Joost Meuwissen, ‘Towards a more active architecture’, Lecture delivered at the The Global Satellite workshop, as part of the The Synthetic Dimension event at De Zonnehof in Amersfoort, October 13, 1991.
Towards a more active architecture
Joost Meuwissen
Ladies and gentlemen, my lecture is titled ‘Towards a more active architecture’ and I will limit the subject to architecture because architecture is what I know best. The term “more active” is derived from the idea that with the present utensils, with the present machines, it is not so much that a new field with endless possibilities to be researched is opened up, as it is that the role of the architect to, as Rem Koolhaas calls it, aggressively explore these possibilities, this freedom, necessitates a new way of thinking about an architectural design, about where it stops and where other things, such as building, using or demolishing, begin. Notions such as the synthetic dimension, artificial intuition, open or free volume point at the advent of a kind of freedom that is not restricted by gravity or the visual impenetrability of material. Little would be gained though if the architect would subsequently lock himself up in his or her newly freed space, a space that, freed from gravity and materiality, would be infinitely symmetrical, as it has been formulated in the first announcement of this workshop: “The concept of the space-station enables us to develop images where front and back, left and right, top and bottom and even inside and outside are their mutual equals.” That is the image of such a space but we can ask ourselves if it is also a foundation for designing or, in general, acting in this space. It occurs to me that if left and right or top and bottom are each related in equal terms, the question would rather be how the relation of left and top is determined, or the relation of behind and outside, of inside and right. Precisely because dimensions become fluid the issues need no longer be a three-dimensional space, there is no point in restoring a Cartesian or Newtonian space, even though this space had a purist beauty in an almost boundless availability. The issue is that in the determination of the dimensionalities of this free space a certain amount of asymmetry is allowed, firstly because all performance in such a symmetrical space, all we do, is asymmetrical and secondly because part of what we do is invisible. The computer program hides invisibilities. Or rather, a part of the logic of the plan as a process of design is not visible. This has always been the case in architecture, it is the case when we draw on paper because paper is an element, a material, that is not visible anymore once the building is erected; the building is not made of paper. The paper is invisible in the architecture. Even in the architectural drawing the paper was already invisible, because the technical architectural drawings in their lining show no evidence of the fact they are drawn on paper. In the drawing the paper already was an element of absence. In architectural graphics the background, the fond of the paper, has no visual role. This is why architectural drawings are interesting in what they represent but they are not interesting as a drawing, because the relation between the paper and what they represent is always the same. It belongs to the code and not to what is signified. The paper belongs to the code and can as such be left out. And this code was the section, in which that which was not cut, the spaces, had a depth that was not articulated. The endless depth of the space next to the building remained as white or blue – in blue-print – as the slight relief of a cut room or even as the density of the ground. In the code of the section there was no relation between fond and line, between background and section, no relation between foreground and background or rather, its relation was as mutually the same as the images produced by the present 3D-programs. Or it at least has the tendency. And it is not surprising that contemporary philosophy, that of deconstructionism, has pointed to the cut, the section, as an important category of architectural thinking, because it is a beautiful idea that the building, this stack of stones and steel, this impenetrable body, this hard volume, can be cut, in an almost accidental way, without there being an image that precedes it and without much image being created. The section, the vertical section, is no Gestalt, no mental image. It is what we could call a trace in the swamp of the building. A trace without much left and right, without much depth, where background and foreground can be quite alarming. The lack of image and as such the alarming character of the section is the reason that in publications that are short of space the section is the first to be left out. The elevations and the plan – those horizontal sections that comfort us with floor or ground – give us more body than trace. They give us more image.
Even then the architectural sections differed from those used in mechanical engineering, which displayed similar graphics but which could at the same time have the mechanical image, the functioning of the machine, as its subject. They are in that sense more didactic, in the encyclopedic sense, more communicative. Buildings, on the contrary, did not function as such in their material, in their section, with the exception maybe of those fascinating sections from the Gothic Revival era. With this I specifically mean the experimental sections by Viollet-le-Duc in his Entretiens de l'architecture (1862-1873), where the material seems to be stressed to the limit, to the point that it could be replaced by other, more stressed materials, in this case cast iron replacing stone. A development that is not really thought through in architecture at the end of the nineteenth century. It has been thought through in building engineering but not really in the modern architecture, because the development of reinforced concrete led to a renewed emphasis on the tectonics of bearing and support. Not, with Le Corbusier and Mies, to emphasize gravity but in order to develop a tectonics that seemed to be free from gravity and that could thus be transparent. The virtual transparency of Le Corbusier's villas, as described by Colin Rowe, is really, when we look back at it, the destruction of the invisibility of the section in architecture. The avoidance of the category of the section. The avoidance of the invisible.
This experience of the section as a two-dimensional trace through architecture is obviously not transferable to a possible experience of a three-dimensional trace in the 3D computer-program, or rather, the issue should be to redefine the presence of this invisibility, as an architectonic category. The invisibility of the section was also a matter of secrecy, of a craftsmanship that need not be communicable. Such a category in the frame of a computer-program – however individual and already programmed as such – , from the nature of the machine and its connections to other machines, could be much more open, much more public, also towards other artistic and economic fields. And it is that publicness that is quite a relief in the same way the exhibition here is a relief.
The theme is individuality, the individuality of the architect or the artist, in relation to the perception of works of architecture and art that is always collective. In the era of the section this collectivum was limited, we could say in architecture it was limited to the architects themselves. This meant expertise but also alienating ignorance by the public. It could mean that although the architect is individual, and works individually, he or she does not lavish him- or herself in the relativism of postmodernism or in what Christian Norberg-Schulz called, in order to describe the contemporary situation in architecture, pluralism and the modern tradition. The pluralism of the free volume of the computer-program partly separates itself from the modern tradition, in its tectonics (column and floor). The issue would then be that the architect gives his or her work a certain point, a tendency. And the point is nothing else but contemplation about the instruments, about what is invisible in architecture because instruments are used, such as the section in the past. Also, what it would mean if the computer-program could be used for entirely different purposes. Such as in the past part of the logic of architectural forms could be found in the section as a code, so nowadays part of the logic of architecture resides in the 3D-program. And this is not just a liberation or just a better tool, it points at a wholly different and new difficulty.
In the first place, without the restrictions of the paper and with no spatial representations that the paper in its flatness requires, the sketching in space is not without a conceptual difficulty, because the trace is tactile, is a gesture, but as an image it quickly becomes mental. When developing a skill in this, however important it may seem, chances are that the technical moment again becomes a moment of secrecy, simply because this fits the traditional attitude of the architect. It is thus important how the primordial or primary or fundamental creative moment, the first step, is formulated. Is this formulated in terms of a mental image, a figure, a Gestalt that is approached in free space and that is weak (that is to say, preliminary and malleable), the question is how this malleability is formulated, along which axis, in which direction. The existing figure, once deformed, is no more in free space but in a space in which the form is already present, not only from the outside but also from the inside. Or, and that is the other possibility, the better possibility, is the traced line, the circumferenced volume for the time being, because it is a tactilly traced line, because time does continue to play a role, and because the thus generated volume remains a trace in the swamp of this free space, is the traced line a trace that is in itself not malleable but can it only be retraced, is it only different in its repetition?
Answering this question requires us to think the visual as a momentum, as not always present and if present not always representing, not always resembling something, that is to say that in both cases, whether the point is in a figure, the Gestalt, or in a gesture, the trace, the visual can point at the more extensive sensuality of architecture, a wider perception and even a wider perceptiveness. I point not only at the tactility or the haptics of a gesture in space, but also at the acoustic, the taste and the smell, all that can be tied into the visual appearance of for instance a pepper and that can make such a product so desirable. The question that follows is whether architecture, with its new possibilities for production, is finally capable to develop an aesthetics for consumption, consumption as a state of desire, as an avoidance of shame, as an offering of boundless individual possibilities that can be appreciated or not appreciated. And not just in relation to a visual form, not just in terms of styling or design but in terms of content. Could a space-time-volume architecture finally rid itself of the constraining expertise, of the secrecy of the section, that has made the architectural product so indigestible for centuries? It seems to me that this is well possible, when the invisibility of the computer-program in terms of program, in terms of openness and possibility, can precisely be thought of at the plane of other perceptual modes. It could be of use to think about an architecture of blindness. Maybe we should develop programs in which the design is not visualized, at least not before it is built. The pepper might then be a good model, a good example. At least better than a tomato, because a pepper is hollow and it is that hollowness – that could be both inside and outside – that increases its edibility because it is asymmetrical and because it has an absolute size. It is an object in a state of consumption, a state of desire.
It might now seem that we have returned to the Gothic cathedrals, that originated without visualizations and without a mental image, in the boundless conference culture of the Middle Ages, discussions that lasted for centuries compared to which our discussion-culture of the seventies has been a minor incident, meetings in which all the elements of the building but never the building as a whole were extensively argued. Was the topic the foundation then the discussion was just about the foundation and not about the rest of the building. Those foundations had to be different to other foundations because the latter had already been discussed. In this sense the Gothic cathedral, as a loose stacking of elements after one another, where what was already built was in a sense merely a restriction of what was going to have to be built, but where those restrictions formed no part in the discussions about the following parts, in this sense the Gothic cathedral is also a trace in space, in elevation. Viollet-le-Duc might be correct in his analysis of it in the middle of the nineteenth century when he, in his Dictionnaire raisonné from 1848 onwards, assumes a certain rationality in those elements, be it that the amount of irrationality has probably been larger. But he is not right when he derives that rationality from or have it pertain to the elevation of the cathedral as a whole, in his later Entretiens. The Gothic cathedral is, in other words, a trace in elevation, in space, with all the weakness intrinsic in a trace, with all singularity of the trace, with all the thrill of the question whether it can ever be repeated.
It could be said that a part of the communication in the computer-program could work in a similar non-visual way, but the result is, and this is why I returned to the Gothic cathedrals, that somewhere there is a sequence of elements of the design, that certain elements will have an absolute size that is not related to the human scale. What plays an important role in the aesthetics for a consumable architecture is the smallness of objects or products, not a visual smallness per se but a tactile, haptic, and acoustic smallness. When touching a wall, one does not simultaneously touch the back of it. When walking a stair, the bottom side is a different side from the one one puts their feet on. That smallness can be of considerable proportions, as the example of Oscar Niemeyer's architecture demonstrates, but if sketching in space, in free space, is a gesture, then architecture, and this is also the case with Oscar Niemeyer, could be modulated by the choreography of the gesture. In that case it is important to contemplate the category of smallness in architecture.
What takes place in the free, threedimensional space is always smaller than that space. The concept of size originates in the asymmetry of the trace that the product or the object cuts through it. The concept of smallness is borne out of the tactility of this trace, separate from this space. Thank you.
