7 Ledoux with Kant

Translated by Erin Williams

Publishing delays sometimes have a beneficial effect in that they bring a semblance of justification to the exercise of writing a preface—by definition a risky undertaking. For if the publication, as well as the purchase of a book, always entails an element of risk (which cannot be measured in financial terms alone), then a preface—whether it is the work of the author or of a third party—is supposed to offer both publisher and reader a sort of guarantee or insurance. The reverse is also true: to say that a text calls for a preface is implicitly to admit that it is not enough in itself, that it will only have its effect with appropriate clarification—that the reader, unless alerted in advance, will have no chance of recognizing its importance, will not know how to read it without the appropriate eyeglasses. This presents the distinct possibility of abuse, as when the preface begins to take on the role of an advertisement or instruction manual.

It is different in the case of a historical text and when dealing with a republication or a new translation. French readers discovered the work of Emil Kaufmann in reverse, so to speak: beginning with what appeared his crowning achievement, the great bookArchitecture in the Age of Reason (1955), and only then becoming familiar withThree Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu (1952), finally arriving at the book published in Vienna in 1933, whose title alone signals Kaufmann’s entire intellectual program—Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. This book has neither the fullness of the two others nor their weight of scholarship, but it contains the seed of an idea that Kaufmann would take up tirelessly throughout his life as he deepened and developed all of its ramifications. It is a book with the appearance of a broadside or pamphlet, and one can see from both its title and date of publication that it was topical enough. At the moment when Nazism was triumphant in Munich and Berlin, strongly supported by a mass of academic rubbish, it was proof of great intellectual courage for a Viennese to attempt to demonstrate the existence of a fundamental continuity between so-called neoclassical architecture and the architecture already denounced by the totalitarian ideology as “international”—all the more so in that Kaufmann pressed his insolence to the point of including under the banner of two French architects a certain number of German architects, beginning with Karl Friedrich Schinkel, that the new order claimed as an integral part of its heritage. (Not to mention the sangfroid Kaufmann demonstrated, in the face of this blackmail and even more in the face of the political hysteria of the avant-gardes, as he celebrated the aspiration to autonomy of a practice that was potentially as profoundly socialized as that of architecture.)

This book was then born of its time. Is this to say that it is only of retrospective interest, as a historical document? While everyone is proclaiming the failure of the modern movement and denouncing its “objective” connections with a technocratic order that ended up adopting it as its own, what resonance can this thin volume and its thesis expect to find without being shored up by a large documentary apparatus? But if (as Jorge-Luis Borges would have it) a preface is no more than a form of lateral criticism, there is no reason the reader should expect to be warned against the book it introduces. To alert the reader to the resistances that the text might elicit is, on the other hand, one of the rights generally granted to one who writes a preface. In this case, since there is a preface, why would this one not take advantage of the gap in time to invite the reader to find in it a way of seeing a little more clearly? Resistance always indicates conflict, and it does no good to ignore it. It is, then, up to us to ensure that this translation too is born of its time, our own, caught as we are in the meandering ways of a discourse that has not yet broken with modernity—and for reasons that the reading of this book should help us to unravel. Despite its brevity, it has lost none of its edge.

One could say that this is certainly the least to be expected of such a book: does its central thesis not suggest that a radical break interrupted the course of architectural production in the era of the French Revolution, a break that would form the distant origin of the modern movement? That the work of Ledoux could be presented as the paradigm of this break assumes that the old and the new are brought together within it in such a way that the rupture is only more evident. Yet it is to this that the most recent discourse on modernity is opposed: a discourse that, far from being one of a “break,” works on the contrary to retie threads, to reinscribe in the continuity of a history a practice from which for too long it had the pretention of freeing itself. The paradox that engages us in reading Kaufmann lies in the fact that he himself attempted to give this phenomenon a historical explanation and that, in a single stroke, he restored to the modern movement both a past and a historical dimension. Indeed, to maintain that the break from which modern architecture in principle proceeds goes back to the end of the eighteenth century implies that this architecture does not begin with Le Corbusier and that behind it lies an entire history—including, as we will see, its claim to the tabula rasa.

Kaufmann’s thesis, which saw Le Corbusier as the true heir of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Schinkel, was bound to scandalize the champions of a showy neoclassicism à la Albert Speer, as well as those on the other side who felt that, after all, the proletariat also had a right to the column. (Question: Does the proletariat therefore have a right to entasis? Can the proletarian column adapt itself to inflation?) Indeed, we often forget that the critique of functionalism did not originate yesterday. Among the Marxists, as well as in Frankfurt with Theodor Adorno, there were a few good minds who denounced what they considered, as Brecht put it, “the last word of bourgeois architecture.”1 The last word, but not the first. One can imagine that those who appealed to the revolutionary ideal might have judged unsuitable the proposition according to which the program of theSachlichkeit would have found its formulation in the period of the “great revolution” (French and bourgeois) of 1789. But Kaufmann’s demonstration was no less shocking with respect to the habitual assumptions of art history. This book, devoted as it seems to be to the investigation of the sources of the modern movement, does not obey the law of the genre. If one agrees with Kaufmann’s thesis, declared as early as 1928,² that Ledoux was a figure who signified a “personalized break point” in history, then one must admit that he is also an end point for any historical tracing of the modern movement. The question, then, would not be so much to search forwhence he came (even if it is always permissible to support rather than oppose one’s predecessors—as in the case of Ledoux in relation to Jacques-François Blondel—it is still a form of owing them something) but rather to know, in Kaufmann’s terms,where he went and to attempt to understand Ledoux not on the basis of his own antecedents but through the path he opened up. It must be noted that Kaufmann only described the beginning of this path—as if, once he had demonstrated the direction in which Ledoux’s work pointed, and how it became explicit in the teaching of J. N. L. Durand and Louis-Ambroise Dubut, a route would be traced that could no longer be mistaken.

Such language is, however, not that of Kaufmann but of Kant, in the preface to the second edition of theCritique of Pure Reason. In this preface, Kant makes reference to that other intellectual revolution that concerns the beginnings of geometry, its “origin”: the demonstration of the isosceles triangle inasmuch as it derives from an a priori construction, the author of which was named Thales, “or any other name.”³ This is the Kant to whom Kaufmann’s text refers from the very first page. Does this mean that from the moment that architecture affirms its “autonomy” it accedes to a new and superior mode of historicity and that its development can be seen, from the logical point of view, as parallel to that of science? Does it mean that this fantasy (if it is one) constitutes one of the impulses behind an architectural ideology that purports to be “rationalist,” as evinced by its constant return in Kaufmann’s work? Certainly, Kaufmann affirms that if Ledoux’s work has value as a symptom and demands to be interpreted as such, he did not for all that create modern architecture by himself; it would have been born “even if he had never existed.”⁴ But such a proposition does not in the least undercut the paradigmatic reading that Kaufmann proposed of Ledoux’s work in 1933, for it was less important for him to write a “page of history” than to construct amodel to show clearly, beyond all deceptive surface effects, the profound continuity of development that leads from Ledoux to Le Corbusier—a continuity that in effect has meaning only by assigning arevolution as its origin, pinning it to the name of Ledoux, or any other name.

Indeed, Ledoux, in his marked preference for the most simple and regular geometric configurations—the cube, the pyramid, the cylinder, the sphere—moves in this same direction, as if he had meant in this moment of origin to reconnect with “the first experience,” as Edmund Husserl would say, from which geometry was born. This first experience held that due to technical ability, the Greeks succeeded in detaching certain “pure” forms from their bodily attachments. The Greeks pushed forms to their point of perfection, according to specifications suitable for the instruction of the geometric mind: surfaces ever more polished (whether flat or turned “in revolution”), edges ever more smooth, lines ever more straight and even, angles ever more sharp, points ever more precise, and so on.⁵ The same process of autonomization of form is translated, with respect to the elements of architecture, by the rejection of all anthropomorphism, of organic metaphors, and, in general, ofimitation, beginning with imitation of the monuments of the past. In all things, one shouldreturn to the principle: if a column, considered according to its function, is nothing more than a post put up to support a load (and Viollet-le-Duc would say nothing less), then there is no more sense in trying to calculate its proportions according to those of the human body than in pretending to stretch it as one would a muscle—a simple cylinder will do the job.

If architecture is no more than the expression of a constructive logic, then its reason for being should be sought in the act of building. In these terms, from the moment it obeyed an external determination, architecture would be no longer autonomous but rather the object of empirical knowledge, technical and experimental, whatever the contributions of calculation. Yet architectonic thought, even if it aspires to autonomy, does not operate in the register of speculative reason. Its aim is not knowledge in itself; it has a task to accomplish, a work to realize, a world to construct. As a matter of principle, it is only so inasmuch as pure practical reason is, in Kant’s terms, immediately legislative: that is, it is only autonomous to the extent that the will is conceived as independent of empirical conditions and, consequently, as pure will determined by the sole form of the law calledmoral law. It is certain that Ledoux did not read Kant, but we know how much he owed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and howThe Social Contract informed his doctrine of autonomy. If the relationship between Ledoux and Kant is based on anything, it is from the point of view of a common derivation. “Return to the principle, consult nature: everywhere man is isolated”:⁶ the formula of Ledoux’sL’architecture echoes the problem posed by Rousseau: to discover a form—that of the contract—through which “each is united to all, yet nevertheless obeying only himself and remaining as free as before.”⁷

For architecture, then, the claim of autonomy has in the first place a moral connotation. One has only to read Loos (in which ornament is associated with a form of crime) or Le Corbusier (“truth” is opposed to lies, as the purity of “whitewash” is to the false appearances of décor) to be persuaded of this; the rigor and the purity to which the modern movement aspired were those of the moral law. Indeed, the relationship of Ledoux, creator of the Saline de Chaux, to Le Corbusier, the apostle of the wall “lait de chaux” (whitewash), is salty enough—if I can say it—in the register of the signifier, especially if one recalls that Le Corbusier was himself born in La Chaux-de-Fonds. If it is in fact necessary to think of Ledouxwith Rousseau, if notwith Kant, it is to the extent that this other relationship allows one to understand how the rejection of rules handed down by tradition could for him be joined with the affirmation of a legality that is equally imperative, precisely because it is unconditional. Baroque architecture was heteronomous inasmuch as it obeyed an external exterior determination—that of “suitability” (convenance), which called for the elements composing a building to be combined, superimposed, and melded together in the unity of a single ensemble, following the rules of anorder entirely of the facade, which was itself an image of social hierarchy. According to Kaufmann’s explanation, the new principle of autonomy would, on the contrary, manifest itself in the egalitarian system of “pavilions,” which assumes that the elements—for example, the different “blocks” orunités (of habitation or otherwise)—retain their independence, freedom, and autonomy. The rationale determining the pavilions’ placement and distribution would only then appear in full clarity on the level of the plan. In this sense, the rejection of the facade, which the twentieth century would recognize as one of the traits of architectural modernity, appeared from the beginning of the nineteenth century as the corollary of the affirmation of a universal and abstract legality. This legality was to be affirmed in the teachings of Durand, taking the form of a regular orthogonal grid inscribed within a square, which both regulated the mechanics of the composition and informed every ensemble, as it would continue to do in the work of Mies van der Rohe: the grid as architectonic will and representation.

This double function reserved for the grid, both regulatory and generative, testifies a posteriori to the universal pretensions of autonomous architecture. In the first place, the grid is presented in Durand as the mechanism for a change in scale. Kaufmann saw clearly that with Ledoux architecture had attained a new dimension, that of the masses (grand nombre). The idea of autonomy is only meaningful in relationship to that of equality, implying that all men have the right to architecture (“Taste, in its combinations with art, recognizes no difference between the poor or the rich,” writes Ledoux) and that, in return, architecture ought to be concerned with all of their needs (“Is there anything that the artist can disdain? Pluto’s baths, the merchant’s warehouse, the farmer’s barn must all carry his imprint”).⁸ The project for an ideal city is thus no longer limited to a perspectival view meant to produce an essentially picturesque effect; it is intended to respond in detail to all the functions of a town in the manufacturing era: “[In my town] I have placed every kind [genre] of building required by the social order. There you will see important factories . . . give birth to populous assemblies. A town will rise up to encircle and crown them. . . . For the first time one will see the magnificence of the palace and that of the alehouse on the same level.”⁹ Indeed, Ledoux treats the question of housing in terms that anticipate the solutions of the Phalanstery, the garden city, or the “apartment block with communal kitchen.”¹⁰ Without going this far, Kaufmann insists that one can see in Ledoux’s concerns the beginning of amechanization of the dwelling. In fact, it seems as though Kaufmann felt closer to Brecht than to Le Corbusier,¹¹ in the sense that the idea of a “machine for living” seemed to contradict the very idea of autonomy. As Adorno would later say, in these “modern habitations . . . the nostalgia for independent existence, defunct in any case, is sent packing.”¹²

But the adoption of the grid has still other repercussions, which one might call epistemological. Whereas the classical doctrine associated the idea of universal architecture with that of acharacteristic (to the extent that Leibniz recognized that the classical orders were a model of combination), of a repertoire of signs—signs that brought with them the rules of their combination and connection—the principle of autonomy places the accent less on the elements of architecture than on the rule that determines their distribution in a given space—a rule to which elements are subjected even in their plan. Not that Durand meant to break with the principle of combination: thePrécis d’architecture supplies the precise nomenclature of the pieces of the game to which architecture is reduced from this point on. Yet the game itself is no longer so much a question of syntax as it is of geometry, a geometry that is flat, elementary, and above allfinite. Retrospectively, Durand’s “system” demonstrates the paradox of an architecture that wanted all the more to be “speaking” (parlant), even as it renounced the ordinary means of language. It is as if, once again, autonomy had to be pushed to the point at which architecture no longer borrowed its determination from articulated language, to the point at which it would impose its articulations, structures, andframeworks on the symbolic—a definition other than that calculated according to the procedures of discourse.

It was Dubut who showed that the game is not affected in principle by the character of the elements at its disposal. In hisArchitecture civile, he proposed to dress up the same structure with either a “Gothic” or an “Italian” facade: proof, as Le Corbusier would say, following Viollet-le-Duc, that architecture—more than a question of style (in the singular)—is a question of styles (in the plural). From then on, the architecture of the nineteenth century, marked as it was on the surface by the stamp of historicism and eclecticism, was able in its deepest structures to participate in the continuity of a development whose effects would not be revealed until the masks under which architecture had been operating were removed. From this point of view, the neoclassical regression was in fact no more than a symptom of the deterioration of traditional forms, as Kaufmann himself noted. If we continue on the level of a “linguistic” description, we could say that it would take a century to shift from an ornate and “baroque” manner of speaking to a free and natural mode of expression. The shift, then, was from a mode of expression that drew its models from tradition to a mode of expression that some would declare antihistorical, but which in fact would be ordered around a notion of history other than that imposed by a history of art understood as a history of “styles”: a notion that, arguable as it may be, demands to be taken into account in and of itself.

In this regard, it may seem that Kaufmann’s work itself has the value of a symptom, if not a paradigm, in the way it conjugates the myth of origins with that of the Revolution. In his work on the French Revolution, François Furet has shown how its own history has been conceived with rare exceptions (among which one must cite Tocqueville) as a narrative of origins, the dread of beginnings investing itself precisely in rupture, or the revolutionary “break.”¹³ If the Revolution of 1789 became a figure of origin in socialist historiography, it is because it appeared as the founding event—the inaugural moment of a history itself revolutionary—released from the determining factors that reduced history before the Revolution to a sort of “prehistory,” as Marx termed it. From the moment that it is seen as the origin of a new epoch, as an absolute beginning, a new start from zero, from principle, the Revolution becomes the matrix of a truly human and rational history. If it were not for the fact that Le Corbusier had little sympathy for revolutions, Bolshevik or otherwise, and that he was more concerned with heading them off by the means and processes of architecture, one could understand how Kaufmann might have been tempted to rediscover in the myth of the tabula rasa something of the consciousness ready to shatter the continuity of history that, to believe Walter Benjamin, is the characteristic of the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. Did not the Plan Voisin, which foresaw the destruction of the greater part of “historic” Paris to make way for a few “autonomous” towers, depend on the same lyrical illusion that prompted the revolutionaries of 1789 to introduce a new calendar and the insurgents of the July Revolution to shoot out the clocks?¹⁴

But what of Ledoux? Is there not a paradox in regarding him as a revolutionary architect and the paragon of the “break” when, by his own avowal, he only just escaped the guillotine (la hache nationale) before welcoming the arrival of the empire with understandable relief? Here, the old debate over the consequences of political and social revolution for the domain of the arts reappears. If Trotsky could not repress the idea that the French language owed some of its “polish” to the sharp instrument namedguillotine,¹⁵ his contemporaries, ready as they were to recognize the initial extent of the revolutionary event, were much more worried that a similar rupture in the order of things and the continuity of time had remained for so long without effect on literature and art, to the point that it was necessary to await the explosion of romanticism for taste to at last have its own Fourteenth of July (in the sense that, for Victor Hugo, romanticism was the French Revolution turned into literature). For Kaufmann to propose that architecture, with Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu, had its own “revolution” (the question remains as to the place that Soufflot should be assigned in this context) was simply to make an analogy between this revolution and the political revolution. Indeed, he later recognized that he was incapable of explaining the change that architecture underwent around 1800, insofar as explanations and reasons of this kind can only be sought in so-called general, if not universal, history.¹⁶ It is surely not an explanation to point to the process of the emancipation of the masses as related to the principle of autonomy. However, we know only too well that, as far as autonomy goes, the French Revolution worked to the contrary, in the direction of an ever more accentuated centralization, the benefits of which Napoleon would reap, to the great satisfaction—must it be repeated?—of Ledoux himself.

Why, then, speak of “revolutionary” architecture? The question, if it occupies us today, in the final analysis bears upon the status that should be attributed to the very notion ofhistory itself, in architecture as well as the other arts, and more generally to the work of thought—and with every practice through which man attempts to assure himself of the control of his destiny. The historian is free, according to his own point of view, to deny any and all descriptive and taxonomic relevance to the notions of heteronomy and autonomy.¹⁷ In the present moment, when the history of architecture hesitates between a renewed form of the history of styles and a form of institutional analysis that ignores everything properly architectural, the idea of autonomy, in its philosophical sense, takes on the value of a regulative concept. To think of Ledoux with Kant is to recognize that in the matter of architecture, knowledge is not solely derived from history; better said, in Kant’s terms, a knowledge thatsubjectively presents itself as historical, according to the way it was acquired, can participateobjectively in one form or another of rationality.¹⁸ From this stems the problem of theory—of theory, not of doctrine—in its relationship to history: Does not theory have to specify the object of this history? What determinations belong to it alone?

To think of Ledouxwith Kant leads one in fact to question what constitutes architecture as an object not only of history but also of thought—a thought that is itself bound by conditions that one will not fear to call formal, if not a priori. Architecture is based on this principle insofar as it is an object of desire, in which the will—as Kant says—finds its determination. But architecture places in this category only empirical principles, in the same way that what constitutes architecture—insofar as it is a thing to construct—is subjected to constraints that attest, even in the constructive order, to the force of the symbolic. Architecture finds its determination both in what constitutes it as an object of desire—or of will, as Kant would say—which in this context only concerns empirical principles, and also in whatever constitutes it as a constructed object, an object itself subjected, like everything in the constructive order, to constraints that attest to the power of the symbolic order. Ledoux did not push the principle of autonomy to the point that Kant would have wished, to the point of viewing dependence on natural law as yet another form of heteronomy. “In all things, return to the principle.” This phrase of Ledoux’s returns to support the idea that in the field of architecture there are principles that are not the product of history, just as in law there are norms that derive from a law postulated as “natural.” It takes no more than this—we have repeated it often enough—to stir up a revolution. But will the fact that revolutions necessarily fail also be made a question of principle?

8.1

Adolf Loos, design for his own tombstone, 1931. © Albertina, Vienna.