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Paragone, © 1996
| 1st Act: Paragone in Paradise | |||
| THE
STAGE MANAGER PRESENTS THE STORY Dear students, Welcome, Allow me to begin with a story. The reason this story should interest you, is because it is your life. The story describes the adventures of Paragone, the first architect, in the market place of ideas. Let me tell it to you. |
Paragone was endowed by God with
knowledge of all things man made. He was assigned a very
well defined role in the total scheme of things in the
universe; that of the Master Builder. He was all knowing,
productive, happily living together on the top of a hill in an
orchard full of apple trees. God warned him of only one
sacred rule: Do not ask why, just build.
Well, Paragone restrained himself as long as he could until one day when faced with a particularly difficult choice in the way of construction, he inadvertently asked himself the forbidden question: Why was one solution better than the other? And all hell broke loose. God was very angry with Paragone. In his anger he condemned Paragone to a life as blind architect philosopher. Paragone was struck with total amnesia. God than turned all the apple trees into a stone as they fall to the ground and roll down the mountain mixing with each other. God told him that he can find the answer, that perfect metaphor of salvation for architecture, is inscribed on one of those stone apples now being picked up and sold at the market by others. Paragone's punishment is to perpetually having to fill in the blank in series of one liners contained in each apple: "Architecture is "X1,3,5,7 etc.........." This was a prime series and therefore tending towards randomness as it grows. Like Sisyphus before him, Paragone must go down the mountain in the murky depth of confusion to find the stone. In the market place of ideas where these apples are bought and sold, Paragone encounters many merchants of metaphors. With great trepidation he occasionally buys a stone apple. In order to decode its meaning he must roll it up the mountain to the top of eternal knowledge and beauty But every time he is near the top he realizes that it is the wrong stone. He lets go and the stone goes rolling down the mountain. Paragone has to start all over again. In the market place there are many stalls with wonderful bits of knowledge and useful concepts. Each stall specializes in a different subject matters: art, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, mathematics and geometry, physics, biology, sociology, psychology, literature, literary criticism, political science, to name but a few. He craves back to a time when the these subjects were not that isolated from each other, and it was possible for one philosopher to wear all of these hats and think and write about them. This list could be organized based on the ancient and modern categories of knowledge and by major historical periods... |
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| 2nd Act: | |||
| The next four acts will portray the same torment in different periods of history. Each stone is a different Metaphor. Each time down the mountain Paragone encounters another Metaphor Merchant | One day Paragone wakes up and finds
himself in the second half of the XXth Century. The shock
of time travel undoes his amnesia. In a flash he sees the
answer in his mind's eye. Believing he has found the
truth he writes a definition of architecture. The
definition contains seven apples, each being partial
answer. But one of them appeared to shine more having
been handled by many buyers at that historical time. Here
it is as Paragone saw it: Architecture is not just a walk through arcades, walls and columns, although such movements are necessary in discovering architecture's most basic condition, that of interiority. Architectural experience, as a mode of knowing, originates and exists primarily in direct experience, the “being here” of bodily experience. It is the disembodied quality of many recent developments in architectural theory that I try to balance in our work in first year. Neither is architecture mere shelter, protection from nature's elements. If it were, we would not have taken the time and effort to improve upon life in caves or similar primitive shelters. Such a utilitarian definition has led to the reduction of architecture to problem solving, dominated by a naive causality implicit in the deterministic model. I will not expand this theme here since this was extensively done by the postmodernist critique. Nor is architecture simply the phenomenological description of so-called primary building blocks of human experience. The possibility of finding such an ontological ground was just another mythology, known as the “myth of essences.” Questions about the beginning, the primal past, and visionary propositions about the future are seductive and occasionally stimulating, but ultimately limiting. And, no matter how tempting and politically correct, defining architecture primarily as theater or ritual, be it social, political or religious ritual, is too rigidly normative. For even when architecture finds itself as a means for self-knowledge or self-expression by an individual monster curves or a group, it betrays its intrinsically nonrepresentational nature and become self-indulgent and sentimental. Furthermore, when architecture is treated primarily as communicative action (language), as it has been for postmodernism and deconstructivism, the act of design becomes subsumed to the act of interpretation, leading to a dominance of the architectural critic over the object maker. Nor is architecture just a utilitarian, information-mediating device akin to the typewriter or the fax machine, as some have suggested recently. Such a view would only follow the many failed attempts at redefining materialism in a less reductive light. To them I say, Good luck. Architecture is, of course, each of the foregoing, but also more. Architecture is a pretext for critical considerations, where, starting from an architectonic detail, one quickly succeeds in establishing a law of expression manifested in a concrete abstraction. This, in turn, becomes an intersubjective territory from which will spring the powers of imagination and inspiration. Today, the most critical questions are epistemological. In other words, how specifically does architecture empower humans to construct and transmit knowledge? Architecture as a mode of knowing - is an act of measurement. Architecture helps us construct a new scaffolding for a family of relationships bridging from one culture to another, and from one age to the next. And then, just as suddenly, he lost it again. The first thing he tried to do is to build a Head Trauma Clinic in order to find some medical help. While in the sanatorium, slowly and painfully over the course of the XXth century he tried to construct the definition of architecture again. He was given three basic metaphors to work with: Architecture is like.......machine, organism, and language. The market place of ideas was full of goods. There were many variations and overlaps between these but when stripped to their essential bare bones, they can be catalogued between these three types. In class we will discuss the fuller implications of each of these and what they imply about the nature of architecture, the nature of human beings, their life as bodies and minds. |
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| List the Apple Merchants | |||
| Jacques Monod, the biologist was obsessed with only one question: How can you tell apart natural from artificial objects, and what drives living organism? He gives a scientist's view of these questions. But he does point Paragone towards two other major questions, two other paradoxes in human knowledge... We will discuss them in class. | The first merchant of metaphors was a French Biologist named Jacques Monod. Then came a mathematician, several philosophers, a physicist, a poet, a theologian, and many artists. With the visual artists Paragone found a lot in common, because they shared a common activity: the shaping of the material world, the making of objects. And at least one other philosopher named Vico, agreed with the artists that the truth is in the made: Verum ipsum factum. | ||
| Structure of a typical episode. In the manner of Cezanne and Wallace Stevens: | |||
| After 2000 years Cezanne leads us out Plato's Cave. | Paragone always asks the question: "Who
am I?" Cezanne's
doubt was Paragone's. |
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| Critical Questions -The Central Plot of Architectural Theory in the XXth Century- | "What is the world, if my
very vision, modeled by my artistic predecessors, is no
longer certain of its own reality? And who am I, if my image in the mirror vacillates, unsure of its own objectivity?" |
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| A brief visit with a poet: Wallace
Stevens. Poets, known for their brevity gives Paragone the whole truth in eight lines called Theory. In the Head trauma clinic Paragone meets Miss D. From Monod, Paragone goes to
Deleuze who thinks that the key question is: |
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| All of these merchants at the beginning
talk to Paragone about everything in general about the
meaning of life. That all sound good, but Paragone's
natural obsession is with geometry (develop that folder) Paragone is an obsessive builder of systems. In spite of the fact that many wise people have said to him: "You can not put all your apples in one basket, he can't help himself from his addiction to the construction of wholes, of totalities. His desire is to know what God knows and he has forgotten. He attempts to make a chart, a kind of periodic table containing a complete list the elements of architectural knowledge based on the three terms borrowed from Jacques Monod. He is still working and reworking this endless task. |
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While it begins with the story of Paragone, the more specific interest of this course is the architectural event born out of an act of measurement. The use of geometry is central to the activity. For Michael Serres the birth geometry occurred when Thales was trying to measure the height of a pyramid in Egypt from a distance. Well, we have come to the end of the beginning of the story. From here on you can go shopping for apples FlowerTucci by yourselves. You have been given a computer and a possible beginning of a rough road map. The course was conceived as an advanced guide to reading about Space, Time and Causality. What you do with it is your business.
Good luck-
Dan Bucsescu, November 1996
The
Architectural Event
© 1996 vico65@aol.com