Manipulations, or, Rethinking Tabula Rasa

The essay deals with the concept of tabula rasa, theoretical topos of architecture since modernity, seen not as a blind removal of existing context, but as a device of selective manipulation, therefore of re-invention, of reality. The thread that ties together the works of Piranesi, Le Corbusier, and OMA reveals that in architecture “the endless process of imitation and revision” that Anthony Appiah mentions in his essay “The Case for Contamination” is nothing other than history. Only in light of history can we legitimately speak about architecture as process; a process in which manipulation is not a performative practice that reduces architecture to an abstract procedure for the multiplication of possibilities, but is an attitude through which architecture, by reducing the range of possible choices, focuses in on and emphasizes the criteria of selection that it has adopted. In other words, it is in light of history that the problem of quality in architecture – in the original sense of the term qualis (“which”), that is, the problem of decision and thus of project – does not remain suspended and hidden behind the logic of quantity. The essay represent the author's contribution to the international symposium "Contamination: Impure Architecture" held at the Guggenheim Museum New York, in June 2006 with the participation of Kunlé Adeyemi, Elizabeth Diller, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Sanford Kwinter, Greg Lynn, Gabriele Mastrigli, Alex Mc Dowell, Farshid Moussavi, Patrick Schumaker and moderated by Cynthia Davidson.