1 Aujourd’hui, l’architecture

What can we learn, today, from architecture? Or, better (though this is already another question), what place does this branch of human activity hold in our culture, this activity that has been, for more than two thousand years, in one form or another, for better or for worse, one of the main agents of the transformation of the world and its hominization, all the while putting its stamp deeply on Western thought? At the end of a century that has seen the built realm grow more in a few decades than in its entire history, but that has also experienced unprecedented destruction from war, as well as every kind of misfortune, catastrophe, violence, and ruination, in all of which architecture has itself been implicated, this is certainly no moment to reassert the confidence of the first masters of the modern movement. If some are still concerned with a resolutely architectural way of thinking, still most professionals are turning toward other branches of knowledge for the apparatus they need, reducing it to a simple tool. In this, they have more or less deliberately abandoned the formerly conceptual and philosophical dimension of their practice, without taking account of what history, sociology, political economics, semiology, and through to information technology might owe to architectonic metaphors—the utopia of Le Corbusier’sVers une architecture.1

The relatively reduced importance given to the art of building in critical and speculative literature is a good indication of its devaluation in the contemporary cultural field. We need only refer to the favorable treatment that our philosophers reserve for painting, or what remains of it, in order to measure the regime change imposed on reflection since the time, not so distant, when Paul Valéry recognized inconstruction an operation analogous to that of language, an act comparable toknowing (though who today still readsEupalinos?).² Is this, as is often repeated, the fault of modernist ideology, which under its double cover as functionalism and abstraction would have succeeded in stripping the art of building of all semantic value, reducing it to products devoid of meaning? Even if equating architecture to an act of communication is no more self-evident than reducing it to a set of functions, the paradox is that “modern” architecture should become so unbearable to so many people at the very moment when, having broken with the recurring fantasy of anarchitecture parlante, it might seem in practice to have revived the symbolic phase of art: the phase that, in Hegel’s terms, best corresponds to its concept. For Hegel, the symbol in some way implied a natural alliance between signifier and signified, in which signification imposes itself as such, avoiding the detour through the sign—with the exception that although, as Hegel states, “whole nations have been able to express their religion and their deepest needs no otherwise than by building, or at least in the main in some constructional way,”³ the representations evoked by architecture today amount to plays of oppositions that are partly emblematic, such as the opposition between the skyscraper and the suburban house, and the ideas and values displayed by architecture are far from having unanimous support. It is nevertheless not the fault of modernist ideology to have wished that humanity, like the ancient gods, be housed suitably in an environment created by architecture. The disappointment is all the more poignant in the face of the avant-gardes’ long-held dream for architecture to participate in the construction of a new world (architectureand revolution)—when they were not casting it, in Le Corbusier’s terms, as the sole antidote to revolution (architectureor revolution). A sign of the times: having run out of inspiration,Waiting for Godot’s Estragon cannot find any worse insult than that of “architect!”⁴

At a moment when criticism, lacking an identity, complacently pins on the “postmodern” label and pretends to renew the threads of a history that the modern movement, in its desire for a radical break with the past, chose to ignore, it seems the time is ripe to unravel the complicated skein of relations Western thought has historically maintained with the art of building, or at the very least to test the idea (the suspicion?) that the “crisis” in architecture today might be prompted by causes beyond the economic or ideological. These determinations of a more secret order are connected, beyond the sphere of artistic practices, to the history—if not to the very economy—of thought. Not that philosophers in the past have gone to any great lengths to deal with architecture as such; with a few exceptions—foremost among them Hegel, whose passages on the column rank among the best articulated texts on the subject—reference to the art of building has been essentially of a metaphorical order. InDiscourse on Method, Descartes sets “buildings which a single architect has planned and executed” against those which “several have attempted to put together by using old walls that have been built for other purposes” and contrasts “those well-ordered places that an engineer has freely planned on an open plain” with ancient cities that start out as simple villages and become, over time, large towns “that are irregularly laid out.”⁵ Such a development might well have only a rhetorical function, serving to introduce the philosopher’s plan to reform, if not the world, then at least his own thoughts, building on a foundation that was uniquely his own. Nonetheless, he shows—just as Plato does in his description of prehistoric Athens in theCritias, or of the ideal city of the Magnesians in Book Four of theLaws—a remarkable attention to the specific characteristics of the built environment and to its concrete conditions in practice, while at the same time understanding the significance, historical as much as epistemological, of atopos through which is revealed (if need be, in the form of a utopia) the truly architectonic dimension of the workings of thought.

This would still mean nothing if, as the philosopher admits, the art of building did not occupy a unique place within the field of productive activities, divine as well as human. The metaphor of God the architect, which in the classical age would take on the appearance of a foundational paradox, was already at work in Plato. The demiurge of theTimaeus is set up as the archetype of the architect par excellence: was he not given the task of constructing the world in the image of an ideal model, following the lines of a calculation, that aimed at realizing “a work by its nature the most beautiful and best”?⁶ But does not the architecture of mankind itself take part, if to a lesser degree, in that singular form ofmimesis that owes nothing to imitation (in the sense of the figurative arts⁷) but claims instead to be equal tomathesis, if not indistinguishable from it? Whereas the other arts, including music, are essentially reduced to conjecture and to an operation of the senses based on hearing or sight, the art of the builder derives from a higher order of knowledge, one that assumes not only the use of precision instruments but also systematic recourse to number and measure. In the final analysis, the fact remains thattopos operates with much more force than the work of architecture at the same time as it provides the example, at the level of the project, of the most subtle conjunction betweenmimesis andmathesis, corresponding in its effects and in its very regularity, its symmetry, to what Hegel regarded as “a purely external reflection of spirit.”⁸

From the perspective of a genetic epistemology, it is certain that a number of familiar notions are propped up, even today, by reference to the art of building. At a higher level, the fact that the eminently technical analyses of a Viollet-le-Duc paved the way for structuralism makes it clear how significant the architectural model has been in our culture through to the present. It is all the more symptomatic that at the moment when the appearance in the built realm of original, if not unforeseen, structures (those qualifying as “self-supporting,” reticulated or supported on continuous sheets of concrete) seems to contradict one of the precepts on which is founded not the method or thought of structuralism but its ideology (an ideology that requires structures to be finite in number and envisaged a priori applicable to any domain)—a moment when architectural theory (or what stands in lieu of it) is drawing attention to itself through the massive and often uncontrolled importation of notions borrowed from disciplines that define themselves as following in the footsteps of structuralism—it is at this moment that the architectural paradigm seems to have lost all critical and heuristic force, to be reduced to a simple stylistic figure. Having claimed to discern in culture, with Claude Lévi-Strauss (if not in the unconscious, with Jacques Lacan), “an architecture similar to that of language,”⁹ we have come, with Jacques Derrida, to propose the task of philosophy as one ofdeconstructing the web of conceptual oppositions that have made up the most constant armature of Western metaphysics (inside/outside, closed/open, continuous/discontinuous, etc.). Architectural practice may well seem to be out of place in our culture—a defection that goes hand in hand with a far more durable and profound eclipse: that of a settled model of coherence (fundamental if not foundational), an archetype of which would be the work of architecture.

Fates of a Metaphor

Our science has chosen to have no other object than what is defined and established by its operations. It constitutes its knowledge by means of formal or experimental models that display their structure and that can be subjected to any variations and transformations at will. The scientist either conceives them from scratch or borrows their schematics by analogy from another area of research or activity. Yet even if he purports to eliminate all reference to concrete imagination, the devices he resorts to nonetheless correspond (merely by virtue of the fact that they proceed from aconstruction) to a concern for order and balance, perhaps even for harmony, symmetry, or elegance, the architectonic connotation of which can be more or less pronounced. These kinds of models cannot in fact function as such, nor can they have any usefulness, any operational value, unless their economy is rigorous and systematic enough to allow a modification in any one of their parts to be reflected, according to a preconceived sequence, in their overall organization. Similarly, in the twelfth century, the substitution of ribbed vaults for the compact vault led, step by step, and following an implacable logic over the course of the century, to the complete overturning of medieval building structures. Again, an epistemological model cannot take into account all aspects of the phenomenon under consideration; theparti to which it responds, like any construction that claims to be “functional,” implies a choice among the empirical givens and the elimination of a certain number of parameters (as we see, for example, with Galileo’s construction of the experimental model of bodies falling in a vacuum). In the same way, the abstraction of an architectural project assumes that some sort of order has been introduced among the elements of the program, since the architectural form is unable, in any circumstance, to display all the functions to which the building must answer.

Science manipulates things, said Maurice Merleau-Ponty; it has given up trying toinhabit them.¹⁰ The world in which man has his place, if not his dwelling, well before he attempts to form a systematic representation of it, is a world the scientist is happy to posit as objectx of his operations. No doubt, contemporary science is not worried whether or not its constructions reduplicate the “real” scheme of the universe, of which it strives only to set up a coherent model. It is all the more significant to see it unwittingly close itself up when, for example, it claims to account for the working of the brain in terms borrowed from information technology in a circle analogous to the one established, this time deliberately, by the creators of mathematical physics.

The fate of architectonic metaphors in the philosophy and sciences of nature, from Plato to Leibniz and beyond, is too complex for us to deal with here; we will confine ourselves to the decisive overthrow of the figure of God the architect in modern cosmology. Whereas for Plato human art was reduced to simulating the operation of divinemimesis, using instruments ofmathesis, such was the prestige bestowed upon the work of architecture in the classical age that Johannes Kepler did not hesitate to confirm the image of a creator God, in a kind of retrospective projection, by referring to the art of building: “I need not stress how important a witness my subject is for the act of creation, questioned as it is by philosophers. For here we may behold how God, like a master-builder, has laid the foundation of the world according to order and law, and how He has measured all things so carefully, that we might well judge it is not nature that human art copies, but that God in His very creation was thinking of the way in which man yet unborn would be building one day.”¹¹

By this, Kepler did not mean to reduce divine thought to human thought or the brilliance of the “divine temple” to the light given out by the architecture of men: “The work of those who wish to understand the Creator through His creatures, God through men, . . . is no more useful than that of those who wish to understand the curved through the straight, and the circle through the square.”¹² The metaphor developed in theMysterium Cosmographicum, from the dedication on, in fact revives Plato’s argument: the works of so-called Nature were only able to come into existence as the result of a spontaneous, “automatic” cause, whose action would not have been accompanied by thought; they were produced according to reason and carry the mark of a divine science.¹³ But the progress of modern science, and even the project formed by Kepler, could not occur without conferring a new status on the figure of an architect God. What the Platonists merely glimpsed—the existence of a harmonic order to the world (“that occult harmony that keeps discordant elements in proper concord,” as Philibert de l’Orme had already written at the beginning of the first volume of hisArchitecture¹⁴)—was confirmed by the dynamic approach to celestial phenomena and the search for the causes of the movement of the planets. The quantitative relationships that Kepler set himself the task of revealing are merely so many “signatures” the Creator left on his work.

But there is more: The reversal sketched in the dedication of theMysterium (“We might think that . . .”) in fact echoes a movement characteristic of a hypothesis at the same time that it appeals tomimesis, in the strict sense of the word, which puts two productive subjects on stage rather than assuming a resemblance between two things produced. If it might seem that God was inspired to create the world by the architecture of a future mankind, this is because science itself can only know anything via some kind of construction. Such a construction—if we keep to the model proposed in this youthful work of Kepler’s, which brought him to the attention of the scientific world—is essentially static and designed according to the norms of spatial geometry, based as it was on the five regular polyhedrons. What is interesting, then, is what happens to the architectonic metaphor when Kepler moves from a static to a dynamic vision of cosmic order, carrying his investigations to bear not just on the metric proportions that govern the spatial distribution of the planets but also on the chronological relationships of their movements: “Once the world appears less like a monument built according to an architect’s plans than like a ballet danced or a chorus sung according to a composer’s score, it is revealed that the divine geometer was also and firstly a holy musician.”¹⁵

There is no antimony here, to the classical mind. Briefly, and speaking figuratively once again—even if the figure is anachronistic and somewhat old-fashioned—I refer to the legend of Amphion, as fashioned by Valéry: “Amphion, man, received the lyre from Apollo. Music was born in his fingers. At the sound of the nascent music, the stones moved and joined, and architecture was created.” Architecture, to which the mind is indebted for “the very idea of construction, which is the passage from disorder to order and the use of the arbitrary to attain necessity,”¹⁶ is an operation whose effects are felt without distinction in both synchrony and diachrony, both in the form of a simultaneous ordering of parts and in their sequential arrangement, as is the case with music or speech. According to its legend, architecture emerged from music, but in return, it was in architecture that music reflected itself and became aware of its means. This might lead one to believe that when Kepler’s God created the world, he took his model from the future Amphion. Thus, while everything depended on the will of God (this was to be Descartes’s thesis), he obviously did not will anything without reason (this was to be Leibniz’s thesis), as witnessed by “the artistic structure of the movements” and the astonishing metric and cinematic relationships that make the world “a wonderfully organized work of art.”¹⁷

The world is not mute: it speaks, and even sings, as Valéry’s Eupalinos would say of the most exceptional works of human architecture.¹⁸ This implies that we do not treat it only as a system at rest but also in its regular functioning. The reference to art is decisive here, in that there is access to meaning only in the moment of its production, in the action of its enunciation—with the proviso that divine art, which leaves no room for the contingent, the arbitrary, or the conventional, is radically distinct from the art of men, which suffers under these conditions (and this is so, no matter what value certain celestial phenomena, which seem to elude the regular course of things, may have assigns). And how could it be otherwise? For “geometry, which before the origin of things was coeternal with the divine mind and is God himself (for what could there be in God which would not be God himself?), supplied God with patterns for the creation of the world, and passed over to Man along with the image of God; and was not in fact taken in through the eyes.”¹⁹ In the final analysis, for Kepler, the order of the world was such that the structure that seems to be the condition of meaning itself, through the play of a paradoxicalmimesis, has a symbolic determination. The revelation expressed in the spectacle of the heavens is accessible to the eye of the mind alone. It does not lend itself to interpretation or to being translated into the terms of human language. The meaning that fills the world can be understood only by one who follows the ways and speaks the language of God, the (sacred) mathematics that is the first principle of things, even as it reveals their necessity.

Doubtless, this shift can most easily be seen in Leibniz. It will lead to a new meaning for the idea of architectonic rationality while at the same time driving an ever more pronounced and problematic rift between the functional constructional order and the semantic order. In his classifications, Leibniz consistently associated architecture with mechanics, astronomy, and strategy—all disciplines in his system, based on a calculation of effects wherein considerations of order were allied (as in Kepler) to those of harmony and finality.²⁰ Leibniz’s lifelong project of a universal characteristic, employing symbols that could be used in invention and evaluation (new notions never proceeding, apparently, except by combining already acquired notions), itself echoed the work long accomplished by architects. Would the architecture of his day not have furnished Leibniz with the model for anart of inventing that could in essence be reduced to the combination of preexisting elements: columns, pilasters, entablatures, niches, pediments, and so on? The institution of auniversal architecture, like that of a universal language, presupposes the elaboration of a preliminary lexicon—if not an alphabet, then an index of signs at once simple and “motivated.”²¹ These either present some trait or property of the signified (such as the column, in Vitruvian interpretation, made in imitation of the tree trunks that were used as supports in primitive architecture and proportioned according to the canons of the human body) or they are the object of areal definition that would articulate—by progressing from a vault or arch as from a circle or a series—the generating principle, the law, of construction.

The dream of a universal language that reflects the innate logic of the human mind has not lost all its authority. The dream of an architecture that would ultimately exclude all idiomatic difference has become a reality, for better or worse, in a world where the same body of construction techniques and functional principles has imposed itself everywhere as the common substance of architectural expression. That substance is, in the end, hardly subtle, and even vulgar. That being the case, it is not surprising that the architectonic metaphor has essentially ceased to inform a thinking that now works on constructions that are infinitely more complex, flexible, and mobile than those built structures on which the model was founded. This holds true except for the models of mathematicians, who remain attached to the notion of an “architecture of mathematics,” which appeals less to the economy of a finished building than to the endless extensions, improvements, alterations, and transformations of urban space—to say nothing of the noted innovations in construction, which demonstrate that the repertoire of built structures is in no way immutable or closed, and at the same time bear witness (even in the absence of any explicit reference to the problem of “foundations”) to the distance covered in this domain since Descartes’s day.²²

Yet constructional figures continue to circulate (surreptitiously) here and there. For it is true that science, even in its most sophisticated forms, cannot make progress without maintaining a few points of contact if not with common sense then at least with common language. Confining ourselves to the sphere of the “human” sciences and more especially to linguistics—the only one of these that can rightfully lay claim to “exactitude”—we note how after Saussure the linguists of his day made use of the termsstructure andconstruction to account for word formation and, among other things, the slow “cementing” of elements that ends by agglutination in a synthesis whereby the original units are completely obliterated.²³ This is a notion of structure analogous to the notion we find in Vitruvius, who regularly associates the termstructure with the continuity of masonry that uses bricks or stones embedded in mortar to ensure its cohesion.²⁴ But the comparison works at the level of systems themselves when Merleau-Ponty, illustrating the diacritical concept of the sign developed inA Course in General Linguistics, defines the unity of a language as a “unity of coexistence” comparable to “that of the elements of a vault that support one another”²⁵—the play of metaphor implying, here as there, a design that is no longer merely static but dynamic, the model of which the philosopher might well have found in Viollet-le-Duc.

No doubt, the significance of such metaphors should not be exaggerated, given the context in which they operate. Nonetheless, the notion ofstructure, like that ofsystem, owes something (genealogically speaking) to the consideration of constructional, if not architectural, issues. Given developments in structural anthropology, it is not correct to say that these concepts are exclusively linguistic in origin. Pierre Francastel has rightly reminded us of their sources in construction.²⁶ It is in the art of building that the notion of structure finds not only its etymology but also its natural iconography, and it is through the treatises on architecture—starting with the English translation of Alberti’sDe re aedificatoria—that the word has seen its semantic field gradually broaden. Structure,struere, to construct: Émile Littré did not fail to note the filiation that justifies the use of the term in both the technical and epistemological senses. When we say “structure,” we actually thinkconstruction: construction of a house, but also construction of a model. There is no point in trying to make an absolute distinction between the two uses of the word, because it may well be that a building also takes on the value of a model—both for the architects, who work at reproducing or varying the building’s layout, and for the theorist, who recognizes it as the product of a constructionraisonnée.

All considerations of number and harmony aside (though such considerations are undoubtedly not to be excluded ultimately), the architectural work carries at once the idea of anorder, that of anecessity, and apurpose: an order that can be read in the composition of the whole, in the distribution of parts, and the combination of elements; a necessity that follows from the laws of solid mechanics and the resistance of materials; and, lastly, a purpose that either derives from an ideal principle or is understood in a strictly utilitarian sense. The one does not exclude the other: Kant defines architecture as “the art of presenting concepts of things which are possible only through art, and the determining ground of whose form is not nature but an arbitrary end,” while stressing that what is essential in an architectural work remains its conformity to a certain use.²⁷ In fact, the distinction between buildings that are designed in principle to pure, technically utilitarian ends and those that take on symbolic or representative functions is not always self-evident. The temple mountains of Angkor Wat, for instance, were inserted into the hydraulic network that ensured the irrigation of rice paddies, thus guaranteeing, in terms of symbolic economy, the regulated operation of the system. Conversely, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were able to use the beauty of the great grain silos of North America to justify the project of a strictly functional architecture to no less effect. It is never easy to make atheory out of any building—to decide on the nature of the principles that govern the ordering of structures and forms within the framework of any given system: thecalculation of which Leibniz speaks. How can we define andcharacterize this calculation, and with it the reasoning that obtains in the architecture of mankind, if the technical and functional register never ceases to interfere with the symbolic and even semantic register—notwithstanding the possibility of confusing the “two”?

The Word, the Thing, and the Appeal to the Concept

It is precisely because the work of architecture seems to offer an example of an ordered device—one that allows itself to be applied, simultaneously or alternately, as a system of functions and as a system of signs—that it has managed to maintain a semblance of relevance for thinking informed by the linguistic model. Even Saussure himself, when seeking to illustrate the mechanism of language and the two kinds of relationships on which it relies, syntagmatic and associative (today we would say paradigmatic), compares the linguistic units that compose speech to the parts of a building—notably, to the column.²⁸ For a column, Doric or otherwise, belongs simultaneously to two orders of coordination: one real (or syntagmatic), corresponding to the axis of combinations, and the other virtual (or paradigmatic), corresponding to the axis of substitutions. Two sets of forms “float” around the column: On the one hand, the column maintains a relationship with the elements that come before or after it in space (the base or stylobate on which it rests, the architrave or arch that it supports), a relationship comparable to that which links the consecutive elements of the spoken sequence within the framework of speech. On the other hand, the column (like any term borrowed from the lexicon of architecture) calls to mind, through a play of mental associations, the group of forms to which it is related: columns of different orders, piers, pillars, and supports of all kinds, and even the wall whose negation it represents.

The comparison between the order of speech and the order of architecture calls for serious critical caution. This is particularly true in light of what Saussure says about the mechanism of language: a mechanism that, if it were entirely rational, we could study on its own and for its own sake, but that in fact amounts to nothing more than a partial correction to a naturally chaotic system.²⁹ Indeed, we might be tempted to say the opposite of architecture. But if the comparison were to be truly convincing, then it ought to work both ways. We would then inevitably be led (as long as we did not look too closely) to see architecture as a system of signs or—and this comes down to the same thing—as a system of functions, even if we admit (with Roland Barthes) that a function is necessarily penetrated by meaning and that the same element, the samefunction-sign, can be put to work, simultaneously or alternately, for its use-value and for its sign-value. A system of functions as such necessarily lends itself to functioning not only as a system of differences but also as a system of groups. The selection of any unit whatsoever will be made according to a double mental opposition, the idea (the function) calling not for some determined form but for an entire latent system through which are obtained the oppositions involved in the constitution of a sign.³⁰ If the column takes on (or can take on) value as a sign, this is not so much through the relationship that binds it vertically to the elements with which it combines as it is through the distinctive lateral relations it maintains with other forms that represent so many different variations of the notion of a support.

The tradition, therefore, had a few good reasons to consecrate the column as one of the privileged members of architecture (Alberti even recognized it as “the principal ornament in the whole art of building”³¹), regardless of whether the persistent recurrence of this form throughout history could be explained by the universality of the function to which it corresponds or by a determination—at once semantic and formal—that has played out across the diversity of cultures and eras in ways we still do not understand. With respect to this quandary, it would be a good exercise to reread Hegel’s commentaries on the column (here we will only focus on those that might serve our purposes, though the entire essay should really be quoted).³² Born of a form borrowed from the natural world of plants, the column in classical architecture becomes a support for rational and regular forms. With the column, architecture emerges from the purely organic world only to be restricted (as Kant clearly saw) to a partly double finality: on the one hand, to the need to satisfy, and on the other, to autonomy, theSelbständigkeit, exercised without any precise aim. As a sign, the column provides proof, in its very appearance, of the labor at stake in it: a labor in which arbitrariness and necessity constantly exchange masks, a labor that plays at will with all of the motivations from which its form emerges. The column has no role but to bear weight. Yet its independence in relation to its context is marked from the outset in its circular section, which clearly demonstrates that it only acts as a support on its own account and that, unlike a square pillar, it does not lend itself to forming a continuous wall through adhesion. Contrary to Alberti’s definition, which does not take into account this nevertheless decisive feature, the column cannot be regarded as a fragment of a wall but owes its value as a sign, as well as in plastic terms, to the fact that it is irreducible to the wall.³³ But its independence is further marked by the fact that its beginning and end, its base and capital, can be displayed in and for themselves, as moments that rightly belong to it alone. Whereas organic formations are endowed with an immanent reason that delimits their forms from within, “for the column and its shape,” Hegel writes, “architecture has nothing but the mechanical determination of load-bearing and the spatial distance from the ground to the point where the load to be carried terminates the column. But the particular aspects implicit in this determinant belong to the column, and art must bring them out and give shape to them.”³⁴

This would still be nothing if the work of art did not correspond, at root, to a determination that we would say was logical, since it refers back to what provides the very condition for the development of architectural thought: “Columns are indeed load-carrying and they do form a boundary, but they do not enclose anything; on the contrary, they are the precise opposite of an interior closed on all sides by walls.”³⁵ It would be hard to put it more accurately or more concisely. But surely we cannot fail to see that what Hegel is well on the way to defining here is nothing less than a logical system of architecture, the philosophical resonances of which are obvious. In other words, the operation ofconstructing has not only structural but also topological implications. If the column plays an essential role in the classical system, this is because it forces the distinction between two functions that are blurred by the wall, that of anenclosure and that of alimit, at the same time as it contradicts the oversimplified opposition between the inside and the outside as well as between the two spatial modalities—the “interior” in its finiteness, if not its enclosure, and the “exterior” in its indefinite openness.

Faced with such a model ofdeconstruction—one that correlates, so to speak, with the labor of construction of which it is an integral part—we are forced to admit that thought still has something to learn from the art of building. This assumes that thought lends itself to playing its own game and that, rather than miming its operations, it takes up residence, inhabits, and allows itself to be taught by architecture even when architecture abandons what has long passed for its most beautiful ornament. “I don’t like to saycolumns,” Le Corbusier once said. “The word has been spoiled.”³⁶ Spoiled the word no doubt is, and irrecoverable, irrecuperable, irremediably worn out, as perhaps is its form, which created its semantic function. There remains the thing, together with the appeal that emanates from it—an appeal to the future of the concept and of building itself.

2.1

Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, 1447. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.