The Analogous Spaces of Paul Otlet (1868-1944)

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Architectural metaphors of knowledge: The Mundaneum designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet, and Le Corbusier

The author discusses the architectural plans of the Mundaneum made in the 1930s by the Belgian modernist architect Maurice Heymans in the footsteps of Le Corbusier and in collaboration with Paul Otlet. The Mundaneum was the utopian concept of a world center for the accumulation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge, invented by the visionary encyclopedist and internationalist Paul Otlet. In Heymans’s architecture, a complex architectural metaphor is created for the Mundaneum, conveying its hidden meaning as a center of initiation into synthesized knowledge. In particular, this article deconstructs the metaphorical architectural complex designed by Heymans and focuses on how the architectural spaces as designed by Heymans are structured in analogy to schemes for the organization of knowledge made by Otlet. In three different designs of the Mundaneum, the analogy is studied between, on the one hand, the architectural structure (designed by Heymans) and, on the other hand, the structure of the cosmology, the book Monde, and the vision of knowledge dissemination as invented by Otlet. The article argues that the analogies between the organization of architectural space and knowledge, as expressed in the drawings of Heymans and Otlet, are elaborated by means of a mode of visual thinking that is parallel to and rooted in the art of memory and utopian imagination.published or submitted for publicationOpe

If walls could talk : the brick sculptures of Per Kirkeby

Per Kirkeby is an intertiolly acclaimed Danish painter, sculptor and writer. Looking back at the period when he started his career, he described the climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a landscape where each figurative gesture was troubled by the iconoclasms of the minimal art movement. In this period, paintings for which he is now well known achieved a delicate balance between iconicity and iconoclasm, populism and minimalism, the figurative and the literal. The architectural sculptures that he then built are as interesting as his paintings but have not received the same attention. In reaction to the articulation of materiality, structure, form and space in the work of artists such as Carl Andre and Dold Judd, Kirkeby's early brick sculptures valued craftsmanship and exposed the figurative connotations of architectural language. While these first brick sculptures were exhibited in a museum setting, since the 1970s he has built architectural sculptures in the form of walls, labyrinths, towers, and donjons in public spaces all over Northern Europe. In the first part of this paper we critically examine how the artist's brick sculptures confront romanticism with minimal art, ultimately in order to merge both into a grand classicism. Unlike many architectural sculptures produced in the 1970s and later, Kirkeby's brick sculptures question neither the discipliry boundaries between sculpture and architecture, nor the relevance of specific contexts for artistic practices. We argue that Kirkeby's privileging of a popular romanticism over minimalism, the figurative over the literal, or iconicity over iconoclasm, while always striving towards balance, is the result of the ambition to create, in the same way as monuments express a perception of the meaning of time, an image in which he - and surrounding inhabitants or passers-by - can condense fragments of time and history

Rencontres intellectuelles et changement social: Henri La Fontaine et la Belle Époque

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Perspectieven op moderniteit, tijd en ruime: een inleiding

Perspectives on modernity, time and space. An introduction. The Universal Exhibition that took place in Ghent in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, is easily interpreted as the swansong of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Yet, the period between 1900 and 1914 can also be perceived as the breakpoint of modernity, when the conditions for a more egalitarian society were created. Several things were in flux in 1913. Under societal pressure, one social experiment after the other was unleashed upon the population. Women, workers, and in Flanders also Dutch-speaking intellectuals laid claim to their share of public space and democracy. Furthermore, the Ghent factories functioned with full speed, and the city’s skyline was dominated no longer by bell towers but by smoking factory towers. The Universal Exhibition succeeded in bridging the apparent contradictions of the moment: modernity and tradition, modernity and anti-modernity, men and , civilized and primitive, labour and capital, reason and nostalgia. Through spectacular settings, universal exhibitions presented the separation between the real contradictions of capitalist production and the dream world of consumer culture as if they were unified, whereas in social realty they were actually divided. The Ghent spectacle may have removed itself from social reality, but at the same time it was an illusory refuge where the frictions of alienation that accompanied modernity were neutralized. One of the separations that the Universal Exhibition sought to reconcile was that between Western and colonial cultures. The Congo pavilion with its huge panorama, the Street of Caïro, and the exhibition of the daily life of complete Senegalese and Philippine villages underscored the binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘the Other’ in a spectacular display. The forces of industrialization were also addressed. In a didactic, immersive environment called the Modern Village, modernization of the agricultural sector was humanized. But also, attractions such as the Scenic Railway or the Waterchute, made the distance between humans and machines merge in a synergetic pleasure of movement and acceleration. However, the most prominent contradiction that the World’s Fair sought to resolve was that between modernity and history. A beautiful poster designed by Léon Spillaert was not used by the organizing committee, as it showed the new Bell Tower of Ghent in juxtaposition with smoking chimneys of factories. The official advertising posters instead presented Ghent as a ‘city of monuments and flowers’. In ‘Old Flanders’, a neo-medieval collage of picturesque buildings which existed or had existed, as well as the ‘Palaces of Cities’, history was reanimated by means of simulation. The same nostalgia had been the source for the renewal of the inner city of Ghent by means of historicizing reconstructions

Analogous spaces: An introduction to spatial metaphors for the organization of knowledge

Spatial metaphors abound in the language we use to speak about the organization of information. Well-established notions such as “architecture of databases,” “knowledge architect,” or “information design” convey their meaning by drawing analogies between the organization of information and the organization of space. The notion “architecture of databases,” for example, relies on the idea that a database provides us, like a building, multiple spaces where we can position different objects that we can exploit for different functions. Just as a building is a fixed construction, the interior of which can be furnished and refurbished time and again, we can add or remove objects of knowledge or data in the categories of a database. A “knowledge architect” is another example. Through metaphor, this notion defines the job of someone who, like an architect, combines technical and artistic skills and who is able to coordinate the overall construction process; not for the purpose of constructing a building but for constructing tools to manage flows of knowledge or relevant information that is meant to remain in place (Tonfoni, 1998). “Information design” is a third example. It underscores metaphorically the idea that the development of an information system involves, as is the case in design, a complex process of planning before actual construction can occur.published or submitted for publicationOpe

Gent 1913: op het breukvlak van de moderniteit

In 1913 streek het fenomeen van de wereldtentoonstelling neer in Gent. Aan de vooravond van de Eerste Wereldoorlog, toonde dit evenement een samenleving op het breukvlak van de moderniteit. Veel was in beweging in 1913. Vrouwen, arbeiders en in Vlaanderen ook Nederlandstalige intellectuelen eisten hun plaats op in de publieke ruimte en de verruimde democratie. Op spectaculaire wijze slaagde de wereldtentoonstelling er in een hele reeks maatschappelijke tegenstellingen te overbruggen zoals arbeid en industrie, en de westerse en de koloniale cultuur. De belangrijkste tegenstelling die de wereldtentoonstelling in Gent wou oplossen was echter deze tussen moderniteit en geschiedenis

Library towers and the vertical dimension of knowledge

Verticality, and related figures such as the tower, stack, or mountain, are commonly used as spatial metaphors to express the hierarchy that we apply to information and knowledge. But these metaphors that transform the vertical dimension of knowledge into words are also translated into library architecture. Different libraries include, or have been built in the form of, a tower. In these cases, verticality as a spatial metaphor is folded back onto the spatial and architectural field where it originated. Library towers transform verticality as a concept that conveys relations in knowledge into architectural language. The translation of verticality as a dimension of knowledge into architecture thus forms a strange double bind between space and knowledge. This article analyzes how libraries have expressed the vertical dimension of knowledge in their architecture and identifies different approaches that make the vertical dimension of knowledge architecturally present. The library of Ghent University (Belgium), by Henry van de Velde, includes a storehouse of books that has been completely accommodated in a tower. The architecture of the French National Library, by Dominique Perrault, plays with the metaphor of the tower in a semantic manner. Other libraries, such as the “Book Mountain” by MVRDV in Spijkenisse, exploit the book stack architecturally; and some libraries, such as The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, by Neutelings Riedijk architects, do not build up but down, in the underground, to house their collections.published or submitted for publicationOpe

Paul Otlet en de verruimtelijking van informatie

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