Reviewed: David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA / London, 2002 (246 pp).
In 1898 Adolf Loos wrote: "In the beginning was cladding. Let us assume that the architect's first task is to provide a warm and habitable space. We humans began with skins to cover ourselves; floor coverings need a structure that holds them in place — inventing such structures is the architect's second task. Man learned how to build in this way... addressing the surface is older than building." On this principle Loos rested the demand: "You must take great pains to avoid any confusion between the cladding and the material that lies beneath." The reflections and resonances of this idea in architectural history are well known. Loos's theory takes in the entire relationship between form, the manner of construction and social communication, and condenses, in a single phrase, the connection between the mode of production and "representation". This is the very relationship that David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi take up in Surface Architecture.
As prefabricated and standardised components — assembled without mortar — become widespread, construction grows steadily more industrial. The problem of building and representation remains unresolved: how can a building (whether within or outside a cultural setting) communicate at all? Architecture oscillates between two poles: (1) the pure application of construction methods, in which the question of representation is altogether ignored; (2) the nostalgic repetition of past forms — and in the latter the new possibilities offered by new technologies are not used. This kind of argument is plainly rhetorical; but from here onward the authors engage with the fundamental question. Can architecture exploit the possibilities offered today by mass production in such a way that architectural representation is neither independent of, nor subservient to, the rule of technology?
Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi begin their pathology with Albert Kahn — better known for his early twentieth-century factory designs; his other works lean toward more historicist styles. In his designs the contrast between mode of production and representation can be read as the broader contrast between modernity and tradition. Traditionally, the representation of a building's elevations was reduced to the design of the elevation itself. With the appearance of curtain walls — the result of a revolution in steel and reinforced concrete — the structural load was lifted from the walls. Once walls had ceased to be load-bearing, their epistemological status also altered. From that moment a current emerges that views every form of presentation and representation with suspicion, with the result that the work tends toward the uneven growth of communicative and expressive functions outside the conventional, recognised semantic systems. The authors of this book direct their attention to this communicative skin — surface as the principal goal of recent designs — and through it revisit some of the most important sites of twentieth-century architecture.
Their approach is not semiotic and embraces a multitude of viewpoints — a little of everything: theoretical, technical and historical. The work also analyses the practice of OMA — useful in itself. The authors then cite examples in which the evolution of surface, mediated by new technology and materials, appears as theses that distance themselves from tradition. The MIT Baker House dormitory by Alvar Aalto and the side window of the Rietveld–Schröder house produce oblique views, transform the inside–outside relationship and alter the structural condition. Curtain walls in skyscrapers became a representation of economic transformation; from that point on, the histories of window and wall began to interlock. Mies, drawing on his fastidious knowledge, was able to give certain technical details of the Seagram building and the Lake Shore Drive apartments a decorative value: no load, for example, rests on the I-shaped column on the facade, yet these columns refer to a steel skeleton behind. It is now clear that functionalism was itself, in an impressionistic way, ornamental — Italian "Radical Design" understood this perfectly well. Venturi and Scott-Brown's "decorated sheds" paradoxically resemble Mies's work. The story is a long one.
The book also addresses the work of Herzog & de Meuron, the sceptical disciples of Aldo Rossi. Their mimicry of production methods differs greatly from the machine-functionalist mimicry; aware of the artificial nature of the new materials, they play with surfaces as though those surfaces were the principal subject of the design. Examples include silk-screen printing on glazed facades and the imprinted photographs on concrete panels at the Eberswalde Library. Here representation is something different; it has, as yet, neither reference nor history. This "unreferenceability" — its oscillation of meaning between the dominance of information technology and the cladding (whose aim is protection) — raises novel questions that deserve careful study. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi do not undertake that study, but they invigorate it. By isolating the question of surface, the surface itself grows larger and larger, potentially affecting the entire domain of architecture and beyond. Therein lie the book's strength and its weakness.
Footnotes: 1. Adolf Loos. 2. Representation. 3. Albert Kahn. 4. epistemological. 5. Venturi. 6. Scott-Brown. 7. Herzog & de Meuron. 8. Eberswalde. 9. Rauch.
