Gernot Böhme_Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture

Talking about architecture seems even more difficult than talking about art, especially when architecture is treated as art; seen as such, a building is not only functional but also has a surplus of some kind.

In classical aesthetics buildings should at once be functional and be functional without possessing a specific function. If the architect differs from other artists by having to create something that is both useful and artistic, then it is natural to be tempted to interpret the artistic character of architecture in terms of other arts, drawing comparisons with sculpture, painting, literature and music.

These comparisons are of course meant in the best possible way – but leads to the question: Does architecture really have nothing to call its own? [Böhme p. 398] No doubt these comparisons and borrowed feathers can be fruitful procedures for the architect’s process and the beholder’s perception. But they also run the risk of being excuses for what really counts in architecture. [Böhme p. 399]

So the danger of talking about architecture in terms derived from other arts is twofold: It lies in the reception of architecture, where it obscures its own concerns in metaphors, and in the production, where this borrowed self-image it is a danger to architects.

So what really counts in architecture? Sculpture seems to be the form closest to architecture in terms of form and content, expression and meaning. They both shape matter, they both rely on visible perception. But the question is whether seeing really is the true means of perceiving architecture? Or is it rather feeling it? These questions relate to the fact that architecture, even more than shaping matter, shapes (invisible) space. [Böhme 399]

Vision has ever since the Greeks been favored in perception. Also Hegel classifies architecture to the visual arts, and it still is. But Böhme argues that this is today due to representation of works of architecture. The presentation of architecture in drawings, models and computer simulations has become essential for competitions and clients before the building of a project. And afterwards, photographs have become just as important, if not more, as the buildings themselves. Representation of architecture through photographs in journals, catalogues, newspapers and brochures is vital for their reputation. [Böhme p. 399]

All of this adds up to a third defining character of architecture, besides from being functional and a work of art, it is also a product that needs a marketable appeal. This means staging architecture.

Despite this, given that you cannot see space, architecture cannot truly be a part of the visual arts. Through an analogy with the inadequacies of perspectival representation, Böhme concludes that perspective is only capable of representing the physical nature of things but not their spatiality or space itself. 3D makes us realize that space is something in which we are [Böhme 402]

If space is genuinely experienced by being in it, and if changes of perspective and focal point are those visual means that are best suited for experiencing space, there is only one problem; seeing is not a sense that defines being-in-something; rather it defines difference and distance. The sense for being-in-something is, according to Böhme, ‘mood’. By feeling our own presence we feel the space in which we are present. We feel its atmosphere. [Böhme 402]

That affects the perception of architecture and demands a physical presence in order to evaluate these spaces. The investigation of the building and its construction, its scale and shape, do not acquire our physical presence. But to attune our mood to the atmosphere of a space it is necessary to directly participate in this space. (Creating this kind of atmosphere, architectural effect, seems impossible for the exhibition – and is it even its goal?)

Architecture concentrates space, opens spaces, creates space.

In conclusion, the recognition of the space of physical presence as the actual subject matter of architecture brings architecture close to stage design, in which there has always been an awareness of the atmospheres it creates. The architect could even learn from the stage designer to create a new awareness of his art – not in order to merge the two fields, this could never happen. Architecture doesn’t build for the sake of a spectator watching a play but for people who will experience the seriousness of life in its spaces. With this Böhme returns to the discussion of the relations between art and architecture. Life is serious; art serene. [Böhme p. 406]

A synthesis / reading of Gernot Böhme Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture with architecture exhibitions in the back of my mind.

The Böhme essay is found in Herzog & de Meuron Natural History / Edited by Philip Ursprung

Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei

Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the mind

Embracing the ambivalence, here we go

Philip Ursprung calls the architecture exhibition “an area of architectural praxis that most commentators avoid because of its ambivalence”. Herzog & de Meuron are the only architects I’ve read about so far who explicitly deals with the exhibition of architecture; in the book Natural History, Ursprung writes about exhibiting H&deM’s architecture, taking his starting point in their collaboration in making the exhibition Herzog & de Meuron: Archaeology of the mind. Remy Zaugg, an artist who has written and thought a lot about exhibiting in general, has also published a conversation with H&deM about their collaboration in making the 1995 exhibition at the Centre de Pompidou, Exhibition Herzog & de Meuron. In the following I would like to try to unfold H&deM thoughts about exhibiting architecture as part of their architectural praxis because I think it can be used as an interesting theoretical (in an artistic sense) background for looking at the biennale exhibitions. H&deM’s way of exhibiting isn’t necessarily right or wrong but it is at the very least conscious, and naturally takes up all the aspects of exhibiting architecture that I’ve come across so far.

In saying that the architecture exhibition is “an area of architectural praxis that most commentators avoid because of its ambivalence”, Ursprung also acknowledges the exhibition of architecture as an area of architectural praxis. In the conversation between Rémy Zaugg and H&deM, they discuss thoroughly the subject of exhibiting architecture, exhibition being a primary interest for Zaugg and architecture for H&deM, who through collaborations with artists since the end 70s have been interested in staging architecture in different ways. The fact that H&deM has worked with exhibitions for so many years naturally leads the conversation between Zaugg and H&deM, as well as Ursprung’s essay in Natural History, towards the issue of art and architecture. Since the exhibition is originally a venue for art rather than architecture, and since it seems to embody a more obvious function for art than for architecture, it is only natural to discuss the relation between art and architecture. But Ursprung quickly transcends this discussion of art and architecture (whereas Kurt W. Forster in the essay Pieces for four and more hands develops the subject of their artistic inspiration further). Ursprung writes that the art-and-architecture discussion distracts us from another issue, for which there isn’t yet an established language: The issue of representation [p. 21 Ursprung] Ursprung tells the symptomatic story of how H&deM invited the artist Joseph Beuys to take part in a carnival procession. “Far from attempting to create a carnivalesque parody of the controversial sculptures by Beuys (…) we were in fact trying to get close to the reality of this work of art. We wanted to create a new reality, a new sculpture.” [p. 20 Ursprung] This idea of creating a new sculpture out of the existing art is what leads Ursprung on to the idea of the sphere of representation. H&deM are interested in this new reality because it transcends simple documentation; it becomes a form of expression in it itself and in this way it has the potential to reflect on architecture [p. 22 Zaugg]

Why have exhibitions played such a big role in the work of Herzog & de Meuron since 1988? Interestingly, Herzog & de Meuron perceive the exhibition as an individual genre, and they number it in line with all their other built projects. Ursprung summarizes the role of their exhibitions:

“They stress that for them exhibitions of architecture are like a test run. Their point is neither to document finished (or unbuilt) projects nor to provide an insight into the architects’ creative process. And it is also not a matter of designing exhibition architecture as either a form of installation or a formal ambiance. It is purely and simply about the genre of architecture exhibitions.” [p. 21 Ursprung]

The exhibition provides a possibility to test new ideas; and to confront these ideas with an interested public. In that sense, the exhibition of architecture can perhaps be seen as a laboratory of some kind [p. 25 Ursprung] In any case, the exhibition has to use different forms of architectural representation to express itself. This can be in the form of sketches, videos, models, photographs, words etcetera. All of these forms point to one essential factor: the absence of the building, the ‘real’ architecture. In an art exhibition the actual works of art are exhibited, whereas architecture exhibitions will always be in need of mediators or substitutes in the shape of plans, drawings, models, animations and so on. Faced with this challenge, Herzog & de Meuron pose some essential questions:

“But even so, is there a way of presenting, exhibiting and putting things together, which would allow us to achieve more than a simple accumulation of documents? (…) is it possible in an exhibition room to constitute a place, which, similar to a building site as it exists outside in the town, might be a reality for itself, and which at the same time reflects the reality of the documented building?” [p. 43 Zaugg]

Ursprung looks at ways of representing in the 1851 World Exhibition to which he traces the roots of exhibiting and representing in the name of the spectacle, a specifically capitalist system of representation, which is still present today. H&deM’s architecture doesn’t seem to operate within this “representative architecture”. And it is because of this that Ursprung sees – with Herzog & de Meuron – the potential in the exhibition to explore alternative ways of representation. The exhibition of architecture can take on many shapes:

“the architectural exhibition as a genre in which architecture is mediated to an interested public; the exhibition of architecture itself, as a means for the presentation of objects; and the question of exhibiting their buildings in mental and social spaces.” [p. 25 Ursprung]

As opposed to the spectacle-like modes of representation, Ursprung sees that Herzog & de Meuron seeks “…a form of representation that can cope with the complexity and dynamism of the current situation and is thus, by definition, oriented towards the future.” [p. 25 Ursprung] In their exhibitions, they take it on them to exhibit architecture’s “waste”, the things that have no place in a spectacle: “Because of its obsession with the finished product, the spectacle makes no provision for exhibiting the ‘reality of architecture’” [p 35 Ursprung]

According to Herzog & de Meuron, the reality of architecture is not built architecture, rather architecture creates its own reality and is therefore an autonomous entity comparable to painting and sculpture [p. 35]. This conviction obviously also influences how architecture is exhibited and takes the exhibition of architecture seriously as more than just documentation or representation.

In H&deM’s exhibition with Ursprung they included many items that aren’t finished products, that are fragments seen out of context. The objects aren’t self-referential like so many objects in exhibitions of art of architecture (monumental models etc.); the materials are celebrated for their own sake and are as such seen as the reality of architecture rather than a fictional whole. It is also an attempt to suggest things that resist representation and which are nevertheless part of the “reality of architecture”: odours, temperatures, spatial memories, day-dreams. [p. 35 Ursprung] The point is, these things embody thousands of man hours, as Ursprung puts it, that could never have been represented but lies in the materials themselves.

But undeniably, the materials are also removed from their natural context. To a certain extent, isn’t the exhibition of architecture always a replacement or displacement of the objects it is trying to speak about? The minimal artist Robert Smithson worked with removing rocks and dirt from their natural sites, placing them into the context of gallery representation [p. 49 Forster] In other words, he works with the art of transforming the nature of materials. Similar to this, Herzog has commented: “the reality of architecture does not simply coincide with what is built, but rather finds its manifestation in its material”. Herzog hereby locates the reality of architecture in materials because “they find their highest manifestation once they have been removed from their natural context”. [p. 54 Forster]. It is only when removed from their conventional reference that materials can assume a specifically architectural purpose. Like Smithson’s experience it is precisely from the discrepancy between their familiar function and a newly invented one that materials acquire character. It is this character that Herzog & de Meuron dares to call the reality of architecture.

The exhibition can be a way to make architectural thinking physically tangible. The title of an exhibition at the Basel Architekturmuseum, Architektur Denkform / Architecture A Way of Thinking, points to this intention. But what the exhibition doesn’t give you is a one to one experience with space/architecture. In an interview with H&deM, Ursprung comments that it is very difficult to represent H&deM’s architecture, that it is almost unphotogenic. H&deM answer that direct confrontation with their buildings is – of course – essential, that their architecture is always based on one-to-one experience. “It is absolutely essential to continue to aspire to these intrinsically architectural qualities.” [p. 82 Ursprung]

In short:

The exhibition of architecture: an area of architectural praxis + the issue of art and architecture + the issue of representation + the different forms of architectural representation + the absence of the real architecture = exhibiting the ‘reality of architecture’ & transforming the nature of materials

Herzog & de Meuron Natural History

Edited by Philip Ursprung

Canadian centre for architecture Lars Müller Publishers

Herzog & de Meuron an exhibition

Rémy Zaugg

Art and Architecture: A Dialogue

Cantz

Berberlandet

Nora og børnene har taget mig med på landet. Helt ude hvor landet stadig er fladt men for foden af Atlas bjergene, der stiger abrupt ud af landskabet. På den anden side af dem begynder ørkenen. Landet her er berbernes bosted, et helt andet folkefærd med et helt andet sprog. Her købte Noras forældre et hus for 30 år siden, som de siden hen har arbejdet langsomt på, bygget en værelse til for hver gang de havde penge, nye terrasser, et atelier og et stort bassin som de fylder med flodvand om sommeren. Der er to køer og høns, en lille olivenlund og en stor blomsterhave og vidst nok også en køkkenhave. Selv nu, i den koldeste måned på året, er alting grønt og mange ting blomstrer, høsten falder allerede i starten af juni. Karima og jeg malkede koen, og manden der holder huset kom forbi med traditionelt brød, som vi spiste med olivenolie af oliven fra grunden. Vi tændte op i pejsen (de store kolde stenhuse kan selvfølgelig slet ikke varmes op denne ene kolde måned om året), og Noras mor fortalte historier mens jeg strikkede og børnene fjollede. Hun fortalte om hende og hendes mands liv i Marokko, deres konvertering til muslimer, om deres liv mellem Marrakech og her på landet, at opdrage børn i Marokko, blandt mange andre ting. Vi snakkede også en del om situationen i Egypten, det fylder også meget her disse dage og folk frygter situationen som var det en epidemi der spredes via medierne.

Fra den svalegangslignende terrasse så jeg den største og mest glimtende stjernehimmel jeg har set i mange mange år, og konturerne af Atlasbjergene i baggrunden gør det ikke mindre majestætisk. I et tilstødende værelse til denne stjernehimmelsterrasse går jeg i seng i et iskoldt rum og afventer dagslyset og varmen.

Marrakech

Det første indtryk af Marrakech er duftene, man glemmer hvor meget frostgraderne tager fra én. Først var det ikke noget særligt, der duftede, bare det hele, men senere var det brødet og citrontræerne, især. Vi rystede træerne så citronerne kunne falde ned, det er åbenbart højsæson for citroner og appelsiner midt om vinteren, smart når det er det, kroppen har brug for om vinteren. Citronerne skulle bruges til at bage citroncheesecake og citronhummus, til en citronmadlavningskonkurrence. Familien jeg bor hos har et slags kultur- og sprogcenter, en skole hvor de underviser i sprog, arabisk til engelske børn og engelsk til arabiske børn, i billedkunst og i basketball, lidt af hvert. Huset er tre gamle huse, der er blevet sammenlagt, der er traditionelle fliser og citrontræer hele vejen rundt om det. Det er levende selv om aftenen og de børn og unge, der hænger ud her, kommer alle mulige steder fra. Nora og hendes mand har skolen sammen med hendes forældre, og de underviser her alle sammen, det virker som et livsprojekt og familieprojekt der er gået op i en højere enhed med det, de tjener penge på.

Børnene i familien taler tre sprog, engelsk, arabisk og fransk, og Nora og hendes mand er begge to marokkanere men oprindeligt fra USA. Hendes forældre emigrerede i 60erne, han flyttede selv hertil som 17årig og konverterede til islam. De mødte hinanden da de var 17, blev gift da de var 20 og nu, ti år senere, har de 3 børn og lever i noget der virker som en kaotisk men ret harmonisk familieenhed. Jeg kan ikke helt finde ud af, i hvilken grad de opfatter sig selv som marokkanere, jeg fornemmer at de ser på Marokko udefra, men ikke kunne forestille sig at leve andre steder.

Jeg sov på Karima’s værelse i nat (hun er otte), og vi lå og snakkede længe i morges før de andre vågnede. Vi snakkede lidt om fugle fordi vi blev vækket til fugle, og jeg sagde at det var jeg ikke vant til her om vinteren; det kunne hun ikke forstå. Hvor tog fuglene hen, hvis de ikke blev i Danmark? Og også det med at bladene falder af, det var ret abstrakt for hende. Hendes mor har forklaret hende at jeg er veganer, og det spurgte hun meget til – hvorfor syntes jeg ikke det var nok at være vegetar, hvad betyder miljø, ville det være okay hvis det var mine egne dyr. Hun var virkelig meget reflekteret over det. Hun snakkede også om at hun havde syv forskellige nationaliteter, polsk, irsk, marokkansk, amerikansk, engelsk, russisk og indiansk.

(Jeg er i Marokko i forbindelse med det samme projekt, som førte mig til Cairo og Amman, denne gang ikke som led i en konference om kvinder og at blogge, men som den del af projektet, der opfordrer og faciliterer individuelle møder mellem kulturer og mennesker. Det møde vil jeg prøve at skrive om de næste par dage...)

usus / usures

Taking its simple starting point around the fact that wear is always about situations, the research study behind the Belgium Pavillion État des lieux / How things stand goes into some of the social implications of the used object in the built environment. How this study, which does not directly relate to architecture, ended up in the Venice Architecture Biennale, and was exhibited in the way it was, I did not yet find out. The book was really interesting in itself, but did not mention architecture once, and I think it could be even more interesting to find out how this study ended up as a “national representation” of Belgium’s state of the art of architecture.

The study is presented as several years of research conducted by the group Rotor, consisting of everything from photographers, architectural critics to sociologists. The initial idea was to investigate the potential market for second hand building materials, and it soon became clear that people received the idea of used objects in two very different ways; on the one hand with a kind of disgust for what had already been used and touched many times, on the other hand with a pleasure, an appreciation of the patina of an object with a visible history. This ambiguous reaction was, as I understood it, the starting point for a more thoroughgoing research with the essential statement that need is what makes wear interesting. Connecting it to architecture, you could say that wear is the reaction to use in architecture. So investigating wear is an interest in the material world and the changes within it, and a questioning of the material's entropy. A huge amount of energy is invested in combating entropy, however; keeping things looking new and shiny is an essential part of every city or building’s maintenance, even though wear is unavoidable. The research study states in the beginning that it is not trying to judge wear as good or bad, attractive or repellent, but it clearly posits itself critical towards the battles to maintain perfection in (architectural) society.

Wear can be a messenger: if one doorknob of a double door looks more polished and used than the other, we tend to take this side of the door. One could say that wear is an invitation to use. If many people have walked on a certain path through the snow of the sidewalk, we choose this path assuming it is the best one. Users associate themselves with other users by showing confidence in the traces they leave behind.

Wear is a system of communication: but it doesn’t have a fixed meaning behind it. Each new alteration is blurred by all those that went before. In the end you cannot separate the scratches but only note that a layer of colour has disappeared, for instance. The narrative of wear gives you a relationship to all the users that went before, it leaves traces of the crowd.

Wear is connected to responsibility: You are more likely to make a hole in a wall in your new apartment if there are already holes. A sense of responsibility decreases the more alterations have already been made; the first alteration will always be a starting point, the pivotal point in a material’s history. Probably also why they paint over the yellow walls of Assistens Kirkegården (a cemetery) every time the slightest bit of graffiti appears. The first graffiti removes the object (the wall) from an immaculate state to one of transformation.

The altered object engenders an action: it becomes a form of production. The intact state (the freshly painted yellow cemetery wall) reveals the silence of use, the absence of a multitude of actions of users. But nothing is fixed, and all artefacts go through successive stages in their production. The pristine state of an object can only appear at the price of great blindness to the labour that led to its production, and taking the analogy further, the yellow cemetery wall only comes into being in its urban context when it is activated as a place by its graffiti-painting users.

There are social implications of the used object as stated in the above, but the pristine object also has its implications: It maintains a day to day perfection, but it cannot be a medium for sharing, it carries no memory of users. The experience of the used brings you closer to the crowd whereas the new singles you out.

Paris denne gang

Architecture on display

I read the book ”Architecture on display: on the history of the Venice Biennale of Architecture” with interviews of most of the previous curators of the Biennale, in search of some kind of definition of the biennale or a set of subjects related to it, that I could start investigating. Is it an integral part of contemporary architectural culture, does it simply display that culture, does it lead that culture? Is it historical and archival or visionary and theoretical? Obviously the different curators present different views on this, and obviously I did not get closer to a definition, but I did get a better sense of the many directions within architectural culture the Biennale can be linked to.

One of the most interesting discussions which is staged by the interviewers between the different curators is the discussion of how to exhibit architecture and whether this is a contradiction in itself. Baratta, the president of the Biennale, sees a big difference between architecture and art exhibitions since in art exhibitions you show the work of art, but in architectural exhibitions you don’t show the product of the architect – so what do you show? Is it an indirect exhibition? Some of the curators suggest that creating an exhibition of architecture means giving a sense of that architecture, or, like Francesco Dal Co puts it, to tell the complex story of each building. A discussion as to how to tell this complex story takes place especially between the older and the younger generation of curators. Kazujo Sejima mentions in her interview that you shouldn’t be scared of using the spectacular, and the director says explicitly that the theatrical ability of the curator is fundamental, because it is this capability which makes for a good or bad exhibition. But even some of the earliest events, like Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima from 1980, seem to apply or even inaugurate some of these theatrical/cinematic means.

As the architecture biennale started out as an extension of the art biennale in Venice, with unclear overlaps, the issue of what separates architecture and art also reappears. Architecture has its own way of showing it self, and as mentioned before this is partly because it can never be showed as it is. The architecture biennale was a reaction to protests following ’68, and an attempt to do something, which was more open to the world than the art biennale. Interviews show, however, that the first biennales consisted of relatively small circles of participants and visitors, who all knew each other and who were all in the business. Even today, Kazujo Sejimas biennale “People meet in architecture” has been criticized by Fuksas, who says it isn’t people who meet in architecture but architects who meet in architecture. In any case, the architecture exhibition was supposed to be more open to the public, probably because architecture reflected urban issues, and urban issues reflected people. But still it seems that many of the curators have struggled with the issue of how to make the exhibition accessible for everybody; that drawings are too complex, for instance, and that the biennale itself must somehow compete with the surrounding city of Venice with all its historical layers.

From the end of the nineties the curators talk about the influence of technology in visualisation processes, screens, three-dimensional possibilities. The use of technology also reflected the influence of technology in everyday life, and the processes creating architecture. And with this, the biennale seems to have become more and more about engaging with the “real world”, and speaks about architecture with the exact same language as you use to speak about the world – the idea that architecture shouldn’t be a specialized language seems to be recurrent for the newer curators. Massimiliano Fuksas sees information as the confrontation between architecture and the world. His biennale attempted to go beyond the internal logics of architecture to question where we as a society are heading and what our responsibilities might be.

The place of Venice itself has played different roles; sometimes as competitor, other times as motivator. Some curators have invited people to study the problems of the city and to use them to create the occasion for a project, as was the case with the legendary Molino Stucky from 1975, when an architect first was asked to curate the art biennale and kick started the idea for a separate architectural exhibition that in a sense started with the question of the heritage of the city of Venice. The idea that the entire use of a section of the city is transformed to serve the biennale is in itself really interesting. The exhibitions even spread beyond the restricted area and into galleries all over the city.

Finally an important discussion, which is more related to the change over time perhaps than the different temperaments of the curators, is whether the biennale is becoming less crucial to the exchange of ideas and information with the raise of the digital age, speed etcetera. This question also implies a question of new ways of displaying, ways to work out how to represent architecture in a way that has to be experienced spatially; to have some sort of contact with the materials on display, as Sejima aims for in her biennale “People meet in Architecture”. The internet takes away the novelty the biennale once had, in a way the internet puts everything on display continually, according to Aaron Betsky. In this year’s biennale, Kazuyo Sejima seems to really incorporate this problem by working with the information society as a kind of starting point. In the interview with Baratta, the director, he says, “a problem which is an inevitable problem disappears as a problem”.

The biennale doesn’t seem to be stuck simply between architecture of use and architecture of display, but also between historical documentation with its importance for contemporary practice, and imagination and the building up of utopias. Many of the curators see the biennale as a creative work of art (or architecture) in itself. Fuksas even believes that if you do a biennale, it has to change something. Others, like Kurt W Foster, describes the biennale as a popularisation of architecture. It is described as an attempt to fix time on the one hand (Fuksas) and on the other hand, according to Hans Hollein, as an attempt to predict time, to show how the architect is like a seismograph.

Det regner meget, på plusgrader måden, det virker ukendt. Men hele dagen har der været solskin, og et øjeblik på en bænk langs muren på kirkegården i Montmartre, den ved de gamle olivenmarker, var der også varme nok til at spise baguette med mirabelle/riesling marmelade. I morges mødtes Isabelle og jeg på toppen af Montmartre ved Sacre Coeur, i morgen tidlig mødes vi på toppen af Belleville parken. Fra det ene højdepunkt til det andet, fredag må jeg starte på Buttes aux Cailles bakken hvor jeg også startede på hele Paris dengang. Alt det velkendte rører mig meget, det første velkendte jeg så fra bussen i dag var Parc Montsouris, parken ved siden af min første lejlighed, som jeg har løbet i så mange gange, og tænkt så meget i mens jeg gik igennem den i forskellige årstider. Trods alt det velkendte overrasker det mig at byen er så stor, så voldsom eller endda voldelig, at gaderne er fyldt med hævede stemmer og at det ikke er så nemt at cykle, som jeg følte det dengang, at der er områder der ikke føles trygge, at metroen er det diametralt modsatte af København’s; den er beskidt, ukontrolleret, stilistisk totalt usammenhængende, omfattende som en organisme, farlig, essentiel, larmende, tilfældig, indtryksudfyldt. Jeg har fået de første fem idéer til udstillinger jeg gerne vil se mens jeg er her bare ved at læse plakaterne fra Jeu de Paume, Fondation Cartier og så videre. Der er plakater og reklamer for alt muligt i den parisiske undergrund, men det er iøjefaldende hvordan det især er plakater for musik, film, udstillinger og forestillinger, en slags fællesejet kultur, der fremtræder, som er så udpræget fransk og selvfølgelig også ekskluderer og ikke er fælles overhoved, men som alligevel får så stor en plads i folks daglige visuelle påvirkning. At vide hvilken udstilling der er på Jeu de Paume, uden at kunne finde på at tage derhen, for eksempel, er at bo i Paris.

I aften tager jeg til Paris. Jeg skal bo i Livia's lejlighed og cykle på hendes cykel, og jeg glæder mig på en virkelig surreel og magisk måde, til Paris og til venner, men også til følelsen af mig selv i Paris. Her er en liste med nogle af de ting, jeg skal:

Yoga au moins une fois

Resto vietnamien

Manger macro-biotique

Supermarché bio - acheter des produits weleda

Le café à Montmartre

APC surplus à Montmartre

Le canal

Buttes chaumont

Falaffel grecque

Og så skal jeg se denne udstilling på Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Vers de nouveaus logements sociaux, som jeg tror kan være interessant i forhold til forskellige måder, at udstille arkitektur på, selvom det er udenfor biennale kontekst.

"Face à la forte demande de logements sociaux, quelle est l’offre architecturale ? Quelle réponse qualitative donner à cet impératif quantitatif ? Quelle est la part de l’expérimentation dans ce domaine connu depuis l’époque moderne comme le laboratoire de l’architecture ?

L’exposition explorera les nouvelles typologies en phase avec les modes de vie et l’évolution de la société aux prises avec les questions essentielles de la ville contemporaine ; et si l’on ajoute le paramètre du développement durable en termes de qualité de vie et de justice sociale, le logement est plus que jamais un sujet d’actualité.

Une sélection de 15 réalisations récentes en France (moins de 5 ans) sera présentée, à travers des documents de nature diverse : visuels, textes, maquettes, prototypes et films. "

Amman

Prior to writing about Amman I wanted to show these few pictures that I had time to take. It was strange to be so far away, in a city where shapes, materials and colors, the basic architectural components, were so unlike anything I could have visualized, and then to see so little of it. What I noticed was the many construction sites, the unfinished look it gave it all, which made the existing buildings breath better, somehow, and the sand colors and the many seemingly homogeneous houses. We also saw a hammam, roman ruins, luxurious hotels which were like monolithic airports - international, or rather, nonnational as they connect nothing - and market places by night. Most of the city I saw by night. In the days after my return to Copenhagen I sincerely missed the sounds of prayer in the speakers calling all over the city, I even imagined that I heard it once, but I strongly doubt it. To me, unable to decode the words, it sounded more like song than prayer, even though it is of course both, but what I liked about it most is the rough quality of the speakers that meets the clear voice, the uniting voice, and the city that listens or doesn't listen.

Guide

1. Some years ago I was sitting at a pillar on the big square behind Palais de Justice in Brussels. The city was new to me, unexpected, and so was my love. I remember the first time he said my name, not as a practicality but as a naming of that in me, which was becoming his too.

2. The way I appropriated the first city we lived in was through our discovery of each other. Recently, when a friend asked me to write her a guide for Brussels, I wrote her a map of the places we’d fallen in love, and I wasn’t trying to be sentimental; it was really the way I remembered the city. Place des Jeux, Jardin Botanique, Palais de Justice. In that order. Later Parc Leopold, Jardin Botanique again, and the library gardens.

3. I took him to Paris after only one month, and it was like introducing him to my parents. I really wanted Paris to like him and him to like Paris. We approached the streets and the churches, my friends and old neighbourhoods and they all embraced him and forgave me for having left.

4. Later that autumn we went to Madrid and visited many museums, the museum walls framed our conversations, it was clear that we were founding a language, we were on new and neutral territory and got lost together for the first time, I discovered he was hopeless with maps and maps of cities are so metaphorical to me.

5. The first Christmas while we were together, we spend with each of our families. I was standing in a little pavilion on the beach, used for selling ice cream in the summer but in the winter just a shelter for random homelessness, while we spoke on the phone, and I realised that he was my allied in the world - not against it but just in it. I realised we were a unit that I could return to when all other chaotic units dissolve and reunite with the wind.

6. When I left for Cairo it was the first time I left such far distances between us. Sitting in the airplane I realized how unbelievably right it felt to be together, it was a physical sensation and I was torn apart by it.

7. The second city we lived in, Vienna, was more familiar to me because we had grown more familiar to each other. I instantly knew my way around. I think that was when I realized that besides from loving each other, you could also be good at loving each other, consciously, carefully, increasingly. That was when we placed our books side by side.

8. Having met each other in foreign countries it was the strangest thing when we visited the city that we had both inhabited before meeting each other. This time, rediscovering known territories in Copenhagen through the other’s eyes was synonymous with discovering his life before we met. The streets he used to take, the cafés he preferred, places he had lived were all old lovers constituting important moments of his past, and his city wasn’t the same as mine. We lived in my sister’s apartment; we snowed in for days and imagined a future where each of our past versions of the city would be known to each other.

9. When we went to Venice to visit the Architecture Biennale we were familiar with travelling together, familiar with all these cities and all these trajectories and knew each other so well – not exhaustibly but realistically. I had long ago accepted that he couldn’t navigate in urban space with maps, for instance, but was much better at navigating in forests and places without names. For some reason, Venice resembled more nature than city, its streets were so labyrinthine and circular that it was much easier to navigate with an internal compass than with a map, you would never find the same street twice if you tried. In this urban but nature like landscape he knew his way around and I was totally lost and devoted.

A geometric metropolis

I was searching for grids and I found this artist who does models entirely out of paper, working with voids.

Architecture as air: Study for Château la Coste

If you look closely, there is a house here. Or a model for a house. This was Ishigami's exhibition at the Venice Biennale. It was one of the first exhibitions I saw, and I had already heard the rumor; that a cat had run through all the big rooms of the Arsenale on the night before the opening, and had caused this architecture of air to collapse even before it had been displayed, and thus making it a myth, causing it to materialize itself more in words than in actual shapes. Miniaturisation and the domestication of nature, as well as utopian visions on the border of speculation, are some of Ishigami's experimental practices. The installation pushes boundaries of materiality and visibility. We spend a long time looking for what we were looking at, which in itself was a really interesting way of perceiving.

Dreams about cities

Kristopher Ho, an illustrator/artist from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, also dreams about cities.

In Jordan I met a woman who had named her son Rilke because the name had come to her on book covers in different places she had travelled to while she was pregnant. I told her it was one of my favorite poets and I told her that I had been following him in my time in Paris, reading his book about Rodin, visiting the Rodin museum, standing in front of the sculptures while reading Rilke's descriptions of them, trying to perceive the sculpture through the book, which was easily done because the descriptions are so amazingly tactile. She told me it was strange that her son was named after Rilke, who was such a delicate poet, while her son was very boyish and not so delicate. I recommended her to read Rilke's Letters to a young poet, since she hadn't read so much of the author who was sharing his name with her son, and that this book is a really good way to grasp Rilke's world, maybe even better than his poems and the novel. Maybe she will read it. I would like to meet her son.

Some of my case studies will be the Belgian pavilion and the Dutch pavilion.

And maybe the movie by Wim Wenders, If buildings could talk.

The Biennale is really where architects go to dream. While we were there I was reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Thesis and other occupations taking my time...

Malmö under snow

the kids are moving to another argument, the older one pulls out a broken plastic tiger, it belongs to the younger one, he swears that the sun has melted the tiger into pieces, the younger one is furious, it doesn't stop the older one from reconstrcuting the tiger in opposite halves “I’m eating my tail, look at me”

udsnit fra en saudi arabisk dag? Hala skriver med dobbeltblik på hverdagen mellem Saudi Arabien og USA, og har nogle gange nogle vildt poetiske, vilde og banale måder at distancere og beskrive sin hverdag på.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

The following will be a more or less coherent structure around some selected Perec quotes on writing urban and ordinary life. I am not a Perec expert and I have based this purely on text analysis.

First a short introduction: Perec’s work is an urban documentation, a topography of the infra-ordinary that mostly deals with urban life, In this sense, topography is defined as the study of places.

His main subject is the urban and domestic space and how we are made to occupy it. His observations are often obvious which is explained by the single fact that Perec was a firm believer in everyday life, in everything that goes without saying. Perec’s project is to say it and his writings on the (urban) space derive from this trying to name the obvious. The pages are filled with experiments and suggestions on how to document life and how to observe it with more awareness.

From the beginning on there is thus a link between observing space and writing about space. Perec doesn’t seem to be concerned about loosing the authenticity of the life-world in the course of writing it or representing it. Rather it seems he sees writing as the beginning of another life-world.

It is this link between writing and observing while also constructing space that I will try to follow in the quotes I have selected. I have tried to divide it into some themes so I hope you will follow me:

1) More or less concrete space

On the very concrete level, and as a first argument, Perec argues that urban life writes itself: there are few events which do not leave a written trace: a metro ticket, the daily newspaper, receipts, mail, cigarette packs etcetera. The everyday life is inscribed in all of this. So it is not only a question of Perec writing urban life, but also urban life writing itself. “This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page” [p. 15]

His favorite example of this is maps, borders and countries. A country is shaped as space when we draw a line on a map and call it: France. There are two movements in this: drawing, filling out the page on the one hand, and naming and thereby creating on the other.

Space is described as something that only comes into being when it is named and written. He thus points to the randomness of borders and countries and the meanings we attach to these.

On the same time, space is a basic constitutive and thus attached with a lot of meaning: “To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing our best not to bump yourself.” This implies space as something physical, more or less at least, and he gives one of his many definitions on space in saying: “Space is what arrests our gaze. There is nothing ectoplasmic about space.”[p. 81] By ectoplasmic I take it he means that it isn’t so abstract or spiritual, but rather something concrete.

Another aspect of this point is that “there isn’t one space, but a whole lot of small bits of space”. [p. 6] This explains his method in breaking up his urban surroundings into smaller pieces.

These are different levels or bits of space, but they are also different levels of perception, which brings me to the next way of writing space in Perec, that is a more subjective space.

2) Remembered space

In the book, he investigates concrete space that you can bump into – countries, apartments, streets and parks - as well as more abstract space of memory and representation.

Perec breaks space into smaller parts, starting with the bed as the individual space par excellence. The bed is described almost as a micro-life world. It is also the starting point for any existence in urban space. Many novels that are essentially about the urban experience take just as much place within the constraints of one single room, often the cold attic room of the writer-subject. Perec says: “I traveled a great deal at the bottom of my bed” [p. 17] which is of course a reference to the opening sections of Proust’s A la recherché… in which the first books main character almost discovers the world from his bed in a state of half asleep half awake.

In the end of “Species of Spaces” Perec contemplates over the temporariness or the fragility of space. “My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them.” And later: “my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory.” From this it becomes clear that what Perec is talking about is the ultra personalized space, since physical spaces aren’t really fragile in this sense.

The subjectiveness he links with space can to a great extent be linked with spaces as hooks on which you can attach memory. The bed is an example of this: His memories are attached to the narrowness of a specific bed in a specific place, there are memories attached to all the different places he has slept in.

I tried to make a list like the one Perec makes, of all the places I’d slept, and I suddenly came to think of a family vacation in Italy that I hadn’t thought about for years, or details from the houses of old friends parents and so on. You should try it yourself; it was like recalling dreams and remembering details in the course of naming them, if you know that feeling.

The bed as a fragment of space represents space as coenesthetic [awareness of one’s own body], as subjective and private, as something connected to memory. This brings me to the third theme I would like to highlight, written space.

3) Written space

Perec’s experiment of observing twelve places in Paris, with two descriptions of two places every month, is very illustrative for the point I am trying to make, that is to trace the link between writing and observing while also constructing space.

One description is made on the site, say Place des Vosges, and as neutral as possible. Another description is written somewhere other than the place described, in his bed, for instance. This experiment really reveals two ways of relating to urbanism. Maybe it’s the difference between traditional urban studies – represented by the first on-site description – and the humanistic field’s interpretation of urban studies, that is, the representation of the urban. In Perec’s case that would be the second description which is constructed from memory and thus removed from the immediate observation. This is a subjective representation, based on as he says, “events that have taken place, people I have met” [p. 55] and is in this way describing the fragile or temporary aspect of a space; the people who pass by it, the things that take place.

Furthermore, what retains this memory is the fact that it is written down. He finally says that his simple goal with this experiment is nothing other than the record of “a threefold experience of ageing: of the places themselves, of my memories, and of my writing.” [p. 56] It becomes clear that what Perec writes about urbanity and ordinary life is also a kind of poetics of his own writing process.

This is further illustrated when he says: “the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors” [p. 79] This both relates to what he has previously indicated on the imaginary and perhaps ridiculous character of borders and of countries but it also relates to a great positive potential in space as something easily redefined because it can be written and rewritten as one likes.

On the other hand, it is also this subjective and temporary state of space, which causes their fragility and the need to retain them through writing.

I will end with one of my favorite quotes to underline this ambivalence between subjective space, which is written and remembered, and then the need for more stable and objective places: “I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin;” and later “such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it.” [p. 91]

He makes an equation between to write and to retain, to cause something to survive but in that act also to create it anew, and the circle is complete.