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Rich with thoughtful deliberation oneight practices that have shaped late-Modern and contemporary speculativearchitecture, Rafael Moneo’s TheoreticalAnxieties and Design Strategies in theWork of Eight Contemporary Architectsprovides a valuable anthology in thesheer number and significance of theworks it documents. But of course, thebook’s merit as a primer is not what isat stake when one such as RafaelMoneo addresses the likes of Kool-haas, Eisenman, Herzog & de Meu-ron, Venturi and Scott Brown, Gehry,Siza, Stirling, and Rossi, particularlywhen that address is christened Theoretical Anxiety.

Moneo is the epitome in architec-ture of the figure crucial to any praxisin which speculation and experimenta-tion are essential, the forthright, learnedpractitioner who speaks with convic-tion for the persistent worth of estab-lished values and methods. Alert to thenecessity of change but wary of it, sucha voice holds speculation accountableto a sober measure of its consequences,damping novelty’s penchant to intoxi-cate and quicken into exoticism.

The major attraction of the bookfor me derives from the prospects ofsuch a figure undertaking to confrontthe considered work on theoreticalgrounds. Inevitably, therefore, the dis-cussion must turn to the question oftheory; though I hold no interestwhatsoever in wrangling over themeaning of the word theory. Moreimportant to ask is what the disciplinecan and should expect from workwhose speculations and experimentspretend to the theoretical.

In his preface, Moneo accounts forhis title by distinguishing a systematictheory from critique motivated by dis-

quiet, terming the latter a theoreticalanxiety and thus situating it in thedomain of the polemic, the refutationor the reflection. He offers the opin-ion that insofar as the practices heconsiders have produced written tracts,these operate more in the latter cate-gory than the former, and whether theyhave tracts or not, the work of eachpractice is best understood in theseterms. That Venturi and Koolhaas bothstyled their first books as manifestossupports the author’s point.

Though I concur with his portrayalof such theorizing, I take issue withthe inference that the results of critiquefall short of theory. While this viewmay hold for the hard sciences andclassical models of theory in the artsand humanities, these latter two haveembraced critique and its discursiverelatives as a recognized and in somecases preferred approach to theorizing.To be sure, such methods no longerengender systematic theories like thoseof Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand orstructuralist semiotics, but today thevery comprehensiveness of such systemsis itself a source of deep suspicion.

Theorizing by critique can do muchmore than express disquiet and cata-logue oppositional tactics. At its best,sustained critique unveils somethinglarger, slowly, through the accumulatedweight of its discontents and alternativeproposals, something that, even if it ismore provisional, rises to the order oftheory if not to its traditional form.

Moneo approaches these practicesnot as a scholar or critic, but as a peer.Of the eight, seven join the author asPritzker laureates, and at this momentthe single omission casts doubt less onthe one passed over than on the credi-bility of the prize itself. The impri-

matur of the author’s position is notincidental; he relies on it to underwritethe sufficiency of his opinion and toabsolve himself of any responsibilityto engage the considerable commen-tary that these practices have accumu-lated, though they have enjoyeddisproportionate attention from thefield’s best minds for over a genera-tion. Moneo enlists very little otherthan each architect’s own projects,buildings and writings.

Whether strident in his rebuke orlavish in his praise, the author neverstrays from disciplinary high ground,but his neglect of the literature is attimes unfortunate, if for no other rea-son than accuracy. In one instance, forexample, he credits Eisenman with theMOMA Deconstructivist Architectureexhibition in its entirety—its concep-tion, the selection of the exhibitedarchitects, the title—as if MarkWigley and Philip Johnson were merepawns.1 The puppet-master caricatureof Eisenman is perhaps forgivable asone of architecture’s favorite urbanmyths. On the other hand, in thesepages it belongs to a more insidiousproblem, a tacit perpetuation of thefountainhead trope reflected in thededication of each chapter to adigested history of a practice in whichthe biographical development of thelead architect largely shapes theaccount of the work.2

Influential frontline practices suchas these warrant a more discerningexegesis than can be achieved by thegenius narrative or the tradition of artas embodied biography. To his credit,Moneo rejects the vogue that theoret-ical architecture refers only to thework of architects who write theories;instead he locates the decisive conse-

Moneo’s Anxiety Rafael Moneo’s Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work

of Eight Contemporary Architects, by JEFFREY K I P N I S

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quence of an architecture in its buildings’ effects. But the book’smonographic organization all butforces the author to measure theseeffects piecemeal, severally, and thusultimately against the presumptionthat his own values are absolute.

That reservation notwithstanding,my favorite chapters in the book are onGehry and on Siza, the architect clos-est to the author’s own disposition.Moneo’s affection for Siza resonates in the commentary, which passes tothe buildings through the writings of Fernando Pessoa, the singular Por-tuguese poet. In nuanced recitations

of the Beires House and the house forSiza’s brother, the author, “overcome[by] the impression of tangibility,”extols the architect’s courage to find aplace for sentiment in his work. It isnot that the Siza makes no missteps,but that in the author’s eyes his courseis so true that a reader might forgetthe theme of theoretical anxietyentirely. In Gehry’s architecture,Moneo sees an obsessive quest forimmediacy, and he emphasizes thephenomenological tilt that results, apoint that will bear further discussion.

The readings of Stirling and Rossiweave together fact, interpretation,

and lore in the way only reminiscencecan, but, though poignant, these read-ings add little to standard views. Thechapter on Herzog & de Meuronfavors the work up to and includingthe Dominus Winery. Moneo revels inthe originality of the handling ofmaterials under the restraint of thebox, chafing as the practice straystoward skin effects and other frivolousexcursions. Above all, he is drawn toan intimation of what he terms the“archaic” in Herzog & de Meuron:“Let us say that the prize awaitingthose who take such intricate paths isa reencounter with a reality thatexpresses the desire for permanencepresent in much of primitive architec-ture; the logic of construction is soevident that any temptation to let aes-thetic parameters come into play is for-gotten” (366). While it is not difficultto detect those aspects of Herzog &de Meuron’s work that lend themselvesto such elegant meditation, insofar asit sidesteps a great deal of invention inthe work, it is one that reveals moreabout the author than it does aboutthe practice’s theoretical achievements.

Addressing those five practices, theauthor takes care to distinguish hissummary of the architect’s theoreticalobjectives from his own observationsand opinions. But when he turns toVenturi, Eisenman, and Koolhaas, thatcare dissolves, sometimes reaching apoint where it becomes difficult todiscern whether he simply misappre-hends the work or refuses on principleto accept its fundamental conjecture.He writes of the columns in Eisen-man’s Wexner Center, for example,“Some suspended prisms never reachthe ground. A superficial reading ofthe construction might well havetaken them as columns” (181). Now,Eisenman’s entire critique starts fromthe premise that architecture as a cul-tural discourse is never founded onstructure but on the significations ofstructure. For Eisenman, the materialor load-bearing differences betweencolumn and piloti are of little import;

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on the other hand, the idea that a col-umn signifies the metaphysical hierar-chy that relates sky to ground whilethe piloti signifies the erasure of thathierarchy is all-important. If an archi-tectural element must bear a load tobe a column a priori, the discussion isover before it begins.

The Wexner Center column-signsjoin the other speculative designdevices in the building as part andparcel of the architect’s contentionthat the building conducts a radicalrethinking of the relationshipsbetween contemporary architectureand contemporary art, its institutions,audiences, and contexts. Certainly, atthe core of much contemporary art isa skeptical critique of the so-calledself-evidence of what stands as thesignified and what stands as the signi-fier, that very self-evidence that per-mits Moneo to distinguish prism fromcolumn without hesitation. Of course,in this case as elsewhere, I do notmean to suggest that just because anarchitecture attempted an experiment,the experiment succeeded. There aresubstantial grounds to debate bothEisenman’s premise and the effective-ness of the design strategies he used atthe Wexner Center to pursue it. Buteven if the author doubts the merit ofthe premise, should he not at leastacknowledge it?

Similar difficulties arise in thechapter on Venturi and reach a dis-comforting pitch with Koolhaas. If wecollate a few dispersed observations,the issue becomes clearer. On Venturi’sVanna Venturi House: “Deliberatelyambiguous, the house ignores both itssocial and physical environment. Justlook at the site plan. The front facademakes no reference to context whatso-ever”(65). On Peter Eisenman’s HouseII: “The result is pure form that ignoresall the circumstances surrounding it . . . , no reference to the topography,to building techniques or to tough cli-mate conditions that would in theorycall for a foundation” (160). On RemKoolhaas’ Villa dall’Ava: “Koolhaas

ignores context, with no regard forthe bourgeois surroundings. Thehouse is a whole reflection on subur-ban life” (350). . . . It is a housedesigned to be consumed visually, tospeak of how its owner wishes to beperceived” (353).

In his reading of the Vanna VenturiHouse, Moneo draws attention to thestrategic use of the generic double-square organization and the floor plansto frame the “autonomy and independ-ence of individual elements” whilebinding them together. Thus does hecall attention to the parallel workdone by an ingenious plan and themore famous front facade. The plancoordinates its disparate elements asthe facade does its similarly incongru-ous collection of stuff. That somethingis askew in the author’s reading, how-ever, first becomes apparent when headdresses the absence of the expectedon-axis front entry and the ninety-degree turn after one passes under thecornice that the actual placement ofthe front door requires. He writes,

“The porch, key to an understandingof the house’s public facade, does notframe a central entrance. Venturireckons that the door, as in oldfortifications, must be handled only bythe owner” (63). A bizarre rationale, itseems, for a formal device whosethwarting of expectations sets up theplan-effects the author has alreadyenumerated. The explanation becomesall the more curious when one laterreads the analysis of a similar formaleffect by Siza a decade later. In theBeires House, Moneo describes theeccentric diagonal entry as necessaryto establish the effect of autonomy inthe house that comes to a climax inthe living room and its relationship tothe garden.

The author concludes his discussionof the Vanna Venturi House with theassertion, quoted above, of a patentlyobvious lapse: “Just look at the siteplan. . . .” Rather than debate hisassessment of Venturi’s siting, let usstipulate its accuracy so to ask why anapproach to site detached from a tra-

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ditional appreciation of the amenitiesof the setting might not be just as nec-essary to the architectural conjectureas the other design devices, the genericdouble square and floor plans? As theauthor has argued, everything about thehouse is devoted to the appreciation ofisolated episodes that lack any organicintimacy. Not only does Venturi’sdesign make of the house a commen-tary on the political and social contextof the suburb, but might it not alsopropose a formal distinction betweena suburban house and those domesticarchitectural typologies long perfectedto the setting such as the garden folly,the villa, or the vacation home?

Might not a similar line of thoughtapply, too, to Eisenman’s House II ? Inthe chapter on Herzog & de Meuron,the author asserts that the key elementof the bourgeois house is the room.Why, then, does the replacement ofrooms in House II with a syntactic fieldof forms not constitute a critique ofthe bourgeois? Not until Koolhaas’Villa dall’Ava does the author allow forthe possibility that a calculated disre-gard of setting, locale, or other con-ventions might be part of a largerarchitectural proposition. That such aproposition, even where admitted,might have an affirmative ambition isnot considered. Though he notes thatthe house creates an atmosphere inwhich modernity is based on “toler-ance and nonexclusivity,” in the endauthor pronounces dall’Ava to be LeCorbusier’s Savoye “manipulated in apersonal and malevolent way” merelyto serve base vanities of the client.

As a fellow critic of architecture, Idispute his interpretation. But as areader of the book, I simply ask again:If the author seeks to engage thesearchitectures in terms of their theoret-ical anxieties, how can sympathy forthe site, or any established value forthat matter, be immune to questioning?While the eight practices bicker amongthemselves about the values to chal-lenge and those to maintain, each isincluded in the book ostensibly because

it sets out to conduct such a challenge. Not only is Moneo entitled to firm

convictions, they are expected of himin such a critical exercise—not asdicta, however, but as positions open todebate. Throughout his career, Moneohas consistently championed certainvalues: that the primary responsibilityof the architect qua architect is toresist the banalization of building cul-ture; that, while it is necessary to bevigilante against simulacra, clichés,and platitudes, the history of architec-ture nevertheless provides the bestresource from which to mount thatresistance; that the ultimate encom-passment of architectural knowledge is the building and, therefore, the justmeasure of architectural achievementis found in a building’s qualities; andfinally, that architecture finds its cultural apotheosis when it serves notmerely a constituency or a public but a community, understood both insocial and contextual terms. As vener-able as these principles may be, theyare each confronted several times over with astounding variety andinvention by these practices. In thatlight, the author’s pervasive comme ilfaut response, particularly to Venturi, Eisenman, and Koolhaas, is disappointing.

Moneo’s skilled, discerning eyerarely misses a deviation from a pre-vailing norm. But when the deviationreaches a certain limit, as rarely doeshis criticism allow that a changing cir-cumstance in a broader disciplinary orcultural context might conceivably vin-dicate it. Though the three architectsprovoke the reaction at its extreme, itis not confined to them. Recognizingthe influence of Warhol on Herzog &de Meuron’s experiments with skinprinting, he nevertheless dismissesthat body of work. Of the Library atEberswalde he writes, “Despite the rad-icality, the underlying structure of thebuilding is conventional. I hesitate toapprove of an architecture that is onlyin control of the skin” (399). Mightnot Warhol, whose work above all

took advantage of a conventionalunderlying structure to achieve aninestimable force of cultural argu-ment, have augured the possibilitythat a building could achieve similarcultural force with just its skin, anexperiment whose hypothesis maywell have required a conventionalunderlying structure in the remainderof the building?

By the time Moneo discusses aspecific building or project, his evalua-tions retreat to predictable terms. Forexample, in his introductory pages hegoes to some length to discuss thedesign strategies proposed by Venturi’sComplexity and Contradiction and, as hisinterpretation of the work proceeds,he recognizes in general the commit-ment of the practice to synthesis thosestrategies with the symbol-orientedpopulism expressed in Learning fromLas Vegas. Thus does he set out theterms of Venturi and Scott Brown’stheoretical anxiety. But when he comesto the Sainsbury Wing in London,regarded as the quintessential test ofthat anxiety, i.e., of the ability of thepractice’s experimental design tech-niques to materialize that populism inan institutional, architectural, urban,and political context inherently resist-ant to it, that test barely colors thediscussion. His exhaustive analysis is abrilliant lesson in formal analysis, butnot a single detail of it is brought tobear on the larger question. Amongother critics, a lively debate surroundsthe controversial third-floor plan,where the transition between the orig-inal Wilkins building and the newwing occurs. Some see the linear arrayof the galleries, entered from the oldwing incongruously and ignobly alonga haphazard diagonal cut, as an idealway architecturally to chip away at themajestic crust accrued by the collec-tion in Wilkins’s ceremonial plans, agentle iconoclasm capped by the drollplacement of the great Cima deConegliano painting as the climax ofthe entry’s dead end. Others see it as atrite slap in the face of a venerated

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collection made all the more regret-table by the pressing of a masterpieceinto the service of a bad joke. Bothviews, however, grasp what is at stake.Though Moneo’s is an extraordinarilykeen analysis of the formal effects ofthe plan, all he sees in it is an obsti-nate interest in introducing contradic-tions for the sake of the exercise.

To go so far as to so interpret thedeviation would still fall short of thefull potential of a criticism that com-pared and evaluated the variety ofresponses by different practices tochanging circumstances. One cannothelp but notice, for example, therecurring themes of autonomy andisolation identified by the author insuburban houses across all eight prac-tices over more than forty years. Towhat force are these projects respond-ing, and toward what end is theresponse directed—an alienation tobe forestalled or a new way of being inthe world? Strictly in terms of designstrategy, one does not fail to noticethroughout the book various debatesamong the practices about plan, sec-tion, materiality, and context. Moneodoes little to tease out the discussionthe works have with one another andwith others about such fundamentalissues as issues.3 Occasionally Moneocontrasts work in passing, but withoutelaboration. He mentions, for exam-ple, a provocative relationshipbetween Gehry and Koolhaas: “foramong the eight taken up in this book,only Koolhaas and Gehry consider

that program lies at the origins ofarchitecture” (324), opposing Gehry’streatment of program as a given con-straint to Koolhaas’ view of program as“more diffuse and much less directlyrelated to the architecture that is to bebuilt” (324). Yet nowhere does the dis-tinction guide the analyses of specificworks by either architect in such away that would indicate how the par-ticulars of their design strategies contest program.

To follow further the question ofthe respective treatment of programto see where it leads, consider theGehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao vis-à-visKoolhaas’ proposal for the BibliothèqueNationale competition. Moneo’s appre-ciation of Bilbao unfolds its architect’suse of layered gestures and scale shifts,symbolic allusion, material effects, anda cunning urbanism to revitalize thepossibility of the monumental justwhen some in the field had begun toargue for an end to monumentality assuch. By the time we read that thebuilding’s “continuous changes ofscale, leaps, breaks, interruptions, spans,etc. bombard our senses and transformour visit into a chain of surprises thatleave no time for reflection” (305), wehave gained insights about the possibil-ity of a new monumentality. Those soinclined, meanwhile, are better preparedto mount a discriminating interrogation

of the building, for it is reasonable toask whether immersion in architec-tural sensation is an adept surroundfor art.

Gehry’s theoretical anxiety concernsa vanishing immediacy and authentic-ity of experience. He sees in most con-ventional architecture what WilliamH. Gass calls a courteous kitsch, ariskless use of familiar forms that atbest reminds us of but does not pro-duce a breathtaking urban vista or theedgy pleasures of the sublime. Muchas the ultimate task of the writer, thecomposer, or the filmmaker whohopes to arouse basic emotions is toshed the medium’s accumulated clichésof those emotions, so too should thatbe the first task of the architect.

That is why Gehry’s architectureadheres so closely to the program as agiven and why his plans are so tradi-tional. Not mere expediency, the narra-tive backbone of a familiar, uncontestedfunctional program is necessary tosecure Gehry’s architecture in the hereand now. The sequenced perspectiveplan is exquisitely tailored to the goalsof the architecture; perfected since theBaroque, that planning strategy pro-vides an effective instrument withwhich to unfold individual architec-tural experience in time and space. Asyou approach from any direction in thecity, the building performs a dazzling

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fanfare, transforming from flower tosail to mountain-scape with almostevery step. You enter . . . only to land,disappointed, in a mean foyer. A sharpturn, a short narrowing walk, one lasttwist, and suddenly the hysteria of thegreat hall’s open section drowns youin the sublime. What staging of thesublime could be more cinematic,more contemporary? And what dis-pute with Koolhaas could be morerancorous?

On the OMA Bibliothèque Nationalecompetition project, Moneo musterslittle more than admiration of the

“extraordinarily expressive” drawingsand models, and the “plastic mastery”evidenced in the facade, with its use oftranslucency, its “note of color,” and the“uncommon dexterity” of the figureshe uses to “liven up” its four planes. Afeeble appreciation at best for a signalproject that reverberates in an extraor-dinary range of speculative work tothis day.4 But then, Koolhaas is alto-gether the architect whose theoreticalimport Moneo most fails to grasp.

Moneo does ascribe to Koolhaasan important innovation: the free sec-tion. At first the provenance seems

capricious, given the spate of section-driven projects that proliferated in the’80s, coalescing into the box-in-boxinvestigations that continue todevelop. Yet there is merit to theauthor’s attribution, I think. Although,oddly, Moneo ignores the Miesianvector in OMA’s work, he is keenlyattentive to its Corbusian trajectory.Much as the free-plan in Corb’s worksimply cannot be equated to a genericopen plan, neither can OMA’s free-section be equated to a generic excessof volume enveloping formal activityin the section; moreover, it is the dis-tinction between the two in each casethat transforms the former (open plan,open section) from an elemental designdevice into a specific theoretical designstrategy (free-plan, free-section.)

Only when an open platform worksin concert with ribbon windows, a roof-top garden, and piloti does it becomethe free-plan. Together, they consum-mate the effect that, in theoreticalterms, is the goal of Le Corbusier’sdesign strategy as a whole: to trans-form the land from ground into anequi-potential datum, one among oth-ers. That effect critiques the discipline’shistory of complicity in the metaphysicsof land’s groundedness with all thatthat entails, from holy land to fatherlandto my land, and, more importantly,broaches an architectural realignment.

Corb’s use of the open platform tocreate free-plan is utterly differentfrom Mies van der Rohe’s use of theopen platform. Both remove the plat-form from the ground, but the dis-tance of the remove, coordinated withthe other building elements devices, iscrucial. To free the ground as datum,Le Corbusier removes the platform alarge distance. Thus must he alwayscloak the door, which works againstthe architecture by reestablishing thepriority of the ground. In Mies’sarchitecture, the overt use of entry-way, stairs, and door, in concert withthe comparatively small distance theplatform is lifted off the ground,transforms it into a theatrical stage.

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But then, Mies is less interested inreconstituting a political ground thanin creating a retreat from it. Similarly,the specificity of OMA’s free-sectioncan only be distinguished from otheropen-section design strategies in itscoordination with plan, building form,and other architectural devices.

No practice has made more cun-ning use of the differences betweenCorb’s free-plan and Mies’s stage-planthan OMA, which has synthesized thetwo into an architecture that, in itscritique of the two, posits a funda-mental shift in the liberal project fromthe Modernist pursuit of democracy asa collective ideal (in the future) to acontemporary desire to instantiateindividual freedom (in the present). Inthat revision, the metropolis is recon-ceived not as artifice or traditional citybut as an ur-zone uniquely capable ofstaging being as emancipation, thedelirium of New York. His architectureinfuses the political dimension of LeCorbusier’s free-plan with the per-formance qualities of the Mies’s stage-plan. The free-section, then, is thenecessary invention; a recasting of themetropolis’s vertical infrastructureinto a building device to achieve theunregulated anonymities—and thusstage the unfettered behaviors—thatare not possible in free-plan. Free-section is at best indifferent to thesublime, to awe-inspiring vistas andpanoptic perspectives; if it has an opti-cal character at all, it would be that ofinexorable voyeurism.

Most of all, free-section cannot bereduced to a solid-void relationship; itcan be an open section as in Zentrumfür Kunst und Medientechnologie Karls-ruhe (ZKM) or the Seattle PublicLibrary, or a solid, as in the Bibliothèque.Like free-plan, it is rather a set ofcharacteristic effects achieved by aclose coordination of sectional effectswith a revision of other devices of abuilding, such as the elevator—recallKoolhaas’s analysis of the DowntownAthletic Club, in which he narrates the

violence visited by that mechanicalvulgarity upon the genteel entry ballet,once choreographed so elegantly byplan, section, and staircase. For morethan two decades, mechanical circula-tion has played a pivotal role inOMA’s experiments.5 But among themore contentious of these revisions isOMA’s treatment of plan as diagram.

“May 13. We begin to the think theplans. There is nothing to think.”(design diary of the BibliothèqueNationale competition, SMLXL)6

Plan-as-diagram, in brief, is a designstrategy that uses the plan (in concertwith other devices) to detach the sub-ject in a building from the regime ofimmediate experience, with its empha-sis on satisfied expectations and phe-nomenological, haptic, aesthetic, andsymbolic pleasures, in order to placethem elsewhere as subjects of a differ-ent spatial regime, one with otherpleasures, other expectations, otherpolitics. Where “elsewhere” could orshould be is a matter of discussion; itmay be in the intellect (Eisenman) orin the metropolis (Koolhaas) or in theclouds (Prix) but in any case, plan-as-diagram can help get there.

A map offers a useful analogy.Driving through the streets, you areimmersed in immediate experiences andexpectations until you turn your atten-tion to a map. At that point you areremoved to elsewhere, to an abstractspace of information. In an Eisenmanbuilding such as the Wexner Center,the plan-as-diagram works to transportyou to a space of conceptual abstrac-tion and to keep you there, even whenyou look back out the window.

OMA’s use of plan-as-diagramworks more like a subway map, anuninflected instrument to get youfrom one activity to another. Moreabstracted than a street map, a subwaymap is pure diagram; it works on thebasis of relations, conveying no actualinformation about distance, route, or

location in the geosection under-ground. Moreover, a subway map dia-grams the blunt quotidian life of thecontemporary metropolis. Accordingto the premise of the plan-as-diagram,for the Parisian, the New Yorker, theLondoner, or the Tokyoite, the day-to-day drag and thrall of the city is nota matter of strolling sights, views, vis-tas, and boulevards, as it is for Gehry,but traversing a diagram, droppinginto a hole, moving to another hole,then popping back out again. And thehole need not be a subway entrance;the contemporary urbanite moves inthat space while driving, even whilewalking, as every New Yorker willreadily attest who has bumped into anoblivious tourist gawking on the side-walks of 5th Avenue. Thus in order toproduce their intended effects in abuilding, i.e., to transport one fromcomfort and accommodation to met-ropolitan intensity, the plan-as-dia-gram and free-section must togethererase the given institutional programand its accreted architectural tropes.

The Bibliothèque Nationale projectis a tour de force of free-section andplan-as-diagram knit together by theirinseparable companion, the elevator,in which program is completely con-cealed as massive poché, and thatpoché in turn structures the free-sec-tion. The abstract figures and translu-cency of the facades that Moneoadmires distance the building from itssurrounds and detach it from the city.Arriving by car, subway, or foot—thedifferences do not matter—visitorspour into an enormous glass-walledplaza, a horizontal cut separating bot-tom floors from the great mass hoveringabove. From there, elevators shuttlethrough the solid mass of books andservices to be off-loaded somewhere, inone alien, cavernous void or another.From agoraphobia to claustrophobia,without respite, one could never knowwhere one was in the building. Tosome, it would be perverse, dehuman-izing, unbearable. To others however,

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such as those who grow vexed themoment they set foot in a pastoral set-ting, it would materialize the nascent,immanent pleasures of the metropolis,materialize, that is, what Koolhaasposits as a new and authentic mode ofbeing in the world.

Despite these long digressions onBilbao and the Bibliothèque, the issuehere is not at all to hold Moneo’s bookhostage to a reading of but two build-ings, but to trace their respective anxi-eties and the resulting contest that lurksbeneath the author’s casual remark,“for among the eight taken up in thisbook, only Koolhaas and Gehry con-sider that program lies at the originsof architecture.” The two employopposite uses of program because thespeculative goal of their architecturesare opposite. In my opinion, to theextent that projects and buildings areever theoretical at all, then they willnever differ merely about program orplan or section.

For all that I admire in the book,its failure to rise to the promise of itstitle must give pause, particularlybecause it is not a matter of Moneo’slack of skill or intelligence, but of hiswill. Permit me, then to conclude bynoticing one last feature of the book.Each chapter, without exception, tellsa story of an architectural practice thateventually loses its way, including thatof the luminary Siza. That narrativearc suggests to me a kinship betweenRafael Moneo and Martin Heidegger.I do not say that Moneo is a Heideg-gerian; he mentions the philosopherin the book only once in passing andwith short shrift. Nevertheless, bothhold that authenticity and meaning inlife flow from groundedness, which inturn flows from place. And both despairof the capacity if not the inevitability ofsophistication, artifice, and technologyto set us adrift. Perhaps, in that sense,the book was never about the theoret-ical anxieties of its subject architects,but about the anxieties of the authoras an architect searching for authen-ticity in a world that feels to him more

interested in novelty. In his GropiusLecture at Harvard in 1990, Moneosaid, “It is not possible today to putforward a single definition of architec-ture. Today’s understanding of theconcept of architecture . . . includeswhat architecture was before, butembraces also many other marginaland not-so-marginal attempts to reactarchitecturally to different circum-stances.”7 After reading the book, Ibegan to feel that, although the author may believe that statementintellectually, he does not believe it emotionally.

NOTES

1. From Theoretical Anxiety . . . : “the success ofdeconstructionist literary criticism in the UnitedStates made him [Eisenman] consider coining a new‘ism’ and agglutinating an entire architecturalmovement around himself. Bear in mind that theterm ‘deconstructivism’ was associated with archi-tecture some time later when Eisenman became thepatron of a new tendency by bringing togetherarchitects as disparate as Gehry, Koolhaas, Hadid,Tschumi, and himself in a 1988 exhibition in NewYork’s Museum of Modern Art” (171). BesidesJohnson and Wigley, also effaced are Joseph Giovannini, who actually coined the term deconstruc-tivism and first suggested the exhibition, and theother two exhibited practices, Coop Himmelblauand Studio Daniel Libeskind.2. This quarrel with the fountainhead trope as itoperates in the book should not be confused withits more familiar role in a welling ressentiment inarchitecture, the petty malice that masquerades asmoral repugnance toward fame. Ressentimentnames the corruption of authentic morality bypetty negativity such as anger, rage, rancor, spite,Schadenfreude, hatred, malice, jealousy, envy, or thedesire for revenge. First analyzed by Nietzsche inthe Genealogy of Morals, its insidious operation as asocial and political affect are elaborated in MaxScheler’s classic 1915 Ressentiment, Lewis B. Coser,William W. Holdheim trans., introduction byManfred S. Frings (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994).

Another, and perhaps the greater disserviceperpetrated by the fountainhead trope is theimpression it leaves of creativity as sui generis at theexpense of the discipline as an active discourse.Master practices don’t exist in isolation; they drawupon the achievements of colleagues. Moneo nar-rates the genealogy and patrimony of these archi-tects with pleasure but neglects the key influencesof contemporaries. Many examples are possible,but one seems to me all but unforgivable: tobroach Koolhaas’s attitude toward program with-out mentioning Cedric Price’s work on eventstructures or Bernard Tschumi’s influential writ-ings on program, including his theories of cross-programming. Surely when the author writes apassage that entertains “cross-breeding” as a possi-ble name for Koolhaas’ ideas, he must cast at leasta thought to Tschumi, whose only presence in the

book is parenthetically as the architect who wonthe La Villette competition “with a project notunlike Koolhaas’s.” 3. Moneo does offer scattershot comparisons. Inone inspired paragraph, he outlines divergent atti-tudes toward models (in the sense of paradigms) insix of the practices: “Curiously, Siza’s workemerges full of references for modern architecture,but without models. Rossi’s concept of type andmodel pertain to the Platonic ambit of a dreamworld. Eisenman’s models give form to a phantomwhere the basic syntactic structure prevails. Stir-ling was more preoccupied with style—ultimatelywith history—than with models. Gehry tries to doaway with them altogether. So surely Koolhaas isthe only one of the architects in this book whoknows . . . his models [modern cities] and like arealist painter, tries to make his buildings as closeto them as possible” (313). In those ninety-ninewords lay an outline for rethinking the clichédconcept of precedent, which today serves as littlemore than an excuse for knee-jerk repetition ofprogram-based building patterns. Here at least, areader can use the author’s sketch as a basis for amore sustained inquiry.4. In addition to its invaluable contribution hereindiscussed, the Bibliothèque proposal developed amajor variant of the box-in-box scheme, reani-mated research into the then-dormant vierendeel(launching engineer Cecil Balmond to fame), andset the stage for both the blob and surface archi-tectural researches that followed soon after: (“May24. Imagine a room where floor becomes wallbecomes ceiling becomes all and floor again.”S,M,L,XL, 634. Few lines of design research activetoday do not trace to the project. It should beremembered, however, that the OMA proposal wasitself clearly a development of the captivatingNouvel-Stark proposal for the Tokyo Opera Housecompetition of 1986, which introduced, amongother things, the free-section variant of the box inbox. Major international competitions of theperiod that followed evidenced the extraordinaryimpact of the Stark-Nouvel project, which in addition to the Bibliothèque can be seen, for exam-ple, in Isozazki’s winning entry for the Nara Convention Center.5. It would not be much of an exaggeration to saythat almost every OMA project uses a mechanicaldevice as a critique. Besides the Zeebrugge Seater-minal, ZKM, and the Bibliothèque, The Tatemuseum proposal, the Bordeaux House and theSeattle Public Library immediately come to mind. Ifwe extend the argument from circulation tomechanical devices in general, one would have toadd the mechanical wall that made the seminalCardiff Opera House proposal possible. Even thesliding door of Villa dall’Ava plays an importantrole in its architectural speculation. 6. Office for Metropolitan Architecture, RemKoolhaas, and Bruce Mau, Small, Medium, Large,Extra-Large, Jennifer Sigler, ed.; photography byHans Werlemann (New York: Monacelli Press,1998), 642.7. Reflecting on Two Concert Halls: Gehry vs. Venturi(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University GraduateSchool of Design, 1990), quoted at<http://www.pritzkerprize.com/rmbio.html>.