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  • Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
  • Sergio Sanabria (bio)
Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. By Dalibor Vesely. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. xviii+506. $49.95.

Important, erudite, dense, turgidly written, this complex assembly of several related tracts investigates how architecture has yielded a central autonomous role to technology and its instrumental values since the eighteenth century. The book joins a distinguished line of pessimistic assessments of technology, led by Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1954; English translation 1964). Since 1968, its author, Dalibor Vesely, has disseminated his views as studio instructor at the Architecture Association in London and later at Cambridge University, and is the éminence grise behind Alberto Pérez-Gómez's Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983). This, his first book, establishes Vesely's firm claim to a central and controversial position in postmodern architectural theory.

Vesely argues that purely instrumental geometric modes of representation ("emancipated" from the world they stand for) used by contemporary architects and engineers sacrifice values once explicit in traditional Western culture, where reality and its optical representations emerged from an embedded participation in the world. In chapters 1 and 2, he grounds this claim philosophically in his interpretation of Hans Gadamer's hermeneutics of communicative space, and what seems to this reviewer a much less convincing discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological psychology. He argues that the Enlightenment program for mathematical precision excluded humanistic values from the unity of knowing, forcing two mutually exclusive visions of reality: "Because any representation, despite its claims to universality, is inevitably partial, there is always a residuum of reality left out, which has to define its own mode of representation. The result is a duplication that may be best described as 'divided representation'" (p. 177). The world in Vesely's (and Gadamer's) view has a latent structure in which all thinking, language, and even space must be situationally embedded: "Communication . . . takes place in a world that is already to some extent articulated, acting as a background for any possible communication or interpretation" (p. 215).

In chapters 3 and 4, Vesely examines earlier approaches to representation in the science of optics and its applications in the visual arts of the late Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque. Optical treatises of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon show that thirteenth-century science supported an ontological role, incorporating Proclus's and Plotinus's Neoplatonic vision of light as intelligible substance and radiance of the Divine. The ontological role of light shifted in the Renaissance work of Alberti, Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo to an equally metaphysical role for proportion in the optico-geometric construction of perspective. While [End Page 659] Renaissance perspective laid the ground for later illusional technical representation, its geometric language still conveyed a symbolic representation of the world. But perspective generated a shift to internalized subjectivity that Vesely connects to Descartes's cogito and early autonomous mathematical physical models, exemplified in Johannes Kepler's cosmology. Vesely incisively discusses parallels in baroque architectural theory and practice in Guarino Guarini's chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin and Johann Michael Fischer's abbey church at Zwiefalten that preserved ancient unified paradigms alongside advanced mathematical innovations. Vesely's intellectual horizon seems most comfortably situated here, in the circle of Gottfried Leibniz and his artistic contemporaries.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover the absorption of techniques by theory, and the emancipation of instrumental thinking. Vesely's discomfort with modernity begins with Newton's mathematization of motion, paralleled in Claude Perrault's severing of architecture from European metaphysical tradition and grounding it in personal taste. Vesely troublingly dichotomizes a reductive scientism, where instrumentality (techne) becomes self-sufficient, from what he views as a richer traditional symbolic mediation (poiesis) between universals and embodied beings. He offers a brief but sharply focused history of positivistic inroads in science and architecture, from Pierre-Simon Laplace and the group of Auteuil to Jean-Nicolas Durand's universal architectural design methods based on typology and Gottfried Semper's project for an architectural science inspired...

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