Professional Documents
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Without Within Mark Pimlott 1-29
Without Within Mark Pimlott 1-29
I
Without and within:
an introduction
Art rno(
loderne
10
11
12
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been published without the financial assistance
of the Netherlands Architecture Fund, to whom I am very grateful.
It could not have been written without the continuous support,
both personal and financial, of the Chair of Architecture (Interior) at the
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. I wish to thank Professor
Tony Fretton in particular for offering me the opportunity to write the
book as part of my visiting Professorship in Relation to Practice.
Colleagues at Delft have provided generous criticism over the course
of that time: Irene Cieraad, Christoph Grafe, David Mulder, Mechthild
Stuhlmacher, David Vernet, Leontine De Wit, and Jurjen Zeinstra.
Other colleagues and friends added cautions and perspectives which
were invaluable. I would like to thank Andrej Radman, John Glew and
Barbara van der Plas in this regard. I owe much thanks to family and
dear friends in the United ICingdom, the Netherlands and Canada who
have shared my burden.
The readers of the entire manuscript, Adrian Forty, Penelope
Curtis and Andrej Radman, generously offered precise commentary
and criticism, directly affecting the final form of the book. I thank
them wholeheartedly.
I thank my publishers, Eleonoor Jap Sam and Nina Post of episode
publishers in Rotterdam, for their faith, help, and patience since the
beginning of this project.
Furthermore, I wish to thank Joost Grootens for his elegant and
sympathetic design, and Inka Resch for its sterling realisation amidst its,
and my, chaotic denouement. I am grateful to Jetske van Oosten and
Use Rijneveld, who secured reproduction rights for the many images in
this book. The generosity of the many guardians of these illustrations
is genuinely appreciated.
Mark Pimlott
13
Picturing fictions
15
Picturing
fictions
Schinkel
Karl Friedrich
Schinl<el,
Perspektivische Ansicht
Rotunde, detail of
Altes
from
Museum,
Berlin, 1830,
D o u g C l e l l a n d , K.F.
Collected
der
portico
Architectural
(London, Academy
Schinkel:
Designs
Editions/
St l^artin's Press, 1 9 8 2 )
their products also share this familial characteristic. In the cases of the
architects observed in this essay, the work of one is followed by the next:
Karl Friedrich Schinkel is followed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Mies and
Le Corbusier offer ideas as contemporaries in parallel, despite
their differing areas of focustheir works and thoughts compete.
Norman Foster emulates Miesian spatial paradigms, yet subjects them
to considerations of technology and the processes of publicity.
Rem Koolhaas offers an appreciation and critique of the modernist
trajectory and its protagonists, and attempts to usurp them (and his own
16
17
(Schinkel).
p a g e : Berlin
Picturing
building from all others in the city, -which are obliged to accommodate
mundane occupation. The building is therefore elevated from the
contingencies of fact. It is a representational objecta Monumenton
an urban stage that serves as setting for both State and Church.^
Many of Schinkel's projects are obliged to be part of a pictorial scene,
and depictions of them are frequently in context, a context often
composed of Schinkel's o-wn buildings and projects. Schinkel was also a
designer of stage sets and a painter. The Museum is part of a pictorial
scene, where it is presented as a kind of Picture. Once past the threshold
of Schinkel's colonnade of repeated, identical Ionic columnswhich
themselves are representations of classical models, hence neo-classical
the viewer enters spaces where picturing standsin for actuality and
coincides with it.
In the Museum's famous interior, the Rotunda, the visitor encounters
what could be best put as acute artificiality. The features of each capital,
string course, moulding, coffer and boss around the space are intricately
fashioned: one might be tempted to say they are delineated. Indeed, they
are overlaid with paint that has been applied so as to picture them, the
painted detail acting as a kind of Doppelganger of actuality, coincident
with it: the picture is fused with its actualisation. Representation and
architecture, drawing and project, idea and object are bound together.
It is instructive to consider the drawing of the Rotunda, as it appears
in Schinkel's Architektonisches Entwilrfen, a folio of drawings produced
for the instruction of architects and architecture students, of a selection
of what he considered to be his best work. The drawings were published
in part between 1819 and 1840, and as a complete folio, an ceuvre complte,
in 1873." The perspective of the interior is, like its realisation, very
delicate, with fine detail distributed over the entire surface. Each and
every moulding and ornament is precisely delineated. The lines of the
drawing are weighted so as to impart a sense of spatial depth in
the pictured space. This effect of depth is keenly felt in the constructed
interior. For example, the floor pattern at the centre of the Rotunda
consists of lines radiating out from a central circular black stone disc,
intersected by concentric lines. The points of intersection are marked
by diamond-shaped bosses. The concentric lines are spaced at gradually
larger intervals and incrementally broaden as they move away from
the centre. Similarly, the radial lines increase in width, and the bosses
get larger as they move away from the centre. In the engraving, this
perspectival effect seems natural and almost goes unnoticed.
However, in the actual space, the centre seems magnetic, drawing the
floor pattern to it. Looking at the actual floor is like looking at a
perspective rendering or a picture of what this floor might look like in
perspective. As the actual space seems to emulate the drawing, it appears
as a picture of itself. The viewer's perceptions are confounded by this
doubling: the interior, contrived to be exaggeratedly present, conveys
extreme artificiality. The viewer has been drawn into a complex play of
representation and its dilemma.
Schinkel's interior compels the viewer to see the space as a fact and
as a fiction all at once. The viewer is required to see fictionally, in order to
cross the threshold between reality (already cafled into question upon
20
von
des
auf
den
Lustgarten u n d seine
Umgebungen'/'Perspective
from the gallery of t h e
staircase of the m u s e u m
the portico onto the
garden and the
from
Doug
Collected
through
pleasure
surroundings',
C l e l l a n d , K.F.
Architectural
(London, Academy
Martin's Press,
view
main
1982)
Sciiinl<el:
Designs
Editions/St
fictions
Picturing
fictions
which frames both the view and the viewer. The drawing shows a building
legitimised by its deployment of ancient forms, in turn picturing a city in
a form that accords with a fantasy of itself.
Burnham
Karl F r i e d r i c h Schinl<et
(delin.
V o n J g e l ) Schauspielhaus
(1821)
Berlin, Perspel<tivische
Ansicht
Einweihungs-Prolog
Aufgestellten
dem
der
Decoration
in
Koningl. Schauspielhaus
Berlin/Perspective view
zu
from
Schinkel:
Designs
Editions/St
Doug
Collected
(London,
l^artin's
Press, 1 9 8 2 )
22
The scheme can be read in the context of the aims of the City
Beautiful movement, which proposed urban arrangements that were
antidotes to the unchecked and un-beautiful expansion typical of
American cities, and the social ills (poverty, squalor, disease, alcoholism,
labour unrest) that came with their expansion. The rational layout of
buildings, organisation of urban elements, distribution of industry,
commerce and housing, public parks and representational civic buildings
(deployed to project civilising values to the populace) were all germane to
plans influenced by the Movement. In the case of the Commercial Club
Plan, the image of the city would be made by a fabric of generic buildings
interspersed with monumental classical buildings placed at the nodes of
a new street pattern, squares and the terminations of great boulevards.*"
Many drawings of the plan were produced by Burnham, showing the
revised Chicago in plan, aerial perspective and views. The drawings were
mostly executed as large painted panels by Jules Gurin, an architect
trained in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Chicago that is pictured
is reminiscent of Baron Haussmann's Paris of the nineteenth century.
This resemblance is most likely intentional, for Paris was revised in
order to achieve goals that were beyond beautification, devised, instead,
to assert administrative control by carving the city up, at once eliminating
the city's poorest districts (and its pockets of diseases and civfl unrest);
making discrete administrative and economic zones (the arrondissements);
and implanting infrastructures for sanitation, transport and the
movement of military forces (for the enforcement of civil obedience).
This picture would have been appealing to Chicago's entrepreneurs,
whose obstacles to more comprehensive financial success were analogous
to those of nineteenth-century Paris.
In the plan, one can see the grid of the city, filling the view, expanded
23
Picturing
fictions
Daniel
Burnham, Edward
Bennett; Commercial
Daniel
Burntnam, Edward
Bennett, Commercial
Chicago
(painting
Chicago, from
H.
Club
Francesco
of
by Jules
Gurin)
proposed
Civic Centre
buildings, showing
it as
of the
country.' 1909
Chicago
&
Faber/Electa,
(London,
1986)
Plaza
of
surrounding
Plan of
History
Architecture/1
Chicago,
i^useum
tliiigJ
Ebenezer
H o w a r d , Garden
(1902) from
Francesco
Manfredo
Dal Co,
Arcliitecture/1
&
Faber/Electa,
/Modern
(London,
1986)
City
Tafuri,
Faber
of
of
Tafuri,
Modern
the
west
Manfredo
Dal Co,
H.
Club
Faber
Picturing
(Crystal Palaces). The Howard plan was devised to replace the iniquities
of the contemporary city with civic authority, morality, industry
and amenity. Essentially, each city would be a contented factory, whose
Authority was implicit in the organisation of the city plan.
The Commercial Club Plan suggests both a territory of controlled
production (which had been a reality of Chicago's urban organisation
since the 1860s), and a domain of embodied authority, not just in the
obvious form of the Civic Centre, but in the form of the city itself.
This idea is evident in the axial, aerial perspective by Gurin:
the city is depicted in the rain at dusk, and a large urban plaza,
concourse-like and apparently reserved for the movement of important
transport, is dominated by the hulking, domed Civic
Centre. To cither side of the plaza are either museums, law courts or
subsidiary civic buildings; each is raised on a plinth to establish its
importance in relation to ordinary buildings, which can be seen here as
being rather Parisian in character. The drawing, like other views in the
series, invokes a fantasy of Paris, or iurope transplanted to the mid-West:
'The central administrative
building, as shown in the illustrations, is
surmounted by a dome of impressive height to be seen and felt by the
people, to whom it should stand as the symbol
of civic order and unity. Rising from the plain on which Chicago rests,
its effect may be compared to that of the dome in St Peter's in Rome...
Such a group of buildings as Chicago should and may possess would be
for all time to come a distinction of the city.
It would be what the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome,
and what St Marii's Square is to Venicethe very embodiment of civic
life."
The urban mass is depicted as a dense, homogeneous urban fabric,
cut through by gridded streets and axial boulevards to form roughly
equivalent blocks, repeating and extending to infinity, contiguous with
the horizon: the West. Extending until the horizon, Chicago becomes the
only feature of the world: there is only its mass where each block is in the
image of the other, its representational spaces and nodes, its bloated civic
monuments. Everything else is eliminated.
8. Sarah w h i t i n g , 'Bas-Relief
Urbanism IITs Figured Field', in
Phyllis Lambert ted.],Mies in
America (Montral/New York,
CCA and The Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2001)655
9. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van
der Rohe (Chicago, Paul Theobold
Company, 1956) 179
When Mies van der Rohe was established in Chicago as the director
of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the powers of the city's
administrators had increased significantly since 1909. Large portions of
land in the city's impoverished Near South Side had been cleared
of communities to accommodate the growth of IIT and other institutions." A
similar strategy of urban clearance was used to set aside an area for a
multi-purpose hall to accommodate 50,000 people for conventions,
political and cultural meetings, trade shows and even theatrical and
musical events.' A site drawing comparable in manner to those produced
for IIT was used to describe the Convention Hall from the air.
In both cases, the drawings were used by the clients for publicity
purposes, to announce the schemes in the regular and specialist press.
These drawings use both drawing and photography to create a
collage, & photo-montage where the architectural or urban proposal
26
Ludwig
for
a glass
skyscraper,
illustration board
(1922), Mies
Art, New
project
charcoal
York
of
on
van
Ludwig
Convention
Rohe,
Chicago.
?photo-
(1953), Mies
Rohe archive, M u s e u m
Art, N e w
York
of
on
van
Modern
fictions
Picturing
r^ies van
Institute
campus,
ROI^G,
Technology
photo-collage
superimposed
on
der
of
of
aerial
der
of
Rohe
Modei'n Art,
model
photograph
archive.
New
Yorl<
28
Peter Gordon,
i t stood
the
courtesy of
Inc.,
View
29th
of
Historic
Ithaca, New
Savannah
March,
Urban
as
1734,
Plans,
York, 14851,
U.S.A.
fictions