Industrial Architecture and Negativity the Aesthetics of Architecture in the Works of Gordon Matta Clark Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher

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Industrial architecture and negativity: theaesthetics of architecture in the works of GordonMatta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Bernd and HillaBecher

Maro Kriv

To cite this article: Maro Kriv (2010) Industrial architecture and negativity: the aesthetics ofarchitecture in the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher,The Journal of Architecture, 15:6, 827-852, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2011.533549

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Industrial architecture andnegativity: the aesthetics ofarchitecture in the works of GordonMatta-Clark, Robert Smithson andBernd and Hilla Becher

Maros Krivy Department of Social Research, Faculty of SocialSciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

The modernist idea of monumentality derived its inspiration from the imagery of late-

nineteenth century industrial structures. In the 1960s, this monumentality and modernist

total design was criticised by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown who proposed the

ugly and ordinary architecture and vital mess of commercial populism instead. On the

background of these two approaches, I will read the art works of Gordon-Matta Clark,

Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Bechers as giving voice to all that is forgotten,

excluded or unacknowledged in architecture. The importance of these artists lies in their

exploration of negativity in architecture. Their art works stage the contras, first, between

the inevitable continuity of architecture as a process and its discontinuity when it is

reduced to a set of objects, as well as the contrast, secondly, between the continuity of

urban and architectural space and its discontinuity when our perceptions reduce it to its

monumental and important parts. Negativity stands for the time before and after of

what is commonly understood as an architecture, as well as for the invisible materiality

parts of urban space and buildings that are usually ignored. Today, it is in obsolete industrial

architecture that negativity finds its purest expression: in the words of Walter Benjamin,

the Modernists imaginary monuments are recognised as ruins even before they have

physically crumbled.

Introduction

In 1923, Le Corbusiers Vers une Architecture was

published. It was to become the canon for the

Modern Movement in architecture. The book drew

on the industrial imagery of American factories

and compared them with the Pantheon. It aimed

to correct the regressive tendencies in the architec-

ture of that time by grounding its practice in the

technical rationality of American engineers. Their

factories and grain silos became symbols of new

architectural monumentality.

In 1975, Gordon Matta-Clark carved a hole into

an abandoned apartment house in Paris, only

moments prior to its speculative demolition. He

created a short-lasting and almost invisible

monument out of the building that had already

lost its function. Although trained originally as an

architect, Matta-Clark turned away from the

actual practice of the discipline and created the

series of exemplary cuts into abandoned factories

and empty houses that explored the limits of the

notion of function in architecture.

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# 2010 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2011.533549

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In 1967, during his trip to Passaic, New Jersey,

Robert Smithson described the processes of archi-

tectural entropy in that suburban landscape. He

selected ordinary, random points on his walk and

documented them as if they were monuments.

Smithson observed the aesthetics of construction

sites and obsolete and polluted industrial land.

Although usually classified as a protagonist of land

art, his specificity lies rather in the complex explora-

tions of the processes of landscape and architectural

ruination.

Since the late 1950s, Bernd and Hilla Becher

have been developing a long-lasting photographic

project of documenting industrial structures on the

verge of obsolescence. Their works pay attention

to the monumental quality of the anonymous

sculptures in a detruit state. Contrary to the Moder-

nists reading of factories as imaginary monuments

of the future, the Bechers are interested in them,

as Benjamin would say, at the precise moment

when they become outmoded. They literally recog-

nise the monuments. . .as ruins even before they

have crumbled.1

This paper intends to show how the works of the

above-mentioned artists constitute a critical

response to the post-war crisis of both modernist

and industrial architecture. At the same time, I

want to demonstrate that this response differs

from the post-modern criticism of modernism, as

elaborated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-

Brown. Instead of celebrating the popular and the

vernacular, the artists in question explore the field

of negativity in architecture: the phases of before

and after of an architectural process, the invisible

parts of architecture and cities and the repetitive

cycle of construction and destruction underlying

the rhetoric of industrial progress.

During recent decades, obsolescence of the

industrial built environment has constituted the

major issue in the urban planning agenda. The

responses oscillate from ignorance and demolition

on one side to fetish-like conservation efforts on

the other. Today, the importance of the presented

works lies not in questioning one or the other of

the two positions, but in questioning the discursive

field constituted by the recurring conflicts between

these two positions. They attempted to disclose

negativity in architecturesomething that is

ignored by both the rhetoric of progress and the

post-modern celebration of the vernacular and tra-

ditional.

Factory as a monumental image

Grain silo, factory, buildings of industry: these rep-

resented for Le Corbusier the language of new

architecture (Fig 1.).2 He sought to substitute

the neutrality and rationality of engineers struc-

tural intelligence for the pathos of architects con-

strained by the falsity of ornaments, decorations

and traditions.

The language of industrial engineering was

perceived as a neutral and objective vehicle of

arranging space, applicable to all architectural

scales ranging from individual buildings to urban

systems. In the work of Le Corbusier, the industrial

sublime of nineteenth-century technological pro-

gress was at the same time tamed down and

made absolute (Citrohan House, Chandigarh). The

factory was the single most appropriate architec-

tural image representing technological progress

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Industrial architecture and negativity: the aesthetics of

architecture in the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert

Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher

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that should be stretched from production to

consumption and, in general, to living.

Before Le Corbusier, American industrial architec-

ture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

centuries had a key influence on Walter Gropius

and Erich Mendelsohn. In 1913, seven pages of

unexplained illustrations of American grain elevators

and factories appeared in Jahrbuch der Deutschen

Werkbundes (Fig 2.). Gropius was soliciting these

pictures for a long time. He compared their monu-

mental effect to the buildings of Ancient Egypt.3

They on their part influenced Mendelsohns silo

dreams of 19141915. It was precisely these

illustrations that Le Corbusier borrowed from

Gropius in 1919 for the article in LEsprit Nouveau,

which was an early germ of Vers une Architecture.4

None of these architects had visited the USA

before they elaborated their silo dreams and indus-

trial fantasies. Mendelsohn visited the country for

the first time in 1924. On this occasion, he wrote:

Mountainous silos, incredibly space-conscious,

but creating space. A random confusion amidst

the chaos of loading and unloading of corn

ships, of railways and bridges, crane monsters

with live gestures, hordes of silo cells in concrete,

stone and glazed brick. Then suddenly a silo with

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Figure 1. Le Corbusier,

Towards a New

Architecture (1923).

Illustration originally

published in Jahrbuch

der Deutschen

Werkbundes (1913).

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administrative buildings, closed horizontal fronts

against the stupendous verticals of fifty to

hundred cylinders, and all this in the sharp

evening light. I took photographs like mad. Every-

thing else so far now seemed to have been

shaped interim to my silo dreams. Everything

else was merely a beginning.5

Gropius visited USA for the first time in 1928 and

Le Corbusier in 1935. The key role American

industrial structures played in the rise of modernist

architecture emerged from illustrations. While

Gropius claimed that American builders have

preserved a natural feeling for large compact

forms fresh and intact,6 these forms influenced

European modernists through images in the first

place. Jean-Louis Cohen argues that Le Corbusier

employed a deliberate strategy of seduction-by-

image.7 Colin Rowe points out that the influence

of Le Corbusiers Vers une Architecture has been

principally achieved through the medium of the

illustrated book.8

In the interpretation of Mendelsohn, Gropius and

Le Corbusier, the factory is represented as an ima-

ginary monument and monumental image of the

social progress rooted in and driven by the ration-

ality of science, technology and engineering.

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Maros Krivy

Figure 2. Illustration

published by Gropius in

Jahrbuch der Deutschen

Werkbundes (1913).

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Monumentality

The defining feature of monumentality is an impo-

sition of spatial order, closure and totality. Ideally,

monuments do not allow for misinterpretations.

They are like the readerly texts of Roland Barthes,

where the spectators are reduced to consumers

of meanings already present in the text.9 The role

of a monument is at the same time to unify a

city around a set of meaningful values and to

communicate these values. In the words of Lefebvre,

monumentality

embodies and imposes clearly intelligible mess-

ages. It says what it wishes to sayyet it hides a

good deal more: . . . monumental building masks

the will to power and the arbitrariness of power

beneath signs and surfaces which claim to

express collective will and collective thought. In

the process, such signs and surfaces also manage

to conjure away both possibility and time.10

Images of industrial structures were utilised as visual

supports for monumentalising the future city

designed according to the scientific and neutral prin-

ciples of engineering. While these principles made it

possible for Modern architects to produce architec-

ture on the urban scale and thus revive its social rel-

evance, they also introduced a closure on the

urban future. Architecture, from then on, was sup-

posed to follow one single logic. Monumentality per-

tains to our perception of time. Usually, we connect

the word monument with the past. Alois Riegl has

described the shift that occurred during the nine-

teenth century, when the historical value of monu-

ment was gradually replaced by its age-value. The

historical value of a monument is unintentional. It

was not designed as a monument, but became to

be valued later. Nonetheless, the criteria for the

valuation lie in the unique nature of the thing

valued. In contrast, monument has an age-value

insofar as it conveys a sense of a passing of time.

Here, the criteria are not the unique quality but the

fact that the thing signifies to us a sense of past.11

However, once the monument becomes a signifier

of a general notion of time, there is no reason why it

should not be capable also of pointing towards the

future. If a concrete individual monument refers to

time as an abstract notion, it can also signify the

future reduced to the abstract principle of function-

ality. It is then the materiality of ferro-concrete,

derived from the industrial structures, that plays a

key role of visual representation of this principle:

[Le Corbusier] knew how to bring out the secret

affinity that existed between ferroconcrete con-

struction and the human needs and cravings

that were just coming to the surface.12

If a monument plays a key role in the organisation

and ordering of our spatial and temporal experi-

ence, it is at the same time caught up in a contradic-

tion. On the one hand, it is an embodiment of a

collective unity, bound together around a central

idea, value or myth. However, if on one side monu-

ment clarifies the future and gives identity to a city

and its people, on the other side it does not explain

why the society should have the one particular form

that it signifies. Hence, the collective unity is at the

same time a project, in which a monument plays a

key role. Monument is both an expression of an

idea of a collective future and a tool for speculative

realisation of this idea.

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Crisis and postmodern criticism

At least since the late 1960s, an increasingly large pro-

portion of the industrial built environment has been

rendered obsolete by the same neutral, objective and

rational logic that established its structures as monu-

mental images in the eyes of Modern Movement.

Factories are devalued, as mobile capital explores

undiscovered territories in the search for a new

spatial fix.13 The monuments of scientific rationality

and the future are crumbling. The monumental

vision of the future becomes an object of post-

modern criticism. In 1964, in one of his last works,

Le Corbusier designed a post-modern museum for

himself. In Centre Corbusier, the structure becomes

ornament and the form becomes more important

than function.14 As Tafuri argues, these stylistic

and formal experiments are related to a failure of

modernist architecture to solve the organisation of

production and consumption on the urban scale.15

This line of criticism is most importantly elabo-

rated in Venturi and Scott-Browns Learning from

Las Vegas,16 where they attacked the total design

of modernism:

Total design is the opposite of the incremental city

that grows through the decisions of many: total

design conceives a messianic role for the architect

as corrector of the mess of urban sprawl; it pro-

motes a city dominated by pure architecture and

maintained through design review, and supports

todays architecture of urban renewal and fine

arts commissions.17

It has been shown above how modernist architects

utilised industrial images to present their claims con-

cerning the future. Venturi and Scott-Brown lay

even stronger claim:

The architecture of the Modern movement. . .

developed a vocabulary of forms based on a

variety of industrial models. . . Their factorylike

buildings were more than influenced by the

industrial vernacular structures of the then

recent past, in the sense that historians have

described influences among artists and move-

ments. Their buildings were explicitly adapted

from these sources, and largely for their

symbolic content, because industrial structures

represented, for European architects, the brave

new world of science and technology.18

The stress on the symbolic power of pure form is

important here. If modernist architecture rails

against ornaments, decorations and symbols in

general, according to Venturi and Scott-Brown the

paradoxical outcome is that the whole building

turns into a symbol. Thus, the authors distinguish

between a decorated shed and a duck.19 While

the former accepts the symbolism of architecture

and thus allows for the distinction between the tec-

tonic and expressive part, the latter refuses non-

functional ornaments that would compromise the

purity of form. The paradox involved is that by

expulsion of symbolic language not subjugated to

the totality of a rational design, modernist objects

become symbols themselves. Above, I have charac-

terised the original strategy of Modernism as a

seduction-by-image. Venturi and Scott-Brown for-

cefully argue that this persists in actual modernist

architecture. The refusal of non-functional symbols

and ornaments (decorated shed) in the end turns

to production of the architectural object itself as

symbol (duck). As they famously put it: Minimegas-

tructures are mostly ducks.20

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In contrast to the totalising urbanism and archi-

tecture based on supposedly neutral scientific and

technological rationality, Venturi and Scott-Brown

propose vital mess. In contrast to the architectural

purity and the calculations of engineers, they

propose architectural symbolism of the ugly and

ordinary.21 But while the authors successfully criti-

cise the modernist Plan, they replace it by the

market, which is suggested as the new principle

determining urbanism and architecture. Thus vital

mess urbanism and ugly and ordinary architecture

are at the same time promoted by sales staff.22

By embracing decorated sheds and the populism

of the commercial strip, Venturi and Scott-Brown

fail to achieve the emancipation of architecture

that they were promising. After liberation from

one master, it succumbs to another. Instead of the

rational plan, we are now in the domain of the

market: [W]ords and symbols may be used in

space for commercial persuasion.23 All in all,

things have not improved much when instead of

architecture that communicates the heroism of a

technologico-rational future we have one that per-

suades us in the sophisticated language of the

latest advertising tricks.24

Aesthetics and architecture

The reason for focusing on the art works of Gordon

Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla

Becher is my conviction that they evade both of

the above-mentioned positions in architecture.

Whilst these works are produced in the context of

the crisis of modernist architecture and urban

planning, they do not yield to post-modern and

populist criticism.

The selection does not claim to be in any way

exhaustive. My interest lies neither in art criticism

nor in mapping of the field of art. I do not intend to

analyse whether the selected art works in any way

represent this field. Rather, I am interested in studying

attempts at redistributing the field that is external,

yet so close to them: the field of architecture.25

Why turn to artists and not to architects them-

selves? What I focus on in this article is the aesthetic

of architecture. Relying on the work of Jacques

Rancie`re,26 I understand the domain of aesthetics to

be the sensible as such. Hence, I am interested in the

aesthetic operations that intervene in our perceptions

of architecture and in the forms by which our architec-

tural consciousness is delineated and structured.

Rancie`re employs the term distribution of sensible

to describe an organisational principle that divides

the whole into parts and determines in what way

individual parts participate in this shared whole.27

An architectural distribution of sensible then

defines what is architecture and what is not, what

is architecture and what is only a building, what is

common within architecture and what is not. It sus-

tains the relationship between the distribution of

social roles in the field of architectural production

and the distribution of ways of seeing and making

proper for each individual part. In relation to the

criticism and transformation of architecture, it also

defines what is perceived as possible and what as

impossible and who shares these perceptions.

The existing distribution of sensible is questioned

when a part refuses to be identified with its parti-

cular position, yet without immediately assuming

another particular position within the whole.28 Ran-

cie`re describes this as a part that has no part,

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because of its paradoxical position: it belongs to the

whole, yet at the same time, it is excluded from

having a particular position in this whole.29 On

account of its ambiguity, a part that has no part is

political insofar as it challenges the aesthetically sus-

tained inequality between parts. Equality is then

understood by Rancie`re as a practical hypothesis,

the effects of which are tested against the everyday

reality of inequality.30

It is then a specific aesthetics of architecture,

focusing on what is forgotten, excluded or unac-

knowledged in the existing architectural distribution

of sensible, that makes the three presented bodies

of artistic work resonate together. They enact a

practical hypothesis of architectural and spatial

equality. Since the interest of the presented artists

in architecture was neither accompanied by having

a direct stake in the field of architectural production

nor bound to the ultimate objective of producing

habitable forms, the role of their artworks may

also be understood as a part that has no part.

Negativity in architecture

It is the notion of negativity, however, that generalises

the concept of a part that has no part and makes it

more suitable for use in relation to architecture. It

broadens the domain of Rancie`res concept from

that of a social group. Negativity expresses those

aspects of architecture that have the ambiguous pos-

ition of being its part and being excluded from it.

If Rancie`re defines politics as the formulation of a

practical hypothesis of equality by the part that has

no part, negativity has, too, direct stakes in the

formulation of politics:

[N]egativity is already political inasmuch as it

signals the vulnerability and contingency of

every phenomenon that appears to be fully posi-

tive and replete. . . . Negativity draws attention

both to the instability of every form and to the

contingency of all boundaries. It delivers the

radical message that things could be different

and that the way they are bounded or limited,

divided up and identified, is not ontologically,

naturally or normatively given.31

In this papers field of inquiry, negativity stands for

what comes before and after what is commonly

understood as architecture. To take these

moments as being intrinsic parts of architecture

and to consider them within the totality of architec-

tural practice is to challenge the existing distribution

of architectural sensible. Artistic exploration of

negativity presents the contrast between the inevi-

table continuity of architectural process and the

discontinuity of architecture reduced to an object.

Negativity also stands for the invisible materiality

of architecturethe parts of buildings and urban

space that are usually ignored and implicitly under-

stood as not being part of a real architecture and

a real city. Here, exploration of negativity stages

the contrast between the essential continuity of

space as a whole and the discontinuity of space

perceptually reduced to its monumental and

important parts.

To invoke negativity is then to be reminded of the

outside of architecture. This notion problematises

any absolutisation or naturalisation of the pres-

ence32 or of the present distribution of sensible. It

is important to understand that negativity differs

from negation: the works I discuss do not oppose

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architecture by not-architecture, but they present

the not-architecture as being part of architecture.

In this sense my position differs from Rosalind

Krauss,33 whose objective is to expand the

coordinates in which we understand a field of pro-

duction (of sculpture, in her case). She conceptualises

not-architecture by inscribing the contrary notions of

landscape and architecture into Greimassquare.34 In

her work, not-architecture emerges as a complemen-

tary term to architecture. What comes out of the

combination of architecture and not-architecture is

then presented under the name of axiomatic struc-

tures, where there is some kind of intervention

into the real space of architecture, sometimes

through partial reconstruction, sometimes through

drawing,. . .through the use of mirrors. . . [or] pho-

tography can be used for this purpose.35

Whilst the discussed art works could come under

this definition, I do not follow this line of analysis

here. The objective of this paper is to explore how

the meeting of architecture and not-architecture

or what I prefer to call the meeting of architecture

and the field of its negativitycan change the

social meaning of architecture itself, or, in other

words, of the architectural distribution of sensible.

Gordon-Matta Clark: holes, functionality and

speculative redevelopment

By mistaking a part for a whole, an activity that

contains elements of violence or destruction is

often labelled as violent and destructive. This is

how Gordon Matta-Clarks Conical Intersect (1975)

(Fig. 3) was received and denounced from the

right, but also from the left of the political spectre.

The editorial of LHumanite ironically commented:

WHAT AN ART! It would seem that this hole is an

art, being made by an artist. The art in the domain

of hole [domaine du trou] is not afraid of the

emptiness in the old district of Les Halles in

Paris. It was the Brantome street, one of the

oldest in Paris, and there behind is the Centre

Georges Pompidou.36

A metonymic displacement takes place in such an

interpretation. The Conical Intersect consists of

cutting a hole into a soon-to-be-destroyed house

in the Beauborg area. The house itself was adjacent

to the future site of the Centre Pompidou and the

old Les Halles that had just been torn down (Fig 4.).

On the one hand, we have a huge hole in the

middle of Paris produced by speculative redevelop-

ment. We have also an empty parking area in the

centre of Paris redeveloped into the Centre Pompi-

dou, which is itself a hole: the buildings structural

system is pushed outside for the sake of maximum

flexibility and adaptability of the empty interior.37

This carcass of signs and flux, as Baudrillard named

it,38 represents one of the first cases of flagship

development, the process by which culture is objecti-

vised as a cultural production, commodified as a cul-

tural consumption and externalised as a sign of a city.

On the other hand, we have a different hole:

Matta-Clarks conical intersect carved into two aban-

doned seventeenth-century apartment houses. From

among the buildings slated for demolition and

making space for the Centre Pompidou, these were

the last.

These holes should not be confused. The former

have a precise purpose and function: they are part

of the speculative restructuring of space. But

Matta-Clarks hole does not have any specific

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Maros Krivy

Figure 3. Gordon

Matta-Clark: the hole of

Conical Intersect

(1975).

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function, if not a symbolic one: it questions the

justification of architecture and urban development

by the notion of functionality. Although it deals

intimately with architecture, it is rather an anarchi-

tecture. In an interview about a different project,

Matta-Clark explains this:

We were thinking about metaphoric voids, gaps,

left-over spaces, places that were not develo-

ped. . .metaphoric in the sense that their interest

or value wasnt in their possible use. . .You mean

you were interested in these spaces on some

nonfunctional level? Or on a functional level that

was so absurd as to ridicule the idea of function.

. . .Its like juggling with syntax or disintegrating

some kind of established sequence of parts.39

On one side, Matta-Clarks work focuses on the

building that lost the function it had performed

within the urban context. This building now simply

waits to be demolished. On the other side, Conical

Intersect can be also read as a comment on the

meaning of function in architecture.

By intervening into the architectural object in a

seemingly random way (disrespecting the natural

order of architecturedoors/walls/floors), the

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Figure 4. The hole of

Les Halles (Le trou des

Halles), Paris (around

19711976).

(Photograph courtesy of

Arnaud Martinez.)

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work questions what is understood as ordinary and

shows its contingent character (Fig. 5).

We can understand this act of cutting a hole as

displaying the foundations of the practice of archi-

tecture in contemporary society. Stylistic exercises

in architecture mirror the fact that architecture is

not really autonomous and that it is caught in a

contradiction between the production of isolated

architectural objects and the urban organisation of

production.40 If the aspiration of modern architec-

ture to change urban organisation failed due to its

totalising drive, architecture is now doomed to

produce isolated objects without being able to

grasp this production in the totality of its social

and spatial meaning.

Conical Intersect refers to the ambiguity at the core

of Modern Movement. The belief that architecture

can and should change society is reflected in the

continuity between urban planning and architecture

(and ultimately, interior decoration as well). But this

continuity is caught up in a peculiar contradiction,

since this belief in the social power of architecture

is ultimately sustained on the notion of function.

Matta-Clarks work suggests a reading of archi-

tecture that exposes the whole of architectural

process, hidden when architecture is understood

as a functional object. In such reading, intervention

by cutting a hole through the building is not its

destruction, but rather questioning the forces of

urban destruction driven by immediate usefulness

and an abstract idea of space.

At the same time, cutting a hole is an act that

refers to the pure materiality of the object. It

focuses on the precise moment when the object is

losing its function, but still exists. It is a breakdown

of a Corbusierian Plan, but not of a Form: There

are forms without plansdynamic orders and

disorders.41 There are the traces, palimpsests of

past activities that reverberate in empty space.

As Rosalind Krauss puts it when referring to

another art work by Matta-Clark: The cut is able

to signify the buildingto point to itonly

through a process of removal or cutting away. The

procedure . . . succeeds therefore in bringing the

building into the consciousness of the viewer in

the form of a ghost.42

In this sense, a hole is not a negation of architec-

ture but exposure of its negativity. A hole is what

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Maros Krivy

Figure 5. Gordon

Matta-Clark, Bronx

floorsfloor above,

ceiling above, building

fragment (19721973).

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makes the object non-identical with itself and resists

attempts for its closure. It shows those architectural

qualities that persist after the building is stripped of

its functionality. It exposes the entropic tendency of

any architectural object and thus discloses the lack

of foundation beneath the monumental project.

Matta-Clarks site-specific works engage an . . .

extreme relation to the logic of the monument.

. . .[B]etween a past that continuously underwrites

itself, and a future that cannot be built on such

historical aporias, they radicalize the entropic

monument, render it a non-ument. . . They do

not aspire to the fantasy of historical stability as

conventional monuments do. . . [T]hese works

embrace the impossibility of inhabiting that

moment. Counterintuitively, they do this in the

marking of such a place, only to be removed

and destroyed, acknowledging the historicist

presumptions around which the conventional

monument is established.43

Robert Smithson: entropy, materiality and

equality of all points in the space

If Matta-Clarks work is the exposure of the non-

architectural of architecture, Smithson deals with

the architectural of non-architecture.44 The meta-

phor of a hole is utilised by the latter as well. In his

trip to Passaic (Fig. 6), Smithson sees the landscape

. . .full of holes. . .and those holes in a sense are

the monumental vacancies that define, without

trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of

futures.45 He does not carve holes as Matta-Clark,

but finds them in the industrial infrastructure of

suburban landscape.

In contrast to the idea of a monument presented

above, Smithson sees holes as having monumental

qualities. Rather than representing suburban land-

scape, holes represent its negativity: its temporal

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Figure 6. Robert

Smithson, the

monuments of Passaic

(1967).

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dimension and the continuity of its production. They

disclose the tendency of de-architecturalisa-

tion46landscapes and buildings cannot be

thought without taking into account the phases

before and after of what is called architecture.

Entropy is usually understood as a state of disinte-

gration, and connected with what comes after.

Smithson expanded this notion to the time that pre-

cedes, to the proto-states of architecture:

I became less and less interested in the actual

structure of the building and more interested in

the processes of the building and all the different

preliminary engineering things, like the boring of

holes to take earth samples. . . . So I was inter-

ested in the preliminary aspects of building.47

Proto-architecture, referring to the moment

between the beginning of construction and the

beginning of buildings proper use, is what Smith-

son calls ruins in reverse. In contrast to the ruin as

an abandoned building, Smithson found ruinous

qualities in the construction itself, in the phase

when something is being built (it is in the process

of building) without being built (once it is built, it

can be put to use): Land surveying and preliminary

building, if isolated into discrete stages, may be

viewed as an array of art works that vanish as they

develop.48

Referring to the proto-architecture of the Passaic

landscape, Smithson observes:

that zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in

reverse, that isall the new construction that

would eventually be built. This is the opposite of

the romantic ruin because the buildings dont

fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise

into ruin before they are built.49

Smithson operates not only with temporal negativity

but also that of the spatial. He inverts the logic of

monumental representation by treating all points

in space as if they were equal. The excluded points

are represented as belonging to the whole. Smith-

son does not advocate uncritical celebration of

disorder, chaos and ruins. What he refuses to do,

is to resolve the contradiction between order and

disorder, between ones spatial orientation and

disorientation.50 Between consensual closure of

the space around a monument and the anarchy of

dismembered shreds of space, Smithson suggests

an universal equality of all points of space.

Elaborating the above-mentioned metaphor from

Barthes, Smithson suggests that the landscape could

be less of a readerly and more of a writerly51 object:

with active spectators who decide for themselves

what is important and what is not. If the monument

is understood as a projection of a spatial and social

order, its meaning becomes uncertain as soon as

we take into account that each physical thing in

some way participates in that order. Smithsons

strategy is the inclusion of negativitythe invisible

and unrecognised parts of spaceinto the whole

architectural process. For example, a monument is

not only a statue in the middle of a square, but

also a quarry which provides the necessary material

for its construction; it is not only a factory, but also

all those locations where the raw materials used in

the factory are exploited. If Modern architects

were fascinated by the materiality of the ferro-

concrete, Smithson takes into account the material-

ity of the space as such.

When encountering an important node in space,

Smithson points our attention to all those other

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invisible moments and spaces that constitute its

importance. The awareness of the relationship

between the physical thing in space and moments

in the past or future of this thing leads him to con-

struct an hypothesis of equality52 of all points in

space. He suggests abandoning the logic of important

and unimportant points in space and the spatial

hierarchy of what is worth our attention and what

is not. This is not a new idea of tourism, but rather

that of random walks anywhere: in the mining area,

for example (Fig. 7). In this way, Smithson criticises

the logic of monumental representation.

Smithson develops the notion of representation

in another direction. It is no longer a monument

that represents a city and its inhabitants. It is a non-

site (Fig. 8) that represents the physical point in

space and time. Smithson creates a non-site by con-

tracting the material from a site and removing it into

the enclosed space of a gallery. A non-site abstracts

from the site and at the same time represents it. Or

better, it represents the site in its abstraction.

The Non-Site (and indoor earthwork) is a three

dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it

represents an actual site. . . It is by this dimensional

metaphor that one site can represent another site

which does not resemble it. . . A logical intuition

can develop in an entirely new sense of metaphor

free of natural or realistic expressive content.

Between the actual site. . . and The Non-Site itself

exists a space of metaphoric significance.53

If we understood the monument as a Borgesian

Aleph, a point in space that symbolically contains

all other points and signifies the unity of a city, in

Smithsons work the monument is emptied of any

essence and defined negatively. Ultimately, it

becomes an empty space, a hole that becomes

itself monumentalised in the process of artistic

non-site creation: Installations should empty

rooms, not fill them.54

But still, what is this non-site? Apropos the

Smithsons trip to Passaic and resulting work,

Linder contends that it . . .elaborates upon specific

architectural forms and instances of the new monu-

mentality by fictionalising them. In the case of

Passaic, its infrastructural monuments were made

physical by photographing and writing about

them. . ..55 If a non-site is defined as a contraction

of site, Smithson adds that it is photography that

stands for the most extreme contraction of

matter.56 Hereby, we move on to the path taken

by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: singularity, time and

historicity of anonymous industrial sculptures

With Smithsons non-sites, the photographic work

of Bernd and Hilla Becher shares the method of

abstraction. When they approach (soon to be) aban-

doned industrial architecture, they abstract from the

locality and from the social context of factories. We

are shown neither workers nor the setting of the

factory in the wider environment. The objects are

reduced to pure forms, which are then arranged

into series and grids (Fig. 9):

Through photography, we try to arrange these

shapes and render them comparable. To do so,

the objects must be isolated from their context

and freed from all association.57

But abstraction should not be confused with what

Lefebvre called abstract space.58 The Bechers invent

such presentation of architecture, which does not

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Figure 7. Robert

Smithson at

Gutehoffnungshutte,

Oberhausen, Germany

(1968).

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843

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Figure 8. Robert

Smithson, Non-site,

Oberhausen, Germany

(1964).

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844




Maros Krivy

Figure 9. Bernd and

Hilla Becher, Grid

typology of blast

furnaces, perspectival

view, Europe (courtesy

of Hilla Becher).

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bury the singularity of the object under its particular

qualities. It is the arrangement of industrial objects

according to their basic archetypes that enables

the singularities to stand out (Fig. 10). The differ-

ence emerges here out of repetition.

When precisely edited and rigorously arranged

into grids, we see in these industrial objects some

formal and material surplus that cannot be

explained simply by reference to their function.

This is the negativity of industrial architecture, the

non-functional excess beyond its functionality. No

two industrial objects are actually the same, in

spite of being engineering works of pure functional-

ity. Starting from 1969, the Bechers produced the

term anonymous sculptures for these objects.

Unlike similar approaches used in botany or

zoology, for example, the cumulative effect of the

typological method as it is applied in the Bechers

life-project does not provide greater knowledge

of the processes or history of their subject.

Instead, the use of rhythm and repetition endows

the buildings they photograph with the anonym-

ity or abstract form they seek rather than with

scientific specificity (by divorcing meaning from

original purpose and everyday social function)

and, in turn, allows us to read them ahistorically

and extra-socially and appreciate them as auton-

omous aesthetic objects or sculpture.59

In their own words, the Bechers shoot straight,

directly facing the buildings, because they dont

agree with the depiction of buildings in the 1920s

and 1930s. Things were seen either from above or

below which tended to monumentalize the

object.60 In contrast to industrial images that

monumentalised the future based on engineering

rationality, the Bechers present portraits of objects

in passing, soon-to-be-ruins, objects whose func-

tionality lies in the past (figs 11, 12).

The operation of the Bechers repeats the underlying

principle of Matta-Clarks holes and Smithsons

non-sites. It is the singularity of an architectural

object that is marked in its passing presence, in its

universal entropic condition.

It is the building itself that is taken to be a

message which can be presented but not coded.

The ambition of the works is to capture the pres-

ence of the building, to find strategies to force it

to surface into the field of the work. Yet even as

that presence surfaces, it fills the work with an

extraordinary sense of time-past. Though they

are produced by a physical cause, the trace, the

impression, the clue, are vestiges of that cause

which is itself no longer present in the given

sign. Like traces, the works. . .represent the build-

ing through the paradox of being physically

present but temporally remote.61

To abstract is to see these objects detached from their

original use, as mere things speaking through their

pure materiality. Such abstraction liberates these

objects from the function they played during a

specific period of history. Together with an increased

attention to material, surface and texture, this

abstraction exposes the marks and traces of time

inscribed in these industrial structures. The historicity

has returned with full force. As Rancie`re writes

apropos an author of nineteenth-century realistic

novels (substitute factories for characters):

He displays the fossils and hieroglyphs of history

and civilization. He unfolds the poeticality, the

historicity written on the body of ordinary

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Figure 10. Bernd and

Hilla Becher: cooling

towers, Belgium,

Germany, France,

Netherlands,

Luxembourg (1968

1983) (courtesy of Hilla

Becher).

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things. . . . [T]he characters are no longer intelligi-

ble through their ends. They are intelligible

through the clothes they wear, the stones of

their houses or the wallpaper of their rooms.62

Hence, what the Bechers abstraction aims at is not

ignorance of history but the opposite: its redemp-

tion from the thrall of heritage and technical

history.63

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Hilla Becher, Minehead,

Charleroi, Belgium

(1975) (courtesy of Hilla

Becher).

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848




Maros Krivy


Hilla Becher, Minehead,

Charleroi, Belgium

(1975), detail (courtesy

of Hilla Becher).

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Urban and architectural historians usually refer to

heritage as a fact. For example: The traces of indus-

trialization sometimes disappear swiftly, without

proper research and documentation, thus threaten-

ing the important heritage of the industrial land-

scape that developed over the last two centuries.64

Using such a reified concept, the architectural

object simply is or is not a heritage. The questions

why and how this or that object rises into awareness

as a heritage is never posed. The question of its

historicity, of its passing from functionality to

obsolescence, from the monumental image of

future to the monument of past, is never really asked.

The Bechers refuse the choice between the

Modern movements monumentalisation of the

future and the present interest in the conservation

of industrial structures as heritage. They show us

factories as anonymous sculptures, necessarily con-

taining a degree of non-functional contingency.

But we also come to understand that it is the

same technical rationality that created them,

which is now rendering them obsolete. Each

factory is also a mere thing, beyond any functional

or monumental justification.

Its not a case of photographing everything in the

world, but of proving that there is a form of

architecture that consists in essence of apparatus,

that has nothing to do with design, and nothing

to do with architecture either. They are engineer-

ing constructions with their own aesthetic.65

This brings us again to Matta-Clarks assertion

that there is a form irreducible to Plan and back to

Le Corbusiers seduction by industrial images. In

the course of our trip, the monumentality of

architecture has been reinterpreted through its

negativity: through the presentation of invisible

parts of urban space and through the assertion of

the continuity of architecture as a process instead

of its discontinuity when understood as a set of

glamorous objects.

Conclusion

In this paper I have first explored how modernist

architects interpreted images of industrial buildings

as rational and scientific monuments of the future.

Their totalising vision failed, at the latest, during

the 1960s and was then heavily criticised. Robert

Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown contrasted moder-

nist ducks with decorated sheds in a commercial

strip. But while escaping the total design of the

modernist plan, their theory yielded to the perva-

siveness of the post-modern market logic.

In contrast to both of these positions, the works

of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and the

Bechers explore negativity in architecture. These

artists are interested in the part of architecture and

space that has no part in the existing distribution

of sensible. These works do not simply oppose archi-

tecture with what it is not but this opposition is

presented in order to challenge the very meaning

and content of architecture.

The works of Bernd and Hilla Becher focus on

buildings, the origins of which lie in the idea of

pure functionality, at the moment they are aban-

doned or soon-to-be-abandoned. Employing such

a view, the purely engineering form is perceived as

an anonymous sculpture. Once presented beyond

its exchange- or use-value, we are able to perceive

the essential historicity of industrial buildings.

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In the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, the hole is a

literal metaphor of that part of space that has no

part. If urban holes are intentionally produced in

the process of spatial restructuring under capitalism,

by producing an architectural hole without any par-

ticular purpose the artist reveals the hidden social

forces behind the process of speculative redevelop-

ment and questions its rationality.

Robert Smithsons art represents space as if all the

points are equaltaking photographs of suburban

infrastructure, strolling in an abandoned quarry,

collecting soil sediments. Every object in space can

have an aesthetic affect, rooted in the perception

of its materiality. Smithson questions the existing

distribution of sensible by regarding any-place as if

equal to any other place.

Today, the importance of these works is twofold.

On the one hand, they show the limits of totalising

claims of technical reason in architecture. On the

other hand, they neither propose commercial popu-

lism as an alternative solution, nor they succumb to

the cultural nostalgia for outdated buildings strongly

present in todays attempts to conserve industrial or

vernacular architecture. Instead, they constantly

point our attention to all that is forgotten, excluded

or unacknowledged: to what I have described as

negativity in architecture.

What the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert

Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher have in

common is their exploration of the aesthetic foun-

dations of architecture. They do not propose new

forms of architecture or new modes of architectural

practice. Rather, their works challenge our percep-

tions as to what is architecture and what is not,

ask which phases of the architectural process are

visible and which are not and question what is

monumental and what is ordinary. In this sense,

they can be read as a practical hypothesis of archi-

tectural and spatial equality.

Notes and references1. W. Benjamin, ParisCapital of the Nineteenth

Century,NewLeft Review, 48 (1968), pp. 7788; p. 88.

2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London,

John Rodker, 1927).

3. S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. The Growth

of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1949), p. 277.

4. R. Banham, A Concrete Atlantis. U.S. Industrial Build-

ing and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge,

Mass., The MIT Press, 1986).

5. Erich Mendelsohn, quoted in ibid., p. 6.

6. Walter Gropius, quoted in ibid., p. 9.

7. J.-L. Cohen, Introduction, in, Le Corbusier, Toward an

Architecture (London, Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2008), p. 3;

from which consider also the following quotation: In

one of the most notorious falsifications in the history

of modern architecture, Le Corbusier retouched the

photograph of the silos in Montreal, hiding the dome

of the Bonsecours market., J.-L. Cohen. Interestingly

enough, the accusation of historical falsification is mis-

placed in relation to this architects act, which is led by

the desire for a clear, monumental image.

8. Colin Rowe, quoted in J.-L. Cohen, ibid., p. 58.

9. See R. Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (Oxford, Hill & Wang,

1991). Readerly texts are texts-monuments for

Barthes. Readerly text situates the reader in the

passive role of user or client of ready-made

interpretations. It reduces text to the canon. In con-

trast, a writerly text calls on the reader to produce

the meaning. Writerly text is always produced again

and again in the moment of presence. It cannot be

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stored in the past with a definitive interpretation. It is

probably not necessary to say that readerly/writerly is

not an objective property of the text, but resides in

the relationship between the text and its reader.

10. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Black-

well, 1991), p. 143.

11. A. Riegl, The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character

and Its Origin, in, K. M. Hays, Oppositions Reader (New

York, PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1998), pp. 621653.

12. S. Giedion,Space, TimeandArchitecture,op. cit., p.433.

13. D. Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford, Basil Black-

well, 1982).

14. C. Jencks, Current architecture (London, Academy Edi-

tions, 1982), p. 50.

15. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capi-

talist Development (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT

Press, 1979).

16. R. Venturi, D. Scott-Brown, S. Izenour, Learning from

Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural

Form (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000).

17. Ibid., p. 149.

18. Ibid., p. 135.

19. Ibid., p. 87. The term duck comes from the Las Vegas

stand in the shape of a duck. If we take an example of

a hamburger stand, decorated shed is a primitive struc-

ture with large neon signs announcing hamburger,

while duck is a building which is itself in the form of

a hamburger.

20. Ibid., p. 163.

21. Ibid., p. 118.

22. Ibid., p. 118.

23. Ibid., p. 9.

24. Todays junkspace (R. Koolhaas, Junk Space, in,

R. Koolhaas, Content [Cologne, Taschen, 2004],

pp. 162171) is then a strange merger between

the two positions presented: the Plan promoted by a

sales staff, totally designed mess; heroism of ugly

and ordinary.

25. This is where my objectives differ from those of

Rosalind Krauss in her account of not-architecture:

R. Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, October,

8 (1979), pp. 3044. See more detailed discussion

below.

26. J. Rancie`re, Disagreement (Minneapolis, University of

Minnesota Press, 1999); J. Rancie`re, Politics and

Aesthetics (London, Continuum, 2006); J. Rancie`re,

On the Shores of Politics (London/New York, Verso,

2007); and J. Rancie`re, The Future of the Image

(London/New York, Verso, 2007).

27. J. Rancie`re, Politics and Aesthetics, op. cit., p. 12.

28. J. Rancie`re, Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,

Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008), pp. 233248; p. 238.

29. J. Rancie`re, Disagreement, op. cit., pp. 1112.

30. This is Rancie`res critique of Bourdieu: J. Rancie`re, The

Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual

Emancipation (Stanford, CA, Stanford University

Press, 1991), p. 46.

31. D. Coole, Negativity and Politics (London, Routledge,

2000), p. 231.

32. J.-L. Nancy, Hegel. The Restlessness of the Negative

(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002),

p. 28.

33. R. Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, op. cit.

34. Ibid., p. 37.

35. Ibid., p. 41.

36. LHumanite (November 29th, 1975), quoted in

P. M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed. The Work of

Gordon-Matta Clark (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT

Press, 2001), p. 185, own translation.

37. See P. M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed, op. cit., p. 192

and J. Baudrillard, The Beauborg-Effect: Implosion

and Deterrence, October, 20 (1982), pp. 313; p. 5.

38. J. Baudrillard, The Beauborg-Effect: Implosion and

Deterrence, op. cit., p. 3.

39. Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Liza Bear in 1974;

quoted in S. Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark: Drawing on

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Architecture, Grey Room, 18 (2004), pp. 108131;

p. 115.

40. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit.

41. Gordon Matta-Clark, quoted in J. Attlee, Towards

Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbu-

sier, Tate Research Papers (Spring, 2007), online at

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/

tatepapers/07spring/attlee.htm.

42. R. Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in

America. Part 2, October, 4 (1977), pp. 5867; p. 65.

43. P. M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed, op. cit., p. 55.

44. M. Linder, Sitely Windows: Robert Smithsons

Architectural Criticism, Assemblage, 39 (1999),

pp. 635.

45. R. Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,

New Jersey, in, R. Smithson, Collected Writings

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California

Press, 1996), pp. 6874; p. 72.

46. R. Smithson, Entropy Made Visible. Interview with

Alison Sky, in, R. Smithson, Collected Writings, op.

cit., pp. 301309; p. 304.

47. R. Smithson, Interview with Robert Smithson for the

Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution

(interview by Paul Cummings), in, R. Smithson,

Collected Writings, op. cit., pp. 270296; p. 291.

48. R. Smithson, Towards the Development of an Air

Terminal Site, in, R. Smithson, Collected Writings,

op. cit., pp. 5260; p. 58.

49. R. Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,

New Jersey, op. cit., pp. 6874; p. 72.

50. A. Reynolds, Robert Smithson. Learning from New

Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT

Press, 2007), p. 121.

51. R. Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, op. cit.: see also Note 8 above.

52. In the sense used in the work of Rancie`re: see notes

above for details.

53. R. Smithson, A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites, in,

R. Smithson, Collected Writings, op. cit, p. 364.

54. R. Smithson, What is a Museum? A Dialogue between

Allan Karpow and Robert Smithson, in, ibid.,

pp. 4351; p. 44.

55. M. Linder, Sitely Windows: Robert Smithsons

Architectural Criticism, op. cit., p. 22.

56. M. Linder, ibid., p. 22.

57. Bernd and Hilla Becher, quoted in B. Stimson,

The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla

Becher, Tate Research Papers (Spring, 2004), online

at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tate

papers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm.

58. Compare H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space,

op. cit., pp. 4953.

59. B. Stimson, The Photographic Comportment of Bernd

and Hilla Becher, op. cit.

60. Bernd and Hilla Becher, quoted in B. Stimson, The

Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla

Becher, op. cit.

61. R. Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in

America. Part 2, op. cit., p. 65.

62. J. Rancie`re, The Politics of Literature, SubStance, 103

(2004), pp. 1024; p. 19.

63. Compare following excerpt from the interview with

Bernd and Hilla Becher by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler: In

the 70s, you seem to have been enlisted by the indus-

trial historians. . . . Bernd Becher: They wanted to write

a text, and garnish their text with our photos. Hilla

Becher: They couldnt imagine that photographs

could stand on their own. They wanted to give it a

scientific basis.: U. E. Ziegler, The Bechers Industrial

Lexicon. Interview with Bernd and Hilla Becher, Art

in America, 90 (2002), pp. 92101, 140141 and

143.

64. L. Bergeron, M. T. Maiullari-Pontois, Industry, Architec-

ture, and Engineering: American Ingenuity, 1750

1950 (New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000), p. 217.

65. Bernd Becher, quoted in U. E. Ziegler, The Bechers

Industrial Lexicon, op. cit.

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Documents

Industrial Architecture and Negativity the Aesthetics of Architecture in the Works of Gordon Matta Clark Robert Smithson and Bernd and Hilla Becher