Images and perspectives

Representational vs. ontological:

On a dilemma with no solution

Professor John E. Hancock, from the University of Cincinnati, OH, was my advisor in the MSArch program I completed in 1993-94. This time (2012), he took me as a partner in the 5th year design workshop (terminal year in the MA in Architecture: degrees that is). I have been left with several interesting ideas from my teacher over the eighteen years we have known and collaborated. But this time, I was shocked by his refusal to even look at the students:

- The pupils lie. You need them in technical projects, of course, but they're troublesome in the design process. Help yourself, when designing the space and the object that contains and articulates it, with working models, sections, virtual perspectives and, if possible, even animation. But not elevations!

In order to explain Professor Hancock's clear refusal to even look at the elevations brought about by his diplomats, we need to go back a little and look carefully at the consequences of a concept that comes to us from philosophy but has also made a career in the arts, especially in architecture: the concept of representation, which is secondary to the even more important concept of presence.

I remembered that we only learned in school about the decomposition of the three-dimensional box, as Bruno Zevi called this projection process (but I only found out about the name when I published the translation of the book in the collection Spații Imaginate, published by Paideia). In other words, we were taught not to think of objects and spaces in their concatenation, but to draw elegant representations of them on the walls of imaginary orthogonal projection planes.What we were presenting to the proofreader, what we were projecting, were representations, not a hypothetical presence, virtual for the moment, of an architectural object. We talked about the elegance of the composition of orthogonal plans and facades, confident that if they were perfect, how else could the object be the representations of which they were? At the same time, however, we looked puzzled at the plans of some masterpieces, which were not only balanced and well-composed plans; or how was it possible, we wondered - not all of us - that a masterpiece could not have projections, perfect representations? In the workshop, Alvar Aalto would have failed the project with some of the plans of his buildings.

From the deconstructed buildings onwards, from the Hong Kong Peak Competition winning project (Zaha Hadid) to Peter Eisenman's numbered houses, there was, however, nothing to understand for our poor teachers, not even for the students that we were. We still found some comfort in the classicizing plans of postmodernist buildings, whose symmetry we understood; but whose superior irony, based on cultural references, escaped us, although we knew from our aesthetics teacher, Cezar Radu, about the work of the"quote with aesthetic function", since he was the Romanian translator of Umberto Eco's Treatise on Semiotics.

As for the regulatory paths of Professor A.Gheorghiu, whom I did not catch in life as a student, I have always suspected them of idealism and some exaggeration: the same Eco tells, through the mouth of a character in Foucault's Pendulum, how an exceptional Egyptologist, Piazzy Smith, was caught grinding the corner of a pyramid stone, in order to fit the measurements into such and such a flattering proportion...But we need not have gone that far, the questions were floating in the air, and in our own: 'Did Constantin Brâncoveanu's craftsmen know the secrets of the pyramids?" asked Radu Dragan in the magazine Arhitectura. I knew them from the history of architecture and from the volutes of the Nike Apteros temple, which I designed in my first year, as a multiplication of a module with a reference to a man-man. I knew, from Vitruvius, that I could represent the whole temple (this - pars pro toto - was an image of the world) if I could "extract the symmetries" of the human body (as the Romanian translation, still unfortunately unrivaled, by Cantacuzino and Gr. Ionescu, beautifully put it). But I also knew that Richard Meier's projects, which I saw at the American Library, were born from these geometrical relations, because we were keen to understand how a project was put together and the teachers I had in the workshop could not articulate a coherent explanation, or did not feel like it.

The following question also derives from our school experience: is the representation of the mentally imagined architectural object an exclusive function of drawing, in whatever variant we imagine it, from the technical to the artistic, and from the rendering of the depth of field through the various modes of perspective constructed at one or more vanishing points to the sensitive artistic rendering (for we will talk about the computer in a moment)? It would seem so, if we are to decline those that various successive curricula put before us.

Has object generation become non-representable?

In fact, our discussion is a twofold one; a) what role do imaginary representations play in the process of morphogenesis? And b) what role do the same images play in the representation of the constituted, finite object? Now, I am already knocking on open doors when I say that, for more than thirty years, the monopoly of the drawing in architectural design and representation has been, and still is, seriously questioned. In terms of generation, this monopoly is overwhelmed by alternative processes. In the bibliography, I refer to a number of titles that deal with the question of design from different - I almost had to write perspectives - points of view. Some start from the cognitive sciences, others from cybernetics, others from semiotics, naratology and other, post-structuralist, methods of relating to text and discourse. The most valuable contribution seems to me to be that of James Eckler. After reading the book, I learned that he taught for a while at the workshop at DAAP, "my" college at the University of Cincinnati, OH. His thesis is that one can produce a list of terms, of words simply (but in the hypostasis of concepts), which, uttered in architectural language, have an extraordinary power of aggregation, of formal suggestion, of constitutive persuasion. All the techniques of literary theory are at hand, invoked for this process of morphogenetic translation. In themselves, these words do not necessarily come with an agenda of forms of their own. Form is added in the process. But how else could Luis Kahn project, when his "Language of God" (Burton, 1986, 69) is nothing but a mystical litany, spoken or written, accompanied by inspired gesticulation or mysterious ideograms?

Even more radically different from the conceptual drawings, the idea sketches of someone like Kisho Kurokawa or Alvaro Siza (two of whom I could see drawing, re-presenting, such generative diagrams in Bucharest), is the process of design with generative algorithms, from parametricism (P. Schumacher). In the process, the future final object is unrepresentable, it is, in other words, un-convocable in presence. This is for two reasons: 1) the process itself - NON-REPREDICTABLE, i.e. non-imaginable, other than in the mathematical language of initial data and iteration rules - is assigned to the computer and is stopped from iteration only by specific performance criteria and 2) more briefly, in such a way of designing there IS NO FINAL OBJECT predictable, imaginable, therefore representable prior to the process running in the first round of iterations.

A second level of the non-representability discourse, which is even more radical, is that which opposes the ontological character of the architectural object (see Kenneth Frampton's preface to his book Studies in Tectonic Culture) to its representational character, through the very design itself. In a more radical stance, design itself (etymologically, throwing forward, temporally speaking, anticipation) should be suspended, architecture then becoming direct, unmediated, bodily engagement with matter. It is a radical-conservative position, which privileges the role of the (arche)typical vernacular, of patterns(Houses generated by Patterns, A Pattern Language by Cristopher Alexander), of types(Architettura della Cittá, by Aldo Rossi) verified in time, of the pre-knowledge of the artisan maker(arche-tektonul) - through techné - to adapt (from always-already, as the Heideggerian saying goes) to any site, material, program conditions. Do you think that Horea, the church builder, was designing in the contemporary, anticipatory sense of the term? No. Most likely, the discussion with a client was in the sense of a definition, based on precedents (proximate genus) and local requirements (specific difference). We know that even today there are still architects who favor such a position of direct connection to the place, to the given circumstances (materials and spaces at hand, even recycled, converted). Cristopher Alexander is just an old example, but we also have www.architectureforhumanities.org (Cameron Sinclair), where sometimes the suspension of design is decided by the urgency of drama and intervention. In other words, architecture is born from unfathomable (or fathomable, but prior to any attempt to (re)present it) beginnings, historical (see the architectural treatises from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier), psychological (the collective unconscious, Jungian) or sociological (tradition) and, in its primordiality, neither needs to be represented nor, in any case, allows itself to be explained; in this primal and vestigial character lies its essence, unconvocable in any other way than through the immediate bodily experience of the space, after the making.

Neither drawing, nor text, nor photography can, therefore, fully capture the essence of building and architectural space without rest; indeed, now and probably for some time to come, this is no longer objectively possible, with the shift from object design to process design.

Bibliography and suggestions for further reading

Alexander, Christopher

HOUSES GENERATED BY PATTERNS (with Sanford Hirshen, Sara Ishikawa, Christie Coffin and Shlomo Angel), Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California, 1969.

A PATTERN LANGUAGE WHICH GENERATES MULTI-SERVICE CENTERS (with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein), Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California, 1968.

Burton, James "Notes from Volume Zero: Luis Kahn and the Language of God" in Perspecta I, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp.69-90

Markus, Thomas A and Cameron, Deborah

The words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language, London/NY: Routledge, 2002

Eckler, James Language of Space and Form: Generative terms for architecture, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2012,

Kausel, Lewis C. Design&Intuition: Structures, interiors&the mind, Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst, Southhampton, UK: WIT Press, 2012

Ockman, Joan (Ed.) The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about "things in the making", NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000

Markus, Thomas A and Cameron, Deborah

The words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language, London/NY: Routledge, 2002

Mateo, Josep Lluis et alii

Iconoclasm: News from a post-iconic world, Architectural Press IV Series, Barcelona: ACTAR, 2009

Pressman, Andrew Desiging Architecture: The elements of process, London, NY: Routledge, 2012

Temple, Nicholas, and Bandyopadhyay, Soumyen (Eds)

Thinking Practice: Reflections on architectural research and building work, Black Dog Publishing, 2008