Spectacular Tectonics

Author(s): Sandy Isenstadt

Source: ANY: Architecture New York , 1996, No. 14, Tectonics Unbound: KERNFORM
AND KUNSTFORM REVISITED ! (1996), pp. 44-47
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41852141

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Sandy Isenstadt
Necessity is something that
exists in the mind,
not in objects. DAVID HUME
To the extent that
necessity is socially dreamed,
the dream becomes
necessary. GUY DEBORD
T E C 1
14
Necessity
Amongst themselves, architects debate - loudly - the merits and
evils for architecture of the death of modernism and the rise of
postmodernism, the superficiality of postmodernism and the pos-
sibility of a modernist revival, the hypertrophy of modernism as
high-tech and the appropriate technology of vernacular, the
impossibility of vernacular in postindustrial society and the exi-
gencies of housing the masses, the inconsequence of materiality
in the information age and the new reality of cyberspace, the
need for sincerity and the inevitability of irony, the decline of
standards, the relaUvism of plurality, the return to dogma, and
the ascendance of spectacle. The bystanders - those who live in
buildings - have accommodated themselves to the debate, if they
are aware of it at all, as a bright, if unruly spot in a discursive
phantasmagoria or as just another relativism in a world that
stopped making sense in the 1960s. Only one area of agreement
seems certain: architecture is as fragmented and uncertain as the
society around it.
[ For many of its proponents, tectonics can oppose rather than
participate in this condition by finding a stable, unanimous spot
in the debate. A theory of tectonics was first articulated over
150 years ago by Karl Bötticher, based on a distinction between
Werkform, an element that transfers load, and Kunstform, an
expression or aestheticization of what would otherwise only be a
[technical problem. More recently the theory has been taken up
!for its explicit convictions regarding necessity: since "architec-
I ture must of necessity be embodied in structural and construc-
tional form/7 formal expression should amplify and elaborate
¡this imperative.1 Tectonics, sometimes described as "poeticized
¡construction/7 acknowledges the inevitability of representation
! in architecture but tethers it to an ontology, an underlying and
undeniable material reality. At its best, tectonics implies, in the
Arquitectónica, 42nd
words of Henry Adams, "construction that . . .
does not need to be explained/7 If it cannot
Street Hotel, New York,
exactly still the ceaseless cycles of consumerism
1995, drawing.
and commodification that course through con-
temporary culture, it may, at least, claim a certain authenticity.
To heighten the power of tectonics, it is often contrasted explicitly
or implicitly with "scenography" or what may be defined provi-
sionally as the architecture complicit with or produced by the
society of the spectacle. Scenography is a term replete with asso-
ciational psychologies, romanticism, and the power to evoke pro-
found states of mind. The term even had democratic - hence, rev-
olutionary - overtones by making aesthetic experience a matter of
education of taste rather than inheritance. But as the dismissive
term for "steel frames wrapped in flashy wrapping paper77 or
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"cardboard stage-set building/7 scenography signifies a subordi-
nation of the irrepressible body of architecture to an image, a far
more transportable and reproducible form.2 Like a sign, scenogra-
phy can operate at a distance. Like a sign, the status of the absent
referent is called into question. When waxing capricious, proximi-
ty offers no check. Out of touch with propinquity, blind even to
binocular parallax, scenography, as Venturi was quick to note, is
"antispatial.77 If tectonics finds its ontology in the necessary, cer-
tain, and continuing presence of the structural unit, scenography
is representation with wings. Ii aspires to the incidental and
unnecessary in architecture and, what's worse, iťs everywhere.
On the stage or on the strip, scenery may be acceptable. But once
it leaves its homeland, it threatens to use up valuable architectur-
al resources. This essay considers what is lost and what is gained
by allowing scenography a chance to overrun tectonics.
Since the concern for authenticity is not limited to architec-
ture, it might be useful to revisit a defining moment in a similar
debate, indeed, one that anticipates not only the sides but the key
'terms of recent thinking on tectonics. In "Art and Objecthood/7
Michael Fried argues that the
"virtual universality77 in art S P E C TA
of theatricality or "stage presence77 can best be resisted by an art
that establishes a "continuous and entire presentness.77 Minimal
■art can7t do this, Fried wrote in 1967 in Artforum, because it
presumes an "object in a situation77 and "includes the beholder/7
thus making the larger setting operational in the experience of
art, not unlike scenography. While he points to earlier arguments
of Clement Greenberg, Fried is careful to disavow Greenberg7s
reliance on the idea of an "'irreducible essence of pictorial art.777
Instead, he defines aesthetic essence not as something irreducible
but as "that which compels conviction/7 making the artisťs task
an inquiry into the conditions and conventions that underpin aes-
thetic identity. Recent discussions of tectonics not only identify
architecture's irreducible essence but, to varying degrees, go on
to contrast it with an illusory stage presence or spectacle. Such
discussions thus reproduce the conceptual divisions upon which
Fried draws upon but without exhibiting his interest in finding the
social equations behind aesthetic practices.
Architecture is less an "object in a situation77 than it is both
object and situation. Architecture is environmental by definition
and must be concerned with the experience of those it stands
among. It follows that rather than resist the pressures of contem-
porary society, architecture must engage them and find the
thresholds for architectural conviction. This does not, however,
invalidate tectonics as a strategy. The idea of a "spectacular
tectonics77 is predicated precisely on the encounter between tec-
tonics and spectacle, on finding an intersection rather than an
opposition. I have chosen three projects based on their positions
along an implied axis from the tectonic to the spectacular. At
one pole is Arquitectónica^ project for a hotel and entertainment
zone in Manhattan's Theater District. At the other is a clay
and glass gallery, located in Waterloo, Ontario, a more or less
suburban setting, by Patkau Architects, a firm whose work is
deservedly praised for its tectonic quality. Somewhere in between
is Rodolfo Machado and Jorge S i I vetti7s design of a new monu-
ment for Leonforte, a baroque Sicilian town. All three projects
make tectonics an inquiry into the experience of the spectacular.
Varieties of Spectacular Experience
1. 42nd Street Hotel What better place to see spectacle than at
the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street in New York City?
At this corner Arquitectónica meets Disney, the nation's leading
purveyor of spectacles, and, not incidentally, morality tales of
organic, if autocratic societies that discover, after 80 minutes or
so, their enduring moral principles. As part of the 42nd Street
Development Project, Arquitectónica^ hotel and commercial
design will be part of the Disney Corporation's bid to attract some
of New York's 20 million annual visitors. Disney's vision has been
cast as "a formerly indigenous theatrical district transformed into
a romantically idealized tourist version of its former self.77 While
there is some historical legitimacy to Disney's inheritance of "the
grand Broadway spectacle tradition," pioneered by figures such
as P. T. Barnum and Florenz Ziegfeld, the area has been seen for
decades as, in the words of formej Governor Cuomo, "a sewer."3
 For the leading retailer of wholesomeness, building at the
center of depravity in the city of sin, Arquitectónica proposes . . .
a shooting star. Leaping out of some resort's orbit, 10 stories of
time-share units are designed to look like nothing so much as
"a meteor moments after the crash," backed by 47 floors of a
colored glass "curving streak of light, representing the meteor's
trail."4 No better metaphor could be imagined for this spot pre-
cisely because spectacle, as feared, creates a democracy of the
imagination: all meanings are flattened within a screen's width
of signification.
Yet even here, in the throbbing heart of ocular fantasy and
mixed metaphor, Arquitectónica employs an elemental, if not
exactly tectonic language. The rest of the tower is clad in vertical
panels of blue glass (sky?) and horizontal panels of an orange
color (earth? brick?). The interaction with spectacle has not
coarsened the conditions of tectonics so much as pixelated them,
as if even the essence of architecture is subject to change when
the society around it changes. The link between earth and sky is
light itself, as if the venerated craft of joining had been vaporized
by the impact of neoprene, clips,
U L A R and mastic. At the smaller scale

of thestreetscape, tacky signs and screens are simply stacked,

like so many chattering bricks, as if spectacle had discounted tec-
tonics to its minimum integers. This strategy is consistent with
other elementalizing tendencies in Arquitectonica's earlier work.
The monumental punched opening of the Atlantis Condominiums
in Miami, for instance, says "wall" louder than a mason with a
megaphone. The opening, rather than looking out to some place,provides the tower's overall dimensions and is etched into its
has itself become a place, as if to literalize the idea that aperture
side, only oriented vertically rather than horizontally. Though
is what makes enclosure habitable - an idea that seems pretec-tectonics is not foremost among design issues discussed by the

41 m m
tonic, more Ur- than Kunst- or Werkform. architects, the tower is nonetheless articulated in terms of its two
In both cases, Arquitectónica amplifies foundational, if predominant structural systems. Masonry walls are clearly 14. m m
Manichaean, concepts of architecture similar to the amplifica-coursed and canted inward at the base to form an entry, amplify-
tion of structural necessity described in tectonics. While the ing a sense of weight by making the wall seem reluctant to part.
ontological claims of tectonics rely on a real proximity and a A lighter colonnade at the top is generated only by removing this
formal correlation between representation and underlying reluctant material. The effect is heightened by contrast with a set
of metal spikes, telescopes actually, that appear leftover from
structure, the legitimacy of Arquitectonica's spectacular tecton-
ics results not from the undeniable presence of spectacle as some ancient and now indecipherable undertaking. Inside, a spi-
a new social necessity as much as from a kind of tectonic fore- ral stair is supported by steel scaffolding, itself supported on a
shortening. At the hotel tower, for example, the elemental is single steel column and attached only lightly to the surrounding
magnified but with no improvement in detail. The joint, the logi-stone shell. The stilettolike telescopes strike the steel and pierce
cal site of constructional elaboration, the place where makers the stone, thus violating both systems with some logic all their
own. At the top is. a pool of water, representing the original
really meet their materials, is made central to the design visual-
ly while it is marginalized materially. This is a precise transla- source of the town's past prosperity and referring again to the
tion into very architectural terms of a spectacular effect: the Gran Fonte. Water, an element both mercurial and weighty, obe-
dient to gravity yet found at tower top, thus occupies the mythic
creation of nearness without proximity, an in-your-face intimacy
without contact. Because it explores spectacle through architec-
poles of earth and sky to which tectonics, at Machado and Silvetti,
tural form if not construction, the project is less the censured times, aspires.
spectacularization of architecture than an investigative archi- At the Gran Fonte the actual flow of water Tower of Leonforte,
tectural ization of spectacle. from spouts is paired with framed views in a
Sicily, 1983, plans and
built metaphor of agricultural well-being.
sections.
2. Four Public Squares If Disney's specific desire to divert someThe tower recognizes a new source of pros-
tourists its way precipitated Arquitectonica's engagement with perity by facilitating instead the flow of vision. The idea of pros-
spectacle in New York, perhaps the entire syndrome of spectacle perity is also theatricalized by the dramatic inversion of placing
a moat at the top of the tower, making oř the town's first act a
is itself a product of tourism. The grand tour certainly inspired the
construction of more than a few resort towns in the 18th centuryclimax. "The tower reinvents I eonforte" not only as a visible
and, not insignificantly, proved that tourism might be architec- symbol, as the architects claim, but as a teletrope - a device for
turally productive. While Machado and Silvetti's Four Public spanning visual distances. The tower, pierced by the sheer pres-
Squares (1983) is not a product of tourism - the term appears sure of seeking to see, proclaims, as it rises, the town's readiness
nowhere in the architect's comments or program requirements - to be seen. In Machado and Silvetti's proposal, the tower makes
it is an architecture about tourism.5 Leonforte, a 17th-century visible the spread and stature of spectacle. In sociologist David
Riesman's terminology, the tower, like the tourist who travels to
Sicilian town, having experienced both economic decline and ran-
dom expansion, sought a design that would stabilize change with- demonstrate his worldliness, is "outer-directed."
out hindering growth and that would balance new development But the project is in no way self-congratulatory. The telescopes
while preserving the character of the historic core. Underpinningstand not on a tripodal altar to vision but are immured and
reached bipedally. Vision is not given to the visitor but must be
the very terms of the commission is a recognition of Italy's tower-
earned. Even the interest in vision seems less a concession to
ing tourism industry. A town seeking the potential revenue stream
generated by tourism would look, naturally enough, to the logic tourism than a connection with the baroque's own love of specta-
of looking within which tourism works. cle: tourism's framed movement between architectures is likened

The central figure in a set of urban interventions proposed byto the baroque elaboration of movement within an architectural
frame. Seeing the town from the tower is less like receiving a
Machado and Silvetti is a new tower. In this structure, materials
and dimensions of the existing town are not so much reproduced postcard than, to paraphrase Charlie Parker, "dancing about
as consolidated. The Gran Fonte, for instance, a series of 22 architecture." Views are exchanged with other views or actual
spouts associated with apertures, the town's chief monument, sites only through one's movement. Scene-seeking thus appears

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 more a negotiation with bodily limitations than a universal
triumph or a steady-state ideology. In Nicholas Green's words
regarding landscape representation, it is a "technology of percep-
tion/' part physical, part ideological, and entirely amenable to
architectural representation. If the tower threatens to make of the
territory a map, it is itself a map, only seen from inside, revealing
the mechanics of aerial vision, like finding beneath a rock a
Cartesian point of view.
Considering this tower as a visualization of the "construct-
Patkau Architects, Canadian Glass
edness" of vision suggests a new meaning for tectonics in
and Clay Gallery of Art, Waterloo,
the 20th century rather than a restatement of its 19th-
century logic. Just as the emergence of guidebooks trans-
Ontario, 1988-92.
formed modes of seeing places, the tower condenses an
itinerary and makes explicit the physical basis for tourism.
Unlike earlier guidebooks, this Baedeker's is built. Tourism itself
becomes part of the town's physical landscape of monuments,
making the town more unique after tourism than it was before.
Rather than replicate a touristic subordination of current human
life to past monuments, as Roland Barthes complained of the
Blue Guide, the tower records the tourist's optical economy into
the town's urban fabric, making manifest a new social geogra-
phy. In turn, by differentiating somatic and visual experience in
terms of systems of materials, the architects deconstruct tourism
through building, revealing it as an encounter between a modern
mode of perception and earlier modes of production. This sug-
gests that -rather than ask architecture to resist making a scene,
one could generate a spectacular tectonics by amplifying a social
pressure rather than a structural unit. If gravity were
i Kenneth Frampton, "Rappel à
46
not
1 ordre: the Case for the Tectonic," the demiurge, architecture would not be limited to
Architectural Design 60: nos. 3/4 the structural articulation of the transfer of gravitational
(1990): 19.
forces. A different attractive force might provide the
2 Peter Davey, "Metal and
Masonry," Architectural Review (July basis for a calculus of pressures and resistances, giving
1 988) : 15. Frampton s interest in form not to the logic of construction but, in this case, a
tectonics is motivated by this dis-
mode of perception. Conversely, in the course of exposing
tinction (see note 1).
3 As quoted in Steve Nelson, tourism as a socially organized way of seeing, a spectacu-
"Broadway and the Beast: Disney lar tectonics would acknowledge architecture as it exists
Comes to Times Square," TDR 39,
in a perceptual space, making explicit scenography's dis-
no. 2 (Summer 1995): 71-85.
4 Herbert Muschamp, "A Flare for
tinction from iconography and orthography. A change in
Fantasy: 'Miami Vice' Meets 42d magnification, a visual tic, or a density in an optical field
Street," New York Times, 21 May 1995, might prove as foundational as Semper's knot.
2:1. The video tower was designed
by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo
Scofìdio. The retail zone was 3. Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery of Art If tourism can
designed by D'Agostino, Quirk. be defined as travel geared to viewing authentic sites and
Architects. "Kinetic signage" is
objects, the museum may be understood as busloads of
required by local zoning; see David
authentic objects that have traveled to their viewers. The
Dunlap, "Along Times Sq., Signs of
New Life Abound," New York Times, 30 museum is surely one of scenography's favored habitats:
April, 1995, 9:1.
a place where authentic culture is routinely decontextual-
5 Rodolfo Machado and Jorge
Silvetti, Buildings for Cities, ed. Peter G.
ized and given to vision, where display is predicated on
Rowe (Cambridge: Harvard authenticity but ends up providing the standard for
University Graduate School of
authenticity, where one's exposure to display is typically
Design, 1989).
6 Brian Carter, ed. , Patkau Architects.
kaleidoscopic and brief, and where one leaves clutching
Selected Projects 1983-1993 (Halifax: merchandise and feeling undeservedly uplifted. The muse-
TUNS Press, 1994), 71-72; and um is not just kin to commerce but its twin, having spent
"Romantic Realism," Architectural
its infancy, youth, and adolescence trading secrets of
Record (January 1995): 64-69. The
gallery was originally to be only
acquisition, organization, and presentation of objects for
one part of a larger museum, which consumption.
was scaled down due to cost con-
If anything, the gallery is more explicit than the muse-
siderations.
7 Ernest Gellner, "Anything Goes,"
um regarding revenue, yet remarkably Patkau Architects'
Times Literary Supplement, 1 6 June design for the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery of Art in
1995.
Waterloo, Ontario makes no compromise with the forces
8 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern
of collection and display. Adjacent to Waterloo's Seagram
Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration
( 1 929) (New York: DaCapo Press, Museum, a city park, and a major shopping center, the
1993), 210. project is unrelentingly tectonic in its approach and frank
9 Rosalind Krauss, "The
regarding systems of materials and their intersections with
Originality of the Avant-Garde" in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde other systems. Programmatic interest focuses on the inte-
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), rior via concrete "totemic elements" repeated out front as
161-62. Krauss goes on to note
"monumental columns that state the order of the building."
that related ideas of origins and
The reviewer for Progressive Architecture describes these
authenticity are terms shared by the
"museum, the historian, and the elements as "didactic objects," as if to underscore the iden-
maker of art."
tity of the tectonic tutors and their lesson. The clear impli-
io Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
cation, and no small part of the ontological appeal, is that
" 'Authenticity, ' or the Lesson of
Little Tree," New York Times Book Review, form here continues to talk shop even after hours.6
24 November 1991. See Anthony But there's more here than tectonics talking. Tectonic
Giddens, The Constitution of Society
order comes unglued if one insists on reading the entry
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1 984) for
his arguments on die consequences
of modernity.
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colonnade as preface to an essay on trabeation; the interior is
predominantly mural in character. Framing is episodic. The
columns cannot stand for some broader tectonic notion since
tectonics generalizes at risk of its ontology. Yet the density of
tectonic signifying, including the tiny totems atop the courtyard
gallery, would be gratuitous were it merely the representation
of an absence, as it might have been had it been built (and
reviewed) 10 years earlier.
Formal similarity and alignment characterize the entry
columns while use unifies the interior galleries: the "totemic
elements" are special gallery spaces. Thus, on the outside of the
building are collected as a system what on the inside is singular
and anecdotal. The architectural treatment reinforces the con-
notations of ancestry that totems bear. More than anything else,
the walls seem to accommodate them, as if the totems preceded
their enclosure. The design thus announces the ancient heritage
V
of the objects displayed therein and helps them cohere within a
museological schema as part of a venerable tradition. In the
rhetoric of return the totems are analeptic, restorative - a kind
of totemic tonic.
In contrast, the entry columns, which signify but do not sup-
port, seem eager for some connection that will make tectonic
sense of their signification. By anticipating a weight, the columns
appear essentially proleptic, like a next generation. The archi-
tects reinforce the celebratory mood by making the totemic
progeny that betoken one's arrival "gas-fired light columns."
The objects displayed within the galleries seem then products of
some subterranean kiln vented by the columns at the exterior.
By anticipating a recollection, the columns start to appear less
a structural expectation than part of a historical narrative or
social myth. This theatrical frame is fairly prescribed by having
a totem serve as display. As Freud noted in Totem and Taboo,
the totem is a psychic expression of guilt over loss and, as such,
embodies a foundational myth. Nearly always, it is bound to
exogamy or incest prohibition, the requirement that future blood-
lines be mixed. Progressive Architecture's claim that "materials
are the medium as well as the message here" diminishes the
varied gene pool that exogamy would confer.
While the design for the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery is
no stage set, it programmatically must set a stage. It does so pre-
cisely by tugging at the gap between ontology and representation.
The construction functions not as a support for scenery as much
as a theater that frames one's understanding of the tectonic labor
of representation. Tectonics is not compromised so much as con-
textual ized. This movement outside the tectonic frame of refer-
ence makes the density of tectonic signifying a virtue rather than
an excess. Like the best architecture, it exceeds the grasp of any
one theoretical position.
Social Dreams
To different extents, the preceding examples espouse a tectonics:
they express something crucial to their construction. They also
serve as examples of a spectacular tectonics: they use construc-
tion to explore conditions of contemporary expression.
Arquitectónica attempts to provide on 42nd Street an architec-
tural translation of the pressures placed on building by the society
and clients of the spectacle. Machado and Silvetti examine mod-
ern conditions of tourism by first distinguishing vision, movement,
and authenticity and then mapping these onto the technically
articulated systems of telescopes, steel stairs, and masonry shell,
the last of which is authenticated by resonance with the town's
urban fabric. Vision and movement are thus incorporated - given
material form - within a tectonic analysis. By reassembling com-
ponents of tourism according to tectonic categories, the architects
enable a mode of seeing through an architectural lens. Though
tectonics is central to Patkau Architects' work, at the Canadian
Clay and Glass Gallery it appears in the particular context of dis-
play. The architects have mobilized architectural markers of mak-
ing, myth, and memory to dramatize display and to balance the
museum's tendency toward decontextualization with a recontex-
tualizing symbolic frame that spotlights craft production rather
than mass consumption. Precisely by attending to the representa-
tion of construction in architecture, the architects have organized
a set of artifacts into a larger historical narrative that distin-
guishes the gallery's displays from those of the neighboring shop-
ping center. All three works, in short, bear signs of spectacle.
This claim is not, however, prelude to a postmodern celebra-
tion of uncertainty or an argument for "anything goes." As
Ernest Gellner observes in an essay of the same name, "Total
relativism ends by underwriting cheap dogmatism/' and, what's
more, "moral relativism is tragic."7 Architectural relativism is
probably less tragic than lamentable, but the search for certainty
needn't tilt toward either dogma or aesthetic isolation. Integrity
in architecture might be found more in its reach than in its roots.
Rather than ground aesthetic identity with an "irreducible
essence," tectonic theory might address instead the conventions
and convictions that bear on aesthetic identity. Such a goal
accords with the initial premise of Guy Debord's theorization of
the Society of the Spectacle: "The spectacle is not a collection
of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by
images." Admittedly, a spectacular tectonics does not accord
with Debord's conclusion: in this and later polemics he condemns
spectacle and ultimately despairs of our ever reaching behind it.
Might there be a way, though, to address his critical categories
without also adopting his resignation? If architecture is in fact
based in matter inimical to spectacle, might it then, more than
survive a confrontation with spectacle, outlive it? If spectacle is,
as Debord and others contend, a lullaby for critical conscious-
ness, might architecture be the wake-up call? At the very least,
a sustained encounter between the two promises either to confirm
suspicions or recast the terms of the debate altogether. Rather
than renounce interest in social relations because they are medi-
nize the unruly facts of the world into schemes; to a large extent,
they determine what the facts are. At the very least, as Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. asserted in a discussion of the correlation of
textual claims and authorial experience, "Fact and fiction have
always exerted a reciprocal effect on
each other."10 Recognizing this, the con-
Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, plan
structivas, from their very first manifestos, explicitly linked a
charged political program of propaganda with their understand-
ing of tectonics. To the extent that they generate conviction,
social fictions can become necessary.
The key idea behind a spectacular tectonics is to make such
psychic values as explicit as possible to facilitate aesthetic or
critical reflection on them. This implies the designation of a third
category in addition to the initial distinction between Werk- and
Kunstform, that is, the form of technology and its aestheticiza-
tion. In keeping with the German terminology, a new category
might be named Sitteform, based on the German word for "cus-
tom" or "convention." The term requires from architecture an
account of human agency but allows that agency may at times be
institutional in form. As such, Sitteform bears the mark of social
compromises between competing contemporary values and, with
its admittedly conservative connotations, implies differential
rates of change between technical facts, aesthetic practices, and
social equations. In theoretical terms, Louis Kahn'swork is
premised on this distinction: he was concerned at least as much
with finding a fundamental institutional character beneath layers
of convention as he was with the appropriate use of materials.
Or, from the point of view of theories of technological change,

ated by images, a spectacular tectonics would question - in
architectural terms - the nature and necessity of such mediation.
As a matter of principle, recent tectonic theories do not seek
to multiply architecture's determining factors. Instead, tectonics
can claim a stabilizing power by binding architectural expression
to an architectural constant, construction. The irony of this par-
ticular conviction is threefold. First, basing architectural authen-
ticity on an idea of aestheticized construction drives architecture
back into the novelty-seeking consumer culture from which tec-
tonics was to protect it. That technology, including building tech-
„47
architecturally articulating a "constructional paradigm" would
draw attention to the beliefs and practices regarding workable
construction solutions. A gap or a gulf between structure and
representation might then be revisited not as a tectonic dud but
as a tension, in the case of Machado and S i Ivetti's tower at
Leonforte, between construction that is expected and construc-
tion that is possible. Such expectations or shared convictions,
once made explicit, are subject to aestheticization, and, possibly,
reassessment. As a system, then, spectacular tectonics allows a
degree of aesthetic autonomy but reveals the limits of autonomy, X
tí
o
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values. It is shaped, in short, by whole realms not represented in struction is to produce a vacuum. Architectural expression, in its OC
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malisms would isolate, for instance, the widespread use of large But in the ether of poeticized construction, no one can hear you .2
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sheets of glass from the social value placed on simultaneous secu- dream. Spectacular tectonics does not argue against a construc- u CA

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