Piling It Up?

The blob ostensibly obliterated the culture of tectonics within architecture, but it was a short-lived fad. Interest has shifted again toward a loosely “aformal” approach —the pile. What are the consequences of architects

- Samuel Medina

“Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians,” Robert Smithson once said. The artist, best known for his earthworks in which raw dirt and industrial materials collided, often in acts of smothering and commingling, accretion and dissolution, had an uneasy relationship with architects. “They never seem to allow for any kind of relationship outside of their grand plan.” Speaking to an actual architect, Alison Sky of SITE, Smithson riffed on the idea of an “entropic architecture” to describe a work site in Central Park he had seen: a vast pit shored up by scaffolding. It should have stayed, he thought.

On the face of it, Smithson’s cosmic position seems untenable for architects. Entropy is an ineluctable fact, but it is easily deferred; other considerations—professional codes of safety, programmatic desiderata—necessarily come first. It doesn’t help that entropic effects occur at a register at odds with our own faulty spatiotemporal antennae. The human animal has great difficulty reconciling cosmic laws with the finitude of everyday experience, and architects are as bad at this as everyone else.

But it is also clear that Smithson’s put-down is dated, and so packs far less punch. Architects are more than capable of thinking dialectically—that is to say, processually—as this group clearly illustrates. These designers share an admiration for Smithson’s primitivist art and that of his fellow traffickers in the archaic, Michael Heizer and Richard Serra. Among them, an expanded definition of form is a given. Technical virtuosity, after a decade of “digital jisms” (in critic Rowan Moore’s memorable epithet), is viewed with suspicion. They are experimental about materials. The catchall “pile” is frequently invoked, both as metaphor and typology, noun and verb, base and superstructure.