summarize
johnbarak
8 9 ofmeaning. Functionalists in general (and Le Corbusier in particular) did not use or develop in depth this dimension of architecture; firstly, because their work was an attack on the symbolic .architecture of the Academy and secondly, because there existed no rigorous theoretical context that would allow such a development.
Now, however, the dimension of meaning, present but underdeveloped in the first phase of functionalism, can be confronted. The polemical conditions facing architecture in the beginning of this century no longer exist, while the historical perspective and theoretical means to conceptualize the role of meaning in architecture, have been created. That is, it is now possible to reintegrate the tendencies of the 1960s and early 1920s into a more comprehensive ideology which fundamentally emphasizes the development of the symbolic dimension the introduction of the problem of meaning within the process of design in a systematic and conscious way. Such an approach might be seen as a "neo-functionalism...
The idea of such a neo-functionalism is opposed to the respective neo-rationalist and neo-realist positions in the sense that they have developed isolated fragments of the original doctrine and, in this way, have eliminated the complex contradictions inherent in functionalism. A neo-functionalist position would neither eliminate nor
solve these dialectical contradictions but rather would assume them as one of the main forces which keep alive the development of ideas in architecture. Thus the concept of neo-functionalism would exclude neither the neo-realist nor the neo-rationalist notions, but rather add and develop the fundamental dimension of meaning, thereby reconstituting all dimensions of the original doctrine.
This should not be seen, however, as a mere revival or development of functionalism as originally conceived, nor as a reconsideration of functionalism in order to realize its dated and, for us, timid propositions and basically reformist aims.
A neo-functionalist position abandons the pendular movement (which is not real change) that has characterized the passage from one ideology to the next, now represented by functionalism, now by neo-rationalism and neo-realism. Such an association tends, through the underlying idealism inherent not only in functionalism but in most architectural ideologies, to eliminate or neutralize contradiction. Rather, such a position proposes the development of the progressive aspects of functionalism, an action which implies the effective transformation of its idealistic nature, building a dialectical basis for architecture.
Mario Gandelsonas
Post-Functionalism
The critical establishment within architecture has told us that we have entered the era of "post-modernism." The tone with which this news is delivered is invariably one of relief, similar to that which accompanies the advice that one is no longer an adolescent. Two indices of this supposed change are the quite different manifestations of the "Architettura Razionale" exhibition at the Milan Triennale of 1973, and the "Ecole Des Beaux Arts" exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1975. The former, going on the assumption that modern architecture was an outmoded functionalism, declared that architecture can be generated only through a return to itself as an autonomous or pure discipline. The latter, seeing modern architecture as an obsessional formalism, made itself into an implicit statement that the future lies paradoxically in the past, within the peculiar response to function that characterized the nineteenth century's eclectic command of historical styles.
What is interesting is not the mutually exclusive character of these two diagnoses and hence of their solutions, but rather .the fact that both of these views enclose the very project of architecture within the same defini tion: one by which the terms continue to be function (or program) and form (or type). In so doing, an attitude toward architecture is maintained that differs in no significant way from the 500-year-old tradition of humanism.
The various theories of architecture which properly can be called "humanist" are characterized by a dialectical opposition: an oscillation between a concern for internal accommodation-the program and the way it is materialized-and a concern for articulation of ideal themes in form-for example, as manifested in the configurational significance of the plan. These concerns were understood as two poles of a single, continuous experience. Within pre-industrial, humanist practice, a balance between them could be maintained because both type and function were invested with idealist views of man's relationship to his object world. In a compari son first suggested by Colin Rowe, of a French Parisian hOtel and an English country house, both buildings from the early nineteenth century, one sees this opposition manifested in the interplay between a concern for expression of an ideal type and a concern for programmatic statement, although the concerns in each case are differently weighted. The French hotel displays rooms of an elaborate sequence and a spatial variety born of internal necessity, masked by a rigorous, well-proportioned external fa(ade. The English country house has a formal internal arrangement of rooms which gives way to a picturesque external massing of elements. The former bows to program on the interior and type on the f~ade; the latter reverses these considerations.
11
• With the rise of industrialization, this balance seems to have been funda mentally disrupted. In that it had of necessity to come to terms with problems of a more complex functional nature, particularly with respect to the aecommodation of a mass client, architecture became increasingly a social or programmatic art. And as the functions became more complex, the ability to manifest the pure type-form eroded. One has only to compare William Kent's competition entry for the Houses of Parliament, where the form of a Palladian Villa does not sustain the intricate program, with Charles Barry's solution where the type-form defers to program and where one sees an early example of what was to become known as the promenade architectumle. Thus, in the nineteenth century, and continuing on into the twentieth, as the program grew in complexity, the type-form became dio minished as a realizable concern, and the balance thought to be fundamen tal to all theory was weakened. (Perhaps only Le Corbusier in recent history has successfully combined an ideal grid with the architectural promenade as an embodiment of the original interaction.)
This shift in balance has produced a situation whereby, (or the past fifty years, architects have understood design as the product of some oversim plified form-follows-function formula. This situation even persisted during the years immediately following World War II, when one might have expected it would be radically altered. And as late as the end ofthe 1960s, it was still thought that the polemics and theories of the early Modem Movement could sustain architecture. The major thesis of this attitude was articulated in what could be called the English Revisionist Functionalism of Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, and Archigram. This neo-functionalist attitude, with its idealization of technology, was invested with the same ethical positivism and aesthetic neutrality of the prewar polemic. How ever, the continued substitution of moral criteria for those of a more formal nature produced a situation which now can be seen to have created a functionalist predicament, precisely because the primary theoretical justification given to formal arrangements was a moml imperative that is no longer operative within contemporary experience. This sense of dis placed positivism characterizes certain current perceptions of the failure of humanism within a broader cultural context.
There is also another, more eomplex, aspect to this predicament. Not only can functionalism indeed be recognized as a species of positivism, but like positivism, it now can be seen to issue from within the terms of an idealist view of reality. For functionalism, no matter what its pretense, continued the idealist ambition of creating architecture as a kind of ethically consti tuted form-giving. But because it clothed this idealist ambition in the radically stripped forms of technological production, it has seemed to represent a break with the pre-industrial past. But, in fact, functionalism is really no more than a late phase of humanism, rather than an alternative to it. And in this sense, it cannot continue to be taken as a direct manifes tation of that which has been called "the modernist sensibility."
Both the Triennale and the Beaux Arts exhibitions suggest, however, that the problem is thought to be somewhere else-not so much with functionalism per se, as with the nature of this so-called modernist sensi bility. Hence, the implied revival of neo-classicism and Beaux Arts academicism as replacements for a continuing, if poorly understood, modernism. It is true that sometime in the nineteenth century, there was
indeed a crucial shift within Western consciousness: one which can be characterized as a shift from humanism to modernism. But, for the most part, architecture, in its dogged adherence to the principles of function, did not participate in or understand the fundamental aspects ofthat change. It is the potential difference in the nature of modernist and humanist theory that seems to have gone unnoticed by those people who today speak of eclecticism, post-modernism, or neo-functionalism. And they have failed to notice it precisely because they conceive of modernism as merely a stylistic manifestation of functionalism, and functionalism itself as a basic theoret ical proposition in architecture. In fact, the idea of modernism has driven a wedge into these attitudes. It has revealed that the dialectic form and function is culturally based.
In brief, the modernist sensibility has to do with a changed mental attitude toward the artifacts of the physical world. This change has not only been manifested aesthetically, but also socially, philosophically, and technologically-in sum, it has been manifested in a new cultural attitude. This shift away from the dominant attitudes of humanism, that were pervasive in Western societies for some four hundred years, took place at various times in the nineteenth century in such disparate disciplines as mathematics, music, painting, literature, film, and photography. It is displayed in the non-objective abstract painting of Malevich and Mondrian; in the non-narrative, atemporal writing of Joyce and Apollinaire; the atonal and poly tonal compositions of Schonberg and We bern; in the non narrative films of Richter and Eggeling.
Abstraction, atonality, and atemporality, however, are merely stylistic manifestations of modernism, not its essential nature. Although this is not the place to elaborate a theory of modernism, or indeed to represent those aspects of such a theory which have already found their way into the literature of the other humanist disciplines, it can simply be said that the symptoms to which one has just pointed suggest a displacement of man away from the center of his world. He is no longer viewed as an originating agent. Objects are seen as ideas independent of man. In this context, man is a discursive function among complex and already-formed systems of language, which he witnesses but does not constitute. As Levi-Strauss has said, "Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reason and of which man knows nothing." It is this condition of displacement which gives rise to design in which authorship can no longer either account for a linear development which has a 'beginning' and an 'end'-hence the rise of the atemporal-or account for the invention of form-hence the abstract as a mediation between pre-existent sign sys tems.
Modernism, as a sensibility based on the fundamental displacement of man, represents what Michel Foucault would specify as a new episteme. Deriving from a non-humanistic attitude toward the relationship of an individual to his physical environment, it breaks with the historical past, both with the ways ofviewing man as subject and, as we have said, with the ethical positivism of form and function. Thus, it cannot be related to functionalism. It is probably for this reason that modernism has not up to now been elaborated in architecture.
But there is clearly a present need for a theoretical investigation of the
12
basic implications of modernism (as opposed to modern style) in architec ture. In his editorial "Neo-Functionalism," in Oppositions 5, Mario Gan delsonas acknowledges such a need. However, he says merely that the "complex contradictions" inherent in functionalism-such as neo-realism a.nd neo-rationalism-make a form ofneo-functionalism necessary to any new theoretical dialectic. This proposition continues to refuse to recognize that the form/function opposition is not necessarily inherent to any ar chitectural theory and so fails to recognize the crucial difference between modernism and humanism. In contrast, what is being called post functionalism begins as an attitude which recognizes modernism as a new and distinct sensibility. It can best be understood in architecture in terms of a theoretical base that is concerned with what might be called a modernist dialectic, as opposed to the old humanist (i.e., functionalist) opposition of form and function.
This new theoretical base changes the humanist balance of form/function to a dialectical relationship within the evolution of form itself. The dialec tic can best be described as the potential co-existence within any form of two non-corroborating and non-sequential tendencies. One tendency is to presume architectural form to be a recognizable transformation from some pre-existent geometric or platonic solid. In this case, form is usually understood through a series of registrations designed to recall a more simple geometric condition. This tendency is certainly a relic of humanist theory. However, to this is added a second tendency that sees architectural form in an atemporal, decompositional mode, as something simplified from some pre-existent set of non-specific spatial entities. Here, form is under stood as a series of fragments-signs without meaning dependent upon, and without reference to, a more basic condition. The former tendency, when taken by itself, is a reductivist attitude and assumes some primary unity as both an ethical and an aesthetic basis for all creation. The latter, by itself, assumes a basic condition offragmentation and multiplicity from which the resultant form is a state of simplification. Both tendencies, however, when taken together, constitute the essence of this new, modern dialectic. They begin to define the inherent nature of the object in and of itself and its capacity to be represented. They begin to suggest that the theoretical assumptions of functionalism are in fact cultural rather than universal.
Post-functionalism, thus, is a term of absence. In its negation of functionalism it suggests certain positive theoretical alternatives existing fragments of thought which, when examined, might serve as a framework for the development of a larger theoretical structure-but it does not, in and of itself, propose to supply a label for such a new con sciousness in architecture which I believe is potentially upon us.
Peter Eisenman
The Third Typology
From the middle of the eighteenth century, two distinct typologies have informed the production of architecture.
The first, developed out of the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, and initially formulated by the Abbe Laugier, proposed that a natural basis for design was to be found in the model of the primitive hut. The second, growing out of the need to confront the question of mass production at the end of the nineteenth century, and most clearly stated by Le Corbusier, proposed that the model of architectural design should be founded in the production process itself. Both typologies were firm in their belief that rational science, and later technological production, embodied the most progressive "forms" of the age, and that the mission of architecture was to conform to, and perhaps even master these forms as the agent of progress.
With the current questioning of the premises of the Modern Movement, there has been a renewed interest in the forms and fabric of pre-industrial cities, which again raises the issue of typology in architecture. From Aldo Rossi's transformations of the formal structure and typical institutions of the eighteenth-century city, to the sketches of the brothers Krier that recall the primitive types of the Enlightenment philosophe~, rapidly multiplying examples suggest the emergence of a new, third typology.
We might characterize the fundamental attribute of this third typology as an espousal, not of an abstract nature, nor of a technological utopia, but rather of the traditional city as the locus of its concern. The city, that is, provides the material for classification, and the forms of its artifacts provide the basis for re-composition. This third typology, like the first two, is clearly based on reason and classification as its guiding principles and thus differs markedly from those latter-day romantic isms of "townscape" and "strip-city" that have been proposed as replacements for Modern Movement urbanism since the fifties.
Nevertheless, a closer scrutiny reveals that the idea of type held by the eighteenth-century rationalists was of a very different order from that of the early modernists and that the third typology now emerging is radically different from both.
The celebrated "primitive hut" of Laugier, paradigm of the first typology, was founded on a belief in the rational order of nature; the origin of each architectural element was natural; the chain that linked the column to the hut to the city was parallel to the chain that linked
13