reading

1

TABLOID TRANSPARENCY, OR, LOOKING THROUGH LEGIBILITY, ABSTRACTION,

AND THE DISCIPLINE OF ARCHITECTURE

Andrew Zago and Todd Gannon

Architecture can only be political, that is, contribute to the production of another world, by being relentlessly attentive to its own discipline. - R.E. Somol

Contemporary architecture is in the throes of an unprecedented expansion of practice types, areas

of expertise, and topics of interest. Though similar proliferations of specialized niches have

occurred in fields ranging from engineering to music, architecture’s unique responsibilities to

society as both a service profession and a cultural discipline have produced more, and more

problematic, internal divergences than in other fields. Today, one is more likely to speak of the

concerns of “sustainability architects,” “interior architects,” or “healthcare architects,” than to

speak of the concerns of the field as a whole. Indeed, articulating such overarching concerns has

become increasingly challenging, just as constructing productive conversations between

architecture’s internal specializations has become more difficult.

At issue in any discussion of nascent tendencies within architecture is the status of the

field’s conventions of communication, its habits of speech, its discourse. The difficulty of

communicating disciplinary concerns to popular audiences is well known. Less often considered

is the difficulty of communication within the field, which often suffers from a similar lack of

linguistic common ground. Failing to recognize important shades of meaning in familiar terms,

members of specialized sub-groups in architecture —both established and emerging ones—often

fail to recognize, and thus to understand and respect, the contrasting ambitions, roles, and

responsibilities of architecture’s varied specializations. In short, many architects today simply do

2

not speak the same language. What follows is an attempt to clarify some basic terminological

distinctions in architecture, to outline some of the field’s generally accepted and less often

acknowledged responsibilities to society, and to sketch the contours of a few promising

developments in architecture’s recent contributions to culture.

Discourse Communities

Fields of cultural production, like all social groups, develop unique vocabularies to articulate

shared ambitions, to identify novel forms that emerge as the field progresses, and, perhaps most

importantly, to signal an individual’s membership in that group. When associated with

geographical regions and socio-economic classes, these clusters of linguistic habits are

commonly known as dialects. Think of Swiss-German, Québécois French, or the distinctive

speech patterns of the American South. Social groups defined by shared professional

responsibilities or cultural interests also develop specific dialects, which in many cases are

known (often derisively) by their jargon, as in “legalese” or “art-speak.”

Though sometimes bewildering to outsiders (and occasionally to the initiated), the

curious inflections of meaning, structure, and syntax found in all dialects are both common and

necessary. This proliferation of linguistic complexity enables not only nuanced description of

topics important to the group but also the construction of the group’s self-identity. The

sophisticated dialects of numismatists, oenophiles, and skateboarders, for example, not only

capture the intricacies of the currency, wines, and aerial maneuvers those groups esteem but also

structure the very substance of the groups themselves. Submission to a dialect’s vocabulary of

expertise, authority, and authenticity constitutes one’s membership in a group, while an ability to

3

manipulate and direct that vocabulary establishes one’s expertise. In sociology and linguistics,

such groups often are referred to as “discourse communities.” 1

Like many large discourse communities, architecture has developed sophisticated dialects

(and many sub-dialects) to govern its internal communications and to represent itself to society.

Replete with jargon, neologisms, and obscure syntax, architecture’s dialects are as necessary to

the field’s development and they are befuddling to the uninitiated. Consider, for example,

architecture’s use of the word “transparency.” As Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky famously

pointed out, the word has two main meanings in everyday English, one pertaining to material

pellucidity, the other having to do with intellectual clarity. 2 To structure a particular formal

debate within architecture, Rowe and Slutzky developed further inflections of the term. In

architecture (at least in one if its more common sub-dialects), literal and phenomenal

transparency now signify contrasting surface effects, the former having to do with the

transmission of light through building materials, the latter having to do with the registration of

multiple abstract patterns and illusory depth on building facades. Of course, Rowe and Slutzky

used these terms not just to make categorical distinctions. More importantly, they used them to

make value judgments. Literal transparency, they argued, was associated with the oblique

compositional tendencies they denigrated in the work of Walter Gropius and others, and

phenomenal transparency with frontal compositions, primarily those of Le Corbusier, which they

supported.

1 For an excellent treatment of the politics of discourse communities, see David Foster Wallace, “Authority and

American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2006): 66-127. For more general treatments of the concept, see Gary D. Schmidt and William J. Vande Kopple, eds., Communities of Discourse: The Rhetoric of Disciplines (New York: Prentice Hall, 1992). 2 Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” [1963], in Rowe, The Mathematics of

the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976): 159-183.

4

Such proliferations of meaning are rampant in contemporary architecture and contribute

to the difficulty of speaking of the field as a whole. Nonetheless, certain general observations can

be made. One relates to architecture’s ability to productively engage other disciplines and the

wider world. Another has to do with the unlikely reemergence of legibility in a field long thought

to have traded representational concerns for abstraction. But before turning our attention to these

inflections, we must first establish an important distinction within the field, that between the

profession and the discipline of architecture.

Profession and Discipline

The profession of architecture concerns itself with the advancement of the field as a reliable,

affordable, and sustainable commodity, the discipline with its advancement as an art form. While

those architects active in the discipline may well provide reliability, affordability, and

sustainability, it is the discipline alone that takes responsibility for advancing the public

imagination. This is not to say that those engaged primarily with professional concerns do not on

occasion participate in architecture’s cultural project, simply that when they do, they have

supplanted a professional posture with a disciplinary one.

Compounding architecture’s disciplinary responsibilities with the sheer size, permanence,

and ubiquity of its professional output produces a unique form of politics unavailable to other art

forms which also advance the public imagination. Though a person might easily avoid painting,

literature, and other cultural artifacts (indeed, many do), no such option is available with regard

to built form. Architecture’s ubiquitous presence in the quotidian affairs of contemporary life

affords it a unique political capacity irreducible to other forms of engagement, such as policy,

5

advocacy, and social responsibility, which obtain in architecture as well as in related fields such

as the political and social sciences.

The diagram above illustrates the relationship of the discipline to the profession. Notice that the

discipline is much smaller than the profession, lies partially outside it, and has a porous

boundary. Its porosity owes to the fact that some practices work at times within and at others

outside the discipline and the overlap to the fact that some extra-professional work (writing,

drawing, etc.) affects architecture without being building per se. As the discipline is capable of

things that the profession is not, the relationship is hierarchical. The discipline provides the

evolving set of artistic concerns that, inevitably, even the most prosaic practice must draw from.

This dependency is rarely acknowledged by the wider profession.

As with the broader profession, the discipline has splintered into numerous sub-interests.

In the past, internal specializations within architecture such as engineering, landscape

architecture, and urban planning spawned new, autonomous fields of expertise. The current

6

proliferation of specializations may well continue to produce such distinct fields. 3 The discipline,

on the other hand, is first concerned with the interrogation and reinvention of architecture’s own

potentials and self-definition and only later with instrumentality in the wider world. Proliferating

specializations within the discipline remain embedded in the structure of the field.

Though both the discipline and the profession organize social relations through the

construction of buildings and both deploy drawings, models, diagrams, and other media to do so,

their contrasting responsibilities to society point their activities in markedly different directions.

The profession responds to society’s immediate needs, where the discipline projects alternative

possibilities for the future.

Most projects are presented to architects as problems to be solved at the level of the

profession, that is, in response to society’s immediate needs. Goals of course vary, but typically

include functional and economic ambitions as well as site, budgetary, and programmatic

constraints, among other concerns. To effectively address these challenges, architects apply the

collective knowledge of the field as well as that of neighboring professions such as engineering

and economics. Such relationships constructed between architecture and neighboring professions

are commonly understood to be interdisciplinary. Within the discipline, on the other hand,

interdisciplinarity is more complex. To project alternative possibilities to the public imagination,

architecture often pursues interests parallel to those of other art forms, and at times finds itself

allied with neighboring fields such as painting, literature, and philosophy, to project a shared

3 Given the complex technical, legal, and bureaucratic contexts within which architects now operate, many tasks that

traditionally have fallen under the purview of standard architectural services (e.g. programming, accessibility, cost

estimating, permitting, specifications, sustainability design, and construction administration as well as rendering,

model-making, digital animation, and other “pre-visualization” techniques) are now increasingly handled by outside

consultants who, like engineers and landscape architects, bring significant extra-architectural expertise to the table

and are rapidly developing specific disciplinary habits and conventions within their respective areas of expertise.

7

cultural agenda. Interdisciplinarity in this sense operates not in the cause of pragmatic efficiency,

but rather to open new avenues of interest for the field.

Despite these differences, it is important to insist that both the profession and the

discipline be understood as advancing architecture as a material practice, even if the former’s

materiality is usually manifest in the durable physicality of buildings and the latter’s often is

found in more ephemeral media, including the seemingly (but not actually) immaterial flux of

digital design software. 4 Where the profession and the discipline deploy similar media, the

former does so primarily in the cause of immediate societal needs (usually via constructed

buildings), whereas the latter deploys architectural media (buildings included) as ends in

themselves and to project alternative social relations. In other words, the profession

instrumentalizes architectural media in order to serve society, while the discipline maintains the

autonomy of those media in order to advance architecture’s cultural ambitions.

Clients, Users, and Constituencies

There was a time when architecture was thought to address a single, general audience. Architects

from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier imagined idealized subjects such as the Vitruvian Man and the

Modulor Man as personifications of the collective audiences they wished to address. One of the

more significant achievements of the past century of cultural production has been the critical

demolition of such idealized subjectivities and with them, the hegemony of the generalized

audiences they stood for. 5 Recently, more vital groups have emerged around specific interests

and proclivities within both the profession and the discipline. In the profession, increasingly

4 See N. Katherine Hayles and Todd Gannon, “Virtual Architecture, Actual Media,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen

Cairns, and Hilde Heynen, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (London: SAGE, 2012): 484-526. 5 For a particularly articulate presentation of this attitude, see Eric Owen Moss, “Armageddon or Polynesian

Contextualism,” lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, 5 December 1979.

http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/1883_moss_eric_owen_1-00-00-00/

8

complex demands have given rise to specialized service niches which address issues of

programming, sustainability, accessibility, and branding as well as specific program types such

as housing, prisons, hospitals, and schools. The clients who commission and finance such work,

as well as the immediate users for whom the project is designed, may be understood as the direct

recipient of a professional service.

The discipline, while it usually works at the behest of commercial clients and users, also

addresses a broader constituency which may or may not directly inhabit or use a building. The

primary concern of such constituencies is not a building’s accommodation of utilitarian functions

but rather the architecture’s contributions to ongoing cultural projects. Where a building’s users

and clients are usually proximate, architecture’s cultural constituencies are increasingly

dispersed. Effectively addressing them requires the discipline to be particularly attentive to the

full range of architectural media. Not only is architecture’s proliferation as and through media

crucial to its ability to impact globalized cultural constituencies, but also, the integral role of

such media in architecture’s ontology must be taken into account if one wishes to take seriously

questions of architecture’s place in cultural production.

Where a building is a concrete physical object (as are drawings, models, photographs,

texts, etc.), architecture as such, the dynamic complex of habits, techniques, biases, proclivities,

and, importantly, values deployed by architects, is abstract, virtual, and ineffable. 6 As literature

is irreducible to books, architecture is irreducible to buildings. And, as a mode of cultural

production as opposed to a class of buildings, architecture inhabits and activates an array of

6 “Just as all buildings hold within them the potential of becoming architecture, so the documents that precede,

surround, and follow buildings are constitutive players in imagining, planning, and implementing architectural

practices and thus also participate in creating architecture. Embodied buildings and embodied documents are

physical objects witnessing to architectural acts, but architecture can never be reduced to these objects. Rather,

architecture partakes fundamentally of the virtual in the Deleuzian sense, a nimbus of potentialities in dynamic

interaction with the actuality of buildings and documents.” Hayles and Gannon, “Virtual Architecture, Actual

Media,” 485.

9

media, even if buildings remain a privileged focus of our efforts. Thus, to characterize the paper

architecture of the 1970s or more recent forays by the discipline into the manipulation of digital

environments, the construction of pavilions, or the programming of robots as somehow less than

fully architectural, as some in the field do, is to fundamentally misunderstand architecture’s

ontology and woefully underestimate its potential as an agent of cultural production.

Such dismissive characterizations also fail to recognize the spectrum of constituencies

that has arisen within and through architecture’s recent disciplinary achievements. As in music,

the diversity of audiences addressed by contemporary architecture has increased dramatically. In

response, the discipline has evolved a host of specialized genres through which to address them.

Given the breadth of interests, limitations of space, and the fact that many of these nascent

tendencies are not yet fully formed, we will not attempt a comprehensive overview of such

practices here. Instead, we will devote our remaining space to a discussion of themes with which

the more promising of these new practices are all in some way grappling.

Legibility and Abstraction

The return to questions of legibility today can be seen in a wide sampling of contemporary work,

including the neo-post-modernism of FAT (the now defunct practice led by Sam Jacob, Sean

Griffiths, and Charles Holland), the frank clarity of typological forms in projects by Herzog and

de Meuron or Atelier Bow Wow, and the regional symbolism deployed in recent projects by

BIG, FOA, and others. At the same time, one sees a resurgent and diametrically opposed interest

in overt, perhaps neo-modernist, abstraction, as in the fluid expressionism of Zaha Hadid

10

Architects, the stark minimalism of John Pawson, or the seeming return to the themes of 1970s

“paper architecture” in the work of young practices in Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere. 7

Left to right: FAT, Blue House, London, 2002; BIG, People’s Building, Shanghai, 2004; Zaha Hadid Architects, Galaxy Soho Complex, Beijing, 2012.

In 2011, the principals of FAT made their case for a resurgent “Radical Post-Modernism”

by calling into question Modernism’s associations with abstraction. Citing observations by the

novelist Gabriel Josipovici, they write,

[T]he essential characteristics of Modernism can be limited to neither abstraction nor

technological innovation and, indeed…the kind of abstraction promoted by the likes of

Abstract Expressionist high priest Clement Greenberg did not represent the essence of

Modernism at all, but acted merely as a sign of it.

Modernism’s key characteristic, they continue, was instead “the recognition of a loss of authority

after the Reformation,” which caused Modernist artists to adopt exactly the values pursued by

the Post-Modernists of the 1970s, that is, “those of multiple authorship, multivalence, collage,

quotation, and decentered authority.” 8

Modernists, they claim, preached abstraction but in fact

practiced Post-Modern legibility.

In this, the authors are half right. Though Greenberg certainly promoted Abstract

Expressionists in the 1950s, he was by no means convinced of abstraction’s necessity to

Modernism. In a seminal 1960 essay, he wrote, “Abstractness, or the non-figurative, has in itself

7 Cf. Log 31: New Ancients (Spring/Summer 2014), edited by Dora Epstein Jones and Bryony Roberts.

8 FAT, “Post-Modernism: An Incomplete Project,” in Architectural Design (Sept/Oct 2011): 18. The issue, Radical

Post-Modernism, was edited by Charles Jencks and FAT. Josipovici’s arguments are from What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

11

still not proved to be an altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even

though artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so.” 9 Indeed, it was self-

criticism, not abstraction, that Greenberg saw as Modernism’s essence. 10

Self-criticism had to do

primarily with self-definition, with establishing the “unique and irreducible” qualities of each art,

which in painting issued from the flatness of the picture plane. For Greenberg, the key feature of

Modern painting was not abstraction, but rather the legibility of a painting’s irreducible flatness.

Twenty years after Greenberg, Peter Eisenman addressed the question of Modernism in

architecture and attempted a similar self-definition of the field. Once again, the central concern

was legibility, not abstraction. Modernism, he argued, was distinguished by an “object’s

tendency to be self-referential.” 11

Indeed, for Eisenman, it was not just Modern architecture but

architecture as such for which legibility was a necessary precondition. To distinguish itself from

geometry, he argued, architecture required legible intentionality. To distinguish itself from

sculpture, it required a legible relationship to function or use. Finally, to distinguish itself from

building, architecture had to “overcome” its function through self-referential signification, as

when a classical column both carries a load and simultaneously represents the act of structural

support. Like Greenberg, Eisenman saw no need to include abstraction in his formulations. In his

view, architecture does not, indeed cannot, deal in abstract forms such as planes and volumes.

Rather, architecture’s elements—walls, roofs, floors, et cetera—are always already legible signs

associated with shelter, structure, or use.

9 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” [1960] in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays

and Criticism, Volume Four, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993): 87. 10

“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the

discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Ibid., 85. 11

Peter Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-referential Sign” [1980], in Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963-1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 112-13.

12

More than thirty years on, Eisenman’s self-referential conception of Modern architecture

remains more convincing than other views that understand Modern architecture as a visual style

based on Platonic forms and blank surfaces. 12

In Eisenman’s (and, it turns out, Josipovici’s)

view, Modernism is not a style particular to a specific medium, but rather a pervasive cultural

condition manifested across creative fields. As Eisenman put it, “Modernism is a state of

mind.” 13

On this, the principals of FAT seem to agree, and indeed they see Post-Modernism not as

a “disavowal of Modernism,” but rather as “the continuation of it under different conditions and

armed with new weapons.” 14

They are also correct in their assessment that Modernist abstraction

is not abstraction as such but rather a sign of abstraction. Their dismissal of abstract formal

vocabularies on such grounds, however, is specious. The question is not whether abstraction has

been achieved, but rather how to overcome architecture’s pre-existing associations with shelter,

structure, and use. FAT’s neo-Post-Modernism works to overcome these associations by pointing

beyond architecture toward other resonances with culture. Their outwardly referential project is

served well by a formal vocabulary freighted with easily legible content. Eisenman’s

Modernism, on the other hand, works to overcome architecture’s pre-existing associations by

directing attention inward toward architecture’s “unique and irreducible” qualities. At least

through the 1970s, this self-referential project was best served by a vocabulary of elements with

minimal symbolic associations. 15

12

Cf. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style [1932] (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). 13

Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism,” 112. 14

FAT, “Post-Modernism: An Incomplete Project,” 21. 15

Of course, by the 1980s, Eisenman would routinely deploy more legible elements as part of his formal vocabulary,

as in the “as-found” elements at the Wexner Center for the Arts and Cincinnati DAAP.

13

The suitability of non-figurative vocabularies to disciplinary self-reflection by 20 th

-

century artists and architects is well known. 16

Equally well known is that by the 1960s,

abstraction in both painting and architecture was on the verge of exhaustion. The reductive

vocabularies of Mondrian and Corbusier, adopted by each as means to direct attention away from

representational clichés toward core disciplinary questions in their respective fields, began, after

decades of imitation, to appear as legible and clichéd as the symbolic vocabularies they had been

developed to replace. 17

By the 1970s, many architects had turned away from the Platonic forms

of orthodox Modernism toward a vocabulary of legible historical types. For some, the use of

identifiable typological forms was a means to counter Modernism’s abstract self-reflections with

overtly symbolic and often nostalgic outward associations. 18

Others wagered that an engagement

with historical types offered the best chance to recover the exhausted disciplinary ambitions of

Modernism. As Anthony Vidler explained in 1977, “the issue of typology is raised in

architecture, not this time with a need to search outside the practice for legitimation in science

and technology, but with a sense that within architecture itself resides a unique and particular

mode of production and explanation.” 19

While Vidler claimed this new, “third typology” “refuses

any “nostalgia” in its evocations of history,” 20

subsequent production demonstrated just how

difficult it was to avoid nostalgia and sustain serious disciplinary reflection when using historical

16

In painting, recall Mondrian: “All art employing naturalistic appearance becomes weakened in its true function.

All representation, even using abstract forms, is fatal to pure art; that is why purely abstract art is expressed

exclusively through relationships.” (Piet Mondrain, “Purely Abstract Art” [1926] in Harry Holtzman and Martin S.

James, eds., The New Art—the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993): 200). And in architecture, Le Corbusier: “cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, and pyramids are the great primary forms

that light reveals well…these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everyone is in agreement about this: children, savages, and metaphysicians.” (Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture [1923] (Los Angles: Getty Research Institute, 2007): 102, emphasis in the original.) 17

On the problem of cliché in architecture, see Todd Gannon, “Five Points for Thesis,” in Elena Manferdini, ed.,

Thesis Now (Los Angeles: SCI-Arc Press, forthcoming). 18

Cf. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977). 19

Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology” [1977] reprinted in K. Michael Hays, Architecture/Theory since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 288. 20

Ibid., 293.

14

types. Indeed, even the formal abstraction of Eisenman and the New York Five was susceptible

to charges of nostalgia, in their case for the historically identifiable vocabulary of Le Corbusier’s

lait de chaux villas of the 1920s and ’30s.21

left: Terence Riley, Light Construction, 1995, catalog; right: Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich, Matters of Sensation, 2008.

The dispute between “abstract” neo-Modernist autonomy and “legible” Post-Modernist

engagement raged through the closing decades of the twentieth century. On one side, the

unavoidable fact of legibility was embraced and used to sanction a broadly engaged populism.

On the other, architects (particularly in the 1980s) allied themselves with philosophers such as

Jacques Derrida not to evade legibility but rather to destabilize it an attempt to maintain

architecture’s inwardly focused autonomy. By the 1990s, new architectural interests rooted

neither in populist legibility nor in autonomous abstraction began to come into focus. Terence

Riley’s 1995 exhibition, “Light Construction,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

showcased an array of projects that focused instead on specific material effects, particularly

21

See Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn, 1972): 3-7.

15

those of glass. 22

In 2008, the exhibition “Matters of Sensation,” curated by Marcelo Spina and

Georgina Huljich at Artists Space in New York, built on this renewed interest in material effects

and directed attention toward architecture’s affective, as opposed to representational, potential. 23

The latter exhibition drew significant inspiration from the writings of Gilles Deleuze on Francis

Bacon. In Bacon, Deleuze saw a painter who rejected both representation (what Deleuze referred

to as “figuration”) and abstraction as viable options for contemporary painting. Instead, Bacon

deployed what Deleuze called “the Figure,” which he described as “the sensible form related to a

sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract

form is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain.” 24

Through the 2000s, appeals to affective figures and visceral sensation (as opposed to

indexical forms and conceptual intellection) were common in architecture, particularly among

younger practitioners engaged in speculative projects executed in unbuilt work and gallery

installations. At the same time, firms such as BIG and FOA began to make overt appeals to

legible symbolic content, claiming to do so in order to seduce clients and competition juries. In

an important 2005 text, Alejandro Zaera-Polo of FOA made a case for a “double agenda” that

wedded the firm’s long-standing interest in formal abstraction and indexical process with their

clients’ desire for legible symbolic identity. 25

Though Zaera-Polo attempted to distance his

approach from the earlier Post-Modernist positions, his argument distinctly resonated with

Charles Jencks’ idea of “double-coding,” 26

and drew pointed responses from Sylvia Lavin and

Jeffrey Kipnis. Lavin criticized Zaera-Polo’s appeal to metaphors, which, she argued, were

22

See Terence Riley, Light Construction (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995). 23

See Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich, “Matter, Sensation, and the Sublime,” in Patterns: Embedded (Beijing: AADCU, 2010): 208-217. 24

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation [1981] (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003): 31. 25

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Hokusai Wave,” Quaderns 245 (2005): 77-87. 26

Cf. Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture, 6.

16

inevitably bound up with meaning and thus vulnerable to falsification. As an alternative, she

proposed the use of seductive but ultimately meaningless forms “that have no logic of

verifiability, truth, or even use,” offering fishnet stockings and Pereira and Luckman’s 1961

Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport as examples. 27

Like Lavin, Kipnis also

suggested non-signifying forms as an alternative to Zaera-Polo’s mimetic paraphrase, arguing

that these should aim to elicit irreducibly architectural effects. Though he offered Deleuze’s

reading of Bacon as a model for how such effects might be pursued (with the caveat that

architecture could not achieve its ends by imitating painting), he noticed that Bacon’s paintings

left: Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucien Freud, 1964; right: Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994-2000

did not fully overcome the legacy of abstraction due to the traces of the process of painting

evident on the surface of his canvases. Better, in Kipnis’s view, were recent works by Damien

Hirst, Jeff Koons, and others that, by effacing all evidence of process, proved startlingly resistant

to the clichés of both representation and abstraction. Works such as Koons’ Balloon Dog, he

argued,

…do not mean anything, they do not say anything, but neither are they silent. …It is not

that they have nothing to say, it is that they do not say; they belong to a world, to an

27

Sylvia Lavin, “Conversations over Cocktails,” Quaderns 245 (2005): 90.

17

ontology that has no place for saying, even as a possibility. This effect, made possible

only by the figural, suggests an un-theorized power of the figure. 28

Writing in 2005, Kipnis found little work on the figure in architecture beyond the writings of

R.E. Somol. 29

In the ensuing decade, a number of architects have taken up the problem. And if

contemporary rehearsals of neo-Modernist abstraction and neo-Post-Modernist legibility appear

ill-equipped to open new avenues of disciplinary exploration, these novel figural speculations

signal just such a possibility.

Tabloid Transparency

To distinguish recent experiments with the figure in architecture from those pursued in painting

and sculpture, we propose the term “tabloid transparency.” 30

In this, we take a cue from tabloid

newspapers, in which the content is so vapid that it cannot possibly bear scrutiny as meaning.

The presence of content provides raw materials to perception, while the vapidity of that content

allows one’s attention to shift toward the material fact of the tabloid as an object—to the letter

forms, the patterning of dot-screen printing, the materiality of the paper, et cetera. Meaning in

such works is so inconsequential that it collapses and, in effect, becomes transparent. In the

object’s absolute lack of ambiguity, questions such as, “what is this?” or “what does it mean?”

are suspended. Thus, tabloid transparency does not proliferate ambiguities or otherwise

destabilize meaning, but rather disarms it by rendering it insignificant. Where Deleuze aimed to

bypass both abstraction and figuration via the Figure, tabloid transparency dissolves the obvious

in order to access what might be referred to as the Abstract.

28

Jeffry Kipnis, “What We Got Need Is—Failure to Communicate” Quaderns 245 (2005): 96-97. 29

See R.E. Somol, “12 Reasons to Get Back into Shape,” in Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO, eds., Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004): 86-87. 30

Though he never used it in publication, we suspect credit for coining this term goes to Kipnis, with whom we

recall discussing the idea several years ago.

18

The Abstract, we submit, stands for an ineffable but nonetheless specific disciplinary

condition, akin to Greenberg’s “unique and irreducible” qualities, or Kipnis’s “ontology that has

no place for saying.” Though closely linked to questions of form, the Abstract exceeds mere

description of physical shapes. As an analogy, imagine an accomplished athlete, say, a

competitive diver or gymnast. While such athletes are likely to be “in shape,” their performance

is ultimately judged in terms of good or bad “form.” In this sense, form, as a function of the

Abstract, disciplines physical shapes.

Though a function of physical materials (e.g., paint and canvas, steel and glass) the

Abstract cannot be reduced to its physical manifestation—the material object only alludes to its

ineffable qualities. 31

Where the distilled palettes of early 20th-century painting and ideal

geometries of early 20 th

-century architecture were able, temporarily, to sustain the illusion of

being “content-free,” that is, of appearing to operate somewhere beyond language or

indexicality, they ultimately collapsed into legibility. Ironically, abstraction precluded access to

the Abstract. Equally ironically, tabloid transparency’s awkward embrace of the banal legibility

of cartoons, contortionists, funny faces, and other trivial figures points toward novel abstract

achievements. 32

Such projects do not attempt to evade meaning, but rather wager that overt

triviality might render the question of meaning moot.

In the art world, the conundrum that links abstraction to figure is hilariously diagrammed

in Mike Kelley’s 1980 triptych, Square, Tangents, and Cats. The effect can also be seen in much

of Kelley’s later work as well as in Koons’ Balloon Dog and other of his pieces. Koons and

Kelley are typically understood as pursuing widely different, even antagonistic, ambitions, and

31

A useful parallel might be drawn here between the writings of Graham Harman, who posits allusion as a means to

intuit the qualities of “withdrawn objects” otherwise inaccessible to perception. See Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011). 32

For a discussion of these tactics, see Andrew Zago, “Awkward Position,” Perspecta 42 (2010): 209-222.

19

both are well known for including overt narratives of their respective subjectivities in their work

(cf. themes of autobiography and suppressed memory in Kelley and of seeming narcissism and

ironic self-promotion in Koons). In the present context, however, both are notable for their keen

understanding of their position within current and broader historical trends in the art world and

for their cunning ability to leverage that knowledge toward the development of novel abstract

effects. If the Post-Modern argument (in both architecture and art) holds that legibility is

unavoidable and therefore should be embraced, works such as Balloon Dog and Square,

Tangents, and Cats demonstrate that abstraction is equally ever-present and, in fact, more

powerfully unavoidable. These works demonstrate that no amount of literalness can remove the

fundamentally abstract nature of everything, and that the more obvious the content, the more

efficiently it can offer access to the Abstract.

Mike Kelley, Square, Tangents, and Cats, 1980

20

Since at least the late 1970s, a number of architects have deployed familiar forms to

open similar avenues of exploration in architecture. Early experiments can be seen in James

Stirling’s use of typological forms at the Berlin Wissenschaftszentrum (1979-87). While one can

easily identify the fortress, theater, and church forms in the building’s plan and massing, the

interior arrangement and facades both work to undermine the clarity of those type-forms. It is not

that their historical significance is effaced, but rather that it is rendered inconsequential to

Stirling’s other organizational and material ambitions. This is particularly apparent in plan,

where the interior organization often diverges sharply from the massing of the typologically

legible volumes. With questions of quotation or meaning thus largely suspended, novel

organizational and material possibilities, such as the axial connections constructed between the

type-forms or the undulating shapes of the building’s perimeter (rendered continuous with

banded and cartoonishly flat stone surfaces) come to the fore.

James Stirling and Michael Wilford, Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, 1979-87, plan and view of courtyard.

Certain of Frank Gehry’s projects from the same period operate similarly. At the Loyola

Law School in Los Angeles (1979-84), Gehry deployed a collection of typologically legible

forms—church, temple, basilica, et cetera—to accommodate a large expansion of the campus.

Filtered through the lens of Modernist abstraction, Gehry’s legible forms resonate with Vidler’s

21

idea of the “third typology.” And, like contemporaneous works by Aldo Rossi, Georgio Grassi,

and others, the strong associations between these forms and the programs they house (e.g., the

relation of ancient basilica and temple forms to law courts) remain intact. In this, the project

produces something akin to Jencks’s idea of “double-coding,” in which one’s attention oscillates

between the legibility of the shapes and the abstraction of their material and organizational

effects. Gehry’s Chiat/Day Building in Venice (1991), with its distinctive over-scaled binoculars

by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, comes closer to achieving tabloid transparency.

Left to right: Frank Gehry, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, 1979-84; Chiat/Day Building, Venice, 1991; Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2003.

The triviality of the binoculars undermines (but does not completely eradicate) one’s ability to tie

them to metaphorical narratives related to the program or context, and hastens a shift in attention

to the object’s unexpected voluptuousness. In more recent projects such as the Lewis House

project near Cleveland, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the Disney Concert Hall in Los

Angeles, Gehry’s formal sources, whether borrowed from painting, folded fabrics, billowing

ship’s sails, or allusions to the building’s immediate context, are relaxed to the point of non-

recognition. Though exhilarating, Gehry’s recent work has become an identifiable signature,

making it increasingly difficult to separate the abstract achievements of individual buildings

from their legible associations with the architect.

Something closer to the effect currently under discussion can be found in Gehry’s serial

use of various animal forms, such as fish and serpents, and more emphatically in his experiments

22

with the form of the Horse’s Head in the Lewis House, the DZ Bank in Berlin, and elsewhere. 33

Herzog and de Meuron have conducted a similar series of experiments with the archetypal house

form dating at least to their 1985 House for an Art Collector in Therwil, Switzerland. Here, as in

their 1997 Rudin House in Leymen, France, the architects adopt the banal massing of a gable-

roof house only to dissolve its prototypical associations through unconventional materials,

detailing, and a curious disengagement from the ground. A number of other architects also have

taken up the archetypal gable form in recent years, but in most cases, their projects fail to

achieve the tabloid transparency found at the Rudin House. In MVRDV’s Ypenburg Master Plan

in The Hague (1998-2005) and Sou Fujimoto’s House 7/2 in Hokkaido (2006), for example,

clear associations to traditional ideas of “house” remain firmly intact and the projects ultimately

fail to overcome the banality of their elements. These latter projects, and others like them, rely

too strongly on reductive tactics, similar to the Platonic abstractions of the 1920s and ’30s, which

have lost their efficacy and no longer offer a viable means of approaching the Abstract.

left: Frank Gehry, DZ Bank, Berlin, 1995-2001; right: Herzog and de Meuron, Rudin House, Leymen, 1997.

33

For an informative treatment of Gehry’s development of the Horse’s Head, see Sylvia Lavin, “Twelve Heads are

Better than One,” in Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin, eds., Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, Essays Presented to Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006): 343-52.

23

Left to right: Johnston Marklee, House House, Ordos, 2008; Hirsuta (Jason Payne), Raspberry Fields, 2008; Herzog and de Meuron, Vitrahaus, Weil am Rhine, 2009.

Herzog and de Meuron’s achievements notwithstanding, most recent “typological”

projects, as well as the commercial popularity and lack of significant disciplinary purchase of

neo-Minimalism (whether manifest in John Pawson’s luxury asceticism or Dwell magazine’s

fashionable populism), suggest that the discipline’s reductive project of the early 20 th

century, as

well as its typological one of the late 20 th

century, have been completed. Rather than rehearse

well-known successes, today’s more inventive practices have concerned themselves with other

possibilities, particularly those that arise from complex geometries that superficially “look like

something,” left unexplored by earlier innovators. Johnston Marklee’s House House project for

Ordos (2008), Jason Payne’s Raspberry Fields project in rural Utah (2008), and Herzog and de

Meuron’s Vitrahaus in Weil am Rhein (2009) are promising examples. Though each begins with

an archetypal gable form, each then aggressively manipulates that massing and deploys curious

surface treatments to loosen familiar associations.

Whether deployed at the level of the element or the massing, the “content” of each of

these projects is immediately apprehensible but, owing to its utter lack of ambiguity, quickly

fades from attention to allow more sophisticated organizational and material effects to take over.

In them, typological forms serve simply as a means of entry into a discussion of the Abstract. Of

course, typology is but one way to enter into such discussions. Other methods, such as cartoons

or contortions, offer other ways, which Zago Architecture has explored in recent projects.

24

Though these latter tactics are sometimes nurtured as inevitable end-games by neo-Post-

Modernists and are easily coopted by those interested in producing a kind of meta-critical irony,

the projects to which we refer here deploy tabloid transparency and an interest in the Abstract to

introduce a reinvigorated sense of authenticity into progressive architectural discourse. Tabloid

transparency points toward the possibility of a post-ironic “stealth authenticity,” which, by

pressing the banal, the ordinary, and the dull into the service of the Abstract, avoids both the

skepticism of neo-Post-Modernism as well as the well-known pitfalls of traditional

authenticity. 34

Left: Zago Architecture (with Jonah Rowen), Taichung Cultural Center, 2013; right: Zago Architecture, Arup Downtown Los Angeles, 2014.

Projecting Interdisciplinarity Outward

Armed with such a concept, architecture might finally begin to move beyond the longstanding

insecurity felt by many architects over the field’s relation neighboring areas of cultural

production. As we noted above, interdisciplinary collaboration has become a central feature of

contemporary practice. Though it greatly increases the effectiveness of building design and

construction, this very effectiveness has led to unfortunate consequences. Routine injections of

efficacy from outside architecture have led many architects to view their own field as

34

For a more developed discussion of stealth authenticity, see Andrew Zago, “Real What?” Log 5 (Spring/Summer 2005): 101-104.

25

fundamentally inadequate. In the hands of some within the discipline, architecture has become

little more than a thinly veiled paraphrase of philosophy, computer science, or studio art. In the

profession, one finds engineering, sustainability, and humanitarianism overshadowing

specifically architectural concerns. The effect is tantamount to draining the architecture from

architectural projects. 35

Feelings of disciplinary inadequacy have also inspired some architects to

retreat from engagement with the broader world to aim exclusively at disciplinary concerns.

Taken to extremes, this approach can result in isolation, acrimony, and, ultimately, irrelevance.

Today, though architecture enjoys a general admiration by society, it is difficult to find

instances where a specifically architectural issue is recognized as making a valuable contribution

to the world. This is not the case for law, engineering, medicine, or, for that matter, painting,

music, literature, or any number of other fields. Though this state of affairs might be attributed to

the fact that some of architecture’s most potent effects operate beneath the threshold of conscious

attention, 36

a more convincing reason is that architecture tends to engage the world on the

world’s terms, not its own. As they generally are not seen to offer an immediate public health,

safety, and/or welfare “service” to society, painting, music, literature, and other art forms are

valued primarily for their specific disciplinary contributions, that is, for their form as opposed to

their function. Architecture, on the other hand, though it offers society both functional “service”

and formal enrichment, generally is understood solely in terms of the former, even though its

greatest strengths issue from the latter. In short, most people (many architects included) miss

architecture’s point, and as a result, many architects have tacitly or explicitly accepted a position

35

In a recent lecture, Sarah Whiting outlined a compelling indictment of this situation. See “Engaging Autonomy,”

lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, 6 Nov 2013. http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/sarah-whiting-

engaging-autonomy-2/. David Ruy persuasively articulated similar concerns in “Returning to (Strange) Objects,”

TARP Architecture Manual: Not Nature (Spring 2012): 38-42. 36

For discussions of such subliminal effects, see Todd Gannon, “Grand Gestures and Intelligent Plans,” in Jennifer

Volland and Bruce Grenville, eds., Grand Hotel (Vancouver: Vancouver Museum of Art, 2013): 170-75.

26

of apparent impotency and have constructed alternative constellations of values in compensation.

R.E. Somol forcefully countered such tactics in a recent essay. “If architecture has lost its ability

to operate in the world,” he opines, “it’s not because architecture has become too self-involved,

but because it has not been attentive enough to its own protocols, techniques, and forms of

knowledge.” His argument hinges on the unrecognized potential of architecture’s disciplinary

abstractions. Too many architects, he continues,

seem afflicted by the assumption that the abstractions of other fields are real (for

example, the bookkeeping tricks that allowed Enron to count potential future profits as if

they were actual—conceptual accounting?), while the abstractions of architecture are not.

Architecture, if it is to operate in the world, first needs to overcome this reality envy of

other fields, and take its own abstractions as literally as it accepts those of others. 37

The form of disciplinarity we have outlined here, one not insulated by neo-Post-Modernism’s

ironic detachment but rather galvanized by stealth authenticity, offers a potent means to answer

Somol’s call to action. Though we respect architecture’s very real and important professional

responsibilities, we insist that the field’s most valuable contributions to culture have been and

will continue to be made in terms of architecture’s disciplinary ambitions. Today, the discipline

of architecture can best “serve” society by continuing to explore counterintuitive, risky, and

abstract possibilities which for various reasons the profession is unable to explore. Only by

taking seriously architecture’s disciplinary responsibilities, and by relentlessly proliferating

formal and rhetorical dialects through which to articulate them, can we meet architecture’s

obligation to “provoke other fields (ecology, law, economics, politics and policy, and so on) to

challenge their own limitations that have been unconsciously and pervasively founded on

ours.” 38

Projecting architecture’s abstractions on other fields, as opposed to absorbing those of

other fields into our own, is a model for a new, more productive mode of interdisciplinarity, one

37

R.E. Somol, “Shape and the City,” Architectural Design 82, special issue, City Catalyst: Architecture in the Age of Extreme Urbanisation (Sept/Oct 2012):113. 38

Ibid.

27

founded not on pragmatic efficiency, aversion to risk, and the solution of known problems, but

rather on counterintuitive experimentation, calculated risk-taking, and the invention of new

problems from which new possibilities—of built form as well as political life—might emerge.