo Bernini en zijn John Macarthur & Andrew Leach
werk in de geschriften van Sforza Pallavicino (2002)
(Dutch) ISBN: 90-76714-118 On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle / Bart Verschaffel A N DR EW LEACH & JOH N MACA RTHUR (E DS.)
* Bart Verschaffel, A propos de Balthus. Le Roi
Architecture and the System of the Arts / John Macarthur
des chats, Le Regard sondeur (2004) (French)
ISBN: 978-90-76714- 23-1 James Fergusson's Theory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts / Peter Kohane
Architecture,
* Wouter Davidts, Bouwen voor de kunst? Mu-
seumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Disciplinary Contrasts : Science, Art, and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Writings
Modern (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 90-76714-282 of William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and Alexander von Humboldt / Deborah van der Plaat
* Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism, and Modernity / Darren Jorgensen
History (English) (2007) ISBN: 978-90-76714-
Disciplinarity,
30-1 Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier / Antony Moulis
* Bart Verschaffel, Van Hermes en Hestia. Teksten
over architectuur (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 978-90- Andre Bloc in Iran / Daniel Barber
76714-29-0
Throwing Light on Our Intentions / Andrew Leach
and the Arts

* Maarten Van den Driessche & Bart Ver-
schaffel, De School als ontwerpopgave. Schoolarchi- Serial Techniques in the Arts : General Ambitions and Particular Manifestations /
tectuur in Vlaanderen 1995-2005 (2006) (Dutch) Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
ISBN: 90-76714-318
* Marc Verminck (red.), Over Schoonheid. Heden- Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures : On Medium and Disciplinarity in the Work of the Bechers /
daagse beschouwingen bij een klassiek begrip (2008) Naomi Stead
(Dutch) ISBN: 978-9076714-356
Callum Morton's Architecture of Disguised Difference / Rosemary Hawker
* Maarten Delbeke, Dirk De Meyer, Bas
Rogiers, Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi. De prenten- Icon and Ideology / Craig Johnson
collectie van de Universiteit Gent (2008) (Dutch)
ISBN 978-9076 71-4004 Tectonics :Testing the Limits of Autonomy / Gevork Hartoonian
Forthcoming : A-disciplinarity and Architecture? / Mark Dorrian

* Pieter Uyttenhove, Stadland Belgie . Hoofd-
stukken uit de Belgische stedenbouwgeschiedenis
(2009) (Dutch)
A&S/books are published by the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning,
* Dirk De Meyer & Maarten Delbeke (ed.), On Ghent University, Belgium
Piranesi (2009) (English) International distribution : Exhibitions International (Louvain, Belgium)
www.exhibitionsinternational.be
ISBN: A&S/books A&S/books

3/7/09 CULTURA B-WETTEREN - ALA - A&S_Architecture 1
Architecture,
Disciplinarity,
and the Arts
Edited by Andrew Leach & John Macarthur
A&S/books
2009

Table of Contents
Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts: Considering the Issues 7

John Macarthur & Andrew Leach
On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle 17

Bart Verschaffel
Architecture and the System of the Arts; or Kant on Landscape Gardening 27

John Macarthur
James Fergusson'sTheory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts 45

Peter Kohane
Disciplinary Contrasts: Science, Art, and the Imagination in the 61

Nineteenth-Century Writings of William Lethaby, John Ruskin,
and Alexander von Humboldt
Deborah van der Plaat
Wilhelm Worringer, GothicVitalism, and Modernity 75

Darren Jorgensen
Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier 89

Antony Moulis
Andre Bloc in Iran 99

Daniel Barber

6 Table of Contents
Throwing Light on Our Intentions 113
Andrew Leach
Serial Techniques in the Arts: General Ambitions and 123

Particular Manifestations
Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures: On Medium and Disciplinarity 135

in the Work of the Bechers
Naomi Stead
Callum Morton's Architecture of Disguised Difference 151

Rosemary Hawker
Icon and Ideology 167

Craig Johnson
Tectonics:Testing the Limits of Autonomy 179

Gevork Hartoonian
A-disciplinarity and Architecture? 193

Mark Dorrian
Contributors 207

Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts
Considering the Issues
John Macarthur and Andrew Leach
Throughout the twentieth century, architecture was commonly distin-

guished from art, where we understand the latter to be the visual arts.
Architects and artists were different people, their activities regulated
or cultivated by different arms of government, their productions re-
ported in different sections of the newspaper. In the early twenty-first
century this distinction is weakening. Claims to the utility of architec-
ture in social formation and the technical aspects of building produc-
tion, which dominated architecture's professionalisation in the twenti-
eth century, are now met with tired scepticism. The utility claimed for
architecture today in branding corporations, creating identities for
cities, providing the infrastructure of a ``creative economy'' is little
different to the sumptuary role that the `àutonomous'' arts have never
quite renounced.
Today, the mix of monetary and cultural capital in the building of a
state art gallery hardly differs from the kind of investment made in the
collection housed. Although the disciplinary distinctions between art
and architecture are still prominent and widely observed, they have
also become something of a topic or a medium, owing to the effect of
particular polemical interdisciplinary projects and the provocative
blurring of institutional frameworks. There is a great deal of interest
and activity in the interdisciplinary space between the visual arts and
architecture. Many artists use building materials or architectural repre-
sentations. Architects and critics speak, with few cautions, of architec-
ture as `àrt''.
Is it possible, then, that architecture is returning to a longer-term,
older position as an art with sibling relations to other disciplines?

8 John Macarthur and Andrew Leach
What is it today to speak of architecture as an art, and what should we
make of the long history of this question? Is it relevant that usage by
which we name the visual arts `àrt'' (to the exclusion of music, dance,
poetry, or architecture) is also relatively recent? Or, is the current
intersection of architecture and the visual arts primarily to do with
their intersecting histories?
It was common practice among eighteenth-century writers on the
arts to compile a system under which the various arts were ranked.
From ancient times to the Renaissance, the status of all kinds of
knowledge had been systematised; but in the eighteenth century a
new realm of the beaux arts became the principal subject to this order-
ing, and the modern category of `Àrt'' its ultimate foundation. The
criteria for ranking the arts ranged from ancient ideas of the menial
nature of manual work to new aesthetic concepts that distinguished
sense from utility. Philosophers used the new concepts to judge the
aesthetic potential of the various arts, whereas the rising academies of
the different arts used a mixture of aesthetic and traditional criteria to
rank genres and degrees of nobility among their practitioners. In this
process, the materials and techniques of trades, such as building and
painting, became aestheticised, and a modern concept of artistic media
arose.
To speak of architecture as an art during the last century has been an
implicit call for a return to an older, more inclusive concept of the arts
and a common cultural space. Calls for a synthesis of the arts, such as
that in France in the 1950s, were also calls for a more general inclu-
siveness, a kind of democratisation in which art would create a new res
publica, just as it had for aristocratic societies in the past. Now, some-
thing like a common audience for art and architecture is emerging in
the joint exhibition and converging discourse of site-specific and `òut
of the gallery'' art interventions and conceptual architectural projects.
Is this the beginning of a new synthesis? Or, as seems more likely,
have the concepts of the disciplines become so etiolated in their differ-
ing directions that it is now possible for them to confront one another
as strangers?
There is an external socio-economic context to the current conver-
gence of art and architecture. It is not irrelevant that the complete col-
lapse of the idea of architecture as an instrument of social reform was
concurrent with the idea that art could be, like architecture, a ``creative

Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts 9
industry'' with a real economy. No one could doubt, however, that
this convergence does not also serve the internal problematics of the
disciplines. For example, in 2008 the Curating Architecture project
directed by Andrea Phillips of Goldsmiths College, London, aimed to
recognise the trend as an explicit issue for curators and institutions by
bringing critical architecture practice such as that of AMO (the
``research'' division of one of the most successful global firms, the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture) into the same curatorial space as
art practices based on urban analysis and intervention. As the project
website states,
Curating Architecture starts with the premise that the routines of artists
and architects share many practical and theoretical concerns and have
entwined histories. It has long been the case that a wide range of artists
are influenced by contemporary developments in the architectural field,
and that architects look to the conceptual and methodological strategies
of artists for ideas.... 1
Certainly, the popularity of constructed environments among artists is

increasing exponentially. The US Public Broadcasting Service's pro-
gramme Art:21 lists seventy-three artists working in architectural me-
dia or on architectural topics in the twenty-first century.2 In the work
of Rachel Whiteread, Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, and Thomas De-
mand, spatial art practice has also moved on from the paradigm of `ìn-
stallation'' to explicitly confront architecture as a discipline and as a
practice. The Hayward Gallery's 2008 exhibition Psycho Buildings: Artists
Take On Architecture includes ten artists and one firm of architects, Ate-
lier Bow-Wow, whose members also practise as artists. 3 But exactly
what categories are at stake in artist Do-Ho Suh's red nylon staircase's
being like architecture but not architecture? Or Atelier Bow-Wow's
twisted sheet-metal tube's being distinguished from their architectural
1. Andrea Phillips, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths College, online at http ://

old.gold.ac.uk/art/curating-architecture/ (accessed March 23, 2009).
2. `Àrt :21,'' online at http ://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/ ?show=71 (ac-
cessed March 14, 2009).
3. Brian Dillon, Jane Rendell, Ralph Rugoff, Francis Mckee, Tumelo Mosaka,
Midori Matsui, Paulo Herkenhoff, Francesco Manacorda, & Tom Morton, Psycho
Buildings: ArtistsTake On Architecture (London : Hayward Publishing, 2008).

works? Does this mean that architecture is more of an art than it was
in the twentieth century, or that its differences from the visual arts are
being conducted more productively? Has the change in practices pre-
ceded or followed a shift in concepts of art and ``the arts''? Two recent
books explore these issues in very different ways.
In Artand Architecture: APlace Between, Jane Rendell makes a thoughtful
survey of what she calls ``critical spatial practice'': recent art and archi-
tecture loosely organised around the concepts of site and non-site, the
`èxpanded field'' in which art and architecture intersect as disciplines,
the idea of intervention as a critical response to circumstance, and of cul-
tural production being less about objects than social exchange. 4 The
practitioners studied would be familiar in most architecture schools, not
only the architects Daniel Libeskind, Diller and Scofidio, Shiguru Ban,
Lacaton and Vassal but also such artists as Rachel Whiteread, Michael
Landy, Andrea Zittel, and a range of more canonical figures, such as
Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys. Rendell's book is about specific
practices. She writes, Ìt is neither possible nor desirable to sketch out
an inclusive picture of contemporary art and architecture.' 5
This is a sentiment shared, if paradoxically, by Joseph Rykwert in
his recent The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts. 6 Rykwert's
book is an astonishingly detailed and inclusive account of significant
interactions among architects and artists across Europe from the eight-
eenth century to the mid-twentieth century, when, he claims, the
mutual understanding of art and the arts withered. Rendell writes of
nothing before Robert Smithson, and Rykwert of little after the Bau-
haus. Rendell is optimistic of contemporary art's potential to renew
architecture but seems to see no useful precedent in what Rykwert
might have to tell her of Semper. Rykwert sees everything going
pretty much downhill from Art Nouveau to the nadir of Duchamp's
nominalism. Yet despite the difference in their diagnoses, Rykwert's
concerns are comparable to Rendell's: how the city and public space
provide a site or occasion for artists and architects to work together,
4. Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London : I. B. Tauris, 2006).
5. Rendell, Art and Architecture, x.
6. Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts (London :
Reaktion, 2008).

how the strictures of the disciplines aid or limit the interaction, and,
finally, what social meaning the arts can claim as a whole.
The present volume contains essays on both contemporary and his-
torical practice in architecture and among the arts, and implicit in this
is a claim that past relations between art and architecture partly struc-
ture our present intellectual and institutional opportunities. Running
through the collection is an interest in disciplinarity, which is to say
that the authors are interested not only in the practices of architects
and artists but also in how their interactions are structured by the con-
cepts they have of their disciplines and practices, and of art itself.
Although neither Rendell nor Rykwert are shy of ``theory'' she
drawing on Walter Benjamin and Edward Soja, he on Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche they both tend to treat theoretical concepts of art
and organised interaction of the disciplines as noisome consequences
of a more authentic practical encounter. In this collection, we are con-
cerned with the historical shifts in the concepts of art and ``the arts'' as
a consortium of disciplines necessary to understanding the precedents
offered by past encounters of architects and artists.
``Discipline'' has been an implicitly pejorative term for some time, a
status best expressed in the high value put on `ìnter-disciplinarity''.
Disciplines speak of customs, institutions, and genres a whole set of
conditions anterior to art practices that constrain the artist's creativity.
To an extent, this makes sense in a model of practice based on media.
When painters paint, and architects build, their discipline is, for good
or bad, the generalisation of the situation each practitioner faces in
their medium. In the visual arts of the late twentieth century, however,
the revolution of new media such as installation and multi-media, fol-
lowed by the more recent return of painting, has left art in a so-called
post-medium condition. Many artists no longer begin within a disci-
pline or media, but make their choice of means of expression a part of
the art work. Rosalind Krauss explored this moment in late-twentieth-
century art through the figure of Marcel Broodthaers, whose concep-
tual practice had the effect of making the symbolic content of his work,
notably the figure of the eagle, into a kind of medium.7 Similarly,
7. Rosalind Krauss, `À Voyage on the North Sea'': Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Con-
dition (London : Thames & Hudson, 1999).

Krauss has been interested in the way in which James Coleman's use of
slide-tape projectors has made an obsolete technology into a medium
specific to his artistic concerns. Closer to our present concerns, a num-
ber of contemporary artists, such as Oliver Prado and Andrea Zittel,
have made buildings, or building-like constructions. In short, the ques-
tion of discipline has returned now that a medium cannot be consid-
ered anterior to the work in a material condition. Prado's constructions
are an ideational medium particular to his concerns, and their material
status as buildings does not make them a kind of architecture.
The essays in this volume address these issues on conceptual and his-
torical grounds, the writers drawing from papers and discussions pre-
sented at a colloquium of the Architecture Theory, Criticism and His-
tory (ATCH) Research Group of the University of Queensland,
Australia, hosted by Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art on August 17
and 18, 2007.
The collection begins with essays by Bart Verschaffel and John
Macarthur. Verschaffel considers architecture's `tasks and duties' as a
foreground for finding limits to architecture's proximity to art. He
turns to architecture for art, the museum, as a type that undermines
the claims of both architecture and art to mount a kind of resistance
in their autonomy. For this, Rem Koolhaas's decision to stay with
architecture, to make buildings, and to resist the classification of art
offers for Verschaffel some grounding for architecture's ongoing
attempts to intervene in social and cultural life. Macarthur, then, steps
back into the eighteenth century, wherein a division between art and
the arts grew out of the intersection of aesthetics and older tropes of
comparisons of the arts. The implications of the unstable concept that
resulted extend to the present-day divorce of the arts' conceptual work
from their media. He claims that recent debates on intermediality, and
on the èxpanded field' of architecture (Vidler, after Krauss), have
strange parallels in eighteenth-century attempts to organise the arts
into systems based on their `àesthetic ideas''.
Two case studies follow, exploring the relation of the arts in the
nineteenth century. Peter Kohane takes up the question of architec-
ture's place among the arts through James Fergusson's criterion of the
`phoenetic arts' a reflection, in 1849, of the ancient prejudices

against manual work and for those human activities that resist utility.
Protagoras' axiom that `man is the measure of all things' is here given
new significance. Where architecture, among the arts, is above all
expected to lend decorum to the city, then those facilities that aid com-
munication are the most prized. This hierarchy allows, then, for the
division of architecture from building on the basis of phonetic rather
than technical qualities. Deborah van der Plaat extends this discussion
to the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth centuries,
asking not where architecture sits among the arts but where it belongs
relative to art and science, placing aesthetic experience in contrast with
positive knowledge and know-how. She picks apart the significance
of the Romantic concept of `ìmagination'' for the artistic status of
architecture of the time.
Wilhelm Worringer appears next. His romantic ideas on the imma-
nence of the artistic impulse in the medieval architecture of what he
called the Northern Line are explored by Darren Jorgensen to show
how, like other art historians of his generation, Worringer could treat
artistic impulse as a form of metaphysics. The dislocation of formal
resonances between nature and architecture, and between works of
architecture across time defers to a concept of artistic impulse that
extends Riegl's Kunstwollen. Jorgensen demonstrates how the question
of art in Worringer is given over to nature and to a metaphysically
framed nature above all, and thus how architecture and the arts
become in his work subject to the same criteria of judgement.
A series of three essays (Daniel Barber on Andre Bloc, Antony
Moulis on Le Corbusier, and Andrew Leach on Francis Ponge)
explores the concept of artistic synthesis in the twentieth century. The
essays consider a series of case studies. Barber describes the historical
and intellectual context of Bloc's intervention in Heydar Ghiai's mid-
1950s project for the Iranian Senate two giant columns and a chan-
delier exploring the production of architecture-as-art as a collabora-
tive venture involving many actors. Moulis turns to Le Corbusier's
painting to assess its status within his largely architectural uvre. Can we
think of his painting as different from his architecture? Or is it, rather,
an extension in different media of ideas explored principally through
buildings and architectural drawings? What, then, of the way Le Cor-
busier's architecture is regarded more highly than his art, both in his
own moment and in his present-day critical reception? Moulis con-

tends that Le Corbusier's concept of art and its practice pose problems
for the artistic media in which he, as an artist, worked. Leach then
looks at a third example of artistic interaction in the mid-twentieth
century, a prose poem by Ponge (1954) written as a missive to `àrtful
architects''. Ponge's piece, Leach shows, distinguishes between the
professional and the artist, and the poem's subject, electricity and elec-
trification, allows the poet to explore an extended metaphor of dark-
ness and light. In parallel with the phonetic criterion considered by
Kohane, Ponge's poem is cast as a communique, and the text's techni-
cal problem concerns the way that poets and architects and techni-
cians of all stripes can meet at a moment when the specifics of their
respective arts are stripped away to become pure language, which rules
over all the arts.
The subject of the next three essays is the disrupted relation of artis-
tic practices to their media in the latter twentieth century and into the
present. Sandra Kaji-O'Grady argues that the dislocation of formal
and compositional strategies from artistic types gave greater mobility
in the 1960s and 1970s to approaches that had once been bound to spe-
cific practices and media. Her case is serialism, and she argues that its
translation from music to the visual arts to architecture gave rise to a
process of autocriticism as technique and strategy that held architectural
form to a new level of accountability. Naomi Stead then turns to the
artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs document indus-
trial heritage, stripping it of the classification `àrchitecture'' and intro-
ducing to the images a spatial quality akin to sculpture. Stead looks at
the way that architecture acts as a subject of their art, and the way it
resonates with the values of their practice, particularly that of shape.
In the third essay in this series, Rosemary Hawker takes the work of
Callum Morton as an example of the relatively large group of contem-
porary artists (already mentioned here) who use building or architec-
tural representation to make artworks. Hawker argues that what is at
stake in such works is not a blurring or broadening of the material
means available to artists but an awareness of the productive space
between medium and discipline. Drawing on Krauss, but also Michel
Foucault, Hawker asks if the current popularity of architecture in the
visual arts bears comparison with the rise of photography in the late
twentieth century.

The final group of papers returns us to the question of architecture's
autonomy as an art, its institutional and disciplinary structures, and its
place as a disciplined practice among the contemporary arts. Craig
Johnson invokes the work of OMA/AMO to think through how the
structures used by Koolhaas and his agencies deal with the problem of
architecture's content, its scale, and its socio-historical setting (and mis-
sion). The essay therefore concerns the boundary between the modern
tradition of architecture received by Koolhaas and OMA/AMO and its
enduring usefulness. Gevork Hartoonian, conversely, delves deep into
the discipline to understand the nature of its own claims for autonomy
through a long durational account of the interplay between the restric-
tions historically placed on the architect's licentia and the internalisation
of those limiting factors as a form of tectonic autonomy. This essay
cuts to the foundations of architecture's disciplinary claims.
Mark Dorrian extends the theme of disciplinarity through a study of
Diller and Scofidio's project Blur (2001), working through a series of
binaries in order to advance an a-disciplinary reading of architecture's
rejections of any form of core or ground in the present. To this end,
he finds productive Richard Scofidio's claim that architecture is atmos-
phere, the vapourous substance of Blur an a-disciplinary answer to
architecture's traditional medium, construction.
As a collection, the essays in this book survey the range of issues
that architecture's disciplinarity, its autonomy, its status as art, or as
an art among others, poses for architectural culture in the present
moment.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Robert Leonard for generously supporting the
event at The Institute of Modern Art, and his staff, especially Anna
Roberts and Vanessa McRae; Miranda Wallace and Andrew McNa-
mara for their contribution to chairing and discussion; Alexandra
Brown, Susan Holden, and Fiona McAlpine for their assistance with
practical matters during the event; and Ben Wilson for his editorial as-
sistance as we moved the book to press. The University of Queensland
assisted ATCH with funding for the IMA symposium in 2007. Thanks
are also due especially to Bart Verschaffel and Johan Lagae of A&S/
books for enabling us to publish this colloquium in the present form.

On Art and/or Architecture
Being an Obstacle
Bart Verschaffel
The eighth principle of Roger Scruton's Architectural Principles in the Age

of Nihilism reads as follows:
Since the common pursuit of a public morality is essential to our happi-
ness, we have an overriding reason to engage in the common pursuit
of a public taste. The aesthetic understanding ought to act as a shaping
hand in all our public endeavours, adapting the world to our emotions
and our emotions to the world, so as to overcome what is savage,
beyond us, unheimlich. We must never cease, therefore, to seek the forms
that display, as a visible meaning, the moral co-ordination of the com-
munity. 1
Scruton may not count as an authority for architecture's in crowd, but

he is very intelligent, and one can learn from him even while disagree-
ing. He argues that the world we share has to be understandable and
familiar for everybody, and that architecture should therefore develop
à public language of form'. One cannot build a world from highly
personal and idiosyncratic inventions or from untried and untested
flashes of wit. Scruton's principle assumes that architecture should
make our lives possible, comfortable, and no more difficult than life it-
self. Architecture should mediate between the big and unknown
threatening universe on the one hand and the capacities and limits of
1. Roger Scruton, `Àrchitectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism,'' in What

is Architecture? ed. Andrew Ballantyne (London & New York : Routledge, 2002),
53-62. First published in Scruton, The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an
Age of Nihilism (New York : St. Martin's Press, 1994).

18 Bart Verschaffel
the human mind and nature on the other. Architecture should ``hu-
manise'' the world and keep what is `savage, beyond us, unheimlich' out
of sight. It is not for architecture but for art to confront and try to
deal with what is humanly `ìmpossible'' or unbearable. Architecture
should neither question nor problematise but offer answers and solu-
tions.
The twelfth principle for architecture in times of Nihilism though
Scruton admits that the authority of this principle is `less obvious'
reads thus: `The problem of architecture is a question of manners, not
art.' 2 Architecture is a matter of good manners, of confirming and
respecting communal life and common heritage. Architecture should be-
have, but art shouldn't. Art can and should be brutal, provocative, difficult:
`... artistic problems faced by people of genius demand upheavals,
overthrowings, a repudiation or reworking of traditional forms.' 3
Making art is therefore a task for a few extraordinary people. Architects
ought to know their place.
For this very reason the resulting stylistic ventures should not be taken
as prescriptions by those lesser mortals whose role is simply to decorate
and humanize the world. The problem of architecture is addressed to
those lesser mortals among whom we must count the majority of
architects. For such people to model their actions on an idea of `creativ-
ity' taken from the great triumphs of modern art is not only a supreme
arrogance : it constitutes a public danger against which we should be
prepared to legislate. 4
The rest of Scruton's argument quickly becomes rather uninteresting

and increasingly predictable. In its next step it turns to the question of
where and how an architect òf modest ability' could learn the àes-
thetic decencies': `The answer is to be found in aesthetic ``constants'',
whose value can be understood by whomsoever should choose to
build.' Those aesthetical constants then appear to be understood fully
by the `(neo)-classical vernacular'. 5
2. Scruton, `Àrchitectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism,'' 57.

5. Scruton, `Àrchitectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism,'' 59-60.

Scruton would certainly not count Ludwig Wittgenstein among
the ``lesser mortals'', although Wittgenstein was first trained as an
engineer and architect. Wittgenstein writes about his decision to quit
architecture after building his first (and last) house for his sister Gretl:
`... my house for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear,
good manners, the expression of great understanding (for a culture,
etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open is
lacking.'6 Wittgenstein writes that his own architecture is sensitive,
attentive to people's needs and wants, and respectful of habits and
expectations. He, like Scruton, even uses the expression ``good-man-
nered'', although their respective ideas about `àesthetic decency''
probably differ markedly. But Wittgenstein immediately gives two
reasons why his own good-mannered architecture does not satisfy and
does not do the job he wants it to do. First, the house testifies to the
sensitivity and understanding òf a culture': highly relative and directed
to a certain milieu and Zeitgeist. That which is meant and maybe even
experienced as `èssential architecture'' and ``true'' is deeply rhetorical.
The call to build `with respect for the World we share' comes down
to serve à culture' or to serve particular interests of those who like
classical vernacular, in Scruton's case. Wittgenstein's sociological
remark decisively relativises the moral and philosophical pretensions
of the architectural discourse on `humanizing the world', on `trans-
forming space into place', etc. Secondly, in the last sentence, Wittgen-
stein expresses his disappointment with his own work in terms that go
completely against Scruton's opinion of the task of architecture: `pri-
mordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open is lacking.'
Wittgenstein does not write, neutrally, ìs absent', but complains that it
ìs lacking'. Its lacking was reason enough for him to change profession
and turn to philosophy.
It is intriguing that in defining tasks and duties Scruton separates art
from architecture and treats them so differently. His theory would be
more consistent if he developed a similar argument to Ruskin's for the
arts as for architecture, defended the idea that art should visualise the
basic meanings by which a society lives, and facilitate living together
and mutual understanding instead of provoking dissent and conflict.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford : Blackwell, 1980), 43.

20 Bart Verschaffel
Why would idiosyncrasy, the use of a private language, and arbitrari-
ness be unacceptable for Architecture, but acceptable when it comes to
the arts? Scruton's case shows how broadly and deeply, even in the
mind of conservatists like him, has spread a certain modern concept of
art. This modern, romantic-vitalistic-expressionist concept of art,
which effectively found part of its origin in Wittgenstein's Vienna,
holds that art has the mission of breaking the old, hypocritical, empty,
frozen, petrified traditions and forms that keep Life imprisoned. Art
should reinvent life, find new beginnings, start all over again from
where ``good manners'' do not yet exist. Art should again be primitive
and wild and rejuvenate the world. In this, the artist is not committed
to a community to which he belongs; rather, he stands alone with no
direction home, working for the future of humankind instead of pleas-
ing the society in which he lives.
Der Mensch sein Kunst, die Kunst ihre Freiheit: Art for Humanity, Freedom for
Art! This motto of the Wiener Sezession contains the basic pro-
gramme of avant-garde and modern art in the twentieth century. Art
has freed itself, firstly, from the pressure coming from outside: art no
longer wants to work for patrons, or to be patriotic. Art no longer
wants to meet expectations, to provide beautiful things, luxury, or
class symbols. Secondly, art does not accept being limited from within:
it does not accept the canon, tradition, continuity. Art is certainly not
about craftsmanship. And on top of this, art no longer wants architec-
ture.
Art accepts, of course, the musuem as an institution. The existence of
the institution, as Arthur Danto and others have argued convincingly,
guarantees its autonomy. 7 It is the institution that transforms every
free gesture of the artist, no matter how boring or uninspired and
irrelevant, into art. Art, however, refuses the museum as architecture: as
a building with specific characteristics, limits, and possibilities, and a
specific history and place in the world, which frames the work of art
and situates it somewhere. Art prefers a neutral and empty environment.
It asks for zero-architecture, flexible architecture, or white cubes, which
are nothing but the addition of technical facilities without a ``face'' or
7. Compare Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art

(Cambridge & London : Harvard University Press, 1981).

a meaning. Art can agree to ``work'' in the museum, but only when it
can ``make interventions'' and only if it has the last word. So the
museum is not where art is `ìn its place'': it is the place where art can
most dramatically demonstrate how it distances itself from the world.
Art no longer needs to fight for its autonomy. Its absolute freedom
is already legitimised; indeed, society imposes that autonomy on her,
and wants art to be `ìll-mannered'' and ``wild''. Even the managers and
the politicians expect art to be provocative and to confront society
with what is ``beyond us'' and what is `ùnheimlich''. Critique is good;
trauma administered properly, in small doses is good for us.
The result of this development is, as has by now become clear,
problematic. Every artist produces work that is sometimes exceptional,
sometimes valuable, often mediocre. But when exposed within the vir-
tually unified exhibition space of The Art Institution, all these works
appear next to one another in one endless row of images, statements,
and actions, and they become all the same. They are all `àrt'', trying
to distinguish themselves by repeating the same gesture in a ``new''
way: to amaze, to provoke, to shock. Yet every gesture is already neu-
tralised. The autonomy is without effect; the freedom is noncommit-
tal. It's like bicycling on a home-trainer. In a discussion with Rem
Koolhaas a few years ago, Koolhaas gave this as his reason to keep
architecture away from the arts: Ì am stunned by the prerogatives art
dares to claim.' 8 To the freewheeling and non-committal freedom of
art he opposed the `dirty hands' of architecture, always caught in the
world, dealing with the power that has the money and commands the
architecture, dealing with the laws of gravity, technical limits, func-
tionality. Architecture is not free, not autonomous, and not pure, but
it deals fully with that which autonomous art lacks and longs for:
reality.
In a time span of less than a century, an important shift took place
in Western thinking from Wittgenstein to Koolhaas, from Bergson
and Simmel to Valery, Barthes, and Lefort in the ``basic metaphors''
or ``root metaphors'' we use to situate and name our existential con-
8. Camiel van Winkel & Bart Verschaffel, ``Ìk ben verbluft over de rechten die
het artistieke zich aanmeet' : Vraaggesprek met Rem Koolhaas'' [Ì am stunned by
the prerogatives art dares to claim' : A Conversation with Rem Koolhaas], De Witte
Raaf 109 (2004) : 6-8.

22 Bart Verschaffel
dition and cultural production. This shift in metaphors indicates,
I believe, an important paradigm-shift in relating to our ``modernity''
and to the mass of the past of all kinds heaped up in the world.
I believe that the romantic-vitalistic-expressionist dynamic, the ``life force'' that
goes against the fossilised and the lifeless, the courage and the daring
of the new wild life, solvation from the fear and the poverty of experi-
ence, is replaced by an existential strategy of retardation, and by the search
for resistance. The breakdown, interruption, opacity, objectness, punc-
tum, the beauty of the Berlin Wall: it is the obstacle that saves us from
the unreality of our constructions of meaning. It is not the `drive'' but the
resistance the presence of a counter-force that brings ``reality''. What is it, then,
that we seek? Wittgenstein gives up architecture because architec-
ture including his own architecture does not succeed in making
`the primordial, wild life erupt into the world'. When it comes to
overthrowing the existing and to feeling one's own drive and lust for
life, more is possible in the arts. Koolhaas, in contrast, opts for archi-
tecture, because art, caged in its own institutional autonomy, spins
around in the void, without touchstone, without resistance, without
reality, without relevance. Abstract artistic freedom however rich
and full and superb the experience may be means nothing compared
to a limitation one feels as a fact and a necessity. Architecture is, in our
present condition, relevant, not because architecture overthrows or repudi-
ates but because architecture clashes with reality and manoeuvres around
facts and givens.
This diagnosis is not new. During the last decade art has tried, in
many ways, to escape her golden cage and regain ``relevance'' to
mean something, to have an impact in the world by forcing a sense of
urgency, for instance, and maximising the `ìntensity'' of the art experi-
ence by mobilising the fundamental meanings by which people live,
those most resistant to relativisation, such as ``the body''. What hap-
pens to the body is always irreparable, definitive, heavy, and real. It is
the touchstone for any kind of relativism. 9 In the last decade many
artists have explored and visualised the modern body experience, the
body-image, the problematic identification with the body. Major work
9. See my article ``The Ubiquitous Body,'' in Witte de With Cahier 4 (March 1996) :
47-55.

has been done on an important topic neglected by both science and
academia; but a lot of this work remains sterile because of the lack of
critical response, and because the competition between artists encour-
ages them to make images that are ever more extreme. By now,
because we have seen the end, all possibilities seem exhausted, and
there is a general feeling that we have had everything. Even the most
extreme artistic statements, actions, or images cannot `òverthrow''
anything anymore or let `the wild primordial life erupt into the open'.
Art's options in the world and the possibilities with which it might
confront the viewer as an obstacle lie elsewhere: in looking for situa-
tions where a work can impose itself and can make a difference not
by dismantling the Art Institution or bringing art into the public
realm. The stunningly pretentious irrelevance of art is strictly linked to its institutional,
public space where the work is displayed and exposed, and to the assumption that art is
a primordially and necessarily public affair. I believe that, for the time being, a
work of art can function better only as an obstacle and be ``real''
and relevant in the private sphere and the intimacy of a life. The rel-
ative newness and the critical response, the hierarchy of names and
reputations, and the overviews and the sales lists now mean little. But
what might still count, now more than ever, is how one chooses a
work of art as one invites a friend or a companion to enter one's life
and living space. How one meets a work of art, why one likes it, what
one wants from it, how one deals with it and makes room for it, how
there are stories attached to it: those stories count. Not to collect and
publish them or again expose them in the museum this is a curator's
cheap trick already used up but to take them and mingle them with
one's own, and to pass them on. In the context of a life or a local com-
munity, in the intimacy of a living space or working space, a work of
art can make a real difference, more so than the most extreme or radical
artistic statement in a museum. One can create conditions for people
who want to `àdopt'' art, those who want to choose a work, care for
it, watch it age, find out how to live with it, and realise that it will sur-
vive them.
How is it for architecture? A few years ago, Claus Dreyer, in his
article ``The Crisis of Representation in Contemporary Architecture'',
made a diagnosis that answers to Scruton's plea for a well-mannered
communal architecture in his own vocabulary: `There is no common

24 Bart Verschaffel
``language'' in architecture through which common experience, ideas,
hopes, values, traditions, and conventions could be expressed, just as
there is no common ground in society for these issues.' 10 There is not
one community; there is not one ``we'' that can talk to an `ùs''; there
are many cultures and many languages. Dreyer finds that a few àrtisti-
cally outstanding individuals' with a `God-like reputation' àrticulate
their ``private language'' by unique means'.11 But their idiosyncratic
architecture gains a public character, not because the language is
shared but because their icon-architecture is known to everybody, like
a trademark. Dreyer's rather frivolous conclusion is that in today's Ba-
bel one has to make a virtue of this need and to choose freely between
`so many different forms of architectural representation' architectures
that, all in all, do not represent anything but their label.
The disintegration of the disciplinary tradition of classical and
modernist architecture into the Babel of star-architectures does not
mean that these architects and their patrons are now more free. Star-
architects are hired to build the few icons needed for prestige. Kool-
haas has made a lucid and despairing analysis of this condition of
artistic irrelevance of the contemporary star architecture. The discipline
of architecture has not just lost its tradition and its dignity but also
most probably because of this lost its relative autonomy due to an
overabundance of ``reality''. It is not the weight of the tradition, nor the
material and technical limitations, nor the shortage of space or the
inherent slowness of planning and building, but the game of money
and power and the development of a global building industry that
have disconnected the discipline of architecture from the project of
``Making the World''.
The market economy has taken away the basis of architecture and the
grounds of all her claims by at least 80 percent. The architect no more
works for the common good nor for a public administration with good
intentions. The clients are now individuals and companies, who have
all kinds of interests but are rarely connected to morals. Architecture's
10. Claus Dreyer, ``The Crisis of Representation in Contemporary Architec-

ture,'' Semiotica 143, nos. 1-4 (2003) : 163-83, esp. 180.
11. Dreyer, ``The Crisis of Representation in Contemporary Architecture,'' 180.

claim to dignity and moral value, which used to revolt us so much, has
already evaporated. 12
The survival conditions for architecture which, on one hand, is in-

evitably a conservative discipline incapable of overthrowing anything
or making any `wild life erupt' in the world, but which is capable, on
the other hand, of effectively making meaning real in the world are
endangered when the ``reality'' of the market economy is so over-
whelming that architecture seems incapable of making any ``differ-
ence'' at all. One could expect that, in these circumstances, Koolhaas
would quit architecture as did Wittgenstein, and also start a new
life in philosophy, for example. That is exactly what Koolhaas did,
but within the discipline of architecture itself. Rather than quit architecture, he
founded, next to his activities as a building architect (OMA), full of
compromises and frustrations, AMO. AMO is a study centre that op-
erates independently of or in cooperation with academic institutions,
and practises architecture and design as a purely intellectual discipline,
unconnected to building and independent of the building industry.
Koolhaas's shadow office where the same people use the same com-
petences and intelligence to think about the same issues as those on
which OMA is working, but now disconnected from the ``real'' world
of money and power defines a model exactly because AMO does
not look for shelter under the autonomy of art. This pragmatic solu-
tion has a general relevance. AMO institutionalises, next to the `ùn-
reality'' of architectural schools and academic discourse, but within the
discipline of architecture itself, a position for architectural thinking or design.
The kind of thinking one can call ``design'' is a relatively new kind of
intellectual competence that operates in terms of ``commission'' (defin-
ing a situation by naming the problem, locating the urgencies, the re-
sources, and the needs) and of ``proposals'' (formulating and conceptu-
ally testing possibilities). Architecture as a discipline could once,
but certainly no more claim to `decorate and humanize the world'.
But in the current circumstances Koolhaas's investigative design-with-
out-building can effectively intervene in societal life and have an impact.
Design as a problem-orientated intellectual practice can adapt to and
12. van Winkel & Verschaffel, ``Ìk ben verbluft over de rechten die het artis-
tieke zich aanmeet','' 6. Trans. Bart Verschaffel.

26 Bart Verschaffel
deal with different contexts, connect different types of institutions, and
combine different types of knowledge, including artistic strategies. Its
``proposals'' can make a difference, more so than the average work of
art or artistic statement. This explains perhaps why art has recently
been so greedy as to incorporate `àrchitecture'' see Documenta
XII in an attempt to import relevance and involvement into the
arts.
With all that, really built architecture, even the fetishised and overex-
posed icon-architecture of the star-architects, remains resistant in a way
critical architectural discourse or an investigative design practice never
can. A building that is not just the outcome of an investment logic
and is not just a commodity, but somehow qualifies as a ``cultural
fact'' because it answers to the question of ``what architecture is
about'', does something in the world. Architecture does not have to be
a manifesto or a ``beginning'' or the promise to make the world heim-
lich. A piece of architecture stands in the world as an obstacle, just as
the work of art is an obstacle in a private interior, and a reflexive state-
ment an obstacle in the midst of gossip: as an obstacle, as a touch-
stone, as a monument. Just as a modest building, when it lasts long
enough, becomes a monument because it accumulates time and
reminds us of the existence of time without ``representing'' anything,
so too can a piece of architecture, isolated and alone in the world,
remind us better, and ``public'' in a different way from art that
more is possible.

Architecture and the Systems of the Arts ;
or, Kant on Landscape Gardening
John Macarthur
From the middle of the eighteenth century to end of the nineteenth,

architecture was conventionally placed alongside poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, and so on, as one art among a system, or, as it was
sometimes put, a division of the arts. In this chapter, I will discuss the
recentness of our ideas of art and ``the arts'' and then the place given
to architecture among the art disciplines in the influential systems of
the eighteenth century: those of the Abbe Batteux, Denis Diderot and
Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Immanuel Kant. 1 Today these systems
seem curious at best a bureaucratic vision of culture that is also aris-
tocratic in its attempt to rank the arts by nobility and even more ab-
surd for the very low place that, in general, architecture was said to oc-
cupy. Nevertheless, I aim to show that these systems reward attention,
not because they have organisational or explanatory powers but be-
cause they put in a different light and under a different order the issues
of the present.
These issues involve the nature of art in the so-called post-medium
condition, where the material basis of art practice has to a large degree
become disarticulated from a concept of medium. 2 Thus artists such
as Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky are said to have revived the problem-
atic of history painting, but using photographic processes. Numerous
1. In fact this project continues in some corners of academia. See, for example
Bulat M. Galeyev, ``The New `Laokoon' : A Periodic System of the Arts,'' Leonardo
24, no. 4 (1991) : 453-56.
dition (New York : Thames & Hudson, 1999).

28 John Macarthur
artists, such as Jorge Pardo, practise by what looks like building, and
yet we understand a disciplinary division between this kind of work
and architecture, no matter how conceptual, ephemeral, or without
function a ``critical'' architectural project might be. We could charac-
terise the situation by saying that the basis of medium has changed
from material constraints to ideational constraints that typically arise
from the internal questions of an art discipline. The categorical distinc-
tions and confusions that arise in a post-medium condition are often
seen as merely a matter of lexical convenience that ought not constrain
the free interaction of artists and architects. I will argue to the contrary,
that the question of disciplinarity, of the internal conceptual and his-
torical coherence of a discipline such as architecture, is all the more at
stake if there is no medium given to it if space, building, and even
the idea of architecture could also be the medium of the visual arts.
The eighteenth-century systems that interest me are not shy of cate-
gorising. They explicitly attempt to find principles with which to dif-
ferentiate the arts and to arrange them in a hierarchy of nobility or seri-
ousness. Some of the ensuing contradictions and confusions are risible,
but the parallels they offer also have the effect of making our present
categories seem strange and arbitrary. Beyond the precedent and com-
parison that these systems of the arts offer for current debates is the
question of history. The direct links between present-day and eight-
eenth-century systems of the arts are tenuous when compared to the
great foundation that eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory gave
to the modern world. The conceptual heritage of Rosalind Krauss's
concept of differential specificity in a post-medial condition runs back
through Clement Greenberg to Kant's `Ànalytic of the Beautiful'' in
his Critique of Judgement. 3 What interests me here is that, at a discursive
level, Krauss is also indebted to the latter section of Kant's book,
where he gives a hierarchy of the arts and struggles to decide on issues
such as the relative nobility of architecture and landscape gardening.
An important aspect of the systems of the arts is that they predate
philosophical aesthetics and hence a modern concept of art. Oscar
3. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston : Beacon Press,
1961) ; Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Mer-
edith (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1911) ; Krauss, North Sea.

Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 29
Kristeller, in his foundational text ``The Modern System of the Arts''
(1951-52) shows that our present concept of art did not really exist
until the project of philosophical aesthetics, of which the systems of
the arts are a part. 4 From its ancient origins to the Renaissance, the
word `àrt'' was applied generally to skills and the mastery of knowl-
edge. What we nowadays call `àrt'' emerged in the eighteenth century
with the qualification beaux arts, the fine arts. It did so by combining
three old ideas with a new one. The first old idea is that of a structured
division of knowledge inherited from antiquity and developed in the
curriculum of the ``liberal arts'' of the medieval schools: trivium (gram-
mar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy). Of the `àrts'' that we enjoy today, only music would
have been called so in the scholastic tradition. The second old idea is
the ancient prejudice against manual labour, which was the work of
slaves undertaken at the direction of free men. This developed as a dis-
tinction between liberal and mechanical arts. The trivium and quadrivium
were liberal arts because they were not applied by necessity or by man-
ual labour, nor in order to produce items of use or sale; they com-
prised intellectual work freely chosen and where the product was an
end in itself. Applying this distinction to manual trades such as paint-
ing and building so that, for instance, representational painting could
be categorically distinguished from more prosaic uses of pigment was
the great achievement of Renaissance thinkers on art. Although
Alberti was successful in using the idea of the liberal arts to reform
architecture and painting, in the Renaissance there was no concept of
``the arts'' in a modern sense (which would, for instance, exclude
astronomy). This emerged much later. Equally foreign to us, Renais-
sance discussions of beauty were not connected to the arts but to the
human body and personal beauty.
4. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ``The Modern System of the Arts : A Study in the His-
tory of Aesthetics,'' Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951) : 496-527 (Part 1) ;
13, no. 1 (1952) : 17-46 (Part 2). Republished as Paul Oskar Kristeller, ``The Mod-
ern System of the Arts,'' in RenaissanceThought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton,
NJ : Princeton University Press, 1990) ; L. E. Shiner, Invention of Art: ACultural His-
tory (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2001). Contrast James I. Porter, `Ìs
Art Modern ? Kristeller's `Modern System of the Arts' Reconsidered,'' British Jour-
nal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (2009) : 1-24.

30 John Macarthur
The third old idea is the origin of our present discussion: the trope
of the paragone or the contest of the arts. In the Renaissance, artists and
writers revived and developed the classical idea of ut pictura poesis, in
which Horace had explored parallels between poetry and painting. 5
Alberti, in De Pictura (1435), recast the theme of comparison as one
between painting and sculpture, and by the sixteenth century this
became a well-known trope for competitions between orators, even
between artists who made works intended to show the superiority of
one or the other in figural representation. Such debates were similar to
those between medicine and law, and characteristic of the importance
of precedence in courtly societies. The most sophisticated development
of this ancient formula was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon oder
Uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie of 1766, in which he attempted to
define the relative strengths of poetry and painting in imitation of
space and time with the aim of defining the medium of each in empiri-
cal terms and beyond the simple contrast of their abilities. 6
What transformed these older ideas into the modern system of the
arts was philosophical aesthetics, specifically French and German
uptakes of British empiricism. Aesthetics supposes there is a sensory
basis, or a critical judgement of sensory experience, which accounts
for feelings of the beautiful in nature and in art. The arts in the mod-
ern sense the beaux arts then formed a group separate to the arts
of astronomy, gastronomy, or carpentry, and based on feelings of
beauty that only they and natural beauties aroused. Like earlier ideas
of the interdependence of the liberal arts, the ``fine arts'' formed a set,
a different and self-contained sphere of knowledge belonging to a dif-
ferent faculty of mind. This new idea of aesthetic feeling was based on
philosophical distinctions between perception and cognition, and
hence separated taste from reason and morality. The liberal/mechanical
distinction articulated the relation of knowledge of art to reason and
science. Art and aesthetic feeling for nature were thought to be not
self-interested or goal-directed in the way that virtue or reason are. In
5. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; the Humanist Theory of Painting (New York :
W. W. Norton and Co., 1967).
6. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoo n : An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984).

the aristocratic societies of the time, this gave continuity to ancient
ideas of prejudice against manual work, for the free and fine arts were
supposed to be enjoyed by gentlefolk who had the personal freedom
to cultivate their aesthetic faculty. Thus it was that the fine arts, usu-
ally said to be painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry,
formed a discrete area of human activity. The fine arts were held to be
distinct from other kinds of practical ``crafts'' because the latter were
conducted with manual dexterity, which was valued over cognition,
and had an aim in utility. Equally, the arts, because they exercised aes-
thetic feeling, were distinct from other purely mental work such as the
former ``liberal'' arts, which were now sciences, knowledges based on
the pure exercise of reason over phenomena.
Before looking at how architecture is placed as an art in eighteenth-
century systems, it is necessary to account for subsequent ideas of art.
A part of the present-day interest of the systems is their unequivocal
categorisation of architecture as an art, a matter that has subsequently
become confused. Today ``the arts'', with the definite article, is perhaps
a memory of ``the beaux arts'', which might include architecture, music,
and dance (strangely, it rarely means literature). The word `àrt'', how-
ever, without the definite article, has come to mean those things that
go in art galleries and are taught at art schools: painting and sculpture,
which are sometimes called the ``visual arts'' to the chagrin of sculptors.
Of course, in the contemporary art world, disciplines and media are in
great flux, and the terms ``painting'' and ``sculpture'' better reflect insti-
tutional memories than actual disciplines. Photography is perhaps the
most popular means for contemporary artists, but today the graduates
of arts schools tend to call themselves artists, whether they press shut-
ters, merge pixels, weld metal, or paint with brushes on canvas, and
their product is, of course, `àrt'' a concept that has developed since
the eighteenth century to a now almost metaphysical level of generality,
despite being used, in an institutional sense, to name the narrowest set
of activities to which it has ever been applied.
As Thierry de Duve shows in Kant after Duchamp, much of twentieth-
century artistic culture can be divided into two camps. 7 First are those
7. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1996).
James Elkins, ed., Art HistoryVersus Aesthetics, The Art Seminar, vol. 1 (New York :
Routledge, 2006).

32 John Macarthur
who think there is art-as-such practised by the available means and
variously constrained by institutional investments in the disciplines
and institutions. Second are those who think that art is merely an
umbrella category in which to group the likes of painting, architec-
ture, video art: disciplines with a concrete history of progressing inter-
nal problematics proper to them. The latter position is the older one,
and its most prominent proponent is the historian and critic Michael
Fried, who has developed a sophisticated and historicised version of
the formalism of Clement Greenberg. If art is merely a consortium of
disciplines, then there is not much at stake in calling architecture an
art, as it was in the eighteenth century. Indeed, architecture would be
an art because of this history, but its driving questions would be its
own. The former position most prominently put by Rosalind
Krauss, but also by de Duve is the more dominant position in the
visual arts of today, where inter-disciplinarity is almost compulsory
and where the post-medium condition seems to require artists to pro-
duce the equivalent of a medium and a discipline from their own
work. The concept that there is art-as-such requires the foundation of
aesthetics. If one thinks that an artist can go beyond the historical
problematics given to them in the history of their discipline, then this
must be given in a native aesthetic sensibility anterior to `àrt'' and its
disciplines. Thus much contemporary visual-arts discourse does not
include architecture on grounds going back to the eighteenth century
and the idea that the utility of architecture makes it less good an occa-
sion of aesthetic feeling. Within that view remains the older prejudice
against the ``mechanical'', by which architects, being commissioned,
are acting out the instructions of others and are therefore less free.
Across its history, architecture has more often than not refused or
avoided the label `àrt''. Like the other, now visual arts, in the Renais-
sance architecture was a kind of rhetoric attempting persuasion and
communication rather than a programme of sensation and affect. It is
only in the eighteenth century with the definition of architecture by
Nicholas le Camus de Mezieres as an art of sensations, by Etienne-
Louis Boullee as an art of volume, and in the English picturesque as a
sequential visual experience that we find a strong idea of architecture
as an art in the aesthetical sense. 8 This has always been the minority
8. Etienne-Louis Boullee, Architecture, essai sur l'art, ed. Jean-Marie Perouse de

theory of architecture as, at roughly the same time, Marc-Antoine
Laugier's grafting of ideas of rhetoric onto construction produced the
more dominant idea of architecture as a legible civic language. 9 In the
twentieth century, much of the architectural profession desired archi-
tecture to be a science, a kind of engineering married to Taylorist ideas
of organisational efficiency. Those who thought of architecture as an
art were generally on the aesthetic side of the argument, from Heinrich
Wolfflin and August Schmarsow onwards, thinking of architecture as
the art-as-such, the art that affected the whole sensorium through the
relatively new concept of space as an object of sense of the whole
body. 10 Similarly, the Arts & Crafts movement in architecture was
the first point at which the liberal/mechanical split that dominated
Western thought was brought under critique, and with it one of the
main pillars of the modern idea of art. The most interesting and pro-
gressive `àrtistic'' architects of the twentieth century did not think of
their products as artworks. What distinguishes the villas of Le Corbu-
sier over those of equally talented modernists of the 1920s was that his
houses were not intended to be unique instances of architectural art
but serial, reproducible buildings. For much of the last century, archi-
tecture has been defined as the art that did not produce artworks but
buildings that were instances of capacity applicable to the whole of hu-
man artifice. In the 1970s, architecture turned towards a concept of it-
Montclos (Paris : Hermann, 1968) ; `Àrchitecture, Essay on Art,'' in Boullee and

Visionary Architecture, ed. Helen Rosenau (London : Academy Editions, 1976) ;
Nicholas Le Camus de Mezieres, Genie de l'architecture, ou, L'analogie de cet art avec nos sen-
sations (Paris, 1780) ; The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensa-
tions (Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1992) ; Uvedale Price, Essays on the
Picturesque: As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and, on the Use of Studying Pictures
for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vols. (London : J. Mawman, 1810).
9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture (Paris : 1753) ; An Essay on the Study
and Practice of Architecture. Explaining theTrue Principles of the Science: Illustrated with Figures,
Elegantly Engraved, ... To Which Are Added, Directions for the Embellishment of Cities and the
Laying out of Gardens, 305 ed. (London : Stanley Crowder & Henry Woodgate,
1756).
10. August Schmarsow, ``The Essence of Architectural Creation'' ; and Heinrich
Wolfflin, ``Prolegomena to a Pyschology of Architecture,'' both in Empathy, Form
and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave &
Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1994).

34 John Macarthur
self as an art, but one founded on its intellectual autonomy, its own in-
ternal problematic, rather than a role played in consort with other arts.
To take a bearing on the present-day convergence of architecture
and the arts, the main lines of this history need to be understood: the
recentness of the beaux arts and their connection to an aesthetic concept
of beauty; the older history in which architecture, painting, and sculp-
ture were related and compared without a concept of art; the conflict
between an historical conventionalist account of art disciplines and a
claiming of an aesthetic faculty as the basis for art-as-such; and the par-
adox that the main distinction between architecture and the visual arts
in the twentieth century was the obverse views they have taken on
matters foundational for both whether art-as-such exists. If, by
necessity, this essay has been a sketch thus far, I hope it will suffice to
justify a closer examination of one small part of the history of this
question.
The Abbe Charles Batteux's treatise Les beaux-arts reduits a un meme
principe of 1746 is the point at which a modern concept of art and the
arts is formed. 11 Batteux names five fine arts: music, poetry, painting,
sculpture, and dance, which are distinguished from the mechanical arts
on their two effects of pleasure and usefulness. 12 Architecture sits with
eloquence in an intermediate category of arts that combines pleasure
with usefulness. Batteux thus includes architecture in the ancient hier-
archy that praises poetry and invention over rhetoric and persuasion.
Batteux's system also had the advantage of familiarity in that the fine
arts he lists were all understood by ancient writers to be imitative arts,
and architecture was not. Batteux is more innovative in extending the
meaning of the ancient concept of mimesis by linking it to our taking
pleasure in beauty. Drawing on John Locke and Voltaire, he thought
that our knowledge of beauty has its origins in taking pleasure in the
experience of nature, and that the fine arts could be defined as the
faithful imitation of the beauty of nature. Thus the idea of `àrt'' as a
whole was bolstered not only by the supposition of a faculty attuned
11. Kristeller, ``The Modern System of the Arts,'' 199.

12. In this section, as well as Kristeller I draw on Gita May and Gary Shapiro,
``French Aesthetics,'' in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Oxford Art Online,
http ://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0218 (accessed Janu-
ary 7, 2009).

to it and nature but also by the idea that divinely created nature was
the cause and end of human creative endeavours. The combination of
the mechanical and the useful was a recent idea. The earlier prejudice
against the mechanical arts is largely a social one, a contrast between
the manual work of the lower classes and the freely manipulated ideas
of the upper classes. Around 1700, however, the Earl of Shaftsbury
developed the distinction of the liberal and mechanical into the mod-
ern idea of disinterestedness.13 Just as true virtue was conducted with-
out expectation of a reward, so the fine arts would be conducted with-
out a use or a preconceived product. The ambiguous position into
which these concepts placed architecture remains today. Architecture
is obviously occasioned by use, and fails if it is not useful, yet this
end-point in a product does not govern the architect in the way that
utility rules in the design of pulleys and levers. Although architects
are contracted to build, to a large extent, their horizon, like that of
poets and painters, is a free contemplation of their art and hence
beauty.
The encyclopedists Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
placed architecture back into the company of painting and sculpture,
which it had enjoyed in the Renaissance. 14 They were impatient of the
denigration of practical knowledge, and mechanics formed a large and
honourable part of the Encyclopedie of 1751-72, which also included sig-
nificant articles on architecture by Diderot's friend Jacques-Franc ois
Blondel. In his crucial article ``Beau'', Diderot mentions architecture
ten times and painting (as a discipline) only three. He argues that Bat-
teux had been unable to define the `beautiful nature' that the fine arts
imitated. His own answer is that beauty is a pleasure we find in order
13. Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected
Letters and Posthumous Writings [Standard Edition: Samtliche Werke, ausgewahlte Briefe und nach-
gelassene Schriften], ed. Gerd Hemmerich & Wolfram Benda, vol. 15 (Stuttgart :
Frommann-Holzboog, 1981) ; Jerome Stolnitz, `Òn the Significance of Lord Shaf-
tesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,'' Philosophical Quarterly 11, no. 43 (1961) : 97-
113 ; Li Shiqiao, Virtue and Power: Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1660-1730
(London : Routledge, 2006).
14. Denis Diderot and Jean le Ron d'Alembert, Encyclopedie, 32 vols. (Paris,
1751-77). See also ``The Encyclopedia of Diderot & D'alembert Collaborative
Translation Project,'' http ://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/ (accessed January 9, 2009).

36 John Macarthur
among variety, a point he takes from Frances Hutchenson and which
he called the `rapports'. From Pere Andre he takes an opposition of
real to relative beauty, which must surely derive from the earlier idea
of material and customary beauty we find in Claude Perrault.15 Like
Perrault, Diderot supposes that we experience the existence of such
``rapports'' as harmonic proportion in a building without measuring
the ratios of members, and it is in this sense that a building is like
nature, if not an imitation in the strict sense. Diderot suggests there is
a relative beauty by which we judge one building more beautiful than
another, and that this involves a knowledge of architecture, such as
the right proportions of the orders of columns. Diderot does not pro-
pound a system for the arts, unlike d'Alembert, whose ``Discours pre-
liminaire'' to the Encyclopedie contains a Map of the System of Human
Knowledge.
D'Alembert's system takes its primary division from Francis Bacon
and divides knowledge into three kinds of understanding with their
attendant knowledges: Memory and History, Reason and Philosophy,
and Imagination and Poetry. The diagram is confusing as a system of
the arts; in Memory and Reason each knowledge is clearly placed in a
hierarchy under the master terms, whereas in Imagination one straight
line separates the genres and forms of poetry from a ranked set of
music, painting, sculpture, civil architecture, and engraving. One
assumes that these latter arts have access to imagination without being
poetry. Equally interesting is that ``practical architecture'' falls under
the heading of Memory. Practical architecture, along with practical
sculpture, masonry, and tiling, appears under the heading Ùses of
Stone and Plaster', which is one of the arts and crafts of manufacture,
which is a kind of use of nature, and lies under the master heading of
natural history. This is not consistent with the Encyclopedie as a whole.
Blondel, in his article `Àrchitecture'', divided the topic into civil
architecture, and military and naval architecture, but he only treats the
15. Wolfgang Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, Studies in Architecture,

vol. 12 (London : A. Zwemmer, 1973) ; Claude Perrault, Abrege des dix livres d 'archit-
tecture de Vitruve (Paris, 1674) ; An Abridgement of the Architecture of Vitruvious (London :
Able Swall & T. Child, 1692) ; Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes selon la methode des an-
cien (Paris, 1683) ; Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients
(Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1993).

first, which, as he points out, is typically called architecture. He makes
no mention of ``practical architecture'' in that entry, but in another
article, ``School of Architecture'', he describes the curriculum of his
own school, the Ecole des arts, which emphasises site visits, construc-
tional knowledge, and costing, alongside the academic and creative
studies. The idea of a practical architecture, of the accumulation and
dissemination of a common knowledge of materials and their con-
structional properties, is quite like Perrault's division of architectural
beauty into the positive and the arbitrary.16 For Perrault, the positive
beauties are those of materials and their working, whereas everything
the Encyclopedie calls civil architecture would be arbitrary in the sense
of what is customary. One must assume, however, that both aspects
of Diderot's beauty pleasure in sensing the existence of rapports
within a building, and the relative beauty of understanding the rap-
ports between a building, other buildings, and architectural ideas
must both be aspects of Imagination.
Kant admired Diderot's essay on beauty, but his aesthetics con-
tained in the Critique of Judgment surpassed all previous aesthetics in its
rigour. It remains the strongest philosophical form of modern ideas of
aesthetic feelings and practices. Diderot, like all previous thinkers on
the topic, believed that at some level beauty was objective, residing in
beautiful objects. He explicitly repudiates personal taste as the basis of
beauty, saying that although it might seem that beauty exists at the
point where we prefer one object to another, and although personal
tastes vary, this is because we are so habituated to attend to ``rap-
ports'' what British thinkers later called associations that we do
not realise that aesthetic feeling follows a kind of reasoning. Kant
takes the opposite tack and argues that beauty exists in judgments of
taste and is fundamentally subjective: beauty is what we feel, not a
quality of objects. In the `Ànalytic of the Beautiful'', Kant gives four
`moments' of his analysis, each describing conditions that are to be sat-
isfied if we are to be sure that our judgement is aesthetic, as opposed
16. On this reading of Perrault see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Archi-
tects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1980).

38 John Macarthur
to an act of reason or a realisation of morality.17 The first condition of
this analytic is that we must have no interest in the actual existence of
the object, only the pleasure it gives us. Kant distinguishes this pure
pleasure from `àgreeableness'', where a desire is satisfied, and from
the pleasure we find in the good, which we ought to find. The second
condition is that when we make the judgement that a tree is beautiful
we imagine that no person should disagree. The judgement of beauty
is thus universal, but it is so without a concept. That is to say there is
no concept of the beauty of trees on which we have prior agreement.
If that were the case, our judgement would be rational, not aesthetic,
as we would be comparing the object to its concept. The third condi-
tion says that we admire in beauty the form of the purposiveness of an
object, but not its purpose. To admire the beauty of a tulip is to ad-
mire the form of its completeness and is distinct from the botanist's
admiration of the flower as a reproductive mechanism. The fourth
`moment' is related to the second: supposing not only that none
should disagree with our judgement but also that all will necessarily
agree with us, giving rise to a ``common sense'' that governs the rela-
tion of sensation to feeling, meaning that beauty is necessarily inter-
subjective.
Fine art for Kant is a kind of human productivity that imitates
God's creativity. It appears to be natural, although we know it is
not.18 Kant still has the older sense of art as making and makers'
knowledge, what we call `craft' in current usage. This is not aesthetic,
however, for the reason of the third moment of the analytic of the
beautiful craft has a purpose. Similarly, Kant rules out of aesthetic
judgement what he calls the `àgreeable arts'', as in entertaining con-
versation, in which we have an interest because it is conducted with
the aim of enjoyment. By contrast, fine-art objects are intrinsically
final, whole in themselves without reference to the use or pleasure they
might entail. Nature is in this, the model of art and superior to it, but
Kant also thinks there are aesthetic ideas that exist only in the fine
arts. 19 Fine art is the result of genius where an artist, by their talent,
17. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1-22.

18. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 45.
19. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 17, 57.

goes beyond the established rules of art and thinks newly created aes-
thetic ideas that are equivalent to new conceptual knowledge. 20
Kant's aesthetics and his definitions of fine art remain the definitive
explanation of our uses of beauty and art in the modern world. With
his rigorous subjectivism, however, it is surprising that Kant supposes
he can make a `division of the fine arts' and a `comparative estimate of
the worth of the fine arts'. 21 He is aware of this problem, stating that
his division is a possible scheme and not a definite theory. He also sug-
gests that the best approach to analysing the arts would be to divide
them into the expression of thoughts and intuitions. But this would
be, he writes, `too abstract and less in line with popular conceptions'.
He then gives a discussion of the familiar fine-art disciplines. The first
level of Kant's division is anthropological: word, gesture, and tone
(according to him) being the three armatures of human expression.
These become the arts of speech (poetry and rhetoric), formative art
(painting and plastic art), and `the play of sensation' (music and `the
art of colour'). Architecture is, along with sculpture, a plastic art. Kant
then gives an estimation of the aesthetic worth of the arts, and this is a
gradient across his three categories. Music is the lowest of these
because it is difficult to distinguish between the mere agreeableness of
tones and harmony and the `beautiful play of sensations' that is the
sense of musical form a listener might have. 22 `The art of colour' is
the most obscure, as it is clearly not painting as an art, and nor could
it be decor, which would be merely agreeable. It could be that Kant is
thinking of the experimental colour harpsichords of his time, for
which Georg Philipp Telemann composed in 1739. 23 Kant assumes,
rather than argues, the superiority of poetry over painting, and within
the arts of speech follows the traditional valuation of poetry over rhet-
oric.
Of the formative arts, he prefers painting to the plastic arts. Sculp-
ture and architecture are sensuous truths, as we truly sense them like

22. Herman Parret, ``Kant on Music and the Hierarchy of the Arts,'' Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (1998) : 251-64.
23. Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts (London :
Reaktion, 2008), 128.

40 John Macarthur
objects of nature. By contrast, paintings are sensuous semblances of
that which they represent, and, Kant implies, superior because, not
being objects, they are more easily combined with ideas. The problem
of sculpture is that the truer it is to its idea, the more easily we might
mistake it for a natural object. Kant thus defines architecture and its
aesthetic potential:
[Architecture] is the art of presenting concepts of things which are pos-
sible only through art, and the determining ground of whose form is
not nature but an arbitrary end and of presenting them both with a
view to this purpose and yet, at the same time, with aesthetic finality.
In architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to
which, as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited. 24
Architecture's limits are then manifold. Aesthetic ideas are the obverse
of concepts for Kant: Reason deals in concepts; the Imagination, in
ideas. Thus when architecture presents `concepts of things only possi-
ble through art' (in the broader sense of artifice), rather than semblan-
ces of nature, it moves it down a peg. It is common for lay-people
and readers of Kant to think that architecture cannot be art because it
must be useful; however, Kant is more subtle than this. If architecture
necessarily implied utility (or pleasingness) it would not be a fine art
at all, whereas, as we have seen, it is included as such and regarded as
superior to music. Although we can consider a building as possessing
its own finality, without thought of its use, architecture nevertheless
has a concept of this subsequent use. (Were we to consider how well
or badly it performs against this use in which we have no interest, we
would make a judgement of reason not an aesthetic judgement.)
Kant gives a high place in his hierarchy to landscape gardening,
which he claims is a kind of painting. 25 It is surprising that this
implies superiority to sculpture and architecture. He follows new ideas
of gardening at stake in the term ``landscape'', which we read in his
curious description of gardening as being like ``simple aesthetic paint-
ing'' (what we would now call landscape painting), as that which `by
means of light and shade makes a pleasing composition of atmosphere,

25. Also see Lucia H. Albers, ``The Perception of Gardening as Art,'' Garden
History 19, no. 2 (1991), 163-74.

land, and water.' He goes on: Ìn addition I would place under the
26
head of painting, in the wide sense, the decoration of rooms by means

of hangings, ornamental accessories, and all beautiful furniture the sole
function of which is to be looked at.' In Kant's time, both gardens
and furnishing would have been understood as ornaments to a build-
ing, and elsewhere he is dismissive of parerga, or ornament such as `the
frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of pala-
ces', which are supplementary to a work.27 Here it seems that a garden
is not an ornament to a building if it is not an added gratification of
the senses, but rather that its design and form are the objects of taste.
It is not clear how furnishing and decor could be understood as the
fine art of painting rather than as ornamental and agreeable arts. Jac-
ques Derrida has pointed out that Kant's aesthetics falls apart at this
point, as his clearest examples of aesthetic finality are decorative, agree-
able, extraneous, and supplementary abstract forms. 28 Kant does
briefly treat the combination of the fine arts, and here the example he
has in mind seems to be musical theatre, which he regards as ultimately
about enjoyment rather than ideas.29 Perhaps a building and its garden
could be thought of as Kant might understand a song, as a combina-
tion of poetry and music, but these familiar combinations of the arts
spoil their potential for thinking aesthetic ideas. Gardens, he writes,
have a `semblance of use', but he does not explain how this differs
from architecture's actual utility. 30 It seems that the productivity of a
garden landscape does not constrain it from shifting into semblance
and evoking aesthetic ideas. The habitability of a building, however,
remains an end point for architecture, meaning that architects must
put concepts ahead of aesthetic ideas.
26. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51 Kant might well have been per-
suaded on this by C. C. L. Hirschfeld's Theorie der Gartenkunst, Engl. ed. Theory of
Garden Art, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
28. Jacques Derrida, `Èconomimesis,'' Diacritics (June 1981) : 2-25 ; La Verite en
peinture (Paris : Flammarion, 1978), Engl. ed. TheTruth in Painting, trans. J. Benning-
ton & I. McLeod (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987).

42 John Macarthur
What has confused Kant is that picturesque landscape gardening is
the first intermedial art. His acceptance of the tradition of the fine arts
means that he has also accepted a differentiation of media. Although
he does not say that building is the medium of architecture, and
although he fails to differentiate the two media of sculpture (carving
marble and casting bronze), his descriptions of their sensory properties
are based on traditional examples. By contrast, he denies that `grasses,
flowers, shrubs, and trees, and even water, hills, and dales' are the
material of landscape gardening, claiming instead that gardens pro-
duced the `sensuous semblance' of these same materials.31 In short,
landscape gardens take as their medium another art-form: painting,
imitating not nature but art. This differs from the combination of
poetry and music in song, or the contest of the arts in the paragone.
The fuller meaning of the picturesque began with William Gilpin's
project of the 1780s to apply Roger de Piles's rules of painting compo-
sition. 32 In this he married contemporary French art theory to a British
empirical account of subject experience such as that of David Hume's,
Francis Hutcheson's, Joseph Addison's, and Edmund Burke's. Gilpin
had produced a new art practice based on the aesthetic ideas (in Kant's
terms) learned from painting.
Although Schopenhauer elaborated Kant's aesthetics and his system
of the arts, this collective project effectively ended with Georg W. F.
Hegel. Hegel famously reversed the usual thinking by claiming that
the beauty of nature is a conjecture we make from concepts learnt in
art. 33 Art and aesthetic feeling could not be based on nature because
art developed. Thus Hegel's division of art into symbolic, classic, and
romantic modes is also fundamentally historical, proceeding from the
ancient symbolic form to the Romanticism of Hegel's time. The apo-
gees of each of the succeeding periods are architecture, sculpture, and
music. Architecture is the oldest form of art and thus, because it was

32. On Gilpin's project, refer to John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Dis-
gust and Other Irregularities (London : Routledge, 2007), 20-40.
33. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder sthetik. Nach Hegel.
Im Sommer 1826. Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler, eds. A. Gethmann-
Siefert & B. Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004) ; Introduc-
tory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. B. Bosanquet (London : Penguin, 1993).

conceived in the world of Pharaohs, was the least capable of artistic
expression in the nineteenth century, in the age of Beethoven. Con-
versely, though, architecture is an important art as it is a continual
reminder of origin. Since Hegel, it has been possible to compare art
and artworks one to the other not only on the basis of their pleasing-
ness or aesthetic ideas but also on whether they progress or retard
the development of human spirit. Thinking like Hegel's, and later
Friedrich Nietzsche's, which was to dominate late-nineteenth-century
thought on art, does not lend itself to the kind of systematising and
diagramming that interests us here.
Anthony Vidler recently remarked on the conceptual anxiety of inter-

disciplinary practice where there is no clear differentiation of architec-
ture from the spatial practices of the visual arts, a concern shared by
contributors to the present volume. He has borrowed a term for this
from Rosalind Krauss: `Following several decades of self-imposed
autonomy, architecture has recently entered a greatly expanded
field.' 34 Vidler's èxpanded field' of architecture can be surveyed be-
tween landscape, biological form, programme, and self-referential ar-
chitectural language, and he notes the prevalence of a kind of axio-
matic thinking that makes these terms like opposing poles of a
diagram. Thus what we know of the so-called landscape urbanism de-
rives from its opposition to the biomorphic. The former is about field
conditions, subjects, and perception; the latter, about objects and
form. Landscape urbanism has an affinity with ``programme'', through
which architects like Rem Koolhaas have reasserted what we might
call the ``form of content'', and this is in explicit opposition to the for-
malism in which form is understood in natively architectural terms
(the form of form). 35 Vidler's model is Krauss's article ``Sculpture in
the Expanded Field'' of 1979, in which she used a Greimasian semiotic
34. Anthony Vidler, `Àrchitecture's Expanded Field,'' in Architecture between Spec-

tacle and Use: Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown,
Mass. : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute ; New Haven : Yale University
Press, 2008), 150.
35. Rem Koolhaas and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Content (Cologne :
Taschen, 2004).

44 John Macarthur
square to explain the mutually defining oppositions of architecture,
sculpture, and landscape, and the forces that were changing the con-
cept of site. 36 Krauss's more recent work steps beyond seeing the art
disciplines as mutually defining. 37 She argues that there is only a dif-
ferential specificity of media, which artists produce work by work. In
the broader view, however, we can trace AVoyage on the North Sea back
to ``Passages in Modern Sculpture'', to Krauss's arguments with the
champion of formalist media specificity, Clement Greenberg, and his
``Toward a Newer La ocoon''; 38 to Lessing's original; and to the Ren-
aissance paragone that predates a concept of art.
Vidler's description of the decades of autonomy from which the
field of architecture is now expanding could also be described as a turn
from art to aesthetics. This is to say that the definitions of architecture
that have dominated since the 1970s assume ``the arts'' to be a consor-
tium of autonomous problematics with no underlying aesthetic princi-
ple. The turn that we are observing at the moment makes an assump-
tion that the relation of the arts is not merely contingent but is, rather,
founded on an aesthetic faculty that necessitates the arts and has the
potential to order their interactions, so that, for instance, visual artists
and architects will understand one another and work better together.
To think like this, however, would be to forget the earlier systems of
the arts, the disreputable side of aesthetic theory that wanted to nor-
malise the arts but could not even make a reasonable account of how
architects and landscape gardeners worked. Further, it is to misunder-
stand how much cultural history of the last centuries has been driven
by the instability of an aesthetic account of art. The current fashion
for diagramming all kinds of cultural phenomenon looks like the
eighteenth-century philosophical systems of the arts, but if this
moment is to be productive it will be best to think that such diagrams
are not firm concepts but `àesthetic ideas''.
36. Rosalind E. Krauss, ``Sculpture in the Expanded Field,'' in The Originality of

the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, ed. Rosalind E. Krauss (Cambridge, Mass. :
MIT Press, 1985), 276-90.
37. Krauss, North Sea.
38. Clement Greenberg, ``Towards a Newer La ocoon,'' Partisan Review 7, no. 4
(1940) : 296-310.

James Fergusson's Theory of
Architecture and the Phonetic Arts
Peter Kohane
According to the nineteenth-century British architectural historian

James Fergusson (1808-86), the design and construction of a building
can be understood in terms of human characteristics and their relation
to a three-part division of the arts. His major theoretical work, TheTrue
Principles of Architecture (1849), argued that muscular action created the
lowest of the three divisions, the ``technic'' arts; the senses gave rise
to `àesthetic'' arts; and the intellect was expressed in the highest cate-
gory, the ``phonetic'' arts.1 Within Fergusson's hierarchy, architecture
occupied a pre-eminent position, as it embodied all three groups: À
perfect building, such as the Parthenon or a mediaeval cathedral, be-
comes the exponent of the principal technic, aesthetic and phonetic
arts of the age in which they were erected.' Other art forms, such as
Greek drama, might also combine several categories of arts within it-
self, but unlike architecture, these were ephemeral. Àrchitecture alone
has hitherto been able to attract to itself so many arts in a permanent
form, and to transmit them to posterity.' 2 Thus, architecture became
the centre around which the entire exposition of the various categories
is structured.
My discussion of Fergusson's system of the arts will refer to its tech-
nic and aesthetic divisions but will focus intently on the phonetic. His
definition of a ``true style'' of architecture was predicated on a building
that displayed phonetic ornaments. An appreciation of this concept
1. See James Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art,
Especially with Reference to Architecture (London : Longman, 1849).
2. Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry, 104.

46 Peter Kohane
must acknowledge Fergusson's scholarly circle, which includes
researchers investigating the ways in which ideas were voiced and rep-
resented in visual forms. It is also necessary to address his assumption
that, in modern societies, the human intellect is best represented in the
phonetic art of literature, rather than that of painting or sculpture.
Despite the decline in significance of painters and sculptors, Fergusson
felt that their works would still contribute to a nineteenth-century
``true style'' of architecture. The difficulty was to determine modern
ideas worthy of illustration in the phonetic arts added to buildings.
In Fergusson's system, a significant religious or civic building has
ornaments whose purpose is to communicate ideas. These forms are
associated with the intellect. A human being may be inferior to the
lower animals in terms of muscular strength and acuteness of the
senses, but his or her mind is more complex. This led to the articulate,
vocal sounds of spoken languages. Such `phonetic utterances' were
impressed upon visual forms, including written texts, paintings, and
sculptures. 3 They served as the phonetic ornaments of a building, giv-
ing it the power of speech.
For Fergusson, the making of architecture was a collaborative effort
involving workers who cultivated and amplified the muscles, senses,
or intellect. Engineers contributed to the technic form, while architects
elevated this into the higher realm of aesthetic beauty. Constructed by
unskilled labourers, the design would provide shelter and delight the
beholder's eye. Transformed from its prosaic structural state through
the intervention of the architect, but not yet bearing phonetic orna-
ments, such a building was an example of the ``cal-aesthetic'' art of
architecture. Fergusson occasionally claimed it was architecture per se.
In the True Principles he therefore explained how
architecture can repeat no narrative, illustrate no book it imitates
nothing, illustrates nothing : it tells no tale, and barely manages to
express an emotion of joy or sorrow with the same distinctness with
which that can be expressed by the unphonetic brutes. 4
3. Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry, 115ff.


James Fergusson's Theory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts 47
Yet a building has the potential to convey ideas. It does so through
the contributions of several intellectual classes. Working in isolation
from engineers and architects, as well as builders, these intellectuals
were concerned with speech and its recording in various media. Books
were important, as were inscriptions, paintings, and sculptures that
could be fixed to a building. It thereby assumed the full status of a
``technic fine-art'', exhibiting sentient and intellectual or phonetic
beauties.
By emphasising architecture's voice, Fergusson endorsed a theme
present in traditional theories on the art of building. From the Renais-
sance onwards, architectural writers studied ancient treatises and argued
that both a human being and a building address an audience through
speech. To use an apt term of George Hersey's, architecture in the
nineteenth century was envisaged as a `communications appliance'. 5
Fergusson's position was nonetheless distinctive in its regard for the
human act of representing ideas in articulate sounds. The intellect was
linked to speech and its phonetic visual arts.
Although Fergusson invoked classical concepts, mid-nineteenth-
century research into the civilisations of the ancient Near East pro-
vided the immediate context for conceiving a theory of phonetic orna-
ment. He respected two British figures who directed excavations in
Assyria. Sir Austen Henry Layard initiated systematic campaigns in
the late 1840s, publishing his findings to public acclaim in Nineveh and
its Remains (1845-47) and Nineveh and Babylon (1853). Layard's work was
taken over in 1852 by Sir Henry Rawlinson, a researcher already
renowned for his contribution to the deciphering of Persian cuneiform
inscriptions. 6 These scholars inspired Fergusson's own book on Assy-
ria and Persia, The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored, which John
Murray published in 1851.7
5. G. L. Hersey, HighVictorian Gothic: A Study in Associationalism (Baltimore : Johns

Hopkins Press, 1972), xviii, 7].
6. On Rawlinson (1810-95) and Layard (1817-94), see The Dictionary of National
Biography [DNB] (London : Smith, Elder, 1885-1900), vol. 16, 771-74 and vol 22,
954-57, resp.
7. See James Fergusson, The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored (London : John
Murray, 1851).

48 Peter Kohane
While writing The Palaces in London during the early 1850s, Fergus-
son sought advice on specific architectural matters from Layard, who
was still on-site in Assyria. 8 Fergusson later dedicated the book to
Layard. Rawlinson's research was also pertinent to Fergusson, who
drew on it when discussing inscriptions in his work on Nineveh. He
addressed the problems encountered when reading Persian and Bab-
ylonian texts, referring to cuneiform characters and the functions of
phonetic and non-phonetic signs. Fergusson singled out the decisive
achievement in the field thus far: Rawlinson's decipherment of the
inscriptions on the Behistun Rock in Persia, a monument associated
with Darius I.9 It commemorated in three languages a victory in war,
along with a relief sculpture portraying Darius confronting his roped-
together prisoners.
Such co-existence of texts and sculpture contributed to Fergusson's
concept of phonetic ornament, set out most thoroughly in the True
Principles. His interpretation of the Behistun Rock was enriched by per-
sonal acquaintance with a colleague of Rawlinson's, Edwin Norris.
An Assyriologist, Norris was the Assistant Secretary of the Royal Asi-
atic Society and editor of its journal. In 1846, he helped publish Raw-
linson's book on the Behistun Rock. 10 Fergusson's preface to the True
Principles drew attention to Norris's outstanding `knowledge of lan-
guages... and their affiliation,' while also acknowledging a debt to
8. Letters, Fergusson to Layard, British Library, Add. Ms. 38979, f. 281 : Au-
gust 1, 1850, from London to Constantinople ; Layard to Fergusson (from Mosul,
the village adjacent to the archaeological sites), September 30, 1850 ; Fergusson,
The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored, x.
9. Fergusson, The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored, 18-24. See also Austen
Henry Layard's introduction to the 1882 edition of Nineveh and Babylon: A Narrative
of a Second Expedition to Assyria During the Years 1849, 1850, & 1851, rev. ed. (1853, Lon-
don : John Murray, 1882), xxxvii-lv ; Rawlinson's researches are discussed xliii-ix.
For a modern account of the rock, now dated 521-485 BC, see Henri Frankfort,
The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, 4th rev. ed. (Harmondsworth : Penguin,
1970), 364-66, fig. 428.
10. On Norris (1795-1872), see DNB, vol. 14, 564-65. For an account of Rawlin-
son's 1846 book, see the British Museum. A Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiqui-
ties, 2nd edition (London : British Museum, 1908) 102-3. Compare Fergusson,
The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored, 18-24 ; and Layard, Nineveh and Babylon,
xliii-xlv.

`verbal communications'. Norris would convey the excitement that
11
he and Rawlinson felt when studying the way ideas, which were first
voiced, subsequently assumed a more tangible presence through the
technological invention of cuneiform writing. Fergusson was espe-
cially intrigued by the Behistun Rock's inclusion of written and picto-
rial records. Juxtaposed on the stone surface, inscriptions and relief
sculpture reinforced each other in recording Darius' verbal pronounce-
ments. These resonated through the centuries.
With Norris and Rawlinson as guides, Fergusson reflected on the
human impulse to represent the evanescent voice in enduring forms,
so that an idea may be comprehended by future generations. Written
languages were invented, which could include or influence pictorial
representations. The Behistun Rock was therefore critical to his theory
of architecture: it clarified the nature of a ``true style'', where the
potential to speak depends on built forms supporting the phonetic arts
of scripts and visual images.
According to Fergusson, written texts, paintings, and sculptures
eliminated the need for time-consuming oral methods of sustaining
memory, and therefore had a role within his philosophy of technology
and the economy of labour. Along with Charles Babbage, he valued
writing and its associated arts as devices for saving and amplifying
intellectual labour.12 For Fergusson, yet-to-be-civilised peoples were
characterised by the primacy of oral communication. The intellect,
`gift of speech', and memory were here ùnassisted' by technology and
could be likened to a person performing muscular tasks without the
help of tools and machines. 13 The civilising process was carried for-
ward when the muscles and memory were extended beyond their natu-
ral states to produce advanced technic and phonetic arts.
Fergusson identified the simplest techniques for amplifying mem-
ory, noting that they were still used in contemporary societies that
failed to participate in the scheme of human progress:
11. Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry, xii.

12. Compare Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 2nd
ed. (London : Charles Knight, 1832). On orality and the technology of writing, see
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London : Methuen,
1982), 42.
13. Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry, 115-16.

50 Peter Kohane
There have been, and indeed now are, tribes so rude that a knot on a
string, a notch on a tree, or a rude scratch on a stone, are the only
means they have invented for extending the powers of speech or mem-
ory that they were born with. 14
Early forms of writing were then considered:

But it was impossible that man could long remain thus ; and though we
still probably want some of the links in the chain, there are at least four
steps in advance of one another with which we are perfectly familiar.
The first [was] the Hieroglyphic Writing of the Egyptians...
This mode of communication was problematic for Fergusson because

it depended on pictograms. He explained that `the Chinese system ap-
pears as a distinct improvement... by abandoning in every case the rep-
resentation of the thing signified, and adopting an arbitrary sign for
every word.' Yet despite `some advantages... they are far overbalanced
by... the immense amount of labour required to remember so great a
number of unsuggestive signs.'15
With Rawlinson's and Norris's research on the Behistun Rock in
mind, Fergusson drew attention to `races dwelling between the Tigris
and the shores of the Mediterranean'. He noted that when the hiero-
glyphic system was in use, but prior to the invention of Chinese writ-
ing, àn alphabet of some twenty or thirty characters' was formulated.
This was attributed to the Pelasgi peoples, who passed it on to the
Semitic and Indo-European tribes. Although the Hebrews and Phoe-
nicians used the alphabet, only the Greeks brought out its extraordi-
nary potential for èxpressing and recording their observations and
thoughts'. They devised `history, philosophy and poetry', as well as
new forms of literature, thereby committing their vast knowledge to
memory. 16
Fergusson disparaged the intellectual life of societies where oral
communication prevailed. Ignoring sophisticated mnemonic techni-
ques that sustained and adapted knowledge, he celebrated only those


moments in history when a so-called unassisted orality was rendered
obsolete. 17 Literacy and the human mind advanced together.
The initial plateau established in ancient Greece had now been sur-
passed, owing to the invention of printing in the fifteenth century.
Fergusson noted that this momentous event was `making a revolution
amongst us as extraordinary as the alphabet did with the Greeks'.
Unlike unique manuscripts, printed works were produced in vast
quantities and widely distributed:
But now an idea strikes one, a word is spoken, or a discovery is made,
and in a few hours a thousand or thousands of impressions of it are pre-
sented to all whom it interests, and are being dispersed to the remotest
corners of the globe. 18
While the steam-engine was amplifying human muscles, the printing-

press eradicated residual orality, and therefore expanded the human
powers of intellect, memory, and speech. Benefitting from widespread
literacy, a nineteenth-century citizen would have realised that the writ-
ings of the Greeks are permeated with irrational and superstitious
themes.
Yet with the development of reading skills, the function of painters
and sculptors faded in social life. In an ancient monument such as the
Behistun Rock, an inscribed text and a pictorial image were equally
significant. Such a complementary relationship, however, could not be
sustained in the nineteenth century, when ideas were best represented
in writing.
A theoretical conundrum had emerged for Fergusson: despite
human progress diminishing the importance of painting and sculpture,
these arts were deemed relevant to a ``true style'' of architecture,
whether created in the past or envisaged for the nineteenth century. A
discussion of such a predicament must refer to the ``true principles'',
as well as their exemplification in the Gothic style. His theory of medi-
eval architecture will be contrasted with that set out by Victor Hugo.
Following this, Fergusson's views on present buildings will be consid-
17. This kind of interpretation is critically analysed in Ong, Orality and Literacy,
34-35.

52 Peter Kohane
ered in terms of the ideas deemed pertinent for their phonetic orna-
ments.
In his estimation, a historical and nineteenth-century ``true style'' of
architecture was characterised by its logical construction, cal-aesthetic
enrichment, and phonetic ornaments. Technologies extending the
powers of the muscles and intellect therefore produced changes within,
but not between, the basic technic and phonetic compartments of a
building. As a result, the intellect and voice could only be represented
in literate ornaments, superimposed upon, or set within, a sound and
aesthetically refined structure.
Fergusson studied these embellishments, and their relation to struc-
ture in Gothic cathedrals, including those at Chartres and Rheims. He
emphasised the literary sources invoked by their sculptors and
painters, the latter responsible for stained-glass windows, and noted
that the knowledge contained in the Bible and èncyclopaedias of the
middle ages' was expressed in èvery statue and every window':
On their walls we have not only a history of the world from the Crea-
tion through the whole of the Old Testament down to the time of
the building of the church but a whole encyclopaedia of arts and
manufactures ; agriculture, brewing, baking, spinning and weaving, car-
pentry, and building, all illustrated here. A whole code of morals, too,
with the appropriate rewards and punishments ; and a whole treatise on
theology, the Trinity, archangels, angels, saints, and all the heavenly
host.
Such phonetic arts were adjoined to the cathedral's structural forms,

which include vaults, ribs, colonnettes, and buttresses. Thus,
the building itself is but a scaffold... and a protection to shelter this vast
and wondrous book. Itself it stands robed in beauty and magnificence,
it is true, but mute and silent as the mountain or forest that clothes its
sides, and as incapable of repeating man's voice as they are. 19
The technic forms had a cal-aesthetic value, yet were inarticulate. Ac-
cording to Fergusson, they served as a support for the more important
phonetic arts, which illustrated myths and stories.

Hugo's interpretation of Gothic architecture was outlined in 1832,
when adding the chapter ``This Will Kill That'' to his Hunchback of
Notre Dame. He focused on the printing-press because its advent initi-
ated a fundamental change in the relationship between ideas and archi-
tecture.
According to Hugo and Fergusson, the desire of human beings to
record their ideas in durable visual forms led to the invention of
writing. Fergusson stressed that texts and associated modes of commu-
nication were always inscribed, or placed upon, a meaningless but
beautiful architectural frame. For Hugo, up until the fifteenth-century
invention of the printing press, architecture itself was a form of
writing.20 A `group of ideas' was first perpetuated though a simple
ùpright stone'. It was a `letter'. Fergusson could accept this initial step
but not Hugo's ensuing ones. Rather than considering the creation of
alphabets and written languages, he charted the progress of `human
thought' through stone members brought together to produce forms
of increasing complexity. An arch was à syllable', which could be
combined with other motifs to make `words'. Later, `sentences' were
composed and, finally, whole `books'. 21 In this way, the comprehen-
sive knowledge of a society was embodied in the structure and adorn-
ment of a building.
Unlike Fergusson, for whom architecture responds to the human
function of sheltering from the elements and then compensates for this
prosaic task by delighting the eye and mind, Hugo refused to distin-
guish between a scaffold and an ornament with literary meanings. The
structure of his pre-fifteenth-century building was just as capable of
recording ideas, and of speaking of universal mysteries, as the sculp-
tures or stained-glass windows. An entire Gothic cathedral was a
book.
20. Hugo's theory of architecture is considered in Neil Levine, ``The Book and
the Building : Hugo's Theory of Architecture and Labrouste's Bibliotheque
Ste. Genevieve,'' in The Beaux-Arts, ed. Robin Middleton (London : Thames &
Hudson, 1982), 138-73 ; and Anthony Vidler, ``The Writing of the Walls,'' Art Forum
(December 1980) : 37-40.
21. Victor Hugo, ``This Will Kill That,'' in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1832, New York : Signet, 1964), 175-76. See Levine, ``The Book and the Build-
ing,'' 149-50.

54 Peter Kohane
By the nineteenth century, however, built form had ceded such
powers of expression to literature. Architecture was now an emaciated,
meaningless scaffold for literate ornaments, to be read like a book. 22
Despite its lack of aesthetic beauty, Hugo's modern architecture was
comparable with one of Fergusson's ``true styles''. Both theorists iden-
tified a split between mute and articulate forms of a building. Hugo
viewed this as the destruction of architecture's poetic content, the
result of a society choosing to invest its ideas in printed texts.23
Conversely, with his regard for the division of labour, Fergusson
assumed that actions involving the muscles, senses, and intellect deter-
mined the technic, aesthetic, and phonetic domains of all ``true styles''.
Thus, even before the Renaissance, the only way in which ideas were
impressed upon architecture was through added inscriptions, paint-
ings, and sculptures.
Although Fergusson was acquainted with Hugo's arguments, he felt
the printing press could have no impact, good or bad, on a ``true
style'' of architecture. This was owing to the divorce of ideas and liter-
ature from the structure of a building. When referring to Hugo's
``This Will Kill That'', Fergusson therefore stressed that the printed
book caused the demise of the phonetic art of sculpture, not the cal-
aesthetic forms of architecture.
In the Middle Ages, when books were rare, and those who could read
them rarer still, the sculpture was certainly the more valuable ; but as
Victor Hugo beautifully expresses it, `Ceci tuera cela : le livre tuera
l'Eglise.' The printing press has rendered all this of little value to the
present generation... 24
Despite literature's triumph as the medium for conveying ideas, Fer-

gusson did not countenance the eradication of paintings and sculptures
from modern buildings. Such phonetic ornaments were needed, as hu-
man speech was illustrated in tangible forms that, according to his de-
sign principles, have an unchanging location within architecture.
22. Hugo, ``This Will Kill That,'' 182-88.

23. Hugo, ``This Will Kill That,'' 182.
24. James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: Being a Concise and Popu-
lar Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and Countries (London :
John Murray, 1855), 677.

History, Fergusson claimed, revealed two ways in which ideas and
the voice were represented. In the first, Egyptian hieroglyphs were
pictures that functioned as a form of writing.25 The subsequent inven-
tion of `àlphabetic writing'' offered a better mode of communication.
For Fergusson, the Greeks used both paintings, like hieroglyphs, and
the new alphabetic written language. The coexistence of the two
modes ended, however, so that by the nineteenth century, painting
and sculpture were subordinate to literature: they became ìdle arts...
merely used as luxuries or, at most, as auxiliary illustrations of the ver-
bal arts'. 26
With the non-hieroglyphic mode of communication dominant, Fer-
gusson wrote of relationships between literature and the arts under its
influence, namely painting and sculpture. Literature, painting and
sculpture were `different forms of the same mode of expression, differ-
ing only in degree'. They were `sister arts', linked by the capacity to
convey ideas, but unequal in value because literature was purely intel-
lectual and the `most comprehensive'. 27
Adding to traditional classical art theory, where poetry was imitated
in paintings, Fergusson placed the phonetic arts within his ideal com-
munity, its divided labours ensuring rational production and pro-
gress.28 A society's ideas were maintained by a class of workers dedi-
cated to the art of writing. Authors offered their texts to painters and
sculptors, who transformed them into the media that best adorned
buildings. Due to co-operation between all contributing to the pho-
netic arts, these visual artists needed not to conceive ideas at all; they
were guided by the superior group of writers. Yet because painters
and sculptors were skilled in amplifying the sense of sight, Fergusson
argued that they connect the `higher phonetic with the aesthetic arts,
[forming] most important links in the great chain of human arts'.29
The `highest intellectual aspirations' of a society were beyond their
25. Compare Edinburgh Review 45 (1826) : 95-147 ; and Fergusson, The Palaces of
Nineveh and Persepolis Restored.
27. Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry, 121, 120.
28. The standard study on the relationship of art and poetry is R.W. Lee, Ut
Pictura Poesis. The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York : Norton, 1967).

56 Peter Kohane
comprehension, but assistance from writers permitted the creation of
works endowed with aesthetic beauty and capable of ìntellectual utter-
ance'.
Fergusson connected ideas cultivated by the literary classes to cate-
gories of the mind, classified according to Sir Francis Bacon's faculties
of memory, imagination, and reason. These informed the literary gen-
res of history, fiction, and philosophy. 30 Memory was expressed in a
text on `[t]he history of a campaign or of a country'. This readily
assumed visual form in sculptures and pictures. 31 Imagination, repre-
sented in fiction, particularly the novel, could also be painted, as Wil-
liam Hogarth had shown with works such as Marriage a la Mode (1743-
45).32 Philosophical works of àbstruse logical reasoning', however,
lacked the concrete imagery applicable to the methods of visual
artists. 33 Thus cut off from writings expressive of the highest category
of the mind, painters and sculptors had a precarious role in Fergus-
son's modern community.34 Although capable of visualising historical
and fictional texts, these and associated human faculties were destined
to disappear with human progress. Fergusson was dismayed by the
resistance to change:
Even now most people in speaking of the arts, would class the works of
imaginative poetry above those of pure reason ; and, educated as we
are, there is something to most minds cold and repulsive about science.
Its truths do not warm them, and they cannot comprehend its sublim-
ity : while, on the other hand, there is a syren sweetness about poetry
that lures us to enjoy it without overtasking our indolence. But those
who have advanced beyond this know how poor a substitute the best
of man's imaginings is for a knowledge of God's truths. 35
Indebted to these enlightened citizens, the public will, in due course,

prefer writings representing reason over those concerned with memo-

32. On Hogarth's famous series, see Joseph Burke, English Art 1714-1800 (Ox-
ford : Clarendon, 1976), 162-63, pl. 4.

ry and imagination. With philosophy and science replacing history and
fiction, visual artists have a limited task to perform. Yet Fergusson
never cogently addressed the possibility of a modern society, governed
by reason, not needing the aesthetic and phonetic ornaments of its
own true style. Indeed, he did not endorse this in many pronounce-
ments, where superfluous ornament was a sign of progress.
The issues raised by Fergusson were still relevant in the early twentieth
century. His ornaments were questioned at this time by prominent
British architects and educators. In a monograph of 1925 on Philip
Webb, the author William Lethaby linked Fergusson to Pugin, Rus-
kin, and Garbett, as theorists with `sane views on the possibilities of
modern practice'.36 Nevertheless, Ruskin and Fergusson were also
criticised. This conforms to an earlier letter to Lethaby, in which
Webb stressed that `J.R. [John Ruskin] once held... that a building
wasn't architecture without sculpture and painting to me a fallacy,
on the line of Fergusson.'37
This perceived over-reliance on superimposed ornament can be con-
sidered further by referring to the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. He
grappled with the status of ornament in a society whose modernity is
associated with reason and economic rationality. These attributes,
which had been prioritised by British theorists such as Babbage and
Fergusson, were germane to Loos's 1908 essay `Òrnament and
Crime''. 38 Like Fergusson, Loos valued a society's capacity to construct
a building efficiently; yet this should no longer be celebrated through
the addition of ornament. Indeed, such embellishment is irrelevant to
the beholder. He or she recognises that ornament is costly to make
and therefore a financial burden on the state. It stands in the way of
human progress. Loos assumed that citizens have evolved, their
powers of reason proclaimed in an ability to repress the desire for
adornment.
36. W. R. Lethaby, Philip Webb and his Work, ed. & intro. G. Rubens (1925,
London : Raven Oak Press, 1979), 81.
37. In Lethaby, Philip Webb and his Work, 132.
38. See Aldolf Loos's famous essay of 1908, `Òrnament and Crime,'' in Programs
and Manifestoes of 20th Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge : MIT
Press, 1975), 19-24.

58 Peter Kohane
Writing in the middle of the nineteenth rather than in the early
twentieth century, Fergusson could only appreciate architecture when
its technic form was adorned. Buildings must stimulate the senses and
lowest categories of the intellect, those of memory and imagination.
He seemed aware that, in the future, the obsolescence of ornament
would undermine the technic, aesthetic, and phonetic aspects of a
``true style''. In the meantime, however, principles discerned in build-
ings from the past, such as Gothic cathedrals, could inform modern
architecture.
In the True Principles, Fergusson judged sculptures and paintings
according to the ideas they expressed. He compared past and present
sources of inspiration. Greek sculptors represented the `deities of their
Pantheon' and `their tragic or heroic myths'. They also perpetuated
`the memory of their great men'. Similar themes were important to
Ìtalian painters in the middle ages'. With the advent of Christianity,
however, the cult of the `saint and martyr took the place of the hero
or the doomed of fate'. Fergusson proclaimed his modernity by stating,
`None of these inspirations remain to us.' 39
Although the erection of `statues in honour of our great men' was
not yet wholly abandoned, the vitality of the medium had been sapped
by widespread literacy. `With us', he pointed out, `the page of history,
and more especially of biography, is the real and earnest memorial
of a man's life, and the best representation of his virtues and actions.'
The advantages were durability and the capacity to reveal more than
`bodily form or intellectual bearing'.40
In addition, `notions of divinity' could no longer be illustrated as in
the past. Defined according to his own Protestantism, modern reli-
gious beliefs were deemed `too pure and too elevated to admit of our
ever seriously attempting to represent God or the heavenly host either
in stone or with colours on a piece of canvas'. Fergusson also
reminded his readers that they cannot `sink so low as to believe either
in the myths of the Greeks, or the more absurd fables and myths of
the middle ages'. These sources could no longer be èarnestly or rever-
ently handled' and were incapable of elevating èither our art or our-


selves to a higher grade than we now occupy'. Such comments were
41
informed by his antipathy towards the Greek and Gothic revivals. He

was a staunch opponent of copying paintings, sculptures, or buildings
from past societies, characterised by their `metaphysical' or `super-
stitious' beliefs.
Although painters and sculptors need alternative sources of inspira-
tion, these must not prioritise the modern concept of aesthetics. For
Fergusson, the sense of seeing was less important than the intellect.
This position was questioned in a review of the True Principles, pub-
lished in The Spectator. Considering the artistic consequences of his
theory of human progress, the author attacked Fergusson for
reproaching the senses and aesthetic beauty by ruthlessly subordinat-
ing them to the realm of ideas.42
He had little specific advice to offer modern painters and sculptors,
who must illustrate the intellectual life prevailing in their advanced
society. They were encouraged to regard Shakespeare's work as a
model of artistic integrity. Although neither contemporary nor a visual
artist, he belonged to the modern tradition initiated in the Renaissance.
Unlike the architects of that period, however, he was free of `classical
models or exotic affectations'. According to Fergusson, Shakespeare
succeeded because he `confined himself to... inspirations... in the hearts
and feelings of those by whom he was surrounded'. Nineteenth-century
authors, painters, and sculptors should consult the achievements of
modern-day Britain. `Patriotism' was identified as a major motive: the
artist turns to the many `noble deeds to commemorate', including
èxcellence in the noble arts as well as in those of war, or their utilitar-
ian compeers'. 43 Presumably such achievements were first expressed in
literature and then paintings and sculpture.
This essay has shown how the human being, defined according to its
divided labours, was the source for Fergusson's classification of the
arts. The actions of the muscles and senses were linked to the technic

42. See Spectator 22 (April 14, 1849), 348.

60 Peter Kohane
and aesthetic arts; both were essential to the design and construction
of a building's refined structure. Such an architectural form, however,
was a mere scaffold, or support, for more important endeavours,
namely, those involving the intellect. A human being's ideas were re-
lated to vocal utterances, the latter providing Fergusson with the con-
cept of phonetic arts. These included a building's inscriptions, paint-
ings, and sculptures.
Analysis of such phonetic ornaments has contributed to an apprecia-
tion of distinctions between artistic disciplines, as well as an accom-
panying theme in nineteenth-century debates on architecture, in which
a building communicates specific meanings. Influenced by Assyriolo-
gists such as Rawlinson and Norris, Fergusson argued that ideas,
which had been first voiced, were illustrated in the texts and image on
the Behistun Rock. This was pertinent to all ``true styles'' of architec-
ture, most obviously the Gothic. Yet he also associated technological
inventions, including writing and the printed press, with the develop-
ment of the human mind. This changed the relative significance of the
phonetic arts, whereby the highest ideas cultivated by modern citizens
could be illustrated in texts but not in paintings or sculptures. None-
theless, these two visual fine arts retained their roles as phonetic addi-
tions to a building, ensuring its capacity to represent thought and
speech.

Disciplinary Contrasts
Science, Art, and the Imagination in
the Nineteenth-Century Writings of
William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and
Alexander von Humboldt
Deborah van der Plaat
A disciplinary allegiance to both art and science is evident in the work

of the English Arts & Crafts architect William Richard Lethaby
(1857-1931). Trevor Garnham has argued there to be `two Lethabys...
the Romantic... champion of traditional crafts and exponent of the eso-
teric views of Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)' and the man who
wrote of the need for à true science of architecture' and èfficiency
style'.1 For Garnham, the scientific Lethaby ultimately supplants the
artistic. Writing on Lethaby's Eagle Insurance Building (Birmingham
1900), Vaughan Hart draws a similar conclusion. Observing that the
sophisticated finish and structural focus defining the lower portions of
the building's fac ade, which is at odds with the `primitive', `rough',
and ornamented parapet above, demonstrates Lethaby's evolution
from his early interest in Victorian theories on art and symbolism to
his later interest in the `scientific universe' outlined in Architecture: An
Introduction to the History and Theory of Building (1911). 2 Comparing Letha-
1. Trevor Garnham, ``William Lethaby and the Two Ways of Building,'' AA

Files 10 (Autumn 1985) : 27.
2. Vaughan Hart, ``William Richard Lethaby and the `Holy Spirit' : A Reapprai-
sal of the Eagle Insurance Company Building, Birmingham,'' Architectural History 36
(1993) : 153.

62 Deborah van der Plaat
by's writings on art and science to those of the English critic John
Ruskin (1819-1900) and the German naturalist Alexander von Hum-
boldt (1769-1859), I will propose an alternative rationale for such dis-
ciplinary contrasts in Lethaby's architecture. 3
Demonstrating an equal appreciation for the perceptual and repre-
sentational strategies of art and science in Lethaby's writings, I will
argue the affinity of his thesis with Humboldt's association of modern-
ity with the ``mutual reaction'' of art and science. These parallels,
coupled with Lethaby's tendency to include comparative content
within his buildings be it the juxtaposition of symbolic ornament
and structure or vernacular and exotic forms in turn suggests Letha-
by's participation in what Humboldt described as the great project of
modern civilisation, the intellectual and aesthetic enlightenment of the
common ``man''. Outlining Humboldt's conviction that this demo-
cratic project would be stimulated by the comparative study of exotic
and indigenous form experienced through the secondary sources of
botanical gardens, travel literature, and landscape painting, I argue that
Lethaby intended his Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891) as such an
experience, a catalogue of architectural traditions taken primarily from
what he described as `primitive' or èarly world' cultures. 4
False Oppositions
In 1920, Lethaby drew attention to a problematic aspect of contempo-
rary architectural theory:
A false and confusing opposition between science and art has been
allowed to arise, and indeed is rather fostered by expert simulators who
`go in for old-world effects' ; but properly there is no strife between sci-
ence and art in architecture. It does not matter a bit if we call flying an
3. My reading of Humboldt in this paper draws from a research collaboration

with Catherine de Lorenzo from 2002 to the present. See Catherine de Lorenzo &
Deborah van der Plaat, ``Southern Geographies and the domestication of science
in the photography of J. W. Lindt,'' Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no.
1 (2006) : 143-66 ; van der Plaat & de Lorenzo, ``Sublime Amenity at Lindt's Her-
mitage,'' Studies in Australian Garden History 2 (2006) : 39-62.
4. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Uni-
verse, vol. 2, trans. E. C. Otte (London : Henry G Bohn, 1849), 370-71. The first
volume of Cosmos was published in 1845.

Disciplinary Contrasts 63
art or a science : the art of house building is practically one with the
science of housing. If we must worry over strict definitions, `science' may
stand for codified preliminary knowledge, and àrt' for operative skill,
experiment and adventure. Science is what you know ; art is what you
do. The best art is founded on the best science in every given matter.
The art of shipbuilding is the science of shipbuilding in operation. 5
Indexically linked to the subject (the producer of the artefact) through

the physical act of making, art for Lethaby represented the ``doing'' of
architecture, the expression of the artisan revealed not only through
the addition of paintings and sculpture but also in the individuality of
the craftsman's mark, roughness of hand, or imperfection of finish. 6
Defining science, on the other hand, as àll that had been spied out of
the actual facts of the material universe',7 its expression in architecture
was focused on construction and materials, all that was `natural, ob-
vious, and... reasonable'.8 To define architecture in terms of only one
of these categories, as had Lethaby's prophet John Ruskin, would lead
in his opinion to a deficient and defunct understanding.
We possess in Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture a most stimulating
treatise on modes of beauty in architecture, but with all its power and
insight it is only a fragment. It is not concerned with building, the art
of making chambered structures, the rearing of walls and the balancing
of vaults, but with the added interests of painted and sculptured stories.
It is a treatise on the temper and conditions from which a noble archi-
tectural ornamentation will spring.... His concern being with the deco-
rative matter in architecture, he identified this matter with architecture
itself. 9
5. William Lethaby, ``Housing and Furnishing,'' Athenaeum, (May 21, 1920) : 37-
38 ; reprinted in Lethaby, Form and Civilisation: Collected Papers on Art and Labour (Lon-
don : Oxford University Press, 1922), 37-38.
6. Lethaby, `Àrchitecture as Form in Civilisation,'' London Mercury (1920) re-
printed in Form in Civilisation, 1, 7, & 6 resp.
7. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (London & Bath : Solos Press, 1994),
17.
8. Lethaby, ``The Architecture of Adventure,'' Journal of the Royal Institute of British
Architects 17 (1910) reprinted in Form in Civilisation, 94.
9. Lethaby, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building
(London : Williams and Norgate, 1911), 12-13.

In Seven Lamps and his later lectures on `Àrchitecture & Painting'',
Ruskin argued that there are only two fine arts possible to the human
race: sculpture and painting. If architecture was to attain the status of
a fine art, the expression of a universal nature, this could be achieved
only through the integration of sculptured ornament, painted murals,
or decorative patterns, `characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise
unnecessary.'10 The logic of Ruskin's thesis is found in his adherence
to the romantic theory of the `ÌMAGINATION'', defined in 1817 by
the critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) as the `living Power
and prime Agent of all human perception'. 11 Èsemplastic' (borrowed
by Coleridge from the Greek ``to shape'') in its capacity, in that it not
only combined but also modified and transformed what was known in
order to produce something new, `that which has no analogue in the
natural world,' the Imagination not only offered an alternative to Fancy,
the mind's ability to mechanically store data extracted from the physi-
cal world through sensory perception, but also disassociated the creative
act from passive mimesis and established it as a `vital' and living pro-
cess. 12 Transforming `dead walls into living ones' 13 (Ruskin's words),
Coleridge drew a distinction between the ``Primary Imagination'', the
ability of all men to learn from nature, and the ``Secondary Imagina-
tion'', a superior faculty associated only with the creative act and artis-
tic genius. 14 A repetition in the `finite mind of the eternal act of crea-
tion', not only did the Secondary Imagination identify the superior
quality of genuine art (be it poetry, painting, or architecture), but
more importantly within the moral aesthetics of romantic thought it
10. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn,
vol. 8, (London : George Allen, 1903-12), 28 ; and ``Lectures on Architecture and
Painting'' (1853), Works, vol. 12, 84.
11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, vol. 1 (Ox-
ford : Clarendon Press, 1907), 202 ; Ruskin, Modern Painters (1849), Works, vol. 4,
223-313 ; The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Works, vol. 9, 346, 383 ; and vol. 11, 154.
12. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 86, 202 & vol. 2, 208 ; Volant Baker,
The Sacred River: Coleridge'sTheory of the Imagination (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1957), 127-28.
13. Ruskin, ``Lectures on Architecture and Painting,'' 84.
14. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 193, 202 ; James Engell,The Creative Ima-
gination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1981),
344.

also equated such artefacts with nature by establishing both as prod-
ucts of a singular organic force, `the infinite I AM'.15
The desire to reunite the worlds of self and nature underpinned
the romantic Imagination. 16 The generative and esemplastic powers
assigned to the faculty, however, guaranteed that no such synthesis
could take place. Rather, the subject subsumes the identity and
autonomy of the object to produce, as Paul de Man (1969) has argued,
àn inter-subjective, interpersonal relationship that, in the last analysis,
is a relationship of the subject towards itself.' 17 Recognising the inher-
ent fallacy of the Romantic project, Ruskin focused instead on what
he saw as the profound and irreducible gulf that separated the object
(the world of facts, things as they are in themselves) from the subject
(the perception of this world by human consciousness), and offered a
strident rebuttal of the positivistic tendencies of nineteenth-century
thought. Noting that it was impossible to `fathom the mystery of even
a single flower', 18 he also lamented that `the most curious, yet most
common deficiency of the modern contemplative mind [was] its inabil-
ity to comprehend that phenomena of true imagination are yet no less
real and often more vivid than phenomena of matter.' 19 The ability to
reach `by intuition and intensity of gaze', as opposed to `reasoning', a
`more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things' not only
identified for Ruskin the `highest intellectual power of man' but also
the prime motive of art. 20
All this I can at once communicate in so many words, and this is all
which is necessarily seen. But it is not all the truth ; there is something
15. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 202.

16. Coleridge, ``The Friend,'' The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. G. T.
Shedd, vol. 2 (New York : Harper & Bros, 1853), 91f ; Biographia Literaria, vol. 2,
12.
17. Paul de Man, ``The Rhetoric of Temporality,'' Interpretation:Theory and Practice,
ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 1969), 180 ;
Michael Sprinker, ``Ruskin on the Imagination,'' Studies in Romanticism 18 (Spring
1979), 116-17.
18. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Works, vol 5, 387.
19. Ruskin, ``The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism'' (1878), in Works, vol. 34,
163-64 ; see also Sprinker, ``Ruskin on the Imagination,'' 139.
20. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 2, Works, vol. 4, 284.

else to be seen there, which I cannot see but in a certain condition of
mind, nor can I make any one else see it, but by putting him into that
condition, and my endeavour in description would be, not to detail the
facts of the scene, but by any means whatsoever to put my hearer's
mind into the same ferment as my mind. 21
An empirical and thus realistic representation of the physical world

had, in his opinion, little to offer such an artistic endeavour. `You
must not allow the scientific habit of trusting nothing but what you
had ascertained,' Ruskin warned, to prevent an appreciation of the true
function of the arts: the èndeavouring to qualify yourselves to appre-
ciate, the work of the highest faculty of the human mind, its imagi-
nation, when it is toiling in the presence of things that cannot be
dealt with by any other power.' The sole value of such data was that it
offered a viable source from which the eternal and universal could be
extracted. This, Ruskin argued, was the `function of the rightly trained
imagination.' 22
Although the empirical worldview of modern science had little to
offer Ruskin's theory of art, the same cannot be said for the reverse.
Modern science, Ruskin felt, could be much improved by the addition
of the perceptual strategies more typical of the imagination. A com-
mon shortcoming of modern science was, in his opinion, men that
have no sould [sic] for anything beyond dynamics, the laws of chemis-
try and the like. They cannot appreciate the beauties of nature, and they
regard the imaginative man one who can feel the poetry of life as
a donkey regards his rider : as an objectionable person whom he must
throw off if he possibly can. 23
The `real scientific man' on the other hand is one `who can embrace
not only laws that be, but who can feel to the full beauty and truth of
all that nature has to show, as the Creator made them.' The German
naturalist Humboldt, `the most imaginative and generally well-trained
21. Ruskin, ``Letter to Rev. WL Brown'' (1847), Works, vol. 36, 80.
22. Ruskin, ``The Relation of Art to Religion'' (1870), Works, vol. 20, 52, 53.
23. Ruskin, cited by Mr. M. H. Spielmann published in the Pall Mall Gazette,
April 21, 1884, in Works, vol 26, xxxix.

scientific man since Linnaeus', was, in his opinion, a rare example of
such an individual. 24
A Modern Species of Intellectual Enjoyment
In 1845, Humboldt published Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of
the Universe, the first volume of what was ultimately a five-volume se-
ries. On the first page of Volume I (1845), he states his central thesis:
that the observation of physical phenomena finds ìts noblest and most
important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection', where-
by the observer recognises the interdependency of all natural things.
Ìt is the perception of these relations,' he argues, `that exalts our view
and ennobles our enjoyments.' 25 Significantly, such an understanding
could be obtained in two ways: through the `scientific delineation of
nature', the `results of observation stripped of all extraneous charms of
fancy', and as `belonging to the purely objective domain' and its àes-
thetic treatment', the subjective, emotional, and psychological reaction
of the observer to his material environment or the image `reflected by
the external world on the imagination'.26
Sharing a common goal the revelation of nature in all its `vast
sublimity' a `sufficient sharpness and scientific accuracy' could be
achieved, Humboldt argued, without `being deprived of the vivifying
breath of the imagination'. 27 To have one without the other would
also result in studies that were deficient and untruthful. 28 Humboldt's
reasoning was based on the belief that the ìmagination' heightened
the ``truth'' of scientific observation by enabling the individual to
come to grips with an ever increasing quantity of information. In an
age where ìntellectual contemplation had sunk under the weight of
accumulated knowledge', those equipped with poetic inspiration and
spontaneity would gain, in Humboldt's view, a `comprehensiveness
and elevation' otherwise denied to others.29 Guaranteeing `precision'
in scientific labour (1:19), the imagination also prevented a `vicious
24. Ruskin, cited by Mr. M. H. Spielmann, xxxix ; also Works, vol. 25, 368.
25. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 1.
26. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2, 370-71.
27. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2, 417, 438.

empiricism' and ìmperfect inductions'. His Cosmos series was partly an
attack on such practices.30
Although Humboldt's understanding of science prefigures Ruskin's,
the influence of Humboldt on Ruskin is contentious. In an appendix
titled ``Plagiarism'', placed at the end of the third volume of Modern
Painters (1856), Ruskin notes that many of his contemporaries had
assumed that a number of his ideas, especially those on landscape, were
indebted to Humboldt's Cosmos. This is a claim that Ruskin strongly
rejects.31 Despite this denial, however, Cosmos and the 1814 translation of
Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America
are cited by Ruskin on numerous occasions.32 A number of such key
ideas as his division of landscape scenery into categories of green, blue,
grey, and brown are, as art historian Bernard Smith has already
argued, very close to Humboldt's division of landscape according to
climatic zone. 33
Yet while Ruskin and Humboldt both believed that science was
enlarged by the artistic imagination, Humboldt alone believed in the
validity of a genuinely neutral and objective knowledge. 34 As Michael
Dettlebach has argued, Humboldt's almost obsessive occupation with
highly refined and precise instrumentation and measurement, the accu-
mulation of data, and its mapping in complex and detailed `tableaux
physiques' demonstrates his association of precise measurement with
`nature writing': nature revealing itself through the grapheme. 35 Sig-
nificantly, the expansion of such knowledge had, in Humboldt's view,
distinct benefits not only for the sciences but also for the arts. Arguing
that science had the ability to enhance the authenticity of artistic

31. Ruskin, ``Modern Painters,'' vol. 3 (1856), Works, vol. 5, 428.
32. Ruskin, Works, vol. 15, 392, 393, 426 ; vol. 17, 168 ; vol. 25, 52, 53, 369 ; vol.
26, 311, 339, 343 ; vol. 27, 503 ; vol. 34, 36, 582.
33. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (Sydney : Harper
& Rowe, 1984), 205-6.
35. Michael Dettelbach, ``The Face of Nature : Precise Measurement, Mapping,
and Sensibility in the Work of Alexander von Humboldt,'' Studies in History and Phi-
losophy of Science. Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science
30, no.4 (1999) : 473-505.

insight, he also suggested that the expanding scientific exploration of
the physical world, especially the new continents opening to the south
would facilitate the progress of the arts and generate new and dis-
tinctly modern art forms. 36 Promising a `new species of intellectual
enjoyment' unknown to previous eras, the ìncreasing accumulation of
ideas and feelings and the powerful influence of their mutual reaction'
was in Humboldt's opinion the òbject for which modern times are
striving'. The continuance and enlargement of this `reaction' was also
in his view the great project of the modern age and as such should
form `the common work of all civilised nations'. 37
Lethaby's Cosmos
The expansion of knowledge that was central to Humboldt's vision of
the modern world was for the first-generation Arts & Crafts theorist
William Morris (1834-96) a trigger for the division of labour and the
subsequent disintegration of the arts. It was only when `the thought
of man became more intricate, more difficult to express' that àrt grew
a heavier thing to deal with' and `labour was... divided among great
men, lesser men, and little men.' As a consequence the lesser arts be-
came `trivial, mechanical, unintelligent' and the fine or higher arts, los-
ing `the dignity of popular arts', were reduced to ùnmeaning pomp,
or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men'. 38 For Morris, the sole
solution was to reinvigorate the crafts and to once again elevate the
craftsman to the status of the artist by reinstating pleasure (the liber-
ated Imagination) within labour.39 Representing a second generation
of Arts & Crafts theorists, Lethaby in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth ad-
vocated a solution more akin to that of Humboldt: a modern architec-
ture built upon the mutual reaction of art and science.
Borrowing from diverse disciplinary sources (ethnology, archaeol-
ogy, mythography, philology, anthropology, etc.), Architecture, Mysticism
and Myth documents examples of cosmological planning and symbolism

38. William Morris, ``The Lesser Arts'' (1887), William Morris on Art and Design,
ed. Christine Poulson (Sheffield : Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 157, 162.
39. Morris, ``The Lesser Arts'', 157, 162.

taken from èarly world' (primarily pre-Greek and Asian) cultures.
Seeking to identify what was described as the èsoteric principles of
architecture', how `building practice and ideas of the world structure
acted and reacted on one another', Lethaby goes on to argue that
such examples stem from the dual representation of `known' facts
àll that had been spied out of the actual facts of the material
universe' and the ìmagined', the transformation of the known to
explain the unknown. 40 Building on Herbert Spencer's assumption
that `given the data as known to him, the inference drawn by the
primitive man is the reasonable inference', Lethaby equated the
`known' with modern scientific method.
We may see that the progress of science is merely the framing and
destruction one by one of a series of hypotheses, and that the early cos-
mogonies are one in kind with the widest generalisations of science
from certain appearance to frame a theory of explanation, from phe-
nomena to generalised law. 41
Central to this process was the ìmagined fact'. 42 In an attempt to ex-

plain the unknown that is, phenomena that could be neither seen
nor directly experienced early man transformed the known into the
ìmagined.' The tree, a fact extracted from the observable world, was
transformed into the ``world tree'', an idea that had no validity except
in the imagination of the subject. These imagined facts of the ``world
tree'', ``world mountain'', and ``world chamber'' in turn provided the
foundation for complete cosmological systems. 43
The significance of the `ìmagined'' was that it demonstrated the
dual perceptual strategies employed by early man. The ``known'',
based on the observation of an object world that was autonomous and
independent of the subject, was now transformed into something pri-
marily imagined and originating within the inner resources of that
same subject. The passive acts of observation and mimesis were trans-
40. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, preface, 17-18 ; Architecture, Nature and
Magic (London : Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1956), 16.
41. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 17-18.
42. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 13.
43. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 18, 21.

formed into something inventive and creative. The vicious empiricism
(feared by both Ruskin and Humboldt) was transformed in this in-
stance into one enlarged and animated by the imagination. Linking in
Architecture, Mysticism and Myth this idea of science to the question of
modern architecture `What, then, will this new art be?' Lethaby,
like Humboldt before him, binds the modern form to a mutual reac-
tion of fact and feeling.44 Architecture, he suggests both here and in
later writings, must `reconcile again Science with Art' the ìmagina-
tive, poetic, even mystic and magic'.45 The visual contrast of primitive
ornament and rational tectonics in the fac ade of the Eagle Insurance
Building, identified by Hart, seeks to formally express this disciplinary
dialectic.
Two additional aspects of Architecture, Mysticism and Myth also recall
Humboldt's Cosmos. Lethaby's comparative method, `the collecting and
comparing of a large number of architectural legends', and his focus
on `èxotic'' architectural examples representative of cultures which he
described as `younger', `primitive', or `rude'.46 Both find a precedent
in the importance placed by Humboldt in Cosmos on the `strongly con-
trasting opposition of exotic and indigenous forms'.47
Seemingly inverting the Romantic doctrine, which associated the
Secondary Imagination with a `superior faculty' or artistic genius,
Humboldt attributes the imagination, albeit often dormant, to àll
men'. Arguing the need to awaken this slumbering faculty, especially
among the masses, Humboldt also suggested that the most effective
means of achieving this was through the contrast of exotic and indige-
nous form. Working on the assumption that such juxtapositions
would induce `more vivid impressions in the minds of less highly
gifted [men]' and `heighten their powers of artistic creation', 48 the
premise motivating Humboldt's hypothesis was the conviction that
the greater the visual diversity or contrast within a region, the greater

45. Lethaby, ``The Architecture of Adventure,'' 92, 94.
46. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, preface, 14, 17, 19.

the opportunity for the individual to grasp the inherent unity binding
nature's Infinite Variety. By seeking the known in the foreign the
similarities binding `strongly contrasting forms' `the spontaneous
impressions of the untutored mind' would lead, in his opinion, `like
the laborious deductions of the cultivated intellect, to the same inti-
mate persuasion, that one sole and indissoluble chain binds together
all nature'.49
For Humboldt, the uncanny flora of sub-tropical and tropical cli-
mates of the new world, including that of Australia, offered the visual
(botanical) material best suited to such contrasts.50 Recognising, how-
ever, that the average citizen had limited opportunities to travel to
these locales, the same effect could be achieved through the secondary
experiences of travel literature, landscape painting, and the cultivation
of tropical gardens, especially those where local specimens were placed
along side the exotic. 51
It can be argued that the opportunities to experience Humboldt's
contrasts the juxtaposition of the local and exotic was greatly
expanded in 1851 with the first International Exhibition held in Lon-
don and directed by the Prince Regent, Albert, who in turn knew
Humboldt. 52 The scientific and artistic collections which grew out of
this event again furthered such intents. Can Lethaby's Architecture, Mysti-
cism and Myth, a descriptive catalogue of not only foreign but also exotic
architectural legends, be read within such a context? A number of
points support such a supposition.
Recalling Humboldt's democratic intent, the desire to expand the
aesthetic and intellectual horizon of the masses, Lethaby outlines his
objective as the definition of a modern architectural form ìmmediately
comprehensible' to the `great majority of spectators'. 53 When Lethaby

50. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 11 & vol. 2, 452. Ruskin, conversely, regards the
tropical landscape as unsuitable to `noble art'. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Works, vol. 7,
175-76.
52. Michael Dettlebach, `Ìntroduction,'' Cosmos, by Humboldt, trans. E. C. Otte
(Baltimore & London : John Hopkins University Press, 1997), ix.

revisits the text in Architecture, Nature and Magic (1928), he also notes that
his `purposes [were] to open up a view of building and crafts wider
than aesthetic appreciation, and an understanding deeper than chrono-
logical cataloguing'. 54 His built work produced during this period al-
so indicates that the purpose of the text was to place the motifs de-
scribed within a local context alongside vernacular traditions and sym-
bolisms. The ornament described by Hart as `rough' and `primitive' in
the parapet of the Eagle Insurance Building consists of an abstract rep-
resentation of the firmament (circles, discs and triangles), sun gates,
and eagles marking the centre of the earth, symbols attributed in Ar-
chitecture, Mysticism and Myth to early cultures, yet here set on an otherwise
commercial facade of a nineteenth-century Birmingham street. 55 A
similar intent is evident in his manor house of Avon Tyrell (1891)
where the bellcote is transformed into a `world temple', and the chim-
ney, through the careful placement of peacocks (the Manner's family
emblem) of either side, into a motif representing the earth's centre. 56
Was the contrast generated by the placement of these symbols within
an English setting intended to spontaneously evoke within the ùntu-
tored mind' the understanding that òne sole and indissoluble chain
binds together all nature'? The transformation of the eagles into pea-
cocks and the omphalos into a hearth in this instance does suggest that
his intent is the revelation of universal principles. His claim that àll ar-
chitecture is one, when traced back through the streams of civilisation'
adds additional weight to this conclusion. 57 Noting that the `habit of
historians of architecture' was to `lay stress on the differences of the
several styles and schools of successive ages', Lethaby also identified
the opposite as his intent, to demonstrate that `behind every style of
architecture there is an earlier style, in which the germ of every form
54. Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, 10.

55. Hart, ``William Richard Lethaby and the `Holy Spirit','' 153 ; Julian Holder,
`Àrchitecture, Mysticism and Myth and its influence,'' in WR Lethaby 1857-1931: Architec-
ture, Design and Education, ed. Sylvia Backemeyer & Theresa Gronberg (London :
Lund Humphries, 1984), 59.
56. Godfrey Rubens, WR Lethaby: His Life and Work 1857-1931 (London : Architec-
tural Press, 1986), 116-17.

is to be found'. Referring to Architecture, Mysticism and Myth as his Cos-
58
mos suggests that Humboldt's comparative contrasts of exotic and in-

digenous form, a method and intent that gives a new insight into the
visual eclecticism of the age, was the democratic paradigm Lethaby
employed to reveal this unity. 59

59. Reginald Blomfield, ``W. R. Lethaby : An Impression and Tribute,'' Journal of
the Royal Institute of British Architects, 39, no. 8 (1932).

Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism,
and Modernity
Darren Jorgensen
Wilhelm Worringer's writing on abstraction, ornament, and the gothic

has at best been historicised as symptomatic of its times, and at worst
disregarded as derivative of better scholarship. In his later years, even
the author himself dismisses the insights of Abstraktion und Einfu hlung
(1907) and Formprobleme der Gotik (1912). 1 Yet these texts express a co-
herent set of ideas designed to critique not only modernity but also
the assumptions of its scholarship. Worringer wanted to resolve the
contradictions of modern thought by turning to ornamentation and
gothic architecture as exemplary of an alternative, pre-modern con-
sciousness. In his book on the gothic, translated by Herbert Read as
Form in Gothic (1927), Worringer uses the organicism of its architecture
to critique what he perceived to be a contradiction between building
and ornament. 2 Form in Gothic proposes that gothic architecture's mode
of construction was organically linked to the ornamental practices of
Northern Europe. In turn, this ornament was inspired by the spectacu-
lar mountains and valleys of Northern Europe, providing the ultimate
model for gothic-cathedral building. Thus gothic architecture plays
out the drama of this natural region of Europe, which makes its way
through ornamental design into buildings that reflect the spectacular
landscape. Worringer looked to the gothic as a metaphysical system of
architecture, a metaphysics that resolved some of the contradictions of
1. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfu hlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie
(1907 ; Munich : R. Piper, 1958) ; and Formprobleme der Gotik (1912 ; Munich : Piper,
1930).
2. Worringer, Form in Gothic, trans. Herbert Read (London : Alec Tirnati, 1957).

76 Darren Jorgensen
modernity. To return to Worringer's argument for the gothic is to in-
vestigate how this period of architecture presents a kind of pre-mod-
ern, utopian naturalism to the modern imagination. That the argument
is also critical of modernity presents a paradox, because Worringer re-
mains trapped by terminologies that are themselves modern.
Form in Gothic traces the relation of large and small, the church to the
gargoyle and the mountain to the stream, in order to enact a kind of
metaphysics. Worringer proposes that all are tied together by what he
call the Northern line, which can be found in the geometrical style of
ornament in Northern Europe, in its wood and bronze artefacts as
much as in gothic cathedrals. This line, he argues, has an èxpression of
its own, which is stronger than our life', independent of the living hand
that carves it. 3 Its vitalism drives it to jump from its small and orna-
mental place to the great structures of gothic architecture, the curling
join of a buckle clasp becoming the angle of a pointed arch, the knot-
tings of a door carving turning into the flamboyant stone lattices of
the later gothic. The metaphysics of this leap, from ornament to archi-
tecture, ideally breaks down the distinction between the two, finding
in the assemblage of ornament and its visual forms the production of
ornament on a much larger scale, that is, on the scale of architecture
itself. Form in Gothic is nostalgic for a time free of the contradiction of
large and small, as well as being nostalgic for a resolution with the soil
from which Europe had since become alienated. In gyptische Kunst
(1927), translated as Egyptian Art (1928), Worringer outlines how the
rigid lines of modern architecture encode an imperial mode of
thought, how much the building-and-beam mode of building
embodies a deterritorialised and destructive tendency.4 Abstraktion und
Einfu hlung, translated as Abstraction and Empathy (1953), also rails against
the spatial imperialism of the modern, writing a sympathetic account
of a harmonic, vegetal ornament at the price of a geometric ornament
that configures a fearful relation with the universe. 5
3. Worringer, Form in Gothic, 42.

4. Worringer, gyptische Kunst (Munich : Piper, 1927), Engl. ed. Egyptian Art,
trans. Bernard Rackham (London : G. P. Putnams, 1928).
5. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans.
Michael Bullock (London : Routledge, 1953).

Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism, and Modernity 77
The problem with Worringer's argument throughout these three
books is that he remains trapped by a language invented and refined
in modernity, a language of modern aesthetics he cannot elude and to
whose dichotomies he remains bound. Thus his attempt in Abstraction
and Empathy to find the essential ontology of ornament is largely
phrased in the terms of decorative art; in Form and Gothic his wish to
conflate ornament with architectonic construction oscillates between
the differences by which these terms assume their identity. Worringer
ends up resorting to a different kind of language in his attempt to
break out of the binds of modernity, and finds this language in meta-
physics, which, like the gothic architecture he so glorifies, belongs to
an imagination of the pre-modern. This retreat into metaphysics, best
represented by the Northern line, is an intuitive and undemonstrable
one, at odds with the scholarly methodologies of art and architectural
history. This metaphysical tendency also leads Worringer to speculate
about the minds of those who lived in pre-historic, Egyptian, and
medieval times, in order to make suppositions about the relationship
of human consciousness to itself. With such speculations, he further
divorces himself from the methodologies of art and architectural his-
tory, in a struggle to resolve the contradictions of modernity from
without.
It is worth revisiting briefly the scholarly background to Worring-
er's first book, Abstraction and Empathy, in order to consider the way in
which he refashions the discipline of art history for the purpose of
going beyond it. Ernst Gombrich argues that Worringer popularised
Alois Riegl's ideas, yet he also transformed them.6 Riegl was writing
against what he perceived to be technical-materialist versions of art
best represented by Gottfried Semper's Die vier Elemente der Baukunst
(1851). 7 One thesis proposed by Semper is that the geometrical style
arose from the necessities of basket weaving, that patterns of cross-
hatching in geometrical ornament were indebted directly to their mak-
ing. Riegl instead set out to prove that the geometrical style preceded
basketry, that its tracings of this style can be found on cave walls that
6. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art

(New York : Cornell University Press, 1979), 197.
7. Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zurVergleichenden Bau-
kunde (Braunschweig : Vieweg, 1851).

78 Darren Jorgensen
predate the existence of baskets. 8 Abstraction, then, is not the by-prod-
uct of a functional, tool-making impulse. Instead, Riegl proposes that
ornamental styles arose from artistic impulses that possess their own
dynamism.9 Worringer follows Riegl in many respects, from a founda-
tional division between geometrical and vegetal ornament to the argu-
ment that the impulse to create abstract visual form exists above and
beyond the demands of necessity. But Riegl treads a more cautious line
when it comes to theorising the origins of the artistic impulse, remain-
ing historical in his notion of a Kunstwollen, or the `way mankind wants
to see the sensual appearance of the world placed before its eyes ac-
cording to line and colour in plane and space'.10 Despite Riegl's sup-
position of a kind of artistic vitalism, he remains an art historian. In
the central argument of the book, he traces a visual history of the veg-
etal style as it transforms from representations of the lotus in ancient
Egypt to the arabesque, in a diffusion of influences. With an eye to
Riegl's cultural relativism, Worringer changes the argument from dif-
fusion to emergence as an account of the universality of decorative
styles, explaining that these visual forms are in fact fundamental to
human consciousness. The geometric style expresses a fundamental
fear of the spatial universe, an orderly refuge from cosmic disorder.
The claim is simply undemonstrable within the disciplinary boundaries
of art and architectural history. Although the universality of the geo-
metric style can be proven one way or another with historical evi-
dence, its relation to human consciousness cannot be anything but
speculative.
Gombrich makes a second simplification of Worringer as a popular-
iser of other people's ideas, specifically that Worringer follows èxactly
Ruskin's two paths' of sympathy with and antipathy to nature. 11 In
8. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen : Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (1893 ; Mu-
nich : Maander, 1985).
9. Alois Riegl, Questions of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. E. Kain
(New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1992), 33.
10. Cited in Michael W. Jennings, `Àgainst Expressionism : Materialism and
Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy,'' in Invisible Cathedrals:The Ex-
pressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil Donahue (University Park : Penn-
sylvania State University, 1995), 89.
11. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 46.

this, Gombrich forgets that Ruskin's interest in nature was not only
aesthetic but also in opposition to a dehumanised and modern civilisa-
tion. Ruskin was one of many nineteenth-century writers whose inter-
est in decoration also had a political dimension, in which this art was
evidence of the innovation of the ordinary craftsman. Like Worringer,
Ruskin championed the gothic for showing details of the individual
worker's hand, in the originality and innovation of gargoyles and
unique ornamental designs on churches. For Worringer, the work-
man's hand embeds the Northern line, which, in the mode of the best
ornamentation, changes without repetition. The politics of ornament
is the site at which both Ruskin and Worringer contest the influential
authority of the Renaissance over the forms that followed it. In archi-
tecture this authority is the classical mode of building that holds orna-
ment and its vitalism subservient to its rectilinearity. Although orna-
ment and the Gothic demonstrates the freedom of the worker's hand,
it follows that the Renaissance enslaved its artists, restricting their
expressive skills to overall design. So it was that with the advent of
modernity, skill took the place of the soul. Ruskin describes the origi-
nality of each gothic statue and cornice, speaking of the liberty of the
workmen who made them. Gothic architecture's imperfect forms tes-
tify to the integrity of its art.
Ruskin and Worringer agree that the aesthetics of the Southern
Renaissance were the ruin of Europe, its regularity spelling the end of
art and the beginning of design. This sweeping dismissal of Renais-
sance and post-Renaissance architecture and art is the dystopian back-
ground against which the utopian conditions for this gothic imaginary
are produced. For Ruskin, too, the buttresses and dynamic lines of the
gothic are like mountains and ocean storms, effected by their natural
home. 12 But Worringer's difference from Ruskin again lies in his
metaphysical speculations on the source of artistic vitalism. Ruskin
identified the optical effects of these natural wonders as the source of
the gothic, but Worringer was searching for something deeper than
the visual. By the time Worringer came to write Form in Gothic, the
German nation had unified and art history had taken shape as a nation-
12. John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter of The Stones of Venice, ed. William
Morris (New York : Garland, 1977), 10-11.

80 Darren Jorgensen
alist discipline. Ruskin's analogy between natural and artificial form
turns in Worringer into a deterritorialisation of the dynamic autonomy
of the Northern line from nature and artifice, mountain and cathedral.
The line has a life of its own, its form embodied not in the immensity
of nature but, to use Worringer's own metaphor, in the flow of Ger-
man blood. 13 This regrettable phrase, written as Weimar Germany
was turning into the brutal Nazi war machine, may partly explain
Worringer's post-war embarrassment at the republication of the Eng-
lish translation of Form in Gothic. Worringer puts into place a double
standard; in writing of his `regrets' about the text, he permits its re-
issue for the purpose of `historical interest', thus inaugurating a tide
of historical interpretations of his work. 14
Much later work on Worringer has been interested in his ideas as an
expression of their time, and thus characterises him as an avant-garde
theorist rather than as a theorist of art or architecture, in order to turn
his work towards the historical requirements of twentieth-century
scholarship. Yet as we have seen, Worringer was also very much an
anti-historical theorist, running with speculative metaphysics against
the methodologies of his own art-historical discipline. In later years,
Worringer embraced the same modernity from which he wanted to
break free. Most tellingly, in 1948, after decades of fame and adulation
from the avant-gardes, and after World War Two, he wrote in another
reissue of Abstraction and Empathy a retroactive tribute to the influence
of Georg Simmel. Seeing Simmel across the aisles in a library,
Worringer claims that he realised the influence of Simmel's ideas on
the composition of Abstraction and Empathy, in a sudden, if belated,
revelation of the truth about his own book. As he writes,
it was the ensuing hours spent in the halls of the Trocadero with Sim-
mel, in a contact consisting solely in the atmosphere created by his pres-
ence, that produced in a sudden, explosive act of birth the world of
ideas which then found its way into my thesis and first brought my
name before the public. 15

14. Worringer, Form in Gothic, xv.
15. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, ix.

This sudden attribution to Simmel is but one strategy Worringer puts
into place to distance himself from his earlier work in a post-war envi-
ronment not favourable to metaphysics. Tendencies towards didactic
universalisms were even more problematic if the writer was German,
as Worringer was. If Worringer could by this time see the strength of
Simmel's Marxist argument after a war that had left his country in
ruins, this should not deter us from thinking the reverse, in other
words, in reading Simmel through Worringer. Recall that Simmel was
the theorist of urban capitalism, tracing the reification of the mind
through the new, vast metropolises of the twentieth century. It is pos-
sible to explain Simmel's ideas about urbanisation through Worringer,
to interpret urban capitalism as part of a much longer historical ten-
dency towards abstraction. The modern city is only the most recent
phenomenon to appear from the horror vacui that has determined this
abstraction throughout human time. The modern city is but the most
recent expression of geometric ornament, of the fear that brings about
abstraction in human artifice.
With a view to reversing the historical interpretation of Worringer,
an interpretation forwarded by Worringer himself, we can turn also to
Form in Gothic. A reversal of this text's historicism has already been per-
formed by Deleuze's book Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, which is every
bit as ahistorical, intuitive, and radically reductive as Worringer's
own. 16 The translator of Le Pli, Tom Conley, proposes that Worring-
er's influence on Deleuze in this book comes through Henri Focillon,
whose rejection of art-historical methodologies led him to speculative
aesthetics. 17 Deleuze's book follows Worringer's interest in ornament
and the gothic, an interest that runs counter to an institutional tradi-
tion that privileges neo-classical and Renaissance aesthetics. Deleuze
radicalises Worringer's argument by proposing that expression has
remained in a state of repetition since the Renaissance. The term for
this repetition is baroque, using this first innovation in architecture
after the Renaissance to name a series of subsequent stylistic changes.
Deleuze wants to lift the term out of its period style and use it to
16. Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris : Munuit, 1988) ; The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London : Athlone, 1993).
17. Conley in the foreword to Deleuze, The Fold, x.

82 Darren Jorgensen
describe the movement of these changes. The history of modern archi-
tecture, for Deleuze, is in fact only a series of variations on the move-
ment introduced by the baroque. The neo-classical, over and against
which the baroque asserts its derivative difference, also comes into the
fold of styles, and is as such subsumed by the baroque. Thus Deleuze
turns the rationalising presumptions of classicism around, by arguing
for a vital aesthetic movement that determines the history of architec-
tural form.
Towards the end of Form in Gothic, Worringer proposes that the
Northern line reappears again in baroque architecture, in an anticipa-
tion of Deleuze's argument. 18 Ornament becomes the site by which
artistic volition survives the hegemony of the Renaissance, and shows
evidence of the power of free labour over and above the architectonic
designs of modern civilisation. But this vitalism is now constructed by
the modern as decoration. This is what Deleuze calls a deterritorialisa-
tion something lifted from its place returns to occupy it again but
only on the level of appearance, not essence. It is an interest in the fate
of vitalism that brings Worringer, Focillon, Deleuze, and Riegl
together in a shared frustration with classically oriented art histories
and the dominance of Mediterranean visual forms in Western culture.
This leads them to shape alternative histories. In studies of the gothic,
these histories and their dispute with classicism and its successors
informs an ongoing debate about the structural devices used to con-
struct gothic cathedrals. Was the origin of such devices as the flying
buttress, the arch, and the spire sheerly aesthetic, or functional? The
debate dates from the nineteenth-century revival of gothic architec-
ture, during which an eclectic interest in style drove a widespread
interest among architects and their clients in the pre-modern. Wor-
ringer can certainly be placed in the heritage of this romanticisation of
form for its own sake, in the idealisation of style and its autonomy.
Yet the debate does something to interrogate the opposition of its
terms, as arguments for the rationality of arches, spires, and buttresses
are in fact arguments for the gothic as a rational modality of building.
Thus it is that Eugene E. Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens sur l'Architecture
(1858-72), a defence of the structural stability of these gothic eccentri-

cities, is itself a rational argument that does much to establish the way
in which these cathedrals exceed the dichotomies of architecture. 19
Here the opposition between structure and style dissolves, such that
the style is itself the structuring principle, albeit one fundamentally dif-
ferent to the pillar-and-beam model. Viollet-le-Duc's interest in dem-
onstrating that even the pinnacles that sit atop buttresses were put
there for structural stability takes the rational, constructivist argument
to its extreme, and succeeds in lending Worringer's own romanticism
the pedantic historicism that he would have needed to earn the respect
of art historians.
Worringer's fidelity to the metaphysics of Romanticism did him no
favours in the eyes of his chosen discipline, and although he might
well have used Viollet-le-Duc to support his own argument, he chose
to maintain that the gothic was a pure vitalism, a will to form. Wor-
ringer's resistance to modern, Enlightenment reason was so pro-
nounced that he takes issue even with the geometry that Viollet-le-
Duc argues is at the basis of medieval knowledge and is that which
holds gothic buildings together under gravity. In this geometric
model, weight is distributed not by pillars and beams but between the
lean of arches and on the angles of vaults. Reason is based here not on
the repetition that distinguishes the rectilinear forms of classical build-
ing but on the integrity of shape. But this would have contradicted
Worringer's earlier work, as in Abstraction and Empathy he argued that
the geometric expressed fear in the human relation with the universe,
a fear that would have complicated an organic vitalism at the source
of the gothic. For Worringer the gothic defies gravity because it
expresses a vitality that has long left behind this primitive fear that
inspires geometric ornament. 20
The problematic place that Worringer had carved for himself in the
debate over the gothic is symptomatic of more general difficulties he
had in situating his argument. The paradox of his discursive situation,
at once modern and anti-modern, is nowhere more apparent than in
his use of Kantian terminology towards the end of Form in Gothic. He
19. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene Emmanuel, Entretiens sur l'architecture, 2 vols (Paris :

Q. Morel, 1863-72).

84 Darren Jorgensen
describes the `super-sensuous' effect of the gothic, borrowing from
Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) to describe both the spiri-
tual aspirations of this visual form and its spatial, material aspect. 21
For Kant the super-sensuous is the mind's recognition of its own
power in some incredible sight, such as a mountain or a cathedral.
Here Worringer can see the sublimity of a gothic line that extends
beyond the hand that sculpts it and is possessed of an infinity that
effects the mind. Worringer recognises the mind's pleasure in the
gothic, yet he also feels constrained by the oppositions that mobilise
it, the conflation in Kant of spiritual and spatial, mind and world. The
pleasure to be found in looking at the scale of a gothic cathedral, at its
proximity to an infinite sky, approximate too closely the pleasures of
modernity. Worringer intends by contrast to argue for a gothic in
which architecture and ornament occupy the same line of flight, in
which scale is no longer a criterion for appreciating expression, as it is
in Kant's account of the sublime. In an attempt to exceed the aes-
thetics of scale and sublimity that have shaped his argument, Wor-
ringer doubles Kant's term `super-sensuous' with the term `sensuous-
super-sensuous', to duplicate the already doubled sensuality of appear-
ance to the sublime. As if demonstrating Paul de Man's point that the
more a term is used the less meaning it has, here familiar Kantian
terms are pushed beyond their capacity for sense. The rhetorical strat-
egy demonstrates the limits of Worringer's discursive means, gesturing
to that which lies beyond it, but all the while positioning the gothic as
commensurable with modern ideas.
It is also in these same passages of Form in Gothic, where Worringer is
thinking along Kantian lines, that he makes the argument that Deleuze
extends in The Fold about the baroque as the mode of modern vitalism.
The presumptions of this argument, that the baroque expresses an
autonomy and originality of line within and in spite of modernity, are
laid out by Worringer:
A super-sensuous effect had to be extracted from sensuous space expe-
rience, that is to say, the sensuous means of expression had to be
increased in such a way as to result in a super-sensuous impression.
Here the inner connection of Gothic with Baroque again comes to the
21. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskaft (1790 ; Berlin : Konemann, 1999).

fore. For it was this same Gothic-Medival will to form which played
itself out in the sensuous pathos of the Baroque, its own proper means
of expression, the abstract, the super-organic, having been taken from
it, in fact, by the Renaissance. Thus we find in Baroque the same sen-
suous-super-sensuous character as in the spatial effect of the Gothic. 22
The appearance of the term `sensuous-super-sensuous' occurs precisely

at the point at which Worringer argues that the Northern line per-
sisted in the baroque, that the baroque is where this line reasserted its
will to form, its independent life. Here also lies the difference between
Worringer and Deleuze, as for the latter the baroque's movement is in-
clusive of the classical whereas for Worringer it is excluded by it. The
sensuous-super-sensuous becomes the term by which this line extends
itself from the gothic and into the baroque, made up as it is of modern
and pre-modern sensibilities, medieval and modern ways of being, its
sublime an aesthetics of the transinfinite in which the mind brings to-
gether incommensurable ideas.
It is to the third of Worringer's translations that we can finally turn
to expand this argument that circles between the modern and its idea
of the gothic. In Egyptian Art Worringer locates the first appearance of
rectilinear forms, not in the Renaissance but in the architecture of
ancient Egypt, finding in this ancient civilisation the source of the clas-
sical aesthetic. That this architecture was built from a civilisation of
immigrants, from a people that had no relationship to the soil, is of
great significance to Worringer, who describes the relationship of
architectural monumentality and rectilinear form to this state of deter-
ritorialisation. Worringer describes North America in these terms, too,
as a nation of migrants developing a similar mode of self-alienation.
Egyptian Art carries on the project of Worringer's Form and Gothic to use
architecture to imagine the relationship of visual form to self-aliena-
tion. The mode of construction and its ornamentation expresses the
image of a people to itself, so that in ancient Egypt the functional style
of architecture represents the alienation of an immigrant nation in a
detachment from the soil that resolves itself in a rectilinear spatialisa-
tion. Egyptian decoration was similarly functional, being largely a rep-
resentational form that betrayed little of the cosmological relations

86 Darren Jorgensen
Worringer finds in abstract and organic ornamentation. Worringer
thinks of ancient Egypt as an impoverished culture, one that demon-
strates little in the way of metaphysical or poetic tendencies. Egyptian
Art may be Worringer's strongest condemnation of the classical heri-
tage. His description of the Americanism of ancient Egypt is accompa-
nied by photographs of contemporary industrial architecture, includ-
ing a grain silo and an aerodrome. Such architectures are compared to
the pyramids and Egyptian pillars that defy the organicism and decay
of time, to enshrine the rectilinear in the eternity of an unchanging
present. The argument echoes the cosmological fear that Worringer
describes in Abstraction and Ornament, the fear of space that produces
abstract form in the first place. The people of Egypt, themselves cos-
mologically displaced from the Earth, settling in a desert beside a
river, were a lonely group, disconnected from the generational dura-
tion that distinguishes a native vitality.
In modern times, ornament is the site at which the vitalism of the
soil is most visible for Worringer. As the spaces of rectilinear architec-
ture demonstrate the impoverished spirit of modern life, ornament
attempts to substitute an exuberance of line and life. That ornament is
defined by modernity as decorative is an indictment on the place of
artistic vitalism in visual culture. Worringer's division of ornament
from architecture makes a strong condemnation of the state of classical
architecture, its classical heritage having emptied it of artistry. The
most pressing condemnation here is that this architecture expresses the
very self-image of contemporary life, that the hierarchy of building
and decoration is symptomatic of the repression of vitalism itself. In
Egyptian Art, Worringer finds only death in this denial of lived form,
as the aspirations of rectilinear form to eternity attempt to erase the
difference between living, dying, and death. The Egyptians rational-
ised the end of the living body by constructing a continuation of the
self into the next world, and to affirm this continuity they built with-
out reference to the organic and its decay. Worringer's persistent refer-
ences to America and Americanism in Egyptian Art, to its industrialism
and superficiality, reflect a similar denial of organicism and its decay in
the architecture of his own time. At least in Europe the progression of
styles described by art and architectural histories carry on a living tra-
dition of artistic vitalism. In the monumental styles of industrial archi-
tecture, in its functionalism and lack of decoration, even this breath of

life is forgotten. In America, Worringer anticipates a modernity with-
out art and ornament, without vitalism. This critique of an imagined
Americanism may well have been overturned by the rise of a visually
excessive, and hardly functional, consumer society. This visuality,
though often ornamental, is hardly vital. If there remains a challenge
in re-reading Worringer, it lies in Egyptian Art, where the ornamental
no longer bears a relation with soil, but has been completely deterri-
torialised by the demands of empire.

Problems for Architecture in the Art of
Le Corbusier
Antony Moulis
In two major exhibitions held in 2007, the matter of Le Corbusier's art

makes a prominent return to discussions of his architecture. Le Corbu-
sier:The Art of Architecture (Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein) and
Le Corbusier: Art and Architecture A Life of Creativity (Mori Museum,
Tokyo) both raise this relation at the level of their curatorship, pre-
senting the architect's artworks (paintings, sculptures, and tapestries)
alongside photographs, drawings, and models of his buildings and de-
signs. 1 Although the intention of this approach is to illustrate the
breadth of Le Corbusier's creativity to a contemporary audience, it is
by no means a new take on the subject. Instead it recalls much earlier
exhibitions of Le Corbusier's work held in Boston (1948), London
(1953), Paris (1953), and Lyon (1956) and overseen by the architect
himself.
As Christopher Green argues, Le Corbusier's intention in mounting
these exhibitions was to reassert the role of architecture in a broader
discourse of culture by displaying the diverse range of his creative out-
put, that is, by situating his art alongside his architecture. 2 Green also
sees this intent as a reaction to the rhetoric of the inter-war modern
movement and its devotion to a pure functionalism that hived archi-
1. Alexander von Vegesack and Mateo Kries, eds., Le Corbusier:The Art of Archi-
tecture (Weil-am-Rhein : Vitra Design Museum, 2007) ; and Le Corbusier: Art and Ar-
chitecture A Life of Creativity (Tokyo : Mori Art Museum, 2007).
2. Christopher Green, ``The Architect as Artist,'' in Le Corbusier: Architect of the
Century, eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (London : Arts Council Great
Britain, 1987), 110-57.

90 Antony Moulis
tecture away from art. Although the current exhibitions are situated
3
in a different context, they mirror Le Corbusier's mid-century agenda

by positioning the relation of art to architecture as central to under-
standing his architectural works. Considered another way, however,
this is precisely the point at which we might observe problems for ar-
chitecture in the art of Le Corbusier.
The key problem concerns the manner in which art and architecture
might be understood to connect or relate as disciplines on the basis of
the architect's work. The underlying assumption of Le Corbusier's use
of art is its relation to his architecture, yet that use is also rhetorical, a
means of representing the implicit agenda set out by the architect of
his architecture's artfulness. Stanislaus von Moos observes in an exhibi-
tion-catalogue essay the great diversity of Le Corbusier's artistic out-
put, yet he also observes the architect's insularity from artists, among
whom he is not properly counted. 4 To start, then, from a position of
acknowledging the significant disciplinary divide between the architect
and his artistic milieu to which von Moos hints is to raise a question:
how ought we look critically at the conventional presumption that Le
Corbusier's artistic output was a search for formal laws essential to,
and applicable across, the disciplines yet not simply take that claim
at face value? There is a sense in which architectural scholarship might
usefully acknowledge a significant tension in the relation of Le Cor-
busier's art to his architecture namely the singularity of his art `às
art'' alongside that art's claim to a formal and synthetic unity with his
architecture. Within this issue lies an apparent, though rarely dis-
cussed, disciplinary divide.
Responses to Le Corbusier's art vary, yet they fall into camps distin-
guishable along disciplinary lines. Architectural critics look to the pur-
pose or meaning of the architect's art in relation to the claims of Le
Corbusier himself, making the kind of critical investment that is seen
to expand upon a received and authorised view promoted by the archi-
tect who, by virtue of his own writings and pronouncements, invaria-
bly sought to guide the terms of his own art's reception. As in so
3. Green, ``The Architect as Artist,'' 110.

4. Stanislaus von Moos, `Àrt, Spectacle and Permanence : A Rear-mirror View
of the Synthesis of the Arts,'' in von Vegesack & Mateo Kries, Le Corbusier, 82.

many instances, Le Corbusier provides a rich vein of material for his
architectural critics to consider, and this is also true in dealing with his
art. For art critics, however, dealing with the architect's art is quite
another story, as critics find themselves posing questions of the quality
of the art and find it lacking. It is worth noting that the greatest col-
lector and patron of the architect's art was Heidi Weber, an interior
designer rather than an art dealer by training. It was her idea to have
Le Corbusier design a pavilion as the perfect setting for the display of
his art, the Centre Le Corbusier, completed in Zurich in 1967. Seen in
this context, the architect's art might well be viewed exclusively as an
`àrt for the architect's sake'', but what then of its status as `àrt''?
A major retrospective at Geneva's Rath Museum in 2006, Le Cor-
busier ou la synthese des arts (Le Corbusier or the Synthesis of the Arts),
which mainly featured the architect's paintings and sculpture, could be
seen as an attempt to arrest this architecturally centred view and renew
consideration of such artistic output as a direct contribution to art as
such. 5 In viewing the exhibition, however, one quickly appreciates
that such an effort appears hamstrung by the problem of deciding
how Le Corbusier's art might be viewed other than in relation to
architecture. The exhibition was set out roughly chronologically
around the identification of themes and obsessions particular to Le
Corbusier, with no broader attempt made to situate its relevance or
connection to work of other artists or art movements. The catalogue
essays also pursue the obvious path toward his art's relation to his
architecture, rather than considering his paintings, for instance, relative
to painting and its historical, theoretical, and critical currents. Ironi-
cally, perhaps, a smaller exhibition of Le Corbusier's drawings held
concurrently at Geneva's Musees d'art et d'histoire (Museum of Art
and History) was more effective in highlighting the role of draftsman-
ship in the output of the architect, thus isolating a skill more particular
to the architecture discipline.
Problems arise for Le Corbusier's art when it appears in institutional
contexts, like that of the Rath Museum, where questions might be
asked of it beyond those so neatly circumscribed by the architect's
own claims and his obvious focus on architecture. Exposing his art to
5. Menz Ca sar, ed., Le Corbusier ou la synthese des arts (Geneva : Skira, 2006), 51.

92 Antony Moulis
a view from outside the discipline of architecture poses interesting
problems, ones specifically highlighted in far-away Australia more
than half a century ago.
On two occasions in the 1950s, artworks by Le Corbusier travelled
to Australia to be shown in public exhibitions of modern European
art. Three of Le Corbusier's paintings Le Femme au livre (Woman
with a Book, 1935), Les deux surs (The Two Sisters, 1933-47), and Deux
mains et pomme d 'or (Two Hands and a Golden Apple, 1948) were
included in the travelling show French PaintingToday: Contemporary Painters
of the School of Paris, which toured every State Gallery in Australia
between January and September 1953.6 His tapestry work L'Ennui
regnait au dehors (Boredom Prevailed Outside, 1954) also appeared in
Contemporary French Tapestry, shown at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales (Sydney) in March and April 1956. 7 Both exhibitions were
overseen by initiatives of the Association Franc aise d'Action Artistique
(AFAA, French Association for Artistic Action), an art society founded
under the auspices of the French Ministere des Affaires etrangeres
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Ministere de l'Education (Minis-
try of Education) in 1923.
Significantly, the limited inclusion of his paintings in Australian
shows is contemporaneous with other exhibitions of Le Corbusier's
work encompassing a span from painting to urbanism in Europe
and North America, appearing in Australia as part of a broadly consti-
tuted international setting. These works clearly had a limited and
mixed reception in Australia, yet their presence, and the reaction of
local audiences to it, is instructive. A significant aspect of this recep-
tion of Le Corbusier's paintings and tapestry as `àrt'' was fore-
grounded by the work's presentation. Contextually, both exhibitions
6. Le Corbusier, Le Femme au livre (Woman with a Book, 1935), oil on canvas,

130689 cm, private collection ; Les deux surs (The Two Sisters, 1933-47), oil on
canvas, 100681 cm, private collection ; Deux mains et pomme d 'or (Two Hands and a
Golden Apple, 1948), oil on board, 100681 cm, private collection. On these
works, see my essay `Àn Active Silence : Le Corbusier's Art in Australia,'' Fabrica-
tions: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 17,
no. 1 (2007) : 6-19.
7. Le Corbusier, L'Ennui regnait au dehors (Boredom Prevailed Outside, 1954),
tapestry work, 2006256 cm, Mobilier National.

were curated within the institutional setting of the art world, situating
the architect's works squarely within a well-defined realm of artistic
and curatorial practice. Put simply, in these settings Le Corbusier was
treated as an artist alongside fellow artists, and not as an architect
who, among other things, paints.
In French PaintingToday, Le Corbusier's three paintings enjoyed illustri-
ous company. The exhibition featured works by such prominent
painters as Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Raoul Dufy, Ferdinand
Leger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vla-
minck, presenting works seen in Australia for the first time. The art
critic of Sydney's Daily Telegraph, observing the exhibition's mix of sig-
nificant and not-so-significant artists, singles out Le Corbusier:
It is true that there are a few blank spots, and that a few pictures, such
as those by Le Corbusier, are not up to the high standard the show
achieves. With a show such as this, critical levels must be raised consid-
erably. 8
That Le Corbusier's work is judged in Australia to be below the crit-

ical standard of the art of its day accords with judgements of the archi-
tect's painting from within cultural circles in Europe. French art critics
were equally derisory, with one claiming the architect's efforts at paint-
ing have `no more importance than his first morning cigarette.'9
Problems in the reception of Le Corbusier's art by Australian art
critics were possibly compounded by the paintings' lack of a clear
architecturality. The paintings submitted by Le Corbusier, abstract figur-
ative works depicting women, were made in the 1930s and '40s, well
into the architect's ``humanist'' phase. They exhibit shape and line
rather than strict geometry, orthogonals and planes that associate with
forms in modernist architecture. These latter qualities are more often
associated with his earlier Purist paintings (from the first two decades
of the twentieth century), where the depiction of objects is generated
from conventional orthographic views rotated and overlayed, produc-
ing static compositions with implicit architectural values. The eminent
Australian art critic Bernard Smith could happily discuss the architec-
8. ``French Art in Sydney,'' DailyTelegraph (Sydney), February 27, 1953.

9. Green, ``The Architect as Artist,'' 110.

94 Antony Moulis
tural qualities of works by Jacques Villon and Jacques Lagrange as
combining `brilliant impressionist effects with an architect's interest
in form and space.'10 No equivalent analysis could be made of the
architectural qualities of Le Corbusier's paintings.
This brief example of the reception of Le Corbusier's art in Australia
highlights issues of disciplinary context in the reading of his art that,
in turn, reveal certain disciplinary baggage. In themselves, these diver-
gent yet discipline-specific views appear to undermine the architect's
claims for a synthesis of the arts, or indeed his search for formal laws
applicable across the disciplines, where no singular critical ground
appears on which these claims could be verified or tested. It is none-
theless useful to understand this problem for architecture, its connec-
tion to art, as a conceptual issue that Le Corbusier attempts to tran-
scend in his own thought. We might view it through the concept of
ineffable space, which Le Corbusier describes in his 1948 book New World
of Space. 11 He explains how the experience of ineffable space, a pure
and unmediated presence, comes to him in a moment of intense revela-
tion, giving rise to the further idea that there is a dimension of space
that transcends the arts painting, sculpture, architecture but
which is central to them all. Of particular interest here is Le Cor-
busier's arriving at his original understanding of ineffable space
through the contemplation of art, rather than architecture. Joan Ock-
man draws attention to a later statement by Le Corbusier in his pub-
lished work Modulor 2 that puts the proposition. 12 He states in a foot-
note, in relatively plain terms, how his access to the experience of
ineffable space works:
These words were the fruit of an experience. At my home there is a hall,
two metres square. One wall faces a large north light opening on to the
roof garden. This wall is, then, under a constant almost an ideal
light. It is the only wall lit this way, the flat being laid out to the east
and west.
10. Bernard Smith, ``The French Art Exhibition,'' Meanjin 12, no. 2 (1953), 168.
11. Le Corbusier, New World of Space (Boston : Reynal and Hitchcock and The In-
stitute of Contemporary Art, 1948).
12. Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture, 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (New
York : Rizzoli, 1993), 64.

I had made a habit to use this wall as a test bench for my paintings
whilst I was working on them : paintings both small and large.
One day at a very precise moment I saw inexpressible space come
into being before my eyes : the wall, with its picture, lost its limits :
became boundless.
I put friends and visitors through the test. After the picture had been
hung, I would suddenly take it away. There remained a little wall, two
metres long : a wretched sort of wall.
This fact gave food for thought. 13
Rather than look at the art `às art'' for what it might reflect back to
the viewer, here the viewer projects forward from the art, that is, out-
wardly looking past it to something other. At this moment, the
painting forgoes its autonomy in two ways: firstly, by referring to
something beyond its flatness (a space projected); and secondly, by
merging with everything else around it, becoming boundless within
its architectonic surrounds. This space to which the painting gives ac-
cess is decidedly architectural on both counts and recalls comments by
Rosalind Krauss on the placement of Le Corbusier's paintings in the
Villa La Roche. She observes that the relation of art to architecture in
his work might be seen in terms of nested relationships that are par-
tially spatial, where the painting is subject to the room in which it sits
just as the room is subject to the architectural work entire, and so
on. 14 This notion suggests a particular synthesis of art and architecture
where the ``weaker'' role is played by art a product that comes off
as secondary to and supportive of architectural conceptions of space at
the outset. Art might be key for Le Corbusier's experience of ineffable
space, but in doing so it dissolves into architecture rather than main-
taining its painterly bounds.
Strangely, in the work of Le Corbusier the reverse can also be true
where art and architecture are concerned. Daniel Naegele suggests that
a key question for Le Corbusier in his 1920s works including the
Villa Savoye might be put as follows: `how to introduce as essence
13. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2: Let the User Speak Next (London : Faber, 1958), 27.
14. Rosalind Krauss, ``Leger, Le Corbusier and Purism,'' Art Forum 10, no. 8,
(April 1972), 50-53.

96 Antony Moulis
to the non-fictive medium of architecture the sensation, the resonance,
found in the space of representation.'15 Here Naegele refers to paint-
ing and photography and to how the qualities of the experience of rep-
resentation are presented through the buildings themselves, as in the
experience of the architectural promenade and the strip window. The
disciplinary circularity is pronounced: as the contemplation of art
gives access to the architectonic of space, so architecture gives access
to representational qualities in art.
Yet these turns from architecture to art and back again are, for Le
Corbusier, personal investments in his creative practice rather than the
identification of a synthesis beyond both architecture and art. These
turns would certainly not lead him beyond the disciplinary politics of
his own day, where wariness of his claims was played out in art circles.
For instance, Douglas Dundas, an Australian delegate to the Interna-
tional Conference of Artists at the Venice Biennale in September 1952,
wrote in Meanjin of witnessing a à sharp conflict between the views
of M Le Corbusier, French Architect, and Mr. Henry Moore, the Eng-
lish sculptor.' 16 The disagreement centred on Le Corbusier's pro-
posals for new communities where architects, sculptors and painters
`might work in close co-operation.' 17 Moore's response was to see this
potential ``synthesis'' as a grab for cultural authority that would com-
promise the freedom of artists. He made the counter argument that
such an outcome `would be artificial and lifeless because it had been
consciously imposed on a group of individuals and not generated by a
way of life.'18
Although Le Corbusier's investment in art practice served his archi-
tecture, it never seems to escape this role, even to the present where it
is reconfirmed by the latest exhibitions on this theme in Japan and
Europe. For this reason, judgements of the qualities of Le Corbusier's
painting are impossible to separate from the cultural and disciplinary
politics that adhere to that same art. It is perhaps inevitable that his
15. Daniel Naegele, ``Savoye Space : The sensation of the object,'' Harvard Design
Magazine 15 (Fall 2001), 3.
16. Ian Bow, `Àustralian Provinciality in the World Art,'' Meanjin 12, no. 2
(1953), 177.
17. Bow, `Àustralian Provinciality in the World Art,'' 177.
18. Bow, `Àustralian Provinciality in the World Art,'' 177.

architectural critics by and large ignore this problem, sticking to the
disciplinary assumptions they introduce and keep alive as the only
terms of its engagement.
Yet if Le Corbusier's art remains an architectural one, how might
we understand his synthesis of the arts in light of this problem or dis-
ciplinary dispute? Le Corbusier's own rhetorical statements about this
synthesis are obviously self-serving and no less useful to his practice
of architecture. If we are to think about the way in which Le Corbu-
sier constructs relations between art and architecture, and with his
comment on the origins of ineffable space in mind, then it is a particu-
lar condition of circularity, tying together concepts suggesting that
one mode of representation acts as the point of threshold or access to
the other that we might take to characterise his practice of artistic
synthesis.
In his catalogue essay for the Rath's retrospective, Jacques Sbriglio
asks: Ìs architecture an art? Or, to put it differently, which part of art
contains architecture?'19 Sbriglio's questions raise the broad issue of
art's relation to architecture, which turns on the specific issue of the
relation of Le Corbusier's art to the architect's uvre complet. I argue
here that Le Corbusier's art raises problems for architecture in the way
that it characterises art. In the end, Sbriglio's question `which part
of art contains architecture' is more difficult to judge than we might
assume for the case of Le Corbusier. It is evident that it cannot be
easily resolved through the kinds of cultural battlelines that continue
to underwrite the reception of the architect's art.
19. Jacques Sbriglio, ``Le Corbusier ou l'art de l'architecture,'' in Ca sar, ed., Le

Corbusier ou la synthese des arts, 51.

Andre Bloc in Iran
Daniel Barber
In 1957, Andre Bloc travelled to Iran to collaborate on a number of

building projects. A sculptor, designer, and, most prominently, editor
of the journals Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui, Art d 'Aujourd 'hui, and Au-
jourd 'hui, Art et Architecture, Bloc was also the driving force behind the
synthesis of the arts-oriented Groupe Espace. His most significant
project in Iran involved a collaboration with the French-trained Irani-
an architect Heydar Ghiai: the Iranian Senate building in Tehran,
completed in 1959. In one of the few realisations of the sort of collabo-
ration across disciplines and across international boundaries that was,
for Bloc, the promise of a synthesis project, he produced two sculptur-
al columns as part of the fac ade of the building.
For Bloc and others, the synthesis of the plastic arts had a powerful
social and spiritual dimension, and was a self-conscious attempt to use
collaborative art to heal the wounds of war and manage the anomie
of modernity. After a brief discussion of Bloc's concept of synthesis,
I will place this ambition in the context of other preoccupations at play
in the journals he edited, and highlight the organisational and bureau-
cratic disposition of his synthesis-promoting activities. In all cases, we
will see Bloc as the consultant plasticien becoming a central node in a
dispersed network connecting industry, policy, and culture, a position
that presented an ethical dilemma for his projects in Iran.
As a promoter of the synthesis of the arts, Bloc embraced almost
anything that fitted that construct. At the same time, his writing, art-
work, and organisational modus operandi concentrated on two aspects of
synthesis: the public, monumental nature of these projects and the
principle of collaboration that defined them. In this he aligned himself
with the influential proposal of Giedeon, Sert, and Leger all of

100 Daniel Barber
whom were frequent contributors to his journals in their 1943 text
``Nine Points on Monumentality''. As they wrote:
The people want the buildings that represent their social and commu-
nity life to give more than functional fulfillment. They want their aspi-
ration for monumentality, joy, pride, and excitement to be satisfied...
A monument, being the integration of the work of the planner, archi-
tect, painter, sculptor, and landscapist demands close collaboration
between all of them. 1
Bloc would take both this synthetic, collaborative imperative and the
important symbolic capacities of these new monuments as a guiding
light through the tumult of post-war France.
The Fourth Republic was certainly a tumultuous period for the
French nation: from 1946-1958, twenty-one different prime ministers
held office, creating constant changes in the government and its blos-
soming bureaucracy. France was consumed in a rebuilding process that
completely realigned its industrial base, caused massive population dis-
placement, and disturbed its social fabric; furthermore, the period saw
a dramatic decline in the influence of Paris on the colonies and protec-
torates of the Union Franc aise. Amid this general anxiety, Bloc saw
the synthesis of the arts as a way to ``push against the wave of aliena-
tion and indifference'' and ``demonstrate belief in eternal values.''2 As
he indicated in a 1960 interview, his reflections on the important pub-
lic artworks of ancient Chinese and Mayan societies led him to con-
clude that a civilised society is measured by the ability of a people to
enshrine shared values in collaborative projects. 3 The project of syn-
thesis was thus one of social and moral revival, not only against the
horrors of the war, but also against the chaos of rebuilding and the
complications of emerging geopolitical tensions.
Bloc's rhetoric of collaboration is not always legible in his own
work, though the aspiration to monumentality is often evident.
1. Sigfried Giedion, Ferdinand Leger & Jose-Luis Sert, ``Nine Points on Mon-
umentality,'' in Architecture Culture, 1943-1968, ed. Joan Ockman & Edward Eigen
(New York : Rizzoli and Columbia Books on Architecture, 1993), 30.
2. Andre Bloc, ``Pour Survivre,'' in Espace. Architecture, Formes, Coleur. Biot du 10
juillet au 10 septembre 1954 (Paris : Societe Parisienne de l'Imprimerie, 1954), 16.
3. Andre Bloc, interview in Aujourd 'hui, Art et Architecture 59-60 (1967), 4.

Trained as an engineer, he began making art during the war. His first
public sculpture, Signal (1949), was commissioned by a building con-
glomerate to commemorate the centenary of reinforced concrete, and
donated to the Musee des Travaux Publics for permanent display in
its plaza. Its blandly optimistic composition is characteristic of Bloc's
work, as is further evident in his contributions to exhibitions at Biot
in 1954 and at the Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas in 1955. Even in
his artwork, we see the general outlines of his real ambition: the col-
laboration of consultants plasticiens with industry and government. The
sculptural columns of the Iranian Senate are not, in any case, easily
inserted into the formal development of his uvre, and only through a
discussion of his editorial and organisational activities can we hope to
understand Bloc's participation in the Iranian projects to see, that
is, how his commitment to the principles of synthesis and collabora-
tion imbricated him in the geopolitical conflicts of the day and, it
seems, left him ignorant of the abuses of democracy he was implicitly
supporting.
Many of the tensions of the Fourth Republic can be mapped across
the editorial disposition of Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui. As Pierre Vago,
one of Bloc's close associates, wrote in 1950: `Àrchitecture d 'Aujourd 'hui
is not just a journal, it is a movement, a tendency, a state of the spirit
that manifests itself in multiple ways: through trips, conferences, com-
petitions, radio shows, and other publications and activities.'' 4 With
the emergence of Groupe Espace in 1951, one could add exhibitions,
meetings, and legislative programs to this list, all of which were ori-
ented towards analysing and influencing the built environment by
engaging reconstruction policy through cultural means.
After starting Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui in 1930, Bloc had to cease
publishing in 1939, when he was conscripted. The journal reappeared
only nine months after the liberation of Paris, in May 1945. Scarce
paper had been found by a young hero of the resistance, Eugene Clau-
dius-Petit, who would go on to become the Minister of Reconstruc-
tion and Urbanism during the most active years of rebuilding. Clau-
dius-Petit also contributed to the first issue. His article ``Renaissance''
4. Pierre Vago, quoted in Pierre Roux-Dorlut, ``L'action de l'A.A. depuis sa

fondations,'' Aujourd 'hui, Art et Architecture 59-60 (1967), 51.

102 Daniel Barber
argued for a radically modernised rebuilding process and a more com-
plete integration of urban infrastructural concerns in the French recon-
struction process. De Gaulle's provisional authority embraced both
recommendations, and it was not the last time an essay in one of Bloc's
journals would be translated into state policy.
After the war, Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui began to thematise each issue,
a device that allows historians to map the development of the journal's
concerns. Initially, documentation and analysis of reconstruction was a
consistent emphasis. The second issue (August 1945) was on ``Solutions
d'urgence''; a three-issue special in mid-1947 was devoted to ``L'equipe-
ment et technique'', two terms central to the bureaucratic organisation
of the reconstruction process.5 These and other issues profiled the
schools, libraries, factories, office buildings, hospitals, housing blocks,
government-agency headquarters, research centres, and other buildings
that made up the reconstruction effort, emphasising the use of modern
design and construction strategies to resolve the complex problems
facing post-war populations.6 The most important architects of the
reconstruction including Georges Candilis, Jean Prouve, and Pierre
Roux-Dorlut seemed to have a project in every issue regardless of
the context, which provides further evidence, though on more prosaic
level, of the journal as a central node in a network of cultural and
political influence.
Insofar as the explicit connection between policy and culture is evi-
dent in the journal's immediately post-war issues, the thematics of
Architecure d 'Aujourd 'hui can be further analysed to expose the geopoliti-
cal tensions that concerned Bloc and his colleagues. Foremost was the
position of France in the world, both its status relative to other
nations on the changing geopolitical scene and its relation to overseas
interests. As reconstruction progressed, Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui in-
creasingly saw itself as an important voice of French building culture
and thus something of a defender of the nation's cultural importance.
Symptoms appeared early. When a Spanish-language edition of the
5. On the term equipement in this setting, see the introduction to Paul Rabinow's
French Modern (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1989).
6. Other issues included ``Prefabrication'' (December 1945), ``Reconstruction en
France'' (December 1946 & November 1950), ``Sante publique'' (November
1947), and ``Construction agricole'' (March 1949).

journal began in 1946, Vago described it as `àrising in response to a
desire, expressed by numerous South American friends, who are
admirers of French culture, and want to know more about the produc-
tion of French architects.'' 7 As the Fourth Republic stumbled into the
early 1950s, efforts of national promotion intensified; a three-issue se-
ries on the Contribution franc aise a l'evolution d 'architecture moderne (February,
April, and August 1953) serves, again, as the most obvious example
of a concern that can be read through countless other buildings and
events on which the journal reported.
In the third post-war issue, ``France d'outre-mer'', the journal began
to reflect concerns about the relation of France to its overseas depart-
ments, colonies, protectorates, and other foreign interests. In this con-
text, Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui maps precisely the decline of direct politi-
cal influence and the consequent shift to more multivalent networks
of international connections. As Great Britain and Italy were negotiat-
ing terms of self rule with their respective colonial interests, France,
its national budget bloated with Marshall Plan funds, dedicated
increasingly more money and soldiers to wars in North Africa and
Indochina. At Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui, the problem of France's
decolonisation was overdetermined, not least because Bloc, like others
in his circle, was born and raised in Algeria, at the time a department of
the French Republic. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Africa served
as an arena for experimental building strategies including important
innovations in housing, schools, and urban centres that would later
be developed in projects on the continent. By meticulously publishing
themed issues and individual projects and celebrating the innovations
of French architects, Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui provided a conduit
among architects, industry, and government agencies.
As the situation in French overseas interests evolved, its coverage in
the journal became more complex. Events leading to the state of emer-
gency declared in Algeria in July of 1955, which lasted through to the
end of the war in 1962, along with more temperate developments in
Tunisia and Morocco, were in the papers as an issue on `Àfrique du
Nord'' went on to newsstands in June 1955. Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui
began a more analytic approach to the problems of the region, dis-
7. Vago, in Roux-Dorlut ``L'action de l'A.A,'' 49.

104 Daniel Barber
cussing, for example, the importance of demographic changes to urban
policy and building types. Ministers of relevant agencies often con-
tributed comments printed alongside projects from throughout the
region.
The issue of February 1957, `Àfrique Noire'', further demonstrates
these new editorial approaches and the shifting economic and political
alliances with which they were concerned. From October 1956 to
March 1957, the Egyptian leader Abdel Nasser occupied and eventu-
ally nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain and France were outraged:
their shipping routes, and their access to Iranian oil, depended on the
Canal. The United States was not so displeased, as their routes through
the Gulf were not affected, and Eisenhower refused to support the
European coalition against Nasser. In Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui, these
tensions emerge in a proposal, which opens the `Àfrique Noire'' issue,
for a coal-and-steel-production facility intertwined amongst the coun-
tries under French influence in west Africa, itself part of a larger trans-
Atlantic steel-production-and-distribution system. The immediate
result was a collaboration among industries to allow French architects
to build in the region without concern for the situation of the Canal.
Nascent in these networks, however, is a recalculation of political and
economic influence across a matrix more dependent on resource con-
cerns than national fealties.
`Àfrique Noire'' also presents a prototype for housing in Iran. The
simple scheme was designed primarily by the architect Georges Candi-
lis, a friend of Bloc's who worked almost exclusively on government-
funded reconstruction projects until the early 1970s. It shows a pre-
fabricated, neighbourhood-focused housing system to be placed next
to the projected French-controlled section of the oil refinery in Aba-
dan, the main oil port of the Persian Gulf. Relative to the tensions
under discussion, it is perhaps this connection to resources that places
Iran in an issue on Black Africa. From 1932 until the beginning of
World War Two, Britain completely controlled the Iranian oil conces-
sion. The post-war reform movement in Iran, however, led by the Ira-
nian Prime Minister Mossadegh, was centred on the nationalisation of
the oil industry. From 1951 to 1953, Iran controlled its oil distribu-
tion; in 1953, the United States and Britain, fearful of further disrup-
tion to their oil supply, enforced an embargo. This led to an Iranian
economic collapse and, soon after, a CIA-led coup to depose the popu-

lar nationalist leader. The subsequent partitioning of the concession
can be seen as a measure of the status of Western power in this emerg-
ing network condition, with the United States and Great Britain each
getting 40%, Royal Dutch Shell 14%, and France 6%. Thus France's
official role in Iran was minimal, but nonetheless significant: for the
relatively resource-poor European country, their 6% was more than
half of the substantial amount of foreign oil received.
The two important characterisations of Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui's
post-war preoccupations its semi-official status as the journal of
record for France's reconstruction, and its more symptomatic docu-
mentation of emerging post-colonial and cold-war tensions condi-
tion a third characteristic, one more evident in the front matter and
hors-series publications of the journal: the synthesis of the arts. In some
ways, Bloc's promotion of the synthesis of the arts was a compensa-
tory inversion of France's devolving international stature. In a recent
essay, Joan Ockman describes Bloc's synthesis organisations and activ-
ities as a lobbying effort an obvious outgrowth of his connections
to government, industry, and architects.8 In the remaining discussion
I will substantiate this description. At the same time I hope to make it
a little more precise, and propose that Bloc's figure of the consultant
plasticien is, by the mid-1950s, concerned with operating across the
boundaries of culture and policy. By penetrating these complicated
networks, such a figure is implicated in geopolitical tensions more by
default than by design, perhaps initiating a new model of neutrality as
the role of the architect in policy and politics that continues to the present.
In 1946, Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui published a supplemental issue
called `Àrt et Architecture''; two years later, another followed on ``Le
Corbusier et l'Art''. By 1949, the supplement would become a regular
one: Art d 'Aujourd 'hui accompanied the architecture journal's six issues
a year and was also available separately. The new publication reflected
8. Joan Ockman, `À Plastic Epic : The Synthesis of the Arts Discourse in
France in the Mid-Twentieth Century,'' in Architecture and Art: New Visions, New
Strategies, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen & Esa Laaksonen (Helsinki : Alvar Aalto Foun-
dation, 2007), 30-61. She makes a similar comment in ``Lessons From Objects :
Perriand from the Pioneer Years to the Èpoch of Realities','' in Charlotte Perriand:
An Art of Living, ed. Mary McLeod (New York : Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 154-81.

106 Daniel Barber
many of the tensions described above, especially the anxiety over the
cultural importance of Paris, but responded to them with the unmiti-
gated optimism of the consultant plasticien. Its pages were filled with ex-
amples of efforts towards synthesis, most of which developed out of
organisations led by Bloc. His first post-war synthesis organisation,
l'Association pour une Synthese des Arts Plastiques, was formed to
support a project for an outdoor exhibition space at Porte Maillot,
outside Paris. The prospectus for the exhibition shows the direct invo-
cation of its relation to government officials, indicating sponsorship
from, among others, the President of the Republic and the Directeur
General des Relations Culturelles au Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres.
The Porte Maillot project, designed by Le Corbusier, a self-identi-
fied plasticien, was to exhibit the work of synthesis artists, first in Paris
and then on a tour of world capitals. Bloc, with the help of Claudius-
Petit, negotiated endlessly with municipal authorities to make the proj-
ect work, but it fell through nonetheless. He blamed this failure on Le
Corbusier's obstinacy, and, in the aftermath of Porte Maillot's collapse,
looked for ways to streamline his lobbying practice and provide a bet-
ter forum for the self-promotion of artists, architects, and plasticiens
interested in working collaboratively on public projects.
Groupe Espace, as this second organisation was called, was formed
in 1951 with Bloc as its president, Claudius-Petit its honorary presi-
dent, and numerous artists and architects as active members. (Its mem-
bership would eventually grow to 500.) As the founding manifesto
indicated, ``Groupe Espace has the goal of producing conditions for
the effective collaboration of architects, painters, and sculptors; of
organising, through the plastic arts, the harmonious development of
human activities.'' 9 By 1953, the meetings were huge celebratory din-
ners, with luminaries from design, art, government, and industry
circles frequent foreign visitors. They would report on the progress of
synthetic works in construction, such as the Renault factory by the
architect Bernhard Zehrfuss with painted murals and walls by Del
Marle, and the Maison de la Tunisie at the Cite Universitaire, where
Bloc was coordinating French and Tunisian architects and artists to
9. Groupe Espace, ``Manifeste. Le Groupe Espace,'' Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui

(1951) : xxii.

design the building and furnish the interiors. Reports also discussed
progress on the French contribution to Carlos Villanueva's Ciudad
Universitaria in Caracas, for which Bloc would both design a large
mosaic and organise an exhibition on French architecture to open its
gallery. Foreign groupes espaces rapidly formed in Finland, Italy,
Argentina, Switzerland, and elsewhere and would send reports to
Bloc for the meetings. Projects of Groupe Espace members were
frequently covered, occasionally in tandem, by both Architecture
d 'Aujourd 'hui and Art d 'Aujourd 'hui.
The group's activities were diverse. Its projects also included the
creation of a proportional system, called the m-omega, to coordinate
measurements across different plastic expressions. Groupe Espace also
attempted, unsuccessfully, to take control of French participation in
biennials at Sao Paolo, Milan, and Venice. Two further interests,
peripheral to our concerns, demonstrate its raison d 'etre. Firstly, it made
repeated attempts to reorganise the education of architects and artists
along integrative principles. (A constant trope in Bloc's writing is the
difficulty architects have in seeing out of their narrow education in
order to effectively collaborate with other disciplines.) These efforts,
which involved many members of the group as well as a number of
luminaries on the editorial board of Architecture d 'Aujourd 'hui, went so
far as to propose a full curriculum for the new system to the education
minister; in the end, however, they were ignored. Secondly, it organ-
ised a major lobbying effort for a programme requiring 1% of the
budget of publicly funded education buildings to be dedicated to the
participation of artists. This so-called percent-for-art programme was
instituted for all public projects under Andre Malraux's term as culture
minister in the mid-1960s, and has served as a model for similar proj-
ects around the world. 10
One of the most significant of the group's activities was a large
exhibition at Biot in 1954. Organised by Bloc and funded by Villa-
nueva, it brought together almost all of the 500 members in a massive
outdoor exhibition that seemed to be the realisation of the Porte Mail-
lot dream. The show presented sculptures, three-dimensional paint-
ings, and other art objects intended to demonstrate the promise of syn-
10. See Aujourd 'hui, Art et Architecture 59-60 (1967).

108 Daniel Barber
thetic practices. The catalogue, furthermore, served as a brochure for
the consultants plasticiens on display: each exhibitor was given a half-page
spread with a photograph (of either the work on display or a portrait)
along with a list comprising their educational background, their
important exhibitions or buildings, and other relevant information.
The front matter included an index of all the exhibitors and their con-
tact information. The brochures went into a second printing when
Groupe Espace was invited to bring the exhibition to Saint Cloud, out-
side Paris, in early 1955 for the ``first international exhibition of mate-
rial and equipment for buildings and public works'' a trade fair for
the building industry held just as the second wave of ground-up
reconstruction projects was heading into full swing.
Bloc, by then over sixty years old, entered the mid-1950s as an
important node in an international network of influence. In 1955, he
transformed Art d 'Aujourd 'hui into the much larger Aujourd 'hui, Art et
Architecture (later simply Aujourd 'hui), which served as his main polemi-
cal platform for the rest of his life. Ockman proposes that this mid-
decade moment is the both the apex and the end of what she has
termed the ``plastic epic''.11 Unfortunately, Bloc did not notice. Nor
did he seem to care about New York ``stealing'' the idea of modern
art from Paris, a phenomenon Serge Guilbaut has carefully docu-
mented.12 Rather, he redoubled his efforts to pursue the project of
modernity as a synthesis across creative fields, and of the production
of monumental, socially significant artworks as a collaboration among
cultural, commercial, and government organisations a constant
expansion of the principles of collaborative plastic expression into a
way of life.
To return, then, to the Iranian Senate building. Right after the war,
the long-standing tradition of French cultural influence in Iran was
alive, but in a state of flux. Commissioned to the architectural office
of Heydar Ghiai in 1955, two years after the young architect returned
to Tehran after studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Sen-
ate building's production remains one of the most dramatic effects of
11. Ockman, `À Plastic Epic''.

12. Serge Guilbaut, How NewYork Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1983).

the waning rayonnement franc aise. Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution,
which derailed his career, Ghiai had designed public buildings and pri-
vate palaces, and he was well known for his hospitals in the far reaches
of Iran. Yet the Senate, prominently located in downtown Tehran, is
his best-known building.
The complex contains a slab of offices and meeting rooms con-
nected by a narrow bridge to a large assembly hall, which leads to the
commanding fac ade Bloc helped produce. Bloc's two mottled columns
of interlocking solid-brass rectangles flank the majestic, open-grid
overhang; the columns' dynamics both affirm and complicate the grid
screen that dominates the fac ade. Bloc also designed a chandelier for
the assembly hall; the French interior designer Jean Royere designed
the rest of the interiors. The building is certainly collaborative, and it
appears to be so on the relatively precise terms Bloc championed; the
structural nature of the columns successfully blends sculptural and
architectural concerns in a truly integrative, plastic innovation. It is
clearly a monumental structure whether of the New Monumentality
or the old is less important, perhaps, than what it is a monument to.
A meeting of the Iranian Senate had not, in fact, occurred prior to
1952. This was not due to totalitarian or colonial oppression; rather it
was a treasured success of the Iranian Left. The political history of Iran
is remarkably complex, but one enduring theme, at least until 1979,
was the presence of a progressive, European-looking Left whose abil-
ity to gain power was consistently subverted by the Shah's authoritar-
ian management of the purportedly democratic process. The 1906 Ira-
nian Constitution created two houses of parliament: the lower house,
or Majlis, began meeting immediately; the upper house, or Senate,
was not initially convened. As the Senate was to be composed largely
of the Shah's appointees and the landed class, the more populist
Majlis, fearing its dominance, periodically refused to vote it into
session.13
When Mossadegh came into control of the Majlis in the early 1950s,
his progressive nationalisation party gained popularity on the initial
strength of increased oil revenues. Fearing complete submission to the
13. Djamchid Tavallali, Le Parlement Iranien (Lausanne : Imprimerie des Arts et

Metiers, 1954), 218-23.

110 Daniel Barber
electorate, Mohammed Reza Shah insisted on the establishment of the
Senate as a balance of power, a concession the newly confident Majlis
was now willing to make. After the coup of 1953, the Shah then used
the Senate as the legislative mechanism of the return to totalitarian
rule, commissioning the building to provide a prominent place for the
Senate in Tehran's urban fabric. 14 As is well known today, but was
perhaps not so clear in the mid-1950s, the Shah would oversee some
of the worst human-rights abuses in human history, and until the
1979 revolution, the Senate building was a symbol of the repression
of the reformist left. 15
It is likely that Bloc was more or less unaware that his artistic efforts
were involved in a venture of such geopolitical significance. Part of
the issue here is the uselessness of the synthetic gesture whether in
Tehran, Caracas, or Paris towards any significant modulation of the
impact of monumental form, and much less so of the political frame-
works from which such forms are produced. Though designed as part
of a plastic collaboration, the columns did not signify cooperation.
Perhaps Bloc was simply na|ve. All the same, one is tempted to make
something of the dramatic presence of the building's fac ade, its com-
manding and almost ironic presence, as if calling out (a la Robert Ven-
turi's drawing of ten years later), `Ì am a fac ade''. It is unrealistic to
imagine that Bloc was cognisant that the fac ade of democracy would
be so demonically deployed by the Shah in the following years or that
his elaborate and supportive column was an attempt to draw more
attention to the already overcrowded shell of the building and away
from the activities going on inside.
The main problem with such speculation, aside from assigning Nos-
tradamian political foresight to Bloc, is that the world's need for oil
created conditions in which the Shah was not called to task on his
totalitarian activities the political fac ade may have been elaborate
and overwrought, but, on geo-political terms, it did not really need to
be, as Western nations were happy to do business with the dictator.
Despite the Shah's repressive rule, and precisely because of its resource
14. M. Reza Ghods, Iran in theTwentieth Century: A Political History (London : Ada-
mantine Press, 1989), 256ff.
15. Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran : Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven &
London : Yale University Press, 2003), 152.

richness, post-war Iran would benefit from extensive Western assis-
tance during its modernisation process. The Shah would go on to
employ European and American architects in countless projects
around the country throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In this
regard, Bloc was part of a different sort of post-war avant-garde, pav-
ing the way for architects and urban designers by mapping networks
of cultural influence and technical assistance over those established by
corporate consultants, military and industrial installations, and, above
all, the complicated interconnections of oil extraction and distribution.
Bloc's network of connections and convictions was not so much
ineffective, then, as inert. The same can be said of other examples of
architecture's humanising moment of the immediate post-war period,
which did little to affect the decay of global harmony their rhetoric
decried: the Habitat concept deployed by French and other European
architects to provide a sense of cultural location for alienating housing
projects, perhaps most famously at Toulouse-le-Mirail, one of the
centres of the October 2005 riots; Le Corbusier's Modulor, on which
his Chandigarh complex, built after the partition of Pakistan, was
built; the everydayness of Team X; even the roots of various environ-
mentalist tendencies. And if the establishment of a network is not in
itself anything new, even in the 1950s, the specific characteristics of
Bloc's operation, especially his emphasis on consultation as collabora-
tion, speak of a new breed, a new type of cultural and commercial
actor whose operations across ethical boundaries legitimate an apoliti-
cal network. From the synthetic Iranian Senate to Rem Koolhaas's icono-
graphic constellation for the state-controlled CCTV television network in
Shanghai, the ethical commitment of the international architect has
been evacuated by default rather than by design, by the fact of partici-
pation. A network of commerce and culture has formed outside of the
direct influence of government, a threshold between policy and culture
that impacts them both in unexpected ways.
However, rather than continuing to speculate on the symptoms as
they emerged in 1957, we can conclude by turning to another example,
a later collaboration between Ghiai and Bloc, along with Claude
Parent, on the Iranian Maison at the Cite Universitaire outside Paris.
An overdetermined symbol of Iran's relation to the West, this build-
ing was the last national house to be built in the Cite. Construction
started in 1963, and it opened in 1969, with much fanfare and a visit

112 Daniel Barber
from the Shah (accompanied by his third wife, Farah, a Paris-trained
architect), two years after Bloc's death. Much of the anti-Shah Iranian
Left was based in Paris, and used the site for protests even while it
was under construction. Once the building was finished, only a few
months after the cultural eruption of May 1968, the protest became
more or less permanent, and in 1971, Iran abandoned the building.
Perhaps realising, ultimately, Bloc's synthetic ambitions, the impor-
tance of the Maison as a monument to the Shah's power outlived Iran's
actual occupation, as the building served as a rally site and meeting
point for protestors against the Shah's regime throughout the 1970s.
The balance of power in the 1979 revolution was more or less negoti-
ated within the exiled Iranian community in Paris. After the Ayatollah
Kohmeini was exiled to Paris in late 1977, the secular left-wing felt
compelled to join forces with the religious hard line, a move that pro-
vided enough momentum to topple the Shah, but also resulted in the
Islamic revolutionaries taking centre stage. The rest of this story is
well enough known. The synthesis of the arts, born of the desire to
``demonstrate belief in eternal values'', was overtaken by geopolitical
complications and had come to engage, on multiple levels, one of the
most corrosive political regimes of the twentieth century.

Throwing Light on Our Intentions
Andrew Leach
Contemporary theories of architecture's relation to the modern arts

privileges its contiguities and parallels with the plastic and visual arts
alongside those artistic practices cultivated from more easily definable
positions, as well as to a general concept of art informed by visuality
and affect. In this essay, I would like to present some old work in a
new light, that is, to talk about the historical case of mid-twentieth-
century French prose-poet Francis Ponge and one attempt on his part
to engage architecture on its own terms. 1 Ponge's thirty-odd-page poem
``Texte sur l'electricite'' was written in 1954, published in La nouvelle
revue franc aise a year later, and included in a French-English dual-lan-
guage anthology of his work in 1979. 2 Ponge described the poem as a
commission by Electricite de France (EdF, est. 1946) to convince ar-
chitects to better consider the relation between architecture and elec-
tricity in mid-twentieth-century France. In its conception, even if the
facts of the commission are fuzzy, it was a literary communique to the
architectural profession. Culturally speaking, it formed part of a
broad-based post-Marshall Plan effort to reintegrate the technical and
1. Andrew Leach, `Èlectricity, Writing, Architecture,'' Mosaic 35, no. 4 (2002) :

35-50. Parts of the present essay are extracted from the essay published in Mosaic,
which in turn developed from a paper given at ``No Sense of Discipline : An Inter-
national Conference on Disciplinarity,'' University of Queensland, June 2001.
2. Francis Ponge, ``Texte sur l'electricite'' (July 1954), La nouvelle revue franc aise 3,
no. 31 (July 1955) : 1-29 ; and in dual French-English edition (as ``Text on Elec-
tricity'', from which all quotations are made here) in The Power of Language, ed. &
trans. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London : University of Califor-
nia Press, 1979), 156-212.

114 Andrew Leach
infrastructural expansion into a generously defined understanding of
French culture.
In this historical setting, the problem with architecture's relation to
electricity was both pragmatic and conceptual. Architects routinely
applied electrical wiring to the exterior surfaces of walls in conduits
rather than incorporating it in the wall cavities along with the plumb-
ing and heating. In its remaining visible, electricity was explicitly dis-
trusted: if (or rather, when) it broke down, the technician could get to
the trouble with ease. By repositioning electricity as a product of cul-
ture, as an index of modernity, but also as a dimension of western cul-
ture proper, EdF invested in a more integrated approach to the inter-
section of electricity and the architectural imagination.
Ponge's first major published work was Le Parti pris des choses (1942),
a collection of literary impressions of everyday things: a door, an oys-
ter, a cut of meat. 3 Over the course of the piece, each abstracted sub-
ject gradually assumes concrete value expressed literarily, and he makes
a claim that any aspect of the world is likewise available to this pro-
cess. Written over a decade after Le Parti pris des choses, ``Texte sur l'elec-
tricite'' pursues this literary goal as it considers the status of literature
as media, between a subject construed culturally and a profession with
cultural aspirations, if not an imposed cultural status.
The work engages architecture on the terms, we could say, of a
view of the arts that understands the presence of fundamentals linking
one art to another, poetry to architecture. For Ponge, though, this lies
not with aesthetics or a broad concept of art-as-such, but rather in the
availability of cultural subjects or, indeed, natural subjects to
multifarious art practices, based as they are on different techniques,
media, and epistemological bases. If his commission, a communique
from a culturally, technologically, and socially constructed subject of
electricity to the profession of architecture and it is to the profession
that he writes is to convince architects to consider and apply the
forces of modernisation in their fields of professional activity, he nec-
essarily must construct an idea of the architect from outside of archi-
tecture, in relation to the strictures of literature. Ponge's strategy relies
3. Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses (Paris : Gallimard, 1942).

on convincing architects of the value and relevance of electricity for
the modern world. He offers electricity as an allegorical feminine fig-
ure archetypically La Fee electricite, depicted in the 250 panels of
Raoul Dufy's 1937 mosaic at the Palais de Tokyo to the architect as
an object of masculine desire. In this, the act of reading, the tactile ex-
perience of holding a book, plays a vital role in what Ponge casts as ar-
chitecture's seduction:
Neither do we have in mind some future or vaguely defined reader. We
are looking at someone, or rather, someone is looking at this book in
his hands. He has opened it. His eyes are now running over these lines,
and, in all probability, he is beginning to wish that he could grasp
something, something clear, that immediately makes an impression on
his mind, and that he could, just as easily, store in his memory : that is,
something already resolved, if this can be said. 4
Ponge conceives of two clear aspects to the architect's persona,

delineated by the artificiality of their lit environments: the daytime ar-
chitect occupies those hours in which natural lighting provides ample
illumination for each task detail drawings, site visits, specifying
whereas a different figure is identified as occupying the territory in
which electricity reigns superior, if not supreme: Ì mean the one who
is still an architect, of course, but also a man of leisure, a man whose
mind and taste are receptive to many other things.'5 The EdF publica-
tion program matches this delineation. The professional and their of-
fice hours are provided a separate volume, a technical book containing
facts, instructions, regulations, and codes of practice associated with
the use of electricity in buildings, a book interesting only `that part of
the architect's mind (or those closely associated with that art) that
functions professionally during working hours in offices or on a con-
struction site'.6 The ``Texte sur l'electricite'' panders to those `òther
things'' that the architect's mind drifts to contemplate, it acts as a
reference, a reminder, even during working hours, of those sensations
belonging to darkness, of the more pressing questions at the heart
(one could say, at the art) of architecture. To these ends, suggests
4. Ponge, ``Text on Electricity,'' 157.


116 Andrew Leach
Ponge, is a book for architects out to be `handsome' something to
show off, proof of the architect's taste. This parameter declared, he
turns directly to his message:
Our business is with electricity. For the man on the street, there are two
aspects to electricity. On the one hand, production and electrical mains
(these mains are practically all built in France). On the other hand, there
are the machines, the appliances, the orchestra of appliances that use
electricity. But among them, if I can express it this way, there are the
dwellings that contain these appliances ; there are the homes and the
offices of the men who use them. And since there are buildings, there
are the architects who build them, and there are also the clients, the
wives, the friends of these architects who commission these construc-
tions, and in general, confide in them, as they rightly should. 7
This negligence is not malicious, rather proof of a lapse of attention

on the architect's professional part, allowed too much influence over
the architect-as-artist. Here, of course, I introduce the issue of persona,
the capacity of the architect to adopt the persona of the artist inde-
pendent of the professional, economic, institutional realities within
which that persona operates. Ponge continues:
Now, and however curious this may appear in an a priori manner..., it
seems that some architects still forget electricity at times. I mean, that
some still do not account for it that is, as being of an importance
equal to that of either air or daylight when they draft their plans...
This work has only one aim : and that is to be I do not say convin-
cing but rather unforgettable, so that not a single one, as readers,
will ever forget that electricity exists, that appliances exist, that they can
be found or will be found (in greater and greater numbers) in each
building, in each house, and that, consequently, when plans are being
conceived for a building, one must arrange for the outlets, the ``circula-
tion,'' and the availability at the maximum number of places, of one or
more currents placed at everyone's disposal. Is that clear ? I believe it
is. 8
Ponge establishes ground rules for the medial function of his ``Texte'',
rules grounded in the acts of both writing and of construing electricity
7. Ponge, ``Text on Electricity,'' 159-61.


as a literary subject. The writer is placed between two èqually intelli-
gent' categories of technicians, `layman in one and the other of the
two techniques'. Ponge is a `layman' in his subjects, even if of à par-
ticular kind'. 9 He is neither an electrician (a technician of electricity,
involved with electricity at a discursive level, corresponding to those
who would, from within EdF, ask a poet to bring architects on board)
nor an architect (again, a technician of architecture, a discursive, cul-
tural, artistic formation, to distinguish from the profession).
As a technician of language, the basis of all communication, Ponge
argues that his technique simultaneously subsumes and activates all
other techniques: `The problem [he later stated in 1969] is to make
our breath vibrate each thing according to its particular timbre.'10 To
bring this back to electricity and architecture,
Because our three techniques have something noble in common, that I
had to clarify, and that is, they are all indispensable to all the others.
Architecture houses all the techniques. Electricity sheds light on them
and animates them. And Speech ? Well, Speech, (in another sense, it is
true) houses them, animates them and sheds light on them, all at once.
Electricians, o laymen ! you had instinctively understood this. 11
The opening words of the text, themselves an exercise in a kind of

word play for which we would now have little tolerance, reinforce
this feeling that a cultural claim is being staked on the electrical terri-
tory a claim that electricity can be considered on a plane with architec-
ture, literature, and, through literature's agency, all the other arts to
invoke our theme of art's systematisation: `To conform ourselves to a
style of life which has been our since the electrical current was placed
at our disposal, we shall immediately establish contact and throw light
on our intentions.'12 Technically, Ponge is à layman, but lay in all
things, systematically'. His job is to shower `his intimate resources' on
architects. These resources have a specific result, one anchored to dark-

10. Ponge in Serge Gavronsky, ed. & trans., Poems and Texts: An Anthology of
French Poems, Translations and Interviews with Ponge, Follain, Guilleric, Frenard, Bonnefoy, Du
Bouchet Roche, and Pleynet (New York : October House, 1969), 39.

118 Andrew Leach
ness, and, following Ponge's own analogy, to art, or to that part of ar-
chitecture that (for him) belongs to art: Ànd now you will taste the
night, and you will taste the poetry that will come from it, with a
wholly different violence, a wholly different voluptuousness.' 13
The violence comes from a return to common points, to a funda-
mental knowledge, bound for him to the history of words:
Through the idea (now a true cliche) that one of those brilliant stars
emitting light might have been dead at the time when the Chaldean
astronomers were observing the same sky, at the time when Thales, as
student in the Egyptian sanctuaries, had already discovered, through
other sources, the electrical properties of yellow amber. 14
Ponge's òther sources' are the dictionaries and histories that suggest a
gulf between the knowledge of Thales (who understood the electro-
magnetic properties of yellow amber) and that of Franklin or Queen
Elizabeth's physician Gilbert. Although `the best among these man-
uals' tell us of other electrical initiates (Moses, Solomon, Numa, ànd
even the Gauls'), these texts generally preclude the possibility of these
electricians, as he calls them, making the connection, for instance, be-
tween thunder and static electrics. 15 Ponge is troubled by the histories
of electricity that emphasise a trajectory of progress from the seven-
teenth to the twentieth century. This notion of progress precludes, for
him, the possibility of a cyclic understanding of history, which allows
for the ancient world to have known scientific secrets that have yet to
be rediscovered:
Being, as I am (as is everyone) sensitive to the great, and so to speak,
superior beauty of the things of ancient Egypt, of the ancient East, of
ancient Greece and when I say things, I do not only mean sculpture
or architecture but fables and mental constructs... I cannot easily accept
the idea that in the area of scientific knowledge, they were considerably
inferior to us. I am slightly embarrassed when I have to accept the idea
that modern man is in any way superior to the man of these epochs. 16


Language, and its history, confirms his suspicion, words being a re-
pository of àll past sensitivity and knowledge'. Ponge reflects that
yellow amber, a substance that became magnetically charged when
rubbed by a cloth, was named elektron, after Electra, whose tears were
so precious they were preserved as amber. Her brilliance, magnetism,
and detachment are likewise revealed in her genealogy. Her father was
Atlas (who `carried heaven on his shoulders'); her uncle, Prometheus
(`ravisher of fire'); she was a sister of Cadmos (ancestor of Thales, who
stood for the influence of Egypt in Greece), one of the Pleiads (whose
suicides responded in despair to the suicides of their sisters the Hyades,
in whom the name rain is found); and related to the Danaids (among
whom is Hypermenstra, who fails to kill her husband, he with such
`piercing sight that it could even go through fortified walls'). 17 Electricity cannot be
divorced from its etymology, nor its etymology from its connection
to myth and the origins of civilisation. To conceive of electricity in
modern terms is, for Ponge, nothing more than a return to a position
whereby we can understand electricity holistically, but now as part of
a modern life organised along `èlectric'' lines while connecting us
back to the roots of culture, if under the cover of darkness. Ponge
wonders of those who `could not accept that [Thales] knew about the
relationship between amber and thunder, and had some vague idea, as
correct as ours of what we call (after them) Electricity'. 18
To restate, he takes a position between electricians and architects.
Yet this move argues that those things important to the writer are
equally important to the electrician and the architect they are all the
same, they pertain to a relation between the present and the past, and
they grapple with the level of authority the latter ought hold in the
former. Therefore, placing the architect in a position where they desire
an historical continuity, expressed through a tradition anchored in the
ancient world, and revealing the electrician as a figure who pays hom-
age to that same ancient world (though to constructions of a different
nature) is the reminder Ponge offers the architectural profession
through an appeal to the artist who comes into work to write specifi-
cations. At the same time, the writer hands electricity over to neither


120 Andrew Leach
the electrician nor the architect: it is now language, thus forcing us to
recognise his claim for the writer's dominance in a privately (or per-
haps institutionally) conceived arrangement of the arts relative to
poetry.
Only from this basis may Ponge proceed with his argument, to make
electricity unforgettable in the mind of architects. He recounts the
recent ``discoveries'' of Poincare, praises Planck `for having calculated
the ``h'' constant'; he lauds the principle of uncertainty, Einstein's ideas
on `the relativity of Space and Time', the `notion of curved Space', and
`progress' in mathematics.19 Yet Ponge continues, in his poem and
this is not to treat the transgressions involved in turning poetry over
to prose, or adopting prose for poetry to identify moments wherein
the ancient and modern worlds are drawn together on the basis of a
conceptual understanding of electricity's mythopoetic associations.
Several decades of technological and scientific achievement is, here,
tempered by this historical understanding, by this weight of history
Ponge has revealed to his architect readership. For him, it is a matter
of continuity: ànother concept of man has prevailed, a new concept of
his relationship to the universe'. 20 The secularity of modern life is a
veil, behind which lies an appreciation of technology that, in its nais-
sance, is fundamentally religious, literally awful:
I asked myself where had I left my goddesses and their knees ? But right
away, all things mingled and I saw these goddesses sitting on moun-
tains near Truyere, or in the caverns of Brommat... Did you know that
men died the moment they so much as touched those Hindu princesses,
those untouchables ? 21
He continues:
Thus, clothed like a maharani, in evening clothes, but naked also, spar-
kling and bejeweled ah ! I would live only at night for the pleasure
of being served by her ! Brusk, elegant, proud, and magnetic : a maid
with a princess' character. Her origins are of the noblest, and she never
degenerates... I am told that she serves me the way she does everyone,
and that any peasant can afford her. To tell the truth, she is a prostitute,


but what do I care since she never loses her distinction, since she keeps
her distance as a matter of principle. 22
Ponge argues that this desire, which by now is ambiguously his own
and a projection of the architect's response to what he has so far writ-
ten, results in a dedication to collect the ``tools'' of Electricity's ``zeal''.
Yet where does he store these tools? In the spaces designed by techni-
cians of the built environment:
That is because, when one has tools, there must necessarily be a place to
put them ; and when one is naked, there must be some house, some cav-
ern, or palace to provide needed shelter. And that is the reason why
man, from the beginning, has had to find shelter, not only to nestle his
companion and his offspring but to put his detachable members in a
place where he could find them again when he needed them. 23
Returning to the problem posed at the outset, the collection of electri-

cal appliances a gesture demonstrating ``compliance'' with electrici-
ty's current influence poses also the problem of housing, which
emerges from Ponge's ``Texte'' as a perpetual and not-simply-modern
concern of architectural technique: that architecture housing humans,
families, societies, but also that between the walls, in which resides the
history of civilisation. The ``Texte'' is at once a panegyric to electricity,
a communique between electricity, with its deep cultural history ex-
posed by Ponge through etymology, and architecture, which wants
history, or the architect-artist, who understands its importance. This
conclusion could lead us, I suspect, to the rather loose importance of
language in architecture's disciplinarity status as argued in the 1960s
and 1970s, against the legacy of the modernism that was perhaps in
Ponge's own mind. For architecture to renew itself, then, is for it to
take part in a long tradition of reconceiving its own place in the
world, in culture, in the history of civilisation. Ponge shows that new
conditions can expose old problems, and this holds true for the rela-
tion between architecture and culture. In doing so, he claims a place
for poetry relative to architecture, whereby architecture would not
know the authority it cedes by believing the poet's stories.


Serial Techniques in the Arts
General Ambitions and Particular
Manifestations
Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
Throughout the twentieth century, common techniques for conceiv-

ing and composing works of art were applied to different media and
to disparate disciplines. Abstraction, narrative and anti-narrative tech-
niques, indeterminacy and chance, and the reductiveness of minimal-
ism, for example, can be found in music, literature, dance, the visual
arts, and architecture. The disciplinary models of history and criticism
through which works of art are apprehended, however, mean that the
shared use of these techniques is rarely tracked across more than two
disciplines. Any transference between disciplines is further obscured
by these techniques frequently being made manifest under different
names and with diverse formal outcomes. Sampled noise in a musical
composition, for example, has conceptual parallels in found objects
and collage. Stream-of-consciousness writing has a counterpart in im-
provised dance and music, and another in automatic drawing in art
and architecture. Moreover, the uptake of a technique developed ini-
tially in one discipline may not occur in another for decades and, con-
sequently, needs to be viewed against contexts that are not only dispa-
rate in their media and critical framework but also divergent in the
historical and social conditions against which they are understood.
This essay is concerned with the transference of serial techniques
across the arts, that is, with predetermined procedures of composition
using series, often numeric and algebraic series. Serial techniques of
composition were first explored in music by Schoenberg, Berg, and
Webern in the 1920s and later by Stockhausen, Nancarrow, Wuorinen,
and, most famously, Messiaen's pupil Pierre Boulez in the 1950s. Serial

124 Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
methods were subsequently adopted in the visual arts in the late 1960s
and developed as a curatorial theme in exhibitions such as Art in Series
(1967), Serial Imagery (1968), and Systemic Painting (1966). Serial methods
appear in the architectural experiments of architects Peter Eisenman
(from the late 1960s), Bernard Tschumi and Hiromi Fujii (in the 1970s
and 1980s), and again in parametric and procedurally driven digital
architectures in the 1990s. Serial techniques have been used to organise
the length and timbre of notes; the temporal or physical spaces
between aural or visual elements in performances; the distribution and
selection of words, shapes, and numbers; the colour and size of marks
on a page or wall; the spacing and size of architectural elements and
openings.
Serial techniques have been selected as a vehicle for exploring inter-
disciplinary transference because of the precision, deliberation, and
self-conscious character of their application and development. Artists
and composers who used serial methods from Boulez in music to
Sol LeWitt in the visual arts are reflective in writing about their
ambitions and the perceived consequences of the approach. John
Coplans (1967), Mel Bochner (1968), and Rosalind Krauss (1971) each
make critical contributions to serial art in essays in Artforum, Krauss
subsequently writing about Eisenman's Houses of Cards of the 1970s.
More significantly for this study, serial practitioners and advocates fre-
quently declare the serial approach to be outside of style and discipli-
nary history, and only arbitrarily connected to its material realisations;
that is, serial techniques are posed as existing outside disciplinary
boundaries.
Serialism is advocated by Bochner and other artists as a way of over-
coming the privilege of appearance and the dominant discourse on
iconology, style, and historical importance. Bochner declares that what
matters is the methodology or `àttitude'' entailed in serialism, not
what is produced through it. 1 He confidently announced, `No stylistic
or material qualities unite the artists using this approach because what
form the work takes is unimportant.' 2 The stylistic uniformity of seri-
1. Mel Bochner, ``The Serial Attitude,'' Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967), 28.
2. Mel Bochner, ``Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,'' Arts Magazine 41, no. 8
(1967) : 39-43.

Serial Techniques in the Arts 125
alist art, however, suggests there is a gap between these aspirations to
formal neutrality and specific instantiation. This gap raises a number
of questions about disciplinarity that this paper will pursue.
This essay will track a single technique taken up at different times
across the arts during the twentieth century, as well as the transfer of
ideas about serial techniques. The aim of this tracking is to ascertain
the degree of consistency of methods used and to assess this against
stated ambitions and results. The supposition is that in studying a nar-
rowly defined and prescribed method across different situations, disci-
plinary differences might be more clearly revealed much as one
might in a scientific experiment narrowly prescribe one set of variables
in order to determine the impact of variation on another set. Some of
these differences might be located in media and the perceptual mode
in which works were apprehended; in the visual arts, for example, the
use of algebraic procedures used to select and order elements is typi-
cally visible in the resulting formal organisation of the work and is
explicitly presented as the subject of the work, as its formal order and
process. In Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, the working out of the various
combinations of elements is presented at two scales, as the working
diagram and the wall drawing, with the two being identical in content.
By contrast, the mathematical permutations that organise the notes of
serial music are inaudible and, as Brindle notes, frequently the concern
only of the composer. 3 In serial art, not only are the systems of per-
mutation frequently those of specific mathematical series, such as the
Fibonacci series, but the material subjected to its organising logic are
those of epistemological systems such as dictionaries or the alphabet,
which are also organised according to sequential conventions. This is
not the case in architecture, where the organising geometries and
material elements subjected to serial permutations for example, the
grids and planes in Eisenman's houses are conceived by the archi-
tect as inherently neutral. Greg Lynn, who has identified his approach
as digital serialism, argues that he applies procedural and rule-based
techniques to `schemata that precede the representational and linguistic
3. Reginald Smith Brindle, Serial Composition (London : Oxford University Press,

1966), 157.

effects they facilitate', these being vectors and blobs outside of Eucli-
dean geometry. 4
Yet there are other differences concerning the historic assumptions
of disciplinary discourse. How serialism is critically understood and
played out relates to the internal organisation of the discipline
itself that is, the location and porosity of its disciplinary boundaries
and the sources that drive historical change. The boundaries between
genres such as painting and sculpture, and between disciplines such as
music and noise, have been seriously eroded in the past century of
artistic experiment and technological change, yet serialism presents evi-
dence that disciplines are not so readily dissolved. The institutional
structures in which works are presented and received tends to return
the generality of a technique to the specificity of the discipline.
An integral part of the picture of serialist practices involves
exchanges among the visual arts, architecture, music, literature, and
philosophy. Serial artists and critics such as Sol LeWitt, John Coplans,
and Mel Bochner attest to the influence of the serial musical composi-
tions of Boulez, Babbit, and the Viennese school of the 1920s. Mel
Bochner suggests that ìn procedure, if not in results', the work of Sol
LeWitt `very closely resembles some contemporary serialist music.' 5
Boulez's arguments for serial music were widely disseminated in publi-
cations such as Tel Quel, reaching audiences beyond music, including
the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who published a
damning critique of serial music in the preface to The Raw and The
Cooked (1964), and philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, who saw in
Boulez's work the radical potential of a formalist approach. 6 More
recently, architects using rule-based procedures coupled with softwares
for ``parametric'' design have likened their work to the serial music of
Schoenberg and Boulez. Sanford Kwinter, for example, describes Peter
Eisenman's design process as `Boulez-like total serialism' in its `rigid
positions or relations' and presents his own use of parameters and
4. Greg Lynn, ``Geometry in Time,'' Anyhow, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cam-

bridge & London : MIT Press, 1998), 170.
5. Bochner, ``Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,'' 42.
6. Michel Foucault, ``Pierre Boulez : Passing through the Screen'' (1982), in
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2, trans.
Robert Hurley et al., ed. James D. Faubion (London : Penguin, 1998), 242.

algebraic procedures as more flexible. Eisenman's introduction to
7
serial procedures was not through Boulez but LeWitt, about whose
work he wrote in ``Notes on Conceptual Architecture'' (1971). The
formal and methodological resemblance between Eisenman's houses
and LeWitt's sculptures is so close that it prompted critic Michael
Sorkin to snipe, `Who, after all, really wants to live with or in a Sol
LeWitt?' 8
There have also been shared exhibitions and collaborations among
serial artists of different disciplines. LeWitt collaborated with Lucinda
Childs on Dance (1979), and Laurie Anderson set one of LeWitt's linear
serial projects to music, as if it were a score. The exhibition Working
Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed
As Art (1966) includes pages of notations and calculations used in the
planning and execution of art works by Bochner, Judd, Andre, and
LeWitt. But it also includes building blueprints, plans for poems,
musical scores by Cage and Stockhausen, chemical equations, diagrams
of electrical circuitry, and record sheets of baseball games. Rainer
Crone's Numerals 1924-1977 (1978) includes a mix of work by visual
artists such as Bochner, LeWitt, and Darboven; architects Peter Eisen-
man and Arata Isozaki; choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown; and
pages of notations by composers Cage, Reich, Gibson, and Glass.
Evidence of collaboration and influence do not, however, explain
the attractiveness of the influence or the ambitions motivating the bor-
rowing of techniques and their application to a different discipline or
medium. There are several intersecting ambitions common to serial
practices across the arts. These need first to be understood in light of
the abiding twentieth-century preoccupation with how to conceive and
make art. This question of ``how'', in terms of process rather than
craft, replaces the historic questions of what function the artwork per-
formed or, post-Kant, what essence it possessed and what aesthetic
experience it made possible. In investigations into process, serialism is
one of a number of techniques used indeterminacy and chance as
7. Sanford Kwinter, ``Can one go beyond Piranesi ?'' in Eleven Authors in Search of
a Building:The Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati, ed. Cynthia
Davidson (New York : Monacelli Press, 1996), 158.
8. Michael Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings (London : Verso, 1991),
38.

practised by John Cage is another and although in some ways the
opposite of serialism, both techniques have the effect of removing
authorial intervention once the process is in train. Andrew Ford
proposes that `[t]otal serialism aimed to give music a mathematical in-
fallibility... Every sound would be subject to analytical avouchment,
free from the moment to moment vagaries of human volition.' 9 Sol
LeWitt, who identified predetermination in art more broadly with
conceptual art, in 1967 proposes a similar removal of the author:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the
work... In other forms of art the concept may be changed in the process
of execution... When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means
that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execu-
tion is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes
the art. 10
In architecture, Eisenman described how given constraints and param-

eters mean that `the process is somewhat out of authorial control.'11
The imposition of a ``machinic'' logic is directed not only towards re-
moving the author as an originating ground of meaning, but simulta-
neously revealing the groundlessness of systems of signification and as
a strategy for undermining representation. In architecture and music,
authorship is always complicated by the constraints of realisation and
performance necessitating the interpretation by others of notations
and instructions with the exception of serial composer Conlon Nan-
carrow, who used a player piano to realise compositions so dense they
are unplayable by traditional means. In the visual arts, authorial con-
trol is less frequently complicated by realisation, although Sol LeWitt
coupled serial techniques with execution by others in many of his wall
drawings, allowing others' input to vary the outcome of given instruc-
tions.
9. Andrew Ford, Illegal Harmonies: Music in the 20th Century (Sydney : Hale & Ire-
monger, 2002), 131.
10. Sol LeWitt, ``Paragraphs on Conceptual Art'' (1967), in Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia
Legg (New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 166.
11. Peter Eisenman & Alejandro Zaero-Polo, `À Conversation with Peter
Eisenman,'' El Croquis 83 (1997), 8.

Talk of machines and the apparently rational pursuit of logical pro-
cedures meant that many critics of serialism, even those who sup-
ported it, viewed it as academic and mathematical. Contemporary crit-
ics of serial music attacked it for being cerebral, mechanical, artificial,
overly sombre, non-melodic, static, and self-defeating. Serial compos-
ers were accused of being preoccupied with technical and theoretical
concerns, prey to sterile mannerisms, uncompromising, and indifferent
to the public. 12 Boulez himself conceded to an ùncomfortable period'
for new listeners and subsequently admitted that serial music was a
`theoretical exaggeration' that overlooked instrumental practicalities.13
In art, Donald Kuspit regarded LeWitt's work as `the deification of
the human mind by reason of its mathematical prowess' wherein `there
is no optical induction: there is only deduction by rules.'14
One or two critics noted the tension between the visual and the
organising logic at work. Rosenblum observed that LeWitt's work
appears às if the computer systems... had been freed from their utili-
tarian duties and had gone beserk in new two- and three-dimensional,
cellular or labyrinthine structures.' 15 LeWitt's intentions are unambig-
uous: Ìrrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logical-
ly.'16 His friend and fellow artist Robert Smithson thought LeWitt's
work was concerned with enervating paradox: `His concepts are pris-
ons devoid of reason.'17 Constraints and predetermined rules were
intended to generate unexpected outcomes that appeared logical, but
in fact pointed to the arbitrariness of systems of meaning and represen-
tation.
12. Nicholas Tawa, American Composers and Their Public: ACritical Look (Metuchen,
NJ : The Scarecrow Press, 1995), 172-203.
13. Boulez, quoted in Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, ed. William Clock (New York :
Da Capo, 1986), 14.
14. Donald Kuspit, ``Sol LeWitt : The Look of Thought,'' Art in America LXIII
(September-October 1975), 48.
15. Robert Rosenblum, ``Notes on Sol LeWitt'' (1978), On Modern American Art
(New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 253.
16. Sol LeWitt, ``Sentences on Conceptual Art,'' Art-Language 1 (May 1969), 80.
17. Robert Smithson, `À Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,'' Art In-
ternational (March 1968), 21.

Krauss, writing in 1978, confirmed that `the babble of a LeWitt
serial expansion has nothing of the economy of the mathematician's
language.' 18 By this date, she had changed her position on serial art
significantly from her 1971 criticism of Frank Stella's practices. Krauss
had then argued that the internalisation of relationships in the serial
work eroded the relationship with the audience, which was no longer
needed for its completion. She claimed the serial calculations that sup-
port the work were no longer present as part of the viewer's experi-
ence, thus substituting vision as the mode in which a work was under-
stood for conditions outside the material factum of the work. Krauss
had concluded that serialisation had become the medium and that Stel-
la's paintings, in tending towards the diagram, had entered `the condi-
tion of the mathematical formula'.19
In The Architectural Uncanny (1992), Anthony Vidler suggests two
ways of understanding Peter Eisenman's serialist houses undertaken
between 1969-83. One is to see the series of projects as àn exercise in
the rational exploration of certain pre-established formal constructs: a
self-conscious logical sequence with a beginning and an end.'20 Alter-
natively, it is plausible to see them as `posed self-consciously against
anthropomorphic analogies, closed formal systems and functionalist
derivations', in such a way that these designs òverturn the classical
system of representation'. 21 As Levi-Strauss discerns, serial music is à
system adrift... like a sailless ship' in which the crew is subjected to
elaborate protocols intended to distract them from thinking about
their origins or destination. 22 Whereas Levi-Strauss believed that
meaning arises from the location of a work within a field of differences
amongst other bounded works, the serialist work, however, makes of
18. Rosalind Krauss, ``LeWitt in Progress,'' October 6, (1978), 55.

19. Rosalind Krauss, ``Stella's New Work and the Problem of Series,'' Artforum
10, no. 4 (December 1971), 44.
20. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cam-
bridge & London : MIT Press, 1992), 118.
21. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny : Essays in the Modern Un-
homely, 118.
22. Claude Levi-Strauss, `Òverture,'' in The Raw and the Cooked (London :
Jonathan Cape, 1970), 25.

itself a field of differences and internal relations and is thus found to be
`floundering in non-significance'.23
Non-significance was, however, exactly what was sought in the
serial method. Bochner referred to this quality as solipism, explaining
that the special kind of order that is the serial, is `self-contained and
non-referential'. The serial art work presents itself as àutonomous and
indifferent'. 24 Or as John Coplans elaborates, `Serial structures are
produced by a single indivisible process that links the internal struc-
ture of a work to that of other works within a differentiated whole.'25
Representation is challenged because these works eliminate any refer-
ence to an exterior world outside the work and insist instead upon the
work as creation in its own right. In place of models and their copies,
the series posits an undifferentiated throng of copies without models,
of simulacra. Relativity replaces causality, banality usurps auratic value,
and multiplicity is valued over uniqueness.
The paradox of the serialist work is that it uses abstract and mathe-
matical universals and makes generalised claims about these, yet each
actualisation of serial techniques takes place in particular historical and
disciplinary contexts. Serial methods require a medium of some sort to
be made evident, and is thus impelled to deal with the relationship
between conceptual and procedural order and visual, auditory, or spa-
tial perception. Rather than this gap signalling some kind of failure,
serialists were interested in the ungovernable residue in any communi-
cation of a concept and the inflection of the idea through the shifts
offered by different media. Or as LeWitt explains, `Some ideas are log-
ical in conception and illogical perceptually.' 26 This is apparent in his
wall drawings, where it is impossible to perceive the whole simultane-
ously in order to comprehend its underlying order. The apprehension
of the work is dependent on the gaze of the viewer. Serial art demon-
strates that concept and percept are not coincident or transparent.
The impact of the gap between concept and percept, and of the
challenge made to representation by the solipsism of serially produced
works, differs in each discipline. This is most evident when one com-
23. Levi-Strauss, `Òverture,'' 23.

24. Bochner, ``Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,'' 40.
25. John Coplans, Serial Imagery (Pasadena : Art Museum, 1968), 11.
26. LeWitt, ``Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,'' 166.

pares the violence of the response to serial architecture with the critical
response to serial music and art. Critical disappointment with serial art
and music focuses on the lack of visual or auditory pleasure to be
derived from the outcomes and on its perceived lack of meaning. In
art, there was also some dismay expressed at the formal similarity of
work. On the occasion of a major retrospective at MoMA in 1978, the
critic Robert Pincus-Witten notes for the first time the formal homo-
geneity of the work, writing, `For all its joy, the occasion was
muted since the imposition of an epistemic system as an authentic
style in the history of art seems over and done to me... that there
should be the possibility of a ``Tenth Street Touch'' with regard to
epistemological abstraction staggers me, hurts a bit.' 27
In the new millennium, serial art has attracted a great deal of histori-
cal revision and retrospective exhibition along with other art of the
period, beginning with Anne Rorimer's inclusion of a chapter on
``Systems, Seriality, Sequence'' in her New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefin-
ing Reality (2001). Serial music has continued to influence composition,
particularly electronic and digital music for example, the work of
Brian Eno. In architecture, however, the experiments of a previous
generation in serial techniques were vehemently attacked by their con-
temporaries and are now overlooked or dismissed by younger genera-
tions who cite the influence of Boulez before the relevant architectural
precedents.
Critics of Peter Eisenman's serial architectural proposals deride them
as non-architectural, because these projects do not derive their purpose
from the function or meaning of inhabitation or the logical processes
of building. Michael Sorkin finds House El Even Odd to be far `from
any reasonable standard of legibility as habitable architecture'. 28 Serial
techniques applied to architecture are an ethical affront. Their form
does not respond to social expectations, function, assumptions about
professionalism, budgets, or regulatory mechanisms pertaining to
planning, safety, and amenity, and they are thus dismissed as socially
27. Robert Pincus-Witten, ``Bochner, Shapiro, LeWitt,'' in Postminimalism into

Maximalism: American Art, 1966-1986 (Ann Arbor : UMI Research Press, 1987), 127-
128.
28. Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse, 38.

irresponsible, culturally irrelevant, and arbitrary. Is this necessarily
true?
Bernard Tschumi in the design of the Parc de la Villette (1986)
attempts to make programme, which he calls event, one of the ele-
ments subjected to serial ordering devices. He proposes that the trans-
formational sequence entailed by the design process is based not on
intuition but on à precise, rational set of transformational rules and
discrete architectural elements'. 29 He likens this process of recombin-
ing fragments through a `series of permutations' to the Oulipian
manipulations of the writers Queneau and Perec. 30 Claiming to avoid
`pure formalism', Tschumi subjects space, movement, event, symbol,
and program to these mechanical operations. He conceives an inde-
pendent relation between object, movement and action, proposing,
Às sequences of events do not depend on spatial sequences (and vice
versa), both can form independent systems, with their own implicit
schemes or parts.' Tschumi is suggesting a broader scope for serial
methods, not dissimilar to Boulez's recognition that serial order could
be applied not only to notes and their timbre and spacing, but also to
elements of performance, or the work of artists such as Karen Shaw
and Hanne Darboven, who sought to intersect the use of abstract sys-
tems with biographical events and details.
Tschumi did not continue with the serial methods he developed in
the Parc de la Villette. Nor have we seen, in any of the disciplines, a
more complex approach to mathematics that takes on multiple, inter-
secting series, open-ended or infinite series, or the irrational series pro-
posed by Cantor and Dedekind in 1917. The series used are mostly
discrete; every element has only one predecessor or successor. In a
sense, the serial techniques described here are limited and the project
of representational critique incomplete. By no means have serial tech-
niques been exhausted in their application. Nevertheless, it has been
possible to discern differences in their realisation in different media
and disciplines in critical response, in the clarity with which audien-
ces perceive the serial structures at work, in the motivations of those
that used them.
29. Bernard Tschumi, ``Sequences,'' Princeton Journal 1 (1983), 30.

30. Bernard Tschumi, ``Madness and the Combinative,'' Precis 5 (Fall 1984), 153

In conclusion, it is worth returning to Mel Bochner's definition of
serialism:
A procedural work of art is initiated without a set product in mind. In a
piece of this kind the interest is only in knowing that the procedures,
step by step, have been carefully and thoroughly carried through. The
specific nature of any result is contingent on the time and place of
implementation and is interesting as such. It is the `proceeding' that
establishes it as such. 31
Curiously, however, this implementation led to works bearing distinct

formal resemblance. In the visual arts this was characterised by planes
of flat primary and secondary colours; epistemological elements such
as numbers and the alphabet; taut horizontal or vertical lines; grids;
Euclidean geometries and platonic forms, particularly cubes; a single
and uniform medium for each work; even distribution of pattern or
parts; and the use of diagrams and tabulated lists.
In the serially devised architecture of John Hejduk, Eisenman, Hir-
omi Fuji, and Tschumi we see the same use of grids, platonic solids,
cubes, flat and uniform colour, and diagrams that set out the iterations
of the process in matrices. Such a convergence of formal outcomes is
not determined by the serial methods used, but arises out of the circu-
lation of forms that crosses disciplines and includes sources such as
Russian Constructivism, mathematics, and a broad representation field
on which serialism builds its critique. The critique of representation
that serialism carries out is undertaken through the subjection of ele-
ments adopted from systems of signification to predetermined rules
and procedures of permutation that operate independently of and in
contradiction to those systems. In effect, serialism does not escape rep-
resentation or discipline, but merely suspends and demonstrates their
underside in contingency and nonsense.
31. Mel Bochner, `Èxcerpts from Speculation (1967-1970),'' ArtForum 8-9

(1970), 70-73, reprinted in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York : Plume, 1972),
52.

Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures
On Medium and Disciplinarity in the
Work of the Bechers
Naomi Stead
In scholarly discussions of the work of the German photographers

Bernd and Hilla Becher, a direct address of architecture is strangely oc-
cluded. There is much talk of industrial structures, artefacts, even
buildings as such, but the authored, contrived, representational aspects
of architecture seem to run against the grain of the Bechers' rigorously
impersonal and contingent methods, and their choice of objects. Some
critics have said that the Bechers photograph ``non-architectural'' ob-
jects, that `[The Bechers'] black and white prints are almost exclusively
concerned with non-architectural industrial constructions, the sort that
are engineered rather than designed.'1 In a discussion about the place
of architecture within a contemporary system of the arts, or of ques-
tions of disciplinarity and medium in both architecture and the arts
that represent it, the work of the Bechers provides a rich and nuanced
case.
Between the time their artistic collaboration began in 1959 and
when it ended on June 22, 2007, the date of Bernd's death, Bernd and
Hilla Becher, working as a couple, spent forty-eight years capturing
and amassing large-format black-and-white photographs of industrial
artefacts. The images seem simple enough; indeed, they couldn't be
simpler as Thierry de Duve notes, they are `taken with a technical
1. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, ``The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon,'' Art in America 90,
no. 6 (June 2002), 93.

136 Naomi Stead
camera, early in the morning, on overcast days, so as to eliminate shad-
ow and distribute light evenly'. He continues,
The subject is centred and frontally framed, its parallel lines set on a
plane as close to an architectural elevation as possible. No human
beings and no clouds or birds in the sky interfere with the starkness.
Not a mood is conveyed in the image, not the slightest touch of fantasy
disturbs its ascetic neutrality. 2
Despite the rigorous and stringent technical limitations the Bechers

place on their framing of individual objects, their work remains dis-
tinctive and recognisable. But it would be wrong to think their work
merely concerns individual photographs of individual buildings. The
search for typical examples and variations on the type, the careful re-
cording of complex objects in the round through serial shots taken at
set angles around them, the creation of typologies, and the arrange-
ment of pictures for `formal analysis by comparative juxtapositioning'
are all central parts of the Bechers' practice. 3
The point of the work thus lies not only in the taking of the photo-
graphs, but in comparison and contrast; in finding patterns, themes,
and variations; and, above all, in amassing an encyclopaedic archive of
a limited series of industrial types, rendered in a uniformly neutral and
objective manner. Far from resulting in an `ànonymous'' photogra-
phy, such conventions produce a highly distinctive one. As James
Lingwood writes,
It may appear that the Bechers' work is cool, controlled and detached.
But rarely can such apparent detachment have been allied to such
enduring passion in this case to attest to the endless variations of ver-
nacular industrial form and rarely can such apparent stylelessness
have evolved into such a singular style. 4
2. Thierry de Duve, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography,''

in Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms (Berlin : Schirmer Art Books, 1999), 7.
3. Susanne Lange, ``History of Style Industrial Buildings : The Photographs
of Bernd and Hilla Becher,'' in Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings
(London : Thames and Hudson, 2005), 10.
4. James Lingwood, ``The Weight of Time,'' in Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Robert Smithson (Porto : Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, 2002), 74.

Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures 137
The Work of the Bechers within the History of Photography

There is, of course, a well-documented history of similar approaches in
photography, particularly German photography, and it is worth
briefly rehearsing here. In an essay entitled ``The Family Firm: An-
dreas Gursky and German Photography'', Norman Bryson discusses
the history of this particular strand of practice through an extended
analogy of three generations of a dynastic family company. If the third
and most recent generation comprises Gursky and his fellows, and the
second generation comprises the Bechers, then the first generation, the
`firm's founding father', he writes, was August Sander, who èstab-
lished virtually all of the conceptual strategies by which the house
would be known'. 5
As Bryson notes, Sander's unfinished project Man in theTwentieth Cen-
tury aimed at an encyclopaedic totality, recording all of the social
groups and strata of Weimar society, categorised according to occupa-
tion. This physiognomic taxonomy of individuals standing for a class
and profession carries forward into the Bechers' architectural taxono-
mies of building types. Much has also been made of the fact that
Sander and Bernd Becher both grew up in Germany's Sieger region
and were immersed in its mining culture their families worked in
the industry. Sander's grand portfolio project was never finished, but
the first part of it, Faces of OurTime, was published in 1928, a signal year
for the place of photography in the Neue Sachlichkeit, with the publi-
cation also of Karl Blossfeldt's Artforms in Nature 6 and Albert Renger-
Patzsch's The World is Beautiful. 7
The work of these three photographers is significant in terms of
its later reiteration and sometime transformation in the work of the
Bechers. Blossfeldt's collection of enlarged black-and-white images of
plants, a similarly systematic and comparative project, sought analo-
5. Norman Bryson, ``The Family Firm : Andreas Gursky and German Photogra-
phy,'' Art and Text 67 (November 1999-January 2000), 80.
6. Michael Mack, `Àrchitecture, Industry and Photography : Excavating Ger-
man Identity,'' in Reconstructing Space: Architecture in Recent German Photography (Lon-
don : Architectural Association, 1999), 9.
7. Armin Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Suggestions for a Way of Seeing' :
Ten Key Ideas,'' in Bernd and Hilla Becher: Typologies (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press,
2004), 14.

138 Naomi Stead
gies between art and nature through strict documentary photography,
gathering a visual archive of material that could be used to design veg-
etal ornaments. Renger-Patzsch, likewise, explicitly rejected interpreta-
tive or `àrtistic'' photography and the then-current ``painterly style'',
in favour of a strictly objective, descriptive use of the medium, sug-
gesting photography ìs meant to recognize [and] highlight. If it tries
to interpret, it usually exceeds its brief. It should leave such interpreta-
tion to art and in some cases to science.' 8
The place of the Bechers within this genealogy was well illustrated
at Documenta VI in Kassel, where their work was displayed interna-
tionally for the first time alongside that of Diane Arbus, Walker
Evans, and the earlier movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge.
Any background to the work would, finally, be incomplete without
mention of the earlier work of Eugene Atget, who, as Walter Benja-
min noted, `photographed [Paris streets around 1900] like scenes of
crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for
the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs
become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hid-
den political significance.'9
Benjamin's notion of Atget's photographs as `èvidence'' of the fac-
ticity of the world is quite appropriate, given Atget's assertion that he
himself was not an artist, that his photographs were not art, but that
the purpose of his work was to produce documents for the use of
artists. The Bechers, too, produce evidence, and they assert that their
photographs are not, in themselves, the point of their gargantuan
documentary enterprise. But even as evidence, even in light of the
detached, cool, precise, anti-humanist, and deliberately neutral presen-
tation sought by the Bechers, these photographs are undeniably evoca-
tive and profound. This is one of the great surprises of the work, what
Bryson describes as the `wildly paradoxical' secret coexistence of òut-
lawed ``romantic tendencies'' within objectivity'. 10
8. Cited in Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Suggestions for a Way of See-
ing','' 14ff.
9. Walter Benjamin, ``The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion'' (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London :
Fontana Press, 1992), 219-20.
10. Bryson, ``The Family Firm,'' 80.

The aim may be to manifest a precise, unartful photography in the
documentation of an equally pragmatic, rational, and expedient type
of building; but this stylelessness in both subject and representation
does not compound itself, as one might expect, into a discreet and
self-effacing objectivity. It rather acts as a strange kind of double
negative or amplification. In their flight from interpretation, expres-
sion, and the agony-and-ecstasy narrative of subjective artistic crea-
tion, the Bechers have nevertheless arrived at something peculiarly
affecting.
Thierry de Duve on the Bechers: Criticism and Affect

The effect of this affect is manifest remarkably in a paper by Thierry
de Duve, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography'',
the introductory essay to their catalogue Basic Forms (1999). I will
quote de Duve's startling essay at some length here, to illustrate the
emotive tone with which the critic approaches his subject and also the
breadth of his terms of reference, which chime with my own fascina-
tion with the Bechers' work.
Let's go right to the essential. I love Bernd and Hilla Becher's work. It
harbours so much contained emotion, melancholy without nostalgia,
historical pain, class wars fought or sustained, wonderment at the engi-
neer's protean art, lucidity, dignity, respect for things, humility and
self-effacement that I have only one thing to say about it : this is genu-
inely great art, the kind that has no need to have its name protected by
being placed in a museum, because it already belongs to our collective
memory. I like the fact that there is something never-ending about the
inventory that the Becher's have undertaken because new buildings
are always being built, because the job is vast and human life is
short and I like the fact that this Titanic enterprise has nothing of
the Sisyphean dimension that characterises so many of the repetitive
practices in contemporary art. I like the admirable reserve of the Bech-
er's photos, their unique way of being devoid of style, their formal uni-
formity. I like the fact that theirs is the modern aesthetic of fidelity to
the medium and not the post-modern aesthetic of appropriation. I like
the fact that this aesthetic is a moral principle and that it takes the
intrinsic humbleness of photography to the pitch of incandescence. I
like the fact that these photos always draw attention to what they show,

140 Naomi Stead
never to themselves. I like the fact that they strive to make an inveterate
gallery-goer like myself wise. 11
Now this seems to me quite an amazing passage. In its description of

the nature and value of the Bechers' work, it reads as if de Duve him-
self the serious, scholarly, reserved, theoretically informed, and
widely respected critic has revealed his hand. On what other occa-
sion does a critic say they `love' a work? When do critics use words
like `wonderment', or argue that a body of work is informed by a
`moral principle'? The essay, or this passage in particular, seems to
break many of the established rules of art criticism, and for this reason
alone it is a singular and fascinating document. But it also points to
the contrast between such an intense subjective response on the part
of the viewer/critic and the lack of subjectivity on the part of the artists.
De Duve's essay concerns disciplinarity and, in particular, the disci-
plinary distinctions and shifting historical hierarchies among architec-
ture, sculpture, and photography. His argument is intricate and beauti-
fully constructed a delicacy I will be forced to collapse and
compress here. But de Duve also neatly lays out his own argument,
emblematised in four fragments: the series of pictures by the Bechers
for which the essay provides an introduction, à well-known Chinese
proverb,... an equally well-known quote from Shakespeare, and a cita-
tion from Valery, not quite as well known.'12 I have already discussed
the first; I will skim quickly over the second and third, and return at
more length to the fourth.
De Duve employs the `Chinese proverb' to discuss the basic semi-
otic relation between the index and the trace, `between the photo and
what the photo shows' in the work of the Bechers. The proverb
`When the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger'
provides an amusingly neat image for the swivel all photographs
undertake, back and forth between the index (that which points to the
object represented, namely the finger) and the trace (the actual mark
or residue of the object, namely the moon). Despite the technical
accomplishment of the Bechers' photographs, and their faithful fulfil-
ment of the normal semiotic swivel between finger and moon and
11. De Duve, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography,'' 9.

12. De Duve, `Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography', 7-8.

back again, de Duve is still reluctant to call them photographers. This
leads him to quote from Shakespeare `What's in a name? That
which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet' to
discuss the way the Bechers' uvre, which could plausibly be called
heritage, or industrial archaeology, or comparative morphology, is
instead called conceptual art, with all its attendant sweet odours.
The exact nature of the Bechers' relation to the conceptual art of the
1960s is something of a moot point. De Duve argues that the associa-
tion is mistaken, while Susanne Lange confidently asserts that `the
Bechers' photographs of industrial architecture are firmly anchored in
minimal and conceptual art.'13 Lange quotes a 1992 interview with
Hilla Becher: `What we may have had in common was methodical
presentation, no subjective interpretation, acceptance of the subject,
the encyclopaedic element.' 14 Whether these techniques and concerns
were held in common by coincidence or by design, a rigorously scien-
tific method links the Bechers' uvre to that of avowedly serialist artists
such as Sol LeWitt and to minimalists such as Carl Andre. Although
Andre, Serra, Smithson, and their fellow travellers were sculptors who
made use of photography, the exact medium of the Bechers remains
ambiguous.
Various art historians have noted that the Bechers' initial choice of
photography as a method of recording information , right back at the
beginning of their project, was pragmatic. 15 It allowed them to cap-
ture a high degree of detail more quickly than sketching could. Like-
wise, the Bechers have stated their overriding aim is not to `make pho-
tographs': `The photo is merely a substitute for the object, it is useless
as a picture in the usual sense of the word.' 16 The photographs are not
autonomous artworks but a means to an end. Klauss Bussmann writes
that
13. Lange, ``History of Style,'' 9.

14. Bernd and Hilla Becher, interview by Wulf Herzogenrath, September 10,
1992, held in the Bernd and Hilla Becher archive, quoted in Lange, ``History of
Style,'' 9.
15. See for instance Lange, ``History of Style,'' 10.
16. Bernd and Hilla Becher quoted by Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Sug-
gestions for a Way of Seeing','' 7.

142 Naomi Stead
what they are concerned with here is the thing itself the object being
presented, reproduced with as little influence from subjective factors as
possible. Creating a disinterested documentary record of the whole
inventory of the industrial world... a record that is subject to strict for-
mal criteria, remains at the centre of the artistic challenge the Bechers
have set themselves. 17
We might say the work brings forth the optical unconscious or thing-
liness of these buildings. A large part of the pleasure of the photo-
graphs resides in their making their subjects into things; they attempt
to show objects on their own terms, in their own right. But to return
to the final and most significant moment in de Duve's argument, he
quotes Paul Valery: ```Painting and Sculpture,'' says the demon of Ex-
planation, `àre abandoned children. Their mother is dead, their moth-
er architecture.'''18
The Bechers' work, de Duve argues, projects us back to a time at
the threshold of the modern movement in architecture, that immanent
moment when it must have seemed that everything was about to
change, forever and for the better. The Bechers' work allows us to see
these industrial structures with all of the feverish excitement with
which they were then viewed by Le Corbusier and Gropius as a
library of forms, structures, and details that would make up the New
Architecture. This was a moment, de Duve continues, when earlier
historicist models of architecture as style and ornament were effec-
tively finished, and the model of architecture as utopian social infra-
structure, reconciling engineering and sculpture, had yet to be realised.
This moment preceded the knowledge that this project would fail and
be ultimately unfulfilled, in a disastrously destructive process exempli-
fied by the industrial exploitation that these buildings exactly repre-
sent. Architecture dead, de Duve says, and architecture yet to be born.
17. Klaus Bussman, `Ìntroduction'' in Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Fac ades
(Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1995), 6-7.
18. Paul Valery, ``Le probleme des musees,'' in uvres, vol. 11, Pieces sur l'art
(Paris : La Pleiade, 1960), 1293, quoted by de Duve, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher or
Monumentary Photography,'' 8.

Photographic and Historic ``Tense''

Many have noted the elegiac quality of the Bechers' work, but its tem-
porality and melancholy seems to me complex they show us the fu-
ture tense of a past moment, as it is remembered in the present. This
is not a sepia-toned nostalgia; it is closer to a historical materialist ap-
proach, viewing historical conditions through the aperture of a partic-
ular, temporally located moment. So the Bechers are not simply pho-
tographers; they are artists who use photography. Nor are they
architects; rather, they cause us, their audiences, to see like architects
of the early twentieth century. But a question remains: are they sculp-
tors? And this question requires some thought.
As is well known, the Bechers received the Gold Lion at the 44th
Venice Biennale in 1990, not in the category of photography but of
sculpture. Different critics have variously accounted for this categori-
sation. For instance, Susanne Lange argues that the Bechers' work is
sculptural in its assigning `three-dimensional laws to a two-dimen-
sional space (the wall)' in a manner consistent with à fundamental
tenet of minimal art'. She also argues that the work qualifies because
`the photographed objects themselves, in their stylistic formal diver-
sity, can also be regarded as sculptures.' 19 Lange's assertion that the
Bechers' work is sculptural because it spatialises the wall is curious,
especially in light of the perspectival flatness that is a marked feature
of their photographic representations. Although the photographs may
attempt to show as precise and accurate a portrayal of the actual object
as possible, they are not ``windows on the world'' in the sense of invit-
ing the viewer to project themselves into the space of the image, and
this effect is exaggerated by the almost total absence of human figures
in the photographs.
Meanwhile, de Duve seems to regard the categorisation as simply
expedient, since there is no photography award in Venice, nor (yet)
one for art `ìn general'', and the sculpture prize was awarded `no
doubt because one of their first collections of pictures was called Ano-
nyme Skulpturen'.20 But what, or who, exactly is `ànonymous'' in these
photographs?

20. De Duve, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography,'' 8.

144 Naomi Stead
Anonymity and Anonymous Sculptures

Anonyme Skulpturen was the Bechers' first book, published in 1970. On
the inside cover, they describe its content in prose almost as precise
and objective as the photographs themselves:
In this book we show objects predominantly instrumental in character
whose shapes are the results of calculation and whose processes of
development are optically evident. They are generally buildings whose
anonymity is accepted to be the style. Their peculiarities originate not
in spite of, but because of the lack of design. 21
Yet there remains a curious and significant ambiguity in the `ànonym-

ity'' of their title. Above all else, anonymity signifies the lack of an ar-
tist / author, or the unknown identity of that author. What is at stake
in the title is thus the question, attribution, or denial of authorship, of
the objects represented, of those making the representation, and per-
haps even of the viewer observing the finished picture.
The tendency is to read the title as `ànonymous sculptures'' in the
sense of sculptures by anonymous artists, in the same way one might
say `ànonymous poems'' or `ànonymous paintings''. This assumes
that the objects have always been sculptures, that they have always
had authors/artists, but that these persons' names are unknown, and
the works therefore remain `ùnsigned''. But it is also possible to read
the title as though the sculptures themselves, as things, are anony-
mous, in the sense that they are unnamed. This would be conceptually
different from saying they are untitled, since objects have titles and
subjects have names, and an unnamed object implies, if not a level of
anthropomorphism, at least a kind of attributed subjective presence.
There is also a third sense in which the ambiguities of `ànonymous
sculptures'' is significant namely that it might mean the photo-
graphs themselves are in some sense anonymous, or at least devoid of
a conspicuous authorial presence. This, as we know, is part of the
Bechers' intention. Could it then be that the depersonalisation of the
photographs in some way renders the viewer anonymous?
21. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anonyme Skulpturen (Dusseldorf : Artverlag, 1970),
unpaginated, quoted by Lingwood, ``The Weight of Time,'' 73.

No doubt it is significant in this context that the Bechers choose to
frame their photographs in a view that is, as de Duve notes, às close
to architectural elevations as possible', especially given that the archi-
tectural elevation is an idealised view that is impossible to attain in
reality, either through the human eye or the camera lens, without tech-
nical adjustment to correct receding perspective. A mode of visuality
is thus at stake. As Armin Zweite notes in the exhibition catalogue for
Anonymous Sculptures (Dusseldorf, 1969), `the formulation `Ànonymous
Sculptures'' is meant not as an assertion but as a suggestion for a way
of seeing.'22 Does this `way of seeing' allow the viewer to see as
though the photographer were anonymous? This becomes especially
interesting as we turn next to address the way this works to frame
architecture.
Architecture, Interiority, and Heritage in the Work of the Bechers
Zweite writes that it is `striking that [the Bechers'] interest is not
primarily in the architecture' of industrial complexes; they rather pur-
sued buildings `that contradicted a stringent notion of architecture in
the sense that the buildings did not really form spatial edifices, but
instead `àpparatus-like structures''.'23 He goes on to describe how the
winding towers, water towers, gasometers, and cooling towers in the
Bechers' photographs occupy the `borderline area of architecture' as
either enlarged versions of devices that were once operated by hand,
or frame structures, or giant receptacles, `less a building than a ma-
chine'. The literature on the Bechers is replete with such references
this is industry, apparatus, history, building, but this is not the auth-
ored, consciously aesthetic practice of architecture.
Nevertheless, if the Bechers can be said to be primarily engaged
with the `profane architecture of industry', then there are several
straightforward ways in which architecture has featured in their
work. 24 One of their established ``typologies'' is the industrial fac ade:
22. Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Suggestions for a Way of Seeing','' 9.
23. Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Suggestions for a Way of Seeing','' 10,
quoting Wend Fischer, Industriebauten 1830-1930. Eine fotografische Dokumentation von
Bernd and Hilla Becher (Munich : Die Neue Sammlungen, 1967), unpaginated.

146 Naomi Stead
an early collection documented half-timbered houses observed in the
central Germany's Siegerland region, even though these were not val-
ued strictly as a vernacular architectural language, but as miners' hous-
ing and therefore part of the larger industrial complex.
Another straightforward attachment between the Bechers' work and
mainstream architectural discourse occurs in the realm of heritage pres-
ervation. The cycle of obsolescence of industrial buildings is short,
and its consequences ruthless, and the Bechers have often documented
outmoded industrial plants under the shadow of the wrecking ball. In
their longstanding concern for the preservation of these artefacts,
whether in photographic or objectival form, the Bechers anticipated
by some years the industrial archaeology movement of the late 1960s.
On occasion, their detailed documentation formed the basis of heritage
activism, and one of the most celebrated examples of this provides us
a useful entry into some of the broader problematics of architecture in
their work.
The Zeche Zollern complex, built between 1898 and 1904 west of
Dortmund in Germany, is one of few subjects in the Bechers' uvre that
demonstrates conspicuous architectural ornament and ``style''. Interest-
ingly, the building is also not an `ànonymous sculpture'': it was
designed by the architect Bruno Mohring, reputedly `the most famous
Jugendstil architect of the day', in collaboration with an engineer, Rein-
hold Krohn.25 Its glass, red-brick, and steel machine-room features a
distinctive Jugendstil entrance, and it is this, as much as its housing `the
first electrically powered winding and pumping gear in a German
mine', that marked it as an icon of early German industrial structure.
This example demonstrates the way in which the Bechers' work has
intersected with and often preceded the movement for the historical
preservation of industrial architecture; Zweite argues that `the preser-
vation work they had pursued for many years effectively anticipates
the decisive shift in awareness that gradually emerged from 1968
onwards... that a historical building's artistic significance could no lon-
ger be the sole criterion for its preservation.' 26 This changed attitude,
25. Mack, `Àrchitecture, Industry and Photography,'' 7.

26. Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's `Suggestions for a Way of Seeing','' 26.

along with a high-profile activist campaign, saved the building from
proposed demolition in 1969, fourteen years after its being decommis-
sioned. This particular industrial fac ade, though, is a visual anomaly
within this category of the Bechers' archive. In fact, the Industrial Fa-
cades series sits strangely within their overall body of work.
It seems to me that this strangeness is due to a tension concerning
expressionism in the Bechers' work theirs is emphatically not an
art of expressionism in the sense of `èxpressing'' the internal psychic
state of the artist, but it does (almost always) represent expressive
objects it emphatically is an art of expressionism in the sense of
representing a technical architecture where the form is generated
strictly by the fulfilment of a specific industrial and economic function.
Bryson describes this preoccupation in their work as an èxaggeration'
of the `legibility of industrial form'. With all of the Bechers' structures,
he writes, `the inside of the form can be exactly inferred or read off
from the outside: the principle of ``fac ade'' of a semiotic split
between exterior and interior is wholly absent.'27
When the Bechers note they have been `fascinated above all by the
shape of technical architecture', the key word here is shape a word
rarely used in architecture schools and often actively frowned upon in
favour of the more acceptably three-dimensional form, envelope, or
mass. 28 But in discussing the objects photographed by the Bechers,
the word shape becomes appropriate, not only because many of these
objects are so strikingly, overwhelmingly complex and excessive in
their detail, but because they represent their architectural objects as
shape and not form.
In this sense, it is space that obstructs the Bechers' project or spe-
cifically the interstitial, vague, poche space between structure and skin,
between cladding and enclosure, between exterior and interior. It may
be an obvious observation, but most of the structures photographed
by the Bechers have little or no interior, a fact echoed by the relative
lack of internal shots in their work. Architecture, when understood as
fac ade and `àesthetic feature'', tends to conceal or obscure the function
27. Bryson, ``The Family Firm,'' 81.

28. Zweite, ``Bernd and Hilla Becher's ``Suggestions for a Way of Seeing,'' 10.

148 Naomi Stead
the Bechers are concerned to depict. In this sense, and in light of the
notion of a contemporary ``system of the arts'', it may be possible to
see a kind of implicit system of the arts, or perhaps just a rudimentary
scale, within the body of the Bechers' work itself. This scale would
start on one side with their most valued objects their highly figured
industrial machines the most complex of which are closer to appara-
tus than architecture. It would then lead to their least valued objects,
which are the least figured, the least expressively functionalist, and are
fundamentally architectural the industrial fac ades. As Klaus Buss-
man writes about this group,
Industrial fac ades, factory buildings, works buildings, the gabled walls
of industrial architecture : the variety of names reflects the difficulty of
trying to sum up this group of typological photographs by the Bechers
under a single term. In contrast to their series of blast furnaces, cooling
towers, coal silos, gas tanks, water towers, and coal mine tipples, in
these photos the function of the architecture does not emerge from its
form. 29
Within the otherwise consistent and coherent body of work that is the
Bechers' uvre, certain distinctions can nevertheless be made, and Indus-
trial Facades stands out as distinct. These artefacts that are most clearly
and conventionally ``buildings'' are also the least expressive in terms
of their revealing a specific and specialised industrial process. They are
generic envelopes, secretive facades, blank skins. In comparison with
these, many of the other artefacts seem like machines, or infrastructure,
but they also seem more like sculptures.
Conclusion
In historic ``systems of the arts'' it would not be outlandish to find ar-
chitecture sitting somewhere between building and sculpture more
constrained by functional imperatives than sculpture, but having aes-
thetic aspirations elevated above those of building. Yet through the
medium of photography, in the work of the Bechers, we see a curious
sleight of hand they build a bridge directly from building to sculp-
ture, which bypasses architecture completely.
29. Bussman, `Ìntroduction,'' 5.

The industrial artefacts photographed by the Bechers do not find a
home within architecture, where they are labelled with the diminutive
term ``building''. Nor do they fit within sculpture, where they have
no advocate and no place because of their anonymity. But they do find
a home, a `foster home' and a `foster mother' as de Duve argues,
within photography, through the infinitely modest and self-effacing
agency of the Bechers.

Callum Morton's Architecture of
Disguised Difference
Rosemary Hawker
Much recent art criticism has been shaped by a reassessment of the role
of medium in art. In this debate, the claim that art has arrived at a
post-medium condition is opposed by the view that it is returning to
an explicit engagement with medium, both in its making and interpre-
tation. 1 Questions of disciplinarity in architecture and art usefully illus-
trate these issues and allow us to consider broader relations of discipli-
narity across the arts. I come to these questions both through
studying Gerhard Richter's use of photography in painting and
through arguing that he demonstrates the continued relevance of me-
dium to art, the possibility of a productive space between media and
their disciplines, and their resistance to homogenous hybrid forms.2 In
looking at relations of medium and discipline as played out today be-
tween architecture and art, the work of Australian artist Callum Mor-
ton, based as it is in diverse and extensive references to architecture,
tells us something of these same issues. Taking what I have learnt
from Richter's dialogue between photography and painting, this dis-
cussion aims to explore aspects of the possibly interdisciplinary forma-
tion of Morton's work and to relate these to broader issues for the in-
terpretation of contemporary art.
1. Rosalind E. Krauss, `À Voyage on the North Sea'': Art in the Age of the Post-Medium
Condition (New York : Thames & Hudson, 1999).
2. See also Rosemary Hawker, `Ìdiom Post Medium : Richter Painting Photo-
graphy,'' Oxford Art Journal, forthcoming 2009.

152 Rosemary Hawker
Morton's attention to architecture is articulated across multiple
forms in digital images and prints, in video and installation works,
and in architectural models. Yet the artist does not aim to engage with
architecture on its own terms:
The work's not about architecture.... The image of the building, the
model, or whatever, is simply a frame onto which I put other subjects. 3
That is, I was never that interested in practicing as an Architect

(although I think about making functional buildings a little more since
I have been asked to make one as a project) but rather in using the
object of Architecture as a subject to consider. It has been at various
times the core around and onto which I can project a number of ideas. 4
In this way, Morton makes a distinction between understanding the

discipline of architecture as the practice of design and construction
and according to the history and theory that surrounds it. Yet
although his works are quite obviously not architecture, that is, not
engaged in the work of designing and constructing built forms in their
own right, in using the language of those forms, their history, and the
specificity of named buildings by well-known architects, he does rely
on the recognisable discipline of architecture to make art. As such, his
work is implicitly grounded in the possibility of productive relations
between art disciplines. Although Morton does not describe his work
as motivated by questions of interdisciplinarity, he concedes that its
genesis might lead us closer to those terms:
Interdisciplinarity is very important... as a tool of inclusivity within the
institutions (the rise of cultural studies) and from there hopefully into
other related fields.... At any rate, the idea of inclusivity is certainly
where my work began. I was schooled after all in the late '80s, which
fostered precisely this.... I pursued the idea that I could draw on any of
my interests to make art and not distinguish between things because
I was drawing them into a broad field of activity. 5
3. Callum Morton, interview with Rosemary Hawker, July 12, 2007.

4. Callum Morton, email to Rosemary Hawker, January 18, 2009.
5. Morton, email.

Although this inclusivity may take us closer to interdisciplinarity, it
cannot accommodate the sense of a productive activity that I am inter-
ested in, where the play between disciplines is what produces the work
and is, in fact, crucial to it. In this context, the distinction that Morton
makes between art and architecture, that is, that architecture is not to
be confused with art, is particularly interesting: Ì don't include it in
the arts. No, it's not a discipline within the arts,... it operates entirely
differently in the world. It's like Donald Judd saying when I'm de-
signing a chair I'm designing a chair, I'm not making art.'6 Is this per-
ceived difference central to understanding Morton's strategies and
their critical success, and, more broadly, the prevalence of an address
to architecture in contemporary art? If architecture were understood
more broadly as having a place within the arts, would artists be able
to make use of it in the same way? Is the perception of architecture as
outside of art and part of the everyday world what enables it to func-
tion as a subject and as a frame onto which ideas are projected? Mor-
ton seems to underscore this possibility when he states, Ì've never
ever thought, at any point, that I could make any contribution to the
field of architecture, at all.' 7
Richter, unlike Morton, has always emphasised his headlong
approach to issues of medium and disciplinarity. His engagement with
photography offers real challenges to our understanding of both, espe-
cially when he famously says, Ì'm not trying to imitate a photograph;
I'm trying to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that a pho-
tograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I'm practicing pho-
tography by other means.'8 There are many things we learn about
medium from Richter, but and most importantly, I think he
demonstrates that it is only through a dialogue between media that we
know medium at all. In taking photography into painting, at least in
the way Richter does, we know something of photography that we
would not know through photography alone. Similarly, in confront-
ing painting with photography, Richter cannot help but emphasise
6. Morton, interview.
8. Gerhard Richter, interview with Rolf Schon, 1972, in Hans-Ulrich Obrist,
ed., The Daily Practice of Painting:Writings 1962-1993 (London : Thames & Hudson / An-
thony d'Offay Gallery, 1995), 73.

154 Rosemary Hawker
qualities specific to painting as a medium. Although it is not the pur-
pose of this paper to provide detailed evidence of this in Richter's case,
this can be argued through theories of an image economy based in the
differences between media, and according to the exchange and circula-
tion between and across media. 9 (I'll come back to these arguments in
greater detail to consider Morton's case more closely.) These relation-
ships of difference and exchange should not be understood to lead to
the collapse of medium distinctions or to allow for the possibility of
truly hybrid forms. Instead, the inability to combine or translate one
medium into the other ensures their identity and their productive sig-
nifying strength. As confident as I am that Richter demonstrates the
continuing relevance of medium in making and judging art, and that
his is a self-reflexive and critical inter-mediality, I am unsure of the sta-
tus of similar cross-disciplinary formulations such as those we see
played out in countless examples of contemporary art that address
architecture.
To refer to the work of such diverse artists as James Angus, James
Casebere, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Tadashi Kawamata, Jorge
Pardo, Rachel Whiteread, and Andrea Zittel is to give the briefest indi-
cation of this phenomenon, but also some sense of what, in art today,
is almost a frenzy of attention to architecture. The extent of this atten-
tion was recently signalled by The Hayward Gallery's exhibition Psycho
Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture. 10 It seems curious that so many
artists have come to architecture around the same time, and it is hard
not to think this marks a shift in architecture's place among the disci-
plines. To get closer to these issues it is useful to consider debates
9. Compare Michel Foucault, ``Photogenic Painting,'' in Photogenic Painting: Gilles

Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gerard Fromanger, ed. Sarah Wilson (London : Black Dog,
1999), 81-104 ; Rosalind E. Krauss, ```... and Then Turn Away ?' an Essay on James
Coleman,'' October 81 (1997) : 5-33 ; also, ``Reinventing the Medium : Art and
Photography,'' Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999) : 289-305 ; and `À Voyage on the North
Sea'' .
10. ``Psycho Buildings: ArtistsTake on Architecture,'' Hayward Gallery, London, May
28-August 25, 2008. Artists : Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Beutler, Los Carpinteros,
Gelitin, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas Saraceno, Do-Ho
Suh, and Rachel Whiteread.

around medium as they have developed in the visual arts and in rela-
tion to more familiar visual-arts media.
Our uncertainty about medium's role in art has in large part been
brought about by the multiple and diverse media used by contempo-
rary artists and the heterogenous combinations of media found within
a single work. Richter is no exception to this, working, as he does,
with painting, installation, photography, and sculpture. Similarly,
Morton works across film, sculpture, digital imaging, architecture,
and more. Given the centrality of Clement Greenberg's theory of
medium-specificity to definitions of modernism, such supposedly
post-modern formulations of multiple media come as no surprise. 11 A
familiar explanation of these circumstances is that art and, more par-
ticularly, painting as the supposed central medium of the visual arts,
exhausted the possibilities entailed in a modernist emphasis on
medium-specificity. Consequently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the received
view was that painting as a medium was over. More recently, pain-
ting's evident resurgence and claims of the discipline beyond its self-
evident medium seem clear proof this claim has lost all strength. For
example, performance and installation works by artists such as Paul
McCarthy, Thomas Schutte, and Francis Alys are routinely referred to
as painting. 12 Such examples provide clear evidence that medium has
come to mean something quite different from what it meant in a mod-
ernist context.
This lack of interest in the purity or unity of medium is particularly
acute in the use of photography in art, as seen in countless contempo-
rary examples: Richter's, but also Jeff Wall's, cinematic tableaux; Tho-
mas Demand's photographs as sculpture; Heather Ackroyd and Dan
Harvey's grass photographs. Some claim such examples as evidence of
photography's post-medium, ``post-photographic'' condition. Yet this
claim makes questions of medium all the more pronounced when we
see photography everywhere and at the same time are asked to think it
11. Clement Greenberg, ``Modernist Painting,'' in Art inTheory 1900-1990: An An-

thology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford : Blackwell,
1992), 754-60.
12. Evidence of this disciplinary designation is found in recent exhibitions such
as Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2001) and Painting
Not Painting (Tate, St Ives, 2003).

156 Rosemary Hawker
is somehow over. Krauss is particularly sceptical about the status of
photography as a medium, arguing that it is so thoroughly dispersed
across the arts that it no longer functions as an aesthetic object. Digital
technology also means that what was once a relatively defined set of
chemical processes has come to include multifarious means of image
capture and manipulation. If we accept that this is a diminution of the
medium and that it results from its being taken up outside its disci-
pline, then photography's case may be particularly cautionary for
architecture. Without ruling out this outcome and its inferences, how
might this interdisciplinarity be understood as productive activity that
extends the function of disciplines and their media?
To answer such a question certainly entails accounting for the his-
torical objections that could be offered to such a suggestion by influ-
ential theories of medium. Greenberg famously argued that ònce the
world of common, extraverted experience has been renounced', there
is only one subject for art, and that is to `be found in the very proc-
esses of disciplines'.13 If art was not committed to this principle, it
risked slipping into what he thought the mere nominalism of the
ready-made, or what Michael Fried called `theatricality'. 14 Greenberg's
conception of medium as based in internal specificity described and
informed much of the art of high modernism, but it cannot account
for the way contemporary works engage with medium. The artists to
whom I have referred are not loyal to a single discipline; their art is
not that of the readymade; nor does it follow the theatrical structure
of minimalism.
Krauss can be said to extend Greenberg's conception of medium
specificity when she argues that artists like Marcel Broodthaers ùnder-
stood and articulated the medium as aggregative, as a complex struc-
ture of interlocking and interdependent technical supports and layered
conventions distinct from physical properties'.15 This ``complex'' of
medium relations to which Krauss refers is able to reside within the
work of art while allowing the differences of each medium to be main-
13. Clement Greenberg, `Àvant-Garde and Kitsch,'' in Art in Theory 1900-1990,

ed. Harrison and Wood, 532.
14. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago : The University
of Chicago Press, 1998).
15. Krauss, `À Voyage on the North Sea'' , dust jacket.

tained outside this structure. In this way, Krauss introduces the neces-
sity of difference and thus extends Greenberg's claim for medium-spe-
cificity by identifying medium as constituted beyond its material form
and as the result of both internal and external relations. This differen-
tial specificity, as Krauss terms it, brings us much closer to under-
standing what is at stake in taking architecture into visual art, as is the
case with Morton, whose example I now return to in more detail.
Morton has been showing work with a self-evident connection to
architecture since the start of his exhibition career, in the late 1980s.
This has taken various forms, including digital images of reworked
canonical modernist buildings; installations of generic architectural
fragments, such as shop awnings, brick fac ades, and balconies; and
precise architectural models based on accurate plans and elevations.
His work is most often interpreted as a critique of modernism and its
failed utopic formulations of the built environment. Perhaps the clear-
est evidence of this is found in Morton's works that recast famous
buildings into new and ironic roles in a world of global capitalism:
the Casa Malaparte becomes a branch of an Italian restaurant chain,
the Farnsworth house a 7-Eleven, the Schroder house a Toys-R-Us.
It would be easy to see Morton as simply making architecture the
subject for his art, or borrowing the superficial look of architecture to
make a new kind of conceptual art. Although he rejects the idea of
architecture as a discipline among the arts, we might nonetheless read
his taking it into the gallery as a literal assertion of this status. But each
of these interpretations rests on different formulations of the relation
between visual art and architecture, and none alone seems sufficient to
account for the range of effects the work produces. Morton's knowl-
edge of architecture tends to make these questions more critical. (He
began, but did not complete, a degree in architecture.) That these are
discipline-based questions seems even more acute in his work than in,
for example, the treatment of architecture by such artists as Demand,
Casebere, or Hiroshi Sugimoto, where I see considerable overlap but
less assertive architectural disciplinarity.
Morton's model works are the point at which questions of medium
and discipline are most insistent, and this is due in large part to the
persistence of the model as a disciplinary form of architecture. They
have also brought Morton's greatest critical success, which is perhaps
no coincidence. Responses to the models typically make much of the

158 Rosemary Hawker
time and labour involved in their making and the precision and perfec-
tion of their outcomes. In this sense, the models are entirely architec-
tural, made in the same way as functioning scale models and judged
according to the same standards of accuracy and verisimilitude. Never-
theless, the different audiences for the models as architecture and as art
force radically different interpretations.16 Morton ensures this differ-
ence by disrupting their architectural origins with the addition of
sounds, lights, and signs. He variously uses sound tracks of conversa-
tion, music, films, and incidental noises of daily life, such as toilets
flushing and televisions blaring, to disrupt the perfection of the origi-
nal. Such additions take the works towards stage-sets where the disor-
dered dramas of life are reinserted into the pristine order of modernist
design.
International Style (1999, fig. 7), Morton's model of the Farnsworth
house (1945-51) designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is supple-
mented by the soundtrack of a party and the glow of light behind
drawn curtains. Sounds of convivial party conversation, laughter, and
the clinking of glasses are drowned out by a rising argument and a
shrill `Don't you dare touch me!'. Gunshots are followed by a shocked
but brief silence; whispers and murmurs soon return to full party chat-
ter, at least until we hear the sequence repeat. Morton's intervention
offers a critique of modernist sensibility based in cool, elegant mini-
malism and suggests that its qualities might be designed but not lived.
As much as Morton's critique identifies a gritty underbelly for ideal
architecture, this tends to be countered in a self-conscious display of
insider design knowledge the interior is shrouded by curtains,
pointing to the litigation famously brought by the client against the
architect who built her a weekend retreat that offered no retreat at all
in a glass box devoid of privacy. There is also the sense that architec-
ture, particularly famous architecture, is able to provide a backdrop to
glamorous living and the means to demonstrate taste in design con-
noisseurship. Morton says,
16. A point made by Sandra Kaji-O'Grady in `Àrchitectural Models, Literally

and Metaphorically,'' at the forum Public # 1 Spatial Tactics, organised by Woods
Baggot, http ://www.woodsbagot.co.uk/en/Pages/Research.aspx, accessed Novem-
ber 10, 2008.

If you listen to architects, the language of formal modernity has

returned... What I was using [in International Style] was the recognition
of that in the culture, and that would mean that a certain audience
would respond to that work in a particular way... I'm sure the response
to the Farnsworth house had a lot to do with this predilection for neo-
modernity. It was a taste thing and it was exploiting what had a certain
currency. 17
Here Morton recognises architecture's place within a system of taste,

and therefore as having cultural meaning. We might know this in oth-
er ways than through visual art, but Morton shows he can articulate
these things through the use of the architectural model in art, amplify-
ing them.
Beyond the self-evidence of the architectural model, there are other
elements of the model works that maintain or point to the particularity
of architecture. Here I am thinking about the way the work is enabled
through a technology that has developed through architecture,
namely, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and also the role of scale in
organising architectural representation. Habitat (2003) is Morton's
model of Moshe Safdie's community housing block for Expo 67 in
Montreal. Morton learnt how to use CAD software for the project,
and he and his assistants checked a rotating digital model of the build-
ing as they put the lego-like complex together.18 That this aspect of
the art is necessarily high-tech is ironically counterbalanced in the
autobiographic elements of this work. Morton's father is an architect
and worked on the Safdie project. Ì used to ring my father when I
was making that model and ask him what the balustrade was made of
because I couldn't work it out from the drawings.' 19
These aspects of the work are grounded in being faithful to architec-
tural detail, but Morton also manipulates standard architectural techni-
ques, like scale, that relate design to building. Common architectural
scales would, for example, be 1:100 or 1:500. Morton's use of scale is
often more idiosyncratic but no less representational:

18. Edward Colles, ``Callum Morton : Interior World,'' Australian Art Collector 25
(2003) : 46-49.

160 Rosemary Hawker
Gas and Fuel is at 1 :34, 34 years being the years [the building] was alive...
Here [in Melbourne] the Farnsworth house was at 1 :10, it ended up at
Santa Monica at 1 :5.... If it's a particular building I'll get it exactly
right, I want that verisimilitude. 20
Yet Morton also identifies a sense in which the architecture of the

model cannot be apprehended as visual art: `When you make some-
thing like the Farnsworth house exactly right it looks wrong, it
doesn't look like an actual thing; it looks like some mean evil ma-
chine. It's disembodied; it's out of its context.' 21
This leads us to another point about the technological determinism
of Morton's means towards art. Questions of scale in architecture have
been radically reconfigured in the way that CAD is able to elide strict
relations of scale. Morton's manipulation of scale is indicative of the
way that standard scaling in architecture has become outmoded. In
CAD, it is possible to look at something in a completely arbitrary scale
and readily change that scale. Architects who were trained before
CAD's introduction are often confused by this and cannot think
clearly about the work until they know its true architectural scale.
Morton says,
The way I do it now is to have photographs and to scale [the work] to
whatever I think is right. It doesn't even follow real scale. [The scale]
comes [from] the photography I'm working from and then straight into
the computer and then out. It's much more intuitive. 22
We might think Morton's idiosyncratic determinations of scale lead

him away from the discipline of architecture, but they often identify a
real shift within that discipline.
The idea that architecture can constitute culture and society is imma-
nent in the strongly autobiographical underpinnings of the work.
Morton's architectural connections are prominent in his artist state-
ments and interviews. He often refers to his father's being an architect
and his consequent immersion in the language of modernism: Ì grew
up with Modernity as a type of English so when I turned to it as a


subject, or as a form to use, I did so because I had such an intimate
knowledge of it.' 23
Morton's story of his birth, not just in Montreal during the time his
father worked with Safdie but also on the day Le Corbusier died,
presents a portentous correlation of events that rely on architecture's
being recognised as a high cultural form. That Morton does not resile
from architecture-as-autobiography is unequivocal in his Valhalla proj-
ect for the 2007 Venice Biennale (fig. 3-6). The work is a large-scale
remaking of the family home designed by Morton's father and recently
discovered to have been demolished. Morton's family home has suf-
fered a more violent form of corruption than the other examples I
have referred to, looking as it does like a bomb-blasted building and
thereby emphasising the macabre connotations of the work's title. The
structure's interior and exterior are entirely at odds. Inside is found a
slick, anonymous lift foyer and a woman sitting silently with mop and
bucket. Those who pushed the lift button heard a soundtrack of its
machinery starting up, but its doors remained closed.
I might feel a hint of envy when I think about what it must be like [as
an architect] to feel you are contributing progressive and constructive
models for the future of the planet but my work is only possible
because it does not exist. That is, its virtuality liberates me from having
to think through the complex pragmatic issues of the daily practice of
architecture. 24
Although we can appreciate the distinction the artist makes here, it

signals both the limits of architecture to the artist's project and a limit
for art, its being outside the pragmatics of the workaday world.
Morton does not want his art to be judged in terms of architecture's
role, yet when he reduces this role to appearance alone it might reveal
more about the relations at stake. Referring to the sort of comments
I have quoted, Morton says, Ì say all that but this is the problem of
discussing the relation of my art to architecture because on some levels
it's so obvious, it's just a kind of image.'25

24. Morton, email.

162 Rosemary Hawker
Thinking back to what Krauss claims of Broodthaer's work, that it
relies on a differential specificity that generates a complex of media
relations, it is possible to mark out a distinction in Morton's use of
architecture around this idea of the image. To do so, I will draw on
Michel Foucault's discussion of medium, which also refers to photog-
raphy. Like Krauss, Foucault argues for the importance of inter-medi-
ality, and he sees the differences between media as crucial to produc-
tive activity in art, describing this as disguised difference.
For Foucault, the best of 1970s art returns to much earlier condi-
tions of image-making: `Between 1860 and 1900 there existed a shared
practice of the image,... on the borders of photography and painting,
which was to be rejected by the puritan codes of art in the twentieth
century.' 26 He describes these early years of photography as a time of
liberated image-making, when artists, photographers, and amateurs
alike used any means at their disposal to make images:
[These years] witnessed a new frenzy of images, which circulated rap-
idly between camera and easel... Photographers made pseudo-paintings,
painters used photographs as sketches. [In this] vast field of play... tech-
nicians... amateurs, artists and illusionists, unworried by identity, took
pleasure in disporting themselves. Perhaps they were less in love with
paintings and photographic plates than with the images themselves,
with their migration and perversion, their transvestism, their disguised
difference. 27
Foucault's examples of this exchange (between Julia Margaret Came-

ron and Perugino, between Oscar Rejlander and Raphael) emphasise
image over medium. Similarly, the refusal of medium specificity in the
1970s was a return to creative freedom:
Pop art and hyperrealism have re-taught us the love of images. Not by a
return to figuration, not by a rediscovery of the object and its real den-
sity, but by plugging us into the endless circulation of images. This
rediscovery of the uses of photography is not a way of painting a star,
a motorcycle, a shop, or the modelling of a tyre ; but a way of painting
their image, and exploiting it, in a painting, as an image. 28
26. Foucault, ``Photogenic Painting,'' 88.

27. Foucault, ``Photogenic Painting,'' 83-84.
28. Foucault, ``Photogenic Painting,'' 90.

As Foucault explains, the image resides not simply within painting or
photography that is, within medium but between them:
Pop artists and hyperrealists paint images. They do not however incor-
porate images through their... technique, but extend technique itself
into the great sea of images, where their paintings act as a relay in this
endless circulation,... what they have produced... is not a painting based
on a photograph, nor a photograph made... to look like a painting, but
an image caught in its trajectory from photograph to painting.
We can also think of Morton in this way if we see his use of buildings
from the history of architecture as part of an image exchange and cir-
culation not constrained by questions of discipline, and which makes
new works in the space between architecture and art. A more exagger-
ated sense of this can be seen in his virtual architecture of Valhalla,
based as it is on a mixture of personal history, media image, generic
corporate environments, conceptual art strategies, and semblance to ar-
chitecture. We might understand what Morton makes as being neither
architecture nor art, but existing at the intersection of their rhetorical
trajectories.
For Foucault, photography and painting are apprehended at once
and in the same place, that is, in the image, but are present and known
according to their difference, which is disguised in the image they
make together. Morton, unconcerned with theories of inter-mediality,
says, Ì don't go into a gallery and ask if I am looking at architecture
or installation or whatever, I just think about the broader experience
of the work.'29 Although Morton insists on a distance between art
and architecture, the difference between art and architecture is dis-
guised in his work, or at least he feigns that disguise. That this differ-
ence is present and productive is evidenced in the work's making
something beyond the self-evident sum of its parts. Krauss's differen-
tial specificity of media still assumes that medium is apparent, even as
a relation. Yet Foucault's disguised difference of an inviolable identity
that can nevertheless be feigned brings us a step closer to painters tak-
ing on photography and artists taking on architecture. This could be
close to what Morton means when he says,

164 Rosemary Hawker
It does seem strange that I would talk about inter-disciplinarity as non-
sense when I use cinema, fiction, architecture, all these things enter my
practice but then I think artists have always done that, so maybe I've
just brought it in more literally. 30
To conclude, I will return to Krauss's concern with photography's

aesthetic status. Photography's dispersal across the arts has been possi-
ble because it is such an effective vehicle for diverse ideas. This is due
in large part to its infrangible connection to reality, and this connec-
tion to the world of objects is what artists have asked it to bring to
their work in one way or another. Morton's comment about Judd's
designing his chair points to the idea that architecture is of the real
world, like photography, whereas art is outside of use. Such formula-
tions of disciplinarity suggest the pragmatics of architecture; its con-
nection to use and to objects is able to bring the world of building
and commerce and fashion and taste into the gallery, to supply the
grist of the real to the conceptual world of art. Morton, and so many
others who have enthusiastically taken up architecture, shows this in
tandem with his appreciation of architecture's ability to transport
ideas. Does this mean, though, that architecture is destined to be dis-
persed across the arts, to lose its cohesion as a disciplinary formation
and a medium, to be the new photography?
If we agree with Krauss's assertion that photography has lost its aes-
thetic value through its dispersal, then this might lead us to fear a sim-
ilar demeaning of architecture. But photography's widespread use has
shown that the medium prevails despite the diversity of its use,
because this diversity marks out the differential specificity of the
medium all the more effectively than isolated, singular expressions of
medium. We can understand this as productive activity when we look
to Foucault: under his scheme of interdisciplinary relations, architec-
ture would enter into an exciting circulation of images unfettered by
concerns of identity. Both Krauss and Foucault, in slightly different
ways, see intermedial relations as productive in their articulation of
disciplinarity and media. This is what I see in Richter's work. Painting
owes photography for all it has learnt from it about the world and its
appearances, but painting repays that debt when it tells us something

of photography we would not otherwise have known. If art can com-
plete such a contract with architecture and tell us more of it, it will be
because the differences between art and architecture (the places where
they do not cohere, their inability to combine or translate one into the
other) ensure their respective identities. Derrida describes this when
he writes, `Through each language something is intended which is the
same and yet which none of the languages can attain separately... They
complete each other.'31 This sameness causes artists like Morton, Zit-
tel, Demand, and Richter to draw different media and disciplines into
their art. They may feign to disguise the differences of these forms in
suggesting they are easily drawn together and engaged in a concerted
task, but it is their disciplinary differences that allow each to say some-
thing quite different. It is their resistance to homogeneous hybrid for-
mations that allows their greatest effect.
31. Jacques Derrida, ``Des Tours de Babel,'' in Difference inTranslation, ed. Joseph
F. Graham (Ithaca & London : Cornell University Press, 1985), 201.

Icon and Ideology
Craig Johnson
In November 2006, the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA, New

York) Department of Architecture and Design staged an exhibition
titled OMA in Beijing: China Central Television Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas
and Ole Scheeren. The exhibition, like most of MoMA's curatorial proj-
ects, continued in the line of the ideology of the autonomy of innova-
tion and the autonomy of the aesthetic. Descriptions of the kind that
MoMA puts forth exist in the service of a fundamental aim: to shift
the aesthetic into the realm of the Absolute, which stands alone as in-
comparable. The function of MoMA's exhibit was to enshrine the Chi-
na Central Television Headquarters (CCTV) project in the merits of
artistry above those economic, political, and other extra-aesthetic qual-
ities the institution might be willing to mention in passing but ulti-
mately rejects as subordinate to the advancement of art. For MoMA,
the CCTV project is significant for its status, as announced repeatedly
in the exhibition's media, as òne of the most visionary undertakings
in the history of modern architecture'. To be sure, the reification of
the aesthetic is a convenient way of not having to talk about the tricki-
ness or downright unsavoury and authoritarian nature of the client it-
self, which undoubtedly has intentions to rock the world far beyond
that of the immediacy of the built object easily submitted to visual cir-
culation. The image of the object itself, however, does have an impor-
tant set of functions that serve the institution and the state. The archi-
tecture provided by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)
is a formal rendering of power itself, in the actual constructed space of
the city and within the economy of image. CCTV is not an exception
among instances of spectacle architecture: it gives form to an other-
wise diffuse and centreless power.

168 Craig Johnson
This essay is not about the MoMA exhibition, but rather about the
use to which the institution, and other cultural sites, has put the image
of the new CCTV headquarters. Its deployment, I argue, is pre-empted
by or programmed into the building's construction and the relative
freedom given to so-called star architects to focus on the design of
shape, icon, and landmark at the expense of programme and all forms
of economic and political consequences that the development of a
work of architecture such as CCTV can possibly have. I will focus on
two different, yet related, examples of what I shall call propaganda in
contemporary architecture, the AMO book Content (Taschen, 2004)
and OMA's CCTV building, which overlap and inform each other in
key ways (as do the mirror-image practices themselves). Their example
will help to extricate some of the issues at the heart of the exclusive
treatment of architecture as an art, and of the architect as an artist.
AMO, since its beginning, has pursued the idea of architecture as
a discipline that can be used outside of architecture. The magazine
Volume (a joint AMO, C-lab, and Archis project) uses the slogan
`To beyond or not to be', indicating that applying architecture to
other disciplines is a matter of survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
because of the high level of ambition, this has resulted in theoretical
ventures, publishing, and urban explorations, rather than new inte-
grated practices with non-architectural disciplines. The rhetoric of the
decisive rejection of practice in favour of ideology expresses an
attempt to turn architecture into the site of revisioning and reimagin-
ing, in both its built form and its scripted version. When revolution-
ary parties have no movement behind their name, they must preoc-
cupy themselves with ideology, or perish. Is the same not true for
architecture? This usually means hurried negative pictures of the
world as it is and positive potentialities indicating what it could be.
Architecture can become a way of capturing contemporary reality. Yet
this is a different form of the autonomy of architecture than that of
the aesthetic. `Liberated from the obligation to construct,' Koolhaas
has written, architecture `can become a way of thinking about any-
thing a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connec-
tions, effects, the diagram of everything.'1 Similarly, Ole Bouman,
1. Rem Koolhaas, `Èditorial,'' in Content, ed. Rem Koolhaas & Brian

McGetrick (Cologne : Taschen, 2004), 20.

Koolhaas's colleague, has written, Àrchitecture might be seen as a
powerful kind of strategic intelligence, as a medium for developing
cultural concepts, as a mode of thinking, as a tactic for social interven-
tion, as an arsenal for promotional images, as a strategy to mitigate
conflict, as a weapon with which to fight a battle, as a metaphor for
the rest of the world.'2
The OMA and China are aware that media represents power, and
control of the image is control of reality. The deceptively classical
symmetry of the company's dualism, OMA/AMO, is focused, on the
one hand, on architecture, that is, designing and producing buildings,
and, on the other, anti-architecture, that is, taking architecture beyond
itself in the form of a think tank. In Bruce Sterling's words, AMO is
`devoted to the virtual'. 3 Sterling, in the `Ùser's Guide to AMO'',
draws a distinction between OMA and AMO as that between, respec-
tively, physical buildings and `ìnformation''. Between these two
realms of practice, Sterling argued, `there is less and less distinction to
be made': physical buildings are frequently designed on computer
screens and information unruly and sprawling in the contemporary
world `cries out for shelter and disciplined organisation'.
Koolhaas and the AMO have proposed the aggressively general
notion of ``content'', which tries to register the nascent departure from
the idea that architecture is defined by the limits of individual build-
ings. Physical buildings, they indicate, are only part of the picture.
Content in Architecture is the subject of an unwieldy, magnificently
inventive, cheap, unambiguously commercial AMO venture. Its com-
mercial aspect allowed it to be sold at nine euros each, which was well
below the average cost of architecture books (Content was not average,
not by a long shot).
Continuing the propagandistic tradition of the pamphlet, Content was
printed on low-quality colour magazine paper and was aimed, like all
true exercises in propaganda, at dissemination; it was an ideological
product. Content represents a veritable hermeneutic bomb dropped into
the complacent pool of discussion and publishing about form, the aes-
2. Ole Bouman, `Àrchitecture as Harmless Practice or ...,''Volume 1 (2007), 9.

3. Bruce Sterling, `Ùser's Guide to AMO,'' in What is OMA? : Considering Rem
Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, ed. Veronique Patteeuw (Rotterdam :
NAi, 2003), 167.

170 Craig Johnson
thetic, the sculptural surface, and the hegemonic romance of the gifted
genius and the great seer, an essentially nineteenth-century Western
view of man as possessing superior and authentic aesthetic feelings
and abilities. Content signifies an orientation away from expression,
away from heroism. The term is apparently intended to indicate the
generality of the vastly heterogeneous field of architectural possibility
and, crucially, the notion that architecture is organisational rather than
simply visual.
Meanwhile, the OMA has accepted increasingly bigger and more
ambitious individual built projects. CCTV is perhaps the most visible;
it is certainly the largest, an absolute thesis in bigness itself. Located in
Beijing's new Central Business District, the CCTV is a megastructure
encompassing approximately 558,000 square metres of programme
designed as the new headquarters for China's state television broad-
caster. As a building, its manifest innovation is to provide the entire
process of TV-making news and broadcasting, administration and
offices, services, research, education, program production in a contin-
uous loop of interconnected activities. Two towers rise from a common
platform and
join at the top to create a cantilevered penthouse for the management.
A new icon is formed : not the predictable 2-dimensional tower `soar-
ing' skyward, but a truly 3-dimensional experience, a canopy that sym-
bolically embraces the entire population : an instant icon that proclaims
a new phase in Chinese confidence. 4
The building itself was said to contribute to the coherence of the or-
ganisation and, in a physical chain of interdependence of departments,
to offer solidarity instead of isolation among the parts of the organisa-
tion (previously, they were distributed randomly and generically across
the city). The loop is conceived as a public space, something the old
headquarters did not have: visitors are admitted and can freely circu-
late within its secured interior, separated from the private spaces of
production (I will return to this point).
This is basically compiling the known and the obvious. CCTV is a
contradiction: it does not seem to advance the AMO's project to take
4. AMO, ``CCTV,'' in Content, ed. Koolhaas & McGetrick, 489.

architecture beyond itself; rather, it affirms the continued existence of
the individual building. It goes against the discourse pouring out of
both Koolhaas and the AMO. It is a massive built object, affirming
the most classical, heroic, monumental aspect of the discipline. It is
also a testament to the linked nature of the OMA and AMO. They
fuel each other. A brief analysis of the cover of Content is telling in this
matter.
The cover shows a commissioned artwork by the digital media artist
Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung. In the image, we see a digital rendering of
CCTV's megalithic structure providing the backdrop to mashed-up
images of George W. Bush wearing a crown of ``freedom fries'', Sad-
dam Hussein as Rambo, and Kim Jong-Il as the Terminator. The only
architectural reference, CCTV's status within the frame is unambigu-
ous: a fourth world-player; the architectural equivalent of the leaders,
extreme and brutal in its practices and intentions; the blatant aggres-
sive bigness and monological politics of the first decade of the twenty-
first century; its company is not other buildings, but beyond: politics,
warfare, gang violence, the conflation of celebrity, politician, and
leader; a sign of the kind of subject the mass media produces in the
contemporary: the star (actor-politician-architect) at the expense of the
collective; the vacuous image over the substantive, difficult reality.
The book, taking the form or camouflage of a magazine, uses ironic
headlines to indicate what readers can expect inside Perverted
Architecture, Homicidal Engineering, Big Brother Skyscrapers, Sweat-
shop Demographics, Slum Sociology, al Qaeda Fetish, Martha Stewart
Urbanism, Paranoid Technology indicating the limitless contempo-
rary thirst for intoxicating mixes of the fascinating and revolting.
The OMA has tended to build structures that not simply shelter but
seek to intervene and invent conditions of new possibility. In develop-
ing a reading of CCTV in Beijing, I will suggest Koolhaas's debt not
to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the Metabolists (oft-cited precursors)
but to Minoru Yamasaki (1912-86). CCTV is a useful example for
invoking a connection between late modernism (not postmodernism)
and the OMA.
CCTV is designed by the OMA with Ole Scheeren, a Koolhaas dis-
ciple and partner, heading the project. It is an aggressively abstract
building, like Yamasaki's twin World Trade Center (WTC) towers
(1972-2001). This comparison is legitimated by Koolhaas's constant

172 Craig Johnson
gestures to the status of the WTC and its temporary successor,
Ground Zero. Koolhaas, himself obsessed with New York City (wit-
ness Delirious New York) and, more recently, the twin towers, praised
their àbstract and structurally daring' design. Koolhaas also noted that
`twinning is their only genius.'5 Comparably, the ``genius'' of the
CCTV design lies in its monumental form of the continuous loop, a
daring simplicity, its shape outlining a massive void.
Koolhaas has wrapped CCTV in a mythos of meaning involving the
late WTC. As Koolhaas narrates the project, CCTV's form responds
to the need for a new architectural possibility in the post-9/11 world,
wherein the skyscraper no longer has the same meaning. Certainly,
Okwui Enwezor has argued that `the skyscraper is today obsolete not
because of its lack of functionality and efficiency, but rather, as a mod-
ern emblem of progress it has entered into a stage of uncertainty', and
`today it may in fact appear not only conservative but also reactionary',
signalling the end theoretically, socially, practically to the once-
marvelled `frontier of the sky'.6 If, in 1972, the completion of Yamasa-
ki's WTC signalled the perfection of the skyscraper, then the genre
was left with no future but replication. The WTC was conceived as a
big centralisation machine: arborescent, not rhizomatic. Yamasaki
continues,
[T]he legislatures of the two states [New Jersey and New York]
directed the Port Authority to construct a World Trade Centre, to
bring together the activities of private firms and public agencies
engaged in world trade in one central location, thus facilitating interna-
tional business contacts among the members of the foreign-trade com-
munity of this country's major port. The centre's intent is to provide
communication, information, proximity, and face-to-face convenience
for exporters, importers, freight forwarders, customs brokers, interna-
tional banks, and the many other enterprises involved in world trade. 7
5. Rem Koolhaas, ``White Briefs Against Filth : the Waning Power of New
York,'' in Content, ed. Koolhaas & McGetrick, 237.
6. Okwui Enwezor, ``Terminal Modernity : Rem Koolhaas' Discourse on En-
tropy,'' in What is OMA?, ed. Patteeuw, 107.
7. Minoru Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture (New York & Tokyo : Weatherhill,
1979), 112.

The WTC can be read as an attempt to symbolise control, or as a sub-
stitute for control in a situation of uncertainty, as it gave concrete
form to the US's central role within late or multinational capitalism.
CCTV was conceived at the moment of the new WTC competition, in
2002, `not in the back-ward looking USA, but in the parallel universe
of China'.8 Koolhaas has justified the OMA's decision not to partici-
pate in the WTC competition, and to bid for China instead, as one that
favoured the Utopian over the nostalgic, or the future over the past.
The WTC was identified with memorialisation; the CCTV, with China
(and the world's largest market) having recently joined the World
Trade Organisation, was identified with the opportunity to articulate
and symbolise that country as a new world superpower. The decision
is reduced to signature Koolhaas minimalism in the slogan used in
Content: `Go East'.
The CCTV building is a spectacle-event designed to engineer spec-
tacle-events, that is, to monopolise the gaze of huge televisual markets,
both internal and external. (The Beijing Olympics, as arguably the big-
gest TV show in the world, could have been CCTV's proving event,
but the building was not completed in time.) The OMA did not arrive
in China from Europe and North America and start building in a state
of disorientation. An information project preceded design. With
OMA/AMO in China, the map preceded the territory; the Harvard
Project on the City began in China, in 1994, with pure investigative
research, which appears to have paid off (if built execution is the secret
utopia of AMO). AMO, as an ideological project, grasps that informa-
tion is the rule of the day compiling disinterested data, or content,
to be retroactivated as capital in potential, not-yet-conceived future sit-
uations.
The titles of the big Koolhaas volumes hint to the historical trans-
formation at stake here, which the OMA participates in, from commu-
nism to consumer capitalism, at least in the country's First Special
Economic Zones (Shenzhen and Zhuhai became official labs for free-
market experiment), as well as Koolhaas's answer to Chairman Mao's
Little Red Book, his own Big Red Book, Great Leap Forward, with ironic
8. Rem Koolhaas, ``Post-modern Engineering ?,'' in Content, ed. Koolhaas &

McGetrick, 515.

174 Craig Johnson
gold coins stamped on the cover, charting the building boom in Chi-
na's Pearl River Delta. The companion volume, Guide to Shopping, charts
the centuries-long rise of arcades, commercial plazas, and shopping
malls, which have become late capitalism's default mode of social space
and key players in the post-war mutation of cities. In under ten years,
the OMA won the CCTV project for Beijing, the Office's biggest
commission.
The relation between architecture and media has become entrenched
in the CCTV project, an example of architecture inhabiting media and
media inhabiting architecture. Although not technically designed for
the Olympics, part of the AMO's concept was that the building be
timed to be ready for the Olympics as a kind of mega-machine
equipped to represent place, an icon of China as a power in the new
global situation. The building was intended, therefore, to circulate as
an image of power while China occupied the world stage as host of
the Olympics. Instead, no less kitsch but certainly friendlier looking
architectural objects such as the Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed
the ``Bird's Nest'', and the Beijing National Aquatics Center, nick-
named the ``Water Cube'', became the dominant architectures sub-
jected to media circulation. CCTV is a more consequential building: it
is a designed to project both inward to China and outward to the
international community, as a sign of technological daring and state
power; the Chinese media are among the least free and most censored
in the world. Knut Birkholz reminds us that the history of architecture
is, to a great extent, the structural demonstration of power, and CCTV
is no exception:
The reverse side to bigness and the àbsence of characteristics' irrele-
vance appears to be something that Koolhaas does not fear. But the
hybrid form that he so values metamorphoses everything it includes all
too easily into a monotonous unity ; the accumulated architectural
effects compete for attention, like the metropolises, shopping malls,
television programs and those architectural publications that must court
an audience with their nice pictures. Should an especially beautiful
building arise in Beijing, which is the express intention of Koolhaas,
then this would be pure and simple prettification of the brutality of its
surroundings. These surroundings make the entire project ugly in the
true sense of the word, and whoever has good reason to hate the power

of the state of China might follow a primordial reflex by directing their
loathing against the new icon. 9
Icons in the current age have become useful for insurgents, terro-
rists, the mass media, and tourists alike for their target potential, a
point brought home by Terry Smith in The Architecture of Aftermath, in
which he argues that the WTC towers were `more than symbols' and
not a spectacular confirmation of postmodern analyses in which ap-
pearance triumphed over reality. `[T]he actual buildings were central,
tangible embodiments of the complex functions that they housed, the
most visible point of concentration of the complex array of powers as-
sociated with them.' 10 Buildings of this kind, world trade centres or
mass-media production machines, designed for global circulation as
image, become images of power, but they are also centralising ma-
chines that maintain power. Power, diffuse and mobile like informa-
tion or digital light itself, needs architecture to present itself in the real,
to give it form and place. Architecture in the contemporary continues
to provide shelter, as architecture has always done, but of another
kind, not that of human protection from the elements, but that of the
vastly different wilderness of our time, the heterogeneous information
disorder. Birkholz usefully outlines the politically repressive context in
which the OMA has agreed to build, citing the Human Rights Watch on
China:
Infringements against human rights in the form of violence against
political dissidents, against representatives of various religious organisa-
tions, against those who provide support to the HIV infected or those
suffering from AIDS, against Muslim minorities labelled as separatists
in Xinjiang, against those who protest the illegal occupation of Tibet...
Freedom of assembly exists nowhere, strikes are smashed, justice is
absent from the courts. Censorship rules supreme in all the mass media
and, to a massive extent, on the Internet too. 11
9. Knut Birkholz, ``CCTV or : Architecture Meets Life,'' GAM 3 (2006), CD-

ROM.
10. Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago & London : University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 7.
11. Birkholz, ``CCTV''.

176 Craig Johnson
One of the constant problems for architectural research undertaken by
architects is its reification by the particular project's or client's interests
and is stopped short of launching its own course. This proves un-
doubtedly frustrating for architects. The knowledge produced by ar-
chitect for client, the argument goes, is the opposite of an agenda
based on the architect's random sequence of commissions attained
largely ad hoc from the system and its current needs and aims, what-
ever they might be.
The most interesting architects have tended to be those engaged not
simply with designing and building but writing. Writing is a way of
overcoming the problem of waiting for commissions. In periods of
waiting, critically minded architects have shifted their attentions
towards propaganda. In modernism, architects like Le Corbusier,
Frank Lloyd Wright, and, to some extent, Walter Gropius, offered
parallel universes of architectural imagination to their built projects in
treatises and manifestoes written variously to enlighten or obscure,
sensitize or desensitize, reveal or push the limits and contents of what
the discipline of architecture can be.
In this way, a generation before Koolhaas, in America, Robert Ven-
turi changed the direction of architectural thought, not through his
buildings but through his manifestoes: Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture and, especially, Learning from Las Vegas. At its most challeng-
ing, architectural discourse of this kind admirably seeks to redefine the
imaginative and conceptual limits of what is too often a mundane
practice of providing spaces for the powers that be and repeating that
which already exists. The manifesto makes connections; it unravels
visions of architecture into other disciplines or forms of culture; it
emphasises revolutionary potentials.
Koolhaas and the OMA recently introduced a new kind of product/
project: the big-book publication, a way of launching research beyond
the reifications imposed by clients. For Koolhaas, the liberation of
publishing, as opposed to functional and expensive construction,
equals the possibility of rethinking or repurposing architecture as a
form of relationship to the contemporary city. Published in 1995 and
totalling some 1376 pages, S,M,L,XL was the inaugural text of this
genre, and the results of the Harvard Project on the City in China con-
tinued strongly in its footsteps. These were manifestations of what
might be called `Bigness by other means' and, in Hal Foster's terms,

are `not coffee-table books, they are coffee tables'. They were not
12
supplements to building or even straightforward interpretations; they

were active, autonomous projects. If we step back a moment and rec-
onceive architecture not as commonsense individual buildings, or as a
style, but as organisational structures, the new books, in their attempt to
give form to an aspect of today's wasteland of information, might be
seen as architectural visions in their own right.
Koolhaas and the OMA have achieved some of the most high-pro-
file built products of the last two decades. A short list of the OMA's
random sequence of commissions would include the redevelopment of
Eurolille, the Seattle Public Library, the Guggenheim in Las Vegas
and Guggenheim-Hermitage, Prada in New York, Casa da Musica in
Porto, CCTV in Beijing, and an expected from-scratch delirious city in
Dubai. Koolhaas has worked in each case on the construction of narra-
tive and concept around each of the buildings, generating occasionally
compelling scripts for architecture. Whatever Koolhaas's status as an
architect, he and his office are ambiguous entities come the final analy-
sis. He has been a committed theorist throughout his journey, which
has helped highlight the contemporary interesectionality of architecture
and the contemporary city. I argue that the originality of OMA derives
from Koolhaas's operating within the disciplinary binds of architec-
ture, but he is not strictly an architect. He has posed as a post-critical
architect, that is, one who makes a critique only by participating in the
system one wishes to oppose. He does not see a dialectical outside,
only the inextricability of criticism and participation. But, for this
ideology, CCTV represents a limit, as Murray Fraser has argued:
Chinese Central Television headquarters... contains a public right of
way snaking through its contorted form does not as such challenge the
notorious secrecy and authoritarianism of that state-controlled institu-
tion. It offers at best an isolated symbol of critique, rather than a critical
architecture that can hint at changes in meaning through radical aes-
thetics and a thoroughgoing spatial manipulation of the building pro-
gramme. 13
12. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London : Verso, 2002), 22.
13. Murray Fraser, ``Beyond Koolhaas,'' in Critical Architecture, ed. Jane Rendell,
Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser & Mark Dorrian (London & New York : Rout-
ledge, 2007), 333-34.

178 Craig Johnson
I wish to conclude on a note that suggests the possibility of an
oppositional architecture, despite the limitations of CCTV. One
approach will be an insistence on the use of architecture to pose issues.
Architecture, then, might be rethought as an open resource useful to
those not directly in the art or business of development a resource
to inform the critical imagination. The AMO's briefs have tended to
focus on rethinking the definition of architecture, which involves
going beyond the discipline of architecture as the practice of constructing
buildings. Architecture is a critical modality per se, a discipline capable
of migration to the world outside of the discipline. At the moment of
architecture's incredible triumph more construction is currently
underway globally that at any point in history physical buildings
themselves, and CCTV is no exception, have become the questionable
centre of the field.

Tectonics
Testing the Limits
of Autonomy
Gevork Hartoonian
I: Licence to Discipline
To work towards an historical understanding of the notion of discipli-
narity in architecture, the first part of this essay will address the devel-
opment of the courtyard type, the genesis of which can be traced in
vernacular buildings. Even though it was common throughout Ro-
man history, the transplantation of the type into the urban context
of Renaissance cities begged modifications that had both tectonic and
aesthetic implications. Consider the meeting line between the two ad-
jacent facades of the courtyards of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi (from
1444) and Palazzo Cancelleria (prob. Andrea Bregno, ca. 1489-1513).
Using Filippo Brunelleschi's fac ade composition in the Ospedale degli
Innocenti (from 1419), Michelozzo di Bartolommeo's handling of the
courtyard of the Palazzo Medici left a major design problem unno-
ticed: the two adjacent fac ades of the courtyard sit over the portico's
column. It is also important to observe the narrow spacing between
the two corner windows of the second tier. The design, furthermore,
discloses an awkward connection both between the two adjacent
arches of the courtyard and between these arches and the capital of the
lower column on which they rest.
Two interventions improve the courtyard composition of the Can-
cellaria. Firstly, in this building, the corner line of the courtyard is not
perceived as a transformational edge where architectonic elements are
moved from one surface to another; it is, rather, designed as a seam
connecting two identical fac ades. Secondly, the two corner arches of
the courtyard are held by two L-shaped piers, the widths of which are

180 Gevork Hartoonian
equal to the widths of each arch. This move from a columnar support
to one combined of piers and buttresses, perhaps naturally, recalls the
tectonic configuration of medieval architecture.
Luciano Laurana introduced further improvements on the courtyard
type in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino (1465-79). There, the meeting
line of the two adjacent courtyard fac ades demonstrates a number of
design resolutions. As in the Cancellaria the corner support element is
composed of two L-shaped piers with a half-column attached to its
narrow side. This configuration, according to Peter Murray, ìs visu-
ally more satisfactory than Michelozzo's single column, and it also
looks back to the entablature carried on pilasters which Brunelleschi
introduced over the arcade of Innocenti'.1 The composed columns of
the portico also confirm that in its advanced stage, the courtyard
fac ades were conceived as four separate but identical compositions.
This observation is not far-fetched. It was a common practice of the
Renaissance to simulate the classical temple front for the main fac ade
of a pre-Renaissance church building. The possibility of perceiving
the fac ade independent of what lay behind it was a huge achievement
in architecture's history, the influence of which can be furthermore
found in modern architecture's tendency to privilege the free-fac ade.
Attaching a pilaster to the front face of each L-shaped pier expands
the space between the two adjacent arches of the portico. Here, the
overall composition becomes rhetorically charged. This much is clear
from the pilasters applied to upper-level columns on the elevation of
the Palazzo Ducale, where their powerful presence cannot be dis-
missed. The composition recalls Leon Battista Alberti's Palazzo Rucel-
lai (1446-51) and the architect's claim in De re aedificatoria (1452) that
the column is one element, along with `the proper arrangement of
structure, the choice of materials, its surface treatment', that deserves
the name `òrnament''.2
This analysis of courtyard typology alludes to the process involved
in consolidating the humanist discourse on architecture implied in the
word disegno, coined by Vasari. In the Renaissance, the idea of design
1. Peter Murray, Architecture of the Renaissance (New York : Harry N. Abrams,

1971), 90.
2. Joseph Rykwert, `Ìnheritance or Tradition ?'' Architectural Design 49, nos. 5-6
(1979) : 3.

Tectonics 181
designated drawings, to present `no other than a visible expression and
declaration of the concept one has in the mind and which others have
formed in their mind and built in the idea'. Aside from the obvious
Platonic tone, Vasari's statement defined the scope of artistic progress
judged in terms of the work's quality in imitating nature, and the
`capacity to form beautiful elements for the work of art in the mind,
and then to execute them.' 3 There are two sides to Vasari's reflections
on style, which will be taken here towards a discussion that is centred
on a contemporary understanding of the notion of disciplinarity.
The first concerns the objective and subjective aspects of the culture
of building. The latter encompasses the body of work, both in the
form of written treatises and built and unbuilt projects, the totality of
which designates the knowledge required for an architect to have
license to design.
Licentia refers to the architect's anxieties in handling architectural
conventions correctly. How should a particular design progress within
given conventions while leaving room for individual expression? The
question is a valid one, even today. The dialectics between the limits
implied in the idea of disciplinarity and freedom of expression, how-
ever, played a critical role during the Renaissance, especially given the
high priority placed on the theme of ornament in the architectural
treatises. While concealing construction defects, ornament was èssen-
tial to the making or experience of any building, since without the
ornament he [Alberti] speaks, no building might be used, inhabited,
or even seen'. 4 The operational scope of licentia, however, concerned
both the visual and textual elements discussed in architectural theories.
According to Alina A. Payne,
Reflecting on formal experimentation and the perplexity caused by the
process of appropriation merged and called for a linguistic space where
forms contrived by man as the principal artifice of architecture could
be discussed, thought about, brought into a consistent and hence com-
prehensible set of relationships discursively, in and through language. 5
3. James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitations, Conventions (Cambridge & London :

MIT Press, 2002), 16.
4. Rykwert, `Ìnheritance or Tradition ?'' 4.
5. Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7.

Thus, both the textual and visual aspects of design were considered
central to any building's claim to be a work of architecture. Licentia
was indeed a strategy to cement the institutional power of the classical
theory of imitation
A second point by Vasari introduces a different set of limitations.
One is reminded of the modifications imposed on architecture through
technical innovations or typological transformations, or both. At one
level, one recalls the role played by representational techniques in the
formation of Renaissance theories of architecture. The choice of tech-
nique was not a neutral decision. There was a level of abstraction
involved in the architects' inclination for linear perspective. Its use,
according to Caroline van Eck,
affected what could be included in architectural theory and the way
in which it was treated, and in its turn the decision to use it reflects
views that often remained otherwise unstated on the nature of
architecture, its design and the task of the architect. 6
At another level, each of the palazzi discussed earlier was designed

with an eye on various typological interpretations. Renaissance cus-
toms maintained that `the palace of business gets to be separated from
the palace of residence, or at least, if business quarters are removed
from street access and located inside the palace or its courtyard.' 7 Ar-
chitects of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were also inter-
ested in searching out and exercising the architectural languages associ-
able with the many pockets of local tradition and their manifestation
in the palazzo type. Palazzo della Cancelleria is, thus, one of the finest
early Renaissance palaces in Rome, whereas the Palazzo Medici is typi-
cally considered a Florentine work. The subject of the historicity of ar-
chitecture, however, was so important for Vasari that his system of
judgement frames what licence meant to him. In retrospect, it seems
more useful to examine `the way in which the ``production of mean-
6. Caroline van Eck, ``Verbal and Visual Abstraction : The Role of Pictorial
Techniques of Representation in Renaissance Architecture,'' in The Built Surface,
vol. 1, Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, ed. Christy
Anderson (Burlington : Ashgate, 2002), 175.
7. Kurt W. Forster, ``The Palazzo Rucellai and Questions of Typology in the
Development of Renaissance Buildings,'' Art Bulletin 58 (1976), 109-113.

Tectonics 183
ing'' was conceptualised' within the limits set by `notions of transgres-
sion and license'.8 Developed within the disciplinary history of archi-
tecture, the architect's licentia had no choice but to be modified accord-
ing to techniques and ideas developed in other production activities as
architecture entered the modern era.
II: Licence for Autonomy
This section will discuss the concept of autonomy in order to demon-
strate that the very internality of text, drawing, and programme, para-
doxically foreshadows the many facets of architecture's relation to its
context. Secondly, contemporary theorisation of architectural practice
demands the reassessment of the historian's definition of the architec-
tural discipline's scope. This last point is important considering the at-
tention given to the contemporary avant-garde architects' advocacy
for an autonomous and self-referential architecture. Bernard Tschumi,
for one, has argued that the 1970s drive for autonomy was a reaction
against those who would propagate architecture as a means to repre-
sent cultural and regional identities. Both formalism and regionalism,
according to him, dismiss `the multiplicity of heterogeneous dis-
courses, the constant interaction between movement, sensual experi-
ence, and conceptual acrobatics that refute the parallel with the visual
arts'.9 Tschumi's statement speaks for architecture's tendency to inter-
nalise ideas and concepts that are extraneous to the discipline.
Contemporary architectural practice also demands that two ques-
tions be posed. Should a distinction be made between an architect's
rapport with theory and that of the historian's theorisation of history?
And could architects share the same theoretical distance from architec-
tural theory so essential for the advancement of critical historiography,
as practised by Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri? There is no
room in this essay to respond to these questions in their full breadth.
In regard to the objectives of the argument presented thus far, how-
ever, it is important to highlight the usefulness of the notion of disci-
8. Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance, trans. Daniel Sherer (New Haven
& London : Yale University Press, 2006), 3.
9. Bernard Tschumi, `Àrchitecture and Limits III,'' Art Forum (September
1981), 40.

plinarity for a semi-autonomous architectural discourse that is centred
on the theory of tectonics.
Concerning the historicity of the concept of autonomy, Immanuel
Kant's formalisation of the project of Enlightenment and his reflec-
tions on aesthetic theory both deserve mention. Around the end of
the eighteenth century it was possible, for the first time in England
and France, to contest the hegemonic position of classical conventions.
This was consequential for any reiteration of values pertinent to mor-
ality, ethics and aesthetics. According to Andrew Bowie, àesthetic
theory from Kant onwards faces the problem of finding a whole into
which the particular can fit in a meaningful way, once theoretical cer-
tainties have been abandoned.' 10 The architectonic implications of
Kant's discourse on autonomy can be summarised in the following
two points. Firstly, eighteenth-century architecture enjoyed a momen-
tary independence from the classical wisdom from which it soon had
to give way to allow the imperatives imposed by the production and
consumption cycles of capitalism.11 Secondly, the aesthetic inclination
for the picturesque and the sublime should have had something to do
with the eighteenth century's departure from classical wisdom, and
therefore from the possibility of contemplating nature as an entity of
values internal to its own cycle of birth and decay. Kant, for one,
sought à basis for artistic understanding within a mental realm that
imparts unified artistic understanding to the perception of appearances
and change in nature'. 12
The idea that capitalism imposes a different set of values will be
taken by contemporary thinkers to demonstrate that architecture has
limited options in modernity. Here is what Mark Jarzombek has to
say on this subject: For Hegel,
modernity-as-history-of Spirit becomes ever more metaphysically appa-
rent, leaving architecture to become ever more entangled in the web of
10. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester :
Manchester University Press, 1990), 5.
11. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans.
Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge & London : MIT Press, 1976), 3.
12. Mitchell Schwarzer, `Òntology and Representational in Karl Botticher's
Theory of Tectonics,'' Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52, no. 3 (1993),
271.

Tectonics 185
philosophy's cunning. For Heidegger, modernity-as-history is nothing
more than background noise with architecture just another element in
the inevitable downward slide. 13
Nevertheless, architecture's rupture from its own history and its conse-
quential entanglement with modernity were instrumental for the pro-
fusion of architectural operations and the formulation of utopia theo-
ries, the anguish of which was better understood when seen in the
light of the culture of building that is, the artisanal dimensions of
building and tropes, which are `ìnternal'' to the historicity of archi-
tecture. Jarzombek definitely offers a different take on this problem,
and perhaps the only ``reasonable'' one given Hegel's dismissal of the
craft aspect of architecture, or Heidegger's hope to tie making with
being. The rupture he suggests also allowed the introduction of
criticism into historiography, a project that, according to Daniel
Sherer, tells `something new about architecture's ``tragic destiny'' its
ill-fated, at times heroic, attempt to acquire autonomy in the complex
(often irrational) web of social reality'. 14
Furthermore, the sublime, as formulated by Edmund Burke, helped
to theorise the aesthetic expression of anxieties generated by the same
historical rupture, which in the second instance had to be either
domesticated in the design of gardens or associated with the aesthetic
qualities of the work of the ``revolutionary architects'' discussed by
Emil Kaufman. 15 Even though Etienne Louis Boullee did not use a
classical vocabulary in his design for Newton's cenotaph, or imbue the
building with a decorous delight, the design's bold geometry and sub-
lime beauty still do not allow any discussion of this project in terms
proper to a contemporary understanding of autonomy. This means
that the rupture contemporary critics attribute to eighteenth-century
French architecture is nothing but a theoretical conjecture between
Foucaudian historicism and contemporary interpretation of autonomy.
13. Mark Jarzombek, ``The Cunning of Architecture's Reason,'' Footprint 1 (Au-

tumn 2007), 36.
14. Daniel Sherer, ``Progetto and Ricerca : Manfredo Tafuri as Critic and Histo-
rian,'' Zodiac 15 (1996), 47.
15. Emil Kauffmann, ``Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullee, Ledoux, and
Lequeu,'' Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, no. 3 (October 1952).

To understand the critical significance of the implied rift between
historicism and autonomy, one should recall Clement Greenberg and
his formulation of a critique of art centred on the themes of autonomy
and abstraction. Even though these concepts were overshadowed by
the 1950s tendency for civic architecture and monumentality, it did
not take too long for their return to the mainstream of 1970s architec-
tural theory. Without infusing the concept of autonomy into architec-
tural theory and history, it would have made no sense for contempo-
rary theorists to claim, for example, the end of history. Any further
discussion of these issues demands, in the first place, addressing the
significance of the concept of autonomy for modernism.
Writing in the late 1930s, Greenberg suggested that in order to iso-
late itself from the imperatives of the market economy and the revolu-
tionary fever rising high in the Soviet Union, the avant-garde had to
navigate a realm devoid of any contradiction. In search of art's purity,
Greenberg speculated that the avant-garde àrrived at abstract or non-
objective art'.16 The aesthetic implication of the concept of abstract art
should be underlined here. As Greenberg reminds his readers, it
alludes to the tendency for autonomy, and a turn for the `disciplines
and crafts, absolutely autonomous, entitled to respect for their own
sakes, and not merely as vessels of communication'. 17 In making the
point that in a given situation diverse artistic tendencies operate simul-
taneously, Greenberg benefits from the aesthetics implied in the Kant-
ian concept of autonomy; one important consequence of which was
the claim that each art has its own specific medium, the opacity of
which should be emphasised.18
Now, after T. J. Clark's reading of Greenberg, one should ask if is
it possible to emulate the opacity of art independent of its historical
context? Clark's criticism is important considering that the very recog-
nition of ``flatness'', a major internal theme for painting, was in part
caused by the tension rising between art and capitalism in the years
between 1860 and 1918. Clark's reading sought to solidify the dialec-
16. Clement Greenberg, `Àvant-garde and Kitsch'' in Art and Culture: Critical
Essays (Boston : Beacon Press, 1961), 5.
17. Clement Greenberg, ``Towards a Newer Laocoon'' (1940) in Collected Essays
(Chicago & London : University of Chicago Press, 1986), 28.
18. Greenberg, ``Towards a Newer Laocoon,'' 32.

Tectonics 187
tics of autonomy and negation advanced by dada and surrealism,
whose work for Greenberg presented nothing but mere `noise'. 19 In
his essay ``Modernist Painting'', however, Greenberg stated that the
essence of modernism demands using `the characteristic methods of a
discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it,
but in order to strengthen it more firmly in its area of competence.'20
The historicity of their respective arguments should by underlined.
Greenberg was writing at a time that maintained hope that art would
take care of what it had achieved throughout history; Clark, writing
after the demise of the project of modernity, instead sought for art to
internalise the devaluation of all values central to the nihilism of tech-
nology, albeit using disciplinary media.
One might argue that while Greenberg's theory of art was primarily
concerned with the state of modern painting, the only way to sustain
architecture's `òpacity'' is to highlight its rapport with techniques, the
primary intention of which is to break into that same opacity. The
implied paradox is central to the dialectics involved in architecture's
relations with its own conditions of production. It also says something
about critical praxis, the way architecture should or might stand
against prevailing formal and aesthetic conventions. After Greenberg,
and in the context of 1970s linguistic theories, it is possible to suggest
that contemporary neo-avant-garde theories disclosed a renewed sense
that architecture could move towards autonomy.
If it is correct to say that throughout modernity architecture had to
adjust its disciplinary history according to the forces of modernisation,
then the historicity of that awareness and its relevance to the situation
of post-war architecture can be detected in this statement by Peter
Eisenman:
If in the interiority of architecture there is a potentially autonomous
condition that is not already socialized or that is not already histori-
cized, one which could be distilled from a historicized and socialized
interiority, then all diagrams do not necessarily take up new disciplinary
19. T. J. Clark, ``Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art,'' Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1

(September 1982), 152-53.
20. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance,
1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago & London : University of Chicago Press,
1993), 58.

and social issues. Rather diagrams can be used to open up such an
autonomy to understand its nature... If this autonomy can be defined as
singular because of the relationship between sign and signified, and if
singularity is also a repetition of difference, then there must be some
existing condition of architecture in order for it to be repeated differ-
ently. This existing condition can be called architecture's interiority. 21
This rather long quotation, written in a retrospective consideration of

his work, reveals issues pertinent to any discussion that concerns the
return of autonomy to architectural theory. There might have been
something in the intellectual air of the 1970s and 1980s encouraging
architects to see autonomy as a conceptual tool capable of re-energis-
ing the situation of architecture, and to push the disciplinary limits be-
yond its historical convention, a daunting subject for historians and ar-
chitects alike.
Thus, to reinvent itself during this time, architecture was left with
three main choices. Some architects were inclined to theorise architec-
ture, borrowing concepts and ideas developed by other disciplines.
One is reminded of Tschumi's notion of event derived from film,
Rem Koolhaas's strategic rapprochement to surrealism, and Steven
Holl's aspiration for a phenomenological interpretation of the architec-
tural object. Others, like Eisenman and Aldo Rossi, chose an intro-
spect position, centring the interiority of architecture in a formalistic
interpretation of grid, plane, and type respectively. A third tendency
was sought by those taking a semi-autonomous approach to architec-
ture. One is reminded of Robert Venturi's concept of ``both/and'' and
of Frampton's theorisation of architecture in terms of critical regional-
ism.
The difference between Eisenman's and Rossi's appropriation of
autonomy needs to be added here. Eisenman's inclination for
autonomy draws a post-modernist reading of Le Corbusier's Dom-ino
frame. Having established the latter's conceptual contribution to mod-
ernism, Eisenman revisited formalism through what is called ``card-
board architecture''. Rejecting the 1960s interest in the notion of
``problem-solving'', and in reference to Eisenman's effort to reinter-
21. Peter Eisenman, ``Diagram : An Original Scene of Writing,'' Diagram Diaries

(New York : Universe, 1999), 31.

Tectonics 189
pret Le Corbusier's Five Points, Stanford Anderson, instead, high-
lights the French architect's contribution to an understanding of the
Five Points that is open to `general propositions about space, light,
and environmental organization'.22 Pier Vittorio Aureli refuses to go
along with this criticism of autonomy. Criticising the American inter-
pretation of autonomy, championed by Eisenman and Colin Rowe,
Aureli depicts a radical picture of Rossi's work. For Rossi `the possi-
bility of autonomy occurred as a possibility of theory; of the recon-
struction of the political, social, and cultural significances of urban
phenomena divorced from any technocratic determinism.' 23 While
architecture, during late 1960s, found a temporary home in the
renewed interest in humanism, Rossi sought the poiesis of architecture
through typological reinvention.
III: Semi-autonomy
The following question allows an opening to discuss the importance
of tectonics for a critical practice that is centred on the notion of semi-
autonomy. What would be the nature of disciplinary limits when
``construction'' evaporates into the textual horizon endemic to the for-
malist interpretation of autonomy of the 1970s? To underline the on-
tological significance of construction it suffices to recall another Kant-
ian theme, the notion of parallax.
Discussing the work of Kant and Karl Marx, Kojin Karatani sug-
gests that parallax is something `like one's own face in the sense that it
undoubtedly exists but cannot be seen except as an image'. 24 This
means the constructive logic central to the tectonics might, paradoxi-
cally, deconstruct the positivistic interpretation of the impact of tech-
nology on architecture. Only in this way can one do justice to Gott-
fried Semper's theory of architecture and discuss the import of
material and technique and the aesthetics registered in the work of
neo-avant-garde architects. When this is established, then, it is possible
22. Stanford Anderson, ``Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture : the Search for an

Ìn-between,'' Pespecta 33 (2003), 36.
23. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Architecture Within and Against
Capitalism (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 12-13.
24. See Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: on Kant and Marx (Cambridge : The MIT
Press, 2003), 47.

to differentiate the formative nature of technique in the culture of build-
ing and to rewrite the history of architecture in consideration of the
economic and technological transformations that were endemic to the
transgressive move from techne to technique, and from tectonic to
montage.
There are many ways to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed
historical paradigm. It allows for a comprehensive understanding of
the dialectics involved in the visibility or invisibility, or both, of con-
struction in different stages of architectural history. That the theme of
construction was invisible in Renaissance architecture suggests a situa-
tion wherein metaphysics takes command and objects are displaced ìn
the illusory space, and not according to their relative value within the
culture', to recall Frampton's reflections on perspective.25 The afore-
mentioned proposition is also useful for differentiating the ways in
which historians and architects appropriate technique, both synchroni-
cally and diachronically. By now there should be no doubt that the
historians who formulated the genesis of modern architecture had the
same understanding of the import of technique as the architects whose
work was central to these historians' advocacy for modernism. Equally
well known is the schism separating the scope of critical historiogra-
phy from architectural theories formulated by the neo-avant-garde
architects.
To understand the full connotations of the theoretical premises pre-
sented here, the discussion should turn to the landscape of modernity
and to Semper's discourse on the tectonics.
Briefly, central to Semper's theorisation of architecture is the trans-
gression of the limits of architecture framed in the classical theory of
imitation. Semper's theory maps the subject matter of construction in
fields considered peripheral to architecture until the 1850s. Further-
more, Semper's rethinking of these disciplinary limits has two signifi-
cant consequences for contemporary architecture. Firstly, in discussing
the tectonic in reference to the four industries of textiles, carpentry,
masonry, and ceramics, Semper set a constructive paradigm with the
possibility for transforming skills and techniques into architecture that
25. Kenneth Frampton, `Èxcerpts from a Fragmentary Polemic,'' Art Forum

(September 1981), 52.

Tectonics 191
are developed in other industries in the first place. Semper's theory
sheds light on the transformational nature of the wall-element, for
example, when a particular technique demands changing the structural
modalities of a given construction system.
Secondly, in discussing architecture in terms of the tectonics of the
core-form and the art-form, Semper's theory retains that which is
architectural through and through. This means that architecture is not
a direct product of construction, and yet the core-form (the physical
body of the building) inevitably puts architecture in the track of tech-
nological transformations and scientific innovations. Herein lies the
ethical dimension of the tectonics, which can be traced back to archi-
tecture's early confrontation with technique. Discussing the notion of
techne in Alberti's discourse, Tafuri wrote, `surely it is tragic that the
same thing that creates security and gives shelter and comfort is also
what rends and violates the earth. Technology, which alleviates human
suffering, is at the same time an implacable instrument of violence.'26
The same paradox might be applicable to the art-form. In suspending
the Kantian notion of beauty, centred on the subjective inner imagina-
tion, the art form remains the only venue by which architecture is
charged with aesthetic sensibilities that are, interestingly enough,
informed by perceptual horizons offered by the world of technology.
The art-form also reveals tactile and spatial sensibilities accumulated
through the disciplinary history of architecture. Therefore, while the
core-form assures architecture's rapport with the many changes taking
place in the structure of construction, the art form remains the only
domain where the architect might choose to impinge the core-form
with those aspects of the culture of building that might sidetrack the
formal and aesthetic consequences of commodification (essential to the
cultural production of late capitalism) and yet avoid dismissing the lat-
est technological developments.
In retrospect, one might argue that the 1970s turn to interdiscipli-
nary theories was fruitful. It enticed architects to redefine disciplinarity
in terms of form, if not in reference to material and technique. More-
over, the theoretical space opened by the contemporary turn to
autonomy was important for architectural historians to discuss the crit-
26. Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance, 51.

ical nature of the tectonic for semi-autonomous architecture. The dia-
lectics between autonomy and semi-autonomy are indeed crucial for
understanding the complexity of the horizon(s) that separates archi-
tects and historians as well as bringing them together.
Finally, in criticism of the present culture of visual, Hal Foster has
recently underlined the usefulness of what he calls `strategic autono-
my'. 27 His argument is based on the historicity of modernism of the
1920s, when the situation was foggy enough for the subject to claim
autonomy from the fetishism of the past, and thus the urge to register
for the Enlightenment's idea of progress. Today the situation has
changed dramatically: commodification of the life-world is total, and
the subjective world of artists and architects is constantly defined and
redefined by an everydayness that is saturated by visual images. In the
present commodified world, the predicament of the discipline centres
on architecture's being defined as a collective and constructive work,
and it might never touch the ground of autonomy as do other visual
arts. One might go further and argue that even modernism's claim for
autonomy was nothing but a foil; the ideological delusion of which
needed only a couple of decades to unveil its affiliated relation with
capitalism. There is further a degree of anonymity in the tectonics that
is not opaque and inaccessible, and yet it stops short of communica-
tion as a familiar sign of a historical origin or of the kind of organic
expressionism permeating the architecture of the neo-avant-garde. In
the dialectics of autonomy and semi-autonomy, tectonics operates like
an antinomy. An attempt to reach that which is architectural relies on
the tectonic, which facilitates architecture's entanglement with the con-
structive structures of capitalism.
27. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London : Verso, 2003), 100-103.

A-disciplinarity and Architecture ?
Mark Dorrian
In 2004, Jonathan Jones, art critic for the British newspaper The
Guardian, wrote an effusive commentary on Foster + Partners' Swiss
Re building at 30 St Mary Axe, in the city of London (the so-called
gherkin). Jones describes the building as
the most satisfying new work of art I've seen in years. It is modern and
ancient ; it is site-specific ; it sculpts the sky. It is a monument and a mir-
ror. It makes you see London in a new way. It does things that
artists people who are officially called that have given up even try-
ing to do. The new architecture that announced itself to the world with
Gehry's Guggenheim does not bear simply a superficial resemblance to
the art of Picasso, or Kirchner, or Michelangelo. It really is doing
things we once expected sculpture to do. It has obliterated the differ-
ence between architecture and art. More than that, it is filling the space
contemporary art has abandoned.
Contrasting the building with the Bruce Nauman sound work then in-
stalled in the Turbine Hall of the nearby Tate Modern, Jones goes
on: Ìt's not just that art now does not add new forms to the world, it
is specifically praised and valued for not doing so. Which means that
the only real sculpture of our time is being made by architects. Archi-
tecture is art's last, best hope.'1
This is the most unabashed and forcefully polemical contemporary
declaration of architecture-as-art I know, of architecture as art `àfter
art'', and it usefully underscores the pertinence of the questions raised
1. Jonathan Jones, `À Fine Pickle,'' Guardian, October 18, 2004, online at
http ://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/oct/18/architecture.regeneration.

194 Mark Dorrian
by the editors of this volume. Certainly, the contemporary status of
the idea of the ``system of the arts'' is a real issue when the person
(most?) frequently referred to as the world's Greatest Living Artist is
an architect.2 In the introduction to this volume, Macarthur and
Leach ask, `What is architecture, now, among the ``system of the
arts''?' This is obviously not just a question about architecture's con-
temporary institutional or conceptual status, but also about the very
possibility of a system of the arts today, and of producing some kind
of plausible relational determination of the specific arts themselves
that would make such a system possible but would equally be its out-
come.
They also note that today `we speak with few cautions of buildings
as `àrt works''', and this suggests that the relatively uncontentious for-
mulation that architecture is an art has tended to slip into the claim
that architecture is art. It is striking the degree to which a whole world
of contingency and negotiation seems folded into the indefinite article
of the former, when compared to the absolutist character of the latter.
What critical scholarship should be interested in doing here, it seems
to me, is not so much adjudicating this claim based on some putative
internal condition proper to each discipline, and identifying the logical
relationships that ensue, as examining and articulating the inter-rela-
tionships between the practical, cultural, social, aesthetic, political, and
economic consequences of approaching architecture in this way. What
does the proposal that `àrchitecture is art'' do for architecture? What
new rights accrue to it, or what losses does it endure, and what are the
implications of these? What interests intersect with that claim? What
hierarchies and exclusions are promoted by it? As a result the key chal-
lenge is, I feel, not to attempt a stabilisation of the system of the
arts or at least not to set out to do so as an a priori but to analyse
the reasons for, and effects of, transformations in it, which may extend
even to its complete destructuration.
The claim, at least in its current guise, that architecture is art might
be seen as a symptom of a new licence available in what Rosalind
2. Hal Foster comments on this in ``Master Builder,'' in Design and Crime and
Other Diatribes (London & New York : Verso, 2002), 27-42.

A-disciplinarity and Architecture ? 195
Krauss has termed the ``post-medium condition''. In her commentary
on this, Krauss develops three narratives to account for the historical
emergence of post-mediality, and to one of these namely, the story
of post-structuralism's assault on presumptions of autonomy and self-
sufficiency she relates the rise of the goal of interdisciplinarity. 3
In their various forms, inter-, trans-, or cross-disciplinarity are familiar
terms, and they represent ideas to which I suspect many readers would
describe themselves as being committed insofar as they register the
partial, provisional, and constructed character of any historically situ-
ated disciplinary discourse and consequently the inevitable limitations
of its approach to, and construal of, its objects of study and produc-
tions. This said, it seems possible that the idea of post-mediality
(which admittedly for Krauss emerges as a highly problematic condi-
tion) 4 could imply a rather different notion, one that would have to
be called a-disciplinarity. Consequently, I want to think about what an
`àrchitectural'' practice that dedicated itself to this acknowledging
all the contradictions and tensions implied would look like. Cer-
tainly, we have recently seen in architecture the emergence of a radical
commitment to non-identity that could perhaps best characterised as
an aspiration towards a-disciplinarity and a corresponding condition of
neutrality: some kind of approach or practice or discourse that would
set itself against any form of positive identification, and would thereby
be marked by a repetitive assertion of the ``not'' (not this, not that,
etc.). A statement that seems to me to relate to this attitude is Ricardo
Scofidio's comment in 2003 that àrchitecture is nothing other than
special effects', and this I think can be correlated in important ways
with Mark Wigley's suggestion in his influential paper ``The Architec-
ture of Atmosphere'', that atmosphere is `the core of architecture'. 5
dition (London : Thames & Hudson, 1999), 32-33.
4. See, for example, ``Roundtable : The Predicament of Contemporary Art,'' in
Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster & Rosalind Krauss, Art
Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London : Thames & Hudson,
2004), 670-79, 674-75.
5. Patricia C. Phillips, `À Parallax Practice : A Conversation with Elizabeth Dil-
ler and Ricardo Scofidio,'' Art Journal, September 22, 2004 ; Mark Wigley, ``The
Architecture of Atmosphere,'' Daidalos 68 (1998) : 18-27, 27.

196 Mark Dorrian
Undoubtedly these both appear to make positive claims about what
architecture is, but at the same time they immediately entail problems
of determination and capture, atmosphere in Wigley's argument being
that which `cannot be simply be addressed or controlled.'6 It is not
coincidental that Scofidio's assertion comes in the context of a discus-
sion of Diller + Scofidio's Blur project, which is itself an example of
an `àrchitecture of atmosphere''. And here we find reference to the
``cloud'', whose utopic resistance to being ``placed'' (in all senses of
the term) has allowed it, I suggest, to act both as an emblem and privi-
leged vehicle for the contemporary drive towards a-disciplinarity.
To articulate further this idea and the ``neutrality'' and refusal of
identification with which I am associating it, it will be helpful to look
at two well-known examples of the use of the semiotic square associ-
ated with A. J. Greimas. For the first we will return to Krauss, this
time to her celebrated 1978 essay ``Sculpture in the Expanded Field'';
the second we will find in Fredric Jameson's article `Òf Islands and
Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse'',
an extended commentary (written one year earlier than the Krauss text,
in 1977) on Louis Marin's 1973 book Utopics: Spatial Play. Krauss's use
of the semiotic square occurred in the context of an argument she
developed regarding post-war American sculpture. Observing the
diversity of practices that had come to be grouped or posited under
the heading sculpture, which over the preceding thirty years had repre-
sented a constant expansion of the category, she suggested that it was
now so semantically elastic as to be virtually evacuated of meaning.
Almost anything seemed to be categorisable as sculpture, and yet she
wrote, Ì would submit that we know very well what sculpture is'.7 It
is, she continued, commemorative and definitively located. Or at least,
this is its historical meaning. Its development under modernity is the
story of its detachment from these parameters exemplified by, on one
hand, a tendency towards self-referentiality and autonomy and, on the
6. Wigley, ``The Architecture of Atmosphere,'' 27.

7. Rosalind Krauss, ``Sculpture in the Expanded Field'' in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge Mass. and London : 1986), 276-90,
279.

other, the incorporation of the (previously) locational pedestal into the
artwork itself. Departing thus from the logic of the monument, sculp-
ture enters its modernist condition in which its status, meaning, and
function is, Krauss argued, èssentially nomadic'.8 According to Krauss,
however, by the beginning of the 1950s this had become reduced to a
situation in which modernist sculpture was increasingly experienced as
`pure negativity... something that was possible to locate only in terms
of what it was not' 9, thus leading to her proposition that sculpture
had come to be defined positionally as a combination of not-landscape
and not-architecture. (This dyad seems structurally although this is not
made explicit in the text to figure the endgame of the double exclu-
sion that first founded modernist sculpture: its functional/symbolic in-
operativity, significantly illustrated for Krauss by Rodin's ``failed''
commission for museum doors, The Gates of Hell, mapping onto the not-
architecture, and its placelessness mapping onto the not-landscape.) From
the late 1960s, however, sculptors began to attend to the òuter limits
of those terms of exclusion', and, in her article, Krauss expanded the
not-landscape/not-architecture opposition into a semiotic square in order to
articulate and analyse in terms of the diacritical relations and combi-
natory possibilities structurally displayed in the diagram the various
practices that had arisen. The expansion of the terms of the initial op-
position gave rise to the pair landscape/architecture to whose terms Krauss,
perhaps contestably, respectively aligned nature and unbuilt, culture and
built. For each of the three `èmpty'' alternative combinatorial positions
displayed by the diagram, she then went on to propose a term (in turn,
marked sites, site-construction, and axiomatic structures), each of which she re-
lated to specific examples, none being, she emphasised, àssimilable to
sculpture'. 10
8. Krauss, ``Sculpture in the Expanded Field,'' 280.


198 Mark Dorrian
In a locally strategic way, Krauss deployed the semiotic square (or

noted that its effect was) to open an ideological closure: this opening
occurred insofar as the expansion of the binary into the square admit-
ted ìnto the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited
from it: landscape and architecture', or at least had hitherto been effective
only as exclusions. Through its relativisation of the position of sculp-
ture, and its demonstration of other logical possibilities, the square
gave, Krauss argued, ```permission'' to think... other forms'.11 Yet
from another point of view, and in a wider sense, the semiotic square
has been seen not so much as opening but mapping the closure of
ideological formation insofar as it displays, and is structured through,
categories and attendant concepts that are non-essential yet culturally,
socially, and linguistically relative (the terms landscape and architecture,
for example, and their construal in opposition): thus Fredric Jameson's
suggestion that the square

constitutes a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the

closure of ideology itself, that is, as a mechanism, which, while seeming
to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions, remains in
fact locked into some initial aporia or double bind that it cannot trans-
form from inside by its own means. 12
Seen in this way, the position and particular anticipatory force of the
neutral takes on special importance.
With regard to the structure of the semiotic square, a distinction is
made between the ``complex'' term at the top of the diagram (the term
that holds together or synthesises the two terms of the `ìnitial'' oppo-
sition, landscape/architecture in Krauss) and the ``neuter'' terms (its coun-
terpart in the lower zone of exclusions). In Krauss's formulation the
complex term is privileged as a point of ideological rupture, whereas
the neuter position becomes a zone of exhaustion or waste (i.e. mod-
ernism in relation to the rich intermedial postmodern practices, which,
released from the categorization of sculpture, proliferate around the
limits of the diagram). Krauss uses the square to produce a semiotic
diagramming of an expanded disciplinarity for sculpture, but one spe-
cifically mobilised against the category sculpture itself. As she makes
clear at the start of her essay, this is a historicising term that has mis-
recognised new forms of work and produced an ameliorating, familiar-
ising effect. This is one side of her insistence that the terms in her ex-
panded field cannot be assimilated to it. And yet it is not clear why
the logic of this argument does not also tell in relation to the kinds of
practice that Krauss situates in the neuter position, which by these
lights it would seem are not, and were never, assimilable to sculpture,
either. The category is admitted as conventional usage (which is
exactly what the argument seeks to relieve the alternative combinato-
rial positions of), and there is no attempt to displace it, giving the
impression that the issue has been bracketed off at this point. On the
other hand, if approached from the other direction and the appearance
of the category in the diagram is taken at face value, it immediately
raises the question of at exactly what point its use becomes unviable
12. Fredric Jameson, ``Foreword'' to Algirdas Julian Greimas, On Meaning:

Selected Writings in SemioticTheory (London : Frances Pinter, 1987), vi-xxii, xv.

200 Mark Dorrian
or impossible, to which the answer would appear to be at, and only at,
the moment of postmodernism. In Krauss's diagram the neuter thus
figures as an exhausted position, blocked under the sign of an obso-
lete, historicising term. From this foil, the diagram derives much of its
polemical force and the alternative positions formulated their future-
orientated implications.
This, then, allows us to pose a question regarding disciplinarity to
Krauss's diagram, and to derive a different answer than the apparently
rigid disciplinary designation sculpture, which occupies the neuter posi-
tion, would imply. If the diagram can be described as a map of
(expanded) disciplinarity, where might a-disciplinarity be located, if
anywhere, within it? One would expect it to be situated in the dia-
grammatic zone of exclusions, in what Greimas termed the ``neuter''
in counterpoint to the ``complex'' term at the top of the diagram that
held together or synthesized the two terms of the initial opposition, a
position over which (according to Marin and Jameson) a question
mark indelibly hovers. As, for example, Marin warns in his second
preface to Utopics,
a diagram of possible choices eliminating the force of contradiction of
the rational struggle of contradictory elements cannot be sketched out.
This throw or move opens up the whole field of possibilities, but the
field itself cannot be controlled because it is nothing but indetermina-
tion, what the ``no'' designates in the utopic no-place. 13
When Jameson draws on the semiotic square in his exposition of

Marin's Utopics in `Òf Islands and Trenches'', the complex term at the
top of the diagram becomes described in terms of existing historical
social reality, as a synthetic and ultimately affirmative holding together
of contradictory terms within an ideological formation. Counterposed to
this is the utopic no-place of the neutral, a neutralisation of the com-
plex term that fractures or dissolves it, that gestures towards some an-
ticipated but presently unthinkable futurity, yet offers no new positive
content to replace what it has cancelled. As Marin declares, Ùtopic
13. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (London : Mac-
millan, 1984), xv-xxvii, xxv.

representation [the neutral] would only indicate, and not signify'; and as
Jameson concludes,
Utopia's [again, read ``the neutral's''] deepest subject, the source of all
that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to con-
ceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project
the Other of what is, a failure that... must once again leave us alone
with this history. 14
(We note in passing that if Utopian praxis is, as Marin describes it, ìn
Kantian terminology... the schematizing activity of political and social
imagination not yet having found its concept... The figure that utopic
practice produces is a sort of zero degree for the concept', 15 then it op-
erates according to a reversal of the structure of the sublime insofar as
figuration comes in advance of an ungraspable concept, instead of a
concept preceding an impossible figuration of it.)
Crucial to this reading is Marin's articulation of the neuter as `sheer
discontinuity', and consequently of Utopia as `not an anti-world or a
new world, but an Other World', a no-place declared in Utopia's
name, which is also a kind of cancellation of a name. 16 For Marin, the
neutral is a kind of space or position of refusal. He writes, `Neither
yes nor no, true nor false, one nor the other: this is the neutral.'17 Its
relation to its double terms is consequently different to that held by
the complex synthesis of the two primary terms. If the former encom-
passes or enfolds the originary opposition, the neutral is more in a sit-
uation of exclusion. The complex is both this and that: the neutral is
neither this nor that, and thus operates not as a synthesis but as a sup-
plement that permits passage between the terms yet sits outside of the
whole that they make. It is a difference, Marin writes, àdded to the
closed system of difference'. 18 Thus the neutral term is, Marin again,
`not the third term; it is the weakest form of it... It is the degree zero
14. Fredric Jameson, `Òf Islands and Trenches : Neutralization and the Produc-
tion of Utopian Discourse,'' in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, vol. 2, The Syn-
tax of History (London : Routledge, 1988), 75-101, 101 ; Marin, Utopics, xxvi.
15. Marin, Utopics, 163.

202 Mark Dorrian
of synthesis... It is the deserted space of contradiction and the proof of
its power death's trace.'19
This, then, seems helpful in terms of how we might theorise a-disci-
plinarity. If we associate the ideal of inter-disciplinarity with the com-
plex term, that is, a synthetic and affirmative enfolding of, or media-
tion between, disciplines, then a-disciplinarity would sit in a
relationship of (utopic) neutralisation to it; it would gesture towards
the beyond of the disciplinary complex, not as further integration
(which would be inter-disciplinarity), but as its outside. Thus it would
gain expression through a characteristic stuttering of ``nots'', which
indicates the neutral and the absence of the positive determinations
proper to the upper, complex zone of the semiotic square.
It is striking how this radical logic of refusal conforms to the way in
which a project we might tentatively treat as a worked example of a-dis-
ciplinarity Blur (Diller + Scofidio's exhibition pavilion for Swiss
Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel) was discursively presented by its
designers. I have written on this project in more detail elsewhere, con-
sidering it in the context of other contemporary ``clouds of architecture''
of which it is the most celebrated and literal example. 20 I am particularly
interested in the euphoric aspect that the project increasingly took on,
which, again, seems telling in relation to Marin's statement that
to live utopia means constructing the representation which will speak
its impossibility and simultaneously indicate it as that which it excludes.
It is the empty space bordering and framing representation. This is the
space of blessedness in representation, the permanent instant of happi-
ness, all in one moment loss, limit and the neutral. 21
Perhaps not by chance, the ``final word'' in Diller + Scofidio's book

about the project is a reproduction of a newspaper report with a pho-
tograph of laughing visitors below the title ``The Wonder Cloud''. 22
19. Marin, Utopics, 15-16.

20. Mark Dorrian, ``Clouds of Architecture,'' Radical Philosophy 144 (July Au-
gust 2007) : 26-32. The following material is largely drawn from this essay.
21. Marin, Utopics, xxvi.
22. Diller + Scofidio, Blur:The Making of Nothing (New York : Harry N. Abrams,
2002).

I earlier suggested a link between clouds and a-disciplinarity. On
one hand the neutral, unlocalisable aspects of the cloud lend it utopic
implications and associations; and on the other it seems unsurprising
that the cloud might be an area of interest for practices that see them-
selves as aiming to transgress architecture's disciplinary constitution,
as opening architecture onto what is taken to be excessive to it, or as
mounting an assault on it. At one point in his book ATheory of /Cloud/,
Hubert Damisch characterises cloud as ```matter'' aspiring to ``form''',
thereby registering its infinite provisionality and imminence. 23
Equally, cloud might be thought of as ``matter after form'', the charac-
teristic ``thing'' that accompanies destruction and demolition, the dis-
persion and suspension of particles that follows convulsions of matter
and that is historically and iconographically fixed in photographs such
as those of the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing in St Louis in
1972, or the attack on the World Trade Center. Curiously, it was two
buildings by the same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, that supplied the
material for these iconic examples of the destructuring of form into
cloud. At the same time, the Pruitt-Igoe demolition was famously pro-
moted by Charles Jencks, for example as the death-rattle of mod-
ernism itself, thereby staging that particular cloud as the registration
of not just the collapse of a specific architectural project but of an
entire ideology. 24
Blur originated with an invitation to collaboratively participate in
a competition project for Swiss Expo 2001. Diller + Scofidio first
worked, and were entrusted with what was called `ìmmaterial design'',
as part of a team called Extasia, on what was conceived as a new media
landscape. The overarching theme of the Expo was to be ``Swissness'',
and Extasia's àssigned theme' was `sensuality and sexuality'.25 At first
the project was imagined as a void that would be made in the lake
itself and was to be called the Waterhole Restaurant. The Expo was
deferred for a year, however and Diller + Scofidio's pavilion emerged
as a separate project. Variously described as `pure atmosphere' and
23. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/ : Toward a History of Painting (Stanford :

Stanford University Press, 2002), 35.
24. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London : Academy
Editions, 1987), 9.
25. Charles Renfro, ``Blur Building,'' A+U 428 (2006) : 62-73, 67.

204 Mark Dorrian
`the making of nothing' the title of the book documenting the
work the project was specifically envisioned as an anti-spectacle, a
refusal of the demand for visual clarity and the scintillating display of
commodities normally associated with exhibitionary pavilions. The
building would take the form of a cloud hovering over the lake, a
`fog mass' 26, a piece of architecture made, according to the architects,
out of nothing but the `site itself: water'. 27 One of the project descrip-
tions put it like this:
Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased,
leaving only an optical `white out' and `white noise' of pulsing nozzles.
Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition vis-
ual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-
definition : there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself. 28
What is striking for us though, is the manner in which the architects'

own descriptions of the project consistently characterised Blur through
claims of what it excluded, rather than what it incorporated, culminat-
ing in the statement that it was the ``making of nothing''. If a-discipli-
narity mobilises a logic of exclusion, a reiterative series of refusals that
we have associated via Marin with the neutral and the utopic,
then it seems fully at work in this project, described by its architects as
a `massless and elastic medium in which time is suspended and orienta-
tion is lost' 29 (no mass, no time, no direction), and again as `spaceless,
formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and di-
mensionless'.30 Moreover, reading this we might even be encouraged
to suspect that cloud approximates the propertyless ``thing'' that Peter
Eisenman and Jacques Derrida sought during their ill-fated collabora-
tion on the design of a garden related to Derrida's commentary on the
Platonic chora (for the Parc de la Villette in Paris)31 especially so,
26. Diller + Scofidio, ``Blur Building, Expo 2002, Yverdon-les-bains, Suisse,''

Lotus International 125 (2005) : 76-81, 78.
27. Renfro, ``Blur Building,'' 67.
28. Diller + Scofidio, ``Blur Building,'' 78.
29. Diller + Scofidio, ``Blur : Swiss EXPO 2002, Diller+Scofidio, Ear Studio,
MIT Media Lab,'' Assemblage 41 (2000) : 25.
30. Diller + Scofidio, ``Blur Building,'' 78.
31. See Jacques Derrida & Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works (New York : Mona-
celli Press, 1997).

when one recalls the momentary flickering and dissolution of aleamor-
phic forms that have historically been glimpsed in clouds, whose art-
historical aspects have been studied by Ernst Gombrich, James Elkins,
and others. 32 Indeed, one could mount an argument that the chora is
the exemplary or ultimate a-disciplinary object an object that is not
an object, an ungraspable idea or, as Marin would say, limitless con-
tradiction.
Although not a term used by the architects themselves, a-disciplinar-
ity seems a goal implicated in the way Blur was conceptualised and dis-
cursively posited. (It may be objected that I am confusing a discipline
with its objects, but I understand the two as necessarily mutually con-
stitutive.) As one might expect, however, things become less
clear or at least more complex when the material realisation of
such a project is confronted, and a number of issues then arise regard-
ing the relations between discipline and technique, as well as the insti-
tutional contexts of production, etc. It is tempting, for example, to see
Blur as an overcoming of ``construction'' by a non-hylomorphic
`àtmospherics'', and yet one of the things that is striking about it was
the huge technological sophistication and the hyper-hylomorphic con-
trol of material on which the vapour cloud was predicated, and indeed,
as a melding of the meanings of atmosphere as gaseous envelope and
atmosphere as experiential ambience, how effectively it was orches-
trated.
32. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representa-
tion (London : Phaidon, 1977) ; James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the
Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York & London : Routledge, 1999).

Contributors
Daniel Barber is an interdisciplinary scholar analysing cultural, technological,
and bureaucratic connections between architecture and what we now call `èn-
vironmentalism'', thereby re-considering disciplinary adjacencies relevant to
architecture. He has published numerous book chapters and articles and has
taught at Yale University School of Architecture, the School of Architecture
and Planning at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Parsons
School of Design. He is currently completing his PhD Dissertation, ``The Be-
ginning of the End of the World : Architecture, Energy, and Climate in the
Emergence of Contemporary Environmentalism, c. 1957,'' at the Columbia
University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Mark Dorrian is Reader in Architecture and MArch Programme Director at

the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the art, architecture and ur-
banism atelier Metis. His books include Metis: Urban Cartographies (with Adrian
Hawker, 2002), Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (with Gillian
Rose, 2003) and Critical Architecture (ith Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill and Mur-
ray Fraser, 2007). Recent essays include ``Clouds of Architecture'' in Radical
Philosophy 144 (2007) ; ``The Way the World Sees London'' in Architecture Between
Spectacle and Use, edited by Antony Vidler (2008) ; and ``Transcoded Indexicali-
ty'' in Log 12 (2008). He is currently working on the cultural history of the
aerial view.
Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor in architectural history and theory

at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is the author of numerous books
and essays, including Crisis of the Object;The architecture of Theatricality (Routledge,
2006). He is also the editor of Walter Benjamin and Architecture (Routledge, 2009),
and the guest editor of a special issue of Architectural Theory Review that will fo-
cus on the subject of architectural drawing (14, no. 3, 2009). A Korean transla-
tion of his Ontology of Construction (1994) is scheduled for 2010.
Rosemary Hawker is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland Col-

lege of Art, Griffith University, Australia. Her research centres on the role of
photography in the work of Gerhard Richter and on interpreting contemporary
art with particular attention to medium relations and theories of representation.

208 Contributors
Craig Johnson is a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University, Sydney,
Australia. His research focuses on issues of culture, modernism and modernity
in the contemporary. He has published in Colloquy, Log, and Architectural Theory
Review. At Macquarie University he has taught in the cultural studies program
on visual culture, theories of modern subjectivity, and writing, and for the
Australian Research Council and the University of Tasmania he has worked
on architectural aspects of heritage assessment. He has also given papers in
Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and has occasionally published
cultural journalism on Australian contemporary art.
Darren Jorgensen lectures on art history in the Faculty of Architecture,

Landscape and Visual Art at the University of Western Australia. He has pub-
lished on Aboriginal and contemporary art, critical theory, Marxism, popular
fiction, and film.
Sandra Kaji-O'Grady is Associate Professor and Head of Architecture at the

University of Technology, Sydney. Her essays and criticism appear in Archi-
tecture Australia, Architectural Review Australia, Journal of Architecture, Journal of Archi-
tectural Education, Exedra, Artichoke, Subaud, Fabrications, and Architectural Theory
Review. Her essay here extends her doctoral work on serlialism in art and archi-
tecture (Monash University, 2001).
Peter Kohane is a Senior Lecturer in the Program of Architecture, Faculty of

the Built Environment, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,
Australia. His area of expertise is nineteenth to twentienth-century architecture
in America, Europe, and Australia. He has published widely on the American
architect Louis Kahn and is currently studying nineteenth-century architecture
in Britain, with an emphasis on the classical ideals of C. R. Cockerell. His in-
terpretation of architectural design is informed by the principle of decorum.
Kohane in currently President of the Society of Architectural Historians, Au-
stralia and New Zealand.
Andrew Leach is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the

School of Architecture of The University of Queensland, Australia. Among
his publications are ShiftingViews: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Austra-
lia and New Zealand (UQP, edited with Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully), Man-
fredoTafuri: Choosing History (A&S), and Frederick H Newman : Lectures on Architec-
ture (A&S). With Paul Walker, he edits Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. His current research concerns
the twentieth-century historiography of the Roman baroque.

Contributors 209
John Macarthur is Reader in Architecture at The University of Queensland,
Australia, where he directs the research group ATCH (Architecture, theory,
criticism, history). Macarthur writes on the cultural history and aesthetics of
architecture. His book The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities was
published by Routledge in 2007.
Antony Moulis is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at The Uni-

versity of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include twentieth-cen-
tury architecture and the work of Le Corbusier. Moulis has undertaken re-
search at the Le Corbusier Foundation, Paris, and the Alvar Aalto Academy,
Helsinki, and his recent research on Le Corbusier has appeared in From Models
to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture (Routledge, 2007). His
writing for professional and academic journals has appeared in Architectural Theory
Review, Architecture Australia, Fabrications, Monument, and The Journal of Architecture.
Naomi Stead is a UQ Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Architecture at

The University of Queensland, Australia. Stead's doctoral thesis examined the
cultural politics of architecture in recent purpose-built social history museums.
She writes architectural criticism regularly for a number of Australian journals
including Architecture Australia, and in 2008 was awarded the Adrian Ashton
Award for Architectural Writing by the NSW chapter of the Royal Australian
Institute of Architects. Stead's scholarly work appears in Critical Architecture
(Routledge, 2007), Architecture and Authorship (Black Dog, 2007), The Journal of
Architecture,The Journal of Australian Studies, OASE, and the Open Museums Journal.
Deborah van der Plaat is a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ATCH

Research Group of the School of Architecture at The University of Queens-
land, Australia. Her published work considers nineteenth-century theories of
the imagination, modernity, mythography, and history and their relation to
the architecture of the period. She is a co-editor of Skyplane (2009) published
by UNSW Press.
Bart Verschaffel is a philosopher and professor at Ghent University. He

teaches architectural theory in the Department of Architecture and Urban
Development, which he chairs. He wrote a doctoral dissertation (KULeuven,
1985) on the epistemology of historical sciences. His publications cover the re-
search fields of cultural philosophy, art and architectural theory and aesthetics,
and they include De glans der dingen (1989), Rome/Over theatraliteit (1990), Figuren/
essays (1995), Architecture is (as) a Gesture (2001) ; A propos de Balthus (2005) ; Van
Hermes en Hestia. Teksten over architectuur (2006), and Essais sur les genres en peinture.
Nature morte, portrait, paysage. (2007).

IMAGES

FIG. 1
Rath Museum, Geneva, June, 2006. Photograph by Antony Moulis.

Antony Moulis, Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier

FIG. 2
Before la Fee Electricite (1937), Palais de Tokyo, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Photography by Hughes Leglise-Bataille, 2007.
Andrew Leach, Throwing Light on Our Intentions

FIG. 3
FIG. 4
Callum Morton, Valhalla, 2007. Steel, polystyrene,epoxy resin, silicon, marble, glass,
wood, acrylic paint, lights, sound. 465 x 1475 x 850 cm. Palazzo Zenobio,
Venice Biennale, 2007. Images courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.
Rosemary Hawker, Callum Morton's Architecture of Disguised Difference

FIG. 5
FIG. 6
Callum Morton, Valhalla, 2007. Steel, polystyrene,epoxy resin, silicon, marble, glass,
wood, acrylic paint, lights, sound. 465 x 1475 x 850 cm. Palazzo Zenobio,
Venice Biennale, 2007. Images courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

FIG. 7
Callum Morton, International Style, 1999. 1:10 scale version. Wood, acrylic,
synthetic polymer paint, light, sound. 52 x 312 x 176 cm. Image courtesy the artist and
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Photo : Kenneth Pleban

FIG. 8
`CCTV is the backdrop to aggressive global politics'. Illustration from Content, 2005,
artwork by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung. Courtesy of the artist.
Craig Johnson, Icon and Ideology

Colophon
The contributions to this book were presented at a colloquium of the

Architecture 9 Theory 9 Criticism 9 History (ATCH) Research Group of
The University of Queensland, Australia, held at the Institute of
Modern Art, Brisbane, on August 17 and 18, 2007.
A&S/books are published by the Department of Architecture &

Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium
A&S/books on Architecture and the Arts

Jozef Plateaustraat 22, B-9000 Gent, Belgium
www.AndSbooks.ugent.be
Lay-out & Printing: Cultura, Wetteren (Belgium)

First print: 750 copies
The Editors, individual Contributors and A&S/books 2009
ISBN/EAN:
W.D.: D/2009/8734/2


Architecture, Disciplinarity, and The Arts - Andrew Leach and John Macarthur

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Architecture, Disciplinarity, and The Arts - Andrew Leach and John Macarthur

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A&S/books selected back list : Table of Contents:

Leach & Macarthur Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts

and the Arts

Forthcoming : A-disciplinarity and Architecture? / Mark Dorrian

ISBN: A&S/books A&S/books

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Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts: Considering the Issues 7

On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle 17

Architecture and the System of the Arts; or Kant on Landscape Gardening 27

James Fergusson'sTheory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts 45

Disciplinary Contrasts: Science, Art, and the Imagination in the 61

Wilhelm Worringer, GothicVitalism, and Modernity 75

Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier 89

Andre Bloc in Iran 99

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Serial Techniques in the Arts: General Ambitions and 123

Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures: On Medium and Disciplinarity 135

Callum Morton's Architecture of Disguised Difference 151

Icon and Ideology 167

Tectonics:Testing the Limits of Autonomy 179

A-disciplinarity and Architecture? 193

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John Macarthur and Andrew Leach

Throughout the twentieth century, architecture was commonly distin-

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Certainly, the popularity of constructed environments among artists is

1. Andrea Phillips, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths College, online at http ://

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The eighth principle of Roger Scruton's Architectural Principles in the Age

Scruton may not count as an authority for architecture's in crowd, but

1. Roger Scruton, ``Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism,'' in What

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The rest of Scruton's argument quickly becomes rather uninteresting

2. Scruton, ``Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism,'' 57.

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6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford : Blackwell, 1980), 43.

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7. Compare Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art

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10. Claus Dreyer, ``The Crisis of Representation in Contemporary Architec-

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The survival conditions for architecture which, on one hand, is in-

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From the middle of the eighteenth century to end of the nineteenth,

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8. Etienne-Louis Boullee, Architecture, essai sur l'art, ed. Jean-Marie Perouse de

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Montclos (Paris : Hermann, 1968) ; ``Architecture, Essay on Art,'' in Boullee and