Lecture date: 1976-05-12
In order to demonstrate that architecture is a poetic discipline as well as an economic, social, and political one, Robert Slutsky explores the relationship of architecture and cubism, with particular reference to the work of Le Corbusier. Robert Slutsky is an artist and a Professor of Fine Arts who has taught at the University of Texas, Cornell, Pratt, Cooper Union, and Penn. He has frequently collaborated with architects, including John Hejduk, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman. With Colin Rowe, he was co-author of the influential essay ‘Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal’.
NB: Audio and image interference 50-60 mins into lecture.
Lecture Transcription:
Robert Slutsky: I’m going to think out loud tonight, and I’m going to hope that somehow you are going to indulge me in this kind of activity because this thoughts that I have now are relatively recent, that is to say that I’ve come about realizing them within the last year or so, and I’d like to share them with you as best as I can. What I’d like to do tonight is I’m going to give you a kind of verbal libretto, and after I finish with that I will show slides, and those are very eloquent, I think, I hope. They will demonstrate to some degree the thesis that I’m proposing.
And the thesis is this: Corbusier and Juan Gris have certain very common attitudes about the Cubist aesthetic, but that Corbusier, being an architect and dealing with architecture, in a sense precludes any obvious use of figuration—the way the Cubists use figuration in painting, as a very necessary ingredient of a dialectic between figuration and geometry. Corbusier, I think, transcended the limitation of not being able to use figuration in the obvious sense by alluding and by metaphorically alluding, in proposing that his buildings be seen in a kind of reference to a Cubist still life condition. I’ll make myself clear as I go on.
One of the things I’ll demonstrate is that Corbusier was very conscious at a very early age of lifting the eye towards the centre of the format, whatever that might be. In his drawings I will provide some evidence of that; his early sketches, which get carried through to the aesthetic of his buildings itself. Is the consciousness of compression, of hermetic conditions, self-referential conditions in architecture, which is very close to still life painting.
I’ll also try to demonstrate that still life painting as such, probably gave birth to Cubism, although most historians like to think of Cézanne, a great landscape painter, as the originator of the Cubist aesthetic. in fact, his landscapes read in still life manner, which is to say that the consciousness of abstraction, of ordinal conditions, of simplification, tend towards the still life rather than the landscape. In one Gris’s case, if I can just draw something on the board, he accomplished a very modernist synthesis of depth and flatness in his paintings. As he developed the still life to the point where the last 5 or 7 years of his work the clear demonstration of a certain kind of double meaning to the diagonal, near symmetry but not quite. He tipped the normal, the vanishing point of the Renaissance, the ideal one point perspective to a ninety degree turn of the canvas, which this occurs in most of his paintings, accomplishing a very marvelous commentary on Renaissance space and Cubist flat space.
I’m going to also read the last paragraph of the first transparency article, because that kicks off the subject of water. One is the aspect of compression and frontality, which incidentally has something to do with water. If you think about what compression implies. The other is the slow liquification of space from what I would consider the ethereal consomme soup of the Renaissance to the thick pea soup of Cubism. Not just a pea soup that’s clear, but more like a combination with minestrone soup, because the meanings come pop up to the surface and disappear below the surface. It’s a very heavy colloid of culture. I think both Gris et Le Corbusier had two quite evident things: the frontality, the tipping forward, and the careful attention to the centre. (…)
In Corbusier’s case, he does something with the centre: he traces facades as, literally, faces. I think his feeling about facade and face, you can do a whole thing on that, the double meaning of a sign in terms of architectural language implies so much, is so rich in meaning. I’d like to suggest that the facade has certain very strong implications in Corbusier’s architecture. He took the classical Renaissance ‘A-B-A’ on the vertical and rotated it 90 degrees, lifted it off the ground, and proceeded to play with the centre in an absolutely fascinating way in terms of its implications. In fact, there are buildings in which either a cut is made, or buildings where slices are made,
