Any discipline can be imagined metaphorically as an area of concern. The extent of that area, its shape and topography, is mapped out by the maneuvering between the discipline’s ideas of the new and the good. Simply, the good fixes the center of gravity, staked out by the canon. The new highlights the edges, as in the popular metaphor of “pushing the envelope.”
The terminology this metaphor obliges is unfortunate, but I will stick with it for clarity’s sake. In this model there is a big difference between looking at architecture as defined by where it starts (the center) or where it stops and meets the rest of the world (the edge). Identity can be oriented toward substance or exclusion. Goodness operates from the center, but its example percolates to the edge, saying emphatically from the inside what is architecture.
The new probes that edge, pushing from the inside and pulling from the outside, wagering on what might be architecture. Newness helps to identify the limits of the area of concern, the boundaries of the discipline, while the good sets the character, locates its heart. In this tug-of-war between the new and the good, the example of goodness protects the edge, and thus what is already inside, while the critique-embodied-in-newness attacks it. Without the protection of goodness the edge will just give way where newness pushes it; without the stimulus of the new the good will ossify into a repressive conformity. This balance has been lost today.
I wouldn’t saddle Peter Eisenman with the authorship of this simplistic geographic metaphor, but our particular understanding of this disciplinary geography, and the dimensions of the present dilemma, can be traced to him. His work has followed the trends in theory from a demonstration of the possibility of structure to an illustration of the forms of indeterminacy that plague the center. The incredible energy expended through time to mask the disciplinary vulnerability exposed in that indeterminacy has been successful for the most part, and made architecture seem robust, able to withstand the most destructive attention.
Eisenman’s efforts show how this robustness has been taken for granted, though, and perhaps has also discovered its limits. So far, the discipline has held up to Eisenman’s probing vivisection, sanctioning if not absorbing his critique. But what it cannot survive is indifference. And this is the unintended legacy of Eisenman’s critique, at least as it has been taken up by the kids.
This is the scene as J,P:A sees it, and where we enter the lists. Not necessarily on Eisenman’s side, though respectful and thankful for his efforts, yet neither with the indifference of the rest. In contrast to both, we see our position toward the discipline as one of stewardship. To go back to the geographic metaphor: the center is where the giants dwell, watching over and protecting all from the howling void of indeterminacy.
To us at J,P:A, the center, so neglected today, is the big leagues. In the center design goes up against the canon head to head. In the center there is nowhere to hide and no tricks to play and no excuses to be made. The test is pure ability, and the stakes, the conditions, the hazards, and the prize are clear.
Paraphrasing Mies, we find the good to be more interesting than the merely new or different. We like to pit ourselves against the giants who have established the good, in the big leagues, where the best considered judgment may be brought to bear (even if we have to do it ourselves). This random sample of some of our built work and projects over the years shows the consistency of our orbit here, with a few formal epicycles.
Our contribution, if any, will come from taking the orbit not chosen by Corbu—die andere moderne that was orphaned when the aliens steered Corbu toward the mass-production, streamlining, branding, and consumer side of the machine.
What the center provides, which has been lost by the exclusive contemporary focus on the edge, is the capacity for judgment.
After the novelty has worn off, and if pretensions to continuing seriousness remain, the first question is always: how do you tell a good one from a bad one? And the answer needs that geography to be laid out, while at the same time extending it as those answers build up over time. The possibility of judgment is the mark of discipline, the sign of maturity in the formal program. There is in the very possibility of judgment itself something that leans toward architecture.
In fact, I would say that the architecture of any condition is precisely that-which-judges or by which judgment is conceivable. Judgment presumes choice beyond necessity, presumes a consideration of the possibilities beyond the simple satisfaction of physical requirements.
Certainly architecture has struggled with the constraints imposed by its presence, yet architecture specifically does not do all that it might once those limits are relaxed by the advance of technology.
If the operation of architecture is judgment, we can see architecture is also the transformation of constraint into restraint. This is perhaps the principle behind Somol’s dictum: never let them see you sweat. The simple service of constraint misses the meaning of this choice, and is only engineering, while the simple practice of restraint also misses the achievement of that choice, and is just manners.
Architecture celebrates the overcoming of constraint, but not indiscriminately: its restraint hovers about like difference, like the absent signifieds that haunt the sign, and is more important. In rising above building, architecture is not more than that, but less than what it could be. Contra Deleuze, if architecture is truly about limits, then its interest in newness will necessarily be circumscribed to those examples whose newness is recognizable and thus not truly new. This of course goes both ways: only those ideas that stick count, and they stick because they are in its terms possible, already falling within those limits. This is the fruit of what judgment is made, and an index of that possibility.
This circumscription favors refinement and development, within the discipline, rather than a forced, radical importation that always risks a near-future bellbottom-like status. The gamble in this accounts for the excitement out on the edge, but also for the silliness of much the remains stranded out there.
In contrast to the sort of refinement that politely sucks the life out of its model (like, say, Meier does to Corbu), or performs science fair experiments with them (like Koolhaas does at IIT), we at J,P:A have come to advocate a process of development termed souping up, that intends to reinvigorate the discipline with a rough respect.
The term is usually associated with the hot-rod culture of Southern California. When an old jalopy is turned into a hot rod, it is said to have been souped-up. Ironically, as near as we can make out, the term refers to the enhanced fuel mixture, rather than anything that contributes to the visible, formal exuberance the term has come to signify.
Souping up is a projective critical design practice. Critical because it does not begin ex nihilo, but with a point on the curve of a tradition, an object emphatically within a discipline, and works with that; projective because it is essentially affirmative rather than negative in nature and, most importantly, results in an object that may stand as the answer to the implied critique.
In its retention of (elements of) the original, souping up is uniquely demonstrative of the passage of judgment. The souped-up object becomes itself a diagram of the comparative logic of judgment. In this it 1) generously presents the case for others to judge, and 2) presents itself as exemplary. In contrast with other critico/generative strategies, souping up is positively guided by the inherent will of the host object or concept.
Thus different starting points, host objects, or concepts (the sand in the oyster) will not only lead the souping-up process in different directions but will give different effects, different characters at the end. So a hot rod is different than a funny car or concept car, and a souped-up Corbu object, like the chaise, will have a different nature than a souped-up Mies object, like the Farnsworth House.
Though souping up is always performance-inspired, it is a design process, not an engineering process, and ends up somewhere beyond, and thus against, performance. This is not a failing of performance, however, but depending on the observer’s interests, an enhancement or displacement: In this, souping up is exemplary of the general truth that performance and signification are inseparable. Souping up may thus tend toward greater or lesser exuberance and calibrate its ratio of effect and reference to suit the program and host.
Souping up proceeds in a piecemeal way, rather than globally, yet respects whatever organic continuity holds the host together—it respects the smoothing hierarchy of the original as the motive genius directing its efforts. In this, souping up moves the machine closer to the machinic (not that we particularly care); it also expands the timeframe beyond the time/presence of the specific physical elements in play at any moment, bringing in relationships to what they were and what they might become. The souped-up object is like the moment when the design/diagram process is frozen, yet it also revels in its presence as well as the referenced duration, rather than being apologetic for it.
Souping up is concerned with overcoming constraints, and its primary expressive energy is devoted to celebrating such transcendence—yet at the same time, by this very action souping up shows how transcendence is not transgression. It dances out toward the edge of the acceptable, sometimes toying with the recognizability of Henry Dreyfuss’s “survival form” and Raymond Leowy’s “MAYA” (most advanced yet acceptable) form. It pushes the envelope without tearing it or overleaping it.
Even the most exuberant hot rod and concept examples hold to certain disciplinary conventions and do not stray from the recognizable idea of automotive performance; not only do they obey a certain disciplinary boundedness, but within that they avoid what might be seen as the absurd or incorrect (though they may flirt with those). While almost anything can be done, far less is. And the array of resulting form can be mapped to capture the “lines of the field” that narrowly describe the range of meaningful, and thus satisfying, possibility.
Despite its critical inception, the souped-up object does not automatically or directly become susceptible to further souping. Its exuberance is proof against too easy a commodification or quick superceding. Rather, depending on how radical the soup, evolutionary progression pauses to regroup and establish the gains made by the souping up, entering perhaps a classic phase in which the center capitalizes on the gains that have been made—think of the pony cars and muscle cars of the 1960s and ’70s. Eventually these then become ripe for another round of souping up. So its piecemeal internal design process extends to a fits-and-starts evolutionary model, not a continuous one. It thus demonstrates at both scales the form of what we call “lumpy” logic, or discontinuous quantization, rather than continuous differentiation. It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to make the case that these discontinuities, and the free spaces between, are less fascist and repressive than the results of design fossilizing continuous differentiation.
Souping up revels in judgment. Judgment, of good or bad, fit or unfit, appropriate or not, red or blue, less or more, anything, involves comparison. Judgment entails standards, involves the direct comparison of examples. The comparison is always made not simply in absolute, objective terms, but in relation to some prior sense of alternatives that are appropriate and specific to its set—some ideal, some structure that also makes the judgment one of value. Makes it interested.
No sensible series is open-ended; completion is always presumed in judgment. Even in judging one number as simply greater or less than another, in the infinitude of the set of integers, an appeal to the structure/system of integers is made that draws in questions/assumptions of completeness. It is this that makes it a series, of which open-endedness can be potentially predicated.
J,P:A would like to boldly propose that underlying all formal judgment in architecture, from the beginning of time to now and into the future, from the primitive hut to the blob and on to the boss—is a consistent manner of discrimination that relies on an understanding of the relation of part to part, their identification as such and what that implies about a sense of their own wholeness and integrity, not very unlike that formulated under the heading of the gestalt. For this reason, and because of the homeomorphic desire of the gestalt, we regretfully call this judgment “topo-logical.”
Further, to answer the expected “well, duh,” we propose that judgment of formal sophistication, which is consistently the only measure that matters, is made possible only by this framework of “topo-logic,” perhaps in the same way as arche-writing grounds speech and writing. This is to say that it is impossible to discuss form in any other way, using any set of concepts or system that are not ultimately reducible to this. Or, to put it another way, if we want to keep the idea of being able to discuss form alone, we will find ourselves here in the land of the topo-logic. This is the environment within which constraint is first felt by design, and restraint is finally practiced. And so the magic moments when the one is mastered and the other is chosen will be understood in terms of topo-logic.
Unlike in mathematics, perhaps, topo-logic in architecture is prior to geometry, which follows as an idealized abstraction. Topo-logic has no necessary ideality about it, but plenty of potential elective ideality, and therefore plenty of places for value to roost. This sounds a lot like tectonics, I’m sure, but it is in fact prior to that—an arche-tectonics, prior to construction and the higher-order logics that flow from that.
It is the ground and ether permitting tectonic understanding to be discussed, that notices the parts before they are particular or named, picks out the systems before they identify themselves according to conventions.
It is no less than the frame of (neutral) reference, and no discussion or even description of stuff can be attempted outside of this sense—by which the thing is identified as such to start with, what sets its boundaries as a thing. The topo-logic names what might be termed its thinglyness-apart-from-its-being, that situates it as properly systemic and thus relatable to others (i.e. as not self sufficient, and according to system/logical relations) so that we can speak of its more particular morpho-logic. Thus, this is before the conventions that name Heidegger’s hammer or shoes and give them their place and being.
Ultimately, all this might be a form, like Kant’s characterization of space and time, of our consciousness—specifically of its deeply characteristic finitude—and the structure it gives to our experience and modes of thinking. This makes judgment into comparison that entails the finitude of its object, relating wholeness and closure, or its lack.
The homeomorphic desire within the topo-logic is not an absolute, but it is a primal “orientation.” The variable infusion/inflection of value to this framework, privileging wholeness or truncation, say, helps distinguish each move and eventually each signature or “style” from the others—makes north mean something different from south, up from down.
It does not tell us what to prefer, but only how to understand it and how to deliver it to intellectual reflection. Recognizing it as a common backdrop, from the mech to the blob, helps to break down the cliques that form in the profession and fosters dialog between, to the advantage of all.
To bring the idea into focus for this particular gathering, lets look at what we can take for a general statement of Eisenman’s long-term program; in his “Architecture as a Second Language,” he states “the dislocating text attacks the terms by which presence is represented, which is that origin, beauty, function, truth are ‘natural’ (i.e. authentic) and not conventional to architecture.”1 This begs the question whether anything is natural, i.e. non-conventional, to architecture?
We submit that this topo-logic is prior to architecture and natural to it for all the reasons just enumerated, and these others to follow. The topo-logic serves architecture’s role of locating us in the world, of expressing how we are there, by acting out, embodying that stance from the micro to macro. Our empathy with that, sometimes explicit and conscious, sometimes subliminal, is what we feel as architecture’s affective establishment of that location.
In its topo-logical dimension architecture covers this territory much more fully than through the overt symbols commonly held to convey it, and from which the claims of language often proceed. But the language given by topo-logic is much deeper—lodged where Eisenman sought it in his earliest work. So what, then—in the jousting spirit of Eisenman—is the opposite or other, of gestalt, and hence of the topo-logical imperative? A lack of concern for wholeness, or an anti-wholistic sensibility? Is this intricacy? Or are either of these at root just reactions to this topo-logic, rather than truly different or other? In fact, both of these can only be described in terms that topo-logic has already prepared: their difference is explained and measured by topo-logic, which is the language of formal manipulation, whatever the details of that manipulation... even if you start from a continuity that does not beg the difference from part-to-whole orientation, the latter can be overlaid fruitfully, and the truth is that its designer has grown up within that world and cannot avoid its influence and his effort must be seen dialectically in relation to the topo-logic he is attempting to escape.
In the very briefest way we would like to close by making some rash claims that could suggest directions for further study and show where this fits into the Souping-up paradigm. First, it can be shown that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, with regards to architectural stylistic development considered from the topo-logic perspective. That is, each style re-records the historical evolution of the play of responses to an original topo-logic problem/set that distinguishes and prompts the inchoate style; thus the Greeks endlessly dicked with trabiation’s originary problem of going from the horizontal to the vertical; while the later Roman classicism could be summed up as the epicyclic range of solutions to the problem of the wall in relation to those orders. In both cases the work evolved from a simplistic solution to the original problem to a more sophisticated one. The clearest examples of such development are to be found in the Italian renaissance, as the path from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo in the handling of the inside corner pilasters in the old and new sacristy gives a taste; others include Corbu’s five points, from plaster to concrete, the journey of Mies’s fancy from the plane to the frame, the blob’s worries about its relative smoothness, or about the dirty ground and its other contexts. The topo-logic history of architecture is traced within each journey to sophistication.
In souping up, the originary formal problem is set by each object to be souped up in relation to the performance in need of enhancement. While a generous reading of performance in architecture can allow almost any period of stylistic evolution to be considered as a sort of souping-up process, it is more interesting to us to understand that performance more narrowly. So while in our work the originary problem is reset each time by that narrow “programmatic or functional” sense of performance, it always remains in part a question of the reconciliation of the architectural with its instrumental heart. Souping up captures that quality.