The Inevitability of (or to) Form

This is an extended version of paper delivered at The F Word: Formalism, the scarlet letter of architecture Symposium, Syracuse
University School of Architecture, Florence, 19 February 2016.

Introduction
This paper draws from nearly a dozen previous papers that have sought to question the role of form
in semiotics and structuralism, the history of the picturesque, walking practices, the everyday and
the history of housing in Britain. The preamble consists of a set of quotes in the form of espresso
shots that point to some conceptual and theoretical premises that underpin the paper. They point
to alternative discussions and trajectories that can be taken with the material that follows. Part 1
outlines a possible origin for the visual regime which currently dominates contemporary architectural
production. Part 2 looks at a couple of historical moments when something other than visual content
is allowed to play a significant role in conceiving spatial forms. But it also suggests that here too,
there is a deflection of focus on the contribution of form. In looking at the everyday Part 3 provides a
way of thinking about spatial form that can avoid treating spatial forms as merely a visual medium. It
also takes a look at problems with agency-driven analyses that fail to grasp the close relationship
between human actions and the spatial forms in which they take place. A short case study in Part 4
attempts to demonstrate how close attention to form reveals its role in the formation of practices
and identity formation. It makes a case for an inseparable but alterable relationship between
practices and forms.
Preamble: Conceptual seeds around form

As far as being a formalist, I have learnt not to shy away from this accusation. One
of the things that cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies etc. the realm
of the studies sought to achieve was to open up a discourse that appeared to be
fairly closed. Yet it actually levelled out in the name of difference the questions
that ought to be asked of the work of art. The questions the studies as are always
the same.
This is where I defer. I do not speak about differences, but always ask myself, when
in front of any art object: what is its specificity?
Yve-Alain Bois 1

But architecture is as much a physical construct as it is a social or political one and

to understand architecture as a mere representation of the political is as
problematic as to declare architecture entirely ruled by natural laws.
Alejandro Zaera Polo 2

The union of man and space is the action of man in that space. We come to know
space through actions. The vectors traced by the actions of man in space are: the
vertical station of man and every object, the horizontal of the environment that he
encounters on both sides, and the depth, before him, of forward movement.
Strezminski & Kobro 3

we must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine
its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other
statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement
it excludes.
Michel Foucault 4

1
Andrew McNamara and Rex Butler, All About Yve: An Interview with Yve-Alain Bois, Eyeline, no. 27 (Autumn 1995): 1621.
2
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, The Politics of The Envelope, Log, no. 13/14 (2008): 193207.
3
Quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting As Model (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990), 146.
4
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002).
 Part 1 Anecdote: the beginnings of a visual regime?
In 1334 Giotto was appointed the master of the works for S. Maria del Fiore, in
Florence. Under this title Giotto was responsible for the design of the campanile, built
between 1334 and 1359. Giotto was a painter and sculptor by training but
nevertheless occupied a role normally associated with an architect. I use this episode
as a kind of bookmark to note the beginning of the dominance of the visual in
architecture. Though it may not be factually accurate (like Pruitt Igoe being the end
of modernism) is it useful for understand the differences in the way architecture has
been conceived in different historical periods. The shift that I see taking place, or at
least signalled, by Giottos campanile makes sense when you compare the
difference in modes of signification between the medieval and renaissance periods.

The renaissance conception had to give the death-blow to the continuous

representation of the Middle Ages. Perspective and continuous representation are
irreconcilable in their very presuppositions. 5

Christian and medieval architecture, particularly gothic cathedrals, are

often interpreted as a visual architecture or as a container for visual
messages (stained glass and iconographic sculpture). However, what
Dagobert Fry calls continuous representation is an architecture that relies on
bodily movement for the full meaning of its architecture to make sense. For
example, in many mediaeval churches one has to physically move off the
central axis to enter due to the presence of a central column dubbed
Christ the column. 6 While the column as a static object is meant to
represent Christ, its meaning is only fully realised by the action of your body
deferring to the column and the central axis. This enacted form of
signification is an important generator of form in Christian and medieval
architecture.

Every step taken in a Christian church, every passage in the liturgy, potentially involved
psychological transformations and the dramatic realisation of some bold metaphor such
as rebirth or salvation. From the moment of decision to enter the portal to the experience
of baptism and the Eucharist, the worshipper was in constant movement and
transformation. The distance from the squalor of the street outside to a vision of Heaven
in the space might be only a few yards, and the architect and decorator had to work
hard to make that journey convincing. 7

In the renaissance this kind of signification is replaced by an emphasis on static visual apprehension.
This is underpinned by the role of perspective as a mode of thought and knowledge.

5
Dagobert Frey, Gothic and Renaissance, in Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 165.
6
Christ, the column, stands in the middle of Christ, the door. John Onians, Bearers of Meaning (Princeton University Press, 1990).
7
Ibid., 60.
 The spectator had the sense of comprehending the whole of this building [the foundling
hospital] because its appearance encouraged him to believe that he could see,
beneath the surface, the design that was responsible both for its form and for his own
experience of it. 8

In the renaissance meaning is predicated on static viewpoints that determine perspectival views.
And it also shifts meaning from something that is experienced and enacted to something that is
consumed. Put in another way, it and renaissance architecture in general is read like a text. This is
not to deny that there are spatial experiences to be had with renaissance architecture nor are that
a good deal of medieval architecture is also read. However, a shift in emphasis occurs and it is shift
towards visual predominance that reoccurs from time to time (e.g. as in neoclassicism, soviet
architecture, postmodern facadism, and todays fetishism for architectural icons and silhouettes).

Another way of understanding this relationship between medieval and renaissance modes of
signification is as an analogy to index versus icon and symbol. In Peirces theory of signs these three
types are defined as:

The icon signifies by virtue of a similarity of qualities or resemblance to its object. For
example, a portrait iconically represents the sitter. The index signifies by virtue of an
existential bond, in many cases a causal connection, between itself and the object. For
example, a weathervane indexically signals the direction of the wind; a footprint
indicates that someone has been on a beach. The symbol signifies by virtue of a
contract or rule it is the equivalent of Saussures arbitrary linguistic sign. 9

So whereas the icon and symbol are primarily visual the index has the capacity to be spatial (and
kinetic). There is a rich history of architecture read semiotically and it is true that a good deal of its
signification happens through structural relationships differences, contrasts, positions within an
organisation, in short, through composition. However, the index goes further in that while it can
signify visually a stair indexically signals the capacity to go up or down through its reference to the

8
Bates Lowry, Renaissance Architecture (George Braziller Inc, 1981), 12.
9
Margaret Iversen, Saussure versus Peirce: Models for a Semiotics of Visual Art, in The New Art History (London: Camden Press,
1986), 89.
way we climb them its meaning becomes fulfilled only through use. 10 So whereas the relationship
between form and content in the icon is mimetic and in the symbol it is arbitrary, in the index it is
motivated, active and produced. And it is this quality in architectural form that gives it added
importance.

Part 2 Moments of convergence: Picturesque and other promenades

The spot from whence the view is taken is in a fixed state to the painter; but the
gardener surveys his scenery while in motion; and, from different windows in the same
front, he sees objects in different situations; therefore, to give an accurate portrait of the
gardeners improvement, would require pictures from each separate window, and even
a different drawings at the most trifling change of situation, either in the approach, the
walks, or the drives, about each place. 11

Enacted and visual (or pictorial) modes of representation come together in a complex manner
during the 18th century in the work of the English Picturesque movement. Here, gardens were
designed to orchestrate a series of pre-planned views that rely on walking the terrain. The
promenades incorporated surprises and events organised geographically and spatially. It was, in its
own way, a return to the idea of continuous representation. However, close readings of the
picturesque show that movement tended to play second fiddle to the idea of constructed spatial
pictures which, although they were views of real spaces, were designed to consumed as static
images, one after another. It could be argued that the spatial form is only there to produce the
pictures and it is the pictures which carry the majority of the meaning. Movement is therefore
reduced to a mode of transportation by which to get from one picture to another. The act of
walking, significant as it is, is not primary.

You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the eye. You follow an
itinerary and the perspectives develop with great variety, developing a play of light on
the walls or making pools of shadow. Large windows open up views of the exterior where
the architectural unity is reassertedHere, reborn for our modern eye, are historic

10
Other examples are doorways as indexes of passage, windows as indexes of views or light, corridors and rooms as indexes of social
organisations.
11
Pevsner, Nikolaus, Humphry Repton, a Florilegium, The Architectural Review 103 (February 1948): 54.
 architectural discoveries: the pilotis, the long windows, the roof garden, the glass
facade. 12

Le Corbusiers promenade architecturale is another model where visual and enacted practices
determine form. In the promenade architecturale bodily movement is conceived as a kind of spatial
figure. And architectural space is not just a container for movement but an active part of the
journey. The architectural forms (solids and voids, henceforth, spatial forms) are sometimes things to
pass through, places to do things in, or look into. In the best of his projects, for example, Villa La
Roche, the spatial form and promenade mutually define each other. However, there is an
inconstancy in the way that Le Corbusier carried this out such that some projects, like Villa Savoye,
set themselves apart from, and hence objectify, their contexts. 13

In framing the landscape the house places the landscape into a system of categories.
The house is a mechanism for classification. It collects viewsThe house can be in any
place. 14

So where Savoye floats in its site, objectifying both the house and its views, La Roche both defines
and is defined by its site. Once can read the beginning of the promenade at La Roche as starting at
the gate to the cul-de-sac whose end is framed by the L form of the villa. 15 However, what results
in both cases is a kind of spatial closure. The promenades are orchestrated and fixed and their
narratives are given up front. The Corbusian promenade does not encourage wondering because
there is no variability in the way the house functions. The clear divisions into public and private
dictate its functional stability, a stability which is antagonistic to wandering. The promenade, in fact,
acts to make things known; it is the tool by which the organisation of the house is revealed,
discovered and learned. But once understood, as a model, one can predict the outcome.

Bridge: Walter Benjamin

Now if we consider those historical moments when enactment or movement were used as active
spatial participants the picturesque, the flneur, the promenade architecturale, the situationist
drive, parkour what they share is that movement is used as a critical device. That is, you are
meant to be aware of it; it is reflective and contemplative. And by way of Walter Benjamin we can
introduce another way of thinking about spatial form.
Banjamins state of distraction invokes the everyday as opposed to the marvellous or extraordinary
(or self-consciously critical).

Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows:
A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it In contrast, the
distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings.

12
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complte de 1910-1929, Verlag, Zurich, 10th ed., 1974, translation from Tim Benton,
The Villas of Le Corbusier: 1920-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 43.
13
For a detailed study of this house and an analysis of the promenade and its spatial form see Diaz, Luis, A Promenade Through
Other Spaces (The Bartlett, UCL, 1997), https://www.academia.edu/3613123/A_Promenade_Through_Other_Spaces.
14
Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, in Sexuality & Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) in Colomina,
Beatriz (ed.) Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).
15
I note here that this house was designed during Le Corbusiers flirtation with Camillo Sittes picturesque planning principles.
 Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of
which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. 16

These forms of spatial practices require concentration that is what makes them work. However, this
excludes a world of practices which take place in states of distraction and this is largely the world of
inhabiting architecture on a day to day basis. We commute, travel, do school runs, jog, run up and
down stairs, take lifts, walk between kitchen and living room and so on. In these situations space is
not absorbed primarily as a visual and contemplated medium. But nevertheless, space affects and
informs our practices.

Part 3 The Everyday (and its faults)

Architecture is inescapably concrete and it forms the fabric and the setting of everyday
lifeSo architectures materiality makes it a natural conduit to the specificity of everyday
life. 17

The everyday takes as its subject everything that is implicated in Banjamins state of distraction. It is
made up of the routine, mundane, monotonous, invisible, and repetitive aspects of our lives and
environment. But it takes these things as meaningfully significant, rather than as a poor cousin to the
heroic, iconic, or monumental. Dell argues for alogical connection between the everyday and
architecture. Yet, here too, visual and pictorial emphasis predominates.

when architects try to incorporate the everyday into

their work, the results tend to be embarrassingly literal and
decorative. They design aesthetically pleasing carts for
street vendors to make them acceptable to the powers
that be, or they create small public places on leftover bits
of land, or they design a house whose form is taken from
the reflection of vegetation in a pond on site, or a building
meant to disrupt the routines of perception or to mimic the
messiness of everyday existence. 18

And when it isnt doing this it is reinforcing human agency as the dominant driver in spatial analysis.
The relationship between production (architecture) and consumption (users) is formulated in such a
way that space and architecture are defined as neutral, empty or merely a stage set. 19 Agents are
often casts as figures that overcome the limitations of spaces and forms. To be fair, care is taken to
suggest that spaces are not just consumed passively, but rather they are reproduced through
appropriation. However, too often this is set out so that reproduced spaces replace or subsume the
original architect-given space. This is where I see spatial form cast as passive; not enough care is
given to how the original form persists, suggests or informs its appropriation. Spatial form is a
background against which agents react. Yet this is far from the intention of the two key theorists of
the everyday, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. For now, I am going to focus on de Certeaus
formulation of everyday practices and their relation to spatial forms. But first its worth nothing de

16
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace & World,
1968).
17
Dell Upton, Architecture in Everyday Life, New Literary History 33, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 707.
18
Upton, Architecture in Everyday Life.
19
For an extended argument concerning the bias of agency over form see Diaz, Luis, From Space to the Everyday and Back (MPhil
Chapter, University of Brighton, 2008), https://theresponsibilityofform.wordpress.com/2015/12/30/7-from-space-to-the-everyday-
and-back/.
Certeaus own attentiveness to the difference between visual (concentrated) and bodily
(distracted) engagement with space.

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade

CentreIts agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The
gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyesHis elevation
transfigures him into a voyeurIt transforms the bewitching world
by which one was possessed into a text that lies before ones
eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like
a god.

And then

The ordinary practitioners of the city live down below, below the
thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk an elementary form of this
experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies
follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able
to read it. 20

De Certeau associates the visual with the idea of reading, recalling the way in which the
renaissances shift to perspectival apprehension transforms architecture into texts. In contrast he
suggests that moving in space is like a form of writing. And it is here, perhaps, where the agency
driven analyses get their clues. Writing is creative not passive, it makes and invents, and if we
translate this to architecture then architecture is made when users practice its spaces. This is, in my
view, an error. And furthermore, it is not what de Certeau meant or intended.

First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities and

interdictions, then the walker actualises some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes
them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since
the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon
spatial elements. 21

What de Certeau proposes here is a dialogical relationship between human agency (our capacity
to act and in particular to act freely) and spatial form (what he calls spatial order). De Certeau
sidesteps the debate between environmental and social determinism in one neat paragraph.
Agency doesnt win nor does form act as a mere background or stage set. Rather what is, to me,
foregrounded is that there is an active relationship between spatial practices and spatial forms. This
is where the earlier analogies of reading or writing break down because the relationship is not
sequential. However, what I wish to emphasise here is that enactment is more important in this
process than the kind of visual signification that has for too long dominated architectural discourse
and production. That is, the process that de Certeau describes, one which takes place everywhere
virtually all the time, is barely present in the way architecture is generally conceived (that is, through
the dominance of visual, pictorial, and other modes of discourse that favour concentrated
apprehension and signification).

I would argue that we are living through an agency-dominated discursive era; one which is
antagonistic to the specificity of space and form. It is a discourse that celebrates and exalts the
subjective while casting off the discreet, objective and measurable. And while it was necessary to
undo the belief in environmental determinism and bureaucratic objectivity that dominated
architecture for some time we have now arguably replaced one misconception with another.

20
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall, First paperback edition, 1988 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
21
Ibid.
Part 4 A Case Study in Form: Alexandra Road
In this case study I hope to demonstrate an example of how spatial form is significant while also
showing how human agency acts in relationship to it. The project is the Alexandra Road Estate
design by Neave Brown for the Camden County Council and completed in 1978. While the project
now has a fair share of both local and international acclaim it has also suffered a great deal of
misrepresentation and at one time stood for all that was wrong with council housing in Britain. The
project consists of 520 units organised in three linear blocks arranged symmetrically around a large
central park as such: new 7 story block pedestrian way new 4 story block park new 4 story
block pedestrian way existing 7 story block.

My focus is on the public and semi-public spaces connecting the pedestrian street and units of
block A and B. There is, to start with, a good deal of formal articulation relating to unit bays, unit
limits, shared and individual territories. Walls, railings, gardens, planters and voids work to sometimes
link adjacent units, sometimes identifying unit limits, and at others times to create ambiguous
overlaps. This kind of visual play appears in certain modernist works and is often associated with
formalism. However, we will shortly see that there is more at stake here than visual geometry games.
Looking closely at the entry sequence into the lower units of block B we find a pair of steps leading
onto individual bridges that space a shared courtyard below. The bridges then meet on a shared
platform, partially screened, that provides entry into each of the paired units. Between the two sets
of steps is a gap that leads down into the shared courtyard giving access into the lower level part of
the units (where the bedrooms are located). There is a built in redundancy in this arrangement. One
can easily identify a stair-bridge combination with an individual dwelling. However, there is nothing
to prevent someone from using an adjacent path and crossing over to their front door on the
landing, thus interpreting and practicing the entry sequence as shared access. There is also a
choice available between entering the upper public level (kitchen, living & dining) or the lower
private level (bedrooms). The use of one or the other may depend on habit or personal preference;
for example, arriving home from work or school some may find it preferable to enter the lower level
to change or shower before engaging with the rest of the family. Alternatively, if arriving with
groceries others may use the upper route leading to the kitchen. Some might restrict entry to the
upper level through habit or social convention. That is, the upper level could be coded front and
the lower level back and reinforce this interpretation though use. As such some users may
abandon spatial elements by not taking paths generally considered accessible or even
obligatory. The spatial configuration is significant in allowing both traditional as well as non-
traditional readings and practices.

We can see how inhabitants have interpreted these possibilities in different ways. Some have
positioned potted plants to permanently claim their half of the landing and by consequence the
stair and bridge leading to their dwelling. In other cases the shared landing has been used for
storage in a manner that does not clearly establish ownership or a boundary. Others have been left
in their original state.
The lower level accesses have also been modified with screens, gates and partitions. These different
treatments provide different levels of privacy for the lower court. Some are full height while others
are low and flimsy sheets of plywood that act more as symbolic barriers. In a few cases tenants have
installed gates which have some affinity with the surrounding metalwork. Here we could read the
form of the additions as constructing new but precise relationships between the lower court and
street. That is, some block access and views, while others only act to prevent access. Low and flimsy
barriers block neither access nor view but make a clear statement which entry is primary.

The overall spatial form of entry results in two types of modifications which in turn call for different
kinds of negotiation between neighbours. While the upper screens (potted plants) can be put in
place without discussion, modification of the passage to the lower level entry requires face to face
negotiation since it affects access to both dwellings. The specific architectural form, then,
contributes to the kind of interaction required for the modification to occur. It should be noted,
however, that these modifications are not only signs of appropriation but can also be points of
conflict.

These sequences and their articulation are not wholly new or unique. We can recognize them in
Georgian and Victorian terraces in varying levels of complexity. As mediators of public and private
realms and as part of the daily rituals of arrival and departure their specific configuration are of
great importance. At Alexandra Road the flexible and interpretative relationship among arrival,
dwelling and stair and the trajectory from street to dwelling is highly structured. That is, there is
deliberate layering of differentiated spaces and practices in order to exaggerate the sense of
threshold. We can define the sequence as:

Stair/lifting/framed>bridge/crossing/exposed>landing/arrival/contained

To be clear, this is not a visual or compositional game. The act of climbing the stairs to the upper
dwellings of block B inscribes with ones body the shared thick boundary between two units. To cross
the bridge to one of the lower dwellings is to express your individual trajectory to your dwelling
while passing through the shared space of a pair of units. As suggested by Nigel Thrift, it becomes
difficult to separate out bodies and things, practices and spatial forms. 22 The meaning and
experience of arrival cannot be found by looking at spatial forms or spatial practices in isolation.
Rather, it is possible to conceive of spatial forms and practices as an irreducible figure in itself.

Conclusion
What this brief analysis hopes to demonstrate is a way of thinking about architectural form (spatial
form) that goes beyond the visual and concentrated modes of engaging with form. It suggests that
form is acting on us even while we are distracted with the business of everyday life. And what it does
on this level is important and significant. My focus on the arrival sequence at Alexandra Road comes
from a belief that this area most affects (but does not necessarily determine) the problems of certain
types of housing. While the visual side of architecture cannot be ignored it is less important than its
spatial formation. Good spatial formations cannot, of course, overcome problems brought on by
bad management or tenure arrangements but it can contribute to the formation of our identity as
inhabitants of a city, a neighbourhood, a block and a dwelling. My intention here is to counter the
over-emphasis on agency and to bring form back into a meaningful role in the discourse of
architecture. Adrian Forty has summarised the problems with the word form revealing it as a term
that has radically changed its meaning over time. 23 Within the last 150 years it has stood for the
immaterial essence underlying physical things but also referred to shape empty of meaning, a
vehicle for transporting meaning that resides elsewhere. My own use may be as simplistic as the
shape of things in and with space. But it is not the definition of form that needs to be complex;
rather it is what it does that needs to be grasped in its complexity and significance. It goes beyond
being a thing, a container, or a shape; it is the intersection of material, structure, visibility, human
agency, politics, economics and ideology, to name but a few trajectories. While I am sympathetic
to agency driven analyses I cant help thinking that if we continue to think that human agency
overcomes form in the end then this absolves architects of their responsibility for and to form. The
inevitability of form is that it does something whether we intend it or not, whether we like it or not.
And isnt it better to be as knowledgeable of its effects, potential, and limitations, to be as conscious
as possible about what and how we form, rather than leave it to chance?

22
bodies and things are not easily separated terms, precisely because of their locatedness. Nigel J Thrift, Spatial Formations
(London: Sage Publications, 1996), 13.
23
Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).