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Misprision of Precedent: Design As Creative Misreading

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Misprision of Precedent: Design As Creative Misreading DAVID RIFKIND Misprision of Precedent Florida International University Design as Creative Misreading Literary critic Harold Bloom’s concept of misprision, although difficult to translate into architectural terms, offers valuable insights into one way that architects critically engage with other designers’ works through a process of creative misreading. Bloom stakes out a theory that governs both criticism and production. Misprision offers critics and historians another tool with which to explain the influence of one architect on another. The concept’s pedagogical value includes a broadened understanding of the roles that precedent studies play in the design studio. Prelude and how do we understand the process that joins The Anxiety of Influence deals chiefly with the the critical appreciation of the former to the design ways ‘‘strong poets […] clear an imaginative space We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s of the latter? How does a work of architecture effect for themselves’’ by creatively misreading the work difference from his predecessors, especially his changes to projects that precede it? We need to of their predecessors.5 Bloom introduces six tropes immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find adapt our as-yet insufficient vocabulary of (which he terms revisionary ratios) through which something that can be isolated in order to be precedent and analysis to account for a process best poets wrestle with precedent.6 Misprision emerges enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet described by literary theorist Harold Bloom with the as the most important revisionary ratio, and is without this prejudice we shall often find that term misprision. understood as a poetic misreading of source not only the best, but the most individual parts material akin to the swerve of atoms described by of his work may be those in which the dead Argument Lucretius with the term clinamen. ‘‘A poet swerves poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality Architects and historians engage architectural history away from his precursor,’’ Bloom explains, most vigorously.1 differently. Yet while historians frequently discuss historiographic methodologies and architects have by so reading his precursor’s poem as to The striking compositional affinity between two developed standardized analytical processes that execute a clinamen in relation to it. This photographs, taken in different decades, continents, emphasize program, site, and spatial organization, appears as a corrective movement in his own and political contexts, of two buildings that differ neither fully accounts for the processes of creative poem, which implies that the precursor poem dramatically in size, program, site, and materiality, misreading through which so many architects have went accurately up to a certain point, but then presents a conundrum for any conventional grappled with the work of others in order to should have swerved, precisely in the direction understanding of the relationship between a work of generate new knowledge and critically engage that the new poem moves.7 architecture and its precedents (Figure 1). It is not precedents. Examining these processes enriches surprising that Peter Eisenman represented House II, both design criticism and design pedagogy. Each new work transforms and completes its a two-story house he designed for a couple in The conversation that architecture has with its precedents through a critical process of Vermont in 1969, in a self-conscious homage to the own heritage is marked by misprision, a mode of criti- interpretation. work of Giuseppe Terragni, whose work the cal engagement in which architects interpret the built Bloom presents misprision, in part, as a American architect studied at great length in a environment through design as active criticism. Mis- corrective to the cult of originality promulgated by doctoral dissertation completed six years earlier.2 Yet prision is a creative misreading that generates new Romantic authors.8 Whereas Emerson extolled what are we to make of Eisenman’s choice to model knowledge. Bloom introduced poetic misprision in his authors to express themselves without recourse to the image of the private house in Hardwick on an widely cited 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence.4 other writers and the history of literature, Bloom iconic photograph depicting ecstatic masses While chiefly concerned with poetry and intra-poetic argues that, ‘‘poetic influence need not make poets gathered at a rally in front of Terragni’s Fascist Party relationships, Bloom develops a concept that is less original; as often it makes them more original, headquarters in Como?3 What do we learn about the important to understanding the ways architects though not necessarily better.’’9 Bloom adopts T.S. Casa del Fascio and House II from this juxtaposition, engage the work of their predecessors and peers. Eliot’s notion that every poem participates in a Journal of Architectural Education, Misprision of Precedent 66 pp. 66–75 ª 2011 ACSA 1. Peter Eisenman, House II, Hardwick, VT, 1969, as published in Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn & Co., 1972, p. 36); and Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, 1932–1936, as published in Quadrante 35 (1936): 19. ‘‘living whole of all the poetry that has ever been preferences. Misprision approaches history through misprision does not easily translate from poetry to written’’ and in so doing develops a theory of an open-ended process of interpretation and architecture, it offers great insight into the passage production and reception, of creativity and criticism, criticism, in which precedents serve as multivalent of formal and conceptual concerns from one work to that is simultaneously heuristic and hermeneutic.10 sources of knowledge, rather than through the more another through a process of creative misreading. Bloom explains: instrumentalized and constrained process of treating precedents as models of programmatic problem- Swerve Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, solving. Misprision recognizes that every creative act Some architectural precursor ‘‘poems’’ have humble authentic poets – always proceeds by a is also an act of criticism, and that any sophisticated origins. Italian engineer Giacomo Matté Trucco misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative work of architecture synthesizes knowledges gained designed the FIAT factory in Turin’s Lingotto district correction that is actually and necessarily a from close readings of disparate sources. according to utilitarian and programmatic criteria misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic Architecture both challenges and expands the based on the automobile manufacturing process influence, which is to say the main tradition of notion of creative misreading in important ways. (Figure 2). Le Corbusier, however, read the Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a Architecture questions Bloom’s insistence, for building’s spectacular rooftop test track as a lyrical history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of example, that images and ideas are not important to expression of a metropolis transformed through distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism poetic misprision. Architecture also disputes his automotive transport.12 The sweeping curve in the without which modern poetry as such could contention that misprision ought not be concerned ground floor of the Villa Savoye, for example, not exist.11 with politics or the history of ideas. What is more, echoes the test track’s banked turns, and marks the Bloom’s insistence on a genetic model of ‘‘filial’’ mid-way point on an oval circuit that reinforces the Misprision enables the study of historical bonds between a predecessor poet and his successor allusion to the factory roof. The connections to precedent to escape the trap of treating history as fails to account for the synthetic manner in which Lingotto continue inside the villa’s entrance, where an encyclopedia of solutions to problems defined by architects join and juxtapose disparate source the visitor encounters two vertical paths—a ramp programs, sites, cultural contexts, and esthetic material. Nevertheless, while Bloom’s theory of and a stair—forms of which make reference to the 67 RIFKIND interpretation of the processional route to the Acropolis in Athens, which he encountered on his formative voyage through the Mediterranean in 1911. By the time of the Villa Savoye’s design, the serpentine passage through the house came to evoke not only the Panathenaic Way, but also the labyrinth of Daedalus and the ‘‘Law of Meander’’ (developed from aerial observations during a 1929 trip to Paraguay and Brazil).13 This plurality of sources invests the promenade architecturale with poetic depth and richness, and illustrates a synthetic vision in which criticism is rendered through the transformation of precedent. Le Corbusier’s writings are filled with provocative misreadings of precursor poems, which offer the reader keys toward unpacking the many examples of poetic misprision in his work. For example, rather than duplicate the ornamental language and organizational syntax of classical architecture like his neoclassicist contemporaries, Le Corbusier identified qualities in the ancient precedents—the mechanical precision of the Doric order, the elemental geometries of Roman architecture—that enabled him to transform, rather than transcribe, classicism.14 Similarly, he re-imagined the monumental machines of his day in classical terms, as when he captioned an image of the Empress of India ocean liner with terms previously used in relation to the architecture
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