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Five Easy MiesesAuthor(s): R. E. SomolSource: ANY: Architecture New York, No. 24, Design After Mies: BOXING THE LONG SHADOWAT IIT (1999), pp. 20-27Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856291Accessed: 18-03-2016 18:55 UTC
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8/15/2019 Somol Five Easy Mies
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Five Easy Mieses
R.E. Somol
What makes Mies such a great influence is that he is so easy
to copy.
- Philip Johnson
In order to "sustain" metropolitan space, architecture seems
obliged to become a spectre of itself. It is as if it were in this way
expiating an original sin, which is nothing other than its own
claim to the right of informing - solely with its own disciplinary
means - the primary structures of the city. Surely it is significant
that in the United States - the country in which this phenome-
non is most evident - it is the university cities which, in a sort of
museum of living architecture, collect the formal experiments
expelled from Manhattan or Detroit. What the apodictic prod-
ucts of that enfant terrible of modern architecture, Mies van der
Rohe, prophesied has now become a reality. In their absolutely
asemantic quality the Seagram Building in New York or the
Federal Center in Chicago are objects that "exist by means of
their own death," only in this way saving themselves from cer-
tain failure. All the same, Mies's "silence" today seems out of date
in comparison to the "noise" of the neo-avant-garde. But is
there really something new in the neo-avant-garde in respect to
the proposals of the historical avant-garde movements? It
would not be difficult to demonstrate [that] ... in comparison
to the coherence of the historical avant-garde movements there
is certainly something less.
- Manfredo Tafuri
Less is more.
- Mies van der Rohe
The much denigrated architecture of Park Avenue known as
"cold glass boxes" . . . have helped to create the entropie mood.
-Robert Smithson
Inviting five contemporary architects to "play" Mies, the Illinois
Instimte of Technology's international competition for a new cam-
pus center has staged an event where - with the spectre ofTafuri as
absent conductor - noise meets silence. Perversely, this architectural
noise is intended to block that of the elevated train, the last trace of
the city that the campus was unable to expunge through its "exper-
iment" in urban disappearance. For Tafuri, of course, the formations
of late capital had appropriated and absorbed modernist architec-
ture s "ideology of the plan," reducing the role of contemporary
design to (at best) perpetually lamenting the end of its instrumental
ambitions or (more than likely) simply accommodating the market
forces that have assumed them. Perhaps die greatest confirmation
for this diagnosis is that contemporary experimental architecture
has largely become exiled to the theme park of the university cam-
pus, particularly (if perversely) as school administrations attempt to
reorient themselves to a changing market.
While recent interventions on typical campuses may prove
Tafuri s point - the quest for brand names amidst a sea of the gener-
ic, as at Irvine or Cincinnati - the intervention on a Mies campus,
where the generic has already been raised to the level of its own
signature, complicates the situation and opens alternative possibili-
ties. Despite the obvious irony (if not new urban fantasy) of retro-
fitting a modernist campus with a "center," the ÏÏT master plan and
campus center program are in many ways the truly inventive docu-
ments in the competition, providing the material requests that pro-
voke the most dynamic elements among the various entries. These
requirements entail not only a response to the el noise and the
application of advanced technology in a discursive way, they also
furnish organizational cues in their calls to densify the campus,
"intensify the landscape," and provide nonorthogonal pathways
that follow the "'lines of desire* of the pedestrian." Thus, for the
ÍIT establishment, architecture still has an informing role to play,
even an instrumental one: architecture as commentary, as infra-
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uThe Campus Center will deal with
light as its guiding principle: Light
inside the building, emanating from it
and flowing through it. This is
enhanced through natural air and flex-
ible control of a dynamic envelope to
create a dynamic tool, adjusting to
the exterior conditions and the
requested interior environment. Such
an innovative environment and hard-
ware require new technologies in
construction and use. The building is
of a synthesized, integrated quality.
It is designed for performance
through rational engineering and
construction and choice of material
and systems. There is less attempt for
design and styling; rather the results
are realities from solving the prob-
lems. Combining nature and technol-
ogy, it establishes a technically facili-
tated revival of traditional proto-
types." - Jahn and Sobek
24.21
structure, as landscape. And if Tafuri is correct about the nature
and validity of Mies s "prophetic" statements of withdrawal, then
IIT is the only possible site for this investigation, as one would
have to return to the scene of the crime in order to rewrite the
postwar implications of Mies s built lessons. Ultimately, the com-
petition poses the question of whether Chicago's perceived
architectural legacy - from the loud "failure" of the White City
to the silent confession of Mies - can become undone.
Perhaps more than any other 20th-century architect, Mies s
authority has been constructed through repetition: both his own
(as critique) and that of others (as consumption) . While expo-
sitions of the former have become largely the domain of acade-
mia, the latter has generally characterized postwar professional
practice. This dual failure of "Miesian" modernism - rendering it
a technological-developmental tool for capital (or, secondarily, a
subject of academic canonization) - was evidenced as early as
1 956, even as Mies was completing Crown Hall. In that same
year, Colin Rowe wrote several articles that focused on Mies and
that, in the midst of his American corporatization, attempted to
elaborate a formal-linguistic project for modernism that was
quickly being repressed. In part, this endeavor led Rowe to give
reluctant approval to neoclassical and Palladian repetitions of
Mies, such as those by John Johansen. Meanwhile, in his
"Chicago Frame" essay, Rowe s juxtaposition of Burnham and
Root s Reliance Building and Mies s Glass Skyscraper project was
intended to contrast the American penchant for economic and
functional rationalization - forces which Mies s work at the time
was itself undergoing - with the European understanding of
architecture as a larger ideological and cultural project.
Curiously, it is precisely as a continued expression of this duality
(architecture as tool of economic speculation or as ideological
critique) that several of the entries pursue their own version of
Miesian repetition.
It is not surprising that among the current field Helmut Jahn
most direcdy extends the corporate legacy of Mies s production,
while Kazuyo Sejima assumes his most recent form of academic
institutionalization. Though almost diametrically inverse proposi-
tions, the schemes by the corporate professional and the academic
craft-artist are the most sensitive and predictable: repetitions
that in one way or another point back directly to an ideal model
of Mies. With seemingly little understanding of the context of
the competition (aside from preventive remarks that his scheme
is not about "form or aesthetics"), Jahn primarily addresses, and
attempts to distinguish himself from, the corporate copyists of
Mies. Jahn argues that, unlike the slavish disciples of Mies, his
project applies the most advanced form of technology: adding,
for good measure, that this is exactly what the master himself
would do if he were alive today. There is apparently no reason to
rethink the conceptual or organizational principles of Mies, but
simply to employ a technological standard that has at last caught
up to seventy-year-old practices. In the end, Jahn's scheme - more
a campus terminal than center - can largely be viewed as merely
building a better Mies trap, one where current building systems and
materials provide the final solution to modernist space.
Jahn s proposal delivers a techno-environmental Mies, one
where advances in glazing systems enable architecture to act
more like nature, in a state of imagined equilibrium. It is a
Miesian upgrade that simultaneously serves as belated compensa-
tion for Jahn's own State of Illinois Center and the infamous fail-
ure of i ts conditioning systems. Technology for Mies, however,
was never simply technical. Rather, he pushed existing technolo-
gies to the point of collapse in order to reveal new social and
aesthetic "diagrams," new modes of perception, occupation, and
behavior: technology was never about adequacy but excess. Mies
understood implicitly Deleuze s later observation that "tools or
material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and
1. For the two accounts of this repetition, see K. Michael Hays, "Critical
Architecture: Between Culture and Form," Perspecta 21 (1984), and
Stanley Tigerman, "Mies van der Rohe: A Moral Modernist Model,"
Perspecta 22 (1986).
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AboveiThe el connection, a glass lined
link between the two halves of the
Jahn/Sobek schemes, slips under the ele-
vated train tracks
The primary structure of Jahn and Sobek's campus center consists of
steel columns with a 30-inch spacing that carry an isotropic mesh-grid
roof structure. The facade and the floor tray system are secondary struc-
tures. The roof grid accommodates various types of cells for light trans-
mission, exterior and interior heat absorption, solar energy conversion,
ventilation, and acoustic damping. The floor tray sits on the slab and can
be fitted with five-by-five concrete panels.
Garden 0 o o 0
Gr ta " ' 2 12 1
Interior 0 14 0 0 0 1
Park ÂÉWBSÍ 0 0 6 i
Transparency O 7 0 O 1 I
Urban/-ism 0 8 0 0 1
Void 2 8 0 7 O I
taken up by assemblages." Finally, Jahns proposal assumes that
technology exists only in and through the built object itself, and
thus neglects advances in the processes of design and production
(offered by the computer) as well as techniques of reception and
communication (the mass media) . Focussing narrowly on devel-
opments in building systems and materials represses the much
larger field of contemporary techniques from which architecture
(perhaps as opposed to "building") is fabricated.
Whereas Jahn s scheme is all-too-visible in its full "building-
ness," Kazuyo Sejima s project is practically imperceptible: Miess
"almost nothing" raised by the power of electronic media. As
Sejima explains, "instead of a material object" her entry suggests a
"reflective, image-like architecture" with "t. v. -like spaces." In
Sejima s project, one views the world as mediated (the roof plane
that reflects clouds and sky; the glass barrier that frames the el
train as a silent moving image through an equally artificial park-
scape) while at the same time intensifying the experience of
inhabiting a cool, abstract mise-en-scene. In some ways more
Hilberseimer than Mies, Sejima s barcode garden-urbanism iter-
ates and dematerializes the generic to such an extent that it pro-
duces a new ideal: silence as virtual. If Jahn s strategy was to get the
building to work like nature (to simulate and supplement it),
Sejima s was to frame and screen nature: thus, the former s interest
in technologizing nature (in terms of production) and the latter s in
formalizing it (through reception). This alternative is suggested by
the fact that Jahn s most frequently used terms in describing his
project are "building" and "technology," while Sejima s are "archi-
tecture" and "garden."
Wagering entirely on neominimal affect by turning Mies into
the sign of Mies (or the sign of silence), Sejima precludes the pos-
sible elaboration of new spatial organizations that she has suc-
cessfully developed in previous projects. Instead, the campus
center is completely contained within a 1 2 -foot-high pancake
section, fully grounded and orthogonal, within which unrelent-
Roof
Tray
Energy Slab
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8/15/2019 Somol Five Easy Mies
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24.23
ing corridors parallel a series of endless cellular offices, occasion-
ally bounded by one of five interior courtyards. In this way, both
Jahn and Sejima "repeat" Mies by returning to reduced, currendy
dominant readings of his production, the one material-technical
and the other aesthetic-formal. Rather than extend these tectonic
or minimalist readings of Mies, Zaha Hadid suggests that these
understandings of Mies are correct yet irrelevant for architectural
production today, perhaps indirectly affirming Mies s sometime
invocation of the Zeitgeist. Consequently, Hadid produces the only
explicitly (or, should one say, exclusively?) critical project of the
five, in many ways the most extreme proposal but one which
nevertheless maintains a stable reading of Mies due to its pre-
dominantly oppositional character.
Through a computer-animated site analysis that reveals a field
of potential forces, Hadid escapes the more static associations of
Jahn s building or Sejima s architecture by initially conceiving the
project as a sectional landscape. For Hadid, "beyond Mies" implies
the avoidance of reduction and simple order. Ultimately, however,
the initial solicitation of overlapping fields results in planar trans-
parencies that are taken as cues for compositional complexity and
ambiguity. As in much postwar formalism, horizontal fields
become largely understood in vertical and optical (i.e., "painter-
ly") terms. Although the project proceeds through continuities of
interior and exterior, the final effect of the project is oddly schiz-
ophrenic: uncharacteristically static in its massing and elevations;
exceptionally sophisticated and developed in its planning and
interior organizations. The interior landscape that weaves through
the three levels, culminating in the Mies Interpretive Center,
accommodates both "soft" and "hard" programs, the latter
emerging in more bounded or cellular elaborations along the
continuous surface. Meanwhile, particles of furniture modules
are strewn across this surface organization as a kind of program-
matic confetti that accumulate and disperse as necessary. In more
formal though still flexible moments, as in the conference and
meeting rooms, telescoping walls serve as a miniaturized version
of the sliding planes of the larger site analysis, so that the overall
urban diagram comes to inform interior program clusters. In
Hadid's project, the city is in the details.
While the interior views suggest an almost Piranesian endless-
ness, the properties of the folded landscape are much more
delimited in relation to the expanded field of site and context.
The most vertical scheme, Hadid's is also the only one to remain
exclusively west of the el tracks, which effectively turns her pro-
ject into an edge that defines the State Street corridor and privi-
leges an orientation to the academic campus. Contextually, the
proposal exists as a bar of massing that establishes and frames a
new centralized quad, just as the recessed and centered entry,
combined with a dominant frontality, produces a strangely hier-
archical object despite its presumed emergence from a field of
visual and physical forces. Whereas the interior is susceptible to a
strong centrifugal pull, the exterior is fully centripetal. In the
end, the project appears as a figure on a field rather than one
emerging from a field, and its notable ambitions of permeability
and transience are unable to compensate for its ultimate status as
a sculptural barrier.
Rather than either simply confirm or oppose dominant fram-
ings of Mies, the proposals by Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas
make possible alternative configurations of modernist discourse
precisely by producing "copies" that serve to question the stable
traits of the presumed "original." Operating "diagrammatically"
- either by reworking a disciplinary opposition or aligning dis-
parate cultural realms - the projects engender difference from
their repetitions. "Mies" is here understood as a discursive and
institutional effect that enfolds within i tself, in one genealogical
or untimely moment, the premodern history of the discipline
alongside contemporary technologies and experiences, as well as
formulations from Rowe.Tafuri, and Venturi to those of Superstudio
and postminimalist art, and so on. It is not surprising, then, that
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"Mies" is the most frequently invoked of 1 5 terms in the presenta-
tions of both Eisenman and Koolhaas, and it may well be that
Mies s collage for the Resor House - where architecture's identifi-
cation with the "wall" is displaced by continuous surfaces of land-
scape with interior objects and finishes - provokes the two
directions respectively pursued by both. Significantly, Eisenman s
second most used term is "grid," while Koolhaas s is
"urban (ism)." In this way, their swerves from Mies are informed
by specific and long-standing research agendas: for Eisenman, the
geometric infrastructure of architectural organization (from the
extended analyses of Palladio, Bramante, Serlio, etc.); for Koolhaas,
the work on shopping and on the city in both its contemporary and
Roman guises. Both attempt to expose and extend the dark side, or
perhaps the "optical unconscious," of Mies s supposed idealism:
Eisenman by turning geometry against itself, Koolhaas by invoking
the "stuff" of cultural matter. And thus the promise of new discipli-
nary diagrams: form without beauty, function without efficiency.
Less is a Bore.
- Robert Venturi
Boring, if seen as a discrete step in the development of an
entire site, has an esthetic value. It is an invisible hole. . . . One
does not impose, but rather exposes the site - be it interior or
exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa.
- Robert Smithson
As one of the primary ideologues for "design after Mies," Robert
Venturi opposes the legacy of modernism found in both the
"building-as-city" (the mini-megastructure) as well as the
"building-as-sculpture" (the duck). It is precisely these two
options that are respectively pursued - at once solicited and sub-
verted - by the Pompeiian carpet of OMA and the folded ground
cocoons of Eisenman. In this manner, both proposals imply that
it is only possible to revisit Mies by introducing variation (or
perhaps more accurately in the case of these two schemes,
"noise" or "interference") in the terms of a contemporary con-
figuration. Thus the term building is now replaced as Koolhaas
reads Venturi 's "city" through the lens of the interior (hence, the
mall), whereas Eisenman sees "sculpture" as a species of landscape
(via postminimalist environmental art) . Significantly, both the
internalized city and the grounded duck exhibit aspects of
"entropy" - the trait that Smithson associates with the possibility
of a new monumentality, one evinced not only in the "cold glass
boxes" of Sixth Avenue but also in the continuous development of
suburban sprawl (Koolhaas 's consumer ist mat) as well as the crys-
talline structures of geology and mineralogy (Eisenman 's faceted
figures submerged in the earth) . As Smithson writes in "The
Crystal Land" :
The highways crisscross through the towns and become
man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire
landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome
diners to glass window shopping centers, a sense of the crys-
talline prevails.
A hybrid of consumption and geology, both projects are
buried: Eisenman s literally, Koolhaas 's under a folded plate
roofscape that "grounds" the raised datum of the elevated plat-
form: a past, present, and future context for OMA's campus
center as socle.
By wrapping the el platform in a chromium-plated steel tube,
the OMA proposal reframes the train as a kind of horizontal ele-
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- Columns in the Jahn/Sobek scheme are tapered
steel tubes with supporting cross arms at slab
locations and at the roof grid mesh. The center
is designed uto highlight in an architectural
setting the research interests of the schools of
engineering, thermodynamics, materials
research, performance of fabrication . . . with-
in the design of the dynamic and technically
advanced building envelope/'
24.25
vator connecting the building to the city so that a l arger urban
infrastructure assumes the site traditionally occupied by a
Miesian mechanical penthouse. Beneath this new urban datum, a
thickened field condition emerges, one distinct from the "open,"
well-lit fields of Mies. In the OMA project - more a material
phase space than a field - dense "islands" of program are broken
by five diagonal "shortcuts" that operate as gradient edges
between the disparate activities and substances of the islands. In
fact, just as Koolhaas inscribed the skyscraper lessons identified
in Delirious New York in earlier OMA projects, the campus center
proposal experiments with the new paradigms introduced by the
space of shopping. The material phase space of the project might
be seen as a response to what Koolhaas has recently referred to as
"junk space," his description of which has multiple correlates to
the IIT proposal:
Junk space looks as if a hurricane has rearranged a previously
ordered condition, but that impression is misleading. It never
did achieve coherence, and it never aspired to it. . . . Junk
space: consider it as a site, a web site, designed or conceived
or assembled by Photoshop, with the same promiscuous ease
of collecting and accumulating desirable conditions, a field, a
trajectory that may start as web, turn horizontal without
warning, intersect, step down, suddenly confront an immense
void from a glass elevator, brutally shift to a seemingly
blocked perspective from which an escalator picks you up at
the last moment to drop you off at the monumental granite
staircase, that leads to a vista of sheetrock that hides the trea-
sures of an upgrade. In plan all episodes seem uncoordinated,
except for the needs of emergency evacuation. The presumption
of geometry is routinely deflected. In fact, survivals of former
geometries now create new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of
resistance that create unstable eddies of opportunistic flows
The ceiling, too, is like a folded, crumpled plate, agitated like
the Alps. Deep chasms between joints, former caverns of
asbestos, which, for all we know, may still be preserved, reveal
harsh beams and brute concrete in expectant ceiling voids that
represent undefined latencies
lence, not only perform their duties in terms of human flows,
they also connect strictly incompatible dei tinations
All surfaces are
ideological - i.e., a palimpsest of
uncounted periods
nate shag, marble, concrete,
rubber, tile, parquet,
travertine,
vinyl
After explo-
sions of trash,
suddenly the
luxury of a court.
. . .The only certainty
is conversion or upgrade
followed, in rare cases, by restora-
tion. ^
Junk space is the new species of minimum architecture; flexible
like its historical correlate, the Roman city, the neutrality of its
field exists as a perverse apotheosis of Miesian space. A contem-
porary response to alternate technologies and ecologies, junk
space is entropie space: the path of least resistance. The OMA pro-
ject thus actualizes a bizarre and virtual trajectory from Mies
through Superstudio to the mall - a continuous monument for
the slacker, a stockpile of opportunity. What was open (or at least
OMA's early elevated tube proposal.
2. From Koolhaas's keynote lecture for the "Learning from the Mall
of America" conference, 22 November 1997, held in Minneapolis.
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24.26
optically distant) in modernism, however, is here ahnost claustro-
phobic, thick, and viscous. Less optical than tactile, the IIT program
itself provides the terms for what Koolhaas has previously described
as the "perversion by proxy" conducted by the interior collabora-
tors of Mies. ^ In other words, against the virtuous, tectonic readings
of Mies, Koolhaas affirms that there has always been an almost kitsch
dimension to Mies - a material excess not simply located in the
chrome-plated columns and luxury marble, but in the delegated silk
and velvet of Lily Reich, the chain mail of Philip Johnson. Shopping -
perhaps almost decorating - meets modernism. As opposed to the reg-
ular uniformity of the grid, shopping entails a situational organization.
It is not simply concerned with smooth efficiency, but instead relies on
delay and drift - a "cooling down" of modernist efficiencies for the
sake of greater exchange; more a stochastic space, the simple ordering
(at once commercial and minimalist) of "one thing after the other."
In their own ways, both Koolhaas and Eisenman (mis) recognize
Mies s campus as a giant Carl Andre installation, less involved with
form or function than with the plasticity of potentially infinite
material arrangements. While Koolhaas loosens Mies s simple iden-
tifications with functionalism, Eisenman deflects Mies s exhaustion
by ideal forms (in this regard, it might be said that the former poses
an alternative to Jahn, and the latter to Sejima). Like Koolhaas,
Eisenman also invokes material, though in this case the materialist
("real") grid of IIT against the ideal Miesian grid. "Noise" (in the
form of decibel readings from the train) is then filtered through
these grids, producing a series of emergent landscape-field figures
that are suspended "between" the two grid systems, caught within
a thickened, underground network of structure and circulation.
Buried underground, the Eisenman scheme ducks the infrastruc-
tural requirement, preferring to insulate itself and i ts students from
the el noise, refusing to take the bullet for Mies s historic campus.
Moreover, it similarly refuses architecture's traditional identification
with the wall as vertical surface of arti culation in favor of a prolifer-
ation of backgrounds. Against the optical, gestalt model of architec-
ture and urbanism where figure-field relations are heightened and
articulated to the point where they become domesticated as figure-
ground balance, Eisenman experiments with field-field organiza-
tions which - like the "unmemorable" planning of Koolhaas -
reassert discourses once considered peripheral to architecture
proper (landscape, interiors, and infrastructure). Both projects dia-
gram and activate blind spots of modernism. These include not
only presumed oppositions between function and form but also
between practices understood as commercial and critical, the
dialectic Rowe specifically identified between Chicago and Mies, a
nationalist split of "economic speculation" (American) and "ideo-
logical critique" (European). These oppositions are simply no
longer tenable today: commerce can be critical, just as the critical
can become a marketable image.
Despite the apparent obviousness of the above observation, it
bears repeating, particularly as there are those who would today
simply invert Rowe s dichotomy. For some, America is now the last
refuge for criticism (and "form") while Europe is the new terrain
for a market-responsive practice (and "function"), and perhaps not
surprisingly (if ironically) these tendencies are located precisely
with the legacies of Eisenman and Koolhaas. In part, this attempt to
resurrect a late '90s version of the Whites-Grays debate (would it be
the Informais and the Performers? The Apples and the Oranges?) is
simply a marketing ploy that keeps others out of the game and
appears to be a useful way to make a name for oneself (as a critic as
well as an architect, for those who continue to insist on such distinc-
tions). There are those, for example, who consistently mistake what
Koolhaas says for what he does. This duplicity may be impossible to
avoid, of course, since, like any good magician, the trick is to keep
the audience (one's would-be follpwers or competitors) looking
3. Rem Koolhaas, "Ena/obling Architecture/' in
Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-
garde in America, ed. R.E. Soinol (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1997), 298: "From the 1930s,
when he began 'working' with Lily Reich, on, Mies
left the theatrical to others - perversion by proxy."
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8/15/2019 Somol Five Easy Mies
9/9
The entire architecture is supported by columns of 5.5 inches in
diameter that are placed on a grid of 20 feet by 20 feet.
Walking through this space gives the impression of strolling
within a forest.
24.27
somewhere else. Nonetheless, although he may talk about Jon Jerde,
Koolhaas secretly knows (and accepts) what all great chefs (and
designers) understand - that selling a billion hamburgers is simply
another Mc World. Despite the warnings of Le Corbusier, there are
still those with "eyes that do not see" who appear in unlikely places
and continue to overlook what Koolhaas s work actually does. For
instance, program in the IIT project is not understood as a set of sta-
tic requirements to be satisfied but as part of a "vast firmament of
statistics" in the sense Smithson described in his proposal for the air
terminal. Program as potential matter, not literally (thus not really a
functionalism), but simply stuff, quantifiable data to be organized
and manipulated.
Perhaps, as also indicated in the nature of this project, if "func-
tionalism" has been historically connected to the spaces of work -
the factory and the office - a new term will have to be invented
when the concern shifts to the spaces of shopping and consump-
tion. In any case, any invocation of functionalism in OMA's project
is not as a direct reflection of "reality," but activates both an histor-
ical aspect of discourse and a future context for the virtual. As
much as Corbusier is associated with a "classical" orientation to
geometry and the grid, for example, he also displays a statistical
orientation - thus, reflections on both geometry and density are
equally discursive or disciplinary agendas. Neither can be praised
or condemned for its presumed avoidance or capitulation to "reali-
ty." Koolhaas does not simply produce "junk space," but distills
principles by extracting a modernist lesson from the contemporary
mass cultural landscape - in this case concerning the utter fungi-
bility and plasticity of spatial, material, and behavioral relations. By
condensing and accelerating these traits a reinvigorated mod-
ernism may be produced, though one whose ultimate project
remains to wrest architecture from junk space (or cuisine from
junk food). Similarly, Eisenman s formal manipulations are equally
conditioned by, and capable of, market-oriented and political
effects. Despite the posturing by all concerned, Koolhaas and
Eisenman have much more in common than either the former has
with Jerde or Jacques Herzog or the latter has with Frank Gehry or
Richard Meier. As evidenced in the IIT competition, by operating
diagrammatically, by opening a territory for potentially new work
(i.e., by performing in the realm of the virtual), they continue to
advance an alternative mode of modernist repetition.
Repetition as a form of entropy suggests a transformation in
state - a transformation that strategies for preservation of the
Miesian legacy have been unable to achieve (e.g., through the tech-
nical conservation of energy located in new glazing systems or the
aesthetic maintenance of the orthogonal via a minimum geome-
try). In this way, it is that signal artist-critic of diagrams and matter,
Robert Smithson - along with his post-optical quest for a new
monumentality - who serves as the missing link between the pro-
gressive slackening of Mies (or "Mies made easy") found in both
Koolhaas s endless consumerism of the interior and Eisenman s
mineralogical noise in the landscape. As an initial maxim for repe-
tition as difference, entropy does IIT.
I wish to thank Donna Robertson, dean of the College of .Architecture at the Illinois
Institute of Technology, for generously providing materials on the competition and for
informative discussions held in transit at various airports throughout the country.
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