summarize

Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form Author(s): K. Michael Hays Source: Perspecta, Vol. 21 (1984), pp. 15-29 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567078 Accessed: 14/01/2009 13:55

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K. Michael Hays

Critical Architecture

Between Culture and Form

That architecture, as activity and knowledge, is fundamentally a cultural enterprise may hardly seem a contentious proposition. And yet questions concerning the precise nature of the reciprocal influences between culture and architectural form bring opposing theories of architecture and its interpretation into forceful play.'

In this essay I shall examine a critical architecture, one resistant to the self- confirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture and yet irreducible to a purely formal structure disengaged from the contingencies of place and time. A reinterpretation of a few

projects by Mies van der Rohe will

provide examples of a critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an abstract formal system. The proposition of a critical realm between culture and form is not so much an extension of received views of interpretation as it is a challenge to those views that claim to exhaust architectural meaning in considerations of only one side or the other. It will be helpful, therefore, to begin with a brief review of two prevalent interpretive perspectives that make just such a claim.

Mies van der Rohe

Friedrichstrasse

project

charcoal drawing

O191

15

Architecture as an Architecture as

instrument of culture autonomous form

The first position emphasizes culture as the cause and content of built form; the task of the interpreter, then, becomes the study of objects and environments as signs, symptoms, and instruments of cultural values. On this view architecture is essentially an epiphenomenon, dependent on socioeconomic, political, and

technological processes for its various states and transformations. Moreover, as a functional support for human institutions and as a reification of a collective volition, architecture ennobles the culture that produces it; architecture reconfirms the hegemony of culture and

helps to assure its continuity. Accordingly, the optimum relationship to be established between culture and form is one of correspondence, the latter

efficiently representing the values of the former.

The temporal convention of interpretation is, on this view, retrospective. Architecture is seen as already completed; the critic or historian attempts to restore an architectural object to its original meaning. Misunderstanding is presumed to arise naturally because of the changes in architecture, language, and world view that have taken place in the time

separating the architectural object from the interpreter; the meaning must therefore be recovered by a disciplined reconstruction of the cultural situation in which the object originated. Starting from the documents, recorded actions, and artifacts which are the base material of the historical world, understanding is seen as essentially a self-transposition or imaginative projection backward in time. When this historical method is of sufficient fidelity, an <objective and true? explanation of the object in

question results. It is supposed that the only alternative to the strict methodological recovery of the cultural situation at the time of the object's origin is the denial of any historical objectivity and capitulation to the idea that all schemes of interpretation are hopelessly subjective.2

The opposite position begins with the assumption that the only alternative to a strict, factual recovery of the originating situation is the renunciation of a single

<<truth,> and advocates a proliferation of interpretations based solely on form. Interpretations made from this second position are characterized by the comparative absence of historical concerns in favor of attention to the autonomous architectural object and its formal operations-how its parts have been put together, how it is a wholly integrated and equilibrated system that can be understood without external references, and as important, how it

may be reused, how its constituent parts and processes may be recombined.

The temporal convention of interpretation here is that of an ideal moment in a purely conceptual space; architectural operations are imagined to be spontaneous, internalized-that is, outside circumstantial reality-and assimilable as pure idea. Architectural form is understood to be produced in a

particular time and place, of course, but the origin of the object is not allowed to constrain its meaning. The intent is precisely to dismiss any of the worldly, circumstantial, or socially contaminated content of history, because such subject matter would necessarily impinge upon the intellectual liberty of criticism and the availability of the formal strategies for reuse. Architectural form can be read and interpreted, of course, yet misreadings and misunderstandings are understood to occur routinely, and with benefit. In any case, there is a conscious avoidance of any historical or material fact other than those of a dislodged formal system. The way in which a building as a cultural object in time is possessed, rejected, or achieved is not addressed.3

K. Michael Hays

I6

The worldliness of architecture

Such an approach has not been entirely unhealthy for architectural interpretation. It has done away with testimonials rhetorically proclaiming a work's greatness and humanistic worth on the basis of its accurate representation of the dominant culture. It has developed a specialized vocabulary enabling critics to talk seriously, technically, and precisely about the architectural object as distinct from other kinds of objects. Furthermore, so long as we construe architecture as essentially dependent on or representative of something else, we cannot see what it does itself; so long as we expect to understand architecture in terms of some anterior process, we cannot see an architecture that is, paradoxically, both the end of representation and the beginning of something quite its own.

Nevertheless, the absolute autonomy of form and its superiority over historical and material contingencies is proclaimed, not by virtue of its power in the world, but by virtue of its admitted powerlessness. Reduced to pure form, architecture has disarmed itself from the start, maintaining its purity by acceding to social and political inefficacy.

Moreover, this formalist position risks collapsing into an interpretive scientism not unlike the one it seeks to criticize. If attempts to recover <history as it really happened, display a quite overt emulation of the positivist methodology of the natural sciences, the formalist attitude too often falls unwittingly into its own scientism as formal categories become more rigidly defined and entrenched. When priority is ascribed to formal categories and operations that claim to be free of history and circumstance, interpretive analysis risks simply reaffirming what its formal categories predict. The supposed universality of any one kind of formal analysis obscures the fact that critical methods are formed through examination of a necessarily limited set of exemplars, and that these paradigms emanate from a specific culture-they do not come to us untainted. It also obscures the fact that the methods of study of these objects are themselves part of a larger complex ensemble of relationships, are contaminated by their own worldliness, and are legitimized by some other cultural authority. A perhaps unforeseen consequence of this idealization of object and method is that architecture is denied its special status as a cultural object with a causation, presence, and duration of its own.

The two positions sketched above are symptomatic of a pervasive dichotomy in architectural theory and criticism. One side describes artifacts as instruments of the self-justifying, self- perpetuating hegemony of culture; the other side treats architectural objects in their most disinfected, pristine state, as containers of a privileged principle of internal coherence. An alternative interpretive position which cuts across this dichotomy would bear not only a more robust description of the artifacts, but also the more intricate analysis demanded by artifacts situated explicitly and critically in the world-in culture, in theories of culture, in theories of interpretation itself.

A discussion of a few projects by Mies van der Rohe will draw attention to the fact that an architectural object, by virtue of its situation in the world, is an object whose interpretation has already commenced but is never complete. Historical contingency and circumstantiality, as well as the artifact's persisting sensuous particularity, must all be considered as incorporated in the architectural object; they saturate the very essence of the work. Each architectural object places itself in a specific situation in the world, so to speak, and its manner of doing this constrains what can be done with it in interpretation. The particular works by Mies to be examined are those I would describe as critical. They might also be called resistant and oppositional. This is an architecture that cannot be reduced either to a conciliatory representation of external forces or to a dogmatic, reproducible formal system. If a critical architecture is to be worldly and self-aware simultaneously, its definition is in its difference from other cultural manifestations and from a priori categories or methods.

K. Michael Hays

17

Kurt Schwitters

view of the Mertzbau

Hanover

I920-I936

The critical architecture

of Mies van der Rohe

Among the principal problems the intellectual faced in the first half of the twentieth century was the acute anxiety that derived from the chaotic metropolitan experience. In the essay

?The Metropolis and Mental Life,?, the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel described this condition as ?the intensification of nervous stimulation?, resulting from the ?the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. > The typical consequence of this nervenleben, according to Simmel, is a blase attitude-a blunting of discrimination, an indifference to value, a languid collectivity. <In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life. The self- preservation of certain personalities is bought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one's own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness. 4

The problem for the intellectual, then, was how to oppose this debilitating dismay, but first how to reveal it-how to provide a cognitive mechanism with which to register the intense changes continually experienced in the modern city. Many of the century's early artistic experiments, from the woodcuts of Edvard Munch to the novels of Franz Kafka, may be seen as attempts to articulate the abject despair of the individual caught by impersonal and incomprehensible forces. The reklamearchitektur (advertising architecture) of Eric Mendelsohn and the factories of Hans Poelzig made manifest, as if to pin down and contemplate, the dynamism, the contradictions, and the disjunctures in the processes and reasoning of commerce and industry. On the other hand Dada's ferocious nihilism was an explicit attempt to demonstrate the futility of conventional modes of reasoning in the face of the chaotic city. As Jean Arp put it, <<Dada wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.>?5 And Mondrian named the city itself as the ultimate form toward which de Stijl tended. <The genuinely Modern artist sees the metropolis as Abstract living converted into form; it is nearer to him than nature.,, 6 It is against this

metropolitan predicament that the early work of Mies van der Rohe should be seen.

Eric Mendelsohn

Schocken

Department Store

Stuttgart

1926-29

K. Michael Hays

I8

Edvard Munch

-The Scream?,

I895

C .

_ -

Georg Grosz

,Friedrichstrasse>

lithograph

I918

The rather startling image of the I922 skyscraper project, published in the second issue of G, comprises two architectural propositions. One, a result of experiments already begun in Mies's Friedrichstrasse project, is a building surface qualified no longer by patterns of shadow on an opaque material but by the reflections and refractions of light by glass. The other, a radical departure from even the earlier skyscraper studies, is a building form conceived not in terms of separate, articulated masses related to one another by a geometrically derived core, but as a complex unitary volume that does not permit itself to be read in terms of an internal formal logic. With these two related propositions Mies confronted the problem of physically and conceptually relating the architectural object to the city. The glass curtain wall-alternately transparent, reflective, or refractive depending on light conditions and viewing positions-absorbs, mirrors, or distorts the immediate images of city life. The convex, faceted surfaces are perceptually contorted by the invasion of circumstantial images, while the reflection each concavity receives on its surface is that of its own shadow, creating gaps which exacerbate the disarray.

Mies van der Rohe

Friedrichstrasse

project, charcoal

drawing

19I9

K. Michael Hays

19

Mies van der Rohe

Skyscraper project plan

1922

( ^^ '

Mies van der Rohe

Skyscraper project model

1922

These surface distortions accompany and accentuate the formal inscrutability of the volumetric configuration. In classically derived form, the viewer can grasp an antecedent logic of the object, deciphering the relationships between its parts and connecting every part to a coherent formal theme; the alternative posited by Mies is an object intractable to decoding by formal analysis. It is impossible, for example, to reduce the whole to a number of constituent parts related by some internal armature or transformed through some formal operation; indeed, no such compositional relationships exist. Neither is it possible to explicate the object as a deflection from some type; Mies has rejected the meanings that such classical design methods tend to promote. Instead he has invested meaning in the sense of surface and volume that the building assumes in a particular time and place, in a contextually qualified moment.

Mies insists that an order is immanent in the surface itself and that the order is continuous with and dependent upon the world in which the viewer actually moves. This sense of surface and volume, severed from the knowledge of an internal order or a unifying logic, is enough to wrench the building from the atemporal, idealized realm of autonomous form and install it in a specific situation in the real world of experienced time, open to the chance and uncertainty of life in the metropolis.7 Mies here shares with Dada an antagonism against a priori and reasoned order; he plunges. into the chaos of the new city and seeks another order within it through a systematic use of the unexpected, the aleatory, the inexplicable.8

This solicitation of experience is intrinsic to the meaning of the work; it serves to identify and individuate the work itself as an event having sensuous particularity and temporal duration, both of which are infrangible to its capacity for producing and conveying meaning. Nevertheless, Mies's skyscraper project is not conciliatory to the circumstances of its context. It is a critical interpretation of its worldly situation.

Mies van der Rohe

Skyscraper project

charcoal drawing

1922

K. Michael Hays

20

In the skyscraper project of I922 Mies approached a radically new conception of reciprocity between the corporeality of the architectural object and the images of culture that surround it; by I928-in projects like the Adam building on the Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin, the bank in Stuttgart, and the

competition for the Alexanderplatz in Berlin-he seems to have diverted his efforts. These projects abstain from any dialogue with the physical particularities of their contexts; as

peremptorily demonstrated in the

drawings, the glass-walled blocks could be reproduced on any site with no

significant manipulation of their form.

Though each building unit has been

adapted to the shape and size of its own lot (for example, the Alexanderplatz project), the relentless sameness of the units and their undifferentiated order tend to deny the possibility of attaching significance to the placement or

arrangement of the forms. But the

repudiation of a priori formal logic as the primary locus of meaning is precisely what is at issue; it is this

repudiation that links the projects of I928 to the research of 1922. Meaning is made a function of impersonal productive systems rather than of formal

operations or of representational devices.

Mies van der Rohe

Stuttgart Bank project

collage

1928

'i

Mies van der Rohe

Alexanderplatz project

1928

Mies van der Rohe

Alexanderplatz project

collage

1928

K. Michael Hays

21

Here we must take Mies at his word. <We refuse to recognize problems of

form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but

only the result. Form by itself does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject. 9 As hypothesized by Mies, modern building production requires that each building unit be

complete in itself yet identical to all others, disallowing either hierarchical relationships among units or

predetermined points of focus or termination. Rejecting the specifications of the Alexanderplatz competition, for instance-which favored a curved, peripheral building that would enclose and centralize the space of the

preexisting traffic circle-Mies's objects are disposed in such a way that no resolute center can be found. Across the Platz or across the intervals of space between the serial building units, each

glass-walled block confronts and

recognizes nothing but its double. Like two parallel mirrors, each infinitely repeats the other's emptiness. The space is duplicitous, but the motivation is

inescapable. Mies's achievement was to

open up a clearing of implacable silence in the chaos of the nervous metropolis; this clearing is a radical critique, not

only of the established spatial order of the city and the established logic of classical composition, but also of the

inhabiting nervenleben. It is the extreme

depth of silence in this clearing-silence as an architectural form all its own- that is the architectural meaning of this project.

Both conceptions of the architectural

object-as the efficient embodiment of a dominant system of values, and as the uncircumstanced existence of autonomous form-are seriously challenged, if not defeated, by the way in which this silent clearing claims a

place in the world. First there is the

recognition of the reciprocity between the culturally qualified, empirical conditions of building production and the practice of architecture. Mies's obdurate refusal to manipulate his

objects to conform to any a priori formal

logic has the effect of repudiating internal formal operations as a source of the objects' meaning. Second, though Mies succeeds in directing the architectural meaning to the outside- to what might be called cultural

space-there is the insistence that architecture does not ?<honestly> represent the technical, social, or economic conditions that produced it. Indeed, Mies's architecture conceals the

?real? origins of its formation by displacing them with a material substitute-an irreducibly architectural

object. It effectively cancels the complex network of colliding forces in which architecture originates to present us with the silent fact of its existence.

<Since the facts have the floor, let anyone who has anything to say come forward and keep his mouth shut,? wrote Karl Kraus. ' Mies's silent architecture, following Kraus's dictum, comes forward to occupy its cultural space actively; it displaces what would have been in its place. Critical architecture pushes aside other kinds of discourse or communication in order to place before the world a culturally informed product, part of whose self-definition includes the

implication of discontinuity and difference from other cultural activities.

Distinguishing architecture from the forces that influence architecture-the conditions established by the market and by taste, the personal aspirations of its author, its technical origins, even its purpose as defined by its own tradition-became the objective of Mies. To achieve this, he placed his architecture in a critical position between culture as a massive body of self-perpetuating ideas and form supposedly free of circumstance.

O ur observations can be verified against the masterwork of Mies's early career, the 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona. With respect to our analysis thus far, this project initially appears polemical and self-critical. The Pavilion has been widely regarded as the most immaculate transcription of the modern

spatial conception: a synthesis of

Wright's horizontal planes and the abstract compositions of the

Suprematist-Elementarists; with honorific nods to the walls of Berlage (?let alone from floor to cornice>), the materials of Loos, and the podium and columns of Schinkel; all processed through the spatial conceptions of de Stijl. This seems to claim for the Pavilion a rarefied spatial order that

presents itself as an a priori mental construct rather than a palpable worldly object.

However, this is precisely not the order of Mies: <The idealistic principle of order . . . with its over-emphasis on the ideal and formal, satisfies neither our interest in simple reality nor our practical commonsense. ,,

The Barcelona Pavilion begins with a

horizontally extended space which is described by the uninterrupted roof slab, its relation to the columns and walls, and the corresponding constancy of section and volume implied by the floor plane. Space is, quite literally, continuous between the Pavilion and the plaza in front of the Palace Alfonso XIII. The Pavilion more specifically engages its site through the careful contrast between the long travertine walls, the roof slab, and the unbroken palace wall. All this solicits the viewer to walk through the building, but the

limpid harmony of the exterior is confounded in the experience of the spatial succession of the interior.

K. Michael Hays

22

Mies van der Rohe

German Pavilion

in Barcelona

I929

German Pavilion

in Barcelona

interior

German Pavilion

in Barcelona

interior

'II.~~~~~~~~~~~

F,- I- 9--.... -~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~c .

+ '

I

....

+ I + +

iA :...? ?'

fj ,, . , .

... - " :

K. Michael Hays

23

. .

There is no prescribed logic of passage; the composition is neither a relational hierarchy of component parts nor a series of identical units repeated in a potentially endless chain. What is presented instead is an assemblage of different parts of disparate materials: the travertine pavement and walls surrounding the large pool, the marble walls facing the court, tinted glass diaphragms, the onyx slab and light wall, the chromium columns and glazing bars. The relationships among these parts are in constant flux as one moves through the building. Because there is no conceptual center to organize the parts or transcend our perception of them, the particular quality of each material is registered as a kind of absolute; space itself becomes a function of the specificities of the materials.

The normal system of expectations about materials, however, is quickly shattered as materials begin to contradict their own nature. Supporting columns A dissolve in an invasion of light on their surfaces; the highly polished green Tinian marble reflects the highlights of the chromium glazing bars and seems to become transparent, as does the onyx slab; the green-tinted glass, in turn, becomes an insuperable mirrored screen; ; the pool in the small court-shielded from the wind and lined in black glass-is a perfect mirror, in which stands George Kolbe's <Dancer.? The fragmentation and distortion of the space is total. Any transcendent order of . space and time that would confer an overarching unity onto this assemblage is systematically and utterly dispersed. Mies has constructed a labyrinth that denies us access to the ideal moment of organization lying beyond the actual experience of this montage of contradictory, perceptual facts. The work itself is an event with temporal duration, whose actual existence is continually being produced.

Jl B

K. AMichael Hays

24

. 71 . . a?, i

.. . .,

k. I I . ."

;w .

.

What should strike us forcibly, then, is that the artifact is nothing less than a

winning of reality. 2 Though it exists to a considerable extent by virtue of its own formal structures, it cannot be

apprehended only formally. Nor does it

simply represent a preexisting reality. The architectural reality takes its place alongside the real world, explicitly sharing temporal and spatial conditions of that world, but obstructing their absolute authority with an alternative of material, technical, and theoretical

precision. A participant in the world and yet disjunctive with it, the Barcelona Pavilion tears a cleft in the continuous surface of reality.

1929 in Barcelona

drawing of 929

interior

a d,

Mies van der Rohe George Kll

German Pavilion ~Dancer~

German Pavilion

in Barcelona

interiorf Xrman Pavilion in Barcelona interior

1)

K. Michael Hays

25

C

Max Ernst

?Tous les vendredis, les

Titans parcourrant nos

buanderies- from

La Femme zoo Tetes

A brief analogy will perhaps afford these points added clarity. In 1929 Max Ernst

published his pictorial novel, La Femme Ioo Tetes (The Hundred Headless Woman), a purely metropolitan inspiration comprising a series of collages made from scenes gathered from popular nineteenth-century illustrated books and magazines onto which Ernst

grafted objects or occupants foreign to them. What results in such collages as <Tous les vendredis, les Titans

parcourront nos buanderie> (Every Friday, the Titans will invade our laundry) is a laconic display of two incommensurable experiences interlocked across the surface of the work. Like Ernst, Mies was able to see his constructions as the place in which the motivated, the planned, and the rational are brought together with the contingent, the unpredictable, and the

inexplicable. This vision persisted even in Mies's later works. The campus of IIT, for example, can be construed as a redistribution of some of the design strategies of the Alexanderplatz project and the Barcelona Pavilion-a subtle grafting of an alternative reality onto the chaos of Chicago's South Side.

Mies van der Rohe

Illinois Institute of

Technology (IIT)

I939

K. Michael Hays

26

Authorship as

a resistant authority From the skyscraper project of I922 to the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies's architectural program was a persistent rewriting of a few themes. Beginning with a set of arbitrary propositions, Mies rationalized his initial choice of themes by demonstrating the range of their applicability. He reused them in

changing circumstances; he modified and refined them over time. This sort of

repetition renders the issue of origins or first causes unproblematic, one arbitrary cantus firmus being imitated and repeated so many times as to lose its primacy.

Though the beginning of his authorship is arbitrary, repetition demonstrates the consistency of Mies's authorial motivation; it establishes the

constancy of his intent. A persistently rearticulated intent accumulates

knowledge-more specific and more

precise-of the general architectural

program and allows the growth of that

knowledge according to its own special beginnings and conventions rather than according to those derived from some prior authority. Mies does not

accept a preexisting frame of reference; he represents neither an authoritative culture nor an authoritative formal system.

Repetition thus demonstrates how architecture can resist, rather than reflect, an external cultural reality. In this way authorship achieves a resistant

authority-an ability to initiate or

develop cultural knowledge whose absolute authority is radically nil but whose contingent authority is a quite persuasive, if transitory, alternative to the dominant culture. Authorship can resist the authority of culture, stand

against the generality of habit and the

particularity of nostalgic memory, and still have a very precise intention.

Critical architecture

and architectural criticism

One crucial issue remains unclear: what is the precise realm of theoretical interest in a critical architecture? How does one define or demarcate the spatial or temporal interval that is the focus of a critical examination of architecture? This discussion of Mies suggests that the realm of interest is in the distance established between architecture and that which is other than architecture.

No single building-neither the most

distinguished nor the most pedestrian- can reflect a preexistent cultural reality with perfect fidelity. To the extent that a work is architecture, it differs

qualitatively both from a representation of reality and from a reduplication of other cultural activities. But the difference carries ideological motivation; it produces knowledge both about culture and about architecture. It should be possible to recognize both the means

by which architecture maintains its distance from all that is outside architecture and the conditions that

permit the existence of that distance.

The kind of theoretical study suggested here does not assume the prior existence of unchanging principles for

interpreting architecture. Instead what is assumed is a specific situation from which came the decision to make architecture. This means that each architectural object places restraints

upon interpretation, not because the situation is hidden within the object as a puzzle, but rather because contingent and worldly circumstances exist at the same level of surface particularity as the

object itself. Interpretive inquiry lies in an irreducibly architectural realm between those conditions that seem to

generate or enable the architect's intention to make architecture and those forms in which the intention is transcribed. 13

The contingent authority of the individual architect exists at a sensitive nodal point. The individual consciousness is a part of and is aware of the collective historical and social situation. Because of this awareness, the individual is not a mere product of the situation but is an historical and social actor in it. There is choice and, therefore, the responsibility of a critical architecture.

But what, then, is the responsibility of architectural criticism or of critical

historiography? Is it to teach and to disseminate information about the monuments of culture? Is it to deliver technical insights and opinions about the capabilities of the architect or the form of the building? Or is it, as has been suggested here, to concentrate on the intrinsic conditions through which architecture is made possible? In order to know all we can about architecture we must be able to understand each instance of architecture, not as a passive agent of culture in its dominant

ideological, institutional, and historical forms, nor as a detached, disinfected

object. Rather we must understand it as actively and continually occupying a cultural place-as an architectural intention with ascertainable political and intellectual consequences. Criticism delimits a field of values within which architecture can develop cultural

knowledge.

Architectural criticism and critical

historiography are activities continuous with architectural design; both criticism and design are forms of knowledge. If critical architectural design is resistant and oppositional, then architectural criticism-as activity and knowledge- should be openly contentious and

oppositional, as well. We must seek alternatives to entrenched modes of

operation and canonical forms. We must strive to invest critical discourse with

something more than compensatory, appreciative reflections or methods of formal analysis for objects whose cultural meaning is thought to be undecidable. It is precisely the

responsibility of criticism that this cultural meaning be continually decided.

K. Michael Hays

27

I have benefited from the

questions and criticisms

of RISD students who

participated in

my seminar,

lInterpretations of Modern Architecture,

where many of the ideas

presented here were

formulated; andfrom

the responses of

colleagues who read

earlier versions of this

paper. I especially wish

to thank Stanford

Anderson and Rodolfo

Machado for their

continued support and

encouragement.

K. M. H.

Mies van der Rohe

Minerals and Research

Building, IIT

1939

K. Michael Hays

28

Notes

I

By culture, as I shall use

the term here, I

understand a conceptual

unity comprising,

on the one hand,

those theoretical and

practical systems which

authorize, promote, or

constrain the production

and use of ideas and

objects and by which a

society or a place

differentiates itself and

maintains its hegemony;

and on the other hand,

the artifacts and

environments which

endure as resourceful

physical precedents or

exemplars of systems of

production and become

transmitters of culture.

Thus, it is in the

purview of culture that

the production of

architecture is overseen

from above by a

dominant system of

values saturating

downward, and

generated or validated at

its base by normative

standards of practice

and methodologies which

may themselves become

cultural agents.

2

The historicism of this

position has been

criticized by numerous

authors, most notably

Stanford Anderson,

Colin Rowe, and David

Watkin. Watkin uses a

Popperian argument

against historicism

without noting

Anderson's earlier study

wArchitecture and

Traditions in

?The History, Theory,

and Criticism of

Architecture,

Marcus Whiffen, ed.

Cambridge, MIT Press

1965.

Watkin does mention in

a different context

Anderson's review of

Pevsner's ?Sources...

in wArts Bulletin,

vol. 53 Sept. I971

pp274-275.

I shall not rehearse these

criticisms here. For a

recent discussion of

interpretations that

emphasize the

object's origins

see S. Anderson

?A Presentness of

Interpretation and of

Artifacts: Toward a

History for the Duration

and Change of

Artifacts, in

.History in, of, and

for Architecture,,

John E. Hancock, ed.

Cincinnati

3

The unfortunate

oversimplification,

packaging, and

consumption of Colin

Rowe's ?collage citys

approach by various

epigones is indicative of

the prevalence of this

attitude. Though Rowe

could not be fitted easily

into the architecture-as-

autonomous-form mould,

such statements as the

following are often

misleading to those

inclined toward

uncritical consumption

of images of the past:

cIt should be obvious by

this point that present

arguments have little

to do with <history.>

<History, so far as we

are aware, relates to

concatenation of events

and their stylistic

profile. In the

framework of this

discussion it can only

interest us very little;

and, if we are interested

in the usefulness of

particular morphologies,

we are correspondingly

unconcerned with the

provenance of specific

models. ,

Fred Koetter and

Colin Rowe

-The Crisis of the Object: The Predicament

of Textures

?Perspecta i6 I1980

University of Cincinnati P135 and nI5

1981.

4

,The Metropolis and

Mental Lifes

(English translation of

-Die Grosstadt und das

Geistesleben ,

Dresden 1903) in

-The Sociology of

Georg Simmels

Kurt H. Wolff,

trans. and ed.

New York, Free Press

1950 p415

5

Jean Arp

eOn My Way:

Poetry and Essays

I912-I9i6?

New York, Wittenborn

1948 p9i

6

Piet Mondrian

oDe Stifjl

7

Rosalind Krauss makes

a distinction between

what she calls analytic

or narrative time-in

which the viewer can

grasp the a priori

transcendent structure of

the object-and real

time-in which the

viewer encounters form

open to change and

circumstance. The

development of each in

modern sculpture is

discussed in

ePassages in

Modern Sculptures

New York, Viking Press

I977

8

Mies's well-known

friendship with

the Dadaists

Kurt Schwitters and

Hans Richter and his

collaboration with the

editors of eG? support

this reading of the 1922

skyscraper. The

implications of Mies's

affiliation with the

Dadaists have yet to be

fully explored.

9

In Philip Johnson

?Mies van der Rohe?

New York, Museum of

Modern Art 1947

10

Karl Kraus quoted by

Walter Benjamin

in ?Reflections,

EdmundJephcott, trans.

New York, Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich

1978 p243

12

Stanford Anderson uses

the phrase -winning of

realitys to emphasize the

reciprocity between an

object, its creation, and

its interpretation. The

phrase captures the

notion that the

understanding of a

building unfolds and

may change in time.

See Anderson,

wA Presentness of

Interpretation and of

Artifacts ...

13

I owe my understanding

of intention-as all that

which follows from a

special beginning-to

Edward Said

,Beginnings, Intention

and Method-

Baltimore

John Hopkins University

Press I975

II

Johnson pI 94

Also see Mies's

disavowal of

de Stijl in Peter Blake

cA Conversation

with Mies,

in ?Four Great Makers

of Architecture

G. M. Kallman, ed.

New York

DaCapo Press

I970 PP93ff

K. Michael Hays

29