PERFORMING the Work of Architecture

­­­Braden R. Engel

Architectural Association, MA Histories & Theories, Visiting Tutor

University of Greenwich School of Architecture, Diploma Histories & Theories Lecturer

Perform:[per (“through” or “by means of”)] + [form (OFr. fournir – to furnish or form; produce an effect)]

In the very first sentence of his Introduction to An Outline of European Architecture from 1943, Nikolaus Pevsner famously proclaimed, “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” Then, in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics published by the Oxford University Press, Karsten Harries would reduce Pevsner’s attitude to what he called the “aesthetic approach,” where the “work of architecture = building + aesthetic component.”

Later, in 1976, in a crowded lecture hall at the Architectural Association, Colin Rowe was perched at the lectern in front of two (characteristically) opposed images: one of Mies van der Rohe’s I.I.T. Library in Chicago and one of the courtyard of the Ducal Palace in Urbino. For Rowe, the corner of the I.I.T. Library building strikes one as aggressive, masculine and protruding, whereas the concave corner of the courtyard in the Ducal Palace is clearly passive, feminine and receptive. Freudian analogies aside, Rowe suggested that the “object fixation” of modern architecture has made any viable urban situation difficult if not futile, since, in a poor analogy, he warns that it simply “does not work if everyone in the orchestra plays at the same time.” Such interpretations – in which the building is treated as an object that impresses itself upon a passive subject – are consistent with an episteme that can be traced from Vitruvius to Alberti, Kant to Hegel and on through modernity in figures like Sigfried Giedion and Robert Venturi.

Today I want to argue for a theory of Performance, which is perhaps best defined by its denial, or attempt to dissolve, three primary architectural paradigms: the aesthetics-utility dichotomy (exemplified by Pevsner above), the subject/observer-object/artifact relationship (as seen in Rowe above), and ultimately, the attitude that architecture as a form of art, is and ought to be an accumulation of all the arts.

Performance, as I speak of it, acknowledges that the aesthetic expression of works of architecture happen through use, by operative rather than passive subjects, constantly and habitually utilizing what the building (as artifact) has disclosed for them, rather than succumbing to a series of affects. To acknowledge that experiencing subjects, such as ourselves, actively perform works of architecture by awakening the accommodations it provides is also to accept that architecture is the only form of art that is able to do this, and yet it remains to be discussed in the terms of all other arts, without a distinct descriptive language.

This was, more or less, the position taken in my final thesis for the M.A. in Histories & Theories of Architecture at the Architectural Association a couple of years ago. But that was largely a critique of how some of the more canonical texts of architecture theory have treated the category of “use” or “utility,” and thus my thesis basically came to a close at the very point where I was able to put forward this theory of Performance, as a response.

What I want to do today is explain some of the most important dimensions of Performance through a few examples, in order to focus on the potential agency of the theory as an instrument or device in theoretical discourse. After all, this sort of Performance seems to be more of a way of explaining or speaking about architectural experience than it is a framework for design; but of course each informs the other. What I hope to show is that one of the most fascinating and defining aspects of Performance is also its most frustrating problem to confront; that is, if works of architecture, as works of art, are furnished as they are performed, then it becomes very difficult to speak about these works of art that are not objectively presented to us, and that have always already happened in the past, as they were performed.

I will start with an excerpt from Jacques Derrida that draws from Immanuel Kant’s very brief definition of architecture. “There is always a form on a ground,” Derrida notes, “but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.” In his Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term parerga to describe the role ornament plays in our appreciation of form in art. While the parerga is not to be liked on its own, it does enhance the form of works of art, “as in the case of picture frames, or drapery on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings.” But in what seems to be an extremely underrated philosophical account, The Truth in Painting from 1987, Derrida reveals the etymology of the Greek term parergon as the necessary supplement, or that which is added to the main work due to a lack within (para, beside or next to + ergon, the work, fact, or piece).

When contemplating the frame (parergon) on a painting Derrida curiously asked himself, “How to give energeia its due?” The Greek term energeia, generally opposed to potentiality, illustrates actuality as it happens. The word is still alive today as a version of power or energy. Derrida hardly mentions it again, which is surprising given his explanation of the framed painting; its defining feature is “not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.” That instant of energy when the frame acts as phantom is, of course, energeia. Has no one ever noticed this? When contemplating the painting there is no frame; glance over to the wall and the frame leaps back onto the canvas. The main difference of course is that works of architecture are not addressed and contemplated like paintings. However, Derrida’s analysis is crucial because it is not a retrospective comment on a completed or finished piece of painting, but an examination into the phenomenological interaction between subject and artifact, as it happens.

More than two-thousand years earlier, the concept of energeia found fruition with Aristotle. Pervasive in his philosophy of metaphysics were themes of activity, actuality, and realization. Aristotle used the example of a house: those who try to define “what a house is” by citing its materials or matter really only touch on what is potentially a house, whereas those who describe the house as a “container sheltering possessions and living bodies” speak of its actuality. He makes the distinction between artifact and activity, between what could be a house into the house actually happening. As with Derrida’s painting, it is the interaction of an experiencing subject with the artifact that ignites the work in energeia. The work is actualized in performance.

In his analysis of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George’s church in London, Robert Venturi provides a good example of a static “reading of space” void of any interaction or participation by operative subjects. The grand entry outside the church implies a dominant axis that contradicts the interior axis made by the tower and apse:

“The pedimented porch of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George, Bloomsbury, and the overall shape of its plan imply a dominant axis north and south.  The west entrance and tower, the interior configuration of balconies, and the east apse (which contained the altar) all suggest an equally dominant counter axis.  By means of contrary elements and distorted positions this church expresses both the contrasts between the back, front, and sides of the Latin cross plan and the duo-directional axes of a Greek cross plan.  These contradictions, which resulted from particular site and orientation conditions, support a richness and tension lacking in many purer compositions.”

Venturi is very close here to a description of the use of interior spaces initiating the change in the work.  However, these are observations, not operations.  Had he provided a description of how the operations of the subjects might enact these shifts, we would have a good example of energeia activating different dimensions of usefulness, and thus actualizing a variety of performances in one work. Instead, emphasis is placed on the church’s “contrary elements and distorted positions” that twist its symbolic meaning.

My issue with Venturi’s interpretation is his tendency to reduce the subject to an observer.  The shift of meaning within St. George’s is something to be noticed by a passive subject; he strolls through and takes note of the contradictory internal configurations: “In St. George, Bloomsbury, for instance, the contradictory axes inside become alternatingly dominant or recessive as the observer moves within them, so that the same space changes meaning.” In other words, Venturi employs the eye of a passive observer to notice symbolic changes, when he would have been better to describe how the work changes as the operations of the subjects change. When he describes the work, he conducts his interpretation in a manner that discards the potency of the active subjects and concedes the building as finished and complete before their operations. This leads one to ask how a work is finished or completed at all?

The artist Barry Le Va is a good example of how the temporal constitution of a work of art can be challenged. In the Postscript to Mark Linder’s Nothing Less than Literal (2004) one reads that, “Alone in an art gallery at Ohio State University in 1969, Barry Le Va produced the artwork he titled Velocity Piece #1: Impact Run, Energy Drain. Le Va ran from one end of the large room to the other and slammed into the wall at full speed. He then repeated the act in the opposite direction. This action continued for 103 minutes and was recorded in stereo. For gallery visitors, the encounter with the work consisted only of the damage done to the surfaces of the two gallery walls and two speakers, in the place of the microphones, replaying the audiotape.” Similarly, in the middle of the twentieth century Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists utilized the temporality of the artifact to ensure their control over the work of art. They separated the work from the piece, or the event from the artifact. In this way their actions will never be seen, and yet the records of their gestures upon the canvas now hang on walls. In other words, as Henry Sayre puts it in his book The Object of Performance, “a museum may have purchased a Pollock, but it could never purchase the action of Pollock painting – the event itself, the real work.” The painting as verb was emphasized over the painting as noun; or, the act was more important than the product. But the move towards technique and method in later twentieth century art and architecture is well documented. At the base of it all is a wonderfully simple yet powerful shift of focus: instead of asking what a work of art is, ask how it is. Or for my purposes I prefer to ask, How does architecture happen as it happens?

Much unlike the other arts, only in architecture does the experiencing subject perform the work. For example, consider the above quote on Pollock then invert its temporality: architects concerned with this kind of performance would recognize that the “work” as activity is privileged over the “work” as product. But where a museum can only purchase the record of Pollock’s actions, the architect can only provide the product (the design for the building, or the building itself) that is yet to receive its performance – the event itself, the real work. Or, produce a canvas that awaits a new onslaught of paint from every performer. No longer does the object achieve effects in the subject but, quite the inverse, the subject performs the work of architecture.

Aldo van Eyck was one who appreciated the changes that occur in a work of architecture before it ever becomes an “object.” The playgrounds designed by van Eyck demonstrate why the freedom of the participant should not be neglected. “When someone beats their rugs on it,” he explains, “a somersault frame is no longer a somersault frame. During the break at a girl’s school, a climbing arch may provide seats for 30 girls from 15 to 17 years old, all eating their sandwiches. It has then become an aluminum hill. If one throws a tarpaulin over it, it becomes a tent. Use can also lead to misuse,” he warns, “and less pleasant things can happen; sometimes the big ones chase the little ones away, sometimes the whole thing is smashed.” Van Eyck recognized the malleable status of the artifact as it is initiated by those who act upon it. Of all the arts, the aesthetic contingency of the artifact is at its strongest in architecture; not only is it afforded by the opportunities utility brings, but as is seen with van Eyck, it is only open to observation as it happens.

In order to locate this idea of Performance in terms of historiography, I want to look at a text by Robin Evans on the work of Mies van der Rohe, specifically the Barcelona Pavilion.In Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries Evans, trained as an architect not a historian, managed to find a path through that “dilemma of interpretation” (as I like to call it) that subdued those like Pevsner, Rowe, Venturi, etc. Before him, the pavilion had been described in terms of “abstraction, silence, vacancy,” and almost always “beauty.” Evans noted that the Western conception of beauty “quells” desire for a thing by directing attention away from its utility to its appearance – an optical hegemony that has dominated architecture since the inheritance of aesthetic efficacy from the visual arts. However, the Barcelona Pavilion “distracts the entranced observer from what is troubling elsewhere” Evans noticed, and “distraction is not amnesia, it is displacement.” But what has been displaced? Abstraction, silence, and vacancy are all terms that imply privation from a prior state. Evans keenly recognized that it is precisely that emptiness that makes it “hard to determine what has been removed.” After all, he says, “if we could easily tell, then the effort of escape would have been worthless.” Escape from what?

Indeed, it is not that something has been removed from the pavilion, but rather the subject is removed in his “escape” from the chaotic metropolis into the abstraction, silence, and vacancy – all qualities that must come-about, happen, or be discovered. Or, the escape into the quiet refuge of the pavilion must be performed. Until then, it awaits its main work, and thus can never be a complete or finished object. In other words, energeia finally actualizes the work in the subject’s displacement, and that initial distractive gift of solemnity, like the frame on the painting, is buried behind the performance. In this, Evans was able to suppress the desire to interpret and direct his attention back to the “forms of experience out of which we speak” (I borrow this phrase from the later Ludwig Wittgenstein who, after focusing on the idea of achieving a “perfect language” or vocabulary in his earlier years, as seen in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, would later look to the forms of experience out of which our language emerges; this turn in the philosophy of language and epistemology has more recently been fostered by the late Richard Rorty, amongst others). The object was dissolved into a malleable cloud of performances. Abstraction, silence, and vacancy can no longer be attributed to the pavilion, for it was never taken as an object that affects; rather, in terms of performance, they are effects produced through the operations of the experiencing subjects.

With the death of the object follows heavy consequences for theory. For example, arguments have been made from the social sciences that posit architecture can exist without buildings. The point is that “the man in the street makes the city.” But due to their reliance on task-patterns and habitual systems, the same arguments hold that the pattern a farmer ploughs in his field is also architecture. These theories generally exclude architecture as an art, which I cannot accept. The great Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri also acknowledged the issue. His worry was that “absorbing art into behavior excludes the possibility of speaking of painting or architecture as objects: they are, rather, happenings.” The aesthetic value of architecture would no longer be attributed to its objecthood, but to the performances it enables. How is one to judge? The static connotations of the built structure give way to a constant oscillation of a blur of performances. So while it may seem obvious to state that the entire aesthetic enterprise hinges on the presence and interaction of the experiencing subject, it is rarely acknowledged in theory.

And yet the installations, situations, or conditions (it matters little what you call them) of the artist Olafur Eliasson have received more attention recently and for good reason. His works refuse to “happen” until and through the performance of the subject. The questions “Is it architecture” or “What can it do for architecture” are belittled by more accurately asking “How is it not architecture?” The point is, it seems to me, that there is more to be gained or to be learned for architecture in these works than for installation art. What would Wittgenstein say? It is always easier to speak of something after it happens, but of what are you speaking: the building, or the forms of experience it has afforded you? After all, we cannot talk objectively about performance because it is not objectively presented to us. Or, it cannot be talked about since it is not there about which to speak. But it is there; or rather, it does happen. And so I speak of it after it – a justly belated apology.

So to return to St. George’s in London, one can now see how the status of the work changes with its activation in energeia. A mass service oriented in the north-south axis implied by the exterior of the church would differ emphatically from a wedding that stretches the east-west axis implied by the tower and apse.  It is in this way that the usefulness given by the work to conduct a church service or wed a couple is buried behind the mass or wedding respectively.  St. George’s is actualized, awoken in the energeia of the service and the wedding, and the usefulness it has given to allow for these activities effaces itself as they happen.  St. George’s at this moment is not so much a church (noun), as it is “churching” (verb).

To conclude then, I would like to offer a few thoughts concerning this theory of Performance as a critique of historical writing, or rather as a historiographical lens, that in turn might foster an idea of the architect as a creator of canvases yet to receive their paint, as well as a reconfiguration of the theorist/critic as a “re-speaker” or eulogist of performances.

So if you allow me the liberty of another poor analogy, I would suggest that the prose of performance takes the form of eulogy. At a funeral the life of the deceased is retold, and the experiences that shaped their life are explained to the audience. No one talks about the expensive coffin or the lifeless body that lies within. Yet architecture is commonly treated as such. “If we find a mound in the forest,” Adolf Loos explained, “six foot long and three foot wide, formed into a pyramid shape by a shovel we become serious and something within us says, ‘Someone lies buried here.’ This is architecture.” I doubt Pevsner would have agreed with Loos; a dirt tomb in the forest is hardly Lincoln Cathedral, much less a bicycle shed. Yet it is not surprising that the architectural artifact has always been considered complete, finished, and all but dead after the production of the object. That attitude, I hope, is at its twilight.   

Still, the inherent aesthetic contingency of architecture will always suffer from the dilemma of interpretation; that is, it will continue to cripple its own epistemological medium as long as it desires to know What architecture is. Performance, as I have tried to explain it, is most lucid when the focus shifts to a rigorous inquiry into How architecture happens as it happens. The real aesthetic energy and power of architecture, so characterized by energeia, may find fruition in this line of questioning. Performance can begin to explain an aesthetic distinct to architecture.

But first, our inability to address performance objectively must be acknowledged while maintaining a critical ear to the way in which we speak of those experiences. Theory must wait until after the performances. And in that way, through us and before interpretation, they speak for themselves.

Bibliography

Colin Rowe, Inside-Out: Outside-In (Presentation at the Architectural Association, London, 1976).

Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (New York, Penguin Books, 1943).

Karsten Harries, “Architecture: Modern Overview” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics v.1(New York, Oxford University Press, 1998).

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987; orig. 1790).

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Aristotle, Metaphysics in S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D.C. Reeve, ed., Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000).

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

Mark Linder, Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004).

Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Aldo van Eyck, “On the design of play equipment and the arrangement of playgrounds” in Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven ed., Aldo van Eyck: Collected Articles and Other Writings (Amsterdam, Sun Publishers, 2008).

Robin Evans, “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London, Janet Evans and Architectural Association Publications, 1997).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, ed., Twentieth Century Philosophy (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 2003).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations in Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, ed., Twentieth Century Philosophy (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 2003).

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (London, Granada, 1980; 4^th edition).

Nathan Silver, “Architecture Without Buildings” in Charles Jencks and George Baird, ed., Meaning in Architecture (London, The Cresset Press, 1969).

Adolf Loos, “Architecture” in Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton and Dennis Sharp, ed., Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design (London, Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975).

 Email: braden.r.engel@gmail.com

“The Badger of Muck and Brass” (on Colin Rowe’s historiography) was recently published in AA Files 62 (see link on homepage).

Another essay on the nebulous gap between aesthetic experience and critical presentations of architecture is forthcoming in a journal in the US.

Discussions have begun with Studio Integrate concerning their recent design work and approach, meant to inaugurate a series of published critical exchanges (find them at: http://studiointegrate.com/)

Competition submissions continue to be an avenue for creative expression. Recent projects have been completed with the architectural designer Amy Leedham (www.amyleedham.com) as well as artist Alex Hirst (www.openedsketchbook.com). Project images can be found on the homepage.

The relatively recent shift from the critical to the curatorial has led to the intellectual production of catalogues rather than critiques. Questions regarding the relationship between architecture as an art and a discipline soon follow. The largely untouched territory binding the aesthetics of architecture to its epistemologies has quickly becoming the source of interest for me. Specifically, the parallel emergence of what we call modern architecture and pragmatist thought in the United States around the beginning of the 20th century is fascinating.

BORN: Fargo, North Dakota, USA, 1983

HOMETOWN: Bismarck, North Dakota, USA

UNIVERSITY: BS Philosophy, M.Arch., North Dakota State University, 2007

POST-GRAD: MA Histories & Theories (Dist), Architectural Association, 2008

WORK: Helenske Design Group, Intern Architect, 2006/07

cds:build/clarke:desai, Architectural Consultant, 2009/10

TEACHING:

UC Berkeley, Architecture, Lecturer in Architectural History, 2012

California College of the Arts, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Theory, 2011-12

UC Santa Cruz, History of Art & Visual Culture, Lecturer in Architectural History, 2011-12

Architectural Association, HTS, 3rd Year Tutor, 2008-11

Architectural Association, MA HCT, Tutor/Consultant, 2009-11

University of Greenwich, Diploma HTS Lecturer, 2009-11

University of Greenwich, MSc Arch. Studies Lecturer, 2009-11

University of Greenwich, First Year HTS Lecturer, 2010