Surface Effects

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The Journal of Architecture Volume 11 Number 1
Surface effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos
Andrew Benjamin
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
The argument in this paper is that surface should be understood neither as a merely structural, nor as a merely decorative aspect of building. Rather, the creation of surfaces (interior walls or fac ades and so on) organises a programme which allows for a reading of the space of architecture. The latter formulationthe space of architecturehas a double register. On the one hand, it refers to the specic architectural works, to particular buildings, and how they effect and affect the subject. On the other hand, it makes a broader, theoretical point about the way that architecture is conceived as an effect of the possibilities inherent in the materials used in the making of surfaces. The argument is advanced through an engagement with work by Borromini, Semper and Loos. Surface/theory
Within architecture, the surface gures as both an historical and a theoretical concern. As an introduction to the specic engagement with Borromini, Semper, and Loosall of whose work will play a pivotal role in this recasting of the surface as a concept within architectural theorya more detailed consideration needs to be given to a concern with the surface in the context of architectural theory.1 Three elements guide this approach to the relationship between theory and the surface. All are integral to the operation of the architectural. In the rst place, there is the denition of architectural theory. It needs to be understood as an engagement with issues arising from the practice of design. Practice has to be given as great an extension as possible running from issues delimited by pedagogy to those whose concern is with the detail of structures and the nature of research. Within practiceunderstood in this extended sensethese specic issues will have autonomy because of such a positioning. Secondly, integral to a theoretical engagement with architecture as a
# 2006 The Journal of Architecture
practice is the recognition that architecture is necessarily bound up with its means of representation. (These means gure as much in the production of images as they do in form creation itself.) This does not entail that architecture is identical with the image of architecture. Indeed the opposite is the case. What it does mean however is that drawings, diagrams, computer images, three-dimensional print outs, models, etc., all form part of the focus of architectural theory. To the extent that the means of representation change there will be subsequent changes in how the practice of architectural theory works. There needs to be a certain reciprocity since moves within the means of representation should be accompanied by changes, or the very least accommodations, on the level of theory. (For example, theory cannot remain indifferent to the move from Cartesian based CAD systems to animation software programs such as Maya.)2 The nal element concerns the relationship between theory and history. The conjecture here is that there is an important difference between the
13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360600636099
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Surface effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos Andrew Benjamin
objects that comprise the history of architecture and the presence of the same objects within architectural theory. While there will be an important relationship between history and theory, the signicance of this distinction should not be overlooked. What is at issue is the possibility of the history of architecture having a productive presence within the practice of design. Again, the argument will be that it is only by construing the history of architecture theoretically that it will then become possible for that history to play a role in particular modalities of practice. In regard to this nal point it will be essential to distinguish between history as a specic discursive activity and what will be called a theoretical history. The details of these elements need to be taken up. While there is the temptation to treat each separately there are important connections between them. The point of departure however has to be with the denition of architectural theory. If the theoretical is dened as an internal conditioninternal to architectural practicethen it cannot be readily separated from the possibilities that obtain for form creation. There are different ways in which it can be engendered. As an activity, form creation can be guided, for example, as much by programme as it can by the abstract activity in which volume (or form) is the consequence of the deformation of a grid. Equally, form creation will always be connected to what a certain set of materials will allow and what others will preclude. To the extent that form and materials are involved, then the geometries within which they are articulated are also central. Once it can be assumed that the relationships between materials, geometries
and forms are not given in advance, then this has the twofold effect of delimiting a space in which architectural research can be done. At the same time it begins to dene the ambit of that research. In addition, and this is the second point, it locates not just the space of theory but more signicantly its necessity. Precisely because relationships have to be established and decisions made, this opens up the need for forms of deliberation that are continually informed. What occasions the introduction of theory is the presence of a space opened by a relationship whose formal presence cannot be determined in advance. History, as generally understood, involves the location of an object within a eld of activity in which the object has meaning because of that context.3 Writing history involves showing in what way the eld individuates the particular object; although equally, it is concerned with the way the eld is maintained by the particulars reference to it. As such, history can only insist on particularity to the extent that what continues to be held in place is the network or eld. This eld occasions the objects meaning (and thus the objects presence as a cultural or historical sign). While such a position enables an account of innovation to be given, and thus an account of how an object may interrupt a eld of activity, perhaps to the point of redening it, what cannot be given within such a setting, is an account of the object that insists both on the centrality of innovation and on the object of innovation as able to cause an iterative reworking of the elements of history. The historical question does not concern the possibility of another form of innovation, or a reworking of the given, in order that
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a further innovative potential be released. The latter possibilitythe destruction of the eld of meaning in order to occasion innovationbecomes the denitional concern of theory. The preoccupations of theory, in such a context, are with the effectuation of the particular as architecture. In regard to the objects of history what this means, as has been indicated, is their capacity to be given another context in order that a potentialunrecognised by the founding contextcan play a productive role in form generation. This is a possibility that emerges if the hold of historyas dened by a strict contextualismis released. The immediate question that has to be addressed is the position of the surfacethe surface both as an existing architectural reality and as a theoretical conceptwithin these large formulations of the concerns of architectural theory. To ask the questionwhat is a surface in architecture?is to ask as much about the practical implications of how surfaces are used and materials are deployed to create them, as it is to ask about the generation of surfaces on computer screens. This latter possibility means that surfaces can be granted complex histories internal to the construction of the surface itself. More signicantly, it will allow for the logic that generates the surface and the one that enables change to be registered to be one and the same and thus internal to the surface as an operative eld. The key move here however, and it is the one that necessitates that a theoretical history of the surface be writtenthis essay being a contribution to that historyis that such a form of production will give rise to a conception of the surface as that which will have an effect rather than simply being
the consequence of the process of its creation. Once a surface can effectie, it can bring something aboutthen it can be understood as that which works to distribute programme. The effect will not be instrumental; rather it will be inherent in the operation of the surface itself. (This will, of course, transform the way the term surface is understood.) Once the surface can be construed either as that which distributes programmable space, or functional concerns, or the elements of architecture (eg, walls and columns), then what is at work is a form of production; hence the surface effect. While such a conception of the surface has only arisen since the use of animation software in the design process, it will allow a history of the surface effect to be constructed. Such a project would have the salutary effect of robbing the present of its claim to pure novelty by allowing a retroactive history to be constructed. It will be a history of the surface written fromindeed made possible bythat which occasions and denes the present. This occurs in the precise sense that the moments within this retroactive history are given coherence by the concerns of the present and those concerns are the issues that arisetodayfor and from the practice of design. While the nature of this conception of the historicaldecontextualisation allowing for a theoretical historydemands further clarication, at the very minimum what has been provided is a point of departure. Procedurally what will be argued is that the roles of the surface in Borrominis San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Sempers writings on cladding as well as his discussion of antiquities especially Trajans
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Column and nally in Adolf Looss Haus Mu ller, while at one level having little in common, on another level have an important afnity. That afnity is constructed retrospectively. It has to do with the way either the writings or specic buildings are concerned with the surface. What is important therefore is to begin to establish how each of these moments, when run together, creates part of the history of the surface effect. The lack of immediate similarity marking each of these domains means that a different way into the question at hand the surface that effectshas to emerge in each case. In regards to Borromini what will become important is the way that the move from an externally regulated systemin this instance the one given by the analogy between the body and the buildingto one whose regulation is internal marks the presence of the surface effect. The move to the surface will be accompanied by a decontextualising move in which both the internal and external aspects of the building as well as certain drawings by Borromini come to be repositioned as objects within a theoretical history. In the case of Semper the key opening moment, at least for this project, is his discussion of the wall in The Four Elements of Architecture.4 If the walls original meaning is identied as spatial enclosure, it is then possible to distinguish between a structure that is simply load bearing and the wall. (The former may be no more than that which supports the realisation of spatial enclosure.) Once this conception of the walltransformed into a concern with the surfaceis interarticulated with Sempers refusal of the distinction between ornament and structure, then surface can begin to be identied with
concerns delimited by programme and function. At the minimum it allows the elements of architecturewall, oor, column, corner, etc.to be an effect of an operative or generative conception of the surface. (Hence a surface dened in terms of potentiality rather than simple literal presence.) This positioning of Semper will take place in terms of an initial juxtaposition with Ruskin for whom architecture is the adornment on any edice. It is not as though Semper returns to the edice by a refusal of the identication of architecture and ornament. His position is far more radical. What will be argued is that he refuses the terms set by the opposition.5 As a result architecture can be thought beyond the opposition structure/ornament. This refusal should now be seen as a radical opening in architectural thinking, one resisted by so-called post-modern architecture whose aims were for the most part explicable in terms of a reintroduction of that very distinction. Looss signicance, initially, can be detected in those writings which try to identify the futility of ornamentation. The distancing of ornamentation needs to be read, at least in part, as a move to the centrality of the surface. With Looss there is an important addition. Programmatic concerns are brought about by the interrelation of surface and volume. Starting with Sempers redenition of the wall as that which effects spatial enclosure, the project is then to establish in what way the cladding within Looss Haus Mu ller, moves the wall away from reductive identication with the literal wall.6 Moreover, when it becomes possible to locate the actual functional operation of the building in the cladding (Bekleidung), cutting the Raumplan in order to
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allow for circulation and programme, then it is equally possible to allow for the presence of the effect of the wall without there having to be a literal wall.7 Even though Looss claim that the interior of the house should reveal all, while the exterior remain mute, is well known, the force, perhaps the potential created by the Haus Mu ller, cannot be reduced to this one authorial comment. The silence of the exterior cannot be enforced. It has an ineliminable potential. (A potential that decontextualisation can release.) What this means is that the interiors presence can be described as functionally indifferent to the exterior of the building. Not only does this create two different surfacessurfaces held by the literal wall though not reducible to itit also allows those surfaces programmatic possibilities that are capable of a relationship of indifference. (The literal wall would then need to be understood as that which carried two surfaces.) Freed from their initial structural or tectonic constraints actual walls are able to function as surfaces that effect. In other words, they are able to work as distributors of programme rather than as markers of putatively neutral spaces. As a consequence wallsnow as surfacescan become effects of the surface. In sum, what Loos achieves is a practical and workful conception of the surface, by having freed the surface from its reduction to the literal wall (even if it is one whose potential was not fully explored in his actual buildings). Nonetheless, there is a signicant opening. From within the purview of this argument the vocabulary of walls and oors has to be reworked such that what is given central place is the surface. Whether a
surface is also a wall or a oor becomes a consideration that has to be integrated into its presence as a surface. They become moments of xity on a surface, moments that are usually the consequences of programmatic constraints. Instead of its being attributed a static quality, the surface will henceforth have a dynamic one. While this can be generalised in terms of the surface effect, the details will always need to be examined. Only then is it possible to occasion that move in which what becomes important is the surface as a process and therefore as a locus of activity. Process and activity will always work to displace the surface from an historically determined context.8 Once it can be argued therefore that, from the position of theory, Loos allows for the intersection of surface and volume to distribute programme, the surface takes on a particular quality. It becomes the abstract or diagrammatic presentation of that which opens up elds of activity. The productive sense of the surface gives rise to a range of research projects that are determined by the nature of the relationship between the diagrammatic and its ensuing architectural representation. From within this framework the surface will remain an abstract possibility. The release of the potential that abstraction contains, and the manner in which that release occurs, or more problematically is occluded, is the act of realisation.
Opening: the body

Architecture has relied on models or analogies in order to dene its activity or delimit its eld of operation. From Vitruvius up until the recent past one of the most pervasive analogies has been the body.9
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What will be suggested here, in order to open up the place of the surface, is that not only have developments in architecture overcome the hold of that analogy, but also that freedom has allowed a return to earlier architectural forms. Such a return means that these forms can be reinterpreted. In a sense architecture can develop another relation to the body by its having been freed from a relationship based on an analogy between the building and the body. Consequently, it is possible to take up, from within architecture, issues that pertain, for example, to the disabled body or the gendered body precisely because issues that relate to embodied existence are no longer positioned by the analogy between the built and the body. The body has not been recongured and the nature of the analogy changed. Rather, the body can be recongured because the analogy has been overcome. Part of the move to the surface accompanies this repositioning of architectures relationship to the body. Of the many formulations of the relationship between body and architecture the one found in Albertis On the Art of Building captures the nature of what is involved.10 It is not just that beauty is dened in terms of the internal adequacy of proportion, the internal divisions of the human body also provide the measure for the building. Of the many passages that could be cited one of the more apposite is the following: The shapes and sizes for the setting out of columns, of which the ancients distinguished three kinds according to the variations of the human body, are well worth understanding. When they considered mans body, they decided
to make columns after his image. Having taken the measurements of a man, they discovered that the width, from one side to the other, was a sixth of the height, while the depth from navel to kidneys was a tenth.11 What is important in this passage is twofold. Not only is there the strength of the analogy, moreover, measurement and the geometry of proportion are structured by it. Measure is always dened externally. Not only is the body a given, it provides accepting a symbiosis between building and bodythe ground of construction and evaluation. Part of the force that can be attributed to the analogy is this structuring potential. Fundamental to the process was an essential anthropocentrism. This is not merely the pursuit of humanistic valuesalthough that may have been the case but the identication of the generative element of design within an analogy in which architecture was always determined externally. When architecture moves to the modern perioda movement, which, as is being suggested, sanctions a retrospective reinterpretation of the traditionthen the external control will have vanished. The body has not been deferred if only to be reincorporated as a concern within architecture, more signicantly an external control, a control structured by analogy (an instance of which is the body), has given way to a fundamentally different way of construing the generative dimension of architecture. That dimension has become internal to the object. The object is redened in terms of its self-effectuation as architecture. A clear example, as has already been suggested, is the way that the Raumplan intersects with the role of cladding in Looss Haus Mu ller to construct the
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object as architecture. (This is, of course, a position that will be pursued in greater detail.) If architecture has been freed from the analogy of the body, how then does this freedom open up the concerns of the history of architecture? Surely it could be argued that while this freedom may have some impact on future projections, the conceptions of symmetry that appeared in earlier buildings, or plans, dened symmetry in terms of the order of the body, or if not the body then nature. (In both instances what determined symmetry was external to built form.) Even if that argument could be sustained there is no need to limit interpretations in this manner. To the extent that elements of the history of architecture can be differentiated from their insertion into a given history, the possibility of reinterpretation and thus reactivisation occasions the emergence of another object. As has already been indicated, such a connection is only possible because the objects potential will not allow the insistence of history to still that possibility. In order to trace the potential in the work of the surfaces comprising Borrominis San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638 1682) a detour will be taken.12 Instead of proceeding directly to the detail of Borrominis work, two sculptures by Bernini will set the scene. The second, David (1623) is by far the more signicant. Nonetheless, the move from the slightly earlier sculpture to this one needs to be understood as the move from a work dened by a clear sense of front and therefore of sides and behind, to one that resists all the dimensions of frontality by working as a continual surface. In architectural terms, the possibility demanded by Palladio, in which, if the Villa Rotonda begins to dene an ideal
and where part of the ideal is the symmetry of the front, would cede its place to an internally generative system in Borromini. This movement is present within the Bernini sculptures. Frontality is overcome by an internally regulated system that individuates specic elements. They are the after-effects of a system, rather than being incorporated into a totality whose organisational logic leads in a different direction; ie, to the object as symbol. While symbolism, both in architecture and sculpture, is almost impossible to avoid, there is a real difference between the attribution of a symbolical quality and the necessity of a symbolic presence derived from the objects relationship to an external order of organisation. The argument is not that sculpture opens up architecture. Rather, in holding to the specicity of sculpture it then becomes possible to examine how a distinction between stasis and movement is at work within this particular eld. As such, what can then be asked is what the architectural correlate to this distinction would be like.
Bernini. The processDavid

As a point of departure it should not be forgotten that with David what is at work is a body (Fig. 1). A sculptured body, and yet as sculpture it can be interpreted as the move from the body understood as proportion towards a body understood as a dynamic process of internal relationships. Moreover, it is a dynamic process that is neither one of simple movement nor one of unending oscillation. What is at work is the movement of what will be called the material innite. While this term will need to be claried, at this stage it should be understood as identifying a process in which nite moments are the effect of the process;
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Figure 1. David, Bernini, (1623), marble. (Rome, Galerie ` se). From Bernini Borghe Toutes Ses Oeuvres au Monde, Figure 4, 4th edition (Rome, Fratelli Palombi srl, 1998).
a process that is potentially innite. As such materiality has a certain immateriality as its condition of existence. This sculpture involves a marked development from earlier works such as The Rape of Proserpina (1621 2). What dened that particular work was its static quality. That quality is brought about by the relationship between the planted left leg of Pluto and the force of Proserpinas left hand against his face. The skin above her abductors left eye is being forced up while all the weight is borne by his left leg. The right leg is raised indicating the possibility of movement and yet the relationship between the
eye and the left leg indicates a stationary position. All that is being marked is the moment. Ovid insists on the simultaneity of seeing, loving and abducting (Metamorphoses, V.395). The sculpture is of that point in time. The movement of hand, facial skin and legs involves a careful balance. As such it is mannerist in orientation, although more importantly as a work it can be said to be dened by the temporality of the instant. What is seen is that particular instant. Each of the elements comprising the relationhips that dene the sculpture can be viewed. There is a real extent to which the work is complete in itself. The completion delimits what is seen. The relationship between presentation and the instant denes the work in terms of both representation and expression. Neither claim can be made of David. This will be the reason why David is an architecturally more interesting sculpture. Moreover, although this is a contention to be argued, David, in procedural terms, opens the way towards Borrominis extraordinary fac ades and interiors. More, particularly David, despite being a body, leads away from the analogy between body and building. Even though there is a body, at work here is a conception of form that is no longer anthropocentric in nature. What marks out David as a site, and therefore what delimits its particularity, has initially to do with a conception of relatedness that is no longer held by the instant. Time gures in a different way. The insistence of the instant cedes its place to the temporality of process. What this conception of time brings with it is work. Work is both object and activity. Once the temporal and active dimension comes to dene the ontology of the object, then while a work is
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present, the presentation has to be dened in terms of an interiority that eschews any reduction to the instant. In other words, it is dened in terms of a set of internal relations whose work comprises the work. While those relationships have exteriority insofar as the object has material presence, the exterior is the presentation of pure interiority. And yet, the relations comprising this interiority have to be dened in terms of dynamic relations rather than the interconnection of static points. What will emerge therefore is another way of construing internal relationships. One of the most remarkable qualities of the sculpture is the impossibility of standing in front of it as opposed to behind it. Equally, it is not possible to stand to one side and see it from that side rather than being either in front or behind. No matter where the viewer stands the sculpture stands before the eye. In a sense this is because Davids body is turned such that in being ready to release the catapulta rope containing a stone stretched between his handsa circle has been constructed. What is viewed is that circle. However, to insist on the formal circularity of the object would be to miss both the counter balancing of forces as well as the dynamic relationships that the circle constructs (or equally, of which the circle is the effect). While it may be necessary to provide a semiology of the sculpture in which the relationships are described, the points being described maintain a different sense of relationality than one understood as mere connectedness. The work is not the connection of points. Nor is it that points connect dynamic lines. Points would only ever be aftereffects of lines. A dynamic quality predominates.
What is maintained is a pure interiority that continues to present itself. What is presented, while having a singular quality, is not reducible to a simple singularity. Within the process of relation it is always possible to construct a point of view, however that point is the effect of the process. Equally, it cannot be identical with the object. This is not a claim about relativity but about the process of pure internal relatedness. The innite in question is that which has already been identied as the material innite.13 Davids right foot is on the ground. The back of the left is raised with the toes of that foot taking the weight. The body is neither turning nor not turning. The tension created by the feet instantiates process. Process here is movement. The rope of the catapult is held tight. The hands are pulling and yet at that moment the catapult is still; a still point within the process that marks the catapult being held and which is, at the same time, the process of its being released. His loins are wrapped by a folded garment and around his shoulder there is a pouch held in place by further folded material. The folds of the material are not, in this context, what is interesting. The signicance is that they cannot be differentiated from the work of the body. The wrap of the material over his loins forms part of the bodys unfolding. It neither ows with the body nor against it. It is neither on the body nor is it separate from it. Body, material, pouch, sling all form part of the process. The error would be to see the body as adorned and therefore the body as central. Indeed, it can be argued that what denes the sculpture are the relationships between the bodyand by body what is meant is Davids literal
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bodyand what could be taken, albeit wrongly, as secondary, ie, material, sling, pouch, etc. On an abstract level it is possible to see the sculpture and it should be remembered that there is a potential endlessness that comprises this seeingas a surface. Different elements are not placed on a single surface. The sculpture is the endless articulation of relationships in which what is individuated can be attributed specic qualities. In other words, on the level of description it is possible to distinguish the material around the body, or connected to it, from the body itself. Nonetheless, such a formal distinction would miss the way they form part of a continuum involving neither adornment nor ornamentation. Rather, these formally distinct elements form part of a continuous surface. Moreover, the only way the distinct elements are able to be distinct and to be viewed as separate is because they are interarticulated within, and as, a continuous surface. Such an argument would be consistent with the claim made above that points are the after-effects of lines that work. What then of Davids body? The body becomes the site of innite relatedness. In refusing to privilege any one positionand thus by extension any descriptionit becomes a nite point, the condition of possibility for which is the innitude of relationships. The latter is the work of the material innite. Internality, therefore, is given priority, and then, as has been argued, individual elements are individuated by the work as a site of process. The object is no longer the totality of individual parts precisely because individuation always occurs as the effect of a process. The elements are effected by the works organisational logic. What this means is that the sculpture, as an
activity, has to be seen as a surface. However, it is not a surface on which things are placed, rather, in sculptural terms, it is a surface that effects.
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

Borromini died in 1667. At the time of his death the fac ade of San Carlo was not yet nished. (The building, except for the fac ade, was nished in 1641. The fac ade was completed in 1682.) The remaining plans, however, indicate the extent to which the existing building follows the original drawings. Steinberg, Blunt and Wittkower, amongst others, have provided detailed descriptions of the building. What is important here is to see the building within what could be described as another history of the curvilinear. Fundamental to the inception of the Baroque was the distinction between the static and the dynamic.14 Accepting that development, while essential, is to repeat a commonplace until the nature of the movement in question is characterised. Even then, it should not be thought that there is simple consistency within all Baroque architecture. However, in this context what has to be noted is the path that stems from a consideration of Berninis David. What is opened up is complexity within movement. In regards to San Carlo what needs to be emphasised, as a beginning, is the distinction between a conception of movement that involves illusion and one that denes movement by the continuity of counter-measures. The latter realises complexity. It is not as though the two are in direct opposition or that they do not overlap or even reinforce each other. However, what is signicant is the way their difference provides particular openings.
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The dome consists of a texture of geometric shapescrosses, octagons and hexagonsthat move towards a naturally lit opening which rises up towards the motif of a bird. Not only is the eye dragged up through the rich array of forms, it is then tempted furthertempted towards the inniteby ight. As the eye soars the innite is captured as much by ight as it is by the geometry. The innite in question is the innite of illusion. The interplay of symbolism and a vanishing point maintained by the intersection of geometry and light creates a feeling of innite movement towards a divine innite. While the illusion is important, it is not as though innite transcendence can have material presence other than as illusion. This is the restriction of this conception of the innite. As Descartes argued in the Meditations, what could not be represented was the innite nature of God. There is however another conception of the innite.15 Here the innite is not linked to representation but to the innity of pure becoming. Within the philosophical writings of the period the most exact formulation of this position is found in Leibnizs conception of substance as force (vis). Sub tre stance is never static nor transcendent, it is un e capable daction (a being capable of action).16 Activity denes substance. Its continuity is its continual self-realisation and thus self-effectuation. Movement therefore is an innitude of relationships. In following Leibniz as opposed to Descartes an architecture of illusion is put to one side. The question to be addressed therefore concerns the architectural correlate to this conception of the innite. It should be added immediately that this conception of the innite can have material presence. The innite
is linked to relation. Baroque architecture is not Leibnizian. The relation has to do with how the innite is understood. Architecture is not philosophy. The importance of the distinction lies in the nature of the formers material presence. One of the central elements dening the internal operation of the church is the movement of bays, columns and walls. While each element has a distinct quality, there is an interconnectedness that is neither arbitrary nor the work of chance. Their interrelationhip is held by an entablature that divides the overall building into three sections. The physical presence of the entablature has the effect of emphasising the columns even though it is an emphasis that is dissipated, formally, once it is recognised that they form part of the walls which in turn form the bays since the latter cannot be dissociated from the walls articulation. There is a complex pattern in which even though the elements are separate, in that they have either ornamental or functional specicity and as such can invite and maintain particular programmatic possibilities, they are nonetheless articulated together. If the walls were understood as a continuous line, then the measure and counter measurethe movement of the curvilinearwould have become a surface. In other words, what is at work here is not a straight line that has become curved. Measure and countermeasure continue to yield openings that become locations within, and as, a surface.17 A similar operation is at work in the fac ade. While the status of the fac ade is contested it is, nonetheless, worth noting the way in which the curvilinear is once again a series of measures and counter measures that yield space. The curvilinear does not maintain space,
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rather it is part of the process of spacing. In the process, and in the potential endlessness that marks the presence of the curvilinear, it is possible to locate the work of a material innite. Finitude understood as the individuation of elements always takes the innite as its condition of possibility. While it is possible to emphasise that the building as a totality is a complex negotiation with differing ordering systems, the most powerfully argued interpretation of San Carlo is Steinbergs for whom the building is an attempt to integrate oval, cross and octagon. He wants to see this three-part system reiterated throughout the church as a whole.18 On one level it is impossible to deny the acuity of this observation. Nonetheless, it is still possible to complicate this particular description. Again, this complication should not for a moment be seen as diminishing its historical importance. Indeed, no attempt is being made here to deny that the building can be understood as the continual attempt to reconcile symbolic, theological and philosophical elements that characterised the seventeenth century in general and the Baroque in particular. The complication in question can be demonstrated by concentrating on a specic drawing by Borromini; namely Albertina 175 (Fig. 2). The importance of the drawing is that it generates a further opening. What allows it to be made is the relationship architecture has to its means of representation. However, fundamental to this position is that while those means are an ineliminable part of architecture, it does not follow that what is an ostensible representation has to be read in that way. In other words, representations can be read diagrammatically. This is the
claim that lines, drawings, in sum representations, once understood as diagrams, have the capacity to generate representations but should not be assumed to be straightforwardly representational. This move introduces into the history of drawing and architectural representation an abstracting element that interrupts the ow of history by linking the abstracting process to the possibility of a representation having an afterlife. To be precise, the afterlife is the move from abstraction to a further representation. The plan allows two different aspects to be emphasised. The rst would be to show how the walls and the structure are an effect of the oval (or ellipse) which is itself part of the internal geometry. The oval is the result of the juxtaposition of two equilateral triangles inscribed within two circles. Whether it is an oval or an ellipse, the end result is that the line is present as a result of the internal conguration.19 Moreover, as Steinberg argues, it is possible to see that the produced line marks out the plan in the drawing as pulled backwards and forwardsa pulling and pushing that produces the curvilinear by the work of the internal conguration. On one level a movement of this type has to be the case. However, to the extent that the production of the line remains central, then an account of the line will be in terms of that production. Any account therefore will oscillate between those involving the history of geometry and in particular the role of geometry in drawing, and more ideologically based versions in terms of architectural attempts to reconcile various religious and philosophical positions.20 The end result is that the line remains secondary to that which is taken to have produced it. There is another
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Figure 2. Borromini: half plan for the church of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (drawing, Albertina 175).
possibility, which, while alluding to these accounts of the line, is not dened by them. Namely, giving emphasis to the line itself. This means more than a change in emphasis. Another area of concern emerges. Henceforth, the interpretive question concerns what is it that the line produces. This questionone that can be taken to a range of different drawings of the planhas to start with what can be described as the lines density. Density means that the line is not the single line but the double line marking, if only as a beginning, an inside and an
outside. The dense linethe line itselfis this double (perhaps doubled) line. In general terms it is a line of information. While accepting that the columns have a loadbearing function within the overall structure, they do not stand opposed to the wall. Nor is it that the columns, which may have been historically separated from the wall, have now been placed next to it. Within the connes of the dense line, how is the relationship between the column and the wall to be understood? This question cannot be asked
14
independently of the movement that the line marks out. While it is possible to account for the movement of the line in terms of the effect of the founding internal geometry, it is also true that any account of the line has to begin with the recognition that its movement effects. The curvilinear creates and distributes internal and external volumes that are themselves the distribution of programmable space. Whether that programme is used in one way rather than anotherie, locating specic functions proper to the operation of a church, or even places for statues or ornamentationis not the point. What matters is that this line has to be understood as that which distributes volume. In other words, the volumes (bays) are the effect of the line. At work therefore is a line that works. This line becomes the architectural correlate to the surface of Berninis David. That surface too, needs to be understood as a generalised production and therefore as a workful line. Allowing the line this capacity will account for the relationship between the column and the wall. What the line makes clear is that the relationship is no longer one either of opposition or ornamentation. If it can be argued that the volumes are produced by the operation of the linethey are its effect then it is also the case that both wall and column are themselves effects of a line. There is no opposition between column and wall. The line although now viewed as a surface that individuatespresents elements that can at a given moment and for a specic reason be given the designation bay (volume) or wall or column. As with Berninis David individual elements are the aftereffects of a surface that effects. Finally, the absences
of an opposition between column and wall precludes the question of their relationship. Relationship is concerned with separate denable entities. Here, they only have a relationship insofar as the same line produces them. The drawing is not the building. However, the drawing cannot be dissociated from the actual presence of San Carlo. What this means is that part of its presence is a quality that allows for a greater degree of abstraction to be attributed to it. The process of abstraction will allow for the decontextualisation. However, this is not a process that refuses the particularity of the actual building. Abstraction refers to the inherent architectural quality of the work that allows italmost in virtue of a form of autonomyto have a life independently of its specic historical presence. The dense line in Albertina 175 works to distribute certain fundamental architectural elements delimiting, as part of that process, programmable spaces. The line individuates these elements; equally, the line also individuates spaces. What is individuated is marked by nitude. Hence, the line, precisely because other instances of individuation could have occurred, can be understood as the work of a material innite. In regards to the fac ade the entablature has a different role from the one it played within the building. Internally, while having a tripartite form, it can nonetheless be described as holding two different orders in place by marking their point of division. Moreover, the visual power of the entablature worked to control the eye and thus to regulate the experience of the building. The fac ade incorporates the entablature. Even though it divides it, it is
15
also the case that acts of division are part of the work of the fac ade. Formally, it consists of convex and concave lines that delimit spaces (bays). As with the interior, columns, and ornamentation cannot be differentiated from the fac ade itself. In forming part of the fac ade they cause it to become, once again, a complex surface. Questions of addition and ornamentation are not to be separated from the possibility of their presence as that which is enacted by the measure and counter measure of the surface. While it is possible to see the two parts of the fac ade as responding to each other insofar as a concave line on one level is positioned in relation to a convex line on the other, there is more at stake. Two elements need to be noted. The rst is that the relationship of the convex and the concave is part of the totality of the surface. The second point is that the work of these linesthe work that is the complexity of the curvilinearis the disclosure of spaces that allow for programme because they await it. Programmable space is the consequence of lines that work. What Borrominis adventure allows is not a claim about the modernity of the Baroque or even the extent to which the concerns of the Baroque could still play a determining role in design. Such claims would have to overlook the need to reconstruct historical periods. The inventing of histories and the establishing of points of connection occur because of openings afforded by the present. What is central to Borromini in this context is the way San Carlo can be seen as demanding another account of the generation of form. As an account it has to involve the movement of matter beyond
the body, precisely because the generation of form is internal to the object. The limitation of the Baroque is the way both internality and form were conceived. The limitation is merely the Baroques particularity. In moving from externality and thus from an anthropocentric architecture, the Baroque demonstrates the impossibility of architecture having a forma nalis. The future opened up by Bernini and Borromini is not to be found in the detail of their formal inventions. That would be to reduce those inventions to an image. The future is allowed by a different repetition, one guided by a process of abstraction. If what is fundamental to their work is the operation of a material innite that continues to be generative of formcontextually, it occurs through the operation of a surface in which elements are individuatedthen as an abstraction this operative quality is what can be retained. Once the dense line that characterises Albertina 175 is given priorityin addition it is a line that once reworked yields the fac adethe continuity of its folds will always have to be arrested. The cessation of movement is the precondition of form. Cessation becomes nitude. Finitude can be equated with architectures material presence. The precondition allowing for nitude is the lines potentiality. As has been suggested, materiality has its conditions of possibility in what was called the material innite. The nal point that needs to be reiterated is that the density of this line need not be literal. Density has to do with the information that the line distributes. If there is a limitation in this conception of the line then it liesdespite densityin the restriction of relatedness; a relationship that would be linked to
16
a sense of productive interruption. An example would be the way volume and surface may be interconnected. While this possibility emerges at its most emphatic in Loos, it is the writings of Gottfried Semper that will allow, again retrospectively, these opening considerations of the surface to be taken a step further.
Ruskin and polychromatic antiquities

In order to position Semperor rather to rework the force of Sempers positioning of the surfacesa setting is essential. This will be provided in this context by looking rst at the way Ruskin denes architecture and secondly at the way Sempers approach to the surface cannot be separated from the dispute concerning polychromatic antiquities that had such an important historical inuence on the development of architectural thinking in both France and Germany in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. While both these attempts to establish a context may seem too distant from Semper, the contrary is the case. Ruskins thinking still echoes in architectural arguments for decorum and the stylistic determination of context. The discovery of polychromatic antiquities can be reworked as the discovery of the surface that was the interarticulation of surface and function. As has already been suggested the importance of Ruskins denition of architecture is that it provides the backdrop against which both the radicality and the commitment to the form of materialism that structures Sempers conception of architecture can be understood. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin denes architecture as an art that adorns the edice raised by man for whatsoever use.21 In this
instance what is signicant about Ruskin is not the argument concerning the use of general symbolism in architecture, nor is it architectures relationship to religion and nature. The signicance of this denition is that it gives a clear place to architecture. Working with the denition is essential in order to see how it denes architecture. The rst part deserving attention is the description of architecture as an adornment. Adorning is always an after-effect. Jewellery is a form of adornment. The pearl buttons or sequins sown on a dress can be said to adorn it. They become an adornment to the extent they can be differentiated from that on which they are placed. Such a differentiation is envisaged by the contrast between adornment and the edice. Edice is a description of the object. It is the pure presence of the objectone that is not given specicityalthough more importantly does not need to be given it. The description of the edice as raised by man is signicant as it locates architecture as a practice that involves a necessary distinction from nature, thereby inviting a possible accord with nature. Architecture is artice although only in the sense that it serves human purpose. If the human being creates, then the question of purpose has to emerge. (This will be Kants enduring legacy; there can be no account of creation that works independently of the constraint of nature that can escape a denition in relation to purpose.) To what end has the human created? If the end cannot be distinguished from the edice (to retain Ruskins terminology) insofar as the edice will always have had, and will always have, a purpose, then there is the recognition of the necessary and ineliminable functionality of architecture. Once the edice has this
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quality, there can be no question of the denial of functionality. Purpose is the already-present identication of function. The question that has to be asked however concerns, from within the purview of Ruskins denition, the relationship between purpose and architecture. Answering that question necessitates paying particular attention to the nal words whatsoever use. It is not just that this eliminates the place of function; it does this by denying it to architecture and then by locating it in the edice. In other words, the force of the whatsoever use is that function is maintained by its being radically distinguished from architecture. As such the question that needs to be brought to Ruskins formulation has to concern the presence of architecture. This is both a question of almost brute physicality as well as a more straightforwardly conceptual one concerning how, within the formulation, is architecture to be thought. These questions are related. The presence of architecturepresence as locationdenes how it is to be thought. Architecture, from within the position that is being extrapolated from this denition of the art of architecture, is located on the surface. More precisely, and this is the essential point, it is the literal surface understood as adornment. The centrality of ornament as the locus of the architectural has an important history. While not originating in Ruskin, what is repeated is a sensibility that locates what is essential to architecture in ornament. In the modern period this conception of architecture continues to have relevance. Not only does it dene so-called post-modern architecture as a moment within the history of ornament, it continues to dene the architectural in terms of
the opposition between ornament and structure (Ruskins edice). The contention here is that Sempers writings can be read as a critique not just of the retention of this opposition but of its dening architecture. With Semper architecture is redened. While this positionthe redenitionnds its most exact expression in the discussion of style and the elements of architecturea discussion that will be taken up in this context in terms of working through Sempers treatment of the wallhis earlier writings on polychromatic antiquities not only set the scene, it is in his discovery of colour that the already-present relationship between function and surface come to be expressed. That expression overcomes the opposition between ornament and structure. This is to argue in the rst place that colour is functionalas opposed to simply decorativeand in the second that structure works in accord with that function. In sum, the interplay of function and colour overcomes the tradition that attempts to identify the architectural with the ornamental. Sempers intervention in the debate on polychromatic antiquities occurred in 1834 with the publication of his pamphlet Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity. While they are only implicit in the pamphlets argument, it has to be understood as involving two subtexts. The rst is an undoing of the Winkelmanian aesthetic that was concerned with the purity of form and therefore the retention of ideals as that which prompted form and which form had to imitate. At the same time however there was a general concern with establishing both the specicity of the modern and more particularly with
18
opening up the question of the appearance of the modern.22 The argument is that a debate as apparently arcane as one concerning the possibility of coloured antiquities was in fact a debate about the nature of the modern. The discovery of Etruscan art not only had the effect of destabilising the nature of the Classical tradition, that destabilisation meant that the grounds of assessment and judgement in both art and architecturethe grounds of Classicismwere no longer secure. There were two arguments against the presence of colour. The rst is an archaeological one, while the second is aesthetic. Clearly, the response to such arguments is to show through the reports of contemporary excavations that coloured antiquities had been in fact found. And yet, that would not have been sufcient since there were aesthetic reasons for holding to the presence of colour being either a mistake or simply exceptional and therefore only of marginal interest. Semper sums up this concern in the following terms; they are sure that colour applied to sculpture must confuse the forms and pamper the eye (dass Farben angewendt auf Bildenerei die Formen verwirren und das Auge verwohen mu ssen) (p. 61/p. 239). Prior to taking up his response it is worth noting the detail of this objection to colour. It should be remembered that it is, as it were, the aesthetic objection and thus one neither checked let alone overcome by additionalfactualdiscoveries. While appearing as merely aesthetic insofar as it is a defence of form, such a position is best understood in terms of forms metonymic links. Once understood in this sense, the threat to form can be comprehended as the threat to the continuity of
historical time that allows for forms own repetition. Form, precisely because it is continually positioned by the movement between the ideal and the actual can be repeated ad innitum. The refusal of formits having become confusedwould be the concession that allowed this sense of continuity to have been interrupted. Sempers language in responding to his own presentation of the aesthetic response has an important aesthetic register itself. He argues that colour: claries the form (sie entwirren die Formen) because colour provides the artist with a new way to throw the surface into relief. It brings the eye back again to the natural way of seeing, (Sie bringen das Auge wieder zuru ck auf den natu rlichen Weg des Sehens), which is lost under the sway of that mode of abstraction that knows precisely how to separate the visible and inseparable qualities of bodies, the colour from the form knows it by those unfortunate principles of aesthetics that dene exactly the sphere of the individual arts and do not allow any excursions into a neighbouring eld. (P. 61/p. 239.) What is signicant about this formulation is that the defence of colour is given an aesthetic register, almost in terms of naturalism. Importance here has to be attached to another aesthetic possibility. That possibility does not separate colour and form noting of course that once this position is expressed in this way the register of form will have changed. No longer held by the opposition between the ideal and the actual it becomes the material instance of form. Emphasising colour, therefore, becomes the afrmation of the materiality of form. The move is not simple empiricism. Nor, moreover, should the
19
evocation of the material be understood as suggesting that form has become the empirical instantiation of the ideal. Rather, it is materiality itself. As a result of this repositioning there has to be an accompanying shift in perception. Perceivingthe use of the eyealters in order to perceive colour. In Semperian terms seeing abstractly is to posit a distinction between form and colour. In other words, abstraction, in this context, means holding colour and form apart. However, in order to give such a move coherence it would have to be grounded, almost of necessity, in a conception of form that locates particulars within a dening oscillation between the ideal and the actual. As such form acquires an inherently transcendent quality. The aesthetic response therefore is fundamental. What Semper is pointing out is a shift in the categories of how seeing takes place. While it is not Sempers actual argument, implicit in his position is the claim that colour has the capacity to overcome the hold of Classicism. Colour undoes the opposition between form and the ornamental or decorative. This development provides the setting in which Sempers discussion of Trajans Column needs to be situated. The basis of the interpretation resides in the column having traces of paint (die Spuren von Malerei ) (p. 67/p. 248). What is signicant about the passage is not just the depth of description but attributing to the column the capacity to have the effect of spatialityand thus to space. This effect is explicable in terms of the operation of colour. What this means, of course, is that spacing is an effect of the surface. The gures on the monument stood out golden against an azure background. The at reliefs on
the pedestal, too, were undoubtedly given their proper appearance (waren entfehlbar) through the rich variety of gold and colour. Only in such a way could the column be in harmony with the richly coloured and gilded forum, the porphyry cornices and green marble columns of the templesas could the bronze statue with the column. (P. 67/p. 249.) Leaving aside any lingering hyperbole that may be evident in the passage, what is clear is that not only is there an urban coherencespatiality is held in place and in playit is also realised, for Semper, by the work of colour. The Column, while not strictly architectural, plays a fundamental role within the visual coherence of the Forum. Coherence is realised by the accord between the form and the colour. For Semper, it would be an accord which, once the debilitating effect of the abstract eye is left to one side, would have been effective and thus would have functioned if the eye had perceived the almost ineliminable reciprocity between form and colour; ie, their conjoined presence rather than their separate existence. It would have operated in relation to the object, the column, then with the other objects in the eld. The latter would now be understood as an urban condition operating on the level of affect as well as the structural and functional. Surfaces in this context are as much implicated in questions of form (structure) as form is in the question of the surface (literal surface) namely colour.
Semper, walls and surfaces

In one of the lectures given in London during his period of residence in the city, Semper did not just
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distinguish between Greek and what he termed Barbarian architecture, he formulated the distinction in a way that concerns the nature of architectures material presence. While Sempers generalised account is part of an overall attempt to categorise and detail the practice of ancient architecture, in distinguishing between the Greek and the Barbarian, he introduces one of the dening motifs in his writings, namely a distinction between that which occurs within architecture and architectures exteriority. The Greek ornaments are emanations of the constructive forms and in the same way they are the dynamical function of the parts to which they belong. They have no other meaning than to explain the construction forms by analogical notions, taken from nature itself or from other branches of art, while the ornaments on the barbarian monuments nd generally their explanations in some historical, local or religious notions, which have nothing in common with the part of the building, whereon they are applied.23 Central then to the Greek is a conception of ornamentation. However, it has to be understood as an explanation of the construction.24 In other words, it is dened internally to the architectural object. Admittedly, this occurs via analogy. Nonetheless, the relationship is structured by interiority. The barbarian on the other hand involves a conception of ornamentation in which the additions have to be explained in terms of symbolic values, which, as Semper concedes, are always accounted for externally. The move to the historical, the religious, etc., denes these additions in terms of exteriority and
therefore, to use the language of Ruskin, they play the role of adornments. The move to interiority not one where form is opposed to ornament but where there is an already present interarticulationbegins to identify the particularity of Semper. While it is always possible to emphasise his engagement with ornamentation and even to construe the insistence on cladding in those terms, it is more productive to connect architectures concern with interiority to one with the centrality of materials. As such what this allows is a connection to be drawn between three aspects of his project. In the rst instance the importance of the surface that emerged during the earlier engagement with his writings on polychromatic antiquities; in the second, interiority as a concern with architectures self-denition given through materials, and nally his identication of the four elements of architecture. What is important about those elements is the way they lead, almost inexorably, to establish the centrality of the wallas surfaceas the focus of architectural consideration. The wall gures signicantly in the short text published in 1851, The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to a Comparative Study of Architecture. In fact this work set in play the role of the wall throughout his subsequent writings. It drew on both his archaeological activities in addition to some of the conclusions reached during the period where his overriding intellectual concern was polychromatic antiquities. Semper uses the so-called elementsthe hearth, the roof, the enclosure and the mound (p. 102)to account for the origins of architecture. While these elements are, to a certain extent, fundamental, they are almost
21
inextricably connected to an historicist if not nostalgic account of the origins of architecture. The interesting move occurs when Semper begins to trace the emergence of the wall from the enclosure. Before looking at the consequences of the move to the wall, it is essential to note that in Sempers account what is of interest to him is that it involved the introduction of a technique. It was not just any technique: the wall tter (Wandbereiter) as protoarchitect deployed an Urtechnik (p. 258); the way the wall emerges brings more than just a physical wall into consideration. The manner in which Semper engages with the wall is in terms of its presence as a surface. Moreover, a surface that effects. This is the position that has to be established. (Reiterated therefore is the way the coloured surface was present in terms of its effect. While colour did not provide volume, it was colour that allowed Trajans Column its capacity to create space and therefore enabled it to have a civic function.) Prior to taking up the key passage from The Four Elements concerning the emergence of the wall, the claim announced a few lines earlier that wickerwork was the essence of the wall (p. 104), needs to be noted. Its signicance is twofold. In the rst instance, it is indicative of the general move within Sempers writings to preclude the possibility of a sustained distinction between the decorative and the functional, except insofar as the decorative becomes evidence not just of function but of the necessary interconnection of the functional and the material. Moreover, in the case of wickerwork what is essential is the relationship between materials and effect. What is signicant about the claim that wickerwork comprises the essence of
the wall, is that the essential cannot be differentiated from the operation of materials. Not only is this to insist on interiority, it allows for a link between materials, and that which demarcates the architectural, to have to be thought together. Moreover it can be concluded that what the wall does is effect spatial enclosure, and therefore the function of the wallie, to spacecannot be thought as though it were independent of the operation of materials. This further accounts for why he states that wicker work is the essence of the wall. It involves the effects realisation through the use of materials. That move can then be abstracted such that it begins to dene the nature of the wall. Walls, for Semper, cannot be separated from the activity of spatial disclosure. From a Semperian perspective space is not a given that is then divided. The contrary is the case. Space is a result. Hence, the wall is that which brings about spatial enclosure. In sum, space is the result of the surfaces operation. The detail of his position is formulated in The Four Elements of Architecture in the following terms. Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means for separating space. Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the invisible structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colourful woven carpets. (P. 104.)
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The importance of this formulation is that the wall is moved away from being no more than a structural element to having a clearly dened function within an overall structure.25 While for Semper there needs to be an accord between the outward appearance of structural elements and the nature of that function, such a relationship resists any reformulation in terms of a theory of ornamentation. What has to be opened up is the potential in Sempers conception of the wall. Sempers project can be understood as the attempt to identify within the history of architecturespecically Hellenic arta principle that could be extracted. ` re de The nature of Sempers relationship to Quatreme Quincy should inform a contemporary response to his ` res own work. The value for Semper of Quatreme writings on ancient sculpture is that they provide an opening. In Sempers terms it lay in their practical tendency. He continues: In line with this tendency the work does not as it were parade the form before us as a nished product according to the lessons of aesthetic ideality, but lets us see the artistic form and the high idea (der Kunstform und der hohen Idee) that dwells within it; it considers and shows how both were inseparable from the material and technical execution and how the Hellenic spirit manifested itself in the freest mastery of these factors, as well as the old, sanctied tradition. (P. 249/p. 207.) The signicance of the formulation lies in the differentiation of form from what can be termed aesthetic ideality. Form and ideas could not be separated from materials, the presentation of those materials and questions of technique. Semper therefore undoes the opposition between
form and idea by incorporating both as material possibilities. Any vestige of that metaphysical distinction is displaced by emphasis having been given to materials and techniques. Once the idea is no longer understood as external, then the building cannot be understood as the ideas symbolic presentation. Hellenic style therefore involved an interrelationship of all these elements. This accounts for why, in addition, art-form and decoration cannot be separated. They are, in Sempers terms, so intimately bound together by the inuence of the principle of surface dressing (des Fla chenbekleidungsprinzips) that an isolated look at either is impossible. (Pp. 252 3/p. 211.) What emerges from giving centrality to materials is the possibility of arguing that materials are what they bring about, what they effect. When Semper argues that wickerwork was the original wall, it was because it was the original space divider. This realisation of division dened the essence of the wall. Any consideration of the wall therefore has to do with how materials realise their effect. This accounts for the move in the same text to the claim that the wall retained this meaning when materials other than the original were used (p. 104). (It should be noted, if only in passing, that the connection is between meaning and materials and not meaning and symbolic determination.) The history of the wall therefore becomes the history of the way materials realise the wall effect. The wall effect is spatial division, although only ever as a result. Hence, it becomes possible to question both the quality of the space produced and the material creating it since spatial division is produced (effected) by the work of specic materials.
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There is a further result that should also be noted. Once it can be argued that the denition of the wall has to do with spatial enclosure and is not reducible to the presence of literal wallsa possibility also evident in Loos, as will be argued in relation to the Haus Mu ller, where the intersection of the Raumplan and the work of cladding produce volumetric difference, hence the effect of the wallit then follows that the wall is not given in opposition to the oor.26 This point can be extended since if the wall/ oor opposition no longer denes the work of the wallbut the wall is the wall effect, ie, spatial divisionthis will result in the need for a reconsideration of the corner since the corner is dened by the intersection of an already determined oor/wall relationship. That reconsideration means that the relationship between wall, oor and corner can be rethought; a relationship rearticulated as a surface. Not just a surface as a at exterior but also a surface as tectonic entity; the reciprocity of materials and geometry. Furthermore programmatic demands necessitating that the elements of architecture have a distinct quality can locate that difference as individuated by a surface. Finally, therefore, the function of the wall is internal to the architecture in question thereby generating a sense of autonomy, one reinforced by the move from an externally orientated symbolic meaning to an internally regulated system of activity. Furthermore, the wall cannot be thought outside its relationship to materiality. Sempers work dissolved the distinction between structure and ornament. The wall was given an integrity that came from its denition in terms of the effecting of spatial enclosure while at the same time locating that realisation in the operation of materials.
Loos: the place of ornament

Looss critique of ornament is well known. However, it acquires another dimension once that critique is connected to the work of the surface. Moreover, Loos relates, both implicitly and explicitly, a concern with the surface to the project of modernity. This emerges strikingly in his discussion of costumes. Implicit in the argument is the position that differences in clothing habit are always more than the register of personal taste. Indeed, they are the enactment of different conceptions of historical time. These differences mark the presence of a conict that not only has a determining effect on the nature of the present, but also yields conict as that which identies the present. Writing of costumes, Loos argues the following: I too admit that I really take pleasure in the old costumes. But this does not give me the right to demand that he put them on for my sake. A costume is clothing that has frozen in a particular form; it will develop no further. It is always a sign that its wearer has given up trying to change his circumstances. The costume is the symbol of resignation.27 This passage can be usefully juxtaposed with the one advancing the central argument of Ornament and Crime. What the juxtaposition shows is that Looss argument is not against ornament as such but on the role and place of ornament within modernity. As ornament is no longer organically related to our culture, it is no longer the expression of our culture. The ornament that is produced today bears no relation to us or to any other human in the world at large. It has no potential for development.28
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What is being worked through in both passages is the way forms of material presence are already interwoven with issues pertaining to historical time and thus modernity. The retention of ornament, much like the wearing of a costume, is viewed as antithetical to the way the modern is understood. Ornament, in this sense, is a vestige. The overcoming of ornament does not give rise either to the positing of simple structure stripped of ornament or the recourse to mere form. What arises as a consequence is the surface. Even if the interior surfaces of Looss Haus and buildings appear to be heavily ornamented, from a Loosian perspective they are not. Cladding (Bekleidung) is not ornamentation. As with Semper cladding operates within architecture. Its presence is organisationaland hence related to programmatic distributionrather than having a purely symbolic role. Moreover, as with Semper, there is an important distinction between walls, understood as load bearing, and what was referred to before as the wall effect. The effect is the creation of space. Before pursuing the detail of the position, it should be noted that the shift from Semper to Loos is that the capacity of a surface to effect is located within the operation of architecture although now architectures operation is itself a consequence of having overcome the need to invest architecture with automatic symbolic value. The surface effect therefore is a sign of the modern both in its overcoming the hold of vernacular yet at the same time resisting the slide into the ubiquity of form in which formal presence is thought independently of programmatic effects. As a result the effect of cladding needs to be understood as being as much a connection of surfaces, function and
modernity as it is the operation of architecture. In order to pursue how the effect of cladding operates it is essential to trace the way in which Loos begins to distinguish between literal walls and the wall as surface in his The Principle of Cladding.29 As with Semperand thus recalling Borrominispace (spacing as an activity and therefore as spatiality) results from the surfaces effect. With Loos, however, there is an important additional element. Again, the setting is the critique of a logic of ornamentation, one in which substitution and imitation not only predominate but also dene part of the operation of ornamentation. Opposition to imitation not only reiterates the critique of ornament, it does so by introducing a more nuanced sense of structure. There are at least two moments in the text that are central for noting the emergence of the surface as a eld of operation. The rst is the opposition established by Loos between an architectural strategy that starts with the wall and then creates rooms or spaces. (They are the spaces left inside the walls.) In German, of course, the distinction between space and room is elided. Raumin this contextdenotes both. Looss point therefore is to contrast a position in which room-making or space-creating is an after-effect, with one in which, instead of assuming the neutrality of space and then seeking to divide it and in so doing create rooms, there is a radically different approach, one starting with the recognition that what is wanted is not mere space but the creation of effects (Die Wirkung). As such, what is at work is affect. The effectsthe creation of affect however come from the operation of material and forms. Effects are the work of surfaces that create
25
spaces (rooms). The introduction of effects not only reinforces the proposition that programme remains fundamental to the operation of surfacesallowing of course for the programme, potentially if not actually, to admit a far greater sense of complexity than envisaged by Loosthere is also the more radical proposition that programme is only possible because of the operation of surfaces. Programme and affect are interconnected. The locus of interconnection is the surface. This opens up the second element of the paper that needs to be noted, namely the discussion of carpets in terms of their material presence. As will be seen, materiality as productive of affect takes precedence over any ornamental or iconic value the carpets may have. The initial argument concerning the carpets materiality is advanced in the following terms. (But) is a living room that is lined all round with carpets not an imitation? The walls are not built of carpet! Of course they arent. But these carpets do not claim to be anything other than carpets. They do not pretend either in colour or pattern, to be masonry but make their function as cladding for the wall surface clear. They full their purpose according to the principle of cladding. (Pp. 43 44,46.) Implicit in this formulation is the distinction that was already noted in Semper between the load-bearing function of the wall and the operation of the surface as that which realises spatial division. The addition by Loos of affect allows the creation of space to rid itself of the feint of neutrality and thus to include the interplay between subjectivity (understood as the nexus of emotional and bodily
presence) and programme. Cladding, therefore, stands opposed both to the decorative and the ornamental once it is assumed that there is a necessary disjunction between these terms and the operation of architecture. That operation can, in this context, be described as occurring at the point of interchange between affect, structure and programme. Ornament is dened therefore as that which is irrelevant to this conception of the generative in architecture. While from a contemporary perspective the actual cladding used by Loos may now appear to be decorative, it is essential to recognise that as an abstract eld of activity the specic role of cladding needs to be understood in terms of this generative quality. That there may have occurred a shift in perception does not obviate the force of the initial claim. That force however can only be maintained by the decontextualising move in which this founding set-up is understood as a productive abstraction rather than as the only literal expression of the way cladding, affect and programme can be interconnected. Working with this conception of abstractionnamely as having an inherently productive quality that works outside the hold of representationallows for a form of decontextualisation in which the surfaces generative quality, rather than just its historical location, is given priority. In a sense Looss own argument concerning carpets allows for precisely this approach. What is clear is that understanding the carpets on the wall as already positioned within the logic of ornamentation would have incorporated the carpets into the realm of meaning and as such would have undone the work of materials. When Loos argues that the
26
carpets do not claim to be anything other than carpets it follows that their meaning is what they are. And that is why he can conclude that they attain their purpose (Zweck) according to the principle of cladding. While any material object will have a symbolic dimension, Looss argument is that within architecture the carpets function or purpose is realised through the operation of material presence. Rather than a pure functionalism, function has to do with the objects materiality. What matters therefore is how carpetsas cladding and thus as surfacework to space; in other words, the question to be addressed relates to the capacity of a given materialoperating as a surfaceto establish spatial conditions. Not only is space not a givenit is always createdspatiality, equally, is not an empty condition identied by a neutral term. When Loos argues that a true building (ein rechtes Bauwerk) makes no impression as a picture, reduced to two dimensions, the argument is not against plans as such but is a reformulation of the tight relationship that has already been established between the operation of architecture and the work of the surface.30 Surfaces create space. And yet, for Loos, spatiality is not just the work of surface. Integral to the system is the Raumplan. The latter can be dened as volumetric juxtaposition and interpenetration resulting in the creation of different volumetric conditions. In order that the relationship between cladding and Raumplan have a precise location, its work will be noted in Looss Haus Mu ller. Again, it needs to be remembered that what is fundamental, in this instance, is that the Haus becomes the locus in which surfaces, spaces and circulation operate. (An operation
whose work is the Haus.) However, that interconnection takes on an abstract quality once it is viewed in terms of its potentiality. The actuality of the Haus therefore lies more in its diagram than in its historic detail. The diagrammatic, however, needs to be located in the detail.
The Haus Mu Muller ller

The house is located in Prague. The initial design plans for the house were submitted on December 28th, 1928. After being rejected initially, they were approved in June of 1929 and the house itself was completed in 1930.31 Possibly the most signicant, and much quoted, comment made by Loos, which provides the setting for any interpretation of the house, concerns his relationship to the practice of design as exemplied in this particular project. (The comment, of which there is a shorthand record, was made during a conversation in Pilsen in 1930.) Again what needs to be remembered is the relationship between surface and spatiality. My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design oor plans, fac ades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground oor, rst oor etc . . . For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. . . . To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Mu llers house.32
27
What is initially signicant here is the way spatiality (a generalised term which, in this instance, will include rooms/spaces, vestibules and terraces) is dened in terms of interconnection. In other words, if there is an argument that circulation is fundamental to the Haus and that if circulation is not for an anonymous individual but that there is a connection between circulation and affect (remembering, of course, that affect is a way of locating programme) then two important questions arise. While they are interrelated they can, at this stage, be posed separately. The rst is, who circulates? The second refers to the structural possibility for circulation. The importance of attributing primacy to circulation is that it makes the position of the sedentary subject a more complex one.33 In other words, a stationary position occurs because of the volume and cladding work to disclose spaces. One of the most important instances of this is the Living Room (Fig. 3). Prior to considering the living room it should be noted that there are two patterns of circulation routes within the house. There are the routes taken by the family. Then there is the route taken by the servants. What Loos has managed to achieveand this is evident in the sectional drawingsis the incorporation of two paths that will not readily intersect. Instead of locating the circulation for the servants on the buildings exterior it was located within the house itself. Part of the force of the house is the way in which these two routes operate. While they mark divisions of class and wealth and therefore are signs of social division, they can also be understood organisationally. Such an understanding would not insist on the sign per
se, but on how two different circulation paths each with their own programmatic differences can cohere. One could be linked to the private and the other to the public and yet both would cohere in the same object. With regard to the living room, the immediate question it raises is denition. What is a room? How is it a room? These questions arise because of the way it takes on the quality of a specic spatial domainthus becoming space or room. This does not occur by a form of enclosure realised by the work of a literal wall running from oor to ceiling. Rather, in place of the conventional vocabulary of rooms, the living room needs to be understood as a specic spatial condition. Part of that condition is the enclosed space of the sedentary subject. Equally, it is the location of the room within a nexus of the structural presence of the possibilities of movementwith the Raumplan the lines of movement running through space are also at work in constructing its spatialitythat privileges the role of the ambulatory subject. However, that condition does not arise from repositioning part of the room in terms of an extended series of corridors. There is both movement and arrest. The two subject positions are the effect of the architecture. Once seated within the room the claddingboth in terms of material and colour consistency provides the overall integrity. (This is a condition that will be reproduced elsewhere in the Haus, eg, in the role of woodwood as claddingin the library.) Atmosphere, the realm of affect, is not given by an enclosed space but one created by the operation of a surface. At the end of the room the evolution of the wall as that which also
28
Figure 3. The Living Room, Haus Mu ller (from the Haus website).
incorporates three load-bearing columnsan act of incorporation in which the cladding constructs a continuous relation between the elementsmeans that structural elements and programmatic elements have the same literal surface. What is signicant therefore is that once the relationship between space creation and affect begins to dene the operational quality of architecture, then there is no need for a necessary consistency
between structure and the visual presence of that quality. While this opens up the path towards a conception of ornamentationa conception which becomes manifest in the advent of post-modern architecturethat path can be circumvented once it is recognised that cladding is not just the cladding on a structure but that in Loos cladding has no architectural importance other than in an already-present relationship with the Raumplan. Cladding therefore
29
is integral to the construction and maintenance of spatiality. When Loos argues that a carpet on a wall should be understood in relation to its capacity to effect space, attention is drawn immediately to the materiality of the carpet. If there is a conception of tectonics that emerges with Loos it does not have to do with the idealisation of structural elements but with the capacity of materials to realise effects. In Loos, materials are limited to what they can effect. Moving on from Loos means retaining the centrality of the relationship between materials and spatiality but it also necessitates taking up the position implicit in Semper that materials have, qua materials, an intrinsic tectonics. The other sense in which the Haus is the work of a surface is the fac ade. While it is initially only of minor interest to recall the fact that the interior of the building is not legible from the exterior, that observation takes on a different quality when it is used as evidence for the indifference that denes the relationship between the interior and the exterior surfaces. Part of the buildings productive potential lies in the way it can be conceptualised as the site of two surfaces whose operation denes its architectural presence. On the interior, of course, the surface loses any simply generalised sense and becomes a locus of plural possibilities. On the exterior the building masks the interior. Appearing as a box it takes on the quality of a container. And yet, the architecturally important aspect of the container concerns its presence, once presence is no longer conated with the image. Merely to describe it as a mask or even, to use Looss own language, to view it as mute reduces the fac ade to that which has interest only as an historical sign. Counter-posed
to the sign is the fac ades potentiality. If the exterior and the initial interior surfaces are viewed as two surfaces held in place by the same structural element, then it can be argued that there are two possible wall effects realised by the same literal wall. In other words, there are three interrelated elements. Once the productive potential of this possibility is taken up, the relationship between these three elements becomes a site of investigation and eventual experimentation. (The combination of these two domains, investigation and experimentation, begins to delimit part of the locus of research within architecture.) Arising from the following consideration of elements of the Haus is that on one level it consists of two surfacesthe interior and the fac adethat remain indifferent. In the rst instance the interior operates because of the relationship between volume and surface. In writing about the singularity of the Haus Mu ller in relation to other works by Loos, Van Duzer and Kleinman argue that in the building everything is on the surface.34 The description is right and yet it needs to be made more emphatic. The surface in question is not articulated in terms of an opposition between surface and depth. Recalling Ruskins formulation in which a distinction between the structure and its adornment (or ornamentation) dominated, what vanishes is that opposition as providing an adequate way of tracing the operation of the surface and thus the creation of the wall effect. This is, of course, another obvious link to Semper. Everything is on the surface precisely because the surface distributes programmatic differences. And yet, as has been argued, for Loos this is linked to an important sense of spatial creation. The operation of the
30
surface cannot be taken as an end in itself. In fact, it can be argued that the surfaces operational success is dependent upon its interarticulation with the Raumplan. What this means is that spatiality has to be thought in terms of an original connection to the operation of the surface.
Reopening the surface

What emerges from this consideration of aspects of Borromini, Semper and Loos is twofold. In the rst instance, it is the creation of a history for the contemporary concern with the surface within architectural design. That concern, while linked to techniques, is itself dependent upon the possibilities possibilities always in a state of developmentof certain software programs. A theoretical history takes the concerns of the present as its point of departure. In the second, it is the recognition that if their work has a potentiality and thus a connection to design practice, then it lies in the capacity to generate productive abstractions. These positions are clearly interconnected. In the guise of a conclusion, therefore, that connection will be made more explicit. The present to which a theoretical history refers cannot be understood as a generalised sense of the contemporary (often masquerading as the pragmatic now). In the rst instance that present has a location within the complex movement of historical time. A movement that is reconguredwithin designto the extent that the means of design begin to alter such that different concerns arise. That difference however cannot be dened simply by architectures link to its means of representation. Drawn into these concernsand they will gure as
much by their afrmed presence as by their possible occlusionare, for example, fundamental shifts in how affect is conceived, experienced and deployed within design, or programmatic concerns are given detail. Affect and programme, however, are sites that are as much architectural as they are points through which cultural and political concerns are registered. In other words, the concerns of the present that work at the periphery, and thus which are always beyond architecture, come to be reinscribed during the process of architectures own effectuation. While that reinscription need not be instrumentalin fact there are strong arguments against thinking of its presence in these termsits avoidance is impossible since affect and programme, in addition to materials and thus tectonics, remain integral to any denition of the activity of architecture. In addition, the present can be dened in terms of a continually modifying locus of techniques. The advent of techniques can cause, if not demand, transformations within the conceptual. Allowing for bothtransformations of techniques as well as conceptsmeans that opening up aspects of history and theory within theoretical histories involves establishing connections between them and the exigency of the present. Within the argument developed throughout this article that connection is bound up with potentiality. The locus of that potentiality was initially delimited by the proper names Borromini, Semper and Loos. Potentiality has to be dened in terms of a yet-tobe realised possibility. However, while the realisation of that possibility may have to be described in futural terms, nonetheless the locus in which
31
potentiality is realised is the present. Potentiality, understood in relation to its release, not only occurs in the present, it is fundamental to any conception of the present thought beyond its conation with the now of chronological time. As has been argued the potentiality of the Loosian surface effect, for examplea position marking the interplay of cladding, affect and the Raumplandoes not lie in its literal re-enactment. Not only does that misunderstand potentiality, it locates it within the structure of representation. As such, potentiality would be no more than the continual re-presentationhence re-production of an already envisaged architectural state of affairs. Within a formulation of this nature the dominance of the image is central, dominating within the demand that it be represented or reproduced. However, once potentiality is dened in terms of the generative where the generative can be located in a set of relationships rather than being reduced to an image of those relationships, then the realisation of potentiality will always have a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive connection to any founding set of relationships. Theoretical histories can be understood therefore as the attempt to examine the detail of architectures history that is guided by the attempt to discern potentiality. Discernment, as a practice, will always bring with it the possibility of judgement. The judgement, however, will not be concerned with any sense of accuracy other than one connected to the productive realisation of potentiality. The site of potentiality is not found in the past as though that were a domain that was simply given. The site is the present and thus the activation of the past by
the present. As has been argued this is linked both to the discontinuous continuity that denes the production of techniquesones linked as much to the means of representation as they are to material possibilitiesand to a conceptualisation of the present as the locus in which the project of modernity is being worked through.
Notes and references

1. Architectural theory is linked to the interiority of architecture and therefore it forms part of the construction of architecture as a discursive practice. The concern of theory is not therefore with the application of theoretical models that are external to architecture. What will always matter is the way such models can be construed architecturally. Nor, moreover, is architectural theory concerned with the juxtaposition of images that are equally external to architecture with ostensibly architectural ones in order that the former illuminate the latter. What must always be central are the possibilities, inherent within any image, for architecture. Architectural theory has to address the practice of architecture. Emphasising interiority does not mean that architecture is reduced to mere formalism. Rather, what is central is that this shift in emphasis provides a location for theory. Only within that location is it possible to approach the question of how autonomy and formalism are to be understood. This is the setting within which this essay on the surface will be positioned. It should be noted in addition that there is a great deal of contemporary work in this area. For a good overview, see, Mark Taylor, ed., Surface Consciousness (London, Wiley, 2003). 2. For a paper that begins to address this precise issue see Manuel de Landa, Philososphies of Design. The Case of Modeling Software, in Verb, No 1 (2001).
32
3. Part of the argument here is that whether the eld is understood chronologicallyeg, the nineteenth centuryor in terms of a periodeg, the Baroqueor discursivelyeg, Foucaults arguments concerning the episteme as formulated in Les mots et les choses (Paris, Gallimard, 1973)each one is dened in terms of simultaneity. The differences within the elds indicate to what extent simultaneity is a problem, and yet, of course, it is only a problem because of the insistence on simultaneity. Part of the argument advanced through this essay is that the project of theory and criticism has to refer to these elds of simultaneity. However, it can neither be conned nor constrained by them. This explains why architectural theory is not the history of architectural theory. 4. References to Semper will be to the following editions. In each instance the pagination, English preceding the German, will be given in the text. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trs, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989). Vier Elemente der Baukunst (Braunschweig, 1851). Der Stil (Munich, F. Bruschmann, 18789). The text Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity in English translation is in the volume cited above; in German it can be found in Kleine Schriften (Berlin and Stuttgart, Verlag von B. Spemann, 1884), pp. 215 258. 5. Hence it becomes possible to question Rykwerts interpretation of Semper on this topic. For Rykwert, Semper gives logical priority to ornament over structure and so to try and reconcile the ancient structure ornament opposition which has dogged classical architectural theory. Joesph Rykvert, Semper and the Conception of Style, in Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Basel und Stuttgart, Birkhauser Verlag, 1976), p. 78. Part of the argument
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
to be developed here is that the opposition, far from being reconciled, is in fact displaced. There has been a great deal of recent work on the wall. Perhaps the most signicant is Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press). Other recent work of signicance includes Fritz Neumeyer, Head rst through the wall: an approach to the non-word fac ade, in The Journal of Architecture, Volume 4 (Autumn, 1999) and Brian Hatton, The problem of our walls, also in The Journal of Architecture, Volume 4 (Spring, 1999). For a general overview of Looss conception of the Raumplanalbeit one that explicates it in relation to Heideggersee Cynthia Jara, Adolf Looss Raumplan Theory, Journal Of Architectural Education, Volume 48, No. 3 (1995), pp. 185 201. It is not enough to suggest that the history of architecture should play a role in the practice of design. What has to accompany such a suggestion is what is involved in such a suggestion having some reality and this has to involve a reworking of the object. For an excellent overview of the issues involved in this analogy as well as the presentation of one way through it, see Anthony Vidler, Architecture Dismembered, in his The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 69 85. The following reference to Alberti is intended to indicate the way the analogy between the body and the building operates in his text. There is no suggestion being made here that there arent other possible readings that would open up the De Re Aedicatoria. The richness of the text cannot be reduced to a source of simple citations. In a more sustained engagement the analogy would need to be incorporated into a reading of the text as a whole. For an important interpretation of the text see Franc oise Choay, De Re sir et le temps, in her Aedicatoria, Alberti ou le de ` gle et le mode ` le (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1996), La re
33
11.
12.
13.
14.
pp. 90 169, and for a reinterptation of the text set within the corpus of Albertis writings see, Mark Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1989). Leon Baptista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trs, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1988), p. 309. The argument concerning the relationship between architecture and the body is more complex with Borromini. Blunt, in his indispensable monograph on Borromini, argues that the move is from Albertis conception of the body towards one developed by Michelangelo who thought of a building as related to a body in movement and in action rather than static. (Anthony Blunt, Borromini. [Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979], p. 51.) Part of the position developed here is that the move from stasis to movement is fundamental. However, what loses its centrality is the body as the organising analogy. Part of the discussion of Berninis David could be used as a counter measure to Michelangelos David. In regard to Borrominis San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane Wittkower argues that its ordering principles break with a central position of anthropocentric architecture. (Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 16001750 [Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973], p. 199.) Again, the central point will be how such a break is to be understood. What characterises the material innite is the relationship between a dynamic system that is characterised by potentiality and immateriality whose actualisation is always material in nature. It should be clear that this is a description of the elements of the Baroque as it is of the connection between software and built form. One of the most persuasive, although general, accounts of the transition to the Baroque in which questions to do with movement are fundamental is lfin, Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca, Heinrch Wo
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Cornell University Press, 1992), see in particular pp. 71 92. The clear distinction here is the conception of the innite held in the architecture of, for example, Gothic dral St-Pierre St-Paul in Troyes churches. The Cathe involves, in terms of the operation of the eye, a simultaneous movement from oor to ceiling. The uninterrupted line of the columns, not only creates the volume of the nave and the choir, more importantly it reinforces the nite nature of the human in relation to the innite nature of God. While the innite cannot be given a material presence, the pure and uninterrupted line of ight from oor to ceiling reinforces the innite of illusion. At work here is a theology of straight lines. The move to the Baroque can be understood, at least initially, as complicating the innite. G.W. Leibniz, Principes de la Nature et de la Grace, s en raison, in Die philosophischen Schriften, fonde Band 6 (Berlin, Georg Olms Verlag, 1965), p. 598. I have discussed the centrality of Leibniz for architectural theory in my Architectural Philosophy (London, Continuum Books, 2001). It is possible to see this process at work in some of the early drawings. See in particular Albertina 171 reproduced in Blunt , op. cit., p. 59. Leo Steinberg, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (New York, Ellard Press, 1977). Steinbergs has to be taken as the denitive historical account of the church. Nothing that is suggested in the following is intended to undermine the importance of his work. The shift in emphasis occurs to the extent that a theoretical account acquires priority over the more straightforwardly historical account. The distinction between the oval and the ellipse is pursued by George L. Hersey in Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 137142.
34
20. For a detailed account of this setting and an interpretation of San Carlo that is in part orientated by what is taken to be Borrominis debt to the Neo-Platonism of Ficino see John Hendrix, The Relation between Architectural Form and Philosophical Structure in the Work of Francesco Borromini in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). 21. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, George Allen, 1880), p. 46. 22. I have attempted to present a detailed examination of this position in my Style and Time. Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Evanston, North Western University Press, 2006), see in particular Chapter 1. 23. London Lecture, 18th November 1853; RES, Journal of Architecture and Aesthetics, 11 (Spring, 1986), p. 38. 24. This is a consistent theme in Sempers work. He argues in Der Stil that in Greek architecture, both the art-form and decoration are so intimately bound together by the inuence of the principle of surface dressing that an isolated look at either is impossible (pp. 252 3). 25. This position is argued for in considerable detail in 62 of Der Stil. In that context walls are described as spatial concepts (rau mlichen Begriffe) (p.255/p.214). There is the important addition that concerns for load bearing were foreign to the original idea of spatial enclosure (des Raumsabschlosses). While this formulation holds to a distinction between wall and structure, it allows for the development of materials in which wall again as an effectand structure come to be interarticulated. 26. It is not as though an extensive literature on the relationship between Loos and Semper does not already exist. Most of the discussions however are concerned with points of historical connection and inuence. While these exist, the point argued here is that they create a more effective constellation once both can be viewed as concerned with different aspects of
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
what has already been identied as the surface effect. For an important discussion of the historical connection see amongst others: Mario Biraghi, La losoa dellavedamento nel primo Loos in Adolf Loos: la cultura del progetto: atti del Convegno tenuto presso il Centro congressi CARIPLO di Milano, 1617 marzo 1995 a cura di Giovanni Denti, Silvia Peirone (Roma, Ofcina, 1995). Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void, trs, Jane D. and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1982), p. 56. Adolf Loos, Trotzdem (Vienna,Georg Prachner Verlag, 1981), p. 84. English translation, The Architecture of Adolf Loos, eds, Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang (London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), p. 102. It goes without saying that Looss function as a cultural critic is more complex than the critique of the role of ornament within modernity. For a judicious assessment of Loos as a cultural critic see Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna. Adolf Looss Cultural Criticism (London, Routledge, 2000). Adolf Loos, On Architecture, trs, Michael Mitchell ber (California, Ariadne Press, 2002). In German in U Architektur (Vienna, Georg Prachner Verlag, 1995). Loos makes this claim in On Architecture, op. cit., pp. G80/E78. In regard to the Haus Mu ller, Giovanni Denti refers to the difculty of providing a twodimensional representation of the works tectonic operation. See his Casa Mu ller a Praga (Florence, Alinea, 1999), p. 10. For a meticulous room by room description of the house see Christian Ku hn, Das Scho ne, das Wahre und das Richtig, Adolf Loos und das Haus Mu ller in Prag, Baulwelt Fundamenta, 86 (Braunschweig, Vieweg & sohn, 1989), see in particular pp. 4372. Kenneth Frampton has also provided a detailed description of the interior of the house in his Adolf Loos: The Architect as Master Builder, in Roberto Schezen, Adolf Loos:
35
architecture 19031932 (New York, Monacelli Press, 1996), see in particular p. 19. 32. The Haus, now a research institute for architecture, specically that of Loos, has a very useful Website. This quotation has been taken from the Website: it is also to be found in the indispensable book by Leslie Van Duzer and Kent Kleinman on the Haus Mu ller (and see succeeding footnote, 33). The image of the Living Room is reproduced from the Website. Its
address is http://www.mullerovavila.cz/english/vilae.html. 33. Leslie Van Duzer and Kent Kleinman, Haus Mu ller: A Work of Adolf Loos, Foreword by John Hejduk (New York, Princeton University Press, 1994). Their work contains an important architectural discussion of the role of the differing subject positions within the house. 34. Ibid., p. 17.

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1

The Journal of Architecture Volume 11 Number 1

Surface effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos

University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Opening: the body

Bernini. The processDavid

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

Ruskin and polychromatic antiquities

Semper, walls and surfaces

Loos: the place of ornament

The Haus Mu Muller ller

Reopening the surface

Notes and references

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