The Last Fortress of Metaphysics by Francesco Vitale

The Last Fortress of Metaphysics by Francesco Vitale

Author:Francesco Vitale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-12-14T16:00:00+00:00


Architectural writing. Between Derrida and Tschumi

At this point, to understand the meaning and implications of Derrida’s interpretation, we must follow the traces and explore the space where they are inscribed and interwoven in order to elaborate possibilities of meaning that do not necessarily account for the supposed meaning of Tschumi’s work but relaunch its opening. Above all, we must go through The Manhattan Transcripts,10 where the reference to deconstruction is explicit. The latter are a set of drawings introduced by a text elaborated according to traditional criteria (6–11) and followed by a more complex text, built on two columns, like a storyboard, a script (xvii–xxviii). The right column is a vertical sequence of texts, divided into sub-sequences made of titled and numbered paragraphs. The left column is made of pictures, drawings, photograms, and diagrams that are differently related to the texts that flow along the other column. Therefore, it is a book that is constructed with quite varying graphic materials. Furthermore, it does not refer to a completed architectural work nor does it gather together the different stages of a design to be realized. It is rather a book of architecture with an explicit theoretical function:

Books of architecture, as opposed to books about architecture, develop their own existence and logic. They are not directed at illustrating buildings or cities, but at searching for the ideas that underlie them. Inevitably, their content is given rhythm by the turning of pages, by the time and motion this suggests. The book may read as sequences, but they do not necessarily imply narratives. They can be theoretical projects, abstract endeavors aimed at both exploring the limits of architectural knowledge and at giving readers access to particular forms of research.11

The drawings are grouped into four sequences entitled: MT1: THE PARK—MT2: THE STREET—MT3: THE TOWER—MT4: THE BLOCK. These sequences are constructed as a succession of cinematographic photograms.12 Each sequence starts from one of the four urban elements that characterize Manhattan, and thus it develops through three planes, levels, or dimensions, by means of different notation systems, according to a device of assembly that is at once preestablished and open, and thus requires the constructive intervention of the observer/interpreter: “Three disjoined levels of ‘reality’ are presented simultaneously in the Transcripts. … At first, the respective importance of each level depends only on how each is interpreted by the viewer, since each level can always be seen against the background of another. In this sense, looking at the Transcripts also means constructing them.”13 The first plan represents the space, the second the movement, the third the event. Their intersection grants the possibility that what has always been excluded within a conventional architectural writing—experience as irreducibly singular—takes place.

The original purpose of the tripartite mode of notation (events, movement, spaces) was to introduce the order of experience, the order of time—moments, intervals, sequences—for all inevitably intervene in the reading of the city. It also proceeded from a need to question the modes of representation generally used by architects: plans, sections, axonometries, perspectives.



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