 Much of what I'm going to say is going to be an advertisement for things that I do, which is history is good, travel is good. Perhaps you knew that. But I'm really going to use those terms to talk about how architectural ideas move and how styles have developed in the past. So I'm going to give you this foundational figure, Johann Joachim Winklmann, who posed a question in the 18th century about taste. Is taste innate or can taste be learned? Are you a genius? Are you born a genius? Does any amount of study help you get better at what you do? Or are you always going to be crummy because you're you? Or can you learn things? And Winklmann was a big advocate of the fact that taste could be learned. And so look how fancy he got after studying for a while. This could happen to you if you pay attention and look around. And one thing Winklmann really believed you should do is go and look at things and try to understand the essence of the things you're seeing and perform an operation that Winklmann called imitation. So Goethe went on the grand tour. Goethe got more taste than he had before. But what exactly did Winklmann mean by imitation? And what Winklmann meant was not to simply copy something, not to simply take something's appearance and to reproduce the appearance, but rather to understand what are the driving principles here and how can those principles somehow be appropriated and used based on new criteria, new programs, new materials, and so forth. So I would say the lessons of antiquity were not learned well by Michael Graves in the Disney headquarters building. Winklmann would say a definitive nine. Because this is stupid. But the early modernists loved antiquity. This is Le Corbusier marching around Greece, sketching, taking it all in and learning how to imitate, in Winklmann's sense of the word imitate. Here's Corbou floating in an inner tube in Greece, sketching. And this is a little sketch that Le Corbusier did in his famous voyage to the east in 1910, 1911. It was a real game changer for Corbou. Here's Mies van der Roa in Epidaurus. And here's Mies standing in front of Crown Hall, a building you probably all know at the IIT campus. It's the architecture school. It's not exactly a temple, but it's kind of a temple. We have the Parthenon right next to it. And you can see that both of them have a kind of elevated rectangular platform, the proportions of which are more or less the same, both of which kind of have something in the middle. And both of them have a long columnar edge, Parthenon side elevation Crown Hall. So we have another 18th century German, early 19th century German, giving us some more terms to tell us what to do with these things that we're seeing. When we imitate, how do we imitate in the most productive way possible? Or how do we take the lessons of history and culture and transform them into something new? So this extremely attractive man is Georg Friedrich Hegel. And oh, God help him. Hegel is famous for a lot of things. And one of the things Hegel is famous for, at least gets credit for, although this is not exactly his formulation of the proposition, is the whole notion of dialectic. And this is something we've talked about in history and I'm sure you still remember a little bit about it. Where an idea emerges, let's call it thesis. It's countered by an opposite idea. Let's call that antithesis. And a new idea is forged from the union or the opposition of the two. Let's call it synthesis. The most elegant example of course is spork. Like I like spoons, spoons can scoop. I like forks, forks can poke. How will we resolve this? We will have a spork. It's great. And in Hegel's construction of the dialectic, it is not simply linear that you keep moving forward, nor is it cyclical. You don't keep rehearsing the same ground, but it's forward and upwards. There is this German word aufheben, which means simultaneously overturning, but also lifting up. So if you look at this little diagram here, you can see that the ambition of the synthesis is not simply moving up, but also displacing the reference point. And that's what a good synthesis should do. These are some further iterations of the spork. I like the sporkula quite a lot and the foodle. But in its most basic terms, it is thesis and antithesis coming together and producing a new thing that recasts the terms of importance in both of the previous debates. At one point in history class, I made something that I called the fun chart art, which is not fun. It was just a way to stick lots of information on a chart. And it has to do with one way to look at the history of antiquity, which is dull as dirt unless you give it some kind of construction. And it has to do with the Hegelian progression from matter to spirit, because Hegel has this kind of overarching idea about the dialectic being progressive, aiming toward something that surpasses and outdoes the thing that came before it. And his idea, which he also casts in architectural and artistic terms, has to do with the movement from matter to spirit. So the more the dialectic advances, the more history progresses, the more it discards material and becomes pure philosophy, pure idea, pure spirit. So if you look at the history of architecture, you might start with something like big lumpy things, pyramids, for example, haptic, huge space displacing, singular, simple platonic forms. And as you move forward to Greece, there's a stronger spatial sensibility, the notion of viewing things in the oblique, the relationship between the subject and the object are here, the assemblage of parts, ratios, complex unions of ideas, quite different, dialectically opposed, you might almost say. And when you get to Rome, strangely enough, there's a synthesis of sorts. If you want to use this frame to organize your ideas, something like the Pantheon, huge, but space enclosing, not simply space displacing, platonic form, but platonic form as void rather than platonic form as solid. And so you get a kind of dialectic. You can see it pretty clearly on this little image of Roman temples for Tuna virilis and Pantheon. Both are kind of hybrid, little bit of Greek portico, little bit of massive wall-bearing architecture coming together. And this way of discussing the dialectic is embedded genetically in art history. That the great art historians, people like Heinrich Wolfland, people like Giacomo Burkhardt, who was Wolfland's teacher, ancestrally go back to being students of Hegel. And when Wolfland writes his famous books at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, Renaissance and Baroque, 1888, and Principles of Art History, I think, 1912, it's set up in a dialectic way. In history class we looked at linear versus painterly, clear, unclear, et cetera. So that's talking about old people, but let's see how these ideas have informed more recent art. So we're gonna look at some 20th and 21st century architects to see how they play out the dialectic or how they perform the vinculmanian operation of imitation to productive ends. Let's take a paradigm. Let's take a perfect model of architecture. Let's take the Parthenon and let's see how you subvert it. And I have in parentheses the word here high because subverting high culture is the way that modernism operates. And by modernism I mean the great 20th century modernists, knees, corbeau, et cetera. If you don't remember the Parthenon, I'm just refreshing your memory. Here it is. And it's perfect, right? It's got all these clear relationships. It's got some wacky things like entices and optical corrections that have to do with your perception of the object. But the object in its disposition of parts, in its articulation of parts, in its logic is as clear as clear can be. This is an architecture that derives its form not from the whim of an individual but from the collective consciousness of an age. So, mees. We know mees went to Greece. We know mees is pretty smart. And when he gets his first chance to build something, or let's say not his first chance, but to build something that doesn't look like a little yodeling chalet, he builds the Barcelona pavilion at the exposition grounds in Barcelona. Here's the site plan. It's quite an interesting site plan, especially if you look at the Barcelona pavilion. Barcelona pavilion, rather sleek, rather abstract, a distiled construction of planes in space, dematerialized window envelope, et cetera. And this site plan is a ponderous bozar site plan organized by axes. And mees's location is actually terminating the cross axis through the Barcelona pavilion grounds. How does mees respond to this? How does he respond to this royalist regime giving him the task of building a pavilion to represent Weimar socialist Germany? And we can already see that there is something about the movement away from the material toward pure spirit, or in the case of mees, let's say a spatial conception, a dematerialized building envelope, a transparency instead of an opacity and a heaviness. But there's also this history game going on because it's how do you make your idea as timeless and eternal as the Parthenon? And one way to do that is to take on the Parthenon on its own terms. So here's our friend the Barcelona pavilion and here's the Parthenon. There are uncanny similarities between the two of them. Again, we have the idea of the rectangles being similar shapes. We have the notion of a cella in the Parthenon, but we have a dismantled cella in the Barcelona pavilion. It's as though a giant axis went crashing through it, splintering it apart into two different pieces and opening it up, democratizing a structure that would have been closed in its original use and opening it up to the people. Mees is not being haphazard in his relationship to the Parthenon. One thing that's easy to spot is the notion of stylobate or giant elevated platform that both buildings are located on. It's also easy to spot the idea of these columns, these cruciform columns that Mees uses to give you the shape, to give you the memory, the trace of the dismantled temple. So he's also playing with the proportions. The building slides apart, the cella goes one way, the stylobate goes another way, and he's matching the proportions of the Parthenon, one for one. He's even taking things in the Parthenon, for example, the idea that there's a cult figure in the side of the building, and he's thrusting it out in this kind of slippage and throwing it into the reflecting pond over there. So these are the constituent parts of the Parthenon, beautifully color coded, because I have a new computer and it gives me freedoms I could never have dreamt of before. And if you assemble the pieces of the Parthenon, you can make yourself a Barcelona pavilion. It's kind of amazing, I did not tweak the shapes. Mees is performing some kind of critical act on the Parthenon, and I think he's doing that to justify his choices, to correct the errors of architecture that derives from one kind of closed political society and to open it up to meet the ambitions of this new progressive culture in the Weimar Republic. Spatially, it's doing a lot of the same things that say, Riedfeld's red blue chair are doing. That is to say, pulling the thing apart and opening it up as a series of planes shifting in space. But politically, he's doing something else. He's building in monarchist Spain. This is Alfonso the 13th, a very attractive man, but I would say a little bit stuffy. And this is Marlena Dietrich in the blue angel, exemplifying the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany. Nothing is as modern as Weimar Germany, nothing. The architecture put there by Alfonso looks like this and the Barcelona pavilion looks like it looks. Shifted apart, split. And here we see the cult statue that originally would be held inside the Parthenon, thrown out into public view. There is no more closure. Everything is open. By the way, you're probably wondering, how did I find the cult statue inside the Parthenon? Because you probably think the Parthenon is a ruin. But if you go to Nashville, there's a perfectly good Parthenon there. Excellently maintained with its own gold leaf cult statue and that is where that one came from. Another thing Mies is doing to kind of stimulate thinking is not simply having his dialectic exist within the world of architecture, but he's broadening his scope to look at art. So if you look at something like The Rhythm of the Russian Dance by Theo van Doesburg, it looks like almost a map for the kinds of strategies that Mies is playing out in the Barcelona Pavilion. If I had more ambition and more time, I would take the Barcelona Pavilion and lay it out over Rhythm of the Russian Dance and you would pretty much see the Barcelona Pavilion emerging from the lines that van Doesburg had put there. Let's look at another high culture paradigm, the Villa Rotunda. How does modernism establish its legitimacy by coming to terms with something like this? How has history imaginatively transformed into something new? If you don't remember the Villa Rotunda, God help you. I want you to take at least one thing away from history class. But here it is again and I'm sure you all know this. This is the ideal Villa in the ideal landscape. A centralized Villa with porches extending on four sides with this Rotunda, this round space in the middle. This aerial view shows you the Villa Rotunda in its particular landscape. And I would have to say it's great from the outside, but if it were up to me to critique the Villa Rotunda, I would say it's kind of B minus, maybe even C plus on the interior. The space of the Rotunda is completely cut out from the exterior. The space of the Rotunda is denied a view and therefore forced to conjure up a view with really bad 18th century wall paintings. So let's look in a more essential way at what constitutes the Villa Rotunda. And you might say cross axes, a square, a circle, and some kind of striated space. Because it's not really what you think it is. You all think it's a nine square grid, right? If you had to draw the plan of the Villa Rotunda, and maybe Doug made you do that in theory class and nobody got it right, because you all draw a nine square grid with a circle in the middle, you have bands of space. It works differently in one direction than in the other. And in the middle you have a circle. And then you have your four porches and you can put them anywhere. Why not put them on the cross axes? What does Le Corbusier do when trying to come to terms with a paradigm like the Villa Rotunda? And we're just speculating that he's trying to come to terms with it. But my hunch is, sure he is. Why wouldn't he be doing that? It's an interesting problem. Well, let's look where he started. This is Le Corbusier in 1905, doing the Villa Fallot in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Fabulous, but really national romanticism and style. It really takes the type of Swiss chalet and vernacular architecture and Raskinian materiality and runs with it. It's not really a progressive project on the part of Corbusier. But then he goes on his voyage to the east. He writes a little book, Voyage d'Orient Carnet, which basically means voyage to the east notebooks, which contains sketches and diaries from this voyage to the east. And it was really transformative. Because when he comes back, he performs a kind of dialectical synthesis between the high culture type, which is the Villa Rotunda idea, and the vernacular Mediterranean architecture that he admired, which was, for the most part, constitute of simple volumes, simple geometrical volumes bathed in light, clear, precise geometry, the qualities of which are revealed not so much through detail, slopped on the surface, but through strong massing. So here's what Le Corbusier does when he gets back from his voyage to the east. He does the Villa Schwab, also in his hometown, Le Choc Fan. This is a crazy project. I always have trouble believing that this is a good elevation. I know that it's a smart elevation, but I have trouble believing it's a good elevation. And part of it is he's layering on so much history. You can barely get away from it. In a sense, here's a flattened elevation of a really good-looking Greek vernacular house. Pure geometry, simple, clean. And at the margins, at the margins, he clusters all this glop. Look at the cornices. As the rounded bays pull out, the pronounced geometry of the cornices becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. It's almost as if he's taking something like the Villa Rotunda and cracking it open. He's cracking it open, taking the old detritus coated with the big cornices. So you know this is ye olden days. We have these little Byzantine windows here, even. Another thing you must have seen in Greece, and finding this new pure spatial conception. He's freeing the center from the perimeter and allowing the square to be sectionally complex and luminous. Oh, Corbou, there's no stopping you. So these are some of the effects that you get. And it's still a kind of strange hybrid of different impulses on the part of Corbou. Another thing he's doing to subvert the type is he's taking the idea of ideal Villa in an ideal landscape. Object in a landscape, and he's making it emphatically sided. He's slamming it into a wall. So it is no longer an ideal landscape. It's bar object. It's hard edge, soft edge. And it's not just looking at one source to get his ideas. He's looking at lots of sources. In Corbou's Towards a New Architecture, he publishes a picture of the capital by Michelangelo. And you see the regulating lines that describe the proportions here. These are the same regulating lines he uses to define the facade of the Villa Schwab. Crazy. So Villa Rotunda is a good one. Let's see what Mies does with it. You take the Villa Rotunda, you have to hate the domed part of the Villa Rotunda. Worst space in the world. No view, no light, no nothing. Another thing you could critique if you wanted to is the whole idea of four identical porches. Like yeah, east, west, south, and some other direction. But so what? I mean, why couldn't it be more than that? Why does it have to be bilaterally symmetrical? And so in the Tugannat house, it is almost as if Mies cracks open the Villa Rotunda in a different way. In a way inspired by the same kind of de-style pushes and pulls that we saw in the Wenduzburg painting and that we also saw in the Barcelona Pavilion. Look at the porches that we get. We get a porch in the front, entry porch. We get a porch in the back viewing the garden. We get a terrace over here. We get a service porch here. We get everything you have in the Villa Rotunda, but each are assigned special properties. You even get this kind of winter garden which becomes an interior porch to the house. A nice thing to have in a climate like Brno Czech Republic where it is freezing quite a lot of the year. And in many ways the whole house becomes a porch. The whole house becomes the portico because there's this famous detail of the window along here. The way you open this window is not in any way that you usually do it, but the window slides into the base. So the window goes away and you have pure portico. The whole house is the Villa Rotunda. And it goes down to this level where there's conveniently a little railing so people don't die. By being so pleased at the beautiful view that they hurl themselves over the edge. I think that was one of Mies' nicest moments. What becomes of the Rotunda in this scheme? We've been criticizing the closure of the Rotunda in the old Villa Rotunda. And notice this strange circular figure in Mies' project which really seems out of place with his distile sensibility. I think it can really only be understood as some kind of reference to the Villa Rotunda. And here, instead of being closed and held away from the exterior, it's open to the exterior. It's part of the portico. The space organizes circulation at its perimeter and begins to contain space in the interior in a way that allows you simultaneously to feel at a center and in a place of importance and connected to the view, to the exterior and to the space of the rest of the house. So there we have it again. Fabulous. Everybody's doing the Villa Rotunda, quite frankly. Philip Johnson, who really is imitating even Le Corbusier's appearance over here, takes, as his point of departure for the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, the idea of porches, now all of which are subsumed to the interior of the building, you get your four views in four cardinal directions and Rotunda, which becomes service spaces in this house. Probably one of the most interesting Villa Rotundas is not too far from the real Villa Rotunda, and it's by an engineer called Angelo Invernizzi, to which you probably all wanna say who? I've never heard of Angelo Invernizzi. He made his money as a railroad engineer and he designed the roundhouses for train stations. That would be the train would come into a dead-ended station and there would be a platform that would rotate so that the train could be pointed out and going in the right direction. And he thought, this is a great idea. I'm gonna get one of those roundhouse platforms and I'm gonna build a house on it. And so he did. This is the Villa Girasole. And Girasole means sunflower, or literally it means turn with the sun. So he built himself an L-shaped house on a railroad pivot and the house has the possibility of becoming a kind of virtual Villa Rotunda, reorganizing itself to find the most congenial alignment of the sun. So it's not like Angelo Invernizzi was actually trying to build a Villa Rotunda but I think the others were. And I think when we look at the high modernists, most of what they were doing is what I would call imitation. Most of it was a kind of taking to terms the essence of antiquity and reformulating it. I think when you get to postmodernism, there's a lot more dialectical synthesis going on because people are not simply dealing with the legacy of history but they're also dealing with the legacy of modernism. So if you take something like the house and you subvert the paradigm and you do it with reference to low culture rather than high culture, you get a kind of playbook for postmodernism. And I use the term broadly to describe people who are dealing with their position in history in a not so progressive and not so totalizing way as the high modernist would. Here's an idea about the house. This is a monopoly house and this is kind of a monopoly house too. A Levittown house from 1948. Typical of developer houses that are all over the world. And I'm sure you know Venturi's mother's house which is kind of a riff on the monopoly house. It's even green for heaven's sakes. And it transforms based on a number of other synthesis. All of these are low culture synthesis. We see the billboard and this thing is flat as a pancake. We see the cowboy town of a facade doing one thing and the volume of a building doing another thing. This is I think looking a lot like the Villa Schwab with its blankness up here, but not intentionally. But Venturi, like Mies, like Le Corbusier is also looking at art and looking at things that are more or less contemporary with the time that he's doing his house. And that would be the whole, let's say debate in the art world between high art which Tony Smith's box would exemplify. This kind of minimalist cube and pop art which Andy Warhol's Brillo Box exemplifies. And it's amusing because they're both boxes but there's a kind of rye acknowledgement of the multiplicity of the tradition in the Warhol and a kind of insistent totalization of the project in the Tony Smith. But back to Venturi because I maintain that Venturi is not simply looking at low art. And if you read complexity and contradiction there are about 200 references to arcane buildings every paragraph to prove to you that he's looking at lots of stuff. But let's look at the site plan and see one building that he's probably looking at quite specifically. This is Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania and here's Venturi's mother's house. This is the site plan dropped onto a Google map. Here's Louis Kahn's Escherich house. Venturi's house is 1960. Louis Kahn's house is 1959. These houses are really close together in terms of where they are. I would say the Escherich kids would trick or treat at Venturi's mother's house. And she probably gave good candy because she seems like a pleasant woman. But when you think about their roles in the history of architecture they're so different. I mean Louis Kahn is so much part of the trajectory of progressive modernism. Venturi is so much part of let's say the pop art or the post-modern ironic repositioning of what architecture is in culture. As an example, Louis Kahn used to work for and then with George Howe and William Lascaz, the architects of the PSFS building, the first international style skyscraper in the United States. The young Louis Kahn worked on that project and the work of the young Louis Kahn are sort of oldish but younger Louis Kahn like the Yale Art Museum represent in a really refined form the aspirations of the international style. This is Louis Kahn, he's carrying on that project. By the way, this is Gary Cooper in the film The Fountainhead as Howard Rourke defending the purity of his idea against people who just don't get it, who don't understand. He will blow the building up rather than let people shovel history down his throat. He is living in the future, he's thinking like an engineer. This is an example of the other architect saying what about a little pediment? Wouldn't you like that? And he's saying, no, tear it down. But I think actually these guys have a good idea because if you look at the building that Gary Cooper is standing next to, there is no door. There are pilotea and a slab and these guys are probably saying wouldn't the door be a good thing? Couldn't we add a door somehow? But let's look at the Escherich House because I think if you look at the Escherich House it will blow you away, it will change your reading of the Venturi House. Have you guys done the Venturi House for history yet or for theory? So this is tragic. A little bit late, I thought I was gonna feed you some good tips. This is the street elevation where the trick-or-treaters come out of to go to Venturi's mother's house and the Escherich predates the Venturi House. Notice that it is a series of cubes, volumes, not flat planes, but the cubed volumes are split in half, split in half. One side is more or less a square aperture. The other side is more or less a linear aperture. So Venturi is simply making a billboard and a house or a house cartoon out of the basic principles of the Escherich House. Even the idea of the fireplace, the chimney, as a figure that plays in terms of massing against the wall of the Escherich House becomes a feature in the entry of the Venturi's mother's house. And the proportions are matched one to one. This is the Escherich House. The blue rectangle is the same as the blue rectangle. The center yellow rectangle is the same as the center yellow rectangle here, and so forth. So Venturi is clever. But how does that game get played when we march closer to the present and get out of the 20th century and into the 21st century? I can't wait to find out. I think it will be exciting. So let's look. Let's look at the Maison-Roudin in France, house for the sister of either Herzog or de Meron. Crazy house, right? I mean, you look at it and you wanna just think, this can't be done yet. Why can't they get some of that, you know, Le Corbusier stencil work going that we saw on Villa Follet? There is a strange hybrid condition going on here. We have a platform on Pilot and on top of the platform, we have a monopoly house. It's as if there's a kind of synthetic act of putting together these two irreconcilable ideas about house. The traditional house and the modern house and slamming them together. And you might say that there's another thing coming into play here and that goes down to the biography of Herzog and de Meron. There were both students at the ETH in Zurich and they were students of Aldo Rossi, the Italian postmodern architect. So Rossi had this critique of modernism and his critique was that history, memory, place, all of these things that architecture had as its core mission were being discarded by the universalization of the architectural envelope in modernism. And he would do these little colored drawings to try to re-evoke these qualities that are now only present in dreamed architecture. Herzog and de Meron are kind of critically responding also to the legacy of Aldo Rossi in putting this house together. And I would say of all these things, well, I think Rossi is the one who gets subverted the most because there's so much kind of critical irony going on in the Maison Roudin that you don't get much of that cuteness. This is an interesting plan. This is the Roudin house plan and this is the Villa Savoy. Big old ramp cutting down the middle, big old bar along one side, big old stair cutting up under the pilotee. How crazy is that into the house? So it's almost a direct remaking of the plan but reprogramming the pieces within the plan. And of course the section of the Villa Savoy looks nothing like this, right? You do not have pilotee with a monopoly house on top of it. That would not happen. Herzog and de Meron are not simply taking Corbuda tasks, they're taking all the high modernists to task. So if you look at the Maison Roudin and you look at the extended planes that go off to either side, you begin to see that this is the footprint of the Barcelona Pavilion. And at the point in the Barcelona Pavilion where you have the reflecting pond, this idiosyncratic reflecting pond is put here as if to say, please pay attention, I'm giving you signals, I'm telling you what we're doing. We are taking on history and we are remaking it based on new terms. You could go through the whole genealogy of how this thing plugs in to all of these other buildings. But I wanna look at another Herzog building that also plays with the idea of house or the Aldo Rossi cartoon of a house remembered through foggy dreams. And that's the Xiaolager in Basel. Here's the plan. This is a really fabulous building. In many ways, it's a dumb box, right? Box, box, box, box, box. And then the entry becomes like a theater, like a proscenium, cut away. And there's a real material coating of what it means to cut into the box. The exterior of the box is this rough, it almost looks like mud. It's not mud, it's some kind of concrete, but it's brown and it's irregular. And you get the sense that this is a primitive hut more primitive than the skeletal primitive hut suggested by Loge. And in fact, just a mud hut. And it makes visible the mud hut in this little entry pavilion, which is right over here. So the way you come into the Xiaolager is you move around this little primitive hut into this pure white proscenium. And it's almost like he's turned the Billes Savoie inside out to have this white stucco fabulousness. The proportions of the opening are very similar to the proportions of the Billes Savoie opening. He doesn't do anything by accident. It's really quite amazing. It's also almost as if the terms that Hegel put forward of the material yielding to pure space or pure spirit or the haptic, the lowest regal's terms, yielding to the optic are being made visible here. Nothing is as haptic as a mud cube. Nothing is as optic as this cone of vision that's being built architecturally. And again, although Rossi gets folded in, this is the distortion of a perspective space that we get made manifest here. But like Mies and like Venturi, Herzog and Neymar are also folding in art. And they do this probably more relentlessly than any other architects practicing today. And they're very interested in the art of the Fluxus group and particularly Joseph Boys. This is a detail, by the way, of a window at the Schaulager where you can see they make it look like cracks in mud. But it's a ribbon window. So it's cracks in mud around a ribbon window. Hilarious, good joke. And this is a piece by the German artist Joseph Boys where he takes something familiar and de-familiarizes it by switching out the material. Here, he's wrapped a piano in felt. And this is Joseph Boys. This is another Joseph Boys project where he made a chair and put a bunch of fat on it, which is a great idea. But it's a good idea, actually. This is a quote from Mark C. Taylor who's talking about the chair and trying to make you think this isn't stupid, which might be your first take on it because it's a chair full of fat for God's sake. What are you gonna think? But Mark C. Taylor's smart, so he makes a good argument. Here's what he says. It's all about the fat, the way it looks, smells, feels, the way it oozes and seeps and jiggles and ripples, molds and melts, the way it is stored and burnt. During an era in which art was becoming ever more abstract and thus increasingly thin, Boys made art fat, real fat, fat. So you look closely at the materials that Herzog and Amal choose to use in any of their buildings and this is a detail from the stuff of the whites, the white entry to Schaulager. It is amazing. It's this kind of reformulation of surface that you don't frequently see in architecture but you see it art all the time. Like this is Eva Hess playing around with textures and metal and this is the mud stuff on Schaulager. So matchy, matchy, matchy. So I just wanna go through a kind of summary of the dialectical synthesis by starting with a fabulous building, the Paris Opera House and ending up with, I don't remember, but something a little bit newer than that. Because the Paris Opera House exemplifies the aesthetic of the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts, the School of Fine Arts, originally in France but then the method became institutionalized all over the world, held sway over what counted as high architecture for quite a long time and there was no building better at making that image clear than the Paris Opera House. And I love this building. It's one of my favorite buildings but even as a fan, I have to admit it is covered with glop. Glop, glop, glop, glop, glop. Oh, we got some glop up here. We got glop down here. The stuff that's great about the Paris Opera House is the sequence through the spaces, it's the light, it's the scale, it's the position of the individual and the viewers within the space. Not so clear why you need quite so much glop and clearly somebody like me's at Crown Hall is making the same kind of critique which is to say this is a box articulated by a columnar order. This is a box articulated by a columnar order. In this case, the columns are totally fraudulent. They're simply stuck there to add to the decadence of glop land that we have. Here we have these exoskeletal braces that are actually holding up the building and we have little eye beams here that are actually stiffening the window. So in this case, at least, Mises structure is real structure and it's doing the same work that the Paris Opera House is doing but in a clean, abstract volume. You might say, where's the glop? And your answer would have to be, well, there's no glop. There is no glop at all. This is a glop-free building. How do you synthesize a building embedded in history, embedded in tradition? They called it, those are, believe that they were really practicing the principles of classical architecture in a way that was consistent to the way that the Greeks and the Romans practiced those principles. They taught symmetry, they taught proportion, they taught the orders. How do you synthesize these two propositions together? And the answer might be something like this and really, it really might that be it? But think about it. This is, again, Aldo Rossi, the teacher of Herzog and Emma Long and a very important Italian post-modernist. This is an architecture that tries to recover for architecture the tasks of connecting to a history, the task of making monument, the task of place specificness. Rossi uses this word oneric, which means as if in a dream. And so this is a redreamed architecture and in that redreaming, it becomes radically simplified. In fact, the Rossi architecture is like the Mesian architecture, glop free. It is an architecture of abstraction. So what do the students of Aldo Rossi make of all this? And I think architecture keeps getting more interesting because there are more layers of dialectic to fold into it. We take another spin of the dialectic when we get to Herzog and Emma Long because they have to make sense out of Rossi. They don't simply have to make sense out of history and modernism, but they have to make sense out of history, modernism and postmodernism. So look at this. This is early Herzog and Emma Long, the Gutz Foundation, a museum, private museum in Munich. And you could just imagine them giggling like crazy as they're designing this, remembering the Aldo Rossi sketches that they got beat up with when they were students saying you like that, this is what we like, suck it up, right? But at the same time, this is an interesting building. It is not simply the anti-Rossian hut. In many ways, it is going back to Mies. It's the simplified Miesian box, but it's not simply the simplified Miesian box because the Miesian box is really interested in telling you a somewhat fake story about structural honesty, at least expressing something that looks like structure so that the logic of the building can be read. And this performs an opposite operation. There is this heavy travertine plenum floating between two plenums of glass. It's an anti-gravity building. And in fact, travertine is the material of Rome. It is the heavy stone of ancient Rome. It is the materiality and the articulation actually of something like the Paris Opera, but cast in Miesian terms. Hilarious. They're really sticking it to poor old Aldo Rossi. What's he gonna do with that? And what are they going to do next, you might add? And this is an example of a slightly later project by Herzog and Amon. It's the Eberswalde Library in Germany. It's another Miesian box, more or less, but it's a Miesian box that is covered with glock. Glock, glock, glock, glock, glock. There is more glock on the Eberswalde Library than there was on the Paris Opera House. And the glock is varied. Some of the glock seems to be drawn from high culture, like the reclining nude that we saw over here. But some of it is stuff from the newspaper. And there is this kind of seriality that erases the specificity of each work as a masterpiece and seems to buy into some kind of project of mechanical reproduction to transform the status of the image. It's a kind of synthesis between glock density at the Paris Opera House and formal abstraction of a Miesian box. Totally clever. And these guys are Swiss. So they're also picking up on certain aspects of Swiss vernacular, right? We saw when we looked at Villa Fale, a tradition that happens a lot in vernacular Swiss architecture, and that is the pattern facade. And we saw in our history class, Otto Wagner doing a similar thing in the Majorca House in Vienna. So they're looking at that, but they're not looking at that in a copyist way, but they're looking at this in an imitative way. They're trying to somehow re-inscribe these issues into the cultural exigencies of the day, and one thing that pushes them forward is looking at art. This is a bit of the facade, and these are some serial sequences of images by Andy Warhol, where they're looking at the way the pattern shifts and changes as it repeats across the surface. Or they're even looking at the hyper-pixelated image-making of somebody like Liechtenstein or the German artist, Zygma Polke. So yes, one more Herzog and De Maume building before I finish, and that is this one. This is the Vitra House. This is the newest of the buildings we're looking at, and it's a shocker, isn't it? Because most of the other buildings that we were looking at in some way favored the abstraction of form and complexity of material as their way of working. That all of the gymnastics that you would expect to find in formal manipulations in an architect, say like Frank Gehry, happened in terms of surface complexity in the architecture of Herzog and De Maume. But here, these are like monopoly hotels, not monopoly houses that are stacked together. And like, what are they doing? It's almost as if they are taking the logic of ornament making. There's a piece of the Paris Opera House where you see all these little tangles and twists and turns, and they're finding some way to recover the density and the complexity and the plasticity of surface that you have in traditional ornament. But instead of using it simply to modify surface, they're using it as a kind of point of departure for the entire project. The little gizmos I have up here are ormalu. This is Rococo ornament, where forms will twist and repeat and overlap each other. And so it is almost as if, by this point in their career, they're taking their type from Aldo Rossi. They're taking their syntax from the syntax of traditional ornament and they're taking the materiality from Mies van der Roa or from high modernism in the Miesian box. And so that's how style moves forward. That's a synthesis. And it's also a good lesson for young architects, which is this. If you want to be famous, if you want to advance the discourse, you cannot do what's popular. You have to do the opposite of what is popular. And by doing the opposite of what is popular, you somehow critically reframe things that came before you. And I say this with a note of caution that during the course of this studio, you have to do exactly what we tell you to do. No subversive actions will be tolerated. But after you get out for a while and reflect on what you're doing, I think the worst thing you can do is what you learn at school, because what you learn at school will already be out of date by the time you're in graduate school. And what you have to do is kind of critically engage the discipline so that you can be an active player.