Theory’s Doubt: History, Theory and Image in Robin Evans’s Physiognomy of Morals

Abstract

This paper begins with a simple proposition: theory is an image animated by history. By exploring the notion of image in the work of architect and historian Robin Evans, the nature of this animation is elucidated. The paper discusses Evans’s infatuation with the “powers of the image” from a threefold perspective: what is a theory-image; how is it constructed in and through Evans’s writings; and why is it relevant for the discipline of architecture. Evans’s project is therefore the recovery of the image and its space of projection as a site of theoretical inquiry, one that is crucially distinct from language. Through the analysis of Evans’s work, I would argue, it is possible to sustain a radical conceptualization of theory not merely as specular history – a Doppelgänger of sorts – but as a productive field of inquiry fundamentally decoupled from, yet forever linked to, history. It is necessary in this radical conceptualization to embrace the conjecture of productive theory in lieu of the disciplinarity of history.

Keywords:

• architectural theory
• architectural history
• image
• animation
• diagram

Acknowledgements

An early version of this essay was submitted for the Graduate Seminar on Architecture Historiography taught by Professor Spyros Papapetros at the Princeton University School of Architecture in the spring of 2015. Thanks are due to Spyros Papapetros for his initial advice. Also, to Joseph Bedford, for facilitating a considerable amount of material on Robin Evans, and to Inés Zalduendo, Special Collections Archivist and Reference Librarian at the Frances Loeb Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, for “moving” Evans’s archive to the School. Thanks also go to Edward Bottoms of the Architectural Association Archives, London.

Notes

¹ “Babies know mothers by the ‘Golden Ratio’,” an interview with Dr. Eugene J. Mahon, in The Times Record (22 October 1985). The Robin Evans Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge.

² See, for instance, Robin Evans, “Persistent Breakage,” in The Projective Cast, Architecture and its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 55–106. For a reading along these lines, see Jeremy Voorhees, “The Projective Credibility of Fictions: Robin Evans’ Methodological Excursions,” in The Visibility of Research Culture: New Ideas, Minor Voices, and Topics on the Margins (Architectural Research Centers Consortium, 2013), 180–87.

³ See Robin Evans, “The Rights of Retreat and the Rights of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 35–54, esp. 40.

⁴ For an insightful introduction to Robin Evans, see Joseph Bedford, “In Front of Lives that Leave Nothing Behind,” in AA Files, no. 69 (Winter 2014): 3–18.

⁵ See Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

⁶ See Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon; or, The Inspection House,” in The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995), 29–96, esp. 31.

⁷ Robin Evans, “Architecture and its Image,” in Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation, eds. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1989), 19–35, esp. 20.

⁸ Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is arguably the single most powerful theory-image in the history of modern architecture, a status greatly due to Michel Foucault’s analysis of “Panopticism” in Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison, published in 1975. See Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–230.

⁹ The majority of Evans’s visual archive is housed at the Frances Loeb Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge. Part of his student work – including the AA Fifth Year Thesis (1969), “Towards Anarchitecture: Artifact Systems with Respect to Human Freedom” – is at the Architectural Association Archives in London. A version of Evans’s AA Fifth Year Thesis was published in the AA Quarterly (January 1970).

¹⁰ See Signs of the Times, or Rather More Symbols than Signs, ed. Robin Evans and John Frazer (London: Architectural Association Students’ Union, 1966). A brief reference to Signs of the Times, or Rather More Symbols than Signs could be found in Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X, ed. Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley (Barcelona: Actar, Media and Modernity Program, Princeton University, 2010), 100.

¹¹ Evans and Frazer, “Editorial,” in Signs of the Times.

¹² It is worth recalling that Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was first published in 1966, the year before Evans and Frazer launched Signs of the Times.

¹³ Evans and Frazer, “Editorial,” in Signs of the Times.

¹⁴ Robin Evans, “The Psychological and Anthropological Sources of Symbol Theory,” in Signs of the Times, or Rather More Symbols than Signs, ed. Robin Evans and John Frazer (London: Architectural Association Students’ Union, 1966), 15–22, 17.

¹⁵ Ibid., 19.

¹⁶ Miran Bozovic, “An Utterly Dark Spot,” Introduction to Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995), 1–28, esp. 5.

¹⁷ Ibid., 7.

¹⁸ And as such, Bozovic suggests, should be understood in relation to Bentham’s Fragment on Ontology or “theory of fictions,” and also, I would add, in relation to his little considered Auto-Icon Writings. The three texts prove even more provocative when considered together and, in the context of this paper, confronted with Evans’s reading of the Panopticon in The Fabrication of Virtue.

¹⁹ Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue, 196. The Fabrication of Virtue was submitted as Evans’s doctoral dissertation to the University of Essex in 1975 under the supervision of Joseph Rykwert, the same year Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison. The dissertation was published, though extensively revised, in 1982.

²⁰ Ibid., 198.

²¹ Ibid., 211.

²² Bozovic, “An Utterly Dark Spot,” 18–19.

²³ Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue, 13–14.

²⁴ Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations, 55–92, at 56.

²⁵ Heinrich Wölfflin had already pointed to the relationship between form – and style in particular – and bodies. See Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 149–92, esp. 182.

²⁶ Robin Evans, “The Ideal, the Home, Paradise and Utopia,” collage in preparation for the essay “Figures, Doors and Passages.” The Robin Evans Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge.

²⁷ The essays “Translations from Drawing to Building” (1986), “The Developed Surface” (1989), and “When the Vanishing Point Disappears” (1992), are central for this genealogy. See Evans, Translations.

²⁸ Evans, The Projective Cast.

²⁹ Ibid., 366.

³⁰ Ibid., 133.

³¹ Ibid.

³² See Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. Giusta Nicco Fasola (Florence: Le Lettere, 1984); and Leon B. Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

³³ See Robert Tavernor, “Contemplating Perfection through Piero’s Eyes,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of the Body and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 78–89, at 83.

³⁴ Evans, The Projective Cast, 142.

³⁵ Michael Baxandall, quoted in Evans, The Projective Cast, 144.

³⁶ Ibid., 159. Evans follows and revises Decio Gioseffi’s analysis in “Introduzione all’arte, introduzione a Piero,” Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste, no. 4 (1980): 9–25.

³⁷ Evans, The Projective Cast, 140.

³⁸ Ibid., 366–70.

³⁹ Ibid., 366.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid. In The Arrested Image diagram, Evans exposes the problematic status of the perceiving subject or “observer.” In this regard, see Jonathan Crary, “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 1–24.

⁴² Evans, The Projective Cast, 366.

⁴³ Ibid., 357.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ The “Information sheet” was prepared by Evans for the second lecture of the class “Aspects of Geometry and Architecture” taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design ca. 1990. Robin Evans, “Information Sheet,” The Robin Evans Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge.

⁴⁶ Evans, The Projective Cast, 363.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 359.

⁴⁸ In “What is an Image?” W. J. T. Mitchell discusses the relationship between image/imagination and idea from a historical and theoretical perspective. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “What is an Image?” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7–46.

⁴⁹ Evans, “Architecture and its Image,” 19–35, at 20.

⁵⁰ Bergson’s complex notion of time is aligned with his critique of the chronometric fragmentation of time, and with the functioning of the mental apparatus in relation to memory and historical recollection. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

⁵¹ The resurgence of affect theory is generally located in a couple of key essays published in 1995: Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect.” Both essays draw on Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze’s work. For a general introduction to affect theory see Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham and London: 2010). In particular, see Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1–29.