Gottfried Semper's Primitive

Primitive

This innovative edited collection of essays charts the rise, fall and possible futures of the word ‘primitive’ in architecture.

The word ‘primitive’ is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the West, providing a convenient starting point for the myth of architecture’s origins. With the advent of post-modernism and, in particular, post-colonialism, the word has fallen from favour in many disciplines. Despite this – curiously – architects continue to use the word, particularly to reify the practice of simplicity.

Primitive includes contributions from some of today’s leading architectural commentators and practitioners, including Dalibor Vesely, Adrian Forty, David Leatherbarrow, Richard Coyne, CJ Lim and Richard Weston. Structured around five sections, ‘Negotiating origins’, ‘Urban myths’, ‘Questioning colonial constructs’, ‘Making marks’, and ‘Primitive futures’, the essays highlight the problems of ideas of the primitive, engage with contemporary debates in the field of post- colonialism and respond to a burgeoning interest in non-expert architecture.

This controversial subject remains, for better or worse, intrinsic to the history of architectural ideas and embedded in both architectural modernism and contemporary practice, and as such cannot be ignored. Considering a broad range of approaches, this book provides a rounded past, present and future of the word ‘primitive’ in the architectural sphere.

Jo Odgers is an architect and lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and previously worked in architectural practice for fifteen years. She is currently writing her Ph.D. on the work of John Wood of Bath in relation to the tradition of occult philosophy. Her next project (with Flora Samuel) is a book entitled Façades. She is an Associate Editor of arq.

Flora Samuel is an architect and reader at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. She is currently writing Le Corbusier in Detail for the Archi- tectural Press. She has a particular interest in the narratives implicit within the construction of buildings and was one of the original initiators of the primitive conference from which this book has evolved. She is an Associate Editor of arq.

Adam Sharr is a lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture and principal of Adam Sharr Architects, both based in Cardiff. Previously, he was Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Nottingham and worked in architectural practice. He is Joint Secretary of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) and is also Associate Editor of arq (Cambridge University Press). His book Heidegger’s Hut will be published by the MIT Press in 2006.

Primitive Original matters in architecture

Edited by Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2006 selection and editorial matter: Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr; individual chapters: the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Primitive : original matters in architecture / edited by Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical reference and index. 1. Architecture—Language. 2. Architecture—Terminology. 3. Language and culture. 4. Architecture—Psychological aspects. I. Odgers, Jo. II. Samuel, Flora. III. Sharr, Adam. NA2543.L34P75 2006 720.1’4—dc22 2006005423

ISBN10: 0-415-38538-5 ISBN13: 978-0-415-38538-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-38539-3 ISBN13: 978-0-415-38539-8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96744-5 ISBN13: 978-0-203-96744-7 (ebk) For Sylvia Harris Colleague, teacher and librarian

Contents

Illustration credits ix Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xvi Introduction xvii Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr

Part 1: Original matters 1 1 Primitive: the word and concept 3 Adrian Forty

Part 2: Negotiating origins 15 2 The primitive as modern problem: invention and crisis 17 Dalibor Vesely 3 Origins redefined: a tale of pigs and primitive huts 33 Mari Hvattum 4 The primitive hut: fantasies of survival in an all-white world 43 Lorens Holm 5 Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut: duration, construction and self-creation 55 Jonathan A. Hale 6 Mineral matters: formation and transformation 63 Richard Weston

Part 3: Questioning colonial constructs 71 7 Post-colonizing the primitive 73 Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen 8 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut 86 Stephen Cairns 9 Reinventing ‘primitiveness’: Henri Lacoste and the Belgian Congo Pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris 96 Johan Lagae 10 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism 108 Styliane Philippou 11 The need to be critical 121 Robert Brown Contents

Part 4: Urban myths 125 12 Practically primitive 127 David Leatherbarrow 13 Giants and columns 139 Nicholas Temple 14 The emblematic city: John Wood and the re-founding of Bath 150 Jo Odgers 15 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb 166 Harry Charrington 16 Metaphorical Manhattan – ‘Paradise Lost’ 176 Lorna McNeur

Part 5: Making marks 181 17 The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness: the primitive in Tadao Ando’s architecture 183 Jin Baek 18 The ‘primitive surface’: carving, modelling, marking and transformation 194 Stephen Kite 19 The modern-day primitive hut? ‘Self-building’ with Jung, Aalto and Le Corbusier 207 Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin 20 The wisdom of the sands 221 Simon Unwin

Part 6: Primitive futures? 227 21 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption 229 Richard Coyne 22 Primitive and the everyday: Sergison Bates, Lefebvre and the guilt of architectural expertise 240 Adam Sharr 23 Heart of Darkness: air of comfort 251 Helen Mallinson 24 Primitive: from which construction begins 260 Peter Salter 25 The United Cultures of Britain 267 CJ Lim Select bibliography 273 Index 279

viii Illustration credits

The authors and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce material in the book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for the permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of the book.

2 © Dalibor Vesely: Plate 2.5. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006: Plate 2.1. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006: Plate 2.4 4 Plate 4.4 reproduced by kind permission of Norton, and also the British Library and Scott Polar Institute 6 © Richard Weston: Plates 6.1–6.6 10 © Styliane Philippou: Plate 10.3; © Architectural Review: Plate 10.2 11 © Robert Brown: Plates 11.1–11.4. 12 © Tonkao Panin: Plates 12.1. © Photo Carlos Naranjo: Plates 12.2–12.5. © Photo Anna Vortmann: Plates 12.6 13 © Nicholas Temple: 13.1–13.3. © 2005, Photo Scala, Florence, courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali: Plate 13.4 14 Plate 14.2 reproduced by kind permission of Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. Plate 14.4 reproduced by kind permission of the Wellcome Library. 15 © Harry Charrington: Plates 15.1,15.3, 15.4. © Alvar Aalto Foundation: Plate 15.2 16 Plates 16.1, 16.3, Manhattan section of aerial photograph of the City of New York 1969 used with permission of City of New York Planning Committee. All rights reserved. Plate 16.2: Lorna McNeur with Maria Santeularia Bada 17 © Tadao Ando Architect and Associates: Plates 17.1–17.3. © Mitsuo Matsuoka: Plate 17.3 18 © Stephen Kite: Plates 18.1–18.3. © Sam Lambert, Wilson Archive: Plate 18.5. © Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art: Plate 18.4 19 © The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photograph Lucien Hervé: Plate 19.3 © Photograph, Flora Samuel, Plate 19.4. © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2005, photograph Lorna Davies, Plates 19.5, 19.7; © Plate 19.2 Copyright Alvar Aalto Foundation. Photo Eino Mäkinen; © Sarah Menin, Plate 19.6 20 © Simon Unwin: Plates 20.1–20.6. 22 © Adam Sharr: Plates: 22.1–22.3 24 © Peter Salter: Plates 24.1–24.15 25 © CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects: Plates 25.1–25.6

ix Contributors

Jin Baek is an architect and assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Community Design, University of South Florida, where he teaches history and theory of architecture. He earned his Master’s degree from Yale University and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on cross-cultural issues between modern East Asian architecture and western architecture. He is currently working on a publication that deals with the conception of Christian sacred space in East Asia as it relates to the Buddhist idea of nothingness.

Robert Brown is an architect with over twenty years of experience in community- based projects in the UK, USA, India and Africa, and has published and lectured on participatory design, as well as on architectural pedagogy. He is currently a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Plymouth, and is also working in private practice with projects in the UK and Japan.

Stephen Cairns is based at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches and researches on architectural design and theory. He has published on architecture and urbanism with a particular emphasis on post-colonial theory. He recently edited Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy (Routledge 2004), and is working on a project entitled ‘Difference and Repetition: An investigation of the residential high- rise as a global form’. He is co-director of the AOE design research consultancy.

Harry Charrington is an architect and Programme Leader for the Architecture and Planning course at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He was the founding editor of Scroope, the Cambridge architectural journal. He worked and taught for many years in Finland and has curated exhibitions, and written books, on Alvar Aalto. He is currently studying for a Doctorate at the LSE.

Richard Coyne is based in Architecture and is head of the Graduate School in the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He researches in the areas of computer-aided design, digital media and design theory. He is author of three books on the implications of information technology and design with MIT Press, and is co-author of a recent book with Adrian Snodgrass, Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (Rout- ledge). He currently heads a research project on the relationship between voice

x Contributors

and public space and a research cluster on Non-Space, both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. See http://ace.caad.ed.ac.uk/richard/

Adrian Forty is Professor of Architectural History at the Bartlett, University College, London, where he directs the Master’s course in Architectural History, and the Ph.D. programme in Architectural History and Theory. His publications include Objects of Desire (1986) and Words and Buildings (2000).

Jonathan Hale is an architect and Associate Professor in Architecture at the School of the Built Environment, University of Nottingham. His publications include: Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (Routledge 2006); Ends Middles Beginnings: Edward Cullinan Architects (Black Dog 2005); Building Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Theory (John Wiley 2000).

Felipe Hernández is an architect and Lecturer in Architectural Design, History and Theory at the University of Liverpool. He has an MA in Architecture and Critical Theory and received his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham. He has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), the Universities of Nottingham, Shef- field, East London as well as at the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University. Felipe has published numerous essays and articles examining architectural practices in Latin America through contemporary cultural theory. He is editor of ‘Spaces of Transculturation: Architecture and Identity in Latin America’, in Journal of Romance Studies 2002 2(3); co-editor of Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America (Rodopi 2005); and is currently completing a book on contemporary Latin American architecture.

Lorens Holm is the director of the Humanities programme at the School of Architecture, University of Dundee. He has taught at the Bartlett, the Mackin- tosh, and the Architectural Association. He is a registered architect in the UK and the state of Massachusetts. His Ph.D. research was on architecture and psychoanalysis and his publications use psychoanalytic theory as an interpretive approach to problems of space.

Mari Hvattum is a Senior Lecturer at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. She is trained as an architect and has specialized further in architectural history and theory with particular emphasis on the relationship between historicism and modernism. Recent publications include Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (CUP 2004).

Stephen Kite is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. His research explores the history and theory of

xi Contributors

architecture and its wider connections to visual culture. It has been disseminated widely through key conferences, and published papers and chapters within numerous books and journals including Art History, Architectural Research Quar- terly, The Journal of Architecture, Paideuma, and the Journal of Oman Studies. With Sarah Menin he is co-author of An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson (London: Ashgate, 2005).

Lea Knudsen Allen is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at Brown University. She has worked extensively on issues to do with postcolonial discourse, transmigration and cultural representation, which is also the topic of her thesis entitled ‘The Mediterranean Imaginary in Early Modern England’. In her dissertation Lea argues that representations of the Mediterranean provided early modern English poets, playwrights and travellers with the means to imagine a metropolitan identity. In addition, Lea teaches at Brown University, and has spoken at other institutions such as the Universities of Maine (USA) and Liverpool (UK).

Johan Lagae is a junior faculty member of the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University. His research focuses on colonial architecture in the former Belgian Congo, Belgian modernism and the architecture of 1930s World’s Fairs. He contributed to numerous books and exhibitions and published in, among others, Journal of Architecture, Third Text and OASE of which he is one of the editors.

David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture and Chairman of the Ph.D. Program at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books are: Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture; Surface Architecture, in collab- oration with Mohsen Mostafavi; and Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Tech- nology and Topography. Earlier books include: The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure and Materials, and On Weathering: the Life of Build- ings in Time, again with Mostafavi. His research has focused on topics in the history and theory of architecture, gardens, and the city; more recently, on the impact of contemporary technology on architecture.

CJ Lim established Studio 8 Architects Ltd in London in 1994. His architecture explores in parallel buildings and landscape design possibilities through narratives, culture and ethnicity and technological inventiveness. He represented the UK in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2004 and was chosen as one of the New British Talents in Architecture by the Guardian and Independent newspapers in 2004. In addition to his practice, he is the Director of the Bartlett Architecture Research Lab at the Bartlett, University College London.

xii Contributors

Helen Mallinson is a Principal Lecturer in Architecture. She teaches history and theory at the School of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University. Programmes include ‘Modern Architecture and Modernity’, ‘The Forgetting of Air’, ‘Interpretation … and Ornament’. She was formerly head of the school and a visiting lecturer, critic and examiner in numerous schools of architecture and design. Helen is currently completing a doctoral thesis at the London Consortium on the modernization of air, pneuma and space in the late seventeenth century. Recent articles include: ‘Metaphors of Experience: The Voice of Air ‘ in The Philosophical Forum, June 2004, vol. 35.

Lorna McNeur has been a Lecturer in Architecture since 1982 in the USA at the Cooper Union in New York; at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; and in the UK at the University of Cambridge. She has practised architecture intermittently since 1980. She is also a body psychotherapist who integrates her architecture and psychotherapy work under the umbrella of environmental psychology. She has lectured, published and exhibited her work internationally, most notably: at the Guggenheim, The Cooper Union, and Art Forum in New York; the Architectural Association (AA Files) in London; and The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. Her forthcoming book is entitled Theatre of the City: The Passion for Public Space (London: Routledge, 2006).

Sarah Menin is Lecturer at the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Having studied architecture, she completed her Ph.D. on parallels in the life and creative works of Aalto and Sibelius, which she is currently publishing as a book. She has written Nature and Space: Aalto and Le Corbusier with Flora Samuel, and has also edited a book of interdisciplinary collection in Constructing Place: Mind and Matter, both published by Routledge. In 2005, her latest book (written with Stephen Kite) – a critical analysis of the work of Colin St John Wilson, An Architecture of Invitation – was published. In addition to her specialist work on the life and work of Aalto, her research explores the place of the psyche in the sphere of architecture, and in particular its effect on the creative imagination, and has been disseminated widely in academic journals and international conferences.

Jo Odgers is a Lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University in design studio and in history and theory of architecture. Her research interests are the architecture of eighteenth-century England, particularly with respect to the alchemical tradition; and the use of drawing in architectural design. Before entering teaching full time in 1998 Jo Odgers worked as a practising architect in London.

Styliane Philippou is an architect and independent scholar. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. She has taught architectural design, history and

xiii Contributors

theory at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Plymouth. Her monograph Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence will be published by Yale University Press in 2007.

Peter Salter taught for many years at the Architectural Association. He was until recently Head of the School of Architecture at the University of East London. His work as Macdonald and Salter is well known throughout the world, notably through the Osaka folly project and the Kamiichi pavilion built as part of Toyama Expo. He now divides his time between teaching (Cardiff, AA) and practice.

Flora Samuel is an architect and Reader at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Her publications include Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist (2004) and Aalto and Le Corbusier: Nature and Space (2003) with Sarah Menin and, based on her Ph.D. research, ‘La cité orphique de La Sainte Baume’, in Le Corbusier: Le symbolique, le sacré, la spiritualité published by the Fondation Le Corbusier (2004). She is currently writing Le Corbusier in Detail for the Architec- tural Press with the assistance of a Leverhulme Fellowship.

Adam Sharr is a practising architect and Lecturer at the Welsh School of Archi- tecture, Cardiff University. His book Heidegger’s Hut will be published by MIT Press in 2006.

Nicholas Temple is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Liverpool, having previously taught at the University of Nottingham and University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has a Ph.D. on urbanism in early sixteenth-century Rome and is completing a book on the influence of perspective on architecture (to be published by Routledge in 2006).

Simon Unwin became Professor of Architecture at Dundee University School of Architecture at the beginning of 2004, after some years at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff. He is the author of Analysing Architecture (Routledge 2003) and An Architecture Notebook: Wall (2000). His research extracts analytical frameworks for understanding architecture as a spatial discipline. He has lectured widely (publicly as well as to anthropologists and architects) on the intellectual structures people use to establish places for themselves in the world. He is particularly interested in rudimentary place-making in informal landscapes. His current research relates to the theme of ‘threshold’.

Dalibor Vesely was born in Prague where he studied Architecture and Art History. He is a Director (Emeritus) of graduate studies in the department of architecture and fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. His interests

xiv Contributors

include the poetics and hermeneutics of architecture and his research and publications reflect a systematic attempt to restore the humanistic understanding of architecture. This is reflected in his award-winning publication Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (MIT) – winner of the 2005 CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award presented by the International Committee of Architectural Critics and of an RIBA Trust award (2005).

Richard Weston is Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University and the author of numerous books including Materials, Form and Architecture and Utzon, the only extended study written with full access to the architect and his archive. His monograph on Alvar Aalto won the 1995 Sir Banister Fletcher Prize, and Modernism received the International Book Award of the American Institute of Architects.

xv Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge a number of people for their help in orga- nizing the event in Cardiff from which this book derives: Laura Colvin and Katrina Lewis; Richard Weston and Phil Jones; Caroline Almond, Sam Austin, Ben Bluestone, Jignesh Khakhar, and Ed Wainwright. We are grateful to all the participants for their contributions, notably those whose work we have not been able to include here, and particularly our keynote speakers who established a formidable context for the debate: (in order of their presentations) Adrian Forty, Dalibor Vesely, Hilde Heynen, Peter Blundell-Jones, David Leatherbarrow and Peter Salter. Caroline Mallinder of Routledge has given generous and invaluable support throughout the development of this project.

xvi Introduction

Nowhere are the complexities of the word ‘primitive’ better expressed than within the pages of Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726. Gulliver, the shipwrecked traveller, arrives at the land of the Houyhnhnms to find it governed, curiously, by horses. Here, the subject species are the Yahoos who are in every way the same in appearance to Gulliver: ‘The fore feet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails.’ They are despicable in their savagery and Gulliver’s only problem is to persuade his new masters that he is not one of them himself. Gulliver slowly begins to realize the extent of the Houyhnhnm’s society – his emerging understanding evolving through his reading of their architecture:

Having travelled about three miles, we came to a long kind of building, made of timber stuck in the ground, and wattled across; the roof was low, and covered with straw. I now began to be a little comforted, and took out some toys, which travellers usually carry for presents to the savage Indians of America and other parts, in hopes the people of the house would be thereby encouraged to receive me kindly.1

His first sight of Houyhnhnm architecture gave Gulliver a comfortable sense of superiority, but his awe increased as he entered the first large room with a ‘smooth clay floor’ and moved through ‘a vista’ of rooms beyond, furnished with increasing elegance, causing him to rub his eyes in disbelief. In this world, first appearances are found to be deceptive, simultaneously both ‘primitive’ and its opposite, whatever either of those might be. Swift invites reflection on established mores of behaviour, upon the cruelty of society, on social assumptions, on patronizing paternalism, on what it means to be civilized and sane. He ridi- cules assumptions deriving from perceptions of unfamiliarity and Otherness. Gulliver’s Travels can be read as a biting satire on colonialism. It can also be read – more mischievously – as a satire on the practices of architects, architectural historians, theorists and critics. A generation ago, it seems that most architects thought that they knew what the word ‘primitive’ meant. It described a simple, unselfconscious harmony of living and making, an attunement often attributed more to the past than the present, supposedly distant from the excesses and vanities of ‘civilization’. Charles Jencks recollects that this was the accepted definition when he

xvii Introduction

met with Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert and others for a discussion on the theme in the 1970s. Since then, with the ascendance of postmodernism and – in particular – post-colonialism, much has happened to shake our confidence in the word, to make us more self-conscious about its use. The work of thinkers such as Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha has had a significant influence outside the often all-too-introvert discipline of architecture, asking powerful questions about attitudes connoted by ‘primitive’.2 It has become a suspect term, carrying connotations of privileged condescension and racism, a designa- tion with potentially invidious consequences in the grasp of a patronizing elite. Yet, curiously, the word ‘primitive’ still bewitches architects. It has been a participant in many an originary myth of western architecture. From neoclassical proponents of the Tuscan and Doric orders to the minimalists of the modern movement, many builders and writers have sought moral or ethical authority in its complexities. In ‘primitive’ have been found opportunities to imagine the beginnings of architecture and find creative potential there, through its promise of temporal and cultural remove. The word has helped them to connect their work with the roots of architecture itself and thus claim authenticity for their endeavours. Frequently, and increasingly from the eighteenth century onwards, the tendency has been to use ‘the primitive’ as justification for rendering simplicity a matter of commitment, distinct from knowing and deca- dent exuberance. The word has come to frame the cause of architecture stripped bare. Many, explicitly or implicitly, remain haunted by this meaning of primitive: its possibilities for valorizing simplicity; the potentially productive idea of a distant romantic origin; its opportunities for making authenticity claims. As such it cannot be ignored. This book emerged from a conference seeking to revisit ‘primitive’ in architecture – held at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, in 2004 – exploring what relevance, if any, the word might have at the beginning of a new millennium. The contributors are all currently, or have recently been, members of various academic institutions in western Europe or America devoted to the study of architecture and who submitted papers for the conference. This reflects the institutional structures and pressures that often shape such an enterprise in contemporary circumstances. As such, the contents do – for better or worse – offer a representative sample of a certain architectural and academic milieu at this time. The implications of who is included and who has been left out will remain as much a part of the book’s commentary as the detail of the papers themselves. Some of the authors here emphasize difficulties of using the word ‘primitive’, challenging the condescension with which it has been associated. Some, while acknowledging the implications of post-colonialism, are keen to retain some of the term’s previous connotations. Some take a much longer xviii Introduction

perspective, seeking to contextualize current challenges to ‘primitive’ in a broader historical sweep. If it has been thirty years between Banham, Jencks and Rykwert’s discussion of ‘primitive’ in architecture and this one, could the word provoke further discussion in another thirty years?

Notes

1 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726), ch. 36. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge, 1978; Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990; The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.

xix

Part 1

Original matters

Chapter 1

Primitive The word and concept

Adrian Forty

There is a difference between the way that the ‘primitive’ is customarily talked about in architecture, and the way it has been used in other disciplines, where the word is usually quarantined by warnings and disclaimers of all kinds. ‘Primi- tive’ is not a politically correct term; it is condescending, it tends to denigrate who or what is described by it, and implies an assumption of superiority in whoever uses it. For good reason, then, when people talk about the primitive in anthropology or in art (the two disciplines where it has had most currency), they generally try to make it safe by placing all sorts of protective barriers around it, disclaimers, apologies, scare quotes, long explanatory footnotes, and so on, to show that they are only too well aware of its shortcomings, even if they nonetheless go on to use it for want of anything better.1 Curiously, none of these scruples seems to have touched architecture. All the circumspection with which the ‘primitive’ is treated elsewhere seems to be ignored when it comes to architecture, where people appear quite untroubled by the political and cultural objections to the word. It is as if all the anxiety that has grown up around the ‘primitive’ over the last century has entirely passed architecture by, as if architects and architectural critics had failed entirely to notice that there was anything contentious about the term. Could this indifference be put down to ignorance, to the insularity of architects? Possibly, but another explanation might be that the ‘primitive’ – at least as a concept if not as a word, and I shall come to that distinction later – is so fundamental to our discipline, and has been part of it for so long, that it does not occur to us to make excuses for it. We have come to accept the primitive as so necessary to our whole way of thinking about architecture that to suggest

3 Adrian Forty

that it needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer seems so absurd as not to be worth considering. For as long as there has been architecture, it has been justified, and sustained by reference to primitive building – Joseph Rykwert spelt out this tradition in his book On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), and left us in no doubt of its importance in architectural thought. From Vitruvius’s time onwards, if not from earlier, the classical system of the orders was justified by reference to ‘primitive’ building; subsequent theories of architecture – Semper’s theory of ‘dressing’, and early twentieth-century modernism – have in turn been legitimized by references to primitive building. If architects seem to be unconcerned by all the reservations that accompany the use of the primitive in other disciplines, it is at least partly because the primitive has been part of architecture for so long as to make any excuses for it seem superfluous. Indeed, one might say that the Greek origins of the word ‘architecture’, from arkhe, meaning a beginning that remains as the hidden essence of a thing, implies that the beginnings of building constitute the discipline, and has given architects grounds for being so much at home with the primitive. If we look at another not-so-distant field, painting, the situation is very different. Although the classical theory of art had its stories of the mythological origins of painting, it never relied upon these in order to find its justification. Indeed the kind of art known as primitive – that is to say either Neolithic art, or African, Oceanic or North American Indian art – was unknown to the art theorists of the classical tradition, and was completely unlike anything that they might have conceived. It formed no part of the discourse of art, and when these new sorts of art were discovered, in the nineteenth century, they were quickly turned to subvert and overthrow the classical tradition of art. Not so in architecture, where the primitive hut, as described by Vitruvius and his successors, was the point of reference for architecture; and when explorers discovered the buildings of distant and previously unknown societies, in the Americas and South Pacific, the resemblance of these structures to the Vitruvian hut only served to confirm the classical tradition of architecture. The primitive hut of antiquity, and actual huts inhabited by savages in far-away places, become in architecture one and the same thing. All this helps to explain why writers on architecture feel thoroughly at home with the primitive and seem able to discuss it without the slightest self-consciousness, whereas writers on art have had extraordinary difficulty with the primitive, and their accounts of what it is are full of contorted qualifications as well as apologies for using the term at all.2 Yet, even if I understand why architects use ‘primitive’ with so little thought for its connotations, I cannot help being surprised at their unconcern. Let us turn now to look at the history of the word. As it is used now, ‘primitive’ exists among a whole constellation of words – ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’, ‘exotic’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘naive’, ‘instinctive’, ‘authentic’,

4 Primitive

‘archaic’, ‘native’, ‘tribal’, ‘erotic’, ‘traditional’, ‘outsider’ – to give but a few. Extended to its architectural usage, we would have to add ‘vernacular’, ‘anonymous’, ‘non-pedigree’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘indigenous’.3 Although nowadays, ‘primitive’ overlaps with all of these, this convergence only came about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until the late eighteenth century, ‘primitive’ had no other meaning than ‘at the origins’, or ‘original’, as, for example, in ‘primitive Christianity’. None of the connotations of tribal or native societies, of savages, or of the exotic, applies when we come across the word in the eighteenth century. It is only in the nineteenth century, particularly as a result of social Darwinism, when African, Oceanic and North American Indian societies started to be seen as the precursors of western civilization that they came to be described as ‘primitive’, on account of their supposed position at the early stages of human social development. This fact, that ‘primitive’ in eighteenth-century parlance means nothing more than ‘original’ is quite significant when we come to its architectural usage. When, for example, Sir John Soane talked about ‘the primitive model’, or ‘the progressive state of primitive buildings’ in his lectures, he meant nothing more than the original buildings of mankind, and it is not likely that he was implying any connection between these and the structures put up by the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific, Africa or the Americas. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that the meaning of the word primitive would be extended to include those. To continue with architecture’s use of the word ‘primitive’, we come to a surprise, which is that although notions of the ‘primitive building’ go back to the very origins of architecture, the huts, tents and cabins to which Vitruvius and his successors refer were not described by them as primitive. Neither in Vitruvius, nor in the writers of the Renaissance, nor in those of the seventeenth century or the first half of the eighteenth century, does the word ‘primitive’ ever occur. Even Laugier, whose ‘rustic hut’ was so important to his theory of architecture, did not describe either this or the man who first discovered it as ‘primitive’ – though the word has crept into Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann’s English translation; where Laugier wrote ‘l’homme dans sa première origine’, this has become ‘man in his primitive state’.4 The first instance of the word ‘primitive’ applied to buildings that I have found, in any language, is in the title of the first plate in William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture of 1759, which is headed ‘The Primitive Buildings etc’. There is no mention of ‘primitive’ in Cham- bers’s text in either the first (1759) or the second (1768) editions of the book, though, interestingly, in the third, 1791 edition, in which the text was expanded, he does use the word, writing ‘That the primitive hut was of a conic figure it is reasonable to conjecture’.5 By ‘primitive’, it is clear that he simply meant ‘original’.

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Nineteenth-century architectural writers who used ‘primitive’ stick to this sense of the word. Even when advancing an alternative theory of architecture, they still, like the classical theorists, resorted to a story of origins; and so for example, when Semper develops his concept of architecture as based in the conjunction of man’s impulse to enclose and to decorate, and the development of craft techniques, he postulates a ‘primitive’ builder. In The Four Elements of Architecture, although his purpose was to reject the old theory of the transmu- tation of materials as the basis of Greek architecture, nonetheless, he writes, ‘I see myself forced to go back to the primitive conditions of human society in order to come to that which I actually propose to set forth’.6 The same is true when he writes about the movable tent as the ‘most primitive mode’ of roof covering.7 When, however, in Der Stil he distinguished between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic art, the word he uses for the latter is ‘barbaric’.8 Clearly, Semper is important because he proposed an archetypal primitive building, the Caribbean hut, as the basis of his theory of architecture – but his use of the word ‘primitive’ was restricted to the sense of ‘original’. The transformation of the primitive into a word that has force really only occurred in the early twentieth century – and here the outstanding exponent must be Adolf Loos. Loos’s 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ draws upon a notion of the primitive that is far from Semper’s primitive builders or those of the neoclassical theorists. The argument of Loos’s essay hinges on evolutionism, on the superiority of the civilized West over the uncivilized, cannibalistic and heavily decorated Papuan: ‘Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by various colours, modern man needs his clothes as a mask’.9 Loos turns the primitive into something that is both atavistic, exotic, but also threatening, and this transformation Loos owed to what had been happening in the visual arts, where the discovery of non-western art, and its take-up by the avant-garde, became a way of destabilizing the conventions of art. Loos, of course, turned on its head the avant-garde’s use of the primitive, so that rather than being a model to emulate, it became a warning against cultural degeneracy. From Loos’s time onwards, the primitive, whether it is taken up positively as a model to follow, or negatively, as by Loos, has had the possibility of an exotic, and sometimes erotic charge: it is dangerous and exciting; it leads to outside the world of the familiar, to a destination unknown. All these characteristics were to be investigated by Freud, by the surrealists and by anthropologists; but before we look at the purposes of the primitive, let us look at another matter, the question of where is the primitive? Is the primitive nearby, or is it far away? This question, the location of the primitive, of where do you find it, is particularly relevant to architecture. When Vitruvius describes the origin of building, he starts with the usual speculations about living in caves, making shelters out of leaves, or building, like swal- lows, out of mud and wattle, and how then, observing the efforts of others, men

6 Primitive

went on to make improvements, and to produce better kinds of hut. All this is entirely speculative and mythical, as it is in every other account of the origins of architecture. Vitruvius then goes on to say that if you go over to Gaul, or Spain, or to Portugal, you can find there buildings just like these mythical original buildings, and concludes: ‘Thus by these examples we can infer concerning the ancient invention of buildings, reasoning that they were similar’.10 This circu- larity is a pattern that architectural writers follow over and over again – they start off with an account of the mythical origins of buildings, and then go on to add, ‘if you go to such-and-such a place, you will find buildings just like I’ve described, so of course my theory must be right’. Semper does it with his Caribbean hut; and we see exactly the same thing happening with Le Corbusier, another enthusiast for the primitive. In Une Maison un Palais his account of the origins of architecture starts off with speculative archaeological reconstructions of the primitive dwellings: places of worship in the desert, Mesopotamian buildings, but then switches to Brittany, and then finally to the Landes in south-west France. In other words, he takes us from entirely speculative and placeless structures, to ones that are wholly specific and that you can go and see for yourself. Le Corbusier’s description of the fishermen’s shacks in the Landes is a perfect example of how the near-at-hand becomes construed as primitive. Built on sand dunes, under the pine woods, these shacks are the homes of the fishermen who constructed them. They are remote from civilization – they are on an isolated spit of land that the railway does not reach, and as the land does not belong to them, they are simply toler- ated guests, without any rights – they build only the simplest shelters out of whatever materials are available. The results, says Le Corbusier, are intuitive and spontaneous, giving them a human and lyrical quality: ‘The fisherman, why shouldn’t he be a poet too – the savage after all is a fine one’.11 He describes the features of these houses – each has a covered porch for sitting under, and a fig tree for shade; and because high tides would wash away the soil of the vegetable garden, they are surrounded with a fence constructed with ‘une sagacité nègre’. Although basic, these shacks have all the attributes necessary to great architecture, and all they need to become great architecture is a more up-to-date interpretation. While Le Corbusier does not actually call them ‘primitive’, his discussion of the shacks includes a whole range of other primitivist terms: ‘spontaneous’, ‘unconscious’, ‘intuitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘Negro’. The fishermen’s shacks of the Landes were not the only places where Le Corbusier found the primitive in the modern world. He also found it in the favellas of Rio de Janeiro, which he contrasted favourably with the over-civilized architecture of the city.12 Siegfried Giedion later followed him, locating the primitive in shanty towns: ‘We realize that often shantytowns contain within

7 Adrian Forty

themselves vestiges of the last balanced civilization – the last civilization in which man was in equipoise’.13 There are two things to be said about this procedure, so familiar to architectural thought, of locating the primitive in the here and now, in the familiar – a couple of things that might help us better to understand the particular, quite specific way in which architecture has grasped the ‘primitive’. If we ask at a more speculative, philosophical level, ‘where is the primitive?’, it is not easily answered. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss spent a good deal of time wondering about this question, about what divides the ‘primitive’ from the ‘civilized’, for without a satisfactory answer to this, the anthropologist’s whole métier is in doubt.14 The conclusion Lévi-Strauss came to in Tristes Tropiques was that the primitive is, and can only be an imagined ideal. The purpose of studying savages, he writes, is to create a theoretical model of society, so that we may succeed – and here he goes on to quote Rousseau – in distinguishing between

what is primordial and what is artificial in man’s present nature, and in obtaining a good knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which has perhaps never existed, and which will probably never exist in the future, but of which it is nevertheless necessary to have a sound conception in order to pass judgement on our present state.

Lévi-Strauss continues in his own words, ‘Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it’.15 The primitive, therefore, is purely an ideal, necessary to conceive of in order to think about society, but not to be confused with any actual state, whether historical or present. Returning to architecture we can see that, all the way from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, people have started off by thinking of the primitive state in these ideal terms, as something that never existed and probably never will exist, but then feel compelled to go and find a real, actual equivalent. As a result, the ideal keeps on collapsing into the real – and as soon as this happens, and it becomes an actually existing local example, it loses much of its force as a means of thinking about architecture. Some architectural theorists, aware of this problem, managed to circumvent it – Quatremère de Quincy, for example, refused to posit any geographical origin of architecture, but instead insisted that it was rooted in human nature; and Semper followed this, equating architecture with language – but then succumbed to the need for an extant building and went on to locate his theory of architecture in the Caribbean hut. Even Le Corbusier, in spite of his predilection for finding actual examples of the primitive, nonetheless initially acknowledged the non-existence of the primitive; in Vers une Architec- ture, he wrote, ‘There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources. The idea is constant, in full sway from the beginning’’ 16 – yet

8 Primitive

nonetheless he too goes on to identify extant ‘primitive’ buildings in remote parts of France, and to make these his architectural paradigm. If we are to answer the question of ‘where is the primitive?’, then we can say that it is either nowhere, or perhaps more accurately, everywhere. However, architecture has always found it hard to accept this non-specific, non- locatable property of the ‘primitive’, and instead of just leaving at what it is, an idea, insists upon going and hunting out actual built examples. As soon as we do this, we lose sight of the model, and become absorbed in the actual qualities of these real buildings. If that was the first thing to be said about architecture’s compulsion always to locate the primitive in the here and now, in the familiar, the second goes back to my surprise that architects and architectural writers never seem to have to apologize for using the word ‘primitive’. If the primitive is local, if it is so ready-to-hand, if all you have to do to discover the primitive is to go and find an old railway carriage sitting in an orchard, then the primitive loses much of its strangeness. For ethnographers and anthropologists the attraction of studying remote tribes is to find something so distant from what we already know that we will be able to re-examine all that we believe to be true about our own society. The anthropologists’ dream is to discover a tribe that has never before had contact with western civilization, that is wholly uncontaminated by the values of other cultures, and then to see in what respects it corresponds to, and in what respects it differs from our own. This dream has of course been unrealizable for over a century, possibly even from the start of ethnography, but that does not take away the longing. The strange, the exotic, the unknown, are precisely what makes the primitive fascinating to the anthropologist. However, architecture, as we have seen, has never really exploited the distance of the primitive, its otherness, its exoticism; Semper did not even go to the West Indies to find his Caribbean hut; it was there, ready, waiting for him in the Great Exhibi- tion of 1851. The facility with which architects have been able to find the ‘primitive’ near at hand means that they have never really made use of the primitive to go outside the immediate surroundings of the present. It is this, I think – the ease with which architects have been able to locate the primitive within the familiar, within their own time and culture – that has made apologies for using the word seem irrelevant. If the primitive is just down the road, there is no assumption of cultural superiority or condescension in so naming it. Of course, one of the consequences of this overfamiliarity of the ‘primitive’ within architecture and its lack of distance, is that the primitive has not been exploited to the full. If, as I have suggested, following Lévi-Strauss, part of the force, part of the value of the primitive comes from its distance from western culture, from being both far and near, then architecture has not been able to take advantage of this;

9 Adrian Forty

and we can say that, in a way, the ‘primitive’ remains an underdeveloped concept within architecture. The final theme to consider is the purpose of the primitive in architecture – and here we are looking at the word rather than the thing. When we look at words, the most interesting thing about them is not what they mean, always in doubt, but rather what their job is. Whatever the job ‘primitive’ does in architecture, it must be something big, because you are unlikely to find an architect who does not subscribe to the importance of the primitive. Recognition of the primitive is more or less a reflex action for architects; if you met an architect who told you that the primitive did not matter, or was irrelevant, your first reaction would be, almost certainly, that they could not be serious, that they were having you on. For an architect, having an eye for the primitive shows that you are sensitive to all the things that are not right about contemporary architecture, and that you are aware of the shortcomings of advanced technological culture. Denying interest in the primitive would be suspect because it would suggest an unhealthy complacency about the present. For that reason, the primitive is, so to speak, a compulsory article of faith in the catalogue of any architect’s range of interests. The only person I have come across to have questioned this was Reyner Banham, who, in 1965, at the end of a scathing review of Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (about which more in a moment) wrote, ‘primitive buildings have only the most marginal and superficial things to teach us’. However, Banham was not really indifferent to primitive buildings, and what in fact he was actually attacking in the review was the convention that architects ought to be interested in primitive buildings. The remark belonged to Banham’s long-standing contempt for the architectural establishment, for what he saw as its complacency with its own traditions; you can tell this from the start of the review: ‘the practitioners of this oldest and most sophisticated of technological arts never fail to drool with delight when confronted with buildings they can describe (however inaccurately) as primitive, rude, vernacular or anonymous’.17 Banham’s point was that if architects, instead of going into raptures about the purity of the forms of peasant dwellings, bothered to look more closely, they would see that ‘primitive’ means squalid and disease-infested, and that we are well rid of it. What, apart from sustaining the architectural belief system, does the ‘primitive’ do? The work of ‘primitive’ has always been to set up an opposition to prevailing norms of taste by appealing to something original, far away, and yet at the same time near at hand. More recently, this opposition has extended to include the exotic, and all kinds of building not produced by professional architects: ‘vernacular’ and ‘anonymous’ building and bricoleur activity of all kinds. Covering an extraordinarily wide range, ‘primitive’ is certainly not a precise

10 Primitive

word; nor has this inexactness disadvantaged it. The real value of the primitive is not so much in what it describes – or fails to describe – but in drawing attention to our own investment in a highly developed, advanced architecture, by its relationship to an alternative, and not necessarily actually existing state of affairs where progress is not valued or is entirely disregarded. Primitive is a mirror: to quote Marianna Torgovnick, ‘For Euro-Americans, to study the primitive brings us always back to ourselves, which we reveal in the act of defining the Other’.18 In architecture, the principal purpose of the primitive, and we have to include with this all its synonyms – ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’, ‘anonymous’, ‘vernacular’ – has been, as Joseph Rykwert says, to renew architecture. ‘The primitive hut … has provided … a point of reference for all speculation on the essentials of building. These speculations intensify when the need is felt for a renewal of architecture’.19 We can go further than this and draw a distinction in the way people have used the primitive – between those who have used it in an affirmative way, so as to point to the continuity of an architectural tradition, and those who have used it in a subversive way, so as to question the values of architecture. Adolf Loos, whom I have mentioned already, illustrates the subversive use of the primitive. Le Corbusier’s use of the primitive, on the other hand, is entirely affirmative, for his references to primitive building are all devoted to showing the existence of eternal values in architecture. What these eternal values were for Le Corbusier changed over time: in the early 1920s, his references to primitive are all devoted to showing that ‘geometry was the language of man’, that geometric proportions were the eternal, timeless basis of architecture. Le Corbusier’s use of the primitive belongs in the tradition of classical theorists of architecture; just like Laugier, he uses it to criticize present abuses by asserting an original model from which architecture has deviated. It is affirmative in the sense that it suggests that architecture has a tradition, with values present since earliest times. This is by far the most common way in which primitive has been used in architecture and there are many examples of it. Siegfried Giedion is another example. In a text written in 1953, he starts ‘We do not regard primitive civilisations from the point of view of an advanced technology’ – though the denial only confirms that this is exactly the viewpoint that is taken for granted – and he continues ‘We realise that they can teach us forms that can be used to express specific social, territorial, and spiritual conditions. From this our social imagination may be able to form an aesthetic unity’.20 In other words, the ‘primitive’ provides the source of the authentic human values that Giedion argued were central to architecture. The subversive use of the primitive in architecture is much less common; Adolf Loos is a rare example. In this respect, architecture is quite unlike other art practices, particularly painting and sculpture, where the primitive has always been made use of to destabilize the tradition of western art.

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Gauguin’s discovery of the primitive in Tahiti, Picasso’s interest in African masks, the German expressionist painters’ interest in African sculptors, the surrealists’ interest in tribal imagery, were all subversions of traditional values in art: in no case were they intended to affirm eternal values of art. Instead, they were intended either to threaten bourgeois taste, by revealing a more direct form of expression uncontaminated by cultural over-sophistication, or to assert the presence of the irrational and the unconscious underlying art practice. More recently, in what Hal Foster calls ‘the ethnographic turn’, artists have taken to identifying themselves with ethnic minorities, a primitive ‘other’, so as to draw attention to the assumption of cultural superiority implicit in western art.21 In each successive case, the primitive has been invoked in order to put pressure upon whatever convention of western art was seen at the time as most stulti- fying. In architecture, the primitive has rarely been used subversively, and the reason for this may be either because primitive architecture has presented fewer opportunities of this kind, or because of the traditional belief that good architecture has always been in touch with the primitive, that the primitive has always belonged to architecture. One architect who invoked the ‘primitive’ with, so he claimed, subversive intentions, was Bernard Rudofsky, in his 1964 exhibition and book, Architecture Without Architects. In the introduction he asserted that it was not just a book of pretty photographs, but ‘that it marks a point of departure for the examination of our architectural prejudices. It is frankly polemic, comparing as it does, if only by implication, the serenity of the architecture in so-called underdeveloped countries with the architectural blight in industrial countries’.22 Rudofsky’s idea was that although the primitive was present in the early phase of modern architecture, it had subsequently been repressed.23 While these ideas about the primitive might have been polemical when Rudofsky first became interested in the primitive in the 1920s and 1930s in Vienna and then in Italy, by the 1960s they were no longer so.24 By 1964 Team X had been enthusing over primitive architecture for over ten years, and Aldo van Eyck had made his famous visit to the Dogon. The travels of van Eyck and of others associated with Team X had put primitive architecture fairly firmly back on the agenda, and, indeed, we can see the effects of it in Dutch structuralism and elsewhere – but none of this was particularly subversive. I have introduced Rudofsky because, in the fairly extensive recent writing about him, we might expect to find the most up-to-date thinking about the primitive in architecture. Here I am disappointed: Felicity Scott takes at face value Rudofsky’s claim to make the primitive polemical, and does not question it. The evidence, however, including Banham’s review, suggests Rudofsky was less polemical than he himself thought.

12 Primitive

All in all, it is surprising how unsubversive the primitive has been in architecture. I cannot help thinking that the way the primitive has been used in architecture has always been astonishingly tame – it has never been dangerous, it has never been the primitive of, say Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,andit has never been allowed to threaten the basic values of architecture. Early Gothic architecture, as interpreted by Ruskin, was far more truly savage, far more disturbing to the established tradition of architecture than have been any number of straw or mud huts, wigwams or igloos. The full potential of the primitive, that is to be more than a source of pleasing effects and formal inspiration, but rather something downright horrifying, has never been realized. The ‘primitive’ in architecture has remained – dare I say it – primitive.

Notes

1 See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobsen and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (trans.) New York and London: Basic Books, 1963 (first published 1958), pp.101–2. 2 See, for example, William Rubin (ed.) Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art, vol. 1, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pp. 5–6. For reactions to Rubin, see Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 3 These are the words used by Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964, p. 2. 4 Marc Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture, 2nd edn, Paris: Duchesne, 1755 (first published 1753 and reprinted, Paris: Mardaga, 1979), p. 8; and Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Archi- tecture, Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977, p. 11. 5 Sir William Chambers, A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture, London: Joseph Smeaton, 1791, p. 16. 6 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1851), H. F. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 102. ‘Primitive conditions’ is a translation of Urzustände, which, like Chambers’ or Soane’s ‘primitive’, means ‘at the origins’, though with perhaps the added sense of a beginning that continues as the hidden essence of the thing. 7 Semper, Four Elements, p. 111. 8 Ibid., pp. 247–8. 9 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), in W. Wang (trans.), The Architecture of Adolf Loos, London: Arts Council, 1985, p. 103. 10 Vitruvius, De Architectura, F. Granger (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, Bk. II, ch. 1.4. 11 Le Corbusier, Une Maison un Palais, Paris: Editions Crés, 1928, pp. 48–50. 12 Le Corbusier, Precisions (1930), E. S. Aujame (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991, p. 9. 13 Siegfried Giedion, ‘Aesthetics and the Human Habitat’ (1953) in S. Giedion, Architecture You and Me, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, p. 96. 14 See Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1955), vol. 1, pp. 101–2; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, John and Doreen Weightman (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, ch. 38. 15 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 513–14.

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16 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, F. Etchells (trans.), London: Architectural Press, 1927, p. 66. 17 Reyner Banham, ‘Nobly Savage Non-Architects’, New Society, 2 September 1965, 6: 153. 18 Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, p. 11. 19 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972, p. 183. 20 Giedion, ‘Aesthetics and the Human Habitat’, p. 96. 21 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, Cambridge MA and London, 1996, ch. 6, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’. 22 Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects, p. 3. 23 Felicity Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling’, in S. W. Goldhagen and R. Légault (eds) Anxious Modernisms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 237, fn.74. 24 Felicity Scott, ‘"Primitive Wisdom" and Modern Architecture’, Journal of Architecture 1998, 3(3): 253; and Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling’, p. 216.

14 Part 2

Negotiating origins

Chapter 2

The primitive as modern problem Invention and crisis

Dalibor Vesely

The notion of the primitive is a relatively new phenomenon. Its modern understanding would have no relevance before the eighteenth century, when it had a very different meaning and was known under different names. The currency it has today is as a result of the development of modern culture and it should be seen not as something obvious and positive, but as an invention, as a symptom of crisis, and an attempt to come to terms with the crisis. In contemporary usage the term ‘primitive’ seems to have two primary meanings: one, related to the cultural nature of the primitive; the second, to its chronological meaning. The first meaning is defined by a particular place of the primitive in the achieved levels of the civilizational process. In that process primitive is usually seen as less developed, as retrograde, as a symptom of nostalgia or regressive utopia The first is closely linked with the second meaning, which is chronological, in other words, temporal and historical. In the temporal sense the primitive, as the term already indicates, is related to ancient primitivus, meaning the first, or ‘primordium’ meaning the origin or beginning. In well-balanced cultures the primitive or primordial is integrated with the rest of culture and serves as its foundation and ground. In traditional societies the process of integration takes a form of regular renewal of the link between the more advanced strata of culture and the foundations in the primordial level of reality. Typical forms of renewal are religious ceremonies, rituals, mythical and poetic narratives, theatre and art in general, but also reflective thinking in the form of philosophy or theology. The process of integration can be described as a continuity of reference between the more abstract levels of a particular culture and its ground.

17 Dalibor Vesely

2.1 Man Ray, Black and White, 1926 Source: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

The primitive, as we know it today, has its origin in the discontinuity of the process of integration (Figure 2.1). In such a situation the foundations of culture do not disappear but take a form of an alienated and distant reality, which asks for a special treatment and also for a new name. It is only under these conditions that such distinctions as elementary–cultivated, primitive–civilized and so on can be made, and the emancipated primitive reality can stand in contrast to the rest of culture. The first signs of cultural discontinuity and thus a possibility of speaking about the primitive in modern terms, can be seen in the sequence of renaissances known also as renovatio or rinascimento – new beginning. The process culminated in the sixteenth century, when the so-called primitive people and societies were for the first time discovered. The ‘discovery’ of the primitive was supported by the awareness of progress, manifested in the battle of the ancients and the moderns, followed by the confrontation of the problematic nature of highly advanced civilization and the virtues of the primitive societies embodied in the notion of bon sauvage, the historicism and the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century and the clear sense of a new beginning in the twentieth century. At the time of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century the primitive was elevated to the status of a movement known as primitivism.

18 The primitive as modern problem

History of the primitive

In the classical tradition there is no room for the primitive in the modern sense. We find in its place reference to origins in the form of the myth of creation (Greek mythology, orphic tradition) turned later into cosmogonic speculations (Hesiod’s Theogony) and finally into cosmology and philosophy addressing the question of origins, using such terms as arche or, more explicitly, a rational version of arche known as aition – cause or source. On a most general level the primordial, or in other words the original, is discussed as the question of Being which is still with us today. There is no need to speak about the oscillation between the higher level of culture represented by the city and civic life and the more natural level of culture, exemplified in the tendency to move away from the cultivated life of the city as it was adopted, for instance, by the Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics. It is instead important to realize, that all these tendencies and movements appeared in the epoch of Hellenism, a time of deep cultural crisis. In the Christian tradition the question of origins was absorbed in the story of creation linked closely with cosmology. The equivalent of the primordial, or the primitive, was represented by the state of innocence in the paradise which once was. The paradise at the beginning of the biblical time was the Christian analogy of the classical golden age at the beginning of time from which everything that follows is derived and is seen as less perfect. The effort to preserve the continuity between the achieved levels of culture and the natural foundations of culture continued, more or less uninterrupted until the eighteenth century. The continuity was challenged in the sixteenth century, but only seriously so during the Enlightenment.

The emergence of the primitive

The tendency that contributed to the discontinuity of the traditional culture and to the emergence of the primitive was the process of individualization manifested most clearly in the Renaissance villa. In its early history the Renaissance villa represents a flight from the city to the country and nature but at the same time it aims to provide a perfect equivalent of the city. This apparent contradiction is the very essence of the modernity of the villa. The origin of the modern villa is associated with a deep sense of political crisis sensed in the villa literature of the period. Giuseppe Falcone writes:

It seems to me that the city, if I am not mistaken, for the most part today is nothing other than a patent theatre of misery and filled with every infelicity, and so it happens in those persons in which the good and blessed life because of sloth [otio] lapses and languishes.1

19 Dalibor Vesely

The desire to move closer to the country can best be understood on cultural and religious grounds, as part of the historicism and naturalism of the period of the Reformation. ‘The life in the country is much older and therefore much more noble than that of the city’.2 This is a typical argument legitimizing the villa and the whole movement known as villeggiatura, by the authority of history. The Reformation and the villa movement shared a similar aim: to abolish all mediating links and institutions that might influence the direct communication with God and ‘divine’ nature. As a result:

The villa is a world at rest with itself. Evil has been banished to the distant city. It was precisely because of this, that the domain of the villa could become a paradise. The paradise is now founded on the trust in the stability of the moral individual.3

It is in this context that we can understand the references to villa as ‘locus amoenus’or‘paradiso terrestris’ which appear so often in contemporary literature. What is meant by such references is a place where man can cultivate his humanity and find his salvation. The goal of the solitary life – vita solitaria –in the villa is not asceticism but the consistent cultivation of one’s self. Cultural crisis, solitary life and the turn to the primitive belong together. The next important contribution to the emergence of the primitive was the idea of progress, closely linked with the new historical awareness in which the present generation was seen as different and potentially better than the previous or ancient. This new confidence was most explicitly manifested in the famous battle of the ancients and moderns. The major disputants in the quarrel used usually one of three arguments: that knowledge is cumulative and therefore the moderns superseded the ancients; that modern men are the real ancients and in many ways better than them; or that the human race is like a single man, a giant with a dwarf on his shoulders. The last argument was expressed most clearly by Pascal in one of his Pensées:

The whole sequence of mankind during so many centuries should be considered as a single man continually existing and continually learning. At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his old age.4

This opened the question we can ask even today: if the earlier civilizations in their childhood were younger or older than we are. The debate between the old and new created a duality that would soon be seen as a duality between the modern as cultivated and progressive and the ancient as primitive and regressive. This vision was based on the assumption that all experience and

20 The primitive as modern problem

knowledge are cumulative. The fact that they are not was expressed later in the eighteenth century in new terms, familiar to us as ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. The distinction between these two terms is made commonly in reference to their modes of development, according to which civilization, defined most often as ‘techniques’, is a continuous and cumulative process, susceptible to generalizing methods of natural science and capable of universal diffusion. Culture on the other hand, defined most often as ‘creativity’, occurring as unique, is not susceptible to these methods and is not transferable. The qualitatively different development of culture can follow the progressive development of civilization only to a limited extent. Culture then appears very often as anachronism, stagnation or even regress. It was in this, not always well-understood, discrepancy between the development of civilization and culture that the modern notion of the primitive was finally formed. In the new situation the cultural and the chronological meaning of the primitive became practically iden- tical, and the primitive could be used as an antithesis to civilization, either as a confirmation of the superiority of civilization or as a critique of its malaise. The close link between the primitive and the natural or Nature may explain the vast amount of literature devoted to the subject during the eighteenth century. However, in spite of its complexity and extent, the content of the literature was dominated mostly by two characteristic attitudes to the primitive – one, based on the assumption that the primitive state of the society is close to the golden age and speaks therefore about the unspoiled truth of reality and the natural goodness of man; the second attitude can be described as anti-primitive, in which the primitive is seen as a brutal and miserable form of existence with no sign of civilization; in fact it is seen as the other side of civilization (Figure 2.2). This polarization of the primitive is reflected in the romantic construct of the natural man and society, exemplified in the appeal of a simple life in far-away places, which may be termed exotic, and which may be characterized by the praise of ‘the noble savage’. This phrase was introduced into the English language, probably for the first time, by Dryden in his ‘Conquest of Granada’, where we find the following lines:

I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.5

In the description of the famous journey of the Bougainville around the world, the author de Fréville described the South Sea islands as ‘a happy land’, with ‘the best built and most handsome inhabitants one could ever see. The women especially seemed to have been embellished with all the graces’. More important, de Fréville also found among these islanders ‘humanity, rectitude, and the frankness of the Golden Age’.6 Lord Monboddo, similarly, observed in his Of the

21 Dalibor Vesely

2.2 The Kanaka Village, New Caledonia, Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889 Source: Le Monde Illustré, 27 June 1889

Origin and Progress of Language that the ‘golden age may be said yet to exist … in the South Sea, where the inhabitants live, without toil or labour, upon the bounty of nature in those fine climates’.7 The anti-primitive attitude can be illustrated with similar quotations but for the sake of space and time I shall mention only one example. Apologists of the slave trade used a brutish stereotype of a slave to argue that the blacks were better off as slaves in the New World than in the cruel environment of their native Africa.8 A former governor of Jamaica, Philip Thicknesse, based racism upon biology. In his Memoirs and Anecdotes he admitted that Negroes are ‘a species of the human race …[but of] … an inferior and very different order’. Their bile, he observed, is black; that of the white man, yellow, ‘proof their being of a very distinct race of the human kind’.9 This attitude was reinforced by social Darwinism, which led through the unfortunate link of the primitive with race to the monstrous consequences of the modern totalitarian regimes. The critical steps in this development were the slave trade, the colonial mentality and experience, the biological interpretation of culture and the general tendency towards a scientistic understanding of life. This development, together with the positive attitude to the primitive was reflected in the problematic nature of the newly created collections and museums of primitive art, the foundation of ethnographic and anthropological institutions and university departments.

22 The primitive as modern problem

From the primitive to Primitivism

It was mainly in the domain of art that the primitive was transformed into primitivism. Primitivism is a completely new phenomenon that could not have come to existence before the end of the nineteenth century. Only then did the inner development of European art reach a level of autonomy and creative freedom that made it possible to move from imitation to an independent creation and self- expression. The best way to illustrate the nature of primitivism is by looking at differences in the representation of a subject dear to everybody interested in the primitive. Such a subject was the life of the child. The interest was based on the belief that the history of individual men reproduces the history of the race and that if we wish to understand what has happened to mankind since the Fall, we have only to watch the child as it matures. It gradually loses its primeval innocence and innate wisdom; the same happens in the society as a whole. It was partly for that reason, that the representation of children became such a favourite subject for the artists of the nineteenth century, particularly for the Romantics. In his painting Earth Children Otto Runge represents earth as a female deity surrounded by children in a quasi cosmic setting. Paul Klee, in sharp contrast to Runge, is not interested in the external image of the child, but in how a child would draw or paint. This is highly significant. The possibility for an artist of a very sophisticated culture to move into the world of a child and simulate its mode of creativity depends on a radically new vision of creativity associated closely with the new vision of an avant-garde artist as a new kind of creator-genius. The generation of artists at the beginning of the twentieth century believed that there is a close affinity between the manifestation of the creative powers of nature and genius. The genius eventually comes to be seen as the sole expression of that creativity. The concept of genius represents a transition from a long tradition of creative imitation to self-expression. In this transition the unity of representation, sustained by the communicative space of culture, was replaced by fragmentary individual achievements aspiring to represent the world in its wholeness. In its original sense, genius was a power of inspiration, invention and creativity derived either from the divine or from nature and known as ingenium – hence ingenium loci.10 It was through the appropriation of the ingenium and through its identification with the qualities of exceptional individuals that the modern notion of genius came into existence.11 In the Romantic understanding, later taken up by the expressionists and surrealists:

The creativity which brought forth independent and organically evolved works of art was given to the artist by great creative nature, the productive force and originating spirit in the centre of life. The artist could create like nature, because, being a force of this creative nature, he possessed in his soul an unconscious formative power

23 Dalibor Vesely

which enabled him to identify himself with the formative energies of the world.12

The formative energies of nature extended now to art were exemplified in the process of crystallization, very often referred to in the period of art nouveau and immediately after. Following the idealistic vision of creativity, the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl writes, ‘All artistic creation is thus essentially nothing other than a competition with nature [ … ] And the fundamental law according to which nature forms dead matter is that of crystallisation’13 (Figure 2.3). Crystallization is seen by Riegl as a cosmic principle which brings together nature and art. In the opening ceremony of the exhibition Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst,onthe Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, (1901) a ‘prophet’ exhibiting a large crystal recited, ‘This is the symbol of a new life, in this sign it is disclosed, young souls, young year, the time has arrived, you have not waited in vain.’14 The symbol of the crystal in the early twentieth century plays the role of mediator in the battle against historicism; it is a symbolic transmitter in the move towards abstraction as the revelation/constitution of absolute truth. In the retrospective assessment of the early avant-garde, influenced very strongly by French cubism, Ozenfant writes:

On the whole and in spite of personal coefficients one can detect a tendency which might be described metaphorically as a tendency towards the crystal. The crystal in nature is one of the phenomena that touch us most, because it clearly exemplifies its movement towards geometrical organisation. Nature sometimes reveals to us how its forms are built up by the interplay of internal and external forces. The crystal grows and stops growing, in accordance with the theoretical forms of geometry; man takes delight in these forms

2.3 W. Hablik, The Crystal Palace in the Sea, 1914

24 The primitive as modern problem

because he finds in them what seems to be a confirmation for his abstract geometrical concepts. Nature and the human mind find common ground in the crystal as they do in the cell and as they do wherever order is so perceptible to the human senses that it confirms those laws which human reason loves to propound in order to explain nature. In genuine cubism there is something organic, which proceeds outwards from within.15

The process of crystallization is the clearest manifestation of the primitive mode of creativity that ‘proceeds outwards from within’. The ‘proceeding outwards from within’ shows that primitivism is not a return to origins but an attempt to be original, to be the origins. Paul Klee again: ‘I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing about Europe, knowing no pictures, entirely without impulse, almost in an original state … one wanted to seize life at its lowest levels, at its origins.’16 This tendency can be summarized by a typical expressionist aim to reach the secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. It is important to emphasize that primitivism is not necessarily primitive, nor is it a primitive art. It is a search for the primordial, essential and original mode of creativity. ‘I draw and paint’, writes Emil Nolde, ‘to grasp something of the primal essence’.17 The child-like quality of many expressionists’ paintings, cannot be described as primitive; they are a result of a highly sophisticated form of primitivism. This is quite clearly reflected in the admiration for the paintings of Henri Rousseau, which Kandinsky describes as ‘magic realism’. He writes: ‘Henri Rousseau, who can be designated the father of this realism, has shown the way … his versatile talent is, for the moment, the most important to us’.18

Primitivism as a form of emancipation

The admiration of Henri Rousseau, as well as the very much discussed inspiration derived from primitive art, did not serve as real inspiration but rather as a confirmation of the Primitivist artist’s own effort. Paul Klee makes this very clear when he says,

If my pictures sometimes make a primitive impression, it is because of my discipline in reducing everything to a few steps. It is only economy, or if you like, the highest professional sensitivity; in fact the precise opposite of the primitive.19

This statement is a clear illustration of the fundamental difference between primitivism and the primitive. It shows that primitivism is an artificial modern phenomenon, while the primitive is a vague residuum of the Enlightenment

25 Dalibor Vesely

and Romantic understanding of the past, of the origins and of the elementary. In the final judgement the primitive can be seen as an external understanding of its own nature, as something to approximate or imitate. The essence of primitivism, on the other hand, is in the creative process, motivated by the search for originality and universality. What makes the primitive and primitivism truly primitive are not external characteristics, but the negation of history, inherited tradition and culture. If we accept this understanding of primitivism, then we can find it in areas of modern art and architecture where it is not apparent or expected, for instance in Malevich, who describes the non-figurative elements of his paintings as ‘the primitive marks on the body of the aboriginal man,20 or in some contemporary high-tech structures that follow the principles of elementary growth or movement, for example the work of Calatrava. A good example illustrating the nature of modern primitivism is the work of Hans Scharoun. In his Berlin ‘Philharmonie’, the main hall was no doubt deeply influenced by the history of music auditoria and yet Scharoun describes the process of its making as a direct dialogue with the nature of music and with the nature of space seen as a landscape. He writes:

The construction follows the pattern of a landscape with the auditorium seen as a valley and there at its bottom is the orchestra surrounded by a sprawling vineyard climbing the sides of its neighbouring hills. The ceiling, resembling a tent, encounters the landscape like a skyscape. 21

The indeterminate, changing perceptual structure of the concert hall is held together by the constructive imagination of the architect and the musical experience of the audience. It is interesting to see how early Scharoun anticipated the close link between his own imagination and public experience. In one of his drawings for the ‘Glass Chain’, he illustrates the place and the role of the artist among the people, his ability to embody and represent their will and elevate it to the higher level of what he calls a ‘spiritual’ existence.22 The image can be complemented by his statement: ‘Do we reach pure creativity through reflection, through knowledge? No – man is the centre.’23 What is meant by ‘man’ here is, no doubt, the architect himself as a creative genius. It is a sign of the avant-garde mentality that the architect sees himself as a sole agent, fully responsible for everything related to creativity. This illusion culminates in the belief that the world is essentially his own world. Everything created under such conditions is bound to be unique and yet claims are often made for a universal validity of the result. This paradox can be sustained only by a self-centred culture, prepared to share this paradox as a norm. The same paradox illustrates the nature of modern primitivism, which is

26 The primitive as modern problem

closely linked with a subjective mode of creativity, while at the same time it characterizes the common culture of the whole epoch. The concentration on private experience, imagination and fantasy contradicts the very nature of architecture, which is always open to a shared public culture; and yet in some recent tendencies architecture is created in a way similar to surrealist automatism or to the automatism of action painting. The architects of the Coop Himmelblau Partnership are very much aware of this affinity when they say ‘We conceive of architecture which would engage complicated human procedures and psyches and which would represent a personal statement, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses implied – not unlike the way art is made.’ The main precondition of such an approach is a full emancipation from the historical precedents and the continuity of tradition. In the author’s own words:

It is a kind of release from fixed ideas … and for that reason we never talk about architecture for fear that inhibitions about what is possible functionally or what others have done before us in similar circumstances will creep in … We have to be self-monitoring, or else we could get side-tracked. We avoid analysis, but remain aware of our bodies and our hearts.24

This highly introverted approach brings us not only to the heart of modern primitivism but also to the very essence of surrealism. In surrealism, as we know, creativity is oriented towards the pre-reflective-unconscious reality. The surrealists were deeply convinced that man had lost his vital contact with reality, and that his primordial links with nature are as important for his social and cultural life as is a dream for the life of the individual. They also believed that the return of culture to its archaic origins was as crucial for the sanity of mankind as is a return to oneself in a dream. The primordial or primitive side of surrealism is well illustrated in Max Ernst’s The Eye of Silence (Figure 2.4). The landscape in the painting is not a vision of an ordinary human eye but rather, of an insect surrounded by a threatening nature. The latent meaning of the painting is very rich but cryptic. The significance of the single eye refers to the subhuman because it is less than two and, given its location, it alludes to the extra human powers that are in mythology incarnated in Cyclops. Architecture was not a very critical subject for the surrealists and yet they found some already existing buildings fascinating. One of them was the ‘Palais Ideal’ of the postman Cheval, who became for the surrealists what Henri Rousseau was for the cubists. ‘What has always passionately summoned me in such works’, wrote André Breton, ‘is their explosive disdain, their self-generation entirely outside the cultural line assigned to our epoch’.25 In his autobiography Cheval describes the origins of the idea of the ‘Palais’: ‘I have built a palais, chateau or grottoes in a dream. I can’t express it very well, but it was so pretty,

27 Dalibor Vesely

2.4 Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943 Source: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006 picturesque that for ten years it remained ingrained in my memory and I couldn’t shake it off.’26 The decision to build the Palais, Cheval describes as being initiated by accident, coming across a bizarre stone on the road:

It was a sculpture of bizarre shape that it would be impossible for man to imitate; it represented all species of animals and all species of caricatures. I said to myself if nature can make sculptures, I could make masonry and architecture, this is my dream.27

The ultimate goal of the surrealists was to grasp the mystery of life revealed through automatism as the spontaneity of desire, and the mystery of the world revealed through objective chance as the spontaneity of nature manifested in crystal. The role of crystal in surrealists’ thinking appears in Breton’s short comment: ‘The great secret of the environment of things and of our own freedom in relation to these things can be discovered in this way: the crystal possesses the key to every liberty.’28 The vision of the crystal appears at the end of the surrealist exploration of the human unconscious, at the end of a journey which started with the interpretation of dreams, hallucinations and automatic writing in the interior, went through the city, discovering there objective chance and the poetics of encounters and led finally to the subterranean world of the cave, to discover there the ultimate mystery of creation in the crystal. The crystal became an essence and substitute of everything that can be seen in nature and also an inspiration to move beyond imitation and perception to the level of pure creation.

28 The primitive as modern problem

This brings us back to our earlier discussion of the process of crystallization as a paradigm of primitivism and the role of crystal in the art of the twentieth century. The vision of the crystal played a decisive role already in art nouveau, later in expressionism, cubism and surrealism, but became most conspicuous in the architecture of expressionism. So far, the less-known beginnings of expressionist architecture in Prague are, from our point of view, most revealing and interesting. The unusual and in many ways provocatively unique treatment of the architectural body and space – the use of crystalline forms, the geometrical articulation of surfaces and the attempt to reduce spatial problems to the problems of plane or relief – was motivated by the attempt to achieve an emancipation from illusionistic perspectival representation, to overcome historicism and to grasp the ‘truth’ of reality on its most primordial level (Figure 2.5). The architect Pavel Janak, one of the main protagonists of the movement, outlined the main principles of the new architecture in his seminal text ‘The Prism and the Pyramid’.29 The text is based on the assumption, taken mostly from Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy) and other sources, that European architecture is defined by two traditions, one classical in the south, represented by horizontality and verticality exemplified by the prism, the other Christian in the north, represented by forces that challenge the inertia of matter and are exemplified most clearly in gothic and baroque art.30 The best example of forces that move matter beyond its natural state is in crystallization, not influenced by matter and gravity. The oblique, diamond-like shaped planes of the crystal represent a movement that transforms the passive natural reality into an animated, more abstract and thus a spiritual reality. The highest

2.5 J. Chochol, Villa in Prague-Vysehrad, detail, 1912–13. Source: Dalibor Vesely

29 Dalibor Vesely

2.6 Daniel Libeskind, Victoria & Albert Museum, extension, 1998

form of spiritually abstracted matter is the pyramid. The content of the text illustrates very well the general tendency of primitivism to reduce the whole body of culture to the most elementary generic principles from which, it was believed, the new culture would grow. It may be interesting, as a final point, to see just visually the spectrum of different forms of primitivism manifested in the phenomenon of crystallization, from the first romantic precedents through the symbolists and art nouveau examples to its continuity in cubism and expressionism and its reappearance in contemporary deconstructivism and neo-expressionism (Figure 2.6). The language of contemporary authors is very often too obscure and it is necessary therefore to read between the lines to understand their true meaning. Daniel Libeskind has this to say about his own way of thinking and approach:

Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be. Architecture as nonexistent reality is a symbol, which, in the process of consciousness, leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch an equivalent depth of originality.31

The depth of originality in the text coincides quite clearly with the depth of contemporary primitivism.

30 The primitive as modern problem

Conclusion

The primitive in the form of primitivism is not a peripheral or secondary phenomenon. It grew out of the depth of modern culture of which it is the main characteristic. The influence of primitive art and other external influences was only marginal and can be seen more as a confirmation of the already existing tendency rather than as a generative influence. This is illustrated well by Picasso: ‘The African sculptures that hang around my studio are more witnesses than models.’32 The current use and misuse of the term primitive should be seen in terms of its shallow and deep meaning. The shallow meaning refers usually to the origins, return to nature, more elementary, primitive way of life or to the earlier stages of civilization. The deep meaning is what I have tried to outline in this paper. Before we indulge in tracing the shallow manifestations of the primitive, we should remember that such indulgence is not only futile, but could also be dangerous. There is probably nothing more dangerous in our time than a one-dimensional cultivation of the primitive, which sooner or later encounters what has been ignored but cannot be eliminated; that is, the given state of our civilization, its science and technology, its level of cultural development and general level of rationality. It is certainly not very clever to ignore the emancipatory tendency of the primitive, which leaves behind a large body of culture. The characteristic expressionist motto: ‘I would rather be barbarized than intellectualized’,33 can serve as a sobering reminder of the consequences that we have seen so many times during the last century and can see still today. We do not as yet understand fully the nature of these consequences, and what is really happening in the cultural space defined by the complementarity of modern primitivism and highly intellectualized culture.

Notes

1 Falcone, La Nuova Vaga et Dilettevole Villa, Brescia 1564, preface, fol. i; in J. S. Ackerman, The Villa, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, p.113. 2 R. Bentmann and M. Muller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture, trans. by T. Spence and D. Cranem, London: Humanities Press, 1992, p. 113, n168. 3 B. Rupprecht, ‘Villa, zur Geschichte eines Ideals’ in Probleme der Kunstwissenschaft, vol. II, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1966, p. 244. 4 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 68. 5 John Dryden, The conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: in two parts, London: pr. by T. N. for H. Herringman, 1672. 6 Joseph Banks, Supplément au voyage de M. de Bougainville, ou Journal d’un voyage autour du monde fait par MM. Banks et Solander (Paris 1772). 7 James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh 1774), p. 3. 8 J. R. Constantine, ‘The Ignoble Savage, an Eighteenth Century Stereotype’, Phylon, 27, pp. 171–9.

31 Dalibor Vesely

9 Philip Thicknesse, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse: Late Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort, and Unfortunately Father to George Touchet, Baron Audley (London: printed for the author 1788), p. 24. 10 E. Grassi. ‘Ingenium und Scharfsinn’ in Die Macht der Fantasie, Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1984, pp. 65–70. 11 ‘Genius’, in R. G. Saisselin, The Rules of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart, Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970, pp. 89–96; ‘Genie’ in P. E. Knabe, Schlüsselbegriffe des kunsttheoretischen Denkens in Frankreich, Dusseldorf: Verlag L. Schwann, 1972, pp. 204–38. 12 A. K. Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art, Old Woking, Surrey: Gesham Books, 1979, p. 155. 13 Alois Riegl in Karl M. Swoboda and Otto Pacht (eds), Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Graz. privately printed 1966), p. 22. 14 Georg Fuchs, ‘Das Zeichen’, in Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst. Die Ausstellung der Künstler- Kolonie in Darmstadt 1901. Festschrift (Munich 1901). 15 Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, La Peinture Moderne, Paris: Cres, 1925, pp. 137– 8. 16 J. Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye. The Notebooks of Paul Klee, R. Mannheim (trans.), London: Lund Humphries, 1961, p. 95. 17 Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kampfe, Berlin: J. Bard, 1931, p. 177. 18 Wassily Kandinsky in Essays uber Künst und Künstler, 2n edn, M. Bill (ed.), Bern-Bumpliz: Benteli- Verlag, 1963, pp. 42–3. 19 Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, p. 451. 20 Kasimir Malevich, ‘Suprematism’ in Modern Artists on Art, L. Robert (ed.), New Jersey: Herbert, Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 96. 21 Peter Blundell-Jones, Hans Scharoun, London: Academy Editions, 1995, p. 178. 22 E. Janofske, Architektur-Räume, Wiesbaden: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1984, p. 35. 23 Ibid., pp. 137–8. 24 Coop Himmelblau, Blau Box, London: Architectural Association, 1988, p. 16. 25 André Breton, Arcane 17, Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1971, p. 51. Originally written 1944. 26 Dalibor Vesely, ‘Surrealism, Myth and Modernity’, in Architectural Design: 2–3 (Surrealism and Architecture) London: AD Profiles 11, 1978, p. 92. 27 Ibid. 28 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, p. 205. 29 Pavel Janak, ‘Hranol a pyramida’ in Umelecky mesicnik, 1 (1911/12), pp. 162–70. 30 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Michael Bullock (trans.), London, 1953. 31 Daniel Libeskind, ‘Çountersign’, AD Academy Editions Architectural Monographs 1991, 16: 110. 32 Florent Fels, Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, 4 August 1923, 42: 2. 33 A. K. Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art, p. 245.

32 Chapter 3

Origins redefined A tale of pigs and primitive huts

Mari Hvattum

Eighteenth-century origin theory, as far as architecture is concerned, is somewhat like the story of the three little pigs. The first little pig built his house of straw, and was eaten by the wolf for his foolishness. The second little pig built his house of sticks. It withstood a little longer, but in the end the wolf huffed and puffed and blew it all down, and alas, the pig was eaten. The third little pig, however, was a sensible pig. He built his house of bricks, and saved his life. Permanence pays off; only with the arrival of the enduring and the monumental, can pigs – and architecture – rest safely (Figure 3.1). This little tale mirrors neoclassical theories of the origin of architecture in a remarkably precise way. The notion of the origin of architecture as a gradual evolution from precarious, inarticulate and primitive structures into a stable, permanent form is echoed in virtually all eighteenth-century origin tales, of which there are many. William Chambers’s Treatise of Civil Architecture from 1759, for instance, could well have served as an illustration for the pig-tale’s progression from straw to sticks to stone (Figure 3.2). Quatremère de Quincy introduced a slightly different version of this tripartite origin theory, in which the cave, the tent and the hut were seen as the gradually evolving origin-types of architecture. Yet the point remains that according to neoclassical theory, the history of architecture was founded on permanence – literally on monumentality, in the sense of ‘that which endures’. It was within this intellectual construct that the story of the primitive hut found its place in enlightenment thinking. The primitive hut was the precursor to architecture’s life-saving permanence in stone. There are several interesting assumptions underlying the enlightenment obsession with origins. One such assumption has to do with the autonomy

33 Mari Hvattum

3.1 ‘Then I’ll huff, and puff, and blow your house down!’ from The Three Little Pigs

of the architectural work. Just like the tale of the three pigs, neoclassical origin theory harbours a curious claim to autonomy on behalf of architecture. Estab- lishing the ossified hut as an eternally valid paradigm, it construes architecture as an imitation of an original, architectural type. As Abbé Laugier wrote, ‘All the splendours of architecture ever conceived have been modelled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that … true perfection is achieved’1 (Figure 3.3). This was 1753 and, for the first time, the meaning of architecture was seen as intrinsic to the work itself, uncon- nected to issues of representation, situation or action. As Caroline van Eck comments in her discussion of Laugier:

The novelty in Laugier’s approach … lies in his attempt to break with the Renaissance tradition of mimesis, and define architecture not as a civic art, whose meaning lies in the decorous representation of social, religious or philosophical values, but as the material art of construction.2

In eighteenth-century thinking on architecture, as in eighteenth-century aesthetics in general, the work is legitimized by claiming for itself an absolute autonomy. From this point of view architecture is about architecture. It imitates its own types, adheres to its own laws, and can be judged by its own, intrinsic 3.2 The development criteria – criteria which were set in stone in the eldest little pig’s primitive hut. of architecture This monumentalizing notion of the origin of architecture has been Source: William an influential one, deeply impacting on the twentieth-century discourse and Chambers, Treatise of Civil Architecture practice of architecture. ‘Modern architecture had to go the hard way’, wrote (1759)

34 Origins redefined

35 Mari Hvattum

3.3 ‘Allegory of Architecture Returning to its Natural Model’, Charles Eisen Source: Frontispiece to M.-A. Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (2nd edn 1755)

Siegfried Giedion in 1948; ‘it had to reconquer the most primitive thing as if nothing had ever been done before’.3 This reconquest, of course, was a reconquest of a pure and original architectural type. It was the eldest little pig’s house in stone, now rebuilt as a concrete slab system, representing nothing but pure, primitive permanence. Postmodern notions of archetype would come to echo the modernist dream of capturing the primitive essence of architecture, and would – just like its modernist predecessor – locate such essence in architectural form itself. Even the deconstructivist rebellion against the immovable and monumental involuntarily confirms this idea, in so far as it substitutes the ephemeral for the immovable, yet accepts the structure of the dichotomy. In contemporary discourse, theorists such as Hans Ibelings identify aesthetic autonomy as a key feature of contemporary architecture, thus testifying to the continued legacy of the enlightenment conception.4 However, parallel to this monumentalizing history runs a different line of argument. It is a less continuous line, more like a trace made up from certain moments of resistance; resistance, that is, to the pig-tale’s smug morals and its automatic assertion that architecture originated with the first building. In the following, I want to examine some such moments of resistance, located in the work of mid-nineteenth-century theorists such as Gustav Klemm, Gottfried Semper and Carl Bötticher.

36 Origins redefined

The primitive hut reconstructed

The resistance of which I am talking emerged, not from architecture, but from other fields, in particular the young discipline of anthropology. Harry Francis Mallgrave has explored Semper’s intellectual debt to the anthropologist, Gustav Klemm,5 who wrote extensively on the origin of human society, including the origin of architecture. At first glance he seems to have accepted Quatremère’s tripartite origin theory, reiterating the types of the cave, the tent and the hut. Yet, Klemm‘s Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (1843–51) is both radical and original, as a closer examination will reveal. He did, indeed, refer to Quatremère’s three types, yet he did not see them as the origins of architecture. This ‘origin’, in Klemm’s mind, was situated not in buildings nor building types, but in a human urge, from which all art is born. As Klemm puts it, ‘man has the urge to manifest his experiences externally, and to adorn his environment with these representations’.6 He called this essential human need for representation a Kunsttrieb – an urge for art – a phenomenon that went through several historical stages parallel to the general development of human society. In its earliest form, the Kunsttrieb came to expression in phenomena like knots and dance, both rhythmical representations of temporal order. These primitive constructions were ‘mimetic narratives’ of the life of the nation, wrote Klemm and, as such, they were primary vehicles for man’s orientation in the world.7 Only in more advanced stages of cultural development did these simple means of representation fuse into architecture, ‘the adornment of these holy places called forth art, namely architecture, dance, music’.8 Seeing architecture essentially as reification of ephemeral decoration, Klemm radically overthrows neoclassical origin-theory with its search for an original building and its predilection for permanence. Klemm’s gradually reified Kunsttrieb opens, instead, a story of architecture in which buildings echo acts which echo urges. Architecture, from this perspective, is a mimetic response to a universal human urge to communicate and coexist with one’s fellow beings.

Carl Bötticher: Der Baumkultus der Hellenen

A scholar who might have sought inspiration in Klemm’s ideas about sacred adornment was the Berlin art historian, Carl Bötticher. Leaving aside Bötticher’s ambiguous tectonics for a moment, I want to focus on one of his lesser-known works, Der Baumkultus der Hellenen from 1856 (Figure 3.4). This little book contains a very similar idea to the one we have just encountered in Klemm – that it was ‘the adornment of these holy places’ that ‘called forth’ architecture. The origins of architecture, far from being found in architecture itself, were to be found in the ephemeral arrangements of worship.9 Bötticher criticized traditional

37 Mari Hvattum

3.4 ‘The Tree of Artemis’ Source: Karl Boetticher, Der Baumkultus der Hellenen (1856) art history for having ignored this link. The obsession with style and appearance, he argued, had led to a neglect of the purpose for which man builds. To ignore this purpose is to ignore the very meaning of the Greek temple, for in the eyes of the ancients you could not divorce ritual practice from the building or the artefact accommodating it.10 Cultic practice and its physical setting formed one indivisible knot of meaning and should be studied accordingly. Der Baumkultus der Hellenen was precisely such a study, uncovering the hidden links between ritual and artefact in ancient Greek tree worship (Figure 3.5). The question of how this interest in the ephemeral squares with Bötticher’s earlier insistence on tectonic autonomy would provide a fascinating object of study. Here, however, it is enough to conclude that with his 1856 publication, Bötticher radicalizes Klemm’s implied criticism of neoclassical origin-theory, and situates praxis back at the centre of architectural discourse.

Semper and the poetics of architecture

This brings us to another important theorist of the nineteenth century, Gottfried Semper. Semper repeatedly criticized neoclassical theory for its obsession with the primitive hut and its idea of architecture as an imitation of itself; yet he kept returning to the topic of origins, clearly with something in mind other than the original abodes of Laugier or Quatremère. Semper insisted instead that the origins of architecture be sought, not in architectural form itself, but in the preconditions that shaped it; like Klemm, he defined these preconditions, not as archaeological facts but as human urges:

38 Origins redefined

3.5 ‘Tree sacellum with several aedicula’ Source: Karl Boetticher, Der Baumkultus der Hellenen (1856)

We make for ourselves a tiny world in which the cosmic law is evident within the strictest limit, yet complete in itself and perfect in this respect; in such play we satisfy our cosmogonic instinct. The imagination creates these images by presenting, expanding, and adapting natural scenes to our mood, so that we believe ourselves capable of discerning the harmony of the whole in a single event. 11

Art, essentially, is born out of man’s need to make sense of the world. Like Klemm before him, Semper identifies play and ritual as key moments in the ordering process of art. Through these means, Semper tells us, man captures the creative law of nature ‘as it gleams through the real world in the rhythmical sequence of space and time movements’.12 Ritual acts find their corporeal manifestation in the motifs of practical arts: ‘the wreath, a string of pearls, scrolls, round dances … the beat of an oar, and so on’ that Semper identifies as ‘the beginnings out of which music and architecture grew’.13 From its ephemeral beginning in ritual movement, the ordering activity of art is embodied in artistic motifs, and finally fused in works of architecture. Weaving, for instance, is simultaneously a ritual imitation of cyclical time and the technical origin of the wickerwork wall (Figure 3.6). Weaving runs through the history of architecture as a constant motif, yet is continuously transformed and metamorphosed into new guises, a development Semper traces in his famous theory of Bekleidung. With these ideas in mind, we can understand Semper’s fascination with the Caribbean hut. It caught his interest in a crowded Crystal Palace, not as

39 Mari Hvattum

3.6 Egyptian vegetal entanglement Source: Gottfried Semper, Der Stil (1860–3) an original model for architecture, but as an early example of how ephemeral acts of weaving and joining had fused and metamorphosed to form an actual building (Figure 3.7). Semper’s ‘primitive hut’ was not an unequivocal entity but the composite product of four distinct elements – the mound, the hearth, the enclosure and the tectonic structure. These elements, in their turn, originated in four distinct techniques, each with a strong link to ritual practice. This theory was nothing if not radical. Locating the origins of architecture in ritual, Semper overturned the neoclassical notion of architectural origins as an actual or imaginary ‘primitive hut’.14 Rather than looking for the origin of architecture in architectural form, Semper located it in human action. In one of his late essays. he stated this quite explicitly; ‘In a most general way, what is the material and subject matter of all artistic endeavour?’ he asked, and answered: ‘I believe it is man in all his relations and connections to the world.’15 Semper’s notion of art as an ordered embodiment of human action has ancient precedents. Aristotle had touched on something similar, when he wrote that tragedy is ‘not an imitation of men but of actions and of life’.16 Semper’s rethinking of the origins of architecture had, in fact, much in common with Aristotle. Mimesis, in the Greek tradition, was not a copying of something already there, but a creative interpretation of reality as a whole. It was an act of ordering, primarily associated with the rhythmic movement of music and dance.17 For Semper too, art was an ordering activity. His meticulous analysis of techniques and materials in Der Stil was intended to reveal this: the ritual ordering of reality and its slow reification into the motifs of art, craft and architecture. A work of architecture will inevitably echo this origin, presenting a configured ‘image’ of human praxis. This is precisely the kind of mimesis that characterizes the poetic work in an Aristotelian sense. Paul Ricoeur calls it a kind of ‘emplotment’, a gathering of reality into a plot that confers a certain

40 Origins redefined

3.7 ‘The Caribbean Hut’ Source: Gottfried Semper, Der Stil (1860–3) readability to our actions and lives.18 Semper’s musing on the primitive origin of architecture thus constitutes not only a radical critique of enlightenment origin theory but also, in a certain sense, a poetics of architecture, in which the act of building may be seen, not as a formal or structural concern, but as a creative interpretation of human life and action.

Origins redefined

Klemm’s Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte, Bötticher’s Baumkultus and Semper’s Der Stil inaugurate a different kind of architectural history. No longer a history of building types or orders, this is a history of the evolving techniques that brought architecture into being and of the human situations for which buildings were built. It is a history in which the primacy of structure has been given over to surface and where the obsession with stability and form – so characteristic of eighteenth- century neoclassicism – has given way to a new interest in the ephemeral preconditions of form. From this point of view, the ephemeral decoration of the altar, the precarious architecture of the procession, or, in Semper’s words, the ‘haze of the carnival candles’, are not phenomena at the margins of architectural discourse. Rather, the ephemeral constitutes the very essence of architecture, as a primordial example of the mimetic transformation from the ritual act to its built

41 Mari Hvattum

embodiment. At a time when aesthetic autonomy yet again is being hailed as the credo of contemporary architecture, there is reason to heed such seemingly fragile and ephemeral notions. Rather in the spirit of the two littlest pigs we may search for the origin of architecture, not in the immobile permanence of architectural form, but in the urges and acts that call forth such form.

Notes

1 Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture (1753). Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Annie Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977, p. 12. 2 Caroline van Eck, Organicism in Nineteenth Century Architecture, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura: 1994, p. 96. 3 Siegfried Giedion, Fernand Léger and José Louis Sert, ‘9 Points on Monumentality’, Architectural Review, September 1948, p. 126. 4 Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, Rotterdam: NAi, 1998. 5 Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘Gustav Klemm and Gottfried Semper, the meeting of ethnological and architectural theory’, RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Spring 1985, 9: 69–79. 6 Gustav Klemm, Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, vol. 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1843–51, p. 214. 7 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 8 Ibid., p. 23. 9 Introduction to Der Baumkultus der Hellenen nach den gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken dargestellt, Berlin: Weidmann, 1856 pp. 11–17. 10 Ibid., pp. 3–4. 11 Prolegomenon to Der Stil (1860–3), Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, Harry F. Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (trans.), Santa Monica: Getty, 2004, p. 82. 12 Ibid., p. 82. 13 Ibid. 14 This point is elaborated by J. Rykwert in ‘Gottfried Semper and the Conception of Style’, in A. M. Vogt, C. Reble and M. Frölich (eds), Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts., Basel: Birkhäuser, 1976, pp. 68–81. 15 Gottfried Semper, ‘On Architectural Styles’, Zurich lecture, 1869 in The Four Elements of Architec- ture and other Writings Harry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (trans. and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 269. 16 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a. 17 See, for example, L. Golden, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis, Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars, 1992. 18 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 45–51.

42 Chapter 4

The primitive hut Fantasies of survival in an all-white world

Lorens Holm

… what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

As Scott lay dying in his tent, he wrote thirteen letters to his family and coun- trymen in addition to his last diary entries:

For four days we have been unable to leave the tent – the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past … Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale …1

It was a great adventure. It reaffirmed the enduring romance that the English have with Englishness. All the evidence suggests that Scott was deeply fulfilled by his own death. Antarctica marked the last gasp of European expansionist exploration. It was the good fight: conquest without the subjugation of indigenous peoples, exploration without exploitation of the environment, its drives untainted by the lure of economic gain, development, new markets (Figure 4.1).2

43 Lorens Holm

4.1 The last page of Scott’s diary Source: All images reproduced from Robert Falcon Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition, London: Smith Elder & Co., 1913, except where noted otherwise

I will sidestep the question of how or in what ways the Antarctic expedition huts are primitive (what relation do they have to the purist villas of Le Corbusier?) in order to pursue another line of thought. I will focus on the narratives in which they are set. This paper will claim that they – the huts, the tents, the narratives of the explorers – are nothing if not enactments of architecture’s fantasy of origins. I will look at the role of what I call the originary object (which is not exactly the same thing as a primitive hut), in the intersecting narratives of exploration (Scott, Amundsen) and narratives of the primitive hut (Vitruvius, Laugier, Le Corbusier). Hostile conditions impose a kind of primitivism upon the subject. Hostile conditions produce the modernist tabula rasa that allows anything – and nothing – to happen. The narrative of the primitive hut is the site where fantasy meets the ground zero of survival: the fantasy of being first, the fantasy of surviving, the fantasy of death. Fantasy is a defence against failure; the myth of origins is where the formal and aesthetic arguments of architecture and European conquest expire.

44 The primitive hut

Scott’s story

Most of us are familiar with Scott’s epic. Scott and his men died on the way back from the pole, having been trumped by a month by Amundsen. Scott’s polar party set off from their wintering quarters at Cape Evans in late October 1911 (the beginning of the south polar summer), and arrived at the pole on 18 January 1912; they stayed long enough to confirm Amundsen’s bearings, take a couple of photographs, and – thoroughly demoralized – began the 800-mile walk home. Two died en route. The remaining three were tent-bound for more than a week in a snowstorm, and died for lack of food, water, and fuel, within 11 miles of a supply depot they had laid on the way out, the so-called ‘one-ton depot’, which was itself only 100 miles from base. Scott’s last journal entry was of 29 March. The tent with frozen bodies and texts were found by a search party the following spring (Figure 4.2). Beside the bitter circumstances, what makes Scott’s story so intense were his journals and letters. In Scott’s narrative, south polar exploration becomes an originary gesture that is confirmed by current (perhaps misplaced) nostalgic interest in the huts.3 A group of white, middle-class professional men march in the name of their country into a featureless whiteness. Their sledges carry heraldic banners. Along the way they test their physical and moral fibre to its limits. Their white skin is burnt black by exposure. Human nature – or rather, their natures – are cast into high relief by this tabula rasa. There is no thing to distract them from these truths, for their destination is a cartographic fiction on a featureless white plateau. The plateau is oceanic. The pole is not found by orien- teering but by navigation. To arrive there is to arrive at nothing, with no place to

4.2 The south polar plateau with a plan of Scott’s route to the pole

45 Lorens Holm

occupy. The South Pole turns out to be a non-place, to which they were not even entitled priority. A comparison between Amundsen’s and Scott’s reactions on reaching the pole makes clear their different abilities to mobilize narrative in their favour. They both knew that what was at issue was how their deeds were represented to a waiting world, and that deeds done in a vacuum are meaningless. Scott’s interpretation of the race as a projection of Englishness was shared by the milieu within which it was conceived and received. In an address to the Royal Geographical Society, Scott’s sponsor, Sir Clement Markham, described Scott’s controversial decision to man-haul:

Captain Scott therefore resolved that the journey from the foot of the glacier to the pole, a distance of 1,200 miles there and back, should be done by himself and his men dragging their own provisions and constant weights. This is the true British way … In my mind, no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of the fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.4

Scott situated his deeds in a context of heroic failure that people could understand; Amundsen regarded the problem of communicating his success as largely a question of getting to the nearest telegraph point. Amundsen celebrated his victory robustly; Scott bitterly protested the events that brought Amundsen to the pole ahead of him. Yet Amundsen can stand at the South Pole and regret not being at the North, and Scott can with his dying hand still play to the image of class and country. Amundsen had embarked on the expedition ostensibly to go to the North Pole, and turned his ship around mid-route. Standing at the South Pole (Figure 4.3), he wrote:

I cannot say – even though I know it would have a much greater effect – that I stood at my life’s goal … I believe no human being has stood so diametrically opposed to the goal of his wishes as I did on that occasion. The regions around the North Pole had attracted me since the days of my childhood, and so I found myself at the South Pole. Can anything more perverse be conceived?5

We can ask after the object that so eluded them, how it functioned in their narrative. The object is given its definitive treatment in the theory of the drives. This is where psychoanalytic theory has its greatest speculative reach. In Freud, each drive has an object, the attainment of which leads to satisfaction. Drive is

46 The primitive hut

4.3 A sledging party on the south polar plateau

sometimes translated as instinct, but it needs to be distinguished from animal instinct, and may be understood as goal-directed behaviour generally. The drive is the flywheel of the psyche. Lacan advanced drive theory from a close reading of Freud’s paper ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in which Freud contemplates a death drive. All psychic activity goes toward death. In Lacan, the end point of life is modelled as an object, objet a. This psychical object organizes the subject’s life: the subject’s discourse focuses on it; the discourse always screens him/her from it. It thus organizes the subject’s life by not being there, which is why Lacan sometimes refers to it as ‘the lost object’ (think how the imminent non-arrival of the Apocalypse organizes the lives of fundamentalists). It is always already lost. Our lives are experienced as a succession of objects, one displacing the next, but they are all pretenders to the psychical throne. The drive ends in its final object, death (the object of life is death), which is not so much the object finally attained as the cessation of all objects in the cessation of the drive.6 We have seen how the pole is given the form of a place in the language of exploration, even though it is a cartographic fiction. When the pole becomes the object of a race – also a construction of the narrative – arguably neither of them attained it: Scott because he was second, Amundsen because he was incapable of enjoying it. Finally, it becomes the intractable point of Scott’s death. We might describe this as the migration of the object across the surface of the narrative. Lacan’s diagram of the visual field models the relation between subject–image–object, in so far as the drive manifests visually (Figure 4.4). The object of the drive, objet a, is shown by the gaze – more a position than an object. The diagram resembles the diagram of perspective in which an image of an object is projected onto a picture plane from a projection point occupied by

47 Lorens Holm

the viewer, but it can be understood more generally to define the shifting relations between a subject and its object. The image need not be a visual image. The triangulating lines are equally lines of sight and insight. These syntactical lines of thought position the object within the symbolic matrix of the subject’s world. The image is as much a source of knowledge of the object, as it is a defence against it. We do not experience our own death, at least not in any way communicable to others; or more precisely, not in any way that others can communicate it back to us (we are always first at our death/we never get there). Scott’s last letters project past the point of his death to the imagined reception of his death by others (a retrospective view of his own death). They are not a little narcissistic. They become incredibly eloquent, melodramatic even. Eloquence is a symptom of the point where language fails. Ponting, the expedition photographer, notes that when the polar party start the return journey, Scott’s diary entries register anxiety almost every day. They also become repeti- tious: reports of the same sledging conditions every day. In psychoanalytic terms, anxiety is a symptom of proximity to death, and repetition, of an encounter with the real (there is nothing more real than one’s death).7 By late March, the horror of his death no longer registers in his text. Instead, he writes letters which project an image of his men as heroes in a world that will take care of their families, as if proximity to the object had become so unbearable that his language was no longer able to engage in any meaningful way with the health and safety of his men, and instead covers it with a melodramatic image. Drama segues into melo.8

4.4 Lacan’s diagram of the visual field Source: reproduced from Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1981, with the kind permission of Norton

48 The primitive hut

Le Corbusier’s story

The reason for spending so much time with the way narrative constructs its lost object (pole as cartographic fiction, object of a race no one won, and death) is because a similar form of migration and screening occurs in the iterations of the primitive hut myth. Le Corbusier’s version of the myth has several affinities to Scott’s narrative. In Vers une Architecture, he writes ‘Primitive man has brought his chariot to a stop, he decides that here shall be his native soil’. This is a narrative of colonization as much as it is a narrative of the first architecture. It repeats Scott’s obsession with marking out a path through uncharted territory, in which the charting and the path are part of the same gesture. This narrative opens the chapter ‘Regulating lines’. Regulating lines are the geometry that harmonize the elements of the plan and elevations. Placing the discussion of regulating lines behind a façade of originary colonization (‘here shall be his native soil’), tends to naturalize them as innate to man and the universe. When Le Corbusier returns to the question of regulating lines in subsequent chapters, he waxes lyrical, he begins to soar. Scott resorted to melodrama when the proximity of his death became unbearable. Le Corbusier’s aesthetics is about to founder, and if he does not know it, his text does.

You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart … and I say ‘This is beautiful.’ This is Architecture. Art enters in.9

The text repeats this ‘Ode to Building’ almost verbatim, twice. If we trace the path of the object across the discourse, we shall see that – as in the Scott/Amundsen narrative – it is efficacious by virtue of eluding it. For Vitruvius and Alberti, the hut is a historical but insignificant beginning, the aftermath of a fire. The primitive hut is simply when building began; the construction of an aesthetic edifice appears elsewhere in their texts. In his Essai sur l’architecture (1753) Laugier makes it clear that he is not talking about a real object, but the product of a thought experiment: ‘Let us look at man in his primitive state …’. It is a symbolic object, a model for aesthetic judgement: ‘it is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided’.10 In Le Corbusier’s text, the hut has drifted toward the imaginary. The narrative simply projects an image of an object, although an object and a discipline lie behind it. The symbolic object is found elsewhere in Le Corbusier, in his maison dom-ino, conceived in 1914 and not so much an image (what’s there to look at?) as a prescription for thought and design. Although he does not call it ‘primitive’ or ‘hut’, it is the twentieth-century counterpart to Laugier’s hut and, like Laugier’s, it is stripped to its essential thought-elements: slabs, columns, an asymmetric geometry.11

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By the time the story makes it into Le Corbusier’s text, it begins to sound trite, and we have to ask what could drive a thoroughly modern man to reproduce such naïveté, let alone repeat it (repetition is a disturbance of language, a stutter). What is so melodramatic about aesthetics?12 Aesthetics is the central tenet of architecture, its proper core. All the rest is peripheral (in Laugier’s terms, all the rest is introduced by ‘licence’ or ‘caprice’) – construction, law, the pro-forma of practice. Yet, aesthetics is exactly where the discipline cannot account for itself. Aesthetics is the soft centre, the sore spot or lesion, in the well-formed discipline. There is, finally, no answer to: why columns, not pilasters; why the straight axis, not the meander; why the strip window, not the vertical window; why early Jim Stirling, not late Jim Stirling? We have all had these sorts of disastrous conversations, usually with non-architects (this is where we are usually called arrogant). They always start amicably enough, but everyone comes away feeling that they were trapped. Once outside the cultivated coterie of the school, not even disagreement is possible. There is a sense that anyone can say anything and that anything is possible because the conversation has lost its bearings. It is, finally, a question of language, a recognition that aesthetic precepts are a matter of speaking the same language. One of the effects of the school is to form a common language so that disagreement is possible. The anxiety of these dinner conversations is not that you like what I do not, but that language is failing; that the common points of reference born of language are beginning to slip and even such basic articulations as the same and the different begin to fade. If language fails, the possibility of reference to an objective world fails. The purpose of the primitive hut (at least in post-Renaissance versions of the myth) is to vindicate the aesthetic claims of architectural discourse either by naturalizing them, or by demonstrating their axiomatic logic. This purpose is at odds with how it functions. The Tahitian hut cannot, as a material and historical beginning, embody timeless principles. The symbolic object that embodies these principles – Laugier’s thought experiment, Maison Dom-ino – is consensual and as such, cannot demonstrate logical priority. The imaginary object, Le Corbusier’s tent, has a rhetorical force (the tent was derived from Moses’ tabernacle in the desert – nothing like the Word of God to ballast an argument); but as a fantasy, it cannot ground the discourse in nature or logic. It relates to discourse like a façade thrown over a disgruntled plan, to hide its lack of resolution. This does not mean that Tahitian huts or Maison Dom-ino are forbidden, but only that when we incorporate them in our designs, we are not using them as primitive huts but as something else. Nor does it mean that architecture is a lost cause, but only that we must acknowledge a constitutive lack in its aesthetics. The lack of the object keeps discourse open to interpretation. The recovery of a real first hut (no precedents) that embodied

50 The primitive hut

architecture’s aesthetic, would be the death of architecture: it would end our ability to say anything speculative about architecture.

Space: identity

What primitive conditions? What return? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud was referring to the unmediated drives, before fulfilment of the drives was prevented by the forms of civilization. Think: unbounded sexual and aggressive energy. Civilization is constituted of all the ways the drive is bound into a structured life, by goals, careers, law, art, war. It would be a mistake to attribute to Freud the thesis that you could strip away civilization to arrive at its origins in the pure state of the drive, for without the object, the drive would cease to coalesce into recognizable forms and would disperse into nothingness – rather like the south polar plateau. Origin, for Freud, is not a starting point, but a dynamic interaction between drive and its repression, like the way origin in Darwin’s Origin of the Species was not an ape, but the process of evolution. Scott and his men do not disperse into whiteness – this would be tantamount to psychic collapse – they bring their identities with them. They brought heraldic banners. Scott’s hut was organized to reflect the naval chain of command. When things became desperate, Scott’s text projected an image of Englishness as a life-and-death struggle against emptiness, onto the Antarctic tabula rasa.A page of writing, a long trek to nowhere, photographs of exposure-blackened faces that resist the white plateau; all these are essays in identity, essays against the dissolution of the spatial subject (Figure 4.5).

4.5 The exposure- blackened face of Petty Officer Forde

51 Lorens Holm

What is primitive about Scott’s narrative? Not the harsh environment. Nor that he leaves behind civilization. The narrative exposes the primitive conditions of identity, what has to happen in order for you to be you. Identity is a matter of projection. It involves a screen and requires a certain sort of reflective space that is not the visual space of architecture. Your image screens its object, death (think of this next time you stand before a mirror, contemplating your age). You have to be held away from your image, in order for it to function. An image, an object, the lines between. We need to revise how we think about space in the light of the psychoanalytic account of identity. We need to loosen the hegemony of perspective space. Although Lacan’s apparatus resembles the perspective diagram, and perspective space may be taken to be the conscious form of space, the space defined by the distribution of subject, image and object, is unacknowledged in architectural discourse and in Scott’s narrative of identity. These texts describe a line through the landscape; Lacan’s diagram describes the space of consciousness, an extension without measure, that precedes the spatial and temporal distances of architecture and makes them possible. The astounding thing is that visual space is itself a projection upon the screen. This is where the intersection of architecture and psychoanalysis becomes really speculative. This does not mean that the visual space of architecture is ‘flat’, somehow two-dimensional; but only that the space ‘in your head’ is always one dimension greater, always n + 1. The space in your head is more robustly dimensional, than the space ‘out there’. It constitutes an unconscious space, even though it is the space that makes consciousness possible, in so far as consciousness is based upon reflection. Scott’s narrative of identity and Le Corbusier’s myth of the primitive hut trace a line through the landscape. This line is the form of a life and the form of a discourse. What looks to be two treks with opposite sense – Scott moving toward his death, a discourse in search of its origin – is really a single axis with an ambiguous sense. Note that Lacan’s diagram is symmetrical. All paths are constructed forward (memory is not a return journey). This line is one of Freud’s most used metaphors for the hard work of psychoanalytic theory (‘the difficult defile’), and it is the metaphor for memory traces on the psyche in his earliest texts (‘path-breaking’, ‘trailblazing’).13 This long trek into a white interior relentlessly pursuing an elusive object, the anti of Kurtz’s trek into the jungle in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, has an affinity to the art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, in which a long walk is represented to an audience through photographs. Where, in all these practices, is this primitive space? It is not in the long line through the landscape, nor in the image; it is – paradoxically – the already complex dialogic space between the line and the image of the line.

52 The primitive hut

Scott’s narrative suggests that collective identity is not cumulative, a quantity to which we all contribute: a little bit of each of us, all holding hands. My identity is a matter of me finding a screen for myself; collective identity is a matter of me finding a screen upon which you can project too. Scott’s genius was to recognize such a screen in the south polar plateau. We can all view Scott’s image (= the image he saw, the image of himself, both, that is the beauty of ambiguity). When we accede to this image of Englishness, we step into his position and view it the way he did: we identify with Scott. It is amazing how architectural identity is. It is all about position and view. Every façade is a material surrogate of the screen, and promises – even if it does not deliver – the possibility of projection. This explains the necessity for facades, and why, even in the case of 1960s projects that do not have them (Metabolists), we tend to put them on anyway. We are all identities. The possibility of me articulating my identity to myself – the who I am – is predicated on this space. We are all ineluctably spatial from the beginning. We do not really know how we are spatial because – like all things unconscious – it is hidden from us; but we like space, space is inherently delicious, beguiling. Space must be what Vitruvius had in mind when he said ‘delight’. Architecture is the conscious form by which we return to space, time and again. We keep battering at the gates. Through these forms, we contemplate space; and the pleasure of such contemplation is the pleasure of contemplating ourselves. Architecture is a lure, even though we know not toward what.

Notes

1 Robert Falcon Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition, vol. 1, London: Smith Elder & Co., 1913, pp. 606–7. 2 Sanjay Chaturvedi, The Polar Regions: A Political Geography, New York: Wiley, 1995, pp. 59–81. 3 David L. Harrowfield, ‘Historic Sites in the Ross Dependency, Antarctica’, in Polar Record,24 (October 1988): 151. 4 Markham’s address to the British Association, ‘Antarctic Discovery at the British Association’, 9 September 1912, after news of Amundsen’s success in reaching the pole first, but before news of Scott’s death. Published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. 5 Quoted in Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979, p. 488. Translated from R. Amundsen, Sydpolen vol. II (first published Norway, 1912), p. 120. 6 For Freud’s treatment of the drives, see ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905), ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915), ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)’, and Civilization and its Discontents (1930). For Lacan’s development of the drive as it manifests in the visual field, see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1981, the sections ‘Of the gaze as objet petit a’ and ‘The Partial Drive and its Circuit’. The diagram is on p. 106. The lost object is on p. 185. 7 Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South, London: Duckworth, 1921, p. 268. 8 Laura Mulvey notes that in melodrama, when the drama (i.e. the predicament of the characters) becomes unbearable, the dialogue fades out and is replaced by music. See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989.

53 Lorens Holm

9 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1982, pp. 141, 165, 187. The primitive hut myth is on p. 65. 10 Vitruvius, ‘The Origin of the Dwelling House’ in The Ten Books On Architecture, New York: Dover Publications 1960, bk 2, ch. 1. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 7–8. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture Wolfgang and Annie Herrmann (trans.), An Essay on Architecture, Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977 (first published 1753). 11 For a discussion of maison dom-ino, see Barry Maitland, ‘The Grid’ and Peter Eisenman, ‘Aspects of Modernism: Maison dom-ino and the Self-referential Sign’, in Oppositions 15/16, Spring/ Winter 1979. 12 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, London: Hogarth Press, 1975, pp. 19–20. The opening quote is on p. 23. 13 For a discussion of Freud’s metaphors, ‘path-breaking’ and ‘trailblazing’, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978, pp. 196–231, especially pp. 198 and 200ff.

54 Chapter 5

Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut Duration, construction and self-creation

Jonathan A. Hale

PHAEDRUS: But all these delicate devices making for the permanence [durée] of the edifice were as nothing to those which he employed when he elaborated the emotions and vibrations of the soul of the future beholder of the work … None perceived, when confronted by a mass so delicately lightened and so simple of aspect, that he was being led to a sort of bliss [bonheur] by insensible curves, by minute and all-powerful inflections … SOCRATES: That is divine. I once heard dear Phaedrus, an expression quite similar, and quite the contrary. One of our friends, whom it is useless to name, said of our Alcibiades who was so beautifully made: ‘Looking at him, one feels oneself becoming an architect! … ’1

Paul Valéry’s poetic parallel between the processes of perception and cognition in architecture – taken from the quasi-Platonic dialogue Eupalinos or the Archi- tect written in 1923 – provides an opening through which to examine the relationship between the concept of time as duration and the idea of the self as a ‘work in progress’ as described in the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In the second part of this paper a further architectural parallel is suggested: the use of Bergson’s ideas as a means to uncover the deeper significance of the writings of Gottfried Semper – particularly his description of the construction of the ‘primitive hut’ in the essay The Four Elements of Architec- ture from 1851.

55 Jonathan A. Hale

Bergson’s Becoming – the self as a work-in-progress

Bergson was Valéry’s countryman and near-contemporary – being twelve years the senior of the two – and spent much of his life elaborating a similar set of notions regarding the interpenetration of past and present in the lived experience of time. This was memorably encapsulated in his challenging and influential concept of duration. That Valéry might have been pleased by the comparison is less obvious; his distaste for intellectual ‘system-building’ would have made him somewhat suspicious of Bergson’s underlying philosophical motives. However, after receiving a personalized copy of the 1934 collection La Pensée et le Mouvant (translated as The Creative Mind in 1946) Valéry’s opinion had somewhat shifted, as A. E. Pilkington observed:

Valéry’s admiration and sympathy for this series of unsystematic reflections in a personal mode (as opposed to his mistrust of the large theories of L’Évolution Créatrice) is easy to understand, as it relates to one of his most permanent convictions. Bergson, in ‘becoming what he has discovered’, has achieved something through philosophical reflection analogous to what Eupalinos achieved through meditation on the problems of construction: in the exercise of his art and through his ‘organic’ involvement in it, each man has ‘constructed’ himself.2

The sense that a true apprehension of the outside world involves an act of perceptual construction – by implication, also an act of perpetual construction owing to the constant flux of the body’s sensory impressions – is what Bergson was attempting to describe in terms of a novel, phenomenological concept of lived time as ‘duration’. Perception seen as a constant activity as opposed to a series of isolated acts, gives rise to an understanding of time as equivalent to our lived experience of it, as opposed to the abstract mathematical measuring of conventional, homogeneous time – observed merely as a dimension of space according to Bergson – marked out by observing one object moving relative to another, such as in the movement of a hand around the face of a clock. For Bergson, it is clear that the consciousness of ‘real’ time involves the construction of a historical dimension uniting the endless succession of tran- sient events. Through the accumulation of the traces of change it might be possible to transcend the eternal present of the clock-hand to gain a sense of the continuity of the past into the future. ‘There are changes, but there are under- neath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves …’3 Bergson seems to be allowing the relationship between ideal and reality – or, more specifically, being and becoming in the Platonic conception of

56 Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut

creation – to pivot about the notion of duration, in his understanding of the ‘real’ depth of existence:

We are seeking only the precise meaning that our consciousness gives to this word ‘exist’ and we find that for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Should the same be said for existence in general?4

The idea expressed here of the self in a continual process of becoming provides a means by which to consider the significance of the temporal aspects of fabrication in architecture.

Duration in architecture – the poetics of process

True to Bergson’s intriguingly materialistic impulse, a number of possible precedents for his extended meditation on the theme of temporal depth can be found among the architectural writers of the mid-nineteenth century, most notably the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper. Semper, like Bergson and the school of phenomenological thinkers he inspired, cherished a deep desire to understand the nature of things-in- themselves. The world into which the later phenomenologists were trying to re- immerse the living body – the perceived world of which the perceiving body is also inescapably a part – was likewise for Semper the focus of much of his most original thinking. By considering the history of architecture in terms of the history of tectonic processes – developing from a series of primeval, archetypal generative impulses – Semper was attempting to re-establish the principles of aesthetic authority in architecture that were being steadily eroded in the post- enlightenment climate of historicism and rapid industrialization. The philosophical context of German idealism had also contributed significantly to a denuded sense of material reality; between John Locke and Immanuel Kant the external world had progressively dissolved into a realm of subjective sensations and individual perceptions, until the famous disappear- ance – in Kant’s system – of the world of things-in-themselves behind the veil of appearances available to human apprehension. This unsettling intellectual outlook, coupled with the art-historical uncertainties of the post-J. J. Winckelmann world of catalogued styles and a growing ‘world’s fair’ consumption of newly discovered cultures, had contributed to a general sense of bewilder- ment – neatly summed up in the title of Heinrich Hübsch’s 1828 publication In What Style Should We Build?5 The architectural profession itself was undergoing its own crisis of creative values, as the engineers of the mid-nineteenth century began to take control of the great building tasks of the new industrial age.

57 Jonathan A. Hale

The recurring desire to re-evaluate the authority of the past in terms of the preoccupations of the present was a significant characteristic of the nineteenth-century architectural debates, witnessed by Viollet-le-Duc’s similarly dramatic re-reading of Greek temple architecture along structural rationalist lines.6 The search for academic respectability for the ‘builder’ Viollet’s radically materialist position also led him irresistibly back to the cradle of western thought in Ancient Greece, as indeed it did for Gottfried Semper in his parallel search for some ground of certainty and authority in architecture. Rather than settle with the kind of spatial typologies that had grown out of the late eighteenth-century primitivism of the Abbé Laugier7 and Quatremère de Quincy8 – or even the later structural typologies such as Viollet- le-Duc’s (1854–68, 1876) geometrical geology of mountains, cathedrals and crystal forms9 – Semper was determined to go further back into the mists of pre-history if necessary, in his search for the ultimate forming principles in architecture. Inspired by his early visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the influential work of its curator and codifier, Georges Cuvier, Semper had decided to attempt a similarly evolutionary classification of architectural form in terms of functional and material characteristics. Working from the familiar Vitruvian myth of the origin of building in the communal effort of protecting the newly-discovered fire,10 Semper then proceeded to analyse the components of the archetypal ‘primitive hut’:

The first sign of human settlement and rest after the hunt, the battle, and wandering in the desert is today, as when the first men lost paradise, the setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of the reviving, warming and food preparing flame. Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were put into the customs of a cult. Throughout all phases of society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which the whole took order and shape. It is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture. Around it were grouped the three other elements; the roof, the enclosure and the mound, the protecting negations or defenders of the hearth’s flame against the three hostile elements of nature.11

In spite of the obvious significance of the hearth in this conception, it is the promise of the ‘type-processes’ – as opposed to type-forms – involved in the assembly of the architectural setting that grasps Semper’s attention. As he goes on to describe:

At the same time the different technical skills of man became organ- ised according to these elements: ceramics and afterwards metal

58 Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut

works around the hearth, water and masonry works around the mound, carpentry around the roof and its accessories. But what primitive technique evolved from the enclosure? None other than the art of the wall-fitter, that is the weaver of mats and carpets.12

He acknowledges the strangeness of the final statement and goes on to justify the importance of textiles from the historical point of view. As the making of mats and floor-covering is clearly observable even in the earliest cultures without sophisticated clothing, the craft of weaving can claim a comparable history to that of pottery. The relationship of body decoration to the patterns of early textiles supports a similar claim to primacy, and Semper’s study of ornamental patterning of artefacts as well as architectural wall decoration had suggested a similar textile origin for the repetitive, regular motifs he discovered. To illustrate the significant survival into the present of this seemingly archaic notion, Semper also discusses the etymology of the German word for wall, Wand and its common root with Gewand, meaning dress. The suggestion is that the woven material that formed the original enclosing ‘wall’ might provide an important clue to the architectural potential of this most crucial element of the builder’s vocabulary – the masonry structure that came to supplant the fabric screen, for Semper is seen as secondary. It is in his later magnum opus Der Stil,(Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics) from 1860,13 that the type-process of the woven wall is carried to its ultimate analytical conclusion, with the further distinction that the knot is actually the fundamental building-block of human production. As the basic unit of ‘energy’ within the tectonic process, the knot in Semper’s thinking offers a striking anticipation of the atomic model of matter. It is also for Semper an early metaphor for the structure of the cosmos itself: ‘The knot is perhaps the oldest technical symbol and, as I have shown, the expression for the earliest cosmogonic ideas that arose among nations.’14 For Semper, the knot also has its history tied up in its etymology, so to speak, as Joseph Rykwert has precisely explained in an essay from 1976:

By a curious use of word-play, Semper foreshadows his later reference to the knot as the essential work of art … when he considers the term Naht: the seam, the joining. It is, he says, an expedient, a Nothbehelf for the joining of two planes of similar or dissimilar material. But the very juxtaposition of Noth and Naht suggests a connection. The seam is an analogue and symbol which has archaic roots, for the usage of joining originally separated planes. Here he presents the reader with a primary and most important rule of art in its simplest form: to make a virtue out of a necessity.15

59 Jonathan A. Hale

The central theme of this discussion, that of the sense of art as the ‘becoming’ or revealing of emerging patterns of order in time and space, is here encapsulated in Semper’s notion of the knot as the archetypal joint or seam in the process of uniting human effort into productive and meaningful action. The significance of the knot in various of the world’s creation myths, as well as the ritual role of dressing and decorating cult objects, can be taken as representative of the deepest human urge to commemorate both the uniqueness and the cyclical recurrence of the fleeting experience of the here and now. As Bergson described in his analogy of concrete duration with the indivisible succession of notes in a musical melody, it is the continual effort to discern a meaningful pattern in the relentless unfolding of present events that has provided an urgent impetus to the representation of temporal order in art. As Rykwert again suggests:

The work of art (Semper says) … is man’s response to the world which is full of wonder and mysterious powers, whose laws man thinks he might understand but whose riddle he never resolves, so that he remains forever in unsatisfied tension. The unattained completeness he conjures with play – and by building a miniature universe for himself. In this the cosmic law can be observed within the smallest dimensions of a self-contained object. By inference therefore, the pleasures of art are analogous to those of nature. ‘And yet’ Semper observes, ‘primitive man takes more pleasure in the regularities of the oarstroke and the handbeat, of the wreath and the bead necklace, than in the less differentiated ones which nature offers him directly.16

For Semper the building’s physical fabric is by definition ‘invisible’, or meaningless, until its ordering principles are revealed through its overlaid dressing or cladding. This idea may also have its roots in the shared etymology of cosmos and cosmetic, both of which imply order: here referring to a far-from-superficial treatment of surface which might thus portray an underlying cosmological structure. This may be achieved by the literal application of a surface coating or even a metaphorical overlaid patterning, as in Louis Kahn’s striated concrete with its exaggerated regular grid of recessed day-work joints. That ornament – in the sense of emerging pattern based on the process of fabrication – should have primacy over any underlying structure is also suggested by Bergson’s insistence that we learn to see change without the need for any unchanging support hidden beneath it. Both kinds of surface, Semper’s woven clothing and Kahn’s ‘tattooed’ skin, present the joint as the archetypal unit of an emerging temporal order and both tectonic processes also illustrate a set of principles that may lie at the origin of the patterns of western logical thought.17 The progress of early Greek philosophy from the pre-Socratic account of the endless flux of the four elements – evolving

60 Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut

into and out of countless combinations ‘in accordance with the arrangement of time’18 – makes a dramatic shift in the later Platonic abstraction of being as the transcendental goal of becoming. This distinction drove a philosophical wedge between the everyday reality of material things and their idealized theoretical models. This unfortunate separation of ideas from things highlights the central criticism of both Semper and Bergson’s allegedly brutally materialist conceptions of reality. This assumption is usually based on a neglect of both men’s efforts at establishing a synthesis between the idealist and the material-determinist positions. In Semper’s case, I would argue, he succeeds in setting out the basis for a new conception of constructional poetics in architecture. This is based on the original Greek notion of poiesis as the ‘art of making’, or in other words, those ‘technical procedures with implicit transcendent objectives’.19 It is thus potentially a kind of making from which meaningful form gradually emerges. This somewhat goes against Kenneth Frampton’s description of the importance of tectonic thinking in architecture, which in some ways actually reinforces the above dilemma:

The beginnings of the Modern, dating back at least two centuries, and much more recent advent of the Post-Modern are inextricably bound up with the ambiguities introduced into western architecture by the primacy given to the scenographic in the evolution of the bourgeois world. However, building remains essentially tectonic rather than scenographic in character and it may be argued that it is an act of construction first rather than a discourse … Thus one may assert that building is ontological rather than representational in character and that built form is a presence rather than something standing for an absence. In Heidegger’s terminology we may think of it as a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘sign’.20

I would argue that Semper’s work, particularly the analysis of the typological processes found in the primitive hut, demands a combination of ontological and scenographic readings in order to understand the potential of a tectonically articulated architecture to communicate a sense of temporal order. In the sense that the knot or the joint marks the path of a process of becoming – the boundary at which something ‘begins its presencing’, to use Heidegger’s term – it can also be read as an element of ‘text’: part of a continuously unfolding narrative of the human body’s encounter with the materiality of the world. This is also suggested by a further etymological link between the words text, textile and tectonic. The idea that a language of architecture might emerge from the process of its own construction is paralleled in Bergson’s later concept of the self as a project of continual self-creation. Thus, as I suggested at the outset, this connection might provoke a deeper understanding of architecture as contributing to our sense of self-awareness.

61 Jonathan A. Hale

To conclude, I would like to return to Valéry’s opening references to the empathic projection of the self into the world, through the contemplation of the tectonically – and even functionally – articulated object. The collision of form and material (what I would like to call the ‘tectonic event’) that is played out in the observer’s imagination when faced with an object ‘so beautifully made’, provides both an image of the process of production (for example the encounter between the building and its makers) as well as – and in many ways more intriguingly – a projection of the future encounter between the building and its users in the traces left behind by the similarly productive processes of creative inhabitation. It is this emergence of a narrative dimension which lends a space its sense of temporal richness, suggesting the continuity of the past into the future, as encapsulated in Bergson’s concept of duration.

Notes

1 Valéry, ‘Eupalinos or, The Architect’, in Dialogues, Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Press, 1956, pp. 74–5. 2 A. E. Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 101. 3 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, New York: Philosophical Library, 1946, p. 147. 4 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, New York: Random House, 1944, p. 10. 5 Heinrich Hübsch, ‘In What Style Should We Build?’ in In What Style Should We Build?, Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1992. 6 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, Lectures on Architecture, Benjamin Bucknall (trans.), New York: Dover Books, 1987. 7 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (1753), Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977. 8 Quatremère de Quincy, A. C., Dictionnaire d’Architecture, 2 vols, Paris: [n. pub.], I, 1789, II, 1832. 9 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, Le Massif du Mont-Blanc. Étude sur sa construction géodésique et géologique…, Paris: [n. pub.], 1876. 10 Vitruvius, On Architecture, Frank Granger (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, II, 1.2. 11 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 102. 12 Semper, The Four Elements, p. 103. 13 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (trans.), Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004. 14 Semper, The Four Elements, p. 217. 15 Joseph Rykwert, ‘Preface to London Lecture by Gottfried Semper’, RES, 6, 1983, p. 125. 16 Joseph Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice, London: Academy Editions, 1982, p. 127. 17 Indra Kagis McEwan, Socrates’ Ancestor, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 41ff. 18 Anaximander Fragment,inEarly Greek Philosophy, Jonathan Barnes (trans.), London: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 75. 19 Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, p. 126. 20 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic’, Architectural Design 1990, 3–4: 20.

62 Chapter 6

Mineral matters Formation and transformation

Richard Weston

6.1 At the opening of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in 1901, Peter Behrens Vanadanite presented a Zeichen or sign. It took the form of a crystal, and was offered as an

6.2 emblem of transformation: just as carbon, under conditions of intense heat and Tourmaline pressure can metamorphose into diamond, so everyday life could be raised to a higher plane by art. More famously, crystal metaphors came to fascinate the 6.3 Meteorite German expressionists, stimulating the ‘Glass Dream’ of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut and related utopian visions. 6.4 Although impervious to the esoteric traditions to which Taut’s Mica ‘Crystal Chain’ was heir, John Ruskin was equally fascinated by ‘crystalline 6.5 beauty’. It emerged, he wrote in Ethics of the Dust,1 ‘under harmonies of law ‘Paesina’ stone which are wholly beneficent, because wholly inexorable’. Looking at a piece of

6.6 Charoite vanadanite (Figure 6.1), it is easy to share his delight in the multiplication of Source, all pictures: tiny cubes. Whereas the early Modernists might have seen this as an example Richard Weston of the ‘mass production aesthetic’, to Ruskin it exemplified the endless devia- tions from perfect repetition characteristic of that ‘natural’ aesthetic Alvar Aalto articulated in a lecture in 1944.

If you are designing a housing scheme, [he suggested], imagine that the houses are like flowers on a branch of a cherry tree, all similar, yet no two exactly alike, varying according to their position on the branch or the direction of the sun or wind.

Over the past two years I have scanned numerous minerals and fossils. What fascinates me most about them is the combination of formation according to inner order – genetic, in the case of Aalto’s flowers, geometric in minerals – and

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 transformation by time and environment. The ‘ruined city’ discovered in a few millimetres of the lustrous black surface of tourmaline (Figure 6.2) is enriched by microscopic inclusions of quartz. A meteorite (Figure 6.3) and slice of mica (Figure 6.4) share similar lattice structures, but radically different histories: the Widmanstetten patterns of the former can evolve only in conditions of near zero gravity and unimaginably slow cooling, while the structure of the latter is rendered fuzzy by dendritic growths that, at points of intersection, may resemble snow crystals. ‘Paesina’ stone (Figure 6.5), an intri- cate marble from Tuscany, evokes in miniature the processes of sedimentation, uplift and faulting that built the mountains where it occurs; and with a similarly uncanny fidelity to origin, charoite (Figure 6.6) – discovered only recently in the banks of a Siberian river – offers a vivid image of turbulence and flux. Seen as obeying autonomous and inexorable laws, nature and technology functioned as ‘primitive’ references within modernism. How fitting, therefore, that minerals and fossils should now be imaged and transformed using the latest digital production techniques.

Notes

1 John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive and The Ethics of the Dust, London: Cassell, 1909, p. 296.

70 Part 3

Questioning colonial constructs

Chapter 7

Post-colonizing the primitive

Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen

The notion of primitivism is inseparable from the question of colonialism. Considering that one of the main strategies of colonialism consists of constructing rationalized cultural identities of the colonized Other through which the self can be understood and emerge as superior, primitivization lies at the core of colonialism and the colonial enterprise. Primitivization takes place within the asymmetrical distribution of power (mainly military and economic, in that order) between the colonizer and the colonized, which authorizes the former to render the latter, the dominated one, an inferior other: a primitive. Other authors in this volume have already referred to the negative connotations implicit in the word ‘primitive’. They have discussed how the primitive denigrates whatever is designated by it and suggests the superiority of whoever uses the term. For this reason, it is not our intention in this essay to expand on this situation but to examine how primitivism can, counter-intuitively, challenge the authority of the colonizer. In so doing, we will first elaborate on the ambivalence of the primitive in the colonial situation, and its discourse, which emerges from the colonial desire ‘for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’.1 Second, we will examine the primitive as a means of resistance both against colonial authority and in opposition to processes of modernization. In the final section of this essay, we will analyse an architectural case study in which notions of the primitive were used in order to oppose – as well as challenge – traditional architectural historicity and to resist processes of modernization.

73 Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen

Primitivizing the other: disavowal and ambivalence in colonial discourse

Various postcolonial theorists have analysed the colonial strategy of constructing identities of the colonized Other which are comprehensible to the colonizer and which permit the latter to emerge as the dominant party in the relationship. Homi Bhabha, for example, in his book The Location of Culture, elaborates extensively on the colonizer’s attempt to create ‘doubles’ of itself in the colonized, a task that is achieved via language, religion, education, etc. Although the task is never fully achieved and the doubles remain forever incomplete, always in a process of formation, Bhabha stresses that such doubles, or partial copies, need to be disavowed in order for the colonizer to maintain its authority. In other words, as the colonizer needs to negate its double in order to reaffirm its authority, the colonial strategy is rendered ambivalent, an ambivalence which, as such, disrupts the authority of the colonizer. Bhabha illustrates this process via the concept of mimicry, which, in his words, ‘emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal’.2 At this point, we would like to draw attention to the process of disavowal through which the desired Other is denied validity and becomes, in Bhabha’s words, ‘almost the same but not quite’. Disavowal is achieved largely through the implementation of different forms of discrimination that deny the validity of the Other – as well as its cultural production. This denial can only operate in relation to an assumed referential, hence superior, socio-cultural system: the European rational system exemplified by the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment period. Therefore, the Other is always understood – and emerges, becomes visible – in its relation to European norms. As Bhabha himself puts it: ‘colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative …) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity’.3 It is here that the notion of primitive, in the colonial context, plays an important role.4 Ethnologists and, in particular, anthropologists used the term ‘primitive’ to describe all kinds of social, cultural and political practices that did not comply with the European model, which was taken as the referent. Ethnologists and anthropologists took it as their task to identify, describe and translate unintel- ligible, ‘primitive’ practices in order to make them accessible to a European audience. This process of cultural translation is examined by Tejaswini Niranjana in her book Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Niranjana advances a critique of anthropology’s project of translation as one which supports the creation and maintenance of a hierarchical system that grants authority to European and, later, to North American cultures:

The ‘primitive’ becomes the anthropologist’s civilizational other. Because it does not depend on logic or consistency, the primitive society’s science is defective compared to ours. The unity of the

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human consciousness does not preclude – in fact, it helps construct – an inner hierarchy: primitive thought needs to be translated into modern, for it is that which is not yet modern. The hierarchy also indicates to us the operation of a teleological model of history.5

Two issues are clear in the previous paragraph. First is the disavowal of the colonized through its primitivization. This process depends on the indissoluble association of anthropological and ethnographic discourses with western classical notions of knowledge, reality and representation. Such an association provides a solid foundation upon which to build a system of cultural superiority. The second, which can be considered as a result of the former, refers to the conjecture of a teleological model of history which (re)presents the primitive as an imperfect realization – in relation to the western classical notions of knowledge, reality and representation. However, more than simply dismissing the primitive for not conforming to the classical ideal, such a (western-centred) model of history erases all traces of the pre-colonial past while, at the same time, attempting to deny the effects of colonization. Mary Louise Pratt presents an interesting interpretation of Alexander Humboldt’s notes about the architectures he found while travelling through South America. Pratt shows how South American indigenous architecture is rendered imperfect, as well as aesthetically incompetent, in relation to the western classical canon mentioned above:

American architecture, we cannot too often repeat, can cause no astonishment, either by the magnitude of its works or the elegance of its form, [Humboldt] writes, but it is highly interesting, as it throws light on the history of the primitive civilizations and the inhabitants of the mountains of the new continent. While in Greece, religions became the chief support of fine arts; among the Aztecs, the primitive cult of death results in monuments whose only goal is to produce terror and dismay.6

Pratt’s main point is that ‘the European imagination produces archaeological subjects by splitting contemporary non-European peoples off from their pre- colonial, and even their colonial pasts’.7 Such splitting occurs during the construction of a history of subjects who did not have a history – at least, not as part of the linear western historicity – and who would only attain historical subject-hood through the scholarly historicizing methods of the colonizer. In other words, the colonized are withdrawn from their own history in order to be inserted into the western teleological historicity devised to grant itself authority. However, the splitting Pratt refers to in her analysis of Humboldt’s passage can also refer to the ambivalent simultaneous recognition and disavowal

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of difference. In his notes, Humboldt affirms that indigenous American architectures are not comparable, in scale and image, with Greek and Roman classic architectures, which are taken as superior referents. Indigenous architectures are recognized as different and disavowed, but disavowal is, nonetheless, followed by another form of recognition – the fact that, for Humboldt, indigenous architectures throw light on the history of primitive civilizations – which reveals the existence of an erased pre-colonial past. It is the incoherence of this splitting, the double inscription of the colonial relation in a homogenizing universal history, which renders colonial discourse ambivalent and undermines its claim for cultural authority. Postcolonial critics and subjects have identified the ambivalence inherent in the colonial discourse and have developed strategies to contest and resist the colonizer’s claims for cultural authority. According to Bhabha:

Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or exclusion of the ‘content’ of another culture, as a difference once perceived. It is the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power – hierarchy, normalization and so forth.8

Thus far, we have inscribed the notion of the primitive at the centre of postcolonial discourse. We have shown that the primitivization of the Other was one of the discriminatory strategies used by the colonizer in order to support its claims to cultural authority. However, the ambivalence of the primitivizing strategy, as well as the primitive’s double inscription as the recognition of difference and its disavowal, allow for an appropriation of the primitive in order to resist western cultural domination and to destabilize the hierarchical discursive structures that render it inferior. The next section examines the way in which various artists, writers and architects have used the primitive as a means of resistance. Nevertheless, we will also shed light on the numerous political questions and theoretical shortcomings that arise from such an operation.

Primitive as resistance

The primitive as an aesthetic is perhaps most familiarly associated with modernist avant-garde art: Kingsley, Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Stravinsky come readily to mind. In spite of the differences in their referents – Africa, Tahiti, pagan Russia – the aesthetic of the primitive is characterized, not simply by an exoticization or fascination with geographically distant cultures and practices, but by a certain ambivalence. This is evident in a text such as Heart of Darkness – perhaps the

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most often referenced novel in discussions of primitivism – for Conrad has been read as participating in either nineteenth-century colonialist discourse – Africa is the site of dangerous, sexualized superstitious beings – or in modernism’s critique of colonialism – Marlow’s encounter with ‘the horror! The horror!’ in Africa allows him to see metropolitan life as merely ‘insignificant and silly dreams’.9 In other words, the encounter with Africa precipitates Marlow’s realization that the foundations of empire, with its ideals of rationalization, scientific progress, civilization and moral superiority, are tenuous at best, false delusions at worst. Thus, while primitivism has long been used, as we pointed out earlier, as an aesthetics/politics of promoting European superiority and colonial power, it contains within itself the germs of a critique of this very discourse. Following from the previous section, the concept of the primitive, within a colonial context, is inherently based on the assumption of a universal progress from nature to civilization. Jacques Turgot’s optimistic view of historical development – ‘the total mass of the human race … marches always, although slowly, towards still higher perfection’ – is characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provides the basic philosophy legitimating colonial domination. During this period, as it had been at least since the sixteenth century, a perceived lack of culture (property, commerce, religion, etc) becomes justification for bringing ‘truth’ or ‘enlightenment’ to non-western peoples. Thomas Macaulay’s view of history as a march of progress underpins his assertion of British superiority over India and informs his colonial policies:

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.10

The need for interpreters to bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘the great mass of the population’, the assertion that only ‘by degrees’ educated Indians may be made ‘fit vehicles’ and the use of terms such as ‘enrich’, ‘refine’ and ‘taste’ point to the belief that non-Europeans are technologically, intellectually and culturally backward – and thus in need of ‘cultivation’. On the other hand, and nearly coincident in time, we find the phenomenon whereby the Other – especially the figure of the Oriental philosopher – was used to satirize or comment upon the moral failings of metropolitan Europe; this privileged perspective was warranted in part owing to the fact that the East was seen as the birthplace of almost all ancient civilizations and

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religions. Recognition of ancient civilizations often led, however, to a reifying of the East as a static space untouched by western notions of progress. For instance, The Illustrated London News, paraphrasing James Fergusson’s evalu- ation of Indian architecture, emphasized that ‘Hindu architecture is so conserva- tive that it varies little at different periods’ (July, 1886). William Jones’s discovery of a similar linguistic pattern between Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin provides another instance of positioning Indian civilization within the realm of European antiquity.11 Yet, it is notable that both Enlightenment and Romanticist engagements led to the development of new genres that made use of ‘Oriental’ motifs to criticize European social arrangements.12 Other figures of primitivism include rusticism, the noble savage, the cult of the child and Greek and medieval revivals. Concomitant with accelerated industrial and commercial expansion, these forms of primitivism can be seen as reactionary responses to the Age of Enlightenment; as a character in Thomas Love Peacock’s Crotchet Castle (1831) observes, ‘Men never begin to study antiquities till they are saturated with civilization’.13 It is precisely in this opposition between ‘civilization’ and ‘antiquity’ that the problem of the ambivalence in the primitive enters; in spite of the idealization of the past, or the rustic or the non-European, the construction still maintains the notion of historical progression – implicitly one looks back to the primitive in order to discover ‘man in all the truth of nature’.14 It is not until the early twentieth century that the optimism of empire and colonialism begins to decay within the metropolitan centre itself. As we have seen with Conrad, primitivism becomes more unsettling; it becomes used to point to the ‘darkness’ inherent in western subjects and institutions:

Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.15

Turning on its head such claims as ‘the monstrous shapes of the Puraneic deities are unsuitable for the higher forms of artistic representation’,16 modernist artists appropriated so-called tribal or primitive art in order to disrupt the blind assumption of superiority implied by Birdwood’s statement. Interestingly enough, the very traits which condemned primitive art earlier – ‘They showed little knowledge of perspective, but tell their story naturally’17 – became desirable for the modernist project. At the same time, then, that the primitive is used as a mode of legitimating European narratives of progress and civilization – as a reserve of unsullied “human” expression which contains the prehistory of modernity – it is used

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as an alienating strategy by the avant-garde who exploited its potential to ‘transcend our sense of civilized experience’.18 Whatever the motivation for using images of the primitive, their introduction and dissemination in the work of European artists ‘forever change[d] the European discourse on representation, on mimesis and subjectivity’;19 for, as Gikandi continues, summing up a host of postcolonial scholarship: ‘English modernism … was generated by a crisis of belief in the efficacy of colonialism’.20 Modernist primitivism, then, both affirms the imperatives of colonization and helps usher in a critique of its ideologies and forms of representation. We have been discussing metropolitan uses of the primitive; another place to consider the way the primitive has been used as a site of resistance is in the work coming out of the ‘periphery’ itself; or rather, by considering the primitive as a strategy used by postcolonial writers, artists and architects to reclaim or rewrite their own past. Resistance, it has been stated, is ‘an alternative way of conceiving human history’.21 It is perhaps obvious, thus, that postcolonial writers and artists have conceived of their task as one of searching for alternate forms of expression in an attempt to escape from the inherited imperial – normal or standard – language.22 As in the case of the Negritude movement, which set out to reject western cultural domination by affirming black ‘consciousness’ and experience (as Leopold Senghor wrote, ‘there is difference, but not inferiority or antagonism’), tropes of primitivism began to be used as affirmative sites of difference in the early twentieth century. Claude McKay – Jamaican-born immigrant to the USA, whose sonnet of resistance ‘If We Must Die’, inspired by the race riots of 1919, was later used by Churchill as a rallying cry against the Nazis – was one of the earlier postcolonial intellectuals to use the concept. In his autobiography A Long Way from Home, he writes, ‘My damned white education has robbed me of much of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering strength of the Jakes [the urban vagabond in Home to Harlem] of the Negro race’.23 That phrase, ‘primitive vitality’, points to an essentializing of ‘the Negro race’ or of the primitive in general (in another poem, the sight of a ‘Primitive Canoe’ causes McKay to ruminate on the contrasts between ‘this hard land of fretful nights and days’ and a ‘dim unknown land’ which ‘intoxicate[s] me’) – but, simultaneously, to the way that the primitive provides an ideal precisely in its difference from the norms of western culture – summed up here as ‘white education’. On the other hand, the primitive can be used, not as with McKay as an embrace of the very terms used to denigrate and affirm inferiority under colonialism, but as a counterpoint to the discourses upholding colonial superiority. Incorporating or using folk traditions, storytelling, the supernatural and magical, non-standard language and Creole or colonial history are deliberate

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ways in which postcolonial writers (and others) work to transform the discourses/ forms of the European West. This is both a strategy of entering into the dominant discourse in order to ‘make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories’24 and a proprietary claim to the very traditions which had served to demark their dispossession. Although Derek Walcott states in one of his poems ‘I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy, filched as the slum child stole’,25 in effect he creates new forms through appropriation. His verse epic Omeros, taking its title from the Greek word for Homer, recalls the events of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey but in a Caribbean setting. Walcott, indeed, calls his work ‘a mulatto of style’. These two versions of resistance – accepting the very terms already given (primitive vitality, ‘simple’ strength) and affirming the validity of this position, and using classical or western forms to tell new stories – are united in that both must decide how to engage with their colonial past. As Edward Said has pointed out, ‘post-imperial writers of the Third World … bear their past within them … as urgently reinterpretable and re-deployable experiences’.26 As one of those ‘reinterpretable and re-deployable’ categories, the primitive has been used in a range of forms in numerous attempts to answer the question: ‘How does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?’27

Architecture and the question of multiple cultural origins

In the first part of this essay we inscribed the notion of primitivism into postcolonial discourse. There, we examined a traditional approach to primitivism in which the West, or the colonizer, used the rhetoric of primitivism in order to support a discriminatory ideology against the non-western – be it African, American, Asian or Austral-Asian. However, at the end of this section, it was demonstrated that postcolonial discourse enables alternative readings and appropriations of the concept of the primitive in order to develop strategies of resistance that destabilize the western colonial ideology. In the second section, we looked at a wide range of examples in which the notion of the primitive, and the primitive itself, has been appropriated in literature, painting, music and other arts as a means to resist and/or challenge prevailing values and cultural narratives. Two different attitudes were explored: on the one hand, modernist metropolitan uses of primitivism in order to disrupt codes of representation (as in Picasso’s cubist paintings), revealing a crisis in the belief of the efficacy and ethics of empire. On the other hand, postcolonial re-appropriations of the primitive by non-western subjects in order to re-imagine their own past, as well as insert alternative experiences and knowledges into the western European

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canon. In this section, we will elaborate further on the latter strategy by focusing on the impact that primitivism had on twentieth-century architecture in Latin America. Particular attention will be paid to the first fifty years of the century when primitive motifs were appropriated by various architects in order to construct a sense of identity in relation to their pre-colonial past – from which, according to the architects themselves, they had been severed as a result of many years of colonial domination. The first half of the twentieth century was a time when, on the one hand, the governments of Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, as well as most Latin American nations, began to advocate national modernization which, to some extent, implied the deletion of an indigenous historical past and the adoption of Euro-American social, cultural and political models. On the other hand, there were nationalist movements opposing the governments’ ‘developmentalist’ agendas and calling for the recuperation of the same (lost) indigenous past that the former group wanted to erase. In spite of the fact that both movements sought to erase a shameful colonial past, their means and aspirations were opposed. The search for a national identity, therefore, developed between these two extremes, a situation that could not but engender tensions and conflicts. In many cases, antagonism led to popular revolts and violent incidents.28 One such violent incident was the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910. Mexican revolutionary artists were among the first to appropriate primitive motifs, not only as an aesthetic but as the centre of their political agenda. They declared that art belonged to the people in the same way that Mexico belonged to the Indian people. This group of revolutionaries included Gerardo Murillo, an artist of Spanish origin who joined the revolution and adopted the name of Dr Atl (Water), David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman. These artists took it as their task to reveal a counter-history based on the return to a mythical past, an original pre-colonial moment that would provide the foundations for the development of a post-colonial29 – and, in the case of Mexico, post-revolutionary – culture. For them, primitivism was the means to reach for the lost past they wanted to recuperate, oppose the government’s modernizing aspirations and dismantle colonial hierarchies whose effects were still felt throughout Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The architect Juan O’Gorman was an active militant of primitivism. However, like most architects of his generation, at the beginning of his career O’Gorman was a fervent follower of Le Corbusier and an advocate of functionalism. He designed a series of twelve ‘functionalist’ houses, and various schools, in and around Mexico City. Most notable among his early work is the joint house and studio for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera with whom O’Gorman carried out various projects and had a long-lasting friendship. This well-known

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project consists of two regular rectilinear volumes organized around a courtyard whose shape is reminiscent of Ozenfant’s studio in Paris designed by Le Corbusier in 1922. Much has been said about O’Gorman’s ‘Mexicanist’ impetus in this project – that the line of cacti and the outside wall, for example, are essentially Mexican – however, such affirmations are difficult to sustain given the evident formal, functional and, even, structural connection with modernist European buildings. During the mid-1930s O’Gorman became disillusioned with the principles of modern architecture as well as with professional practice. He thus retired from practice and devoted his time to easel- and mural-painting. For nearly fifteen years, O’Gorman produced work closer to that of other revolutionary artists, particularly that of his friend Diego Rivera, whose favourite subject was the indigenous worker and his/her direct relation to Aztec ancestors. This is why, when O’Gorman returned to architectural practice in the 1950s to collaborate in the design of the Ciudad Universitaria (university campus) in Mexico City between 1950 and 1952, his work showed a dramatic transformation. He was no longer interested in the purity and abstraction promoted by modernist architects – and found in his early projects – but in the inclusion of powerful allusions to a pre-colonial past. This is clear, for example, in the design for the central library at the university in which he collaborated with Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martinez de Velasco. Their original scheme was for a pyramid, which, occupying a central location on the campus, would make a direct connection – visually and symbolically – with Aztec architecture. This design was modified into a large cubic tower standing on a lower plinth. However, both tower and plinth were covered with colorful images of mestizo workers and soldiers, Aztec imagery and traditional pagan motifs. According to O’Gorman himself, the mural was conceived in order to enlighten the masses about the greatness of their pre-colonial past and the blessings of the revolution. As Edward Burian enthusiastically and optimistically puts it, ‘O’Gorman’s mural represented a shift to a didactic, symbolic, allegorical architecture as well as mythological imagery and occasionally compositional devices from pre- Columbian culture’.30 O’Gorman’s own house, designed between 1949 and 1953, the same time he was working on the murals for the university library, also illustrates his adherence to the nationalist ideology. Like the central library at the university, his house shows an amazing combination of materials, forms, imagery and symbolism. The house is almost completely covered in brightly coloured mosaics and contains a rich variety of sculptural elements such as Aztec gods and warriors as well as snakes, jaguars, monkeys and other animalistic imagery made of local stone. The main entrance to the house is guarded by giant figures on either side of the door.31 Paradoxically, O’Gorman’s house shows, nonetheless, a rationalist arrangement of spaces and a subtle separation of the areas dedicated

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to different social classes: servants and elites. He also uses mass-produced metal-frame windows, which are also found in his earlier functionalist buildings. The central library at the university also contains these kinds of contradictions. Behind the colourful walls there is a functionalist building, which, unavoidably, uses cement (a material symbolically linked with progress, modernization and globalization32) and numerous mass-produced elements, such as prefabricated concrete panels and blocks. Far from negative, the contradictions found in the work of O’Gorman are evidence of the antagonistic attitudes towards national identity, culture and architecture during the mid-twentieth century in Mexico. Such contradictions bring to the fore the enormous and unbridgeable differences that coexist in the various nations of Latin America. It is precisely here that we see the effects of the post-colonial appropriation of primitivism as a mode of resistance. While it is impossible to assert that O’Gorman successfully establishes a connection with an imagined pre-colonial past, his work does clearly unsettle the univocality of Euro-American architectural discourse. Given the fact that O’Gorman appropri- ates from a variety of cultural sources – he uses Mexican Aztec and Mayan motifs and also elements from classical antiquity and modernist architecture – his work, as well as that of many other architects and artists of his generation, ‘posits itself as the returning gaze of the colonized, a reappropriation of identity that lays claim to the rhizomorphous continuity of multiple cultural origins’.33 In other words, the same primitivism that was at the centre of the West’s colonial discriminatory strategy is transformed into ‘a form of cultural affirmation and a reformulation of identity starting from non-Western autochthony’.34 It is important to underline that O’Gorman’s use of the primitive is not an essentialist move that ignores the violence of colonization and the multiplicity of cultures and social groups that coexist in the space of Mexico and the rest of Latin America. In not returning to an idealized, homogeneous pre-colonial past he avoids essentializing identity. As we have noted throughout this paper, one must, however, proceed with caution when discussing the degree to which (non-western) post-colonial subjects can transform western dominant narratives. It is also important to be careful about the recuperation of an imagined pre-colonial past. This can be seen in the work of Edward Burian, for example, whose un- problematic acceptance of O’Gorman’s success is alarming precisely because it is based on his implicit assumption that the past is transparent. When referring to O’Gorman’s university library, Burian affirms that ‘in one of the landmark symbols of modern Mexican architecture, O’Gorman, architect and painter, was able to reconnect to a mythical past for political and racial purposes’ (our emphasis).35 Such a facile celebration of the appropriation of primitivist motifs in the construction of national identities and nationalist agendas poses numerous

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political questions. Most importantly, it draws our attention to the way in which critics, artists, architects and writers have naively assumed that the concept of the primitive can be disassociated from its colonial usages. The politics of using the primitive as a site of resistance presents problems because, to a large extent, it is an attempt to ‘recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire’.36 It is for this reason that the primitive, as we stated at the opening of our essay, cannot be understood without its colonial context.

Notes

1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 86. 2 Ibid., p. 86. 3 Ibid., p. 111. 4 It is important to note, however, that Bhabha never refers to the notion of primitivism, nor does he use the term itself. 5 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 69–70. 6 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travelling Writing and Transculturation, London, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 134. 7 Ibid., p.134. 8 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 110–11. 9 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover, 1990, p. 66. 10 Thomas Macaulay, ‘Minute on Education’ (1835), in Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader, Antoinette Burton (ed.), New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 20. 11 See also Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine, for a similar attitude: ‘We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity ... We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge ... India, in her splendor, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom’ (1996: 18). 12 See Alan Richardson’s edited collection: Three Oriental Tales: History of Nourjahad, Vathek, the Giaour, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. 13 Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831), Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999, p. 49 [electronic resource]. 14 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, W. Conyngham Mallory (trans.), New York: Tudor, 1935, bk I. 15 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 35. 16 George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, London: Chapman & Hall, 1880, p. 125. 17 Ibid. 18 William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, p. 254. 19 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 163. 20 Ibid. p. 161. 21 Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 216.

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22 While we wish to maintain the full range of meanings in the term ‘language’, it is significant that imposing its own literary tradition onto the other is a strategy of domination and cultural imperialism practised by the colonizer. In a speech before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in 1846, Thomas Babington Macaulay offered a toast ‘To the literature of Britain … which has exercised an influence wider than that of our commerce and mightier than that of our arms … before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the Banks of the Ganges!’ 23 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, New York: L. Furman, 1937, p. 229. 24 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 216. 25 Derek Walcott, ‘Another Life’ in Collected Poems, 1948–1984, London: Faber & Faber, 1986, p. 294. 26 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 212. 27 Ibid. p. 214. 28 Felipe Hernandez, ‘Spaces of Hybridization: The House of the Architect’, in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, Jean-Francois Lejeune (ed.), New York: Princeton Archi- tectural Press, 2005, p. 111. 29 Please note that our use of the hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ refers to the period after colonialism, while the non-hyphenated ‘postcolonial’ refers to scholarly discourse. 30 Edward Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism: Juan O’Gorman and Post-Revolutionary Architecture in Mexico, 1920–1960’, in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 220. 31 For a more detailed description, and images, of the house, see Keith Eggener, ‘Contrasting Images of Identity in the Post-war Mexican Architecture of Luis Barragán and Juan O’Gorman’, in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 2000, 9(1): 27–45; or Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism’ in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 30. 32 For more information about cement’s symbolic relation with progress, modernization and globalization, see Adrian Forty’s essay ‘Cement and Multiculturalism’ in Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America, Felipe Hernandez, Mark Millington and Iain Borden (eds), Amsterdam–New York: Rodopi, 2005, pp.144–54. 33 Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo Gonzaléz, Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature and Culture, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000, p. x. 34 Ibid, p. xiv. 35 Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism’ in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 220. 36 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 210.

85 Chapter 8

Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut

Stephen Cairns

Historically, arts discourse in the West has tended to characterize the ‘primitive’ in two distinctive frames. The first depicts the primitive as an attractive state, holding something the West or modernity has lost. Here the primitive is imagined as being in tune with nature and able to serve as a reservoir of essentially unchanging and noble truths; and because these truths are usually caricatured as fragile and under constant threat, they are seen to need protection or conser- vation, an impulse James Clifford has named the ‘salvage paradigm’.1 The second frame depicts the primitive as a repulsive condition. Here the primitive is conceived as a more violent, marauding and threatening state, not so much in need of protecting, conserving or salvaging, as controlling and guarding against. Furthermore, both the attractive and repulsive depictions of the primitive – ‘what we should emulate or, alternately, what we should fear’2 – are often entangled, such that a positive assessment of the primitive cannot help but be coloured by a negative one, and vice versa. The noble savage and the cannibal, that is, are almost always co-present.

Theory and the primitive

Recent theoretical writing has captured something of this entanglement, and has self-consciously activated the violent and marauding conception of the primitive to alternate ends. Theorists often gathered under the heading of ‘post- structuralism’ – Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Barthes and others – have redeployed the critical potential of the primitive as a condition of radical and threatening difference. The primitive in this disparate body of theory

86 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut

circulates in the guise of terms such as ‘paganism’, ‘nomadism’ or ‘savagery’. The primitive is, in this context, activated as agent of disruption, interruption and potential. With its themes of corporeality, base materiality, irrationality, or alternate rationalities, the idea of the primitive serves as the vehicle by which to question, as Spivak puts it, ‘the millennially cherished excellences of western metaphysics: the sovereignty of the subject’s intention, the power of predica- tion’.3 It acts as a provocation to radical forms of invention. In the context of this redeployment, the long-standing notion of the primitive-as-reservoir has come to seem anachronistic. The primitive, now loosened from its essentialist moor- ings, is reasserted as a generative force. No longer merely a mute resource awaiting reverential interpretation by external (western) agencies, the primitive is affirmed as a principle of newness and potential in its own right. For all of this recent affirmation of the primitive, the cultural-political dimensions of this recognition are, at best, implicit. Reasserting the primitive as a generative force in western theory, seemed to carry with it the possibility that those cultures to whom the term ‘primitive’ was historically attached might now themselves find a place from which to speak, to act and to articulate their own desires and aspirations. Yet, there is nothing in this theoretical work that offered such an explicit or particular politics of representation. Without such particu- larity, the appreciation for a newly radicalized notion of the primitive begins to appear as yet another form of orientalism in which a generalized mode of creativity and potential is extracted from heterogeneous subjects whose only unifying trait would be a relative lack of material resources. Post-colonial critics such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, have, in various ways, commented on this paradox. They have sought to exploit the openings that this animated and threatening primitivism offers to a consideration of a cross- cultural politics of representation, while at the same time critiquing the latent ‘macrological nostalgia’ and ‘primitivistic reverence’ that they say persists in this theoretical work.4 As Spivak points out (in the context of her critique of Kristeva’s book on Chinese peasant women) the interest ‘French theorists’ such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and others have in ‘reaching out to all that is not the West’ is ultimately a form of self-interest. As she puts it:

[i]n spite of their occasional interest in touching the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism, their repeated question is obsessively self-centred: if we are not what official history and philosophy say we are, who then are we (not), how are we (not)?5

Spivak characterizes this theoretical engagement with difference as a kind of crisis management in which the West turns to the primitive only in order to manage its heterogeneity and to confirm and enrich its own identity.6 Homi Bhabha advances a similar argument suggesting that the notion of culture is

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often used to domesticate difference into the project of universal theory- making, citing a number of (mostly contemporary) illustrative exemplars: ‘Montesquieu’s Turkish Despot, Barthes’ Japan, Kristeva’s China, Derrida’s Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard’s Cashinahua pagans’.7 In each instance theory’s proper name is doubled by a culturalist ‘ethnic’ representative, which stands for difference incorporated. In this doubling theory enacts a ‘strategy of contain- ment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation’.8 Indeed, one of the central arguments of Bhabha’s book The Location of Culture is that anthropology’s culture-concept functions repressively in the context of radical difference primarily because of its spatiality. He argues that, in spite of the sophisticated self-reflexivity of contemporary theory, ‘[t]he Other is [still] cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment’.9 In this sense, the other is spatialized: located, fixed, grounded and thereby known through the culture-concept and so ‘loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse’.10 The artistic avant-garde from the turn of the last century is, of course, one of the classic sites of the West’s engagement with the primitive. It is a site that has come to orient some of the key theoretical debates in art criticism in recent times, and is where this line of post-colonial criticism finds its most sustained development in relation to the arts. The Susan Hiller edited collection, The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art usefully encapsulates the key post-colonial parameters of these debates.11 Ethnographic material from Africa and Oceania that so inspired the European metropolitan avant-garde, was, on the one hand, openly understood to be a ‘resource’ for the enrichment of Euro- pean art (Picasso, for example, famously appreciated ‘what one could gain’ from this alter-tradition)12 and, on the other, produced in communities that were always, relative to Europe, materially under-resourced. Primitivism in art, it was argued, not only relied on the processes of colonialism that enabled these materials to be accessed in the first place, but could itself be construed as another, more subtle, form of (cultural) resource extraction. The event that served as a lightning rod for this line of criticism was the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art’. Hal Foster, in his critique of this exhibition, invoked Ricoeur who, he suggests, ‘wrote presciently of a moment when “the whole of mankind becomes a kind of imaginary museum”’. Echoing the critiques of Spivak and Bhabha, Foster suggests that this primitivism represents a kind of ‘closure’ or ‘claustrophobia’.13 He concludes by arguing that:

rather than seek or resuscitate a lost or dead other, why not turn to vital others within and without – to affirm their resistance to the

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white, patriarchal order of Western culture? … On this reading the other remains – indeed, as the very field of difference in which the subject emerges – to challenge Western pretences of sovereignty, supremacy, and self-creation.14

These cultural-political questions raise important themes to do with appropriation, ownership, repatriation, agency and resistance in the relationship of art production to cultural difference. They are questions that are still very much alive, as more recent books on art and primitivism suggest. We might think by way of example here of Flam and Deutch’s Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History,15 or Pinney and Thomas’s Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment.16 This latter collection, written from the perspective of an anthropology of art, outlines perhaps the strongest post-colonialist critique to date. Developing the central thesis of Alfred Gell’s book Art and Agency,17 it explores the idea that the art product in tribal contexts never simply bears the impression of an artist’s agency, but that this agency is itself distributed through the social and material context in which the work is being made. In this analysis, artistic agency and its social and material milieu are given a kind of mutually soliciting power. Agency cannot, then, be located in any particular individual, but is dispersed among a community and into the material realm too because material objects are assumed to have ‘the capacity to stand in networks of human social agency’.18 This can be seen to be a radical extension of the kind of post-colonially-inspired critiques being advanced by Foster and others during the early debates on primitivism in art. Significantly, because this work is anthropologically-framed, it is energized empirically by carefully specified social, geographical and material situations. It represents a kind of situated theory. In this sense, the anthropological concept of culture has been radicalized and reactivated, not as a domesticating device as Bhabha charged, but as an enlivening and enabling condition.

Architecture and the primitive

In architecture the status of the primitive appears to be much more clear cut. It is the first framing, that of the primitive as the noble savage (rather than cannibal), that figures most prominently in the key chapters of the history of architectural theory. As a consequence, it is a history that is remarkably free of the ambivalent and contorted play of fear and desire that marks the appearance of the primitive in the arts more generally. However, the freedom that comes with a whole- hearted ennobling of the primitive is a blind and unproductive one. With primitivism’s internal tensions seemingly resolved, the motivation for thinking critically about the problematic of otherness and difference more generally becomes

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dissipated in architecture. It is remarkable, for instance, that while the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art’ provoked controversy and heated debate, and generated a range of important reconsiderations of the politics of art,19 the Bernard Rudofsky-curated Architecture Without Archi- tects, held in 1964 at the same institution, and which relied on a primitivist depiction of non-western architectures as organic, authorless, cultural creations, generated little controversy. Of course, the twenty-year difference between these exhibitions is crucial as it was precisely in this period that the theoretical discourse I sketched above began to have its effects, and the critical reception of the Primi- tivism show could be counted as one of those effects. Nonetheless there has been little, even belated, critical reflection on the 1964 show,20 and it still remains widely regarded within architecture as an appropriate and timely corrective to the excesses of architectural modernism. All of this confirms what Adrian Forty pointed out in his keynote paper in the conference that inspired this book: that, historically, architecture has remained relatively untouched by the controversy that the primitive has generated for the other arts. Part of this immunity may be related to the form that the primitive most commonly takes in architecture. In architecture the trope of the primitive is given its most consistent expression through the idea of the primitive hut. Joseph Rykwert’s book On Adam’s House in Paradise (first published in 1972)21 is perhaps the most influential encapsulation of the history of this idea. For him the primitive hut is ‘the paradigm of building: as a standard by which other buildings must in some way be judged’.22 He argues that the primitive hut functions as a resource that underpins architecture’s very rationale, grounding questions of ‘why we build and what we build for’, while offering a set of principles to which architects could appeal in order to reform ‘corrupt custom or practice’.23 In this intellectual context, the primitive hut ‘retain[s] its validity as a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all building for people: that is, of architecture. It remains the underlying statement, the irreduc- ible, intentional core’.24 There is little sense that the primitive is a threatening or difficult condition in Rykwert’s account. On the contrary, again and again culturally, geographically and historically diverse examples, Rykwert demonstrates the persistently benign and noble values that seem to radiate from this idea. Rykwert’s book effectively raises the stakes around the question of the primitive. Not only is this a matter of thinking through the question of architecture’s relation to the primitive, as if it were one idea among many; but because the primitive hut is as old as architectural theory itself,25 and because of its special status as original architecture, to broach the primitive is to raise fundamental questions about architecture itself. At a time when the cultural- political debates around the question of difference and otherness have such prominence across all the arts and beyond, it becomes more important than

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ever to explore the idea of the primitive (as one embodiment of difference and otherness) in an institutionally-specific way.

An alternative history of the primitive hut

One way of framing this line of inquiry would be to propose an alternative history of the primitive hut. The aim of such a history would be to explore how the internal tensions held within the notion of primitivism I charted above, came to be resolved within the field of architecture. It would interrogate precisely how architecture’s embrace of the primitive managed to hive off and domesticate primitivism’s more troubling and threatening dimensions, and how the (ultimately more interesting and productive) tensions that the primitive seems to present for the other arts were resolved in architecture. Such an alternative history would be attentive to the institutional positioning of the primitive in architecture and would explore its productive potential and political consequences. It would borrow the theoretical vigour of the ‘pagan’ and the ‘nomad’ to exploit the critical possibilities that theory has opened, while retaining the kind of scepticism post-colonial criticism reserves for a theoretical practice that under- invests in the contingencies of specific histories of difference and their worldly circumstances. Such an alternative history might begin with a re-examination of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture (first published in 1753),26 perhaps architecture’s best-known formulation of the idea of the primitive hut. In the remainder of this chapter I would like to sketch such a re-examination in order to offer a sense of how this alternative history might develop. For Laugier the failures of the architecture of the mid-eighteenth century were all too evident in the fashionable ornamental ‘excesses’ of the Rococo and in the medievalism of the Gothic. His version of the primitive hut embodies a set of essential principles – that happen to consist of the basic components of Classical architecture: column, entablature and pediment – that amount to a structural-functional basis for architectural composition.27 Laugier suggests:

From now on, it is easy to distinguish between the parts which are essential to the composition of an architectural Order and those which have been introduced by necessity or have been added by caprice … Let us never lose sight of our little rustic hut.28

Laugier’s primitive hut is a theoretical deduction predicated upon a generalized figure of ‘man’ who, ‘by imitating the natural process’,29 comes to discover the correct and proper principles of architecture. Laugier does not rely on empirical evidence of the building practices of contemporary or historical ‘primitive’

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peoples to make his case. The famous and influential frontispiece to the second edition of his Essay (published in 1755) by illustrator Charles Eisen (Figure 3.3), dramatizes the theoretical character of Laugier’s primitive hut by omitting any identifiable agent guiding the construction process. The construction appears to have unfolded with such inevitability and autonomy that, as Anthony Vidler points out, ‘[t]he first man, so often shown building Adam’s hut, is nowhere to be seen’.30 Laugier’s narrative of the primitive hut was, as is widely noted (by Rykwert, Herrmann, and Vidler among others), indebted to Jean-Jacques Rous- seau’s fiction of primitiveness as embodied in the figure of the noble savage. Yet, as Vidler notes, ‘Laugier, in contradistinction to Rousseau, had chosen to eliminate altogether the social roots of dwelling’.31 Laugier preferred to use ‘architectural criteria derived from the internal logic of architecture’ rather than ‘the external influences of customs or mores’.32 Vidler develops this point by comparing the respective frontispiece images of Laugier’s Essay and Rous- seau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, (also designed by Charles Eisen), both of which were published in the same year, 1755. Rousseau’s image (Figure 8.1) depicts

a Hottentot raised by Dutch missionaries on the Cape of Good Hope, demonstrating, to the Governor of the Cape and his aides seated outside the walls of their fort, his desire to ‘return to his fellows,’ gesturing toward a group of huts on the shore, his true home. ‘Noth- ing’, noted Rousseau with delight, ‘can overcome the invincible repugnance they have in assuming our mores and living in our way’. The hut, however rudely built, here became a principle of social happiness, not of architecture.33

While Rousseau’s image places the primitive hut in a complex scene of cross- cultural contact in order to illustrate the ‘incompatibility of primitive life with civilized mores’,34 Laugier’s image isolates the primitive hut in an open landscape, uncomplicated by anything other than the threat of bad weather. Laugier’s anthropology was of a speculative and non-empirical kind, and the omission of an evident human agency from the graphic representation of his primal architectural scene underscores the theoretical and autonomous status of his primitive hut. His anthropology is, at the same time, shot through with emerging empirical evidence of contemporary primitive life. This anthropology, Herrmann notes, was gleaned from classical sources ‘such as Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Vitruvius, Tacitus and others’, but was supple- mented by contemporaneous ‘accounts given by missionaries and travellers about the life of modern savages in North America and elsewhere’, including the influential missionary ethnography of Joseph-François Lafitau’s Customs

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8.1 Frontispiece of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, designed by Charles Eisen, 1755 of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times.35 In addition, as Geoffrey Symcox shows, the figure of the noble savage emerges from the pre-existing wild man myth, a crude and threatening figure who was, in effect, ‘disciplined and domesticated’ to emerge ‘in the eighteenth century as the refined and rational Savage’.36 The noble savage cannot, then, be simply accepted as a self-evident predicate upon which a case for architecture’s proper values might be deduced. Rather, he emerges through a complex play of classical anthropology, mythological tradition and a growing body of contemporary ethnographic material. This figure, who was later to be subsumed into the nineteenth-century doctrines of evolutionist anthropology, begins to emerge in the Enlightenment as an analytic category of cultural anthropology.37 Laugier’s influential essay on the idea of the primitive hut, elucidating as it does a set of autonomous architectural principles, can be shown to rest upon experiences of the primitive that are delivered to it and managed by way of an institutional exchange with anthropology. Architecture’s immunity from the more troubling dimensions of the primitive – its corporeality, materiality, mutability and radical difference, for instance – relies on this institutional exchange. In this sense, anthropology touches actual ‘primitive’ states through its ethnographic field techniques so that architecture does not have to. In effect,

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it allows architecture a vicarious experience of the primitive, to touch the primitive while keeping its hands clean. This laundered primitive is not an isolated quirk of eighteenth- century architectural theory. Architecture’s vicarious (anthropologically-mediated) relationship with the primitive can be shown to operate in any number of contexts: in Vitruvius’s account of the origins of architecture; in Gottfried Semper’s interest in the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Gustav Klemm’s account of the material and ornamental basis for architecture; in Le Corbusier’s reference to ‘savage’ and ‘nomadic’ dwellings in his theorization of a modern urbanism; in Aldo van Eyck’s relation to Marcel Griaule and Ruth Bene- dict in his proposal for distinctive social forms and architectural counter-forms; and even in the Arcadian primitivism that informs Kevin Lynch’s notion of cogni- tive mapping and urban imageability. While an often culturalist interest in the architectures of others remains a minor knowledge within architecture, the primitive remains the Other against which key moments in architectural theory are constructed. In this sense the dominant strands of architectural scholarship are threaded together by an uncritical reliance upon the primitive. It is time for architecture to attend more critically to its primitivist subtext in order to generate a productive engagement with the full critical potential of the primitive. Paying serious attention to this subtext is a risky business as it necessarily opens onto a more fluid and mutable set of conditions in which forms, materials and social agencies interact in complex and unpredictable ways. But, as the work on ‘art and the technologies of enchantment’38 suggests, this risk is intellectually rewarding and politically necessary.

Notes

1 Clifford, ‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm’, in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster (ed.), Seattle: Bay Press, 1987, pp. 121–30. 2 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 3. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies 1981, 62: 157–84, esp. p. 157. 4 Ibid. p. 160. 5 Ibid. pp. 158–9. 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in The Post-Colonial Critic, Sarah Harasym (ed.), London: Routledge, 1990, p. 8. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 31. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 ‘However impeccably the content of an “other” culture may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as the closure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytic terms, it be always the good object of knowledge, the docile body of difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory’. Ibid.

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11 Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, London: Routledge, 1991. 12 Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange, cited in Hiller, p. 12. 13 Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, October 1985, 34: 58–70, esp. p. 69. 14 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 15 Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (eds), Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 16 Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, London: Berg, 2001. 17 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 18 Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Pinney and Thomas, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 5. 19 See ‘Part IV. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 Primitivism exhibition and its aftermath’, in Flam and Deutch, Primitivism, for a selection of key articles in this debate. 20 An obvious exception is Felicity Scott’s work. See Felicity Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling’, in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Sarah Goldhagen and Rejean Legault (eds), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 215–37. 21 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981. 22 Ibid., p. 190. 23 Ibid., p. 192. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 13. 26 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977. 27 Ibid., p. 12. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Anthony Vidler, ‘The Hut and the Body: The “Nature” of Architecture from Laugier to Quatremère de Quincy’, Lotus International 1981, 33: 102–11, esp. p. 105. 31 Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987, p. 20. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. p. 20. 35 Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London: A. Zwemmer, 1962, p. 46. Rousseau’s interest in Lafitau’s work is also noted by Geoffrey Symcox, ‘The Wild Man’s Return: The Enclosed Vision of Rousseau’s Discourses’, in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (eds), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972, p. 233. 36 Ibid., p. 224. 37 Hayden White, ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea’, in Dudley and Novak, The Wild Man Within, p. 10. 38 Pinney and Thomas, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 5.

95 Chapter 9

Reinventing ‘primitiveness’ Henri Lacoste and the Belgian Congo Pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris

Johan Lagae

With its monumental scale, its use of axial symmetry, its obus-shaped cupolas, and its Africanizing decoration, the Belgian Congo pavilion at the Paris International Colonial Exposition of 1931, designed by architect Henri Lacoste (1885–1968), presents itself at first sight as a striking example of what the architectural historian Jean-Claude Vigato has referred to as ‘the colonising of the vocabulary of exotic architecture through the architectural principles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts’.1 Describing it as an ‘overblown and regularized hut’, Vigato proved very critical of the project.2 His critique is echoed in a statement by Paul Greenhalgh who, in his historical survey of World’s Fairs, labelled it as an example of ‘mock African’ exhibition architecture, that only serves as a stage set conceived ‘to mentally transport the visitor away from Europe’ and in his view lacks all ‘serious architectural considerations’.3 There should be no doubt that the essence of Lacoste’s design was precisely such a mental transportation, but I would like to argue that the critiques formulated by Vigato and Greenhalgh are rather too reductive in their assessment of the pavilion. Henri Lacoste was not just another art deco architect seduced by a then-popular taste for exoticism, but one of the first Belgian designers who displayed a genuine interest in African art and architecture at a time when the Congo was still regarded as an architectural terre vierge. A close

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reading of the pavilion’s architecture will reveal the undeniable functionalist character of the design and will illustrate how the architect skilfully responded to the constraints of both building site and programme. By focusing on the intriguing structural solution of the cupolas, I will indicate how this pavilion can be seen as a form of reinventing ‘primitiveness’ that blurs preconceived notions of western architectural discourse, although Lacoste himself might not have been aware of the architectural ambivalence his striking project generates.

The ultimate ‘Théâtre des colonies’

In many respects the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 was the ultimate ‘théâtre des colonies’.4 Occupying an immense site on the periphery of Paris, the so-called Parc de Vincennes, and presenting over thirty sections, it was one of the largest colonial exhibitions ever. In his opening speech, the French Minister of Colonies in a striking way underlined the extent to which the exhibition architecture turned the event into an imaginary trip across the continents: ‘You just have made, mister president, a tour de monde in a quarter of an hour.’5 Some pavilions were almost exact replicas of existing structures, such as the reconstruction of part of the temple of Angkor Vat. Others consisted of a bricolage of ‘indigenous’ built forms, as was the case in the Madagascar pavilion or that of l’Afrique Occidentale Française. Only a select number of pavilions were designed in a contemporary idiom, such as the Musée des Colonies, a good example of 1930s official classicism blended with art deco decoration. In the context of the exhibition, the inspector general of artistic education and museums at the Ministry of Fine Arts, Emile Bayard, published a book entitled L’Art de reconnaître les styles coloniaux de la France.6 The book is pervaded by a western architectural conception that presupposes ‘monumentality’, ‘durability’ and ‘history’ to be conditions inherent to any architectural tradition. It is telling that Bayard only briefly discussed l’Afrique noire, while he gave ample attention to colonies with a heritage considered as monumental, such as North Africa. The large-scale mud mosques of Djenné also could be described in western architectural terms, and Bayard significantly sought to link these impressive ensembles to certain stages of western civilization, positioning them within a larger evolutionist discourse that proclaimed Africa as the ‘dark continent’ in need of western civilization. As such, Bayard’s discussion of the exhibition’s architecture embodies what Patricia Morton, in her recent study of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, has described as the then- current ‘architectural physiognomy of the colonies’. Further, ‘like the science that catalogued corporeal differences between races, architectural physiognomy detailed physical indicators of difference among cultures that allowed them to be allotted places in an evolutionary hierarchy’.7

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Inventing a Congolese architecture

It was precisely this western preconception of architecture – being by definition, monumental, durable and embedded in history – that had been the major obstacle for Belgian architects designing a Congo pavilion. Indeed, ever since the Congo needed to be represented at an international or universal exhibition, the argument had been that no inspiration was to be found in the indigenous built forms of the country. In the Livre d’Or of the 1905 Universal Exhibition in Liège it was formulated as follows: ‘because no relic of an indigenous public building of importance is to be found anywhere in the Congo, it is meaningless to search for representative morphological elements amenable to transformation in a stylistic manner’.8 As a result, since 1885, when the Congo Free State was founded, Congo pavilions had been built in a variety of styles, ranging from beaux-arts classicism and art nouveau, to Viennese secession and a bizarre form of classicist orientalism. Twice, in 1885 and in 1905, a colonial building formed the model.9 Some architects had tried to give their design a certain African flavour by using decorative schemes that clearly referred to geometrical patterns of Congolese artefacts. Being probably the most imaginative Belgian architect of his time, Henri Lacoste was one of the first architects not to reject Central African building forms as a possible source of inspiration.10 By combining beaux-arts design principles with a formal language that explicitly referred to African ‘huts’, he actually succeeded in ‘inventing’ a native architecture that was highly praised at the time (Figure 9.1). Using the technique of axial composition, Lacoste created a symmetrical composition from one privileged point of view located near the main entrance of the site, linking the three pavilions visually by means of a colonnade and marking the focal point of the central axis by surmounting the main pavilion with three cupolas whose shape recalled African pain de sucre, as some contemporaries commented.11 This solution allowed Lacoste to mask the irregular shape of the whole complex that resulted from the site’s contours as well as to minimize the visual impact of one of the main circulation paths of the exposition that ran across the building plot. The Belgian Congo section comprised three main pavilions as well as some commercial stands, a pigeon house and a model colonial house in copper. To emphasize his preferred direction of approach, Lacoste designed an entrance porch bearing Africanizing totems in the form of armoury. The initial designs for this entrance were even more daring, including one project with four gigantic elephants and another with female figurines that seem inspired by the female bodies that are characteristic of sculpted stools of indigenous chiefs of the Katanga or Maniena region. Lacoste’s design was highly praised by the colonial establishment as well as by the professional milieu. The French critic Robert Cogniat

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9.1 Congo pavilion at the Paris Colonial Exposition, 1931. View from the main entrance Source: L’Emulation (1931), 12, plate 29

wrote that the Congo pavilion ‘proved that the architect had understood the plain and instinctive grandeur of the art nègre and that he had succeeded in interpreting it without deforming its essence’, while architect Jean Gallotti labelled the project a ‘majestueux palais nègre’.12 While Lacoste suggested that the overall composition was inspired by the layout of a Congolese chief’s residence, the Africanizing character of the project is most explicit in its decorative scheme.13 At the time of the design, Lacoste had not set foot in the Congo.14 However, he did extensive research by studying the collections of the Congo museum in Tervuren, by reading articles on African art in contemporary publications, and by visiting exhibitions. Ever since Lacoste had operated as an architect on archaeological missions in Syria and Greece, he had displayed a keen interest in other cultures that not only surfaced in his architectural work, but also nurtured his courses as a professor of art history at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts.15 During the preparation of the design of the Congo pavilion, Lacoste developed a profound knowledge of African art, as is revealed by his use of rare sources for the decorative scheme. Instead of using the well-known geometrical patterns of the so-called velours du Kasaï, as had been the case, for instance, in the Congo pavilion of the 1930 Antwerp World’s Fair, Lacoste instead turned to abstract animal motifs of Yombé textiles for the main pavilion’s mosaïc floor.16 For the decoration of the exterior colonnade, Lacoste freely drew inspiration from Congolese masks and

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9.2 View of one of the colonnades with Africanizing capitals Source: L’Emulation (1931), 12, plate 30 figurines in the museum’s collection, such as those from the Bembe or the Songye people (Figure 9.2). The design of the benches in the section’s garden were based on a zoomorphic Congolese drum that was one of the museum’s masterpieces and that had already been on display at the African village of the 1897 Colonial Exhibition in Tervuren. Lacoste also used sources of non-Congolese origin. Some of the capitals of the colonnade were in fact based on artefacts from the Ivory Coast and Gabon. In the decoration of the canvases that masked the industrial skylights on the inside of the main pavilions, as well as of the outer walls of the section’s pigeon house, reference is made to cave paintings that had recently been discovered by the German explorer Leo Frobenius in Rhodesia and South Africa. In this respect, Lacoste was no doubt heavily influenced by the exhibition l’Art nègre: les arts anciens de l’Afrique noire, that ran at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1930 and which had such items on show.17

An architecture, ‘Modern’ in spirit

Since the 1920s a broad interest in African artefacts had surfaced in Belgium that induced a shifting perception. No longer seen as mere curiosities testifying to a ‘primitive otherness’, sculptures, textiles, objects of Congolese origin were gradually being regarded as examples of ‘traditional’ craftsmanship worth collecting. It was also at that time that a number of innovative ethnographic studies were published, such as Joseph Maes’s Aniote Kifwebe of 1924, a

100 Reinventing ‘primitiveness’

book that discussed the original use of some of the Congolese masks in the collection of the Tervuren museum.18 There should be little doubt, however, that aesthetic rather than ethnographic principles underscored Lacoste’s selection of African elements to be integrated. For the architect the commission to build a Congo pavilion provided a unique opportunity to develop fully his imaginative skills. As an ‘invention’ of a traditional Congolese architecture the 1931 Congo pavilion responded perfectly to the lure of exoticism typical of colonial expositions and the art deco vogue of the time. This does not mean, however, that Lacoste was a mere formalist, or that the pavilion was nothing but a stage set. In this respect, it is important to underline that Lacoste did not only design the exterior but also the exhibition stands within. The archival fund of the project enumerates numerous detailed studies of circulation routes, exhibition stands, innovative lighting solutions and so on, illustrating how Lacoste formulated apt answers to the specific demands of each of the section’s participants. On a more general level, he provided a passage hidden from view that allowed the section’s staff easy access to the showcases. Even some of the decoration was based on a functionalist reasoning. In his personal note on the pavilion, Lacoste explained how his assumption that the industrial skylights, because of the temporary character of the pavilion, would not be perfectly waterproof had informed the decoration of the canvases masking them. Imprinted with a drawing based on cave paintings, stains from incoming rainwater would, according to Lacoste, easily be overlooked, because they would be understood as belonging to the image itself.19 Marcel Temporal, who commented upon the 1931 Colonial Exposi- tion for l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, considered the pavilion of the Belgian Congo, together with those of Madagascar, Togo/Cameroon and the Dutch Indies as good examples of a ‘modern’ architecture that ‘united the spirit of the colonial style, which they should represent with a formal logic resulting from functional demands’.20 The statement is striking, considering that all the examples mentioned were, in one way or another, re-interpretations of indigenous architectures. Yet, it remains in tune with Temporal’s critical stance towards what he considered the ‘empty formalism’ of the pavilions built in an undecorated, modernist style. His reading of the Congo pavilion can therefore be ascribed to a more general trend in 1930s architectural discourse that sought to re-evaluate the relationship between architecture and ornament.

Displaying authenticity and progress

The 1931 Colonial Exposition took place in a context of economic turmoil. The essence of Belgium’s participation in it was to counter international critiques of the fact that one of the smallest European nations was governing one of the

101 Johan Lagae

largest and potentially most rich territories on the African continent. For this reason the message to be conveyed was one of a colony in full process of modernization.21 The interior displays put great emphasis on technological progress and Lacoste skilfully designed a presentation that incorporated part of a bridge, an aeroplane, a replica of the interior of an ocean steamer and impressive dioramas of the mining industry.22 As such, the interior display of the ‘modernized’ Congo formed an ambivalent alliance with the exterior design that aimed at evoking an image of the ‘authentic’, that is, pre-industrial Congo. Hence, the 1931 Congo-pavilion exemplifies an ‘architectural ambivalence’ in the sense that ‘an invented hybrid exterior acts as mediator between a presti- gious western presence in the interior and an absent, native environment considered not worth showing’.23 One element of Lacoste’s design, namely the obus-shaped cupolas, is of particular importance in this respect because it blurs this dichotomy between inside and out. Indeed, the structural design of the cupolas asks for a reading that goes beyond the categories of the ‘primitive’ or the ‘modern’. The cupolas consisted of a structural wooden frame left unconcealed on the inside and covered with straw on the outside (Figure 9.3). Made of prefabricated elements, this frame permitted easy assemblage on site and created large spans without secondary supports. It was a French entrepreneur, Louis Hartmann, who introduced Lacoste to this structural solution, referred to as a charpente en lamelles.24

9.3 View of the main cupola, showing the charpente en lamelles Source: L’Emulation (1931), 12, plate 31

102 Reinventing ‘primitiveness’

In 1928 the magazine La Technique des Travaux dedicated a special issue to the charpente en lamelles, describing it as a totally new, promising concept of constructing in wood.25 This diamond-patterned lamella roofing system was built up of relatively short wooden members oriented with their deeper section perpendicular to the surface of the structure and bolted together at an angle so that each was intersected by two similar adjacent members at its mid-point. The interlocking diamonds thus formed are triangulated, giving the whole structure its stability. Since the lamellas brace each other at frequent intervals, even concentrated or live loads are rapidly dispersed through the network of intersecting diamonds. The circular segments generally used in the lamella system closely follow the parabola, which represents the pressure line of a uniformly distributed load placed on an arch, making it an extremely effi- cient system that uses the minimum of material.26 The origin of the system was German. Developed by Fritz Zollinger in the early twentieth century, it was patented as the Zollinger-Bauweise in 1910 and put into practice on a large scale in Germany during the reconstruction period after the First World War.27 In the context of a housing shortage that necessitated new solutions for quick and cheap construction, the Zollinger-Bauweise allowed a significant reduction of building material as well as assembly time. During the interwar period numerous housing settlements were constructed according to this principle, but also it was applied to warehouses, exhibition halls, sports centres, churches, and so forth. Hugo Häring used it in several of his projects, among them the widely acclaimed farm complex at Garkau, near Lübeck (1924).28 As well as in Germany and France this mode of construction also made its appearance in other European regions, such as Scandinavia and Italy, and was successfully used in the United States. Up until the 1960s and 1970s, the charpente en lamelles or lamella roof received frequent mention in the professional press. The charpente en lamelles thus had already a certain tradition by the time Lacoste applied it to his 1931 Congo pavilion. Normally used for arched roof constructions, it was unusual to use it for the construction of a cupola. The system could only be played out to its fullest advantage in arched roofs as this allowed for the construction of a roof with the minimum number of different members. Not only were a large number of different timber members needed for the construction of the cupola, but the determination of their precise shape proved a difficult undertaking. This was owing to the form of the node that resulted from the way that the system is put together. Indeed, mathematically, such cupola structure is difficult to describe.29 An analysis based on CAD models suggests that the building of the cupola probably took place in a process of trial and error, with a large amount of adjustments made on site.30

103 Johan Lagae

An architectural hybrid?

Whatever the method used actually to construct the cupola, the result was by all accounts intriguing. On the one hand the lamella roof induced associations of standardization, efficiency, economy and rationality, making it a mode of construction that was perfectly in tune with the functionalist tenets of modernism during the interwar years. Paul Peirani, writing for La Technique des Travaux, labelled the use of the lamella roof in Lacoste’s design as a solution of ‘totally modern simplicity’.31 On the other hand, because of its appearance, this structural system was simultaneously reminiscent of building techniques of, what were still considered at the time, ‘primitive’ societies. When discussing this mode of construction in the magazine Architettura e Arti Decorative in 1931, the Italian modernist architect Gaetano Minucci, pointed out this duality.32 Responding to industrial, economical and organizational criteria, the lamella roof had, according to Minucci, precedents in ‘simple, primitive constructions’ such as the indigenous huts of Samoa, a picture of which he included on the title page of his article. It is precisely this duality of the structural solution of the cupolas, being at once ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’, that allows us to read Lacoste’s design as an ‘architectural hybrid’, a term coined by Patricia Morton to describe a form of architectural ‘crossbreeding’ between the metropolitan and the colonial, that blurs preconceived notions of western architectural discourse as well as the boundaries of the hierarchies inherent in colonialism.33 Indeed, how could a people be ‘primitive’ if they were able to construct with building techniques that inspired a mode of construction that, at the time, was considered most innovative? One can only speculate whether Henri Lacoste was aware of the ambivalence inherent in his reinvention of Central African ‘primitiveness’. His personal description of the project contains no passage that hints in that direction. Instead, he places emphasis almost exclusively on the formal characteristics of the cupolas. In later projects where he reused the lamella roof, such as the Pavilion de la Vie Catholique at the 1935 Brussels World’s Fair or the chapel of a vacation home in Buizingen built in 1936, such ambivalence was absent. Rather than reinvesting the formal language – the tectonics or the typologies of contemporary architecture – with inspiration drawn from ‘primitive’ examples, as Le Corbusier would do around that time, Lacoste’s design attitude was informed by an eclectic curiosity that often resulted in a ‘shameless use of images that come to us from foreign regions’.34 What turns his oeuvre – and his teaching – into ‘an alternative for the normative discourse of the avant-garde’ is precisely this non-conformist attitude that allowed him to utilize his profound knowledge of worldwide architectural history in the pursuit of creative architectural practice.35

104 Reinventing ‘primitiv RRKness’

The 1931 Congo pavilion stands out as one of the most striking representations of Belgian colonialism ever seen at an international exhibition and no doubt informed the choice for an Africanizing Congo pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair of 1935. Such a design approach would, however, quickly become obsolete. By the end of the decade, when the Congo had to be represented at several international events, the organizers opted instead for a more contemporary architecture. A sleek colonial bungalow formed the setting at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 while, in New York in 1939, the Belgian colony was represented within the modernist Belgian pavilion. Lacoste’s later more phantasmagorical design for the Congo pavilion of the 1939 International Water Exhibition in Liège seemed quite out of tune with current thinking. Even in its much simplified form as built –a huge, totem pole-like construction in front of a ‘decorated shed’ with Africanizing motifs – it could not match the compelling image of technological progress celebrated at the Liège event. Nor could it express the emergence of ‘Le nouveau Congo’, a colony fully modernized, that would become the key image of postwar colonial propaganda and of the Brussels 1958 fair, in particular.36

Notes

1 Apart from contemporary publications, use was made of various primary sources. The original drawings of architect Henri Lacoste, kept at the Archives d’Architecture Moderne, Brussels, hereafter referred to as AAM; official records of the Belgian participation at the 1931 International Colo- nial Exposition, consulted in the Africa Archive, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels; various documents from the personal archive of Denys Lacoste, son of the architect, Lille. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s. 2 Jean-Claude Vigato, ‘The Architecture of Colonial Exhibitions in France’, Daidalos, 1986, 19: 24– 37, esp. p. 30. 3 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 71–2. 4 Sylvianne Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies. Scénographie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions 1855–1937, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986. Numerous publications accompanied the International Colonial Exposition. The popular periodical l’Illustration, for instance, devoted several themed issues to the event. For historical studies, see Catherine Hodier and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition Coloniale, Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1991, and Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Moder- nities. Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. 5 Opening speech of Paul Reynaud, published in La Dépêche Coloniale et Maritime, May 1931, 7. 6 Emile Bayard, L’Art de reconnaître les styles coloniaux de France, Paris: Garnier Frères, 1931. 7 Morton, Hybrid Modernities, p. 217. 8 Gustave Drèze, Le Livre d’Or de l’Exposition Universelle et Internationale de 1905, Liège: Impr. Aug. Bénard, 1905, pp. 487–8. 9 No comprehensive historical survey of all the Congo pavilions has yet been published. 10 In 2003 the Archives d’Architecture Moderne devoted the first major exhibition to this remarkable architect. A small booklet accompanied the exhibition: Eric Hennaut, Henri Lacoste. Un imaginaire

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Art Deco, Brussels: Archives d’Architecture Moderne, 2003, while a more extensive monograph is forthcoming. For a review of the exhibition, see Johan Lagae, Journal of the Society of Architec- tural Historians 2004, 4: 542–4. 11 L. Creplet, ‘L’Exposition Coloniale de Paris. La Belgique participe brillament à cette grandiose manifestation de l’oeuvre civilisatrice internationale’, Le Soir, 9 May 1931; ‘Une heure au Congo Belge’, Exposition coloniale internationale. Correspondance hebdomadaire du Bureau de Presse, 26 July 1931, 13, press cuttings in file O.C. 473, Africa Archive, Brussels. 12 Robert Cogniat, ‘L’Exposition coloniale. Les palais métropolitains, les colonies étrangères, les pays sous mandats’, L’Architecture 1931, 9: 317–41, esp. p. 332; Jean Gallotti, ‘Les Pavillons Etrangers’, L’Art Vivant 1931, 151: 402. 13 Henri Lacoste, ‘Le Congo belge à L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 1931’, L’Emulation 1931, 12: 431–44 and plates 28–31. 14 It was not until the 1950s that Lacoste travelled to the Congo to visit one of his sons, who was a missionary father there. 15 On Lacoste’s background as an archaeologist, see Jean-Charles Balty, ‘De l’architecture à l’urbanisme: Henry Lacoste et l’archéologie’, in Académie de Bruxelles. Deux siècles d’architecture, Jean-Paul Midant (ed.), Brussels: Archives d’Architecture Moderne, 1989, 421–37. 16 Lacoste could have been acquainted with such motifs through his research in the textile collection of the Congo museum or from a publication drawn from it: Emile Coart, Vanneries et Tissages Congolais, Brussels: Ed. de la Renaissance d’Occident, 1926. 17 An analysis of the design process reveals that the decorative scheme changed radically, shortly after this exhibition opened its doors. For the artefacts on display, see Joseph Maes and Henri Lavachery, L’Art nègre à l’Exposition du Palais des Beaux-Arts du 15 novembre au 31 décembre 1930, Brussels/Paris: Librairie Nationale d’Art et d’Histoire, 1930. 18 Joseph Maes, Aniota-kifwebe: les masques des populations du Congo Belge et le matériel des rites de circoncision, Antwerp, de Sikkel, 1924. On the shifting perspectives on Congolese artefacts at that time, see Patricia Van Schuylenbergh and Françoise Morimont, Rencontres artistiques Belgique-Congo 1920–1950, Louvain-la-Neuve, UCL, 1995 and Maarten Couttenier, Fysieke antropologie, koloniale etnografie en het museum van Tervuren. Een geschiedenis van de Belgische antropologie, 1882–1925, unpublished Ph.D., KULeuven, 2004. 19 Lacoste, L’Emulation, pp. 437–42. 20 Marcel Temporal, ‘De la lettre de l’esprit de l’architecture dite “moderne” à l’Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 1931, I: 149–51. 21 See Etienne Deschamps, La participation de la Belgique à l’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris-Vincennes 1931. L’Affirmation d’une politique coloniale sur le scène internationale, unpublished mémoire, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994. 22 For extensive visual documentation of the interior displays, see a themed issue on the Congo section of the periodical L’Illustration Congolaise 1931, p. 117. 23 H. Heynen and A. Loeckx, ‘Scenes of Ambivalence: Concluding Remarks on Architectural Patterns of Displacement’, Journal of Architectural Education 1998, 2: 100–8, esp. p. 103. 24 This could be established on the basis of documents in the personal archive of Denys Lacoste. 25 ‘Un nouveau mode de construction de charpentes en bois. Les charpentes en lamelles’, Extrait de La Technique des Travaux, 1928, 10. 26 For a concise description in English, see also G. R. Kiewitt, ‘The new look of lamella roofs’, in Robert E. Fischer (ed.), Architectural Engineering. New Structures, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 20–4. 27 Klaus Winter and Wolfgang Rug, ‘Innovationen im Holzbau. Die Zollinger-Bauweise’, Bautechnik 1992, 4: 190–7. 28 Matthias Schirren, Hugo Häring. Architekt des neuen Bauens 1882–1958, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001, pp. 124–33.

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29 Fred Brackx, Hennie De Schepper and Johan Lagae, ‘Mathematical Model of the Laminated Frame for a Dome’, in K. Gürlebeck et al. (eds), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on the Applications of Computer Science and Mathematics in Architecture and Civil Engineering, Weimar: Bauhaus Universität, 2003, unpaginated. 30 Such a hypothesis is sustained by photographs of a large-scale model of the cupola, found in the personal archive of Denys Lacoste. Various CAD-models of the cupola structure were developed by Jeroen De Wael at Ghent University in 2003. 31 Paul Peirani, ‘L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris’, La Technique des Travaux 1931, 6: 330–58, esp. p. 352. 32 Gaetano Minucci, ‘Notiziario tecnico’, Architettura e Arti Decorative 1931, 5–6: 408–12. 33 Morton, Hybrid Modernities, pp. 269–71. 34 A description of Lacoste by one of his former students as quoted in Geert Bekaert, Hedendaagse Architectuur in België, Tielt: Lannoo, 1995, p. 109. 35 Hennaut, Henri Lacoste. Un imaginaire Art Deco, p. 3. 36 For a concise survey of the different colonial sections in this decade, see Johan Lagae, ‘Displaying Authenticity and Progress. Architectural Representation of the Belgian Congo at International Exhi- bitions in the 1930s’, Third Text 2000, 50: 21–32.

107 Chapter 10

The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

Styliane Philippou

The sixteenth-century discovery of the New World was chronicled as the discovery of a Garden of Eden, defined by orgiastic nature, free love and innocent nudity. Jan Van der Straet’s 1589 image of Vespucci’s first encounter with America depicts the continent that bears his name as a passive naked female beauty rising from her hammock. In the background there is a scene of cannibalism (Figure 10.1). The scribe of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s Brazilian expedition, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, marvelled to King Manuel of Portugal: ‘Sire, the innocence of Adam himself was not greater than these people’s … They danced and footed it continuously with our people to the sound of one of our tambourines.’1 French sailors returning from France Antarctique, around Guanabara Bay of Rio de Janeiro, brought Tupinambá and Tabajara Indians to Rouen, to participate in ‘Brazilian festivals’, staged to enchant the visiting King Henry II (1550), and later King Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici with their court (1562). Among those observing the real, naked natives, swinging in hammocks or engaging in tribal warfare, was Michel de Montaigne, who subsequently wrote ‘Des Cannibales’ (1580), describing ‘[t]hose people … ruled by the laws of Nature and very little corrupted by ours’. In their idyllic world, ‘[t]he whole day is spent in dancing’. Montaigne described also acts of ritual cannibalism directed against the Indians’ imprisoned enemies, but found these less barbarous than the deaths the Portuguese of Brazil inflicted upon their prisoners and even upon ‘neighbours and fellow citizens’, in the name of a religion of love.2 Hans Staden’s sensationalist account of his two Brazilian adventures was published in 1557 as: The True History and Description of a Country of Savages, a Naked and Terrible People, Eaters of Men’s Flesh, Who Dwell in the

108 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

10.1 Engraving by Theodore Galle after Johannes Stradanus (Jan Van der Straet), America (1589) The caption reads: ‘Americus [Vespucci] rediscovers America. He called her but once and thenceforth she was always awake’

New World called America, Being Wholly Unknown in Hesse Both Before and After Christ’s Birth Until Two Years Ago, When Hans Staden of Homberg in Hesse Took Personal Knowledge of Them and Now Presents His Story in Print. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of cannibalism and sexual trans- gression among Brazilian Indians added legitimacy to the efforts of the Portu- guese and Jesuit missionaries to subjugate the savages, stressing the moral superiority of the Europeans. The Brazilian ‘primitives’ provided also inspiration for theories of the natural goodness of humans and the nobility of savages, for long after the Tupinambá had been sacrificed to European demands and diseases, or forcefully assimilated into Christian communities.

Anthropophagy as anticolonialist metaphor

Anthropologists and historians have recognized the Tupí as ‘the single most important native element contributing to the early formation of Brazilian civilization’.3 With the patronage of Emperor Dom Pedro II, nineteenth-century Romantic Indianism glorified the indigenous exotic, paving the way towards the replace- ment of European idols with tropical ones. Campaigning for a national literature, poets and historians such as Fransisco de Varnhagen argued that ‘the ancient language of our land [Tupí] is much more important than the study of Greek’.4 It was in the twentieth century, however, long after their dispossession and cultural extinction, that the Tupí provided Brazilian culture with its most effective and

109 Styliane Philippou

enduring strategy for perpetual renewal, sustained dialogue and pluralism, radicalization of what has been perceived as negative and subversion of normative discourses. Rejecting the docile native of early twentieth-century paternalist ‘pacifying’ and ‘civilizing’ commissions, the Brazilian Modernists of the 1920s sided with Indian cannibalism, the practice which epitomized Otherness, the ultimate act of savagery. The contested story of Hans Staden – the German artilleryman shipwrecked and captured by Tupinambá Indians, in 1554 – was reprinted, with an English translation appearing in 1928. Oswald de Andrade called for the ‘de-Cabralization’ and ‘de-Vespucciazation’ of the Americas,5 and launched anthropophagy, a form of indigenous resistance and irreverence, as an anticolonialist metaphor. His Manifesto Antropófago was published in 1928, but dated ‘In Piratininga, in the 374th Year of the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha’, proposing this legendary irreverent anthropophagous act of 1556 as the foundational act of resistance, marking the birth of a Brazilian (anthropophagic) consciousness. The 11th of October 1928, the last day of ‘free Amer- ica’ before Columbus’s arrival, was chosen for the first World Conference of Antropofagia. William Arens has argued that the unsubstantiated notion of cannibalism has been used ‘as ideological justification for some very real forms of human exploitation’.6 In a reaction against the intensive nineteenth-century Europeanization of Brazilian society and culture, the Movimento Antropofágico – launched by de Andrade with Raúl Bopp – appropriated the Eurocentric concept of cannibalism associated with the natives of America and the Carib- bean, radicalized that which the Europeans feared and hated, and turned the myth that has served to sustain oppression of the ‘primitive’ Other into a strategy of cultural emancipation. The Antropofagists favoured a new modernity, capable of embracing truly Brazilian values and themes, stressing the importance of the Indian, the African and the rural heritage – that is, those elements that differentiated the Brazilian from the European culture, and which the latter had categorized as primitive. The concept of cultural cannibalism was based on the alleged practices of Brazilian natives, who feasted on those war prisoners who had proven themselves courageous. The ritual ingestion of the enemy resulted in the assimilation of their strengths and qualities. The Tupí- inspired cultural formula has ensured the structural openness of Brazilian cultural practice throughout the twentieth century, and guaranteed its ability to critically assimilate diverse African, indigenous and Western influences, while also resisting domination by hegemonic models. At the centenary of Independence (1922), the poet Menotti del Picchia announced the ‘Brazilianization of Brazil’, and Ronald de Carvalho called for a rejection of the European canon: ‘[l]et us forget the marble of the Acropolis

110 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

and the towers of the Gothic cathedrals’.7 The anthropophagic method, however, allowed for both a firm rooting in Brazilian soil, and a devouring of foreign models, taking over the enemies’ attributes, and destroying their Otherness in the process. De Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago recognized the inevitability and nutrient qualities of the European, and offered an instrument to unite the native with the foreign, the savage with the civilized: ‘Cannibalism alone unites us … Tupí, or not tupí, that is the question … I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal.’8 His ‘cannibalistic vaccine’ initiated the ‘Carib Revolution’ and proclaimed the independence of Brazilian culture. Aggressive and defensive, it aimed to contaminate the European with the tropical, and to protect the native – no more restricted to the Indian – against the viruses and catechisms of ‘the dressed man’. At the Fourth Pan-American Congress of Architects (Rio de Janeiro 1930), the Antropofagist delegate Flávio de Carvalho presented his urban utopia, entitled ‘The City of Naked Man’. In his book of travels, he treated Europe as an exotic Other (Os ossos do mundo 1936).

The twentieth-century Brazilian primitive

Following the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris, French newspapers wrote enthusiastically about the ‘art of the savages’9 exhibited at the exoticist Brazilian Pavilion. From the early twentieth century, a number of Old World avant-garde artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, Gide, Stravinsky and others had ‘discovered’ the ‘primitive’ art of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania. Without questioning the European mythologization of the ‘primitive’, they hoped that their art would be liberated through contact with it. Francis Picabia’s Manifeste cannibale dada (1920) and other European primitivist exaltations of the exotic were not without their influence on the Brazilian artists. For the Brazilians, however, their turn towards the ‘primitive’ did not represent yet another slavish imitation of Euro- pean models but, on the contrary, a turn away from these or, rather, a ritualized ingestion and transformation of the European rival, in the manner of the native savages. The ‘primitive’ was their legitimate heritage and contemporaneous reality. Not so long after the abolition of slavery (1888), Brazil’s definition of her unique, hybrid national identity went hand in hand with the re-appraisal of her African heritage, which was found living on, in the forms of twentieth- century popular Black culture. The discovery and revalorization of the marginalized, strong Black presence in Brazilian culture, at the beginning of the twentieth century, coincided with what the Peruvian poet César Vallejo called ‘La conquista de París por los negros’10 (1925). But, in contrast to the Europeans who imported the African Other, the Brazilians were able to export, as their own,

111 Styliane Philippou

the Other the Europeans craved. In 1923, Oswald de Andrade stated at the Sorbonne: in Brazil, ‘black is a realist element’.11 The baroque architect and sculptor Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisbôa, 1730–1814), son of a Portu- guese master builder and a black slave, was consecrated as the paradigmatic Brazilian artist. As an Antropofagist avant la lettre, he was seen to have infected his work with subversive, ‘anti-European’ qualities, making it ‘an expression of social revolt, and of the Brazilian native and mestizo wish for independence from white or European masters and exploiters of slave labor’.12 The twentieth- century rewriting of the past suggested that Antropofagia had always flour- ished in Brazil as the way the natives received things foreign: they swallowed them, thus acquiring their best qualities and the power to transform them. With the twentieth-century expansion of Rio de Janeiro towards the beaches of Zona Sul, white bourgeois Cariocas rushed to the beach to sunbathe. For gems of Afro-Brazilian culture, they and their guests climbed up to the favelas of Zona Norte, birthplaces of the throbbing national rhythm, samba de morro (hill/favela), and the ‘samba schools’ of Rio’s Africanized carnival, feared by the upper classes for their dangerous inhabitants. In 1926, when his Futurist mani- festos were published in Rio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti posed for a photograph inside a favela. Giuseppe Ungaretti returned to images of abundance and innocent nudity:

[a]midst this new, delirious natural environment the Blacks [lived] apparently happily, deprived of nothing, with no need for clothing to cover themselves, able to obtain nourishment from the freely growing banana trees, always ready for dancing, religion, superstition, sorcery.13

The romanticization of the ‘primitive’ favela reached the silver screen three decades later, in French director Marcel Camus’s Orphée Noir (1958). Camus’s bucolic utopia of the happy favelados who sing, dance and play their guitar all day, oblivious to poverty and chores, offered the New World exotic Other to Hollywood-bred audiences, as a contemporary version of the innocent natives of sixteenth-century chroniclers, and the carefree Blacks of European artist- voyeurs who made the pilgrimage to Rio’s favelas, in search of an authentic experience and ‘[p]rimitive huts’ (Giedion).14 The clichés of the ‘noble savage’ were applied to the ‘noble poor’.15 Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings Morro da favela and Carnaval em Madureira had illustrated de Andrade’s first modernist Manifesto de la Poesía Pau-Brasil, published in Paris, in 1925. Pau-Brasil had anticipated the powerful effect of the Antropofagist vaccine: ‘[t]he Carnival in Rio is the religious outpouring of our race … Wagner yields to the samba schools of Botafogo. Barbaric, but ours.’16 Cannibalization or subversion of things European meant

112 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

carnivalization of pre-established hierarchies and profanation of what belonged to white masters. The Manifesto Antropófago reiterated: ‘[w]e were never cate- chised. What we really made was Carnival’. Carnivalism and Cannibalism became strategies of cultural empowerment and methods of mixing diverse ingredients, to obtain the dynamic pluralism that was seen as characteristically Brazilian, an on-going dialogue between ‘the jungle and the school’ of Pau-Brasil. European modernism was not rejected, but the Brazilians were not proselytized either; they appropriated modernism and transformed it, like their forefathers had transformed Catholicism: they ‘made Christ to be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará’.17

Fantasies of conquest

In 1929, Le Corbusier, an admirer of the jazz of ‘the simple naïve black’,18 shocked his hosts in Rio de Janeiro by following the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti to a favela. To the ‘civilized’ Brazilian officials, who found the black inhabitants of the hills ‘extremely dangerous … savages’, he replied that he

found these blacks basically good: good-hearted. Then, beautiful, magnificent. Then, their carelessness, the limits they have learned to impose on their needs, their capacity for dreaming, their candidness resulted in their houses being always admirably sited, the windows opening astonishingly on magnificent spaces, the smallness of their rooms largely adequate.

On his return from his ‘attempted … conquest of America’,19 aboard the ocean liner Lutétia, he reverted to the infantilizing myths of the ‘child[-like], pure, simple and limpid’ black girl who ‘glides over the roughness of life’, the sauvage Josephine Baker whom he sketched au naturel every day in his cabin. At the ship’s costume ball, he criminalized his painted black face, sporting the convict’s striped uniform.20 To his Brazilian benefactor Paulo Prado, Corbu wrote:

I said my farewell to the continent in a hotel in Copacabana, with a whole afternoon of caresses with Jandyra, a mulatto girl, whose body, I swear, is beautiful, pure, delicate, perfect and adorably young … Behold the miracle. Corbu’s imagination embodies the whole of America in the perfect, pure body of a cook.21

Le Corbusier, whose attitude towards the Brazilian exotic echoes his fascination with the women of Algiers, had filled his sketchbooks with the beauties of the city during his Rio sojourn. He claimed ‘no European infiltration into the powerful mass of American sensations and sights’. Yet, his ‘pure’, exotic girl offered for tourist consumption recalls the ‘primitive’, shameless beauty lolling

113 Styliane Philippou

in a hammock, that Eurocentric conquistadores’ mythology identified with the land they invaded. Le Corbusier’s exuberant, feminized and eroticized Brazil is a land offered for conquest, where ‘everything is festival’,22 the lost paradise of Orphée Noir, inhabited by beautiful mulatas swaying their hips seductively up the morro, where exotic beauty, joy and sensuality are plentiful. George Bernanos, too, likened Rio de Janeiro to a submissive ‘won- drously beautiful [woman … ] [s]eeming to cast herself at one’s feet … An appearance of savage sweetness’. And Marinetti unleashed a fully fledged masculinist fantasy of sexual penetration of the seductive Brazilian female body:

[t]he bay of Rio de Janeiro is clearly enamoured of this Giulio Cesare, this promontory of Italy with its sharp-edged imperial profile that impels itself into the peninsula in search of harbours worthy of its dimensions. The beauteous bay, certain to please and capable of loving, offers all the curves of its beaches and its mountains and opens wide its harbours, geometrically squeezing the transatlantic steamer against its heart of ardent traffic … with the reinforcement of the tropical stars I lovingly assaulted and possessed the mountains of Rio de Janeiro which receded before me in perspective.23

To paraphrase Beatriz Colomina, commenting on another Corbusian act of colonization, ‘[l]ike all colonists, Le Corbusier [and the other twentieth-century Euro- pean conquistadores] did not think of [their Brazilian conquest] as an invasion but as a gift.’24

Radically primitive

In the 1930s, Brazilian mestiço nationalism replaced earlier nationalist ideologies, centring upon the supremacy of white colonial culture. During the authoritarian Vargas regime (1930–45), the Ministry of Education and Public Health was responsible for the creation of a national consciousness and cultural renovação. In 1936, Le Corbusier was invited back to Rio, officially to give a series of lectures and informally to act as a consultant to the projects of the Cidade Universitária and the Ministry, for which Lúcio Costa and his team (Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Oscar Niemeyer and Ernani Vasconcellos) had already proposed a scheme, based on Le Corbusier’s Centrosoyuz Building. Niemeyer recalls their first meeting with Le Corbusier, ‘an architect-genius come down from heaven’.25 A line directly out of Staden may have described more aptly the Brazilian Modernists’ irreverent approach towards their European captive: ‘[h]ere comes our food hopping towards us’. The Ministry of Education and Public Health (1936–44) developed all the elements of what would become recognized as Brazilian modernism: it

114 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

employed local materials and techniques from historic colonial architecture, such as azulejos (blue-and-white glazed tile mosaics), but also that granite the colour of ‘burnt straw’ favoured by nineteenth-century French architect Grandjean de Montigny; the revolutionized Corbusian brises-soleil, made adjustable and related to the Moorish shading devices of colonial architecture; the tropical gardens of Roberto Burle Marx, epitomizing the desire to transgress the rules of pleasureless and prosaic functionalism; the Imperial Palm known as the Brazilian order; and specially commissioned works of Brazilian artists. The local Portuguese architectural traditions, expelled from the city one century earlier, were redefined as predisposed to polyphonist mixing, and added to the Antropofagist structure, helping to Brazilianize modernist architecture in accordance with the principles of ‘Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu into a totem’.26 Ironically, Le Corbusier was called to grant legitimacy to Brazil’s reconciliation with her colonial past, and he encouraged the seminal rapprochement. A year earlier, he and Louis Carré had juxtaposed works of ‘primitive art’ with modern ones, in Le Corbusier’s Parisian apartment and studio. The Ministry building was recognized as one of the first regional interpretations of the Modern Movement. Giedion expressed surprise at ‘such a high architectural standard’ coming from a country that had ‘been lying for a long time on the outskirts of civilization’.27 In 1944, The Architectural Review saw the technologically advanced, monumental modernist building ‘as a technically rather more highly developed example of the tree-house in [Debret’s] drawing’. It compared the ‘enormous “honeycomb”’ of the brise-soleil shielded northern façade to the ‘primitive types of bee-hive dwellings’ sketched by Debret in 1820. The drawing was published next to the modernist skyscraper as ‘a fitting companion’ (Figure 10.2).28 The ‘primitive’-inspired element of the Ministry, however, was not its sophisticated climate-responsive envelope, but its architectural application of the Antropofagist strategy of cultural resistance and empowering irreverence. What was being reinvented was not the dwellings of the Brazilian ‘primitives’, but the Corbusian vocabulary of open floor plan, free façade, pilotis, curtain walls and roof gardens. Upon his arrival, Le Corbusier had sketched a scheme for an alternative site, on the Praia de Santa Luzia, and, few days before his departure, one for the central Castelo site. His first scheme served as the basis for the final Castelo project developed by the Brazilian team. They welcomed Le Corbusier’s proposal, and its deglutition increased the strength of their architecture. At the same time, their conscious ‘transformation of the Tabu into a totem’ under- mined the dominating strategy implied in the foreign catechizing import. The Ministry stands at the beginning of a process which denounces the repressive hierarchy of the allegedly rational, Euclidean orthogonality of the European master, who had written: ‘[w]here the orthogonal is supreme, there we can read

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10.2 Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Jorge Moreira, Carlos Leão and Ernani Vasconcellos, after a sketch by Le Corbusier, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–44, the Ministry of Education and Public Health, Rio de Janeiro. In the March 1944 issue of The Architectural Review the Ministry building was compared to the ‘primitive types of bee-hive dwellings’ sketched by Debret in 1820 Source: The Architectural Review, March 1944, special issue on Brazil, 45(567): 76. Reproduced courtesy of The Architectural Review the height of a civilization’. Infecting the Corbusian volumes with the crooked lines of the ‘pack-donkey’ he abhorred,29 aimed to ally Brazilian with European architecture ‘as equal with equal’, in the manner of the Nambikwara leader observed by Lévi-Strauss in 1938.30 For Pevsner, the Brazilian ‘revolt against reason’ may also have been responsible for ‘forcing into the open the irrational traits of [Le Corbusier’s] character’.31 The Manifesto Antropófago had declared: ‘we never permitted the birth of logic among us’.32 Twentieth-century Brazilian national ideologists and modernist artists preached a Dionysian subversion of rationalist European cate- chism. The distinctly Brazilian Dionysian spirit, associated with the African

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religious heritage that Eurocentric discourse had deemed irrational, was associated with all things exotic, sensual, festive, luxurious, popular, wild: lush tropical nature, vibrant colours, feminine curves were all mobilized to erode the aesthetic prejudices of dogmatic rationalism, without however denying its nutri- tive properties.

Radically feminine

Oscar Niemeyer’s carnivalization of the functionalist paradigm adopted a mantra: ‘[m]y work is not about “form follows function,” but “form follows beauty” or, even better, “form follows feminine”.’33 In his Casa do Baile (dance hall and restaurant, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 1940–3) (Figure 10.3), Niemeyer opted for ornate, fluid and mutable forms; that is, for things feminine, epitomizing sensuality, as opposed to things austere, straight, fixed and static, associated with the male and a narrowly conceived rationality. His instrumentalization of the feminine Other is part of the same liberatory strategy of radicalization of that which is perceived as negative, in the case of the feminine, as irrational and amoral. It has often been noted that the Portuguese and, by extension, the European image of Brazil was, from the beginning, erotic. In the legendary Portuguese phrase, ‘beneath the equator there is no sin’ and, in Amerigo Vespucci’s words, the Brazilian Indians ‘should be considered Epicurians rather than Stoics’. As Parker has demonstrated, the Brazilian cannibal of European thought was highly eroticized. Furthermore, the ‘emphasis on the native women … on their unrestrained sensuality and their easy seduction of the European male is crucial in the configuration of Brazil’s own myths of origin’.34 For the leading intellectual exponent of Brazilian national identity, Gilberto Freyre, the ‘milieu in which Brazilian life began was one of sexual intoxication’. The Portu- guese ‘always was inclined to a voluptuous contact with the exotic woman’. The successful mixing of the third race – the African – was also accomplished in an atmosphere of moral laxity.35 Sensuality, especially the female sensuality associated with the body of the African woman or the mulata, and the notion of Brazil as a strangely sensual, exotic land with ‘the hidden tradition of a licentious past’ continue to play a key role in definitions of brasilidade, to this day, also at the centre of this most Brazilian of festivals: carnival. In 1924, Le Corbusier had stated: ‘[i]t seems justified to affirm: the more cultivated a people becomes, the more decoration disappears. (Surely it was Loos who put it so neatly).’36 For Adolf Loos, ornament with its erotic origins was typical of ‘primitive’ cultures, peasants and women who ‘have no other means to fulfil their existence’.37 Tournikiotis notes Loos’s ‘sentimental erotic approach’ to the decoration of the bedroom of his nineteen-year-old wife Lina (1903), and his ‘unusually erotic spatial manipulations’ of his unsolicited house

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10.3 Oscar Niemeyer, Casa do Baile, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (1940–3) Source: Styliane Philippou for Josephine Baker (1927).38 As Barbara Hooper argues, for Le Corbusier, the feminine, especially the primitive feminine, ‘represents what disfigures the orthogonal forms of modern architecture’.39 Niemeyer used feminine, ‘Aphrodisiac’ curves and ornament as means to resist that rationalist fear of the body – especially the female body – that he recognized in the utilitarian rationality of architectural modernism, and to subvert the hegemonic rational order of modern masculinist civilization, which austerity of form and restraint of self-expression would valorize.40 To the ‘intellectual beauty’ that Le Corbusier and Ozenfant associated with ‘Europe, inheritor of Greek thought, [that] dominates the world’, Niemeyer counterposed the intoxicating beauty of corporeal dynamism, the beauty of ‘the savages’, who ‘like loud colors and the noisy sound of tambourines’.41 For ‘[t]he [Antropofagist] spirit refuses to conceive a spirit without a body.’42

‘How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman’

Hans Staden escaped his savage captors. In Como era gostoso meu francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman), the 1971 film of Nelson Pereira dos Santos, set in sixteenth-century France, Antarctique, the primitive Tupí, coloured, tattooed, colonized, naked woman finally eats the enslaved civilized, French, white, dressed colonizer man, in an ultimate reversal – carnivalization – of normative discourses relating to race, gender and Old/Third versus New/First World. Le Corbusier says his beautiful mulata told him she was ‘a seamstress’, but ‘Cavalcanti said that she was a cook’.43 In the Brazilian Portuguese word ‘comer’, there is a linguistic convergence between eating and sexual possession.

118 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism

Le Corbusier believed it was the airplane, the ultimate machine of modern civilization, that offered him the pleasure of ‘enter[ing] into the body and the heart of the city’; but it was in the manner of the primitive savage of the jungle that his ideas were ingested and ultimately subverted. Although he was aware of the Brazilian ideology of cultural cannibalism,44 Le Corbusier had not foreseen that he would become the ‘sacred enemy’ of the Brazilian banquet, set ‘[t]o transform him into a totem’.45

Notes

1 E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 15. 2 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Cannibals’, in The Utopia Reader, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), New York: New York University Press, 1999, pp. 99–103, pp. 99–102. 3 Burns, A History of Brazil, p. 14. 4 Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974), Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 45. 5 Robert Stam, ‘Cabral and the Indians: Filmic Representations of Brazil’s 500 Years’, in The New Brazilian Cinema, Lúcia Nagib (ed.), London: I. B. Tauris with The Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2003, pp. 205–28, p. 211. 6 W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 184. 7 Burns, A History of Brazil, p. 274. 8 Oswald de Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, in Brasil 1920–1950: De la Antropofagia a Brasília, Valência: IVAM, VEGAP, 2000, pp. 591–2, p. 591. 9 Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy of Brazil, New York: Hill & Wang, 2004 (first published in Portuguese in 1998), p. 293. 10 Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (1967), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 320. 11 Jorge Schwartz, ‘Tupí or not Tupí: The War Cry of Literature in Modern Brazil’, in Brasil 1920– 1950, pp. 539–48, p. 540. 12 Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (1959), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963, p. 210. 13 Carlos Augusto Machado Calil, ‘Translators of Brasil’, in Brasil 1920–1950, pp. 563–78, p. 565. 14 S. Giedion, ‘Brazil and Contemporary Architecture’, in Henrique E. Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, New York: Reinhold, 1956, p. ix. 15 Ivana Bentes, ‘The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film’ in The New Brazilian Cinema, Nagib (ed.), pp. 121–37, p. 129. 16 Oswald de Andrade, ‘Pau-Brasil Poetry Manifesto’, in Dawn Ades, with contributions by Guy Brett, Stanton Loomis Catlin and Rosemary O’Neill, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 310–11, p. 310. 17 De Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, pp. 592, 591. 18 Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991 (first published in French 1930), p. 13. 19 Le Corbusier, Precisions, pp. 9, 18. 20 Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker, London: Robson, 2002, pp. 157–8. 21 Calil, ‘Translators of Brasil’, p. 571. 22 Le Corbusier, Precisions, pp. 1, 233.

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23 Calil, ‘Translators of Brasil’, p. 565. 24 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Battle Lines: E.1027’, in The Sex of Architecture, Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds), New York: Harry N Abrams, 1996, pp. 167–82, esp. p. 178. 25 Oscar Niemeyer, The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer, London: Phaidon, 2000, p. 69. 26 De Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, p. 591. 27 Giedion, ‘Brazil and Contemporary Architecture’, p. ix. 28 Special Issue: Brazil, The Architectural Review March 1944, 45(567): 76. 29 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1929), New York: Dover, 1987, pp. 37, 5–6. 30 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil (1961), New York: Atheneum, 1965 (first published in French 1955), pp. 287–93. 31 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, London: Penguin, 1972, seventh edn, pp. 426, 429. 32 De Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, p. 591. 33 Tracy Metz, ‘“Form Follows Feminine”: Niemeyer, 90, Is Still Going Strong’, Architectural Record, December 1997, p. 35. 34 Richard G. Parker, Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, pp. 12, 19, 160. 35 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (1946), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956 (first published in Portuguese 1933), pp. 83, 161–2, 350. 36 Mary McLeod, ‘Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender and Modernity’, in Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (eds), Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement, Rotterdam: 010, 2002, pp. 312–25, p. 314. 37 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ (1908), in Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, Vienna: Herold, 1962, pp. 276–88, p. 287. 38 Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, pp. 36, 98. 39 Barbara Hooper, ‘Urban Space, Modernity, and Maculinist Desire: The Utopian Longings of Le Corbusier’, in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis, Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach (eds), London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 55–78, p. 62. 40 Freyre, New World in the Tropics, p. 275. 41 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Where Are We?’ in Architecture and Cubism, Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (eds), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 141–66, p. 151. 42 De Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, p. 591. 43 Calil, ‘Translators of Brasil’, p. 571. 44 Le Corbusier, Precisions, pp. 235, 16. 45 De Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, p. 592.

120 Chapter 11

The need to be critical

Robert Brown

Apart from its obvious visual appeal, the wall painting of the Ndebele people of South Africa illustrates how the ‘primitive’, when viewed from outside, is often presumed to be pure and rational, and is accorded a heroic status in opposition to external, globalizing forces.

121 This presumption fails to recognize that all cultures are hybrids bearing the imprint of other cultures, such as with the Ndebele who adopted the practice of wall painting from their Pedi neighbours.

122 The choices that people make often reflect a desire that outweighs the rational. The Ndebele abandoned a house form and use of materials responsive to their climate and way of life, for one technically inferior but mimicking the architecture of their more economically and politically powerful and modern white neighbours.

123 The authentic ‘primitive’ is often subject to manipulation. The ‘traditional’ Ndebele aesthetic only came into being in the 1940s, after the then-South African government donated colourful commercial paints and paid the Ndebele to paint their homes, in order to establish a unique cultural identity and thus legitimize its policy of separate cultural homelands. The Ndebele also played a role; less marketable aesthetics were abandoned for more colourful imagery that sold well to tourists.

As architects increasingly work across boundaries, it is vital to be critical of the world view informing our judgements, and engage with local discourses to reveal the meaning of things as they are experienced and understood locally.

124 Part 4

Urban myths

Chapter 12

Practically primitive

David Leatherbarrow

I have two aims in this paper: first, to introduce and criticize a few common conceptions of ‘the primitive’ in art and architecture, and second, to propose an alternate conception, one that admittedly diverges from common usage in art history writing, and quite possibly exceeds the term’s proper application, but may for these very reasons avoid its more disabling assumptions and more positively increase its significance for contemporary architecture. I’ll begin somewhat obliquely.

Savage modernity

For Le Corbusier, the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) building evoked the true splendour of the Cartesian skyscraper; it was ‘a tonic spectacle, stimulating, cheering, and radiant’ (Figure 12.1).1 This high praise was set out in When Cathedrals Were White, Le Corbusier’s report on ‘the land of timid people’. He had used the last of these adjectives, ‘radiant’, a few years before to describe his new city. ‘Through transparent glass walls’ its towers would reveal the greatest splendour of all, ‘space’.2 In Philadelphia, however, something else earned his admiration, something no project could ever reveal: truly magnificent workmanship. Precise craft was present, he said, to ‘an aston- ishing degree’ in the building’s details and finishes. The ventilators and bank vault doors, for example, were so well made that he noted in his travel log: ‘They are gods’ (Figure 12.2).3 Hyperbole is not uncommon in Le Corbusier’s writing. In this instance it seems more than a little extreme. The building’s exemplary status becomes a little clearer when the ‘spiritual’ consequences of

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12.1 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, view from Market Street, 2001 Source: Tonkao Panin radiant construction are described. Architectural transparency – the transparency of the PSFS solarium, for example – gives free range and full amplitude to a primitive human desire, the outpouring of the self, the heart, lungs and eyes, into the vast, infinite and unlimited expanse. If the human spirit is a river, the architectural aperture is its floodgate. Well-crafted materials disclose an equally primitive reality, the inner potential of things, their unforeseen possibilities and unspoiled clarity, no matter whether they are artificial or natural. That Le Corbusier should witness an epiphany such as this in America is not entirely surprising. Reporting on his travels as if he were a modern Captain Cook, he described New York as a ‘savage city’. From the first moments of his arrival, its uncivilized vitality was vividly apparent: ‘When my ship stopped at Quarantine, I saw a fantastic, almost mystic city rising up in the mist. As the ship moved forward the apparition was transformed into an image of incredible brutality and savagery’.4 Like its skyline, the city’s people expressed a primal energy all their own: ‘In the evening, on the avenues of the city, I began to appreciate the people who, by a law of life which is their own, have been able to create a race: handsome men, very beautiful women.’ Aboriginal beauties also attracted his attention at Vassar College a few weeks later. He compared the female students there to ‘amazons’. Apparently, a fairly unruly band of the 600 that had invaded his lecture that night reduced a large drawing he’d made to confetti, wanting a signature on each of its torn fragments. At a buffet that followed, ‘they did almost as much’ to him. Their unbridled passion for cultural

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12.2 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, depository, 2000 Source: Photograph by Carlos Naranjo

objects was not directed toward the architect alone; they also had a strong appetite for the paintings of Caravaggio.5 In 1929 William Lescaze, one of the two designers of the PSFS building, was described by a New York critic as the ‘Le Corbusier of America’.6 Given the somewhat eclectic and derivative character of much of his work, it is obvious that this too is an instance of hyperbole, perhaps greater than Le Corbusier’s. Nevertheless, the two architects did know one another: Lescaze visited Le Corbusier in Paris in 1927. They took that opportunity to console one another about the conversion projects they had been given, jointly expressing confidence that meagre work of that sort would lead to bigger and better opportunities. Lescaze had good reason to complain; by the mid-1920s he had designed just a few renovations, albeit for wealthy and forward-looking clients, including the great conductor of the Philadelphia orchestra, Leopold Stokowski.7 After Paris, back in New York, Lescaze finished his own apartment renovation. For a self-appointed herald of the esprit nouveau, the elements of the interior are surprising: furniture from eighteenth-century France filled the bedroom, and ornaments from seventeenth-century Spain the entry hall. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the mural Lescaze painted in his bathroom: resting on top of some rough stonework is a Chagall-like dream landscape that twists together emblems of the natural world and primitive culture. A contemporary journal described the experience of the space as ‘stepping into a pool in the heart of a jungle’.8 Here, as in so many instances of early modernism, the great leap forward was meant to be accomplished by an even greater leap backward (skipping the present).

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The progressive aspect of the apartment was apparent, however, in other murals; one from the architect’s professional office looks like a still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, released the year before. Emblems of remote cultures were not, of course, what Le Corbusier admired about the PSFS building. Nor were exotic peoples and places important to Lescaze when he worked with George Howe on the design of that building between 1929 and 32. According to art historians, a different aspect of primitivism was important to them: the inner and native properties of things, raw materiality. The finishes of the building are, as Le Corbusier pointed out, remarkably beautiful, at once simple and eloquent. Freerick Gutheim found in its ‘boldness and rugged strength’, a ‘curious, haunting, and distinctive kind of beauty’.9 This arose, he suggested, from a reduced palette of materials that possessed sharply contrasting qualities – black and white, hard and soft, opaque and transparent – qualities that were inherent to the materials themselves (Figure 12.3). Under the cool glow of indirect lighting, marble, metal, timber and fabric were allowed to speak for themselves, to say or show their most basic – which is to say primitive – capacities and characteristics. PSFS, then, does not display images but reveals qualities, not representations but properties. This made its settings somewhat uncanny, at least unfamiliar, because customary forms of articulation typically involved imitative shaping and inscribing. When their unfamiliarity or remoteness is taken into account Le Corbusier’s idolizing of stainless steel hinges becomes a little more intelligible, for remoteness or distance is the most basic attribute of the gods. Idols, of course, mediate this distance. I suppose his narration was meant to recall

12.3 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, mezzanine stair landing, 2000 Source: Photograph by Carlos Naranjo

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archaic forms of worship. Mircea Eliade, in his study of comparative religion, has written that ‘the hardness, ruggedness, and permanence of matter was itself a hierophany in the religious consciousness of the primitive’. Speaking of rock and stone, in particular, he said that ‘in its grandeur, its hardness, its shape and its color, man is faced with a reality and a force that belong to some world other than the profane world of which he is himself a part’.10 Primitivism, then, would seem to be the key to this wonderful building, primitivism in a number of senses. Like American skylines, city streets, and college students, it shows a savage sort of beauty. Like untamed animals and uncultivated landscapes, it expresses undomesticated or native potential. Its steel and stone offer experience ‘a reality and force that belong to some world other than our own’, ‘a curious, haunting, and distinctive kind of beauty’. Attractive as it might be, two problems weaken this interpretation. The passage from Eliade indicates the first: if primitive materials belong to some world other than our own, the steel and stone of the PSFS building cannot be described with that term, for they are – or the building is – completely enmeshed in its surroundings, reciprocating by contrast its geometries, distances, types of occupation, and construction, bound to its milieu like day is to night. I’ll say more about this reciprocity in a few minutes. The second problem with this reading is that it treats aspects of the building as objects, assuming they have been independently conceived because they can be distinctly experienced. Such a view reduces characteristics to caricatures by severing the links between explicit figures and their tacit background, assuming that what is apparent on the surface of things adequately represents what is latent within them. These two problems, which I will call illusions of remoteness and immediacy, exist not only in most descrip- tions of this building, but also in many accounts of ‘the primitive’ in modern art and architecture. When thought of spatially or geographically, the primitive is normally imagined to exist in some other place, such as the wilderness. Considered temporally or historically, it is also assumed to be very far from present circumstances; typically, the remote past. Similarly distant is its social reality, the primitive is generally taken to indicate a very basic cultural level, the style of societies we describe as ‘underdeveloped’. Thus, the primitive is removed from the here and now in three ways: geographically, chronologically and socially. Paradoxi- cally, this primal state can also be understood as something uniquely immediate, particularly when physical concreteness is at issue. Architecture in its primitive state assembles raw materials. Beginning construction means beginning with something, something simple, which is to say unprepared and irre- ducible. Primitive is the presence of things in their uncultivated manifestation, undomesticated, self-determined, and brutally direct. Unblemished by mimetic intent, showing nothing but themselves, primitive materials have an im-mediate

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and un-delayed manifestation, which means they are rarely thought about, even if sometimes seen, normally just felt. This explains why metaphors of temperature and touch so often come into play when primitive forms of experience are described. Here is the problem: conceived of in these ways, the primitive is either so remote that it is inaccessible, or so close that it resists shared understanding, known only in intimate contact, as if it were an extension or modula- tion of one’s own flesh and corporeality. Because they alternately make artefacts too far and too near, neither of these notions of the primitive helps describe the actuality of things, particularly that of architecture, and more narrowly, the Philadelphia building Le Corbusier admired so greatly. If the PSFS is to be understood as primitive, another sense of the term must be understood, one that avoids the illusions of remoteness and immediacy. To work toward another sense of the primitive I will change my approach.

Pedestrian beauty

Were we to accept the account offered by the building’s architects, the PSFS would have to be seen as a work designed to be ‘ultra-practical’. On this thesis, what is basic in the building is not something distant from prosaic affairs but dependent on them. The term ‘ultra-practical’ was not coined by Howe and Lescaze, but the bank’s president. While its meaning is not immediately clear, two senses seem obvious: programmatic and technological practicality. Considering the building’s programme, much has been written about the novelty and foresight of placing the banking facilities on the building’s second floor, above street level, reached by a stairway, elevator, or the famous escalator. While unprecedented and controversial, this decision – proposed by the architects and accepted by the bankers – proved to have great practical advantage, for the ground level was thus freed for retail activities, which attracted potential customers into the bank, customers who might not have entered it otherwise. Before this design, bank buildings basically were fortified strongholds, designed to resist, not invite pedestrian and public activities. The PSFS was not, however, an ordinary commercial bank, but a depository for savings, especially of the working poor (the first institution of this kind in the Unites States). During the most desperate years of the Great Depression, under- or unemployed Philadelphians used its vaults to hold whatever savings they could collect. Imagine someone without a job sliding a quarter across the marble of a teller’s countertop. Put differently, the bank’s doors, windows and repositories received all the city was able to give. This receptiveness could be described as practical urbanism. Its practicality was also technological. This is

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clear in both the interior settings and the elements that particularized their use, the elements that provided for daylighting, for example; also, for thermal comfort. The PSFS building was the second high-rise in the United States to be fully air conditioned. Practicality is hardly such a simple issue in architecture, however, especially when the aim of a project is ultra practicality. Was this ‘ultra’ a matter of increase, meaning extremely practical, or did it indicate architectural conditions that were somehow beyond the practical? If so, what might they be? Would aesthetic content be what one finds ‘beyond the practical?’ Expediency, efficiency, and need-based functionality of the sort promoted by doctrinaire functionalists were surely not intended here. Consider the famous banking room (Figure 12.4). Not too long after the building was finished, a new lighting system was installed. One can assume that the illumination from recessed and indirect lighting, together with the broad sweep of perimeter glazing facing the north and east was discovered to be inadequate from a strictly functional point of view, although one suspects that the room seemed bright when first built. William Jordy, not intending dispraise, described the interior before the upgrade as ‘subdued’ and ‘shadowy’.11 More encouragingly, he introduced the term ‘muted splendor’ to define the quality of the interior finishes. This is not quite the ‘splendor’ of Le Corbusier’s Cartesian skyscraper. Frederick Gutheim, I’ve already said, observed ‘a curious, haunting and distinctive kind of beauty’. These terms

12.4 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, banking hall, mezzanine, 2000 Source: Photograph by Carlos Naranjo

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suggest, and early photographs confirm, that the original condition of the room, while not practical by our standards because a little dim, was not without quality. Of those who reported on it, all were impressed by its dignity. It seems to me that this quality, difficult as it may be to define, requires thought. Jordy pointed to matters of construction and finishing when explaining the building’s ‘ultra’ functional qualities. Surely nothing is so effective in giving the building its shadowy kind of beauty than the surface treatment (finishing) of its palpable body. Seemingly, this is also what makes its ‘laconic’ space ‘haunting’, what gives it such a strong sense of emptiness or loss, or more positively, of readiness to receive. The conclusion to this line of thinking would seem to be that the building’s dignity results from its unaffected simplicity, a confident forthrightness produced by scraping away peculiarities of circumstance and conventional motif; but the opposite is also true: simple surfaces and settings give one the sense of anticipation, of potential, that something is about to occur, as if the architects were content to let the settings wait for or anticipate possible forms of occupation. The purpose of the settings, then, would not be to designate but to anticipate, to be empty of indication but full of potential, a potential not known to be their own. What, then, is the relationship between this sense of potentiality and the tight-fisted rationality we tend to associate with functionalism? Although both are oriented toward the future and concerned with the unfolding of events, the prediction of practices is rather different from openness toward their possible occurrence. In contemporary architecture this is hard to understand because we tend to see design as an artistic sort of planning, which is in the end really a form of management or administration. George Howe described the building’s rationale as follows: ‘the design is “modern” in the sense that it is based on economic and structural logic. It is, however, subdued and dignified in ornament and coloring’. Considering modern architecture more broadly, he stressed the ‘social’ meaning of architectural settings. Along the same lines he stated ‘his conviction that architecture is social, not individual, that its ideal must conform for better or worse to the social ideal of its time’.12 He developed this thesis in 1932, the year PSFS was finished. Seven years later he made similar points in a paper on movement in architecture, but shifted from the ways people co-exist to the ways buildings do. Speaking of the spatial structure of urban housing, he argued that ‘we no longer conceive of housing as a row of isolated dwellings on a street, but as an integrated community.’13 The house, he said, is part of a ‘spatial complex’. Likewise, an office building, or a bank, must be enmeshed in its urban framework. While this interweaving of part and whole was decisive in the new architecture, Howe also maintained it was not new. It could be found in what he called ‘the primitive community’. With this statement we have arrived, I think, at a topic of design that contributed as much to the

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dignity of the PSFS building as it did to its construction: the building’s engagement with the city, its primitive situations and institutions, in this case saving,by which wealth, whatever the amount is withheld in the present so that it can be donated in the future. Of all the expressions of the ‘social ideal’, the city was for Howe the most durable, eloquent, and apparent. In a letter to the philosopher Paul Weiss, he defined architecture as ‘the physiognomy of culture’.14 This wonderful definition, together with the preceding passages suggest that what is primitive in architecture, particularly in its physiognomy, is neither brutal form nor raw materials, but the social fabric in which its settings and situations are interlaced. A new, or newly integrative social programme was accommodated by the PSFS building’s elaborate stratification of the street: from the lower landscape of the subway (Figure 12.5), up to the several levels of the street, the massive body of the set-back block, and then higher still to the upper horizons of the penthouse, solarium, observatory, and sign. Clearly, before this time buildings had basements and first floors; but never had they been synthetically elaborated in this way, never so carefully interwoven with an underground network in the first case, and as the upper horizon of streetscape in the second. Nor had the remote horizon of the city been so clearly seen as an aspect of office interiors, which was the result of the cantilevers and ‘horizontality’ about which the architects were so insistent. Likewise for the connections to the far distance established by the top of the building. The genius of the building was to integrate these strata into one section, giving each its dimension, settings,

12.5 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, subway below Market Street, 2000 Source: Photograph by Carlos Naranjo

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material and luminous qualities and ‘distance’. The building is ‘ultra practical’ because it transcends itself as an accommodation of particular functions into an urban receptacle not only of these events but many, many others besides.

Manifest latency

I do not want to suggest that there is a primitive sort of practicality beyond the actual events of the building, nor that such a thing could be realized apart from them, as if something essential could be freed from all things accidental. Primi- tive does not necessarily mean distant or remote. What the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said of death is also true of the primitive: it is ‘a side of life that is turned away from us’. When speaking of practical matters, I propose that we replace the metaphor of ‘beyond’ with ‘through,’ which is to say that this new urban horizon was realized through the particularities of an institution of saving. This means the building’s first task was (and is) to mediate the potentialities of its milieu, crystallizing its capacities, and drawing figures out of its background. Put simply, the urban framework is the building’s source and soil of expression. However, while it gives birth to architectural articulation, the urban horizon is never fully absorbed into those accomplishments, for it still exceeds every presentation – it is a ‘side of life’, that is ‘turned away from us’. Architecture’s primitive condition is neither immediate nor inaccessible, neither an extension of our individual sensibilities nor a distant arche or lost paradise; it is, instead, an aspect or dimension of prosaic existence, part of everyday affairs, just not obvi- ously so – manifestly latent. Settings in urban circumstances open themselves to shared experiences. Describing what is specific to human praxis, as opposed to animal instinct, Hans Gadamer suggested that the key is ‘acting in solidarity’.15 He also suggested that this occurs most visibly and vitally in the city. With these state- ments in mind, I would like to propose a three-part connection: the primitive to the practical, and both to the city as the embodiment of ‘acting in solidarity’. Gadamer’s term solidarity is at once familiar and difficult. So much of our thought and experience these days speaks against this experience, protective as we are of our individuality – its freedoms and expressions. We tend to posit solitude against solidarity, holding fast to the first when all else fails. Following Gadamer, I want to maintain that cities and societies are not collections of individuals. Although our dedication to individuality is entirely congenial to professional interests, it is reductive with respect to human experience, for it neglects the dependence of figures on their constitutive ground, in all its dimensions. Merleau-Ponty noted that just because we die alone does not imply that we live alone. The town is a connective fabric that holds itself together through the co- operative labour of its constituents – building to building, person to person. This

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co-operation is hard to catch sight of because we tend to concentrate on its manifestations, each of us and the things nearby. Their dependence on a framework that exceeds them is easier to grasp if they are viewed in action, behaviour or operation, for there never was an act that did not summon its energy and measure its outcome against some other thing or person, which is the outer face of some power or force of resistance. The city is the horizon of human interactivity or co-operation. Architecture’s first, or primitive dimension is not pure materiality – the so-called nature of materials – but the milieu or topography in which they make themselves manifest through suffering and resistance, which is to say, work. Buildings perform, as do people. Speaking not of things but of people, Gadamer said the first requirement of praxis is effort or labour. Practice involves actually doing something. It involves living, and this means, he said, actuation of life. For people, actuation of life involves not only labour but making choices or indicating preferences, and that presupposes having an orientation that is historically and ethically constituted. Because it enjoys freedom and involves deliberation, practical is not technical activity (a distinction neglected in functionalist thinking). The key point is that none of this – labour, actuation, choice or orientation – is possible without a frame of reference. Again, the most difficult task is to see this framework as something other than the sum total of its components, something different from a collection of buildings, streets and gardens, or friends, neighbours and strangers. Another city, architecture’s primitive ground, will only become apparent if we imagine the conditions that exist before its elements are congealed or hardened into distinct entities. Within this horizon, which I have tried elsewhere to

12.6 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Philadelphia, 1932, George Howe and William Lescaze, lower levels seen along Market Street, 2003 Source: Photograph by Anna Vortmann

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characterize as topography, buildings are less objects than configurations, each a hinge or pivot in a matrix of engagements.16 The key is not the so-called ‘space between’ things but their prolongations into and through one another, according to different degrees of porosity and permeability, and configured after patterns of more or less typical events: reading a newspaper on a subway platform, buying a shirt in a clothing store, depositing a cheque in a bank, or having a meal above the town in a penthouse. The PSFS building did not so much internalize the city in its accommodation of these and other events as it opened itself to the town’s structures and situations, some of which were quite stable within the cultural context, while others were emerging with the building itself (Figure 12.6). The building plays its part within this primitive condition by not closing itself up into itself, but by yielding to some of its pressures, resisting others, and catching its opportunities, of which – paradoxically – the building is one. Thus, the building is at once enmeshed within a primordial framework that exceeds it and at the same time stands apart from that framework as its most visible manifestation and palpable embodiment.

Notes

1 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, London: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947, p. 54. First published as Quand les Cathédrales Étaient Blanches, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1937. 2 Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, Paris: L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1935. 3 Le Corbusier, Cathedrals, p. 63. 4 Ibid., p. 34. 5 Ibid., p. 137. 6 See Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001, p. 162. 7 This is discussed in Lorraine Welling Lanmon, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987. 8 See the review in Arts and Decoration, November 1927, 28: 50–1. 9 Frederick Gutheim, ‘Saving Fund Society Building: A Re-appraisal The Old Beauty’, Architectural Record October 1949. 10 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed & Ward, 1958, p. 216. 11 William Jordy, ‘PSFS: Its Development and Significance in Modern Architecture’, in American Buildings and Their Architects, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 52. This aspect of the buildings has also been discussed in David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Archi- tecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 12 George Howe, ‘Functional Aesthetics and the Social Ideal’, Pencil Points, April 1932, 14(4): 215– 18. 13 George Howe, ‘Going In and Coming Out – the fundamental architectural experience’, 10, unpublished MS, George Howe Collection, Avery Library, Columbia University. 14 George Howe, ‘The Architect and The Philosopher, a dialogue by correspondence’, unpublished MS, George Howe Collection, Avery Library, Columbia University. 15 H .G. Gadamer, ’Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation’, in In Praise of Theory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 16 David Leatherbarrow, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000.

138 Chapter 13

Giants and columns

Nicholas Temple

The following study is not concerned with the primitive as such, at least not in its modern sense, but rather, considers the meaning of originary myth in humanist thought. Unlike the beginning of the modern age – when origin was considered as much a polemical as a historical issue – the subject was considered in the Renaissance as an opportunity to reaffirm a continuity between divine creation and human history.1 The search for a measure of continuity between the simplicity of primordial existence, typified for example in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the highly cultivated world of humanist thought was motivated by a quest for a golden age that could rival those of past ages.2 This paper examines the idea of the golden age in the context of Renaissance views of primordial origins that considered the past as a series of exemplary events. In this providential reading, extending from original creation to the age of the popes, human destiny and the revival of the Biblical/classical past (renovatio) were believed to be intertwined. Only by emulating past deeds could the redeeming qualities of human action surpass earthly existence. Among the many symbolic references that were deployed in the Renaissance to emphasize continuity between human destiny and the ancient/ archaic past, two are of particular interest here: the giant and the column. The symbolism of both was informed by a redemptive understanding of the primordial past; the historical development of the classical orders and the myth and folklore of giants constituted two facets of Renaissance views of ancestral origins. Both, moreover, served as important terms of reference in the literary, artistic and architectural initiatives that underlie the quest for a golden age.

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We have a sense of this relationship in Filarete’s account of the origins of the orders in which he states that there are five qualities in the measure of man. Two of these he identifies as dwarfs and giants, of which the latter are rarely found as they are ‘a travesty of nature’.3 Given this, Filarete advises us not to take our measures from them. Instead, he describes the other three qualities as being universal in their proportions – small, common (medium) and large – and therefore constitutive of the three principal classical orders described by Vitruvius: Corinthian, Ionic and Doric, respectively. It is the last of these that Filarete gives greatest emphasis as its quality was probably taken from the body of Adam, given that he was ‘handsome and better proportioned than any other [man] who has ever lived, since God formed him’.4 The shift from the unwieldy features of the giant to the noble proportions of the Doric order could be seen in metaphorical terms as invoking the critical transition from a preredemptive world to an exemplary one of human perfectibility. The graduation from the ‘sub-human’ world of giants to the ideal world promulgated by humanists provided the impetus for historiographical enquiry in the Renaissance, as we see, for example, in the study of Etruscology. The Etruscan civilization provided a paragon of an archaic – pre-Roman – culture whose origins were believed to be ancestrally, and providentially, related to Biblical history. Indeed, Renaissance humanists went to great efforts to draw analogies between Judaeo-Christian and Etrusco-Roman traditions. This was manifested in particular in the fields of etymology, the symbolism of topography and architectural representation. In regard to architecture, humanists sought to ‘historicize’ the classical orders by recasting them as distinctly Greek or Etrusco-Roman. We can see this, for example, in Alberti’s treatment of the Composite and Tuscan Doric orders and his reconstruction of the ‘Templum Etruscum’ in Book Seven of his De re aedificatoria.5 Of particular interest here is the way in which the Tuscan (Italic) column was promoted by humanists as an indigenous order of the Etrus- cans. It embodied exemplary qualities that were considered appropriate for buildings of veneration and authority such as palaces, shrines and churches. The specifically Etruscan origins of the Tuscan Doric gave it a venerated status as an archaic motif that affirmed the providential nature of Roman civilization.6

The golden age

According to Gary Ianzitti, the Renaissance understanding of time was diametrically opposite to that of the modern age. In conceiving the present as old and moribund, antiquity was portrayed in paradigmatic terms as constituting a series of golden ages that were variously characterized by qualities of innocence and youthfulness.7 The further one moves into the depths of human

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history, the closer one approaches Paradise and therefore the essence of human piety. This redemptive view of history, however, which was brought about by the corrupting influence of time, was underscored by an essentially medieval onto-theological world-view. This saw man’s relationship to God in analogical and hierarchical terms that acquired new meanings in the Renais- sance by the priority given to human action and creativity, as opposed to contemplation. This meant that the golden age was seen not merely as an idea but as an actual possibility.8 Central to this redemptive view of the past is the role played by giants as a primitive race that dwelt on earth before human civilization. It was believed by many humanists that giants were primitive ancestors to the human race, given that they ‘had not yet been delimited or individualized by evolving societal norms and canons’.9 Indeed, the myth and folklore of giants allude to a time before the establishment of moral codes. In such a world bodily needs reflected the processes of the natural order that could be fulfilled without fear of God’s wrath. This model of a pre-moral world formed a central theme in the writings of two key Renaissance thinkers, François Rabelais and Annius of Viterbo. The sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais wrote two major works on the mytho-history of giants, the Gargantua and Pantagruel.10 In these works, Rabelais ‘is rewriting the book of Genesis and completely overturning the fable of Paradise Lost. As in the Garden of Eden, everything starts with the desire for a fruit – except that in Rabelais the fruit is not forbidden’.11 Rabelais contests that the excesses of the giants should not be considered as immoral given that they are dictated not by human moral standards but by ‘natural morality’. Accord- ingly, ‘As at the dawn of Gargantua’s life, we are in the innocent world before the Fall’.12 A rather different interpretation of the age of giants is made in the genealogical writings of the fifteenth-century Dominican monk, Annius of Viterbo. Central to his thesis is the idea of a holy alliance between Judaeo-Chris- tian and Etrusco-Roman traditions. This is examined in his vast tome, the Antiquitates, where Annius attempts to construct a history of the human race based on a forged document reputed to have been written by the Babylonian librarian, Barosus, in the time of Moses.13 With its extensive references to giants, the Antiquitates had a profound impact on Renaissance historiography, particularly relating to the origins of Rome and Tuscany. At the heart of this historiography is the story of Noah who, along with his three giant sons Samus, Japetus and Chem, and his wife Tytea the Great, lived in the city of giants – called Enos – in the Lebanon.14 This provided the background to a genealogy of Noah and his children until the Fall of Troy. Annius portrays Noah as a unique giant with a moral

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outlook, describing the patriarch’s journey to the ancient region of Etruria in Italy where he founded a community. Popular belief states that Noah disembarked in the Vatican fields, at the bend in the Tiber river, from where he ventured to a place that would later become the ancient town of Viterbo, near Rome.15 The story was inspired by a need to perpetuate a belief that the Etruscans were one of the saved tribes of Noah’s Ark. It was in Etruria, according to Annius, that the patriarch (and second Adam) was ‘reincarnated’ as the Etruscan deity Janus, God of all beginnings and guardian of thresholds. The connection proved fruitful in the cultivation of an alliance between the Roman ancestors and the Jews. To advance his genealogical enquiry Annius translated – with some success – Etruscan text into Latin, claiming that the structure of the Etruscan language had similarities to Aramaic.16 In the fifteenth century the region of Etruria, that stretched from the Arno river to the north to the Tiber river to the south, was promoted as the second Holy Land. This association was justified on the grounds of a special religious alliance between Noah/Janus and the Christian saints and martyrs.17 In Annius’s epic history, giants dwelt on the lands of Italy and were civilized by the moralizing influences of Noah, the giant redeemed. Hence, Noah’s arrival in Etruria, and his ‘reincarnation’ as Janus represented an auspicious moment in history when primitive dwellers first became moral beings.

The Tuscan order

Considered in metaphorical terms, the coupling of giants with columns in the sixteenth century drew upon a rich primordial symbolism, as we see, for example, in the Mannerist use of telamones – male caryatids – in architecture and garden iconography.18 The deployment of such motifs was motivated as much by the authority of classical precedent as by certain perceived affinities between the archaic ‘Etruscan’ order and the primitive human form. This is implied in an observation made by the sixteenth-century English classical theorist John Shute: that the Tuscan Doric order possesses a robustness in its physical appearance that could be compared to ‘ancient giants’.19 The analogy is based on the premise that the column is the strongest of all the orders, given that it can bear the greatest weight. The growing interest in the rustic origins of human civilization went hand in hand with the emphasis on the simplicity and ‘masculinity’ of the Tuscan Doric order, and its later associations with the primitive hut. The specific connection, however, between the Tuscan order and gigantology was not based simply on issues of strength but was also concerned with a common ancestry centred on the region of ancient Etruria. We are given an indication of this relationship by the seventeenth-century antiquarian, Giuseppe Leoncini:

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This order traces its development in Italy from the period of the Tuscan people during the first age after the universal Flood, when these peoples held the dominion of almost all of Italy; from which followed the erection of the Tempio di Iano (Temple to Janus), that is Janus the first King … 20

The idea of a distinctly Tuscan (Etruscan) architecture was already identified by Vitruvius and developed further by Leon Battista Alberti in his emphasis on an indigenous classical (Italic) style. While the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline is traditionally associated with the Etruscans, having been built by the first Etruscan king (Tarquinio Prisco), the Temple to Janus in the Roman forum became a source of intense antiquarian interest during the Renaissance on account of its dedication to the first key-bearer.21 This interest gave support to claims of religious continuity between Judaeo-Christian and Etrusco-Roman civilizations, a continuity that was most apparent in the symbolism of Rome’s topography. Long venerated as sacred ground in both pagan and Christian traditions, the ridge of the Janiculum is traditionally the location of the mausoleum of King Numa, founder of the Janus cult, and the place where Janus/Noah is said to have died in a cave.22 Forming a natural defence to Rome, on the edge of Etruria, the Janiculum also straddles the west bank of the Tiber river. During the Renaissance the ridge was identified as one of the contested locations of the martyrdom of St Peter, one of the ‘Princes’ of the Roman Catholic Church. The claim was made by Annius and later Giles of Viterbo. Both asserted that the euhemeristic pairing of Noah and Janus constituted a Judaeo-Etruscan ‘precursor’ to the apostle, Peter. The archaic god of the door, and founder of the Etruscan civilization, foreshadowed the key-bearer and founder of the Roman Catholic Church.23 It is likely that this quasi-historical background of the Janiculum influenced Bramante’s design for the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, built in the early years of the sixteenth century on the reputed site of St Peter’s martyrdom (Figure 13.1). Probably partially modelled on a Roman heroon – perhaps in emulation of the mausoleum of Nulla on the Janiculum – the shrine was designed as a small circular domical building with an inner cella and outer ring of Tuscan Doric columns. The deployment of the Tuscan order evokes the ‘ancestral’ connections between its dedicatory saint and Etruria. Exquisitely proportioned and detailed, the Tempietto exudes a certain primordial simplicity, befitting a shrine dedicated to the ‘descendent’ of the first key-bearer and patriarch Noah/Janus (Figure 13.2). While re-affirming the heroic and sacred deeds of the founder of the Roman Church, the Tempietto could also be seen to commemorate the mytho-historic foundations of Etrusco-Roman civilization. Given this lineage, Bramante’s incorporation of an underground chamber

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13.1 Outline plan of the east and west banks of the Tiber river, indicating the locations of St Peter’s Basilica (A) in the Vatican and San Pietro in Montorio (B) on the Janiculum Source: Drawing by Nicholas Temple

13.2 Donato Bramante, San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum, 1502 Source: Photograph by Nicholas Temple.

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beneath the Tempietto (formerly thought to have been used as a hermit’s retreat), to mark the site of Peter’s martyrdom, may also allude to the burial cave of the Biblical patriarch on the Janiculum. As the chief promoter of this model of providential history during the early sixteenth century, Giles emphasized the symbolic significance of the west bank of the Tiber river, that includes the Vatican and Janiculum hills. This symbolism is clearly highlighted in a sermon written and delivered by Giles in the presence of Julius II in St Peter’s Basilica in 1508. The sermon commemo- rates the discovery of Madagascar, and other lands, by the Portuguese king and close supporter of Julius II, Manuel I. In the eulogy Giles weaves a complex symbolism that unites Janus, Noah’s Ark, Peter the key-bearer and the Pope. Critically, Giles uses the Basilica as a critical symbolic reference:

Why did divine providence arrange that a bronze model of a ship should be hidden in Janus’ temple (new St Peter’s Basilica), if not because the Etruscan throne of Janus, which your holiness (Julius II) now occupies, already accustomed as it was to rule benevolently, was to be dedicated to the benevolent laws of the barque of Christ? Why was that bronze model of a ship hidden with Janus, if not because the Etruscan hill of the Vatican was to send the most holy laws of Christ to the end of the earth through the ships of a noble king (King Manuel of Portugal) … ?24

As the site where Noah first disembarked from his vessel in the Tiber river, the Vatican also served as the gateway to Etruria. In so doing, it constituted a fulcrum in the sacred topography of Italy. It was in the Vatican, as Giles conveys, that the shrine dedicated to St Peter was under construction. The centralized Greek-cross plan of Bramante’s design could be likened to a giant Janus Arch (‘Janus Quadrifrons’).25 Implicit therefore in the design of the new Basilica is the idea of a ceremonial gateway of the first key-bearer and guardian of Etruria. Here we see an attempt to convey in architectural terms certain genealogical relationships between apostolic tradition, papal authority, Etruscan history and Old Testament patriarchal rule. It is as if the scale and monumentality of the new St Peter’s Basilica was intended to invoke the giant redeemed, and in so doing allude to the gateway to the new ‘promised land’ of Etruria (Figure 13.3). It may come as no surprise therefore that the Papal territories during Julius II’s Pontificate roughly coincided with the ancient region of the Etruscans, a coincidence that Bramante himself may have recognized.26

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13.3 Plan of Bramante’s design for St Peter’s Basilica with outline (shown dotted) of a Janus Quadrifrons Arch superimposed Source: Photograph by Nicholas Temple

The David and Medici rule

Humanistic interests in gigantology during the Renaissance also contributed to the symbolic understanding of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, the David (Figure 13.4). The work was carved out of a marble block that had first been destined for a sculpture of a giant by Simone da Fiesole for the Duomo in Flor- ence. Sculpted at a critical time in Florence’s history, following the invasion of Cesare Borgia (Pope Alexander IV) in 1501, the sculpture embodied the duties of the rulers of Florence to protect liberty and govern wisely as David had done for the people of Israel.27 In one sense the David takes on the identity of his opponent Goliath, only to transcend the giant by the cunning, intelligence and beauty that pervades his very being. In this transformation, from the uncouth giant to the superhuman, scale and monumentality become metaphors of inner spiritual devotion. Hence, the poise of the sculpture could be said to define a critical eschatological moment when the primordial age of giants succumbs to the superior intelligence and wisdom of the human race. This is further implied by the name given to the sculpture by humanists – ‘hominem vocato Gigante’. Could we not construe from this hybrid term (human and giant) the humanizing influences of a pre-moral being? At one level, the David constitutes a fulcrum in the sacred lineage that extended from the primordial world of Noah/Janus, through the Etruscan kings and culminating in the Medici rulers of Tuscany. Along with Moses, David was seen as an Old Testament prefigurement of Christ, whose superhuman

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13.4 Michelangelo (1475–1564): David Source: Florence, Accademia. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali

deeds and ‘inner sight’ constituted essential qualities in the quest for a golden age. Considering this lineage, it is important to recognize the symbolic importance of the David in the hagiography of the Medici rulers. Like the popes, the Medicis also cultivated associations with the Etruscans that gave the region of Tuscany – promoted as the new Etruria – the status of a new Holy Land. With the initial support and patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Florentine humanists adopted a specifically Florentine/Medicean bias. Supported by archaeological material, humanists formulated an elaborate genealogy of the Medici clan that claimed the family were descendants of the Etruscan kings of Chiusi, and therefore related to Janus/Noah and his family. This Etruscan link found

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expression, for example, in the iconography of the Medici Villa at Pogio a Caiano, designed by Giuliano da Sangallo for Lorenzo. We can see evidence of this in the painting by Pontormo of Janus in the great hall of the villa, not to mention the Etruscan-like temple façade of the first floor portico with its wide intercolumniation and ‘unclassically’ wide pediment.28 Not surprisingly, the Tuscan order played a key role in the cultivation of Etruscan ancestry in the Medici rulers, as we see, for example, in the giant Tuscan column erected by Catherine de’ Medici in Paris for use as an astrolog- ical observatory.29 Beyond its obvious allusions to the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome, the monument could also be seen as symbolizing, in its configuration as a giant order, the Medici clan as descendants of Noah’s ‘saved tribe’ – albeit presented here in a new political context; namely the ascendancy of the Medicis to the royal households of Europe. From what has been presented in this paper, it seems apparent that both giant and column were imbued with symbolic meanings that assumed a redemptive view of human history. What is revealed in the ‘noble’ order of the Etruscans are the remnants of the origins of human civilization that centred on the patriarch and key-bearer Janus/Noah. Accordingly, the body analogies of architecture served a genealogical function by disclosing our human ancestry. Such analogies ensured that the mytho-historic past was not conceived as distant and recondite but rather as a lived tradition that influenced the very fabric of human existence.

Notes

1 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (1753), Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977. 2 Hesiod and Theognis, Dorothea Wender (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, pp. 59–86. 3 Harry Francis Mallgrave (ed.), Architectural Theory – Volume 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p. 38. 4 Ibid., p. 39. 5 Leon Battista Alberti in Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (eds), On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988, pp. 189–243. 6 Gabriele Morolli, Vetus Etruria: il mito degli Etruschi nella letteratura architettonica nell’arte e nell’arte e nella cultura da Vitruvio a Winkelmann, Florence: Alinea Editrice, 1985, ch. 5. 7 G. Ianzitti, ‘Humanism’s New Science: The History of the Future’, Villa I Tatti Studies: Harvard University 1992, 4: 59–88. 8 John W. O’Malley, ‘Fulfillment of the Christian Golden Age Under Pope Julius II: A Text of a Discourse of Giles of Viterbo 1507’, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion, XXV, 1969, pp. 265–338. 9 Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History and Nationalism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 25. 10 Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, B. Raffael (trans.), New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991.

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11 Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 26. 12 Ibid. 13 On the Antiquitates, see C. Ligota, ‘Annius of Viterbo and historical method’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1987, L: 44–56. 14 Walters, Giants in Those Days, p. 113. 15 This is outlined in the Illustrations de Gaulle et Singularitéz de Troye by the early sixteenth-century commentator Jean Lemaire ‘de Belges’. Stephens, Giants in those Days, p. 150. 16 Annius claimed that the Etruscan language was ‘an older dialect of “Aramaic” than Hebrew, and therefore decipherable with the aid of Hebrew’. Ibid., p. 110. See also Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 56 and Fig. 10. 17 For a contemporary account of Etruria as the second Holy Land, see F. X. Martin, ‘Giles of Viterbo and the Monastery of Lecceto: The Making of a Reformer’, Analecta Augustiniana 1962, 25, pp. 225–53. 18 Evidence of this is highlighted at the Palace of Fontainebleau in the stuccoed embellishments in the Galerie François 1er by Rosso and dating from 1534–40. Anthony F. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953, p. 35. 19 Morolli, Vetus Etruria, p. 90. 20 Ibid., p. 98, author’s translation. 21 On the Temple of Jupiter, see Filippo Coarelli, Rome: Guide archeologiche Laterza, Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1985, pp. 27–30. On Renaissance receptions to the ‘Temple of Janus’, see Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 230–7. 22 Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 369. 23 On Giles’s interpretation, see ‘The Third Golden Age: Janus and the Etruscans’, in Francis X. Martin, Friar, Reformer and Renaissance Scholar: Life and Work of Giles of Viterbo 1469–1532, Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1992, pp. 229–39. An early edition of part of Annius’s ‘magnum opus’ is Antiquitatum Variarum Volumina XVII, Josse Bade and Jean Petit (eds), Paris: 1515. 24 Martin, Friar, Reformer and Renaissance Scholar, p. 229. 25 My comparison between Bramante’s design and a Janus Quadrifrons was initially prompted by an examination of the architectural background of Raphael’s fresco, the School of Athens, considered by many as a representation of the new St Peter’s. Arnaldo Bruschi has provided compelling evidence that the scene represents a Janus Quadrifrons. Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante architetto, Bari: Editori Laterza, 1969, p. 95. 26 George Hersey, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter’s and the Vatican: An Interpretative Guide, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 14. 27 For a detailed account of the David, see Anton Gill, Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence, and the David 1492–1504, London: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003. 28 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 368. 29 Ibid., pp. 369–70.

149 Chapter 14

The emblematic city John Wood and the re-founding of Bath

Jo Odgers

John Wood the Elder of Bath worked as architect and developer in the first half of the eighteenth century. During that period he was one of the predominant players in the expansion of that city into a fashionable and elegant resort. His work at Bath is informed by the two parallel foundation myths. The first of these is described by Wood in his book The Origin of Building; Or, the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected.1 In this, Wood traces the source of architecture to divine revelation by God to the ancient Jews and in particular to Moses. The second myth is the traditional story of the foundation of the city of Bath by the magician King Bladud, Wood elaborates this in his popular guide, A Description of Bath.2 Wood’s problem in reconciling the two myths is that his Protestant Christianity confines the manifestation of miraculous powers to the ancient Jews and to the age of the apostles, while his British and Bathonian hero, Bladud, is repeatedly and unambiguously attributed with magical skills – necromancy, prophesy, healing powers and levitation. Wood is not content to cast Bladud as a fabulous figure (one way out of his difficulty); on the contrary he is insistent that Bladud was an actual historical person. How, then, could Wood interpret the repeated accounts of the hero’s magical gifts? The keys which I use to unravel this problem are an understanding of Wood’s attitude to myth and his use of ‘emblem’. He uses emblematic interpretation in deciphering text, in understanding ancient monuments and in his own architectural designs. Before going into this we will look briefly at some of his urban projects in Bath.

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Wood’s urban schemes in Bath

Wood’s realized urban schemes in Bath lie mostly outside the boundary of the medieval city. Many of them consist of residential developments of terraced houses grouped around a variety of figural urban spaces. The North and South Parades to the south, and to the north the sequence of urban spaces which starts with the Queen’s Square, extends up the lower slopes of Lansdown to the King’s Circus and culminates in the Royal Crescent all fall into this category (Figure 14.1).3 The King’s Circus, which is the primary focus of my discussion, is a circular space surrounded by three terraces of private houses, united behind

14.1 Accurate plan of the City of Bath, 1776

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façades bearing three superimposed orders. Each of the top pairs of columns is surmounted at cornice level by a vast finial in the form of an acorn. As it stands today the centre of the circus is occupied by a clump of mature trees. As conceived and executed by the Woods the public space was entirely paved, the only relieving feature being a circular raised platform over a reservoir of water placed in the geometric centre of the space (Figure 14.2). The Circus is entered from three separate streets which are located approximately equally around the circumference and imply the figure of an equilateral triangle inscribed within the circle. This is an example of Wood’s concern with emblematic geometry which is perhaps best illustrated with recourse to the illustrations of some of his other Bath projects which he published in the Description of Bath. Taking these in published sequence, the Queen’s Square is shown as a four-quartered garden centred on an obelisk which tapers to a point; thus, as Wood explains, evoking a ray of sunlight (Figure 14.3).4 The St James’s Triangle, planned for a plot on the bank of the Avon, is shown as a circle inscribed within a triangle; inside this are two implicit intersecting equilateral triangles, and at the centre another obelisk, this time triangular in plan. Prior Park, the house built for local magnate Ralph Allen, is a quarter of a twelve-sided figure centred on a circular Basin of water. The King’s Circus came too late in Wood’s career to be included in his book, but as we have seen, the basic figure of the circle with inscribed equilateral triangle is repeated.5

14.2 ‘The Circus’, etching by John Robert Cozens Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

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14.3 Plans of Queen’s Square, St James’ Triangle and Prior Park from the Description of Bath Source: Architect: John Wood

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Emblematic figure and the occult philosophy

These geometric plan figures are a part of Wood’s reinterpretation of the tradition of Emblematics associated with the Neoplatonic traditions of alchemy and hermetic cabbalism.6 Two intersecting equilateral triangles, such as those implied in the plan geometry of Wood’s St James’s triangle, are a common alchemical symbol denoting the union of opposites or the interpenetration of the male and female principles, heaven and earth. They can be seen as a metaphor for the gradated hierarchical vertical ordering of the cosmos. As illustration I give you here Robert Fludd’s version of the light and dark intersecting triangles as a representation of the ascent from earth to heaven via the sun (Figure 14.4.). For Wood, I believe, the mystical talismanic possibilities of the emblems had been swept away with the dwindling of the ‘magical’ practices with which they are associated, but the emblems themselves remained as an intriguing field of possibilities to be interpreted and reintegrated in Wood’s work in the form of

14.4 Robert Fludd, engraving from Philosophica Sacra, 1626 Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

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poetic metaphors. The key issue here is the practices associated with the symbols. Where the emblematic figures retain their use in religious or healing practices, they retain their symbolic vitality within the culture; where they are not used thus, their meaning must also change. The primary geometric emblem used by Wood – that is, the circle and inscribed equilateral triangle(s) – makes its first appearance in Wood’s work in a small project for an altarpiece at Tyberton, in rural Herefordshire. Here the circle appears as a snake holding its tail, a symbol of eternity, but also here, perhaps a symbol of Heaven or God the Father; the triangle, given its context, may well be intended as a symbol of the Trinity, but could be more generally a reference to, as Wood puts it, ‘celestial’ matters or divinity, the sunburst in the centre is a symbol of divine illumination and emblematic of God the Father or God the Son. These are the primary motifs that Wood reiterates again and again in his Bath projects: the sunburst transformed into an obelisk, the triangle and circle embodied in the plan figure. It is worth noting that it is an intrinsic characteristic of emblems that they frequently carry the possibility of more than one meaning and that they are to be interpreted in their context. What one might call an accurate reading is often only possible to an initiate, in other words their reading depends on an inside knowledge. Furthermore, an emblem properly encompasses both an image and a piece of text. When, as in the case of the Tyberton altarpiece, there is no text, we can refer to the ritual text appropriate to the space, which is here the Anglican liturgy. Similarly we can see Wood’s published writings as the texts which will enable a fuller reading of the emblematic meanings embodied in his architecture. For those able and willing to plough through the lengthy ramblings of the Description of Bath or the somewhat more pithy prose of the Origin of Building, new layers of emblematic meaning would have been revealed. The Origin did not enjoy huge success in terms of sales, but the Description ran to several editions and its elaboration of the Bladud myth would have been common knowledge within the spa-visitor culture of the city.

Foundation myths

The Origin of Building: or; the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected, traces the origin of building to Jewish antiquity. According to Wood the true and original architecture was uniquely and completely revealed by God to his chosen people. The paradigmatic constructions to which he refers are Noah’s Ark, the Tabernacle of Moses and Solomon’s Temple.7 With reference to the plagiarism theme, Wood literally charts the events of Vitruvius’s account of primitive man’s discovery of architecture against the events of the book of Genesis. On one side of the page are recorded the events of the Vitruvian account and against these,

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on the other side of the page, Wood records what he sees as a corresponding instance in the Biblical account. Thus, Vitruvius has primitive man building huts covered with leaves, this is identified with the Mosaic account of Adam and Eve covering their nakedness with leaves, and so on. Wood’s project was to show how the Romans and Greeks copied without acknowledgement the true source of their architectural knowledge. Vitruvius’s writings about architecture may have value, but for Wood he was misguided in taking the Greeks to be the origi- nators of architecture. On the contrary, the source and origin of true architecture and by implication of all true knowledge is not Greek, but Judaeo-Christian. Wood’s intention is to set the record straight, to ‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s‘, as he puts it.8 The second myth that informs Wood’s work, the myth of the foundation of Bath by King Bladud, runs as follows. I quote here from an inscription on a genealogy of British Kings prepared for James the First in the early seventeenth century which, in brief, records the essential elements of the myth:

Bladud the ruler of Britain being a student at Athens brought with him 4 Philosophers for whom he builded the University of Stamford wherein they read the 7 liberal Sciences. This Bladud adjusted himself so much to the study of Necromancy by his magical art he made the hot bathes and attempted to fly with artificial wings & fell down upon the temple of Apollo.9

The illustration shows a be-winged Bladud, hovering on a magic circle of hiero- glyphic emblems above the Temple of Apollo. In the time of James the First it would have been possible to interpret this account in the light of the, at that time dangerously controversial, but nonetheless current traditions and magical practices of hermetic cabbalism and alchemy.10 At that time the figure of the Magus was clearly understood and magical practice, as part of what Frances Yates refers to as the ‘occult philosophy’, was certainly still current in various forms. For Wood, just over a century later, the situation is more ambiguous. From a reading of Wood’s writings it would seem that the practice of miracles was for him relegated to biblical history. His intention with respect to Bladud is to retain him as a founding hero, while explaining away his magical powers of healing, prophecy and levitation all of which the traditional account refers back to his necromantic skills, that is his skill in conjuring the spirits of the dead. The book in which Wood sets forth his exposition of the Bladud myth is the Description of Bath, and it is by no means immediately apparent that his project is a rationalizing one. This is because of the degree to which he compiles quotations and accounts from historical authors and what he refers to as ‘tradition’ (in other words oral history). He is scrupulous about giving references, but nonetheless the sheer volume of material, much of it highly coloured with magic, leaves the

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reader with the immediate impression that he is all for the magical account. This is not the case; whenever he comments on the histories in his own voice he makes rationalist interpretation of the material. In the Description of Bath Wood brings together accounts of the ancient world drawn from sacred and profane history, from modern historians and from local tradition and reconciles them into one coherent account of what he sees as actual historical events contained within the framework of a universal chronology. Where accounts are obscure or seemingly fabulous he employs the method of looking within the text for emblematic meanings that can furnish a rational explanation. For example, he elaborates the traditional story of Bladud by identifying him with the Persian magus Abaris on the grounds that both could ‘fly’ and both were magicians. Abaris’s chosen vehicle of flight was an arrow, and this Wood interprets as an emblem both of the great man’s fame and of that true knowledge of the ‘Pythagorean’ planetary system which Wood posits that Bladud introduced into Britain.11 For Wood emblematic interpretation ends, not in mystical insight or arcane metaphysical truth as it might in a renaissance interpretation, but in sound knowledge, chronological events, the reputa- tion and deeds of actual historical persons. Ultimately, the point of Wood’s chronological framework is in that it provides the temporal measure of a Christian redemptive history, a history of the world that starts with the creation and will end in the second coming of Christ. The events of history both ancient and modern form part of this sacred drama, the close of which was not necessarily expected to be too far off. At the time this was in no way an eccentric or unusual attitude. Newton’s studies of Biblical chronology, which were posthumously published in 1728, were oriented in this way and may well have provided inspiration and methodological guidance for Wood’s own historical writings.12 Wood is very clear on the historical existence of Bladud, devoting a whole chapter to the subject. Bladud lived at a particular time, travelled and met with other eminent persons and thus learnt and disseminated his wisdom. By elaborating his chronology Wood allows Bladud/Abaris to have met and possibly instructed Pythagoras during his travels to Greece and to have visited Jerusalem during the time of the building of the second temple there. Bladud was thus party to the ancient knowledge of both the order of the heavens and the ancient Jewish architecture, the true architecture of God.13 This ancient British/Persian hero was an important player in the sacred drama of the ancient world.

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Antiquarian research and the mythic landscape of Bath

Wood did not rely solely on texts to elaborate his history of Bath. He included the antiquarian methods of interpreting the physical and cultural aspects of the surrounding country, such as place names and ancient monuments. In his study of two prominent local stone circle monuments, Stantondrue and Stonehenge,14 Wood brings the two themes of Bladud’s architectural and cosmological knowledge together. He attributes both monuments to Bladud and his subject Druid priests, and places them within the bounds of the ancient city of Bath, bounds considerably wider than those of the city of his own day. Stantondrue is cast as the site of Bladud’s university, its plan embodying what Wood sees as a perfect model of the ‘Pythagorean’ planetary system. Wood’s interpretation is based on a measured survey and involves a lengthy illustrated description (Figure 14.5). At Stonehenge, Wood also carries out a survey and publishes this along with his reconstruction in an epistlatory pamphlet addressed to the Earl of Oxford. Wood sees the monument as a temple dedicated to the moon and explains that it contains all the secrets of the Druids in emblematic form. The core of these secrets was again the ‘Pythagorean’ cosmology, by which I believe he means not a mystical cosmological structure but a mathematically understood heliocentric planetary system. As with the emblematic geometry of his Bath plans discussed above, Wood’s material is again derived from the hermetic cabbalistic tradition. He writes that ‘The Samian Philosopher [Pythagoras] held numbers to be the Principle of all things; the two sources of numbers were the Monad and

14.5 Plan of Stantondrue, from Wood’s Description of Bath

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the Dyad; Pythagoras calling the supreme Deity a Monad, and also a Tetrad or Tetractys’.15 He then goes on to relate the stones of the monument to this ‘Pythagorean’ doctrine and, in particular, to the lunar cycle in the following manner. His predominant method is to count the stones in various combinations and read them emblematically with respect to the ‘Pythagorean’ doctrine. Thus, with reference to the illustration (Figure 14.6):

• Looking at the outer ring of thirty pillars Wood finds in them the thirty days of the lunar cycle. Four of these thirty pillars are connected together by three horizontal stones laid over the top to form a sort of entrance portico on axis with the main ceremonial avenue; these he sees as an emblem of the Pythagorean ‘tetrad or tetractys’. The two single stones which flank the central ‘tetrad’ are ‘monads’. • Moving towards the centre of the circle, the next ring in has twenty-nine pillars; this, Wood explains, represents the days of each alternate lunar cycle. • The seven stones of the ‘tetrad’ and its three capping stones represent the seven intercalatory months necessary to bring the solar and lunar calendars in line according to the ‘Druid’ calendar.

14.6 Plan of Stonehenge, from Wood’s Choir Gaure

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• The six pillars of the ‘tetrad’ and its two flanking single ‘monad’ stones represent the sixth day of the new moon, the day on which the Druids began their new month, year or age. • The trilithons, that is, pairs of standing stones capped by a single horizontal stone, when seen as pairs represent the Pythagorean ‘dyad’, and seen as an assemblage of three stones each, represent a single month made up of 3 × 10 days.

The whole monument is seen by Wood to be in some way a sophisticated calendar. The reconciliation of the lunar and solar calendars through the addition of extra days periodically, according to different calendar systems, is discussed, and in conclusion Wood states that the ancient idea of the ‘harmony of the spheres’ is nothing other than the concordance of the solar and lunar cycles every nineteen years, a statement of staggering rationalizing banality.16

The emblematic meaning of the King’s Circus

Now let us consider how some of Wood’s observations on the two ancient monuments are brought to bear on his design for his final emblematic piece in Bath, the King’s Circus.17 At the level of iconography, the most obvious Druidical reference is the circle of acorns which adorn the pediment of the circus – suitable for the ‘priests of the oak’. There are two points relating to the orientation of the space and its points of entry. First, Stonehenge and the Circus are both exactly aligned with the rising sun at the summer solstice so that you would enter Stonehenge from the grand axis and the Circus from the direction of the London Road with the rising sun at the solstice behind you (Figure 14.7). Second, the house on axis with this entry point into the Circus, No 6 is the only house to have its door in the centre. As we have seen above, Wood records the number six as an emblem of the Druids’ practice of starting of their new age, new year, new month on the sixth day of the new moon. Then there is the possibility of reading the number of houses in the Circus as lunar references. At first glance there seem to be thirty houses in the Circus, Nos 1 and 30 flank the entry into the space from Gay Street to the south. On closer inspection, while there are thirty house numbers, there are actually only twenty-nine front doors which open onto the space. The house which would bear the address No. 19, King’s Circus, opens onto Bennet Street. So there are either twenty-nine or thirty houses on the Circus, depending on how you look at it. Referring back to Wood’s interpretation of Stonehenge, the thirty standing stones of the outer ring and the twenty-nine stones of the inner ring relate to the days of alternate lunar months. This might all seem slightly strained,

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14.7 Plans of Stonehenge and the King’s Circus, Bath as they stand today drawn to the same scale

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but I believe the reasoning to be absolutely consistent with Wood’s interpretative method in which the minutiae of numbering and grouping elements and their subsequent emblematic reading is essential. His method hovers between the certainty of absolute measurement and the ambiguity of multiple possible readings. It is worth noting that in his interpretation of Stantondrue, Wood has eighty-one ‘cells’ for the college of Druid priests set between the eighty-one standing stones representing the ‘earth’ circle.18 Finally we must address the question of size, and comparative measurement. It has been noted that the diameter of the Circus corresponds almost exactly to the diameter of the outer circle at Stonehenge and also to the largest circle at Stantondrue.19 Wood was interested not just in proportion but in the actual size of the objects of his studies. He devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to a comparative study of the units of measurement, his ultimate aim being to establish accurately the size of the Jewish yard, a prerequi- site of achieving an accurate reconstruction of the ultimate origin of true architecture in the biblical Jewish precedents of the Ark, tabernacle and temple. His published version of the Origin of Building devotes a full eight pages to the subject. This need to establish a firm unit of measurement is very similar to Wood’s search for a universal chronology. If history needs a chronology, then surveying, architecture and antiquarian studies need a standard universal unit of measurement. Having established the matter of comparative measurement to his satisfaction, Wood is able to observe that the circumference of the circle of the earth at Stantondrue, and thus the circumference of the King’s Circus, is 365 Jewish yards and thus ‘was made so as to express the days of the Solar year ‘.20 He observes that Stonehenge is a temple devoted to the Sun and Moon, but principally to the Moon. The same could be said of the King’s Circus.21 In the Description of Bath, Wood identifies local sites quite specifically as Druid monuments, as for example the identification of Stantondrue as Stamford University. There are many such examples. The hill of Lansdown, the site of the King’s Circus and Royal Crescent, Wood sees as the Mons Badonca, or mount of Onca, the Persian goddess of the Moon. He not only conflates Bladud with the Persian magus Abaris but identifies the Druid religion with what he calls the Persian magian religion, the Druids in other words were magi. The Mons Badonca he imagines as the vantage point from where the Druids would watch for the rise of the new moon. The orientation of the circus, its actual dimension, the number of houses, its location on the hill dedicated to the Moon goddess all point to Wood’s intention that it should be read as an emblem of ancient Druid/magical wisdom and learning. This does not, however, eliminate other possible readings, such as an embodiment of Jewish architectural principles or an interpretation of a Vitruvian theatre, both of which are also present, as has been pointed out by other commentators.22 All of these readings are

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encompassed by implication in the same tradition, the tradition of the ancient wisdom or pristine knowledge.

The ancient wisdom

As we have seen, Bladud’s university was staffed by Athenian philosophers, and Bladud himself was, for Wood, in the East during the time of the construction of the second temple at Jerusalem. Through these travels Bladud and his high priests had plenty of opportunity for learning and disseminating the ancient wisdom which is ultimately traceable back to the Jews, though present in other traditions in diluted and corrupted form. This is Wood’s reinterpretation of the Christian Neoplatonic tradition of the ancient wisdom. This pristine knowledge was given by God to the patriarchs of mankind, the offspring of Adam and Eve; dispersed throughout the world by the sons of Noah after the flood, obscured by the confusion of languages after Babel and renewed in the revelations of Moses.23 Again, all this material comes from the tradition of hermetic-cabbalistic magic; but what, for Wood, really were his magician-priest Druids? Fascinated though Wood clearly is with the hermetic-cabbalistic tradition, I think that in the end his Druid magicians are not mystics, nor necromancers, but mathematicians, philosophers, astronomers; not mystical Pythagoreans but rational Pythagoreans in the mould of the great mathematical genius of Wood’s time, Isaac Newton.

The ‘Kings’ of Bath

Wood lived and worked within a specific culture, and there is a question as to the degree to which his interpretations of history and his artistic intentions were understood within that culture. Some have chosen to see Wood as utterly eccentric and, by implication, isolated in his ideas.24 I do not agree with this interpretation, the popularity of the Description of Bath alone seems to argue the contrary. It was certainly Wood’s intention to make a parallel between the ancient city of Bath and its contemporary manifestations and it would seem strange that he be totally isolated in this. The Description of Bath is divided into two books, rather in the manner of the Bible, one devoted to ancient history, one to the contemporary city. There are repeated inferred parallels between the account of antiquity and the description of the contemporary city and its inhabitants. The first book of the Description reconciles the Bladud myth with Old Testament and classical sources, it then describes Bath in Roman times, skips through subsequent invasions and occupations, celebrates the Reformation and ends with the inauguration of Beau Nash as the new ‘Titular King’ of Bath. To refer to Nash as the King or ‘Little King’ of Bath was a commonplace. The second book of the Description proceeds chronologically from the point of

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Nash’s inauguration and describes the contemporary city, its laws, habits, customs and of course its architecture, which is principally Wood’s architecture. The first book, then, is devoted to the ancient history and founding of the city and revolves around the story of King Bladud. The second book describes the city renewed, expanded and re-founded under its new ‘Titular King’, Beau Nash. Wood thus saw his work as a re-foundation of the city of Bath in terms of its primitive origins. The implicit identification of Nash with King Bladud is clear and can be found in references as late as the early nineteenth century. I have shown above how Wood uses emblematic interpretation to rationalize some of Bladud/Abaris’s reputed magical attributes; but Wood seems to have had difficulty in finding a hidden emblematic meaning in Bladud’s reputed practice of necromantic divination that would allow him to furnish the reader with an explanation of his conjuring, both rational and suitably princely. Here he falls back on the explanation that Bladud and the Druids did indeed engage in supposed conjuring, but that this was in truth nothing but trickery and illusion, the aim being to enslave the credulous population of unsuspecting good-hearted Britons and bring them around to the Persian Magian religion. This rings a strange note in the biography of the founding hero. Elsewhere Bladud/Abaris is given a glowing character reference by Wood that he has taken from the Roman Orator Himerius writing on Abaris:

[Bladud/Abaris] was affable and pleasant in Conversation, in dispatching great Affairs secret and industrious, quick sighted in present Exigencies, in preventing future Dangers circumspect, a searcher after wisdom, desirous of friendship, trusting indeed little to Fortune, and having every thing trusted to him for his Prudence.25

These are just the sort of qualities that you might want in a founding hero, or indeed in a master of ceremonies. What you presumably do not want is a trickster involved in dubious charlatanry and manipulative conjuring tricks. However, Wood’s overriding intention, it seems to me, is to maintain a strong connection between the ancient British founders of Bath and its contemporary inhabitants. To endow Bladud with prophetic gifts would place him outside Wood’s particular Christian understanding, an understanding into which we gain some insight through the pages of his Origin of Building, an understanding in which the gifts of the spirit, that is, prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues, are confined to scriptural accounts. Presumption of heathen prophetic utterance was, I would suggest, as unthinkable to Wood as credence given to claims of prophetic utterance among his contemporaries. Therefore, there was no alternative for him but to interpret Bladud’s prophetic and conjuring powers as tricks. For Wood the inhabitants of Bath ancient and modern were rational, sober, learned and cultured, and not given to enthusiastic outbursts. Both were players in the sacred

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drama of Christian redemptive world history. The Woods’ architectural projects in the city are conceived as a backdrop to this drama, a return to the sacred origin of architecture and to the mythic foundation of the ancient British past.

Notes

1 Wood, John, The Origin of Building; or, the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected, J. Leake: Bath, 1741. 2 J. Wood, A Description of Bath, Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1965. This is a facsimile of the 3rd edn, Bath: J. Leake, 1765. 3 C. E. Brownell, ‘John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger: Architects of Bath’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1976. T. Mowl and B. Earnshaw, John Wood, Archi- tect of Obsession, Bath: Millstream Books, 1988. 4 See drawing and explanatory note in Bath Reference Library, MSS, Wood, Origin of Building. See also J. Wood, Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, Oxford: The Theatre, 1747, p. 52. 5 V. Hart, ‘John Wood, Stonehenge and Palladianism: or Whose Renaissance is it Anyway?’, Scroope, Cambridge Architecture Journal 1992, 4. R. S Neale, ‘Bath: Ideology and Utopia 1700– 1760’ in The Eighteenth Century Town, A Reader in English Urban History 1688–1820, P. Borsay (ed.), London: Longman, 1990. 6 C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. V. Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts, London: Routledge, 1994. 7 See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, New York and London: Routledge, 1979, pp. 34–5. 8 Wood, Origin, Closing lines. 9 ‘Britaines Monarchie’. Lyte pedigree. 1605. BL Add Ms 59741. 10 Yates, The Occult Philosopy, particularly ch. 9 ‘Spencer’s Neo-Platonism’. 11 Wood, Description, pp. 35–9. 12 Isaac Newton, The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (Dublin 1728). See Isaac Newton, A Dissertation on the Sacred Cubit of the Jews, in John Greaves Misc. (Oxford 1737). 13 See Wood, Description, p. 40. 14 For Stantondrue, see Wood, Description, ch. 4, pp. 147–59. For Stonehenge, see John Wood, Choir Gaure. 15 Wood, Choir Gaure, p. 84. 16 Ibid., p. 87. 17 See Brownell, ‘John Wood’, Hart, ‘John Wood’, and John Summerson, ‘John Wood and the English Town Planning tradition’, in Heavenly Mansions, New York: Norton, 1963, pp. 87–110. My observations on the Circus and Stonehenge are, in part, dependent on these authors. 18 Wood, Description, pp. 154–5. 19 See Hart, V., ‘John Wood’, p. 33. 20 Wood, Description, p. 156. 21 Wood, Choir Gaure, Brownell, ‘John Wood’ and Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood, pp. 179–206. 22 Summerson, Heavenly Mansions. 23 Haycock, D. Boyd, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. 24 See, for example, Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood and Summerson, Heavenly Mansions. 25 Wood, Description, p. 38.

165 Chapter 15

Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

Harry Charrington

‘Primitive’ seems to be one of those approving adjectives such as ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ and ‘modern’ that recur in recent and contemporary architectural description. Ill-defined, such words rely for their meaning on images displaying an assumed analogous aesthetic; in the case of the primitive this is almost anything that can be configured in its appearance as a poetic rebuttal of the conditions of modernity; as being ‘rude’ and ‘radical not derivative’.1 In this context the appeal of the primitive lies in its derivation from the Latin primitivus: ‘first of its kind’. In spite of the teleological basis of modernism’s sense of mission, few of its architects have ever really come to terms with modern circumstance. Rather, they have attempted to construct, or to impose, a higher ‘commonplace’ and work towards ‘a real work of art (that) pushes our consciousness away from its everyday practices and aims it at the deep structure of reality’.2 The authority on which that structure is built is not questioned, and hence there is the melancholic trait in twentieth-century architectural history of every successful building being more than matched by ‘heroic’ or ‘noble’ failures. The frustration is obvious; if only the nuances and complexities of the everyday would bend to the singular visions of the architect. However, the resignation that might be expected to follow this is countered by the architects’ purposefulness being sublimated into an aesthetic that stands for that ‘deep structure of reality’. Little wonder that non-industrial cultures, taken as a significantly mute beauty to stand in cautioning opposition to modernity, are so widely praised; along with ‘exceptions’ within modernism such as, say, Le Corbusier’s Monastery at La Tourette (1953–7) or Sigurd Lewerentz’s Church of St Peter at

166 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

Klippan (1963–6). Ontologically and sensually engaging in themselves, these might be called sublime; but in relation to modern circumstance their adoption as talismen within the general architectural culture represents what Arnold Berleant has termed the ‘negative sublime’.3 The suggestion here is that authenticity can only be achieved by a negation of circumstance and a search for something ‘apparently originating in unconscious needs or desires and unaffected by objective meaning’.4 Since Siegfried Giedion’s revisions to Space, Time & Architecture in 1947, Finland has acted as such a primitive conscience to modernism,5 a place where there was a direct and, at times, dramatic collision of a singular modernity and the diversified nature of a pastoral – that is to say non-urban – context. Whereas the nuances of tradition in most countries were to be rejected as historicist convention, in Finland the primitive status assigned to them under- wrote their validity, as an expression of an unsullied relationship of wilderness and pre-industrial man. Architects searching for a rootedness that seemed impossible to attain in their own despoiled homelands adopted Finnish architecture as a totem of authenticity, in particular the work of Alvar Aalto. Published works on Aalto have focused on a limited canon of buildings in a limited number of settings that emphasize this view, yet Aalto’s vast output is most often sited in the same kind of ex-urbis and ex-arcadia as the rest of the developed world. This essay attempts to suggest that while Aalto’s work is clearly that of a sophisticated and determined aesthetic, within it the ‘primitive’ is not an assigned appearance but something from which some construction begins. Adopting a more modest, non-teleological approach to the making of place – and unconcerned with notions of totality – Aalto is able to build in those suburban conditions that have so defined twentieth-century architecture and yet so frustrated twentieth-century architects. His work deals with the postulated causes of its situation; ‘preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development’ through an engagement with tradition, landscape, climate and assemblage.6 This paper will illustrate this by examining Aalto’s approach in a number of suburban sites.

Alvar Aalto & Co.

Josef Albers wrote:

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW not the WHAT; not with literal content but with the performance of the factual content. The performance – how it is done – that is the content of art.7

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Alvar Aalto was almost alone among the ‘defining’ architects of the mid-twentieth century in maintaining a positive relation to his home, foregoing any more ambiguous issues of identity. For Aalto, architecture could not be packed up and taken across oceans. Assimilating and sceptically, lovingly remaking, Aalto instead set about rearranging the familiar. At the end of his life, he described the white table of his father’s surveying office:

As a child I played under my father’s workdesk, a large white table around which eight surveyors, maybe more, carried out their demanding duties. Very far-reaching and difficult work was done there by means of cadastral measurements and geodesy. The solutions were based not only on practical considerations but also on broader goals. In order to perform the work in a satisfactory way, something that I would call a society-building cultural realism was needed. Because of this background, I think the incidental aesthetic elements that may exist in my work shouldn’t be exaggerated. Realism usually provides the strongest stimulus to my imagination. 8

The table is a setting for the imagination, but one rooted in a reflexive process of designing in which pragmatic and cultural matters are active and in dialogue: a methodological accommodation to circumstance that is perhaps most explicit in his furniture. Stackable, inexpensively mass-produced and even throwable (as Aalto demonstrated in the workshop and countless Finnish schoolchildren have since repeated), the S60 three-legged stool of 1932, is one of the few ‘designer’ objects of modernism that have achieved approaching a vernacular anonymity (Figure 15.1). These stools are the outcome of a process that realizes their factual content; a local source under a global influence. The legs are of birch with 3 mm birch strips laminated into their top end, which is then bent to create a ‘knee joint’ that can be fixed to the seat; the lamination is only exactly where it is needed. The seat is of ply, discreetly trimmed with a birch edging and covered with linoleum to both ‘give’ to the body of the occupant and provide a warm surface to the touch. Aalto designed them with Aino Marsio-Aalto in conjunction with the Turku furniture-maker Otto Korhonen, developing their potential through the concentration and experimentation of the workshop. The stools consolidated Aalto’s understanding of his friend László Moholy-Nagy’s method and technique, and were further reinforced by knowledge garnered from Finnish peasant chairs and critiques earlier made of Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus cantilever chairs. In the words of Gaston Bachelard: ‘millers, who are wind- thieves, make good flour from storms’.9

168 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

15.1 Development studies for the laminated ‘knee-joint’ used on the S60 stools, Alvar Aalto Source: Harry Charrington

Clearings

This is not so much creative as inventive, and it is just this shift in approach that enables Aalto to bring the primitive into almost any circumstance; architecture as non-teleological evolution. In place of a conception of architecture’s authenticity premised on, and defined by, a wholesale acceptance or repudiation of industrialism and its consequences, Aalto establishes clearings: de-limiting and framing places within its territory. These clearings are, as the word suggests, spatial definitions; but spaces defined as much by memory and habits as by any formal aesthetic structure. As early as 1922, Alvar Aalto had praised the Finnish expressionist painter Tyko Sallinen for his depiction of a Finnish landscape that was ‘not idealized but intertwined with man, seeing something of value in the Finnish earth, its wounded landscape, even in its violated forests and its desolate suburban development’.10 This understanding of landscape as a process owes debts to a

169 Harry Charrington

myriad of sources beginning with his experience of living and working with his father – a land surveyor – and his grandfather – a forester. It is easy to senti- mentalize such experience, but this involvement in a complicated biological unit sees Aalto sharing in nature’s rationality, not just its romanticism. Moreover, in his upbringing ‘between Goethe and Darwin’ Aalto was rooted in a pre-industrial order of nature and civilization.11 For Aalto, invention is a Darwinian act of progress; but one that must be checked by Goethe’s concept of an empathetic harmony in which patterns of natural growth are shadowed by human artifice so that the form relates to both their conditions.12 Invention, seen as an intervention within an existing order, was a necessity to be brought about in a way that would reveal the state of things, not as extreme aesthetic or regularized order but as patterns that reveal how things are done and that structure experience. Such an approach accepts architecture as a fragment of a greater circumstance and allows for the vaga- ries of inhabited place to be as highly valued in the act of designing as the representational certainties of geometric space. This is exemplified by Aalto’s treatment of one of the emblems of modern architecture’s representational rationalit, the grid. Aalto’s frames are simply frames, rather than self-referential rhetorical devices. North of the city centre in Helsinki, the National Pensions Institute (Kansaneläkelaitos, Helsinki, 1953–7) is laid out over a broadly triangular site at the head of a park (Figure 15.2). In place of a singular unifying structure, a diversity of frames are set up in response to the needs and desires of the programme. Each of these is then cut away or reconfigured whenever necessary in relation to the nature of the site, or develops varying rhythms according to nuances of inhabitation. Similarly, the concrete structure itself accretes varying surfaces that both inform and respond to the nature of the

15.2 Site plan for Aalto’s 1948 competition winning entry ‘Forum Redivium’ for the National Pensions Institute on Mannerheimintie, Helsinki Source: Alvar Aalto Foundation, Helsinki

170 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

building’s spaces. As Tide Huesser has said, in all of Aalto’s work there is an understanding of the difference between pattern and form, which is to say content.13

Human landscape

In Aalto’s siting of buildings, these patterns fragment both the brief and any suggested Euclidean volume of the building to create a diversified formation: ‘a number of possible coherences [that] glitter separately without a unifying common law’.14 Plateaux, terraces and stairs establish continuities and flows through sites and buildings to intertwine architecture and location. At The House of Culture (Kulttuuritalo 1953–8), situated on a heavily trafficked arterial road in Helsinki, Aalto uses the site as a ready-made. The building sits on the crest of the hill which then flows into the building’s courtyard beneath a 60 m- long canopy. Through the emphatic horizontal delineation of this canopy, a line of thin verdigris copper hovering above the tarmac, Aalto brings out the contours of the hill and incorporates it as a foil to the masses of the auditorium and office wing behind.15 Surfaces shift from being primarily an expression of volume or a particular material to become a medium for revealing the qualities of latitude and climate. In Finland, the low sun angle creates long shadows throughout the day, particularly in the winter when it is often reinforced by the reflective surface of the snow-laden ground. Consequently, vertical mouldings create a bolder shadow upon the building surface than horizontal ones, an inversion of the hierarchy of mouldings developed around the Mediterranean and later in Central Europe. The billowing radii of The House Of Culture’s auditorium are vertically scored through the use of stacked, rounded bricks together with flush horizontal bonds and deeply incised vertical bonds between the curving perpends. As the rays of the low sun traverse the building, the scored skin captures and reveals them. Standing across the courtyard, the four-square office wing clad in finely incised copper panels brings out another quality of luminescence. In place of an abstract ‘quality of light’, surfaces reveal the sun’s qualities of illumination and, in curving and orthogonal silhouettes reiterate the sky as context. At Seinäjoki Town Hall (Seinäjoen kaupungintalo, 1959–60), the surface becomes cobalt blue ceramic sticks – a reworking on the plain of Ostro- Bothnia of the coloured tiles he had seen on a visit to Baghdad and first experi- mented with in the interior of the Rautatalo in Helsinki (1951–5). These change colour from black to gold as they reflect and absorb the sun’s radiation through the changing seasons and 24-hour cycle of the day. More modest buildings such as Aalto’s atelier in Munkkiniemi (1954–5) are plainly whitewashed to act as a foil to the cycle of seasons and the contours of the site, but they are

171 Harry Charrington

deliberately not rendered so that the variegation of the brickwork comes through to capture the slightest shadows.

Covenance

Contiguous with this amplification of the site is Aalto’s configuration of a continuous landscape incorporating human actions. He first voiced this in an article written for Aitta magazine in 1926 in which he juxtaposed Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1437) with Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau (1925), pointing out their shared unity of room, exterior wall and garden.16 Aalto invokes just such spatial formations that lie between inventory and memory, but whose uniqueness is discovered in turn through the accretion of experiences acted upon them. With a conception of propriety as covenance, as opposed to convenience to use, it is into these structures that Aalto places the utilitarian brief of any project.17 A primitive touchstone from which Aalto extended and developed a series of typologies that point to the realm of the befitting: ‘the first impulses of architecture are born … out of the lives and senti- ments of people’. A spatiality matched by the material experience of construction, as he wrote in the same article of the Ionic column: ‘the marble product is not a natural- ized copy of the original process. Its polished and stabilized forms embody human qualities that the original constructive form did not have’.18 In the 1948 competition for the National Pensions Institute, on the site of what is now the Inter-Continental Hotel in the Töölö district of Helsinki, Aalto dissolved and then reconstituted an entire government department as a means to form an extended, continuous urban landscape (Figure 15.3). The complex becomes a sequence of squares, steps and plateaux leading from Töölöntori, the district’s market square to the banks of the Töölönlahti bay – a

15.3 First floor-plan of the National Pensions Institute as built on Minna Canth Katu, Helsinki, 1953–4 by Alvar Aalto Source: Harry Charrington

172 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

way to bring a neighbourhood to its shoreline. The Institute appears simply as part of this greater scale, becoming fragmented and integrated into a wider landscape and consequently more approachable to its users. The realized version of the National Pensions Institute similarly binds the institution into the paths and places of the city. Aalto extends the adjacent park into the complex; the Canteen is a separate granite pavilion in the park accessed from below and an external public route penetrates the main block. At the associated housing built for the Institute’s workers at the same time in the suburb of Munkkiniemi (KELA työsuhdeasunnot 1952–4), the stark, repetitive modules of the brief, instead of covering the park in the typical manner of a Siedlung, are structured around a small square and large park with the buildings oriented to delineate streets as much as by any abstracted notion of solar access. At a more intimate scale Aalto developed an entire public borrowing library type out of the simple habit of choosing, collecting and reading a book. Eleven buildings follow the covenance of the Viipuri Library (1928–35), where, through drawing simple diagrams and ‘fantastic mountain landscapes with cliffs lit up by suns in different positions … like a child’, Aalto locates the reader under the sky.19 The section is structured with enclosures, overlooking terraces and walls of books that frame the differing intimacies readers establish with their books: choosing, browsing, concentrating, contemplating. Vaults or rooflights admit and reflect light down to ensure that neither of the facing pages of an open book casts shadows on the other. There are no picture windows; the view is through the books. This determination to make experience legible does lead to accusa- tions of nostalgia – as in Aalto’s churches and urban plans – but only when the forms are viewed as symbolic and outside history rather than as, as Göran Schildt describes it, a biological traditionalism.20 A more perceptive criticism is that it can lead to a kind of hubris, most notably in his acoustical designs that Aalto needs to be ‘felt’, even when there is no music playing.

A kind of guardian

As acts of construction that create a resistance and continuity within, not a digression from, contemporary conditions, Aalto’s work is a shift from much of modernism. Self-satisfied in their search for authenticity, for many architects the practice of architecture becomes an ever more marginal and self-marginalizing activity. Aalto has no such antagonism in constructing the nominally primitive because he has no a priori conception of it. As he said:

… the much discussed sceptical world-view is in reality a necessary condition for anyone who would like to make a cultural contribution.

173 Harry Charrington

15.4 The board-marked, whitewashed vault of Alvar Aalto’s Seinäjoki Town Library photographed in April 2005 Source: Harry Charrington

This is of course dependent on scepticism’s transformation into a positive phenomenon, an unwillingness to ‘move with the crowd’. On a higher plane scepticism is transformed into its apparent opposite, to love with a critical sensibility. It is a love that lasts, as it rests on a critically tested foundation. It can result in such a love for the little man [sic] that it functions as a kind of guardian when our era’s mechanized life style threatens to strangle the individual and the organically harmonious life.21

A final glimpse of this can be seen in his attitude to authorship and the building site. The concrete vault of the Seinäjoki Town Library (Seinäjoen kaupunginkirjasto 1960–5) is the outcome of Aalto’s typically undogmatic response to the building as it evolved on-site. Noticing the builders’ intuitive change from rough, wide planks to finer, narrower boards for the shuttering as the vault leapt from the windows to the central reading well, he insisted the marks should not be plastered over as stated in the original specification (Figure 15.4).22 Aalto’s work is not reliant on aesthetic structures mimetic of an ideal world but spatial allegories akin to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological entreaty that ‘the fundamental question [is] that of comprehending or understanding, not securing objectivity’.23 It seems reasonable to say that ‘the fundamental a priori upon which Aalto’s architecture rests is … the sensuously loaded materiality of its elements’.24 But only if those elements are understood as spatial and stylistic

174 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb

metaphors that both frame and act as a mnemonic for human actions within, and relations to, the natural world.

Notes

1 ‘Early, ancient, old-fashioned, simple, rude, original, primary, radical, not derivative, from which another is derived, from which some construction begins’, Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, 1962. From the themes published for the conference ‘Primitive’ held at Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 15–17 September 2004. June 2004]. 2 Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Elämyksen Geometria/The Geometry of Feeling’ in Arkkitehti 1985, 3: 44. 3 Arnold Berleant, ‘Negative Aesthetic: The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature’, paper presented to the international Summer School of Applied Aesthetics, Lahti, 12 August 1995. 4 Definition of primitive: Oxford American Dictionaries. Electronic version for Macintosh OS X.IV 2005. 5 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time & Architecture, 5th edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, pp. 565–604. 6 Oxford American Dictionaries, electronic version for Mac OS X.IV 2005. Aalto’s office completed over 400 projects. This is not interesting in itself, even if it is startling. What is significant is that he was able to build so extensively and so well in a variety of locations and with such a variety of briefs and clients. 7 Josef Albers, Black Mountain College. Undated. http://blackmountaincollege.org/content/view/ 15/58/1/1 [23 November 2005]. 8 Alvar Aalto: ‘Interview for Finnish Television, July 1972’, p. 174. 9 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 64. 10 Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto, The Early Years, Rizzoli: New York, 1984, p. 34. 11 Ibid., pp. 194–202. Jakob Burckhardt’s Die kultur der Renässance was a more direct architectural source of this. 12 David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc (eds), Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, Albany: University of New York Press 1998. 13 Tide Huesser worked for Alvar Aalto & Co. from 1966 to 1987. Private conversation with the author. The playfulness implicit to this counter-trend to utilitarian or purely symbolic models of architectural design was reinforced by the Finnish philosopher Yrjö Hirn and his concept of Elementary Play. See Yrjö Hirn: The Origins of Art, London: Macmillan 1904, Leikkiä ja taidetta muutamia lukuja lasten leluista, lauluista, tansseista ja pikku teatterista, Porvoo: WSOY, 1918. 14 Demetri Porphyrios, Sources of Modern Eclecticism, Rizzoli: New York, 1982, p. 26. 15 Aalto and Max Ernst worked on the Corso Theatre in Zurich in 1934. It seems likely that he was familiar with Ernst’s Ready-mades. 16 Alvar Aalto: ‘From Doorstep To Living Room’, Aitta Magazine, 1926, in Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto In His Own Words, pp. 49–55. 17 Demetri Porphyrios: Sources of Modern Eclecticism, p. 26 18 Alvar Aalto: ‘The Trout & the Stream’ (1948), in Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto In His Own Words, pp. 108–9. 19 Ibid pp. 107–9. 20 Göran Schildt, ‘Aalto, Bauhaus & the Creative Experiment’ in Alvar Aalto vs. the Modern Move- ment, Jyväskylä, 1st International Alvar Aalto Symposium 1980, p. 39. 21 Alvar Aalto: ‘What Is Culture?’ (1958), in Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto In His Own Words, p. 108 22 Interview with Jaakko Suikhonen, one of the job architects of the library, 8 November 2000. Aalto’s responsiveness to the site as the final stage of design testing is well documented in many other buildings. 23 Husserl quoted in Nicholas Ray, Alvar Aalto, p. 115, unpublished MS, 2004. 24 Demetri Porphyrios: Sources of Modern Eclecticism, p. 14.

175 Chapter 16

Metaphorical Manhattan ‘Paradise Lost’

Lorna McNeur

Following the destruction and its after effects; of the World Trade Center Towers is akin to In New York City having destroyed the natural island on 11 September 2001 by constructing the rational grid debates about whether to build across the Manhattan landscape, a garden or a tower with little regard for the lives rekindled historical wounds of the Ancient Native New Yorkers, their culture, animals, land and spirit. To quickly rebuild new World Trade Center towers Manhattan was once is akin to the historical act of a ‘beautiful garden like paradise’ having levelled and gridded to its original inhabitants the island of Manhattan the Ancient Native New Yorkers. that was once sacred to Native Americans They spoke of the earth ‘as if she were their own mother’. In other words To quickly rebuild towers One glance at the long and thin island of with what could be a token gesture Manhattan to a memorial garden at the base with its green oasis of Central Park at the and too little regard for the victims’ centre lives, families, and friends, quickly reveals a body and all of the New Yorkers with a womb at the centre. who suffered the WTC 911 attack The urban inhabitants turn

176 to the sacred oasis of nature who have lost their lives tragically at the centre of the city in the past and present. for replenishment. PROPOSAL To let gardens grow now Embodied within Central Park on the long time traumatised island of Manhattan is a Metaphorical island of Manhattan is to let the Spirit of the island return Here is the ‘garden’ as a microcosm of the to heal the long history of human neglect city of both ancient and contemporary The garden symbolic of the city as ‘Paradise Native New Yorkers Lost’. Joining all the other green initiatives The fading idea of the WTC site Currently active in New York City becoming a memorial garden I propose green public spaces throughout the is potentially a profoundly missed island of Manhattan opportunity. to gain a more healthy balance of active and Here is a moment in time when the wounds contemplative public spaces. of the past have met those of the present The overall proposal would include: exposing the rocky cliffs, deep soil the WTC site as a memorial garden and soul of the city. Broadway as a green journey through the city This is a rare and precious opportunity meeting the grand space of Central Park for acknowledgement of the spirit of the and the whole perimeter of the island could island continue to be developed further and people Into a string of greens and other public spaces.

177 16.1 The island of Manhattan showing the metaphorical island at its centre.

178 16.2 Central Park = enlargement of Central Park plan showing metaphorical Manhattan.

179 16.3 Manhattan (2) = The island of Manhattan showing the location of green public space proposals (indicated in black) at the World Trade Center site, along Broadway, and around the entire perimeter of the island.

180 Part 5

Making marks

Chapter 17

The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness The primitive in Tadao Ando’s architecture

Jin Baek

Tadao Ando once claimed that ‘no superficial ornament’, which, according to him, does not ‘truly enrich life’, is found in the courtyard of the Azuma House.1 I would like to interpret this comment of Ando in such a fashion that in the house, for instance, the walls do not intend to be more than walls; neither do the windows, the doors, and the dark stone-paved platform. Because of their non- figurative quality, the elements do not invite any subjective deciphering, nor do they attract any particular attention as independent objects. They do not impose their presence upon the perceiver; instead, they recede to the background in the perceptual experience of the occupant. It is from the collectivity of these inconspicuous elements that a sense of room, opening or emptiness emerges (Figure 17.1). The uniqueness of the spatial configuration of the house has often been pointed out. A courtyard intervenes between the living room on the one hand, and on the other hand, the dining room, kitchen and bathroom. The courtyard interrupts the activities for which these individual spaces are set (Figure 17.2); this unconventional configuration demands the inhabitant to be, according to Ando, a man of ‘strong will’ who dares to traverse the courtyard even on a harsh winter day.2 Ando wrote:

In an early work, Row House, Sumiyoshi (Azuma House), I severed in half a place for daily living composed of austere geometry by

183 Jin Baek

17.1 Tadao Ando, courtyard of the Azuma House Source: photograph by Tadao Ando

inserting an abstract space for the play of wind and light. I sought to inject inquiry, thereby, into the inertia that has overtaken man’s dwelling. Or again, in a commercial facilities project known as Time’s, I let an opening for nature into the continuous fabric woven of urban space by economic efficiency. The project was, thus, an attempt at introducing discontinuity.3

The sense of emptiness emerging from the courtyard because of the renunciatory qualities of the architectural elements was not for the sake of emptiness that encloses itself onto itself. On the contrary, the emptiness renders the courtyard as the capacity to accommodate a perceptual experience, which Ando called ‘the play of wind and light’. Moreover, this perceptual experience is that which charges architecture with a ‘sense of life and a feeling of substantial existence’.4 Ando also described the perceptual experience as the encounter between man and things (mono). The things Ando was referring to were wind, rainwater and light — natural elements without enduring profiles. Accordingly, the perceptual experience is projected towards these invisible, yet palpable, elements of nature that are unfolding in the place of emptiness. The elements are phenom- enally present, but cannot be said to exist from the substantialist perspective. Such things of invisible presence do challenge on the one hand the Democritian atomistic tradition of things as being equipped with substantiality and as identifiable with a fixed point in space, and on the other, the Aristotelian tradition that takes thing ‘as a normative subject of a sentence’ that ‘bears its contents and determina- tions as predicates’.5 The things favoured by Ando overturn these perspectives by

184 The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness

17.2 Tadao Ando, plan, section and axonometric of the Azuma House Source: Tadao Ando Architect and Associates

185 Jin Baek

letting their appearance overcome their presumed substantiality. They are in constant radiation and in reaching out beyond itself, defining its ontological status as ek-stasis. Among these natural elements, wind is particularly interesting. Its incessant movement, fluidity and unboundedness register themselves on our body, rather than on our conceptual faculty. Wind does not come alone. It comes with coolness on a hot summer day in Osaka, or brings an abrupt shower in a rainy season. It accompanies the sound of gaiety or that of bleak- ness. Just as a steep mountain creates a characteristic movement of wind, such as a blast, so does the topographical condition of the Azuma House. Its two heavy monolithic walls – which form a cavernous space – and the operable windows and doors contribute to the formation of the wind’s distinctive movement: its velocity, its trajectory, its sound, its degree of coolness and so forth. Again, these conditions of the wind are not merely physical or environmental, but conjoined with a characteristic atmosphere. In this manner, wind experienced in the courtyard is the agent for the revelation of the mood (Stimmung) of the world, mood in Martin Heidegger’s sense of the term. It is neither a subjective feeling, nor an objective scientific phenomenon, but the mode of the disclosure of Dasein’s Being, its relationality with the world.6 In Japan, the idea of perceiver who is enshrouded by a specific atmosphere of the world has been articulated in the idea of fudo, or its conventional, yet largely dissatisfactory, translation into climate. Fudo is not simply an indifferent depiction of any given climatic-related and topographical condition, nor does it posit a scientific horizon of stimuli and response prompted by climatic conditions. Rather, it is about the climatic and topographical field as they affect the interiority of selfhood and as they initiate cultural activities that extend the moment of self-discovery to the intersubjective realm. The idea of fudo was articulated primarily by Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960) in modern East Asian thinking. Watsuji studied in Germany between 1927 and 1928, the period during which Heidegger’s Being and Time was published. Watsuji was inspired by Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, yet simultaneously criticized it for the reason that it still remained within the tradition of solitary individualism. According to Watsuji, the failure of Dasein considering the interpersonal dimension of man as an essential mode of his Being ends in losing sight of his spatiality and in lopsidedly emphasizing his temporality. Fudo, a milieu as affecting the interiority of selfhood and as grounding cultural activities as the trans-subjective and communicative extension of the self-awakening, was his alternative. He expanded later this interest in the spatiality of man into the ethics of ningen, in which the reciprocity between the individualistic and the communal is acknowledged as the fundamental condition of man.7

186 The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness

In the moment when a specific content of selfhood is formed, for example, ‘I feel cold’, as Watsuji would claim, the interiority of the ‘I’ is filled by the coldness of the surrounding air. One’s discovery of the self – as in this case of the ‘I’ who is feeling cold – does not lead the one to ‘look towards the “subject [himself]:”’ the trans-subjective condition of coldness that is pervasive at the locale and has become particularized into the feeling of the cold in one’s interiority guides him to the acts of ‘putting clothes on [his] children’ and ‘[buying] more clothes and charcoal’.8 By conjoining this subjective, individual awakening and the trans-subjective background from which it has emerged, fudo operates as the basis for sympathetic compassion in interpersonal relationships, and for the formation of cultural measures. Only on this trans-subjective union can the occupant of the house state affirmatively and affectionately to his child that ‘it is cold this morning’. The same coldness, now distinctively specified within the interiorities of the parent and child, embraces them as one. Consequently, fudo does not result in a void of psychically nihilistic solitude, nor in the dreary space of scientific environmental control, but rather, the social space of sympathy. From this perspective, the contact with wind in the courtyard of the Azuma House is meant to recover the sense of fudo with its subjective and trans-subjective dimensions in the heart of a residence that is situated in a metropolis fraught with, for instance, interiorized shopping arcades with constant environmental control. The ‘sense of life’ and the ‘feeling of substantial existence’ that Ando mentioned previously lie in ‘[restoring] the relations between human beings and things (mono)’9 through the mediation of architecture that recedes to the background. Ando wrote:

With the sense of life generated by this approach to form and materials as a mediating element, it becomes possible to inspire contacts between people and things (mono) on a deeper level and in this way to evolve new relations between them. This in turn will enable human beings to hope for the emergence of new place in which to experience the kind of self-knowledge that people today are losing.10

‘The kind of knowledge that people today are losing’ does not lie in the intro- spective vision of one’s interiority, but in the rediscovery of fudo as the mode of enabling a revelation about the world, that embraces and penetrates one’s interiority. Ando’s emphasis on the need of the occupant of the house to be strong implies that, even on a day of harsh weather, the occupant should be able to bring life to the courtyard by crossing through it, and in so doing, to throw himself into the experience of fudo – rather than residing in some envi- ronmentally-agreeable interior of the house.

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The appearance of wind in fudo, that is an invisible kind as its existence is felt on the body, conflates the visible and the tactile, and renders one folded upon the other. That not the substantiality of wind but its phenomenal appearance conveys the atmosphere of the world – again because its ontological nature is ek-stasis – naturally involves the participation and existence of the perceiving subject. What is further verified is the intertwinedness between the perceiver and the wind in the experience of fudo. The emergence of a thing in appearance and the sense of the selfhood are necessarily conjoined together. In this coemergence, the appearance of the thing is not about the subjective imposition of meanings placed upon it, but rather is a reflection of fudo, which radiates and nullifies the distinction between the thing’s surface and its depth. The intertwinedness between the perceiver and the thing in fudo further indicates their interpenetration. The sensation through which the para- doxical appearance of the invisible wind is detected already involves the sense of the wind’s penetration – and of the world uncovered by it – into the interiority of the self, no matter how strongly the ego-self may resist this acceptance. As Tadashi Ogawa would argue, the wind carrying the gloom of a late autumn day crushes our egoistic will, defining our interiority as gloomy to the root.11 Fudo in this manner overcomes the dualistic-substantialist dichotomy between the perceiver and the object of perception. The perception of absolute acceptance in the revelation of fudo resonates with the Japanese tradition that considers selfhood an empty vessel. As Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945) argued in his philosophy of ‘the topos of absolute nothingness’, perception is not a form of self-imposition in order to gauge the other. On the contrary, it is that of self-negation to embrace the other, and through that process, to paradoxically acquire one’s selfhood. Shintai, or body, is a tool that actualizes this level of perception. The emptiness of selfhood is not a conceptual theorem, but a principle that is corporeally actualized at the moment when one feels the other as his own interiority. The body is like an iconic instrument for the unconditioned acceptance of a thing, constituting the deepest layer of one’s knowing the thing. The conceptual and predicative knowing is always an abstraction of this concrete and active knowing through body. The active dimension of knowing within the perception of self-negation lies precisely in the body’s emptying capacity to allow for the full manifestation of the thing within one’s interiority. In this manner, Nishida replaces the active perceiver who projects meanings – whether intellectual or psychological – from the imagined, substantial core of the self with his emptiness as the corporeal capacity to be filled.12 As a matter of fact, the self as an ‘empty vessel’ is homologous to shintai, as the self, without shintai, is neither a vessel, nor an entity able to empty itself. Because of this indispensable role of shintai as the agent for deep

188 The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness

and active sensation, Nishida even claimed that the self, which appears at the moment of accepting the other as its content, is coterminous with shintai.13 The moment of creation, for Nishida, arises at the moment when the sensational capacity of shintai starts to overflow. Shintai as concerned with internalizing the outside world, comes to a demise – not resulting in a kind of physical death, but rather in a redefinition of itself into a qualitatively different phase as the tool for creative action to accommodate the surplus. It is in this context that Nishida named the work of art as ‘the pure body of the artist’.14 As if reminding one of the Buddhist idea of shinshindatsuraku, Nishida claimed that shintai passes away at the moment when its sensational capacity to be voluntarily filled by the outer world reaches its limit. At this moment, shintai as concerned with the sensational capacity is transcended and the dimension of action concealed in sensation starts to be revealed. Shintai now enters into the world of creative action beyond sensation to accommodate the surplus, a phase which Nishida called ‘the simple instrument of nothingness’. Shintai now concretizes the matrix of transformation of the world ‘from the Created to the Creating’ (tsukuru mono kara tsukurareta mono e). What is created in this fashion is not an object of unknowability in confrontation with the perceiving subject, nor is it the sign of subjective intentions. What is created is the extension of the bodily self that is encountered pre-reflectively. It is directly and immediately knowable; any aesthetic distance based upon which the hegemonic gaze of the perceiver would operate yields to an unprecedented intimacy and unison between himself and the created figure. Shintai, or ‘the actively knowing body’,15 was the medium for one’s acceptance of the appearance of natural things as the agents of fudo in the courtyard of the Azuma House. Shintai conjoins the activity of emptying selfhood and passivity of accepting the manifestation of fudo through things. According to Ando, wind does not remain on the margins of our body, but ‘penetrates’ it.16 The perceiver’s experience of a cool breeze in the courtyard of the Azuma House through shintai, ‘a sentient being that responds to the world’,17 brings about its absolute contradictory of warmness and softness as the expression of the very self. The gaiety carried by the wind imbues one’s shintai, driving away the melancholy that had possessed her. Identity thus takes its shape through this reciprocal corporeal resonance in absolute relativity with the agent of fudo, which operates through the perceptual matrix of self-emptying and accepting the world. In this perception of self-negation, shintai knows things of ek-stasis through its unconditional acceptance, while conceptualiza- tion fails to understand their non-substantialistic, phenomenal presence. Ando’s restoration of the corporeal contact with profile-less things that are in constant fluidity, unboundedness and incessant transformation thus challenges the habitual perception that tends to look for the contour or profile of the things in

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order to take it as the proof of their self-enclosed, objective substantiality. This conceptual focus on the profile of things prohibits one from seeing the things’ ecstatic nature, which radiates and penetrates. In the courtyard, for Ando, ‘the true sensation of being alive’ is never understood conceptually, but ‘inscribes itself on shintai’,18 ‘the actively knowing body’ that sees and feels beyond the horizon of profile. The opening of a gap in a residence where profile-less things permeate should not be understood as indicating that Ando cancels out things with relatively enduring profiles in perception. As a matter of fact, the reflectivity, texture and size of the concrete wall of the house participate in the formation of a specific phase of fudo. As much as things in ek-stasis are the agents of fudo, so too are the things with enduring profiles. The wall is a component of the revelation of fudo – not because of its aesthetic quality or its compositional consistency with other elements, but because of its self-renunciatory appearance in fudo. The concrete wall is not a self-enclosed object of meaningful-ness, or of its corollary, meaningless-ness, but rather, is a thing that transcends the confines of its profile and participates in the formation of a specific fudo. The wall receives, accelerates, and reflects wind: its sound, its texture, its moisture, its coldness, and its gaiety or gloom. In this reflectivity, the wall loses its substantiality, concretizing the formula of ek-stasis. The surface of the concrete wall is not always grey, nor does its effect remain within the physical category of colour. It appears gilded when hit by the sunlight on a dry day, clothing itself with resplendence. It appears nearly black when the sky is covered in thick and dark clouds, igniting within the occupier the memory of a series of showers, and making her rush to remove the laundry articles that were basking in the sun. Probably, this is what Ando meant by describing architecture as charged with a ‘sense of life and a feeling of substantial existence.’ In this light, Ando’s approach to ‘form and materials as a mediating element’ points to the state in which the substantiality of an element is transcended by its appearance as it reflects fudo. The same goes for other elements of the courtyard, such as the doors to the living room and dining room, the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the concrete partition wall (Figure 17.3). They all participate as the agents of fudo. The dark sky of heavy clouds falls upon the black pavement of the courtyard, rendering a dim light coming from the dining room as feeble, yet glorious. The window appears non-existent in the midst of such darkness and the light of the dining room appears to be something like a beacon. As a shower appears and vanishes, the sunlight starts to dry the wet concrete wall and partly comes to be refracted by it, to be absorbed by the black platform. The window catches a gap of the sky in a purified blue that surfaces out of the clouds in dissipation. On a winter day, bitter wind brings snows to the courtyard. Some of them embroider

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17.3 Tadao Ando, view from the dining area to courtyard, Azuma House Source: photograph by Mitsuo Matsuoka

the black platform with white stripes, registering the pattern of the wind; others come only to be carried back into the air. On such a day, beyond its protective function as insulator from the direct sunlight, the concrete partition wall complements the otherwise unenclosed interior with a cave-like intimacy, in which the gas flame of the mundane stove becomes like the hearth in a traditional Japanese residence. In this fashion, the literal substantiality of these architectural elements breaks off in the emergence of each phase of fudo. They appear as the reflection of individual holistic situation, nullifying the substantialist perspective that would consider the essence of the elements to be in their physical properties. Just as the things in ek-stasis are apprehended through shintai,or ‘the actively knowing body’, so too are these elements of enduring profiles. The touch of the concrete wall of the courtyard on a hot summer day registers unprecedented coolness upon ‘the actively knowing body’ that has been soaked in hotness. The touch acquires the dimension of what Watsuji called ‘cultural measures’ in response to a particular phase of fudo that is mediated by the courtyard.19 As Nishida would argue, when shintai cannot fully accept a

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particular phase of fudo into his interiority, shintai seeks out measures to accommodate the surplus that it cannot contain solely. In this light, the shade that the wall provides also acquires the dimension of cultural measure; the wall is knowable not because of its decoration with familiar representational codes, but because of its resonance with shintai. The act of locating oneself in the shade is the response of shintai to the condition in which its sensational capacity to accept a specific phase of fudo overflows. Following the argument presented by Nishida, the wall that creates the shade can be considered even as the extension of shintai – and that of one’s self, too – because the wall accommodates the surplus at the moment when the shintai as concerned with sensational capacity reaches its limit. Accordingly, the wall as a cultural measure is not understood as a sign to be deciphered, but is rather understood pre-reflectively as shintai’s extension. By the same token, the doors and floor-to-ceiling windows, that deploy themselves in response to each phase of fudo, are understood directly and intimately as shintai’s extensions. In conclusion, Ando’s adoption of ‘no superficial ornament’ to realize the sense of emptiness is oriented not only towards the perception of profile- less things — which helps unfasten perception from the horizon of the profile — but also toward the perception of things with enduring profiles in order to save them from the paradigm of semiotic representation. Of course, this was a historically-necessitated attempt, considering the post-war Japanese culture. Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1970) introduced the image of Japan as a post-modern utopia in which the connection between signified and signifier deteriorated to such a degree as to cause the spectacle of unfettered and sense- less signifiers to prevail in the urban landscape. Fumihiko Maki’s aesthetics of fragments, and Arata Isozaki’s aesthetics of irony, celebrated the paradigm of the representational illusions that clothe architecture with formal indices, fragments and segments, thus embodying the spectacle of signifiers. Confronting these, Ando’s presentation of natural things without profile in a stage of emptiness constitutes a preliminary step toward recovering the radiating and ecstatic nature of things with profiles beyond their physical properties and boundaries. Before they are defined as signs in the framework between signifier and signified, appearance and essence, and surface and core, architectural elements are things in radiation whose phenomenal appearance as the reflection of fudo penetrates the emptied interiority of the perceiver. Their deployments are cultural measures to each phase of fudo as apprehended by shintai, or ‘the actively knowing body’. In this perspective, the Azuma House is concerned not so much with proffering a minimalistic, syntactic purity – the popular label attached to the house – as with restoring the ecstatic nature of the architectural elements. In the wake of Ando’s rejection of a ‘superficial ornament’, there might not be any figure in the house, as long as its figuration is understood in

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semiotic signification; the house is in fact full of figures that are corporeally apprehended and that have accordingly recovered their figurative efficacy.

Notes

1 Tadao Ando, ‘Townhouse at Kujo,’ The Japan Architect, November and December 1983, 50–6, esp. p. 52. 2 Ibid. 3 Tadao Ando, ‘Thinking in Ma, Opening Ma’, El Croqui 58, Tadao Ando 1989/1992, Madrid: El Croquis Editorial, 1993, pp. 6–7, esp. p. 7. 4 Tadao Ando, ‘New Relations between the Space and the Person’, The Japan Architect, November and December 1977, pp. 44–6, esp. p. 44. 5 Tadashi Ogawa, ‘Qi and the Phenomenology of Wind’, in Phenomenology in Japan, Anthony J. Steinbock (ed.), Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, pp. 97–111, esp. p. 105. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.), New York: Harper & Row, 1962, pp. 172–9. 7 Tetsuro Watsuji, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, Geoffrey Bownas (trans.), Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Japanese Government, 1961, Preface. 8 According to Watsuji, to claim that each has a distinctive sense of coldness is possible ‘only on the basis of our feeling the cold in common’, ibid., pp. 4–5. 9 Tadao Ando, ‘New Relations between the Space and the Person’, p. 44. 10 Ibid. (mediating, my italics; things, Ando’s italics). 11 Ogawa, p. 103. 12 Kitaro Nishida, Complete Works, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1947, vol. VI, pp. 120–5. 13 Ibid., pp. 128–9. 14 Nishida, VI, 128–9; Kitaro Nishida, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, David A. Dilworth (trans.), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987, p. 57; Nishida, Complete Works, vol. X, p. 237. 15 For the interpretation of shintai as ‘the actively knowing body’, refer to Matteo Cestari, ‘The Knowing Body: Nishida’s Philosophy of Active Intuition’, The Eastern Buddhist 1988, 31: 179– 208. 16 Tadao Ando, ‘New Relations between the Space and the Person’, p. 44. 17 Tadao Ando, ‘Shintai and Space’ in Tadao Ando Complete Works, Francesco dal Co (ed.), London: Phaidon, 1994, p. 453. 18 Tadao Ando, ‘From the Sumiyoshi House to the Townhouse at Kujo, Sumiyoshi no nagaya kara kujô no machiya e)’, Shinkenchiku July 1983, 58: 163–73, esp. p. 173. 19 Watsuji, A Climate, pp. 5–7.

193 Chapter 18

The ‘primitive surface’ Carving, modelling, marking and transformation

Stephen Kite

Modernity’s longstanding obsession with space as essence – manifest in classic texts such as Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) – has yielded (at least on the part of some architects and thinkers) to a renewed engagement with surface as a site of meaning within the work of architecture and the city. This essay seeks to explore the nature of the architectonic surface in the context of the psychoanalytic aesthetics of Adrian Stokes (1902–72)1 as well as other thinkers, and notions of the ‘primitive’, herein variously defined as the raw matter that the artist/architect works to reveal articulate form, and the ways in which these acts of making might be described in relation to the ‘primitive’ ego. It is especially concerned with the innate connection between these primal ego-states and the pre-verbal body-language of architecture: accordingly, Roger Scruton – otherwise sceptical regarding psychoanalytical interpretations of architecture – comments:

We find that [Heinrich] Wölfflin … relied on a theory of what is ‘primitive’ which closely resembles that of Stokes. What is primitive is the innate connection between our way of perceiving architecture and our way of perceiving the human body. This truth (which has been found, lost, and found again throughout the history of architecture) is one to which we shall have to pay serious attention.2

In consequence the teacher and critic Colin Rowe came to deplore the lack of ‘face’ in most of modern architecture; that crucial ‘metaphorical plane of intersection between the eyes of the observer and what one may dare to call the soul of the building’.3 Notwithstanding Le Corbusier’s claim that ‘the plan is the

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generator’, for Rowe it is ‘the vertical surface [that] can only remain the threshold of understanding’.4 This essay investigates the potentialities of the surface especially through the themes of ‘carving, modelling, marking and transformation’. The dyad of ‘carving-modelling’, as characterized by Adrian Stokes, is presented here as an important thesis within modernist debates concerning that clarion call of modernism – ‘truth to materials’. In a present culture that privileges the plastik and gorges on fast-consumption images, this essay foregrounds, instead, the ‘carver’s’ stance to material and respect for matter’s innate qualities. Where the ‘carver’ seeks to reveal forms immanent in matter, the ‘modeller’ imposes form on matter that exists merely to serve some a-priori conception. Indeed, in reclaiming contact with material, modernism often stressed the clumsy and ‘primitive’ over the fluency of the technician; the hand-made and ‘as-found’ against the machine-made, the over-processed.

Space versus surface

The question as to how we arrived at the space-obsession noted above can be located in later nineteenth-century German psychologies of art and architecture. On the one hand there is Heinrich Wölfflin’s empathetic ‘psychology of architecture’, which stresses the corporeal aspects of matter and form; concurrently other later nineteenth-century thinkers, such as August Schmarsow, propounded an alternative view of architecture as an essentially spatial art, urging the conception of an ‘aesthetics from within’ – based on a psychologizing of interior space – in contrast to Wölfflin’s corporeal ‘aesthetics from without’.5 Architecture, claims Schmarsow, ‘is the history of the sense of space’ and is in essence a ‘spatial construct’.6 Cornelis Van de Ven locates in such writings ‘two major schools of architectural thought … the defenders of the idea of space, and the trend founded upon the concept of empathy, projecting anthropomorphic symbolism in mass’.7 Schmarsow – it can be argued – won. ‘Space’ issues have predomi- nated in the interpretation and practice of modernist architecture over the corporeal presence of the planes and masses that define the space. The optical-conceptual mentalité has tended to override the physical, the haptic – indeed, the ‘primitive’. In the dissertation which inaugurated Wölfflin’s career, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture of 1886’, he stresses the façade’s physiognomy:

Even though a house has little in common with a human form, we see the windows as organs that are similar to our eyes … We … attribute to them all the expressive value that resides in the relation

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of the eye to its surroundings. The portion above the windows becomes a forehead. Cheerfulness demands a smooth brow.8

The literal body-image of the late sixteenth-century Palazzo Zuccari in Rome that this passage might bring to mind is a joke (Figure 18.1), but jokes are serious in revealing deeper hidden structures – the fact that architecture is a body language. Moreover – if psychoanalytic aesthetes such as Adrian Stokes are to be believed – it is a language that is crucial to our well-being in the world. In unpublished lecture notes that ponder the relationship between building and the graphic arts, Stokes cites Geoffrey Scott’s Wölfflin-inspired statement that ‘architectural art is the transcription of the body’s state into forms of building’ and notes how this view ‘echoes the theory of Einfühlung or empathy elaborated by several nineteenth-century German writers on aesthetics’. Stokes continues:

An alternation of rough and smooth surfaces, specific in architecture, reconstructs for us a prime aspect of the body as it is revealed from the earliest times by touch, with the result that an imaginative economy concerned with texture still informs the aesthetic apprehension of volume, weight and space. In other words, all graphic art

18.1 Palazzo Zuccari, Piazza Trinità dei Monti, Rome – late sixteenth century Source: Stephen Kite

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in some sense reconstructs for us a very primitive but unforgotten image of the body on the model of architecture … One way or another, the body is the foundation for significance. 9

To understand what Stokes means by the significance of this ‘very primitive but unforgotten image of the body’, it is important to appreciate the psychologies of the maker’s stance to material, as explicated in the pivotal concept of Stokes’s theory of art – his carving/modelling dyad.10

Carving the surface

Compare two celebrated ‘kisses’: Constantin Brancusi’s first ‘Kiss’ of 1907–8 (the year in which he began his pierres directes – direct stone carving), and Auguste Rodin’s ‘Kiss’, one of his most famous figures from the Gates of Hell project begun in 1880. In his The Preference for the Primitive (2002) Ernst Gombrich illustrates this now-classic opposition of Brancusi’s defiantly direct ‘Kiss’ – emblematic of the aesthetic of ‘truth-to-material’ – and Rodin’s plastic virtuoso performance.11 In Stokesian terms, Rodin is pre-eminently a modeller and Brancusi, a carver. This has been an important distinction in the practice and theory of modernist art and, as I want to argue, is of value for architecture. The Rodin is fluent, polished; employing up to fifty assistants, Rodin would make clay models that were then cast in bronze or reproduced in marble. The Brancusi declares its making and material authenticity; the form is innate to the material and its resistance.

Modelling–carving: Gehry and Kahn

To extend a similar polemical carving/modelling contrast into architecture; in Frank Gehry’s work, such as the Los Angeles Walt Disney Concert Hall, it is arguable that we find the modeller at work; the resistance or emblematic qualities of the material seem distant from the conception (Figure 18.2). It is also arguable that a building such as Louis Kahn’s Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale (1969–74) embodies the carver’s approach; here materiality and tectonic character seem immanent to the formal outcomes (Figure 18.3). The orthogonal masonry base that abuts the Los Angeles grid represents the only moment of stasis and gravity in Gehry’s project; but what erupts from this acropolis expresses modelling values in extremis. Membranes of stainless steel sway, soar and furl in concatenations of filmic skins and part- objects: they have an oneiric magic-carpet quality for they never frontalize, but ever elude the grasp, unfurling and rolling off into the blue Californian sky. Equally, the stainless steel plating itself is strangely disembodied and non-

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18.2 Frank Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Source: Stephen Kite

tactile; in so far as it enters our perceptual world, it has the ambiguous and dreamlike aspect of the Hollywood silver-screen. Likewise, the part-objects of collage and bricolage predominate in the Disney building, as commonly in the object-cities of modernity. As is explored further below in the outline of Kleinian psychoanalysis, such fragmentation characterizes the un-integrated experience of the infantile ego, which relates to its inner and outer worlds as part-objects. Stokes was accordingly nervous of ‘the brassy element of shock, impact or arrest’ of the contemporary urban environment that denies us even rudimentary counterforms to the whole-body of mature ego-integration: ‘Blindly, like the infant with his part- objects’, he writes, ‘we grope for those [corporeal] attributes as this art [of collage] pounds us’.12 At Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, on the other hand, the entrance invites, but does not envelop; it is an offering in the sequence of offerings to Chapel Street that the building affords – not least the row of shops included in its perimeter. The materiality of concrete and dulled (not specular) pewter-like stainless steel is immanent to the character of the sheer wall of the Center that values the integrity of the urban block and holds calm dialogue with the Roman gravitas of his earlier Yale University Art Gallery (1953) opposite. For Kahn was concerned that ‘the street’s continuity, the urban character of the street, not be lost’.13

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18.3 Paul Mellon Center for British Art, Yale – Louis Kahn, looking towards corner entrance on Chapel Street Source: Stephen Kite

Likewise, in terms of creative process, as Gehry has described: ‘My projects always develop through a succession of tests in different media that tend to evolve a gesture into a building’. Further, ‘I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into a building’.14 If Gehry’s work is the built gesture-drawing, Kahn, in contrast, is more concerned with ‘stopping the pencil’ in accord with the carver’s concern for the slow revelation of making; Kahn urges that we should ‘train ourselves to draw as to build, from the bottom up, when we do, stopping our pencil to make a mark at the joints of pouring or erecting’.15

The surface psychologized

For Stokes the ‘carving-modelling’ dyad, demonstrated by these didactic contrasts, is not some mere arts-and-crafts moralizing around ‘truth to materials’ but the foundation of an entire ethic and aesthetic theory. Here is Stokes’s definition of the carving-modelling dyad from Stones of Rimini of 1934:

A figure carved in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come to life. Plastic conception, [modelling] on the other hand, is uppermost when the material … from which, a figure has been made appears no more than as so much suitable stuff for this creation.16

Stokes had begun a seven-year analysis with the child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in 1930; her ideas, and the terminology of psychoanalysis, become increasingly integral to Stokes’s post-Second World War texts. Klein, a follower

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of Freud, concentrates on the early years of child development, maintaining that in the early stage of life – defined as the paranoid-schizoid position – the infant is in a state of oneness with the mother. At this stage the child relates only to part-objects, such as the mother’s breast, which may be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, satis- fying or frustrating. As Nicola Glover points out in relation to Klein: ‘Since instincts are active from birth, some primitive phantasy life is assumed to operate from the very beginning … primary phantasies are innate and wholly unconscious’.17 Gradually, in the first few months of life, argues Klein, the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ position and its primitive phantasy life matures to the more mature ‘depressive’ stage of the ego where the child now recognizes both its own identity and the mother, as a whole other person, and concurrently suffers guilt at the pain and aggression previously inflicted on the mother. In Stokes’s theories, art and architecture can play a fundamental role in this on-going process of maturation if paintings or sculptures are considered as acts of repair that the artist makes in the outer world that correspond to processes of integration within the psyche. In this light Stoke contends that the cardinal role of art is to ensure ‘a milieu for adults, for true adults, for heroes of a well-integrated inner world to live in’.18 One of the most significant developments in Stokes’s later books is to map the dualism of carving–modelling on to the two states of child development identified by Klein. Therefore, for him, carving – reflecting the depressive position – represents a more mature stage of ego-development concerning art- making, than the modelling aspects of the first primitive mental states of the paranoid-schizoid position. As Richard Wollheim lucidly puts it: ‘The carver, we are to imagine, in respecting the integrity and the separateness of the stone [for example], celebrates at once the whole object with which he characteristically enters into relation and also the integrated ego that he projects.’19 Whereas the inchoate and enveloping nature of modelling work, with its disregard for the ‘otherness’ of the material which it utilizes, partakes of the relationships attribut- able to the primitive phantasy life of the infant. At the same time – as I shall explore further around the primitive surface – Stokes increasingly comes to recognize that carving–modelling, and the ‘primitive’ and ‘mature’ mental states of the two psychoanalytical positions are deeply interrelated, both in the contemplation of, and in the creation of, art. Thus, Stokes condemns the immateriality of early Corbusier: ‘Modern building materials are essentially plastic’, he writes in Stones of Rimini, and therefore inimical to the advancement of carving values. He parallels ‘Le Corbusier’s lightning concrete’ to ‘oil paint that is slickly splashed about’ and deplores the fact that ‘with an armature of steel, Le Corbusier can make you a room of any shape you like. He can express speed with a building’.20 The Villa

200 The ‘primitive surface’

Savoye is a hybrid of modern and traditional techniques rendered over to attain the desired Purist image: later Le Corbusier is undeniably more tactile, as evidenced by the carved space and mass of La Tourette.21 In the context of current debates on the image and landmark architecture, Stokes perceived that modelling values would prevail, partly because they travel so well in the photographic image; this is especially true of architecture and sculpture. Gehry’s work leaps from the glossy pages of the journals whereas Kahn’s calm pewter-clad forms can look … merely grey.

Transformations: inarticulate–articulate

With these concepts in mind, we turn now to examine the wall as a site of transformation: a plane of potentially intense significance where it is possible to experience and witness the interchange between inarticulate and articulate form – akin to the part-object stage of the child’s absorption in the mother – and the whole-object recognition of the mother’s otherness. In the Renaissance – significantly paralleled by a deep exploration of the body and the mother-and- child relationship – we observe an especial fascination with transformation. Writing of the great stone architecture of the Italian Renaissance, Stokes makes the parallel explicit: ‘We partake of an inexhaustible feeding mother (a fine building announces).’22

18.4 Giulio Romano, Palazzo Maccarani, Rome Source: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

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Thus, in Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Maccarani (1522–3) at Rome, Rowe (who had certainly read Stokes) finds in the architectural surface (Figure 18.4):

Two principles at work – there is elegance and there is savagery. There is the rational, intellectual order of the structural grid and there is the explosive, primitive order of the rustication. The primitive building, which is presented, is constrained in a sophisticated corset …. The building palpitates (one can only use sexual imagery for what is going on here), but in the end, it concedes to a cerebral order of things.23

And in Smooth and Rough of 1951 Stokes records the survival of the ‘inexhaustible feeding mother’ announced by the charged surfaces and openings of a fine building:

Though we have bitten, torn, dirtied and pinched her, though we thought to have lost her utterly, to have destroyed her utterly in fantasy and act. We are grateful to stone buildings for their stubborn material, hacked and hewed but put together carefully, restored in better shape than those pieces that the infant imagined he had chewed or scattered, for which he searched. Much crude rock stands re-arranged; now in the form of apertures, of suffusion at the side of apertures, the bites, the tears, the pinches are miraculously identified with the recipient passages of the body, with sense organs, with features; as well as with the good mother which we would eat more mercifully for preservation and safety within, and for our own.24

While Stokes always privileged the carved ‘outwardness’ of, for example, the courtyard of the fifteenth-century Palace of Urbino, or the related art of Piero della Francesca, in his later writing he came to allow a greater role to the ‘primitive’ ego. Writing on ‘Psychoanalysis and our Culture’ in 1973 he can still write that ‘all that is most disturbing is infantile or, rather, the persistence of the infantile. Man’s achievement has been his maturity, that is to say, the modifications of the infantile material’,25 yet, at the same time, he is now prepared to concede that, while

neither the drive towards primitive identification nor the striving toward maturity will cease: and though these aims are often exclu- sive of one another, it is in their meeting that the height of creativity exists. I have presented the conjunction repeatedly when portraying the form in art.26

202 The ‘primitive surface’

In thinking about the nature of primitivity and the architectonic surface, I have been struck by Stephen Newton’s stance to the facture, the handling, of the surface from the painter’s standpoint; ideas evolved with reference to Anton Ehrenzweig’s stress on the role of inarticulate form in the psychology of creativity. In his The Spiritual Unconscious, Newton points to Ehrenzweig’s definition of ‘inarticulate form’ and the role of unconscious form processes in creativity – the ‘hidden order’ of art.27 Painting’s formal characteristics, notes Newton, include ‘impasto, texture, depth and gesture’. In the facture of the architectural surface, to extend the painterly analogy, we may not find ‘impasto’ per se, but we might hope to discover ‘texture, depth and gesture’: indeed, all that haptic potential Stokes inscribes under his rubric of ‘Smooth and Rough’. Ehrenzweig’s importance, therefore, is to give much more credence to the ‘primitive’ states in the artistic process. In fact, as Nicola Glover has pointed out, ‘one major characteristic of post-Kleinian aesthetics is the re-appraisal of the developmental and creative role of manic fusion and omnipotence’ (which traditional Kleinians tend to see as a feature of primitive, ‘part-object’ relationships). Indeed, although Stokes’s earlier writings focused (like Hannah Segal) on the achievement of the depressive position as the sine qua non of artistic authenticity, his later contributions, such as The Invitation in Art (1965) and ‘The Image in Form’ (1967), viewed this state as a necessary complement to the sense of ‘otherness’ in art, associated with the depressive position’.28 For example, in The Invitation in Art – in tandem with an unswerving predilection for the steadfast brotherliness of form of the early Renaissance – he is more accommodating to art forms such as action painting or collage. He surmises that the shock of the new in such practices might allow us an accommodation with the enveloping, illimitable and jarring chaos of the present urban scenario.

The primitive ‘as-found’

Noting Stokes’s cultural preference for the ‘anti-manic’ – as in his exploration of the classical world in Greek Culture and the Ego (1958) – Newton points rather to Jackson Pollock and argues that ‘at the cultural moment of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and abstract expressionism, there appeared to be a cultural need for the manic in art’.29 In a related connection, it seems no accident that contemporary architectural practices interested in the primitive surface – such as Caruso St John, or Sergison Bates – have sought inspiration in such cultural moments as represented, for example, by Alison and Peter Smithson and the rawness of the ‘as-found’ aesthetic.30 To Jonathan Sergison, the Smithsons’ refractory buildings ‘seemed awkward, even ugly’ but were clearly important and profoundly thoughtful, not least in their attention to the ‘enclosing envelope of buildings’

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and the multi-faceted and Janus-like potential of interior and exterior surfaces to respond to many conditions. 31 In conclusion, with connections like this in mind, I can only point to the rich nexus of ideas that informed the Independent Group in London in the 1950s; notions clustered around anthropology and the tribal, the fractured and battered post-blitz East End of London, the primitive and Art Brut. As Jean Dubuffet wrote, speaking for many at the time: ‘I, personally, have a very high regard for the values of primitive peoples; instinct, passion, caprice, violence, madness.’32 In the 1950s, as a prominent figure in the Independent Group – and a friend of Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and other artists – Colin St John Wilson (later architect of the British Library 1974–97) was very exposed to this ‘preference for the primitive’ – he was also reading Adrian Stokes inten- sively. In the Independent Group’s first unofficial session in April 1952 he recalls Paolozzi’s assault on ‘pure-form’ modernism in ‘firing off disparate, contradictory images [from American popular magazines of ephemera, disposable consumer products, low art, high technology etc] like a machine gun while making grunting noises’.33 Against ‘pure form’, Paolozzi projected its opposite – ‘the image’: something ‘to do with content and message, to do with relating in some way to the human condition – a blood-soaked sort of thing’.34

18.5 Colin St John Wilson, upper level of Cambridge School of Architecture extension looking back to link staircase Source: Sam Lambert, Wilson Archive

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Fusing the intellectual, and a more ‘blood-soaked’ empathy with the human condition, Wilson’s projects of the 1950s – like the Bentham Road estate, Hackney, London of 1950–535 and the extension to the School of Archi- tecture, Cambridge University of 1957–8 – reflect the passion for the primitive (Figure 18.5). Condensed in the raw tectonic authority of the school extension, Reyner Banham discovered ‘most of the intellectual aspirations of the Wilson and Smithson generation’.36 As a final image to these notes on the ‘primitive’, this particular box of miracles serves to express the gamut of emotion inscribed under the rubric: carving, marking and transformation.

Notes

1 See Stephen Kite, ‘Adrian Stokes (1902–72) British Critic’ in Key Thinkers on Art: The Twentieth Century, Chris Murray (ed.), Routledge: London, 2002, pp. 256–62. 2 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture, London: Methuen, 1979, pp. 156–7. 3 Colin Rowe, ‘James Stirling: A highly personal and very disjointed memoir’, in James Stirling. Buildings and Projects, Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford (eds), London: Architectural Press, 1984, pp. 10–27, esp. p. 23. 4 Rowe, ‘James Stirling’, p. 22. 5 The salient text in Wölfflin’s case is his Renaissance and Baroque of 1888. 6 August Schmarsow, ‘The Essence of Architectural Creation’, in Empathy, Form and Space. Prob- lems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds), Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, pp. 281–97, esp pp. 296, 286. 7 Cornelis Van de Ven, ‘Ideas of Space in German Architectural Theory 1850–1930’, Architectural Association Quarterly 1977, 9(2–3): 31–9. 8 Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture’ in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, pp. 149–90. 9 My italics. Tate Gallery Archive reference: 8816.181.The lecture typescript is titled ‘An Influence of Buildings on the Graphic Arts in the West’. References in the paper, to Stokes’s own and other texts, suggest a later 1950s or early 1960s date, though it could possibly be later. (Archive material used with kind permission of Adrian Stoke’s literary executors.) See also Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism. A Study in the History of Taste (1914), London: Architectural Press, 1980. 10 For further exploration of the carving–modelling theme, see Stephen Kite, ‘Introduction to Stones of Rimini’ in Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini, Pennsylvania and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press and Ashgate, 2002, pp. 1–18. 11 Ernst Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive, London: Phaidon, 2002. See also Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945. After Rodin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, ch. 3, ‘Direct Expression through the Material’, pp. 72–104. 12 Lawrence Gowing (ed.), The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vols I, II, III, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978. This and subsequent references to the Critical Writings in the form: CW, III, Reflec- tions on the Nude, pp. 316, 317. 13 Quoted in Richard Saul Wurman (ed.) What Will Be Has Always Been. The Words of Louis I. Kahn, New York: Accesspress & Rizzoli, 1986, p. 240. 14 Quoted in Bruce Lindsey, Digital Gehry. Material Resistance/Digital Construction, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001, pp. 52, 54.

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15 Quoted in Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been. The Words of Louis I. Kahn, p. 125. 16 Stokes, CW, I, Stones of Rimini, p. 230. 17 Nicola Glover, Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School, available online at www.human- nature.com/free-associations/glover/index.html– ch. 5. 18 Stokes, CW, III, The Invitation in Art, p. 266. 19 Richard Wollheim (ed.), The Image in Form. Selected writings of Adrian Stokes, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 27. 20 Stokes, CW, I, SR, pp. 229, 244, 258. 21 On the Villa Savoye’s materiality, see, for example, Richard Weston, Materials, Form and Architec- ture, London: Laurence King, 2003, pp. 65–6. 22 Stokes, CW, II, Smooth and Rough, p. 240. 23 Colin Rowe and Leon Satkowski, Italian Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, p. 114. 24 Stokes CW, II, Smooth and Rough, p. 241. 25 Adrian Stokes, A Game that Must be Lost. Collected Papers, Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1973, p. 133. 26 Stokes, A Game that Must be Lost, p. 136. My emphasis. 27 Stephen Newton, The Spiritual Unconscious. Stephen Newton Paintings and Drawings 1975– 1996, London: Ziggurat Books, 1996, pp. 120–3. See also Stephen Newton, Painting, Psycho- analysis, and Spirituality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 28 Nicola Glover, Psychoanalytic Aesthetics, ch. five. 29 Newton, Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality, p. 88. 30 See Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger (eds), As Found. The Discovery of the Ordi- nary, Baden: Lars Müller, 2001. 31 Jonathan Sergison, ‘Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson. Sergison Bates Architects’, Made 2004, 1(10–19): 11, 17. 32 Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologising of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 80. 33 Quoted in Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite, An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson, London: Ashgate, 2005, p. 40. 34 Colin St John Wilson, quoted in Ellis Woodman, ‘Profile. A Life in Books’, Building Design, April 2005, 29, p. 12. 35 Here, working with Peter Carter and Alan Colquhoun, Wilson realized an estate whose two slab- blocks pay homage to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles. 36 Quoted in Menin and Kite, An Architecture of Invitation, p. 75.

206 Chapter 19

The modern-day primitive hut? ‘Self-building’ with Jung, Aalto and Le Corbusier

Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin

In the words of Le Corbusier ‘Modern life demands the recuperation of nervous forces’.1 The desire to build a primitive hut, a place of recuperation within an unspoilt environment, is one that repeats itself among European intellectuals and artists across the twentieth century. Martin Heidegger built his hut at Todtnauberg;2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, his cabin at Skjolden;3 Carl Jung, his tower at Bollingen (Figure 19.1); Alvar Aalto, his retreat or ‘Play house’ at Muuratsalo (Figure 19.2)4; and Le Corbusier his Cabanon at Cap Martin (Figure 19.3).5 Primitive – simple, in construction – they are also primitive in that they were built to encourage an almost mytho-poetic view of life, breaking down the boundaries between self, time and architecture. ‘Primordial links are broken’, stated the surrealist André Breton. In his belief ‘only analogical tools reach fleetingly towards their re-establishment’.6 We suggest that these modern-day primitive huts provided one such analogical tool, and that one retreat, Jung’s tower, provides a rubric for the typology, offering an explanation of the essence of all, regardless of their architectural type. We will compare Jung’s retreat with those of both Aalto and Le Corbusier, because there are clear parallels and important distinctions between them. In an isolated spot, amidst fields on the edge of the upper lake of Zurich stands a rough stone tower, shrouded in trees. Adjoining the tower is a series of little buildings that seem to have been built up over the years. The outline of the rough stone building appears not to follow any rules but there is an overall feeling of unity. Parts are of dressed stone, with walls adorned by strange carvings (Figure 19.4). Fronting it is an enclosed courtyard with a stone loggia overlooking the lake. In appearance the building is not so very different to

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19.1 Carl Jung in the courtyard of his tower Source: Aniela Jaffé (ed.), C. G. Jung, Word and Image, Princeton, Bollingen: Princeton University Press, 1979

19.2 Aalto emerging from sauna, Muuratsalo, c.1960 Source: Alvar Aalto Foundation, photograph by Eino Mäkinen

many others in the area, yet for its owner – the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung – the Tower at Bollingen was a place where the very ‘hinter- land’ of the ‘psyche’ could be explored.7 More specifically, it is the physical embodiment of his work to revive the link between the psyches of modern and archaic man, the loss of which he saw as creating so many of today’s psychological disturbances. Jung’s son Franz, himself an architect, believed that the tower held nothing of interest – that it would be completely fruitless to discuss the tower in terms of its aesthetics, and inappropriate to try to unravel its psychological meaning;8 however, our interest is in neither of these issues but in the idea that a house could somehow reflect and affirm the inner life of its owner by allowing him to bask in his own thoughts and dreams in an undisturbed communion with the past.

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Setting: a retreat from the modern

The tower, the ‘Play house’ and the Cabanon are sited within trees and above purifying water. The archetypal significance of these elements would have been fully apparent to the three men, and cannot be underestimated. While the trees that surround the Cabanon may be stunted and Mediterranean, it is itself built of timber (Figure 19.5). In Man and his Symbols Jung and others offer insights into notions of growth, life, the unfolding of form in physical and spiritual senses, development, maternity, shelter, nourishment, rootedness, death and rebirth – linking all these to the process of individuation.9 For Jung the forest is a

19.3 Le Corbusier on the rocks below the Cabanon Source: The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

19.4 Carl Jung’s tower at Bollingen from water Source: Photograph by Flora Samuel

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symbol of life, close to the eternal, and giving a reassurance of perpetuation – contact with nature facilitates the experience of the primitive self or the primal in psychological terms. This reading is assisted by the etymology of wood as both material and mother.10 A short distance from the brick house at Muuratsalo Aalto built an archetypal sauna using the natural taper of tree trunks from the site, and made small jetties from which to plunge from granite rocks into the water. Le Corbusier also enacted ritual purification, climbing down the steep cliff-path to the Mediterranean, for his daily swim. Such ideas marry well with Gaston Bachelard’s notion of water as being a narcissistic mirror, symbolic of death, birth and dissolution.11 ‘Thus the cupped hands of narcissus led us to invent the bottle’, wrote Le Corbusier enigmatically.12

Form: the boundaries of intuition and the edge of reason

Jung’s first conception of his tower was that is should be a kind of primitive hut within which he could, very literally, imagine himself returned to the realm of the archaic, but he soon began to think in terms of a two-storey building as opposed to the single-storey hut that initially occupied his dreams.13 The first round tower was built in 1923 and was developed over thirty years, whenever Jung felt that something needed to be expressed or changed. The tower thus became an outward manifestation of an inner frame of mind.14 Jung’s tower at Bollingen was not a

19.5 Le Corbusier’s Cabanon in 2005 Source: FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2005, photograph by Lorna Davies

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place of peace and quiet, it was a place of agonized soul-searching, hallucinatory experience, ancestor worship, fever and ghosts in what seems, to us, to be a rather more authentic or at least holistic representation of what it means to be primitive than that exhibited at Muuratsalo or Cap Martin. As Le Corbusier wrote in Precisions ‘I step over the line and enter the domain of emotions’.15 As architects, Aalto and Le Corbusier brought more skill to the designs of their retreats, disguising that which is more clearly apparent in Jung’s more ‘intuitive’ tower.16 In terms of cultural preoccupation, all three men were immersed in the same northern Romantic tradition and, seemingly, built their retreats for very similar reasons. However, unlike Le Corbusier, whose forms are invariably in Euclid’s grip, Jung celebrated and materialized the turmoil that he experienced within its walls. To some extent Aalto did this too, but he did it in a more controlled manner – creating an experimental montage of different brick textures, allowing the tail of the retreat to bleed into the forest, and encouraging nature to complete the courtyard. Nature threatens to engulf the building – as is often the case with Aalto’s architecture – but it does not succeed as long as nature is beaten back: the psychological corollary here is important. Boundaries, thresholds, edges are the stuff of architecture. Yet, in Jung’s view, to be truly primitive is to lose boundaries, boundaries that simultaneously protect and repel, to be fully immersed in the world, in many ways a terrifying prospect and a challenge to the architectural preoccupation with threshold.17 Certain Finnish philosophers have discerned a primitive attitude to nature that denies all human privileges, securing the rights of all species, and overriding the ideals of civilization.18 This provides a recognition of a more humble attitude to nature, which may stimulate human poiesis – the process of primary psychic creativity, as defined by the psychiatrist Donald Winnicott,19 and that in which the self develops towards individuation in Jung’s terms. Experience of nature is understood to ‘give us some kind of deep, reassuring knowledge of our deep nature’,20 and to reflect memories of past experiences, which are envisioned as an extension of the self.21 Here there is an important familiarization and merging of place (and building), self and experience, these becoming bound in memory in terms that recall Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.

Architecture and the making of self

Our analysis of Aalto and Le Corbusier in Nature and Space22 demonstrated that there is something essentially different about the two architects’ approach to the organic realm. Sitting outside the Cabanon or in the brick-lined courtyard of the Muuratsalo house inner turmoil would be reduced and inner order regained – the

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clarity of the architecture leading to a clarity of vision. Le Corbusier, in particular, advocated a cleansed architecture, believing that it led to ‘inner cleanness’,23 at one with nature, a suspiciously cleansed and unthreatening nature alluding to a cleansed and unthreatening past, at once polite and wholesome. At least, this is the myth that has been peddled. Aalto gestured something more incomplete and open-ended, pending completion. He was immensely skilled at handling such difficult wholes, those ‘quarrelling sub problems’, as he put it, barely hinting at the chaos within.24 The primitive in architecture has generally been given an anodyne gloss; it is never too dangerous or too dark, precisely because architects want to build buildings in the real world, and most clients want an architect who appears, at least on the face of it, sane. Yet, the relationship between creativity and the psyche can be said to be the very realm of the primitive. Acknowledging the nature of the creative process, and its relation to the psyche, Winnicott wrote, ‘Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane’.25 Whenever Jung came up against an issue to which he could see no answer, he painted a picture or sculpted stone. Over time he discovered that the best approach to take, when confronted by a seemingly insoluble problem, was to work with his hands in a mediumistic way. A whole series of fantasies would be released which very often offered him the necessary solution or helped him on his way towards it. The generation and form of the tower is the manifestation of this type of process. Aalto, similarly, dropped normal boundaries in the act of ‘play’, noting that having put aside the complex and competing needs of the situation he would ‘simply draw by instinct … what are sometimes childlike compositions’.26 He was aware of ‘the crucial significance of play’, and even mentioned the idea of ‘grown-up children’.27 He described his retreat as being ‘made for the architect’s own pleasure and play’28 – play that addressed the ‘innumerable demands’ from within and from without.29 Le Corbusier’s approach to play seems highly controlled and deeply earnest, by comparison, usually involving the viewer in discovering some hidden intention at work in his oeuvre: ‘Try to look at the picture upside down or sideways. You will discover the game’.30 While such exercises are gravely lacking in spontaneity, the same cannot be said of his approach to painting, which he, too, approached in a kind of mediumistic way. The seemingly chaotic jumble of innumerable dissociated fragments of dream and fantasy presented to Jung by his clients was, he believed, imbued with a tendency gradually to transform the personality in the direction of its own self-realization. He began to develop a hypothesis that it is not only the ego that is capable of organization and deliberate initiative, but that there is also a hidden (unconscious) centre in the human psyche, an ordering element that he called

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the self, in contrast to the ego. This hypothesis is called the individuation process – the possibility of a development, immanent in everyone, which culminates in the rounding out of the individual into a psychic whole as he or she approximates towards the self, or the fulfilment of his own myth. The concept may also refer to a collective life process – a possible new myth in which man is reunited with the archaic within himself and looks upon the world with new eyes. Jung’s tower was built as a result of a kind of compulsion: a ‘kind of representation’ of his ‘ innermost’ thoughts and knowledge he had acquired, ‘a confession of faith in stone … that … gave me the feeling as if I was being reborn’.31 Built in stages over a number of years, as and when Jung felt the need, it was only afterwards that he realized how all the parts fitted together and that what he had created was for him a ‘symbol of psychic wholeness’.32 Le Corbusier and Aalto conceived their retreats amid times of turmoil in the early 1950s. Aalto was in his deepest period of psychological collapse and total disorientation following his wife’s premature death in 1949, and his friends had ‘feared for his future’, as the historian J. M. Richards put it.33 However, he groped his way out of the blackness through the design of Muuratsalo, with the help of a young assistant whom he subsequently married. We suggest that Aalto’s need to deny death at the conscious level led to the creation of a retreat imbued with the presence of that very reality he denied. Ruin, overgrowth and decay were inherent in his creative idea – gelled in the moments of childlike play – moments in which the horror of both his childhood loss of his mother and the premature loss of his wife commingled. Le Corbusier began his Cabanon shortly after the onset of his wife’s final illness. Like Jung’s tower, it is also a place of death – the ultimate reunification. ‘I feel so good in my Cabanon that without a doubt I will meet my end here’,34 which, of course, he famously did. Logically, given his belief in nature, Le Corbusier should not have feared death, and his writings, particularly ‘Mise au Point’, his ‘Final Testament’, sees him oscillate between feelings of it being ‘a beautiful thing’ and a matter of unjust ‘grotesquery’.35 The primitive herein is not to be mistaken for pretty pastoral scenes. Jung’s lifetime work, including the tower, was ultimately ‘the concretisation of the individuation process’.36 The same cannot be said of Aalto, nor Le Corbusier who, it can be argued, did not undertake the requisite deep inner work inherent in the process of individuation. Aalto’s retreat was restorative – a place in which he played to solve external problems, and where, in so doing, his precarious homeostasis would be maintained. Never- theless, Aalto’s gross manic-depressive psychopathology was never healed. The same may be said of Le Corbusier, who oscillated between feelings of grandiosity and inadequacy, as indicated in his Final Testament.

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Loosening Euclid’s grip: control, composition and composure

Jung’s retreat was extended further in 1935 to encompass ‘a courtyard and a loggia by the lake which formed a fourth element that was separated from the unitary threeness of the house’, and ‘thus a quaternity had arisen’.37 The tower began to resemble a mandala form in plan, the quaternity a four-sided figure representing unified wholeness. If there is a tacit acknowledgement that the pursuit of the primitive can be a painful and frightening process, then, for the weaker, more vulnerable psyche, the coherence of the physical form in which this happens is crucial, as external, physical chaos can further trigger inner turmoil. In spite of Euclid’s grip on Aalto’s own courtyard (unusually in his oeuvre, it is a pure square) the ‘Play house’ is riddled with the imagery of ruin, of the passage of time and the even- tual dominance of nature over civilization; for example, incomplete walls, overgrown steps, fragmentation of the courtyard form. Although much of his work imbibes teleological themes (growing towards a predetermined whole), the house also gestures towards something post-telic (beyond fruition), venturing into the realm of death and becoming. Utilizing nature’s growth process in his buildings may have enabled Aalto to address ruin and death architecturally in a way that filled him with terror psychologically – recalling his mother’s early death, his brother’s suicide, and his wife Aino’s premature end. The form of the Cabanon is also well known, a timber cube, with interior dimensions of 3.6 × 3.6 m, a Modulor proportion that Le Corbusier named the ‘application révélatrice,’ (the revealing implement).38 This proportion would render the space ‘radieuse’, harmonious with nature, but also active ‘shooting lines’ through space, making connections both within and without. Le Corbusier observed that:

The house is a tool: a purely technical matter. But there is always a feeling, sometimes an overriding one, which demands a very special attention: integrating the house to oneself, making it say “I exist”, making it radiate. A manifestation of the sensitive ego: Architec- ture.39

This form of architecture becomes radiant through integration, not with nature without, but with the nature within the architect himself. Le Corbusier seems to have shared in Jung’s belief in the connections between geometry and the inner world of man, originally espoused by the alchemists. Like Jung he played games with mandala forms of circles and squares – the Platonic cube of the Cabanon itself, of course, being a case in point.

214 The modern-day primitive hut?

Jung began the tower two months after the death of his mother in 1923. Then, following his wife’s death in 1955, he added an upper storey – ‘which represents myself or my ego personality … an extension of consciousness achieved in old age’.40 He took pride in the fact that the tower, as an archetypal form, would create a familiar home for parts of his inner world that linked back into the past. Bollingen became for him a place in which one ‘lived in many centuries simultaneously’,41 where he could interact with the different voices, or characters within his subconscious, an integral part of the process of Jungian therapy. He named that part of his being that dwelt in the centuries his ‘no 2 personality’.42 ‘He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.’43 This character began to seem quite real to Jung, who described walking up and down the garden with him; he was to Jung a spiritual guru, representing superior insight. He became the focus of many of the paintings and carvings that adorn the tower’s walls.

Mind and matter

Aalto seemed to flee from his inner world, hiding in extended periods of hypo- chondria and depression. Nevertheless, these periods seem to have fuelled his belief in a humane modernism – compassion for ‘uomo piccolo’, ‘his comedy and tragedy – both’.44 The inner worlds of Jung and Le Corbusier, on the other hand, were populated with mysterious characters, with whom they communi- cated at times. What started with the adoption of a nom de plume took extreme forms for Le Corbusier. First, there was young Charles Edouard Jeanneret, then came Le Corbusier the architect – the crow – closely followed by Père Corbu, Don Quixote, Père Ubu and indeed others.45 Then there was the inner world of his paintings – in Jungian terms all aspects of the architect himself – the siren, amazon, ubu roi, Icône and, of course, Taureau, found while painting at the Cabanon in 1952.46 ‘One fine day the discovery of a bull on my canvases came to light quite out of my control’ he wrote.47 Le Corbusier wrote of the development of the Taureaux paintings that they were intimately connected to his relationship with his wife. ‘These Taureaux = total and intimate confession Corbu- Yvonne my constant, sick, dying, dead wife = the Taureaux!! Incitement! From whom? Subconscious acts! Yes. Divinings, uplifting of the heart and spirit. Yes!’48 While it seems unlikely that Le Corbusier could be seen, in the manner of Jung, walking down the path to the beach in earnest conversation with Taureau, such characters had a very real presence in his life. His time at the Cabanon, ‘a duel between the artist and himself with the battle taking place within, inside and unknown to the outside world’,49 his paintings made to be read by ‘graphol- ogists, seers or psychiatrists’.50

215 Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin

Jung relates how, as a young boy, he made a ‘mannekin’ to ‘house his troubled soul’... whenever I had done something wrong, or my feelings had been hurt … I thought of my carefully bedded down and wrapped up mannikin and his smooth pretty coloured stone’.51 Here, like archaic man depicted in the Finnish folk epic, the Kalevala and elsewhere, Jung invested those elements that surrounded him with the power to act and help him to pursue his cause while embodying that which he hoped to achieve. Something rather similar was done by Le Corbusier when he invested a great deal of meaning and power into the objects with which he surrounded himself.52 He carried ‘a big coin, some kind of icon’ that was given to him in Brazil wherever he went – apparently his wife used to complain that it wore holes in his trouser pockets.53 When his wife died he made a note to himself to take a talisman that he had given her to an ethnographic museum to check that its effect was benign. Through such ‘evocative companions’ he felt that ‘friendly contact between nature and ourselves is woven’.54

I mean all the objects with which we maintain a constant communication, companion objects which might also be poetic objects. We may feel like collecting them, and they will seem to us to be contemporary, although in actual time, they certainly are not. This anachronism must not be measured by the scale of time. It arises only in the gap between things utterly different in spirit. What we mean by contemporaries, at this level of perception, are objects with sister souls. So objects originating in any time and place whatsoever may aspire to this brotherly communion.55

His observations on timelessness echo those of Jung above. Worthy of veneration like the lares and penates of Pompeii, he made homes for these timeless objects in the altar-like niches common in his domestic architecture. Without investing superstition in small objects, Aalto rather invested in architectural form and detail the invitation to the metaphysical realm, using the whole form of the building to trigger the psycho-physical associations, and invite experience of the elemental, mystical realm. Not unlike Le Corbusier’s altar-like tables at Villa Savoye and in the Unités, Aalto allowed a whole wall of the brick courtyard at Muuratsalo to be punctured by a vast white-painted trellis, like an altar to Tapio, the God of the forest (Figure 19.6) The trellis sticks mingle with white birch trunks beyond, and through it the evening light penetrates the courtyard, touching the fire-pit. Thus, although Aalto was reluctant to speak of the mystical, his architecture evokes the metaphysical and the symbolic ineffably.56 Although he rarely mentioned the mystical directly, he ended his matter-of-fact architectural description of the ‘Experimental House’ with a description of the fire-pit set at the centre of the courtyard, ‘evoking a pleasing, almost mystical experience’.57

216 The modern-day primitive hut?

19.6 Alvar Aalto, view from outside altar-like opening, Muuratsalo Source: Sarah Menin

In spite of the elemental context, the ‘Play house’ does not have a rustic exterior but, like all Finnish ‘cottages’ and, indeed, like Jung’s house, it houses a large fireplace, reminiscent of the life force of the primitive Finnish huts – their massive granite stoves. The interior is basic, but does have modern conveniences that released his women from domestic slavery (an aspect of the primitive that is not often articulated). The interior of Le Corbusier’s Cabanon is, on the contrary, spartan, the minimal timber furnishings simple and flexible (food in this case would be provided by the café next door). Unlike Aalto, but like Jung, Le Corbusier adorned much of the interior with paintings, the products of his feverish mind: ‘the life of a monk! terrible and hard. My nights are full of intense imaginings, the sun drives them away’.58 As ever, he returned to his favoured subject, the female body.59 Even the inner lining of the shutters is adorned with the figure of a woman (Figure 19.7), in Jungian terms his anima, which would thus replace the view of the sea when the shutters were closed.

Conclusion

Jung revelled in his encounters with his inner demons, the story of the house delivered in Memories, Dreams and Reflections reveals him as ultimately heroic in a suspiciously tidy manner. The opposite can be said of Le Corbusier, who ended his life troubled and in many ways disillusioned, and Aalto, whose handle on his inner world was precariously weak, being submerged beneath deep

217 Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin

19.7 Interior of shutter of Le Corbusier’s Cabanon Source: FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2005, photograph by Lorna Davies psycho-physical depression throughout life. It is tempting to suggest that Jung faced up to his demons in a way that Aalto and Le Corbusier never really did, but clearly this would be too simple an interpretation of events. Both architects wereat least fully aware that they had issues with which to contend. The paintings Aalto made in his loft-studio, through which he resolved the ‘quarrelling sub problems’, were full of sexual abstractions and the forcing forms of nature that he saw around him, and within himself. Meanwhile Le Corbusier’s paintings, filled with mask-like women with aggressive staring nipples, allude to a much darker version of reality and ‘la nature dominatrice’60 than that addressed in his cheerful visions of sun, space and greenery. Indeed his awareness of the former may have fuelled his zealous promulgation of the latter. It seems that the experience of Aalto at Muuratsalo and Le Corbusier at Cap Martin had more in common with Jung’s experience of Bollingen than many of us would care to admit, the more uncontrolled and painful aspects of the primitive being continually suppressed in a history of architecture devoted to self-promotion and to overlaying a patina of order – or strategic disorder – onto a chaotic and frequently frightening world.

218 The modern-day primitive hut?

Notes

1 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète Volume 1, 1910–1929 (1937), Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1995, p. 76. 2 See Adam Sharr’s forthcoming book, Heidegger’s Hut, to be published by MIT in 2006. 3 ‘Martin Heidegger’s Cabin at Todtnauberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Cabin at Skjolden’, Daidalos 1989, 32: 84–7. 4 A. Aalto, ‘Experimental House at Muuratsalo’, Arkkitehti 1953, 9–10, reprinted in Alvar Aalto: In his own words, G. Schildt (ed.), New York: Rizzoli, 1998, p. 234. 5 Samuel, ‘A Confession of Faith in Stone: Carl Gustav Jung’s tower at Bollingen’, Things, Summer 1998, 8: 49–60. 6 André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writing, London: Pluto, 1978, p. 280. 7 Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, London: Fontana, 1986. 8 Correspondence between Franz Jung and Flora Samuel, 1990. 9 C. G. Jung (ed.) Man and his Symbols, London: Picador, 1978, pp. 30, 69 and 152. See also M-L von Franz, ‘The Process of Individuation’, pp. 162–6, ibid. See also Jung, C. (1953–79): The Collected Works, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1953–79, vol. 9, part 1, p. 271, and vol. 13, p. 350. 10 Many scholars who have investigated the forest find innumerable analogies and symbols and notions of system related to the tree. For example, R. P. Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civiliza- tion, London: Chicago University Press, 1992, pp. 27–8 and S. Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: Harper Collins, 1995. 11 G. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. 12 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, London: The Architectural Press, 1987, p.72 (first published in French 1925). 13 Jung had in mind an African dwelling in the middle of which a fire burns, ringed by a few stones, around which the whole life of the family revolves. 14 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 251. 15 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930), E. S. Aujame (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991, p. 36. 16 Although both architects retained a strong relationship with Switzerland, neither seems to have met Jung, although he is connected to Le Corbusier through his friend Andreas Speiser of Zurich University, who later became involved with Jung. Gerhard Wehr, Jung, A Biography, Boston: Shambhala, 1988, p. 276. See Samuel, ‘Animus, anima and the architecture of Le Corbusier’, Harvest Journal for Jungian Studies 2002, 48(2): 42–60 for links between Jung and the architecture of Le Corbusier. 17 C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, London: Ark, 1985, p.161. 18 J. Pietarinen, ‘Ihminen ja Metsä: neljä perusasennetta: Man and the forest: Four basic Attitudes’, Silva Fennica, 1987, 21(4): 323–31. 19 D. W. Winnicott, ‘ Psychoanalytical Studies of the Personality’, International Journal of Psycho- Analysis 1963, 34: 43. 20 A. Reunala, ‘Forest as Symbolic Environment’, in Multiple-Use Forestry in Scandinavian Countries, Communicationes Instituti Forestalsi Fenniae, 120. Helsinki, 1984, pp. 81–5, esp. p. 84. 21 Ibid., and L. Horelli, Ympäristöpsykologia, Espoo: Weilin & Göös, 1981, p. 115. 22 S. Menin and F. Samuel, Nature and Space: Aalto and Le Corbusier, London: Routledge, 2002. 23 Le Corbusier, Decorative Art of Today, p. 188. Italics, Le Corbusier’s. 24 Aalto, ‘The trout and the stream’, 1947, Domus, reprinted in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, Schildt (ed.), p. 108. 25 D. W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis, London: Tavistock, 1958, p. 150.

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26 Aalto, ‘The trout’, p. 108. 27 Aalto, ‘Experimental house,’ p. 234. 28 Ibid. 29 Aalto, ‘The trout’, p. 108. 30 Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp,, London: Architectural Press, 1957, p. 47. 31 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 250. 32 Ibid. 33 J. M. Richards, Memories of an Unjust Fella, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980, p. 203. 34 Le Corbusier, interview with Brassaï, FLC, cited by Ivan Zaknic, The Final Testament of Père Corbu, New Haven: Yale, 1997, p. 66. 35 Le Corbusier, Mise au Point, ibid., Zaknic (trans). 36 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, pp. 197 and 252. 37 Ibid, p. 251. 38 Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complète Volume 5, 1946–1952, Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1995, p. 62. 39 Le Corbusier, ‘Architecture de l’époque machiniste’, Journal de psychologie normale et de pathologie, Paris, 1926, p. 326, quoted in Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier, London: Yale University Press, 1987, p .83. 40 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 251. 41 Ibid., p. 264. 42 Ibid., p. 252. 43 Ibid. 44 A. Aalto, ‘Instead of an Article’, Arkkitehti-Arkitekten, reprinted in Alvar Aalto: Sketches, Goran Schildt (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985, p. 160. 45 Le Corbusier also had a penchant for dressing up – women, clowns and convicts being favoured themes. 46 Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks Volume 3, 1954–1957, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1982, sketch 662. 47 Letter Le Corbusier to Ronald Alley, 25 June 58, quoted in J. Coll, ‘Le Corbusier. Taureaux: An Analysis of the Thinking Process in the Last Series of Le Corbusier’s Plastic Work’, Art History 1995, 18(4): 562. 48 Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks Volume 4, 1957–1964, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1982, sketch 690. 49 Ibid., sketch 506. 50 Letter Le Corbusier to M. Tjader Harris, 21(3): 39 in J. Jenger, Le Corbusier Choix de Lettres, Basel: Birkhauser, 2002, p. 258. 51 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p.36. 52 Such ideas do link to arcane theory and, simultaneously, to the contemporaneous theories of Teilhard de Chardin, who believed in an element of consciousness even within inanimate things. See F. Samuel, ‘Le Corbusier, Teilhard de Chardin and the Planetisation of Mankind’, Journal of Architecture, 4, 1999: 149–65. 53 Balkrishna Doshi interviewed by Carmen Kagal, ‘Le Corbusier the Acrobat of Architecture’, Archi- tecture and Urbanism 322,1997: 168–83. 54 Le Corbusier, Talks with Students , New York, Princeton: 2003, p. 71. 55 Ibid., p. 70. 56 Aalto, ‘The trout’. 57 Aalto, ‘Experimental house’, p. 234. 58 Tim Benton, (ed.), Le Corbusier Architect of the Century, London: Arts Council, 1987, p. 243. 59 F. Samuel, Le Corbusier, Architect and Feminist, London: Wiley, 2004. 60 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète Volume 1, 1910–1929 (1937), Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1995, p. 106.

220 Chapter 20

The wisdom of the sands

Simon Unwin

Situating ourselves in the world ...

221 we live in caves,

222 and make magic circles.

223 As families...

224 we identify our places.

225 These photographs illustrate the presence of the human being on the pristine landscape of the beach.

They show how we orient ourselves in relation to the horizon and the sun, and anchor ourselves to rocks.

They show how we nestle into caves and frame ourselves and our belongings within magic circles and encampments that mediate between us and the world around.

By this architecture we establish places of sense and stability amidst changeful- ness and complexity, like small islands of philosophy.

These photographs illustrate that the seed of architecture is the human being. They show that the ‘primitive’ is not remote in history or geography but in us all here and now.

226 Part 6

Primitive futures?

Chapter 21

Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption

Richard Coyne

In this chapter, I hope to show correspondences between three strands of thinking that at first appear very different, but that coalesce on the theme of the primitive: (a) the myths of architecture’s origins, (b) utopian narratives about the primal origins of mass communications, and (c) reflections on the seeds of commerce as residing in the gift. In contemporary terms, mass communications and commerce come together as a concern with digital commerce (or ‘e- commerce’) – which is only controversially aligned with architecture as the use of the computer and the imperatives of commerce are so often presented as antagonistic to architecture’s dignity and autonomy. As a by-product of this juxtaposition, I affirm that the primitive roots of architecture – in so far as they can be said to exist at all – are not pure, innocent, savage or particularly dignified. Who claims that they are? This is the assumption that seems to underlie Joseph Rykwert’s authoritative account of the primitive hut as the progenitor of architectural invention, and the traditions on which he draws.1 Why does it matter? I think that a provocation to the idea of architectural origins helps in advancing a more sophisticated and robust response to the excesses of mass media, the promiscuity of life on the web and the contradictions of commerce.

The primitive hut

Rykwert provides an authoritative account of the propensity within architectural discourse to appeal to the origins of architecture, evident in the writings of

229 Richard Coyne

Vitruvius,2 through to Laugier,3 Ruskin4 and beyond. The originating architectural artefact is the ‘primitive hut’: that elusive primary moment of architectural invention, the traces of which persist overtly in the classical orders and the gothic and, on close analysis, in remnant form everywhere else. The hut, of course, is the architectural prototype. It is fashioned from trees whose trunks become columns and canopy becomes the roof. Then, by the Vitruvian and Renaissance accounts, the whole assembly is mimicked in stone. There are other embellishments to the story, such as the invention of fire, the establishment of language and community, and the retreat from (or to) the forest. Rykwert’s fascinating and lengthy treatise on the primitive hut raises several questions. The simple question is: why is it that one or other artefact (the hut, the cave, the mound, the hollow, the tent5) should assume status as the primary generator of all architecture? As there are several accounts of creation in Genesis, there are diverse accounts of the beginnings of architecture, often presented in parallel and in contradiction. For example, Vitruvius presents: the primitive hut derived from imitating the shelter provided by trees in the forest, the gnomon and the eight winds, the reclining body with its geometry, the primordial elements, and so on.6 What is the relationship between these contesting origins? The second intrigue is that writers on architecture throughout the ages should have found it necessary to give an account of origins at all. From the perspective of contemporary social science we are used to explaining cultural change in terms of complex networks of social interaction. We are aware in the realms even of recently recorded history of the difficulty and controversy that surrounds stories about the invention of flying machines, the first iron bridge, and the foundations of modernism. From a contemporary perspective, though one largely lost in the popular media, cultural change is prone to complex technological and social systems and influences in which a first moment, a prototype, an author, is not the most interesting construction that can be placed on events, except in so far as any particular narrative of origins says something about systems of authority and power that are in play.7 Received history is the history of victors and dominators; so stories about the origins of architecture reflect and propagate regimes of power, as in Vitruvius’s attribution to those at the farthest reaches of the empire (Gaul, Portugal), the best preservation of the remnants of these primitive origins (thatched roofs, bent columns, etc).8 The narrative of origins is also one of progress with its apotheosis at the centre of empire.9 The quest for origins can take several, further, contradictory paths. One of the most basic expressions of the impulse for origins is to look for causes, which in the Enlightenment becomes the hallmark of rationality, as evident through Leibniz’s (1646–1716) ‘principle of reason’.10 The primitive hut,

230 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption

as outlined by Laugier in his 1753 essay, is the first cause, and the hut conflates to the idea of a principle, according to Herrmann.11 Second, the primitive hut can also serve to mark an essential moment, when architecture was at its most pure, with what follows as derivative, accidental, and deviant, evident in Laugier’s desire to correct architecture from the excesses of the Baroque and the Rococo. According to Rykwert, the primitive hut is a concept to which purists could return in the face of forces that would corrupt architecture’s essence.12 Third, the narrative of origins can also involve emerging from irrationality to rationality. The forest is all that is primitive, a pre-linguistic world of chance, and daily habits, according to Vitruvius.13 Fourth, and more controversially, in so far as architecture identifies with its primitive origins, it participates in the irrational. The murky origins of architecture are nothing rational at all. It is presumably this latter thread that interested the Romantics, and later the surrealists, for whom architecture makes reference to its origins in the pre-rational. For the Romantic, the primitive is the source of imagination. The primitive is also the child within, the source of creativity, and epitomizes the sublimely inexpressible, with pure innocence as its motivation. This is a theme of Rousseau, to which Laugier subscribed in part,14 and that of twentieth-century primitivism in art, according to Goldwater.15 Architecture can participate in these mysteries.

The electronic jungle

By a simple reading, the romantic impulse is anti-technological. Contemporary primitivism in architecture seeks a return to simplicity, organic forms and craft practices; it is against factory production and overt displays of technological sophistication. It takes the buildings and art works of tribal communities and their remnants as models. At the very least, it sees technology as a servant of the creative process rather than a determinant. In the realm of mass communications, the romantic only reluctantly adopts the necessity of rapid transportation, mobile phones, digital television, the computer and email.16 As with cooking, architecture lends itself to dalliance with a primitive organicism and the vernacular. In the case of communications, there is an equivalent romantic, anti- industrialized interest in oral traditions, primitive music, and ambient noise.17 However, here it is a movement that often brings to bear the most sophisticated recording and transmission technologies in extracting and promoting the cause of primitivism. In fact, the most interesting variant of latter-day romanticism is not that which eschews technology, but that which exalts it. Marshall McLuhan in 1962 introduced the primitive into considerations of digital culture.18 More specifically, he argued that electronic communications (radio, television, and the telephone) were ushering in a return to a tribal

231 Richard Coyne

condition: the primitive hut as telephone booth. The condition of the tribe was one in which distinctions were as yet unnamed. Humankind was immersed in its environment and even indistinguishable from it. Events were immediate and unmediated. McLuhan talks of this as a condition where the ear held sway over the eye. Humanity was immersed in its environment as we can become immersed in sound. Sound comes to us initially as non-directional, ambient, a cacophony, without source. Only as sight begins to enter our considerations do we think of distinguishing one sound from another, attribute sources and causes. The processes of civilization and developments in literacy are a gradual assertion of the superiority of sight over hearing, with the invention of the printing press as a pivotal moment. With print, propositions are laid out at arm’s length, to be seen, tabulated, diagrammed and defined as knowledge. For McLuhan we are now entering a third phase in the development of civilization, abetted by electronic communications. We are returning to the tribal hum. There is incessant barrage of sound and imagery from the mass media: billboards, TVs in waiting-rooms, bars and the living room, muzak, tran- sistor radios, iPods and mobile phones, which make up the ambient sounds of our electronic jungle.19 The stilted and static objectivism instilled by the world of literacy and print is being supplanted by a new electronically mediated sociality and practice, where news, opinion, information, diversion and play are able to be received and disseminated at the touch of a URL. With the growing ubiquity of computer usage and access to Web servers, the ‘world readable’ status of electronic documents is almost a default. Having engineered this profligacy of information, ingenuity has to be directed at controls to limit, rather than promote access. That someone in Calcutta might happen upon a string of text posted by a student on an electronic message board in Edinburgh strikes any utopian as evidence that McLuhan’s global village is nigh. Events in the electronic jungle are instant, interactive, dynamic, capricious, risky, promiscuous, and prodigious. Of course, this return to a putative primitive state is a return with a difference. McLuhan says we are returning to the tribe but with our eyes wide open. In keeping with utopian narrative, there is a transformation in play. The Garden of Eden represents an ideal from which we are cast out with the hope that we will return some day, though then it will be to a new Heaven and a new Earth. His utopian vision of the emergent global village resonated with the romantic tribalism of 1960s counter-cultural hippiedom, as it does with their new-age descendants, and the Web-savvy, text-messaging urban cool of the twenty-noughties. McLuhan’s influence has also held sway with many of those currently setting the pace of corporate digital media culture, and is a force to be reckoned with.20 Aspects of McLuhanism appear very different to the supposed primitive origins of architecture. McLuhan’s narrative is more overtly utopian with the

232 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption

suggestion of a return to a prior condition. It is descriptive and resigned to the human condition, rather than censorious and normative (Laugier). McLuhanism is born of a sceptical, post-Enlightenment sensibility, as opposed to the confidence in reason evident in the eighteenth century. For McLuhan the primitive state is unified, whole, and an altogether desirable condition. For Laugier it is a childlike and helpless state out of which humankind was to grow.21 For McLuhan the invention of the printing press is the defining event after which everything became different. For Vitruvius and Laugier it is the construction of the first hut. For McLuhan it is the time before this event to which we should return, but in the primitive hut myth it is the hut event itself that constitutes the desirable moment. The differences are obvious. What of their similarities? Both myths draw on the appeal to a primitive condition for their narrative force, also exemplified in the condition around the fire.

The world of the gift

We turn now to the third thread, that of economics. Certain social economists assert that modern-day capitalist economics is but a toned-down, and dimin- ished, version of something far more consequential that existed since primitive times, namely the society of the gift. There is a move here to unseat the authority of economic determinism; that is, the easy assumption that human agency can be described in terms of decision-making, that the validity of decisions are to be measured in terms of how rationally the consumer weighs up costs and benefits; and that this process occurs among individuals, each ultimately looking after their own interest. These are views championed notably by Adam Smith and later the utili- tarians (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and so on), and it is still the avowed philosophy of many leaders in the corporate world (such as Bill Gates).22 For McLuhan, economic determinism epitomizes the objectivist, ocular-centred condition of a culture obsessed with print and ledgers.23 For social economics it represents an impoverished and derivative mode of human interaction. In terms of the primitive hut myth this would be architecture well-and-truly after Adam left the garden.24 Of course, Vitruvius and the ancients make reference to economy as ‘a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense,’25 and appropriate building ‘for each and every class’. Economy, prudence and order are linked. Architecture is a process of taming, harnessing, and nursing from the bounty of nature. Ancient economics is less about costs and benefits than about being appropriately positioned in the order of things: notably the household for Aristotle.26 Vitruvius’s account of the first building is accompanied by an attitude to sociability that is arguably anti-economic, at least counter to contemporary

233 Richard Coyne

economic determinism. The primitives discovered fire, then invited others to enjoy its comforts. Fire brought people together and impelled them to build shelters. Initially, we participated in an idealized sociability, a sharing that can be readily translated into the culture of the gift. The primitive origins of architecture reside as much in the gift as in the necessity to build shelter. It is beyond the scope of this paper to go further, but we could draw on the stories of mythic beginnings for signs of the gift. Fire is often presented as a gift (in the Prometheus story), the primitive hut recurs in rituals of sacrifice, and the departure from the garden of Eden is presented as a fall from grace, from participation in the condition of the gift.27 Independently of myths of origins, one can readily identify the gift with contemporary creative production. The culture of the gift is not so far from the concerns of architectural design, a practice in which much time and design effort is given away for free, and the recognition expected is other than merely remunerative. As for performance and artistic production, it is not enough that a designer is paid for her work, but that she receives approbation, recognition, applause and prizes. This dual economy is explicit in architecture, with evidence dating back at least to Vitruvius’s laments about his own impecunious state at the start of each book, complaints echoed by Laugier about ‘mercenary artisans whom I would never for a moment confound with our true architects’.28 On the one hand, one must make a living. On the other hand, there is a giving and receiving of expertise, artistry and approval that positions architecture squarely in the realms of the strange economy of the gift: offering up produce where the return is other than material benefit, a posture given heroic treatment as the first of Ruskin’s seven lamps of architecture: sacrifice as an invitation to produce and give without expectation of repayment.29 The society of the gift is not restricted to architectural production. The supposed altruistic aspects of online digital culture provide further manifestation of the gift, foregrounding the propensity of Internet users to give away personal details, insights, images, essays, architectural models, advice, information and even useful software, for free and with no expectation of anything in return.30 The development of the Linux operating system is one celebrated case of a tangible computer product emerging from a global community of voluntary and free labour.31 This digital altruism has various interpretations. On the one hand, from the point of view of the economic determinist, the informational gifts are of no value in any case, an opportunity for individuals to grandstand, indulge their self-obsessions and achieve a modicum of recognition and fame. In some cases, the value for the giver is in the expectation of reward, professional recognition and secure employment and profit further down the line. According to the gift narrative, digital altruists are doing what comes naturally anyway. Each individual is contributing to a pool of bounty from which all can benefit. They are

234 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption

sharing in the warmth of the first fire. They are participating in a primeval, familial condition that pre-dates formal commercial arrangements, trade and even barter. Given time, one could garner further evidence – even in the world of hard-nosed commerce – of a propensity to present transactions in terms of the gift, as a remnant of ‘stone-age economics’.32

Profligacy

Therefore, the primitive resides in the mythology of the first dwelling (architecture), the return to a pre-literate tribal condition abetted by communications technologies (McLuhan’s global village), and the remnant of the gift in the world of commerce (the gift society). Though there are obvious differences in these narratives, it is provocative to take them as variants of the same story, each informing the other. Architecture’s mythic origin is also about a naturally spontaneous, pre-literary mode of being outside of an objectivist frame, and participation in the egalitarian and altruistic society of the gift. Each refers back to a condition of idealized wholeness and unity and, in utopian variant, each lends itself to implicit or explicit expression as a state to which we may return. Having entertained the importance of primitive origins in narratives about architecture, communications technologies and economics, there is scope for their unsettling. For one thing, we can always argue that all three are able to draw on the same myths, thereby disarming any case that one is corrupting the other. If architecture wishes to appeal to noble origins, then likewise so can the impetus towards advanced communications technologies, and commerce; but the nobility of these origins can also be unseated. Not surprisingly, the most critical response to the myth of origins emerges from the measured and highly reflective voices of social economics and cultural theory on the theme of the gift. I will attempt to bring some of these critical insights back to the hut. It was the anthropologist Marcel Mauss who introduced and valorized the role of the gift in tribal societies, by some accounts scarcely concealing a neo- Marxist agenda to unsettle economic determinism.33 His main thesis was that social interaction is characterized by the giving and receiving of gifts, sometimes elaborately transacted and highly ritualized, and that gifts retain their value, or soul, independently of economic value. The transaction of gifts is prior to the necessity to barter, trade and dispose of the excesses of production. As if to rein- force the non-rational basis of the gift, he also introduced observations about the curious practice known as the potlatch, by which tribal people would not only exchange gifts but give until it hurt. In fact, the giving would lose its sense of a recipient – who is transformed into more of an audience – as wealthy village leaders would ritualistically dispose of precious objects and even slaves in an orgy

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of conflagrations and drownings. That is, in order to impress a former adversary, a leader would destroy his own property (and the lives of his retinue) in a public display. The ‘recipient’ was expected to do the same. Presumably there is a show of prowess here, an indication of wealth and power through demonstrated capacity to absorb self-inflicted sacrificial excess, though by means which make little sense when seen through the lens of economic necessity. In so far as the gift is imbued with this propensity towards self- destruction through display, it presents as a very shaky origin. Georges Bataille suggests that it indicates that economic domination resides in the ‘power to lose’.34 Through loss, ‘power and glory are linked to wealth’.35 This also indicates the presence of the capitalist ethos right at the start of sociability. The contemporary domination of capital is a situation where the owner of capital does not so much sacrifice the lives of his slaves but the surplus labour of the workers.36 There is a transformation, but the motivation is similar. Bataille is in the company of Marcuse in eschewing any romantic notion of an idealized past.37 Class struggle, the will to dominate, has always existed, whether we take the origins of the social order in the father–son relationship of the Oedipal myth (Marcuse) or in the society of the gift (Bataille). Independently of this critical frame, it is easy enough to convert the origins of the economic system from the gift to an even more primordial notion of excess and profligacy. Veblen38 and Galbraith39 have in their own ways drawn attention to the centrality of conspicuous consumption, the desire to mimic and create displays of wealth, independently of the economic means to deliver, and independently of the desire to actually enjoy that wealth, and to self-destruction and loss. Arguably, architecture serves as one extremely conspicuous way of being demonstrative of actual or putative wealth, prosperity, generosity, and excess, and there are many examples of buildings bankrupting potentates and ‘draining a kingdom to exhaustion’ (as in the case of the Edinburgh Parliament building at Holyrood).40 And this propensity is already there in the myth of the hut. For Vitruvius, the attitudes of the first builders as they emerged from life as wild beasts included terror (at the sight of fire), then comfort at its warmth, then sharing, pointing out, imitating and making. The dominant attitude is imitative, accompanied by pride. For Vitruvius, humankind is different from the animals in that we are able to walk upright and look up at the ‘splendour of the starry firmament’.41 This is a boast in its own right, but signals the proud posture that enables imitation of the overwhelming excesses of the night sky, the defining posture of the inspired creative.42 According to Vitruvius, with each improvement to construction practice, the first builders would point out the results of their building, ‘boasting of the novelties in it’.43 People wanted to imitate the condition of others in having certain things. They knew that others wanted what they have, and they knew to signal to others that they have what

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they have. By this reading the first hut is built of imitation, pointing and boasting, or to dignify them: mimesis, signification and conspicuous display. To see these as the origins of architecture is not to return by any means to economic determinism. By the reading we are entertaining here, an economic account only makes sense if we presume a propensity for imitation, comparable to the way that economics derives from the gift, which in turn derives its true character from the excess of the potlatch. To elaborate further, Rykwert asserts that the history of architecture shows ‘gradual improvement through competition and imitation’, which in turn ‘justifies the practice of transferring the details of one form of construction into another’.44 Wood is depicted in stone, iron mimics stone and wood, and so on. That architecture’s basis is in imitation is hardly a startling assertion. The tradition affirms as much, from Plato to Laugier and beyond. The nuance is that there is an excessiveness to this. Mimicry already implies redundancy, a surfeit. What I have is sufficient, but still I want what you have. Whether your sloping roof is better than my flat roof is a secondary consideration. You could imitate someone who has less, or their displays of economy, but this comes later in the Vitruvian account. The originary mimesis is of a fecundity of possibilities, experimentation, and chance, and within this profusion a promiscuous copying and display for copying. If there was space we could also enlist Lacan’s definition of mimicry as residing in travesty, camouflage and intimidation.45 Whether or not this argument suffices, my intention here is to align the narrative of the gift with that of the hut, and of the potlatch with something that precedes the hut: proud and promiscuous display, and so absorb the unsettling effects of economic discourse into architecture’s sacred origins. I hope the case for digital communications as a manifestation of potlatch does not need to be similarly laboured. McLuhan’s originary account is already of profusion and excess, well exemplified now in the surfeit of communications, necessary or not, or that develop their own necessity from the surplus that is the World Wide Web and that draw architecture in.46 There is an evidently destructive element to this profusion. Like a stellar body burdened with its own weight that ceases to emit light, or a population of algae that grows to the destructive condition known as turbid bloom, the profligacy of the Internet may suffocate from its own detritus of spam mail, censorship and excessive regulation. There are sufficient ingredients here for ascribing to the primitive hut any of the excesses we may wish to regard as corrupting, superficial, or incidental to the essence of architecture. The controversial lesson is that architecture is not some essentially pure and noble pursuit that is later corrupted by commerce. Nor is it sullied by being over-technologized with the use of computers. Architecture, computing and commerce are each symptoms of the same basic drive towards excess, an origin that we can choose to forget,

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resist, transform or otherwise deploy. With our investment in the enterprise of design, it is perhaps more in our interest to test architecture’s limits on this, which is what I think many contemporary architects are doing along with many academic design studios. Rather than simply offering resistance, architecture can appropriate and transform what is on offer from the legacies of digital communications and economics; that is, the over-connected, redun- dant cornucopia of digital commerce. At the very least, these reflections on primitivism do not lead to a retreat from technology, or consumer society, but offer an invitation to manipulate and distort their possibilities.

Notes

1 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 2 Pollio Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Morris Hicky Morgan (trans.), New York: Dover Publications, 1960. (originally written c.50 AD). 3 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (trans.), Los Angeles, Ca.: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977 (first published in French 1753). 4 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), London: Everyman’s Library, 1956. 5 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, H. Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 6 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, pp. 26, 38, 42, 73. The proposal to shape Mount Athos into a human figure with a city in one hand and a water catchment in the other may also be a candidate, p. 35. 7 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 8 McEwen gives extensive treatment to the theme of Roman power in Vitruvius. See Indra McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. We address the historicist aspects of originary discourses in Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, Interpretation in Architec- ture: Design as a Way of Thinking, London: Routledge, 2005. 9 Note, however, that the thatched roof on the Citadel in Rome is a reminder of former times. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 40. 10 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Monadology’, Richard Francks and R. S. Woolhouse (trans.), in Philo- sophical Texts,, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 268–81. 11 Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, London: Zwemmer, 1962, p. 55. 12 Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 192. 13 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 38. 14 Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory. 15 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, New York: Random, 1967. 16 I discuss these themes further in Richard Coyne, Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. 17 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977), Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1993. 18 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. 19 For more contemporary discussions of the impacts of these media, see: Michael Bull, ‘The Intimate Sounds of Urban Experience: An Auditory Epistemology of Everyday Mobility’, in A Sense of Place:

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The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication, Kristóf Nyíri (ed.), Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2005, pp. 169–78, and Tia de Nora, Music and Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 20 I address further the importance of McLuhan’s work in digital culture in Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995, and Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Cambridge MA: MIT, 1999. 21 Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, p. 11. 22 See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (first published 1776). Alan Ryan (ed.) John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Utilitarianism and Other Essays, London: Penguin, 1987 and Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead, London: Viking, 1995. 23 See also W. J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. 24 Rykwert brings the fall into his explanation of the myth of origins. The hut belongs within the garden of Eden. 25 Vitruvius, Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 16. 26 Aristotle, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, J. A. K. Thomson (trans.), London: Penguin, 1976. Originally written c.334–323 BC. 27 See Lewis Hyde, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, New York: Random House, 1983. 28 Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, p. 70. 29 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 30 Richard Barbrook, ‘The High-Tech Gift Economy’, in FirstMonday: OnLine Journal, 1998. 31 Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, New York: Texere, 2000. 32 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock, 1974. 33 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies,W.D.Halls (trans.), New York: W. W. Norton, 1990, p. 97 (first published in French 1925). 34 Georges Bataille, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds) The Bataille Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 174. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 177. 37 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. 38 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Amherst, New York: Promethius, 1998. 39 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, London: Penguin, 1998. 40 Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (1958), p. 70. 41 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 38. 42 In Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, the primal ape-person turns a bone into a tool, but the most intense moment is when our gaze is fixed to the bone’s ascent into the heavens. This is the awakening prior to the hut, and the hut is bypassed in Kubric’s instant evolution to the picture of an orbiting space station. 43 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 39. 44 Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 111. 45 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Alan Sheridan (trans.), London: Penguin, 1979, p. 99. 46 I develop this theme further in Coyne, Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet.

239 Chapter 22

Primitive and the everyday Sergison Bates, Lefebvre and the guilt of architectural expertise

Adam Sharr

Many chapters of this book can be read as speculations about why the term ‘primitive’ appears to have continued currency in architecture in spite of its denunciation within cultural theory and, particularly, post-colonialism. This paper contends that this peculiar persistence can be attributed, in part at least, to the unease of some architects at being cast as elite professionals within the institutional structures of contemporary western society. Professional status appears to be worn more proudly by others in the building industry: engineers, surveyors, quantity surveyors. Many architects, it seems, are less driven by productivity and profit, rather more preoccupied with a perceived transcen- dence of the architectural object and an endeavour to build richly inhabitable space for others. Architects are, perhaps, an elite uncomfortable with the comforts of professional status, trying to do what they perceive as right while accepting the institutional framing of their circumstances. This situation has parallels with the attitudes of nineteenth-century philanthropy which seem to characterize the notion of ‘primitive’: looking outward from a privileged and supposedly educated position with an assumed benevolent curiosity and an ultimate reluctance to disrupt the status quo. This paper seeks to explore the curious persistence of ‘primitive’ in architecture by asserting, and investigating, a perceived sense of guilt among certain architects surrounding expertise in contemporary practice. It examines as a case study the London-based practice Sergison Bates, their building, their writing about ‘the everyday’ and the use of that term to describe their work by critics and journalists.

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The ‘everyday’ and Lefebvre

Sergison Bates have made much use of the term ‘the everyday’ in their writings. The word appears decisive to the office’s work, outlook and attitude to practice and it is worthwhile to discuss it in some detail here. In contemporary architecture, the term ‘the everyday’ seems to have two parallel lives. One of these derives from cultural theory, particularly the texts of Henri Lefebvre, where the word describes a reference point for autonomous behaviour; nostalgia for an unencumbered, festive way of living presumed lost to an impoverished modernity.1 Its second life is peculiarly architectural, used as a label to describe the concern of certain contemporary architects with a particular abstracted, intensi- fied domesticity.2 This heightened domesticity, presented on glossy art paper by the specialist media, has a knowing irony which recalls the photography of Martin Parr and the packaging of his books in the Boring Postcards series.3 Just as there has been a slippage of meaning in the past between the reception of particular terms in architecture and other disciplines – such as ‘modernism’ and ‘deconstruction’ – so the term ‘everyday’ seems to have a distinctive life in architecture. The prolific career of philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) included some seventy books and a journey from a rural, Catholic community on the edge of the Pyrenées to Paris, the Sorbonne, the Parti Commu- nist Français, the wartime French Resistance, various professorships, a collabora- tion with the Situationists and a role in the student uprisings of May 1968. He felt his work on everyday life to be his primary contribution to scholarship, and to Marxism.4 Lefebvre’s ‘everyday’ is a somewhat slippery and elusive notion, its limits shifting and mutating across the three volumes of his Critique of Everyday Life (first published in French in 1947, 1961 and 1981),5 Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968)6 and other essays he wrote throughout his career. In all these texts, Lefebvre distinguished between: ‘the word everyday [quotidien] [which] designates the entry of everyday life [vie quotidienne] into modernity [and] the concept of everydayness [quotidienneté] [which] stresses the homog- enous, the repetitive, the fragmentary in everyday life’.7 Academically, Lefebvre’s critiques of everyday life drew from his interpretation of Marx’s writings on alienation – the estrangement of the worker instrumentalized by capitalism.8 For Lefebvre, alienation did not just pertain to the workplace but rather permeated ‘everydayness’, every sphere of life from home and family to religion and art.9 It has also been suggested that Lefebvre’s critiques responded to the surrealists and – although he denied it – to Heidegger’s notion of Alltäglichkeit, a repetitive, inauthentic everydayness discussed in Being and Time.10 Biographers have claimed that Lefebvre’s everyday drew from a post-war nostalgia for his early life.11 He wrote his doctoral thesis, submitted in 1954, on agrarian communities in

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the Pyrenées, also the focus of other writings in the 1950s and 1960s. He was concerned with motions of pre-modern life and its festivities in rural communities, and with historical relationships between town and country as mediated by capitalism and technology. In beginning an encylopedia entry on ‘the everyday’ written in 1972, Lefebvre suggested that ‘[before] the series of revolutions which ushered in what is called the modern era, housing, modes of dress, eating and drinking – in short – presented a prodigious diversity’.12 He felt that modernity – its effects latent in work, retail and even human relationships – had flattened a way of life that had gone before. For Lefebvre, the everyday life that supplanted it remained haunted by this time which he mythologized, before modern society imposed a homogenizing rationality. His was not romantic nostalgia for a mythical past to which contemporary society could or should return, but rather an operative nostalgia offering up a critique to the present. Lefebvre’s ‘everydayness’ eschews professionalized activity and belongs instead with living and experience, the drudge of routine and also occasions of escape and celebration which reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. This ‘everydayness’ comes before the concerns of elites and remains most at home where people dress, eat, drink, talk and experience for themselves. As such, writes Lefebvre, it involves ‘a set of functions which connect and join together systems that may appear to be distinct … the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected’.13 This everydayness, however, also has potential for assertion and autonomy, showing opportunities for choices that subvert the organizational structures of states, institutions or of capitalism.14 But, as Lefebvre wrote, it is ‘covered by a surface, that of modernity.’15 ‘Everyday life’ thrives in those residues of contemporary daily existence most resistant to impositions of state and market forces, and the media’s promotion of ‘heroic’ individuals. It is a quotidien which belongs to the unexam- ined life or, maybe more accurately, to the life less concerned with seeking out examination of itself. In The Production of Space (first French publication 1974), Lefebvre wrote about ‘space’ in connection with his ideas of everydayness. Specifically, he associated alienation with a professional focus on ‘space’ as a strictly visual medium. He criticized architectural historians such as Siegfried Giedion and Bruno Zevi, suggesting that a visual focus serves to marginalize the role of space in experiences and routines of everyday life. He felt that such historians promoted ‘the growing ascendancy of the abstract and the visual’.16 For him, this was a strategy of subjugation: a way to privilege metaphor and visual coding over tactility, engagement and interaction.17 Lefebvre thought that this promotion of the visual had elitist tendencies, appropriating ‘space’ as the property of experts. He wrote that Zevi, for example, ‘does not appear to understand the implications of his findings … beyond the education of connoisseurs’.18 For

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Lefebvre, this sort of connoisseurship promoted alienation – part of the obstruc- tion of ‘everyday life’ – and he sought to challenge its authority politically.

Sergison Bates and ‘the everyday’ in architecture

This ‘everyday life’ which, for Lefebvre, remained shrouded by modernity can be differentiated from the ‘everyday’ in architecture. Issue 75 of the architectural journal Daidalos, published in 1999, announced its theme as ‘The Everyday’.19 This journal arguably demarcates the parameters of architects’ understanding of the term.20 The first text by Frank-Berthold Raith was entitled ‘Everyday Architec- ture: In What Style Should We Build?’ Reflecting this subtitle, most articles in the volume presented illustrations of built projects: work by Dutch architecture firm Atelier Van Lieshout, Restaurant Georges in Centre Pompidou by architects Jakob and MacFarlane, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Upper Lawn Pavilion, and Sergison Bates’s review of their own recently completed pub in Walsall. By way of acknowledging the life of the term ‘the everyday’ in critical and cultural theory, a paper was included by Ben Highmore titled ‘Dwelling on the Daily: On the Term Everyday Life as Used by Henri Lefebvre and Michel DeCerteau’. Architects’ understanding of the ‘everyday’ is seemingly encapsulated by this contents list focused on the presentation of architectural form: the term’s role in theoretical writing is acknowledged, but the word primarily becomes a tag for the classification of visual ‘style’. The work of Sergison Bates offers an intriguing case study of the ‘everyday’ in architecture. Their Walsall pub, adjacent to a new art gallery designed by architects Caruso St John, was one of their first projects to be published internationally by the architectural media. The building is notable for its four highly considered elevations, finished with dark materials, each particular to the specific site conditions they address. Subsequent published projects include the residential conversion of a paint factory in Wandsworth and, after Daidalos 75, repairs to the Smithsons’ Upper Lawn Pavilion. Sergison Bates’s semi-detached pair of houses in Stevenage is arguably their most published project (Figures 22.1, 22.2).21 Many consider the building as their decisive manifesto statement. These houses, built following a competition for housing prototypes, are located on a developer’s estate of speculative housing. The two houses are cranked in plan, inflected towards one another at the front and away at the back (Figure 22.3). Their planning artfully minimizes circulation and, apart from using the volume of the roof in upstairs rooms, otherwise makes spaces not too dissimilar from those in neighbouring houses. Construction is timber-framed and highly insulated. It is apparent that the architects have laboured most over the external form of these houses. The

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plan-crank allows two pitches to be truncated on the front elevation, visually unsettling a highly familiar form in British towns and cities, known through nearly eighty years of developer-built semi-detached suburbia loosely inspired by the Garden City movement. Symmetry is broken by off-setting one window on each elevation by two courses of tiles. Windows are brought forward to the

22.1 Architects: Sergison Bates, semi-detached houses, Great Notley, Stevenage, UK. Front view Source: Adam Sharr

22.2 Architects: Sergison Bates, semi-detached houses, Stevenage. Rear view Source: Adam Sharr

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22.3 face of the elevation, visually dematerializing the manufactured slate tiles, Architects: which are already in non-natural colours of brown and a light blue-grey. This Sergison Bates, semi-detached dematerializing effect, rather like the flattening of a CAD rendering, is accentu- houses, Stevenage. ated by coursing through the tiles between wall and roof. The elevations are Ground and first highly considered, ensuring that only whole modules of each material are floor plans Source: Adam Sharr used. Much of the architects’ effort clearly has been devoted to the making of a form which evokes visually the domesticity of the British ‘semi-’ while also displaying architectural credentials. In 2001, Sergison Bates printed an elegant and highly-considered volume called Papers for use as practice literature.22 If the houses in Stevenage comprise the firm’s built manifesto, then this illustrated collection of texts comprises their written manifesto. Papers is curiously reticent about promo- tional material, more a book than a brochure. A series of images of the practice’s work and places that interest the architects are collected alongside, or occasionally in-between, a number of essays. The first text, ‘Somewhere Between Ideas and Places’, points to their spheres of interest: a concern with places, conditions, making, memory and experience. Other writings include ‘A View of How Things Are’; ‘Working with Tolerance’;23 ‘Building Presence’; and ‘Time Register’. These titles encapsulate qualities that the architects want to promote through their writing; they have a certain plainness and humility while the word-play of double meaning suggests an intellectualization of their position.

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The book’s cover is artfully minimal, a brown uncoated stock with the word ‘Papers’ inscribed top-left in silver ink. When the cover is opened, another four covers (papers) are revealed – one maroon, one blue-grey and two in different shades of silver grey – each imprinted with the same silver text as the brown cover. The cover, once again, has a controlled plain-ness but it also asks enjoy- ment of its aesthetic qualities. On the rear is a bibliography citing texts about the architects’ work published in the international media. The text flows between lines, indicating that this is not so much a list provided for ease of scholarly reference, but rather an opportunity for the firm to stake its credentials. Papers displays a concern for the commonplace, but it does so with the measured assurance and assertiveness of the architectural expert. In ‘Somewhere Between Ideas and Places’, Sergison Bates write of themselves that:

The tendency for disciplined reflection stemmed from the example held by A+P Smithson, and from a period, prior to the formation of our practice, in which we contributed to a group of architects and artists who met regularly to present discussion papers. During these sessions, the value of observation of places as found and the potential in the everyday became apparent and formative.24

In ‘Working with Tolerance’, the firm describes their concern with the ‘everyday’ primarily with reference to images of architectural form, writing that:

in our view, the experience of everyday life is highly influenced by personal and collective association relating to the images of buildings. By images, we mean the aspect of an object that relates to appearance and character and which stimulates an associative and emotional response. While it may be argued that most architectural acts produce images of things, we believe that only a few architects consciously work with images.25

An interesting tension emerges here. Sergison Bates’s writings make no mention of Lefebvre, but their concerns seem to have some relation to ‘the everyday’ that he wrote about. Inhabited pictures in Papers –andinDaidalos – suggest the firm’s celebration of opportunities for people to inhabit and experience the world around them. It seems that, for them, ‘everyday’ is a synonym for the term ‘ordinary’ as used by Alison and Peter Smithson: a care for what is already there; the ‘as found’, architectural and social, expert and non-expert.26 In addition, perhaps also inspired by the Smithsons, Sergison Bates are concerned with architectural image; particularly images which somehow evoke and heighten the ordinary. Sergison Bates seem open to the ‘everyday’ of the individual but they also remain deeply concerned with the skilful and aesthetic.

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There seems to be a tension evident between the expert and the ‘everyday’ here. This is particularly clear in the way that the term ‘everyday’ is used around the work of Sergison Bates and others. The editor of Daidalos, for example, begins the issue on ‘the everyday’ by writing of architects who seek ‘the ideal image of an everyday architecture’.27 Here, the term is being used primarily to categorize an architecture whose forms refer knowingly and aesthetically to visual characteristics of buildings deemed ‘ordinary’. A short article by Caruso St John, again in Daidalos, makes this point. It shows evocative, composed images of ‘non-expert’ elevations in London which the architects have used as visual ‘cribs’ in their work. Presented for a professional audience on the art paper of journal pages, these images become currency for the knowing. In association with the presentation of architects and architecture concerned with evocative form, the ‘everyday’ is here a tag for a conspicuously visual ‘style’ whose keepers are the architectural cognoscenti. The visual has taken priority over any sort of individual autonomy and experience. A particularly architectural ‘everyday’ – one which is clearly the province of experts – has emerged, to be differentiated from the other ‘everyday’ of Lefebvre. The expert’s ‘everyday’ is a label, lent credibility by its echo in theory.

The experts’ ‘everyday’ and the persistence of ‘primitive’

There appears to be an easy differentiation between these two ‘everydays’: that of theory and that of architectural experts. The ‘everyday’, as discussed by Lefebvre, is ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’. His texts ascribe it to the mass of non-experts whose daily lives are clouded by impositions of state and market, the ‘high-art’ of elites and the media’s ‘stars’. It fringes the realm of the knowing. On the other hand, what might be called ‘the experts’ everyday’ describes a particular kind of architectural form configured around associative images – produced by an architectural elite – which draw elegantly and artfully from familiar shapes and building elements. Visual training is needed to identify its characteristics and, thus, it becomes the property of the expert few. However, this differentiation is not quite as clear as it might first seem. The term ‘everyday’ refers to a discourse in cultural theory that has its roots in complex sociological and philosophical texts. These texts themselves refer to previous texts and the scholarly definition of terms. Lefebvre is often discussed in secondary literature with reference to the philosophers and theorists who influenced his writing.28 He is presented as part of a Hegelian dialectic – itself a game of experts. Lefebvre was, clearly, an expert of sorts and his work has certainly been drawn into the institutional structures of publishing and the academy. In this way, he too is implicated in tensions between the elite and ‘the everyday’.

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The architectural ‘style’ described here as ‘the experts’ everyday’ plays knowing games with associative architectural form. Although it belongs to the realm of metaphor and visual coding, that association does embody a certain egalitarianism. The code is not an exclusively expert one. There is a conciliation in attempting to make form that is redolent – albeit on different levels – to both the expert and the non-expert. An aspirational distinction can be made with that form-making which is composed by the cognoscenti principally with the appreciation of the cognoscenti in mind. There is a clear tension operative in the work of Sergison Bates, arguably exemplifying the position of many like-minded architects. On the one hand, they feel a pressure – perhaps born of architectural training, perhaps of commercial pressure – to participate in the motions of architectural expertise. They seem unwilling or unable to be diverted from the artful. On the other hand, they remain fascinated by the realm of the non-expert, by those beyond professional circles who will be involved with the buildings that the office has designed. This tension seems to pervade Sergison Bates’s work, evident in the reticence but assurance of the Stevenage houses and the Papers texts. These can be perceived as built and written testimonies to a profound unease with the expert position of the contemporary western architect. Where the title ‘architect’ is protected by law, where architectural education is validated and instituted in universities, where building procurement is determined by the regulations and processes of a professionalized industry, where there persists a canon of expert practice guarded by journalists and academics, architects are almost inevitably distanced from the people for whom they build.29 They are cast as mandarin or factotum: intellectual, institutional, the aloof arbiters of good taste. Sergison Bates seem occupied with a sense of guilt, their work an attempt to work through its problems in building and writing. This engagement with expertise, illustrated by Sergison Bates’s concern with both the Lefebvrian ‘everyday’ and the ‘experts’ everyday’, is arguably just a more contemporary manifestation of a guilt long-held by a swathe of architects. Sustained interest in ‘the primitive’ – also ‘the vernacular’, ‘the arts and crafts’, self-build and community participation – demonstrates some architectural experts’ commitment to, and perhaps their attribution of some notional authenticity to, the activities of non-experts. Such architectural fascinations can be attributed to a deep-felt concern with the building and inhabitation activities of those beyond the confines of profession and industry. Nineteenth-century philanthropy can be characterized by a similar guilt held by certain members of the elite. It is possible to perceive a common attitude underpinning the outlook connoted by both philanthropy and ‘the primitive’: one which – unable on occasion to perceive the implications of its own privilege – tends all-too-easily towards unquestioned exclusion, towards the patronizing and invidious, in spite

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of aspirations to be outward-looking and generous.30 Contemporary architectural interest in the ‘everyday’ circles the same problems. The ‘experts’ everyday’ represents a manner of concern that allows for a certain benevolence, albeit one which does not challenge the status quo too much. The Lefebvrian ‘everyday’, while still deemed worthy of interest, is somewhat pushed aside as having altogether more awkward connotations, less readily compatible with the regular businesses of architectural practice and journalism. Architects, it seems, prefer the surer ground of form and visual coding to the political problems of challenging societal structures surrounding building procurement and inhabitation. Whether brought to the fore through ‘primitive’ or ‘the everyday’, a professional architect who is sensitive to the ethics of building for others will always find themselves bound-up in the paradox associated with expertise. It is a situation that remains an almost inevitable consequence of education and institutionalization. Some architects will find themselves always hankering for something that remains beyond the reach of established practice. Trained and professionalized to the point of irretrievable distance, such architects are fated – for better or worse – only to look outwards with curiosity. If ‘primitive’ persists in architecture, then it is perhaps because that term continues to reflect a nego- tiation into which many architects still find themselves bound, albeit sometimes productively: between the acknowledgement of an awkward distance from those for whom they design and an ultimate unwillingness to challenge actively the professional and institutional props that surround them.

Notes

1 H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, S. Rabinovich (trans.), London: Continuum, 2000. 2 See the contents of Daidalos 2000, 75, 3 V. Williams, Martin Parr, London: Phaidon, 2004; M. Parr, Boring Postcards, London: Phaidon, 1999; M. Parr, Boring Postcards USA, London: Phaidon, 2000; M. Parr, Langweilige Postkarten: Boring Postcards Germany, London: Phaidon, 2001. 4 H. Lefebvre, ‘Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson C. and Grossberg L. (eds), London: Macmillan, 1988, p. 78. 5 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1, Moore J. (trans.), London: Verso, 1991; H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume 2, trans. by Moore J., London: Verso, 2002; H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life: Volume 3), G . Elliott (trans.), London: Verso, 2003. First published in French, respectively, as: H. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, Paris: Grasset, 1947. Also, second edition with new foreword, Paris: L’Arche, 1958; H. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne II: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté, Paris: L’Arche, 1961; H. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, III: De la modernité au modernisme, Pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien, Paris: L’Arche, 1981. 6 Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World. First published in French as H. Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, Paris: Gallimard, 1968. 7 Lefebvre, ‘Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics’, p. 87. Cited in S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, London: Continuum, 2004.

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8 In 1934, Lefebvre collaborated with Norbert Guterman to publish the works of the young Marx on alienation. H. Lefebvre and N. Guterman, Morceaux Choisis de Karl Marx, Paris: NRF, 1934. 9 H. Lefebvre and N. Guterman, ‘Mystification: Notes for a Critique of Everyday Life’ in S. Elden, E. Lebas and E. Kofman, Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, London: Continuum, 2003, pp. 71–83, esp. p. 83. 10 R. Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 68. 11 Ibid; Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre. 12 H. Lefebvre, ‘Quotidien et Quotidienneté’ in H. Gregory (ed.) Encyclopedia Universalis, vol. 13, Paris: Encyclopedia Universalis, 1972. 13 Ibid. 14 Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, pp. 81–108. 15 Lefebvre, ‘Quotidien et Quotidienneté’. 16 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, D. Nicholson-Smith (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 228. The text was first published in French as H. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, Paris: Anthropos, 1974. 17 Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, p. 80; A. Merrifield, ‘Space and Place: A Lefebvrian Reconcil- iation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 1993, 18, 4, pp. 516–31. 18 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 229. 19 Daidalos 2000, 75. 20 A distinction should be made here between the use of the term ‘everyday’ in the background currency of practising architects and some architectural journalists, and the way that certain architectural writers have used it, more conscious of the ‘everyday’ beyond architecture. For the latter, refer to: J. Chase, M. Crawford and J. Kaliski (eds.) Everyday Urbanism, New York: Monacelli, 1999; M. Miles, The Uses of Decoration: Essays in the Architectural Everyday, Chichester: John Wiley, 2000. 21 Other publications include: V. Richardson (ed.) New Vernacular Architecture, London: Lawrence King, 2001; Architecture Today 1999, 96: 14; A&V Monografias 2000, p. 86; The Telegraph 29 February 2000; pp. 86–9; A&D 2002, 10(18): 16–21; Lotus 2003, 116: 88–97; 2G: International Architecture Review 2005, 34: 26–35. 22 Sergison Bates Architects, Papers, London: Sergison Bates, 2001. 23 An essay with this title has also been published as S. Bates and J. Sergison, ‘Working with Toler- ance’, arq 1999, 3(3): 220–33. 24 Sergison Bates, Papers. 25 Ibid. 26 A. Smithson, Charged Void: Architecture, London: Monacelli Press, 2001. 27 Daidalos 2000, 75: 5. 28 For example, Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle; M. McLeod, ‘Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduction’ in Architecture of the Everyday, S. Harris and D. Berke (eds), New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. 29 The historical development of such professional props is outlined in M. Crinson and J. Lubbock, Architecture: Art or Profession?, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991; D. Cuff, Archi- tecture: The Story of Practice, London: MIT Press, 1991. 30 D. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

250 Chapter 23

Heart of Darkness Air of comfort

Helen Mallinson

The primitive in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is pitiless. Conrad wrote the story at the height of Empire as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close.1 It follows the journey of a narrator, Marlow, deep into the Congo, the still barely mapped heart of Africa. As the story unfolds we seem to be travelling back through civilization as much as to a distant land. But there is a twist to the tale. The dark heart that beats at the furthermost and the innermost is not that of the native cannibal, but the heart of Kurtz, civilized man. Conrad’s story was the inspiration for Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now about the American war in Vietnam. Both tales contain narrators who journey into the jungle to recover a lost Kurtz – but too late. Marlon Brando, as the dying Kurtz, whispers Conrad’s famous line: ‘The Horror! The Horror!’ But what and where is the nameless horror that so completely consumes Kurtz’s soul? Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’ refers at once to an unfathomed continent, Kurtz’s rotted soul, the implacable reality of raw nature, a bottomless universe. The horror is the horror of a world without feeling. Through the finding and losing of Kurtz, the epitome of civilized man, Conrad conjures deep in the ‘heart’, that is, in the very centre of emotion, love, life, soul and mind, a pitiless darkness. Conrad’s tale was set in the fetid jungles of the Congo but threw into doubt any easy distinction between primitive and civilized. This essay will suggest a similarly ambiguous relationship stalks the cooler world of air-conditioned modernity. If we assume that the environments in which we live are both real and metaphorical, our relationship with the air, like our idea of the heart, is interwoven with concepts of civilized and primitive, human and natural, body and soul, life and mind. What is interesting about both the heart and the air is

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that they are not immediately obvious to sight: the one is unseen and the other invisible. They are felt rather than seen and their tendency to be felt subliminally has fostered their long association with the irrational and emotional faculties (whether claimed as the origin or opposite of the rational). If Conrad’s tale collapses the safe distance between the civilized and the primitive, the rational and the irrational, the object of speculation here is how we instate such differences in architecture, specifically in our control of the air that is in effect and affect the medium of the heart, mind and soul. The question that arises is if, like the heart, the air is intrinsic to our imagination of ourselves, how do we read ourselves in our modernized air? Does air-conditioned comfort render us more civilized or more primitive? Does its reign of comfort promise to banish the unto- ward in the physical body along with its irrational passions, or does it allow our inner desires free rein, unencumbered by having to physically adapt or be adept? Are our souls consumed or emancipated when we live submerged in a brightly lit but cool equilibrium of air? One might begin to explore such questions by pondering whether the drive to modernize is any different from the drive to colonize, at least as far as nature is concerned. If Conrad locates the horror of Kurtz in the colonial conquest of the Congo, what lurks in the modernization of the air? The culpa- bility of architecture is not limited to questions of visual style. Architecture of all stripes leavens the fast-expanding ‘great indoors’, the new empire of the air conditioned in which space, not air, constitutes the figure ground. The air is silently conditioned in a process that is not confined to remote jungles. It tempers the very breath and medium of our existence. Like other tidemarks that chart the expanse of civilization, the air-conditioned environment presents a voracious boundary, a thermal contour that consumes all in its path like a gigantic wave. The subjugation of the air is no more recognized by its participants as a war than was the brute colonization of the Congo: it is simply civilization expanding. It is unsettling, then, to find that Freud, in ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, sources civilization rather than nature as the inescapable cause of conflict within the human psyche.2 Freud argues that we repress our natural instincts in order to become civilized. The curious question posed by air conditioning is whether it is a symptom of civilized repression or primitive emancipation. The paradox might be traced in the complex figure of Kurtz. Freud’s prognosis, crudely interpreted, suggests that Kurtz is an object lesson in insuf- ficient repression: the excoriating jungle, the temptations offered by uninhib- ited natives, nature’s excess, conspire to arouse his primitive instincts and overwhelm his reason, his civilized soul. Kurtz murders at will while Marlow and Willard (Coppola’s narrator) are en route to rescue him – or protect civilization from his weakness and betrayal. In this depiction soul is rational soul

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and the hard-won achievement of civilization. The primitive is something to be conquered or held at bay. Conrad, however, complicates the story. His Kurtz seems to represent the rational soul in extremis as the source of an evil of its own, not nature’s, making. Conrad’s native cannibals, meanwhile, suggest the human soul is an unfathomable enigma glimpsed in the shadows of nature. The cannibals exhibit inexplicable restraint while the representatives of civilization, the potentates of Belgium, the missionaries that accompany Marlow’s journey, the unnamed ‘Intended’ that loves the idealistic Kurtz that was, are all uncannily mindless. (Coppola’s equivalents are mad as hatters.) Kurtz, though he abandons all forms of civilized restraint, is the one who thinks and his disembodied voice draws Marlow on through the jungle like a lodestone. Does the voice of Kurtz echo the call of the wild or the call of reason, the call of the soul or its nemesis? The history of modernity, no less than the history of civilization, is marbled with theories about the provenance of soul – but not just theories. Conrad experienced for himself the punishing physical, mental and emotional strain of the Congo, on would-be civilizers, when he undertook the journey up-river to the remote Stanley Falls in the 1890s. It broke his health but inspired his book. Conrad saw how immensely difficult it was to construct civilization: the untold labour, the countless struggles. He had Marlow reflect on how the Romans must have felt when they first encountered the barbaric regions of the north – the dark, the cold, the fogs, the forests and wild men, death ‘skulking in the air’ – and now London was a great city. Conrad did not belittle the achievement of civilization and neither did Freud. Both believed that civilization demanded ‘restraint’ in the face of potentially overwhelming forces, forces that were as liable to be found on the inside of man’s psyche as encountered on the outside. But it was not easy to pin down the nature of the forces at work. Why was Conrad so drawn to the ‘other’ to civilization, to the sea, the jungle, the unknown, the unknowable? Freud thought one clue to civilization and its discontents was to be found in the structure of the psyche and its most primeval memories. In his explanation the origin of the ‘oceanic’ feeling, the feeling of being at one with the world that religion promised to convene (and, it might be suspected, aspects of technology to deliver), could be identified in the memory of the mother-bound infant before it developed an ego and the consequent determination of both separateness and identity. True or not, Freud gives an account of a deep urge to annihilate the self in distraction, bliss or death that seems to shadow the struggle for autonomy of self in civilized mode. What holds Marlow in thrall is the somehow magnificent commitment of Kurtz to this struggle; an independent soul so determined to possess his origin that he plumbs the abyss. Between them, Freud and Conrad make one wonder whether a desire to return to the primitive marks infantile regression, more

253 Helen Mallinson

savage because armed with adult teeth, or whether it represents the search to find an original self in its relation to the world. Is civilization merely an approxi- mation that mitigates the former or deludes the latter in the effort to secure the social? Is it nature or civilized nurture that in-forms the soul? It is not just the soul, however, that harks to the call of the wild. It is also the body. Conrad’s story is characterized by the fecund excess of the jungle, its heat and its sexual beat. Life in the jungle seems larger than life, and death equally so. It held Kurtz fast. In western myth the jungle, like nature, is gendered. But such ideas are indelibly cultural and anthropocentric. Examined scientifically, there is not one shred of nature that does not possess a logic of existence that has, as far as we can tell, little to do with our mythologizing propensities. How then might one understand our current endeavours to create the ideal interior climate? Can corporeal comfort deliver a forgetting of body and emancipation of mind that renders civilization more civilized? Imagined within this scenario, surely if Kurtz had been ensconced in a modern air- conditioned office in Stanley Falls, rather than a native hut rank with jungle, he would have stayed civilized? The recurrent problem of any expedition into the wild – any ‘wild’ – is that its emissary runs the risk of going native. Staying civilized in uncivilized conditions requires keeping the emotional affect of being civilized. This is not only secured by social mores but a complex raft of feelings of uncertain provenance. When men are sent into outer space, they take with them the air as a matter of survival. When Kurtz went to trade ivory in the Congo, he took with him his ideals. When modern man travels, he takes his lifestyle along and one that is as tethered to his native climate as surely as the infant to its mother’s breast. Except nowadays there is only one climate recognized as native to modern man – cool and temperate. The question here is not whether it is natural to desire comfort, the conventional argument, but why we so readily suppose that modern western ‘cool’ comfort represents civilization? Against this index, the entire history of civilization up until almost yesterday is counted barbaric. Civiliza- tion has become firmly entrenched in our minds (is it our bodies, is it our souls?) with airy and thermal comfort. To modern man, nature, unless entirely benign and airbrushed to perfection, is seen as the source of priva- tion and discomfort, as primitive in the same way as are all historical or regional habitats that are not up to modern standards. From this perspective the entire climatic system of the world stands in need of modernization. The only problem with Buckminster Fuller’s projected dome over lower Manhattan is that it might be judged insufficiently ambitious. What funded the opening up of the Congo was not Kurtz’s archaic trade in ivory but the expanding vision of an industrial economy. The Congo had a potential labour force, a population so remote it had avoided the worst

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depredations of slavery, and a potential wealth of natural resources. The Congo required roads, railways, townships, and European organization that King Leopold II of Belgium was ambitious to supply. The ancient example of the Roman Empire, as Conrad suggests, was not without relevance. It is appo- site, therefore, to read in Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, his blithe pronouncement: ‘Hence it was the divine intelligence that set the city of the Roman people in a peerless and temperate country, in order that it might acquire the right to command the whole world’.3 Vitruvius does not claim race superiority as such but an environmental one. The Romans, Vitruvius argued, were blessed with the most perfect climate. It balanced the elements of the human body and soul in unabashed material continuity. Regional and local climates were thought to figure in determining physiology, character and intelligence as well as day-to-day diseases and health. Vitruvius believed the Roman climate was so perfect it nurtured men strong in valour and swift in intelligence and he applied the idea to the sites of cities, the orientation of buildings, the importance of walks and colonnades, openings and shelter. The Romans figured that architecture, by tempering the climate, helped temper their citizens. Architecture played a material role in maintaining their civilizing prowess. But then the Roman concept of soul was fundamentally material: soul was a refined form of matter.4 The argument that caught American attention in the first half of the twentieth century was whether the climate America had been blessed with made it fit to be a great civilization. The paradigm was the temperate but cool northern European climate, the cradle of industrialization. Marsha Ackermann observes that although the American climate was hardly equatorial, for the nascent air-conditioning industry to succeed economically

a significant portion of the American public needed to believe that heat was not just an occasional unpleasantness but a serious problem: that this problem could be corrected: and that the uniform control of indoor thermal conditions in all weathers, seasons, and climatic regions was the birthright of a truly advanced society.5

Nature in this scenario had to be seen as inherently primitive, whatever the weather. This posed something of a reversal of the American pastoral dream and required the conversion of legion doubters. The project galvanized the redemptive tradition. The combined empirical logic and missionary zeal of the early air-conditioning professionals, like William Carrier, fired the belief that a regulated climate could help solve society’s moral as well as material problems. Man-made weather would temper the inconsistencies and unfortunate features of the raw product, natural and human. When in 1942 Sydney F. Markham published Climate and the Energy of Nations on the climatic destiny of

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America,6 he did not follow earlier arguments that claimed the effect of climate on humans was innate or unalterable – arguments that revolved around the interpretation of skin colour and racial characteristics that had characterized the old slavery debates7 – but the seemingly more liberated idea that civilization followed man’s control of his environment, and thus himself. Manufacturing the dream of the man-made environment merged two strands of late nineteenth-century technology into a single enterprise that made the dream into goal: the control of material production and the experience of thermal comfort. The technology of process air conditioning developed for the factories focused on temperature as a way of controlling the humidity that so affected the quality of manufactured goods. The second strand modified the experience of human comfort and developed into comfort air conditioning. This focused on temperature. The provision of heat in America had been solved in the nineteenth century by the fuel-burning stove developed to compensate for the light methods of building construction. However, continental America also experienced periods of summer heat. The technology developed to address this involved refrigeration and the use of chemical processes to cool water that could then cool the air. The market, however, was occasional. Trans- forming a few inventions and patents into a successful industry required reconfiguring the psychology of heat. Thermal comfort and its regulation through air conditioning had to be associated not just with health and efficiency, but progress and civilization.8 Ackermann traces how the air-conditioning industry ‘appropriated ancient theories about race, heat, and human history, investing them with the authority of modern science in order to expand the market for cooling technology’.9 It was, to begin with, a tough idea to sell. The big breakthrough came in the 1950s when air conditioning went domestic and became accepted as an ordinary condition for everyday life and representative of the American dream. Human habitation as a whole could be freed of climatic restraint. In the end it did not matter whether the indigenous climate was tropical or temperate, hot or cool, whether it was winter or summer, or even what the building was used for. Air-conditioned living became commensurate with modernized, promising not just preservation from the elements but something like the ideal growing conditions for modern man, modern life, the modern economy and modern civilization. Freud admitted he never felt the ‘oceanic feeling’ claimed by his esteemed friend Romain Rolland, but he thought it important to explain, nevertheless, because he agreed that it was probably this feeling that religion exploited to such effect. Freud, of course, was vehement in his dislike of religion, a form of consciousness he saw as primitive in a pejorative sense as well as characteristic of the formless state of the infant. But then Freud was not a nature lover either. He claimed that what distinguished civilized man was his

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capacity for cleanliness. Order and beauty, his other criteria, might be learnt from nature but cleanliness in nature was not to be expected. The historic stench of Versailles and the fetid breath of its king, the dunghills of Shake- speare’s age, could be judged materially barbaric – like unclean nature. Freud, in suggesting the progress of civilization might be mapped against the development of the human psyche, also posed the corollary question: can certain civilizations be considered neurotic or pathologically disturbed? Freud begs the question as to what constitutes ‘normal’ civilization as well as how we deter- mine who is qualified to be its judge and physician. Robin Evans argued the cumulative effect of modern architecture might be compared to performing a general lobotomy on human experience, that architecture is employed ‘more and more as a preventive measure’.10 Air conditioning might be imagined here as one of its more effective surgical instruments. The outside has become in effect something to be looked at; like the image of a severed limb, like the earth from outer space, like beauty and horror at a distance. What air conditioning seems to promise is that we can all be Romans now – though the indigenous Roman climate is considered overly hot and seasonal. As early air-conditioning adverts proclaim, men ‘wilt’ in the heat, their energy slackens and they lose the will to work. A controlled environment, we are led to believe, is essential for self-control and self-determination. The Vitruvian image of the civilized Roman, as one who combined wit and valour, has changed into rational man emancipated from bodily distractions that ener- vate his mental virility and undermine his moral integrity. Against debates such as these, the huge attraction of air conditioning to old cultures that want to be seen as new, to the disadvantaged and the aspirant, might be gauged from the history of the industry. The Vitruvian argument, it seems, can be used to advantage. If the lived-in climate is peerless, the argument now runs, so are its inhabitants – except that the peerless climate is now man-made and readily available on the open market. Although architecture may have failed, thus far, to lend itself to the logic of mass production, it has become homogenized through air conditioning. Whether the technology is high or low, whatever the age or style, whatever the weather, the comfort expectations are the same, at least symbolically – but is nature or nurture in the driving seat here? As has been observed, somewhat keenly by an industry dependent on selling its products, air conditioning works best when noticed least. The working definition of comfort in the air-conditioning industry is the absence of complaint by a majority of users. The stuff of concord is measured, statistically, by the lack of conscious sensation and depends on two factors: the agility with which we adapt and habituate ourselves to our environment, and our subliminal consciousness of the air. The air is not imagined as an object of attention: it does not rate on any of the conventional aesthetic registers

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or lend itself to media representation. The air is invisible, formless and intan- gible. Modern civilization simply eradicates its uncertain and informal pleasures as well as its inconveniences. There is, after all, no profit to be made from the free air. But what do we mean by temperate? One thing that might be observed is that it has nothing to do with a uniform, fixed or otherwise absolute state. Indeed, it is a time word that involves difference and mixture. Life and liberty have a long association with the flux of the senses, the feelings, the emotions, the weather, the wind, the air. At present we seem persuaded by the idea that the feeling of corporate and corporeal equilibrium, at least when we stop to think about it, provides a desirable feeling of being at one with the world. It is not so difficult to imagine that ‘air-con’ lives up to its name, but has ‘cool comfort’ already become so closely identified with being modern, too inextricably bound to the economic paradigms of success and growth, to even imagine as desirable different paradigms of civilized? One of the unending wonders of civilization, any civilization, is the extent to which it is anything but. Compared to the more obvious iniquities civilization imposes, air conditioning might not seem particularly threatening and arguments against the small measure of comfort and practical benefits it offers seem greatly exaggerated. The reality is, however, that if someone switched off all the air conditioning in the world – as threatened in California during the 2001 summer brownouts – the practical consequences would be untold. Air conditioning has become built-in to the extent that increasing numbers of buildings have become uninhabitable without it, even in temperate weather conditions, not to mention most types of transport and industrialized process. We are stuck, it seems, with solving the consequent energy and pollution problems. Querying the assumptions behind comfort ideology raises too many uncomfortable spec- tres. Yet quite apart from the ludicrous idea that there is one uniform artificial climate that is naturally comfortable to the whole of mankind day-in day-out, there remains the vexed question of its supposed effect. What is air conditioning supposed to deliver – repression or emancipation, individual freedom or social control? The confinement of most of our lived lives (we spend well over 95 per cent of our time indoors)11 to conditions of unconscious comfort suggests a somewhat bizarre pathology of liberation. The point here is not to remount the moral/material argument in favour of primitive nature or natural man, or suggest that there are not legion situations where air conditioning is desirable or essential – though there are plenty of examples where it is used as a quick fix for poor design. The issue of interest here is the ‘modern’ tag. To air condition has become a trope of to modernize.Yet the limits of ‘modernize’ become evident when applied to nature rather than social forms of production. There is something uncannily flat earth about the quest to modernize the air. It seems modern man does not

258 Heart of Darkness

want to admit the flux of climate or weather – the affects of our dizzy planet. Thus, even though the advantage of modern space is supposed to be its freedom for difference and choice, any difference created by nature-in-the- round is neglected. What is real and what is metaphorical here? Is the external climate and the internal psyche materially related? If modern architecture went native, climatically speaking, would it engender a loss of civilized soul? As Marlow observed of the jungle, it was no less dark or pitiless for being brightly lit by the blazing sky. Was it the Congo he was talking about?

Notes

1 The source of the text used here and many of the ideas on its interpretation is Robert Kimbrough (ed.), Heart of Darkness: an Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, 3rd edn, New York: Norton, 1988. 2 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, in The Freud Reader, Peter Gay (ed.), London: Vintage, 1995. 3 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Morris Hickey Morgan (trans.), New York: Dover, 1960, bk VI, ch. 1. p. 174. 4 In one form or another this materialist view can be found in most of the major philosophies of the classical period as well as in medical theories. 5 Marsha E. Ackermann, Cool Comfort: America’s Romance with Air-Conditioning, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002, p. 9. For the history of air conditioning in America, see also Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 6 Sir Sydney F. Markham, Climate and Energy of Nations, London: Oxford University Press, 1942. 7 Ackermann, p. 13. 8 Ibid., p. 17. 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’, in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, London: Architectural Association, 1997, p. 89. 11 According to research carried out in America and Britain. Nicholson-Lord argues that this excessively indoor existence is unhealthy physically, emotionally and culturally. See ‘Why we all need to get out more: humanity has gone back to its origins. We live in caves again, but the cave is now a glass palace’, in New Statesman, 24 Jan 2005 (http://www.newstatesman.com/ 200501240024).

259 Chapter 24

Primitive From which construction begins

Peter Salter

The definition of ‘primitive’ provided by the Oxford English Dictionary offers the reading, ‘from which another is derived, from which construction begins’, as though it were a near-base layer which – through removing subsequent layers of construction – permits a primary architectural form to emerge, as if it were some evolutionary process. However, the term ‘primitive’ could be defined as an era; like the terms given to geological time, it has its own characteristics, not underdeveloped but differently developed – the ‘primitive’ as lodged in its cultural circumstance, as specific societies in time. Instead of serial consequential acts of development, it offers leaps of invention in the practical issues of shelter and its territory in relation to societies’ rituals and underpinnings. As an outsider, one cannot read such constructions as a ‘vernacular’ because they are bound specifically to their social circumstances. As a maker, the architect can observe the constructional response to climate, site, materials, technology and threshold circumstances. As with the ‘vernacular’, one cannot re-work its detail because it is of a different tradition and expertise. The ‘vernacular’ construction comes from a development of building as a response to circumstance by generations of craftsmen. To the observer, it offers an intuitive understanding of shelter grounded in its site, of a territory in scale with its inhabitants’ needs, and a technological invention derived from the expediency of circumstance. The first settlers on the Aran Island of Innisheer cleared the limestone platform of rocks to make fields. They moved the boulders by muscle power to build up rubble boundary walls that traced a new territory for cultivation, each field scaled to the strength of its maker – the water-soluble limestone

260 beds interleaved with striations of shale and clay. Positioned on these horizons of stone, settlements were built to integrate the spring lines with the servicing of the dwellings. Each house tucked into the strata of the hillside had three rooms, the end rooms protecting the middle room from the weather. This middle room had two doors to the outside, one to catch the offshore breezes and the other to moderate the onshore winds of the afternoon. In a limestone environment of porosity and solution joints, the pavement captures and diverts all runoff. Such a lack of water inhibits plants and prevents substantial tree growth, those stands of timber necessary for construction. Timber had to be shipped from the mainland. In such circumstances timber was used with great economy and invention. The curragh, a rowing boat for all shoreline work and fishing, was made of small-section steamed and sprung timbers. The inherent material quality was used to provide an economy of structure and weight as boats were launched from the beach. The boat was constructed from a truss-like ring beam that acted as the jig for the boat’s shape, and as a stable structure from which the ribs and stringers were sprung and housed. The ribs were made of Amer- ican Red Oak, its lack of knots making it suitable for steam bending. The longitudinal stringers were made from Yellow Deal, planed along its surface so that the varying thicknesses took the different bending characteristics of the boat’s shape. The vessel rode on top of the waves with very little underwater resistance. Such a form needed only two or three oarsmen to power the boat’s progress through the water. Sandbags were used as ballast to balance the boat against Atlantic winds and sea currents. In an age in which the world is rapidly using up its resources, we have to look for new economies of means. The ‘primitive era’ prompts us to think about materials that have low embodied energy and renewable sources, to reassess techniques of building that with limited working enable low-grade materials to achieve the precision and the tolerances that the building industry requires. The prefabrication of high-embodied energy components in factory conditions changes the need for site tolerances. The assembly of structure as skin components, tempered and butt-jointed, requires only expansion joint tolerances. The use of low-embodied energy materials requires larger tolerances and strategies of layering in or order to make an accommodation. The seminar room at Hooke Park sought a structure that used low- grade material and limited operations to make the components of the building. The explorations attempted to work with the inherent material qualities of timber in different configurations. A cross-cut and longitudinal chainsaw slot cut into the greenwood allowed the pole to bend and stress to a new form. The use of thinly cut sawn timber boards enabled the form to be twisted to counteract deflection

261 and produce an effective depth of section for spanning. Unfortunately as the 24.1 timber dried out it induced cracks and splitting. No solutions were developed. Michael Connelly John, the curragh The temporary pavilion to house the restoration plans for Chiswick maker House Gardens was to be built on the site of Lord Burlington’s former aviary. Source: Peter Salter The project was to use greenwood construction from poles taken from the 24.2 overgrown council depot located in the kitchen garden. The proposal used Hooke Park layering as a way of screening the contents of the pavilion. The slung Seminar Room: construction of the bent pole structure enables local wracking and twisting, side view of model Source: Peter Salter without distributing undue stress across the structural cage. Both these projects required ‘dirty testing’ to understand the prin- 24.3 ciples of the structure and the behaviour of the material. Hooke Park Seminar Room: top view of model Source: Peter Salter

24.4 Sketch of the bent pole construction Source: Peter Salter

262 263 24.5 Sketch section through Hooke Park Seminar Room Source: Peter Salter

24.6 Housing plan for Hooke Park Source: Peter Salter

24.7 Preliminary section through housing for Hooke Park Source: Peter Salter

264 24.8 Sketch exploring the geometry of the seminar room for Hooke Park Source: Peter Salter

24.9 Construction components for Chiswick Park pavilion Source: Peter Salter

24.10 Chiswick Park: Snorkel construction Source: Peter Salter

24.11 Chiswick Park pavilion plan Source: Peter Salter

265 24.12 Chiswick Park exploded axonometric Source: Peter Salter

24.13 Early plan and section for Chiswick Park pavilion Source: Peter Salter

24.14 Development plan and section for Chiswick Park Source: Peter Salter

24.15 Chiswick Park elevation Source: Peter Salter

266 Chapter 25

The United Cultures of Britain

CJ Lim

Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of London’s West End has been transformed into a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) striped edifice! No longer does the street appear dilapidated and incongruent; over-crowding is a thing of the past. It is now the home of the national multi-ethnic culture centre: the entire street acts as an urban foyer to multiple cultural activities – Asian, south-east Asian, Middle Eastern and African groups all under one roof. Single ethnic buildings can be construed as being divisive and the idea of overlapping multi-cultures needs therefore to be encouraged. This programme exists to facilitate cultural discourse on the ‘see, hear and speak’ of ethnic minorities in Britain today. The trans-ethnic urban culture foyer consists of virtual exhibition galleries, language and storytelling lounges, photograph, letter and foreign map archives, and a series of Japanese-style capsule hotels. The latter brings together foreign travellers and local late-night inhabitants of the West End while financially providing for the running of the urban foyer. The 480m between Cambridge Circus and Piccadilly Circus show palpable signs of architectural ‘nip-tuck’ treatment. Facades of many buildings have been replaced; four great carbuncles removed to provide more street-level public spaces. The five old dowager-like theatres have undergone some serious facelifts, restored to their former glamorous selves with their function intact. Most notably, new cultures have emerged and activities introduced to perform alongside these established Victorian typologies; a new social collage created. What makes this cultural foyer formally different from its precedents? Composed of an archipelago of separate spaces on different sites visually united by the CMYK banding, the building at street level is without physical

267 walls or barriers, merely an empty surface with endless spatial possibilities. This 25.1 unconventional method of spatial planning encourages spontaneous interac- Bird’s eye view of overall design from tion between different users of the cultural facilities and possible interaction Cambridge Circus with initially disinterested passers-by. Here, the urban foyer is offered to all, to Piccadilly Circus being inviting while intensifying the sense of community. (bottom right to top left) From one end of the street to the other, the foyer appears to Source: CJ Lim/ continue endlessly in perspective, its monolithic coloured stripes matching the Studio 8 Architects rhythm of the surrounding urban fabric. This three-dimensional edifice is inhab- 25.2 itable: the stripes, on collision with the edges of different sites transform into View from accommodation for the capsule hotels. The urban foyer folds over the Lyric, Piccadilly Circus Apollo, Globe and Queens theatres to form the cultural archive, relaying the down Shaftesbury Avenue; the desire to shelter and embrace the theatres while confidently grafting new and existing electronic old cultures, new and old programmes, together. These stripes are embedded billboards extend to overlap with the with miniature recorders and LED lights. They continuously transmit translated urban foyer impromptu foreign language conversations occurring along the urban foyer into Source: CJ Lim/ electronic urban-scaled English LED text, enticing curious passers-by into Studio 8 Architects establishing a relationship with the foyer that will sustain its life. Translated conversation and gossip of the street’s inhabitants, whether unaware or revel- ling in their temporary celebrity, help inform us of our multicultural society. The ground level of the urban foyer is a dynamic entity, effecting an ethereal threshold between the civic and private, exterior and interior. Story- telling, language learning and virtual galleries exist within this ephemeral environment. Excess heat from the underground station below is used to create local microclimates for these activities. Only in severe winter and wet conditions will the bespoke glass lounges mushroom to the foyer’s surface to provide physical shelter from the inclement weather. Here, children listen attentively to Eastern tales and traditions being recounted by their elders. Choruses of foreign language classes recited mantra-like orchestrate the tempo of the foyer and street. Visitors sit cross-legged on mats with footwear left at the threshold. This informal and convivial nature also applies to the workings of the virtual galleries. Exhibitions of different cultures are presented simultaneously; the gallery visitor, also acting as curator, chooses the content of the exhibitions for his or her personal viewing while sharing glimpses of the adjacent viewings of others. The urban-scaled exhibitions, on the other hand, are activated by passing traffic and are designed to be viewed from the upper floor of double- decker buses. Eastern conviviality replaces formality; English eccentricity and fun are the order of the day. Shaftesbury Avenue is alive once more with festive atmosphere. Its spatial configuration relies upon the symphony of foreign language, tradition and imagery, while its materiality is wholly dependent on the wealth of overlapping coexistence of its multi-ethnic inhabitants.

268 269 25.3 View from Cambridge Circus down Shaftesbury Avenue Source: CJ Lim/ Studio 8 Architects

270 25.4 Storytelling, language learning and virtual exhibition on street level; beams above contain the capsule hotel accommodation Source: CJ Lim/ Studio 8 Architects

271 25.5 25.6 Upper deck viewing The urban foyer of the urban-scaled folds over the Lyric, exhibitions from a Apollo, Globe and bus Queens theatres to Source: CJ Lim/ form the cultural Studio 8 Architects archive Source: CJ Lim/ Studio 8 Architects

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277

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations

Aalto, Alvar 63, 166–75; Muuratsalo 207, 208, occult philosophy 154–5, 160–3; 210–16, 217, 218; National Pensions foundation myth 156–7; John Wood’s Institute 170, 172; S60 stools 168, 169; scheme 151–2; ‘Kings’ of 163–5; plan Seinajöki Town Library 174 (1776) 151; Queen’s Square/St James’ Ackermann, Marsha 255, 256 Triangle/Prior Park 152, 153 air-conditioning 251–2, 254–9 Bayard, Emile 97 Albers, Josef 167 Behrens, Peter 63 Alberti, Leon Battista 49, 140, 143 Belgian Congo Pavilion at International Colonial altruism 234 Exposition (1931) 96–105; as Amaral, Tarsila do 112 architectural hybrid 104–5; as architecture Amundsen, Roald 45, 46, 47 ‘modern’ in spirit 100–1; displaying Ando, Tadao 183–93 authenticity and progress 101–3; Andrade, Oswald de 110, 111, 112 inventing Congolese architecture 98–100; Angelico, Fra 172 as ultimate théâtre des colonies 97; view Annius of Viterbo 141, 142, 143 from main entrance 99; view of colonnade Antarctica 43–8, 51–3; Scott’s route to South 100; view of main cupola 102 Pole 45; sledging party on south polar Bentham, Jeremy 233 plateau 47 Bergson, Henri 55, 56–7, 61 anthropology 6, 9, 74–5 Berlin: Philharmonie concert hall 26 anthropophagy (cannibalism) 108, 109–11 Bernanos, George 114 anti-primitive 22 Bhabha, Homi K. xvii, 74, 76, 87–8 Arens, William 110 Bladud 156, 157, 162, 163, 164 Aristotle 40 Bopp, Raúl 110 art: art nouveau 24, 30; avant-garde 6, 18, 76, Bötticher, Carl: Der Baumkultus der Hellenen 79, 88; cubism 30; expressionism 12, 23, 37–8; ‘The Tree of Artemis’ 38; ‘Tree 25, 29, 30, 31, 169; primitive in 4, 12, sacellum with several aedicula’ 39 23–5, 31 Bramante, Donato: St Peter’s Basilica 145, avant-garde 6, 18, 76, 79, 88 146; San Pietro in Montorio 143, 144, Azuma House 183–93; courtyard 184; section 145 and axonometric 185; view from dining Brancusi, Constantin 197 area to courtyard 191 Brazil: radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism 108–18 Bachelard, Gaston 168 Breton, André 27, 207 Baker, Josephine 113, 118 Burian, Edward 82, 83 Banham, Reyner 10, 205 Barthes, Roland 192 Cabral, Pedro Álvares 108 Bataille, Georges 236 Cambridge School of Architecture extension Bath 150–65; antiquarian research and mythic 204 landscape 158–60; The Circus 151, 152, Camus, Marcel 112 160, 161, 162–3; emblematic figures and cannibalism 108, 109–11

279 Index

Carrier, William 255 dressing (Bekleidung), theory of 4.39 Carvalho, Flávio de 111 drive 46–7 Carvalho, Ronald de 110–11 Dryden, John 21 Cavalcanti, Emiliano di 113, 118 Dubuffet, Jean 204 Chambers, William: Treatise on Civil duration 56, 57–62 Architecture 5, 33, 35 charoite 69, 70 economics 233–4 charpente en lamelles 102–3, 104 Ehrenzweig, Anton 203 Cheval, Ferdinand 27–8 Eisen, Charles: ‘Allegory of Architecture children 23 Returning to its Natural Model’ 36, 92; Chiswick Park 262, 265–6 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Chochol, Josef: Villa in Prague-Vysehrad 29 (frontispiece) 92, 93 Christianity 19 electronic communications 231–3 civilization 21, 51; air-conditioning and 251–2, Eliade, Mircea 131 254–9 emancipation: primitivism as form of 25–30 classicism 4, 6, 11, 19 emblematic figures 154–5 Cogniat, Robert 98–9 emergence of primitive 19–22 colonial system 73–84; anthropophagy emptiness 184, 188 (cannibalism) as anticolonialist metaphor Ernst, Max: The Eye of Silence 27, 28 108, 109–11; Belgian Congo Pavilion at ethnnography 100–1 International Colonial Exposition (1931) Etruscans 140, 141–2, 146–8; Tuscan 96–105; disavowal and 74–6; multiple columns 140, 142–5, 148 cultural origins and 80–4; radicalization of Evans, Robin 257 the primitive in Brazilian modernism ‘everyday’ 240–9 108–18; resistance 76–80 evolutionary theory 6, 18; social Darwinism 5, columns 139–40, 230; telamones 142; Tuscan 22 140, 142–5, 148 expressionism 12, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 169 communications 231–3 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness 13, 52, Falcone, Giuseppe 19 76–7, 78, 251–9 Ferguson, James 78 conspicuous consumption 235–8 Filarete (Antonio Averlino) 140 Coop Himmelbau Partnership 27 Finland 167 Coppola, Francis Ford: Apocalypse Now 251 Flam, Jack 89 Costa, Lúcio 114 Florence: David statue 146, 147; Medici family Cozens, John Robert: The Circus (Bath) 152 146–8 creation myths see originary myths Fludd, Robert: Philosophica Sacra 154 crystals 24–5, 28–30, 63–70 Forde, Robert 51 cubism 30 Foster, Hal 12, 88–9 culture 17, 18, 21; multiple cultural origins and Frampton, Kenneth 61 80–4 Freud, Sigmund 6, 43, 46, 47, 51, 252, 253, curraghs 261, 262 256–7 Cuvier, Georges 58 Fréville, Anne François Joachim de 21 Freyre, Gilberto 117 Darwin, Charles 51 fudo 186–8, 190–2 death drive 47 Fulton, Hamish 52 Debret, Jean-Baptiste 115 functionalism 81, 104 deconstructivism 30 Deutch, Miriam 89 Gadamer, Hans 136, 137 digital commerce 229 Galbraith, J. K. 236 disavowal: colonial system and 74–6 Gallotti, Jean 99

280 Index

Gates, Bill 233 Janak, Pavel 29 Gauguin, Paul 12 Jencks, Charles xvi–xvii Gehry, Frank 199; Walt Disney Concert Hall Jones, William 78 197, 198 Jordy, William 133, 134 Gell, Alfred 89 Julius II, Pope 145 genius 23 Jung, Carl 207, 208, 209, 212, 215, 216, 217; giants 139–40, 141; David statue 146, 147 tower at Bollingen 209, 210–11, 213, Giedion, Sigfried 7–8, 11, 36, 115, 167, 194, 214, 215 242 Jung, Franz 208 gifts 233–5 Gikandi, Simon 79 Kahn, Louis 60; Center for British Art 197, 198, Giles of Viterbo 143, 145 199 Glover, Nicola 200, 203 Kanaka Village, New Caledonia 22 golden age 139, 140–2 Kandinsky, Wassily 25 Goldwater, Robert 231 Kant, Immanuel 57 Gombrich, Ernst 197 Khalo, Frida 81 Gothic architecture 13 Klee, Paul 23, 25 Greenhalgh, Paul 96 Klein, Melanie 199–200 Gutheim, Friedrich 133 Klemm, Gustav 37, 38, 39, 41, 94

Hablik, Wenzel: The Crystal Palace in the Sea Lacan, Jacques 47, 52; diagram of visual field 24 48 Häring, Hugo 103 Lacoste, Henri: Belgian Congo Pavilion at Paris Hartmann, Louis 102 International Colonial Exposition (1931) Heidegger, Martin 186, 207, 241 and 96–105 Hellenistic period 19 Lafitau, Joseph-François 92 Helsinki: House of Culture 171; National lamella roof (charpente en lamelles) 102–3, Pensions Institute 170, 172; Rautatalo 171 104 Hermann, Wolfgang 92, 231 Laugier, Marc Antoine 5, 11, 34, 49, 50, 58, Hesiod 139 91–2, 93, 230, 231, 233, 234 Highmore, Ben 243 Le Corbusier 81, 82, 104, 117, 118, 133, 166, Himerius 164 172, 200–1; in Brazil 113–14, 115, 118; history of primitive 19 Cabanon 207, 209, 211–17, 218; Hooke Park 261, 262–5 primitive huts and 7, 8–9, 11, 49–51, 52, Hooper, Barbara 118 94, 230; in USA 127–9 Howe, George 130, 134, 135 see also Lefebvre, Henri 241–3, 246, 247 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society building Leibniz, Gottfried 230 Hübsch, Heinrich 57 Leoncini, Giuseppe 142–3 Humboldt, Alexander 75–6 Lescaze, William 129, 130 see also Husser, Tide 171 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society building Husserl, Edmund 174 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 8, 9, 116 huts see primitive huts Lewerentz, Sigurd 166 Libeskind, Daniel 30; Victoria and Albert Ianziti, Gary 140 Museum extension 30 Ibelings, Hans 36 Linux 234 idealism 57 Lisbôa, Antônio Francisco 112 individualization 19 Locke, John 57 Inisheer 260–1 London: Chiswick Park 262, 265–6; International Colonial Exposition (1931): Shaftesbury Avenue 267–8, 269–72 Belgian Congo Pavilion 96–105 Long, Richard 52

281 Index

Loos, Adolf 6, 11, 117 Nishida, Kitaro 188, 189, 191 Los Angeles: Walt Disney Concert Hall 197, Noah 141–2 198 Nolde, Emil 25 Lynch, Kevin 94 occult philosophy 154–5 Macaulay, Thomas 77 O’Gorman, Juan 81–3 McKay, Claude 79 originary myths 19, 33–42, 139–40, 155–7, McLuhan, Marshall 231–3, 237 229–31, 234, 235; multiple cultural Maes, Joseph 100–1 origins 80–4 Malevich, Kasimir 26 Orozco, José Clemente 81 Mallgrave, Harry Francis 37 Ozenfant, Amédée 24–5, 118 Marcuse, Herbert 236 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 112, 114 ‘Paesina’ stone 68, 70 Markham, Clement 46 Paolozzi, Eduardo 204 Markham, Sydney F. 255 Paris: Belgian Congo Pavilion at International Martinez de Velasco, Juan 82 Colonial Exposition (1931) 96–105; Marx, Karl 241 Universal Exhibition (1889) 111 Marx, Roberto Burle 115 Parker, Richard 117 Mauss, Marcel 235 Parr, Martin 241 Medici family 146–8 Pascal, Blaise 20 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 136 Peacock, Thomas Love 78 meteorite 66, 70 Peirani, Paul 104 Mexico 81–3 Pereira dos Santos: Como era gostoso meu mica 67, 70 francês 118 Michelangelo Buonarotti: David statue 146, Pevsner, Nikolaus 116 147 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society building Mill, John Stuart 233 (Lescaze/Howe) 127–38; depository 129; mimesis 40 lower levels seen along Market Street minerals 63–70 137; manifest latency 136–8; mezzanine Minucci, Gaetano 104 banking hall 133; mezzanine stair landing modernism 4, 36, 61, 79, 104, 166, 194; 130; pedestrian beauty 132–6; savage avant-garde 6, 18, 76, 79, 88; modernity 127–32; subway below Market radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian Street 135; view from Market Street 128 modernism 108–18 Picasso, Pablo 12, 31 Monboddo, Lord 21–2 Picchia, Menotti del 110 Montaigne, Michel de 108 Pinney, Christopher 89 Montingy, Grandjean de 115 poetics of architecture 38–41 Morton, Patricia 97, 104 poetics of process 57–62 multiple cultural origins 80–4 Pollock, Jackson 203 Murillo, Gerardo 81 post-colonialism xvii, 73–84, 240 postmodernism xvii, 36, 61 Nash, Richard (Beau) 163–4 post-structuralism 86–7 Ndebele people 121–4 potlach 235–6 neo-expressionism 30 Prado, Paulo 113 New York 128, 176–80; Central Park 179; Pratt, Mary Louise 75 Manhattan 178, 180 primitive huts 4, 5, 33–6, 39–40, 51–3, 90, Newton, Stephen 202, 203 229–31, 237; alternative history 91–4; Niemeyer, Oscar 114, 117; Casa do Baile 117, Belgian Congo Pavilion at Paris 118 International Colonial Exposition (1931) Niranjana, Tejaswini 74–5 and 96–105; Le Corbusier and 7, 8–9, 11,

282 Index

49–51, 52, 94, 230; reconstuction 37; Saavedra, Gustavo 82 self-building 207–18; Semper and 7, 8, 9, Said, Edward xvii, 80, 87 37, 55–62, 94; tents 43–4; Vitruvius and Sallinen, Tyko 169 6–7, 49, 94, 156, 230, 231, 233 Scharoun, Hans 26 profligacy 235–8 Schildt, Göran 173 pyramids 30 Schmarsow, August 195 Pythagoras 157, 158–9 Scott, Felicity 12, 45–8 Scott, Geoffrey 196 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome Scott, Robert Falcon 43, 51–3; ‘Last page of 8, 33, 37, 58 diary’ 44; route to South Pole 45 Scruton, Roger 194 Rabelais, François 141 Seinajöki: Town Hall 171; Town Library 174 radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian self-building 207–18 modernism 108–18; anthropophagy Semper, Gottfried 4, 6; poetics of architecture (cannibalism) as anticolonialist metaphor 38–41; primitive huts and 7, 8, 9, 37, 108, 109–11; fantasies of conquest 55–62, 94 113–14; radically feminine 117–18; Senghor, Leopold 79 radically primitive 114–16; twentieth- Sergison, Jonathan 203 century Brazilian primitive 111–13 Sergison Bates 241, 243–7, 248; semi- Raith, Frank-Berthold 243 detached houses in Stevenage 243, 244, Ray, Man: Black and White 18 245 Reformation 20 Shaftesbury Avenue 267–8, 269–72 religion 19, 37–8 shanty towns 7–8, 112, 113 Renaissance 18, 139; villa movement 20 shintai 188–90, 191, 192 resistance 76–80 Shute, John 142 revolutions: Mexico (1910) 81 Simone da Fiesole 146 Richards, J. M. 213 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 81 Ricoeur, Paul 40 slavery 22, 111 Riegl, Alois 24 Smith, Adam 233 Rilke, Rainer Maria 136 Smithson, Alison and Peter 203 Rio de Janeiro: favelas 7, 112, 113; Ministry of Soane, John 5 Education and Public Health 115, 116 social Darwinism 5, 22 Rivera, Diego 81, 82 Socrates 55 Rodin, Auguste 197 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 87 Rolland, Romain 256 Staden, Hans 108–9, 110, 118 Romano, Giulio: Palazzo Maccarani 201 Stantondrue 158, 162 Romanticism 21, 23–4, 231 Stevenage: semi-detached houses 243, 244, Rome: Janiculum hill 143, 144; Palazzo 245 Maccarani 201; Piazza Trinità dei Monti Stokes, Adrian 194, 195, 196–7, 199, 200, 196; St Peter's Basilica 145, 146; San 202, 203, 204 Pietro in Montorio 143, 144, 145; Temple Stokowski, Leopold 129 of Janus 143, 145; Temple of Jupiter 143 Stonehenge 158, 159, 160, 161 Rousseau, Henri 25, 27 suburbs 166–75 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 8, 92 surface 194–205 Rowe, Colin 194–5, 201–2 surrealism 6, 23, 27–8, 231 Rudofsky, Bernard 10, 12, 90 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels xvi Runge: Earth Children 23 symbolism 30 Ruskin, John 13, 63, 230 Symcox, Geoffrey 93 Rykwert, Joseph 4, 11, 59, 60, 90, 229–31, 237 Team X 12

283 Index

telamones 142 Vigato, Jean-Claude 96 telecommunications 231–3 Viipuri Library 173 Temporal, Marcel 101 villa movement 20 tents 43–4 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 58 théâtre des colonies 97 visual field 47, 48 theory: primitive and 86–9 Vitruvius 4, 5, 155–6, 233, 234, 236, 255; Thicknesse, Philip 22 primitive huts 6–7, 49, 94, 156, 230, 231, Thomas, Nicholas 89 233 time: duration in architecture 56, 57–62 Torgovnick, Marianna 11 Walcott, Derek 80 tourmaline 65, 70 Watsuji, Tetsuro 186, 187 translation 74–5, 77 Wilson, Colin St John: Cambridge School of Turgot, Jacques 77 Architecture extension 204 Tuscany 140, 141–2; Medici family 146–8; Winckelmann, J. J. 57 Tuscan columns 140, 142–5, 148 Winnicott, Donald 211, 212 Wölfflin, Heinrich 194, 195–6 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 112 Wollheim, Richard 200 Universal Exhibition (1889) 111 Wood, John 150, 163–5; antiquarian research and mythic landscape of Bath 158–60; Valéry, Paul 55, 56, 62 emblematic figures and occult philosophy Vallejo, César 111 154–5, 160–3; foundation myths and Van de Ven, Cornelius 195 155–7; urban schemes in Bath 151–2 Van der Streat, Jan: Discovery of America 108, Worringer, Wilhelm 29 109 worship 37–8 van Eck, Caroline 34 van Eyck, Aldo 12, 94 Yale: Center for British Art 197, 198, 199 vanadanite 63, 64 Yates, Frances 156 Varnhagen, Francisco de 109 Vaz de Caminha, Pêro 108 Zevi, Bruno 242 Veblen, Thorstein 236 Zollinger, Fritz 103 Vidler, Anthony 92 Zuccari, Palazzo: Piazza Trinità dei Monti 196

284