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the high school a contemporary parallel to “Revolution 9” is that no one knows what the number nine in either name signifies. This isn’t really surprising given that meaning is socially produced, making it impossible for a building to accrue value if the culture around it cannot even agree on a name or thinks the entire enterprise— a school for the arts at a time when most schools can’t afford pencils—isn’t even worthy of public support in the first place. And left nameless, in fact and in spirit, the building has become like a Rorschach test, with every Tom, Dick, and critic trying to fill it up with meaning that can be nothing more than their own personal and often paranoid projections leading to a crazy chain of misunderstanding. For example, and against all odds, in the midst of Prix’s pile of aggressively abstract concrete, some want to read the tower as a sort of billboard in the shape of the number nine, but a nine turned upside down. Wouldn’t that make it a six? Which belongs to the sign of the devil. And the conspiracy theorists who play things backwards or, in this case, upside down, focus not on the empty meaning of the number nine but on the fact that the tower was left physically empty, which proves to them that which they already thought, namely (or namelessly), that the school is an excessive waste of money and the tower is the sign of a devil-wearing-Prada architect. Given all the Sturm und Drang, it is worth considering for a moment if the number nine, that might be a six, or an empty vessel, is a more strategic consequence of the design rather than the accidental result of a funny shape that can get flipped around and turned into anything. I don’t mean that Coop Himmelb(l)au devilishly designed a billboard for the school that no one can read, but I am asking if the
larger problem of architectural legibility in a diverse culture is what is at stake in the difficulties people have had in reading not only the tower but the complex as a whole. Even critics—supposed experts—have not had much to say about its particularities, tossing off vague comments about how the high school recalls Le Corbusier, for example, without giving any sense of in what way or to what end. Furthermore, if you actually made some effort—looked on the Internet or went to the library—to learn how to read Coop Himmelb(l)au you would find many news reports but surprisingly little analysis of any use in this regard. Even though the firm is well known, often cited, and well published, there are no histories of the firm’s work, no accounts of its contribution, and no written record of its development. (A major