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Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis
Author(s): Lars Lerup
Source: Assemblage, No. 25 (Dec., 1994), pp. 82-101
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171389
Accessed: 09/11/2009 20:58
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Lars Lerup
82
STIM &
DROSS:
Rethinking the
Metropolis

Assemblage 25 ? 1995 by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
83
assemblage 25
stim
As in stimulation
(William Gibson in
Mona Lisa Overdrive);
Stimme: voice;
Stimmung: ambiance.
dross
1. Waste product or
impurities formed on
the surface of molten
metal during smelting.
2. Worthless stuff as
opposed to valuables
or value. Dregs.
rethinking
To change one's
point of view, find
a new vocabulary.

metropolis
No definition.
84
A
I (ttA S4 I I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New Babylons Lerup
Houston, 28th Floor, At the Window
The sky is as dark as the ground; the stars, piercingly
bright, a million astral specks that have fallen onto the
city. On this light-studded scrim the stationary lights
appear confident, the moving ones, like tracer bullets,
utterly determined, while the pervasive blackness throws
everything else into oblivion. The city a giant switchboard,
its million points switched either on or off.
Yet behind this almost motionless scene hovers the
metropolis, and the more one stares at it the more it
begins to stir.* A vast psychophysical map rolls out to
fill my window like Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, cut
here at midpoint by a bright horizon: a dense band of
lights flickering hysterically, a great milky way sending
myriad distress signals about its impending demise.
Enter the chocolate grinder, the bride and her nine bach-
elors, and yet a third field speedily emerges. Pulsating
from below, the flurry momentarily draws the attention
from Duchamp's frozen figures to the dynamics of their
interactions: the abrasive motions of work and the

throbbing tensions of sexual strife. Visible patterns in the
glass may be few, but the individual points and their vari-
ous qualities and constellations are many: cool and warm,
red, green, but mostly yellow. Closer - or better, in the
lower portion of the glass - the moving lights easily
match the intensity of the far more numcrous immobile
ones, suggesting the monstrous possibility that none are
definitively fixed. All is labile, transient, as if it were only a
question of time before these lit particles would begin to
move billiard balls on a vast felt-covered table unless
2 a er y *N Y 4s4 ___- _ _ - _5~I _ _ _ _ _- _ _
t V.4,. Ar WA
I
I
I
-:7
-
-~~~p t~
*Thc city we face at the dusk of
the century is infinitely more com-
plex than the night suggests. It is
time to close the book on the City
and open the manifold of the Me-
tropolis. Behind this melodramatic
pronouncement lies the hypothesis
that our customary ways of de-
scribin g, anin d designing
are novw outmoded. Though the
world is mutating at a dizzying
speed, we remain mesmerized bv

the passeiste drcam of the city.
Contemporary metropolitans must
confront a series of givens that
radically change the equation of
the old citv. Perhaps nowhcre with
more intensity than in louston is
the full set of these revolutions
being cinematically played out:
Demographic: tlhe emerging me-
tropolis is giving way to a truly
multiethnic continuumi. Economic:
global integration threatens not
only to extend but to redraw con-
tinuously the boundaries of the
city's hinterland. IDomestic: both
parents have absented themselves
from the household semiperman-
ently to enter the marketplace, de-
spite and because of chronic and
massive uncnplopy1ment. While in
the shadows hover AIDS, lhome-
lessncss, substance abuse, and
epidemic violence. Resources: em-
phasis has shifted from ras and
manufactured materials to
"imimaterials" such as knowledge,
services, management. Vlcology: a
science, a politic, and an ethics
that is simply no longer a fad. (The
five points are drawn from a lec-
ture given this year at Rice Univer-
sity bv Stephen I. Klineberg,
"Making Sense of Our Times: Five

Revolutionars ''rcnds.")
85
assemblage 25
the table is not in itselfa fluid in motion? Physicists ab-
stract from these flux-fields features such as smoothness,
connections to points-particles, and rules of interaction
(among sources, sinks, cycles, and flows). "Where space
was once Kantian, [embodying] the possibility of separa-
tion, it now becomes the fabric which connects all into a
whole."' Nothing on the plane is stationary, everything is
fluid, even the ground itself on which the billiard balls
careen. The bio-vehicular, electro-commercial, socio-
electronic, and opto-ocular metropolis knows no steady
state. In a city predominantly constituted of motion and
temporalities, space itself is about deformation and veloc-
ity - constantly being carved out in front of one and aban-
doned behind - the end, definitive now, of the Corbusian
promenade and the Corbusian subject as the gentleman
puppet on the architect's string.2 The post-Corbusian
subject emerges here as a complex amalgam of Benjamin's
Angelus Novus - "a storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm ... we call progress"
-and an omnigendered drifter - the wo-man-vehicle -
whose subjectivity engulfs both the futurist reflections of
Duchamp's descending nude (and the subsequent bach-
elors) and the tuned-out yet wired-in driver cruising along
the superhighways of the Metropolis.
The European metropolis-without-crowds has skipped
westward while radically transforming itself into a new

creature, leaner, meaner, and more superficial, but harder
to catch, at once simpler and less bearable to live in. This
shift was prefigured by Robert Smithson in 1972 (in an
interview with Paul Cummings) while discussing his ar-
ticle "The New Monuments": "I was also interested in a
kind of suburban architecture: plain box buildings, shop-
ping centers, that kind of sprawl. And I think this is what
fascinated me in my earlier interest in Rome, just this
kind of collection, this junk heap of history. But here we
are confronted with a consumer society. I know there is a
sentence in 'The Monuments of Passaic' where I said,
'Hasn't Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?"'
Back at my window, the palimpsest of a new city flaunts
its hypertextuality in black and light; its mental map of
diverse subjectivities rarely operates while one is on foot, a
predicament that hints at the possibility of a new visibil-
ity, a new field with emergent, unexpected megashapes
newly apprehensible but only at vastly different scales of
motion. And we can expect megashapes to be quite com-
plex. On the one hand, we have the Zoohemic Canopy
constituted by a myriad of trees of varying species, size,
and maturity and, on the other, we have a Downtown
formed by the tight assembly of skyscrapers. Both shapes
rely on repetition, one of many small elements, the other
of a fairly small assembly of large elements. Though these
two megashapes seem different, both are apprehended
and appreciated only through shifts and distortions of
scale and speed. The Downtown relies less on speed than
on distance. Both require modern mathematics for ana-
lytical description. The Canopy demands a special kind of
attentiveness since it operates truly on the periphery of
everyday vision. Once focused on, however, trees "get
counted" and form with time and repetition a zoohemic
appreciation - even the pedestrian gets a sense of the
forest. The Canopy, moreover, is understood from within,

from the counting of trees, not from the realization of the
whole; more correctly, there are two ways of seeing it, one
from within and the other from the perspective of the
Aerial Field. Radically different, they do not suggest the
same appreciation (form?): one is close and intimate, the
other cool and distant. This double reading brings Canopy
and Downtown together conceptually since driving inside
the Downtown may prompt an appreciation of its
megashape - again, this would be quite different from
the shape gathered from a distant position in the Aerial
Field (such as from the 28th floor). There seems, then, to
be at least two readings of any megashape: one from the
inside leading to an appreciation of the algorithm of the
shape (or its taxis, to borrow from classical thought) and
one from the outside, leading to an understanding of the
whole - the figure (the result of the algorithm, once
solved). The inside appreciation may well be the more
interesting because it suggests that a megashape may be
imagined through a fragment and thus does not require
completion, while the outside view requires both the more
traditional perspective as well as a literal apprehension of
the whole. The fieldroom, for example (literall! simulta-
neously a field and a room, as will be discussed later), thus
86
Rachel Schenk
New Babylons Lerup
consists of one actual dimension - the room-and one
imaginary or extrapolated dimension - the field. How we
reconstruct or think about the megashape of the Down-

town may be similarly developed.
The task at hand is, in a most rudimentary way, to trace
the lineaments of this city. The desire to capture this
elusive creature forever on the run is, however, both auda-
cious and presumptuous, offered in the spirit of the great
Rcyncr Banham whose ruminations on the four ecologies
of Los Angeles serve as a constant inspiration.* Because
Houston, most perplexingly (and despite its deeply con-
servative and isolating tendencies) is still a Metropolis
waiting and poised for the great adventure.
"It is ironic that at the end of a
century characterized by the most
dizzying urban transformations in
human history academic readings
(apart from writers like Banham
and Koolhaas) and projects of the
city (particularly in postwar cities
like I ouston) remain haunted by
the irrelevant ghost of the histori-
cally outdated European center
city. A distinctly European view of
our cities has made them em-
battled, ridiculed, and flat - too
often conceived as mere Monopoly
games. The hegemony of the pe-
destrian, the plaza, the street, and
the perimeter block must be chal-
lenged not because the "values"
they embody are no longer valid,
but rather, because they are suf-
fused with a set of fundamental
misconceptions about the nature

of contemporary civilization and
its outside, leading to a false under-
standing of the whole. More point-
edly, even the most sophisticated
readings (and the occasional build-
ing) of the American city and its
postwar expansions, whether
haunted and paranoid (as in
Baudrillard's America) or openly
nostalgic for the eternal return
of the bourgeois pedestrian
(Krier, Duany & Platcr-Zyberk,
Calthorphe, Solomon) are predi-
cated on a more or less hidden
positivity that, if fulfilled, would
bring us "community" - or better,
bring us back to the American ver-
sion of the European city. Yet the
City is forever surpassed by the
Metropolis and all its givens (a
steadily globalizing economy, de-
mographic changes, AIDS, unem-
ployment, violence, and so on),
which will make any return to the
past both impossible and undesir-
able. The obsession in valorizing
the pedestrian over the car hides
and ignores the presence of a
driver (and passengers) in the car,
a roving subjectivity whose body
phantom apprehends the world in a
vastly different manner. A manner
that, in turn, will, and must, have
consequences for the way the

Metropolis is designed. More im-
portant, however, to hinge all judg-
ments about the city on the forlorn
pedestrian and his requirements
avoids tackling the fact that the
Metropolis is driven in and driven
bv not only the pedestrian and the
driver but a myriad of subiectivi-
ties that include the old (and pos-
sibly infirm) and the young (and
equally vulnerable), men and
women, African-American and
white, as vwcll as less human "ob-
jectivities" such as the economy,
public opinion, and the market
place.
87
The Plane, the Riders, and Airspace
Houston is a different planet. Here space in the European
sense is scarce, perhaps nonexistent. With neither sea nor
confining walls to define it, it consists only of a mottled
plane to navigate. By turns smooth, undulating, and
choppy, this surface medium appears endless and oceanic;
literally so during a downpour - a periodic, torrential
"pouring" constitutes one of the critical affects of this
(en)Gulf(ing) city. Its plane is also crude and wild, marked
by fissures, vacated space, and bits of untouched prairie,
aptly described by what Smithson found in New Jersey:
"Passaic seems full of 'holes' compared to New York City,
which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes ...
are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying,
the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures."3 Pa-

tently unloved yet naturalistic, this holey plane seems
more a wilderness than the datum of a man-made city.
Dotted by trees and criss-crossed by wo-men/vehicles/
roads, it is a surface dominated by a peculiar sense of on-
going struggle: the struggle of economics against nature.
Both the trees and machines of this plane emerge as the
(trail or) dross of that struggle. In New York and Paris such
a precarious, unstable status of the city is unthinkable.
There nature has been defeated, erased, or domesticated
to a degree that ensures it will never return. In Houston,
however, schizophrenia rules: By proximity or synomorphy
(similarity of form), the riders of the plane drift along (in
contradistinction to the pedestrian, the ruling subject of
the old city) as morphing extensions of the machines,
forming with technology a shifting and uneasy coalition.
Yet the same drifters coalesce with the biota and trees,
particularly when (even for the briefest of moments) they
walk the plane. The trajectories along which riders move
follows at least two speeds, both of which are ballistic in
nature: along the first, bullet cars with their cooled interi-
ors push through the thick, humid phlegm; along the
second, even more viscous one, that of fear - urban fear
(driving one to the false safety of closets, behind the barri-
cades of one's enclaves) - another kind of bullet propels
the action, now aimed back at the rider. It is no wonder
that the commanding machine of this plane is the Chevy
Suburban, named, appropriately, for all but achieving the
dimensions of a suburban house, providing a protective,
mobile, exoskeletal enclave (almost safe) along this tortu-
ous trajectory of fear.
Fields
The commingling of nature and machines, be they houses,
cars, or skyscrapers, set on a prairie, on this crudely gar-
dened version thereof, results in a IIouston that is fully

neither city nor tree. Yet all the things that constitute this
*The city must be seen as an or-
ganismi, but a deeply perplexing
one because it is simultaneously a
machine, or rattier, a series of dis-
connected (nano-)machines run-
ning their own determined and
reckless courses - the combined
result of which we will never fully
fathoim. Drifting, the procedure of
preference for this reading, is
umlbilically connected to the Me-
tropolis via Baudelaire and that ul-
timate fldneur Valter Benjaminin
(although he would agree that in
I louston the car is the drifter's ve-
hicle par excellence). Benjamin be-
gan his drifting across the Me-
tropolis on the back porch that
overlooked the inner court of his
parents' apartment in Berlin. Icre
he had his first encounters with
the Other. And learned that the
bright lights of the city are also to-
kens of the many pistons that drive
its motors - the multitudc of lan-
guages at work - whether the
light under his bedroom door
(wheln his emancipated Jewish par-
ents entertained friends on Satur-
day night) or the mesmierizing red
light signaling the district of pros-
titution. Despite the semantic lu-

minosity of the many citv lights,
there is no sense that Benjamin
found anything but tensions, rup-
tures, and catastrophic leaps. 'lhe
more he seei-ms to have grasped of
the Metropolis the faster he saw it
slip away, until he finally escaped,
by his own hand, in distant Port
Bou. This text is ostensibly a drift
along Houston's many physical tra-
jectories; like gossip or commen-
tary, the many oddities and kinks
on the hide of this otherwise "lite
city" (Koolhaas) leads to descrip-
tions that warp and bend, while at-
temipting to make the plhysical
reverberate sith all the other not-
so-physical frameworks and con-
structions that shape the
Metropolis, ranging from the
IIouse to the Office to the circula-
tion of Moncy. I)rifting-as-tcxt is
more about departures tlhai arriv-
als, more about movement and
change than fixedness, but it is
also about a desire to cover more
with less, to leave lacunac to bc
filled later - with the help of others.
88
New Babylons Lerup

specific territory are more or less organically related, such
that we can assume that it is, if not strictly or classically a
city, then certainly an ecology - or more theatrically, a
flat planet. Which suggests that it is the powerful web of
organic relations that make Houston a palpable, cohesive
reality.* I ere variously gendered machines rather than
pedestrians are the predominating species, and clean and
cool air (rather than the atmosphere of Paris or the energy
of New York) is the determinant commodity. The plane,
with its Zoohemic Canopy of trees, forms a carpctlike
subecology dominated by dappled light, the collective
purring of a panoply of machines, the invincible sting of
mosquitoes. The planetary impression becomes even more
compelling as the reader ascends: suspended overhead in
a skyscraper two distinct strata or fields are apprehensible,
one sandwiched atop the other: the Zoohemic Field below,
the Aerial Field above. This huge bag of air is articulated
by airplanes, helicopters, and the grandiose machinations
of Gulf weather, which rolls into this upper strata quietly
to surprise the drifters in the green sponge below or
with terrifying fanfare. Unlike the lower strata, the bag
seems underdeveloped - almost begging for more towers,
more air traffic, more lights - the perfect setting for
lofty speculations.
Two ecologies, two modalities of circulation and appear-
ance (speeds). The two strata touch, as do the two speeds,
when the freeway hews its way through the green carpet to
merge with the airspace. In these gashes the two worlds
are sutured together, or more precisely, the motorway
adjoins the airspace by delaminating from the plane. Sub-
merged in the lowest strata of a major freeway intersec-
tion, literally driving (at warp-speed) on the underside of
the ground ecology of the city, the rider is brought to a
realization. In fact, all brushes with the outer margins of
the various ecologies of the city, whether here at the base

of the hierarchy or at its very top, hovering in an air ve-
hicle while rapidly traversing both ecologies, tend to throw
the whole into focus. Such realizations, frog's-eye or soar-
ing-eagle perspectives, are shapeful and at least partially
extraspatial. They bring out of the scattered suggestions of
wholes, or megashapes, that the rider senses while operat-
ing on freeways or arriving at large openings in the ground
THE WEATHER * - -
/Xs 7-/t_^-^^ ///[?
,oTHE FR E E WA Y' 6
89
7WE O CiAh C i
plane (such as an airfield) a sensation of traveling along
the tangent of the very definition of the ecological enve-
lope. While this may appear more evident in an airplane,
it is in fact more sensational when you dip underneath the
ground ecology (as in the great freeway cloverleaf), possi-
bly because the vehicle operates along a curve whose ori-
gin is somewhere above the driver swinging him out of, yet
against and into, the crust of the earth that serves as the
carpet's ground.
The clashes between the Zoohemic and the Aerial may be
putting the drifter in touch with what Baudrillard calls the
"astral."4 This may also be particularly European (eastern
too?), but the sensation one has when, for the first time, a
tumbleweed crosses the highway somewhere on former
Route 66 with no other car in sight makes one's ancestral
home burst, releasing the rider within or from its (oppres-

sive) security into the open - never to return. "How can
anyone be European?"' The sensations referred to here
cluster around the notion of speed, or better, the notion of
motion. In Houston, it is not an exaggeration to suggest
that the alien prosthetic is neither the car nor the air ve-
hicle but the drifter's legs. Thus coming from a pedestrian
past bursting onto the scene of the vehicular (and its asso-
ciated velocities) clearly demarcates a takcoff that is beside
reality as one once knew it; it lurches one not just into a
more rapid disappearance of what is seen in the rearview
mirror but also into the future (Virilio). Not withstanding
Baudrillard's point that "driving produces a kind of invis-
ibility," the shape of the setting for those "pure objects"
become more visible.' This is, of course, more truly the
case when the trip is repeated over and over again - a
sensation Baudrillard the European clearly never experi-
enced. The shapes of the city's ecologies appear at its
margins but, maybe more importantly, during the repeated
trips along these same margins. Yet this exterior shapcful-
ness is more conceptual than actual, held in place by men-
tal constructions made up of sporadically gathered
shape-fragments rather than actual physical continuities.
These external visions of shape are propped up, however,
now from the inside by additional visions of shape, both
more contiguous and more pervasive. To drive inside the
zoohcmic ecology - which includes trees, incessantly
drawn at the periphery of one's vision - builds an addi-
90
New Babylons Lerup
tional understanding of shape that may not be exactly

synomorphic with the external shape of the ecology. But
counting the particles of a field, rather than establishing
the parameters of the field itself, touches on another
grammar of shape - a grammar that has been called oce-
anic. However fractal and seismic the oceanic experience
may be, it is also smooth and voluptuous. The almost
continuous underside of the leafy canopy supported by
the countless tree trunks form an inverted mountain chain
of green that begins to build - once again through repeti-
tion - a conception of an inside. This inside is in no way
trivial, particularly since it substitutes structurally for the
actual loss of European city form. As city form, the Hous-
tonian interiority is very different from, say, the Parisian.
Where the latter is constituted by the street, the vertical-
ity established by the perimeter block, and propelled by a
pedestrian subjectivity, the low-slung green canopy estab-
lishes a pervasive almost-domestic intimacy that in the
European city can only be had inside the residential block
in the warmth of a house. Thus Houston is at any one
location both a giant room and an ocean of endless sur-
faces. This inner field-and-room, produced through a
trajectorial subjectivity, is held in place by two planes: the
ground and the canopy of trees. Both planes undulating,
the fieldroom is not a space in the European (Euclidean)
sense but a constantly warping and pulsating fluidity. The
pedestrian, painstakingly, circumscribes the blocks of the
old city, harbors no doubt about what moves and what is
fixed. In Iouston, however, the speeding car projects
itself into a space that is never yet formed, forever evolv-
ing and emerging ahead, while disappearing behind. This
creates a liquidity in which the dance and the dancer are
fused together in a swirling, self-engendering motion pro-
moted by the darting of the driver's eyes, touching (be-
cause so intimate, so familiar): street, canopy, house,
adjacent car, red light, side street, radio station Tejano

106.5, car upon car, instruments, tree trunks, joggers,
barking dogs, drifting leaves, large welt and dip, patch of
sunlight. This is a navigational space, forever emerging,
never exactly the same, liquid rather than solid, approxi-
mate rather than precise, visual but also visceral in that it
is felt by the entire body - not just through the eyes and
the soles of the feet. The body in this liquid space is sus-
pended, held and urged on by the trajectory.
91
assemblage 25
The Zoohemic and the Aerial fields, invested by various
velocities ranging from Suburbans to helicopters, pop out
and disappear. On rare occasions nature itself draws the
two strata clearly and distinctly, and for a brief moment
their innate fluidity is arrested. 7 A.M., 29 December: a
weather front has drawn a blanket of clouds across the
Metropolis, so low that the tops of skyscrapers brush it.
Not yet completed, the blanket gapes to the East and the
sun, like a child's flashlight, illuminates (not his nmomen-
tary tent but) the airbag between the top of the zoohemic
and the underside of the cloud cover. The light from the
sun paints all the eastern facadcs of the skyscrapers
giant pilotis-candles supporting the sky. The huge window
to the East burns bright red, while the sun rises up and
out to create an eventual arctic-scape of the cloud cover's
upper surface. The sun has literally drawn a new section of
the city.
The similarity in form between the two assemblages (tree
trunk/canopy and skyscraper/cloud cover) posits the first
determining structure or shapefulness of the two ecolo-

gies. First, like stacked tables, one sits on top of the other,
then at closer scrutiny, the upper table pokes its skyscraper
trunks down through the Zoohemic Canopy to the
ground, thus originating in the lower ecology - literally
growing out of it. The clear definition of the two fields,
and the air space in particular with its momentary ceiling,
forces the intimacy first established under the trees now
to include the entire Metropolis. Air and biota are merged
to form a double space in which elements (tall buildings
and certain vehicles) and fluids (air, sound, and smell)
circulate freely.
Back on the ground, driving across the Zoohemic Field,
the conceptual mingling of ecologies provokes addi-
tional crossreadings but now horizontal: the freeway un-
derpass, laminated away from the ground (that barren
forest of concrete columns-and-canopy), takes on new
value as the petrified token of the dominating ecologies
of the metropolis - the concrete columns as so many
artificial limbs mending the rift in the green hewn by
the freeway itself.7
92
New Babylons Lerup
Entortung
J. B. Jackson's Westward-moving House haunts Houston.8
While driving east-west along a street of modest houses
two remarkable rhythms occur. The street begins to roll
like an ocean. Long shallow swells threaten to bounce
riders from their seats while the houses, many of which are
partially overgrown with vines, tilt ever so slightly, (fur-
ther) revealing the tropic instability of the ground. The
combination of the rolling street and the tilting houses is

deeply unsettling. Everything moves (as in a sped-up geo-
logical flow). Every element is detachable, ready to go.
The Westward-moving House could have originated in
some Heideggerian clearing in the Schwartzwald, but
Jackson chose to begin the story on America's East Coast.
At the beginning of its trajectory, the house still had a
basement. As it migrated further West, and it often did so
literally because the settlers brought their houses with
them, the more it was modified to respond to the next
move. Among the first modifications, the cellar was left
behind, replaced by rocks set simply on the ground to
serve as point supports. The final transformation of the
frontier Urhaus is the contemporary mobile home, still the
cheapest and fastest way to "own a home," since, like a
car, it can be delivered the following day on the basis of a
ten-year amortized loan. The tendency to make things
lighter and more mobile goes hand in hand with what Karl
Popper called the "ephemeralization of technology," the
suggestion that all technology will evolve from clocks to
clouds. The tilting houses encountered at the outset (they
sit on the same type of supports as the Westward-moving
House, today made of mass-produced concrete blocks) are
both an expression of this ephemeralization and an uproot-
ing of the house, here literally severed from the ground
and thereby shifting its status from building to furniture.
The rolling street (a reminder of the swamp out of which
I ouston arose) gives the experience of driving in this flat
city a quality of being held hostage on a subdued roller
coaster. The rolling is not at all confined to the poorest
parts of the city but characterizes the entire secondary
street grid - and every house has had or will have "a bad
foundation day." Unsettling as it may seem, the rolling
rhythm of the road and the racking of the houses (real or
imagined) produce a strange echo of what in New York
would constitute a city beat, though here it is not that of

be bop but blues, zydeco, and cumbia; at the same time,
this rolling of the ground suggests not only that the ele-
ments upon it are unstable (and rhythmic) but that the
very field itself is the ultimate demonstration of the Met-
ropolitan Entortung (uprootedness) that Georg Simmel
began to map out in his famous essay "The Metropolis
and Mental Life" and that Massimo Cacciari used as one
of the bases for his book Architecture and Nihilism: On the
Philosophy of Modern Architecture.9
In Houston, the entire foundation of the ground-level
ecology is soft, rhythmic, and unstable, held together by
the roots of the canopy of trees, creating the absurd im-
pression of a city suspended from the treetops, its cars,
riders, and roads gently swinging. At any rate, the ground
is a detached ground, the house, an infinitely migrating
detached house that follows in a slow attenuated progres-
sion the same Brownian trajectories as do its associated
deputy paraphernalia - the car and the dweller - em-
blems of a restless urban matrix continually on the move.
Dross
Space is granted little physical presence on the plane of
this planet. Dominated by motion, time, and event, all
components of this complex hide an essential vulnerabil-
ity - trees die, cars and markets crash, and the air slowly
kills. In fact, in Houston, air functions much like our skin,
an immense enveloping organ, to be constantly attended
to, chilled, channeled, and cleaned. Pools of cooled air dot
the plane, much like oases in deserts. Precariously pinned
in place by machines and human events these become
points of stimulation - Stims - on this otherwise rough
but uninflected hide, populated only by the dross - the
ignored, undervalued, unfortunate economic residues of
the metropolitan machine. Space as value, as locus of
events, as genius loci, is then reduced to interior space: a

return to the cave. In these enclaves or Stims, time is kept
at bay, suspension is the rule, levitation the desire - be it
the office, the house, the restaurant, the museum, or the
ever-marauding Suburban. Outside, the minimization of
93
assemblage 25
time is the dominant force that both draws lines on this
erratically littered surface and gathers its pools of energy.
Because once the time lines are seen to coincide and over-
lap, they begin to curl and twist. Our plot thickens at the
Galleria - Houston's giant shopping spree, where the
pistons and cranks of the Metropolis have compressed
more buying power into a single horizontal concatenation
than in the entire region - and at the oil company office
park euphemistically known as Downtown - where again
the metropolitan muscle is flexed, but now vertically to
sculpt the ultimate urban physique. The entire Down-
town becomes one megashape, a token for all of America's
downtowns. In a less obvious manner, time dominates still
other forms of thickening in the ecology. Many of these
bulges are less physical than virtual, noted in remarks by
the rider: "here, another Exxon' station, another Tar-
getT" - subtle, ever-multiplying as market bytes whose
recurrences follow the logic both of the cash flow and the
bayou or catch basin. Outside, these Stims, at once retinal
and rhythmic, like mild electroshocks on the plane, now
join to become the extended skin of the rider.
The new space emerging from the impulses of this huge
envelope is transient, fleeting, temporary, and biomorphic
rather than concrete, manifested, or striated. Barely visible

to the classical eye, these forms appear as expanding
ripples in one's consciousness, swellings, bumps, and
grinds coursing through the nervous system. Erratic, un-
predictable, the time line for the spatial event jumps,
twitches, hums, and wiggles like an erratic hose in a
gardener's grip. Yet the flow encourages, the speed comforts,
the ride heals. The chorus of the multitude of familiar
Stims forms a signifying beat, tapping gently on the rider's
visual domain: the optic pouch.0l This pouch is always
changing its size, sometimes confined, as when throttling
through a tunnel of trees, at other times expanded to
amorphousness, as it fills out an abandoned lot, a leftover
plot of prairie, or when, in a flash, it explodes like a para-
chute to include a stretch of sky.
Yet urban threats prevail in this huge ecological envelope.
Largely hiding out in the spaces between, the threats are
kept away from the Stims. (They must not be implicated
or soiled by any harsh realities.) Consequently, clandestine
at first, yet ultimately as palpable as the humidity, the
threats rush to the surface - environmental ones - made
apparent by the Metropolis as a large unified ecology, an
envelope with its own air, a sloppy organ whose precarious
health is clearly in question. Here the fear of miasma is
real; Houston is one of the most polluted cities in the
nation. And urban fear: the insidious force that atomizes
the city like a scatter bomb into a myriad cells each
surrounded and enclosed by various forms of callused
protective tissue (physical prowess, power in numbers,
rent-a-cops, walls, gates, distance, electronics, guard dogs,
lot size, borders, rail-road or freeway barriers) - an entire
physics ofenclavism. We are talking warfare here. This
strife propels and animates the ecology, much more than
Ecology itself, perhaps as much as the market force. Like a
myriad invisible nano-machines clandestinely at work
undermining metropolitan sanity, fear has delaminated

the Stim from the plane - Entortung efficiently at work.
94
New Babylons Lerup
In gaggles, Stims agglutinate, skip, and leapfrog once the
barometer of fear passes the critical mark of 103 degrees.
Yet among the middle class, the fear remains unspoken,
silenced, merely illustrated in passing by the antiseptic
crime statistics of the news media. In the street it speaks
loud and clear. In fear's wake, in addition to the great
suburban escape, come deed restrictions, restricted num-
bers of sewer hook-ups, zoning, alarms, and armaments-
one hundred thousand four hundred registered guns.
Guns and gas are the propellants of the Metropolis on the
run. To what end all this paraphernalia, when according to
recent polls, Houston ranks as the fourth most livable city
in the United States? The answer surely leads us to the
Stims themselves, to their internal strength, and, alas, to
their vulnerability.
95
A sudden glimpse, a distant bearing. A
momentary stop on the eye's endless loop:
roadway, neighboring traffic, instruments,
your passenger. The optic pouch explodes
into the distance instantly to envelop the
megashape of downtown, retrieving it for
short-time storage, mapping onto the
construction site of memory, only to cut

the shape loose until the next recounter.
Lifting out of the ground the
freeway abandons its base to
join, ever so briefly, the air-
space. Helicopters join Subur-
bans in the Minor Airshow.
Preparation and Promise: The prefigura-
tion of the Metropolis. Holey space soon
to be filled. The clean slate: the city floor,
the weather system, and the facsimiles of
what's to come (or what could be). The
Warwick Hotel at the edge of Hermann
Park.
96
Sick City, Texas Medical Center:
An arsenal of air and ground
vehicles, elevators, stretchers,
deliver the medical body. The
ecology of prevention, care,
and intervention operates on
world time - twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a
week. Bodies come and go,
live and die. Free Parking at
First Visit. Brain scan, bone
scan, MRI, PSA, hopes,
illusions, and the eternal wait.
Statistics vs. self.
Depth & height. The oil gusher

transfigured and petrified in the priapic
tower - the emptying of the earth and
the filling of the sky.
Gulfgate Shopping City: Born To Shop, the stimmers spill off
the
freeway to evaporate in the parking lots. The assemblage of car/
credit card/shopper makes it the hypodermic of the shopping
stream. Just as the medieval stirrup allowed the power of the
horse to be transferred to the horseman's lance, the shopping
assemblage composes and releases pure buying power. Hour,
day or night, the stimmers' time is always now, and as place, the
mall is a feverish monad held up by its intoxicating inside only.
97
assemblage 25
Stimulators
A colleague invites us to a reception given by an art pa-
tron. We traverse the plane and navigate the dross: A
mental map, an address, a curving road, large lots and
gigantic houses, the de rigeur smiling rent-a-cop. Our
destination is a marvel of a house, a fantasy sustained by a
spectacular architectural scenography, various addenda
(arresting decoration, whimsical furniture, subdued mu-
sic, etc.), and the glamour of the party itself. Truly stimu-
lating. The collusion is in fact a perfect one, between
architects (the curved interior street), decorators (the
towels arranged on the floor in the bathroom), caterers
(the glutinous loot of shrimp), the art patron (her son's
taxidermic hunting trophies) and her own overflowing
enthusiasm. Suspended, the audience hovers in the fan-
tasy. The house itself is a miniaturized Siena, (turning

abruptly I search for a glimpse of the Palio), though not
Siena at all, a marvelous polyphonic concoction that
threatens all analogy in favor of the authenticity of the
bristling Stim itself. Here critique and skepticism must
fade in favor of the materiality of this specific event. It is
an audacious one, surely costly, and marvelously intoxicat-
ing. Yet how does it hold up, or rather, how is it held in
place? Where are the invisible wires, the conceits of this
theater of events? I ow and where does the dross come
into play? After all, this fragment of Siena is held in place
not by a city, by streets, piazzas, walls, or a city-state and
its culture. Dislocated, the Stim is suspended in the ocean
of the city, but also suspended in time and out of context
(Tuscany is far away)."' When toggled on, the Stim's
shimmering lights attract its participants like moths
sucked out of the darkness of the city. Yet the smiling
guard suggests that the suspense is not only momentary
but precarious. And when the lights are turned low, the
guests and caterers departed, the Stim is turned off and
the house and its occupants are again mere dross on the
littered city floor. Indeed, light and darkness are inextrica-
bly bound together. Like a cyberspace, the Stim is an-
chored in place by much technology and machines of
every type, mechanical, electronic, and biological.12 The
imbroglio is vast, ranging from the Mexican laborers tend-
ing the gardens to the architects' studies at the academy
in Rome; it gathers, in a single sweep, lawnmowers and
airplanes, but also sewage pipes, floral designers, pool
installers, electrical power grids, telephone calls, asphalt,
automobiles, the birds drawn to bird feeder hubs, deathly
silent air conditioners, mortgage banks, hunting rifles, and
the little pink shrimps from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of
these components and interlocking systems have, in com-
mIon architectural practice, been taken for granted and
ignored, while others have been dealt with as a kit of parts,

each component neatly defined and rendered indepen-
dent. This array forms a complex body that must, in the
wet of the postwar city, be seen for what it is, a partially
self-steering, partially spontaneous, yet cybernetic aggluti-
nation of forces, pulsations, events, rhythms, and machines.
The neglect of any of its interlocked systems may, despite
a multitude of checks, locks, gates, and balances, threaten
its existence. The Age of Integration has come to call.
Stimdross
Like the surface of a lake during a rainstorm pocked by
thousands of concentric ripples, the Metropolis is bom-
barded by a million Stims that flicker on and off during
the city's rhythmic cycles. These Stims steam and stir,
oscillate and goad, yet each specific stimme, or voice, re-
verberates throughout the Metropolis in a most selective
98
New Babylons Lerup
manner: the "art party" visited above draws a very narrow
audience just as do the zydeco dance halls in East HIous-
ton. Both are essential, vital elements of the full-fledged
Metropolis. The Stimmung, or ambiance, projected by
each Stim is fully understood and fully had by insiders
only. Although as a stimulus the zydeco dance occasionally
draws a group of (slumming?) upper-middle-class guests
(and they are graciously tolerated), they remain aliens,
however touched and moved they may be by the dance
and its inert stimulantia. And there is IIugo's Garage, a
stim that lasts for a brief hour or two on Friday afternoons
when his clients come to pay their respect. Hugo is the
much-beloved and respected mechanic (he works on im-

ports, too) whose greatly diverse clientele come to stim:
beer and cars, the car-as-transport is parked and briefly
elevated to the car-as-art, setting aside all class and money
distinctions between the aficionados. Simultaneously, a
block away the trunk hoods on a dozen cars go up (and the
tiny lights turn on) to wire the iron-clad Hlispanic Parking
Lot Stim. Men gather around, the echo of a cumbia pro-
jected from several car radios envelops the momentary
brotherhood Like open treasure chests the stationary cars
now project back in time and place (to a common culture
and history) - El Bulevar de Sueiios. A telling balance to
the carro's otherwise futuristic prowess. A tiny sampler
from the menu of "a million Stims."
Ranging from the Family Dinner to the Card Game, all
Stims are held precariously in place, in intensity, and in
motion by the metropolitan physics of "walls, particles, and
fields." Metropolitan Life is concentrated in all these Stims,
and we live as if our life depended on them.' The common
tendency to focus all attention on the Stim itself ignores
that it is a living organism, machines, a behavior setting, in
short, a manifold shale of wonderful complexity. As such, it is
dependent on its talons and its backwoods: first, the ocean
of the Metropolis, then the world. The inadequacy of the
binary opposition of Stim & dross is becoming evident (the
legacy of our stale language and its profound grammatical
limitations). Only in the hybrid field of stimdross may we
begin to rethink and then to recover from this holey plane
some of the many potential futures.
99
assemblage 25

Notes
This essay would not have been possible with-
out Sanford Kwinter's inspiration, support,
and editing. I would also like to acknowledge
Dung Ngo, the Director of Publications and
Exhibitions at Rice, Stephen Fox, Michael
Bell, Mark Wamlble, and those students who
helped with the research: Sommer Schauer,
Lonnie I oogeboom, and Branden I ookway.
1. The entire section on the relationship be-
tween physics and the metropolis is drawn
from Martin Krieger's Doing Physics: lHow
Physicists Take H-old of the World (Bloom-
ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1992), 25.
2. Lars Lerup, "At The End of the Architec-
tural Promenade," in Architecture & Body, ed.
Scott Marble et al. (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).
3. Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert
Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, ed. N.
I olt (New York: New York University Press,
1979), 55.
4. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris
Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 27.
5. Ibid., 105.
6. Ibid., 7.
7. The two dominating ecologies harbor a
multitude of subecologies, or biotopes (lim-
ited ecological regions or niches in which the
environment promotes and supports certain

forms of life). 'T'hcse topoi arc often the grow-
ing grounds for the Stim, whose biotic poten-
tial (the likelihood of survival of a specific
organism in a specific environment, especially
in an unfavorable one) is, as I hope to show,
highly dependent on both Stim and sur-
rounding dross.
8. J. B. Jackson, "The Westward-moving
Hlousc," in l,andscapes: Selected Writing of 1.
B. lackson, ed. Erwin 11. Zube (Boston: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 10.
9. "In the Ent-ortung it is the destiny of the
West itself that runs from the rooting of the
Nomos in the justissima tellus, through the dis-
covery and occupation of the new spaces of the
Americas ('free' spaces, that is, considered to-
tally available for conquest, totally profanable:
devoid of places), up to the universalism of the
world market ... (a total mobilization of an
intensive kind, a universal displacement)"
(Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism:
On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture,
trans. Stephen Sartarelli [New IIaven: Yale
University Press, 1993], 169).
10. What in more mechanistic times was
known as a fixed "cone of vision."
11. The issue of appropriateness is evident
here. However, the complexity and multitude
of cultures and concerns in the manifold of
the Metropolis force us seriously to question
contextualism, or to elevate this issue to envi-
ronmental contextuality, leaving the issue of
style to the beholder.

12. The Stim's apparent mixture of program
and building, on the one hand, and all the
support structures (people and machines), on
the other, makes evident that the designer
can, but perhaps should not, exclude the
latter from the design equation. Interior
designers frequently cross the line between
hardware and software. T'his attitude be-
comies even more relevant when environmen-
tal issues arc brought up, since they have
direct bearing on the life cycle and life span
of the building (and all its elements and sys-
tems) and thus directly on its life (use).
13. In attempting to find a narrow definition
of the Stim, I have at this point excluded the
workplace, although stimming clearly takes
place here, too. The subject of the suburban-
ization of work and the increased need for
Stims to compensate for the loss of the office
is a chapter in itself in need of extensive ex-
ploration.
Figure Credits
1-3, 8, 9, 18, 20, 27. Photographs by George
0. Jackson.
4, 23. Photographs by Steve Brady.
5. Collage by Bruce Wcbb; photograph by
Paul I lester.
6. Courtesy of the Texas Department of
Transportation.
7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17. Drawings by Lars Lerup.
12, 13. Photographs by Michael Kuchta.
15. Texas Architect (July-August 1989).
19, 22. Photographs by Lisa Hardawav/Paul
I-ester.

21. Photograph by Ester Bubley.
24. Courtesy of John Graham and Company.
25. Photograph by Peter Brown.
26. Lotus 75 (February 1993).
Lars Lcrup is the dean and the I larry K.
and Albert K. Smith Chair at the Rice
School of Architecture in Iouston. IHe
has written several books, most recently
Planned Assaults (1987), and is one of
the principals of LMNOP. I-e is a Fellow
of the Rice Center for Urbanism
(ReCurb).
By peculiar coincidence, Lerup lives and
wrote this article in the same high-rise
apartment in which George 0. Jackson
lived and photographed, some six years
earlier, many of the images used in this
article. Jackson is a Houston-based
photographer who spends the majority
of his time in Mexico, recording ancient
rituals and festivals still being practiced
by the indigenous population.
100
New Babylons Lerup
101
Article Contentsp. 82p. 83p. 84p. 85p. 86p. 87p. 88p. 89p. 90p.
91p. 92p. 93p. 94p. 95p. 96p. 97p. 98p. 99p. 100p. 101Issue
Table of ContentsAssemblage, No. 25 (Dec., 1994), pp. 1-
101Front Matter [pp. 1 - 5]Urban Pleasures and the Moral Good
[pp. 6 - 13]You Are Here: Information Drift [pp. 15 - 43]In the

Place of the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer [pp. 61 -
79]New Babylons: Urbanism at the End of the Millennium [pp.
80 - 81]Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis [pp. 82 -
101]Back Matter
Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism," Architectural Review
vol. 118 (December 1955): 354-361.
In tlte chapel of Notre Dnmc du Hnut at Rrmchamp,
Lc Corbusier is generally felt to ltavc achieved one of the
tno.<~l personal and surprisit¥J buildings of his career. In
thcfirstjlurry of cmcitcmcnt at its Unc:»pcctcdforms;
consternation has been expressed at the way a master of
logicttl structure has set Ms great cw'Ving roof apparently
ajloat above the apexes of the massive and perforated
wall.~-thc narrow glazed gap between roof and walls can
be seen in the exterior views opposite ~. Matl~rcr
consideration nrlll be able to evaluate "'<il& lwrvfar the
succCss of the plastic cjfcctjustiftcs such anti~structural
mages and, as a step to·tVard such evaluation, James
Stirli,tg wiU contribute at! appreciation of Notre Dtunc
du I·Inut in the new year.
Rayner Banham
THE NEW BR UTALISM
1L'Architecture, c'est, avec des matib:cs bruts, CtG.blir dea
rapports emouvantu.' Le Corbusler: Vers·une Arclliteclure.
Introduce an observer into any field of forces, influences or
communications and that

field becomes distorted. It is common opinion that Das Kapital
has played old harry
with capitalism, so that Marxists can hardly recognize it when
they see it, and the wide-
spread diffusion of Freud's ideas has wrought such havoc with
clinical psychology that
any intelligent patient can make a nervous wreck of his analyst.
What has been the
influence of contemporary architectural historians on the history
of contemporary
architecture?
They have created the idea of a Modern Movement-this was
known even before
Basil Taylor took up arms against false historicism-and beyond
that they have offered
a rough classification of the 'isms' which are the thumb-print of
Modernity into two
main types: One, like Cubism, is a label, a recognition tag,
applied by critics and
historians to .. a body of work which appears to have certain
consistent principles running
through it, whatever the relationship of the artists; the other,
like F:uturism, is a banner,
a slogan, a policy consciously adopted by a group of artists,
whatever the apparent
similarity or dissimilarity of their products. And it is entirely
characteristic of the New
Brutalism-our first native art-movement since the New
Art~History arrived here-that
it should confound these categories and belong to both at once.
Is Art-History to blame for this? Not in any obvious way, but in
practically every
other way. One cannot begin to study the New Brutalism
without realizing how deeply

the New Art-History has bitten into progressive English
architectural thought, into
teaching methods, into the common language of communication
between architects and
between architectural critics. What is interesting about R.
Furneaux Jordan's parthian
Reyner Bonham: 7'HE NEW BllUTALISM
footnote on the New Brutalism-' .. #tubetkin talks across time to
the great masters,
the Smithsons talk only to each other'-is not the fact that it is
nearly true, and thus
ruins his argument, but that its terms of valuation are historical.
The' New Brutalism
has to be seen against the background of the recent history of
history, and, in particular,
the growing sense of the inner history of the Modern Movement
itself.
The history of the phrase itself is revealing. Its
form is clearly derived from THE ARCHITECTURAL
REVIEw's post-war trouvaille 'The New Empiricism,'
a term which was intended to describe visible
tendencies in Scandinavian architecture to diverge
from another historical concept 'The International
Style.' This usage, like any involving the word new,
opens up an historical perspective. It postulates that
an old empiricism can be identified by the historian,
and that the new one can be distinguished from it
by methods of historical comparison, which will
also distinguish it from a mere 'Empirical Revival.'

The ability to deal with such fine shades of historical
meaning is in itself a measure of our handiness with
the historical method today, and the use of phrases
of the form 'The New X-ism'-where X equals any
adjectival root-became commonplace in the early
nineteen-fifties in foUl'th-year studios and other
places where architecture is discussed, rather than
practised. ·
· The passion of such discussion has been greatly en-
hanced by the clarity of its polarization-Communists
versus the Rest-and it was somewhere in this vigorous
polemic that the term 'The New Brutalism' was first
coined.'lt was; in the beginning, a term of Communist
abuse, and it was intended to signify the normal vocabu-
lary of Modern Architecture-fiat roofs, glass, exposed
structure-considered as morally reprehensible devia-
tions from 'The New Humanism,' a phrase which
means something different in Marxist ·hands to the
meaning which might be expected. The New
Humanism meant, in architecture at that time,
brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small
windows (or small panes at any rate )-picturesque
detailing without picturesque planning. It was, in
fact, the so-called 'William Morris Revival,' now
happily defunct, since Kruschev's reversal of the -
Party's architectural line, though this reversal has,
of course, taken the guts out of subsequent
polemics. But it will be observed that The New
Humanism _was again a quasi-historical concept,
oriented, however spuriously, toward that mid-nine-
teenth century epoch which was Marxisn;t's Golden
Age, when you could recognize a capitalist when you
met him.
However, London architectUl'al circles are a small

field in which to conduct a polemic of any kind, and
abuse must be directed at specific persons, rather
than classes of persons, since there was rarely enough
unanimity (except among Marxists) to allow a class
to coalesce. The New Brutalists at whom Marxist
spite was directed could be named and recognized-
1 '!'here is a persistent belief that the word Brutalism (or
something like it)
r·, had nppenrcd in the English Summaries in an issue of Bygg-
Mastaren published
'·· ... Jo.te in 1950. The reference cannot now be traced, and the
story must be
' "io~ruted to that limbo of Modern Movement demonology
where Swedes1
' <> "'~!'ts and the Town and Country Planning Association are
bracketed
:-.., ·-..."l.(ffercnt jsotopes of the common • Adversary.'
' ~-.
.1 .il: .. ,
and so could their friends in other arts. The
term had no sooner got into public circulation
than its meaning began to narrow. Among the
non-Marxist grouping there was no particular
unity of programme or intention, but there was a
certain community of interests, a tendency to look
toward Le Corbusier, and to be aware of something
called le beton b?"Ut, to know the quotation which
appears at the head of this article and, in the case
of the more sophisticated and aesthetically literate,
to know of the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and his

connection in Paris. Words and ideas, personalities
and discontents chimed together and in a matter of
weeks-long before the Third Programme and the
monthlies had got hold of the phrase-it had been
appropriated as their own, by their own desire and
public consent, by two young architects, Alison and
Peter Smithson.
The phrase had thus changed both its meaning and
its usage. Adopted as something between a slogan
and a brick-bat flung in the public's face, The New
Brutalism ceased to be a label descriptive of a tendency
common to most modern architecture, and became
instead a programme, a banner, while retaining
some-rather restricted-sense as a descriptive label.
It is·because it is both kinds of -ism at once that The
New Brutalism eludes precise description, while
remaining a living force in contemporary British
architecture .•
As a descriptive label it has two overlapping, but
not identical, senses. Non-architecturally it describes
the art of Dubuffet, some aspects of Jackson Pollock
and of Appel, and the bUl'lap paintings of Alberto
Burri-among foreign artists-and, say, Magda
Cordell or Edouardo ·Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson
among English artists. With these last two, the
Smithsons collected and hung the I.C.A. exl!libition
Parallel of Life and A1·t, which, though it probably pre-
ceded the coining of the phrase, is nevertheless regarded
as a locus classicus of the movement. The more
instructive aspects of this exhibition will be con-
sidered later: for the moment let us observe that inany
critics (and students at the Architec,tural Association)
complained of the deliberate flouting of the traditional
concepts of photographic beauty, of a cult of ugliness, "

and 'denying the spiritual in Man.' The tone of re-
sponse to The New Brutalism existed even before.
hostile critics knew what to call it, and there was an
awareness that the Smithsons were headed in a
different direction to most other younger architects '
in London.
Alison Smithson first claimed the words in
as her own in a description of a project for a
house in Soho (Architectural Design, November,
designed before the phrase existed, and nr<,vi•ous:l1
tagged 'The warehouse aesthetic' -a very ·
Architectural Review, December 1955
of what The New Brutalism stood for in its first
Of this house, she wrote: ' ... had this been
would have been the first exponent of the
Br·ut,ali•>m in England, as the preamble to the
shows: "It is our intention in this
to have the structure exposed entirely,
interior finishes wherever practicable. The
onnt.l•H:.d·.cw should aim at a high standard of basic
!cortstr,uction, as in a small warehouse".' The publica-
this project led to an extensive and often
'·hihtricms colTespondence in various periodicals through
tl;~,f~~:~r~~d of 1954, a correspondence which wandered
fll further from its original point because
writers were in fact discussing either the

fexhibit;ion of Life and Art, or the (as yet)
un]puJP!lEme:a school at Runstanton. When this was
published (AR, September, 1954) the dis-
cus:sio•n took a sharper and less humorous tone, for
in three-dimensional and photographic reality,.
in the classic Modern Movement materials of
concr~,t,e, steel and glass, was the Smithsons' only
building. The phrase The New Brutalism
applied to it, though it had been
in the spring of 1950, long before even the
Soho, but the Brutalists themselves have
this and it has become the
wherever the building has been
'''' Hunstanton, and the ·house in Soho, can serve as
points of architectural reference by which The
Brutalism in architecture may be defined.
are the visible and identifiable characteristics
these two ·structures? Both have formal, axial
pla.nsc-JEJ:uns!tartton, in fact, has something like true
bi-•txi>tl symmetry, and the small Gymnasium block·
ilJOJogside the school is a kind of exemplar in little
how formal the complete scheme was to
been-and this formality is immediately legible
without. Both exhibit their basic structure, and
make a point of exhibiting their materials-in·
this emphasis on basic structure is so obsessive

many superficial critics have taken this to be the
. of New Brutalist Architecture. Admittedly,
emphasis on basic structure. is important, even
it is not the whole story, and what has caused
iHu:nst:anlton to lodge in the public's gullet is the fact
it is almost unique among modern buildings in
made of what it appears to be made of. Whatever
said about honest use of materials, most
appear to be made of .whitewash
glaczirrg, even when they are made of
or steel. appears to be made of
brick,. steel and concrete, and is in fact made of
brick, steel and concrete. Water and electricity
. come out ,of unexplained holes in the wall,
are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes
manifest conduits. One can see what Hunstanton
of, and how it works, and there is not another
to see except the play of spaces.
ruthless adherence to one of the basic moral
/i1~~~~~~~~v~ of the Modern Movement--honesty in [s and
material-has precipitated a situation
only the pen of Ibsen could do justice. The
of moderate architects, hommes moyens sensliels,
found. their accepted practices for waiving the
requirements of the conscience-code suddenly called
in question; they have been put rudely on the spot,

and they have not liked the experience. Of course, it
is not just the building itself which has precipitated
this situation, it is the things the Brutalists have
said and done as well, but, as with the infected Spa
in An Enemy of the People, the play of personalities
focuses around a physical object.
The qualities of that object may be summarized as
follows: 1, Formal legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition
of structure, and 3, valuation of materials for their
inherent qualities 'as found.' This summary can be
used to answer the question: Are there other New
Brutalist buildings besides Hunstanton? It is interest-
ing to note that such a summary of qualities could be
made to describe Marseilles, Promc;mtory and Lake-
shore apartments, General Motors Technical Centre,
much recent Dutch work and several projects by
younger English architects affiliated to ClAM. But,
with the possible exception of Marseilles, the Brutal-
ists would probably reject most of these buildings
from the canon, and so must we, for all of these
structmes exhibit an excess of suaviter in modo,
. even if there is plenty of fortiter in re about them.
In the last resort what characterizes the New
Brutalism in architecture as in painting is precisely its
brutality, its je-m'en-foutisme, its bloody-mindedness.
Only one other building conspicuously carries these
qualities in the way that Hunstanton does, and that
is Louis Kahn's Yale Art Centre. Here is a building
which is uncompromisingly frank about its materials,
which is inconceivable apart from it,s boldly exhibited
structural method which-being a concrete space-frame
-is as revolutionary and unconventional as the use of
the Plastic Theory in stressing Hunstanton's steel
H-frames. Furthermore, the plan is very formal in

the disposition of its main elements, and makes a
kind of symmetry about two clearly defined axes at
right angles to one another. And this is a building
which some Brutalists can apparently accept as a
constituent New Brutalist structUl'e.
But, with all due diffidence, the present author
submits that it still does not quite answer to the
standard set by Hunstanton. For one thing, the
Smithsons' work is characterized by an abstemious
under-designing of the details, and much of the
impact of the building comes from the ineloquence,
but absolute consistency, of such components as
the stairs and handrails. By comparison, Kahn's
detailing is arty, and the stair-rail and balustrading
(if that is the word for stainless netting) is jarringly
out of key with the rough-shuttered concrete of the
main structure. This may be 'only a matter of
detailing' but there is another short-fall about Yale
Art Centre which could not be brushed off so easily.
Every Smithson design has been, obviously or subtly,
a coherent and apprehensible visual entity, but this
Louis Kahn's design narrowly fails to be. The internal
spaces will be cluttered with display screens which,
in the nature of his programme and his sol,ution of it,
must be susceptible of being moved, so that formal
clarity is always threatened. But beyond this the
relation of interior to exterior fails to validate the
axes which govern the plan. Available viewpoints, the
placing of the entrances, the handling of the. exterior
!.
I
. I,
I

I
:··~ ... -.
I
~
walls-;-all tend to lose or play down the presence of
planmng axes. No doubt there are excellent functional
reasons for the doors being where they are, and
excellent structural reasons for the walls being treated
in the way they are-but if these reasons were so
compelling, why bother with an axial plan anyhow?
This is a hard thing to have to say about a seriously
considered building by a reputable architect of some
standing, but contact with Brutalist architecture
tends to drive one to hard judgements, and the one
thing of which the Smithsons have never been accused
is a lack of logic or consistency in thinking through a
design.· In fact it is the ruthless logic more than
anything else which most hostile critics find distressing
about Hunstanton-'Or perhaps it is the fact that this
logic is worn on the sleeve. One of the reasons for
this obtrusive logic is that it contributes to the
apprehensibility and coh.,ren.ce of the building as a
visual entity, because it contributes to the building
as ' an image.' ·
An Image-with the utterance of these two words
we bridge the gap between the possible use of The
New Brutalism as a descriptive label covering, in
varying degrees of accuracy, two or more buildings,
and The New Brutalism as a slogan, and we also go

some way to bridge the gap between the meaning of
the term as applied to architecture and its meaning
as applied to painting and sculpture. The word image
in this sense is one of the most intractable and the
most useful terms ·in contemporary aesthetics, and
some attempt to explain it must be made.
A great many things have been called 'an image'-
S.M. della Consolazione at Todi, a painting by Jack-
son . Pollock, the Lever Building, the 1954 Cadillac
convertible, the roofscape of the Unite at Marseilles,
any of the hundred photographs in Parallel of Life
and Art. 'Image' seems to be a word that describes
anything or nothing. Ultimately, however, it means
~omething which is. visually valuable, but not neces-
sarily by the standards of classical aesthetics. Where
Thomas Aquinas supposed beauty to be quod visum
placet (that which seen, pleases),• image may be
defined as quod visum perturbat-that which seen,
affects the emotions, a situation which could subsume
the pleasure caused by beauty, but is not normally
taken to do so, for the New Brutalists' interests in
image are commonly regarded, by many of themselves
as well as their critics, as being anti-art, or at any rate
anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word.
But what is equally as important as the specific kind
of response, is the nature of its cause. What pleased
St. Thomas was an abstract quality, beauty-what
moves a New Brutalist is the thing itsGlf, in its
totality, and with all its overtones of human associa-
tion. These ideas of course lie close to the general
body of anti-Academic aesthetics currently in circula-
tion, though they are not to be identified exactly
with Michel Tapie's concept of un Art· Autre,• even
though that concept covers many Continental Brutal-

' Paraphrasing Summa Tlleologka II {i) xxvii, I. The poasage is
normall;r-
rendcrcd into English as ', •. but thllt whose very apprehension
pleases 1s
called beautiful.'
._. ~Sec bis book of the same name, published Jn 191)2, A
closely anulogous
development is that of musiquc cotJCTetc, which uses 'rool
sounds,' manipulated
Jn a ma·nner which resembles the manipulation of some of the
photographs
In! Pbalralk/, ll!ld d ... no oon®tll ilsolf Wllb b•tmony o<
m•ody In !IllY NCO~-
Dt.ll ~way,
Reyncr Banham: TilE NEW BRUTALISM
ists as well as Edouardo Paolozzi.
Nevertheless this concept of Image is common to
all aspects of The New Brutalism in England, but the
manner in which it works out in architectural practice
has some surprising twists to it. Basically, it requires
that the building should be an immediately appre-
hensible visual entity, and that the form grasped by
the eye should be confirmed by experience of the
building ih use. Further, that this form should be
entirely proper to the functions and materials of the
building, in their entirety. Such a relationship between
structure, function and form is the basic common-
place of all good building of course, the demand that
this form should be apprehensible and memorable
is the apical uncommonplace . which makes good
building into great architecture. The fact that this
form-giving obligation has been so· far forgotten that a

great deal of good building can be spoken of as if it
were architecture, is a mark of a seriously decayed
condition in English architectural standards. It has
become too easy to get away with the assumption
that if structure and function are served then the
result must be architecture-so easy that the mean-
ingless phrase 'the conceptual building' has been
coined to defend the substandard architectural
practices of the routine-functionalists, as if 'conceptual
buildings' were something new, and something faintly
reprehensible in modern architecture.
All great architecture has been 'conceptual,' has
been image-making-and the idea that any great
buildings, such as the Gothic Cathedrals, grew un-
consciously through anonymous collaborative atten-
tion to structure and function is one of the most
insidious myths with which the Modern Movement
is saddled. Every great building of the Modern
Movement has been a conceptual design, especially
those like the Bauhaus, which go out of their way
to look as if they were the products of 'pure' ·•
functio.nalisln, whose aformal compositions· are com- .:
monly advanced by routine-functionalists in defence
of their own abdication of architectural responsibility. ·•.
But a conceptual building is as likely to be aformal ':
as it is to be formal, as a study of the Smithsons' •
post-Hunstanton projects will show.
Hunstanton's formality is unmistakably Miesian, .
as Philip Johnson pointed out, possibly because liT ;:
·was one of the few recent examples of conceptual, ..
form-giving design to which a young architect could
turn at the time of its conception, and the formality
of their Coventry Cathedral competition entry is equally

marked, but here one can safely posit the interference ,
of historical studies again, for, though the ,
priority of date as between the Smithsons'
and the publication of Professor Wittkower's LLr,,ll.t•
tectural Principles of the Age of Il umanism is disputed :;
(by the Smithsons) it cannot be denied that they were ''
in touch with Wittkowerian studies at the time,
and were as excited by them as anybody else. . ·
The general impact of Professor Wittkower's book ·
on a whole generation of post-war architectural ·
students is one of the phenomena of our time. Its
exposition of a body of architectural theory in which
function and form were significantly linked by the
objective laws governing the Cosmos (as Alberti · ·
tmd PaUadio m~derstoqd them) 5uddenly offered a/
[contln.e<l on page 361
Uli8!.
pollock
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SOUTH FACAOE
~~-_.:;.:.~;.:.,.:;;::~
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NEW BRUTALISM
l'a.inlillf1 on. lmrilt}l-llfpirnlfJI Jtmla!i#

in hi8 «fUfmlc to m11tr.rialn, J/urri 11CC1.mhr
fl1c burlllp 1111'; BIIIIIO vi"1111l t•trlu<' os llw
1mint it. r.arrirn,
pa.olozzi
1'hc first build in(! to be cnfe(lorizell «,~
JJrH111Ust, tflis wojectjor a house in Solw
(A, ,(1 P. 8mitlumn) !'XJtibi/,1' uot mr/y lim
<'tn]lhrt$i8 OH tllii(Crirrls am/. struclurl!, but
also tile compositional formality of early I i
Brutali8m.
(Jo/rlcn J .• mw rr·rlrt•dnJ~111('11/. jll'ojrct, 8/mW$
SmiiiiMII~ tum{~
llf/ltim:l tl•'lill!<'frJ! nml fnml!lli!/1, p/nr.illr/
iiiCfi'IU!e!llli~tm/ fm·
p/w~i~· on ~u, .. l'ifl!ll/nti!m .• fmln'lllliun 111ul litWut/1
wcuw.
2
H!ttt.ffirobl IJuitV'rNilt/ll.!'IM!fdl>llil (1'11111/Wli/iun e/1/ry
/111 A. ,J• P,
8miflmm)-furlln•nl.llr•m•lr1JIUH'IIt uf Nm11 1/rutfllfRt
llrr!.i/tr(~l(
t.m~mltlir r:"m.p/rtdy 11·/IJrmnl, 11/!li·t/m!mdrfc, 1/l'l
~1/dfi!Wit
CIII!I.JI(!Siallllll/ 1/1('/J/111/8 r.rr.mp/ified. ii!JII!illti.ll!f /Jy/
1111/ufk niJ
Buni.lllli8ml uvdk·U'fiYH, 1!/ll.l ""npem/rtl bmumtlt
rr/m;:·l/llrl/llf
Hi!Y!'Iun, Mt/1/ec/.llle tl!flln cnll'flllf'{l, umlu J, with 1/.r .!/U

d~JI(., 3, b'clllt/rr /frmnr., 2, mu!.IJtfmr /m(/llill{fR 1111 nile.
3(}0
Tltc Arcltitectural Review, December 1955
. continued from poge 35BJ
out of the doldrum of routine-functionalist
aO<Jicauons, and neo-Palladianism became the order
, of the day. The effect of Architectural Principles has
· it. by far the most important contribution-for
well as good-by any historian to English
Al•<Jhitectw:e since Pioneers of the 1J1odern Movement,
it precipitated a nice displ!tation on the proper
of history. The question became: Humanist
princiipl<~S to be followed? or Humanist principles
an example of the kind of principles to look for?
students opted for the former alternative,
Routine-Palladians soon became as thick on
ground as Routine-Functionalists. The Brutalists,
. the inherent risk of a return to pure
pronounced at Liverpool than
AA-sheered ofl' abruptly in the other direction
were soon involved in the organi::;ation of Parallel
Life and Art.

Introducing this exhibition to an AA student
debats Peter Smithson declared: 'We are not going
about proportion and symmetry' and this
his declaration of war on the inherent academi-
of the neo-Palladians, and the anti-Brutalist
of the house made it clea1' how justified was
su:spJ.cllm of crypto-acadernicism by taking their
only on Pal!adio and Alberti but also
and the Absolute. The new direction in
lrutal.ist architectural invention showed. at once in
m~~~~~l~l~~:~~ Golden Lane and Sheffield University
w entries. The former, only remembered for
put the idea of the street-deck back in circula-
England, is notable for its determination to
coherent visual image by non-formal means,
~£~~~~:J~~~~g visible circulation, identifiable units of
~a and fully validating the presence of
u~~;e~,~~:~~s as part of the total image-the per-
"' photographs of people pasted on to the
ra"l'rin~rs. so that the human presence almost over-
v~JlmE:cl the architecture.
the Sheffield design went further even than
ais--a.na aformalism becomes as positive a force
its composition as it does in a painting by Burri
Pollock. Composition might seem pretty strong
· for so apparently casual a layout, but this

not an 'unconceptual' design, and on
~runillaicion it can be shown to have a composition,
not on the elementary rule-and-compass
which underlies most architectural com-
""''"v''• so much as an intuitive sense of topology.
~.~~~~K~'~~ of architecture topology has always
n in a subordinate and unrecognized way-
~~~~t~l~a~s penetration, circulation, inside and out,
Ill been important, but elementary Platonic
been the master discipline. Now, in the
j§~~~l:~~~~t Sheffield project the roles are reversed,
~ becomes the dominant and geometry becomes
the subordinate discipline. The 'connectivity' of the
circulation routes is flourished on the exterior and no
attempt is made t<:> give a geometrical form to the
total scheme; large blocks of topologically similar
spaces stand abqut the site with the same graceless
memorability as martello towers or pit-head gear.
Such a dominance accorded to topology-in whose
classifications a brick is the same 'shape' as a
billiard ball (unpenetrated solid) and a teacup is the
same 'shape' as a gramophone record (continuous
surface w1th. one hole) is clearly analogous to the
displacement of Tomistic 'beauty' by Brutalist
'Image, '• and Sheffield. ren~ains the most consistent
and extreme point reached by any Brutalists in their
search for Une Architecture Autre. It is not likely to
displace Hunstanton in architectural discussions as the
prime exemplar of The. New Brutalism, but it is the
only building-design which fully matches up to the

threat and promise of Parallel of Life and Art.
. And it shows that the formal axiality of Hunstanton
is not integral to New Brutalist architecture. Miesian
or Wittkowerian geometry was only an ad hoc device
for the realization of 'Images,' and when Parallel of
Life and Art had enabled Brutalists to define their
relationship to the visual world in terms of something
other than geometry, then formality was discarded.
The definition of a New Brutalist building derived
from Hunstanton and Yale Art Centre, above, must
be modified so as to exclude formality as a basic .
quality if it is to cover future developments and
should more properly read: 1, Memorability as an
Image; 2, Clear exhibition of Structure; a.J:d 8,
Valuation of Materials 'as found.' Remembering that
an Image is what affects the emotions, that structure,
in its fullest sense, is the relationship of rarts, and that
materials 'as found' are raw matenals, we have
worked our way back to the quotation which headed
this article 'L'Arch.itecture, c'est, avec des Matieres
Bruts, etablir des rapports emouvants,' but we have
worked our way to th.is point through such an aware-
ness of history and its uses that we see that The New
Brutalism, if it is architecture in the grand sense of Le
Corbusier's definition, is also architecture of our time
and not of his, nor of Lubetkin 's, nor of the times of
the Masters of the past. Even if it were true that
the Brutalists speak only to one another, the fact
that they have stopped speaking to Mansart, to
Palladio and to Alberti would make The New
Brutalism, even in its more private sense, a major
contribution to the architecture of today.
'This nnnlogy could probably be rendered epistemologJcaUy
strict-both
beauty and geometry, hitherto regarded as ultimate properties ot

the cosmos,
now appear as linguistically refined special cases of more
generalized concepts
-image and topology-which, thou~h essentially primitive, have
been
reached only through immense sophistication. Once this state of
sopbiatica~
tion has been achieved, and the new concept digested, it
suddenly appears so
simple tha.t it ca.n be vuJga.riz:ed without serious distortion,
and for a handy
.bnck~entrnnce to topology without using the highly complex
mathematics
involved. the reader could not do better tbtm acquire a copy of
Astounding
Science Fiction for July. 1904-.
II
I
~·
'I
I
I
I
I.
. i
'
' I.
I
I
i.
·i i' , I

I
i
I
I
372 Sample Soundbite
Quotations:
1) “The panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use
one may wish to put it to, produces
homogenous effects of power.” pp. 202, Panopticism
2) “In 1970, Archizoom interpreted Typical Plan as the terminal
condition of (Western) civilization, a utopia of
the norm. Since then, the one really new architectural subject
this century has introduced has been endlessly
denigrated in the name of ideology—its occupants ‘slaves,’ its
environment ‘faceless,’ its accumulations
‘ugly.’” pp. 348, Typical Plan
3) “The cumulative effect of architecture during the last two
centuries has been like that of a general lobotomy
performed on society at large, obliterating vast areas of social
experience. It is employed more and more as a
preventative measure; an agency for peace, security, and
segregation which, by its very nature, limits the
horizon of experience.” pp. 90, Figures, Doors and Passages
Summary statement:

Panopticism uses the panopticon to illustrate a diagram of
power, rather than a particular building. The
panopticon’s method of inducing people to discipline
themselves manifests as an instrument of control and
repression in society at large; it ensures the efficiency of power
to regulate behavior anywhere, for anyone
ranging from a madman, a patient, a criminal, or a worker, to a
schoolboy. In the second quotation, European
dismissal of the “Typical Plan,” deeming its occupants “slaves,”
seems to stem from suspicion of the kind of
efficiency which appears cold and mechanical in nature through
its homogeneity. Finally, Evans’s statement
affirms the potential of architecture as a tool of social division
and control. Both Evans and Koolhaas, however,
argue in their essays for the positive cultural effects that
architecture also makes possible, in Evans’s words, “an
architecture that recognizes passion, carnality and sociality.”
Definition of Terms:
Panopticon – the “panopticon” was a prison-style building
designed by Bentham, which was unique in the sense
that it incorporated a tower in the center that made it possible
for a supervisor to view all the inhabitants of the
cells around it. The prisoners can be seen, but cannot see
themselves. This “permanent visibility” creates a
condition in the prisoner’s mind that they under constant
surveillance, and thereby ensures the “automatic
functioning of power” through architecture. Foucault uses the
panopticon to illustrate the way in which
discipline and punishment can work in modern society.
Movement notation – this type of notation was introduced to
capture movement of architectural bodies within
spaces, at a time when new methods were being sought to
overcome the limitations of traditional plans and

sections in representing architecture. Derived from
choreography and musical scores, they became a type of art
form that layered, juxtaposed and superimposed images to
obscure the relationships between plans and
traditional architectural graphics. Tschumi uses the example of
movement notation to paint the shift in the late
20th century toward an architecture that began to represent not
just spaces, but the events that took place inside
them. (Note to 372 students: this term was taken from a reading
that, although assigned for the same
week, was different from the three that were used above for
quotations.)
Typical plan - by Typical Plan, Koolhaas refers to the modern
American invention of a standardized floor plan,
used to best effect in large office towers. To Koolhaas, the
Typical Plan represents a triumph over modernist
formalism because it represents the most abstract program
possible. By its mere emptiness, simply “a floor, a
core, a perimeter, and a minimum of columns,” it embraces all
possibilities.

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