by Amir Shahrokhi

Exterior and interior views of the DAAP, University of Cincinnati, Eisenman Architects. 1987-1996

In his account of the Pantheon, Alois Reigl states: “in place of the absolutely motionless plane typical of the Egyptian artistic ideal there exists now the restless curve searching for depth; in place of the exterior organization into shapes as observed in the columnar house (Greek Temple), is now set the undifferentiated dissemination of all small parts within the whole.”¹ Reigl’s theory of sights posits a transition in the conception of space from the Ancient Egyptian to the Roman. In this framework, space is understood as emerging from the plane. Reigl describes a progressive shift from tactility to opticality; from shallow relief, to surfaces of varying depth, to individualized parts distinct from and set against each other.²

In the essay, ‘Cincinnati Impressions’, architecture critic Jeffrey Kipnis presents an analysis of two of the most significant works of architecture at the campus of the University of Cincinnati: The Recreation Center by Morphosis Architects (1999-2004) and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning by Eisenman Architects. In his analysis of the spatial construct of the Rec-Center, Kipnis engages Riegl’s three sights as a framework to probe the project. Kipnis summarizes Reigl’s three sights as a progression from “the surface preoccupations of Egyptian Pyramids (Nahsicht-near sight), which develop into the relational interests of Greek Temples (Normalsicht-normal sight). Space as such emerges in a first holism of enclosed objects exemplified in the Roman Pantheon (Fernsicht-far sight).”³ Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s essay, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, extends Reigl’s formulation of sights to the modern period.

The starting point for Rowe and Slutzky is a definition of transparency borrowed from the artist and educator Gyorgy Kepes. Transparency, Kepes states, is a condition in which multiple overlapping figures coexist without optically destroying each other: “Transparency however implies more than an optical characteristic, it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity. The position of the transparent figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, now as the further one.”⁴ In Part I of their essay, Rowe and Slutsky make evident the distinctions between the literal and phenomenal incarnations of transparency. They are dismissive of works of literal transparency as exhibited in the works of Moholy Nagy and Walter Gropius in favor of works that exhibit phenomenal transparency such as the work of the Cubists in painting and Le Corbusier in architecture.⁵ For them, the significance of transparency lay within the potential for multiple and complex spatial readings, such that “the transparent ceased to be that which was perfectly clear and became, instead, that which was clearly ambiguous.”⁶ In Part II of the essay, some of the complex spatial aspirations celebrated in the first essay are left behind in an attempt to prove phenomenal transparency through its more two-dimensional manifestations as evidenced in the patterns of facades.⁷ Rowe and Slutzky, not only succeeded in this goal, but through their demonstration, instrumentalised a set of techniques for the collapse of deep-space to a phenomenologicaly experienced shallow-space.

The addition to the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), the other subject of ‘Cincinnati Impressions’, is largely preoccupied by the latter discussion, which is evidenced by the highly articulated reliefs of its interior and exterior surfaces. Kipnis’ interpretation of Reigl’s Nahsicht (nearsight) “suggests that, however complicated the voids and vistas of a building may be, a judicious use of construction to proliferate the surfaces may eradicate the space”.⁸ Through an obsessive elaboration of Rowe-Slutzky, Eisenman accomplished an incredible reversal of Reigl’s progression from planarity to spatiality, even surpassing the collapse of deep-space, such that “it may be accurate to say that the DAAP had achieved an unmitigated erasure of space, leaving behind nothing but diagram.”⁹

^{“What happens when one building indulges two or three of the ‘sights’ simultaneously?”10}

If Eisenman’s building at the University of Cincinnati, by an extreme extension of the Rowe-Slutzky method, results in a reversal of Reigl’s sights, then the all-encompassing nature of Morphosis’ Rec-Center suggests that it is a building that cannot be understood from any single vantage. As Kipnis’ analysis suggests, the Rec-Center is a building that defies a reductionary description. He states that “the Rowe-Slutsky argument presumes that architecture (and painting) operates in and for one mode of awareness, i.e., the, scrutinizing attention of intellection and connoisseurship.”¹¹ Similarly, in the article, 12 Reasons to Get Back into Shape, Robert Somol categorizes this mode of operation as Form(al), “architecture as text (it is to be read)”¹², which is clearly the mode of operation for Eisenman’s DAAP, but not the operative mode of the Rec-Center. Rowe and Slutzky’s contribution of phenomenal transparency or collapsed-sight, can be seen as the fourth in a continuation of the Reigl lineage of sights. Both Kipnis’ and Somol’s articles provide related but differing alternatives to that lineage.

In his account of Morphosis’ body of work, Kipnis describes their method as one of “inverted part/whole relations”¹³. That is, rather than creating compositions of parts that together describe a cohesive whole, their work tends to fragment holisms or produce redundant parts. This description would seemingly put the work into Somol’s category of Mass, “architecture as object sculpture”, “an act of expression that achieves its value through the cult of the author”¹⁴. However, as Kipnis continues on in his analysis, he implies that the Rec-Center has achieved a spatial amalgam that is irreducible to either of Somol’s disciplinary categories and has transcended “into the realm of the scape, pointing toward a new approach to the design of an all-space building”. The all-space building provides a significant counterpart to Somol’s Shape. If, as Somol states, Shape is a construct that defies categorization as Form or Mass, then so too does all-space. Both constructs seek to release and reformulate architecture from those disciplinary conventions; of optical manipulations and geometric processes. Kipnis’ simultaneity of sights suggests the deployment of multiple modes of operation (tactile, optical) in combination, as opposed to a single dominant mode or the collapse of those modes as in phenomenal transparency. On the other hand, Somol suggests Shape as a graphic with the performative capacity to create alternative realities.¹⁵

The all-space building and the shape building also share an interest in context yet have markedly different attitudes towards context. The arguments of both Somol and Kipnis, maintain that the surroundings of the building are essential: Kipnis states that “the rec-Center makes it clear that an all-space building can arise only in an urban situation, where both artificial surfaces and the rudiments of a constructed density gradient are native”; whereas Somol states “that shape is generally involved with the contextual and situational.”¹⁶ Though both methods are involved with their context without making rhetorical references to it, the Rec-Center actively engages the campus’ architectural elements, while a so called shape building can be seen as acting upon its environment. In the case of the Rec-Center, the scheme takes advantage of the disparate parts of the campus buildings, as implicated participants in a ploy that disguises any condition that may otherwise be considered an entry. In this way the interstitial spaces created between the Rec-Center and the other campus buildings become confused and intertwined with the interstitial spaces created by the Rec-Center itself, thereby defeating or at least “suppressing the awareness of entry, so that one finds oneself in the scene without a sense of having gotten there.”¹⁷ On the other hand, the relationship of a shape building to its context is not contingent but projective. That is, the shape building does not use context as a pretext for its being, but rather (re)acts upon that context such as with OMA’s Seattle Public Library or CCTV. In a doubly productive act, shape “generates a new identity” and “reframes the city.”¹⁸ Here the issue of context raises several more questions regarding the potentials of these modes of production. Somol and Kipnis assume the context of the city as a necessity, but is that a necessary condition for shape or all-space? Are the projective and performative qualities ascribed to shape limited to such objects? What are the projective and performative capacities of other architectures? These are questions that will be taken up on the following pages in regards to specific works of architecture. In particular, there will be a focus on the condition of all-space as an architecture that can, through multiple modes/levels of operation, project alternate realities without succumbing to a singular shape. Inherent to the idea of all-space is an ambition for inclusivity, where varieties of contextual influences, penetrate and are made manifest in a work. The success of more recent projects, that achieve a condition of all-space, has been dependent on this issue of inclusivity and a fertile context. As Kipnis points out, the early attempts at an all-space such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s, which “strove literally to construct an undifferentiated continuity between inside and outside”, were set in the landscape. The material and optical attempts to overcome the “inside/outside metaphysic” fell short partly due to the great disparity between the landscape and the architecture, and partly due to the lack of other elements from which a “constructed density gradient” could be achieved.¹⁹

Universtity of Cincinnati, Campus Plan

Sketch for the UC Rec-Center, Thom Mayne

Rather than producing a logo, or a “graphic event directed at consolidating the resources and identity of a community that did not yet exist”,²⁰ Morphosis’ Rec-Center manages to produce a set of urban spaces that create a sense of place from the disparate campus architectures. Morphosis achieves this placeness not with a unifying gesture (which might be suggested by  the roof of the rec-center), but by deploying yet even more disparate elements, and further refuting the formation of a recognizable object or unified whole. Unlike more recent projects of Peter Eisenman, such as the proposal for the Musée du Quai Branly, that connects distinct architectural elements on opposite ends of the site through a singular modulated roof surface or the uniformly defined skin which conveniently wraps the various volumes of the Seattle Public Library of OMA, the Rec-Center’s roof is never seen or experienced in its entirety. Though the roof spans the length of the project, it serves a multitude of spatial roles. Folded, crenulated, pierced and interrupted by expansive trusses, the roof channels flow in one direction, while disrupting it in the other; parting to the sky in moments, while bearing down with an impression of great mass at other times. It is the fragmented nature of the rec-center and its ability to deploy its fragments as yet more campus rather than discrete identifiable objects that allows for a simultaneity of sights; “by muting the exaggerated interests that each and every element tried to demand in its signature work, Morphosis had advanced its architecture into the realm of scape and pointed toward a new approach to the design of an all-space building.”²¹

^{Interstitial spaces of the UC Rec-Center, Morphosis. 1999-2004}

Seattle Public Library, OMA. 1999-2004

Musée du Quai Branly, Eisenman Architects. 1999

As previously mentioned, Kipnis is emphatic that the success of the all-space achievement of the Rec-Center is partly due to the urban situation of the UC campus (which the project is also responsible for inflating). The other project that Kipnis credits for achieving a condition of all-space is the Yokohama Port Terminal by FOA, and it presents an interesting counterpart to the Rec-Center, in terms of their contexts, but also in terms of the differing methodologies. In respect to the urban-ness of the two contexts, neither location is one that would be considered a conventionally urban setting; a university campus and a pier. The UC Campus is in actuality set in a suburban neighborhood, and though the architecture of the campus itself offers the diversity and density of urbanity, it is important to note that the campus plan is coordinated by a the landscape architect, George Hargreaves, and that the role of landscape is just as significant a component of the context as is the architecture.

Yokohama International Port Terminal, FOA: Alejandro Zaero-Polo, Farshid Moussavi. 1995-2002

As a necessary condition of its program, The Yokohama Port Terminal is situated at the edge of the city and inextricably tied to both the water and the land. The condition of the pier, as an extension of the city into the water, brings to the fore the question of artificial or constructed landscapes and the architects’ decision to create an inhabitable roofscape directly responds to that question. The combination of this attitude with the porosity and multiplicity of scales suggested by an infrastructural program, lead to a further exploitation of the potential of an all-space. Unlike Morphosis’ loose knit improvisation method, FOA employs a highly systematic formalism. This method strays from previous formal methods that maintain a level of autonomy from extra-disciplinary influences. The work of FOA embraces factors such as site, program and material limitations, enfolding them within the architectural process. As Sanford Kwinter states in his contribution to Phylogenesis, “true formalism refers to any method that diagrams the proliferation of fundamental resonances and demonstrates how these accumulate into figures of order and shape.”²² In this sense, the key achievement of the project is the method by which FOA is able to geometrically relate all of the influences that they aspire to embrace. In a discussion regarding the project, Zaero-Polo states that “geometry plays a primary role in establishing consistency across spatial domains at every scale… we used a single geometry to generate consistency across the project.”²³ It is precisely this ambition for consistency that takes the project towards an all-space. Like the early examples of Wright or his disciple John Lautner that strove to mitigate the disparity between their buildings and the landscapes within which they were set, FOA’s Terminal seeks to create an undifferentiated experience through continuity of surface and materiality. The bifurcation sequence from their competition entry clearly demonstrates this ambition and also suggests how a consistency of geometry results in a proliferation of like-spaces. As such, Yokohama’s claim to an all-space is achieved through a set of near déjà vu experiences; where similar spatial conditions are found in various parts of building.

Drawings from the competition entry for the Yokohama International Port Terminal, FOA, 1995

Two decades prior to Morphosis’ Rec-center and FOA’s Terminal, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos were also pointing to a new approach at all-space. Like the earlier examples of Wright and Lautner, the work of Miralles is also predominantly set in the landscape. However, it offers a major contribution to this discussion and exhibits new methods, which move beyond those earlier attempts. The working method of Miralles and Pinos is strongly tied to representation, and their drawings bear great insight into the character of the work. What is distinctive of their representational technique is it does not distinguish between landscape and building. They employ the same notational syntax across the field of a work, such as in instances where a contour line morphs into a wall or paving stones become roof shingles. At the Morella School, an early work for a small boarding school set into a rocky hillside against the backdrop of a Moorish Castle, architectural elements and landscape are drawn with equal attention. Similarly, the models of Miralles, typically made entirely of Balsa wood reinforce the inseparability of building from landscape and are equally as boundless as the drawings.

Hostalets Civic Center, Balenyá, Miralles & Pinos. 1986-92 Morella School, Miralles & Pinos. 1986-94

This investment into the syntax of the drawings and models literally translates into the built work. The work of Miralles and Pinos expands the earlier material and optical attempts at an all-space, extending the built further into the landscape through hard-scaping, and extending the land further into the building through a continuity and transformation of landforms. In this way, their buildings are landscaped and their landscapes are constructed.  In addition to the capacity of Miralles and Pinos to transcend the landscape-building divide, their work also bridges the structural-phenomenological divide, through what Lauren Kogod terms the dynamic subject.²⁴ What’s critical to this approach is “the body as an agent in motion, forcefully shaping the space that receives it, more a participant than a mere occupant.”²⁵ Kogod suggests that Miralles and Pinos’ work acknowledges a subject, but it does so without the “direct privileging of the individual.”²⁶ In this respect, the work of Miralles and Pinos may present the most sophisticated example of all-space. Set within the landscape or not, all the various spatial conditions in their projects are like singular inventions. As with the  fragmentary tactile/optical recombinations of the Rec-Center, this work produces a fluctuating field of experience internal to itself, even in the absence of an urban context. Kogod’s description of the Civic Center captures a sense of this:

…the proposition of a promenade architecturale is more pronounced in the Social Center in Hostalets, in which the ramps are not installed as free-standing objects, but actively define the overall form of the building. This project resists any expectations of a figure-ground relationship, despite its rotating ‘beams’ or planes of habitable space. Circulation, structure, space, and volume are knotted into the dense layers of a figure-figure relationship, and every edge is invested with the intensity of friction between two salient forms. Paradoxically, the planes and spaces of the building, both interior and exterior, seem to recede from the viewer, straining away into a distance with multiple vanishing points.²⁷

Suprematist Snowstorm, 1983The Peak, 1983

During the mid 1980’s, another architect was working on her own drawing/painting techniques. Similar to Miralles, the new representational techniques that Zaha Hadid developed during this period reflected an attitude about “architecture as an integral part of the wider world.”²⁸ Though the drawings of Hadid and Miralles appear very different at first, they share much in common. Where, Miralles uses a sparing and reductive language to achieve equality between landscape and architecture, Hadid abstracts all the elements within the field of vision to fragmented planes of color. Again, through drawing, the differences between landscape and building are made nearly indistinguishable; everything comes to be understood as tectonic elements available to architect and her scheme.  As Lebbeus Woods points out, these drawings of Hadid “synthesized entire landscapes within which a project she was designing may have been only a small part.”²⁹ In the drawings for the Peak project, the vague and lightly rendered fragments of the cliff side gradually gain intensity, becoming more and more defined, out of which emerges the Peak Club. This process of abstraction and reinterpretation towards a gradual intensification from context to architecture results in another type of scape: one that no longer relies on the literal. Reaching near and far (very far) into its surrounds, these drawings expand the range of architectural engagement, simultaneously involved with the materiality of the immediate context and the urban elements of the city below.

The examples discussed here achieve varying levels of all-space through a variety of means. There is however some commonality to the methods. In each, there can be seen a tendency toward equalization, whether through representation, geometry, or repetition. That tendency is in turn supplemented by acts of aggregation, surface/ material manipulations and tactile/optical recombination. This supplemental process is essential in implanting in each work an opportunity for a multimodal reading. In this way, an all-space architecture creates not so much an “undifferentiated continuity between inside and outside”, as much as it does an equally differentiated continuity.

Specimens of all-space have appeared, disappeared, and re-emerged at different times over the second half of the twentieth-century. With each incarnation, all-space has evolved to produce greater complexity in its spatial, structural, and material constructs. All the while, all-space has maintained (as the term suggests) an encompassing approach to the disciplinary traits of architecture; rather than ignoring certain traits in favor of others; as transparency favors frontality, auteurship favors mass, and shape favors the graphic. As the intellectual movements of the latter-half of the twentieth century (structuralism, post-structuralism, collage, criticality, post-criticality) came and went, architects at times became frustrated with the shortcomings of each. In those moments of frustration and transition, all-space was always there to offer an alternative; a kind of essentialist practice that emphasized a reconsideration of the fundamentals of architecture (structure, program, materiality, and light) and the ground upon which lies.

¹ Reigle, Alois. Late Roman Art Industry. Trans. Rolf Winkes. Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985. p. 30
² Ibid. p. 24-27
³ Kipnis, Jeffrey. “Cincinnati Impressions.” Fresh Morphosis. Thom Mayne. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc, 2006. p. 14-19
⁴ Kepes, Gyorgy. “Vision in Motion.” Chicago,1944. p. 77
⁵ Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutzky. “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Colin Rowe. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. p. 162-168
⁶ Ibid. p. 161
⁷ Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutzky. “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” As I Was Saying. Colin Rowe, Ed. Alexander Caragonne. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. p. 75
⁸ Kipnis. p. 15
⁹ Ibid. p. 16
¹⁰ Ibid. p. 14-19
¹¹ Ibid. p. 14
¹² Somol, Robert. “12 Reasons to Get Back Into Shape.” Content. Ed. Rem Koolhaas and Brendan McGetrick. Köln: Taschen GmbH, 2004. p. 86-87
¹³ Kipnis. p. 16
¹⁴ Somol. p. 86-87
¹⁵ Ibid
¹⁶ Ibid
¹⁷ Kipnis. p. 18
¹⁸ Somol. p. 86-87
¹⁹ Kipnis. p. 15
²⁰ Somol, Robert. “Green Dots 101.” Hunch 11: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Penelope Dean.  Rotterdam: The Berlage Institute, 2007. p. 28-37
²¹ Kipnis. p. 15
²² Kwinter, Sanford. “Who’s Afraid of Formalism?” Phylogenesis, foa’s ark. Foreign Office Architects. New York: Actar, 2004
²³ Macapia, Peter. “Consistency: A conversation with Alejandro Zaera-Polo.” Log 3. Ed. Cynthia Davidson. New York: Anyone Corporation, 2004. p. 37-49
²⁴ Kogod, Lauren.  “A Commentary on the Work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós.”  Assemblage, No. 7. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. p. 108-111
²⁵ Ibid
²⁶ Ibid
²⁷ Ibid
²⁸ Woods, Lebbeus. “Zaha Hadid’s Drawings.” Architectural Design, Protoarchitecture: Analogue and Digital Hybrids. Ed.Bob Sheil. 2008
²⁹ Ibid

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Amir S. Shahrokhi E.P. holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union. He has worked in a number of offices in Toronto and New York, including ROY Co. He was collaborator with Lebbeus Woods on The Storm, an installation at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery and has also contributed to exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, including Mies in America, and Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk. Amir is currently completing his graduate studies at the Yale School of Architecture.

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