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On
the Interpretation of Architecture
Applied
Interpretation Vol.
13, No. 1, May 2009 |
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Conceptional design, Editing, and
Curator: |
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Eduard
Heinrich Führ
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Organisation, Editorial
assistance, and layout: |
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Ehrengard
Heinzig |
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Editorial
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Heidi
Helmhold |
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Deterritorialization. The
Faculty of the Humanities of the University of Cologne from the Point
of View of its Users |
Claus Dreyer |
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Interpretation of Architecture as a
Semiotic Programme –
On Gregor Schneider's Cube in Hamburg 2007 |
Andrzej Piotrowski |
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Building as Unselfconscious Representation |
Sven Martensen & Anne Gelderblom |
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Writing Choreographies into Space |
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Sokratis
Georgiadis |
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Korai and Antefixes –
Metamorphoses of the Human Figure in Greek Architecture and their
Interpretation |
Henrik Hilbig |
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„Approaches of a New Architectural
Style...“ Interpretation between Meaning and Action by the Example
of Anthroposophical Architects from 1925 to 1939 |
Ulrike Seeger |
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Architecture of
Relationships and Interconnections –
A New Approach Exemplified by the Central Railway Station in Stuttgart |
Sabine Brinitzer |
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About the Complexity of Interpreting
"Organic Architecture" |
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Alban Janson
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“Presenting and Withdrawing”
The Villa Müller in Prague by the Architect Adolf Loos |
Christine Neuhoff |
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The Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der
Rohe
Canon und Autobiography |
Ulrike Sturm |
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'Against Interpretation' –
Re-Visiting the Bauhaus Building at Dessau |
Lukas Zurfluh |
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The ‘Flowing Space’ of the Barcelona
Pavilion –
A Metamorphosis of Interpretation? |
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Silke
Langenberg |
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Planned Design – Built Process
Architecture of the Sixties and Seventies |
Matthias Korn |
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A Modest Proposal for Getting to Know
Architecture: Destruction.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Cuts |
Zeuler R. Lima |
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The Reverse of the Reverse:
Another Modernism according to Lina Bo Bardi |
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Christine
Neuhoff |
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The Myth of Vals |
Jan Pieper |
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Critical Approach of the Architecture’s
Periphery |
Jörn Köppler |
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Interpretation and the Aesthetic Experience,
Discussed at the Example of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Berlin
by OMA / Rem Koolhaas |
Ryszard Sliwka |
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Sublime Phenomena:
Notes on the Architecture of the Horizon |
Ryszard Sliwka |
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Genetic Architecture |
Anna M. Eifert-Körnig |
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The Block Beuys –
A Traditional Occurrence as Interpretation of Architecture |
Katharina Lehmann |
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The Constructed Room
with its Effect on Reception and Experience of Perception |
Fred Truniger |
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The Accumulation of Images –
A Cinematic Interpretation of the Landscape of England |
abstracts: |
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___Heidi
Helmhold
Cologn |
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Faculties are part of ascribed
academic power structures. Their localization on campus and their
architectural coding are the result of a practical discourse which
defines their modernity and otherness. The contemporary academic
culture in Germany is focused on a dynamic constructive process,
which produces hierarchical oppositions of excellence and non-excellence.
At an increasing pace such processes take place at various university
locations. In the following I will present the spatial pattern of
a (non-excellent) academic landscape, the Faculty of the Humanities
of the University of Cologne, its otherness demonstrated by several
changes in name: Pedagogical Academy in the 1950s, Pedagogical College
since 1965, Faculty of Education since 1980 and Faculty of the Humanities
since 2006.
I suggest that architecture is reduced to a mere additive spatial
container if its users cease to actively participate in the ascriptive
performances of their house. Whenever a Ministry and the governing
body of a university marginalize a faculty by continually submitting
it to conditions of material scarcity, this will endanger not only
the physical construction as the outer house; it will also destroy
the academic culture of the inner house. As a result, the shaping
of the cultural and social body ceases. Processes of identification
disappear; physical and social reality are no longer constructed
through activities at and with the architectural material. A sequence
of deterritorialization emerges, in which insular space, escapism,
seclusion and homogeneity lead to exclusion, academic ghettos and
loss of academic culture.
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Paper
in German |
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___Claus
Dreyer
Detmold |
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Interpretation of signs and sign-complexes
is one of the main tasks of applied semiotics. For architectural
theory it is especially the “readability” and “communicative capacity”
of the relation between form, function and meaning of a building,
which shall be made obvious and understandable by interpretation.
Usually the following problems are treated in this context:
Which signs and sign-complexes can be found in an architectural
work, what do they mean and to which “fields of discourse” do they
belong?
Which “codes” can be identified, in which combination or mixture
do they occur and what do they signify?
Can single signs or codes be interpreted as “cultural symbols” and
related to a special “milieu of symbols” (Norberg-Schulz) and integrated
in an “overall-interpretation”?
The black “Cube” of Gregor Schneider at Hamburg 2007 is an example
for this methodical approach and it should be demonstrated that
it is the dialectical mixture and combination of sacred, aesthetical
and ordinary signs and codes which makes this temporary building
a symbol of the present multicultural discourse. |
Paper
in German |
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___Andrzej
Piotrowski
Minneapolis |
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Reductive categories and conceptual dichotomies, such as art
versus science or creativity versus necessity, tend to structure
architectural discourses again. They create an impression of clear
distinctions and logical arguments. Designing and knowing architecture,
however, has always been much more complex and epistemologically
messy than what these tropes of communication imply.
My paper will propose that built environments have always participated
in establishing thinkability of culturally shared thoughts. Without
the total understanding architects and master builders have given
form to attitudes and ways of thinking that verbal discourses
have not yet been ready to articulate.
To substantiate this point of view my submission will focus on
the Royal Chapel in Lublin, Poland, a small structure constructed
in the Gothic style but decorated with Russian-Byzantine paintings.
The structure is riddled with symbolic conflicts and that is why
it is usually discussed as a provincial and imperfect example.
I will show what one can learn from this kind of architecture.
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Paper
in English |
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___Sven
Martensen &
Anne Gelderblom
London, Hamburg |
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interpretation of architecture, as much as architecture itself, can
hardly be thought without the body. In order to define the process
of the interpretation of architecture more precisely, the text therefore
seeks to analyze the relation between our moves and the built environment
and to demonstrate that this relation is reciprocal. The text also
aims to explain the impact of social conditions and denotations on
the spatial organization of day-to-day routines and our social practices.
However, as they are constantly reconstituted through our practices,
these social structures and denotations are subject to processes of
change, allowing us to redefine our social and built environment.
Through our moves, we create a relation to our built environment (Alkemeyer
2003) which we interpret with our practice, incorporating the social
structures through the displacements and moves of our bodies (Bourdieu
1991). |
Paper
in German |
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___Sokratis
Georgiadis
Stuttgart |
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The "human scale"
has always been one of the basic premises of a humanistic conception
of architecture. This conception eagerly sought its legitimation
in the anthropomorphic foundation of column proportions passed down
by Vitruvius. However, an archaeology that goes beyond the usual
anachronisms of the Vitruvian matrix and focuses on the contexts
in which the human figure was employed in an architectural function
reveals that the Roman theoretician's anthropomorphic analogies
were attributions post factum. A walk through the labyrinth
of interpretations, but also of literary tradition and the material
evidence available, shows that the application of the human scale
to architecture was nowhere a motive of relevant practice, at least
in those verifiable cases from archaic and classical times in which
the human form was architecturally used in figurative representation
rather than in the abstract shape of the column. The lines of flight
of the investigation rather come upon the horizon of ancient myths
about power struggles between chthonic and celestial forces to rule
the world and man. These myths provided the raw material for a multiplicity
of cult practices and rituals, which in turn proved to be the most
important form-generating factors of an architecture that served
as their container and background.
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Paper
in German |
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___Henrik
Hilbig
Dresden |
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Juan Pablo Bonta’s study Architecture and its Interpretation
described the process of canonicalising architectural significance,
mainly from the point of view of a fixed separation between existing
structures and subsequent attribution of significance by critical
discourse. Little attention was paid to the architects. This is
all the more astonishing, as the architects themselves are mainly
responsible for the implementation of visions and significance in
buildings by their own activities.
This complex process of translation between interpretation on the
one hand, and actual activity – architectural design – on the other
hand, is represented in a topic of architectural history that has
hardly been addressed today, the first anthroposophical architects’
generation after Rudolf Steiner. A relatively tight collective of
significance and activity in discourse with the everyday demands
of contract principals, laws, and territorial restrictions, developed
a canonical style using the partly disparate textural and visual
basis of Steiner‘s work. Unlike Steiner’s buildings, this style
may be regarded as a whole.
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Paper
in German |
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___Ulrike
Seeger
Stuttgart |
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Traditionally, the interpretation of historical
architecture is based on documents from the planning and construction
phase and on the comparitative analysis of contemporary buildings,
in the discussion of 20th century architecture this approach often
supplemented by the autobiographical notes of the architects. Emphasis
is typically on the facades and on the execution of individual rooms.
Only rarely the interconnection of spaces is considered as reflecting
the original intention of the architects. Employing the central
Stuttgart railway station (constructed 1914-28 by Paul Bonatz and
Friedrich Eugen Scholer) as an example the present contribution
emphasizes the importance of room sequences and of the interconnection
of rooms with different functions. One the one hand, the architects
made full use of the expressionistic contrast between the human
and the superhuman scale. On the other hand, they attempted, in
the travellers’ interest, to minimize distances. In this respect,
Bonatz and Scholer owed important suggestions to the advice of Alexander
Rüdell (1852-1920). The role of this experienced state architect-engineer
tends to be ignored in the historical accounts of 20th century architecture,
which tend to concentrate on the artists.
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Paper in
German |
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___Sabine
Brinitzer
Kaiserslautern |
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Based on my scientific research in this article
I will exemplarily show the interpretation of ‘Organic Architecture’
by analysing the writings, drafts, and constructions of Hugo Häring,
Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun, and Alvar Aalto. Each of their
positions bases on the theoretical fundament of a different interpretation
of nature and resulting from this their drafts display specific
interpretations of construction works. However, their subsequent
written interpretations of implemented works are building more than
only complex “parameters”. Due to those reasons the interpretation
is claimed as critical revision. |
Paper
in German |
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___Alban
Janson
Karlsruhe |
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This text is primarily about
the careful observation and the precise description of architecture:
The Villa Müller in Prague by the architect Adolf Loos will be treated
as the subject of perception and concrete experience. Emphasis is
put on the particular feature of architecture to create wholesome
situations comprising also of the participants. It is not possible
to describe and understand those situations by merely countable
or measurable facts. What counts is the lively interaction between
the spatial qualities of the building and the movement and living
in it as experienced on the spot. Yet this experience would again
be cut down to a reduced form, when restricted to some detailed
purposes due to an individual interest. For this reason only a very
general type of actions will be considered here, such as arriving,
entering, circulating, going upstairs, sitting down, looking out
etc. Even though architecture is usually perceived only incidentally,
the effectiveness of the architectural means deserves a closer look.
The way they convey their impact on our experience can be detected
and described only by sharpened observation. Sometimes the verbal
expression of those descriptions even demands slightly exaggerated
formulations. |
Paper in
German |
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___Christine
Neuhoff
Berlin |
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This paper will compare two different accounts
of Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat: on the one hand,
the villa as a defined canon of modernism, and on the other hand
as a lived autobiography. I will trace in how far these accounts
correspond to each other, complement one another or contradict each
other.
The aim of this paper is thus threefold: Firstly, by investigating
into the establishment of the Villa Tugendhat’s canon in
both the European and the American contexts, I want to elucidate
the process of canon-formation and give an overview of the aspects
mentioned and most frequently repeated with regard to the Villa
Tugendhat. Secondly, based on this analysis, I will show that
the canon was mainly established by the visual records of the villa,
notably the photographic representations of the house, and not by
the house itself. In contrast, the Tugendhats’ perception of the
house and their lives, and the villa’s history after 1938 did almost
not influence the canon. Finally, I will elucidate the role of the
architectural critic with regard to the parallel existing accounts
of the same building. |
Paper
in English |
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___Ulrike
Sturm
Cottbus |
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In her famous essay “Against Interpretation” Susan
Sontag severely attacked the American art criticism of the 1960ies
and pleaded for an alternative approach to art. Instead of suffocating
the piece of art in a futile search for its meaning critics should
rather focus on “how it is, what it is, even that it is, what
it is”. The following essay is guided by Susan Sontag´s alternative
approach and applies it to one of the most interpreted icons of
“Neues Bauen” in Germany, the Bauhaus Building of Walter Gropius
at Dessau.
Visiting the Bauhaus Building at Dessau without automatically, interpreting
it as the icon of modernism, opens up new facets of its architecture.
Looking at the building in a “non-interpretive” way means to describe
it as “what it is” without referring to Avantgarde theorems.
Surprisingly enough, Gropius himself gave a very down-to-earth description
of his building, which was rather obscured by later critics as Sigfried
Giedion and others. Moreover, explaining “how it is, what it
is” reveals features of the Bauhaus Building which could even
be classified as “traditional”.
These features, however, do not lessen the quality of the building,
but add to it. Gropius combined conventional settings with modern
techniques and this is why the impact of the building is much more
complex and humane than most interpretations suggest. Julius Posener
who visited the restored building in the late 1990ies was one of
the few critics who were fully aware of these features. As Posener
wrote emphatically, he “beheld the Bauhaus for the first time”,
when he saw the restored building, although he had “known it
by heart” from many photographs. |
Paper in German |
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___Lukas
Zurfluh
Zurich |
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On the basis of an analysis of texts and discourse,
this article deals with the reception and interpretation of the
specific spatial qualities of the Barcelona Pavilion after its reconstruction
in 1986. Thereby two aspects are emphasized: on the one hand the
importance of the possibility to experience space in order to describe
and interpret it, on the other hand the understanding of interpretation
as a steadily changing, discursive process.
The reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion has led to a differentiation
and expansion of the before codified interpretation. A plenitude
of characterizations took the place of the formerly codified description
of the space as ‘flowing’, all of them having a commonness on a
meta-level: they specify the spatial qualities in analogy to the
different physical states of liquids – ranging from firm to fluid
to gaseous. These apparently conflicting interpretations can thereby
be conceived as continuously changing conception of the same spatial
situation, even as an actual metamorphosis of its interpretation.
They can lead us to a comprehension of interpretation, which is
no longer interested in an irrevocable codification but in a dialogue
of varying options to interpret spatial qualities. |
Paper in
German |
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___Silke
Langenberg
Zürich |
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The debate on the quality of
architecture in the sixties and seventies is still undifferentiated.
The large scale and serial production of architecture difficultly
open up artistic analysis. For understanding the “boom-buildings”
different standards of evaluation seem to be essential, compared
to buildings of earlier centuries. For example the historic importance
is based on “the phenomenon of mass”, the architecture-historical
value on the process-orientation of architectural concepts. Knowledge
of the strategies for optimising processes and achieving economies,
which control planning and construction in the 1960s and 1970s,
are fundamental to the interpretation of the buildings.
In the sixties and seventies about 5 billion buildings with more
than one and a half thousand billion square meters were constructed
in the Federal Republic of Germany as the result of falling unemployment
and increasing social prosperity. Parallel to economic growth, the
population of the Federal Republic is growing – between 1950 and
1970 it jumps about 10 billion. Thus there was a need not only for
higher standards of in the quality of the building stock, but also
in a higher capacity overall.
The high demand for buildings allows the breadthways test of different
rationalization strategies for the first time: to be profitable,
serial production strictly asks for a high number of recurrent,
identical elements; the employment of certain constructions, machines
or formworks only pay off by developing great volumes. Furthermore
ambitions of developing location-independent and flexible system-buildings
appear. The planning-process is rationalised, and the building process
is optimised in consideration of all related standards and eventualities.
The built mass of the sixties and seventies boom is remarkable as
a contemporary phenomenon and important in respect of the visions
of industrial mass-production. Nevertheless strategies of conservation
have to be geared to criteria of sustainable management of the building-stock.
Its chance of survival should be seen in the light of wider economic
and ecologic interests including commercial real-estate concerns.
The bigger part of boom-building is not to be conserved as a contemporary
reference, but to be used and valued as a resource. |
Paper
in German |
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___Matthias
Korn
Berlin |
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The paper deals with the somewhat unorthodox way
of getting to know architecture by cutting it through. This procedure
shall be understood in general as an alternative way of approaching
a building. It will focus on Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic process,
in which his working material consisting of abandoned architecture
will play a leading role. I will explore the evolution of one of
his most famous works, Splitting, from the first abstract
sketches to the idea and the final execution. It will be shown what
special interests were leading Matta-Clark towards Splitting,
and which experiences and special ways of perception were the condition
to generate his idea of cutting the house through. Further will
be explored that his achievement lies in the production of a very
close contact to the building. The cut frees inner invisible tensions
within the house that were sensed unconsciously by Matta-Clark as
it touches his inner self during the process at the same time. |
Paper in German |
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___Zeuler
R. Lima
Saint Louis |
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This paper proposes to reflect upon the notion
of other modernisms, which tends to gain acceptance in
contemporary architecture theory. Our theoretical and empirical
analysis is framed by the work of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina
Bo Bardi, particularly by two houses she designed in the 1950s.
The central hypothesis of the text is that the separation between
central and marginal areas of architectural production presents
a problematic framework to analyze modernism around the world. The
notion of other modernisms intrinsically implies the limitation
of the notion of critical regionalism. As Lina Bo Bardi operated
both in Italy and in Brazil, she transcended this hierarchical division
with contrasting aesthetic affiliations and hybridizing practices.
The mutual exchange and influence between different realities provides
a more nuanced relationship to consider otherness as an
internal and not only an external condition of artistic and cultural
manifestations.
Two theoretical propositions advance the points in this article.
First, we analyze Lina Bo Bardi’s struggle with modernism as related
to anthropologist Nestor García-Canclini’s discussion about hybrid
cultures. Second, we analyze her conception of modernity with regards
to anthropologist Timothy Mitchell’s definition of modernity as
the vulnerable staging of history. As a foreign woman with key political
connections, Lina Bo Bardi was the most disruptive other
in the Brazilian architecture mainstream. Her life and work spanned
between two continents and merged rationalism and popular culture.
As she remained loyal to the avant-garde ideas of the Modern Movement,
she critically proposed an alternative to the cosmopolitan, Corbusian
branch of Brazilian architecture.
Lina Bo Bardi’s work challenged traditional dichotomies between
rationalism and everyday improvisation. Her goal to bring popular
culture into her conception of modernism emerged in the context
of postwar Italian reconstruction and became a political critique
of the inequalities of social and cultural modernization in Brazil.
Her work represents more a reflection on modernism and modernity
than a reflection on the meanings of tradition and the popular.
Despite her struggles, Lina Bo Bardi was committed to the belief
that the role of architects is not to turn away from design but
it is to be involved in aesthetic, social and political negotiations.
And as she negotiated between entering and leaving modernism, she
demonstrated that the modern has no simple and fixed origin, place,
or form.
Ambivalence and ambiguity are features that can be easily associated
with Lina Bo Bardi’s work, but the same is true in regard to modernism
despite its claim to universality. Instead of separating and resolving
differences, her work highlighted the instabilities that are present
in the workings of modernity and in the relationship between different
cultural needs, values, and forms. |
Paper in English |
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___Christine
Neuhoff
Berlin |
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This paper challenges the widespread
habit of praising Peter Zumthor’s bath for its site-related materiality
and proposes:
Could it be that instead of the bath’s careful placing and its tactile
sensation, it is the bath’s place effect and tactility
effect which is paid reverence to?
Could it be that instead of the bath’s actuality, it is the bath’s
photographic effect, its photogenic quality, which is paid reverence
to?
With this paper, I will exemplify that the positioning of Peter
Zumthor’s thermal bath within the discursive context of Mies van
der Rohe, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Robin Evans and Heinrich
Wölfflin reveals the bath’s kinship with photography and its operations
on a visual level. The thermal bath will serve as a case study to
identify effects of photography, notably the effect of photogenia
in architecture. |
Paper
in English |
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___Jan
Pieper
Aachen |
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The architecture’s Avant-garde gradually equals
a secret society. The one, who is willing to engage with it, apparently
is required to possess knowledge in philosophy, mathematics, and
natural sciences and some enthusiasm for the application of advanced
software. The question if this causes a gain for architecture remains
open. In the light of those hermeneutic approaches many comments
only paraphrase well-meant formulas provided to them by the architects.
The professor for construction history and conservation of the RWTH
Aachen, Jan Pieper, states the preconditions for his criticism on
randomness of the forms and deals systematically with the spectacular
Daimler-Benz-Museum. Behold, all the glamour is gone. |
Paper in
German |
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___Jörn
Köppler
Berlin |
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Based on Kant's classic definition of the human
capacity for aesthetic judgment, this essay argues that the experience
of such aesthetic objects as buildings always leads to an overarching
reflection on meaning. Within this reflection the essay inquires
about the possible positive relation of the single aesthetic object
to a meaningful oneness of Nature. Following Kant we just cannot
do otherwise than to reflect on this meaningful oneness in aesthetic
judgment, because the latter describes the structure of this form
of knowledge, and is not simply a discussion of the recognition
itself. This would mean that every interpretation of architecture
is set under the a priori of the reflection on meaning. This nowadays,
however, includes a significant potential for disturbance because
meaning itself seems to be only seen as problematic in modern thinking
and so in modern building.
Would that then mean that all aesthetic judgments about contemporary
modern architecture have to fail inevitably because of the absence
of a positive reference to an idea of meaning and so only a non-meaningful
world is unfolding in it? With the aid of the example of the new
Dutch embassy in Berlin by OMA / Rem Koolhaas, it is argued that
the character of the non-meaningful is an essential of the mainstream
of contemporary modern architecture indeed. What manifests aesthetically
here is the repetition of the abstract building principle of the
classical modern age. Keeping this in mind helps to explain the
usually more negative judgments of non-architects about such an
abstraction-oriented contemporary architecture: such judgments are
caused by the fact that the experience of a non-meaningful reality
is equivalent to an exclusion of your own mental being out of this
reality – because this mental being is always asking for meaning,
and for the congruence of purely subjective ideas about meaning
with reality. But it was just this question of the compatibility
of the concept of freedom (of the subject) with the concept of nature
(the reality) whose inevitable dissolution Kant has seen only in
the non-conceptual aesthetic experience, specifically in the experience
of the beauty of nature. With that „aesthetic turn“ Kant solved
the modern aporias of the pure, conceptually based knowledge which,
nevertheless, we nowadays still follow with the result of the afore-mentioned
– but only apparent – aporia of meaning in our times.
Finally the paper points out that the possible positive conclusion
on an objective-natural wholeness of meaning in the moment of beauty
could be a starting point for a meaning-reflecting, critical interpretation
of architecture as well as one for a meaning-defined idea of building.
This would build up a perspective for sheltering the meaning-asking
man. |
Paper
in German |
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___Ryszard
Sliwka
Cambridge, Ontario (CA) |
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‘Sublime Phenomena’ examines the question of limits
in the interpretation of architecture, particularly with reference
to the horizon. Two recent pavilions by David Adjaye frame the discussion.
One of these pavilions was designed by Adjaye to house Olafur Eliasson's
your dark horizon installation on an island in the Venetian
lagoon as part of the 2006 Biennale. The other ‘horizon’ pavilion
is a project that Adjaye recently constructed to frame horizon located
directly between the sky and a body of water known as the Sea of
Galilee. These works share some interesting similarities to Le Corbusier's
development of a horizon of 'yearning' in his last projects, particularly
the incorporation of the horizon in the design for his own (and
his wife’s) tombstone at Roquebrune, overlooking the Mediterranean
sea. In other aspects the approaches can be seen to convey rather
different concerns. By comparing these examples, I hope to outline
some of the key questions regarding concepts of immanence and transcendence
and the capacity of architectural objects to evoke these limits.
The complex interwoven artistic, cultural, economic, political,
and religious influences of Caspar David Friedrich's sublime depiction
of landscape and horizon in Monk by the Sea (1809–1810)
serve as a starting point for the discussion, since it is a work
that closely embodies Edmund Burke's eighteenth-century treatise
on the sublime and its subsequent affirmation in Immanuel Kant's
discussion of the same subject in his Critique of Judgment
(1790).
In addition, the introduction of the unsettling anecdote of the
sardine can (at least to its author Jacques Lacan) is extended to
explain in psychoanalytic terms something of the perceptual mechanism
involved in the discussion of the sublime and its emergence in artistic
discourse in recent years.
Both Adjaye and Eliasson rely on phenomenological descriptions that
firmly embed any transcendental discussion of the horizon in a world
of immanence. The significance of the horizon for Le Corbusier emerges
from his writings and painting, yet operates in a cryptic personal
mythology that ties him to ancient Greece and ideas of alchemy.
Both Eliasson and Adjaye on the other hand, confine themselves to
rather reticent and mundanely concrete descriptions of their installations.
This is in a curious contrast to the extraordinary atmospheric and
temporal effects created, together with the desires and epiphanies
that experience of the work elicits.
While a discussion of the horizon in all three works can be discussed
in terms of the sublime, the experience of what that means appears
to vary with all three authors. My conclusion speculates that no
one specific feeling is involved in the experience of the sublime,
but that a broad range of different feelings may be involved on
different occasions. Indeed the social and cultural context of the
sublime may have a significant bearing on our experience. However,
there is an aspect of the experience of the sublime as a limit-experience
that binds us to our condition of being human, that we all recognize.
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Paper in English |
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___Ryszard
Sliwka
Cambridge, Ontario (CA) |
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The forces of globalization on the environment
in recent decades have rapidly consigned sentiments of wilderness
to an endangered species list. Nevertheless, understanding our place
in the world hinges on a reassessment of out relationship to the
wild in the making of our built world. Genetic Architecture, a term
in currency since the mid-nineties, may indicate such a shift from
shift from strictly human-centred preoccupations. It embodies a
specific design sensibility inspired by the growth of organic systems
and shares many similarities with evolutionary, emergent, morphogenetic
and cosmogenic approaches to design, as well as bio constructivism,
bio-mimetics or bio-morphism. The emergence of these strategies,
particularly among a younger generation of architects such as the
3deluxe group, Herault-Arnod and others, form the speculative
basis for this essay addressing the question of Genetic Architecture
in terms of perception and the integration of the wild as a cultural
objective. |
Paper in English |
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___Anna-M.
Eifert-Körnig
Darmstadt |
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Hesse’s State Museum of Darmstadt is under reconstruction.
The Block Beuys, arranged between 1967 and 1970 by the
artist’s own hands, is affected by this fact as well. Regarding
the further conservation of the Block Beuys one needs to
identify the pieces belonging to his work varying in those belonging
to the architectural envelop. The article shows that the several
approaches explain the perception of architecture in terms of Beuys
quite differently. Does the architectural coverage imply an envelop,
or is it related to the museum as a ‘construction-organism’ respectively
to an institution? In case the environment is interpreted as ‘room
for perception’, ‘room for action’ or ‘room for consideration’,
the exposure to the work varies. The challenge of objectuality and
occasionality is common in architecture and action art. Beuys’s
artistic action is a particular form of the use of architecture.
It transforms the real space into an artificial one. The spatiotemporal
interlocking of museum and the eventful work turns out to be a provocation
touching the museum’s self-concept. |
Paper
in German |
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___Katharina
Lehmann
Lüneburg |
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An application-oriented aesthetical rationality
can provide information about the decoding interpretation of architecture
causing its own content of perception that enters levels of view
not being accessible through a purely workaday-view.
For the means of exemplification is consulted Gregor Schneider’s
work Dead house Ur (Totes Haus Ur) that thanks to its dissected
spaces represents architecture in extreme sense and makes the practice
of perception in particular clearly feasible. In this context in
the first part Martin Seel’s aesthetical practice of perception
is exemplified illustratively. However, for the means of an aesthetical
interpretation of architecture the second part explains Gilles Deleuze’s
approach of the pleat. |
Paper in
German |
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___Fred
Truniger
Zurich |
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The question raised in this issue of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
refers to the fact, that the world can be represented with many
different means. Interpretation is representation charged with analysis
and meaning. It always bears the imprint of a certain point of view
– more or less objectivized and more or less stringently argued
for.
Commonly, interpretation uses written or oral language as its medium.
Owing to age-long refinement of its means in philosophy and literature,
the human language has turned into the most precise instrument of
representation at our hands. It's our language that is at the basis
of our thinking. We are using it from our infancy to express our
thoughts. Our whole way of seeing the world develops as a structure
of meanings tightly bound to the possibilities language offers for
our thinking. But language is not everything there is and not everything
can be conceived through it.
This paper presents an alternative. It puts forward the film as
a form of visual interpretation and introduces the film Robinson
in Space (GB 1997), in which British filmmaker and architect Patrick
Keiller narrates the contemporary landscape of England. Through
temporal and geographical densification the film makes phenomena
visible, which, for various reasons, are easily lost out of sight
in the real topography. |
Paper
in German |
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