Misprision of Precedent: Design As Creative Misreading
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510 WHERE DO YOU STAND Misprision of Precedent: Design as Creative Misreading DAVID RIFKIND Florida International University PRELUDE We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most indi- vidual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.1 The striking compositional affinity between two photographs, taken in different decades, continents and political contexts, of two buildings that differ dramatically in size, program, site and materiality, presents a conundrum for any conventional under- Figure 1 - Peter Eisenman, House II, Hardwick, VT, 1969, standing of the relationship between a work of ar- as published in Five Architects (1972), and Giuseppe Ter- chitecture and its precedents (Figure 1). It is not ragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, 1932-36, as published in surprising that Peter Eisenman represented House Quadrante 35 (1936). II, a two-story house he designed for a couple in ARGUMENT Vermont in 1969, in a self-conscious homage to the work of Giuseppe Terragni, whose work the Ameri- Architects and historians engage architectural his- can architect studied at great length in a doctoral tory differently. Yet while historians frequently dis- dissertation completed six years earlier.2 Yet what cuss historiographic methodologies and architects are we to make of Eisenman’s choice to model the have developed standardized analytical processes image of the private house in Hardwick on an iconic that emphasize program, site and spatial organiza- photograph depicting ecstatic masses gathered at a tion, neither fully accounts for the processes of cre- rally in front of Terragni’s fascist party headquarters ative misreading through which so many architects in Como?3 What do we learn about the Casa del Fas- have grappled with the work of others in order cio and House II from this juxtaposition, and how do to generate new knowledge and critically engage we understand the process that joins the critical ap- precedents. Examining these processes enriches preciation of the former to the design of the latter? both design criticism and design pedagogy. How does a work of architecture effect changes to projects that precede it? We need to adapt our as- The conversation architecture has with its own her- yet insufficient vocabulary of precedent and analysis itage is marked by misprision, a mode of critical to account for a process best described by literary engagement in which architects interpret the built theorist Harold Bloom with the term misprision. environment through design as active criticism. MISPRISION OF PRECEDENT 511 Misprision is a creative misreading that generates Misprision enables the study of historical precedent new knowledge. Bloom introduced poetic mispri- to escape the trap of treating history as an ency- sion in his widely-cited 1973 book, The Anxiety of clopedia of solutions to problems defined by pro- Influence.4 While chiefly concerned with poetry and grams, sites, cultural contexts and aesthetic pref- intra-poetic relationships, Bloom develops a con- erences. Misprision approaches history through an cept that is important to understanding the ways open-ended process of interpretation and criticism, architects engage the work of their predecessors in which precedents serve as multivalent sources and peers. of knowledge, rather than through the more in- strumentalized and constrained process of treating The Anxiety of Influence deals chiefly with the ways precedents as models of programmatic problem- “strong poets […] clear an imaginative space for solving. Misprision recognizes that every creative themselves” by creatively misreading the work of act is also an act of criticism, and that any sophisti- their predecessors.5 Bloom introduces six tropes cated work of architecture synthesizes knowledges (which he terms revisionary ratios) through which gained from close readings of disparate sources. poets wrestle with precedent.6 Misprision emerges as the most important revisionary ratio, and is un- Architecture both challenges and expands the no- derstood as a poetic misreading of source material tion of creative misreading in important ways. akin to the swerve of atoms described by Lucretius Architecture questions Bloom’s insistence, for ex- with the term clinamen. “A poet swerves away from ample, that images and ideas are not important his precursor,” Bloom explains, “by so reading his to poetic misprision. Architecture also disputes his precursor’s poem as to execute a clinamen in rela- contention that misprision ought not be concerned tion to it. This appears as a corrective movement with politics or the history of ideas. What’s more, in his own poem, which implies that the precursor Bloom’s insistence on a genetic model of “filial” poem went accurately up to a certain point, but bonds between a predecessor poet and his suc- then should have swerved, precisely in the direc- cessor fails to account for the synthetic manner tion that the new poem moves.”7 Each new work in which architects join and juxtapose disparate transforms and completes its precedents through a source material. Nevertheless, while Bloom’s theo- critical process of interpretation. ry of misprision does not easily translate from po- etry to architecture, it offers great insight into the Bloom presents misprision, in part, as a corrective passage of formal and conceptual concerns from to the cult of originality promulgated by Romantic one work to another through a process of creative authors.8 Whereas Emerson extolled authors to ex- misreading. press themselves without recourse to other writers and the history of literature, Bloom argues that, SWERVE “poetic influence need not make poets less origi- nal; as often it makes them more original, though Some architectural precursor “poems” have hum- not necessarily better.”9 Bloom adopts T. S. Eliot’s ble origins. Italian engineer Giacomo Matté Trucco notion that every poem participates in a “living designed the FIAT factory in Turin’s Lingotto district whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” according to utilitarian and programmatic criteria and in so doing develops a theory of production based on the automobile manufacturing process and reception, of creativity and criticism, that is (Figure 2). Le Corbusier, however, read the build- simultaneously heuristic and hermeneutic.10 Bloom ing’s spectacular rooftop test track as a lyrical ex- explains: pression of a metropolis transformed through au- tomotive transport.12 The sweeping curve in the Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, ground floor of the Villa Savoye, authentic poets – always proceeds by a misread- ing of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. for example, echoes the test track’s banked turns, The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to and marks the mid-way point on an oval circuit say the main tradition of Western poetry since the that reinforces the allusion to the factory roof. The Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving connections to Lingotto continue inside the villa’s caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revision- ism without which modern poetry as such could not entrance, where the visitor encounters two verti- exist. 11 cal paths – a ramp and a stair – whose forms both 512 WHERE DO YOU STAND Figure 3 - Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-31, entry. Photograph by Barry Bergdoll. voyage through the Mediterranean in 1911 (Fig- ure 4). 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 Mean- der” (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 syn- thetic vision in which criticism is rendered through Figure 2 - Le Corbusier’s visit to the FIAT Lingotto factory the transformation of precedent. (Giacomo Matté Trucco, Turin, 1919-26) and his design for the new colonial city of Algiers, 1931, as published in Le Corbusier’s writings are filled with provocative Quadrante 13 (1934). misreadings of precursor poems, which offer the make reference to the helical ramps which lead to reader keys toward unpacking the many examples the factory’s roof (Figure 3). Le Corbusier creatively of poetic misprision in his work. For example, rath- misread the Lingotto factory in a way that embeds er than duplicate the ornamental language and or- within the Villa Savoye a larger search for appropri- ganizational syntax of classical architecture like his ate architectural form in a world where the relation- neoclassicist contemporaries, Le Corbusier identi- ship between city and building had been radically fied qualities in the ancient precedents – the me- reconfigured by the emergence of the automobile. chanical precision of the Doric order, the elemental The dramatic promenade architecturale assembled from vehicular and pedestrian movement at the Villa Savoye demonstrates another key aspect of architectural misprision – the synthesis of multiple poetic sources. Like the mixtilinear skyline of the building’s rooftop solarium (simultaneously taken from the