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In a fraudulent era, a new book reminds us of the fundamentals.
By Philip Nobel
December 2002
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In his new book, The Designer's Eye, Brent Brolin pairs photographs
of buildings with manipulated versions in which a detail has been altered.
Left, the Chrysler Building is pictured as it really is; and right, reconceived
without its top.
From The Designer's Eye: Problem Solving in Architectural Design
by Brent C. Brolin. Copyright 2002 by Brent C. Brolin. Used by
permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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We live in fraudulent times. Democracy was buried in Florida. Enron burst.
The White House is a gurgling fount of mendacity. Steroidal ballplayers
skew league stats. A Bell Labs researcher faked a lifetime of eurekas. Everyone
lip-synchs. And there's Martha. You can see where this is going. Last month
in this space we addressed in passing a bold fraud against architects--artist
Brian Tolle's appropriation of the work of 1100 Architect, his collaborators
on the troubled Irish Hunger Memorial, in New York City. It has since gotten
worse: in a recent issue of Artforum Tolle's gallery ran an advertisement
for the artist, a full-page full-bleed image of the memorial, Tolle's name
printed big and alone over a design that was not his doing. Bad, but most
fraud in architecture is intramural; who could count the times a famous
architect has put his name on a design his pen never touched?
Next, of course, comes everyone's favorite category: intellectual fraud.
I hate to return again to Peter Eisenman as an example to illustrate such
a point, but in his late marginal period he is serving them up with carefree
abandon. Martin Filler wrote last year that Eisenman "has kept up a
nimble and unending saraband to remain one step ahead of the intellectual
fraud squad." He may be dancing too slow. Appearing on Charlie Rose
to celebrate his participation in Herbert Muschamp's fatally compromised,
egregiously starstruck World Trade Center redevelopment proposal that ran
in the New York Times Magazine, Eisenman explained that his design--towers
arrested in a sophomoric state of mock collapse--was meant to evoke, like
Greek sculpture, a fleeting beauty found only near the edge of death.
We can assume he was referring to statues such as the Dying Gaul
and other antique melodramas that come to us primarily through Roman copies
of unknown fidelity and might anyway be more accurately classed as
Hellenistic. But no matter. We know what button he was trying to push.
Fraud is not a victimless crime. Eisenman's recent con abused the public
trust. It also did violence to the reputation of the architect at large
(and some of Peter's peers might want to work in this town again). Beauty!
Death! Look at me! It's sad and boring--shock and sham are such small places
to find inspiration--and it's unnecessary. Why do architects flirt
with fraudulence when there is so much mystery in their art that might be
honestly probed indefinitely, with never a threat of resolution? So
many things to learn and test. Can we call them fundamentals?
Just what are these neglected architectural basics? I always cast around
and return to gravity and materials and light (and programs and clients
and money and such). In a new book, The Designer's Eye (W. W. Norton,
2002), Brent Brolin has found many more, all hidden in plain sight.
Someone remind me: are we still in a fashion-moment when it's uncool to
control effects? If so, Brolin's book is the antidote. It is a tool for
recognizing and managing that trickiest and most critical of architectural
phenomena, the repercussions of detail. Each page has two images. On the
right, a snapshot of a building, as is. On the left, the same image tweaked--a
string course erased, a gable-edge contoured, the Chrysler Building truncated,
Chartres given symmetrical spires. Scan-ning from one to the next is revelatory.
Can a small alteration--a cantilever versus a pier, say--change the feel
of building so drastically that it means something new? It looks
that way here.
Brolin calls the book "an exercise in the visual craft of design,"
and he states as his thesis that "visual choices have visual consequences."
But that emphasis on the visual sells his idea short--for, as he shows,
architectural effects are visual for only an instant, just long enough to
translate into limbic cues. The book is a primer for avoiding unintended
results, for opening eyes to the power of simple moves, for letting go of
words. It's about regaining control of architecture as a medium. The cumulative
effect is to demonstrate that--relativists be damned--there is an intrinsic
logic linking form to feeling to meaning in the perception of architecture.
(And if that is true, my God, why are we wasting our time with stunts and
lies?) This grand digression that at its end has given us Eisenman's dance
of death was born from frustration with that limited role. Architecture
would strut and preen, its revolutionaries hoped; it would rival philosophy
and science and art; it would leave those old rigors unplumbed and set out
to find new truths. It hasn't worked out that way.
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