Description

Great space has no corners.

Great form has no contour.[1]

The document of a historical place: the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, photographed by one of the ingenious technical pioneers of the 19th century. The painter Louis Daguerre states that on that day in 1838, the boulevard was ”filled by a busy crowd” yet the photograph does not show any sign of this. Because the inventor of the ”light-stylus art” had to expose his glass plate for minutes, only entirely still objects would be fixed: chimneys, houses, trees. The mobile parts of the scenery – the smoke above the roofs, the pedestrians, the horses and carriages – have left no trace on the image, with one exception: In the bottom left corner, bathed in sunlight, a small figure is standing on the pavement, his right foot on the ground, the left foot on the stool of a shoeblack. Out of the many fleeting incidents of this day and place, solely this scene alone has been captured – a shadowy message of long gone times, the only witness of a moment that made history.

Architect, painter and poet Louis Kahn wrote about the magic of a quiet place lost in dreams: ”Let us go back in time to the building of the pyramids. Hear the din of industry in a cloud of dust marking their place. Now we see the pyramids in full presence. There prevails the feeling of Silence, in which is felt man’s desire to express. This existed before the first stone was laid. (…) When its use is spent and it becomes a ruin, the wonder of its beginning appears again. It feels good to have itself entwined in foliage, once more high in spirit and free of servitude.”[2]

Kahn conjures up the quality and energy of the origin’s spirit that is independent of the particular circumstances of the emergence of a structure, its use and its purpose. This energy transcends all practical and functional intentions. Instead, much like a poem, it carries a subtext or immaterial content between the lines, connotations that go beyond the story, the pure facts, and gives it meaning and universal range. Places that radiate and house such energy cannot be clearly localised in space and form, cannot be precisely sized or measured. It is hard to attribute clearly specified characteristics to them since they do not have a secured identity. In this sense, they are like quanta – the smallest energetic particles in physics – whose discovery marked the introduction of coincidence, or, in other words, the ”magic moment” to the realm of natural science. Magic and identity originate from entirely different spheres, sources, and intentions. Identity is associated with recognition, relief, satisfaction, and limitation. Magic, on the other hand, sparks man’s inspiration and taps the vast, unlimited reservoir of origin. Where this spark is missing, there ”may fly words”, but the thoughts remain below: words without thoughts never to heaven go.[3] Where this sense is missing, one believes oneself to be ”close to heaven” while actually just stacking storey upon storey.

Great architects have always been aware of this. When Le Corbusier built the chapel of Ronchamp he attached great value on mathematics, physics, and acoustics. In this question he was ”inexorable” as is noted in his biography. However, when he handed the building over to the Bishop of Besançon he found quite different words: ”I envisaged this chapel as a place of quietude, of prayer, of peace and inner joy. A sense of sacredness inspired our efforts.”[4] Calculation and reflection, action and contemplation, to deal with all aspects and not give preference to either, that could be the first essential in the design of a place by means of architecture. To start with, such a place would have to be patiently ”sounded” and questioned – just like Auguste Rodin did before he went took hammer and chisel: he walked around the stone for a long time, looking at it, tapping it, and asking: What is this stone? What does it require?

In architecture, every project that respects the magic of its genius loci as much as its measurable coordinates should pose these questions: What is this place? What does it require? Oswald Mathias Ungers’ answer reads as follows:

”If architecture deals with reality then it is also the result of a dialectic process between the given conditions and its derived ideal vision. The term contextualism is called to mind, which means nothing else but architecture that is derived from its local context… Architecture means vitally fathoming the multi-layered, mysterious, grown, and imprinted environment. The creative objective of architecture is to visualise the task, to integrate itself into the context, to accentuate and enhance the qualities of the site. Over and over again architecture is the recognition of the genius loci it arises from.”[5]

A good example for the successful merging of architecture and place is situated in La Jolla on the Californian coast. In 1960, physician Jonas Salk, who discovered the vaccine against polio, resolved to build a bacteriological institute. He was so involved with the project that he personally supervised design and construction. Salk did not simply leave this task to one of his employees or some architectural practice, but managed to win Louis Kahn for the project. Both personalities – one more difficult and adamant than the other – engaged in an intensive discussion. For Salk it was not enough that the institute worked properly; it rather had to be the material expression of an idea, a conviction: instead of writing a book, he had chosen to voice his opinion architecturally, Salk would later say about the project.

Kahn understood: He could visually imagine what scientists were missing, what they were only too prepared to ban from their world. The architect or the architecture respectively, was to replace the missing link with its own means – at least it should try. ”The scientist,” Kahn writes, ”snugly isolated from other mentalities, needed more than anything the presence of the unmeasurable, which is the realm of the artist.” Besides spaces, which should be flexible, there are also some which should be completely inflexible. ”They should be sheer inspiration… just the place to be, the place which does not change, except for the people who go in and out. It is the kind of place that you enter many times.”[6] A place providing architectural quality is a complex situation that is not simply created by putting individual elements together in a refined and logic manner. A car or a plane will not create such a place, how impressive they may be.

In La Jolla, within the load-bearing structure of the Vierendeel girders, technical facilities are housed; the open plan research laboratories are accommodated below and are in turn linked to small private studies. An ingenious and clearly structured system of stairs and bridges links all areas together. This layout respects the general purpose of the building and at the same time provides private space for individual study and therefore ”free” research. Kahn’s proposal shows the relationship between the institute’s employees and their work places in an exemplary way and simultaneously transcends it.

Yet La Jolla’s main feature is the large courtyard between the two institute wings. It is a plaza, a free open space with a narrow watercourse running in the middle of the paving and flowing into a little well at the end of the courtyard. Beyond, there is nothing but the unobstructed view to the west, across the Pacific.

If architecture would be reduced to its pure content of function and information, on its obvious aspects, if one was to seek its essence by analysing, explaining, and understanding its components and relationships – architecture would become rough, massive, and soulless. ”… architecture weakens and turns into mere visual fabrication and rhetoric when it loosens its connections with the arts, on the one hand, and loses the existential and mythical ground of dwelling, on the other,” writes Finnish art historian Juhani Pallasmaa. ”Architecture, like all arts, is simultaneously autonomous and culture-bound. It is bound to its era in the sense that tradition and the cultural context provide the basis for individual creativity, and it is autonomous in the sense that an authentic expression is never simply a response to prescribed expectations or definitions. A fundamental existential mystery is at the core of architecture, and the confrontation of this mystery is always unique and autonomous, totally independent of the specifications of the ‘social commission’.”[7]

In such self-forgetting moments far from any object, fear, and ambition, any creative work becomes its own end. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who started out as a teacher and also worked as an architect for a couple of years in Vienna and certainly cannot be suspected of mystical sentimentality, said about architecture that it compels and glorifies, that architecture cannot exist where there is nothing to be glorified.

8

Ludwig Wittgenstein, ”Vermischte Bemerkungen 548”, in: Works vol. 1, Frankfurt/Main 1984

This would constitute its splendour and freedom, but also its limitations and endangerment. Yet it would not to be obtained for less either.

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Originally published in: Hardo Braun, Dieter Grömling, Research and Technology Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2005.