alpbacher architekturgespräche 2003 - ATP

There is a theology in architecture that architecture must always mean
something and that architecture must always have four walls.Yet many architects
are proving today - rightly or wrongly - that architecture may not always
have four walls. Radical thought in architecture has destroyed the notion that
architecture will always have four walls and mean something. It seems to me
essential to question this architectural theology, the mythology that architecture
is the locus of the metaphysics of presence.
Of course we will always have to have shelter, enclosure and reality, but this
does not mean that we have to thematize these - to make them conceptually
active in our architecture.When I look at an architect like Peter Zumthor who
uses material in a most exquisite way, I think, he is the best craftsman of wood
that I know. But does he thematize wood or merely use it decoratively?
Zumthor is returning to architecture as presence, but only aesthetic and
material presence, not thematic presence. However, what occurred in painting,
photography and architecture in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was the notion
of producing not an aesthetics of wood but rather to distance wood - the
material - from its metaphysics, to find its "other than woodness.”Take a painter
such as Gerhard Richter.What Richter did was to take a real photograph -
which is already not a presence but a representation of another presence -
and to scramble it, blur it, paint over it, etc. and make a secondary condition.
The photograph is a record of a real presence, but by using the techniques of
blurring, doubling, and repeating, the metaphysical realness can be reduced to
a mere presence.The photograph was no longer something of importance but
rather it was the painting over the photograph that destroyed its metaphysic.
Richter is a model for dealing with media because, by replacing a present
presence with a past, present, and future, Richter answers the question of how
one competes with instinctual images. Richter introduced time into presence.
Look also at Gordon Matta-Clark, a famous American architect/artist who cut
houses in half. But what was he really doing? A house has a metaphysic. It
expresses shelter and history, family and security.Taking a saw and cutting a
house in half destroys its metaphysic. It is still there but no longer acting as a
house. It is no longer secure; you are no longer going to live in it.The metaphysical
content is destroyed and the house is reduced to pure presence. Matta-
Clark took the metaphysic out of the house and produced presence. My
argument is that the history of architecture has been made up of these kinds
of discontinuities.
The great architects, from Brunelleschi to whichever modern architect you wish
to think of - Le Corbusier, Mies, Loos - were, whether they realized it or not,
always attempting to reduce the metaphysic.What Brunelleschi did was to
attempt to say that architecture was not a metaphysical relationship between
God and his embodiment in the church but a relationship between a real
seeing person and the architecture he saw. Brunelleschi brought perspective
into architecture and in so doing created a conscious human subject.What this
subject saw was still a church (and in a sense still a gothic church) but it was
now ordered by a single human eye.The difference between Brunelleschi’s two
churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito in fifteenth-century Florence is
important. San Lorenzo is still gothic deep space but Santo Spirito is flat space
- the space of a perspectival view which changes deep space into flat space
bringing subject and object into a conceptual relationship. Brunelleschi’s move
was radical at the time, and as with all radical moves, discontinuity eventually
becomes a continuity.Today we are all still witness to perspectival space, which
has become conventional. Great architects and great architecture always
attempt to open up conventions. Brunelleschi happens to be one of those that
opened up architecture and in turn his opening quickly became a convention.
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