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The Lab ors

Val K, Warke

ww

of BlissWhdl LO mdkc of these r presenLdltons? these

plan-ish, perspective-ish, model-ish, even video-

ish things occupying these galleries? How are they

representing? - and what? And, perhaps more to

the pOint, reacqua inted w ith the expressiveness of

'elegant simplicity' - thank you Mies, Ignasi de

So la-Mora les, and the rest for reminding us w hat

a masterpiece of sophisticated clarity that German

Pav ilion in Barcelona was; thank you, MONARK,

for that stark Scylla and Cha rybdis, the Finnish

Pavilion in Sev ille (and th ank yo u, Archi tecture

Society, for adopting it); thank you, Rafael

Moneo, for that proscenium of a Museum in

Merida - reacquainted with the revived virtues of

forma l res t ra int, w hy does the rather hyperact ive

modernity of Morphosis seem to enthrall, to

bedazzle?

Various critics, some frustrated by the varieties

of presen tation languages that have prol iferated

within the pa st thirty years, some simply lazy, have

often noted that the drawi ngs and models

Morphosis chooses to air in publ ic are 'too

comp licated' , 'too di fficult' to understand.

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w..

s: Morphosis: comp lete wo rkso-a

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Sal ick Hea lth ca re

Certainly, there is a paradox at work here.

Generally, when drawings and models are

intricately detailed and technically precise, such as

those by Morphosis, it suggests that the labor of

representation is in inverse proportion to the labor

of app rehension; tha t it IS in tended to give

us uninterrupted access to the physical

characteristics of proposed constructions. Instead,

this labor seems to circumscribe these works with

a resistance to reading.

I suggest that these 'complexities' and

'difficulties' are not only central to the

architecture itself, but are the sources of its

principal virtues.

Modern ism has conditioned us to the notion

that complex fo rm should be the result of so me

pro grammati c complexities (Fun ctiona lism). Or

that the complexities shou ld be the result of some

ironic structure employed by the wor k 's author inreference to the complexities of life itself (New

Crit icism)l . Or that compl ex it ies mig ht so meh ow

be incorporated to detain overly facile perce ption

(Russia n Formalism). None of these arguments

completely prepares us for the eviden t origins or

impacts of the complex ities see n here.

For, while these representations seem to

frustrate our achieving direct access to these

buildings, instead they seem to entice both our

rat iocinati ve and haptic senses. While less th an

mimetic reteliings of the physiques of buil d in gs

intended or built,t h

are actually very mimeticaccounts of the experiential phenomena one

might encounte r w ithi n and around those

buildings .2 Specificaliy, they are accounts of the

kinds of pleasure3 one might sense in these

constructi ons, and in much of arc hitecture in

genera l. Th ere is a persisten t theme in the work

of Morphosis: the technology and precision that

appears to saturate these representations do not

function as the standard modern indices of facil ity

ASE Design Center



b The Labors of Bliss

"'";;•

, .

•".

11I\d ltu1c.l!U!\tdlly, 1 I I I T H 1 l ' ~ S emu commodity, but

they pose instead as the elus ive indices of de light

(Vitruvius's venustas).

Of cou rse , many of the complicated attributes

of the se drawings as wel l as of the designs

themselves can be traceable to the media of their

production . While the early drawings were

produced by hand and the later one s have large ly

been produced by compu ter, they disclose certain

similar traits. Just as ha nd drawings can retain

ma rginal sketche s and a patina of skin oil and the

grinding of parallel ru lers, computer drawings can

easily be made to re tain traces of their

construction, or, to be more specif ic, of the ir

plotting: a computer does nothing if not

remember, and it can reme mber the history of its

aggregate composition, and repre sen t that history

even as it presents its present. What one sees,

then, are often the th ing and its making . The

process of p ro duction is disp layed along with the

objec t.4

The computer also seems to be contribut ing

some of it s own morph ological tools to the de signprocess. 'C lipping,' for example, occurs when the

image goes beyond certain invisible planes - the

ro ma nt ica lly nominated 'h ither' and 'yon' planes

- and gets indiscriminately dissevered . This

su ggests the presence of a definable yet invisible

pictu re plane located som ewhere in space , and

one that causes ma ss to dissolve, One sees

'cl ipped' latt ices and wall segm en ts in the long

Beach Scho o l, the Scie nce Cente r School, and in

parts of the Mack Residence, for example, The

obselVer of the se buildings has the sensation of

being repea ted ly displaced, wit h the individ ual's

visu al pyramid (Brunelleschi's fifteen th -century

vers ion of linear perspective is still the computer's

rep resentational scie nce of choice) implicitly

dispersed across a series of equivalent pyramids

su rrounding the structure, includi ng above and

1. Robe rt Penn WJrren, io r a m in his 194 3 essay

«Pure and Impure Poetry» (Kenyon Review 5, Spring

1943) proclaimed that the poet's vision must have

ereference to the complexities and contradictions oi

experience." New Criticism's staunchest arc hitectural

proponent has been Robert Ven t uri, whose Comp lex ity

and Contradictioo in Architecture (New York: Museum

of Modern Art. 1966) transcribes the work of various

affiliates of the New Critical movement (such as Warren,

T S [ Iiot , Cleanth Brooks, Williilrn Empson, S anleyEdg ar Hyman, and others) into an arch itec tura l

ar9ument When I discuss «complexity» here, I am rIOt

loading It With the accouterments proposed by Venturi,

snce I believe his "complex ity" carries with it the Haws

centril l to the concep t as propounded by the New

Crit ics : priVileging the work as the exclusive effect of

compleX ity (versus the Intricate network of subjects

invo lved in the dialogica l act oi a p p r e h ~ n d n rnclud ing

various level sof authoring and read ing), and suggest ing

that «diHiculty" ultimately points toward the virtuosity

oi the responsble author/craftsman,

2_ Th ere is no dou bt that th is «diHiculty" is rntended,

even at the experientia l leve l. In describing the MTV

Studios, for example, the archlte<:ts' text heralds, d t is

difficult to be in .. .. (Morphosis: Buildings and PrOJects,

19B9-1992, New York : Rizzol i, 1994, P 66). Oi cou rse,the myriad rap id cuts tha t constitute a musIC video could

conceivablybe cancelled by an architecture of rapid cuts

I use this term guardedly

4 Paradoxically, a certain 8enjaminian aura is preserved

in this highly mec hanized process.



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Crawford Residence

Ihis leads to another source of complexity in

this work: there is an exuberant polyphony ev ide nt

in these bu ildings and their representations. Each

drawing, each space, each surface poses several

synchronous and dehie rarchized eleme nts t hat

advance and recede as subjects of our

apprehension. One f inds, for example, that there

IS a tende ncy to develop formal equivalence s

between beams, duds, and lighting fixtures: long,

rectangular objects that vie for attention even as

they excha nge thei ratt

ribut es (the light may beseen as a support, the beam to be suspended as if

it were a duct, the duct confronts the beam as a

battering ram). It is as if they return to their

elemental, l i n e ~ d r a w n origins.

It is IronK, then, given this apparent

polyp hony, t ha t the Mo rphotic work presented

here is almost exclusively done under the principal

tutelage of one individual: Thom Mayne. Ye t there

is an assid uous effort to spurn authorship per se .

In wr iting abou t the buildings, there is always

'we' . And t his 'we ' is not just the standa rd

affectat ion of a legally constituted collaboration

(5 0 resiliently formulated in recent history by

Wa lter Gropi us with his Th e Arch itects

Collaborative), but appears to be an expression of

the m u l t i p v o i c e d origin of these constructions.

Rat he r t ha n co nc ede to auteurism, th ese w ork s

effectively strive for narratorship. (Note how

di fficult it is even to say Morphosis's.) In proposing

their ins inu ated comp lex of uttera nces, they reject

the monological disclosure of spaces in favor of a

more involved discurs ive engagement .

This discursive aspect bring s to mind Rola nd

Barthes, on the Composed Heads of Arcimboldo:

«These Images [heads composed of fruit,animals, plant s, and the like] bear a rela t ion to

language, but also to discourse: for example, to

the popu lar tale: the method of description is the

same.

6. There seem to be a 101 01 reference s to Le Corbusier

lingering around these works. especially for work by a

gang from California.



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10. One except ion is th e case of the 6th Street lIouse.

wherc the «things. arc given alphabet ical

designatiOns . Perhaps they are left anonymous because

there are many of them. H a ~ i n g len or eleven

named objects lounging about within a single house

might be claus trophobic. Even then, It IS SignifICant t hat

the objects are fellered and not numbered, eschewing

mathematical empiricism in favor of the suggestion of

an abbrevia ted naming system, The lireplacelstove «B, »

for m p l e , seems related to the oS» who ohen

appea rs in Victorian nove ls: an old CO l ege ch um, once

cha rming and reso urcefu l, whose subsequen t busness

and relat iona l co nt rivan ces have led to several eth ical

crises and a rumored slide into degeneracy. Perhaps

these letters are ur-names.

Michel Foucault deals with the necessities of

naming in his The Order of Things, whe re,

theorizing the wo rk of Ca rolus Linnaeus, he

concludes that, in re lation to nature:

«Things and words are very st rictl y

interwoven: natu re is posited only throug h the

grid of denominations, and - t hough w ithout

such names it would remain mute and invisible

it glimmers far off beyond them , continuous ly

present on the far side of th is grid , which

neve rtheless presents it to our knowledge andrenders it visible only when wholly span ned by

language. }) 12

Not only does the nam ing suggest Du champ's

naming, but the ir tec hn ology seems also to point

to Duchamp. Here is a verSion of Duchamp's

Glider, from the Bride .

The Chariot shou ld be ma de of rods

of emancipa ted metal; the chariot

would have the property of giving itsel f

without resistance of grav ity

to a force acting horizontally

upon it. (See the fa ll of the weig ht, in

the form of a bottle of Benedictine) 13

Duchamp repeatedly specifies that these

mach ines are to operate errat ical ly, that is to say,

humanly; despite their status as mach ines, they

are not in te nded to operate as ideal, efficient

machines. Actually, the ir 'operation' is la rgely

sug gestive. In fact , they do nothing. Activi ty is

embedded in their raw ma ter ials (e,g.,

emancipated metal, falling weight). t4

Similarly, the machi nes that populate

Morphosis buildings opera te almost exclus ively in

a myth ic realm . They are more of the order of the

totem than the dynamo . They evoke modernism's

heroic posture while disclos ing the rhe torical

11 Wh ich, based on its form, seems to be less an

evocation of futurism than a reference to Frank Zappa's

Oinah-Moe-Hum, another human/machine of sorts

12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An

Archaeologyof he Human Sciences, New York: Vin tage

Books, 1973, p 160. Interestingly, FOlKault s e e m ~ to be

occupymg Ortega's metaphor, with Ortega's

windowpane - a surrogate fo r the work of art -

becoming Foucault's semantic grid: and Ortega's garden

becoming all of Fouca ult's nature

13. Marcel Ducl1a mp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her

Bachelof's, Even, typographic verSion by Richard

Hamilton, from Duchamp's Green Box, trans. George

Heard Hamilton, New York : Jaap Rletman Inc., Art

- '".0C

'"

Books, 1976 , un paginated. LJnderscoring, pu nctua tion ,

ilnd spacing from the original.

14 . This biomorphic aspect of milchlnery in Morphosis

may have something to do With the aspects of

ma chinery emphasized by Siegfried Giedion In

Mechanization Takes Command (New York: WW.

Norton & Company, Inc., 1969), where his «anonymous

history» finds muchof

its focus in the phasesof

Industrialization in wh ich mach in es firs t came into

contact w ith flesh. Ult imate ly, there is someth ing in the

mach ines of both Duc i1amp and Gied ion - end probably,

by ex tension. of M orphosis - that sug gest comparisons

to the impregnator, the fustlgator. and the Marquis de

Sade's other imagined me<:hanisms of debauchery.



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r The Labors of Bliss

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fi ltered : the French des igner Jean Prouve, w ho

evidently had a mora l effect on the wor k of Thom

Mayne from the beg inn ing. Prouve established

what he described as an «a lpha bet» of structures,

a series of constructive elements that cou ld be

used in dividually or in comb inat ion to resolve

virtua lly any architectu ra l problem. In real ity, not

as reductive as the term «alpha bet» might

suggest each of t he ten structures was given a

name, and described as compris in g a «type» :

«jointed f rame, she ll, shed, prop, vault, H-shapedax ial f ram e, center core, stool, var iab le area grid,

and plastic.»15 Each would find its ideal form and

dimension in t he natu re of the material to be

used . Eac h had its own spat ia l and productive

characteristics that wou ld optimize its usage for

certain programmatic req uirements. Each cou ld

be used in the product ion of a house or a factory.

Ce rtainly, the work of Morphos is seems to have

been inf lue nced by the eth ics of this 'a lphabet,' if

not by some of the specif ic elements themse lves,

Simi lari t ies with Pro uve do no t stop there.

There are also ce rta in resemblances be tween the

worki ng method put forth by Prouve and tho se

employed by Morphosis. Prouve states that his

wo rki ng sequence on every project in vo lves:

a) An idea, be it a piece of furniture or a

construction.

b) A d ial ogue beg un on the spo t wit h associates

by means of highly technica l sketches,

c) A prototype or model.

d) Assessmen t s, t rials, tes ts, corrections, and on ly

th en is a plan drawn Up.1 6

The only major difference betwee n the

me thods of these two off ices is in the pr imacy of

plans . Plans seem to be central to Morphosis's

formulations. They are un doubted ly the catalysts

of the office d ia log ues, and th e necessary

prepara tory components of the model phase.

(Some of the models even seem to be models of

15 See Jean Prouve, Jea n ProuVlf:lPrefabrication

Structures and Elements, ed . Benedikt Huber and Jean

Claude Steinegger. New York . Praeger Publishe rs, 1971,

pp. 28ff

16. Ibid . p. 13



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r The Labors of Bliss

"S•c-o.

.'••'

It is what, again, Ro land Barthes describes in

his discussion of Seve ro Sarduy's Cobra : 7

«Language reconstru cts itse lf elsewhere

under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic

pleasure. Where is thi s elsewhere? In the parad ise

of words. Cobra is in fact a parad isiac text,

utopian (w ithout site), a heterology by plen itude:

all the signif iers are he re and each scores a bu ll 's

eye; the au t hor (the reade r) seems to say to them:

I love you al l (words, phrases, sentences,

adject ives, discont inuities : pell-mell: signs andmirages of objects wh ich they represen t ); a ki nd

of Franciscanism invites al l words to perch, to

flo ck, to f ly off again : a marbled, iridescent text;

we are go rged with language, l ike ch il dren who

are never re fused anyt hin g or sco lded for

anything or, even worse, 'perm itted' anyth ing .

Cobra is the pledge of contin uous jubilati on, the

moment whe n by its very excess ve rbal pleasu re

chokes and ree ls in to bliss.) 18

And in t his work by Morphos is we are

'gorged w ith language'. It presents a surpl us of

architectural elocution , not on ly in t he

construction of its parts, but in the composit ion of

its w holes. We f ind an abundan ce of viewpoints

in t he mult iple evalu ative tech niques used to

produce eac h work, and an abundance of vo ices

in its authorship. There is a saturati on of

representati onal co nvent ions both in the media of

its presentat ion and in its va rious modes of tell in g.

Add to this the works' intr ins ic opt imism - its

perpet ually assert ive endorsement th at

arch itecture is always possib le - and we f ind that

th e works' bounti ful complex it ies and diffi cul t ies

both simu late and stimulate an architectural

blissfu lness.

Oc tober 1998

o

C

0-

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"-ro

co

co

co

17. Severo Sarduy was a Cuba n author to France

H s no ve . Cobra, dea ls specif ical ly w ith a pair of

transve sti tes and, mo re broadly, w ith his recurren t

t he me: ba roqueness, wh ich he saw as an interse ction

betwee n physics and the arts . and characterizes as a

unity achieved '-lith an tinomi es al1d w ithout hierarch ies

Cobra presents transvestism a<; a ploce<;s of

transubstantiation, w ith the 110tion that a body might

cha ng e f rom some thing normative into some thing tha t

exte nds beyond any ca tegorizable archetype, The text

itse lf is composed of fragmented sentences as we l as

frequent sty list ic sh ifts, all of which are inten ded to

ach ieve in the reader what Sarduy desc ribes as a

«baroque)) or «anamorphic reading» of the work (see

hisSaracco). I mention t his because it seems to me that

Sardlly'$ theories and methods might 110t be irre leva nt to

a potential ana lys is of this work we're pe rusi ng

18. Ro lal1d Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans

Richa rd Miller, New York: Hil l and Wang. 1975 , p 8

bliss2 copy

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