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The Historicity Of The Modern

Daniel Sherer

Preston Scott Cohen’s Herta and Paul Amir Building for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art confronts an urgent problem affect-ing architecture today from an angle that is at once radical and unforeseen. This is the problem of overemphasis on the envelope and the digitally generated surface at the expense of the interior – ultimately, of the inside of architecture.1 This imbalance, a persistent symptom of the reigning ideology that subjects all areas of culture – and architecture in particular – to the imperatives of the spectacle, can also be seen as an overreaction to the economy of means imposed by modern rationalization. In the Amir Building, Cohen stakes out a sin-gular position by making a specific choice in favor of interior space, understood to be the nucleus of the project’s formal idea. Armed with an acute historical awareness of the param-eters of the problem when pursuing the realization of the building’s radical, contemporary form, Cohen takes up, from a new perspective, the complex negotiation between interior and exterior that is inherent in the modern museum and in the architecture of institutions in general. This awareness of what can be called the historicity of the modern – the dialogue between modernity and determinate moments in architec-ture’s history, informed by a play of internal affinities and differences in the languages in question – offers an important key to the specificity of his approach. At the present moment this kind of dialogue presupposes a return to architecture’s deep interiority that can help situate his critical stance toward the demand for an easily consumable image that is a recurrent feature of recent architectural developments. To unfold what the idea of modernism’s historicity could mean for a new reading of the contemporary situation, and cognizant of the challenge Cohen’s project constitutes to dominant modes of practice and reigning categories of critical discourse, let us first recall the perennial opposition between restrained and exuberant form as articulated through the di-chotomy of interior and exterior. Two very obvious examples can be used to clarify some of the principal implications of this dichotomy. The first is arguably the key building of clas-sical Roman architecture, the Pantheon. Despite its brilliant if

1. Peter Eisenman, “Introduction,” in Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963–1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), vi–xii.

Preston Scott Cohen, Herta and Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2011. View into the Lightfall. Photo: Amit Geron. Images courtesy the architect.

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somewhat awkward solution of pushing a Greek and Roman temple front up against a domed volume, or tholos, on the exterior, its real monumentality is the interior. As Alois Riegl points out, the Pantheon represents the first instance in which a building’s logic and discourse, its meaning and form, be-come concentrated above all as an interior.2

The second example, from the Baroque period, is Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Although the rich dialogue established between the concave and convex forms of the facade enables an impressive initial encounter with the building, its actual climax is experienced after we enter and witness the transcendent vision of the honey-combed dome above. The complexity and exuberance of the Baroque interior attain an even higher formal level than seen on the outside, which seems somewhat detached when compared to the integration of the domed space with the rest of the plan. One can argue that the Baroque experiment with form, space, structure, and light, presented as different mo-dalities of a singular interior, has had a profound impact on Cohen’s thinking and work. At first glance it might seem beside the point to approach the Amir Building through a reading of Baroque space and visuality, given the building’s grounding in modernist form and the strong resonance it establishes, through the use of concrete, with the Bauhaus idiom of Tel Aviv. Yet it is also the case that some of the most powerful aspects of the museum reside in its synthesis of distinct, even disparate, codes in ways that lead to a clearly contemporary result. Among these is a Baroque matrix manifested in the precisely calibrated curvi-linearity of the Lightfall, a spiraling, 87-foot-tall atrium that refracts natural light into the half-buried building, and in the play of real space and illusionism obtained by the use of complex geometries, which becomes evident as one views the Lightfall from various angles while moving up and down the escalators and ramps that frame it.3 Baroque architecture was hardly a new area of investi-gation for Cohen when he won the competition for the Amir Building in 2003. While his earliest house projects are closer to high modernism, his Cornered House (1991–92) marked a decisive turning point. The torqued volume of the house dramatizes the play of forces unleashed in the jagged and dy- namized figure, which was shaped by dramatic oblique vec-tors that lend equal energy to readings of mass and void. The result reflected Cohen’s interest in returning to the then largely untapped potentials of the Baroque projective geometries of

2. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G. Bretschneider 1985), 31.3. Preston Scott Cohen, “The Route to a Building,” in Five Moments: Trajectories in the Architecture of the Tel Aviv Museum, eds. Yasha J. Grobman and Arielle Blonder (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2011), 18.

Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, 1638–41. View into dome.

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Girard Desargues and Brook Taylor and using them to radi-cally transform the formal logic of the modern house.4 In the Torus House (1998–2000), Cohen’s primary focus is the relation of inside and outside. This relation can be seen as paradoxical since access to the second floor can only occur by means of a detour through the roof garden. The paradox is only reinforced by the consistent antithesis of a highly ex-pressive interior and a generally spare exterior. The twist-ing core, which in all likelihood owes as much to Gaudi and Expressionism as it does to the Baroque, and the internal dy-namism of the Torus House foreshadow the spatial and visual logic of the Lightfall. At the same time, the museum’s enve-lope can be seen as an amplification of the Cornered House facade strategy, as it centers the entrance within an oblique, cantilevered mass while making its forceful diagonality into an edge that guides circulation. In contrast to the compulsory ascent that is a distinguishing feature of the Torus House, in the Tel Aviv building entry occurs in medias res, and one is immediately presented with the option of going either up or down in the Lightfall. At this point Cohen became interested in the contrast in Sansovino between the demand for austerity on the facade – a response to the Venetian Daula Law, which prescribed an egalitarian lack of rhetoric on the exterior – and exuberance and experiment within, as brought out in Manfredo Tafuri’s analysis of Venice and the Renaissance.5 When he began to de-sign the Tel Aviv Museum addition, the architect was also fas-cinated by such works as the anonymous Palazzo Grimani at S. Maria Formosa (c. 1550), the stylistic peculiarities of which may be the result of an unusual degree of intervention by the patron in the design. Such works, which stand out from the historical continuum by virtue of their singularity, not only shed light on the formal genesis of Sansovino’s design strategies, but also clarify the wider significance of exceptional spatial conceptions in Renaissance and modern architecture. In this palazzo a nondescript exterior contrasts sharply with the ex- plosive vertical articulation of the interior, the chief purpose of which was to display the client’s collection of antiquities, and an unrestrained play of ornament that would have astonished even those humanist cognoscenti attuned to the most daring formal experiments of Giulio Romano and Michelangelo. Although Cohen was clearly attentive to this kind of in-terior, which already exhibits many of the essential traits of Baroque space, one thing is clear: it cannot be fit into any kind of reductive or linear argument regarding style, and in fact

4. On Cohen’s adaptation of Baroque pro-jective methods, see Preston Scott Cohen, Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Baroque ideas of visual curiosity and the exceptional ar-chitectural conditions that were associated with them, particularly in connection with the elliptical light sources of San Carlo ai Catinari in Rome, are also discussed here.5. Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renais-sance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989), 8–10.

Anonymous, Palazzo Grimani at S. Maria Formosa, Venice, Italy, c. 1550. Exterior and interior.

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constitutes a sort of implicit refusal of the totalizing assump-tions underlying such arguments. It does, however, provide a significant clue as to the direction of his architectural thought and practice when he began to design the Amir Building. Here it is superfluous to recall that what we are dealing with in this case is an extrapolation from history, a point of departure for a new understanding of the potentials of interior space, rather than any design strategy that can be interpreted with reference to obsolete conceptions of style or influence. At stake here is an argument that eschews the hunt for architectural sources, focussing instead on points of tangency that enable specific types of comparison, and, in the final analysis, a concept of ar-chitectural modernity rooted in the dialectic of continuity and rupture between past and present: the Venetian proto-museum being just as radical in its own day as Cohen’s museum is in our own. And since the differences between Cohen’s practice and its humanist and Baroque precedents are greater than the similarities, their divergence is a key to understanding what is meant by modernism’s historicity, the internal logic of which is driven by singular moments of historical rupture as well as by comparable instances of spatial dynamism. The Lightfall is, undoubtedly, one of the clearest instances in Cohen’s work of such dynamism. It arose from the need to bring together in a single knot of forces a set of rectilinear galleries on a cramped triangular site. Establishing an elabo-rate yet elegant feedback loop, it conditions its own reception spatially as much as visually. As we ascend in the light-filled space we see others ascending and descending. If the space is sculptural to the extent that it is formally autonomous and a clear and distinct entity animating the larger body of the museum, it is pictorial to the extent that the large apertures in the form of canted parallelograms, some of which contain half-glazed panels, frame views into the galleries and create complex illusionistic effects. Yet it is inherently architectural and spatial insofar as it is central, in all senses, to the prom-enade architecturale. Considered in purely formal terms, it al-ternates between the organic continuity of the spiral and the broken yet linear effect of a faceted panel – somewhat like the vocabulary of panelization developed in a more understated way on the exterior; the dramatic diagonal vector of the ramp is accentuated by the dynamic play of voids. In all of these re-spects the Lightfall has many parallels but no real precedents. In its vertical modulation of an oblique circulation path and in its daring curvilinear solution to the relationship between rectilinear spaces around the perimeter, it evokes the postwar

Herta and Paul Amir Building.The Lightfall’s relationship to gal-lery spaces. Photos by Amit Geron.

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Italian modernism of Luigi Moretti and Carlo Mollino – radical figures who drew with equal facility on severe Rationalist and exuberant Baroque spatial codes.6 In a more general sense, the Lightfall evokes the Baroque concerto degli arti, or concert of painting, sculpture, and architectural space that is one of the keynotes of the language. The overall effect of the Lightfall is that of a dynamic, spiralling motion, affecting built form and moving spectator alike. The motion here is broken into discontinuous accents that register the contribution of the interlocking volumes of the gallery spaces that it services from the Lightfall structure itself, indicating both a Baroque idea of spatial continuity and a reconfiguration of the Loosian Raumplan with its staggered volumes. The galleries are differentiated in their ceiling heights and overall handling of space, lending themselves to diverse types of curatorial inventiveness and logics of display. After having risen through the Lightfall, the visitor is deposited at the threshold of this more normative and flexible area with the immediate memory of a formal and spatial turbulence that was, nonetheless, controlled by the governing geometry of the hyperbolic paraboloid. A crucial distinction is thereby made between the unitary core space, to be looked at on its own

6. On Moretti and the Baroque, see Federico Bucci and Marco Mulazzani, Luigi Moretti: Works and Writings, trans. Marina de Conciliis (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 136–49; on Mollino and the Baroque, see Kurt Forster and Daniel Sherer, “A Conversation on Carlo Mollino with Bruno Bischofberger,” Domus 951 (September 2011): 274–81.

Herta and Paul Amir Building. Looking up at and across the Lightfall. Photos by Amit Geron.

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dramatically architectural terms, and a series of discrete spaces subordinated to the function of displaying art. This becomes most evident at the top of the ramp, which shows how much Cohen’s strategy relies on studied contrast. Like the massive hull of some great ship, the bulging volume of scored, finely calibrated concrete segments is seen against the rectilinear spaces of the galleries beyond, and moving toward these gal-leries, the visitor is tempted to peer over a sharply rising wall to see the dizzying drop to the lowest level. With its taut geo-metries and powerful tensions, this space seems always to walk on a knife’s edge, and so does the viewer’s experience of it. The Lightfall has no comparably prominent feature on the exterior. However, as a result of the deft siting of the building among a series of other cultural facilities, a subtle but signifi-cant dialectic emerges between the articulation of the enve-lope and its urban address that makes the outside read at least partly as an inside. This dialectic is enhanced by the careful handling of the connection to the dignified Brutalist Tel Aviv Museum building by Dan Eytan and by the sunken garden that was inserted between the old and the new buildings. The contrast between the relatively innocuous entry to the new building and its dynamic interior creates an incisive paradox: that of holding back the best for those who enter, rather than giving all, or most of it, away at the outset. Here Cohen goes

Herta and Paul Amir Building. West facade as seen from the pub-lic arts plaza. Photo: Amit Geron.

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against the current tendency to overstate or “push” the enve-lope. Two conspicuous examples of contemporary museums will suffice to make this point: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s proj-ect for The Broad Museum in Los Angeles (2011–12) deploys a structural honeycomb facade tipped up at one corner to dra-matize the act of entry, exemplifying a spectacular use of the envelope, even though most, if not all of the structural weave is visible from the inside; and Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern addition in London emphasizes the scored skin of the project so as to dematerialize and paradoxically augment the monumental effect of the broken pyramidal volume. By con-trast, the multifaceted, panelized exterior and modest entry of Cohen’s museum seem rather quiet, despite the dramatic vector of the building’s cantilevered profile. When dealing with such strategies of the envelope it is important to remember that their efficacy depends almost en-tirely upon how they are deployed, the urban and spatial con-texts in which they appear, and the overall artistic aims they serve. Excess, especially as manifest in a building envelope, has an optimal effect when what is being exceeded is a more or less clearly understood set of aesthetic expectations tacitly estab-lished by precedent and the conjunction of artistic languages, ideological imperatives, and technological forces. Ultimately, at stake is a strategic use of form that moves beyond both the contrived patterns of exuberance and the more conventional modes of restraint as well as the manner in which the prolif-eration of surface effects enabled by digital technology is cali-brated. One of the chief points of critical interest in Cohen’s museum is the way it embodies the architect’s idea as the spatial drama of the inside, rather than fetishizing external articulation at the expense of any other criteria. Cohen’s work presupposes the use of complex geometries that distort and defamiliarize recognized types or typological motives, in keeping with his vision of the modern as a tension- filled discourse that supplanted the harmonic understanding of classical wholeness. At the same time, this allows him to preserve the idea of a formally coherent totality that privileges the elaboration of interior space. In effect, this strategic use of interiority calls into question the state of contemporary architecture and the various critical and ideological roles it performs within the wider cultural matrix. The Amir Building suggests that the most effective way to approach the tensions of the present is to historicize them, to see how they are the result of unresolved conflicts, not only between distinct languages from diverse periods in the history

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of architecture, but also within the individual works at any given historical moment and their complex mediation with the social crises they at once register and conceal. In this re-gard the museum proposes a deeper historical narrative than many works of comparable ambition and scope informed by an investigation of the ways architecture constructs its own historical awareness, critical parameters, and specific place within the chain of historical becoming. The Amir Building allows us to reframe the history of modernism from a new vantage point and to reconsider the wider implications of the dialectic of historical continuity and rupture with the past that is an integral aspect of the modern-ist narrative itself. This is because Cohen’s museum is part of an extended genealogy of modernist buildings that exhibit a strong relationship with the Baroque, which has been more or less suppressed in conventional histories. In both the pre- and postwar periods, for example, Moretti and Mollino were caught up in a complex dialogue between Rationalist ideas of restraint and clarity on the one hand, and the dynamic interpretations of space, form, and light charac-teristic of the Baroque on the other. A salutary tension be- tween Baroque and Rationalist languages is evident in Mollino’s

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Herta and Paul Amir Building. Clockwise from from top left: Plan, plaza level; plan, level +1 and +2; section.

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Società Ippica building in Turin, in which the interior speaks more eloquently than the somewhat episodic exterior; and Moretti’s Casa del Balilla in Rome evokes a sense of Baroque dynamism with the vigorous plasticity of a spiral stair in-serted into the austere confines of the modernist volume, which produces a more powerful spatial articulation than ex-clusive adherence to either of these codes could have brought about. Works of this kind renewed the interaction between modernism and history, and also served to underscore a more particularized awareness of the divergence between the lin-guistic codes of different eras. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their inherent disparity, these codes converge, in the best of cases, in the unexpected conversations that oc-cur between epochs, which singular buildings like the Amir Building make possible. For this reason I have no qualms in placing it squarely within a tradition of modernism that is sensitive to Baroque space. One should not hesitate to read such a complex work in relation to those aspects of modern-ism that are equally cognizant of the latent modern potentials embedded in historical languages or of the historical reso-nances that can be discovered in the more critically aware contemporary approaches. In Cohen’s work, the idea of the historicity of the mod-ern implies a valorization of the interior in strong contrast with the privileging of the envelope that presently dominates contemporary practice. His emphasis on the interior does not mean that the exterior is wholly ignored; rather, what is at stake is the negotiation between inside and outside, not an ex-clusive focus on either. Thus, the real question is how Cohen deals with the problem of connectivity between exterior and interior. Cohen is among the many architects in the modern period who have taken seriously the Corbusian injunction that architecture is circulation, but one of the few who are presently pushing it in a new direction. In addition to provid-ing an element that mediates between levels, the Lightfall acts as an emblem, a mode of emphatic articulation, and a key factor in the equation of architecture with one of the unstop-pable forces it must deal with: the force of the interior, which can only be grasped, or be best understood, through the dramatization of the circulation that passes through it and that it enables. In this sense the Amir Building reinvents the museum as a type by reformulating the idea of space for art as clearly divided from the space of architecture as an autono-mous formal language. In Cohen’s case this is a recognizably modernist language, yet inflected by a Baroque pedigree that

Luigi Moretti, Casa del Balilla a Trastevere, Rome, 1937. Photo: Gabriele Basilico. Top: Carlo Mollino, Società Ippica, Turin, Italy, 1937–40. Interior.

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is rigorously controlled by geometry, rather than being a dis-connected shell wholly given over to gestural figuration and the solicitations of the image. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, the museum is the locus where the aesthetic disposition is turned into an institution that thrives equally on spatial unification and spatial differ-ence. Spatial unification because the most disparate aesthetic objects are brought together under a single roof and equal-ized as formal objects of contemplation, despite their very real differences. Spatial difference because the museum itself requires what Bourdieu calls the “demand for un-limited receptiveness” on the part of the visitor, and such a disposition can be fostered, and perhaps can only come into play in the first place, if an essential continuity in circulation, above and beyond the different imperatives of sequence, is to be maintained.7 The Lightfall objectifies space insofar as it becomes the privileged locus of the aesthetic contemplation of architec-ture and the bearer of its autonomous claims as a discipline, here emblematized by the rigorous control of geometry and the independent dialogue it sustains with the other arts. Yet it also emancipates space from the objectifying gaze thema-tized in the galleries, since it sets the very act of contempla-tion in motion, both encouraging movement along its ramped itinerary dividing the ramps and the atrium. The fact that the experience of circulation along this route is simultaneously registered and enhanced by lozenge-shaped apertures remi-niscent of Le Corbusier’s fenêtres en longueur, even as these apertures diverge from this modernist convention because they look onto an “outside” space rather than onto an outside per se, shows how far Cohen has moved beyond the modern-ist model, while radically reshaping it through a profound conversation with the formal codes and spatial languages of many eras. In this sense modernism’s historicity, the inevita-ble corollary of any critical assimilation of the past, goes hand in hand with the museum’s newfound interiority.

Daniel Sherer teaches architec-tural history and theory at Yale University School of Architec-ture and at Columbia University GSAPP. His most recent publica-tion is the catalogue essay for the exhibition, “Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture.”

7. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 30–31.