On Detail and the Sublime

The past century of architectural history can be understood as a continual diminishing of the architect’s domain of expertise, which has been fragmented away and delegated to a vast body of adjacent specialists —  structural consultants, glazing consultants, energy consultants, lighting consultants, acoustics consultants, security consultants, waterproofing consultants, to name a few — whose necessity is demanded from often already bloated budgets, and whose number grows exponentially with the increasing scale of any given project. 

Under these conditions, architects themselves seem to have little left from which to derive their own disciplinary legitimacy. Our only domain of authority that so far remains relatively unscathed by this fragmentation seems to be our supposed ability to subordinate the chaos of material, labor, and business to a delicious and delicate mirage of meaning. One way we construct this mirage is through detail.

Edward Ford makes an important distinction between the abstract and the articulated detail. Two planes of a wall, two panels of a window, two cladding materials meet — what happens at the edge? The articulated detail announces the joint by exaggerating, offsetting, or adorning it with a piece of trim. The abstract detail, on the other hand, forces a collision of the two conditions, sanding away the fasteners and smoothing over the joints, erasing all traces of their assembly in favor of a pristine image of graphic clarity.

Modernist architects became particularly interested in the abstract detail, partly because of its ability to obscure the labor that produced it and forget the entropy that awaits it, and partly because of a racist dismissal of ornament as unnecessary cultural vestige.

Except, the supposed ornament of the articulated joint wasn’t only there to carry cultural or iconographic weight; it was there to loosen the construction tolerances needed to make the joint below work, as well as manage weathering by redirecting water and critters elsewhere. The abstract detail, in its stubborn nakedness, no longer has this luxury. Funnily, despite seeming so self-evident in its graphic clarity, it is often both harder to produce and quicker to decay.

It is no surprise that, often driven out by excessive leakage, the original clients of many famous modernist houses didn’t get to spend much time living in them.

This hasn’t prevented contemporary architects from clinging to the abstract detail. A blooming facade fabrication industry has emerged to meet their demands for ever more acrobatic acts of abstraction.

Architecture has always been well equipped in manufacturing awe, and participating in the various projects that required the legitimating affect of the sublime, often simply due to the scale of its work. Kings and churches were the original rich client, and architecture was in the business of lending an aesthetic language to their divine entitlement. The sublime was to be induced by tortuously ornamented facades and ceilings, the tactility and materiality of their intricate craft obscured by the distance from which they were often observed, held hostage in the realm of tantalizing image. The global financial market, with its incomprehensible scale and the vast landscapes of violence routinely inflicted in its name, is similarly indebted to the sublime for its ability to manufacture and continually uphold our assent. In order to oblige, architecture has had to adopt a new aesthetic language, of which one of the more beautifully distilled specimens may be found, according to Reinhold Martin, in Frank Gehry’s IAC. In Martin’s words, “Abstraction [has been] modern architecture’s answer to circulatory capital, wherein the supposed lifelessness of the commodity form is given an aesthetic language of its own.”

Of course, it also leaked.