reading

13

Beyond the QuerelleBryony Roberts

There is in fact no such thing as a return. – Michel Foucault

Why New Ancients? The disciplinary dilemma facing the current generation mirrors that of the 17th-century Academie francaise. Like their predecessors, these “ancients” also re- spond to baroque excess and scientific positivism by affirming classical rigor. But while the term Ancients has long evoked conservative rigidity, a closer look at François Blondel and his allies reveals a more complex approach to history and science. Rather than asserting the strict mimesis of classical precedent, the old Ancients, as well as their 21st-century counterparts, reflect a synthesis of classical scholarship and emerging sci- ence that subversively elides past and present. Our conventional understanding of the querelle between the Ancients and Moderns has perpetuated a false dichotomy between tradition and progress. When Bernini unveiled his proposal for the east facade of the Louvre in 1664, he shocked the Academie with his curvaceous distortions of classical forms. Favoring more austere classicism but divided over the means, the Academie splintered into the opposing camps of the Moderns and the Ancients. While Claude Perrault spearheaded the Moderns by advocating for rationalism and scientific in- novation, Blondel led the Ancients by demanding fidelity to classical precedents. Since the Moderns ultimately won this fight, spawning French Enlightenment rationalism and, one could argue, modernism itself, Perrault is known as a pioneer of innovation and Blondel as an intractable conservative. But recent research by Anthony Gerbino reveals a different picture.1 A trained mathematician, disciple of Galileo, and professor of mathematics before becoming director of the Academie royale d’architecture, Blondel also aspired to the synthesis of emerging science and classical knowledge. In his treatise Résolution des quatre principaux problèmes d’architecture from 1673, he integrated discoveries by both contemporary and classical geometers to solve problems of projecting and building curvatures.2 The difference between Blondel and

1. Anthony Gerbino, François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 26–43. 2. Anthony Gerbino. “François Blondel and the ‘Résolution des quatre principaux problèmes d’architecture’ (1673),” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, 4 (December 2005): 498–521.

14 Log 31

Perrault was not the opposition between tradition and progress, since both were trained scientists and believed in a synthesis of the two, but rather a subtler but no less impor- tant difference in epistemology. Perrault argued for empirical testing as the foundation of knowledge, pushing architecture toward the sciences, while Blondel represented an earlier model of erudition that integrated the humanities and the sciences, valuing scholarly expertise in classical and contem- porary mathematics, science, literature, and architecture. Today, the field of architecture is facing a similar epis- temological divide between empirical experimentation and broader cultural knowledge. The loosely termed New Ancients operate with facility across the empirical realms of material and digital experimentation, but they locate intellectual discovery in dialogue with scholarly histories of techniques and precedents. Their integration of emerg- ing technologies and buried histories reconstructs an archi- tectural subject capable of decision making based on layers of cultural and disciplinary knowledge. Reared on Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche, they see the past as so conditioned by its contexts as to be impossible to repeat, but not so incidental as to lead to cynical relativism. Instead, they approach history in search of useful truths, and stage conceptual exchanges between past and present methodologies. While this genera- tion’s freewheeling transformations of historical sources would have horrified the old Ancients, their ambitions re- main uncannily similar: rather than pegging architecture to either individualized form making or scientific innovation, they invest in architecture as a cultural and intellectual proj- ect with a history of techniques for transforming abstractions into constructions. This valuation of history inevitably invites comparisons to postmodernism and its similar epistemological turn from technological positivism to historical tradition. But besides a difference in tone, from irony to sincerity, this turn is distinct for taking place after the shift in architectural discourse from signification to technique. Although the wide-ranging diver- sity of postmodernism is impossible to encapsulate, the most prominent buildings, texts, and exhibitions of the period con- sistently positioned architecture as a language. Charles Jencks, the prophet of postmodernism, celebrated the influence of se- miotics and promoted multivalent double entendres of archi- tectural signs, exuberantly realized in the late work of James Stirling, Charles Moore, and Robert Venturi. The recent his- torical turn is closer to the work of the Oppositions crew, which

15 Log 31

shifted the linguistic framework toward formal analysis and minimalist mannerism. Many of those featured in this issue of Log passed through the tutelage of Peter Eisenman and share his interest in constructing the discipline as a cultural and intellectual project. The trajectory from Rudolf Wittkower to Colin Rowe to Eisenman offers current practitioners an array of analytical tools, but recent projects manifest more willful transformations of the formalist canon that project outward from the discipline, in resistance to the old divisions between autonomy and engagement. Furthermore, current practitio- ners have been shaped by the intervening decades, in which the rise of projective pragmatism and technological experi- mentation have redirected architectural conversation away from signifiers and toward instruments. The recent obsession with technique leads some to appropriate historical precedents purely to enhance virtuosity, but the forerunners featured here use technique conceptually to stage parallels between past and present disciplinary predicaments. A geometric agenda drives many of the practitioners in this issue, who cultivate the rigorous refinement of primitives in contrast to the biomorphic digital baroque. For at least a decade, architects have been playing with slightly deformed primitives to differ from the continuous variation of digitally generated fields. With OMA as the grandma, practices such as MOS, Johnston Marklee, and Michael Maltzan Architecture have nudged, tugged, and collided simple cubes, cones, and cylinders to create intentionally awkward but program- matically astute primitives. Many of the practitioners seen in these pages take primitives to the next level of classical rigor, through old-school formal analysis of classical and neoclassical architecture and the perfection of orthographic projection techniques. Their strict use of regulating lines to construct any variations in geometry offers a latent critique of the sloppily distorted NURBS curves that have devalued the original rigor of the digital project. This meticulous refine- ment and transformation of primitives is emerging, in part, in the core curricula of schools known for exuberant digital form making, such as SCI-Arc and UCLA. Although initially seeming contradictory, this phenomenon actually continues disciplinary formalism by fusing classical knowledge with emerging technologies. In contrast to this more formalist strain, the emerging phenomenon of experimental preservation manipulates his- torical structures as fully embedded in material, political, and urban conditions. The fields of architecture and preservation

16 Log 31

have long been separate if not antagonistic, but more recent practices begin to fuse the two as preservation is acknowl- edged as an act of design. In the wake of poststructuralism, alternative preservationists have claimed the process of impos- ing a contemporary ideological framework onto past objects. A plethora of new journals, exhibitions, and academic pro- grams, such as Future Anterior and the Harvard GSD’s Critical Conservation program, are fostering discourse and mate- rial experimentations on the manipulation of historic objects. Architects, preservationists, and theorists are transposing his- toric objects from one cultural context to another, generating ambiguity between historical fidelity and forceful transfor- mation. The convergence of design and preservation opens up a new territory of architectural experimentation, in which we are designing the past and the present simultaneously. The historians and theorists of this moment are striv- ing to articulate a new approach to history, both in their own methodology and the design work they observe. Hailing from a range of camps, including critical historiography and the history collaborative Aggregate, they emphasize renewed methodological rigor and historical expertise. Their frequent references to Palladio, Piranesi, and Perrault (as well as to medium specificity and Clement Greenberg) reflect their ef- forts to establish disciplinary awareness within the milieu of technophilia. But alongside this seriousness about process and precedents comes an understated cheekiness about their own authority. Poststructuralism left historians with the undeni- able awareness of their own cultural biases, a perspective that can easily lead to fatalistic relativism. But rather than giving in to fatalism, these scholars synthesize historical rigor with temporal self-awareness, and even sometimes humor. The fables and allegories in this issue attest to the pleasure histori- ans and theorists are taking in constructing histories, and the resonance they feel with designers who are relinquishing tra- ditional authorship to fictionalize past forms. This motley crew of practitioners and theorists, with their range of techniques and their aggressive manipulation of sources, clearly represents only distant cousins of the origi- nal Ancients. The improbable comparison is at times wildly inaccurate, yet it does point to an important shared goal. Both old and new Ancients refuse to align architecture with either individual self-expression or technological positivism. Both see the beauty, success, and intellectual depth of architecture as emerging from a dialogue between techniques of the past and real-world demands of the present. Besides this shared

17

epistemological platform, there is also a shared approach to temporality, which only a revision of the original Ancients versus Moderns debate can reveal. Moving beyond the familiar simplifications of the Ancients versus Moderns – tradition versus progress – we can see instead a history of provocatively equalizing past and present. We typically understand modernization as initiat- ing a culture war between history and technology, but it also produced a series of thinkers who collapsed time by elid- ing historical moments. Although Blondel and Perrault are known for their opposing defenses of tradition and progress, they did not embody this duality; Blondel was less invested in the triumph of tradition than in the integration of classi- cal scholarship and science, while Perrault, the vocal defender of scientific progress, was an erudite scholar and translator of Vitruvius. The great architects who followed them from the Enlightenment through the early Industrial Age – from Henri Labrouste to Viollet-le-Duc – were notable for creating reso- nance between new technology and classical form. The rise of modernism in the 20th century, although ostensibly trumpet- ing positivism, also ushered in even more bizarre and experi- mental thinking about the elision of historical time. It is no coincidence that Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, and Walter Benjamin, widely different thinkers linked in a chain of influence, all appear with regular frequency in the writ- ings, projects, and teaching syllabi of the individuals featured in this issue. All three philosophers expressed doubt about both scientific positivism and historical authority, and instead argued for temporal collapse. With the idea of eternal return, Nietzsche calls for suprahistorical beings who can see that the “past and the present are one and the same.”3 Bataille picked up the theme to mock architecture for attempting to resist the delirious looping of time,4 while Benjamin celebrated the spaces and objects that collapse past and present in a flash.5 While previous historical turns of the 20th century have lauded the past over the present, the practitioners, theorists, and historians who inspired this issue have stepped into the realm of strange equivalence. Absorbing and transforming, they develop a new authorship based not on singular individ- uality, but rather the ability to alter both past and present by making them inextricable. Past geometric techniques quietly shape contemporary forms, while digital techniques rear- range historic structures from the inside out. The intimacy of old and new plays out in the subtle redirection of architectural form and the rearranging of the architectural mind.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life (1874)” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Pearson et al. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 130. 4. Georges Bataille, “The Obelisk,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 213–22. 5. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400.

Bryony Roberts is co–guest editor of Log 31.