Victor Hugo’s essay, “Ceci tuera cela [This Will Kill That]”, points to a recurring anxiety about new developments in expressive technology – that as societies adopt new methods of telling stories about themselves, each one increases in its level of abstraction – is further removed from the reality of everyday life as it is lived. Hugo sees architecture as the first method of abstraction, of signifying – sealing traditions under a monument, as he puts it.
The mass-printed word, to Hugo, removes us even further from the literally grounded edifices of architecture: thought expressed via the printing press “converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once”. He could just as easily be talking about radio or television or the Internet – disseminating ideas through the ether. And similarly, with each new communication technology, there are both celebrations of new possibilities, and concerns about the increased removal from “real,” “authentic” interaction. I think of it as the increasing “metaphorization” of our actions – from GUIs’ “desktops” and “windows” to Facebook’s “likes” and “friends” and Google’s “hangouts”.
Lewis Mumford seems to critique the same phenomenon in baroque-era urban planning: “the new order of paper patterns, paper plans, paper constitutions … sacrificed the craft autonomy of the worker to the vanity of the architect [and] the uses of life to the formalities of plan and elevation” (132). I couldn’t help but be reminded of Max Weber’s ideas about how the rationalization of capitalist societies leads to fragmented spheres of knowledge – and how mass printing must have helped to further, even cause, the intellectualization and abstraction of architectural principles. As these
principles became codified in literature, they reflected literary modes of expression – but they also helped architecture develop its own internal logic, narrowing its intentions and capabilities from the “total art” Hugo describes.
Neil Levine, in his chapter about Hugo and Labrouste, relates Frank Lloyd Wright’s interpretation of Hugo’s essay, casting it as an elegy for a handicraft architecture, and a call for a new mechanical architecture. I suppose you could make the case that either 1) Wright and other modernists’ emphasis on utilizing and foregrounding industrial materials is a removal of the literary abstraction of Romantic styles, or perhaps, 2) in its use of simple and inscrutable geometry, is yet another example of technologically-driven abstraction.
And as the review of Rem Koolhaas’s book reminds us, he and Le Corbusier, two of the most name-checked architects in recent history, are as facile with writing theory as they are with actually designing structures. Even where Wright saw a new dawn for architecture, its relationship with the printed word is still, if not as subservient as Hugo saw it, at least symbiotic.
The “archicomic” Yes Is More tries to overcome the limits of an architecture defined by writing – as it says in some of the earliest panels, the medium of a graphic novel allows for a story to unfold in a much less rigorous and narrow way than theoretical essays or critical manifestos. The necessary abstraction of a generalized thesis, the comic points out, ignores the messy realities of the processes of design and construction. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but I’m interested to continue and see if they are successful at capturing that philosophy of “real” improvisation and intervention, as opposed to a more traditional, removed statement of principles. One hopes they will point to an architecture that doesn’t only sustain its own internal logic, but interacts with other spheres of daily life in a way that recaptures some of the grand beauty and societal relevance of Hugo’s lost “Bible of stone”.