wileypeter | Architecture theory ramblings

Think of this as a beginning of a rough draft for an idea toward which I'm grasping

So a good deal of the dissonance in architectural theory in the 20th century was the conflict of Modernism and Postmodernism. At least this is the way it is often seen and addressed. Like many theoretical debates outside the scientific sphere, the whole thing is an oversimplification of muddy, complex issues, but for my purposes this will retain the traditional framing.

The two biggest problems Postmodernism had in championing its ideals were its lead designers and its lead communicators (often the same people). The most prominent buildings, things like Graves' Portland Building, Bofill's Spaces Of Abraxas (so brutally inhuman that major parts of Brazil were filmed there), Moore's Piazza d'Italia and Venturi's Guild House are simultaneously some of the major statements of Postmodernism and most convincing arguments against it. It also doesn't help that two of the most prominent writer/proponents of Postmodernism, Also Rossi and Robert Venturi, are at best mediocre writers whose work tends to take their premises, write them large, and show them as architecturally weak. Modernism, on the other hand, has produced bona fide architectural masterpieces, and the few buildings from Postmodernism that can compete, e.g. Sea Ranch and the Vanna Venturi house, are really more a soft, contextual Modernism.

Where the Postmodernists were/are strong is in the larger compositional communication among buildings, i.e. the City. (For the record, though Aldo Rossi wrote the then-acclaimed book The City I do not include him in this. Rossi's writing is some of the worst pseudo-academic claptrap ever foisted on a field. He contradicts his sources, he contradicts his precedents, he contradicts himself. The book amounts to a badly annotated bibliography of better works.) Learning From Las Vegas is a strong book because of Denise Scott Brown's urbanism (and despite Robert Venturi). Modernist urban planning, on the other hand, is weak. Concepts that work in the isolated and specific world of a building break down in the larger, messier fabric of the city.

So I guess what I'm saying is that Modernism vs. Postmodernism isn't so much a matter of right and wrong as it is one of scale. An oversimplified analogy might be quantum vs. Newtonian physics, in that the phenomena described by each exist at different scales, and to apply one to the other's scale seems to net either no result or bad results.

Anyway, further exploring the idea would require reading more theory than I could handle right now, but I wanted to get the basics down here.

As a bonus, here's a dissection of a chunk of a Rossi text. It's aimed at an audience that has read the work, and may well put you off reading any Rossi if you haven't already.

Aldo Rossi: The Structure of Urban Artifacts (A Chapter from "The City")

Ostensibly this chapter is supposed to be about the structure of urban artifacts, meaning not merely the buildings that are in a city but the ones that make a city what it is. Rossi refers to them as “characterized by their own history, and thus by their own form,” making a somewhat tenuous connection utterly without reference or support. This will be a pattern throughout the chapter. In discussing a Palazzo in Padua, Rossi is “particularly struck” by the discontinuity between the original form of the building and the many functions it currently holds. His surprise implies a larger theoretical idea waiting in the wings, and fails to ask if this wondrous discontinuity is a product of long-term adaptability, of good design, of some unknown metaphysical quality or of the fact that it’s so expensive to build a big building that it’s almost a foregone conclusion society will shoehorn something into existing useable spaces.

The vagueness of Rossi’s writing (and one must therefore conclude theoretical thought) is maddening. He says some qualities and functions remain and some are altered, and that some “stylistic aspects” of the artifact are obvious and some less so, never giving any examples of these qualities or why these constants and alterations have meaning. He then speaks of the “values” that remain, calling out the specifically spiritual, and asks if these are the only “empirical” facts pertaining to the issue. Given that the spiritual is implicitly non-empirical, one has to wonder if Rossi has even the slightest idea what he’s writing about. He then uses the hoary rhetorical trick of short-circuiting criticism of his work with a quick dismissal of “modern sensibility” in favor of some yet-again vague, ancient, profound analysis, failing to respect the reader by giving but the slightest concrete reference to either the modern or ancient ⁽¹⁾.

He then moves on to urban artifacts as works of art. Rossi begins by citing Lewis Mumford (rendering Mumford’s lyrical words on the city’s artistic nature as a complex product of intent and situation simultaneously vapid and prosaic), and by mentioning the importance of urban geography, urban topography and other similar disciplines and their importance in defining anything about the city and urban artifacts. He then takes a sharp turn into fuzzy-land. Without ever defining what he means by the word “art,” Rossi begins comparing art and the collective urban artifacts as both being born of unconscious impulse, art from that of an individual artist and the city from the collective unconscious impulse of the citizenry. Setting aside the vast difference between the unconscious and the subconscious, it’s tempting to rebut this argument by looking at the actual development of, say, Paris as an expression of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s conscious impulse being forced on the collective citizenry⁽²⁾, but again, Rossi doesn’t really give us a concrete enough conception with which to agree or disagree. Debate would be akin to wrestling fog.

He does cite other authors, and when he can be bothered to quote their work his work snaps into tighter focus. When Carlo Cattaneo is quoted as calling the built environment “our artificial homeland,” one begins to see what Rossi is groping toward. Rossi says that these constructed objects “testify to values,” which on its face may be true, but to what values, and are those values those of the society of the time, or a reflection of the wants, needs and prejudices of an individual⁽³⁾? Again, the self-evident is used to propose the unsupported.

Eventually he gets around to trying to tie the “artistic quality” of the city to small moments, to plazas, streets and monuments, which create the whole, which is imperceptible to a person experiencing the city (again, an emphasis on the empirical). This of course leads us to the importance of the urban artifact in defining what a city is in the mind of the user. Still, nowhere do we really have much of a solid connection made between the idea of art and of the urban artifact. From here he transitions to a discussion of typology, using a quote from Durand as a suitable segue. And again, we’re in trouble early on as Rossi speaks of the “true means of transforming nature,” creating an implied false, less valid means of doing so, somehow setting his as-yet-to-be-clearly-enumerated theory above some unnamed architectural bogeyman. Again, a cheap rhetorical trick.

However, here we at least have a declarative statement: “I would define the concept of type as something that is permanent and complex, a logical principle that is prior to form and that constitutes it.” Type here is not a form but an idea. It “plays its own role,” a role that is, again, clouded in Rossi’s nonsensical prose. It isn’t formal. It’s a constant, predetermined thing, but it’s fluid. It’s a cultural element that occurs in “different architectural artifacts.” It is ascribed a primordial origin. It cannot be further reduced, yet there are a great many variations.

Rossi explicitly denies function as a factor in the structure and formation of urban artifacts. He also rejects the idea of cause and effect⁽⁴⁾. Functionalism, he says, robs architecture of “autonomous value” and stymies examination of the still-ambiguous, still-unexplained “intentionality and necessity that characterize urban artifacts and establish their complex ties.” This time instead of a thesis without an antithesis we have antithesis without thesis, but the mess is the same. He oversimplifies functionalist rhetoric as viewing all function as being equal, then disingenuously refers to functionalism as “naïve,” and not corresponding to Rossi’s “reality.” In his straw man functionalism there is no reason for monuments and architecture to exist. Were this the product of rigorous analysis one might be tempted to agree. Given the amazingly weak rhetorical basis for the assertion, though, it is difficult to imagine any veracity in Rossi’s arguments.

Rossi then draws on three theorists, cherry-picking from their work as he sees fit. He says in essence, “I like Tricart’s idea of breaking the city into three scales. However, I don’t like that he broke the city into three scales,” bothered that the urban artifact might change qualities as the scale of consideration changes. Of course, anyone who has ever seen the Sears tower from miles away and then stood at the foot of the building would agree, the building’s qualities certainly remain the same considered at these two scales.

Having rejected function, he proceeds to categorize housing by economic function. He dodges his rhetorical lie by referring to the categories as “social content.” He states that “in the urban composition, everything must express as faithfully as possible the particular life of the collective organism.” In no city I’ve seen is this more than marginally true, but I will admit I’ve seen fewer cities than Rossi likely did. Eventually Rossi, through Enlightenment-era theory, gets to the idea of the interconnected system of The City and The Building. He still tries to dodge around function, dismissing Milizia’s use of function to categorize types by playing semantic games and substituting the word “purpose.”

Rossi runs through the theorists again, summarizing what he’s drawn from them. Particularly interesting was this passage, “since every function can be articulated as a form, and forms in turn contain the potential to exist as urban artifacts,” at which point logic dictates the formal articulation of form can be articulated as an urban artifact. No, Rossi instead concludes, “one can say that forms tend to allow themselves to be articulated as urban artifacts.” He then derides the idea of the city as analogous to a biological entity by saying it was inapplicable, suitable only for journalists and the profession, and goes on to complain of the imprecision of the “organic” and “rational” movements’ language. Sadly, he doesn’t seem to see the irony.

In the end he essentially concludes by saying urban artifacts are complex, and that the city must be considered as a whole, and from many different angles. We have wandered through a thick bramble of obfuscation and arrived at our starting point, with little to show for it but the reiteration that we have far to go, and the realization that our tour guide hasn’t any more clue than do we how to get there.

It is tempting to blame this article on a bad translation or edit, given the fact that the writer was later rewarded with the Pritzker Prize. This is unlikely to be the case, as the translator, Diane Ghirardo, is a more eloquent and understandable author than Rossi’s text would indicate, and that Rossi and Peter Eisenman revised the text for the American version themselves, aiming for “clarity and simplicity.” The tenor and value of Rossi’s work is neatly encapsulated by the way he cites the work of Kevin Lynch. He mentions Lynch’s work in the understanding of how people conceptualize and understand space, but his own work lacks the clarity and rigor of Lynch, reducing the citation to mere name-dropping, largely devoid of any greater theoretical import. The passages quoted and authors cited, while disparate, are an interesting bunch. It would have been interesting if Rossi had done something with more depth and clarity with such raw material.

⁽¹⁾ Interestingly, the one concrete “modern” thing he calls out is psychology, itself largely based on the philosophical writings of ancients. In this case the works of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato had massive influence on the theories of Freud. This would seem a lapse in reasoning, if not education.

⁽²⁾ Or, alternately, how the very Italian idea of the contado, a region subjugated to the will of the city and feeding it just as the lower classes in the city were in essence subjugated by and fed the wealthy families like the Medicis, is at odds with this conception of the city.

⁽³⁾ For example, the Postal Bank by Otto Wagner was at the time an open expression of the anti-Semitism of his client. It doesn’t read that way now at all.

⁽⁴⁾ On a personal note, if I hear one more theorist spout this Jungian claptrap I may be forced to cram a copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractacus down some throats.