Dan Bucsescu, Stephen Friedman, April 1984

Abstract

This essay is a close reading of another essay. It is another glance at the words: 'architecture is always dream and function’ ... 'use never does anything but shelter meaning' ... the emergence of a "new category... that of concrete abstraction"

For Roland Barthes. the goal of literature was 'to put meaning into the world'. He defined writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: 'a way of being.' But given his feelings on 'the democracy of the text.' which denies the demarcation between all arts and sciences, and his passion and eloquence when writing about architectural objects such as the Eiffel Tower, he would undoubtedly have been comfortable substituting the words 'architecture' and 'design' for 'literature' and writing' in the above sentences. His search for meaning everywhere, made him what the philosopher Karl Popper might call a Christopher Columbus of World #3 (that realm made up of products of the human mind such as myths, theories. social institutions and works of art and architecture).

While clearly acknowledged as one of the seminal thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, it is our contention that with his essay Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes can also lay legitimate claim to the title of master architectural theoretician. King of the hill of all those who have speculated on the nature of the architectural object and its place in contemporary human experience. A close reading of the essay provides a complete program for an approach to architecture, and central to this program is a set of attitudes toward abstraction, meaning and thinking. There is a theory of cognition, a set of prescriptions on how to approach the designed object, whether it's the tower or the city of Paris itself, and significant discourse on almost every major theme of contemporary architectural relevance. It is our intention to examine these ideas as they're presented in the essay and demonstrate their importance for architecture and particularly for an understanding of issues having to do with abstraction and meaning.

Barthes is, in that long line of thinkers and writers, primarily in the Western tradition, who believe that life is less a search for pleasure than it is a quest for order and meaning. Of course these two realms - pleasure and meaning - are not entirely divorced from one another. Indeed, Barthes describes the life of the mind as 'desire', and as an essay on the nature of cognition and abstraction. Eiffel Tower reads as much like a love letter as anything else. A love letter, or amorous Journal and like any other seduction, It begins with a need. When Susan Sontag describes Barthes in terms of "the emergence of a wisdom of a Platonic sort - tempered to be sure by wisdom of a worldly kind; skeptical of dogmatism, conscientious about gratification,

wistfully attached to utopian ideals." she is clearly referring to those ecstatic elements of cognition that Plato talks about in his parable of the cave. But in the center of Barthes explication of the Eiffel Tower, just as the Tower itself is central to Paris, is a commitment to the primacy of meaning and abstraction. This is attested to by a brief look at five of the major themes of the essay:

1. "The Tower looks at Parts", To visit the Tower is to get oneself up on the balcony in order to perceive, comprehend and savor a certain essence of Paris... permits us to transcend sensation and see things in their structure. a new category appears, that of concrete abstraction’. Here we are at the heart of the matter. Not only is the Tower itself a symbol and object of contemplation. but through its use one can take a step back and analyze Paris itself. The very existence of the Tower allows for the that possibility of detachment and as an epistemological strategy this tradition runs throughout Western thinking. The appeal of science in the twentieth century and all those quests for objectivity which lie at the heart of so much architectural systematizing are some of the latest examples of this strategy. But once again, one of those wonderful paradoxes which are so much a part of Barthes. The very tower which makes possible distance and objectivity also provides for wholism and prevents falling into the analytic trap of only looking at one part at a time. Before the Tower. except for the lucky few who had access to a spire of Notre Dame. or perhaps in rare cases a hot air balloon. Paris could be grasped in its entirety only through a leap of the imagination. But now, all parts can be seen at once and related to each other. The strategy of the view from above, in terms of plans and models. has always been a useful one for architects. Even the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the city, the crossroads within the wall. recognizes the power of this point of view. Literally. an overview which serves to gain meaning.

For Barthes humans are active agents who constantly put meaning into the world. We are all lovers of signification. Knowledge and meaning are the result of an 'infinite circuit of functions'. of glance, object and symbol'. He is really talking about the cycle of perception and cognition through which humans construct a representation of reality in the Piagetian sense. Piaget suggests that knowledge of the world includes two aspects. One which is essentially figurative and relates to percepts and images, sense data, of successive states of momentary configurations of the world through direct and immediate contact, and a second aspect which is essentially operative. This term refers to operations which intervene between successive states and through which the person transforms parts of the world into reconstructable patterns or schemes. Barthes talks about 'glance' and 'object'. Visual perception is only one form of figurative knowing, while thinking and intelligence are based on the operative mode. ' To know the world is to be in it and move through it. The tower allows, and even encourages this to happen.

What does Barthes mean when he writes that 'the Tower is much more a crystallizer than a true object'? Why the word 'crystalizer' placed in opposition to 'true object'? If by 'true object' he means a tangible thing that can be seen, touched, smelled, then the opposite of a true object would be an idea, a mental thing, a 'concrete abstraction'. And in what way is it a crystalizer? Because it helps the mind to construct new categories of cognition to 'reconstitute memory and sensation . In this struggle we are required to 'identify and divide... to group and separate...'.

What Barthes is telling us is that the process of thinking and acquiring knowledge in general is similar to the task of forming a spatial image of Paris. a cognitive map. by Journeying to the top of the Tower. What is crystallized is an abstract map of Paris because it is only from up there that we can decipher, recognize known sites, and connect them spatially through the structure of their relationships. He is describing a process of organizing, categorizing and ordering reality.

2. When Barthes says that "architecture is always dream and function!" and 'use never does anything but shelter meaning' he is paying homage to both his philosophical dualism and the central conviction that we are beings that think even before we are beings that are extended in space. This is as significant for our relationship to architecture as it is for all the other spheres of existence. "Descartes said the same thing, and in many ways the sentiment is similar to Gaston Bachelard's assertion that the 'house is shelter for the daydreamer.' but the importance of Barthes for architectural thinkers is that he presents precise images of how something like the Eiffel Tower can participate in this process. It is in his theoretical writings on semiology that we discover how precise his words are when he writes,'use never does anything but shelter meaning.

Barthes writes that architectural objects belong to the group of objects. gestures and pictorial images whose origins are utilitarian and functional. They are objects of everyday use, used by people in a derivative way to signify something. He called them sign-functions. Their essence, their original reason for creation was not to send messages and in this they are not like words which are arbitrary symbols. but to serve some specific functional purpose. Because of this origin, Barthes sees these objects as having a double linguistic role. One is to first represent. denote the original function. and the second is a disguised connotative one in which 'the function becomes pervaded with meaning'. Barthes writes that this phenomenon is inevitable. As soon as there is society every usage is converted into a sign of itself. Yes, a door is a door is a floor, a penetration through a wall, a fire exit, a means of keeping the wind outside, but when ‘an object, a mere door can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect’ as it does for Gaston Bachelard, then this second order linguistic role is added on top of its creation as a functional object. These objects and gestures Barthes calls semiological signs and he points out that they differ significantly from verbal and written signs. This is a very important istinction between verbal language and object language. For Barthes, these two roles of the usable object are interwoven. In the case of the Tower, its inutility has always been considered something of a scandal, but it is this very uselessness which frees the object from its denotative utilitarian role in order to release it to focus on the second order connotative role. It's "as if the function of art were to reveal the profound uselessness of objects". But Barthes cautions against completely ignoring the utilitarian function, however naive or obscure. "And yet here as in the case of the Tower the naive utilitarianism of the enterprise is not separate from the oneiric, injinitely powerful function". To satisfy this great oneiric function, certain formal properties of the Tower are quite important. "Reduced to a single line whose sole function is to join, as the poet says, base and summit or again, heaven and earth". And then there is the relationship to use ‘as if the function of art were to reveal the profound uselessness of objects'.

3. "the Tower is friendly"... all this night too it will be there connecting me above Paris to each of my friends that I know are seeing it’. The Tower is a builder of community, but more importantly, a community based on shared percepts. (We are what we see and those bumper stickers that say 'honk if you believe in Jesus' are sending messages to other people more then they are to the heavens.) Isn't this the real function of the landmark in these media dominated days? If city life is lived within the paradox of 'the close stranger and distant friend'- where physical and psychological space rarely correlate and the people you're close to are often not the people you're close to in the elevator, on the subway and crowded city street: then the Tower plays a significant part in the social life of the group by being a primary generator of relationships between people. Barthes also calls the Tower a 'rite of initiation' and a 'rite of inclusion' for a young man from the provinces. Initiation into what? Inclusion in which secret fraternity? It is an initiation and inclusion into that select group of citizens of Parts who posses a clear cognitive spatial image of the city. Knowing that concrete abstraction is to be privy to knowledge, to belong to the group.

The last two themes deal with what Barthes calls.'the Tower itself. the Tower which will live its life as an object before being mobilized as a symbol.

4. The technical order of the Tower engages the visitor, in a number of interactions which are so rich that they result in the viewer becoming an "engineer by proxy". It's possible to see how the thing is made while at the same time becoming aware of the fallibility of perception - a straight line, that isn't really a straight line. The very transparency of the Tower leads one to almost inevitably think about certain traditional architectural concerns like the separation of inside and outside and the entire issue of verticality.

5. And finally, the Tower participates in a "familiar little world". It's a setting for a number of activities where food, postcards and souvenirs are bought and sold. and as such. it invites us to do those very things which make-up so much of our daily lives. Barthes may not be quite ready to replace 'dwell'with 'sell' in Heideggars famous dictum.'to build in itself is already to dwell', but we do domesticate by ritual, and high on the ritualistic ladder is the world of commerce.

If meaning is the dialectic between sensation and thinking. then the essay itself is a model providing lessons and examples on how these activities can best proceed. What are some of the lessons? Paradox and binary process should be at the heart of our attempts at meaning. 'Maupassant eats there but doesn't like thefood', 'the Tower sees and is seen, 'the surprise of seeing how this rectilinear form. which is consumed in every comer of Paris as a pure line, is composed of countless segments, interlinked, crossed and divergent' Take a step back and look at the whole whether it's the Tower or Parts itself. Take a step forward and examine the details. For Mies van der Rohe 'God is in the details.' and for Roland Barthes 'surface is as telling as depth.’

The Barthes' essay Eiffel Tower is a ritual and an intellectual strategy and a poetic statement. It's a work of art in and of itself. We are by no means the first hungry members of the architectural tribe to visit .vith Roland Barthes. Others have been there before. The early theoreticians of that architectural camp which came to be known as post-modernism, looked at, borrowed and misused, words, concepts and linguistic theories in their otherwise worthwhile search for a 'Theory of Meaning". What they missed is Barthes the poet, the designer of meaning. Those attempts to appropriate concepts developed by Barthes and his colleagues have been marred by an exceptional literalness and an inattention to the emotive resonances which are an essential part of any true poet. Barthes warns us against falling victim to the dilemma described by the Argentinian novelist Borges in 'Of Exactitude in Science'.

from Travel of Praiseworthy Men (1658)

JA Suarez Miranda

We don't need maps. We do need evocative images which help us comprehend architectural experience.