The ungenuiness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be.[1]
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
Gotfried Semper, in 1859, wrote that the Greeks “were able to enliven their tectonic whole [tektonischen Gebilde] with something quasi-organic.”[2] What does he mean by ‘tectonic whole’? The word tectonic references back, of course, to ancient Greek wood workers who were mostly associated with the building of ships and temples. But in this case, it is not the origin of the word that is significant, but its more contemporary usage as it was a relatively new concept as an offspring of the word architectonic. That word had been around for about a hundred years or so and was informally associated with the look and feel of a building as a whole or with large-scale matters of massing and plan disposition.[3] An English dictionary from 1708 defined architectonic as that which “builds a thing up regularly according to the nature and properties of it.” Immanuel Kant even used it as a metaphor for mastery and control with a huge impact on subsequent aesthetic theorizing. Karl Otfried Müller's Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (Handbook of the Archaeology of Art, 1830) used Architektonik in the Kantian sense to describe buildings where the whole and its parts worked together to create an art object [Kunstform] that was grounded “in a general set of rules that appear as mathematical relationships or as organic life forms [Lebensformen].[4]
But Müller also used the stand-alone word Tektonik to describe the more intimate processes of making, primarily by woodworkers, but also by other craft specialists. Till then Tektonik had been an relatively esoteric term and does not appear in Johann Christoph’s Wörterbuch from 1781.[5] Müller's use of the word was thus significant, especially since it helped focus on what we might call the processes of making. He envisioned those as a legitimate category of theorization. If Architektonik pointed to mental operations, Tektonik pointed to corporeal ones.
But Semper added a twist when we referenced a ‘tectonic whole’. The convention at the time would have been ‘architectonic whole.’ By implicitly removing the prefix archi-, or, in reverse by shifting the word ‘whole’ away from ‘architectonic’ to ‘tectonic,’ in essence combining the meanings of the two words — architectonic and tectonic — he challenged the separation of idea over body that was more or less a truism in European thinking ever since Aristotle and that was implied in Müller’s aesthetics as well as in Kant’s philosophy.
What prompted this tour-de-force? When Semper was writing, construction drawings as we understand them today – and which were hardly ever used before the 19th century — had begun to become important for even the most prosaic of details, given that many of the low wage workers on the construction site had little training in the trades. Since the ancient Greek tektōnes did not operate with plans or drawings, Semper was making the case for what we today might call an architecture without – or perhaps before — architects. Semper imagined that the relationship between designing and building back then was more seamless or, in his words, ‘organic.’ There was, in his view, no modern alienation of mind and body and its translation into design from construction.[6] The monuments of the Greeks, he argued, are special “since they were not constructed by mechanical means alone or made simply from working drawings, but exist as if they ‘are grown’ by a ‘mysterious organic law,’” one that he called Lebenskraft [life force].[7]
There was another equally pressing issue for Semper that had to do with the distinction between architect and contractor. Unlike today, back in the early 19th century, the distinction was still quite fluid. In fact, Christoph’s dictionary defines Baumeister [Literally: building master] not just as the person who both understands and executes the Baukunst [the art of building], but as “an architect.” In other words, there was for Christoph no real point of difference.[8] To make matters worse, in France, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who was a professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique in Paris wrote a book, Précis des leçons d'architecture données à l'Ecole Polytechnique (1802–5), that made it easy for any engineer to design even the largest of buildings. Every plan was reduced to a grid. Today, we might give the book the title, Roman Architecture for Dummies.
Though a lot of ink has been spilt on the definition and theorization of ‘tectonics’ we must remember that it is first and foremost a neologism, born as a protest against the emergence of a heartless, and for Semper, mindless, industrial world. It was an argument about rupture and repair. In other words, Semper wanted to impose the relevance of a historical consciousness – and its associated package of erudition and theorization — to the making of architecture that is modelled, ironically, on a pre-architectural and pre-literate sensibility. What we thus see in Semper’s writings – though Müller and others are implicated in this as well — is the birth of what we today would identify as Eurocentrism, the moment when the European cultural class sought to invent, define, and enforce Europe’s deep history – in this case by going back to the Greeks — as a way to challenge the perceived superfluidity of modernity. But for Semper, unlike other Hellenophiles, to access that world he had to split the Greek word architecture into its component parts, a rupture in the name of the ‘organic’ to make a concept that was detached from architecture’s fluid, but intractable, interconnections with the world of the ambitious Baumeister and engineer, and, of course, their thoughtless clients.
Semper probably did not fully realize that the word architecture was itself a neologism, though its neologistic status, even today, has hardly ever been adequately theorized. The word came into play only around the late 6th or early 5th century BCE during the period of the modernization of the temple building site, meaning that there is an uncanny parallel to the early 19th century situation encountered by Semper, but in reverse. For centuries, temples had been made by tektōnes using skills that were handed down from father to son. The change from wood to stone happened extraordinarily quickly in the span of almost a single generation. The Temple of Apollo at Corinth, constructed ca. 540 BCE was among the first. From there, it only took a hundred years for the Greeks to develop the extraordinary skills that went into the making of the Parthenon. With the change-over, construction sites became complicated places bringing into play a vast array of skills and services. Plutarch’s description of the building of the Parthenon in Athens is an astonishing read, even today:
The materials were stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony, cypresswood; and the arts or trades that wrought and fashioned them were smiths and carpenters, moulders, founders, and braziers, stone-cutters, dyers, goldsmiths, ivoryworkers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again that conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and mariners and ship-masters by sea, and by land, cartwrights, cattle-breeders, waggoners, rope-makers, flaxworkers, shoe makers and leather-dressers, road-makers, miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a captain in any army has his particular company of soldiers under him, had its own hired company of journeymen and laborers belonging to it banded together as in array, to be as it were the instrument and the body for the performance of the service.[9]
As Plutarch makes clear at the end of the quote, the journeymen and laborers were merely soldiers in the service of the larger project, meaning that the design process of a Greek temple was anything but ‘organic.’ And tragically for the tektōnes, though temples were famously meant to look like wooden temples, the skill of wood working was no longer needed. The only thing left of real wood in these temples were the rafters. The 19th and 20th century literature of Greek architecture is so enamored of the fact that Greek temples preserved their wooded heritage in replica form, that the disappearance of the tektōnes from the building site is left unremarked.[10] A modern day parallel would be when the newspaper typesetters were ‘phased out’ due to the introduction of the computer in the 1970s.
Richard Sennett noted that something was afoot when he observed that “if the artisan was celebrated in the age of Homer as a public man or woman,” by classical times, namely by the time of the Parthenon “the craftsman’s honor had dimmed.”[11] But Sennett’s perspective is too narrow and he misses the fact that we see by classical times a whole new person, the archē-tektōn, celebrated by none other than Plato who used the job description of the recently minted archē-tektōn as the model for a statesman.[12] Why not? Building a temple, as Plutarch made so clear, is an index of a thriving and well-managed economy. There is an uncanny and perhaps even real link between Plato’s archē-tektōn / stateman and Kant’s "architectonic of pure reason." Both admired the skill of managing complexity, Plato as a political project, Kant as a philosophical one.
The Greeks could have used the Egyptian word ‘building-overseer.’ After all, that job description goes back to the 3rd millennium BCE, and it is almost certain that the Greeks learned about all of this, including the use of stone, through their military and trade contacts with the Egyptians.[13] But the Greeks, in their rush to modernize their construction industry were never going to introduce a ‘barbaric’ Egyptian word into their language. They simply added the prefix archē (first, leader, principle) to the old word tektōn. And so, a word was born that is now so ubiquitous that its historical, ruptural resonances have long since been washed away.
But just because the word archē – tektōn existed, the difference between architect (as we understand it today) and chief contractor was not clarified even by the time of Semper. The issue was first exposed by Leon Battista Alberti who asked, How does the presumptive architect – the maker of the design — separate himself from the upstart, and culturally unsophisticated builder who might well be called an architect?
For Alberti, the answer hinged on the fact that the architect had to not only understand this novel thing called Roman history, but also had to be able to convey the esoteric design realities of that unique brand of historicism to the noble class through a combination of writings and drawings. To read and to make presentation drawings was something that very few builders at the time could do with any proficiency. In De re aedificatoria (written between 1443 and 1452), Alberti also writes:
Before I go any farther, however, I should explain exactly whom I mean by an architect; for it is no carpenter (tignarium fabrum) that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter (fabri) is but an instrument (instrumentum) in the hands of the architect. Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows how to devise both through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the most noble needs of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies.
I inserted the Latin to make sure that we understand that the translation of tignarium fabrum and later fabri should not be ‘carpenter.’ Instead, those words should be translated as ‘contractor’ or ‘construction manager.’ Alberti also uses the word ‘discipline’ very precisely to convey the fact that if architecture was to be a field it would have to possess ancient texts that allowed the architect to enter to and engage with the literate, aristocratic class. So here, in this quote, the tone of the word architecture changes. If before, the contractor-architect continuum could be seen as part of the natural evolution of the modernization of the building site toward increasing complexity, now, with Alberti, the word has a violent inner life that brings out of hiding the implication of the word’s origins. Alberti wanted to finish what the Greeks had started in elevating mind over matter and by elevating literacy over illiteracy. And by literacy, I mean not just the capacity to read, but the capacity to understand the value of Roman and Greek culture to the upper classes. So significant was this that proficiency in Greek and Latin was a hallmark of a good education and social status among the upper and middle classes in England well into the 19th century.
Though Alberti wanted this break between the architect and the contractor to be absolute, his theory was more fantasy than reality. The great architects who built the cathedrals and palaces of Siena, Florence, Milan, and Venice were all master builders most of whom came to architecture late in life. Some started as painters or as masons. Brunelleschi started his career as a goldsmith. Palladio, whose real name was Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who was nominally literate, started his career as a humble stone carver. His name would have been lost to history had not his wealthy, humanist client, Gian Giorgio Trissino, ‘discovered him’ and even invited him on a trip to Rome to measure Roman details for his villa. Trissino, however, did not want to be seen as slumming it with a laborer, so he gave the man a fancy new name, Palladio, derived from the Greek goddess Pallas Athena and a character in a poem. Palladio, thus refashioned and coached by his mentor, lived up to expectations. I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), first published in 1570, which consisted of a text and accompanying drawings of Roman details and their proportions, was the instrument by which the architect – as a cultured person — performs his elevation over the contractor.
Today, of course, the distinction between architect and contractor is a legal one, even though it still disguises a the old cultural one. When I recently rebuilt my barn, even though the contractor did everything, he was required by law to have a licensed architect make the drawings that have on them in big words: “These renderings are for illustrative purposes only,” meaning they are not construction drawings. But as a matter of reality, back in the 19th century, the Baumeister still had the upper hand. In Germany, the Latin word architectus referred mostly to the designers / builders of churches and cathedral buildings. Though it was a word that implied status, it was not a term with deep theoretical implications. In fact, a German dictionary from 1781 has the comment under the heading “architect” that it is a “fully unnecessary word,” probably in reference to its Greek pretensions. The better word, it states, is Baumeister.[14]
So when Semper detached the tektōn from archē, it was meant to give the appearance of a liberation of the detail-maker (and by extension the detail-drawing) from the magisterial, but presumably alienated gaze of the Baumeister — contractor – engineer who, given monetary constraints, was well inclined to think of details as ‘off-the-shelf.’[15] Semper imagined a non-archē world where the detail was not just a dull construction drawing. The semiotic violence – the violence of the word that also applied to the word – was, for Semper, an unfortunate necessity to get the architect to imagine an unviolated whole and therewith instrumentalize his control over the whole process of design. For Semper, if the emerging discursive distinction between architectonic and tectonic needed to be erased, its parallel, the cultural and class distinction between architect and contractor, needed to be enforced. In other words, the theorizing of ‘tectonics’ was grounded in a contradiction about the status of the architect in the modern world. The culturally sophisticated architect on the one hand, and the laborer, guided by a custom-made drawing, could outflank the dull and dimwitted contractor.
The defenders of modern-day tectonics are, therefore, not out to truly free the proverbial builder from the rulership of the uncultured contractor. Almost to the contrary, they want to force the builder to follow the mandates of a higher sensibility, the results of which are supposed to be aesthetically pleasing to the ‘wholeness’ of the design just as much as they may be practical. Kenneth Frampton in 1995 re-affirmed this mandate when – in recasting Semper’s notion of the ‘organic’ — he championed the tectonic as the place where architecture can most effectively challenge the ostensibly, scenographic superfluidities of “global modernism.”
The primary principle of the autonomy of architecture resides in the tectonic rather than the scenographic: that is to say this autonomy is embodied in the revealed ligaments of the construction and in the way in which the syntactical form of the structure explicitly reveals the action of gravity…The tactile and the tectonic jointly have the capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical in much the same way as the place-form has the potential to withstand the relentless onslaught of global modernism.[16]
The idea of a tectonic modernity as a form of resistance (still related by default to academic, upper class sensibilities) to capitalism has by now become implicit in the meaning of the word.[17] So if we think back to Alberti’s put-down of the builder as a mere instrumentum, it becomes clear that tectonics in this sense does not want to liberate the builder from the archē, but rather to empower the architect over the contractor even more. Tectonics allows the architect to borrow down into the design process to the level of ‘making.’ From that point of view, tectonics requires the outside agency of guilt as enforcement. Karl Bötticher, whose chief work is the "Tektonik der Hellenen" (Architectonics of the Greeks; 1844–52), wrote that
It is in the nature of things that this simple law will restrain any subjective and arbitrary desire to cover the core-form haphazardly with symbols...The essence and idea of a structural part prohibit arbitrary decoration and do not allow one to deal with the decorative elements as one pleases. (emphasis by author)[18]
Buildings are not meant to be put together through the abstract determinations of reason or by aesthetically illiterate builders. There has to be a custom-tailoring of the parts.[19] Ornaments and their associated details had to exist, as Bötticher would phrase it, in a living relationship to the whole, a ‘whole’ that was endangered by the very people who made it.
But unlike the archē who learns about the discipline through books, studio classes, exams and other sources, tectonics has no particular disciplinary grounding. It is, as Semper implied, supposed to be ‘organic’ meaning that it is produced magically from the inside of a culture. In other words, unlike when we say the word architecture and obviously assume that architects get their position through a process of learning [i.e. enforced through the mechanisms of a discipline], when we say tectonic, there is no clear socio-epistemological equivalent. And just as there is no ‘school of tectonics’ there is also no category of laborer that corresponds to it. The tekton, the actual person in historical time, is of no interest to Semper. Not only is he a cultural imaginary, he is purposefully placed outside of the orb of the contractor-builders as an unattainable abstraction that when it does finally reach the construction site can only be sustained and implemented through the armature of a distant, moral control that, if anything, is not ‘organic.’
This leaves us with a paradox. Tectonics is an aesthetics, but one that is supposedly not shallow; a way of detailing, but one that is not about the reality of construction; a way of knowing, but one that cannot be found in books; a way of building, but without a corresponding set of laborers.
At stake in this conversation is not how an imagined Hellenic, dignity-of-labor (albeit without laborers) can be used as leverage against the unruly, superficial, industrialized world of today, but rather the role of tectonics / tektōn in the play of disciplinary signifiers. If anything, the tektōn today might seek to free itself from the compulsions of good ‘tectonic’ behavior, whether imposed on it from within (either in the form of unreflective tradition) or from without (as in the form of ‘good design’). The point is not to make the unconscious of the tektōn speak through some imagined aesthetic-of-purity, but to locate it as a sometimes disturbing force in architecture’s disciplinary landscape.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Marin County Civic Center (1957). Photo by author
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center (1957) rightly deserves a place in history books [ 1 ]. But there is one spot that is never discussed. In designing the external colonnades, Wright apparently faced a quandary. Instead of doing a more regular column, Wright decided to float the column and have it rest precariously along the flank of a ‘rock’ that rises like a mini-monolith from the walkway as it were some natural feature. It is a steel column, but it seems to be made more of wood than metal, looking very much like a gilded 2X4. Wright added an elegant slopping capital to transition to the arch. From the side, the capital is off-center to the line of gravity descending from the arch to create a disturbing and almost dangerous looking situation, made even more pronounced when the column hits the ‘rock’ along its outward facing slope. These columns do not fall in line with the conventions of tectonics as they not only want to look like they defy gravity, but they also defy the material properties of their constituting elements: concrete and steel. They even defy the constructional principle set out by the building itself. They are a curiosity and a flourish, but also a puzzle to be figured out.
La Maison Cubiste at the Salon d'Automne, 1912. Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912
There is no clear picture of the genesis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s column, but there is, of course, a dotted line that can be drawn back to Art Deco and even further back to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau, in particular, had little patience for gravitational realism and an associated ascetics of laconic minimalism that underlies much of what we call tectonics. Perhaps one can cite the entrance to La Maison Cubiste at the Salon d'Automne, 1912 with its asymmetries, chamfered surfaces and gravity defying elements [ 2 ].
Mortensrud Church, Oslo (2002)
Compare the Wright columns with a those in the Borre Skodvin’s Mortensrud Church in Oslo (2002), which I would venture to say better conform to the conventions associated with tectonics [ 3 ]. There, a large rock protrudes into the space. The architects shifted the columns to accommodate its girth tilting them to emphasize the rock’s location in the design. It is without doubt an example of subtle contextualism. The columns speak very openly of the work that they need to do to adjust for the intrusion of the rock. But compared to the columns at the Marin County Civic Center, these do not liberate the structure from its dutifulness. On the contrary. The columns, even the angled ones, are pronouncedly Doric and masculine. Unlike the columns of the Marin County Civic Center, which are, one can say, experimental, the ones in Mortensrud Church are comfortably ensconced in the Hellenic, European sensibilities.
Contractor house, California. Photo by author.
Perhaps we can go even further afield than the Marin County Civic Center in the search for an alternative tectonic – a tectonic liberation — and look to things that fall under the heading of contractor mistakes. The builder of this house added an extra column base for the porch before he realized his mistake, so he left it unfinished [ 4 ]. When he decided to raise the roof a bit, he left the facing of the gable dangling in the air. It did not really bother him.
This project makes no one happy. The teacher of architecture would see this simply as silliness and note that such a building’s resale value has been damaged. Pro-tectonic advocates would cringe at the careless of the carpenter and perhaps see it as even a statement verging on the immoral. What would this world be if everyone just left their mistakes out to rot. And yet I would say that the builder of this house has made a modest but powerful political statement, not about some fantasy of a ‘corrected’ modernity, but about the tyranny of the ideology of completion and about the pathology of dutiful conformity to expectations all the way down to the detail.