Thoughts on the Formal Method

El Lissitzky wanted to eliminate the concept of perspective from his art as a way of eliminating the natural sense of depth perception of a human being. Normally, the human eye uses the vanishing of lines and the extension to their intersections to judge distance. This is done without any thought. He theorized about the unsettling nature of the axonometric, a drawing where the lines will never vanish. He believed that such a drawing would allow the human mind to grasp the infinite nature of space. There is an ambiguity to parallel lines, and to perspectives without clarifying figures, that makes it impossible for one to truly grasp the space. While this is an interesting theory, axonometric drawings rarely appear to by anything more than a little unsettling. The viewer may have an unconscious understanding that this is not how the world works, but rarely does it help in the understanding of infinite space. It typically does more to isolate the drawing as an object that could never exist in reality. This is what it has in common with infinite space; objects that do not vanish even slightly and infinite space are both impossible. As far as grasping the impossible and portraying it on canvas, El Lissitzky was successful. As far as attaining a representation of infinite space, he appears to be much less successful.

The more successful attempt of his is to eliminate the third dimensional axis in the drawing while making it appear that the objects are still three-dimensional. Many of his Prouns have objects all drawn with different techniques. Some are perspective and some are axonometric. This combination is much more successful at being unsettling. There is no fundamental orientation and no clear location for the observer. He wished his Prouns to be displayed horizontally to disconnect the viewer from the typical relationship to a work. When the Formalists attempted to incorporate these concepts into architecture, such as the Palace of Labor by the Vesnin brothers, they showed that such strong ideas about art could be translated into an architecture that fundamentally reflected the nature of the regime.

There came about in the minds of Choisy, Eisenstein, and the like, an obsession with the relationship between cinema and architecture. These theorists wanted to have architecture be central to the plot of a movie. They believed that the representation of a work was as important as the work itself. For instance, Choisy agreed that the axonometric drawing was the most powerful, and he felt that it communicated the agitation and animation of the building itself. Personally, it is hard to see such characteristics in axonometric drawings, but this was the common belief of the day. It was used as a means of gaining a new understanding of their surroundings. Eisenstein also helped to introduce the idea of contextualism, which has since fallen from popularity but was once a grave concern of architecture.

Furthermore, Eisenstein did not believe that elements of architecture had to be literal in order to be present. For instance, he believed that symmetry did not have to be exact if the visual symmetry made up for it. His example is the Acropolis. This appears true even today. When one looks at the plan of the Acropolis, one rarely sees a horribly disorderly composition. The buildings are not symmetrical but the composition is balanced, and this was what Eisenstein thought was the better means of design. The basis of all of this design is memory. Designing with memory is something that Eisenman has clearly undertaken as well. In his buildings, though much more modern, memory is the key to the design. The buildings are designed to evoke certain memories, and the understanding of many of his spaces hinges on the observer’s memory of what he has seen before. All of these ideas form montage because they are multiple frames that have been superimposed not in the physical reality, but in the mind. This architectural theory is most interesting because it does relate almost entirely to the mental effects of architecture. Such intellectual concepts were key to the Formal Method.