Pro-feigning the Profane
“In the expression homo sacer, the adjective seems to indicate an individual who, having been excluded from the community, can be killed with impunity but cannot be sacrificed to the gods.” Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” Log vol. 10.
There is nothing Architecture[1] fears more than itself. “Junkspace” is Koolhaas’s diatribe-disquisition on just this paranoia. Koolhaas feels that Architecture ended in the 20th century with the proliferation of air conditioning, automated stairs and mass-producible pastiche. Architects feel endangered by a global warming of tastelessness, of tackiness, of stucco-ness that threatens to overtake us by dint of its juggernaut size, momentum and ease. Ways of construction, economies of scale production, increasingly oppressive resource scarcity are the carbon omissions of the great vulgarity that is gradually eroding Architecture into architecture. The period Koolhaas associates with the birth of the air conditioning unit, the mall and the Levittown—or the first signs of Architecture’s rigor mortis—is the time American narratives hearken back to as the birth of mass (white) prosperity. This is the era when images projected through a glass fronted box could be consumed for the first time, not because of some great refinements of Filo T. Farnsworth’s first successful television, but because the glass fronted box could be consumed on a mass scale affordably for the first time. AC, escalators, TVs, automobiles, suburbs were the hammer and sickle of an American communism that secretly vied against the Russian communism not out of a fear of invasion, nuclear fallout, or totalitarianism, but out of a mass capitalist loyalty to our corporation’s way of doing business. Russian and Chinese communism celebrated communal parsimony, our communism worshipped communal profligacy. We won; Russia and China are still undergoing a corporate merger into our business-of-life platform. Our profligate communism is now more predicated upon China than Russian communism ever was. Communism in its political form is nothing more than simulacrum, than stucco. Which brings me back to architecture.
We read Vitruvius a couple millennia after his expiration, not because he was a particularly good architect, or a particularly elegant writer, or a particularly influential mind in his own time. Anyone would acknowledge that he was none of these. What Vitruvius reminds us, however, is that we are still the right hand professional to Caesars. We are cosmopolites; we are atelier-dilettantes. We understand how to make other peoples hands dirty and how to keep ours clean. We have special instruments no one else understands, we have special skills no one else adequately appreciates, we are artists, historians and professionals whereas other professionals are simply professional tradesmen. In the battles for client commissions and building inspector endorsements, we find security in obscurity, arming our justifications with the inscrutable escutcheons of “Art” and “subjectivity.” This story has not changed millennia later. And yet, we don’t seem to feed POW’s to lions in public arenas (secret ones, maybe), we don’t ape Roman notions of hygiene, we don’t patronize many ancient roman restaurants, and we don’t wear togas unless inordinate quantities of alcohol and dope are handy to distract us. Why ape Vitruvius? Because he canonizes our elite-hood. Today more than ever, Architecture schools pop The Ten Books on Architecture into reading lists to mollify the raging heartburn our discipline suffers after having supped on the deep-fried-fast-food-feast of the mass diet. Plop plop fizz fizz what a relief it is. Because the truth is we have grown fat on this diet. We wag our admonishing right index finger at the stuccoed-air conditioned box while we reach out with our left hand to accept the greasy wax paper one. Once in our lives we eat at Alinea, but we talk about it at every critique, every debate, and every explication of doctrine in order to simulate the fiction that we only eat and make the molecular-gastronomical. Yet, Architecture has never thrived more off the junk-economical. For this reason, we can’t look at ourselves naked in the mirror.
A rapid survey of Architecture’s mythology reads not unlike that of the Greek Pantheon. Before us there were only deities, demi-deities and heroes. It is no coincidence that the first 4000 years of Architecture’s mythology only recounts the houses we made for the supra-humans: ziggurats, temples, pyramids, palaces, churches, etc. Vernacular architecture is reserved for the archaeologist only; indeed, after four years of Architectural education, the only lecture I have ever attended that analyzes “vernacular” architecture, and does so without irony, has been in the archaeology department at the University of Chicago. We have only ever believed that a building is only Architecture if Apollo or Google Earth can see it without squinting too hard. Readers may argue, “whereas monumental Architecture was built for permanence, the plebeian home was constructed of such ethereal stuff that nothing could persist.” I have heard the argument before. It is the choir-song-soundtrack to Architecture’s fire and brimstone sermon admonishing practice for the pedestrian lest our fruits wither and ferment before they can be bottled in the cellar for our discipline’s perpetuity.
The truth is, look outside, drive down the highway, google earth the outskirts of every major American city, and you will see architecture, “vernacular” architecture, emanating in all directions. It is huge, it is expansive, it is cheap, it is transient, it is redundant, it is most often ugly, but it is there and it is here in super-abundance. So, if monuments are Architecture’s Titans and Giants of yore, why is it that still to this day we only ever discuss Titanic and Gigantic design when chances are, on a typical day, you will see no sign of such design anywhere. Again, it is Architecture’s enduring faith in its own religion, its alabaster and ebony simulacrum. “Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony” (Baudrillard 37). The suburb, the big-box are our agony; the Bilbao effect, CCTV, and the Phaeno are our opiate ecstasy, our blinded-Oedipus-like-apotheosis, our fables. The monuments of yore, the star-chitects of now, their tomes, their treatises, their lore, their glossy monographs, the Kostofs, Vitruvius’s, Lootsmas, Jencks and Albertis who have narrated our rituals, are our thanatology, or rather, our mythology to reconcile Architecture’s thanatology.
…..Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no stucco….
In his exhaustive investigation of the Architecture and geometries of the Laurentian Library in “Underfoot and Between Boards at the Laurentian Library,” Ben Nicholson explains that the library’s books were arranged according to Plato’s epistemological mapping of the different branches of knowledge. As you enter the library, all of the sciences are to the right, including physics, biology, medicine, history and politics, and are arranged according to the scale of the respective study’s object. To the left, the more metaphysical sciences are similarly arranged according to scale, with the first of three groups consisting of poetry and literature, often in the vulgar tongue, and the last consisting of religion, in Latin. The profane and the sacred. The second group, the one between poetry and religion, as Nicholson points out, is the most fascinating because it delimits the sacred from the profane, the gods from the humans, the celestial from the terrestrial. This is where you would find Vitruvius and Pythagoras, in the space of architecture and geometry, the two disciplines that translate the heavens into discrete, intelligible and palpable forms—in other words, the processes of profanation. When all languages were one, we attempted to use architecture to bring us to the heavens. But with the smiting of the tower of Babel, gravity compressed our ambitions, and out of the addled and incoherent babble of a thousand incommensurable tongues, we found two pre-Babelian dialects, architecture and geometry, that would, instead, bring the heavens to us. Trebatius, the Roman jurist, wrote “in the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men” (Agamben, 23). Thus it is that Architects and geometers mediate between the profane and the sacred, the Caesar and the slave, the CEO and the migrant worker. And so Kostof, the (slightly drier) J.R.R. Tolkein of Architectural mythology, recognizes when he tells of Daedalus’s labyrinth and his bestiality aid for Pasiphae, or of Senmut, Queen Hatshepsut’s architect, who boasted “I had access to all the writings of the prophets; there was nothing which I did know of that which had happened since the beginning” (Kostof, 5). We are not laborers and we are not rulers, we know our wax wings will melt should our hubris take us too high, and yet we won’t take the ferry to Sicily, we don’t actually make the building, we don’t actually commission it, but we make smaller versions that allow us to look down upon mankind in simulation of the gods’ perspective. Just ask yourself how many contemporary urban planning schemes, roof designs and circulation patterns privilege a heavenly view ever seen only by its modelers (architects), financers and the gods. We profane.
Then again, maybe we don’t profane enough. As Giorgio Agamben’s theories on the sacred and profane in “In Praise of Profanation” suggests, our problem may be that we make a religion out of feigning profaning. Let us first clarify what consecration and profanation mean in architectural terms. Agamben explains that “if ‘to consecrate’ was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men” (Agamben, 23). Architecture, as told in its mythology, translates base practices like construction, materiality, labor management, resource husbandry into symbolic, monumental form that houses—physically and metaphysically—the gods it honors. The architect consecrates by fashioning vulgar matter into a panegyric monument that reifies the distinction between men and gods. “Religio,” Agamben explains, “is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct” (Agamben, 24). Don’t forget, we are the intermediaries between gods and men, meaning we are lesser than gods but superior to men, we fly over the water but below the clouds on our self-made wings. On the other hand, the bastard architecture of suburbs, big boxes, and the huddled masses that inhabit them, have contaminated what for every other century prior to the 20th had been reserved for the sacred, namely Architecture. Babel has toppled, and now we are bringing the gods to us at an unprecedented scale by actually returning architecture “to the use of men.” This is precisely what 9 out of 10 architects are working on and it is precisely what 0 out of 10 forms of architectural media documents. Why? Because “to profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use” (Agamben, 24). In a religion presided over by Kostof, Vitruvius, Eisenman, et al., the elision of distinction constitutes not just profanity but heresy. Again, Agamben can help us here.
We must distinguish between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another….Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized (Agamben, 26)
Victor Hugo was wrong when he had his archdeacon point to his mass-produced Bible and then at a Cathedral, exclaiming “this will kill that. The book will kill the edifice.” That never died, it merely secularized into other forms such as government buildings, palaces, ramparts, institutes, corporation headquarters, mansions etc. For all of Eisenman’s efforts to provoke an “autonomous discourse of Architecture” in his early house designs, born out of the ambition to architectonically manifest a Derridean a-signifying revolution only ever waged in semiotic terms, his practice and his Caesar-like control of Architectural theory did nothing but “carry [power] back to a sacred model.” When Venturi raises a column off the ground, or when Johnson turns a chippendale clock into a tower, or when Greg Lynn, Ali Rahim, Alonso-Diaz and the parametric vanguard claim scripting is their apostrophe to the phenomenological paradise of the virtual, they are invariably rendering any revolutionary impulse entirely obscure and inscrutable, thereby doing nothing more than re-entrenching Architecture’s lofty dimension between heaven and earth, and doing so on the Powerful’s dime. Their inclusion in the latest chapter of every Architectural encyclopedia that begins in Ziggurats, Pyramids, Vitruvius and all sacred spaces should come as no surprise.
Where do we go? How can we begin to look in the mirror and enjoy what we see? What fitness regimen must we adopt to look beyond our unhealthy body image and shed away the adipose of mass production? In a word: play.
Every great Architectural movement begins with play but ends in rarefied pastiche. The Beaux Arts pulled apart the temple walls and played with their assemblage; the Bauhaus took the planarity of mechanized production and played with composition; Venturi played with the iconic; SITE played with the big-box; Koolhaas played with the polemical and the quotidian; Gehry played with the industrial; Lynn played with the digital. Who today is playING with the OSB, the chain link, the carpet, the stucco, or in a word, the unit, the off-the-shelf, off-the-boat from China unit that is everywhere but in Architecture? Before Bilbao, there was Gehry’s private residence in Venice, distinguishable by its playful manipulation of chain link and corrugated metal. Before CCTV, Koolhaas actually made OSB sexy. Before the National Portrait Gallery, Venturi played with the composition of pre-fab windows and quotidian building elements in his mother’s house. “Just as the religio that is played with but no longer observed opens the gate to use, so the powers of economics, law, and politics, deactivated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness” (Agamben 25). The key to productive profanation is playing without secularizing. Venturi and Warhol’s gestalts originated with play but then secularized into Pop—they returned the profane to the sacred. The same can be said for Gehry and Koolhaas.
We must play with what is sacrosanct in Architecture not within Architecture (that’s just secular), but within architecture—bringing the sacred to the profane. Now that’s profoundly profane. That is why my thesis begins in playing with the brick.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. “In Praise of Profanation,” from Log. Anyone Corporation,
New York. Vol.10 Summer/Fall 2007, pgs. 23-32.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Semiotext[e]: USA. 1983.
Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Penguin Press: New York. 2004
Kostof, Spiro.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” 2002.
Nicholson, Ben. “Underfoot and Between Boards in the Laurentian Library.”
Thinking the Unthinkable House (CD Rom). 1997
[1] Throughout this essay, I will use the terms Architecture and architecture to discriminate between the elect form of practice responsible for high theory and monumentality and the more common yet bastardized practices responsible for suburbs and big-boxes.
