Tectonics and the Grammar of Program
If we were to come across a mound in the woods, six feet long by three feet wide, with the soil piled up in a pyramid, a somber mood would come over us and a voice inside us would say, “There is someone buried here.” That is architecture.[1]
In Loos’s image, what makes the mound architecture is its indivisible coherence, presence and immanence, manifested in silent evocations of life, death, truth, and mystery. The mound encountered by chance, in the woods, is meaningful in its setting. Indeed, its setting is inseparable from its meaning. Here, architecture presents as a singular phenomenon. But is it really so? The mound, the path, the woods, the proportions, geometry, the material: all are directly experienced, but are also comprehended poetically as a symbolically charged, emotionally, sensually embodied and intellectual complex grasped through recollection, associative references, grammar, and syntax—the language of architecture.
For architecture to be meaningful, it must fulfill its double function as symbolic language and as a built phenomenon.
Architecture’s ontological and epistemological entanglement with its spatial, constructional, and historical contingencies and references is reflected in the topic at hand—the grammatical relations between tectonics and program. One cannot isolate the former from the latter, yet doing so may be a necessary prelude to gaining a better sense of their intertwinement or, metaphorically speaking, their special way of “constructing” architecture.
Classical Architecture, arguably, the most grammatical of all architectural movements, traces the relation between tectonics, program, and construction back to its roots embedded in the logic of construction. The refinements of base, capitol, entablature, proportions, and so on all echo origins in building, structure, gravity, durability, and the behavior of physical material. The Greek temple’s transition from wood tectonics to stone structures emancipated construction from the intrinsic joinery of wood assemblies transforming the wooden joists, pegs, and wedges of wooden antecedents into skeuomorphs of triglyphs, mutules, guttae, and metopes of the Doric frieze. The very act of freeing the tectonics of wood construction from their utility, while continuing to deploy their appearances transformed construction into language and associated tectonics with the construction of both meaning and building.
The architect is tied to the building process, not by direct action but at a distance that simultaneously liberates and blinds. Drawings and other representations, while free of the restraints of gravity and structure, delete the propelling realities of physical material that underpin tectonics. Since projection drawing was adopted by the profession, architects have navigated the schism between representation and building through a gradual process of codifying the relation between building and drawing: essentially, building technique remained tacitly understood and controlled by the builder while the architect had authority over the form, geometry, and visual language of building—that is, the grammar of tectonics. In addition, the architect took instrumental control of spatial organization—that is, program—empowered by the plan drawing. The precarity of the situation was managed through stability: as long as architects worked somewhat within the norms of architecture and the builder built according to well-understood techniques, a certainty of outcome would be ensured. It was only natural, then, for post-renaissance construction to remain fundamentally static while architecture’s progress was limited to formal, stylistic, and decorative developments, focused on what was available for the architect to articulate through drawing—namely, the grammar of program and building tectonics.
Tectonics in Architecture
By the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the proliferation of formal rules, stylistic manipulations, ornamentation, and semantics, reduced to visual representations, had undermined architecture’s cultural authority, which had been rooted in historical continuity, structural and constructional integrity, and an inherent stability that bestowed it timelessness. A return to origins, to roots, was the cure, marking for many twentieth-century historians the emergence of modern architecture.
European origin myths of architecture, from Marc-Antoine Laugier to Godfried Semper to Adolf Loos, shared a belief that architecture arose from a natural order. Laugier, in his Essai sur l’architecture,[2] saw structure as the origin of architecture and called for the return to authentic building through recovering the essential elements of architecture: columns, beams, and pediments, reuniting formal elements with their original structural purpose. His allegorical “primitive hut” (as the famous frontispiece represented ) underscored the origins of architecture as given by nature; tree trunks (columns), forks, and branches (beams ) providing for the most primitive of needs—shelter. Unironically Laugier saw nature bequeathing to primitive humans the means (tectonics) to protect themselves (program) from nature, no craft or skills required.
In his book The Four Elements of Architecture,[3] Gottfried Semper makes an anthropological case for building origins arising from human activity rather than nature’s divine gifts. Unlike Laugier’s idea of the primitive hut as a tectonic re-imagining of nature, Semper’s “Caribbean Hut” proposed that the social action (program) of gathering around a fire gave rise to the primary, essential element of architecture: the hearth. The other three elements follow logically; the hearth is set on a raised plinth or earthwork to protect it from the ground and water; a woven enclosure is hung around the gathering space/hearth to protect it from wind and animals; and finally, a roof is draped to shelter the fire from weather. While Laugier’s primitive hut manifests as an image, wholly formed, Semper’s is all process—the drawings of the Caribbean Hut are far more technical than allegorical. Here the subject of tectonics appears as a response to the program, a need addressed through available craft skills centered on material processes. The fire/hearth is the purview of those skilled in ceramics and metallurgy;, the textile walls made by weavers; the evolving roof advancing both the skills of the weaver and carpenter; and the earthwork, masons.
While both Laugier and Semper argued the authenticity of architecture is rooted in its origins as structure and construction, Laugier’s primitive hut is an abstraction, a representation, an archetype presumably having informed the design of the Greek temple. Semper’s hut is all fabrication, craft, and material joinery. The etymology of “tectonics” follows similarly: the terms “context,” “pretext,” “subtle,” and “text” all allude to joining, weaving together in the abstract, dissociated from physical material. Tectonics is also rooted in *teks, meaning “to weave” as well as “to fabricate,” especially with an ax and “to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls.” Here the physical and material conditions of weaving are at the forefront. In other etymologies, the craft and maker are the origin: Sanskrit taksati meaning “he fashions,” “constructs,” and taksan, “carpenter”; Avestan taša meaning “ax, hatchet,” and thwaxš-, “be busy”; Old Persian taxš- meaning “be active”; Greek tekton, “carpenter” and tekhnē, “art”; Old Church Slavonic tesla meaning “ax, hatchet”; Lithuanian tašau, tašyti, meaning “to carve.”[4]
As for the architect, as Laugier makes clear in his frontispiece, she points to the primitive hut but is not the maker; her role is as guide pointing us to true building. The architect in Semper’s treatise is nowhere to be found, but is nevertheless etymologically nearby: the arche-tekton, the “chief carpenter,” fully versed in the art and craft of making. Only the arche-tekton has the broad capability and responsibility of synthesizing the work of multiple trades that building entails. In both instances, the architect is still at a remove from the work, no longer homo faber but one who slowly acquires instruments, not to build with but to direct, control, script, and envision the outcome of the building process.
The “crisis” of architecture that led to the emergence of the modern movement was a crisis of meaning. By the early twentieth century the now sclerotic formal language of classical architecture was rendered irrelevant by Europe’s societal upheavals and the loss of the mytho-poetic dimension of architecture as a means of contemplating the greater cosmic order. The symbolic language of tectonics, reduced to empty rhetoric, a “facade” of tired tropes detached from advances in building technology, had become complicit in the unmooring of the language of architecture from the physical making of building, once again bringing into question the “what” of architecture and its sources of authenticity.
Program in Architecture
The idea of program in Laugier’s primitive hut is similar to what was coined as “affordances” by psychologist James Gibson, referring to the potential of an environment or element for use–as in stair, which “affords” ascending.[5] The trees in Laugier’s forest “afford” the making of a primitive hut; architecture “affords” and does not prescribe its uses. Semper’s version is the opposite: the act of gathering calls in programmatic needs and elements. The hearth, the wall, and other elements are made in response to the need; program brings architecture into being. If we give some credence to Laugier’s and Semper’s concepts, program both precedes and is determined (or afforded) by architecture, as Churchill’s famous maxim underscores: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Until the recent past, program shared a language-like role with tectonics. The use of a room was understood culturally and symbolically more than prescriptively, and it was generally accepted that the sequence, scale, and general spatial conditions would be sufficient to accommodate (or provide the “affordances”) for a range of uses/functions. The physical and economical constraints of construction that limited early buildings to certain arrangements of space tied activity/use to general conditions of space and vice versa. The continuous symbiosis and frictions between buildings and human actions activated architecture as a symbolic and language-like discipline, whose value lay in bringing the logos of construction together with the mythos of human existence. Architectural meaning lay in the semantics of architecture–in which tectonics inscribed and described program—that is, the “public proclamation” and elevated construction from brute assembly to architectural language. Architecture itself was an inscription, a representation of the program as symbolic proclamation, the foreshadowing of its role in the constellation of worldly elements being assembled into buildings and cities that revealed the larger and mysterious cosmic world order.
Typologically, buildings were more strongly propelled by construction, and only weakly associated with function, yet building type remained a stronger predictor of use over time than any program of use. As long as architecture was the “form” of culture, program could be understood as what contemporary philosopher Alva Noë (paraphrasing Goethe) calls “frozen habit,”[6] in which human actions are guided by the spatial arrangements of buildings (which in turn are tied to structural and construction logic) not prescriptively but implicitly and pre-reflective as the embodiment of symbolically understood “form”—not unlike how a fork is understood to be held “properly.”
While tectonics was at the epicenter of the aforementioned modern search for an authentic relationship between building and architecture, program was under less scrutiny. Initially, there was little interest in revisiting the relation between human activity and building organization. The Behrens AEG Turbinenhalle was a turning point: celebrated for its authenticity, the building’s dramatic tectonic language was guided by the spatial uniformity and tectonic logic of the daylit steel and glass bays which mirrored its Taylorist factory program dedicated to homogenous and continuous production spaces. The new modern architecture eventually came to fundamentally rethink program as an “unfrozen” spatial condition, and a new grammar of program ensued as the idea of movement and the unbounded continuity of space were adopted as the new fundamentals of architecture.
The conflicts between methods of building construction and the spatial concepts of modern architecture sparked a period of unprecedented invention. The demand of the new program of architecture—unbounded continuity of space, stripped of weight, gravity, or any references to traditional construction—was a wellspring for architecture because it conflicted with construction, which remained bound to the laws of physics and nature. The new spatial program could be projected, drawn on paper, where conveniently gravity and mass were absent. But to build, say, a floating space, meant architecture had to operate symbolically between a new grammar of program and grammar of tectonics, which manifested a feeling of floating space. When Mies designed the Barcelona pavilion, every detail was designed with the erasure of gravity in mind: the extruded chromed cruciform columns (reflections dissolve mass), supporting an impossibly thin horizontal roof (it was only thin at the visible edge), a ceiling of equal luminosity as the floor (the direct sun on the travertine floor matched the reflectively lit white ceiling). The grammar of these details generated the experience both phenomenally and intellectually—one can “read” the suprematist composition as well as experience the unbounded space and Boustrophedonic movement of the pavilion.
The “rub” between tectonics and program are not dissimilar to the “rub” between words in poetry. When words resist a prosaic reading, they come alive to their neighbors—potentially transmitting/evoking new insights. Consider this translated excerpt from “Poisson,” a poem by Paul Éluard:
Water is soft and moves
only for what touches it
The fish proceeds
like a finger into a glove[7]
Architecture’s cultural importance lies in its presence, which cannot be reduced to the legible aspects of the grammar of program or the grammar of tectonics, though both play critical roles in the grasping of architecture’s meaning and significance. When program and tectonics generate poetic tensions—even contradictions—associations, both metaphoric and symbolic, multiply and densify architectural meaning. The Barcelona pavilion’s dematerialized and abstracted space is contradicted by its opulent materials yet the overall effect is one of unity and immanence, not one architecture as a representation that must be read or deciphered. Dalibor Vasily observed: “It is not the representation but what is represented that matters— and what is represented is always a world that the work of art reveals and articulates, at the same time contributing to its embodiment. We have already seen that Architecture is not as crucial in explicitly articulating the world as in embodying and implicitly articulating it.”[8]
“Taking them together,” he added, “we see the silence of embodiment is also to a certain extent also a voice of articulation. It is only under these conditions that we can understand the language and the cultural role of Architecture.”[9]
What, then, does architecture articulate? At minimum, architecture is a palimpsest of self ‑inscription into the world, articulating the imagining of how we live and might live, which plays a critical role in our being-in-the-world. The grammar of program ideally gives agency for life to be inscribed into architecture, which depends on an open symbolic grammar as poetry is “open” to interpretation. It is the same with tectonics. The play between representations of construction and actual construction demand an “open” condition in which the symbolic nature or culture of building is revealed.
A small detail serves as an example. The brickwork of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House is manipulated to accentuate the horizontal. From the choice of elongated Roman bricks, to choosing brick-colored mortar exclusively for the vertical joints, to raking the light-colored mortar of the horizontal joints, the tectonic logic of the brickwork symbolically and literally joins with and builds the spatial horizontality of the house.
The Digital Influence
Digital tools and building techniques—widely insinuated to represent getting the same job done but in a better “way”—have had unintended consequences for architecture. The digitization of the practice of architecture has changed not only the design process but also the ways in which architecture is conceived. The shift from projection drawings and physical making to digital models as the locus of design decisions has vastly simplified the making of complex formal compositions and like any technology at its inception, the sheer ability to do something never before possible has become the “means justifying the ends.” Digital tools, by their nature, generate a homogenous datascape architecture—an architecture incapable of registering the profound and complex symbiosis between program and tectonics arising from the challenges of joining, seaming, intersecting, and colliding architectural assemblages and materials. In short, digital design/fabrication/installation has successfully bypassed the interpretive component between design and construction and thus has negated the tectonic grammar, craft, and human sensibility that has made architecture a meaningful cultural activity.
Tectonics, which I have discussed as literally and symbolically representing the techne of building, is being displaced by the technological systemization of buildings. Rather than attention to architectural language arising from putting disparate elements together, much of large-scale building design is focused on evidence-based design (EBD) and digital management and coordination of technological systems, including roof assemblies, facades, synthetic material systems, circulatory and mechanical devices. Contemporary architectural projects are more often aimed at achieving measurable performance-based outcomes, which diminishes the immeasurable, non-quantifiable—that is, meaningful—architectural questions at hand.
In the digital era, the grammar of program has transformed from a more interpretive spatial language that the imagination could inhabit and inscribe itself into something more prescriptive and inflexible. The pressures on architecture to perform/function as precisely as any machine have only increased with the adoption of digital tools—since they, if not promise, insinuate a greater degree of precision both of the physical artifact and its exacting fulfillment of the programmatic brief. This short-circuits the necessary exchanges between program, tectonics and inhabitation wherein each redefines the another—an essential part of any design process. Program is no longer something that arises from and defined by its architecture, but became something external to architecture that demands transposition and performance compliance. As a consequence, program is increasingly at odds with architecture’s capacities and with architecture’s potential to re-imagine inhabitation. Program today is more directive—“to cause to be automatically regulated in a prescribed way” (as the call for this special issue of AR notes), which reduces programmatic flexibility and often paradoxically results in a self-fulfilling “failure” because space gets “mis-used,” that is, it doesn’t conform to the external written programmatic demands made on architecture without including spatial and tectonic considerations in the defining of program.
There is a troubling contradiction between the prescriptive nature of contemporary architectural programs and the supposed celebration of freedom and individual volition. The current tendency to fear space—more specifically, unregulated space—has led directly to the overcontrol of space, which manifests as overprogramming, overprescribing, and over-proscribing, intolerant of provisional or opportunistic uses. Architectural tolerance is both a spatial and material value: spatial tolerances anticipate and helps one imagine the possibilities of human relations extended to the social body. The grammar of program is culturally valuable because its connotative role in architecture keeps open the interpretation of program and actions and thus the potential for self-inscription.
Architecture’s generative role in affording and inscribing human aspirations is colliding with the culture of technologically determined, data-driven, and evidence-based design.
In materials, tolerances are the intelligent and sensible anticipation of physically joining dissimilar physical things. The formal homogeneity fostered by digital tools extends to fabrication, where digital production processes almost invariably minimize tolerances for deviation, movement, and differential material behavior. Optimization has supplanted meaning as the goal of design, which can be observed in building details computationally resolved—such as the complex intersection of two parts, which are made into the digital dream of seamless smoothness, effacing the grammar of relations between tectonic and program.
The erasure of material tolerances goes beyond joinery. The relentless efforts by the building industry to duplicate the appearance of materials with synthetic replacements is symptomatic of a greater effort to transform the immaterial digital realm into its physical replica. New synthetic materials strip away the inconvenience of material behavior and the tolerances necessary to handle that behavior. The digital realm, within its exclusively ocular environment, denies presence, umwelt, character, change, tone, and atmosphere, the ambience which renders the language of architecture meaningful. It’s as if the constructed building is not the work of “the first order” (to use Ezra Pound’s term), but rather is a representation of the “perfect” digital model and its attendant renderings, which have now become the primary work of architecture.
The gains achieved by digital tools have occluded the losses, the greatest being the loss of reciprocity between maker, material, and space in the architectural design process. A willful methodology, made more confident with data, is supplanting the quiet process of reiterative exchange, associative reasoning, and metaphorical insight that has long nourished and centered the relation between program and tectonics as architectural language. Since the nineteenth century, the attempt to turn architecture into a science—from Durand to behavioralism to parametrics—has been fueled by the idea that architecture can and should be reframed as reductive logic and now, in the digital age, data. Not only data, but data with an ultimate aim of predictability. The fear and suppression of sensibility, paradox, the odd, strange, accidental, the unknown, the unpredictable has become not a bug of digital tools but a feature.
The grammar of program and tectonics in this context shares the connotatively indeterminate and unstable aspects of language, which paradoxically is one of the stabilizing aspects of architecture that allows, for instance, the transformation of an old factory into new housing, or a Greek temple to articulate stone details that evoke an eidetic memory of wooden joinery.
Architecture and Resistance
By contrast the temple work in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open region of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to say. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal into the brightening and darkening of color, into the clang of tone and into the naming power of the word.[10]
Heidegger contrasts “world” with “Earth,” the former being what we physically articulate and the latter the physical reality that stands in contrast or resistance to our articulations of the world. Articulation and resistance, in Heidegger’s thinking, combine to make meaning or more precisely to bring the Greek term Alethia, which can be translated as “truth,” “unconcealedness,” “disclosure,” or “bringing into presence.” In other words, articulation needs resistance to be meaningful. Artists are fully aware of this and have continued to use their respective physical medium(s) as the basis for their work. Architects, in contrast, have almost completely embraced the shift from physical media (paper, pencil, ink, wood, chipboard, etc.) to digital software, leaving behind resistance and focusing exclusively on articulation.
Buildings, in getting built, recover resistance, not in relation to articulation, but as a problem to be managed and “smoothed” away. The result is increasingly specialized and inflexible buildings devoid of the meaning that arises from articulation in conversation with resistance.
Digitally conceived buildings clad in synthetic materials are, conceptually, “forever” buildings, providing no or almost no allowance for the patinas of time (such as Wabi Sabi), and finally achieving what early European modernism dreamt about—an eternal present. An unconscious fear of aging, of deterioration, of decay, of change, motivates the erasure of the temporal dimension of buildings and with it the idea of building as a complex, evolving cultural project in which the past is tied to the future by the architectural language of program and tectonics. For example, the shift from wood to stone in Greek temples generated a new language of architecture that mediated and absorbed the constructive change from the past while providing a means of articulating architecture into the future. In short, tectonic and program grammar allows architecture to evolve with time, independently of its being prone to the obsolescence of “forever” technology.
Digital tools in and of themselves are not the problem; rather, the problem lies in the shift away from long-held values and understanding of architecture a shift those tools have subtly influenced.
As a cultural project, architecture has endured because its authenticity and meaning derives from the non-fixed relation between its symbolic and physical content, enabled by the interdependent grammar of tectonics and program. Contemporary academic discussions about program and tectonics show signs of resistance to the relentless technological logic of contemporary architecture: the cheeky pop-up; social- and environmental justice-framed programs; a yearning for the hand to be involved in making; the interest in biophilia; re-adoption of natural renewable materials; a return to craft and materiality; All these are, in themselves, critiques of the brittleness of technology and its inevitable and rapid obsolescence. Architecture has the latent capacity to reconcile technological advances with the human condition, to be guided by empathy and place specific conditions without ignoring data and technology. But that requires a return in many respects to timelessness and meaning, pre-modern values in which the grammar of program and tectonics play a central role. If from here on architecture can recover timelessness and meaning, it may turn out to be our discipline’s greatest value to culture, providing the record of and the means for society to understand the world as it is and to imagine it as it might be.