Background
Studying architectural education in South Korea, I have always questioned why every semester's project must culminate in a design that considers the 'feasibility of construction' within a 'planar' context. If we assume that university architectural education in Korea is designed following the Korean Architectural Accreditation Program, it can be inferred that this reflects the national architectural discourse. The prevailing architectural discourse in Korean architectural education essentially revolves around the question, 'How well can one design a building that will actually be built?'
I have come to question this premise itself. The primary question is, 'Is an architect someone who designs buildings that are actually constructed?' Following this, the secondary question arises, 'Is architecture a discipline that explores buildings meant to be actually constructed?' However, what I perceive is the academic field of architecture becoming ambiguous when there is an excessive focus on buildings that are to be actually constructed. In architecture, there are two aspects: 1. the task of designing buildings that will be built, for instance, delivering construction drawings with sufficient buildability and without missing information to the constructor, quantifiably defined; and 2. the work related to the discipline, which fundamentally underlies all these tasks, clarifying the thinking principles and processes that create form. However, this separation became intentionally ambiguous through modernism, and efforts to integrate these emerged. The current ambiguous distinction is a phenomenon that originated in this period.
Therefore, this study will re-examine the architectural movement during the modernist period and deconstruct architecture and buildings. Through this process, 'architecture' will emerge as an independent academic field. Moreover, this will lead to a change in the meaning of contemporary architecture, distinct from that of the modern era.
Architectural Trends During the Modernist Period
The architectural flow during the Modernist period can be divided into two main streams. The first is a trend that sought to experiment with architecture through buildings. This approach solidified the vertical relationship between architecture and buildings, ambiguously blending the 'act of architecture' with the 'act of building construction.' The second trend chose 'mass media' as the medium for realizing architecture. This stream perceived architecture as a metaphysical system, not requiring material manifestation. These two trends, seemingly contradictory, actually stem from the same root. The architectural evolution of Mies van der Rohe (hereinafter Mies) exemplifies this phenomenon well.
a. Architectural Development of Mies van der Rohe
Mies, raised by a stonemason father, began his architectural career in 1908. Even after World War I in 1914, he continued to design traditional houses. However, it appears he consistently pursued new architectural styles. In 1921, he submitted the radical <Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper> design for a competition in Berlin, catapulting him to stardom.
In 1922, he presented a curved skyscraper design, continuing to develop speculative projects. Although most of these were never built, he participated in the design magazine “G” in 1923. His architectural ideas had already spread among architects and the public, forming a particular discourse. This includes concepts like 'universal space' and 'transparency' discussed in his later works.
Beatriz Colomina, a professor of architecture at Princeton University, mentions in her book <Manifesto Architecture> that Mies's modernity lies in enabling architecture to exist in mass media. Mies's architecture, not expressed through buildings but driving substantial movements in academia and society through mass media, is thus existent. Similar endeavors are observed in contemporaneous architects, like Daniel Libeskind, born in 1946, who became famous before actualizing any projects, notably through his 1988 exhibition at MoMA's <Deconstructivist Architecture>. Earlier, Adolf Loos wrote his essay <Ornament and Crime> in 1908, and his renowned <Looshaus> in Vienna was built in 1912.
Mies later actualized various projects, including the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929, with the Farnsworth House in 1951 being a pinnacle. Importantly, he consistently expressed his architectural perspective through drawings and writings, establishing his architectural discipline before applying it to the materiality of buildings. The intention to express architectural discipline through buildings is more evident in contemporaries like Le Corbusier, whose aesthetic discourse was closely linked to societal agendas, solidifying the architect's professional view.
b. Architectural Experiments of Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier is typically described through three transformative periods: early, middle, and late, represented by <Villa Savoye>, <The Radiant City>, and <Ronchamp Chapel>. In his early period, he defined his architectural discipline and experimented with it through buildings. In the middle period, he sought to solve real-world problems through various urban plans. In his late period, while aesthetically pronounced, his work like <Unite d’Habitation> remains relevant in experimenting with architectural discipline through buildings. Le Corbusier, in his book <Toward an Architecture>, expressed optimism about machinery and technology, advocating for new architecture fitting the era. His continual critical perspective on contemporary architecture and consistent mention of his architectural view resonate with how Mies made his architecture exist in mass media. However, Le Corbusier's path was more constructive, focusing on societal agendas such as new urban planning for the technocratic era and post-war restoration of life. His architecture had significant impact, and his various urban plans and collective housing designs have become a typology still evident today.
However, this trend created a convention where architecture increasingly became fixated on representing buildings, leading to problems. Intersecting with socialist tendencies, it evolved into an elitist and enlightenment-driven phenomenon, attempting to reshape human behavior through specific building forms. This enlightenment view was later discarded, and in the post-modern era, a movement to continuously explore pure architectural acts emerged.
Architectural Trends Post-Modernism
a. Architectural Drawings of Archigram
Archigram, revealed at the Living City Exhibition in 1963, was a group of six young British architects. Drawings like Ron Herron's <A Walking City> and Peter Cook's <Plug-in City> were mostly published in magazine formats. Initially, they focused not on realizing buildings, but on expressing future life through drawings. Utilizing collage, graphic, and comic techniques in their drawings, they used the power of mass media to disseminate their architectural discipline and form discourses. Their concepts included capsules, metamorphosis, and nomad. Capsules represented a near-future urban idea, where all devices are built-in, exchangeable, and connectable to various platforms. Metamorphosis refers to the continual change in status and value of architecture due to assembly properties, reflecting the evolution of buildings with modern technology over time. The nomad concept is an extension of capsules, emphasizing spatial expansion and transformation, enabling modular spaces to be mobile and adaptable.
Their architecture, though not materialized as buildings, greatly influenced later generations and exists in a real sense. Especially, their concept of capsules has been reproduced in contemporary architecture as ideas for constructing various unit spaces, now a standard design methodology.
However, Archigram’s attempts can still be seen as somewhat reliant on buildings, as they often represented "technically impossible" utopias of future life. A break from this societal agenda, ensuring architectural autonomy, is seen in the work of Peter Eisenman.
b. Architectural Autonomy through Peter Eisenman’s Work
Peter Eisenman (hereafter Eisenman) explains architectural interiority by integrating the concept of diagrams with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. In his book <Diagram Diaries>, he attempts to elucidate the process of form-making in architecture through diagrams, where diagrams function as abstract machines that auto-generate architecture.
He states that diagrams, combining anteriority (accumulated knowledge in architectural history) and interiority (inherent rules or elements within architecture), create difference and repetition, thus auto-generating architecture. Anteriority is the attribute that knowledge accumulates over history and is interpreted anew in the present context, like how a Gothic cathedral’s blueprint is reinterpreted today. Interiority involves inherent elements within architecture, which Eisenman divides into Grids, Cubes, El-forms, and Bars, with El-forms assuming non-materiality in architecture, allowing complete separation of architecture and buildings.
With Eisenman’s era, three points become clear:
The necessity for architecture to become buildings was only a temporal agenda of Modernism, not the identity of the academic field of architecture.
Buildings are just one of many expressions of architecture; post-modernity has clearly revealed that architecture exists through mass media.
The existence of architecture through mass media is primarily visual, likely due to the intuitive nature of images.
Summary
In contemporary architecture, architecture can exist through mass media without relying on buildings, and the most powerful form of this expression is through images. The author distinguishes this concept from Eisenman’s diagrams (as Eisenman's diagrams have a clear goal of form generation) and prefers to call it ‘drawing.’ This encompasses technical images like bird’s eye views, plans, sections, Zaha Hadid’s painterly conceptual images, and Eisenman’s abstract diagrams. Thus, architectural drawings should be seen not as a preliminary step towards buildings or a representation thereof, but as artworks with inherent significance. Deleuze’s dialectics of ‘possible-real’ and ‘virtual-actual’ lend strength to this argument.
Deleuze's Concept of the Virtual
Deleuze's dialectics of possible-real and virtual-actual are ambiguous in everyday terms and must be understood within the context of his entire philosophy. The possible refers to a state already formed but not yet manifested, retaining its nature and components without alteration, like a calculator producing a predetermined answer within a set framework. The virtual, on the other hand, can be seen as a 'problematic', a knot of forces or tendencies accompanying a situation, event, or object. It represents the process of resolution, akin to calculators producing different answers through various methods. Thus, while the possible manifests as a singular reality, the virtual results in numerous actualities.
This dialectic can be understood through the analogy of computer programs. Rhinoceros, commonly used by architecture students, operates under a predetermined programming language, bound by its framework, akin to the possible-real dialectic. Any non-conventional modeling in the program, though not manifested, is just one of many alternatives. However, when designers use the program to solve problems, the interaction between user and program falls under the virtual-actual dialectic. Even a minimalistic model, such as a tetrahedron composed of only four points, can be creative. The form's outcome is less important than its background and its potential to influence other elements within a field of forces.
This discussion can be extended to Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the 'Body without Organs' (corps sans organes). This concept rejects the organismic view that the body and organs are necessarily interconnected, suggesting a non-fixed, momentary differential relationship between organs and the body. A 'Body without Organs' should not be interpreted as a body stripped of organs but as a body that can become any organ. For Deleuze and Guattari, a 'mouth' is not just for eating but can be for kissing, speaking, or even for writing with a disability. This concept is often interpreted in relation to Francis Bacon's paintings.
In Bacon's paintings, bodies appear distorted and transformed by certain forces. While some paintings focus on specific body parts (especially the face), others reconstruct the overall appearance. These paintings represent the flow of various forces within a field of forces, expressed through the transformed body. Considering that a key aspect of the 'Body without Organs' is allowing new flows to pass over the surface of a deterritorialized body, Bacon's works aptly illustrate this. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the 'Body without Organs' represents a field of 'intensity=0', a potential entity with infinite transformative capabilities.
The Potentiality of Architecture
Applying the concept of potentiality to architecture, architectural drawings should not be categorized in the realm of possible-real, as mere precursors to buildings, but rather in the realm of virtual-actual, where they can become anything. This shift in categorization can only be achieved by breaking the Modernist relational ties between architecture and buildings.
In this relationship, even conventional plans and sections, previously meant solely for building construction, can now possess extended meanings. Traditionally, these drawings belonged to the realm of possible-real, having a predetermined purpose and representing buildings. If they failed to materialize into buildings, they were deemed meaningless. However, categorizing these drawings in the virtual-actual realm enriches their significance. This concept is somewhat similar to Peter Eisenman’s notion of anteriority. He argued that even if past drawings lose their original purpose or constructability over time, their accumulated meanings can emerge through reinterpretation and be utilized in new diagrams.
This concept is evident in many historical examples. Intriguingly, Le Corbusier’s plans, previously discussed as antithetical in our discussion, can be a prime example explaining the potentiality of drawings. His <Radiant City> plan, never realized by himself, has become a dominant feature in Southeast Asian new cities, especially in Korea. These plans are not exact replicas of Le Corbusier’s originals but are transformed according to technical, geographical, economic, and political contexts. This phenomenon perfectly illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the 'egg' in the 'Body without Organs'. The egg, a quintessential example of a 'Body without Organs', redistributes energy across its surface under varying conditions, leading to differentiation. This concept aptly describes the potentiality where certain parts become beaks or wings, depending on the flow of forces.
Interpreting architectural drawings within the realm of potentiality not only explains the phenomenon of architecture diversifying into various buildings but also how unbuilt architectures influence other architectures, which in turn may become buildings or influence further architectures. Eisenman’s various diagrams, some of which were never realized as buildings, have influenced architects engaged in computational design processes, including Zaha Hadid.
However, the tendency to dismiss unbuilt architectural drawings as mere ‘paper architecture’ still exists. Previously, the notion that architecture must manifest as buildings was influenced by enlightenment and socialist ideologies; now, it's perpetuated by capitalism. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s description of Zaha Hadid implies that drawings must be realized as buildings, overlooking the fact that architectural drawings have inherent completeness and meaning even if they don't become buildings.
The Significance of This Discussion in Contemporary Architecture
This discussion becomes critically important today, where mass media exerts more influence than ever, dominates everyday life, and is predominantly image-based. The age where people travel to Korea, inspired by Instagram photos, shows that these media representations may not match the actual landscapes. Yet, it's challenging to deem this as incorrect, as it's a pervasive phenomenon. The Korea depicted on Instagram and the real Korea exist in their own rights and spaces, both valid and influencing social phenomena. Sometimes, the world depicted on social media wields more influence.
From this perspective, the capitalist-backed illusion that architecture must materialize as buildings can be discarded. Instead, a new market and foundation for discourse are established in economics and academia. Now, architects can evolve from being 'builders of buildings' to 'presenters of architecturally potent drawings.' This process is already underway, as seen in architects like Vincent Callebaut, who continuously produce paper architecture, infusing their architectural visions into the public consciousness. Callebaut's depictions of the future, characterized by sleek organic forms and blurred boundaries between nature and artifice, contribute to the creation of futuristic fantasies in our era.
Conclusion
This study revisits Mies's architectural evolution to show that although architecture found a way to exist within mass media during Modernism, it was constrained by the era's demand to produce buildings, as illustrated through Le Corbusier's works. However, architects like Archigram demonstrated that architecture need not be parasitic on buildings and can exist sufficiently as drawings. With Eisenman, we witness a complete separation of architecture and buildings. Thus, architectural drawings, categorized within the virtual-actual dialectic, are argued to be 'Bodies without Organs' with rich potentiality. In today’s society, this discussion signifies a revival of the architect’s role, emancipated from ‘building’, and the rediscovery of the new meaning of architectural drawings, empowered more than ever by potent mass media.