Ten Canonical Buildings Peter Eisenman PDF

Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000
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Peter Eisenman
TEN
CANONICAL
BUILDINGS
1950–2000
Foreword by Stan Allen

Edited by Ariane Lourie

First published in the United States of America in 2008 by
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
300 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010
www.rizzoliusa.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-3048-0
LCCN: 2007921092
© 2008 Rizzoli International Publications

© 2008 Peter Eisenman
“Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern” ©
Stan Allen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

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of the publisher.
Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York
This book was developed with the support and cooperation

of the School of Architecture, Princeton University.
DESIGNER
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Eisenman, Peter
Ten Canonical Buildings
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Contents
Acknowledgments 6
Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern 9

Foreword by Stan Allen
Introduction 15
1. Profiles of Text 26
Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole,” 1947–50
2. The Umbrella Diagram 50

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 1946–51
3. Textual Heresies 72
Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg, 1962–64
4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic Space 102

Louis I. Kahn, Adler House and DeVore House, 1954–55
5. The Nine-Square Diagram and its Contradictions 128

Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 1959–64
6. Material Inversions 154

James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building, 1959–63
7. Texts of Analogy 178

Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, 1971–78
8. Strategies of the Void 200

Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, 1992–93
9. The Deconstruction of the Axis 230

Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 1989–99
10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram 256

Frank O. Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building, 1997–2002
Bibliography 288

Acknowledgments
The ideas and arguments presented in Ten Canonical Buildings were

developed in seminars I gave over four years while a visiting lecturer at
Princeton University’s School of Architecture. The school’s support, in
particular the support of the dean, Stan Allen, made this book possible. I
especially want to recognize the Princeton students who both participated
in the seminars and spent summers producing drawings to illustrate these
building analyses: John Bassett, Andrew Heid, Ajay Manthripragada,
Michael Wang, Carolyn Yerkes and, later, Matthew Roman. Andrew Heid
also stayed on to design this book.
Clearly this book is the result of a team effort. Ariane Lourie endured
numerous drafts and rewrites to help me bring this manuscript to its
final form—even editing and repairing drawings—and Cynthia Davidson
reviewed it for clarity. Jeffrey Kipnis made insightful comments on drafts
of the introduction. Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown helped to obtain the best
historical images from the archives of Le Corbusier, Luigi Moretti, Mies
van der Rohe, John Hejduk, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling
necessary to illustrate each building. I want to thank the architects who
lent images from their offices: Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, OMA,
Studio Daniel Libeskind, and Gehry Partners. Finally, I would also like to
thank David Morton and the editorial staff at Rizzoli New York for their
patience and for reproducing these drawings with such care. –P.E.

Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern
Stan Allen
‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and
nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy
toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations
and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because history
is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
—Michel Foucault
The title of Peter Eisenman’s new book, Ten Canonical Buildings,

suggests the construction of a new orthodoxy. Indeed, there is something
didactic about Eisenman’s canon, and it is important to remember that
these meticulous formal readings were developed in the context of
seminars taught at Princeton from 2003 to 2006. At one level what is
proposed here is nothing less than a new pedagogy, which would have at its
center the close reading of exemplary twentieth-century buildings. In the
past Eisenman has often been criticized for his reliance on concepts from
outside of architecture. With this analytical work he declares explicitly
that it is buildings themselves that are the source of ideas in architecture,
and not applied philosophical concepts from outside the discipline.
But to leave it at that would be to miss the force of his argument.
His title, I would suggest, is something of a ruse; a sly bit of misdirection
to distract the reader while he palms another ace off the bottom of the
deck. Eisenman is operating on the basis of a rather unorthodox notion
of the canonical, which places him much closer to Foucault’s idea of an
“effective” history than to the conservative idea of maintaining a timeless,
undeviating canon.

10 Eisenman’s Canon
It is the “liberating divergence” of archi- distinct task: the identification of breaks, ruptures
tecture’s marginal or apparently insignificant and divergent pathways. He remains, however,
moments that Eisenman has identified as canoni- indebted to Rowe for his analytical methodology:
cal in this collection. In other words, innovation “Colin Rowe first taught me how to see what was
occurs when the previously marginal is absorbed written into the building but was not thematic
into the discipline, triggering internal adjust- of seeing as opticality.” Eisenman takes Frank
ments to the logic of the discipline itself. Eisenman Stella’s famous literalist dictum—“What you see
understands the modern condition as shot through is what you see”—and turns it on its head. Like
with contradiction, which is in turn manifested in his mentor Rowe, he is not interested in “what
formal discontinuity and historical rupture. “The is literally there, but what is implied by what is
purpose of history,” Foucault writes, “is not to there.”
discover the roots of our identity, but to commit Perhaps the best known example of this
itself to its dissipation.” “A canonical work,” method, and the essay that declared in the stron-
Eisenman writes here, “is a hinge, a rupture, a gest possible terms his ideological distance from
premonition, in other words, of something that Rowe, is the article “Aspects of Modernism:
necessarily signals a change.” For Eisenman (an Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign.”
attentive reader of Foucault) the task of history In this essay (which opens with an epigraph from
is to make contradiction and discontinuity vis- Foucault), Eisenman identifies the idea of the
ible. He is searching for those moments when the self-referential sign as the aspect of Dom-ino that
ground of the discipline changes and the para- makes it “truly modernist.” Eisenman’s start-
digm shifts. In this sense, Eisenman’s canon is ing point is the iconic perspective drawing of
the opposite of an eternal canon: it is precisely the Dom-ino system. Ostensibly the demonstra-
bound to the historical moment of rupture, mean- tion of a construction system, it is often taken
ingless outside the horizon of possibilities that it as a diagram of the basic principles of the free
opens up at that particular time. plan. Eisenman reads the drawing against the
To identify discontinuity as the primary ana- grain, teasing out a series of small but signifi-
lytical trope of this collection is also to take note of cant formal moves that produce a kind of degree-
a conspicuous counterpoint to Eisenman’s mentor zero of architectural form: the minimum formal
Colin Rowe. To mention Rowe here (as Eisenman differentiation necessary to define the artifact
does in his own introduction) is both to acknowl- as architecture, as opposed to mere structural
edge the intellectual debt that Eisenman owes to diagram. All of the elements of the Eisenman
Rowe and to measure the distance between the methodology are here: the ostentatious disre-
two. Rowe had famously postulated an underly- gard of structure, site, and program in favor of
ing geometrical continuity between the classical a nuanced formal reading, and the extension of
and the modern. For Eisenman, Rowe’s empha- that analysis as a more generalized proposition,
sis on continuity locked modern architecture which Eisenman calls a “diagram.” Maison Dom-
into a humanist tradition. To disengage modern ino is one of the key diagrams discussed in this
architecture from its humanist tradition it was book. As in the previous articles, it is a privileged
necessary to construct an alternative genealogy, point of departure, a conceptual lever to open up
in which fragmentation and discontinuity would the field of modern and postmodern architecture.
now take precedence. Eisenman takes Rowe’s The reference to Dom-ino here is then both to a
method of close formal readings and sets it to a method of analysis and to an exemplary modern-

Eisenman’s Canon 11
ist work. It is emblematic of the democratization own explanatory framework. At that time, as is
of space under modernity and of postmodern still the case today, Leicester was interpreted
architecture’s turn toward self-referentiality. almost exclusively in terms of the clarity of its
For Eisenman, it remains “a true and seminal functional arrangements, its direct (not to say
break from the 400-year-old tradition of Western “brutalist”) use of industrial materials, and a
humanist architecture.” series of quotations of canonical modernist pre-
Many of these same arguments are present cedents (the echo of Melnikov, for example, in the
in an earlier essay that prefigures the analytical thrusting angle of the auditorium). To claim early
method here: Eisenman’s brilliant, counterin- Stirling instead for the camp of self-referentiality
tuitive, formal deconstruction of James Stirling’s and formal innovation is provocatively counter-
Leicester Engineering Building in “Real and intuitive. It opens the work up to wider inter-
English: The Destruction of the Box,” published pretation, and serves to confirm the idea that a
in the first issue of Oppositions (1974), although complex work like Leicester will always exceed
written a decade earlier. Stirling stands in as definitive explanation.
Eisenman’s avatar in the intellectual tug-of-war The analysis of Leicester is reprised in
with Rowe’s interpretive models: “In his need the current volume, with added anecdotal back-
to clear a kind of ‘turf’ for himself, Stirling had ground, which makes it a better read, and newly
to take on not only Le Corbusier but also the drawn diagrams, which make the argument
received interpretation of Le Corbusier provided clearer. More important than chronology and pre-
by Stirling’s own tutor, Colin Rowe.” In a key cedence is the method itself: Eisenman’s dogged
passage and a sequence of diagrams that antici- determination to read certain of these buildings
pate the more fully developed argument of the against the grain of the received interpretation,
Dom-ino essay, Eisenman teases out the formal through the primary vehicle of the cut-away
consequences of the Dom-ino diagram. While set- axonometric diagram. This has its awkward
ting the structural support back from the edge moments. The drawings of Frank Gehry’s Case
of the horizontal plane of the slab emphasized Western Reserve project, which emphasize the
the horizontal flow of space (sponsoring the free roof geometries seen from above, seem inad-
plan), it also freed the vertical surface from its equate to the sculptural effects of an architect
structural support and allowed a layering of who designs almost exclusively in model form,
space in the vertical dimension. Eisenman locates and with a close attention to the experience of
Stirling’s formal innovation in an alternative the building from street level. It does, however,
proposition for the vertical surface that “implies yield brilliant formal insights in the analysis of
the potential for presenting the vertical plane as the Jussieu Libraries, and reminds us that Rem
a dominant spatial datum, while using a vocabu- Koolhaas, for all his engagement with architec-
lary which runs counter to the by-now traditional ture as social/cultural prop, is an architect of
dematerialized cubist aesthetic.” subtle and sophisticated formal invention. After
The accuracy of this formal reading is per- all, would we really be so interested in Koolhaas
haps less significant than its methodological if he were simply using architecture as an instru-
implication. To me, the real force of the essay ment of social criticism? Similarly, in his patient
is to foreground the formal characteristics of explication of the changing plan strategies for
Stirling’s architecture against the then-dominant Robert Venturi’s mother’s house, Eisenman
interpretations of his work—as well as Stirling’s reminds us that Venturi, although usually asso-

12 Eisenman’s Canon
ciated with the semiotic capacity of the vertical gests other, future trajectories. These buildings
plane, is a brilliant plan maker, whose buildings are precisely where the possibility of the new
can stand up to extended formal analysis. becomes evident for the first time, even if in a
A final point of reference, perhaps less imme- tentative and incomplete manner. This may be
diately obvious; it seems to me that Eisenman Eisenman’s most telling insight. He presents
has internalized Harold Bloom’s idea that, as an here a collection of suggestive possibilities, of
author takes on his predecessors, rather than architectural problems opened up and provision-
confront a fully realized, mature masterwork, it ally addressed, but always leaving room for the
is often the early work, or the slightly marginal next author to complete the work, and create a
and unresolved aspects of the mature work, that new break, which will in turn open up new terri-
offer a kind of handhold, or a crack to open up tory for generations of architects to follow.
the field, and clear space for working. While Mies
van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Stirling’s
Leicester Engineering Building are inarguably
central to postwar architectural history, Luigi
Moretti is a less obvious choice. To examine Louis
Kahn’s Adler and DeVore Houses, rather than
his better-known public buildings, is similarly
counterintuitive. We understand Le Corbusier’s
Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg as canonical
today primarily because it has sponsored several
generations of work on the warped surface. In
this case, Koolhaas’s Jussieu Libraries confer
a retrospective “canonical” status to this previ-
ously somewhat overlooked building.
But there is more here than a pursuit of
the obscure for its own sake. Eisenman finds and
zeros in on those moments—in well-known and in
less well-known buildings—that still offer room
for working. Eisenman’s canon is definitively
not a new orthodoxy. A canon usually implies
looking back to validate history’s great, untouch-
able monuments. Eisenman’s canon is instead
anticipatory—it lays the groundwork for future
monuments. It is also—in contradistinction to
the notion of an anonymous canon handed down
from on high—somewhat idiosyncratic, and in
the end, highly personal. For all that, it is surely
not a teleology with “Eisenman” at its endpoint.
It is neither a universal canon nor an individual
genealogy. It is both the record of one architect’s
intellectual trajectory and a method that sug-

Introduction
In reading Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon, I discovered that

the term canon has more mobility than might have been at first assumed,
and that it could help to structure my thinking about the fundamental
project of this book, which is to address the necessary evolution of close
reading in architecture. While The Western Canon looks at what consti-
tutes canon in Western literature, some of Bloom’s various and perhaps
subtle uses of the term help to clarify my thinking concerning this period of
time. Bloom says in different contexts that canon refers to the experience
of limits, which are extended or broken (74), or which are vital, original,
arbitrary and personal (75). For Bloom, canon refers to authors and their
entire oeuvre; in the context of this book, however, canonical buildings
are singular works without reference to their authorial provenance. For
Bloom, canon has centers; in this book, the edges and cusps are of interest.
For Bloom, canon also has a heretical intensity (72), which is useful in
distinguishing canon from its use in religious, as opposed to artistic or
scientific contexts. The idea of canon would refer to an operative dogma
in a religious context: an orthodoxy, as in canon law. In science, a canonic
pattern—such as canonical coordinates or canonical conjugates—contains
an uncertainty. A canonical pattern in music is contrapuntal, repeating
but also constantly changing. In the context of this book, the term canoni-
cal encompasses the potential heretical and transgressive nature of ways
of close reading architecture. If, as Bloom suggests, political correctness
can be considered a polemic against difficult art, then the canonical is a
combination of difficult and popular (56); in this book, it is the distinction
between the easy and the difficult in terms of readings that will be made.
Finally, no less an author than Michel Foucault rails against the idea of canon
16 Introduction
and replaces it instead with the idea of the archive, at the core of a postmodern practice, as distinct
which reorganizes hierarchies. I did not set out from a modernist practice and from the current
to define or co-opt the term canonical for archi- state of architectural practice. This book seeks to
tecture. In fact, even though I have attempted a locate the core ideas that form the basis for their
provisional definition here, this is not the purpose argumentation. Ultimately this will be seen to
of what follows. Rather, the idea of the canonical involve both a rethinking of the reading strate-
informs my interest in reading architecture, and gies which sustained modern architecture and,
also explains the inclusion of each building in this at the same time, reiterate a demand for other
book, which lays out their roles in defining today’s forms of close reading.
particular historical moment in architecture. If
part of the meaning of the term canon is to con- ***
travene its own accepted definition, then its use
here represents that possibility. More specifically, Colin Rowe first taught me how to see what
the term canonical begins to define the history of was not present in a building. Rowe did not want
architecture as a continual and unremitting assault me to describe what I could actually see: for exam-
on what has been thought to be the persistencies ple, a three-story building with a rusticated base,
of architecture: subject/object, figure/ground, increasingly less rustication in each of its upper
solid/void, and part-to-whole relationships. These stories, and with ABCBA proportional harmon-
concepts become canonical over time; therefore, in ics across the facade, etc. Rather, Rowe wanted
their attack on the canon, these buildings become me to see what ideas were implied by what was
canonical in themselves. But as a group, the build- physically present. In other words, less a concern
ings herein do not represent a canon. Rather, the for what the eye sees—the optical—and more for
idea of the canonical begins to describe potential what the mind sees—the visual. This latter idea
methods of analysis, which derive from an interest of “seeing with the mind” is called here “close
in reading architecture in a more flexible and less reading.”
dogmatic way. Each of the buildings discussed here
While this is a personal selection of architec- requires one to see in a different way, particular
tural works, the ten buildings in this book do not to the building under consideration. While these
represent my personal canon. Rather, they were ten buildings may reduce the effects or thematic
chosen, in retrospect, for two reasons: they rep- of opticality, each in turn organizes a different
resent both a necessary evolution in the terms demand on visuality. Visuality does not refer to a
of close reading and an evolution in the nature prima facie response to image, but rather to what
of that close reading, from the formal to the is apparent and implied by aspects of the build-
textual and perhaps even the more phenomenal. ing’s formal organization. Each of these buildings
Perhaps most importantly, these buildings not requires close reading. Close reading can be said
only challenge the canons of architecture, they to define what has been known until now as the
also challenge our received idea of the canon of history of architecture. But for our purposes here,
close reading. All of the architects discussed here close reading also suggests that a building has
represent different ideological, theoretical, and been “written” in such a way as to demand such a
stylistic points of view, as well as different atti- reading. If the first question posed in this book is:
tudes toward site, material, and program. What “close reading of what?” then one of the answers
defines them, however loosely, in my opinion, is proposed in the following chapters involves the
Introduction 17
close reading of critical architectural ideas. moment could serve to shed light on other such
The readings proposed in this book would canonical moments in architecture’s history. It
not have been possible before 1968, with the effect may not be necessary therefore to study many
of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and the such moments to understand what is meant by a
idea of the undecidability of any single reading canonical moment.
invoked therein. The use of the term undecidable Canon in that sense requires a specific his-
in the context of this book is no mere wordplay torical context, but it is not necessarily an expres-
between ambiguity, indeterminate, multiple and sion of such a moment, a Geist, or a comparable
undecidable. The differences between these terms historicizing imperative. It could be argued that
are crucial. Modernism was perhaps best defined a canonical moment describes what could also be
by William Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. called a paradigm shift. But the idea of a paradigm
The idea of ambiguity lodges itself in a dialectical shift does not necessarily implicate the critical
notion of either/or and determinate/indetermi- content latent in the idea of the canonical. The pur-
nate, which, as decidable characteristics, possess a pose of distinguishing a canonical moment from a
supposed clarity which belies any need to examine history is that while history provides a narrative
their repressions. Undecidability questions the flow to the discipline of architecture, it does not in
very nature of the notion of ambiguity itself. It is itself provide a necessary basis for close reading
in this context that Derrida’s work remains under- and for opening the discipline to question its own
examined in today’s architectural culture, which history, and thus to alternative interpretations of
has gravitated toward the more facile interpreta- that history.
tions of a Deleuzian schema of the multiple. As used here, the term canonical initially
If since 1968, undecidability is an aspect of provides a possible basis for an alternative read-
criticality, and since undecidability as opposed to ing of what today constitutes the critical in archi-
ambiguity is perhaps more difficult to tease out in tecture. Rather than focusing on history qua
architecture as opposed to say in literature, then history—this building was built at this time,
today, more than ever, a close reading comes to used in this way by this architect, etc.—the idea
terms with undecidability. The idea of undecidabil- of canon in architecture also makes possible the
ity makes it possible to look back and see changes recording of the changes in close reading, in issues
in work which in turn demand a new kind of close that range from the formal to the textual, or from
reading, which, it will be argued, responds to the the phenomenological to the performative. Thus
evolution of canonical in architecture. canon is a way of opening up a particular dis-
It is first necessary to distinguish between course to reading its own history as something
a canonical period in history and the period from other than a narrative of facts. These readings are
1950 to 2000 covered here. One way to study the the wedge that allows postwar modernism to be
discipline of architecture is to use a particular seen, absent its former ideology and clichéd rhet-
period in history as a master exemplar, to use oric, as imbued with other powerful concepts. If
the historical conditions of a particular period to canon establishes a perimeter to the center of the
stand for history per se. For example, instead of discipline, then such readings suggest that a cri-
using history as a narrative structure, it is pos- tique of canon ultimately displaces this perimeter
sible to take the period in northern Italy from with a new canonic idea. It will be argued that the
1520 to 1570 to describe a canonical moment in canonical will inevitably be a critique of what at
the history of architecture. This specific canonical any moment is termed the canon.
18 Introduction
1. Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole.” 2. Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House.
These ten buildings do not so much describe The idea of the canonical is often confused
a history as they define the evolution of canonical with the idea of a so-called great work. In the
works that eventually became known as postmod- context of this book, canon is not necessarily a list
ernism. Close readings that are other than formal of great work, nor is it necessary for a canonical
or conceptual remain within and are at once building to be a great work. In one sense, canon
canonical to a postmodernism and at the same and great work have little to do with each other.
time heretical to mainstream modernism. The A great building may be just that, requiring no
term postmodernism is not used here to denote a more than an initial look that defines a single,
style but rather refers to the period of time after directed reading, while a canonical building
modernism. Postmodernism reflects an attitude presupposes in this context undecidable, often
concerning ideas about architecture which are diffuse readings as a necessary condition of the
articulated as a critique of modernism and particu- critical. As will be seen here, a close reading of
larly of abstraction, modernism’s dominant mode a great building is complete unto itself, like JØrn
of close reading. Not all buildings in the years 1950 Utzon’s Sydney Opera House or Frank Gehry’s
to 2000 describe this moment. The ten buildings Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which requires
here are read, each in their own way, through a little or no outside references in order to be read.
different lens, producing arguments which, taken This is not the case with a canonical building,
together, define a series of canonical moments that which requires a reading forward to what the
loosely identify some of the transgressive concepts building inspired, as well as backward to what
of the postmodern period. the building denoted.
Introduction 19
3. Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg. 4. Louis Kahn, DeVore House.
In this sense, great buildings are timeless, operative at a particular moment in time and on
while canonical buildings are identified with the specific works which at the time provoke such
specific moments in time. For example, in the a close reading. The canonical both places in doubt
eighteenth century, Palladio’s Villa Rotunda was previous work and demands new interpretations,
considered canonical because its close reading pro- not only of the individual work, but also of archi-
duced an interpretation of his Villa Malcontenta. tecture in general. In short, while the canonical
Yet in the twentieth century, Villa Rotunda was building requires close reading, it also problema-
seen as a great work, and Malcontenta came tizes the idea of a great building or masterwork
to be called canonical because its close reading as a historically sedimented concept, without the
spawned an interpretation in Le Corbusier’s Villa mobility and flexibility that canonical implies.
Stein at Garches. A canonical building requires For example, one of the buildings discussed
study, not in and of itself as an isolated object, but here is Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building for the
in terms of its capacity to reflect on its particular Weatherhead School of Management at Case
moment in time and its relation to buildings which Western Reserve, which is neither as well known
both precede it and come after it. In the study of nor as great as his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
the buildings collected here, each canonical work There can be little doubt that Bilbao changed the
impinges on those works created in its wake, architectural face of the ensuing decade, and it
works that in turn redefine what is considered is certainly what can be called a great building
canonical. Thus canon is intimately linked to and or a masterpiece of its time. The first question
dependent on both the concept of close reading is, then, why Case Western rather than Bilbao?
20 Introduction
5. Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House. 6. James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building.
While Bilbao is effectively the most well-known cially to the plan of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, as a
and popular of Gehry’s buildings, this building progenitor of the modern.
was not so much concerned with reading and Also discussed here are the Adler and DeVore
producing a critical stance on modernism as it Houses by Louis Kahn, as opposed to his better-
was the reflection of a personal sensibility, albeit known, even seminal projects such as the Indian
about the siting of a building in the city. Bilbao School of Management at Ahmedabad, the Exeter
may be a great postmodern building, and its Library, or the Yale University Art Gallery. The
quality establishes Gehry’s personal view of the Adler and DeVore Houses are an obscure pair of
object in the city, but it does not embody an argu- houses that were never built, yet they demonstrate
ment about its relation to history in the critical certain of Kahn’s ideas in what was a crucial turn-
terms that characterize the Lewis Building. The ing point in his career. They represent a moment
argument set forth in this book considers the in Kahn’s career between the Trenton Bathhouse,
Lewis Building to be a canonical, as opposed to a which preceded these houses, and the Richards
great building, in that it organizes a demand for Medical Building; the houses represent a moment
a close reading of a different kind, one that dif- which articulated several possible directions
fers from the formal and conceptual readings that for Kahn’s architecture. The Adler and DeVore
dominate architecture’s recent past. The Lewis Houses also contain the origins of his eventual
Building can be considered canonical in defining career direction; in fact, his next major project,
more clearly its theoretical rupture with classic the Richards Medical Building at the University of
modernist readings than does Bilbao, because it Pennsylvania, evolves as a stylized Kahnian trope
refers back to the history of the discipline, espe- that is clearly derived from these two houses. The
Introduction 21
same can be said for each building in this book, moment in history in order for it to be seen as a
some more obvious than others. While individually hinge/rupture in either the architect’s career or
these buildings may each be canonical, there is no the architectural discourse.
intention in their collection here to define any so- A building’s function, structure, and
called postmodern canon. type—its instrumentality—are not the criteria
A canonical building also spawns subsequent for understanding its importance in the discipline
interpretations by other architects as a commen- of architecture, nor would these be considered
tary on that particular moment. For example, Le aspects of its criticality. All buildings stand up;
Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg both all buildings function; all buildings enclose. These
manifests his own critique of his earlier “Five qualities comprise neither the central character-
Points,” and serves as a model for Rem Koolhaas’s istics nor the thematic of the buildings analyzed
Jussieu Libraries project. Thus each project dis- in this book. Canonical buildings are not consid-
cussed here represents a moment in architecture ered canonical because they have functioned well;
in which there is an acknowledgment of the past, a their instrumentality has never been the cause of
break with the past, and simultaneously a juncture their canonical role in the discipline. For example,
with a possible future. While a great building per- whether or not Borromini’s churches functioned
haps is self-sufficient, a canonical building is not. well has not been a concern in history, because
Its outward references, forward and back, make it the functioning of the church was not necessarily
contingent on external factors. its thematic. Rather, the representation of those
The difference between a canonical work, as functions in the artifact was important. Whether
defined here, and a critical work is more nuanced. the mass could be heard or whether Easter ser-
All canonical works are per se critical, but not all vice was crowded was not the issue for Borromini
critical works are canonical. The critical can be or for his patron; in fact, these matters have never
considered a necessary but not sufficient com- been the issues for the history of architecture.
ponent of the canonical. In this book, the term Equally, very few people care whether Gehry’s
critical refers to the capacity to open up to ques- Guggenheim Museum Bilbao functions well or
tioning problems which are essentially architec- not; and many great museums—the Louvre
tural. In the sense that it is used here, critical is a in Paris, the Frick Museum in New York, and
concept that distances the object or subject from others—were not designed as such. There is no
the terms of the analysis at the same time that such thing as a good plan for a museum, because
the analysis is also part of the subject or object. there is no plan for a museum.
The important distinctions between critical and If canon is commonly associated with the
canonical are twofold: first, a canonical work is a critical as a reference to prior work, canon is also
hinge as well as a rupture, while a critical work commonly associated with the textual, that is, an
can function principally as a break with its pre- internal critique or questioning of its own status
cedents. Canonical in this context refers to a rup- as a narrative. For the textual, I am referring to
ture that helps to define a moment in history; it is the Derridean idea that texts manifest the leg-
a constant reevaluation in the present as to what ible dimensions of ideas and objects while linking
constitutes such a rupture. Of course, a rupture them with preexisting ideas and objects. In the
can only be seen in hindsight, looking back rather context of this book, the textual will also connect
than looking at the present. Second, a canonical ideas—for example, in the form of a diagram, an
work is time-bound: it depends on a particular explanatory or analytical device aims to uncover
22 Introduction
7. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery. 8. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries.
latent organizations. The textual becomes a subject and the object, the relationship between
tissue of marks that are no longer only represen- form and meaning, and between instrumentality
tational as the three types of sign identified by and discourse come into sharp focus.
the American pragmatist philosopher Charles The period from 1950 to 1968 could be char-
Sanders Peirce: the icon, the symbol, and the acterized by a rethinking of modernist abstrac-
sign. According to Peirce, the icon has a visual tion. Thus the first four buildings shown here,
similitude to its object; the symbol establishes each in its own way, define and critique previous
a visual convention for the relationship of the invocations of close reading affiliated with mod-
symbol to some object, and the index, which does ernism. For example, while Luigi Moretti’s Casa
not rely on the thematic of the optical, functions “Il Girasole” demands a formalist close reading,
as a record or a trace. it begins to introduce concerns such as historical
Each of these ten buildings will be situated references and materiality, which later become
as the fulcrum of an argument that the building known as postmodernism. Mies van der Rohe’s
defines, an argument that can be grasped through Farnsworth House, while continuing Mies’s
a close reading of textual, formal, and conceptual investigation of the column grid in relation to
strategies. These will not always be the most interior space, external surface, and the corner,
well-known buildings, but they will stand for a is still the most abstract—if not the most overtly
moment when the relationship between the sign modernist—of the four buildings, but it also
and the signified, the relationship between the becomes a manifestation of Mies’s first diagram.
Introduction 23
9. Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum. 10. Frank Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building.
Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg similar characteristics in orienting their critique

requires a reading beyond formalist close read- of modernism toward a new realism, expressed
ing because at root it is a reversal of his own in structure, materiality, and iconography.
“Five Points,” but more importantly because it Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery presents a
introduces a centripetal energy as well as a cen- critique involving surreal or superreal shifts;
trifugal energy that moves attention away from James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building
the center to the periphery and thus away from reverses the conventional solid/void character-
any classical, centric, deep-space composition. istics of material, and Robert Venturi’s Vanna
The last of the early projects is Kahn’s Adler and Venturi House evokes the form of an American
DeVore Houses, which represent both a rejection shingle style with European overtones. However,
of the modernist free plan but also deny tradi- none of these buildings lapse into a simple phe-
tional part-to-whole relationships. Instead they nomenology. In fact, the characteristics of these
introduce a play of readings, which ultimately are buildings have less in common with the pure mate-
undecidable. This pair of houses is thus a hinge riality of Kahn’s Trenton Bathhouse than they do
in Kahn’s career, but also a hinge between the with each other in broaching the conceptual impli-
first phase of postwar building and the second, cations of organization, type, and material.
transitional postmodern phase in America. The three projects in the last section of this
The three buildings that characterize the book, from 1988 to 2000, not only require close
second generation, from 1968 to 1988, exhibit reading but also mark sufficient changes in what
24 Introduction
constitutes the idea of close reading. This period able. These buildings not only challenge the formal
begins with the Deconstructivist Architecture and conceptual conventions sedimented in the
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which history of close reading, but also challenge what
included, if not the specific projects of Rem constitutes the persistencies of any architecture:
Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry dis- part-to-whole, subject/object, Cartesian coordi-
cussed in this book, at least their sensibilities. What nates, and abstraction/modernism. In attacking
links them is a concern for diagram, as opposed to the clichés of modernism, these buildings of the
type, but each architect employs the diagram in postmodern period remain engaged in a challenge
a different way. In Koolhaas’s Jussieu Libraries, to opticality and the metaphysics of presence. In
the diagram is an iconic device where the building suggesting that the challenge posed by one era
displays a visual similitude to the animating dia- becomes clichéd in the next, this book offers nei-
gram. As such Koolhaas’s work begins to define ther solutions nor instructions for contemporary
another reading strategy, one that Jeffrey Kipnis architecture, but rather presents a slice in time
defines as performative rather than conceptual. that is part of an endless cycle of becoming, and
In the performative strategy, the human subject as such an idea of infinite displacement.
becomes involved in the architectural object in a
way similar to the minimalist sculptors’ involve-
ment with the subject, the object, and the site
specificity of the work in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum also invokes
the diagram, but to indexical ends, where the
building marks a series of traces of its process of
becoming. This organizes the demand for a close
reading of not only the traces within the building
but also the traces of its own origins in a prior
project. It will be argued that Gehry’s Lewis
Building for the Weatherhead School also relies
on a diagram that invokes a shift in reading from
the formal or conceptual to the phenomenological.
These three projects, more than the other build-
ings assembled herein, best describe the dilemma
of close reading today. Equally, it is perhaps too
early in the architects’ respective careers, and
in time, to assess which buildings in their oeuvre
could be considered canonical, although it is cer-
tainly possible to understand their effect on the
idea of close reading.
In each case, the buildings herein disturb
the complacency of the act of reading. The idea
of undecidability suggests that readings are no
longer necessarily dialectical. Ultimately it is not
buildings but their readings which are undecid-
1. Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole.” Rome, Italy, 1947−50.
1. Profiles of Text
Luigi Moretti, Casa “Il Girasole,” 1947–50
One of the first critical articles to appear in English on Luigi Moretti’s

Casa “Il Girasole” was written by Peter Reyner Banham in 1953. Banham’s
article, published in the February issue of Architectural Review, labeled
Casa “Il Girasole” the defining monument of “Roman eclecticism,” which
was an eclecticism that Banham considered operated within the confines
of the vestiges of modernism. If the label eclecticism has different con-
notations today, in 1953 it implied that Moretti’s work could be seen as a
haphazard collection of classical tropes and architectural strategies lack-
ing any single organizing principle other than having been assembled by
Moretti in a single building. In this sense Banham’s argument was pro-
phetic, though his use of the term eclecticism, it will be argued here, was
flawed. It is interesting to note that as early as 1953, Banham proposed
that modern architecture had already become a style, and thus he was able
to cite Moretti as deviating from its formal and supposed social impera-
tives. Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” would subsequently earn an important
citation in Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, a citation that would become physically manifest in Venturi’s
own Vanna Venturi House (see chapter 5). One important distinction
between Banham’s conclusion and a possible present reading is that prior to
1968, and the rethinking of the idea of a text proposed by Jacques Derrida’s
Of Grammatology, it was not possible to propose a textual reading of what
appeared to Banham to be mere eclecticism. Post-structuralism offered
methods of analysis and composition as a new lens through which to under-
stand complex phenomena; in certain cases, these phenomena defy a clear
reading altogether, and instead represent a condition of what can be now
called undecidability.
28 Casa “Il Girasole”
2. Casa “Il Girasole,” south elevation. 3. Casa “Il Girasole,” north elevation.
In this context, Moretti becomes neither an eclectic described as the formal, the distinctions between
nor a modernist; rather, his work defies any easy the formal and the textual in what follows will be
categorization, even as one of the first, if rarely seen to be important. The term formal describes
acknowledged, postmodern architects. It is this conditions in architecture that can be read not
condition of what can be termed undecidability necessarily in terms of meaning or aesthetics, but
that emerges in his Casa “Il Girasole” and will in terms of their own internal consistency. This
develop as one of the defining themes of this book. internal coherence involves strategies that have
Completed in 1950, Moretti’s Casa “Il nothing to do with the primary optical aspects
Girasole” incorporated the first appearances of the aesthetic (proportion, shape, color, tex-
of historical allusion in the wake of modernist ture, materiality) but rather have to do with the
abstraction. This overture to history is not, how- internal structure governing their interrelation.
ever, why Casa “Il Girasole” is the first building in Formal analysis looks at architecture outside
this book. Rather, it is because Casa “Il Girasole” of its necessarily historical, programmatic, and
represents one of the first postwar buildings to symbolic context.
manifest a hybrid condition of both abstraction The term textual can be defined in relation-
and literal figured representation. These simul- ship to one of post-structuralism’s key concepts in
taneous yet seemingly antithetical positions are the Derridian idea of text. Derrida suggests that
never resolved as a single narrative, meaning, a text is not a single linear narrative, but a web
or image. Rather, it is the dialectical relationship or a tissue of traces. While a narrative is unitary,
between the two positions that is questioned in a continuous, and directional, a text is multivalent,
postwar climate that challenged the innate value discontinuous, and nondirectional. In the context
of such a dialectic. Furthermore, it could be argued of this book, the idea of a text, like the idea of a
that Casa “Il Girasole” represents one of the first diagram, helps to initiate a change from the idea
buildings after World War II to embody the unde- of reading a work as a unitary entity to under-
cidable nature of truths in attempting the parallel standing a work as an undecidable result of vary-
use of both abstract and figured tropes. It is here ing forces. In my work on Giuseppe Terragni, for
that an idea of what might be considered a text example, the idea of a text reoriented my analy-
in architecture might be introduced. While the sis of Casa Giuliani-Frigerio from essentially for-
abstract and the figured refer to what is usually malist interpretations to a more textual reading.
Casa “Il Girasole” 29
4. Casa “Il Girasole,” west elevation. 5. Casa “Il Girasole,” section, north-south.
Texts, therefore, do not deploy the same internal form in Italy through neorealist cinema and its
consistency as in the formal. unvarnished view of Italy and the detritus of
In addition to provoking formal reading, five years of war. Neorealist films like Open City
buildings can equally be read as textual, offer- and The Bicycle Thief were a form of empirical
ing different modes of reading, which may chal- existentialism, in that they represented attempts
lenge established architectural vocabularies. For to move the language of abstraction toward a
example, Alberti’s superposition of the Arch of language more closely associated with what could
Titus over the vernacular Greek temple-front at be considered “the real.” Moretti’s postwar work,
Sant’Andrea becomes textual, because this mon- which also proposed a didactic view of architec-
tage of architectural forms from different histori- ture that now critiqued abstraction, evolved out
cal periods destabilizes a singular meaning. The of such a neorealist sensibility. However, it is to
textual provokes a reading outside of the facts of Moretti’s credit that little of his first postwar work
an object’s physical presence, or the underlying can be considered neorealist, just as it cannot be
structures which govern its being; in the case dismissed as eclectic.
of Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, the superposition of The subtlety of Moretti’s critique of mod-
historical tropes creates this disturbance in pres- ernist abstraction was articulated in his now
ence that takes the building out of the category much sought-after magazine Spazio (Space) in
of the conventionally formal. If the formal begins the early 1950s. Spazio followed in the tradition
from a conception of presence that is both a linear of architects’ little magazines, which began with
narrative and what can be called fixed or decid- Le Corbusier’s magazine L’Esprit Nouveau in
able, then the textual suspends the narrative of 1920 and Mies van der Rohe’s magazine G, with
presence, in which a hierarchy is implicit, and Theo van Doesberg and El Lissitzky, in 1923.
offers instead undecidable relations rather than While Le Corbusier’s magazine referred to a
a single static condition. It is this undecidability new spirit, and the G of Mies’s magazine stood for
of relations with both historical and modernist Gegenstand (object) and effectively addressed
tropes that Moretti invokes to produce an initial ideas about objecthood, Moretti’s Spazio made
critique of modernism. an important distinction between the object-
The abstract languages of cubism and futur- thing and the object of containment as space or
ism were subjected to a critique, which first took volume. An object can be seen and analyzed as
6. Casa “Il Girasole,” ground-floor plan. 7. Casa “Il Girasole,” second-floor plan.
a geometric abstraction, but space is difficult to the edge of a volume seen against the sky is a
analyze as a physical entity because it is usually literal profile. This means that all architecture,
defined by other things. While space is a concep- because it is three-dimensional, will have some
tual entity, its container is formal. Such a redefi- sort of profile. While in architecture a profile is
nition of the modeling of space was among the the edge of a plane or the edge of a surface, it
issues Moretti broached in Spazio. is also either the edge of the containing surface
It was Moretti’s article “Valori della or the edge of the exterior space in relationship
Modanatura,” (The Value of Modeling) in Spazio to the containing surface of the interior. In either
6 (1952) that challenged the modernist concep- case, profile tends to be the result of figured form,
tion of space. The article suggested that surface which in turn produces shadows. Moretti was not
had the capacity to be modeled in such a way as referring to a literal profile per se but to a con-
to create a dialogue between volume and flat- ceptual profile, which was made thematic in the
ness, and therefore that the modeled surface design. Moretti made profile thematic in his work
could engage the affective potential of light by suggesting that profile becomes more than
and shadow. The article challenged the boxlike just the edge of a three-dimensional volume and
abstractions of modern architecture by raising instead serves to question the clarity of boundar-
the issue of profile, which is articulated through ies between edge and volume. In Moretti’s terms,
both hard edge and figured form. profile is not a narrative device, revealing shape
Profile is the edge of a figure—in other or figure, but rather can be disassociated from
words, how a surface in architecture meets space: any shape or figure; this disassociation is not
8. Casa “Il Girasole,” third-floor plan. 9. Casa “Il Girasole,” roof plan.
merely a line but can be, for example, the dark and defined physically—linear elements such as
edge of cast shadows. By calling attention to pro- structure and walls—and subsequently broaches
file in architecture, Moretti suggests its role as a the spatial, that which is contained within physical
marker of undecidable relationships and engages boundaries. The history of architecture has been
space as an object for close reading. As hierarchy largely defined by this progression from object
and singularity of meaning are made problematic, or geometry to space. Moretti’s models inverted
the rhetoric becomes textual rather than formal. this convention by taking space, rather than its
The idea of space as volume was illustrated in enclosing surface, as a starting point for analysis.
Spazio by Moretti’s series of cast models of histor- On the one hand Moretti deals with the edge of the
ical buildings, churches, and villas. Moretti broke surface—its profile—and on the other he engages
with the conventions of architectural models by volume without surface in these model studies.
representing a building’s interior space as a solid Moretti’s notion of profile and space, as articu-
volume and dispensing entirely with its exterior lated in his volumetric models, raises formal and
enclosure, structure, facades, or any other indica- conceptual issues that refuse resolution as a single
tions of an exterior skin. These volumetric models narrative or meaning. These models prefigure a
seemed to deny a relationship to the exterior. radically new diagram of space that Moretti fur-
Rather, they embodied space itself, conceptualiz- ther developed in Casa “Il Girasole.”
ing space by turning void into solid. In the history The first impression of Casa “Il Girasole”
of architecture, analysis usually begins from the is a dynamic tension between volume and edge.
geometric, and from elements that can be touched The cut in the center of the front facade is the
10. Casa “Il Girasole,” northwest corner.
first postwar use of the aedicular motif, whereby dominant motif of the neoclassical, and if the
a spatial division occurs between two solids, frontal picture plane was a dominant motif of the
which nevertheless remain related across its modern, then Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” uses
void. Moretti’s use of the aedicule comes out of an elements of each while breaking with both tradi-
historical tradition, from the Palladian window tions. The corners of Casa “Il Girasole” are sites
to Carlo Rainaldi’s Santa Maria in Campitelli. of fracture: both the front and rear facades over-
Moretti’s facade cannot be considered a pastiche hang the main mass of the building as thin screens,
of history, however, because he uses historical separated from the main volume of the building.
motifs in a new way. The aedicule divides the The corner is also shadowed by an undecidability
planar surface of the facade of Casa “Il Girasole” as an assembly of concrete solids and voids. This
into two volumetric pieces which, though paired, develops from the idea of profile that Moretti put
are not identical, nor do their edges align across forward in Spazio, yet the layered character of
the void. The physicality of the facade is equally the facade creates a different understanding of
ambiguous, in that it appears to be a cleft profile. Casa “Il Girasole” is no longer a building
volume when viewed frontally, but when viewed where profile can be said to define a continuity, as
obliquely, the facade becomes attenuated at the would be the case in classical architecture where
edges, resembling a screen. profile and shape were one and the same thing.
The tension between the facade seen as a One of the important theoretical propositions set
screen and as a volume is further developed at into play at Casa “Il Girasole” is that the profile
the corners of the facade. If the corner was a does not equate to the shape of the building.
Another theoretical proposition resides in

the problematic of the corner: Casa “Il Girasole”
does not present a clearly subjective view of the
object, seen perspectively as Greek space, nor
does it offer a frontal view as modern Roman
space. It is something other, and makes an argu-
ment of its otherness, similar to the manner in
which Adolf Loos disarticulated the exterior
envelope from inner volumes. For Moretti, the
play of solid, void, and edge are simultaneous
conditions. Thus Casa “Il Girasole” is one of the
first didactic examples of the idea of the profile as
breaking up the regular outline of the modernist
box: the modernist envelope is confronted by its
opposite in the idea of contained volume.
In modern architecture’s free plan, columns
were usually the same size and shape as functional
grounding elements. At Casa “Il Girasole,” the
columns become figured, changing shape and
size as they move through the building, signaling
difference. The paired volumes and paired sets of
11. Casa “Il Girasole,” front facade profile.
columns speak to a formal order that is different
from an abstract or neutral column grid. The Zumthor’s use of stone or wood. Rather, material
pairing of the columns creates a play between functions here as notation, articulating difference
symmetries in two different axes while at the in a manner reminiscent of Loos’s turn-of-the-cen-
same time disrupting an abstract nine-square tury Viennese interiors. Loos juxtaposed marbles,
grid and a plaid grid of servant and served spaces. granites, woods, metals, and stuccos to articulate
In this, Moretti’s plan critiques the uniformity of their iconic value as individual materials. Loos’s
space in the free plan. The importance of these interiors are not about the richness of the materi-
two forms of notation lies in the breaking down als but their juxtaposition.
of historical continuity, which for Moretti was The lobby of Casa “Il Girasole” is a riot of
the Renaissance villa, the baroque palazzo, and materials—metal, stone, glass, wood—that obeys
the nineteenth-century hôtel-de-ville. This is an no structural or compositional logic. No dominant
evolution of the idea of the whole as a consistent material system can be discerned, and there is
relationship of parts, as would be the case with no governing color palette. The use of material
any idea of type to a condition no longer described is both notational and didactic, to call attention
by a dominant whole. to the possibility of material as text. Material
The materiality of Casa “Il Girasole” lodges elements refer back and forth to one another, yet
another critique of modernist abstraction. Material they do not represent anything other than the
here is used rhetorically, but not in the tradition mere fact of their existence. While this could be
of formal rhetoric, as material in and of itself, nor considered a form of neorealism in architecture,
for its purely phenomenological value, as in Peter in their refusal to refer to any external systems
12. Casa “Il Girasole,” base of west facade. 13. Casa “Il Girasole,” entrance.
of material meaning, the materials function patterns that deny their structural logic. The
textually. sculpted remnant of a human leg is incorporated
The stonework of the base takes on a into a window jamb as if a relic from an early
notational quality in its use of false rustica- classical sculpture had found its way into the
tion, varied patterns, and sculptural motifs. In fabric of Casa “Il Girasole.” This historicizing
Casa “Il Girasole,” the “rusticated” base turns motif triggers a thought about the past, but it
out to be a play on rustication. Rustication in a is not aimed at a nostalgic or adulatory remem-
Florentine palazzo follows a logic of mass: heavi- brance. Rather these sculptural elements are
est at the base and increasingly thinner at upper archaic and anarchic, as if the arbitrariness
levels. Countering this convention, the rustica- of everyday life, as portrayed in neorealist
tion at Casa “Il Girasole” harkens back to Giulio film, informs what Banham might consider the
Romano’s sixteenth-century Palazzo del Te in arbitrary, whimsical, and unsystematic use of
Mantua, whose paper-thin rustication does not materials. The sculptural leg has no meaning
look like stone and whose keystones seem to and could be considered purely arbitrary, but
drop out of their holding positions, questioning this is an order of arbitrariness divorced from
how the stone arch is structurally supported. an expression of will, historicism, and expres-
The state of suspension between support and sionism. Moretti’s calibrated arbitrariness calls
collapse, between heavy and paper-thin rustica- attention to its own condition as arbitrary in an
tion, calls the materiality of stone into question. internal referencing that is textual rather than
Moretti inverts the conventions of rusti- purely meaningful.
cation by putting heavy stones on thin stones, Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” uses histori-
incorporating stony blocks within window open- cal motifs to make a critical commentary on the
ings, or cutting rusticated stone in chevron formal coherence of architecture. Historicizing
14. Casa “Il Girasole,” rusticated base of west facade.
references such as the aedicular motif of the which may explain one reason why Moretti’s
facade and the rusticated textures of the base work has gone almost unnoticed in the interven-
point toward postmodern practices, yet at Casa ing years. Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” rewrites
“Il Girasole” these belong to a wholly different the conditions that suggest architecture itself,
order. Such conditions make Casa “Il Girasole” and which this book argues, relate canonic build-
both formal and textual; certain formal coher- ings to close reading. While Moretti’s building
ences are emphasized and simultaneously dis- transitions from the abstractions of modernism to
placed. In Casa “Il Girasole” Moretti does not a sensibility more closely related to neorealism,
thematize proportions, materials do not cohere it proposes methods of close reading of a differ-
into narrative, and the masses of the build- ent kind, methods no longer tied to modernism’s
ing remain a series of juxtaposed volumes and formal lexicon but rather to an undecidability of
screens, if not random notations, which replace the text. Casa “Il Girasole” is the first and per-
the formal conventions of the plan. Many of the haps the earliest exemplar of such a discourse.
possible readings are undercut by other read-
ings, and therefore do not provide any synthesis.
If the notion of a text posits the breakdown of a
decidability leading to closure or synthesis, then
the textual in architecture suggests a breakdown
in the notion of the meaningful organization of a
single narrative.
Casa “Il Girasole” has many possible con-
tingent readings as a textual work; it does not
sustain a single, dominant view of architecture,
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15. Casa “Il Girasole” in Rome sits on a nearly rect- 16. The mass of the building is cut in two through
angular block bounded by two major streets, Viale most of its center, essentially creating a U-shaped
Bruno Buozzi to the south and Via Schiaparelli to building condition. The central void creates the initial
the west. While the front facade is orthogonal to Viale appearance of an axial symmetry running through
Bruno Buozzi, the rear facade of the building is paral- the building, but the implied symmetry is belied by the
lel to its street, thus deviating at a slight angle from actual configuration of the side blocks, which are not
the front facade. Other disruptions of symmetry that parallel to each other. Rather, the volumetric sidepieces
occur in the building include the central north-south are splayed from the central axis of the building. In
axis, which is not a continuous axis and bends at the addition to marking this destabilized symmetry, the
stairs. void registers as a vertical cut in the facade.
17. The massing of Casa “Il Girasole” alludes to 18. The vertical division in the facade, as well as the
certain classical ideas: its tripartite organization com- facade’s extension beyond the body of the building,
prises a seemingly rusticated base; a middle portion produces a profile. The vertical cut creates the idea
that is accentuated in the facade as a glazed zone; and that the facade is volumetric, revealing the corner and
an upper zone that resembles a pediment crowning inboard edge at its center. Yet at the outer edges of the
the upper portions of the building. The pediment is di- facade, this presumed mass becomes an attenuated
vided by a central cut that recalls a classical aedicule. screen. On the upper three residential floors, the build-
The broken pediment is asymmetrical in that the right ing’s two long sides are fractured by three minor cuts.
piece rises slightly higher than its corresponding seg- The building thus presents a series of conditions which
ment on the left. literally and conceptually cut into the modernist box.
19. The analysis of the ground plan reveals that the 20. In Casa “Il Girasole” profile no longer defines a
front and rear facades extend beyond the building continuity; this contrasts with classical architecture,
base. Both facades are screenlike, but the front facade where profile and shape were conceptualized as one
resembles a screen cleaved in two, while the rear and the same thing. Here profile and shape are dis-
facade hangs off an intermediate boxlike volume. juncted from one another; that is, the profile is not the
Immediately apparent in the ground-floor plan are the shape of the building.
two curved walls, which disrupt the axis of symmetry
and appear to displace the staircase.
21. The facade of Casa “Il Girasole” breaks down the The void between the screen and the building mass
unity of the modernist frontal plane into a series of com- articulates the edge of the facade as a distinct element,
pressed layers. The complex articulation of these layers and creates what could be considered a gasket space
is apparent at the corners, which are no longer legible as especially apparent in the side views of the building.
singular entities. An oblique view demonstrates that the This layering, along with the deep cut in the front
facade is not just a thin plane but rather is composed of facade, further erodes the physical presence of these
three layers: a screen as the outermost layer, a void slot layers, since they fluctuate between two volumes and
between the screens, and a glazing layer. a series of layered planes.
22. For analytical purposes, it is necessary to examine 23. Other pairings involve columns in line 1 and line
the columnar organization. Columns are numbered 1 4: columns 1A/1B and 4A/4B are thin rectangles.
to 4, from left to right, and A through K from front Columns 1C/1D and 4C/4D are square columns, which
to back. Column line 1 initially appears reciprocal to are slightly smaller in column line 4. In both cases they
column line 4, and column line 2 reciprocal to column are attached in a way that makes them seem to bleed into
line 3. This sets up an initial symmetry. However, an external wall poché. Column lines 1E/1F (4E/4F)
column lines 3 and 4 relate to each other because they and 1G/1H (4G/4H) consist of paired rectangles, which
are skewed at the same angle from the orthogonal, alternately extend out into wall poché or bend into a
while column lines 1 and 2 are related because they splayed exterior plane. Columns 2D and 3D, 2E-F and
remain on the orthogonal. In column lines 2 and 3, the 3E-F, and 2G-H and 3G-H are each small square paired
A column is a slab column. Columns 2B and 3B are columns, except for the additional column beside 2D.
also slab columns that on three sides still read much In 2J and 3J there remains the slight trace of a column,
as columns. Columns 2C and 3C are different: 2C is a provided by a slight articulation in what is otherwise a
square column; 3C is a freestanding slab. seemingly solid wall.
24. An organization of paired columns occurs from the 25. The paired columns can be read as reinforcing the
front to the back. This begins with the freestanding col- rhythmic progressions from the wider column group-
umns 1A and 4A. Columns 3A and 3B begin as a pair ings in A and B at the front of the building to the more
with 2A and 2B as orthogonal and freestanding. There tightly paired groupings at the rear of the building.
is no longer an orthogonal alignment between 2A and While this progression can be read in plan, it has little
3A. Rather, 3A is slipped toward the right while remain- to do with the organization of the functional spaces. As
ing the same distance from both exterior faces. Further evidenced in the ground-floor plan, column line 3 is
pairings occur among square columns. In modern where much of the wracking, splaying, and distorting
architecture’s free plan, columns were usually the same is concentrated. This column line serves not so much
size and shape; they were ground elements. Here the col- as a reading datum as a receiving datum, not so much
umns have become figural, changing shape and size as the static place where vectors originate as the dynamic
they move through the building, signaling their internal place where vectors are recorded.
differences.
26. Ground-floor vector analyses. An analysis of the These forces suggest two different ideas of form: one
interior volumes following the column subdivisions as the product of a vector coming from the inside and
allows one to track several vectors. An erasing arc or causing a convex form; the other as produced by a
force (A) seems to push against the mass defined by vector originating outside of the space, which carves
column lines 3 and 4 until only column 3C remains, away the solid to create a convex form. Space is simul-
but in a flattened and distorted state. This erasing arc taneously positive and negative. The two curves play
(A) is joined by the partial S-curve of a second curved against one another, as the result of these forces. This
surface (B), which is also dislocated from its former is purposeful, typical of Moretti’s articulation of the
linear position. This conjunction of forces creates a active nature of space as carved away or compressed
figure that seems to have been compressed to the rear by a solid. The play between the carved out and pro-
and expanded outward to the center. The bulging part jecting space can be seen as two opposing ideas embod-
of the figure seems to affect the alignment of the main ied in the same form.
staircase with the central axis.
27. The organization of columns, alternately paired The pairing of the columns also creates a play between
and single, creates an ABABA rhythm that suggests a two abstract nine-square grids and a plaid grid of ser-
compression at the back of the building and a sense of vant and served spaces. Moretti’s idea was clearly a
extension at the front. The columnar relationships are critique of the free plan, where space was uniform.
both partial orders and symmetries.
a. c.
b. d.
28 a-d. Certain conditions on the south or front facade Traditional rustication in a Florentine palazzo obeys
on Viale Bruno Buozzi complicate a more traditional a structural logic: heavy at the base, with increasingly
reading. The facade (a) can be read as a classical, refined rustication in the higher floors. Moretti con-
vertically tripartite, rusticated base, fenestrated body, founds these conventions by placing heavy stones on
and solid cornice. However, once this general type is thin stones, and by adopting a vertical chevron pattern
accepted, deviations can be seen, for example, in the for the implied rustication (d). This chevron pattern
facade (b) in which the middle zone actually sits on indicates that the rustication is not structural, but
steel columns rather than on the base. There is an iconic. The stone base is rhetorical: it is not a Greek
articulated slot between the base and the main body. plinth, which implies a datum, nor is it in the modern
Moretti exposes the actual structural elements between idiom of piloti.
the rustication and the underside of the floor (c).
a. a.
b. b.
29 a-b. The side elevation on Via Schiaparelli compli- 30 a-b. The various types of rustication, both smooth
cates the readings already established on the front eleva- and rough, at Casa “Il Girasole” deny a structural role
tion. First, the heavy rustication continues around the for one that is notational. The diagonals of the chev-
corner, again marking the line of the structural columns ron-shaped rustication reappear in the geometry of
behind. The same paper-thin chevronlike stone pattern several textured blocks (a). The windows in the back
appears, echoing the patterning on the right front base facade register the cut of the front facade, and seem to
element. Second, the columns are again revealed, this compress the space toward the center (b).
time in the horizontal slot that runs across the top of the
facade. Moreover, the alignment of windows is partially
determined by the implied line of columns running
behind the screenlike plane of the facade.
31. Casa “Il Girasole,” second floor, axonometric view.

.
32. Casa “Il Girasole,” fourth floor, axonometric view.

33. Casa “Il Girasole,” axonometric view.

1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House. Plano, Illinois, 1951.
Mies Layout 02 08.indd 50 4/9/2008 10:52:47 AM

2. The Umbrella Diagram
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 1946–51
According to Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe lived by his
aphorism “Less is more.” Some years later, Robert Venturi, in a reply
to Mies, said, “Less is a bore.” While Venturi meant this as a pejorative
comment, it resonates differently when read through Roland Barthes’s
citation of “the boring” as a locus of resistance; the boring was a way to
stand against the rampant consumption of art by a postwar consumerist
culture. Mies’s “less is more” is a key statement for architecture; it makes
its first appearance in the Farnsworth House, where less is more in the
sense that this is not an architecture of modernist abstraction, but one
which provokes another kind of close reading. Of all the works in this book,
the Farnsworth House is the most abstract, while seemingly retaining
a modernist vocabulary and conception of space. But a close reading of
the Farnsworth House reveals important deviations from the modernist
conventions of the open plan and the expression of structure. Together
these point toward what could be considered Mies van der Rohe’s first
diagram.
All houses are traditionally thought of as a unity. The Farnsworth
House is a tour de force that denies this idea. From its detached and
oversized entry “portico” to its pervasive yet disrupted symmetries, the
Farnsworth House marks one of the beginnings of the breakdown of the
classical part-to-whole unity of the house. While for the early modernists
the house was often a place for the study of radical innovation, from Le
Corbusier’s two canonical diagrams—the Maison Dom-ino and the Maison
Citrohan—to Gerrit Rietveld’s De Stijl Schroeder House, these were still
single, definable entities. The early houses of Mies were no exceptions to
this attitude.

52 Farnsworth House
2. Farnsworth House, north elevation, 1946.
From his early Brick and Concrete Country postmodernist, use of architectural elements to
Houses to the Lange House, Mies worked out create a visual illusion, and the alternative use of
many of his later large-scale projects at a resi- the column and wall to provoke a critical reading
dential scale. But the Farnsworth House disrupts of modernity. This confrontation, from what had
this cycle; it is no longer a single, definable entity, been containers in Mies’s early abstract building
and the little-mentioned detached entry platform denying the idea of dwelling, to containers that
produces the most poignant clue to this idea. were no longer only abstractions, produces a
Mies’s rejection of the part-to-whole unity is more diagram of a different sort—one which is meta-
subtle than Walter Gropius’s and Marcel Breuer’s phorically figured—initiated at the Farnsworth
obvious bi-nuclear houses, which are conceptu- House.
ally two-thirds of a palazzo type. The Farnsworth It is the interplay between column, wall,
House does not function as a fragment, but pro- and horizontal plane that marks the evolution of
poses another type of reading altogether. Mies’s thinking, beginning with his early houses,
Mies’s idea of building—and in particular, which emphasized the formal and organizational
of building a house—can be contrasted with role of the vertical wall plane. The Brick Country
Heidegger’s idea of dwelling as an object in a House, for example, used vertical walls extending
specific place. Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and pinwheeling out from a central vortex (à la De
concerned the rootedness to a place: site specific- Stijl), while the later houses of the 1930s—such as
ity, the grounding of the subject, and ultimately the Tugendhat House in Brno and the prototypi-
the presentness of presence. For Mies, dwelling cal courtyard houses—were composed of vertical
is an abstract series of conditions and, in the case planes which no longer extended out from the
of the Farnsworth House, the “dwelling” itself main volume, but rather defined and enclosed
offers the opportunity to enact a critical reading space. The first two houses, the Brick Country
of modernity. The Farnsworth House can be seen House and the Concrete Country House, were
as a transition from Mies’s earlier work to his later both load-bearing concepts without columns.
work; it is a hinge between what modernism was These houses were essentially walls that did not
in Mies and what will appear postmodern in his enclose volumes in a boxlike rectangle; the space
work. The shift with the Farnsworth House also is fractured by the way the walls extended out
sets up the difference between a scenographic, or into the landscape. Following from these two

Farnsworth House 53
3. Barcelona Pavilion, 1929. 4. Tugendhat House, Brno, 1928-30.
houses, Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion introduced a opposed to structure itself; and two, the disasso-
new set of questions regarding the relationship ciation of the column from its use as a spatial inte-
of column, wall, and roof. The walls here are no ger. The Farnsworth House is the first of Mies’s
longer load-bearing, rather the columns become many projects to follow that questions the truth
the load-bearing elements; the enclosing elements of what is seen as structure.
are distinguished from the tectonic elements. The Such use of the column can be related to
pavilion could be called an open plan, as opposed Alberti’s critique of Vitruvius, which Alberti
to a Raumplan or even a free plan, because the articulated in his De Re Aedificatoria (Ten Books
column in this space is conceived differently from on Architecture), regarding Vitruvius’s three
Corbusian columns, which allowed for the free basic principles of architecture: commodity, firm-
movement of enclosing walls. ness, and delight. Commodity was usefulness,
The Farnsworth House is a transitional point firmness was structural utility, and delight was
that moves Mies’s idea in several new directions. beauty. Alberti said that all architecture is firmi-
First, unlike Le Corbusier, Mies had no diagram tas because all architecture must stand up, and
until the Farnsworth House. This, it could be suggests that Vitruvius was stressing firmitas
argued, is an important distinction between the not in reference to standing up, but in reference
two architects. The Farnsworth House, however, to the appearance of standing up—in other words,
sets the groundwork for a diagram, and in this as the sign of structure. Thus a column or a wall
sense it functions as an incipient diagram. Second, has two functions: it stands up, and it represents
at the Farnsworth House Mies is no longer deal- the idea of standing up.
ing with the corner or the column in space; rather, The three categories of signs proposed by
at Farnsworth he introduces the use of outboard C.S. Peirce are useful in characterizing Mies’s
columns, which rethinks structure in proposing use of the column: the icon, which has a visual and
the idea of the sign of the column. Mies’s use of the formal similitude to its object; the symbol, which
column suggests a movement from the abstract has a cultural and an agreed-upon conventional
to the real: the sign of the column is a real column, meaning in reference to its object; and the index,
exposed on the outside of a real floor slab. Thus which describes a prior activity of the object.
the Farnsworth House poses two questions: one, Peirce also is one of the first to use the term
the question of the representation of structure as diagram, which for him is an icon having a visual

54 Farnsworth House
5. Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-ino, 1914. 6. Barcelona Pavillion, plan, 1929.
similitude with its object. As a sign of standing tinguished from those of Le Corbusier in that it
up, the column embodies a double condition: a makes a conceptual distinction between the hori-
column is an icon that looks like a column, and it zontal floor plane and the horizontal roof plane
also is the sign or index of being a column. In the while at the same time denying any horizontal
Peircian triad of icon, symbol, and index, a column continuum.
is both an icon and an index. This condition of Mies’s evolution of the column section can
simultaneity—the column used simultaneously as also be distinguished from Le Corbusier’s use of
a critique and a representation of structure—dis- the column. In Le Corbusier’s work, the column
rupts a single reading and provokes both formal was a didactic mark that punctuated space in the
(as a representation of structure) and conceptual free plan. Usually these punctuations were round,
(as a critique of structure) readings. allowing space to flow freely around them. The
These simultaneous readings of the column Dom-ino diagram does not reveal much about
informed what could be considered Mies’s incipi- structural intention, but expresses intentionality
ent diagram. This diagram responds on several about the continuum of space, set up in part by
levels to two other preexisting diagrams in the locations of columns, which are flush from the
modern architecture: the Dom-ino and Citrohan ends and set back from the sides equally, imply-
diagrams proposed by Le Corbusier. The Maison ing a cut on both ends. Le Corbusier, for the most
Dom-ino illustrated Le Corbusier’s “Five Points” part, used round and square columns relative to
as well as instituted an idea of the possibility of their placement. If he wanted to stress the edge,
a spatial continuum in the horizontal dimension. he would use a square column flush with the
The Maison Dom-ino presents a diagram as a hor- facade; if he set the column back from the glass
izontal sandwich of space, in that the floor and the plane, he would typically use a round column.
roof are conceptually equivalent integers. Mies’s Mies’s columns are set back from the wall plane in
architectural development is in one sense a sus- the Barcelona Pavilion, but are also cruciform in
tained critique of the Dom-ino diagram’s notion of section. The cruciform column section illustrates
a horizontal continuum of space. The Farnsworth Mies’s position between Adolf Loos’s Raumplan
House proposes what could be considered Mies’s and Le Corbusier’s free plan: the cruciform stain-
first diagram: the umbrella, a critical diagram dis- less steel columns define a series of cubic volumes

Farnsworth House 55
7. Farnsworth House, sketch plan.
in articulating the corners of each spatial unit. The Mies places the columns outboard. He seems to
chrome plating on the columns serves as a mirror, suspend the roof between the columns, suggest-
inverting conventional square columns: that which ing that another strategy is intended—one which
is typically solid—the actual corner of a space occurs in many of the buildings that follow. At
defined by a real column—becomes a mirror or a the Farnsworth House, the horizontal floor slab
reflection of the space and thus becomes a void. and roof are framed between the columns, so the
The real column in some sense becomes a virtual columns are no longer supporting the roof, but
column, even while it continues to define a spatial rather the roof and floor are slung like hammocks
unit. For Mies, columns define and circumscribe between the columns. Mies’s postwar work rep-
spatial units; for Le Corbusier, columns allow resents a transition from the column as either
space to pivot and act as a fulcrum rather than load-bearing or marking a spatial quadrant to
as corners. For Mies, the column and the corner a condition where the column is the support of
become one didactic model, from the Barcelona a suspension structure, in which the horizontal
Pavilion to the buildings at the Illinois Institute members are hung from the outboard structural
of Technology (IIT). The position in space and the columns and the overhead roof beams. This will
sectional properties of the column at the corner lead to a subsequent development, in which the
frames a conceptual discourse for Mies. beams are articulated above and the roof hung
Yet at the Farnsworth House, the corner from these beams, giving rise to what will become
would seem to be a nonthematic element: the col- the Miesian umbrella diagram. The metaphorical
umns are no longer at the corner, neither gridding umbrella is a diagram in which the roof and its
space internally nor holding the outboard corners. appended columns seem to be hovering above a
Mies’s initial sketches for the Farnsworth House podium base. The Farnsworth House is the first
demonstrate his intention to use the columns in a realization of this umbrella diagram.
different way, namely outboard of the floor slab. The Farnsworth House is also perhaps the
It is possible to assume that the outboard columns most didactic critique of the column and the wall
are more of a structural expression, that the as merely structural elements. This building
columns are functioning as structural elements. has often been misread as an articulation of the
But this is not the case. This is the first time that principles of Le Corbusier because of its seem-

56 Farnsworth House
8. Crown Hall, IIT Chicago, 1950–56. 9. Alumni Memorial Hall, IIT Chicago, 1947.
ing evolution of the Dom-ino diagram, or as the structure. This is a radical idea for the late 1940s
progenitor of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. In and early 1950s; it is a radical idea for Mies, and
either case, these attributions are problematic, breaks with his use of the idea of the column as a
if not superficial. The Farnsworth House is not clear indication of tectonics. Instead the column
about trabeation, but rather engages the look of reads as both structure and the sign of its dia-
trabeation in bringing the columns outboard and grammatic condition.
suspending the floor and roof slabs between the The plinth and the horizontal roof plane are
columns. again conceptually different in Mies’s space as
The idea of the sign of structure at the opposed to Le Corbusier’s space. Whereas Le
Farnsworth House is also a precursor of the Corbusier’s ground plane is separated from the
column-over-column detail at the Seagram ground conceptually and floats, like the roof plane,
Building and also at IIT, where Mies adds I-sec- Mies’s ground plane is tied to the ground while
tions and H-sections at the corner and on the the roof floats free. If there are precedents for the
facade to mask the actual structure. This the- differentiation of space between ground and roof
matic in Mies’s postwar work engages structure at the Farnsworth House, one would include the
that is the sign of structure; what is seen is not Resor House of 1937−8. The model of the Resor
the actual column, but a mask of the structure. House is the first indication of a new attitude in
The Farnsworth House initiates this argumenta- Mies’s work. The house seems to float above the
tion: when the column is placed outboard of the ground, though it actually spans a ravine and is
slabs, it still acts as a column, but not as straight- anchored at both ends. The house itself is a virtual
forwardly, as in the case of directly countering podium that reappears in the Farnsworth House,
vertical load. Because the slabs are being held up with its suspension a few feet off the ground. This
through the suspension of plates coming off the lifting of the house has a different value than Le
column, this allows the box-frame of the house to Corbusier’s Dom-ino diagram. For Le Corbusier
straddle and be suspended between the columnar it signals the infinite horizontal extension of

Farnsworth House 57
10. Farnsworth House, plan 1946-51. 11. 50 by 50 House, plan, 1950-1951.
space; for Mies, it sets out the ultimate distinction above the roof line at IIT’s Crown Hall and at
between the ground and the roof, leading eventu- Mannheim, suspending the roof like a giant para-
ally to the umbrella diagram. chute. Clearly the National Gallery in Berlin is
The Farnsworth House also had important the last, and perhaps most subtle, in the line of
implications for the 50 by 50 House that immed- progeny from the Farnsworth House. Given the
iately followed in 1951. First, at the 50 by 50 gallery’s stone base and projecting roof line flush
House, there are only four outboard columns, with the exterior column line, the umbrella effect
which appear at the centers of the sides of the is finally presented as concept and not image.
square, providing the building with a clear rota- In both the National Gallery and IIT, the
tional quality while framing the corners on the idea of dwelling, or use, is clearly not what is
diagonal. Second, the ground-floor plane is no at stake, since Mies sinks the primary functions
longer articulated; the glass box sits on what below ground. Their envelopes function as an
seems to be a natural plinth, which is clearly icon of a building that will be used as an archi-
distinguished from the pristine white line of the tectural school or as a museum. On entering
roof. Together, the roof line and single columns Crown Hall at IIT, for example, one notices little
produce an image of an umbrella-like structure. on the iconic plane that involves its use as an
What follows, less literally but no less conceptu- architectural school: all of the offices and studios,
ally, are the Mannheim Theater project, Crown whether they need light or not, are placed below
and Alumni Memorial Halls at IIT. In these proj- the plinth. Similarly, there is little at the plinth
ects, the columns are brought outboard, not so level at the National Gallery that represents its
much to show them holding the roof up but rather use as a museum.
to show them as representing another kind of At the Farnsworth House, with Mies’s care-
spatial attitude articulated in Mies’s umbrella ful manipulation and placement of the forms,
diagram. The 50 by 50 House also manifests the it becomes clear that a scenographic condition
transition to the exposed steel truss running between the viewer and the building is not what

58 Farnsworth House
12. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1966.
is desired. Rather, a reading of the relationships a complex and dense relationship of elements
between column, floor, plinth, and roof other than that, while they appear scenographic, produce a
as a series of modernist abstractions gives this critique of any single reading. The different axes
building its critical dimension. To further this formed by a series of symmetrical parts indicate
idea, Mies establishes shifting axes of symmetry that the parts do not create a whole. What seems
deployed among the three disparate entities of to be a classical and symmetrical whole is rather
the Farnsworth House: the entry platform, the broken down into asymmetrical dynamic parts.
house platform, and the glass box. While the stairs Mies’s play against classical symmetries con-
of the entry platform are aligned with the stairs tinues with his treatment of the glass surfaces. At
to the house, the intermediate platform itself is the Farnsworth House, the glass is dematerialized
slipped off this potential axis. Similarly, the glass and there are no horizontals to articulate a wall
enclosure is asymmetrically placed in relation plane. The outboard columns of the Farnsworth
to the floor slab, yet symmetrically placed with House do not go above the line of the finished
respect to the centerline of the column grid. This roof but just up to it, articulating the difference
sliding or oscillating movement between the glass, between structure and finished surface. This can
mullion, columns, floor slab, and plinth produces be contrasted with Johnson’s Glass House, which,

Farnsworth House 59
whether trying to break away from a Miesian or a

Corbusian space, basically defines a classical ver-
tical surface with the marking of a chair rail in the
vertical plane. There is no chair rail in the vertical
plane at the Farnsworth House. Johnson, both for
the sake of his furniture but also to differentiate
his ideas, is interested in the glass as a plane or
membrane, as opposed to Mies’s interest in glass
as a void. Johnson’s intent is to render the sur-
face as a vertical plane, while at the Farnsworth
House, Mies renders it as an absence.
The shift at the Farnsworth House registers
the difference between a scenographic represen-
tation linked to postmodernism and the use of the
column as a critical reading of modernity’s idea of a
spatial continuum. The Farnsworth House stages
this confrontation between what in Mies’s early
building was used to deny the image of dwelling,
and the Farnsworth House, where the elements
are no longer abstractions. The organization of
column, walls, and slabs become real but no less
critical counters in the design, which proposes an
implied real structure against the sign of struc-
ture; columns read not for their tectonic truthful-
ness, or for their visual composition, but for their
condition as a sign of a conceptual diagram.

60 Farnsworth House
13. The organization of the column grid at the 14. Each slab is also positioned symmetrically within
Farnsworth House and its entry platform produces the column grid, yet the center of the main slab is not
an AAAA four-bay sequence. Each bay is equal in aligned with the column grid. The columns supporting
size. The edge of the enclosing glass wall falls sym- the entry platform are aligned with the column grid
metrically between the right two bays, extending a of the house, yet the platform itself is slid off the axis
half-module beyond each column line. established by the floor plane.

Farnsworth House 61
15. The glass enclosure is symmetrically placed within 16. The play of the two centers is an aspect of the
the framework of the columns. The center of the glass dynamic of the Farnsworth House. The location of the
enclosure is aligned with the column line. The glass glass enclosure, in coming to the edge of one end of the
enclosure, therefore, produces a second center located floor slab but not to the other, while seemingly assy-
along the middle column line, while the center of the metrical, defines a symmetry about the middle column.
floor plane lies along the mullion line. This establishes These two symmetries also define closure, and anchor
a tension between the glass enclosure’s center and that what would seem to be the potential extendability of
of the floor plane. the building.

62 Farnsworth House
17. The Farnsworth House does not present a horizon- is connected to the ground by the entry platform. The
tal sandwich of space in the manner of Le Corbusier’s movement from the ground level up the stairs to the
Dom-ino diagram. The lower slab is raised off the entry platform and up to entrance on the main floor is
ground on stub columns, but it does not echo the pre- perpendicular to the grain of the house.
cepts of the Dom-ino diagram because the floor slab

Farnsworth House 63
a. b.
18 (a-b). The progression of movement at the Farns- At the Farnsworth House, the perpendicular move-
worth House is significant, emphasizing Mies’s trans- ment resembles that of the subject entering the Maison
formation of vertical and horizontal surfaces in Dom-ino (a), as opposed to that of the Maison Citrohan
response to Le Corbusier’s diagrams. (b), which is parallel to the movement of entry.

64 Farnsworth House
19. The traditional relationship of post to beam is 20. The attachment of the mullions to the corner pro-
confounded by the outboard columns, with no obvious duces what could be considered a positive inboard
fastening system, but rather a carefully detailed set corner, thereby inverting the conventional form of the
of discreet connections, holds the horizontal slabs in corner.
place.

Farnsworth House 65
21. Mies’s corner reads as two entities fused together, 22. The two sets of mullions at the corner produce an
with the trace of their joining still legible: the mullions outboard L-shaped condition, creating a void at the
are compressed together to articulate the corner. outboard corner.

66 Farnsworth House
a.
b.
c.

Farnsworth House 67
d.
e.
23 (a-e). The existing column arrangement at the of the fascia plane (b and c); columns organized simi-
Farnsworth House (a). Possible alternate arrange- larly to those of the Dom-ino diagram (d); and doubled
ments include columns aligned with the inner edge columns at the corners of the slab (e).

68 Farnsworth House
24. Farnsworth House, exploded axonometric of slabs and columns.

Farnsworth House 69
25. Farnsworth House, exploded axonometric view.

70 Farnsworth House
26. Farnsworth House, axonometric view.

1. Louis I. Kahn, Adler House. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1954–1955.
4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic Space
Louis I. Kahn, Adler & DeVore Houses, 1954–55
In an essay on Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Maurice

Blanchot raises the question of narrative time and its disruption. While
there is a chronological time in narrative, Proust interweaves another
form of time which Blanchot describes as another possibility of time
brought back not as a memory but as an actual event. Blanchot quotes
from Proust: “The footsteps that stumble on the irregular cobblestones of
the Guermantes Way are suddenly the same footsteps that stumbled over
the uneven flagstones of the Piazza of San Marco.” These footsteps are not
just a double, or an echo of a past traverse. They evoke another sensation,
one which does not take the form of a synchronic linear memory, but
becomes a diachronic, nonlinear, and simultaneous experience. According
to Blanchot, the Venice and Guermantes moments should not be considered
separately, as a past and a present, but as a single presence that harbors
a sense of absence. The incompatibility of these two moments creates a
sense of simultaneity, which Blanchot suggests is a sensation that suspends
and neutralizes even narrative time itself. The simultaneity, according to
Blanchot, comprises the “then” of the past and the “here” of the present.
These times resemble two instances of the “now,” superposed in the
conjunction of two simultaneous presents which alter time in a narrative
sense. This diachronic time disrupts the traditional synchronic condition
of both a linear time of reading and the linear time of the story.
In literature, the time of the action of reading and the time of the
narrative are not the same. Yet unlike literature, architecture is
thought to presume a single time: the experience of the building and the
conceptualizing of the building are understood as one and the same.
104 Adler & DeVore Houses
2. Adler and DeVore Houses, elevations, 1954.
A building unfolds in a linear manner as a person The narrative of time that exists in a build-
walks in and around the space to come to under- ing will always be constructed in real space,
stand the building. The time of “reading” is dif- which is experienced as a narrative space—that
ferent for a reader of literature than it is for a is, by walking in and around a building. One way
reader of architecture. Time is only imagined that architecture can suspend the time of the
in the space of literature, but in architecture it narrative is by superposing on it another time.
is actually experienced in space, and because While this may seem an appropriate concept for
the time of experience in architecture is linear, an architecture of close reading, such an idea
architecture is associated with synchronic time. has rarely been considered in the work of Louis
Blanchot suggests that the disruption elicited by Kahn. In the Adler and DeVore Houses of 1954–
a narrative’s simultaneous moments represents 55, unlike in many of his other projects, Kahn
such a diachronic moment in actual space. The achieves what could be considered an architectur-
question for architecture involves eliciting that al text in diachronic space. This is brought about
disruptive moment or diachronic time: in other by the superposition of classical and modern
words, considering Blanchot’s reading of Proust space; that neither of these “times” dominates
in architectural terms, can architecture, like lit- results in a dislocation of moments or, in other
erature, propose affective moments in which the terms, a disjunction that is experienced in space.
viewer is suddenly freed of the ultimate move- In the Adler and DeVore Houses, Kahn presents
ment of time toward death, where one can expe- architecture both as a complex object and as the
rience some other kind of time, a more pure state potential for the subject to experience the object
that exists somewhere between the viewing sub- as both a real space and an imaginary space. Both
ject and the object itself? conditions are present and can be read, each in
Adler & DeVore Houses 105
3. Trenton Bathhouse, New Jersey, 1954–59. 4. Trenton Bathhouse, axonometric view.
turn displacing the other. It is this unresolved pattern of square columns within square enclo-
moment in the Adler and DeVore Houses, which sures. Kahn suggests that the houses “grow out
are themselves suspended in real time between of the same order,” but that their designs are
the Trenton Bathhouse and the Richards Medical different. These statements by Kahn imply an
Center, that makes these two houses different origin as a unity and a sameness, which belies
from much of Kahn’s other work. It is in the con- the disjunctive conditions lodged in these two
text of the denial of axial symmetries and part- projects. Kahn actually produces two diagrams
to-whole relationships evident in much of Kahn’s in each of these houses, one a classical, tripartite,
later work that these differences lie. nine-square diagram and the other a modernist
Thus the Adler and DeVore Houses can asymmetrical diagram. The dual diagram coun-
be seen to articulate an alternate internal logic: ters the idea of a singular origin, just as these
first, as a conscious, didactic proposal against superposed organizations deny a beginning in
the free plan of modern architecture, and a particular historical moment. The denial of a
second, as a critique of modern architecture. It single and identifiable point of origin also begins
is significant that the drawings for the Adler and to critique the notion of the classical part-to-
DeVore Houses were published in Perspecta whole relationship in its denial of a single uni-
3 (1955) in a short article titled “Two Houses,” fied whole. A series of potential points of origin
which stressed the underlying geometric order suggests the undecidability of relationships
of both projects. Each was conceived as a clus- between parts, which therefore no longer can be
ter of squares, according to Kahn, and each is subsumed within a clearly definable whole.
represented with an emphasis on its columns, A variety of historical moments can be dis-
as if the houses were essentially an abstract cerned in Kahn’s plans for these houses. The
5. Adler House, preliminary plan. 6. John Hejduk, Texas House 4, 1954–63.
European influence of the late 1940s and early despite their appearance, are not load-bearing;
1950s is evident; Le Corbusier’s Maison Jaoul, for the actual steel structure is just visible between
example, is one such possible model, as a brick, the masonry and the roof. This is a self-referenc-
wall-bearing structure whose barrel vault has ing notation of the disjunction between the section
dispensed with the flat roof of modernism. The of the roof and that of the plan; in other words, an
hipped roofs of Kahn’s Trenton Bathhouse, as articulated system in section, which evolves out
well as its emphatic materiality, are clearly ante- of an extrusion in plan. There is no sectional dis-
cedents to the Adler and DeVore Houses, given placement. If in Le Corbusier the section is often
that initial sketches of both houses similarly have the site of the displacement of the subject, Kahn’s
hipped roofs. The Trenton Bathhouse is the first Trenton Bathhouse produces no such disturbance
example in America of a massive brick and con- in section, which, it could be argued, fits within
crete structure denying the free plan and dynam- the pragmatic tradition and utilitarian organiza-
ic asymmetries of modernism with a classicizing tion of space in American architecture.
nine-square plan. While only a small portion of Materials are expressed in the Trenton proj-
the Trenton Bathhouse was built, its master plan ect, which eschews the use of a surface veneer.
was radical in deploying a plaid grid, a Beaux- The corner pier structures and wall are made
Arts grid of servant and served spaces with an of concrete blocks. The wall plane of the corner
ABABAB rhythm in its overall organization, pier structures is made of the same material as
rather than the homogenous space of the mod- the corner, and contributes to the sense that
ernist grid. Kahn uses the particular alignment the pavilions appear the same from the corner
of the column within its masonry enclosure to dif- as from a frontal view, denying the picture or
ferentiate the variegated bays that constitute the frontal plane. The bathhouse pavilions are nei-
plaid grid. The structure is articulated with a cer- ther Greek (conceptualized from a perspectival
tain redundancy because the large masonry units, view) nor Roman (conceptualized from a fron-
7. DeVore House, plan. 8. John Hejduk, Wall House, 1968–74.
tal plane); here the point of view of the subject producing what seems to be the fragmentation
becomes irrelevant. This disruption of specific of a former nine-square grid. Yet attempts to fit
points of view in the Trenton Bathhouse’s nine- the pavilion units back into a unified organization
square plan foregrounds the destabilization that such as a nine-square are frustrated and elude
becomes manifest in the plans of the Adler and any stable originary part-to-whole relationship.
DeVore Houses. The Adler House maintains both of these ideas:
The Adler House stands as a critique of the the whole as the sum of its parts, and the impos-
bi-nuclear houses of Walter Gropius and Marcel sibility of the whole; the whole is made impossible
Breuer. In these bi-nuclear schemes, one enters by the different shearings and slippages resulting
in the middle space between two pavilions; on from the superposition of a modernist plan and
one side is the public space and on the other is a classical nine-square parti. That neither plan is
the private space. These modernist bi-nuclear made dominant recalls the disruption generated
houses were essentially a misreading of classi- by the diachronic idea of time in Blanchot’s read-
cal architecture, in that in a classical parti, the ing of Proust.
void between the two pavilions would never The plan of the Adler House registers this
have been entered. Kahn, who understood this, superposition of the modernist and Beaux-Arts
maintains vestiges of a bi-nuclear notation in schemas, which implies a transformation not from
the Adler House, which is a combination of a a single original state but from several possible
series of pavilions along the lines of the Trenton originary conditions. This transformation leaves
Bathhouse with a fracturing that does not occur traces that can be read in the resulting plan. The
in the work of Gropius or Breuer. A first sketch movement in the Adler House’s square units pro-
with nine-square and axial symmetry clearly has duces a shearing motion and introduces two con-
echoes of the Trenton Bathhouse. Later sketches cepts: the idea of a grain to the space and the
demonstrate the fracturing of this organization, idea of time in its process. Yet while the square
9. Adler House, plans.
units of the plan themselves have no direction- ard or an arbitrary organization of pavilions, this is
ality, their varied motions away from possible not the case. Through a purposeful manipulation,
points of origin always occur along a horizontal Kahn produces the dislocations that articulate a
axis. The square columns and their groupings to text of diachronic spaces in the architecture of the
form rectangles imply a grain and directionality Adler House.
to the implied movement of the pavilion units. The DeVore House similarly resembles
In the Adler House, the horizontal motion of the the record of a process that has been frozen at a
units remains discontinuous, as if several disloca- moment in time; it alludes to a possible origin but
tions from a seeming origin have occurred over frustrates any direct reading of such origins. This
time, even though that origin in itself cannot be can be best understood in comparison to both John
fixed. The overall arrangement of square units Hejduk’s Wall Houses and his Texas Houses, with
comprising the Adler House resembles an orga- which the Adler and DeVore Houses are contem-
nization of pavilion units intermittently sliding poraries, though which came first is of little rel-
off the nine-square grid, yet their asymmetrical evance in this context. Their similarities reflect
placement confirms a modern spatial arrange- a shared set of ideas also present in the early
ment. The interior grid of the house reverts to drawings for the Vanna Venturi House (chapter
a Beaux-Arts plaid grid, and thereby decenters 5). Like the Adler House, Hejduk’s Texas Houses
the nine-square grid parti. This is one of many of use a classical nine-square parti as their basis.
the embedded oppositions at work in the Adler Alternatively, Hejduk’s Wall Houses and Kahn’s
House. If the house at first seems to be haphaz- DeVore House focus on the relationship of the
10. DeVore House, partial plan.
pavilion to the wall, which in and of itself is the- assumes a metaphysical presence as the central
matized as a didactic element to which the pavil- element in the formulation of the perceptual and
ions respond. In the DeVore House, the placement navigational intelligibility of the design.
of each of its pavilion units seems to respond to In drawing attention to this moment,
the wall, and the shape of its columns further Hejduk and Kahn set up a tension in the archi-
implies a directionality in relation to the wall. In tecture that questions the common understand-
both Hejduk’s Wall Houses and Kahn’s DeVore ing of the dialectical difference between inside
House, the wall performs as a divider, separat- and outside. Kahn’s DeVore House also fuses two
ing public from private and bucolic from built; it different geometries and two different moments
also becomes a threshold marking the moment of in history, the classical and the modern. What can
crossing. The wall simultaneously differentiates be more evocative of the modern than a wall knif-
and makes intelligible; it separates but also links. ing through the heart of the house, which is not
Despite its obvious materiality, it embodies sev- a modern house, but one that has classical echoes
eral seemingly contradictory abstract principles, in its nine-square grid? If a wall is usually read
establishing a narrative sequence for the subject as a divider between an interior and an exterior,
passing through the house: while the subject is once a person passes through the wall at DeVore,
aware of a continual breach of that threshold, this that conditioning has been problematized: has
awareness focuses the spatio-temporal emphasis one left the structure or entered it? How space is
on the moment of crossing. Thus, dividing dif- experienced in an interval of time is part of how
ferent times and spaces, the datum of the wall the time of the object is usually revealed to the
point for future work. From these two houses it is a

short jump in scale to the Richards Medical Center,
1957–65, which is a project made up of a sequence of
pavilions, extruded and positioned as if unwinding
out of a tight spiral. Richards is also a pavilion proj-
ect of servant and served elements extruded into
the third dimension. If the pavilions of the Adler and
DeVore Houses functioned as units marking tactical
shifts across the physical threshold of a wall or the
implied/conceptual threshold of a nine-square grid,
then the pavilions of the Richards Medical Center
are made to serve a picturesque rather than didactic
function. Kahn’s sketches of the Richards Medical
Center transform and extrude the pavilions to pro-
duce a romantic skyline. Each of the three main
towers is a volume articulated by thin columns,
with the servant spaces pulled off into smaller, sep-
arate towers. The H-shaped columns reiterate the
nine-square organization of each volume and form
a plaid grid. Unlike the Adler and DeVore Houses,
the structure frames the middle tier of each side,
leaving a void at the corner. This voided condition
recalls the Exeter Library and other Kahn proj-
11. Richards Medical Center, 1957–65. ects. At Richards, the two conditions contradict
subject. Because the subject is continually oper- each other: the alignment of the pavilions sets up a
ating around the wall and making reference to it, frontal organization in plan, yet the entry occurs at
the only “inside” is that point in the interior of the corner. The arrangement is both orthogonal and
the wall itself. Everywhere else is outside of the diagonal, a combination of Greek and Roman space
wall, outside of its inside, but constantly aware that becomes a Kahn trope. The countermanding
of that moment of inside. A “time of inside” is pavilion alignments, operating systematically in
thereby established in relation to the “time of the Adler and DeVore Houses, become at Richards
outside.” The actual “time of enclosure” then more graphic, and ultimately expressionistic. The
becomes infinitesimally small relative to the con- legibility of the Richards servant and served spaces
tinuum of which it is a part. Thus, one of the main marks another shift from the undecidability of the
characteristics of both of these works is the col- pavilions in the houses.
lision of time narratives within the boundary of Kahn participates in the pre-1968 attempt to
the wall itself. rethink the originary premises of modernism that
The Adler and DeVore Houses can be con- characterize works belonging to this first paradigm
sidered an inflection point in Kahn’s work, for shift. His work here represents a split between the
they stand both outside of the traditional inter- unconscious theoretical propositions apparent in
pretations of his work and become the starting the work of both Mies and Moretti, and the seem-
ingly conscious theoretical reversals articulated

in that of Le Corbusier. The movement toward
real materials as well as the reintegration of clas-
sical schemata, is an expression in each of these
houses of a critique of abstraction. This critique
involves a new interest in what resembles incom-
pleteness and fragmentation of form. With today’s
hindsight it is possible to suggest that the shifts,
dislocations, and superpositions in the Adler
and DeVore Houses ultimately could be consid-
ered a questioning of the classical part-to-whole
relationship.
12. The organization of the Adler House suggests that 13. The organization of the pavilions seem to originate
the house has a conceptual origin in a nine-square grid, in the nine-square grid. While the lowest row (open
five pavilion units and five square outdoor spaces. space, pavilion unit, open space) can be conceptually
returned to such an origin, the center row (open space,
pavilion, pavilion, open space) and the upper row
(pavilion, halved open space, pavilion, open space)
cannot.
B
B
B B
A B
B
A
A
A B B
B B
A A
A
A
A B A A B A B B A B B A
14. The organization of the pavilions thus enables 15. Equally, the modern BBA arrangement emphasizes
multiple readings. The Adler House’s internal logic an asymmetry of organization and can be adapted to
depends on the simultaneity of two dissimilar systems the Adler House by removing and shifting pavilions.
involving the open spaces (A) and the pavilion The overall arrangement of the pavilion units presents
units (B). The ideal ABA nine-square is adapted to a superposition of Beaux-Arts and modern plans.
accommodate the Adler House plan by removing a Their combined product allows for a double reading
pavilion and shifting them. Although the plaid ABA of the house as an ABA arrangement and a BBA
plan derives directly from the Beaux-Arts tradition, arrangement, in other words, as both Beaux-Arts and
this reading emphasizes the house’s modernist modern organizations.
asymmetry.
16–17. There are two ways to locate the Adler House is chosen, one part of the scheme is outside of the nine-
within a classical nine-square-grid; yet each is an im- square diagram. When the outside part is the basis for
perfect fit, with all or a portion of a pavilion falling out- the basic diagram, the other part moves outside, thus
side of this idealized schema. When one interpretation there is no stable single diagram for the Adler House.
18. In general, the piers provide points of alignment 19. However, an anomalous condition (highlighted in
for one nine-square diagram, which responds to the red) can be defined by the single piers of the uppermost
single, double, and triple pier conditions. row. While this space remains a void in the project,
there is a conceptual overlapping of an implied unit
bounded by piers and open space.
is
ax
y-
x-
ax
is
20. The column grid of the Adler House has a prob- pier by itself, the pier doubled along the x-axis, the
lematic pier arrangement within the nine-square grid. pier doubled on the y-axis, and the intersection of the
There are four different pier organizations which con- two doubled axes, which creates an L-shaped corner
tribute to a striation of space in the Adler House: the pier condition.
21. The dimensions of the window mullions and piers 22. This thirty-six square sub-grid accommodates both
of each pavilion unit constitute a notational system nine-square and four-square organizations and there-
for subdividing each pavilion. This minor grid is by allows a double-reading of interior spaces that is
composed of thirty-six squares. also possible for the overall organization of the pavil-
ion units. This allows the doubled piers, for example,
to remain within the definition of the overall sub-grid.
23. Adler House, ground floor, axonometric view.

24. Adler House, roof level, axonometric view.

a. b.
25 (a-b). The pavilion units of the DeVore House 26. Four actual units (B–E) and one implied unit (A)
are organized in relation to a wall. Origins can be stand on one side of the wall, while a single similar
attributed to classical ABCBA (a) and modernist pavilion unit (F) is located on the other side of the
asymmetrical schemes (b). wall. The leftmost two units (A and B) are aligned but
separated by a gap that functions as an implied wall.
a. b.
27 (a-b). Unit (E) is separated by a space equivalent to 28. Units A and B are separated by a narrow slot of
half of the unit dimension (a) from the adjacent unit space, while unit D is separated from the wall by a
D, but is the only unit physically attached to the wall. space (b) that is equivalent to half of space (a). The
Units B, C, and D are aligned in a parallel manner dimension of a pavilion unit is double that of space
along a wall that is breached by the C and F blocks. (a). A logic of spacing emerges in which spaces of
The outermost units (A, E) are aligned with the wall. dimension (a) interlock and frame the units in a plaid
Units B and D shear from the mass created by unit C, grid.
establishing a grain perpendicular to the wall.
a. b.
a. b.
29 (a-b). Units A and B are separated by a space, 30 (a-b). A single square column located centrally
yet it is a pochéd area (the fireplace) that maintains between units C and F indexes the presence of the
their physical separation (a). Rectangular columns existing wall. One of the middle columns is unaligned,
define the relationship between units B, C, and D and but in another reading it aligns with an outboard
establish a grain running in parallel to the wall (b). column to produce a double column in unit C (a).
Unit F is “rotated” so that its two open sides suggest a
movement producing a third shearing condition.
31. A strategy of mirroring and rotation emerges in Units A and E seem to mirror each other across a line
the play of units, spaces, and walls. Unit C is mirrored perpendicular to the existing wall and established by
in unit F across the presence of the virtual wall that the square column between units C and F. The units in
is established by the square column aligned with the the DeVore House can be read as a series of shearing and
existing wall. However, the grain produced by the rotational movements. The effect of the superposition
orientation of rectangular columns also suggests a of these multiple systems both reinforces and displaces
rotational relationship. the relationships of unit to wall to conceptual grid.
32. DeVore House, ground-floor plan and sublevel, axonometric view.

33. DeVore House, ground floor, axonometric view.

34. DeVore House, roof plan, axonometric view.

1. Venturi & Rauch, Vanna Venturi House VI. Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1964.
Venturi Layout 02 08.indd 128 4/9/2008 11:35:04 AM

5. The Nine-Square Diagram and its Contradictions
Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, 1959–64
Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

is one of the few texts by an American architect that responded to the shifts
in culture occurring in Europe around 1968. Architectural texts that marked
this change included Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City and Manfredo
Tafuri’s Teorie e Storia dell’architettura. If seminal theoretical texts of
this period, such as Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gilles Deleuze’s
Difference and Repetition, and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle,
provide a further indication, then it is clear that the period around 1968
represents a generational if not a paradigm shift. The texts of this period,
both within and outside of architecture, made a profound impact on culture
in general, and specifically on architecture in America. These books begin
to question the internal conditions of the discipline of architecture, partic-
ularly in America, which had, until 1968, been a relatively nontheoretical
and professional one, focused primarily on the pragmatics of the architec-
tural practice. Texts by Venturi, Rossi, and Tafuri questioned architecture’s
capacity for social reform, a thematic of mainstream modern architecture.
If Le Corbusier had stated that the plan is the generator—of the building,
the city, and on some level, of modern society—then these texts initiated
a profound critique of the part-to-whole relationship implicit in his vision
of the plan. No longer adherents of the polemical style of Le Corbusier’s
Vers Une Architecture or the equally polemical historical perspective of
Sigfried Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture, on which the generation
of the 1940s and 1950s was weaned, these books of 1966–68 were didactic
in their reevaluation of modernist principles. No longer was the ethos of
CIAM (which held that modern architecture was a vehicle toward a better
society), nor its rebirth later in Team Ten, thought to have much currency.

130 Vanna Venturi House
In contrast to Europe, the significant social

changes occurring in America, such as the break-
ing down of ethnic and religious barriers after the
war, did not engage architectural polemics. Many
American corporations hired new firms of young
architects to design what was considered to be
modern architecture for such projects as public
housing; the Federal Housing Authority, which
allowed for returning GIs to buy apartments at
low cost, financed buildings designed according to
Le Corbusier’s proposals for the Ville Radieuse
but stripped them of their ideological component.
Rather than social reform according to Corbusian
principles, American cities became blighted by
versions of towers-in-the-park-schemes, which,
along with the flight to the suburbs, ate away at
2. John Hejduk, Texas House 4, 1954–63.
the formerly dense fabric of the city.
Such changes in the city fabric reverberated and writing—in some cases by choice, in others
through the architectural profession. Between for purely practical reasons.
1945 and 1950, new practitioners and new offices Venturi was clearly the most articulate
were created to accommodate America’s post- spokesman for this younger generation and
war building boom. Instead of adopting modern- brought what was perhaps the first theoretical
ism’s ideology, which was directed toward cre- and ideological approach to American architec-
ating what was called “the good society,” these ture. Complexity and Contradiction in Archi-
new practices adopted the modernist style as a tecture, which was published by the Museum of
manifestation of “the good life,” an ideal almost Modern Art, launched an attack on modernist
antithetical to the social utopian goals of mod- abstraction by reintroducing the idea of history
ernism. Yet modernism’s relatively “new” look in contemporary architecture. Venturi, who was
appealed to corporations, given their production educated under Jean Labatut at Princeton, had
for an openly acquisitive and relatively affluent continued his research at the American Academy
society. In this period of architecture’s capitalist in Rome. Perhaps because of his stay in Rome,
expansion, engaging an ideology of the left was Venturi examined Italian buildings in relationship
certainly not a pressing issue. to issues faced by contemporary American archi-
The architectural profession grew rapidly, with tects. For example, Luigi Moretti’s Casa “Il Gira-
corporate practices founded by numerous archi- sole” in Rome used historical architectural tropes
tects, including Edward Barnes, Gordon Bunshaft, that would play a subtle role in the arguments in
Harry Cobb, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen, Philip Complexity and Contradiction. Venturi saw him-
Johnson, and I.M. Pei. The next generation, Michael self not as a postmodernist, but rather as a new
Graves, John Hejduk, Don Lyndon, Charles Moore, American realist, bringing historical traditions into
Jaquelin Robertson, Robert Venturi, and Tim the present by way of American architectural tra-
Vreeland, among others, found few openings for ditions described, for example, in Vincent Scully’s
this type of practice and turned instead to teaching The Shingle Style and the Stick Style. Complexity

Vanna Venturi House 131
in Peirce’s terms, in that it has a conventional-

ized meaning: the classical facade symbolizes a
public building, whether it is a bank, a library, or
a school. Icons and symbols become related when
an overuse of an icon produces its degradation
as it becomes a symbol, which in turn becomes
clichéd and thus drained of the necessity for any
form of close reading.
If the issue of meaning is introduced in
Complexity and Contradiction, it is first articu-
lated in built form with the Vanna Venturi House,
built by Robert Venturi for his mother between
1959 and 1964. It could be argued that the Vanna
Venturi House is the first American building
to propose an ideological break with modern
abstraction at the same time that it is rooted
3. Vanna Venturi House I, plan, 1959.
in this tradition. Like the citations in Venturi’s
and Contradiction, as the title indicates, addresses book, the Vanna Venturi House requires close
questions of meaning in architecture, but not in the reading—and actually questions what constitutes
sense that would parallel the renewal of analytical such a close reading, both at the time of its con-
work on language and signification by European struction as well as today. No building has more
structuralists and post-structuralists. completely symbolized a new American ver-
Venturi is perhaps one of the first archi- nacular, yet its placement in this book, it will be
tects to make the important distinction between argued, is haunted by a little-acknowledged set of
what C. S. Peirce had earlier labeled an icon and origins in both Italian Renaissance tropes and in
a symbol. Venturi’s famous dictum categoriz- the nine-square grid of modernist abstraction.
ing buildings as either “a duck” or “a decorated To locate the origins of the Vanna Venturi
shed” casts the difference between an icon and a House, two projects are worth comparing: John
symbol in architectural terms. A duck is a build- Hejduk’s Texas House 4 from the mid-1950s, and
ing that looks like its object: a hotdog stand in Venturi’s first study of the Vanna Venturi House
the form of a giant hotdog, or in Venturi’s terms, from 1959. Hejduk’s Texas Houses are nine-square
a place that sells ducks taking the very shape of a exercises, which bear a speculative relationship to
duck. Each of these examples has a direct visual Louis Kahn’s Adler and DeVore Houses (chapter
relationship to its object. This visual similitude 4) in that there are a series of servant and served
produces what Peirce calls an icon, which can be spaces, but in the Texas Houses, the thick corner
understood at first glance; it does not require, for piers of Kahn’s Adler House are dematerialized
example, close reading. Venturi’s other term, the and stretched into linear wall elements. Hejduk’s
decorated shed, refers to a public facade for what projects modify the Palladian schema of the nine-
amounts to a generic boxlike building. For exam- square grid. Yet as Venturi’s scheme for the
ple, a bank building with a classical facade front- Vanna Venturi House evolves, it confounds the
ing a rather ordinary enclosure is a decorated nine-square schema differently from the works of
shed. The decorated shed is more of a symbol either Kahn or Hejduk.

4. Vanna Venturi House IIa, plan, 1959. 5. Vanna Venturi House IIb, plan, 1959.
Venturi’s first scheme (House I), with its elements can be read as a cruciform organization.
compressed center bays and the external columns This play of multiple interior grids confounds any
on the centerline, invokes a nine-square grid. single interpretation of origin. Close readings of
Yet, because of the compression of the center the plan of Venturi’s first scheme do not produce a
bays, it can also be read as a four-square grid. An dominant diagram or a primary organization, but
articulated corner and freestanding columns are rather several diagrams which mark the begin-
also overlaid on the nine-square grid, yet neither ning of a shift from a single reading to one which
scheme dominates. This overlay of two poten- can be called undecidable. Each of the six schemes
tially different interpretations is reinforced by for the Vanna Venturi House provokes such a
the absence of a column centerline running from reading of undecidability, which must be under-
the top to the bottom of the scheme, while the stood as a Derridean, post-structuralist notion, an
continuity of both the vertical and horizontal axes idea that was not available until after 1968.
is interrupted by the central fireplace element. A second reading in Venturi’s House I
Another interpretation would read the lateral involves the disjunction of the exterior walls from
striation of the plan into three zones, creating an the internal volumes. First the spacing between
ABA demarcation of servant and served spaces. the exterior walls and the internal volume is
The lateral center zone can be read as both a void, unequal, the right-hand void being larger than the
given that it lacks the defining walls of the upper left-hand void. The mullions and columns of the
and lower zones, and as a solid whose rectangular exterior walls, while they align and are symmetri-
form is bounded by six large piers. In yet a further cal across the building, have little relationship with
analysis, the mullions, columns, and wall-bearing the articulations of the inner volumes. A compari-

6. Vanna Venturi House IIIa, plan. 7. Vanna Venturi House IIIb, plan.
son of the walls enclosing the inner volume reveals kind of pochéd “part” that cannot be read back to
minor shifts and offsets in what would initially an originary whole. While there is a relationship
seem to be a symmetrical alignment of column and of this first scheme to Hejduk’s Texas Houses,
walls about a central axis. the subtractive notching and additive poché of
It is also important to notice the articulation these early studies give the walls a figured qual-
of the four corners of the house’s inner enclosure; ity distinct from the linear quality of Hejduk’s
whether wrapping around the corners or coming Texas Houses: if the wall/space relationship in
together as a seam, the joints at the corners Hejduk’s Texas Houses is produced by a series
are articulated as notches. This reinforces the of squares pinned at the corners by steel columns
independent and distinct nature of each facade, and defined by infill walls; in the Vanna Venturi
brought literally, but not conceptually, together at house, the walls begin to take on a volumetric
the corner. These notched corners of the interior presence that undermines their relationship to a
volume can be read as indications of further sub- classical nine-square plan.
versions of the whole into a multiplicity of parts. In the second versions of the scheme (House
The notched corners of the enclosure mark the IIa and IIb), the outside frame walls are still
boundaries of a set of three inner “parts,” demar- present, as is the central horizontal core; how-
cated by rectangular zones. For example, in the ever, the play between a tripartite and quadri-
central area these notches are integrated into partite scheme is less evident. For the first time,
the piers, which then take on an irregular form a figured central body is clearly manifest in the
as mullions joined to the piers. In this scheme, form of two chamfered corners which now extend
wall fragment, pier, and mullion become a new beyond the ends of the two exterior freestanding

8. Vanna Venturi House IIIa, model. 9. Vanna Venturi House IIIb, model.
walls. The cutout in the lower right quadrant cre- smaller cut, which nevertheless follows the domi-
ates a directional vector, moving into the center. nant diagonal pointing toward the central hearth.
The changes in the second project have little to do There is a shear about the center, as the diagonals
with the preceding scheme in terms of the critique are not aligned to meet there; this causes the fire-
of nine-square or four-square organizations. The place to become a volumetric element that at one
second scheme breaks with the central symmetry moment is in rotation, and at another moment is
of the prior scheme, and can be read as respond- the object of an implied shearing.
ing to the potential of a figured condition through Subtle differences between the projects
chamfering and cutting; this incision produces a for House IIa and House IIb begin with the four
dynamic directionality in the internal volume. columns that frame the center, which become
Throughout the plan, elements defining the increasingly figured, thickened by poché-like
inner volume—walls, columns, and mullions—are attachments. In other areas, symmetry is rees-
intermittently aligned and misaligned with the tablished: for example, the small diagonal wall
external perimeter condition, as if to portray a segment defining the upper bathroom is straight-
contradictory condition of simultaneous affirma- ened out, mirroring the other side of the bath-
tion and denial. These misalignments acknowl- room across the vertical axis. Clearly these are
edge the dislocation of the internal volume from notational rather than functional changes.
the free standing wall planes. Diagonals, whether In versions IIIa and IIIb, the project retains
actual or implied, seem to converge on the cen- the central element of the fireplace and the two
tral fireplace. These countermand the orthogonal external chamfered corners, yet here the central
organization of rooms symmetrically across the zone becomes increasingly articulated. The central
central vertical band of service spaces. The diag- horizontal walls are also thickened and a secondary
onals animate the organization of the plan with a chamfering is introduced, as if the dominant exte-
volumetric sense. The large cut that defines the rior volume were reduced and rotated, respond-
kitchen is echoed across the vertical axis by a much ing to the spiraling motion of the fireplaces, which

10. Vanna Venturi House IVb, plan, 1961. 11. Vanna Venturi House V, plan, 1962.
shear off of the central axis in a yin-yang form. toward the projecting semi-circular termina-
Finally, what was formerly a straight-run stair, tion of the interior volume. This semi-circular
aligned on the vertical axis, suddenly bends: this external enclosure softens the blunt form of the
produces a third level of chamfering. This is the chamfered end. A disjunction remains in what
first appearance of such an oddly angled stair in will eventually become the union of fireplace
the project, and it will become one of the signa- and staircase. In IVb there is a compression of
ture figures of the final house. space that modulates the internal organization.
In the early plan studies, the seeds of the This compression is a thematic that will animate
arguments of Complexity and Contradiction are the final scheme. The fireplace is no longer in the
present as a rethinking of the nine-square and center of the four-square plan, displacing the ideal
four-square diagrams. The constant play between of the centralized hearth. In IVb, the “decorated
elements that are in reciprocal and symmetrical shed” is made of isolated walls that wrap around
relationships in one reading and are displaced by an internal “duck” with what becomes, after mod-
another reading marks the beginning of what can ernism, a stereotype of the gabled, symmetrical,
be read as Venturi’s implied critique of any clas- double-chimneyed house. In this fourth project,
sical part-to-whole relationship. the internal “duck” has a different profile than its
Vanna Venturi House IVb is perhaps the exterior shell. The slot between the exterior shell
most subdued of the schemes, returning to a and the interior object makes the play between
self-contained symmetry. A four-square parti is the two legible.
evident in the compact pairs of rooms flanking It is only in House V that the strategies ani-
the compressed central service spine. Yet there mating the final scheme appear, beginning with a
is a vestige of the nine-square organization, in radical reorientation of the house on the site by
that the paired fireplaces are incorporated into a ninety degrees. The long axis of the house is now
thickened band of services, as a third zone run- made perpendicular to the entry from the street,
ning vertically. The central fireplace is offset reinforcing the idea of a facade across the grain

12. Vanna Venturi House IV, model, 1962. 13. Vanna Venturi House V, model, 1962.
of the house. The exterior envelope of House V condition of unity.

appears the same as that of IVb, but now a fac- These changes all occur behind a complex
eted figure extends out to the left beyond what facade notation—the articulation of a horizontal
is clearly a four-square plan. This figure is simul- beam, a fallen arch, and a broken pediment involv-
taneously compressed by some internal vector ing an aedicular motif. Venturi had observed
pressing from the back to the front. This shape this aedicular motif in Rome, in Moretti’s Casa
seems to extend into the exterior courtyard with- “Il Girasole” as well as Carlo Rainaldi’s Santa
out any internal logic from the main volume, and Maria in Campitelli. In baroque architecture,
will become a central feature of the final project. the upward thrust of the aedicule is usually a
In the sixth and final version of the Vanna voided condition. In the Vanna Venturi House,
Venturi House (VI), what remains is only a part the pediment is broken, but the upward thrust
of a previously existing and implied whole as if of the central fireplace is both volumetric and a
House V were cut in half. The sixth version ini- void. As a centerpiece, the fireplace both affirms
tially appears to have been divided in two: the historical precedence and simultaneously denies
previously semi-circular end becomes a quarter- this precedence. While Venturi employs histori-
circle, and the tripartite condition in the middle cal elements in plan and section, he does so in a
has vanished, compressed in the faceted figure way that denies their historicity, and therefore
of the stair/fireplace. The compressive energy questions the value of any historical precedent.
internal to the previous plans is registered in the Moreover, the vertical cut on the facade bears
fireplace/stair element, which has been relocated little relation to the horizontal compression that
to a central position. The resonances between appear in the interior. Venturi’s critical reading
Hejduk and Venturi reappear in this version: if of Moretti’s Casa “Il Girasole” can be discerned
the nine-square scheme of Hejduk’s Texas House here: if the latter can be seen as layers of space
had appeared in the first scheme of the Vanna compressed toward the rear of the building and
Venturi House, then it is Venturi’s final scheme, away from the facade, then the Vanna Venturi
as a half-house, that seems to influence Hejduk’s House articulates these compressive vectors in a
subsequent Half-House and Quarter-House, both thickened, condensed facade apparent in the final
of which are intended to be read from a prior plans. This disjunction between the vertical plane

14. Vanna Venturi House VI, plan, 1962.
and the horizontal space of the plan looks forward versions. For example, much of the complexity of
to the decorated shed of Venturi’s 1967 National other versions of the Vanna Venturi House—the
Football Foundation Hall of Fame competition. play between the tripartite and quadripartite,
Other aspects of the design involve a gabled the occupied center and the voided center, the
roof, which extends and interweaves with the center and the edge—disappear with the clarity
facade, causing it to function as a mask. What of the final version’s articulation of a conceptual
is significant in this respect is the purposeful front and back to the house.
extension of the facade as a surface denying any The earlier schemes involving a nine- or
volumetric corner. The treatment of the facade four-square parti deny the possibility of any res-
resembles Venturi’s notion of the decorated shed, olution. The final house is both more classical and
in calling attention to the facade as simply that: a less modern than the earlier projects. One ver-
screen masking a shed. This single element con- sion may not necessarily be better than the other,
flates two of Venturi’s signature ideas. He com- they merely attribute differing importance to
bines the energy of the bent staircase, the central different ideas. But in neither case is one single
diagonal rotation, and the projective vectors, but dominant idea operating. Classical and modern
contains these within an exterior condition that tropes operate simultaneously; the heritage of
highlights its own function as a screen. this house is one where that evolution is con-
A reading of the Vanna Venturi House stantly at odds, and ultimately remains unde-
requires a reading of its previous incarnations cidable. This studied undecidability is one of the
before any appreciation of its undecidable condi- qualities that emphasizes the need for this proj-
tion is possible. This is one of the first American ect to be closely read, and simultaneously its
houses that can be read as process, and as such demand for a different kind of close reading than
becomes an expression of the process of reading its formal predecessors. Such a close reading no
in the object. To attempt to argue that any final longer produces a single formal whole, but rather
project, the built building, carries all of the energy allows the unreconciled differences of this project
of its earlier studies can rarely be sustained. Most to remain legible.
final projects move to establish certain, but not Many of Venturi’s houses that followed
all, of the elements that evolved in the previous became rhetorical devices, references, and ges-

tures which lack the inherent undecidability of

the Vanna Venturi House. Even in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, the idea of the house carried the
possibility of theoretical and critical weight, and
the possibility of manifesting ideologies other
than that of merely a single-family house, as it
did for Mies, Le Corbusier, Loos, and many of
the early modern architects. There is a truism
in architecture that books are sometimes more
important than buildings. This could be said
for Palladio, and perhaps for Le Corbusier. Yet
the Vanna Venturi House is a writing, in archi-
tectural terms, of Venturi’s Complexity and
Contradiction; no American house or building
before or after can make that claim.

15. Vanna Venturi House, elevations, ground-floor and upper-floor plans.

16. The facade acts as a screen for the volume of the The notational arch, an indexical mark framing the
house. This motif similarly has resonances with the opening, is a classical resonance.
screenlike north facade of Luigi Moretti’s Casa “Il
Girasole.”

17. The aedicule appears in the slot in the front facade. Similar to the Casa “Il Girasole,” a dialogue between
The half-round aedicular window in the rear facade the back and front facades is evident.
and the split in the front facade play together.

18. The front and rear facades of the Vanna Venturi 19. A center axis running laterally is defined by a
House become screens or planes bracketing the interior partition on one side, and a wall on the other.
space. The final version of the house has returned to
the classical idea of a front and a back.

20. There is a figural compression against the front

facade. The rear corners can be read as voided.

21. The fusion of the fireplace and stair elements house. This element becomes a single, central form,
registers important changes in each version of the one that is cranked and bent in the final project.

22. Together the stair and fireplace spiral upward and generated by the most central fireplace element in the
outward. The staircase with the fireplace causes space house. The inclusion of a staircase that leads nowhere
to be articulated as a series of centrifugal vectors, is significant. It is an index of the denial of function.

23–25. The lateral cross section shows the thickened 26 (Opposite page). The facade is split into two parts,
poché defining the vertical fireplace sitting within a with the flue off center. Both the broken arch of the
frame. Sections cut across the width of the house reflect facade and the arch on the rear facade reiterate the
a compression toward the front facade and a thickened tripartite division between base, middle, and pediment.
frontal datum. The windows break the lower chair rail into sections. A
five-part horizontal window plays between symmetry
and asymmetry with its central bars; another four-
part square window is divided symmetrically.


27. Vanna Venturi House, exploded axonometric view.

28. Vanna Venturi House, exploded axonometric view.

29. Vanna Venturi House, ground floor and facade, axonometric view.

30. Vanna Venturi House, front axonometric view.

31. Vanna Venturi House, rear axonometric view.

1. James Stirling and James Gowan, Leicester Engineering Building, Leicester, England, 1959–63.
6. Material Inversions
James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building, 1959–63
James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building is one of the early post-

war buildings to stage a confrontation between modernist abstraction and
an incipient postmodern “reality” embodied in a material presence. It can
be said that this confrontation is manifest not only in the forms of the
building, which owe their paternity to the Modern Movement, but also
in its materiality, which initiates a critique of the modernist palette as
orchestrated within an abstract framework. Postwar realism took differ-
ent forms across continental Europe, and in this sense, the English con-
text immediately after World War II is significant in understanding the
critique of modernist abstraction embodied both materially and conceptu-
ally in the Leicester Engineering Building.
England was relatively removed from prewar mainstream modern
architecture, which was essentially a continental phenomenon with vary-
ing political aims. In Germany in the 1920s, modernism was a left-oriented
and Marxist-inspired movement; while in Italy after 1933, under Mussolini,
modern architecture—in many cases even in the late 1920s—represented
the aesthetics of the fascist regime, classical rhetoric, and monumental-
ity. In France, modern architecture maintained an unclear relationship
between left and right. Le Corbusier, for example, alternated between an
entreaty to Mussolini and French Syndicalism on the one hand, and a radi-
cal program for urban change on the other. In England, as in America, the
context for architecture could essentially be called pragmatic. But unlike
in the United States, which remained under the sway of a prewar Beaux-
Arts influence, architectural culture in England was profoundly affected
by the war. First, because of the refugees from Polish architectural
schools; this influx would have particular influence on the young student
156 Leicester Engineering Building
2. Leicester Engineering Building, site plan, 1959–63. 3. Leicester Engineering Building, axonometric, 1959.
James Stirling. Second, the war clearly disrupted Liverpool in 1949, Rowe was his teacher, and
the education of an entire generation of students. Stirling completed his final thesis project in 1949
Of that generation, James Stirling and Colin Rowe under Rowe and the profound influence of Le
first met while serving in the British army in Corbusier.
Scotland at the Queen’s Barracks, Perth, in 1942. The 1950s signaled a change in the climate
They would find each other again after the war for modernity in England as architects, artists,
at the Liverpool School of Architecture. Rowe and sculptors focused on alternatives to modern-
had begun his studies at Liverpool in 1939, which ist abstraction. Collaborative efforts such as that
had been a conservative school of architecture of the Independent Group proclaimed an inter-
before the war, but had radically changed with est in everyday materials and an “as found” aes-
the influx in 1938–39 of Polish refugees, many of thetic, which Stirling captured in a papier-mâché
whom had been active in the Modern Movement model of soap bubbles in the famous 1956 exhibi-
and introduced the school to Corbusian modern- tion “This is Tomorrow.” The sculptor Eduardo
ism and a form of Russian constructivism. When Paolozzi showed work in raw iron materials and
the war became critical after Dunkirk and the fall Cor-ten steel; the pop painter Richard Hamilton
of France, both Stirling and Rowe volunteered incorporated collaged imagery of contemporary
and joined the army parachute corps. In train- consumer culture; Nigel Henderson introduced
ing, Rowe made a practice jump out of a plane his documentary photographs of the working-
during which his parachute did not open, and his class street; and the architects Peter and Alison
back was broken; Stirling, on the other hand, con- Smithson used corrugated plastic and rough ply-
tinued through his training and eventually jumped wood for their Patio and Pavilion installation.
at Remagen Bridge. By the time he returned to “This is Tomorrow” brought together work by
Leicester Engineering Building 157
4. Melnikov, Russakov Worker’s Club, 1927. 5. Le Corbusier, Maison Jaoul, 1951.
members of the self-styled Independent Group and Archigram in London during the 1960s.
(which included architects Stirling, the Smith- The impact of “This is Tomorrow” cre-
sons, and the critic Reyner Banham). Some of ated an impetus not only toward pop, but also
the participants—including the Smithsons— toward a tough form of neorealism, different in
were equally involved in a post-CIAM (Congrès England from that of Italy; it was named “New
International d’Architecture Moderne) group, Brutalism” by the critic for the Architectural
Team Ten, which was dedicated to reviving the Review, Reyner Banham. New Brutalism was
principles of modern architecture after the war. a reaction to the image of a comfortable British
As a member of the Independent Group, Stirling lifestyle and the Townscape movement. It was
was critical of Team Ten’s late modernist ideology. oriented instead toward an idea figured in blunt
If “This is Tomorrow” drew attention to the cozy materials and forms such as the Martello towers
comforts of the postwar British consumer cul- on the south coast of England. The obvious mate-
ture, in turning attention to the material of the riality of these forms can in some sense be related
everyday—advertising, furniture, the street— to the role of materials in Italian realism, of which
the exhibition also led to several widely divergent Stirling was aware. An important later influence
offshoots. One was in urban planning as envi- can be gathered from his article “‘The Functional
sioned by Gordon Cullen’s “Townscape” draw- Tradition’ and Expression” in Perspecta 6, 1960.
ings, which resembled picture-postcard views Here Stirling discussed Luigi Moretti’s plaster
of cities. Another direction was pop art, which casts, which created what Stirling called “solidi-
developed in the work of Peter Blake, Hamilton, fied space.” This seemingly paradoxical inversion
and Paolozzi as a celebration of technology, and of the material qualities of solid and void became
would ultimately lead to the work of Cedric Price a theme that Stirling would develop more didac-
6. Leicester Engineering Building, office tower. 7. Leicester Engineering Building, office tower.
tically in his early works, including a series of surfaces of Garches. Stirling noted that “it is
flats in Ham Common outside of London and a disturbing to find little reference to the ratio-
row house project in Preston, which prefigured nal principles which are the basis of the modern
his conceptualization of an inversion of materials movement,” and he saw in the Maison Jaoul not
at Leicester. just a romantic or picturesque notion of postwar
In another context, Stirling was also much modern architecture but also, in its use of varied
taken with Le Corbusier’s reintroduction of mate- materials and a barrel vault, a profound critique
rials, especially in the Maison Jaoul’s low, vaulted of modern architecture. Such attention to materi-
brick arches, which he described as almost primi- als reflected not only Stirling’s interest in a tough
tive in character in his September 1955 article, realism, in some sense accommodating his “north
“Garches to Jaoul,” in the Architectural Review. country” origins, but also his own reappraisal of
Stirling emphasized the materiality of the Maison postwar Le Corbusier. Yet Stirling’s return to
Jaoul, which he contrasted to the “neutralized” material was different from that of Le Corbusier
8. Leicester Engineering Building, stair towers. 9. Leicester Engineering Building, workshops.
and his English contemporaries in that, as will the Leicester Engineering Building is the most
be argued here, Stirling used material both criti- articulate in its critique of modernist abstrac-
cally and conceptually. tion. This critique is manifested in three differ-
Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building, ent ways: first, in the use of glass; second, in the
done in partnership with James Gowan, marked use of modular ceramic units (brick and tile); and
a significant change from their earlier work. third, in the compositional organization of the
Leicester is one of the first manifold critiques of building’s masses.
modernism and the first in a series of Stirling’s In modern architecture, glass was con-
major university buildings in England, which ceived and used as a literal void as well as a phe-
include the Cambridge History Faculty Library, nomenal transparent material, as discussed by
the Florey Building at Queens College, Oxford, Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in their seminal
and the Saint Andrew’s Dormitory project in article “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,”
Scotland. Of these four university commissions, published in Perspecta 8, 1963. In the Leicester
10. Leicester Engineering Building, workshops. 11. Leicester Engineering Building, workshop roof.
Engineering Building, glass is used to suggest changes can be seen in the curtain wall element
that it functions conceptually both as a solid and in the tower block. In the drawing, this element
volumetrically. Contrasting with its implicit func- is flush with the brick fascia above it (and actually
tion as a negative or void in modernist architec- recessed back from a vertical concrete element
ture, glass serves here as a positive integer in that is no longer present in the final building),
what has been called a textual sense. Leicester while in the executed tower, the entire glass
marks the movement of glass from void to solid, curtain wall is set forward of the brick fascia. A
in other words, a reversal of the conception of third and minor change occurs in the glass under
glass’s materiality, from literal void to conceptual the parallel (to the dominant grain of the build-
solid. ing) lecture theater, where the glass element
Stirling’s drawings of the building illustrate underneath the theater now has chamfered cor-
the evolution of this treatment of glass from the ners. All of those taken together have the same
first early sketches to the final building. The often effect: what was seen in modernist abstraction as
published early axonometric drawing by Stirling transparent, planar, and void is now to be read
is important in understanding the conceptual as more opaque, volumetric, and solid. A fourth
development of the material inversions. The change involves the actual material solids. In the
drawing marks four significant changes which drawing, these are rendered accurately, denoting
will appear in the executed project. First, and the difference between the ceramic and running
probably the most noticeable, are the changes bond brick. All the surfaces which run vertically
involving the idea of solidity in glass. These are (denoting their nonstructural condition) are ren-
the addition of volumetric diamond-shaped ele- dered in the drawing with vertical hatching, while
ments, which form both levels of the laboratory the bearing-wall brick surfaces are rendered with
roof, and the horizontal glass projections replac- horizontal hatching.
ing the banded glass striations of the office block. It is also necessary to look at some of the
Second, and less obvious but no less significant, other aspects of the building to understand its
12. Leicester Engineering Building, glass stairwell. 13. Leicester Engineering Building, spiral stair.
conceptual density. At the core of the building glass as part of a continuous surface, and glass as
are two stair towers whose forms have cham- a volume that is clearly interrupted by and artic-
fered corners. The stair towers are not the same ulated around this concrete haunch.
height and thus produce something of a roman- These numerous inversions may be consid-
tic skyline similar to that of Kahn’s towers in the ered textual rather than formal since they are
Richards Medical Center. The vertical gridding less aesthetically or visually conditioned. For
of the brick tile units on the stair towers is also example, one of the stair cores is shaped to read
significant in Stirling’s inversion of the conven- as a prism; however, its lower portion is cut away
tional qualities of material. These tiles are laid to reveal a spiral stair clad in the same translu-
end-to-end vertically; though these units have a cent glass and opaque metal panels as the stair
real materiality and physical presence, they are tower. The staircase becomes a figured element,
not treated as structural. There is a play between twisting like a corkscrew and driving its way up
the glass elements, which are not structural but through the floor surface. Chamfering and twist-
appear volumetric and structural, and the brick ing are certain of Stirling’s strategies that sug-
units, which are laid vertically and made to gest the glass again has become conceptually
resemble a surface veneer. more solid than the concrete structure of the
This undecidable quality is reiterated in building. This stair core can be contrasted with
several details of the office tower. This volume is a second stair encased primarily in clear glass.
also supported by a concrete column that seems Here material inversions undermine conven-
to run through the auditorium element, yet in tional associations of structure: the transparent
becoming a concrete haunch it supports another glass stair tower becomes a void that seems to
glass element which can also be read as volu- hold up the large cantilevered mass of the audito-
metric, since it projects forward of the tiled ele- rium, while the metal-panelled stair tower—the
ments. This didactic use of materials clearly dem- solid—is cut away, revealing the corkscrew of a
onstrates the difference between glass as a plane, concrete staircase. Such a play of materiality—
14. Leicester Engineering Building, section, 1959–63.
making the glass staircase appear to support volume of the Russakov Club, while rotation is a
a massive volume while the concrete staircase primary characteristic of Leicester’s juxtaposed
is dematerialized into a spiraling vector—con- volumes. Melnikov’s volumes seem to float free,
founds the properties conventionally associated while Stirling’s volumes are pinned by the towers,
with each material. which introduce a dynamic thrust downward.
The didactic character of Leicester is also Stirling further emphasized the undecid-
manifest in its reversal of what could be consid- able nature of these materials by producing over
ered a modernist idea of a centrifugal compo- the shed building (workshops) a volumetric glass
sition, that is, one that moves its energy away unit, diamond-shaped and translucent, which is
from the center to the periphery. At Leicester, extended and repeated over the entire roof. It
the organization of the volumes is centripetal, seems to slide or hover in an unstable position
in other words, collapsing or being sucked down over the structure. Such inversions of materiality
into the center of the volumetric massing. The also continue throughout the workshop building:
diagonals of the ramps and beveled lecture hall brick-tiled units are structural at the base, yet
volumes slant toward this center as they pivot are surmounted by a concrete, lintel-like element
about the central stair tower. There is a second, above a reveal, which suggests that the concrete
countermanding energy, a dynamic rotation that element is floating over the brick. In this sense,
reveals the influence of Melnikov’s Russakov the “reality” of the void is articulated as a slot or
Worker’s Club in these two discrete volumes. The cut-away—in other words, as real space—while
significant differences between the two buildings the representation of void in glass—in other
must be registered: while Melnikov’s project pro- words, the “unreal” voids—are treated volumetri-
poses a collapse toward the center, there is a lack cally. This constant displacement in meaning and
of rotation in the composition of the projecting function of materials provokes the need to read
15. Leicester Engineering Building, ground-floor and mezzanine plans, 1959–63.
materials as conceptual rather than phenomenal

physical integers, producing a building that is
neither picturesque nor expressionist but rather
defines a textual use of materials. The implied
flows and forces in the volumes deny a static rela-
tionship between the viewer and the building. In
Leicester the sense of arrested rotation gives a
sense of space and time that is no longer merely
formal as a dominant mode of discourse. Thus,
Leicester, in its numerous inversions, denies
the traditional architectural interpretations of
facade, stasis, and literal materiality.
16. The Leicester Engineering Building is articulated and stairs acts as a vertical fulcrum around which the
as an assemblage of component elements—atria, stair masses of the building rotate. These rotating elements
towers, auditoria, offices, lab towers and workshops— produce a centripetal thrust downward, similar to the
each remaining separate from the other and treated directionality implied by the chamfered glass units
volumetrically. The central tower of lobbies, elevator and beveled volumes of the laboratory building.
17. Stirling’s use of chamfered corners in both glass 18. The stair tower is cut vertically at the corners and
and masonry units reveals these elements to be undercut at the top, thereby rendering them volumetric
conceptually solid and volumetric. in both axes.
19. Leicester Engineering Building, interior spatial

diagram of auditorium, office, and lab towers.
20. Leicester Engineering Building, diagram of

circulation and stair towers.
21. Leicester Engineering Building, diagram of glass

elements.
22. Leicester Engineering Building, diagram showing

the structural elements.
23. Leicester Engineering Building, worm’s-eye axonometric view.

24. Leicester Engineering Building, ground floor, axonometric view.

25. Leicester Engineering Building, lobby floor, axonometric view.

26. Leicester Engineering Building, fourth floor, axonometric view.

27. Leicester Engineering Building, ninth floor, axonometric view.

28. Leicester Engineering Building, roof from north-east, axonometric view.

29. Leicester Engineering Building, roof from south-east, axonometric view.

1. Aldo Rossi, Composition with saint and the Modena cemetery, 1979.
7. Texts of Analogy
Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, 1971–78
In 1945, just after the end of World War II, Georges Bataille published
a book titled Le Bleu du Ciel, which translates as “the blue of the sky,”
yet curiously enough was published in English as The Blue of Noon. The
book was actually written in May of 1935. Its plot, set during the general
strike in Spain and rise of Nazism, is a metaphor for the hopelessness of
the left’s ideology in the face of the oncoming world war, with necrophilia
as one of its central metaphors. It is therefore not without some relevance
that Aldo Rossi’s competition project for the Cemetery of San Cataldo in
Modena was entered under the title “The Blue of the Sky.” Its ossuary is
an empty walled cube reminiscent of the stark geometries of a De Chirico
painting or those of Ernesto Lapadula’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana at
the Esposizione Universale di Roma planned for 1942. Rossi’s project is
also a metaphor for the futility of redemption in the sanctuary; instead,
the only hope is the ever-present but mockingly distant and unachiev-
able blue of the sky. In the project for the Cemetery of San Cataldo, the
metaphor not only derives from the typological explorations of Rossi’s
analogical drawings, but also emerges as a polemical statement drawn
from postwar literature signaling the political exhaustion of modernism.
Unlike Rossi’s earlier projects or those which became more illustrative at
the end of his career, the Cemetery of San Cataldo is both a political and
architectural critique of modernism in which the ideas broached in Rossi’s
book The Architecture of the City ultimately take physical form in the
partial realization of the cemetery.
Rossi’s critique of modernism is located in the grim reality of postwar
Italy and its multiple reactions to the fascist monumentality in aspects of
Italian modernism. One such reaction took form in the escapist aesthetic
180 Cemetery of San Cataldo
2. Central Business District proposal, Turin, 1962 . 3. Study for the Segrate Monument, 1967.
of the neoliberty style, referring to Italy’s ties marked by a nostalgic quality. This was coun-
to England in the late nineteenth century and tered by another form of realist thought which
adopting the name “Liberty” after the English worked against the grain of neorealism’s descrip-
manufacturer of Art Nouveau fabrics. Neoliberty tive effects. Rossi’s concept of realism departs
called for a return to patterned figuration, evoca- from neorealism’s humanist values, as Pier
tive materiality, and a type of softness to counter Vittorio Aureli describes in discussing the terms
both the harshness of modernist abstraction and of Rossi’s “realist education,” and turns a new
the overblown imperial scale of Italian fascism. critical attention to what Rossi considered to
A second reaction was manifest in Italian be the “facts” of the city. In his early work and
neorealist film of the same period. Neorealism is writings, Rossi initiates a critique of the sceno-
a term derived from literature and film and, when graphic effects of neorealism by pointing toward
extended to architecture, reflected the climate a more structuralist notion of realism in archi-
of the Italian liberation and its turn away from tecture that is grounded in typological studies.
modernist abstraction. A documentary attention Rossi’s critique of the modernist canon—of both
to everyday life and an abundance of details were the abstractions of late modernism and the mon-
among the mimetic techniques used to produce umentality of fascist Italy—could be considered
the “realistic” effects of neorealism. Neorealism most evident in his drawings and his important
involved a double mimesis in architecture. For first book, The Architecture of the City, published
example, the rebuilding of the Tiburtino district in 1966. The Cemetery of San Cataldo at Modena,
in Rome during the early 1950s produced build- and perhaps to a similar degree his Gallaratese
ings that were new by necessity but also needed housing complex, are among the few of Rossi’s
to resemble the product of historical sedimenta- realized buildings in this period that integrate his
tion. This mimicking of historical forms resulted critique of abstraction with his interest in typol-
in an architecture whose neorealist effect was ogy, analogy, and scale.
Cemetery of San Cataldo 181
4. Gallaratese 2, Milan, 1969–73.
Another critique of modernism in architec- gular form on a circular column for his Segrate
ture was represented at the time by the maga- Monument to the Partisans exemplify his interest
zine Casabella, which, under Ernesto Rogers’ in forms reduced to their geometric archetypes.
direction, included many of Rossi’s early articles Such forms would reappear in the Cemetery of
on Adolf Loos and Louis Kahn, as well as on mod- San Cataldo competition in different guises.
ernist buildings such as Mies’s Seagram Building Rossi published The Architecture of the City
and Le Corbusier’s La Tourette. In addition to before any of his work had been built, much like
critical writings, Rossi’s early work as an archi- Robert Venturi’s publication of Complexity and
tect included his participation in several competi- Contradiction in Architecture, published the
tions. The most famous of these was the project same year, before Venturi completed any major
for a regional government center in Turin, which built work. Venturi and Rossi also shared an
consisted of a giant four-sided square, a mega- interest, new at the time and expressed in the-
building on giant columns spaced 100 meters oretical postulates, in describing the irreducibil-
apart with a vast square courtyard in the center. ity of the city to any of modernism’s totalizing
Rossi placed this massive form outside of the city visions. Yet, where Venturi’s populist embrace of
of Turin as a new kind of over-sized civic marker. the city and its hallmark strip includes its tem-
In the Turin project, as well as in competition porary signage in the city’s symbolic language,
projects for monuments in Cuneo and Segrate, Rossi instead adopts an analytic method to iso-
the juxtaposition of scales becomes an important late what he considered the city’s urban arte-
theme. These early works also deploy pure geo- facts. Such urban artefacts include elements of
metrical forms—circles, isosceles triangles, and the city whose continuities, be they functional,
squares—which are extruded to form cylindri- such as housing, or symbolic, such as monuments,
cal, cubic, and triangular structures. The cubic account for their permanence within the history
form of his Turin project and the extruded trian- of the city. In Rossi’s analysis, these artefacts can
5. Domestic Architecture with Monuments, 1974. 6. Courtyard and tower, Fagnano, 1973. Detail.
also be considered catalysts for new buildings. square or even a mega-building like the Hofburg
This dialectic of permanence and growth defines in Vienna, and inserted them into other contexts
Rossi’s understanding of the city as occupying in a strategy that resembles Piranesi’s Campo
different moments in time and suggests that the Marzio project. Rowe’s idea of set piece, taken
urban artefact records diachronic moments and out of its original context and reinserted into a
histories. new context, linked contextualism to the idea
As one of the books that was critical in of collage. Yet Rowe’s and Piranesi’s strategies
rethinking the relationship of architecture and differ in respect to the value of origins. Whereas
the city, Rossi’s The Architecture of the City Rowe assigns an a priori value to what exists
shares some similarities with Colin Rowe’s book and adds structures to reinforce this concept,
Collage City, first published in 1978, yet it is their Piranesi assigns no value to the existing context
differences that are important. A fundamental and creates set pieces with no a priori context as a
premise of Collage City is that what existed—the grounding idea. Rowe’s method of collage reuses
buildings embodying the history of architec- preexisting meaningful fragments, while Piranesi
ture—had an intrinsic value and could be consid- maintains the juxtaposition of elements without
ered truthful as well as foundational. Rowe gave being beholden to an idea of the whole. Rossi’s
a value to origin, and therefore any urban project approach could be likened to that of Piranesi in
had to respond to these pre-existing or, in Rowe’s terms of retaining a tension between urban ele-
terms, “set pieces” of the city. In Collage City, ments, denying a singular narrative, meaning,
Rowe selected such set pieces, like a rotunda or a or origin. Instead of set pieces, fragments, or
7. For Peter Eisenman, 1978. Detail. 8. Studio, 1980.
collaged elements of the city, Rossi conceived of as to generate a critique of modernist abstrac-
the city as an ensemble of typological elements, tion. He reintroduced instead a typology which
whose simple geometries could be read as the dealt not only with the problem of scale but also
result of removing their layers of historical accre- with the problem of meaning. Rossi envisioned
tions. The process of reduction is identified in typology as standard elements that were scale-
Rossi’s typological analysis as the study of types less and only meaningful when understood in a
of urban elements distilled to their most simple particular context.
geometric form. This produced geometric figures This idea of typology raised the issue of rep-
with a level of figuration unlike the abstract etition, suggesting that the city is given form by
entities of modernism and unlike the contextual a repetition of certain archetypal elements or
character of Rowe’s urban fragments. In this urban artefacts. The issue of repetition was also
operation, Rossi rethought the entire notion of important in minimalist sculpture as a critique of
typology developed in the nineteenth century narrative—the repeated series lacks beginning,
by J.N.L. Durand as a series of type conditions middle, and end—and as a critique of origin, as the
for certain buildings. Rossi was perhaps the first individual or starting unit is subsumed by other
postwar architect to reintroduce the notion of identical units. The repetition of an urban arte-
typology in architecture. In attacking the tradi- fact destabilizes the relationship between these
tion of typology related to function as well as elements and their perceived aesthetic and func-
to the formal, Rossi used type as an analytical tional value as cultural icons. Rossi uses iconic
instrument with which to generate form as well forms but strips them of their iconicity through
repetition, a technique that undermines the aura as lighthouses or the giant figure of a saint, from
and uniqueness of architectural elements. When the hills outside of Turin, continue to defamiliar-
these elements are taken out of their aesthetic ize the sense of a unitary urban scale. If a light-
and functional context, they can potentially be house is a coffeepot at one scale and a coffeepot is
deployed as textual elements. Their visual impor- a lighthouse at another scale, Rossi suggests that
tance is undermined through repetition of arche- familiar objects have their own autonomous con-
typal elements that have no fixed or determinate dition inscribed in their type, yet his concept of
scale. Rossi achieves shifts in scale in several dif- typology remains resolutely open-ended.
ferent ways, in both drawing and building—for One of Rossi’s first buildings to deploy this
example, architectural elements such as pilotis. shift of scale and repetition of elements is his
The image of the building on giant pilotis is one Gallaratese housing project, whose colonnade is
that Rossi repeats both in drawings and in build- less a classical organization than it is a repetition
ings such as the Gallaratese housing project and of typical elements. Gallaratese’s heavy pilotis
subsequently in the Modena cemetery. return in a number of drawings, and when juxta-
Rossi’s drawings are also a locus for his posed with the coffeepot, the mortar-and-pestle-
critique of contextualism. His drawings, for like elements enter Rossi’s vocabulary as a means
example, register both the dislocation of place of describing an estrangement through scale.
through the repetition of typological elements, Rossi’s drawings also combine aspects of the
and the dissolution of scale through the intro- Modena project into new relationships with the
duction of domestic objects into the urban envi- city: Modena’s conical shrine resembles an indus-
ronment. In these drawings there are recurring trial tower, and occupies the same landscape as an
formal themes: types based on Platonic forms are archetypal Tower of Babel. In Rossi’s painting of
scaleless, placed in different contexts, and thus the courtyard of Fagnano, Modena’s square cru-
estranged from any classical concept of a part- ciform window forms the backdrop for an arcade
to-whole unity; types drawn from domestic envi- reminiscent of the Gallaratese housing block.
ronments are envisaged at architectural scales; Other drawings equate the punched-out square
these objects of domestic use, in their figured windows of Modena’s cubic ossuary to those of a
condition, capture Rossi’s questioning of scale house. It is when these elements are taken out of a
related to typology. Rossi’s urban artefacts could real or built context that they become both analogic
exist at any scale, in an interior as well as in a and textual, in that they do not conform to a single
cityscape, as is suggested in the drawing called idea nor to any manifestation of reality. There is a
Domestic Architecture. While the drawing seems play between the real and the abstract, between
to present a table top with a cup, goblet and cof- the scale of objects, and between the familiarity of
feepot in the center, all of which are household objects which breaks down conventions that are
items, when the top is removed from the pot, the attached to meaning, abstraction, form, and scale.
domestic object becomes an architectural form Drawings, for Rossi, are not intended as artwork,
that reappears as Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, his nor are they examples of metaphysical or surreal
floating theater for the 1980 Venice Biennale. His content like De Chirico’s urban landscapes. While
play with scale allows the table, along with the the deep shadows, black windows, and white sur-
fork and the spoon, to disappear into the city: faces of structures within Rossi’s drawings have
the table top becomes the ground and the cof- De Chirico-esque characteristics, Rossi’s draw-
feepot becomes a building. Other elements, such ings are analogic as well as textual; they are a cri-
9. Composition with plans, elevations, and sections, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971.
tique of architecture that cannot be made in the funerary monuments, yet transposes the themes
medium of architecture itself. of life and death through the symbol of the house.
The Cemetery of San Cataldo project In the project’s columbaria blocks, Rossi main-
focuses the energy of Rossi’s drawings and the tains the formal condition of the house through
ideas in The Architecture of the City to render the use of a pitched roof and windows, yet strips
the cemetery as another type of city. In the draw- the windows of the elements—the frames, mul-
ings that Rossi submitted for his competition lions, and glass—which signify occupation. As an
entry, the conception of the cemetery as a series emptied opening, the windows of the columbaria
of parts becomes clear: rows of columbaria and instead register absence.
objectlike ossuaries are the locus for the sym- Rossi’s project for the Cemetery of San
bolic burning of the bodies. The “town square” Cataldo engages aspects of its context without
occupying the center of the cemetery houses the resorting to a contextualist strategy, yet plays off
artefacts culled from the interchangeably urban of its position as an addition to a cemetery com-
and domestic realms: the conical shrine recalls plex comprising a small Jewish cemetery and the
the coffeepot as well as the industrial tower, and existing Costa cemetery. The existing cemeter-
the columbaria and ossuaries blend the typolo- ies—the campo santo (holy ground)—are tra-
gies of house and memorial. Rossi’s cemetery ditionally enclosed by an external wall. One of
also draws on Enlightenment models such as Rossi’s decisions involved using a wall to join the
Fischer von Erlach’s cemetery and Boullée’s cemeteries, which sets into play the vertical and
10. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium exterior. 11. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium interior.
horizontal axes of the traditional Roman town, ism, and instead become urban secular symbols
which grids the cemetery complex. The plan of brought into a sacred burial ground. The confu-
Rossi’s cemetery project can be read as a diptych sion of symbols between the sacred and profane is
with the existing Costa cemetery, and bears both part of the textual nature of the project. The con-
symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships to text of the idea of Le Corbusier’s plan as genera-
this context, aligning and slipping out of alignment tor is called into question as Rossi puts both sec-
with different portions of the plan. While Rossi’s tional and perspectival elevations into the plan;
plan also responds in its geometric order to the these, too, become typological elements deployed
Jewish cemetery, its multiple misalignments fur- without scale and without the context of a single
ther disrupt the classic idea of a part-to-whole place or time.
relationship. Alternatively, the cemetery project Another relationship presented at Rossi’s
can be seen to take the theme of the enclosure of Cemetery of San Cataldo relates to scale, both
figured objects from Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum of the city and of the individual building. This
project. Yet Rossi’s plan rethinks Le Corbusier’s critique is proposed through a single element:
utopian gesture within the context of a more prob- the window. Le Corbusier suggested that when
lematic relationship of drawing to building. a window is too large or too small for a room—
The competition drawings of the Modena that is, when it is not the right size—then one
cemetery depict the symmetrical axis with an is in the presence of architecture. Therefore an
entrance arcade leading to the cubic ossuary, the excess in the relationship signifies architecture
U-shaped columbaria leading down a central axis as an excess in relationship to the functionality of
to the conical shrine, and the enclosing structures the object. Rossi’s strategy differs slightly from
with pitched roofs—many of which can be consid- Le Corbusier’s and is more akin to that in Adolf
ered traditional Rossian elements. These reap- Loos’s house projects, in which the exterior of
pear within the context of the cemetery project, the house was conceived as different and sepa-
but have nothing to do with religious symbol- rate from the interior. The facade in Loos’s case
12. Cemetery of San Cataldo, niches, ossuary. 13. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium.
was a double-sided membrane that articulated that the wall thickness houses the square slots
the urban scale of the city on one side and the for urns. Moreover, the dimension of these square
domestic scale of the house on the other. Rossi spaces is related to that of the window, a relation-
also developed a similar strategy at Gallaratese, ship reiterated by windows with a cruciform sub-
where the standard square window is sized in division. The multiple scales at which the square
relationship to the scale of the square outside operates are legible as a honeycombed effect, with
rather than for the room within, for which it is too the square window as an insert, reproducing the
large. This distortion of scale indicates that the windows at many different scales. The window
room can be read as having been tacked onto the becomes the register of several repetitions: that
facade of the square. Thus the actual facade plane of the square form, and that of the cruciform sub-
of the building is not to be read as the exterior division. Rossi also introduces an uncanny effect
of a building, but rather as the exterior facade produced by other typologies—for example, that
enclosure of the public space. This play of scale of the Tuscan farmhouse, with stucco surfaces,
articulates an idea about a disjunction in the rela- columns, and pitched roof. The square open-
tionship between facade-part and public space- ing punched into the wall is a traditional type of
whole in terms of the city. window, yet in this context the window becomes
The punched square window openings that a register of a space of absence and emptiness.
reappear in the Modena cemetery similarly Modena is important as much for its draw-
question the relationship of part-to-whole. The ings as it is for the building, even though it was
window functions as both the outside and inside never built or completed as drawn. Many of the
of urban scale: the exterior scale of the window drawings are partial plan views rendered as flat-
differs from that of its interior, from which one tened, one-point perspective views, similar to a
can read the slightly smaller frame of the exte- cubist still life. Only the heavy outline of Rossi’s
rior window. The legible change in dimension drawings attest to another sensibility. The draw-
between inner and outer windows is poignant, in ings are diagrams and the buildings, in many
cases, are built as illustrations of the drawings. process of reasoning from parallel cases. The ana-
For example, the plan, section, and elevation are logical method attempts to understand the city
all deployed in a flattened treatment in the draw- from its urban artefacts, which are elements from
ing. The shadows become important as the sole different places and different times, and thereby
indicator of relief. Whether the architecture of removes architecture from a historical form of
the Cemetery of San Cataldo resonates in the logic to another condition of logic, which could be
same way as the drawing is an issue in much of considered textual. Rossi said that to understand
Rossi’s work. As in the work of John Hejduk or his drawings it is necessary to read the text of
Daniel Libeskind, or perhaps even Palladio, who The Architecture of the City. The drawings of the
redrew all of his buildings late in life, it is possible analogous cities contain the primary elements,
to say that building is a representation of an idea the monuments, the special places (or loci) sim-
first proposed in a drawing. It could be argued ilar to the written ideas presented in his text.
that the portion of the Cemetery of San Cataldo Drawings then become another means of archi-
that was built is not as deeply evocative of the tectural thought, not illustrations of or metaphors
ideas that exist in the drawings of the cemetery. for architecture. The movement from Modena’s
Certain of Rossi’s drawings for the cemetery competition drawings to its built components
depict the ground plane becoming a skylight, as and subsequently to the Citta analoga drawings
if describing an interchangeability of ground and suggests that the relationship from drawn idea
sky, of plan and window. In this sense, Rossi’s to built form is recursive, and ultimately textual,
title “The Blue of the Sky” speaks of a condition thus undecidable. Its most important moment is
in which the sacredness of the ground has disap- in the Modena cemetery, a work that can be seen
peared—dissolved, in some sense—into the vast as sited between drawing and building.
emptiness of the sky.
Modena’s physical buildings are power-
ful in their austerity and reticence; their primi-
tive structural systems and cruciform windows,
set within the wall of square burial niches, can
be seen as a summation of a Rossian trope: the
frame within the frame within the frame. The
interrelatedness of these frames is textual as
opposed to visual in nature, playing on associa-
tions related to typology and analogical forms.
The Modena project, especially the drawings,
also points toward the development of what Rossi
would call his Citta analoga or Analogous City of
1976. In his essay, “L’architettura analoga,” Rossi
draws on Jung’s notion of analogical thought as
archaic, unconscious, and practically inexpress-
ible in words, a counterpoint to rationalist logic.
If analogous thought for Rossi is an interior
monologue, then it also offers the possibility of
understanding architecture as the product of a
14. Plan, persectival sections, and elevations for the columbarium, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971.
15. The organization of Rossi’s Cemetery of San Rossi’s San Cataldo cemetery is gridded by vertical
Cataldo responds to an existing cemetery complex and horizontal axes, which recall the cardo and
in Modena. The original site plan is important in the decumanus of the traditional Roman city. There is
context of questioning part-to-whole relationships. an impression of symmetry about the hinge of the
Rossi’s cemetery can be seen as a diptych with the Jewish cemetery centered between the San Cataldo
preexisting Costa cemetery (on the right-hand side); and Costa cemeteries. This symmetry is reiterated in
these two cemeteries flank the smaller Jewish cemetery, the symmetry of the Rossi scheme, which has a central
which functions as a hinge. While the areas within axis with square, pyramid, and conical structures in
the walled enclosures of Rossi’s San Cataldo and the its center. Yet the organization of Rossi’s project can
Costa cemetery are roughly the same size, Rossi’s also be read as bi-nuclear about two main volumes
San Cataldo establishes a distinct difference from the (the cube and the cone), producing a constant play
existing cemeteries. While Rossi’s San Cataldo project between symmetry and asymmetry. The project’s
becomes part of an entire cemetery complex, it can symmetry and use of Platonic forms recalls the
also be characterized in terms of its dislocation from Italian ideal cities, as well as cemeteries by Ledoux
its specific context. and funerary monuments by Boullée and Fischer von
Erlach. The project can thus be seen as a palimpsest
of Roman town, neoclassical framework, and utopian
modernist schemes like that proposed, for example, in
Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum project.
16. Rossi’s Cemetery of San Cataldo project is aligned located in the center of the interior space of the Rossi
along the top and bottom with the Jewish cemetery, yet project, but which runs across the bottom third of the
not with the dimensions of the top and bottom of the internal divisions. The midpoint of the Costa cemetery
Costa cemetery. The central axis of the Costa cemetery, articulates, both vertically and horizontally, what can
which is the dominant cross-axial circulation of the be viewed as eight squares gridding the cemetery space
plans, aligns through the Jewish cemetery with the (the four central spaces being true squares, the four
major cross axis of the Rossi project, an axis not peripheral spaces being less than squares).
17. Rossi’s project for the Cemetery of San Cataldo The exterior rectangular block recalls the Siedlung
appears to be a complete rectilinear enclosure. More (housing blocks) by Ludwig Hilberseimer, which have
specifically, it is articulated as a flattened three-sided no identifiable front or back, as each side is identical.
U-shape with a top element distinguished from the Rossi confounds the idea of the Siedlung by adding
U-shape with small gaps between the building blocks. a pitched roof, which effectively mixes different
This exterior U-shape is then repeated in the interior typologies in combining different characteristics from
of the space as the single scaffold organizing each of different moments in time. The questioning initiated by
the symbolic elements along the central axis. This buildings at different scales challenges conventional
repetition of the outer U-shape and an inner U-shape typologies and prevents a single reading of the object.
maintains a tension between elements.
18. In the Cemetery of San Cataldo the voided cube, The square and cube are repeated at various scales
while reminiscent of the voided cube of Rossi’s Turin throughout the project, from the large scale of the
project, also bears a relationship to his Cuneo monu- building to the individual scales of the ossuaries
ment and serves a similar function as a monument to and the smaller scale of the squares of the cruciform
war dead. Rossi also describes the voided cube as an windows. Rossi is clearly interested in the restoration
abandoned house, lacking functional windows and a of figure, but one of ambiguous scale and function.
roof.
19. Cemetery of San Cataldo, roof plan, axonometric view.

20. Cemetery of San Cataldo, ossuaries and columbaria,

axonometric view.
21. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbaria and

ossuary entry sequence.
22. Cemetery of San Cataldo, ossuary,

axonometric view.
23. Cemetery of San Cataldo, ascending ossuaries

flank the central axis, culminating in the conical
monument.
1. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, Paris, 1992–93.
8. Strategies of the Void
Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, 1992–93
If Walter Benjamin, in his famous and oft-quoted remark, said that archi-
tecture is viewed in a state of distraction, then the iconic building so prev-
alent today may reflect this condition. This prominence of iconic buildings
relates to two factors: first, perhaps to a tendency to treat the diagram as
an icon; second, a tendency to apply the iconic diagram directly to the prob-
lem of generating form. Much of Rem Koolhaas’s earliest work explores
the diagram as a symbolic form; for example, the New York Athletic Club
becomes symbolic of a discontinuous formal diagram. However, much of
his recent work, such as the Seattle Public Library or the Casa da Musica
in Porto, privileges the idea of an iconic diagram in that the realized form
of the building has a visual similitude to its diagram of functions. It can
be argued that Koolhaas’s 1992 project for the Jussieu Libraries takes a
position between these two types of diagrams—that is, that it marks an
inflection point in Koolhaas’s shift from a symbolic to an iconic diagram,
and that this movement is registered through a critique of the diagrams of
Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-
Strasbourg will be seen to be an important precedent for Jussieu, because
in section the project implies a continuity between the ground and the
roof. This sectional continuity denies the ground as a datum by suggest-
ing that the ground is conceived as a malleable fabric, capable of being
pulled up to meet the roof. In seeking to produce a diagram that is differ-
entiated from that of Le Corbusier without resorting to classical poché,
Koolhaas uses the void, which is conceived as an inversion of poché, as
a conceptual armature in a series of projects leading up to the Jussieu
Libraries. While architects such as Luigi Moretti sought to solidify the
void, Koolhaas instead seeks to capture its energy by conceptualizing
202 Jussieu Libraries
2. OMA, Mission Grande Axe, La Defense, Paris, 1991. 3. Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 1946.
the void as a latent force contained between prior generation, including Venturi, Rossi, and
layers of solid floors. “Strategy of the Void” is the Stirling, used strategies of fragmentation and
title of Koolhaas’s statement for his Très Grande materiality to critique the modernist idea of the
Bibliothèque competition entry (1989), in which whole, the fragment cannot help but to recall an
he describes the library as a solid stack from absent “whole,” and in that sense maintains, at
which volumes are carved: “The major public least in concept, a traditional part-to-whole rela-
spaces are defined as absences of building, voids tionship. The post-1968 generation engaged in
carved out of the information solid.” Void thus a different idea of the part-to-whole dialectic,
becomes poché, as a cutting into both the build- which reflected alternative ways to view the sub-
ing and urban fabric. In adapting Koolhaas’s title ject, drawing on structuralist and poststructural-
to “Strategies of the Void” for an analysis of the ist theory. For example, Jacques Lacan’s notion
Jussieu Libraries, this chapter argues that the of the split subject and the development of the
project conceives the void not only as a critique conscious subject as a function of its projected/
of modernist precedents, but also as a means to reflected image suggests a different idea of part-
rethink the relationship between the subject and to-whole in the context of the subject/object rela-
the object of architecture, and ultimately to sug- tionship. The split subject is no longer considered
gest another form of close reading. a fragmentary part of a whole, and the concept of
Koolhaas frames the Jussieu project in the “wholeness” becomes increasingly untenable.
context of its Paris university campus, the expan- A second aspect of Koolhaas’s strategy of the
sion of which had been initially truncated by the void involves creating situations which introduce
student uprisings of May 1968. Koolhaas belongs a voyeuristic gaze and in which the voided space
to a generation of architects who describe being both blocks direct vision and reveals supposedly
powerfully affected by the events of 1968 and the hidden elements. Koolhaas, like Le Corbusier
literary and cultural theories generated in its before him, presents a didactic image of a hand
wake. These challenged the humanistic notion of lifting up a corner of the ground. For Koolhaas,
the subject and the modernist notion of the object this image suggests that the surface is malleable
as a part of a rational whole. While the work of a and pliable, that it is no longer specifically related
Jussieu Libraries 203
4. New York Athletic Club, section, 1978. 5. OMA, Parc de La Villette model, Paris, 1982.
to the ground, and that it partakes in a vertical to a strip of playgrounds, and a strip of discovery
continuum. More importantly, in lifting up the gardens beside a strip of museums. These func-
city’s fabric, a hidden aspect of its infrastructure tional conditions do not require such contiguous
is revealed as an underlying object. spatial relationships. In envisioning the ground
With his first book, Delirious New York plane as a series of strips, Koolhaas’s La Villette
(1978), Koolhaas presents a radical conception proposal breaks with a figure/ground urbanism to
of an architecture using the New York Athletic propose a montage of programmatic lateral bands
Club as a model. It is not a traditional diagram of linked by the strong vertical of a proposed prome-
function, but is rather a diagram symbolic of the nade. This is a clear echo of the New York Athletic
dismantling of the traditional physical contiguity Club’s discrete programmatic layers linked by the
of part-to-whole relationships. For Koolhaas, the elevator. This leads Koolhaas to suggest that not
New York Athletic Club diagram proposes an idea only the isolated building but also the field of the
of discontinuity in its questioning of traditional city can be rethought, beginning with the very
functional adjacency relationships. Koolhaas sug- distribution of the ground itself.
gests that the presence of the elevator denies the This denial of the ground as a datum begins to
need for contiguous functional relationships in a appear in Koolhaas’s project for the Très Grande
skyscraper such as the New York Athletic Club, Bibliothèque in 1993, which further develops
whose stacked functional layers happen to be Koolhaas’s diagram of contiguous discontinuity
physically contiguous, yet there is neither func- in the section of the building. The library is con-
tional need nor meaning in their physical contigu- ceived in section, not as a series of free plans, but
ity. Such a diagram, one that presents what can as a vertical stacking of differentiated horizontal
be called contiguous discontinuity, also appears in planes that do not share a contiguity of program
Koolhaas’s entry for the 1982 Parc de La Villette from one level to the other. Only the structural
competition in Paris. One of Koolhaas’s most dia- grid links the floors, but in pragmatic and not the-
grammatic projects, the park is depicted as a series oretical terms. While it could be argued that the
of horizontal programmatic strips. La Villette’s Très Grande Bibliothèque’s nine main columns
didactic plan places a strip of theme parks next are organizing elements, these columns are not
6. OMA, Très Grande Bibliothèque, competition model, Paris, 1998.

thematic of a free plan in that they do not pro- cal frontispiece, which distinguishes the project’s
vide a regular backdrop for the figuration of free back from the front and differentiates the front
forms. Koolhaas denies the thematic of the col- from the sides. The figured energies of the proj-
umns, which disappear and reappear randomly, ect’s diagonals, horizontal cuts, and plans never
depending on how they intersect with the walls. disrupt the clear geometric boundary of the
This structural system also could be seen as building’s edge. This condition is one not so much
a critique of Mies’s umbrella diagram. Large X- of floor levels, but rather becomes a matrix of vol-
shaped columns at the base of the Très Grande umes that do not obey any horizontal datum.
Bibliothèque create a giant truss that supports the The 1990 project for a convention center
building. Whereas Mies hung his buildings off of a at Agadir, Morocco, presents a critique of the
truss, as in Crown Hall and the National Gallery horizontal extension of space proposed by Le
in Berlin, Koolhaas places the truss under the Corbusier with his Maison Dom-ino diagram.
building, reversing Mies’s umbrella diagram. The While the Maison Dom-ino located the individ-
spaces for the library stacks of the Très Grande ual in relationship to a larger context, Koolhaas
Bibliothèque are organized around the structure establishes the interrelationship of individuals
with a discontinuity reminiscent of La Villette, as a kind of free play of the individual in space
while the circulation is treated as a series of fig- and time. Agadir presents an intermediary step
ured objects, much like Le Corbusier’s ramp at between the Très Grande Bibliothèque and the
Strasbourg. Rather than the floors, it is the ele- Jussieu Libraries. Instead of a horizontal contin-
ments of circulation which are given form—and uum there are three possible sectional interpre-
as cuts in the floors, or holes that punch through tations: one, the ground becomes modulated; two,
walls, these voids capture the figured energy of the sectional space becomes modulated where
the project. However, there remains a formal the ground rises substantially in the section; and
perimeter condition that is maintained in a classi- three, the horizontal is no longer a continuum. In
7. OMA, Palm Bay Seafront Convention Center, Agadir, model, Morocco, 1990.
the first, the ground is no longer a datum, and a different kind of spatial relationship between
the roof is no longer part of a ground/floor/roof subject and object. This imitation of a voyeuris-
continuum, but becomes something else. This tic space is what Jeffrey Kipnis calls a performa-
is neither the umbrella diagram of Mies nor the tive discourse.
horizontal continuum of Le Corbusier. Rather, it While the Jussieu Libraries project of
manifests an energy that causes an undulation 1992–93 is essentially a vertical project, the
in section. Agadir is no longer the didactic hori- warped floors signal an evolution from Agadir.
zontal continuum of Cartesian x- and y-axes but Yet unlike Agadir, whose warped floor remains
rather proposes a figured section where the hori- horizontal, the floors at Jussieu are warped in
zontal is a figured void cut out of an equally figured section to the extent that floors rise to touch
solid poché. the floor of the next level. The floors become a
Koolhaas introduces a horizontal distur- series of continuous surfaces which tilt from the
bance in section as a dominant mode of discourse horizontal. Conceptually the circulation and the
rather than the vertical extrusion typical of floor levels become a continuous surface, yet the
classical architecture and present in the work project retains a discontinuous relationship in
of postwar American architects such as Louis terms of a Cartesian axiality. No longer is the
Kahn. The modulation of section creates condi- subject in a one-to-one relationship with another
tions in which space can be occupied by a subject subject but, because of the inclined planes, it
who may become a voyeur while hidden from views other subjects—and is viewed by them—
the view of another subject and vice versa. The as objects. There are spaces in Jussieu which
resultant coup d’oeil and peripheral views shift allow a voyeuristic tendency to take place. This
the focus of opticality from the physical object manipulation of the visual field begins with the
to the subject, who looks through, around, Jussieu Libraries and continues, for example, in
beneath, above, and at spaces, becoming part of the Seattle Library.
8. OMA, Jussieu Libraries, section drawing.
The unfolded section of the Jussieu ing provided by a type of porte-cochère, a portico-
Libraries competition entry becomes a critique like element marking the transition from exterior
of Koolhaas’s earlier New York Athletic Club to interior at ground level, twists up through the
diagram, and produces an entirely new diagram project, seemingly autonomous from the build-
that focuses on the internal continuity of sur- ing’s formal organization.
faces. The diagrammatic icon of circulation now The cross section of the Jussieu Libraries
becomes literal circulation. The sections also sug- expresses the discontiguous relationships of pro-
gest that the only real volumes in the building are gram, and the continuity of the ramped floors
the interstitial spaces between floors. These are produces an entirely other section, no longer the
bounded as figures by the bow and bend of the stacked layers of the New York Athletic Club or
floor planes, and in that sense can be viewed as La Villette. The section reveals that the only vol-
residual, while the linking of circulation with the umes in the buildings are trapped voids, intersti-
floor planes suggests that a diagram of circula- tial spaces between floors, which are not continu-
tion is its governing form. ous. The drawings reflect a new ethos of percep-
At Jussieu, as in the Très Grande Biblio- tion, and suggest a departure from architecture
thèque, Koolhaas retains aspects of classical as a product of close attention. Koolhaas’s strate-
architectural notation, such as the differentiation gies of the void are important, linking the issue of
of the building’s front, back, and sides. The differ- the void—present in the postwar work of Moretti
ential between the building’s sides, one of which and Venturi—to new methods of working that
appears almost eaten away by interior voids while confront questions about part-to-whole relation-
others are mostly intact, also maintains the clas- ships, inattention versus close attention, disjunc-
sical legibility of front and back. Finally, the open- tion versus fragmentation.
These voided elements, which are rendered equilibrium. The void produces a space of unre-
as gray solids in the large competition model, solved tension between center and edge. It is this
cannot be read as purely poché, nor as purely irresolution that introduces what has been called
figure, because they are residual spaces cre- here the idea of undecidability. Similarly, while
ated by the continuity of the floor planes. These there appears to be little continuity to the circula-
darkened segments emphasize the connections tion, it remains contained within its cubic frame-
between levels, allowing the horizontal to be read work: the floor and the circulation are joined as a
as a continuous flow which is only interrupted by single element. The Jussieu Libraries become the
the gray elements. The energy, whether it is reg- model for many of the later projects, including the
istered in different shapes, horizontal cuts, spi- Seattle Library, the Casa da Musica in Porto, and
rals, or ramping floors, does not disturb the edge. the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, all by Koolhaas. It
This contrasts with the edge stress of cubist becomes clear that the influences of the diagrams
painting and the centrifugal stress of Venturi’s of Le Corbusier and Mies are inverted, and are
and Moretti’s work. At Jussieu, there is neither transformed into figured, volumetric, objectlike
a centralized stress, nor a stress at the edge. elements as “strategies of the void.”
Rather, the stress is diffused; it appears in the The critique that begins with Strasbourg
different layers of the object, particularly when and the lessons learned in the Très Grande
the only centralizing figure is clearly thrown Bibliothèque and at Agadir coalesce in the
off center, but not enough to be seen as moving warped sections and figured voids of Jussieu.
toward the edge. The energies which figure the Yet the critical and theoretical arguments con-
voids are equidistant from the edge and from the densed in Jussieu’s model, drawings, and section
center, carefully balanced in a kind of dynamic give way to an increasingly iconic use of the dia-
gram by Koolhaas at the Seattle Public Library

and at the Casa da Musica. These buildings adopt
a visual similitude with the ideas posited in their
diagrams. Because the diagram of discontinuous
layers of program retains a visual similitude to
the architectural form, Koolhaas’s work begins to
suggest another attitude toward close reading.
When the reading of the diagram approaches
the reading of the building, close reading is no
longer necessary. While this may not be the case in
Jussieu, certainly the projects that follow, Seattle
and Porto, seem to belie these earlier directions.
They give up close reading for the immediacy of
shape and a more popular appeal: the diagram as
logo and branding.
9. Jussieu Libraries, third sublevel, plan and sections.
10. Jussieu Libraries, second sublevel, plan and sections.
11. Jussieu Libraries, first sublevel, plan and sections.

12. Jussieu Libraries, mezzanine-entry level, plan and sections.
13. Jussieu Libraries, first floor, plan and sections.
14. Jussieu Libraries, second floor, plan and sections.

15. Jussieu Libraries, fourth floor, plan and sections.
16. Jussieu Libraries, roof level, plan and sections.

17. The Jussieu Libraries project responds to several of 18. A stacked parking-garage diagram demonstrates
Le Corbusier’s diagrams: the Maison Dom-ino, squared the possibility of a continuous relation between the
and stacked, can be considered one such precedent. Le stacked floor levels. This registers as a disturbance in
Corbusier’s Dom-ino diagram located the individual the horizontal section.
clearly in relationship to a context which was elevated
from the ground. The stacking function maintains
layers as discontinuous elements.
19. An analysis of the horizontal disturbances in the 20. At Jussieu, the distinction of floor and ramp is
stacked layers of the Jussieu Libraries demonstrates effaced. A little noted aspect of Koolhaas’s discourse
the shifts, ramping, and discontinuities that serve as is the cant of the roof plane, which indicates that this
a critique of the Dom-ino section. It no longer suggests no longer represents a flat extension of a horizontal
that there is an extension of Cartesian space into a continuum of space, but instead produces a perspectival
horizon. twisting in space. This false perspectival twisting
continues through to the roof, marking the spiraling
energies upward.
21. The discontinuous circulation and warping floor 22. (Right) In an exploded axonometric diagram, the
levels create a condition in which the only discernible figured voids can be characterized as cuts (A), tears
volumes are the interstitial spaces between floors. (B), and holes (C). The horizontal layers that constitute
Certain of these interstitial spaces are highlighted the floors are opened by these cuts, tears, and holes,
in the competition model (gray areas). These zones suggesting that the floor has become a fabric joining
are articulated as part of the relationship between the roof and ground.
one floor and the other, yet these figured voids are not
continuous. These spaces could also be considered as
partial figures. These figures disrupt the reading of
a continuum from floor to floor in terms of function.
The discontinuous vertical circulation, horizontal
circulation, and condition of objects which are not
located on a ground can be seen as a critique of the
notion of ground as a datum.
B C
A
C
A
A
C
B
A
A B
C
A A
B
B
C
A
B A
B
A
A
23. Lifting the horizontal plane, as if cutting away the 24. Jussieu is framed as a square. If envisaged as a
surface, produces the idea that the surface is malleable sequence of folded planes in a soft and pliable material,
and pliable. This also implies that the surface is no it is apparent that the distinct edges of the folded plane
longer necessarily only related to the ground, but that maintain the geometrical form of the square.
it becomes part of the vertical continuum.
25. The folded condition of a single sheet of pliable 26. The fabric of the folded plane registers a series
material produces spaces whose variable section of cuts and shears. Certain cuts are clearly ramps;
registers the deformation of the plane. The folded plane others are void figures unto themselves, lacking clear
is a diagram for the Jussieu Libraries. function. These voids do not seem to follow a clear
organization, but rather disrupt continuity and the
idea of a single thematized reading.
27. While the Jussieu project has a regular structural 28. In addition to Jussieu’s large-scale ramping
grid, certain grid elements tilt and bend, demonstrating circulation, there are smaller orthogonal figures
that the regularity of the grid is not thematic. Yet the created by stair cores and giant columns, similar to
structural grid indicates that there are narrow bays those in the Très Grande Bibliothèque. These forms
flanked by a series of wider bays on the inboard emphasize vertical circulation; the conception of
side, which take on a different organizing structure Jussieu as a folded, lifted, and cut plane presents a
than those at Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès– different spatial idea. Thus, the circulation is not
Strasbourg. treated at either the large scale of the ramp or the
smaller scale of inner circulation as a figured object.
29. Jussieu Libraries, circulation diagram.

30. Jussieu Libraries, third sublevel, axonometric view.

31. Jussieu Libraries, second sublevel, axonometric view.

32. Jussieu Libraries, first sublevel, axonometric view.

33. Jussieu Libraries, mezzanine-entry level, axonometric view.

34. Jussieu Libraries, first floor, axonometric view.

35. Jussieu Libraries, second floor, axonometric view.

36. Jussieu Libraries, third floor, axonometric view.

37. Jussieu Libraries, fourth floor, axonometric view.

38. Jussieu Libraries, roof level, axonometric view.

1. Studio Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2000.
Libeskind Layout 02 08.indd 230 4/9/2008 11:44:29 AM

9. The Deconstruction of the Axis
Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 1989–1999
In the 1970s, Rosalind Krauss gave two important lectures titled “Notes
on the Index” at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in
New York, which subsequently appeared as essays in the journal October,
numbers 3 and 4, published in the spring and fall of 1977. Krauss’s dis-
cussion of the index drew on the distinctions between icon, symbol, and
index first put forward by C. S. Peirce. If, for Peirce, an icon had a visual
likeness to its object and a symbol had an agreed upon or conventional
meaning, then an index was a trace or record of an actual event or a pro-
cess. The index displaces the movement outward of both the icon and the
symbol to a signified, while referring inwardly to its own processes. But
most important for architecture, the index is also closely tied to the issue
of presence and absence. For example, Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of
footprints in the sand gave him the idea that there was life on the island
without having seen the living being itself. The index, Krauss describes,
“establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its
referent.” The footprints are the trace of a previous presence, yet also
record the current absence of that presence. The footprints in the sand
imply several registers of an index as both imprint and trace. When the
foot lifts up from the sand it leaves the imprint of human presence in the
depressed sand, yet at the same time a layer of sand clings to the bottom
of the foot. Thus, the trace remains on the object—the foot—while the
beach registers the imprint of the foot, or the human presence. Another
component of the footprint as index is its notation of time; the footprint
registers the span between the moment of human presence in making the
imprint and that of human absence. The idea of presence and absence sug-
gests a significant difference between an idea of an index or trace in a

232 Jewish Museum
2. Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas, Time Sections, 1978.
linguistic or photographic context, and an index an index undercuts such a metaphysical fullness
in a physical context like architecture. because its referent is to a prior condition—or in
Krauss suggests that language presents us other words, a condition of absence.
with an historical framework which preexists In the second part of “Notes on the Index,”
its own being, and therefore joins language to Krauss considers the photograph as another
a metaphysics. The idea of an architectural lan- example of an index, as it introduces a set of
guage becomes problematic when it assumes that abstractions which include both process and
any historical context is a stable entity. Because absence. It is the absence of the actual event,
architectural representation is presumed to be a or the photograph’s actual relation to the past
stable relationship between a sign and its object, event, that is signified. The photograph is consid-
the idea of the index in architecture seeks to ered the index or trace of some condition of fact
undermine the idea that its language is a decid- or reality, and while it is a physical object in itself,
able physical presence with a one-to-one relation- it also reproduces signs of former presences,
ship to a signified. Krauss has suggested that the and therefore undercuts fullness by introducing
importance of the index counters the overwhelm- these absences. Krauss describes the index as
ing physical presence of an object, in that it is a the mute presence of an uncoded event, one that
trace of some other object, and not a sign or a operates without conventions. She cites Gordon
representation of the thing itself. Thus an index Matta-Clark, whose cutting of holes in floors and
in architecture attempts to deny pure presence facades of buildings creates the ultimate icon
by presenting a condition of absence in presence. for an indexical architecture. Krauss describes
If a metaphysical presence presupposes a notion these cuts as akin to the linguistic shifter, which
of fullness because it is present in physical terms, she describes in October 3 as a term in linguistics

Jewish Museum 233
3. Line of Fire, plan, 1988.
which is filled with signification only because it be considered a more literal presence. The index
is empty. thus traces the movement from metaphysical
A word like this, as in this table or this chair, presence to pure presence itself. The logic of
lends signification to its referent but remains such indexical signs seeks to undermine the
empty itself, or in Krauss’s terms, is “an empty iconic and symbolic, yet the index can easily be
pronominal sign.” The cut in Matta-Clark’s transformed into an icon of its own indexicality.
work becomes an empty sign of an event, a Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin is
trace of someone’s having cut into the build- just such a project. It is one of the important real-
ing. The cut also empties the metaphysical con- ized buildings of what can be called the indexi-
tent of the house because the house is no longer cal project in architecture. This building engages
functioning as a house. Once its enclosure is the index as a critique of architectural persis-
breached it can no longer shelter: its content tencies, in particular that of linear axiality, which
and functions are emptied. If the form of a can be considered fundamental to Cartesian and
house with a pitched roof harbors metaphysi- classical space.
cal and meaningful implications related to the Libeskind’s indexical work begins with
image and function of shelter, then these mean- his 1978 Micromegas drawings, a series of lines
ings are shattered by any kind of cut. Not only that attempt to question Cartesian space. The
is the cut in itself a trace of the cutting, but in Micromegas drawings in fact were not merely
the act of cutting the house reduces its meta- drawn lines but tectonic architectural lines, index-
physical content. The cuts in the work of Matta- ical markings of conditions in space and time on a
Clark become the index of the absence, displac- virtual object; the series is an index of the denial
ing a metaphysics of presence with what could of any Cartesian coordinates or picture plane.

234 Jewish Museum
4. City Edge competition, model, 1987.
With lines that shatter space and undermine political divide that initiates the disruption of the
iconic and symbolic references, the Micromegas axis, but it is a physical gesture which ultimately
drawings initiate this breakdown of axial space. destabilizes the continuity of the part-to-whole
If all sites contain axes, and if site specific- relationship.
ity is an idea relating a particular building to a The indexical project of Libeskind’s Jewish
site, then all buildings contain axes which relate Museum becomes more apparent in its direct
building to the subject’s movement through it. relationship to his 1988 work Line of Fire, an
Libeskind, in presenting the axis as a trace, an installation in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation
inaccessible void, and a series of discontinuous in Briey-en-Forêt. The ground level of Le
segments, offers a critique of axiality, site speci- Corbusier’s Unité provided an axial space defined
ficity, and ultimately the classical subject/object by pairs of massive pilotis. In this and other
relationship. One of the dominant persistencies Corbusian buildings, these symmetries identify
of architecture is the traditional movement of the path of the subject in much the same way
the subject from the entry of a building through as in a Palladian villa, the symmetry of columns
its major spaces, which are typically perceived providing a simple geometric means of recogni-
through symmetrical sequences. Whether this tion. These symmetrical pairings in architecture
path is called a promenade, a marche, or merely make the time of the subject’s movement and the
a symmetrical x-axis is of little concern here, but time of the object (or its physical axis) the same.
to deny the idea of the subject’s understanding of When the path of the subject does not seem to
space through Cartesian coordinates is to chal- correspond with the form of the space, then the
lenge one of the persistencies of architecture. time of the subject’s movement and the time of
Libeskind’s project for the City Edge competi- the object become differentiated. Libeskind’s
tion of 1987 continues this exploration of the axis Line of Fire project does just that by disrupt-
with a linear project sited to slice across the grain ing the possibility of axial movement around and
of the divided city of Berlin: in this case it is a through the Unité’s pilotis. The zigzagging form

Jewish Museum 235
5. Line of Fire, plan 1988. 6. Line of Fire, installation, Briey-en-Forêt, 1988.
of his installation denies the idea of an axis, both suggests that the time of the experience can no
as a real pathway and as a concept of an axis of longer be assumed to be calibrated with the time
symmetry. When the installation was placed in an of the object, because the time of the object will
architectural context it disrupted the metaphys- not reveal itself with the path that the subject
ical idea of an axis, that of a single movement is taking. This is the central issue of Libeskind’s
through space and its engagement with an idea Jewish Museum, which is one of the first real evo-
of axis. This disruption questions the classical cations of an attempt to deny the continuity of the
notion of the continuity and symmetry of x-axes, axial path to the object of architecture.
while creating a disjunction in time and a dislo- The Jewish Museum in Berlin in one sense
cation in space. It is that distance in time that is itself a repetition, a trace and an index of the
causes the indexical quality to become part of the Line of Fire exhibition. In fact, mirroring Line of
project in the disruption of the axis. Line of Fire Fire about a horizontal axis produces the identi-
establishes a series of different axes which coun- cal form of the Berlin project. It could be argued
ter the subject’s path and call attention to the then that the axiality challenged by Line of Fire
discrepancy between the experience and com- is displaced again, this time rotated in its context
prehension of space. The subject’s mental tracing to produce the Berlin project. Libeskind’s own
of a zigzag route is disorienting, even though an argument that the Berlin project represents the
implied axis remains present. Libeskind’s instal- fragmentation of a Jewish star, or is an index of
lation suggests that this axis is not a pure and the points in Berlin where the Jews were trans-
continuous vector, but one that may be modified ported out of the city, has little to do with the
by historical circumstance—in this case refer- argument here and its relation to Line of Fire.
ring to the destinations of deported Jews in Nazi While Libeskind will always claim that the Berlin
Germany. Libeskind, like Henri Bergson before Museum comes from connecting the lines from
him, questions the relationship of the time of the points of Jewish embarkation from Berlin to
the object to the time of the subject. Libeskind the death camps and that the intersection of these

236 Jewish Museum
7. Jewish Museum, preliminary working model, 1990.
lines produced this form, the correspondence in manner from the conventional relationship of win-
form between the Jewish Museum and the Line dows to their respective interiors.
of Fire seems to suggest other interpretations. Windows typically reveal the scale of rooms
The original idea for the building emerged from and reflect the scale relationship of interior to
a competition for an extension to the neoclassical exterior. Such a relationship is fragmented by
Berlin Museum for German history. The competi- these cuts on the Jewish Museum facade: cer-
tion model and some early drawings suggest that tain of these cuts are small, others large, but they
Libeskind originally connected the Line of Fire bear no relationship to the interior spaces. In
to the museum as an extension, not as an entirely Libeskind’s museum, the apertures are divorced
new Jewish Museum. from function, registering the conflict between
The first working model of the scheme for interior and exterior scales, as well as between
the Jewish Museum had canted and battered exte- light source and the possibility of functional exhi-
rior walls. In addition to the zigzagging form of bitions. These cuts recall the lines in Micromegas,
the museum disrupting the x-axis, the walls were and shift the role of the window from function to
canted at various angles so that the vertical y-axis indexical marker. The cuts work in a similar way to
was similarly challenged. But in both the models the openings in the sloping wall of Le Corbusier’s
of the project and in the realized building there chapel at Ronchamp in that they relate to an
remains a trace in the roof of the continuous axial implied vertical datum. Ronchamp is successful in
path that is disjuncted, first by the angled body that its sloped wall and its cut-outs play against
of the museum, and next by the actual inacces- an implied but nonexistent vertical plane.
sible void which extends down to the floors from There is nothing more indexical in plan
the roof trace, denying any continuity along the and elevation than the random, arbitrary cuts
x-axis. The facades are already marked by indexi- throughout the museum. This is similar to Matta-
cal cuts similar to Matta-Clark’s, which articu- Clark’s cuts as the traces of that cutting, resem-
late apertures in a building in a radically different bling a photographic plate of a series of arbitrary

Jewish Museum 237
8. Jewish Museum, zinc model, 1990. 9. Jewish Museum, site model.
gestures. It could be argued that these gestures perception on the eye itself. Thus, again the cuts
relate to the arbitrary and random execution of become indexical, not so much of the political/his-
Jews by the German state under Hitler. Yet the torical narratives articulated by Libeskind as of
dominant mode of discourse is one of traces of the act of cutting itself.
some event that internalizes “no meaning,” which If both Line of Fire and the Jewish Museum
in itself takes on a symbolically meaningful rela- present a disruption of the x-axis, the scale of
tionship to the willful, i.e. “meaningless,” killing the Jewish Museum allows Libeskind to artic-
of people. In one sense, the cuts establish the con- ulate this disruption in more precise ways.
dition of the arbitrary, which then relates to a real Circulation plays a key role in a critique of the
meaning, which is the ultimate condition of the need to understand space through movement.
arbitrary. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum oscillates The stairs of the museum do not provide connec-
between the indexical and the symbolic, as the tion, but in one sense function to interrupt con-
indexical register triggers a symbolic key, which tinuous movement. The location of the staircases
then returns the symbolic to the arbitrary. further denies any continuity of movement. It is
In Libeskind’s final rendition of the Jewish important to understand that one cannot follow a
Museum, the conceptual resonance for the cuts in horizontal route, nor remain at a horizontal level
the facade as indexing the play between y-axis when moving through the museum. The subject’s
and canted wall no longer exists, as the realized movement along a Cartesian conceptual axis is
walls are no longer canted. However, the cuts interrupted, as is the ability to remain on a single
still challenge the traditional use of windows for comprehensible horizontal datum. The length of
orientation, for the narrow cuts of light produce the building represented by spaces on the same
a strong contrast with the museum’s dark walls; floor cannot be experienced as the typical hori-
the cuts create what in painting is called a hala- zontal datum provided by a floor plane. Rather,
tion, which causes the light to produce an after- the horizontal axis must be traversed through
image on the retina—in other words, an index of a sequence of interrupted levels, as stairs and

238 Jewish Museum
ramps move the subject across the series of voids

enclosed in the museum. Such disruptions frus-
trate programmatic and formal expectations, but
more importantly separate the time of the expe-
rience of space from the comprehension of its
organization.
The traditional subject/object relation-
ship depended on a continuous horizontal datum
that could be traversed, but the Jewish Museum
denies that possibility. The sequence of inacces-
sible voids at the center of the museum, while
variously described in terms of poetic reso-
nance, can also be interpreted as a continua-
tion of Libeskind’s critique of Cartesian axial-
ity. These voided zones slice through the center
of the zigzagging form of the museum, so that
a void zone, which might be comprehended by
a legible axis, is never experienced as such and
instead becomes one of the devices to impede
the subject’s movement. The visual parameters
of what is being seen do not produce an over-
all image or gestalt, but produce something that
is difficult to extrapolate from the experience
of the building. Not only are the axes and floor
levels denied as parts that ultimately relate to a
whole, but the overall impression of a function-
ing whole is denied by the parts.
Ultimately Libeskind’s museum is a strug-
gle between the indexicality of the building and
the symbolic resonance of the rhetoric. Perhaps
it was the specific context of the earlier projects
that provided the necessary rhetoric implied in
the work. Later projects suggest that the sym-
bolic predominates over the indexical and dia-
grammatic nature of the earlier work. The new
work becomes more open to expressionist ges-
tures that move it closer to an iconic project, no
longer requiring the close reading of indexical
traces. As such, the Jewish Museum represents
the cusp of a relationship between the indexical
and the iconic.

Jewish Museum 239
10. Jewish Museum, underground level plan.
11., Jewish Museum, first-floor plan.

240 Jewish Museum
12–13. Jewish Museum, envelope and circulation dia- along a level horizontal axis, while ramps and stairs fur-
grams. The void spaces (dark gray) prevent movement ther disrupt the continuous line of movement.

Jewish Museum 241

242 Jewish Museum
14-15. Line of Fire, plan and projected elevations, the envelope of the installation piece. Highlighted in red
based on the 1988 plan drawings. An incised pattern of are rectangular elements which resemble the markings
crossing lines, resembling an uneven grid, is applied to on the envelope of the Jewish Museum.

Jewish Museum 243
16. Jewish Museum, diagram of envelope highlighting indexical project registers on the museum’s envelope as
rectangular motifs that appear to be traces based on well as its form.
surface markings in Line of Fire. These suggest that the

244 Jewish Museum
17. Jewish Museum, roof plan, including underground level, axonometric view.

Jewish Museum 245
18. Jewish Museum, underground level, axonometric view.

246 Jewish Museum
19. Jewish Museum, ground-floor plan, axonometric view.

The highlighted void forms the horizontal axis.

Jewish Museum 247
20. Jewish Museum, first-floor plan, axonometric view. The

highlighted void forms an inaccessible volume on this floor.

248 Jewish Museum
21. Jewish Museum, second-floor plan, axonometric view. The

highlighted void forms an inaccessible volume on this floor.

Jewish Museum 249
22. Jewish Museum, third-floor plan, axonometric view show-

ing the volumetric form of the void.

250 Jewish Museum
23. Jewish Museum, exploded sectional axonometric

through void axis, revealing the figured voids.

Jewish Museum 251
24. Jewish Museum, section through void axis, axonometric

view. The circulation around the void spaces is highlighted.

252 Jewish Museum
25. Jewish Museum, unfolded. The trace of the voids,

highlighted in red, retains the zigzagging form of the
actual plan.

Jewish Museum 253

254 Jewish Museum
26. Jewish Museum, roof plan, axonometric view.

1. Frank O. Gehry & Partners, Peter B. Lewis Building, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western
Reserve University. Cleveland, Ohio, 2002.
10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram
Frank O. Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building, 1997–2002
Most of the diagrams discussed in this book, whether they are iconic,
symbolic, or indexical, secure their importance by displacing an original
and preceding condition. Greg Lynn, in his Embryological House and in
several recent projects, proposes another kind of diagram, one that has
no originary condition. Lynn suggests that form harbors, as an integral
aspect of its being, conditions which he calls form’s own diagrammatic
necessity. This internal logic renders it possible to produce diagrams that
refer not to an external transcendental signified, but to their own opera-
tions. Such diagrams may not depend on any of the a priori notions that
could be assumed to determine architecture, such as site or program. If
that is the case, for example, if the problematic of part-to-whole—the
relation of a building to its site, of its inside to its outside, or of the build-
ing to the city—is no longer necessarily an a priori truth, then the neces-
sity of a part-to-whole relationship is in fact undermined, as is the type
of close reading that searches for this relationship. Rather than the part,
Lynn’s work deals with the component as an infinitely repeatable entity.
He suggests that it is possible to work on components—whether they are
components of a building or components of the city—which have no nec-
essary relationship to the whole, nor to a precedent, but result from a set
of internal or computational logics.
Lynn argues that a computer algorithm operates both in the Peircian
sense of the symbol and the index, in that its meaning is legible as a rep-
resentation of such processes and that these operations take place over
time, which is recorded in an indexical manner. These digital processes,
Lynn suggests, do not depend upon an external relationship of site, pro-
gram, or some prior architectural necessity.
258 Peter B. Lewis Building
2. Peter B. Lewis Building, study model, June 1997. 3. Peter B. Lewis Building, study model, June 1997.
Architecture may always look like archi- is a significant separation between Lynn’s and
tecture because it shelters, encloses, resists the Gehry’s invocations of the digital. While Gehry
forces of gravity, and is sited, yet these thematic might argue that his work is the result of com-
operations do not necessarily need to refer to putation, it could similarly be argued that Gehry
previous disciplinary architectural conditions— occupies a terrain that is not as clearly defined,
in other words, to precedents or what are called being sited between personal expression—or ana-
here disciplinary persistencies. Lynn’s argument logic processes—and digital processes. Gehry’s
implies that these prior conditions of architec- diagrams originate in analogic methods, and the
ture’s own disciplinary precedents are not neces- subsequent digital work is one of reproduction of
sarily relevant to those of the future, given that these forms. Perhaps it would be more produc-
these algorithmic processes are in fact unfamiliar tive to say that the diagram in Gehry’s work is
to architecture. This effectively suggests that it iconic and, more importantly, it situates his work
may not be necessary to study the history of archi- in the realm of the phenomenal. The crucial dif-
tecture or the history of the twentieth century in ference between the conceptual and the phenom-
order to be able to work diagrammatically using enal lies in the domain of close reading, with the
digital processes. Lynn’s argument is probably the nexus of attention shifting from the eye to the
most relevant summation to date on the condition mind in the conceptual, and from the mind to the
of the digital as a critique of precedents. This argu- eye in the phenomenal.
ment about the role of the digital in undermining Little of Gehry’s previous work can be
architectural precedents is useful in considering called diagrammatic, yet certain projects suggest
the relationship of digital and analogic processes that Gehry has always had an implied diagram,
in Frank Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building for which bears some relationship to Mies’s concept
the Weatherhead School of Management at Case of the umbrella diagram. Gehry’s diagram could
Western Reserve. be called a “soft umbrella,” resembling a dropped
It is necessary to distinguish first Lynn’s parachute or napkin, which settles in various ways
idea of the digital from that of Gehry’s, and second, over an internal organization of spaces and struc-
between the conceptual in Lynn and the phenom- ture. This type of diagram depends on the artic-
enal in Gehry. There is little question that there ulation of the roof and the roof’s impact on the
Peter B. Lewis Building 259
4. Peter B. Lewis Building, model, September 1997. 5. Peter B. Lewis Building, sketch, October 1997.
section; the plan becomes residual to the process. precedents, which may be of limited use today if, in
The dropped napkin or soft umbrella diagram Lynn’s terms, the precedent is understood as enforc-
is subsequently translated into a digital format. ing a part-to-whole relationship. In one sense, the
While the digital processes are those from which development of this building operates against the
the precise form is generated, the conceptual dia- top-down system of the soft umbrella diagram. The
gram remains analogic. result resembles a classic Gehry expression, but
In addition to engaging Gehry’s soft umbrella the building requires the digital processes of the
diagram, another of the originary conditions for computer to erode the section, which begins as an
Gehry’s Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School orthogonal condition, in a way that would not have
of Management is a classical precedent, more pre- been possible with analogic methods. This invoca-
cisely, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum. tion of the digital is crucial to understanding the
Gehry’s use of a plan as precedent departs radically evolution of the Lewis Building, and its conceptual
from the top-down approach implied by the soft differences in engaging precedents, from Lynn’s
umbrella diagram. If the Lewis Building begins work, which undermines the role of precedents.
with a classical plan, this precedent is increasingly Tracing the evolution of the Lewis Building
eroded and corrupted in section. Gehry uses the through study models and early sketches in some
classical plan as an a priori ideal that evolves ver- sense reveals the undecidability of any origins.
tically, and at the same time challenges the idea The earliest study models of June 1997 reveal a
of sectional extrusion implicit in the classical plan. tension between orthogonal organizations with
The Altes Museum, which can be considered the clear historical precedents and biomorphic forms
historical prototype for the Lewis Building, has related to Gehry’s exploration of digital model-
an orthogonal rectilinear plan with a central drum; ing. A two-color model, reminiscent of a Richard
the drum is extruded, so that its condition is the Neutra or Rudolf Schindler project of the 1920s
same in section from the plan to the roof. Most clas- and 1930s in terms of its blocky massing, has a
sical buildings are vertical extrusions from a plan base on which the smaller blocks of its upper
and Schinkel continues this tradition, which is also level sit. This U-shaped organization of blocks is
apparent in the postwar work of Louis Kahn, among frontalized like any classical building with a dis-
others. The Lewis Building thus makes a critique of tinct propylaea or frontispiece. There is a clearly
6. Peter B. Lewis Building, study model, October 1997.
articulated, voided space in the center, in which more than a doodle. However, this sketch pro-
is housed a bi-nuclear element formed by two col- vokes several interesting interpretations. First,
ored cubes bound together by a smaller rectan- despite the loose hand, a base condition which is
gular element. A vertical cut emphasizes a strong more or less orthogonal is visible, as is the bipar-
central axis. This axis, the frontispiece, and the tite relationship of volumes around a depressed
U-shaped body recall both classical and neoclas- center. The sketch contains a series of biomor-
sical precedents. phic, nonorthogonal forms that seem either to
A second model from June 1997 shares the grow out of, or are being pulled down into, a cen-
blocky forms, U-shape, and frontispiece of the tral vortex; the section implied by the drawing
first model, but in this case its voided center is reveals this force that could be either centrifugal
a wellspring for curving and biomorphic forms in or centripetal.
metal and plastic. It is clear that the energy is not The model of October 1997, seemingly
coming from above, as would be the case in a soft based on this sketch, suggests the integration
umbrella diagram, but from below, as if the blocky of a U-shaped and corner-towered palazzo with
organization of the model were being overcome a diagram of biomorphic forms exploding from
from within. The next model, from September a voided center. The color scheme of the model
1997, returns to a building of boxlike units, yet marks an intention to show a difference between
introduces a distinct pinwheeling character. the biomorphic and the biotechnic, the base and
The tension between the biomorphic and the superstructure, the center and the edge. The
orthogonal forms is poignantly captured in a digital model produced in April 1998 manifests
sketch for the Lewis Building from October the coexistence of these two types of organiza-
1997, which appears at first glance to be little tions, maintaining their distinction in its two-color
7. Peter B. Lewis Building, digital model, April 1998.
scheme. This is not a top-down strategy, nor is it tional energies in the May 1998 and March 1999
a monochromatic or monolithic material strategy, models present a section in which the biomorphic
but one that remains dialectical in its nature and form becomes a wrapper for an internal volume,
bi-nuclear around a voided center. a form within a form. While this sectional model
The two study models of May 1998 and March maintains some of the earlier ideas, this intro-
1999 are sectional models revealing the presence duction of the shell and solid forms adds another
of the base and corner towers, which are artic- dimension to the evolution of the section.
ulated in a different material. This model has a The section produces a dialogue between
distinct base, an external wrapper that is the U- container and contained, figure and ground, ver-
shaped body of the building, a voided center, and, tical and horizontal, and forces of erosion and
within that void, a bi-nuclear central element— stability. All of these dialectical characteristics
which itself seems to wrap around yet another are apparent in the model. While supposedly an
element, creating an interior and exterior wrap- expressionist artist, Gehry adopts a process, as
per. The section suggests that the biomorphic evidenced in these study models, that combines
forms are lifted off the base, creating a sectional intuition with the understanding of the less-than-
deployment of the voided center. These two com- conscious influence of historical precedents. The
ponents—base and biomorphic forms—share a corkscrewlike energy of the section differs sig-
dialectical relationship, but the question remains nificantly from that at Le Corbusier’s Palais des
whether the biomorphic forms are coming up Congrès-Strasbourg or from the ramp at Poissy.
from the base, being pulled down to the base, or, The section at the Lewis Building is not the
alternatively, are suspended between the base product of a vertical extrusion; rather it evolves
and the roof. More interesting is that the sec- from a classical plan as an initial whole, which
8. Peter B. Lewis Building, study model, May 1998.
is corrupted as it moves vertically to the point ing a concept of a quasi-invisible “ground” which
where the parts seem to have no relationship to is rooted in historical precedents, such as corner
their origin in that classical plan. The section, towers, set against the energy of emergent bio-
for example, is reminiscent of James Stirling’s morphic forms.
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, suggesting that a crit- The compositional trajectories are apparent
ical evaluation of the relationship between the in this project in a way that differs from other
Altes Museum, the Staatsgalerie, and the Lewis Gehry projects. This is one of the few Gehry proj-
Building could prove interesting. ects that could be considered an unintentional
A digital rendering from 2000 of the subliminal critique of historical precedent. The
Lewis Building can be analyzed as if the recti- resonance of Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Gehry’s
linear forms of the underlying elevation were scheme for the Lewis Building is first and fore-
removed from the drawing. The remaining image most visible in the plan. While there is a literal
is exclusively one of biomorphic forms seemingly section in the Altes Museum, it is not thematic
exfoliated out of the plane of the paper. The two as in the Lewis Building. This is not to say that
towers are now seen as the ground of the paper, the influence of Schinkel’s plan reflects a wholly
and the vertical explosion is a series of cutouts conscious decision; such influences can penetrate
coming out of the literal ground of the paper. one’s unconscious, particularly when a diagram-
These are important conceptual images reiterat- matic operation allows such unconscious projec-
9. Peter B. Lewis Building, study model, March 1999.
tions to surface. The diagram provides a vehi- a roof. Digital modeling provides the possibility of
cle for the unconscious expression of figural an extension of space that is no longer necessarily
warping to emerge: diagrams often activate the Cartesian, yet is different from Koolhaas’s Agadir
unconscious memory, which in this case could section or Libeskind’s erosion of the x-axis at the
reflect Gehry’s prior work on a 1995 competition Jewish Museum. This technology enables the mod-
in Berlin for a museum that was to be added to eling of new forces of vertical extension, such as
the Museum Island. The project for the Lewis erosion and warping. The vertical erosion devel-
Building falls between the conscious and the oped at the Lewis Building is of value in relation-
unconscious, between the analogic and the digi- ship to a series of plan and sectional precedents
tal, and as such is different from Gehry’s other that do not have such an erosion in section. The
projects. That is what makes the Lewis Building lateral and continuous extension of space as a hori-
a fulcrum project between Gehry’s past work and zontal datum seen in the Maison Dom-ino can now
the projects that follow. be modulated in a more nuanced manner, as is the
The Lewis Building engages the combination case in Agadir, or in Foreign Office Architects’
of the analogic and the digital, and in particular project for Yokohama, each of which focuses on
how the digital may impact the notion of section in the disturbance of the horizontal section as their
architecture. The traditional or analogic section is thematic. In Gehry’s building for the Weatherhead
produced from the plan and extends vertically to School, section is not merely a horizontal datum
10. Peter B. Lewis Building, side elevation, digital model, 2000.
extension of space, but rather becomes a modula- ism and the critical uses of the diagram in its var-
tion of space in the vertical: the section warps and ious forms. The Lewis Building is a cusp project
spirals as it evolves vertically. It is the rethinking between the past as present and the present as
of section—differently from Koolhaas, Libeskind, future, and broaches the underlying paradigm shift
and Le Corbusier—that makes the Lewis Building that occurs in questioning the precedence of the
again a fulcrum between past and future ideas of unity of the classical part-to-whole relationship.
section. Gehry simultaneously denies both the Gehry’s Lewis Building for the Weatherhead
idea of vertical extrusion from a plan and his own School addresses the problematic of part-to-whole
soft umbrella diagram. That the warped section in differently than the other works in this book on
the Lewis Building is masked by a facade further the question of precedent. It can be argued that all
denies the part-to-whole relationship of the section of the ten buildings discussed here depend on the
to facade. possibility of processes which relate to some form
Gehry’s Lewis Building is a pivotal project in of precedent seen as originary, truthful, or ideal.
that it raises the question of the transgression of Each of the ten buildings also refers diagrammati-
architectural precedents. It marks a shift in con- cally to some precedent. Historically, any paradigm
ceptualizing the diagram as an analogic device and shift begins with the denial of precedent as a nec-
in differentiating between analogic and digital pro- essary agent. In this sense, the analysis here may
cesses. While Lynn’s design relies on computation, be a work of sublime yet necessary uselessness in
and while Koolhaas and Libeskind work in analogic the face of the evolving ability to produce condi-
terms, there are aspects of the Lewis Building that tions internal to component relationships that have
could only be developed in the digital. As the final no necessary analogic relationship to any prior, or
project in this book, the Lewis Building provides a precedent, condition.
frame for the other nine projects to be seen within If anything in architecture has changed as
the evolution of architectural critiques of modern- a result of these ten buildings, it is primarily the
11. Peter B. Lewis Building, section, 2000.
subtle change in the relationship of subject to

object. This occurs in two senses: first, the change
in close reading necessitated by the emergence of
figural forces produced through digital processes;
second, the change in the subject’s physical rela-
tionship to the object, with the subject himself
becoming an object of the gaze. There is no unify-
ing theme in these works. If anything, these read-
ings reveal the breakdown of close reading predi-
cated on part-to-whole relationships and the con-
commitant idea of decidable meanings. When nar-
rative—as an altered sense of time in the subject/
object relationship—is diminished, close reading
cannot help but be affected, which produces an
idea of undecidability. Text is thus the engine of
the undecidable. It is these changes in close read-
ing which ultimately suggest a rethinking of the
canon which has always been underpinned by a
received idea of close reading. To question these
received ideas is perhaps what marks a canon of
this moment in time.
12. Peter B. Lewis Building, sublevel and ground-floor plans.

13. Peter B. Lewis Building, first- and second-floor plans.

14. Peter B. Lewis Building, third- and fourth-floor plans.

15. Peter B. Lewis Building, roof plans.

A B C B A
A B C B A
16. The floor plan of the Altes Museum can be seen 17. The ground-floor plan of the Lewis Building also
as a precedent for Gehry’s Lewis Building for the retains distinct traces of the classical plan in its
Weatherhead School. Schinkel’s Altes Museum seems U-shaped organization, frontispiece and ABCBA
at first glance to be the prototypical neoclassical organization. The equivalent of the frontispiece stoa in
palazzo, with four corner blocks. It is an ABCBA the Schinkel plan is isolated in the Lewis Building as
parti, whose frontality is emphasized by a frontispiece a distinct component of the building.
running the entire length of the facade.
18. In the Altes Museum, a drum establishes the vertical 19. The ground-floor plan of the Lewis Building is
axis. Symmetry is established by a vertical axis that similarly a bipartite organization around a central
cuts through the central volume, which is flanked by void. There is a paradoxical play between the small
two square spaces and two rectangular blocks. size of the central nucleus and what can be interpreted
as its impact on the surrounding blocks. It seems to
exert a force that presses the rear blocks backward and
carves into its neighboring blocks.
20. In the Altes Museum, the central drum is flanked 21. The central nucleus of the Lewis Building is
by two identical volumes. The drum is also compressed framed by what can be read as two major volumes
by the staircases which are pushed into the central forming a bi-nuclear element. These volumes
space. Such compression can also be read in the width reinstate a rough symmetry around the vertical axis,
of the niches carved into the poché around the drum. which is subsequently obscured by the asymmetrical
The broad niches to the rear of the building become frontispiece as it exerts a similar push toward the
compressed at the front of the drum, as if registering center, like the frontispiece stoa of the Altes Museum.
the impact of the stairs.
22. There is an anomalous zone (in red) in the Altes 23. There is also an anomalous zone in the Lewis
Museum which animates the plan. Building shifting the central axis of the actual plan.
24. The plan of Schinkel’s Altes Museum produces 25. Essentially, an ABCBA organization can be can
symmetrical and asymmetrical readings. While the be read across the Lewis Building, from top to bottom.
plan is symmetrical about the vertical axis, no single The central axis of the C zone does not correspond to
horizontal axis is dominant. that which is established by the center of the drum. The
drum in the C zone intrudes into the rear B zone to
press against the rear A zone. Such compressive forces
act against the stability of any symmetry.
26. The neoclassical view of the Altes Museum is 27. The Lewis Building adopts certain of these
approached from the corner, resulting in its being seen neoclassical tropes, not only in plan but also in
perspectivally rather than frontally. In this corner perspective. At the corner, a difference between a
view, it is the relationship of the side to the front that is vertical stacking of windows on the left side and a
stressed, making the corner thematically important. pyramidal stepping on the right side can be noted. The
corner tower is articulated in such a way that each side
presents different information yet frames the corner
as a central element.
28. Peter B. Lewis Building, vertical warp from ground-floor plan to roof.
29. Peter B. Lewis Building, column grid with tilted columns.

30. Peter B. Lewis Building, vertical Cartesian extrusion of plan.

31. Peter B. Lewis Building, contrast between vertical extrusion and sectionally warped elements.
32. Peter B. Lewis Building, ground floor, axonometric view.

33. Peter B. Lewis Building, second floor, axonometric view.

34. Peter B. Lewis Building, third floor, axonometric view.

35. Peter B. Lewis Building, fourth floor, axonometric view.

36. Peter B. Lewis Building, fifth floor, axonometric view.

37. Peter B. Lewis Building, roof plan, southeast axonometric view.

38. Peter B. Lewis Building, roof plan, northwest axonometric view.

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290 Bibliography
1. Profiles of Text
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2. The Umbrella Diagram

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois,
1946–1951.
Blaser, Werner. “Farnsworth-Haus in Plano, Illinois von Mies van der Rohe, 1945-50.” Detail 26
(November/December 1986): 526-529.
Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe: Farnsworth House: weekend house. Basel: Birkhauser, 1999.
Eisenman, Peter. “miMISes READING: does not mean A THING.” In Mies Reconsidered, organized
by John Zukowsky. New York: Rizzoli, 1986.
Eisenman, Peter. “Mies and the Figuring of Absence.” In Mies in America, edited by Phyllis
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Guisado, Jesus Maria Aparicio. “The Dematerialisation of the wall, an evolution of tectonics: Gottfried
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Hartoonian, Gevork. “Mies van der Rohe: The Genealogy of Column and Wall.” Journal of
Architectural Education 42 (Winter 1989): 43-50.
Lambert, Phyllis. “Mies Immersion.” In Mies in America, edited by Phyllis Lambert, 192-589. New
York: H.N. Abrams, 2001.
Lohan, Dirk. Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1945-50. Tokyo, Japan: A.D.A. EDITA Tokyo, 1976.
Schulze, Franz. The Farnsworth House. Chicago: Lohan Associates, 1997.
Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe : A Critical Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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292 Bibliography
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Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg, France 1962–64.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel Smith. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Eisenman, Peter. “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign.”
Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/Spring 1980): 119-128.
Frampton, Kenneth. “Le Corbusier and ‘l’Esprit Nouveau.” Oppositions 15-16 (Winter-Spring 1979):
12-59.
Frampton, Kenneth and Roberto Schezen. Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Century. New
York: H.N. Abrams, 2002.
Frampton, Kenneth. Le Corbusier 1933-1960. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.
Le Corbusier, Oeuvres Completes. Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1970.
Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture. Translated by John Goodman. Los Angeles: Getty Trust
Publications, 2007.
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture. Paris: Les Editions G. Crès et Cie, 1923.
Rowe, Colin. “Mannerism and Modern Architecture.” In The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and
Other Essays, 29-58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.
Sarkis, Hashim. “Constants in motion: Le Corbusier’s “rule of movement” at the Carpenter Center.”
Perspecta 33 (2002): 114-125.
Smet, Catherine de. Le Corbusier, Architect of Books. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2005.
Von Moos, Stanislaus and Arthur Rüegg. Le Corbusier before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts,
Architecture, Painting, Photography, 1907-1922. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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Louis Kahn, Adler and DeVore Houses, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
1954–55.
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Brownlee, David B. Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture. Introduction by Vincent Scully.
New York: Rizzoli, 1991.
Fitch, James Marston. “A Building of Rugged Fundamentals.” Architectural Forum 113 (July 1960):
82–87.
Frampton, Kenneth. “Louis Kahn and the French Connection.” Oppositions 22 (Fall 1980): 20-53.
Jordy, William H. “Criticism, medical research building for Pennsylvania University, Phila.: Louis I.
Kahn, architect.” Architectural Review 129 (February 1961): 99-106.
Kahn, Louis. “Two Houses.” Perspecta 3 (1955): 60-61.
Kahn, Louis. “Monumentality.” In Architecture Culture 1943-1968, edited by Joan Ockman with
Edward Eigen. New York: Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993.
“Louis I. Kahn, architect, Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Building, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1958-1960.” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 28 (1961): 3–23.
Maniaque, Caroline. “Louis Kahn: La Maison comme Laboratoire d’éxperimentation.” Moniteur

architecture AMC 108 (June/July 2000): 94-100.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. “Kahn, Heidegger, and the Language of Architecture.” Oppositions 18

(Fall 1979): 28-47.

294 Bibliography
5. The Nine-Square Grid and Its Contradictions

Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania,
1959–64.
“Interview: Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman.” Skyline (July 1982): 12-15.
Raggatt, Howard. “A Zone of the Blur.” Transition 41 (1993): 7-13.
Rowe, Colin. “Robert Venturi and the Yale Mathematics Building.” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976): 1-23.
Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill. Edited by Frederic
Schwartz. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Steele, James et al. “Special Issue: Venturi Scott Brown & Associates on Houses and Housing.”
Architectural Monographs 21 (1992): 24-30.
Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1966.
Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown, “Some Houses of Ill-Repute.” Perspecta 13 (1971):
259-267
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten
Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.
Von Moos, Stanislaus. Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, Buildings and Projects. New York: Rizzoli,
1987.
Wrede, Stuart. “Complexity and Contradiction Twenty-five Years Later: An Interview with Robert
Venturi.” In American Art of the 1960s, 143-163. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991.

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6. Material Inversions
James Stirling, Leicester Engineering Building, Leicester, England,
1959–63.
Banham, Reyner. “The New Brutalism.” Architectural Review 118 (December 1955): 354-361.
Cook, Peter. “Stirling and Hollein.” Architectural Review 172 (December 1982): 52-54.
Eisenman, Peter. “Real and English: Destruction of the Box. I.” Oppositions 4 (October 1974): 5-34.
Frampton, Kenneth. “Leicester University Engineering Laboratory.” Architectural Digest 34,

(February 1964): 61.
James Stirling, Buildings and Projects, 1950-1974. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.
James Stirling, Buildings and Projects, 1950-1980. Edited by Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford. New
York: Rizzoli, 1993.
Maxwell, Robert. James Stirling/Michael Wilford. Basel, Boston: Birkhauser Verlag, 1998.
McKean, John. Leicester University Engineering Building. London: Phaidon, 1994.
Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54.
Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. II.” Perspecta 13 (1971):
287-301.
Scalbert, Irne. “Cerebral Functionalism: The Design of the Leicester University Engineering
Building.” Archis 5 (May 1994): 70-80.
Stirling, James. “Garches to Jaoul: Le Corbusier as a Domestic Architect in 1927 and 1953.”
Architectural Review (September 1955): 145-151.
Stirling, James. “‘The Functional Tradition’ and Expression.” Perspecta 6 (1960): 88-97.
Stirling, James. “Regionalism and Modern Architecture.” Architects’ Yearbook 8 (1957): 62-68.
Tafuri, Manfredo. “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir.” Translated by Victor Caliandro. Oppositions 3

(May 1974): 37-62.

296 Bibliography
7. Texts of Analogy
Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, Italy, 1971–78.
Aldo Rossi, Buildings and Projects. Edited by Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford, essays by Vincent
Scully and Rafael Moneo. New York: Rizzoli, 1985.
Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “The Difficult Whole.” Log 9 (Spring 2007): 39-61.
Bataille, Georges. Le Bleu du Ciel. Paris: J.Pauvert, 1967.
Bataille, Georges. Blue of Noon. Translated by Harry Mathews. New York: Unizen, 1978.
Eisenman, Peter. “The House of the Dead as the City of Survival.” In Aldo Rossi in America: 1976-
1979, 4-15. New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1979.
Johnson, Eugene J. “What Remains of Man – Aldo Rossi’s Modena Cemetery.” Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians 41 (March 1982): 38-54.
Moneo, Rafael. “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery.” Oppositions 5
(1976): 1-30.
Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978.
Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Translated by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Rossi, Aldo. “The Blue of the Sky.” Oppositions 5 (1976): 31-34.
Savi, Vittorio. “Il cimitero aldorossiano: traccia di racconto critico [the Aldorossian Cemetery: outline
of a critical account].” Lotus International 38 (1983): 30-43.
Tafuri, Manfredo. “The ‘Case’ of Aldo Rossi.” In History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985,
translated by Jessica Levine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Thom, Deborah. “The City of the Dead as the City of the Living: Aldo Rossi’s Modena Cemetery.”
Dimensions 4 (Spring 1990): 14-17.

Bibliography 297
8. Strategies of the Void

Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries, Paris, France, 1992–93.
Aureli, Pier Vittorio and Gabriele Mastrigli. “Postmodern Oppositions: Eisenman contro Koolhaas.”
Arch’It files (28 January 2004).
Cornubert, Christophe. “Ein offenes Fenster: die Fassade der Bibliotheken von Jussieu in Paris.”
Deutsche Bauzeitung 128 (1994): 152-156.
Fernández-Galiano, Luis. “The Butterfly’s Fate.” Log 2 (Spring 2004): 15-23.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Junk Space.” In Content, 162-171. Cologne: Taschen, 2003.
Lucan, Jacques. “Le concours de Jussieu.” Moniteur architecture AMC 38 (February 1993): 22-25.
“Office for Metropolitan Architecture: two libraries for Jussieu University, Paris.” AA files 26
(Autumn 1993): 36-44.
Somol, R.E. “12 Reasons to Get Back into Shape.” In Content, 86-7. Cologne: Taschen, 2003.
Somol, R. E. and Sarah Whiting. “Notes Around the Doppler Effect.” Perspecta 33 (2002): 72-77.
Vidler, Anthony. “Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliothèque de France.”
Representations 42 (Spring 1993): 115-134.
Zaera Polo, Alejandro, Rem Koolhaas, et al. “OMA/Rem Koolhaas 1992-1996.” El Croquis 79 (1996).

298 Bibliography
9. The Deconstruction of the Axis

Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany, 1989–1999.
Anderson, Stanford et al. “Memoria.” Diadalos 58 (December 1995): 122-125.
Evans, Robin. “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind.” AA Files 6 (1984): 89-96.
Gonzales Cobelo, J. L., Donald L. Bates, and Daniel Libeskind. “Daniel Libeskind 1987-1996.”
El Croquis 80 (1996).
Huyssen, Andreas. “The Voids of Berlin.” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 57-81.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68-81.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part II.” October 4 (Autumn 1977):
58-67.
Libeskind, Daniel. “Between the lines: extension to the Berlin Museum, with the Jewish Museum.”
Assemblage 12 (August 1990): 18-57.
Libeskind, Daniel. Chamberworks: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus. London:

Architectural Association, 1983.
Libeskind, Daniel. Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines. Munich and
London: Prestel, 1999.
Libeskind, Daniel. Jewish Museum Berlin. Berlin: G + B Arts International, 1999.
Libeskind, Daniel. A Passage Through Silence and Light. London: Black Dog Publishers, 1997.
Rambert, Francis. “Presence de l’absence: Musée juif de Berlin.” Connaissance des arts 561
(May 1999): 98-105.
Ullman, Gerhard. “El rayo del entendimiento: Libeskind, Museo Judo en Berlin.” Arquitectura Viva
11 (March-April 1990): 14-19.

10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram
Frank O. Gehry, Peter B. Lewis Building, Weatherhead School of
Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio,
1997–2002.
Dal Co, Francesco and Kurt W. Forster. Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works. New York: The
Monacelli Press, 1998.
Frank Gehry, Buildings and Projects. Edited by Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford. New York: Rizzoli,
1985.
Foster, Hal. “Re: Post.” In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis,
188-201. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition.” In Art After
Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, 12-29. New York: The New Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1984.
Litt, Steven. “Business unusual [Peter B. Lewis Building, Cleveland].” Architecture 91 (October
2002): 68-73.
Martin, Jean-Marie. “Frank O. Gehry.” Casabella 63 (September 1999): 12-21.
Polano, Sergio et al. “Forms and methods of deconstruction [Forme e modi della deconstruzione].”
Casabella 63 (September 1999): 12-20, 88-89.
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” In Art After
Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, 202-235. New York: The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.

300
Index
Numbers in italics denote pages upon which
illustrations appear.
50 by 50 House, 57, 57 Casa da Musica in Porto, 201, 207–208

Adler House, 12, 20, 23, 102–119, 102, 104, 106, Casa “Il Girasole,” 18, 22, 26–48, 26–48, 130, 136
108, 112–119, 131 Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, 28
Alberti, Leon Battista, 29, 53 Case Western Reserve, 11; and Weatherhead
Altes Museum, 259, 262, 270–275, 270–275 School of Management, 19
Alumni Memorial Hall (IIT), 56, 57 Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena, 22, 23, 178–
American Academy in Rome, 130 180, 184–198, 185–198
Arch of Titus, 29 Central Business District Proposal, Turin, 180
Archigram, 157 Chandigarh, 75, 80: Assembly Hall, 76, 77;
Assembly Hall at Chandigarh, 76, 77 Parliament Building, 76
Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 180 Chapel at Ronchamp, 236
Bacon, Francis, 73 CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture
Banham, Peter Reyner, 27, 157 Moderne), 129, 157
Barcelona Pavilion, 53, 53, 54 City Edge competition, 234, 234
Barnes, Edward, 130 Cobb, Harry, 130
Barthes, Roland, 51 Concrete Country House, 52
Bataille, Georges, 179 Corbusier. See Le Corbusier
Benjamin, Walter, 201 Costa Cemetery, 185–186, 191
Bergson, Henri, 235 Crown Hall (IIT), 56, 57, 204
Berlin Museum 235, 236 Cullen, Gordon, 157
Blake, Peter, 157 De Chirico, Giorgio, 179, 184
Blanchot, Maurice, 103–104, 107 Debord, Guy, 129
Bloom, Harold, 12, 15 Deleuze, Gilles, 73, 129
Borromini, Francesco, 21 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 27–28, 129
Boullée, Etienne-Louis, 185, 190 De Stijl, 51–52
Brick Country House, 52 DeVore House, 12, 19, 20, 23, 103–111, 120-126,
Breuer, Marcel, 52, 107 104–107, 109, 120–126, 131
Bunshaft, Gordon, 130 Doesberg, Theo van, 29
Cambridge History Faculty Library, 159 Dom-ino. See Maison Dom-ino
Campo Marzio, 182 Durand, J.N.L., 183
Carpenter Center, 76–78 Dutch Embassy in Berlin, 207

301
El Lissitzky, 29 Jewish Museum in Berlin, 23–24, 23, 230–231,

Empson, William, 17 230, 233–254, 236–254, 263
Esposizione Universale di Roma, 179 Johansen, John, 130
Exeter Library, 20, 110 Johnson, Philip, 51, 56, 58, 130
Farnsworth House, 12, 18, 22, 50–71, 50–52, 55, Jung, Carl, 188
57, 60–71, 60–71 Jussieu Libraries, 11–12, 21–22, 22, 24, 79–80,
Federal Housing Authority, 130 200–202, 205–228, 200, 206–228
Florey Building at Queens College, Oxford, 159 Kahn, Louis, 12, 19, 20, 23, 102–127, 131, 161,
Franzen, Ulrich, 130 181, 205, 259
Frick Museum, New York, 21 Kipnis, Jeffrey, 24, 205
Foreign Office Architects, 263 Koolhaas, Rem, 11–12, 21–22, 24, 79–80, 200–228,
Foucault, Michel, 9 263, 264
Gallaratese housing complex, 180, 181, 184, 187 Krauss, Rosalind, 231–232
Gehry, Frank, 11, 18–21, 23–24, 256–286 Labatut, Jean, 130
Glass House, 56, 58 Lacan, Jacques, 202
Graves, Michael, 130 Le Corbusier, 11–12, 19, 21, 23, 29, 51, 53, 54–56,
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 18–21 62–63, 72–100, 106, 111, 129–130, 138,
Giedion, Sigfried, 129 155–156, 158, 181, 186, 201–202, 204–205,
Gowan, James, 154, 159 207, 212, 218, 234, 236, 261, 264
Gropius, Walter, 52, 107 Lapadula, Ernesto, 179
Half-House, 136 Leicester Engineering Building, 11–12, 20, 23,
Hamilton, Richard, 156–157 154–176, 154, 156, 158–176
Heidegger, Martin, 52 Libeskind, Daniel, 23–24, 23, 188, 230–254, 263–
Hejduk, John, 106-109, 130–131, 133, 136, 188 264
Henderson, Nigel, 156 Line of Fire installation, 234–237, 235, 242–243,
Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 192 242–243
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), 55–57 Liverpool School of Architecture, 156
Independent Group, 156–157 Loos, Adolf, 33, 53, 138, 181
Indian School of Management, Ahmedabad, 20 Louvre, Paris, 21
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Lyndon, John, 130
New York, 231 Lynn, Greg, 257–259, 264

302 Index
Maison Citrohan, 51 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 156–157

Maison Dom-ino, 10, 51, 54, 63, 204, 212, 263 Parliament Building at Chandigarh, 76
Maison Jaoul, 106, 158 Parc de La Villette, 203, 203, 204, 206
Mannheim Theater, 57 Parthenon, 73, 74
Martello towers, 157 Pei, I.M., 130
Matta-Clark, Gordon, 232–233, 236 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 22, 53, 130, 231
Melnikov, Konstantin, 157, 162 Peter B. Lewis Building, 19, 20, 23 24, 256–286,
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 12, 18, 22, 29, 50–71, 256, 258–286
110, 138, 181, 201, 204–205, 207, 258 Philips Pavilion, 75
Mission Grande Axe, La Defense, Paris, 202 Piazza San Marco, 103
Modena Cemetery, 186–188, 190 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 182
Moore, Charles, 130 Price, Cedric, 157
Moretti, Luigi, 12, 18, 22, 26, 26–48, 110, 130, 136, Proust, Marcel, 103–104, 107
157, 201, 206–207 Quarter-House, 136
Mundaneum project, 186 Rainaldi, Carlo, 32, 136
Museum of Modern Art, 24, 130 Resor House, 56
Mussolini, Benito, 155 Richards Medical Center, 20, 105, 110, 110, 161
National Football Foundation Hall of Fame, 137 Rietveld, Gerrit, 51
National Gallery in Berlin, 57, 58, 204 Robertson, Jaquelin, 130
Neutra, Richard, 259 Rodgers, Ernesto, 181
New York Athletic Club, 201, 203, 203, 206 Romano, Giulio, 34
Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 75 Rossi, Aldo, 22, 23, 129, 178–198, 202
OMA. See Rem Koolhaas Rowe, Colin, 10, 11, 16, 76, 79, 156, 159, 182
Ozenfant, Amédée, 74 Russakov Worker’s Club, 157, 162
Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg, 12, 19, 20, 23, Saint Andrew’s Dormitory, Scotland, 159
72–101, 72, 75, 77–101, 201, 207, 218, 261 San Cataldo Cemetery. See Cemetery of San
Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, 179 Cataldo
Palazzo del Te, Mantua, 34 Sant’Andrea, 29
Palladio, Andrea, 19, 138, 188 Santa Maria in Campitelli, 32, 136
Palm Bay Seafront Convention Center, Agadir, Schindler, Rudolf, 259
Morocco, 204, 205, 207, 263 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 20, 259, 262, 270

Index 303
Schroeder House, 51 Venturi, Robert, 11, 20, 23, 27, 51, 128–152, 130,
Scully, Vincent, 130 181, 202, 206–207
Seagram Building, 56, 181 Von Erlach, Fischer, 185, 190
Seattle Public Library, 201, 205, 207–208 Vreeland, Tim, 130
Segrate Monument, 180, 181 Wall House, 107, 108–109
Slutzky, Robert, 159 Weatherhead School of Management, Case
Smithson, Peter & Alison, 156–157 Western Reserve, 19, 24, 258, 263, 270.
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, 262 See also Peter B. Lewis Building
Stella, Frank, 10 Yale University Art Gallery, 20
Stirling, James, 11–12, 20, 23, 154-176, 202, Zumthor, Peter, 33
262
Sydney Opera House, 18
Tafuri, Manfredo, 129
Team Ten, 129, 157
Terragni, Giuseppe, 28
Texas House, 106, 107, 130, 131, 133, 136
Tourette, La, 76–80, 181
Trenton Bathhouse, 20, 23, 105–107, 105
Très Grande Bibliothèque, 79, 202–203, 204, 204,
205, 218
Tugendhat House, Brno, 52
Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 202, 234
Utzon, Jørn, 18
Vanna Venturi House, 19, 23, 27, 108, 128–152,
128, 131–152
Villa Malcontenta, 19
Villa Radieuse, 130
Villa Rotunda, 19
Villa Savoye in Poissy, 74, 76
Villa Stein at Garches, 19, 74-75
Vitruvius, 53, 74

Illustration Credits
Every effort has been made to identify the provenance of each Ajay Manthripragada: cover, 20 right, 22 left, 164, 165, 166,
image. If inaccuracies have inadvertently occurred, they will 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 190, 191, 192,
be corrected in subsequent printings. 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198.
John Bassett: 18, 21, 23, 36 right, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, Mies van der Rohe Archive; digital images © The Museum
45, 46, 47, 48, 62, 63, 64 left, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 105, 120, 121, of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. ©
122, 123. 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn: 50, 52, 53, 54 right, 55, 56 left, 57, 58.
Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre
for Architecture. Montréal: 157 left. Luigi Moretti, Archivio Centrale Dello Stato: 26, 28, 29, 30,
31, 32, 33, 34, 35.
Collection Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève: 233, 235 left.
Office for Metropolitan Architecture: 200, 202 left, 203, 204,
Chicago History Museum © Hedrich-Blessing: 56 right. 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211.
Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London: 275. Matthew Roman: 89, 99.
Le Corbusier, Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Aldo Rossi Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Montréal: 180 left, 185,
54 left, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 157 right, 202 right. 189.
Peter Eisenman collection: 158, 159, 160 left, 161 right, 183 left. Fondazione Aldo Rossi © Eredi Aldo Rossi, Photographs:
© Alessandro Zambianchi, Simply.it: 178, 180 right, 182, 183
Gehry Partners, LLP: 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, right.
265, 266, 267, 268, 269.
James Stirling / Michael Wilford Fonds, Collection Centre
Archivio Ghirri© Eredi di Luigi Ghirri: 181, 186, 187. Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Montréal: 154, 156, 160 right, 161 left, 162, 163.
Andrew Heid: 22 right, 23 right, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217,
218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 270, 271, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. and Rollin La
272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, France: 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137.
285, 286.
Michael Wang: 23 left, 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249,
John Hejduk Archive, Collection Centre Canadien 250, 251, 252, 253, 254.
d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture. Montréal:
106 right, 107 right, 130. Carolyn Yerkes: 19 right, 20 left, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88,
90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117,
Udo Hesse: 236, 237 left. 118, 119, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,
150, 151, 152.
Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: 102, 104,
105 left, 106 left, 107 left, 108, 109, 110.
Studio Daniel Libeskind: 230, 234, 235 right, 237 right, 239.
Libeskind/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY: 232.
Ariane Lourie: 19 right, 36 left, 60, 61, 64 right, 65, 117, 124,
125, 126, 242, 243.

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Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 1 4/9/2008 10:43:34 AM

Foreword by Stan Allen

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 3 4/9/2008 10:43:46 AM

© 2008 Rizzoli International Publications

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York

This book was developed with the support and cooperation

Printed and bound in China

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 4 4/9/2008 10:43:47 AM

Eisenman’s Canon: A Counter-Memory of the Modern 9

2. The Umbrella Diagram 50

4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic Space 102

5. The Nine-Square Diagram and its Contradictions 128

6. Material Inversions 154

7. Texts of Analogy 178

8. Strategies of the Void 200

9. The Deconstruction of the Axis 230

10. The Soft Umbrella Diagram 256

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 5 4/9/2008 10:43:47 AM

The ideas and arguments presented in Ten Canonical Buildings were

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 7 4/9/2008 10:43:47 AM

The title of Peter Eisenman’s new book, Ten Canonical Buildings,

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 9 4/9/2008 10:43:47 AM

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 10 4/9/2008 10:43:47 AM

Editorial Layout 02 08.indd 11 4/9/2008 10:43:48 AM

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In reading Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon, I discovered that

3. Le Corbusier, Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg. 4. Louis Kahn, DeVore House.

7. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery. 8. OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Jussieu Libraries.

Le Corbusier’s Palais des Congrès-Strasbourg similar characteristics in orienting their critique

One of the first critical articles to appear in English on Luigi Moretti’s

10. Casa “Il Girasole,” northwest corner.

Another theoretical proposition resides in

14. Casa “Il Girasole,” rusticated base of west facade.

31. Casa “Il Girasole,” second ﬂoor, axonometric view.

32. Casa “Il Girasole,” fourth ﬂoor, axonometric view.

33. Casa “Il Girasole,” axonometric view.

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2. Farnsworth House, north elevation, 1946.

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3. Barcelona Pavilion, 1929. 4. Tugendhat House, Brno, 1928-30.

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5. Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-ino, 1914. 6. Barcelona Pavillion, plan, 1929.

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7. Farnsworth House, sketch plan.

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10. Farnsworth House, plan 1946-51. 11. 50 by 50 House, plan, 1950-1951.

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12. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1966.

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whether trying to break away from a Miesian or a

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