The Journal of Architecture

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Composition, Non-Composition: Architecture and

Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

To cite this article: Maria Shéhérazade Giudici (2015) Composition, Non-Composition:

Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, The Journal of
Architecture, 20:6, 1122-1126, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2015.1116721

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1116721

Published online: 22 Jan 2016.

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Book, exhibition and film reviews
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Composition, Non-Composition: Architecture and
Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
By Jacques Lucan
Abingdon, Routledge, 2012
ISBN 978-0415641111
Hb, $125, pp. 610, with illustrations
In 1986 Casabella published a monographic issue
entitled ‘Composizione/Progettazione’. These
Italian terms would translate in English as ‘compo-
sition’ and ‘design’, or perhaps more precisely as
‘composition’ and ‘project’:1 if composition arranges
the internal layout of a building following a consist-
ent formal logic, design is rather driven by the
intended use. In his contribution to the magazine,
Kenneth Frampton stated that for him the introduc-
tion of this debate in the Anglo-Saxon world would
serve well to disrupt the ‘demagogic somnambulism’
of the post-modern discourse.2
Thirty years afterwards, for the very same reasons,
it is intriguing to see Jacques Lucan’s Composition/
Non-Composition attempting once again to shed
light on the concept of composition, which in the
meantime has become not only even more confused
than it was in the heyday of post-modernism, but
also infinitely less popular, to the point that this is
perhaps the first full-length book to discuss it in
decades. Lucan himself had contributed to the
1986 Casabella with an article3 on the idea of com-
posing through ‘rooms’ in the work of Julien Guadet
and Louis Kahn, foreshadowing some of the themes
which figure large in the closing chapters of Compo-
sition/Non-Composition. It is therefore quite clear
# 2015 Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
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that this book is the outcome of the rarest thing in
contemporary academia, namely a research—and a
theoretical —concern which spans multiple
decades of the career of the author. This sets
Lucan’s work apart from most books published
today, which often seem to have been produced
fast, and are meant to be consumed just as fast.
On the contrary, Composition/Non-Composition is
not an instant book, it does not prey on fashionable
subjects, and its solidity, seriousness and thorough-
ness can only be praised.
It reads like a sweeping history of the last two cen-
turies of architecture seen from the point of view of
the strategies architects use to organise space. This
history begins in the moment in which the design
of the interior of buildings became a major concep-
tual problem, and French composition emancipated
itself from the much more pragmatic idea of distri-
bution. Composition emerged when the realm of
intervention of the architect brusquely widened as
housing became a main concern in the expanding
European cities. This evolution not only required a
new way to produce projects that had to adapt to
different conditions, while employing a repeatable
logic, but also raised the issue of teaching aspiring
architects how to design. The first half of Lucan’s
book deals with the nineteenth-century search for
a method which would respond to the necessity of
constructing a new-found common ground or
language, whilst allowing for variation. The second
half of the book describes the discontents of the
twentieth century—a century which inherited
much the same mandate and problems of the one
before, but in which both the invention of new
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techniques, and the need for the modern movement
to represent itself as a cathartic new beginning,
forced architects to invent ways out of the strait-
jacket of academic education, subverting the rules
of traditional composition. One of the merits of the
book lies in the choice of timeframe which binds
together the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as
one project, highlighting the continuity of the key
debate on composition across the ‘long’ nineteenth
century and the ‘short’ twentieth century.
In fact, Lucan posits non-composition as the flip
side of composition itself, rather than an entirely
different way of making architecture. In the intro-
duction to the aforementioned Casabella issue, the
then-editor-in-chief Vittorio Gregotti maintained
that the composition/design dichotomy was not
only an academic issue, but rather an ideological
opposition that had fuelled the last few centuries
of debate. In Lucan’s book, on the contrary, this dia-
lectical relationship is blurred. When terms such as
‘design’ and ‘project’ were used in the Italian
debate, or when the Russian avant-garde talked
about ‘Konstruktion’,4 the idea was to substitute
the geometric and formal predominance of the
parti with methods which were meant to be fully
‘other’, from the refusal of the plan as main design
tool, to the search for alternative ways to manage
the economy of the built world as a process rather
than as a static product. Reading Lucan’s book we
are left wanting perhaps a more assertive picture
of what this ‘other’ can be.
Casabella considered the querelle anything but
finished, and analysed it as a potentially fertile
ground for an ongoing debate. Lucan, however,
looks at this querelle as a disciplinary development
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that is substantially linear: a fact underlined by the
division of the book into five sections but virtually
divided in two halves with the titles ‘Closed order’
and ‘Open order’. If Casabella had set out to
sharpen the contrast between composition and
design, Lucan’s book —while clarifying their geneal-
ogy—ends up by describing what is rather a shade
that goes from one way of composing to another.
As a broad generalisation one could state that,
while nineteenth-century composition had been
based on the regular subdivision or parti of the
plan, generating a clearly hierarchical and often sym-
metrical interior (or ‘concave’) space, twentieth-
century composition worked by montage, creating
a ‘convex’ space punctuated by readable volumes
rather than partitioned enclosures.
The title Composition/Non-Composition suggests
a position along the lines of Gregotti’s Casabella,
whilst the actual text seems rather to maintain that
composition has never really disappeared, but has
just been challenged from within. Any expectations
of receiving a more specific statement on ‘non-com-
position’ are in fact very much frustrated until the
last two chapters, and, more specifically, only the
excellent analysis of OMA’s work suggests how
non-composition can be posited as a real alternative
to composition. It is not surprising that the reader
might expect a more projective intention and a
clearer statement on the subject, a statement that
is much needed, as in contemporary practice we
architects tend to have a passive-aggressive relation-
ship with composition: while evidently the ‘other’
methods have won, and we like to think we chiefly
design systems, manage parameters and handle
the choreography of evolutional patterns (all of this
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strictly modelled in three, or more, dimensions), in
reality we still largely use the plan as our key tool,
and, as Lucan rightly suggests, there is just as
much composition in our ‘non-composition’ as
there used to be in Durand’s examples.
In this virtual stalemate, the term composition
emerges as the great unsaid of the last decades: a
term which we find uncomfortable as it seems
perhaps too linked to an idea of autonomous
form. In a very subtle way, Lucan in fact suggests a
possible strategy to rethink composition today start-
ing from a concept he had already explained in the
1986 Casabella—the room. One of the main ques-
tions of composition is the choice of the elements
to be composed. Generally speaking, nineteenth-
century tradition ‘composes’ with either abstract
axes or load-bearing elements such as walls and
columns. The issue with this way of working is
that, apart from their size or centrality, the different
spaces are virtually undifferentiated from the point
of view of their quality. Another tradition,
however, that goes from Guadet to Kahn, uses the
room as the key element of composition, challen-
ging the abstraction of the parti. The room brings
with it issues of function, representation and social
understanding—in fact, Lucan rightly questions
whether we can still consider one of Durand’s bays
a room—and suggests another horizon for compo-
sition.
The potential richness of this theory of the room
highlights two striking omissions in Composition/
Non-Composition. On the one hand, Lucan is extre-
mely careful not to use the term type. On the other
hand, there is no discussion of the economic and
social context of the works discussed apart from
indirect hints at the changing role of the architect.
These two omissions are perhaps linked; while com-
position is a disciplinary term that applies to the
methodology with which the architect designs,
type is a broader category that mobilises all kinds
of issues—from function to social engineering to
construction logic—that are not necessarily perti-
nent to composition.
Here, we are again faced with the issue of Lucan’s
refusal to name non-composition, because an inter-
esting debate could arise at this point: while type is
not the opposite of composition, it is not impossible
to draw an opposition between a way of looking at
architectural debate in terms of composition (which
is a more ‘autonomously’ architectural category that
refers chiefly to form) or in terms of typology (which
is a wider concept that links form with other con-
siderations that have to do with use and social rel-
evance). Typology —the discourse on type—is in
its beginnings inextricably linked with composition
through the eighteenth-century idea of character;
however, with the nineteenth-century and the emer-
gence of the modern state as a full-blown bio-politi-
cal machine, it becomes something else altogether.
As the deep structure of any spatial product, typol-
ogy is about form (as both composition and non-
composition are), but also about the people who
inhabit the building in a way that transcends mere
function: it is about the relationships, the subjectivity
and the ethical frameworks the space itself pro-
duces. So it comes as no surprise that seeing ‘Archi-
tecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries’ from a point of view antithetical to that of
typology means to eschew any need for a social or
economic understanding of the shifts described.

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On the one hand this is a rather refreshing stance,
especially as the last decade of economic recession
has redirected the architectural debate towards pre-
dominantly social themes that often end up being
insupportably moralistic towards any attempt to
discuss form. However, the fear here is that by avoid-
ing a wider political positioning of the cases dis-
cussed, we might do more harm than good to the
debate on form, as it is hard to understand the
deeper reasons that fuelled debate and change in
the case studies discussed. One of the few
moments in which we have a sense of how dramatic
was the background to what are portrayed largely as
academic conflicts is the clash between Karel Teige
and Le Corbusier. While Teige, preoccupied with
the condition of the working class, demanded the
erasure of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘artistic’ composition, Le
Corbusier defended humanity’s aspiration to an aes-
thetic dimension as a fundamental driver of architec-
ture.
Teige’s criticisms are still very contemporary—as is
Le Corbusier’s plea for form. However, the weapons
with which we can extend the discussion today
should be different, if we want to add to the
debate: the political critique of architecture has to
get its hands dirty and dare to discuss form, and
the history of architectural form should broaden its
horizon including a social understanding of the pro-
jects discussed. Unless we dare to see the two sides
of the issues as fundamentally one, it will be imposs-
ible to come out of the impasse that has made
talking about composition taboo for the last three
decades. Sadly, Lucan’s book stands very firmly
within a traditional reading of design method
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completely autonomous from any broader consider-
ation, and this feels like a missed opportunity.
Composition/Non-Composition is a monumental
work, in terms of quantity of content, references
and number of projects discussed, but at times it
feels almost too complete, as this inclusiveness can
frustrate an attempt to read it as an operative state-
ment on the current usefulness of the two key terms.
However, another reading is possible. In fact, the
book is essentially a (recent) history of the architec-
tural plan: as ‘concrete’ abstraction, the battlefield
where the artistic ambition of the architect meets
the managerial requests of function, the plan is
front and centre in the book, starting from the
cover itself. From this point of view, Lucan’s book
proves a rewarding read—rich, precise, full of infor-
mation. Although we might very well be at the end
of what Mario Carpo called the ‘Albertian para-
digm’, and the analogical mechanism of the plan is
already being substituted by other ways to conceive
a project, Lucan’s Composition/Non-Composition
remains a brilliant overview of the ways in which
the plan has dominated our very way of seeing
space. As much as perspective emerged as the sym-
bolic form of the Renaissance, the abstraction of the
plan is exposed in Lucan’s work as the real symbolic
form of industrial modernity in all its managerial
ruthlessness, but also, perhaps, in its hidden beauty.
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
Architectural Association School of Architecture
London
United Kingdom
(also at: Black Square, www.black-square.eu)
(Author’s e-mail address: info@black-square.eu.)
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Notes and references
1. ‘While in the Italian language the contrast composi-
zione/progettazione has become schematically
evident, the relationship “design/composition ” or
“composition/projet ”, or “Komposition/Entwurf ”
do not seem to us equally loaded with ideological
differences. Nevertheless the contrast composizione/
progettazione has sometimes, and not only in Italy,
been used as symbolic of a war between different
positions.’: Vittorio Gregotti, ‘The Building of
Architecture’, Casabella, 520–521 (January–February,
1986), p. 2.
2. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Anthropology of Construction’,
Casabella, 520–521 (January–February, 1986), p. 26.
3. Jacques Lucan, ‘From Guadet to Kahn: the Theme of the
Room’, Casabella, 520–521 (January–February, 1986),
pp. 72–77.
4. On this subject, see Jean Louis Cohen, ‘The “Construc-
tivist” Project’, Casabella, 520–521 (January–February
1986), pp. 36–43.