Tectonic Narratives An Architectural Position
Samantha Druhot Virginia Tech Architecture is a technical art that answers questions of both experiential and constructive realities. In his essay “The TellTale-Detail,” Marco Frascari, an architect, theorist, and educator, writes about the union of these ideas of construction and construing. The act of construction in architecture is understood as the expression of craft or a “logos of techne.” Meanwhile, the construing, or “techne of logos,” is understood as the artful storytelling of one’s knowledge. He says, “any architectural element defined as detail is always a joint,” (Frascari, 231). The architectural joint is not just a means of communicating assembly but a tool by which a building can better tell its story at a variety of scales. To tend to the tectonic expression of the joint in a work of architecture is to better understand and communicate the work’s overall narrative and meaning. Architectural historian and educator, Kenneth Frampton, also discusses the need for tectonic expression in architecture in both the essay “Rappel à l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic” and Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. Similar to Frascari’s discussion of construction and construing, Frampton discusses the tectonic in terms of the ontological and the representational. The essence of the thing and the act of making the thing are inextricably linked. He says:
Needless to say, we are not alluding there to mechanical revelation of construction but rather to a potentially poetic manifestation of structure in the original Greek sense of poesis as an act of making and revealing [...] Thus one may assert that building is ontological rather than representational in character and that built form is a presence rather than something standing for an absence. In Martin Heidegger’s terminology we may think of it as a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘sign’. (Rappel à l'Ordre, 210-212)
Building is an inherently ontological act, therefore you cannot separate the construction from the construing, or the knowing from the making. As Frascari would say, architecture exists at the intersection of techne and logos. Tending to the tectonic is a “poetic” method of making and revealing, manifesting the truth of building. The articulation of the joint asserts the position of the architecture. The decision to reveal or conceal can enhance forms and assemblies that further an architectural narrative. Two examples of architecture that embrace the articulation of the joint, though in different ways, are The Loblolly House by KieranTimberlake and the M.H. de Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron.
Tectonic Narratives | Samantha Druhot