from current issue of _Architecture_ mag web site....
The few architects we find in popular fiction are
predictably likable. For an
antidote to the fashionably sensitive, yet
terminally bland architect,
adventurous readers can turn to Douglas Cooper's
new novel, Delirium
(Hyperion, 1998).
<image of Eisenman installation>
<clip for D+S video>
Cooper wrote script for two Diller +
Scofidio projects: "Indigestion"
(1995, above), an interactive
installation. Cooper collaborated on
Peter Eisenman's Milan Triennial
installation (1995, top).
It obliquely traces the fate of a sinister
practitioner and his malevolent
biographer.This tale bears the imprint of Cooper's
degree in philosophy, two
years of architecture school, and collaborative
forays with architects Peter
Eisenman and Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.
ARCHITECTURE: How do the structures you find in
philosophy and
architecture inform your writing?
DOUGLAS COOPER: I believe that program and
narrative are
analgous. These structures all map onto each other
in a way that's
intelligible. I make novels in the shapes of the
plans of cities and
houses; arguably, this makes me a structuralist.
Now that
Deconstructivist heaven has arrived, my position
is not chic. I call
myself a Structuralist, but esthetically I'm very
much drawn to
post-structural and Postmodern ways of
delaminating things.
Describe the philosopher's need for structure.
It's what prevents flux and chaos. Look at the
so-called
Deconstructivist movement, which is an attempt to
capture flux and
chaos in built structure. Someone suggested that
the problem with
Deconstructivist buildings is that they don't
move. Zaha Hadid says, "I
believe my buildings can fly until my engineers
tell me otherwise."
Well the fact is her buildings don't fly. They
don't crawl; they don't
whirl; they don't move an inch. They exist as
structure. Every once in a
while, an architect will design a floor that moves
in his building. But
that's a gimmick. Structure is how architects
impose their will on chaos.
They make things that stand and are ordered in a
specific way, with a
sequence of rooms that mean something or dictate
the way human
beings move through them. This is exactly what a
novelist does when
he or she structures a narrative. You dictate the
way in which
somebody experiences a story. It's a way of taking
the flux we're
working from and paring it down to something
significant.
I like Decon. It's architects experimenting with
the unmoving and the
built, seeing how far they can push it before it
ceases to make sense,
how close to chaos they can make a building and
still render it
meaningful. That is what I do with a narrative. My
books always have a
story, but they're about as far from traditional
storytelling as you can
get without lapsing into meaninglessness.
Philosophy is a point of contact for me with the
people I respect most
in architecture today: John Hejduk, Elizabeth
Diller and Ricardo
Scofidio, and Daniel Libeskind. There are other
architects who just
shovel philosophy into their work; sometimes I
think Peter Eisenman
is guilty of that. They simply take philosophy and
transform it
automatically into a building. But there are those
who actually think
their way through building; Peter sometimes does
that as well.
Someone like Liz Diller will not make an
architectural or an artistic
gesture without understanding extremely rigorously
why she is doing
so. We have worked together on some projects; I've
watched her in a
state of intellectual paralysis, which is
wonderful to watch. She just
won't move until I can explain to her why we are
doing what we're
doing, or until she can come up with an
explanation. It's deeply
frustrating. Sometimes you get nowhere for a
couple of hours and then
you break through in a rigorous manner. That's how
I work as a fiction
writer.
Compare reading your novel and walking through a
building.
Delirium is serialized on the Internet, where
people can decide how to
read it. I am asked, "Doesn't it appall you to
give so much artistic will
to the audience by allowing them to navigate your
text as they
choose? Doesn't this diminish your powers?" It
doesn't. I consider the
works of architects analogous. The architect
designs a floor plan; he
doesn't dictate the order in which the rooms are
to be experienced. He
gives over the options of navigating that building
to its occupant. This
doesn't make the architect any less of an
architect, any less the author
of a building. The walls are set in place. The
plan is the plan. Similarly,
my book on the Web has an unvarying plan. You can
navigate it
anyway you like, but I wrote it.
The built environment does not reveal the mind of
one creator. Does
your analogy extend there?
Yes. Our experience of the congested city, to
borrow a term from Rem
Koolhaas, is closer to a fragmentary consciousness
than it is to the
heroic modern vision of the city created out of a
single will. The city
described by Jane Jacobs or Koolhaas involves an
esthetic of accretion
and a collision of wills and the celebration of
accident and moments of
chaos. All of that is in this novel.
Given what you've learned from architecture as a
writer, do you see a
reciprocal process? Can architects learn from a
novelist?
Absolutely. Peter Eisenman imagines a building
that is inextricable
from its text, one that is not just inspired by a
text, but is wedded to
its text. There's no reason an architect can't
look at a text to give him
or her the structure for building. There's a Paul
Celan poem at the
heart of Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. But
in an even more
rigorous way, I can imagine constructing a
building like a sonnet. A
sonnet is an extremely rigid metric structureÑa
mathematical grid,
really. The novel, while less mathematical, is
structurally capable of
producing potent analogs to the city. I always
look at Victor Hugo's
Notre Dame de Paris, which architects look at as
well, as the first
significant architectural novel. (It's not a great
novel actually.) It is
built in the same way the city of Paris was, with
a description of the
cathedral at the center from which the story
radiates outward.
Cathedrals did this with Biblical texts; they were
built books.
Didn't Hugo also say that the book would defeat
the building?
Yes. He said the printing press would render all
of this obsolete. This
will kill that. Of course it didn't. I think one
of the great recurring comic
themes in every art form is the exaggerated rumor
of its death. Every
10 years, poetry is dying. Every 10 years, drama
has died. Architecture
dies a thousand deaths. It makes a nice story to
argue that
something will kill off something else.
I see Delirium as an optical novel - not simply
because one section is
based on the Panopticon, the most explicitly
optical architectural type,
but because it is about judgement and shame, both
of which are
conditions predicated on the optical. You are
judged because you are
seen. My two antagonists are optically determined:
Ariel Price, the
architect with hiddenness at the core of his
opaque structure and life,
and his corrupt biographer, whose life's work is
to peer into the
hiddenness, into the dark spaces.
I think that the optical is becoming important in
architecture: The
Museum of Modern Art's recent, and much maligned
Light Construction
exhibition will define architectural practice for
the next decade or so.
People will look back at what it says about the
mutability of opacity
and how that alters the Vitruvian universe. It
suggests that we look at
buildings in a way that is more nuanced and
profound, more paranoid
and complex, than the Modernist obsession with
glass. Delirium plays
with these kind of things, with the idea of being
able to partially see
something. One of the ways the optical is resolved
in the novel is in
Ariel Price's prison cell, which grew out of the
project I did with Peter
Eisenman for the Milan Triennial.
Delirium is layered with Biblical allusions. Is it
a modern morality tale?
Do you present Ariel Price to comment on the
profession or to
comment on human nature more generally?
Both. I don't see my novel as highly moralistic.
Delirium is an antidote
to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is a highly
moralistic book. It
plays with moral constructs that Modernism itself
erected, and has fun
with those. My novel plays with the idea of the
moralistic construct of
the hero, and tries to unlayer that notion within
the context of
Modernism.
What is the modern hero?
Well, he looks a lot like Le Corbusier. In
Delirium, I'm taking Le
Corbusier apart and even more so, Mies Van Der
Rohe and Philip
Johnson. I thought it would be interesting to
conflate Mies and
Johnson, the great man and his plagiarist, and
analyze that dual
figure who is both genius and mediocrity, a great
man and his mirror.
That's what Ariel Price is. He looks too much like
Mies to be Johnson
and too much like Johnson to be Mies. He embodies
both the heroic
and the ludicrous of the heroic Modernist.
What are his ludicrous qualities?
Well, ludicrous is the wrong word for this, but it
is deeply ironic and
morally and esthetically disturbing that Philip
Johnson, Nazi fellow
traveler, is the most powerful architect in our
democratic empire and
has Jewish patrons. At least Mies and Le Corbusier
had a core of
genius. I find Johnson to be like a statue of
Lenin. He's this empty
construct who has managed to assume a great deal
of power. And that
points to idolatry, to the evil and nihilistic
aspect of Modernism.
The first of two stories that got me started was
the story of Philip
Johnson, who famously has said: "I am a whore." We
build for
anybody. We go for a client, no matter who the
client is. In Delirium, I
tell the story of Philip Johnson, the whore who
remains unredeemed,
and Mary Magdalene, the whore who is redeemed; I
rhyme these
stories in parallel strands on the Web. That's how
I started this book.
So I suddenly had my heroic Modernist and my Old
Testament icon
occurring in parallel, winding around each other.
It became an analysis
of whoredom.
For whom was Delirium written?
My ideal reader is an architect or an art student
or people who share a
way of thinking about the liberal arts. Architects
read differently from
other people. They are some of the few people who
read theory in a
practical manner. That sounds like a contradiction
but it's not.
Architects read theoretical books to determine how
to make buildings
and how to think esthetically.
Ned Cramer
source:
http://www.architecturemag.com/july98/spec/interview/interview.asp
