Lateness 9780691203911

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Lateness

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SERIES EDITOR EDITOR

Sarah Whiting

Lateness, Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe After Art, David Joselit Kissing Architecture, Nicholas Carnes

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Lateness Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe

Princeton University Press  Princeton and Oxford

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Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All images are courtesy of Eisenman Architects All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-­0-­691-­14722-­2 Library of Congress Control Number 2019955614 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Helvetica Neue and Scala Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents Series Editor’s Preface Sarah Whiting  vii Introduction  1 Lateness: Toward a Definition  11 Lateness in the Twentieth Century  23 Adolf Loos  25 Aldo Rossi  47 John Hejduk  63 Conclusion  93 Acknowledgments  103 Notes  105

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Series Editor’s Preface POINT offers a new cadence to architecture’s contemporary conversation. Deliberately situated between the pithy polemic and the heavily footnoted tome, POINT plumbs the world of the extended essay. Each essay in this series hones a single point while situating it within a broader discursive landscape, thereby simultaneously focusing and fueling architectural criticism. These short books, written by leading theorists, historians, and practitioners, engage the major issues concerning architecture and design today. The agility of POINT’s format permits the series to take the pulse of the field, address and further develop current issues, and turn these issues outward to an informed, interested public. With Lateness, architect Peter Eisenman, writing with Elisa Iturbe, offers up the ideal model of POINT, even if to speak of idealization is to counter Eisenman’s own argument. This essay is at once deeply personal and yet highly relevant to practitioners and students alike. Contemporary architecture, Eisenman argues, is so focused on making an immediate splash that it has 

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no impact—­architecture has become a world of complexity for the sake of complexity, representation for the sake of representation, exuberance for the sake of exuberance. Laying out a remarkably clear argument that relies on a close analysis of three projects by Adolf Loos, John Hedjuk, and Aldo Rossi, Eisenman offers us the model of lateness—­work that is contingent, nondialectical, nonzeitgeist, and non-­avant-­garde. This short volume does not offer up a how-­to of lateness; instead, it provokes an entirely new way of thinking of architecture’s time, as well as its impact. —­Sarah Whiting

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Lateness

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Introduction In November of 1989, my major building, the Wexner Center, opened. Participating in that occasion, among others, was Laurie Anderson, who that same year had issued an LP called Strange Angels. On it was a song, “The Dream Before,” which resonated with me. It was a ballad about Hansel and Gretel alive and well, living in Berlin, the site of another of my projects. In the lyrics, Gretel asks Hansel, “What is history?” Hansel’s reply alludes to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus, describing history as an angel being pushed backward into the future by a storm from paradise. In Benjamin’s account, the winds are so strong that the angel can no longer close his wings, and even if he would like to, he cannot pause “to awaken the dead and to make whole what has been smashed.” The storm—­which is identified as “progress”—­forces the angel past the ruins of war against his will, and although there is no depiction of rubble in the foreground of the drawing, Benjamin writes, “where a chain of events appears before us, he [the angel] sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.”1 Benjamin was trying to come to terms with the twentieth century as a time when astonishing technological advancements were paired with unprecedented atrocities of war. His analysis of the Klee drawing reveals his disillusion in 

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the ideals of the twentieth century and his skepticism of the notion of progress. For Benjamin, progress represented the concept of implacable linear time derived from Hegel’s concept of the forward march of history, and could only be ideological, as evidenced by the way the storm interferes with the angel’s process of perception: as he is carried swiftly away, he cannot hold his gaze upon the events of the present in order to perceive them critically, for the storm pushes him ever forward. In architecture, belief in progressive time manifested itself in the twentieth century’s concept of the zeitgeist, an Hegelian incarnation that saw the spirit of the age as a propulsive force different from any previous defining era such as the baroque or the neoclassical. In contrast, the zeitgeist was seen as the evolution of a collective consciousness about the present and, tinged with a utopian energy, saw the present as both a means to break away from the inherited values of the nineteenth century and as a vehicle to look forward into the future. This produced an almost universal idea in the early twentieth century, called the “modern,” and its fervor for novelty in form and construction was embedded in a belief in progressive time. Evidence of this new temporality can be found in Mies van der Rohe’s notion of the “will of the epoch,” and his interest in using new materials and building technologies to express the essence of the present. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s five points proposed a new architectural language that 2

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maximized the potential of new materials and reconceived the nature of urban relationships to reflect a society structured by industry and technology. With the zeitgeist as a framework, the question of how to be present became the means by which the moderns projected into the future, and so, despite modernity’s transformational aspirations and its critical capacity to challenge the status quo, there emerged a characteristic faith in the possibility of a new progressive paradigm that gave the modern an idealizing and propelling tendency, similar to historicism. Art historian Rosalind Krauss identified this inclination toward idealization as a problem for architecture’s modernity, arguing that the infatuation with industrial forms was fundamentally different from the paradigmatic conceptual shift seen in painting due to the rise of abstraction. As long as modern architecture continued to imitate the forms of technical progress, it remained a representational practice, and as such would not transition into what had defined the modern in the other arts. In fact, the attempt to rid architecture of its representational idealizations was at the heart of the modernist abstractionist project.2 In 1941 Sigfried Giedion published Space, Time and Architecture, a seminal work that gave rise to an attitude toward space-­time that framed the modern as a discourse of temporal integrity. The notion of literal transparency celebrated the openness and clarity of introduction

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architectural space made possible by steel and glass. Before beginning my dissertation in 1960, these views espoused by Giedion and the inherited discourse of the modern had shaped my understanding of architecture. But in the summer of 1961, on a trip to Italy with my then mentor and colleague, Colin Rowe, I had two realizations: first, in the formal contradictions of the Casa del Fascio, I saw the potential of a different modernity in the work of Giuseppe Terragni, making it possible to question any universalizing tendency that previously had been thought to pertain to Le Corbusier. Secondly, I was asked by Rowe to stand in front of a Palladian façade and rather than describe it as I saw it, I was to tell him what I could not see. This changed my understanding of architectural perception and analysis. Then in the fall of 1961, back at Cambridge, I read Rowe and Slutzky’s text “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.”3 It was at this point that I realized that neither seeing nor representation was the basis of architecture, but rather, abstraction and the critical, which refers to the possible or necessary commentary on a work. To be critical meant learning to see not only what was present, but also what was absent. This realization, along with my linguistic concerns, began to shape the foundation of my dissertation research. The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture was my first attempt to move away from the idealizing tendencies of the modern by using an analytic frame devoid of 4

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function, technology, or social purpose. But an unacknowledged idealism and a universalizing tendency remained in my belief that an underlying modern language could connect four very different works of architecture: those by Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Giuseppe Terragni, and Le Corbusier. And in fact, at the time of writing, Colin Rowe, in a 1963 letter providing commentary on an early draft of the text, asked, “Why is modern being singled out while your principles are thought of as universal?” In Rowe’s opinion, the dissertation was arguing for the modern as a universalizing force, and as such could only ever uphold the idealizing tendency of the zeitgeist. In other words, the conception of the modern as universal projected the modern into the indefinite future, replicating its future-­oriented temporality. It is clear in retrospect that Rowe was, in part, correct: first because it is possible today to see that The Formal Basis had assumed the modern was critical in its essence, and as such, idealized its potential to be universal, and secondly because the critical framework of the modern clearly has not held past the middle of the twentieth century, proving that a universal modern framework was not possible. Despite these lessons learned in hindsight, in the context of today’s digital turn it becomes difficult to avoid similar idealizing notions, as the desire to keep pace with the ever-­evolving digital realm echoes the fascination with present and future technologies that i n t r o d u c t i o n

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characterized the modern. In his book The Second Digital Turn, architectural historian Mario Carpo recounts the shift from spline-­based modeling to voxel-­based design, outlining how technologies that have the capacity to work with an abundance of data have made formal complexity increasingly possible, a trend that had already begun when scripts and algorithms became widespread tools in architectural design. Since the publication of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in 1966, complexity had become an important critical tool after the modern, introducing a framework for reading form that saw complexity as a means to slow down perception and induce a process of close reading. Unlike Klee’s angel caught in the compulsion toward progress, Venturi practiced a sustained attention to form and space, looking both forward and backward in time—­in clear opposition to modern habits, which by that time had transformed into a platform for corporate interests. Complexity, then, became a critical tool and a mode of resistance to institutional power, due to its ability to resist the ideological trends of the time. In today’s context, however, the digital facilitates the production of complexity without heightening its capacity as a critical tool; instead the ease of production normalizes formal difficulty because complexity can be generated automatically by software. As scripts easily generate endless iterations of varied forms, the difference between one form and another is no longer a critical integer but 6

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instead the output of a totalizing mathematical process. Any formal complexity in this context becomes normative and thereby ineffective as a mode of resistance to power. Moreover, form can be generated today without concern for constructability, because advances in digital software are paired with ever-­ more-­ sophisticated building technologies. With constructability becoming less of a concern, contemporary architecture produces increasingly more exuberant forms, each one just as anomalous as the last, creating a conceptual milieu that is ultimately homogeneous, despite any specific differences between individual forms. What capacity does architecture have to be critical in this context? While it is tempting to identify the problem as an infatuation with software, perhaps the problem lies in the inherent attitude around time that the digital presents. The techno-­zeitgeist of today has returned to a present-­based avant-­garde, one in which the limits of form are defined by the technical possibilities of the present and in which time might be the integer of possible resistance. If this is so, what might a different attitude toward time look like? For this, it is possible perhaps to turn to Theodor Adorno’s study of Beethoven’s late works. Adorno finds in Beethoven’s late works a return to classical conventions after a long period of rejecting them almost entirely, and yet this classical recapitulation does not follow formulaic classical structures. Instead, Beethoven introduces caesuras i n t r o d u c t i o n

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and ruptures between classical conventions, and as such, he identifies the fragment as a formal idea, which informs the path that music and other disciplines take in the nineteenth and twentieth century. But Adorno’s analysis is of interest not simply because he succeeds in identifying a formal change that marked the beginning of a new period in musical history, but rather because Beethoven’s unusual treatment of classical conventions problematizes the existing relationship between form and time. The classical conventions that appear in the work inevitably embody a temporal dimension, due to their emergence within a specific historical context and their corresponding associations with particular styles. Yet because of gaps and breaks between these conventions, the classical elements no longer follow the formulaic sequence of classical form, and are thereby transformed from stylistic determinants to autonomous fragments within a work. Untethered from style, they become possibly unbound from time. So, in a way, Beethoven’s late works were neither imitative nor innovative. Instead they rewrote the relationship between the parts of classical form through an approach that did not rely purely on formal anomaly to break from the past, but that disrupted temporal continuity by breaking up the narrative sequence of a piece, and in so doing, questioning the historical context within which the work unfolds. Beethoven’s work looks neither forward nor backward in time, but rather sits outside a temporal 8

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progression. Anachronisms no longer operate as historical reference; as fragments they acquire a different capacity to identify with other moments and other eras—­including those that had not yet occurred. Adorno called this phenomenon lateness, and it is different from the modern relationship to history, which focused on a break with precedent, and different from the postmodern relationship to history, which focused on citation and a return to past historical styles. Instead, lateness exhibits temporal ambiguity. The result is something nondialectical, not of the zeitgeist, and not of the avant-­garde. Late works are neither of the present nor of the past. They are, as literary critic Edward Said wrote, in and apart from the present.4 This essay proposes lateness as a possible different attitude toward form and time in architecture, one that attempts to circumvent stylistic constraints and expand the critical capacity of architecture through the notion of untimeliness. Examples of lateness can be found throughout history, arising when a work is “out of joint” with its time.5 As such, lateness is a contingent phenomenon. It has no predetermined formal qualities and must be read relative to its historical context. As a result, the outward appearance of lateness changes depending on how a work invokes the conventions of its time or those from previous eras. This text will not attempt to prescribe what the appearance of lateness might be in the contemporary moment. The focus will be instead i n t r o d u c t i o n

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on the works of three twentieth-­century architects who exhibited qualities of lateness in their work: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. The goal, however, is not a reevaluation of the twentieth century but a reexamination of the relation between a work and its time, which generates a different mode of close reading that is, in itself, untimely.

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Lateness: Toward a Definition In music and art scholarship, there seem to be three different meanings of the term late. The most common refers to the closing years of a coherent style, as in late Renaissance, late baroque, late modern. This use of the term serves the purpose of historical categorization, fully available only in retrospect and as an exercise in classification. Here, late is relative to the rise and fall of movements, marking a linear trajectory of history and reflecting on the preceding era while drawing its style to a close. Another common meaning of late is part of the term late style, an expression that identifies changes that take place in an artist’s work when the artist is faced with the proximity of death. It is what Edward Said calls “the new idiom” that emerges in an individual artist’s work and thought as their life draws to a close.1 In this context, late style can only appear at the terminus of a chronological and biographical arc. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote, “There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death.”2 Late style, in this sense, is a phenomenon of personal intransigence, a moment when the artist ceases to heed the norms of the discipline; subjective expression, in the face of death, drives away any formal predeterminations.

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A third context for the term late can be found in Theodor Adorno’s seminal study of Beethoven’s final works. Although Adorno uses the same phrasing—­late style, or Spätstil—­and although the works he analyzes are written near the end of Beethoven’s life, he insists on rejecting the “usual view” of the term late that attributes the intransigent qualities of late works to the “uninhibited subjectivity” that arises from a confrontation with death. In his view, such an attribution gives death power over art, “as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its right and abdicate in favor of reality.”3 In other words, if late style is defined by, or induced by, proximity to death, then art is reduced to a subset of biography, and the autonomy of art is subsequently denied. For art, then, to assume its “right,” rather than divest itself of it, the subjective and biographical aspects of an artist’s life must be separated from the artwork itself. In addition to critiquing late style, Adorno proposes a redefinition of the term late. He identifies a “formal law of late works,” which, he argues, “is, at the least, incapable of being subsumed under the concept of expression.”4 By describing the idea of spätstil as a “formal law,” Adorno rejects an individualized framework based in personal caprice in favor of exploring formal characteristics that can apply across different works and different artists. In other words, while in the usual understanding of late style, the virtuosity of the artist 12

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freely digests, breaks down, and ultimately discards precedents in order for subjectivity to “break through the envelope of form,”5 in Beethoven’s late works, the opposite occurs. Phrases and formulas of the classical era remain intact: classical trill sequences, cadences, and melodic embellishments appear unaltered, unlike in earlier Beethoven. The “envelope of form”—­through a renewed attention to classical convention—­appears to defy subjective whim. Adorno writes: “the power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. . . . Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form . . . hence the conventions that are no longer penetrated and mastered by subjectivity, but simply left to stand.”6 One could propose, then, a modification of terminology in order to distinguish late style from this idea, which would be referred to simply as lateness. Lateness frees form from the deformations wrought by a hand in search of expression, and as such, formal conventions appear in the work unprocessed, “bald, undisguised, untransformed.”7 In contrast to late style, where the artist resists dominant conventions, lateness is the resistance to personal expression, in favor of working with specific formal relationships. While this may at first seem to imply, through opposition to subjective invention, a resurrection of past styles, or a plea to adhere to its rules, the use of recognizable tropes in lateness does l at e n e s s : t o w a r d a d e f i n i t i o n

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not serve to reinstate the classical order, for it is clear from Adorno’s writing that the conventions still appear somehow altered, since their “baldness” or “nakedness” seem to achieve a startling effect. The implication is that conventions do not necessarily represent a style, nor do they always embody or follow stylistic determinations. In order to better understand this phenomenon, a more precise definition of convention is needed. In music, the word convention is used differently from its normal use in architecture, where the term implies standards by which architects can more easily communicate with each other—­for example, the drawing conventions expressed through graphic standards and the structural conventions standardized through building codes. In music, conventions refer to form. Musical form governs the overall structure of a piece of music as well as its internal relationships. The basic constitutive elements are a single note, a sound, or the absence of sound, and these elements are repeated and aggregated, generating form as notes are organized into phrases and rhythms. In turn, these phrases are organized into themes, variations, and rhythmic sections. As defined by musicologist Percy Scholes, musical form mediates between “unrelieved repetition” and “unrelieved alternation”8 by making an organization of sound in time. Conventions emerge when particular organizations of musical sections become recognizable and prevalent during a defined era. For example, the 14

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sonata form, which dominated the classical period, is like the sonnet form in poetry, or the palazzo type in architecture. These conventions were widely used to determine overall form in their time. Convention can also operate at a finer grain, dictating internal relationships within the whole. For example, because of its ABA structure, sonata form is characterized by the differentiation of the central section. A typical convention of the classical period was to achieve this differentiation via contrasting thematic material and tempo. In poetry this would be more like a literary device such as repetition or alliteration. In architecture, it would be like the play between the central bay and the flanking bays in the palazzo type. These formal conventions structure the relationships between parts. Conventions, then, consist of formulas and replicable configurations that define the nature of form. Thus the definition of convention can be easily translated into architecture. The basic unit equivalent to notes or sounds in music would be the elements of architecture such as walls, columns, floors, apertures, et cetera. How these are arranged respective to each other varies according to the scale of the building and necessary functions, but as in music, it is possible to make a catalogue of these possible arrangements, such as in the typological drawings of J. N. L. Durand, John Hejduk, or Stanley Tigerman. These forms become a formal vocabulary for architecture, generating conventions l at e n e s s : t o w a r d a d e f i n i t i o n

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such as the centrally planned church, the nine-­square grid, and the palazzo type, among many others. These conventions are not in themselves stylistically specific. For example, the courtyard type is a formal structure that has appeared across cultures and throughout history, and the nine-­ square plan was prevalent both in the Italian High Renaissance and the modern period. However, due to a convention’s repeatability, it does have the capacity to hold the integrity of a style, defining its character and its limits and giving formal consistency to an era. For example, the centrally planned church was very prevalent during the Italian Renaissance, and when the elongated oval plan became common during the baroque, the change in form cued the ensuing change in style. So while a circular plan has appeared and reappeared throughout architectural history, often without reference to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, read against the oval plan of the baroque, its particular condition as a centrally planned church lent coherence to the architectural style of the Renaissance. In music’s classical period, specific conventions were repeated and propagated until they stabilized and merged with social and cultural forces into the rigid standards of an era, i.e., until they became a style. In this context, Mozart and Haydn were able to work without experimenting with form, and instead generated work prolifically within the boundaries of the 16

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predetermined forms of the classical style. Beethoven scholar Michael Spitzer calls this the “extreme conventionalization of eighteenth-­ century musical mate9 rial,” a phenomenon that made it possible for Mozart to compose around six hundred works before he died at age thirty-­six. While conventions can feed into style, it is important to note that they are not synonymous with style. A style arises when a specific combination of conventions is adopted and repeated. In other words, styles dictate how conventions relate to each other and generate a series of predetermined forms that become indicative of a specific era, bounded by time. If this is so, then conventions can become disassociated from style if the specific combinations dictated by that style are challenged, as they are in Beethoven’s late works. This is the reason the classical and baroque elements legible within those works appear “undigested” and broken apart. “Abrogating the classical art of logical transition, the late Beethoven loves to juxtapose contrasting ideas or sections directly. . . . Keystones, ligaments, pivots are all knocked away, and yet the structure levitates, defying musical gravity.”10 With typical transitions and connections gone, the conventions become fragmentary and figural, and introduce an unprecedented formal relationship rather than reinforcing the style previously associated with those same conventions. For example, in the Missa Solemnis, Beethoven moves away from the evolution of motifs within a given structure (the l at e n e s s : t o w a r d a d e f i n i t i o n

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standard in the classical period) and instead generates imitative sections accumulating throughout the piece with breaks and difficult transitions between them. A formal structure emerges that is aggregative and disjointed rather than conforming to an idea of the unity of the whole. In the face of the fragment, the whole dissolves, opening gaps where they previously did not exist. Adorno is interested in this analysis of Beethoven because the fragment as a formal idea was unprecedented in early music and became one of the predominant innovations of modern music. While that may be true, to frame lateness as a concept of transition, or as a hinge between two styles or paradigms, belies the temporal complexity of the idea. If Beethoven brought change to the classical—­a moment that was otherwise hung in a suspended state due to the rigidity of its style—­it was due to the notion that the relationship between form and time could be rethought. His late works show that a convention, rather than being understood as an historical citation, can operate instead as part of a vocabulary of elements that can be infinitely recombined. For example, fugues appear in the late works, not as a reference to the baroque but as particular rhythmic and harmonic structures,11 i.e., as a syntactic element rather than as a reference to a style or an era. Beethoven is “playing with the empty shells or clichés of the language. . . . At a micro level, [he] seems to interrogate the very building blocks of the language.”12 This emphasis 18

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on the syntactic—­rather than citational—­potential of an historical convention has the effect of producing temporal ambiguity. By decontextualizing a convention and stripping it of its historical weight while preserving its formal integrity, a late work can break historical narratives and cause time to become discontinuous. As such, lateness need not be a hinge that leads into the development of a new style—­it can be an aporia, or caesura, in itself. This conception of time differs from the dialectical framework in twentieth-­century architecture that relied on a rejection of what came before—­an attitude that was prevalent both in the modern era’s pronouncements of a break with the past as well as the subsequent postmodern rejection of that break. By the end of the century, it seemed that the digital would introduce a different temporality, as its emergent forms seemed to have no history at all. However, it has since become evident that the digital is a recapitulation of a techno-­zeitgeist in which the limits of form are determined by the boundaries of the technology itself. For example, in parametric design, form is determined by numerical inputs. At the same time, the idealization of technological progress occludes the perception of the imposed formal limits. The digital did not transcend the dialectic frame of the twentieth century, but rather, reverted to the idealization of the present that characterized the modern.

l at e n e s s : t o w a r d a d e f i n i t i o n

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Against this backdrop, lateness presents an alternative view of form in time because the integrity of form is preserved at the scale of specific conventions, while at the same time, inherited notions of how one convention might relate to another are challenged or reinvented. Operating outside a strict dichotomy between transgression and regression, and remaining instead in the realm of the untimely, lateness is neither an explicit break with history nor an overt return to the past. Lateness has no ties to any particular style, nor does lateness operate as a style in itself. It manifests itself as an interruption to linear time, and as such its form must be contingent, its outward appearance dependent on the historical context in which certain conventions are dominant and others are suppressed. The works by Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk analyzed in the text that follows were chosen because they exhibited qualities of both modernity and a subconscious lateness, and each represents a different moment in the twentieth century. Through a contrast between their modern and late aspects, the modern—­as the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century—­can serve as a backdrop against which different temporal and formal attitudes emerge and begin to suggest a definition of lateness in architecture, as well as a catalog of its attributes. Drawing from the modern in this way is not meant to portray modernism as a monolithic style or ideology, nor will lateness emerge as an 20

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undiscovered style or a new historical category of equal weight and importance with the modern or postmodern. Rather, this study of lateness offers the possibility of uncovering a critical mode in which the invention of new form is no longer the stated goal of a critical architecture. Instead, a different critical mode might emerge in questions about the relationship between form and time, proposed in the term lateness.

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Lateness in the Twentieth Century It can be readily agreed that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were two of the major figures who defined what was considered modern architecture. Le Corbusier with his five points and Mies with his “will of the epoch” defined a complex, critical matrix that sustained the twenty-­five years between the two world wars—­1914 to 1939, essentially—­in a fragile détente between their two positions. Through their work, themes such as edge stress, sparse space, flat space, free plan versus open plan, centripetal versus centrifugal energy, and others, came to define the critical nature of the modern project as a commentary on architecture’s autonomy. While many of those conditions can be said to animate any given moment of architecture, their invocation as a totally new lexicon of conventions served both as an antithesis to preceding historical eras as well as a new logic for how an architectural plan could be composed, while making the dialectic a central aspect of modern discourse. Against these conventions of modernity, lateness can perhaps be read. While the modern put forth new conventions in opposition to history, lateness can be found where the relationship between known conventions is reinvented—­a phenomenon present in the work of three anomalous architects: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Their architecture openly deploys the vocabulary of the modernist project while introducing new relationships between elements that

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allow the work to look both forward and backward in time, neither openly rejecting nor fully accepting the language or conventions of the modern, which produces untimeliness. It should also be noted that there is no single definitive or paradigmatic late architect or architecture. Each architect chosen for these analyses exhibits different qualities of lateness, and together, in the aggregate, they might begin to suggest the possibility of lateness. Furthermore, changes in convention and style over time do not repudiate the possibility of lateness—­the difference between Loos’s and Hejduk’s historical contexts, for example, is great—­yet evidence of lateness can still be found in their works as both architects interrogate the potential of their inherited architectural language. Unlike Adorno’s reading of Beethoven, their interventions, as studied here, do not necessarily establish the ground for a new style—­Loos’s Raumplan and the vertical surfaces of Hejduk’s Wall Houses do not generate a new lexicon of conventions as did the work of Mies and Le Corbusier. Yet these works are significant precisely because the formal relationships within them resist becoming stylistically normalized; as such, these works are characterized by a quality of undecidability. By examining this aspect of architectural form, the following analyses propose lateness not only as a possibility of form itself, but also as a method of interrogation, one that places criticality at the center of architectural discourse. 24

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Adolf Loos This study of lateness in architecture begins with Adolf Loos, who in most historical accounts is categorized as protomodern due to the taut white volumes of his villas and his critique of ornament. However, despite this tendency toward the modern, these works also deploy the familiar language of the nineteenth century. The conflict between past and present prevents each project from being stylistically categorized, creating formal contradictions that might be read as instances of lateness. Villa Karma Evidence of lateness in Loos can be found in his early work, such as his Villa Karma, supporting the theory that lateness is not a biographical phenomenon, but rather one that emerges when a work is read relative to its broader historical context. The Villa Karma (figure 1) is a unique project in Loos’s work because it was a renovation and addition to an existing nineteenth-­ century home. Initially the house appears to be a square, corner-­tower parti. This reading is deceptive, however, because another parti description is also possible, since the project takes the form of a wrapper. This wrapper allows Loos to leave the original architectural object intact while creating four new façades. These façades are spare in their ornamentation, suggesting a stark

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Figure 1

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Figures 2, 3

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Figure 4

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contrast between the original house and the new addition. At first this might be read as analogous to Alberti’s project for San Francesco in Rimini—­also a wrapper—­ where the metered exactness of Alberti’s Renaissance addition stands starkly against the irregularities of the original Gothic structure, creating tension between an early example of modern rationality and premodern form. However, a close reading of Loos’s project for Villa Karma reveals that the wrapper generates four very different façades, each setting off a play of symmetry and asymmetry throughout the project. Rather than engaging in the rational language of the modern and drawing a clear distinction between old and new, the addition introduces irregularity, ultimately destabilizing the architectural object, which could be considered a characteristic of lateness. The original house has a geometrically symmetrical plan, divided roughly into a nine-­square organization with a narrower center bay that runs uninterrupted in the plan from east to west (figure 2). In the design of the addition, there are only two moments where the poché takes up the thickness of the original walls. These added walls extend the north and south walls of the original house toward the west, emphasizing the orientation of the center bay (figure 3). Loos’s design for the new east façade, which contains the entrance to the house, at first seems like it will emphasize the internal organization of the house by setting up an axis adolf loos

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Figure 5

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Figure 6

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Figure 7

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of symmetry along the same orientation as the center bay. The façade is flat and taut, with hardly any articulation. The towers on the corners are forced behind the flat vertical surface and their presence is reduced to two symmetrical trellises that rise above the parapet in perfect symmetry. Furthermore, this façade is the only one that is three stories, because the ground plane drops in line with the front of the house, allowing the back three façades to be four levels. These characteristics of the front entry façade strongly differentiate it from the rest and, in combination with the original front and back façades of the existing house, seem to set up a spatial layering in the house in an east-­west direction (figure 4). The volume of the wrapper, however, contradicts this reading because it does not fully surround the house on all four sides, leaving the north façade partially open. As a result, the wrapper has a C-­shape that creates symmetry along a north-­south axis, in contrast to the east-­west layering set up by the front façade (figure 5). This organization is further emphasized by the four-­corner tower parti, an echo of Palladio’s sixteenth-­ century villas. The two northern towers frame the opening that exposes the façade of the original house. This opening creates a secondary north-­south layering, while the southern towers frame an ABA façade on the south side of the house. Unlike the entry façade, however, the south façade expresses neither flatness nor frontality. The towers adolf loos

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create an asymmetrical condition due to both their fenestration and their form: one is round and repeats the scale of the openings in the central bay while the other is rectangular and has an anomalous rectangular window subdivided into square openings. This not only destabilizes the symmetry of the south façade but forces a turning of the corner, unlike the east façade, which suppresses that turning. What emerges is a diagonal axis of symmetry at the southwest corner that is much stronger than the one suggested by the ABA fenestration of the south façade (figure 6). This phenomenon is due to the scale of the windows being repeated across the face of the round tower and onto the west façade. Along this diagonal axis, the towers regulate the symmetry as the rectangular towers frame the outside corners of the building while the circular tower—­otherwise an anomaly in the four-­tower parti—­occupies the line of symmetry. However, this symmetry frames an asymmetry, because the ABA structure of the south façade is not repeated on the west side of the house. Instead the west façade has an AABAA structure. As such, no single façade reading provides stability or resolution in this project. This analysis demonstrates that the wrapper is fragmented into four different façade ideas, with none of the readings achieving dominance over the rest. Formally, this fragmentation produces a torqueing effect, as the reading of the wrapper is seen as constantly turning (figure 7). 34

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Furthermore, no single architectural convention dominates. There is no singular Geist; the project is not swept up in any single cultural or social ideal. Instead, the house is infused with conflicting but simultaneous formal logics, where the wrapper does not operate as a modern occlusion of the preexisting architectural object. The contrast between old and new in the Villa Karma is far more ambiguous. The disparate façades stand as isolated conditions that touch on their autonomous possibility without asking for synthesis. As such, the project does not fully announce the arrival of the modern; it lies somewhere between acceptance of nineteenth-­century norms and the kind of transgression that became prevalent with the twentieth-­century avant-­garde. As an internally contradictory object, the house can carry no clear temporal trajectory, nor stand for any single architectural discourse. It propels itself out of its own time, embodying lateness by endlessly engaging in the irresolution between its own architectural elements and a temporal present. Villa Müller The Villa Karma serves as an evocative precedent for Villa Müller because, in comparing them, one can see the transformation of Villa Karma’s thickened wrapper into the taut, white, modern envelope of Villa Müller (figure 8). Villa Müller, then, much more than Villa Karma, retains a certain ambiguity relative to the modern and adolf loos

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Figure 8

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the late. This is made evident by a disjunction between interior and exterior, which in itself already opposes the modern functionalist belief that the inside of a building should be expressed on its exterior. The interior of the Villa Müller is characterized by a raumplan, a spatial sequence that can be compared to the neoclassical marche that came before it, and to the promenade architecturale that followed. The marche is an axial organization, relying on symmetry along the axis for its overall organization. The positioning of spaces along the marche is always ultimately in reference to the axis. In contrast, the promenade architecturale is a modern response to the marche: neither axial nor symmetrical. In Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy, the spaces are randomly organized along a route that takes on a freer and looser arrangement. Despite these differences, however, the promenade, like the marche, continues to operate with a spine. The path is not linear, but it does operate as a prescribed route, organized by function and form, producing a sequence of differentiated events and images that result in a whole different from the sum of its parts. An individual moving through the house begins in a car, turning in to and under the house. After exiting the car, one follows a torqueing ramp at the core of the house, moves past the living accommodations, and eventually exits onto the roof garden. On this path, the viewer will have seen each of Le Corbusier’s five points: the piloti, the free adolf loos

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Figure 9

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plan, the fenêtre en longeur, the free façade, and the roof garden. As such, the house not only adds up to a formal whole but offers an ideological one as well, just as the five points were understood to manifest the language of modern living. In Villa Müller, Adolf Loos proposes another idea of a differentiated route—­one that does not consist of a path that organizes ancillary spaces but instead engages the horizontal surface in a stepping sequence of rooms and stairs that winds throughout the house. In this organization, no room is subsidiary to a dominant path, but rather the entire house is engaged in the making of a spatial knot (figure 9). The elements of architecture that constitute the horizontal surface—­stair and floor—­ become the critical components of the knot. As in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the radical nature of Loos’s Villa Müller does not rely on the creation of a totally new and unprecedented form. In fact, at first glance the plan of the house seems to evoke the nineteenth century much more than it looks forward toward the modern. Yet the relationship between elements of architecture has been reinvented, exploiting the syntactic quality of the horizontal to generate a new possibility for spatial organization that did not previously exist. A raumplan differs from the classical idea of en suite rooms where entry and exit are aligned in sequence, or from the nineteenth-­century plaid grid, which allowed for parallel but separate routes of circulation. Loos adolf loos

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Figure 10

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creates situations in which rooms are often entered and exited at a corner, or in conflict with the grain of the room. Entry on an orthogonal, parallel to the axis of a room—­a convention in both the neoclassical and the modern—­is almost entirely absent. Instead, one moves through the house by constantly changing level and simultaneously turning in space. The stairs wrap around each other, and any given level might connect directly to another two. The rooms, then, respond to no exterior organization, nestling against each other without any reference to a larger whole (figure 10). This is reinforced by the placement of the windows, which respond to the internal logic of each room, with no concern for the organization of the façade (figure 11). Unlike a palazzo type, which would try to enforce a certain order on the façade while making concessions on the interior, Loos patently projects the interior organization onto the façade, where the dissolution of the whole becomes apparent in the irregular pattern of the windows. This dissonance between the interior and the exterior is of particular interest because it can be interpreted in two ways. First, as modern: the material presence of the myriad spaces of the interior against the pure white and unadorned exterior creates a dialectic—­the critical tool of the modern. Furthermore, the way the interior tracks onto the exterior marks the façade as subordinate to the interior. In this way, the façade “disappears,” foretelling adolf loos

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Figure 11

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the modernist emphasis on transparency, which was later interpreted through the literal transparency of glass. While Loos’s transparency is subtler and more opaque, it can be seen as a harbinger of the modern. A second interpretation would be to understand the conflict between interior and exterior as a phenomenon of lateness. This interpretation hinges on the fact that the façade, although showing misalignments between windows, is not a true free façade in the modernist sense. The modern free plan and free façade are able to break away from the geometric rigidity of the neoclassical due to the expression of the structure as a lattice grid. This allows for structural columns to be inset from the perimeter, which in turn allows for the plan and façade to take on forms independent of the grid. However, the freedom of these forms continues to rely entirely on the geometric regularity of the grid—­a totalizing system. As such, the “freeness” of a modernist façade is not a disjunction between architectural forces but a celebration of technology. A raumplan, in contrast, has no grid whatsoever, and is not regulated by any totalizing system. The structural system of Villa Müller consists of load-­bearing walls—­ which already distinguishes it from the modern—­and furthermore, the raumplan shows no evidence of an underlying grid or any totalizing system. Even the walls themselves are carved out, allowing views from one space to another and generating a series of rotating adolf loos

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picture planes that both frame and separate the distinct spaces of the house. The most dynamic of these registrations occurs in the east wall of the grand living room. Here the wall is eaten away to become a row of unique columns—­the only columns in the house. Through these cutouts can be seen a myriad of other spaces and planes: eleven levels in all in the three-­story house. The house, then, although consisting of a wall architecture, ultimately presents the walls as a series of open frames rather than as opaque partitions between rooms. The distinction between rooms is thus primarily achieved through changes in level and the dominant spatial reading is one of an episodic, unfolding, and unstable space. Each room in the house is ultimately arrayed against the pure whiteness of the exterior. As mentioned previously, the windows are aligned with the interior logic of the rooms (figure 11). In other words, unlike the free façade, the asymmetrical location of the windows on the vertical surface is not a celebration of structure, but rather is evidence of the part-­to-­part logic of a raumplan syntax. The façade makes no effort to reconcile its misalignments, meaning that the house can only be other to the totalizing conception of modern space; in fact, serving as an index of the raumplan’s disjunctions. So, while the traditional historical discourse around Loos pulls the misalignment of the windows in Villa Müller (and Villa Moller, for that matter) into the lineage of the modern through a connection to the free façade, 44

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that lineage ignores the role of the raumplan in generating the irregularities of the façade. The raumplan is not in service to modern ideologies; its lateness, like Beethoven’s, shows a suspicion of totality. As Adorno writes, “To the musical experience of the late Beethoven, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundedness of the successful symphony, the totality arising from the motion of all particulars, in short, that which gives the works of his middle period their authenticity, must have become suspect. . . . He must have felt the untruth in the highest aspirations of classicist music.”1 There is, then, in lateness a refusal of reconciliation, a resistance toward resolution. The open contradiction between the complexity of the interior and the purity of the envelope need not be resolved: “unity is transcended, yielding fragmentariness.”2 If the modern aspired to be an idealization of time and technology, then the raumplan and its incongruous expression on the vertical surface must necessarily embody a temporal, as well as a formal, contradiction. In other words, this is not a dialectic leading to synthesis but one that remains always apart.

adolf loos

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Figure 12

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Aldo Rossi The work of Aldo Rossi is often categorized as postmodern, but one could argue that this is an inadequate designation. Just as Loos can be identified as protomodern due to the outward appearance of his façades, the use of symmetry and primary forms in Rossi tends to be interpreted as aligning with the classicizing tendencies of the postmodern. However, a close reading suggests a much greater dissonance between Rossi and his historical context, coupled with Rossi’s desire to situate his theory of the city within a notion of time, the work could be reconceived not as postmodern, but rather as late. Gallaratese Housing Rossi’s most critical work was in the 1960s and 1970s, when the monolithic tenets of Le Corbusier’s five points had given way to other tendencies such as Brutalism, for example, which—­despite sharing with modernism an interest in material experimentation and the formal potential opened up by the rejection of neoclassical rigidity—­tended to question modernism’s stylistic and ideological clarity. Rossi was working when architecture neither supported the coherence of a modern style nor took a reactionary stance against the modern; it mostly aspired simply to represent an evolution of modern innovations. Aspects of this final stage of modernity

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Figure 13

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appear prominently in a few of Rossi’s projects, such as the Gallaratese housing project—­a work that can only be understood as late modern (figure 12). Gallaratese is defined by its flatness and the lack of differentiation between front and back that had been a distinguishing feature of the vertical surface from Gothic cathedrals to Palladian villas. The introduction of the free façade in modern architecture had changed this discourse, allowing an architect such as Ludwig Hilberseimer to collapse the metaphoric space of his housing blocks into a flat conceptual line, and to avoid making a traditional distinction between front and back. The façades of Gallaratese, however, introduce a new idea of the vertical surface that differed from the modernist principle of the free façade. First, while the openings on the façades are almost the same on both sides—­ square punched openings placed at regular intervals—­ a close reading reveals important differences between them. For example, the east façade is actually a screen. Behind it, a corridor provides access to the apartments and the stair cores (figure 13). The outer fenestration has no glazing, allowing the corridors to be open-­air and creating a strip of space that is enclosed yet open and that negotiates the misalignments between the outermost façade and a second, interior layer (figure 14). The geometry of the outer façade is uncompromising, broken only by four square openings situated opposite the stair cores. These aldo rossi

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Figure 14

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openings are out of scale with what is behind, relating much more to the city beyond than to the logic of the interior. In addition, the outer façade shows two strips of windows, when in fact, there are three stories behind it—­the first level of apartments sits behind the elongated pilotis. As such, this outer façade is like a mask with openings at an urban scale that do not correspond to individual rooms inside and that obscure the domestic scale behind it. This “frees” the façade from the logic of function, which differs from the modern free façade that “freed” itself from the logic of structure. This phenomenon is apparent in the opposite façade as well, although with a different articulation. The fenestration here is totally regular, with no extra-­ large openings like the ones that frame the stair core on the other side (figure 15). But once again the geometric rigidity belies a disjunction between interior and exterior, as the actual perimeter of the domestic interiors is not fully flush with the façade. At regular intervals, the apartments pull away from the façade and allow for open balconies. Yet the façade does not register this change (figure 16). The openings on the west side of the building alternate between glazed and unglazed, but the regularized configuration of windows is indifferent to the alternating interior and exterior spaces along its inboard edge. This façade strategy, while unusual, can still be considered an evolution of a modernist idea, and as such, aldo rossi

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Figure 15

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Figure 16

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Gallaratese represents a late modernity in the historical sense, without suggesting lateness. Another example of its late modernity would be the pilotis of the building, which no longer appear as the round columns of Le Corbusier, but rather as elongated piers. Although they lift the building and allow the ground to pass beneath the building in a modern fashion, they can be read as either walls or columns. In the same way that Rossi cannot be easily categorized as postmodern, however, classifying Rossi as late modern obscures the untimeliness, or lateness, of his work. Though projects such as Gallaratese exhibit innovations of modernist form, Rossi deliberately sheds certain modern tenets; significantly, the notion of time introduced by the twentieth-­century avant-­garde. Rossi’s work—­both at the urban and domestic scale—­ counters Le Corbusier’s insistence that modernism marked a divisive moment in history against which one could measure a before and an after. Rossi espoused a more nuanced notion of time, studying transformations in the urban fabric across time. For Rossi, there was no single moment that marked a new beginning in the city, as evidenced by his interest in Canaletto’s “capricci” or his collaboration with Arduino Cantafora on the mural Città Analogica of 1973 and his own collage of the same name of 1976. The interest in past works of architecture is not purely historical. His paintings and collages show a city composed of an assemblage 54

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of recognizable works of architecture from antiquity to the present, suggesting that the city is formed through an additive procedure in which each urban artifact operates as a finite and legible part, unable to be subsumed into a larger form, even as the works, in conjunction, compose the city through aggregation. Rossi had a different sense of temporality than both the modern and the postmodern. In Rossi’s work, time is neither linear nor evolutionary. Instead, each building is left to stand as an embodiment of its own time while also participating in the formation of the city in the present and future. What Rossi called analogy can thus be understood as a concept of lateness. Moreover, his drawings and paintings from this era further pursue this concept of time and space in the city by conflating the scale of buildings with domestic objects—­teapots intermingle with architectural form, both whole and fractured, floating in a temporally undifferentiated urban context. San Cataldo Cemetery This attitude of temporal ambiguity was present not only in Rossi’s urban theory but also in his buildings, as evidenced by the design for the cemetery at San Cataldo, which is neither classical nor modern, though references to both can be found in the work (figure 17). The project presents an eerie reminiscence of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical drawings, due to the arcaded walls that frame the periphery of the project, which are aldo rossi

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Figure 17

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Figures 18, 19, 20

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then repeated as an interior surrounding wall. One can see in the evolution of the project, from competition entry to final execution, the movement toward temporal and spatial ambiguity. In the first competition entry, Rossi situated the project in such a way as to draw it into a symmetrical relationship with the context, as evidenced by an axis located on the centerline of the existing Jewish cemetery. Here Rossi’s project repeats the proportions of the preexisting neoclassical cemetery by Cesare Costa, and all figures are held in the balance of the symmetrical relationship (figure 18). With each successive iteration leading up to the final project, the intention seems to be to destabilize this equation and in doing so to present San Cataldo as a series of unresolved fragments. While the two rectilinear enclosures were aligned in the competition entry, in the realized project they are not. Rossi’s addition is shifted up so that the bottom edge of the inner wall is aligned with the central axis of the closed rectangle, creating a shear condition (figure 19). The final project also shifts the central axis symbolically off of the Jewish cemetery with the addition of a long bar that aligns with the edge of Rossi’s addition but extends north-­south past its edges, denying any centrality of composition. Furthermore, throughout the iterations of the project, the enclosing wall of Rossi’s proposal goes from a complete perimeter that repeats the closed classical form of the Costa design and the typical campo santo to a rectangular figure with 58

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an open side whose only enclosure is a series of steps. In one undated drawing of the cemetery, the rectangle almost disappears, as the enclosing walls are truncated before reaching the midpoint of the would-­be rectangle, leaving the figures to sit partially outside the frame (figure 20). Rossi’s cemetery can only be read as incomplete, especially since the outer walls retain only one central gate, despite the openness of the opposite side. This is in contrast to the Costa cemetery’s rectilinear 4 x 2 grids providing regularized enclosure and four entries. The dialogue between Rossi’s cemetery and the context is between a closed figure and an open ground; between classical and other. The central figures in the plan of the cemetery are also evidence of lateness. According to Adorno, the Missa Solemnis possesses a “unity of a wholly different kind,” one which may quite possibly not be comprehensible at all. The Missa Solemnis has “no special musical complexity . . . [and] contains little which does not remain within the confines of traditional musical idiom.”1 Instead, the work is distinguished by archaic harmonies, the dissolution into short parts that are not symphonically integrated, and a lack of long, dynamic elaborations. The design for San Cataldo exhibits a similar lack of obvious complexity, and the use of pure geometric form evinces a comparable absence of formal invention. Instead, the framed site is articulated on its central axis with three major physical elements: aldo rossi

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a conical tower, a series of elongated blocks forming a spine-­like figure that is triangular in plan, and an empty seven-­story cubic volume with punched openings in each of the four external surfaces, reminiscent of the white cubic Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome’s EUR by Ernesto Lapadula and Giovanni Guerrini. The axis in San Cataldo creates an open form, a linear organization that suggests continuity beyond the limits of the project and allows the gaps between figures to further differentiate the individual parts. The axial nature of the project, then, is different from the classical usage. Just as the Missa Solemnis preserves the form of certain motifs throughout the piece in order to allow them to be read as distinct accumulated fragments, the primary forms of San Cataldo remain intact throughout Rossi’s composition. They come together as no more than what they are as parts, unable to be broken down or subsumed into the logic of a whole. As their physical forms attest, they are empty shells with little function, whose only iconography seems to be a carcass that is left after its life has moved on. The archetypal geometric forms of these figures do not conjure up any personal stylistic references; they are neither modern nor postmodern. Instead, the cone and the cube allude to the fundamental elements of form, potentially establishing the atemporal possibilities of form. The project, then, cannot be read stylistically nor can these figures be said to operate as historical citation. 60

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These objects come into being not in order to announce the beginning of a new age but to allude to both past and future. Time, then, is conceived as neither linear nor stable, for each architectural object defers historical specificity and refuses to reconcile itself with its context—­both spatial and temporal. Rossi “tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.”2 Rossi emphasizes this in the final design, by leaving the perimeter wall open, so that the central figures can no longer be read as objects enclosed within a frame. Rather, the frame itself, once broken open, becomes another figure arrayed on the central axis. The project is thus constituted as much by the breaks between figures and the blankness of the ground as by the figures themselves, which, arrayed on an empty ground, become a jarring reminder of a modernity that has passed. Crucial to this reading is the unity of each primary form, such as the cone and the cube, which makes the contrast between figure and ground stark, embodying the stubborn irreducibility of parts and pushing architecture into the category of a possible lateness. As Rossi puts it, “every part is a finite architecture that cannot be altered. And even though the wholeness of the representation shall still be written, it cannot transform the sense of each part.”3 In other words, the unwritten whole does not drive the form, and the stubborn wholeness of the parts represents the uncompromising attitude of lateness. aldo rossi

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Figure 21

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John Hejduk The studies of Loos and Rossi served to outline the formal and temporal qualities of lateness, yet these still leave the opening question of this essay partially unanswered: whether a study of lateness can serve to reevaluate the nature of the critical in architecture. The Texas Houses The mode of critique prevalent in the modern was one of dialectic opposition. This attitude was reflected in modernist notions of time—­ the new spirit championed by Le Corbusier and others marked a sharp line between the past and the present. The modern was the antithesis to neoclassicism’s thesis as well as to the theoretical framework of twentieth-­ century criticism, in particular at the apex of midcentury critical theory, where dialectics proved to be a dominant device. With the work of John Hejduk, it is possible for lateness to introduce a nondialectic condition into the language of architecture and into its modes of criticism. A comparison of Hejduk’s Texas Houses and Wall Houses can serve to establish this contrast between dialectical and nondialectical, for each corresponds to different temporalities in Hejduk’s work: modern and late. The seven Texas Houses are evidence of Hejduk’s desire to critically interrogate the modern, and each house challenges the basic tenets of modernist language in

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Figure 22

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different ways. Yet, as a group, the houses keep modern notions of space intact, as shown through the following analysis of the column, the free plan, and the figure in three of the seven houses. The column as an integer of an uninflected overall spatial grid is one of the central manifestations of the modern in architecture. There are two different column types, each of which suggests different spatial organizations that in turn define two dominant conceptual trends. These types are the square column, exemplified by the work of Mies van der Rohe, and the round column, as used by Le Corbusier. Square columns imply a gridded space, while round columns suggest a fluid space. The Texas Houses adopt the square column, and as such, Hejduk aligns himself with Mies, who, more than Le Corbusier, conceptualized modern space through the Cartesian grid. Furthermore, the square column differs from the round column since it marks both a point-­grid and a grain. In other words, while the round column allows for the unimpeded flow of space around it, the square column begins the striation of space both parallel and perpendicular to a potential grain in the space. Hejduk’s Texas Houses take up the evocation of the square column grid, and as a result, the undifferentiated point-­grid is constantly at play against both virtual and actual striations of space. In this way, the houses do not contest the logic of the modern, but rather use this disposition of the square column to engage in john hejduk

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Figure 23

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dialectical contrasts, questioning the language of modernism without denying it or transcending it. House 4 provides an initial example (figure 21). The plan has a nine-­square organization, with all the walls in the project running in a single direction, giving the project both an abstract context and a definitive grain. Each intersection of the nine-­square grid is marked by an I-­beam, all of which are oriented in the same direction: the flanges run perpendicular to the wall, and the web is parallel (figure 22). The result is an explicit interruption in the continuity of the walls and the introduction of a contradictory grain in the opposite direction, due to the negative space that is formed between the facing I-­beams (figure 23). The house, then, counterposes solid and void within the context of the grid; the nine-­square is not static, because it oscillates between two orientations. Another central manifestation of the modern in Hejduk’s Texas Houses is the open plan—­the Miesian version of Le Corbusier’s free plan—­as in House 5 (figure 24). Here the possibility of the open plan comes from the deployment of a square grid, once again in a nine-­square composition. The furniture is misaligned, which would be in keeping with the idea of an open plan except for the fact that the arrangement establishes an alternative spatial logic in two ways. First, the furniture is arranged in a square—­but one that is shifted off the center of the house. As such, rather than reading john hejduk

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Figure 24

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Figure 25

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the furniture as objects floating within homogeneous Cartesian space, the plan reads as two figures in tension (figure 25). Second, the façades are composed of structural columns that mark the intersections of the nine-­square grid, as well as thinner, secondary columns. The latter mark the centerline of the façade bays in ten of the twelve bays. The exceptions are the center bays of the east and west façades. Here the secondary columns are shifted away from the centerline, sliding in opposite directions until the column on the east façade aligns with the center of the square delineated by the furniture, setting the plan into motion as a pinwheel. The pinwheel, however, is immediately arrested by the secondary columns in the north and south façades, which do not move from the centerline of their respective bays. Hejduk establishes an open plan while at the same time intervening with an alternative spatial logic—­the arrested pinwheel—­thus freezing the elements of what otherwise would have been a simple open plan. Yet Hejduk remains adamant in the textual description of the project that the house is an explicit exploration of the open plan idea.1 As with the square column, Hejduk works within the vocabulary of the modern in order to explore the limit of its logic. Furthermore, the house is characterized by a dialectical tension between the plan and the pinwheel. The house does not introduce a new syntax, but it finds the potential for tension within a modernist syntax. 70

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A third example of modernity in the Texas Houses can be found in the strict adherence to the grid that is legible in Hejduk’s treatment of the figure. House 1 (figure 26) consists of a cruciform figure within a field of columns (figure 27). The cruciform rigidly adheres to the logic of the grid and is delineated by a simple change in the height of the walls. As such, rather than challenging the grid through the introduction of an anomalous figure, the cruciform serves to create differentiation between each square of the nine-­square. In other words, the modules in the plan, which are both inside and outside the cruciform, are identical in dimension yet differentiated through their position relative to the cruciform. The A-­bay is central, while the B-­bay is both peripheral and central. The C-­bay, in turn, is fully outside the cruciform, and as such, takes on a residual character, despite being fully within the nine-­ square, which is the dominant geometry of the house. The cruciform and the grid are in constant play—­the cruciform is dominant in an axonometric view of the house, whereas in the plan, the orientation of the walls breaks down the integrity of the figure and the nine-­ square becomes dominant. Given these readings, it would not be difficult to argue that the Texas Houses challenge the modernist assumptions of Cartesian space by making contradictions possible within its logic.

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Figure 26

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Figure 27

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Figure 28

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The Wall Houses Hejduk designed three so-­called wall houses (figure 28), and while they all share a vertical surface as a central compositional device, each house takes a different stance on the relation between that surface and the surrounding figures. It could be argued that Wall House 1 is the least problematic. The central wall divides living spaces from circulation, and on one side of the wall a stair core and ramp are attached as volumes, while on the other side, the walls enclosing these rooms are modeled as totally transparent so that the living spaces are expressed as naked floorplates that seem cantilevered from the wall. In contrast, in Wall Houses 2 and 3 each room becomes an independent volume and Hejduk maintains a gap in section between them, such that ceiling planes and floor plates are never shared between rooms. This creates a non-­homogeneous vertical stacking (figure 29). This in itself is certainly not a modern convention and yet the formal vocabulary of the Wall Houses is very Corbusian. The figural volumes set against the rectilinear wall are reminiscent of the roof figures in Villa Savoye, the lobes in the Carpenter Center, or the curvilinear rooms of the Mill Owners’ Association Building. Because of this it can be tempting to keep them, like the Texas Houses, within the modernist canon. However, as architectural historian K. Michael Hays has written, “It is apparent that every element of the Wall House comes from the

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Figure 29

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formal repertoire of Le Corbusier (think especially of Villa La Roche and the blank wall at the monastery of La Tourette), and yet our encounter with the Wall House is an experience unassimilable with Corbusian codes.”2 Thus the architecture expresses one of the central characteristics of lateness studied by Adorno in Beethoven: the ability to maintain the outward appearance of form while reformulating the codes that hitherto had determined its relationships. What remains, then, is to study the codes that are reinvented in the Wall Houses. First, the Wall Houses introduce the vertical surface as a picture plane or as a proscenium, as in Le Corbusier’s Salvation Army building, that organizes three-­dimensional objects in space. Since the discovery of perspective—­from Brunelleschi and Bramante to the free façades of modernism—­the picture plane has played an essential role in the evolution of the conception of space. Hejduk, with full awareness of this history, materializes the picture plane into a three-­ dimensional backdrop that both reinforces the picture plane as a painterly idea but expresses it in architectural terms. And yet, despite its physical expression, the wall does not behave as a wall traditionally might, that is, as enclosure or as structure. Instead, drawn in elevation, the wall becomes a pictorial ground against which the figures are arrayed, denying the presence of an architectural ground, especially in Wall House 3 (figure 30). In the sectional drawing, however, the wall is no 78

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longer a mere backdrop but in fact the most important spatial organizer of the project, with volumes arrayed on either side. The wall acts as a compositional device that is operative on a two-­dimensional plane as well as in three-­dimensional space. With the wall so radically reconceived, the Wall Houses represent a departure from the notion of the plan as the critical integer—­a foundational principle of both neoclassical and modern architecture. Instead, the architectural relationships are conceived in such a way that they oscillate between pictorial and architectural space in the vertical dimension. Furthermore, the idea of the wall as enclosure is turned inside out, as the wall no longer serves to functionally separate inside from outside or to formally delineate a figure in plan. Instead, the wall bifurcates a composition of figures perpendicular to the picture plane that maintain a certain level of autonomy from each other, but the wall does not act as a frame for these figures or as a perimeter within which they sit. As such, what would have otherwise been an interior room can instead be perceived as conceptually existing already in an “exterior” condition. For example, in Wall House 2, every room is an independent volume, sharing no walls or floor plates with other spaces in the house in either plan or section. This creates a very complex notion of threshold: in order to pass from one room to another, one must cross the central wall through an opening in the wall itself, thus inhabiting john hejduk

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Figure 30

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the thickness of the wall itself for a brief moment, as well as through the space between the wall and the figural rooms (figures 31, 32, 33, 37). There are two kinds of negative space in this threshold. First, the threshold of the door is a negative space with a defined shape due to the framing of the doorway. A second kind of negative space is created by the gap between the central wall and the volumetric rooms. This gap is not figural or structured but purely interstitial. In contrast to this unstructured negative space, the void of the doorway, i.e., the threshold itself, takes on a positive quality. As a result, from one room to another there is an extended threshold consisting of a sequence of structured and unstructured negative spaces, which together generate a kind of interstice that is present neither in the modern nor the postmodern. Michael Spitzer writes, “believing in Beethoven’s late style as something special and genuinely new depends on how much one is willing to invest in it intellectually. Sometimes, one needs to work hard to understand why it is new.”3 In a similar way, the extended threshold in the Wall Houses may not seem like the most radical element in the design. However, lateness is an interrogation into the relationship between elements, a questioning of the in between. The extended threshold is not simply an elongated transition between spaces, it is in itself a combination of several liminal and residual spatial conditions. As a result, the negative john hejduk

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Figure 31

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Figure 32

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Figure 33

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space is not read against the positive volumes on either side but through the differences in its own internal conditions. Conceptually, the interior spaces of the house do not reside in the inhabited rooms but in the space between the two vertical surfaces of the wall. All other spaces are “outside” of this threshold, which turns the house inside out. In the absence of an underlying grid to organize the overall composition, the extended threshold serves to mediate the relationship between figures. In this way, the threshold embodies the nondialectical nature of lateness. Here, in contrast to Texas House 1, the figures are neither emergent nor resultant; they are “naked,” as in Beethoven’s conventions—­ juxtaposed without ultimately serving to constitute a clear and coherent whole. This is further exacerbated by the gap between figures in section (figure 34), where a narrow strip of space between the floorplates of the figures introduces a figure-­to-­figure relationship into the section, thus giving the horizontal gap a critical capacity. Finally, the Wall Houses take up the problematic of the column, and in this case Hejduk chooses a round column rather than a square one. Here he aligns himself with the formal language of Le Corbusier rather than of Mies, but while the Texas Houses ultimately reinforced the modernist vocabulary by finding new potential for contradiction within it, the use of round columns in the Wall Houses differs from Le Corbusier’s architectural john hejduk

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Figure 34

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lexicon. The only columns in the project appear in the interior, forming a rectangle within the living room that could at first glance seem to be the fragment of a grid. However, the columns are displaced from what would have been a square grid, as the dimension on the y-­axis of this protogrid is shorter than the distance on the x-­axis (figure 35). Furthermore, a close examination of the placement of the columns shows that they do not align with any other element in the house—­misaligning not only with the figures on the other side of the wall, but also with the openings between the rooms (figure 36). As such, the columns do not conform to one of the most dominant tropes of the grid, which is to imply systemic organization within which figures can fall. Instead, they delineate a rectangle within a nonrectangular space, without referring to anything outside of that implied figure. Finally, these columns play a role in creating the extended threshold mentioned above (figure 37). They are set in from the wall, creating a strip of space between the columns and the perimeter of the room. This strip allows the threshold to be extended into the living space, which means that the centerline of the threshold is not the wall itself, even though the wall is the perfect halfway point between the figures on either side. Through the extension of the threshold, the centerline is shifted toward the living room and exists at an unmarked point between the repeated doorways (figure 38). These threshold spaces are impossible to john hejduk

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Figure 35

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Figure 36

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Figure 37

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Figure 38 36

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define. They are both structured and unstructured; they define an inflection point without having a clear center; they operate as thresholds yet they are spaces in themselves. They embody no single meaning yet do not revel in their own contradiction. As architectural theorist Jeffrey Kipnis has written regarding architecture that embodies Jacques Derrida’s notion of dissemination: “It is neither meaningful nor meaningless; it enters into affiliations with many reading frames while subverting each and confirming none.”4 In this way, through the undecidability between known forms, the Wall Houses of John Hejduk defy a set reading or a defined temporality.

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Conclusion Following these analyses of Loos, Rossi, and Hejduk, what remains is to compile a possible definition of lateness. First, through the lack of a correlation between the personal chronologies of the architects and their work, the analyses articulate a strong difference between lateness and late style. For example, aspects of lateness can be found in early Loos, while in Rossi, the chronologies of Rossi’s Gallaratese housing and San Cataldo cemetery overlap. Furthermore, scholars define late style not only through chronology but by an identifiable personal intransigence and subjective expression in the face of death. The projects analyzed in the above text do not manifest the free and expressive subjectivity of their authors. Rather, they reflect qualities of lateness, where an artist, rather than rejecting the rules of history through the capricious invention of new forms, returns to the dominant conventions of the era in order to interrogate their internal formal relationships. This questioning is evidenced by Loos’s ability to work within the logic of the nineteenth-­century house, by Rossi’s decision to work with platonic forms, and by Hejduk’s interrogation of Miesian and Corbusian language in the Texas Houses and the Wall Houses, respectively. As such, another characteristic of lateness is not only a resistance to expression but also a refusal to discard

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convention in the name of novelty. This attitude allows a work to interrogate the internal relationships of an architectural language. For example, although the threshold condition in the Wall Houses is composed of recognizable architectural elements—­an open doorway, a corridor of conventional width, and the vertical surface of the wall—­the unique sequencing between interior and exterior creates an oscillation between two kinds of negative space that reconceptualizes the notion of spatial transition from inside to outside. This begins to suggest that lateness is differentiated from late style by a denial of subjective expression in favor of using the conventions of an artistic language in order to question the relationship between elements. A second aspect of lateness that emerges from this essay is the absence of a single formal configuration or aesthetic attitude that characterizes lateness. A raumplan shares hardly any physical characteristics with the San Cataldo cemetery, and the vertical surfaces of Villa Müller and the Wall Houses establish very different formal configurations within each project. This is not to say that there are no formal commonalities between the works—­each late work analyzed in this text shares a tendency toward disjunction, fragmentation, incompleteness, and the irreducibility of parts into the logic of the whole. For example, the sectional displacement of the raumplan, the open figures in the plan of San Cataldo, and the detached figures that constitute the 94

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Wall Houses all share these interests. However, it is possible for conditions of fragmentation or disjunction to appear also in projects that might not be considered late, such as those that acquire an aspect of formal complexity as an output of a formulaic digital algorithm. But these specific formal characteristics that are held in common by the projects analyzed in this text should be understood within the general conditions of lateness, which could be described as an indefinite play between these particular formal conditions and a temporal context. In other words, the common condition between late works is their capacity to interrogate the dominant tropes of the era in which they emerge by using the tropes themselves, instead of rejecting them. This causes late works to acquire an historical contingency. For example, because Loos was working before the full onset of the modern, the white façades of Villa Müller necessarily had a different critical poignancy than the dematerialized vertical surface of the Wall House by Hejduk. In the Villa Müller, even though the façades index the disjunction of the raumplan on the interior of the house through the blatant misalignment in the external location of the windows, it is possible for the vertical surface to be read as a harbinger of the modern, rather than as evidence of lateness. In contrast, the vertical surfaces of the Wall Houses embody lateness by treating the blank wall as a picture plane against which figures are arrayed, rather than through any conclusion

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conventional use such as functional enclosure or structure. This shows that the same architectural convention—­in this case a vertical surface—­has no singular or consistent meaning across projects and throughout time. In other words, the architectural conventions analyzed in Loos, Rossi, and Hejduk are not inherently late, but their lateness becomes apparent when considered within a matrix of contingent relationships, both spatial and temporal. As such, this second characteristic of lateness could be described as a capacity to embody contingency, since the work is always defined in relation to another condition. For example, in the Wall Houses, Corbusian forms were used according to totally different formal codes than those dictated by Le Corbusier in the modern era. As such, the Wall Houses are not interesting due to their strangeness but because they are able to fundamentally disturb how an architectural convention is deployed, decontextualized from its original historical context and then inserting it into a different set of relationships. Lateness comes into being when a convention is temporally displaced, causing the relationship between parts within an architectural work to be reinvented. The contingency of lateness, then, does not rely on replicable spatial configurations or on historical juxtapositions. Lateness emerges when recognizable elements of architecture are decontextualized, creating new relationships within a known language of form. The contingency of lateness is both temporal 96

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and spatial—­ temporal due to the historical displacement of conventions and spatial due to the formal contradictions and spatial disturbances that result when a decontextualized convention is put into an unfamiliar context. This differs greatly from the attitude of both the twentieth-­ century avant-­ garde and twenty-­ first-­ century digital design. The former, in its desire to break from history and establish a new horizon of time based on the present, could be considered an obsession with an historicizing zeitgeist, a forward-­pressing vector and the opposite of lateness. The latter, propelled by digital tools and their capacity to generate unprecedented deformations, echoes these concerns through the persistent search for novelty in form, pushing the limits of form through technological means. In both cases, rather than problematizing or critiquing the relationship between parts, architecture seems to pursue novelty in form. However, these formal proposals remain aligned to the conditions of the present, either through a direct rejection of the past or through an idealization of technology, both present and future. As such, the architectural project that emerges reflects an obsession with timeliness and projects the present as a universalizing condition—­a position that cannot sustain itself as a universal critical frame, since it is only a reflection of that moment, rather than an interrogation of its contradictions. In contrast, the decontextualized conventions that characterize lateness destabilize ideological, conclusion

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stylistic, or historical narratives, which generates the untimely character of these works, now understood as a contingent and temporal displacement that is a second characteristic of lateness. A third characteristic of lateness is its capacity to deny a holistic view of any style. In other words, lateness is not being proposed in this text as an oppositional design strategy. In fact, it could be argued that lateness cannot be taught or practiced, and that as a framework, it provides no specific formal prescriptions. There is no strong formal order associated with lateness. Instead, lateness is characterized by an ability to debilitate the holistic nature of a style. This differs greatly from the dominant critical tool of the modern era—­the dialectic. In fact, the untimeliness of lateness stems from an ability to fall outside of a constantly resolving dialectic, which draws an important contrast between the zeitgeist and the late, between a present-­based notion of the critical and something that could resist adherence to an ideology of the ever-­changing new. Instead, through contingent architectural conventions, the syntactic investigations of late works incite a disconnection from present time and an openness to exploring the nature of architectural form. The latter may make possible a different critical mode—­one that alludes to the idea of ohne Leitbild, which could be translated as without a model, a term used by Adorno to indicate the critical potential of a weakened formal order, one that could 98

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facilitate the unforeseen without fetishizing the notion of invention.1 The Wall Houses serve as a useful example for the way they are able to fundamentally disturb modern conventions, subverting and disturbing the model. However, the concept of without a model does not imply rejection of a known model through opposition to or total disregard for a set of conventions. Projects such as Hejduk’s Berlin Masque, or his Lancaster/ Hanover Masque, with their oneiric figures inhabiting imaginary landscapes and the strangeness of their tentacled figures, lack the complexity of internal relationships between architectural figures present in the Wall Houses. While the Masques are unfamiliar and strange, unique in their being (and as such closer perhaps to late style), the Wall Houses, in contrast, rewrite the relation between negative and positive space. Ultimately, that rewriting establishes the possibility for a new kind of relationship, one that can play out again in a different project and a different form. This is ultimately a syntactic idea, leading Adorno to state his desire to uncover the “formal law” of lateness. Yet it does not in itself become a new model. The primary model that lends the connections is debilitated and disturbed, yet its disturbance through lateness does not produce a new stylistic horizon or a temporal synthesis, but rather remains temporally displaced. Lateness in a work overcomes any zeitgeist or historicizing tendencies, as it cannot establish a new temporal horizon in the present that projects conclusion

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into the future; in its temporal ambiguity, it looks both forward and backward in time. Time reconceptualized, then, becomes a critical integer. In fact, without specific attention to time, an application of Adorno’s theory of lateness to architecture could be incorrectly interpreted as a call to replicate the specific formal qualities of Beethoven-­like lateness, such as dissonance and fragmentation. However, in a digital paradigm, these properties of form could be all too easily replicated due to the tools architects have at hand. It seems, then, that a formal model alone is not enough. To continue to push novelty in form alone, finding new levels of dissolution, disintegration, smoothness, roughness, et cetera, is to create a narrative of morphological change, but not a new episteme. Lateness, on the other hand, suggests that criticality could be decoupled from historicism and the zeitgeist through an open-­ended notion of time, one in which a work can, as Giorgio Agamben has written, adhere to the present through disjunction,2 i.e., through critique and interrogation. As such, a fourth characteristic of lateness could be a stubborn temporal irresolution, an undeniable untimeliness. It would seem that lateness could have two contexts in which it could be critically useful: one analytic and one synthetic. The first proposes lateness as a mode of reading, as in Adorno’s analysis of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or the critical analysis of twentieth-­ century 10 0

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works presented in this essay. The second proposes lateness as a creative influence, part of an architect’s toolbox. Both would always involve a contingent framework, the first due to the limits inherently imposed by the object of study. The second, however, is more complicated, as it involves setting up a condition that would allow lateness to accrue to the final object. The process of design might not only involve questions of form but questions of contingency against both a formal and historical context. In Beethoven’s case, this was achieved through the opposition between convention and invention, where anachronisms proved not to be regressive, but rather a means to slip out of time—­something that pure subjective invention could not achieve. In today’s context, for lateness to suggest a critical condition within a nondialectical context, such as the stepping planes of the raumplan, the interstices of the Wall Houses, or the blankness of the San Cataldo cemetery, it may be possible to generate an heuristic framework, i.e., for a context to be prepared so that lateness can manifest itself. In other words, for the particular condition of being out of time to begin to neutralize the dialectical impulse in any pair of concepts, a tabula rasa may not be sufficient to generate a transgressive or critical condition in the resultant object. A late work today may discover that the limitless possibilities of the digital and the open horizon of a techno-­optimism have proven to be a hindrance to the notion of critique. conclusion

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Lateness proposes a view toward history that is neither modern nor aligned to the postmodern embrace of history as a reactionary stance against the modern. Rather, through a nonoppositional, nonlinear notion of historical and temporal discontinuity, lateness might present a different possibility for critique.

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Acknowledgments Special thanks to the following people for their help in the production of this book: Yeonho Cho James Coleman Federica de Masi Ian Donaldson Anthony Gagliardi Cheuk Wai Lam Timlok Li Yujie Li Erdem Tuzun Issy Yi

Special thanks also to our students who were first exposed to the difficulties of lateness, and who aided in the development of the concept: Azza Abou Alam Guillermo Castello James Coleman Ian Donaldson Spencer Fried Claire Haugh Amanda Iglesias Jeremy Jacinth Alexandra Karlsson-­Napp Sunwoo Kim

Patrick Kondziola Ziyue Liu Nadeen Safa Evan Sale Robert Smith-­Waters Isabelle Jeongyoon Song Melissa Weigel Alison Zuccaro

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Notes Introduction 1.  Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–­1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 2.  Rosalind Krauss, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” in Eisenman, House of Cards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166–­84. 3.  Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45–­54. 4.  Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 24. 5.  Hamlet, 1.5.188.

Lateness: Toward a Definition 1.  Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 6. 2.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), 2–­3. 3.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. S. Gillespie  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 564.

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4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6.  Ibid., 566. 7.  Ibid., 565. 8.  Percy A. Scholes, “Form,” in Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 10th ed., ed. John Owen Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 289. 9.  Michael Spitzer, “Notes on Beethoven’s Late Style,” in Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 193. 10.  Ibid., 194–­95. 11.  The fugue had been emblematic of the baroque period, but was largely abandoned in the classical era, as its flat and mathematical nature directly contradicted the classical desire for tonal and thematic contrast. Examples of Beethoven’s use of the fugue include the finales of the Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106, and the Quartet op. 130, as well as the Credo of the Mass in C, op. 86. It also appears in first movements (the Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, the Adagio of the Quartet in C-­sharp Minor, op. 131), in slow movements (the “Heilige Dankgesang” of the Quartet in A Minor, op. 132), and in central dance movements (the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony). See Spitzer, “Notes on Beethoven’s Late Style,” 194–­95. 12. Ibid.

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Adolf Loos 1.  Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 151. 2.  Ibid., 152.

Aldo Rossi 1.  Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 143–­44. 2.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. S. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 567. 3.  Beatrice Lampariello, Aldo Rossi e le forme del razionalismo esaltato: Dai Progetti Scolastici alla “citta analoga,” 1950–­1973 (Quodlibet, 2017), 294.

John Hejduk 1.  Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk: 7 Houses, IUAS 12 (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1980), 76. 2.  Michael K. Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-­garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 95. 3.  Michael Spitzer, “Notes on Beethoven’s Late Style,” in Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 201.

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4.  Jeffrey Kipnis, “Freudian Slippers,” in Princeton Architectural Journal, vol. 4, Fetish, ed. Greg Lynn, Edward Mitchell, and Sarah Whiting (New York: The Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 169.

Conclusion 1.  Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). 2.  Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary? ” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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