a discourse on architecture or the conflict between theory and practice
 
 
augustin ioan 

translated by oana godeanu
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Architecture’s meta-discourse, upon which Virtualia invites us to ponder, is by far a wider issue than the mere relationship between Architecture and Philosophy, to which I shall return later. What I shall try to do here is to synthesize the affirmations made by my professor John Hancock from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, not only during the admirable lecture he delivered at Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture from Bucharest, but also later on, at New Europe College, in the spring of 1988; I shall also try to add my own personal remarks on this matter.

Roughly speaking, there are two major series of theories on Architecture. The first one concern theory as an observed practice, and this is the very kind that used to circulate among the various guilds of constructor workers. It deals with reducing practice to a fix algorithm, in order to render it repeatable even in the absence of the person who first performed the activity, or of the one who did it the best, this attempt consequently involving an optimisation of the space production, whenever the initial conditions appear again. Such texts are quite frequent everywhere, including Romania, but mostly under the form of Ph.D. theses of the staff of the Design Departments – industrial, or urbanistic. This particular form of theory recuperates the information offered by Sociology, environmental Psychology, behaviorism and post-occupational evaluations and, after a period of ‘assimilation’ feeds them back to the design practice, this theory surprising thus the making of design itself.

The second series of theories deals with theory seen as a perpetual interrogation on the deep reasons of this particular domain: its main question being “ What is Architecture?” You must notice how seldom this question is asked in our profession, as if it were well known and its answer would be an axiom no one has yet been able to formulate, but which has always existed somewhere, in our subconscious, from the very beginning and, therefore, reformulating it would be utterly ridiculous.

The next set of questions concerns Architecture’s origins, goals and kinship, and borrows from the Aesthetics of art its specific themes, turning them into an Aesthetics of Architecture in general. This theory challenges the characteristic of “architectural” attributed to some works, and does so on the basis of the methodological message chosen, by announcing its priorities and by sanctioning its failures. From what I have just said, we can realize that this theory deals on the one hand with criticism, and on the other with the philosophy of the constructed environment, enclosing between these to elements the genesis of the organized space.



 

Both the philosophers camp and the architects, often ignore the consequences that the philosophical texts might have on Architecture. The latter pay more attention to the normative texts, to the manifestos of the various trends and movements, than to the apparently obscure texts from that difficult area, traditionally called Philosophy. The disparity existing between these two different types of language – the one pertaining to Philosophy, the other to Architecture, is a dramatic one, and it can only partially explain the gap between the two domains. Instruction can either diminish or deepen this gap, according to the direction it takes – a more humanist or a more scientific one, respectively.

The orientation of some Universities I had the opportunity to attend, like the one in Cincinnati, Ohio or the one in Cambridge (UK), is rather philosophical, while the one taken by the University of Bucharest or by the Oxford Brooks University (UK) still owe a lot to a more empirical practice. This is backed up neither by a theoretical understanding, nor by doubling the act of designing with one of aprioric conceptualization
In such universities, students are taught not how Architecture is ‘supposed to be done’, or what it truly represents, but rather how ‘it is done’ by certain practitioners, who are also teaching their methods at seminars.

However, there is still an interface area between the two domains thus separated, and this area represents more than a singular case of punctual contacts –like it is the case of Louis Kahn, Peter Eisenman, or Bernard Tschumi – or even than merely drawing one’s inspiration from the same Zeitgeist, from the same temporary epistemological paradigm- Kuhn’s “piers in the marsh” – or from other such aesthetic theories. This interface area is in fact the Theory, which, in its turn, has several levels of abstraction. Its meta-level is governed by Philosophy and its particular aspect that focuses on practice is, or, under normal circumstances, should be the one orienting the physical production of the architectural space. The important architects whose work happens mostly in front of the drawing board, are not only ‘theory consumers’, like V.Gregotti. Mario Botta, Ricardo Bofill or Michael Graves, but, very often, they are producers as well: Le Corbusier, Kisho Kurokawa or Robert Venturi). This theory goes beyond the mere explanation of its own physical outcome and tends to be projective, casting thus a new light on the architectural taste, on Architecture’s origins and definitions in general.

The same way that we face the existence of a theory of practice – which mostly concerns the production of new spaces, various conversion and restorations – we also come across a theory on the history of Architecture; if such a theory did not exist, history would implode in an array of irrelevant data. There is another kind of theory as well, a more general one, which is the interpreter between Philosophy and the architectural discourse; it employs philosophical concepts, adjusting them to a discourse they do not belong to, the same way it interprets a casuistry that completely differs from the regular architectural discourse, in order to give this one an informational feed back.


 
 

Along with deconstruction, there were several attempts at creating an autonomous ‘architectural’ way of thinking, would relate to these concepts offered by philosophy or the literary theory. Derrida explicitly states the possibility that such a way of thinking may actually exist: “there may be a yet undiscovered way of thinking which pertains to the architectural moment, to desire and to creation” (Leach, 1937, p.319). Such a way of thinking should rely on architecture’s renouncing to observe the mere representation any longer.
However, the same way Eisenman did, another advocate of the theory of an architectural way of thinking - through this statement, Derrida seems to willingly ignore that any such thinking would be forced to employ language, a language that partly owes its verbosity to the very concepts of this type of thinking, thus becoming contaminated precisely with what he had so desperately tried to avoid.

Nevertheless, there are two privileged contemporary examples of contacts between architecture and philosophy: the phenomenology we have mentioned before, and deconstruction. They both illustrate two diametrically opposed attitudes. On the one hand, the contact between the two domains we are discussing here is facilitated by the existence of several well-known texts explicitly dealing with architecture, but written by philosophers. Not only Heidegger, but also Gadamer, Bachelard and Ricoeur, they all wrote about, or used space - namely the architectural space – as a vehicle to concepts promoted within their own philosophy.

This phenomenology is doubled by a rich corpus of secondary texts on the Architecture phenomenology, texts that are merely interpreting philosophy, or even offering their own original complementary information. (See Mircea Eliade, K. Frampton, Cr. Norberg-Schultz or Cristopher Alexander). It is therefore able to offer a coherent and technically complete interpretation of all the segments of architecture: its origins, definition and goals, as well as the manner in which we can build a criticism of the architecture done so far –i.e. of modernism –and the way can propose a practical methodology of building in a phenomenological way.

On the other hand, deconstruction is – as it should be – a more complex and a case totally opposed to the first. We have often come across clear attempts of merely moving concepts that traditionally belong to deconstruction, to the field of architecture. We can even talk about a jargon of the deconstructionist architects which are all supposed to be ‘sapping’ or ‘de-centering’ some power structure or another, or ‘infecting’ forms; there also are several works Derrida and Tschumi or Eisenman wrote together, which deal with building. Derrida’s belief is that”the very concept of deconstructivism resembles an architectural metaphor” (p. 320)

However, in the end, we are able to realize that the relationship between deconstructionism and deconstructivism is a fragile one. What we call deconstructivism are those common features shared by all the works exhibited at MOMA, in 1988, and presented in Mark Wigley’s manifesto with the same title). Wigley’s opinion is that the source of deconstructivism cannot be found in philosophy but in the experiments of the Russian constructivism. This is a situation similar to Derrida’s not acknowledging his contribution to that branch of architecture named after his own philosophical method.


 

This where I shall put an end to my brief observations on the theme of the meta-discourse, however not before emphasizing the difficulties to which the Architecture is confronted when it comes to situating itself in both language and meta-language at the same time. Along with the postmodernism and the deconstruction, those theories that brought about the self-referential, the self-quoting, the collage and the ironical and explicit imitation, seem to have become more reflexive, although in parallel with this inspection of the self, the impression created by the architectural work became even more artificial, more unreal and counterfeited. On the other hand, the phenomenology, though revisiting the ’natural’, ‘the organic’ and ‘the authentic’, is not less in danger of being perceived as artificial, or of acquiring that air out of place, that is characteristic to any imitation of the vernacular, of the commonest contextualization, in a place where both the context and the physical site have already disappeared under the blade of the bulldozers.

I believe that here, in this ‘elected’ space, the drama of the meta-discourse is even more serious and more obvious for those who are to design form now on, than it is for us poor creators of hyperlinks and other such things; on the contrary, any such crisis is a rich opportunity for those who are able to reconsider their own selves; where such a crisis does not exist it should be invented!

This is a thing that came to me as was I sitting outside, enjoying the breeze and watching the tide, in a landscape both natural and artificial, both these aspects perfect and therefore utterly enervating; it was in St. Andrews, Scotland, where everything was orderly, including the way in which the rocks of the cliff had deposited. The layers were symmetrical, geometrical and flawless. But we have plenty of crises here, in Romania, quite generalized and, alas, even chronic.

Therefore rejoice you, dwellers of Virtualia, for a chronic crisis means endless topics to be discussed. And this is where my ‘chronicle’ ends, before it becomes, in its turn, chronic.

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