Reality’s Sieve – WEEK 10

ABOVE: FLC/ADAGP Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, Paris

It’s difficult to imagine the production of architecture in our contemporary era without the inclusion of representational techniques born outside the discipline. Reason being, nowadays much architecture begins outside the discipline. Buildings, like the reflection of the self in Freud’s mirror, are more than just a physical reality. They are polemic filters for ideas transposed onto the materials of construction. The arguments that are interwoven into buildings are threads of thought that start far away from the architectural arena. In the more critical practices, it is commonplace for architects to look outside of the traditional bounds of architecture to find textual inspiration. Beatriz Colomina shows us Bernard Tschumi’s appropriation of print ads as evidence of this. We use texts on sociology, psychology, economics, media theory, advertising, and philosophy to help us comprehend and make buildings. As an architectural designer some of the books that have brought the most clarity of thought to my process have had very little to do with architecture.  These alternate texts act as sieves, both mental and visual, through which more traditional architectural discourse can be understood or reduced.
In many ways Le Corbusier is the most prominent example of an early modern critical practice. As he absorbed the texts of the other milieus in which he was immersed and trained, his architecture mutated. He looked at architecture through several critical sieves; Dutch Calvinist, watchmaker, painter, pilot, naval and structural engineer, and (as both Colomina and Cohen reiterate) magazine editor. This infectious absorption of the external text took his creative output from a fairly normative Jürgen-stile to something altogether different.  Asceticism and the  simulacra of the machine and the vehicle crept into his work, but so to did language of media; in scale, orientation, and relation to the human body.
Any architect of the mid-century era on is guaranteed to have an intimate relation with Le Corbusier that begins at a very early stage of disciplinary pedagogy.  He was, for many years, the main bias in modern architectural discourse. His incredible staying power is the result of his ability to use the sieve in the reverse direction, pushing the images and generating theory of his architecture into a print media format. Using the reductive nature of image alteration, layout, and branding that exists in the world of book and magazine publishing Le Corbusier was able to place his architecture in the public consciousness.
This changed the practice of architecture. Books on architecture had existed before, but they failed to dip into the critical theory other disciplines. Palladio’s books, for instance, refuse to speak a language other than architecture.  I Quattro Libri Dell’architettura hardly reads like an issue of Life magazine. Towards an Architecture, on the other hand, pre-filters for you.
This reduction of architecture though the critical filter of media continues on till this day. The airbrushing by Le Corbusier of the Villa Schwob or the Parthenon is essentially same technique used in the super simplified diagrams presented by firms such as B.I.G. or OMA.  It’s still architecture, just sifted through the critical theory of the medium with which it is transmitted to the public.

One comment

  1. A fantastic final post, Dan (you’ve reached #6)! I’d love to have you talk a bit tomorrow, particularly for the benefit of your non-architect classmates, about the role Le Corbusier has played in “the education of the architect.” I’m particularly interested to her if — and if so, how — Corb’s and Colomina’s and Cohen’s recognition that media both inform architecture and serve as platforms for architectural practice (i.e., building books rather than, or in addition to, buildings) is represented in contemporary architectural training.

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