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Extracts
from: Peter Nesteruk, A
Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
From: Chapter Five: Utopia and Dystopia:
Eternity
and Entropy in Twentieth Century Architecture.
Contents:
three experiential parts (the lived environment, the visual field), State or
religious structures and the city street and square (‘two-’ and ‘three-part’
signifying structures), the human body and the pillar, Louis Sullivan, ‘form
follows function’, ‘ornament’, definition of the ‘three parts’, New York
(Manhattan) and American architecture, solar evolution in new York, Entropy and
Utopia, hypsosis (the solar and
ideals), billboards, ‘minorities’, Historicism, the New York Stock Exchange
(1904), Art Nouveau, Modernism, Art Deco, Historicism and Post-modernism, our ‘Room’,
the ‘continuous present’, time and the three parts, light, the ‘rhetoric of eternity’
and the Solar, Nature & Culture (again), Ironies (antiphrasis), follies and the Arch (II), public and private
meanings (the State), ideals and ideologies, Capital and Market (the Invisible
God), Entropy and Dystopia, Globalisation and Global Warming.
…
Argument.
Foregrounding the three
experiential parts or layers of our built environment enables us to describe
the lived experience of architecture and its meanings. Subjective experience
and objective differentiation have evolved together in an intimate feedback
loop whose history which reaches back through the Renaissance palazzo-form and
its medieval predecessors, to that Ur-form of urban life, the Roman insula (with its differentiation between
the ground story, the taberna and the
apartments rising up above). The employment of these experiential parts and
their temporal analogues in the analysis of the modern cityscape does not imply
a formalist method allied to an assumed essentialism, rather it is due to the
recognition of the evolution of experience and the history of our collective expectations
and perceptions. These categories reflect the need to register the actual
experience we have of buildings and the meanings this experience generates,
including a set of temporal–semantic equivalents.
These
equivalents, as we have seen in the preceding history of temporal rhetoric in
the visual arts, are bound to audience realisation - and maybe even to author
strategy, to artistic intention or persuasive rhetoric. This insight has been
carried over into architecture; with the provision that the fluid context of
the built environment -the 'framing' of a building- may significantly alter the
realisation of its social meaning. The temporal aspects of visual culture, the
temporalisation of spatial cues, are read as providing the self with its sense
of presence (it sense, as well as content, of the present) and to objectify its
inescapable and continuous intuition of past and future. This is the temporal
positioning so necessary to identity and meaning-making in the most profound or
metaphysical sense.
One highly significant
symbolic aspect of temporal coding is the reference to the a-temporal, the ‘outside
of time’ (a spin-off from the 'now moment’ with its inescapable 'duration', the
'eternal present' generalised into an ‘external’ fact). This sense of an
‘outside’ to our experienced temporality is intuited as a personal support, of
a rhetorical (because unreachable) 'outside' of time in to which key
existential, identity and other significant belief-supporting propositions can
be placed, as it were, beyond the reach of history with its contingencies. The
term most generally used for this most important ‘place’ is ‘eternity’, the
myth time of tribal societies, the heaven and hell of ancient and feudal
religions, and the universal, a-historical, or essential realm of axiomatised
systems of thought. The symbolism of eternity has been read as a key player in the
making of social meaning, the foundation and cement of belief systems, religions
and ideology, until the twentieth century (where we shall see its form mutate,
not once but twice, as new relationships of general meaningfulness take hold).
Potentially
legion, or just single, the experiential parts of a building, of the built
environment, or of our culturally constructed 'second nature', appear, in
practice, to number two or three only (broadly speaking, the State or religious
building, such as the Classical or Baroque temple, and the city street with its
debt to the Palazzo style). Often a ‘two-part building’, or signifying
structure, is found to consist of a section with a clear physical function
supporting a section with a distinct symbolic function (sign section above
entry section); or these elements may be found to be augmented into three
parts: top, middle, and bottom (layers or parts themselves can also be found
differentiated in this manner). The role of the solar (the top, or end point of
a rising gaze) is usually the focal point of the building's symbolic message,
an ideological entity underwritten by the suture of eternity with duration (and
what better than a part which soars, which points, which hovers, which floats
above, and behaves as both incarnation and index). The solar, therefore, is the
part devoted to reflecting society's meta-narratives; the site of meaningful
decoration. ‘Single part’ buildings, or unitary signifying structures, are
comparatively rare, and begin with the Pyramid (considered as a unitary form
framed by its base and its context as part of an extended temple complex) and
may be found again, at the other, most recent end of architectural history,
with the arrival of structures such as Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Gugenheim Museum
(1997) and Beijing’s CCTV Building (2009).
…Three
layers to the built environment.
The three parts or
horizontal layers have evolved into almost completely separate zones of meaning,
each carrying a different group or range of meanings. The middle or facade has
become vestigial - or else its symbolism has become fused with that of the
built environment as a whole; part of the cocoon of material culture. When
interrogated by the gaze the middle responds to human curiousity, a
manifestation of desire which itself is concerned with desire, what is it
people do behind those windows, whether shielding work place or living space?
The question of how others live, not least including our ever-present sexual
curiousity, is stimulated by the perusal of the window walls of the modern
city, and by the experience of the suburban (bedroom) window too. The top, our
solar, carries the most significant social meanings (a general absence of solar
is also significant as we shall see). This is the realm of sacred meanings, of
the symbolism of first and last things, and also the expression of the care put
aside, or abrogated, by a society for its urban landscape and the feeling it
evokes. The bottom-most level, the entry-fronting, has become the carrier of
more local or immediate meanings (of information and advertising, with this
latter function expanded into metaphysical meaning in state or religious
buildings). For most the ground-floor strip of the city is the place of
shopping, real or imaginary, of commodities and identity, as we find ourselves
reflected (quite literally) in the objects for sale behind the windows into
which we stare. Three kinds of space the temporality of which configures three
kinds of desire (sacred, sexual, and the desire for recognition that forms such
an important part of our identity) or reflects and perpetuates three aspects of
human identity (religious/metaphysical, sexual/sexed, individual/collective),
otherwise put; our place in the world, our place in embodied, reproductive (of
bodies and things) existence and our place in the social world - three aspects
of our ‘tie-in’ to the exchanges that make up the social world (ideas,
feelings, commodities/objects).
Subjectivity and
architecture, our ‘room’…
Whatever the configuration,
the decorations (and anti-decorations) on view are the walls that enclose us.
An enclosure for whose walls we ourselves are responsible; for they are at once
our mental as well as our physical constructions. Fruit of mental habits as of
physical labour. An enclosure, if we are outside, with an open top; a room (or
jar) without a lid. This general or exterior sense of ‘room’, reflects our
inner sense of ‘room’; the ‘space’ of consciousness. Inner and outer room, of
course, are one, are the same (perceived signals are formed into a sense-making
‘reality’ in our brains, vision, the placing of the eyes before the brain,
prove this ‘space’ with a place in the world). Whence the reliance of self on
outside information or perception to form (as well as fill) the self. We feel
as as if the self is separate and ‘looking on’, occupying a space in the room
of our head; but we are this ‘room’
as well as the exterior replicated within it, whence space’s ability to alter
our mood which gives the lie to this, that sense of separateness - or rather, this sense, our sense, of space and our time, which is us.[1]
However our sense of identity
also requires recognition (confirmation, renewal, anti-entropic ritual) given
from without; individually as collectively, on a small scale (greetings) as on
the intense, normally cyclic, large scale of major festivals (where the
rhetoric of eternity, guarantor of identity through sacrificial expenditure
comes into play). In this sense the self is a ritual structure. The basic role
of ritual is to counter entropy; of the self as of the social, with which
fabric, through a thousand exchanges, the self is interwoven. The experience of
the outside as such, a recognition of the outside, as also a recognition by the
outside, as constituting sanity within. The recognition and return of the
physical outside, the architectural outside, also carries ritual force. As does
the symbolism we place there. For the enclosure we inhabit is a ritual
enclosure, set in a perpetual feedback loop. ‘In’ and ‘out ‘: two mirrors
facing one another.[2]
In this way it
is that the ’walls’ about us, of the built environment as of our visual sense
(walls that are also windows), are not only experienced as manifesting
buildings, layers, and features, all with potential significance for the
embedded viewer; but also found to be manifesting compressed versions of this
whole, each a mise-en-abime, a space
yet again re-framed. Such spaces distil significance, suggest special meaning
(frame), intensify meaning (ritual), as such operations or repetitions must, as
with painting and photography (so all art, like the visual aspect of a poem, or
a poem read, a piece of music, framed in time). Art as a window on the wall.
So it is that one aspect of
the facade, of its ubiquity in street and square, not least after its growth upward,
is as an extension of the walls of the soul, the well of life, the sides of our
human 'room'. The ’prison-house’, not of language, but of vision; of the visual
field and its role as chief perceptual support for our sense of placement in
the world. This sense, if made from received perceptions, is equally culturally
made and individually, culturally flavoured, so marked by our socialisation and
learning, our habits, our habitus (in
Bourdieu’s sense of cultural place, being positioned in a cultural hierarchy). So
we continually gaze as if onto a mirror of recognition and sanity, our second
nature, both received and made (‘received’ equally from nature and nurture,
from input and from concepts: ‘made’ mentally and physically, as we refashion
the planet after our own image). But not consciously planned (even if the God
of Reason attempts such planning): our actually-achieved reality is always in
excess of the Idea.
Indeed the facade
or Middle may be read as a screen. A sheet-like, smooth surface, perhaps a wall
of flesh, our world as womb, or breast if we are as infants, our home. At once
the walls of our perceptual enclosure, our canyon or fold, and an image barrier
‘between’ self and reality, the ‘thing for us’ as masking the ‘thing for itself’
(Kant) the inorganic made organic, maternal (by imagination, a prosopopoeia, and in actuality, in its
replication or (re)creation, within us). This screen effect is further
performed by the glass curtain wall of the modern city-scape; functioning as a
collective mirror, showing back to us only the inside of the collective viewing
subject – inciting our desires. Reflected is the street's outside, even as we
in turn reflect on the building’s inside from our own ‘inside’. Itself ‘outside’,
‘thing in itself’ parallel to that beyond the wall of representation, the
hidden beyond, the figural, sublime or absolute outside – in parallel with the
hidden and mysterious 'inside' of the building itself. Again parallel with our
own ‘hidden workings’… masked by a screen ‘eternally present’.
Within these
walls. Given ourselves as a sense of the ‘eternal present’, eternally
vulnerable to our ‘room’ outside, no sooner perceived then rendering oneself,
inside, its support and ideational matter of constitution. What then are the
basic temporal co-ordinates of the modern high-rise city street? How do our ‘semi-present’
windows onto the past and future interact with the environment we see and that
we ‘are’. If the physical foundation of our world, the place of the foundations
of our built structures, offers one limit or extreme pole or our
symbolic-temporal universe, one covered over, concealed from sight, then the
other pole lies, at the opposite extreme, up, luminous, visible, home to our
spiritual foundations. As we have seen, the upper reaches of our senses and the
imagination they feed, offer heaven above and the solar regions just below -
both of which call to our stare. So an initial intuition would give the value
'past' to that which lies invisible below the feet; 'down' becomes 'before'.
This felt association is literally true in the geological and archeological
sense, as a nature superseded, or built over, by a given culture; literally, as
well as figuratively, 'below' is the place of history, the place of the buried
past. A buried past that sustains, in our human imaginary, the mythic past, but
also, it terms of archaeological evidence, disproves it.
The 'now' of the
continuous present, our here, obviously
enough, finds its analogue in the entry-fronting, taberna, or ground floor strip whose immediacy often extends into
the lower facade. If the continuous present, our ‘eternal present’ is where we
forever find ourselves, are forever finding our-selves, then the reflective
glass strip of the urban high street, together with its shop-window contents,
that which we wish, or are wished (by others) to buy, to complete ourselves
with, supplying that which is missing, is its most accomplished realisation. A
manifestation, which through linking the gift aspects of identity (sacrificial
exchange) to the commodity exchange that dominates our social form, repeats and
performs our self-constituting experience or place in the present. A confluence
of self and objects we find in the superimposition of our mirror image and the
clothes and other objects we would buy in the simultaneous reflection and
transparency we witness in the window that both reflects and admits our gaze.
The facade as
Middle, or facade properly speaking, insofar as we raise our eyes to and focus upon
it, as far as we separate it from the general sense of our ‘room’ in the world,
may take the past or future in the sense of our imagination depicting what has
happened or will happen there, in
effect the imagining of a repetition (of a repeated action - traversing past
and future). So one step removed from immediate proximity as presence, as
present, there, on the other side of
the windows (a curiosity about other people’s lives which is often sexual in
nature). The future is also implied in the eye-lifting required by the vision
of the upper facade and solar as an aspect of their relative absence or
distance.[3]
Ironies…
The temporal insights
gained from taking a given portion of the built environment, be it a building,
street or square (part or whole, layer or totality) as an act of persuasive
communication, as a performative identity exchange, or just ‘simply’ as a piece
of rhetoric, would include the location of unintended ironies, or antiphrasis. Everyone is familiar with
Shelley’s famous poem, ‘Ozymandias’ (1816), where the time-savaged remnants of
a past empire bear the proud, but deeply ambiguous phrase, ‘Look on ye mighty
and despair’ (intended as an act of boastful comparison of the achievements of
civilisations, vaunting that of a particular tyrant, the comparison is in
effect noting the inability of civilisations and particularly tyranny,
including, by inference, that of the present, to endure). The ironic relation
that obtains between past intention and present interpretation is one that may
be found in many aspects of architectural hubris.
Potential
discrepancies between the idea of a past glory encrypted in the size, style,
and visual rhetoric of the building, and the situation (cultural, ideological,
or historical) of the present viewer who is in a position to reflect upon
transformations in the building's material and spiritual contexts. The
resulting contrasts may result in a critique of the past, (or the present, if
the apposite tradition still continues) by means of the contradictory relation
that the two historical viewpoints produce (antiphrasis).
It is here that a traditional ideology, or immanent, critique would look for
the disparities between an ideological proposition (a subjunctive proposition
masquerading as an indicative) and a proposition describing 'actual'
(indicative) social relations.
We have seen,
for example, the rhetorical claims of solidity and ever-lastingness of banks
and other financial institutions (including Wall Street), as configured in
appropriations of the Classical and of the Renaissance extended fortified
entry-fronting, some of whose symbolic affectivity did not survive the
financial crisis of 2008. Then, of course, there is all and every ruin
(including the latter day parodies of such, appropriating and re-duplicating,
not the meaning of the original building, but of the remains, of the ruin and
its retrospective meanings). But whether ruined or not, there is one
architectural tradition, perhaps one of the oldest forms of architectural
rhetoric, those relation to self-proclamation offers a hostage to historical
fortune the world over: the Triumphal Arch. From the Roman Forum, with its
arches, battered and half-sunk, its images and messages half-erased, leaning,
their current state contradicting their claims to ever-lasting empire; to those
constructed under the rule of Sadam Hussein, in Baghdad; and including, on a
more humourous note, the depredations of context we sense in the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, - now the centre-piece
of a traffic roundabout!
If we stay in
Perhaps the key
21st century example of the Arch tradition and its attendant, or
intended, meanings, would be the CCTV building in
Interpreting architecture as the
carrier of a profound, indeed, invasive, social symbolism begins with its
relations of second meaning, the decipherment of significant form or ornament together
with their various connotations (taken in the broadest sense to include a part,
the solar layer, or a citation, a pediment, or a detail, egg and dart molding).
However, as with the interpretation of literature, as with the all language,
indeed all communication, there are intended and unintended meanings; ‘in-coded’
meanings and pragmatic or actually-realised meanings. As we have seen in the cladding
of banks and most cogently in the Baroque front (pediment or architectural
sign-post), what we have is a ‘front’ with no behind, a message whose presence
exhausts the structure, leaving behind the remainder, what there actually is
behind, as a hostage to ‘other’ readings. This configuration has been much
copied since; with a similar form of intended meaning (the ‘front’ or
advertising hoarding), and a similar, and contradictory unintended meaning;
that the structure, the means of expression, performs a message whose actual or
pragmatic content is the emptiness of the proffered rhetoric, or content of
expression.
Moreover, second,
or figurative, meanings may be scrutinised for any affective role they might
have played in the culture of the building's period of construction and its
period of 'newness'; when it was regarded as historically original, before it
became historic - before it became 'history'. Such a temporal reconstruction,
or 'translation', may of course involve a complete transformation in the nature
of the affective meanings posited to the past. These reconstituted meanings can
then be contrasted to the meanings made by the present cultural viewpoint of
the observer. The ironies which such a relation may produce are heightened by
the further contrast of the implied future of the building's time of
construction and first consumption (the past's projected future), and this
relation's reduplication in the yet further, still unattained, future as seen
from the present. We can see this clearly in the case of an originally up-town
building, now in a down-town area, the fate of many of Sullivan's works in
Chicago, as in the case of the, once massive, 19th century bridge
(imperial, triumphal, like the Arch whose form it is some ways shares), now
dwarfed, made to look squat and ugly, by the recent light and elegant, design
of the modern bridge. A contrast to
the statement of an everlasting Empire - made shortly before its dissolution.
Such operations also
involve a comparison of 'implied futures', where the present viewer's sense of
the future, either extrapolated from some aspect of the building or related to
the dominant ideas of the present, is contrasted against the particular sense
of a future as implied by the past (by the building and its symbolic meanings
as a product of this past, or by the ideology dominant at its time of
construction). This comparison, between the past's projected future and the
possible future trajectories suggested by the current cultural context, in
effect the building's self-proclamation to future viewers, is a veritable
hostage to utopian and dystopian readings. Not long after the communist take-over
of power in China, we saw the building of grandiose state institutions on Tian’anmen
Square; however their style is the central Asiatic, or desert style with a flat
roof and extended colonnade, in complete opposition to local traditions,
exemplified by a variety of ingenious pointed roof designs (as found, for
example, in the neighbouring Forbidden City). The then new structures of
governmentality echoed the structures built by the centralised despotic states
of the distant past. Style may also be read as oracular; presaging the growing
desertification of global warming.
Finally, readings
given to architecture, based upon the implied, normative, socially accepted, dominant
or cohesive role of architectural temporal symbolism (whether taken as ideal or
as ideology, recommended or realised), may be opposed by an actual,
appropriative, or resisting form of experience, reading, or consumption. This
opposition or discrepancy, which we normally gloss as the public-private
opposition (in the sense of public as opposed to individual interpretations,
rather than of behaviour in public space as contrasted to that in a private
space) has been described by Emile Durkheim under the term homo duplex, and, more recently by Micheal Taussig under the
concept of the ‘Public Secret’: both contrast ‘official’ meanings to personal
versions of the ritual, myth, narrative or symbol in question.
See also: Articles on Architecture on
Website.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.
[1] See the following for recent attempts to
retheorise ‘architecture’ from the point of view of the user, and as
communication (even ‘intense communication’ - as Bataille would say): Mark
Kingwell, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness
and the City (Viking, 2008). Christian Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (London:
Academy Editions, 1980) FP in Italian, 1979. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern
Science (Cambridge: MIT, 1983), and Polyphilo,
or the
[2] With respect to the ritual
element in our experience of architecture, see Ritual: The
[3] The relative absence of the facade and
solar when compared to the experience of the fronting suggests that they might
be interpreted as connoting the past; indeed, this is what a historical (or
literal) description of a facade or solar might involve. As the figurative (as
opposed to literal) past, the facade and solar might be read as the
repositories of the sacred in architecture. The reasons why the future is the
tense to be preferred when evoking the sacred will be made apparent in what
follows.
[4] Bernard Tschumi, Cinegramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989). Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring:
Art,Architecture, Religion, (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press, 1992) p.
247.