The subject of architecture.

Abstract

Architecture is intended for certain subjects, i.e., for clients, the public, etc. These subjects are at least partially imagined and, therefore, constructed. In the twentieth century, some of these constructions involve a split subject, one divided into one or several binary structures. An examination of the differences between the intentions towards this split subject in certain texts written in the first and second halves of the century indicates a shift from an early interest in overcoming the split to a later one of acceptance. The method employed in this study is based on a critical framework derived from recent psychoanalytic theory, specifically the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's theory of the split subject is based on two ideas (the mirror and the objet a (a substitute object)) that suggest two kinds of architectures: (a) architecture as a mirror that reflects the split condition and (b) architecture as an objet a that substitutes a unified object for the split condition. This framework is used to examine the major texts of practicing architects in the twentieth century with the objective of uncovering the concepts of and intentions toward the subject. These texts include Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture, Moisei Ginzburg's Style and Epoch, Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City, and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. An examination of the subjects of these texts reveals differences in intentions between the authors of the early and late periods and, therefore, suggests an historical shift in relation to the subject of architecture. In Le Corbusier's work, the split is characterized as between two historical periods and the desired condition is their synthesis. In historical terms, his work attempts to overcome the rupture and alienation of the Industrial Revolution and the machines and mass-produced objects that it spawned. In contrast to Le Corbusier's subject, Ginzburg's is a fully contemporary subject who is collectivized by the machine and the Russian Revolution, two factors that combine to bring the North and the South, i.e., the intellectual and emotional, together in a new epoch. Unlike these early twentieth-century author-architects, Rossi shifts the dialectical framework to include the collective subject. Both subjects and objects in Rossi's work are generated through erasure, a technique in which something essential--type and the collective--is sought by means of the erasure of "deformations", i.e., the inessential contingencies of local historical and cultural transformations. Venturi and Scott Brown present two subjects, one the accommodating subject of Complexity and Contradiction and the other the subject that reflects the split of the "decorated shed" in Learning from Las Vegas. In the first, the promise of overcoming the split is made. In the second, however, it is not. Le Corbusier and Ginzburg, therefore, share synthetic intentions towards the split condition of the subject. In contrast, Rossi and Venturi/Scott Brown propose more problematic, less utopian, and more complex models of the split or splits without offering models of closure. The differences between these author-architects describe an historical shift in relation to the split subject of architecture.