The Fourth Typology:
Paradigmatic Ambiguity

“I was reading something out of the diary of Kierkegaard the other night, and he said if you work hard enough you can be your own father. And everybody who makes something wants to be his own father—the origin. You want to deny that what you do has a source external to you.”                                                                                              -Eric Owen Moss 

INTRODUCTION

An agonistic paradigm, should not, by definition, be attainable, as paradigms are totalizing views: models which cannot be disbanded into a constitution of components.

As “public” often carries a double-meaning of social totality and specific audiences, it is an elusive form that can be articulated reflexively around specific discourses, namely the self and the public sphere. The existence of this polarity, the basic separation of group versus individual, does not require a choice between one or the other. Yet in resolving problems inherent to a circumstance, or specific discursive framework, one choice may have more instrumentality than another.

Postmodernism understood this, claiming that difference lies within modernity itself. Rather than suffer a systematic modern decay on the internal contradictions which are embedded in the modern’s problematic dialectics, it chose to endure a loss of meaning, through allowing uncritical subjectivities to combine, overlap, and intersect, not deferring to the domain of each group’s meta-narrative.

This disintegration, however, means the dissolution of narrative subjects into a fog of combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous typologies. These mixing moments of subjectivity, of discord and resolve, do not cohere into an identity, yet they are stable and can be interrogated. Similarly, within architecture’s postmodern discourse, the dominant function within each type, becomes the radical interrogation of dominant function, or more namely, a liberated function, which can oscillate between poles of dominance that might otherwise have no causal relation besides the very absence of dissensus: pure possibility.

Postmodern indifference, then, bears witness to how antagonism is openly admitted, displayed – and, in this way, neutralized: the tension between different standpoints is flattened into indifferent plurality of standpoints. Contradiction thus loses its subversive edge, in a space of globalized permissiveness. Sometimes, the contradiction itself can serve as its own mask : the most efficient way to obfuscate social antagonisms, to diminish conflict, is to openly display them.

The question then, is not one of recovering difference, as in the modern sense, but to probe more carefully the production of heterogenous types. Were the critical parameters of constitutive subtypes tuned to force opposition, or direct conflict, we might say that the higher type, in addition to postmodern liberation [Habermas], might acquire an agonistic sensibility [Mouffe] producing the contestation necessary to recover an epistemic coherence of dominant function (either through itself or the appearance of its opposite).

In this regard, the model of paradigm as the progressive development of consensus is outmoded. In fact, attempts to retrieve the model of consensus can only lead to the domination of capital, as they repeat standards of coherence demanded for reprocessing functional efficiency. If then, architecture can be fixed in a state suspended between antagonistic paradigms, what is acquired is an uncommon legitimation of the common. By building democratic space which supports dissent, in addition to difference, oppressive relations of power that exist in society are able to come to the forefront so that they can be challenged. 

If the modern paradigm of progress is to be understood as new moves under fixed rules, and the postmodern paradigm as inventing new rules (consequently changing the game), the agonistic paradigm is the game which is fixed between two sets of contradictory rules; requiring moves which are nimble enough to advance through the gap.

The inventiveness of an agonistic paradigm raises the possibility of a new sense of justice, as well as knowledge, as we move through the architectural frameworks which entangle us, namely Rationalism and Realism. For Slavo Žižek, the Real is not that which description falls short; the Real is instead the movement from one vantage point to another—“the parallax."

While more putative spatial solutions may exist, merging point and counterpoint, I argue that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Preston Scott Cohen) presents a dialogic synthesis, wherein, a higher type emerges in the strange alignment of two opposing paradigmatic frameworks. Yet, this new coupled state cannot be decomposed into its ancestoral paradigms, but rather, occupies each paradigm at different times in the same space. The antecedents, then, shift organizational control, each holding more salience in particular circumstances. In that gap between circumstance, between antecedents, there functions a singular, agonistic logic-- both in radical continuity with, and apart from, the theoretical tensions expressed by the Modern Movement. 

In the perturbation of type, one must first deduce what is common to a group of precedents, so as to establish criteria for manipulation. Preston Scott Cohen’s work presupposes exceptional typological states, using complex geometry as a discursive apparatus for deconstructing and reconstructing typological configurations. While the retention of ideal geometry contributes to the sensation that one is experiencing something coherent, against the idea of its fragmentary quality, its true architectural agency is found in the reinforcement and subsequent de-familiarization of recognized types, creating a gap (or Žižek’s parallax)to act. By its geometric nature the operations necessitate an index of transformation, however, I would argue, it is not to accelerate an erotic response of lines moving in a medium of abstract space, but rather to trace typological motives moving in time- revealing a genealogical memory of its precedents, codes of inwardness and unity that have shaped our culture to problematize difference. The outcome then is not formal coherence but the prospect of coherence, a new paradigm by which an opportunity to oscillate between typological poles (or dominant functions) is presented, maximizing their conflicting status and their creative potential. 

The physical manifestation of these destabilizing forces is found in the idea that the contemporary city is no longer identifiable as an entity. As the coherency of place is lost, so too is the perceptibility of its edge or boundary. The idea of what a boundary is has undergone continuous transformation throughout our history. In today’s city, if it is still locatable, it no longer corresponds to the old division between centre and periphery. 6 The permanency of localization no longer exists. Yet, there is no architectural generality outside of a specific architectural form. The most effective way, then, to approach the tensions of the present, its typological crises, is to historicize them, to see how they are the result of unresolved conflicts, and what new conflicts they can produce, or exhibit, to treat the old.

Both Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum (SANAA) in New York are different paradigms for architectural intervention based on the idea of the singular urban event.7 As a disciplinary matrix each paradigm designates the common possessions among members of its ensemble: “the set of techniques, models, and values to which the group members more or less consciously adhere.”8 As will be shown, these two paradigms are near-to-opposite, producing both Hegelian dialectics of formal organization and a Marxist dialectical materialism. Because these two projects have converse states of maximum efficiency (one based in urban rejection and another in urban embrace, both over-determined)—I will argue that their lamination achieves a “difficult unity,” an agonistic approach to space-making.

Following Chantal Mouffe’s definition of democratic politics, the agonistic state is an arena for individual participation which, while promoting a common cultural identity, is open to internal conflict. 9 The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, then, an agnostic consociation, rather than a conventional liberal plurality, creates types of proportionality and degrees of segmental autonomy that are informed by two opposing traditions: the museum of commonality, where exhibit space submits to an organizational sequence, and the museum of severance, yielding dislocated singularities. While invariably developing internal contradictions, theoretical or functional weaknesses in time, I contend that if a project could contain its opposite, so as to participate across paradigms, yet never in synchrony, that in this tension or gap, the project’s decay could never be systemic. This is precisely because, in order to accept this dynamic state of historical becoming, rather than to look for a replacement with something fixed, or stable, is to utilize the tremendous energy of the city.

THE GUGGENHEIM PARADIGM

“Form follows function—that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

The Guggenheim is an example of an over-determined Rationalism.                                                                                                                               It has a locatable center and a locatable perimeter

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim and Preston Scott Cohen’s Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA) are each examples of urban radial organization, oscillating between traditional notions of centre and periphery. However, I will argue that the example at Tel Aviv, “establishes a broader problematic context” which it both “constitutes and make intelligible,” through an “analogical logic” it shares with the New Museum, and which is incommensurate with the example of the Guggenheim.

“The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse – fixed, over-determined: it can change its position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of destabilizing navigation.” 

The Guggenheim is an example of an over-determined Rationalism. Its rule is thoroughly visible in the plan of the museum: a single-loaded corridic state14 colonized with indistinguishable cells, subordinate to helical ambulation. The Guggenheim’s structuring of this experience, then, of coupling singularities to a linear organizational sequence, is the intelligibility which is shares with Tel Aviv.

According to Wright’s design, visitors would enter the building, “take an elevator to the top and enjoy a continuous art-viewing experience while descending along the spiral ramp.” The resolution of the project is unmistakably conventional, yet similar in scope to the totalizing attitude and simplified vocabulary of the Panopticon, “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.”16 Here, every partition, every cell, every base-unit is self-similar and anonymous, repeatable and interpretable, as in the ideal sense of mass production.

The essentiality of the formal organization was meant to be for art, what Le Corbusier meant for dwelling when he stated, “the house is a machine for living in.”17 This equally conceptual essentiality pervades the type, even as it was meant originally as a Non-Objectivist Museum of Art, with an interest toward the production of subjects. However, the building dispenses with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and often forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, the pre-scripted ambulation proceeds down (or up) a gentle ramp of a continuous slope, without intercession. Attempting, in anticipation, to control and organize the possibilities it may produce, it shares the character of the modern dystopian city, which “overlays differences, rather than segments them.” The galleries are equally divided by structure, interdependent sections which support the spiral ramp; a collective ownership.

Reinforcing this social liberal spatial ideology, the continuous ramp is planned around a great central space. The rotunda floor functions almost like a town plaza. From any location of the ramp one is afforded the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously, implying a heterotopia, however, this is just a representation of several spaces juxtaposed when in reality the space is hegemonic, without contestation (for every uniqueness the same). The representation is reinforced by architectural historian and critic, Paul Goldberger who says of the project, 

“In many buildings, you observe them best by staying in one place and taking it all in. But the only real way to experience the rotunda is to move along the spiral… Because it’s the experience of…feeling the space change.” 

Yet what really changes is an effect of vertigo, as this change is experienced in a continuous, proportionate, and spatially self-evident way. The relationship to the center is precisely radial at all occupiable locations. The perimeter, to which the gallery cells are anchored, is always linear, however sloped, constant and uncontested. Conceived as a "temple of the spirit,” the ramped floor of the project is circulation, all destinations (gallery or otherwise) are submissive to this order. The predictable and standardized bays are subordinate to an implied means of power, namely, radial ambulation. This submission serves to enhance the incorporation of ideological state-determined space, or “sameness” in the socialist episteme.

The common structural framework, the element of helical precession, absorbs new operability in the Tel Aviv museum. As a discursive apparatus, we can evaluate TAMA as inclusive to the Guggenheim paradigm, each sharing a “coherent tradition of inquiry:” 20a continuous, radial organizational strategy, capable of representing a high degree of differentiation within a framework of order and continuity. Each in its own way attempts to challenge the traditional submissiveness of ambulation in galleries, by making it the dominant function. While the Guggenheim’s execution reflects sameness, fluidity, and repetition, TAMA favors a more dispersed, fragmentary, and integrated relationship.

The latter oscillates between traditional notions of centre and periphery by stringing self-similar volumes along a low-resolution (piece-wise continuous) spiral. Like the continuous spiral of the Guggenheim, the switchback ramped walkway at TAMA hugs a common central space open to a generous lobby area, four floors below. As the diffuse glow from the skylight originates three floors above, one enters the helical structure mid-sequence so is confronted, immediately, with opposition. Because this opposition creates conflict, we see others in the atrium both ascending and descending, above and below, broken into swapping dioramic apertures containing unknowable space behind, a true heterotopia . Understood in relation to the former, the paradigm which contains both the Guggenheim and TAMA must lie “neither diachronic nor in synchrony,”  but in crossing of the two.

In addition to this question of directionality, the ramps of TAMA are broken by accessibility code for landings. The promenade architecturale, then, is read as an inorganic continuity, breaking in sequence with the main, segmented gallery boxes. Here there exists “both a Baroque idea of spatial continuity and a reconfiguration of the Loosian Raumplan with its staggered volumes.” As this discursive apparatus first locates TAMA within the Guggenheim paradigm, we must understand the galleries, or staggered perimetal volumes, as being incidental, or anchored submissively to the paradigm’s “originary phenomenon,” that of the ramped element of circulation. It is then “an entity which is found in something other and separated in another entity”, yet is “recognized as the same, and having been reconnected together generates a true and unique opinion concerning each and both.” Plato continues, “It is to a simple sensible element that is present in two different places, but something like a relation between the element and the form.”  To be sure, then, while the form of the two projects may give different spatial qualities to the center and the perimeter, the element which is shared across examples is the type of connection between center and perimeter. The paradigm maintains a unitary core space, to be looked at on its own, and a series of discrete secondary spaces structured around it. While the discrete galleries are homogenized in the Guggenheim, the galleries at Tel Aviv have distinctive spatial handling, depending on where and how they flank the staggered central space. This has the consequence of differentiating ceiling heights, relative orientations and split-level access, engendering the dependent boxes with more conflictual types of sequencing and curatorial logics of display: more subjectivity. The effect is also transformative of the central atrium space. A staggered geometry of parallel lines connected by geometric episodes juxtaposes real spatial differences in visual connection. While the two museums' spatial constructions deviate in character and texture, it only serves to “presuppose the impossibility of the rule,” as, what is common in the two projects is an inflexible consistency between the deep interior and the envelope. As all is ambulation in the Guggenheim, the perimeter and the center establish a fixed, stable relationship throughout: an offset. Because the ambulation in Tel Aviv is piece-wise continuous, and the galleries are splintered, rotated, and have varying depths, the offset between center and perimeter is also fixed, however, in regular instability. 

“When it exercises a dominant function (as model, a critique, or a verification) over knowledge, we will say that the discursive formation crosses a threshold of epistemologization.”26 Here, in both cases, the episteme of resolution is the systematic binding of an identifiable center (deep interior) with an identifiable perimeter. The circulation scheme, then, is the critical parameter, containing, for both, the dialectic struggle.

Another production of analogy connects the projects to their respective sites. Using Rossi’s theory of the city we can find in both radial organizations, a consistency in the development of fundamental representations of their singular place. For Rossi, typology was a form of rational study “based not on normative facts but on the possibility of architectural form to evoke urban themes.” Type is not rendered through universal rules as was the case with Quatèmere de Quincy, but by immediacy and singularity of an architectural event “from which the practice of architecture extrapolates the principles of its development.”29 The Unite d'Habitation in Marseille by Le Corbusier is an example of this, with its “rue interieur.” This interior street, added to the spatial complexity, redefining the social parameters of a public circulation space. For Rossi, the urban event is “an architectural form which takes a typical element of the city and develops it as an exceptional one.”

The Guggenheim is situated along Fifth Avenue, among buildings that are rectangular, vertical, and decorated with bits of ornamentation. It counters this regularity with its circular, horizontal, and sculpted façade, yet the exceptional urban event in the Guggenheim is in the handling of its interior in relation to the street, and its adjacency to Central Park, with its numerous promenades. As can be deduced from the relation of the empty atrium to the building-less park space, situated in the dense fabric of Manhattan, the urban event identifies itself as a "defined and finite form” which, “by virtue of its clear limits, allows for its continuity and for the production of further actions and the adaptation to unpredictable events." In Rossi's view, this continuity meant purifying the typological inheritance of the Modern Movement from external elements, such as the imposition of standards. The formal, radial procession, then, is not imposing “a new concept of habitable space,” or treated as a standard, an archetype, but rather “acknowledges, explains, and thus retroactively justifies what already exists,” the urban theme which supports it. For Rossi, this concept was called locus:

“The city is the locus of the collective memory of its people. Like memory it is associated with objects and places. The relationship between the locus and the citizenry becomes the city’s predominant image, which will be part of its memory, flowing through history and giving shape to it.” 

The so-called locus at The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is manifold. Located in the center of the city’s cultural complex, the program for TAMA posed an extraordinary architectural challenge: to resolve the tension between the tight, idiosyncratic triangular site and the museum’s need for a series of large, neutral rectangular galleries. It was also an addition, though comparable in size, to an originary museum which organized galleries in a pinwheel configuration.

Because of the small site, an economy of planning was necessary to free the ground-plane for periambular traffic. The required gallery spaces were so large and so deep that in order to get light into the building, the singular boxes had to cramp tightly into an idealized zoning perimeter determined by neighboring buildings and a street. The independent cells were stacked and skewed according to a logic of vertical circulation, resolved as a helical switchback ramp, from which independent plans are strung and connected with minimal surfaces, to maximize the central void, or lightfall. Because of the nature of the interior galleries, which are mostly parallelograms, the formal structure of the lightfall is codified on the exterior, revealing a nearly self-similar volume. As such, the interior circulation, about the lightfall, approximates the ramped circulation about the building’s exterior (or urban circulation).

In some sense, relating again with the Guggenheim, the subordinate gallery spaces are “offsets” of the central void space’s perimeter, so as to address the public space of the city with a reference to its deep interiority. This is not simply an indexical procedure, but one of spatial behavior. The nature of the offset truly establishes the building’s exterior vocabulary as a circulation scheme, inscribing external ramps and walkways. Like the rich dialogue established between the exterior domes of ancient Rome and their interior monumentality, the exterior of TAMA (or dome) signifies an exception within the city, yet its actual climactic experience, or understanding, comes after we enter and witness the deep interiority of the lightfall, “perennial opposition between restrained and exuberant form as articulated through the dichotomy of interior and exterior.”

Just as the edge boundary of the atria fastens to singular galleries, making up the building’s collective-form , the edge boundary of the collective-form (the envelope) fastens itself to the urban context. As the interior atrium relates to program inside the building, the exterior of the building functions as an interior for the city. The deft siting of the project, among a series of other cultural institutions, reveals “a subtle but significant dialectic” where the neighboring cultural institutions (theater, museum, and courthouse) might be understood in a proportion to the singular gallery boxes which frame TAMA’s interior core, making the outside plaza space read at least partly as an interior round the museum.

As the architect states most clearly, “The lightfall is to everything around it, what the [exterior] is to the urban context.” This makes the museum at once a part and apart from the city.

Thus, the urban treatment of both The Guggenheim and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art share a coherent tradition of inquiry by which they examine the possibility of a deep interior (relating to the city), inscribed by a figure of ambulation with singular cells subordinate to it. The projects “live in perfect equilibrium beyond the opposition between generality and particularity.” While unique syntactically, the projects are equal as they are different, as defined through the other. The element of radial organization around a void space persists as the paradigm’s deep structure; the struggle for primacy, between center and perimeter, of an organizational scheme, the dominant function. 

THE NEW MUSEUM PARADIGM

For the New Museum in New York, Form follows Function.

The Museum of Modern Art is an example of an over-determined Realism.                                                                                                                   It has multiple centers, and its perimeter is the city.

Demonstrated within its own genealogical emergence from the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan, the downtown New Museum by SANAA is an example of an urban institution which maximizes distribution of singularities at the expense of continuity.

We see today that many institutions have gradually replaced the traditionally modern discourse of universal access to art (culture as common good) with a new one based on the assimilation of the cultural experience into the processes of consumption.  We find here an identification of a public of consumption, that is one with access to commodities and so through that access is able to be commodified itself. “Since the 15th century,” says Pier Vittorio Aureli, “architecture has been part of that vast process in which power is distributed as a spatial governmental apparatus of subject-making.” At the very core of the architectural project and the production of form lies the possibility of producing subjects. Yet, opposing the homogenized and abstract conception of the subject, this new discourse of cultural industry, in identifying the public with consumption, tends to marginalize subjectivities through enhancing them in a controlled way: recognizing and embracing difference—albeit for the perversion, subjugation, and inspection of said subjectivties.

For the architecture of consumption, difference is not understood so much in terms of a recognition of political minorities, but rather in sustaining and reproducing minorities (and majorities) within a criteria of marketing. This gives rise to populist cultural policies, which follow the pattern of television consumerism and thereforehave the same consequences: “a growing banality and impoverishment where the critical potential and emancipatory dimension of the cultural experience (based on the articulation of real experiences and problems) is eliminated in favor of a false participation.“ From that point of view, a consumable architecture means giving to the public what it is supposed to expect, taking for granted the public’s pre-existence (its subjectivity). This statistical and capital-based approach thus controls and ensures the reproduction of the existing social order, without contention.

In "Of Other Places" Foucault looks at the historical development of western space perception. He determines that emplacement, or relations between locations in space, are the constitutive principle of spatial politics. Foucault writes that while earlier centuries defined themselves in relation to history, the twentieth century is defined by its relation to spaces. Unlike time, which Foucault argues has yet to complete its process of secularization, space, as in politics, depends on mutual relations (multiple, fragmented or even incompatible). Hetertopia, then, is a real place which stands outside of a known spatial politic. They are able to oppose, in the same place, different times. In this regard, they always maintain a system of opening and closing which isolates and connects them from and to their surroundings. However, this fixed tension stresses the space’s inexistence everywhere, and as such is an “other place.”

This “other” often emerges out of capitalist tendencies, which rely on an essential dynamism, a fixed tension of life (between dwelling and labor, buying and selling) as its mode of production. It is not an institution that forces a labor power to assume a specific position but is instead the totality of relationships that include all aspects of the production of labor. Contestation then, from within the labor power “manifests itself by its implicit or explicit resistance toward the labor subjectivities enacted by capital to the point of forcing the latter to evolve by radically transforming itself.” Consequently, this transformation, which comes out of, and so, back into, the essential dynamism, serves only to control and reproduce the labor power through its own participation in the capitalist paradigm it attempts to resist.

In a certain sense, the history of New Yorkers’ conquest of its domain, “Manhattanism,” as told in Delirious New York, typifies the existence of “other places.” The heterotopias which emerge(d) in the development of Manhattan often occupy their entire blocks. Koolhaas writes, the Manhattan Grid was conceived in 1807, and broke the island into 2,028 blocks, well before most of its territory was ever occupied. The block becomes the largest possible unit of development.

Koolhaas identifies several factors which contribute to the colonization of heterotopias. One, Vertical Schism, is a state in which each floor is programmatically discontinuous. In its most extreme, these floors can each become independent realms with “no seepage of symbolism between floors.”  Each floor of an extrusion is represented as a “virgin site, as if the others did not exist.” This becomes a crucial parallel to what Koolhaas terms “the reproduction of the world,” the process of urbanism by which a given site is simply extruded, vertically and occupied differently.

In 2004, the Museum of Modern Art renovated its Manhattan block to mix suspended galleries with its existing floors to optimize crowd support, in its maximal distribution of space. This also had the added effect of achieving a range of differentiated ceiling heights, augmenting the types of art which the museum could buy or exhibit. This overlay of difference, exhausted within the taught parallel of the city block perimeter, came at the expense of continuity with no logical relation of space besides a conventional, stacked escalator system, tucked against the building’s parti-wall. In this sense, there is utter pluralism, with every space belonging, somehow, to every other space. 

The New Museum in the Bowery by SANAA (2007) restates this paradigm in a slightly different way. Wedged between two parti-walls, the museum has a very limited building footprint, a literal scale-order46 down from the block depth of MoMA. And yet, to maximize the usable floor area, the developers required the architects to fill the zoning allowance, including the purchase of air rights, which define the total form. The interior, then, is bound to its perimeter, defined by the urban envelope in its changing scale and off-kilter arrangement. On such buildings codified by zoning, Aurelli notes, they “seem politically neutral but are actually used by power as a form of subtle social control.” The stacked boxes, the result of three decades of planning adjustments, allude to the instability in New York’s cultural, economic, and democratic future.

In the New Museum, different singularities with different ceiling heights compose an unknowable spatial whole, yet this unknowability is present in every singularity (and in its monolithic exterior treatment), thus eliminating room for contention. This subversive hegemony is reinforced through the extruded circulation core, minimized to submit to the dominant function of singular galleries and large column-less spans, unsettled as they may be in relation to one another. In this codification, we see the instrument of an “unknowable urbanism,” the extrusion as an illusion of function which Koolhaas calls “the great metropolitan destabilizer: [promising] perpetual programmatic instability." A "pure product of process,” these extruded exteriors and vertically differentiated interiors form urban events that are “sheer envelope.” “On the one hand, it constitutes what capital always attempts to capture and administrate [the box], and at the same time it is something that exceeds that fate precisely because something that is potential is not yet a determinate reality.”

The New Museum, like the state of Manhattanism, is congestion for congestion's sake, but comes with a pragmatism so obsessive that it forces out the possibility of contestation. The hyperbolized efficiency of the extrusion, and its multitude of possible spatial orders and differences, acquires banality and infinite separation in the exchange. Given that we are comparing paradigms for the institution of art, this banality functions to maximal real effect, systematically yielding a disproportionate amount of art space for the tiny cramped site. However as a political analogy, this type of spatial paradigm should embody multiple states of isolation connected only through their disconnection (a dark vertical core), a frozen relation. 

Similarly, Tel Aviv has the problem of maximizing its internal program within a contentious and inflexible site. Like the New Museum, Tel Aviv embodies a perverse functionalism as an “over-reaction to the economy of means imposed by modern rationalization.”50 In comparing the two examples, we see what is common: banal, neutral, maximally spanning volumes struggling for position within an urban envelope. And in that resistance of deformation by the large-spanning singular galleries, the circulation or spatial logic is subordinated. In this discursive apparatus of comparison, it is the dimension of the singular galleries, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which are now dominant, situated so as to render the circulating lightfall as a spatial residue.

This double-standard might seem paralogical, yet as we see in Heidegger, “there is no circularity, between a before and an after, between pre-understanding and interpretation, because “intelligibility does not precede the phenomenon.” A paradigm does not simply acquire a descriptive label from its abstract function, but is demonstrated through what it shares with its ensemble; what is common. As such, the agonistic paradigm embeds specific, multivalent readings within a limited number of oppositional frameworks. The Guggenheim Paradigm which TAMA is a part of and the TAMA Paradigm which Guggenheim is a part of, stand “beside” each other. And yet, when evaluating Guggenheim against the New Museum, the two are incommensurable.

No longer anchored to the atrium logic (as the logic is simply the interior edges of suitable boxes), singular galleries with robust geometries are fit into a perimeter which disallows common adjacencies. While this is a strictly formal apparatus of negotiating two geometries (the ideal instrumentalized rectilinear volumes and the triangular site), there exists a political and agonistic consequence. Each part wishes to remain whole, in autonomous plural resistance. Through its “capitalistic instrumentality,” the building is liberated as “the autonomous architectural project is not simply the reproduction of a given order but also the possibility of its critique and reformulation.”

The question then, can be restated as one of ownership. Who owns the lightfall? Is it the galleries (singular elements) which inscribe it? Is it the ambulation (organizing center and perimeter) which generates it? We know that Realism (suitability, namely capital) owns the exhibit space of the New Museum as all space is exhibit space. We know that Rationalism (a processional, chronological spatial order) owns the exhibit space of the Guggenheim as all space is circulation.

With the New Museum as with the Guggenheim a dualistic juncture emerges, between a paradigm which esteems singularities and one which is governed by maximum connectivity. Yet in as much as these two paradigms possess whole identities, they maintain their opposites through the lightfall’s synthetic transformation. By its piecewise-continuous construction, the void at Tel Aviv precludes the postmodern paradigm of disaffected pluralism. Tension in the paradigm is established in the production of exhibition spaces, for habitation, and the problem of inhabiting the light fall (as its negative presence invalidates the myth of capital efficiency) . In Tel Aviv, each gallery box has an inexorable association with the uninhabitable center, yet each box establishes, in itself, a singularity- making it at once an autonomous segment.

As Robert Venturi recognized, a “formal, complex, and contradictory architectural language,” is not characterized by “the relativity of a liberated fragment,” like the boxes at the New Museum, but rather, found in “a commitment to the whole.” The lightfall, then, becomes a “no”-space. Not the absence of space, but the agonism in the impossibility of reconciling two opposing concepts of architecture. Conceptual equity, then, is produced in opposition or in reconciliation of that commitment, the capacity for the “powerful space” to both resist and produce “spaces of power.”

THE AGONISTIC PARADIGM 

For the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, either Form follows Function or Function follows Form.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an example of either Rationalism or Realism.                                                                                                                It has either a singular and static or dynamic and multiple center. Its perimeter reciprocates this relational structure.

“While for Venturi the difficult whole is a compositional device, in Rossi this idea represents the formal and political understanding of the relationship between the city and architecture.”

While not solutions in themselves, paradigms should exemplify both unresolved and unresolvable problems- in architectural typology as in political life.

In the previous case studies we have compared two legacies of the Modern Movement: namely, of Rationalism, The Guggenheim as an operational device, and of Realism, the New Museum as an artifact of suitability.  A struggle for primacy, then, emerges within the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, between its curatorially conceived boxes (New Museum) and its figure of ambulation (Guggenheim). So, which frame of reference is more durable?

Thomas Kuhn tells us that “when an old paradigm is replaced by a new paradigm that is no longer compatible with the previous one, scientific revolution occurs. Yet, within the proposed agonistic paradigm, scientific revolution is precisely impossible, as there remains a commensurate comparison with individual antecedents, and yet when measuring across the generation of these ancestoral paradigms, we see no likeness.

Similar to the Seattle Public Library by OMA, Tel Aviv reiterates specific characteristics of “what capital always attempts to capture and administrate (the box),” and yet demonstrates its tentativeness to fixity, producing agonistic informal spaces that cannot be dimensioned—outside of their shifting circumstance of submissive or dominant lamination with economy-obsessed artifacts.

Thus, agonistic pluralism is not hybridity, as hybridity would imply compromise, and compromise implies that there could be something other than compromise. Agonism, rather, is both within and without. It can always produce collaboration, but the constituent parts never function as they once did, independent of the “difficult whole” with which they are discursively entangled (in autonomous segments).The nature of each constitutive paradigm must be consigned to its structural isolation. There is no overlap: “in this polar tension, their substantial identities evaporate.”

Neither idiosyncratic nor iconoclastic, as if two principles are locked in a struggle for hegemony, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an institution that thrives equally on spatial unification or spatial difference. At stake, then, is an argument that sidesteps the modern/postmodern hunt for architectural sources, focusing instead on points of tangency (or perpendicularity) which enable specific types of comparison. In the final analysis, the idea of the agonistic paradigm is a concept of architectural modernity rooted in the gap between continuity and rupture, between past and present. 

“Just as in the case of recollection--which Plato often uses as a paradigm for knowledge---where a sensible phenomenon is placed into a nonsensible relation with itself, and this ‘re’-cognized in the other, so in the paradigm it is a matter not of corroborating a certain sensible likeness but of producing it by means of an operation. For this reason, the paradigm is never already given, but is generated and produced.” 

For Rossi, typological study represented a more composite framework that becomes real only in its application, in the singularity of a decision, and in the singularity of the urban event. “Its specific operation consists in suspending and deactivating its empirical given-ness in order to exhibit only an intelligibility. The medium of this intelligibility, then, is considered the paradigm."

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as agonistic paradigm, establishes an elaborate feedback loop in conditioning its own reception spatially. The galleries at the museum are part of an accretive experience which allows inhabitants to anticipate the next local intervention, as they constantly transpose between paradigmatic domains. The recognition of one is the recognition of both, simply a question of salience, and the result of choices one makes to participate in either experience (subscribing to the lightfall or subscribing to galleries as the dominant function). As a gap between those circumstances, between antecedents, is experienced and questioned, one participates in his own subjectivity, and thus defines for himself the dominant function. At the end of the museum, (at the beginning for the next, the city), this awkwardness of typological permutation might bring to the table question’s of society’s agenda, what it registers and what it conceals. 

If we are to say then, that Tel Aviv does represent this agonism as its “dominant function” in which the “the epistemological figure thus outlined obeys a number of formal criteria” what can be said of those multiple formal criteria from which emerge a singular logic? Stated differently, if there emerges a new paradigm, which edifies both the singular framework and assumptions of separate antecedent paradigms of incommensurability, yet functions in a way that is irreducible to either in space, but collapses into ever-changing alliances in time … What can be said then of this paradigmatic anxiety?

If the example should hold wherein the Guggenheim and the New Museum are made commensurate, not only do the antecedents suffer from function-loss (as having each defined itself through the other, its opposite), but this death feeds back into the agonistic structure itself. Once the “positivities” of Paradigm A and Paradigm B fail to function independently as such, the higher type (Tel Aviv), which collapses both positivities, in its assumed neutrality, can no longer achieve its agonism.

Yet in the higher type’s application, we never achieve paradigmatic condensation, but rather the successive state, like sublimation, where one oscillates between extremes (solid and gaseous phases), without ever experiencing the co-incident, transitional state (liquid). The project at Tel Aviv “does not consider hypotheses [the Guggenheim and the New Museum] as first principles but truly as hypotheses-- that is, as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything.”  

“In the enigma of scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists.” Somehow then, the ahistoricity of this new paradigm (in its coexistence within the real global discourse of the New Museum and Guggenheim) is precisely what creates the gap, or parallax, necessary to resist dialectic, making it a model for a different discursive practice,

“That is to say, to give an example is a complex act which supposes that the term functioning as a paradigm is deactivated from its normal use, not in order to be moved into another context but, on the contrary, to present the canon- the rule- of that use, which cannot be shown in any other way.

The example, then, is the symmetrical opposite of the exception: whereas the exception is included through the exhibition of its exclusion, the example is excluded through the exhibition of its inclusion. And yet, “it is impossible to distinguish between creation and performance, original and execution. Precisely because in Tel Aviv we cannot know how form can achieve such “diachrony and synchrony, unicity and multiplicity,” or more specifically: whether circulation structures destination or destination structures circulation, we are held in an agonistic teleological-suspension. It is either exceptional through its typicality, or typical through its state of exception.

And in this suspension, wherein the paradigm becomes incommensurable with the “discursive practice” from which it originated, a paradox is formed—self-contradictory, yet expressing a possible reality in its parallactic coexistence 70 with its antecedents—“a synthesis of distinct, even disparate, codes”.  As this very multiplicity might have signaled, “each time it is a matter of paradigms whose aim was to make intelligible a series of phenomena whose kinship had eluded or could elude the historian’s gaze. The phenomena unfold across time and require attention that cannot follow the laws of historical philology.”

“That is to say, while induction proceeds from the particular to the universal and deduction from the universal to the particular, the paradigm is defined by a third and paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular.” The domain of this discourse, after all, “is not logic but analogy.”

An architecture of complexity and contradiction does not forsake the whole.