GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
ASSESSMENT
If architecture is at all a system grounded in any "reality" of experience and nature, then a deconstruction of its language cannot proceed from an assumption of total arbitrariness. This is the issue which the deconstructionists take up with respect to phenomenology. At the same time, if architecture is a totally arbitrary system of meaning, then it should be possible to eliminate all natural or quasi-natural elements from it.
The implications of these two positions may indeed be the very attraction architecture presents to Derrida and an explanation of his interest in working on architectural projects with Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. (Indeed, Derrida's interest in issues of geometry is evident in that his first published work was a new "Introduction" to Husserl's "On the Origins of Geometry.”22 His ambiguous relations with phenomenology are well known) It would further explain Peter Eisenman's fierce efforts to undermine both function and natural structure in architecture, essential preconditions for any effort to privilege the arbitrary.
If the borrowing of deconstruction in architecture examined herein and the traditional modernist's critique of borrowing are both suspect, where does one turn for clarification? Could it be that something is being missed in the conceptualization of architecture which would illuminate this impasse? Alan Colquhoun has proposed a view of architecture analogous to music in which he sees architecture as both a natural and an arbitrary system:
"The application of the linguistic model to the arts resulted in a certain confusion, for it could be interpreted in one of two ways: as a syntactics that was 'empty' or as a semantics that was 'full'. Neither of these interpretations contradicts the notion of the arbitrariness of the signs. Nor do they necessarily exclude each other, since one is concerned with the signifier and the other with the sign (signifier + signified) as an object of attention. But, I would argue, it is the second of these two interpretations that applies to architecture, a position best justified by Levi-Strauss in his discussion of ...music. ...In music, meaning (that is, 'musical' meaning) is only imaginable if the sonic material has already been given a structure; no meanings can only emerge as modifications of an inherited structure. Now in music the basis for any such cultural structuration already exists in the natural degrees of dissonance. I would argue that a similar basis exists in architecture and that, therefore, architecture, like music, is both a natural and an arbitrary system."23
Deconstructive thinking would thus be most useful in any part of architecture concerned with arbitrary systemic forms of meaning. This limitation would of course be resisted by most deconstructors as the establishment of a "protected" natural system of meaning. Is there a way to get beyond this second impasse?
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about art as a cultural system, expressed the magnitude of the task in the following:
"...the notion that the mechanics of art generate its meaning, cannot produce a science of signs or of anything else, only an empty virtuosity of verbal analysis.
If we are to have a semiotics of art (or for that matter, of any sign system not axiomatically self-contained), we are going to have to engage in a kind of natural history of signs and symbols, an ethnography of the vehicles of meaning."24
In architecture these vehicles of meaning might include complex associations between "natural" and "arbitrary" elements; associations which would of course be time dependent and
subject to many forms of variation. A continuing difficulty in the culture of architecture is its resistance to any deepening of the ethnography of its elements of meaning through its continuing focus upon superficial aspects of architectural experience. Such an ethnography would enrich the condition of borrowing and would be able to define contexts of meaning beyond the geometric.
And finally, what then of the original question of borrowing? The interaction of mutually distant modes of thought is, or should be, a feature of intellectual life. The problem cannot be the existence of borrowed ideas. As John Griffiths points out, borrowing creates unique conditions which do not jibe with either the source or destination discipline when he writes of deconstruction in architecture:
"Almost every interested party will find fault with any account of the concept and its history with respect to the visual arts. That, in a way, is as it should be. Works of art often have the oddest relations to the ideas which they cite, manipulate, and even proclaim as their origin and goal. Measured by the yardstick of loyalty to the supposed originating philosophic, theological, or political system, artworks which a number of people agree are very worthwhile are usually cheap heresies. Strange to say, however, they often would not exist, or exist in precisely that appealing way, without the impetus and sometimes correct but usually mistaken quotation of the ideological system which is their apparent structuring principle."25
Borrowing is thus not the problem so much as is the lack of attention to the interactions between the borrowed ideas and the natural language of architecture. In the Frankfurt project the borrowed processes have been geometricized and in the excitement of the borrowing are seen to be new when they are in fact quite limited by and derived from traditional architectural motivations. In this project, each of the borrowed fields: deconstruction, biology, and fractal geometry has alternative and potentially richer architectural linkages. The rapid translation of concepts into representations of themselves limits their architectural resonance. In trying to do this with deconstruction, Peter Eisenman may have finally hit upon the impossible borrowing, one that deconstructs any attempt to grant it privilege.
Temple University
ASSESSMENT
If architecture is at all a system grounded in any "reality" of experience and nature, then a deconstruction of its language cannot proceed from an assumption of total arbitrariness. This is the issue which the deconstructionists take up with respect to phenomenology. At the same time, if architecture is a totally arbitrary system of meaning, then it should be possible to eliminate all natural or quasi-natural elements from it.
The implications of these two positions may indeed be the very attraction architecture presents to Derrida and an explanation of his interest in working on architectural projects with Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. (Indeed, Derrida's interest in issues of geometry is evident in that his first published work was a new "Introduction" to Husserl's "On the Origins of Geometry.”22 His ambiguous relations with phenomenology are well known) It would further explain Peter Eisenman's fierce efforts to undermine both function and natural structure in architecture, essential preconditions for any effort to privilege the arbitrary.
If the borrowing of deconstruction in architecture examined herein and the traditional modernist's critique of borrowing are both suspect, where does one turn for clarification? Could it be that something is being missed in the conceptualization of architecture which would illuminate this impasse? Alan Colquhoun has proposed a view of architecture analogous to music in which he sees architecture as both a natural and an arbitrary system:
"The application of the linguistic model to the arts resulted in a certain confusion, for it could be interpreted in one of two ways: as a syntactics that was 'empty' or as a semantics that was 'full'. Neither of these interpretations contradicts the notion of the arbitrariness of the signs. Nor do they necessarily exclude each other, since one is concerned with the signifier and the other with the sign (signifier + signified) as an object of attention. But, I would argue, it is the second of these two interpretations that applies to architecture, a position best justified by Levi-Strauss in his discussion of ...music. ...In music, meaning (that is, 'musical' meaning) is only imaginable if the sonic material has already been given a structure; no meanings can only emerge as modifications of an inherited structure. Now in music the basis for any such cultural structuration already exists in the natural degrees of dissonance. I would argue that a similar basis exists in architecture and that, therefore, architecture, like music, is both a natural and an arbitrary system."23
Deconstructive thinking would thus be most useful in any part of architecture concerned with arbitrary systemic forms of meaning. This limitation would of course be resisted by most deconstructors as the establishment of a "protected" natural system of meaning. Is there a way to get beyond this second impasse?
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about art as a cultural system, expressed the magnitude of the task in the following:
"...the notion that the mechanics of art generate its meaning, cannot produce a science of signs or of anything else, only an empty virtuosity of verbal analysis.
If we are to have a semiotics of art (or for that matter, of any sign system not axiomatically self-contained), we are going to have to engage in a kind of natural history of signs and symbols, an ethnography of the vehicles of meaning."24
In architecture these vehicles of meaning might include complex associations between "natural" and "arbitrary" elements; associations which would of course be time dependent and
subject to many forms of variation. A continuing difficulty in the culture of architecture is its resistance to any deepening of the ethnography of its elements of meaning through its continuing focus upon superficial aspects of architectural experience. Such an ethnography would enrich the condition of borrowing and would be able to define contexts of meaning beyond the geometric.
And finally, what then of the original question of borrowing? The interaction of mutually distant modes of thought is, or should be, a feature of intellectual life. The problem cannot be the existence of borrowed ideas. As John Griffiths points out, borrowing creates unique conditions which do not jibe with either the source or destination discipline when he writes of deconstruction in architecture:
"Almost every interested party will find fault with any account of the concept and its history with respect to the visual arts. That, in a way, is as it should be. Works of art often have the oddest relations to the ideas which they cite, manipulate, and even proclaim as their origin and goal. Measured by the yardstick of loyalty to the supposed originating philosophic, theological, or political system, artworks which a number of people agree are very worthwhile are usually cheap heresies. Strange to say, however, they often would not exist, or exist in precisely that appealing way, without the impetus and sometimes correct but usually mistaken quotation of the ideological system which is their apparent structuring principle."25
Borrowing is thus not the problem so much as is the lack of attention to the interactions between the borrowed ideas and the natural language of architecture. In the Frankfurt project the borrowed processes have been geometricized and in the excitement of the borrowing are seen to be new when they are in fact quite limited by and derived from traditional architectural motivations. In this project, each of the borrowed fields: deconstruction, biology, and fractal geometry has alternative and potentially richer architectural linkages. The rapid translation of concepts into representations of themselves limits their architectural resonance. In trying to do this with deconstruction, Peter Eisenman may have finally hit upon the impossible borrowing, one that deconstructs any attempt to grant it privilege.
