David Salomon

David Salomon, The Specter of Symmetry, 19 de noviembre de 2015. Fotografía: Pablo Gerson, Juan Ignacio Palma, Sebastián Izquierdo. Archivo EAEU.

The Specter of Symmetry David Salomon

Aparentemente desestimada por los arquitectos modernos por arbitraria e inflexible, la simetría nunca se ha ido. Tanto en las matemáticas como en las ciencias duras, su influencia ha aumentado de manera dramática durante el siglo XX. Y si bien no son pocos los modernistas que disfrazaron su uso, hoy ha adquirido un lugar de honor entre los arquitectos: ¿por qué la simetría, por qué ahora? La conferencia examina la larga historia de esta idea arquitectónica sorprendentemente flexible, procurando una caracterización de su oscilante definición, y especulando sobre los motivos de su continua relevancia dentro del campo disciplinar. Entre tanto, se pregunta en qué ha estado ocupado este fantasma, y por qué podría ser relevante para la arquitectura hoy. Si fuera aún relevante, la definición matemática de la simetría como invariante que persiste a pesar de una transformación podría resultar la clave de su renovada significación en el mundo contemporáneo.

Form

Where does form come from? You have all been in studios in one way or another, and you are constantly asked to tell the story of the project, the source of it. I have found this to be an incredibly useful and productive question. And not just in a studio, also where does the form of a building come from? It is related to its use, its meaning, its place, its time, the biography of the people who created it. It is a way to integrate all art. I would argue that if you start with form you will be able, more easily, more effectively, and more efficiently, to integrate performance. Form is far from autonomous, form is instrumental. It organizes effects, energy, information, and people. This is the background, the source of use of form. Symmetry

Architecture is one big, haunted house. Composition, ornament, function, beauty, all live there. Among its occupants, symmetry is a particularly uncanny one. It is one exiled, given its indifference to contexts, climates, and cultures. But it turns out that symmetry never really went away. As Oswald Mathias Ungers notes, it can ever really die, it should be taken for granted in architectural discourse and architectural practice, and at the same time, it never should. In modern architecture, it is found in countless examples, even expressionist ones, when we would not expect to find it, like in Mies van der Rohe Glass Skyscraper plan.

Types

We are not just talking about mirror reflections, but about rotational, translational, glide-reflection symmetry. There is more than one form of symmetry. There are four, and their combinations. They are often called rigid motions in a plane. Symmetry is back for vengeance, and if not completely visible yet, it is being talked directly. Straight forward and highly differentiated reflections, rotations, translations, and mirror symmetries are everywhere. Look up and you will find it in the façade of Reiser Umemoto O-14 tower, look down and you will see it in Moss’ Elements House, in UN Studio’s Mercedes Benz Museum, or in Christian Kerez’s villa. And those are only Log magazine’s top 10.

Isolate

Why symmetry? Why now? Many practices are interested because of its ability to isolate itself from its surroundings. It is indifferent to its surrounding. It does not have to adjust

to localities, to climates. That is the most classical definition of symmetry, a symmetry reserved for the sacred and for the elite: groups that sought to distance themselves, or that were removed from everyday reality. Symmetry is a privilege only given to them. It is interesting that people are interested in the ability of symmetry to isolate.

Non-hierarchical

I want to focus on symmetry’s surprising ability to cross over multiple fields simultaneously, operating in architecture, art, design, biology, chemistry, or physics. Rather than thinking of symmetrical objects, we need to think of symmetrical fields and legible patterns that connect ideas and objects from different disciplines in a non-hierarchical way. Symmetry has been associated with hierarchy, indifference, isolation, but in other fields its definition is rather that of a place where hierarchies have been levelled off. Continuum

After teaching classical patterns, I started seeing symmetry as a device for connection and not isolation. Even its classical use, the universal mathematical truth with underlying consistency, could link things that look and act differently as part of a continuum. Equivalence

One important thing is to recognize symmetry not only as an architectural concept, but also as a scientific concept, where the definition changes. If you look at Vitruvius, even at Alberti, symmetry implies the harmonious proportions that make a building, an object, or a body pleasing. The definition has changed several times, particularly shifting from proportions to equivalence between parts.

Existential Truth

Symmetry has expanded the borders of architecture to ornament, and has expanded its influence in other disciplines, but we do not recognize it well enough. One has to temper its enthusiasm for symmetry, because this expansion into so many fields always raises existential questions, implying that symmetry is everywhere, that there is some kind of deep truth it, not factual truth, but religious, existential, philosophical truth. This question is a consistent criticism to symmetry. But one can regard symmetry exactly by what makes it not metaphysical, but useful. Nevertheless, symmetry is haunted by this association with universal and transhistorical accounts.

Obsolescence

Compared with industrial practices, symmetry has been dismissed for being formulaic and uncreative, in contrast to biological models or metaphors. It was ridiculed as mechanical, or primitive. Yet none of these dangers, fears, or laments have kept it from reappearing. When there is no influence, symmetry tends to stay, isolated and indifferent. In general, symmetry appears to be obsolete, rather than key to architectural production. And yet, one spots it lurking in the shadows, over and over again.

Value

We were taught that symmetry was only for ornament and style, that symmetry is superficial, oversimplified. However, symmetry is not an inflexible motive, but a set of robust aesthetic operations that produce an understanding of complex architectural and artistic artefacts. The equivalences found in symmetry, the sameness, the invariance, the non-hierarchical nature, are paradoxically where its current value resides.

Style

Symmetry is an aesthetic tool. It helps determine the internal body of economics or politics. It can be used to produce a new sensibility, even a new style. The laws of symmetry and its operations are a source for creating this new style. By using new materials and locations with a new sensibility, the ornamental surface deployed by Frank Lloyd Wright was not meant to protect an old way of life, but to produce a new one. His plans

and elevations are littered with rotations, translations, reflections. Their combination produces a new sensible texture, in Jacques Ranciere’s terms, for which new laws and constitutions need to be written.

Aesthetic Technology

The positions of both Loos and Wright suggest that style, ornament, and symmetry can be best understood as technologies. The effect of everyday technologies is not limited to the personal phenomenological experiences that symmetry produces. As McLuhan has noted, such technologies can expand, suppress, and mediate the relationship between subjective perceptions and social practices. If architecture is a technology, it is an aesthetic one, one that changes scale, pace, and pattern via the manipulation of sensorial effects. If aesthetic technologies cannot be resisted, the trick is to recognize how they affect habitual mental processes and to experiment the consequences that generate them.

Reason and Emotion

Reason and sensation, or reason and emotion, are things that need to be non-hierarchical. Making things equal is always evidence of an aesthetic logic trumping an ethical one. Ethics is about right and wrong while aesthetics is subjective. That is the power of aesthetics, the fact that it is subjective and cannot be agreed upon. This is when the dominance of one term over the other is neutralized. In this framework, no position or set of credentials has any natural right to rule, govern, or dominate over the other. All positions are equal in this logic. Symmetry reigns.

Reversal

An argument can be made for formal motives and sensitives. It is important to say that symmetry is not more important than asymmetry, and that ornament is not more significant than shape. Simply reversing these longstanding binaries would stop the tyranny of a stratified way of thinking. Ornament and symmetry need not triumph over their enemies. They just need to be legitimately occupying the same territory.

Exile

No other topic has generated more descent in XX century architecture than ornament and symmetry. Their dismissal is due to their perception as excessive and wasteful. Function was first, efficiency was best. Ornament has suffered from being symmetrical. Symmetry, especially bilateral, was too simple, obvious, inflexible. They exiled it for being indifferent to context, content, and cultures, although, in closer inspection, they never went away.

Extractos de la conferencia de David Salomon, con introducción de Julián Varas, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 19 de noviembre de 2015.