186578445-Ten-Canonical-Buildings-Peter-Eisenman.pdf

Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000

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Peter Eisenman

TEN CANONICAL BUILDINGS 1950–2000

Foreword by Stan Allen Edited by Ariane Lourie


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Peter Eisenman

TEN CANONICAL BUILDINGS 1950–2000

Foreword by Stan Allen Edited by Ariane Lourie


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First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-30 978-0-8478-3048-0 48-0 LCCN: 2007921092 © 2008 Rizzoli International Publications © 2008 Peter Eisenman “Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern” © Stan Allen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher publisher.. Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York This book was developed with the support and cooperation of the School of Architecture, Princeton University.

DESIGNER Andrew Heid Printed and bound in China 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Eisenman, Peter Ten Canonical Buildings ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-3048-0 (alk. paper) 1. Postmodern Architecture 2. Critical Architecture II. Title. NA2760. E45 2006 720.1--dc22 2007921092


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Contents Acknowledgments

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Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory Counter-Memory of the Modern Modern Foreword by Stan Allen

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Introduction

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1. Profiles of Text Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole,” 1947–50

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2. The Umbrella Diagram Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 1946–51

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3. Textual Heresies Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg, 1962–64

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4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic Space Louis I. Kahn, Adler House and DeVore DeVore House, 1954–55

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5. The Nine-Square Diagram and its Contradictions Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 1959–64

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6. Material Inversions James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building, Building, 1959–63

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7. Texts of Analogy Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, 1971–78

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8. Strategies of the Void Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, 1992–93

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9. The Deconstruction of the Axis Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 1989–99

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10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram Frank O. Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building, 1997–2002

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments The ideas and arguments presented in Ten Canonical Buildings were developed in seminars I gave over four years while a visiting lecturer at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. The school’s support, in particular the support of the dean, Stan Allen, made this book possible. I especially want to recognize the Princeton students who both participated in the seminars and spent summers producing drawings to illustrate these building analyses: John Bassett, Andrew Heid, Ajay Manthripragada, Michael Wang, Carolyn Yerkes Yerkes and, later l ater,, Matthew Roman. Ro man. Andrew Heid also stayed on to design this book. Clearly this book is the result of a team effort. Ariane Lourie endured numerous drafts and rewrites to help me bring this manuscript to its final form—even editing and repairing drawings—and Cynthia Davidson reviewed it for clarity. Jeffrey Kipnis made insightful comments on drafts of the introduction. Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown helped to obtain the best historical images from the archives of Le Corbusier, Luigi Moretti, Mies van der Rohe, John Hejduk, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling necessary to illustrate each building. I want to thank the architects who lent images from their offices: Venturi, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, OMA, Studio Daniel Libeskind, and Gehry Partners. Finally, I would also like to thank David Morton and the editorial staff at Rizzoli New York for their patience and for reproducing these drawings with such care. –P.E. – P.E.


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Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern Stan Allen ‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because history is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. —Michel Foucault

The title of Peter Eisenman’s new book, Ten Canonical Buildings, suggests the construction of a new orthodoxy. Indeed, there is something didactic about Eisenman’s canon, and it is important to remember that these meticulous formal readings were developed in the context of seminars taught at Princeton from 2003 to 2006. At one level what is proposed here is nothing less than a new pedagogy, which would have at its center the close reading of exemplary twentieth-century buildings. In the past Eisenman has often been criticized for his reliance on concepts from outside of architecture. With this analytical work he declares explicitly that it is buildings themselves that are the source of ideas in architecture, and not applied philosophical concepts from outside the discipline. But to leave it at that would be to miss the force of his argument. His title, I would suggest, is something of a ruse; a sly bit of misdirection to distract the reader while he palms another ace off the bottom of the deck. Eisenman is operating on the basis of a rather unorthodox notion of the canonical, which places him much closer to Foucault’s idea of an “effective” history than to the conservative idea of maintaining a timeless, undeviating canon.


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It is the “liberating divergence” of architecture’s marginal or apparently insignificant moments that Eisenman has identified as canonical in this collection. In other words, innovation occurs when the previously marginal is absorbed into the discipline, triggering internal adjustments to the logic of the discipline itself. Eisenman understands the modern condition as shot through with contradiction, which is in turn manifested in formal discontinuity and historical rupture. “The purpose of history,” Foucault writes, “is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.” “A canonical work,” Eisenman writes here, “is a hinge, a rupture, a premonition, in other words, of something that necessarily signals a change.” For Eisenman (an attentive reader of Foucault) the task of history is to make contradiction and discontinuity visible. He is searching for those moments when the ground of the discipline changes and the paradigm shifts. In this sense, Eisenman’s canon is the opposite of an eternal canon: it is precisely bound to the historical moment of rupture, meaningless outside the horizon of possibilities that it opens up at that particular time. To identify discontinuity as the primary analytical trope of this collection is also to take note of a conspicuous counterpoint to Eisenman’s mentor Colin Rowe. To mention Rowe here (as Eisenman does in his own introduction) is both to acknowledge the intellectual debt that Eisenman owes to Rowe and to measure the distance between the two. Rowe had famously postulated an underlying geometrical continuity between the classical and the modern. For Eisenman, Rowe’s emphasis on continuity locked modern architecture into a humanist tradition. To disengage modern architecture from its humanist tradition it was necessary to construct an alternative genealogy, in which fragmentation and discontinuity would now take precedence. Eisenman takes Rowe’s method of close formal readings and sets it to a


Eisenman’s Canon

distinct task: the identification of breaks, ruptures and divergent pathways. He remains, however, indebted to Rowe for his analytical methodology: “Colin Rowe first taught me how to see what was written into the building but was not thematic of seeing as opticality.” Eisenman takes Frank Stella’s famous literalist dictum—“What you see is what you see”—and turns it on its head. Like his mentor Rowe, he is not interested in “what is literally there, but what is implied by what is there.” Perhaps the best known example of this method, and the essay that declared in the strongest possible terms his ideological distance from Rowe, is the article “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign.” In this essay (which opens with an epigraph from Foucault), Eisenman identifies the idea of the self-referential sign as the aspect of Dom-ino that makes it “truly modernist.” Eisenman’s starting point is the iconic perspective drawing of the Dom-ino system. Ostensibly the demonstration of a construction system, it is often taken as a diagram of the basic principles of the free plan. Eisenman reads the drawing against the grain, teasing out a series of small but significant formal moves that produce a kind of degreezero of architectural form: the minimum formal differentiation necessary to define the artifact as architecture, as opposed to mere structural diagram. All of the elements of the Eisenman methodology are here: the ostentatious disregard of structure, site, and program in favor of a nuanced formal reading, and the extension of that analysis as a more generalized proposition, which Eisenman calls a “diagram.” Maison Domino is one of the key diagrams discussed in this book. As in the previous articles, it is a privileged point of departure, a conceptual lever to open up the field of modern and postmodern architecture. The reference to Dom-ino here is then both to a method of analysis and to an exemplary modern-

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Eisenman’s Canon

ist work. It is emblematic of the democratization of space under modernity and of postmodern architecture’s turn toward self-referentiality. For Eisenman, it remains “a true and seminal break from the 400-year-old tradition of Western humanist architecture.” Many of these same arguments are present in an earlier essay that prefigures the analytical method here: Eisenman’s brilliant, counterintuitive, formal deconstruction of James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building in “Real and English: The Destruction of the Box,” published in the first issue of Oppositions (1974), although written a decade earlier. Stirling stands in as Eisenman’s avatar in the intellectual tug-of-war with Rowe’s interpretive models: “In his need to clear a kind of ‘turf’ for himself, Stirling had to take on not only Le Corbusier but also the received interpretation of Le Corbusier provided by Stirling’s own tutor, Colin Rowe.” In a key passage and a sequence of diagrams that anticipate the more fully developed argument of the Dom-ino essay, Eisenman teases out the formal consequences of the Dom-ino diagram. While setting the structural support back from the edge of the horizontal plane of the slab emphasized the horizontal flow of space (sponsoring the free plan), it also freed the vertical surface from its structural support and allowed a layering of space in the vertical dimension. Eisenman locates Stirling’s formal innovation in an alternative proposition for the vertical surface that “implies the potential for presenting the vertical plane as a dominant spatial datum, while using a vocabulary which runs counter to the by-now traditional dematerialized cubist aesthetic.” The accuracy of this formal reading is perhaps less significant than its methodological implication. To me, the real force of the essay is to foreground the formal characteristics of Stirling’s architecture against the then-dominant interpretations of his work—as well as Stirling’s


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own explanatory framework. At that time, as is still the case today, Leicester was interpreted almost exclusively in terms of the clarity of its functional arrangements, its direct (not to say “brutalist”) use of industrial materials, and a series of quotations of canonical modernist precedents (the echo of Melnikov, for example, in the thrusting angle of the auditorium). To claim early Stirling instead for the camp of self-referentiality and formal innovation is provocatively counterintuitive. It opens the work up to wider interpretation, and serves to confirm the idea that a complex work like Leicester will always exceed definitive explanation. The analysis of Leicester is reprised in the current volume, with added anecdotal background, which makes it a better read, and newly drawn diagrams, which make the argument clearer. More important than chronology and precedence is the method itself: Eisenman’s dogged determination to read certain of these buildings against the grain of the received interpretation, through the primary vehicle of the cut-away axonometric diagram. This has its awkward moments. The drawings of Frank Gehry’s Case Western Reserve project, which emphasize the roof geometries seen from above, seem inadequate to the sculptural effects of an architect who designs almost exclusively in model form, and with a close attention to the experience of the building from street level. It does, however, yield brilliant formal insights in the analysis of the Jussieu Libraries, and reminds us that Rem Koolhaas, for all his engagement with architecture as social/cultural prop, is an architect of subtle and sophisticated formal invention. After all, would we really be so interested in Koolhaas if he were simply using architecture as an instrument of social criticism? Similarly, in his patient explication of the changing plan strategies for Robert Venturi’s mother’s house, Eisenman reminds us that Venturi, although usually asso-

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ciated with the semiotic capacity of the vertical plane, is a brilliant plan maker, whose buildings can stand up to extended formal analysis. A final point of reference, perhaps less immediately obvious; it seems to me that Eisenman has internalized Harold Bloom’s idea that, as an author takes on his predecessors, rather than confront a fully realized, mature masterwork, it is often the early work, or the slightly marginal and unresolved aspects of the mature work, that offer a kind of handhold, or a crack to open up the field, and clear space for working. While Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building are inarguably central to postwar architectural history, Luigi Moretti is a less obvious choice. To examine Louis Kahn’s Adler and DeVore Houses, rather than his better-known public buildings, is similarly counterintuitive. We understand Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg as canonical today primarily because it has sponsored several generations of work on the warped surface. In this case, Koolhaas’s Jussieu Libraries confer a retrospective “canonical” status to this previously somewhat overlooked building. But there is more here than a pursuit of the obscure for its own sake. Eisenman finds and zeros in on those moments—in well-known and in less well-known buildings—that still offer room for working. Eisenman’s canon is definitively not a new orthodoxy. A canon usually implies looking back to validate history’s great, untouchable monuments. Eisenman’s canon is instead anticipatory—it lays the groundwork for future monuments. It is also—in contradistinction to the notion of an anonymous canon handed down from on high—somewhat idiosyncratic, and in the end, highly personal. For all that, it is surely not a teleology with “Eisenman” at its endpoint. It is neither a universal canon nor an individual genealogy. It is both the record of one architect’s intellectual trajectory and a method that sug-


Eisenman’s Canon

gests other, future trajectories. These buildings are precisely where the possibility of the new becomes evident for the first time, even if in a tentative and incomplete manner. This may be Eisenman’s most telling insight. He presents here a collection of suggestive possibilities, of architectural problems opened up and provisionally addressed, but always leaving room for the next author to complete the work, and create a new break, which will in turn open up new territory for generations of architects to follow.

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Introduction

In reading Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon, I discovered that the term canon has more mobility than might have been at first assumed, and that it could help to structure my thinking about the fundamental project of this book, which is to address the necessary evolution of close reading in architecture. While The Western Canon looks at what constitutes canon in Western literature, some of Bloom’s various and perhaps subtle uses of the term help to clarify my thinking concerning this period of time. Bloom says in different contexts that canon refers to the experience of limits, which are extended or broken (74), or which are vital, original, arbitrary and personal (75). For Bloom, canon refers to authors and their entire oeuvre; in the context of this book, however, canonical buildings are singular works without reference to their authorial provenance. For Bloom, canon has centers; in this book, the edges and cusps are of interest. For Bloom, canon also has a heretical intensity (72), which is useful in distinguishing canon from its use in religious, as opposed to artistic or scientific contexts. The idea of canon would refer to an operative dogma in a religious context: an orthodoxy, as in canon law. In science, a canonic pattern—such as canonical coordinates or canonical conjugates—contains an uncertainty. A canonical pattern in music is contrapuntal, repeating but also constantly changing. In the context of this book, the term canonical encompasses the potential heretical and transgressive nature of ways of close reading architecture. If, as Bloom suggests, political correctness can be considered a polemic against difficult art, then the canonical is a combination of difficult and popular (56); in this book, it is the distinction between the easy and the difficult in terms of readings that will be made. Finally, no less an author than Michel Foucault rails against the idea of canon

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and replaces it instead with the idea of the archive, which reorganizes hierarchies. I did not set out to define or co-opt the term canonical for architecture. In fact, even though I have attempted a provisional definition here, this is not the purpose of what follows. Rather, the idea of the canonical informs my interest in reading architecture, and also explains the inclusion of each building in this book, which lays out their roles in defining today’s particular historical moment in architecture. If part of the meaning of the term canon is to contravene its own accepted definition, then its use here represents that possibility. More specifically, the term canonical begins to define the history of architecture as a continual and unremitting assault on what has been thought to be the persistencies of architecture: subject/object, figure/ground, solid/void, and part-to-whole relationships. These concepts become canonical over time; therefore, in their attack on the canon, these buildings become canonical in themselves. But as a group, the buildings herein do not represent a canon. Rather, the idea of the canonical begins to describe potential methods of analysis, which derive from an interest in reading architecture in a more flexible and less dogmatic way. While this is a personal selection of architectural works, the ten buildings in this book do not represent my personal canon. Rather, they were chosen, in retrospect, for two reasons: they represent both a necessary evolution in the terms of close reading and an evolution in the nature of that close reading, from the formal to the textual and perhaps even the more phenomenal. Perhaps most importantly, these buildings not only challenge the canons of architecture, they also challenge our received idea of the canon of close reading. All of the architects discussed here represent different ideological, theoretical, and stylistic points of view, as well as different attitudes toward site, material, and program. What defines them, however loosely, in my opinion, is

Introduction

at the core of a postmodern practice, as distinct from a modernist practice and from the current state of architectural practice. This book seeks to locate the core ideas that form the basis for their argumentation. Ultimately this will be seen to involve both a rethinking of the reading strategies which sustained modern architecture and, at the same time, reiterate a demand for other forms of close reading. *** Colin Rowe first taught me how to see what was not present in a building. Rowe did not want me to describe what I could actually see: for example, a three-story building with a rusticated base, increasingly less rustication in each of its upper stories, and with ABCBA proportional harmonics across the facade, etc. Rather, Rowe wanted me to see what ideas were implied by what was physically present. In other words, less a concern for what the eye sees—the optical—and more for what the mind sees—the visual. This latter idea of “seeing with the mind” is called here “close reading.” Each of the buildings discussed here requires one to see in a different way, particular to the building under consideration. While these ten buildings may reduce the effects or thematic of opticality, each in turn organizes a different demand on visuality. Visuality does not refer to a prima facie response to image, but rather to what is apparent and implied by aspects of the building’s formal organization. Each of these buildings requires close reading. Close reading can be said to define what has been known until now as the history of architecture. But for our purposes here, close reading also suggests that a building has been “written” in such a way as to demand such a reading. If the first question posed in this book is: “close reading of what?” then one of the answers proposed in the following chapters involves the

Introduction

close reading of critical architectural ideas. The readings proposed in this book would not have been possible before 1968, with the effect of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and the idea of the undecidability of any single reading invoked therein. The use of the term undecidable in the context of this book is no mere wordplay between ambiguity, indeterminate, multiple and undecidable. The differences between these terms are crucial. Modernism was perhaps best defined by William Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. The idea of ambiguity lodges itself in a dialectical notion of either/or and determinate/indeterminate, which, as decidable characteristics, possess a supposed clarity which belies any need to examine their repressions. Undecidability questions the very nature of the notion of ambiguity itself. It is in this context that Derrida’s work remains underexamined in today’s architectural culture, which has gravitated toward the more facile interpretations of a Deleuzian schema of the multiple. If since 1968, undecidability is an aspect of criticality, and since undecidability as opposed to ambiguity is perhaps more difficult to tease out in architecture as opposed to say in literature, then today, more than ever, a close reading comes to terms with undecidability. The idea of undecidability makes it possible to look back and see changes in work which in turn demand a new kind of close reading, which, it will be argued, responds to the evolution of canonical in architecture. It is first necessary to distinguish between a canonical period in history and the period from 1950 to 2000 covered here. One way to study the discipline of architecture is to use a particular period in history as a master exemplar, to use the historical conditions of a particular period to stand for history per se. For example, instead of using history as a narrative structure, it is possible to take the period in northern Italy from 1520 to 1570 to describe a canonical moment in the history of architecture. This specific canonical

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moment could serve to shed light on other such canonical moments in architecture’s history. It may not be necessary therefore to study many such moments to understand what is meant by a canonical moment. Canon in that sense requires a specific historical context, but it is not necessarily an expression of such a moment, a Geist, or a comparable historicizing imperative. It could be argued that a canonical moment describes what could also be called a paradigm shift. But the idea of a paradigm shift does not necessarily implicate the critical content latent in the idea of the canonical. The purpose of distinguishing a canonical moment from a history is that while history provides a narrative flow to the discipline of architecture, it does not in itself provide a necessary basis for close reading and for opening the discipline to question its own history, and thus to alternative interpretations of that history. As used here, the term canonical initially provides a possible basis for an alternative reading of what today constitutes the critical in architecture. Rather than focusing on history qua history—this building was built at this time, used in this way by this architect, etc.—the idea of canon in architecture also makes possible the recording of the changes in close reading, in issues that range from the formal to the textual, or from the phenomenological to the performative. Thus canon is a way of opening up a particular discourse to reading its own history as something other than a narrative of facts. These readings are the wedge that allows postwar modernism to be seen, absent its former ideology and clichéd rhetoric, as imbued with other powerful concepts. If canon establishes a perimeter to the center of the discipline, then such readings suggest that a critique of canon ultimately displaces this perimeter with a new canonic idea. It will be argued that the canonical will inevitably be a critique of what at any moment is termed the canon.

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Introduction

1. Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole.”

2. Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House.

These ten buildings do not so much describe a history as they define the evolution of canonical works that eventually became known as postmodernism. Close readings that are other than formal or conceptual remain within and are at once canonical to a postmodernism and at the same time heretical to mainstream modernism. The term postmodernism is not used here to denote a style but rather refers to the period of time after modernism. Postmodernism reflects an attitude concerning ideas about architecture which are articulated as a critique of modernism and particularly of abstraction, modernism’s dominant mode of close reading. Not all buildings in the years 1950 to 2000 describe this moment. The ten buildings here are read, each in their own way, through a different lens, producing arguments which, taken together, define a series of canonical moments that loosely identify some of the transgressive concepts of the postmodern period.

The idea of the canonical is often confused with the idea of a so-called great work. In the context of this book, canon is not necessarily a list of great work, nor is it necessary for a canonical building to be a great work. In one sense, canon and great work have little to do with each other. A great building may be just that, requiring no more than an initial look that defines a single, directed reading, while a canonical building presupposes in this context undecidable, often diffuse readings as a necessary condition of the critical. As will be seen here, a close reading of a great building is complete unto itself, like J Ørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which requires little or no outside references in order to be read. This is not the case with a canonical building, which requires a reading forward to what the building inspired, as well as backward to what the building denoted.

Introduction

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3. Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg.

4. Louis Kahn, DeVore House.

In this sense, great buildings are timeless, while canonical buildings are identified with specific moments in time. For example, in the eighteenth century, Palladio’s Villa Rotunda was considered canonical because its close reading produced an interpretation of his Villa Malcontenta. Yet in the twentieth century, Villa Rotunda was seen as a great work, and Malcontenta came to be called canonical because its close reading spawned an interpretation in Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garches. A canonical building requires study, not in and of itself as an isolated object, but in terms of its capacity to reflect on its particular moment in time and its relation to buildings which both precede it and come after it. In the study of the buildings collected here, each canonical work impinges on those works created in its wake, works that in turn redefine what is considered canonical. Thus canon is intimately linked to and dependent on both the concept of close reading

operative at a particular moment in time and on the specific works which at the time provoke such a close reading. The canonical both places in doubt previous work and demands new interpretations, not only of the individual work, but also of architecture in general. In short, while the canonical building requires close reading, it also problematizes the idea of a great building or masterwork as a historically sedimented concept, without the mobility and flexibility that canonical implies. For example, one of the buildings discussed here is Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve, which is neither as well known nor as great as his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. There can be little doubt that Bilbao changed the architectural face of the ensuing decade, and it is certainly what can be called a great building or a masterpiece of its time. The first question is, then, why Case Western rather than Bilbao?

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Introduction

5. Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House.

6. James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building.

While Bilbao is effectively the most well-known and popular of Gehry’s buildings, this building was not so much concerned with reading and producing a critical stance on modernism as it was the reflection of a personal sensibility, albeit about the siting of a building in the city. Bilbao may be a great postmodern building, and its quality establishes Gehry’s personal view of the object in the city, but it does not embody an argument about its relation to history in the critical terms that characterize the Lewis Building. The argument set forth in this book considers the Lewis Building to be a canonical, as opposed to a great building, in that it organizes a demand for a close reading of a different kind, one that differs from the formal and conceptual readings that dominate architecture’s recent past. The Lewis Building can be considered canonical in defining more clearly its theoretical rupture with classic modernist readings than does Bilbao, because it refers back to the history of the discipline, espe-

cially to the plan of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, as a progenitor of the modern. Also discussed here are the Adler and DeVore Houses by Louis Kahn, as opposed to his betterknown, even seminal projects such as the Indian School of Management at Ahmedabad, the Exeter Library, or the Yale University Art Gallery. The Adler and DeVore Houses are an obscure pair of houses that were never built, yet they demonstrate certain of Kahn’s ideas in what was a crucial turning point in his career. They represent a moment in Kahn’s career between the Trenton Bathhouse, which preceded these houses, and the Richards Medical Building; the houses represent a moment which articulated several possible directions for Kahn’s architecture. The Adler and DeVore Houses also contain the origins of his eventual career direction; in fact, his next major project, the Richards Medical Building at the University of Pennsylvania, evolves as a stylized Kahnian trope that is clearly derived from these two houses. The

Introduction

same can be said for each building in this book, some more obvious than others. While individually these buildings may each be canonical, there is no intention in their collection here to define any socalled postmodern canon. A canonical building also spawns subsequent interpretations by other architects as a commentary on that particular moment. For example, Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg both manifests his own critique of his earlier “Five Points,” and serves as a model for Rem Koolhaas’s Jussieu Libraries project. Thus each project discussed here represents a moment in architecture in which there is an acknowledgment of the past, a break with the past, and simultaneously a juncture with a possible future. While a great building perhaps is self-sufficient, a canonical building is not. Its outward references, forward and back, make it contingent on external factors. The difference between a canonical work, as defined here, and a critical work is more nuanced. All canonical works are per se critical, but not all critical works are canonical. The critical can be considered a necessary but not sufficient component of the canonical. In this book, the term critical refers to the capacity to open up to questioning problems which are essentially architectural. In the sense that it is used here, critical is a concept that distances the object or subject from the terms of the analysis at the same time that the analysis is also part of the subject or object. The important distinctions between critical and canonical are twofold: first, a canonical work is a hinge as well as a rupture, while a critical work can function principally as a break with its precedents. Canonical in this context refers to a rupture that helps to define a moment in history; it is a constant reevaluation in the present as to what constitutes such a rupture. Of course, a rupture can only be seen in hindsight, looking back rather than looking at the present. Second, a canonical work is time-bound: it depends on a particular

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moment in history in order for it to be seen as a hinge/rupture in either the architect’s career or the architectural discourse. A building’s function, structure, and type—its instrumentality—are not the criteria for understanding its importance in the discipline of architecture, nor would these be considered aspects of its criticality. All buildings stand up; all buildings function; all buildings enclose. These qualities comprise neither the central characteristics nor the thematic of the buildings analyzed in this book. Canonical buildings are not considered canonical because they have functioned well; their instrumentality has never been the cause of their canonical role in the discipline. For example, whether or not Borromini’s churches functioned well has not been a concern in history, because the functioning of the church was not necessarily its thematic. Rather, the representation of those functions in the artifact was important. Whether the mass could be heard or whether Easter service was crowded was not the issue for Borromini or for his patron; in fact, these matters have never been the issues for the history of architecture. Equally, very few people care whether Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao functions well or not; and many great museums—the Louvre in Paris, the Frick Museum in New York, and others—were not designed as such. There is no such thing as a good plan for a museum, because there is no plan for a museum. If canon is commonly associated with the critical as a reference to prior work, canon is also commonly associated with the textual, that is, an internal critique or questioning of its own status as a narrative. For the textual, I am referring to the Derridean idea that texts manifest the legible dimensions of ideas and objects while linking them with preexisting ideas and objects. In the context of this book, the textual will also connect ideas—for example, in the form of a diagram, an explanatory or analytical device aims to uncover

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Introduction

7. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery.

8. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries.

latent organizations. The textual becomes a tissue of marks that are no longer only representational as the three types of sign identified by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: the icon, the symbol, and the sign. According to Peirce, the icon has a visual similitude to its object; the symbol establishes a visual convention for the relationship of the symbol to some object, and the index, which does not rely on the thematic of the optical, functions as a record or a trace. Each of these ten buildings will be situated as the fulcrum of an argument that the building defines, an argument that can be grasped through a close reading of textual, formal, and conceptual strategies. These will not always be the most well-known buildings, but they will stand for a moment when the relationship between the sign and the signified, the relationship between the

subject and the object, the relationship between form and meaning, and between instrumentality and discourse come into sharp focus. The period from 1950 to 1968 could be characterized by a rethinking of modernist abstraction. Thus the first four buildings shown here, each in its own way, define and critique previous invocations of close reading affiliated with modernism. For example, while Luigi Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” demands a formalist close reading, it begins to introduce concerns such as historical references and materiality, which later become known as postmodernism. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, while continuing Mies’s investigation of the column grid in relation to interior space, external surface, and the corner, is still the most abstract—if not the most overtly modernist—of the four buildings, but it also becomes a manifestation of Mies’s first diagram.

Introduction

9. Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum.

Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg requires a reading beyond formalist close reading because at root it is a reversal of his own “Five Points,” but more importantly because it introduces a centripetal energy as well as a centrifugal energy that moves attention away from the center to the periphery and thus away from any classical, centric, deep-space composition. The last of the early projects is Kahn’s Adler and DeVore Houses, which represent both a rejection of the modernist free plan but also deny traditional part-to-whole relationships. Instead they introduce a play of readings, which u ltimately are undecidable. This pair of houses is thus a hinge in Kahn’s career, but also a hinge between the first phase of postwar building and the second, transitional postmodern phase in America. The three buildings that characterize the second generation, from 1968 to 1988, exhibit

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10. Frank Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building.

similar characteristics in orienting their critique of modernism toward a new realism, expressed in structure, materiality, and iconography. Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery presents a critique involving surreal or superreal shifts; James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building reverses the conventional solid/void characteristics of material, and Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House evokes the form of an American shingle style with European overtones. However, none of these buildings lapse into a simple phenomenology. In fact, the characteristics of these buildings have less in common with the pure materiality of Kahn’s Trenton Bathhouse than they do with each other in broaching the conceptual implications of organization, type, and material. The three projects in the last section of this book, from 1988 to 2000, not only require close reading but also mark sufficient changes in what

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constitutes the idea of close reading. This period begins with the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which included, if not the specific projects of Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry discussed in this book, at least their sensibilities. What links them is a concern for diagram, as opposed to type, but each architect employs the diagram in a different way. In Koolhaas’s Jussieu Libraries, the diagram is an iconic device where the building displays a visual similitude to the animating diagram. As such Koolhaas’s work begins to define another reading strategy, one that Jeffrey Kipnis defines as performative rather than conceptual. In the performative strategy, the human subject becomes involved in the architectural object in a way similar to the minimalist sculptors’ involvement with the subject, the object, and the site specificity of the work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum also invokes the diagram, but to indexical ends, where the building marks a series of traces of its process of becoming. This organizes the demand for a close reading of not only the traces within the building but also the traces of its own origins in a prior project. It will be argued that Gehry’s Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School also relies on a diagram that invokes a shift in reading from the formal or conceptual to the phenomenological. These three projects, more than the other buildings assembled herein, best describe the dilemma of close reading today. Equally, it is perhaps too early in the architects’ respective careers, and in time, to assess which buildings in their oeuvre could be considered canonical, although it is certainly possible to understand their effect on the idea of close reading. In each case, the buildings herein disturb the complacency of the act of reading. The idea of undecidability suggests that readings are no longer necessarily dialectical. Ultimately it is not buildings but their readings which are undecid-

Introduction

able. These buildings not only challenge the formal and conceptual conventions sedimented in the history of close reading, but also challenge what constitutes the persistencies of any architecture: part-to-whole, subject/object, Cartesian coordinates, and abstraction/modernism. In attacking the clichés of modernism, these buildings of the postmodern period remain engaged in a challenge to opticality and the metaphysics of presence. In suggesting that the challenge posed by one era becomes clichéd in the next, this book offers neither solutions nor instructions for contemporary architecture, but rather presents a slice in time that is part of an endless cycle of becoming, and as such an idea of infinite displacement.

1. Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole.” Rome, Italy, 1947−50.

1. Profiles of Text Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole,” 1947–50 One of the first critical articles to appear in English on Luigi Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” was written by Peter Reyner Banham in 1953. Banham’s article, published in the February issue of Architectural Review, labeled Casa “Il Girasole” the defining monument of “Roman eclecticism,” which was an eclecticism that Banham considered operated within the confines of the vestiges of modernism. If the label eclecticism has different connotations today, in 1953 it implied that Moretti’s work could be seen as a haphazard collection of classical tropes and architectural strategies lacking any single organizing principle other than having been assembled by Moretti in a single building. In this sense Banham’s argument was prophetic, though his use of the term eclecticism, it will be argued here, was flawed. It is interesting to note that as early as 1953, Banham proposed that modern architecture had already become a style, and thus he was able to cite Moretti as deviating from its formal and supposed social imperatives. Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” would subsequently earn an important citation in Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a citation that would become physically manifest in Venturi’s own Vanna Venturi House (see chapter 5). One important distinction between Banham’s conclusion and a possible present reading is that prior to 1968, and the rethinking of the idea of a text proposed by Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, it was not possible to propose a textual reading of what appeared to Banham to be mere eclecticism. Post-structuralism offered methods of analysis and composition as a new lens through which to understand complex phenomena; in certain cases, these phenomena defy a clear reading altogether, and instead represent a condition of what can be now called undecidability.

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Casa “Il Girasole”

2. Casa “Il Girasole,” south elevation.

3. Casa “Il Girasole,” north elevation.

In this context, Moretti becomes neither an eclectic nor a modernist; rather, his work defies any easy categorization, even as one of the first, if rarely acknowledged, postmodern architects. It is this condition of what can be termed undecidability that emerges in his Casa “Il Girasole” and will develop as one of the defining themes of this book. Completed in 1950, Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” incorporated the first appearances of historical allusion in the wake of modernist abstraction. This overture to history is not, however, why Casa “Il Girasole” is the first building in this book. Rather, it is because Casa “Il Girasole” represents one of the first postwar buildings to manifest a hybrid condition of both abstraction and literal figured representation. These simultaneous yet seemingly antithetical positions are never resolved as a single narrative, meaning, or image. Rather, it is the dialectical relationship between the two positions that is questioned in a postwar climate that challenged the innate value of such a dialectic. Furthermore, it could be argued that Casa “Il Girasole” represents one of the first buildings after World War II to embody the undecidable nature of truths in attempting the parallel use of both abstract and figured tropes. It is here that an idea of what might be considered a text in architecture might be introduced. While the abstract and the figured refer to what is usually

described as the formal, the distinctions between the formal and the textual in what follows will be seen to be important. The term formal describes conditions in architecture that can be read not necessarily in terms of meaning or aesthetics, but in terms of their own internal consistency. This internal coherence involves strategies that have nothing to do with the primary optical aspects of the aesthetic (proportion, shape, color, texture, materiality) but rather have to do with the internal structure governing their interrelation. Formal analysis looks at architecture outside of its necessarily historical, programmatic, and symbolic context. The term textual can be defined in relationship to one of post-structuralism’s key concepts in the Derridian idea of text. Derrida suggests that a text is not a single linear narrative, but a web or a tissue of traces. While a narrative is unitary, continuous, and directional, a text is multivalent, discontinuous, and nondirectional. In the context of this book, the idea of a text, like the idea of a diagram, helps to initiate a change from the idea of reading a work as a unitary entity to understanding a work as an undecidable result of varying forces. In my work on Giuseppe Terragni, for example, the idea of a text reoriented my analysis of Casa Giuliani-Frigerio from essentially formalist interpretations to a more textual reading.


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4. Casa “Il Girasole,” west elevation.

5. Casa “Il Girasole,” section, north-south.

Texts, therefore, do not deploy the same internal consistency as in the formal. In addition to provoking formal reading, buildings can equally be read as textual, offering different modes of reading, which may challenge established architectural vocabularies. For example, Alberti’s superposition of the Arch of Titus over the vernacular Greek temple-front at Sant’Andrea becomes textual, because this montage of architectural forms from different historical periods destabilizes a singular meaning. The textual provokes a reading outside of the facts of an object’s physical presence, or the underlying structures which govern its being; in the case of Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, the superposition of historical tropes creates this disturbance in presence that takes the building out of the category of the conventionally formal. If the formal begins from a conception of presence that is both a linear narrative and what can be called fixed or decidable, then the textual suspends the narrative of presence, in which a hierarchy is implicit, and offers instead undecidable relations rather than a single static condition. It is this undecidability of relations with both historical and modernist tropes that Moretti invokes to produce an initial critique of modernism. The abstract languages of cubism and futurism were subjected to a critique, which first took

form in Italy through neorealist cinema and its unvarnished view of Italy and the detritus of five years of war. Neorealist films like Open City and The Bicycle Thief were a form of empirical existentialism, in that they represented attempts to move the language of abstraction toward a language more closely associated with what could be considered “the real.” Moretti’s postwar work, which also proposed a didactic view of architecture that now critiqued abstraction, evolved out of such a neorealist sensibility. However, it is to Moretti’s credit that little of his first postwar work can be considered neorealist, just as it cannot be dismissed as eclectic. The subtlety of Moretti’s critique of modernist abstraction was articulated in his now much sought-after magazine Spazio (Space) in the early 1950s. Spazio followed in the tradition of architects’ little magazines, which began with Le Corbusier’s magazine L’Esprit Nouveau in 1920 and Mies van der Rohe’s magazine G, with Theo van Doesberg and El Lissitzky, in 1923. While Le Corbusier’s magazine referred to a new spirit, and the G of Mies’s magazine stood for Gegenstand (object) and effectively addressed ideas about objecthood, Moretti’s Spazio made an important distinction between the object thing and the object of containment as space or volume. An object can be seen and analyzed as

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6. Casa “Il Girasole,” ground-floor plan.

7. Casa “Il Girasole,” second-floor plan.

a geometric abstraction, but space is difficult to analyze as a physical entity because it is usually defined by other things. While space is a conceptual entity, its container is formal. Such a redefinition of the modeling of space was among the issues Moretti broached in Spazio. It was Moretti’s article “Valori della Modanatura,” (The Value of Modeling) in Spazio 6 (1952) that challenged the modernist conception of space. The article suggested that surface had the capacity to be modeled in such a way as to create a dialogue between volume and flatness, and therefore that the modeled surface could engage the affective potential of light and shadow. The article challenged the boxlike abstractions of modern architecture by raising the issue of profile, which is articulated through both hard edge and figured form. Profile is the edge of a figure—in other words, how a surface in architecture meets space:

the edge of a volume seen against the sky is a literal profile. This means that all architecture, because it is three-dimensional, will have some sort of profile. While in architecture a profile is the edge of a plane or the edge of a surface, it is also either the edge of the containing surface or the edge of the exterior space in relationship to the containing surface of the interior. In either case, profile tends to be the result of figured form, which in turn produces shadows. Moretti was not referring to a literal profile per se but to a conceptual profile, which was made thematic in the design. Moretti made profile thematic in his work by suggesting that profile becomes more than just the edge of a three-dimensional volume and instead serves to question the clarity of boundaries between edge and volume. In Moretti’s terms, profile is not a narrative device, revealing shape or figure, but rather can be disassociated from any shape or figure; this disassociation is not


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8. Casa “Il Girasole,” third-floor plan.

9. Casa “Il Girasole,” roof plan.

merely a line but can be, for example, the dark edge of cast shadows. By calling attention to profile in architecture, Moretti suggests its role as a marker of undecidable relationships and engages space as an object for close reading. As hierarchy and singularity of meaning are made problematic, the rhetoric becomes textual rather than formal. The idea of space as volume was illustrated in Spazio by Moretti’s series of cast models of historical buildings, churches, and villas. Moretti broke with the conventions of architectural models by representing a building’s interior space as a solid volume and dispensing entirely with its exterior enclosure, structure, facades, or any other indications of an exterior skin. These volumetric models seemed to deny a relationship to the exterior. Rather, they embodied space itself, conceptualizing space by turning void into solid. In the history of architecture, analysis usually begins from the geometric, and from elements that can be touched

and defined physically—linear elements such as structure and walls—and subsequently broaches the spatial, that which is contained within physical boundaries. The history of architecture has been largely defined by this progression from object or geometry to space. Moretti’s models inverted this convention by taking space, rather than its enclosing surface, as a starting point for analysis. On the one hand Moretti deals with the edge of the surface—its profile—and on the other he engages volume without surface in these model studies. Moretti’s notion of profile and space, as articulated in his volumetric models, raises formal and conceptual issues that refuse resolution as a single narrative or meaning. These models prefigure a radically new diagram of space that Moretti further developed in Casa “Il Girasole.” The first impression of Casa “Il Girasole” is a dynamic tension between volume and edge. The cut in the center of the front facade is the

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10. Casa “Il Girasole,” northwest corner.

first postwar use of the aedicular motif, whereby a spatial division occurs between two solids, which nevertheless remain related across its void. Moretti’s use of the aedicule comes out of an historical tradition, from the Palladian window to Carlo Rainaldi’s Santa Maria in Campitelli. Moretti’s facade cannot be considered a pastiche of history, however, because he uses historical motifs in a new way. The aedicule divides the planar surface of the facade of Casa “Il Girasole” into two volumetric pieces which, though paired, are not identical, nor do their edges align across the void. The physicality of the facade is equally ambiguous, in that it appears to be a cleft volume when viewed frontally, but when viewed obliquely, the facade becomes attenuated at the edges, resembling a screen. The tension between the facade seen as a screen and as a volume is further developed at the corners of the facade. If the corner was a

dominant motif of the neoclassical, and if the frontal picture plane was a dominant motif of the modern, then Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” uses elements of each while breaking with both traditions. The corners of Casa “Il Girasole” are sites of fracture: both the front and rear facades overhang the main mass of the building as thin screens, separated from the main volume of the building. The corner is also shadowed by an undecidability as an assembly of concrete solids and voids. This develops from the idea of profile that Moretti put forward in Spazio, yet the layered character of the facade creates a different understanding of profile. Casa “Il Girasole” is no longer a building where profile can be said to define a continuity, as would be the case in classical architecture where profile and shape were one and the same thing. One of the important theoretical propositions set into play at Casa “Il Girasole” is that the profile does not equate to the shape of the building.


Another theoretical proposition resides in the problematic of the corner: Casa “Il Girasole” does not present a clearly subjective view of the object, seen perspectively as Greek space, nor does it offer a frontal view as modern Roman space. It is something other, and makes an argument of its otherness, similar to the manner in which Adolf Loos disarticulated the exterior envelope from inner volumes. For Moretti, the play of solid, void, and edge are simultaneous conditions. Thus Casa “Il Girasole” is one of the first didactic examples of the idea of the profile as breaking up the regular outline of the modernist box: the modernist envelope is confronted by its opposite in the idea of contained volume. In modern architecture’s free plan, columns were usually the same size and shape as functional grounding elements. At Casa “Il Girasole,” the columns become figured, changing shape and size as they move through the building, signaling difference. The paired volumes and paired sets of columns speak to a formal order that is different from an abstract or neutral column grid. The pairing of the columns creates a play between symmetries in two different axes while at the same time disrupting an abstract nine-square grid and a plaid grid of servant and served spaces. In this, Moretti’s plan critiques the uniformity of space in the free plan. The importance of these two forms of notation lies in the breaking down of historical continuity, which for Moretti was the Renaissance villa, the baroque palazzo, and the nineteenth-century hôtel-de-ville. This is an evolution of the idea of the whole as a consistent relationship of parts, as would be the case with any idea of type to a condition no longer described by a dominant whole. The materiality of Casa “Il Girasole” lodges another critique of modernist abstraction. Material here is used rhetorically, but not in the tradition of formal rhetoric, as material in and of itself, nor for its purely phenomenological value, as in Peter

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11. Casa “Il Girasole,” front facade profile.

Zumthor’s use of stone or wood. Rather, material functions here as notation, articulating difference in a manner reminiscent of Loos’s turn-of-the-century Viennese interiors. Loos juxtaposed marbles, granites, woods, metals, and stuccos to articulate their iconic value as individual materials. Loos’s interiors are not about the richness of the materials but their juxtaposition. The lobby of Casa “Il Girasole” is a riot of materials—metal, stone, glass, wood—that obeys no structural or compositional logic. No dominant material system can be discerned, and there is no governing color palette. The use of material is both notational and didactic, to call attention to the possibility of material as text. Material elements refer back and forth to one another, yet they do not represent anything other than the mere fact of their existence. While this could be considered a form of neorealism in architecture, in their refusal to refer to any external systems

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12. Casa “Il Girasole,” base of west facade.

13. Casa “Il Girasole,” entrance.

of material meaning, the materials function textually. The stonework of the base takes on a notational quality in its use of false rustication, varied patterns, and sculptural motifs. In Casa “Il Girasole,” the “rusticated” base turns out to be a play on rustication. Rustication in a Florentine palazzo follows a logic of mass: heaviest at the base and increasingly thinner at upper levels. Countering this convention, the rustication at Casa “Il Girasole” harkens back to Giulio Romano’s sixteenth-century Palazzo del Te in Mantua, whose paper-thin rustication does not look like stone and whose keystones seem to drop out of their holding positions, questioning how the stone arch is structurally supported. The state of suspension between support and collapse, between heavy and paper-thin rustication, calls the materiality of stone into question. Moretti inverts the conventions of rustication by putting heavy stones on thin stones, incorporating stony blocks within window openings, or cutting rusticated stone in chevron

patterns that deny their structural logic. The sculpted remnant of a human leg is incorporated into a window jamb as if a relic from an early classical sculpture had found its way into the fabric of Casa “Il Girasole.” This historicizing motif triggers a thought about the past, but it is not aimed at a nostalgic or adulatory remembrance. Rather these sculptural elements are archaic and anarchic, as if the arbitrariness of everyday life, as portrayed in neorealist film, informs what Banham might consider the arbitrary, whimsical, and unsystematic use of materials. The sculptural leg has no meaning and could be considered purely arbitrary, but this is an order of arbitrariness divorced from an expression of will, historicism, and expressionism. Moretti’s calibrated arbitrariness calls attention to its own condition as arbitrary in an internal referencing that is textual rather than purely meaningful. Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” uses historical motifs to make a critical commentary on the formal coherence of architecture. Historicizing


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14. Casa “Il Girasole,” rusticated base of west facade.

references such as the aedicular motif of the facade and the rusticated textures of the base point toward postmodern practices, yet at Casa “Il Girasole” these belong to a wholly different order. Such conditions make Casa “Il Girasole” both formal and textual; certain formal coherences are emphasized and simultaneously displaced. In Casa “Il Girasole” Moretti does not thematize proportions, materials do not cohere into narrative, and the masses of the building remain a series of juxtaposed volumes and screens, if not random notations, which replace the formal conventions of the plan. Many of the possible readings are undercut by other readings, and therefore do not provide any synthesis. If the notion of a text posits the breakdown of a decidability leading to closure or synthesis, then the textual in architecture suggests a breakdown in the notion of the meaningful organization of a single narrative. Casa “Il Girasole” has many possible contingent readings as a textual work; it does not sustain a single, dominant view of architecture,

which may explain one reason why Moretti’s work has gone almost unnoticed in the intervening years. Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” rewrites the conditions that suggest architecture itself, and which this book argues, relate canonic buildings to close reading. While Moretti’s building transitions from the abstractions of modernism to a sensibility more closely related to neorealism, it proposes methods of close reading of a different kind, methods no longer tied to modernism’s formal lexicon but rather to an undecidability of the text. Casa “Il Girasole” is the first and perhaps the earliest exemplar of such a discourse.

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V i a S c h i a p a r e l l i

z i o z u B n o u r e B l i a V

15. Casa “Il Girasole” in Rome sits on a nearly rectangular block bounded by two major streets, Viale Bruno Buozzi to the south and Via Schiaparelli to the west. While the front facade is orthogonal to Viale Bruno Buozzi, the rear facade of the building is parallel to its street, thus deviating at a slight angle from the front facade. Other disruptions of symmetry that occur in the building include the central north-south axis, which is not a continuous axis and bends at the stairs.

16. The mass of the building is cut in two through most of its center, essentially creating a U-shaped building condition. The central void creates the initial appearance of an axial symmetry running through the building, but the implied symmetry is belied by the actual configuration of the side blocks, which are not parallel to each other. Rather, the volumetric sidepieces are splayed from the central axis of the building. In addition to marking this destabilized symmetry, the void registers as a vertical cut in the facade.


17. The massing of Casa “Il Girasole” alludes to certain classical ideas: its tripartite organization com prises a seemingly rusticated base; a middle portion that is accentuated in the facade as a glazed zone; and an upper zone that resembles a pediment crowning the upper portions of the building. The pediment is divided by a central cut that recalls a classical aedicule. The broken pediment is asymmetrical in that t he right piece rises slightly higher than its corresponding segment on the left.

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18. The vertical division in the facade, as well as the facade’s extension beyond the body of the building, produces a profile. The vertical cut creates the idea that the facade is volumetric, revealing the corner and inboard edge at its center. Yet at the outer edges of the facade, this presumed mass becomes an attenuated screen. On the upper three residential floors, the building’s two long sides are fractured by t hree minor cuts. The building thus presents a series of conditions which literally and conceptually cut into the modernist box.

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19. The analysis of the ground plan reveals that the front and rear facades extend beyond the building base. Both facades are screenlike, but the front facade resembles a screen cleaved in two, while the rear facade hangs off an intermediate boxlike volume. Immediately apparent in the ground-floor plan are the two curved walls, which disrupt the axis of symmetry and appear to displace the staircase.


20. In Casa “Il Girasole” profile no longer defines a continuity; this contrasts with classical architecture, where profile and shape were conceptualized as one and the same thing. Here profile and shape are dis juncted from one another; that is, the profile is not the shape of the building.


21. The facade of Casa “Il Girasole” breaks down the unity of the modernist frontal plane into a series of com pressed layers. The complex articulation of these layers is apparent at the corners, which are no longer legible as singular entities. An oblique view demonstrates that the facade is not just a thin plane but rather is composed of three layers: a screen as the outermost layer, a void slot between the screens, and a glazing layer.

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The void between the screen and the building mass articulates the edge of the facade as a distinct element, and creates what could be considered a gasket space especially apparent in the side views of the building. This layering, along with the deep cut in the front facade, further erodes the physical presence of these layers, since they fluctuate between two volumes and a series of layered planes.

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22. For analytical purposes, it is necessary to examine the columnar organization. Columns are numbered 1 to 4, from left to right, and A through K from front to back. Column line 1 initially appears reciprocal to column line 4, and column line 2 reciprocal to column line 3. This sets up an initial symmetry. However, column lines 3 and 4 relate to each other because they are skewed at the same angle from the orthogonal, while column lines 1 and 2 are related because they remain on the orthogonal. In column lines 2 and 3, the A column is a slab column. Columns 2B and 3B are also slab columns that on three sides still read much as columns. Columns 2C and 3C are different: 2C is a square column; 3C is a freestanding slab.


23. Other pairings involve columns in line 1 and line 4: columns 1A/1B and 4A/4B are thin rectangles. Columns 1C/1D and 4C/4D are square columns, which are slightly smaller in column line 4. In both cases they are attached in a way that makes them seem to bleed into an external wall poché. Column lines 1E/1F (4E/4F) and 1G/1H (4G/4H) consist of paired rectangles, which alternately extend out into wall poché or bend into a splayed exterior plane. Columns 2D and 3D, 2E-F and 3E-F, and 2G-H and 3G-H are each small square paired columns, except for the additional column beside 2D. In 2J and 3J there remains the slight trace of a column, provided by a slight articulation in what is otherwise a seemingly solid wall.


24. An organization of paired columns occurs from the front to the back. This begins with the freestanding columns 1A and 4A. Columns 3A and 3B begin as a pair with 2A and 2B as orthogonal and freestanding. There is no longer an orthogonal alignment between 2A and 3A. Rather, 3A is slipped toward the right while remaining the same distance from both exterior faces. Further pairings occur among square columns. In modern architecture’s free plan, columns were usually the same size and shape; they were ground elements. Here the columns have become figural, changing shape and size as they move through the building, signaling their internal differences.

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25. The paired columns can be read as reinforcing the rhythmic progressions from the wider column groupings in A and B at the front of the building to the more tightly paired groupings at the rear of the building. While this progression can be read in plan, it has little to do with the organization of the functional spaces. As evidenced in the ground-floor plan, column line 3 is where much of the wracking, splaying, and distorting is concentrated. This column line serves not so much as a reading datum as a receiving datum, not so much the static place where vectors originate as the dynamic place where vectors are recorded.

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26. Ground-floor vector analyses. An analysis of the interior volumes following the column subdivisions allows one to track several vectors. An erasing arc or force (A) seems to push against the mass defined by column lines 3 and 4 until only column 3C remains, but in a flattened and distorted state. This erasing arc (A) is joined by the partial S-curve of a second curved surface (B), which is also dislocated from its former linear position. This conjunction of forces creates a figure that seems to have been compressed to the rear and expanded outward to the center. The bulging part of the figure seems to affect the alignment of the main staircase with the central axis.


These forces suggest two different ideas of form: one as the product of a vector coming from the inside and causing a convex form; the other as produced by a vector originating outside of the space, which carves away the solid to create a convex form. Space is simultaneously positive and negative. The two curves play against one another, as the result of these forces. This is purposeful, typical of Moretti’s articulation of the active nature of space as carved away or compressed by a solid. The play between the carved out and pro jecting space can be seen as two opposing ideas embodied in the same form.


27. The organization of columns, alternately paired and single, creates an ABABA rhythm that suggests a compression at the back of the building and a sense of extension at the front. The columnar relationships are both partial orders and symmetries.

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The pairing of the columns also creates a play between two abstract nine-square grids and a plaid grid of servant and served spaces. Moretti’s idea was clearly a critique of the free plan, where space was uniform.

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a.

c.

b.

d.

28 a-d. Certain conditions on the south or front facade on Viale Bruno Buozzi complicate a more traditional reading. The facade (a) can be read as a classical, vertically tripartite, rusticated base, fenestrated body, and solid cornice. However, once this general type is accepted, deviations can be seen, for example, in the facade (b) in which the middle zone actually sits on steel columns rather than on the base. There is an articulated slot between the base and the main body. Moretti exposes the actual structural elements between the rustication and the underside of the floor (c).

Traditional rustication in a Florentine palazzo obeys a structural logic: heavy at the base, with increasingly refined rustication in the higher floors. Moretti con founds these conventions by placing heavy stones on thin stones, and by adopting a vertical chevron pattern for the implied rustication (d). This chevron pattern indicates that the rustication is not structural, but iconic. The stone base is rhetorical: it is not a Greek plinth, which implies a datum, nor is it in the modern idiom of piloti.


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a.

a.

b.

b.

29 a-b. The side elevation on Via Schiaparelli complicates the readings already established on the front elevation. First, the heavy rustication continues around the corner, again marking the line of the structural columns behind. The same paper-thin chevronlike stone pattern appears, echoing the patterning on the right front base element. Second, the columns are again revealed, this time in the horizontal slot that runs across the top of the facade. Moreover, the alignment of windows is partially determined by the implied line of columns running behind the screenlike plane of the facade.

30 a-b. The various types of rustication, both smooth and rough, at Casa “Il Girasole” deny a structural role for one that is notational. The diagonals of the chev ron-shaped rustication reappear in the geometry of several textured blocks (a). The windows in the back facade register the cut of the front facade, and seem to compress the space toward the center (b) .

186578445-Ten-Canonical-Buildings-Peter-Eisenman.pdf

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