DAVID RIFKIND

Florida International University

Misprision of PrecedentDesign as Creative Misreading

Literary critic Harold Bloom’s concept of misprision, although difficult to translate into architecturalterms, offers valuable insights into one way that architects critically engage with other designers’works through a process of creative misreading. Bloom stakes out a theory that governs bothcriticism and production. Misprision offers critics and historians another tool with which to explainthe influence of one architect on another. The concept’s pedagogical value includes a broadenedunderstanding of the roles that precedent studies play in the design studio.

Prelude

We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’sdifference from his predecessors, especially hisimmediate predecessors; we endeavor to findsomething that can be isolated in order to beenjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poetwithout this prejudice we shall often find thatnot only the best, but the most individual partsof his work may be those in which the deadpoets, his ancestors, assert their immortalitymost vigorously.1

The striking compositional affinity between twophotographs, taken in different decades, continents,and political contexts, of two buildings that differdramatically in size, program, site, and materiality,presents a conundrum for any conventionalunderstanding of the relationship between a work ofarchitecture and its precedents (Figure 1). It is notsurprising that Peter Eisenman represented House II,a two-story house he designed for a couple inVermont in 1969, in a self-conscious homage to thework of Giuseppe Terragni, whose work theAmerican architect studied at great length in adoctoral dissertation completed six years earlier.2 Yetwhat are we to make of Eisenman’s choice to modelthe image of the private house in Hardwick on aniconic photograph depicting ecstatic massesgathered at a rally in front of Terragni’s Fascist Partyheadquarters in Como?3 What do we learn about theCasa del Fascio and House II from this juxtaposition,

and how do we understand the process that joinsthe critical appreciation of the former to the designof the latter? How does a work of architecture effectchanges to projects that precede it? We need toadapt our as-yet insufficient vocabulary ofprecedent and analysis to account for a process bestdescribed by literary theorist Harold Bloom with theterm misprision.

ArgumentArchitects and historians engage architectural historydifferently. Yet while historians frequently discusshistoriographic methodologies and architects havedeveloped standardized analytical processes thatemphasize program, site, and spatial organization,neither fully accounts for the processes of creativemisreading through which so many architects havegrappled with the work of others in order togenerate new knowledge and critically engageprecedents. Examining these processes enrichesboth design criticism and design pedagogy.

The conversation that architecture has with itsown heritage is marked by misprision, a mode of criti-cal engagement in which architects interpret the builtenvironment through design as active criticism. Mis-prision is a creative misreading that generates newknowledge. Bloom introduced poetic misprision in hiswidely cited 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence.4

While chiefly concerned with poetry and intra-poeticrelationships, Bloom develops a concept that isimportant to understanding the ways architectsengage the work of their predecessors and peers.

The Anxiety of Influence deals chiefly with theways ‘‘strong poets […] clear an imaginative spacefor themselves’’ by creatively misreading the workof their predecessors.5 Bloom introduces six tropes(which he terms revisionary ratios) through whichpoets wrestle with precedent.6 Misprision emergesas the most important revisionary ratio, and isunderstood as a poetic misreading of sourcematerial akin to the swerve of atoms described byLucretius with the term clinamen. ‘‘A poet swervesaway from his precursor,’’ Bloom explains,

by so reading his precursor’s poem as toexecute a clinamen in relation to it. Thisappears as a corrective movement in his ownpoem, which implies that the precursor poemwent accurately up to a certain point, but thenshould have swerved, precisely in the directionthat the new poem moves.7

Each new work transforms and completes itsprecedents through a critical process ofinterpretation.

Bloom presents misprision, in part, as acorrective to the cult of originality promulgated byRomantic authors.8 Whereas Emerson extolledauthors to express themselves without recourse toother writers and the history of literature, Bloomargues that, ‘‘poetic influence need not make poetsless original; as often it makes them more original,though not necessarily better.’’9 Bloom adopts T.S.Eliot’s notion that every poem participates in a

Journal of Architectural Education, Misprision of Precedent 66pp. 66–75 ª 2011 ACSA

‘‘living whole of all the poetry that has ever beenwritten’’ and in so doing develops a theory ofproduction and reception, of creativity and criticism,that is simultaneously heuristic and hermeneutic.10

Bloom explains:

Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong,authentic poets – always proceeds by amisreading of the prior poet, an act of creativecorrection that is actually and necessarily amisinterpretation. The history of fruitful poeticinfluence, which is to say the main tradition ofWestern poetry since the Renaissance, is ahistory of anxiety and self-saving caricature, ofdistortion, of perverse, willful revisionismwithout which modern poetry as such couldnot exist.11

Misprision enables the study of historicalprecedent to escape the trap of treating history asan encyclopedia of solutions to problems defined byprograms, sites, cultural contexts, and esthetic

preferences. Misprision approaches history throughan open-ended process of interpretation andcriticism, in which precedents serve as multivalentsources of knowledge, rather than through the moreinstrumentalized and constrained process of treatingprecedents as models of programmatic problem-solving. Misprision recognizes that every creative actis also an act of criticism, and that any sophisticatedwork of architecture synthesizes knowledges gainedfrom close readings of disparate sources.

Architecture both challenges and expands thenotion of creative misreading in important ways.Architecture questions Bloom’s insistence, forexample, that images and ideas are not important topoetic misprision. Architecture also disputes hiscontention that misprision ought not be concernedwith politics or the history of ideas. What is more,Bloom’s insistence on a genetic model of ‘‘filial’’bonds between a predecessor poet and his successorfails to account for the synthetic manner in whicharchitects join and juxtapose disparate sourcematerial. Nevertheless, while Bloom’s theory of

misprision does not easily translate from poetry toarchitecture, it offers great insight into the passageof formal and conceptual concerns from one work toanother through a process of creative misreading.

SwerveSome architectural precursor ‘‘poems’’ have humbleorigins. Italian engineer Giacomo Matté Truccodesigned the FIAT factory in Turin’s Lingotto districtaccording to utilitarian and programmatic criteriabased on the automobile manufacturing process(Figure 2). Le Corbusier, however, read thebuilding’s spectacular rooftop test track as a lyricalexpression of a metropolis transformed throughautomotive transport.12 The sweeping curve in theground floor of the Villa Savoye, for example,echoes the test track’s banked turns, and marks themid-way point on an oval circuit that reinforces theallusion to the factory roof. The connections toLingotto continue inside the villa’s entrance, wherethe visitor encounters two vertical paths—a rampand a stair—forms of which make reference to the

1. Peter Eisenman, House II, Hardwick, VT, 1969, as published in Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn & Co., 1972, p. 36); and Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, 1932–1936, as published in Quadrante 35 (1936): 19.

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helical ramps that lead to the factory’s roof(Figure 3). Le Corbusier creatively misread theLingotto factory in a way that embeds within theVilla Savoye a larger search for appropriatearchitectural form in a world where the relationshipbetween city and building had been radicallyreconfigured by the emergence of the automobile.

The dramatic promenade architecturaleassembled from vehicular and pedestrian movement

at the Villa Savoye demonstrates another key aspectof architectural misprision—the synthesis ofmultiple poetic sources. Like the mixtilinear skylineof the building’s rooftop solarium (simultaneouslytaken from the visual language of ocean liners andthe everyday objects Le Corbusier studied throughhis Purist paintings), the circulation paths throughthe villa draw on several sources. The promenadearchitecturale first emerged from Le Corbusier’s

interpretation of the processional route to theAcropolis in Athens, which he encountered on hisformative voyage through the Mediterranean in1911. By the time of the Villa Savoye’s design, theserpentine passage through the house came toevoke not only the Panathenaic Way, but also thelabyrinth of Daedalus and the ‘‘Law of Meander’’(developed from aerial observations during a 1929trip to Paraguay and Brazil).13 This plurality ofsources invests the promenade architecturale withpoetic depth and richness, and illustrates asynthetic vision in which criticism is renderedthrough the transformation of precedent.

Le Corbusier’s writings are filled withprovocative misreadings of precursor poems, whichoffer the reader keys toward unpacking the manyexamples of poetic misprision in his work. Forexample, rather than duplicate the ornamentallanguage and organizational syntax of classicalarchitecture like his neoclassicist contemporaries, LeCorbusier identified qualities in the ancientprecedents—the mechanical precision of the Doricorder, the elemental geometries of Romanarchitecture—that enabled him to transform, ratherthan transcribe, classicism.14 Similarly, here-imagined the monumental machines of his day inclassical terms, as when he captioned an image ofthe Empress of India ocean liner with termspreviously used in relation to the architecture ofEgypt, Greece, and Rome, ‘‘Architecture is themasterly, correct, and magnificent play of massesbrought together in light.’’15

Le Corbusier’s oeuvre also provides examples ofanother facet of misprision, in which a successorauthor renders multiple criticisms of a precursorpoem. Le Corbusier returned to the theme of theLingotto test track numerous times. The viaducturbanism of his proposals for the regional reorgani-zation of Rio de Janeiro and Algiers transforms theFIAT factory from an isolated monument to an inte-grated system in order to re-imagine the metropolisas a regional infrastructural network. The buildingand rooftop test track that signaled the integration

2. Le Corbusier’s visit to the FIAT Lingotto factory (Giacomo Matté Trucco, Turin, 1919–1926) and his design for the new colonial city of Algiers,

1931, as published in Quadrante 13 (1934): 37.

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of architecture and automotive infrastructure wasthus misread into an urbanism of infrastructuralarchitecture at a regional scale. The roofscape of theUnités de Habitation, and particularly that of theblock realized in Marseille between 1946 and 1952,interpreted Lingotto differently. Here, Matté Trucco’sroof became a solemn district raised above the sur-rounding city, an Acropolis studded with small con-crete temples and, because Le Corbusier’s visualsynthesis drew on so many sources, the funnels ofocean liners.

This transformation is not simply metaphorical.Each act of creative misreading changes itsprecedents, or, as Eliot wrote, ‘‘the past [is] alteredby the present as much as the present is directed bythe past,’’ and thus the Acropolis cannot be thesame after the Villa Savoye.16 Nor does the houseremain static, since it, in turn, serves as a precursorpoem for numerous projects by students of LeCorbusier’s work. One example (among a greatmany) is Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum inAthens.17 Superficially, the two buildings shareseveral formal traits: both involve a stack of threelayers, with the uppermost level perched pavilion-like on the mass of the layer below, and a forest ofpiloti structures both. Tschumi’s major misprisivegesture, however, is the circulation path through themuseum, which draws the visitor along achronological display of artifacts climaxing,although not culminating, in the room of Parthenon

friezes on the uppermost level. Tschumi set theentire building into motion, transforming LeCorbusier’s promenade architecturale—previously a discrete circuit contrasted against morestatic volumes—into a single, spiraling procession.Here in Athens, within sight of its ‘‘source poem’’ atthe Acropolis, the promenade architecturale iscreatively misread to layer new understanding onthe relationship between Le Corbusier’s architectureand its ancient precedents.

Images and IdeasArchitecture challenges Bloom’s insistence thatimages and ideas are not important to poeticmisprision. ‘‘The profundities of poetic influencecannot be reduced to source study, to the history ofideas, to the patterning of images,’’ Bloommaintains. ‘‘Poetic influence, or as I shall morefrequently term it, poetic misprision, is necessarilythe study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet.’’18

In the case of architecture, however, images offerimportant clues to a larger affinity betweenprecursor and successor, and can be read asmanifestations of deeper connections between awork and its precedents. Consider, for example,another image of the Casa del Fascio.

Terragni published a photograph taken on theCasa del Fascio’s second-floor balcony in the sameissue of Quadrante (October 1936), dedicated tothe recently completed building, that provided the

image appropriated by Eisenman (Figure 4). Thephotograph is one of many in the issue by Terragni’sapprentice, Ico Parisi, and it depicts a glancing viewof the building’s main façade, in which the openend of the Casa del Fascio’s botticino-cladcolonnade frames a prospect of Lake Como and themountains beyond.19 The image is beautiful. It isalso a fabrication.

The lake is not visible from this vantage point.An adjacent apartment building terminates the vistain Parisi’s original photograph.20 Terragni altered theimage for publication, and in so doing offered thereader a clue to decoding the deeper affinitiesbetween the Casa del Fascio and its precedent—theParthenon.Terragni modeled the upper-story loggiasof the Casa del Fascio on the spaces between theperipheral columns and cela wall of his Greekprecedent.The fact that one building has multiplestories while the other has one, or that the twobuildings accommodated such different programsand sites is not important.Terragni was interested inmore than a specific formal gesture or spatialrelationship, such as the way exterior ambulatoryspaces frame distant landscapes. He sought to imbuehis work with a Hellenic sense of order that helearned to appreciate through the compellingmisreadings of the Periclean temple by Le Corbusier.Terragni’s Parthenon was the one he inherited fromLe Corbusier, a solemn and austere work ruled bymechanical precision and mathematical proportion.The photograph that best demonstrates thisconcern—the one altered by Terragni forpublication—is based on the only image thatappears twice in Le Corbusier’s Towards a NewArchitecture, a view of the distant mountains framedby the columns and cela of the Parthenon (Figure 5).

Terragni and his fellow Italian Rationalists cameto love classical architecture through Le Corbusier’swritings. Stripped of its ornament, classicism nolonger evoked the social exclusivity of the academiesof fine arts to the polytechnic-trained members ofthe Gruppo 7, the Rationalist group Terragni co-founded in 1926. Instead, through Le Corbusier’s

3. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928–1931, entry (Photo courtesy of Barry Bergdoll).

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eyes, the Rationalists learned to see the architectureof ancient Greece and Rome as the concrete expres-sion of such timeless values as order, hierarchy, andharmony. It was Le Corbusier’s misprisive vision ofHellenic classicism that Terragni sought to emulate,and the images reproduced in Quadrante trace themultiple layers of his references.21

Terragni’s colleagues celebrated the classicalsources for the Casa del Fascio in their writings. Thebuilding’s completion, contemporary with theseizure of Addis Ababa, Pietro Maria Bardimaintained, paralleled the Athenians’ constructionof the Parthenon in the wake of their victory overthe Persians.22 Carlo Belli asserted that the Comoheadquarters sprang from the same harmonybetween Athena and Apollo, beauty and wisdom,which had given birth to the Parthenon.23

Bloom, however, would insist that misprisionextends beyond poetic reference to incorporaterevisions to the precursor poem. The swervesbetween the Parthenon, the Villa Savoye, and theCasa del Fascio comprise critical emendations toeach work’s precedent. Bloom further explains the

relationship between precursor and successor in hissecond revisionary ratio, tessera, an antithetical actof completion. ‘‘A poet antithetically ‘completes’ hisprecursor,’’ Bloom argues, ‘‘by so reading the parentpoem as to retain its terms but to mean them inanother sense, as though the precursor had failedto go far enough.’’24 As with misprision, tesseradescribes a process of close reading and imaginativetransformation in which the later work presents analternative conclusion to its predecessor. Terragni’swork completes Le Corbusier’s, just as the lattercompletes the Parthenon.

Bloom’s idea that each poem is an act ofcriticism toward (that is, a critical reading of) itsprecursor poems parallels Octavio Paz’s positionthat poetry comprises not a representation of, butrather an intervention in, the world:

A poem is not only a verbal reality; it is also anact.The poet speaks, and as he speaks, hemakes.This making is above all a making ofhimself: poetry is not only self-knowledge butself-creation.The reader repeats the poet’s

experience of self-creation, and poetry becomesincarnate in history. […] The conception ofpoetry as magic implies an aesthetic of action.Art ceases to be exclusively representation andcontemplation; it becomes also an interventionin reality. If art mirrors the world, then the mirroris magical; it changes the world.25

PoliticsArchitecture also challenges Bloom’s contention thatmisprision ought not be concerned with politics orthe history of ideas.26 Bloom criticizes theseanalytical frameworks as unnecessarily reductive.‘‘The issue is reduction and how best to avoid it,’’Bloom writes. He continues, ‘‘Rhetorical,Aristotelian, phenomenological, and structuralistcriticisms all reduce, whether to images, ideas, giventhings, or phonemes.’’27 Architecture’s ability tooperate on multiple levels—to engage the politicaland to wrestle with contemporary thought whilesimultaneously speaking diachronically to theheritage of the discipline—demands a multivalentcriticism. Misprision adds new dimensions to thehistoriographic analysis of architecture’s roles inaffirming or negating power relationships. Anotherexample drawn from interwar Italy helps illustratethis point.

The 1934 competition to design the Palazzodel Littorio in Rome provided the most prominentopportunity for architects to explore the question ofwhat a ‘‘fascist architecture’’ should look like. Asthe national headquarters of the Fascist Party, thePalazzo del Littorio would mark the center of powerin state affairs, and it would focus on thecharismatic dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. TheFascist Party intended its permanent seat tomanifest the hierarchical structure of the FascistState, climaxing in the Duce’s arengario (rostrum)above the ruins of imperial Rome.

A particularly elegant entry to the competitionby six of Terragni’s friends (under the collectivepseudonym ‘‘Gruppo Quadrante’’) creativelymisread the urbanism of Classical Athens and Rome

4. Terragni,Casa del Fascio, second floor balcony, as published in Quadrante 35 (1936): 20.

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in order to invest the relatively young Fascist regimewith the timelessness of those ancient precedents.28

They sought to define a sacred precinct in which tocelebrate the ‘‘secular liturgy of fascism’’ amidst theruins of imperial Rome.29 The solemn spaces, strictgeometries, and traditional materials of their projectexemplified what the team called the ‘‘classicalspirit’’ animating modern architecture and theSpartan discipline that ‘‘binds the esthetic to theethical.’’30 No building in interwar Italy came closerto realizing the ‘‘noble spirituality’’ Le Corbusierascribed to the Parthenon (Figure 6).31

The Gruppo Quadrante raised a twenty-three-foot-high plinth over the triangular site, andcarefully placed four pavilions accommodatingdifferent programmatic functions on the platform.32

Three of these elements defined the piazza d’onore(plaza of honor) on the plinth, which the architectsenvisioned hosting mass rallies of 15,000 people.33

The piazza d’onore became a modern acropolis,elevated above the surrounding city and dedicatedto ritual participation in the collective myths offascism. Yet unlike its Athenian precedent, thisacropolis did not open toward the entire city; thebackdrop of an administrative wing ensured that theview outward from the complex would focus onmonuments important to the party’s identificationwith imperial Rome, such as the Coliseum and theBasilica of Maxentius, with whose ‘‘apse’’ the piazzaaligned axially. The piazza d’onore thus more closelyresembles the nearby Campidoglio, another spaceelevated above the city, enclosed on three sides bybuildings and centered on an equestrian statue.34

The Gruppo Quadrante competition entrysynthesized dramatic misreadings of two sources,the Greek acropolis and the Roman Campidoglio.Here, too, Le Corbusier played a part, as the youngarchitects from Milan looked both to the AthenianAcropolis, and to other sites, such as thepromontory in Cape Sunion, which members of theQuadrante circle had visited during the epic 1933journey of the Patris II during the fourth CIAMconference.35 The view of the distant landscape

5. The Parthenon, as published in Towards a New Architecture (1923). Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans, Frederick Etchells (Repr. New

York: Dover Publications, Inc.), p. 210. Image courtesy of Dover Publications.

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through the Doric columns of the temple at CapeSunion resonated with the comparable view of theStuttgart suburbs through the piloti of LeCorbusier’s double house at the 1927 Weissenhofsiedelung exhibition, as well as the view of thehorizon through the steel structure ringing thepromenade of the Patris II. These precedentsprovided multiple levels of reference for the GruppoQuadrante’s use of piloti to raise a building—amuseum dedicated to the Fascist seizure ofpower—above the acropolis-like plinth. Anotherancient site on the CIAM conferees’ itinerary, thetheater at Epidaurus, provided a model (in terms ofgeometry, arrangement, and proportion) for thePalazzo del Littorio’s auditorium (Figure 7).36

The competition entry by the GruppoQuadrante illustrates how the creative misreadingof sources expands the conventionalunderstanding of precedent analysis. Neither theAcropolis, with its religious rites rooted in pre-Periclean ritual observations, nor the Campidogliomatches the political context, programmatic uses,and site conditions of the Palazzo del Littorioproject. Instead, the architects were concernedwith a set of spatial relationships that mirroredpower relationships (speaking broadly to thequalities of authority and hierarchy specified inthe competition brief) and with the difficult taskof imbuing modernism with the sense oftimelessness associated with classical architecture.Misprision, the creative misreading of precedentthrough analogy and poetic reference, enabled theGruppo Quadrante to argue that their workexhibited the spirit of classicism without recourseto the eclectic reflex of cloaking buildings inclassical ornament.37

Eisenman’s misreading of Terragni’s workfurther demonstrates how misprision enablesarchitecture to operate politically, without reducingthe work of architecture to an essay in politicalaccommodation or resistance. For Eisenman, theCasa del Fascio and other works by Terragni(notably the Casa Guiliani-Frigero) exhibited a

formal syntax without reference to extra-architectural sources, a radical position thatliberates architecture from its subservience to bothprogrammatic and rhetorical functions.38 AlthoughTerragni never diagrammed the formal shifts anddisplacements discovered in his work by Eisenman,the buildings in Como could be read as referringonly to themselves with the kind of autonomyEisenman claimed for House II. Unlike Terragni andthe Gruppo Quadrante, Eisenman’s political

concerns involve disengaging architecture from therepresentation of social and cultural relationships.Eisenman divorced Italian Rationalism from onepolitical context and inserted it into another, equallycharged debate over the discipline’s obligations toexternal concerns.

Limits of MisprisionMisprision in architecture challenges other preceptsof Bloom’s theory. Bloom’s insistence on a genetic

6. Gruppo Quadrante, competition entry for the Palazzo del Littorio, Rome, 1934, as published in Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17 (1934): 23.

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model of filial bonds between a predecessor poetand his successor fails to account for the syntheticmanner in which architects join and juxtaposedisparate source material. The richness ofarchitectural poetics stems from the surplus ofmeanings possible in a single reference, and fromthe plurality of precedents embodied in any gesture.Even though Bloom allows for the idea that ‘‘someof the fathers […] are composite figures,’’ thenotion that one poet or poem ‘‘begets’’ anothernarrows the possibility of artistic production in amanner that forecloses the possibility of richlysynthetic practices like the work of BalkrishnaDoshi, which is densely layered with references tomultiple sources, or Richard Neutra, whoseresidential designs integrate parallel misreadings ofthe spatial sensibilities of both Ludwig Mies van derRohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.39

While The Anxiety of Influence profits from adetailed adaptation of Sigmund Freud’s theorizationof defense mechanisms, which underlie Bloom’s sixrevisionary ratios, Bloom’s critics have challengedhis insistence on an Oedipal conflict betweenauthors, in which each successor metaphoricallyslays his predecessor. ‘‘Battle between strongequals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laiusand Oedipus at the crossroads; only this is mysubject here,’’ Bloom contends.40 Yet misprision inarchitecture reveals more complex webs of analysis,interpretation, and synthesis. The creativemisreading of precedent—as, for example, whenFrancesco Borromini distorts Michelangelo’smuscular Capitoline facades into the sinuousfrontispiece of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane—isneither submissive nor nihilistic.41

As both a heuristic and hermeneutic stance,misprision must be approached with caveats. Onelimitation of this theory is that it treats history as amine from which to draw forth nuggets useful tothe present. This instrumentality creates a form ofoperative criticism in which examples are soughtand analyzed in terms of their utility tocontemporary concerns, potentially limiting the

range of both subjects and interpretations. As inthe historical materialism described by WalterBenjamin, historic events are shaped by thedemands of the present. ‘‘History is the subject ofa structure whose site is not homogenous, emptytime, but time filled by the presence of the now.’’42

Yet such an instrumentality has historiographicadvantages. Paul Ricoeur, who challenged the

human sciences’ Kantian claim toward objectivetruth by examining the paradox of historicity,argued that meaning was rooted in an experience ofexistence anterior to methodology.43 Such anexperience was possible precisely because thehistorian is embedded in history. ‘‘If the historiancan measure himself against the thing itself,’’Ricoeur argued:

7. Acropolis at Cape Sunion and theater at Epidaurus, visited during the IV CIAM, as published in Quadrante 5 (1933): 21.

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if he can compare himself to the known, it isbecause both he and his object are historical.[…] What was a limit to science – namely, thehistoricity of being – becomes a constitutingelement of being. What was a paradox –namely, the relation of the interpreter to hisobject – becomes an ontological trait.44

Misprision suggests an intersubjectiverelationship between architects, or betweenarchitect and critic, in which engagement, notdetachment, creates knowledge.

Another threat that hangs over misprision isthe potential lapse into eclecticism. However,misprision is more than simple borrowing. Referenceis not the same as quotation, and transformationshould not be confused with transcription. Theintra-poetic relationships described by the swervebetween precursors and successors result from acritical process of interpretation.

The vitality of the past as read through theworks of later poets is a concern adapted by Bloomfrom Eliot, who explained that tradition demandednot slavish devotion to specific forms, but rathercareful critical study of ‘‘the whole of the literatureof Europe from Homer.’’45 Eliot argued that ‘‘thehistorical sense involves a perception, not only ofthe pastness of the past, but of its presence.’’46

This historical sense, which is a sense of thetimeless as well as of the temporal and of thetimeless and of the temporal together, is whatmakes a writer traditional. And it is at the sametime what makes a writer most acutelyconscious of his place in time, of hiscontemporaneity.47

ConclusionMisprision does not account for every relationshipbetween works of architecture, nor does it excludeother historiographic methodologies. However, theconcept of misprision holds great potential value for

both historians and practitioners of architecture. Theprocesses of creative misreading described bymisprision reveal levels of poetic richness that eludeother interpretive methodologies, and explain a kindof analogical vision common to the work of manyarchitects.

Seen through this lens, every work ofarchitecture is an act of interpretation. Each projecthas the potential to excavate new understandingsabout the artifacts of the past, which themselvesmay offer new insights of value to the future.‘‘[T]here is interpretation wherever there is multiplemeaning,’’ Ricoeur argues, ‘‘and it is ininterpretation that the plurality of meanings is mademanifest.’’48 Misprision is the expressive mode of adiscipline constantly examining its own heritage.

Critical self-examination has been a hallmark ofarchitecture since the Enlightenment. Bloom’s studyof intra-poetic relationships offers new insights intoa key aspect of that auto-criticism: thetransformation of ideas through creative misreading.Eliot, the poet-critic whose reflections on thecreative basis of his own discipline inspired Bloom’sessay, argued that this process always transformsthe content of past works:

[…] what happens when a new work of art iscreated is something that happenssimultaneously to all the works of art whichpreceded it. The existing monuments form anideal order among themselves, which ismodified by the introduction of the new (thereally new) work of art among them.[…]Whoever has approved this idea of order,of the form of European, of English literature,will not find it preposterous that the pastshould be altered by the present as much asthe present is directed by the past. And thepoet who is aware of this will be aware of greatdifficulties and responsibilities.49

Robert Venturi, a contemporary of Bloom’s whoshares his admiration for Eliot’s criticism, described

processes of misprision in his landmark text,Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.50

Venturi’s trans-historical analyses of formal gesturesand spatial relationships imply patterns of creativemisreading in the work of scores of European andAmerican architects. Misprision helps shapeVenturi’s critical vision, thus contributing to both hiswork as a critic interested in the development offormal concerns over time, and as an architectconcerned with the levels of meaning suggested byeach gesture.

Architecture and its history challenge Bloom’stheory on numerous grounds. Misprision oftenoffers profound insights into the relationshipsbetween works of architecture, yet Bloom’s theorydoes not fully account for the creative misreadingthat links the work of one designer to another.Architecture, along with the visual and performingarts, calls for revisions to the theorization ofmisprision relationships.

How do we employ misprision as a designmethodology? We cannot; but upon drawing on theexamples cited here, we can expand the lensesthrough which we read precedent. This requires alevel of comfort with analogical thought processesthat treat historical artifacts through poetictropes—such as metaphor, synecdoche, andirony—rather than through the prosaic processeswhose empiricism is intended to ward off thespecter of subjectivity. It requires, above all,imagining the possibility of what a work could havebeen. Paz argued that, ‘‘[i]magination is thecondition of knowledge: without it there could beno link between perception and judgment.’’51

Misprision is the actualization of that imagination,the concrete expression of new knowledge drawnfrom the critical misreading of precedent.

AcknowledgmentsThis essay has benefited from generous and insight-ful comments by Holly Zickler, John Stuart, NateZelnick, Tony DeLeon, Gray Read, KatherineWheeler, Vladimir Kulic, and two anonymous

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reviewers. Lucy Maulsby, Andrew Manson, and Ad-nan Morshed corrected crucial historical details.Careful editing by Marc J. Neveu and Saundra Wed-dle has made the argument more cogent and theprose more accessible. My gratitude to EisenmanArchitects for permission to reproduce the photo-graph of House II, to Barry Bergdoll for permissionto reproduce his photograph of the Villa Savoye, andto Dover Publications, Inc., for permission to repro-duce a page from Towards a New Architecture.

Notes

1. T.S. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919) in The Sacred

Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1922), p. 43.

2. Peter Eisenman, ‘‘The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture’’ (PhD

dissertation, Cambridge University, 1963).

3. Peter Eisenman, ‘‘House II,’’ in Five Architects (New York:

Wittenborn, 1972), p. 36. Quadrante 35 ⁄ 36 (October 1936): 19.

4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1973).

5. ‘‘Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be

indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that

history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for

themselves.’’ Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.

6. Bloom names six revisionary ratios: misprision, completion and

antithesis, repetition and discontinuity, counter-sublime, purgation and

solipsism, and the return of the dead.

7. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 14.

8. Among architects, Frank Lloyd Wright exemplifies the figure of the

self-proclaimed designer sui generis who denied any debt to precedent.

9. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 7.

10. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ 48. Eliot’s work, particu-

larly this essay, is equally important to Bloom and his contemporary,

Robert Venturi. See Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in

Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 13.

11. Bloom, ‘‘Clinamen or Poetic Misprision,’’ New Literary History 3:2,

On Interpretation: I (Winter, 1972), 381.

12. An unidentified news clipping reproduced in Quadrante quoted Le

Corbusier as saying, ‘‘The FIAT factory anticipates the urbanism of the

new mechanized civilization,’’ Quadrante 13 (May 1934): 37.

13. Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and

City Planning, Edith Schreiber Aujame, trans. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT

Press, 1991), p. 5. Cited in Adnan Morshed, ‘‘The Cultural Politics of the

Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929),’’ Journal of Architectural

Education 55 (4) (May 2002): 204.

14. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Frederick Etchells, trans.

(New York: Payson & Clarke, 1927), pp. 131–173. Originally published

as Vers une Architecture (Paris: Crès, 1923).

15. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 101.Two pages earlier,

Le Corbusier presented the ocean liner Lamoricière as a lexicon of ‘‘new

architectural forms’’ described in similar terms (good contrast between the

solids and voids; powerful masses and slender elements) to the Parthenon.

16. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ 45.

17. Projects that adapted the promenade architecturale to other

contexts appeared soon after the publication of the Villa Savoye. For

example, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini arranged a serpentine processional

path leading to their kindergarten for the children of Olivetti employees

in Ivrea (1939).

18. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 7.

19. Parisi’s photographs are conserved in the Fondo Ico Parisi, Musei

Civici, Pinacoteca Civica, Como.

20. Flavio Mangione, Le Case del Fascio: in Italia e Nelle Terre

D’oltremare (Rome: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Direzione

generale per gli archivi, 2003), p. 221.

21. I discuss the photographic representation of the Casa del Fascio at

greater length in David Rifkind, ‘‘Furnishing the Fascist Interior: Giuseppe

Terragni, Mario Radice and the Casa del Fascio,’’ arq—Architectural

Research Quarterly vol. 10, no. 2 (June 2006): 157–70.

22. Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘‘Prima conclusione di una polemica,’’

Quadrante 35 ⁄ 36 (October 1936): 2–3.

23. Carlo Belli, ‘‘Dopo la polemica,’’ 4.

24. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 14.

25. Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1974), p. 59.

26. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 94.

27. ibid.

28. The Gruppo Quadrante was a collaboration of partners Luigi Figini

and Gino Pollini, with BBPR (Gianluigi Banfi, Ludovico Belgioioso, Enrico

Peressutti, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers) and engineer Arturo Danusso.

29. The Gruppo Quadrante reprinted their explanatory text in a double

issue of Quadrante devoted to their submission. See Gruppo Quadrante

(Banfi, Belgiojoso, Danusso, Figini, Peressutti, Pollini and Rogers),

‘‘Relazione al Progetto del Palazzo del Littorio,’’ Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17

(August ⁄ September 1934): 13.

30. Gruppo Quadrante, 14.

31. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 147. Like Le Corbusier,

the Gruppo Quadrante equated the visual refinement of Hellenic

architecture with the mechanical precision of contemporary engineering.

‘‘The absolute mathematical relationships,’’ they wrote, ‘‘that have

dictated the laws of the pyramids, of the Parthenon and of the

Coliseum, will tie together the masses of the Palazzo del Littorio with a

constant module,’’ Gruppo Quadrante, 14. Compare this statement with

Le Corbusier’s discussion of the ‘‘legislation’’ at play in such Roman

monuments as the Colosseum and the Pyramid of Cestius. ‘‘Simple

masses develop immense surfaces which display themselves with a

characteristic variety according as it is a question of cupolas, vaulting,

cylinders, rectangular prisms or pyramids.’’ Le Corbusier, 158.

32. Gruppo Quadrante, 13, 17.

33. Carlo Belli, ‘‘Atto di fede,’’ Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17 (August ⁄ September

1934): 9. The project’s spare vocabulary, which Belli lauded for its

‘‘purity of expressions,’’ reflected its designers’ belief that the ‘‘spirit of

classicism’’ consisted of geometry, proportionality, composition, and

refinement. The same issue as the Gruppo Quadrante’s relazione also

included Figini’s article on Mediterranean settlements (Luigi Figini,

‘‘Case di Libia–aerofotografia,’’ Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17 [August ⁄ September

1934]: 43, 45, 49, 53, 57) and Peressutti’s photos of Greece (Enrico

Peressutti, ‘‘Grecia,’’ Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17 [August ⁄ September 1934]: 11),

along with an essay on Greek art by Cahiers d’art founder Christian

Zervós (Christian Zervós, ‘‘L’arte in Grecia,’’ Quadrante 16 ⁄ 17

[August ⁄ September 1934]: 55–60. See also Zervós’s contemporary text,

Christian Zervos, L’art en Grèce des temps préhistoriques au début du

XVIIIe siècle [Paris: Éditions ‘‘Cahiers d’art,’’ 1934]).

34. A mounted figure of Mussolini in front of the Palazzo del Littorio

was intended to evoke the Campidoglio’s sculpture of Marcus Aurelius,

the only equestrian bronze to survive from antiquity.

35. Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘‘Cronaca di viaggio,’’ Quadrante 5 (September

1933): 5; Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter, Anthony Eardley, trans.

(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), pp. 21–25.

36. The issue of Quadrante dedicated to the 1933 CIAM had also

featured numerous photographs from Greece, including the Doric temple

on the promontory at Cape Sunion and the theater at Epidaurus. The

former may have inspired the Gruppo Quadrante to raise the museum

above the piazza d’onore on piloti, while the latter may have been a

model for the team’s assembly hall. Quadrante 5 (September 1933): 21.

37. I discuss the Gruppo Quadrante project at greater length in David

Rifkind, ‘‘Architecture and Revolution on the Street of Empire,’’ Scapes,

no. 6 (Fall 2007): 26–40.

38. Peter Eisenman, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations,

Decompositions, Critiques (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003), pp. 9–15.

39. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 11.

40. ibid.

41. ‘‘Borromini regarded Michelangelo and the Ancients as the two

authorities to whom he could appeal with absolute confidence.’’

Anthony Blunt, Borromini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979),

p. 28. Blunt makes the specific comparison between San Carlo and the

Capitoline palaces on page 74.

42. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, Harry Zohn,

trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 262.

43. Ricoeur explains this paradox by posing the question, ‘‘How can a

historical being understand history historically?’’ Paul Ricoeur,

‘‘Existence and Hermeneutics,’’ Kathleen McLaughlin, trans., in Don

Ihde, ed., The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 1974), p. 9.

44. Ricoeur, ‘‘Existence and Hermeneutics,’’ 9.

45. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ 44.

46. ibid.

47. ibid.

48. Ricoeur, ‘‘Existence and Hermeneutics,’’ 13.

49. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ 44–45.

50. Venturi, ibid. See also Robert Venturi, ‘‘Complexity and

Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,’’

Perspecta 9 (1965): 17–56. Venturi’s work precedes Bloom’s, and thus

he does not use the term misprision, nor does he cite Bloom as a source.

51. Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 52.

75 RIFKIND