Mimi Yiu

English Department
Cornell University
msy4@cornell.edu

 

Review of: Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

 

Structured as two free-ranging dialogues, The Singular Objects of Architecture brings into conversation two of the most thought-provoking cultural innovators of our time: Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel. It is perhaps ironic that Baudrillard, the poststructuralist French theorist best known for such works as Simulacra and Simulation and The Vital Illusion, ponders the very material discipline of architecture, and with a practicing architect to boot. Of course, Baudrillard finds in Nouvel a kindred spirit fascinated by the conceptual intersections of transparency, illusion, and ideology. The creator of such landmark buildings as the Arab World Institute and the Cartier Foundation in Paris, not to mention the Hotel Broadway in New York, Nouvel has received the Grand Prix d’Architecture, among numerous international honors, and was the subject of an acclaimed exhibition at the Centre Pompidou last year. His works are marked by a preoccupation with surfaces, textures, falls of light, and the visual framing of spaces. Both Baudrillard and Nouvel are very much concerned with the status of cultural artifacts as products of contemporary state power and, especially in these dialogues, with the notion of singularity in objects.

 

The extended discussions found in this book are the result of a series of dialogues between architects and philosophers held at a multi-segment conference entitled “Urban Passages,” which took place in Paris throughout 1997 and 1998. The Singular Objects of Architecture was first published in France in 2000; the present volume, a translation by Robert Bononno, includes a thoughtful introduction by K. Michael Hays, the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture at Harvard and editor of Architecture Theory Since 1968. The format that Baudrillard and Nouvel have chosen for their collaboration seems intellectually productive and felicitous, especially considering the fate of a similar joint venture undertaken by Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman just a few years ago. Invited by architect Bernard Tschumi to contribute one allotted section to the Parc Villette project in Paris, Derrida and Eisenman met, corresponded, and participated in forums over several years, but never actually contributed anything tangible–architecturally speaking–to the Parisian site. Not surprisingly, considering the theoretical nature of both men’s work, the only result of their collaboration is a book entitled Chora L Works, which documents their futile endeavors at planning a built space that would express their mutual commitment to conceptual experimentation. Eventually, as letters published within the book attest, the whole project self-destructed as personality conflicts arose and their partnership broke up. Baudrillard and Nouvel, wisely, do not even attempt to engage the technical and material side of architecture, opting rather to remain in the purely discursive realm amenable to both thinkers and their disciplines.

 

Ever the provocateur, Baudrillard claims right off the bat that he has “never been interested in architecture” (4); instead, he cites a fascination with the singularity of built objects and the world they translate as his primary point of entry into architecture. It seems curiously appropriate, then, that Baudrillard cites here the World Trade Center as a question mark in interpretation. Does architecture merely translate its contemporary societal context, or does architecture constitute an anticipatory illusion, a sort of self-fulfilling cultural myth? It is telling that, for Baudrillard, the pre-9/11 towers evoke “two perforated bands” whose architectural truth lies in its context of a “society already experiencing hyperrealism” (4). Of course, this prescient apprehension of the twin towers cannot help but resonate with those of us who first and foremost associate the buildings with those hypperreal television and Internet images of planes puncturing the structures, images that have indelibly inscribed themselves upon the national consciousness. Nouvel’s response–that architecture can unexpectedly convey “things we cannot control, things that are fatal” (6)–seems to echo his interlocutor’s concern with the signifying capabilities of built space and the sense that architecture remains a communal enterprise, reaching far beyond the designs of a single mastermind.

 

Indeed, what the World Trade Center tragedy reminds us, inevitably, is that buildings have ideological weight, that buildings can be singular and yet doubled, that architecture cannot be divorced from the world of images. Our relationship with architecture, as Nouvel points out, is strongly correlated with our visual impressions and memories of places, which in turn lead to a narrativizing of spatial dimensions. Drawing an analogy between an architect and a film director, Nouvel stresses how the built environment relies heavily upon sequence, narrative, and memory; a peer of Paul Virilio’s from the 1960s, Nouvel is likewise very much interested in the temporal and visual restructuring that has occurred with the rise of postmodernism. In his own work, Nouvel pursues what he calls a “critical architecture” that deflects the hegemonic, panoptic gaze and radically destabilizes space. By playing with the conventions of sightlines and visibility, these subversive structures attempt to erase themselves from the legibility and surveillance of dominant cultural forces. Often, Nouvel’s buildings suspend the viewer between multiple modes of visuality, forming nodes of instability within a given urban system.

 

Indeed, Nouvel’s architectural philosophy shares two key terms with Baudrillard’s cultural theory lexicon: transparency and illusion. Opposed to the transparency demanded by a hegemonic regime, Nouvel attempts to construct “a space that works as the mental extension of sight,” performing a type of vanishing act that leaves the viewer wondering where the object went (6). Similarly, Baudrillard’s theorizing in such works as The Transparency of Evil ponders ways to subvert the perfect transparency of both individual and system, an ideal that he considers complicit with the powers-that-be in rendering every object legible and classifiable. Reworking Virilio’s notion of the aesthetic of disappearance, in which real objects are gradually replaced by virtual counterparts and individuals evanesce into the network, Baudrillard proposes a type of disappearance that is more a metamorphosis, a “chain of interlinked forms . . . where everything implies its own disappearance” (29). This theoretical notion can be carried out in the practice of architecture, Nouvel implies, through a play of visual accessibility that foregrounds for the viewer the problematics of transparency. In essence, the buildings’ selective opacity and surprising views constitute a refusal to yield to the ideal standard of universal legibility and coherence.

 

Nouvel’s own architecture is greatly concerned with what he terms “dematerialization”–a reconfiguration of material substance so as to confound traditional notions of the object and its mapping in Cartesian space. Defying the monumental impulse even in his large-scale projects, Nouvel aspires to the legerdemain of making the building vanish, or at least making the vanishing point of linear perspective vanish. As Nouvel explains it, the goal is to render ambiguous the boundary between materiality and non-materiality, between image and reality (62). That is, spaces no longer try to make themselves accessible and thus knowable to the controlling eye, but rather fragment into local sites and illusory dimensions, conflating real and virtual in unanticipated ways. Indeed, dematerialization in this sense often implies a type of demobilization that breaks up regimented formations, both physical and mental. At the same time, however, both he and Baudrillard agree that complicity with the dominant regime is unavoidable, and even essential. After all, an architect must work in tandem with the client, the end-user, and the already-existing social and geographical spaces. Deconstructing the opposition between transparency and a hidden complicity, Nouvel observes that complicity is “the only guarantee that we’ll be able to push the boundaries” (77).

 

Probing the limits of architecture, Nouvel and Baudrillard discuss such landmark buildings as the Beaubourg in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. For Baudrillard, Frank Gehry’s curvaceously deconstructed Bilbao museum exemplifies the disappearing chain mentioned earlier, where one object merges and transforms into another. Indeed, architectural elements are juxtaposed, recombined, and reinvented in novel ways, so that the finished product transcends the sum of its parts. For Baudrillard, such seemingly serendipitous permutations, which have their beginning in computer manipulations of graphic ideas, constitute the ultimate expression of readymade architecture. As Nouvel adds, the computer revolution allows architects to open “a direct passage from desire to the built reality” (49). Whether these technological shortcuts to creative and indeed psychic fulfillment are seen as positive or negative developments remains unclear from Nouvel and Baudrillard’s dialogues. At times, Baudrillard seems to exult in the proliferating potentialities made possible by virtuality and decentered, destabilized spaces; at other times, we see evidence of the nostalgia that crops up again and again in his other writings on the age of simulacra, as he laments the advent of cloned structures that lack “quality or a sense of nobility” (50). Nouvel, on the other hand, embraces a more practical approach to the technological innovations that have changed the practice of architecture and, indeed, repositioned the architect’s role within the design process. As the architect of a museum space–the Cartier Foundation in Paris–whose glass walls problematize if not downright prohibit the installation of art, Nouvel can never be accused of succumbing to bland corporate utilitarianism, but he definitely comes across here as the more down-to-earth of the two speakers. Although Nouvel is deeply invested in the philosophical implications of dematerialization and the disappearance of the modern object, he nevertheless shows a workmanlike sensibility for what can be built and never strays too far in his thinking from the realm of functional architecture. For Baudrillard, however, architecture remains primarily a vehicle for talking about spatial politics and the postmodern dissolution of stable, material objects. Like a counterweight, then, Nouvel’s responsibility towards the pragmatics of the architecture profession checks Baudrillard’s more effusive and hyperbolic theoretical pronouncements, creating a balanced textual architectonic that is both dynamic and productive.

 

What is sometimes frustrating for the reader of The Singular Objects of Architecture, however, is the choppy editing of these extended conversations. Although section headings indicate the general gist of the discussion at any given moment, the two speakers occasionally seem to refer to ideas or points raised in dialogue that has not been transcribed and published. These gaps could be considered a postmodern deconstruction of the text, a performative gesture towards the indecipherability and rupture of any speech act, a reminder of the ephemerality of enunciation and the impossibility of total transcription. It is on these grounds that Derrida and Eisenman’s Chora L Works sets out to confound readers’ expectations playfully, by breaking down the structure of the book itself: sections refuse to follow in set order, the table of contents lies buried in the middle of the text, and holes are punched through the entire book so as to obscure or render forever missing specific words. By thus putting into praxis the theory of chora as spatial absence elaborated in the book’s essays, these disjunctures in the material text serve to bind form and content even closer, indeed making the book into an architectural artifact that substitutes for the unrealized Parisian project. Yet in Baudrillard and Nouvel’s work, the textual non-sequiturs seem like just so much sloppy proofreading, especially since the section headings and straightforward layout clearly valorize cohesion and accessibility. Although, in the acknowledgments, the authors claim to have reworked the original dialogues towards a resolution that is also a “radical and necessary incompletion” (xv), the desultory feel of the book appears to have less to do with theoretical provocation and more to do with infelicitous editing decisions. At times, I kept flipping back in the book to see whether some prior referent could be found, but to no avail: while an oppressive drive towards transparency ought not to be the goal, these small slippages in the chain of reasoning are nonetheless puzzling, forcing the reader to a painful awareness of being on the outside. The book is only 80 pages in length, leaving ample space for publishing the dialogues in full or having the authors write more extensive elaborations on a few topics. As it is, the inconsistencies in the text create a sense of unexplained selectivity and complicity–in the negative sense–on the authors’ part.

 

Despite these occasional overtones of collusion, there are enough moments of genuine collaboration to make the book a joyful and worthwhile read. Baudrillard and Nouvel are complementary thinkers who push each other to new considerations of ideas that both have elaborated in their respective fields. Indeed, although I would gladly dispense with section headings in exchange for the messiness of actual unedited dialogue, these headers do make apparent recurring themes in the two interviews. While the brevity of the sections, which run from one to two pages on average, disallows in-depth meditation on any particular subject, there are flashes of brilliance that gather in momentum as Baudrillard and Nouvel revisit, albeit always from a slightly different angle, concepts of transparency, virtuality, radicality, and, above all, singularity. Paradoxically, singularity in this conversation diverges into a multiplicity of views on the same object, an uncanny thread that keeps emerging persistently in different guises. In the acknowledgments, the two authors explain that the dialogues have been edited to focus on the notion of singularity. Long an important idea in Baudrillard’s other writings, singularity here is applied to buildings that, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, appear almost to float in a vacuum, isolating themselves from the surrounding architectural matrix. Indeed, singular buildings are a challenge to their environment and prevalent ways of thinking; they anticipate future developments rather than merely translate current needs and desires.

 

By blocking the transparent ideal prescribed by the prevailing cultural regime, these buildings question the norms that force architecture to assimilate and facilitate. Thus disappearing into illegibility even as they frame the buildings around them, singular buildings test the limits of what architecture can signify within its sociocultural context. As Michael Hays puts it in the book’s foreword, the singular object is a “way of access . . . opening onto the determining conditions of its cultural surround” (xii). Because singular buildings both stand out and efface themselves, they slip into the singular vanishing point of the extant ideological and spatial grid, denying perspective its hegemonic power over the interpellated viewer. Thus suspending the order imposed upon the mental and geographical topography, singular structures force us to pose the difficult questions of “what if,” “what now,” and “what next.” Indeed, as Nouvel perceptively points out: “Architecture is always a response to a question that wasn’t asked” (79).

Work Cited

 

• Kipnis, Jeffrey, and Thomas Leeser. Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. New York: Monacelli, 1997.