28 R.E.

Somol Green Dots 101 29

The question comes, as devastating ones usually do, from the person nearest.
He isn’t (simply) the smart ass in the front row wearing a college football
sweatshirt with a toothpick wedged firmly in one side of his mouth, he’s the
premier architectural educator of his, and our, generation. The question, as
always, begins slow and low, out of the non-toothpick side: “Hey,” casual
salutation, slight pause and head bob, before the faux formality, “Robert.”
He now deliberately inserts his right index figure into his ear and slowly rotates
it counter-clockwise, though it is unclear whether this gesture is meant to make

logo hunch
room for the response or signals an unconscious desire to block it. “Let me ask
you one question.” Shades of Dirty Harry, before the change-up, to the almost 1 See, “All Systems GO!:
inaudibly swallowed, exasperated sigh-cough, followed quickly by seemingly The Terminal Nature of
Contemporary Urbanism,”
apoplectic hand-shaking, “how do you teach green dots?” Boom. He leans back, in CASE: Downsview
turning red from staged effort and secret satisfaction, and grins maniacally, Park (Prestel, 2001). “For
his entire frame beginning to vibrate, while dilating his eyes and nodding in a OMA/Mau, contingency
and imagability are not
half-crazed, touché maneuver. He’s done for the day. Peter Eisenman – or is it incompatible. In fact, the
William Shatner’s Denny Crane? – has left the building. But the question, a image, the condensation
reference to “Tree City,” the winning OMA/Bruce Mau competition entry for of the diagram to a logo,
is necessary precisely as
Downsview Park, hangs rhetorically in the air, a Gordian knot taunting any who an attractor for disparate
would challenge the dominant form of academic criticality. possible associations
and developments. A
vague specificity permits
This introductory course is designed especially for those But it is this preeminent value of “teachability” that is unnecessarily limiting in future diversity. … In the
this framework, along with the academic cottage industry of institutionalizing performative immediacy
who need to overcome a preoccupation with criticality autonomous design procedures and criteria of evaluation. Of course, it may of transforming trees
into logos, … [Tree City]
well be true that one really can’t teach green dots, one can only do green dots, provides an instant graphic
and the index. It constructs a perverse genealogy from giving some retrospective credence to the old adage, “those who can, do, identity, a logo to attract
and those who can’t, teach.” But while it may not be possible to teach green diverse constituencies
today, an image that
the figuration of John Hejduk and the decoration of Robert dots in the sense of giving a recipe for a design process, it is quite plausible can impel and absorb its
to instruct in the potentials for a contemporary architecture of doing, of various future product
Venturi to recent architectural projects that distill the issuing performatives, rather than the (now well-rehearsed) re-presentation lines and services. …
Almost entirely disposable,
of representational problems. Such an architecture would venture to commit the entry promotes not
incongruence of mass and surface into the arbitrariness a saying that is also a doing, a specific territory explored in jurisprudence and merely an economy of
linguistic theory under the category of “speech acts.” And the big green dot of means, but the total
evaporation of means
of shape and saturation, thus establishing the terms Tree City functions as the graphic equivalent to a speech act or performative in toward all effect. No
precisely this way. The entry was not the representation of a park, but a graphic process, no index, no
for a graphic protocol able to redirect architecture’s event directed at consolidating the resources and identity of a community work, but simply a cool and
pervasive image.”
that did not yet exist, a presentation immediately exhausted in its public
seeming fixation with the formal intricacies of geometric performance. 2 For a related
formulation of this idea,
see my discussion of
manipulation and critical reading. This course is a In How to Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin elaborates the effects of a special gossip in “Pass it on,”
case of utterance, the performative (more broadly, speech act), where the action Log 3 (2004). “Talk is
prerequisite for later offerings in the concentration: Blue is executed in the statement itself, as in nominating, promising, bequeathing, performative, and is
thus a useful alternative
betting, and sentencing. Unlike the more common constative statement, which to the representational
Whales 201, Checkered Periscopes 301, Monochrome describes some aspect of the world and therefore can be judged in terms of its obsession (and high, often
truth or falsity (as a representation of a natural phenomenon), performatives ineffective, seriousness)
that afflicts a practice that
Monopoly Houses 401, and White Tagged Amebas 501. This operate in such a way that the saying of it makes it so. Transformative or has analogized itself for
promissory, performatives are not descriptions or representations of this too long to writing and text.
course may not be audited; you can only do Green Dots. world, but establish the construction of another. In this way, performatives Gossip is a speech act
that forms and dissolves
are not subject to evaluations of falsifiability, but are merely successful or community. … The lessons
unsuccessful, felicitous or infelicitous in Austin’s terms, happy or unhappy. of gossip for research and
In this way, performatives also resemble norms, which are artificial constructs design are that saying
makes it so; it’s not about
not natural properties; they don’t describe how the world is, but prescribe how getting the facts right but
the world should be. This might further suggest that performatives and norms the assertion of potential
do not function along the scientific register but the political; they do not record facts.”

facts (or establish terms of critique) but rather project desire. 3 See, e.g., Alejandro
Zaera-Polo, “A
Conversation with
The academy, of course, is the institutional form through which the scientific Peter Eisenman,” and
discourses of interpretation, analysis, falsifiable method, critical thinking, Eisenman’s response,
and so on function. And it is from this domain that Eisenman’s anxieties about “Processes of the
Interstitial: Notes on
the ability to teach green dots issue. Understandably, Eisenman, as Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the
Zaera-Polo has suggested in another context, wants to refine the controls Machinic,” El Croquis 83
of architecture, to eliminate his bete noir of the arbitrary and expressive, to (1997).
30 R.E. Somol
establish objective criteria for the processes and evaluations of architecture, to
provide architecture with techniques to reveal the procedures of its conceptual
construction, to make it legible. Nevertheless, Eisenman’s loaded question
overshoots its ostensible mark, inappropriately (or simply nonsensically),
attempting to obligate a performative (or projective) practice, one might say, to
a constative (or critical) evaluation.
But there is also a more obvious explanation here, which is that Eisenman’s
problem is not really with the dubious ability to teach green dots, but with the
very existence of green dots at all as a legitimate architectural project. In other
words, Eisenman’s career-long pursuit of a critical disciplinarity has always
relied on a geometric order, and such a critical orientation is antithetical to a
graphic project. And here it is possible to agree with the correlations implicit in
Eisenman’s question, if not its evaluative thrust: in other words, the association
of the geometric with an architectural project of critical representation or
description, and the graphic with the performative or projective.
Without trying to reduce too quickly the recent architectural noise that has
ironically accompanied a new-found desire for communication – that is, the
proliferation of discussions about ornament, monuments, the figure, the iconic,
blobs, shapes, etc. – it might be useful first to examine four early vectors that
developed in the quest for architectural signification after modernism: namely,
articulation, notation, decoration, and figuration. While a range of projects and
arguments from a diversity of practitioners and theorists could be associated
with each of these tendencies, for heuristic economy four prototypical
approaches to these trajectories can be usefully identified as, respectively,
Kenneth Frampton’s tectonics, Peter Eisenman’s index, Robert Venturi’s shed,
and John Hejduk’s characters. To borrow Austin’s categories of statements,
it might further be productive to suggest that the first two (articulation and
notation) tend to be constative descriptions, while the other pair (decoration
and figuration) operate more as performatives.
Extending modernism’s values of abstraction and medium-specificity,
articulation and notation both demand a commitment to the natural, necessary,
and authentic. Regardless of the fact that Frampton is interested in production
processes and assembly systems (and therefore the joint) and Eisenman in
design processes and geometry (and therefore the grid), both share an aversion
to external content, the arbitrary, and the scenographic in favor of some
purportedly real place or trace. Differences aside (e.g., the inverse emphases
on the physical or the conceptual), one can understand the commonality of what
one might call the Oppositions axis as broadly invested in the critical project
of architecture, the high seriousness of working at a contemporary moment of
crisis, and therefore the exhibition of forms of architectural research conducted
in the idiom of tragedy.
Left: Duck and Shed,
Robert Venturi.
Right: Wall House, shop drawing.
John Hejduk.
Emphasizing message or content over formal medium, decoration and
figuration embrace the conventional and arbitrary as a way to take pleasure
in the ersatz and artifice. Manifest through the informational surface (the
wall) or the performative ready-made (the element), the plastic pursuits of
Venturi and Hejduk aim to displace the purity and necessity of both late- and
Green Dots 101 31
neo-modernism. Though disparately resolved as what one of them might have
referred to as “sheds” and “ducks,” the projects of Venturi and Hejduk are
nonetheless linked by exaggerating the surface or elemental properties of the
vertical interface, which both of them significantly describe as “an architectural
event,” as witnessed in the Bill-ding-board of the former and the Wall Houses of
the latter. Delivered through an oversized cartoon levity, the projects of Venturi
and Hejduk evoke a surprising laughter, which necessarily solicits a collective
as opposed to individual address, and evince practices at once optimistic and
logo hunch
projective. If the controlled necessity of articulation and notation is technical
and scientific, then the will-to-power of decoration and figuration may be
viewed as political. In this sense, perhaps, the individual struggle of science
can be understood as reflective and tragic while the collective association of
politics is at once imperative and comic. 4 In this case it is
notable that Hejduk’s
urban masques can
While still active modes of research and production, the four trajectories of be understood as
articulation, notation, decoration and figuration have, in the intervening thirty contemporary versions of
years, confronted impasses internal to their development that have provoked the commedia dell’arte,
improvised performances
subsequent practices to redirect priorities and hybridize modes of production developed from
as the opportunities of technology and demands of cultural audiences have standardized situations
allowed. For example, Peter Eisenman’s conceptual markings and notations and stock characters that
flourished in Italy from
of design process have been invariably registered through manipulations of the 16th to 18th centuries,
the structural grid. While this worked well at the scale of the early houses, the the golden age’s answer
sheer size of the later work has opened a disjunction between the structure to the sitcom. See, “One
or Several Masters?” in
and its ability to legibly serve as an index of the design process, reaching an Hejduk’s Chronotope, ed. K.
extreme in his Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela. With apparently Michael Hays (New York:
massive volumes given over to the poché of doubled floors and ceilings, and Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996).
façade fragments in danger of popping off swollen elevations, the irreparable
gap between the constructional and notational logics produces a situation
where the grid as disciplining geometry can only be rendered as ornamental
appliqué. The grid, in other words, becomes a thematic trope, a drywall voice-
over that is necessary to maintain continuity and serve as a reminder of where
one is in the critical design narrative.
For the generation following in Eisenman’s notational wake, the curve, in
the technical move from line to spline, is no longer the exception but the
norm, the “new generic,” as Greg Lynn would have it. This has had several
important consequences for architectural representation, not the least being
the displacement of Cartesian linearity (evident in the early, favored technique
of axonometric projection for both formal analysis and generation by the
oppositional axis of Eisenman and Frampton) with the non-linear, turning the
disciplinary problem of geometry inside-out. In this case, then, the structural
grid is too crude a regulating device for the new default of continuous non-
orthogonality, demanding that this generation operate at more refined scales
of building assembly and component systems. Fortunately, the answers to
the questions raised by this new architectural heterodoxy (e.g., how do you
produce a continuously differentiated surface? how do you put an opening in
a blob?) were also provided by the opportunities of digital fabrication. Indeed,
the part-by-part constructo-compositional logic of CNC-milling has practically
become the new fetish of this group, suspending all questions of ends in a new
religion of technical means. Thus, despite the distance traveled from their 5 This aspect of the
predecessors, the constative preoccupation with descriptive process remains digital organicist project
has been most recently,
the same, accounting for the de rigor representational technique of serially if surprisingly, canonized
unfolded components among this generation, a new aesthetic of the virtual by Michael Speaks, in
“Fabrication: The Fifth
Ecology of Los Angeles,”
in “Record Reveals: Los
In short – and here the professional and pedagogical connections to New York Angeles,” Architectural
and Columbia University are not surprising – the digital intricacy group has Record (May 2006).
married the former Oppositions pair, Eisenman and Frampton, using each to
“solve” the problem of the other, and thus produces a species of notational
tectonics. Focusing simultaneously on the micro-articulation of non-standard
parts as well as design conceptualization and realization (such as it is at this
32 R.E. Somol Green Dots 101 33

point) in the mediated realm of the digital, they aim to overcome the aversion to As a performative, what can be called an architectural “logo” has become a 7 The term “logo”
material detailing of the one and the exclusive commitment to a poetics of place primary device through which the project of graphic expediency takes shape. (a generic category to
which the “green dots”
of the other. Through new technologies of representation and production, the Although not the focus here, it should be noted that one of the important ways of Downsview, as well as
intricate geometers have presumably fused the terms of a previous opposition: in which the logo works is that its operational effects are not restricted to other architectural and
design process with construction, the conceptual with the material. Now doubly building, unlike the way in which the fixation on assembly systems and object- urban projects, belong)
is used as a convenience
indexical (in terms of form generation and fabrication), it is also not surprising 6 Though offered from figures by the intricacy group tends to limit their practice to architecture-as- to distinguish this field of
that the position of the digital organicists represents a neo-naturalism, a new a sympathetic “life of product. The logo can, and often does, operate at the larger organizational design from the surface
matter” orientation, Jeffrey topologies of “blobs”
architectural science of authenticity and transparency, as well as parametric scales of landscape and urbanism, as witnessed in the Tree City proposal for

logo hunch
Kipnis’s promotion of this typically produced by the
flexibility and functionality, a rhetorical faith in the emergent and self- work as “hyper-indexical” Downsview itself, but also in much of the work of Adriaan Gueze and West 8, digital organicists, but also
organized: constative statements in terms of the “true.” is consistent with this as well as WASAW’s “Loops and Lilies,” a collaboration by WW and Stan Allen to differentiate them from
observation. the “icons” endorsed by
for the Toronto Waterfront Competition. The logo can slip from foreground to
Charles Jencks. Here, a
If the project of digital intricacy (and its currently presumptive product, “the background as the situation warrants. logo functions as a “graphic
blob”) can be understood as the constative combination of notation and act” (the material-visual
tectonics, an alternative platform of graphic expediency (and its condensed In addition to projecting an artificial style of life and coalescing new audiences, corollary to a speech
act), and in this sense
configuration as “logo”) might be extended from the performative pairing of the logo in its architectural manifestation enacts a hybrid state of figural operates as a performative,
decoration and figuration. If intricacy was concerned with introducing the decoration by overcoming previous alternatives (e.g., of duck and shed), largely whereas Jencks’s icon,
non-linear, with turning the geometric inside-out, one aspect of the expediency through intensifying the incongruence of mass and surface, and condensing associated with and
generally exhausted by
program is to make extensive references intensive, or to distill collage. In them into the monolith of a saturated shape. Indeed, there seems to be no other metaphorical displacement,
other words, intricacy strives to differentiate the homogenous (e.g., “hot up” way of accounting for the proliferation of decorated ducks and figural sheds remains in the constative, or
Cartesian geometry, or individualize the previously standard unit), while than as the pointed if improbable meeting of the design-research of Venturi representational, domain.

expediency aims to make the disparate indifferent (e.g., “cool down” surrealist and Hejduk. Within this genealogy, the Concert Hall in Bruges by Neutelings 8 The present effort should
collage, or generalize the exception). Thus, the former selects the micro- Riedijk (NRA) – a zoomorphic totem wrapped in super-sized floral wallpaper be understood as an attempt
to specify and amplify
articulation of milling while the latter initially dispenses the big outlines – can be seen as one of the first of these unlikely hybrids. More recently, NRA’s some of the characteristics
(or macro-monotony) of cartooning. Given these affinities, the fixation on Shipping and Transport College in Rotterdam continues this research, with previously identified in my
process and production by the geometric intricacy crowd achieves its natural its contorted “periscope” figure suffused with a nautical, blue-and-white “12 Reasons to Get Back
Into Shape,” Content (Koln:
apotheosis in the goal of mass customization, a call that still prioritizes the checkered pattern of corrugated steel panels that erase any trace of building Taschen, 2003).
individual subject. Less concerned with means (“how you teach… x”) than ends, scale or construction.
the focus of graphic expediency is on audience and reception, and what might
now be characterized as a custom massification, the specific fashioning of
unlikely collectives and synthetic communities. Rather than offering parametric
flexibility for the world as it exists, the graphic enacts a cultural-political world WASAW “Loops and
of plastic relationships. Lilies,” Toronto Waterfront
competition, 2006.

NRA, Shipping and Transport College, Rotterdam. NRA, Concert Hall, Bruges.

Perhaps an early progenitor for this combination of shape and saturation can
be glimpsed in what might be the ur-logo building, Cesar Pelli’s Pacific Design
Center (PDC), popularly known as the “Blue Whale.” The PDC consists of a
taut blue glass skin that operates in graphic indifference to its (highly specific)
extruded profile. Like NL’s WOS 8, or MVRDV’s houses on Hagen Island, this
monochrome shape has no significant trace of tectonic articulation or scale, its
graphic saturation indifferent to constructional detail. The PDC ventures what
Gilles Deleuze might have understood as a Pink Panther-like tactic of active
disappearance, of becoming-the-world by coloring everything blue. Eschewing
representational idioms of thematic difference or critical commentary, which is
to say without excuse or elaboration, the PDC is big, it’s blue and, as improbable
as this may sound, it disappears. Within this graphic trajectory, Herzog
and de Meuron’s Laban Dance Center, with the toxic rainbow that radiates
independently across its curved surface, finds its distant ancestor in Pelli’s
Blue Whale.
34 R.E. Somol
HdM’s Cottbus Library in Brandenburg extends the immediacy and figural
decoration of the logo in additional dimensions. An extruded amoeboid in
plan, the Library is shrouded in a monolithic cloud of white characters, as if
a gang of Robert Rymans tagged the building. The pattern at once conceals
the construction and assembly system and produces the effect of an airy
monolith, though one that varies under different conditions of illumination.
Inside, primarily horizontal bands of intensive color operate without regard to
the shape of the overall envelope, an hysterical form of informational graphics
without reference. Periodically, these zones of artificially saturated color
become adjacent to grey and white reading rooms, exaggerating the effect of
inhabiting a mediated, graphic space, as one shifts between the colorized and
B&W versions of the library.
As with Pelli, neither NRA nor HdM expect assembly systems to produce
their “authentic” ornament (scalar, part-to-whole) as an automatic gratuity for
their efforts; nor do they mistake the excessive labor and cost of developing
overwrought design processes (now called scripting, the contemporary form
of Eisenman’s autonomous procedures of design notation) or expressive
construction methods (still called hi-tech overbuilding, the extension of
Frampton’s faith in tectonic articulation) as “getting something for free.”
Neither natural nor necessary, the plasticity of the graphic can only be
artificially asserted and subsequently played out. In contrast to geometric
intricacy, the delay of which addresses a selective reader, the graphic, fast and
loose, condenses constraints into an image to collect an audience that does not
yet exist.
In cooling down the disparate collage affiliations of Venturi and Hejduk, or more
generally collapsing the trajectories of decoration and figuration toward a logic
[A] logo functions as a “graphic act” … and in this sense operates as a
performative, whereas Jencks’s icon … remains in the constative, or
representational, domain.
Cesar Pelli, Pacific Design
Center, Los Angeles.
HdM, Cottbus Library, Brandenburg. corrugated cement panels of the Regional Support Center; MVRDV’s texture
HdM, Cottbus Library, Brandenburg,
interior.
Green Dots 101 35
of indifference, a series of operations in recent projects provide cues for how
to do logo buildings and landscapes. Each step, arbitrary but singular, should
neutralize or background the previous arbitrary operation.
1 INTENSIFY AN ELEMENT
Rather than exaggerate the kit of parts that makes up the whole, turn a single
part or component into the whole. Proliferate one thing; see rabbits (and
green dots) everywhere. Never displace (a metaphoric operation), but always
logo hunch
condense. See, e.g., a series of experiments by MVRDV: the Utrecht Double
House, or project as all doors; the Hagen Island Houses, or project as all
roof; the Silodam Housing, or project as all windows. Note that in Silodam,
more than simply deploying actual windows, the elevation becomes a graphic
manifestation of the window schedule itself, as an off-the-shelf building system
takes on the effect of applied wallpaper or informational chart.
2 EXTEND THE LINE
Eliminate the articulation or scalar coding of an architectural device through its
graphic extension. See, e.g., the exterior molding line drawn across the Vanna
Venturi House; the steel facing that wraps all openings, and thus liberates
the mass from the ground, in Wiel Arets’s Lensvelt Building; the similarly
continuous metal trim (functioning variously as baseboard, sill, casing, and
coping) that outlines scaleless voids (no longer architecturally-registered
openings) in HdM’s Laban.
3 DEVELOP A PRECISE BUT VAGUE SILHOUETTE
The configuration must be imagable but without reference; the logo is a hard-
edge shape, not soft. It should be surprising but fast, allowing no time for the
quotation, irony, or delay of formal and informal reading protocols. See Pelli’s
PDC or any member of Hejduk’s characteristic caste updated, e.g., in NRA’s
Sphinx Housing, the City Hall for Moscow, the Breda Fire Station; OMA’s
CCTV, Whitney Addition, Seattle Public Library, etc.
4 SATURATE WITH A MONOTONE TREATMENT
Apply or infill the profile with a singular color and/or material. Contributing
to the effect of fast monolith, the monotone treatment can also be used as
a form of dazzle camouflage to conceal expansion joints and other signs of
construction or modular units. See, e.g., NRA’s overall pattern produced by
alternating pairs of rotated bricks aligned on their edges at Breda, the black
mapped Houses; the screened dot pattern of HdM’s Cottbus Library; the black
polyurethane skin of NL Architects’s WOS 8, etc.
5 BORE THROUGH IT
Nothing says unnecessary and arbitrary – and therefore quickly disposable
– like something with one or several holes in it. Don’t just paste; but cut,
erase, remove, extract. This forms an important distinction to the digital
intricacy group whose privileged surface modeling programs allow them
to distort, inflect, warp, deform, indent, and undulate, but does not readily
36 R.E. Somol
allow the expedient removal of free volumes that is available to other, often
“cheaper,” modeling techniques. Such “holes” are positively crude and primary
– graphically material, even – and should be distinguished from “voids” (the
negative twin of formalism’s solids), “absences” (the textual notations of post-
structuralism), and the merely “residual” (the unconsidered leftovers of figural-
objects). Along with the mix of Venturi’s decoration and Hejduk’s figuration, a
dose of Robert Smithson’s subtraction. See, e.g., OMA’s Porto; HdM’s Forum
Building in Barcelona; MVRDV’s Eye-Beam; NRA’s IJ-Toren, etc.
The heuristics above notwithstanding, the point of Eisenman’s question isn’t
a challenge to produce “Green Dots for Dummies.” Indeed, his real problem
isn’t that teaching Green Dots is too confusing or complicated, but that it’s
too easy. But the fact of the matter is . . . , well, the fact is that the facts don’t
matter. It may be difficult to do, it may be less so. Doesn’t matter. What matters
is that it look easy. The effective speed of ingenuity doesn’t require the deferred
exhibitionism of talent or virtuosity. It’s not even that Eisenman’s question is
wrong from the point of view of graphic expediency, it’s just that it’s framing is
unhappy. In the end, there is no useful form of exchange between the constative
and performative (or the critical and projective), it’s simply a choice one makes:
which world does one want to occupy, what game does one want to play? One
can struggle – heroically, tragically – within and against “this” world; or attempt
to reorganize its materials in such a way as to invite as many takers as possible
into another. Design as nomination, as promise, as bequest, as sentence
(voluntary prisoners?), or, as I might prefer, as wager.
[T]he graphic, fast and loose, condenses constraints into an image to
collect an audience that does not yet exist.
Green Dots 101 37
Though his historical affinities have been to form and indexical legibility, there
are recent signs that Eisenman himself may be moving his chips. In attempting
to deal critically (yes, it’s still about criticality) with contemporary spectacle
culture, Eisenman seems to be arguing for a loosening of form and indexicality
into figure, and for the (still individual) subject to exhibit and experience “the
non-passive passive.” In this construction, Eisenman now conveniently lumps
together all his would-be competitors as simply doing “shape” as opposed to 2x4, Mies graphic, IIT
his privileged (disciplined and critical) “figure.” This is reminiscent of Jürgen student center, Chicago.
logo hunch
Habermas’s dismissal of all postmodernism as forms of conservatism. In
Eisenman’s architectural version, the sponsors of a denigrated “shape” are a
consortium of old conservatives (e.g., the expressionism of Frank Gehry), new
conservatives (the commercialism of Rem Koolhaas), and young conservatives
(the software deferral of the blobistas).
Despite Eisenman’s slight-of-hand, the argument here has been rather that the
Eisenman legacy forms part of the digital intricacy project, and that both remain
ultimately engaged in a critical or constative practice. The significant argument,
then, is not between blob and box (which remains a geometric debate), but
the alternative worlds and forms of practice set up by blob (geometric,
representational, still indexical, still of this “natural” world) and logo (graphic,
performative, diagrammatic, and of another world). Eisenman’s position seems
to be that, though close reading is necessary, given the society of the spectacle,
it is not possible today. This, of course, is the typically frustrated formulation
of all discourses of crisis and criticality: there’s something we need, and we
can’t have it. For the projective, alternately, we don’t need it (anything), but we
can have it (like a third martini). Thus, the tragic idiom of criticality – frustrated
necessity – and the comic idiom of the projective – non-necessitarian possibility.
All of this is to say there’s nothing scientifically or technically true about Green
Dots or the general performative category of the logo. They don’t represent
anything, even less the impossibility of representation, but they might, under
certain circumstances, do something. It’s like the big, yellow smiley face the
Smithsons once associated with Mies – and that 2x4 later proposed for OMA’s
IIT Student Center – a prescription of graphic prozac. No deep, tragic truths,
MVRDV, housing, just potential felicities, in Austin’s sense. Go graphic and get happy. Paint the
Hagen Island. town red. Or green. Win or lose, it’s a bet worth making.
Photo Rob ‘t Hart.
Painting the town red:
“The Stranger” (Clint
Eastwood) directs a
graphic saturation in High
Plains Drifter (1973)