NEO-NEO-MODERNISM
"Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change."(1) --Bertolt Brecht
WHAT IS IT that makes modernists, neo-modernists, and post-modernists clamor to dispel the metaphysical chains (claims) that bind architecture while unwittingly endorsing the very premises of the age-old metaphysical project?
Take for example the modernist claim that architecture is not an art, a fine art, or an applied art. Against all claims to the contrary, architecture is -- to such pragmatists -- the art of construction and/or language games. This has been the argument since the first stirrings of the modernist project in architecture and this argument underwrites all of the materialist, structuralist, and nihilist operations of the last century. In the case of constructivism and functionalism this claim was the high-water mark of the deluge initiated in post-World War I Europe and transferred to America by architectural refugees in the run-up to World War II.
Odd, that the extreme positions of purism, constructivism, and functionalism found solace in quoting American vernacular and industrial architecture -- and, oh yes, steam ships, airplanes, and locomotives. The machine-age romanticism that runs throughout modern architecture is yet another sign of its specific time frame -- despite all attempts to define it as universal or timeless.Indeed, this feigned timelessness still underwrites authorized readings of modern architecture. The so-called "pure classicism" of high modernist architecture is an always-already useless gesture resorted to by the apologists for the rest of modern architecture.
The anti-metaphysical bite of this circular logic is undermined when one takes into account ideology. Architecture has always been a form of built ideology, whether of Empire imperialism or machine-age empiricism. Curious that Karel Teige, bęte noire of late-1920s early functionalism, found some periods of Empire architecture edifying. These examples, in Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, seem (to Teige) to foreshadow the pure plasticity of purism and the inspired-elementalism of constructivism.(2) The buildings he valorizes are chosen expressly because they are not neo-classical and not apparently ideological. This is, of course, a selective reading (as all readings, such as Giedion's) and Teige was appropriating these "non-ideological" buildings from the 19th century for purely ideological reasons. Sic transit all appropriations.
Metaphysics, since god knows when, has utilized an architectonic structure. Kant is the best example. His trio of critiques is built on a superstructure of metaphors and inferences that are structural. Such is the "art of memory". Nietzsche's acts of demolition were the inverse of this -- he was the wrecking ball of metaphysical pretensions. Wittgenstein simply rounded up the minimalist program for this project and issued the brilliant Tractatus as a summary. In the Tractatus we have the Russellian project as apotheosis -- the end of metaphysics and the substitution of logical, structural, and materialist figures for ideology and metaphor.To denounce metaphysics requires inquiring into "which" metaphysics. A once-and-for-all bracketing of abstract (a priori) signifiers is essentially a pipe dream. Phenomenology almost always circles back to the dyadic conundrum of absence and presence -- the metaphysical Je ne sais quoi itself. That which can be excised (exorcised) is simply the historical detritus of signifying systems. The precise determination of metaphysical coordinates lies outside structuralist operations. Bourdieu's extraordinary analyses stopped short of analyzing structure itself. Braudel and colleagues simply sailed into the vast sea of archival documentation and economic data (re Baxandall's quixotic and exotic "dancing merchant savants"). Hence, too, Tafuri's lack of interest in Annales-style research.
Architecture cannot escape its putative Being-for-the-World characteristics. This is not to say, however, that architecture is without a transcendental aspect (and by "transcendental" is meant the Kantian "transcendental", or the Emersonian, versus anything religious and/or eschatological/teleological). The magic epicycles of architectural formalism -- the on-again-off-again tinkering with the structural dynamics of expressive systems -- are a type of proof that even in the most inward manifestations of architectural science and the art of memory the impress of synchronic, signifying chains may be found.
The peculiar situation of modern-day (present-day) architecture is that it has come full circle to face Itself. Architecture Itself is the architecture of immanence. The architecture of immanence is the architecture of things plus that which the thing contains, and that in which the thing swims (its milieu). Within the thing itself is the entire apparatus suppressed by useless attempts to transfigure, denature, and/or limit architecture. There is a long tradition of imposing limits (mostly as a rhetorical operation aimed at objectifying a discipline). Architects, today, stand at the edge of an abyss -- staring straight into the depths. In those depths are all the suppressed, repressed, excised, exorcised, torn, ripped, denatured, discarded forms and figures removed from the practice of architecture over millennia.Chief among these lost figures is the idea of the idea. Chief among the insidious reductions of modern aesthetics to pragmatics is the dishonorable idea that architectonics is nothing more than construction. Architectonics is the articulation of formal ideas through structural (synthetic) innovation. Here is the abject (empty) signifier of neo-functionalism -- indeed of all isms. The noble destruction of pseudo-historicism notwithstanding, the graveyard in which modernism and neo-modernism operate is spectral, haunted territory. Neo-modernism is not precisely the reification of functionalism, but it still retains the signature/mark (the surgical/operational scars) of the brush with nothingness within its conceptual apparatus that distinguishes all forms of mere empiricism.
The possible return of all of the above repressed signifying subjects through an architecture of immanence is quite simply the rewriting of the language of architecture. The next wave, wherever it may arise, will address this absence through a synthetical realization of the inwardness and waywardness of things, and through a dynamic and utterly electrifying rapprochement with both milieu(x) and anti-milieu(x) (landscape + architecture + +).As I have stated elsewhere, "As long as the object of architecture is the architectural object, I object."
Dr. Prof. Ing. I. M. Avenarius (July 2002)
ENDNOTES
"There exist mute edifices -- constructions and lodgings; and there exist edifices that speak; but there are others still -- and they are the most rare -- which sing." --Massimo Cacciari, "Eupalinos or Architecture" (1980)
1 - Bertolt Brecht, "Against Georg Lukács", trans. Stuart Hood, New Left Review 84 (March-April, 1974), p. 51
2 - Karel Teige, "The End of the Century", trans. Irena Zantovska Murray and David Britt, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), pp. 60-62
HARVESTING THE 20TH CENTURYPOSTSCRYPT(S)
O AUTONOMY !!! - "As it is, art is always already there, addressing the thinker with the silent and scintillating question of its own identity. However, through constant invention -- its metamorphosis -- art dismisses whatever the philosopher has to say concerning its own self." --Alain Badiou, "Art and Philosophy", Lacanian Ink 17 (2000)
O PURISME !!! - "Whether it be through such an enlightened fundamentalism [of the Tendenza] or the fundamentalism of a Richard Meier, repeating over and over the linguistic tropes of twenties purism, those responses, for all their good intentions, amount to nothing more than historicism." --Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
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For the mostly pathological, half-hearted gestures of neo-modernist architectures (in Berlin, in the 1990s), see Raoul Eshelman, Performatism in Architecture: On Framing and the Spatial Realization of Ostensivity, Anthropoetics 7, No. 2 (Fall 2001 / Winter 2002)
For the first gestures toward renascent immodern architectures, or architectures that appear to be swimming upstream toward the headwaters of architectural production (apropos of Massimo Cacciari’s remarkable remarks circa 2002, regarding the need for new heresies, new insurrections, etcetera), see the following:
Eisenman Juggernaut (HTML) /
Arakawa and Gins (HTML / RTF) /
The Given, The Taken, and The Given-Back (RTF) /
L+A (+ This + That) = ???? (HTML) / Thought Itself (RTF)For printable essays on This + That, see PDFs / RTFs
