Chapter Seven: TRAUMA AND TYPE
1 The Trauma as Learning
In the final and irreversible stage of an architecture's history it breaks up into variations on variations of itself. Continuous exchange between architects simply compounds the disarticulation of buildings caused by the use of a set of stereotyped architectural elements. A disarticulation which can only be alleviated by the further use of decorative remedies which can visually hold the building together and at the same time allow it to respond adequately to specific contexts. This ideological tendency towards the over-articulation of buildings can be found, for instance in the dispersed forms of Baroque architecture and in the so-called Functionalist examples of the mid 20th century. In both cases, attempts to precisely identify and name the relations between the parts of the building result in its fragmentation.
Because it is still locked into a highly-integrated socioeconomic system, architecture cannot extricate itself from this Involutionary spiral by instituting radical recombinations of its typical set of elements. There is no choice involved in whether it remains in this state or is transformed into another. No effort on the part of individual architects (no matter how skilled they are) can unlock this collective pattern of behaviour which is now so deeply programmed into architectural activity. Indeed to all intents and purposes, it is architecture; it is the only meaningful option available to architects at these times. It is trapped in this state by two dimensions of similarity which impose themselves on all production; the learned program of typical forms at its disposal developed out of its own past, and the homogeneity of commissioning sources which reflect the current socioeconomic environment. These few sources still initiate most of the building activity during such periods so that while there may be many buildings commissioned, there will be relatively few patrons.
Any conscious attempt by architects to reconstitute the lost integrity of the architectural language using the conventional elements at their disposal will simply appear to be another superficial variation on the Involutionary theme. Here we have an example of the ‘Red Queen’ analogy where in a sense architects have to keep running in order to stay in the same place. That ‘place’ is the authentic representation of social institutions. Although motivated groups might seek to put forward what they see as generally-applicable propositions for the whole of architecture, these will be indistinguishable in effect from other less ideological works. There is no way out of this; it is impossible at this stage in history to solve these problems within architecture by any combination of its forms or decorative additions.
This is the same kind of problem which is faced by architects during an Evolutionary phase in architecture; but, in the case of Involution ('internal evolution'), the problem exists within one Type rather than several. Since history is irreversible and sequential, architects cannot choose to jump from the problems caused by Involution to the authenticity which prevails during the Developmental or classic phase. An Integrated environment has nowhere else to go except towards dissolution and Plurality. So too with its architecture. It will inevitably go through a historical stage where its forms are subject to continual crises of meaning. Quite simply architecture at this point has used up its communicational resources and now has severely limited semiotic freedom to resolve these representational problems. There is no alternative to this state of affairs, for the social and economic constraints which govern these conditions have their own unpredictable timescales. Either they will remain as integrated as they are or become more diversified in organization. Either way, this is not under the control of architects, although they will make constant (and ultimately futile) attempts to resolve these problems within architecture itself. If at some point a multitude of new commissioning sources should arise, this will be reflected in production by an even more rapid splitting of architecture into variations and their increasing divergence from one another. There will come a critical point in such a process where whatever characteristic identity remains of the Involutionary Type is finally destroyed and dissolved into a number of truely distinctive separate architectures. It is not that new architectural types will be spontaneously generated in order to replace the multiple variations of the Type. No dynamic and collective system ever allows this discontinuity to take place; it does not stop being one thing in order to become something else entirely. It changes by recursively transforming the material at its disposal through communication and exchange between its agents. Thus the unforeseen emergence of a new Evolutionary phase with its multiplicity of commissioning sources affords an opportunity to radically recombine existing material to the extent that what had been merely illusions of differences during Involution are projected into real and irreconcilable oppositions – autonomous styles. Until that happens current problems have to be dealt with on an almost day-to-day, crisis management basis.
The inability of an architecture to escape from the confines of an Involutionary Type without the prior reorganization of its environment points to its nature as a learned and habitual mode of behaviour assimilated out of past experience. In this case the collective experience of numerous individual architects. Behaviour involves a repertoire of possible responses to a variety of circumstances. For architecture this repertoire is defined by the set of typical forms it has at its disposal – the style. In effect this is a set of instructions about how to behave in different circumstances. Different environments will either reinforce or deny their validity as a mode of behaviour. With the emergence of an Integrated environment, one particular set will be locked into place as the only viable means of expression and subject to further development and elaboration. With Evolution, a potential architecture may be overwhelmed by the multiplicity of circumstances which it must represent and simply collapse into an aggregate of purely pragmatic responses.
The Involutionary style, however cannot respond pragmatically to any circumstance. and, in this respect one could suggest that its behaviour has at some point in its past been locked into the repetition of a standard formula. In these conditions, each and every response it makes is not orientated to current reality or changing contexts, but is always simply a confirmation of its limited behavioural repertoire. It never comes face to face with reality by adjusting its behaviour according to new events but operates at a purely ideological level with regard to experience. It continues to superimpose on to experience the pre-formed pattern of responses locked in during the Developmental phase and stereotyped by the continuity of its environment. These form a perceptual filter through which all future events are perceived and by means of which the system will act more or less effectively in the world.
From a behavioural point of view the mode-locking by the environment of a very particular set of responses which the system has developed can be looked at as a form of trauma in its history. That is an event which in some sense closes the system off from real world diversity in order to focus on a narrow region of experience sharply defined in its past. At this traumatic point, development of the typical set – its adaptation and flexibility to circumstances - stops and the reductive processes of Involution take over. Time, in the sense of real change, stands still. All that happens is a reductive and essentially ritualistic ‘purification’ of the behavioural possibilities offered by the typical set. Clearly, the more limited the number of possible responses the organism has in its behavioural repertoire, the more likely it is to collide with the demands made upon it by the events of the real world. It will, in certain situations, be unable to modulate its behaviour enough to produce appropriate responses and will thus be forced into conflict with its environment: a conflict which may turn out to be a continual feature of its post-traumatic history.
The impact of the trauma, on the other hand, closes off this capacity to learn from new experiences. It is not that there is no feedback from experience to the behavioural map, indeed there is; it is simply that whatever it reports cannot alter the deeply-programmed routine which has already been established. So intense has the traumatic experience been, that it has imprinted a virtually unalterable routine or type of behaviour on to the perception of the organism.
In architecture, the preconditions for what can be regarded as a trauma in its history are, firstly, the establishment of a highly-integrated society which endures over time and, consequent upon that, the formation of a single typical set. The first is the (integrated) environment from which there is no escape, and the second is the resulting limited behavioural set which is condensed out of the increasing similarities of the environment. This, of course, is the long-term definition of a trauma since it relies on the continuity of certain socioeconomic conditions. As far as architecture is concerned, 'sudden' traumatization would be exemplified in a colonial situation where, relative to the long history of an indigenous culture, the imposition of an 'imperial' architecture is a sudden and violent occurrence. It closes off the possibility of a society learning from its own experience and substitutes in its stead a rigid and unrepresentative symbol drawn from someone else's experience.
Post-traumatic experience is, inevitably, one of continuous conflict with the environment to a greater or lesser degree. In order to survive the stress which this impose, the organism is forced to utilize secondary behavioural mechanisms which can at least alleviate this problem (since it is unable to alter its more basic mode of behaviour). For an individual, these take the form of 'masks', gestures, attitudes and linguistic devices which are invented anew for each context. These perform a permanent remedial role in fitting a rigid behavioural pattern to the unavoidably transient nature of the environment. In architecture, the same purpose is served by decoration and articulation of the form of buildings. In neither of these cases do these devices represent a 'fine-tuning' of behaviour to context, but are more akin to CAMOUFLAGE which allows the organism to appear to respond to its environment while not, in fact, doing so.
Up to a point this displacement can work; however, it can only do so in relatively simple contexts where different demands can be easily isolated from one another. In contexts which are more complex than this, where, for instance, the organism must respond to differences simultaneously it will be subject to increasing degrees of stress. The reason is the organism's tendency to split contexts into precise IDENTITIES which can be clearly categorized and represented in built form. Thus, even although the context might contain relations which are inherently ambiguous (when viewed from 'outside' so to speak), or which must function simultaneously the organism will only be able to represent these relations in a serial form. The result will be an incongruous ASSEMBLAGE of devices which caricature the actual context. (Modern architecture is particularly prone to this kind of over-articulation which, firstly disperses the form of the building and then articulates each of these arbitrarily-identified and precisely named functions separately. The result is a crude form of 'architecture parlante' (or ‘functionalism’ in mid 20th century terminology) played out with abstract shapes. This is an issue which will be gone into in some detail later on.
To the critical eye, the true rigidity and arbitrariness of the Type which lies underneath its multiple disguises will, in such circumstances be clearly revealed. It will be seen to be an architecture which does not belong to its time and place.
2 The Role of the Avant-Garde
The point has been made that the trauma induces an organism to treat one part of experience as the whole. (It mistakes the part for the whole). In this respect one can place the activities of the avant-garde in the role of forcibly re-orienting architecture towards a more comprehensive representation of experience. It is, however, important to recognize that this function is carried out differently at different stages of architectural history. Although the goal of an avant-garde forever remains that of re-establishing the authenticity of architecture, the means which it uses for this purpose must necessarily change from period to period to suit the current state of architecture. It is for the same reason that the function of decoration must in some circumstances be to unify the typical set while in others it will be to differentiate it. Both these forces play a regulatory role in the history of architecture. So with the avant-garde, the authenticity which they seek in the architecture of their time will, in some periods be expressed in utopian terms while in others it will be presented as an articulation of existing tendencies. In the latter, the architecture of the avant-garde will be a 'rationalist analysis' of what already exists whereas utopian projects propose a radical and unrealizable alternative to what exists. There is no need to suggest a different intention or goal in these two perceptions of architecture; all one need assume is that they are the same critical endeavour played out in different circumstances. (Once again, 'same rules, different starts'). They both arise out of a criticism of architecture at different points in its history.
If one locates avant-garde activity in an Evolutionary, Developmental or Involutionary phase in the history of architecture, this will determine which of these two perceptions will predominate. Very simply, since the problems of authentic representation will be different in each of these periods, so too will the solutions (all constrained by the idea of an ideal type). For example: when critical activity takes place in an Evolutionary-Developmental phase (several architectural types, but converging), the result will be what one might call rationalist proposals. They will seek to reveal the potential architecture which underlies the diversity of current tendencies. Given the diversity of production during this phase, the avant-garde will attempt to focus on, and draw out unitary principles relevant to all production. One can put it this way, that what the avant-garde propose in the Evolutionary-Developmental period CAN be realized in architecture; it indicates what is already implied in current production; it is an extrapolation which remains well within the bounds of what is possible.
If, on the other hand, one looks at avant-garde activity in a Developmental-Involutionary period where there is already a fully-developed and dominant architecture, the problems and the suggested solutions are entirely different. There, architecture is already highly condensed and unified; so condensed in fact that it repulses analysis by displacing it into historical justifications of the status quo. (Every element and combination can be justified by other elements and combinations exemplifying what would seem to be the utter rationality of the system. The whole, however, is justified by its own existence as a truly organic product of history - a new 'nature'). Since avant-garde criticism cannot enter this self-contained architectural world and reveal the inconsistencies between its parts (theoretically, at least, there are none), it is forced to approach this architecture AS A WHOLE. It is forced to project another whole architecture as an alternative to this unrepresentative symbol of production. This is the UTOPIAN alternative whose forms are not derived from existing tendencies nor implicit in current production.
To summarize: in Evolutionary-Developmental conditions there will be a rationalist criticism of the prevailing architecture which seeks to accelerate existing tendencies towards unification of style. In Developmental-Involutionary conditions however, there will be an Utopian criticism which seeks to dislocate the overwhelming uniformity of architecture.
The function of the avant-garde exists throughout all periods of architectural history as one of architecture's regulatory mechanisms. Its role however, is highlighted when socioeconomic conditions force architecture into generating internal contradictions such as being too diverse in its repertoire or too uniform and rigid. In one case the avant-garde will attempt to speed up the process of convergence of diversity, while in another it will seek to degrade the unity of the Type. For instance, in the 19th century the avant-garde was presented with a situation in which both these tasks had to be performed simultaneously. In the terminology of this book the 19th century in Europe can be classified as an example of an Involutionary-Evolutionary transition. The remnants of a long era of Classicism acted as an obstacle to the emergence of a new and comprehensive architecture which could be condensed out of the multitude of pragmatic types and the more extreme variations of the Classical Type. The memory and influence of that Type as a cherent strategy simply refused to allow the completely impartial recombination of architectural material. Even although it was no longer a homogeneous entity, architecture was still unable to adjust to the new plurality of commissioning sources which had emerged by the middle of the century. Here is the strength of the trauma in architecture: that it causes the fragments of the Type to endlessly circulate around a now invisible centre. The avant-garde was therefore required to oppose the remnants of Classicism with Utopian symbols and, as the century wore on, by rational analysis extract from the architectural material which the Type had released the basis for a potential new architecture. In other words, to fragment the dominant style and then synthesis a new architecture out of the debris. (Note, for instance, the remarkable mixture of styles which prevailed in the mid to late 19th century: Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Classicism in its many various forms, Neo-Gothic and proto-Modernism, which cover a whole range of states from the most pragmatic to the most ideological). Yet even by the early years of the 20th century, the problem of convergence has not resolved itself in all areas of Europe thus requiring that Utopian blast of Futurism in Italy. A Utopianism which, however, was relatively quickly absorbed or overtaken by the Rationalist successes of the 1920s. The Evolutionary conditions of the 19th century had finally given way to Developmental processes triggered by socioeconomic integration in the form of corporate capitalism and government interventionism.
The different positions taken by an avant-garde throughout architectural history may be tentatively summarized as follows:
Historical Transition Phase Avant-garde Activity Procedures
Evolutionary-Developmental Rationalist Analytical-reductive
Developmental-Involutionary Utopian Symbolic-oppositional
Involutionary-Evolutionary Utopian-Rationalist Symbolic-Analytical
The focus of avant-garde activity (and, indeed, decorative activity) always remains that of the current state of typical set of elements and combinations. It is the degree of diversity or integration of that set which determines the critical method which the avant-garde will use in order to regulate the architecture of its time. Although, within the life-time of one characteristic Type (defined by the cycle: evolution-development-involution), architectural form is in continuous change, one thing remains constant: the relation between the different processes which bring about the change and which regulate it. Thus the state of the typical set at a given time will generate a quite specific decorative and avant-garde response which will seek to contain the representational performance of the set within certain definite limits. As regulatory mechanisms, both decoration and avant-garde activity bridge the gap which always exists between the Symbolic (the Type), and the Imaginary (the Ideal Type); between what does exist and what should exist. Their task, therefore, is twofold: firstly, to maintain the uniformity of the language of architecture (its 'oneness'), and secondly, to ensure its authenticity to different contexts (the 'many'). It will be shown later that architectural criticism performs the same regulatory role and similarly is in a constant relationship to the state of the typical set.
3 The Limits to Avant-garde Activity
The proliferation of radical projects, manifestos, magazines, exhibitions and all the pronouncements of the avant-garde (even down to the details of their perhaps unorthodox lifestyles), are a deliberately constructed illusion. They present a whole alternative reality to that fragment of experience upon which the Type has built a complete architecture. A parallel world is formed which seems to have all the paraphernalia which one would associate with an architecture; all, that is, except the buildings themselves. Those few buildings which the avant-garde do manage to get built will, in the nature of things, form only a small percentage of the whole of architectural production. There is no doubt that they form an imitative source – a set of models - but it would be a mistake to assume that these projects and buildings precisely describe the shape of things to come: or that they alone will replace the disintegrating images of the Involutionary architecture. They will not. Architectures arises as a result of multiple exchanges of new and recurrent combinations. For this reason one cannot consider architecture to be akin to a religious controversy where a small group of high-motivated individuals 'convert' a majority to their views. To believe this is to fall victim to a somewhat dated Romanticism and the ‘heroic’ myths set out in many books on architectural history In order to explain the move from one architecture to another, one must look at it as a process of the general transformation of the whole of production. The collective typological process of exchange condenses everything that exists as production including what some might regard as the most 'reactionary' and the most 'progressive' works of architecture into a new Type. In this, the works of the avant-garde are quite impartially fused with the vast majority of more conventional material. The architecture which results from this process will not be that described by the avant-garde, it will be something else entirely which will be different to all previous types whether classicist or radical.
The exchange of elements and relations within the field of production is a purely pragmatic process which condenses only what exists at the time and does not give a privileged status to the works of the avant-garde. Nor does it transform hopes or intentions, dreams or visions of the future, but only architectural forms and their patterns of distribution. The architectural system does not have a ‘mind’ which can discriminate between the progressive and the reactionary – architecture is a result of cumulative activities. It is not a choice. Even at the level of the aggregate of individual architects, where there is choice, the selection and combination of elements is carried out for the most pragmatic of reasons: 'Will it solve this particular representational problem?'; 'Can it be combined with these existing reliable elements?' These are the questions which determine the mode of exchange through which architecture changes from one state to another. They are also questions which are of equal concern to avant-garde architects who do not invent the forms of their buildings from nothing, but who, like other architects condense them out of what already exists. What distinguishes avant-garde architects from other architects is not, therefore, the METHOD which they use to generate form, but the RIGOUR of its application to existing material. The avant-garde architect seems able to essentialize the vast repertoire of architectural material much more thoroughly than other architects and to define its most inherent tendencies. For instance the ability of the early Modern architects to decypher the underlying geometric elements of previous styles and synthesis them into a coherent model of a new architecture. In this case to define the Gothic-vernacular ‘free plan’ and the classical grid as fundamental elements which could be combined to resolve the key issues of context and uniformity, freedom and order which had been major sources of argument in the 19th century. The fusing of these two organizational principles within one architectural form (for instance, in the Ville Savoie), provided a supremely rational model drawn from tendencies already implicit in the stylistic chaos of the 19th century. The new in this sense is simply a radical recombination of what already exists.
To a greater extent than other architects, the avant-garde, do not have an in-built resistance to radical recombination of conventional forms and are prepared to accept that what they produce may not look like anything that has been built before. But this does not distinguish them as a 'different species' of architect. This capacity for accepting change is a matter of degree, not of kind. It is present more or less in the work of all architects and is, therefore, a spectrum of abilities and personal attitudes from which one cannot isolate the avant-gardist perception of architecture in particular. If they do not actually produce the 'architecture of the future', then at least the rigour of their analysis abstracts and identifies its tendencies and directions. Relative to the prevailing Type, the avant-garde produce signs which function at two levels of the architectural system. The first is that of focussing on as yet unrealized potential in architectural form which could provide the basis for a more authentic Type. Their radical analysis of the language of architecture uncovers statements which could be formulated and thus enrich architecture's capacity to represent the whole of experience. Some of these statements will be of little actual value while others will be of immediate use, but the more fundamental reason for this exercise is to point, once again, to the infinite possibilities inherent in architectural form as against the arbitrary limitations imposed by the current dominant architecture. The avant-garde thereby seek to re-establish the plasticity of architecture as a medium which can represent every conceivable context. The second level at which avant-garde activity works is that of being itself a symptom of the crisis of meaning which has befallen the Involutionary Type (or, indeed, the crisis which is apparent when there are too many different types). The very existence of the avant-garde points to some failure or incapacity in the prevailing architectural Type in the same sense that decorative activity points to its communicational failure. The more demonstrative the avant-garde criticism is at any time, the deeper one can assume is the crisis of contemporary architecture. As a regulatory mechanism for the whole of the architectural system it is forced into becoming more active and more radical in its criticism the more inauthentic the prevailing Type becomes. This scaled response to conditions thus defines a range of avant-garde radicalism in projects and criticism which, at its most extreme produces Utopian thought, dropping through various Rationalist criticisms to the point where it theoretically disappears within the authenticity of a classical Type during the Developmental phase. Just as decoration must become more elaborate as a Type becomes more rigid in its typical set (displacement), so equally the projects of the avant-garde will become more radical.
However, it is neither the projects nor the propaganda of the avant-garde which finally unlock the traumatized behaviour of an Involutionary architecture. This can only occur when there is an actual change in the socioeconomic infrastructure of the society: an alternation in the numerical distribution of commissioning sources
Here, however we sometimes face the essential optimism of the avant-garde and, equally the romantic narratives of future historians of the period. From this point of view utopian activity brings about the downfall of a failed architecture and further, that the models produced by the avant-garde become the basis for a new and vital architecture. All at once, it is sometimes proposed, the majority of architects reject the past and take up the visions put forward by the avant garde. This is an unrealistic scenario to say the least. No matter now apparently unrepresentative or ineffective an architecture is during a given period in history, no effort on the part of architects can dislodge it from the path mapped out for it by its socioeconomic environment. What the avant-garde tries to do (by utopian project and manifesto), is to speed this fragmentation up to the point where the Type destroys itself as a homogeneous entity. This is done in the belief that the power to change architectures is in the hands of architects themselves as a group no matter what the state of society is at the time. More realistically one can suggest that by their continual criticism and the presentation of alternative forms (which are in fact, unrealizable at the time), the avant-garde poses unanswerable questions about the Type and its failings. It is in the attempt to answer such questions that architects resort to ever more abstract permutations of the typical set and to decoration while remaining firmly within the characteristics of the prevailing Type. (A point that should be made here is that most architects do recognize the representational problems which beset architecture. However, unlike the avant-garde, they see the solution in terms of a part-by-part adaptation of existing material rather than the construction of a whole new architecture.)
Both the ideological criticism by the avant-garde and to a much larger extent the pragmatic activities of other architects gradually push the prevailing Type to the cathartic point of total fragmentation. Yet, since these dispersed fragments of a once-unified architecture are still locked within the same set of socioeconomic conditions, no new architecture automatically comes into existence. What has been achieved (as far as the avant-garde is concerned) is that the Type has been unravelled to the point where it has lost any unique stylistic identity and thus its ability to restrict direct and necessary expression of individual contexts. It now consists of perhaps many EQUALLY-VALID variations on an almost-forgotten theme. As such, it has been emptied of a specific content and, therefore, made receptive to new kinds of architectural experience. During such times, recombination of architectural form become more and more radical and the relationships between different variations become more tenuous. As suggested before, there is no automatic time-limit to this anarchic state of architecture. The avant-garde functions as a catalyst in the destruction of one architecture, but they cannot institute another to replace it. Only TIME, measured in the degree of institutional change in the society can now provide the conditions for the advent of a new architecture. By attempting to telescope the Involutionary time-scale of an architecture, the avant-garde seek to make form once again plastic and responsive to context. The parallel of this process with the role of decorative activity must be emphasised. Avant garde activity like decoration is an attempt to resolve immediate problems of representation faced by architecture.
4 Rejecting the Concept of Style
Decoration and the arid permutation of typical elements are the means whereby the Type attempts to remain fundamentally the same. (Note the difference here between the act of 'permutation', which assumes that the elements are fixed and unchangeable, and the more creative act of transformation or modulation of typical elements). Below the level of the Type and within the aggregate of individual architects, this resistance to change is revealed in the quite legitimate caution shown by them to the introduction of radically new elements. It is, however, a caution which at this late stage in the architectural cycle is counter-productive: it becomes progressively more difficult to select and combine architectural elements for unique contexts while differentiating them from others. Yet faced with the impending bankruptcy of the prevailing Type, architects are forced to make minimal adjustments to the form of their works which will, once again, allow them to express the particular nature of context while still attempting to retain all that has been learned from the past. At the level of the Type one can suggest that these gradual adaptations are an attempt by the Type to inoculate itself with just enough new characteristics to disguise its fundamentally unchanged nature. An example of such 'minimal adjustments' in architecture would be the 'modernistic' decoration applied to essentially Beaux Art buildings in the early decades of the 20th century. Thus, classical planning and spatial organization, and the proportional order of the facades of buildings would be hidden behind decorative devices such as flat roofs, ribbon windows, 'streamlining', geometric patterns and smooth wall surfaces. Art Deco, Jazz Moderne, the ‘stripped classicism’ of totalitarian states or a degraded form of Art Nouveau would be used to articulate a basically stereotypical form. One can include amongst these displacements the stripping away of the profuse classical decoration which gave the post-classical building some contextually-related meaning. However, simply 'scraping' the building in this way was not a real answer, for, as suggested earlier, it was only by profuse decoration that the Involutionary architecture could fulfil any representational function. In order to substitute for the removal of classically-inspired decoration, architects were forced into replacing it with a rigid and mechanical formalism in a futile attempt to retain the clarity of form demanded by Involutionary pressures. It was, of course, simply sublimation of the decorative impulse, not an alternative to it.
There is an apparent diversity of architecture during these late Involutionary periods and this essentially decorative diversity is a product of local socioeconomic, cultural and geographical differences within the overall frame of an Integrated state. Differences which in the late Involutionary period are allowed to surface as decorative variations in order to save the Type as a whole. All architectures, in this sense, are compounds of different developmental stages at any point in their history. This process of trying to reproduce local innovation within existing canons produces another dimension of complexity in the history of architecture. This is compounded by the fact that major socioeconomic change can take place at any time and may occur in different geographic areas at different times. A single Involutionary Type may be subject to differential rates of change, decorative innovation or decomposition resulting in the co-existence of radically different variations on the same theme. For instance, classically-inspired and overtly decorative sub-styles may sit side-by-side with the stripped classicism or moderne styles mentioned above. Yet they are all derived from the same Involutionary stylistic source. Here is the complexity of things: a multitude of forms produced by the fragmentation of the Type into local variations coupled with the effects of random socioeconomic change and its geographic variations.
Here is the central issue in the avant-garde criticism of existing architecture: that this incomplete transformation (or more cynically, this 'innoculation' against radical change), might be taken up and developed as a legitimate architectural Type. Their task, as they see it is, therefore, to prevent the stabilization of this false authenticity as a new architecture. Since history is quite impartial about the state of the architecture which it allows to flower or to deny and since there is no inevitable relationship between the character of an architecture and the society which it represents, the avant-garde must try to wipe the typological slate clean. It must do so for this false responsiveness of the existing Type could perpetuate itself in the form of a new architecture. In rejecting this smooth assumption of contemporary forms by architecture and in calling for the complete reconstruction of the Type, the avant-garde seek to ensure the absolute authenticity of architecture to new conditions. To the radical analysis, all existing architectural symbols can be discarded for they cannot be identified with 'Architecture' per se, but only with one historical manifestation of it. It is a typical set which has served its purpose and has now become a hindrance to architecture's primary goal of representation. It has become necessary to re-synchronize architectural form with the great spread of contexts which it is meant to represent. That vertical harmony between form and context must be re-established and with it a whole dimension of meaning which had been lost with the internalization of the discourse of architecture around a perfect, but abstract concept of unity. That great plane of architectural order which arose with the separation of form and context (the formation of the ONE routine for all purposes) can no longer be considered to be the embodiment of the discourse of architecture. Indeed, no architecture can ever say all that there is to be said for they are always in the process of becoming other architectures. To assume otherwise is to reify the architectural symbol of experience and to treat it as 'more real' than reality.
If all architectural styles are expendable - a consistent claim of the avant-garde which condemns the very concept of 'style' as it faces the superficialities of an Involutionary architecture - where then does the presence of architecture lie? If it does not lie in present or past buildings, in their substance, where is this architecture of the avant-garde? In truth, it is nowhere, for it is not a 'thing', but a PROCESS. Architecture is the continuous transformation of the material world. From this point of view, specific architectures are only the residue of this activity - a trail of images which disappears into the past. As Le Corbusier pointed out: architecture is a 'pure creation of the mind'. This is the basis of the anti-stylistic appeals of the avant-garde which calls on architects to discard their fixation with particular sets of forms and recommit themselves to that eternal principle of architecture; the harmonious ordering of the material world in the image of humankind. Clearly, such a task is endless, for architecture is subject to external forces which tend to lock it into very specific and durable routines. It is, therefore, always necessary to reset or renormalize the limits of the discourse and to reorientate it to human experience. This is the internal regulation of architecture (not a specific style) carried out in part by the avant-garde.
Where 'socioeconomic time' has allowed the formation of a rigid set of typical elements and combinations - an irreversible state - regulatory measures take the apparently contradictory role of accelerating this process of contraction. At this historical stage of an architecture, there is simply no alternative means of returning architecture to a more plastic state. It must be thrust along the road which it will travel anyway; it must be forced to 'live out' these abstractions which have ceased to bear any relation to human experience. Ultimately the internal contradictions of such an architecture will sooner rather than later shatter its homogeneity in a violent oscillation as it tries to cope with the unending diversity of experience with progressively more limited means. It will arrive at its final illogical conclusion: that in order to maintain its function of being an absolutely singular definition of architecture, it must equally-absolutely unravel itself into a multitude of differences.
The regulatory role of the avant-garde is not inconsistent with its stated purpose of forcing the Involutionary Type into a catastrophic crisis. The function of regulation works in that space between the supposed goal of the system and its actual performance. When the latter diverges from the former, and when this cannot be corrected (if it is dictated by external circumstances), regulation requires the projection of a new level of architectural activity - another architecture. Avant-garde activity, therefore concerns itself with the IDEA of Architecture, rather than any particular historical manifestation of it. There is in this the curious reversal of appearances, where it is the avant-garde who defend the continuity of architecture against the more general tendency to freeze history into the forms of one particular architectural Type. To the institutions of the time, who preserve and enshrine the techniques and routines of the prevailing Type, the presentations of the avant-garde appear incoherent and ultimately negative. However, from a wider perspective (history), they can be seen as a call for a more authentic and harmonious order. The supposed merits of the Type: its internal harmonies, its precise and calculated relations, its elaborate decoration (regarded as further 'beautification' of its buildings), will, from a radical perspective be regarded as signs of its detachment from experience. The Involutionary architecture is a Symbol for a context which no longer exists.
5 The Role of the Critic
The Type is simultaneously subject to attack from another quarter and that is from the analysis of the architectural critic. Unlike the avant-garde architect, however, the critic cannot offer a concrete alternative to what exists, except insofar as he or she points to radical projects. Criticism, therefore, acts indirectly on an existing architecture by indicating what is ABSENT in the Type; that is, its deficiencies. These centre on the logical inconsistencies which riddle an architecture in its Involutionary phase or with the chaos that reigns in an Evolutionary period. The critic deals with these as symptoms or 'signs' of some fundamental communicational failure. At the end of an architectural cycle, these problems revolve around the conflation of the logical levels of representation which arise when a symbol (the Involutionary Type)is taken to be REAL rather than what it actually is: simply the name of a class of signs. It interferes with the pragmatic organization of those architectural signs (elements) into a necessarily complex and authentic symbol - namely the building itself. The typical set is now so strictly defined that it cannot be adapted to the particular context which a building must represent. It is at once too general in its scope in that this one set informs the whole of production and therefore defines the limits of meaning, and too specific in that each element is so sharply defined. When the general and the particular are fused together in this way (in the form of the typical set) without any mediation at the point of context, the result is the production of incongruous architectural forms.
The critic of this failed architecture points to the actual semantic incongruities of the buildings produced by this over-selective approach to architectural representation. An incongruity which sometimes borders on the ludicrous as the Type attempts to be impossibly unified and simultaneously infinitely flexible in its coverage of a multitude of different contexts. In order to adjust without adjusting, to move without moving and to represent without actually representing, the Type is forced to invent a new decorative mask for each occasion. This false complexity cannot however disguise the petrified and austere repertoire which lies behind it. At least it cannot do so 'for those who have eyes to see', including the architectural critic who points to the ambiguity which lies in the obvious lamination of the signs of unity and diversity in the buildings of the period. These clear cut seams which appear between the primary and secondary a lamination occur when organically-induced difference is extruded out of the typical set and forms its own fantastic and imaginary world separate, but parallel to that of the primary forms. Note that in this Involutionary period complexity becomes a matter of appearance and not of substance. Diversity in this context is quantitive, not qualitative.
Along with the projects and manifestos of the architectural avant-garde, the critic seeks to restore Architectures capacity to derive its meaning out of a fusion of unity and diversity; out of an expression of the particular within the constraints of a homogeneous language. But, again, the subject of this activity is the IDEA of Architecture, not any particular manifestation of it. Equally, the role of the critic is to provoke the prevailing Type into unravelling itself in order to make it divulge (or, perhaps, disgorge), the multiplicity of sources which were the matrix from which it emerged. In effect, the goal of the critic is to 're-plasticize' the Type and thus allow it to express DIFFERENCE at the level of its primary forms. In this way, the typological range of an architecture is opened up to improbable combinations consonant with its function of representing unique contexts. It is a criticism which seeks to prevent the application of the same limited set of answers to the most diverse set of questions: the constant misapplication of general categories to particular conditions and the arbitrary imposition of an unity of form on to a wide variety of contexts where no such unity exists. At its final stages and contrary to all appearances, the Type is inarticulate since it is unable to express the complexity of the society in which it exists. For the critic, therefore, the task is to re-establish the necessary link between the architectural sign and what it represents and, thus, re-establish the root of meaning - the correct guess, the assumption based on limited facts, the prediction.
The means which the critic uses to carry out this task of unravelling the condensed symbols of the Involutionary architecture is, firstly by contextualizing them, by pointing out their inappropriateness when used in particular situations. That is, they cannot do what they are supposed to do as architecture, namely represent the complexity and difference of one place from another, one meaning from another while remaining a unified language. In fact much of this kind of criticism of buildings during this period is directed to a lack of skill on the part of the architects in this place and this time. While this concrete approach to architecture may be legitimate, it can only be limited in its analysis since even the most skilful architects of the same period utilizing a whole range of articulation and decoration in their buildings will find it difficult to represent particular contexts with the limited linguistic means at their disposal. It is when the critic recognizes that the problem is global and is not just a matter of this building or that, this architect or another that a deeper kind of analysis and theorizing can take place.
This too involves contextualizing the forms of an architecture, but in this case into its historical context (or, more precisely, into a series of historical contexts). This is the key to unlocking the Type, for it exposes the multiplicity of its origins. That totalitarian 'ONE-NESS' must be revealed for what actually is: a pathological compression of an original 'MANY': a real plurality of routines and different responses. It is not, of course, that the critic wishes to dissolve the unity of the architectural language for that would equally render it incapable of effective representation and also deny the natural economy of means by which systems prevent the duplication of effort. Rather, the task is to re-articulate the language of architecture out of the smooth surface of the Involutionary Type. This also reveals the true nature of the symbol: that it s a multiple and that its power is the annexed power of many. In a sense the critic EXPLODES the symbol (and, therefore, the myth of the symbol) by re-classifying its constituent signs into their original historical contexts; by re-charging them with forgotten meanings which had been essentialized during the Developmental stage in the history of the architecture. In doing so the critic unmasks what is, in fact, an illusion or semblance of a real thing - the implacable unity of the Type and its status as a 'nature'. In this, the similarity of the role of the critic with that of the psychoanalyst is clear, not only in the operations which each carries out but also in the purpose to which each is directed in their respective fields. The re-orientation of an organism away from an original trauma, the unlocking of rigid behavioural routines and the liberation of individuals from self-destructive perceptions of their environment, all form the basis of critical and psychoanalytical operations.
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