Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

and James Carpenter, among others – is closely related with the
essential issues of architecture. These are all artists whose
works have inspired architects and will continue to do so.
We can also study principles of artistic thinking and
making in the writings of many of these artists. Henry Moore,
Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, James Turrell, all of
whom write perceptively on their own work, have been
meaningful for me. Artists tend to write more directly and
sincerely of their work than architects, who frequently cast an
intellectualised smoke screen across their writings.
The Architecture of Cinema
In its inherent abstractness, music has historically been
regarded as the art form closest to architecture. Cinema is,
however, even closer to architecture than music, not solely
because of its temporal and spatial structure, but
fundamentally because both architecture and cinema
articulate lived space. These two art forms create and mediate
comprehensive images of life. In the same way that buildings
and cities create and preserve images of culture and particular
ways of life, cinema projects the cultural archaeology of both
the time of its making and the era that it depicts. Both forms
of art define dimensions and essences of existential space –
they both create experiential scenes for life situations.
Film directors create pure poetic architecture, which arises
directly from our shared mental images of dwelling and
domesticity as well as the eroticism or fear of space. Directors
such as Andrey Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni have
created a moving architecture of memory, longing and
melancholy, one that assures us that the art form of
architecture is also capable of addressing our entire emotional
range, from grief to ecstasy.
Buildings are mental instruments, not simply aestheticised
shelters. The essence of architecture is essentially beyond
architecture. The poet Jean Tardieu asks: ‘Let us assume a wall:
what takes place behind it?’ 13 but we architects rarely bother
to imagine what happens behind the walls we have erected.
As we read a poem, we internalise it, and we become the
poem. As Brodsky puts it: ‘A poem, as it were, tells the reader,
“Be like me”.’ 14 When I have read a book and return it back to
its place on the bookshelf, the book, in fact, remains in me. If
it is a great book, it has become part of my soul and my body.
The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal gives a vivid description of
this act of reading: ‘When I read, I don’t really read; I pop a
beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop
or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like
alcohol, infusing my brain and heart and coursing on through
the veins to the root of each blood vessel.’ 15 In the same way,
paintings, films and buildings become part of us. Artistic
works originate in the body of the maker and they return
back to the human body as they are being experienced.
The Dualistic Essence of Architecture
My response to the question of whether architecture is or is
not an art form is determined: architecture is an artistic
expression and it is not an art, simultaneously. Architecture is
an art in its essence as a spatial and material metaphor of
human existence, but it is not an art form in its second
nature as an instrumental artefact of utility and rationality.
This duality is the very essence of the art of architecture. This
dual existence takes place on two separate levels of
consciousness, or aspiration, in the same way that any artistic
work has its existence simultaneously as a material,
disciplinary and concrete execution, on the one hand, and as a
spiritual, unconsciously conceived and perceived imagery,
which carries us to the world of dreams, desire and fear, on
the other. Architecture can be understood only through this
very duality. ‘A painter can paint square wheels on a cannon
to express the futility of war. A sculptor can carve the same
square wheels. But an architect must use round wheels,’ as
Louis Kahn once said. 16
Ontological Ground
The art form of architecture is born from the purposeful
confrontation and occupation of space. It begins by the act of
naming the nameless and through perceiving formless space
as a distinct figure and specific place. I wish to emphasise the
adjective ‘purposeful’ – utilitarian purposefulness is a
constitutive condition of architecture. The task of
architecture, however, lies as much in the need for
metaphysical grounding for human thought and experience
as the provision of shelter from a raging storm.
Architecture as Collaboration
Architecture, as with all artistic work, is essentially the
product of collaboration. Collaboration occurs in the obvious
and practical sense of the word, such as in the interaction
with numerous professionals, workmen and craftsmen, but
collaboration occurs as well with other artists, architects and
Andrey Tarkovsky, ‘Mirror’ (film still), 1975
This shows the old family house in which the director had spent much of his
youth. To meet the architecture of memory accurately, Tarkovsky had the
house painstakingly reconstructed (it had been destroyed by fire – another
memory). In his films he sought to address the entire emotional range of
man, ranging from grief to ecstasy.
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