Studying history provides us with
references to the past that are frozen moments in time. Whether cognizant or
not, we are observers looking to gain from the past in order to create our own
experiences in the present. The present constantly announces itself through
moments of experience and demands for the future. Throughout history the
dualities of tradition and progress have posed issues for debate in great times
and lesser ones, both destined for change. The machine for some signaled the
end of the individual but gave humanity, for example with the camera, the
ability to capture moments forever with the photograph. The purview of the
historiographer requires expansive vistas and sharp vision with an inherent
ability to collect the moments marked for immortality. Hyungmin Pai has this
extraordinary, cogent ability to write history, as witnessed in The
Portfolio and the Diagram, Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America. This
book, composed in exacting language with uncommon clarity, is based on
Pai’s, MIT dissertation written in the early 1990s, under the guidance of
Stanford Anderson.

The author leads the reader through
the end of the nineteenth century, as the Beaux-Arts trained architect looks
toward a world of problem solving that necessitates replacing the portfolio
with the diagram. As the architectural field readies for the next generation of
its profession, the mechanical pencil is passed from the academic repository of
collected drawings known as the portfolio, towards the demands of an emerging
industrial world that no longer had the time for the mimetic equisse or
sketch. The discourse of the architect and the changing role of architecture
experienced a rapid departure from past practice as a result of a changing economic
climate in America after World War I. The rise of automation dictated a new
building type, as did advances in science and medicine. Architects were left to ponder their
reflections, for suddenly they needed to fit into a system and serve society, at
a time when capital and sponsorship waned. Add to this the automated printing
press and how it gave the average citizen the ability to design his or her own
home via mail order catalog plans, it was a time in which architecture as the
art and craft of humanity, stumbled to right itself, as it evolved. What is
made clear throughout these two hundred ninety pages, plus generous notations,
is that this was a time of enormous change.

Another dimension to this book is
the visual support in the form of complete illustrations, drawings and diagrams
that are found throughout. Careful study of the included imagery helps
reinforce the chronological order of the history being expressed and, on
another level, supports the story without words. One fine drawn example is
Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 Panopticon. This illustration exemplifies an early
shift from the portfolio to the diagrammatic plan. The circular space is noted
to be a truly functional layout allowing the discourse of the diagram to be
born. In it we can visualize a new work place that contains no dark spaces and
provides the employer with full views of the worker in the workplace. Whether
factory or prison setting this concept for a fully functionalized space was to
revolutionize the architect’s world.
Industrial engineering and the advent of ergonomic design were also
spawned. One hundred fifty years later Paul Nelson presents another circular
design in a diagram executed for the Museum of Science that was
“proposed for the 1937 Exposition Internationale, Paris.”(238) It builds on the
simple diagram but expands to include an illusion of an axonometric drawing,
heralding another format and view of modern architecture.

Nestled in this complex historic
framework are glimpses of visual beauty. Witness the composite view of the
grand auditorium building, part of (the) entry for Phoebe Hearst
Competition, University of California, Berkeley, ca.1899 created by
Constantine- De¢sire¢
Despradelle, a “distinguished professor of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries”(263) also at MIT. In this grand theatrical-like stage plan
there is fantasy, yet the assertive markings of reality. Another feast for the eyes is Sigfried
Giedion’s work, Juxtaposition of New Mexico pueblo, California bungalow, and
an Irving Gill’s house design, done for the Architectural Record. This revolutionary method of combining
visual resources that unite “photographs, plans of buildings with details,
sections, axonometrics, and site plans” allows Giedion to acknowledge Le
Corbusier, while maintaining his editorial presence in Space, Time and
Architecture, 3^rd edition, 1954. Giedion’s clever positioning of images developed a format for the
standard text layout with photographs. This is shown in a “double-page spread
of a photomontage of Rockefeller Center” (262) and a time-lapse photograph of a
golf strike by Harold “Doc” Edgerton, he of MIT, high-speed, strobe
photography, milk – drop fame.

As we read through this history we
find the architect in a perpetual state of persuasion to quantify existence,
lest we not forget the authors of setback aesthetics and the International
Style. (261) It was Giedion again, according to Hyungmin Pai who raises “the
historical convergence of the new photography and modern architecture.” (261) The lens and special camera angles were associated
with formatting and picturing modern architecture. (255) From both disciplines
there arose a celebration of the concept of space and time. The photograph rekindled
the portfolio format presenting impressions, versus the here and now of real
time. It is what Sokratis Georgiadis refers to as “ a perceptive apparatus” (263), and also what the author points
to as “an intersection of the camera-viewer and its object, frame and
presence.”(263) The human eye was asked, as Pai points out, to be a moving
camera.

As with all great storytellers we
somehow end where we begin. Throughout these pages is built a structure, if you
will, that begins with the ideas, the plans, the codes, and the interior
furnishings. We are privy to the ad campaigns and the vying ideologies of the
times. As the project is complete we must rely on the photograph to capture the
moment and the essence of the structure, in order to sell the space. As Pai
rides the waves of change following the discourse of architecture and the birth
of modernity in America, he presents the reader with a comprehensive assessment
of historic events. This history is chiseled from the vantage point of a dedication
to the monumental and how, if successful, it is here that we find inspiration.

©
2003 Elissa Tatigikis Iberti

Elissa Tatigikis Iberti is an
Assistant Professor of Visual Arts and Chair of the Department
of Visual Arts at Dowling College in Oakdale, NY. Residing in New York
City, she is a practicing artist specializing in painting and costume design.

Categories: General, Philosophical