“The Grotesque”-Pratt School of Architecture Renovation
Critic-Peter Eisenman
for
role
status
year
The Cooper Union
Student
Project
1988
The project explores “conservation” as the strategic renovation of the building to give prominence to a “repressed text” thought to have the potential to provide a new trope for organizing and renewing the building in response to the program for a school of architecture.
This repressed text of the building is elucidated through a reading of the repressed text of Chronology in the painting “The Temptation of St Anthony” by Hieronymus Bosch (c.1500). The emergent features of this repressed text in the painting order and make expressive similar yet latent structures in the building.
This mapping of the text of the painting onto the building, results in a layering of an evolutionary and devolutionary process (see summary below). This dual structure, when applied to the structuring of a school curriculum, leads to an understanding of the process of education as not only ascension through tasks with increasing degrees of difficulty but also a descending progression or return to basics where the basis for knowledge is continually re-investigated.
Furthermore, the chronological text in the painting is itself a vehicle by which the allegorical text of Alchemy is conveyed as a process of self-realization through a succession of trials, say as in the experience of St Anthony. or material transformations, to evoke the alchemical metaphor. With the text of Chronology established, the occasion is set to register the allegorical text of Alchemy which, when read in the building, serves to reinforce the notion of cycle while providing a material text for how a new architectural palette could be introduced into the building as pedagogic instrument.
Summary:
The primary text of the Painting (second text)- Chronology – is used to invoke the repressed text in Building (first text).
The secondary (repressed) text of the Painting – Alchemical Allegory – is used to invoke a new text with respect to material treatments. Also provides an architectonic language for how the moves instate the repressed text.
The tertiary (repressed) text of the Painting – Dual Chronology – is used to invoke changes to the expression of the repressed text in the Building in the service of arriving at a new conception of a school of architecture.
Building (first text)
primary text-
Classical object (nine square grid) triptych on two axis, static, eternal, stable. materially consistent.
secondary (repressed)text-
Chronology as idea. Building as a process of continual growth. perturb able, capable of incorporating change.
Painting (second text)
primary text-
Narrative depicting major events in St. Anthony’s life. A Chronology of events. A classical formulation of diachronic time: Beginning, Middle, and End.
secondary (repressed)text-
Primary narrative serves as cover to allegorical text of Alchemy
tertiary (repressed)text-
Bosch uses the actual events in a reverse order to suit his textual pursuits. The presented chronology has implicit in it 2 chronologies 1.evolutionary presented 2. devolutionary represented
