On the Entrails of Architecture's Organism

Author(s): Emmanuel Petit

Source: Perspecta , 2010, Vol. 42, THE REAL PERSPECTA (2010), pp. 168-175
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.

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- Fig. 01
The Laocoön Group (Alinari-Scala)
168
On the Entrails
of Architecture's
Organism Emmanuel Petit
Architecture frequently derives its principles from the notion
of the body, which, in the Vitruvian tradition, epitomizes the
ideal of the well-proportioned, well - structured, and self-con-
scious human. In this humanist tradition, it was believed that
if "correctly" translated into the geometry and the syntactic
bond between the individual members of a building's construc-
tion, architecture would be able to "embody" the alleged
perfection of its natural precursor. As a consequence, archi-
tecture would reach its classical telos and achieve Beauty.
There are moments of history, however, when both the metaphysi-
cal assumptions of- and the formal analogies with- this static
view of the body are radically put to question; the ambition to
transfer a formal logic across distinct ontologies, from bio-
logical bodies to tectonic constructs, is revealed as culturally
conditioned and hence is contingent on the rhetoric and self-
understanding of a social group in their particular moment
in space and time. I will attempt to reveal connections between
a few of these "romantic" moments throughout modernity- in the
18th century and today- when the notion of the classical stabil-
ity of the body has been challenged in favor of an alternative,
functional, and performative aesthetics of the body- as -organism.
The language of description of these organisms borrows from
psychological and physiological processes of the human body,
which had not usually been incorporated in the terminology of
aesthetic reasoning, and had even been cast out from the
classical lexicon of aesthetics. I will further speculate that
architecture since the early 1990s hopes to find, in an anti-
classical metaphoricity of the body's "infrastructure," a dif-
ferent kind of spatiality that is eminently suited to generate
an immersive experience of the biological human body.
Within the conceptual frame of the classical notion
of beauty, the possibility of particular transitory emotions
of the body seemed to interfere with the more universal and
timeless features of its humanist ideal. In the mid- 18th cen-
tury, the notorious discussion between Johann Joachim Winck-
elmann and Gotthold Ephraim Les sing about the Greek statue
of the Laocoön opened up the conceptual dilemma posed by the
question of how to represent bodily passion. n8- 01 The statue de-
picts the scene in which Laocoön- the Trojan priest- and his two
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 169
Emmanuel Petit

sons are strangled by sea serpents sent after them by Poseidon

because they warned the Trojans against accepting the "poisoned
gift" of the Trojan Horse from the Greeks. Despite the real
suffering Laocoön must have faced while being choked, his facial
expression remains calm and serene. While Winckelmann and Less-
ing disagree on the reasons for which a genuine representation
of Laocoön's agony is avoided, they do agree on the sculpture's
representational characteristic of a "noble simplicity and
quiet grandeur." On the one hand, Winckelmann sees in the art-
ist's representational restraint the reflection of the serenity
and composure of the Greek heroic temperament; Greek heroes
faced death without exhibiting their full emotional pain. Less-
ing, on the other, holds that because Beauty is the supreme
aspiration of art, an overly realistic depiction of Laocoön's
suffering would have violated the main principle of the spatial
art of sculpture, i.e. to find the singular, most aesthetic
moment to "freeze" in stone:

I wanted simply to establish that among the ancients

beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts. [...]
If we apply this now to the Laocoön, the principi e
which I am seeking becomes apparent. The master strove
to attain the highest beauty possible under the given
condition of physical pain. The demands of beauty could
not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring
violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to
be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an
ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a
di s gust i ng manner. Simply imagine Laocoön's mouth forced
wide open, and then judge ! [...]
The wide-open mouth, aside from the fact that the
rest of the face is thereby twisted and di storted in
an unnatural and loathsome manner, becomes in painting
a mere spot and in sculpture a cavity, with most repul-
- 01
sive effect . 01
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön:
An Essav on the Limits of Painting and
The particular contortions of Laocoön's face risk elevating Poetry [1766], trans. E. A. McCormick
(Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins
nothing more than a fleeting moment of physical pain to the
Press, 1984), 15-7.
status of an artistic ideal, fixed in marble. Such an aesthetic
basis grounded in the "real"- though ephemeral- condition of
pain was unacceptable to Lessing's neo-classical mindset; the
materialized scene should only trigger the mind to imagine
the climax of pain. In other words, art has to follow the inter-
nal principles of art, while "reality out there"- including the
appearance of the tormented body- is relegated to a different,
non- artistic sphere of perception.
In a contemporaneous essay entitled "A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti-
ful" from 1757, Edmund Burke makes the case for a very different
aesthetic philosophy, which opposes the category of the Beauti-
- 02
ful to the Sublime. Burke argues that "the ideas of pain are
Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry
much more powerful than those which enter on the part of plea- Into the Origin of our Ideas of the
sure. Without all doubt," he continues, "the torments which we Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-

Reyolutionary Writings (London: Penguin

may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the
Books, 1998), 86.
body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned volup- - 03

tuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the On the idea of Neoclassical versus

most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy."02 Against Romantic aesthetics, refer to Pierre Wat,
Naissance de Part romantique: peinture et
the classical prerequisite for absolute values of Beauty, Burke théorie de limitation (Paris: Flammarion,
here substantiates an interest of all Romantic aesthetic theo- 1998), 99. Wat argues the following:
"Au general le romantisme substitue la
ry in the "particular," including the sick, the distorted, the
peinture du particulier, donc de l'écart,
grotesque, the ugly, and the monstrous.03 In the face of sublime du laid, du monstre, de la maladie, de
wonder and the ensuing delightful horror, "the idea of a la mort."

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 170

On the Entrails of Architecture's Organism

- 04
perfect unity can no more be arrived at,"04 and consequently,
Burke. Philosophical Enquiry (London:
Penguin Books, 1998), 115. the structural autonomy of the well-proportioned, classical
body is radically put to question as an aesthetic archetype.
Despite Winckelmann's and Lessing's justifications for
Laocoön's calmness, the traditional "beauty" of the aesthetic
body is on the verge of losing its formal autonomy and unity
in the sculpture. The open orifice of the mouth and the ex-
tending snakes contribute to this process of dissolution in
an analogous way: while the gaping mouth stops just short of
disturbing the visual surface of the body by engulfing it with
a grimace, the snakes stretch the body's membrane outwards by
entwining it with the bodies of Laocoön's two sons. Both the
depth of the mouth's cavity and the extension of the snakes
thus come very close to breaking the visual plane or "façade"
of the body, pushing inwards and outwards against the classical
boundaries of the body in space.
In the last decade of the 20th century, architects have
reactivated their attention to particular aspects of the body,
an interest which, I would argue, has adopted the Romantic sub-
lime as its conceptual antecedent like no other period of time
since Burke's. Herein, the idea of the beautiful, autonomous
body has mutated into the notion of the architectural organism ,
capable of new interactions with the spaces within and around
the surface of the classical body. Increasingly, different
physical states of the carnal body changing in time have become
paradigmatic for architecture's morphogenesis- like, for in-
stance, the body in a state of decomposition, or the grotesque
body. Once architects emphasize the transient and singular
nature of the physical body over some classical idea of formal
stasis, architecture can engage in an unprecedented way with
the ephemeral, the transitional, and the contingent. In this
conceptual frame, the architectural body is no longer primarily
articulated in space, but in time. Amongst other factors, in-
creasingly sophisticated and versatile animation software- first
introduced in the world of architecture in the early nineties-
opened the way into an understanding of form as dynamic and,
at the same time, as inhabited by some enigmatic agency with
an idiosyncratic and quasi - autonomous behavior. The effects of
the software- which itself has a progressively more opaque logic
of operation to the architect -user- hold great poetic potential:
the creative software -user relishes the ineffable effects that
different algorithms produce, and we are awed in the face of
the unfolding techno - subì ime . For an architect like Greg Lynn,
- 05 this new paradigm has had mostly geometrical effects. Indeed,
Greg Lynn, Animate Form in aYork:
(New number of his early texts, Lynn situates his interests
Princeton Architectural
within a well-known formalist tradition from Rudolf Wittkower
Press, 1999), 9.
- 06 to Colin Rowe, and, against their "reductive formalism," lays
Lynn, "Blobs: Why Tectonicsout the parameters for an irreducible formalism that is based
is Square
and Topology is Groovy," Any 14 (New
on anexact geometries. In the very beginning of Animate Form ,
York, May 1996), 169-86.
however, Lynn explains that "animation implies the evolution
of a form and its shaping forces: it suggests animalism,
animism, growth, actuation, vitality and virtuality."05 Both his
choice of metaphors in this quote and his reference to the
series of Blob films (starting with The Blob , directed by Irvin
Yeaworth, Jr. , in 1958) used to illustrate his case reveal that
Lynn's interest goes beyond the potential for new geometries;
in fact, he is fascinated by the changed psychological condi-
tions new monstrous, dynamic, and amorphous forms could pro-
voke in the beholder of architecture. 06 In Yeaworth's films,
the "blob" is a scary alien life -form, which consumes every-
- Fig. 02
Still from The Blob.
thing in its path as it expands . n8- 02 While architectural tec-
tonics have hitherto been grounded in a tradition of making

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 171
Emmanuel Petit

the joinery of different formal systems articulate, blobs erase

the legibility of such connections altogether; hence their un-
canny, "sticky" appearance. And, most importantly, the decrease
of traditional categories of "understanding" in this paradigm
is commensurate with the subject's lost ability to comprehend
the object -world around him, as well as the ensuing psycho-
logical trauma he suffers from his loss of control over the
environment. At least on a theoretical level, the body of the
subject and the body of architecture now influence each other
interactively, which renders the autonomy of both of them unat-
tainable: subject and object now have to be conceptualized in
relation to one another. The motif of humans losing analytic
control in face of the ineffable behavior of the blob acts as
an analog to the changed relationship of the animator/ archi-
tect toward his design. The architect's agency undoubtedly finds
itself radically altered when feeding the computer with data
while abandoning the traditional design techniques of the pa-
per sketch. This type of architecture unfolds through iterative
processes, instead of as a series of conscious, step-by- step,
non- automat ic, and non- linear decisions. Lynn's early projects-
derived from those creepy, sticky, and slimy forms- impose on
both the designer and the beholder of architecture psychological
sensations of fascination and, at the same time, of impotence
and horror. The distinction between the will of the subject- the
designer as an agent of formal decision-making- and the inter-
nal "strategies" of the obj ect- designed as the "receiver" of
formal informat ion- is removed.
The artist's motivation to consciously surrender part
of his metaphysical control over the obj ect -world is not
new. Surrealist authors and painters from Hieronymus Bosch to
Salvador Dali daydreamed about mysterious life forms, which
erased the ontological differentiation between live and dead
matter, and visibly exceeded the economy of control of "classi-
cal" artistry. Fi8-03 Beyond the painterly depiction of Bosch's - Fig. 03
Salvador Dali, El enigma del deseo, 1929.
and Dali's quasi - self - conscious "subject -obj ects," science
fiction writers such as Stanislaw Lem envisioned whole sentient
planets in outer space ( "object -worlds" ) , which almost behaved
like conscious subjects: in Lem's 1961 book Solaris , the planet
Solaris is covered with an "ocean," which turns out to be a
single living organism enveloping the entire surface of this
celestial body. Because of the self-conscious environment's
radical exteriority from the categories of "understanding" of
human beings, the planet reveals nothing about itself through-
out the course of the book and remains entirely mysterious to a
group of human researchers in the narrative, who are attempting
to analyze the planet from their space station. Instead of be-
ing understood, the environment acts on the scientists' minds,
laying bare their own repressed and daunting thoughts: they
are confronted with their own psychological horror. In this
way, Lem upsets the traditional master- slave association of the
subj ect -obj ect relationship, which tends to be based on the
one-sided agency of the subject- that is, the "thinking" subject,
framed by a passive environment: "reality."
This "sci-fi" idea of real-time interactivity between
humans and their surrounding environments also appealed to
architects in the 1960s. One of Archigram's projects, the Elec-
tronic Tomato from 1969, amongst others, expressed the desire
for an active subj ect -obj ect engagement, although the nature
of that interaction remains crypt ic. F'g-04 Archigram's quasi-bio- - Fig. 04
Warren Chalk & David Greene, "Elec-
logical prosthetic gizmo had a stimulating effect on the human tronic Tomato," 1969.
body, causing it to abandon both a passive state of being as
well as its illusion of metaphysical control over the object.

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 172

On the Entrails of Architecture's Organism

In a sense, the project updates the Laocoön for the 20th cen-
tury: the electric wires substitute the sea snakes and, in this
"new Laocoön," it is not pain, but rather the more desirable
state of ecstasy which makes the human figure contort her body
and open her mouth.
Few have depicted the symbiosis between organic and
inert matter in such a powerful way as the Swiss artist H. R.
Giger, who was first educated as an architect. Giger's explora-
tions of a "biomechanoid" aesthetics resulted in whole animate
- Fig. 05
H. R. Giger, Landscape X, Work INo.203, landscapes made of both biological and mechanical matter. F'g«-05»06
1972.
In these settings, humans have relinquished all conscious con-
trol over their surroundings; Giger's environments are now con-
ceptualized as vegetative organisms, which fundamentally upset
the traditional separation between the realities of the subject
and of the object. The formal autonomy of the humanoid body is
entirely dismantled; it now establishes connections with the
obj ect -world. Giger's oeuvre has, in many ways, influenced and
anticipated one of the central conceptual themes of architec-
ture's experimentations with a new aesthetic over the past two
- Fig. 06 decades. Among those, the notion of the fusion of morphologies
H. R. Giger, Li I, Work No.250, 1974. with dissimilar ontologies- i. e. the fusion of organic matter
with technological "prostheses"- can be found in many of the most
provocative projects since the early nineties, particularly in
the work of Karl Chu, Marcos Novak, Xefirotarch, and many others.
The formal inventions of these artists, authors, and
architects- who are all associated in one way or another with the
idea of the sublime- find their theoretical counter-part in the
anti -philosophe Georges Bataille. Bataille most notably makes
use of a wealth of grotesque body metaphors to undo what he
sees as the repressive and static force of "architecture," which
underlies all human efforts to structure the world around them,
physically and conceptually. Indeed, for him, all architecture
exists only in the service of the official power structure of
the society that erects it, and, as a consequence, has its con-
ceptual origin in the building of the prison: the official voice
of society imposes its ethical "forms" onto the individual, who
has no choice but to move within the space defined for him by
On the significance of
society. Nevertheless, Bataille's
Bataille's writing
argument is even more funda-
for architecture, refer to Denis Hollier,
Against mental, in
Architecture: the sense that he
The conceptualizes
Writings body-
the human of man's
Georges Bataille, trans. most intimate form- as the first site of incarceration. 07 Invested
Betsy Wing
(Cambridge MA:
through The
his writing MIT
in finding ways Press,
to de -structure1989).
these author-
- 08
itarian
Georges Bataille. The Story of the Eveconstraints, Bataille highlights their transient and
artificial
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, nature by dismantling the biological prison that the
1987).
human body represents. He takes an early interest in the body
in a state of "ecstasy," i. e. a body that literally breaks out
of its own boundaries. This pursuit is most clearly portrayed in
his first novel, the Story of the Eye , from 1928, which explores
notions of human obsession, excess, and deviance.08'^-07 Here, all
traditional limitations of the body's morality and physical in-
tegrity are suspended and replaced with the decadent pleasures
of sexuality, eroticism, and necrophilia. Bataille's bodies are
penetrated or torn to pieces in sexual, brutal, and grotesque
spectacles. The novel's main tropes are constructed through the
exaggeration of the improper. Of course, Bataille's interest
in this sort of transgression is part of a broader critique of
academicism, as well as an attempt to undo the metaphysical a
priori of all Western thinking. He also challenges the tradi-
tional forms of epistemology by acknowledging the existence of
the formless'. ". . . [F]ormless is not only an adjective having a
given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in
- Fig. 07
Cover page of Georges Bataille, the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form.
The Storv of the Eve. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself

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 173
Emmanuel Petit

squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. [...] Affirm-

ing that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless
amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider
- 09
or spit."09 The analogies between "unformed" matter with such
Bataille, quoted in Rosalind Krauss and
"low" bodily substances like spit, and "low" and "ugly" animal Yve Alain Bois. Formless: A User's Guide

species like spiders or earthworms suggest a lexicon for philo- (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 5.

sophical thought, which is in radical opposition to the tradi-

tional values of humanist language, society, and architecture.
Each one of these unusual metaphors eschews the inertia of the
formal and static universe while carrying a new aesthetic code;
all three metaphors- spit , the spider, and the earthworm-are
quasi -forms in perpetual morphological transition. Due to a
lack of "formed-ness," Bataille's grotesque metaphors themselves
are, in fact, over- saturated with meaning and constantly shift-
ing with new possibilities of significance.
To help understand the specificities of the grotesque,
we might turn to Russian philosopher and literary scholar
Mikhail Bakhtin, who by all accounts most convincingly defines
the term. In Bakhtin's words, "the entire mechanism of the word
[grotesque] is transferred from the apparatus of speech to the
abdomen. . . [it is] the drama of the body giving birth to the
- 10
word."10 The foregrounding of the "lower stratum" of the body
Mikhail Bakhtin, "The Grotesque Image
creates a grotesque effect which, nevertheless, is eminently of the Body," in Rabelais and His World
"productive" of new connotations of meaning. The grotesque (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1968), 309.
capitalizes on the fullness of meaning by suggesting a wealth
of promiscuities with the surrounding world: "It is looking
for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go
out beyond the body's confines. Special attention is given to
the shoots and branches, to all that prolongs the body and
- 11
links it to other bodies or to the world outside,"11 explains Ibid., 316-17.
Bakhtin. The recurring motifs in Bataille and Bakhtin of
interweaving bodies and objects include gaping, swallowing,
bulging, devouring, and defecating.
In the context of this argument, Bataille's fascination
- 12
with the grotesque body is most relevant, since with this focus,
IVIarco Frascari, Monsters of Architec-
the distinction between the body's interior and its surround- ture: Anthropomorphism in Architectura
ings is again blurred. Instead of a net distinction between Theory (Savage, ML: Rowman and Little-
field Publishers, 1991), 32.
inside and outside, both the body and its context are woven into
some kind of labyrinthine continuum, which reveals any "form" - 13

only in a state of transition. Architectural historian Mario The subject of the monsters of Bomarzo
is related to "love, orgy, play, death and
Frascari describes the grotesque body as:
the torments (infernal and terrestrial)."
Cf. André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Les
... a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished , monstres de Bomarzo (Paris: Grasset,
1957), 14.
never completed ; it is continually being built, con-
tinually created; it is the principi e of others' bod-
ies. The logic of the grotesque image ignores the
smooth and impenetrabl e surface of the neoclass i cal
bodies, and magnifies only excrescences and orifices
which lead into the bodies' depths. These outward and
inward details are merged. Moreover, the grotesque body
swallows and is swallowed by the world. 12

The grotto, which is at the etymological basis of the gro-

tesque, figures as another archetype of the womb -like space,
which engenders multiple future meanings yet to be delivered.
The grotto's orifice becomes the interface between the hidden
image of the body and its open appearance. This interface, due
to its special function of becoming, inspires monstrous im-
agery, imagery in the process of morphological formation and
- Fig. 08
metamorphosis. The grimace of the monstrous Ore at the Mannerist
Pirro Ligorio, The Ore at the Bosco dei
Bosco dei Mostri (Monsters' Grove) at Bomarzo is merely Mostri (Monsters' Grove) at Bomarzo,
one illustration of this idea. 13,n8*08 In this discussion, the Italy, 16th c.

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 174

On the Entrails of Architecture's Organism

architectural archetype of the grotto and the carnal aspects

- Fig. 09
Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949.
- Fig. 10
INOX, H20 Pavilion aerial photo, Neeltje
Jans, The Netherlands, 1994-97.
of the human body reveal their physicality in an equivalent
way. The same imagery of the mouth as the orifice, which con-
nects the head of the human- the locus of his intellect- to the
stomach and the intestines, can also be found, for example,
in many of Francis Bacon's paint ings . n8-09 The mouth is a most
ambiguous interface, since it is the bodily abyss which, fol-
lowing Bakhtin's description, gives birth to "low" bodily se-
cretions-such as spit- at the same time as it constructs "high"
metaphysical words. This equivalence has been a challenge to
architects since the early 1990s, and it gave them a pretext
to rethink the relationship between architecture's cerebral
theories and the new possibilities of materiality, physicality,
and atmosphere.
A whole series of architectural projects since the
early 1990s can be invoked to illustrate this ambivalence. NOX
and Lars Spuybroek's H20 Pavilion in Neeltje Jans in the Neth-
erlands (1994-97) is of particular interest in this context
since, in this project, "space" is no longer understood as a
void that is delineated by a material container; rather, archi-
tectural space congeals into a plasmatic atmosphere in its own
right. The pavilion is conceived as a place to raise awareness
of the scarcity of water, and thus it devises a choreographed,
interactive water "experience." In it, the visitor's body is
immersed in a dense environment, which formally resembles hu-
man entrails and which performs in metabolic ways: exhibition
visitors enter into the pavilion's longitudinal space and,
while moving through it, activate sensors that control light,
sound, digital projections, and water nozzles . Fi8s,10> 11 Here, ar-
chitecture is thought of in terms of an ephemeral experience
which is contingent on the visitor's movements. This is Spuy-
broek's way of challenging the traditional relationship between
the spectator- subject and the static object of architecture:
the pavilion does not define a "place" for observation, but is
conceptualized as a mere passageway, embodying flux and move-
ment. The visitor passes through an environment which liter-
ally materializes as mist is sprayed throughout the pavilion's
interior. Architectural perception here is no longer organized
around a spatial interval or distance between the subject
and the building, which thus creates the possibility for

- Fig. 11
NOX, H20 Pavilion interior photo,
1994-97.

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 175
Emmanuel Petit

a contemplative and visual apprehension; instead, the subject

now participates in the building's metabolic exchange as if
swallowed by it. Much like the skin of the body, the building's
"container" is turned into a formless membrane, ostensibly to
assure the performance of the building, which is contingent on
local prerequisites. The architecture's metaphorical reference
to the biological "lower stratum" of the body (entrails, in-
testines) cannot be ignored; the grotesque iconography puts the
subject in the very unusual position of being the only recog-
nizable "form" or façade in this environment. It is as if the
subject visited the inside of his own body, a sensation that
corresponds perceptually with the intense feeling of complete
spatial immersion.
The metaphorical weight of this building is not merely
casual or accidental. Indeed, shortly after completing the H20
pavilion, NOX designed a project for the Expo. 02 "The Future
is Now" in Biel, Switzerland; in the project brief, Spuybroek
is explicit about his intentions to revisit the body's in-
- Fig. 12
terior through architecture. F|s-12 In it, he explains that his
INOX, The Future is Now, Expo.02, Biel,
architecture "is to show the future not as an 'object' far away Switzerland, 1998.
in space, but as something hidden in the present and inside
ourselves. ... One [is] surrounded by molecules, constantly
- 14
dividing up and making new connections."14 Architecture here
INOX Architecture project description
distances itself from its traditions of static and theatrical for an Interactive Exhibition in Biel CH

form and seeks to connect to the dynamism of organic morpholo- "2001_Future.com," http://www.noxarch.
com/flash_content/flash_content.html
gies in the state of perpetual transition.
(accessed 20 IVI ay 2006).
It is, of course, hopelessly early to conclude what
the cultural meaning could be of architecture's turn to the
grotesque body towards the end of the 20th century. On the one
hand, the generation of architects who constructed their con-
ceptual identities in the past two decades needed to swing the
pendulum away from postmodernism. This move, arguably, meant
investing more energy in visiting the inscrutable performance
of the formless than in tuning the superstructure of form to-
ward public communication and consumption. On the other hand,
the "mere" switch of the lexicon of descript ion-f rom metaphors
of the humanist body to the grotesque body- could indicate both
a modification of the aesthetic basis of the discipline and
a thorough shift of consciousness on the part of the contem-
porary subject. I submit that, in a "global" world, in which
mass media promote and market the illusion of increased con-
trol of the subject over an ever larger portion of his or her
environment, architects feel a relative impotence in upholding
their tradition of "metaphysical" jurisdiction (their "façade")
over the obj ect -world. Instead of using architectural repre-
sentation as a mirror of that disillusionment (which is an
unavoidable by-product of the recognition of the loss of con-
trol), architects have decided to venture into an alternative
sphere of metaphors, a world that has always subsumed notions
of the unconscious, the instinctive, the performative, and the
impulsive, all of which are now accepted categories of intel-
lectual inquiry. The "opening up" of the body of architecture
towards the outside world, through conceptual apertures and
extensions, also suggests the acceptance of the relative vul-
nerability of the architect. While I have traced the formalist
symptoms of this changed relationship to the environment, one
can easily imagine how this new consciousness impinges on the
political body in an equally dramatic way. At this very moment,
when the global colonization of the world by the subject seems
most possible (and the world seems "wide open"), we find that
very subject compelled again to revisit the hidden places of
its own being.

THE REfìL PERSPECTfl 42

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