Tableaux Vivants: Tables and Stages of Architectural Striving

Abstract

This essay explores the worktables of architects, especially architecture students, as crucial sites of dramatic knowledge construction. More than an instrumental platform for drawing operations, the space and occasion of worktables provide an immersive, allusive, and speculative environment for rehearsing architectural performances, negotiating divergent desires, and conjuring meaningful worlds. As this essay argues through a demonstrative matrix of examples, the architect’s worktable serves as a miniature theater: a physically intimate place, which – when inhabited imaginatively – suggestively opens up as an expansive social space of dramatic transformation, mediation, and revelation. Moreover, the table surface and setting perform as in-situ archives, preserving – through traces of interaction and circumstantial evidence – a partial record of the very design practices they support.

Keywords:

• architectural representation
• imagination
• design education
• theater
• tableau vivant
• Marco Frascari
• Saul Steinberg
• Francis Ponge

Notes

1. Francis Ponge, The Table [La Table, 1991], trans. Colombina Zamponi (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2017), 76.

2. Paul Emmons, Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in Architectural Design Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 32–33.

3. Ibid., 191.

4. On tabula plena as a concept that resists a “clean slate” approach to urban planning, see Bryony Roberts, ed., Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016). See also Diane Lewis, Open City: Existential Urbanity (Milan: Charta, 2015).

5. Marco Frascari, “Horizons at the Drafting Table: Filarete and Steinberg,” in Chora 5: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Steven Parcell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 179–200.

6. Ibid., 192.

7. Ponge, The Table, 50. The Table was composed over three decades beginning in the 1960s. It was the last project Ponge was working on before he died in 1988. This is the same time period that Saul Steinberg was working on his series of table drawings.

8. Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). The architect’s drafting table, as a site opening onto the imaginal world (mundus imaginalis), where real and imaginary meet, is also central to Frascari’s design for “A Dream House for the Next Millennium.” See Marco Frascari, Marco Frascari’s Dream House: A Theory of Imagination, ed. Federica Goffi (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), see especially 33–34, 54 and 74.

9. The establishment of tables, which Foucault refers to as tableaux vivants, were intended to “transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities.” See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 148; cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [Les mots et les choses, 1966] (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), especially chapter 5 on “Classifying,” 136–179.

10. Georges Perec, “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1976]), 144–147.

11. Frascari, “Horizons at the Drafting Table,” 180.

12. Ibid., 196.

13. Lisa Landrum, “Chōra before Plato: Architecture, Drama and Receptivity,” in Chora 7: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 323–358; Lisa Landrum, “Theory’s Theatricality and Architectural Agency,” Architecture & Culture, Special Issue: This Thing Called Theory, 43.3 (2016): 463–475; Lisa Landrum, “Performing Theōria: Architectural Acts in Aristophanes’ Peace,” in Architecture as a Performing Art, ed. Gray Read and Marcia Feuerstein (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 27–43.

14. Designed by James Donahue of Smith Carter Katelnikoff Associates (now Architecture49).

15. The size and arrangement of desks and benches comprised the module of Mies’ orderly grid at IIT. See Werner Blaser and Masami Takayama, Mies van der Rohe. IIT Campus: Illinois Institute of Technology (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2002), 9.

16. Derived from the Latin verbs facio and facere, meaning both “to make” and “to do,” facture highlights that “architectural drawings don’t just represent something – they are something in their own right.” Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 10.

17. Marco Frascari, “The Drafting Knife and Pen,” in Implementing Architecture: Exposing the Paradigm Surrounding the Implements and Implementation of Architecture, ed. Rob Miller (Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1988).

18. David Leatherbarrow, “Table Talk,” in Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 122, 119–140. This study of typical table situations concentrates and extends arguments that Leatherbarrow makes elsewhere concerning architectural and urban platforms: tables, like dwelling terraces and civic plazas, provide practical support for social engagement while integrating broader environmental and historical horizons. On the correlation of planned spatial settings and unplanned social behaviors, see Leatherbarrow’s introduction “Architecture and its Horizons” to Uncommon Ground. Architecture, Technology, and Topography (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 2–24. On the primacy of the platform as an architectural topic, and its “manifestly latent” mode of disclosure, see David Leatherbarrow, “Leveling the Land, or How Topography Is the Horizon of Horizons,” in Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 114–130, 251–253.

19. Ponge, The Table, 9.

20. Vitruvius. De architectura, 6, pref., 1, 167.

21. Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 31–33. Comparable layout lines have been found inscribed on a stone wall of the ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Didyma, revealing proportionate calculations for column drums. See Lothar Haselberger, “The Construction Plans for the Temple of Apollo at Didyma,” Scientific American 253, no. 6 (December 1985): 126–133.

22. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). For a similar argument concerning accessory marks that decorate and deface architectural drawings, see Justine Clark, “Smudges, Smears and Adventitious Marks,” Interstices 4 (1996): 1–8.

23. James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999).

24. Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 57. Poggi elaborates the theme in chapter three entitled “Frames of Reference: Table and Tableau in Picasso’s Collages and Constructions,” 58–89.

25. See Diderot’s dialogue Entretiens sur le Fils natural / Conversations on the Natural Son (1757), with Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

26. The notion of “extended temporality” is borrowed from Leatherbarrow, Architecture Oriented Otherwise, 126. Architecture’s temporal dimensions are elaborated in his new book, David Leatherbarrow, Building Time: Architecture, Event and Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

27. This graduate design studio was co-taught with Ted Landrum in the Department of Architecture at the University of Manitoba during the 2017–2018 academic year. For further images of outcomes, see the Department’s online ArchFolio 2018: https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/media/AR_Landrum_2017_2018_StudioTheatre.pdf (accessed February 20, 2021).

28. Robert Wilson, “Set and lighting design,” in Sculpting Space in the Theater: Conversations with the Top Set, Light and Costume Designer, ed. Babak A. Ebrahimian (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2006), 168.

29. For instance, the chivalrous order of equal status implied by King Arthur’s legendary Round Table remains tacitly at play in today’s round-table consultations. See Erik Fenstad Langdalen, “(Pre)Served at the Table,” in Experimental Preservation, ed. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Erik Langdalen, Thordis Arrhenius (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 168–183.

30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52.

31. For a seminal study of architecture as a social practice see Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). See also the newly launched Deem Journal (2020) https://www.deemjournal.com/about (accessed February 20, 2021).

32. Ponge, The Table, 33.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Landrum

Dr. Lisa Landrum is Associate Professor and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University, and a post-professional Master’s and Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University. Her research on architectural agency is published in numerous books, including Architecture as a Performing Art (2013), Architecture and Justice (2013), Architecture’s Appeal (2015), Filming the City (2016), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (2017), Reading Architecture, Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience (2019), and Canadian Modern Architecture (2019). Her essay on “Theory’s Theatricality and Architectural Agency” was published in a special issue of Architecture and Culture 4:3 (2016). Bio page https://umanitoba.ca/architecture/lisa-landrum