6

BEYOND EXPRESSION

Lily Chi

In the early 1990s, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was commissioned to design a plan for doubling the size of the city of Hanoi. Rather than tamper with the existing fabric, the OMA proposal leaps over the Red River to establish a new district twenty-five kilometers from the city center. Hanoi New Town is an archipelago of fantastic island-districts that build on the city’s fabled relationship to water: an intriguing dreamscape and a provocative vision of cosmopolitan life as might be imagined by the author of Delirious New York.¹

As victim of an Asian financial crisis, OMA’s plan was not implemented but its twin-city configuration presaged a common, if less visionary logic of development in many cities all over the world today. In Hanoi, the “36-street” district has been designated a preservation area, and plans are to remove all manufacturing and automobiles from this market quarter; in their place, boutiques selling the city’s culture and history to international visitors, and on the expanding peripheries, corporate parks, gated communities, and leisure compounds. This is a common pattern of development in so-called “new markets” all over the world as governments open their economies and resources to global finance, and their histories to leisure industries and corporate branding.

Understandably, global capital’s apparent alternatives of “museum city” and “generic city” are not universally embraced, and there is widespread, resurgent interest in Regionalism in various forms. Far from the nuanced arguments of the original authors of Critical Regionalism,² the rallying cries for architectures of “Identity, Place and Human Experience” against the homogenizing forces of globalization project great optimism through a narrow lens.3 “The time is now for an architecture of resistance,” notes one proponent, “a spirited architecture of place … that belongs to the soil within which it is sited, and which belongs to its people too.”⁴ Architecture can reclaim, or appropriate the local, even invent “new identities” through “careful borrowing of elements from rich architectural traditions” to create “the ‘new local.’”⁵ Other regionalist trends graft identity and sustainability issues, calling for place-specific architectures arising out of concern for local environmental, material, and human ecologies.

Anxieties of homogenization, ungroundedness, and cultural identification are not unique to twenty-first-century globalization, nor are critiques of Regionalism as an approach.⁶ As Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Dalibor Vesely and others have argued, questions about architecture’s ability to contribute to cultural location, continuity, and coherence need to be posed within a broader horizon of knowledge structures and practices that underlie and prefigure the dilemmas of the contemporary discipline.⁷

In the spirit of such thinking, this essay explores an underlying premise of Regionalist ambitions: the idea of architecture as expression of site. I would like to begin with context of concerns for which the specific site, or program of a building, came to be posed not as one concern amongst others in design work, but as the generative factor for formal invention. In considering the quest for legible form as a “worksite” – a paradigmatic response to a defining dilemma of modern architectural work – rather than a design intention, I will point out two critical blind spots in the navigation of this terrain and, in a postscript, touch upon what an expanded notion of site might comprise.

Provisional grounds: architecture as expression

While architects have long been concerned with conditions of site, the idea that design should create a unique expression of a particular site is a relatively recent preoccupation. Vitruvius devoted chapters of de architectura to site considerations for ensuring the health, propriety, and operative needs of cities, buildings and theaters, but discussions of appropriate ordering and ordinance fell under entirely different principles. Site figures in these latter discussions in the need to adapt such principles – symmetry, for example – to local conditions of appearance. This understanding of site persisted well into the eighteenth century in European architectural writing. Formal references and design procedures varied greatly in the course of this history, but the guiding principles of design and the discourses thereof were attuned to a different scale of context. Whether embedded in the constructive geometries by which Gothic builders literally drew out an architecture, or played out in geometric figurations that structured building in the Vitruvian tradition, design aimed at situating the local, the particular, within a more important “macro” site: the harmonically proportioned geometric universe of classical and Biblical teaching.

The idea that the designer should “adapt his Building to the Situation,” or site, was a departure of the early eighteenth century, as David Leatherbarrow noted in his study of Robert Morris.8 Even for Morris, however, this adaptation was not a matter of individuated expression, but one of differentiation guided by three descriptive tropes – variously depicted perceptual qualities associated with the proportioning and ornamentation of Vitruvius’ three Orders. The systematic elaboration of this idea was the theory of architectural character, first introduced in the French Academy and subsequently published by Germain Boffrand in 1743. Emerging from a commingling of texts on classical rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, on physiognomy, the idea that “an edifice should present a character fitting to its destination” became widely accepted in the late eighteenth century. As disseminated by Boffrand and fellow academician Jacques-François Blondel, character theory was effectively a reformulation of key Vitruvian principles – harmony, proportionality and the use of the Orders – into a theory of architectural expression. Most adherents assumed Boffrand’s premise about how “character” would be rendered in architectural terms: the Orders served as ready-made formal tropes, three genres of appearance and perceptual effect. The judicious choice and adaptation of these genres to specific sites and programs would render legible the entire range of possibilities in the eighteenth century’s changing social and urban landscape.⁹

The terms of character theory were, however, intrinsically open-ended. In due course, all terms in the formulation came to be rethought: from the formal basis for architectural character, to premises about the “spectator” in or of architectural works, to the very “destinations” or programs that comprised a civil society.¹⁰ In leaving behind the Vitruvian Orders as a basis for architectural character, in drawing on premises of corporeal sensing and ideation to explore entirely unprecedented formal inventions, Etienne-Louis Boullée’s projects in Essai sur l’Art perhaps comes closest to contemporary notions of design as a search for individuated expression.

Despite this divergence on what exactly constituted architectural “character,” architects converged in their anxieties. “Such is the degeneracy of fashion,” lamented Boffrand, “that at times what ought to be at the top has been placed at the bottom.”¹¹ Boffrand’s complaints can still be heard a half-century later: “There are no certain principles in architectural composition; each architect has his esprit, his own specific way of arranging proportions… . Thus, the diverse qualities, the constitutive proportions of a beautiful ­building … are but arbitrary qualities?”12 Readers of Pérez-Gómez’s scholarship will recognize in Charles-François Viel’s rhetorical question the long shadow cast by Claude Perrault. If the principles of harmonic proportion that had long guided architectural invention and collective apprehension have no basis beyond custom, what then? Is architectural work left to the wiles of individual fancy and the vagaries of relativism? Boullée summarized the angst of the period in one plaintive question: “Is architecture merely fantastic art belonging to the realm of pure invention or are its basic principles derived from Nature?”¹³

Writers on architectural character diverged greatly on Boullée’s second question, but were resolute on the first. The significance of these varying theories of architectural character for the eighteenth century’s crisis of grounds lies not so much in the emergence of a coherent new idea of Nature, but in their very structure. The formulation that design should express the character of a building program or site effectively replaces Vitruvian tradition’s extrinsic schema of harmony – between micro and macro, between the ordinance of buildings and bodies, both heavenly and corporeal – with a more modest, intrinsic “harmony:” that between a building program or site, an architecture that gives visual expression to that program/site, and a sentient “spectator.” The space opened up between these three terms is a dialogical structure, a linguistic space: a finite, delimited public realm in which architecture acquires legibility, and creative invention and critical discourse find a local, provisional ground.¹⁴

In other words, the idea that site or program could serve as a referent for architectural form emerged in a context where premises about the grounds for architectural ideation, and concordantly, for creative invention, could no longer be assumed but must be actively sought in the work of design itself. One can see in this predicament a common thread between apparently antinomic design doctrines since the eighteenth century, from Form follows Function to the various historicist and semiotic approaches that ensued therefrom. Regionalism in its various guises is but one expression of a broader “burden” of creative invention in modern contexts: to wager and posit within the work itself the terms for its legibility and grounding.

Naturalizing expression

Defining the quest for legible, expressive form as a modern problematic – a worksite rather than a specific design intention – surfaces new sympathies between seemingly distant design methods and agendas, but also one important point of difference. For many eighteenth century architects, “taste” guided the interpretation of site and program into visual form (through proportions, geometry, figurative elements … ). Taste, in turn, was defined as consensus amongst the most “enlightened” men about the parameters for appropriate form. This explicit reliance on the opinions of men, and the ambiguous measure of appropriate – as opposed to correct – form made character theory a historically short-lived idea.

With correct reasoning and method, self-evident, readable architecture automatically follows. In developing his compositional method, Durand was of course not concerned with architectural expression. Legible, expressive form is not a matter for deliberation – not a matter of choice, interpretation, or judgment – but the direct outcome of correctly applied principles and procedures. This aspiration for a method of work out of which a “natural” expression arises – one that could bypass the finitude and fallibility of human judgment and individual wills – articulates an enduring trope in modern efforts to define a theory of design without recourse to transcendent givens.

A particularly illuminating illustration of this trope in contemporary architecture is given in an early and influential argument for “morphogenesis” as a design method. For Sanford Kwinter, Lindy Roy’s “Delta Spa” project in Botswana exemplifies a “different design methodology,” one that begins with a clearing of the decks of tradition, on the one hand and of willful form-making on the other.¹⁶ Working with clear analytical parameters and computational tools, design becomes a tapping of Nature’s own volatile, dynamic forces, as exemplified by the African landscape and its peoples. Generative software is key to this mimetic aspiration: the architect does not make forms; s/he sets up processes of interaction and parameters for their unfolding. The results of the two algebraic processes that generate the work may be compared to “pheromonal wakes of termite swarms,” African space–time, African music, with each of these being alternatively understood as an “animal event,” a “dance of genesis, of life,” “African genesis in general,” “feminine forces,” the “feminine weave of temporalities,” and even “the classical Chinese tradition.” Morphogenetic design in this project aspires, in short, to the very principles of originary harmony between site, beings, and dwellings. “Site” in this case is not a physical given, not a cultural given, but the principles of emergence of both: with strategic use of computational tools, the designer may simulate nature’s own processes of form-giving – that which generates human and animal, the geological and the biological.

In Enlightenment France, “speaking architecture” promised a new approach to urban and civic coherence. Whether drawing on Aristotelian notions of sympathetic comportment, or on new sensorial theories of ­understanding, writers on architectural character hoped to inspire virtuous conduct in the spectator. Similar aspirations towards liberatory forms of individual and collective experience characterize the early twentieth-century avant-garde’s efforts to seek out new grounds for visual expression in art and architecture. “In our architecture, as in our whole life,” wrote El Lissitsky in 1929,