Non-Standard Architectural Productions

Between Aesthetic Experience and Social Action

Sandra Karina Löschke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815382614
• eBook ISBN: 9781351208055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book captures concepts and projects that reshape the discipline of architecture by prioritizing people over buildings. In doing so, it uncovers sophisticated approaches that go beyond standard architectural protocols to explore experience-based aesthetics, encounters, action-based research, critical practices, and social engagement.

If these are widely understood as singular or incompatible approaches, the book reveals that they form a growing network of interrelations and generate levels of flexibility and dynamism that are reshaping the discipline.

The thirteen chapters analyze thought-provoking projects – branded museums, restaged exhibitions, home/work spaces, multi-cultural spaces, ageing apartment blocks, abandoned homes, and urban slums amongst them. Together, they enliven the stalled debate about a single architectural response to the complex challenges of the contemporary world by highlighting pluralistic perspectives on architecture that offer fresh solutions on how architecture can improve people's lives.

Featuring essays from an international range of authors, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the wider conditions under which, and in relation to which, contemporary architecture is produced.

Part I

Experience

2

Architectural aesthetics

From tent to tectonic and back again

Gernot Böhme

Homage to Jørn Utzon

The first time I saw Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, it was as a tourist looking over to the building from a boat, appreciating the complexity of the repeating forms that make up its roofs – and that were to be vainly understood through metaphors, such as copulating turtles (Figure 2.1). On this first encounter, I wondered how the spatial arrangement of the roof-forms may relate to the structural and constructional logic of the building, and to its internal spaces, and whether all of this might bear a relation to its function – that of an opera house.

Figure 2.1View of Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney as seen from ferry, 2013. Photograph by author.

Hence, I asked myself the following questions:

• How do the roof-shells relate to the internal structure of the building?
• Are these the roofs of the main central spaces, namely the concert halls?
• Can visitors see and appreciate the inner side of the shells?

On the occasion of my second visit, I had the opportunity to observe the building close-up and from the interior. I attended a concert in the major hall, and in response to my initial thoughts, I discovered that the roof-shells are definitely visible on the inside, and what is more: it seemed that they were designed to be felt in their fully spatial-performative effect by the visitors moving through the foyers. They are not just the roofs of functional rooms; they actually generate the space of these rooms. This is particularly the case in both of the concert halls. Therefore, photographs taken during the construction of the building, show the foundation of the concert halls already constructed much like those of Roman amphitheatres, which afterwards were made into halls by roofing them with carapaces. Thus, not first the building and then the internal structure – which was supposedly the case with Copenhagen’s Royal Opera House: this one is a building like a cave constructed from steel and glass, the interior of which (a big wooden egg), is the very concert hall itself.

With Utzon’s Opera House we are in the presence of a building, which in its own unique way presents the unity of tent and tectonics.

Tent and tectonics

The central question of my chapter is just this: What is the relation between the skin and the structure of a building? I will pursue the topic by mirroring it against Gottfried Semper’s Aesthetics of Architecture, published in three volumes in the 1860s under the title Style.¹ Reading Semper’s book today, one is struck by the way that, when dealing with Architecture, he takes the textile arts as his point of departure. This procedure is founded in his thesis that Architecture did not begin – as Vitruvius has it – with the hut, but rather with the tent. It was cloths, tissue, blankets and fur that were used in the beginning to form dwelling spaces. With this in mind, the basic facts, as asserted in Architectural Aesthetics, were tissue, pattern and ornament. He employed the term tectonics to express the fundamental character of the structure for a building (Gestell in the original German²), namely as the support for skins.

Semper’s second thesis makes the claim that the very vocation of Architecture in its historical development was the clothing. The clothing of the building-structure: the structure, that is, tectonics, and later when building with stone the so-called stereotomics, should all be hidden from sight. One of his major examples cited in support of his theses is the mask-work of Metopes in Greek temple Architecture. In addition, he emphasizes throughout his texts that with the Greeks the whole building was plastered, painted, glazed or – a term he often used – incrusted (inkrustiert).

It is true that, in following his central concept, he shoots past his goal time and time again – that may be understood by his original Paulus-enlightenment: when he was still a young man, archeologists hit upon the realization that Greek buildings as well as sculptures were fully coloured. This finding actually meant a fundamental turn for understanding of Greek art, or rather, it should have marked a fundamental turn. However, as we know, even in our current time the beauty of Greek art is conceived as its form: its marble-white pureness. A mirror of this traditional understanding is the sculptural art of Knut Thorvaldsen. Semper instead was an enthusiastic advocate for Polychromy, and therefore for surface Aesthetics.

It is true that Semper did not adhere to his thesis at all times. For example, when illustrating his book with half-timbered houses, the building’s structural patterns are clearly visible on the outside. When turning to stereotomics, he chooses the example of Palazzo Pitti, the appearance of which is visibly patterned by its cuboid construction.

Intersection

I recently published an essay entitled “Plaster and Camouflage,”³ where I criticized the current tendency of Architectural Aesthetics to become the Aesthetics of surfaces.

Even in this essay, I hint at the fact that Semper’s work as a Classic of Architectural Aesthetics may in fact be read as a precursor and justification of this tendency. In fact, in our times this tendency is caused by the predominance of concrete construction – which has the consequence that in many cases the structure of the building is decided by structural engineers and it is only the surface that is left to be designed by the architect. This situation led to the dictum of the decorated shed, as to be found in the book Learning from Las Vegas.⁴ This development also indicated a certain fatigue with Bauhaus-Aesthetics, or the International Style, according to which form had to follow function. It was Charles Jencks who, as a consequence, proclaimed a revival of décor in postmodern architecture.⁵ This, along with the demand that commercial buildings should have changeable floorplans and fitouts that practically resulted in curtained façades, lead to the aforementioned tendency of Architectural Aesthetics to become equal to Surface Aesthetics.

As mentioned, I criticized this development because, according to my own conception, Architecture is the art of space. Yet, in the meantime Architecture seems to perform an even more fundamental turn, which brings it back to Semper again, namely, to his claim that the primordial paradigm of Architecture is the tent.

Trends in recent Aesthetics

Up until this point, I have described a growing concern of Architectural Aesthetics with surfaces, with skins of buildings that might have nothing to do with what they hide, which I characterized as Camouflage-Architecture. Now, with contemporary buildings, we even observe that surfaces gain independence from the functional buildings they cover. We get the impression that quite recent works of Architecture have been constructed in alignment with Semper’s idea of Architecture as tent-making.

Considering this trend, we first must turn to the development of extended self-supporting, suspended or tensile ceilings. Here we are not yet concerned with what I have in mind: surfaces becoming independent from the functional buildings to which they belong. But, in the first instance we need to consider quasi roofs, as such: the main example here is the covering of the Olympic field at Munich, which was designed by the architect Frei Otto, one of the manifestations of his investigations into lightweight-structures. This tent is not simply a roof for the Olympic Arena – only half of which it covers anyway – but rather the design of a landscape of roofs which connect a number of sports facilities. Frei Otto has also designed similar tents for various exhibitions. Here I only want to mention one related work, namely, the multifunctional hall (Multi-Halle) in Mannheim. This is made up of a self-supporting lattice-structure made of wooden roof lathes – a structure which still is to be understood as a roof. Nevertheless, it is comparable to roofs becoming independent, because in both instances stability is guaranteed by suspending a skin within a frame. Frei Otto studied these phenomena in experiments with wire-loops carrying soap-bubbles. The whole construct has – as Semper already claimed for the tent – a framework or a bearing construction, which does not engage with the skin but only its edges. These types of skins do indeed have something in common with those textile coverings by which, according to Semper, confined spaces are made. Contrary to tectonics, what is at stake here is not relations of load bearing and compression but of tension and net forces. This is why architectural innovations are currently not initiated by new materials (though they may be: steel-ropes and glass as building materials) but much more by the facilities of computer calculations and simulations. These tools enable the architect to calculate conditions of stability over the whole of an area. It is a question of honour then to mention the software used in describing the building. The need to have these calculations area-wide, and at the same time exact to the point, stems from a fact that the ship-building astronomer Galileo was already aware of. This fact was that the relations of stability cannot be experimentally found by models that are different in scale: by linear proportional enlargement some parameters would grow by the power of two, and some by the power of three. This means that relations of stability cannot be empirically determined but must rather be scrutinized by computer simulation. And here it is not sufficient to calculate the conditions of stability only at rest, but also under dynamic stresses, such as those induced by storms or earthquakes.

Therefore, the research, the calculations and the buildings of Frei Otto must be seen as forerunners of those works of Architecture, which I am finally going to present as paradigmatic for surfaces becoming independent; independent from the functional buildings they cover. My examples are the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne (Figure 2.2) is a particularly interesting case study because its forerunner was Gehry’s own Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Both – as to their external appearance – are powerfully-set oversized sculptures. But the Fondation Louis Vuitton is nothing but a sail-like tent covering the functional buildings, while the Guggenheim at Bilbao is st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Experience
• Part II Encounter
• Part III Action and critique
• Part IV Social engagement
• Index