Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation by Kaminer Tahl;

Author:Kaminer, Tahl; [TAHL KAMINER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

(Eisenman 1987: 168)

Eisenman’s text in ‘Misreading’ does not refer directly to the quote, but implicitly suggests overturning Loos’s claims, calling for an architecture that shatters man’s complacency, an architecture that is revolutionary, that points man in the direction of new paths and thinks to the future. In an era in which Loos’s assertion that man ‘loves the house and hates art’ had been reversed, Eisenman sought a remedy for architecture by overturning the rest of the equation, or, in other words, by creating architecture that emulates art. In his understanding of autonomy, Eisenman’s debt to aesthetics and to art theory is unveiled. His theory of autonomy resembles understandings of modernist art, and especially the ideas of Clement Greenberg. Greenberg, like Eisenman, described autonomy as a critique of society; he delineated artistic progress as a disciplinary self-evolution with emphasis on formal development. Eisenman’s departure from Greenberg is limited to the preference for abrupt ‘dislocations’ to smooth evolutionary progress.

Eisenman returned to the idea of autonomy as late as 1997, attempting to elucidate his theory and to refute contradictions and lack of consistency. He identi-fi es the avant- garde with autonomy, claiming that ‘[i]t is this idea of autonomy that I suggest will begin to distinguish modernism from the avant-garde, and the architectural avant-gardes from those of other disciplines’ (1997: 72). Eisenman expands the idea of autonomy, including such diverse notions as Venturi’s premise to place architecture back ‘into its historical discourse’, Rossi’s historicism, Michelangelo’s desire to invent ‘new forms of language’, and Serlio’s variations on an existing language. In short, Eisenman claims that these very diverse, even antithetical notions are all manifestations of autonomy, thus creating a broad definition that includes Kaufmann and Greenberg’s emphasis on originality and individualism side by side with the historicist, self-generative understanding of the term: the architecture of zeitgeist and progress, as well as the architecture of ideal typologies and transcendentalism. He proceeds to describe the novelty in the autonomy of Venturi and Rossi as an architecture ‘standing outside of linear time that becomes part of the idea of an autonomous language, autonomous to the history of architecture, and becomes an autonomy in itself ’ (Eisenman 1997: 73). Eisenman posits his idea as a challenge, even rebellion, against the positions of both Rowe and Tafuri regarding autonomy and avant- garde: ‘Neither the autonomy of architecture nor the idea that this autonomy, in particular with respect to architecture, constitutes a permanent condition of the avant- garde can be merely willed away’(1997: 78).

In addition to the idea of autonomy, Eisenman introduced to architectural design and discourse the interest in process, in the index and in the diagram. The interest in process and in the diagram suggests disavowing authorship and preferring the object to the subject, a position that could be identifi ed also with Eisenman’s use of structuralist linguistics, with his emphasis on syntax rather than semantics. The frequent use of axonometric drawings by the American dissolved the human subject by eliminating the perspectival viewing point and emphasizing the object.

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