What's Wrong with the Primitive Hut?

[...] This monotonous fable is recounted at the beginning of the first chapter of Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753) and, consequently, at the very beginning of modern architecture. In its sublime lack of inspiration, the fable is impeccable: no antagonists, no encounters, no drama, no plot, no sex, no anecdotes, no noise, no ambiguity, no jokes. There is just primitive man and nature, nothing else. Primitive man is perfectly alone, just like Crusoe on his deserted island. His problems are limited to meteorological conditions: the sun’s heat, rain, humidity. Still, as silly as it may at first seem, this fable is not all that innocent. Some of its curious presuppositions are crucial for the understanding of modernism. Indeed, according to Laugier, primitive man has needs but no companions, and he possesses a logic (a pretty utilitarian one) but not a language. The atmosphere is remarkably silent: in the tale, architecture is born in complete isolation, without words, without lies. Consequently, for Laugier, architecture is just a matter of shelter. Functionalism is the logical consequence of these (quite surreal) assumptions. Houses come before temples. And so private architecture is the model for public architecture. Pragmatism comes before ritual. Structure comes before space. The fundamental element of architecture is the pillar, not the wall, and its fundamental device is the section, not the plan. Against all evidence, engineering precedes rhetoric. Laugier’s narration of the supposed beginnings of architecture anticipates Adam Smith’s minimal recounting of the supposed origin of exchange. In Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith describes this unlikely sober Urszene: “one man . . . has more of a certain commodity than he himself has occasion for, while another has less. The former consequently would be glad to dispose of, and the latter to purchase, a part of this superfluity” (Book I, 4)

Space, or Bramante's Problem

In 1934, a very young Giulio Carlo Argan wrote, for a rather provincial magazine, a fundamental text titled “Il problema del Bramante”, or “Bramante’s Problem”. Argan tried to identify the focus of Bramante’s interests and to define his particular way of making architecture. He concluded that what was systematically explored in Bramante’s work was space: for Argan, Bramante’s architecture was a spectacle of spa- tiality,2 an investigation of space developed beyond tectonic constraints and a rhetoric of space understood as the endlessly multiplied unfold- ing of artificial landscapes. But if the substance of this architecture is space, then what kind of sense did Bramante attribute to his work on space? And, more generally, what does it mean to work on space? What kind of intellectual value does such work have? What kind of "problem" is Bramante’s problem

Seasons of Life

La casa di riposo di Nevele (poco distante da Gand) è un edificio di tre piani, rivestito di mattoni vetrificati di un rosso molto scuro, con un grande albero davanti, attaccato ad un vecchio edificio che ospita gli spazi comuni del complesso. La casa di riposo è incastrata tra le case e i capannoni che la circondano ed ha grandi finestre quadrate da cui si mostrano gli anziani che la abitano. L’asilo e la sede del servizio giardinaggio di Merksem (alla periferia di Anversa) sono accoppiati in un unico edificio di un piano, a pianta circolare. L’asilo si sviluppa attorno ad una corte a prato, un quarto di cerchio è occupato dalle rimesse e dagli uffici del servizio giardinaggio. In entrambi i casi gli architetti si sforzano di osservare con precisione le dinamiche che caratterizzano questi luoghi, senza accettarne letture predeterminate, senza cercare improbabili novità. In entrambi i casi emergono dispositivi spaziali allo stesso tempo normali ed imprevedibili, capaci di mostrare la ricchezza dei nostri gesti quotidiani, di attribuirvi dignità senza ricorrere ad esagerazioni. 51N4E prova a mettere in ordine le cose, nominandole una per una, sforzandosi di non dimenticare nulla, senza fingere di non vederne anche gli aspetti meno piacevoli

Rituals, Ostacles and Architecture

In one of the few fundamental pieces of writing about architecture ever produced, Adolf Loos argued: Our culture is founded on the recognition of the all-transcending great- ness of classical antiquity. Our manner of thinking and feeling we have adopted from the Romans, who taught us to think socially and to disci- pline our emotions. It is not mere chance that the Romans were incapa- ble of inventing a new order of columns, a new ornament. The Greeks, who invented the mouldings, were individualists, scarcely able to govern their own cities. The Romans invented social organization and governed the whole world. The Greeks applied their imagination to the elevation, which is individual, the Romans to the ground plan, which is general. The Romans were more advanced than the Greeks, we are more advanced than the Romans. The great masters of architecture believed they built like the Romans. They were mistaken. Period, place, climate frustrated their plans. But whenever lesser architects tried to ignore tradition, whenever ornamentation became rampant, a master would appear to remind us of the Roman origins of our architecture and pick up the thread again (Loos, 1910). Though hermetic as usual, Loos was precise here: he recognized the particular attitude toward architecture developed in the Roman cultural context and suggested that this experience still provided the basis for contemporary architectural practice. In other words, for Loos – no matter what changes have happened in the meantime – con- temporary Western architecture was still “encompassed within the limits of the natural evolution of Roman architecture” (Grassi, 1997). What does this mean? Should we follow Loos’s perspective even today

So Much Damned Bad Work

In 1889 Joseph Morrill Wells, at the time an employee of the firm McKim, Mead & White (MM&W), refuses to become a partner, arguing that he could not “put his name to so much damned bad work”.1 In fact, over a twenty-five-year period, from 1879 to 1904, MM&W realizes almost a thousand buildings. This enormous production is not an accident, nor the unpredictable consequence of the lucky career of its three partners. Quantity is not by chance; it is a choice, involving a very precise commitment to both city and architecture

Fuck Concepts! Context!

Contemporary architecture is generally presented with the phrase “My concept is . . . ”, in which the blank is lled in by some sort of no- tion: “My concept is freedom”, “My concept is the iPad”, “My concept is the Big Bang”, “My concept is democracy”, “My concept is panda bears”, “My concept is M&M’s”. This statement is then followed by a PowerPoint presentation that begins with M&M’s and ends with round, pink bungalows on paradisiacal Malaysian beaches. According to concepts, to design is to nd what buildings are: an ontology for dummies that turns banality into spectacle. Thus, the library is the books, the stadium is the muscles, the promenade is the beach, the aquarium is the sh, the swimming pool is the water and grandmother’s garage is grandmother. Concepts are a tool used to justify design decisions in the absence of architecture. Concepts originate from a state of self-in icted despair in which design needs to be justi ed point by point, and architecture by de nition has no cultural relevance. Concepts presuppose that nothing speci cally architectural exists in reality: there are no spatial relationships, no territories and no cities, and it is thus impossible to obtain any knowledge about these phenomena. Concepts are the tools used to make architecture in a world of post-atomic barbarians. Conan and Mad Max would dream up a concept for imagining how to erect their own primitive huts

Thirteen Notes on the Villa Garzoni

The visitor who enters the Villa Garzoni walks up a monumental staircase, steps under a loggia, crosses a wall, passes through a portico and eventually arrives in a courtyard. The courtyard is separated from the elds behind the villa by a wall. On the main axis of the villa there is not a single room. The rooms on the two sides are separated from each other (in order to go from one room to the other, Mr. Garzoni actually needed to exit the building). Of an overall footprint of approximately 1,700 square metres, more than 1,000 are either loggias, stairs, courtyards or porticoes. Therefore, 60% of the Villa Garzoni is a void

Fake Gothic

The case of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) is particularly telling in the context of this discussion, because Schinkel was – to a certain extent – a convert to (and later also away from) the Gothic. Schinkel confronted the Gothic for the entire span of his professional life, and the changes in his position toward it coincided with the evolutionary shifts of his architectural thinking. A detailed description of all of the chapters of this story is not possible here, so I will concentrate on just a few episodes: his proposal for the mausoleum for Queen Luise (1810); the Befreiungsdom, or Cathedral of Freedom (1814); the Gertraudskirche in the Spittelmarkt (1820); and the projects for the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche (1821–30). Strangely enough, Schinkel started to be an enthusiast of the Gothic during his Grand Tour (1803–5). In Italy, Schinkel drew several buildings that he described in his notes as gotisch, or as belonging to an unspecified sarazenischer Stil. Although the terminology is quite generic, it is evident that the Gothic and the sarazenisch were, for the young Schinkel, synonymous with the exotic, bizarre and marvellous

Fischer auf der Reise nach Stonehenge

On 26 July 1721, the Wiener Diarium informs its readers that a new book by the general surveyor of constructions, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, is ready and that the ones who had pre-ordered their copy could go and pick it up at the architect’s place. The book is titled Entwurff einer historischen Architektur2 and is a collection of eighty-six folios promising to illustrate the architecture of the Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Siamese, Chinese and Japanese together with some projects by the author. The title of the book is curious. Literally translated into English, it would read “Project of a Historical Architecture”. The difficulty here is not only the interpretation of Entwurff – which can be understood as “project” but also as “essay”, “draft” or “sketch” – but also the fact that the semantic realms of “architecture” and “history” are not combined the way we might expect. Fischer does not speak of architectural history; he speaks of historical architecture. If nouns and adjectives mean anything, then the book is not, as Hans Sedlmayr suggested, “the first ever monumental history of architecture in images”. The title does not announce a “history of architecture”. Rather, the Entwurff is a book about “the architecture of history”

Zwei Zimmer, eine Stadt

Architecture of the past twenty years has had to respond to contradictory requirements: on the one hand, it had to be scaled back in order to provide neutral structures open for a variety of uses. On the other, it had to present inimitable, eye-catching objects with a unique design and high recall value. Pursuant to the idea of “specific neutrality” and strategic key terms such as “low cost monuments” or “Ikea classicism,” Atelier Kempe Thill has continually come up with new solutions that, despite times of upheaval and increasing costs, still manage to recall the legacy of European architecture in a powerful, natural, and innovative way. Today, the office, founded in Rotterdam in 2000 by André Kempe (*1968 in Freiberg) and Oliver Thill (*1971 in Chemnitz), has about fifteen employees. This publication illuminates the architects’ distinct approach based on very personal and not always politically correct statements with respect to selected projects from the past twelve years