The problem with trying to understand a subject by reading about it, Plato writes in his Seventh Letter, is that language cannot say what is named by the name. In other words, anyone can bandy about "architecture", but there is no way of accurately explaining what that term means. Books claiming to define architecture in some new, more authentic way will probably be around as long as the word exists.
Of course, no matter how articulately we present ourselves, something will always be missing in our description of architecture — there will always be more to add, and that something is the most important part. Plato suggests that the only way we can gain the "light that is kindled by a leaping spark" is by "rubbing together" words and images, because the spirit of the thing "exists neither in voices, nor icons, but in souls."
In his Pictographs project, Valerio Olgiati attempts to "show the roots of architecture, and expectations concerning projects" through a parade of very small, captionless slides. These thumbnail-sized drawings, sketches and photographs are "interpretable as icons", and proffer "a universal view of the perceptible origin of contemporary architecture." Pictographs began in 2012 at the Venice Biennale, when Olgiati asked over forty well-known architects to send forth a set of reference images which they felt captured the impetus of their work, and the spirit of architecture as a whole. The Images of Architects is the edited compilation of that project, and it is a beautiful little book — roughly the dimensions of a Roman brick, cloth-bound in imperial purple with black velvet end papers.
Since architects have a penchant for pages without text, you might think a picture book would at least be easy to get through. However, Images bears no relation to the pornographic satiation of typical coffee table monographs; it takes as much concentration as a technical report. The images demand to be interpreted, and there’s something at first intriguing, and then a little crushing about that. It feels somewhat insular, requiring a particular understanding of how architectural images work in sequence — that Wölfflinian activity of endless coupling and uncoupling to construct new historical narratives.
The problem with the book – and the challenge set by Olgiati – parallels that faced by the discipline: when we juxtapose so many examples of strong individual praxis and personal aesthetic, what results is strangely vacuous and unfulfilling. There are simply too many architectures, too many histories, a psychedelic palimpsest of competing visual definitions. In the words of Boris Groys, Images is "homogeneity without universality." The dubious intellectualism of the Americans; the earnest sincerity of the Japanese; the uninspiring, literalist banality of the English — all serve to perpetuate a certain elitism amongst architects, especially given the exclusive architectural elite invited to contribute to this volume in the first place.
To give you a flavour of the book’s inevitable predictability: Venturi Scott Brown displayed 1970’s snapshots of Vegas and some collages of Philip Johnson, while Glenn Murcutt split his collection into one-third aboriginal paintings, one-third corrugated iron photos, and one-third high modernist masterwork. Ben Van Berkel focussed on formlessness, featuring intricate biological specimens and bright colour streetscapes of New York, vaguely reminiscent of those generic photos that come in Ikea frames. Meanwhile Alejandro Aravena unimaginatively listed the canonical work from any Introduction to Architecture class: the Parthenon, the Pantheon, The Basilica of San Marco, the Villa Rotunda, the Barcelona Pavilion, and so on.
The biggest disappointments were Caruso St. John and Peter Eisenman — the former for their stuffy Georgian sitting rooms and stock photo cloisters (half cast in afternoon shadow); the latter for his utter repetitiveness. For at least a decade, Eisenman has been giving the same lecture all around the world; from Rainaldi through Corbusier and Piranesi, concluding with an analysis of Terragni’s Casa del Fascio (the subject of his own thesis). To my personal distaste, his contribution to Images was basically the PowerPoint to this lecture.
Nonetheless, there were definitely a few surprises; Sou Fujimoto has a wonderfully coherent set, redolent of a Studio Ghibli film — bustling Asian streetscapes, dappled shadow on tombs in summer. One fantastic shot shows a Japanese shop owner surrounded by colourful knickknacks, seemingly overcome by the immensity of all the plastic shit crowding her in. Opposite is a serene fig tree in Singapore, its buttress roots forming a cathedral for children to play.
But there was only one entry that I felt really did the structure of the book justice, and that was Mario Botta. Clearly reading the complexities of the challenge, he has wrestled to depict more than his own interests. His third image is an icon of a martyr. It is intuitively recognisable as religion itself (in the abstract) and not, as with John Pawson, a picture of a real-life structure that happens to be religious. Opposite the suffering saint is a Picasso sketch, a deformed face contorted in agony. With just two little squares, Botta captures the universality of human suffering, the eternal struggle to make sense of our being and the architect’s constant negotiation of the absolute and the subjective. Similarly, Botta’s last slide, a typographer’s diagram of a capital letter A, evokes the richness of proportion, structure, authority and the perfection of nature.
Certainly though it is Botta’s first image that is the most poignant: a sketch by Carlo Scarpa that simply says "Verum Ipsum Factum", in reference to a branch of philosophy not so far removed from the concerns of Plato. It means the truth defines itself, and suggests that architecture is not, perhaps, a thing in the world at all. Rather, it comes into being only through recognition and labelling. This is a subtle (and perhaps somewhat obtuse) way of saying that architecture is necessarily whatever we say it is, and therefore any attempt to construct even a fleeting "universal view" by Olgiati is a beguiling, but utterly impossible task.
