Peter Eisenman – The end of the classical: The end of the beginning, the end of the end”
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To establish the fictions associated with architecture and responds with a proposal for an
alternative series of “non-classical” conditions for architecture.
Fiction becoming simulation when architecture does not recognize the condition as
fiction.
Three simulation: Representation, reason and timelessness.
The conditions are equally formulated in the another era or a reduction of pure
functionality messaging another realism.
Simulation of reason or truth
The modern movement went on to use the idea of zeitgeist, contrasting the earlier
practice of natural or divine orders of the absolute and eternal.
“the realization of architecture as an independent discourse, free of external values –
classical or any other; that is the intersection of the meaning – free, the arbitrary, and the
timeless in the artificial.” (Eisenman)
The architecture must have no a priori origins of shelter, function, divine, or natural but
rather one of arbitrary derivatives devoid of meaning, truth or timelessness.
The “end of the end” is an architecture that “raises the possibilities of the invention and
realization of a blatantly fictional future.”(Eisenman)
End of the beginning must consist of an end to time bound concept, the end of value and
the end of historicism.
How do we determine Eienman’s philosophy in the present, past and future? Where does our
culture fit into all these? How do we know when we reach the end? How can we tell?
Weak Architecture – Ignsi de Sola-Morales
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“weak thought and weak ontology.”
What really lies behind the propositions of weak philosophy is an interpretation of our
contemporary culture’s international, aesthetic situation.
He asks what role is accorded to architecture in an aesthetic system of contemporary
weak thought.
“Tafuri, posed the problem of interpreting what we commonly refer to as modern
architecture, concluding that the contemporary experience, embracing all of twentieth
century architecture can no longer be read in any linear form.”(616)
However it presents itself as a plural, multiform, complex experience in which it is okay
to cut sectional trajectories that run not only from the top to the bottom but from
beginning to end, but also transversely.
Sola-Morales propose utility of the term weak architecture, same section cuts can be
made.
Interpretation of the crisis of the modern effected from the disappearance of any kind of
absolute refrence that might some way coordinate or close the system of our knowledge
and the point which articulates the global vision of reality.
Contemporary architecture – need to build on air, to building in the void
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Diversity of times, is central in weak architecture; transform aesthetic experience of the
architecture into event.
Idea of the fold – reality emerges as a continuum, the subject and the time of external
objects go around on the same looped tape.(621)
Monumentality – “The monumentality of weak architecture is not continuous with the
monuments of the classical age in either geometric or ideological value, but only in what
remains within the present context of that condition of the root term monitu;that is to say
or recollection” (623)
Strength of weakness – art and architecture are capable of producing precisely when they
adopt a posture, not aggressive but weak.
What is an example of weak architecture and how do they different from traditional
approach of architecture?
Architecture is weak why
Deleuze and Guattari – Introduction: Rhizome
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“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo.”
Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari talks about the Rhizome and relate it to the idea of
multiplicities and assemblages.
Properties of book: “these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or,
on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds,
constitutes an assemblage” (4).
Body without organs, nothing more than trace of intensity.
Cycles relate to multiplicity
“the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily
linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and
even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neigher to the one nor the multiple. It is not
the one that becomes two or even directly three, four, five etc.” (21)
Rhizome is extolled for its ability to have a multiplicity of connection points and a lack of
orientation.
Rhizome is an antigenealogy and an antimemory resisting all classification and direction
Rhizome carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be”.
Idea of the middle: “the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where
things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from
one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal
movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that
undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.” (25)
From Deleuze and Guattari’s context, how does being middle relate to architecture
and its form?
What is differentiate the horizontal and trans species connections over vertical and
linear connections?