I would like to thanks first to 2012 Cities Methodologies organising andcuratorial committee to put this exhibition and events together. The work I am presentingtoday is part of my PhD dissertation titled ‘Rhetoricsof the Plan’, currently being developed at the Architectural Association Schoolof Architecture. The title of the exhibition is ‘the Plan of oikonomia’ which attempts to highlighton of the central argument of the work. Oikonomia is the ancient word foreconomy, from oikos, which meant house, and nomia, or nemein, which refer tolaw and management, Oikonomia refers then the rules and management of thehouse, the disposition, and housekeeping of a thing.
As system of representation and as strategy oforganisation, the plan has a communicative nature both in rhetorical andsyntactic terms, that is, it deals with figures and tropes on the one hand andwith articulation and order on the other. Thedrawings displayed map the role that plans have played on the construction ofdiscourses on the modern city from within architecture, taken the urban as anexpanded field of the discipline.
Which sort of underlying tactics lie behind the plansof current housing projects?
What are the cities they compose in their assemblage?
How these drawings mediate between individualarchitectures and the larger scale of the collective?
And eventually, in which ways are these linesideologically loaded?
Four moments are delineated through the drawings: theinvention of orthogonal projections in the Renaissance, the nineteenth centuryconceptualisation of the Plan in the context of the École des Beaux-Arts, earlytwentieth century notion of planning for the functional city, and thequestioning to the Plan in the decades after Second World War. These momentsare revisited by identifying a series of drawings which first locate the planas the primary instrument to address the city to then question and criticizeits very existence.
These drawings constitute a kind of visual genealogyof the Plan, and in these terms, outline anarrative of the relationship between architecture and the city.In these terms, rhetorics of the Plan refers to the discursivetropes, which architecture, by means of a particularmode of representation, has used to accomplish its goals, either pedagogical ormaterial. Dealing with the notion of Rhetorics in relation to the Plan has atwofold implication: the inclusion of an underlying politics, an ideologicalload which locates the plan as part of a mode of spatial organization andtherefore governance, and the attention to a particular aesthetic practice, toa specific aesthetic regime. These drawings thus attempt to convey both, thePolitics and Aesthetics of the Plan, a series of tactics which situate it as atool and a techne rather than mererepresentation.
At aiming to dismantle the Plan’s politics a concernis set forth with the forms in which the Plan, has addressed the city, inasmuchas what is common and shared. At pairing these drawings with six differentrhetorical tropes I am proposing a drift in the role of plan towardsinstrumentalisation, arguing that the modern plan becomes a technology for the administrationof the entire city and then to its own critique.
Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony have beenidentified as the four ‘master tropes’ to which all others are reducible withindiscourse. Each of these tropes represents a different relationship between the'signifier' and the 'signified', thatis, between the 'mark', and that which is 'marked', between an object and itsrepresentation. Hayden White has suggested a tropological sequence in Westerndiscourse (originally based on historical writing), whereby the dominant tropechanged from one period to the next - from metaphor to metonymy tosynecdoche to irony. Jean Piaget has argued for the same kind ofcontinuity in children’s development; from an early metaphorical way ofrelating to the world based on the identification of similitude, to theironical manners in which adults classify and manipulate phenomena. I willdiscuss the plan following these tropes, proposing that the drawing of the planperforms a central role within a similar drift frommetaphor to irony in architectural thinking, and in fact, it becomes a registerof theses transformations.
This is actually the structure of mydissertation, the first part outlining the shift from metaphoric to metonymicdesignations, a transition that can be read by contrasting the Renaissance Planwith its Beaux Arts’ counterpart -the place where ‘composition’ is performed.The middle part of the dissertation addresses the rhetorical potential of theplan as synecdochic device, relating the individual with the collective, thepart with the whole. The final part eventually recapitulates theinconsistencies and ironies of the Plan.
To the main four master tropes, I have included inthis exhibition two additional figures of speech: ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘decorum’,which describe the discursive nature of the modern plan. In the case ofekphrasis, its communicative and diagrammatic potential, in the case ofdecorum, the always-already relation to a context, to a site, to a city.
METAPHOR / The first drawing relates to the trope ofmetaphor, the figure of speech which involves the transference of a name tosomething analogous (this ‘like or as’ that). In drawings such as FILARETE’s‘Plan of the Ideal City of Sforzinda’ or FRANCESCOD DI GIORGO’s ‘Man inscribedin a Building Plan’ each part of the plan has a role and place withinfigurative references, that is, the human body, nature or God. Nothing can beadded or subtracted since its shape metaphorically refers to something else.The disposition of the plan is led by metaphoric designations with referencesexternal to architecture. It is the thought by resemblance which isbehind the Classical Orders and their mimetic verticality. This graduallychanges towards the syntactic horizontality of the Plan by the end of the C18thwhen the city comes to be thought as an expanded field in which thearchitectural and the urban become part of the same problem and the same systemof production. The plan is no longer an orthogonal projection with the sameepistemological status as elevations or sections. It becomesinstead the main instrument for architectural projection, a site of productionof knowledge regarding the building in relation tothe city. [204]
METONYMY / Metonymy is the figure in which the name ofone thing is substituted with an attribute of it. The things are not called bytheir name, but by an agreed coding system. DURAND’s plate shown here illustratesBeaux Arts’ mécanisme de la composition whichcodified the plan into a series of aesthetic codes: the esquisse-analytique, the poche, the parti, the mosaique andthe entourage. These establish anon-figurative relationship between conceptualisation and materialization, ametonymic ‘order of things’ which locates the conventions of ‘composition’ atthe core. Recalling the myth of the origins of drawing, the cast of ashadow, we may understand better the initial conceptualisationof drawing which suggests that therelationship between signified and signifier isone of recording, of tracing. The instrumentalisation of the BeauxArts’ Plan is is primarily a process of translationand coding. The act of composing a plan, of planning acomposition, is a process based on the identification of the fundamentalelements of architecture to be assembled to form a kind of architecturalgrammar. This grammar, exclusive of the discipline, constitutes the ‘phonemes’of an autonomous aesthetic code, dictating the rules of a set of drawingtechniques. The plan becomes not only prominent, but also a specialized ground,an instrument for viewing rather than merely a view, for ordering rather thanto fix an order. [2262]
SYNECDOCHE / From this aim for of ordering,is thatthe plan develops its
synechdochic tactic, a form of metonymy in which apart is call to represent the whole. The plan of the house (oikos) became adiagram, and indexical device, for the management (nemein) of the entire city,the plan of oikonomia. This suggests a device with the capacity to form theurban, and by means of it, to shape also the realm of the collective, dealingeventually with certain politics of the Plan. The building is no longer anobject but the place where the elementary assemblage of single cells reifies,an instrument to develop and formalise the ways in which individual buildingsand the city can relate. As in HILBERSEIMER’s drawings for ‘The New City,Principles of Planning’, the plan becomes the unit and the diagram for the largercity, the planning of the building representing a factor of the urban. Thehouse, historically at the margins of the polis, becomes the tool to composeand govern the modern city. The scale of the building and the scale of the cityare integrated into the same operational logic. The role of the plan as embodimentof the modern project was to regulate the collective by introducing a newspatial and social order through the organisation of the private realm. [2202]
IRONY / Irony is the figure of speech in which theintended meaning is the opposite of that expressed. AUGUSTE CHOISY worm’s eyedrawings by the end of the C19th already challenged the view of the world fromabove, the view of the world as a plan. The aspirations of the modernfunctional plan were challenged in the 1950s and 60s by arguments which claimeda recovery of the everyday, the spontaneous, and ‘unplanned’ aspects of urbanspace. While the plan entailed a view from above and a managerial relationshiptowards the city, post-war challenges to the very nature of the plan claimed toreorganize such knowledge. From Cedric Price and Reyner Banham idea of‘Non-Plan’, the Smithson’s ‘As Found’ and ‘Plan as Structure’, Venturi andScott Brown ‘Learning from’ and John Volcker ‘Plans as method’ the relationshipbetween architecture and the modern city was outlined anew. While claiming achange of attitude their real effects are yet to be seen. Irony is the last tropical element in thediscourse of the Plan and relates to the contradictions and ambiguities of itsfate. It represents the transition from the Plan’s original conceptualizationsbased on the utopia of autonomy and social reform towards its later ideologicalinstrumentalisation. As Tafuri has argued when the Plan is deprived from utopiaarchitecture is then turned into the ‘object’, as opposed to the ‘subject’ ofthat Plan. This rhetoric of autonomy sets forth the Plan’s own crisisironically becoming the most efficient ideological agent and a predicament ofarchitecture’s own failure and contradictions: from Plan to Non-Plan tocounter-planning. [264]
The next two drawings refer torhetorical tactics intrinsic tothe nature of the plan.
DECORUM / Alberti’s lineamenta, translated as disegni (drawings) and as ‘measuredground plan’, refers to a site in which the plan is to be stamped. A plan of abuilding in these terms is in fact the impression of such building on aterrain. Plans, in these terms, are always already related to a larger piece ofland. Being convincing in oratory relies on the arrangement of a composition (dispositio),as much as on the selection of the elements of the argument (inventio)and on its delivery in performance (elocutio),but first and foremost on the experience of that composition with itssurroundings (decorum; that which is ‘proper’). Decorum is the condition wherethe relationship between a composition and its context is convincing. Thegoverning concept of the rhetorical decorum is that an argument must beeffective through its fitness, economy and utility. The form and organizationof a building become fundamental aspects to be arranged in the planform. This becomes the instrument of decorum, by means of theefficient arrangement of the parts to fit their purpose and context in aneconomic manner.
Such functional claims become architectural expressionand were translated into a culture of forms. COLIN ROWE’s ‘Collage City’ nollimaps reveals this rhetorical concerns between the plan and its appropriateness.[2143]
EKPHRASIS / Ekphrasis, literally means expression, isthe rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another bydefining and describing its essence and form: a vivid description. The Plan hasa descriptive nature, a will to impress but also to express, being a condensedversion of a building or urban ensemble, a transference in which informationabout programmatic, constructional and material necessities are turned into avisual code. ALEXANDER KLEIN ’Typological Plans for Minimum Housing’ isillustrative of the ekphrastic potential of plans and their possibilities forthe production of types. In Beaux Arts a composition is beautiful when is ableto narrate the purpose and character of a building. The success of the planthus depends on its ability to seize and scale the dominant motive of theprogramme, becoming, as Juilen Guadet discussed by the end of the C19th, a‘moral’ impression of the architectural programme. The plan, once a depictionof a building or urban ensemble like any other projection, in modern times has becomenot only representation but also, and more important, a condensed descriptionof the relationship between parts. From this ekphrastic potential is thataphorisms such as Le Corbusier’s ‘the plan is the generator’ arise. The plan isable to generate, in a relation of transparency, not only the volume thesections and the elevations, but also and more important, the entire city. [2245]
--------------
This exhibition revolves around lines, drawings,plans, plot, complot, architecture, the city, rhetoric, strategy, tactics, and discourse.
Lines ‘compose’ drawings, and drawings are ‘design’.Lines are the fundamental ‘elements’ of Plans, and Plans are always-alreadypart of a Plot and within a
Complot. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, the art of‘composition’, the art of design, an art of drawing techniques. Tactic refersto the art of arrangement. Oikonomia to the disposition andmanagement of the house. Plan is a footprint in a small piece of city, a smallpiece of land, a plot, a complot, a secret conspiracy. The Plan is a technologyin the organization and management of that land. The Plan is a drawing, acomposition, a strategy, and a discourse. The drawing of the plan incarnates aseries of ideas and ‘technologies’, which documents the intricate relationshipbetween architecture and the modern city. The drawing of the plan is presentedas a socio-political operation that internalises rhetorical power through itsdrawn lines. Plans are manipulative devices able to cause ‘impressive’rhetorical effects.
As system of representation and as strategy oforganisation, the plan has a communicative nature both in rhetorical andsyntactic terms, that is, it deals with figures and tropes on the one hand andwith articulation and order on the other. Thedrawings displayed map the role that plans have played on the construction ofdiscourses on the modern city from within architecture, taken the urban as anexpanded field of the discipline.
Which sort of underlying tactics lie behind the plansof current housing projects?
What are the cities they compose in their assemblage?
How these drawings mediate between individualarchitectures and the larger scale of the collective?
And eventually, in which ways are these linesideologically loaded?
Four moments are delineated through the drawings: theinvention of orthogonal projections in the Renaissance, the nineteenth centuryconceptualisation of the Plan in the context of the École des Beaux-Arts, earlytwentieth century notion of planning for the functional city, and thequestioning to the Plan in the decades after Second World War. These momentsare revisited by identifying a series of drawings which first locate the planas the primary instrument to address the city to then question and criticizeits very existence.
These drawings constitute a kind of visual genealogyof the Plan, and in these terms, outline anarrative of the relationship between architecture and the city.In these terms, rhetorics of the Plan refers to the discursivetropes, which architecture, by means of a particularmode of representation, has used to accomplish its goals, either pedagogical ormaterial. Dealing with the notion of Rhetorics in relation to the Plan has atwofold implication: the inclusion of an underlying politics, an ideologicalload which locates the plan as part of a mode of spatial organization andtherefore governance, and the attention to a particular aesthetic practice, toa specific aesthetic regime. These drawings thus attempt to convey both, thePolitics and Aesthetics of the Plan, a series of tactics which situate it as atool and a techne rather than mererepresentation.
At aiming to dismantle the Plan’s politics a concernis set forth with the forms in which the Plan, has addressed the city, inasmuchas what is common and shared. At pairing these drawings with six differentrhetorical tropes I am proposing a drift in the role of plan towardsinstrumentalisation, arguing that the modern plan becomes a technology for the administrationof the entire city and then to its own critique.
Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony have beenidentified as the four ‘master tropes’ to which all others are reducible withindiscourse. Each of these tropes represents a different relationship between the'signifier' and the 'signified', thatis, between the 'mark', and that which is 'marked', between an object and itsrepresentation. Hayden White has suggested a tropological sequence in Westerndiscourse (originally based on historical writing), whereby the dominant tropechanged from one period to the next - from metaphor to metonymy tosynecdoche to irony. Jean Piaget has argued for the same kind ofcontinuity in children’s development; from an early metaphorical way ofrelating to the world based on the identification of similitude, to theironical manners in which adults classify and manipulate phenomena. I willdiscuss the plan following these tropes, proposing that the drawing of the planperforms a central role within a similar drift frommetaphor to irony in architectural thinking, and in fact, it becomes a registerof theses transformations.
This is actually the structure of mydissertation, the first part outlining the shift from metaphoric to metonymicdesignations, a transition that can be read by contrasting the Renaissance Planwith its Beaux Arts’ counterpart -the place where ‘composition’ is performed.The middle part of the dissertation addresses the rhetorical potential of theplan as synecdochic device, relating the individual with the collective, thepart with the whole. The final part eventually recapitulates theinconsistencies and ironies of the Plan.
To the main four master tropes, I have included inthis exhibition two additional figures of speech: ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘decorum’,which describe the discursive nature of the modern plan. In the case ofekphrasis, its communicative and diagrammatic potential, in the case ofdecorum, the always-already relation to a context, to a site, to a city.
METAPHOR / The first drawing relates to the trope ofmetaphor, the figure of speech which involves the transference of a name tosomething analogous (this ‘like or as’ that). In drawings such as FILARETE’s‘Plan of the Ideal City of Sforzinda’ or FRANCESCOD DI GIORGO’s ‘Man inscribedin a Building Plan’ each part of the plan has a role and place withinfigurative references, that is, the human body, nature or God. Nothing can beadded or subtracted since its shape metaphorically refers to something else.The disposition of the plan is led by metaphoric designations with referencesexternal to architecture. It is the thought by resemblance which isbehind the Classical Orders and their mimetic verticality. This graduallychanges towards the syntactic horizontality of the Plan by the end of the C18thwhen the city comes to be thought as an expanded field in which thearchitectural and the urban become part of the same problem and the same systemof production. The plan is no longer an orthogonal projection with the sameepistemological status as elevations or sections. It becomesinstead the main instrument for architectural projection, a site of productionof knowledge regarding the building in relation tothe city. [204]
METONYMY / Metonymy is the figure in which the name ofone thing is substituted with an attribute of it. The things are not called bytheir name, but by an agreed coding system. DURAND’s plate shown here illustratesBeaux Arts’ mécanisme de la composition whichcodified the plan into a series of aesthetic codes: the esquisse-analytique, the poche, the parti, the mosaique andthe entourage. These establish anon-figurative relationship between conceptualisation and materialization, ametonymic ‘order of things’ which locates the conventions of ‘composition’ atthe core. Recalling the myth of the origins of drawing, the cast of ashadow, we may understand better the initial conceptualisationof drawing which suggests that therelationship between signified and signifier isone of recording, of tracing. The instrumentalisation of the BeauxArts’ Plan is is primarily a process of translationand coding. The act of composing a plan, of planning acomposition, is a process based on the identification of the fundamentalelements of architecture to be assembled to form a kind of architecturalgrammar. This grammar, exclusive of the discipline, constitutes the ‘phonemes’of an autonomous aesthetic code, dictating the rules of a set of drawingtechniques. The plan becomes not only prominent, but also a specialized ground,an instrument for viewing rather than merely a view, for ordering rather thanto fix an order. [2262]
SYNECDOCHE / From this aim for of ordering,is thatthe plan develops its
synechdochic tactic, a form of metonymy in which apart is call to represent the whole. The plan of the house (oikos) became adiagram, and indexical device, for the management (nemein) of the entire city,the plan of oikonomia. This suggests a device with the capacity to form theurban, and by means of it, to shape also the realm of the collective, dealingeventually with certain politics of the Plan. The building is no longer anobject but the place where the elementary assemblage of single cells reifies,an instrument to develop and formalise the ways in which individual buildingsand the city can relate. As in HILBERSEIMER’s drawings for ‘The New City,Principles of Planning’, the plan becomes the unit and the diagram for the largercity, the planning of the building representing a factor of the urban. Thehouse, historically at the margins of the polis, becomes the tool to composeand govern the modern city. The scale of the building and the scale of the cityare integrated into the same operational logic. The role of the plan as embodimentof the modern project was to regulate the collective by introducing a newspatial and social order through the organisation of the private realm. [2202]
IRONY / Irony is the figure of speech in which theintended meaning is the opposite of that expressed. AUGUSTE CHOISY worm’s eyedrawings by the end of the C19th already challenged the view of the world fromabove, the view of the world as a plan. The aspirations of the modernfunctional plan were challenged in the 1950s and 60s by arguments which claimeda recovery of the everyday, the spontaneous, and ‘unplanned’ aspects of urbanspace. While the plan entailed a view from above and a managerial relationshiptowards the city, post-war challenges to the very nature of the plan claimed toreorganize such knowledge. From Cedric Price and Reyner Banham idea of‘Non-Plan’, the Smithson’s ‘As Found’ and ‘Plan as Structure’, Venturi andScott Brown ‘Learning from’ and John Volcker ‘Plans as method’ the relationshipbetween architecture and the modern city was outlined anew. While claiming achange of attitude their real effects are yet to be seen. Irony is the last tropical element in thediscourse of the Plan and relates to the contradictions and ambiguities of itsfate. It represents the transition from the Plan’s original conceptualizationsbased on the utopia of autonomy and social reform towards its later ideologicalinstrumentalisation. As Tafuri has argued when the Plan is deprived from utopiaarchitecture is then turned into the ‘object’, as opposed to the ‘subject’ ofthat Plan. This rhetoric of autonomy sets forth the Plan’s own crisisironically becoming the most efficient ideological agent and a predicament ofarchitecture’s own failure and contradictions: from Plan to Non-Plan tocounter-planning. [264]
The next two drawings refer torhetorical tactics intrinsic tothe nature of the plan.
DECORUM / Alberti’s lineamenta, translated as disegni (drawings) and as ‘measuredground plan’, refers to a site in which the plan is to be stamped. A plan of abuilding in these terms is in fact the impression of such building on aterrain. Plans, in these terms, are always already related to a larger piece ofland. Being convincing in oratory relies on the arrangement of a composition (dispositio),as much as on the selection of the elements of the argument (inventio)and on its delivery in performance (elocutio),but first and foremost on the experience of that composition with itssurroundings (decorum; that which is ‘proper’). Decorum is the condition wherethe relationship between a composition and its context is convincing. Thegoverning concept of the rhetorical decorum is that an argument must beeffective through its fitness, economy and utility. The form and organizationof a building become fundamental aspects to be arranged in the planform. This becomes the instrument of decorum, by means of theefficient arrangement of the parts to fit their purpose and context in aneconomic manner.
Such functional claims become architectural expressionand were translated into a culture of forms. COLIN ROWE’s ‘Collage City’ nollimaps reveals this rhetorical concerns between the plan and its appropriateness.[2143]
EKPHRASIS / Ekphrasis, literally means expression, isthe rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another bydefining and describing its essence and form: a vivid description. The Plan hasa descriptive nature, a will to impress but also to express, being a condensedversion of a building or urban ensemble, a transference in which informationabout programmatic, constructional and material necessities are turned into avisual code. ALEXANDER KLEIN ’Typological Plans for Minimum Housing’ isillustrative of the ekphrastic potential of plans and their possibilities forthe production of types. In Beaux Arts a composition is beautiful when is ableto narrate the purpose and character of a building. The success of the planthus depends on its ability to seize and scale the dominant motive of theprogramme, becoming, as Juilen Guadet discussed by the end of the C19th, a‘moral’ impression of the architectural programme. The plan, once a depictionof a building or urban ensemble like any other projection, in modern times has becomenot only representation but also, and more important, a condensed descriptionof the relationship between parts. From this ekphrastic potential is thataphorisms such as Le Corbusier’s ‘the plan is the generator’ arise. The plan isable to generate, in a relation of transparency, not only the volume thesections and the elevations, but also and more important, the entire city. [2245]
--------------
This exhibition revolves around lines, drawings,plans, plot, complot, architecture, the city, rhetoric, strategy, tactics, and discourse.
Lines ‘compose’ drawings, and drawings are ‘design’.Lines are the fundamental ‘elements’ of Plans, and Plans are always-alreadypart of a Plot and within a
Complot. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, the art of‘composition’, the art of design, an art of drawing techniques. Tactic refersto the art of arrangement. Oikonomia to the disposition andmanagement of the house. Plan is a footprint in a small piece of city, a smallpiece of land, a plot, a complot, a secret conspiracy. The Plan is a technologyin the organization and management of that land. The Plan is a drawing, acomposition, a strategy, and a discourse. The drawing of the plan incarnates aseries of ideas and ‘technologies’, which documents the intricate relationshipbetween architecture and the modern city. The drawing of the plan is presentedas a socio-political operation that internalises rhetorical power through itsdrawn lines. Plans are manipulative devices able to cause ‘impressive’rhetorical effects.
