ARCHITECTURE AND REPRESENTATION. Peter Eisenman

Lectio Magistralis. Accademia di Brera, Milan, 27/01/2012. Peter Eisenman. 

First, I want to thank the Brera Academy.
It is a great honor.
As part of that honor I would like to share a few personal thoughts with you.

Many scholars have noted the impossibility of a stable language after the Holocaust, that a poetic language, like German, could never be the same. This is also true of architecture in particular, whose language always had problems in terms of the representation and expression of deep emotions or feelings. This is especially true in the case of a memorial, and more specifically one to the Murdered Jews of Europe. More generally, the problem of an architectural language has to do with the representation of anything in architecture, especially in attempting something which clearly has as its primary goal an emotional narrative.

To understand this problem, it is necessary to paraphrase a debate in the 18th century between two German philosophers, Gottfried Lessing and Johann Winckelmann, about the famous second-century Greek sculpture, Laocoön. The Laocoön is a sculpture of three men – a father and his two sons – being strangled by huge sea serpents twisted around them like giant pythons.

Winckelmann argued that the Greeks could express a confrontation with agony and death in their tragic poetry and dramas, but because they were a heroic people possessing a certain sublime nature, they could not face the horror of portraying such a tragedy in physical form in a sculpture. Hence, the face of Laocoön is not contorted in the throes of the moment before death. Rather, the stoic tranquility of the face represents for Winckelmann a kind of transcendent horror that is abstracted from the real agony of the figure. Thus, for Winckelmann, this sculpture, while it expresses the death throes of Laocoön, cannot express any noble simplicity in accordance with Greek ideals of soul. This, he argued, is beyond the scope of a sculptural form.

Lessing replied to Winckelmann in a famous essay, “The Laocoön” of 1766. Lessing agreed that the Laocoön sculpture shows a man in extremis, under conditions of the most violent suffering, but that the pain is expressed without any sign of rage in either his face or his posture. Lessing proposed that while Laocoön suffers, and this suffering pierces our very soul, Winckelmann attributes this, he said, to the endurance of suffering as a great man, that is, as a Greek would endure. Lessing was critical of Winckelmann and suggested that according to the ancient Greeks, crying aloud when in physical pain is compatible with a nobility of soul. Thus the desire to express such nobility could not have prevented the artist from representing the scream in the sculpture. Lessing’s point is crucial. He said that what can be represented in literature, poetry, and even in music is different from what can be represented in figural form – that is, in an object, in the form and space of painting, sculpture, and more importantly architecture. Lessing suggested that the reason Laocoön and his sons do not express agony in its full formation is that the physical form of the human mouth open in a violent scream becomes a caricature, a mawkish representation that lacks any formal quality. Thus any expression of violent agony would overcome the formal quality of the sculpture. And for Lessing, it is the formal quality that also gives both meaning and an internal integrity to the figure.

Lessing argued that the supreme law of difference between sculpture and poetry is that emotion can be expressed in a literal writing – that is, in literature or poetry – because the reader does not directly confront these emotions in that context. This difference articulates what can be called the autonomy of sculpture, an autonomy that is important to this argument when it comes to architecture and the Holocaust. When something is in writing, the reader has to use his or her imagination. When physical or emotional pain, or the reaction to such pain, i.e. to the Holocaust in a memorial, when it needs to be expressed in physical form, it requires a different form of imagination; hence the problem of such a representation for architecture.

This problem certainly pertains to the possibility of expressing emotion and its affect when it comes to the specific case of such an expression in the architecture of a Holocaust memorial.

There is no doubt that the Holocaust and its culture of representation has been considered a singular problem in the discourse of Western thought, at least through the end of the last century. But a monument is a very specific case of such a representation for architecture. Can a monument ever be architecture; and in the very specific case of the Holocaust, can it ever be both a representation of an external political, social narrative, as well as an example of the internal necessities of architecture, its disciplinary being? I am here this evening to argue that such a condition is possible. In order to express what I consider necessary to any architecture, it is necessary to lessen the importance of a representation as stated above in favor of something I will call a “presentation in the present.”

Thus, the aspects of the memorial in Berlin that may make it architecture are twofold. One is the recognition of the paradigm shift that has moved toward the affective experience of objects and away from their critical, linguistic, and textual nature. Whether by accident or by design, our memorial was less about its possibility of its representation of a symbolic text, but rather about the individual subject having a prima facie experience in the present.

This is not about the prima facie of the space of the concentration camps themselves. The camps can be seen and then psychologically assimilated into everyday experience. This is not the case with our memorial site, which allows for the experience of the affect of being alone, of being constricted, of possibly feeling lost in space, if ever such a condition were possible. This is an experience which cannot be easily assimilated in and of itself into everyday experience. It is an out of the ordinary physical experience unlike any other in everyday life. That is what makes it architecture: a physical experience that does not rely on a representation of the Holocaust as its major narrative but rather seeks to present what architecture is and can be.

At the time of the Memorial’s opening some seven years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, writing in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, suggested that there were two types of memory: one was the immemorable, or that which could not be or was beyond being memorialized; and the other was an archival memory, that which could be recorded and preserved. Agamben suggested that the Memorial in Berlin did both, the field of pillars being the immemorable and the underground chambers being the archival.

Ultimately, as a great painting is always about painting and less about its content, and great literature is ultimately about writing and only secondarily about its narrative, so too is architecture which aspires to be of disciplinary importance always about architecture. It is that aspect of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin which remains long after any memory has faded.