Excerpted from "Eyes in the Heat: RSE", As published in Perspecta 34.
By Michael Bell
Introduction: Perspecta's Other Urbanism
RSE is an acronym for Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky and Peter Eisenman in the context of Perspecta, circa 1971. Rowe and Slutzky's "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" was first published in Perspecta 8 in 1963. Peter Eisenman's essay, "From Object to Relationship II: Giuseppe Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio" first appeared in Perspecta 13-14 in1971, along with Part II of Rowe and Slutzky's "Transparency" articles. RSE is invented shorthand that heuristically conflates the two essays, written in what might be argued to have been a collective manner. Despite the historically decisive nature of each essay, Rowe, Slutzky, and Eisenman opened the door to re-writing the application of their work, particularly in relation to urbanism. As of 1971 all three writers had yet to engage a theory or practice of the city, even as the implications of their work were vulnerable to both the spatial expanse of contemporary urbanism and its ubiquitous financial procedures. Neither "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" nor "From Object to Relationship II: Giuseppe Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio" examine the urban implications of their premises, yet each promised and implied themes of a broader and more comprehensive spatial field that was potentially urban or metropolitan in character.
The dispersed urban conditions of present day cities such as Houston, Los Angeles, or the fringes of metropolitan New York - the later day post-war city of 2002 that was well underway in 1963 - coerce new modes of vision from Rowe, Slutzky, and Eisenman's foundational work. Both essays assume an idealized subject discrete from local or actual context. RSE's subject is described as an "observer" without reference to the segregate nature of this position, a viewing subject that is apart from the urban field. Each essay is also predominantly architectural in its concerns. The experience of space is described at the scale of the building, and understood through a pictorial reading; one that is subject's originated and frontal. In order to sustain the potential of this early work by RSE, a necessarily less ideal and segregate problem of the viewing subject is described in this essay. The term "observer" changes to "visual subject" and vision will be shown to reconcile itself with a broader array of architectural and urban technologies. Architecture and a visual subject are here placed in a broader and less heuristic realm of space and ultimately of power.
Urban Memory
The implications of RSE's visual models find their most significant urban corollary in the mid-1970's writings of Rafael Moneo on Aldo Rossi. Here a potential alternative evolution to the development of vision and frontality in the works of RSE emerges in a theory of vision and memory. A line is drawn through the trajectory of each critic and architect - from Rowe to Rossi - which finds in each participant a unifying, but challenging relation to Henri Bergson's theorization of memory and the role of the body in the sustenance and use of memory. An alternative architectural and urban present - a renewed urban subject - is revealed when these foundational architectural histories/theories are re-read through Bergson, through each other, and through the vacated spaces of the contemporary city. Bergson's description of memory as a time-image and movement-image, as an intuited presence situated "between a thing itself" and its representation, extends Rowe and Slutzky's themes of phenomenal transparency and Rossi's and Moneo's theorization of material and memory. It also provides a preface to Eisenman's work on simultaneity and frontality in his analysis of Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio of 1939, and contextualizes Terragni's earlier optical experiments in photo elastic stress analysis - work that predates and supports themes in Eisenman's analysis of the later work. Together. these five architects/critics are coupled to reveal a potential other post-war urban role for what Gyorgy Kepes called the "language of vision."
In his 1976 essay, "Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery," Rafael Moneo implied that the foundations of Rossi's theoretical purpose relied on a self-imposed amnesia. Moneo claimed that Rossi had to adopt an "evasive" relation to broader urban technologies to secure the authority of architecture in the post-war city. Rossi's architecture was "deliberately forgetting the framework of the real, even at levels evident and compromised as the technological one," wrote Moneo. To the reader, it seemed that Moneo was seeking the grounds to support Rossi, but the evidence of the contemporary city - the late 20th Century metropolis -made Rossi's propositions difficult to accept without reservation.
Moneo's essay began a process of reconciling Rossi's theory and practice of architecture within a broader and ultimately more self-sustaining field, in this case the post-war city of Western Europe and the United States. If Rossi's amnesia sought to protect the authority and autonomy of architecture from a metropolis characterized as both predatory and vicarious, Moneo's essay constituted a turning point. In addressing the self-sustaining role of the metropolis itself, Moneo seemed reluctant to accept a project of architectural autonomy, and instead came close to proposing the autonomy of the metropolis as a fiscal, governmental and power-laden instrument Moneo described Rossi's urban theories as a mode of temporal vision, one that can be aligned to Henri Bergson's theory of duration and the temporal aspects of his theory of intuition and memory. In Rossi's work, architecture offered what Moneo termed a "fleeting glimpse" of the city achieved in the suspension of analytic technique. Rossi's own writing, as is well known, proposed that buildings found their fullest urban meaning as a form of passive and undirected memory. This mode of memory was not attached to an active or strategic process of remembering; it was instead an unregulated and more ambient theory of memory as after-image no longer authored by the demonstrative needs of its host or limited by the position of the host's body. For Rossi, the after-image was understood to "construct the city" - it was a way to see the city, and allowed the full comprehension of the city from the relative isolation of a subject's singular vantage. Architecture in this equation was less than literal, yet more than phenomenal, in Rowe's and Slutzky's terms. More so, it was greater than a representation. Architecture as memory, as time-image, allowed Rossi to conceive of architecture as fixed, finite and discrete, yet also relieved it of its relative and artificial, or overly local, unity. If architecture was to be "a great representation of the human condition" even in its "fixed" literalness, memory allowed its subject to become urban within a wider field, yet remain rooted in the isolation and sight of a subject. Bergson's theorizing of duration often parallels Rossi's theory of memory. For Bergson, the multiple and temporal comprehensions of movement both maintain and supercede the closure of the literal limits of form, the body, and of location. "We perceive that being is. . .the very numerous durations" - our own duration is "caught between more dispersed durations and more taut, more intense durations." One moment is thus "extended to the whole of the universe," writes Bergson.
Peter Eisenman accompanied "From Object to Relationship II: Giuseppe Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio" with diagrams drawn in part by Daniel Libeskind. The analysis presented what Eisenman called a "conceptual ambiguity" developed from the simultaneous use of the "two opposing conceptions of space" manifest in plan but understood frontally via elevation. Eisenman's analysis depicted both concepts as simultaneously at work in the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio. The effect was to leave the origin of the building's spatial energy uncertain, while maintaining a sense of potential and immanent, or one might say phenomenal, energy. At times Eisenman came close to revealing a theory of vision linked to matter that is similar to Bergson's theory of intuition, in which architecture instigates what Bergson called two fluxes contained and held temporarily within a third duration. Bergson, like Eisenman, relies on the term simultaneity in his description of these multiple durations. "Such is our first idea of simultaneity," writes Bergson. "We call simultaneous, then two external fluxes that occupy the same duration because they hold each other in the duration of the third." Bergson's duration includes that of the viewer: "Our own simultaneity of fluxes. . .brings us back to internal duration, to real duration." Eisenman's reading can be understood as a form of this duration: it creates a third form that encapsulates the expansion and contraction of two types of space and implies that the subject and object are fused in a third perceptual space.
In his analysis, Eisenman moves the subject's frontal comprehension of space from the actual and thereby relative vantage point to the represented and thereby intuited understanding of the whole work. In doing so he places both the subject and the object within a third duration - a third field - that allows the autonomy of each participant, yet also allows presence only through the other body. Eisenman's interest in the "ambiguity" or the conceptual relations between competing spatial readings in Terragni's architecture was intended to reveal an autonomy founded in this ambiguity: architecture resists a static and foreclosed finitude as it evades easy reading and definitive origins. In the context of the contemporary city this autonomy has been potentially inverted: it is the autonomy of financial and material processes achieved in their dexterity that Moneo feared Rossi was not acknowledging, and that today render most building inadvertently autonomous.
Terragni's and Lingeri's Photo Elastic Experiments
Eisenman's early work on Terragni is an essential yet unrealized key to Terragni's own earlier work on photo-elasticity - a process that Terragni employed for the structural analysis of his proposal for the design of Palazzo Littorio in 1934. Terragni, with partner Pietro Lingeri, used of a set of photo-elastic stress analysis models while designing the Palazzo Littorio Solution A in the early 1930's, a work preceding Casa Giuliani Frigerio by five years. Terragni's work in photo-elasticity links themes of transparency in the work of Rowe and Slutzky, and material and memory in the work of Moneo and Rossi. More importantly it pre-dates the Casa Giuliani Frigerio - the building of Eisenman's analysis - and suggests that the conceptions of space described by Eisenman could not have been possible if not for these early experiments. Terragni's work in optics is more extensive than has been historically noted.
Palazzo Littorio , Solution A, 1934, Terragni, Lingeri: photo-elastic stress analysis: A photo-elastic study of a surface under loading. Stress and strain are revealed in a pattern of polarized light.
To date, the most significant attempt to place the role of Terragni's and Lingeri's work in photo-elasticity is contained in Manfredo Tafuri's essay "Giuseppe Terragni: Subject and Mask." The essay questions the aberration these tests seem to be in Terragni's career, but does not examine the intrinsic properties of photo-elastic processes themselves. Tafuri is forced to reconcile their significance in the design of the Palazzo Littorio within the linguistic prerogatives that dominated the trajectory of his own critical writing. Tafuri was unable to synthesize his linguistic research and his sometimes-startling structural and mechanical insights. His analysis was at times startling in its insight and in the degree to which it intuitively sensed the potential implications of the photo-elastic work. For example, while Tafuri recognizes that what he called the "wall" that composes the primary facade is actually a "box-like structure," he did not recognize that this reading changes not just the mechanics of its cantilever and its rotational tendencies, but also the facades ability to "speak " or be "read" (Tafuri's words). Tafuri's critique concludes by stating that he is unsure of the reason the iso-static lines of the photo elastic process are represented on the proposed final surface of the building. His analysis focuses instead on the conclusion that Terragni had reduced these "forces" to an "arabesque," to an "apodictic word." The building was thus forced to be understood as "speechless" and "silent" and as such ultimately corroborate Tafuri's existential interpretation. Had Tafuri examined the history and implications of the photo-elastic process Tafuri may have concluded that Terragni's intentions were instead to open architecture's visual techniques to new instruments and new means and to thus transform the visual subject's relation to technology and to power. Tafuri also suggested that the shallow curve of the structure is not sufficient to define the piazza in front of the Palazzo Littorio, not noting its role in providing a mechanical ballast or stiffness to the suspended structure.
Palazzo Littorio , Solution A, 1934, Terragni, Lingeri, perspective.
There were of course pragmatic needs for the photo-elastic analysis: the scale of the cantilever that Terragni and Lingeri proposed in Scheme A necessitated that the architects test the potential stress and strain in the proposed structure. Had Tafuri situated Terragni's and Lingeri's ambitions within the techniques of the photo elastic process itself - the science and optics of these techniques were being perfected as the building was designed - he would have potentially diminished the role of linguistics in his conclusions and have unanchored a project of frontality from a project of linguistics and semiotics. An examination of the photo-elastic process itself would have transferred the role of a linguistic or sign-based critique to an inquiry instead focused on perspectivalism, optics, lens/camera mechanisms, and of chemistry and material mechanics. The final mode of subjectivity would have been one of visual subjectivity linked to material intuition, and the role of the architect would have migrated towards a realm of newly acquired visual and technical procedures. With this change, the existential dimensions of Tafuri's critique might have been forced to migrate as well, towards a subject whose comprehension of visual depth and space would have technological dimensions.
The photo-elastic tests by Terragni and Lingeri were done to ensure equilibrium as the necessary and final state in the design of the massive cantilever of Solution A. In choosing to represent the residual and latent forces - the surplus energies - at work in the creation of this political spectacle, Terragni and Lingeri created a visual critique of metropolitan dialectics. In doing so they also created a crisis in the arena of metropolitan subjectivity. This vertical surface is an expansive visual field that delivers to Mussolini the pictorial gaze of an audience whose subjectivity it both conscripts and ironically severs. In transforming the perspectival depth of a viewing subject into the thermodynamic modeling of light as a material strain within photography, Terragni and Lingeri effectively flattened the distance that segregates subject and object or subject from spectacle. In other words, it is possible to read this pictorial field as expanded and also foreclosed or quite literally foreshortened. In essence this de-limiting of the pictorial field is the architecture of the Palazzo Littorio. It forms an artificial contrivance and the model of nature's duration -- a frontalized and at least partially classicized architectural design whose structural mechanics instigate a migratory set of forces that mimic the duration and temporary nature of organic life. Tafuri's attempt to analyze the Palazzo Littorio asked what these forces represent and indeed were they intended to represent anything at all. Here I would instead suggest that they were intended not to represent but to create a new horizon for architectural space, based on the intuition as well as literal comprehension of material and mechanical duration. In doing so they renew our own duration in relation to material and to the power relations inherent in material production. Here, architectural frontality and perspectival design are involved with and reveal modes of space and of power that have dominated the 20th Century fabrications of capital, power and political authority - can these modes of vision be applied to a visual comprehension of the post war or contemporary city?
