aureli pier v - log 3 - who is afraid of the form object 02

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Architecture and Content

Who is afraid of the Form-Object?

Rabbit is the new Beef…Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a life-long immersion in the arbitrary.

Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, 2000

If there was a commonly held view in the 1990s that the idea of architectural form had evaporated

within the urban space and that, consequently, the idea of urban space had taken over even within the

field of architecture itself, the course of recent events seems, in part, to prove this hypothesis wrong.

The “monumental” image of the destruction of the twin towers inaugurated a new season of grand and

monolithic public monuments in which architecture never disappears, but in fact remains

conspicuously on the scene, “pumped up” to extreme limits. Towers, libraries, theaters, museums,

office buildings, auditoriums, stadiums, and terminals that seem like small cities, oppose discrediting

the idea of an infinite and dispersed city (or perhaps instead they confirming it in the most tragic and

frenzied way possible). The “shape” of this architecture seems aimed at recovering architecture’s

canonical place on the urban skyline. However, judging from the latest large-scale landmarks adorning

the image of the contemporary city, this presence is rather debatable. For quite some time architectural

criticism – indeed the entire field of architecture – has insisted upon ignoring the most important

question of this “new” scale of the urban project: its architectural form. The notes that follow attempt to

re-open this “old” debate.

1.

During a recent lecture on the state of contemporary architecture, Robert Somol opposed the concept of

shape1 to that of form.2 Somol describes shape as easy; that is, its constitution does not result from a

conscious generative process but rather springs forth from improvisation and chance. In comparison,

form asserts an inherent difficulty, manifesting itself as an expressed index of its generational process.

Shape is viewed as a low-resolution image, while form is the index of a conscious and explicable

method imprinted in an object.

1 Cf. Michael Fried “Shape as Form: Frank Stella new Paintings” in Artforum 5:3, November 1966, pgs. 18-27.2 Robert E. Somol, Shapers and Movers, lecture at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, April 2004, cf. Robert E. Somol, “12Reasons to get back into Shape», in: Rem Koolhaas, AMOMA, Content, Taschen, Colonia, 2003.

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Therefore, while form, according to Somol, must be reasoned, shape is arbitrary.

This distinction divides the panorama of contemporary architecture into two categories: the shapers

and the movers. According to Somol, the former find their strategies in the instantaneous appearance of

formal manifestation, while the latter center their work on the generative process of form, starting from

external or algorithmic data.

The critical operation Somol proposes is of interest because it effectively crushes the recurring

mythology in architecture and urbanism – the theoretical, sociological, anthropological, technological,

geometric, and utopian – that use as a scientific apparatus, in order to mask what is becoming a mere

landscape of shapes, as spectacular, symbolic, and monumental as they are ultimately self-referential.

Countering the false consciousness demonstrated by architectural culture in the past few years, a

posture bred on the obstinate negation of this reality, Somol turns toward a new architectural optimism.

He envisions a world in which architects, finally free from the intellectual taboo of the difficult and of

their many responsibilities to society, technological resources, program, and the moral blackmail of

utopia can legitimately reappropriate a space of their own, which until recently was considered to be

superfluous.

To better describe this space, Somol traces a genealogy that extends from Malevich’s Architectonics to

Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, to John Hejduk’s masques, and then to the latest project designs

by OMA, an office that, for some years, has been spreading gigantic and monolithic shapes throughout

the world, from the U.S. to China. These projects are already completely liberated from the speculative

and urban characteristics that typified OMA’s work in previous decades.

According to Somol, such examples of new shape-architecture do not require any critical, hermeneutic,

geometric, linguistic, formal, scientific, or metaphysical effort in order to be “created” and

“interpreted.” They are the extrusion of a simple graphic gesture that explicitly and quickly

communicates the irresistible sex appeal, innate grace, and, above all, “cool” presence of the new

shaped architecture.

The minimalist attitude that appears in the forms of shaped architecture’s impact is quite different from

the idea of rationalism that the term minimalism usually evokes in the architectural field. On the

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contrary, the new shape-architecture seems to recover a precocious characteristic of minimalist

sculpture that was labelled “theatrical” when it appeared in the mid-1960s.

2.

In building this critical hypothesis, Somol seems to refer to Michael Fried’s 1967 essay, Art and

Objecthood, although he reverses the conclusion. In this well-known negative review of minimal art,

Fried attempts to salvage a modernist formalism threatened by the totemic, void, and objectified

literalness of minimal art. Fried accused Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and their colleagues of creating

art that was too easy, too literally similar to existing reality, and thus too theatrical and graceful.

For Fried, art had to defeat theater as a form of seductive narration or attempted realism that occupies

the same space as our bodily experience. Art, Fried argues, should center on its formal conventions,

which are susceptible to renewal or destruction, while concurrently remaining irreducible to everyday

reality. In this sense, Fried was saying that minimalist sculpture, which both he and Clement Greenberg

defined as “literal,” is reduced to the reproduction of realistic forms. According to Fried, this occurs

through the reproduction of the forms’ ”spectacular” simplicity, which is irremediably normalized and

insufficiently abstract: not built up through the rigorous verification of artistic principles in the abstract

and atopic space of art but rather obliterated by realistically material and contextual situations.

Contrary to current art and architectural criticism – which often confounds minimalism with a style that

is vaguely purist, essentialist and idealistic – Fried found the point of no return at which art had been

conclusively removed from its pedestal and immersed in the space of real experience. In his critique,

Fried ultimately affirmed that Minimal Art was founded on the pure Objecthood of things (he was

referring to Donald Judd’s specific objects where Judd was finally destroying the distinction between

the abstract and material conventions of painting and sculpture), and therefore, on a scenic depiction of

presence, on the theatrical.

Due to his resolutely assertive and apparently dogmatic manner, Fried’s essay raised a number of

polemics and, above all, became the object of sarcastic derision because of the moralist attitude and the

aesthetic responsibility (deemed anachronistic) he undertook in defining the boundaries of art.

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However, because he formulated his critique in such an accurate way, greatly exceeding the nominal

requirements of a negative review, it became one of the most penetrating and sharp interpretations of

minimalism and of the “return of the real.”3 Fried ultimately affirmed that minimal art was founded on

the pure objecthood of things, and therefore on a scenic depiction of presence and the theatrical. His

critique –puritan, modernist, and classicist – ultimately coincided with the same explicit and implicit

positions expressed by the work of the artists themselves. In retrospect, even the minimalist artists

never truly denied the compelling veracity of this reading of their work; instead, they confirmed it in

their own writings and projects. Consider the photographic mappings of Dan Graham, the prosaic

materials used by artists such as Flavin or Judd, or the dynamic and urban spatiality of Richard Serra’s

work.4 Judd and Morris worked on their own strong and analytic awareness articulated (as Fried noted)

not in terms of its avant-garde shock value, but as the conscious choice of their own means and formal

principles. This effort, however, appeared to Fried as a mere “aesthetics of doubt,” a return to a kind of

conscious naturalistic automatism that resolved itself in an indiscriminate acceptance of reality.

Somol seems to take off from this suspended point: after the minimalists’ “return to reality” was

stigmatized by Fried’s formalist criticism, after the Smithsons’ sympathy for “Reality as Found,” after

Venturi’s “amnesty of the real,” and Koolhaas’s acceptance of nothingness, we cannot expect to shield

the impact of the “easy” – the prosaic, the ephemeral, the trivial, the reified with occasional

hermeneutic phantoms– from the linguistics of the 1970s, the historicism of the 1980s, the digital age

of the 1990s, to the new commitment of the present day. It will instead be necessary to free this

ceaseless drift – mappings of urban realities, blobs, diagrams, logos, high-tech décor, installations,

exhibitions, software, graphic design, and coffee-table books – from its false intellectual meandering

and commit ourselves to what really gives body to our discipline. Somol seems to suggest that

revealing the true nature of this avant-garde junkspace will hence be crucial, for it is the hollow core of

architecture as well as the heedless entropy of its language.

The situation Somol portrays, for better or worse, represents the most lucid recording of what is

happening in architecture, specifically, the shift from the mapping-fetishism of the 1990s to a new

shape-fetishism in the zeros of the new millennium. To make the image of this situation more incisive,

Somol, paraphrasing Andre, , writes “a shape is a hole in a thing it is not.” He thus claims that the value3 Cf. Hal Foster, “The Return of the Real” MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1996.4 Cf. PietroValle, Intervista a Dan Graham in www.architettura.it\files, 2001

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of large-scaled shapes in contemporary architecture lies in their absolute superficiality, their semantic

nothingness, and hence, in their pervasive emptiness, in their inexorable condition of their being

sufficient to and for themselves, and in their implacable quality of “being there” instead of “being

something.”

3.

Despite the intellectual lucidity and honesty with which Somol recognizes the true content of the

present situation and his commitment to giving a sense of what might remain buried under conjectures

treating content as metaphor, the position he takes (one that Koolhaas also seems to be slowly leaning

toward) runs the risk of becoming tautological. If such a position does not need further theorization, as

Somol himself implicitly admits, then it is a self-sufficient proposition not even susceptible to criticism.

Paradoxically, the only reproach that can be made of this position concerns its marked ideological

character in the sense that Marx would have given to the term ideology: it creates a (false)

consciousness that sublimates a real situation and removes it from its material context, the only

effective and “empirically contestable” ground. Instead of confronting and eventually operating within

the very reasons that brought us to this situation, too long abandoned and treated with presumptuous

and arrogant negligence, Somol creates the umpteenth hermeneutic phantom in order to further delay a

final confrontation. Following the defeat of other types of false-consciousness, including functionalism,

organicism, realism, pragmatism, supermodernism, minimalism, populism and utopia, there is nothing

left to be had except a sublimation of all such residue, that is, an autistic and self-referential universe

made up of fragments and drifting babbles, incapable of transmitting any sense. This is a universe

nurtured by the tired regimes of words and meanings that, beyond their evident hermeneutic paranoia,

do not propose any new ideas.

One point which deserves attention is that participation – which Somol invokes as a fundamental

characteristic of the light attributes of the new shapes and the low resolution of the easy – is instead the

naturalisation of communication, something that unfortunately no longer has the innocence it had at its

early stages. Today the content of the easy contributes to an economy of information that, behind the

mythology of accessibility, the ordinary, the spontaneous, and the self-organizing, hides an

unconvincing ideological and political opacity. This is based on the fact that an excess of content often

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corresponds to a deficit of sense. The superficiality of Shape is nothing but the solidification of excess

content, metaphors, meanings, and symbols without sense; a solidification for which the architectural

form is often literally a mold. Shapes can be interpreted as hieroglyphics; incomprehensible, yet their

stubbornly figurative and symbolic character wants to be deciphered.

For Fried, objecthood was the theatrical precision with which minimalist sculpture replicated the things

of reality obliterating the condition of the inventive and generative aspirations of art. Given the present

state of architecture, we can say that its content consists in the precision with which architectural form

replicates the low-resolution of information (in other words, our reality), obliterating the condition and

the convention of its form-objecthood. By paraphrasing Fried thus, we can affirm that the majority of

architecture today, in its most emblematic forms – work by Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean

Nouvel, Toyo Ito, Diller + Scofidio, MVRDV and all of their followers – is pure content, or

contenthood, as Fried might say today.

4.

The question however remains: how is the idea of shape emancipated and distinguished from form?

Shape is opposed to form in order to highlight its easiness and immediacy, which in turn reveals form

to be the index of its own constitution: a complex elaboration fabricated by means of what supports it.

Following this, form does not generate but is generated, and therefore forces us to travel over the entire

geometric, linguistic, philosophical, technological, economical, biological, and sociological spaces that

its constitutional process covers.

Thus form becomes an index in the sense that Rosalind Krauss gave this term; essentially, it becomes

the repository of traces left by its own referent.5 According to this view, architecture, whether as a book

or a tattooed body, is read, presuming that its critical function in the world is the very difficulty of its

appearance and the prerogative of its deserving attention.6 If this is the “critical” form to which Somol

refers, then it is not form as form-object but more as a form-index, such as the postmodern form

(always an index), the sign or emblem of a methodology or “critical” phantom.

5 See: Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America», in October 3-4, Spring Fall 1977.6 Cf. Robert E. Somol, Sarah Whiting, “The Doppler Effect” in: Perspecta, “Mining Autonomy” , 2002.

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Therefore, “difficult form” which has embedded in it all of the formal architectural theory of the past

50 years – positively symbolized by the likes of Rudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe, or Peter Eisenman – is

founded on the belief that it is necessary to construct a complex “dispositif” for form, a whole system

of virtual objects to support it and which are proof of its existence: a diagram of its own constitutional

process.

In limiting the existence of form to this tradition, architecture capable of producing forms in a

projective, analytic, and phenomenological manner without relying on the extenuating diagrammatic

pathways of the “difficult” is the first thing excluded from the spectrum of formalism. This would

exclude, for example, the work of Le Corbusier, Mies, Rossi, Stirling and OMA. This procedure also

ignores the prerogative of the true theory of form which has always been based on the immanence of

the form itself and never on the application of a method for producing form. In founding the “theory of

formal method” in literature, Boris Eichenbaum affirmed that “what is fundamental to the formalists is

not the problem of the methods of the study of literature, but literature purely as an object of study. In

substance, we are not to talk about nor discuss any methodology in particular. We instead speak, and

can only speak, of some certain theoretic principles that have not been suggested to us by a given

methodological system or a granted aesthetic principle, but from the study of concrete material in its

specific peculiarities”.7

Therefore, the idea of form is neither necessarily identified with a method nor understood as virtual and

transcendental space, nor is seen as impregnated with notational techniques that always remain

estranged from the logic of the form constituted before us. An idea of form in architecture neither needs

to coincide with Wittkower’s proportional diagrams, where the geometric proportional system

completely replaces the objective mass of architecture, nor with the “digitalist” architecture of Greg

Lynn, of Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and of others for whom form is “generated” by algorithmic processes,

the complexity of which often becomes completely disproportional vis-à-vis the phenomenology of real

space, or at least in relation to what architectural form can inscribe.

Ultimately, architectural form is commodity, just as commodity was theorised by the economist Piero

Sraffa in his attempt to demystify, with analytic precision and political passion, the value of commodity

7 Boris Ejchebaum, La teoria del “metodo formale” in Tzvetan Todrov, I formalisti russi; Teoria della letteratura e metodocritico, Einaudi, Torino, 1968, cit. pg. 31.

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as determined by the virtual spectrum of what we refer to today (with much nonchalance) as the

Market.8

Eschewing the mythology of a commodity determined by the curves of supply and demand, Sraffa

instead illustrated how the re-distribution of surplus is in no way the automatic by-product of the

interaction between factors of production and factors of consumption, but is a thing in itself. It thus

becomes possible to consciously conceive (and represent) the entire economic system as scenario,

independent from the factors of production and the factors of consumption, a scenario where

commodities are produced by the means of commodities themselves. The economic theory developed in

vacuo by Sraffa did not limit itself to the designation of a circular production process, but elucidated

the economic process as something based on the clarity and necessity of its form. In Sraffa’s theory,

commodities are radically abstract, because they refer to reality, a reality understood as the material

necessity and concreteness of the thing that produces other things. Consequently, commodity does not

have an autonomous meaning of its own, nor is it a self-referential entity; rather, it is an instrument-

object that generates a productive cycle: the principle of subsistence in economy.

The logical austerity of Sraffa’s scenario is certainly a model and a hypothesis (in the absolute sense of

the term): not simply a “critical” description of reality, even as it carries a ferocious and devastating

criticism of reality itself (as exemplified by the irrational criteria of a marginalist economic system). It

is exactly because Sraffa’s logic acts as both a hypothesis and a model of sense that this criticism was

not addressed with arguments relating to content but with the rigorous and concrete grounds of the

economic form itself. Therefore, for Sraffa, economic form represents the process of production and re-

distribution realised through commodities, where form is seen for its performative and constructive

qualities and not for its symbolic or informative meaning.

Fate ensures that the architect will find form as an object in his path, and only by virtue of a clearly

founded, affirmed, and established objecthood, will it become intelligible: something fully grasped,

used, composed, and criticised.9 Form can be defined absolutely, but only through its own

phenomenology – the way it is materially fabricated and inserted into the operative sphere of use – not

only as a “body” but also as a full and direct expression of a sense, created by its logic and constructive

8 Cf. Piero Sraffa, Production of commodities by means of commodities, Prelude to a critique to Economic Theory,Cambridge University Press, 1975.9 Cf. Etienne Souriau, L’avenir de l’esthetique ; Essai sur l’objet d’une science naissante, Felix Alcan, Paris 1929.

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foundation.10 This way, form is always austere, but its austerity is not a formal language, nor is it a

style. Austerity is precision, the engagement of the responsibilities with which form is chosen,

enunciated, and built. Form can also assume an eclectic, available, realistic, modest, ordinary, comical,

heavy, technocratic, elegant, and even modern style, but while this is important for personal choice,

from a theoretical point of view its value is relative. As a result, that which contemporary criticism

calls Minimal Architecture becomes the victim of a semantic caricature of the idea of austerity, a

boring and insipid one at that.

Form is always opaque in its meaning, while it is also always immediate and transparent in its

establishment. This is why, in a period in which we are immersed in a complex and already

problematic communications economy, where the immediacy of information corresponds to its own

opacity, we must concentrate on the idea of form, determining the specific sense of it for each case, in

such a way as to salvage it from its own already tired and self-referential drift into content.

This Text was first published in Log No. 3, New York, NY: Anyone Corporation, Fall 2004

10 Gottlob Frege, "Über Sinn und Bedeutung." Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 1892, pg. 25-50.

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aureli pier v - log 3 - who is afraid of the form object 02

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