Advanced Design Studio, Eisenman

Modernism or Fascism: Motivating the conceptual stakes of "Lateness" in a design for the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism

Background

The relationship between part to whole, and subject to object, determined, up until 1968, the synthetic project of architecture and the formation and naturalization of the Cartesian subject, respectively. While the parallels between these discourses are of utmost importance to our understanding of both the conception of architecture and its practice today, this studio will focus, also, on the political and ideological implications of these relationships--examining, simultaneously, our contemporary condition of "lateness" alongside modernity's darkest manifestation: the Third Reich.

To arrive at National Socialism and, also, at our current considerations around "lateness," however, we will begin with an engagement of fin-de-siècle Vienna: the site of Hitler's young adulthood as a painter (in possession of a special interest in architecture), and an important historical "late" cultural moment with which we will identify certain sensibilities that might or might not coincide with contemporary developments in our own time. Most pressing for the purposes of this studio will be the articulation of design strategies that reflect or are informed by "lateness" not as an historical moment, per se, but as a theoretical construct. Aligning with our historical perspective (though our role, here, will not be as historians), Adolf Loos will emerge as the most conceptually provocative figure in our analysis of Vienna (which will function, at this moment, as a fulcrum around which the rest of European culture will revolve). The Raumplan, its relationship between inside and outside (especially: between section and interior elevations), Loos's call for a monumentality appropriate to architecture, and, also, his attacks on Jugendstijl and the Werner Werkstätte (which, for Loos, threatened the integrity of the modern subject), will inform our formal, conceptual, and architectural interest in Loos. While modernism (a paradigm shift in architecture embodied in the figure of Le Corbusier but whose arrival is anticipated in the problematic, "late" figure of Loos), re-articulated and displaced the Cartesian subject (which, following our interest in Vienna, will be most radically affected by the investigations of Freud), the studio will assume that the metaphysical underpinning of this subject will remain intact until the breaks enacted in philosophy by Derrida, or in psychoanalysis by Lacan, fundamentally call this subject into question. A task of this studio will be to discover an architecture that, also, accommodates or allows for this problematized subject in the present. Simultaneously, fascism will be understood as the flip side of the modernist attempts to displace the metaphysical subject: it stants in, rather, as the unthinkable limit of the synthetic project in modernity.

 
Program

At the intersection of these concerns, the studio will focus on the design of an "dokumentationszentrum" dedicated to the history of National Socialism. Slated to be built on the site of the former "Braunes Haus" (the "Brown House," so named after the color of the Nazi uniform), which housed the offices of many high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler, the Center will operate as an exhibition and educational facility focusing on, especially, the role of Munich, the birthplace of National Socialism, as a political, administrative, and representational center of the Third Reich. Twenty years in the making, the plans to construct a memorial building arrive amidst criticism concerning Munich's history of whitewashing its Nazi past. The site, near the palaces of Ludwig I of Bavaria, was, during the Nazi era, part of a complex of ceremonial and monumental buildings commmemorating Munich as the birthplace of the party and solidifying its role as a center for Nazi art (where, infamously in 1937, modernism was labeled "degenerate" in the exhibition "Entartete Kunst" and contrasted with the exhibition of Party-approved German art held in the neo-classical Haus der Deutschen Kunst.) The design of the Center will serve as the medium for the integration of those design strategies identified in the studio with lateness (i.e. problematic symbolism, internal disciplinary issues, etc.) while simultaneously questioning the ethical imperative of such a monument. Here, perhaps, Hanna Arendt's conception of the "banality of evil," suggestive of the ultimately antispectacular flows of power that undergirded the most spectacular of regimes, carries architectural implications as well. Indeed, a "dokumentationszentrum" dedicated to the history of evil can be anything but iconic of that evil, but at the same time it cannot ignore the mere presence of its program. Following Loos, the studio will attempt to uncover those strategies, revolving around the re-articulation of the part-to-whole relationship, that will offer an anti-spectacular solution to this ambivalent, yet imperative task, of the monument. The specific programmatic requirements of the center will be articulated by the project organizers in the middle of August and will constitute the program brief for the studio.

 
Process

The work process of the studio consists of weekly pin-ups every Thursday and desk crits every Monday. For the first, analytic phases of the studio, students will work individually. In some reasonable way, students will eventually form two person teams to produce a completely documented building (plans, sections, interior and exterior elevations) for the final review.

Final Review: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 10:00am

Jurors: Massimo Scolari, Leon Krier, Kurt Forster, Emmanuel Petit, Mark Wigley, Ingeborg Rocker, Sarah Whiting

Travel: Students will spend four days in Vienna and two days in Munich. We will be joined in Vienna by Hans Hollein, Wolf Prix, Peter Noever, Mario Carpo, etc.