Having three options rather than one to select from is better practice in architectural design. To create something useful, beautiful, and capable of managing all the contingencies a design encounters requires trial and error, because perfect solutions do not exist. This seems self-evident to any designer. But a hyperbolic strain of this belief has become increasingly common: the more options, the better. Make a hundred, blue foam variations on a cube, because ten will not do.

What kind of architectural subjectivity is this? Rosalind Krauss perhaps had foreseen it in her essay on Sol Lewitt in 1978. Discussing the artist’s proliferation of forms and objects from a single ‘concept’, she writes:

There is, in Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, as they say, a method in this madness. For what we find is the ‘system’ of compulsion, of the obsessional’s unwavering ritual… It is in that sense design without reason, design spinning out of control. The obsessional’s solutions to problems, strike us as mad, not because the solutions are wrong, but because in the setting of the problem itself is a strange short-circuit in the lines of necessity.

The mind is mechanized like a script. In design, this thinking emphasizes a lateral, proliferating production over an iterative, revision-oriented one. Multiplying choice by mechanized production, the designer selects from soundbyte forms—pixel, donut, or squiggle option—and endless deformations of each. Significantly, the operative design strategy is selection rather than postulation. No longer is the architect brandishing the willful hand, in which lies a perfected, principled design. Instead, the architect has become the critic—a post-human(ist) factory that produces and reproduces culture. One moves forward by deciding what is not good rather than what is good. Conviction and will are continuously deferred.

Revision is another word for process. Every idea, every sentence, once it is formed, begins the process of revision.

Revision is another word for erasure. A revision is new, it is renewed, a re-vision, a looking again.

A building is revised endlessly, but it is a machine for resisting revision. You move furniture around, you fix a door handle, you add curtains, take away blinds, you add a floor. Eventually, the building is bought and someone else wants to make it their own, and it is revised again, invariably.

Architects are almost never able to give revisions, but one notable exception exists in New Haven, Connecticut. There, two museums by Louis Kahn—the 1953 Yale University Art Gallery and the 1977 Yale Center for British Art—face each other on Chapel Street, bookending Kahn’s career in an unreasonably poetic way.

In short, the program and size are very similar—gallery space, a circulation core, administrative space, a street entrance. Kahn’s British Art Center alters and perfects his first try. A too-flexible open plan is changed for an interchangeable grid. A heavy, dour façade is changed for one that opens along the street and along the sky. An inscrutable structure is changed for a clearly legible concrete frame. One likes to think that architects learn from mistakes—their own and others—but these two buildings prove that a lesson is never absorbed unless one has to contend with its final, physical manifestation. Only then can revision begin.

In 1977, Vincent Scully compared the two buildings, tying both back to the legacy of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist envelopes. The 1953 Art Gallery, Scully writes, “had employed the Miesian envelope and had also fought it, as something inherited and unwanted…But now, in his last urbanistic dialogue, he turned around and… more

Henry Ng

Aleksandr Bierig

Concrete represents permanence and solidity. It is possible to claim that its enduring form in the ruins of the Ancient Rome, delivering the ideas of the empire, accounts for much of Western civilization, as we understand it. As architects, we know about its durability, strength, and power to render form sharply. But the material tells a more complex story.

The word ‘concrete’ originates in the Latin concrescere, meaning ‘to grow together’. Inherent to itself, concrete describes a fundamental drama about transformation. In its vague, liquid-like form, concrete is much like fat: malleable, composite matter lacking internal structure. Its shape emerges from its container, without which it dissolves into uselessness, like a chameleon without a background. To seep and to mirror are its functions. It is the toti-potentiality of the formless that Joseph Beuys sought in his frequent use of fat in his art. Chaotic and fundamentally dense to comprehension, fat signified a void of form that could be either filled by transcendent potential or remain nothingness. Liquid concrete is much the same as fat, until it achieves its second life.

In solid form, concrete is in every way the opposite, epitomizing immutability and structure. It is helpful to describe it by discussing “concrete” in a related use. Concrete poetry is a form of poetry where words aggregate to become an image. Ash and limestone are replaced by language. It is this moment of achieving the gestalt of the image that makes it concrete, when an alternate reading of the poem opens up, which collapses time to the instant of recognition. In reference to language and ideas, ‘concrete’ describes that which has realized a material form or reality, and is thus opposed to the ‘abstract’. The same is true for concrete as a material. When concrete is poured to create a block or beam, it becomes real, and the liquid void is filled by a timeless certainty. And so, concrete tells the story of transformation from non-form to form, of coming into being.

‘Dich aber, süße Sprache Deutschlands,
Dich habe ich erwählt und gesucht, ganz von mir aus’.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Etymology always poses the greatest stumbling block to theory: because when it comes down to it, what do we really mean by Geist? But Hegel hasn’t been the only thinker to regress into language for solutions to philosophical problems (although German as the Science of Logic is a compelling argument indeed). Whereas Virno laments the multitude’s ever-shrinking grammar, pooling around inane topoi koinoi, the field of hermeneutics would cease to exist if it weren’t for Greek and Latin roots. When reaching into the abstract for theories sandwiched somewhere in between intuition and rational thought, words fall easily enough into place, explaining concepts in a manner that is deceptively concrete.

But how stable is language, and the meanings of words, after all? The beauty of poetry is that it can contain contradictions without ever losing inner consistency. And yet, before I had any sort of fluency in a second language, I felt drawn to the poetic edge of the concrete arts (from the postwar era and thus after Apollinaire, because who wasn’t?) drawn up by Emmett Williams, Eugen Gomringer and Augusto de Campos. But the more I became engaged with feeling out the cultural echoes of the conversational everyday, the less enraptured I was by concrete poetry’s typographical delights. Imagine the word ‘apple’ typed repeatedly into lines tracing a perfectly-formed–well, apple. Word and image have struggled enough on the plane of the representational as it is, and the concrete poem finally seemed like too much brittle surface, sealing me off from more fluid constructions without any means to gauge the depth of discourse layered beneath. So I gave up. No matter how dried-out or defined, words will never be bricks for me.

Henry Ng

Kari Rittenbach