Tracks, Trace, Tricks

Author(s): Stan Allen

Source: ANY: Architecture New York , May/June 1993, Writing in Architecture
(May/June 1993), pp. 8-13
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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 Like the Archbishop of Pan
with a mistress in his garde
following to erase their foot
dissolve into silence a sente
Tracks interpretation. Causality is inverted, pointing back to a previous moment, eliciting a
1 . In an anecdote related at the beginning of Book VI of Vitruvius, Socratic reconstruction of causes from effects. The indexical sign is an empty slot awaiting
philosopher Aristippus is shipwrecked and cast ashore on the island of Rhodes. interpretation: "Such, for instance, is a piece of mold with a bullet-hole in it as a sign
Initially in despair, he observes geometric figures drawn in the sand and cries out of
to a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole
his companions: " Bene speremus, hominum enim vestigia video" (Let us be hopeful,
there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not."
for I see the traces/tracks of men). To begin this essay with a citation from the Latin
would seem unnecessarily academic were it not for the fact that much hinges on the
Carlo Ginzburg has suggested that the origins of a reading model based upon
exact translation of vestigia .1 Tracks or traces? Does the trace/track always imply
deciphering and interpretation of clues might be traced to early hunting practices,
an evidential paradigm pointing to the past? What is the status of geometry as thewhere small signs led the hunter to his quarry, and to divination, which works
trace of thought in architecture? The anecdote continues: "With that he made for the
through a "close reading" of minute, even trifling matters ("animal's innards, drops
city of Rhodes, and went straight to the gymnasium. There he fell to discussing of oil on the water, heavenly bodies, involuntary movements of the body") to discover
philosophical subjects, and presents were bestowed upon him, so that he could fitthe traces of events (past or future) that could not be directly experienced by the
himself out." The geometric tracks lead to philosophy, which, in this case, takes observer. Ginzburg then links this to the invention of writing systems, pointing back
precedence over necessity. to Peirce's proposition of the index as the fundamental category of sign: "The
identification of soothsaying with the deciphering of divine characters inscribed in
2. To exemplify the concept of the index, C. S. Peirce too has recourse to the reality was reinforced by the pictorial features of cuneiform writing: like divination,
footprint in the sand. The footprint that Robinson Crusoe found in the sand, Peirce
it too designated one thing through another."
writes, "was an Index to him that some creature was on his island." Indexical signs
are bound to their referents through some form of contact, physical or otherwise: 3.
"AnThe index holds a privileged place in the ontology of the photographic image.
Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really Photography is unassailably identified with the modern values of progress,
affected by that Object." Examples often given include animal tracks, fingerprints,authenticity, and exactitude. But this alone does not account for photography's
handwriting, and medical symptoms. Yet, as the analyst knows, the movement from
ontological authority: "A photograph," Susan Sontag writes, "is not only an image,
symptom to pathology is never entirely straightforward. Peirce takes note of thisan interpretation of the real, it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the
detachment, placing the index under the category of "secondness." The index is real, like a footprint or a death mask." Photography's truth value is directly linked to
doubly marked: by the definiteness of physical contact and by the uncertainty of its indexical status. A photograph, like a fingerprint or a fossil, can be classified as

Stan Allen

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is who , when he walked
'■ n had three men with rakes
prints, we are obliged to
nee scarcely formed.-,
an index by virtue of the spatial connection of the body
negative,
in question
the imprint,
to theand
chemical
the trace operate in resem
sanction of
surface of the photographic negative (through the mediation of the
the Idea. The
optical index of
system proceeds from one t
the lens). The index, operating under the logic of metonymy, points
writes: "For a finger
if copies back are good images, well
or icons
are endowed
over time to the moment of physical contact, now fixed with resemblance.
and detached according to But
the resemblance mus
external correspondence.
logic of its own materiality (soft sand, fired clay, photographic film). It proceeds less from one th
thing to an Idea, since it is the Idea that comprises t
4. For Rosalind Krauss, photography's indexical status - the inverted
constitute internalshadow fixed
essence. Interior and spiritual, r
on the light-sensitive film - is decisive. In "Notes on
claim."
the Index,"
The index,
published
insofar
inas
1976,
it is an image, is alway
Krauss proposes the idea of the index as a thematic construct withof
the paternity which the critic
the Idea or essence. This opens the
might cut through the heterogeneity of the art of the 1970s to find
arbitrariness, some common
slipperiness, and multiple interpretatio
thread. The diverse production of that decade, Krauss
never
suggests,
in depth;
might
hence
be its
understood
affiliation with the simul
to have a shared point of reference in the notion ofsay
theof
index.
the simulacrum
Thus Richard
that
Serra's
it is a copy of a copy, an
rubber castings or thrown lead pieces relate to video's
infinitely
"structure
slackened
of narcissism,"
resemblance, we miss the essen
hyper-realism's appeal to photographic veracity, and Dennis
nature Oppenheim's
between Identity
simulacrum and copy, the aspect thr
Stretch of 1975, in which the artist transferred the of a division.
magnified Theof
image copy
his is
ownan image endowed with re
an image without
thumbprint onto a large field outside Buffalo. The importance resemblance."
of documentation in
both performance art and earthworks (where the notes, photographs, and artifacts
stand in for inaccessible or short-lived works) underscores the indexical
6. The index character
in architecture of
has been linked with a n
these works. Like a readymade, each of these works freezes an instant
Architecture's in time
extended time and
of realization, the indir
initiates an interpretive movement on the part of the
itsviewer to patronage
distinct fill up thestructure
empty place
all draw out this mo
of the indexical sign. The "snapshot effect" of the index ties the
Vitruvius's work to a saw on the beach were not fo
philosopher
hermeneutics of the time of its making. abstracted tracings of idealized forms, mediated, ic
of intelligence - i.e., a kind of writing. The detachm
Peirce's
5. The mechanical character of the index has another secondness
consequence - is doubled
in theories of in architecture. T
representation. The index produces "automatic" external correspondence.
disengaged The
from the process of making architectur

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pointed out, architects do not make buildings, they make drawings for buildings. 2. "There is no trace itself, no proper trace," writes Jacques Derrida in Margins of
In architecture the index points back not to a moment of physical contact but to the Philosophy. The trace is fundamental to the thought of deconstruction and, as such,
implied movements (cuts, displacements, grid shifts, shears, inversions, rotations, resists reduction or exemplification. Derrida proposes understanding the trace as
and folds) carried out within the abstract materials of drawing itself. Drawing may difference, never to be resolved into presence, always produced out of an elusive
function as an index of a complex and sometimes dynamic process, but the building movement from text to text. Derrida has made it very clear that the linear, the bodily,
is an index of the fixed form of the drawing (which is necessarily complete - frozen the indexical, and the geometric have little to do with his notion of trace: "I have the
- before the process of construction begins). Even the more radical operations of impression now that the best paradigm for the trace . . . is not . . . the trail of the hunt,
process (invoking chance, nonlinear geometries, or the readymade) are forced at a the fraying, the furrow in the sand, the wake in the sea, the love of the step for its
certain moment to hypostasize the complexities of process into a "snapshot" to imprint, but the cinder (what remains without remaining from the holocaust, from the
which the building then stands in mimetic relation: a conventional representation of all-burning, from the incineration of the incense)." in Derrida's modernist theology
perhaps unconventional materials. The reading of such a work inevitably evokes the of form, the trace is always the trace of absence, manifest through erasure: "The
deductive/divinatory paradigm of the index as a series of clues pointing back to the trace is produced as its own erasure. And it belongs to the trace to erase itself, to
event of design and the hand of the author. This is a fundamentally modernist elude that which might maintain it in presence. The trace is neither perceptible nor
practice, reflecting a belief in the object's capacity to carry traces of its origin and imperceptible." Thus only the fragile form of ashes is an adequate image for the
making and a corresponding belief in interpretation as unmasking a self-referential radical space of disembodiment required by such a concept. Yet the trace, even in
play of meaning. But just as the strategy of the readymade has exhausted itself its most formless form, is caught up in an evidential paradigm. It still points back to
within artistic practice, might we not begin to question the persistence of an an origin: "Do you know how many types of cinders the naturalists distinguish? And
indexical idea of the trace, the privilege of process - and concomitant deductive for what 'woods' such cinders sometimes recall a desire?" The trace may point
paradigm of interpretation - in architectural practice? Any critique of the idea of endlessly without hope of arriving at that origin or, more precisely, may reveal that
the trace in architecture must necessarily interrogate its capacity to carry meaning the origin is a place of emptiness and loss, though the direction is clear. Glass too is
over time and examine how that meaning is conditioned by the interplay between the the product of an incineration.
trace as drawn and the trace as built.
3. Deconstruction's need to inscribe itself in the formless form of the cinder - and to
Trace recover the moment of absolute loss - is symptomatic of a desire to hold itself apart
Don 't you know the story? ... It was all anyone talked about last year. from all of the abstract and idealizing discourses with which architecture is inevitably
- Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad compromised. Necessarily mediating this formless form, however, are all of the
linear incarnations of the trace present if only in their refusal: architecture's
1 . Traces are indexical signs. In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Walter "burdens of linearity." The trace is a privileged currency in the architecture/
Benjamin notes the simultaneous appearance of the detective story, which deconstruction exchange (and in any theory of writing in architecture) precisely
investigates these traces, and the fully realized bourgeois interior: "The interior was because it is a concept already available in architecture. Derrida appeals not only to
not just the universe, it was also the protective casing of the private citizen. Living architecture as example but to architecture's procedures as well. In architecture the
means leaving traces. In the interior, these were stressed. Coverings and trace is produced out of the movement of process and the heterogeneity of its
antimacassars, boxes and casings, were devised in abundance, in which the traces procedures. Translation is always already at work within the discontinuity of
of everyday objects were molded. The resident's own tracings were also molded in architecture's operations. Buildings do not simply embody the abstract concepts that
the interior." For Benjamin, to lose the trace is to lose the opacity of the secret, the enable them but erase those concepts - incompletely - in the assertive physicality
narrative time of history; it is tied to the refusal of the marks of possession. In of construction. The trace, if it remains, persists as an excess unaccountable
"Erfahrung und Armut" Benjamin writes: "A beautiful word from Brecht helps us go according to the simple logic of the tectonic.
far, farther: Erase your traces,' so says the refrain of the first poem in the Reader for
Those who live in Cities. . . . Scheerbart and his glass and the Bauhaus and its steel 4. Architectural drawing encodes the architect's displacement from the material
have opened the way: they have created spaces in which it is difficult to leave object of the discipline. Classical theory conceived drawing as the realm of
traces." Benjamin links modernity's Utopian project to reception in a state of idealized, abstract speculation: "Since that is the case, let lineaments be the precise
distraction and the loss of the aura: "It is not for nothing that glass is such a hard and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and
material upon which nothing attaches itself. . . . Things of glass have no aura." perfected in the learned intellect and imagination," writes Alberti. The codification
The modernist project sought to efface the trace, displacing it to the disembodied, of the operations of architectural drawing coincides with the separation of the
geometric form of the tracés régulateurs. The recovery of the trace today in the procedures of design and construction in the early Renaissance. The need for
form of a theory of writing in architecture needs to be seen against this shift. accurate systems of projection arises out of the requirement for a legible code to
Contemplating the ruin of the modernist project, the trace is reinscribed in transmit the desire of the architect from a distance. The drawings mark that distance
architecture as process, collapsing the bodily and the disembodied under the sign and are marked by it. Orthographic projection consists in tracing out, or cutting
of babble. Jacques Lacan writes: "Writing is a trace in which is read an effect of through, the imagined contours of an absent body. Unlike the body of classical
language. It is what happens when you scribble something." theories of mimesis, it is not given in nature but proposed as construction.

The first and last images are of Mies van David Hemmings (the photographer)
der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, shoots a series of photographs of an
1962-8. In between are six stills, in unknown couple in a park. As he
narrative sequence, from Michelangelo develops the photos, an inexplicable
Antonioni's Blow-Up, 1967. The film, is "stain" appears that, upon being
structured around a central lack: enlarged, proves to be the contours of a
Antonioni acknowledges, through his body. A nighttime trip to the park
character, that "the game works withoutconfirms the implacable presence of a f
a body." Driven by an interpretive corpse. The photographer is suddenly '
desire initiated by an absent body, the placed within a double dilemma: on the
film presents a puzzle whose solution is one hand interpretive (who did it?, why
never to be revealed. The narrative line was it done?); and on the other hand,
of the film - a form of detective story - ethical - possessing the proof, what
functions parallel to a cinematic trucage should he do? Upon returning to the
that makes explicit a thematic of the park in the morning, he finds the body
image, the deciphering of clues, and, the has disappeared. He is restored to his
difference between cinema and position as an outsider, his dilemma
photography. In Blow Up, the specific evaporates, but the uneasy crisis
effect of cinema is to undermine the initiated by the absent body persists. By
truth value of the photographic image. enfolding and undermining the
photograph's relation to its original
referent, the fluid time of cinema
supplants the fixed time of the
photograph. The effect is ambiguous in
the extreme, the loss of the " evidence "
short-circuiting the interpretive desire of
the hero and the viewer, leaving both in a
condition of suspension.

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5. "The architect's drawing," Félix Guattari points out, "which in French is the 2. In film studies there exist, not surprisingly, various theories that make the illusion
homophone of plan, project (dessin/dessein), and implies goal, axiological finality, thematic. Christian Metz, for example, notes that the "image track" of the film
sets out in search of a partial enunciator that will give consistency to the group of contains many elements that are not, properly speaking, images. They signal the
components put into question." Drawing's compromise with competence (authority, intervention of the filmmaker in the manipulation of the material of the film itself.
institutionality) is clarified by a distinction offered in the beginning of A Thousand These include all of the written materials, subtitles, intertitles, credits, the words
Plateaus: "The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, The End, but more importantly the "optical effects obtained by the appropriate
not a tracing. . . . What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely manipulations, the sum of which constitute visual but not photographic material."
oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. ... The map is open and In this category Metz places blurred focus, accelerated or slow motion, the "wipe"
connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to or "fade" (the "visible material of transitions"), as well as color shifts and super-
constant modification." The architect's drawings, on the other hand, inscribe the positions. To these effects, which are defined by their divergence from photography
authority of the project and function as tracings. (and by implication, the truth-value of the index), Metz assigns the term trucage.

6. From Alberti's lineamenta to Le Corbusier's tracés régulateurs, the authority of Usually translated as "special effects" or "trick photography," the connotation of
tracing has persisted in architectural theory and practice. This tracery might be trucage is broader. Metz elaborates and classifies cinematic trucage on the basis of
understood, in terms familiar to Colin Rowe, as an idealized abstract scaffold that "profilmic" effects, which take place before the camera (i.e., the use of stunt men),
maintains form in its proper place but disappears as presence in construction. and "cinematographic" effects, which are achieved by manipulating the film or
("The choice of a regulating line fixes the fundamental geometry of the work," writes camera - blurred focus, slow motion, etc. Cinema's earliest "tricks" already
Le Corbusier.) The propriety of geometry as underlying structure enables Rowe to employed both effects simultaneously. Georges Méliès achieved the "disappearing
propose continuity between the classical and the modern. Alternatively, if we assign trick" (1896) by stopping the camera while the actor left the set: simply a substitute
to geometry a different status, as a contingent mark of always shifting systems of for the theatrical trapdoor. The reading conventions of classic narrative film further
description, then the trace - which paradoxically needs to be thought of as all that categorize trucage. An "invisible" trucage (the Stuntman) is not intended to be
escapes the authority of the tracing - lies in the incompleteness of the translation noticed by the audience; "visible" trucage functions rhetorically to signal psycho-
and persists in construction: the "errors" of Renaissance perspective; Guarini's logical or narrative intent: slow motion to heighten suspense, blurred focus to
"immeasurable" structures produced by the intersection of multiple geometric indicate a dream sequence. Yet there are also effects, designated as "imper-
systems; the theatricality of the baroque; the combinatory excesses of Piranesi; ceptible," that are unnoticed, impossible to localize, yet intrude upon the senses
Iannis Xanakis's experiments in counterpunctual notation at La Tourette; Ronchamp's and contribute to the affective power of the film (cuts, transitions, color shifts,
complex curvatures, simultaneously mathematical and sculptural; Gaudi's structural and lighting).
experiments; Mies van der Rohe's "paradoxical symmetries"; Carlo Mollino's
anthropomorphisms; and Eisenman's axonometric distortions in the House X model. Trucage does not function primarily as syntactic marking (i.e., as punctuation or
In each of these works, the trace functions out of the difference between delineation, structuring of the cinematic narrative), although it can do so. Rather, the sum of
projection, and construction. It opens the possibility of understanding the trace not these effects operates specifically in the cinematic realm and outside conventional
simply as absence reified but as a condition made possible precisely by linguistic codes. "Trucage," Metz writes, is "avowed machination"; "There is
architecture's promiscuous presentness. always a certain duplicity attached to the very notion of trucages. There is always
something hidden inside it (since it remains trucage only to the extent to which the
Tricks perception of the spectator is taken by surprise), and at the same time, something
Not just an image, just an image. which flaunts itself, since it is important that the powers of the cinema be credited f
-Jean-Luc Godard this astonishing of the senses." Metz goes further: "It is in fact essential to know
that the cinema in its entirety is, in a sense, a vast trucage, and that the position of
1 . Architecture has always been afraid of the trick. What is surprising is the way in
the trucage with respect to the whole of the text, is very different in cinema than it i
which, under conditions of postmodernity, this debate continues, persisting in in photography."
attempting to unmask a logic-in-depth behind the play of forms and surfaces.
Postmodernism sought a recovery of meaning in form; in a modernist counter-turn,
3. In what would a theory of architectural trucage consist? To begin with, it would
it was criticized for the "depthless" play of illusion and surface. Architecture's necessarily abandon the opposition between (authentic) modernity and (inauthentic)
meaningfulness is seen as something to be regulated as it approaches the postmodernity. It might begin by examining architecture's specific power to
slipperiness and trickiness of meaning in play: an architecture that turns tricks. Isconstruct
it illusion through images. It might lead to a theory of construction that does
possible to suggest a paradigm of the postmodern in architecture that could escape
not simply oppose the rationality of tectonics (presence, materiality) to the
this double bind? To do so would not represent an attempt to recuperate a more slipperiness of illusion (absence, immateriality). It would locate its power not in the
perfect modernist transparency, in which nothing is hidden, but rather to accept the
ability of the building to operate as an index of process but in the specificity - and
partial - and more complex - opacities of the present. Put another way, is the unpredictability - of architectural effects in the realm of the constructed.
appeal to the logic of the trace a disguised attempt to reinscribe architecture in a
metaphysics of depth? Risking a definition, I propose that an architectural trucage might be all of the effec

il

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(visual, aural, and tactile) obtained by the appropriate manipulations, the sum of mention the redeployment of visuality under conditions of spectacle in the early-20th
which constitute spatial but not architectonic material. It would consist neither in a century and the revision of the body and sight in the late-20th century under
denial of architecture's enabling fictions nor in the simple embodiment of those advanced simulation technologies.
fictions. Because it would not have to believe in the reality of the categories it
erects, its space would necessarily support a multiplicity of programs and events Among the optical devices of mass visual culture that Crary studies (the stereoscope,
without resorting to obsolete hierarchies or Utopian attempts at the dissolution of kaleidoscope, phenakistiscope, zoetrope, and diorama) is the panorama. Panoramas
hierarchy. By unhinging architecture from its (modernist) appeal to origins, process, were constructed as popular entertainment in large numbers in European and
and unmasking, trucage redirects attention toward the architectural artifact itself, a American cities beginning in the 1790s. There were several in Berlin, and K. F.
construct that must be capable of generating its own terms of interpretation beyond Schinkel, among his avocations, was active as a painter of panoramas. The
the protection of the author and the control of the institution. By shifting attention panorama is constructed according to conventionalized codes of vision that dictate
from artifact to effect, trucage undermines the finality of the architectural. its ideal circular form and complex sectional configuration. Unlike the fixed
viewpoint of Albertian perspective, the panorama allows - in fact necessitates -
4. "But what means does the architect have at his disposal to grasp/seize and plot the movement of the observer. The continuous band of painted scenery cannot be
the productions of subjectivity which would be inherent to his object and activity? scanned from a single station point; the viewer's "ambulatory ubiquity" is the
We could speak here of an architectural transfer which, evidently, would not manifest necessary counterpart to the encompassing spectacle. The panorama always looks
itself through an objective knowledge of a scientific nature but through the angle of back at the observer, but not with the ideal gaze of the panopticon with which it
complex aesthetic affects," suggests Guattari. An example of an "architectural shares certain formal characteristics. The panorama is constructed to sustain an
transfer" operating through the "angle of complex aesthetic affects" are the multiple illusion around the complex reality of spectators in motion; the panopticon models
practices of Rem Koolhaas. Despite the constant seductiveness of his surfaces and the all-seeing gaze from an abstract locus of power, directed at fixed bodies. In the
forms, Koolhaas operates in a kind of stylistic vacuum, indifferently appropriating panopticon both gaze and body are abstract and incorporeal. Insistently spatial and
from an open catalogue of modernist, technological, and popular vernaculars. His three-dimensional, the painted panorama cannot be accurately reproduced in two
practices affirm that there is no intrinsic depth content (no objective or scientific dimensions. Either the continuous surface is arbitrarily cut and flattened, or the
basis) behind a formal choice, that the effect of the amalgamation matters above all. circular continuity is maintained and the view is represented anamorphically, the
Alternatively, in John Hejduk's architectural works an assembly of known parts yields upper boundary being elongated along its entire perimeter.
astonishingly complex wholes - an "avowed machination" where laying bare the
device of construction in no way explains or exhausts the associative capacity of the If the plan maps the laws of vision and the compass of the spectator, the section
object itself. reveals most effectively the apparatus of the illusion. Spectators enter from below,
occupying an artificial horizon (in more elaborate versions, these too were fitted out
It might be more effective, in the context of the present argument, to draw an illusionistically, including one example built in England where visitors occupied the
example from the modernist canon itself, reading Mies van der Rohe's Berlin deck of a ship that swayed gently on a concealed mechanism). By means of a
National Gallery as panorama. The panorama is a duplicitous device for reframing suspended curtain or dome, the illusion of the sky was maintained, usually pulled
the city, constructing, on artificial ground, a double of the 19th-century city. To read away from the perimeter, to cut the gaze of the viewer and to allow the painted
the National Gallery as panorama is to propose that Mies's architecture, often scenes to be lit from above. The illusion was made as complete as possible, but the
understood as a paradigm of constructed, material presence (a synthesis of romantic spectacle was concentrated in the horizontal extension of the gaze, dissolving the
classicism and technological rationality, expressed in details and in absolute architectural fixity of the perimeter and grafting a new spatiality onto the city.
structural clarity), can be seen as an architecture of the ephemeral and the atectonic,
operating in the realm of the effect and the trick. 6. The base of the National Gallery is usually understood in classical terms as a
plinth functioning to isolate the building from its surroundings. As a device to detach
5. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary proposes - in contradistinction the structure from an otherwise all too haphazard site, the plinth constructs an
to the prevailing historical model, which describes a hegemonic Albertian/Cartesian idealized ground free from contingency. However, this reading is contradicted by
tradition of perspectivai vision overturned by developments within the visual arts another well-known observation: that Mies placed all of the services and functional
during the late-19th and early-20th centuries - a progressive modernization of accommodations into the base to maintain the severity of the visible pavilion of the
vision concentrated in the early half of the 19th century. Drawing from scientific building. The base's solidity dissolves into a floating plane at the back of the
studies of vision, technology, popular culture, and only secondarily from visual and building. Therefore, the blind socle, which wants to be understood as artificial
artistic practice, Crary charts the emergence of the body as a "productive ground, solid and resistant, is instead a hollow, occupiable space that conceals the
psychological apparatus" at the center of the visual experience. A paradigm of apparatus necessary to preserve the ideal form. This insight directs attention to the
vision as nonveridical - lodged in the body - and a corresponding epistemologica! stagelike form of the plaza itself as an integral part of the building. Mies takes great
shift produce an "observer effect" distinct from classical models of vision as well as pains to place the interior in continuity with the plaza, minimizing and multiplying the
from 20th-century abstraction. Crary suggests that the radical abstraction and architectural separation - note the suppression of the railing, which would mark the
reconstruction of optical experience in the 19th century is a necessary "fore-history," edge of the plaza, and the multiple demarcations of interior: the overhang of the roof,
allowing certain notions of autonomous vision to emerge in the 20th century - not to the glass wall, the railings and barriers within. Far from isolating the experience of

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the building from the city, the architecture of the plaza places the National Gallery in experience of the National Gallery is an experience of affects that are undeniably
continuity with the now disjointed city. The building and its surround are always spatial, doubtless specific to architecture, and achieved by a subtle choreography of
seen in juxtaposition. The foreground of the plaza interrupts the previously perceived architectural elements but that are themselves other than architecture itself. To read
ground, fragmenting and reframing the city. The real event is to put the city on Mies in this way is to appreciate the exquisite measure with which he has calibrated
display, but by means of a device that constructs a defamiliarizing distance between the play of fixity and freedom, absence and presence.
the viewing subject and the reality of the surrounding context.
This would necessitate reading Mies's architecture not in terms of its "timeless"
The plan, far from exhibiting the axial symmetry characteristic of Mies's supposed presence, aloof from the contingencies of history and experience, but rather as
neoclassicism, is dominated by ubiquity and directional equivalence. The eight foregrounding the actual experience of real visitors in real time. Hence a
structural columns are deployed with absolute neutrality - in both configuration and characteristic description would have to include the experience of climbing up from
placement they are identical from all sides. The placement of the columns at mid- the lower galleries by the austere stairs, the spectator carrying with himself/herself
quarter points does not pin the corners with a vertical mark but reinforces the the memory of the representations of the city (fragmented and disjointed) from the
horizontality and floating effect, freeing the cantilevered corners to direct the gaze to canvases displayed below, to test and compare that reality against the image of the
the distance beyond. The paving grid and the egg-crate effect of the space frame city flattened onto the plate glass, detached from its own ground by the artificial
ceiling exhibit a similar indifference to axiality. They create a universal field open to horizon of the plaza; a city converted into a representation of itself, as contingent as
multiple directional and functional accommodations. The inverse symmetries of the any of the representations displayed within. The reframing is double: not only spatial
access stairs reinforce a circular movement as an effective counter to the frontality of and architectural, but conceptual, experiential, and ultimately political. What is
the main stair along Potsdamerstrasse. The perimeter is sheared and does not close contingent and constructed may itself be altered and reconstructed.
upon itself. In this centripetal space, the eye moves quickly past the symmetrically
placed service stacks, which in turn are dissolved and multiplied in the play of It might be noted that there is (at least) one significant difference between Mies and
reflection and transparency. The cornice and roof are immaculately neutral. the anonymous 19th-century architects of the panoramas. The panorama conceals
all of the mechanisms necessary to construct the illusion. The codes of popular
As in the panorama, the ideality of the plan contrasts with the pragmatism of the entertainment then (as today) required that the illusion be sustained by every
section, which reveals the apparatus of the illusion. Note, for example, the possible trick. Mies, on the other hand, strips away the mask. Any visitor can
dimension of the columns that carry the cruciform columns of the plaza: they are examine how the illusion is constructed, can understand the source of a reflection,
actually smaller in profile than the cruciform columns above. The hollowness of the can reoccupy the ground of the city. Exhibited in details like the hinged roller-
base is manifest, as is the indifference of the platform, which sometimes rests on bearing joint separating the space frame from the column head, the construction
filled ground and at other times roofs occupiable space. The continuity of this declares its own self-evidence (this despite minor deviations and inconsistencies,
primary datum is underscored by the minimal representation of the window wall. which have often been noted but which in no way detract from the overall clarity).
The great floating horizontal roof plane functions, like the plaza, to slice the gaze of Is this the opposite of the 19th-century strategy of illusion production, or its inverted
the viewer and reframe the city beyond. Together these two horizontal planes double? Mies "covers his tracks masterfully." Unlike the modernist impulse to "lay
reproduce the effect of the panorama, turning the city into a continuous band, bare the device," Mies's architecture declares the futility of the unveiling operation.
detached from the ground of the city, horizontally wrapping the space of the viewer. Mies realizes that it is neither necessary nor effective. It is not necessary under
Hans Scharoun's Philharmonic and the 19th-century St. Matthaus-Kirche float, like conditions of reception in a state of distraction and not effective because of the
collage elements, on an artificial ground. As in the panorama, the eye moves to the impossibility of the perceiving subject ever standing outside the web of illusions
perimeter, tracing out a horizontal extension of the gaze. Here too the panorama constructed by the architectural.
cannot be taken in all at once, and the spectator is forced into motion. The city that
looks back at the spectator is a city of disjointed fragments, upon which a new unity 1 . vestigium ii n. I. Act. = the part of the foot that treads, the sole of the foot, [. . .] B.
has been conferred by the architectural frame. Meton., 1, a foot-step, track, foot-mark; [. . .] b, a trace, mark, asigir, [. . .] II. Pass.,
that which is trodden upon, a position, post, station; [. . .] b, the position of a
To see the National Gallery in this light is also to call attention to the experiential destroyed town, ruins; [. . .] ( Casseil's Latin Dictionary [New York: Funk and
aspects of Mies's architecture: the ephemeral play of reflection and transparency on Wagnalls, 1955]).
the massive plate glass walls, which always opposes the assertive materiality of the
tectonic elements. The play of reflections doubles the city and superimposes it onto Stan Allen is assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University and
the blank screen of the architecture. In contrast to the bronze finish of the Seagram projects editor of the journal Assemblage.
Building, the matte black finish of the National Gallery's steelwork enforces the
lingering suggestion of immateriality. This is not to propose that Mies's architecture
be seen entirely as illusion and ephemerality but rather to underline how the very
definiteness of the architectural support, instead of being sufficient in and of itself, is
necessary to frame and set in motion a play of illusion and representation that is its
dialectical counterpart. Mies deploys, without apology, the logic of the trick: the

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