Page 71 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
formulated within the discipline and as a result they carry content that is architecturally and even aesthetically codified, communicated and similarly appreciated. In advance literature underlines that even technical representations are also guided by aesthetic values, even if they are conceived as purely procedural manifestations 2. This is eas- ily understood in parallel to typography, graphic design or mapmak- ing and how these practices carry cultural content that goes beyond the information they communicate. This aesthetic parameter though is a first order representation that is based on the belief that there is some kind of an inherent truth in the code that architects use in order to communicate. The only way to test their meta – meaning would be to investigate whether codes are prolific in advancing cognition in ar- chitectural thinking, and not just symbols that follow a stylistic man- ner. This is related to architectural interiority and has historically been documented as a repetition happening in abstract-space through el- ements of what constitutes a disciplinarian architectural language.
One example is the codification in Le Corbusier’s “Five points” (Le Corbusier, 2007) (figure 3) of architecture; pilotis, the call for an ab- sence of supporting walls in favour of a free-designing ground plan, the free design of the façade, horizontal windows and roof gardens adopt a typological vocabulary that references the advances in build- ing construction, the autonomy of the façade from the structure, and essences of standardization that follow the first industrial revolution that at the same time conceal aesthetic aspects linked to machine age, modern painting, abstraction and the early 20th century avant – garde. Another example is the series of diagrams of interiority that Eisenman produced in the 1980s and the beginning of the 90s in which a cube is deconstructed following discreet steps and specific rules. Geometry as abstraction functions as a metarepresentation of the modern architectural production as it is used as a cognitive tool that measures relations between parts and justifies their necessity and role in a synthesis. Even in Eisenman’s procedural experiments functionality is embedded in the somehow automatic, cause and ef- fect logic that we believe that is hidden in the mathematic founda- tion of geometry. And although diagrams serve as criticism they do not depart from the meta-level of gaining coherence by referencing symbols. Belief is the basis of this contentual system and the seem- ingly infinite possibilities are embedded in the same eidetic path, the one of the rule, the canon that directs sameness and difference. By residing in abstract space in opposition to a qualitative environment, modernism inserts the necessary distance between the architect and the actual built environment . Architecture controls the material ob- ject as a representation of an object conceived in vitro, in the design praxis milieu almost symbolically. Architecture is mediated as an ex- teriority while any construction is nothing more but an image of the model. Alberti’s notion of the “lineament”, Le Corbusier’s declaration that “architecture is the product of the mind” and Vitruvius’s distinc-
2. “Within the spatial practice of modern society, the archi- tect ensconces himself in his own space. He has a repre- sentation of this space, one which is bound to graphic elements [...] this conceived space is thought by those who make it to be true. Henri Lefebvre,The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nich- olson-Smith, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishing, 1991), p. 361.
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Meta(re)presentations
Antonis Moras