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The Journal of Architecture Volume 13 Number 1

For (a) theory (of architecture)

Manuel J. Martn Hernandez

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tara, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

If theory means a series of rules for interpretation and action, which aspire to the explanation and comprehension of reality, we are now living in a situation where theory is not a priority concern, and in the case of architecture probably because theory is also a way of questioning it. As we know, reality is built by theory, but to this a certain distance and time is necessary that active practice does not permit: the quiet contemplation which theoria needs is not at present on architects agenda, thus depriving it of its political task. But is it not necessary to justify architectural decisions, to transmit them, to share a common language? Is it not necessary, in the midst of incomprehensible verbiage, to look for a coherence, to build up knowledge about architecture? The purpose of this paper is to remember and to recall the role played by theory in architectural thought.1 1. Against theory
In America some years ago, a provocative article in the eld of literary studies, written by the neopragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter B. Michaels, with the title Against Theory, had a certain success.2 In its classical meaning, theory denotes a series of rules for interpretation and action, which aspire to the explanation and comprehension of multiple realities with relatively few instruments, that are usually also the ideas of the dominant classes and powers. Theory always places itself at the beginning or the end of thought, providing rst principles from which hypotheses, laws, and methods may be deduced, or summarizing, encoding, and schematizing practice in a general account.3 But between those theoreticians that defend methods for giving assurance to the objectivity and validity of interpretations, and the ones that deny the possibility of a correct interpretation in view of the incapacity of those methods to produce an agreement between interpreters,
# 2008 The Journal of Architecture

Knapp and Michaels established a third way: the task is not establishing a theory but denying the idea of theory itself. If being a theoretician means to believe that there are alternative methods to choose from, and that there are certain beliefs that underpin a particular practice (eg, theory of reception, structuralism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism...), they both inferred that theory was no more than an attempt to escape from practice, because, as they saw it, to be placed outside practice is not possible. Twenty years later, coinciding with the worldwide antiwar movement in the Spring of 2003, the magazine that staged that debate, Critical Inquiry, again questioned the future of theory and critique. The editor, W. J. T. Mitchell, asked what can the relatively weak power of critical theory do in such a crisis?, and, was it true that the great era of theory is now behind us and that we have now entered a period of timidity, backlling, and (at best) empirical accumulation?4 The answers
13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360701865357

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For (a) theory (of architecture) Manuel J. Martn Hernandez

suggested ambivalence for theory: that it was not easy then to be radical at all. And, in regard to architecture, Francesco dal Co opened a debate, in the April, 1999, issue of Casabella, which he then directed, challenging the vacuity of theory. Theory, being neither project, nor history, nor criticism, should occupy the place where those three disciplines crossed. That was where architects might be questioned about the sense of their activity, being interrogated on the meaning and the ways of architectural practice, to extract the problems that are not inherent to the subjective experience, but to the objectivity of a common way of doing, . . .,5 trying to be precise about that which permits people to speak about architecture and understand one another. But, according to dal Co, very few architects undertake that task. Architects have certainly needed some theory in past decades in order to develop their work. Indeed, the architect-theoreticians were the most interesting: Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Peter Eisenman, Vittorio Gregotti, Rafael Moneo, John Hejduk, Rem Koolhaas, etc. But now, the discrediting of architectural theory has led us to hear pronouncements from star-system architects such as Jacques Herzog (from the practice Herzog and de Meuron, winners of a Pritzker prize, nowadays unquestioned and in global demand) who, in response to Jeffrey Kipniss question concerning his relationship with theory, afrms: We do not remember any text that has changed our way of thinking, that has had any meaning for us. . . Words and texts are mere seductions.6 It could not be otherwise: Herzog and de Meurons architecture is skin

and cosmetics,7 ideas (always different for each project, a direct result of brainstorming in the studio) without references (because there are apparently no sources, or openly acknowledged inspiration, pure creation therefore), that, on the other hand, need a rened architectural technique to make them practicable by means of a process of trial and error, even using full-scale models. I quote this example because the more apparently stimulating places of western architecture derive from new technologies and materials, or electronic processes and languages, and around a constructional and speculative practice, increasingly more obsessive and without curb or scruples because of the Western economic boom (even after 11th September, 2001). Faced with this situation, criticism is in retreat: there is no scope for it, and, at least in architecture, that is the reason why there is no place for theory.

2. On theory
We must recall here the etymology of the word theoria. First, it is the experience of looking at the divinity (the theos of theoria). Next, in the face of the Olympic spectacle the spectator (theoros) observing the measured movements of the visible gods it is the theasthai (to look at), from which the theatron (place to look at) also results. Finally, we have the gure of Theoros who, sent to a distant place, separated from society, experiences a radical conversion becoming someone different, a new man. Encountering the divine, participating through the gaze, experiencing a revelation: all that results in something similar to a confrontation with the eternal but, at the same time, it is an experience

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of change, an afrmation of a moment before and a moment after.8 Any of those experiences has altered the knowledge of reality and also of the theoretician him or herself. This is exactly what denes Hermeneutics, so that etymology would bind with a contemporary sense of the theoretical look, that is: interested comprehension of the object and, at the same time, self-building as an individual. In The scholastic point of view, a presentation at the Berlin Free University in 1989, Pierre Bourdieu wrote about the homo scholasticus or academicus as the scholar that, because he or she has the ` necessary means (free time that is: skhole, competence acquired by study, and disposition to invest that time in a very probable triviality), produces discourses freed from current, coercive limits, or from the simple urgency typical of practice (as Aristotles wise man, who is free exactly because he is not tied to the satisfaction of vital needs). 9 The issue is not one of opposing theory to reality; to the contrary, reality is built by theory alternatively, it is theory that reveals or constitutes a reality each time that it is activated: To theorize as Jose Ricardo Morales says means to convert reality into a certain and specic reality.10 A certain distancing is necessary to understanding this, which direct involvement in practice does not permit. Therefore, theoretical reection which is continuously involved in the immediate task of resolving problems is not possible. So Herzogs cynicism just referred to has a certain justication. The issue is not that theory is of no use to him, it is that the quiet contemplation which theora needs is not part of his agenda. And in any case, the habit of architects that, for the sake of the myth of the

architectural creation, deny or avoid any reference to their sources, does not facilitate the establishment of any theory. As Alberto Perez-Gomez recalls, architecture is not only an aesthetic or technological matter, but is fundamentally ethical, given the political dimension that its conceptualisation as a common good possesses, when dened as producing places for human stability and equilibrium.11 Thus, theory is a critical instance from which to interpret reality and to imagine the attainment of a possible future, after a negotiation that is always an expression of that political task.

3. Towards theory
There is not a theory, just as there is not an architecture. Therefore, there is no closed and unique system, but interruption, superimposition and juxtaposition phenomena, that replace the old dominant mechanisms of the Academy with weak and provisional platforms.12 There is no general and immutable knowledge anymore, but instead narrations and discourses. To engage, Theory cannot position itself at the margin of contemporary thought and debate, but it should be moved away from any claims to instrumentality. In the interpretations of its etymology, there is nothing to cause us to think that theory (any intentional look) should have an immediate corollary in practice. It is true that relatively recent support for architectural theory in philosophy or literary criticism (for example, Derridian deconstruction or Deleuzian conceptualisation) has become a direct ally of supposedly avant garde practices. It would seem that theory has repeated again the instrumental vices of Modernity, when reection

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coincided with operation, when theory was no more than ideology, when, as Manfredo Tafuri stated, it substituted analytic rigour with value judgments related to immediate action.13 It is forgotten continuing with Tafuri that criticism is also History and that, in any case, it raises questions but does not advance solutions, in a process in which architecture appears always in continuous transformation. Emphatically, anti-historicism (and therefore the refusal of criticism), either of those that deny history, or of those that use it like an available collection of codes (from an already obsolete formal postmodernism, to the regulations that govern interventions in historic cities), has led to the mystication of architecture and the biased manipulation of its potentialities, on the part of capital and dominant ideology. In that use of philosophy or criticism deriving from comparative literature (after a long transatlantic journey from France or Italy to the USA), Mark Wigley has established ways in which to relate philosophy and architecture, taking account of the reception of Derridas texts, and starting with the question How then to translate deconstruction in architectural discourse? The translation of one language into another is not a simple transference but is a transformation of the original, through which, however, the text may survive. But the translation does not occupy an independent place between both languages, but is inscribed within them: Because language is always already divided, inhabited by the other, and constantly negotiated with it, translation is possible; so, translation between architecture and deconstruction occupies and organizes both discourses, and

thus, to translate deconstruction into architectural discourse is to examine the gaps in deconstructive writing that demand an architectural translation in order that those texts be constituted as deconstructive.14 So, City (Freud, Wittgenstein) or Architecture (Heidegger, Derrida) are metaphors of thought, and accordingly, the ground/structure/ ornament system makes the philosopher into the architect, trying to produce eternally a supported structure and representing it with the addition of art. Deconstruction would inhabit that building not to demolish it but to shake it, to interrogate it, to ascertain its weaknesses, its structural defects. To translate deconstruction into architecture does not lead simply to a formal reconguration of the object. Rather, it calls into question the condition of the object, its objecthood; it problematizes the condition of the object without simply abandoning it.15 It is very curious that the resurgence of theory in the 1970s was caused precisely by a generation that wanted to recover for the profession the intellectual dimension lost in previous years. But the effect of that recovery through French poststructuralism has been that the theory of architecture (or simply theory) has descended into excesses, narrow secrecies and obscurantisms leading to an almost autonomous cultural industry, with its own aura, stars and fashions that needs already to be deconstructed.16 In what manner? By returning to architecture itself. Turning again to Wigley, in one of the debates carried out as part of The Politics of Contemporary Architectural Discourse (1995, Tulane University, New Orleans):

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The Journal of Architecture Volume 13 Number 1

I think architecture is incredibly interesting. The desperate attempt to instrumentalize theory always rests on the premise that architecture is dumb, that it requires this investment from extraordinary theories taken from science, from philosophy, from car mechanics, or whatever, to somehow get it right. I think the more traditional image of architecture is much more interesting. And precisely a lot of its interest has to do with strange hints on mythologies about a prediscursive condition of architecture, the sense that it always avoids theorization, that it cannot be regulated. But the strangeness of architecture is avoided by the instrumentalization of theory, which is written into the rules of the university, it is in the way we operate, in the way we are positioned, in the questions we ask.17 But is it not necessary to continue asking ourselves those questions? One may reject that instrumentalised theory, which sometimes justies or conceals bad architecture, but does that necessarily mean that theory should not occur? Should we resign ourselves to the fact that the architectural project does not need to justify itself anymore?18 The fact is that theory is the only thing that permits its transmission: a shared language (which certainly remains very far from an obligatory code).

4. For theory
We have seen that the most ferocious criticism of theory has come from Neopragmatism. But it is precisely in early Pragmatism (Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey) that we can nd some of the elements that more clearly permit us to overcome the discrediting of theory. This at

least is what was intended in a meeting at Columbia University in 2000 involving the defence of a certain pragmatic imagination,19 where several scholars tried to dismantle the opposition of a practical American architecture without ideas to an alternative more theoretical European ethos. Among the early pragmatist theses analysed, perhaps the most suggestive one was that of William James: What really exists is not things made but things in the making (. . .). Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality.20 This brings to the foreground the questions of transience, of modication and the open strategies of the project, of the recovery of politics (the res publica) and of collective participation set against imposed aesthetics. So we would have timeless ways of building, open programmes, exible procedures, cultures of redistribution rather than of development, etc.,21 that are some of the strategies able to re-politicise society and democratise architecture. To understand the project of architecture always as one of a modication of reality helps one to see it, following Vittorio Gregotti in one of his sharper reections on the project, as an encounter between the rules of the trade and the actual problem, in such a way that each case offers a specic truth to investigate and to be unveiled.22 That is why it is always important to remain in the end with architecture. Recently, Ashley Schafer has suggested a theory after after-theory, that would be able to liberate theory precisely from being instrumentalised through practice, and thus turn it into a platform from which to inform the way we work, rather than to dictate what we make.23 A theory

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that can be developed, changed, and modied over time, far from being a manifesto. Therefore, an idea of theory is proposed that is not prescriptive (as it has been from Vitruvius to Eisenman) but critical within the situation of current architecture, close to Tafuris critical history. A contingent and open theory would therefore be the answer to the denial of theory altogether. Architecture, freed of parallel discourses, of bombastic and incomprehensible verbiage, and understood more as a trade able to negotiate with time, becomes the product of relating projected and built shapes with the developmental ideas. Those ideas and cultural interests are many, but this does not mean that we should tolerate them all. Such multiplicity is only the starting point for future legitimations, it is not a non-critical nal legitimacy.24 Fortunately, once the Academy no longer exists, nor the absolute project, nor a unique system of rules, it is not possible to identify rst principles or immovable foundations. Nevertheless, coherence must exist; even chaos has its rules. In as much as architecture is a way of thinking the world, that thought should be transmissible; and through this process there must be brought to the surface also hidden or non-explicit discourses. Reason and intuition, objective matter and the subjective, problems of form and content, experiences and expectations, tacit and articulated knowledge: both terms of each couple should be made explicit, related, submitted to reection, criticised, shared, perhaps rejected. That is what one calls (a) Theory (of Architecture).

Notes and references

1. This paper is a preliminary version arising from some work done at Columbia University during a sabbatical year (20032004), for which I received a grant from the Direccion General de Universidades del Gobierno Canario, of a projected more extensive text about the present state of the Theory of Architecture. 2. This originally appeared in Critical Inquiry (Summer, 1982), being reprinted as the discussion base text in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory (Chicago/ London, The University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11 30. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, Introduction, op. cit., p. 7. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium, Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, n. 2 (Winter, 2004), p. 326. In that volume are the papers of the Symposium held on 11th 12th April, 2003, in Chicago about The Future of Criticism. 5. Francesco dal Co, Teoria, parola cava?, Casabella, 666 (1999), p. 32. 6. Jeffrey Kipnis, Una conversacion con Jaques Herzog, El Croquis, 84 (1997), p. 18. 7. Jeffrey Kipnis, La astucia de la cosmetica, El Croquis, 84 (1997), p. 22 and Foreword. 8. All this is in David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention (Cambridge/New York/Oakleigh, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 218 219. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, El punto de vista escolastico, Razones practicas (Barcelona, Anagrama, 1997), p. 203 and Foreword. Bourdieus discourse is pertinent here, although he intends to warn us about the dangers of a pure scholastic and therefore non-political thought, which forgets the social and economic privileges that underpin its statements (what he calls the doxa). 10. Jose Ricardo Morales, Arquitectonica. Sobre la idea y el sentido de la arquitectura (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 1999), p. 136.

Acknowledgement
Translation revised by Eugenio Rodrguez.

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11. Alberto Perez-Gomez, The Case for Hermeneutics as Architectural Discourse, in, H. Dunin-Woyseth and K. Noschis, eds, Architecture and Teaching (Lausanne, EAAE, 1998), p. 23. ` 12. See Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Arquitectura debil, Dife rencias. Topografa de la arquitectura contemporanea (Barcelona, G. Gili, 1995). 13. Manfredo Tafuri, Teoras e Historia de la Arquitectura (Barcelona, Laia, 1977), p. 195. 14. Mark Wigley, The Translation of Architecture. The Production of Babel, Assemblage, 8 (1989), p. 9. 15. Ibid., p. 18. In the catalogue of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, organised in the MOMA in 1988, Wigley afrms: A deconstructivist architecture is not therefore one which dismantles buildings, but one that locates the inherent dilemmas inside them.; Arquitectura deconstructivista, in P. Johnson and M. Wigley, Arquitectura deconstructivista (Barcelona, G. Gilli, 1988), p. 11. Deconstruction does not try, therefore, to establish strategies or formal ploys (it is not a method), but to alter, to nd the hidden, to render free what is strange. 16. See Joan Ockmans text in Assemblage, 41 (2000), p. 61. 17. Mark Wigley in Assembly 3, Assemblage, 27 (1995), p. 101. The proceedings of the forum The Politics of Contemporary Architectural Discourse, organised by

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

the publishing team of the magazine, were collected as Tulane Papers in this issue. As Antonio Monestiroli says, . . .a project without theory is deprived of its constituent reason and can be thus modied in many ways without serious consequences (. . .) If the active role that the architectural project takes in the construction of the real wants to be claimed, it is necessary to ponder its essential reasons (. . .) Otherwise everything seems lawful; ` Necesita della teoria, in, P. Portoguesi and R. Scarano, eds, Il progetto di architettura (Rome, Newton & Compton, 1999), p. 381. Joan Ockman, ed., The Pragmatist Imagination (New York, Columbia University/Princeton Architectural Press, 2000). William James, Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism (1909), quoted in ibid., p. 27. See Hashim Sarkis, On the Line between Procedures and Aesthetics, in ibid., pp. 92 103. Vittorio Gregotti, De la modicacion, Desde el interior de la arquitectura (Barcelona, Peninsula, 1993), p. 75. Ashley Schafer, Theory After (After-Theory), in Perspecta, 38 (2006), p. 110. See Marco Diani and Catherine Ingrahams Introduction to Restructuring Architectural Theory (Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 3 4.