Architecture Beyond Typology?

An assignment for an architectural theory seminar at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Dora Epstein, 2015

Reviewing Miguel Gomes’ widely acclaimed 2012 Portuguese film “Tabu”, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott laments, “[the film] views colonialism as an aesthetic opportunity rather than a political or moral problem”. Enumerating this, Scott pins his accusation upon Tabu’s character as “art rather than history”, for him a troublesome position where “artfulness seems like an alibi, an excuse for keeping the ugliness of history out of the picture.” This example precisely elucidates the problematic nature of aesthetic representation. As the discontent critic subsequently identifies several films, Philippe Falardeau’s “Congorama” and Claine Deni’s “White Material”, which in his mind more appropriately portray late European colonization in Africa, we witness the formulation of a method for gauging correctness in regards to the representational dimension of colonialism in cinema. At face value, the situation presents a conundrum of signification. How correctly is one to portray such an event? How does one differentiate between qualities which register appropriately and those which are incongruous in such a context?

For Scott, the rolling, dreamy shots of Tabu are “morally” inadequate in performing the horrors of colonialism they contain. The selfish love between two white Portuguese settlers, told entirely in black and white as if itself a bygone antiquity, does too little to atone for the reality that its scenography along the foothills of Africa is predicated on genocide, racism and empire. Though this particular example may first seem rather indifferent to the issues of contemporary architecture, further inspection reveals it to be quite appropriate at identifying the representational disconnect pervasive across the built environment. Architecture and Tabu stand before the same problem. In both we counter a question of appropriateness. What can and can’t, (or better yet: should and shouldn’t) be visually expressed about the dwindling European colonialism of the 1970s in a film represents a set of ethical statements about our relation to the subject tied deeply in both history and complacency just as much as the performance we expect of any built work in regards to its context, function and constituency.

In seeking justification, architecture long relied on typological relationships to ossify this expanse between constructed material and metaphysical intention. What we find in the adherence of the Neoclassical style to the Greek temple front in civic buildings demonstrates precisely this rigid compliance – architecture as an immediacy between a legible form and a programmatic concern, expressed through a recognizable signifier. As architectural writer Norman Crowe annotates, typology allows “architectural elements, organization and geometries, etc [to come] to the design process as preconceived entities”, providing us the framework for a vocabulary of architectural intentions. By result, these approaches culminate in “the acceptance of a knowledge of analogous solutions”, as Crowe puts it. Such consensuses around programmed architectural typologies allow us to briefly inspect Palais Garnier and say with little prior knowledge yet such exactitude “Opera!”, not “public latrine?” or “social housing development?”. In this way, the notion of architectural typology aligns with some resonance to Judith Butler’s analysis of gender’s performativity. Where Butler says “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a hugely rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 45), architecture might posit that “typology is the repeated stylization of a building, a set of repeated forms within a hugely rigid disciplinary frame that iterate over time to produce the appearance of an architecture, of an ideal building”. To this extent we might see Colin Rowe’s examinations on the decoupling of the physique-flesh and the morale-word as liberatory in their subversion of the ideological paradigm within Modern architecture (Rowe 83). While aspects of ideology do not necessarily hinge in totality on typology, Rowe’s criticality of the functionalist preoccupations during the period illuminate a kind of performative expectation on architecture much akin to the overlay of gender on the body (Rowe 74). Consequently, the encounter between architecture and the spectator in the contemporary period is one which lacks entirely the predisposed typological signifiers of previous epochs. This seizure of meaning from form has obviously served the emergence of an abundance of architectural expressions in what we might term a “queering” of the previously binary logic between certain forms and their typological identification.

Thus architecture has approached a complete divorce between form and content, a broken intersection at which arrives a vast array of postmodern mishmashes. The proliferation of the pitched roof cottage exemplifies this matter, a deranged geometric primitive which has come to adorn in one way or another everything from the massing of Estudio Barozzi Veiga’s Szczecin Philharmonic Hall to the façade tectonic of the tower on Herzog and De Meuron’s De Young Museum. While such examples flaunt themselves rather harmlessly, more contentious ambiguities arise in such works as Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Here, architecture confronts a question of the appropriate agency between a work and its constituency. Is architecture inherently obligated to the representational dimension of a memorial? Naturally, a great freedom has been found in the cacophony that is contemporary style after the dissolution of typology indicated by Rowe. It remains nevertheless salient that the consensus around recognizable architectural forms provides a twofold performativity between the building itself and its users. Typology supplants not only a set of rules for crafting a building but a series of social suggestions that orchestrate appropriate interactions with a space.

Having deliberately skirted the issue of outright representation towards the Holocaust, the Eisenmanian sea of muted black stela finds the ultimate proof that it has indeed expunged signification in the questionable interactions it evokes. From fashion shoots to skateboarding to gay men cruising online with photos taken at the memorial (https://grindr-remembers.blogspot.com/), one cannot help but to be confounded at the deep erasure of content in the project. Starkly in juxtaposition to the loaded content-packing of the adjacent Reichstag, left bare with vengeful Russian graffiti, bullet holes and blackened scorches from the final hours of the Battle of Berlin, the expanse of stone blocks begs us to ask the question “what now?”. If Gomes’ fault in Tabu is one of artful over-glossing, Eisenman’s might be dubbed something like a negligent austerity.

Yet herein resides a central conflict of architecture. To overbear the representational logic of building performance constrains both designer and patron. As we expect greater compliance from an architecture, we also dictate to a wider degree the corporeal authority within a space over the bodies which inhabit it. In other words, our insistence that any building speak only to its intended role precludes a myriad of human interactions by virtue of the space’s authority to program those conducts which occur within and thus exclude as social deviance other interactions not considered appropriate. Rather than strictly rejecting either end of the dichotomy, a vast and fertile ground can be found between the two which feeds a dual potential of supposing both novel forms and non-oppressive interactions. Leaving both typology and form at once recognizable and malleable allows for the productively uncomfortable fit between a body, both human and architectural, and its space. While clearly designated as a park, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s and Field Operation’s Highline allows, though choreographed urban arrangements and typologically ambiguous formworks, a set of interactions not otherwise expected of such a setting. Those visiting the space feel compelled to take part in a myriad of behaviors ranging from benign idleness atop of the bustling grid of Manhattan to socially deviant voyeurism before the notorious windows of the W Hotel. Such is the formulation of a space that embraces the typological constraints of its program while presenting a series of abstractions from it that lessen the will towards performative conformation.

This subtle transfusion of both a space’s capacity to perform a role and the possibility for outside influence encapsulates an architecture that resists the oppressive nature of typology but avoids the disarray of form sans meaning. Where an architecture’s agency remains ambiguous yet somewhat legible, a unique possibility emerges that those encountering the space become aware of the game with which they take part. Thus is achieved the emancipation not only of the human participant from strictly fulfilling the intended role of a space but of the architecture from authoritatively defining the totality of its presence.