In order to demonstrate that architecture is a poetic discipline as well as an economic, social, and political one, Robert Slutsky explores the relationship of architecture and cubism, with particular reference to the work of Le Corbusier. Robert Slutsky is an artist and a Professor of Fine Arts who has taught at the University of Texas, Cornell, Pratt, Cooper Union, and Penn. He has frequently collaborated with architects, including John Hejduk, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman. With Colin Rowe, he was co-author of the influential essay 'Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal'.NB: Audio and image interference 50-60 mins into lecture.
Lecture Transcription:
Robert Slutsky: I’m going to think out loud tonight, and I’m going to hope that somehow you are going to indulge me in this kind of activity because this thoughts that I have now are relatively recent, that is to say that I’ve come about realizing them within the last year or so, and I’d like to share them with you as best as I can. What I’d like to do tonight is I’m going to give you a kind of verbal libretto, and after I finish with that I will show slides, and those are very eloquent, I think, I hope. They will demonstrate to some degree the thesis that I’m proposing. And the thesis is this: Corbusier and Juan Gris have certain very common attitudes about the Cubist aesthetic, but that Corbusier, being an architect and dealing with architecture, in a sense precludes any obvious use of figuration—the way the Cubists use figuration in painting, as a very necessary ingredient of a dialectic between figuration and geometry. Corbusier, I think, transcended the limitation of not being able to use figuration in the obvious sense by alluding and by metaphorically alluding, in proposing that his buildings be seen in a kind of reference to a Cubist still life condition. I’ll make myself clear as I go on. One of the things I’ll demonstrate is that Corbusier was very conscious at a very early age of lifting the eye towards the centre of the format, whatever that might be. In his drawings I will provide some evidence of that; his early sketches, which get carried through to the aesthetic of his buildings itself. Is the consciousness of compression, of hermetic conditions, self-referential conditions in architecture, which is very close to still life painting. I’ll also try to demonstrate that still life painting as such, probably gave birth to Cubism, although most historians like to think of Cézanne, a great landscape painter, as the originator of the Cubist aesthetic. in fact, his landscapes read in still life manner, which is to say that the consciousness of abstraction, of ordinal conditions, of simplification, tend towards the still life rather than the landscape. In one Gris’s case, if I can just draw something on the board, he accomplished a very modernist synthesis of depth and flatness in his paintings. As he developed the still life to the point where the last 5 or 7 years of his work the clear demonstration of a certain kind of double meaning to the diagonal, near symmetry but not quite. He tipped the normal, the vanishing point of the Renaissance, the ideal one point perspective to a ninety degree turn of the canvas, which this occurs in most of his paintings, accomplishing a very marvelous commentary on Renaissance space and Cubist flat space. I’m going to also read the last paragraph of the first transparency article, because that kicks off the subject of water. One is the aspect of compression and frontality, which incidentally has something to do with water. If you think about what compression implies. The other is the slow liquification of space from what I would consider the ethereal consomme soup of the Renaissance to the thick pea soup of Cubism. Not just a pea soup that’s clear, but more like a combination with minestrone soup, because the meanings come pop up to the surface and disappear below the surface. It’s a very heavy colloid of culture. I think both Gris et Le Corbusier had two quite evident things: the frontality, the tipping forward, and the careful attention to the centre. (…)
In Corbusier’s case, he does something with the centre: he traces facades as, literally, faces. I think his feeling about facade and face, you can do a whole thing on that, the double meaning of a sign in terms of architectural language implies so much, is so rich in meaning. I’d like to suggest that the facade has certain very strong implications in Corbusier’s architecture. He took the classical Renaissance ‘A-B-A’ on the vertical and rotated it 90 degrees, lifted it off the ground, and proceeded to play with the centre in an absolutely fascinating way in terms of its implications. In fact, there are buildings in which either a cut is made, or buildings where slices are made, and I think it has to do with an attitude about feet, eye, brain. That is to say, that Le Corbusier, while acknowledging the ground plane of activity the ground plane of activity, at the same time is trying to make the vision of his structure aspirational: as you are walking, and approaching his building, you are in fact experiencing another take on what the facade is dictating to you. In that sense you can play with the word ‘elevation’ and with what that implies in terms of reality, ethics, etc.
The last issue I’m going to touch on is the variations on the theme of water. Water plays a very important part in both artists. In Corbusier’s case, I believe he went through three different attitudes about water, one being the reflective, contemplative situation. The second, a hydrodynamic—that doesn’t sound good—hydrothermal attitude, the active. And the third is a play on the word water that has to do with fishing and being the sponge. He absorbed all the elements of what he thought to be poignant in his culture. Unconsciously he had an eye to his environment which recorded all the events around him and utilized those elements, those which he considered significant for architectural expression.
I’m going to look at the slides almost with a fresh eye, nonotes, and we’ll just conjecture together. Hopefully, by the end of this evening I would like to have transmitted to you that architecture is indeed in the realm of poetry, a very significant poetry, that of course deals with society, and with economics, and politics and all that, but I’m not going to talk about that tonight, I simply want to talk about the passion of the vision.
I will read the very last paragraph of ‘Transparency I’ which made me feel the notion of liquidity of Cubic space. We tried to put it into metaphor somehow and we compared the Bauhaus to League of Nation's project of Le Corbusier.
“But we look in vain for ‘loosening up’ in the Palace of the League of Nations. It shows no evidence, nor any desire of distinction. Le Corbusier's planes are like knives for the apportionate slicing of space. If we could attribute to space the qualities of water, then his building is like a dam by means of which space is contained, embanked, tunneled, sluiced, and finally spilled into the informal gardens alongside the lake. By contrast, the Bauhaus, insulated in a sea of amorphic outline, is like a reef gently washed by a placid tide.”
That triggered in me this particular interest in the nature of water in Le Corbusier’s architecture, which I always felt it was present. We can go through his writings and he published a lot, and he loved pictures. He was in a funny way a Sigfried Giedion, he like to make this kind of pictorial analogies; he loved metaphor. On this page, which I believe comes from ‘Radiant City’, and it shows a dam, the Normandy, and the lock of Panama. One has to do with the storage, and the channeling and the making of turbulence over the spillway, this elusive aspect, the conversion of space into energy. The second, the ship, is also a container, it’s a membrane that floats. The lock of Panama is a very conscious attempt at absolutely ruining nature by the cut, the slice and the absolute control of that water, so ships can go up and down and make passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The ship is the metaphor for architecture. I’ve always felt that the Swiss Pavillion in Paris was a very very significant building, because it established for the very first time clearly, Corb’s thesis of lifting the building out of the ground, and obliterating the basement. The formal condition of the second storey porch coming down into the rear garden, taken from underneath that porch produces to me an incredible condition of perfection (with the pavement of the ground). This photograph of la Roche always reminded me of Juan Gris’ Canicule of where the outside and the inside interchange in a very flat, and still life way, as a flow between outside and in. As a footnote, this fantastic androgynus guitar, which speaks of both sexes, of Mallarmé’s interpretation of the pictorial image of the guitar which is in itself both the container of female and male.
There are meanings in art that one has to discover, but not with any kind of iconography, but you interpret it, you have your own discoveries based on the evidence. But what I’m also bringing into play is the outdoor and the indoor, a real interchange of exterior and interior, a ying-yang notion; geometry keeps flipping all the time, is energetic. Of course there are golden sections and so on, ok, but we are not going to look at the field of space and the messages that come through very clearly. I see relationships sometimes—maybe they might not exist!—but I maintain they do, and I try to explain why I think so. For me this [slide shows Cité de Refuge, Le Corbusier] is a marvelous condition of the A-B-A’ where the entry blocks are a still life set up in a pictorial way, with the middle plane of the picture and then the reference to the site. (...)
[Photograph of the Parthenon] The space becomes so shaped that it intrudes on your vision and is in some kind of cohesion with the shapes in front, and there is an interchangeability, and there is a poetic dialogue between infinity and fineness. Probably [prehistoric drawing of a bison] this is the first still life, don’t forget they didn’t lock the bison into the cave, they had it abstracted and gave meaning to it. It’s quite obvious what the meaning is here, you have the identification periphery telling you what kind of piece of meat it is, but the centre, the meaning is the hunt, he food, the huge amount of meat. And the face in front is not a bison’s face, it might be the god of hunting. Taking it into the interior of the cave and re-establishing meaning by abstraction and living with it. This is already a still life. [Two slides: African anthropomorphic sculpture and Renaissance window] I think there is a deep level of commonality here. Quite obvious that the window on the right is saying something about head, body and legs. The figure on the left (African sculpture) is a Corb’s building: pilotis, the face-facade and the rooftop. (...) The complete mastery of painting can only happen in the studio. We have a Goya, three slices of salmon. Here you see the beginnings of abstraction, the beginnings of a commentary on it, that the still life itself can speak of many things. [shows a Picasso and a Cezanne] (...) [a Leger painting] Leger’s making of the urban scape into still life. I think it’s a mistake to talk about urban landscape, we should talk about urban still life. (...) [Goes on commenting on a selection of slides, most of the stress is made on their graphic features and qualities].