Withdrawing Towards a Different Authorial Relationship

1. Two models of authorial relationship

I will depict two models of authorial relationships. Each of them is related to a different model of creation.

However, before coming to these two models of creation (and consequently of authorial relationship), I begin with a linguistic remark. The relation between a work and its author is also expressed through linguistic conventions. A clue that in architecture the relationship between work and author is different than in other art forms is given by the way we call architectural works. I draw attention to the difference between titles and names, and thereby to the difference between two ways of being authorial.

2. Giving titles

Literary and visual artworks have titles that are decided by their authors. The author creates a work and gives it a title. The attribution of a title to a work is the very prerogative of an author (Levinson 1985, 33). It is the author who, as creator of the work, has the right to give the artwork a title. Being an author is equivalent to the right to give the artwork a title, and the operation of giving a title repeats the theological act of creation. Ultimately, the author-title relationship is the secularization of a theological model: God creates things and gives them a name. Similarly, the artist creates works and gives them a title. This relation of authorship between the creator and the creature is described in Genesis’ seven days of creation. In Genesis 1 the creation of the elements of the universe goes hand in hand with giving a name to created things: sky, water, planets, plants, animals, human beings. Creating and naming are one and the same thing.

However, we must consider that the act through which God gives a name to creation does not correspond to the anonymous act of name giving in human language; it rather corresponds to the relationship between artist and his/her work, i.e. between author and her/hir work. Therefore, it concerns the authorial act of giving a title to a work.

Instead, objects in the world have no titles; they have names. The fact that an object has a name indicates there is no specific author of that object. Asking who is the author of the moon or the oak, or of the words “moon” and “oak” is a question that does not seem to make sense. There is no paternity for the names of objects. There is no author of objects just as there is no author of the objects’ names and in general of language. The author of a language (and here I am using author in a purely metaphorical way) is the entire anonymous community that speaks that language. The object-name relationship indicates a non-authorial relationship, unlike the work-title relationship which is an authorial relationship.

And now the question: do architectural works have names or titles (Rocca 2009)? The answer to this question is crucial to understanding what kind of relationship exists between an architectural work and its author or authors. “Maison Carré” is a name, “Colosseum” is a name, “Ville Savoye” is a name. These names are given according to the place, the function, or the client. Sometimes they simply arise from the linguistic community of a place, as if they were nicknames.

And yet architects are increasingly giving titles to their works, often encouraged by critics. I will give just an example: a college built in Copenhagen in 2024 and designed by the design studio EFFEKT. The design studio named the building “UMEUS Noli”. This name does not seem to make sense until we apprehend that it is an acronym. “UMEUS” stands for “you-me-us”. “Noli” stands for “Nordic living”. Thus, “UMEUS Noli” intends to signify something like “the (beautiful) Nordic way of living and of building together a community”. However, one of the most important Danish critics, Karsten Ifversen, wrote in a newspaper review that, according to him, the right name of the building should be “Accordion Houses”, because of its zigzag façade (Ifversen 2024). Finally, on its homepage, EFFEKT adopted the name “Accordion Houses” for the building (EFFEKT 2025). However, both “UMEUS Noli” and “Accordion Houses” are not names; they are titles. They express an idea of authorship, of authorial fatherhood, of relationship between author and work, as if the author were the divine creator.

And here it makes no difference whether the author is a single architect, an entire studio or an interdisciplinary team of engineers, architects, landscape architects and so on. What matters is the kind of relationship established between the author (or the authors) and the work.

3. Withdrawing

If we want to find a different form of authorship, we must look at another model of creation. In my opinion, this other model of creation can be found in the kabbalistic theory of Tsimtsum. Tsimtsum is a theological concept that could be of great relevance to architectural thought and to the question of authorship in architecture. Its author was the 16th century kabbalist and mystic Isaac Luria (1534-1572). He lived in the city of Safed, in Palestine, and died without leaving anything written. His follower Hayyim Vital (1542-1620, called Calabrese, the Calabrian, after his father’s birthplace) put Luria’s esoteric teachings for the first time into writing. At the beginning, these handwritings circulated in narrow circles. The publication of the Kabbala Denudata by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, half a century after Vital’s death, was decisive for the diffusion of Luria’s kabbalistic doctrines throughout the European cultural world. Vital’s text was published in Hebrew, its original language, two centuries after Luria’s death, in 1782 in Korets (Ukraine) under the title of Ez Hayyim (The Tree of Life). Here we find the original formulation of the doctrine of Tsimtsum, the contraction or withdrawal of God.

Luria is driven by the following question: how is creation possible if God, the Infinite, is everywhere? Indeed, creation cannot begin until there is room for the world. I quote from The Tree of Life:

Know that before the emanations were emanated and the created things were created, there was a pure highest light [Or] filling all that exists, and there was no unoccupied room [Makom] in the sense of empty air or space. On the contrary, everything was filled with the pure light of the Infinite [Ein Sof]. … And behold, the Infinite contracted [tsimtsem] to the point at Its own center, truly to the center of Its own light, and contracted this light and removed Itself to the extremities, away from the central point, so that an unoccupied place now remained in the center, empty air and space. And behold, this contraction and withdrawal [Tsimtsum] took place uniformly around that empty central point, so that the place of this space was round on all sides and in perfect proportions. … And behold, after the withdrawal described above, which thus left room for space, truly empty and free air in the midst of the light of the Infinite, there was now a place where what was emanated, created, shaped, and made could exist.’ (Schulte 2014, 58-61; English translation by the author)

This tale of the origin of space concerns the condition of possibility of creation. It concerns the moment before creation. For creation to take place, the Infinite must first make space for the world. It does so with a double movement. First the light of the Infinite contracts to a point. Then the light withdraws, moving away from its center, like the waves that are generated when we throw a stone on the surface of a lake. So, the Infinite leaves its center empty and dark, like “a man who gathers in and contracts his breath”, as was already said in a 13th century treatise (Scholem 1961, 260, 410; Scholem 1988, 129). This empty and dark center – called Tehiru – produced by the withdrawal of the light of the Infinite will be the place for the universe. The Tsimtsum doctrine “states that the ‘nothing’ of creation is the one that opens in God when God withdraws in itself (and in sum from itself) in the act of creating. God annihilates as a ‘self’ or as a distinct being in order to ‘withdraw’ in this act – which makes the opening of the world” (Nancy 2007, 70). God’s withdrawal means its and self-annihilation as pure identity, allowing the opening of the world, or better, allowing the opening of the space of the world.

Christoph Schulte argues that the concept of Tsimtsum is the most original idea in the entire kabbalistic corpus. Instead of the Aristotelian concept of an immutable God, prime mover of the universe, we find the idea of a God who limits himself and his power to give space to the world, while continuing to contain and embrace it. Moreover, “in tradition only the self-contraction of God in or near a place was known, not away from a place … In Luria the Tsimtsum is no longer God’s concentration and taking up residence in a specific place, but on the contrary his withdrawal from a place in God’s own center” (Schulte 2014, 47; English translation by the author).

Tsimtsum is a paradoxical conception of space before time and before the universe. There must be space before time can begin. In this, it is analogous to the Plato’s concept of space, called chóra, as described in the Timaeus (Cornford 1937, 159-197). It is noteworthy that one of the meanings of the verb choréo, from which the noun chóra derives, means precisely: “I withdraw” (Sallis 1999, 118). Furthermore, like the chóra, the void space produced by the Tsimtsum, “both mediates between and separates the creator and the created” (Lipszyc 2021, 196). And in philosophy the mediating term is more important than the terms that are related. The third and mediating term is the condition of possibility of the other two terms to be thought. In this case without the void of Tehiru we cannot think of the relationship between the creator and the created universe.

4. Four paradoxical features

If the story of creation is the account of the universe’s architectural design, it should be possible to secularize the mystical concept of Tsimtsum and see its potential for architectural thought and for architectural authorship. I suggest four lines of thought: withdrawal, self-limitation, giving freedom, impotence. However, these features are paradoxical: my thesis is that Tsimtsum names something that is the ultimate condition of possibility for architecture, but at the same time pushes architecture to the limits of its possibility. Architecture’s condition of possibility seems to make unrealizable an architectural practice which is faithful to its own condition.

4.1. Withdrawal. First of all, in Luria’s thought, God, as author of the universe, creates the universe not by expanding, but by retracting. The Tsimtsum, then, leads us to think of the inaugural architectural authorial act not as an act of expansion, but of retraction. Architectural Tsimtsum is not an act that makes space by extension, continually conquering new (already existing) spaces, but as an act that gives space by retraction. Space is allowed to be by retracting. Architecture must therefore begin with retraction.

But is this retraction possible? In practice, however, architecture is expansion, conquest of soil; it makes space by clearing, leveling, excavating, demolishing. If the ultimate goal of architecture is to make room for human activity, and if making space can only be achieved by retracting, the architectural act should be inaugurated by an act of retraction. Consequently, the condition of making space, and therefore of architectural creation, is always disregarded by the architectural act. Architecture disregards and overturns its own condition of possibility. Compared to Tsimtsum, the condition of all space-giving, architectural practice is paradoxically counter-architectural. Tsimtsum can be symbolized in architectural practice, but in reality it is always contradicted by architecture. Architecture betrays its first condition of possibility. The architect-author must live this contradiction: knowing that creation presupposes an act of withdrawal but not being able to do so.

4.2. Self-limitation. In the divine Tsimtsum, the Ein Sof, the “limitless”, limits itself. There is again an almost contradictory movement: the Infinite, which by definition has no limits, limits itself, and yet remains infinite. The Infinite does not manifest its omnipotence in the solitude of its infinity, but in opening a nothingness at the center of itself. God “is nothing more than the opening of this void. Only the opening is divine, but the divine is nothing more than the opening” (Nancy 2007, 70). God is accessible only through his own empty non-being. In other words, God is accessible only through his being non-God.

In the last phase of his thinking, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that architecture is the greatest expression of the will to power as synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian (Nietzsche 1997, 56-57). So, architecture is the most human activity, the highest form for a human being to be an author.

By contrast, the Tsimtsum as an architectural act means that the greatest power of architecture is expressed in its self-limitation. Self-limitation, and not having all resources at one’s disposal, is the prerequisite for any creative deployment. The architectural act is all the more powerful when it is an act of self-limitation, an act that gives space to the non-human. The non-human, the void of the human, is the way through which we can access this other authorial architectural act.

If architecture believes it can exert unlimited power by political, economic, technological, or artistic means, it systematically betrays the second aspect of its condition of possibility. Self-limitation is believed to be a new theme for architecture, imposed by human-induced global warming; instead, it has always been a condition, mostly ignored, of architectural practice, conceived in terms of its possibility.

4.3. Giving freedom. The purpose of the act of divine withdrawal is not that of leaving an empty space, but of preparing the place where the universe can be created, and can begin its history. By withdrawing, the Infinite makes it possible for there to be a world, as something other than the Infinite, and makes possible the relationship between itself and the world. God makes room for the other than himself. In a diary entry, Søren Kierkegaard, ignoring the tradition of Tsimtsum, notes that only through an omnipotent movement of withdrawal can God give human beings the highest gift: making them free and independent (Kierkegaard 2011, 56-57).

In the same way the architectural Tsimtsum is not the simple act of emptying, but it is the premise in order that the architectural composition and construction can be realized. In this way architecture can give space to the other, that is, it can give space to the (not only human) lives of those who will live there. To design and to build places means allowing relationships between the place and those who live there, and allowing the inhabitants to relate to one another, thanks to the place. Therefore, the aim of the architectural Tsimtsum is to establish places where individuals and communities can unfold by developing their relationships. Its purpose is to give freedom. Giving space is giving freedom. The authorial architectural act is not about the solipsistic manifestation of the conquering and building power of architecture. Rather, architecture manifests its power by allowing the establishment of relationships between individuals, so that individuals can unfold their freedom. By giving space, architecture works to enable free relationships. Without retraction, no gift of freedom. Giving freedom, the third aspect of architecture’s condition of possibility, should be the maxim that guides and directs every architectural act.

4.4. Impotence. However, the act of giving freedom is connected to an admission of impotence. What do I mean by this?

The act of divine Tsimtsum involves the Infinite withdrawing from the place of the world, but at the same time continuing to contain the world, since the space of the world is the result of the Infinite’s withdrawing from its own center. However, the world is not the plaything of the Infinite. God leaves the world to human beings and their responsibility and thus accepts his own impotence.

In the same way, the architectural act cannot claim to pre-figure what will happen in the places it designs. It must create the conditions for the free unfolding of individuals, but it cannot predetermine the future behavior of those who will live there. The architectural act is always a wager, that is to say a hope and a promise of emancipation and freedom, but a promise that will always remain unfulfilled (Derrida 1987, 491-492). It is a lost wager, a broken promise. The architectural act must be aware of its impotence in creating freedom, in creating emancipation. If it thinks it can predetermine the behavior of those who will live there, it transforms itself from an opportunity for freedom into an act of domination (Adorno 1967, 104-127). The power of the authorial architectural act is a confession of impotence, of impossibility of control.

5. The other form of authorship

These are the four features of the Tsimtsum model of creation, and these are the four features of this other form of authorship: withdrawal, self-limitation, giving freedom, impotence. These four features define an alternative relationship between the authors and their works, a relationship that in my eyes is more fundamental than the model creator-creature described in Genesis. As argued, the relationship creator-created universe needs a middle term, which is the non-human void as the result of the Tsimtsum, and which is more fundamental than the two terms creator and creature. Therefore, the Tsimtsum authorial model of designing is more fundamental than the Genesis authorial model. On the one hand, the concept of Tsimtsum imposes itself as a condition of possibility for the architectural act; on the other, it shows us how architecture disregards, overturns, and betrays its own condition, that is, the condition of giving space; and how architecture must continually denounce its own betrayal, under penalty of transforming itself into an act of domination.