Divisible by 2, a square pavilion designed by John Whiteman for the 1988 Geburt einer Haupstadt (Birth of a Capital) exhibition in Austria, explored the political power of architecture.
June 25–July 24, 1988
St. Pölten, Austria
Divisible by 2, John Whiteman, Chicago, 1988. © Iker Gil.
In November 1987, Dietmar Steiner and the Donnau-Festival of Lower Austria invited John Whiteman, director of the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, to participate in the Geburt einer Haupstadt (Birth of a Capital) exhibition at St. Pölten. The exhibition was planned to commemorate the moving of the state capital of Nieder-Ostereich (Lower Austria) from the cosmopolitan scene of Vienna to the rural town of St. Pölten.
Whiteman started drawing initial ideas for the pavilion in April 1988, and soon after began working with eight students from the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC): Michael Ambrose, Madelaine Boos, Ann Clark, Ken Fougere, William Hornoff, Dan Marshall, Brett Roberts, and Mark Searls. In the space of seven weeks, the UIC students helped to design, detail, manufacture, and assemble the pavilion.
The project, Divisible by 2, was conceived as an architectural experiment. The pavilion was designed to explore the political power of architecture and set at play certain cross-relationships between building, image, and word. It reconstructed the insistent event of sexual difference upon the surface of bodies, where political power makes it impact. The pavilion was intended to exist as a machine that could calibrate and effect a spatial definition at the same time as it exhibited the machinery of its architectural operations.
Divisible by 2 was prefabricated at UIC’s workshop, shipped to Vienna, and constructed in St. Pölten between June 13 and June 25, 1988. Ironically, built as an exhibit in an exhibition on the relations between architecture, city planning, and politics, the pavilion was destroyed by firebombs on the night of Sunday, July 24, 1988—possibly by persons who could not tolerate its radical themes. Although the pavilion had stirred some local controversy, uniting the political left and right in their dislike of it, it is not known exactly who destroyed the pavilion or why.
Divisible by 2, John Whiteman, Chicago, 1988. © Iker Gil.
Divisible by 2, John Whiteman, Chicago, 1988. © Iker Gil.
Divisible by 2, John Whiteman, Chicago, 1988. © Iker Gil.
The building does not answer to the text.
John Whiteman
Diascopic drawing of Divisble by 2. Drawn by Hashim Sarkis.
The pavilion is the essay form of architecture. This building attempts to foil the system of architectural appropriation at work in the banality of function.
John Whiteman
Cover, Divisible by 2.
Whiteman, John, ed. Divisible by 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Divisible by 2 documents an architectural experiment by John Whiteman that articulates the preoccupations and concerns of the current generation of architectural and cultural theorists and practitioners. It investigates questions of embodiment, signification, visual perception, and physical experience developed in a square pavilion that was erected in Austria as part of the Geburt einer Haupstadt (Birth of a Capital) exhibition. Integrating the text with images and drawings of the building, Divisible by 2 reveals the project's philosophical concerns and explains the design processes. John Hejduk’s commentary establishes a dialogue with the project, acting as a critical counterpoint to text and images. More specifically, Divisible by 2 explores the cross-relationships between building, image, and word. Partly inspired by Jacques Lacan's depiction of a figure of two doors, one marked for men, the other for women, in his writings on the “agency of the letter in the unconscious,” Whiteman's pavilion marks the architecture of human and sexual difference.
The publication was supported by the Graham Foundation.
